June 27 Balance Update Preview

[Astralporing.1957]

9 minutes ago, Trigg.9402 said:

What happened to "we will monitor for your feedback"? That's right, that's just pr talk. They dont listen to feedback because if they did, they would have seen this 50+ thread and realized that the vast majority did not want these changes.

It's not about vast majority not wanting those changes. Sometimes in the name of balance it becomes necessary to push in something majority might dislike. The feedback did communicate which parts of the changes community dislikes, but, first and foremost, it also identified parts that were just genuinely bad. And not of the "i don't like it" kind of bad, but of the game/class/espec breaking one. The first kind of feedback can sometimes be ignored when devs will think it might be better for the game. The second kind must never be ignored however. And yet devs did exactly that.

[Eddie.9143]

So once they fix herald number being 95% dmg reduction instead of 5%, then we just need quickness on catalyst changed to 1.5 seconds and swirling winds duration to 4 seconds, and focus mag aura 2 seconds.

 

Deadeye steal time needs to be adjusted, because I got hit with it 6 times in a row for 5-6k each, so that's definitely in need of a tune for something that jumps around like crazy, 1200 range, projectile denial, and stealth, and immob lol. 

 

 

Other than that nothing else felt horrible to fight in FFA. I'm sure tempest and core ele will be very strong as well but as long as I'm not getting PUMPED on like I am by cata I'm okay with it.

 

Honestly very confused as to why they haven't just fixed a couple things quick and shut us right the f up 

[Arrow Blade of El Elyon.9341]

Druid changes need to be re-thought.

By tying things like blood moon, eclipse, grace of the land, etc to CA skills a house of cards has been created.

No reduction in CD in sPVP for CA skills, blood moon and eclipse do not compensate for the loss of ancient seeds and a missed opportunity to buff staff. 

Support Druid hasn't faired well with the changes either;
 

 

[ericpeggy.8206]

51 minutes ago, Ekko.9854 said:

Lol but the upkeep is the problem .. Why would you want to have upkeep skills on to drain your energy? You have 0 reactivity with that if you are low on energy and it forces Qdps players to just auto attack only and healers to maintain a bubble just for the sake of upkeep ?? It's just such a bad design which doesn't contribute anything at all. Before the patch it was nice, I just see 0 reason to do it like this. it's not fun and unplayable as healer if people fail a mechanic which other healers would just heal through but if you are low on energy rip xd

(also i'm just gonna ignore how changing the trait completely broke how herald takes damage somehow)

Maintain upkeep is not the best way to give quick probably, but that's better than swap to dragon in time and press all skills.

But if you are used to camp in dragon, you do struggle with low energy exactly.

Actually, I only use Ventari when my squad needs bubble.

Herald change is the very few changes not bad in this patch.

[TheBouge.7406]

Looking for clarification on the Catalyst updates from the balance notes.  Can we clarify if this change is all game modes or PVE specific.  Currently in WvW this grants swiftness in all but Air attunement.  Thanks!

"Spectacular Sphere: This trait now grants quickness when deploying your jade sphere in any attunement, in addition to the boons currently granted. Quickness duration reduced from 5 seconds to 2 seconds."

 

[Abyss.5986]

Hello one in the chamber trait is bugged it doasnt reduce cantrips. it did yesterday (27thjune23) or give stollen skills so quickdeadeye dosnt work anymore :(

[Griifen.2473]

Dam the wording on the new "Let Loose" on untamed grandmaster was confusing to understand.
Unleashed power and unleashed ambush attacks are used in the same sentence but are different things?
So I need to unleash myself, ambush, swap weapons, unleash my pet, unleash myself, then only do I get another ambush.
I can't get ambush by swapping weapons alone...

It has to be unleash self first, use the ambush, then weapon swap - which resets the 9sec ICD, then unleash my pet, then unleash myself to get the 2nd ambush that doesn't have a 9sec ICD.... and then be very careful to not mess that order or execution by the slightest or that whole mechanic of skipping a 9sec ICD on a grandmaster trait (which is already less impactful because unleashing your pet and then yourself is a 2 second process at minimum) is completely wasted and you won't be able to get/give enough quickness, and you have to make sure you get a natural ambush from unleashing yourself with a perfect internal clock of 9 seconds so that you don't waste the second ambush from swapping weapons...

No wonder snowcrows said it wasn't worth it XD

Edited June 28, 2023 by Griifen.2473
Correction, also WTF Anet

[Lorgansaar.2309]

An attempt at giving constructive feedback on scrapper changes, in case anyone with powers to change thing would care to read through

TL;DR current changes to quickness-scrapper DO NOT improve the gameplay, so please undo the changes, or at least add more ways for quickness generation besides blast & leap finishers

As per Your post, changes to boon generation were to address 2 main issues of boon-support gameplay: "mindless buttonmashing" and "being forced into specific utilities instead of swapping them on-demand". I believe that current iteration of scrapper quickness generation solves neither, and to some extent makes it worse. With this post I hope to get that point across.

1. General contradictions and issue applicable to both dps and heal scrapper
   a. "Function gyro is now a blast finisher" - trading the strongest utility scrapper has (revive) for 3-6 seconds of quickness is straight-up offensive. I can imagine it helping some hardcore group squeeze in a bit more offensive stats instead of boon duration, but for the remaining 99% of the player base (we happen to die from time to time) having a stand-by downstate revive is far more valuable than a few extra seconds of quickness, or any boon for that matter.
   b. scrapper does not have access to good Leap Finishers - animation lock on Rocker Charge (hammer-3) is simply painful and Jump Shot (rifle-5) has too long of a cooldown to be a reliable source of anything.
   c. The only means of generating 100% quickness uptime with minimal utilization of skill bar slots (at least as far as I know) are hammer-3 and flamethrower-2. Both option feel rather self-contradicting: with hammer, forcing use of a specific weapon (on a class that already struggles with weapon diversity) in order to reduce buttonmashing and free-up choices in utility slots seems backwards; and with flamethrower, simply does not achieve anything - Instead of spamming 3-4 buttons from gyros, that produce some value (one could argue that permanent superspeed is already enough to justify it), one spams a single button that generates no value beyond quickness.
   e. Ignoring the flamethrower/hammer - forces one to fill their bars with buttons that they'd have to spam to generate value, very much the same problem this balance patch tried to fix. Except now, that superspeed and quickness are uncompressed - those compete for very limited skill slots available - still spammy, still very little variation.

2. Power-DPS-quickness scrapper
   a. For as long as "Object in Motion" trait exists, dropping uptime on superspeed is not an option - dps scrapper is still locked into using 2+ gyros and they still need to be activated *effectively* off-cooldown, so the gameplay stays very much the same.

3. Heal-quickness scrapper
   a. The only weapon that can provide 100% uptime is hammer, for heal-scrapper it has gameplay implication: one either has to sac already limited protection uptime and run hammer instead of a shield, or try to finangle more Blast Finishers on their bars, that would compete with healing throughput and superspeed application.
   b. Blast Finishers have a LOT more value for a healer than for DPS. Engi, having plentiful access to Water Fields can provide a lot of emergency healing with Water-Blasts (shield-4, medkit-5, elixir gun-4, etc), but now - instead of using said skills reactively, they become part of the rotation, just to keep a boon up:
    When previously I was locked into spamming 4 buttons (albeit, including a heal skill) but had several blast finishers and on-demand protection to keep people alive.
    Now, I either dedicate a utility skill just to provide protection and pray that animation lock of hammer-3 does not get me killed
    or I fill my bars with blast finishers and dedicate some of them to hard-spamming; while hopefully keeping at least 1 gyro to provide superspeed when necessary

What could be done better
I know criticizing is easier than proving solutions, so here are my thoughts on how it could be improved (assuming objective of making utility skills more situational), disclaimer, this is for PvE only.
1. Re-balance "Object in Motion" - remove superspeed condition from it entirely, and just give buff to scrapper damage in other places. 100% uptime on superspeed is not hard condition to achieve, but it is very restrictive to what buttons dps scrapper presses, and removing quickness application component is not a way to change it.
2. Reduce cast time on Rocket Charge (hammer-3) or at least allow for some form of animation canceling, to make it less clunky and less dangerous to use.
3. Not sure if intended or not, but: Rocket Charge (hammer-3) despite dealing 3 instances of damage only trigger finisher twice, maybe a bug, maybe not, but it surely affects usability.
4. Assuming you intend hammer-3 being the only viable way of providing quickness (and 2 instances of finishers in 3 hits is intended behaviour) - extend base quickness duration from 3 seconds to at least 3.5 seconds. rationale being, one could expect that 100% boon duration should be enough to overcap without external help (mechanist AA chain generates 1s of alacrity in 1.75 seconds - overcapping at 75% boon duration without external quickness and at just 18% with; similarly, in lieu of recent herald rework - they start unassisted overcapping on quickness at ~8%, which is conveniently achieved with traits alone); while, as it stands, scrapper's hammer-3 generates 6 seconds of quickness baseline and 12 with 100% boon duration, (cooldown is 12 seconds), and only with external alacrity this threshold drops to ~60% (at 3.5 seconds for example the solo overcapping begins at ~72% boon duration and at ~37% with external alacrity)
5. Expand list of things that apply quickness. While I'd personally prefer something as simple as "gyros do blast finisher when they expire" (very much in-line with the "function gyro is now a blast finisher" flavour-wise) - it most likely wont affect overall spamminess and won't be much different from reverting to old superspeed=quickness behaviour. Still, what appears like a broad list of things (blast/leap finishers) at a first glance, ends up being surprisingly restrictive upon closer inspection.
6. Alternatively, scrap combos and return quickness to gyros: except, instead of everything upfront, do the way Renegade's "Orders from Above" work - every second gyro exists it provides small amount of quickness, this might even be easier to balance overall (eg 12 seconds of quickness "right now" on a 20 seconds cooldown sounds scary, and unpleasant if somebody had to run away and missed it; same 12 seconds over 6 seconds duration on the other hand is very much in-line with other, less spammy, boon supports).
7. Final, (rather crazy, but flavourful idea) - scrap combos interaction. Instead add superspeed acquisition for self on AA chain and a trait to give small amount of quickness in AoE every second while under superspeed (alternatively - AA give superspeed in AoE and conditions for quickness being "have superspeed applied by the scrapper with a certain trait"). This, with trait to allow gyros giving superspeed - could provide scrapper with 2 distinct option of boon provision - when they can whack something on the head with hammer - passively through being around, no utility slots wasted; and when they cannot (which tends to happen with us, mere mortals) - through other means of generating superspeed, including but not limited to - gyros. This comes with, (in my opinion) a fair tradeoff between "having extra utility skills dedicated to providing quickness" vs "trading throughput stats for boon duration". It also has an added benefit of not butchering heal-quick-scrapper.

[AlchemistRai.7596]

This was not a good patch guys, youre main goal of "make boon upkeep less spammy" has failed

scourge feels awful to use because you nerfed it's revival (because of WvW kill denial instead of nerfing in just that)

Core necro lost like all boon corruption and access to signet passives in shroud (boon corruption once again a WvW nerf put into all game modes)

druid is just better NOT taking the alac trait now because if you do take it you need to burn your emergency heal mode to keep up a boon that every other class could bring instead.

and heal scrapper needing to do 10 finishers off cooldown from multiple weapon kits to just HOPE to keep quickness up

If you go through the changes you can see that most of these are WvW nerfs brought into every game mode by some one who hates the classes that got nerfed. Total bias 

[Ekko.9854]

6 hours ago, ericpeggy.8206 said:

Maintain upkeep is not the best way to give quick probably, but that's better than swap to dragon in time and press all skills.

But if you are used to camp in dragon, you do struggle with low energy exactly.

Actually, I only use Ventari when my squad needs bubble.

Herald change is the very few changes not bad in this patch.

Okay so Herald change is REALLY bad and I'll break it down for you so you see why:

1) You previously never had to press all skills of CD at all. Bad players did that, or players new to herald did that. If you managed concentration right you just had to spam facet of strength, fury and than 1 of the other 3 you did not have to use (mostly just facet of darkness because you want to save elite for cc and heal for bursthealing when something went wrong) after initially spamming them all to start a fight. This is like saying if virtuoso spams all skills he deals damage which is a bad way to get 30k dps. Well yeah but if he spams stuff in the right order he gets borderline 40k... Obviously if you spam all stuff you have quickness but than you cant react to anything.

2) There is no struggle in low energy. You have low energy and you can't press stuff. That's how it is, there is no 'you can manage it better', if you want uptime you need upkeep and if you are getting low on energy because of it you cant react to break a cc bar or burstheal your party as a healherald as you have no more energy. Making reactivity worse is never a good way to change things. 

3) Forcing people to swap legends also contributes to the reactivity problem. Example: You are doing Sloth and you are the stab of you party with jalis. You are giving quickness and are doing the upkeep in jalis, you get low on energy and are forced to switch to shiro or glint idk. Bam CC phase happens and everyone gets feared because you were forced of jalis and have to work with the legend CD. And I can give a million examples of this btw. It is never a good thing to force people to swap. Also it just takes away from the rev identity to manage legends as you are now just a slave to them. 

4) It makes it super boring to play. People were complaining that 'spamming' all facets was boring. Now you just press the facets and afk auto attack???? That is less boring xd? That's actually just a joke ngl. There is no rotation at all anymore. You literally press upkeep skills and afk... 

So please don't come with herald was the only good change. Nobody asked for this, quickness herald was one of the few classes a people liked to have in their party as it provided nice boons etc. and had no complains about, and now they kinda murdered it and made it hella boring. 

Edit: apparently mukluk also has a vid that kinda explains the reactivity thing more in depth and not only for herald

Edited June 29, 2023 by Ekko.9854

[ChronoPinoyX.7923]

Watching this entire Balance Patch unfold after recently returning tells me ANet still has no idea what they're doing when it comes to balancing and don't care one bit about player feedback. 

Well at the very least they're consistent with one form of balance. They do one decent thing which is upcoming Expansion but they gotta make sure there's something equally terrible to keep the equilibrium hence these horrendous balance changes... 

[Burnfall.9573]

I just left WvW and The Power Creep, Perma-stuns, Reflects, Red Bubble, 1 shots everywhere...has gotten much worse than the prior patch. 

Well.....this is Anet lost, not mine

Tonight, I have come to a Resolution..to never buy any Guild Wars 2 expansions until either, the entire Balance Team are replaced or have a new Leadership in place; who will immediately, take serious action, in removing every elements...who are responsible for implementing Toxicity in Guild Wars 2 Philosophy and its Visions including its Balance Designs...with no exceptions!!

Until than; I will no longer Tolerate, Anet Toxic  Philosophy and Vision

Until Otherwise....Our Experience, My Experience Demand Respect!!

 

~~To Guild Wars 2 Community~~

“Don’t lose your dignity and self-respect trying to make people accept, love, and appreciate you when they just aren’t capable.” 

~Burnfall~

Edited June 29, 2023 by Burnfall.9573

[ericpeggy.8206]

6 hours ago, Ekko.9854 said:

Okay so Herald change is REALLY bad and I'll break it down for you so you see why:

Pressing all skills can make sure you have more time to stay in Jalis or Ventari.

Swapping legends is an old problem, you still be struggling to swap to glint if you need to maintain quick but still need stab or bubble.

I understand why you hate this change so much now.

But our best friend still keeps silent...what can we expect?

[Viper.2436]

2 hours ago, Burnfall.9573 said:

Well.....this is Anet lost, not mine

And we still have no answers from the developers, no reactions, nothing.
In the forum they are active, unfortunately in absolutely unimportant things. I mean ruby is taking care about the 5 pages runes but not about the 550 pages balance......

They prefer to lose all the players instead of finally acting. This can hardly be surpassed in terms of arrogance.

At the end of July, they will then implement a little bit of the thousands of suggestions and think that they have made everything good again.

Edited June 29, 2023 by Viper.2436

[Zephire.8049]

Threads devs have been active in according to the dev tracker since this preview:

• WvW restructuring issues
• June 6th update notes

Since yesterday's patch it's now also:

• About prepurchasing SotO
• Warrior bug
• Deadeye bug
• SotO beta thread creation x10
• Patch bug fixes
• Addressing concern about relics and legendary runes in SotO

Nothing about the preview feedback, nothing about concerns of the patch, nothing about the reasoning why they did what they did. The closest is the warrior and deadeye bugs where they basically say "Thanks for letting us know!" with dang near everything else being cookie-cutter or tied to the upcoming expansion. It very much feels like they're ignoring the current playerbase and this thread—which they created—and are only focusing on the expansion, especially as the thread about relics got a response in ~17 hours but they said nothing about the patch in 19 days. Not even a "Thanks for all the feedback, keep it coming."

I'm fully expecting this thread to be unpinned and/or locked soon with zero acknowledgement.

[Nachthimmel.6802]

At this point of ongoing silence even a simple "We are working on a response and explanation for the changes we made with the latest Balance Patch" would feel like a blessing.

[Astralporing.1957]

7 minutes ago, Nachthimmel.6802 said:

At this point of ongoing silence even a simple "We are working on a response and explanation for the changes we made with the latest Balance Patch" would feel like a blessing.

Only if they were really working on that. Which at this point is not so certain. I mean, they have an expansion to sell...

[Zephire.8049]

At this point if they say anything, it's going to be a retroactive justification. I can't remember if it was last year's June patch or another one where they did similar: Put out a preview and then after it went live released a statement that didn't actually say anything or explain anything new. Just some verbosity and to trust them they'll change things in a future balance patch.

Wasn't impressed then, not impressed now.

[Imperial.8471]

I'm starting to think we simply didn't post our feedback at the right place and Anet just didn't see it.

Maybe the GW2 Steam review page would be more visible to them?
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1284210/Guild_Wars_2/#app_reviews_hash

[Kal Durak.2830]

On 6/10/2023 at 4:57 AM, Tulki.1458 said:

I hope the Mechanical Genius change to a cooldown penalty still has the buff as a grace period. Pet pathfinding and movement are too unpredictable to take into account without a grace period buff.

I simply cannot control my Mech.  It's a  loose cannon.

[Vidit.7108]

It was really underhanded to not mention that there was going to be a rework of mace on mechanist. That was a pretty big change and it's raising the difficulty of heal mech in a way that's probably not good in the long term.

This is probably the last time I am making a feedback post period. It was said by double tap once that you read this specific topic, it seems that's no longer true and thus I'm not participating in any feedback threads from here on out. 

What it feels like is happening is that you have looked at the relative ease healer players seem to have with PvE and decided that boon support had to be something that players needed to work at to do. In a sense i get the feeling of needing to make gameplay "engaging". Where I feel this goes wrong is that it misunderstands where difficulty in gameplay from using a heal build should come from.

In instanced content, a dps player does two things, fight/encounter mechanics and dps. Because boons are not being allowed to be an afterthought, a boon support dps does three things, boons, dps, and fight/encounter mechanics. A healer boon support also does three things, boons, heals, and fight/encounter mechanics. The harder boon upkeep is the more and more players of the last two categories are doing three things in a fight instead of two. Ideally the healer boon support should only have to worry about mechanics and healing. The effort that should be spared in boon support is when you built your character to fill that role, when you figured out what stats let you dps or heal the most for your skill level.

I'm sure a lot of healers feel bored, but that's not because boon support is less engaging. The challenge of healing is the other players, the better they are at mechanics the less pressure is on the healer. If you play with players new to the fight suddenly healing becomes very difficult. Your source of engagement is the in the behavior of other players and the fight mechanics. New fights even with experienced players will be more engaging that first time then the thousandth time. The fight for a dps player becomes easier as they learn and perfect responding to mechanics so everyone starts to feel bored when they do the same fight 100000s of times. A player that is bad at dps will probably never notice their dps is low without looking it up. Everyone notices when boons aren't up and everyone, especially the healer, notices when a player is dead. Making those heals and boons harder for healers has cascading effects. If people don't like healing because it's lame and boring then they can boon dps instead or join a no healer group.

Changes over the last year have pretty blanketly been making healing harder by either making healing worse or boon support more complicated. HAM probably shows up as your most used healer, but that's not because it's better than the rest at healing, it's because it's easier to learn and understand especially for new players. It seems like each mmo has trouble getting healers, the job is intimidating for some and it is very obvious when you are bad at it. It was a good thing HAM was easy it meant more people had a place to start and learn how to heal in this game. The complications with other boon and healer builds that people are complaining about after this patch all trace back to making the boon part harder to do. It's not necessary, it should really be a non-issue. 

The changes to heal alac specter, kind of work, it's not easy to play imo, but the firehose of alacrity it gives off makes the shroud part a non-issue. Using the ally target is still a problem and a big hindrance to healing. Endless night seems to be interrupted too easily to be useful, particularly when the targeted player walks behind the specter. I doubt the boons will stay this way and so heal alac specter will probably have only these three weeks to exist. If druid had been given the same 2seconds of alacrity each skill maybe it wouldn't suck as much to play, as it stands you've pretty much ruined druid. I doubt whatever you've cooked up for heal scourge will fix it or make people happy, maybe you'll surprise me.

I'm still thinking about quitting, while my main builds got away from this update without issue, the failure of this patch is a reminder that it's all temporary. I've been enjoying FFXIV a lot, so this might be the last couple months I play this game after 11 years. I'm very unhappy with the balance direction overall, i tried out some new builds that were promising but I am already worried they'll be gone in three weeks after the next patch. GW2 just isn't worth the time anymore and the radio silence surrounding this patch and balance patches makes it easy to feel the game is in a dead end. 

[Kal Durak.2830]

14 minutes ago, Vidit.7108 said:

It was really underhanded to not mention that there was going to be a rework of mace on mechanist. That was a pretty big change and it's raising the difficulty of heal mech in a way that's probably not good in the long term.

What the heck! I didn't see this... Dang it another slam NERF to the Mech!

[Gendalfs.7521]

What if a person in charge above balance team doesnt even know this thread exists?

[Pie.2167]

I'm curious, are you all having more, less, or about the same amount of fun playing GW2 after this patch?

[Viper.2436]

2 hours ago, Gendalfs.7521 said:

What if a person in charge above balance team doesnt even know this thread exists?

Unfortunately, we do not know. For my part, at least today I sent a registered letter to the management of Anet. I don't think they are up to date what the balancing team is doing here.