June 27 Balance Follow-Ups

[BatelGeuce.3591]

3 minutes ago, Gendalfs.7521 said:

I see youre in acceptance phase 🙂

NO, remove that MG bullsh1t Anet. 

And give our triple shot AA back. Please?

I mean, acceptance phase is better than delusional phase 😀

1 hour ago, BatelGeuce.3591 said:

How about you let druid generate basic boons without the need to go to CA.

CA could serve mainly for healing and supply less frequent but sometimes needed boons such as stability (not like CA5, I mean party stability not my own) or aegis (kudos to the only source we have now, the White Tiger). You could have the spirits back the way they were, lower the alac duration to like 3,5s and have the one that used to give might per pulse do more than 11 stacks so that it outweighs the loss of might in CA. The trait that currently gives 0.75 Alac could bump up condi cleanse instead cause god knows that Healing Spring + CA2 + Glyph of Stars are not bad but it could be a lot better (easier), imagine having cleanse on CA 3 and 4. Like try to make the spec more fun to play, not more dreadful. Or maybe we should all go play hFB 🙃

I'd like to add a suggestion (imagine me flextaping it under the initial one) for astral energy rework since it might be better off working like necromancer's life force does - as in you can tap in whenever as long as it's above certain amount and you don't lose 50% of it when you tap out.

[CrazyM.1852]

Really hope they don't nerf thief to the ground again. Power quick Deadeye build is fun to play, and am hoping i can play it for more than 1 patch. It has high single target dmg, but aside from that not much else and no cleave. If the dmg of build like power quickness Deadeye is same as other quickness builds, you will have no reason to play the build, because every other quickness build brings so much more than just dmg and quickness.

Specter is not in much different situation. The dmg build was not in a good spot since they nerfed shadow shroud, and never gave initative back that they sad they would. But agree that there should be a bigger dmg gap between dmg build and alac build.

Power Daredevil atm is weird, i dont think the rotation should include cancelling 3rd auto-attack and breaking auto-attack chain.

Pls don't overreact just because there is a viable thief build in PVE that is not pure dps.

[WizardXeze.2860]

Qucik Scrapper feels weird. Most people seem to hate the new chances. The dps adds hammer 3 to the rotation and has permanent qucikness but most people don't enjoy using hammer 3 as it is force movement and super long. Heal on other hand needs to use Shield 4, med kit 5, blast gyro and any fourth source to generate permanent quickness. Adding 1-2s to the Quickness would make Heal Scrapper fun in my opinion but it would also brake The DPS Scrapper unless you remove the Leap finishers from giving quickness? Heal Scrapper specifically wants to save F5 the function gyro as it is your revive and now that you don't need super speed also your other source of stability. Using Elixir 4 is no fun because you leap backwards and are forced to move forwards and people beside me hate that. Mine while usable feels like you are now slapping solutions to not press F5 on cooldown, it is also good CC and boon rip but still not so fun to be forced to do this. You could use Bomb kit for quickness and blast Fire Field for Might but again it makes the heal scrapper not fun. Rocket Boots and Thumper Turret just are bad choices but ways to generate quickness. Solution, remove leap finishers and add 1-2s more quickness duration? Or more sensible revert the quickness back to super speed?

 

Offensive and Defensive supports suffer from unequality. What I mean is that some supports are giving ton of boons while others are giving few. Herald gives Quickness, Fury and some might with elite elixir giving all boons for 5s with long cooldown? Chronomancer gives either Qucikness or Alacrity and some Fury and nothing else? Mean while DPS Mechanist gives Alac, Fury, 25might, some Protection and one stack of Aegis & Stab.

Healers should always give permanent Regeneration and Protection with Quick or Alac. Heal Harbinger and Heal Scourge are both lacking self healing and protection. Solution? Add Protection to Scourge?? Why don't we add Protection to Blood Magic so Heal Harbinger could also give permanent protection? On top of the topic Transfusion should be self healing the Necromancer? Is it not? It feels like it is not healing yourself at all?

Specter had an interesting bug where Protection and other boons from Scepter are going to the closest targets and not the sub-group?! Specter Tank had only 10% Protection uptime on himself as you can't self target.

[Kain Chaos Angel.1845]

how about to remove alac and quicknes from the game, it would solf so mutch problems, make the balancing easyer. Healer can be healer again and not an alac or qicknes generator, witch hopefully heals enough to keep the others a life. 
As long healer have to do this boons they will yelled at if the heal is not enough or the boon uptime is not enough. 
2 years ago i stard to say they should take alac and quicknes from all healers now i'm at the point that the entire health of the game would be better without this 2 Boons. 
If the options are to try to give every class the boons and make them more difficuld, more unfun. Or aciveing the same result in removing the 2 boons from the game and provide the class identety, a fluid fun gameplay and solving some of teh biggest blancing problem (and protecting players from itself) it's only logical to to have a GW2 without Alac and Quicknes!
This is only an opinion but i think it should be strongly conciderd.

[ErisianMoon.1740]

I appreciate the quick communication and intention to fix some of the damages done by the last balance patch, but I gotta agree with so many other commenters that some of the design choices here are completely missing the mark.
I'll focus on druid as that's one of the main classes I've been playing in PvE for at least 6 years.

I do not appreciate the way Alacrity has now been added to CA at all. As others have said and as Mukluk pointed out in his recent videos on the topic, you used to save CA for the right moments to provide a burst heal, a cleanse, additional cc or in some cases an immobilise as the context demanded. That's the fun of playing a support, picking and utilising the tools available in your kit to adapt to an encounter and squad/subgroup composition. Adding alacrity which such a short duration to CA makes you need to dip into CA as soon as it's recharged to maintain upkeep and is ultimately a lot spammier than alacrity on spirits ever felt like. Some have and are going to point out that you essentially did similar for might generation but the difference is might duration was longer already and you had other tools outside of CA to help with upkeep, as well as others in your sub with some passive generation. Adding might now to pet swap is a similar problem and removes the posibility of using pet swaps/pet active to wait out certain mechanics and just makes for more spammy, unengaging gameplay.

I wouldn't agree to simply revert back to alacrity on spirits, but not onto CA. if we all must go along with a rather tiring boon meta, then at least equalise all the supports so alac/quickness gen becomes integral part of their existing gameplay loop already. For druid, as I saw someone else suggest, I'd agree with trait to provide alac on granting regen since regen is one of your core boon applications already, both in and out of CA.

The same idea holds true for scrapper though I'm less familiar with Engineer as a whole. Moving quickness from superspeed to finishers seems counterproductive. Please listen to veteran players of particular classes and redesign the support build so we can use them again effectively instead of all seeking refuge in heal firebrand.

Other than that, the change to Arc Divider was neither good nor needed. As everyone else has said, please revert this change and get rid of the aftercast instead as you're doing for power guardian.

 

[Furball.1236]

Thank you for these changes. I'm hopeful some of these changes, such as to DPS scourge, are enough to solve the problems.

For other changes, such as to heal alac druid, I hope they won't make the class easy-mode and playable semi-afk like a couple of classes we already have.

I also appreciate you're being so responsive and already discussing about adjusting some of the thief elite specs. I imagine the balancing team has eyes on some discord channels to get the insight regarding this. I do think the final decision probably should be made after we players further explore the performance of these elite specs on both the golem and real fights.

Lastly, also thank you for dealing with some old issues like the aftercast of the guardian skills.

 

Edit: I removed the edit I made and posted that part as a separate post.

Edited June 30, 2023 by Furball.1236

[Zephire.8049]

You thank us for our feedback and say you've been keeping an eye on that but we never, ever saw that. There were over two weeks between the preview and when the patch went live and the only things said or done on the forum was making the preview discussion thread, a bug fix for the previous patch, and a note on WvW restructuring. That's it. If you were reading the preview thread or the countless individual threads in various profession-specific forums you should have said something.

But given how you were surprised some of the changes "didn't land" I'm not sure if you were reading them, or if you had made up your mind already and just skimmed them. In less than an hour of the preview being posted there were concerns brought up about druid, scrapper, scourge, and arc divider, all of which had those concerns make it into the game and even now you're ignoring scourge players when they're telling you two ways to make it playable without spam.

But since you ignored 50 pages of feedback in your own feedback thread (on top of all the other threads people created), I'll reiterate my concern about heal quickness scrapper. It does not feel good to play now and there's still no choice, there's just spamming other skills instead of gyros. Keeping Kinetic Accelerators as it was and then adding the option to apply quickness from blast, leap, and whirl finishers would have provided options other than gyro spam while keeping gyro use as an option if people wanted.

All without having to use Function Gyro or the self-heal as a crutch to keep quickness up and working with both DPS and heal scrappers.

If the intent was for scrappers to use mace to apply quickness, that should have been clearly communicated and such a drastic change shouldn't have been added to the game until scrappers could use mace, otherwise heal quick scrappers are dead in the water until late August and you don't even mention scrapper of any sort for changes for the July 18th patch, not even to say you're looking into it like you say you're doing regarding a nerf to deadeye but don't know how yet.

[drchaos.5204]

while i gladly accept the herald buff... it is completely unneeded. if you play with diviner gear then quick herald is very comfortable playstyle without button spamming and the most reliable way to keep up quickness.

now it gets even easier or just allows you to change to berserker gear... imo its perfectly viable to expect diviner/ritualist gear for a buff providing class

[Ishkar Malheur.8142]

Is this still a joke? Berserker still irrelevant. Have the lead balance really have ever touch and play on Berserker and see the problem from the root?

DPS berserker is also useless and Quick DPS berserker cannot exist anymore, I would suggest the lead balance to try and play what you have done to every classes before releasing all things out.

[Leonard.6081]

Wait a second... you just removed 2 spins from berserker's greatsword, and put one on dagger burst? 

come on... this feels like an out of season april's fools joke...

Revert Arc Divider as it was before this patch. 

[reapex.8546]

1 hour ago, SkyRight.2370 said:

I'm so, so tired of ANet thinking "How to fix this problem in a specific way" instead of "Can we make everyone happy here?" When the answer to the 2nd question is almost literally always Yes.'

 

In terms of making everyone happy that can actually be really hard to do.  Some people will be upset if they see a class got more buffs than their personal favorite class.   

Edited June 30, 2023 by reapex.8546
Clarification

[svnset.8206]

I am glad you at least try to address some of the terrible changes. 

 

Now please revert the boonbreak/boon corruption nerfs on spellbreaker and necro. We need them. Boons are already out of control. I would even say we need MORE builds denying boons and not less.

Also please revert the Scrapper changes. Getting quickness now is worse than before. Why do you punish a class that does not even perform that great in the first place... I do want to use my scrapper utility for utility reasons alone and not to create combo fields that I now desperately need.

Most improtantly revert the boon corruption changes.

Please.

Edited June 30, 2023 by svnset.8206

[Spucke.4163]

I guess you didn't notice that alac bladesworn is overperforming too. does identical dps like the pure dps variant 🙂. Dragon trigger was already nuts but this is too much...

Edited June 30, 2023 by kaese.8765

[Marrek.5823]

Badly need to address the ICD on 'Heat the Soul' for Berzerker quickness, it's terrible as is, a long internal cooldown should not be tied to a key boon on skills you use every 2-3 seconds resulting in massive de-syncs. 

It needs to have quickness durations specific to each berzerk skill. Decapitate being the shortest, longbow or greatsword having much longer durations. 

Edited June 30, 2023 by Marrek.5823

[isakaswe.3815]

It is really sad seeing untamed in this state. Not only is it neglected and no one plays it after the fervent force removal but for some reason you guys are so scared to make it viable, it does nothing that other classes don't already do way better and in 2 months power dps untamed seems like it will be useless if soulbeast can also use untamed hammer.

Power untamed is not only clunky because of the awful unleash attack mechanic but it's near impossible to have 5 stacks of ferocious symbiosis during a lot of boss encounters which sucks because it's so crucial for dps untamed to preform, not only do the stacks decay after just 5 seconds which also relies on your pet to actually auto attack and not just run off doing something else or chase an enemy around for a few seconds and when 5 seconds pass you lose ALL stacks immediately. Dps and quickness untamed both feel awful, it is obvious that you guys have no clue what you are doing when it comes to this elite spec as quickness untamed is practically unplayable? the rotation feels awful and dps untamed feels useless when soulbeast does the same thing without dealing with the awful pet ai to keep up your damage bonus while also outpreforming untamed easily. Honestly makes me disappointed that instead of making dps untamed viable you guys got lazy and simply threw quickness on it to make up for its lack of dps and its awful playstyle. 

if you actually listen to community feedback even if there are basically only 5 people in this community who still play untamed after the Fervent Force removal then please make untamed more viable for encounters, either make it so when you engage in combat you have 5 stacks of Ferocious Symbiosis or make them decay one by one or hell why not both its not like untamed would become too strong anytime soon. I am really wondering what class identity you think untamed currently has, for me its just ranger that has to baby sit its pet more while getting a cool hammer (that soulbeast will come and steal in 2 months)

Quickness untamed is not a bad idea on paper but the truth is, unleashed attacks suck. It's a core mechanic in the build but it simply doesnt do enough to be relevant its at the point that even if you do not unleash ur pet a single time during untamed rotation its only aprox 10% dps loss. at this point its just core ranger with a hammer. Please just make it actually feel good to play. Make it unique and not just a core ranger with quickness (that feels awful to give)

Untamed traitline is a joke for a dps/quickness dps. I'm sorry but seriously what went wrong here, I am talking from pve standpoint as untamed traits arent awful for pvp but for pve my god I do not think I have ever seen people use half of them. I mean seriously? 2k barrier for a cantrip? The lowest cd cantrip which would be the port if you hit it is 20 seconds. 2k barrier for 20 seconds? is this a joke? 100 barrier a second? Sure you can use more cantrips but no one would ever do that outside of the elite skill and exploding spores there is not anything that is used much at all. And why do we still have this awful disable to apply posion? i mean seriously when would this ever get used? in a condi untamed build? Binding outburst is just simply far better. 

The 2nd traitline is so much worse somehow. Disable for stability does make some sense, it is nice for a dps build to generate some stability however 3 second duration on stability is something else.. it is not even possible to swap into pet unleash to keep up stablity in a rotation because of the huge dps loss and clunkiness. And the other two traits are simply useless. Cleansing unleash is just awful 10 second cooldown on a 2 condi cleanse? It gets worse too, corrupting vines since when did untamed need boon removal? And if you guys wanted untamed to be a elite spec using boon removal as a main part of its kit why does it not have any place in grandmaster traits or on its cantrips? Not only that but if untamed is supposed to be a boon removal class all of a sudden it has to compete with spellbreaker which is not even a competition as untamed falls short on everything (except for its awful and clunky quickness you guys have given it)

It would be amazing to see a bigger rework in how untamed plays I understand that is difficult but currently it just does not serve any purpose and feels bad to play for the most part so a lot of people just do not want to play it at all. Unleash attacks feel bad especially hammer unleash as it's just such a long cast time. Not to mention the amount of bugs biggest one being pet animation canceling that i honestly think has been a bug since untamed came out where any f1-f3 skills resets your pets auto attack chain even if they are on cooldown. (making bird pets on untamed a machine gun in pvp)

overall I'm disappointed with the approach for untamed. And wish you guys would not be so scared when changing things with it.

[Esufer.8762]

Good to see you guys iterating on stuff and communicating it out (and with more detailed patch notes too!) - keep it up!

[SourceOfTrippy.4207]

Lets say a class benches 40k then you take lets say you call it a “scholar relic” giving it 5% strike damage on a power class. So its 2k damage increase bringing it to 42k. Keeping in mind this is hypothetically speaking. So now the devs see it as a overly damaging for a dps class. So lets say down the road in the future they nerf it right. Basically doing that to even or level it out a bit in this particular case. In turn what this does is makes the relics worthless through the eventual balance patches that come. So several years down the road they would go around nerfing everything that was actually making the class a bit better through the relic choices. Now I am not saying 100% they will nerf all the relics as years go by but in some cases it will make the relic worthless because they are suppose to add option benefits. So the class now takes a specified nerf on the build in turn hurting the class builds that don’t use that specific relic anyways. 
Which makes things complicated and idk might turn into a mess

Other thing would be 6th effect from what I am understanding not the stat that the relic does I am assuming they keep all the 6th effects from old runes in the legendary relic selectable and maybe add new 6th effects to relics. I am a bit confused how this will all turn out but I am sure they will handle everything as always. 

[HotDelirium.7984]

I'm more curious about how the changes didn't land as intended. Do YOU the dev team know why that is because I hope you do. From a logistics POV, creating changes and then fixing them because they came out badly sounds like a quality assurance/iteration/game design/testing issue. I hope you get help with this! Everything else will fall into place. Keep at it. 

[Scaffold.9475]

Really no addresses to the warrior community's feedbacks? 

The changes to the gratsword made it absolutely useless (not to mention the changes to blood reaction)

At least revert Arc Divider back as it was before this patch

[Maze.3892]

Shade duration??

[Baseraver.7241]

New Power DPS Berserker Benchmark - 27th June Patch
Edit: See a later post.

Edited July 3, 2023 by Baseraver.7241

[Tachenon.5270]

I propose the addition of two entirely new professions: the Quickener and the Alacritic. Then you can put all the Quickness and Alacrity your hearts desire on these two and leave everybody else the hell alone.

Alternately, create two new Universal (elite) Specializations which can be chosen by any (core) profession, and lump all the Quickness and Alacrity stuff into them. A Warrior, for example,  might take Strength, Tactics, and either Lemme Fix This Here (quickness) or Unleashing the Hounds (alacrity) depending on the desired result.

You're welcome.

[xXxOrcaxXx.9328]

I need you to explain to me why, after doing away with alac on spirits for being too spammy, spamming Celestial Avatar skills, pet swap and pet F2 is an improvement.

[pufina.9651]

For a brief history lesson, Arc Divider was introduced ad a single greatsword spin at the HoT release...

Then it was changed to three spins because it was awful, and the comunity was happy with that.

Then why going back to square one if something has been perfectly fine for years?

Just acknowledge your error, then bring it back as it was before

[Malus.2184]

A few things

The Herald change makes it even easier than it is now for QHerald to provide Quickness. While it's good for Heal Herald it makes QHerald WAY too easy and with a practical need for little to no Concentration.

The rationale behind the changes to Alac Willbender can also be used for Scrapper as Scrapper effectively has to contort itself into knots to provide Quickness under similar conditions.

Edited June 30, 2023 by Malus.2184