November 28 Skills and Balance Update Preview

[arazoth.7290]

1 hour ago, Tokizo.8917 said:

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I was hoping so much that the Revenant shield will be improved and either will grant barrier or aegis. 
And you delivered. Now shield grants aegis and is a really good support weapon and heal herald is now really usuable with a second weapon set. If the upcoming scepter will be a support weapon i will be happy as a rabbit. Barrier and Revive is now the only thing missing on rev however it now already sooo much better. Thank you again

I think it doesn't need revive, it already has these things. Overbloating by giving all options is too much, I think this already more then fine ^^

[arazoth.7290]

17 minutes ago, Sereath.1428 said:

One question.
No longer getting
Vigor Effectiveness Increase: +25%
?

I think this might be grammar mistake that is endurance. Would make more sense if hou could share it with allies 

[Sereath.1428]

2 minutes ago, arazoth.7290 said:

I think this might be grammar mistake that is endurance. Would make more sense if hou could share it with allies 

Hopefully.

[Oslaf Beinir.5842]

So rest in peace Illusionary Inspiration?

[Eddie.9143]

1 hour ago, miiroto.3672 said:

"Relic of Vass: This relic no longer has an internal cooldown when triggered by an elixir skill. Reduced the stack duration from 30 seconds to 10 seconds. Stacks are now expended when striking an enemy and when attacks are negated. Increased the poison duration from 3 seconds to 5 seconds in PvE only"

Currently, this relic procs on Elixir Gun skills aswell, by  removing ICD from it, it can proc on elixir gun many times. Making it possibly exploitive in Competetive modes.

Better add some condi removal to ur build, good things there's a ton of condi removal and boon vomit

 

[Eddie.9143]

Stability on dodge for mirage is wild, Mesmer gonna be so strong.

[Plushie Knight.4209]

Interesting stuff. I see a number of details I'm excited to try out and play around with.

Bringing more relics up to pace is good! Especially with more expansion relics on the way, options to help customize playstyle within a build or suit specific elite specs are tasty.

I'm very glad support Scrapper is getting a little boost. I've played it for years as my preferred heal support, and it has a lot going for it, but it feels like it's stayed static as similar roles have been buffed a lot. I'll gladly take a little more breadth and identity. And I'm very excited for Relic of Mabon with Blast Gyro on a lower CD, for even more team support.

It's a tiny detail, but I'm glad for the look at Ranger pets as well. I'm not as experienced with them, so I can't speak for all those changes, but I'm very excited for Phoenix swapping to a new skill. It's one of my preferred pets, and having Dash as movement or utility sounds so much nicer than a Peck which does less than an autoattack (barring traits that proc on beast skills).

[arazoth.7290]

4 minutes ago, Sereath.1428 said:

Hopefully.

Because for my reasoning if I read this. 1 traitline is to buff dodge and decrease it's cd for more reliable uptime sync with dodge. Another removes cd energy cost and gives plain more energy, which is another nice option for certain builds. And the last gives endurance increase and shares some + vigor boln, thzt would make more sense then adding energy which difectly competitive with the plain energy increase

 

They are trying To make different trait choices to affect the elite spec like I suggested some time ago ( glad they listened+ other ideas i suggested that made the notes)

[psizone.8437]

On 10/26/2023 at 7:40 PM, Rubi Bayer.8493 said:

Dash (Soulbeast): This skill replaces Wicked Bite when merged.

Don't forget to increase the range to 1200 or something so it can be used to actually chase enemies in WvW.

[Every day pon.5386]

*please* re-assign/fire the WvW balance team holy mother of Kormir

[psizone.8437]

Please have a look through rangers skills and traits, too.

The pet changes are very welcome but if you leave ranger untouched, especially after the one wolf pack nerf, it might start falling behind other classes quite heavily.

[WhoWantsAHug.3186]

Best balance patch in the history of GW2. GREAT JOB ANET!!!

[Antrix.4512]

Please, fix the god kitten mechanist’s toolbelt bug 🙏

[the krytan assassin.9235]

the balance preview actually looks pretty good! 

Love the changes to hammer cata and berserker. 

relic of the herald changes might finally open up abit more possibilities for power alac builds

Heal mesmer might actually be viable now, gonna be quite interesting!

cd reduction on axe mesmer seems abit to much, was already wiggling around to the level where it doesn't feel good to play, seems to get even worse now.

parasitic contagion seems to be the major fckup this patch. ~400 dps loss for ~1.5k hps in return isn't something the scourge (and to lesser extent harbi) needed. 

Edited October 27, 2023 by the krytan assassin.9235

[Dualumina.1760]

Looking forward to the Mesmer changes. Quick question though; is there any plans for reworks of runes? It just feels... strange that the goal was to expand the flexibility of builds with the addition of relics, but now every condi build under the sun is using Trapper runes, minus a few edge cases.

[Curunen.8729]

Sand through Glass removing Immobilise!!!! Thank you finally!!! 😄

And moving Restorative Illusions to GM tier so you can use that and Warden's Feedback at the same time!!! 😮 omg finally amazing!

Lots of interesting changes, not sure about the axe clone auto as visually that was quite nice to see them do the whole chain. But nice on the cooldown reduction back to normal without the trait.

[Tokizo.8917]

17 minutes ago, arazoth.7290 said:

Because for my reasoning if I read this. 1 traitline is to buff dodge and decrease it's cd for more reliable uptime sync with dodge. Another removes cd energy cost and gives plain more energy, which is another nice option for certain builds. And the last gives endurance increase and shares some + vigor boln, thzt would make more sense then adding energy which difectly competitive with the plain energy increase

 

They are trying To make different trait choices to affect the elite spec like I suggested some time ago ( glad they listened+ other ideas i suggested that made the notes)

look into the stream, all 3 traits are shown how they will be in the patch.  I have screenshotted them here:

https://ibb.co/Z1s98st
https://ibb.co/TLZCZ3b
https://ibb.co/X3QnvWP
 

While i like these changes, I think Song of Arboreum was a great trait and you could give 100% Vigor uptime with higher effectivness to yourself and your allies. Really good trait for both Solo/Open world play as well as for pure DPS Group instance content. Since it was always used, maybe we can replace Balance in Discord with that? however that would also make the new lower trait useless and you already have 100% vigor.... I think at least the vigor effectivness should be kept. 

[Aeslarin.6830]

Honestly speaking, the changes for Ranger’s pets are decent. However, there is one change that I find very disappointing. It concerns the Smokescale’s Takedown skill, in which knockdown was removed from both the pet and Soulbeast’s rotation.

[ZEUStiger.3590]

As a PvE berserker player, for once I'll be anticipating a balance patch without an overwhelming sense of dread. I don't remember anymore when I've last had this feeling. Good job at identifying problems and addressing them. I scrapped a good half of the text I was expecting to post today.

Glad to see you gave up on the idea of having an ICD for Heat the Soul. This may actually make quickness berserker playable.

Hopefully now more players give the spec a chance thanks to berserk mode changes. I was going to suggest making the ability to exit berserk mode baseline, because I wasn't expecting you to budge on the cooldown of berserk, but at 8 seconds this should largely be a non-issue anymore.

There are, however, some outstanding issues still remaining that I want to mention

Relic of the Thief should trigger from warrior F1 skills
The current implementation of Relic of the Thief works only on weapon skills 1-5, which makes its interaction with berserker and bladesworn clunky. For all intents and purposes warrior F1 skills can be considered "weapon skills", since they depend on the currently used weapon. Berserker can gain adrenaline from utility skills and keep using its F1s without touching the actual weapon skills for a long time, but this causes the buff from Relic of the Thief to simply expire. Bladesworn can use multiple gunsaber F1s consecutively with the help of Dragonspike Mine, which causes the buff from Relic of the Thief to expire. This creates a need to keep needlessly weaving in weapon skills just to upkeep the buff. Players should not be punished for properly utilizing their class's toolset.

Revert Arc Divider back to what it was before the 2023-06-27 patch and fix the aftercast animation cancelling
Buffing the damage only made it usable on bossfights again, but it doesn't address the blatant functionality loss that came with the June 27 patch. I've said enough on this subject in this half-a-year-old feedback post. Arc Divider is worse than it was in every respect except for dpsing in endgame content. Until the latest damage buff it was worse than even the non-berserker GS F1 Arcing Slice, which has a faster casttime and grants fury.

Rifle is still not a viable ranged power dps weapon
Nothing else needs to be said about this.

Soldier's Comfort is still not good enough for permanent protection uptime
At 2.5 seconds every 10 seconds (the interval of Soldier's Focus, another example of garbage design btw, just like the ICD of Heat the Soul was) even with 100% boon duration warrior is only capable of providing 50% protection uptime, and that's assuming that Soldier's Focus will be expended precisely the moment it appears, which is simply unrealistic, good luck predicting it with no display of ICDs. In this patch you will be buffing it to 4 secons, which still means only 80% uptime under unrealistic ideal conditions. I hope staff will bring with it something that can offset this, because this ain't it, chief.

Condi berserker is no longer using torch
The recent nerfs to burning application left berserker in a state where off-hand sword is better than torch, berserker's dedicated weapon. Unless something is done about this - in a couple of months you'll have people complaining that torch is a dead weapon, as there is no reason to use it on other builds, and not even its own elite spec is using it. Granted, it's funny to see off-hand sword seeing use in PvE for the first since release, but I suspect that this wasn't how you meant to achieve that. 😄

Some other potential QoL changes and bugs

Reset the adrenaline decay time upon gaining adrenaline out of combat
There are many utility skills which grant the player extra adrenaline. While they work perfectly fine in combat, outside of combat they lose a chunk of their functionality, because the adrenaline you gain from them starts decaying immediately. There are good reasons to want to use burst skills outside of combat (for example hammer's F1 for mobility or any F1 for quickness, if quickness application would be moved away from hitting the target to simply using the burst skill, like it currently works on bladesworn) or to simply prepare for the combat by pregenerating adrenaline (playing longbow in WvW is a bit of a PITA because of this) and while on core warrior and spellbreaker you can sort of get away with using a lower-adrenaline-tier skill (since the immediately decaying adrenaline won't allow you to fully utilize the adrenaline you gained), with berserker this basically prevents you from even entering berserk mode, and even if you manage that by spamming the button - you pretty much won't be able to reliably use any burst skill at all, becase the decay will immediately put you below 10 adrenaline, the minimum amount needed to use the lowest-tier burst.

Fix the size of longbow F1 AoE indicator
The size of the ground-targeting decal mismatches the actual size of the AoE from core longbow F1 on all adrenaline levels. It's bigger than the actual radius by like 50%. The visual effect of core longbow F1 field (i.e. flame particles etc) has also been always way too small compared to the actual area the skill covers, but at least it doesn't mislead the player like the ground-targeting indicator.
I was unaware of the 2017 change that made the AoE radius of longbow F1 the same across all adrenaline levels. Berserker main, like I said... Regardless, the ground-targeted AoE indicator size mismatches the real size of the AoE field.

Mirage is still missing the visual effect around the health orb on dodge
The effect went missing in 2023-06-27 patch. There used to be a while flash around the health orb on the actionbar/skillbar whenever the mirage performed a dodge. This is a fairly important for gameplay, as it was one of the few indications that a dodge succeeded. The sound and the visual effect on the player's model are too easy to miss in the midst of the combat, and mirage's dodge lacks the forced player movement that other classes' dodge have, making it rather difficult to spot at a glance if the dodge actually happened unless you have your eyes glued to the skillbar.

Edited November 7, 2023 by ZEUStiger.3590

[arazoth.7290]

3 minutes ago, Tokizo.8917 said:

look into the stream, all 3 traits are shown how they will be in the patch.  I have screenshotted them here:

https://ibb.co/Z1s98st
https://ibb.co/TLZCZ3b
https://ibb.co/X3QnvWP
 

While i like these changes, I think Song of Arboreum was a great trait and you could give 100% Vigor uptime with higher effectivness to yourself and your allies. Really good trait for both Solo/Open world play as well as for pure DPS Group instance content. Since it was always used, maybe we can replace Balance in Discord with that? however that would also make the new lower trait useless and you already have 100% vigor.... I think at least the vigor effectivness should be kept. 

8 minutes ago, Tokizo.8917 said:

look into the stream, all 3 traits are shown how they will be in the patch.  I have screenshotted them here:

https://ibb.co/Z1s98st
https://ibb.co/TLZCZ3b
https://ibb.co/X3QnvWP
 

While i like these changes, I think Song of Arboreum was a great trait and you could give 100% Vigor uptime with higher effectivness to yourself and your allies. Really good trait for both Solo/Open world play as well as for pure DPS Group instance content. Since it was always used, maybe we can replace Balance in Discord with that? however that would also make the new lower trait useless and you already have 100% vigor.... I think at least the vigor effectivness should be kept. 

 

Like I thought, it is a gramar mistake here and it grants endurance. I think these choices are awesome for how it mechanical works and gives more controll. The idea is most important, numbers how much it does for each content can be adjusted later on. In the long this will work a lot better for vindicator and give it some more identity it was lacking with the dodges with related traits

[Wyld Fyre.8970]

The Twitch recording has sound issues - I can only hear ROY and not the other two !!  help pls.   I cant be getting up at 4am to watch this live.... sad i know

Wyld

[Nighthawk.2401]

On 10/26/2023 at 2:40 PM, Rubi Bayer.8493 said:

Takedown (Soulbeast): Reduced the cooldown from 20 seconds to 10 seconds. This skill no longer knocks down enemies. Increased the power coefficient from 0.7 to 0.1 in PvE

There's a typo somewhere in here - "increased" -> "from .7 to .1"

It's at .7 now, so is the .1 wrong, or is the word increased wrong? Thanks 🙂

[Jasper Defthand.3018]

Keep my smokescale knockdown plz, reduce coeficient if needed but keep functionality.

[Darkhart.4769]

I hope the mechanist range mech command ability Spark Revolver cooldown reduction is fix with mechanical genius. Its CD penalty is always active whenever you have the mechanical genius buff or not.

[DownDrisis.4826]

" Heightened Focus: This trait will now also recharge all burst skills when it activates. Reduced the cooldown from 15 seconds to 12 seconds. "

- This ^ should not have a cooldown on anything outside of full counter. Giving up Burst Mastery and the adrenaline/flow refund that you'll need to pull this off (AND NEEDING TO BUILD ADRENALINE/FLOW BACK UP) to do anything is enough of a limiting factor. Also, this is 100% NOT the reset of [Daring Dragon] that people wanted. >> ESPECIALLY If it requires you to hit' with the burst skill -- as, tragically everything else on warrior does. | BEACUSE: | That means you can not use burst skills for kitting mobility on Core/Spellbreaker Hammer OR Dragonslah - Boost on Bladesworn because you're either a) kitting or your opponent has one one of their 10,000 blocks/aegis/evades/invulns up in the current state of the game. PLEASE just let Heightened Focus reset your burst or DT skills. Having to Spec into Discipline and not take Burst Mastery is already a huge penalty here when you need other trait lines for either defense or damage.

  - Also, "HOW DOES THIS TRIGGER!?" It doesn't say. | My idea: whenever you have over 2 bars of adrenaline at the start of your cast / load 2+ bullet. -- This also fixes the potential "full counter spam" problem.

  - Also where's the Trait that's Replacing Vengeful Return? Also Why is Vengeance chance not increased to at least 50% in PvP / WvW!?!? Also can you PLEASE HIRE A PLAYER WHO HAS SOME PASSION FOR WARRIOR AND WOULD CARE ABOUT IT ENOUGH TO KNOW THESE THINGS / PUT THEM IN THE NOTES!!!

 

Also, also this does absolutely nothing for Dual Wielding, which as Brooks mentioned Also is completely useless because it doesn't stack with quickness and is just a useless grandmaster, or the Actual Warrior Problem of all of their Weapons being more outdated than the Ranger pets. Idea: just make Warrior a Ranger pet and then maybe it'll have someone care about it enough to get updates. Worked for Moas this patch.