January 30 Balance Update Preview

[RasSativa.5109]

So to see it from anet perspective a elitespec that is played for 0.9% in raids and maybe does a bit more damage then it used to do is getting nuked. Not only that there nuking other specs in that profesion to the point that there is no reason to play mirage anymore. 
 

its not anly dps mirage you nuke, but also alacmirage wich does not see any playtime after the 6th nerf.

 

[Nimon.7840]

I really appreciate the heads up notice. Some of these changes are pretty nice.

What I don't understand is, why there's still no changes to the boon radius of a lot of builds. And there's also no changes to the boon access to certain boon dps builds.

There's basically no reason to play any other quick dps build than herald.

Other than that, I have a very big issue with waiting for Necro swords, before making changes to power harbinger. Sorry but dmg wise those swords were so bad in the beta, that they have to be buffed to the moon, to make power harbinger a thing. And then this creates another problem: they even have to be a lot better than greatsword, to make power harbinger a good dps build. But then this would be a dmg increase for reaper as well, and reaper is a lot tankier and imo easier to play, so basically no reason to play harbinger.

I feel like harbinger needs a rework.

But I'm excited for the big profession updates in the patch after this one.

And I'm really sad about no nerfs to heavily over performing roaming/small-scale builds for wvw.

Edited January 13 by Nimon.7840

[VeriBeri.9528]

14 hours ago, LichOverlord.6329 said:

CmC needs to learn how to better lead the balance of the game for PvE, or take a step back and just focus on PvP - his mode of choice - while someone else takes over and leads the PvE balance

Exactly my thoughts. Can we finally have a balance lead, that actually knows what "balance" means? We have tons of underperforming specs, and he keeps AdJuStInG the same few, based on stupid idea of snowcrows benchmarks, instead of actual usability in game. About time there was a PvE balance lead, that actually plays PvE, and understands how it works, instead of running everything over with a bulldozer, so the numbers look even.

Also, leave mirage alone. No one plays it anyway, let the remaining 5 people have some fun at least.

[Bizgurk.5639]

The changes to Relic of Resistance sound a bit too strong. At least make it scale with the cooldown of the healing skill, else it'll be too easy to gain Resistance in WvW.

[Cogadh.1845]

Little played specs nerfed because of some abstract metrics from a golem, while Willbender yet again remains untouched in PvP/WvW.... I don't know anymore

[Suyheuti.1732]

You are unbelievable Anet. Are you nerfing mirage just because less than %1 people play.  Really unbelievable. There was one thing to do. That would be tuning down chaos a little to balance staxe version without touching pure axe. If you release this, mirage will be garbage again.

[Morgoth Bauglyr.9726]

Instead of trashing transfusion for every single wvw scourge, consider moving it to dagger 2 instead. It fits thematically and might make mainhand dagger a choice for support. 

[kiranslee.4829]

As this is obviously im prep for 1st of april, ill leave this link here for off chance someone may notice it.

https://www.youtube.com/@captaincrapface7337/videos

[ZephidelGRS.9520]

Nerfing Mirage is unjustified, but the bigger offender here is nerfing the condi traits of the Chaos traitline as collateral damage. 

The previous support reworks to the traitline was an additional welcome, turning it into an interesting hybrid condi/boon support traitline. But now it feels more like boon support only with all its condi traits destroyed, which is redundant when Inspiration is already the dedicated support traitline.  

Please undo these changes, it brings absolutely nothing good to the game.

[HnRkLnXqZ.1870]

On 1/12/2024 at 12:26 AM, Rubi Bayer.8493 said:

General

As with the November update, this update also includes improvements for some underperforming relics.

• Relic of Karakosa: Lowered the healing multiplier from 0.8 to 0.5 in PvE and WvW.
• Relic of the Flock: This relic now heals instead of granting barrier. Excess healing is converted to barrier.
• Relic of Resistance: This relic now triggers when using a healing skill instead of when using an elite skill. Reduced the resistance duration from 5 seconds to 2.5 seconds. Reduced the cooldown from 30 seconds to 10 seconds.
• Relic of the Pack: This relic now also grants might and fury to affected allies.
• Relic of Durability: This relic now also grants resolution.
• Relic of the Weaver: This relic no longer has an internal cooldown.
• Relic of Dagda: The projectile fired by this relic now dazes enemies that it strikes. Reduced the warmup duration from 1.5 seconds to 1 second.
• Relic of the Citadel: Reduced the warmup duration from 2 seconds to 1 second.
• Relic of the Krait: Reduced the warmup duration from 2 seconds to 1 second.
• Relic of the Nightmare: Reduced the warmup duration from 2 seconds to 1 second.
• Relic of the Wizard's Tower: Reduced the warmup duration from 2 seconds to 1 second.

Yikes! I switched from Flock to Karakosa, probably going for another after that patch - I don't tell you which, else you nerf that as well 😛. Pack is kinda pointless if you keep the cooldown at 30 seconds.

On 1/12/2024 at 12:26 AM, Rubi Bayer.8493 said:

Engineer

Condition holosmith and power scrapper are both a bit overtuned in PvE and are getting brought down in this update. We've also slightly reworked Bulwark Gyro to be more reliable for supporting allies, and Adaptive Armor has been reworked to be an effective grandmaster trait for support builds to prepare for the introduction of the short bow.

• Blowtorch: Fixed an issue that caused this skill to inflict more burning than intended.

·         Bulwark Gyro: This skill no longer redirects damage from nearby allies to the user, and it now grants barrier to nearby allies upon activation and on each pulse.

• Adaptive Armor: This trait has been reworked. Your function gyro has two ammunition and grants barrier to allies when cast. Function Gyro no longer has an increased recharge when creating additional gyros but has a higher base recharge.

·         Applied Force: Reduced the bonus power per might stack from 35 to 30 in PvE only.

Bulwark Gyro will be a nightmare for you to balance out properly. But that is luckily not my problem :). The truth is that you have made the current gyros effect also into a relic and combining both can be used to bypass certain mechanics I guess? Do as you please ^^. While I enjoyed shielding people from lethal attacks, this new version will make my life much easier.

In anticipation of this change, I swapped out Adaptive Armor a few months ago. Most Scrappers with support refuse to cast Function Gyro for boon application at the moment and only use it for quick revival. With the ammo change, some of us may change their habits. But it mostly depends on how long this higher base recharge will be. In addition, you will get a lot of 'feedback' from sPvP players who already hated the original Gyro. A Scrapper with two of those abominations will definitely not cause happiness. I already have a few ideas how to utilize the new trait. This will be a lot of fun. 

Blowtorch and Applied force are acceptable imo, the guys on the sub-board will once again call you out for "making the whole class unplayable!" as usual ^^.

Looking forward to the patch 🙂
 

[Vegeta.2563]

On 1/11/2024 at 5:26 PM, Rubi Bayer.8493 said:

Transfusion: This trait now increases the cooldown of Garish Pillar to 60 seconds in WvW only.

300% increase seems pretty high considering the trait is already weakened with Garish Pillar.  1% revive rate compared to other shroud 4 skills which have 2%.  On top of that base healing reduced from 292 to 204.

[SeTect.5918]

18 hours ago, Alva.4590 said:

Mirage being worse than before November with those changes. GG anet. 
It would be very justified though, if Mirage didn't have such a high skillfloor. Other classes are very easy to play compared to Mirage and hit 40k + very easily. 
On Mirage you have to watch out for every little thing to do somewhat decent even. 
In relation to it's difficulty the numbers past-patch will just not justify playing this class any further - again! 

Skill floor does not matter for them. Otherwise condi holo With like 3 kits would have to be 50k compared to some others that deal 44k with like 5 skills. That wouldn't be healthy for the balance. 

What mirage needs is a ramp-up time increase. It needs 20 seconds to reach 41k dps while the max. Is at 46.6k. Imagine how long it needs to reach even 38k dps if it deals max. 40-42k dps. Probably like 25+ seconds. 

[ShadowKatt.6740]

4 hours ago, Zepharos.5860 said:

instead of nerfing stuff why don't they just boost other stuff that has fallen off, this Teter-toter balancing is BS stop touching scourge, stop touching mirage I don't even play mirage and know that's too harsh of a nerf. 

relic of karakosa doesn't need a nerf.

 

Do you want power creep? Because that's how you get power creep.

All joking aside, there's a very good reason, and you have to look long term. If everyone is at power 5 when the game launches and you see some builds over performing, some under performing, you boost a couple up to 6 and a couple down to 4, and you see how well it's going. This is how balancing works in general. But if we were to just boost everyone up  then suddenly not only did some of our builds go up to 6, a couple of them went up to power 7 as well. And the meta changes. People are using new abilities, and other builds are lagging behind. So they get boosted up to 7 as well, and the meta changes again. next balance patch some need to boost up to 8, and six months later some go up to 9.

But the CONTENT of your game hasn't changed. Everything is still tuned to a base power of 5 that you had at launch and now your players are basically double that. Think of how you can go back to core how and just melt everything effortlessly even on a new character, and then consider how much worse that might be if they didn't nerf more than they buffed. That's the reason we don't always uplift bad builds, we also have to weigh down the overly powerful builds.

[ethereal.5270]

The nerf on alac chrono is way too harsh, needs to balance sure, but dont gut the spec

[deathdealerpreha.6029]

You all already nerfed scourge into the ground by crippling their shades. spent 4 years playing that build for you to mess up the entire professions mechanic.  Wish you knew as much about balance as you think you did. only took you a year to figure out sand shades nerf ruined the spec.  but not to be outdone for idiocy  you reduce the timer to 8 seconds?  really?  AND you want to go in on transfusion?  Do none of you people actually play scourge? seems like it.

[deathdealerpreha.6029]

51 minutes ago, ShadowKatt.6740 said:

Do you want power creep? Because that's how you get power creep.

All joking aside, there's a very good reason, and you have to look long term. If everyone is at power 5 when the game launches and you see some builds over performing, some under performing, you boost a couple up to 6 and a couple down to 4, and you see how well it's going. This is how balancing works in general. But if we were to just boost everyone up  then suddenly not only did some of our builds go up to 6, a couple of them went up to power 7 as well. And the meta changes. People are using new abilities, and other builds are lagging behind. So they get boosted up to 7 as well, and the meta changes again. next balance patch some need to boost up to 8, and six months later some go up to 9.

But the CONTENT of your game hasn't changed. Everything is still tuned to a base power of 5 that you had at launch and now your players are basically double that. Think of how you can go back to core how and just melt everything effortlessly even on a new character, and then consider how much worse that might be if they didn't nerf more than they buffed. That's the reason we don't always uplift bad builds, we also have to weigh down the overly powerful builds.

this is laughable.  They legit just pick a few specs and run them into the ground every 3 or 4 months. Look at what they did the Mechanist Power build, only spec on snowcrows without a power spec because they screwed up the spec to begin with then completely buried it when they " wanted to balance" yet every other spec in the game is doing 40k + damage.  Power creep give me a break RAID damage was 25 to 30k for years  and now its 40k +.  Its been power creeped for more than 5 years.  Its what they did to cover for lack of content. 

their balance ideals are "1.1% of players might abuse this one thing lets nerf it for the other 98.9% of players" they nerf on potentials then pretend that they are looking at data.  Their not.  they are like a 14 year old girl that gets a zit.  Nobody else cares but they just stare at it till they have to screw something up. Always been their downfall.  Its why they cant retain players because they cant figure out balance. Gutting specs isn't the way.  Though you cant tell them nothing.

[Szatko.8132]

20 hours ago, Fade.1743 said:

I mean this is a good change. But...why is this for PvE support? 

A PvE support build is going to take the Quickness trait for scrapper. Is shortbow going to supply Quickness without the trait?

I guess this is for a wvw support.

[Hidden.5946]

The slow on frigid blitz was the best part of the skill

[sieyu.1875]

We noticed that senior developer has a slightly higher salary than forum moderator so we adjusted it, now everyone is equal and happy 

[Serephen.3420]

I thought in that huge blog post about the new balancing direction that you were not going to base things off golem benchmarks anymore. Funny how that turned out, nothing changed, only the names that sign off on it.

[chripsy.1027]

Can someone tell me why the Phantasms aren't invulnerable while they perform their attack anyway? They shouldn't even need Distortion....

[Dadnir.5038]

5 hours ago, Nimon.7840 said:

Other than that, I have a very big issue with waiting for Necro swords, before making changes to power harbinger. Sorry but dmg wise those swords were so bad in the beta, that they have to be buffed to the moon, to make power harbinger a thing. And then this creates another problem: they even have to be a lot better than greatsword, to make power harbinger a good dps build. But then this would be a dmg increase for reaper as well, and reaper is a lot tankier and imo easier to play, so basically no reason to play harbinger.

I feel like harbinger needs a rework.

Unless they've made significant change to how swords work alongside the Harbinger, you are right in thinking that what they say doesn't make sense. If swords were to build blight instead of sacrificing life when paired with Harbinger, what they say could make sense (breaking free from the dependency of the elixir would be a relief for strike damage builds).

That said, Harbinger need to be looked at since EoD release. And I'm not talking about power harbinger only.

[ShadowKatt.6740]

3 hours ago, deathdealerpreha.6029 said:

this is laughable.  They legit just pick a few specs and run them into the ground every 3 or 4 months. Look at what they did the Mechanist Power build, only spec on snowcrows without a power spec because they screwed up the spec to begin with then completely buried it when they " wanted to balance" yet every other spec in the game is doing 40k + damage.  Power creep give me a break RAID damage was 25 to 30k for years  and now its 40k +.  Its been power creeped for more than 5 years.  Its what they did to cover for lack of content. 

their balance ideals are "1.1% of players might abuse this one thing lets nerf it for the other 98.9% of players" they nerf on potentials then pretend that they are looking at data.  Their not.  they are like a 14 year old girl that gets a zit.  Nobody else cares but they just stare at it till they have to screw something up. Always been their downfall.  Its why they cant retain players because they cant figure out balance. Gutting specs isn't the way.  Though you cant tell them nothing.

HEY, I didn't said they were doing it well, I explained WHY it's done the way it's done and if you don't like it then there's the door. Go back to playing Monopoly and Risk because this is how balance works in EVERY MMO.

But it requires a few things, like first and foremost developers that actually play their own game and know how things work. Guild Wars 1 was actually notable for having great balance between the professions and a development team that both played the game and knew what they were doing. Granted, it also helped that back in Guild Wars 1 they didn't expect EVERY profession to fill EVERY role. Warriors were tanks, Monks were healers, and everyone else was some facet of support, at least til Factions came out. Now that they're trying to open up every profession to filing every role (DPS, Condi, Heal/Boon Support) they've lost any lens on actually balancing anything.

[Althean.5976]

13 hours ago, daw.4923 said:

Can guard finally get boon strip? its one of 3 classes which cant provide this basic function.

Skills like "sword of justice" or "purging flames" would be ideal for this, if core access sounds too good just put it on "mantra of truth" bcs that one is basically pointless in pve. (i take even oh pistol 5)  thx!

 

..... Purging Flames does condi cleanse....

[KyiuTec.7926]

In my opinion, the winner is the Guardian again. You can tell it's Anet's favorite class. Back in the beta, he was able to generate 40 stacks of burn in PvE in seconds. With the change, there are no longer 40 stacks. "Radiant Fire: This trait no longer grants Zealot's Flame when critically striking an enemy, and instead it grants an additional ammunition to Zealot's Flame. This trait also causes Zealot's Flame to inflict additional burning to enemies in PvE only." I'm curious to see how the Necro plays with the new weapons. He was unplayable back then.

Overall, I personally am not happy with the changes.