Wintersday Balance Update: Feedback Thread

[Arkantos.7460]

expose defense maybe bugged it not applied everytime before a fight.... did not get the buff several times....

Revenant still upper low tier in tpvp... you take our block from sword4 and give us nothing back to mitigate dmgCleansing Channel should remove MORE as 1 condition by switching legends (3 minimum)also shortbow still to slow at all animations (you could integrate the stolen block from sword4 here)

[ezd.6359]

Hm.... less stacks more duration... this means all condi dps nerfed by 50%? In pvp when most of classes clear conditions every second, necro will bring close to zero damage now right?

[ArmageddonAsh.6430]

@Falan.1839 said:Ele and Rev, which were barely viable, got nerfs (mostly insignifcant ones).

Ele nerf to Fury wasnt slight. It was to EVERY build bar one, which didnt even need the change to begin with. Today ele got direct damage nerfs to pretty much EVERY attack (-20% Crit chance) as well as Condi nerfs which are rather funny - no one plays condi ele these days, it died when BurnGuard started...

[zabandija.9623]

Every time I read " this extra balance update" and find each class had around 400 traits balanced, I quit playing pvp for a while and go pve.

[Elementalist Owner.7802]

Why did firebrand get a buff? It was already too strong before this patch :/

[Falan.1839]

@ArmageddonAsh.6430 said:

@Falan.1839 said:Ele and Rev, which were barely viable, got nerfs (mostly insignifcant ones).

Ele nerf to Fury wasnt slight. It was to EVERY build bar one, which didnt even need the change to begin with. Today ele got direct damage nerfs to pretty much EVERY attack (-20% Crit chance) as well as Condi nerfs which are rather funny - no one plays condi ele these days, it died when BurnGuard started...

Yeah, I might have missed the fury nerf. Makes it even worse. All this makes it harder to defend a game that I still enjoy against those people who want to see it fail.

[JayAction.9056]

-Rev short bow still useless in almost all game modes everywhere.
-Renegade still has no use outside of PvE-Rev only viable pvp spec does so low damage that even when playing as high damage as possible now many targets can simply out heal the damage. This is seen in PvE also where the damage coefficients for sword are higher yet it's still one of the lowest damage power specs.-Rev still will die to condi loading from certain specs and you have 0 hope of counter play because the class for some reason is not allowed to have sustain after being nowhere near the highest power damage dealer.

[meri.9187]

Hey, I really hope one of y'all reads this. Irenio, Karl, Ben, someone. Hear me out here, balance team. I don't want to sound accusatory, but wow am I frustrated and I really don't understand this game design.

For some reason, this patch resulted in another nerf to Power Revenant, already the worst class/build in PvP. Karl said it himself, your balance team uses Metabattle to judge game balance, so why do you refuse to notice that not only is the only rev build that was viable in high tier PvP not in the meta build section anymore, but now it is the lowest rated out of even the "great" tier builds, signifying that even secondary builds for many other classes far outperform Revenant in any capacity. I'd like to point out to you that the worst user-given average grade for any other "great" tier build is 93, and Power Shiro Revenant has an 86 and has still been dropping. I've played 25 games this season. Mid to high tier platinum. You know how many revenants I've seen in all 50 teams combined? ZERO. The class's pick rate is ZERO.

Your change to Mutilate Defenses now only gives 5 vulnerability ON ENTERING COMBAT, making us unable to maintain even a single stack of vulnerability unless we use Burst of Strength, or spam sword autoattacks. While in Staff, we don't have any ability to get vulnerability on the enemy. Same thing with Hammer. This means that Focused Siphoning and Targeted Destruction have a lot less impact on duels/small-scale fights. Now you've got lousy uptime on your Devastation passives, lowering already middling sustain and damage in PvP. What is the point of having every minor trait in Devastation involve vulnerability on the enemy if we can't keep it up without spamming 1 or using extremely risky elite skills?

So since you previewed this trait last week, I knew it would be a net nerf to our build, but I thought there might be some saving grace in that "Expose Defenses" refreshes when you use an elite skill so I planned to use Facet of Chaos passive to do this and set up a Surge of the Mists, Precision Strike, or some other skill that I could benefit from Focused Siphoning and Targeted Destruction. HOWEVER, this trait was then revealed to be even more of a joke: You have to use Chaotic Release, the chain skill, to get a refresh. So for this build, you have to either use Chaotic Release or Jade Winds to get a measly 5 stacks. This trait used to not look like much, but it kept up our damage modifiers and siphoning for sustain.

The other "upon entering combat" trait, Brave Stride is a garbage trait that only bad warriors take. Expose Defenses is a worse trait that all Power Revenants are now forced to take, and it replaces Mutilate Defenses, a trait that maybe wouldn't come up in your mind if you wanted to list the most important Revenant traits, but

5 stacks of vulnerability upon entering combat ain't gonna cut it guys. It doesn't "offer more distinct opportunities or create synergy with other traits" as Irenio said in his post. Another quote from his post: "These changes will offer chances to spike up vulnerability when it is ebbing or encourage new build styles." No, they don't. This is a garbage change for the least used class in PvP.

But you decided to give Condi Mirage a direct buff. I'm afraid that no matter how much internal testing you do, you are losing touch with your playerbase, and the newest class you created is becoming more and more unusable every patch.

Cross-posting this to Revenant forum as well, although I doubt you guys will read anything posted there.

[Ghos.1326]

@choovanski.5462 said:buffed FB, Scourge and mirage- the three S tier PvP classes.

nerfed core warrior, ele and rev. all classes that were not great.

I'm uninstalling as we speak. the bad balance in PvP has just become even worse.

/////

all the hard work done by @Ben Phongluangtham.1065 in the PvP forum, trying to give us hope. trying to make the game better. well, that's all just been undone with this patch. it's made an already bad situation even worse. great work

I'm sorry that this happened to you Ben. you're a cool guy, and you don't deserve to have your efforts wasted :-(

This is a little extreme to say really. Although I agree about mirage, they actually increased the amount of stacks of confusion they can deal in one go. So they are quite strong, if not stronger, now.But as for the rest, I think you are just seriously angry without giving the patch a real chance.As for the engi changes, I think the heavy armor exploit thing, removing the way it applies vuln and swiftness is not such a great idea, though the application of might is pretty cool! It just takes away the swiftness/invigorating swiftness trait synergy in alchemy. Then again, I guess I can see why, because explosives gives a constant supply of vuln if taken. Though again, the removal of the swiftness, I think was not a very good idea. For the other changes, I actually really like them! especially no scope! #nerdOrgasm #flamethrowerEngiReturns? #rangeThreshIncrease

[Lexan.5930]

I wanted to say thank you for the axe and spite changes. As a beta and entire game Necro player, the changes to power necro core have been really nice. I'm excited to try out some new power builds with reaper and scourge in PvP and raiding. I will update when i get to raid with the new condi changes and see how my damage changes with the durration buffs. Hopefully for long no transition fights the dps will rise slowly but will top out higher than it did before.

Thank you for the change to the spite line for axe in tier 1 and the new dread trait. This gives us more options on traits to pick based on situation and/or game type. I am looking forward to playing with this trait as both power and condi with terror.

[Lithril Ashwalker.6230]

the mirage condi for confusion gives NO room for counterplay at all, the amount of confusion stacked in pvp is just ridiculous and no one can survive that much confusion unless conditions are removed before the skill is counted as active...

gj, you made rifle thief still useless in spvp, why pve?! no one will use rifle in pve.

you still didnt fix Shadowtrap for thief OR the No Valid Path for renegade on summons.

[Miko.4158]

don't really understand the logic, in wvw you get condi spammed, the counter was reistance, the counter limit was that resistance was short.it made roundabout sense, when your resistance was done you used your one big clear or humped your nearest guardian, didnt always work ....and even after the skirmish its possible to die riddled with condias the number of clears cant keep up.by extending the duration of condi you increased this problem.If people don't drop condi meta, and we still get utterly spammed, we'll still have to fire resistance but guaranteed dead at the end.surely reducing the number of conditions per skill would have been better.or letting people predefine the preference/order of condi's, for their cleanse.

found a sensible pic:

cleanse away!kitten, didnt get the 19 bleeds....I've abandoned cleanse

[Lunateric.3708]

@Irenio CalmonHuang.2048 as a regular engi player I liked the changes you guys introduced to the class and got a couple inquiries about them:

• The change to excessive energy removes the need to be dodging constantly and I love that, it also has synergy with the vigor application trait you got in Tools. That said, have you considered giving the traitline some condi interaction to bring back condi vanilla engi back on the menu?, I enjoy it tremendously but it has fallen out of flavor because of its complexity and overall lower damage output compared to PoF condi classes.

• The changes to the firearms traitlines are also great, the No Scope tier offers choices when you're on a condi or power sub and if you're not the only engi in it.

• Regarding sword for Holo, what's the intent of this weapon and where do you want it to be/what role should it have?, I love rifle and what it brings and sword seems to be more of a solo oriented weapon, will it remain that way?, just curious and not really looking for changes there.

I think overall it was a great patch and thank you for actually having a feedback thread this time around.

[JayAction.9056]

@"ventusthunder.5067" said:Hey, I really hope one of y'all reads this. Irenio, Karl, Ben, someone. Hear me out here, balance team. I don't want to sound accusatory, but wow am I frustrated and I really don't understand this game design.

For some reason, this patch resulted in another nerf to Power Revenant, already the worst class/build in PvP. Karl said it himself, your balance team uses Metabattle to judge game balance, so why do you refuse to notice that not only is the only rev build that was viable in high tier PvP not in the meta build section anymore, but now it is the lowest rated out of even the "great" tier builds, signifying that even secondary builds for many other classes far outperform Revenant in any capacity. I'd like to point out to you that the worst user-given average grade for any other "great" tier build is 93, and Power Shiro Revenant has an 86 and has still been dropping. I've played 25 games this season. Mid to high tier platinum. You know how many revenants I've seen in all 50 teams combined? ZERO. The class's pick rate is ZERO.

Your change to Mutilate Defenses now only gives 5 vulnerability ON ENTERING COMBAT, making us unable to maintain even a single stack of vulnerability unless we use Burst of Strength, or spam sword autoattacks. While in Staff, we don't have any ability to get vulnerability on the enemy. Same thing with Hammer. This means that Focused Siphoning and Targeted Destruction have a lot less impact on duels/small-scale fights. Now you've got lousy uptime on your Devastation passives, lowering already middling sustain and damage in PvP. What is the point of having every minor trait in Devastation involve vulnerability on the enemy if we can't keep it up without spamming 1 or using extremely risky elite skills?

So since you previewed this trait last week, I knew it would be a net nerf to our build, but I thought there might be some saving grace in that "Expose Defenses" refreshes when you use an elite skill so I planned to use Facet of Chaos passive to do this and set up a Surge of the Mists, Precision Strike, or some other skill that I could benefit from Focused Siphoning and Targeted Destruction. HOWEVER, this trait was then revealed to be even more of a joke: You have to use Chaotic Release, the chain skill, to get a refresh. So for this build, you have to either use Chaotic Release or Jade Winds to get a measly 5 stacks. This trait used to not look like much, but it kept up our damage modifiers and siphoning for sustain.

The other "upon entering combat" trait, Brave Stride is a garbage trait that only bad warriors take. Expose Defenses is a worse trait that all Power Revenants are now forced to take, and it replaces Mutilate Defenses, a trait that maybe wouldn't come up in your mind if you wanted to list the most important Revenant traits, but

5 stacks of vulnerability upon entering combat ain't gonna cut it guys. It doesn't "offer more distinct opportunities or create synergy with other traits" as Irenio said in his post. Another quote from his post: "These changes will offer chances to spike up vulnerability when it is ebbing or encourage new build styles." No, they don't. This is a garbage change for the least used class in PvP.

But you decided to give Condi Mirage a direct buff. I'm afraid that no matter how much internal testing you do, you are losing touch with your playerbase, and the newest class you created is becoming more and more unusable every patch.

Cross-posting this to Revenant forum as well, although I doubt you guys will read anything posted there.

Does anybody at ANET play rev at a decent level? I was unaware that they wait for meta battle to judge game balance. Meta battle sucks and most of the time it's severely out dated with regards to pvp. Meaning things became meta and stopped long before it's seen on that website.

That says a lot as to the balance changes that happened from season 1 up until now. They are always out of the loop and never will be in the loop.

That's interesting that the site no longer refers to rev as meta. Took long enough

[BlaqueFyre.5678]

@Karl McLain.5604 said:The primary design for confusion is 'burst'; it's expected to deliver a lot of stacks at once for low duration, punishing skill usage for a short while and then falling off quickly. Due to this difference in nature, we chose to leave it alone in this patch.

If that is the primary design, then why not Revert in PvP and WvW only the Passive Damage from Confusion? Since that breaks away from your stated design intent of Confusion for punishing skill usage, players get punished both on use and when not using abilities.

That one change alone would balance it out.

[Spurnshadow.3678]

There's a lot here that I just don't care about as I'm a WvWer who quit after 11/7. I look forward to trying out some of these changes.

So far, I'm encouraged by many of the condition rebalancing. This is a good step in the right direction to cut down on the condi burst and move more towards DoT. While this won't be the end all in balance or 100% solve the condi issues, this is a good step in tackling it and hopefully improves WvW/PvP. I really hope the PvEers don't freak out as in pre-patch threads, as if one looks closely, there's actually an overall increase in dps. There are a few things that make me scratch my head, however. Mesmer seems to have gotten an over all buff and some of their multi-stack condi abilities haven't been touched. The same thing with the ranger. Some things, like torch has been touched, but not traps/shortbow. Maybe you guys ran out of time? While this stretching out of condi damage is great, it needs to be across the board. I ask a dev what's with the big discrepancy?

The glacial weapon skins look great. Haven't had a chance to look at the obsidian weapons, but I'm glad there's some exclusives for WvW/PvP.

Don't really care about anything else

[Spurnshadow.3678]

@Karl McLain.5604 said:The primary design for confusion is 'burst'; it's expected to deliver a lot of stacks at once for low duration, punishing skill usage for a short while and then falling off quickly. Due to this difference in nature, we chose to leave it alone in this patch.

I guess that makes sense, especially considering how low the DoT of confusion. You still may need to look at the total number of stacks being sustained.

[Eleazar.9478]

Love the power ranger buffs. However please think about spreading around cleanse on ranger so we're not locked into ws trait line. (,It's a must have for core,druid, soulbeast for any PVP/wvw)

Some things I was let down by.

1st please please rework the marksmanship opening strike mechanic it sucks that it's only useful, if you take one grandmaster trait. There's some fantastic suggestions by wonderwall on possible interactions opening strike can have with the grandmaster traits.

2nd give main hand dagger some utility (cc evade) for the love of all that is PVP/wvw there's plenty of awesome suggestions on the ranger forums of just giving it something in order to be useful in a PVP senario, cause as is ain't it.

I love the feel, but it gives you no tools to stay close range in this heavy aoe spam meta. Also would like to point out the fact that none of our Condi weapons outside of sb synergize with sbs minor trait. (Insaneqr has some interesting suggestions)

Well that's my two sense maybe in half a year I'll see a use for mh dagger for other than dps in pve

[Spurnshadow.3678]

Another note:

You guys ended up buffing a lot of skills. I don't get this. Maybe people weren't using them for one reason or another, but usually, it's because other skills/weapons/traits, are just flat out better regarding mechanics more than just power damage. Buffing damage is only increasing power creep, something we've had for 3 years. This trend needs to be reversed. That, or increase base health/toughness across the board.

[Spurnshadow.3678]

@JayAction.9056 said:-Rev short bow still useless in almost all game modes everywhere.

-Renegade still has no use outside of PvE-Rev only viable pvp spec does so low damage that even when playing as high damage as possible now many targets can simply out heal the damage. This is seen in PvE also where the damage coefficients for sword are higher yet it's still one of the lowest damage power specs.-Rev still will die to condi loading from certain specs and you have 0 hope of counter play because the class for some reason is not allowed to have sustain after being nowhere near the highest power damage dealer.

Rev's are massive damage dealers in WvW and are nearly essential for their utility. People still don't use SB though.

[Spurnshadow.3678]

To Everyone re: confusion.

I just want to remind everyone that the passive DoT of confusion is about half of that of bleeding/poison in WvW/PvP.

[ilmau.9781]

BUFF THE REAPER!!!!

[Clownmug.8357]

It seems like leaving confusion alone is causing quite a Cry of Frustration.

[ArmageddonAsh.6430]

@Spurnshadow.3678 said:To Everyone re: confusion.

I just want to remind everyone that the passive DoT of confusion is about half of that of bleeding/poison in WvW/PvP.

Oh, okay. Now add in the other aspect of it? Why would you KNOWING that confusion does damage passively AND when you do something, ignore the other aspect? Is it to try and make it out like Confusion isnt insanely broken, poorly designed, poorly implemented and balanced on Mesmer that can spam the mindless hell out of it!?

[nedlee.5943]

I understand that you guys don't play rev and don't want to pay attention to it, but at least could you not nerf it even more and add useless things like this time with the case of Mutiliate Defense?