PvP Concerns

[Lost Elegy.9276]

I'll update this as I test everything out, but I'm going to be blunt: The meta isn't going to shift as much as it should. There are a few reasons:

1) Reducing overall damage across the board doesn't change burst combos, it just slows them down. In the case of the combos that just barely 100-0'd players, those combos now do 80% of their health at the same time. Call me crazy, but anything doing that much damage in a safe burst will never NOT be meta. The combos need to be addressed, not their damage.2) The core, problem amulets are STILL in the game. Sinister and Berserker amulets are still in PvP for some ungodly reason. The only people who use these amulets are people abusing burst combos or the absurd scaling of their class. Amulets that go too far in one direction (PURE physical burst, PURE condition burst, etc) should be outright removed. If having toughness and healing power on the same amulet was a crime that needed to be fixed, why are these pure damage amulets still around? With the nerfs to quad stat amulets, these tristat pure amulets will be even more oppressive.3) The problem traits are STILL untouched. For example, Ranger's oppressive dominance as a ganking god is due to the power of Moment of Clarity. This trait is disgusting. It gives them a flat 1.5x damage modifier on the ENTIRE next skill they use. Barrage doing 14k+ damage was entirely due to might stacking and this ONE PROBLEM TRAIT. How this got past Q&A amazes me. There should NEVER be a flat damage boost in traits, let alone one that can cause a 4-second cooldown greatsword ability to crit for 10k.4) While it seems that stealth has been touched, it doesn't change the core problems of how obnoxiously widespread this has become. The way it acts is still an issue. Previously, only thief and Mesmer had access to stealth. The two classes with a base health pool of 11 THOUSAND. A light breeze would kill them, so they needed some incredible defensive tools to compensate. Stealth was considered so powerful that an entire ultimate ability was JUST stealth for you and your allies. The original cooldown was 1/5 minutes and lasted only 5 seconds. That's how strong the original designers understood stealth was. Our current dev team looked at this and decided that wasn't unfair enough, so they reduced the cooldown by 33% and increased the duration. WHY!? Stealth is ANNOYING. There isn't any counterplay unless you're playing a SPECIFIC ELITE SPECIALIZATION with a SPECIFIC stealth removal skill. I'm sorry, but stealth needs to become like other games: If you get hit, you lose invisibility. If you get too close to an enemy, they can see you. I play a thief. I'm complaining about stealth. It doesn't feel good to fight and I never feel like I outplayed my opponent by walking away from a fight with 0 ability for them to find me.5) Warrior and Greatsword. They deserve their own bullet point. For context, I have almost 1k games on warrior. I'm no god at the class, but I know it inside and out. Greatsword is the biggest crutch weapon in the game, and has needed a massive rework since day one. It provides literally everything: Damage, Burst Damage, High Mobility, a ranged cripple to chase foes, high AoE damage, fast animations and can be used to escape ganks. Every. Single. Warrior. Uses. It. Even condi warriors used them for mobility. By the way, did I mention it has one of the BEST Burst skills for the entire class? Seriously. What does this weapon NOT do? It needs to be nerfed. HARD. I would like the ability to use ANY OTHER WEAPON, please. The moment I lock in warrior, my weapon slots are automatically filled by Greatsword, Axe and Shield. I have NO CHOICE if I want to be viable. That's a problem. If warrior could run two greatswords and swap to reset cooldowns, they would. The weapon is absurd.

UPDATES1) So, it seems Conditions were not worthy of nerfs. My condi Ranger still oneshots people with 2 traps. My condi thief is still bursting people down. All while their recently nerfed power characters struggle to even take me to half health. It's not like Scourge, Weaver, Guardian and Firebrand couldn't burst players down just as fast as a power build before the changes. Glad to see they still can. I was worried these braindead builds might require some mental effort now. Phew~! I also think the scourge bots needed a buff, Anet. Glad we're on the same page.