Upcoming Balance Notes

[Fahren.4230]

**thanks!**

I Hope we can have balance patch 2 per month

it build Hype and refresh the meta, its exactly what gw2 needs

[daLira.6078]

1+1 on how to get people from enjoying chrono even less

[Debra.9456]

Another patch - another mess nerf. I'm sure, anet dont care about this commet.

I playing gw2 3 years, my main power mesmer. I playing only wvw. All 3 years, when i open patchnote - i seen 1 thing: anet try nerf condi mes and rekt pow mes. I have the impression that Anet does not understand the mechanics pow mesmer. They rlly thing gs2f1 burst thats all you need, but it's so stupid. I dont like playstayle "All or nothing". Power mesmer cant use def armor cuz dmg will pretty low, so u can ez die. It's hard and inetersing class, i rlly like pow mesmer. But Anet dont like pow mesmers. Some ppl from pve start cry about MESMER OP - and nerf incoming. I mastered the class for three years, studied matchups, but some pve scrub start crying and anet make new nerf. Now dodges and illus ambush, + 15 sec cd, rlly? Many mesmers playing with burst and call this fun, but i playing burstbuid 1,5 years and it's bored use 3 buttons all time. How long it will be going on? Some nabs crying about mesmer and nerf inc. Now 70% low skill ppl playing sb cuz ez oneshoted. U can stack armor on sb, use "sick em" and do dps with tank armor. Zerk dedeye with malice stack hit this sb on 4k. What doing anet? Mmmm, they nerf sb? Ahaha, not, ofc not. They nerf mesmers, like all 3 years. So many people I knew left the game, cuz Anet prefer listen pve casuals. On wvw I hardly meet with a pow mirage, cuz it's not so op and need l2p. Every 3 minutes I meet sb cuz it no brain cancer. And the cherry on the cake:: WvW mount. In this patch anet decided to kill not only my favorite class, but also wvw roam. GG. A few more of these patches and WvW finally die.

 

[Hyper Cutter.9376]

> @"Klypto.1703" said:

> I should have known we would get a retaliation patch because of the ncsoft layoffs and its here. I mean deadeye and renegade changes you might as well have just remove them from the game. Based off other posts too its pretty much anything pof if it was reworked or not is going into the garbage. Something must be coming in some form to actually be fun gameplay wise or something because it feels like buying any expansions is just a waste of money now.

It's not "retaliation", this is the balance patch they already had planned for this week before it got delayed.

[Girth.9731]

> @"Randulf.7614" said:

> > @"alcopaul.2156" said:

> > Could you please clarify/expound on the "Breaking the channel will destroy the spell." part for the spellbreakers. Thanks.

>

> Sounds like it is interruptable if the caster is hit

 

Sounds more like an other channeled skill, such as 100b, where the channeled skill is broken by CC or interupts.

[vesica tempestas.1563]

Is Ele staff viable in spvp - no.

is Ele dagger/anything competitive in spvp - no

is Ele sceptre/anything competitive in spvp - no

 

This patch - do anything to address this? no and we are not even talking about meta - what metrics are you looking at ?!!!!

 

After over a Year of patches in spvp. Start bloody engaging with your customer base and actually listening, your costing Anet money and not providing good service.

[Teratus.2859]

Been running Ranger spirits for years.

 

Guess i'm finally going to have to change my main build.. Really not liking the sound of these spirit changes.

The boon spam is one of the things I relied on for survivability and support... taking that away and limiting said boons to a 20 second CD has utterly killed that for me.

Adding degen to spirits stops them being useful for taking aggro which has thus screwed a big part of my Ranger's playstyle.

And add to that spirits now TP to me and their skills pop on my location rather than the enemy or where I placed them before.. which means i'm going to end up having to go in close to get any actual use out of them or straight up waste them for what little boons they now give..

 

Yeah looks like you just straight up killed one of my favorite builds.. :(

Not just nerfed my survivability which would be bad enough but completely screwed how I can even play the character and it's usefulness to others..

It's very rare a balance patch does something that messes up one of my builds but it's safe to say this very much looks like one of them..

[Willhart.8230]

• Battle Standard: Resynced the time at which a banner appears to properly line up with the effect. When planted in the ground, this banner skill now deals damage to foes within a radius of 180. _Foes who are in a downed state are now finished when damaged by Battle Standard._

 

This sounds very useful for wvw, where there can be a lot of downed players.

[mortrialus.3062]

> @"NeoN.2193" said:

> Core guard in sPVP was already struggling at high ratings and wasn't outperforming in other tiers. That NERF is NOT NEEDED at all.

 

Core guardian has been confirmed by Ben to be the build with the second highest win ratio after boonbeast. It performs better than Holosmith and Mirage.

[lare.5129]

Don't see something bad or wrong, only have some ideas:

warrior:

- Banners no longer have skills and are instead destroyed when they're picked up. ??

so if I put banner's and kill elite someone can run near, click on my banner and it dissapear ?? I feel this is bad idea, may be will be good that rule "Banners can now only be picked up by the warrior who summoned them." just make my banner non tochable for others.

 

because it looks like that I make mass boon, someone run near me, dispel it from himslef and also steal from me ..

[MidnightX.6294]

still no glamour trait for mesmer??

[Synx.3750]

> @"vesica tempestas.1563" said:

> Is Ele staff viable in spvp - no.

> is Ele dagger/anything competitive in spvp - no

> is Ele sceptre/anything competitive in spvp - no

>

> This patch - do anything to address this? no and we are not even talking about meta - what metrics are you looking at ?!!!!

>

> After over a Year of patches in spvp. Start bloody engaging with your customer base and actually listening, your costing Anet money and not providing good service.

 

Just give up Ele like I did and main another class. Almost every other profession is more fun and more viable then Ele in all game modes.

[Kaltyn of Torbins Deep.294]

> @"RAZOR.7246" said:

> > @"Kaltyn of Torbins Deep.2946" said:

> > > • Inspiring Battle Standard: This trait has been renamed Doubled Standards. It no longer causes banners to apply regeneration and instead causes the warrior to gain 5 seconds of swiftness when summoning or picking up a banner. Additionally, the banner effect improvements that are gained when this trait is equipped have been increased from 50% to 100%.

> >

> > That removes pretty much ALL of the group sustain that warriors could provide. And it deletes banners from my berserker entirely - I'll get more sustain from running Dolyak Signet instead of the Banner of Discipline that I currently carry. The entire reason that I have that banner when I am at group events like Octovine is strictly because of the regen it pumps out. That regen lets me out-sustain a large mob of bad guys when I'm soloing the open world on my berserker. The little bit of precision it granted was a bonus, but the regen was what really mattered to me. Without that regen, does Berserker have any thing to offer for group sustain, because all I am seeing is group dps buffs and no sustain.

> >

> > I really like the kit changes to the banners, and the recharge reductions, BUT, stripping regen from it is BAD.

>

> The effect improvements are exclusive to the warrior, they don't apply to any other group memebers. Theoretically it's a buff on the warrior itself but a huge nerf for banners on groups. Regeneration isn't the main issue with the banner nerf.

Yeah, there are lots of issues with the banner change. However, the regen removal means that instead of you only getting 100 precision from my banner of discipline at octovine, now you're going to get ZERO, because I'm running dolyak signet instead of that banner.

[vesica tempestas.1563]

> @"Synx.3750" said:

> > @"vesica tempestas.1563" said:

> > Is Ele staff viable in spvp - no.

> > is Ele dagger/anything competitive in spvp - no

> > is Ele sceptre/anything competitive in spvp - no

> >

> > This patch - do anything to address this? no and we are not even talking about meta - what metrics are you looking at ?!!!!

> >

> > After over a Year of patches in spvp. Start bloody engaging with your customer base and actually listening, your costing Anet money and not providing good service.

>

> Just give up Ele like I did and main another class. Almost every other profession is more fun and more viable then Ele in all game modes.

 

I would do, but i've been playing main mage since the 80's, i'm pot committed :)

[Endaris.1452]

Some thoughts on Chrono and its development in the past.

When I first tried getting into support Chrono, we still had the trait that casted a lesser SoI on Phantasm-Cast and Sigil of Concentration was meta. In the end that meant playing around two abstract concepts, the weapon swap for 33% boon duration and having your wells, SoI and lesser SoI hit within that timeframe. Especially managing the lesser SoI was completely intransparent.

All that combined made it awkward and I didn't really like it.

 

Removing the lesser SoI and making the boon duration from SoC constant was a great move to make Chrono gameplay a better experience. Boons were easy to share, you didn't have to look out for any weird stuff and just spam your boons without holding back and focus on the other mechanics that were interesting about Chrono (CC, sharing blocks, controlling adds).

I had a lot of fun learning Chrono during that time.

 

The big problem was that the new trait made SoI more than twice as good as it was and a spell that powerful would obviously be a spell you want to use with Mimic.

Ever since that patch it feels like they're trying to tone down the interaction of SoI and Mimic with the unannounced final goal of making Chrono play with both wells again.

In the process the gameplay of Chrono was downgraded with the change to the SoI that we have now and that makes it difficult to see if casting it will have the desired impact. Mimic interaction with CS was downgraded in a way that has no meaningful interaction but just says "this doesn't work because".

 

After this failure to balance SoI you're now reducing it to 3s duration with a lowered CD, effectively increasing the abstraction of the optimal playstyle even further through the logic of boon stacking, rendering Mimic pointless to use over Well of Recall.

I'm not going to bore you with the details but with the maximum stacks of alacrity being 5, the maximum time of alacrity you can stack drops by 8s to 17s and eventually causes you to drop Alacrity with SoI, WoA, Mimic on 2 100% boon duration chronos unless having absolutely perfect coordination.

So effectively another sneaky hit. Although that isn't even necessary anymore. Firebrand+Renegade as boon core has been adapted as an alternative and even an alternative that is likely to have more damage with the same uptimes. I've seen it being accepted in pugs without issues and even my guild group pretty much stopped running chronos for boons.

 

The problem is that it looks like you're balancing the traited spell to make other raid setups competitive (Sand Squall on Tempest is now literally the same spell as SoI except that it also grants Protection, is a blast finisher and has more cooldown) while making the spell close to useless in any other scenario. In a party of 5, I want to use SoI to bridge the gap between my quickness wells where Time Warp can't fill it. With 3s that is never going to be possible. The spell hardly feels impactful anymore and you will never be able to reach reasonable uptimes on your 2 staple boons even with maximum investment in boon duration outside of a 10 player context where another Chrono bolsters your boons.

A proper solution wouldve been adding an additional effect that ticks over time so that using SoI twice in succession would lose out on the trait's benefit.

Imagine something stupid like decreasing the speed at which boons run out by 33% for 15s. That would equal 5s of boons that are lost upon pressing SoI the second time while also making the spell easier to use as boons added after the effect will still gain a small benefit. It would break up that unholy bond the spell has to Raid squads right now. If you followed further down that road it would make the spell a ton easier to use with no need to play the bad squad UI. And it would pretty much have the same benefit that the old lesser SoI had except that it doesn't have the bad gameplay mechanic of being hidden behind some internal cooldown.

 

 

 

Aside from that I'm quite intrigued but also a bit worried about the Gyro changes. While these will be a great thing for WvW and most likely also PvE, removing an almost spammable source of Weakness and the passive damage reduction from the Bulwark Gyro may put a dent into scrapper versus power specs in PvP. The barrier numbers on Bulwark Gyro will make or break the skill in that context.

[Floz.8904]

All awesome.

 

Now delete the Warclaw and your game will be fine. Revenue from skins for your mounts won't compare to how much you'll lose when players move to your competitors because you've changed the one thing the game-mode is based on: Movement.

 

Preaching to the Loyalists who argued against this change at Anet.

[signarokkaos.4035]

I love that you are keeping the community informed and hope you do more of this in the future. I really like hearing the reasons behind the balance decisions and would love if you all did this for other types of patches as well.

[Kalinka.2538]

Dear AnenaNet devs,

 

Thank you for giving us this type of communication, we really appreciate it. Seeing the reasoning behind the changes and keeping comments open is something that will only do good for the game in the long run. I look forward to the patch going live and getting my kitty cat Warclaw., and whatever you decide to do in the future!

 

P.S. I agree that cheese on beans on toast is amazing :)

[Cortex Killer.4689]

Nice and informative communication - the outline of design thought/process is tremendous step forward. Keep up the hard work.

[MightyTeapot.2093]

Great changes! :) Regardless of the exact numbers, thank you for posting your reasoning behind the changes as well as keeping comments enabled. Communication and discussions between the playerbase and developers are a fantastic thing for the community.

 

Also, cheese on beans on toast is really good.

 

Amazin'

[flyingzambie.5473]

Even though you killed my enjoyment of chronomancer. T'is was a good patch anyways. Thanks.

[Elpredator.8523]

good job slugger keep it up

[OniGiri.9461]

Loving the communication :+1:

[OdinMinusNull.8072]

Thanks for the open communication! Keep it up :)

[Angeels.3269]

Amazin! B)

 

Looking forward to more