This page has all upcoming changes nicely formatted with wiki links.
What do you think of those changes?
- Ranger: i’m super excited about those changes, particularly druid. Looks like druid will be come super op heal support with those changes and i’m VERY interested in the dps and condi alac options. Curious about quickness untamed too.
- Engineer - on the fence with quickness via leap/blast. On one hand it’s great there is no more need to spam gyros. On the other i very much like the fact that spamming gyros also gives superspeed to allies. Can’t have it all i guess
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To me these Balance Changes/Shakeups are just cheap pseudo content, i. e. I have to revisit all my open world builds on 9 classes and check what is still working and what needs to be adjusted. No fun at all.
I also dislike the continued class/profession homogenization. Not to mention that I think that 100% boon uptime for Alacrity, Quickness, … is/was a terrible idea in the first place and now every class/profession has to be able to provide at least one of thoses OP boons to the entire party 100% of the time.
Alac and Quickness are not an easy design problem to solve imo. If they aren’t powerful enough then nobody will use them, but if they are then people will want to stack boon supports until they get 100% uptime.
The only other options I see are having them only be worth it during certain phases in the fight, having a forced downtime like BL in WoW, or having the boon supports do virtually no damage so stacking them isn’t worth it. The first makes fights harder to design as every encounter would need a burst phase, and the third is probably not fun to play, so I think WoW’s BL design is the best solution. It also allows you to decide when you want the buff, so it adds a tactical element as well.
I would love the fights to be more tactical (and possibly slower paced), but I guess this ship has long sailed.
I mean, we have the Exposed phases after breaking the Defiance bar which kinda is GW2’s equivalent of the moment where WoW players would use their Bloodlust (BL) abilities. But from my experience the timing (frequency and duration) of thoses phases is all over the place and generally too short for being a proper burn phase in which you would pop your (Quickness, Alacrity, …) CDs, e.g . a 10…20 second buff/boon on a 1…2 minute cooldown (Utility Skill) which you would try to perfectly align with the Exposed phases of the boss.
This would require to remove other sources (weapon skills, traits, …) which grant those boons as a side effect (pretty much accidently) which combined with enough boon duration currently allow them to become permanent. As I said, this ship has probably long sailed.
I don’t think it will ever be too late to change things. Look at their current design direction: They changed a system of profession specific boons into a somewhat homogenized alac+quickness system over the course of 1-2 years. They could do something similar again if it doesn’t work out the way they want.
But one other thing came to my mind. I think perma boons you have to spec into might fulfill the offensive support fantasy better than a time-limited boon. With perma boons you associate the boon with your party or the boon provider specifically, while a temporary boon feels more like a property/mechanic of the enounter you’re fighting. With perma boons you have to stay close to your group for example, while a temporary boon would only requires you to stack on boon application, like many other boss mechanics. Maybe that’s just me, but being the boon guy sounds more fun than being the one to press a certain button at some point, provided boon support gameplay is fun as well of course.
I feel a bit different about offensive boons like Might and Fury which most open world builds can maintain on themselves at a decent level anyway.
What I mostly dislike is the pretty much mandatory stacking of players so that they have good boon coverage. This also applies to defensive boons like Protection, Aegis, … which are so strong that people may even stand in shit as long as they are covered by enough boons.
GW2 has so many ways of 100% damage mitigation (don’t stand in shit, dodge, evasion, block) and a massive 33% Protection boon that armor/toughness almost does not matter. Not even for a raid tank (Mesmer) who just needs more toughness than other party members to taunt the boss.
I like to think back to GW1 where a clumped up team gets destroyed by an opposing Mesmer, Elementalist or Barrage Ranger. Those where the times… 🙂
To me these Balance Changes/Shakeups are just cheap pseudo content
Tbh after so many years it feels like some of these balance chances (overall - not just the upcoming ones obv) are introduced to make sure players are engaged. They obviously fix broken things but they also “fix” things when nobody ask them to and then, you need to wait months so they revert or change things again. The best example would be the journey we had with warriors banners.
… or with the Mantra Square Dance
Homogenization. Mechanics and skills that were fine for years and years and years are suddenly a problem and get gutted, dumbed down and/or simply removed.
I know that point in the lifecycle of MMOs. The preview actually had me buy New World. Not because it’s a superior game, but because it’s one I haven’t played yet and will therefore be fun until it isn’t anymore. I’m not too motivated to play the newest iteration of my main class.
I think they are mostly trying to shake things up, and this time, really shake things up from the looks of it. I agree it sucks for some classes to be getting super nerfed. At the same time i welcome options that open up.
What did you use to play?
Mesmer. I’m tired of the constant removal of core mechanics, while I have to agree that it is a “shaking” it “up”, I don’t think it’s the kind of shake-up a company wants. Still it happens in every MMO at a certain point of its life cycle, funnily enough.
What caught most of my attention in mesmer changes is how chrono can now provide either alacrity or quickness via just summoning phantasms. It’s exciting - if it makes it possible to be alacdps/qdps with no or little use of continuum split, i’ll be happy to pick chrono back up
Sad state of affairs that I went to check if that meant that Shatters no longer provide Quickness. It SEEMS like OOC quickness is still somewhat possible. Nuking the range of Temporal Curtain is still retarded, though, same for Null Field (wtf). The Mirage dodge nerf will make it even clunkier to play, staff DPS have been nerfed into the ground and Virtuoso has been straight-up nuked to shite. Which is amazing, considering that the sub-class doesn’t have clones to defend itself and its ability to chain invulns and blocks was its defining trait. No, not the pretty animations, those are just flavour.
Ah well, what do I care anymore. (<- Not a good reaction.)
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I’m really looking forward to most of the Druid changes, they sound pretty nice.
I’m a bit sad that they’ll take away the speedbuff and the ancient seeds tho…
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Condition virtuoso is a really strong pick for a class that basically doesn’t have much of a rotation. I remember also condi tempest being very easy to play if doing cc is not your thing, haha! Do check out “beginner” tab for snowcrows those builds are really easy and have progression levels, first level of each is usually plenty damage: https://snowcrows.com/builds?profession=any&category=beginner
Hyped about the Guardian cool downs! Mained Guardian since Beta; in every game mode - been in Firebrand jail (PvE/WvW) since PoF. The cool down reductions will make my aHeal WB a bit better. It runs fine in Fracts (T4/CM) Strikes, and even raids but the extra pumping of the heals is gonna be nice on things like boneskinner PUG.
Glad it works out for you! I used to play a bit hfb in fractals long time ago, but then fell off. Recently check out condi quickness firebrand (when mantras were in spam mode) and… it felt crazy spammy lol i was overwhelmed
One thing i never liked about guardian are cast times. Much of the weapon skills feel super slow to actually cast, even with quickness. This is particularly visible when using gs5 to pull enemies/do cc - how much time you have to spend “doing” gs5 (i understand it’s dual function, this is just for illustration)
Not a fan of the Druid changes for WvW builds. Ancient seeds was really fun to play. However I am interested to see its heal and alacrity options in fractals and raids.
I don’t like what they did with heal scourge.
I love engineer. I am glad they made elixirs unblockable. I can’t believe it took them 10 years to do it, lol. However the combo fields will be interesting to see how the builds and rotations turn out.
One of these days I’ll manage to finish leveling my ranger to try out druid… I’m not even sure why I dislike playing ranger, since I can only really think of positive things to say about it.
I actually checked out condi soulbeast for a bit in open world, and it seemed super fun! Perhaps the ranger class feature, a pet is not that exciting compared to other classes? Soulbeast surely changes that up for me :)
I’ll need to give that a try eventually as well. I’ve actually quite enjoyed the pet management so far. Sending my puppy to chase down a foe as I rain arrows upon them is kinda fun. The “gotta catch them all” aspect of ranger is very appealing too! I guess none of the (weapon) abilities really just ‘click’ for me, leaving me overall unhappy with the class.
I haven’t really done the math, but I’m fairly hopeful about condition quickness berserker. The rework of Heat the Soul is a massive nerf to touch though, I hope they consider buffing the skills to compensate (and baseline the cooldown reductions).
Quickness via burst seems like sucha a quality of life and flexibility boost though! Provide quickness by doing what you would be doing anyway. Numbers aside, love the idea. In general, love instances where key boons now fit organically like with berserker or untamed
I play Thief Daredevil and it seems I just get to do a little bit more damage in PvE with my P/P :D
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I’ve actually never played Staff Daredevil… xD Guess I still got that play style for later, when P/P gets boring.
Nice! glad the patch works out well for you. I played a bit of staff and p/p daredevil in open world. with invigorating precision and lifesteal food it was really doing nice damage and staying alive. My only issue was, any cc cut off my healing source (attacking) and thief being one of lowest hp classes, even with marauders, was dead fast :)
It’s quite fun actually, frantically spamming “3” to get some heals XD
