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
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
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.
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.
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)
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
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…
