State of the Game

E

Enok

New Member
So ANet just did a state of the game with Guru. Reddit summary is here. Gives us a sneak peak at what next weeks patch notes may contain for class balance.

A couple of big things:

Mesmer - WvW is now going to have confusion damage like PvP instead of PvE, so it's going to do a lot less damage.

Ele - Ride the Lightning now on a 40 second cooldown if you aren't using it to hit a target. Nerf to some of the Ele's ability to self-heal.

Thief - Get a anti-boon ability where they can steal an entire stack of boon from their target. Also switching "revealed" back to 3 seconds for PvE and WvW. Mug can't crit, but will heal thief. Flanking strike being improved to hit more reliably.

Warrior - Gets a boon hate trait where they can do 3% more damage for each unique boon on a target.

Engineer - I don't know Engineer well to understand how the individual items do it, but Engies on the forums are saying it basically amounts to a significant nerf to the currently popular HGH build.

They talked about buffing Signet passive abilities so that it's more difficult to decide whether or not you want to use the active ability and give up the passive while recharging. Mention of doubling stat boosts from signets and others.

This is all taken from notes and discussion about the video, so some things may have got lost in translation. If anyone wants to watch the actual interview it's here.
 
Really liking the thief love. I know everyone hates getting ganked but steatlhy trouble makers are really what thief is. Also I believe rangers are getting some attention to.

yep: Ranger- Improvement to pet AI. new pet archetype where pets will now move behind the target out of cleave range if they do not have aggro. Pet stats improved, higher toughness. F2 activation reaction time improved (finally :)). Leash range is longer (not sure what that means).
Spirits utility skills improved, more health as well as trait that increases proc time.

on a side note, Ele's are really raging about the rtl nerf, it is a pretty big nerf.
 
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RtL is a very good change, and nothing worth whining about at all.

Bunker eles can take multiple players with almost no impunity, then escape easily across the map with RtL if they start to get damaged. It is simply not fair for a class to be able to pick at you then escape so easily. And they STILL get to escape; it's not like RtL won't be usable. It should be interesting to see how this works out with the boon hate.

I'm a bit worried about what'll happen to guards. Eles are a bit more versatile and still do damage, the impunity was the problem, but a bunker guard has absolutely nothing outside of the bunkering. Take that away and they are completely useless.

Of course, that might not be a bad thing - sPvP would be a lot more interesting without bunkers imo, more action.
 
Since guardian isn't getting any big nerfs i'm hoping they won't be hurt to bad by boon hate. Bunker builds are definitely the target and reasonably so. Ele bunkers with super might stacks are the big problem though so I hope that guardians don't get hurt. Thieves are getting more changes than I first thought to, looks like the days of uber back-stab thieves may be over (oh NOOOOOOOOO!). It looks like A-net wants thief to be mobile and sustainable instead of super bursty. We'll see.
 
I admit I'm not a great PvP player, so that probably colors my experience. Keeping 10 to 15 might stacks up takes a pretty specific rotation that is easy to accomplish in PvE, but can pretty easily be disrupted in PvP. If I'm facing an opponent who is at all aggressive I often have to choose between getting another blast finisher off in a fire field or getting distance. In my experience, might stacks get Ele bunker damage up to reasonable. Without them I hit like a marshmallow.

IMO, the problem with Ele bunkers is that we have a crazy amount of heals, cleanses, and mobility. I can get down to a sliver of health and opt to juke out of the situation while simultaneously filling my red ball almost back to full. Stop a D/D from moving and it's dead. The problem is, that's very hard to do. The RtL nerf might help a little, but without RtL a D/D still has perma-swiftness, and a teleport for movement.

A typical D/D elementalist can cleanse a condition by attuning to water, dodging while in water, casting cleansing wave, eight with ether renewal, four with cleansing fire, and one for each of two more cantrips on their bar. That's in addition to each of the three equipped cantrips breaking stun and granting vigor for more dodging. Armor of earth also grants protection and stability, and mist form grants three seconds of invulnerability. That's a lot of ways to slip out of the CC conditions.

I'm not sure the RtL nerf is going to hurt their escape much. As far as I understand, if you use it to hit a target (gap closer) it'll still have it's old cooldown, so it'll still pop up in it's normal time to use as a getaway. Seems like the big thing it's going to do is make ele's think twice about using it to get across maps quickly.

I've read a lot of arguments on both sides of the boon-steal and boon-hate issue that were really good arguments, so I remain intrigued about how they are going to actually play out.
 
Your absolutely right. Ele's healing and movement is what makes the bunker so hard to deal with. The might stacks on top of that mean that a good bunker ele can move, heal, AND damage. This is why the ele has been top in tpvp for the past 4 months. I'm not sure what the full ramifications of the nerf will entail but, it was somewhat merited. Guardian isn't getting nerfed but guardian bunkers are very likely to be affected by boon hate. That, of course, depends on how effective the new mechanics are. I'm bringing up thief because the boon stealing will be added to the thieves S/D set which is quite possibly one of the worst sets the thief has. I like it's playstyle but, the damage on that set is almost non-existent lol.
 
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Gotcha on the might stacks. The might keeps the ele from having to choose to nerf their own damage for going full defensive. That's the way it works with Guardians, right? If they go full defensive, they end up doing negligible damage?

Reading more about the SotG, I see that Cleansing Water is getting a 5 sec cooldown. So all three cantrip cleanses and one water attunement cleanse are getting collapsed into one shared cooldown. That should put a dent in the endless ele cleansing. Seems like a much more significant change than the RtL nerf eles are crying about on the forums.

I'm intrigued by the S/D thief as well. I started a thief during the free trial weekend because for some inexplicable reason my wife wanted me to roll a new toon with her rather than running around destroying everything in two seconds on one of my 80s. ;)

I enjoyed the back and forth playstyle, though it takes some getting used to. At first, I kept forgetting Shadow Return was up. I would hit what I though was Infiltrator's Strike to shadowstep to a new target, and end up instead in the empty corner of some cave we passed through earlier.

The boon-steal sounds interesting, but we'll have to see how it works out in play. I don't know about Guardians, but Eles are constantly restacking boons. As a method of boon removal, it seems like the Ele will just refresh them in no time (and indeed, the boon removal is already there on FS and people haven't been crowing about it as anti-bunker) and I wonder how long a stack will actually last on the Thief. It does present a comical image of a d/d ele and thief endlessly circling each other, one attunement dancing and laying down blasts in fire fields while the other constantly evades around in circles stealing boons.

Once I get settled into my new thief, I'd love to get some tips from any of our PvP thiefs on how to play it.
 
Well.... after a few hours of thief S/D play in hot-joins today, I still don't like it. The new boon steal #3 skill ( larcenous i think it was) is ok but the damage on FS is still miserable and the boons didn't really help much as they run out and thieves have no way to refresh them. Ele's didn't give me much trouble but that may be simply because i didn't run into a good bunker. I did run up against a warrior that was plain nasty but I think he was just a very good player. So no real verdict on boon hate builds yet either. Thief is still D/D and my old build did better than the new one. Anyone who doesn't PvP much has some very good news *ahem* SPECTATOR MODE IS AWESOME *ahem*. I was having as much fun checking out other people as I was playing my own toons (especially that leet warrior). If you want to learn the PvP ropes you can watch how it's done now! (I need all the help I can get :))
 
What kind of build did you run with S/D?

On Guru there's a player who's been a frequent poster about using S/D before we had news about the update, and he has several different builds he recommends. One of the key points I've seen him make several times is that S/D is more sustain than the burst that D/* is usually built for. He uses the auto-attack a lot more, and picks out some of the traits that give you benefits for having initiative.
 
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