User:Relyk/2013-12-10 preview
General[edit]
These are the proposed balance changes for the Dec. 10th build. These changes are not final and are subject to change. We are posting them early so the community can discuss them with us. We wanted to be more transparent with the community about these changes to help expose problems that riskier changes might create.
Our goal for many of the classes was to increase build diversity while still maintaining class roles and identities. Some of the things we increased were abilities/skills that people don’t run very often. Our goal was to increase these abilities to make them viable alternate builds.
How to give good feedback and what to expect.
- Be constructive. If you think a change may cause issues, say why and give examples. Try not to argue with others – make your point and then accept that other people may have different points of view.
- Be concise. Our time is limited and we can’t read walls of text because it will prevent us from having the time to read as many posts as possible. Bullet points or numbered lists are very easy for us to read!
- Be specific. “I expect this change to accomplish A, but I think it will actually accomplish B”. The more specific you are, the better we are able to understand where you’re coming from, what type of content you play, and it helps us to understand the context for your feedback.
- Be objective. Keep in mind that just because you may not like something, that doesn’t make it bad. Others may have differing opinions. They may play a different type of content, or they may play a different profession, so be objective and keep in mind – we have to balance the game for EVERYONE, not just you.
- Be respectful. This goes for your fellow community members as well as for devs. Respect the ideas and opinions of others.
- Be mindful of scope. These are the changes we are trying to get in for the Dec. 10th balance patch. That doesn’t leave us with time to rework entire classes, or redesign entire weapon sets with this update. Keep scope/work/time/resources in mind when you make your suggestions.
- Be mindful of context. Power creep is something we’re trying to avoid. Sometimes a profession may not receive as many increases as other classes. A lot of times, this is because that class is already performing very well in the current state of the game. So keep the overall context/state of the game in mind when giving feedback.
Elementalist[edit]
This patch’s goal for the elementalist was to increase the power of the Earth, Air and Fire lines, while taking away some of the need to go into the Arcane line. This was done by bringing up the base cooldown of attunements so that elementalists aren’t forced to go as deep into Arcane in order to get the old attunement cooldown %’s. In doing so, we decided put some of the most powerful Adept tier traits in Water magic and Arcane to the Master tier to avoid power creep that would have occurred by letting players gain powerful effects in Master and Grandmaster tier of Fire, Air, and Earth and still get the extremely powerful traits in Water and Arcane by only splashing in 10 points.
General[edit]
The following changes were done to reduce the necessity of putting points into the Arcane trait line.
- The base cooldown of the attunement that you just left is now reduced from 16 seconds to 13 seconds. Attunement cooldown rate now increases by 1% per point in Arcane down from 2%. The end result is that now Attunements go from 13s to 10s instead of the old range of 16s to 10s.
- Base global attunement cooldown is now 1.625 seconds. Global attunement cooldown rate now decreases by 1% per point in Arcane down from 2%. The end result is that now global attunement cooldown goes from 1.625 to 1.25 instead of the old range of 2.0 to 1.25.
Traits[edit]
- Burning Fire: Cast Lesser Cleansing Fire when you have a number of conditions on you.
- - This trait has a new effect. Use Cleansing Fire automatically when you have a number of conditions on you. 3 conditions. 40 second cooldown. Moved to Master tier.
- Conjurer: Gain fire aura when an ally picks up a conjured weapon.
- - Moved to Adept tier.
- Ember's Might: Burns you apply last longer.
- - The effect of this trait has been changed to Burns you apply last longer. 25%.
- Burning Rage: Sunspot inflicts burning, and its radius is increased. Your condition damage is increased.
- - Increased damage dealt to burning foes from 5% to 10%.
- Soothing Winds: Gain healing based on your precision.
- - Increased conversion from 5% to 7%.
- Tempest Defense: Cast Shocking Aura when disabled. Deal increased damage to stunned or knocked-down foes. Disables include stun, daze, knock back, pull, knock down, sink, float, launch, taunt, and fear.
- - Decreased the cooldown from 60s to 25s.
- Stone Flesh: Strike damage taken is reduced while attuned to earth.
- - Increased toughness while attuned to Earth Magic to 1.5/level (120 at level 80).
- Strength of Stone: Gain condition damage based on your toughness. Inflict bleeding when you immobilize a foe. Bleeding can only occur on the same target once per interval.
- - This trait is now Gain condition damage based on your Toughness. 10%.
- Diamond Skin: Remove conditions from yourself when you successfully combo a field with a leap finisher. Remove conditions from nearby allies when you successfully combo a field with a blast finisher.
- - This trait has been redesigned. Conditions cannot be applied to you when your health is above the threshold. 90%.
- Aquamancer's Alacrity: Reduces recharge on all water weapon skills.
- - Moved to Master tier.
- Cleansing Wave: Remove conditions from nearby allies when attuning to water.
- - Moved to Master tier.
- Arcane Restoration: Swapping attunements restores health.
- - Moved to Adept tier.
- Soothing Wave: Gain regeneration when critically hit.
- - Moved to Adept tier.
- Arcane Retribution: Gain Arcane Power when your health drops below the threshold.
- - Moved to Master tier. Decreased cooldown from 90 seconds to 45 seconds.
- Final Shielding: Cast Lesser Arcane Shield when you use an elite skill.
- - Decreased cooldown from 90s to 75s.
- Elemental Attunement: Grant a boon to nearby allies when changing attunements. Note: This effect will not trigger when attuning to the same element.
- - Moved to Master tier.
- Renewing Stamina: Gain vigor when you critically strike a foe.
- - Moved to Master tier.
- Vigorous Scepter: Endurance recharges faster while wielding a scepter.
- - Moved to Adept tier.
- Blasting Staff: Area attacks with staff are larger.
- - Moved to Adept tier.
- Windborne Dagger: Move faster for each dagger that you wield.
- - Moved to Adept tier.
Engineer[edit]
We wanted to maintain the engineer’s core roles while still increasing build diversity. We also wanted to take out some of the random effects for some of the class’s traits. The biggest change here is allowing Modified Ammunition to work with any skills so that an engineer, regardless of build, can look at putting 30 points into firearms. By increasing the swiftness duration on Speedy Kits, we hope to allow Swiftness to be maintained more reasonably without having to constantly be swapping between Kits. This change will also bring down the total up time for Vigor due to its interaction with Invigorating Speed. We don’t like classes having permanent Vigor, and this is one of the areas we needed to tone down the up time of the engineer’s Vigor.
Traits[edit]
- Incendiary Powder: Burning you inflict lasts longer, and your critical hits inflict burning.
- - Moved to Master tier.
- Exploit Weakness: Cripple foes you hit when they are below the health threshold.
- - Increased the health threshold from 25% to 50%
- Accelerant-Packed Turrets: Turrets explode when killed. When your turrets explode, they push back foes.
- - Moved to Adept tier.
- Modified Ammunition: Deal increased strike damage for each condition on a foe.
- - This trait now works regardless of equipped weapon.
- Energized Armor: Gain power based on your toughness.
- - Increased conversion from 5% to 7%.
- Autotool Installation: Turrets are self-repairing.
- - Increased healing percent from 1% to 5%. * Decreased interval from 10s to 3s.
- Elixir-Infused Bombs: Bomb explosions heal allies.
- - Increased healing scaling by 50%.
- Blood Injection: Gain condition damage based on your vitality.
- - Increased conversion from 5% to 7%.
- Transmute: Drink a Lesser Elixir C when you use a healing skill.
- - Increased % chance from 8% to 100%. This effect can now only trigger once every 15 seconds.
- Speedy Kits: Gain swiftness whenever you equip a kit.
- - Increased Swiftness duration to 10s. This effect can now only trigger once every 10 seconds.
- Armor Mods: Gain aegis when struck.
- - Changed this to now trigger on struck instead of on critical hit incoming. Reduced the cooldown from 25 seconds to 15 seconds.
Guardian[edit]
Tanky and supportive guardians are in a strong position in many gametypes. We do feel that damage guardians are not as powerful as they could be. While we don’t want guardians to be as strong offensively as some of the other classes (given their powerful defensive abilities) we opened up more offensive guardian builds.
Traits[edit]
- Shattered Aegis: When an aegis you applied blocks an attack, it unleashes a Mystic Rebuke.
- - Damage instead of Burning.
- Zealous Blade: Your power is increased. Gain additional power while wielding a greatsword. Your greatsword skills have reduced recharge.
- - This trait now scales with Healing power (2%.)
- Kindled Zeal: Gain condition damage based on your power.
- - Increased conversion from 10% to 13%.
- Searing Flames: When you apply burning to a foe, remove a boon.
- - Reduced cooldown from 20s to 10s.
- Powerful Blades: Sword and spear damage is increased.
- - Increased damage from 5% to 10%.
- Retributive Armor: Gain toughness for a period of time when blocking an attack. Gain ferocity based on your toughness.
- - Increased conversion rate from 5% to 7%.
- Pure of Heart: Aegis heals when it blocks an attack.
- - Increased scaling with Healing power from 25% to 40%.
- Supreme Justice: Virtue of Justice causes burning more frequently. When activating Virtue of Justice, the burn duration is increased.
- - Number of attacks going from 4 to 3.
Skills[edit]
- Symbol of Swiftness: Symbol. Sear a mystic symbol into the target area, damaging foes and granting swiftness to allies.
- - This skill now applies 4 seconds of swiftness per pulse, rather than 8 seconds if you have no swiftness and 1 second if you have swiftness.
Mesmer[edit]
The bulk of the mesmer changes are focused on two things. 1) Bringing up some of the mesmer support traits and condition removal traits. 2) Reduce dependency on certain trait lines. The changes to Mender’s Purity and Shattered conditions as well as the move of Dazzling Glamours are meant to accomplish the first of these two. The changes to Shattered Strength and Illusionist’s celerity are what we feel accomplish the second one. Before this change mesmers needed to place 25 points into Illusions for many of their builds. Now they can place only 15 points in there to get the Illusion cooldown which will give them back 10 more trait points to open up some new builds. Finally, we felt that the Mantra traits were fairly difficult to collect. Moving Mantra mastery to adept tier takes some trait pressure off of the Dueling line, allowing mantra mesmers to gain a good trait with only 10 points.
Traits[edit]
- Confounding Suggestions: Diversion now stuns foes instead of dazing them.
- - Changed to increase daze duration by 25%.
- Protected Mantras: Gain toughness while channeling mantras.
- - Moved to Master Tier. Increase Toughness from 400 to 600.
- Mantra Mastery: Reduced recharge on mantras.
- - Moved to Adept Tier.
- Chaotic Transference: Gaining chaos aura grants boons to nearby allies.
- - Increased conversion from 5% to 10%.
- Chaotic Revival: Gain Chaos Armor when you rally.
- - Reduced cooldown from 35s to 10s.
- Auspicious Anguish: Convert damaging conditions to boons whenever you gain Distortion or become disabled. This trait can only trigger when disabled once per interval. Disables include stun, daze, knockback, pull, knockdown, sink, float, launch, taunt, and fear.
- - Reduced cooldown from 90s to 60s.
- Mender's Purity: Cast Lesser Power Cleanse when you use a healing skill.
- - Now removes 2 conditions.
- Shattered Conditions: Using a shatter skill removes a condition from you and allies around you.
- - Increased radius from 240 to 600.
- Illusionary Invigoration: Recharge all of your shatter skills when your health drops below the threshold.
- - Recharge reduced from 90s to 60s. Moved to Master Tier.
- Dazzling Glamours: Glamour skills blind foes at target location.
- - Moved to Adept Tier.
- Shattered Strength: Shattering illusions grants you might per illusion.
- - Moved to Grandmaster tier.
- Illusionist's Celerity: Reduces recharge on illusion-summoning skills.
- - Moved to Master tier.
Necromancer[edit]
For the necromancer, we felt that a few traits and skills were too powerful, while others were lacking in efficacy. We brought down some of the raw DPS conditions that necromancer enjoys, while also maintaining their pressure and sustain elements. The necromancer’s mobility will remain where it is currently, as we want the Necromancers to be focused on sustaining themselves through death shroud, siphoning health, and slowing down their opponent’s ability to act.
Traits[edit]
- Death into Life: Gain healing power based on your power.
- - Increased conversion from 5% to 7%
- Chill of Death: Cast Lesser Spinal Shivers on a foe when attacking them while their health is below the threshold.
- - Increased trigger threshold from 25% to 50%.
- Weakening Shroud: Cast Lesser Enfeeble when entering shroud. Critical hits inflict weakness.
- - Increase recharge from 15 to 25.
- Banshee's Wail: Warhorn skills gain increased effect duration.
- - Increase cooldown reduction from 15% to 20%.
- Reanimator: Summon a jagged horror whenever you kill a foe.
- - Decreased cooldown from 30s to 15s.
- Dark Defiance: If you are disabled, gain protection. Incoming condition damage is reduced while you have protection. Disables include stun, daze, knockback, pull, knockdown, sink, float, fear, taunt, and launch.
- - Decreased the cooldown from 90s to 60s.
- Deadly Strength: Carapace stacks grant power and condition damage.
- - Increased conversion from 5% to 10%.
- Blood to Power: Gain additional power when your health is above the threshold.
- - Decreased health threshold from 90% to 75%. Increase Power from 90 to 120.
- Vital Persistence: Gain Vitality. Your incoming healing is increased.
- - Increased reduction of life force drain from 25% to 50%.
Skills[edit]
- Mark of Blood: Mark. Inscribe a mark that bleeds foes when they trigger it, and grants regeneration to allies.
- - Removed 1 bleed in PvP only.
- Signet of Spite: Signet Passive: Improves power. Signet Active: Inflict bleeding, blindness, crippled, poison, vulnerability, and weakness on your foe.
- - Removed one bleed.
Ranger[edit]
For the ranger, we’ve adjusted the placement of some traits so that rangers should have more build combinations. For example, by swapping Nature’s Vengeance and Spirits Unbound so that rangers can have spirits follow you in tier 2, players can now opt out of the higher damage output from spirits and still have options elsewhere. We also brought up some Marksmanship and a Skirmishing trait to make power specs more appealing. We feel like rangers also currently have too much endurance regeneration through traits. Due to this, we’ve made adjustments to Wilderness Survival traits, and we’ve also brought down the passive of Sun Spirit and the active effect for Storm Spirit.
Traits[edit]
- Predator's Instinct: Apply cripple to foes you hit while they are below the health threshold.
- - Increased the threshold from 25% to 50%. Increased the Cripple Duration from 2s to 10s. Increased the cooldown from 15s to 30s.
- Beastmaster's Bond: Gain fury and might when your pet's health reaches 50%.
- - Decreased the cooldown from 90s to 60s.
- Moment of Clarity: Gain an attack of opportunity for you and your pet on interrupting a foe. Daze and stun durations that you inflict last longer. This trait can only grant an attack of opportunity against enemies with defiance bars once per interval.
- - Stun Duration increased from 50% to 100%.
- Natural Vigor: You recover endurance more quickly.
- - Reduced the increased endurance regeneration from 50% to 25%.
- Oakheart Salve: Gain regeneration when you are inflicted with bleeding, poison, or burning. While you have regeneration, you take reduced strike damage.
- - Decreased the recharge of this trait from 20s->15s
- - Increased the damage reduction from 30% to 50%.
- Circle of Life: Create a healing spring when you are downed.
- - Cleared up the text of this trait to clearly identify that it happens when downed, not defeated.
- Strength of Spirit: Gain power based on your vitality.
- - Increased conversion from 5% to 7%
- Two-Handed Training: Greatsword and underwater spear skills deal more damage and recharge faster. Gain fury when you disable a foe.
- - Added the following functionality to this trait. Greatsword and Spear attacks have a chance to grant Fury on hit. 50% chance. 3s Fury. 10s cooldown.
- Enlargement: Use Signet of the Wild when your health drops below the threshold.
- - This trait now uses Signet of the Wild to trigger. This reduces the cooldown to 60 seconds and allow it to interact with the Signet of the Beastmaster and Signet Mastery traits.
- Nature's Vengeance: Spirits slam again when they finish shaking.
- - Moved to Grandmaster Tier.
- Spirits Unbound: Spirits can move and follow you.
- - Moved to Master Tier.
- Mighty Swap: You and your pet gain might when they are activated.
- - The might from this trait is now applied to you and your pet.
Skills[edit]
- Long Range Shot: Shoot your foe from long range. The farther the arrow flies, the more damage it does.
- - Increased the damage at 500 range by 20%.
- Long Range Shot: Shoot your foe from long range. The farther the arrow flies, the more damage it does.
- - Increased the damage at 500-1000 range by 15%.
- Sun Spirit: Spirit. Summon a sun spirit at a target location and apply blindness to nearby enemies. The spirit will slam the ground and then shake, granting boons to nearby allies.
- - Reduced the passive burning from 3s to 2s.
- Storm Spirit: Spirit. Summon a storm spirit at a target location and apply vulnerability to nearby enemies. The spirit will slam the ground and then shake, granting boons to nearby allies.
- - Reduced the damage from the Call Lightning skill by 33%.
Thief[edit]
One of the issues we are working on for thieves this patch is the dependence on the traits which boost initiative. We did this by shaving a significant amount of initiative gain from these traits while simultaneously boosting the generic rate of initiative gain by 33%. We have also somewhat reduced the effectiveness of high evasion thieves by reducing vigor up time and adding some cast time to the Shadow Return skill on the sword. This prevents these thieves from evading too much and too easily dealing with being disabled (stun, daze, fear, knockdown, etc.). Also we are trying to improve the survivability of thieves in the Acrobatics line through easier access to the Hard to Catch trait and increased effectiveness of the Assassin’s Reward trait. This will reward thieves who are actively engaged in the fight rather than those who are just dodging over and over again. The change to Infusion of Shadow is meant to stop players from gaining initiative by applying stealth while already in stealth. This should keep thieves from being able to recharge all of their power while idling in a very long stealth. We felt that using a lot of different abilities to maintain stealth is ok, but re-using the same ability over and over for almost permanent stealth was just bad for the game, especially when gaining large amounts of initiative.
General[edit]
- Increased the base rate of initiative gain from .75/second to 1/second.
Traits[edit]
- Sundering Strikes: Critical hits have a chance to cause vulnerability.
- - Increased the trigger chance from 50%. Remove ICD. Decrease Vulnerability duration to 6s.
- Practiced Tolerance: Gain ferocity based on your precision.
- - Increased conversion from 5% to 7%.
- Opportunist: Critical hits have a bonus chance to restore initiative.
- - Increased trigger chance to 50%. Increase cooldown from 1s to 5s.
- Signet Use: Gain initiative when activating a signet. Reduces recharge on signets.
- - Reduced initiative gain from 2 to 1.
- Critical Haste: You have a chance to gain quickness on a critical hit.
- - Increase trigger chance to 25%.
- Infusion of Shadow: Gain initiative when you enter stealth.
- - This trait functionality has been changed to “Gain initiative when you enter stealth.” 2 init.
- Pumping Up: Gain might when when you dodge.
- - Reduced Vigor duration to 4s from 8s.
- Assassin's Retreat: Gain swiftness when you kill a foe.
- - Increased swiftness duration to 20s.
- Quick Recovery: Gain bonus initiative over time.
- - Reduced initiative gain from 2 to 1.
- Assassin's Reward: Heal yourself whenever you use a skill that uses initiative. Heal yourself for each point of initiative spent.
- - Increased healing scaling by 35%. Moved to Grandmaster Tier.
- Hard to Catch: Gain endurance when you shadowstep.
- - Moved to Master Tier.
- Kleptomaniac: Stealing gives you initiative.
- - Reduce initiative gain from 3 to 2.
- Burst of Agility: Use Lesser Haste when attacking a foe from behind or from the side or when they are defiant.
- - Move to Master tier.
- Bountiful Theft: Stealing grants you and all nearby allies vigor. You rip boons from your target and grant them to nearby allies. Grant additional boons to allies if your target has no boons.
- - Reduced vigor duration to from 15s to 8s.
- Trickster: Tricks remove conditions.
- - Move to Adept tier.
Skills[edit]
- Shadow Return: Deception. Return to your starting location, and cure three conditions.
- - Renamed to Infiltrator’s return. Added a 1/4s cast time.
- Pistol Whip: Dual Wield. Pistol-whip your foe, stunning them, then slash repeatedly with your sword.
- - Reduced the after cast on the first half of this skill by .25 seconds.
Warrior[edit]
The overall goal here is to reduce the damage for the very high control warriors. This means reducing some dependency on going 30 points into discipline for Burst Mastery, making warriors spend 20 points in Arms to get the benefit of Unsuspecting Foe. We also reduced the damage on the hammer’s burst skill to separate the control from the damage. We don’t mind warriors doing massive damage, or doing great area of effect control, but we’re trying to prevent them from easily doing both. We also increased the readability of Skull Crack, which will allow opposing players to more easily react to it. Combustive Shot on longbow also saw some rework. It will scale better with adrenaline levels, and still provide strong burning per adrenaline level, but the raw damage was toned down slightly.
Traits[edit]
- Reckless Dodge: Damage foes at the end of a dodge roll.
- - Increased Damage by 25%
- Great Fortitude: Gain vitality and ferocity based on a percentage of your power.
- - Increased conversion rate from 5% to 7%.
- Unsuspecting Foe: Increased critical-hit chance against disabled or defiant foes. Disables include stun, daze, knockback, pull, knockdown, sink, float, launch, taunt, and fear.
- - Moved to Master Tier.
- Crack Shot: Your longbow, rifle, and harpoon gun weapon skill 1 attacks are enhanced.
- - Moved to Adept Tier.
- Last Chance: Gain quickness when you strike a foe that is below the health threshold.
- - Increased the threshold form 25% to 50%. Reduced the cooldown from 45 seconds to 40seconds.
- Armored Attack: Gain power based on your toughness.
- - Increased conversion rate from 5% to 10%.
- Hardened Armor: Gain resolution when you block or are struck by a critical hit. Strike damage taken is reduced by a percentage while you have resolution.
- - Reduced the recharge from 15s to 10s.
- Determined Revival: Reduce incoming damage while reviving.
- - Now correctly displays the amount of toughness.
- Reviver's Might: Heal and grant might to nearby allies when you rally or successfully revive someone.
- - Now applies 3 stacks of Might instead of 1.
- Thrill of the Kill: Gain extra adrenaline on a kill.
- - Increased Adrenaline gain from 1 to 10.
- Burst Mastery: Burst skills deal more damage, grant swiftness, and restore a portion of adrenaline spent.
- - Reduced damage increase from 10% to 7%. Removed erroneous adrenaline gain fact.
Skills[edit]
- Earthshaker: Burst. Jump to the targeted location and slam your hammer down, damaging and stunning foes.
- - Reduced damage by 20%.
- Staggering Blow: Push back nearby foes with a staggering blow.
- - Reduced damage by 23%.
- Skull Crack: Burst. Stun your foe with a skull crack. Effect increases with adrenaline level.
- - Increased the cast time from 1/4s to 1/2s. Updated the animation and effects of this skill to be more clear.
- Combustive Shot: Burst. Ignite target area, burning nearby foes. Effect increases with adrenaline level.
- - Increased pulse duration to 3s. Increased burn duration per pulse to 3s. Normalized damage per pulse. Updated pulses per tier to 2, 3,and 4 respectively for tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3.