Q: The additional effects on phantasm summons for mesmer are interesting (still have to test them myself to see how effective they are), but why didn’t iBerserker or iWarden get the same love?
A: We’d actually planned for more phantasm changes in this update including iWarden, but we weren’t satisfied with how some of them turned out. When developing these new phantasm skills it was important for us to add functionality that had meaningful combat effects without deviating too much from the purpose of the phantasm or the weapon. We’d like to do more of these in the future but we are being careful not to power creep them so much that we have to weaken the phantasm to counterbalance it.
Q: What was the thought process behind giving Alacrity to ventari? From my understanding its the clunky mechanic of the tablet that is keeping ventari from being a viable legend, and alacrity won’t change that. It feels like putting burn cream on frostbite. You tried to help but will it actually do anything?
A: There may not have been too much danger in changing this game-wide. The PvP impact ,from internal testing, was where we wanted to see more of how this change would play out. This is something we’re open to revisiting in a future update.
Q: I think power guardian is in a really good spot right now. Are there any future plans to buff condi guardian a little bit aswell? Maybe a change to the spirit weapons could help it a lot.
A:There are thoughts on this that we’re exploring. As it is, we’ve got to be careful with anything we do condition-wise because of the guardian’s interaction with Justice and the virtues line. With the wide variance of burning, it’s going to be something we’ll approach with caution. As for Spirit Weapons: we have some plans for them, but haven’t had the right timing/tech to implement the changes in the way we want.
Q:“Specializing in chronomancy grants mesmers access, through traits and skills, to a new effect called alacrity. " Chronomancers. “Chronomancy is the only specialization allowed access to this powerful effect.” Chronomancers. So why do revs have alacrity now?
A:Chronomancer was given Alacrity because it was incredibly thematic and felt within its kit.
From a group content perspective, alacrity is so strong that if no other profession gains access to it then Chronomancers would push others out of groups because it feels necessary. As is, they are likely to remain the best ways to grant alacrity to others.
The game evolves and we decided that keeping this feature exclusive may not be in the best interest of the game as a whole. From a general game perspective, specializations are places where a profession may gain access to features from a different profession.
Q:How much further do you guys plan to up the target cap on skills? I know you are cautious about adding more, but can we see things like spotter see 10 man cap?
A:(for reference) As indicated in the dev notes: “We will not be looking to increase our five-target-maximum standard for player skills and will seldom (if ever) increase existing skill/trait caps.”
Traits that apply constant AOE benefit are not candidates for target increases. Primarily, they’re heavy on server performance. Secondarily, while we want to increase group diversity, we want to do so in a meaningful fashion.
Taking a trait and standing around doesn’t really hit the bar for participation, where ensuring proper placement and timing of a Timewarp has significant meaning.
Q: Do you generally consider reworking skills when working on the balance patch or is this something you’d only do in a “last ditch effort”, when the skill just can’t be put in a good place?
A:We generally try to avoid reworking skills in a vacuum. If we feel a skill is slightly out of line, small tweaks to things like damage, recharge or cast time can usually be enough. We’re more likely to do skill reworks when doing major updates to a given skill category such as some of the changes to mesmer phantasms this time around, but for one-off skills we try to avoid it if we can since it can come across as random and affect players who like using the skill as is. That’s not to say we wouldn’t do it, but it would have to be a fairly extreme case.
Q: My main concern is the fact that Spirit Weapons went completely untouched. One of my favorite things about Guardian when I began playing back in beta was my Spirit Weapon build. Spirit Weapons seem to be relegated to the realm of “just for fun” rather than having any remotely competitive applications. I would really love to see Spirit Weapons and other neglected skills get some love rather than just tweaking what is already being used ad nauseum.
A:We would really like to do some in-depth passes on underused utility types across most professions. We did not have time to do that for this update, sadly.
Kits on Engineer are an outlier; as utilities they provide an insane amount of versatility. Inherently it is difficult to bring a single skill up to the level of five skills. This is a difficult conundrum and one we discuss regularly. That said, we do have a few ideas for creating gameplay with other utility revisits in the future.
In particular I’d like to review and revisit Elementalist Conjures, Guardian Spirit Weapons, Engineer Gadgets and potentially Mesmer Mantras.
Q: Also, can you comment on the devious change adding in a cool down on Stealth Attacks? This was never explained, and one question that is more pressing than the “why” is whether or not the team is satisfied with the cooldown and open to making changes to this in the future.
A:Unlike other thief weapons skills, stealth attacks do not have an initiative cost. Previously they did not have a cooldown as well. Guild Wars 2 frequently uses recharge as a cost to casting a skill as a result, these skills were essentially “free”. With the previous version of stealth attacks, you could spam your stealth attack until it hit at essentially no cost while your opponent had to use resources like aegis, blind or evasion to avoid it.
tldr; We added the recharge to stealth attacks to insure that there would be appropriate cost to failing to hit with a stealth attack. We’re pretty happy with this change and aren’t planning to revert it.
Q: So im not sure on alot of things with this patch, but I think i can live with/ get used to it. All except one. Wvw. red circles AoE even if its freindly. NO. If its a test for lag then its a bad bad choice. no idea where is safe and where is not. Been doging these circles for years and now we wont have to doge them, maybe.
A:This is a bug. It’ll get fixed hopefully soon.
Q: - I believe the treatment you gave to GoTL and banners to be a really positive change: are you planning on giving the same treatment to other unique proffesion buffs?
The healing aspect for the legend is already very powerful, but the utility granted through constant energy use didn’t quite make up for the loss of DPS you take when not using other abilities. The legend itself is close to feeling like the high-healing support that it was intended to be.
Often times in the past, characters that are strong at healing are also extremely tanky, which hamstrings our efforts of making a more capable healing support build. We wanted give a good reason to take both the Salvation specialization line along with the tablet, but not give the wielder superior self-sustainability or damage as a result. As the revenant is less reliant on cooldowns and more reliant on energy management, Alacrity was a natural option. Thematically, the tablet is assisting with ‘growth’ and thus speeds up a target’s cooldowns.
Question 3: This particular change (and many others) go through several phases of testing and iteration. We did a large amount of assessment in this change, as we were also adjusting energy and healing values at the same time.
Q: Druid spirits are still 5 targets. Considering warrior banners are 10 targets now, is this an oversight that will be addressed very soon?
A:This was not an oversight. Making something affect ten targets is not something we want to do across the board for unique buffs. They are pretty costly performance-wise, however this is not to say it will never happen.
A: We’d actually planned for more phantasm changes in this update including iWarden, but we weren’t satisfied with how some of them turned out. When developing these new phantasm skills it was important for us to add functionality that had meaningful combat effects without deviating too much from the purpose of the phantasm or the weapon. We’d like to do more of these in the future but we are being careful not to power creep them so much that we have to weaken the phantasm to counterbalance it.
Q: What was the thought process behind giving Alacrity to ventari? From my understanding its the clunky mechanic of the tablet that is keeping ventari from being a viable legend, and alacrity won’t change that. It feels like putting burn cream on frostbite. You tried to help but will it actually do anything?
A: There may not have been too much danger in changing this game-wide. The PvP impact ,from internal testing, was where we wanted to see more of how this change would play out. This is something we’re open to revisiting in a future update.
Q: I think power guardian is in a really good spot right now. Are there any future plans to buff condi guardian a little bit aswell? Maybe a change to the spirit weapons could help it a lot.
A:There are thoughts on this that we’re exploring. As it is, we’ve got to be careful with anything we do condition-wise because of the guardian’s interaction with Justice and the virtues line. With the wide variance of burning, it’s going to be something we’ll approach with caution. As for Spirit Weapons: we have some plans for them, but haven’t had the right timing/tech to implement the changes in the way we want.
Q:“Specializing in chronomancy grants mesmers access, through traits and skills, to a new effect called alacrity. " Chronomancers. “Chronomancy is the only specialization allowed access to this powerful effect.” Chronomancers. So why do revs have alacrity now?
A:Chronomancer was given Alacrity because it was incredibly thematic and felt within its kit.
From a group content perspective, alacrity is so strong that if no other profession gains access to it then Chronomancers would push others out of groups because it feels necessary. As is, they are likely to remain the best ways to grant alacrity to others.
The game evolves and we decided that keeping this feature exclusive may not be in the best interest of the game as a whole. From a general game perspective, specializations are places where a profession may gain access to features from a different profession.
Q:How much further do you guys plan to up the target cap on skills? I know you are cautious about adding more, but can we see things like spotter see 10 man cap?
A:(for reference) As indicated in the dev notes: “We will not be looking to increase our five-target-maximum standard for player skills and will seldom (if ever) increase existing skill/trait caps.”
Traits that apply constant AOE benefit are not candidates for target increases. Primarily, they’re heavy on server performance. Secondarily, while we want to increase group diversity, we want to do so in a meaningful fashion.
Taking a trait and standing around doesn’t really hit the bar for participation, where ensuring proper placement and timing of a Timewarp has significant meaning.
Q: Do you generally consider reworking skills when working on the balance patch or is this something you’d only do in a “last ditch effort”, when the skill just can’t be put in a good place?
A:We generally try to avoid reworking skills in a vacuum. If we feel a skill is slightly out of line, small tweaks to things like damage, recharge or cast time can usually be enough. We’re more likely to do skill reworks when doing major updates to a given skill category such as some of the changes to mesmer phantasms this time around, but for one-off skills we try to avoid it if we can since it can come across as random and affect players who like using the skill as is. That’s not to say we wouldn’t do it, but it would have to be a fairly extreme case.
Q: My main concern is the fact that Spirit Weapons went completely untouched. One of my favorite things about Guardian when I began playing back in beta was my Spirit Weapon build. Spirit Weapons seem to be relegated to the realm of “just for fun” rather than having any remotely competitive applications. I would really love to see Spirit Weapons and other neglected skills get some love rather than just tweaking what is already being used ad nauseum.
A:We would really like to do some in-depth passes on underused utility types across most professions. We did not have time to do that for this update, sadly.
Kits on Engineer are an outlier; as utilities they provide an insane amount of versatility. Inherently it is difficult to bring a single skill up to the level of five skills. This is a difficult conundrum and one we discuss regularly. That said, we do have a few ideas for creating gameplay with other utility revisits in the future.
In particular I’d like to review and revisit Elementalist Conjures, Guardian Spirit Weapons, Engineer Gadgets and potentially Mesmer Mantras.
Q: Also, can you comment on the devious change adding in a cool down on Stealth Attacks? This was never explained, and one question that is more pressing than the “why” is whether or not the team is satisfied with the cooldown and open to making changes to this in the future.
A:Unlike other thief weapons skills, stealth attacks do not have an initiative cost. Previously they did not have a cooldown as well. Guild Wars 2 frequently uses recharge as a cost to casting a skill as a result, these skills were essentially “free”. With the previous version of stealth attacks, you could spam your stealth attack until it hit at essentially no cost while your opponent had to use resources like aegis, blind or evasion to avoid it.
tldr; We added the recharge to stealth attacks to insure that there would be appropriate cost to failing to hit with a stealth attack. We’re pretty happy with this change and aren’t planning to revert it.
Q: So im not sure on alot of things with this patch, but I think i can live with/ get used to it. All except one. Wvw. red circles AoE even if its freindly. NO. If its a test for lag then its a bad bad choice. no idea where is safe and where is not. Been doging these circles for years and now we wont have to doge them, maybe.
A:This is a bug. It’ll get fixed hopefully soon.
Q: - I believe the treatment you gave to GoTL and banners to be a really positive change: are you planning on giving the same treatment to other unique proffesion buffs?
- Alacrity on revenant is a change I don’t quite understand, would you mind elaborating on what was the thought process behind it?
- Do you beta test all these changes extensively?, if you do, can you share part of the evaluation and tweaking process with us?
The healing aspect for the legend is already very powerful, but the utility granted through constant energy use didn’t quite make up for the loss of DPS you take when not using other abilities. The legend itself is close to feeling like the high-healing support that it was intended to be.
Often times in the past, characters that are strong at healing are also extremely tanky, which hamstrings our efforts of making a more capable healing support build. We wanted give a good reason to take both the Salvation specialization line along with the tablet, but not give the wielder superior self-sustainability or damage as a result. As the revenant is less reliant on cooldowns and more reliant on energy management, Alacrity was a natural option. Thematically, the tablet is assisting with ‘growth’ and thus speeds up a target’s cooldowns.
Question 3: This particular change (and many others) go through several phases of testing and iteration. We did a large amount of assessment in this change, as we were also adjusting energy and healing values at the same time.
Q: Druid spirits are still 5 targets. Considering warrior banners are 10 targets now, is this an oversight that will be addressed very soon?
A:This was not an oversight. Making something affect ten targets is not something we want to do across the board for unique buffs. They are pretty costly performance-wise, however this is not to say it will never happen.
