Summary
Balance
1. On behalf of most Ele players, we can agree that a damage nerf was needed. However, the cooldown increases make rotations clunky and unsatisfying to use (fire/lava font specifically). Is there any chance we can see the old cooldowns restored and instead apply the nerf to the skill damage directly? I’m all for game balance but I really want my main class to be enjoyable to play.
1. What is the status of Legendary Armor? Is there any way we can at least get a preview of what it looks like or some sort of time table? It takes a lot of effort to get the items for the armor and right now we’re working for something we know virtually nothing about.
1. With all the little details in the story instances, particularly the first one, it feels as if you all had more time to breathe life into this release. Do you all feel more comfortable with the pace of release now?
1. I was super excited to see the return of the Capricorn sPvP map. Managed to get in one match before the server crash, it seems really awesome so far. Will the map eventually enter the ‘Ranked’ map selection? Also, are we likely to be seeing any more new sPvP maps in the next year or so?
Also, how "prestigious" did you intend the separate divisions to be? Right now it’s pretty much like meh, when you see another dude with legendary. You can’t tell if he’s actually a decent player, or just grinded a ton of games.
1. The WvW portion of this update is kinda lacking, especially with all the stuff we’ve voted on. Are the repair hammers, cannons, and 2 Alpine 1 Desert borderland updates fairly close to launching? I won’t even ask about the scoring update.
It’s refreshing to see work being done on WvW though, please continue!
1. What has been the most hilarious bug you have come across during the development of the game?
Balance
- Regarding Ele damage nerf and how the rotation feels clunky -the previous 33% reduction caused skills to be too effective when traited, causing issues with both offense and defense game-wide. As such, they’ve been normalized to a more appropriate 20%. We felt that keeping the damage per-cast of the ability as is was more desirable than a reduced damage value and same cooldown.
- We are not going to go back and completely separate skills between game modes. The splits shown today are a good example of the kinds of changes we’ll be going toward in the future.
- As for the frequency of balance, we want to give time for things to settle and gather information/feedback as to the current state of things. We’ve done some changes ‘mid-season’ before and will do them again as necessary, but will try to not repeatedly shake things up over a short period of time.
- Previously Venomous Aura was a grandmaster trait that you had to made some trade off for, since there is no longer a trade off given we made VA baseline, decreasing the range felt necessary and increase skill cap of the thief.
- Guardians in PvP – I’ve always liked the feel of less mobility but high effectiveness that scales more with more people making them strong group fighters but I think with a lot of the changes the guardian’s ability to sustain compared to other professions has been a major issue causing them to be less effective and something we need to work on but it can come into conflict with speeding the game up so it’s a bit tricky.
- Epidemic – There’s a bit of inconsistency with the ways that condition copies function and we are looking into how we can normalize it. Once that’s solved, we’ll be able to better evaluate epidemic’s current effect.
- Legendary Armor is still in development, and we are working out the final stages.
- Took us 5 months from start to finish designing the Chaos Fractal
- We have a new standard of quality with fractals going forward, and we are pouring a ton of effort into them
- Fractal Tonic will be more accessible in a future release.
- Snowblind didn’t get easier, just made the fight go more faster. Going forward we will probably create fractals that have an even higher difficulty at the highest scales.
- Fractal Rewards – Ascended drops need to remain tied to the daily achievements, so those cant be added to standard Fractal loot. The boss chests already give a significant amount of gold in the form of Fractal Encryptions, so I’m not sure there is much more we can do there.
- No plans to legendary fractal armor at this time.
- No plans to change the 150 Legendary Insight requirement for legendary armor.
- Future Raids will keep drop legendary insights.
- Remaining collection items for legendary armor should be coming with future raid releases.
- No date given for next raid release, just anything is possible when asked if we will see new raids before the next expansion.
- No plans to overhaul stat-swapping menu for legendary armor to be like those in PvP.
- Systemic limitation caused us to replace the amulet infusion slot with enrichment slot instead. it’s actually takes fewer +1 Agony Infusions to get 150 AR post-patch. To get 150 AR now, you only need to make 12 +8s and 6 +9s. You don’t need +11s or +10s anymore
- I feel like we’ve gotten into a really good rhythm now. Polish and those little details are a high priority for us, and it’s great to have the time and resources necessary to be able to include the "little things" that make the world feel more alive.
- The blood ruby equipment allows you to choose the new HoT-exclusive stat combinations like Viper and Minstrel. The bloodstone capacitor resets the stat-selector for the items, allowing you to choose a new stat combination.
- We’re going to be adding more ascended rewards in future Living World releases- I picked the ones available in this episode to try and address the biggest gaps from HoT.
- Our goal is to make sure we have a sustainable cadence and don’t have to take down Living World to deliver the next expansion.
- Next Living World release may not have other content bundled with it. The other teams ship content when they’ve got something great to ship. There are specific times that are good for skill balance updates, where they don’t interfere with PvP seasons and tournaments, and Living World episodes won’t always line up with those times.
- New map doesn’t have much much merchants as lorewise it isn’t for merchants to receive goods or have stockpiles of stuff.
- We plan to release living world episodes every 2 to 3 months
- For why no Trahearne Memorial – Eir’s loss hits much closer to home and at a time like that, it is important that we take the time to draw in those closest to us for support. Sylvari are young and don’t have traditions on how to deal with deaths. And from a development standpoint, two memorials would significantly slow the pacing of the content, and it was no small feat to make the one as it is.
- RNG Gliding traps – bloodstone was a repository for any magic the ancient races could hide away from the dragons, and has continued to passively absorb magic, so the rapid release of that magic created unpredictable magical storms that can trap players gliding in the area. Dodge them.
- One of the priorities for the team is to create new maps for sPvP. We can’t say how many we will get out over the next year but we intend to include new maps as part of our teams content creation.
- Capricon in ranked rotation will depend on community feedback
- A lot of players are in Ruby. Players mostly fall in a bell curve as we expected, but skewed upwards because of the backwards progression rules.
- We currently do not intend to prevent players from progressing the backpack after season 4.
- The addition of off-season ranked will help prevent these one sided matches in unranked in offseason.
- We are not super happy with deathmatch to get Courtyard into the ranked rotation. It is not something we want to support as a major game type.
- The WvW team has a different release schedule than the other teams and we will continue to release outside of the quarterly releases.
- Repair hammers will be coming in the beginning of August. 2 Alpine, 1 Desert and Scoring are tentatively coming the end of August. Cannons will be coming sometime after that (we don’t want Cannons and Scoring going out at the same time).
- No plans to refund WvW Infusions for laurels since they are still functional.
- As for lag, it is always something we are trying to improve. There are some changes coming in early August specific to WvW that should help with lag, but we are constantly working on improving lag for WvW.
- We have talked about a salvaging system for runes and sigils for years, but it’s a rather large project, larger than you might expect, so we haven’t gotten to it.
- Taimi has already grown in size.
- QoL changes are usually the work of developers in the downtime between teams/larger projects.
- Mac Client – Currently we can patch, run around in several maps, we don’t fall through the floor anymore.It is progressing and we will let you guys know when we’re ready to go into beta.
- Nothing for special forces training area this patch but they have a list of things they like to improve in the future.
- Can always add more mystic forge recipes.
- Players have requested more cross-race hairstyles and we wanted to support that request. While looking at some of the more popular hairstyles for cross-race use there were some culturally aesthetic and physiological restraints. Human and Norn share more similarities and were a more natural choice when creating cross-race hairstyles.
- Bloodstone Ruby are not considered as a material for material storage.
- Armor sets are by far the most expensive reward we can make. A full set includes heavy, medium, light, times five races, times two sexes, so it’s like developing 30 sets. It takes nine months to develop. (That’s for a normal armor set — legendary is much longer.) It’s not something we can do for Living World episodes. Individual pieces are good rewards for Living World episodes; full sets are more something for expansion packs.
- Backpacks and gliders are different items and came into the game at different times with different goals, needs, and different technologies available. By the time we were developing gliders, we were able to intentionally create them so that they could be dyed and had missed that opportunity with backpacks.
1. On behalf of most Ele players, we can agree that a damage nerf was needed. However, the cooldown increases make rotations clunky and unsatisfying to use (fire/lava font specifically). Is there any chance we can see the old cooldowns restored and instead apply the nerf to the skill damage directly? I’m all for game balance but I really want my main class to be enjoyable to play.
- I find that with balance changes, it’s a good idea to play the skills in a variety of game modes before making a judgment. In the past, I’ve felt strongly that something won’t work, or is changed too dramatically.(Basically, I admit it, I’ve gone "Oh nooooo!" when I’ve read the notes.) But when I play it and assess it real time, I realize it works fine. Having said that, naturally we want your feedback once you’ve played!
- Regarding the cooldown (training) traits, the previous 33% reduction caused skills to be too effective when traited, causing issues with both offense and defense game-wide. As such, they’ve been normalized to a more appropriate 20%. As for Lava Font, this particular skill was causing an undesirable amount of sustained damage in prolonged fights. We worked with development teams across content types and felt that keeping the damage per-cast of the ability as is was more desirable than a reduced damage value and same cooldown. We understand the concerns and perspectives presented here, but believe we need to give the changes some time before we look to make alterations to the profession
- Some of the skill splitting tech is new and compliments our old tech to the point where we are much more comfortable with making splits. Are we going to look to split everything and have completely separate skills between game modes? Probably not. The splits shown today are a good example of the kinds of changes we’ll be going toward in the future.
As for he frequency of balance, we want to give time for things to settle and gather information/feedback as to the current state of things. We’ve done some changes ‘mid-season’ before and will do them again as necessary, but will try to not repeatedly shake things up over a short period of time.
- When we increased the radius of the aura, we did so because it was a skill-modifying grandmaster trait that you had to make a trade off for. As there’s no longer a trade-off, decreasing the range felt necessary, as it in turn increases the positioning requirement of the thief and somewhat increases the skill cap. We’ll continue to monitor the effectiveness of the utility set and adjust as needed.
- There has been debate here on the subject but it’s more along the line of what are ways we can speed up the game.
- As for guardian I’ve always liked the feel of less mobility but high effectiveness that scales more with more people making them strong group fighters but I think with a lot of the changes the guardian’s ability to sustain compared to other professions has been a major issue causing them to be less effective and something we need to work on but it can come into conflict with speeding the game up so it’s a bit tricky.
- There’s a bit of inconsistency with the ways that condition copies function and we are looking into how we can normalize it. Once that’s solved, we’ll be able to better evaluate epidemic’s current effect.
1. What is the status of Legendary Armor? Is there any way we can at least get a preview of what it looks like or some sort of time table? It takes a lot of effort to get the items for the armor and right now we’re working for something we know virtually nothing about.
- Legendary Armor is still in development, and we are working out the final stages. As soon as we are happy with how the final result will look and interact with the character models we will be sending out a preview and including it into the wardrobe viewer.
- Legendary Armor will be released when it is ready. We are working through the final stage now.
- It took us about 5 months to go from concept to finished with the new Chaos Fractal.
- There really isn’t much I can say about the next fractal, we don’t want to spoil things! You will just have to wait and see :). We have a new standard of quality with fractals going forward, and we are pouring a ton of effort into them!
- No, we’re working on multiple Fractals at once. With the way development works, it’s easy to have one project in the polish & balance phase while another is in the prototype or fleshing out phase.
- Future release.
- I can answer about the Mistwild Greatsword specifically. All you need to do is defeat the chaos fractal at scale 88
- I can respond in reference to your fractals question. Snowblind didn’t really get much easier, the elemental source event did, but thats because it was frustrating before. The actual boss fight in snowblind as well as the intro event were incredibly easy yet long and tedious before. The changes to the elemental were intended to make the encounter go faster and be easier, but the changes to the boss made it more difficult yet also faster. Pacing is important and it just wasn’t good in the previous version.
- Fractal scale is not the only measure of difficulty. Some fractals are just harder than others. For instance, chaos at scale 99 is going to feel harder than snowblind if it was also at scale 99. Going forward we will probably create fractals that have an even higher difficulty at the highest scales.
- Ascended drops need to remain tied to the daily achievements, so those cant be added to standard Fractal loot. The boss chests already give a significant amount of gold in the form of Fractal Encryptions, so I’m not sure there is much more we can do there.
- Yep! Check the Infusion Deconstruction tab on the new vendor in the Fractal Lobby!
- No plans for legendary Fractal armor at this time. Ad Infinitum will remain Fractals only legendary for the time being.
- There are no plans to change this requirement.
- It is our intent that future raid release will continue to drop Legendary Insights.
- Anything is possible.
- The envoy armor collections are tied to the raids, and the remaining collection items should be coming with future raid releases.
- While we do try to coordinate releases our primary goal is to only release the content when we feel it is ready.
- We don’t currently have any plans to majorly overhaul stat-swapping with Legendary Armor- it’s using the same system as the legendary weapons and backpacks where you can access the stat-swap menu whenever you’re out of combat.
- No, there are only going to be two Envoy Armor collections – you will be able to create your legendary armor after completing the second collection.
- It was a systemic limitation. With the change to infusion slots which let players place any Infusion into any Slot, we couldn’t keep both kinds of amulets. It is worth noting, however, that it’s actually takes fewer +1 Agony Infusions to get 150 AR post-patch. To get 150 AR now, you only need to make 12 +8s and 6 +9s. You don’t need +11s or +10s anymore.
- If you currently have a set of +11s and +10s, you can take those to the new vendor in the Mistlock Observatory to break them down into +9s and +8s. Once you’re down breaking them down, you should have enough Infusions to get 150 AR and still have 2 +9s left over.
1. With all the little details in the story instances, particularly the first one, it feels as if you all had more time to breathe life into this release. Do you all feel more comfortable with the pace of release now?
- I feel like we’ve gotten into a really good rhythm now. Polish and those little details are a high priority for us, and it’s great to have the time and resources necessary to be able to include the "little things" that make the world feel more alive.
- Yes, the blood ruby equipment allows you to choose the new HoT-exclusive stat combinations like Viper and Minstrel. The bloodstone capacitor resets the stat-selector for the items, allowing you to choose a new stat combination.
- We’re going to be adding more ascended rewards in future Living World releases- I picked the ones available in this episode to try and address the biggest gaps from HoT.
- At the end of Season Two we had all shifted from Living World onto Heart of Thorns. So between Season Two and Season Three we’ve rebuilt and restaffed the Living World team. My goal is to make sure we have a sustainable cadence and don’t have to take down Living World to deliver the next expansion.
- QoL can be a little hard to predict. The more low hanging fruit we take care of, the more difficult it can be to come up with more cool ideas.
- The Fractals, PvP, and Raids teams ship content when they’ve got something great to ship, not on a set schedule. This release had a new Fractal and a new PvP map bundled with it, because they were both ready, not because we’re trying to establish a pattern. There’s no way that could happen with each release. With WvW we’re shipping updates as frequently as possible, not bundling them with these larger releases.
- This release has a skill balance update bundled with it, as did the January and April Quarterly Updates, but the next Living World release may not. There are specific times that are good for skill balance updates, where they don’t interfere with PvP seasons and tournaments, and Living World episodes won’t always line up with those times.
- We had discussed this prior to launch a bit, actually. Because the camps are all very makeshift and it isn’t easy for merchants to, lore wise, receive goods or have stockpiles of stuff, we decided against it. The poor Pact is pretty broken, so the low number of merchants helps support the idea that this place is rugged and rough. We were naturally concerned about the ease of access to merchants, though, which is why there is one located right near the waypoint in the ship. I suspect we’ll discuss it again when we see more feedback trickling in, but I can’t make any promises
- We plan to release living world episodes every 2 to 3 months.
- Eir was a very close and personal friend of the player character. The whole world mourns Trahearne’s loss, and the player character chooses to do so privately as a comrade in arms. However, Eir’s loss hits much closer to home and at a time like that, it is important that we take the time to draw in those closest to us for support.
- So narratively speaking, Norn have existed for centuries, and have been dealing with death for generations. Their customs for what you should do when someone passes are well established. Sylvari, on the other hand, are a young race and they’re still establishing those sorts of customs. It’s not that the sylvari aren’t dealing with the emotions of the death of a firstborn, of course they are, they just don’t have traditions already established on how they deal with them. How would we know, as humans, that a funeral or memorial is an appropriate response to death, except for the fact that our parents, and our parents parents have always done that?
- And from a development standpoint, two memorials would significantly slow the pacing of the content, and it was no small feat to make the one as it is. Other characters have died without the PC being invited to their funeral or memorial (Tybalt: never forget!) and it would be quite unsustainable to create a memorial for all of them.
- The thought process is that the bloodstone was a repository for any magic the ancient races could hide away from the dragons, and has continued to passively absorb magic, so the rapid release of that magic created unpredictable magical storms, that materialize in one of the schools of magic – elemental, chaotic, etc. It’s basically a giant sponge full of every type of magic you could imagine, hence the randomness of what you’re struck with.
- As far as the moa? Yeah that was me. We knew we had to include magic that was within the realm of mesmers/mind/chaos since Mordremoth was very mind-y himself, and turning flying players into a flightless bird is hilarious. You can redeploy after the transform to avoid death, or just dodge the giant sparking magical storms in the sky to begin with.
1. I was super excited to see the return of the Capricorn sPvP map. Managed to get in one match before the server crash, it seems really awesome so far. Will the map eventually enter the ‘Ranked’ map selection? Also, are we likely to be seeing any more new sPvP maps in the next year or so?
- One of the priorities for the team is to create new maps for sPvP. We can’t say how many we will get out over the next year but we intend to include new maps as part of our teams content creation. As for putting Capricorn into rotation, that will depend on community reception.
Also, how "prestigious" did you intend the separate divisions to be? Right now it’s pretty much like meh, when you see another dude with legendary. You can’t tell if he’s actually a decent player, or just grinded a ton of games.
- The distribution is how you describe where a lot of players are in Ruby. Players mostly fall in a bell curve as we expected, but skewed upwards because of the backwards progression rules.
- We want prestige to come from the ladder and all our changes up to this point have been aimed at working towards that goal. However, we recognize there are trade-offs when also making the system feel rewarding and have a sense of progression. Here is some info from Josh on the matter: https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/pvp/How-many-are-keen-for-S4/first#post6245573
- There will still be a path to achieve the back piece in future seasons. We currently do not intend to prevent players from progressing the backpack after season 4.
- The reason unranked can feel volatile around off-season is for two reasons: First, the ratings for everyone who didn’t move exclusively to ranked arena spread out over time to match the population. Second, the ranked players that go back to unranked once the season is over have stale ratings that swing up and down while they find their true rating again. The addition of off-season ranked will help prevent these large population swings from affecting the accuracy of ratings.
- Unlikely deathmatch isn’t something we’ve ever been super happy with and not something we want to support as a major game type.
1. The WvW portion of this update is kinda lacking, especially with all the stuff we’ve voted on. Are the repair hammers, cannons, and 2 Alpine 1 Desert borderland updates fairly close to launching? I won’t even ask about the scoring update.
- The WvW team has a different release schedule than the other teams and we will continue to release outside of the quarterly releases.
- Repair hammers will be coming in the beginning of August. 2 Alpine, 1 Desert and Scoring are tentatively coming the end of August. Cannons will be coming sometime after that (we don’t want Cannons and Scoring going out at the same time).
- No plans for that. Those infusions are still functional, even if they’re not meta, and refunding laurels is tricky because those can convert to gold.
- The WvW team releases on a different schedule than other teams, and we will continue to release content outside of the quarterly updates.
- A lot of the major scoring changes are tentatively coming at the end of August.
- As for lag, it is always something we are trying to improve. There are some changes coming in early August specific to WvW that should help with lag, but we are constantly working on improving lag for WvW.
1. What has been the most hilarious bug you have come across during the development of the game?
- If you use the leyline gliding skill (5) right before you hit the ground running, you get a super speed boost for a few seconds
- Jumping while sleeping
- So specifically in this release, a bug resulted in a pretty good work around for that bug. Using the gliding skill "Ride the Leyline" while inside a leyline would shoot you into the top of the map at the max velocity possible in the game. So to fix that, we made it so using that skill in a leyline blows you up, and gives you a warning and achievement to "not cross the streams.
- Outside of this content, I may or may not have made the Rata Novus turrets shoot Farren in a speedo as a projectile during HoT development…
- A bug during HoT testing in which updrafts in the guild hall shot your character into the stratosphere. There was no way to stop it, just… to the moon uncontrollably.The only way out was to fall to your death.
- There was a time where the Bouquet of Roses could be thrown at enemy creatures. When they caught the bouquet, they would get a new set of skills that they didn’t recognize and would freeze up. Basically, they were defeated by gifts of love and would lock up till they were defeated. Joshua Davis found this one. =p
- We have talked about a salvaging system for runes and sigils for years, but it’s a rather large project, larger than you might expect, so we haven’t gotten to it.
- We have had some discussions on possible changes we could make to reduce the inventory clutter of these, but haven’t settled on a solution yet. In the meantime, we set up the Bloodstone Fen rewards to try and give comparable rewards with less inventory management required.
- She has already started growing!
- Take a closer look. She is already larger in this episode than she was in previous
- Most of the QoL changes from this patch were a result of some down time between teams/larger projects for me. It’s usually what I try to do whenever I’m blocked on whatever I’m supposed to be working on. I don’t usually plan it ahead, it usually just comes from a suggestion from someone in the office/reddit/forums that happens to be low enough hanging fruit to fit in whatever gap in my schedule I have. I’m not entirely sure that’s how everyone else does it, but we play the game and the things that you guys want, we usually do too.
- Currently we can patch, run around in several maps, we don’t fall through the floor anymore. It is progressing and we will let you guys know when we’re ready to go into beta.
- There wasn’t anything in this patch for the SFTA but I’ve got a list of things I’d like to do to improve it for an update in the future.
- We can always add more. What kinds of things are you still hoping to find?
- Players have requested more cross-race hairstyles and we wanted to support that request. While looking at some of the more popular hairstyles for cross-race use there were some culturally aesthetic and physiological restraints. Human and Norn share more similarities and were a more natural choice when creating cross-race hairstyles.
- They are not what we would consider a material for material storage.
- It’s certainly fair to say we’re not putting ourselves in positions where anything else takes priority over quality. For example, we’re not adopting a rapid fixed release cadence, where hitting a date would take priority over quality.
- It’s still a lot of content. Maybe ask this question again after a few episodes. Right now it’s easy to point at the recent content drought, but that’s not how it will feel.
- Armor sets are by far the most expensive reward we can make. A full set includes heavy, medium, light, times five races, times two sexes, so it’s like developing 30 sets. It takes nine months to develop. (That’s for a normal armor set — legendary is much longer.) It’s not something we can do for Living World episodes. Individual pieces are good rewards for Living World episodes; full sets are more something for expansion packs.
- Backpacks and gliders are different items and came into the game at different times with different goals, needs, and different technologies available. By the time we were developing gliders, we were able to intentionally create them so that they could be dyed and had missed that opportunity with backpacks. My toon also has the new Shining Blade Backpack and Glider Combo that are mismatched due to this.