Community Q&A
- Why doesn't Mini Arrowhead roll? The roll the arrowhead use is a skill, minis don't use skills ingame. Same reason why Mini Wyvern doesn't fly.
- Glide in WvW? No plan right now. It would change the way core WvW functions
- QA get 400-1000 bug reports a day. Most are duplicates of things they already know. Don’t contact customer service when it is more fitting for a bug report (i..e something is broken, a skill/item isn’t working or you find an exploit).
- Quickness/Slow no longer affects stomping/rezzing. Trivialized too many things.
- Quickness/Slow turned defensive abilities into faster abilities, which is not useful. We turned the time scaling off for these abilities (i..e shield block no longer hastened with quickness or extended with slow). There are some exceptions like Blurred Frenzy which are pseudo defensive/offensive and are not touched.
- Modifying or removing some of the more defensive amulets in PvP. Adding in some new stat combos to PvP that you don’t normally see.
- Protective Reviver – added a speed increase in revival.
- Smite Conditions – Increase the number of conditions removed from 1 to 2. This works with the utility and traits like Smiter’s Boon.
- Test of Faith – Right now 66% of the full damage comes from when player first cross the rings and the sword comes up. It felt too spike oriented. It will be reduced to 50% of the full damage.
- Piercing Light – Reduced the daze duration from 1s to 0.5s. It will no longer daze enemies in an unblockable way.
- Power Wrench – Recharge reduction was 20% before. We increased it to 33%.
- Takedown Round – Damage increased by 33%.
- Scrapper felt a bit too defensive so the following changes were made
- Rocket Charge – Increased recharge by 2s (going from 10 to 12s).
- Stealth Gyro – Increased recharge from 20s to 40s.
- Corrupt Boon – Reducing the amount of boons you can corrupt from 5 to 3. Recharge reduced from 40s to 15s. You can corrupt boons more frequently instead of corrupting a large swath of boons at once.
- Putrid Curse (scepter autoattack chain 3) – Corrupt one boon with every attack. So every third autoattack you can corrupt one boon.
- Unyielding Blast – No longer adds piercing but Life Blast and Plague Blast now pierce by default.
- Diamond Skin going from condition immunity to condition removal (1 condition removed on a 1s internal cooldown). Health Threshold is now 75% instead of 90%. So rapid conditions applications will spike you down.
- Auras – duration and overall availability of auras too much since HoT. Overall uptime too high. We are reducing all the auras activated from skills/traits to 4s.
- Fresh Air – In addition to its refresh mechanic, everytime you reattune to air, you get 250 Ferocity for 5s. This bonus doesn’t stack in intensity. So you will be critting and then critting hard.
- Shatterstone (Water Scepter)– Reduced the timeit takes for the shatterstone to explode from two seconds to one. It has a small radius so the explosion would often miss. Cooldown increased from 2 to 3s.
- Mesmer will be getting a reduction in both defense and offense (via alacrity changes).
- Alacrity caused too much overall damage increase. Basically you had a mesmer or you had 66% damage loss. We didn’t want to reduce the amount of alacrity as you can just bring more mesmers to bridge the gap. We brought alacrity brought down from 66% to 33% so it is not useless.
- Well of Precognition - Gone from granting invulnerability to applying 3s of aegis every pulse.
- Malicious Sorcery - This trait applies attack speed while wielding scepter. Increased from 15% to 20%.
- Chaos Armor - This was applying too much blind. It will apply weakness rather than blind. Swiftness/confusion duration increased from 3s to 5s.
- Search and Rescue – Will now give ally in the area regeneration but if there is an ally down in the area (1200 range), the pet will teleport the downed person to you and then revive them.
- Protect Me – Now will break stun on nearby allies, giving you protection and cause the next foe that attack you to be taunted by your pet.
- Hidden Barbs - Bleeding damage increase changed from 20% to 33%
- Predator's Onslaught - Increased damage for you and your pet on inhibited targets changed from 10% to 15%
- Sword autoattack damage going down 10%ish. First auto attack gone down by 10%, 2nd autoattack gone down by 20%, third autoattack down by 10%. Damage will be put back in Precision Strike
- Precision Strike - now always launch 3 projectiles regardless of how many targets (if there is only 1 target it will receive all 3 projectiles). Reduced the chill duration from 2s to 1.5s per projectile.
- Unrelenting Assault. Reduced the number of strikes from 7 to 5. Increased the damage of each strike by 10%. This skill had a weird issue with animation scaling under quickness/slow. This has been fixed.
- Facet of Light - Initial activation of the facet will now have a cast time. This means that you can no longer use it as a stun breaker. We now want you to preemptively activate this and make a commitment to use this heal before you can use it.
- Coalescence of Ruin - It had too low cooldown. Cooldown increased from 2s to 4s. It will no longer double hit.
- Our goal with Acrobatics is to boost the regenerative ability of the thief and remove conditions more frequently.
- Fleet Shadow changed to Instant Reflex (gain evasion for 2s when struck below the health threshold –50%, 40s CD).
- Upper Hand – Changed to give regeneration when you evade an attack (in addition to the initiative gain). Cooldown also reduced from 3s to 2s.
- Basilisk Venom – Your attacks are unblockable in addition to turn foes to stone. This works with Venomous Aura so all your ally attacks will be unblockable.
- Withdraw healing has been increased by 10%.
- Autoattack damage for sword not changed but the frequency has increased. Overall damage increased by about 30%.
- Black Powder has its aftercast removed.
- Dagger autoattack damage increased.
- Bandit’s Defense, you can now block for the full duration of 1.5s.
- Staff got some damage increase as well.
- Warriors are getting a more defensive buff via more healing and cooldown reductions.
- To the Limit had its healing increased by 40%. Other heals similarity had their heal increased by a certain margin. Signet had its HP increased by 20 HP per second. Adrenal Health also has about a 15% increase.
- Some damage increases and some aftercasts removed so you can activate skills quicker.
- Cyclone Axe was previously split between PvP/PvE with it dealing less damage in PvE. We unsplit it now so it deals more damage in PvE.
- Rifle rework: Crackshot no longer grants piercing by default. It will instead apply additional adrenaline per shot. Piercing is now default on a few select skills like Volley, Killshot, Forceful Shot and Repeating Shot. Brutal Shot (rifle #4) will now evade you back by 400 range and immobilize for 1.5s.
- Aimed Shot will now applies 5 stacks of Vulnerability for 8s. Damage increased by 20s.
- Berserker – King of Fires – Changed to give a fire shield on critical hits with a cooldown of 15s. Using a berserker skill will detonate any fire aura on you, giving 3 stacks of burning on nearby enemies for 3s.
