Earlier this week, Justin and I were noting that the problem with Guild Wars 2 balance patches is that the patch notes are often presented without comment or context, so the players are left in the dark about ArenaNet’s big picture and all the changes look scattershot. I doubt ArenaNet was listening, but I’m nevertheless happy to say that the company dropped a big forum post yesterday that basically filled in many of the gaps in knowledge regarding the next week’s update.
“In this update, we’re preparing for Cantha by cleaning up longstanding frustrations with boons and conditions, as well as by positioning existing builds as new potential sources of alacrity and quickness in group play,” an unnamed staffer explains.
“Among these changes are new duration caps for each boon and condition, a rework of the retaliation and resistance boons, and a reversal to the bonus-damage state of the torment condition. Torment will now deal bonus damage to targets that are standing still instead of to moving targets. This change will enhance torment’s performance in most boss encounters and create better opportunities for synergy and counterplay in PvP.
“The retaliation boon has long been a pain point, both in PvE and PvP. It’s not particularly impactful to use, and it’s never fun to play against. We have replaced it with a new boon, resolution, which complements the existing protection boon by reducing incoming damage from conditions (bleeding, poisoned, burning, torment, and confusion) by 33%. Many current traits and skills use retaliation in some way, or to added effect; those traits aren’t going away! Generally, they’ve been updated to use the new resolution boon. As always, the detailed patch notes below will tell you exactly what’s happening for each profession.
“Similarly, we’re not quite happy with how resistance is a hard shutdown on all conditions, which creates overlapping gameplay with skills that cleanse conditions. We’re updating resistance to only affect nondamaging conditions. In other words, resolution helps reduce damage from bleeding, poisoned, burning, torment, and confusion, while resistance lets you temporarily ignore blinded, chilled, crippled, fear, immobilized, slow, taunt, vulnerability, and weakness. Since we’re reducing the overall effect of resistance, we’re also reevaluating and increasing durations in some skills where it is applied.”
The post then goes through every single class and details what’s being changed and why. For example, the studio says Mesmer mantras are flawed and needed a big user experience overhaul, that endgame Elementalists needed some love, that nobody plays Scrappers, and so forth. You may not like the changes, but you can’t say they’re not being explained fully anymore. Cheers, ArenaNet.
