Over the weekend, Guild Wars 2 balance lead Cal Cohen and associate game designer Roy Marks swung by the ArenaNet Twitch channel to show off the game’s upcoming balance changes. According to the stream, the nerf bat will applied only sparingly to PvE, with updates mainly focused on quality-of-life changes for each class, such as the timing of when buffs happen and rolling some traits’ buffs into baseline to increase the variety of viable builds. There were also sundry buffs to some underperforming playstyles like power Guardian and Reaper.
The big headline is that mantra skills are being reverted to their earlier state, for both Mesmers and Firebrands, in both PvE and PvP. Players of those classes will recall that prior to May of 2021, mantras had to be charged up first, then had three ammo with no cooldown between uses. Back in 2021, this mechanic was removed, and mantras became simple ammo skills.
“We feel like a lot was lost in the previous rework,” Cal Cohen said, “We went back and we thought about ‘are there other ways we can solve these problems?'”
The balance team apparently believes so, as all mantras are being reverted to their earlier state, with some big tweaks to the bonuses given for charging the mantra on the Mesmer and using the final ammo on Firebrand.
In the competitive world, the Vindicator and Elementalist in particular are getting their damage and utility dialed back a bit. Additionally, the Deadeye’s Shadow Meld skill will no longer remove the Revealed effect, meaning the Deadeye can’t simply pop back into stealth after being de-stealthed, which has been the spec’s bread and butter for some time now.
Be sure to check the full patch notes to see if your favorite class is getting some love this Valentine’s Day, February 14th.
