Hi Everyone,

We wanted to swing by with an update on the balance patch and respond to some of the main feedback points that we’ve seen. At this point we’re mostly locked down for the release, but we’re still gathering feedback and continuing some investigation for future work.

For reference, the initial post can be found here: https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/96744/balance-patch-preview-pvp

0.01

There’s been a lot of discussion around CC skills and if all of them should deal minimal damage. We agree that it shouldn’t be a hard rule and there’s room for exceptions. We won’t be making any adjustments to these for the initial update, but expect some changes as we continue to evaluate things moving forward. Even for the exceptions, hard CC skills still won’t be near the top of the damage range, but there’s room to work with above 0.01. In some cases it may make sense for a skill to not have any CC and instead be a higher damage skill, but these would need to be game-wide changes and something that we’ll be discussing with the skills team.

General balance concerns

We’ve read all the feedback and seen the concerns about future metas and the viability of certain professions and specializations after the update. After the patch goes out, we’ll be continuing to iterate as we gather more data and feedback based on actual gameplay. We’re prepared to act quickly in response to anything egregious that pops up, whether it’s an individual build greatly overperforming or a heavy skew of the meta in any particular fashion (unkillable tanks, dominant condition builds pushing out any power builds, etc). Once any major wrinkles are ironed out, we’ll settle back into the faster cadence that we mentioned previously as we work toward improving balance across the board.

Additional changes

Concealing Restoration: Reduced stealth duration from 2 seconds to 1 second.

Rending Shade: Reduced number of boons stolen from 2 to 1.

Assassin's Signet: Increased cooldown from 20 seconds to 30 seconds.

Leeching Venoms: Reduced maximum stacks of spider venom provided by this trait from 6 to 2.

Malicious Backstab: Reduced power coefficients from 1.2/2.4 to 0.9/1.8

Smokescreen: Increased cooldown from 35 seconds to 45 seconds

Lightning Rod: Reduced power coefficient from 1.5 to 1.2

There’s still a lot of work to do, but this update should give us a good starting point to build from and we’re excited to see where things go.

-The Systems Team