The torment change was most certainly for PvP; old torment basically had no counter play because standing still was never a valid option to mitigate the dot, and the only synergy on the player side was to fear them to force movement. Now that it's reversed, it has synergy with stuns, immob, and knockdown, and when you're affected by it you have actual counter play that won't get you killed like standing still will. Imo, torment should have been this way from the start. Retaliation is the same thing; there is no counterplay to Retaliation besides having a condi build or ripping the boon (unless you're fighting a guardian, then they'll just have it up at all times). If you just happen to be using a weapon that hits frequently for low damage on a power build, a Guardian basically just eats you alive, and because all melee cleaves, there's nothing you could do about it. I think Resolution is fine because Resistance is such a rare boon. Resolution is just the condi version of protection, which flips Retaliation's issue in PvP on its head. Retal punished power builds, and now Resolution makes those Retal heavy builds more effective against condi instead. Not to mention, Guardian has low HP making their weakness to condi kind of glaring, having so much access to this Resolution boon really helps them survive against Condi without having to rely on condi cleanses. These are very good changes. TL:DR fuck Retal and old Torment, they were badly designed.
For the people complaining that they don't play the game. I think they change things so you have to figure out New ways... They want you to play more and have something New to think about and Not use the Same stuff for ever.
Before this came out, I said that condi will be for PVE and strike for PvP. Strike builds should be more rewarding in higher level play anyway. I also said that celestial will take over all game modes except PvP.
Plus, since all the classes have protection, they also need to add some new ways for the classes that didn't have retal to have the new boon, eg Ranger who has to waste a god skill to get some resistance to condi, that's bs.
By my estimate, it seems the the developer's goal with this change is to make condition damage less effective, and power damage more effective. I like the concept, but we'll see how it plays out.
Man, I sure am happy for this change for retaliation. Core Guards pressuring was quite powerful and ppl in pvp think they are good cause they can stand and fight and think they're good, while in reality, its me being an idiot for not looking at their status bar. Now we'll see.
Same goes for almost every other boon/condition that's not obvious at first glance, like confusion or stability. If they wanted to remove this issue as a whole, they would have to remove every boon/condition that doesn't show an easily noticeable change, like slow. But then again, go see how they handled "balancing" in GW1. It's a mess and this one is on the way to be one too.
Great video man. One of my favorite builds was my core guard that I designed to be a tank/healer/boon beast. I had 89% retaliation up time. I saw this coming and was was pissed. Now I am going to have to go back and reconfigure the whole thing. Hopefully I don't have to scrap it altogether. I agree with some of the other comments. I feel like some of the designers don't even play the game to understand what should be left alone to make the game fun like it used to be when I started eight years ago.
Believe it or not, core warrior is a strong option as a roamer. Theres no visible buffs to it from the patch but its mobility is good, defense is stronger because with resolution makes it an absolute tank, especially vs condi heavy builds, stamina is a 14 condi cleanse, 3 limit burst hits harder than a spell breaker and offers better sustain than berserker via 3 condi cleansing and 3 stacks of regen/burst bonus (33% more damage), great movement speed via warrior sprint and gs, bonus damage vs boon heavy builds. Since this meta is very reliant on boons keeping you alive rather than things like resist making you absorb a lot of condi damage, core warrior is s pretty strong choice atm. I managed to carry 2v2 games up to gold II and have been floating around there for a bit. The main downside is that it absolutely can be kited to death if you plan on running axe/axe/gs instead of axe/axe/rifle.
Hello Vallun. Great video btw. I am struggling a bit to see why you go with Ineptitude and Chaotic Interruption as your only access to interrupt is Magic Bullet and Diversion. Am I ignoring sthg. Thanks again for all the great work
honestly i didnt think too much about it i just threw together a build. Staff 5 daze can rupt but its mostly that when you blind you get confusion, because there are other ways to give out blinds such as chaos armor and f2
Is the mirage axes-coming-from-everywhere build still going to be viable in PvE? I can't see any changes that would make the build less viable, but I'm not understanding the synergies in the traitlines.
staff probably going to be used because it gives utility as well, the axe would just be dps. hard to justify bringing a dps when u can get considerably similar dps with alacrity. Though it would still be viable
@Vallun How will this affect your easy pvp builds to play? I'm currently playing two of them trying to get into pvp, but don't want to totally gimp myself. Will most of them still be viable?
@@Vallun I see. Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately been playing the scrapper one so will look for an alternative (such as learning to play holosmith).
nah those vides are still useful, if i wanna show an updated version of it ill put it in the description of those older vids. As far as the information present in those videos other than some basic clicks on a trait board, its still very relevant. I will keep making vids for new builds as always though
The buffing of celestial is really going to change roaming i believe. Any build that can get some decent amount of might will be really strong with cele. For example my cele rev build should replace the old condi rev, cele ele may be pretty good too. Everything that was good before should still be though
i didnt even play the game during the time that the bug was being used, i got my footage the first few hours and then edited my video. Don't see how a bug is supposed to represent a long term balance change
@RedXI basically, it did 5% damage PER might stack, so +125% damage. there were engis running around with 40k flamethrower one hits, and reapers with 1 button 1 shot kills lmfao. I was on a win streak in placings and only loss was vs that. it was so bad that, to put in perspective: in 5 matches which were all dominating wins and in which I died only 2 times in 5 matches, the match vs engi and reaper with that bug, i got 1 shotted 3 rounds in a row. even on full bunker weaver with full barriers lmao.
If the resistance now ignores non-damaging conditions then how about daze and stun ? These are non-damaging conditions, do resistance protect against them ?
Daze and stun don't count as conditions (e.g. they can't be cleansed by condition remove and their duration isn't affected by Expertise), so resiliance does not protect against them. For that you need stability.
For wvw it was extremely smart to remove retaliation imo. That opens up a bit for more zergbusting. And really helps staff ele a lot. Before the patch you could just stack and let the enemy ele kill himself by hitting into the retaliation. And I also don't think, that a support build should be able to deal much damage just by getting hit and then heal back up. Condis should be absolutely dead for bigger zergs now, because resolution is much more accessible than resistance was pre patch. But I can't tell for sure because I'm stuck in t4 right now (enemy dumbass server playing a lot of cele scourge, but they are mostly bad players. You can stand inside of their zerg, and take almost no damage. I don't think that cele scourge is good, because most of the condition damage a scourge did, was torment, and that was heavily nerfed for wvw). I'm running a cele reaper build, that shouldn't be really good, but I usually down three to five people when I go into the enemy backline (keep in mind, bad enemy server, that's only in t4, because they have a ton of people ppting). It's fun to experiment with the new cele stats in wvw. Even though this already produced some unkillable guard and Mesmer builds (unkillable in 1v1s). But on other classes it's super exciting (for example a damage/heal + some cleanses tempest) gw2skills.net/editor/?PGAFsE2aYZEMHWDjhVil0kbbH-zVhYQhIUFkfX0T7CDK4QiQF0yEomhgqmmAspB-w Is extremely fun to play (I'm normally a necro main so...) What's sad is some of the caps for boons. Especially increasing swiftness to 1minute wouldn't hurt anyone. There's some skills, that easily get cut off their swiftness duration with 50% boon duration. Two examples: retreat (guardian) and spectral walk (necro) both give (more than) 20 seconds of base boon duration I think it's 20seconds of swiftness and aegis for retreat and 24 seconds of swiftness on spectral walk. It's really sad, that you basically waste boon duration on those skills, because they get hard capped at 50% boon duration for retreat and I believe 30% on spectral walk, which is really sad. I think those skills should be buffed slightly to compensate (for example 5 seconds less cool down) And I think I would find some more skills like these two. Another bad choice for wvw was the change to scrapper. It was already the most busted support wvw has ever seen, and it even got buffed with the patch by giving it quickness for 5 people as well.
this may very well depend on your point of view and the way you play the game but when it comes to wvw and boons and debuffs, i always followed the mentality of: you have to strip the enemy boons and get rid of your debuffs. getting killed by retaliationas as an ele means your supports havent stripped. to me, its a loss that killed my interest in my guardian completly, that i played 6 years in wvw. removing retaliation in combination with the staff AA change, lead to less points and less loot and makes me feel, that i play a class to keep other alive in order for them to get 3times as much xp as i do, since healing along grants nothing
After some WvW-fights playing as a support-/boon-Firebrand, I definitely miss retaliation. And not only for the loot bag tagging. Before the patch, glassy DPS class got instantly punished for blindly bombing all their damage into a well-playing group with high boon uptime, including retaliation. The pressure was lower, so the need for healing and cleansing less extreme. Now we see Weavers full on casting from the walls, and not risking anything besides pulls. This might not affect same-sized groups fighting so much. But it is a significant difference for smaller groups trying to out-skill bigger groups. The challenge here was to be better at playing, so you can win against much bigger groups (15 vs 40 and more). Now the bigger groups have even more of an advantage, since they just "blob" us down. They just need to throw everything into the smaller group, and can even lack decent support. In my opinion, this change made the gameplay less diverse. You have to bring numbers of players more to even be able to play efficiently. So now, larger numbers with less skill can win over smaller numbers with high skill with much less effort. Let's see how the Meta will change to address this. This change from retaliation to resolution might have been a small and useful correction for PvE, but for WvW it ruined a lot for us. We fought against only slightly bigger groups we usually could win against most of the time. Now our Scrappers couldn't keep up with cleansing any more due to massive condi damage. Guardians had to sacrifice boon uptime for additional cleanse. Out of five players in a group, two support players seem not to be enough any more, regardless of skill.
this is a HUGE nerf to the entire profession of guardian. Not only did they COMPLETELY get rid of one of their most useful boons (that being retaliation) they took resistance split it in half with two weaker versions. Guardian essentially lost 2 great boons and gained two weaker boons. time for me to explore other professions being that guardian was my main.
So in short, ANet has not learned anything from GuildWars1. Still running around with the sledgehammer and changing complete mechanics without really understanding the whole picture. What a surprise ...
The torment change was most certainly for PvP; old torment basically had no counter play because standing still was never a valid option to mitigate the dot, and the only synergy on the player side was to fear them to force movement. Now that it's reversed, it has synergy with stuns, immob, and knockdown, and when you're affected by it you have actual counter play that won't get you killed like standing still will. Imo, torment should have been this way from the start.
Retaliation is the same thing; there is no counterplay to Retaliation besides having a condi build or ripping the boon (unless you're fighting a guardian, then they'll just have it up at all times). If you just happen to be using a weapon that hits frequently for low damage on a power build, a Guardian basically just eats you alive, and because all melee cleaves, there's nothing you could do about it. I think Resolution is fine because Resistance is such a rare boon. Resolution is just the condi version of protection, which flips Retaliation's issue in PvP on its head. Retal punished power builds, and now Resolution makes those Retal heavy builds more effective against condi instead. Not to mention, Guardian has low HP making their weakness to condi kind of glaring, having so much access to this Resolution boon really helps them survive against Condi without having to rely on condi cleanses.
These are very good changes. TL:DR fuck Retal and old Torment, they were badly designed.
For the people complaining that they don't play the game. I think they change things so you have to figure out New ways... They want you to play more and have something New to think about and Not use the Same stuff for ever.
the boon changes are really something. a lot more classes had access to resistance to counter condi pressure than they had access to retal/resolution
Where did Retal go? Where it belongs, in the trash heap of unfun things to play against, that's where! IT'S WEAVER AND AC RANGER ROLEPLAY TIME BABY!
torment change killed condi herald.. but condi renegade looks good now :)
And so Runes of Stars, Death Magic and Resolution shall render necromancers near impervious to harm from conditions.
"Kinda feels like it was meant for PVE" - Welcome to every balance patch since 2016.
I got my girlfriend to log in and upvote this for me.
Core dps burn is performing better than DH for me
Before this came out, I said that condi will be for PVE and strike for PvP. Strike builds should be more rewarding in higher level play anyway. I also said that celestial will take over all game modes except PvP.
i miss retalition so much, especially in wvw on my guardian
My core guardian still hits like a truck
Plus, since all the classes have protection, they also need to add some new ways for the classes that didn't have retal to have the new boon, eg Ranger who has to waste a god skill to get some resistance to condi, that's bs.
By my estimate, it seems the the developer's goal with this change is to make condition damage less effective, and power damage more effective. I like the concept, but we'll see how it plays out.
Man, I sure am happy for this change for retaliation. Core Guards pressuring was quite powerful and ppl in pvp think they are good cause they can stand and fight and think they're good, while in reality, its me being an idiot for not looking at their status bar. Now we'll see.
Same goes for almost every other boon/condition that's not obvious at first glance, like confusion or stability. If they wanted to remove this issue as a whole, they would have to remove every boon/condition that doesn't show an easily noticeable change, like slow. But then again, go see how they handled "balancing" in GW1. It's a mess and this one is on the way to be one too.
Great video man. One of my favorite builds was my core guard that I designed to be a tank/healer/boon beast. I had 89% retaliation up time. I saw this coming and was was pissed. Now I am going to have to go back and reconfigure the whole thing. Hopefully I don't have to scrap it altogether. I agree with some of the other comments. I feel like some of the designers don't even play the game to understand what should be left alone to make the game fun like it used to be when I started eight years ago.
Believe it or not, core warrior is a strong option as a roamer. Theres no visible buffs to it from the patch but its mobility is good, defense is stronger because with resolution makes it an absolute tank, especially vs condi heavy builds, stamina is a 14 condi cleanse, 3 limit burst hits harder than a spell breaker and offers better sustain than berserker via 3 condi cleansing and 3 stacks of regen/burst bonus (33% more damage), great movement speed via warrior sprint and gs, bonus damage vs boon heavy builds. Since this meta is very reliant on boons keeping you alive rather than things like resist making you absorb a lot of condi damage, core warrior is s pretty strong choice atm. I managed to carry 2v2 games up to gold II and have been floating around there for a bit. The main downside is that it absolutely can be kited to death if you plan on running axe/axe/gs instead of axe/axe/rifle.
Hello Vallun. Great video btw. I am struggling a bit to see why you go with Ineptitude and Chaotic Interruption as your only access to interrupt is Magic Bullet and Diversion. Am I ignoring sthg. Thanks again for all the great work
honestly i didnt think too much about it i just threw together a build. Staff 5 daze can rupt but its mostly that when you blind you get confusion, because there are other ways to give out blinds such as chaos armor and f2
Is the mirage axes-coming-from-everywhere build still going to be viable in PvE? I can't see any changes that would make the build less viable, but I'm not understanding the synergies in the traitlines.
staff probably going to be used because it gives utility as well, the axe would just be dps. hard to justify bringing a dps when u can get considerably similar dps with alacrity. Though it would still be viable
@@Vallun What about open-world pve rather than raids?
@@michellegosse5597 nobody is going to kick you from an open world map lol
@@Vallun it's around staying alive while soloing ;)
@Vallun How will this affect your easy pvp builds to play? I'm currently playing two of them trying to get into pvp, but don't want to totally gimp myself. Will most of them still be viable?
mirage probably wants to be using a staff build now, and maybe the scrapper needs different traits, not sure, but otherwise they should all work
@@Vallun I see. Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately been playing the scrapper one so will look for an alternative (such as learning to play holosmith).
ty vallun, great video
Are you go na do videos on those updated builds?
nah those vides are still useful, if i wanna show an updated version of it ill put it in the description of those older vids. As far as the information present in those videos other than some basic clicks on a trait board, its still very relevant. I will keep making vids for new builds as always though
weird, so now guard hits even less hard and protection gets more complicated by being spread out over multiple skills.. teh fuck
As a WvWer, I'd be interested in your meta predictions for roaming/small-scale...similar to your PvP meta, or notable differences?
The buffing of celestial is really going to change roaming i believe. Any build that can get some decent amount of might will be really strong with cele. For example my cele rev build should replace the old condi rev, cele ele may be pretty good too. Everything that was good before should still be though
Jajaja
@@Vallun Thanks, Vallun! Was thinking along those lines, just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing any other big game changers for WvW!
@@Vallun Celestial Condi Firebrand is absolutely busted now ._.
@@Vallun are you talking about the cele herald build or some other?
Dude, no comment on the Bugged/Broken Rune of Strength??? It's broken as hell
Its fixed from couple hours from now.
i didnt even play the game during the time that the bug was being used, i got my footage the first few hours and then edited my video. Don't see how a bug is supposed to represent a long term balance change
@RedXI basically, it did 5% damage PER might stack, so +125% damage. there were engis running around with 40k flamethrower one hits, and reapers with 1 button 1 shot kills lmfao.
I was on a win streak in placings and only loss was vs that. it was so bad that, to put in perspective: in 5 matches which were all dominating wins and in which I died only 2 times in 5 matches, the match vs engi and reaper with that bug, i got 1 shotted 3 rounds in a row. even on full bunker weaver with full barriers lmao.
If the resistance now ignores non-damaging conditions then how about daze and stun ? These are non-damaging conditions, do resistance protect against them ?
Daze and stun are not conditions, they are control effects only
wiki: wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Control_effect
Daze and stun don't count as conditions (e.g. they can't be cleansed by condition remove and their duration isn't affected by Expertise), so resiliance does not protect against them. For that you need stability.
Vellun how about thief changes?
For wvw it was extremely smart to remove retaliation imo.
That opens up a bit for more zergbusting. And really helps staff ele a lot. Before the patch you could just stack and let the enemy ele kill himself by hitting into the retaliation.
And I also don't think, that a support build should be able to deal much damage just by getting hit and then heal back up.
Condis should be absolutely dead for bigger zergs now, because resolution is much more accessible than resistance was pre patch.
But I can't tell for sure because I'm stuck in t4 right now (enemy dumbass server playing a lot of cele scourge, but they are mostly bad players. You can stand inside of their zerg, and take almost no damage. I don't think that cele scourge is good, because most of the condition damage a scourge did, was torment, and that was heavily nerfed for wvw).
I'm running a cele reaper build, that shouldn't be really good, but I usually down three to five people when I go into the enemy backline (keep in mind, bad enemy server, that's only in t4, because they have a ton of people ppting).
It's fun to experiment with the new cele stats in wvw. Even though this already produced some unkillable guard and Mesmer builds (unkillable in 1v1s).
But on other classes it's super exciting (for example a damage/heal + some cleanses tempest)
gw2skills.net/editor/?PGAFsE2aYZEMHWDjhVil0kbbH-zVhYQhIUFkfX0T7CDK4QiQF0yEomhgqmmAspB-w
Is extremely fun to play (I'm normally a necro main so...)
What's sad is some of the caps for boons.
Especially increasing swiftness to 1minute wouldn't hurt anyone.
There's some skills, that easily get cut off their swiftness duration with 50% boon duration.
Two examples: retreat (guardian) and spectral walk (necro) both give (more than) 20 seconds of base boon duration
I think it's 20seconds of swiftness and aegis for retreat and 24 seconds of swiftness on spectral walk. It's really sad, that you basically waste boon duration on those skills, because they get hard capped at 50% boon duration for retreat and I believe 30% on spectral walk, which is really sad. I think those skills should be buffed slightly to compensate (for example 5 seconds less cool down)
And I think I would find some more skills like these two.
Another bad choice for wvw was the change to scrapper. It was already the most busted support wvw has ever seen, and it even got buffed with the patch by giving it quickness for 5 people as well.
this may very well depend on your point of view and the way you play the game but when it comes to wvw and boons and debuffs, i always followed the mentality of: you have to strip the enemy boons and get rid of your debuffs. getting killed by retaliationas as an ele means your supports havent stripped. to me, its a loss that killed my interest in my guardian completly, that i played 6 years in wvw. removing retaliation in combination with the staff AA change, lead to less points and less loot and makes me feel, that i play a class to keep other alive in order for them to get 3times as much xp as i do, since healing along grants nothing
nice review :)
I feel like warrior is gonna drop even lower in the meta tier list. But wait n see
Where can I find this Warhorn build? I've always wanted to pvp with Ele Warhorn but always felt like I'm not allowed to
im actually working on an entire video for it. soon tm
@@Vallun Yesss I appreciate all your content! Always so deep and helpful.
@@Vallun Meanwhile can I just get a copy paste build from you?
@@avielp [&DQYpKxEeMBsXAScPvgFQAfYAkACQAPYAlwCWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA=] marauder eagle cleansing energy
lmao sorry i sent u the pve version just take lightning rod instead of fresh air and the cantrip trait
RIP my burn dragonhunter for wvw
Gooooooood. Time to put the one trick class to rest.
*cries in guardian : (*
After some WvW-fights playing as a support-/boon-Firebrand, I definitely miss retaliation. And not only for the loot bag tagging.
Before the patch, glassy DPS class got instantly punished for blindly bombing all their damage into a well-playing group with high boon uptime, including retaliation. The pressure was lower, so the need for healing and cleansing less extreme.
Now we see Weavers full on casting from the walls, and not risking anything besides pulls.
This might not affect same-sized groups fighting so much. But it is a significant difference for smaller groups trying to out-skill bigger groups. The challenge here was to be better at playing, so you can win against much bigger groups (15 vs 40 and more). Now the bigger groups have even more of an advantage, since they just "blob" us down. They just need to throw everything into the smaller group, and can even lack decent support.
In my opinion, this change made the gameplay less diverse. You have to bring numbers of players more to even be able to play efficiently. So now, larger numbers with less skill can win over smaller numbers with high skill with much less effort.
Let's see how the Meta will change to address this. This change from retaliation to resolution might have been a small and useful correction for PvE, but for WvW it ruined a lot for us. We fought against only slightly bigger groups we usually could win against most of the time. Now our Scrappers couldn't keep up with cleansing any more due to massive condi damage. Guardians had to sacrifice boon uptime for additional cleanse. Out of five players in a group, two support players seem not to be enough any more, regardless of skill.
RIP Lightning orb.
its still good
They wanna kill my Rev
Starting to sound like the balance team just didn't like mantras so they made them shiiiiiit
Well after a number of games, the most cancerous build to come out of this patch has got to be flamethrower/rifle scrapper followed closely by thief.
Care to elaborate on that?
fucking true
@@chiffa37 nevermind. I was all due to the bugged rune of strength.
How was thief so cancerous?
Kind of still hard for me to find a reason to play after 22k hours of playing this game lol
Personality i think resolution is garbage
this is a HUGE nerf to the entire profession of guardian. Not only did they COMPLETELY get rid of one of their most useful boons (that being retaliation) they took resistance split it in half with two weaker versions. Guardian essentially lost 2 great boons and gained two weaker boons. time for me to explore other professions being that guardian was my main.
Let's not pretend guardians are a weak class.
@@waynnehelena6384 outside of support they basically are worthless now.
Good vid, but I'm so sick of GW2.. Its like they dont even play the game when balancing
So in short, ANet has not learned anything from GuildWars1. Still running around with the sledgehammer and changing complete mechanics without really understanding the whole picture. What a surprise ...
Jajajaja