Anet_KarlMcLain

To clear this up ahead of time: The duration increase is intended, but unintentionally omitted in the release notes.

The issue is known and we've been looking into a fix. It's unknown when we'll be able to get it pushed to a live build.

From the forums (If there's any other conversation on this, I'll copy it here)

Moving Confusion to have condition damage contribution ticks made it a damage-over-time condition in addition to its 'hex' style punishment of using skills. We needed to make a choice as to whether or not the condition was going to be used as spammable DOT, or rarer/shorter, with more potency. We've decided to push Confusion to be burstier and once again focus on punishing skill activation. The reason for keeping any dot component is to message that you're under the effects of the condition, so you can be informed of it without looking at your buff bar. With that said, we'll be moving weapons like Mirage's Axe toward Torment, rather than Confusion, as soon(tm) as the process allows.

The "This condition remains split between PvE and PvP/WvW" part has unfortunately caused unintended confusion.

To Clarify: Condition damage contribution of the damage-over-time component of confusion has been removed from ALL formats. 'Remains split' was meant to indicate that the base damage ticks are higher in PvE still, even without condition damage contribution.

Praise Joko

We had considered this at one point early on, but decided not to go with it. The weaver’s mechanic and trade offs are designed with needing to go through main-hand to off hand. We left Unravel as a unique utility option for the purpose of improving rotations or providing instant access to needed weapon skills, but did not want to embed it into the core of the specialization.

I tag up in ArenaNet guild events like WvW roaming, during meta events or world bosses. I do tend to run around not tagged, to get more of a perspective on how people feel about the game from the raw emotional standpoint. People tend to behave differently if someone who is tagged up is around.

We take inspiration from a lot of different places. Life, movies, games (video and other!), anime... a lot of concepts, presentation and styles can help shape the things we make. Thus, I can’t say that Full Counter has been inspired by the anime. I can, however, say that everyone on the team has seen the Seven Deadly Sins. :)

We’re excited about the new barrier mechanic, but are still wary of its placement. Yes, we have some places we want to inject barrier in core specs. An example here would be the ele’s Conjure Earth Shield, whose rework was delayed until barrier was released in POF.

Overall, we’re still in conversation as to where it should go and which professions would get it, in what capacity. As an example: Guardian is controversial in this regard because it’s got a lot of support through hard mitigation and damage reduction, and adding yet another defensive mechanism may muddy its theme.

There are a few changes being looked into for the Weaver, to improve some damage numbers with Sword. Barrier numbers overall have been balanced So that it’s a boost of survivability, but not the primary source of it. We’ve experienced periods of godlike weaver survivability (internally) due to barriers being too strong, so we’ll be careful with any increases. We’ll continue to monitor the numbers, analytics and feedback, but for right now we’re holding them where they are until the sword damage numbers shake out.

It’s likely that we won’t be adding new weapons to core professions (baseline). Elite specializations allow us to implement weapons with more direct themes and flavor, and ensure a more modular (within the elite spec) way to balance weapons.

The skills and balance team is pleased to say that you'll be seeing a balance pass in the next release. We're looking forward to it! -Karl

This update was specifically aimed at PvP, so the goal for balance was to make mostly pvp-only changes. Barring the couple of changes that would have made the skill functionally different. As we've been doing, we'll evaluate the splits over time and look to bring them into the rest of the game (with some possible tweaks). Some of these will stay PvP-only, however.

The new interaction with quickness (and slow) indeed did turn out to be more detrimental than we had desired. As such, we're pulling the change time-scaling change for now. If we can get the code to work right at all ranges, we'll give it another go!

Balance dev here! I can't give specifics, but we'll be introducing a few different changes in the next update that we hope will address some of the engineer concerns with the core specializations and general pve viability. We'll be seeing you soon! -Karl

Hey all,

Regarding the cooldown (training) traits, the previous 33% reduction caused skills to be too effective when traited, causing issues with both offense and defense game-wide. As such, they've been normalized to a more appropriate 20%. As for Lava Font, this particular skill was causing an undesirable amount of sustained damage in prolonged fights. We worked with development teams across content types and felt that keeping the damage per-cast of the ability as is was more desirable than a reduced damage value and same cooldown. We understand the concerns and perspectives presented here, but believe we need to give the changes some time before we look to make alterations to the profession.

-Karl

There's a bit of inconsistency with the ways that condition copies function and we are looking into how we can normalize it. Once that's solved, we'll be able to better evaluate epidemic's current effect.

-Karl

When we increased the radius of the aura, we did so because it was a skill-modifying grandmaster trait that you had to make a trade off for. As there's no longer a trade-off, decreasing the range felt necessary, as it in turn increases the positioning requirement of the thief and somewhat increases the skill cap. We'll continue to monitor the effectiveness of the utility set and adjust as needed.

-karl

Some of the skill splitting tech is new and compliments our old tech to the point where we are much more comfortable with making splits. Are we going to look to split everything and have completely separate skills between game modes? Probably not. The splits shown today are a good example of the kinds of changes we'll be going toward in the future.
As for he frequency of balance, we want to give time for things to settle and gather information/feedback as to the current state of things. We've done some changes 'mid-season' before and will do them again as necessary, but will try to not repeatedly shake things up over a short period of time.

-Karl

This does look to be mostly the case, in that cancelling the after-cast doesn't award you... which pretty much sucks. It's more likely to occur in instances with longer after-cast like the ones initially reported. We've got a fix for this in and testing now. Cheers ~