The latest round of balance changes are out for Guild Wars 2, following the initial release a couple of weeks ago by the team to let the community weigh in on proposed tweaks.
Today’s update marks the second of the major balance patches that followed the adoption of a more transparent and community-involved process by the team, including the release of a balance goals philosophy document.
While most of the update is a balance patch, there are some fixes and additions too. First up, Challenge Mode is now in the game for Old Lion’s Court. The patch also adds the Primordus legendary variant skin collection for Aurene-based legendary weapons. There are even some helpful quality of life changes, including tooltips on player portraits identifying players’ professions or elite specializations and the ability to export custom input bindings and settings that let you maintain consistent control on different devices you might play on.
One of the more general balance changes affects World vs World, with Sigil of Absorption getting an internal cooldown when used against a player. This previously just didn’t have one, and gave an unfair advantage.
The rest of the update is where all those deliberations over balance changes bear fruit. The GW2 team has been open about their goals being to be able to continuously keep classes relevant across the multiple game modes. The class changes here definitely reflect that, and there isn’t even consistency between them, which shows the depth of the work.
For example, Elementalist gets some tuning to make the class more viable in PvP, but nerfs to some PvP defenses come too. Additionally, there’s a WvW healing improvement, and an effort to offset some previous changes that had dinged the Elementalist’s effectiveness in PvE.
Other classes get similar passes, with the devs figuring out just where the balance was needed most, and some of the changes more extensive than others.
You can read the full patch notes over at Guild Wars 2.
