December 10th PvP reward changes with preview of new healing skills for all areas.

[Karizee]

http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2/b/485426386

(notes by Dulfy)

Blog Q&A

• Purchase Tome of Knowledge with gold and glory to level up your alts starting on Tuesday.
• Ladders is a long term plan but not ready to talk too much about it yet.
• There will be multiple updates related to the blog post changes.
• Q:Should plays open their unopened tournament chests A: You will be able to break down the PvP gear for Luck, so keep it until Tuesday.
• Q: How will my PvP gear look carry over? A: We are not ready to talk about it at this time as we are still working on it. Build your collection and don’t break down everything you got.
• Q: What will happen to existing PvP crafting mats? A: PvP crafting will go away (not on Tues but with the next big update). These will become junk items once the update hits.
• Q: What will happen to glory boosters? A: Glory is going away (not on Tues but with the next big update). Start using your glory booster now.
• Q: Gold rate? A: It is not our intent to make PvP a good place to farm. We are looking at average gold rates similar to those playing PvE.
• Q: Retroactively add gold? A: That is something we cannot do, it would shock our economy.
• Q: People walk in and buy everything with gold? A: New vendor requires both gold and glory.
• Q: Ranks A: It is a pretty controversial change. We have being talking about this a bunch internally. We have decided we are going to keep ranks. We cannot keep them in their current format and once we have a better plan we will let you know. We are planning to boost 3x rank points for solo arena, 5x rank points for team arena from the tournament chests.

PvP Rewards

• Glory rewards vendor – temporary vendor. http://imgur.com/a/eLD8d
• Tome of knowledge – 1500 glory and 20 silver. Account bound.
• PvP Mystery Coffer – 200 glory and 4 silver 80 copper. It has thing you probably have not seen (i.e. from super high ranks). Most armor and weapons. You can salvage them to get Luck to increase your account wide magic find.
• PvP Salvage kit – 100 glory
• 20 slot leather bag – 6000 glory and 6 gold.
• 18 slot leather bag – 2000 glory and 1 gold.
• 12 slot leather bag – 1000 glory and 20 silver.
• 8 slot bag – 500 glory
• Custom arena starter kit: 200,000 glory.
• Dungeon armor – 5000 glory and 2 gold 50 silver for kodan, 10,000 glory and 5 gold for inquest, 15k glory and 7 gold 50 silver for orrian. etc. Cost is for whole set.
• Cultural armor set – 20k glory 1g50silver for tier 1. 40k glory and 3g50silver for tier 2.. 60k glory and 60 gold for tier 3. Prices for for whole sets.
• Custom Arenas – how much do I get if I win. 15 silver per win in custom arenas. You get 10 silver for a loss. Daily cap is 5 gold. We are afraid of botters so the cap is there. The cap only applies to custom arenas.
• Solo Arenas – win is 25 silver. loss is 12.5 silver. Daily cap is 15 gold.
• Team Arena – win is 30 silver. Loss is 15 silver. Daily cap is 15 gold.

New healing skills

• These are the updated tooltips they showed: http://imgur.com/a/XJLiX
• They cost 25 skill points each.
• The datamined skills are inaccurate in values and tooltips.
• Elementalist: Arcane Brilliance. 3600 heal base (if you hit no target). You can hit up to 5 targets and it will raise by 20% per target. Scales up with healing power. Blast finisher. This skill is a PABOE with a cast time. Arcane wave is made into a ground target.
• Engineer: Gadget skill.Base healing if you don’t reach the lethal damage is ~4300. Lethal damage heal is ~12,000. Static shock for F1 skill.
• Guardian: Litany of Wrath. We didn’t want to buff tanky or support guardians that much. This is mostly for DPS guardians. ~1640 base for the first heal but 20% of the damage you deal is returned to you as heal for the next 6 seconds. If you trait for Meditations you get ~4000 for the first heal.
• Mesmer – Signet of Ether. The passive does not heal you if you don’t have illusions out. it is a 3 second pulse. Passive is weaker than healing signet but active is stronger to make up for. 5500 heal for the active and very useful for phantasm builds. At 250 heal power. 1 illusion – 350 heal every 3 seconds. 2 illusions – 681 heal every 3 seconds. 3 illusions it is ~1000 heal every 3 seconds. Active also recharge your utility phantasm skills, allowing you to get a couple of illusion defenders out.
• Necro: Signet of Vampirism. Active put a 25 stack siphon debuff on the target that lasts 5 seconds. Target has a mark on their head so you will know if you get this debuff on you.
• Ranger: Base heal is 810 or so. Spirit heal every 10 seconds. Spirit lasts 60 seconds and broadcast radius of 1000. Using it give you the Aqua Surge active skill.
• Thief: Skelk Venom. 4300 initial self-heal and 685 heal for every attack for the next 4 attacks. The heal for every attack can be shared with allies. Quick Vendom will bring it down to 36 CD. Leeching Venom allow you to heal even more. Warrior can get about 20% HP from this shared heal (5.4k HP or 7.3k HP if you equip cleric amulet on the thief).
• Initiatives – base initiative regen too low and you can get way too much through traits. So we increased the base regen rate on all thieves and reduced the effectiveness of these traits a bit so they are less required. Traits like Opportunist now have 50% chance to give you 1 initiative with 5s internal cooldown.
• Warrior: Defiant Stance. All stance traits will affect it. Convert all incoming damage (both physical and condition dmg) to heal. Base duration is 3 seconds (3.75s if traited). Small base initial heal so if you do mess up using it, you still get healed a small amount. Agony and fall damage will go through this. Don’t use Endure Pain and Defiance Stance together.

[zito]

Mesmer – Signet of Ether. The passive does not heal you if you don’t have illusions out. it is a 3 second pulse. Passive is weaker than healing signet but active is stronger to make up for. 5500 heal for the active and very useful for phantasm builds. At 250 heal power. 1 illusion – 350 heal every 3 seconds. 2 illusions – 681 heal every 3 seconds. 3 illusions it is ~1000 heal every 3 seconds. Active also recharge your utility phantasm skills, allowing you to get a couple of illusion defenders out.

Sorry but what? Is this seriously being implemented? You have to be joking.... the amount of stupid.... ARRRGHHH

- - - Updated - - -

"Hey guys we know phantasm mesmer is the thing you guys use in PvE and PU/phantasm stealth mesmer is the only thing you play in PvP cause its really fucking strong. So here is an OP signet that resets your phantasm CD's so you keep playing phantasm mesmer while we let all the other signets suck ass and burn in hell too, thanks - Anet"

Do we really need a buff to phantasm mesmer? And do we really need people to feel more pigeon holded into 20 precision for the dodge clone trait? And are we really going to ignore how the rest of the signets just suck?

[Purple]

I'm not sure I like the Necromancer Signet. Heal when struck by a Foe? I'm just not seeing that. Should it not be a heal when you strike a foe or damage a foe with a skill? That makes much more sense. That it heals you, when activated makes sense, but then it also applies a mark that not just you, but everyone can siphon health off the foe with. That part I like, but the passive doesn't make a lot of sense. Most things I avoid damage on entirely, so it does nothing. The few things that are inevitably going to hit me, are things that hit so hard that the heal in question will be equivalent to nothing.

[zito]

I'm not sure I like the Necromancer Signet. Heal when struck by a Foe? I'm just not seeing that. Should it not be a heal when you strike a foe or damage a foe with a skill? That makes much more sense. That it heals you, when activated makes sense, but then it also applies a mark that not just you, but everyone can siphon health off the foe with. That part I like, but the passive doesn't make a lot of sense. Most things I avoid damage on entirely, so it does nothing. The few things that are inevitably going to hit me, are things that hit so hard that the heal in question will be equivalent to nothing.

It got nerfed 10 minutes after the unveiling apparently. It has a 1 sec ICD now. It is nothing but a fixed damage reduction - for one attack from one person per second.

Nobody will use it.

[Purple]

It got nerfed 10 minutes after the unveiling apparently. It has a 1 sec ICD now.

That was fast. Though I wouldn't be surprised if it were intended to be there in the first place.

It is nothing but a fixed damage reduction - for one attack from one person per second.

Straight from questionably useless, to the question not even needing asked.

Nobody will use it.

It's certainly not worth 25 skill points.