If you've completed everything the latest Long Live the Lich update has to offer and you're now looking for some fresh new gameplay, you might be interested (or terrified) to hear that the latest balance update has brought in a whole bunch of changes, including some rather heavy nerfs. Most notably, it is the Elementalists, Mesmers and Necromancers that have been hit the hardest, with the Elementalist changes being by far the most impactful.

While I won't list out all of the specific tweaks, it is the nerf to Lava Font that I find the most peculiar. Instead of tweaking the Staff and making the Elementalist playstyle just a bit more interesting, the devs have decided to reduce Lava Font's overall damage by around 40%. I'm not much of a stats guy so I won't pretend to know how this is going to impact Elementalists as a whole, but due to this and some of the other changes I really don't see Staff Elementalists sticking around for very long. A real shame given how the build was one of the very few that remained intact since the very beginning of Guild Wars 2.

The Mesmer, however, has been nerfed in a much more interesting way. Blurred Frenzy, the sword attack that makes you immune to damage and lets you avoid most raid attacks, has had its animation speed reduced from 1.75 seconds to 1 second. While this has reduced its damage by approximately 36% in PvE, the far more important change is that it can no longer be used to simply avoid boss mechanics as some of them last longer than the new animation. Definitely a huge nerf, but the ability is still pretty darn good, even though it does require much better timing to utilize properly.

There are tons of other equally interesting changes in the patch notes, so if you're interested you should head on over to the official website.

And as a final note, I would highly recommend taking advantage of the currently ongoing chaos to try out some of the more niche builds out there. Who knows, you might just find a build you enjoy but were too afraid to bring into raids due to it not being as good as some of the more 'meta' ones!