Guild Wars 2

As the screenshot of my PUG shows, not really. (Doctor Derek and I are condition builds.)

We got swamp, cliffside and Thaumanova Reactor. Our only wipe was on a puzzle in Thaumanova Reactor.

I’m actually not sure how much easier some of these encounters would be if all of us were heavy classes with berserker gear, particularly since conditions aren’t affected by the lv. 49 instability (lower stamina reduces direct damage).

I’m well aware that easy content, such as COF and Arah farming runs, goes much faster with full berserker heavy classes and elementalists. But I’m not sure how much that applies to difficult content.

(With all that said, a thief would have absolutely been a hindrance in this group. That class needs a total revamp in PvE.)

All PvE content goes faster with zerker gear if you have a party that knows what its doing.

The nature of stat scaling means power, precision, critical damage interact better with each other (damagewise) than other stat combinations. The way bosses are designed (slow attacks with big damage) means armor is unnecessary as long as you know how to use dodges, evades, blocks, etc. properly.

Actually, when that dungeon first came out I on my thief single handedly saved the group. Cloak and dagger mia, drop shadows refuge, hit blinding powder, rez team mate, go from person to person getting them all. Got them all to around 98% rez health and then mass rezzed everyone up. Saved the fight.

Lord Kuru.3685:

All PvE content goes faster with zerker gear if you have a party that knows what its doing.

The nature of stat scaling means power, precision, critical damage interact better with each other (damagewise) than other stat combinations. The way bosses are designed (slow attacks with big damage) means armor is unnecessary as long as you know how to use dodges, evades, blocks, etc. properly.

I’m not disputing whether it would be faster in a perfect group. I’m just arguing that it’s not necessary or even easiest, as some have implied.

I am questioning how much faster it would be, though. A lot of the mechanics in higher-level fractals are very unfriendly to the theoretical berserker melee train.

Hell, I found all of those “Need class X”, or “Class Y is baaad” to be strictly dependent on the team and team members prejudice and skill.
Everything I’ve encountered so far in the game (And that means pretty much everything since I play since first Beta Event and regularly) is totally doable with any class without much hassle provided players know how to ride the class and build.

Lopez.7369:

I am questioning how much faster it would be, though. A lot of the mechanics in higher-level fractals are very unfriendly to the theoretical berserker melee train.

If they are moving towards punishing zerker gear (or making it far less effective), I wonder whether this will backfire on them with respect to Ascended gear:

Considering how much of a pain it is to craft Ascended weaponary (and armor in the future), a large percentage of people will likely craft one set of gear and use it everywhere, regardless of its effectiveness. Even if Anet pushes people towards using different types of gear, I’d guess that many will not want to grind out alternate sets of Ascended gear (and forget about Exotics: once you have Ascended, you feel, psychologically, Exotics are a step down).

It’s an excuse for bad players. Fractals are doable with all professions, depends how skilled you are though.

I don’t think they need to punish berserker gear and stat allocations, per se. What they do need to do, however, is make pve content more compatible with their build system: you take one thing, you give something up. Mob classes that require different strategies or different setups to beat seems like a good start (i.e., enemies that can’t be critical hit, fast casters that need confusion to effectively take down, enemies that come in large swarms befitting the aoe aspect of conditions – not limited to 5 like burst damage). At the very lease, having a mix of enemies like that in the game would reward various build and party combinations.

Berserker stat allocations and gear are fine for character setups, but, the goal shouldn’t be to punish some stat allocations, but to reward others, like heavy support, sustained damage, aoe/condition builds (conditions are aoe, really) and so on. Enemies that reward different build setups would be the way to go. Then berserker setups would shine where they are supposed to, which is more single target/small group burst damage, but not where they make no sense to, like sustained fights. In that sense, balanced parties would be rewarding on top of that. Granted, that’s easy to conceive, more difficult to implement, but seems like the way to go.

Difficult and new fractals in one sentence don’t make much sense.

zwierz.9012:

Hell, I found all of those “Need class X”, or “Class Y is baaad” to be strictly dependent on the team and team members prejudice and skill.
Everything I’ve encountered so far in the game (And that means pretty much everything since I play since first Beta Event and regularly) is totally doable with any class without much hassle provided players know how to ride the class and build.

There is video of 5 naked bow rangers fighting simin and yet it proves nothing. Doability is not an issue here. Ofc any level of FotM is doable with 5 naked condi necro but it will take days to complete.

Zerkway is not some awesome godlike uberpro goku bam bam way of doing things, its just the fastest. And most players want that, not the challenge of lvl 50 fotm full condi.

Punishing berserker gear isn’t really a punishment, though. It’s just proper game balance. There should be mechanics that require bringing in a lot of roles. For too long the PvE in Guild Wars 2 only had mechanics that opened the door to berserker and nothing else.

I would argue they haven’t gone far enough, either. I’m still waiting for the day bosses and mobs make greater use of conditions and boons. I’m also still looking forward to that one boss that finally requires some sort of crowd control.

Bjarl the Rampager req cc.

To make condi builds good in pve they would have to change the way conditions are stacking on foes or change hp pool on mobs. Either way it would made pve easymode. And still warriors are pretty good in condition damage.

Imo the best way to make nonheavy classes more popular is to give them direct dps options as good as wariors. If you could roll direct dps necro as easy as warrior less people would run away from 1+ necro groups. Or give them some cool utilities(the real problem with necro) – I don’t think anyone would take mesmer in a group without pull/reflect/tw, ele without fgs and mightstacking abilities or engi without vunstacks.

Some things are more efficient in pve(directDPS) and some in pvp(condi/cc) and you can’t change that no matter how hard you try.

Imagine the world where condi damege is hella good in pve and all guardians are QQ their fire only. I can dream, can’t i?

Lopez.7369:

As the screenshot of my PUG shows, not really. (Doctor Derek and I are condition builds.)

IIRC you two usually post “LFM no conditon builds”, so I guess you already know how much harder it would be having 5 condition builds in your party, even in a fractal that reduces direct damage when endurance is low.

That’s only because of bleed cap. We can handle it with just two condition builds. Obviously, I would never recommend more than that.

With the addition with these annoying debuff in FOTM, heavy armors are still the best candidate to do these contents.

It’s not just about the damage, but warrior’s regen/hp/armor and guardian’s reflection is getting better and better the harder the content goes. Many classes very lack in healing themselves or condition removal, so with harder content which you get hit harder, some classes will have a much harder time to survive in hard contents.