Guild Wars 2

With the recent patch things are amazing. Dungeons have not been this fun in a very long time. And the reason is that #1 more specs are viable(ish) and #2 bosses melt quickly.

Now for #1 basically my friends who play necro in wvw wanted to try condi builds in pve and found that bleeding did a ton of damage. Our kill times were very quick even with condi specs in our group. However the problem i see here is that Anet does not usually distinguish between pvp and pve even though it should. In PvP and WvW condi specs are very powerful now and may be toned down. But in PvE they still don’t match power specs and could use a little more of a buff or just stay the same

for #2 i know a lot of people hate the fact that bosses melt quickly, but let me explain why i think this is good before anyone jumps to conclusions. Anet has a pattern of designing bosses in dungeons and open world content that are not difficult by any stretch of the imagination but are just tanky with huge health pools. With the disparity (not so much now) between class damage this meant that certain comps took a lot longer to kill bosses and even with perfect comp without perfect buffs it would take a pretty long time to kill them. And it wasnt fun for most people because of how tedious it became. Examples of this are HOTW p1 bosses besides cave troll, one who has invuln phases and is tanky, the other one is tanky and has reflect and has prot retal and regen totem. Another example is the ice boss in p1 of COE that you have to lure to electrified pillars. These bosses were tedious and not fun because they didn’t require skill but rather required time. And time =/= difficulty or enjoyment. This relates back to kill times in the new patch because with how fast bosses are melting it makes it more fun for bad comps to fight against these bosses since it wont take super long, and also it may push Anet to instead of trying to nerf speed of kills, create interesting and difficult mechanics that will force people to play skillfully to kill bosses quickly.

With the new break bars that will be coming in HoT it seems they are going in this direction (ice bow 5 nerf basically). Hopefully they allow us to retain the amazing amount of damage we get to do, does anyone not enjoy seeing huge numbers and melting bosses, but create encounters that actually challenge us and make us better at the game.

My 2 cents hoping that nerfs arent too bad. GJ on the new patch Anet

I agree with everything said, as long as hot makes enemies much harder and dungeons get some kind of hard mkde

You do understand though that this is only temporary right?

The amount of damage has nothing to do with the viability of specs currently. It’s all due to the fact that we are back to square 1 and nobody has any idea of what is optimal to run.

While I think the patch is great, the changes open up new possibilities gameplay wise, everyone if up and about testing stuff, I’m not as naive to believe this will last.

Eventually things will settle down, best/fastest combos will have been figured out and people will go back to running a certain set of builds/classes.

tl;dr: the current cluelessness is the main reason for the everything goes (spec wise) attitude, not the actual changes (or only partly).

Cyninja.2954:

You do understand though that this is only temporary right?

The amount of damage has nothing to do with the viability of specs currently. It’s all due to the fact that we are back to square 1 and nobody has any idea of what is optimal to run.

While I think the patch is great, the changes open up new possibilities gameplay wise, everyone if up and about testing stuff, I’m not as naive to believe this will last.

Eventually things will settle down, best/fastest combos will have been figured out and people will go back to running a certain set of builds/classes.

tl;dr: the current cluelessness is the main reason for the everything goes (spec wise) attitude, not the actual changes (or only partly).

Yeah i get that, but i think its a good sign. The fact that my group managed to do se, ta, and coe at relatively the same speed give or take 2-4 min with 2 condi necros in se, condi necro and condi ranger in ta, and condi necro in coe today was fun. I know optimizations will come out, but I think its a great that the times we are used to can be achieved with what were be ‘bad comps’.

Fun? I stopped reading right there. Killing things in 10 secs has more active gameplay than what we had before? Lol

Nyx.7342:

Cyninja.2954:

You do understand though that this is only temporary right?

The amount of damage has nothing to do with the viability of specs currently. It’s all due to the fact that we are back to square 1 and nobody has any idea of what is optimal to run.

While I think the patch is great, the changes open up new possibilities gameplay wise, everyone if up and about testing stuff, I’m not as naive to believe this will last.

Eventually things will settle down, best/fastest combos will have been figured out and people will go back to running a certain set of builds/classes.

tl;dr: the current cluelessness is the main reason for the everything goes (spec wise) attitude, not the actual changes (or only partly).

Yeah i get that, but i think its a good sign. The fact that my group managed to do se, ta, and coe at relatively the same speed give or take 2-4 min with 2 condi necros in se, condi necro and condi ranger in ta, and condi necro in coe today was fun. I know optimizations will come out, but I think its a great that the times we are used to can be achieved with what were be ‘bad comps’.

True, and ideally if arenanet gets the balancing just right, multiple builds should be able to get taken along. Time will tell.

XxSmokedatganjaxX.2948:

Fun? I stopped reading right there. Killing things in 10 secs has more active gameplay than what we had before? Lol

I knew someone would say something like this.

I know now bosses will die very quickly and for some of them it is a bad thing, although the new scaling should balance it out since in lower level dungeons like cm and ac the power increase seemed minimal if at all. But for the most part bosses who die super fast do so because of bad design, like destroyer in coe, who are basically punching bags. But lets take alpha, he has some interesting attacks nothing too complicated. the first 20s of the fight against alpha is fun. Everyones trying to pull off their bursts while not getting killed by his aoe or his ground projectile. However after burst are gone its basically just trying to auto attack him to death faster than he gets healed. Its easy at that point because dodging aoe while autoattacking is not hard or skillful. Its analogous to trying to kill a warrior at 10% health in wuvs with heal signet. However when your bursts actually burst the fight is fun and the active part of the fight, deciding when to channel skills when to dodge etc. etc. are all still there, you just dont have to do the boring part. Isn’t that good? I can try to explain it in more detail but you should jsut try for yourself. And after new break bar comes out and ice bow 5 will not be able to nullify bosses it will be even more fun.