Guild Wars 2

Revenant needs to get rid off energy from weapons. From ALL specs.
Renegade have nice flashy skills. But his energy management is TOTALLY AWFUL. Its like cast 1 skill and “oh, im already empty, but my legend swap is still on 8 second cooldown, nevermind, push 1 auto and go drink tea”.
The whole class gains so much hate due balance changes and it feels so weak and unfinished without any idea due double cooldowns

Scourge boils down to LF generation issues. It’s basically a mana bar with no way to restore it with condi build. Solutions:
Add LF generation to Scepter AA. IIRC it’s the only necro weapon that lacks one.
OR attach torment to Staff AA. This will make it into LF generator for condi.
OR attach condi to mainhand dagger AA.
OR all 3 please.

Also, consider removing ICD on Demonic lore trait in PVE mode.

I’d comment more on scourge “support” in PVE, but it’s pretty much dead on arrival. Let’s get the damage rolling first.

Alright, let’s get into it. These are my impressions after spending the demo weekend testing out Soulbeast and its various mechanics.
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Dagger:

• MH dagger feels very clunky.
• The autos feel very slow. Its base speed should be what it is when we use it with quickness.
• The 2 skill doesn’t have enough damage/utility. It is also relatively hard to hit and doesn’t do anything special. It feels like another auto attack.
• The 3rd skill also feels very slow. Its base speed should be what is is when we use it with quickness. It should also be an evade.
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Stances:

• They are all very lackluster. Shouts beat stances out by a wide margin. I’m sure some dedicated ranger players could come up with much better ideas on how to rework/improve them.
• Dolyak Stance seems the best out of all of them, but it didn’t even work for the demo weekend. No one had been able to test it.
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Beastmode:

• Honestly it’s pretty decent. At least with some pets, the additional combos and rotations we get access to by entering SLB to use f1-f3, and leaving it to use/swap pets feels pretty smooth.
• Boons from the pet should automatically be shared with the player when entering Beastmode, without having to trait for it.
• Any boon the ranger had received/currently has should also be shared with the pet upon leaving Beastmode, without having to trait for it.
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Traits:

• Soulbeast doesn’t offer enough in terms of survivability or damage to justify dropping one of our core traitlines/Druid for.
• There is also a lot of inconsistency in terms of what actually affects us and what doesn’t when we enter Beastmode.
• Every trait that affects the pet should affect us as well when we are in Beastmode. If some do, and some don’t, many traits won’t be taken because they will be useless every 10 seconds.
• Core is a lot more fluid to play than Soulbeast. It does more damage and has better survivability.
• Again, experienced ranger players can come up with much better ideas to improve the experience.
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Pets:

• They are pretty meh. Nothing special here. Jacaranda and the Fanged Iboga are the best out of the 5 we got in terms of their AI and Beastmode skills.
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Conclusion:

• Core ranger and Druid are stronger than Soulbeast. Soulbeast’s Beastmode mechanic feels like it should be a part of core ranger, rather than an elite specialization.
• Soulbeast needs more in terms of survivability and/or damage to be worth dropping our core/druid traitlines.
• If Anet would be willing to take suggestions, I will personally gather some of the top ranger players in the game to discuss possible changes to be made to Soulbeast.

DiogoSilva.7089:

My suggestions to fix the revenant’s core issues are two (for PvE): either remove energy from weapon skills, so that we can do more interesting rotations, or have our starting energy be at 100 instead of 50, so that we are forced to use energy skills other than the upkeep one before the legend cooldown is over and we can reset it back to 100 again. If 100 was the base value, then our upkeep skills wouldn’t be enough to put it at 0 before legend swapping becomes available again, which means that using MORE skills would actually lead to a DPS boost, instead of a DPS nerf. If you are worried about PvP and WvW balance, then just make this a PvE only change.

I would love to see no energy on weapon (so I actually use them). The 100 energy starting would just help my ocd. I hate when you go out of combat for 1/2 a second and loose 30-50 energy instantly if you saved some up! It doesn’t even slowly degen to 50 its instant…

1.) Make Endless Horizon baseline. Because I thought thats why the dogderoll was replaced by the cloak, so that enemies cannot make out the real mesmer.

2.) Holosmith is a great class with even more great traits. Thats how all traitlines should work.

Lets start from the most underpowered spec of this expansion, which is…

• Soulbeast.

Do you realize that if we trade something like a ranger pet, we should get something more powerful in return to justify losing that useful pet?

So far by trading a useful pet we get pathetic skills that deal like 300 dmg and have huge cast times and pathetic ranges. Do you really think it’s even worth playing that class when you actually lose more than you already have as a core ranger?
All ranger traits are horribly situational and weak even if conditions are met (especially the laughable grandmaster one’s)
Did I mention over 9000 bugs with that spec? For example not all pet-focused traits/skills transfer to beast mode or don’t work at all?

So far that spec is just laughable pile of worthlessness so it should be a main priority above anything else of buffing it.

Core ranger is better than elite spec… Which is just LOL.

• Deadeye.

Maximum Malice stacked Death’s Judgment does too much damage so it should be toned down at high stacks.

Also class as a whole is utterly useless vs reflects/projectile blocks spam that we always have in this game so it needs more unblockable attacks or a way to get unblockable buff on themselves.

Stolen abilities are totally useless. There’s a bug too > Deadeye loses stolen ability if target dies.

Overall spec is pretty almost finished, just needs the mentioned tweaks. It already got a good counter-play strategy against them (kneel has cooldown so using line of sight vs deadeyes is a great way to control their damage, forcing them to reposition themselves)

• Holosmith.

Seems to be heavily melle oriented spec but lacks stability or resistance or overall surviviablity to be in melle, so he’ll be an easy kill in any PvP mode. Damage is crazy however. Solution – tone damage down a bit but give them more defences OR range.
Losing F5 skill kinda limits this specs viability by alot too…

All utilities besides Laser Disk are worthless so they need serious buffs (including toolbelt one’s)

Overall, spec is a suicide bomber who will be doing his combo and then dying with no chance of revival in any PvP(useless engineer downed state abilities say HI)

• Spellbreaker.

Winds of disenchantment are overpowered. That whole skill will be what makes or breaks any team-based pvp engagement.

Overall damage on spellbreaker is pretty low. Solution – buff damage a bit but nerf that broken elite (also give it a use in PvE)

• Mirage.

Totally forced to go condi, needs serious buffs on physical side of that spec, otherwise we won’t see anything but condi mesmers once again.

Overall class doesn’t excel in anything but running away. No strengths no weaknesses.

Several of the new elites (Holosmith, Weaver, Mirage) feel like there is going to be quite a learning curve to use effectively. This is probably a good thing, but Holosmith in particular felt like too many moving pieces to track and Mirage felt too clunky; even after reading through the skills and using them at length against golems I had no feel for flow. Scourge takes a lot of precision spread out ground targeting, it seems, difficult for me given I mouse move so it’s move or target. This is in a bare few minutes of trying it, though, and I’ll admit it took me months of Chronomancer to internalize dropping the F5 -before- using up long CD items.

The main issue was being confined to PvP — no, I did not go anywhere that other players could beat me up, I don’t normally PvP or WvW so I knew I would get zero feel for the effectiveness and flow of each elite when in panic mode or dead. The HoT betas very nicely let us try out elites both in sections of Verdant Brink and in the main world.

I’m ok with this, it was nice to get a preliminary feel for the mechanics so I could focus on which alts to gobble up HP on first, but it only held my interest for the Friday hours it took to make each elite once, study its skills, pick gear, and attack golems and NPCs.

One happy side note: I made nine elites, gave eight of them one word names that sounded lore appropriate and I would willingly use permanently, including one or two I’d used in the HoT beta, and the ninth I used a two word name I’d used in HoT beta for a human revenant. Not one name was taken. Pshaw to those that think there are no names left for them, pshaw I say!

Weaver
– it didn’t look like arcana line did anything for the attunements, with and without arcana were 4s, don’t have a problem with that CD, but traited into arcana I felt like I should get some CD reduction.

Firebrand
- I think that the mantras need a bit more “Flash” or tell of there aoe, the range of skills might need to be tweeked.

Deadeye
- I think that the basic stealth for thief should be increase to 4s, because all classes have that same 4s of stealth, the radius or deadzone, where the deadeye should be more clear add a bit of a wall or some sort of indicator of when you can tell target is in range, I tried to shot at 1 of the blue guards and he was just out of my radius, as for the size I think is fine

From PvP perspective, mirage’s new ambush and mirror mechanics need improvement. Traits and skills related to them are underwhelming due to how clunky they are. Either increase their power level or make them more smooth to use. The new dodge for mirage is awesome.

I played mostly Sword/Dagger and Sword/Focus Weaver this weekend. Here are my impressions:

General

-Weaver as it stands is definitely not a pure Power spec. It does decent condi pressure though. I found Sage amulet to work best for myself, though I hope others can find more viable options. I know Phantaram tried a Mender’s build with some success. Deadshot looks like it has some potential, but I couldn’t make it work.

-The overall animations and look of the spec are great. The Sword, Dual Attack and Utilities are flashy and look powerful. The Elite skill looks good too.

-The biggest issue for me is the inability to have instant access to powerful defensive abilities like Swirling Winds and Obsidian Flesh. THAT SAID, I will for now chalk it up to a L2P issue on my part, since Weaver does provide evades on both Sword and Utilities (Twist of Fate.)

-Survivability needs help. Weaver cannot reliably survive condi bombs. Barrier seems lackluster. It requires speccing into Vitality and Healing Power (already limiting build diversity) and decays too early to be useful. I’m willing to admit that with more time to learn the spec, I might find Barrier as it currently stands to be viable, but Weaver is still really lacking condition removal, and is particularly vulnerable to condi bombs.

-Another problem I see with the Weaver is that one Utility skill (Primordial Stance) seems to do the bulk of its damage. PS itself is bugged (pulses 3 burn/sec when attuned to Fire and Earth, instead of 1 burn/sec.) It’s going to be weak when fixed, which is going to exacerbate the problem that our weapon skills don’t do all that much damage for a melee spec.

-I also fear that Weaver is still too reliant on Water/Arcane, hamstringing its build diversity. Especially with the crazy condis flying around now, Water is needed more than ever. And Arcane is indispensable for the Attunement swap cool down reduction and Evasive Arcana. I was hoping for more active defense to be added to Sword to help us justify specccing into Fire/Air/Earth, and the evades are a good start, but there simply isn’t enough condi removal to justify abandoning Water, and the class feels too clunky without Arcane.

Sword

-Sword auto-attacks are not good. They don’t do much damage and feel clunky. I think they should just have their cast times reduced/animations sped up. Another problem is that if you swap Attunements mid-AA chain, you reset the chain to the first attack. It’s clunky and annoying.

-Besides the auto-attacks, the Sword feels great to use. A lot of potential here. Needs more damage though!

-Dual attacks for the most part are great (though Staff and Scepter seem to have a few underwhelming Dual Attacks.) However, none of the Dual Attacks benefit from cooldown reduction traits. This needs to be rectified. Some skills like Flame Eruption and Gale Strike could be faster too. Lava Skin should really be instant-cast.

-I love the gap-closers, CC and evades on Sword! Been looking forward to this for ages. I so badly want to spec into Air for Lightning Rod, but am too scared to give up Water/Arcane

Utility Skills

-Primordial Stance is great! However, it’s going to be weak when its bug is fixed

-Twist of Fate is a good skill, and will be on my bar with Lightning Flash and PS.

-Unravel is just a waste of a Utility skill IMO. Once you get the hang of how Attunement swapping works with Weaver, you will almost never need to take this skill. I’d much rather see it reworked. Maybe condition removal or more CC?

Healing Skill

-No real opinion on this; I mainly used Signet of Restoration.

Elite Skill

-Should definitely be usable while moving. Stopping to cast this just cuts your momentum dead.

Traits

-Grandmaster tier needs work. IMO, there is only one good GM trait, Invigorating Strikes. Elements of Rage runs counter to the Weaver mechanic! It should reward dual-attuning; it feels more like a Tempest trait at the moment. Unravel Hexes is so pointless. It’s essentially another Lucid Singularity, which no one takes. It should remove all conditions (one condition per half second) when under the effects of Superspeed.

Overall, I love the Weaver, a lot more than I liked Tempest initially. I hope the issues get fixed; I really want it to be viable as a damage-dealing spec in PVP. It needs to be able to survive on the frontlines and/or have the capacity to do enough damage if people are going to play it.

Spellbreaker damage is way too low

Firebrand

Mantras:
Mantra of solace (heal)- was fine, maybe buff heal by 100-200hp.
Mantra of flame – feel underwhelming.
Mantra of lore – love those condi removals.
Mantra of truth – not bad giving those condies but lacks CHILL condition.
Mantra of potence – ok at giving quickness also good might giver.
Mantra of liberation (elite) – while it breaks stuns and giving stability this should also give 3 sec of PROTECTION and final 5 sec of PROTECTION.

While mantras are luckluster cause they are cone oriented and only in x-axis, I had problems dmg ppl on little higher or lower terrain.

AXE:
After testing it they need to increase dmg of autoattacks by 20%.
Symbol is BUGGED cause hes dmg was way too low and nothing near the tooltip compared to mace symbol dmg.
Pull is also luckluster if someone is on little higher or lower terain it will miss every time to pull ppl.

TRAITS

Adept:
Unrelenting Criticism – instead of bleeding they shuld introduce 3rd condition – torment and instead of daze give immobilize.
Liberator’s Vow – feels powerfull and effective (maybe 10 sec cd)
Archivist of Whispers – never used this, worst ability of those above

MASTER:
Weighty Terms – feels hugely underwhelming, immobilize? I rather would see swiftness buff for 8 sec every mantra use.(this should help ppl at mobility)
Stalwart Speed – best trait in this line
Legendary Lore – its good in group play and thats it, nothing special.

GRANDMASTER
Stoic Demeanor – pretty luckluster for grandmaster – give chill or daze also.
Quickfire – very good at group play
Loremaster – worst trait of them all.

Notable mention:
MINOR GRANDMASTER
Imbued Haste – this dont belong here (Gain increased attributes while affected by quickness.) I mean if you do not trait for quickness you dont get any benehit of those…pretty weird trait.

TOMES:

TOME OF JUSTICE:

Chapter 1: Searing Spell – pretty powerfull spell, but its a cone attack so dmg ppl above or below you is NOT POSSIBLE.
Chapter 2: Igniting Burst – range 240, useless.
Chapter 3: Heated Rebuke – not bad, but could use to pull ppl toward us.
Chapter 4: Scorched Aftermath – very good aoe dmg.
Epilogue: Ashes of the Just – very good in group play.

TOME OF RESOLVE:
Chapter 1: Desert Bloom – could use some buff, again CONE heal spell that dont heal allies on higher or lower terrain.
Chapter 2: Radiant Recovery – another cleansing skill
Chapter 3: Azure Sun – this needs to be BLAST to blast water field. (and maybe daze)
Chapter 4: Shining River – could use some healing buff.
Epilogue: Eternal Oasis – good in group play

TOME OF COURAGE:

Tome of Courage – ok skill but again terrible CONE effect that wont buff allies on higher and lower terrain.
Chapter 2: Daring Challenge – 240 range taunt, USELESS
Chapter 3: Valiant Bulwark – BUGGED reflecting allies and enemies projectiles
Chapter 4: Stalwart Stand – good skill for group play.
Epilogue: Unbroken Lines – very good skill granting stability.

Lets summ it up:
Axe could use dmg buff and SYMBOL is BUGGED, axe pull dont work properly or its luckluster with current playstyle.
Mantras could use swiftness buff on their trait plus elite could use protection for some dmg mitigation. Some mantras need buffs like chill.
Tomes, oh man tomes, those cast times are ridiculous. Tomes should be instant, there were so many times that i press f1,f2,f3 and they dont react cause of wvw skill lag or something so pressing twice bring them to long cast times. This should be instant or 1/2 or even 1/4.
Loooooooooong cooldowns – they should be 20 35 50 (without virtue line if they wont buff or change them).
Some traits are horrible and will never be taken.

Overall Firebrand is fun but not that effective cause of CONE (only x axis) dmging abilities and mantras and LONG COOLDOWNS of tomes. It will be great in raids and pve, but needs serious buffs in pvp or wvw if they want it to be competitive.

For a melee condi/support it lucks mobility (maybe his runes will give 25% movement speed) but its very slow clunky and weird and not effective in wvw and pvp.

Firebrand:

• Mantras need their functionality completely changed, 300 range cone shape simply does not work in a live setting where you aren’t wailing a DPS golem.
• The Axe is very clunky, the symbol has way too long of a cast time and doesn’t even grant any boons.
• Tomes having cast time simply does not work
• The class overall suffers from the same issues as base guardian that has been covered up by the DH Longbow and virtues: serious lack of mobility/disengage and no ranged options for damage or support (see 300 range cone shaped Mantras)

Renegade
I liked the theme, but it played very poorly. Very low damage. Low survivability. Nothing to address conditions, which are becoming more of a problem. And energy costs were too high across the board.
Shortbow
Was fun, but low damage. High costs. Some bugs.
(Skill 1) bleed needs to last longer.
(Skill 2) doesn’t land on moving targets. May also need more damage.
(Skill 3) almost never hits the target at all.
(Skill 4) needs to be castable behind me.
(Skill 5) needs to be castable behind me.

Kalla
I liked the spirits, but they cost way too much, and didn’t have enough defensive utilities to them to help stand my ground.

(Heal) lower the cost to 5 energy. Increase the initial healing by 1000 or more. Give it something better to handle condi’s (Condi removal or resistance). Probably should move the stunbreak somewhere else.

(Razorclaw’s Rage) lower the cost to 15 energy. Needs to give something defensive along with the bleed. Maybe a boon?

(Icerazor’s Ire) lower the cost to 15 energy. Maybe add more damage?

(Darkrazor’s Daring) lower the cost to 25 energy. Should reflect or at least block ranged attacks. Maybe become the stunbreak?

(Soulcleave’s Summit) Maybe up the damage and/or healing.

All f skills should have their costs cut in half.

Besides these issues, it was fairly fun, and had some promise.

Hope this helped some.

Firebrand needs virtues to be instant and support mantras need to be standard aoe. Scourge is way to strong with condi damage, don’t know if dhumfire is supposed to work with every skill but it does reaper level damage with more cleanse and support. Spellbreaker elite breaks wvw. Put icd on spell breaker traits, make winds of disenchantment only tick once a second and make so boons can be applied while in it there was already plenty of boon rip and scourge got more of it.

Im disappointed in the new specializations. GW2 develops into a direction I dont like. Almost all elites are condi based and deliver to a meta thats already around and makes it even worse. Where is the place of power specs? necros that can condi bomb the crap out of you with clicking a button 3 times is not really motivating at all.

I mainly tested Firebrand. Way to clunky. Cast times on tomes are terrible. Cooldowns are too high. No mobility at all. The F2 and F3 tomes feel undertuned. 300 range cones on the skills in front of the charackter. It doesnt feel good.

Good idea on “giving something up” for the elite specialization. Everything else is power creep. Reign it in.

I played Scourge. I think Dhuumfire did not work properly. The Desert Shroud applied too much burning.

Nourishing Rot should work like Chilling Darkness. All boon corrupts and removals per skill/pulse should count. In WvW I would reduce the LF gain to 3%.

Serpent Siphon feels very clunky and underwhelming. Maybe you should add one or two more stacks of poison.

I would give 1200 range to sand swell. The duration of the portal did not work properly.

I only played Scourge this weekend, but there were a few trait synergy issues that needed looking at. One was that Transfusion (from Blood Magic) didn’t seem to work at all when traited on a Scourge. I did love the synergy with throwing Shades up with Vampiric Presence. I didn’t understand if my sand portals disappearing were a feature or a bug, though. I would use them once twice and they’d disappear, even though they had a 20 second duration. The barrier mechanic feels ‘right’ based on the situations I encountered and am really happy with the measures you have taken to discourage stacking barriers.

To echo almost every other post in this thread:

You really need to fix Renegade/Revenant.

Hi,

Here is my feedback on the Deadeye, with youtube video included! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIW_vwXP4Z8&feature=youtu.be

TLDR

Stolen Skills need adjusting/buffing. Would like to see self cast instead of requiring a target.
The class needs more defensive options as it is easy to get jumped on.
The 3rd trait in each tier needs to be adjusted to stolen skills as they do not work very well.
Love how the class plays in small group fights. Doesnt work well for roaming solo or zergs.
May have some use in PVE with the malice mechanic but it is overall slow in WvW

Thanks.

all of the elite specs were conceptually awesome, but a few needed some major tweaks.

Renegades feel lackluster compared to the others in terms of what you gain from it, which is compounded by the fact that core rev still feels unfinished. I would suggest giving Revs a few new utility skills not tied to the new elite and making some tweaks to the warband summons.

I see no purpose in giving Rangers beastmode but still forcing them to leave it constantly so they have to deal with the pet. It feels extremely clunky & awkward. An elite spec that modifies the way the core pet mechanic works in this way is the perfect opportunity to provide ranger players with a “petless” option. Don’t force otherwise onto players just because you have an irrational vendetta against the concept of a petless ranger. Just allow pet swapping in soul beast mode and dial back the aura.

Mantras for both Mesmers and Guardians still just don’t really feel right, although overall I loved the firebrand concept as well as gameplay.

Scourge

I liked how shroud no longer blocks use of non-shroud skills. It is a radical change for the profession and will take time to learn. I also liked the added group utility and burning damage.

Scourge can be very glassy and needs its corruptions and condition bursts to defeat opponents before being owned by control effects.

I know a lot of other Necromancer-mains will disagree but I would like more separation between sceptre bleed and poison dps and torch burn, torment, and cripple dps to prevent maximum profession dps being a combination of the two by a significant margin. Greatsword and sceptre could not be used simultaneously so bleeds from one would replace many of the bleeds from the other and the rest of Reaper dps was power-based. Deathly Chill may be the one trait preventing power-Reaper from good dps because the hybrid build defines its upper dps limit by a large margin.

Ideally, core sceptre builds would have roughly similar condition damage as a glassier, bursty, burning, melee Scourge. It would be great if a core condition build dps equalled condi-Reaper. The potential for condition dps bursts and group utility at higher personal risk feels like Scourge should be similar.

On a side note, sceptre could use more life force generation without an elite trait line but I had no problems with LF using dagger, axe, or even staff.

Core and Reaper power builds could use a dps buff, which would be negated by taking Scourge for a hybrid power-condi build where significant power would be traded in a Curses/Scourge build.

Group utility seems dubious right now. Blood Magic/Scourge works but I have yet to really test this. Scourge’s ability to be accepted in Raids depends upon the combination of minor heals and minor barriers, though the portal may be the one, defining utility.

Take a hard look at Death Magic. It does not do anything useful aside from its rather weak minion buffs. I would suggest making Death Magic very un-selfish. Add sharable group defensive utility to a few traits like making spectral skills have a shareable aspect; e.g., Wall lasts 2 sec longer, Armor proc’s an aura for nearby allies, Walk acts like a swiftness shout, and Grasp imcreases hard CC duration by 1 sec for nearby allies.

There are no good finishers on Scourge, or fields for that matter. Even if dps is fine without them, the complexity of watching for fields and using them is something I liked about Reaper. Perhaps consider if Oppressive Collapse could be made a blast finisher.

In general, I do not mind Scourge being more delicate and requiring healing and blocking support if the utility and/or dps are attractive enough.

Corruptions are good and, though there is some crying, the boon hate may change the WvW and PvP environment so players are more cautious about boons, conditions, and ignoring them due to passive and secondary skill effects.

Dhuumfire and terror may need some caps or ICD to limit condition bursts. Likewise, individual professions could use a review of low boon output and high cleanse builds. Popping boons like a hand full of skittles before facing a supported Scourge will be painful. Boonless builds could use love, assuming corruption skills have a purpose in PoF.

Most important on my mind is being able to sustain good dps on Scourge with or without sceptre or Curses so the profession is not dominated by one build and one trait. It would be nice to be able to do good hybrid dps with Spite and Soul Reaping or offer attractive support with Death Magic and Blood Magic. Curses and Soul Reaping would still be mostly condition damage. Reviewing, and adding, modifiers that synergize for Spite and Death Magic that depend upon other trait lines to scale up on effectiveness would ensure more variety in builds. Nice work with Blood Magic and Soul Reaping, though.

Consider making shades for opponent players redish for clarity.

Scourge boon corrupt and condition application broken and overpowered.
2 Boons corrupted with 4 sec cd + torment + burn(traited), that makes 4, i mean, 4 condition at once on a 4 sec cooldown (pvp/wvw speaking).

Meanwhile guardian got a 2.5 sec cast mantra that apply 1 stack of burn with 15 sec of recharge. This mantra would be useless even if it applyed 3 stacks.

At the same time weaver got a pulsating stance that can pulse 5 times 2 stacks of burn, on the same recharge/ammo mechanic of the guardian mantra, without any long ass cast time and punishing cd if used the last charge.

Weaver -
Fun but needs some power damage buffs and a bit stronger barriers.
Sword in particular needs more power damage.
With stronger or more ways to build up barrier it might stand a chance in pvp without running some tank build that does even less damage.
Also attunement cooldown seems a bit too long and makes it clunky.
We’re glass and it isn’t hard to lock us down, so it would be nice to have more sustain.

Deadeye -
Possibly favorite. Wouldn’t change anything really.
Some of the traits are far more superior, but they provide difficult decisions which seem to balance things out.

Soulbeast -
Dagger is weak for power and the only way to get a lot of condi for viable dps seems to be to forgo survivability. But I don’t know much about condi ranger and favor power anyway.

Spellbreaker -
Lots of sustain, lots of damage. Daggers aren’t particularly powerful in themselves but the combos are. Full counter trait is insane but fairly fun. Could possibly use a second look at damage output but overall pretty balanced.

Scourge –
Insane damage. Instant death if anywhere close to a sand shroud with the shroud skill traits in other lines. Fun, but probably a little too powerful in competitive play. Like the damage in pve though.

Holosmith -
Also absurd damage, but no survivability. Full glass power or condi build. Loved it. Might need a bit of toning down but I’d love the damage to remain in pve. Great visuals and heat mechanic. High damage but low survivability.

Renegade -
Honestly the worst of them all. No survivability or mobility. Too many abilities that require stationary targets. The utility skills are… no words. Damage on shortbow is abysmal for seemingly condi and power. Would love more direct damage. Shortbow 2 animation is really lackluster and just looks like Ranger Longbow 2 but shorter.
Energy costs lock you out of pretty much every ability 2 seconds into a fight.

Firebrand -
Clunky tome system.
No survivability.
Mantras have insanely long charge time and don’t seem very useful.
Condi cleanse is a little lacking compared to Dragonhunter.
Condi output seems weaker than dragonhunter or core burn guard so it doesn’t seem like it will be great in pve or pvp.

Mirage -
Biggest disappointment for me by far as a Mesmer main.
Mirage mirrors don’t last long enough.
Window to use ambush doesn’t last long enough.
Much less survivability than chrono.
Condi cleanse requires the mantra and grandmaster trait, or running inspiration which forces you to use all of your clones and phantasms for shatters which defeats the theme of this spec.
Ambush attacks do next to nothing on most weapons
Jaunt has too low of range.
Axe 2 is pretty much suicide and isn’t as effective at clone generation as it wants to be.
Axe 3 has ported me in strange places at times, like on the bridge above somebody in Foefire. Could be a fun side effect but probably not what you were aiming for.
Greatsword ambush is the worst of all.
Would love higher power damage for ambush abilities and axe skills, as well as traits to make you not forced to be condition damage.
Infinite horizons trait should be baseline as I thought that trait was the entire purpose of this spec, but we actually have to trait into it? Really?
Clones are useless as they die pretty much immediately from cleave damage.

Will anything expressed in this thread actually be taken into consideration and lead to revisions with the specs? Or are we all just wasting our breath?

Scourge being able to affect 20 players at once is broken in large scale combat. I don’t believe you’re capable of balancing this over all three gamemodes, since only one gamemode deals with large groups of players regularly. (Not counting openworld PvE)

Alot of new mechanics have visibility issues in WvW. Sandshade is very strong, yet you can’t tell if its an allied or enemy shade. Outside of the 4 and 5 ability, it’s very hard to tell if it’s attacking, assuming you actually know what it does.

Warrior elite? Same thing. Before it was only timewarp, which is very strong but not something that’ll immediately kill your melee.

Scourge and Deadeye are the only things that are problems atm , Scourge has an insane ammount of boon corrupt ontop of being able to deal alot of conditions. I feel that the burn grandmaster needs an icd of about 3-4 seconds , Spawning a sand shroud should cost a certain ammount of life force , And the trait that causes you to lose a condition whenever you spawn a shroud should get an icd aswell. I feel like this would make Scourge alot more balanced in a competitive enviorement such as WvW and PvP. The biggest problem i see with Deadeye is that it can perma stealth and 1 shot people. This is a big problem in WvW. I think this could be fixed by nerfing Shadow Arts traitline which causes them to be able to upkeep their perma stealth.

imidacloprid.2948:

I only played Scourge this weekend, but there were a few trait synergy issues that needed looking at. One was that Transfusion (from Blood Magic) didn’t seem to work at all when traited on a Scourge. I did love the synergy with throwing Shades up with Vampiric Presence. I didn’t understand if my sand portals disappearing were a feature or a bug, though. I would use them once twice and they’d disappear, even though they had a 20 second duration. The barrier mechanic feels ‘right’ based on the situations I encountered and am really happy with the measures you have taken to discourage stacking barriers.

Transfusion applies to Garish Pillar (the fear). It’s actually much stronger on Scourge than base Necro or Reaper.

Holosmith. No dual sword. Shield Skills still have long CDs. Exceed Skills have long CDs. No dual Specializations.

Soulbeast. I like it. Good thinking. Som bugs that will be fixed.
Diverse and fun offensiv spec that actually uses the rangers unique mechanic (wich Druid doesnt) in a usefull way.

About the animations though… there are many bite/chomp skills. Let u’r character (charr at least) make a biting movement instead of a hand-movement as a bite.

1. Mirage
- great concept and visuals, a bunch of problems
- too short Ambush time window to use; most of ambushes are really weak
- need NEW F1-F4 to work better with the concept (a lot of nice ideas in Mesmer forums, please take time to look at them) – this really feels like could change a lot for better and currently lack of new F1-F4 is troubling, feels unfinished actually.
- axe sometimes bugs and feels weak (after a while I used mostly staff)
- jaunt needs slight more distance
- why can’t we switch with clones? it’s supposed to be the idea for Mirage
- skills that allow your illusions to retarget are a very good concept.
- overal utilities felt good and gave a nice variety to make fun rotations

2. Firebrand
- too long Tome 2 and 3 cooldowns to be reliable support source.
- nice to have a support option on guard finally, tho it’s not my cup of tea – I’ll probably stay DH. Also condi option felt clunky to use.
- where are those lovely books that floated in front of guards in old version of Tomes?
- most of stuff is either cone or round AOE – felt very boring, only difference was numbers and radius or boon that skills applied, no actuall distinction between all the skills. Especially tome skills felt lackluster in terms of animations.
- tho animations like matra charging or equiping or stowing a tome were very nice
- axe AA sound is annoying

3. Deadeye
- rly liked it, do hope for use in PvE
- make some sort of adjustments for deadeye to be viable against huge healthpool targets like raid bosses – way to maintain max malice on target for dps benefit.
- I love the options – daredevil for crazy mobility and cleave close combat and deadeye for long range snipery stuff

4. Yolosmith
- gosh these visuals are stunning, love it
- theme is nice
- yolosmith will make me actually play engie, thanks!

5. Scourge
- seems a nice concept
- we need mobs mechanics that we could counter with scourge skills (boon converts)

6. Weaver
- love the ammount of new skills,
- visuals again stunning, I love you put a lot of effort to it
- still won’t play it, as I do not enjoy ele that much

7. Spellbreaker
- again like with scourge – I do hope for actuall pve mechanics that will utilise boon ripping
- again not my cup of tea

8. Renegade
- please make revs happy (I don’t like rev anyways, but sad for all the rev enthusiasts)

9. Soulbeast
- cool idea, poor animation after merging (no distinction depending on pet)
- love the possibilities for build diversity with all the different pets

TLDR:
- I’ll definately play a lot with Mirage (my future main, tho I do hope It’ll get some improvements), Deadeye – as I enjoyed them a lot, then a bit of Firebrand (used to main guard) and Holosmith (for those animations lol). All other I’ll just max out for collections, weapons and skins.

- And we need more boons on mobs in PvE to use all the new stuff on several elite specs outside of PvP.

my first impressions:

Guardian. With practice, this could be crazy powerful. Tons of aoe quickness, tons of aegis, more stab, more cleanses and support. Seems a bit clunky at the moment though and would require much more testing than just one weekend with all the new classes to settle on a conclusion . Axe is meh, but it’s another choice in the kitten nal, and a dedicated condi weapon. Whole spec seems condi based which is dissapointing. Good for large group combat. Maybe not so much for roaming pvp. Could be viable in raids to replace or suplement mesmers although I don’t see any alacrity, so mesmers will still rule the quickness side. Overall, a big option.

Thief. Again, with practice this could be really fun and super trolly. I like how they are balancing the high dps with lack of mobility. Wish they did that with the rifle warrior, but whatever. Definately takes some getting used to. Definately not for zerg fights. With some practise, might be good for roaming/pvp. May have a place in raids. Time will tell whether the lack of mobility will be it’s downfall and people will just revert to daredevil but it’s a good option to play with.

Mesmer: This is a total fail, imo. [Edit: btw, I have about 4000 hours on mesmer]Most of the other classes I’ve played have major changes. Like the guardian gets an axe, big deal. But it also gets 3 new skill bars with every virtue. Ele, massive change. That’s a lot. Mesmer doesn’t get this. It does get an ambush skill, like a special thief stealth attack, but the timing needs to be improved as there’s a very short window to utilize it. There’s a lack of control regarding mirrors which is never good. Clone ai is an improvement, but that’s something that should be done as a whole. I tried and tried to understand where they were going with this, but can’t figure it out. The axe is a terrible weapon as it’s melee range condi weapon, so it’s just better to use a scepter and stay at a safer distance with better clone generation. Without having crunched any numbers they seem to be about the same damage. But since you can’t spec chrono, you can’t use a shield. It’s nice to be able to generate an extra clone with your utility skills, but some of them seemed lackluster. Over all, I don’t see this replacing anything in WvW, even for roaming, maybe pvp for a dedicated mesmer that wants to make this work. It’s like they had an idea of something but couldn’t refine it into anything good.

Elementalist: Briefly played with this and it’s very cool. New weapon, the sword, which opens up 12 new skills for the ele. Add to that the combo attunement skills, a #3 like with the thief, that changes depending on your attunment choices and weapons. That opens up your options even more. A lot of work went into this and I think it’s a great addition and increases the skill level of the ele. How many times have we cycled through our attunements only to skip stuff we knew we didn’t need? Now we can have a much more robust rotation. There’s more survivability with the new barrier trait, and lots of it in this class. Doesn’t seem to favor either power or condi, like most ele things. But it’s definitely not, as far as my first impression, something for large group combat. Seems much more appropriate for smaller scale, roaming, pvp, as it lacks the plethora of tempest aoe attacks and support. Overall, seems really good. Might be OP in the right hands.

Warrior: didn’t test but I hear it’s great at boons stripping. This will be very popular in WvW.

Necro: This is a total fail because it is completely overpowered. There’s just too much boon corruption, and as it is, this will ruin WvW. But the skills are ideal for large group combat. This might be ok for pvp to camp a point, but not roaming or small scale combat as it’s just too easy to avoid the sand totem things. I don’t see this having a place in raids. Centers totally around condi, so not much choice there. Again, dissapointed with that.

Revinent: I’ve heard others say this was the worst and I can’t disagree more. [Edit: appologies, as the summons can die and be CCed so, yeah, maybe not so much. I was doing massive damage in my small scale testing with trait changes.] This is insainly op for WvW, small or large scale combat, pvp, and if the numbers are good, raids, but it would be best at large group. Massive buffs to allies and tons of damage output. I think the negative comments really haven’t looked into the traits and how everything works together. Really really overpowered. The skills seem to use up too much energy. Again, specs heavily into condi, but seems like the traits can work with power if you drop the bow. Bow is condi.

Engi: Don’t play engi much.

Ranger: Don’t play ranger much. I hear bad things.

Overall:

I have very mixed feelings about these new specs. They seem to be pushing condi damage big time with most of these and introducing more condi removal via the guard. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be another class that’s pumping out lots of resistance, like the rev. The rev PoF spec also has lots of condi damage reduction in it, making it more necessary as a protection class in a group for WvW. They didn’t introduce another spec with lots of resistance and I can only recall one skill on another class that had resistance. That is a failure imo. No matter how many cleanses your group has, resistance is a must, especially with the necro having a ton of boon corruption. Honestly, there’s so much boon corruption here, add to that the existing boon corruption, the new warrior spec, all the condi damage with the new specs, and it doesn’t matter what your resistance is. It will be stripped and I see this needing a massive nerf or it will be the end of WvW. No joke.

Another failure is not having another class with heavy alacrity. This makes raids want only a chronomancer. This was a great opportunity to get the other classes or specs into the rotation, as it seems that’s Anets whole motus apparandi regarding balance.

There already was way too much damage being put out with HoT, and it seems that it is only going to get worse with PoF. They really need to increase the base toughness/vitality of classes to compensate if they don’t tone down the damage. I doubt they will, however.

I’m glad to see some classes got some really cool and interesting specs that truly drastically change them. That’s great and it keeps things fresh and makes us all have to sit down and rethink group comp, builds, etc. Maybe some of you don’t like that, but I know lots who live for it.

Is it going to be worth the money? I don’t know. That’s so subjective. I think it’s a bit of a mess right now and needs a lot of work to balance these classes and tone down the damage. I’ll probably wait until well after release to see what the feedback is and if you guys get your act together balancing these specs and if WvW has been ruined by boon corruption.

Deadeye

• Too clunky gameplay, the kneel gameplay shouldnt be linked to a skill slot, just to change between kneel or not kneel, make it an automatism, that happens by using your weapon skills and holding them down for a while, to go for that skill into kneel mode, and if you move, you stop kneeling, or instead put it to F4 or 5 to free up Weapon Skill Slot 5 for actually a Weapon Skill, not a lousy mode changer that does otherwise nothing for you
• Too slow/unmobile..any halfway good daredevil or core thief will shred them into pieces them oment they force them into melee combat and to force them to swap weapons as the rifle is just only useful on longrange combat to actually snipe unaware targets down
• Utility Skills feel unfitting and cant be reduced in their recharge times!! bad Most of them as usual for thieves cant whyever even be used under water..terrible design..if you can’t design skils, that work on land as like in water, then just let it be and begin from start until you have a skil lidea, that can work in all areas of the game!!!
  - Shadow Meld is massively overpowered, making it possible to backstab a targed just 3x in a row, basically killing anybody with the right build within seconds, unless the victim is a heavy tanky build full of boons like protection, regeneration and retaliation, while you can perma stealth to just wait, until Shadow Meld recharged to go for your next instant kill victim
• Using rifle compared to other weapons just feel underwhelming..if you add a sniper to the game, then using the rifle should be also its most effective long range weapon and not other weapons, otherwise its pointless to call this class a sniper (german localization)

Soulbeast

• Dagger skills are unimpressive, feels liek a cheap weaker Core Thief 2.0 without Initiative and Stealth. Soulbeast should have gotten better a different Weapon – Scepter or Focus which are actually weapons the ranger can#t use yet, instead of recycling the Dagger as MH Weapon, what you could have done anytime retroactively as improvement of the Core Ranger to add MH Daggers to them as well, no need to make that with an E-Spec and waste that way the chance to add actually a new Weapon to the ranger, that woudl have been more interesting, than just gettign the Dagger recycled like getting presented warmed up cold old coffee – a weapon that the ranger already can use.
• Underwhelming Skill Design in regard of the Stances
• No Shapeshifting, would be awesoem if it could have some kind of Primeaval Beasts as unique beastforms to transform into
• Pets should have all unique skills and unique Beast Skills to increase build diversity.
  Reduce if neccessaary the amount of Ranger Pets, we have anyways too much reskins and some are so ugly, I mostly never see a single ranger player ever use them cough Rat Bears. Just let us change their pet skisn as we like, but each individual pet that remains, should have unique skills, stop please the skill recycling, it isnt good for the game and makes pets only more boring, when they could be alot more interestign, if they would be all individuals that actually change your build divesity each on their own way – yes, even if that means more effort, but effort, that woudl be worth it for the class to do.
  Eles get with every spec like quadruplle the amount of skills compared to other classes, due to their 4 elements, so wheres the problem to make pets each individual with unique skills??

Mirage

• Mirage mirror gameplay feels too short lasting to be of any good usage. Mirror Cloaks are also not long lastign enough to make any good use of ambushes,when you can use them only in the tiny time frame when you dodge. Change it rather to a mechanism, that becomes able to use for a longer time, after shattering your clones, so more clones shattered, so longer the time frame for ambushes to use them
• Axe skill AAs too similar of Scepter, all this torment spam..seriously? as if we haven’t already enough torment spam in this game since you introduced this condition, are you running out of ideas or what is the reason, that this is just another torment spammer?
• Personally the E-spec should have been made rather into a Minstrel (Bard) rather with Warhorn as weapon, would have fitted alot better to the Elona theme of PoF, just Could have easily been combined as well with the whole stuff od decepting foes, lullabying them with melodies and defeating them with fearsome battle dances that work like a merged concept of mobile stances/banners while bringing halfway back this way too the dervish, as they r dancers in one go, just without scythes – my opinion, this spec doesn’t really feel like a specialized illusionist as it cant make us see things, that aren’t true.. the Mirage Cloak aspect is rather something, with that the gameplay of the core mesmer could get improved to make their dodges more different from the other classes, under a different term – Phase Shifts or Phantasmal Veils to not completely remove all aspects of thes spec, but just merge parts of it into core mesmer, and make out of the rest a better Minstrel..unlikely to ever happen, but just my opinion as i will always favor, what fits better thematically to an expansion and this change would be a win/win for the core mesmer as like the E-Spec.. but with only 1 month left before release..what can we seriously expect here for any serious changes so short before launch.

Havent tested the others much to be able to say something about them of great usage in regard of feedback as I main mostly only Thief, Mesmer n Ranger

Kalla as a legend needs to be redone from scratch. It’s… really not well-thought-out.

DE is a one-trick pony spec that is either has no counters or is the easiest build in the game to shut down with little counterplay from the DE. Removing casts won’t help the former, keeping it as-is won’t help the latter. The sniper concept is a bad idea for the thief, especially in WvW where people gang up with groups of thieves and just spam rifle nukes without ever getting into fighting distance. As predicted, this design is simply anti-fun, and will cause people to get upset and stop playing. Malice stacks in the UI are very hard to see, and the mechanic in general was not worth taking away Assassin’s Signet from core. You’d be better off scrapping it entirely and just reverting AS imho, as this also cuts rifle burst potential from DJ while upping its non-kneel killing potency. The trait line is way too tied to Steal and the Rifle. Overall the entire thing feels like one massive gimmick that lacks purpose outside of AA’ing for PvE raid DPS.

Soulbeast needs some pretty big numerical buffs to dagger’s power coefficients and some major animation love. The animations have massive delays/casts for almost meaningless effects. Pet swap in Beast Mode needs to be allowed. The Bird Beast Mode Skill 1 (gap close) needs a bugfix as it only travels 400 range instead of the listed 1200 while having an animation length for what should be 1200 – it has nearly a full second’s duration recovery animation lock at the end which is terrible. Stance cooldowns need major changes or huge cooldown reductions. Up power damage build synergy in the trait options, but tone down Sic ’Em’s bonus damage applied to self as compensation.

Spellbreaker MH dagger feels a bit weak but OH dagger feels bonkers. OH dagger skills regularly hit 10k+ in sPvP and 15k+ in WvW. Something like A/D will hit 20k+ damage per cast on engage, have a triple gap close on weapon skills, and be able to follow up with another 20k+ eviscerate while running invuln effects and the likes.

Scourge may need an initial delay timer on barriers that lasts like .25 seconds where the effect doesn’t immediately start decaying to make it better akin to dodging.

First off – The Soulbeast’s fusion effect (Also known as “Fartshroud”) should probably be changed/removed/used only in the initial fusion and on splitting, with something less offensive to fashion wars in its place while it’s in operation. As a fashion warrior, I’ll also admit I’m not a fan of the forced bladetrail effects for Soulbeast and Spellbreaker daggers.

I think the Charr soulbeast animations need a complete overhaul – Charr have horns, tails, teeth, and claws, and should use them as their beast companions normally do (Or improve on their beast when possible) Some of these suggestions would also work for non-charr, who have similarly underwhelming animations:

Feline Skills:
Bite: Currently, the animation is… open-palmed punches? No. We have massive teeth and jaws, and should actually be able to use them. It may require tweaking of another skill or animation, such as one of the many roars
Maul: Currently it’s a double-swipe with one hand, and rather lame-looking, even for a single use. Re-use the Norn Snow Leopard transforms Auotattack. Let us rip and tear with our claws! In fact, the Snow Leopard form animations can be used for a lot of these animations, since it seems to use the Charr rig.

Devourer Skills: Alright, I admit I was hyped when they explicitly mentioned the devourer in the blog: They remembered my favorite pet! But unfortunately, the skills are lackluster.
Tail Lash- Currently, this is the wimpiest swipe/punch/uppercut I think I’ve ever seen animated outside of cheap early 3-D indi attempts at games. Sorry, but it is. It should use a larger, more dramatic animation – possibly unique. Unfortunately, Charr tails don’t arch over their heads. Therefore – we’re going to have to backflip! Other races could possibly get away with having a two-foot kick in the flip. But the current animation is terrible.
Devourer Retreat: Pirouette into the ground and pop up somewhere else? That’s not right! It should be a quick duck, followed by the tunneling to the exit and popping out again!

Bear Skills:
Again, we have Bite. It should be an actual bite, not that open-palmed punch
While not mandatory, a full-body flex would probably look better for Defy Pain.

Canine Skills:
Crippling leap: The “Two hands brought down” was dumb when Oblivion had it in 2006, and it’s dumb here. Honestly, re-using Snow Leopard skill 3’s animation would look better.
Brutal Charge: It’s a wierd, glidey kick that looks terrible. The Wolf itself lunges with its jaws. The Charr should likewise use their head- we even have horns! Re-using the Warrior’s Headbutt animation would be better than the current kick.

Drake skills:
Chomp: Again – we have teeth. Let’s use them, instead of this wierd, slow punch/swipe thing.
Tail Swipe: This is a wierd animation, and I think it distorts the body. An actual tail-swipe for Charr, and a Chuck Norris Roudhouse Kick (With the burst on the ground) for non-charr would be an improvement, IMO.

Bird Skills:
Swoop: Again with the overhead double-smash? I was hoping for something more agile and more or less floaty… though I guess Dagger 3 already stole whatever it could have been.

Spider Skills:
Okay, I’m at a loss for these. They look terrible (Just throwing something), but I have no idea what they could be.

Porcine Skills: OKAY SO THIS IS WHERE ALL THE COOLANIMATONS ARE HIDING! Brutal Charge should finish with a headbutt instead of a kick, though. We may not have tusks, but we do have horns.

Wyvern Skills:
Again with the Tail Lash – I’d rather it be an actual tail lash instead of this wierd, glitchy multispin.
Wing Buffet: This one needs to be reworked for all races. We should leap up with our arms oustretched for balance (Like the Crane pose from Karate Kid), and kick with both legs to knock our enemies back!

The bristleback skill is fun and fine.

The Smokescale’s Smoke assault is fine, but the Takedown sounds like it should be a tackle with both arms outstretched., not Yet Another Kick.

Jacaranda: These skills might look better as a spit instead of a throw, but possibly not.

Rock Gazelle: Finally! Animations that match our attacks! Just… bring the head down a bit more for Charr, so we’re slamming with our horns (Except for the minority of horns that are front-facing instead of top-covering or back-facing)

tried each class for 10 minutes in the PvP and WvW preview weekend

no matter what I tried I just could not even get into any of it at all .

the test dummy’s was ok and all but just could not get into it at all .

Necro shilds need to be fixed! They dissapear in less than 2 seconds

Guardian, please remove the mantra cone effect.

Also…
REMOVE THE SOFT TRINITY FROM PVE , I mean… give a clear role (Tank, support, healer, dps (power), dps (condi)) at least in each elite class. For example. The druid is the best PVE healer because it has 2 roles in one.

I really want to be a support/healer with my Necro and Guaridan in PVE especially with the new elites class but vs a Druid healer it will be impposible.

Excelsior.

I was quite shocked when I mouse-over’d a skill and my screen literally has been blocked with tooltips because everything does 50 boons, 30 CCs, 5 “if”-cases and 26 combos.

Why can’t a sniper just be a sniper – quick and dirty? It feels like a dump truck being driven in Venice: Tourists everywhere, the canals, buildings, the dashboar has 150 lights blinking and accoustic signals give you the rest.

But the more I think about it, I might actually really love deadeye in PvE, even though the SFX are so bad.

I wrote like a Bookah and it was fun!

waiting to see each in PvE play

Deadeye — break stationary kneel by movement keys
Renegade — quicker shots for short bow
Weaver — allow weapon swapping (I can dream)

Others I didn’t play much

Please completely rework the Renegade

1. Kalla was a rebel Charr, the Legend-Skills feel more like a cheap Ritualist.
A more guerilla themed Legend would be more appropriate imo (Kalla’s Fervor is nicely themed for the spec) .

2. Rev was always about Torment and Burn when playing Condi, now we got bleed traits and only 2 skills on bow give us bleeds….rly? Stick to torment/burn for rev (having only 2-3 dmg conditions also makes the +X% Sigils for specific condis better).

3. Please don’t force only 1 skill type on the Legends just because Glint was fine with it, Revenants cant swap these and it feels just bad only to be able to summom stationary minions.

4. Stun-Break on a Heal?!

Soulbeast

Have to say I really like this spec and it is a good deal of fun. I cannot speak from a PvE perspective, but those saying that core ranger is better than SB in PvP or WvW are wrong. Soulbeast offers a lot of customization and variability. It is suitable to play as a condition, power, or support oriented character. Druid may outshine it, but they are different play styles.

The most important thing you guys can do at the moment is iron out some of the bugs (Doylak’s Stance doesn’t work, Smoke Assault doesn’t evade). Fixing the bugs alone will make the spec better than it was prior.

Some pet effects that were given to us need to be adjusted.

• Attack of Opportunity triggering on Maul is quite unfair. Retain the Attack of Opportunity but simply have it enabled after the attack has finished.
• Empathetic Bond should be a flat 20% condition reduction in Beastmode instead of doing nothing.
• Sic Em’ may be too strong as a 40% damage boost in Beastmode, but maybe not as well. If it proves too strong, do not increase the recharge of the skill. Reduce it’s damage bonus to 25% (Signet of the Wild had this, so we know it is balanced) at most.
• On Signet of the Wild, you made it’s active effect really bad. I understand why the change was made. Stacking Sic Em’, Doylak’s Stance (unbugged), and Signet of the Wild would make a soulbeast ranger upstoppable. Yet there’s no need for it’s active to be as bad as it is. Consider changing it to something better. It would be nice if it still granted stability since core ranger is pretty stabless at the moment. Perhaps instead of a damage increase as it once granted, have it reduce damage by 25% when active and lower the stability duration it used to have.
• Mainhand Dagger is not great. It is ok, but should be better. Evasion frames on #3 seems natural and balanced. I think the weapon overall needs a damage boost. The #2 skill is quite lame. It should’ve been more unique and done something different other than apply more conditions.
• Bear Stance – Great skill, with great healing potential. But that’s the thing, it’s potential is great, but often the healing output is not. If fighting a power oriented character, you cannot make use of the full healing for you will not be showered with conditions. Consider upping the base heal to ~7k, but in return, slash the healing per condition consumed by half.
• Vulture Stance – Might be lacking, might not be. I did not use it much because it seemed weak.
• Griffon Stance – I would say either leave the skill as is and reduce it’s recharge to 30s, OR keep its recharge the same and have it fully restore endurance on use.
• One Wolf Pack – Not too sure about this one. It will probably never see use considering how important Strength of the Pack is.
• Guard and Search and Rescue – These skills do nothing in beastmode aside from grant you boons if traited. Have them do something at the least.
• Predator’s Cunning – It’s a hit and miss trait. It has good potential, but it’s hard to make an effective build around. Consider significantly reducing the lifesteal, but instead have it trigger on all conditions. This would make it effective in many builds, especially those condition oriented.
• Worldly Impact – Good skill with a few changes I think should be made. Firstly, because you are immobile while casting, it’s radius should be buffed to 300 and it’s casting time reduced to 3/4s. Secondly, it should quite obviously be a blast finish.
• Photo Synthesize – Good skill, reduce its’ cast time to 1/2s.
• Spiritual Retrieve – Great skill, but reduce its’ cast time to 1s.
• Unflinching Fortitude – Great skill, but consider removing its’ cast time.
• Beast Skills don’t receive a reduced recharge from the beastmastery traitline. I don’t know if this is intended on your part or not but some clarity would be appreciated.

Overall I really enjoyed soulbeast and look foward to playing with it again.

Firebrand:

Please make mantras an AoE… the cone is so narrow and tiny, it was a disappointment and doesn’t look that well thought out for an elite with so little mobility.
Also, tomes having cast times on top of skill cast times and long cooldowns regardless of how many pages you used don’t lend well to using them reactively… it’d be fun if the playstyle was faster.

Soulbeast:

• Some of the Beast skills really need less of a cast time, running black bear gives 2 damage immunities but are useless with the amount of stuns in the game. Too much planning ahead for an “Oh S****” button.
• Bear Stance could use less of a cast time, since there’s more condition builds in the game now with PoF coming, we’ll need this on demand. It’s currently interrupted too easily.
• One Wolf Pack could use a condition damaging effect
• Oppressive Superiority doesn’t need the health restraints. It’s a GM trait, give it some oomph.
• Give us the ability to swap pets whilst in Beastmode. There are situations where dropping out of Beastmode is a bad idea, being able to swap to use other skills would be helpful.
• Vulture Stance, Might above 50% health isn’t great since might is easily gained. Consider changing to Torment over 50% and Poison under 50%. Perhaps up the stance duration for a slight buff to condition builds.
• For a more extreme suggestion, take the conditions off the Dagger mainhand, buff the power coefficients and add conditions to mainhand Sword. Soulbeast feels more like a power spec, give its weapon power and give Sword a role in making core Ranger condition builds better.
• Make the Beastmode “fart effect” only appear for a few seconds upon entering Beastmode. If you(when*, wink wink) add pet swap within Beastmode then have the effect play again to warn opponents that you’ve pets/abilities.

I spent the bulk of my time in the Deadeye spec and only dabbled with Spellbreaker so will speak only to the former.

I was never too keen on Rifle as weapon as what had always drawn me to thief style of play was the quickness and mobility. That said on playing I decided to spend the majority of my time in the weaponset I felt I would least like.

At first it all seemed clunky and the use of the skills did not seem fluid but I persisted and became enamored more and more wih the weapon the more I played. I did go off to try other weaponsets when i got one of those “This would work great with….” moments but then would come back again to Rifle.

I really liked it. I think the designers did a very good job with it. Yes gameplay does change and how I think of thief changed but the when the hunt for my next target started, I was really immersed in the playstyle.

I think this “new feel” of a spec and the immersion facto is as important as the mechanics and the raw numbers. The Numbers can alwys be tweaked.

Ther aree some tweaks needed but out of the gate I am quite impressed with the Spec. It does “feel different” and I only began to explore the synergies it would have with other sets.

I had fun. Well done.

Played Holosmith and (to a lesser extend) Weaver over the weekend, which are my 2nd main and main classes respectively.

In general:
I can see that most Gen2 Elites have gotten notably more dev-time and polish and they all look very interesting in at least a few aspects.
However some effect animations are a little too offset from the usual theme of the class (purely visually) making them feel a little disconnected. (e.g. Axe-Symbol on Firebrand)

Specifics:
Weaver: A very interesting idea; embraced to the limit of what a human mind can bear. Weaver is a riddiculously complicated class with an exponentially high skill ceiling. Basically it’s Elementalist².
While that is cool, new and shiny at first glance it’s also its biggest downside:
It’s Just. Too. Much.
I have near 3000 hours in ele and I gave up after 3.5 hours on the golem just reading tooltips. I predict even qT taking a few weeks until all synergies are discovered on all weapons and all are wieghted against each other.
I can’t even begin to fathom where this Elite is going. Is it FL support because of some water synergies? Will scepter take a DPS role? Will it be a duelist?
While Tempest was “abused” as a DPS spec (because of literally a singular trait) it was clearly designed with defensive support in mind. That said: Weaver is just this Quantum particle that’s neither 1 nor 0 but every proportion inbetween.

Holosmith: In regards to Skill impact feels a lot like the HoT-Launch-Version of Scrapper to me. It has a lot of control, nice sustain while hitting quite hard.
That in mind it feels extremely satsifying as a Frontline brawler and an exceptional duelist, just like launch scrapper did.
On the same note I have the fear of the story repeating itself. Scrapper might still be a very viable class for PvP scenarios, but even in Open PvE I have ultimately switched to a Core spec, because Scrapper felt more and more underwhelming over time.
I feel that the Heat mechanic is a big enough layer to allow for the Forge to hit as hard as it does (ok maybe a little lower, but not too much.) the fact that you actually damage yourself if you misplay it is incredibly punishing (in a good way), imo enough to give the Forge this power.
Just like with Scrapper I feel this is the clear Power Engie that I wanted, because I don’t really dig Condi on Engineer.

I tried out all the classes a little bit, but since I’m a PvE player, I couldn’t get much actual combat experience in any of them. All of them had some interesting elements, but all of them also had some fatal flaws, and very few of them seemed to be something I would choose over an HoT spec.

Holosmith: + Fun and varied abilities, cool visuals. – Nothing really, good job.

Weaver: +Lots of interesting abilities to mess with. -confusing to use and there needs to be a bigger visual showing what the primary element is.

Renegade: + I like the SB abilities with The Dreamer. -There is no reason to take this spec over Herald, we need a way to equip both at once. Also, Seven Shot needs to cluster up to prevent terrain misfires.

Scourge: +nifty visuals on several attacks. – Why? Why would I want to give up Reaper for this? No GS, no summons, no Reaper form, the sand totem things are pretty lame and too much seems based on boon corruption when enemies rarely have boons.

Spellbreaker: +some dagger skills look cool, nice counter ability. – Utilities are all lame, and there seems to be absolutely no purpose to this spec when enemies rarely have boons.

Deadeye: +Rifle is a nifty weapon and the Mark mechanic has some cool implications. -Kneel is too much of a pain to get out of, and since Acrobatics was nerfed to make Daredevil, a non-DD Thief is too lacking in mobility. Either restore the pre-HoT core Thief or add more mobility to Deadeye.

Firebrand: +Nice idea. -Awful execution. The tomes need to be rebuilt from the ground up. They are not strong enough or convenient enough to be “occasional” things, and on too long a CD to be a core ability. I would prefer changes to make them something you can use at will, like Elements or Engi Kits.

Mirage: +I enjoy the axe and teleporting abilities. – Dodge does not move you around, which is a necessary part of this game, given all the AoE circles. Mirrors are also counter-intuitive. Maybe they should just provide Endurance.

Only one thing is absolutely clear. The game requires a build-swapping button. Even if the PoF specs have some uses, they are still very situational, and having to manually swap a dozen or more factors to change from a Deadeye to a Daredevil and back again is way more hassle than it’s worth.

dragonkain.3984:

Lets start from the most underpowered spec of this expansion, which is…

• Soulbeast.

Do you realize that if we trade something like a ranger pet, we should get something more powerful in return to justify losing that useful pet?

Seriously, no. The soulbeast is very strong at the moment, and by absorbing the pet you get free stat bonuses. Also you’re not forced to keep the pet absorbed. It’s an additional mechanic. You keep your pet out until it’s low on hp or you need dps bursts.

I really liked the elite class soul beast, I managed to adapt the builds in a way that I had a lot of fun, but the damages for example of f1 and f2 of the wyverns when absolved is very weak if compared to other pets, What has discouraged me, also need to improve the attributes when absolving the pets, also the trait of the second column left me with no option of choice because I do not use protection, I do not use quickness or poison .. ..

In the most irenio is to be congratulated, I liked it very much and I intend to use soul beast, so I bought the POF expansion

The elite one wolf pack think it needs an improvement, because if it compares to strenght of the pack it becomes very weak, I tested it and saw that I only doubled the damage and did not receive anything else, while strenght of the pack delivered me fury, might , Stability and switness for 60s as well.

Some parts of the traits and stances could have something better to help both damage and sustain of soulbeast, but we’ll see what you guys are going to do there, I’m waiting to know what changes will have for the best we can play each with the elite class that Likes. Rather they could give some attribute to the pet of healing, expertise and concentration ..

It would also be nice if we could use the f2 of the pets even cast, but I think it would give more work to implement maybe …

So far my experience about weaver (played 3 days sPvP):

The good:
- become complex;
- more flexibility;
- the design idea is not just great – it’s genius idea;
- nice animation;

The bad:
- the implementation of this idea is NOT FUN due to GCD, we can not react to problems anymore; even arcane path does not help much;
The feeling of weaver – slow and clunky gameplay. Like under constant “stun” debuff.
- So this long GCD on attunement swap is the most annoying thing in whole PoF PvP
– skills on off-hand become unusable.
Example: I am under heavy-pressure from enemy and I want to use ASAP [Obsidian Flesh], I switch to Earth, but just main-hand was switched, need to wait 4s cooldown, then press again Earth, so around 5s I must wait before [Obsidian Flesh] , during this time I will be already killed 2-3 times in pvp… Unravel is too weak to take it on to skill-slot
- weak sustainability in general, zero condy removal in condy meta is a joke.
also no regen from stances -> no condy removal from water trait, if take condy removal skills, then lose stances;
- shield is so small – totally useless (just look to damage from enemies, from deadeye for example …)
- fresh air trait become unusable, because of attunement logic
- no enough blast finishers/combo fields (stance=no blast), during long GCD on attunement switching combo fields expired too fast! blasts on right hand are unusable
- useless Elite ,even just primordal stance is much stronger
- sword skills need some damage buff ,
- dual skills have to be more usefull on scepeter (add conditions)

How to improve:
- remove 4s cooldown (GCD) on attunement switching , you may leave CD on attunement that you left.
- increase shield by 250-300% at least;
- add regeneration on a stance 6s, make stance 50%-70% longer and reduce CD OR add aura to each stance
- increase longevity of combo fields (water 40% / fire 60%)
- add removing of some enemy’s buffs to Elite perfect wave, otherwise enemy will ignore this CC just by using one simple stack of stability
- sword skills add 40-50% to damage
- add conditions to Scepeter dual skills at least (Scepeter use to be condy weapon)
- make dual skill stronger than normal 3 skills (Phoenix)