Guild Wars 2

Be viable in top tier comps when the upcoming balance changes go live?

If so, how… and, if not, why don’t you think so?

Way too early to say..

condi-based rangers will be for sure. their susceptibility to burst and getting +1’d by thieves while fighting something else has been addressed by various traits. Quickdraw is probably one of the best if not the best GM in the game, and it along with Beastly Warden adds a lot of utility to our toolkit. pets may be very useful as well if BW is instacast with a decent range. also, ranger condi damage is going to be nasty with poison stacking and +33% bleed damage.

LB rangers will be significantly stronger than they are currently because their survivability and lack of utility has also been addressed via Quickdraw and a few other changes. I really do see exceptional power rangers being viable as roaming assassins.

but once again, the meta will revolve around the thief, so much depends on how hard devs messed that up.

This is my personal opinion: The meta won’t change, the TOP team will still run double warrior ( shoutbow or new hambow) or double engi and at least one med guardian, fewer teams will run double med guardian.

Thief will be ever present in every single team and Mesmer will see much more play respect to now, Ranger will remain more or less the same, you’ll see this class a little more often and finally Elementalist , the changes did not do much for the status quo, no updates on weapon skills and utilities, at most ele will see a similar level of play respect to now, at worst ele will keep falling out of favour

will those specs be as viable with cele’s condi damage and sustain getting nerfed?

As far as eles go…depends a lot on how amulets are changed. Eles are very much going to be pigeon-holed into amulets with a decent amount of vitality and toughness. So it will depend on if any of the builds work well with cele, soldiers, and zerker amulets. Without vitality and precision from traitlines, even valks is 100% useless.

But maybe amulets will be more hybridized in general….

Necromancer will be even less viable in sPvP than before because they were nerfed.

What? Ele is already in the top tier. They actually receive quite some nice buffs too.
Why would it fall from High tier PVP?

Toxsa.2701:

What? Ele is already in the top tier. They actually receive quite some nice buffs too.
Why would it fall from High tier PVP?

Just because something is in a good place now and will be getting buffs for the future, doesn’t mean it will automatically perform well.

Example:

Elementalist Now: 3. Elementalist After Patch: 5.

Every Other Class Now 2. Every Other Class After Patch: 8.

Before the patch Ele was stronger than every other class, AND THEY ARE GETTING BUFFED… OMG.

Yes but every other class got buffed way more which will ultimately put Elementalist at a huge disadvantage.

Disclaimer: Those figures were all made up to bring across a point.

Ele

Most likely they will be very viable. Both tanky/sustain builds similar to cele-staff and cele-DD look very strong and even Fresh Air could be viable, depending on the meta.

Ranger

I have some pretty nice builds in mind for ranger, with taunting/blinding/weakening pets, or quick-draw PowerRanger. Even tankier builds (maybe with shouts?) are a possibility.
But the biggest problem I see is that one of the best targets for the Ranger to target (mesmer), will now have tons of reflect. Depending on the Meta, there could simply be too much projectile reflect/absorption for the Ranger to be viable (Mesmer, Staff-Ele, S/F-Ele, Guardian with Shield), or at least the Ranger will be pretty easy to hardcounter.

Necro

No clue: There are simply too much changes to the class itself and all the other classes to know it without trying. But all the current Meta-classes look so freaking strong, that it probably will at best still be a niche-pick for top-teams.

^that’s why pets are gonna be so valuable. cant reflect a bird with 25 stacks of might critting your face for 6k while taunting in an aoe.

mistsim.2748:

^that’s why pets are gonna be so valuable. cant reflect a bird with 25 stacks of might critting your face for 6k while taunting in an aoe.

true, and beastmastery gives them pretty decent stats as well.

I’d probably go for the birds with the bleed-F2: lowest CD on the F2 for weakness and blind and they benefit heavily from the added ferocity.

Still don’t know if the taunt is 15 ICD per Pet or in general and the size of the AoE of blind and taunt are very important as well.
We don’t exactly know how taunting works as well – do the taunted enemies just attack with their autoattack? Can they dodge while taunted or use other atk-skills? Pretty important stuff we don’t yet know.

But Ranger is surely gonna get more fun to play and require more skill: Interrupting is much stronger, so you actually want to use your daze/knockbacks for interrupting, pet-positioning is much more important for the taunts and AoE, quick-draw could be a very versatile trait that needs to be used on different skills depending on the situation (since ranger weapon-skills are very diverse in what they do: offense, defense, interrupts, movement).

I actually really look forward to try out those builds and they’ll probably be the first ones I’ll try (even though ranger is not my main).

D/D Elementalists will probably only be viable as total bunkers (basically nothing much will change), the damage is getting nerfed too much in air and the other classes buffs are so substantial.

I expect the new ele meta to be earth/water/arcana 0-0-6-6-6 just because so much condi will be spammed you will need the cleanse on such a squishy class.

Aura build may be possible but they’ll probably be lackluster without arcana.

Jasher.6580:

Toxsa.2701:

What? Ele is already in the top tier. They actually receive quite some nice buffs too.
Why would it fall from High tier PVP?

Example:

Elementalist Now: 3. Elementalist After Patch: 5.

Every Other Class Now 2. Every Other Class After Patch: 8.

Before the patch Ele was stronger than every other class, AND THEY ARE GETTING BUFFED… OMG.

Yes but every other class got buffed way more which will ultimately put Elementalist at a huge disadvantage.

Orrrrrrr…. maybe it means that the other classes will be on a more even playing field with ele? I mean D/D celestial ele was really strong ever since celestial got buffed and the cleansing water icd got taken out. Even though it will be mostly the same as it is now, I think it would be strange to say that ele will fall out of favor simply because other classes are a bit more viable than before.

The main problem with ele’s visibility, in my opinion, is that people have gotten bored of it, because we’ve been using essentially the same build for 3 years. Still, its effective now, but many ele players have switched up the classes they play in tournaments just to deal with that boredom, and the rotation heavy playstyle doesn’t help with that.

The biggest buff to ele in my opinion is being able to take a full non arcane/water, traitline, and after asking some top ele players, they predict that fire will be ideal for celestial, and air for zerk, as earth is only good for raw bunkering, and things like warriors have and will continue to outclass ele in that role.

Still, I would argue that mesmer should replace elementalist in the title of this thread, simply because memser visibility in NA pvp has been very very slim. Even with portal, until this patch, thief has objectively outclassed mesmer altoghether. The elementalist has not had those problems with visibility. A shoutbow warrior may outclass a D/D elementalist in the bruiser/team support role, but it hasn’t really been enough to push it out of the meta all together.

Xillllix.3485:

D/D Elementalists will probably only be viable as total bunkers (basically nothing much will change), the damage is getting nerfed too much in air and the other classes buffs are so substantial.

I see great potential for more dps-oriented builds (still with tons of sustain and cele though) on DD-Eles (as well as S/D and S/F), for example:

DD Fire-Aura
http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-o33;2B2-V0y4wMFZ0;9;402G;0246036146;9;90K

PowerBottom.5796:

mistsim.2748:

^that’s why pets are gonna be so valuable. cant reflect a bird with 25 stacks of might critting your face for 6k while taunting in an aoe.

true, and beastmastery gives them pretty decent stats as well.

I’d probably go for the birds with the bleed-F2: lowest CD on the F2 for weakness and blind and they benefit heavily from the added ferocity.

Still don’t know if the taunt is 15 ICD per Pet or in general and the size of the AoE of blind and taunt are very important as well.
We don’t exactly know how taunting works as well – do the taunted enemies just attack with their autoattack? Can they dodge while taunted or use other atk-skills? Pretty important stuff we don’t yet know.

But Ranger is surely gonna get more fun to play and require more skill: Interrupting is much stronger, so you actually want to use your daze/knockbacks for interrupting, pet-positioning is much more important for the taunts and AoE, quick-draw could be a very versatile trait that needs to be used on different skills depending on the situation (since ranger weapon-skills are very diverse in what they do: offense, defense, interrupts, movement).

I actually really look forward to try out those builds and they’ll probably be the first ones I’ll try (even though ranger is not my main).

taunt is a status effect, so people will need to use their stun breakers. if they cant stun break, they will be forced to eat the pet’s f2 plus your condis. BW’s effectiveness will depend a lot on 1) cast time, 2) conditions required to cast it, and 3) aoe range. best case scenario: instacast, does not require pet to make contact with its f2 skill, and at least 300 range. anything less and we wont be able to use BW reactively. but if these conditions are satisfied, it’s going to be insanely good. peels, rez interrupts, stomp interrupts, heal interrupts. snow owl and raven have a 16s cd on f2, so we’ll be able to hit BW almost as soon as it’s off CD.

nearlight.3064:

-snip-

I’ll address a few points here. The first thing I’d like to highlight is that I wasn’t necessarily singling out Elementalists. I don’t play an Ele at all.

Secondly, I don’t agree with your reasoning that Ele’s are slowly falling out of the meta because they are boring. You are using a personal experience or an isolated example instead of actual evidence. As a matter of fact, after speaking with actual players who play Elementalists competitively, they give me other reasons (most of which revolve around the dominance of Shoutbow Warriors).

Thirdly, I didn’t include Mesmer in the title because so far the upcoming changes to Mesmers look incredible. I am almost completely confident Mesmers will do well.