I haven’t played them too much, but 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. Axe is meh, but it’s another choice in the kitten nal, and a dedicated condi weapon. Whole spec seems condi based. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Without having crunched any numbers they seem to be about the same damage. But since you cant 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. 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 and roaming, 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.
Necro: Seems like it could be good, but I don’t get it. There’s no death shroud. On paper, yeah, there’s a ton of boon corruption, really, too much. It’s overpowered. This could be great for WvW. But like half of the necro traits centers around death shroud skills, like gaining buffs or applying condition when you use shroud 1 or whatever. That doens’t exist here. Some of these traits are the adept ones, so you can’t even spec out of it. They are basically trying to make the necro into a different class, and it just doesn’t work in the theme and traits. That’s very dissapointing. But the skills are ideal for large group combat. 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. This is insainly op for WvW, small or large scale combat, 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 a bit too much engergy. 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. They didn’t introduce another spec with lots of resistance and I can only recall one skill on another class that had resistance. No matter how many cleanses your group has, resistance is a must, especially with the necro having a ton of boon corruption [edit: honestly, there’s so much boon corruption here, add to that the existing boon corruption, and it doesn’t matter what your reistance is. It will be stripped and I see this needing a massive nerf ir it will be the end of WvW], the warrior with boon removal, and the massive condi damage that will come form revs, necros, guards, and what have you, this seems like the inevitable meta shift, and I find that a shame.
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.
Blackgate Native. It takes tremendous strength and skill to pull a lever.
