Guild Wars 2

Magic casters are a dying breed, i see more and more warriors,thieves and guardians with each addition to the game. They keep getting buffs while other classes receive nerf after nerf. Power is so much more powerful, -.- get it, than conditions right now, -40% condition duration from food and -% condition duration from runes, throw in condition cleanses and bam, conditions can hardly hit some people.

Also, mobility. Warriors and thieves have so much mobility behind them its nearly impossible to escape or lock down. Take a necro, you look at a necro and we have to stand in place, code of in game conduct look it up, cant do anything to escape, fight or die. Hit a warrior with my cc ( cripple, weakness, chill, fear) which is suppose to be my defense and its gone within a second, how is that balanced.

It obvious what needs to be done, Anet stronger utilities clearly known compare of correct knowledge. Better utilities to help counter, why are certain class stun breakers on long cooldowns while others are only half the time?

so much wrong w this post
a) warr, thief, NECRO is the current meta in wvw, not thiefs
b) thiefs gets nerfed every patch, as the unwanted redheaded love child nobody wants
c) conditions are really OP in current meta, & the example u mentionned (warr) is one of the best cleansing classes, if u hit a thief w some conditions they melt quite eassily
d) y thief has mobility, its his only defence as one of the lowest base hp char’s, stelathed thiefs can still be hit, warr thats another story, they could use some balancing here & there
e) better utilities for necro? a wellomancer is a serious thread, they’d better fix thiefs venoms or traps for example, instead of adding another useless heal-venom

Bertenburny.5103:

so much wrong w this post
a) warr, thief, NECRO is the current meta in wvw, not thiefs
b) thiefs gets nerfed every patch, as the unwanted redheaded love child nobody wants
c) conditions are really OP in current meta, & the example u mentionned (warr) is one of the best cleansing classes, if u hit a thief w some conditions they melt quite eassily
d) y thief has mobility, its his only defence as one of the lowest base hp char’s, stelathed thiefs can still be hit, warr thats another story, they could use some balancing here & there
e) better utilities for necro? a wellomancer is a serious thread, they’d better fix thiefs venoms or traps for example, instead of adding another useless heal-venom

Stop showing you play a thief, it’s obvious…

Thieves are utterly broken in anything but a zerg, and stealth needs to be GUTED (or removed for anything above a couple seconds of stealth every 120s or so), because there is absolutlely NO counter to stealth, and thieves can spend (even now after the supposed “nerf” to it) 80+% of their time in stealth for above 2 mins.

There is a problem with ANY class when 5+ people with cc can only kill it by :
- cornering him in a place where it’s only way out is jumping to his death, giving credits to the people killing him
- stacking huge amounts of CC, AoEs and conditions
- facing a bad thief

because otherwise it’s gone.

And don’t pretend thieves aren’t everywhere in WvW, 99% of the solo/small group roamers are made of thieves or mostly thieves, to go cap camps in 2s, kill everything that isn’t 5+times more than them in seconds and then run away because you can’t catch them if they aren’t stupid, utterly bad AND undergeared AND with a bad build.

Warriors are a bit of a pain on certain points yes, but those points got hit harder than any other classes recently (the last 2 patches at least), and they are falling in line.

You don’t have to be 3/4v1 to force a warrior to run (even if to catch him it’s a bit harder), and a warrior won’t kill any dolly in 10s when it’s defended by 4 people then run in stealth again, he won’t get the dolly without dying (and most of the time he dies without getting the dolly).

For the op :
the problem is that there isn’t ONE WvW, there is multiple WvW.

There is a HUGE difference between WvW zerg (where there is sooo mucchhh conditions removal and buffs and stacking and cleanse and stability) than cc/conditions roughly doesn’t matter, and most of the time, people drop so fast that conditions aren’t useful because the ramp up time is too long, and solo/small group roaming where conditions are REALLY strong to the point of being broken (there is a reason why pretty much every single solo roaming builds out there are condition based….on top of the most broken ones using perplexity runes atop of it).

But yes, Necros should get a bit of mobility at least, because it’s painful right now how you can’t get anyone (worst case, they run away, you are screwed because you’ll never catch up, unless you are packing your kit with mobility, in which case you die, because you have zero efficiency….), and a couple changes here and there to stop having to get into stupid lines because traits are all over the place (having pet traits in curse/spite/death is ridiculous, same way that having staff traits in 2/3 different branches is, or having DS traits in 2/3 lines too), on top of the fact it’s more than time to get a viable life leech build that would change quite some things too and could make lacking mobility “bearable”.

Oh and in WvW it’s : zergs =War/Guardian mostly, some necros, elementalists (for the insance amount of damage and utility they bring), rest is less seen (outside of people wanting to bring utility with Mesmer, easy tags with Rangers and/or people that only play one class)
solo roaming : thieves and mesmers all day long even more than Warriors (and that says a LOT when you realize the amount of warriors out there).

Small groups : truckload of thieves/mesmer with a couple guardians/warriors/necros there.

The only ones that could really complain about the current state of WvW (but can’t because of their state in PvE and sPvP) are Rangers and Engi, but even then, Rangers are probably the easiest solo camp cappers out there, that can do it even upscalled (thieves are the most painful ones to fight, but they take longer to take camps, and require more gear to do so).

No stability (unless 30 points invested), absolutely crap swiftness from one offhand skill that puts you into combat if anything “alive” is close to you, or using a signet with a crap active leaving one decent utility skill with a very long cooldown, one gap closer that you’re lucky if it hits anything that isn’t stationary. Death Shroud that locks you out of any form of healing and melts when focused by a few decent players. Yeah, necro is the epitome of fight or die.

You wanna talk corruption and conditions? Staff #1 nerfed, Sceptor AA nerfed, Staff #4 broken, Corrupt Boon nerfed, Well of Corruption converting one boon per pulse only, only idiots stay in your wells. Epidemic and Signet of Malice, total joke against a well organised group. That leaves solo or roaming for a condition necro only.

Yes a power well necro is powerful offensively, defensively if you’re out of position GG, stand and fight is the only option. Oh, they also got the worst new heal period.

You say thieves have stealth and mobility as defense, yes agreed, except Ele’s used to have mobility and good regen, both nerfed. How many thieves you find actually building into survivability? 5% 10%? 90% of Ele’s do just that.

Thieves were never meant to be zerg material and if you can’t do your job as part of a small roaming group, well that’s your own problem.

MarzAttakz.9608:

No stability (unless 30 points invested), absolutely crap swiftness from one offhand skill that puts you into combat if anything “alive” is close to you, or using a signet with a crap active leaving one decent utility skill with a very long cooldown, one gap closer that you’re lucky if it hits anything that isn’t stationary. Death Shroud that locks you out of any form of healing and melts when focused by a few decent players. Yeah, necro is the epitome of fight or die.

You wanna talk corruption and conditions? Staff #1 nerfed, Sceptor AA nerfed, Staff #4 broken, Corrupt Boon nerfed, Well of Corruption converting one boon per pulse only, only idiots stay in your wells. Epidemic and Signet of Malice, total joke against a well organised group. That leaves solo or roaming for a condition necro only.

Yes a power well necro is powerful offensively, defensively if you’re out of position GG, stand and fight is the only option. Oh, they also got the worst new heal period.

You say thieves have stealth and mobility as defense, yes agreed, except Ele’s used to have mobility and good regen, both nerfed. How many thieves you find actually building into survivability? 5% 10%? 90% of Ele’s do just that.

Thieves were never meant to be zerg material and if you can’t do your job as part of a small roaming group, well that’s your own problem.

I main a necro, i know perfectly well the drawbacks of it, the problem is still the same, in small groups, conditions are a problem, and necros are insanely good at applying them/spreading them to multiple targets.

I wouldn’t mind some tweaks/change to mobility/utility so it’st not as painfull (beinf locked out of pretty much, including stomping, in DS is beyond stupid for exemple), but necros are far away from totally broken either…..

Main problem is always the same, conditions and condition removal, either you/your group don’t have enough condition removal (or isn’t organized enough to exploit them properly) and you are screwed as soon as you fight condition based builds (thieves, mesmer, necros, engi and a couple others), or you have, and those builds are useless and free kills (except thieves, they’ll still get away :p).

Anet did the same design error than pretty much every multiplayer games out there with cc/debuffs and the way to “counter” and “balance” them, it’s ALWAYS broken somewhere.

Either in big groups, or in small pvp, or in roaming or in pve (most of the time in multiple places, broken in different ways).

The problem is that they roughly decided that balance wouldn’t occur for :
- PvE
- WvW
outside of very specific blattant broken things, and even then, it would take months/years (see : runes of perplexity, there is a reason they don’t work in sPvP….).

They only balance out of sPvP, which is a very specific environnement (where mobility matter less, at least some sort of it), and the rest is screwed.

Sadly, with all they’ve shown recently, in particular with the CDI project, it won’t change soon.

PvE seems to be there to allow people to grind the money/karma to gear up for sPvP in their mind, WvW i don’t know what it should be, but it’s a clusterkitten of tremendous dimensions, with huge problems that take a couple hours to fix and still aren’t after over 18months, and everything is more or less put on “balancing” sPvP.

It’s sad.

You just have to take a look at the TP, it’s interface, and the totally lacking and useless filters to understand.

Changing those filters is a matter of hours of work for 2 persons :
- one to add the requests for the filters (which are easy to write, they are the same than existing requests, except they target different attributes)
- one to change the ui to allow those filters

and yet, we still have a TP that is lacking, useless and skeletal comparing to pretty much the worst TP of the worst MMO released in the last 15 years. :/

It’s a shame what Anet is doing, because they had tremendous potential, some great ideas/realisations, but they ruin everything by being lazzy and ignoring vast portions of the game.

Oh and i forgot, if you have problems with travel as an Elementalist (a caster) you’ve got a problem.

If it’s skirmishes/solo roaming you have a problem with as a Mesmer you’ve got an even worse problem honestly.

Casters aren’t bad at all as a whole, but they all have quite steep drawbacks in some situations, and the zerg meta isn’t so kind on (most of) them, due to the sheer amount of damage you take when in a frontline zerg.

But they are still the Kings of utility, and deadly in roaming/small groups.

Every class is going the way of the dodo except Warriors, Guardians, and Necromancers. The current meta just doesn’t support anything but large zergs and hard CC. If you can’t provide this in a front line role you’re not going to have a place on the team.

Guardian
Warrior
Necromancer
Elementalist
Mesmer
Engineer
Thief
Ranger

Atherakhia.4086:

Every class is going the way of the dodo except Warriors, Guardians, and Necromancers. The current meta just doesn’t support anything but large zergs and hard CC. If you can’t provide this in a front line role you’re not going to have a place on the team.

Guardian
Warrior
Necromancer
Elementalist
Mesmer
Engineer
Thief
Ranger

Except it’s not true.

Yes, the frontline is thrusted by Guardians/Wars (and sometimes Necro, but not that much) due to their survivability (“surprise”, the frontline is the heavy armored meat shields like in any other game, i wonder why ?), but you still need quite some Elem and Mesmer (and some Engi if specced right) to make that frontline survive properly, it’s just that people are so used to mindlessly rush spamming 1 they don’t realize the WORLD there is between mindless pug zerg and coordinated 20+ man (guild) group with raid setup…..

Really the only ones that are (mostly) screwed in the zerg meta are rangers and engi and thieves, because they mostly aren’t great in Zergs (even if rangers are able to tag a truckload of people with barage and hence getting fat loot, they aren’t really “useful” to the zerg….), but those 3 are really good/great in solo/small group roaming/havoc teams to flip camps quite fast (or even take a tower with 2/3 peeps, it works really well with a ranger or 2 to tank).

ie : things are mostly working for pretty much everyone, specially if you stop only considering the “mindless pug zerg mentality”.

Filovirus.6258:

Bertenburny.5103:

Stop showing you play a thief, it’s obvious…

yes I play one, also warr, guard, engi…
all I’m saying is its easy to play a class like warrior, there’s alot of room for error
thief aint easy, the slightest mistake costs u bigtime, thief has to be played good or not played at all
everybody keeps crying OPOPOPnerfnerfnerf, & now the class comes close to ranger …
& invis aint godmode, u can still hit him w aoe’s & such, while thief can do nothing in stealth, but run arround, mesmers got t even easyer w invis+phantasms a plenty

Bertenburny.5103:

Filovirus.6258:

Bertenburny.5103:

Stop showing you play a thief, it’s obvious…

yes I play one, also warr, guard, engi…
all I’m saying is its easy to play a class like warrior, there’s alot of room for error
thief aint easy, the slightest mistake costs u bigtime, thief has to be played good or not played at all
everybody keeps crying OPOPOPnerfnerfnerf, & now the class comes close to ranger …
& invis aint godmode, u can still hit him w aoe’s & such, while thief can do nothing in stealth, but run arround, mesmers got t even easyer w invis+phantasms a plenty

Don’t make me laugh about Thief being complex to play with no room for errors…. it’s the only prof with as much room for error as Warrior.

Even a terribad thief with a useless build is nearly unkillable and will walk off unscathed from pretty much any encounter when there isn’t 4+ people to kill him.

Thieves need to be gutted on stealth, BIG TIME, or there need to be a counter (for every prof out there) to stealth. Until that happens they WILL be broken and OPOPOP, because it’s what ALWAYS happens when there is something with no counter in a game (and there is absolutly no counter to stealth in this game atm, no the stealth trap in WvW isn’t a counter it’s totally useless, and there is no way to use it properly due to the fact you can’t create a hotkey to use it for exemple).

And yeah thieves do “nothing” when running around in stealth… except having bleeds and other conditions killing you, on top of waiting without taking damage (unless the opponent is AoE heavy, without the need for targetting AND lucky AND the thief is ultra bad and as such allows to predict his movement, which never happens) for his cds (that are already short) to come back on top of positionning himself to take off more than half your life again in a couple attacks with backstab.

Yeah, “poor” thieves, they really need a “buff”.

Be serious, thieves are so broken you see them more than Warriors for solo/small group/havoc roaming, and you can catch them even less than Warriors, on top of the fact that they don’t have to run away on half the map to survive, they stealth, go hide nearby where you can’t see them, and they are back 30/60s later when you left.

And it’s with thieves being roughly useless in zergs, while Warriors are pretty much the most played prof right now, with a lot of fotm rerolls for the past 6 months or so, while thieves are relatively unplayed.

There is a reason too why you see thieves everywhere in lower level zones, all grinding levels, all being alts (Hell you see them more than war right now).

It’s because they are broken op, and it’ll last till stealth get the nerf it deserve since before launch….

AFTER that there can be balancing and some changes on thieves, before, the only thing they deserve and need is nerfs. And a LOT of them, comparable to the Hammer War nerfs from early december.

And don’t pretend that Mesmers have it easier than Thieves, be serious 2 seconds. Mesmers are a pain, are quite painful when played well but they are far harder to master than thieves (it takes 3 mins to master a thieves, 2 of those being spent on finding a build on Google and copying it…..), and if you screw up, you’ll die quite fast, to pretty much any class capable of locking you for a few secs…. thieves laugh and run away.

Haha, I hope you guys can read this before it gets deleted:

Cry me a river “casters” Ninjas feed on your tears and your vain attempts of mindless AoE spam.

I`ll chill in stealth for a bit and watch you rage, haha.

I usally do not post this kind of BS but you asked for it so here you go. Internet sterotypes here we go.

OP makes four points:

- Casters are a dying breed. I see plenty elementalists and mesmers everywhere I look. They’re both excellent classes, though they have their problems. All the light and medium classes have problems

- Power is better than condition damage. Debateable at best, given all the bunker builds in full Dire

- Warriors and Thieves are more mobile than necros. Yep. That’s core to the class designs, as the devs have explicitly stated. Necros are supposed to lack mobility

- Stun Breaks have long cooldowns. I have the same issue with my thief. Some classes can spam stuns more quickly than you can break them. I don’t think this is a necro or thief specific isssue

You have a hard case to make that necros are not powerful, given they they’re core to the current ‘meta.’ I think you’re right that certain things, like the lack of mobility, make them less fun to play, though. That’s why I don’t play mine.

Sorry, but I don’t agree with a lot of what is being said in this thread. Character role has a lot to do with some of these poor comparisons. Every class has multiple builds you can run, each related to the role you plan to play. Any class is OP if played correctly, it comes down to player knowledge and preferred play style. Obviously, more players will want cookie cutter classes and builds because this is the norm for average players- which is why they’re referred to as “average”.

Do you think thieves and mesmers are OP in roaming? Play a kit engineer (flamethrower lols @ mesmer clones and thieves in stealth) or a condition trap ranger with shortbow and sword/warhorn. Magically, they’re not OP anymore.

Medium and Light armor classes are getting used less in large group play. Condi-bunker and shatter mesmer are the new dominant solo fighters (necro, engi, mesmer). Only skirmish play is seeing a nice diversity.

That has been the trend for a while now. The days of thieves owning 1v1 fights is over. Any condi-bunker or shatter mesmer worth their salt is far more dangerous and certainly harder to bring down. In large group play especially zergs if the vast majority of the group isn’t heavies, that zerg is easy to wipe.

I don’t know what anyone here is complaining about. I’m quite confident that I’ve seen near equal ratios of players of all professions both melt away from DPS, conditions or stunted by CC as well as run, stealth or tank with everlasting evades and/or damage mitigation. The professions are very well-balanced in my opinion, and anyone complaining about buffs and nerfs are short-sighted by their own bias.

That said, I have definitely seen different trends among different servers in WvW. When I’m fighting FC, I know to expect major condition-based groups; against AR, I have faced parties full of face-tank Guardians and Warriors; HoD often has us outnumbered, but melt like glass when you catch them off guard (even their heavies). If I’m having trouble in any given scenario, I don’t go blaming ArenaNet or the most recent balance update, I ask what I am doing wrong and what I can do to improve.

I stopped reading after you said you’re a necro. Necros are so stupidly OP in wvw right now it’s not even funny. You have no right to complain about anything.

The only thing I don’t get is the high base HP for warriors. They really don’t need it…

Sube Dai.8496:

The only thing I don’t get is the high base HP for warriors. They really don’t need it…

Lol wut