Guild Wars 2

AoE builds being un-able to pressure stacked zerg balls is heavily influenced by Retaliation. There’s few dcounters to zerging, except a few builds that bypass the retaliation, or arrowcarts.

Retaliation can easily have very high uptime, has no aoe limits, no ICD and does extremely unbalanced damage compared to the innate damage of some aoe skills. Stepping off the side and lobbing aoe at a stack of enemies, often results in taking more damage than you are doing, while simultaneously getting far less healing than in a stacked zerg-ball.

This makes aoe builds need to stack together for healing to try and mitigate the high levels of passive/perma retaliation on many zergs, stacking making them of course an easy target for the hammer-stun-train meta.

Better Retaliation design could make for far more interesting spread of tactics and strategies in fights over 8 people, retal just hasn’t kept up with the changes to ICD on traits and sigils etc and is wildly out of balance compared to at release.

I have access to nearly perma retaliation on my main, once I’m in a larger fight in wvw the retaliation becomes an always on passive effect not an occasionally present boon. It’s just not tactical, or skillful, it just punishes every player who attacks me, regardless of how much damage they did to me, also punishing quick fast attacks completely disproportionately to big hits.

What would you suggest for WVW only tweaks?

Possibilities could include:
Make any player immune to receiving retal damage for 2? seconds after each time they take a retal hit.
Retaliation could only return a percentage like 10% of damage received.

I would miss the dozens of fists showing damage that fly over my head when I AoE a group though.

I wonder if they could put a short ICD on the Retaliation boon itself that only happens after x amount of fires, or just give Retaliation a fixed # of charges (like a summoned weapon).

Retaliation could only return a percentage like 10% of damage received?

Ok let’s take an example : i’m a gurdian with 3k4 armor and i’m often on retaliation.

I usually take around 100-300 dmg per hit and sometime 2-3k from thief or elem.

For now, retaliation does around 270 per hit (with full stack of might) and with your system it could do around 20 dmg per hit.

That is just ridiculous dmg ^^ I’m not sure if you have noticed but they reduced retaliation’s dmg by 40% in WvW

So maybe it’s difficult to take dmg when u cast a skill but it’s fair because you are not in range regarding the melee cell.

You have to deal with it and include hp in your build.

Retal has already been nerfed enough. Stop running berserker if you are dying from it.

Retal isn’t really a problem.. u might want to tweak ur stats abit or just be careful when or where ur aoe’ing

Retal? Really? It’s joke already, only good thing in retal now is tagging. It can do serious damage only against some stupid glasscannon, and if glasscannon play stupid in WvW, he deserve to die.

Retaliation makes grenade kit completely unusable in wvw for one example, upto 15 retaliation hits for one single attack, returning massively unbalanced damage compared to the damage caused. This is a glaring example of the problem, different builds are affected in vastly different ways because the core design of retaliation is totally unsuited to situations of many enemy players at once.

Some builds can ignore retaliation, some might aswell go afk, that is bad design.

Anyone defending the current implementation of retaliation has obviously never played a grenade engineer. It’s so easy in big group play to have perma retaliation especially in the current meta. The grenade kit’s sole purpose in the game is to provide ranged aoe damage. Yet that is impossible when a defensive perma buff out damages the actual offensive kit. Retaliation ticks hit the engineer for more damage that the grenades put out. That’s a broken mechanic. Barrage is a pure 8 grenade aoe, meant specifically for aoe damage. Yet it theoretically has the chance to hit the engineer for 40 yes 40 ticks of retaliation if tossed into a zerg. That’s over 10k dmg for 1 throw. Every offesive proc in this game is subject to some icd. All on-crit procs have been given cooldowns preventing them from hitting more than 1 person. On-crit heal procs have also been nerfed with icd’s. Yet, a passive defensive proc, which every large group has via guardians, has never been subject to the same treatment. In small play, the buff is great because it punishes people for not paying attention. I honestly don’t know what the solutions is. I favor a damage percentage (30-50%) so that it punishes people equally across the board, but then we’d hear of people getting hit for thousands by retaliation. I guess the best bet is to just leave it as it is since it seems anet doesn’t care what engineers think anyway, since such a low percentage of people play them.

Dasboba.1652:

Anyone defending the current implementation of retaliation has obviously never played a grenade engineer.

Anyone playing the current implementation of a grenade engineer would obviously never defend retaliation.

Retal is not a big deal. I can’t remember the last time I died from it. The people who die are the AOE spammers.

Retal isn’t that bad. There are very few professions who can use it and the ones who can don’t stack it for very long. The Light Field + Blast finisher is probably the most common source of retal but it only lasts 3 seconds and is better used on fire fields for might anyways.

As someone who plays a VERY aoe heavy thief I find retalitaion damage to be quite ignorable. But that may just be because my Signet of Malice out heals it. Not sure.

style.6173:

Retal is not a big deal. I can’t remember the last time I died from it. The people who die are the AOE spammers.

Quoted for Truth…

He’s probably one’ of the PUGs sitting in a tower spamming nades on a small cluster of comrades who are laughing at him in TS together, while they chain blast finishers on light fields and watch him die.

Nope, quite the opposite really. The guild I’m in knows the meta and runs a heavy guardian squad doing exactly as you said. Engineer is not a class that does well in that meta, so I usually run mine in small man havoc. Even when I do run mine, I’ve don’t die because I barely use grenades in those situations. The point is it’s silly that an entire kit can be negated by a passive debuff in a situation that the kit actually was designed for.

I did make a joke about this above but retaliation while potent is not OP and seems to be reasonably well balanced. A player cannot receive more than 5 stacks at a time and stacks are in duration not intensity so the math works out in a worst case scenario as follows:

(198.45 + (0.075 * 3000)) = 423.5

That is per attack that hits and in a worst case scenario. You have to be hitting a lot of targets before retaliation is a significant issue and it is meant to be a natural counter to AoE.

AoE ranged damage is supposed to be the counter to melee zerg balls (e.g. hammer stun trains).

The awful design of retaliation has a large part in preventing this from working properly for many aoe specs.

A passive type buff that someone else might be perma stacking onto you, should never be severely out damaging actual activated skills.

I play a well and mark Necro am have no problem with retal. I think people should spend a little more time on their builds and play style rather than nerf another part of the game.

That said if I were going to suggest doing anything it would be give it a 60% or 70% chance of landing.

The biggest problems I’ve had dealing with Retaliation damage are Barrage on my Ranger (because I can’t stop it once I’ve started and found out Ohnos, a lotta Retal) and being a Grenadier.

And, someone said up there the max you can hit by it is 5x on one attack. Well, that’s not true for a Grenadier at least. Roll up an Engi and go Grenade Barrage a zergball.

Flamethrower auto attack is another classic example. Potentially 30x retaliation hits in 2 seconds.

It’s pretty much the most broken mechanic in game right now. It should have a 1 second cooldown per target, no fast attacks should be punished more than slow attacks in any game.

dragonkain.3984:

It’s pretty much the most broken mechanic in game right now. It should have a 1 second cooldown per target, no fast attacks should be punished more than slow attacks in any game.

I’d put the cooldown on the receiving player, so if you have retaliation, you can still damage 20 individuals from your retaliation inside 1 second, but each individual attacker cannot take more than 1 hit personally per second for example.

Kalan.9705:

Flamethrower auto attack is another classic example. Potentially 30x retaliation hits in 2 seconds.

Fast-cycling channeled AOE really, really sucks vs. retaliation blobs.

The other thing they could consider doing is putting a really, really short duration effect on players hit by Retal that make them immune to Retal.

Or something like that Sigil that builds charges then makes you immune. Gain a charge everytime you suffer Retal. After x charges, you get an immunity to Retal for a bit.

An AoE can only effect 5 targets max at a time (mostly anyway). If a player is spamming an AoE, they are opening themselves up to retaliation having an increased effect.

I use grenade kit quite a bit and understand retaliation is the trade off involved in that decision, but I do have one problem with retaliation. Retaliation ticks seem to lag which makes it difficult to gauge your health. Oftentimes there will be a big burst of retaliation, then a couple extra ticks, then a couple more. I have gotten ticks of retaliation up to 30seconds after I stopped attacking. Not sure what is happening there.

Vires Ex.1826:

I play a well and mark Necro am have no problem with retal. I think people should spend a little more time on their builds and play style rather than nerf another part of the game.

That said if I were going to suggest doing anything it would be give it a 60% or 70% chance of landing.

I also have a faceroll frontline power necro. Taking a couple thousand retaliation damage is nothing when I’m putting out aoe damage for 10x that amount. The problem is with the mechanics of fast hitting aoe attacks like engineer grenades. They can hit up to 15 people. So on my engy, with 1 autoattack, I may hit 15 people. Each one takes around 200 damage (condition specced). In return, the engineer takes around 4k damage. At what point would anyone ever use an ability that hits himself for 20x the damage of any one target. Never, that’s when. Yet, the whole point of the kit is ranged aoe damage. Maybe if the sigil of earth worked in aoe then it might be worth it to spread bleeding to large groups. But, like all over offensive procs, it’s subject to an icd. Thus only the first person to get crit on gets the bleed. Yet, retaliation has no icd. I would like to see the mechanic tweaked so more classes would be viable in big group play.

BTW, as you suggested, I adjusted my engineer’s play style. I benched him in big group play to run my easy mode necro to supplement the 10 guardians.

Retaliation and Confusion just need a big nerf… I’m never sure what you’re supposed to do in this game when faced with situations where you’re taking more damage from attacking than you are dealing…. since almost every ability in the game is an AOE attack.

Even games where there are lots of utility skills and positioning and repositioning have kept damage shields and barbs in check….. so why does this game which is 90% dodging and attacking overpower them so much?

Players complaining about a skill that makes you think (slightly) before using a skill? IT MUST BE NERFED.

I makes you think only in small scale fights. And be honest, WvW is mostly about zergs.
You cannot check everyone in zerg if he has retaliation and there is no other icon than small next to his portrait when you target enemy.
Retaliation =/= makes you think
retaliation = kills you if you use aoe (5man cap) on zerg, where aoe was meant to deal dmg to zergs

If retaliation is killing you with a 5-man AoE cap then…its a build/gear/l2p

I am sorry, not even saying that as a cop-out either…There have been times when it’kitten me really kitten a mesmer or engi, but never died from it.

First off, its not Perma uptime, I can only have it on me for a maximum of 9.5 seconds out of 24 seconds. With traits/runes/food to increase boon duration, that is not no where near 100% uptime.

Second, it is not Passive, see above.

Third the damage is based on the one Guardians Power, some have low power, some have high power, but that is what it is based off of.

Lastly, If you are getting retaliation damage that is your fault, I notice it on my thief and I just turn around to stop attacking/shooting…its that easy…

Guards in the scenarios above mentioned tend to run stat sets with majors in power (soldiers, clerics). So yeah, they will have high power and high retaliation damage as a result.

It just seems like the only ones having issues are the engi because of the high hit rate of thier skills and everyone else doesn’t seem to care. Not very fair if you ask me.

They should make retail proc on melee. What kinda sense is there in taking damage from 1500 away anyway. When I think retal I think of thorns, hell even the animation seems to portray that fact.

Well retaliation could be easily nerfed like they nerfed Chaos Armor. Give retaliation an 1 second internal cooldown. So it would be still strong inna small scale scenraio, but would not be that strong in Zerg fights.

As a small group guardian since headstart I find retaliation broken. I exploit this as much as possible for my groups, its certainly perma on myself, and near perma for my group. However, I gave up using a staff because the huge cone hit from 1 meant constantly taking large chunks of my life while doing small dmg. Now I use greatsword and often take 50% of my health on a 2 whirl. Do I “die from retal?” I don’t think I’ve been put into down state from retal specifically, but there are certainly times I’ve died because hitting the group would reflect too much dmg, while not hitting the group meant a slower death.

My suggestions is to drop the duration by around half, possibly lower the base damage, and make it scale based on condition damage, just like its counterpart confusion. This would also help to address the lack of a condition spec for guardians.

Retaliation should NOT tick more than ONCE per second. Don’t give me this crap about not running zerker builds or not aoe spamming. Retal is far to easy and mindless in its current state, just op and encourages blobbing.

theres an easy counter to retaliaton, called WELL OF CORRUPTION. Retaliation is the first boon it will remove since its following a priority list. so stop complaining about retaliation and get some coordination with your teammates, large scale fights aren’t about soloheroes anyways…

edit: the whole priority list can be found here http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1fyebd/boon_removal_priority/
if some1 wanted to know

So you are telling me, as an ele, I should be able to position my self right and just continually free cast on the zerg ball with no cares in the world? Not at all… that’s why you boon strip as an organized group and heal as a group with water… if you really have to complain you either need a new wvw build or a new mindset of a back liner in this game. As a backline you need to pick when you do things well, don’t drop meteor shower/ nades when they have retal, call a boonstrip, then lockdown and AoE, don’t just mindlessly spam AoE.

Sarsbear.3469:

As a small group guardian since headstart I find retaliation broken. I exploit this as much as possible for my groups, its certainly perma on myself, and near perma for my group. However, I gave up using a staff because the huge cone hit from 1 meant constantly taking large chunks of my life while doing small dmg. Now I use greatsword and often take 50% of my health on a 2 whirl. Do I “die from retal?” I don’t think I’ve been put into down state from retal specifically, but there are certainly times I’ve died because hitting the group would reflect too much dmg, while not hitting the group meant a slower death.

My suggestions is to drop the duration by around half, possibly lower the base damage, and make it scale based on condition damage, just like its counterpart confusion. This would also help to address the lack of a condition spec for guardians.

" I exploit this as much as possible for my groups, its certainly perma on myself, and near perma for my group. " – near perma is 9.5 seconds?

“Now I use greatsword and often take 50% of my health on a 2 whirl.” – You’re doing it wrong.

“My suggestions is to drop the duration by around half” – which would be 2.5 seconds by default. Seems legit.

“possibly lower the base damage, and make it scale based on condition damage” Implies you don’t know anything about guardians’ lack of condition abilities….

“As a small group guardian since headstart I find retaliation broken.” – Only implies you were on that cookie cutter retaliation build…tisk tisk tisk, of course that was broken, it has been fixed for a while not, why dont you try to build your guardian the same way and see how effective it is again…

Littlefeather.8623:

Sarsbear.3469:

As a small group guardian since headstart I find retaliation broken. I exploit this as much as possible for my groups, its certainly perma on myself, and near perma for my group. However, I gave up using a staff because the huge cone hit from 1 meant constantly taking large chunks of my life while doing small dmg. Now I use greatsword and often take 50% of my health on a 2 whirl. Do I “die from retal?” I don’t think I’ve been put into down state from retal specifically, but there are certainly times I’ve died because hitting the group would reflect too much dmg, while not hitting the group meant a slower death.

My suggestions is to drop the duration by around half, possibly lower the base damage, and make it scale based on condition damage, just like its counterpart confusion. This would also help to address the lack of a condition spec for guardians.

" I exploit this as much as possible for my groups, its certainly perma on myself, and near perma for my group. " – near perma is 9.5 seconds?

“Now I use greatsword and often take 50% of my health on a 2 whirl.” – You’re doing it wrong.

“My suggestions is to drop the duration by around half” – which would be 2.5 seconds by default. Seems legit.

“possibly lower the base damage, and make it scale based on condition damage” Implies you don’t know anything about guardians’ lack of condition abilities….

“As a small group guardian since headstart I find retaliation broken.” – Only implies you were on that cookie cutter retaliation build…tisk tisk tisk, of course that was broken, it has been fixed for a while not, why dont you try to build your guardian the same way and see how effective it is again…

I have no idea where you’re getting these numbers from. Stand your ground, 25% longer trait, 30 points into virtues for another 30% boon dur, symbol on greatsword 4, blasting with 4s cd hammer 2 twice (with access to 2 other light fields). That’s nearly 25 seconds. Stand your ground has a 24 second cooldown traited. So yeah, near perma.

If you round 2.5 seconds up to 3, you get the duration of many sources of confusion, the counterpart to retaliation. I think that’s a fine duration, especially considering retal stacks dur.

I know full well the state of guardian conditions, which is the whole argument for making retal based on condition damage over power. The scaling would obviously have to change, but done appropriately it would do more damage than it does now for guardians with condition damage, and do not very much for all of the people without. Then your flamethrower or grenade engineers, or staff guardians, or barrage rangers, can punish clustered players and take much less damage they are taking now.

And I never knew there was a retaliation build. I read the abilities and make my own builds.

I play as engineer
1)engies have no boon stripping
2)grenades are probably the best weapon vs zergs
3)you throw 3 grenades each can hit 5 targets(or 3 i cant remember)
4)i cannot stop grenades when they are in air
5) my options are fight and die due to retaliation or do nothing and die due doing nothing, is this how this game is meant to play? do nithing just stand there?

6)in zergs there are probably more than one guardian,in fact most guild groups play only with guard/warr/ele

7)difference confusion vs retal
- you can see retaliation all the time because it is condition on you
-you cannot se retaliation if you fight group because you dont know which 5 man from zerg your grenades will hit
-confusion proc on ability, while using skill it will hit you one time only(tried it with grenades)
- retaliation proc on hit, so channeled skills are disadvantaged
-confusion is based on condition damage
-retaliation is based on power

Besides all other features of retallation, it should have a cap that the retallation damage cannot exceed your damage. Like you do 20-30 dmg and you will not get 300 damage back. That is pathetic.

Thats right. I remember with guardian with staff, enemies were at hills south outer gate.
I get there and used skill 1 on staff on gate to know if enemies are there or not.
It almost killed me even the staff makes so kitten damage.

Hule.8794:

Thats right. I remember with guardian with staff, enemies were at hills south outer gate.
I get there and used skill 1 on staff on gate to know if enemies are there or not.
It almost killed me even the staff makes so kitten damage.

staff dmg is actually fine considering it will always hit 5 ppl because of its range. 1,4k on krits with a support build isnt THAT low…

i think he’s rather talking about thinks like ele flame greatsword skill4 which hits like 200times a sec for VERY LOW dmg (around 40 per tick? dunno), still instakills you if you use it in a retal group

Here’s a summary of the answers so far:

From the hammer wielders and press 1 autoattacking guardians, they see no problem with retal as they run around in a ball and have their own regeneration and healing going on so don’t really notice it, while tagging everything in sight with a weapon that does aoe damage and causes heals to trigger on the rest of their ball.

From anyone trying to damage the press 1 spammers by actually using skills as intended, retal is the most broken mechanic in the game.

It’s VERY easily fixed- no one should be able to receive more than one proc of retal per second. It will still do damage, but will enable medium and light armor players the chance to play their toons.

Will they take a blind bit of notice and do anything about it (it doesn’t effect spvp, so the answer is blindingly obvious- no).

Victory.2879:

Here’s a summary of the answers so far:

From the hammer wielders and press 1 autoattacking guardians, they see no problem with retal as they run around in a ball and have their own regeneration and healing going on so don’t really notice it, while tagging everything in sight with a weapon that does aoe damage and causes heals to trigger on the rest of their ball.

From anyone trying to damage the press 1 spammers by actually using skills as intended, retal is the most broken mechanic in the game.

“Number 1 spammers” are forced to always be in frontline, eating all melee, ranged and AOE damage, while skilled “killers of spammers” want to stay behind in safety, roll their faces on 1-2-3-4-5 and don’t care about stupid things like non-zerk gear, boon stripping
and backlash from retal? Oh, i see now.

Rednik.3809:

Victory.2879:

Here’s a summary of the answers so far:

From the hammer wielders and press 1 autoattacking guardians, they see no problem with retal as they run around in a ball and have their own regeneration and healing going on so don’t really notice it, while tagging everything in sight with a weapon that does aoe damage and causes heals to trigger on the rest of their ball.

From anyone trying to damage the press 1 spammers by actually using skills as intended, retal is the most broken mechanic in the game.

“Number 1 spammers” are forced to always be in frontline, eating all melee, ranged and AOE damage, while skilled “killers of spammers” want to stay behind in safety, roll their faces on 1-2-3-4-5 and don’t care about stupid things like non-zerk gear, boon stripping
and backlash from retal? Oh, i see now.

Pretty much this…Retal might be OP in few scenarios for a few short bursts. (I enjoy popping group retal on an engie trying to flamethrow my group through a gate for instance).

For the most part retaliation (like I said before) punishes players who refuse to monitor their play. If you just wanna faceroll your keys and spam every skill trying to tag every mob while wearing DPS gear, expect to die from your playstyle. I can honestly say I have never been killed from retaliation or confusion for that matter. Mostly because as soon as I see said skills I back off my attacks until it is safe, or most of my builds are tanky enough to attack through the retaliation. (Confusion just depends on # of stacks)

King Amadaeus.8619:

Rednik.3809:

Victory.2879:

Here’s a summary of the answers so far:

From the hammer wielders and press 1 autoattacking guardians, they see no problem with retal as they run around in a ball and have their own regeneration and healing going on so don’t really notice it, while tagging everything in sight with a weapon that does aoe damage and causes heals to trigger on the rest of their ball.

From anyone trying to damage the press 1 spammers by actually using skills as intended, retal is the most broken mechanic in the game.

“Number 1 spammers” are forced to always be in frontline, eating all melee, ranged and AOE damage, while skilled “killers of spammers” want to stay behind in safety, roll their faces on 1-2-3-4-5 and don’t care about stupid things like non-zerk gear, boon stripping
and backlash from retal? Oh, i see now.

Pretty much this…Retal might be OP in few scenarios for a few short bursts. (I enjoy popping group retal on an engie trying to flamethrow my group through a gate for instance).

For the most part retaliation (like I said before) punishes players who refuse to monitor their play. If you just wanna faceroll your keys and spam every skill trying to tag every mob while wearing DPS gear, expect to die from your playstyle. I can honestly say I have never been killed from retaliation or confusion for that matter. Mostly because as soon as I see said skills I back off my attacks until it is safe, or most of my builds are tanky enough to attack through the retaliation. (Confusion just depends on # of stacks)

pretty much this.

King Amadaeus.8619:

Rednik.3809:

Victory.2879:

Here’s a summary of the answers so far:

From the hammer wielders and press 1 autoattacking guardians, they see no problem with retal as they run around in a ball and have their own regeneration and healing going on so don’t really notice it, while tagging everything in sight with a weapon that does aoe damage and causes heals to trigger on the rest of their ball.

From anyone trying to damage the press 1 spammers by actually using skills as intended, retal is the most broken mechanic in the game.

“Number 1 spammers” are forced to always be in frontline, eating all melee, ranged and AOE damage, while skilled “killers of spammers” want to stay behind in safety, roll their faces on 1-2-3-4-5 and don’t care about stupid things like non-zerk gear, boon stripping
and backlash from retal? Oh, i see now.

Pretty much this…Retal might be OP in few scenarios for a few short bursts. (I enjoy popping group retal on an engie trying to flamethrow my group through a gate for instance).

For the most part retaliation (like I said before) punishes players who refuse to monitor their play. If you just wanna faceroll your keys and spam every skill trying to tag every mob while wearing DPS gear, expect to die from your playstyle. I can honestly say I have never been killed from retaliation or confusion for that matter. Mostly because as soon as I see said skills I back off my attacks until it is safe, or most of my builds are tanky enough to attack through the retaliation. (Confusion just depends on # of stacks)

The thing is I can keep retal up almost permanantly for my group. If I add another guild guardian the 2 of us definitely will. That does not include the group mates also knowing to leap/blast in light fields. You will have to back off indefinitely, and there are many groups out there that use the same mechanics.

You say you’ve never died to retal, and I’d like to change that. I think you should be able to spec a way so that retal truly punishes all people, not just flamethrower engineers or anyone with heavy AoE or fast attacks, just like eng/mes can spec for confusion and turn it into something very dangerous. But being based on power, the current retal is a little too powerful for people who aren’t specifically trying to make it better.

timidobserver.7925:

Retal has already been nerfed enough. Stop running berserker if you are dying from it.

Full soldiers gear gives me 20-24k health depending on stacks/food.

1 meteor shower on a blob stack, an AoE I cant reasonable stop once its started, can take me from 24k health so low to the point I am forced to mist form to keep from dying from it.

Not use an ability I have that does reasonable damage in the exact situation it was designed for? I suppose I could drop staff, but it is pretty much the only thing a Ele has left to play the game for open world outside of a single gimmicky scepter build.

Well whenever people fail in some situation they are not going to analyse how they can do to improve their gameplay build and organisation they will just ask for some nerf. Retaliation could be less efficient BUT it remains the fact you need to learn to play better mitigate damages and adapt your build on the current meta or you are only dead meat. And I don’t play guardian at all nor CC warrior…

style.6173:

Retal is not a big deal. I can’t remember the last time I died from it. The people who die are the AOE spammers.

Let me see, every single one of my abilities save for one does AoE damage. The one that doesn’t hit multiple targets, hits for like 400 damage because it has a very minor heal attached to it.

I can run full soldiers and still have a single AoE ability kill me with retaliation. In fact i both slot and save mist form strictly for retaliation so I can actually be useful in breaking up blobs.