Guild Wars 2

The assumptions were true in that Firebrand are generally considered the new Necros in terms of relying on teammates for survival while dishing out aoe damages. We survive long enough in a team fight, people are getting dropped like flies. Focus us and we don’t exactly have an F3 shield or F2 mobility for peeling off and self sustaining ourselves.

It’s shown that Necro’s were able to survive a season even though they weren’t the best 1v1 side-point holder class. Are Guardians, who’s never been entirely dependant on others, able to accept this new “I need Ele heals!” role just like Reaper?

So the question now is, which classes does Firebrand do the best with? Scourge, Holosmith, and Spellbreaker seem to be a good trio-de-dangers already. Add in Firebrand and you have a fairly strong supportive group of people who sync incredibly well with each other be-it duos or team fights.

Firebrand is great in first 10 sec while preparing and casting mantras, in 11th sec he dies painfully.

DH is still preferred over Firebrand.

I still wouldn’t compare us to necro. While the function is similar, we’ve still got access to quite a few defensive tools. Necro couldn’t generate even slightly the same amount of damage mitigation even if they wanted to.

The FB need support if the enemy team use a large amount of AoE and enter the field brainlessly still thinking to be able to active the F3 and block everything.
If you enter the fight while the enemy already chose a focus and spam your AoE there’s not any problem.

My main is a necro and i can tell you that a Firebringer have tons of defensive skills if compared to a reaper.
A reaper can only die if focused, a firebringer can still flee using shelter and elite to survive, activating the F3 and spamming the heal if needed (still if the heal is low is better than nothing), also have offhand weapons that grant defensive skills.

The Firebringer is more like a real Condi Bomb, if you’re there when the bomb explode you’re dead, if you survive you’re able to kill the FB easy.

Anyway, i did a lot of 1v1 and win more or less 70% of them.

A thief can kill you without too much problems, but different classes can be killed easy.

I’d say you are correct as far as being an aoe damage dealer. But FB has more sustain than the old glass condi reaper due to tome of courage blocking cc, projectiles and condi damage via resistance and power spikes with aegis. if you can predict enemy burst you can get into courage on time to counter and then return to justice to respond with nukes.

Having a scourge back you up with barrier helps tremendously to cover up your weaknessess.

the condi bomb part of firebrand is greatly dissapointing to me, especially axe.

the tomes + mantras when traited though are great. i see a ton of uses for them in organized group play. but it is weak in 1v1 or small scale.

firebrand is well worth taking over guard / DH just for additional cleanses and more stab + group stunbreaks. definetly not for DPS though.

damage wise, while it looks good on paper and in theory, it may be good on DPS testing golems or PVE targets that do not move much, it is worthless when going up against any high mobility target, including all pvp / wvw and some pve.