Guild Wars 2

What sPvP builds will now become viable with the April 15th patch?

Due to the rune and sigil changes…we really can’t be quite sure.

We will have to see everything in total to know for sure, however some BS guesses that I’m going to pull out of my kitten

Cleric’s MM with 5% more LF per minion death, more toughness while in DS, vampiric master getting scaling, and likely buffs to healing power rune sets (based off Monk’s amazing 6 slot bonus), slight nerfs to offense but decent buffs to sustain will synergize with already high sustain

Bunker with the new 30 trait, maybe a X/X/30/X/30 spectral bunker would pull in with a really difficult to kill necro that just sits in DS for ages. Note that the new trait + dark armor will pull in 500-600 toughness (most likely) while life transfering, while healing your HP bar, while sitting in DS even longer

Support X/X/X/20/30 with new monk runes + new trait, transfusion, well of blood + traited WoB on revive, you already heal more than anyone else, and now you can heal 10% more than that. could potentially even combine this with the above one

Besides that, Blackmoa mentioned an Axe/Focus build with the new curses trait to just do a stupid amount of debuffing. And all of the old viable builds will still exist, but at most with some changes (20/30/0/0/20 standard condi build, instead of 30/20/0/0/20)

Interesting and helpful, Bhawb. Thanks.

Don’t know about viability but vampiric builds can be looked at again.
Cavaliers amulett adds tough/pow/critchance (tough is more efficient for “healing” types and prec is a requirement to a lot of proccs) to pvp and runes of the vampire will get some kind of overhaul. Also sigils of leeching and blood can be used together.

Bhawb.7408:

We will have to see everything in total to know for sure, however some BS guesses that I’m going to pull out of my kitten

Cleric’s MM with 5% more LF per minion death, more toughness while in DS, vampiric master getting scaling, and likely buffs to healing power rune sets (based off Monk’s amazing 6 slot bonus), slight nerfs to offense but decent buffs to sustain will synergize with already high sustain

Bunker with the new 30 trait, maybe a X/X/30/X/30 spectral bunker would pull in with a really difficult to kill necro that just sits in DS for ages. Note that the new trait + dark armor will pull in 500-600 toughness (most likely) while life transfering, while healing your HP bar, while sitting in DS even longer

Support X/X/X/20/30 with new monk runes + new trait, transfusion, well of blood + traited WoB on revive, you already heal more than anyone else, and now you can heal 10% more than that. could potentially even combine this with the above one

Besides that, Blackmoa mentioned an Axe/Focus build with the new curses trait to just do a stupid amount of debuffing. And all of the old viable builds will still exist, but at most with some changes (20/30/0/0/20 standard condi build, instead of 30/20/0/0/20)

Problem with all these is that if your not doing something completely broken then the build isn’t truely “viable” in this game. And by viable I mean a top tier build able to compete at least somewhat with other top tier builds in terms of what they bring to team or solo arena.

All the theory crafting in the world ends up becoming irrelevent if you can’t spam a 8k dealing, stunning and evading skill like pistol whip. Which is able to port around the map with ease. Or if you cant aoe give massive amounts of boons, blocks, condi clear and stomp/heal and res like a guardian then you are again not going to be viable.

To do anything in this game you need to do something broken. Synergy isn’t enough. You need to be abusing something. And none of the necro builds you listed are capable of that. At the end of the day when you play them you will be all happy about how clever the build is until you get trashed by a thief/warrior or something and then it is back to square one.

The only one with potential is the MM cleric build depending on the healing power scaling. I doubt it will be sufficient to make this poor spec viable though.

He asked for viable sPvP builds, not “I want to win every single organized 5 man tournament that comes out”. I specifically said I pulled them out of my kitten . But you don’t need to be able to beat every single OP build to be viable, you just need to be able to achieve success in your play. If you aren’t in the top 90% of PvP (and 90% of us aren’t), the amount of viable builds opens up significantly.

Can’t wait to try out support necro..

I think it is most likely that the healing potency of minion siphon will be at what it is now only if you spec for the highest healing power. That will mean giving up toughness or vitality for the same amount of siphon healing they give now.

Its a 10% nerf to base, but with the ratio now working. Basically just means that soldier has lower siphon sustain, but cleric’s gets a buff.

It’s difficult (and perhaps of limited value) to discuss potential builds with such limited knowledge of the reworked runes and sigils, but given what has been revealed to us, I’m led to believe some seemingly “nerfed” specs may continue to exist in some form. The previewed Balthazar runes plus 30 in Spite gives us 5-second burning on Dhuumfire procs, which at least seems decent on paper. I don’t believe we’ll get a combination as good as 4 Nightmare/2 Lyssa runes for +20% total condition duration, but if Necromancer runes retain the +20% fear duration feature, we can use them in a 30/20/0/0/20 shell to execute fear chains of pre-Feature Pack duration.

These are just two specs I’ll be testing on patch day, but I imagine there will be quite a few more to consider. Overall, I’m optimistic about the build diversity these rune changes could bring to our profession.

EDIT: I briefly mentioned Perplexity runes, but just got the memo (over a week late!) that they actually won’t be coming to PvP quite yet. To quote Jonathan Sharp in the Perplexity rune thread in the sPvP subforum:

JonathanSharp.7094:

I just wanted to give you guys a quick update. Based on your feedback, we’ve decided not to add Runes of Perplexity to PvP in the 4/15 Feature Pack. We’ll be monitoring the balance of runes closely, making more tweaks if necessary, and revisiting the possibility of adding Runes of Perplexity to PvP at a later point.