Guild Wars 2

DeceiverX.8361:

Zenith.7301:

It needed way more than a 10% increase. Why was 10% settled on on all the bad autoattack weapons for necro and mesmer, while thief is receiving 25%+ damage boosts?

Because the pistol’s power scaling was worse than Axe’s with arguably just as poor utility and suffered from projectile problems. Actually, the pistol is still really bad because Body Shot is pretty much the worst skill ever made.

Axe has crazy burst LF generation and with excessive damage would make it a safer dagger with range and no projectile deficiencies. While it might not be perfect as is, it’s better to see incremental buffs in the right direction (we’ll also see what goes on with the Reaper due to its LF-generation dependencies) rather than monsters emerge like PU mes and burn builds did after the 6/23 changes.

Yeah because PU mesmer was so good at anything besides hurting pvp crybaby feelings in 1v1.

So many Guild vs Guild used them, and it was totally meta in PvE.

In fact said “monster” burn builds are the only condition specs competitive and viable in PvE against berzerker whereas the garbage bleed/confusion/torment centric necromancer and mesmer end up as the weakest condi specs in PvE.

If we accept that these buffs are all Axe needed (even if it is only around a 6% increase over the pre-buff damage over 30 seconds (assuming a Rending+Ghastly Claws rotation and not accounting for aftercast)).

While I think I would have preferred a greater damage buff and have kept the range at 600, I assume there was a valid reason in increasing the range to give Necro a (still rather low damage) power weapon (probably raids).

The greatest thing holding Axe back from being a viable weapon is Unholy Fervor. Trait wise Rending Shroud is just plain better for obvious reasons, meaning that not only does Axe have a trait doing the exact same thing it wants to do, it loses out on 10% damage and 20% lower cast time (to put this perspective DS deals 26.6% more damage over 30 seconds and RS is 18.5% (DS numbers take from Brazil’s ‘Is Axe a Good Weapon for Necromancer?’ RS numbers are the base listed on the wiki so would be higher).

The solution is obvious, Unholy Fervor needs to not be Axe only. This allows you to make a choice between taking Rending Shroud in low vulnerability group or Unholy Fervor for additional damage in a high vulnerability group (with Axe as your ranged backup). The fact this change would help all Necro PvE power builds considerably is an added bonus.

What about PvP? Well, (imo) this change shouldn’t really impact PvP at all. I see no reason why you’d take Unholy Fervor over Rending Shroud, even in a non DS build Rending Shroud is simply the better choice.

I know that I am preaching to the choir on this, but I feel that we need to keep repeating things like this if Necro is to get the buffs it needs.

Zenith.7301:

DeceiverX.8361:

Zenith.7301:

It needed way more than a 10% increase. Why was 10% settled on on all the bad autoattack weapons for necro and mesmer, while thief is receiving 25%+ damage boosts?

Because the pistol’s power scaling was worse than Axe’s with arguably just as poor utility and suffered from projectile problems. Actually, the pistol is still really bad because Body Shot is pretty much the worst skill ever made.

Axe has crazy burst LF generation and with excessive damage would make it a safer dagger with range and no projectile deficiencies. While it might not be perfect as is, it’s better to see incremental buffs in the right direction (we’ll also see what goes on with the Reaper due to its LF-generation dependencies) rather than monsters emerge like PU mes and burn builds did after the 6/23 changes.

Yeah because PU mesmer was so good at anything besides hurting pvp crybaby feelings in 1v1.

So many Guild vs Guild used them, and it was totally meta in PvE.

In fact said “monster” burn builds are the only condition specs competitive and viable in PvE against berzerker whereas the garbage bleed/confusion/torment centric necromancer and mesmer end up as the weakest condi specs in PvE.

Except PvE is only a third of the game, and is not what the classes are balanced around, and condi viability (although class-dependent) as a ratio of damage dealt vs damage taken is the best in the game and has been for a very long time, making the content innately easier to achieve than playing glassy. The two stats will never be balanced perfectly and a meta will ALWAYS exist for solvable content, berserker or not, it will ALWAYS be a specific combination of gear and/or players. Would be a shame if necros or any class made a certain type of content exponentially more difficult to beat, not in time but actually chance of success, just because of a lack of certain options needed for a group. I think a lot of people fail to recognize the basics of problem solving and what a “meta” coined by culture is and constitutes of, and how they are generated.

I’m also going to say it now that condi specs are easier to win with in PvP modes than any DPS spec is for PvE. The last thing we want is the necromancer to be “OP” and have it get nerfed into the ground to a point where it can’t initiate a fight or hold a point for a few seconds because people are whining about it’s “OP” axe damage.

Incremental increases are better than huge buffs or absolute nothing.

meow one twenty.4376:

Matt Stacey.7415:

Can’t someone post a link of this horrid animation for me? I won’t be in-game for a bit

It was posted above, but here it is.

Narrrz.7532:

The real issue:

For those, who will never forget and never forgive:

The Good ==> The Ugly

Good Asura ==> Ugly Asura
Good Charr ==> Ugly Charr
Good Norn ==> Ugly Norn
Good Males ==> Ugly Males
Good Females ==> Ugly Females

Edit: not to minimize the actual numbers balance. But i recently posted a suggestion on how to change the autoattack to fix it, which still seems like it would work, so it seems redundant to also address that here.

Dat female tho… It’s like “please don’t hit me”

What I find most ironic about vulnerability is that so many players would rather build for might and totally forget about keeping vulnerability near its cap.

Perhaps that is why gw2 dev’s are sticking vulnerability onto so many skills and traits.

At a Teqatl fight defending the hills, yesterday, I ran axe and was surprised how little vulnerability was coming from the other four group members on champs. It was not as if any two of them could not cap vuln without my axe yet it seemed as if all four others were purposely avoiding vulnerability application skills.

I thought people had been clamoring for a range increase for months. Now it’s here, and people claim it’s unnecessary.

Also, Axe #3 has always been good as a soft-CC that can operate against stealthed opponents. Yes, I’m talking about PvP, but I don’t need the “are you trying to balance solely around PvP?” shenanigans, because most of what I see is people trying to balance solely around PvE. They don’t seem to want to separate the balance because it makes going from one to the other much more confusing. So this is what we’re working with.

Crippling and detecting (by way of acquiring a boon) a stealthed opponent in a 600 range of you is very useful out in WvW. Channels are also very useful out in WvW, as they continue on opponents who go into stealth while also removing blinds/blocks while still maintaining usefulness. Pesky D/P Thieves, for example, can be hit with all but the first tick on Axe #2 every time they try to Heartseeker into stealth. With the range increase, it’s just added pressure from further away.

I don’t think Axe is designed to keep people from running, and that’s OK. You could take Focus for the chill on #5 at 1200 range, for example, to help with that. Or you could work other utility into the equation. At the end of the day though, 900 range provides much more flexibility in the way of spacing/pressure than 600 range did, and Axe #3 being 600 range still gives it potential usefulness, even if you can’t just rotate through your cooldowns at 900 range.

Cogbyrn.7283:

I thought people had been clamoring for a range increase for months. Now it’s here, and people claim it’s unnecessary.

Different people.

Blaine Tog.8304:

Cogbyrn.7283:

I thought people had been clamoring for a range increase for months. Now it’s here, and people claim it’s unnecessary.

Different people.

Pretty much this.

Axe’s short range was a Learn to pay issue. You learned axe & the short range didn’t matter much.

The problem with axe is that all three skills are bad because they don’t scale with power damage well enough.

And the 8 stacks of vulnerability that axe 1 can upkeep are pretty pathetic considering how much vulnerability has power creeped into the game. Once the problem with vulnerability was “since vulnerability is on warrior greatsword 1, it will hit the cap automatically.”. Today not just warrior greatsword, but a bunch of classes hit the cap themselves without even trying.

nekretaal.6485:

The problem with axe is that all three skills are bad because they don’t scale with power damage well enough.

The autoattack scales pretty well with Power right now, considering its range and mechanics. It’s less than the dagger’s auto damage but since you’ll have higher uptime, the tradeoff seems fair. A bit of cleave wouldn’t go amiss.

Axe 2 may still need a damage boost. In the golem tests I’ve done, judging the difference between kill times with Axe 2 vs kill times with just the autoattack is more difficult than I’d like. Still, the damage doesn’t appear to be worse and the Life Force generation isn’t bad. I could see a case to be made for a slight damage increase, or possible for some cleave.

Axe 3 is a Swiss army knife of a skill and high damage really isn’t a priority for it.

Yes, range was never my problem with axe. If I could play dagger, axe was fine. Vulnerability is what I have difficulty with. It is a potent condition on a skill until the cap, which usually takes only 2 players to reach.

It is harder to cap Might, if only because positioning is required. Vulnerability is still stuck in the same rut that bleeding was.

Eh, I find vuln stacks to be very spikey, and most are way shorter duration than might. Regardless, why compare them when you should have both. That’s how I feel about comparisons of protection vs weakness, as well.

DeceiverX.8361:

Zenith.7301:

It needed way more than a 10% increase. Why was 10% settled on on all the bad autoattack weapons for necro and mesmer, while thief is receiving 25%+ damage boosts?

Because the pistol’s power scaling was worse than Axe’s with arguably just as poor utility and suffered from projectile problems. Actually, the pistol is still really bad because Body Shot is pretty much the worst skill ever made.

Axe has crazy burst LF generation and with excessive damage would make it a safer dagger with range and no projectile deficiencies. While it might not be perfect as is, it’s better to see incremental buffs in the right direction (we’ll also see what goes on with the Reaper due to its LF-generation dependencies) rather than monsters emerge like PU mes and burn builds did after the 6/23 changes.

Methinks you overestimate Axe. LF generation isn’t crazy, it’s good. Comparable damage to Dagger wouldn’t give it Dagger’s utility.

Agree with incremental changes as long as they don’t take a year or three to do it, unlikely thanks to #Geelieve, but still a point nonetheless.

If vuln were reworked to reduce boss effective life, it could be made to stack beyond 25. at 0.5% reduction per stack, 25 stacks would give 12% reduced life, 50 stacks 23% and 100 stacks 40%. (13.3%, 28.5% & 65% increases in damage)

Narrrz.7532:

If vuln were reworked to reduce boss effective life, it could be made to stack beyond 25. at 0.5% reduction per stack, 25 stacks would give 12% reduced life, 50 stacks 23% and 100 stacks 40%. (13.3%, 28.5% & 65% increases in damage)

I’ve played a few games in my time, but I don’t know what the difference is between “reduced effective life” and “increased damage taken”.

from a technical point of view, little or none, but in GW1, the deep wound condition cut mob life by 20% for its duration, resulting in an effective 25% damage increase (both direct and degeneration)

in this case the point would be for the purposes of diminishing returns – if you reduce mob life multiplicatively, the formula for damage taken is 1/((1-x)^n) where x is the % health reduction and n is the number of stacks.

On the other hand, a multiplicative stacking of increased damage taken would just be 1+x^n which results in an increasing scale – they actually work out as very close, mostly because a 0.5% reduction in health is actually more than 0.5% increased damage taken, but at very high stack count increased damage taken would win out by a significant margin.

Edit: actually, i’m wrong – there’s no difference whatsoever (lol)

I tried axe in a few pvp matches and I like it now. But in pve axe still feels weak. I’m still better off running staff so I can tag more enemies for loot.

Instead of making any more changes to axe, I’d like to see the axe trait get changed.

Unholy Fervor is currently:

Reduce recharge of axe skills. Axe skills deal increased damage to vulnerable foes.
Damage Increase: 10%
Recharge Reduced: 20%

I’d like to see it changed to:

Reduce recharge of axe skills. Rending Claws is now an AoE skill (Radius: 240 from target)
Number of Targets: 5 (or 3 if this seems to strong)
Recharge Reduced: 20%

Narrrz.7532:

Edit: actually, i’m wrong – there’s no difference whatsoever (lol)

Haha, dang. I was hoping there was some really cool math in there making them different that I hadn’t intuited, and it looked so close. I appreciate you working through an explanation though.

While technically no difference, due to game mechanic differences between what Vulnerability affects, less effective health would make certain things significantly stronger (life steal for example).

Robert Gee.9246:

One of the reasons we are more conservative about axe when it comes to balance is because axe uses a unique attack action in our game that cannot be avoided using positioning. Normal melee attacks have an attack arc and normal ranged attacks use projectiles. Enemy players can use positioning and movement to avoid these attacks. Axe 1 and 2 by contrast just hit you when you are in range regardless of your positioning. While some utility skills (like Corrupt Boon) also use this targeting method, it’s rare on weapon skills and thus we are wary of buffing it too much.

Here is my suggestion for Axe #2. Forget it as it is, its ‘uniqueness’ is not worth the hassle. Now that we tasted the awesomeness of Reaper’s spin2win, why don’t you give us THIS instead?, our body is ready to do the Meat Grinder. Keep the current Axe #2 damage and life force generation, revert the range to how it originally was (600), add cleave, pull, ‘whirl finisher’ and an awesome claw animation similar to that of Grasping Darkness (instead of Meat Grinder’s enormous axe) and let us enjoy.

Robert Gee.9246:

As for the animation on axe 1, it was changed because of an exploit with cancel casting that allowed players to get significantly more damage from the skill by continually canceling it. At the time I tried to just adjust the original animation so we could keep it but due to its construction that ended up not being feasible. The resulting animation looked extremely choppy and didn’t sync well across races. You are always welcome to make suggestions on alternate animations you’d like to see, but going back to the original animation at this point is extremely unlikely.

IMO Necromancer/Reaper’s axe skills should look direct and “brutal”. Axe auto-attack current animation is really underwhelming, we wield it like a badminton racket. THIS is what I want: a diagonal cut, a horizontal cut, and a vertical cut that smashes into the ground, each of them with their corresponding slash animations on the foe. If the ‘uniqueness’ of the attack action is in the way, please drop it and change this skill to a normal chain, I’m sure that we can live with that.

As for Axe #3, like other people said it would be nice if it had ‘blast finisher’, and/or if it converted 2-3 boons instead of 1. It would also be interesting to get Fury or Resistance instead of Retaliation.

I would like to see something to make this weapon more unique compared to the other weapons. But all i really need is for its auto attack’s animation not to be so horrendous.

I’d be happy to just see more damage on the auto attack, making it simply a good ranged power weapon (the Scepter counterpart).

They could try adding good damage to Axe 1 and pass the vulnerability to Axe 2 (more or less the way Longbow works on ranger). Axe 1 could even do more damage the closer you are to the target (inverse of Longbow).

Maybe someone suggested this already but, what if we get a chain instead of our current axe autoattack, and give the third link an effect similar to that of Mesmer’s sword 1c: “Stab your foe and rip a boon off of them. Does additional damage when the target has no boons.” Just changing the “rip a boon” for “transfer a condition”, and do additional damage if we have no conditions on us (or less than X number of conditions).

Axe AA is mostly fine from a damage standpoint now. It deals 0.7 coefficients per second, which is solid for an attack that is “guaranteed” in a way that projectiles aren’t. Compare it to other ranged AAs and it has very comparable damage, but also inflicts vuln.

The thing holding Axe back at this point is the pitiful 2 skill, which deals too low of damage compared to other abilities like Rapid Fire (which deals 30% more damage AND stacks vuln). Other than that I think Axe is pretty decent right now, the AA is okay, just needs a less awful animation, the 3 skill is crazy overloaded on effects, and it lets you grab an offhand which is pretty nice.

I support making 3 a blast finisher. Also maybe make 2 hit multiple people in an area around your target (but life force only generates on one). Buffing 3 even more probably wont happen though because its already pretty decent.

Axe 2 needs a slight damage buff, not much and it should function similar to DS4 where you can get partial hits. One more thing to consider is a slight LF gain boost on Axe2. I mainly use Axe/focus as a quick LF generator and as a range relief weapon when I move out of melee to heal or reset. It works pretty good for this but doesn’t have the chops to be a primary weapon.

I would just like it if axe gained some kind of a pull. >_<. Is that too much to ask?

TheLastNobody.8319:

I would just like it if axe gained some kind of a pull. >_<. Is that too much to ask?

What possible reason would a ranged weapon like Axe have for a pull?

I’d just love to see a whirl finisher on Axe 2.

OlliX.1705:

I’d just love to see a whirl finisher on Axe 2.

and 10% dmage buff

Bhawb.7408:

TheLastNobody.8319:

I would just like it if axe gained some kind of a pull. >_<. Is that too much to ask?

What possible reason would a ranged weapon like Axe have for a pull?

To keep em in range? Seriously Bhawb, seems like whenever I have a suggestion you must take my hopes and dash them entirely. V_V.

I mean, I’d love pulls, but I don’t think it fits on Axe, and it’d cause Axe to lose potential power from its damage/other stuff. At 900 range pretty much the only person who would be outranging you is Mesmer and Ranger, and at that point a single pull doesn’t really accomplish much.

Bhawb.7408:

I mean, I’d love pulls, but I don’t think it fits on Axe, and it’d cause Axe to lose potential power from its damage/other stuff. At 900 range pretty much the only person who would be outranging you is Mesmer and Ranger, and at that point a single pull doesn’t really accomplish much.

What about longbow warrior? Or is it impractical for them to stay at such a range?

Brokensunday.4098:

OlliX.1705:

I’d just love to see a whirl finisher on Axe 2.

and 10% dmage buff

And small cleave? Ok, maybe too much. But whirl and 10% damage boost seems perfectly reasonable.

(and let’s not forget that blast finisher on skill 3…)

Icdan Sevaen.4628:

Bhawb.7408:

I mean, I’d love pulls, but I don’t think it fits on Axe, and it’d cause Axe to lose potential power from its damage/other stuff. At 900 range pretty much the only person who would be outranging you is Mesmer and Ranger, and at that point a single pull doesn’t really accomplish much.

What about longbow warrior? Or is it impractical for them to stay at such a range?

Longbow on Warrior is primarily used up close.

F1 is for the Fire field, which they like both parties to stay in.
2 is only effective up close, where all three arrows hit.
3 is so slow it doesn’t hit targets from far away.
5 is often used to set up GS burst damage or Hammer CC chain.