Are we even playing the same game? Lightning Hammer hits supremely harder than wells do as does frost bow. Same goes for engineer kits. Hell, thieves can hit backstabds every 5 seconds for far more damage than our 30+ sec cd wells do.
Lightning Hammer also forces you to drop your standard weapon skills while using it and Engineers don’t get a regular weapon swap. Backstab isn’t a utility skill at all so I’m not sure why you’re even bringing it up.
Once again, my point isn’t to argue numbers or current effectiveness, and it’s certainly not to argue that the professions are all properly balanced at the moment. I’m simply saying that the professions are designed to do things differently from each other, which means comparing an aspect of two professions together in a vacuum doesn’t tell you anything.
Please, pvp people, refrain from commenting on DPS. You people have no clue and assume Burst=DPS.
As you will note by reading my signature, I barely play PvP at all.
In a game with no tanks or healers, the most important utility a class can bring is DPS or some tool that enables the group’s DPS to be higher.
No, boon strip or chill won’t fulfill that role, sorry. All that matters in PvE is damage. You kill the mob before it kills you and you gain rewards as efficiently as possible.
Introducing differences in DPS dooms the class to marginalization in the format, which it has suffered for the last 3 years.
We seem to have fundament differences in how we understand game design, so I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree. ANet has certainly given themselves one heck of a design challenge by committing to breaking from a set trinity, yet I still think it might be possible to balance around that without homogenizing each profession too much. They’ve fallen short so far, but hopefully they’ll get it right eventually. I’m heartened by how they’ve listened to our feedback on the Reaper after the first BWE.
In their hype when they announced the game before it was released, their big selling point is that all classes would be able to fulfill most roles. Some would be slightly better than others, but have something else to make up for it.
Fast forward to now, and it’s not a “little better”. It’s “incredibly better”, as in an ele/thief is so far ahead in dps from necro/mesmer, it’s not even a question of viability.
And necro sacrificed DPS, sacrificed mobility, sacrificed the group utility of ele, and for what? It got nothing of value to make up for it.
That’s what angers people.
I will grant you your points. I can even agree with your view that necro can do slightly less DPS. But man, the differences are too large for what we get in exchange.
Some classes like ele and warrior are so absurdly overloaded in boon share/utility while maintaining top tier damage, while classes like necro/ranger are far behind and bring so much less utility.
Something’s gotta give. How can you balance a PSEA warrior. Our Chilling Force gets murdered with an ICD, and meanwhile a warrior comes in, does 100 blades and the group sits at a consistent 20+ stacks of might from a single trait with no meaningful ICD. Then you add to that banners, which are warrior exclusive in that they give raw stats, stats fairly equivalent to spotter, except a warrior with 2 banners brings 4 auras (power, condi damage, precision, ferocity) plus his own power aura (Empower Allies) that stacks with the power bonus of his own banner.
It’s just unacceptable how much boon generation and blast finishers/fields a warrior/ele bring, when boons are the largest contributor to DPS increase for a group (nothing approaches the boost of 25 might stacks and perma fury that both warriors and eles provide for the group effortlessly with a single easy trait).
They need to balance the playing field. Hell, mesmer scepter, most ranger weapons, necro scepter, ele scepter (hell, all scepters in this game are weak), necro axe, and even the dagger didn’t get touched to bring them in line with the top tier specs. Just the traits got changed. Why add new specializations and traits/utilities before fixing the base ones that have been so weak for so long?
Preach!
(edited by Odeezee.7362)
