Guild Wars 2

Thoughts? Aside from how silly it is that linecasting has been allowed to be a thing?

Haven’t taken Nemesis all that serious since he tried to proclaim that we out damaged Warrior. I’d love to see a “Nike reacts” video to this though, dude is going to blow a casket when he sees this.

Bhawb.7408:

Haven’t taken Nemesis all that serious since he tried to proclaim that we out damaged Warrior. I’d love to see a “Nike reacts” video to this though, dude is going to blow a casket when he sees this.

Ok, but unless I’m reading these numbers incorrectly, he’s kinda proved his point mathematically, hasn’t he? It’s kinda late and I’m in the middle of packing so I may indeed have been misreading, but it sure looks like he’s at least dishing out a competitive level of DPS.

I feel like it’s already well established that ice bows are the thing that makes “meta speedrunning” happen. The fact that ice bow 4 still has not been capped to like 1 hit per target per second is the most disturbing part of GW2’s development.

Talks about dagger being suboptimal in fights where it is difficult to melee. I agree with this, I carry an axe around with me all the time, but the only time I’ve ever needed to use it was in archdiviner, mai trin, and jade maw. Not in any of the dungeons.

Talks about how sick his “nosferatu” build is, which seems to be very similar to the metabattle wells necro except that he uses blood is power instead of signet of spite and doesn’t use signet of vampirism as an offensive heal and once lich form expires his dps goes down from amazing to below mediocre. Maybe he’ll surprise us with a video later and show that he can sustain above 11k dps but I feel like if that was possible, people like Brazil would have already shown us how to do it.

Talks about how “Team – Phalanx Strength” from metabattle is cancer designed entirely around ice bow, which is true. Talks about baddies being bad which is also true. I don’t know about other people’s experiences but I play in a lot of “zerk 80 exp” groups with no eles no icebows and no prebuffing other then guardians popping empower as we run up to the boss, and fights are still very fast and efficient. I’ve also been kicked on account of being a necro like twice ever, but that may have something to do with me never bothering to go above fractal 20, I’d imagine that cancer congregates a lot in the fractal 50 LFG.

Main problem with this video is the only people who are going to watch it are people who already agree with it. The scrubs he makes a point of in the video aren’t going to sit there and let a snarky european make fun of them, they’re going to close the video and go back to doing what they do. People who want to exploit and are actually “good” at it aren’t going to watch it either.

I feel like the thing that is mostly at fault is the dungeon design itself, exploit meta is a result of dungeons being so repetitive and boring and easy that people want to get that crap done as fast as possible and just get paid.

Blaine Tog.8304:

Bhawb.7408:

Haven’t taken Nemesis all that serious since he tried to proclaim that we out damaged Warrior. I’d love to see a “Nike reacts” video to this though, dude is going to blow a casket when he sees this.

Ok, but unless I’m reading these numbers incorrectly, he’s kinda proved his point mathematically, hasn’t he? It’s kinda late and I’m in the middle of packing so I may indeed have been misreading, but it sure looks like he’s at least dishing out a competitive level of DPS.

That wasn’t the point of the video, it’s about how this meta of 3 classes designed to carry ice bows to a boss and four ice bows to kill the boss in 5 seconds renders any dps measurement pointless since the ice bows do so much more damage then any player could hope to achieve.

I agree with him here. If ANet had gone along with their original plan and nerfed the ice bow as they said they would all classes would be more “wanted”. In this case Anet listening to the whiners about how it was a bad move was not the right decision to make.

If you have no place in making the ice bow quicker, be it by using time warp for more DPS or stealth to skip, you are a useless gear in the machine according to the “meta”.

I may be one of the few but I was VERY happy they were going to change it, as I was when they nerfed the fiery great sword. No one skill should ever be better than ANY other skill (let alone class) in order to have balance!

Jesus the PVE is a mess in this game.

Always had faith in the Nem. Good work bruh.

He completely decimated the elitists of gw2 and their extreme delusions of meta. XD

He broke it down.. broke dat sumbish down. I mean its one thing to cling to meta which is proven without a doubt to be the most efficient.. but the lengths and practices at which they cling to it (as described even in the vid) completely contradicts their own fanatical gospel lol. Thats the part I’ve always fond the most hilarious.

Tommyknocker.6089:

I agree with him here. If ANet had gone along with their original plan and nerfed the ice bow as they said they would all classes would be more “wanted”. In this case Anet listening to the whiners about how it was a bad move was not the right decision to make.

If you have no place in making the ice bow quicker, be it by using time warp for more DPS or stealth to skip, you are a useless gear in the machine according to the “meta”.

I may be one of the few but I was VERY happy they were going to change it, as I was when they nerfed the fiery great sword. No one skill should ever be better than ANY other skill (let alone class) in order to have balance!

Nerfing ice bow changes nothing. Why are you people clueless about the appeal of a staff ele.

Without ice bow ele still achieves DPS competitive with thief single target, yet it’s AoE instead of the abckstab thief’s single target, the ele provides perma fury with Persisting Flames, permanent blast fields with lava font in addition to two water fields and 2 AoE CC for mob control (earth 4 and air 5).

Glyph of storms is a utility that grants 25 vulnerability stacks on top of damage, and that same utility skill is basically a better version of Well of Darkness.

They can nerf ice bow, people will still bring 1 ele for persisting flames perma group fury as no other class can do group perma fury by pressing a single button that’s part of their normal DPS rotation, and the highest AoE and single target DPS ingame.

If HoT brings high toughness mobs, you replace the elementalist with sinister engineers instead.

If you think nerfing ice bow increases the chances of necro/ranger/mesmer being brought in larger numbers or at all, you’re fooling yourself.

Yes, ice bow needs nerfing, but don’t think for a second that this will fix the lopsided class balance because the truth is that utility and damage balance across classes is so ridiculously skewed in favor of classes like ele/warrior/guardian/thief.

Zenith.7301:

Tommyknocker.6089:

I agree with him here. If ANet had gone along with their original plan and nerfed the ice bow as they said they would all classes would be more “wanted”. In this case Anet listening to the whiners about how it was a bad move was not the right decision to make.

If you have no place in making the ice bow quicker, be it by using time warp for more DPS or stealth to skip, you are a useless gear in the machine according to the “meta”.

I may be one of the few but I was VERY happy they were going to change it, as I was when they nerfed the fiery great sword. No one skill should ever be better than ANY other skill (let alone class) in order to have balance!

Nerfing ice bow changes nothing. Why are you people clueless about the appeal of a staff ele.

Without ice bow ele still achieves DPS competitive with thief single target, yet it’s AoE instead of the abckstab thief’s single target, the ele provides perma fury with Persisting Flames, permanent blast fields with lava font in addition to two water fields and 2 AoE CC for mob control (earth 4 and air 5).

Glyph of storms is a utility that grants 25 vulnerability stacks on top of damage, and that same utility skill is basically a better version of Well of Darkness.

They can nerf ice bow, people will still bring 1 ele for persisting flames perma group fury as no other class can do group perma fury by pressing a single button that’s part of their normal DPS rotation, and the highest AoE and single target DPS ingame.

If HoT brings high toughness mobs, you replace the elementalist with sinister engineers instead.

If you think nerfing ice bow increases the chances of necro/ranger/mesmer being brought in larger numbers or at all, you’re fooling yourself.

Yes, ice bow needs nerfing, but don’t think for a second that this will fix the lopsided class balance because the truth is that utility and damage balance across classes is so ridiculously skewed in favor of classes like ele/warrior/guardian/thief.

Well…As far as perma fury goes. My ranger gives that with one button to 5 people >.<. And without ice bow prebuffing itself loses alot of its impact. Which is a big part of why eles are viewed in the same light as the captain of your high school cheerleading team. And while nerfing icebow might not get other classes in the meta. It shortens the gap by quite a bit. Also. ice bow four in its current form NEEDS to disappear before raids. Or else someone will get the idea to bring 10 eles with icebows. And I have a feeling theyl melt a massive chunk of the bosses health. If they dont kill it outright.

He has a few points.

1) Ice bow is broken. In other news water is wet. Everyone except the developers has known this since even before the FGS nerf. (This also deflates the notion that the developers have some brilliant ‘master plan’)

2) Likewise, Reaper does great damage. This time it’s that ice is cold. ooh. So insightful. Such wow.

3) Saving time warp for at least sub 50%, and likely best case is 25%, just like Bloodlust back in Wow. This is logical and a great point that the mesmer community(and anyone else with group quickness) should definitely consider.

Now, for my issues with it:

He does a few obvious math tricks that he didn’t need to: Counting the pre-fight buffing in DPS calcs is arguably cherry-picking evidence, since he clearly swaps at least utilities, and probably traits before fights depending on adds or not. One can argue either way.

The other is in claiming that debuffs are just as valid as buffs. Vuln is important, and frankly it’s everywhere and everyone as a groups brings enough that it should never be an issue to max it out. That little defiance irritation though guts the important debuffs that necro brings, like reliable Weakness uptime and Chill that reduce their group viability, and by extension ours by a very large margin.

Lastly, he talks about sustained DPS while running one of the most burst-happy weapon groups, necro A/F, using some of the most burst-happy skills, wells/epidemic, and the most burst-happy elite, Lich.

Now, for the fun part. Deducing the Nosferatu spec:
Obviously:
Spite, 1/3/2. maxing A/F and not having a signet leaves no other choice, A/F with those traits also means you’re never using Ax1 for any period of time(which is what he does, only using it as filler between bigger skills.
Blood, 3,3,1, that much is obvious.
Now, the last one seems to be Curses(2/2/3) because of the fury when he pops DS, and makes the most sense for a hybrid build.

Gear seems to be a mix of celestial and zerker, ax and focus make sense to be zerker, s/w make most sense as sinister.
Just played around with what I had, kept zerker armor with strength, swapped out accessories and rings for rampager exotics, rampager WH and sinister Scepter. Worked very well.

When I can’t use dagger I just use Life blast or my staff. I haven’t touched the axe in a while because I’m still not using it until they fix that animation. Its horrible… Also the axe does need some love. As does the scepter, though not as much as people might think. But I melee bosses that could easily one or two shot me. And I don’t exploit. I play legit! :p I just know when its safe and when to skedaddle.

Shadelang.3012:

Zenith.7301:

Tommyknocker.6089:

I agree with him here. If ANet had gone along with their original plan and nerfed the ice bow as they said they would all classes would be more “wanted”. In this case Anet listening to the whiners about how it was a bad move was not the right decision to make.

If you have no place in making the ice bow quicker, be it by using time warp for more DPS or stealth to skip, you are a useless gear in the machine according to the “meta”.

I may be one of the few but I was VERY happy they were going to change it, as I was when they nerfed the fiery great sword. No one skill should ever be better than ANY other skill (let alone class) in order to have balance!

Nerfing ice bow changes nothing. Why are you people clueless about the appeal of a staff ele.

Without ice bow ele still achieves DPS competitive with thief single target, yet it’s AoE instead of the abckstab thief’s single target, the ele provides perma fury with Persisting Flames, permanent blast fields with lava font in addition to two water fields and 2 AoE CC for mob control (earth 4 and air 5).

Glyph of storms is a utility that grants 25 vulnerability stacks on top of damage, and that same utility skill is basically a better version of Well of Darkness.

They can nerf ice bow, people will still bring 1 ele for persisting flames perma group fury as no other class can do group perma fury by pressing a single button that’s part of their normal DPS rotation, and the highest AoE and single target DPS ingame.

If HoT brings high toughness mobs, you replace the elementalist with sinister engineers instead.

If you think nerfing ice bow increases the chances of necro/ranger/mesmer being brought in larger numbers or at all, you’re fooling yourself.

Yes, ice bow needs nerfing, but don’t think for a second that this will fix the lopsided class balance because the truth is that utility and damage balance across classes is so ridiculously skewed in favor of classes like ele/warrior/guardian/thief.

Well…As far as perma fury goes. My ranger gives that with one button to 5 people >.<. And without ice bow prebuffing itself loses alot of its impact. Which is a big part of why eles are viewed in the same light as the captain of your high school cheerleading team. And while nerfing icebow might not get other classes in the meta. It shortens the gap by quite a bit. Also. ice bow four in its current form NEEDS to disappear before raids. Or else someone will get the idea to bring 10 eles with icebows. And I have a feeling theyl melt a massive chunk of the bosses health. If they dont kill it outright.

And what button is that? Because you get 15 seconds from clarion call on a 30 second internal cd, and if you use warhorn for an extra 15 seconds you are achieving perma fury, yes, but by trading a suboptimal DPS offhand instead of your offhand axe. If you use s/a+s/w, you lose opener vulnerability and burst from a quickness barrage into rapid fire, or you lose s/a+(empty)/a Path of Scars benefitting from Quick Draw.

Meanwhile persisting flames provides a permanent fire field to blast for might on top of perma fury, and lava font itself does a ton of damage.

Buffing does not lose its importance without ice bow. 25 permanent might stacks is an immense damage increase, with or without ice bow.

I will also say that it is true this community is delusional, because by far this game’ PUG community is the most vile and self-aggrandizing I’ve encountered out of any MMO. It almost feels like this game’s PvE community is made of the usually toxic PvP players you’d find in LoL or some MOBA/RTS.

But Nemesis doesn’t help himself when he calls people scrubs and he shows videos of him eating several mossman axe throws or using life blast from greater than 600 range on the Molten Duo boss fight.

I do hope this game’s PvE evolves to more diverse combat than “stack 25 might/fury and just stand in the boss’s face while blocking/CC’ing any form of potential damage to turn the boss into a target dummy”.

Klaeljanus.7695:

Now, for the fun part. Deducing the Nosferatu spec:
Obviously:
Spite, 1/3/2. maxing A/F and not having a signet leaves no other choice, A/F with those traits also means you’re never using Ax1 for any period of time(which is what he does, only using it as filler between bigger skills.
Blood, 3,3,1, that much is obvious.
Now, the last one seems to be Curses(2/2/3) because of the fury when he pops DS, and makes the most sense for a hybrid build.

Gear seems to be a mix of celestial and zerker, ax and focus make sense to be zerker, s/w make most sense as sinister.

You guessed wrong, seems you made a build between ultimate hybrid 3.0 and the glass cannon 3.0 (Nosferatu) but you’re not even close at fullfilling one of the builds or both :> There’s a trick to both

Zenith.7301:

Shadelang.3012:

Zenith.7301:

Tommyknocker.6089:

I agree with him here. If ANet had gone along with their original plan and nerfed the ice bow as they said they would all classes would be more “wanted”. In this case Anet listening to the whiners about how it was a bad move was not the right decision to make.

If you have no place in making the ice bow quicker, be it by using time warp for more DPS or stealth to skip, you are a useless gear in the machine according to the “meta”.

I may be one of the few but I was VERY happy they were going to change it, as I was when they nerfed the fiery great sword. No one skill should ever be better than ANY other skill (let alone class) in order to have balance!

Nerfing ice bow changes nothing. Why are you people clueless about the appeal of a staff ele.

Without ice bow ele still achieves DPS competitive with thief single target, yet it’s AoE instead of the abckstab thief’s single target, the ele provides perma fury with Persisting Flames, permanent blast fields with lava font in addition to two water fields and 2 AoE CC for mob control (earth 4 and air 5).

Glyph of storms is a utility that grants 25 vulnerability stacks on top of damage, and that same utility skill is basically a better version of Well of Darkness.

They can nerf ice bow, people will still bring 1 ele for persisting flames perma group fury as no other class can do group perma fury by pressing a single button that’s part of their normal DPS rotation, and the highest AoE and single target DPS ingame.

If HoT brings high toughness mobs, you replace the elementalist with sinister engineers instead.

If you think nerfing ice bow increases the chances of necro/ranger/mesmer being brought in larger numbers or at all, you’re fooling yourself.

Yes, ice bow needs nerfing, but don’t think for a second that this will fix the lopsided class balance because the truth is that utility and damage balance across classes is so ridiculously skewed in favor of classes like ele/warrior/guardian/thief.

Well…As far as perma fury goes. My ranger gives that with one button to 5 people >.<. And without ice bow prebuffing itself loses alot of its impact. Which is a big part of why eles are viewed in the same light as the captain of your high school cheerleading team. And while nerfing icebow might not get other classes in the meta. It shortens the gap by quite a bit. Also. ice bow four in its current form NEEDS to disappear before raids. Or else someone will get the idea to bring 10 eles with icebows. And I have a feeling theyl melt a massive chunk of the bosses health. If they dont kill it outright.

And what button is that? Because you get 15 seconds from clarion call on a 30 second internal cd, and if you use warhorn for an extra 15 seconds you are achieving perma fury, yes, but by trading a suboptimal DPS offhand instead of your offhand axe. If you use s/a+s/w, you lose opener vulnerability and burst from a quickness barrage into rapid fire, or you lose s/a+(empty)/a Path of Scars benefitting from Quick Draw.

Meanwhile persisting flames provides a permanent fire field to blast for might on top of perma fury, and lava font itself does a ton of damage.

Buffing does not lose its importance without ice bow. 25 permanent might stacks is an immense damage increase, with or without ice bow.

I will also say that it is true this community is delusional, because by far this game’ PUG community is the most vile and self-aggrandizing I’ve encountered out of any MMO. It almost feels like this game’s PvE community is made of the usually toxic PvP players you’d find in LoL or some MOBA/RTS.

But Nemesis doesn’t help himself when he calls people scrubs and he shows videos of him eating several mossman axe throws or using life blast from greater than 600 range on the Molten Duo boss fight.

I do hope this game’s PvE evolves to more diverse combat than “stack 25 might/fury and just stand in the boss’s face while blocking/CC’ing any form of potential damage to turn the boss into a target dummy”.

Well…to answer your question the button is f2. The trait investment is a minor trait in the nature magic line. The dmg I give up is taking a red moa. But I still have a cat on the swap so whatever. Fights don’t last long enough for me to worry about having to swap back to moa. Between a Red moa and jungle stalker thats perma fury and perma 5-10 stacks of might that I don’t have to worry about being in melee to get (not counting other procs). So its a pretty nice deal for ranger’s that dislike the hump the boss meta. (err I guess its called hte icebow meta now)

Second. Your obviously agitated man. It shows in the way you type. Calm down. I wasn’t saying I was in anyway superior to ele. Just saying that the whole fury thing isn’t that impressive. Also. The biggest issue is that the time it takes to prebuff is time you could spend fighting the mob and doing your might rotation on him. Instead of stacking up ahead of time you can be a bit more skillful and do it on the move.

Hell. Why the kitten did we get moving fields with elite specs if not for that?

Edit: Best part about using pets to generate boons is you can reach both the ranger AND the melee with them. They have more than enough range just gotta use them as there otw to the boss.

Although I agree with the points on the Ice Bow, cause ya know… It’s silly strong, we’ve been down this road before and last time It ended very poorly for this dude and I don’t take much of his info very seriously.

I’m gonna hold off on opinions until I see the counter videos big timers such as Nike will obviously make. I’ve run dps tests on hybrid builds, conditions builds… Hell, everything and they all ended short.

The whole speed of fights is an interesting thought. As for dagger, I hope this guy realizes that there are VERY few fights where you can’t afford to be in melee. Ironically, I laughed when I saw that Molten Twins solo, I ended up having to carry a group somewhat the same, though I did it in melee with a dagger.

Dont care at all about PvE and Hardcore PvE dosent exist in Gw2 so dont get some Eliteist ppl when there really nothing to brag about. pvE needs to be harder and chellenging imho for there to be hardcore Eliteist ppl in Gw2 PvE Forum.

Killing a Boss/NPC in Gw2 sadly has never about challenge just a matter of speed, and that isnt even the slighest hardcore.

Still I always enjoyed your Vidz Nemesis and I did enjoy this build aswell, keep them comming.

Only brutally stupid.

Axelwarrior.9084:

Only brutally stupid.

Your account name thow :P

I don’t get the point discussing that, really. Necros got slapped with bad PR long time ago and DnT are oracles for half of the PvE community. Even if Nemesis is right, it won’t make our situation much better, we have our stereotype and you won’t convince lambs. It’s same like at launch when your group’s usefulness was measured by number of Greatswords your party wields. Took 2 years to convince people otherwise.

Better focus on future raiding content.

All that I can see is he saying a lot of obviously problems from current PvE, which isn’t actually a meta problem , and self-promotion.

I dont know. I agree with a lot of what he says, but disagree with a lot of other things as well.

I agree with how Ice Bow ruins the game (and has done so since pretty much forever) and I also agree that people overestimate the benefit of buffs and underestimate the benefit of debuffs.
I agree with him that dagger isn’t always the best option, and that it’s very fight dependent.
Also agree that time warp is awfully misused most of the time.

I disagree with a few fundamental things as well.
First of all, removing Ice Bow won’t suddenly wipe clean the meta slate. The top classes aren’t just top because of ice bow. There are significant other benefits they bring.
On top of that he’s talking like our ability to bring certain debuffs to a group is unique, when that’s far from.

Secondly, he talks about the difference between burst and sustained dps. And yet he kind of makes the same mistakes when he starts with full LF and brings a lich to a 25 second boss kill.
Dont get me wrong, that’s fine with current fights as most bosses don’t last longer anyway. But with upcoming raids, your dps will be a lot lower since you don’t have a high% uptime on that lich, not as high % uptime of that death shroud, etc.

Third. He tries to sell the axe and the scepter as weapons. Which I’m fine with, but he’s using them solely for the axe #2 / scepter #2 / scepter #3 abilities by the looks of it.
That stuff is fine, since he spends the rest of his time in death shroud, where he basically uses DS #1 as his auto attack.
So far so good, the problem arises more when for some reason you:
a) Get hit and take a good chunk of LF damage
b) Flunk a skill like Axe #2 or Focus #4 and you’re low on LF generation.
Suddenly you’ll have to make due with scepter or axe auto attack, which are both embarrassingly bad dps wise.
This doesn’t invalidate his build, but it has a few drawbacks that he seems to glance over.

That all said. I usually quite like his videos.
He’s a bit annoying at times; like when he killed all the mobs with his scepter #2 and wells. I was like: “Dude, if you just let them come to the group you would’ve killed them much faster. You’re now just crippling them so it takes longer to get to the rest of your party .”

So he can manage half decent burst dps that is almost 75% of ele’s sustained dps even without ice bow… color me not impressed…

Too bad his dps would drop by 80% if he took a single hit or if the fight lasted longer than 30 seconds.

Bhawb.7408:

Haven’t taken Nemesis all that serious since he tried to proclaim that we out damaged Warrior. I’d love to see a “Nike reacts” video to this though, dude is going to blow a casket when he sees this.

Out DPS, yes, outburst, no. Again proven by numbers. And the real point was that since line-casted icebow does around 10 times more DPS/Burst than anything else in the game, DPS measurements are pointless from the get-go.

Batresh.3958:

You guessed wrong, seems you made a build between ultimate hybrid 3.0 and the glass cannon 3.0 (Nosferatu) but you’re not even close at fullfilling one of the builds or both :> There’s a trick to both

the glass cannon build seems like

spite 132 to boost axe and focus damage. Also 5% increase against foes with no boons is nice.
blood 331 pretty obvious seeing the buffs he gets during combat and the utilities he uses (actually, not the first trait… )
soul reaping 322 (or 122 depending on the fight). since he has awful autoattacks from the weapons, he needs to recharge his DS as fast as possible to keep the damage up, and then vital persistence and deathly perception seem mandatory if you are doing any damage with DS.

Also, in a scenario like this, and admiting he doesnt use dagger (he did the same with his old hybrid build, stating that you cannot always melee, which is not true… i used to melee even when playing scepter, to make things more fun) he would carry staff as second weapon, to boost his DS and Lich damage. Gear would be all zerker. Runes whatever (i would go with scholar) and damage modifiers for sigils.

Elementalist needs top end damage skills lowered. The problem with Ele is, once the pressure from opponents is off the profession, damage skyrockets. Force Ele’s to stay alive and the numbers fall back in line.

PvE is just designed to favor specific professions.

I completely agree on his statement that we are not in a zerker meta but rather the ice bow meta. That one spell has hurt build diversity in this game so much and strangely enough it was buffed when June 23rd came around.

I also think he has some valid points on pre-buffing.

In regards to his DPS comparison to warrior, I believe that your run of the mill PS warrior can pull around 13k DPS. The numbers provided in the video show he is pulling 14K on this new zerker variant (which is yet to be disclosed) so it appears on the surface to be better damage.

Shiki.7148:

Bhawb.7408:

Haven’t taken Nemesis all that serious since he tried to proclaim that we out damaged Warrior. I’d love to see a “Nike reacts” video to this though, dude is going to blow a casket when he sees this.

Out DPS, yes, outburst, no. Again proven by numbers. And the real point was that since line-casted icebow does around 10 times more DPS/Burst than anything else in the game, DPS measurements are pointless from the get-go.

Only if 100% of the players know how to linecast realiably & DPS calcs assume line casted Ice Storms and Meteor Showers which are obviously not the case.

The only info you can’t take with a grain of salt is that Ice Bows are OP.

Bacon.1835:

I completely agree on his statement that we are not in a zerker meta but rather the ice bow meta. That one spell has hurt build diversity in this game so much and strangely enough it was buffed when June 23rd came around.

I also think he has some valid points on pre-buffing.

In regards to his DPS comparison to warrior, I believe that your run of the mill PS warrior can pull around 13k DPS. The numbers provided in the video show he is pulling 14K on this new zerker variant (which is yet to be disclosed) so it appears on the surface to be better damage.

Of course the PS warrior is boosting group dps by nearly 50%. A full zerker dps warrior can pull 16k dps, but that is not the role of a PS warrior. So great for the necro… he can outdps a support role and reduces the groups DPS by 50%. Doesn’t seem like something we should be proud of…

I never knew about line casting so thank you for informing me. I also aggree that ice bow needs a nerf. I do aggree that time warp later might have positive results then early. I haven’t seen his new build so I will wait with judgement with that. I do not think that comparing the dps of a support character and (2 banners, empower and might stacks) against a necromancer which offers at best 25 stacks of vuln and vampiric aura at best is a good idea. I also think that buffing is still more important then debuffing ( you need more then 3000 power to make 25 stacks vulnerability then 25 stacks of might).

Agree with a lot of what Nemesis says in this vid.

The shorter a fight is the more the DPS of these short duration high damage abilities is exaggerated. SO Icebow is exaggerated because the fights don’t last long enough for the full cooldown to tick out and it’s true DPS is shown.. hence DPS versus burst. Burst is the damage over the active period of a skill, DPS is the damage in the active and downtime period. Currently the game favours the burst of a skill over the DPS and this helps promote the meta builds.

Really that’s just well known mechanics of fights, it’s always been known the length of a fight vs cooldowns affects the burst you can put out. Raid in any serious raid based game such as WoW and this sort of thing is basic knowledge.. you save your high damage long cooldown skill for burst phases… dungeon bosses in GW are pretty much all burst phase. Currently only world bosses are long duration fights that people take part in regularly. Work out the damage on a player in say Karka Queen and it will be lower than the DPS on a dungeon boss.

The Berserker meta was designed for one thing and one thing only.. to kill bosses in as short a time as possible. So it’s built around the point of engagement to the end of the fight. It’s built for timed kills where fractions of a second count. But many players think it’s built around completing a dungeon as quickly as possible, it does have that benefit but really it’s maybe a couple of minutes over a run. For quick dungeon runs the ability to skip packs is far more useful than the stats you have. Stats are for boss kill speed in the current dungeons. For the vast majority of players (i hate numbers pulled out of people’s butts like 95% of players etc because they are obvious vagaries) Whether they wear zerker or other DPS stats won’t really make a big difference… but they think it does.

Pre buffing will make your timed kill on a boss quicker, but not the time it takes to complete the dungeon. This is because time spent buffing > time gained on the boss kill. SO the point he make is if you are just trying to run a fast dungeon, just get on with killing a boss don’t pre buff.

I also agree that as far as damage produced goes a necro can match most other classes in straight out DPS… but they aren’t part of the meta because they don’t provide party buffs, icebow, timewarp and protections such as reflect.

So TL:DR his points are

1: Zerker meta is based around Direct damage for speed of patchwork style boss kills.
2: Fury and Might buffing are about getting fast buffs up due to shortness of the fights, hence why warrior and Ele are the buff kings.
3: Burst skills such as timewarp and icebow have their real benefits exaggerated by the current fights being so short.
4: Classes DPS are actually not that far apart, some could use a slight buff and some a nerf (Ele) but damage per second isn’t as huge a gulf in general as believed.
5: Players in the game base their play around the points above. The zerker meta does not encourage skill as there’s no need for it. The gap between a good player and a bad players means almost nothing in this game compared to say WoW. As such players don’t learn to play well. Due to this they have no concept of many of the basics of playing an MMo that are critical in other games EG don’t stand in the AoE, positioning, awareness of the surroundings, timing of when to use bursts and when to hold back, survival over OMGWTFDeeps.

Thinking about this and raiding, I think raiding is going to have a massive effect on these points.

1: Fights just won’t be Patchwork short boss kills. DPS is needed but it won’t all be direct damage, condition damage gets to play in longer fights too. DPS also isn’t the only thing to think about when it comes to stats as you will need to survive fights too, dead players = zero DPS. This should mean players will move away from the zerker meta, sure some people will still use it, but until a boss is easy farm mode and players outgear the content you will see much more variation.
2: As fights last longer the fast ramp up time that warriors have on means far less. On a 10 second fight getting to 25 might pre fight or within the first few seconds is critical to speed. But on say a 5 minute boss fight this really makes bugger all difference as most classes can get themselves to 25 might easily and sustain it there. Fury is different because most classes can’t sustain their own fury. That said as there are more players in groups so more fire fields the ability to permanently sustain a field is needed less. So we should see the dominance of warrior and ele in the group lessen as the need for instant quick might and fury is reduced… leading to more spaces opening up. This should also mean debuffs such as vulnerability get more purchase as there’s not no need for a fast might buffer so someone who could sustain a useful buff (Chill maybe) should become more valuable compared to the current get might up ASAP meta.
3: The dominance of Icebow and Timewarp will reduce as the goal is not outright speed and burst. They won’t go away as they are always a kitten good thing to have in this and any other game, but they shouldn’t be such a determining factor as before. It’s bad game design that these abilities are each tied to one class being able to cast them as that will reduce the variety of classes in a raid group. In most other games similar buffs that affect whole groups/raids usually are castable by more than one class.. thereby not making certain classes indispensable.
4: With the reliance on DPS and burst being the only things needed decreasing, the differences in classes DPS should start to matter less. A class that does lower DPS but isn’t in downed state so often will be preferable to a class with more DPS that goes down more often. It will also encourage bring the player not the class. Also once sufficient stats are in you would expect Anet to look at the data and balance the classes more… though admittedly their track record on this is spotty so far it’s been down to their being no real need to. We all out gear and out damage the content so stats are skewed. If Anet want HoT and raiding to work they will have to look at balance.
5; If GW2 raids are anything like other game in terms of difficulty and the need for player ability… oh boy are a hell of a lot of players are in for a REALLY big shock. GW2 has probably the lowest average player ability of any game I’ve ever played, purely because so many mechanics of the game that are staple to other MMO’s can be ignored. In raids where it’s not about pressing buttons and using cooldowns ASAP, but about playing the actual mechanics some players are really going to struggle. It matters not if you could kill boss X in Y seconds in a dungeon as an ele if you don’t play the fight mechanics. You may have a class that can do 18KDPS on a stand still dungeon burst, but if you can’t play the mechanics and put out reasonable DPS then that player whose class can only do 14K but can do it will get your raid spot. Once again bring the player not the class should hopefully come into play. As someone who used to lead raids in WoW for a pretty decent raid guild I regularly see players in groups in GW2 that I would never let raid in WoW. Raid leaders will take the better players over worse players with better theoretical stats. I’m willing to bet player screams of frustration at Anet will go through the roof because the content is too hard.. for them.

His video made me think more about the current game and how it’s not actually a true reflection of what the game could be. And then about how the game could be and it’s made me feel a lot more hopeful. It might take time for the current meta to change as it sinks in to players heads that it’s not valid anymore, but change it will.

Ravezaar.4951:

Dont care at all about PvE and Hardcore PvE dosent exist in Gw2 so dont get some Eliteist ppl when there really nothing to brag about. pvE needs to be harder and chellenging imho for there to be hardcore Eliteist ppl in Gw2 PvE Forum.

Killing a Boss/NPC in Gw2 sadly has never about challenge just a matter of speed, and that isnt even the slighest hardcore.

Still I always enjoyed your Vidz Nemesis and I did enjoy this build aswell, keep them comming.

This. GW2 PVE is one of the easiest I’ve played, possibly THE easiest. Yet for some odd reason it has a more elitist PVE community than many of the actual difficult games combined….. What is going on?

Really,…… “LF2M, No Necro”? Oh no, your shoddy PUG run is going to take 1 minute longer! LFG is beyond terrible and toxic. The scrub “players” on it need to go play a game with PVE content that actually warrants this kind of behavior.

Uhm… Maybe I missed something, but where is the part of the video with the “insane” Necro DPS?

Also, if he’s going by the logic of “no best, just best at”, why is he citing Ranged Necro damage, without comparing to other ranged setups?

I don’t understand what I was supposed to learn from this video? Besides that Ice Bow is broken, what about Necros was he trying to tell us?

Kain Francois.4328:

Uhm… Maybe I missed something, but where is the part of the video with the “insane” Necro DPS?

Also, if he’s going by the logic of “no best, just best at”, why is he citing Ranged Necro damage, without comparing to other ranged setups?

I don’t understand what I was supposed to learn from this video? Besides that Ice Bow is broken, what about Necros was he trying to tell us?

Didn’t you saw. The Necro have a DPS of 14.7 and the Warrior a dps of 9k. Necromancer is clearly better.

The necromancer used line casting icebow and the warrior no, but ahhhhhhhhh that doesn’t matter right? right?

So after watching the video it’s safe to assume everyone agrees ice bow is stupid. He didn’t make any amazing revelation there. Nerfing it doesn’t change eles still having the best dps even without it and the amount of fire fields/fury/vuln they can provide and have a godly amount of active defense.

His numbers are all wrong, his builds are terrible, what he says about other people and the generalizations he tried to throw on them such as Miku in the comments makes me embarassed I play the same profession as him. Him and his fan boys were literally the most toxic thing I’ve seen related to this game on the youtube comments.

If his point was necros can still do dungeons and do damage well duh they can, it’s still nowhere near the best dps, and it’s all we bring, he literally can’t argue that. And he basically claims everything in the game is an exploit, like stealthing and reflecting. No, that’s just bad game design. People aren’t abusing exploits, Anet gave us content and tools to go through that content, and have been content with people using our abilities to do the content.

Even if they did fix the bad encounter/AI design that doesn’t change the fact the necro has little utility and active defense and even in a more active fight our dps wouldn’t be worth it to take over anything more useful.

Frankly all I got from this video is Nemesis is trying to force his ideas and beliefs onto others and then just flaming anyone who remotely disagrees. We all play the necro because we like it, but don’t let how much you like it blind you from its faults.

L Step.8659:

Even if they did fix the bad encounter/AI design that doesn’t change the fact the necro has little utility and active defense and even in a more active fight our dps wouldn’t be worth it to take over anything more useful.

Well they can fix that if they want. If reaper give enough dps to the necro to reach decent numbers similar to guardian for exemple. This will help him a lot.

The other part is to give hime some support capability. But he doesn’t need he gain new ability. He have a lot of support stuff, but they just don’t matter in the current PvE content.

Enemies that have a lot of crits or a reworking of weakness to make it a more consistent debuff would give a good defensive capability for the necromancer. I’m hopeful about that, because anet said that they will give stats to enemies like precision. They said that in the fractal post. Giving an endurance bar to ennemies with an IA that try to dodge when a burst is incoming would even more increase the power of weakness.

Give important boons to ennemies. Ennemies that can get high amount of might and fury to have devastating attacks and vigor/protection for a good defense would push players to corrupt or strip their boons. Mesmer and Necro are the only profession that can do that on a high level. The more important boons strip/corrupt is important the more importance a necromance will have.

Give more condition to ennemies. Necromancer is good for transfering conditions, which would help the team survive, but also increase the pressure on ennemies.

So there is way to create content that work with the strength of the necro.

I recommend you avoid watching that video if you want to maintain your mental health. His bad math and “dps uptime” is contagious.

“Brazil had X dps with icebow and timwarp!”. No icebow was used in that clip. #logic

“Each party member is worth roughly 25% of the group’s DPS” Does that mean hes worth 0% and the other 4 do all the damage?

Video is full of embarrasing things like that.

Plus, comparing a full DPS build on a necromancer to a PS warrior is embarrassing. A PS warrior stacks 25 might stacks for the group permanently, brings 170 power/precision/ferocity/condi damage with banners+150 power with empower allies.

That’s such an immense amount of party DPS boost that he would not factor into why a PSEA warrior is taken over a necromancer.

It’s like saying a ninja in FFXIV does 70 DPS less than the other melee without factoring that his trick attack adds around 4-6% party wide DPS which you should attribute back to him.

Yeah, line casting is cheesy, but guess what? It’s banned from record submissions. Yes, ice bow and meteor shower need nerfs. Persisting Flames should not increase the duration of lava font.

But that’s beside the point, his claiming necromancer is fine is annoying as hell.

Guang would be proud of Nemesis’ math.

spoj.9672:

I recommend you avoid watching that video if you want to maintain your mental health. His bad math and “dps uptime” is contagious.

“Brazil had X dps with icebow and timwarp!”. No icebow was used in that clip. #logic

“Each party member is worth roughly 25% of the group’s DPS” Does that mean hes worth 0% and the other 4 do all the damage?

Video is full of embarrasing things like that.

Yeah, I stopped watching after seeing those.

meow one twenty.4376:

spoj.9672:

I recommend you avoid watching that video if you want to maintain your mental health. His bad math and “dps uptime” is contagious.

“Brazil had X dps with icebow and timwarp!”. No icebow was used in that clip. #logic

“Each party member is worth roughly 25% of the group’s DPS” Does that mean hes worth 0% and the other 4 do all the damage?

Video is full of embarrasing things like that.

Yeah, I stopped watching after seeing those.

I had to laugh at this too ^^

The only point I would concede is that pre buffing, running into melee range or letting npcs run to you takes away from actual fighting time.
However, like Nemesis mentioned himself, this is a matter of seconds. And if there is one player who’s never doing speed clears anyway (because “exploits”…) and therefore wouldn’t care about those extra seconds in the first place, its good ol’ Nemesis!

Ele’s top end dps aside, the problem is really PvE.

Bosses need to…
Corrupt or strip boons.
Chase the highest dps players harder instead of lower dps bunkers who are less of a threat.
Dodge red circles and skills with long tells theyay be weak to.
Try to reset the fight or use special moves when they are losing.
Counter control effects, mobility skills, and stealth.

After sleeping on it, I’m a bit torn about the video.

On the one hand, I do think he makes a number of interesting points:

1. Ice Bow is obviously broken and obviously warping the meta.

2. Perhaps prebuffing time should be included in DPS calculations, or at least included as an extra note attached to the calculation; it’s time when you’re at no risk of wiping, sure, but it’s still extra time spent on that specific boss.

3. A lot of people are sneering at his math but his math is actually the least objectionable part of the video. His DPS calculations seem solid (and he includes the final numbers for both with and without prebuffing taken into account, so this isn’t a reason to ignore his numbers either).

4. The preponderance of skip sections is a serious design flaw. Maybe you shouldn’t have to kill everything in a dungeon to get rewards (and the rewards for killing things shouldn’t be so efficient that they encourage mob farming mid-dungeon), but it’s just bad if the optimal strategy for a dungeon is to simply ignore 90% of it.

5. Necromancers have much higher damage than we get credit for. To be clear, I’m not saying that we’re better in group play than Warriors even if his DPS calculations are accurate; group support is more important than individual DPS, after all. However, all too often people will claim that Necro damage is bad, or even awful, and it’s just not. Even if it isn’t quite as good, it’s in the same ballpark.

However, I also have some serious problems with the video:

1. To be blunt, the bad manners are strong with this one. It’s really off-putting, and his attitude really isn’t doing him any favors. It’s clear that he’s intentionally trying to be provocative to create discussion, but while I do think discussion needs to happen (hence why I tossed this video here), I don’t really think screeching is going to change many minds or hearts.

2. He harps on about the difference between DPS and Burst and then proceeds to showcase one of the burstiest possible Necromancer builds.

3. He claims that the Axe and nonzerker builds have their place because you can’t always melee, but this isn’t the whole story. Daggering almost everything down in full Zerker gear is totally possible if you’re good enough, but it may be the case that keeping at range or gearing up with a bit less damage will save you from having to dodge as much or scramble for healing, which might lead to higher damage uptime overall. He has a point here hidden underneath the slight inaccuracy, but the inaccuracy means most people will dismiss his point out of hand. He also doesn’t do a great job of arguing this point numerically.

4. He calls party buffing overrated, but it flatly isn’t. Having 25 stacks of Might and Quickness is a massive DPS boost. To read his point charitably, it may be the case that prebuffing is overrated because it’s so easy for even an uncoordinated PUG to stack up significant AoE Might during the start of a fight, but he doesn’t really make that distinction as clearly as he should’ve. Conversely, debuffing really isn’t as good as he says because PvE bosses get Defiant and almost never use boons, which severely cuts into the usefulness of debuffing. Vulnerability is also scattered everywhere across every profession, so that it isn’t really worth spending too much time worrying about.

5. He’s supposedly railing against elitists while acting actually quite elitist himself. Non es bueno. While I realize taking the higher ground isn’t really his style and he’s probably a bit crochety from tanking so much hate, this is still a pretty big downside to my mind.

Overall, I’m always excited to see someone sit down and crunch some math and I hope this video triggers more solid DPS calculations, thoughts about how DPS is calculated, and perspective on relative DPS numbers… but I also really doubt this video will change anything. You put people on the defensive and they’ll just counterattack regardless of whether you’re right or wrong.

spoj.9672:

I recommend you avoid watching that video if you want to maintain your mental health. His bad math and “dps uptime” is contagious.

“Brazil had X dps with icebow and timwarp!”. No icebow was used in that clip. #logic

“Each party member is worth roughly 25% of the group’s DPS” Does that mean hes worth 0% and the other 4 do all the damage?

Video is full of embarrasing things like that.

1. Somebody else used the dropped Ice bow.

2. Directly after that quote he said “… that means doing a fractal run with four players…”

Good Work Nemesis! Enjoyed the video and I am going to go get myself a five man icebow team right now..

Ooooh wait…

Blaine Tog.8304:

After sleeping on it, I’m a bit torn about the video.

On the one hand, I do think he makes a number of interesting points:

1) I agree that Icebow should be nerf a little. Ice Storm a coefficient/second of casting of around 7 compare to 8. for Meteor Shower. But Meteor shower is a lot bigger so if you take into account that Meteor shower is probably more like 5 Coefficient/second of casting. So they could nerf it by 30% of increase hits radius to 360. Line casting isn’t that much of a problem. It’s banned in speed run, and kind of difficult to do for a lot of pugs. But it’s an exploit and shouldn’t be in the game. But it doesn’t wrap the meta. All the math done by DnT exclude the icebow. The meta would be the same if there was no Icebow with only some small modification. It’s more in the execution that it would have a big impact.

2) But we pretty much always add a note when we talk about dps. We said the full buffed dps of that profession is that xx dps. It’s to provide a base situation with which we can compare each profession. It’s easier to compare them with full buff than no buff because you always have some buff on you. They are part of the build so which buff do you exclude? It’s just easier to include them all. So unless you have no idea of how the game work you know that DnT’s number are full buff since the first second, which isn’t representative of the reality, but give you a good way to compare different profession.

3) Completely agree. The number are good, but know how he present them. In another post he compare the 14.7K dps of his necro to a 9k dps of a warrior. HE COMPARED THEM. Even tho the necro was full dps with an Icebow burst and the warrior was a PS with no Icebow. The number are good, but the present them like an idiot to make his point.

4) I agree that skipping isn’t handle very well in gw2, but I don’t skip 90% of all content in any dungeon path. I like skipping and hope that anet bring more intelligent skipping. Stuff that are as hard to skip as they are to fight. Or stuff that are rewarding to fight, but you can still skip if you want to go faster but gain less reward.

5) Agree.

He has a lot of good points, but I do have to disagree with him on some things.

#1: Prebuffing isn’t necessarily to improve group DPS. He is correct in that, when a lot of groups don’t factor buff and positioning time in their kill, that their numbers are inaccurate. Real life doesn’t stop ticking away.

However, prebuffing does make the fight easier. So in a hard fight, it is still worth it to buff early, even if it takes slightly longer overall.

#2: Telling people to use melee weapons, even when inexperienced, isn’t bad advice. The necro when played horribly is the second most durable class in the game. Using the dagger for higher sustained damage is a good option for new players. In fact, I recommend most new players use melee weapons and learn fights instead of hanging back with ranged weapons.

Otherwise I like most of the video.

Thaddeus.4891:

2) But we pretty much always add a note when we talk about dps. We said the full buffed dps of that profession is that xx dps. It’s to provide a base situation with which we can compare each profession. It’s easier to compare them with full buff than no buff because you always have some buff on you. They are part of the build so which buff do you exclude? It’s just easier to include them all. So unless you have no idea of how the game work you know that DnT’s number are full buff since the first second, which isn’t representative of the reality, but give you a good way to compare different profession.

For direct comparisons of one profession’s DPS to another, that’s totally fair. Is it customary to include those extra seconds in the calculations when calculating the DPS of an actual dungeon/fractal boss fight, though?

Thaddeus.4891:

3) Completely agree. The number are good, but know how he present them. In another post he compare the 14.7K dps of his necro to a 9k dps of a warrior. HE COMPARED THEM. Even tho the necro was full dps with an Icebow burst and the warrior was a PS with no Icebow. The number are good, but the present them like an idiot to make his point.

Unless I missed it, I didn’t see him actually use an Ice Bow on his Necro at any point in the video. I think he mentioned the Ice Bow in those fights to specify that his team was using the Ice Bow even though he wasn’t (which would’ve reduced the time-to-kill significantly and raised his relative DPS since a lot of it came from Lich Form bursting).

Thaddeus.4891:

4) I agree that skipping isn’t handle very well in gw2, but I don’t skip 90% of all content in any dungeon path. I like skipping and hope that anet bring more intelligent skipping. Stuff that are as hard to skip as they are to fight. Or stuff that are rewarding to fight, but you can still skip if you want to go faster but gain less reward.

I don’t think we should homogeneously have to fight everything, but more thought needs to be put into skippable sections. Not just making them more difficult, impossible, or inadvisable, but giving us interesting decisions to make. I happen to really enjoy stealth games and would be tickled pink if we had more interesting, difficult sections you could skip if you were up for the challenge (and perhaps with an achievement or rewards for making it through unseen), but there also need to be skippable sections which parties may not want to skip. Currently, there are no interesting decisions. You skip everything you can just to rush to the end prize, period.

“Our Necro’s DPS sucks.”
“lol you are on youtube. "

For serious? Way to make players more welcoming to Necros.

Blaine Tog.8304:

Unless I missed it, I didn’t see him actually use an Ice Bow on his Necro at any point in the video. I think he mentioned the Ice Bow in those fights to specify that his team was using the Ice Bow even though he wasn’t (which would’ve reduced the time-to-kill significantly and raised his relative DPS since a lot of it came from Lich Form bursting).

Well he give 3 DPS for the Necro. The first is like 8k, the second is like 7k for two different build.

Then the screen got to black and he give a dps of 14K. Then he say.

Did I had another build? No

So what is different? I present to you line casting Icebow

So he’s saying that the same build without using icebow is 8k and 14k with line casting icebow.