Guild Wars 2

With investment in several traitlines, runes (not sigils) it is possible to get the might stacks to 25 with the use of “we heal as one” and autoattacking.

In this sceneario axe AA hits for a whoopin’ 900~ DMG. Yes, 900 dmg.

I’m not sure how to fix this weirdly designed weapon. Are hybrid weapons even something we can design to be good at as we stand atm? spvp wise.

1. is hard to land, the traits based around axe are awfull (adding ferocity to a weapon that is condition damage and pathetic power damage on AA)

If anyone has some input I’d appreciate it.

Just a weird design.

Don’t think too much around it. It’s not as bad for open world tagging now, though.
If you go Viper, Rampager or Sinister stats (both Power, Preci and Condi) Axe is quite good for open world. Easy access to might stacks and it’s power damage can exceed sword’s since it got stealth-nerfed.

The design doesn’t fit the competitive scene. It just so happens to be our only weapon that deals condition damage to compliment Quick Draw torch rotation.

stealth sword? tf did I miss?

Mizu Misa.8730:

stealth sword? tf did I miss?

The sword auto does less DPS since the animation change, because apparently being able to move and do damage at the same time would make us OP…..

It’s easy to look at axe aa and say, why it not do any condition dmg? But it does do condition dmg, with its easy might stacks buffing all other condition dmg output.

The axe trait forcing axe into mainhand for the ferocity is wonky. Not even I can white knight a reasoning behind that bearbow lvl of an anet joke.

Axe mainhand is used as a way to give your pet might stacks. It offers good buffs for a beastmaster build, but the weapon offers little else in pvp

MH axe is great for tagging tons of mobs that give xp (like in dragon stand).

That’s pretty much it.

If find axe lacking when it comes to single targets. As soon as there are two or more targets, it’s one of my favourite weapons, especially traited – Winter’s bite AOE with such a short cd is wonderful. Put on some sigils and runes for a build focused on chill and you can pretty much keep an opponent perma-chilled.

As for single target, I’ve suggested many times over that Ricochet should change from 33% – 33% – 33% to maybe 50% – 25% – 25% or even 60% – 20% – 20%, in short the first attack hits harder. That would really make MH axe more viable in all types of encounters imho.

I just find it funny that main-hand axe and shortbow used to share similar issues where their spread shots and 3rd skill had damage almost equal to their respective auto attacks.

Shortbow received some love in addressing this but axe didn’t. Maybe Winter’s Bite doesn’t it need it so much since they added the bleeding, but this still seems odd to me.

Axe MH is a hybrid weapon leaning towards the condi half. the auto-attack is there for easy might stacks (off-hand being only power). The trait gives some boost to power damage in the form of ferocity, while Precision will be helpful for both power and condi. Considering there’s now a use for every offensive stat, Celestial seems to be the most useful if you want the full experience of Axe.

Whether this is good enough for you individually is another matter.

Mizu Misa.8730:

With investment in several traitlines, runes (not sigils) it is possible to get the might stacks to 25 with the use of “we heal as one” and autoattacking.

In this sceneario axe AA hits for a whoopin’ 900~ DMG. Yes, 900 dmg.

I’m not sure how to fix this weirdly designed weapon. Are hybrid weapons even something we can design to be good at as we stand atm? spvp wise.

1. is hard to land, the traits based around axe are awfull (adding ferocity to a weapon that is condition damage and pathetic power damage on AA)

If anyone has some input I’d appreciate it.

The direct damage component is a little lacking, but if you use a hybrid amulet like Sage you can also deal about 8k bleed damage in around 6s when fully might stacked. Add in a fully might stacked pet swipe and the damage is OK.

You really need to use the Honed Axes trait and capitalize on Winters Bite to get the most of this weapon. Every 8s you can have AoE chill and AoE 3 stacks of bleed.

A simple combo like the following will hit a somewhat stationary pleb for around 12k-14k in about 5s.

1. Weapon Swap with Geomancy and Hydromancy Sigils
1a. Maybe Swap Pet (if BB f2, else if SS ready, swap and f1)
2. Winters bite
3. Split blade
4. Dagger 5 and/or 4—if they are still in range or attacking

As @Justine.6351 saied, with axe and NM(WHAO) you can easily build up 25 might stacks and use the full potential of might(power and condi damage), it’s the reason axe is being used mainly in condi or hybrid kind of builds. Axe desighn is fine, the axe trait desigh is strange and should be changed to main hand axe or of off-hand, axe. Off hand axe works much better with feroicity(even with the buff, this trait probobly wont be picked).

While they could simply make the 250 ferocity available always or with offhand axe, they could go another route:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Inspiring_Presence

Might also gives +10 ferocity. Trait would then be useful even without an axe equipped.

As long as they don’t touch might on #1, I’m open for all suggestions when it comes to improvements. The area to focus on should be vs single targets. And I agree, the axe trait should work on either main- or offhand, since axe is the only weapon we have that can be equipped in either (or both).

Justine.6351:

While they could simply make the 250 ferocity available always or with offhand axe, they could go another route:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Inspiring_Presence

Might also gives +10 ferocity. Trait would then be useful even without an axe equipped.

Cool Idea, it will make this trait much better.

Or, you know, remove the ferocity and have the axe trait improve all possible 5 axe moves instead of the one.

Only reason why I don’t use MH axe is because it auto-attacks up to three targets. Meaning, if I am attacking an enemy and there happens to be another creature nearby that is not aggressive, I am going to aggro them, and have more than one enemy to fight. If this was not the case, if these types of weapons (another example is Thief shortbow and Mesmer staff) could only attack up to 3 targets only if they were aggressive (red health/name tag, auto attack you if you get close enough), then I’d be more willing to use MH axe for Ranger. It’s a useful weapon, just not when you do not want to aggro enemies unnecessarily (which is my situation all the time with it, ugh).

Sorry for the rambling sentences, and if this was off-topic…

Moyayuki.3619:

Only reason why I don’t use MH axe is because it auto-attacks up to three targets. Meaning, if I am attacking an enemy and there happens to be another creature nearby that is not aggressive, I am going to aggro them, and have more than one enemy to fight. If this was not the case, if these types of weapons (another example is Thief shortbow and Mesmer staff) could only attack up to 3 targets only if they were aggressive (red health/name tag, auto attack you if you get close enough), then I’d be more willing to use MH axe for Ranger. It’s a useful weapon, just not when you do not want to aggro enemies unnecessarily (which is my situation all the time with it, ugh).

Sorry for the rambling sentences, and if this was off-topic…

This is a non-issue most of the time, and I don’t really mind if a yellow pve mob joins the fight – more might stacks for me.

Thank you all for the insightful answers, Ill make use of them!

Mizu Misa.8730:

With investment in several traitlines, runes (not sigils) it is possible to get the might stacks to 25 with the use of “we heal as one” and autoattacking.

In this sceneario axe AA hits for a whoopin’ 900~ DMG. Yes, 900 dmg.

I’m not sure how to fix this weirdly designed weapon. Are hybrid weapons even something we can design to be good at as we stand atm? spvp wise.

1. is hard to land, the traits based around axe are awfull (adding ferocity to a weapon that is condition damage and pathetic power damage on AA)

If anyone has some input I’d appreciate it.

Same with mesmer staff and necromancer staff. Mesmer staff at full power hits for about 600.

Necromancer auto hits harder than both ranger axe and mesmer staff but it’ll never hit a target since it’s so slow.

Meanwhile daredevil staff’s final part of the autoattack chain, WITH ZERO might stacks, does 12k damage in PvE and reflects projectiles.

12k damage. On an autoattack.

Our Maul hits for half or less of that.

The developers in this game are negligent amoebas when it comes to PvE balance and autoattack damage differences across classes.

You have thieves, revenants, and elementalists autoattacking for 4-5k+ a pop while ranger and mesmer are autoattacking for 2-3k.

Most pathetic part is that ranger greatsword autoattack doesn’t cripple, doesn’t apply vulnerability. It virtually does nothing but offer a delayed dodge.

And a revenant’s autoattacks are hitting for 80% of a Maul while his sword #2 hits for triple of what Maul does.

Ranger and mesmer DPS is pathetic and they refuse to buff our autoattack and skill DPS.

So we’re stuck being healbots/alacrity bots.

Zenith.7301:

Ranger and mesmer DPS is pathetic and they refuse to buff our autoattack and skill DPS.

Rangers and Mesmers have these things called pets and they add to the overall damage they do overtime. I’m not saying it is 100% balanced but the DPS gap is much closer than you realize.

The real issue is that pets are clunky (especially when it comes to point-of-attack tracking and aggro issues), really requires additional traits and/or utilities to be useful (for both Mesmer/Ranger) and the utility provided by those pets is usually subpar compared to direct control and lower cooldowns abilities/traits/utilities that other classes have.

But my point would be autoattack comparison is apples-and-oranges without also bringing in the larger picture (this also goes with all the DPS charts you see that doesn’t usually include optimized for pet damage/boons/etc.)

Artaz.3819:

Zenith.7301:

Ranger and mesmer DPS is pathetic and they refuse to buff our autoattack and skill DPS.

Rangers and Mesmers have these things called pets and they add to the overall damage they do overtime.

No, they do not. Plenty of people already calculated the DPS with pets and phantasms, it doesn’t make the Ranger or Mesmer competitive.

The DPS gap isn’t close at all.

Krispera.5087:

Artaz.3819:

Zenith.7301:

Ranger and mesmer DPS is pathetic and they refuse to buff our autoattack and skill DPS.

Rangers and Mesmers have these things called pets and they add to the overall damage they do overtime.

No, they do not. Plenty of people already calculated the DPS with pets and phantasms, it doesn’t make the Ranger or Mesmer competitive.

The DPS gap isn’t close at all.

This.

Also, our DPS is that way because we boost our people’s DPS in a unique way.
Mesmers can keep 100% Quickness uptime and provide Alacrity.
We bring Spirits, GotL, Spotter and Glyph of Empowerment.
That’s the reason.

Artaz.3819:

Zenith.7301:

Ranger and mesmer DPS is pathetic and they refuse to buff our autoattack and skill DPS.

Rangers and Mesmers have these things called pets and they add to the overall damage they do overtime. I’m not saying it is 100% balanced but the DPS gap is much closer than you realize.

The real issue is that pets are clunky (especially when it comes to point-of-attack tracking and aggro issues), really requires additional traits and/or utilities to be useful (for both Mesmer/Ranger) and the utility provided by those pets is usually subpar compared to direct control and lower cooldowns abilities/traits/utilities that other classes have.

But my point would be autoattack comparison is apples-and-oranges without also bringing in the larger picture (this also goes with all the DPS charts you see that doesn’t usually include optimized for pet damage/boons/etc.)

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/4ft01q/qt_dps_benchmarkstests_for_all_classes/

You have no clue what you’re talking about.

Thief and ele are doing 35 and 36k respectively. Guardian, rev, engineer ~28-30k.

Druid is doing 16-17k DPS and mesmer 13.7k.

Please don’t post ever gain.

Pets don’t scale up with ascended gear (a 10% stat boost up from exotic), pets max with BM trait at a pitiful 300 ferocity, while the player sits at 1068, basically they don’t get even close to 220% bonus crit damage of a full ascended berserker player. This means a % of our damage simply does not scale as well as others.

Pets don’t benefit from food, potions, oils, sharperning stones, sigils, runes, they lose boons on pet swap and you need a Nature Magic trait for them to even gain boons.

Pets in this game are absolute garbage. It took them 3+ years to even fix aoe issues with them, in PvE. WvW and sPvP is still a crapfest for pets.

Tragic Positive.9356:

Krispera.5087:

Artaz.3819:

Zenith.7301:

Ranger and mesmer DPS is pathetic and they refuse to buff our autoattack and skill DPS.

Rangers and Mesmers have these things called pets and they add to the overall damage they do overtime.

No, they do not. Plenty of people already calculated the DPS with pets and phantasms, it doesn’t make the Ranger or Mesmer competitive.

The DPS gap isn’t close at all.

This.

Also, our DPS is that way because we boost our people’s DPS in a unique way.
Mesmers can keep 100% Quickness uptime and provide Alacrity.
We bring Spirits, GotL, Spotter and Glyph of Empowerment.
That’s the reason.

No, you have no clue either.

Ranger and mesmer have been garbage DPS compared to ele and thief and engineer even before elite specializations came into play. This is not new.

Herald and Warrior also massively buff parties, but they do far more DPS than mesmer or ranger. Guardian provides perma protection for the raid on top of reflects and aegis, and they’re doing 28k DPS, basically 11-13k more than mesmer/ranger.

Ranger and mesmer DPS suck because the core classes suck at DPS, and the elite specs do nothing to improve on that.

Look at tempests. Their elite spec only gave them overloads, the warhorn and the traitlines themselves are not great for PvE. But core ele and core thief were already such strong DPS that their elite spec changed nothing. Same applies to warrior.

They had better numbers, period.

Zenith.7301:

Tragic Positive.9356:

This.

Also, our DPS is that way because we boost our people’s DPS in a unique way.
Mesmers can keep 100% Quickness uptime and provide Alacrity.
We bring Spirits, GotL, Spotter and Glyph of Empowerment.
That’s the reason.

No, you have no clue either.

Then I’m terribly sorry, Sir.

Let me know which of my statements were incorrect so I can learn.

I’d dare to say your vision is way too narrow-minded. The true, real reason why we have DPS in a state we have is because this game has not been balanced ever since release. And it didn’t have to be. All we had was friendly content beaten by power of friendship that one day changed to MetaZerk speed runs.
And here is the time to take your clues back because some dungeon world records included a ranger.

HoT introduced a completely new Raid and Fractal system … that is actually based around numbers rather than friendship at boss fights lasting for 10 seconds straight. And they haven’t adjusted classes to it. So instead of having classes similar DPS, they glued the support portion on classes that suck on long-term personal DPS. That’s all there is to it.
Because I’m not sure if you are aware but we are so meta that almost every hard-core raiding group has 2 Druids. And currently there’s no way to make 3 other traitlines increase your personal damage by 120% (in addition to what we currently get) without allowing Druid to trait into those lines as well – buffing it further.

Tragic Positive.9356:

Zenith.7301:

Tragic Positive.9356:

This.

Also, our DPS is that way because we boost our people’s DPS in a unique way.
Mesmers can keep 100% Quickness uptime and provide Alacrity.
We bring Spirits, GotL, Spotter and Glyph of Empowerment.
That’s the reason.

No, you have no clue either.

Then I’m terribly sorry, Sir.

Let me know which of my statements were incorrect so I can learn.

I’d dare to say your vision is way too narrow-minded. The true, real reason why we have DPS in a state we have is because this game has not been balanced ever since release. And it didn’t have to be. All we had was friendly content beaten by power of friendship that one day changed to MetaZerk speed runs.
And here is the time to take your clues back because some dungeon world records included a ranger.

HoT introduced a completely new Raid and Fractal system … that is actually based around numbers rather than friendship at boss fights lasting for 10 seconds straight. And they haven’t adjusted classes to it. So instead of having classes similar DPS, they glued the support portion on classes that suck on long-term personal DPS. That’s all there is to it.
Because I’m not sure if you are aware but we are so meta that almost every hard-core raiding group has 2 Druids. And currently there’s no way to make 3 other traitlines increase your personal damage by 120% (in addition to what we currently get) without allowing Druid to trait into those lines as well – buffing it further.

Which is why you would buff the terrible damage on ranger weapons and make the pet have the same crit damage and crit chance values as the master alongside having fortifying bond and the added stats from BM traitline be baseline and replace those traits with something else.

You don’t buff the druid traitline. You buff the core ranger.

And yes, groups take 2 druids. Just like they take 2 warriors who also do significantly more DPS than a druid and whose group buffs are so massive they are even larger DPS buffs than what the druid offers.

So, no, don’t come at me with this crap that our DPS sucks because of utility, because we have other utility classes we stack that also do much more DPS.

And mesmer is only brought as ONE, while doing less DPS than druid (because alacrity is not good enough to bring a second chrono over a tempest and a single chrono can keep up quickness).

Their PvE class balance sucks, period. There’s no real explanation for why classes with utility should do a third of the DPS of other DPS classes who also have utility as well.

Zenith.7301:

And yes, groups take 2 druids. Just like they take 2 warriors who also do significantly more DPS than a druid and whose group buffs are so massive they are even larger DPS buffs than what the druid offers.

…

Their PvE class balance sucks, period. There’s no real explanation for why classes with utility should do a third of the DPS of other DPS classes who also have utility as well.

So I am going to paraphrase your quote like you did mine. Then why wouldn’t raids take 4 warriors? Is it perhaps because that DPS/DPS support is not the entire reason Druids are taken on raids?

What two classes are you comparing that one is 1/3rd of the DPS as another with the same level of support utilities?

Zenith.7301:

Artaz.3819:

Zenith.7301:

Ranger and mesmer DPS is pathetic and they refuse to buff our autoattack and skill DPS.

Rangers and Mesmers have these things called pets and they add to the overall damage they do overtime. I’m not saying it is 100% balanced but the DPS gap is much closer than you realize.

The real issue is that pets are clunky (especially when it comes to point-of-attack tracking and aggro issues), really requires additional traits and/or utilities to be useful (for both Mesmer/Ranger) and the utility provided by those pets is usually subpar compared to direct control and lower cooldowns abilities/traits/utilities that other classes have.

But my point would be autoattack comparison is apples-and-oranges without also bringing in the larger picture (this also goes with all the DPS charts you see that doesn’t usually include optimized for pet damage/boons/etc.)

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/4ft01q/qt_dps_benchmarkstests_for_all_classes/

You have no clue what you’re talking about.

Thief and ele are doing 35 and 36k respectively. Guardian, rev, engineer ~28-30k.

Druid is doing 16-17k DPS and mesmer 13.7k.

Please don’t post ever gain.

Pets don’t scale up with ascended gear (a 10% stat boost up from exotic), pets max with BM trait at a pitiful 300 ferocity, while the player sits at 1068, basically they don’t get even close to 220% bonus crit damage of a full ascended berserker player. This means a % of our damage simply does not scale as well as others.

Pets don’t benefit from food, potions, oils, sharperning stones, sigils, runes, they lose boons on pet swap and you need a Nature Magic trait for them to even gain boons.

Pets in this game are absolute garbage. It took them 3+ years to even fix aoe issues with them, in PvE. WvW and sPvP is still a crapfest for pets.

Tragic Positive.9356:

Krispera.5087:

Artaz.3819:

Zenith.7301:

Ranger and mesmer DPS is pathetic and they refuse to buff our autoattack and skill DPS.

Rangers and Mesmers have these things called pets and they add to the overall damage they do overtime.

No, they do not. Plenty of people already calculated the DPS with pets and phantasms, it doesn’t make the Ranger or Mesmer competitive.

The DPS gap isn’t close at all.

This.

Also, our DPS is that way because we boost our people’s DPS in a unique way.
Mesmers can keep 100% Quickness uptime and provide Alacrity.
We bring Spirits, GotL, Spotter and Glyph of Empowerment.
That’s the reason.

No, you have no clue either.

Ranger and mesmer have been garbage DPS compared to ele and thief and engineer even before elite specializations came into play. This is not new.

Herald and Warrior also massively buff parties, but they do far more DPS than mesmer or ranger. Guardian provides perma protection for the raid on top of reflects and aegis, and they’re doing 28k DPS, basically 11-13k more than mesmer/ranger.

Ranger and mesmer DPS suck because the core classes suck at DPS, and the elite specs do nothing to improve on that.

Look at tempests. Their elite spec only gave them overloads, the warhorn and the traitlines themselves are not great for PvE. But core ele and core thief were already such strong DPS that their elite spec changed nothing. Same applies to warrior.

They had better numbers, period.

I’m going to help you because you seem troubled.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/4ft01q/qt_dps_benchmarkstests_for_all_classes/

Let me read something for you since you skipped it:
“Druid – Pet DPS could be higher because it doesnt get boons in the testing area.”

“In the tests Druid never healed so take that into account, he also didnt use GoE.” Hint, that means GotL was also not in effect.

Holy crap – do I really need to explain how flawed that DPS testing is?

Again, I’m not saying Ranger doesn’t have a need for improvements but if you think it is night/day (3x) difference in DPS, it’s not helpful to spread clearly false statements as no one believes that either.

Artaz.3819:

Holy crap – do I really need to explain how flawed that DPS testing is?

Again, I’m not saying Ranger doesn’t have a need for improvements but if you think it is night/day (3x) difference in DPS, it’s not helpful to spread clearly false statements as no one believes that either.

I agree that DPS testing is flawed. A lot.
But even from first hand experience, one can tell that elementelists are just from another league. All the fields, finishers, reflects etc. they have on top of being the top tier DPS is hardly a compensation for having low base defenses.

The data we had showed these results even at real-time raids. Some classes are just way ahead. Sadly, we are the worst designed class with worst designed Elite Spec with one of the bottom-tier DPS and lowest constructive PvP performance.
(I can already see the replies "we are fine, blah blah… But this is what people call comparison. When compared to other classes – this is just where we are)

Artaz.3819:

Zenith.7301:

Artaz.3819:

Zenith.7301:

Ranger and mesmer DPS is pathetic and they refuse to buff our autoattack and skill DPS.

Rangers and Mesmers have these things called pets and they add to the overall damage they do overtime. I’m not saying it is 100% balanced but the DPS gap is much closer than you realize.

The real issue is that pets are clunky (especially when it comes to point-of-attack tracking and aggro issues), really requires additional traits and/or utilities to be useful (for both Mesmer/Ranger) and the utility provided by those pets is usually subpar compared to direct control and lower cooldowns abilities/traits/utilities that other classes have.

But my point would be autoattack comparison is apples-and-oranges without also bringing in the larger picture (this also goes with all the DPS charts you see that doesn’t usually include optimized for pet damage/boons/etc.)

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/4ft01q/qt_dps_benchmarkstests_for_all_classes/

You have no clue what you’re talking about.

Thief and ele are doing 35 and 36k respectively. Guardian, rev, engineer ~28-30k.

Druid is doing 16-17k DPS and mesmer 13.7k.

Please don’t post ever gain.

Pets don’t scale up with ascended gear (a 10% stat boost up from exotic), pets max with BM trait at a pitiful 300 ferocity, while the player sits at 1068, basically they don’t get even close to 220% bonus crit damage of a full ascended berserker player. This means a % of our damage simply does not scale as well as others.

Pets don’t benefit from food, potions, oils, sharperning stones, sigils, runes, they lose boons on pet swap and you need a Nature Magic trait for them to even gain boons.

Pets in this game are absolute garbage. It took them 3+ years to even fix aoe issues with them, in PvE. WvW and sPvP is still a crapfest for pets.

Tragic Positive.9356:

Krispera.5087:

Artaz.3819:

Zenith.7301:

Ranger and mesmer DPS is pathetic and they refuse to buff our autoattack and skill DPS.

Rangers and Mesmers have these things called pets and they add to the overall damage they do overtime.

No, they do not. Plenty of people already calculated the DPS with pets and phantasms, it doesn’t make the Ranger or Mesmer competitive.

The DPS gap isn’t close at all.

This.

Also, our DPS is that way because we boost our people’s DPS in a unique way.
Mesmers can keep 100% Quickness uptime and provide Alacrity.
We bring Spirits, GotL, Spotter and Glyph of Empowerment.
That’s the reason.

No, you have no clue either.

Ranger and mesmer have been garbage DPS compared to ele and thief and engineer even before elite specializations came into play. This is not new.

Herald and Warrior also massively buff parties, but they do far more DPS than mesmer or ranger. Guardian provides perma protection for the raid on top of reflects and aegis, and they’re doing 28k DPS, basically 11-13k more than mesmer/ranger.

Ranger and mesmer DPS suck because the core classes suck at DPS, and the elite specs do nothing to improve on that.

Look at tempests. Their elite spec only gave them overloads, the warhorn and the traitlines themselves are not great for PvE. But core ele and core thief were already such strong DPS that their elite spec changed nothing. Same applies to warrior.

They had better numbers, period.

I’m going to help you because you seem troubled.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/4ft01q/qt_dps_benchmarkstests_for_all_classes/

Let me read something for you since you skipped it:
“Druid – Pet DPS could be higher because it doesnt get boons in the testing area.”

“In the tests Druid never healed so take that into account, he also didnt use GoE.” Hint, that means GotL was also not in effect.

Holy crap – do I really need to explain how flawed that DPS testing is?

Again, I’m not saying Ranger doesn’t have a need for improvements but if you think it is night/day (3x) difference in DPS, it’s not helpful to spread clearly false statements as no one believes that either.

…. GotL is not taken into account in a golem test because GotL is a DPS boost for the group at a DPS loss to the ranger, who’s doing ZERO DPS for 4+ seconds while in astral form.

The numbers you see offer no GotL to other classes either.

Pets don’t get boons in the testing area, just like they won’t in raids. Because you don’t run Nature Magic for Fortifying Bond, so your pet is NOT getting the boons that are prioritized to your party members in any optimized squad. The pet comprises about 12% of the ranger’s DPS, 25 might, quickness, and fury is at best another 2k DPS added to the ranger, still far below even the median DPS class.

Artaz.3819:

Zenith.7301:

And yes, groups take 2 druids. Just like they take 2 warriors who also do significantly more DPS than a druid and whose group buffs are so massive they are even larger DPS buffs than what the druid offers.

…

Their PvE class balance sucks, period. There’s no real explanation for why classes with utility should do a third of the DPS of other DPS classes who also have utility as well.

So I am going to paraphrase your quote like you did mine. Then why wouldn’t raids take 4 warriors? Is it perhaps because that DPS/DPS support is not the entire reason Druids are taken on raids?

What two classes are you comparing that one is 1/3rd of the DPS as another with the same level of support utilities?

This doesn’t even make sense.. You take 2 druids and 2 warriors because their buffs are capped to 5 people. If it affected 10 people, you would only see 1 warrior and 1 druid, and the other 2 spots would be taken up by more tempests/daredevils.

You don’t take 4 warriors for the same reason you don’t take 4 druids or 4 chronomancers, because group buffs are redundant; they don’t stack. 2 warriors cover all banners and empower allies+PS.

If you honestly think people take 2 druids because they need the heals, you have no clue. These druids are being geared in Berserkers stats. They’re brought in for the base buffs of GotL and spirits, otherwise a Tempest with Wash The Pain Away and Elemental Bastion is more than sufficient.

By all means pretend that the DPS benchmarks from the leading EU raid guild and confirmed by DnT (another leading US raid guild) don’t represent the reality of class balance.

Rangers need damage buffs, particularly power builds (who unlike condi builds pay a pet tax on their weapon coefficients, while their condi weapons do full condi damage).

A godkitten Maul is critting for only slightly more of what my revenant’s autoattack crits for. That’s a disgrace.

Zenith.7301:

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If you honestly think people take 2 druids because they need the heals, you have no clue. These druids are being geared in Berserkers stats. They’re brought in for the base buffs of GotL and spirits, otherwise a Tempest with Wash The Pain Away and Elemental Bastion is more than sufficient.

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All excellent points here. Up to 1 thing, and that’s the meta Druid goes for Viper stats, not berserker but that’s just a tiny difference.
Berserker is used only in dungeons and low level fractals (up till 40 I guess).

Berk or Viper depends on fight. You user berserker on raid bosses that move, Vipers on those that don’t. Mostly because all the condi druid’s DPS is from the stationary Bonfire.

Vipers do more damage, but they also recharge astral form slower since staff is a power wep and viper druid runs A/T+SB.

Zenith.7301:

Berk or Viper depends on fight. You user berserker on raid bosses that move, Vipers on those that don’t. Mostly because all the condi druid’s DPS is from the stationary Bonfire.

Vipers do more damage, but they also recharge astral form slower since staff is a power wep and viper druid runs A/T+SB.

WoW, seems like a lot changed since I stopped playing, and that’s not even that long and nothing affecting PvE appeared in patch notes.

Best results were LB+S/A Glyph Buffer (zerk) or Viper SB + A/T… SB scales much better with Quickness than Axe does (which brings another flaw to Axe Design)
You can get some very easy CAF access by slotting one pet as Fern Hound for Viper, or in Berserker slotting Healing Spring + Trapper’s trait for perma AoE regen (perma ticket to CAF).

People I talked to told me the only fight that went better with Berserker was Vale Guardian and that’s it (the DPS calculator that used the combat log). He was the only boss constantly moving with very low toughness (like 1300 armor?).

No one’s using staff in hardcore groups. It’s a “training wheels” weapon. Just like healing druid in general.

Yup, it changed. Vale Guardian is actually a place where you might go Viper’s since you can contribute to the condi team without having to cut down eles to bring in condition classes.

fern hound does SIGNIFICANTLY lower DPS than Lynx or Tiger, so you gain uptime on CA but lower DPS.

By taking Trapper trait, you give up extra bleeds which is also another DPS loss, and by using healing spring you lose a glyph GotL proc and your heal is on a longer cd.

Not terrible losses, tbh.

Staff’s not only good for the healing but because it provides great mobility to deal with mechanics like Matthias on top of projectile defense with a blast finisher and water field.

Zenith.7301:

Yup, it changed. Vale Guardian is actually a place where you might go Viper’s since you can contribute to the condi team without having to cut down eles to bring in condition classes

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Well, that makes sense.
I still think that none of the options would lower the DPS more than slotting staff but it’s all as it always was. Utility traded for damage. I usually played Staff myself, since I mostly played with my RL friends that were decent but nowhere near HC.
We all preferred another water field, heals, my mobility and easy access to CAF. We didn’t really go for the maximized DPS. But then again, I was playing half-cleric anyway.

Indeed the axe Mh is weird, and it’s trait is more.
The axe is an hybrid weapons, medium range, might buffer.
In my opinion, and following some suggestion posted here, it would be cool if:
-AA is doing +20%, -20%, -20% on the three targets too boost single target’s damage
-More direct damage to winter’s bite to boost the trait
-Replace the “250 ferocity with mh axe equipped” to 250 precision (works well with bleed on crits) or “with an axe equipped” (not only MH).

i think axe should choose what it wants to be. it clearly fails at being a hybrid weapon.

edit
what if ricochet bounced off of enemies once, then allies buffing them with might, then back to enemies one more time? would boost dps tremendously in group battles while giving some decent might stacks.

The issue is not the might, the might itself is useless when in groups a warrior can cap everyone’s might and if not all the ele fire fields.

What the axe auto needs is either to apply bleeds, or have its base numbers and power coefficients buffed by a lot to not make it the weakest autoattack ingame.

Still would like to see the axe auto have a bonus like Dragon Hunter’s Longbow auto. Would be nice to have it be like: “Ricochet: Gain Might (5s) for each target struck. Inflict Bleeding (4s) on all targets if an axe hits a second target”

That and like I mentioned above, Split Blade and (maybe) Winter’s Bite should probably get a power increase. There’s no reason (to me) that connecting all 5 axes on Split Blade should deal equal damage of an auto attack – the same issue Shortbow had before it was updated.

This is how I feel the weapon should be changed.

First change the auto attack to function similar to Elementalist Dagger water auto attack. Hitting an enemy as it passes through and hitting them again as it makes its way back to you. Boost the damage coefficient by 100%. Gain a might stack on the first hit and a might stack on the second hit.

Second remove the bleeds from axe 2 and increase the damage coefficient by 100%.

Third make axe 3 aoe by default.

FrownyClown.8402:

This is how I feel the weapon should be changed.

First change the auto attack to function similar to Elementalist Dagger water auto attack. Hitting an enemy as it passes through and hitting them again as it makes its way back to you. Boost the damage coefficient by 100%. Gain a might stack on the first hit and a might stack on the second hit.

Second remove the bleeds from axe 2 and increase the damage coefficient by 100%.

Third make axe 3 aoe by default.

Removing the bleed would effectively neuter any condi ranger build options, as the shortbow is a very poor condition weapon by itself.

They just need to buff the power base damage and coefficients of all the skills, buff the hell out of the autoattack, and give it 2 bleeds per hit so it actually functions as a hybrid weapon.

Look at warrior’s 1h sword, it’s a weapon that does condi damage but the power damage is actually good as well.