Guild Wars 2

Why is Escapists Absolution competing with Staff Master in the Trait lines??

If I want to play staff.. Staff Master is a pretty important trait. But when your playing staff you literally have no condition removal, except from utility skills. That’s garbage for any game mode! Escapists Absolution needs to be a minor trait OR staff master does.. they shouldn’t compete with each other.

Here’s some logic:
If I’m going to roll Daredevil as a trait line and I want to use staff, I’m either taking EA and my dps/endurance suffers or I’m forced to trait into Trickery for conditions to be removed on trick use. The latter of course pigeon holes you into tricks / withdrawal. Never fun to be forced into skills you might not like or want to use. Shadow Arts is useless for Staff and acro is underwhelming compared to Trickery. So at this point it would be more efficient for me to just grab a different weapon set altogether like S/P and not worry about it. GG?

i agree. condi is the one weakness of daredevil, however there is a trait in acro that can remove conditions every time you are struck under 75%.. i dont know what the ICD on it is tho. that’s basically what i have to rely on because of the build i use. but my build is super fun so that’s okay i guess. i really only have trouble with flamethrower engi’s

i really think anet should consider granting us just a little more condi removal, or like i suggested in another thread that staff #3 skill should clear 1 condition instead of just cripple

edit: this would really help bring us up to par with all the other classes.. i don’t think it’s asking for much

That’s kind of the whole point. You have to make a choice, you know? Daredevil is pretty well designed in this regard, actually. All of the trait choices have some validity to them.

YuiRS.8129:

That’s kind of the whole point. You have to make a choice, you know? Daredevil is pretty well designed in this regard, actually. All of the trait choices have some validity to them.

The choices we face is kinda unfair compared to other classes though.

The problem is, the amount of traits we need to sacrifice for each mechanic of our class to be decent is higher than other classes.
Baseline, we don’t have much.

Steal requires to dedicate whole traitlines to become relevant.
Dodge needs the same kind of care since our extra dodge doesn’t come with an appropriate endurance regeneration.
Same for minimum condition mitigation.
In addition with that, we also have initiative that feels comfortable only traited.
(And that is while being the class with the least amount of slotted skill, with our only class mechanic being that one steal button. The initiative system makes it so switching weapon doesn’t contribute in increasing the amount of actions possible. Each of our utility slot is more precious than with other classes)

All of those four points (well arguably initiative in a lesser scale) are almost mandatory for our class for basic survival, but it then sacrifices traitlines and slots for damage dealing purposes.

This very choice illustrates in a small-scale what the whole class suffers from.
Sacrifice essential survivability for decent damage, or dealing poor damage to have a way to defend ourselves.
Whereas other classes’ trait choice is either about choosing the way to deal damage, or higher bonus for defence or for attack.
(our choices feel more like having to choose between having a dodge button or an attack button).

Even with all our traits dedicated to damage, we are considered far from top dps dealer.

Gaining endurance back for using initiative should be baseline to any weapon…

Staff dmg is already very strong. If you want even more dmg plus endurance back, you must lose something.
Staff alteady offer great aoe dmg, great evasion uptime and great blind uptime, having also reliable condition removal, no way I would choose any other weapon set.

This is actually well-designed. If you play staff, you have to choose between staff master or escapist’s absolution. If you play anything else, you are most likely having pistol off-hand, so you can pick between impacting disruption or, again, escapist’s absolution.

The only problem is with dagger off-hand, but who uses it anyway?

To me it’s not well-designed because we don’t have enough access to condition removal without stealth.
What would have been fair is choosing between more attack or more defense, not between more attack or a defense mechanism.

Condition removal on evade can arguably be considered very powerful. But aside from that, we either need to sacrifice a traitline to get acro, or shadow art (and rely on stealth once again), or we sacrifice all our utility bar to get the single condition removal on tricks (utility bar is precious to our class). That leaves us with not enough leeway to get a desired build straight.

What would’ve been a better design is having something along the line :
having a condi removal that works in a similar way as pain response as a minor, and having to choose between the staff trait or an improvement on the condition removal minor.
Which means, we still have some condition mitigation but in a lesser scale without the trait. That’s how the trait choice should work.

Having an all or nothing kind of choice like choosing between fighting superman with or without cryptonite isn’t good design to me.

I get that you want a reason to choose another weapon set beside staff. But that’s not the way to have it. It just means that those said weapon sets need a bonus on par.

There an alternative of using sigils of purity , generosity and cleansing in some combination along with trickster trait. This gives close to enough condition removal if coupled with using dodges to avoid the bombs.

The 10 percent more damage added to 7 percent from havoc mastery and that potential 10 percent from bound , along with more bounds due to endurance regen off staff mastery is more then enough to make up for loss of fire/air/force type sigils.

I play S/P with DA/DD/Trick, always using shadowstep, signet of agility and using roll for ini, scorpion wire or bandit’s defence depending on the encounter. My only other condi cleanse is on sword 2, I take impacting disruption as the damage is really nice on a CC build and trickster isn’t worth dropping bountiful theft for unless you really build around it imo.

I find I have enough evade frames to avoid most conditions, the CC helps a lot too. Generally I just gtfo and reset if hit by too many condis, if they chase you in PvP you can just port back and decap while they feel like an idiot.

I’d play around with using trickster and scorpion wire with generosity and cleansing sigils on shortbow if you’re struggling. Either that or just kill them faster and keep them CC’d.

As a solo player dealing with most of the contents (even PvP), I know we have somehow the tools to make up for shortcomings due to our class design.

The problem is when having to contribute in your group. I’m specifically pointing out Raids.

Our class is balanced enough to fair well against most of the content, but our lack of baseline necessary skills makes us on the paper subpar to other classes, getting us shunned by raid runners (because we have to compensate, while other classes accumulate).
I’m just pointing out that this kind of design decision (the subject of this thread) is what tones down our class compared to others.

I guess it comes down to the question about : having a better separation between pvp and pve contents.

To be honest, there’s no reason for our class mechanic to be our Grandmaster traits… Make the kitten dodges toggle-able outside of combat (which would be an amazing QoL change as well), and make new GM traits. Hell, move the condi cleanse there, I don’t know…