Guild Wars 2

Trevor Boyer.6524:

It’s also exploitable when large wide characters such as char, are able to block any/all animations from tablet casting by standing on it.

There is a reason why standard character models are a thing.

Zenith.7301:

Well, sure, they’re good, but everytime a class is good at something it needs to be nerfed?

When a class is not only competitive, but straight up optimal to take in pretty much every situation while others struggle to remain even competitive, then yes it should be nerfed. The problem with balance in this game is that Anet basically never changes meta. Warrior is currently optimal for every single raid boss in the game. When raids were first released warrior was optimal for every fight then too. During the dungeon days warrior was optimal or at least competitive for most record speed clears. Warrior has simply always been top tier in instanced pve.

On the other hand we look at say necro. It was never optimal or competitive for speed clearing dungeons, and has never really been optimal for any raid bosses, necro has always been low to mid tier for instanced pve. For the entire duration of the game warrior has been better than necro in end game pve content. Leaving the imbalance in such a consistent state brings the mindset of “warrior is meant to be good while necro is meant to be bad”. Sure it would be impossible for the balance team to make necro and warrior perfectly equal in value, but there should at least be some times when necro is perhaps at least a little bit better. Also you can replace necro in this analogy with most other classes as warrior has always been top tier, while the others have had their ups and downs.

thrag.9740:

Here is something people have not really brought up into the discussion.

Yes, condi ps brings a lot of offensive support, but they bring no defensive support. condi ps can’t heal you. Compare to druid which not only brings strong offensive support, but also strong condi clense, strong healing, and other defensive abilities such as projectile conversion, search and rescue, stone spirit for protection, etc.

Also compare this to chrono. In addition to great offensive buffs, chrono also has amazing defensive utility. First off, distortion. Distortion share is insanely strong. good chronos consistently distort:
-gorse slams
-sloth shakes
-matthias haduken (especially when rezzing somone)
-kc slams, and pizza cutter after catching orb phase
-samarog slams
-deimos slams

That alone makes chrono defensive utility amazing, but then you have things like permanent protection through chaos line/herald runes, vigor easily accessible through chaos, resistance, and stability, all pretty easily accessible. They can slot things like feedback, disenchanter, and precog for even more defensive utility. They can pull and group mobs together. A 4 condi clense on a 10 second cool down via their healing mantra.

What defensive utility does warrior have for the group? Very little. What I am saying is, your comparing a class that has offensive support and dps to two classes that have both offensive and defensive support, and complaining that the prior class has too much dps.

Personal stance: I don’t see people stacking condi ps in raids. I see 2 warriors in each group, and it could very easily drop down to 1 warrior (which is the point of this thread). Occasionally you get a dps warrior, but that is a seperate build. So no, I don’t think warrior is broken. If people start stacking them, then I will reevaluate my stance.

Let’s just agree that all 3 of them are highly over powered in the current meta.

At the moment you either find it funner than other classes or there isn’t a reason to chose it. Renegade will probably make it pretty strong dps in raids thanks to Kalla’s Fervor.

All that damage and only 6 kills lel.

That is what we call inefficiency.

Cleansing Channel: increased from 1 to 2 conditions cleansed on legend swap.

Renewing Wave: Cast time reduced to 1/2 seconds.

Two small changes that would really help.

Aktium.9506:

Zoltreez.6435:

People are unable to adapt to changes in MMOS

Majority of people cant adapt to new game modes and mechanics for some stupid reason…

The problem with Stronghold was that players did adapt. And when the optimal strategy involved Chronos, Eles and usually a Scrapper as well keeping the Door Breakers alive and stealthed no matter how much damage you threw at them it quickly devolved into both teams doing exactly that. And entire matches went by with neither team even attacking the other, just trying to be the first to down the Lord and finish the match.

I liked the concept of Stronghold, but it was far too unpolished.

And then all of that was nerfed. Chrono bunker is now useless at keeping door breakers alive, healer tempest is much easier to kill now and can be focused down so it can’t heal the door breakers, stealth gyro from engi can be killed quickly destroying the stealth option. But people have already passed judgement and are unwilling to try it again.

Abelisk.4527:

PSA: Mesmers can port the orb to a point.

Good point, I didn’t realize that but an easy fix in theory. The game already forces the person taking the port to drop the orb but they drop it upon exiting the portal not going into it. Making the orb not get ported would be good.

I like spirit watch. I would say that the orb mechanic is a bit too high risk for its reward and hence is almost always best to ignore. Either make the orb worth more points or allow the orb runner to go just a bit faster. Also since skills have been normalized for orb running, they should also normalize base stats with the orb since now high health classes are the best orb runners though that currently doesn’t matter since orb running is a bad idea.

Carighan.6758:

Best I could think of is that they realized during development what a terrible mistake Grace of the Land already was, and didn’t want to repeat it.

Agreed, gotl has been one of the worst balancing decisions of all time (which the balance team seems to not want to fix) and Kalla’s fervor on the group would just be gotl 2.0. Basically every raid group takes renegade forever regardless of fight mechanics because of a passive buff.

The best part is that Kalla’s fervor is going to single handedly make renegade the optimal for rev for raids. So it won’t change gameplay at all really, you are just forced to take the traitline to passively do a bit more damage.

Energy costs can be rebalanced but doing away with them completely is a horrible decision which would just make the class another spammy brainless class.

Far too small of a sample size to draw any conclusion. With that being said, since the maps are not perfectly symmetrical one side will technically have a slight advantage but it is for the most part too small for us to conclusively say which side is better.

Well I figure there has to be something though I couldn’t find it. Anyone got anything?

They have to go in at some point, unless you never want the new specs and to just keep playing all the same builds we know for all eternity with just minor number tweaks to change the meta periodically. Now is a perfectly fine time, currently off season and no monthly AT going on till next weekend so no reason not to be now.

Either I am missing something major, or this isn’t a remotely competitive spec for pvp. Not even a good cheese build or troll build or anything but give enemy team an easy win build.

DarkStar.1749:

Whatever ones you had up when you mounted should be up when you dismount right?

Would make sense, but was not that way, at least during last weekend.

If it makes you feel better the average death’s judgement seems to hit for 10-15k which is very balanced, kapa.

Gorseval aura is unblockable. Also pretty sure KC is perma revealed.

Lord Velar.1509:

Ivantreil.3092:

Koto.1824:

Condi thief IS NOT OP. D/p is way better in so many ways. Thief is a +1 role, and d/p will always be superior due to on demand stealth and the damage burst. If you think condi thief is OP, you need to get a better duo partner to carry you out of bronze xD

Let me put you some perpective, as an engi, when i get basilisk venom’d outta nowhere i instantly release elixir s so i dont get blown by a power thief combo, i reengage the battle in my favor if possible.

This was my normal method, but this method backfired me when i tried a condi thief, got the same thing; steal, basilisk venom scenario, i release elixir s…. im trapped in elixir s dying in conditions, im ded, now i have to decide etiher take elixir s or elixir c, and i cant tell wich one to take because thiefs dont have 1 viable build only, its the only class that made me had to decide on get a hard condi cleanse utility, no other condi build was this opressive in condition bombs.

Wait till you run into a plat burn guard or a plat fire ele or a deathly chill necros, youll realize quickly that, in all actuality, thief isn’t the worst offender

I stayed in platinum/top 250 all three seasons and I have not seen any fire eles or any offensive eles that were remotely effective. Condi thieves on the other hand are a dime a dozen and very deadly.

With those 2 professions, the only thing you are missing out would be the ability to craft staves which requires artificer, and shortbows for when renegade becomes a thing which requires huntsman.

Dadnir.5038:

Come on… ain’t it obvious? They can’t keep the elementalist dps on the high side when we know that the weaver will be able to gain 7% + 7% + 10% damage increase thanks to 3 traits that you can take together.

Superior element, swift revenge and element of rage are our culprit for the dps loss.

They must have been really inspired to achieve a traitline with traits that have so much diversity…

Well none of those traits can be used with overloads or warhorn which both got nerfed so…

If anything it is harder since you can’t luck out and have the floors not disappear. Also invisible enemies bug going on right now is annoying.

Feanor.2358:

voidvector.2780:

As of last week, Elementalist is 2nd best healing class in PvE. They would be best if we only count healing output, however druid has way better buff/boon support.

Your normally see druid healers in raid, but groups would use elementalist for either training or facerolling.

I’d take Ventari Rev over aura Ele any time. The ele can heal, but it does nothing to improve the damage output of the group. The rev can at least pump some alacrity and maybe give AP.

It is a toss up. If you are running either of them instead of another druid then you are just accepting a sub optimal DPS comp in general and just want to get the kill safely. In this situation, the larger radius on ele heals is often better for keeping people alive especially on fights where people are frequently spread out like for Matthias. It makes very little sense to say ventari is better because higher DPS when it is still so far behind druid in this regard that it can’t even compete.

It is hilarious because they mostly buffed Condi ps which is already stupidly overpowered in pve while heavily nerfing pvp warrior which was underpowered.

Warrior, mesmer, ranger. No particular order between the three but they are all an order of magnitude above the rest.

Just play druid. It is pretty much always the best. Even in the rare instances where alternative healers are considered, they are still used in addition to at least 1 druid. Druid is always a part of an optimal comp while still being just as easy to play as alternative healers, so no matter what skill level everything else is niche at best. Also anet has no intention of balancing this, or they have been hopelessly clueless how to since heart of thorns release.

The thing is, expertise is already an under used stat with Condi builds normally opting for carrion, sages, or rabid. It doesn’t make sense to nerf underused amulets.

Gambino.2109:

Nick.6972:

Here’s a question;

Should 100 Challenge Mode be doable by anyone and everyone, or those who are willing to spend time learning all intricacies and master all mechanics?

Is it even a challenge mode if I can spend 1-2 hours and become master at it and start facerolling it on daily basis?

No..

As long as RNG and luck is determining whether you succeed or not.. it’s not worth it. You can be trained to have the best reaction in the world.. but if you get unlucky and get the bomb then immediately go down and wipe your party some where along the line.

If you have best reaction in the world then you won’t go down in the first place.

DiogoSilva.7089:

My friend has been playing pvp with her ranger lately, and she just told me that her longbow 4 skill is making opponents getting stuck in walls. Apparently, people started to report her and she’s afraid she’s going to get banned.

Just to have some assurance, longbow’s 4 skill is part of the issue people are talking in this thread, and it’s not ban-worthy, right?

Yes, PBS can easily knock people into walls, not her fault.

Any high velocity movement can do it. I even had a friend surge of the mists himself into a wall.

As long as banners exist without a major overhaul, warrior will always be meta as it has always been. Guardian has no such safety net and as such been periodically in and out of the meta. Currently guard is not meta.

Druid will still be meta, warrior with banners will still be meta, everything else just comes down to number tweaks which we can’t really know till release.

Won’t make as much difference as people think. Just drop sigil of earth for sigil of malice and the DPS barely goes down.

Power creep is mostly inevitable. The only way power creep can be avoided is if all of the new specs are worse than currently existing specs in every situation imaginable. However hopefully we don’t get what happened at the release of HoT where the new specs were better than the old specs in every situation. I would suspect I am suspecting all the specs will be released over powered, hopefully so everyone gets to have some fun with them, however I really hope A-net normalizes them much faster than last time.

So a ranged, Condi, ai specialization… pretty much the last thing I would want from a new e-spec. Just hope these new specs don’t power creep the game making classic power rev even more obsolete.

Any chance we can lower the height of the eye icon which telegraphing the fear attack for Aark? Right now it is so high up in the sky you can’t see it unless you have the camera zoomed all the way out or have the camera angled at a severe angle.

megilandil.7506:

Keadron.9570:

Oooh how about we give ele a viable dps spec and everyone can support themselves or die trying!

major problem of ele is not the dps specs are not viable, the problem is that healboot is so god mode than overshadows all other specs

You sort of have a point that auramancer would stay the go to ele build unless DPS ele was very op, but the DPS specs are genuinely horrible currently.

megilandil.7506:

Keadron.9570:

Oooh how about we give ele a viable dps spec and everyone can support themselves or die trying!

major problem of ele is not the dps specs are not viable, the problem is that healboot is so god mode than overshadows all other specs

You sort of have a point that auramancer would stay the go to ele build unless DPS ele was very op, but the DPS specs are genuinely horrible currently.

Jski.6180:

ArthurDent.9538:

High damage per attack balanced by low rate of attack, and hammer is a VERY slow weapon which is bad at literally everything except for ranged damage.

Fire ball for staff ele ask you why that and its a lot easier to see the fire ball then a dam “shadow” hammer. Necro staff 1 there a lot of classes who have a slow attk that do not even come close to a revs dmg. Its not a balanced attk.

Staff ele does a lot more damage than hammer rev against targets that can’t dodge the obvious animations, and the animations for hammer rev are just as obvious. Main difference is ele dies to retal in wvw while hammer revs low hits per minute keeps it relatively safe.

High damage per attack balanced by low rate of attack, and hammer is a VERY slow weapon which is bad at literally everything except for ranged damage.

I suspect a lot of the salt towards hammer revenant is purely because of this trait:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Cruel_Repercussion

They look at their combat log, see a 15k cor, and assume that every cor hits that hard when it really only happens occasionally.

Regardless I would love to see the trait reworked to a steady +10-15% damage modifier. This would eliminate the exceptionally high hammer hits in wvw that everyone loves to post screen shots, make power rev less trash for pve raids, and not break pvp rev since they would need to give up their one decent condi cleanse for it.

Over the past year or so A-net has been adding the revealed affect to many profession skills. Revealed makes it so that the target affected by the buff cannot stealth and if they are already stealthed they will be come unstealthed. This works fine in the pvp game modes, however in there are many PVE enemies that do stealth and from what I have tested they use a different kind of stealth which is not affected by revealed. Some enemies that I have tested this on with herald’s gaze of darkness and have been unable to reveal were:

Stalkers
Skelk
Mossman
Stealthed mordrem snipers

This should be changed, since it is silly that the tooltips still show that the skills should reveal when they simply don’t in these instances.

High rated teams should play low rated teams first. If finals are that lopsided then maybe your point stands.

What do you want to do in end game? If raid, we are still one of the 2 most shunned classes. If speed running fractals or dungeons and trying to push for a really fast clear then we are pretty much useless there. For anything else the class is serviceable and just comes down to the subjective question of is it fun for you? What has been annoying you currently about rev that makes you want to know if it gets better?

Crinn.7864:

bluri.2653:

Yes it absorbs projectiles, you cant headshot them when they do #2 in reaper shroud.

I have on several occasions been headshot out of RS2 (and no they did not have basi) in addition to being point blank shot, pin down, unload, and all other manner of projectile attack.

If it destroys projectiles, it’s buggy and unreliable.

Speculating purely based off of the animation it may be a directional projectile block similar to dragon Hunter f3. Basically blocks projectiles from the front but not the rear. Need testing though.

The question is who actually takes that trait?

OriOri.8724:

TexZero.7910:

Cyninja.2954:

The availability and bottleneck of mesmers and especially chronotanks begs to differ.

Has nothing to do with the ease of play.

Tank has always been one of the least desirable playstyles.

To play devils advocate with TexZero here, the optimal build for chronotank is also extremely expensive for comparatively little payout since its not that great of a build if you are in an uncoordinated group full of average players.

More significantly in my opinion is that it is a chore to play in general pve due to poor aoe DPS and losing all phantasms on changing targets

Cyninja.2954:

I find the arguments for and against distortion funny, especially the ones from clearly non-mesmers hearing from others how easy the class is.

Newsflash, no class in GW2 is hard to play. The only semi interesting roles that require attention are any type of special job during raid boss fights, usually done by tanks and kiters. I’m sorry but playing dps which make up about 7-8 of the raid spots is not hard.

To argue that mesmer is easy though is silly. Easy compared to what? Any of the other classes ingame? Don’t make me laugh. Most classes have such idiotically easy rotations that a blind man with 1 finger could play them. Any that require even a tad of attention (hello engis) are either shuned or not meta because they can get outperformed by braindead afk classes.

So yes, mesmers are easy to play, in a game where everything else is baby mode.

I have no problem in arenanet rebalancing distortion or even making chrono tank unviable. In that case I would like for them to address some of the other issues the mesmer class has as well. Maybe give them some dps or any other role to fill. Since I doubt that is going to happen, I’m fine with chrono tanks remaining where they are: glorified support bots that fullfill their role well.

Azoqu.8917:

(since I Guardian main, and man do I want to be able to play support like this class should).

Have you checked guardian dps rotation for raids? It is literally autoattack until boss is dead. Let mesmers have some of that and we can talk. Meanwhile mesmers are at the bottom of the damage chart, by a mile.

Mesmer is probably my most played class in raids. I consider it much easier to play than most classes other than perhaps magi druid.

In my opinion the salvation traitline is the one in greatest need of an overhaul. It is pretty much completely useless unless you are a ventari build which is still useless unless you run high healing power. One would think that salvation would be a traitline that could be selected to gain some extra sustain similar to elementalist water attunent which can be used with dedicated healer builds all the way through burst builds. However salvation offers basically nothing to non ventari users since so many traits are “increase healing to allies when _______” and all significant group healing comes from the centaur stance. Even the trait that blinds enemies when you use a heal skill is only good with ventari thanks to the short cool down on ventari’s will. The traits need to be completely redone to be worth at least considering in a non ventari build.