Guild Wars 2

I know it’s too early to say and a lot of this could be placeholder stuff, but please devs, before it’s too late, consider making either mace or sword a direct damage focused weapon (if their role is currently indeed as it looks like).

The other weapons are all so flavorful and each seem to cover a particular area:
Hammer – ranged
Staff – bunkerish
Axe – mobility/control
Torch – high damage/hybrid
Shield – support

You almost have all bases covered there… and then we arrive at the 1h mainhands:
Mace – hybrid
Sword – essentially mace 2 (basically just exchange combo field+finisher for mobility?)

Justin ODell.9517:

If you play with a party, you will never lose ladder standing because someone else on your team, but not in your party, deserted.

If you play with a party, and someone on your team deserts then everyone in the party will take a full loss worth of ladder standing regardless of outcome.

Justin, the way it’s written now these 2 points directly contradict each other. I assume you mean for the second one:
If you play with a party, and someone on your PARTY deserts then everyone in the party will take a full loss worth of ladder standing regardless of outcome.

An additional note: maybe it’s even possible to fit the races into this “6 magic spheres” structure. After all, according to the conversation with Scholar Trueclaw , there may have also been 6 (main) races fighting the dragons in the previous cycle. Maybe each race (both then and now) leans towards one of the 6 magic spheres?

Then we have 6-6-6… OMG relevant :P

Yeah, you’re probably right. I switched to them when I was still using celestial amulet and fights would tend to drag out longer, so the might they proc on their own really added up. But now that I use berserker’s, it’s probably indeed time for something different (not sure if that’s Melandru thought :P).

I’ve ran a very similar build the past few days and I had a similar experience. Mostly done soloQ. Can’t say if this a meta-worthy build as I’m only a sub-top player at best, but if anything it feels at least close to it. This is what I currently use (tried a celestial amulet as well as traveler runes at first, but this feels like it does better):
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fRAQNAoYWjc0UbbfNu2whbCehS6A4Am3IvgOgyvINA-TpBFABCcCAA+QAgwRAol9HqqMAAPAAA

With some tweaks (both from the player side, i.e. finding out what variations work best, and from the dev side, i.e. balance), I could see this become a solid and fun build in the future. It feels pretty ‘active’, in that you’re not just plain tanky and unkillable without doing anything, but you can survive very well if you manage your cooldowns and CC properly. (A bit like there’s a world of difference between a guardian that just does random stuff and one that manages his tools well.)

Let’s call the build “Spectral Sanctuary”! (Come on, you know you want to )

Edit: forgot to change the utilties

Mike, I would like to address a very specific part of your post as I think it’s important.

Mike O Brien.4613:

If we make optimistic promises and then can’t deliver on them, everyone suffers.

I think by now, it is clear to you as well that by avoiding just that (and thus sometimes not saying anything for long bouts of time), everyone suffers as well. Pretty much everyone knows that some group of players will always complain and appear unsatisfied, regardless of what you do. I think what it then really comes down to is how do you view the other part of your community? Are they able to handle somewhat uncertain information in a responsible way (i.e. like adults) or can’t they handle it at all (i.e. like little kids).?

I hope you can one day reflect on this in an unbiased way and then chose the former, as life sometimes has a funny way of giving us exactly what we ask: you choose to treat your customers as if they can’t handle this uncertainty, so that is exactly the reaction you got this past week. Had you simply said from time to time “look people: we are trying to do this, we are attempting to build that; no promises, no deadlines, but that’s what we are working on” many of the people that were carrying pitchforks this last week would instead have been defending you. Yet the method you chose results in alienating these people and thus you ended up getting this instead.

I really can’t stress enough that handling people in a mature way will also cause them to react in kind. After all, you are all human beings too, and human beings try things and fail sometimes: these are things most of us can relate to and which in turn create an understanding. (For a cool GW2 related example of this: check out Helseth’s recent video about his impressions concerning Gamescom, where he goes as far as apologizing for any harsh things he said in the past after simply experiencing the dev’s passion and conviction for the game firsthand.) Yet by hiding yourselves behind a wall, and only showing the things you yourselves are happy enough to show, you are basically making yourselves in-human: by showing only your best, we will in turn only expect perfection from you and if that isn’t the case ‘kitten will hit the fan’, as it did. I think the expression “far from the eye, far from the heart” is well placed here. As such, I really don’t think you have been and will doing yourselves any favor by sticking to this course of action.

NeXeD.3042:

Is there a vod of those fights I missed them =(

nearlight.3064:

I too want to see videos of this match. This whole e-sportz thing is dreadfully hard to follow since I don’t actually have a twitch, and I feel like I can never find decent information on anything related to high end pvp or its matches.

Video’s of all 3 days can be found on their twitch channel (no need to have an account or anything):
Day 1: China vs NA – http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2/b/558026312
Day 2: China vs EU – http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2/b/558393810
Day 3: NA vs EU – http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2/b/558734864

Breaking desks… true story!

Edit: I feel there’s a deeper meaning that shouldn’t be ignored here: lots of necroes probably have a feeling of “I’ll flip a table if we don’t at least get […] in the next balance patch.” (e.g. 2 target cleave on dagger auto, like thief). Zombify is just taking it to the next level and showing he means business!

For those that are like: wtf did I just read? I’m talking about the final match of the All Stars Tournament which had to be delayed cause Zombify broke his desk… twice.

Your allies will still see your looks, so someone will still notice your swag.

Literally, I have never noticed any enemy looking cool or whatever anyway, I simply don’t have time to check out their looks in the middle of a pvp match…

It is not mentioned in the patch notes, but the parts that required you had the previous backpiece to proceed no longer do (e.g. getting the Pile of Elemental Essence in Deirde’s Steps). So your progress with the pet seedling should no longer be blocked .

(I had to shorten the title to be able to post it, but to be clear this feedback is about this releases’ Shadow of the Dragon Challenge Mode and Condition Damage)

The discrepancy between doing the related achievement (or this challenge mode in general) on a direct damage based character vs. a character based on condition damage is HUGE. As you well know, the main extra difficulty here is the pods that heal the dragon and you need to be attuned (which involves getting trapped for several seconds before freeing yourself, putting you in a very vulnerable position) to even damage them. So, why did you need to class these pods as objects (which doesn’t even make sense story-wise as they are plants…)? Due to this ‘oversight’ power-based characters can destroy 1.5 to 2 pods per attunement cycle, while pure condition-based ones need 3 to 4 atunnement cycles to destroy a single pod… I don’t think I need to explain how much more difficult this makes it?

I’m all for opponents that promote mixing up your playstyle a bit (e.g. husks that are more resistant to direct damage, dust mites that make meleeing more difficult etc.). But in this case the difference is so large, it is nigh impossible to complete if you happen to have build your character a certain way (and it isn’t ‘easily’ fixed by switching a utility, a weapon, some traits, etc.). Further more, this particular difference isn’t even interesting in any way, shape or form…

We all know the difficulties condition damage already faces in PvE, there is truly no need to add even more. As such, please be more considerate of this when designing future content.

John Smith.4610:

TooBz.3065:

Hi John,

How does wealth / material distribution affect how you think about sinks?

For example, I imagine that gaining wealth for the sake of gaining wealth could be, under some circumstances, be very similar to a sink – as wealth and materials are held outside the market. The problem being that at anytime those materials and gold could flood back in. Or is this a self-correcting problem that you don’t need to worry about?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe you’re asking if the sink is likely to sink from the rich/poor/middle/everyone, is that a factor of the design?

Where the sinks hit are a major factor of the process. Imagine the difference between HoHo Tron allowing people to donate to kick off the event faster and requiring anyone who wants to participate to donate.
It’s good to think about sinks and faucets in terms of wealth and potential wealth, both must remain balanced or you lose sleep over the possibilities.

I think you’re wrong

Imo, what he meant is that ‘pathological’ collectors act as a type of sink (because they gather and gather and gather but don’t give it back to the economy) and how you deal with the associated uncertainty (cause given enough incentive, they may dump their stuff anyway).

I guess this largely relates to the very first question you answered in this thread.

1. Stack conditions
2. Epidemic
3. ???
4. Profit
Bonus: anything that helps you do more condition damage helps you heal more

Bhawb.7408:

PvE will never be balanced period. Yes they can give us cleave and make us decent (they already said they wanted to up our power damage a bit), but PvE is still awfully designed.

PvE needs to change to fix PvE, not the professions.

In between the lines, you could kind of hear they don’t want to give us cleave though. They said we are supposed to be bad at sustained AoE and also consider warrior’s cleave to be melee sustained AoE, so yeah…

Dark Path should judge it’s range (i.e. out of range) on the current position of the Necromancer, not the initial casting position.

As it is currently, Dark Path will never hit anyone that is running away from you (if there is at least some distance between you and them when you cast it), even if you are pursuing that person and the distance between you is only 300 range. This is because the ‘out of range’ is judged compared to the initial casting position, and with the projectile being so slow, pretty much anyone will outrun the 1200 range before the projectile can catch up.

This change would help the intended class design wherein a necro has pretty much no escape mechanics, but is conversely hard to escape from (of which currently on the first part is true).

You should really try CPC, 15 sec of weakness + poison is just crazy strong.

And axe isn’t too bad, especially since it gives you easy access to near-perma retaliation. Probably also gives you (together with the off-hand) access to better LF-generation.

CPC is really quiet good for this… I did a couple of games now with this:
http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fRAQRBIRdG2IHN90WbjzN83m4Xok+FCg2dqgg6mYMiCA-TJxHAB1+EAOZ/BAOJAFVGAA
and, surprisingly, it sort of works… There’s definitely improvements to be made, but the first impression was better than expected. I was using it mostly to help the teams at mid, not as a close bunker or something (would probably pick some different choices for that).

Good suggestions so far.
I’ve tried to throw something together myself (will have to test it out tonight), but constantly get reminded how our stuff is truly all over the place… I mean you kind of want to work on 3 areas that simply aren’t compatible at the moment:
- You’ll be in DS a lot, so you want some traits to boost that
- You need a lot of life force generation, so spectral skills and their traits are your obvious answer
- You kind of want to bring some wells for the team utility/area denial
So you end up wanting/needing to go 6 in death, 4 in curses, 4 in blood, 4 in soul reaping … actually 4 in spite would be too bad either. Combine that with 6 utility skills and 3 weapon sets and you know you’ve got a problem.

I’m also really liking Bhawb’s suggestion for Unholy Martyr, as it would give us an option to simultaneously relieve some pressure from our own team while putting it on the enemy team…

TL;DR For lacking of anything truly game changing, you end up needing a ton of small things and you simply can’t slot that many…

(reserved: will keep the current best version of the build here and update as we improve upon it)

The idea was mentioned on “the state of Necromancer’s in PvP” thread about a possible debuff bunker build (think guardian but with debuffs for the enemy instead of buffs for your team). I thought it may be a good exercise to see how close we could get to such a build with what we have now, and thus figure out what we still need to make it a strong build.

Some requirements:
High life force generation
Strong healing
High pressure on the enemy through debilitating conditions and (soft) cc

Maybe this spectral build would be a nice place to start this exercise?
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Attrition-PvP-Spectral-Build-Video
Obviously, Unholy Sanctuary should be too good to pass up in a build like this… I mean, this is practically what the trait was made for, if it doesn’t live up than that will have to be one of the points that should be improved.

So… start brainstorming

(PS. I’ll try to flesh out the post a bit more once I find some time, but meanwhile: get started :P)

EDIT: Added the build I was referring too

It seems some are kind of ignoring the elephant in the room: Guardians have been the most core component of any team since release and their mobility is arguably worse than ours; so no, having bad mobility does not inherently exclude you from conquest. But what they lack in mobility and damage, they make up in survivability and team support (through crazy amounts of boons).

And so there is a possible role for us right there: imagine guardian-like survivability (through solid LF-regen, that scales with opponents; while actually being able to receive healing in DS), with moderate damage while basically radiating metric-kittenloads of debilitating conditions (vulnerablity, blinds, poison, weakness, torment, cripple, etc.). I’m obviously exagerating with the metric-kittenloads, but you know, basically what the guardian brings in own-team-support, you’d bring in enemy-hindering abilities…

Cogbyrn.7283:

You wouldn’t call the fact that you can gain ~48% of 2x your LF pool, then when you go back to normal vitality, it simply reduces your total LF while maintaining your raw LF a strange interaction? The game is clearly keeping track of your % LF, but it casually ignores it in this scenario in lieu of max HP, even though your HP scales by % when going into/out of Plague Form.

I know why it happens. I was just pointing out THAT it happens in case people hadn’t found it.

Behind the curtains, LF isn’t tracked as a % but as a ‘health’ number; it’s only displayed as a %. You can also see this by adding/removing some vitality in the Mists for example.

Actually, they asked a while back which amulets we would like added to pvp (for this release) and immediately said dire (condition damage, toughness, vitality) isn’t going to make it, then they started laughing. I realize it could be over the top on other condi classes (engi, ranger, warrior, etc.), but if you keep insisting that Death Shroud is our subsitute for our lack of stability, block, vigor, invulnerablity, stun breaks, mobility, etc. then you’re going to need to allow us to be one hell of a tanky kitten or it’s never going to match up…

That or (and actally preferably) we need a giant boost to life force generation (without ICD kitten, our defenses not scaling with the number of opponents is a real problem and is only made worse by ICD), especially on a condi necro, and we need to be able to be healed in DS. But because of whatever happened in beta, they seem to really fear going that route…

Well, who knows. We weren’t that great last year and then got a good offensive boost, maybe 2014 will be the year of the defense…

I’ve been watching parts of ToL EU and NA and was noticing some peculiarities:
- The further the matches advanced the less condi builds seemed present in the teams. Apart from the spirit rangers and a necro here and there, there were pretty much none.
- A fair presence of people using the celestial amulet: not only elementalist, but even engineers in builds that would traditionally use rabid instead.

So, the question, given that our condi builds have fairly hybrid trait spreads already and that both staff and scepter are more hybrid in nature than they are generally given credit: could we make the same move and slap on celestial instead of rabid/carrion? Why would it (not) work?

Edit: language

Aedrion.6483:

Having a good necromancer on your team is most certainly not a bad thing, especially versus high level teams.

Seeing that in the combined ToL EU and NA there were no necroes in the finals and only 1 in each region in semi-finals, it would seem that the high level teams don’t really share your sentiment.

Imo, against competent teams, the (condi) necro always needs to some amount of babysitting by his team. And that was fine when we made up for it with the pressure/damage we brought. But the combination of incremental nerfs and the recent buffs to direct damage make it so we don’t really have that strength anymore; so it’s only normal that we fall out of favor compared to classes that are more self-sustained.

Tbh, and this may be a personal issue so I’m curious if you guys experience something similar, I often feel like a force multiplier more than anything else: if we win, I can make us win (a lot) harder; but if we lose, then I was often akin to dead weight. Never do I feel like my presence turned the tide (beyond a mere number advantage, obviously).

@manveruppd.7601: My point is more like Bhawb said, in that you would ideally try to achieve a balance between vitality and toughness. In scenarios where you can only pick one (pvp), both give pretty much the exact same benefit before you take condition damage and healing into account. So which one is better for you ends depending a lot of smaller factors: how much (team) healing can you expect; how do you deal with conditions; in those situations where the choice decides whether you barely survive or whether you die, do you die more often from condi burst or from being stunlocked by a warrior/backstabbed by a thief; etc. The take home message: they are close, it’s up to you to decide what you need more. NOT vitality, obviously, it’s a no brainer.

flow.6043:

1. Life Force regeneration is better and more reliable than our regular healing.

2. LF regen is always percentage based. That means you don’t have to worry about healing effectiveness.

3. Our LF pool is 120-156% of our regular hp, meaning that unlike with other classes 1 point of vitality actually gives you an additional 2.2-2.56 hit points.

And these are all points I can agree with (well, except 3 doesn’t actually matter; see above). Now please explain how we go from “in DS, vitality is more like toughness” to “in DS, vitality >>>>>>> toughness”. Cause that’s the giant leap that I take issue with and which sort of gets thrown out there all the time without anyone even knowing why that would be.

manveruppd.7601:

for necromancer, because each point of vitality is essentially 17HP rather than 10 (because it adds to your total life force), so it just about comes up even against direct damage too.

An easy mistake to make, but that’s not how the math works. The reason you want (in the approximated version) 10 times as much health as armor is exactly because every point of vitality gives you 10 health. If it would give you 5, you would want 5 times more. And if it gives you 17, then it’s 17 times more (but obviously ‘normal health’+’death shroud health’, since that’s where the 17 comes from). So while that may seem weird, 1 point of vitality giving you more health doesn’t actually mean it’s worth more and you should invest more in it. In the end, due to how the formulas work out, what you’re really balancing is points in toughness vs. points in vitality, and how much either of them gives you is not important. (Or in other words: toughness becomes more important the more health you have, so when vitality gives you larger chunks of health, the importance of toughness equally goes up and the rates of both even out.) Taking it back to DS: in the first approximation, adding DS thus actually doesn’t change the ideal stat spread AT ALL. The only difference is that healing works different in DS (percentage based, so doesn’t favor toughness) and you’re under a fairly high constant Damage over Time effect (which is again percentage based, so vitality doesn’t protect you better against it).

Seems like people smarter than you were not as smart as you or they thought, so you shouldn’t accept this so readily. If I made a mistake myself, then I’ll be the first to hear it and thank whoever can show me where. But obviously, if there’s a problem with my math, I want it to be proven with (better) math… It’s when you don’t that misconceptions as above arise…

flow.6043:

Alright, I’ll give you that one.
With just 100 toughness or vitality the eHP is better with toughness.
But what does this mean, really? If you take nothing but direct damage, no condition damage, no healing, no life force, then you can take exactly 1 extra dmg with toughness instead of vitality. ONE. A single tick of any damaging condition means vitality takes the lead again.

So arguments like this…

… rely on you not cherry picking the circumstances. Where are the 2 uses of your healing skill that you should be able to rely on? Right, they would swing the balance more to the middle again, so you conveniently ignore them.

flow.6043:

…don’t mean anything. Handling conditions well doesn’t mean you’re immune.
You will take condition damage, period. If the eHP is that close, the decision is indeed a no-brainer: vitality, please and thank you.

Same as above. It’s not like our pathetic healing already easily equates to +50% health, no, just throw it out the window.

flow.6043:

On the other hand, if I’m sitting in DS while I’m getting a hammer massage, I’d rather have Spectral Armor refilling me with every hit.

Why do you keep hinting at some special synergy between vitality and DS that completely dwarfs toughness into none-existence? There really isn’t anything like that. Substitute vitality for toughness in this example and everything will be EXACTLY the same.

flow.6043:

That golden ratio is bull.
Leaving aside that you can’t predict the course of every actual battle, there’s no math to support any of it. At best it’s a rule of thumb that someone made up a million years ago for classes without life force to give you a general idea for what to aim at when gearing your character.

o.O … like seriously… o.O
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/60838-math-damage-reduction-toughness-and-vitality/
Nothing made up there, just simple math based on the equations the game uses… The full formula even incorporates healing and condition damage. Since one favors thoughness, the other conditions and both change from fight to fight, indeed the first approximation is to leave them out. And indeed that’s not the end of the story, cause you very much should try to guess how much healing you can expect and how much condition damage you will take. Factors that very much depend on your playstyle, your team, the way you handle conditions, etc. etc. etc. Thus making blanket statements that ‘in general necros want vitality’ nothing more than a jump to conclusions…

flow.6043:

And as seen in the eHP example, without any gear or traits at all you’re just 100 stat points off the breaking point before vitality starts giving you more raw defense.

More o.O
You know the ‘breaking point’ isn’t fixed right? The more vitality you have, the more use you get from toughness and vice versa? And thus the ‘breaking point’ constantly moves the moment you add a single point into either vitality or toughness?

flow.6043:

And not only is this assumption based on never taking any condition damage, but once you start mitigating with DS the difference becomes even more favorable for vitality. Don’t forget, 100 vitality actually adds an additional 1200 hitpoints to you life force pool.

Except it doesn’t. DS starts of at 60% of your total vitality, not 120%. I know there was a lot of confusion about that for a long time, but a dev confirmed it back in august and it’s now very clearly visible in game… https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/DeathShroud-is-now-base-100-HP/first#post2539415
And even that aside, it doesn’t matter (see below).

flow.6043:

If I start at base value an additional 100 toughness is ~5% dmg reduction. In that case your opponent would have to do 20k direct dmg to make it worth not taking 1k hp instead.

First of all, you’re completely screwing up your results by rounding here. Just adding 2 more figures, you’d get 5.17% dmg reduction, meaning you need to take 19342 direct damage (that’s before the damage reduction btw) before it’s advantageous. This happens to be lower than the 19372 you’d have from +100 vitality, so toughness is actually slightly better here.

I don’t know why you want to compare them in such an unintuitive manner though, why not just use eHP instead (which gw2buildcraft even calculates for you)? In that case, you see that the difference between +100 toughness and +100 vitality (starting from base) is actually crazy small, i.e. 19373 vs. 19372. As is to be expected when base itself has the closest ‘ideal’ ratio of any class: 18372/1836 = 10.007.

flow.6043:

2500 was just a random number, but the comparison shows that the more toughness you have the more vitality you actually want instead.

And vice versa. That should be common knowledge…

flow.6043:

Like I said, I wouldn’t go without any toughness but if I had to choose just one then vitality is always the clear winner for necros.

It may be a clear winner for you, which is fine, but it is not a clear winner for necros in general. The difference between the 2 (in pvp, which is the only place where you have to chose between the 2) is again extremely close before you take condition damage and healing into account (24806 vs 24802). Given that we handle conditions pretty darn well and I hope you have some team mates that heal you a bit from time to time, the decision is really not the no-brainer you’re making it out to be.

flow.6043:

Arvid.3829:

The basic rule, which doesn’t take into account healing (favours thoughness), condition damage (favours vitality) or death shroud, is simply “armor = health/10”

I would agree if we actually had decent healing, which we don’t.

Well, there’s nothing to disagree here. Given the approximations I said there, math simply dictates it’s right… Obviously, you have to try to add the other factors into your decision; which involves a considerable amount of guessing and which is something each has to judge for his own. But I didn’t do that exercise there… that’s simply the formula in first approximation and that’s all there is to it.

flow.6043:

Life force on the other hand does most of the work when it comes to our sustain. And since it always generates in percentages there is no magic sweet spot for healing power vs toughness, just one rule instead: the more vitality the better.

Or the more toughness the better? Seriously, the sweet spot for health vs. armor is still there… Just because vitality is less bad because of how the ‘healing’ works in DS, doesn’t suddenly make it the only sensible choice. The only advantage vitality has in DS is that it helps against conditions which toughness doesn’t… and then you realize tanking condition damage by going into a mode that basically adds a serious amount of DoT onto yourself might not be such a bright move to begin with.

Except, now you’ve assumed that you already made a large investment in thoughness to begin with (664 to reach 2500 armor). If you had started at base thoughness and 25k health, you’d have reached the opposite conclusion.

The basic rule, which doesn’t take into account healing (favours thoughness), condition damage (favours vitality) or death shroud, is simply “armor = health/10”

Imo, it depends on what you do most. For organised runs where you want to optimize your speed, zerker is a no brainer. But if you mostly pug, then it’s more up in the air.

Tbh, I personally pug lvl 49 and 50 regularly on a full dire condi necro: if you trust the forums and stuff, I should be shot on sight. In reality, I literally never have anyone complaining/kittening about it in game. I know I can easily do 3.5-4.5k dps single target (depending on buffs) which is about 3 times lower than a fully buffed zerker, actually higher than a non-buffed zerker and usually not worse than your teammates (cause even at that lvl, full zerkers aren’t at all as common as you’d think)… Meanwhile, runs are a lot smoother (outside of the parts where that’s pretty much the point, looking at you dredge, no one in the party regularly downs and defeats are exceedingly rare) but slower. Within that pug context, I know my build simply outperforms a zerker one, while not feeling like you’re a bad warrior….

But don’t rush the crafting just to do lvl 50: it’s nothing special and not worth the regrets you’ll have if you end up making a set that doesn’t suit you. Also, if you enjoy the zerker style but want a bit more range/survivability, you can adapt the dagger build to be more DS-oriented (piercing+vulnerability+might on life blast, Deathly Perception, etc.). This gives you a safer option (cause you’re mostly in DS, with the option of doing max damage up to 600 range) with more aoe, at the cost of a few percentages of damage. There are a few guides to be found about that build as well.

AkkiChan.7164:

… and 2% per second with.

ftfy

Dire… always. Crit chance is overvalued imo: your on crit effects are mostly limited by their ICD, not your crit chance. Also note that pure dire trinkets do not exist, so even if you go as dire as possible, you will still have around 23% crit chance. That’s enough to reliably trigger your on crit effects. Sure Rabid will still be slightly (the imperative word being slightly) higher dps, but the trade-off in survivability and synergy with our class mechanic dwarfs this gain imo.

As a class that, by design, just has to take stuff to the face and live through it more than anyone else, having the option to go for max survivability while losing only a couple of percent dps max just seems too crazy to pass up.

Since you have them, one of you may know: where are these Aviator Glasses in the wardrobe? I can see a slot for the Reading Glasses and the Inventor’s Sunglasses, but no Aviator Glasses to be seen…

Yesterday’s blogs were posted an hour and a half ago (comparatively). The old release previews were posted half an hour ago like 90% of the time.

They can drink coffee later, I tell you!

Title says it all.

And sorry, I’m just too anxious and been refreshing the page since forever.

On paper, it seems a bit under tuned. Base (without healing power), you’re looking at 2600 healing if you manage to stay in DS for 20 seconds… Doesn’t sound too game changing, but we’ll have to see in practice.

The change dates back to the summer somewhere. It is/was 3 from the caster per target. So if you hit more than one guy, it can still act as a full condi clear.

I believe it was around the Fractured release that a dev confirmed that the change was intended, before we pretty much all thought it was a bug…

I haven’t tested it recently btw, so it may have changed again.

Honestly, I think staff is at a very good place as it is now. It’s a well-rounded weapon with some support, some control, some direct damage, some condition damage, pretty decent life force generation, pretty decent aoe, pretty aweful single target (which also leads to the whole “there’s no counter play” not being that much of an issue). Thismakes it awesome as a second weapon (which is also how it’s mostly used) in a lot of specs, as it will almost always cover some of the areas that you main set lacks. In the end, it think it’s really good to have such a type of weapon and staff is really good at that role…

Our weapons that really need the most work are, imo, the weapons we don’t have: some kind very offensive melee weapon with cleave (like sword and greatsword on most classes) is really lacking in our repertoire.

But not the only valuable thing. If not, pro-tip: the shortest way to finish a dungeon is to never start.

spoj.9672:

That race was just about who had the most free time.

The amount of time you can dedicate has always been a big factor in any world first, nothing new here. Also, I’m sure there were more than 5 people playing GW2 that had the same amount of free time at that point.

The real point is: if you read this thread (and any related) you’d think they wouldn’t have had a shot even if they had 30 hours in a day, per definition… cause, you know, conditions are terribad!… Obviously, that’s not entirely correct.

Then again, the first group to hit scale 50 fractals after the patch was running with a condi necro, so yeah…

Unfortunately, more than 99% of the players (these are real numbers ) don’t have a clue of what conditions are and aren’t capable off. So whenever you ask this stuff, pretty much all you’ll get is a rehash of popular opinion instead of an objective answer.

1. Necromancer
2. Ranger
3. Elementalist

(I kind of cheated and gave the three who’s profession identitity/role is (imo) most unclear at this stage and thus which I hope the developers will be able to clarify a bit; seeing as that’s what any profession threat is going to end up being anyway)

Karl McLain.5604:

Edit:
Most of these notes are simply a summary of what was discussed in the previous Ready Up stream, with a few tweaks based on feedback. This list of changes does not encompass all changes that will occur in the next feature build. We’ve got quite a few more things coming, but are unable to talk about them at this time. Soon.

I’m curious; does ‘we’ mean ‘the skills and balance team’ or ‘ArenaNet’?

I’ve only read the first post and skimmed through the rest, so maybe this was addressed already: a major flaw I see in your post is that you apparently think that power damage has to be actively applied (thus requiring skill), while conditions just sort of magically happen (thus not requiring skill). Yet skills that apply conditions are functionally exactly the same as skills that only do power damage, with the only difference that their damage is applied in a delayed fashion instead of immediately.

This actually creates an additional layer of difficulty for conditions, as not only do you have to wait for your damage to actually apply, but your target can also use condition cleanses during that time to cut your damage short. Or, from the other side, not only can you avoid damage by good positioning, dodging, evading, etc. but even after already being hit, you still have options to reduce the damage taken.

And that’s exactly why all condition builds that currently work feel spammy: you can only hope to do well if you can take their condition cleanses out of the picture, so you are forced to build in such a way that you can overload those cleanses by means of frequent application of numerous conditions…

Rennoko.5731:

I never got the thing to ever blast might when placed on a fire field. I never really bothered to pay attention if the activation caused a “double” blast or not, but It always seemed to be a single bast to me.

My interpretation of this was they simply removed the blast notice that did nothign when you dropped the mark,… but I could be wrong.

If you placed it in a field and it didn’t trigger directly, it would ‘store’ the blast and activate the effect whenever the mark was triggered.

If you place it in a field and it also activated while the field was still up, you would indeed get 2 blasts (e.g. 6 stacks of might).

The fix may have been good (it was clear it wasn’t intended), but as it’s been there since release, it has been an integral part of our overall effectiveness. However small, this is once again a flat nerf .

Tbh I’m finding this stream of small balance nerfs and fixes over the last months (what is it? 6, 7?), without any form of compensation in other areas, increasingly hard to swallow…

Kravick.4906:

rohnis.2715:

Curses
Dhuumfrost:
Chill does damage.

Name it Grenthfrost to keep with the theme. Grenth did come after Dhuum, after all.

Call me crazy, but I actually like this idea… Expanding upon the Terror idea and letting necros pick traits that add damage to otherwise non-damaging conditions. Obviously, the numbers would need careful consideration, but add this e.g. to the Death Magic line and there would be a nice incentive to actually put points in that again…

Bhawb.7408:

It is literally the exact same “OP” Dhuumfire that everyone has been complaining about, except now you proc it with Life Blast, instead of a random crit.

Not sure why you keep repeating that, as it simply isn’t true. The duration is 25% shorter (in PvE/WvW) and it can no longer trigger alongside your other skills, effectively lowering it’s damage potential by 50% or so…

Rennoko.5731:

Pve I feel for you. It was tedious playing necro there anyhow with conditions. Just play power and put yourself out of your misery.

Except, as condi you actually feel like you’re doing something different (dare I say unique?) in your team. As power, if you’re honest with yourself, you’re simply a bad warrior…