I get that the change has left Elementalists in a wierd place, but please don’t pretend it was not needed. Condition builds were completely, utterly, and absolutely destroyed by the mere existence of an Elementalist and this kind of change was long overdue.
I do not agree. The only issue I have with the mode is that a skilled healer can make a minion wave kitten near immortal. If that was not the case, it would be easy to rush them down and force a supply fight or to force them to defend their gate. The meta right now is entirely based on having a healer escort your breakers and keeping them alive.
Fractals are old and tired. Its like Tequatl for a lot of people, we have done it so many times that the act has lost all meaning. If you want to gloriously kill Mossman the proper way, then you can go right ahead, but I’m tired of it and I just want the loot.
Its good for two reasons. 1) It was not nerfed into unviability like a lot of doomsayers were making it out to be. 2) It actually has counterplay besides “don’t be a condi build.” I love it. Not being able to use 80% of my stuff on an Ele was most frustrating.
I have to agree with what a fellow Reaper said. The only thing that felt ridiculous was Diamond Skin, which completely locked us out of fights against Elementalists. Once that was dealt with, we were always going to have our own place in the new meta.
Corrupt boon change is not too bad of a powercreep, the scepter aa chain is. Idk what they are thinking making a fricking auto attack corrupt a boon. If you go through with it at least make it on crit corruption.
It is the third in a chain. In reality its impact will be beyond minimal. Think how rarely you get off the third in a chain. Its pretty rare. And its often random dodged, blocked, etc
I think people are overestimating this change. i doubt it will be a big deal at all.
This. I can think of very few situations where I would rather sit there and auto attack instead of swapping weapons, using a skill, going into shroud, etc. This will have a very minor effect on balance. I personally don’t even care if it gets added or not.
All I know is that, even as a Signet Reaper, I still see pretty much everyone with a million boons all the time. 1 more boon off on every third attack is going to be nothing, except in the most drawn out of fights where we are meant to be really good anyway.
I don’t want to sound rude, but Elementalists have been at the top of the food chain for a very long time now. Tempest just made it even worse. They have been overdue for a good few balance changes, and the Diamond Skin change was so very needed.
I am at Ruby rank, and I am consistently getting Amber players in my games. I am getting players who are no less than four divisions below me. Something is broken.
ANET’s main goal with this patch will be to destroy Mesmer.
@Chaith, worry not.. you’ll still be able to team with one low level player to get easy matches.
If “destroy” means they will be on the level of most other professions, then thats a good thing. Just do the same to Elementalists and we might even get a decent meta.
I’m actually really happy with the strength of necromancer and its elite. The only issues I have are more to do with some other elites being ridiculously strong in PvP, so if they get balanced down a little then power creep will bring us in line with those classes. Diamond Skin in particular is getting changed, and thats already a massive buff for us :P
Why? It’s been the same for years. Now that nearly everyone wants to play some kind of cheap condi bomb you can’t vs the ele. You want to play Passive vs passive then this is what you get lol.
Except I’m a celestial Necromancer, and I can’t use any meaningful CC on an Elementalist with this trait because they can simply heal most of the damage I do to them… This is not just about condition damage, it means I can’t chill, fear, or immobilize them etc.
I’m fine with hard world bosses. The problem comes when you locked important items and currencies behind them. Half the new collections required a mass of ley line crystals or a chak gerant kill, so making the event more accessible was a good decision.
Well, you obviously don’t play with 300 latency. How difficult the content is also depends a great deal on your class. I’m having an easy time on Reaper for example, but my squishy classes get eaten alive. But hey, this thread is obviously a subtle brag, so whatever.
I’m raiding on my Reaper. Killed the first boss, got the second to 35% or so. The only issue with the class, honestly, is that its not a Revenant with its overtuned damage or a Warrior with its boons. For raids, I do think our power damage could go up a bit though.
I worked with PUG groups and had a few bad runs. Then I had a really good run, though we did not kill the boss. But, the 10 of us decided to make a raid guild.
So, the very next day we kill Vale Guardian, and tomorrow we’ll try Gorseval. Its not too late at all, though I confess it may bit a bit harder to find a group now.
Edit: Watching a video and learning the fight would help.
Yes they can, though I do not recommended it. They basically crawl away and then come right back to bite you in the ankles. You buy… Maybe half a second at most?
The main point the guy was making is that raids can take far more than they give. I’ve spent about 30 gold on consumables and I made about 12 of that back.
Yeah, I get it, I’m wrong. I discussed it with a mate of mine and I’ll just assume its a side effect to playing with 300 latency. But, my group has killed him, so either way. Ironically enough I’m actually enjoying Gorseval far more, though I have yet to kill him.
Well, for those not already doing it, just hang on to all your fractal chests and boxes, etc, and open them all up after the rewards update. They did say rewards for the higher level fractals would be improved, and who knows, maybe other stuff will too.
Crowd control seems to be the best way. Moving the boss during certain phases is also a pretty good idea. Also, not breaking him means having less seekers.
As far as group functions are concerned, I really do wish we could colour code each group. My groups for content that require coordination, like raids and Triple Trouble etc, always set us up to teams with specific duties, and colours would really help.
8 shards for killing Vale Guardian seems pretty lame to me… As far as farming shards is concerned, its actually faster not to kill him. You can earn enough credit for shards a lot faster, and you don’t need to remake the squad to get him to spawn again.
Obviously the bosses can drop what you want for killing them too, but I personally never get favoured by the RNG gods… Thus I’ll often farm or buy the stuff I want.
Just to weight in, class balance actually does have a lot to do with it. Some pull more damage, have better utility and are more demanded for raid groups. That is a reality and it does effect the raiding experience, so you can’t really discard it like that.
It might not be the raid teams department, but it most certainly is a consideration when designing challenging content… While power Reapers are by no means in a bad place for example, I have seen videos of Revenant damage and they make me drool.
I understand that the skill can be annoying to learn, especially since many of the fight’s mechanics are traps set up to hinder you, like Seekers.
Distributed Magic isn’t necessarily a raid wiper though. There are things that we can do to prevent it from straight-up killing us, like “Rebound!” or invulnerability skills. If a Warrior survives it, he can use Battle Standard on his allies.
Sure, that is a good point. I’m just assuming it was intended to kill you. I personally have 25k health on my Valkyrie Reaper and it still almost kills me, for example.
That said, I don’t like how people are acting like I don’t know the mechanics here. I don’t pretend to be all knowing, but I’ve killed him twice and attempted him many more times you know. It would be difficult to get that far without knowing mechanics.
Regardless, I kind of hijacked the thread, so I apologize and will see myself out.
You’re confusing things. What they nerfed was parties not breaking the breakbar for the express purpose of avoiding having to move the boss around to play around the hot zones. Whether or not the boss was in the middle was completely irrelevant for that tactic.
And if you loathe the mechanic I think you still don’t completely understand it because I really don’t see what you could possibly dislike about it. If you move the boss at the right time no green circle will ever spawn in a hot zone as for as I know. It punishes bad timing and slow movement.
On your first point I disagree. While you could do the “No CC” strategy anwhere, lets not pretend it was not most often done in the middle. Hell, the strategy existed so you could maintain DPS at all times, which meant being able to melee from any zone.
As for the second. The mere act of a raid wiping mechanic being able to spawn on a floor that kills you is, in my opinion, a bad mechanic. Then again, maybe we just have different ideas on what good or bad mechanics are, and there is nothing wrong with that.
Yes, correct, but it can happen during the transition phase too. As in when the boss has actually gone over the line, there is still time for the circle to spawn behind. In addition, if you fight him in the middle as is a popular tactic, lightning can go anywhere.
1. The Distributed Magic from the boss cannot happen “during the transition.” The boss is not there to cast it. It does not cast it even when it’s moving en-route to divide. The Blue Division can cast Distributed Magic, and only cast it in its section.
2. If you mean “right before transition”, you can minimize the damage this does by keeping the boss far away from the middle right before you transition.
3. If a group is keeping him directly in the center, that’s simply a bad strategy. They could, and should, always favor one section. It’s such a small, insignificant distance to move him in order to keep him in one section over another.
I’ll accept I may be wrong, even if I do still loathe the mechanic. However, on point 3 I must disagree as that is actually one of the most effective ways to kill the boss right now, to the extent that it was an undocumented nerf in the most recent patch.
Edit: For clarity, when I said transition, I meant moving from one colour to the next. I did not mean the split. But that’s my bad, I explained it poorly and I apologize.
The circle appearing in the fire zone is because you didn’t move him quickly enough. It is not RNG. Making sure this doesn’t happen is probably the hardest thing about the fight.
Yes, correct, but it can happen during the transition phase too. As in when the boss has actually gone over the line, there is still time for the circle to spawn behind. In addition, if you fight him in the middle as is a popular tactic, lightning can go anywhere.
ale Guardian lightning circle can spawn even outside the zone he is in, and it can spawn on the other side of the map where no one can reach it in time. I’ve killed the guy and the only “difficult” part of it was the green circle RNG.
The Distributed Magic circle cannot spawn anywhere except in the section of the room the Vale Guardian is in. If you want to convince people otherwise, then I suggest offering actual evidence (A video?) of this happening.
That would be difficult due to the fact that I am Australian. Trying to stream or record a video with internet like mine would literally make the game unplayable.
My opinion is purely based on experience. The boss may have been moving between two zones, or had just entered the new zone, and we had the lightning circle spawn where we had just left, meaning it A was always in a lava zone and B was often too far away.
Our win actually came from ignoring a lightning circle that was behind us in a fire zone, and taking it on the chin, only to then recover with warbanner. That is my idea of a bad mechanic, since trying to do it correctly in that situation meant a wipe.
Edit: I was incorrect, sorry about that. I’ll remove this post so it stops being quoted. For future reference, I was having an issue related to latency and boss movement.
Any idea where Reaper damage is at in the class hierarchy? I’m not quite sure I’m pulling the numbers I should be even with the correct gear and traits, etc.
For power Reaper, what are the recommended runes? Are runes of the Scholar the only way to go or are there decent alternatives? I somewhat dislike the idea of Scholar runes as they don’t really apply to me outside Raids all that much, so I’m looking for ideas.
Good
1. The mechanics are mostly really good.
2. Its challenging content that the game really needs.
3. Ghostly Infusion looks amazing and I want it.
Bad
1. RNG (like green circles) has no business being in a raid.
2. Its the first raid wing of a “casual” game, it could be more forgiving.
3. I think the non Ascended rewards could be better.
I did a PUG run with a few Attuned members a while ago and they were very good. I did not do very well personally and we did not kill the boss, but I learnt a lot from them and I do appreciate the experience. Best of luck to them, and to Ethereal Guardians.
I did a PUG run with a few Attuned members a while ago and they were very good. I did not do very well personally and we did not kill the boss, but I learnt a lot from them and I do appreciate the experience. Best of luck to them, and to EG.
Some builds are far better than others at damage. Revenant, for example, has no right to be pulling its current numbers with such a simple rotation. I don’t want them to nerf it or anything, I just want all classes to pull similar amounts of damage if possible.
Other classes can work, but PUG raids won’t ask for anything other than a Revenant or a condition Engineer. The ones that don’t ask strictly for those will typically fail anyway. I’d really like to see a little more balance between the classes, PvE damage wise.
Ahhh. DPS meters. A mechanic that can help all but is instead abused to mistreat other players are spread elitism. Its a great thing and I would love to have it, but as a mostly PUG player I am forced to cower in the face of the untold horrors it would release on an otherwise laid back community. Besides, I personally fear it will just force the meta even more in one direction, something we already see with engineers and revenants.
Oh please, even PvE is imbalanced in many areas. Some classes are simply better than others at certain things. Just look at the 10 man raids with 3 Revenants and 3 condition Engineers. You can worry about PvE nerfs when PvE is actually balanced.
Its challenging for the wrong reasons. I can handle the mechanics, but I can’t handle the strict time limit even with full damage gear… It puts people under too much pressure in my opinion, and its that pressure that causes people to choke / make mistakes.
Mastery level 84 and I love Reaper. Best part of this expansion for me. Playing a regular Necromancer was mostly just auto attacking with a dagger and throwing a bunch of wells in my opinion, but now we can do so much more. It feels a lot more fluid.
What a load of waffle. Are you really telling me its a perfect system?
1. Most guilds should have had a bunch of this stuff unlocked right from the start. They took 2 years of effort away from my guild and threw it all down the drain.
2. There is no incentive to donate to the guild hall. Members throw in their resources and get pretty much nothing in return. Honestly, it is just another material sink.
3. The progression is messed up. PvP guilds want arena, WvW guilds want more supply and catapults. They have to jump through many hoops to actually get them.
4. They still have not fixed the guild mission system. People are missing out on rewards, different guilds are fighting over who gets mission credit, and other issues.
If you can make it work, then good for you. Its still a horrible system.
I like how some people are trying to imply that 20 to 50 “active” players is a small guild. That is not a small guild at all. That is, at worst, a medium sized guild… A small guild, by definition, is a size on the lower end of the spectrum. In this case, 15 and under.
The issue is pretty straight forward, you jerk. We had loads of stuff we worked towards before the expansion came out. Then the expansion hits and we lose… What did we lose again? Oh, right. EVERYTHING. All of that time and effort, for nothing at all.
Starting at 0 is like having one of my weapons on cooldown at the start of a fight. Its pretty bad, and one of the main reasons we have to take certain skills. If I had my way, it’d be 50%… But obviously that is ridiculous, and 30% would be more “balanced”.
A lot of classes actually do feel over the top right now, Revenant in particular stands out. Not to mention, a lot of games out there are solo versus premade, and those make for some pretty lame games. But hey, lets bury our heads in the sand and pretend the game is fine. I’m sure the expansion is completely balanced and that nothing is wrong.
There’s a difference between burying your head in the sand, and acknowledging that maybe we need some time for players and teams to develop before crying “op” on every build that we struggle even a little bit against.
We could do that, but I have a better idea. How about we acknowledge that a lot of this stuff is new, and through the act of being new, is somewhat poorly balanced… Not many games can release a new class, etc, and claim its perfectly balanced on day 1.
By virtue of being new, you can say that it is more likely that balance could be more drastically skewed than usual, sure. But also because it’s new, we shouldn’t be leaping to conclusions about what is actually poorly balanced, because it’s new. Until you take the time to collect an appropriate amount of data, you shouldn’t be making a decision. A few frustrating matches one night isn’t an appropriate amount of data.
So really, all of the “this is OP”, “that is OP” callouts on this forum should read “this seems strong”, or “help with that”, in order to better understand what each new spec/build/class brings to the table before going back and trying again.
What can I say? I operate on a more straightforward theory.
I look into the distance, and I see some smoke… The act of seeing smoke, while it could be a number of things, leads me to the natural assumption that its probably a fire.
This forum is filled with such smoke. You can label it however you want, but at the end of the day, no class is going to be perfectly balanced at every level of play.
Ahhh, perspective. One man’s stupidity is another man’s genius. Thank god Einstein didn’t listen to his critics or god knows where we would have been today.
A lot of classes actually do feel over the top right now, Revenant in particular stands out. Not to mention, a lot of games out there are solo versus premade, and those make for some pretty lame games. But hey, lets bury our heads in the sand and pretend the game is fine. I’m sure the expansion is completely balanced and that nothing is wrong.
There’s a difference between burying your head in the sand, and acknowledging that maybe we need some time for players and teams to develop before crying “op” on every build that we struggle even a little bit against.
We could do that, but I have a better idea. How about we acknowledge that a lot of this stuff is new, and through the act of being new, is somewhat poorly balanced… Not many games can release a new class, etc, and claim its perfectly balanced on day 1.
