Showing Posts For Deepfreeze.1048:
I appreciate the ranger changes overall, but I’m worried about the intended GM traits for WS.
Currently, rangers have several methods of getting adequate condition removal.
- Run healing spring and signet of renewal
- Run empathic bond
- run survival of the fittest
- Some combo of the above
Currently, the different methods all see some use due to the other traits available in the lines and the ability of specs to take advantage of either more toughness in WS or more vitality in NM.
Moving Empathic bond and poison master into the WS tree will probably result in them seeing almost zero use, however.
With Wilderness knowledge you get both offensive and defensive benefits. Running the fairly standard troll unguent, lightning reflexes, and entangle you will get 6 on demand condi clears (assuming TU becomes a survival). You also get reduced cooldowns on those skills and an additional cleanse + fury from the SS proc. There are no drawbacks here, just a huge boost to offense and defense if you take 2 or more survival skills.
Now with empathic bond you get more condi removal than WK in a perfect scenario, but this trait is mired with situational problems. For one, you can’t see the internal timer. This means that you will frequently end up cleansing useless condis like single vulnerability stacks, cleansing conditions that could have been removed with evasive purity, or getting stuck with a heavy bleed stack for 9 seconds because you didn’t notice that the trait just procced. Further, the caveat that you need to keep the pet alive to transfer them is directly conflicted with handing said damaging conditions to the pet. This trait really isn’t worthy of a grandmaster spot tbh, and it completely pales in comparison to WK.
Also poison master. Taking this trait would be used in 2 situations. 1). You’re a power build with no access to poison that wants some application. But you can fulfill that by taking sword mainhand, spiders, or doom sigils. 2). You’re a condi or hybrid build that has enough condi clear and wants more pressure. But if you have to choose between either of our condi clear methods and this trait I can’t see that condition ever being met, so when would this trait ever be justified.
Some alternatives:
- Move empathic bond down to master level, either in WS or beastmastery where it may fit better thematically
- Remove the “gives conditions to pet” part of empathic bond and instead make it remove 3 conditions from both you and your pet.
- Change something on poison master to make it more appealing, open to suggestions.
(edited by Deepfreeze.1048)
1). Run traveler’s runes. You want to disengage? Sword 2 -> lightning reflexes -> sword 2
2). Put signet of the wild on your bar, I carry it for stomps and it works great.
3). Run two canines and keep wolf as your swap. You don’t need jungle spider because you already have plenty of poison.
You could run the first build and do fine if you use SOR for your stun break and healing spring as your heal. I would swap in warhorn on the sword set to fill in out of combat mobility and increase fury uptime.
The second one gives you empathic bond, but then you have to ask what the power is getting you over a standard trapper build.
You need condi clear, healing spring and signet of renewal probably being the bare minimum.
Your third video is copyright blocked for me. You might want to edit your spacing on the post too, the descriptions aren’t next to their corresponding video.
You would probably do better against thieves if you proactively switched to gs. Flail around, spin your camera, use number 3 to reposition, get a feel for the timing so you can use 4 to counter the opener.
Gear combos that work:
Full settlers / full apothecary / full dire / basically any combo of all three to preference
I wouldn’t run that trait combo for roaming. Off hand training is normally more useful than oak heart salve since on top of the extra radius on bonfire and slightly higher pressure you get a second dagger evade on axe/dagger per cycle which normally “blocks” more damage than I would have healed with the regen anyway. Also nature’s protection is amazing against thieves, and you will see a lot more of them in wvw than in spvp. It procs before you take backstab damage which then also mitigates any fire/air procs so you take a lot less opening damage. Also stops any gimmick killshot warriors, neuters d/d ele fire grabs, and makes eviscerate manageable.
You have lots of viable options for runes. Personally I take travelers most of the time because I want three utility slots and the non-boon movement speed buff is the single best tool you can have for kiting (prevents stripping by thieves chasing you down or lucky necros with corrupt boon). I also carry gear sets with lyssa, krait, and mad king though for when I’m feeling different.
What do you mean by 4-5 2k bleeds?
Nice videos, always fun to see what other rangers are running.
If you are considering starting out as a trapper ranger I wouldn’t run this setup though. It’s interesting that you can win so many 1v1s with 0 evasion skills and no stunbreakers, but if you’re new to the class or spec you’ll find yourself frustrated without them.
Useful options
Traveler runes – imo most useful for SOTF builds
Trapper runes – obv most useful for trapper builds
Krait runes – best “damage” option for SOTF builds
Mad King runes – provide some semblance of condi burst for SOTF builds
Grove runes – useful against necros, some warriors, rangers, guardians, engis
Lyssa runes – useful for 1vx against multiple condi classes
nightmare runes – additional control effect for dealing with thieves
Grenth runes – can be used to setup a perma chill build, although personally I don’t like them since chill doesn’t help against the classes we struggle with most
scavenging runes – a more defensive damage option than krait runes
There is no way that roll tables are correlated to equipped weapon.
I can’t think of a time where I lost a pet in a 1v1 actually. The most common combo of pets in pvp I think is the jungle spider / wolf.
The spider mostly stays out of your and the opponent’s way, so I frequently finish a 1v1 without it even taking damage.
The wolf does eat a lot of pbaoe, but you should always save it as your swap and are generally using that swap to lead immediately into a knockdown / fear. That combo does a lot to mitigate the heat it takes.
Zergs are another matter, but one that’s very difficult to fix without something drastic.
It would be pretty nice to have more ways to remove conditions from pets. Problem is that said methods would have to scale up a lot to keep pets alive in zergs.
All I can think of is something similar to outnumbered that polls the number of enemies around the pet and reduces incoming condition duration by x% per enemy. Would be resource intensive for the server though for little overall benefit.
In duels, I never struggle with keeping the pets alive. Even with birds they have to do 30k damage to the pets (due to swap) before one actually dies. If your enemy manages that and you haven’t killed them because they’re completely ignoring you idk what happened.
In that duel you posted your problem wasn’t the pet, it was that you had no idea where the warrior was for greater than half the fight. If you haven’t already started, I would learn to make use of free camera and pull your zoom all the way back, it makes a massive difference.
I don’t think I want to even imagine running a double melee with cleric’s gear. Yes, you can live forever if you want to, but I’m not sure you’ll ever actually kill anything.
I’ve been running a variation of this for a little bit after the big thread we had here about the defender runes. Changes are having a little over 3000 armor and 30% crit chance, muddy terrain over signet of stone in most situations. I run dagger or warhorn offhand depending on the mood, although I think I’m starting to prefer warhorn even without offhand mastery.
It’s great that rangers have so many good roaming builds right now, although I don’t really know which are most effective anymore.
This build and its variants, survival sotf s/t a/d, trapper ranger, power glassbow, power trapper, and to a slightly lesser extent condigen builds all work really well.
Dire isn’t objectively better, this is a game with a lot of factors available. We have no idea which is better.
Wearing Apothecary’s gear seems to be the natural response if you find that you’re in fights a long time and need more staying power.
Dire is more of the natural response if you have no problems outliving the other guy but do have problems getting through his own healing and defenses.
Personally, I run into the second problem a lot more than I do the first, so I run dire. If you find that you need to live for longer periods but don’t have a problem taking people down you might run apothecary.
It’s also not normally just “oh I’ll swap dire gear for apothecary.” For example your whole build is fairly different from one that would be run with dire gear. You give up entangle for more might stacks from rao, bleeds / torment from krait runes for might duration, and 5 extra stacks of bleed on axe 2 in favor of guard. That’s a big shift in favor of the “I need to live longer” side of the spectrum where dire is moved a lot towards “I need more offensive pressure.” They’re both personal preference.
(edited by Deepfreeze.1048)
Guys, i have a question(maybe its stupid, but lets go…)
Why is the Survival Fittest Condi Rabid build ‘superior’ as the Settler/Apotecary regen build? (Both builds with S/T A/D). Ive playing both builds in SPVP Hot Joins, and IMO, the regen is so much stronger then the survival fittest.
I will explain: Both builds have almost the same skills and condi aplicattion, but the regen one allows you to kitte ppl in 1v2 while ur condis kill them and your HP is regenering. The survival fittest build doesnt have this power, it only give u some more bleeds and condi removal, as well fury.
But honestly, i dont see how ppl say survival fittest is stronger. Ive only played SPVP, maybe in WvW its superior? Any tips?
2 answers. 1 – in spvp people have to fight you if you’re on the point, so you can force the other guy to fight the drawn out engagement as a settler’s build. In wvw they typically just run away from you if they aren’t making any headway.
2 – ranger condi builds don’t exactly have a lot of team fight presence. You are useful if the other team decides to focus you, and basically useless if they leave you alone since you provide pretty limited support. Taking more offensive options at least makes you sting more if you’re ignored in a team fight.
I see occasional people with the condi gen builds.
Compared to about a year ago you still have the new people roaming about and people who are just trying to get back to their zerg, but there is a big focus right now in roaming builds on being able to reset fights easily.
Most warrior, theif, ele, and to a lesser extent ranger, engi, and mesmer roaming builds have a lot of reset potential and will just run away from you if you’re trying to kill them with a regen / condi build.
To counter this the first evolution was probably moving to a dire gear s/t a/d build that takes evasive purity over the increased regen duration and wilderness knowledge over shared anguish from your build. This ups the condition damage by about 600 I think and increases your “burst” potential a lot.
From there we had the longbow buffs where glassbows became a thing. They are immensely powerful if you can keep an enemy at 1500 range and beat the majority of specs 1v1. Many people still run these.
Around the same time we had the release of trapper runes. These can be used in a pure condi/trapper build or a slightly hybrid power/trapper that uses the runes to provide 2 or 3 additional stealth repositions for pew pewing at the cost of damage.
The condi trapper build probably has out best 1vx potential since you can reset at any time, have more aoe condition application, and keep the high evasion of the original condi/regen builds.
The dire gear s/t a/d offensive variant of the old builds is probably the strongest duelist right now since the regen versions can’t get an opponent to stay in the fight.
Power builds are strong although I don’t run those as often. I can tell you that the power build with trapper runes generally gives up enough offense that you never really die but stalemate a lot of fights.
I’d imagine with a build like that and your play style you’d be better served with a spider and a wolf. The spider would poison and root and the wolf would fear. Unless you’re using the drake to blast finish some of your traps.
The drake is sometimes used to blast the viper’s nest or flame traps for weakness/might. Spider is normally more useful though for the ranged immob.
Superspeed increases your movement speed additively up to the cap of +33%. Chill reduces movement speed by 66% which is the “wasted” duration from superspeed so you won’t even notice being chilled.
How do you swap pets in a downed state? I hate to admit it, but I honestly have no clue.
Just push the normal swap pet key. You’re probably going down with the swap on cooldown so it does nothing. Same for the pet F2, still just press F2.
It’s not actually doing what we would think of as a normal proration either, at least in some cases. With the terror trait on and master of terror with nightmare runes I am a little short of 2 seconds of fear duration on reaper’s mark. This should give me 1 full tick and 1 partial tick.
Instead, if all I cast is reaper’s mark I get a single full tick and that’s it. If I cast something else before I get 2 full ticks, that is how conditions used to work.
But with say burning and some bleeding I am getting the smaller ticks at the end.
On ranger,
throw torch works perfectly fine with a partial prorated tick on the end.
Bonfire is borked and does about 60% of the listed tooltip damage for me. The ticks look like this 609, 548, 487, 426, 365, 304, 243, 182, 121.
Great video, almost makes me want to switch back to a trapper build. How do you do against condition roamers though? I found that the trapper build gave up too much condi survivability to work against rabid engis, terrormancers, and condi mesmers.
Minions work in situations where
-there aren’t a lot of terrain hindrances
-you get a little bit lucky with the ai
-you only need moderate sustained damage
-you don’t need to apply a lot of aoe damage
-you aren’t taking aoe damage
Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of situations in the game that meet those criteria.
What do you want to do in the game?
This hybrid build works pretty well in wvw roaming, general pve, and pvp: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Build-Staff-Corruption
I haven’t seen any other truly functional hybrid builds.
You can run the standard condition terrormancer spec with carrion gear (particularly useful in pvp), but in pve or wvw the dire set is just better in most situations.
Go to metabattle, switch a few things in your build to line up with the standard power necro build, do much better.
Point for point though.
Fire / air sigils are better than force for a power build in pvp. You shouldn’t take geomancy on a spec with no condition damage.
It isn’t worth giving up the +20% damage on foes below 50% health trait just to get banshee’s wail. You don’t need the extra swiftness duration, you’ll waste some of the crit chance from fury any time you go into deathshroud, and the daze increase only helps in rare situations.
You have 2x application of spectral armor, staff auto, dagger auto, and locust swarm for life force generation, you don’t need the life force on marks trait.
You also don’t need to reduce cooldown on spectral skills, you’ll have at least one application of spectral armor in every fight.
Chilling darkness works with well of darkness, but you’ll want to replace that well with the boon stripping one or well of suffering for dps in almost all situations
Corrupt boon is much more useful than grasp against most people
Finally lich is generally a much more game changing elite than golem, particularly since golem often just sits there and smells the roses
That video is pretty great. Don’t understand why you wouldn’t run +40% condi food though; it’s an amazing option. I also like all the survivability tools you incorporated into the build. It works beautifully in the 1vx’s you show, although in a straight 1v1 it’s complete overkill. We’re already in a far better place than tpvp just by running around continuously with full lf.
Very viable for running around solo or with a few friends, not going to do much in a zerg. You can keep your staff for zerging, but you’ll want to switch to a power build where the staff is mostly just adding aoe filler / pressure.
Condi is still only viable in small scale of about 10 people down to solo roaming. Standard terrormancer 0/6/4/0/4 still works very well. A lot of people will run other condi variants like 6/6/X/X/X or 4/6/0/0/4 and do perfectly well. Honestly as long as you take 4 points in curses for terror and place the remaining points with some thought there’s very little difference in our effectiveness in solo roaming. Having the 40% bonus duration food + 10% from toxic tuning crystals and running around with full lifeforce is strong enough in 1v1 it doesn’t matter.
In zergs condi is generally useless and most people run predominately zerker gear power well specs. There’s variance there too, but the important things are having the ground target wells in curses trait and generally deathly perception in soul reaping so you can crit all your well procs while in death shroud.
For condi necro in small scale wvw there’s no reason not to run dire.
Well if your easiest to play threshold is just attacking target dummies then we can all just go back to heartseeker thief imo. That way your skill hits and takes you back to your target when you’re kitten ing on your keyboard and accidently run away.
Looks like from this thread every class has at least one specialized roaming build that works pretty well.
Also on necros there really aren’t any issues roaming. Mobility wise if it’s on the lower part of the map you can just port back to a spawn point. If you’re on the upper part of the map there are cliffs, and cliffs + spectral walk = get out of jail free every time.
Otherwise the only thing to fear on condi necro is a very skilled player who happens to be set up with an anti condi build and lemongrass food. That just means I bypass people running lemongrass though, and essentially never die.
You’re not as efficient at ppt, but hey play what you find fun.
Terror roaming is great for efficiency, but it gets pretty boring. You win virtually every 1v1 and have no way to escape most 1vx situations. You can flip camps in about 20 seconds, and most people will just turn and run away from you when they notice you’re a +condi duration necro. Ends up feeling like playing a ppt robot that flips camps for eternity.
While dhuumfire is a bit of an anathema for necromancers both from a lore and damage perspective, removing it will only have a significant effect in 1v1 situations, and your odds of finishing a true 1v1 in pvp are incredibly slim. In group situations, someone else will happily apply burning to the necro’s target and once epidemicced there will have been no net change in the situation. If you actually want to tone down the necromancer’s single target condition “burst” then you probably need to change terror. Something along the lines of “fear now applies 2 stacks of torment per tick,” with a 4 second duration on stacks will provide basically the same overall damage as prenerf terror provided the target stops moving after the fear, and more if they don’t. You’ve now added a damage ramp up, however, and the ability to remove the torment during the duration, while providing synergy between fear’s forced movement and torment procs.
The other possible source of the issue is probably in force multiplication. Necros have consistent single target condition pressure through all damaging conditions save confusion, and moderate aoe condition pressure. As blood red arachnid pointed out in a series of excellent posts, however, the raw pressure of a necromancer does not exceed and in fact trails that of an engineer. We have something that an engineer does not, however, and that is force multiplication. There are two methods at play here, condition transfers, and aoe spread through epidemic. Condition transfers: dagger 4, staff 4, and plague signet, all contribute heavily to our class flavor, affect only our current target or in staff 4’s case a random target in the radius per condition, and perhaps most importantly, are reactive. You can negate the benefit of 2 of these 3 skills by choosing not to focus condition pressure on the necromancer.
Epidemic, conversely, is an aggressive aoe force multiplication tool that benefits from the necromancer’s applied conditions, any transferred conditions from the aforementioned skills, and any other conditions applied by your teammates. Its effect radius basically covers a point, and it can be used to effect aoe dps in the 5k range, something that really doesn’t exist for any other profession. Others have done a very good job of pointing out all the contributing factors that go into landing epidemic, no dodges from target or recipient(s), all targets remain in the skill range and effect range, neither the target nor the recipients are immediately cleansed, etc. Despite all these caveats, however, epidemic can generally be used to spread to at least one other target, and if someone on the opposing team brings a tanky ai companion, a ranger pet or a flesh golem for example, you can often create a full condition stack and transfer without player reaction. In my opinion, it is this ability to spread the sum aoe pressure on a target every 15 (12 traited) seconds that is proving simply unmanageable for existing aoe cleanses. Epidemic is allowing necro players to take the realm of condition application, which is predominately single target, and force it into an aoe mold. Additionally, unlike the overall condition landscape, which tops out quickly with the bleed cap limit and the number of conditions that stack duration rather than intensity, adding more necromancers with epidemic provides a linear increase to your ability to recreate intense aoe condition pressure, and results in 2 necromancers rotating epidemic use being able to very easily overwhelm the aoe condition removal you can bring in a typical 5 man group. You could fix this easily in the short term by doing a skill split and disabling epidemic in pvp while figuring out what to do with it, but disabling it in pve as well would be catastrophic to open world and wvw uses.
(edited by Deepfreeze.1048)
So first off please pardon my ignorance as I haven’t been doing wvw very long, but the maguuma server seems to have some weird ritual of dancing on solo players’ corpses. At this point I’ve witnessed it quite a few (>20) times, with it happening most frequently after a large group (10+) charge me down to try and use me as fertilizer or after I summon a giant useless druid spirit and jump around in circles next to it. I’ve thus become convinced that it’s some sort of initiation rite for maguuma’s guilds, which are apparently akin to gangs, and have been doing it back to try and gain their respect.
Please enlighten a confused tree like thing.
-Thyme Traveler, FA
I’m using 30/30/10 for roaming, and have had great success against virtually everything tonight. The extra pressure from burning and torment really swings things into our favor and it’s nice to put mesmers and d/d eles on the defensive for once. Spectral wall also lets you do a full 100% to dead combo on anyone foolish or inexperienced enough to not bring a stun break.