Guild Wars 2

I find the sounds that both these weapons make to be extremely obnoxious. This would be fine if I could avoid hearing them by simply not using them, but if other players have them equipped I have to listen to them nonstop. In a lot of situations this kills immersion in the game since they are basically novelty weapons, at least as far as the sounds are concerned.

I understand that some people may enjoy these effects, so I would really just prefer an option that is something like “use default sounds for other players”. If that is not technically possible, then I think the suggestion of giving them a different sound effect with a small chance to make the original effect is a good one.

I would like to second the thought in the OP, I have a list of fractals from worst to best that I made as a joke to decide what order to do dailies in, and in this patch Jade Maw is literally at the very bottom. The encounter is lengthy for no reason and extremely unchallenging, and the mechanics of the fight do not change for the entire duration. Spending the first 2 minutes just running past a bunch of enemies before you start the fight serves no purpose but to waste time. It is ostensibly a boss fractal but it is the worst fotm boss encounter by a wide margin.

I am assuming that something similar to this is going to become the norm, at least for heal druids. Unless warrior got a good new DPS build there is very little justification for bringing more than one.

However, blasting might is too unreliable and frost spirit has too much downtime to really consider. Just the warhorn 5 w/ sigil of concentration (maybe quick draw as well) and jungle panther can maintain like 8-10 might stacks depending on how much boon duration is on your gear, and since 2x druid is almost certainly going to still be the meta that should be plenty with just a warrior.

Something else to consider is that fresh air tempests with warhorn are also looking pretty good right now, and multiple heat syncs kinda makes any other might sharing unnecessary.

Valik Shin.9027:

Dinosaurs.8674:

I don’t see how you can justify more than one warrior anymore. It’s pretty easy to achieve permanent 25 might with just one (assuming the rest of your group helps a big, e.g. druid warhorn 5, maybe even jungle panther), and empower allies alone isn’t enough to justify a second warrior. Don’t forget that EA can already affect 6-7 players, so a second warrior is really only giving ~3.5 players EA for the crap personal DPS it provides. Even if you need the might, revenant is better in pretty much every way since Assassin’s Presence is better than a second EA and glint/jalis rev deals more damage, gives prot, etc.

Idk if I would go as far saying no more than 1 warrior at any raid boss. Only power can solo stack a 10 man party and even then they need strength runes , dumplings and bountiful. If you get in even a remotely moment fight most warriors just aren’t good enough to pull it off without doing crazy stuff like sigil of battle with double gs and or commanders gear

You don’t need to solo stack 25 might on a single warrior. If you bring two druids with warhorns and jungle panthers they can together maintain probably 10 stacks of might across the group if they quick draw warhorn 5, and maybe 6-7 stacks if they quick draw something else. You will also get one stack from your chronomancer. Since it looks like Sc/W Tempest is going to be meta for power damage, you could probably stack 25 might without even having a warrior if you have multiple heat syncs.

And again, even if might is an issue, why would you bring the second warrior over a revenant when rev deals more damage and assassin’s presence is better than EA?

Guess I’ll just post here what I did on reddit:

It’s cool than engi has insane DPS now, but I wish instead of giving huge buffs to the meta builds they gave huge buffs to the underused, crappy stuff. Blowtorch was already probably engineer’s single best skill, why is it getting buffed by 33%? Meanwhile blunderbuss gets a 10% buff, what a game changer. This kitten makes no sense.

And flamethrower gets buffed under the guise of “purity of purpose”…that was the only kit you could even consider dropping before, now it just solidifies the 3 kit build, with any other engi utility being unusable. Meanwhile grenades and bomb kit are still “general DPS plus conditions”, pretty much the same kitten as each other with no focus towards power or condi on either. Where is the “purity of purpose” on those? I guess we only get one skill purified per patch.

Meanwhile hammer is still completely unusable in pve, alchemy, inventions scrapper all get nothing while explosives firearms are buffed so I really can’t change traits. This patch killed any possibility of diversity in pve. We have achieved purity boys.

I don’t see how you can justify more than one warrior anymore. It’s pretty easy to achieve permanent 25 might with just one (assuming the rest of your group helps a big, e.g. druid warhorn 5, maybe even jungle panther), and empower allies alone isn’t enough to justify a second warrior. Don’t forget that EA can already affect 6-7 players, so a second warrior is really only giving ~3.5 players EA for the crap personal DPS it provides. Even if you need the might, revenant is better in pretty much every way since Assassin’s Presence is better than a second EA and glint/jalis rev deals more damage, gives prot, etc.

It’s also possible that dropping a chrono is worth it with the time warp change if someone can figure out a good spot for ventari rev. In theory a single chrono can give pretty solid quickness to 10 people now (probably average ~90% uptime across the group, with some people a little lower and some higher) and you can have ventari fill in the alacrity gap, but revenant might just have to sacrifice too much to do it. I’ve messed around with dropping the herald line and running jalis/ventari with full DPS gear and it seems like it could be decent, my group will probably try it out tonight.

2x Druid is here to stay forever. Spotter and spirits are unique buffs that no other healing class can match.

Malediktus.3740:

I think the endboss of the underwater fractal needs to be revamped. It is a very boring and uninspired fight at the moment. The electricity fields get ignored by almost every group.

I would agree that the boss sucks, but given that support for underwater combat has pretty much vanished (not a complaint, just a fact) I would put this very low on the list of priorities for fractal updates. And to be fair, the rest of that fractal is actually decent, so I don’t mind that the boss is boring and easy…otherwise I might actually have to make underwater gear lol.

zealex.9410:

Lahmia.2193:

Warcry.1596:

Lahmia.2193:

Dredge isn’t so bad now, since dredge lost their blind immunity.

They did? I don’t remember being able to blind them last time I did it. Maybe I am mistaken but will check next time it is a daily.

Anyway: I dislike Uncat and Cliffside, but love Aquatic, Nightmare and new Swamp. The rest are great too.

Aye it was with the A crack in the ice patch.
-Underground Facility
The dredge in the Underground Facility have opened their eyes and can now be blinded.

it is sad tho that still under their hp bar it says “cannot be blinded”

I actually really liked that they couldn’t be blinded, I wish that would come back. So many times I came in on engineer and launched a mortar 4 or something and see “immune” and think “oh kitten they’re moles, I’m stupid”, and even though it was annoying I though it was good flavor.

The worst fractals by a huge margin are Solid Ocean and Molten Furnace.

The first section of Solid Ocean has you literally just walk past every enemy, the Jade Maw fight is ridiculously long and boring as you do the same thing repeatedly, the Jade Maw itself has only one attack that visually bugs about 25% of the time, and there is no element of teamwork at all besides the typically futile exercise of trying to get out of combat so your teammate that fell can respawn. It is truly sad that this is the only glimpse of Cantha we get in gw2.

Molten furnace is probably slightly better because fighting different enemies in the rooms is moderately not terrible. But spending the first half watching a drill move slowly is pretty stupid. However, the most offensive thing about this fractal is that after literal multiple years you can still stand in the corner of the boss room and ignore every mechanic. What’s even the point? They might as well just create an in-game reddit browser that pops up for 5 minutes and then you get the fractal rewards afterwards.

But hey on the plus side the two most recent fractals are both fantastic.

Jerus.4350:

skarpak.8594:

necro has higher surviveability then other classes.

That’s the thing, they don’t really. They have higher passive surviveability than other professions, but when you factor in active defenses necro doesn’t look all that good. Simply put look at old Lupi solos, it was easier to do with a Thief that died in one hit than with a necro because the thief could actually avoid every hit where the necro had to mitigate them with shrouds. I don’t think raids put that much pressure on active defenses in general but to say that necro has better surviveability than other professions just isn’t totally true. And, at the very least they don’t have an advantage worthy of the DPS disparity there is right now.

Yeah, necro is okay for surviving if you’re a newer player since the high hp pool lets you react slower to certain skills, but as you start to improve at raids necro has some of the worst survivability. No blocks, invulns, or evades, no extra endurance regeneration, no supplementary heal skills, and shroud is mediocre when you’re on low health because it stops you from being healed.

So sure you can stand in vg seekers or sloth flame breath an extra couple seconds like an idiot but those can be easily avoided anyway with a little practice. For the majority of players, even things like rev sword 4, engi bonus endurance regen, distortion, etc are way more useful defensively than the extra hp pool.

Rising Dusk.2408:

While I agree that things like “Gain X power based on Y% of <OTHER STAT>” are too passive, I think things like Empower Allies or Spotter are nice class-defining buffs that strongly discourage class-stacking and add specialization value without blatantly changing the way you have to play the class. If every class just does a ton of damage, then class-stacking becomes a real problem.

I understand the idea of the class defining buffs, There can be class-defining buffs that aren’t so good that the class becomes mandatory in raids. EA and Spotter wouldn’t be so stupid if the buffs they gave were actually in line with the power levels of other trait buffs. Warrior has a master major trait called Armored Attack that gives 10% of toughness as power – in practice this is usually 100 power. With a stupid build it could be let’s say 200 power. Warrior has another master major trait called Empower Allies, which gives 150 power baseline and has an duration 3x longer than its application interval so it can affect 6-7 players. That’s like 900 total stat points for a single master major trait. The power level of that and several other passives are total bullkitten, so they 100% must be taken for every raid fight. Oh and warrior has banners that give even larger bonuses as well, so you could have a warrior literally use no skills except banners and his group DPS will be about as good as most DPs classes. It’s completely absurd.

Also class stacking is already a huge problem, I don’t see how changing class specific support buffs could possibly make it any worse.

Rising Dusk.2408:

They could always keep these buffs and tie them to other actions, sure, but that may not be practical and can result in a lot of them being good on paper and useless in practice. I also think hooking all of these buffs to actions would either interrupt the flow of a class or happen so easily that they might as well have stayed passive.

For instance, consider this option:

Empower Allies: Every time you strike with a burst skill, you grant Empower Allies (+150 power) to up to 5 nearby allies for 10 seconds.

That might sound ‘active’, but it’s really no better design than the passive mode because now it’s a risk if you get blinded/disabled and during normal play you have it permanently anyway. Functionally you’ve added no depth to the class, you’ve just made the trait harder to understand and easy to counter for no good reason.

Just because you thought of an implementation and called it crappy doesn’t mean that a good implementation isn’t possible. There are only a small handful of such skills in the game, surely given enough time anet could come up with a decent way to implement them.

Or I would be totally fine with these kinds of traits and skills just being removed, changed, or severely nerfed in raids. Even besides how boring and powerful they are, they take the place of other potentially useful and more active skills. Warrior at this point might as well just have only one utility slot and the game just gives everyone the banner buffs.

There are other less considered stupidities as well, such as the abundance of free precision making power and precision into equivalent stats on most classes. Engineer has the odd misfortune of huge amount of free personal crit chance, meaning they become comparatively worse by not being able to make use of all the free stats.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Grace of the Land, however, is an example of it being implemented pretty well; the player is forced (even on DPS builds) to use a healing-based CA skillset to some extent as part of their rotation to achieve an even higher level of team support.

The problem is that if they took the GotL approach for core classes, they’d interrupt the flow of the class. What if suddenly, Elementalist gave damage bonuses to allies when they used water skills? Your DPS builds would end up feeling weird (and lots of people would complain) because they couldn’t just camp fire or alternate fire/air, and would have to balance some measure of water spam for team support. Elite specs, however, are a great place to do this because by definition they alter the playstyle of the class (and thus players are more receptive to the flow change).

I never said anything about giving more support buffs to other classes, and especially not to core classes. I think that’s a horrible idea. Support buffs on core classes is basically current warrior, which is going to be going PSEA with 2 banners in raids until the end of time unless the base class is changed.

Oh and remember when warrior was top tier DPS and meta comps were like 6+ warriors? Because that’s what we have to look forward to again if any of the current top tier support classes also get a good dps elite spec, or another good support spec, or – god forbid – both.

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

Dinosaurs.8674:

Not that I disagree with your point as a whole but again, saying necro brings nothing meaningful besides its DPS is completely wrong. Just Epidemic and Plague Signet is better utility than every non-support class, and necro has plenty more useful tricks. Necro’s problem is literally only the fact that its DPS is 50-70% that of other classes.

Other classes have much more complex problems but tbh necro is a fairly well designed class overall, it just has poor numbers atm.

The problem with this is, while cpc/epi/plague signet etc. can definitely be good utility skills, they’re heavily condi biased and make a power necro perform indirectly or even directly (cpc self weakness for example) worse. If we want to rephrase this then let me say that power necro needs meaningful support.
Plague signet is only worthwhile at Matt, on Xera you generally want to avoid bringing condis otherwise it wouldn’t be bad there either and like Sublimatio pointed out – Epidemic is great, but only as long as adds aren’t just pulled in and cleaved down, like every proper group would do. Leaves bouncing which is pretty good, but in the current state of necro not worth taking two for because you just lose so much more. CPC is good utility for condi necs, but absolutely horrendous for power like I already said.
Everything else is either highly gimmicky/not necessary/a (highly) kitten version of something another class can do.

I would agree that necro’s utility is much better on condi builds than power ones, but it isn’t like power has absolutely nothing. GS has a pull, and your wells contribute to group protection. You can also trait transfuse, and honestly epi bouncing is so good that in a multiple necro comp you would take it anyway. You also still have solid CC.

Regardless, power necro obviously doesn’t have good enough utility to make up for its awful damage. It really just needs better damage on power weapons. There is more than enough condi manipulation support on necro to make using CPC, epi, plague signet, etc worthwhile on power necro if it dealt enough damage. Weapon DPS is still the issue, because if you don’t need to use your utility slots just to eke out mediocre damage then you can bring meaningful utility. This is the same problem engineer builds have – its weapon damage is so horrible that it needs to use all of its utility slots just to meet damage that another class could do while also bringing utility.

Compare this to something like hammer guard that has utility that’s pretty good but not out-of-this-world-insane like warrior, druid, and chrono – aoe prot, a bit of fury and quickness, group stability, a pull, aegis. Necro has much better support than that, even if only situationally, and engineer has comparable support. The difference is that guardian deals its damage by pressing 1, and actually has the chance to use its utility.

So even on power necro the the support skills aren’t bad. The problem is that you can’t bring them without losing a ton of damage because power necro’s weapon skills are so bad.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Sublimatio.6981:

necro is terribly designed. if it was decently designed, the problems it faces now wouldn’t be that severe

I disagree with this point in particular. The necromancer’s design is fine, it just needs meaningful offensive support and meaningful personal damage.

I don’t mind offensive support in general but skills/traits like Vampiric Presence that give a benefit for doing nothing are really horrible design for raids. They force the class to be in a situation where their personal DPS has to be low since their group DPS is high, and since you get the boosts for free it doesn’t matter that much how well you play. Look at warrior – a great warrior player can probably push out 3-4k more DPS than a crappy one, but when the personal DPS is under 20k and the group DPS is over 50k who cares? Almost the entire benefit comes from just existing in the fight. Offensive support skills and traits should force you to actually do something to get them, like Grace of the Land requiring you to use astral skills or alacrity requiring use of wells or shield 4. Stuff like spotter, spirits, banners, EA, assassin’s presence, and vamp aura are stupid in raids, and I would rather Vamp Aura just remain crappy and give necro more personal DPS instead.

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

sophiewhite.3149:

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

sophiewhite.3149:

Sublimatio.6981:

sophiewhite.3149:

you are ridiculous, go actually play a necro. i dare you to solo lupicus without sacrificing anything to do so

i do play necro. daily. im done with you. youve proven you only want a OP class so you can faceroll raids solo. bye

LOL
nice joke

Subli is absolutely right. The fact that you react like this shows that you have no idea about necro.
And also, you say “necro has plenty of HP so they should be weaker” yet you have warriors which can bring more DPS (even if just slightly so), have the same base HP, heavy armor and plenty of defensive options, if they wish to bring them. On top of that, they are capable of increasing group DPS by ridiculous amounts through various means just by… well, doing their thing. How again is the spot necro is in justified?

my warrior has shroud? NO WAY!!!!! i guess youll just ignore me everytime i say necro deserves a buff huh? just goes right over your head. ive said it in every post so far. but it does not deserve damage on par with eles.

The point is that shroud is absolutely trash for defense and going into it is a dps loss on power necro.
I’m not saying it should be ele tier damage, not sure where you got that from, but it isn’t close to deserving being absolute garbage-tier dps while also bringing nothing else meaningful to the squad.

Not that I disagree with your point as a whole but again, saying necro brings nothing meaningful besides its DPS is completely wrong. Just Epidemic and Plague Signet is better utility than every non-support class, and necro has plenty more useful tricks. Necro’s problem is literally only the fact that its DPS is 50-70% that of other classes.

Other classes have much more complex problems but tbh necro is a fairly well designed class overall, it just has poor numbers atm.

Sublimatio.6981:

Hi devs. Power reaper is weak. It needs a buff to be in par with thief/ele in dps. Then I can enjoy the raid content and people wouldn’t exclude me from playing. Look at ele you got 3 viable builds. Thief is somewhat the same dps. Ele still brings more utility. Look at necro, no utility and disastrous dps, 1 build recently butchered and 1 build worse than PS warr dps.

Btw same can be said about other builds like power engi for example. We need to get more versatility.

Yeah power necro is bad in raids. But having entire facets of a class be bad in raids is the norm for every class honestly. Only ele and druid have substantial variation in their “meta” builds and even they have entire skill/trait/weapon lines that are just awful. Every other class has 1-2 builds that it can use, with only very minor variations possible. Necro unfortunately has zero which sucks but I wouldn’t expect it to last forever.

Sublimatio.6981:

Since you decided not to go with 10 man buffs and we have mirror comps, it opens 4 spots for dps class. Currently owned by ele or thief. I play power necro and I need this dps so i can be useful since I don’t bring ANY meaningful utility.

Sorry dude but necro utility is disgustingly good in raids. Epidemic is probably the single best non-support utility skill you could possibly bring to a raid, and Plague Signet is up there as well in several fights. CPC is also pretty good, necro gets a good amount of cc through warhorn, reaper’s shroud, and flesh golem, and you have better mobility than most classes with reaper’s shroud, which you take for free. Necro also can use most of its utility from range which is a huge advantage in many fights.

If necro DPS was as high as ele and thief if would be broken as hell. It deserves to be less than them given what it can do. The only reason necro doesn’t get used now is because its DPS is so unbelievably bad that its utility skills can’t make up for it.

It’s honestly a pretty simple situation. Necro just needs a numbers buff to some of its weapon skills. But there is no way in hell it should be dealing top tier personal DPS considering what it can do with condition manipulation.

Ohoni.6057:

Crystal said that they ship easy raids as well as hard ones to get newer players interested. Would you rather have escort and xera or two versions of xera? Because that is the choice you face.

Two versions of Xera, obviously. And of course there would be a third scenario, either a “hard mode” escort that most raiders would not consider “too easy,” or some other boss encounter entirely, which I think would satisfy both hardcore and easy mode players.

Even considering that escort is the worst raid encounter by a large margin I don’t think that many players would agree with your opinion. If you do consider it and change the question to “would you rather have VG and Gorseval or 2x VG” I think that virtually no one would take the latter option.

Ohoni.6057:

Looks like you have a guild. Why don’t they host training runs? Why don’t they allow off-meta builds? This seems to be a guild problem, not a raid problem.

Training runs and off-meta builds for less than expert teams are just “failure runs,” and most players want no part of “failure runs,” they do not want to waste their time on attempts that will not result in a victory. This is why easy mode has a role, it allows people to put together training runs where they will learn while succeeding at the task for that day. You build up your skills by repeatedly winning and doing so more efficiently each time, rather than by failing less spectacularly each attempt.

I have been leading training runs for months – since before wing 2 was even released – and in my experience the exact opposite of this is true. If players are able to play poorly and succeed then they will continue to play poorly because there is no incentive to improve.

Furthermore, getting a boss kill isn’t the only measure of success for a training run. I have had matthias training runs where we could barely make it to fire phase at first, and after 90 minutes were consistently making it to ~20% before wiping. That’s pretty good for a group with mostly new players. The point of a training run is to learn, practice, and get better. If someone doesn’t want to put in that kind of time already they aren’t going to suddenly feel up to it just because they are now able to kill the easy boss with easy mechanics that drops no rewards.

For that fight in general, if you are having trouble keeping everyone up don’t be afraid to bring a healer and slot in auto-res skills/traits like SnR, Spirit of Nature, Transfusion, and Function Gyro. Protection and other damage reduction skills are also useful. Keeping Vigor up is extremely helpful as well.

Blaeys.3102:

Harper.4173:

It IS a waste of dev time.
They have already given you plenty of options:

1. Cleared instance.
2. NPC that catches you up and explains what happened in the raid.

Neither of those options are interesting or fun in any way. Once again, it is about being able to experience the encounters, not have someone else explain it to you.

A story mode raid isn’t interesting or fun either after the first time. There is no way it is worth the development time to make an easier version of content that already exists just for the purpose of letting people “experience the story” as OP puts it. Despite the OP talking it up, the raid story is extremely minor and inconsequential compared to what is in LS3. In fact, until bloodstone fen was released the raid story made very little sense, and even then only if you read the journal entries.

Blaeys.3102:

I do believe there are ways (potentially like the one Mad talks about above) that seem to be fairly simple solutions that would address the issue.

And if it adds fun to the game for more players, it is most definitely not a waste of time.

If more fun could be added by doing something else then it is a waste of time.

I always find these “raid story mode request” threads funny because the current only raid mode is story mode. If you’re going to say “story mode” which of course references the only other content in the game which has a story mode – dungeons – then the logical request should be for a more difficult “explorable mode”.

Come on man, you can see like 90% of the raid lore in a cleared instance, and the rest can be easily found on the wiki (fight dialogue) and youtube (cutscenes). WP also has a couple vids which go over at least some of the raid lore in detail. Anyone who cares that much about the lore can easily do those things. I fail to see how the requested “story mode” is any different from a request for easy mode and/or tiered raiding.

I mean I understand that people want to do the fights, but take it from someone who has raiding a whole lot: easy mode/story mode/whatever raids is like 60-90 minutes of content – total, not weekly. If the rewards aren’t there and the fights aren’t challenging, why would anyone do the fights at all after the first time? You don’t see people repeating the difficult LS2 achievements do you? Or doing the HoT achievements at all besides getting the mordrem loop? Those are challenging content for a small number of players which contain lore elements but no one does them because they don’t care about the rewards.

I too miss hardcore world bosses. I really wish there were more events that required coordination of a large number of players, similar to triple trouble

• Event mechanics – not just hp – scale based on number of players. So for example, on TT you don’t need 20 harpoons if there aren’t 20 players. This would make these world bosses doable even with smaller numbers of players. Of course, this also means that bosses might simply be unable to be completed if a large number of players stand around and do nothing. I don’t think this is an issue though – you see people do that on karka and teq but not TT because there is no loot to be gained from doing it at TT.
• Guilds can spawn a “hard mode” of hardcore world bosses. I don’t think there is any need for these to be instanced.

I’m not under any illusion that any of these things will happen to existing world bosses, but I really hope that going forward anet will make more open world content that both requires a large number of players and has challenging mechanics and coordination requirements.

Ranael.6423:

It saddens me every time I do the champ Karka in Ember Bay that the encounter is a bit tougher and longer than the Karka Queen for which the real difficulty is to run fast enough so that she is still alive when I reach her…..

I too remember being horribly disappointed by the karka queen boss fight. “Hardcore” huh?

Goldfox.5729:

OnizukaBR.8537:

This topic again ? Let me show you how to use the search tool on the forum.
Here you can see this same topic already beat to death, and answered/locked by the Devs:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/An-issue-raids-and-their-accesibility/page/5#post6389189
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Raid-problem-solutions/first#post6389222
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Making-tiers-in-Raids-like-fractals/page/5#post6390112

So there is nothing more to discuss and this topic should be locked.

If there’s so much debate about it then maybe it should be considered instead of locked down.

Or maybe people could respond to existing threads instead of making new ones with identical OPs.

The dev responses at the end of the locked ones are pretty succinct as well. The suggestions have been received. Mission complete.

nagr.1593:

Dinosaurs.8674:

What he’s saying isn’t necessarily wrong. Suppose that there were one class that were so much better than all others, such that every slot went to that class. All other classes are equally good. Then suppose the superclass got nerfed into the ground. Suddenly eight classes are great instead of just one. This could also happen if the nerfed class filled multiple specific niches that are difficult to fill otherwise.

What your said makes sense. But in this case here, there’s little doubt abt what the supposed ‘superclass’ is now. This class obviously has 4 reserved slots in any group on most encounters, like double what every other class has. This part of reason why it’s sooo much easier to get a temp when u post for it than even a ps warrior, I mean c’mon.

Look I get it everyone’s hesitant to talk abt the elephant in the room so ill do that now. Ele dps is just ridiculous atm – it was alrdy always insanely op but now it’s gone too far. When u think abt a class that can reach close to 50k dps while almost all other class struggling to get half that, u know something wrong. Warrior meta dps was already pathetic to begin with, now it’s even more pathetic that it downright laughable when u put it in perspective. Warrior is what, mid 20ish dps.. compared to insane op damage that is made even more insanely op with alacrity and quickness? It’s like fighting swords with sticks.. no competition at all. /bows

So now that elephant has been saluted and recognised, I continue to speculate abt future patch. Ele being superclass atm will get nerfed to the ground, or other class be buffed. It’s simple rly.. and before anyone throw their hand up and say the end is nigh, I give one reason why this will be good thing:

- Pugs who struggle with eles, as they should

I rest my case. When u think abt amount of players who botch rotations on ele or are first to step up and sacrifice themselces without no preamble or purpose for grp, what u will realise is that their dps nerf has not been a complete nerf. It is a blessing in disguise that will actually stabilise diversity and dps overall

What the kitten? No, that’s not what I was saying at all. If you want to use the word “superclass” then it applies to mesmer, druid, and warrior. Those are the classes that are in every fight. Those are the classes that are hitting well over 50k group DPS.

Ele DPS is fine. Sure it can hit big numbers on large hitboxes, but that’s only in ideal scenarios. Personally I would like it if meteor shower was nerfed for large hitboxes, but I don’t think it’s anywhere near as important as addressing mesmer, druid, and warrior, all of which bring disgusting support buffs which make them mandatory in every fight.

Honestly almost every time I see groups try to use 4 eles it goes horribly. It does not have 4 reserved slots. People discount guardian because they are stupid but guardian is also extremely good. Thief still deals the most damage in a lot of fights. Rev is useful in a couple situations but it’s rarely used because of its similarity to guardian more than its lack of dps compared to ele. The only class that doesn’t get used because of low DPS is necromancer. In general, we have a situation with the DPS classes where which one you choose is dependent on the utility you need for that fight, which is the ideal scenario. By contrast, chrono/warrior/druid are just in literally every fight and they still would be if their non-dps utility was garbage.

Sure if you look at speed kills they’re using 3-4 eles but that does not mean that’s the best strat for every group. In fact it almost certainly means it’s not because it’s a comp that goes for all out offense and ignores utility that makes the fights easier.

Astralporing.1957:

Obtena.7952:

Frankly, if the class changes make those classes less desirable to play, that alone increases the diversity that people will have for raid comps.

Suuure. Making less classes desirable for raids will increase the diversity somehow. Because reasons.
Really, you might want to check what diversity actually means, because it seems to me you are using some really nonstandard definition here.

What he’s saying isn’t necessarily wrong. Suppose that there were one class that were so much better than all others, such that every slot went to that class. All other classes are equally good. Then suppose the superclass got nerfed into the ground. Suddenly eight classes are great instead of just one. This could also happen if the nerfed class filled multiple specific niches that are difficult to fill otherwise.

Of course, just because it is theoretically possible doesn’t mean it is true in this particular case. And in this case it is pretty obvious that the nerfs to chrono, rev, and necro did in fact reduce class diversity. Necro dps is so far behind the other classes that bringing one will add substantial time to a boss kill. Revenant is strictly worse than guardian in most cases. Chrono is worse but still OP as hell so two is optimal and the number of “free” slots in a comp is down to four. Increased alacrity makes ele generally preferable to the utility-dry thief.

Honestly the current patch is far superior to the previous one in terms of gameplay, since it turns out that necro and rev were somewhat of a crutch in a few fights, but claiming that diversity was not reduced is absurd.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Bleh, alright. So with some more practice I hit 31.7k while missing 2% from infusions (according to [qT]) and 2% from using a cheaper food. Altogether that would put me at a pretty clean 33k, which is a far cry better than the 28k I had before, but still pretty far off from a 38k average. I noticed in the [qT] video that Flame Burst is being used basically off cooldown. Is that being used to interrupt the aftercast on Fireball? I also think that some part of what I’m messing up is that I’m casting Ice Bow 4 while Meteor Shower is still going on, which removes the Seaweed Salad modifier from Meteor Shower. I think based on the video that [qT] is autoing in air until MS finishes and then uses Frost Bow.

I guess I’ll just keep grinding the numbers, but after about 2 hours it isn’t improving any and it’s surprising that I’m as much as 15-20% off from the target still.

I’m not aware of any aftercast cancelling interaction with Flame Burst.

Flame Burst is a little bit less damage / cast time than an autoattack. The reason you use it is 1.) it fills gaps smaller than 1s since it is faster than the auto, and 2.) it’s a easy filler that gives you a split second to think about what you’re going to press next without wasting much time. If you look at the rotation you linked there were at least a couple times where he definitely should not have used flame burst, but ultimately it’s not really that big of a deal since the skill casts so fast with quickness and the damage isn’t that bad.

The one thing to watch out for is that using flame burst when you have an autoattack casting will cancel it. This is a large damage loss.

Jahroots.6791:

I’m happy to have another fractal added but 4 months between islands is just too much, man.

4 months between fractal island releases doesn’t seem too bad to me considering there is also work being done updating other fractals. I think it only seems slow because the insanely long stretch of no content makes it feel like we are “owed” a lot now. But if we can consistently get 3 islands a year + updates to existing fractals, along with other pve releases like LS, raids, and current events, all while building towards the next expansion, I would say that is a pretty solid content output.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Sheesh. I spent a few hours the other night really trying to hone my rotation on staff Ele, and I still can only realistically hit about 28k on a large hitbox. I don’t have power infusions, sure, but there’s no way it contributes that much damage. When comparing with the [qT] rotation builds, for some reason staff Ele is the only class where I can’t make within 5% of the expected value on average. Is there some trick that I’m missing here?

P.S. I realize you’re using FGS for damage in this rotation, whereas I didn’t because I was comparing with [qT]‘s rotation. This is what I’m comparing against: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpYbtb5mSFg&feature=youtu.be&t=108

This is my setup: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQFAWn0XCNNgVPAmNAcYiFBALIAUAOACXySQKwN1ObztA-ThBBAB5pDoS1fC4BAAwFA4MlgYt/o8jUADMGA-e

EDIT: Now that I’m thinking about it more, I actually think I only put Vulnerability on the golem and didn’t give it burning. That would account for a 10% multiplier I’m missing.

28k is way too low to the point that you have to be making a mistake with the settings. Double check that you have all the relevant buffs on, including things like 5 stacks of gotl (not just 1) and make sure you actually apply 25 vuln instead of just 1 stack.

Other than that the best advice I can give on staff ele rotations is to make sure you aren’t cancelling autoattacks. When the golem first came out I discovered I had been losing a lot of DPS by doing this. Another consideration is that the start of the DPS test is a huge deal since you get to use overload air for “free” with full might etc. If you really need to see those big numbers to feel validated you may want to practice just the beginning on a 1m HP golem.

I wouldn’t worry about doing the rotation the way the OP of this thread did. Don’t get me wrong the DPS he achieved is extremely impressive but ultimately it’s unrealistic for a raid scenario. Moving around the way he did would likely result in lost buffs from the mesmer and druid, plus the chance of running into obstacles and losing scholar buff is higher. And of course that’s assuming you will actually be able to pick up your conjures again. Maybe you could pull it off against gorseval with a DH to aegis slams if you didn’t have to clear orbs, but that’s about the only scenario I can think of where this rotation would be better than staff rotation you linked.

Good luck dude.

Absurdo.8309:

Dinosaurs.8674:

Absurdo.8309:

There seems to be 2 low-hanging fruit already: necro and engie.

Necro dps is low compared to other dps classes. I would recommend reverting the lich form nerf.

Engie dps is complicated. That said, groups brought them before the slick shoes nerf because of its excellent cc. I would recommend reverting the slick shoes nerf, at least for pve.

There’s other problems with balance, but I believe these are easy fixes that would make these classes more desirable, even if they’re not optimal.

Having an entire class’ worth dependent on a single skill is a horrible idea. It puts that class in a position where it’s either amazing or total crap depending on the usefulness of the skill, it ruins the class’ flexibility, and it creates a situation where if that skill gets nerfed the class suddenly becomes terrible (i.e. what happened to necro and kindof rev).

Necromancer just needs more damage on its skills in general. Substantial damage buffs to 5-10 skills is probably the way to go.

Engineer has better DPS than other classes that actually get used. It’s is total crap because it needs all its utility slots to deal that damage and – despite being a “jack of all trades” class – is completely inflexible and unable to change skills or traits without losing a substantial amount of damage. I’ve written this elsewhere but I think best way to address these problems in pve is:

1.) In the explosives line, Glass Cannon (and maybe Shaped Charge) removed and replaced with something more specific to explosives
2.) Pistol autoattack bleed damage increased, rifle auto damage increased, hammer damage substantially increased.
3.) Alchemy line gains a trait which increases damage on allies affected by elixers.

These are fair points, but I don’t think the developers have the desire or the means for complete structural changes.

I view these as quick fixes that immediately give these classes more of a spot on the team.

I agree that more expansive changes are ideal. The resources for them seem lacking though.

For necromancer I don’t see why it’s an issue. In the last patch something like 6 skills received damage buffs. If they had just made the numbers bigger for pve necro would be in a fine spot (albeit with power builds). Besides the existence of epidemic necro is actually a well designed class in pve, it just needs a numbers buff on scepter 1 2 3 dagger 5 and some power skills (I’m fairly ignorant about those so I can’t comment on which ones).

For engineer though you are right, I doubt even a minor rework is anywhere on anet’s radar. As an engi main it’s sad but that’s probably the way it is. Still, a very easy quick fix for engineer would be to buff weapon autoattack damage. If weapon damage were comparable to at least one kit’s damage for any build it would open up at least one utility slot. If the hammer auto was good enough then the scrapper line could be taken as well.

These kinds of numbers buffs happen every single patch so I don’t see why it would be difficult.

Absurdo.8309:

There seems to be 2 low-hanging fruit already: necro and engie.

Necro dps is low compared to other dps classes. I would recommend reverting the lich form nerf.

Engie dps is complicated. That said, groups brought them before the slick shoes nerf because of its excellent cc. I would recommend reverting the slick shoes nerf, at least for pve.

There’s other problems with balance, but I believe these are easy fixes that would make these classes more desirable, even if they’re not optimal.

Having an entire class’ worth dependent on a single skill is a horrible idea. It puts that class in a position where it’s either amazing or total crap depending on the usefulness of the skill, it ruins the class’ flexibility, and it creates a situation where if that skill gets nerfed the class suddenly becomes terrible (i.e. what happened to necro and kindof rev).

Necromancer just needs more damage on its skills in general. Substantial damage buffs to 5-10 skills is probably the way to go.

Engineer has better DPS than other classes that actually get used. It’s is total crap because it needs all its utility slots to deal that damage and – despite being a “jack of all trades” class – is completely inflexible and unable to change skills or traits without losing a substantial amount of damage. I’ve written this elsewhere but I think best way to address these problems in pve is:

1.) In the explosives line, Glass Cannon (and maybe Shaped Charge) removed and replaced with something more specific to explosives
2.) Pistol autoattack bleed damage increased, rifle auto damage increased, hammer damage substantially increased.
3.) Alchemy line gains a trait which increases damage on allies affected by elixers.

NikeEU.7690:

The gap in performance between professions – ESPECIALLY in terms of pure dps output and boon sharing – is far too wide to be healthy for the game.

I don’t think the data supports your position. The gaps between dps classws are relatively small and the differences largely situational. The only issue is that the pug community always seeks a one size fits all solution so they just “learn” ele is best and don’t bother understanding when it isnt.

“If you ignore chrono warrior druid necro all the classes have similar DPS”. Come on man, you know it isn’t fair to just look at the DPS classes. Chrono contributes likely well over 50k group DPS. You probably have a better idea of warrior than me but I’m sure it is something similarly absurd, as is druid if you consider the ability to maintain damage boosts due to healing.

Necro damage is like 2/3 of the other DPS classes unless you are running a comp built around stacking epi bounces, in which case your other classes’ DPS will suffer anyway.

Even besides that, staff ele on large hitboxes is 30-40% better than the other DPS classes (depending on which class and boss), which would be fine except “large hitboxes” is 3/7 fights. That’s beyond “largely situational” to me, especially considering the magnitude of the DPS discrepancy.

I definitely agree with the idea that newer players get it in their head way too often that bringing an ele will always increase DPS and ignore the particulars of their situation. I’ve seen plenty of hilarious 3-4 ele comps on matthias and VG that are constantly rezzing. But there are large gaps in class DPS in raids, and there, are definitely even larger gaps in terms of overall performance based on available utility skills and traits, and these gaps are wide enough to make certain classes essentially mandatory and others essentially unusable (at least to the extent that anything can be mandatory / unusable given how little DPS is actually required).

Obtena.7952:

I won’t speculate with you on why you think the changes were made. If Anet wants an inclusive, challenging raid experience, the changes make sense. If those changes are good for WvW as well, so be it. It’s really not relevant what the primary reason was; you don’t need to be a genius to see it works for both.

Dude my post was responding to you speculating about it. So I guess you will only speculate alone?

Obtena.7952:

AndyS.5630:

And once again any player-imposed restrictions are controlled by Anet-made balance. There is correlation. They are supposed to understand that.

No, that’s false because there is absolutely NO Anet-made balance effect that makes a group of players decide to impose upon themselves, by choice, specific raid comps; the number of combinations of comps to ‘solve’ raids is sufficiently sized to ensure that. I know this because EVERY time a group deviates from the meta and wins, it makes that true.

I think you need to check what “correlation” is because what he’s saying isn’t an opinion, it is a fact. It is factually correct to state that player imposed restrictions are influenced by the relative abilities of the classes. When anet nerfed the crap out of necromancer in the last patch, it went from being a desirable class to an undesirable one. This has nothing to do with necromancer being able to “solve” raids or not – it is a simple fact that anet made necromancer deal less damage and now players are less inclined to use it.

Obtena.7952:

Anet does understand how their changes affect how players ‘solve’ raids … that’s why they make those changes.

You may be surprised how untrue this is. Remember the wing 3 bug thread on reddit a while back was a bit of an eye opener.

Obtena.7952:

CptAurellian.9537:

Obtena.7952:

Anet does understand how their changes affect how players ‘solve’ raids … that’s why they make those changes.

Now that’s something I seriously doubt when I think of the consequences the last round of balancing had.

Really? Do you care to explain why? Let me start: Here is why I think it’s true:

Primarily, because raids were too easy with excessive boon durations and sharing.
Secondly, because the compositions were biased too much against unfavoured classes

So basically, if Anet is advertising an inclusive and challenging raiding environment, everything that got nerfed moves them in that direction.

The boon sharing was nerfed more for wvw than raids. I won’t claim that they were unaware of the impact it would have on raids, but there are a huge number of issues with certain skills that affects raids but not other game modes that went completely ignored.

Then there was the fact that the necro changes were billed as a “minor bug fix” – which is true in every game mode besides raids, where it completely devastated the entire class.

So yeah I’d say it’s fair to say they don’t always think about the impact of changes for raids.

Rising Dusk.2408:

cranos.5913:

I see a lot of people ask for a nerf to PS. While I’m all for creating options and I don’t think there should be just one master class at stacking might I sincerely doubt it’s going to solve anything.

“A single class should not be able to stack 25 might.”

To be fair, the true strength of a Warrior isn’t PS, it’s EA and Banners. The fact that the Warrior also generates all might for the team is just icing, really. If we didn’t have that, it’d revert a lot of stuff to the old dungeon style where all fields but fire are banished and Eles are generating might via blast finishers. Either way, Warrior won’t stop being mandatory.

If they want to make other classes relevant, they need strong DPS boosting utility traits like Spotter/EA/GotL on other classes that compete in efficacy with a Warrior and a Druid and a Mesmer. Only then will you see some interchangeability.

Alternatively you could just remove the BS no-effort support skills and traits from raids or from the game as a whole. You could also make it more difficult to max crit chance and / or change crit multi so that precision isn’t just an equivalent stat to power in raids.

As far as the OP goes, some people like raids and some don’t. That’s no different from any other content. People can say raids divided the community or whatever crap they want but the reality is that HoT pve was in general a huge letdown and did not meet the anticipation built around it in any game mode. Promised content was cancelled or substantially delayed, and was lackluster and buggy otherwise. It’s ridiculous that people would blame gw2’s financial disappointments on raids in that context – it’s pretty obviously a result of players’ general disappointment with HoT as a whole and the lack of playable content since its release. It’s equally ridiculous to suggest that the 6 or 7 or whatever person raid team pushing out content is related in any way to the lack of production from a company with 100+ people working on the game.

As an avid raider I can tell you there are plenty of problems with raids, but blaming raids for the problems in the rest of the game is beyond stupid. Blaming raids for players being kittens to each other is even more stupid. I’ve known plenty of kittens in gw2 but I’ve yet to find someone that magically became an kitten because raids were released rather than just already being a crappy person.

In raids at least, the lack of a good autoattack is the largest factor in engineer being undesirable. Typically DPS classes in raids are brought for their utility, not strictly for their damage. This is why thief is fairly uncommon despite having the highest DPS in several fights – it brings no utility and its DPS isn’t so much higher than ele and guardian that it makes a large difference.

Engineer has a bit less DPS but it is within 5-10% of the top DPS classes in some fights. The problem is that engineer cannot bring utility. It is locked into 4 kits on the condi build, and it is locked into rifle turret / bomb kit / grenade kit on the power build. These kits provide some utility with knockbacks and blinds but ultimately those are just not that useful compared to things like free protection, group condi cleanse, group stability, reflects, etc.

Funnily enough engineer actually has all of those things besides permanent group protection, plus some unique things like bulwark gyro (which is also a reflect!) and function gyro, but can’t bring any of them because it loses too much DPS by dropping a kit, and it can’t being support traits or gyros because those are locked behind alchemy, inventions, and scrapper.

Engineer needs a good autoattack. It won’t fix everything but it will at least give us one or more utility slots. It would also be nice if Glass Cannon and Shaped Charge were made baseline and replaced with actual explosives themed skills so that you don’t have to take Explosives to hit someone with your non-exploding weapons. Then we might have one free traitline as well!

DUNSTAN.8529:

What’s wrong with it:
1. It allows very little time to react
2. Spirits are clunky
3. It is often difficult to see if you are targeted (during green circles and when stacked)
4. It is difficult for teams to make calls since you cannot easily differentiate between targeted players

1. Little time to react to what? You know approximately where the next phantasm is going to spawn since they alternate sides, so it’s very easy to keep them apart even if your timings are off.
2. Their AI is super basic, they walk up to their fixate and then stop and do their ground slam attack, then do random crap that doesn’t matter for positioning. It’s not difficult to stand a little behind where you want to pull them to.
3. Yeah it can be a bit hard, but it also plays a sound when you become fixated, and if you move your character around randomly its pretty easy to tell if it’s on you or not.
4. What is hard to call? We just refer to the fixated player as “fixate” and trust that that player can figure it out themselves. So for example “fixate and tank stay on boss”, or “fixate get to close green circle”. It sounds like you are relying on your caller to figure out who is fixated rather than your individual squad members, which is making the fight way harder than it should be.

DUNSTAN.8529:

Simple solution:
1. Have different colours for spirits from each side
2. Announce the name of the player that is targeted to the entire squad(including by which colour spirit) in a similar way to Slothasor fixation

1. What QoL issue does this solve? It seems to me that all it does is make the fight slightly easier by reminding you where that phantasm spawned from 10 seconds ago.
2. Those announcements can be annoying to see on your screen when there’s already a lot of visual clutter, as you already point out. Since it doesn’t give your squad any additional information I don’t see what this accomplishes other than further removing personal responsibility from an already easy fight.

“Ideal” depends on your goal. For consistency and ease of use we typically do something like Druid/Condi war or rev/Necro/Necro/other condi class (engi is decent for blinds) and just destroy everything with epidemic. If you want clearspeed you probably take something like Druid/PS War/Ele/Ele/Chrono or other DPS like hammer guard or thief for fast cc.

sophiewhite.3149:

maxwelgm.4315:

No balance to any class will change the game breaking mechanic of quickness and might. You can do whatever you want, but unless you simply take away everyone’s ability to maintain 25 stacks of might (all alone, 1 person in 10 can do this by him or herself!) and 100% quickness uptime (2 person in 8 is all it takes, I mean yeah what?!) then some classes will always be absolutely necessary and others will always be absolutely unnecessary. Because you now have a situation where that swinging hammer guardian actually doesn’t have to give up on speed, while that super fast hitting Shiro Rev is just as normal paced as everyone else with 100% quickness uptime. And let us not even dwell on the topic of classes that have no ways at all of competitively being either power or condi if they chose so, like necro.

honestly id like to know 1 thing a warrior can do without might generation. you want to kick us out of the meta too?

If warrior brought literally 0 boons it would still be in every raid group because of Banners and Empower allies. The might is a nice bonus, but might is fairly easy to come by.

And yes I would want to kick the current warrior out of the meta and raids as a whole if I could. Its current class design is awful for raids and it needs badly to be reworked. It has mediocre personal damage but insane passive group buffs which makes it relatively unimportant whether you play well or not and forces it to be included in every fight. Furthermore two of those passive buffs are utility skills so you only have one actual utility slot, which is stupid as a general idea but also reduces the flexibility of the class.

zealex.9410:

m8 :/ alacrity is an elite spec exlusive mechanic/ buff like facets on revs, like got(kittening)l that druids bring the fact that alacrity doesnt benefit thieves should not mean that mesmers should not have alacrity or alacraty should change in any way. It means thief needs a rework something that would make this an actuall class that requires some skill rather than standing close to boss and semi afking while just dodging and aaing.Alacrity is fine the way it works your best bet atm is to w8 and hope that the next theif elite spec will do something else other than aaing

The problem is that yeah maybe the next thief elite spec is awesome, doesn’t change the fact that group alacrity and quickness is OP as hell in raids. Classes like thief that don’t get full benefit are going to be starting at a large disadvantage when a new raid comes out simply because it’s almost impossible to make a fight where chrono isn’t optimal.

Honestly I would be thrilled if chrono were just not allowed in raids but that seems unrealistic.

I’m pretty sure if box of raider supplies dropped reliably every 3 boss kills it would crash the market for ascended mats. I could see maybe getting one every week for re-completing all the boss kill achievements or something. But even that might be too much.

Ayrilana.1396:

Dinosaurs.8674:

Ayrilana.1396:

Dinosaurs.8674:

Ayrilana.1396:

Like I’ve stated several times already, necro was brought because of an unintended mechanic that allowed them to create tons on jagged horrors to tank while stacking bleeds. I’d hardly consider fixing something like that as a nerf otherwise why not just call fixing the glyph of elemental power as a nerf too. Or fixing scoring earth many months ago as a nerf. Or that fall damage thing that could kill other players as a nerf. This is the point that you’re missing which I have mentioned several times.

There will always be a meta which involves the most optimal builds and group composition. Those that are not the best are excluded no matter how close they may be. Let’s assume that Ele can now stack might up to 8 times without losing DPS and that sroppibg the warrior allows them to maintain full might stacks on everyone and group DPS is increased by 2K. Those that favor the meta would go with the 3 Ele per team comp and then consider the previous comp unviable. That’s pretty much sums them up.

You can buff other classes but they’ll still go with what team comp is the strongest no matter how close. Why not just nerf Ele’s damage down so that other classes are more equal. No reason to add even more power creep so they can be equitable to Ele. Not to mention the balancing implications that there would be in other game modes.

And as I had said, I was showing sympathy towards those that felt necro was undesirable and saying that Anet could always buff them. I was trying to come off as less harsh but my mistake. Next time I won’t make that mistake again. It was in no way part of my argument.

Of course players will always tend towards the strongest classes in a particular fight. The issue is that “the strongest classes” are the same for every fight in the only raid. I don’t think anyone would argue that the previous patch had a balanced and diverse raid meta, but it’s certainly true that the recent patch was a step backwards in that regard.

Unfortunately just nerfing ele would do little, because despite being the best personal DPS in most fights, its group DPS is still substantially worse than warrior, mesmer, and druid.

The recent patch only changed the optimal team composition. It had minimal impact on the viability of any of the classes including team compositions.

That is only true for experienced groups, where the lost DPS could be made up in 10-15 seconds resulting in only a slightly longer boss fight. If you are in a group that was less experienced and was maybe getting close to the enrage timer, you may not be able to make up for the lost DPS fast enough and necromancer may in fact not be viable. At the very least, 40-60 seconds of extra fight time could easily result in a substantial reduction of success rate for less experienced groups, which is about as close to non-viability as you can get considering the low difficulty level of this game’s raids.

Read the post before this one which I made as you were writing this. You can’t use player skill to determine viability otherwise a new group of players doing raids could call the mirror comp unviable if they keep failing at it. As they get more skilled, they’ll succeed at that comp. as they get more skilled, other comps can result in a success. Player skill is unreliable when determining whether a build/comp is actually viable.

This whole discussion is way too caught up in what “viable” means. Of course everything is viable. It is possible to kill the boss with anything, even for a new group. But ignoring player skill when discussing any quality of a class is ridiculous. Snow Crows did a 3 man vale guardian, so by that logic 7 empty slots is a viable strategy in that fight. Objectively that is not wrong, but what is the point in arguing that other than being semantically correct?

Whether necromancer is “viable” to the best raiders or median-level raiders or whatever is a discussion that misses the point. The fact is that in virtually every situation, in almost every fight there is now no reason to actually want a necromancer in a group. That’s the real problem on the level of the individual class – what people want for a class isn’t mere viability, it is a compelling reason to bring this class to a fight. And necromancer is now in the same boat as engineer and revenant to some extent, where sure they could be used, and often will be used, but that doesn’t mean those classes are in an even remotely healthy place. I and most of the other experienced raiders I know would argue that the current class designs in general function extremely poorly in raids, and it shows in the relative usefulness of the classes, among other things.

Ayrilana.1396:

Dinosaurs.8674:

Ayrilana.1396:

Like I’ve stated several times already, necro was brought because of an unintended mechanic that allowed them to create tons on jagged horrors to tank while stacking bleeds. I’d hardly consider fixing something like that as a nerf otherwise why not just call fixing the glyph of elemental power as a nerf too. Or fixing scoring earth many months ago as a nerf. Or that fall damage thing that could kill other players as a nerf. This is the point that you’re missing which I have mentioned several times.

There will always be a meta which involves the most optimal builds and group composition. Those that are not the best are excluded no matter how close they may be. Let’s assume that Ele can now stack might up to 8 times without losing DPS and that sroppibg the warrior allows them to maintain full might stacks on everyone and group DPS is increased by 2K. Those that favor the meta would go with the 3 Ele per team comp and then consider the previous comp unviable. That’s pretty much sums them up.

You can buff other classes but they’ll still go with what team comp is the strongest no matter how close. Why not just nerf Ele’s damage down so that other classes are more equal. No reason to add even more power creep so they can be equitable to Ele. Not to mention the balancing implications that there would be in other game modes.

And as I had said, I was showing sympathy towards those that felt necro was undesirable and saying that Anet could always buff them. I was trying to come off as less harsh but my mistake. Next time I won’t make that mistake again. It was in no way part of my argument.

Of course players will always tend towards the strongest classes in a particular fight. The issue is that “the strongest classes” are the same for every fight in the only raid. I don’t think anyone would argue that the previous patch had a balanced and diverse raid meta, but it’s certainly true that the recent patch was a step backwards in that regard.

Unfortunately just nerfing ele would do little, because despite being the best personal DPS in most fights, its group DPS is still substantially worse than warrior, mesmer, and druid.

The recent patch only changed the optimal team composition. It had minimal impact on the viability of any of the classes including team compositions.

That is only true for experienced groups, where the lost DPS could be made up in 10-15 seconds resulting in only a slightly longer boss fight. If you are in a group that was less experienced and was maybe getting close to the enrage timer, you may not be able to make up for the lost DPS fast enough and necromancer may in fact not be viable. At the very least, 40-60 seconds of extra fight time could easily result in a substantial reduction of success rate for less experienced groups, which is about as close to non-viability as you can get considering the low difficulty level of this game’s raids.

Sublimatio.6981:

Dinosaurs.8674:

Well the damage for all of them is bad, you bring flesh wurm for matthias because it lets you teleport back to the stack quickly after dropping off poison, allowing you to get in more DPS as well as avoid unintentionally pulling him out of the middle. It also gets you out of a tornado and you can use it while stunned to avoid killing your teammates with the timed bomb. Teleports in general are really good against matthias and there isn’t a great 3rd slot DPS skill unless you’re willing to risk cpc, so most everyone I know takes flesh wurm for that fight.

every issue you wrote doesn’t concern me so i’m better off using bone fiend. it’s just optimal if you play perfectly

Flesh wurm a more reliable option and is only an extremely minor difference in dps, so I think is more applicable to the raiding community as a whole.

If you’re playing for speed kills assuming you play perfectly you would bring cpc anyway, since in a group that plays perfectly the boss will rarely move out of the aoe and you can time it to not block the pea shooter. Or you just wouldn’t bother to bring necromancer at all lol.

Most of the gyros are actually pretty decent and really only need minor changes, if any at all. Bulwark gyro is fine as is. Purge gyro isn’t amazing but it does what it’s supposed to do so I think it’s fine as well. Blast gyro should probably apply daze when it explodes even if it is blocked, considering how rarely it actually hits the intended target anyway. It could probably use a small damage increase as well. Shredder gyro just need to whirl way way faster, as the whole point is that you combo it with fields but it’s garbage even if it lands in a field.

Gadgets are definitely in a much worse position. I like the OP’s general idea of giving them passive effects after they complete. I think the ones OP suggested are good besides slick shoes, since the toolbelt skill gives superspeed which is nearly the same as immunity to soft cc anyway. I would make it something like 25% chance to dodge attacks for a duration after slick shoes ends. As for battering ram, I would do something like “after being hit by battering ram, enemies have 25% chance to be dazed on hit for X seconds” which might be a bit too strong but the numbers could be adjusted and it seems to fit the theme.

Thief may have higher DPS on the golem, but that isn’t the only consideration in an actual raid. Ele has range, deals its damage in a large area, has gale song, has useful fields, gives might to teammates, applies burns for epidemic, can reflect, and generally just has a lot of extra utility. Thief situationally has higher DPS, but with permanent alacrity thief’s edge over ele is extremely small even on small hitboxes. The moving boss would be an issue except that none of the raid bosses actually move very much besides VG, and even VG can be kept stationary until the final phase.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with thief but there’s no denying the fact that ele is pretty bonkers right now. It’s also no surprise that pug groups are using meta comps for raids – at this point most players just want to get their kills done as efficiently as possible.

Ayrilana.1396:

Like I’ve stated several times already, necro was brought because of an unintended mechanic that allowed them to create tons on jagged horrors to tank while stacking bleeds. I’d hardly consider fixing something like that as a nerf otherwise why not just call fixing the glyph of elemental power as a nerf too. Or fixing scoring earth many months ago as a nerf. Or that fall damage thing that could kill other players as a nerf. This is the point that you’re missing which I have mentioned several times.

There will always be a meta which involves the most optimal builds and group composition. Those that are not the best are excluded no matter how close they may be. Let’s assume that Ele can now stack might up to 8 times without losing DPS and that sroppibg the warrior allows them to maintain full might stacks on everyone and group DPS is increased by 2K. Those that favor the meta would go with the 3 Ele per team comp and then consider the previous comp unviable. That’s pretty much sums them up.

You can buff other classes but they’ll still go with what team comp is the strongest no matter how close. Why not just nerf Ele’s damage down so that other classes are more equal. No reason to add even more power creep so they can be equitable to Ele. Not to mention the balancing implications that there would be in other game modes.

And as I had said, I was showing sympathy towards those that felt necro was undesirable and saying that Anet could always buff them. I was trying to come off as less harsh but my mistake. Next time I won’t make that mistake again. It was in no way part of my argument.

Of course players will always tend towards the strongest classes in a particular fight. The issue is that “the strongest classes” are the same for every fight in the only raid. I don’t think anyone would argue that the previous patch had a balanced and diverse raid meta, but it’s certainly true that the recent patch was a step backwards in that regard.

Unfortunately just nerfing ele would do little, because despite being the best personal DPS in most fights, its group DPS is still substantially worse than warrior, mesmer, and druid.

Sublimatio.6981:

Dinosaurs.8674:

necromancer also lost the ability to consistently transfer conditions back onto matthias. If jagged horrors aren’t up, you can only transfer one condition every 5 seconds on average, assuming you have a blood fiend and a flesh wurm.

flesh wurm, wtf? best dps minion for viper necro is bone fiend, the devourer one. shoots 2 100% combo projectiles with each attack.

Well the damage for all of them is bad, you bring flesh wurm for matthias because it lets you teleport back to the stack quickly after dropping off poison, allowing you to get in more DPS as well as avoid unintentionally pulling him out of the middle. It also gets you out of a tornado and you can use it while stunned to avoid killing your teammates with the timed bomb. Teleports in general are really good against matthias and there isn’t a great 3rd slot DPS skill unless you’re willing to risk cpc, so most everyone I know takes flesh wurm for that fight.

As far as rev goes it’s not that bad. It’s just that everything useful it does guardian can also do, and guardian has a little bit better DPS and a few other goodies. Rev is still totally usable it’s just not optimal for speed clears.

I would even say you should bring a revenant if your group sucks at stacking up against matthias, because the might ramp up is pretty decent and allows for players that are further apart.

Rising Dusk.2408:

LinseyMurdock.4165:

It would be extremely hard, if not impossible to make those things stack.

Unrelated to the primary thrust of this topic, but couldn’t you add a Mystic Forge recipe to combine 4 25-use BL kits into 1 100-use BL kit, and then 2 100-use BL kits with 2 25-use BL kits to get a 250-use BL kit? That would be pretty legendary if so, because I currently have ~30 BL kits and they’re way too valuable to just waste.

yeah if i could replace my 25-use kits with 10x less 250-use kits that would be pretty swell

this is what i found looking through my inventories and bank on gw2efficiency, plus a couple that i typically just delete

• amalgamated gemstones
• doubloons
• legendary insights
• bloodstone rubies, petrified wood, similar future currency-material hybrids
• tome of knowledge
• blade shard
• reclaimed metal plate
• chak eggs
• boosters
• agony infusions (definitely +1s at least)
• philosopher’s stones
• mystic crystals
• mystic forge stones
• (lesser) vision crystals
• charged quartz crystal
• black lion tickets
• black lion scraps

Dahkeus.8243:

Ging.6485:

Dahkeus.8243:

Jerus.4350:

Kinda funny when Rev and it’s buffs is still very viable and the profession hardest hit is actually Necro. But, groups of pugs are called grumbles for a reason

Necro is still desired because they still fit so well on certain fights, even if they took a big hit overall.

Rev doesn’t really have any fight that requires or highlights its strengths.

The thing about Rev is, it can provide to the group (on small hit boxes) pretty much exactly what a DH can. Comparable utility and comparable DPS. Add to this, it also has the Boon Duration.

The thing about Boon Duration though is that, with 50% Boon Duration, Chronos could run full zerkers, 1 piece of boon duration food, and the sigil of concentration and everything was fine. With only 33% though and the nerfs to SoI, Chronos now have to run some boon duration gear, and with the crappy DPS Chronos do anyway, you might as well just go 100% self sustain boon duration and replace the Rev with a Thief or Ele for the extra damage.

Rev doesn’t suck, it’s in a difficult place since it’s place in raids was completely reliant on Chronos. The nerf to Chrono however forced an adjustment that doesn’t require Rev, so Rev has to be on the sidelines.

As far as Necro goes, I don’t understand why they nerfed it the way they did. It changes nothing. They lowered a Necro’s personal DPS a little, but Necro’s were never taken for their personal DPS. They were taken because of how Epi works, and because of their survivability and utility… things that are completely in tact. You have made fights slightly longer by nerfing Necro, but nothing changed over all.

Rev definitely doesn’t suck. My guild cleared everything fine last night while running with a rev.

However, it’s not optimal anywhere. Necros are still at least optimal in some fights.

I agree that rev is pretty decent, the only thing keeping it from being really good is the existence of hammer guardian. Still, rev is a great option if your chrono doesn’t have 100% boon duration gear or if you are having trouble maintaining 25 stacks of might for whatever reason.

Necro though…I don’t think it’s good anywhere anymore. The condi cleanse is helpful against matthias but far from necessary, and it no longer makes up for its poor starting damage later in the fight. Keep in mind that in addition to losing the normal damage inflicted by jagged horrors, necromancer also lost the ability to consistently transfer conditions back onto matthias. If jagged horrors aren’t up, you can only transfer one condition every 5 seconds on average, assuming you have a blood fiend and a flesh wurm. Everywhere besides matthias necro is just bad. It might help if there were more condi classes in the meta so epi would transfer good burns and maybe even confusion and torment, but as it stands you aren’t making up enough DPS with epi bouncing to justify using it.

I guess to be fair necro is still good on bandit trio but I think most people don’t consider that fight (or escort) when discussing raid viability.

burning speed cd reduction, the dream is real boys

DeceiverX.8361:

If pursuing the optimum is all that matters like you said, then these kinds of changes should be preferential, actually, since shaking up the meta requires people to figure things out again. There will be to some degree experimentation. I’m not suggesting the specific implmentation ANet made here was good – far to the contrary, actually, as I think they did an absolutely abysmal job for a featured balance patch – but being upset the meta changed is literally a fallacy unless there was true diversity beforehand, which there clearly was not, and is seen in the professional world of game development as a pragmatic impossibility.

This is 100% correct and I would like to add that I (and presumably others) think that major changes like these also just make the game more fun. Even if the game were already perfectly balanced I would still want major shakeups like this because it forces you to actually think again rather than using the same crap someone figured out six months ago.

vicious.5683:

Dinosaurs.8674:

Someone jokingly mentioned earlier that anet would also nerf epidemic too just to screw necros, well you know what? Epidemic deserves to nerfed in raids, that skill is completely ridiculous. It doesn’t just make bosses’ adds trivial, it makes them a negative for the boss, unless the fight is set up in such a way that necros are completely horrible (a la KC). With epidemic nerfed, it would be reasonable to buff other aspects of necromancer to make them more generally useful, which would both improve viability of necromancer and make raids better as a whole.

You say necro’s only reason to be in raids is Epidemic and you wanna nerf it? LOL
If you buff other aspects of necro’s builds then you will generate unbalance in pvp. And believe me, no one wants necro to be OP in pvp.
Epidemic is just right and needed to make the entire profession viable in raids.

Yeah that’s why I’m saying epidemic is awful for necromancers, because they rely completely on that skill to be good in raids. That skill is so good on its own that other necromancer skills and traits cannot get significant buffs, and so if you encounter a situation where epidemic doesn’t help, the entire class becomes bad. It would be much better if epidemic was a worse skill and other necromancer skills and traits were better to compensate.

As far as raids go, if there are other changes paired with the ones stated in the OP it could actually be a big improvement. Saying things like “this kills raid comp diversity” is a little silly because raid comp diversity is already pretty bad, with druid/warrior/chrono/rev being essentially required against every boss, and the 4-5 remaining slots being filled in by DPS classes. I understand that raids are supposed to be hardcore content and “play what you want” doesn’t really apply, but come on, even if you don’t agree with the particular changes you have to agree that changes need to be made. Having the exact same core composition be optimal for every single fight is just bad design. I can’t blame the devs really because the classes weren’t originally designed with raids in mind, but from a raider’s viewpoint some kind of rework for the support classes has been long overdue.

Additionally, several classes have little to no relevance outside of a single utility skill or trait. Revenant without the boon duration facet is completely worthless. Necromancer without epidemic and plague signet is completely worthless. Mesmer without Signet of Inspiration might not be totally worthless but its use would be limited. While these aren’t bad classes in raids by any stretch, having the usefulness of an entire class be essentially dependent on a single skill/trait is pretty unhealthy for those classes.

Someone jokingly mentioned earlier that anet would also nerf epidemic too just to screw necros, well you know what? Epidemic deserves to nerfed in raids, that skill is completely ridiculous. It doesn’t just make bosses’ adds trivial, it makes them a negative for the boss, unless the fight is set up in such a way that necros are completely horrible (a la KC). With epidemic nerfed, it would be reasonable to buff other aspects of necromancer to make them more generally useful, which would both improve viability of necromancer and make raids better as a whole.

So I’m hoping that that is exactly what is happening to chrono and rev – since their single OP skill is being nerfed some other aspects of the classes can be buffed. Chronomancer with SoI in particular I feel has a negative effect on raids – its current iteration (and it has only been nerfed lol) is so powerful in raids that every future elite spec and skill is going to have to be made with it in mind. Just look at it now – there are several skills/traits that grant quickness which should be pretty solid but which chronomancer makes worthless (impossible odds, applied force). Alacrity on its own has shaped what is viable since raids were released. SoI sharing every boon and being repeatable is so good that people actually don’t use the hilariously OP facet of nature on anyone but the chronomancer. So yeah, Signet of Inspiration absolutely deserves to be nerfed, and it deserves to be nerfed hard. Sadly I’m expecting that anet will either not go far enough and people will just use two 100% boon duration chronos or we will continue with the status quo, or anet will nerf it into oblivion (which is fine with me) but then will not change anything else and mesmer will be worthless.

The druid nerfs are positive to me in the sense that they make raids harder by requiring healing gear. But they’re also potentially awful because they don’t address the core problem with druids which is the unbelievably stupid power of their support buffs, and now if the support skills get nerfed in the future (which would be reasonable) then druid might be garbage tier because they also have bad healing.

Finally, for the love of god can we please buff hammer and/or rifle skills on engineer in pve to consistently deal OK damage? Engineer has some of the sickest utility skills in the game but can’t bring any of them to raids because its repeatable damage is largely in its utility skills. All I’m asking for is one free utility slot. Just one. Just imagine, you could bring an elixer or a gyro to a raid without losing 20% of your damage!

Ultimately even if the changes wind up being awful for raids I will be grateful that an attempt was made. Having changes every so often makes the game a lot more fun.