If you don’t have stab, it is more or less impossible to stay with the melee train, which is where your heals are needed. Healing prioritizes health percentage over subgroups afaik.
Running healing druid in blobs without stab feels worthless.
In terms of ele vs druid: Ele offers condition removal, auras, more damage and higher heal/second
Druid offers spotter, grace of the Land, stealth and more waterfields.
From a selfish point if view, playing druid in blobs makes no sense anyway, as you do not even get half the loot and wvw xp that e.g. necro or guardian gets. Probably not even a third.
It is funny how the build sees no or next to no play in EU. I encountered it only two or three times over the course of 4 seasons. Once it died to reaper, once it lost the cap vs lb druid. Perhaps it becomes worse when players are better.
People are more likely to voice their opinion when they are unhappy. Most classes have weaknesses here and there (E.g. Many classes are subpar in wvw zergs, others provide substantially lower dps for raids etc). Combine these and you are going to get lots of complaints.
Check how much your laptop utilizes the turbo boost (e.g. Mine sits at 3.4ghz) when playing gw2 and compare that to your desktop cpu clock speed. That is pretty much where the fps difference comes from. Your gpu is more than what gw2 needs. I have a gtx 1070 and I get similar frame rates as your laptop (I have the same cpu). Max gpu load I got when playing gw2 was 42%; It is the mobile cpu that bottlenecks.
1060 is slightly better than the 970 but as it has been said, the cpu is the issue here.
If you only play gw2, you want as much cpu clock speed as possible and 2 cores is enough. Gtx 1050 ti should be more than enough. From what I have heard the game runs very poorly on some amd cpus, so you are probably better off with intel unless someone can tel you exactly what amd cpu to buy
Dont buy a laptop because even high end ones cant handle gw2 on max settings properly due to the much lower cpu clock speed (unless you buy a big bulky one with a desktop cpu)
My opinion:
beast form is fine but being able to change pets would be cool
most traits are useless/worse than core ranger traits in all game modes
soulbeast suffers from underperforming core ranger weapons (Druid staff having 1 good mobility skill and a reliable auto attack is already better than all of the other ranger weapons)
dagger is trash
It´s good at killing people who never dodge maul. You can play some bunker builds which are essentially selfish druid builds that are worse at disengaging due to no stealth.
Why are you blaming players for standing near shades, you can cast your shades directly onto people to hit your other f-skills. Shades have 0.5 cast time and the others are instant.
I like Bear Stance, it actually gives you the option to run a heal that removes conditions and doesn’t force you to stay in place without having to run wilderness survival. It is highly unlikely to ever be part of the meta in its current state (which is mostly true for all but 1 healing of any class anyway) but at least it opens up a few random builds.
I am confident you could have beaten all your opponents on core ranger as well. Soulbeast certainly is more fun than core ranger though, because using gs and maul (buffing itself) is worth using over sword auto attacks in terms of dps.
It has a charge attack that hits the same target multiple times which results in ridiculous damage (if it actually hits at all that is).
Maul gives an attack of opportunity (50% increased damage on the next attack) which is granted before the damage portion of the skill, thus it increases its own damage by 50% in beast mode. Might be too much damage for pvp/wvw, but it might also be what is needed to make power ranger viable in pve. The problem is that you have hardly any skills except maul that you could use the damage buff on to considerably increase your dps.
Everyone who says that the dps loss from not having the pet is too much to justify the stat increase should consider that the maximum dps you can lose from the pet is 3k and that assumes a golem with 25 vuln and a pet with all boons possible + sun and frost spirit buffs which are usually not granted to the pet as the spirits are capped at 5 targets. In PvE at least. If they make loud whistle work in beast mode, that alone should make up for the pet dps loss (assuming the overall power dps of soul beast is competitive which means > 30k).
What you fail to see is that dead eye can do that without investing every single part of the build and game play into a single hit (running an actual build rather than some fully kitten maul build) and it does so while being ranged and having stealth to reposition which makes it much easier to actually pull it of aka more realistic.
Snipers Cover -> Dead Eye´s Mark -> Death`s Judgement already hits for 9+k. No need to wait for malice stacks, waste any utility skills, stack might or anything similar.
I actually like dead eye design but it should either have less stealth or less damage especially when the damage does not require much set up.
edit: Just played a ranked game on dead eye. No set ups beyond rifle 5+f1. No utilities etc to increase damage used.
Are you surprised? People have pretty much said that already when HoT was released. Chronomancer simply offers too much and fixes pretty much all weaknesses that core mesmer has.
Scourge has much better ranged pressure than reaper. 4 of its class skills, which are major part of the damage, are instant and can be used while cc´d. The class is beyond broken right now.
soooo how long you ben standing in a shade to make that assumption ?
Don’t stand in one……..
I played the scourge. It is actually pretty simple: Scourge, Reaper and Core-Nec have the same ranged options on weapon skills.
The only additional ranged pressure that reaper has (compared to core necro skills) is deathly chill which improves staff 3 and 5.
Scourge on the other hand has F1 which already has more damage than the 1 stack of bleeding and can be combined with an immediate F-skill of your choice. Scepter 3 also procs burning on scourge which increases ranged damage. If you run torch instead of warhorn, the gap becomes even bigger.
I always assumed they just banned the single letter G as they did not want players to impersonate game masters (to prevent abuse). ‘Game Master’ and ‘Gamemaster’ as well as ‘Gm’ and Gmxxxx are also not permitted. Single M is allowed though.
Scourge has much better ranged pressure than reaper. 4 of its class skills, which are major part of the damage, are instant and can be used while cc´d. The class is beyond broken right now.
You failed to avoid an attack that hits you after a giant, obvious laser targets you for like one full second.
git gud.
By that logic, other skills such as mind wrack, back breaker, maul, gravedigger etc should also deal 30+k damage if the player equips berserker amulet. Somehow they are far away from that though. True shot was nerfed a hundred times despite dealing less than a third of the damage.
If there is any class in gw2 that has been trash for longer than ranger, that is necro (unless we are exclusively talking about wvw zerg game play where necro is been great). Scourge right now is broken but based on the history of necro/reaper it will be nerfed to garbage (pve) or barely playable without support ele (pvp) soon enough.
I mostly tried scourge and soulbeast and imho either scourge is ridiculously overpowered or soulbeast is complete garbage. Or both.
Spellbreaker and holosmith also seem to be overtuned and on a similar level as scourge.
So i saw the quantify build for power druid and it says that dps is still lower than condi Druids even after the nerfs, is that true?
I thought power druid builds were viable.
Condi is more damage due to condis ticking while you’re in the avatar state and thus can’t deal any damage, where a power Druid would go into the avatar state and lose all damage but what their pet is dealing.
The personal dps loss when you enter avatar is the same on condi as it is on power if you only use healing skills (100%). If you use CA5 the dps loss on condi is actually higher than the dps loss on power.
The damage that is ticking is the delayed damage from the attacks that you have hit before (on power the damage would have already been done). People keep coming up with this flawed logic that conditions deal damage while you do something else but you are not adding damage but instead you are waiting for your previously added damage to be applied:
Power attack that deals 5k damage: You hit it and the damage is done, you then enther CA for 10 seconds – 5k total damage done
Condition attack that deals 10*500, You hit and then enter CA for 10 seconds, after those 10 seconds you have done the exact same damage: 5k.
That said, condi druid still deals higher dps because power damage on ranger is lacking due to bad weapon skills and few damage modifiers.
Come back when you’ve actually tried a power build that can’t stack toughness. Though you seem like that type of “path of least resistance” follower. It’s OK to be timid and afraid, you’ll get better with practice and experience! Good luck out there if you ever do decide to give it a try!
What does stacking toughness do? According to you, dire gear is what I should be worried about???
I also wonder how I made to top 20 in pvp where stacking toughness is impossible as they removed all the amulets that let you do that
Hmm, someone claimed 22k previously. I can’t test for myself currently, but I will when I can.
For the GS to be a viable DPS weapon in PvE, all the skills would need to be split from PvP and WvW because it is quite powerful already when played well in those aspects of the game.
Wow, 22k actually sounds impressive. I did my tests with 1 or 2 exotics, but it can’t be that much of a difference. I’d be really interested in your results.
I tried some builds post patch and got around 18k with all of the following:
S/a+wh (quickdraw)
S/a+lb (quickdraw)
S/a+gs (vicious quarry)
I used nature magic with 6 boons for a 6% damage modifier.
Can surely be improved by an air sigil (I had water sgil on axe and intelligence on gs in addition to force) and less errors (canceling aa) in the rotation. Perhaps beast mastery is more dps, I did not try it.
Either way 18-22k is still only ~60% of what you should bring to raids. Against big hitboxes, you are half a guadian or ele.
You’re delusional if you think a Necro in Soldier’s gear with traits built for power is anywhere near the damage of a Necro in Dire gear with traits built for condi. Pick any other profession, the result will be the same.
In WvW you’re not fighting a golem that stands still. Nor are you just auto attacking and using 1 additional weapon skill. Your “test” is terrible and provides zero support to your claim. Try it again using things like condi traps and weapon swapping, then let us know how you did. Please leave your PvE arguments to the PvE forums.
Keep believing that dire is op, I am glad it helps you feel better about losing to terrible.. erm I mean op dire builds
Power gets a 50% modifier at base, and then you increase crit chance by 20% using fury.
Fury also increases the crit. chance of the dire build which increases its damage as well. I know it is more beneficial to soldier, but I had already written that. In return, flanking/standing behind a target with ranger short bow, favors condition damage as the power damage remains exactly the same (In reality on the other hand, high or permanent fury uptime is much more likely than permanently flanking your target, which should further shift the balance in favor of soldier).
Either way, if you don´t believe me, you can test it for yourself. I am not here to convince anyone that conditions themselves or dire gear are not overpowered. I have long given up on that as there is no point in trying to convince average players who probably misplay more often than they play correctly that their perception does not reflect reality. Therefore I don´t care whether you think I am lying or you are claiming that the opposite is true.
All I am doing is pointing out faulty arguments that are presented as the ultimate truth like dire deals more damage than soldier, when one can easily find reasonable examples (= examples that do not heavily favor either side) where it does not hold true.
Fact is wvw players (especially those who only play wvw) as well as lower division/tier pvp players have always complained about conditions even when condition builds were severely underpowered, which hints at a lack of understanding of the game/skill (as the better players rarely complain about it and when they do, they are usually more specific as in build/trait/skill xy is too strong because…).
might fury quickness are all power damage modifiers and short bow uses some condition and some power damage.
Also positioning behind the golem for condition damage modifier and bleeding.
Generally condition does more damage than power but different weapons have different scaling.
An example is engineer hammer and rifle. It scales awful with power but scales good with condition. Also i am not familiar with ranger but i thought long bow is power and short bow is condition ?
Might and quickness give the same bonus to power and condition. Fury favors power, but sb+permanently standing behind the target should favor condition builds. Point is, dire gear itself is not better than soldier but about the same or slightly worse even. One thing that broke the symetry was food, which increased the damage by more than 30%.
The claim that dire deals more damage than soldier gear in general is wrong though. It is some made up non-sense supposed to prove something.
It is just tiresome to see people make claims about how conditios are cheap and overpowered because of something they have actually never tested and are clueless about. There are certainly broken things concerning specific condition builds (e.g. The synergy between the reaper trait and reaper runes) but the same is true for some power builds.
Also from my experience in eu tier 1, power is far more prevalent than condition. The only mode that is dominated by condition builds is pve and that is because mobs do not walk out of damage fields aka firefields and caltrops.
I’ve still yet to see a pro-condi argument that makes sense as to why Dire gear should continue to surpass Soldier’s gear in effectiveness tenfold – when they have the exact same amount of added defensive stats.
I used ranger shortbow autoattack + poison volley against the 1 million hp golem (25 might, fury, quickness as I did not want to spend too much time at the golem) and soldier gear actually slightly outperformed dire gear.
No damage modifiers or condition duration were used. Pet was on passive. Fury favors soldiers but it is very easy to obtain on most power builds so I think that is realistic. I was positioned behind the golem to get the increased condition duration on poison valley and the additional bleeding on the auto attack.
Or you just do it in normal mode which is super easy once you have understood about 5 (special action key, catching the ball, pushing orbs at the last boss and evading a couple of highly telegraphed skills) mechanics in total?
Put any of those necros in solo q and they would still win games.
Funny that you said that because half of those necros are actually people who almost exclusively played warrior in ranked during the last and when they played necro, they were duo with an ele :^)
Then the there is the necro who won the tournament.. he usually plays mesmer and occasionally thief. Apparently the class is so hard to play, that only people who actually don’t play it can do it. Makes sense. It is certainly not related to solo vs duo vs organized play.
I’m not the best player by any stretch yet when I see something I don’t just bang my head against the wall. I identify the problem and either fix it or do what I can to mitigate it.
Guess what, most necros have already identified it. As the leaderboards show, they have also found the fix: Contrary to what you think, it seemingly was not to improve themselves, but to duo queue with an ele
Edit: Don’t get me wrong. Of course they would still win games as they are great players in general but I am also sure, that their overall performance and winrate would have been significantly worse if they had solo queued nec or duo queued nec without support.
Btw it seems a bit off that some guilds are listed with their guild tags whereas most are not on the ugo webpage.
Pretty sure that druid is one of the very few classes that can actually 1v1 mesmers. Just make sure you dodge the shield block to limit their clone generation.
It just depends on what you want to do. If you want to have the armor as a prestige item, then rank 2k is fine. If your goal is to encourage more players to play wvw, then 2k is pretty absurd as it is too far away to encourage people and will more likely deter them.
You still don’t get why people complain about the state of necro, do you? Yes, every class relies on teammates. It is only natural in a 5v5 game mode, but no other class relies on its teammates to the same extent that necro does. Necro has 1 favorable 1v1 outside of support ele who never 1v1s anyways and loses vs everything else. Thief has better 1v1 match ups than necro, yet its not deemed worthy of 1v1s. Now this would not be an issue, if not for the fact that necro is also utterly useless in teamfights unless the rest of the team babysits it. it is by far the easiest class to kill and fortunately focusing the nec also reduces their damage output to about 0 because the combination of long casting times, low stability and inability to kite and reposition themselves makes it so that they cannot succesfully cast anything relevant especially not against thief+something. If you want to resolve any of your spells you need to rely on ele refelcts or teammates peeling for you. NO OTHER class in the game suffers from this to the same extent as necro does, because they all have means to lose focus/disengage or simply skills with low casting time.
Druid is btw literally the worst classto support you as a necro, because they dont have enough damage output to effectively peel for you (except vs other necros as necro is also the only class in the game thwt still blows vs entangle/ancient seeds). While raw heals help with surviving, they don’t help with successfully casting skills and therefore you will just be ccd until you are dead. The stealth is useful but most classes have so many gap closers, that theyll just catch up immediately once you are visible again and due to your own low mobility and the ineffectivity of snares, you wont be able to kite. literally the only thing that you can do yourself to survive as a nec right now, is doing jumping puzzles but then again you have to hope that your ele does them too.
Scrapper/druid instead of an ele is the equivalent to dual thief, it can work under the right circumstances but is generally not where you want to be.
Obviously it works in low plat/gold division or if the opposing team also has a bad team comp but everything works in that case. I mean I played qualification matches on thief after not having played thief for about 3 years and immediately went to top 100 despite having a 2nd thief all day. Game is hard.
I’m trying different builds but still I can’t find one able to survive to a fight or be selfish enough to win a 1v1 (unless against an engi, the only class we actually counter).
can you help me find one?
pre patch core nec could do a lot of things that necro cannot do anymore, because geomancy sigil was so strong/broken. I have never done the math for 7sec geomancy but when it was still 10 sec, geomancy sigil dealt more damage than every single core necro skill except signet of spite, while also being the easiest/most reliable to hit as it was instant. The sigil was literally the best source of damage that necro had access to and all the class skills were garbage compared to it.
So, it’ s ok for any class to have a build that’s easy to access and which can is viable for solo queue, but necro shouldn’t have that option?
Have you forgot eles? Or thieves? Those have to rely on teammates.
The difference is that necro needs ONE specific class to function, eles and thieves work with a variety of different classes/set ups. When you play necro without an ele against good opponents, you are a massive handicap for your team. That is an issue for everyone who does not want to constantly duo queue with an ele.
Make flesh wurm instant or at least double its hp, so it doesnt die vs one ranged attack. Shroud cd is fine as it is.
It would also help necros survivability a lot, if cripple and chill were more meaningful aka less spamable removal for it. One reason why necro is destroyed by thieves and revs is that they have low cd teleports and are both more or less immune against snares (plenty of dodges and removal for it in case you are hit)
Seasons 2+3 were the worst as winning was mostly tied to playing at the right time and not to playing well. All you had to do to get countless free wins was keep queuing when you were on the higher mmr spectrum of the currently available player pool and stop queueing if you were not.
Seasons 1+4 were better but still being legend In seasons 1-4 was completely meaningless. Literally everyone could do it with enough time/dedication, no matter how bad the player.
Season 5 was the best. Season 6 technically had the better system, but lacked active players (still better than 1-4).
Haven’t really played much recently, but when I played a couple of matches post patch, I had the impression that necro/reaper damage is really low without geo-/hydromancy/fire/air/blood sigils, which is not really surprising as the sigils both, the most reliable and one of the highest single hit damage source available to necro. Pretty much all the class damage skills are either too easy to avoid or low damage or both (scepter 2 being more or less the only exception).
edit: @Crinn: Power necro dps is abysmal. It has always been trash and it probably will always be trash.It was only playable in pvp, because of the combination of chill of deaths and sigil procs, which resulted in a “spike” against targets below 50% health. The build was carried by fire/air sigils, because necro has literally 0 good power damage skills.
edit2: the plan for necros is probably to not bring one, as rev+thief can easily train necro to death with the high amount of cc+power damage. At the same time, they have so many evades and blocks/blinds that is pretty much impossible for necro to counter pressure either of them.
