Ok let me add some spice to this kitten pot!!!!
Who wants to stir this:
Dwarven / Berserker (Great Axes)
only race I’d be willing to re-roll for, and great axes are a must.
and for all of those who hate on dwarves for being too “standard fantasy” if the writing is good and the implementation sound they’ll be fantastic and reinvigorate the race.
Stone dwarves, who are have lost everything, their kingdom is in ruins, over run by their former slaves. Their place as one of the leading races has been shattered, everything has changed for them.
They could make a great story line about dwarves trying to recover, grow, and expand.
Most of the time dwarves are shown as facing their end, dwindling and dieing out, Anet could turn that around, and show them restarting as a race.
Lore isn’t an issue, as we’ve seen before they can retcon and change things at will, and it’s very easy to bring dwarves back.
don’t try to make too much sense of engi.
FT doesn’t apply burn, does power damage more than condi.
rifle is a melee weapon that fires from the hips.
rocket turrets special rocket / tool belt skill can take over 5 seconds to hit a target at max range due to an arch that makes the St. Louis Arch look tiny.
Tool kit does aoe damage on the first 2 hits, but ST on the last … why?
there is a lot of weird design, that doesn’t make much sense.
It’s not a bad build and I have run pretty much the same build before.
But it’s big weakness tends to be no elixir s or rocket boots. If you get heavy pressure, or condi spammed, that’s the fight.
Great if you got everything setup and they come to you, bad if you get attacked moving from A to B, and if you fight someone who knows what their doing, they can avoid the mines all together.
A good ambush setup, but kinda of limited elsewhere.
There is not a really great build.
It will all come down to what your guild is doing and what they need.
although on a side note it is not easy to work gadgets into condi builds, they seem to mesh better with power SD, while elixirs work extremely well for condi.
PBR / UG seemed designed for SD but they just lack trait support.
I do not mind the idea but gadgets are not signets and it would be hard to shoe horn stats on them since they have very active abilities and short CD’s.
I’d rather see something like kit refinement for gadgets, or some sort of passive buff applied via a master trait.
It could be stats, or it could be abilities.
Like maybe condition removal when using utility googles, might when using prb, stealth with mines, stability with slick shoes, and maybe flame sheild or a fire trail with rocket boots.
Toss a 5-10s gcd on it and it would open up a few builds making utilities like mine / slick shoes have some nice niche uses.
That and tools could really use a good 30 point.
even in pve I do recommend having some form of escape or stun break.
elixir S or rocket boots can fill the role nicely. You can use utility googles, but I do not like it as much because it doesn’t get you out of aoe.
unfortunately that means maybe dropping pbr or rt. I tend to go with RT since I can use it to stack vuln now, but PBR is fantastic as well.
if you want warrior ish mobility there are a few ways to do it.
with the speedy kits in tools it is easy to get perma swiftness.
you can also add in slick shoes or the kit refinement trait (also in tools)+ tool kit to get quickness buffs.
there is also rocket boots that let you do super leaps when combined with quickness.
we also have a 25% movement trait in inventions (the toughness tree), and we have a lot of ways to reduce / remove immo, chill, and cripple in any spec.
But generally you have to either give up 1-2 traits, or 1-2 utility slots to get the movement speed you want, and to match warrior mobility, you have to do both.
There is to much to say in one post but I wanted to start with a serious problem that is at the core of WvW population.
Players who play WvW as their focus, vs. players that play WvW situationally.
On almost every server there are guilds and player groups that are focused on WvW, it is the reason they play the game, and they spend their time there, fighting, organizing, leading, and defending.
They are the driving force behind their servers. They are the guilds, the commanders, the scounts, the cappers, claimers, upgraders. They are sheild and swords of a server.
Then you have the more causal WvW players. The loot and xp grinders, the crafters, the achivement and daily hunters, and the fair weather warriors. If your doing well on the point score the population soar, if your doing poorly the population plummets. They are the masses, blown by the winds of victory.
When things go well the focused WvW players suffer, horrendous queues, and disorganized masses.
When things go badly, the full timers suffer from empty maps, and fully upgraded, defended objectives.
This causes a massive amount of frustration for those that play WvW full time. Often it feels you spend more time fighting the queues and your fellow server mates, than it does fighting the enemy servers.
Your effort is punished by your inability to play the game you like, by those that play for seperate reasons.
It is pvp, but of a different sort as intended.
simply put the amount of time to add in a new race to the game.
even ones with exisiting lore and models.
tengu, dwarf, dredge, skritt, kodan, quaggan, ect.
is far to much work for to squeeze into the LS system.
Not only do you need to build and ingame storyline and introduction events, you need new animations, voice work, personal story lines, reskinning all of the existing game models for new models, new emotes, new racial armor sets, new starting zones, new race specific npcs, new zones.
Everything has to be tested and evaluated and then fixed and tested again. It is a huge undertaking and would require either a vast amount of time or a vast amount of resources.
Simply put it would be a massive investment akin to a major feature of a paid expansion.
I’d really like see dwarf, tengu, and some of the other GW1 notables make apperances as playable races, because I personally find all the existing races to be either boring, lackluster, or simply ugly.
My big problem with the living story right now is that it does not interest or captivate me at all.
I do not feel any kind of engagement or attachment to the characters, and when there is something that interests me I am unable to sink my teeth into the content, it is always broken up and locked away between events.
But generally I find the living story characters to really lack the development of the personal story characters, and I find my player character as more of a spectator than a participant.
I’ve also grown frustrated with the living story mechanics, the pve down system for enemy npc’s is nothing but frustration. In zergs it is non existant, but solo it does not add depth as much as annoyance to me.
But I might not be the best judge of things. I do not particularly like any of the lore or back story of the game anyone.
The only aspect that ever interested me was the Dwarfs, and since they have been deleted to try to build a different brand of fantasy I do not really feel all that motivated to even try anymore.
Oh what I would give for playable dwarfs …, and a meat story line filled with loss, anguish, a slimmer of hope for rebuilding what has been lost.
this is my wvw guild play rifle / tk build
it’s not 100% tk you swap to rifle for bb / js for burst dps.
you’ve got high toughness and a lot of burst healing and burst dps, but you do have to learn the tricks.
overcharging thumper for the triple blast. the quick double tap + blast on healing turret for the double heal condi removal and then healing blast.
interrupting the 3rd hit on the wrench combo by swapping to rifle. (3rd hit is slow and ST so if I am in the front line melee, I try to avoid it, the 2 fast hits are better since they stack cripple / vuln. )
I personally found for WvW unless if your solo roaming cherry picking your fights, roaming in a server sized zerg, or sitting on an AC, you need to be using more defensive gear. Without at least 1600+ toughness 1 zerker thief or ranger can and will liquifiy you whether your good at dodging and blocking or not, and often they don’t travel alone.
We are enough of a target as it is will all the GC grenade engi’s running around that when given a choice they’ll always go for a engi over a guardian or warrior.
(todays broadcast of Asura News Daily is brought to you by Flexx’s miracle golem cream, when you need a miracle you need Flexx’s, warning be advised Flexx is not liable in the case of any burning, searing, loss of vision, or death of any krewe member or members that stems from or relates to the use of Flexx’s miracle cream. Flexx’s miracle cream may contain dragon related substances, use with caution)
Questions for Evon Gnashblade,
Why will you not support the investigation into the Thaumanova reactor inciedent, the worst industrial and enviromental accident in history?
Is there a cover up?
Are you working with the inquest to hide the truth?
Don’t you think the people, not only need, but deserve answers?
Can you confirm the rumors of dragon envolvement?
Mr. Gnashblade do you have any comment at all?
Times have been real hard for me and mine since the dredge attacked our village.
We were forced out, driven from homes. It was a periless trek to Lion’s Arch, that left us pennyless and destitute.
We had no future, and no prospects, so when the consortium came, we took their word, and their promise of a better future to heart.
But it was a lie. Those consortium thugs worked us night and day on that karka infested deathtrap, siging us into contracts we couldn’t refuse.
If it were not for Ellen Kiel and the rest of the Lion Guard I wouldn’t be here today.
There are a lot of promises being thrown around, but for me, I trust what I see, and when I look at Evon Gnashblade all I see is another fatcat merchant trying to take me for ride with false promises, decietful tactics.
Vote Kiel, for honor, for dignity, and for the Lion Guard.
I think your really limiting the scope to PvP, and particularyly to some specific builds.
a lot of the turrets work well in SD builds, but are horrible in HGH or FT/EG builds.
rocket in particular can be really nice, as can net, and rifle, given the right situation, and usage.
for WvW and guild fights I’ve started to use thumper with the deployable turret / accelerant pack turrets a lot. I can toss it into a gate way or a door way, onto a wall, or into a tightly packed enemy group and do a quick overcharge for 2 AoE knockbacks, it is also handy for triggering necro marks at the start of a fight, or for interuppting reviving / stomps.
also if you combine elite supplies with packaged stimulants the supply crate bandages get the heal increase, which is really nice.
what I tend to do with medkit is if I see a fight incoming, I drop bandages ahead of time so i do not need to swap kits to use them.
the thing is with tools is both of the grandmaster traits are junk. The lower traits are simply much better, espeically the newer leg mobs, kit refinement, speedy kits, speedy gadgets if your are using a gadget build.
I would really like to either see them scrapped or combined with existing traits.
reactive armor could be added to the gadget trait, and change to give aegis on gadget use rather than on crit, and then moved to grandmaster, with a new trait to replace it.
Our maybe we could get a group stat buff trait like rangers / warriors / others get. Maybe it could be crit damage to match the trait line, or potentially some kind of proc on hit for nearby allies. Maybe SD for everyone.
There are a lot of options out there to play with.
berzerker can work but more than likely you will want a tankier gear set.
Knights / Invader or Valkerie could work. I tend to go with knights.
Your build is not bad since you have a lot of CC, but you will definately want a cc break, and some condition removal for smaller scale fights.
There are a lot of condition builds, and bursty power builds, so you need to be able to clear conditions, and escape when need be.
Going elixirs with Elixir H / Elixir S with cleansing formula 409 can work well but you have to drop a kit.
If you take medkit you can use food to get extra condi removal when you swap into it which helps a lot.
For the stun break you have a few options. I like Elixir gun my, but you can also use thumper turret, utility goggles, elixir s, and elixir u.
Rocket boots is also nice for breaking immobilize and leaping away or after someone.
But a more tanky gear setup is a must really, as is a stun break.
Toughness won’t help with the condi damage but it does save you against power builds.
The real question is why is a Charr interested in the history of Abaddon?
Clearly he is trying to learn how the crystal sea was destroyied to replicate it and use it as a weapon!
Remember the searing! remember the foefire!
Never trust a Charr!
Vote Kiel! Savior of Southsun, Sky Pirates Sorrow!
The thing with GvG is some people play for fights, because that is what they like to do, and that is where they get their enjoyment and where through rivalries with other guilds they create content.
When you seriously play the point system, fighting is not really optimal. The best way to win is to have everyone blob up and just bounce around the map, with a bigger blob than everyone else.
A lot of guilds do not enjoy that playstyle.
Ganadara has a lot of fighting WvW guilds, and a lot of guilds transfered to Ganadara for that reason.
It may be annoying if your waiting in queue, or trying to play for points with GvG players on the map, but it is not up to them.
This kind of falls into arenanets court.
Don’t fault guilds for having fun playing in a way they enjoy.
And you can also be polite about it. Most of the GvG guys will come and help out if you actually ask them nicely. Say “hey we got this huge zerg at garrison tons of guys flailing around waiting to get killed, can you come help for a minute or two?”
you can solo cap towers on Gandara I have done it a few times and I am on Gandara.
Gandara has a good population around primetime, and when things are going well we have a lot of pve players and guilds that will hop on, but we’re mostly a GvG server to an extent. We have a lot of guilds that go for the fights rather than the points. Which means when we climb up the ranks a bit to the zergier servers, our population cools off for a few weeks, and we drop down again. We don’t like the server zergs, so a lot of people hold back to avoid moving up a tier, and the moment were behind on points or we’re not dominating the maps, our pve population vanishes instantly.
But the issue with the solo cap is for the last few months we have been fighting the more zergy german servers, who nearly 24 hours of the day have 2-3 guys standing in each tower / keep on an arrow cart.
So it is hard to take anything without being scouted, even if you manage to hide a group inside.
A guardian and I were hiding inside anza’s. We got a good attempt on it and cleared out the npc’s and were capping when we got scouted and then zerged to death.
So sometimes it is more a matter of luck, and how well your enemy servers scout.
I’m for the reactor.
Playing the role of the god would cheapen their existance for me. They are best left out of the hands of the players.
Also Abandons = no possibility of dwarves
Reactor = almost no possibility of dwarves
engi is great for small scale, 1v1, and solo`ing pve mobs, but when you try to scale up to organized groups you just don’t compete as well as some of the professions.
The difference between the 5 and the 20+ person scale is fairly vast, and engi’s get lost in it.
For wvw I like the jump builds that utilitize a combination of SD / rocket boots.
You can go into the tools like to get reduced cool down on your tool belt (mechanic skills) and to get the static discharge trait that shoots bouncing lightning bolts every time you use a tool belt skill.
If you pair that with abilities like personal battering ram, rifle turret, tool kit, or utility googles you can get a lot of burst dps, with great mobility from rocket boots.
I personally like rifle with med kit, tool kit, utility googles, and rocket boots. You pack a nasty punch, and with kit refinement, you can still super jump away when things get dicey.
great for roaming with theives / warriors / ele’s
I know the build and I have used variants of it for guild play.
But I typically don’t use the 1 skill at all, unless something is downed or it’s pugs. The ret damage is to much if you fight another serious team. But you should be using the 2 skill traited every time it is up on the FT, and swapping to EG for acid, and then either back to FT or to rifle if your running it for blunderbuss / jumpshot. You can cancel the acid bomb leap by dropping the kit or swapping to FT fast after you activate it.
You can get a lot of dps out of it that way. Since you can move between FT / EG / Rifle and go from strong ability to strong ability, and when you get good at chaining them they are good damage.
I swapped my stuff around so I use pretty much rifle – medkit – eg – rifle turret – rocket boots and cut FT out of the build and change to rifle traits. basically a constant swap between EG and rifle focusing on acidbomb with blunderbuss / jumpshot and more group condi removal with fumigate.
Rifle turret is nice for constant SD damage, and the detonate now does damage so thats an extra 2-4k aoe spike with the blast.
With modified ammo you get extra damage on the tool belts when rifle is out, and that goes for the SD’s as well. Which means if your guild has a lot of necros, you can get a nice damage boost even in invader / knights gear.
I would like to see something in a main hand weapon like axe / mace to pair with offhand pistol in a duel weild melee build.
2h hammer would not be bad but I wouldn’t want to see too much overlap with rifle.
a long range ST skill set would be nice.
I would like to see some more static fields, and engi is a good place for them since we already have a lot of air / electric attacks.
lightning turret! / lightning rod! new elite skill.
spawn a turret / rod that sends out bouncing lightning attacks, with an overcharge that drops a static field. (kind of like the asura ones in pve)
well the strength of the medkit is really the tool belt heal.
With full tools you drop the recharge to 15.5s so that’s a 5k heal every 16s. You also have it refresh when you hit 25%, and gain endurance from it’s use.
With kit refinement you get a 2 sec projectile reflect, with speedy kits swiftness which you can add to the 5 skill to stack swiftness, so it is really good as an escape tool.
The condition removal is okay.
I actually really like the bandages because you can pre load them before a fight, basically drop all 3 in when you see something coming in, and you get a free 3k heal.
The recent changes to the trait for medkit are nice, but I am not really big on the throwing aspect. The bigger heals is great through, since it effects the supply crate health packs as well.
Since I tend to play close melee medkit is really important for me when I fight ranged projectile builds, since I can rotate from medkit to tool kit or tool kit to med kit to get 5s of block and projectile reflect with heals as I move in. It’s a great counter to SB ranger / LB rangers, rifle warriors, or PP thief / engi. Any projectile heavy build really.
nice video!
have ninja’d a few myself with the old tankcat build.
well because it is neither and incomplete it is not a solid competitor to other close up melee options on other profession.
the same is true of all the kits.
that creates a viability issue when you scale up to play in larger groups.
my issue with engi rifle is that it is a shotgun but it is not.
I love it except for the 1 ability. Thats what’s really crippling it in WvW for melee builds. The net is great, the knock back is good, could be aoe, but its not bad, blunderbuss, and jumpshot are fantastic.
But when I use rifle I feel that the 1 skill is just kind of out of place. The dps is not bad, and the piercing is okay, but I think given the nature of the weapon it would be better to have the 1 skill be more of an aoe cone or an explosion like pistol 1.
When you try to use rifle as a close range aoe weapon the 1 skill is what holds you back, while blunderbuss and jumpshot are on cool down. You can try to fill the gap, but if rifle 1 was more akin to other melee weapons like the hammers, or great swords with a multi hit conal 1 skill, I think it would feel more natural as shotgun.
well I think the way to build it would more than likely be 20-30 tools, and then firearms / alchemy to take advantage of the EG / FT traits.
You can get nice might stacking from FT with juggernaut, good crit / crit damage, increased FT / EG damage, reduced cool downs on FT / EG, kit refinement for additional skills like projectile reflects from med / ft or quickness from TK. Speedy kits for perma swiftness. From alchemy you can get backpack regenerator for another constant heal, or the added damage trait, and the vigor on swiftness to pair with speed kits, which gives you perma vigor for faster dodge roll regeneration.
I’d run it with a power toughness setup like knights myself. You have a lot of good hard hitting power moves, but if you went pp condi is an option as well.
- a good thief always runs shortbow
- a good thief will reset a fight using teleports / stealth if a fight doesn’t go right.
- if you have to blow elixir s, or another stun break to survive, you won’t have that it up for the next round.
- if you try to run, they will chase, and your not gonna outrun them unless something is close.
- you can take them, if you in a purely 1v1 built condi build, that is useless outside of 1v1, unless if you are solo roaming, or just tagging with a zerg.
Thiefs are broken, since you can’t avoid the bulk of their dps out of stealth, and they have no risk versus reward, since they can always reset the fight.
People who think otherwise either do not play thief, or play thief and ignore the issue by using other easily avoidable visible burst dps spec’s as cover.
You can’t dodge an attack you can’t see coming, and saying everyone should have to spec for 1v1 roaming to deal with troll thiefs is just thread trolling.
I can fight a thief in my guild wvw build, and I can survive the initial hit and drive them away, but unless if I am willing to completely change my utility and gear setup, after the second or third time they reingage I run out of cool downs, and die. With my only hope of killing them being that they either get kitteny or I get assitance.
keep in mind a lot of guilds do not play for points, or just for points.
Their enjoyment comes from fights, for a lot of organized guilds, from fights with other teams.
The higher the tier you are in the worse the blobing becomes, until you reach the point that every server you run up against is running massive blobs, sometimes with the full server pop on a single commander. That is simply the way to win.
A lot of organized guilds hate that play style, they do not want to blob up, and they do not want to be lagged out fights in a numbers game of 1 spamming.
So to get the fights they want they often have to move down their tiers.
The problem is that when they do really well, when you have a lot of organized groups, you climb up the rankings, until you hit the server blobs, where you then have to choose. Blob up or swap servers.
It is a continual cycle now where a lot of guild teams end up doing transfer every few months as they climb to high, and are then forced to change servers to keep getting the fights they want.
The problem is not guilds are much as the blob centric game play in the other tiers. It is more about numbers and stacking then it is about fighting, and the fights you do get are not fun. Guilds play for the fun and difficult fights, and they create their own content via guild rivalries.
If you want to keep guilds from transfering, and crashing servers, then the game play mechanics in the upper tiers need to change. No guild is gonna stay where they can’t have fun, having fun is the reason they play.
Good match up so far! lots of fights.
I am not sure if I need to sober up or drink more…
hard choice!
CNTK
Also CNTK doesn’t blob, Aloners just needed bloodlust …
this build is a work in progress but it works really well atm, but in 1v1 your gonna wanna swap things it.
It is mainly a large group build.
The way it works is you use the blasts from rocket boots, rifle turret and acid bomb for water / feild blasting.
Combining a detonate on the rifle turret on top of an acid bomb, blunderbuss, or jumpshot is really nice burst dps, and you can rotate between EG / rifle and use constant tool belts to get more consistant dps.
You’ve got 2 leaps and a stun break, with the melandru runes, leg mods, and the foods you are nearly immune to cripple, chill and immobilize. It is fantastic escape and mobility. With decent burst.
A nice trick for guild play is to use kit refinement, swap to EG and rocket leap over or thru an enemy guild group. When they move on the poddles it gives immobilize and they often wont dodge roll to avoid it, since its hard to see and not many engi’s run it. So you can split or catch people out which is nice in guild fights. If you run PP instead of rifle you can double up with glue shot. I like to cut a few people out and supply crate them, to split enemy teams up a bit to screw with their movement / burst.
But the most important thing is to stay alive.
Good mobility and high toughness are key to that.
It is a good build, and there are a few good builds, but I’ve yet to find a great build, anything that really rivals, shout warrior / guardian, or well necro for the guild group meta.
well you take a gadget when it offers something different from or better to the option you can get from a kit.
A good example no kit really replicates the escape leap from rocket boots, or as a better example, the condition removal from elixir C.
for gadgets to be viable against kits they must offer somethings kits do not provide. Another example is utility goggles. The blind immunity is very unqiue and in certain fights against certain builds it is extremely useful. But overall the cooldown hinders it, and it has a more niche use.
you might simplify it so that kits give me 5 abilities gadgets / elixirs give me one, but the question then becomes how many kit abilities are you using, and when are you using them?
The general issue I have found is that a lot of in kit abilities are better than the base turrets / gadgets. So rather than taking a gadget / turret / elixir with a similar ability, you snag a kit with a better version of the skill with few extras.
Think PBR’s utility skill, and FT #3. I use them in the same places for the same reason, but without any points put in FT has a faster CD, and is AoE. PBR is not bad but it is overshadowed.
my issue with the non hgh / 409 builds is that you do not get enough condi removal, and in a lot of small scale fights lacking condi removal is death.
The best thing about elixirs is that with trait’s put in them they gain (extra) abilities. Might stacks, boon stripping, condition removal, vigor on swiftness, 2-3 extra things. It is like having 4 abilities in 1.
There are times I think the kits have to much utility, compared to normal weapons. Grenade and bomb are the exceptions to this, but think of FT for a power weapon only 2 abilities do power damage, the same is true of toolkit, and even EG falls foul of this. If you swap them to condi the same is true. They don’t full compliment most builds, and you end up taking them for 1-2 abilities, with the rest being situational.
But when I look at weapons on my guardian or my ranger I am utilizing all of those abilities between weapon swaps. It’s not like I swap to axes just for 1 skill. Part of that is the swap cool down but I really feel kits suffer from this. I may take 2-3 kits but unless if it’s a niche situation I won’t use the bulk of the abilities regularly. They just sit unused.
That and with a lot of builds the kits kind of overlap.
I am doing a turret build for wvw guild play. I bring flame and rifle, deploy them in safety to detonate for the new detonate damage on top of SD and tool belts. It’s great burst. I like to take a kit to add on to this. Whether I do FT for the 2 skill, EG for the 4 skill, or grenade for barrage it all really works out the same in the end. Grenade typically wins out if I have a it traited, but untraited it is not much better or worse than the others.
It’s not the same kind of feeling as using s/d on the ranger rather than LB for my second weapon set, with this build whatever I do is going to be in melee, it’s going to focus on power damage, and I am going to want swap back to rifle for jump / blunderbuss after 1-2 abilities.
The overwhelming problem is for a good thief there is no risk in a fight. You can opt to reset or escape the moment things go wrong, and it takes a great deal to catch and finish you.
Your not punished in the same way others are, and with the exception of mesmer, others cannot drop and re-enage as effectively.
A thief can run away from you, but you can’t run away from a thief, and it is a perfectly valid and widely used tactic for a thief to hit some to force them to burn CD’s, escape, and then come back.
That’s the issue, and the core of it is stealth.
If you push in or ambush and fail to kill then you should die, but that does not happen a lot of the time, which makes fighting thiefs extremely frustrating.
I like the LS content but it is not the sole reason I login. I have a guild, we do events, we do PvP, WvW. When I login I login to play with my guildies, hang out, and relax a bit after work.
What the LS content gives me is something new and refreshing to do. I can go play around in this new zone, explore a bit, laugh at a guildie who fails the jumps. It’s nice it’s relaxing, it’s fun.
Spot on to the dev’s on the new content. Nice work! My guild and I are looking forward to a lot more to come.
to be honest I think if your focusing on FT you want P/S rifle is good, but the survivability from the shield can really save you in a pinch with FT. The extra AoE KB and stun also help a lot as well.
thumper is good if you pair it with something else. Such as thumper + rocket boots. Which gives you 2 blasts and a nice bit of dps as well.
it has it’s uses, espeically in WvW where with a field those 2 blasts can be 3k healing, 6 might stacks, swiftness, aoe weakness …
if your going rifle, and playing it melee you want soliders for the toughness. You can use berzerker but you’ll explode quite easily.
unless if your mainlining a kit with rifle you do not really want condi gear since rifle only stacks bleeding, and maybe burning with traits.
But if you use grenade kit or bomb kit condi can work well.
I somewhat agree with the OP that within small scale, espeically 1v1, pvp, and wvw roaming that there is not a lot of diversity.
So much of small scale is focused on condition builds, so a good amoutn of survivability is tied into condition removal, and we only have one solid source for that which is elixir spec’s. Healing turret, med kit, are okay but they are not enough on their own.
When you add to that the need to boon strip, and or stack boons such as might, protection, swiftness, ect. Your really left with being heavily reliant on elixirs with HGH, and 409.
I play SD, and I love SD, but I know that it is not as good as HGH and I have a lot of problems when conditions are stacked on me. I do not have a good way to clear them and it makes fighting a tanky condi build, which is fairly common these days, extremely difficult.
There are nice things from gadgets, turrets, and kits to be sure but there arn’t any utilities that really compete with trait elixirs, grenade kit, and bomb compete with trait elixirs, grenade kit, and bomb kit.
You realize you only use a kit for 1-2 abilties, but you also realize that you can’t replace that kit and get the same thing someplace else, even if you do not use the bulk of the abilities.
This is a fairly fun guild spec for burst dps / blast finishers that utilizes the recent detonate damage addition.
The basic spec is
0
30 cool down recution, 10% rifle damage, modified ammo
10 stablizied armor
0
30 SD, leg mods, adrenal implant
The gear setup is full knights, with + crit damage runes, and then sigil of fire + bloodlust.
its rifle, with healing turret, EG, rifle turret, thumper with healing turret, EG, rifle turret, thumper turret and supply crate.
The general play style is to drop you turrets in a safe place as you push in. Keep them out of the aoe. You can then leap in with jumpshot or just push in normally. Use jumpshot / blunderbuss, then swap EG, push in normally. Use jumpshot / blunderbuss, then swap EG, fumigate, water field, detonate the turrets and use acid bomb. You can then do a quick swap to cancel the backwards leap and use blunderbuss and jumpshot again, or escape to heal up and redeploy turrets.
with the knights gear setup the detonate should hit a soft target around round 2k and crit closer to 4k.
pro’s
high burst damage from rifle and denotate.
good escape tools with 3 stun breaks, and backward leap.
lots of blast finishers, with the potentional to max out your own water field for aoe healing / support.
con’s
close melee
lack of solid self condi removal
squishy, no channeled blocks, no blinds, no aoe knock backs.
squishy turrets. if you place them to close they die before you detonate in a crunch. gotta put them in safe places.
It takes practice to get movement and ranges down but it as a definate role for down but it as a definate role for brusting or finishing downed players in guild play.
The problem is not the place but the population caps.
I like GvG and it is a lot of fun, but WvW is not meant for it.
Thes best example to be given of this is when you do GvG you might spend hours on a map not contribution to the map while eating up map spots.
I’ve seen this a few times where a BL map is undermanded and guilds fighting for keeps and objectives have members stuck in queue with 30-40 people at standing around doing / watching GvG.
I do not fault the GvG’ers for this but something needs to change. It’s hurting everyone.
I would like to see the addition of a trait to reduce turret CD’s a 20-33% reduction on turret cooldowns would go a long way into making them more worthwhile, and it could be a good addition to an existing trait.
But I still the key stumbling block for turrets is their survivability and targeting issues.
I think getting use to the living story content requires a change of perspective from the more traditional mmo mindset of grind it now, grind it fast, be the first to finish.
If you look at it from the perspective that every time you log in, that there is something new you can do for a few hours or in addition to your normal WvW, PvE groups, or TPvP it’s really nice.
You can take a break for a week or two and come back to something new, and for a long time player you can have neat items and skins for xxx event that others who weren’t in the game at the time don’t have.
You might be a bit miffed that you missed that content, but there is more coming.
I kind of look at the living story now as a daily newspaper or a T.V. show, something new each week that I can sink a few hours into on top of my usual stuff.
Rather than from my old mindset of “I’ve got 3 weeks off lets grind this out, and watch all of xxx T.V. show in one sitting”
well it might be true in WvW groups, but it is not like we were a go to profession for guild comps before.
we got a few things we can do well and bring to the table but none of our spec’s are really strong enough to really justify bring more then 1-2 most of the time.
the blast are nice, EG is pretty good, and you can do some dps with grenade / ft / bomb, but overall when you get above the 15-20 man scale it’s simply much better to stack something else. Guardian or warrior for supporty stuff, dps warrior, or necro for dps.
So we are a little bit niche at the moment.
I like the idea of a long ranged more ST ish skill set.
you can kind of do something if you mix traited rifle with EG and then utilities like rocket turret, but it is by no means a fully effective ranged build.
We’ve got tons of aoe and mid to close range options so if we were to get another kit or other weapons having something that is meant for LR ST might be nice.
Doesn’t have to be sniper rifle throw. It could be a steampowered crossbow, static cannon, there are a lot of different ideas.
I think a land version of the harpoon gun with a few quick changes could be nice.
For weapons though I would like to see axe or mace, so we get more mix / match option with P/S offhands. 2h hammer might be good but I would worry it would overlap to much with the melee kits / rifle. An axe similar to warrior or ranger could be a lot of fun with a bouncing 1 attack. Could pair up nicely with an SD build.
I missed a banana blob! NOOOOOOOOOOOOO
I like bananas they are cool and banana’y.
The smell nice like fresh summer bananas.
I remember the last time I blobbed with TDA we had like 3 guys and we blobbed over the map in a pink and bana storm of 3 man blobbiness.