Showing Posts For Narane.3825:
Stop talking about GW2 not having a dedicated healer class. By that logic, GW2 shouldn’t have a dedicated damage dealer/glass cannon either, yet 30 Trait points put into Critical Damage already give you 30% extra Crit damage. For glass cannons that have like 65% Crit chance and 2k Power, it’s not even funny how much 30%+ Crit Damage does— and that’s from Trait points alone.
I agree. I was speccing my ranger for condition damage and by the mid 40s it just wasn’t cutting it. I switched to precision/power instead and haven’t looked back since.
That’s another peeve of mine. All professions are very capable of making good use out of Power+Precision+Crit (which would explain why Ruby-based items are 3x the cost of others), meanwhile very few classes seem to have skills that actually make good use out of +ConDamage. There aren’t enough abilities that are not simply ‘targeted damage ability with a condition thrown on top that lasts 3 seconds’.
Only the Necro, with his Marks/Utilities, has a ‘working’ Condition build; all other classes seem to completely lack the ability to keep conditions applied on enemies and/or spread conditions to all enemies around, not just one target. Again, I’m going back to my title with the Conditions being hugely lackluster outside 1v1.
That was the single biggest problem I had as a ConDamage Engineer; the moment I’m facing against more than one enemy, I’m absolutely screwed because I can’t keep damage applied to both of them. Grenade Kit is nicer for that, but again, it suffers from the problem where its damage source seems to have a 50/50 split between Conditions and base physical damage that occur on explosion.
(edited by Narane.3825)
This might anger all the players out there who are speccing for ‘Condition Damage builds’, but here it is. I find that there are some problems with Conditions, speaking from both theorycrafting and actual experience trying to play as Condition Necro/Engy.
That said, I’m mostly speaking about Burning/Poison/Bleed. I have little clue about Mesmer builds to talk about Confusion in enough detail.
1. There aren’t any low-cooldown abilities that only deal Conditions. Most abilities that deal Conditions tend to take too long to cool down, and/or a big chunk of its damage is put into flat damage that benefit off Power/Precision instead. Flat damage has no place in Condition Damage builds, because you’re likely investing in Toughness/Vitality to whittle down your foes while you dodge around. I’d rather, for example, have 6 Bleed stacks for 10 seconds than 4 Bleed stacks for 8 second + 300 base damage. I feel that Mark of Blood is the only skill that truly fits the ‘Condition Damage Skill’ concept.
2. Stacking Conditions is problematic. This is only problematic when you have more than three people speccing for Condition Damage, but nevertheless it is a problem. The general DPS from per person diminishes as there are more people applying Conditions, because of the max limit on Bleed stacks, and that Poison/Burning only stack in duration. This problem is quite evident in boss fights, where you can see that huge variety of conditions stacked on a boss that deal like… 0.0001% of its total health with every tick, and you really can’t do more than that because you’ve hit the limit. Meanwhile, Crit-based physical burst damage can ‘stack’ to no limits because we don’t have anti-spike skills anymore.
3. It’s too easy to prevent or remove it. No need for awesome dodging skills, or quick thinking with Block/Reflect abilities! Just press that ‘remove condition’ button, and BAM, there goes all the effort and spirit of your enemy Necros. In GW1, pressure builds worked because healers would eventually run out of Energy to continue removing conditions— and more importantly, there were hundreds of hexes to worry about on top of conditions. Now there are only conditions, yet they aren’t any harder to remove.
4. Bosses tend to be immune to a variety of conditions. I guess this isn’t a huge problem because ConDamage builds are strictly for PvP, but I think it’s worth a mention. Want to feel useless in an AC Explorable run? Go grab a Condition Damage build!
If you feel that I’m missing something obvious here, feel free to point it out for me!
thieves get too much stealth…
Thieves have just the right amount of stealth. It’s how thieves are supposed to be played. Smack Smack, Stealth, Smack Smack, Stealth. They have a 3 second “revealed” debuff that stops them from re-stealthing too fast. Just remember you can hit thieves in stealth.
I think the problem is that Thieves are able to simply NOT DIE if they’re bent on living. Shortbow swap will nullify Immobilization or Cripple, and Stealth can stack up on duration as long as you don’t land any attacks (yes, you can fail an attack and stay stealthed).
If you’re not going for a Backstab-based build, you can also wait for the stealth to run out first before attacking, so you can actually instantly stealth again after attacking. It’s a nice tactic for the Pistol Whip + Quickness build.
I’m going off topic though.
Throwing down Shadow Refuge on death can grant you ~15 seconds of stealth, because of SF’s weird mechanic with the stealth durations stacking with every pulse. They also have a Trait that let them stealth when downed, and using Smoke immediately after will grant ~8 seconds of stealth with the stealth trait. They can also, without breaking the stealth, teleport away to a secluded area where you can’t really see them.
Yeah, the stealth part might not be a hack.
Right so the ability to put down a well that constantly blinds the enemy doesn’t mitigate damage, the one that pulses and turns theirs boons into conditions also doesn’t mitigate damage, the one that turns your conditions into boons isn’t mitigating anything either, nor the fact i’m traited to get toughness upon casting a well and leach health with each pulse of them either. I’m not trying to say a necro will out tank a def specced guardian or warrior, but with the mitigation I can pull of all the while dealing a decent amount of damage and having an extra pool of health with a teleport and refiller on as well as fear and weapon swap reguardless of whether your swap is on cd or not.
The last part of your comment was the only thing I really meant. Necros can never outdo Warriors or Guardians because of the silly ‘armour classes’ are imposed on Necros and Eles and Mesmers.
My peeve is, why? It’s a dead tradition from older RPGs and GW1; there isn’t too much reason in having Warriors tank more damage NATURALLY, when GW2 is such a mobility-heavy game, and everyone is very capable of jumping in front of someone’s face with a bit of a quick thinking and spell uses.
No damage mitigation, with a toughness/vitality build necro with at least a semi decent focus on damage I have about 2800 toughness with 21k health, couple that with DS and ground targeted wells on a 20% reduced CD you have plenty of damage midigation, not to mention plague form practically doubles your health, can spam blind, cripple, or bleed with a poison also raises my toughness up to over 5k. No sir, we have no damage mitigation whatsoever.
… I don’t think you know what ‘mitigation’ is judging from the fact that ‘Toughness’ is the only mitigation-related thing you said in your entire paragraph.
PS: All professions share the same base attributes. The only stat-wise difference between them is the armour class. Soldier professions can always do you better at tankiness.
I really believe that Death Shroud’s advantage as explained by Jon is negated due to the number of immobilization skills (cripple, snare, knockdown..) that seems to be common in PvP nowadays. As a game where dodging and maneuverability is the best way to keep yourself alive, Necros have no reliable ways of escaping or dodging; Swiftness is RARE on Necros, and Signet of the Locust is incredibly lackluster for both +MS and Active. Coupled with this fact is Death Shroud’s ‘extra life’ mechanic, which makes me think that Necros are intended to stand there and eat damage like a tank.
Except, you know, they’re the Scholar profession, so they’re all health and no damage mitigation.
GW2 isn’t RO.
As a tradition passed down from GW1 to make the game more competitive and less grind-based (ie. the furthest thing possible from RO’s design), gears are standardized. No one is going to be particularly more effective than the other just by having spent several hundred hours more into game time; you always have a chance at becoming just as powerful without grinding or farming.
You certainly have to play a bit more if you want the ‘perfect’ equipment for every one of your equipment slots; but in all honesty, unless you’ve been completely out of luck all the time, you should at least have gear that contain 95~100% of the stats, and maybe 2/3 of the stat boosts that you actually want. Trying to get any more is just OCD telling you to do so.
That said, accessories ruin this design for GW2. Accessories are incredibly difficult to acquire without crafting, and getting ‘perfect’ accessories seem to mostly equate to “Ecto farming in Orr”.
The cost rises with your level, I believe. The aim is to have fast travel be equally taxing on your wallet, no matter what your level is (though 1 silver still means nothing when you have 20 gold stocked up by now).
I can’t find anything related to this bug with search keywords such as ‘channel’ or ‘animation’, so I will post this here.
Channeling animations can be canceled via switching your weapon to the next set (`). This is problematic, because many Heart quest completion methods that require you to channel on an object (ie. ‘repair the flag’) have the completion bar raised at the START of the animation; the added channeling becomes meaningless entirely.
Rarely, you can get stuck in the channeling animation if you attempt the above; the channel bar doesn’t go away, and you cannot perform any actions. The best way to break out of this is to force a different animation loop, i.e. by dancing out of it.
It’s a fairly minor bug, I’m sure, but it might be noteworthy for future additions that require channeling.
(edited by Narane.3825)
While stealth doesn’t stack, it can appear to stack if you’re stealthed and don’t take any aggressive actions to trigger your stealth immunity, because the duration is refreshed by the field constantly, leaving you with 3 seconds of stealth after leaving the field (or the field dissipating)
That is incorrect. Your idea of Shadow Refuge is very different from what I’m noticing right now; perhaps it behaved that way in one of the previous Betas, but it isn’t like that at this moment. The stealth ‘pulse’ seems to occur at every second interval, one at the very beginning of the skill, for four pulses total. Problematically, these pulses stack in duration.
I can say for sure that it’s not merely a visual glitch, as I did use this fact to great effect in WvW by keeping an entire squad hidden in a middle of a huge enemy horde. You can also mine an entire Rich Mithril Ore out while being completely unseen by monsters, by throwing down Shadow Refuge on the ore.
You can break out of the stealth for Shadow Refuge prematurely by exiting the original area that the ability affects; if you wait about 10 seconds and escape where the ‘ring’ was, you will still break stealth even if you are stealthed for a longer duration by other means, and you will receive the debuff that prevents you from going stealth for 3 seconds.
As another bug, sometimes the debuff doesn’t occur, which means you can freely walk around any way you want, completely invisible to the enemy. I don’t have the full reproduction steps for this bug, however.
(edited by Narane.3825)