Guild Wars 2

The argument isn’t Renewed Focus is bad. It does do some awesome stuff.

The issue is that it is a very lackluster elite that is heavily dependent upon traits to do anything. I can completely understand a utility or weapon skill being that dependent, but an elite?

It’s basically a second Empower with a much longer CD and no real benefit.

Shelter probably saves you more than Renewed Focus.

Our Virtues in generally are a bit mediocre. If the passive effects remained, I think the actives would actually be pretty balanced. 99% of the time, unless you can immediately refresh the Virtue, you do not want to activate it. Similar to many of the Signets, the actives are just poorly designed and far too limited to use.

Renewed Focus is conceptually a good skill..it’s just barely a step up from a standard utility skill. We’re talking about an elite that is comparable to Staff’s Empower, but arguably offering less support AND having nearly 5 times the CD.

Empower gives you 12 stacks of might for 8 seconds every 20 (16) seconds. It heals for a moderate amount and can be interrupted prematurely to give the heal.

Renewed Focus untraited, gives 3 second invulnerability and refreshes the Virtues (Burn, Regen/Heal, and Aegis). With traits it can also give 5 seconds of Might (3), Blind, Regen, and Protection. If interrupted, it does not refresh for another 90 seconds.

Really the only advantage Renewed Focus has over Empower is the invulnerability, which staying still for several seconds can just delay death, not prevent it.

Definitely awesome, but not really worth the difference in cooldowns of 20(16) versus 90 seconds doesn’t really make up for the meager, limited defensive difference.

Compare Guardian’s elites to Necro. They have a pet that does solid DPS, cripples a target, and is a warm body to soak damage. Plague gives a huge HP boost while spamming poison/blind/bleed/weakness for its duration.

If you’re dying around level 12 on any class at all, you probably need more practice with the game.

All it really takes to avoid dying in PvE is to spec tanky enough for the amount of mobs you plan to pull. If you’re a glass cannon build, you’re likely killing less mobs at once or kiting. If you’re facechecking stuff, you’ll probably decently spec for vit/tgh. Doing either disproportionately just hurts your kill speed.

For any class.

If you’re looking for a class that doesn’t gaf, look at warrior. They have comparable sustainability with more offense.

Also it is quite silly to make sweeping judgements on any class before you at least have major traits unlocked and access to all the skill slots. PvP and PvE are completely different to boot, and each have their own balance issues to deal with.

Oh wells, lvl 12 troll post is troll post.

Honestly the Scepter and Staff only need a small retweaking.

If Staff’s range was increased to 750 or 900, it would make a huge difference, while its low base damage would still keep it sub-par for single target DPS.

Scepter’s orbs could be made faster and Smite could be changed to count as a symbol or field. You could also tweak Scepter’s #1 to be a chain attack with the additional strikes blinding and/or burning the target.

Guardian’s main issue isn’t that the skill sets on our ranged weapons are bad, but their difficulty in landing strikes at a distance (Staff’s range, Scepter’s speed).

The UI needs improving and basic customization, regardless of whether player-created addons become available.

You should be able to resize/hide all the windows independently. Everyone has different things they want to see more or less prominently, this is really just a basic preference that I’m pretty sure every other game typically has some HUD control.

The addition of some % and # markers (target at 58% health, ally at 13k health, boon/condition at 5 seconds, etc) for information you could already derive from the game (like hovering over) should probably be added.

Ultimately if I can control how the game looks on my end, allowing me to highlight and resize the bits I care about, I’ll be all set.

Also, is there any existing or talk about a parser for this game? Would love to see some non-anecdotal logs for damage.

I initially went with Mesmer back in the beta, but the illusions mechanic felt sloppy to me.

Clones are pretty easy to spot, even easier if you have first hand experience playing Mesmer. While they are initially giving people some edges in PvP, this is partly due to the community as a whole not being intimately familiar with the class.

AFAIK, you can’t charge them up pre-combat, once you’re engaged in combat they typically don’t trick anyone already targeting you (save for stealth/swap ones), and they melt to any AoE or cleave attack, which seems at least most competent PvPers will have skills that can destroy them out just as soon as you pop them.

Some of these mechanics may have changed since the game went live and other people may have found better ways to prevent the above from happening, but overall I haven’t really seen Mesmers do very well in WvWvW PvP scenarios. Typically when I find them they run away and personally haven’t seen any that have damage I would run from.

I’m not sure on their overall damagepotential, but I’m pretty sure their core condition Confusion is still pretty worthless since the Scepter nerfs and their main DPS weapon GS requires them to be ranged, which seems super easy to destroy their numbers. Unsure on sword/pistol numbers.

It’s an awesome class idea, but the execution has left me lacking. There are a lot of very skilled players making the most of the class, but I feel any success with Mesmer is from the player being skilled, not that the class.

That Phantasm build Malakree posted could be interesting, although I’m curious how quick the Phantasms will die to people recognizing where the damage is coming from.