The only build with a lot of regeneration is a shout build with Guard, which I both dislike.
You don’t need to slot guard anymore really now that heal as one and strength of the pack are also shouts. Toss in sick em and you have 3 skills that are solid in their own right (unlike using guard just for regen) and essentially 100% regen uptime in fights.
Also warhorn with windborn notes in nature magic plus clarion bond in marksmanship give very high regen uptime too, for you and allies, even though windborn notes seems bugged and doesn’t give the full 10 seconds of regen advertised in the trait tooltip. With nature magic specced it should be 12 seconds (due to NM minor +20% boon duration) twice every 24 seconds for 100%, instead it gives around 16-18 or so. Still with oakheart salve and rejuvination (NM minor) it should be near 100% in most fights. You could also take dwayna runes and easily get 100%.
Finally just using healing spring with trapper’s expertise gives you over 100% as long as you stand in it more than half its duration.
That said, I’d be surprised if druid spec doesn’t have instances of regen traits given with how the boon seems to be what rangers offer most (along with fury offensively). Perhaps on staff skills themselves instead. Resistance also seems very likely. It would be really good to have some anti condition options besides two mutually exclusive traits, healing spring, and a two minute cd immobile elite.
Read the thread. Already been covered. Or are you THAT lazy.
I did read it. You posted numbers from siege of orgrimmar (after it was out for an entire year) and a lot of people were dismissing them as garbage because of your extreme negativity and hyperbole in other posts.
I posted further, more recent numbers from blackrock foundry (which actually support you) and gave context of the gameplay styles of the different difficulties involved.
IMO it is illogical and irrational (for the game as a whole) to spend significant development time and money going for 1 difficulty content at the “mythic” level. That is, organized guilds only, scheduled, repeated, practiced progress slowly over time, while thoroughly min/maxing and analyzing all facets of performance with intense scrutiny. Even in a raiding game like WoW, the numbers show maybe 5% of the playerbase wants to play like this.
On the other hand it could possibly be acceptable if the raids turn out to be around the WoW “normal” difficulty level. Which would certainly be “difficult and challenging content requiring organization” relative to other GW2 pve content. Where any 10 random players couldn’t be thrown in blind and faceroll win. But after a few weeks, with common strats online and vids on youtube, you could see pugs forming the the LFG listing, with a leader and a plan that needed to be followed in order for success. I could see maybe ~15% of the gw2 playerbase (up to this point a thoroughly non-raiding game) participating in that.
Unfortunately I don’t think many of the raiding elitists in this thread would be satisfied with anything but full on mythic mode. It’s up to Anet though.
Here are some recent WoW numbers for discussion:
These numbers are from 2.1 million accounts (an extremely large sample statistically speaking), and are a per account, not per character (so someone killing bosses on an alt doesn’t count twice). They are also biased towards raiders as anyone not in a guild won’t show up (but I don’t think this is that big of a number considering how much guild invite spam you get in WoW if you ever aren’t in a guild)
Context of the different difficulties:
LFR – This is queued, automatically formed raids, extremely easy. Think silverwastes level of difficulty. Very few boss mechanics need to be payed attention to by the majority of the players.
Normal – This is manually formed groups, mostly pugs through a browser like the LFG finder in gw2. Generally requires groups to actually do boss mechanics, but is fairly lenient.
Heroic – Also manually formed groups, some pugs some guilds. Similar to normal but everything has more health and hits harder.
Mythic – Completely intended for serious organized guilds with scheduled raids multiple nights a week with months of wiping for slow progress.
LRF: ~46-56% of players
Normal: ~25-30% of players for most bosses, ~12-20% for harder ones
Heroic: ~20% of players for most bosses, ~10-15% for harder ones
Mythic : ~3-5% of players for easier bosses, <1% for harder ones
Keep in mind these numbers are in a game that has had raiding for over a decade, and there is currently very little pve content in the game outside of raiding.
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gw2 was always supposed to provide challenging content, they just didnt want it to be content with mechanical walls, like joining big guilds, grinding gear, etc.
That’s the problem with “raids”. As soon as you make them “hard” execution-wise at an individual level with that many people, you pretty much mandate all the organizational/scheduling walls and all the application/trial/performance/drama crap that goes with it. Yet if the raid is doable without such things, it’s usually not satisfactorily difficult on an individual level.
I really don’t understand these complaints.
If they make the raids hard enough such that they require scheduled (can’t play when you want) and organized (can’t play with just anyone, needs to be the same people/guild so you make progress) groups, then they are content that effectively doesn’t exist for anyone who doesn’t want to schedule their life around a game.
Except those people are still paying for them. Developer time/resources are not infinite (this seems to be what you don’t understand). Raids aren’t just a bonus. They were made in place of something else. How much something else we don’t know yet because we haven’t seen how big/significant the raids are. Perhaps 5 or 6 new zones in HoT instead of 4. Perhaps more fractal style (scaling difficulty) instances. What about $35 for base HoT, and anyone who wants raids can pay an extra $15 for them? Who knows. But they aren’t just another skin set, they are whole additional areas with bosses and tuning involved.
Take WoW for example, which spends probably 40-50% of the dev “budget” on making raids (and then is forced to offer the mindnumbing, kittenized LFR version of it in order to justify that expense to the vast majority the player base who will never do organized raiding), leaving an insufficient amount of content outside of raiding. It’s one of the main reasons WoW is declining at the moment.
And organized raiders are a small minority in that game which has been “raid or quit” for years now, let alone GW2 which essentially set itself up as the antithesis of that game model. What percentage of the player base came to GW2 just to escape that? So it’s easy to see why a “GW2 now has Raids!” announcement can get negative reactions.
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again, factor in might, fury and banners…
your projection of soldier damage is way off…
Actually your formulas are incorrect and you are underestimating lower crit setups significantly.
Simple proof:
Assume two setups, A and B, where both have the same power and a 2x crit multiplier. A has a 100% crit chance however B has only a 50% crit chance. Using the formula you used Power * crit chance * crit multiplier, we would conclude that
A would do
power * 1 * 2
B would do
power * 0.5 * 2
So B would do half the damage of A, when the obvious correct answer is B does 75% the damage of A. Basically the formula you are using is only comparing the damage done from critical strikes and ignoring non crits. This inflates high crit % and ferocity.
Total damage is (non crit damage) + (extra damage from crits), or
(power) + (power * crit% * critbonus%)
Using that formula with your buffed stat numbers puts Soldiers at ~71.3% the damage of full zerk.
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Actually it does since the healing skills give some utility on top of that, while healing signet gives raw healing only. On top of that does having 2 healing skills mean that revenants can easiliy proc on healing skill usage runes.
It sounds about as OP as giving some other class TWO weapons they can switch between and use damage/cc/mobility abilities on both.
In terms of skins and collectables, most of them can be bought. Either directly with gold on the TP or by converting gold to gems and buying them in the store. Go to a banker and look at the wardrobe. This lists and previews every skin in the game. Find some you like then look them up on the wiki (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Main_Page) to see where they come from. Check the TP to see if you can buy it directly and the price. You’d be surprised how some of the fanciest skins are pretty cheap. Then it’s just a question of getting the gold. Don’t make the mistake of trying to farm most things directly, that is a path to frustration. Just play whatever you find the most fun and you will accumulate wealth. Then pick what you want to buy. Ascended gear can mostly be bought (money to skill up tradeskills, money to buy time gated mats, laurels come from just logging in) if you want a few stats too instead of just skins.
Dungeon and fractal skins can’t be bought with gold so you’d have to do those to get them. Do them if you find them fun.
You don’t need gear to do the lobby based pvp. Only WvW uses your pve gear. Do them if you find them fun.
I find it best to mix it up. Don’t get stuck on doing one monotonous activity because it’s the “optimal” and “most efficient” way. Just play what you feel like doing each day. If you don’t feel like doing anything, then don’t; take a break.
I’d much rather he reliably attacked instead of standing around like a moron half the time before getting greedy and asking for that other extreme irritation of water to be changed.
No one needs +100% duration anything to be balanced (in the pvp aspect of the game at least). Look at spvp, other than str runes since the feature patch, condition builds are highly competitive/desired. And that’s without stupid dire gear or OP food.
Your compensation for the loss of +duration food is the loss of -duration food.
There is no sense in – % duration food after you nerf the + 40% to +10%.
No, it would be similar in potency to the 3-5% offense you get from 80-100 power or 3-5% damage reduction from 80-100 toughness whatever. Though I could see things like mango pies or omnomberry pies being the new go-to food.
No sense is what we have currently: just look at all the -15% or -20% to a single specific condition foods, when blanket -duration to all conditions exists with over double the potency.
First, on food: both +40% and -40% should be nerfed down to 10%. They currently simply remove 99% of choice. If you use conditions to do damage, you are stupid to use anything but +duration, if only to not get screwed by anyone using -duration. Anyone else is stupid to use anything but -duration, if only to not get screwed by anyone using +duration. Things like melandru runes and dogged march also wouldn’t be anywhere near as powerful if there wasn’t the absurd food for them to stack with. Taking something from 100 to 75 is a much smaller % decrease than taking it from 60 to 35.
As for conditions in general, I think certain classes need to be changed to require more than just stack condition damage and when it comes to consider duration, just think “OP food has it covered!” to get high condition dps. A pitifully weak trait or two and on-crit sigils are nowhere near enough to overcome the defensive advantages dire/apothecary gear gives. P/D dire thieves are just the most grievous offenders. Necro’s, warriors, and rangers have a small bleed on crit. Engineers’ incendiary powder “nerf” actually make crit far less important when they increased the cooldown. You don’t get much of any benefit on crit after say 20-25% when you only need 1 crit every 10 seconds for 6-7 seconds of burning. Mesmers are probably the only class that suffer significantly if they don’t invest in precision due to the bleeds from sharper images having no cooldown and being a large chunk of their condi application capability.
The problem with low/no cooldown, on-crit condi procs is they remove a lot of the desired counter-ability of well timed cleanses and turn it into constant spam. So atm it might be too big of an undertaking to redesign/rebalance condition gear requirements. Probably the best solution would be to have never implemented dire gear in the first place (and please don’t ever bring it to spvp), but too late for that eh?
Permanent vigor isn’t the problem.
The problem is feline grace bypassing the 100% endurance regen rate cap. Everyone else gets just vigor. Thieves with 6 acro/trickery can get ~50% more dodges (from feline grace reducing dodge “cost” by ~35%) on top of vigor, plus withdraw on top of that. Personally I’d change feline grace to “endurance regenerates 50% faster” so it doesn’t stack with vigor.
It is the nature of MMORPGS to cause players to continue to play long, long after they’ve stopped having fun just playing the game. If everything stays the same or too much changes, it matters not. People can get misguided and fixated on “progressing” their character that by the time they move on they really hate the game. I played WoW for about 2 years too long out of 6. When I quit I thought blizzard had ruined the game and it was garbage etc etc, though the vast majority was simply a case of me no longer having fun playing the basic premise.
This is of course, the way mmorpgs make a lot of their money. Just ignore what other people say about a game, on a subjective level, and make your own decision. If you’re having fun playing, do so. Stop as soon as you only care about “completing” things.
GW2 is nice with no sub in that you can come back a few months down the road if you get the desire.
Results of my 3 minute test in HotM: scepter reactive block is bugged and still 8 seconds with both cd reduction traits, the active use isn’t though and goes down to 6.
Other than an occasional veil/portal, the general consensus seems to be that mesmers aren’t very compatable with wvw zerg vs zerg combat. Usually too much single target damage, and too much damage potential tied up in things that fall over dead instantly to random aoe.
This is very true to 1 or 2 two lone mesmers in a zerg. Hypothetically though, what if the entire zerg of 30-50 were mesmers? Could they setup in such a way to mitigate these shortcomings?
From what I’ve seen, the standard organized zerg consists of a large ball of warriors and guardians, with a spattering of elementalists and necros skirting around the edges of the fight. The melee ball has heavy access to stability, stuns, and condition removal, and is definitely doing the bulk of the damage in fights.
So, with that in mind, here’s what I’d propose in our hypothetical scenario:
The Build
- Basic Premise: Do not focus on phantasm damage or stealth. Stay balled up, use clone death traits to completely overwhelm their condition removal and supplement damage. Note that clones also greatly enhance your survivability as well, as with the target caps for attacks when your 30-50 players suddenly becomes 60-200, not everyone gets hit. The enemy melee ball and ranged aoe won’t be able to stop from hitting and killing clones, and every death will spamming 3 conditions aoe.
- Why Sword/Focus? Best cleave dps as well as short cooldown evade. Boon stripping as well. Wardens are aoe damage but also protection from any enemies staying at range while you fight the melee ball. Temporal curtain for constant pulls, swiftness, cripple and for catching runners along with illusionary leap.
- Why Greatsword? Ranged aoe for when you aren’t pressured by melee. Works decently as a hybrid weapon due to sharper images.
- Why Celestial? The clone death traits damage is completely condition, but power and crit are needed for the weapons. No one can be squishy so toughness and vitality are needed too. Healing power is probably the weakest overall, but still gets used.
- Mantras? This is the core of the mesmer zerg sustain. This gives everyone 3 stunbreaks that also do aoe stability. The heal is for more personal condition removal with mender’s purity and since rarely will the fight be over in one clash, everyone has large aoe healing while they heal themselves too. No water fields needed.
- Why Null Field? AoE boon stripping plus condition removal. Need to get the stability and protection off the melee ball. Mesmer zerg can put these down constantly.
- Third Utility? Feedback as a default perhaps, to neutralize whatever ranged dps there is, but I don’t think everyone needs to run this. This should be a variety of utility. Veil, portal, illusion of life, and even some with mantra of pain for the no/low cooldown aoe heal when regrouping.
- Elite? I’d say half time-warp, half mass invisibility. Enough to make your whole zerg vanish despite the 10 target cap.
- Why Pack Runes? Mesmers lack offensive boons. This should hand out a large amount of might, fury, and swiftness to many allies.
- Why Torment Sigils? More aoe damage and yet another cover condition.
- Why Koi Cakes? If there is enough condition spam going out overwhelm active cleansing, then the durations need to be as long as possible for more control and damage and not be marginalized by passive -duration food and runes.
Anyone else have any fun ideas?
I find it hard to get a clearly superior damage output using soldiers/knights/zerk, while maintaining a certain level of toughness, without giving yourself too much vit. This is because of the lack of choices of high power gear (the kinds that really boosts your direct damage).
PPF (zerker)
PVF (valk)
PVT (soldier)
PPH (zealot)
That’s what you have to choose from. Compared to a celestial/cleric mix, if you mix zerker and soldier and keep your hp at the right level, then you lose toughness. If you then start throwing in knights instead of zerker to counteract that, you damage advantage starts to shrink.
Comparing these two setups:
zerk/soldier/knight: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fFEQJAoYhcMKcW5wzBf0APAC5fD3JKQ5qJfC-T1RSwATUGUUPAg9Hqo0jqqFjUCCVNFyAwMGA-w
cleric/celestial: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fFEQJAoYhcMKcW5wzBf0APAC5fD3JKQ5qJfC-TVRSwAF1DES53W1fAs/wIlgkBgZMA-w
Assuming 100% fury uptime (pack runes) and 10 stacks of might (easy enough), the z/s/k setup does around 15% more direct damage on average (including crits), while the c/c setup does around 14% more burning and 19% more bleeding damage. The z/s/k has 270 more health, the c/c heals for 20-30% more depending on ability.
Note that if our damage breakdown was half direct and half condition, there would be no overall damage advantage whatsoever. That’s an unrealistic assumption though and the actual ratio is probably going to vary from fight to fight depending on what gets dodged and how much armor and condition removal your opponent has. If say ~25% of your damage comes from burning and bleeding, that puts the damage advantage of z/s/k at around ~12%. The difference gets smaller as might stacks increase as well.
~12% damage vs 20-30% more healing? Doesn’t seem like there’s any one “best” choice. I think with either one your skill as a player will matter far more for how well you do.
This is solely from a wvw perspective of course. If the OP is talking about pve, then most people will definitely recommend a lot more berserker.
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If you sit on one point an entire game, no problems at all, if you try to move from point to point (even taking a very nice path) they are liable to mess up a bit.
I’m not sure this is the case, as when I did the test with the earth elemental, I never moved more than maybe 2500-3000 units from (rough estimate, just far enough to get him to disengage), and was killing mobs with him bugged directly on top of the spot that I had summoned him. All over flat ground of course.
Regardless, if this is something beyond their coding capability to fix they need to completely rework the summon cast time, duration, and cooldowns so that being “permanent” isn’t just a liability. IE: 1/2 sec summon cast time, ~1 minute duration, 20-40 second cooldowns.
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I don’t think it has anything to do directly with time spent summoned.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuI1A_SthCs&feature=player_detailpage#t=77
He summons a fresh golem right as the match starts and it bugs out immediately upon reaching midfight. Doesn’t do a single auto attack before it dies 2 minutes later.
Testing this really quick, there is some “feature” with companions that makes them disengage if you get far enough away from them. Presumably so you can keep your summon and not get locked in combat when you just want to run away. Well I tried it out with some of my elementalist summons, earth elemental. Had a mob agro and hit me, the pet auto defended, then I ran away. At a certain distance, he disengaged and came running over to me. I then directly attacked another mob or two. Guess what? Earth elemental stood there dumb as a flesh golem for the last ~25 seconds of his life before expiring as I killed 2 or 3 mobs. I tried it some more with an air elemental but couldn’t get it to bug out. Maybe because it’s ranged, or because it didn’t walk back to me but instantly ported when it disengaged. Curiously, my guardian’s sword spirit weapon would NEVER disengage, no matter how far I ran.
So IMO the problem is this engage/disengage logic based on range is FUBAR. You just only see it with necro minions because besides rangers, who have complete control anyway, everyone else just summons their stuff AT the fight, and it dies or expires without ever traveling to another fight. So in the case of the above video, I think when the warrior shot him from range at the start of the mid fight, the golem AI made the choice “do not engage.” (he’s at range and the necro hasn’t attacked anyone, I shouldn’t run off) Then the necro quickly moved far away after the engineer. The AI however was stuck on “disengage” and never got out of it.
So indirectly time increases the likelihood of the bug occurring due to more “disengage” happenings.
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It’s been bugged since release. Approaching 2 years now. Don’t hold your breath thinking it will be fixed any time soon.
It does seem to be a pathing issue. He knows to attack, he just doesn’t try or know to walk over to his target. Seems to be the same with all necro melee minions.
Never had a single problem with any other classes’ AI companion abilities: ranger pets on auto defensive, elementalist elementals, guardian spirit weapons (kitten near exact clones of necro minions, work perfectly), etc. kittenes me off more than any other thing in this game how they can let this go for so long.
The main difference is in wvw you can easily assume going into any encounter with 100% lifeforce due to all the mobs around. In spvp you can assume the opposite unless your team is already winning. This difference in survivability and effectiveness is huge. There’s also several necro specific damage nerfs still in place in spvp due to dhuumfire that need to be undone now that it’s nerfed. Wvw also allows exploitation of some really overpowered kitten like perplexity runes for condi stacking burst and 40% condi duration food. No dhuumfire needed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=7p8P0LWFDAI#t=500
Compare the wvw vids to this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvuc99al9j4
This game is not GPU bound- it’s heavily CPU Bound for larger areas.
Mantle support would not give much of a boost – it would also be expensive to code, develop and test for.
Mantle is all about removing CPU bottlenecking with direct3d. You get very large gains when you have a slow cpu and fast graphics card, but not much at all with with a fast cpu and slow graphics card. It is logical to conclude that this is the type of game it would benefit most.
That said, I don’t think there’s a chance at all of them implementing it as they haven’t even bothered with implementing directx 11/11.1, still only using directx 9, which is over a decade old.
There’s no way they’re going to have 45% might duration on one rune set and the same 45% to all boons on another. Much more likely going to be around 30% boon duration total. BUT, you should get a pick of a working 4 and 6 pc bonus now, along with higher stat totals. Perhaps there could even be some choice now in which boon duration set you want too. We won’t know until the patch. Personally I don’t think 60% boon duration vs 75% (including traits) makes that big of a difference, if it’s made up for by those other things on the rune sets.
No one uses just scepter air 1 by itself though, 2 and 3 can also be instantly cast while channeling it. And of course, raw sustained dps wise a melee range attack is going best a 900 range attack, that’s just the way Anet has designed the game.
It’s not that fresh air is only usable with scepter, it’s that scepter gets a lot out of it. If you think dagger’s fire/water/earth #1s are bad, scepter’s versions are beyond pathetic. Fresh air lets you do exactly what you say, use the 2-3 good skills in your other attunements then get back to your best attack in air as quickly as possible.
I see kick as being viable in a distracting strikes build. Other than that though…?
Bolas is pretty good though, when it lands. Not just for setting up your own hundred blades, but for making a single target very vulnerable to group burst.
Runes of speed can sub for traveler’s runes for the financially constrained. They’re not quite as good but about 1/4th the price last time I looked. The extra vit just means you can replace a few dire pieces with more rabid if you want. The main thing you lose is the boon/cond duration but instead get a swiftness proc.
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Even 20% is over budget. Should be 10%.
Just compare to the other foods:
Rare Veggie Pizza: +40% cond. duration, +70 cond. damage
vs
Chocolate Omnomberry Cake: +15% chill duration, +70 power
vs
Bowl of Fire Meat Chili: +15% buring duration, +70 precision
Hrm, which should I use, +15% to a single specific condition or +40% to all of them? You have to delusionally biased to not see the +/- 40% foods are grossly out of line.
As for the whole “but but but but we need these to be viable!” crap, no one uses conditions in spvp because there’s no +40% food right?
If you really want to go staff for pve leveling, I’d do staff + greatsword with at least 15-20 into dueling for sharper images and deceptive evasion, then use rampagers gear (mix of power/prec/cond). Basically a lot of extra damage from bleed on crits instead of crit damage.
Something like http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fgAQJAWRlwzKqXQzqGb9ICKFYX2RShqlalUgbXIA-jwwA5vioxqWw0mER1A-e
dueling first, illusions second, last 10 points can go anywhere.
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IMO, for solo leveling it’s more important to reduce your phantasm cooldown times than to increase their damage. You’re going to be facing a lot of weak mobs that die quickly, you want to be able to get another one out asap on the next target as they are a huge chunk of your dps, even without the traits increasing their damage.
Everything else in inspiration isn’t very important for leveling (you are plenty survivable with just clones, decoy, and mass invis), so you’re basically spending 25-30 trait points for just 15% phantasm damage.
Instead, I’d suggest going for blade training first (+critical infusion), and 10 in domination for empowered illusions. At 40 respec for 0/15/0/0/15 for illusionist’s celerity, getting 20 dueling and deceptive evasion after that. From there you can either put more points into illusions if you want to shatter every mob or go up domination for empowered illusions again and greatsword training. Use sword/sword (or sw/p) and greatsword, focus on power + precision gear.
Condition mesmers are kinda frustrating in pve because a ton of your damage comes from scepter block and confusion, both being flaky in pve with mob slow swing speed and failure to even attack you.
Everything does work though, I think it’s better to keep switching weapons around so you don’t get bored than simply level as fast as possible.
So lets think about this. Do you mean to say that all the bad players in the game are drawn to the ranger profession? All the better players play other professions? hmm what are the odds of that?
It’s actually very plausible as the same phenomenon has been observed in other MMORPGs with the “ranged, bow using, pet master” class archetype. They aren’t known as “huntards” in WoW for nothing you know…
I too think it has a lot to do with how absolutely trivial the pet makes solo open world content while leveling, in both games.
Perhaps further compounding this is GW2s “ranged dps is inferior” paradigm that is done for pvp reasons yet ends up conflicting with all the players choosing the class to be “THE bow user, 100%”
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Still a net loss of zero skills compared to the ele if you take three kits, and an engi gets vastly more versatility because of the variety available to them.
Remember another great thing about engineers’ setup is because kits are optional, anet has to consider how the class would play without them or with just one or two. This leads to both weapon and kit ability cooldowns to be much shorter than elementalists’ weapon ability cooldowns. Most engineers find more than 1 or 2 kits to be unnecessary as it’s just ability overload, while elementalists need all 4 attunements or they’d easily run out of “good buttons to push”.
The meta isn’t elitist, it’s not a belief in superiority, it’s a fact that the meta is superior, or would you say “completing a dungeon faster using build X versus build Y” means that it isn’t superior? This is from an efficiency standpoint of course.
The belief that efficiency/speed itself is always superior and “the meta” can’t see why anyone would want to do anything else is the very epitome of elitism.
The guardians are right, we should encourage more skillful usage and timing in this game.
Therefore we should change retaliation to only have a ~2 second duration so they learn not to spam it mindlessly and time it for when the multi hit attacks are coming.
Given what Anet has said over the past year, when they nerfed retal durations the first time, this is actually how they envision it to play out as a counter anyway.
Then I looked at Engineers who can also switch between multiple ability bars (kits) with a 1 SECOND cooldown, giving them access to many USEFUL abilities with short cooldowns with no downsides…and a 100% spammable toolbelt to boot. I felt I was always ready for any situation! Dealing damage whenever I wanted, going defensive whenever I needed, switching between the two at will.
As much as I hate comparing different classes, Elementalist basically plays & feels like a VASTLY inferior Engineer.
That’s my opinion on it too. I don’t feel adaptive as elementalist because the cooldowns of the skills themselves are so long that I can’t stay “offensive”, “healing” or “defensive” for more than a few seconds. So instead of me deciding on my “stance” for however long I want/need to play like that, I feel obligated to switch through attunements, use the strong skills, and then move on. My play is always going to be a mix of all, unless I’m doing trivial pve content where I can just camp in fire with the staff.
I’m not sure just removing the attunement cd would even fix that. I think I might even prefer an attunement cd increase if it meant shorter cds on the skills themselves. Either way, having BOTH downsides of long skill recharges and attunement cds feels extremely unnecessary.
Yes I noticed the change where minions now are immediately attacking targets you do any hostile action towards. Seems they removed that whole “wait for 2 auto attacks nonsense”.
However they still didn’t fix the bug. Within a few minutes playing my flesh golem was doing his usual standing around doing nothing while I’m hacking away at a mob. Swapping weapons seems to unbug this situation.
I want it to be a condition because DS feels really weak if you’re a condition build with no power.
Overall aesthetics: shroud, scythe staff, green icons etc.
Condition manipulation gameplay: somewhat minor in effect, but one of the few non-passive synergistic uses of abilities in this game
Epidemic: spreading 4-8 conditions to 5 targets on such a short cooldown is so fun
Relatively good trait layouts: Many other classes have ~2 good trait lines that are specced into 95% of the time.
Strong single target dps while not being super squishy: at least when minions aren’t bugged out.
In fact, the correct AI is already in the game. If you want to see it for yourself, take a guardian to the heart of the mists, equip a staff and the sword spirit weapon. Guardian staff 1 is a 5 target aoe, and staff 2 is a piercing projectile. Both cause the sword to immediately attack the golem you have targeted, no matter how many you hit. Amazingly, when you target something else and cast staff 1 again, the sword immediately switches targets to that exact one.
It took all of 5 minutes in game right now before auto attacking with the scepter failed to get minions to attack on the the 2nd hit. 5-6 hits later they start. This is on an open plane with no obstructions and using no other skills. Multiple mobs in a row like this. Only swapping weapons then swapping back fixed it. I’ve had this problem with dagger before too. I do not know what causes it to bug, but bug it does, and fairly often.
Staff 1 seems to never follow the 2 attack rule. It’s always the delay rule. Marks usually cause immediate attack, but again, within 5 minutes I ran into the case where marks would no longer trigger agro just like the scepter bug.
I’m sorry, they need to just get rid of all these delays and all the associated bugs. They should immediately attack anything I’ve hit with any skill, preferring the one I am targeting if applicable Continue to leash (stop attacking and come back to you) at 2500-3000 range. “Pulling” is a sorry excuse. It’s just a very small percentage of cases where it might cause you to lose minions. Oh no! They’re disposable. If you’re by yourself, MM necro is already incredibly strong solo pve. If you’re doing group content, someone else can pull. Compare that very specific isolated case to you know, pretty much every other situation where you don’t want to have to open up with 2 auto attacks nor wait ~6 seconds. Just watch the first kitten fight, it’s pathetic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIEt3jQn55U
As for pets and water, I agree that it isn’t a big deal that they aren’t available underwater, and don’t think it’s worth ANet’s man-hours to make all the animations they’d need. However, despawning pets should NOT trigger the cooldown. Only dying pets should. It’s one thing to have to resummon them after stepping in a puddle. It’s a whole different level of stupid to have them be unavailable for 40-60 seconds as well. Until that changes, I’ll avoid water like it was lava on my necro.
One last thing which no one has mentioned:
- Summoned creatures and pets can no longer draw aggro from enemies that have not already aggroed on their master.
Anyone notice that that april 30 patch note doesn’t apply to necro minions? Really kitten es me off, especially since our minions love to run ahead 500 some range after you stop.
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I think the much bigger issue is that you can left click target friendlies (in a game where there is zero reason to ever directly target a friendly in combat) and corpses among other things. When there’s lots of targets around and the “target nearest” type functions simply aren’t feasible, the direct target is atrocious. Especially since in this game you can use abilities with improper targets and they simply fail and go on cooldown. They really need to have an option like “Left click only targets living hostiles while in combat”.
While you’re fixing seven+ month old bugs, could you fix necro melee minions as well?
Talking about:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/My-new-Minion-Mancer-WvW-Movie-Enjoy
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Scarecrow-Army-Volume-1-MM-WvW
I found that armor/HP downscales too much but dmg not enough. In low lvl zones I kill much faster than in high level zones, to the point that I can oneshot things constantly with at least 4 different skills, but the mobs also kill me faster than high level ones do.
This is my experience as well. Going around one-two shotting mobs in <1.5 seconds is exactly what the downscaling was supposed to prevent. It is really really boring for me. It removes all nuances of the combat. It’s not about making it “hard” but making it feel like a game with some depth.
Damage output needs to scale down A LOT more. Survivability needs to come up a bit.
Ya you’re right, 1-100 is a hair over 1 level. Never paid exact attention to it even though I have everything but Artificer and Huntsman at 400.
With that in mind, if you do craft to 400 I’d suggest making the rares as much as possible in the last tier (at 325+ i think it is) if you’re doing a gear based tradeskill. Buy the patterns for karma from the trainer. For me these sold on the TP for material cost so it was pretty much getting xp for free.
Just make sure you have a decent amount of AOE capability. Single target dps doesn’t matter anywhere near as much as not being able to aoe while leveling. I prefer staff for that role, along with well of suffering. Other weapon can be any of the other 3. Usually dagger as a single target dps/object buster.
Spec doesn’t really matter, though greater marks (10 pts death magic) is really key for said staff. More important is gearing. Necros are very hybrid, you want both power and condition damage. Don’t get fooled by that bleed on crit trait in curses. It’s very weak and certainly doesn’t make you want precision/condition over power/condition.
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I know what you mean about the same weapon getting boring after a while. I get bored of any weapon on any class after about ~5 levels. Maybe 10-15 for ele since they have more skills and less auto attack.
I’d focus less on leveling as fast as possible and put more value on having fun actually playing. Unfortunately warrior isn’t the best class for variety of playstyles. The traits and utility skills aren’t as differing as other classes like ele or necro. Most warrior traits are “do more damage with X weapon” or “do more damage with all weapons” or “don’t be kited as much” (which doesn’t really mean anything in pve as mobs don’t kite you).
Biggest change you’ll get is try out a condition damage build (not only condition, get power + condition) and use sword + sword, longbow etc.
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except thats not how the warrior skill works. if you start your spin close to your target, you’ll hit 4 times. and if you start spinning far away, and just barely reach your target by the end of the spin, then it’ll hit once.
This is completely false. Just did several whirlwinds straight through mobs, starting point blank in melee range:
2 hits
3 hits
2 hits
3 hits
2 hits
2 hits
1 hit
1 hit
2 hits
3 hits
And when I whirled into a wall, so I was right on top of the mob for the whole spin?:
4 hits
4 hits
4 hits
4 hits
4 hits
If any ability doesn’t hit for it’s full potential on a static target, when it’s meant to, that ability is broken.
He just said it’s not “meant to.”
The berserker itself travels as it attacks. 4 attacks are spread out over the distance. Not all 4 of them are going to always be in range of a stationary target.
It’s completely identical to warrior greatsword whirlwind, where you do A LOT more damage if you stay right next to them for the entire animation. Such as if the warrior is crippled/chilled or immobilized, the attack barely moves and thus gets more hits. Same with if the target is next to a wall, and you whirlwind into the wall so you don’t move.
I’ve had it on my necro while leveling for months, with no other bleed proc equip. Auto attacking with dagger always gave very short bleeds, certainly nowhere near 5 seconds.
In addition to those two things, I think 15 dueling (clone/phant bleed on crit) trait is an issue. When it is such a large source of your condition applications, it requires you to have a large amount of precision in addition to condition damage. This makes it much harder to to make a survivable condition build with ample toughness/vit/healing power. Condi rangers, and necros don’t rely on crits anywhere near as much . They get a few small bonus bleeds from crits, but it doesn’t feel absolutely necessary to have a high crit rate.