Guild Wars 2

Makes you appreciate the fantastic terrain design again, with all the great normal / collision maps, that will make sure to let you know they are still working properly (against you)…

Same for us (Ninja Nurse Rescue Squad). We’re also at guild level 32, if that helps.

Diovid.9506:

It’s not quite as simple as you make it out to be.

Yes, it is. Most professions can fill multiple roles easily. Just switch some gear and traits, and you transformed a phantasm power mesmer into a mantra healing bot, a hybrid D/D ele into a staff AoE machine, a guardian from tank to heal support to brute damage, etc.

I get that people don’t like certain playstyles, but you still should be able to adapt to situations. You neither need to relog, nor does acquiring gear for playing another role require long grind. If your group lacks heals, there are many professions that can provide dedicated healing builds, or just stack blasts and water fields. If your group lacks CC, switch an offhand weapon or utility. If your group lacks power or condition damage… well, that’s your fault… (please note how the statements are mostly profession-agnostic, so “everyone” can fill each role in a viable way)

While wielding a greatsword, the Reaper lacks animations for the following skills:

• Well of Corruption
• Well of Suffering
• Well of Darkness
• Well of Power
• Signet of the Locust
• Signet of Spite
• Plague Signet
• Spectral Wall

Signets show the symbol above the necro’s character, but lack the animation that’s played on other weapons.

Well of Blood and Signet of Undead already play the appropriate animations even while holding a greatsword.

Mak.2657:

You operating wrong numbers/ doing wrong math.

Yup, never should’ve agreed to enter the math here as it proves useless anyways. Mesmer can use Zerker and has access to more power through might and better damage output via vulnerability, while Thief has to rely on Marauders.

So… I went into the mists and abused the light target golems to prove my point. Both professions on their respective meta builds with vamp runes. Results just for the burst section of the respective combo are included (no dodge for MW wasted). You can add ~3k for thief AA chain and 2k for Mind Stab and / or ~1k for CoF, Wave for the probable heal interrupt, or swap weapons and do whatever.

Mak.2657:

Steal, shadow shot backstab? SS is on 4s CD (if roughly convert ini to cd) .

Shadow Shot only ports you towards your target and can be seen, even when casted from stealth. You can interrupt the damage part of SS to keep your stealth, but the blind really gives anything else away.
Precasting MB spawns it directly at the target when combined with Blink, or you simply walk up to your target (only closer than 240 units range required), stun mid-cast and you’ll sometimes see the numbers you can see in the attached image.

Mak.2657:

Though mesmer can survive few secs more in center of teamfight (due to distortion and blurred frenzy) he is still very glassy.

S/T is okay, but not meta. GS and staff are more probable encounters for obvious reasons: Staff offers many defensive boons and conditions, pseudo-stunbreak and port on low CD, and pulsing AoE interrupts, as well as a very strong illusion.

Thief has to switch to short bow or waste initiative to stealth or HS away to build distance, or they use a long CD utility, while mesmer still has strong area denial and has way more interrupts and defensive boons / skills to keep themselves alive. Also: Single target vs AoE. Also range in team fights. Really, the only thing thieves are currently better at is mobility and on-demand stealth access. Damage and control goes heavily in favour of the mesmer.

Iavra.8510:

Mind Stab is too slow for your burst, especially if you want to Mirror Blade and Dodge beforehand to get your 3 clone shatter.

With a 3+1 Mind Wrack you raise the coefficient from 2.67 to 3.2 ( for the shatter but waste up to 3/4th of a second to deliver additonal damage (your target should be stunned and there’s no need to waste energy), depending on when you actually shatter.
MS ist roughly 1/4 a second to cast when you know how to avoid the aftercast for 1.0 higher damage output. Also it’s more useful to have an additional stun with Harmonious Mantras (which, btw, further raises your overall damage by 0.03 per mantra activation within the effect’s duration).

denis.9487:

You add a crux to thief burst yet ignore the Mesmer crux? Our burst is tied to paper thin illusions and ai!! If looking at the burst then the thief is higher in a perfect world. Like how you favored the thief crux though.

The above mentioned burst isn’t affected by clone health and ai. You literally throw MB in your opponent’s face while they are stunned / immobilized, maybe teleport near them to get the IP proc as well, shatter as soon as the clones are out and that’s it. Really, it’s not that hard to land as you try to convince me.

Again, I want to emphasize on what makes thief backstabs way harder to land: They have to get in range, which either means they are already in your face and are very much affected by any cleaving melee and PbAoE effect, or have to use a gap closer on long cooldowns (steal is an exception, but that’s also their profession mechanic). Getting a flanking hit off requires positional awareness relative to your opponent, which is quite hard if your target is moving all the time. Mesmer shatters are homing and even PbAoE with a 240 radius (agian, that’s the size of a Ring of Fire or that of the side cap nodes), without relative positional benefits. You got the damage baseline from range if you don’t want to get near your opponent. A thief has to get in there and is vulnerable to all the kitten that’s getting thrown down on the spot where they’re supposed to deliver damage.

Fay.2357:

Most of your post is just random whining, but I’ll take this bit:

Call it whatever you want… It’s just a list of mesmer strengths, backed by explanations, which we currently have to deal with when facing a shatter / lockdown mesmer.

Fay.2357:

Backstab + auto chain = 4.66 skill coeff. Mug is something more, but not listed.

Simple mesmer shatter:

• Mirror Blade: 2 * 0.7 = 1.40
• Mind Wreck: 3 * 0.89 = 2.67
• Mental Anguish: 0.30
• Mind Stab: 1.0 (can be aborted early and still get the full effect)
• Vulnerability: 1 + (3 + 5) * 0.005 = 0.04

adds up to 5.41 in ~1 second. Then we also got at least 8 might stacks from MB and CI (all considering that you interrupted your target before landing the above skills so you benefit from the traits. After that your DPS drops a bit and you either spam autoattack (at least 0.5 over 1.5 seconds), go for another interrupt or swap weapons. At this time a thief used steal, backstabbed (hopefully from a flanking position) and triggered mug. Total over 2.5 seconds is roughly 6.

Let’s compare that to D/P thief:

• Backstab: 2.4
• Mug: 1.7
• AA: 0.56 + 2 * 0.85 = 2.26
• Exposed Weakness: 0.1
• Lead Attack: ~0.05

adds up to roughly 6.51. Here’s the crux with that: It is chained, doesn’t rip nearly as much boons, is more spread out, mug doesn’t crit, except for the AA chain it’s single-target and thieves are running Marauder instead of Zerker. Thus the actual damage output is way lower even against single targets.

Fay.2357:

In other words, you’re wrong.

Still have to prove me wrong.

Fay.2357:

Good luck landing that combo on someone paying attention when you’re not engaging from stealth. Mirror blade is slow and obvious. The only way you can reliably land it without stealth is with a CI proc…which means you’ve already been fighting and got interrupted by the mesmer in order to land it.

I don’t even know what you’re trying to argue here. I never complained about instagibbing from stealth but about fights that may take longer than one MW rotation.
Btw, it’s quite easy for a mesmer to interrupt their target. The benefit is huge both for themselves as well as for their team when they participate in a team fight. At some point the opponent has to activate skills. It’s the mesmer’s fault when they don’t bait dodges enough to land one power lock. There’s still plenty time to cast an iZerker or MB while the target at some point lacks invuln, steady blocks or condition removal / stun breaks.

Fay.2357:

Sure, removing boons with the shatter is a pretty key thing that mesmers do, I’ll give you that one.

It’s a niche aspect which mesmer is strong at. I think it’s a good trait, it’s just too much combined all the other aspects available to mesmer power builds. (which doesn’t mean SC has to go, but other things should be looked at to avoid stacking so many beneficial effects in one specific build)

Fay.2357:

Except you sorta do. As I just said, it’s very difficult to land that shatter combo on someone paying attention if you’re not engaging from stealth. While stealth isn’t an integral part of the mesmer burst like it is for thief, it still remains extremely important.

So you’re trying to tell me that you have to abuse a kittened up mechanic which lacks serious counterplay except for playing guessing games, to be able to play mesmer effectively. That would make the profession even more broken in its core design if that was the case.

Luckily, I can tell you that some mesmers are able to setup their stun + damage chains without heavily relying on stealth, and they still do very well. An ele can mitigate pretty much all the Mind Wrack shatters, that’s true. But it’s also quite easy to lock even those down before initiating your actual damage chains. You just have to play the patient game a bit, which you’re able to, thanks to all the defensive abilities mentioned earlier. Anything else probably lacks the neccessary access to vigor and evade-skills.

Edit first, because I forgot to reply:

maeggle.6021:

maeggle.6021:

Thieves haven’t been top-tier fighters for a long time now.

Thieves have been a value to teams since the beginning of this game. and with the elite spec soon, even more so.

You may want to reread what I wrote and what you replied. That’s two completely different things to discuss. While I agree on you that thieves can have a big impact on Conquest matches, it’s not because they are great fighters on their own, hence why they are usually just used to +1. when they aren’t busy decapping an unoccupied node or getting a map buff. Their damage is laughable compared to that of all the other professions’ meta and occasionally played builds (not counting in bunker guard or clerics ele, ofc).

msalakka.4653:

I am going to guess balanced builds requiring loads of skill and intricate gameplay, such as d/d ele, cele necro, and everyone’s favorite, burn guard.

Neither. Want to roll again?

denis.9487:

So tired of the last paragraph. If by unbearable or imbalanced you mean Mesmer actually is on par with other classes besides burning ele. Mesmer is in a good place that needs some fine tuning. Still waiting to see the Mesmer represented and dominating at a higher level.

Also really tired of your last paragraph. Mesmer was used in every ESL weekly by at least two teams (as far as I remember, ymmv). Two teams ran mesmers during WTS, the other two teams also have pretty good mesmer alt players, who play on mesmer frequently.
Besides, it’s a strawman argument. PvP in this game should never be just balanced on what the highest level teams currently run. Arenanet hasn’t brought up #esports by themselves for quite some time. Actually, with leagues and Stronghold they emphasize on and encourage more casual and mid-tier players to participate in the game’s PvP contents. It should be of priority for them to also consider what provides fun and what does not.

I really know how / when to anticipate mesmer bursts; I know mostly any spell animations and tells, have trained to get used to rotations and patterns, etc. I even don’t argue about stealth, because it is not a problem in itself in my opinion. What I think is the main culprit about mesmers atm is, that with IP baseline they get the defensive shatter skills for free for (i.e. at least one short invuln and an interrupt). This usually is accompanied by boon hate (protection and stability is pretty much useless here), fast vuln stacking, punishing interrupts (okay, we may agree that’s what the archetype of the profession is about) & stuns, strong aoe and range damage, strong defensive boon stacking (when running staff or PU), a very strong unblockable and bouncing spell on short cooldown that also stacks might (because Arenanet seems to be unable to distinguish projectile absorption from reflection – was fun back in the days to get your own clone when reflecting Mirror Blade) which renders countdown-blocks like aegis and some shield skills useless, stupid AI (which is equally frustrating for mesmers and their opponents because sometimes a shattered clone runs after you for 5+ seconds just to get off that additional 1 second daze) as well as instant interrupts which also can trigger Chaotic Interrupt (at least no PU with that) – must feel very rewarding to interrupt auto attacks for that juicy 2 second immob without an ICD…
Mesmer can stuff all of that in one build (except for the lockout between PU and CI). Combined it’s not even annoying anymore, it’s just no fun. Fun, which should be the main focus for a multiplayer and social game, is very important to keep most players engaged in your game and game modes.

Most importantly, a decent shatter combo delivers more damage than a mug + backstab + auto chain in equal time, of which most is AoE in a 240 radius (equals the size of the side cap nodes). It’s not tied to engaging from stealth, just helps to setup the stun / immobilize, and it also benefits from the above mentioned vuln stacks and partly from shattered boons. You don’t lose damage potential when you don’t use stealth, which enables the mesmer to use its stealth mostly defensively and occasionally offensively.
A thief that’s forced into stealth for his defense usually has a very hard time to recover on the offense and also are more affected by movement impairing conditions (and more prone of getting hit by condition application because of their reliance on melee damage with the occasional port and shadow steps), while mesmers usually still have at least one more invuln, aegis, protection (mostly staff or PU), more instant interrupts and more boon hate.
Also positioning is less relevant to actual damage done (except for GS AA, for which the reliable sigil procs are more important than the skill effect itself), enabling the mesmer to kite far more than any other of the prominent burst-enabled professions.

Please explain to me how that’s fun to fight, all stacked in one build. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t see any relevant tradeoffs in running shatter / lockdown mesmers atm.

msalakka.4653:

Good. Thieves didn’t seem to mind killing us with their eyes closed for years; I hope they enjoy them apples.

Thieves haven’t been top-tier fighters for a long time now. They got and still get very much countered by probably any other decent power (except for warrior), hybrid and condition build on any other profession at the moment. They had an advantage over power mesmers, but now there’s nothing left to keep mesmers in check anymore except for some special snowflake builds and celementalists (which we probably agree on, also need more than getting looked at).

Some former main mesmer players I know and play with switched to other professions because they consider the current state of mesmers unbearable, some of them even expressed, they don’t think they can get better at the game when the profession and their players rely on the current imbalances.

Wolfric.9380:

cleansing flame + arcane shield.

Arcane Shield is rendered useless cause of Mirror Blade and self-interrupted AA-spam. Also each shattered illusion counts as a single attack, which might save you from a single shatter with spot-on timing, but nothing more. Cleansing Flame is pretty much useless unless you also use Blinding Ashes. Otherwise all the mesmer spells with tells, that apply relevant conditions, are easily evaded, so that condition removal won’t help you much against a power / stunlock mesmer.

Also protection may help against mesmers not running Shattered Concentration, but who isn’t running this trait in a power build anyways?

Currently D/D Ele vs Shatter Mesmer is pretty one-sided, depending on lucky openers or who slips up first. In either case it’s no fun fight.

docMed.7692:

and most importantly, it’s really boring to play against.

/thread

Many players don’t want to see that the mesmer profession has and relies on many broken (not equal to overpowered) mechanics, which ultimately leads to boring / one-sided fights. There’s nothing that keeps shatter / lockdown mesmers in check atm, except for other unfun builds (e.g. fire-spec celementalist).

Prepatch, d/p thief was very strong against mesmers, but got countered by pretty much anything else that had some kind of (Pb)AoE, so there was a trade-off. PU Mesmer currently doesnt have such trade-offs. Times changed, and now only boring-to-play builds can compete with boring-to-fight builds.

That doesn’t make for fun game experiences while fighting it out (which I know some high-level PvP folks don’t give an F about, since their fun is only tied to the outcome of the fight, not the process), but should – at least in my opinion – be a priority for Anet to consider when they want to push casual and none-top-tier players into the PvP modes. After all, it’s still a game which should be about providing fun for all players involved.

Iavra.8510:

In my defense, i never add into 1v1s or 1vXs (with our people outnumbering).

:D suuure…

Anyways, can confirm: there are no good solo and group roamers left on EU Tier 1 to Tier 3. (seriosly… what is wrong with the kitten text filters?)

And yet there are way too many occasions when I get hit by projectiles which magically pass through meters of solid rock or huge tree trunks. Also this does not seem to affect rangers’ longbows, which also, by coincidence, hit from 1900+ units afar…

On a more serious note, this issue was brought up by one two of my guildees several times tonight. Might be worth a look at some of the path validation checks to keep customers happy.

While everyone talks about packet loss when sending / receiving some ICMP packets, there’s this whole issue of traffic shaping and QoS filtering going on. Unless Anet’s support rolls out proper diagnostic tools, the only reliable response anyone will get is, “it’s your ISP, tell them” (even though you already told them multiple times that you did so and just were told they can’t find any issues on their end or yours).

But hey, it’s totally okay to get your gaming experience diminished because of bugs (e.g. denial of service attacks via chat codes and corrupted account information) and improvable features (e.g. skill-lockout mid-evade damage, and evade-interrupts), because there is in no way a chance that it’s something else than yourself or your ISP. /shrug

Proper diagnostics means to me: in-game logging & tracing via communication lines and protocols which are also used by the game engine…

Well, was too early to be happy about less lag.
Can’t play PvP atm because of constant rubberbanding and random lag spikes :/

Location: Germany, near Frankfurt Main
Where: tPvP match on Silent Storm (206.127.146.125)
When: just now (~20:30 GMT+1)
Issue: Rubberbanding, skill delay, animation delay, etc — my buddy in the same instance wasn’t affected by those issues, though

~~~
>pathping -4 -q 100 206.127.146.125

Tracing route to 206-127-146-125.ncsoft.com [206.127.146.125]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
0 Hebe.fritz.box [192.168.42.103]
1 fritz.box [192.168.42.1]
2 87.186.224.87
3 87.190.174.134
4 f-eb7-i.F.DE.NET.DTAG.DE [62.154.16.182]
5 80.157.129.70
6 ae5.XT2.FFT1.ALTER.NET [146.188.6.105]
7 ae1.GW8.FFT4.ALTER.NET [149.227.16.54]
8 213.71.135.138
9 206-127-157-86.ncsoft.com [206.127.157.86]
10 206-127-157-102.ncsoft.com [206.127.157.102]
11 206-127-146-125.ncsoft.com [206.127.146.125]

Computing statistics for 275 seconds…
Source to Here This Node/Link
Hop RTT Lost/Sent = Pct Lost/Sent = Pct Address
0 Hebe.fritz.box [192.168.42.103]
0/ 100 = 0% |
1 0ms 0/ 100 = 0% 0/ 100 = 0% fritz.box [192.168.42.1]
0/ 100 = 0% |
2 16ms 0/ 100 = 0% 0/ 100 = 0% 87.186.224.87
0/ 100 = 0% |
3 17ms 0/ 100 = 0% 0/ 100 = 0% 87.190.174.134
0/ 100 = 0% |
4 23ms 0/ 100 = 0% 0/ 100 = 0% f-eb7-i.F.DE.NET.DTAG.DE [62.154.16.182]
0/ 100 = 0% |
5 —- 100/ 100 =100% 100/ 100 =100% 80.157.129.70
0/ 100 = 0% |
6 22ms 0/ 100 = 0% 0/ 100 = 0% ae5.XT2.FFT1.ALTER.NET [146.188.6.105]
0/ 100 = 0% |
7 18ms 0/ 100 = 0% 0/ 100 = 0% ae1.GW8.FFT4.ALTER.NET [149.227.16.54]
0/ 100 = 0% |
8 20ms 0/ 100 = 0% 0/ 100 = 0% 213.71.135.138
0/ 100 = 0% |
9 —- 100/ 100 =100% 100/ 100 =100% 206-127-157-86.ncsoft.com [206.127.157.86]
0/ 100 = 0% |
10 —- 100/ 100 =100% 100/ 100 =100% 206-127-157-102.ncsoft.com [206.127.157.102]
0/ 100 = 0% |
11 18ms 0/ 100 = 0% 0/ 100 = 0% 206-127-146-125.ncsoft.com [206.127.146.125]

Trace complete.
~~~

Yesterday I flushed my block list (had several spam bots and a few presumed bot users / cheaters on it) and since then I have experienced far fewer latency issues. Could be just a lucky coincidence, but I’m not too sure about that anylonger. Maybe some of the devs can look into it; Are there some corrupted accounts (like the ones causing map-wide lags and disconnects) which can cause issues for some others?

pathping, as usual, looks fine. But there’s persistent latency, spell effects aren’t applied in-time, and now there’s a very common issue which causes the character to get rooted (similar to the issue when you use a stunbreak / stability just at the same time a cc ability lands on you) even after the CC wore off.

Pathping log for the lulz (RTT looks more than awesome):
[spoiler]>pathping -4 -q 100 206.127.146.47

Routenverfolgung zu “206-127-146-47.ncsoft.com” [206.127.146.47]
über maximal 30 Hops:
0 Hebe.fritz.box [192.168.42.103]
1 fritz.box [192.168.42.1]
2 87.186.224.87
3 87.190.174.142
4 f-eb7-i.F.DE.NET.DTAG.DE [62.154.16.182]
5 80.157.129.70
6 ae5.XT1.FFT1.ALTER.NET [146.188.4.29]
7 ae0.GW8.FFT4.ALTER.NET [149.227.16.46]
8 213.71.135.138
9 206-127-157-86.ncsoft.com [206.127.157.86]
10 206-127-157-102.ncsoft.com [206.127.157.102]
11 206-127-146-47.ncsoft.com [206.127.146.47]

Berechnung der Statistiken dauert ca. 275 Sekunden…
Quelle zum Abs. Knoten/Verbindung
Abs. Zeit Verl./Ges.= % Verl./Ges.= % Adresse
0 Hebe.fritz.box [192.168.42.103]
0/ 100 = 0% |
1 0ms 0/ 100 = 0% 0/ 100 = 0% fritz.box [192.168.42.1]
0/ 100 = 0% |
2 16ms 0/ 100 = 0% 0/ 100 = 0% 87.186.224.87
0/ 100 = 0% |
3 16ms 0/ 100 = 0% 0/ 100 = 0% 87.190.174.142
0/ 100 = 0% |
4 21ms 0/ 100 = 0% 0/ 100 = 0% f-eb7-i.F.DE.NET.DTAG.DE [62.154.16.182]
0/ 100 = 0% |
5 —- 100/ 100 =100% 100/ 100 =100% 80.157.129.70
0/ 100 = 0% |
6 25ms 0/ 100 = 0% 0/ 100 = 0% ae5.XT1.FFT1.ALTER.NET [146.188.4.29]
0/ 100 = 0% |
7 20ms 0/ 100 = 0% 0/ 100 = 0% ae0.GW8.FFT4.ALTER.NET [149.227.16.46]
0/ 100 = 0% |
8 21ms 0/ 100 = 0% 0/ 100 = 0% 213.71.135.138
0/ 100 = 0% |
9 —- 100/ 100 =100% 100/ 100 =100% 206-127-157-86.ncsoft.com [206.127.157.86]
0/ 100 = 0% |
10 —- 100/ 100 =100% 100/ 100 =100% 206-127-157-102.ncsoft.com [206.127.157.102]
0/ 100 = 0% |
11 18ms 0/ 100 = 0% 0/ 100 = 0% 206-127-146-47.ncsoft.com [206.127.146.47]

Ablaufverfolgung beendet.[/spoiler]

maeggle.6021:

Your location: Germany, Darmstadt (ISP: Telekom)
Time and date of incident: anytime (varying severity, though), most sever between 5pm and 02am CEST. Also now (~11am CEST)
Game World: Kodash (mostly playing WvW, but also noticable in PvE and sPvP)
Brief description of what you’re seeing:

• Frequent rubberbanding / warping of other players and NPC
• spell and effect delay: between ~0.2 and sometimes up to 5 seconds, sometimes skills won’t activate
• getting hit / interrupted during evade frames: e.g. in the middle of burning speed (50% of the fire fields already on the ground, no shocking aura involved) or just at the beginning or end of a dodge roll
• sometimes getting affected by effects even if a skill was successfully dodged (e.g. blind from Shadow Shot even if the projectile was evaded as can be seen on the screen and in the combat log). This is very rare though
• async animations + effects: damage or effects are applied prematurely compared to the animation state (I’ll make a video if I remember to hit the record button sometime)
• often “out of range” and “obstructed” notification even when the foe is in plain sight and in range

Currently also affecting all chat functionality.

New pathping log:

Also Wireshark shows many TCP Retransmissions and Fast Retransmissions on the Server-to-Client-direction…

After all, the changes provide enough space for further changes to mechanics (provided by Anet) and play styles (required from us).

If they leave us without swords without compensation to emphasise on defense, active play and communications, that’d be bad. As long as we don’t know if they give us some tools neccessary to tackle these, I’d keep calm and wait for what they’ll throw at us in December, though.

Last night our small group wished for the changes to white swords to be already implemented. It was hilarious that, whenever we were done pecking a gate or wall down, a whole map-jumping zerg rolled in to defend their stuff. It was noticable that, most of the time, there was a group of similar size nearby, throwing siege disablers onto us and holding us off.
So far, so good, but this didn’t lead to the PvP interactions we hoped for. Without white swords, there would’ve been either no player alarming the map-jumpers (would’ve been equally boring) or the defenders had to be more aggressive to shake us off as soon as someone noticed the attack on the structure.

Without compensation and addition of some meaningful mechanics, just removing the white swords will be – as already stated many times – a bad change for defenders. If we get other means of scouting and reporting, on the other hand, it will be a whole new situation (possibly even a good change to promote splitting up).

Some random ideas that we came up with (some of which were already suggested elsewhere):

• make sentries and guards a real thing. If they are attacked make that visible to the whole map and / or to the nearest fortified structure
• allow us to place sentry turrets like on EotM (but avoid spamming them)
• or add sentry turrets to fortified structures, which we can build (similar to cannons) without an upgrade for supplies worth of 2 to five players
• allow players to set team-wide markers or notifications on the map, so that roamers and roaming groups can help to report enemy movement and sieges (“siege marker trick” for 5 supplies, maybe?)

Hi John,

thanks for listening to and considering our feedback and worries.
I think the suggested approach — experimenting and changing things now and then — is great for all of us. Some may feel like we’d be downgraded to being test dummies, but this is what we need right now: Collaboration between the designers, devs and us players, to find out which ideas only sound good on paper, what needs some fine-tuning and which things are worth keeping after all to make WvW a fun experience for most (if not all) players involved.
In my opinion you should set up the experimental changes for several weeks (especially regarding PpK, overall scoring, maybe new maps or map mechanics, etc) to let us players adjust.

(Just to name an example: During the first weeks many players were mad about the bloodlust buff changes and the added ruins — Today they provide great areas for small scale fights and give roamers even more things to contribute to the overall match (at least on Kodash). After all the ruins were a good change, which, today, most players accept or even use.)

There will be some nay-sayers, ofc… But let me say that I think those experiments will be fruitful and are welcomed by most of the WvW population. Please make sure to announce the experiments to all WvW players, but you may want to not name the ones you implement directly, so we don’t approach the stuff from a focus-tester’s view but experience them as we’d do if the game was released just then.

Please note that the most common format of “GvG” in Guild Wars 2 is either 15vs15 or 20vs20 team deathmatch. While those groups make up a big part of the player-driven “GvG”-movement, there are many guilds which prefer 5vs5 or 10vs10 TDM over the large scale combat that is 20vs20.

If you and your buddies prefer one of the small-scale variants, or some folks from the bigger guilds would like to go small-scale every now and then, don’t hesitate to get in touch with like-minded groups on your enemies’ realms.

After all, every form and scale of combat that involves team play, organization and somewhat skillful gameplay can provide lots and lots of fun, even if you may be new to it.

Ragnar.4257:

Are the boons gained when you convert a condition with PoV affected by boon duration?

Yes, they are. I just tested it some moments ago in HotM with 6 in Virtues and Water runes (+50% total) with one of the NPC (thief is pretty good for testing since the NPC will most likely use her blinding powder for a single condition at a time), and then again without any additional boon duration. The boon duration from conversion is noticeably longer with the first setup (fury > 12 seconds with boon duration and only a bit more than 8 seconds without +duration). Same applies to Contemplation of Purity, btw.

The proposed removal of white swords is something that won’t help the issues with scouting-jobs at all. It’s often the case that we can only react to an attack by some swords appearing somewhere on the map because we lack the numbers to set up scouts. When there are no swords anymore, that means that you take away an important tool for us small scalers, roamers and off-time forces in the current objective-based gameplay that is WvW.

My suggestion to emphasize active scouting (instead of having to set up humanoid sentries) is, to keep white swords as is and reverting the changes made to orange swords, so that instead of 25 players in combat, the threshold would be set to 5 players in combat. The thought behind this goes as follows: Larger groups will most likely bring up swords if they don’t organize, so that it is easier to scout them over the whole map, while smaller groups would be able to set up several traps and fake attacks if the server-wide communication works out. The opposed realms then have the opportunity to scout groups more easily, which both boosts active communication and agile play on every side, as well as making “mindless zerging” less of an option if you are actually going for PpT and PpK.

tl;dr: Keep white swords (with 30 seconds initial delay, I’m okay with that), reduce orange-sword threshold to 5 again.

Elmo Benchwarmer.3025:

The lag got worse for me. I have a significant skill activation delay now in every area of the game.

Dito. Another pathping log (unfortunately only from the PvP Lobby, which showed similar behaviour to the yoloQ-instance I was on shortly before, aka massive skill activation delay, rubberbanding and so on):

>pathping -4 -q 100 206.127.146.97

Routenverfolgung zu "206-127-146-97.ncsoft.com" [206.127.146.97]
über maximal 30 Hops:
  0  Hebe.fritz.box [192.168.42.103]
  1  fritz.box [192.168.42.1]
  2  87.186.224.87
  3  87.190.174.130
  4  f-eb7-i.F.DE.NET.DTAG.DE [62.154.16.182]
  5  80.157.129.70
  6  ae5.XT1.FFT1.ALTER.NET [146.188.4.29]
  7  ae0.GW8.FFT4.ALTER.NET [149.227.16.46]
  8  213.71.135.138
  9  206-127-157-86.ncsoft.com [206.127.157.86]
 10  206-127-157-102.ncsoft.com [206.127.157.102]
 11     *        *        *
Berechnung der Statistiken dauert ca. 250 Sekunden...
            Quelle zum Abs.  Knoten/Verbindung
Abs. Zeit   Verl./Ges.=   %  Verl./Ges.=   %  Adresse
  0                                           Hebe.fritz.box [192.168.42.103]
                                0/ 100 =  0%   |
  1    0ms     0/ 100 =  0%     0/ 100 =  0%  fritz.box [192.168.42.1]
                                0/ 100 =  0%   |
  2   16ms     0/ 100 =  0%     0/ 100 =  0%  87.186.224.87
                                0/ 100 =  0%   |
  3   17ms     0/ 100 =  0%     0/ 100 =  0%  87.190.174.130
                                0/ 100 =  0%   |
  4   21ms     0/ 100 =  0%     0/ 100 =  0%  f-eb7-i.F.DE.NET.DTAG.DE [62.154.16.182]
                                0/ 100 =  0%   |
  5  ---     100/ 100 =100%   100/ 100 =100%  80.157.129.70
                                0/ 100 =  0%   |
  6   25ms     0/ 100 =  0%     0/ 100 =  0%  ae5.XT1.FFT1.ALTER.NET [146.188.4.29]
                                0/ 100 =  0%   |
  7   20ms     0/ 100 =  0%     0/ 100 =  0%  ae0.GW8.FFT4.ALTER.NET [149.227.16.46]
                                1/ 100 =  1%   |
  8   41ms     1/ 100 =  1%     0/ 100 =  0%  213.71.135.138
                               99/ 100 = 99%   |
  9  ---     100/ 100 =100%     0/ 100 =  0%  206-127-157-86.ncsoft.com [206.127.157.86]
                                0/ 100 =  0%   |
 10  ---     100/ 100 =100%     0/ 100 =  0%  206-127-157-102.ncsoft.com [206.127.157.102]

Ablaufverfolgung beendet.

After my Ele, Guardian is my second-most played character with ~1500ish hours of active play time (mainly WvW roaming, but also running dungeons every now and then). I feel quite confident when playing my guard and having a deep understanding of its mechanics, thank you for asking.

I’m not only suggesting that, as a guardian, you have several tools to keep your foes in melee range, I actually know that you can (if you want to) because it’s something I’m doing all the time when I’m playing guardian. If nothing helps, your team will, anyways. And yes, sometimes staying in your symbols is exactly what your group should do to win fights, and sometimes it is something you just set them up and then forget about them after a second. It really depends on the encounter.

I already listed several things which would be hugely affected by even the smallest changes to the AH-formula, which are unrelated to symbols. Also, halving the pulses or doing some other stuff to them, would make traited symbol effects not only worthless but would reduce their effectiveness in both their defensive and their offensive capabilities.

On another note: Mace is one of the go-to choices in dungeons and fractals atm. You have to wonder why that is? Probably has to do with the short-cooldown AoE-block and the strong AA damage coefficients…

Pinkamena Diane Pie.8054:

Just look what happened when you made EOTM, you got players who dont even play WvW to test that and it became nothing more than a K-Tain map and leveling alt area!

EotM beta was fun and didn’t involve too much zerging. We had lots of roamers, smaller groups and sometimes medium sized groups on there during the testing windows. Concerns were raised about different stuff like some strong NPC and AI stuff, but during testing we could make use of offensive and defensive means pretty well.

The k-train just evolved as soon as people realized how much rewards can be in there, by just rallying on one single taco. Also, the volatile nature of the map, lack of team play on a larger scale and so on don’t feed the fuel of smaller groups who try to turn the tide of battles.

Pinkamena Diane Pie.8054:

You need to talk to the smaller guilds and players who run smaller groups, the ones who actually use their skills and tactics and builds to defeat larger groups.

They did / still do. Many devs joined raiding guilds and groups of different sizes. I also know of at least two devs who had really intense talks with their hosting guilds. I’m sure the guys at Arenanet already have visions and goals, how the game should work and how it should be played, but drawing the best possible conclusions can sometimes be hard to impossible. They kittened up at some, but that’s just the game of life. Let’s hope that their next steps will take us all in better directions.
Blaming and badmouthing won’t help anyone, though — especially if your assumptions are only based on verbal propaganda.

Symbols are fine as is. I cannot see why you can’t benefit from them as much as I or my party / teams are able to do. In WvW roaming (solo, small group & full group) and PvP conquest mode we are / I am able to get the full benefit in most situations, no matter the weapon set and play style.

You seem to be in doubt about the ability to stay on a symbol for its full duration, and about the inability of your foes to not leave it. Well, just look at the whole spectrum of weapon skills, traits, utilities, self-sufficient and team-related synergies: You have lots of stationary control over your opponents in offensive play, and you can mitigate a great deal of (melee) damage via blocks (mace #3 even is an AoE block on low cooldown!), blinds, evades, reactionary control and melee damage pressure in defensive play.

In PvE, mobs are dumb enough to just stand in your AoE. State of the art dungeoneering relies on heavy stacking. The only problem with symbols might be, that – if you don’t know what you are doing or you’re not paying attention – you might screw up a whole might-stacking rotation. As long as you pay attention and communicate with your mates, it’s no big deal.

Changing anything about the current symbols would just break so much stuff and either make them over- or underperforming. I wouldn’t want that to happen, just for the sake of making some stuff more accessible in-transit. Please try to think more about how everything relates on a wider field of view than than your personal wish for better access to swiftness, and try out some different play styles if symbols don’t feel right for you at the moment. They are great, you can use them efficiently on every weapon set, and they are extremely powerful in team play, even without any changes to them.

Ragnar the Rock.3174:

I severely doubt it would “Destroy” builds that make use of altruistic healing if the number of pulses on symbols were halved.

Five allies per pulse equals 350 HPpS without any Healing Power. For most symbols that’d result in a loss of 700+ HPpS for the guard if we talk about stacked play.

I don’t agree about your statement of EM being used in most AH-builds. My experience is quite the opposite: While AH ist often traited when using EM, AH is mostly used in pseudo-tank builds, both in PvE and several WvW group comps, where EM’s performance may be subpar compared to other traits and to what your group can do.

Currently, the equations for AH also incorporate stuff like shouts, traited virtues, boons on weapon skills (e.g. Empower) and boons from combos. Symbols are part of it, but not mandatory. If you push AH scaling just because you nerfed symbols, that’d lead to a total mess.

Ragnar the Rock.3174:

In the end guardians would be better off anyway because you & your group wouldn’t be forced to stand still for 3-5 seconds to make full use of a symbol.

That’s the point of them, though. Just like consecrations, they provide a temporary and stationary area which benefits your team. If you want to play with symbols, you have to adjust your own and your team’s play-style accordingly to get the best use out of it.
In my opinion, it not only makes sense from a magic-lore PoV (symbols being areas which protect you, but if you leave them you lose the buff), but it’s also good design: You want powerful benefits from symbols? Stay in them. You want to fight your enemys while buffing up? Control them. You want your foes to not get the buffs? Control them!

Also, it was already said that team comps can mitigate problems like lacking swiftness up-time. If you want to solo-roam in PvE or WvW, you could always opt-in for some traveler runes, run a meditation sword+greatsword variation and / or use Retreat and Save Yourselves as well.

Reducing the number of pulses would lead to the situation where your group can just leave the symbol and still get the full effect by touching the symbol once over its duration. Currently you either need to stay on spot to get short benefits, or you leave the symbol, which reduces the (mostly defensive) effects of a symbol on your group. A great boon of the current implementation is, that the short-duration boon spam kind of counters boon ripping but also provides good counter play via AoE boon removal and corruption.
That ultimately would destroy most builds which make use of Altruistic Healing as well, because the healing potential would go down significantly.

If you want higher swiftness uptime on your guard, get an ele or warrior in your group, or sacrifice 4 seconds on your way for perma-swiftness every now and then, if you lack allies to help you out.

One more pathping-log because I still experience severe lag:

maeggle.6021:

Your location: Germany, Darmstadt (ISP: Telekom)
Time and date of incident: anytime (varying severity, though), most sever between 5pm and 02am CEST. Also now (~11am CEST)
Game World: Kodash (mostly playing WvW, but also noticable in PvE and sPvP)
Brief description of what you’re seeing:

• Frequent rubberbanding / warping of other players and NPC
• spell and effect delay: between ~0.2 and sometimes up to 5 seconds, sometimes skills won’t activate
  […]
• async animations + effects: damage or effects are applied prematurely compared to the animation state (I’ll make a video if I remember to hit the record button sometime)
• often “out of range” and “obstructed” notification even when the foe is in plain sight and in range

Your location: Germany, Darmstadt (ISP: Telekom)
Time and date of incident: anytime (varying severity, though), most sever between 5pm and 02am CEST. Also now (~11am CEST)
Game World: Kodash (mostly playing WvW, but also noticable in PvE and sPvP)
Brief description of what you’re seeing:

• Frequent rubberbanding / warping of other players and NPC
• spell and effect delay: between ~0.2 and sometimes up to 5 seconds, sometimes skills won’t activate
• getting hit / interrupted during evade frames: e.g. in the middle of burning speed (50% of the fire fields already on the ground, no shocking aura involved) or just at the beginning or end of a dodge roll
• sometimes getting affected by effects even if a skill was successfully dodged (e.g. blind from Shadow Shot even if the projectile was evaded as can be seen on the screen and in the combat log). This is very rare though
• async animations + effects: damage or effects are applied prematurely compared to the animation state (I’ll make a video if I remember to hit the record button sometime)
• often “out of range” and “obstructed” notification even when the foe is in plain sight and in range

btw: Already checked and swapped network interfaces and gateway on my side, tried different computers and operating systems, opened a ticket with Arenanet support (everything seemed normal), tried a custom VPN connection and contacted my ISP, which couldn’t detect any faults on the line.
Unfortunately nothing of that was of help. Friends on the same ISP (but in different locations) don’t experience those issues, though.

Sample pathping to the WvW server I was connected some minutes ago, experiencing severe lags:

Addendum: I recorded the traffic on my local network device with libpcap and filtered for traffic from and to the game servers. There were lots of TCP retransmissions for the server side and many DUP-ACK from client to server. I currently don’t have time to look into this, but it’s obviously not working as intented… The pcap file is ~7MB in size (unfortunately can’t give you the filtered version because Wireshark can’t interpret the stream correctly without previous packets). If a dev is interested in it, I can upload / mail it to you.

Filter is: “(ip.addr==206.127.0.0/16) && (tcp.analysis.retransmission ||
tcp.analysis.fast_retransmission
|| tcp.analysis.duplicate_ack)”

Cody Crichton.7516:

A most gracious thanks go to the Ninja Nurse Rescue Squad on Kodash for adopting me into their ranks. They’ll make a decent skirmisher out of me yet!

We’re very happy to have you with us!

I was pleasantly surprised by your great positioning and movement – unfortunately this didn’t help too much when we bumped into much larger groups on several occasions…
We’ll make sure to find us some decent action during the upcoming nights.

While I still like the underlying idea, initial experiences lead me to think that the initial implementation of the Siege Disabler can be improved in some ways.

“Siege Disabled” effect duration depends on siege weapons hit
Against a small group, who’s able to build a single ram, it’s okay to hinder them slightly from wearing down a gate or wall, but they are slow enough with just one siege item anyways.
When siege disabling really shines, is when there are many siege weapons in a small area. Many offensive siege weapons require a lot of players to be built, so what would happen is that a large group of players is slowed in their progress for quite some time.

What should happen in my opinion, is that the “disabled” effect duration depends on the number of siege weapons hit by the trick (e.g. 15 seconds per affected siege weapon). Against a single ram or cata it can still be used to delay the enemies, but it won’t lead to situations in which the defenders won’t have time to rally forces and defend against the small group of opponents. Against 2 rams or catas the trick can significantly delay the attacking forces, thus giving your own realm time to rally and fight for the structure. 3 rams (currently the number of rams and catas most zergs and raid groups can build at a time) would be disabled for the current duration if they aren’t spread apart, and so on.

The more siege, the quicker a gate or wall is torn down, but the number of concurrent siege also depends on the number of players… You not only get in a structure faster, but you also have more players to intercept defenders. With the suggestion above, you’d also be at higher risk of getting your siege disabled for a longer duration, though, so it balances out: Do you wish to get in fast? Take the risk of getting your rams disabled for a long time. Take a safer approach? Be less vulnerable to the trick by spreading out your siege assets and / or building less siege.

Spread siege also enables defenders to counter attack more easily, because attackers have to either split up to protect everything with their meat, or run the risk of getting some siege weapons (or players manning them) taken out rather quickly.

Longer “Siege Disabled” on Omega Golems
With omega golems you’re able to spread out and stay at max range, which already protects against most defensive counters. To disable the big golems, a defender already has to take risk and run outside. Why aren’t they rewarded equally compared for disabling some rams (which are more vulnerable to defensive siege anyways)? Also remember that omegas allow for easy counter by just spreading out a bit, thus avoiding being hit by a single trick simultaneously…

Remove non-siege Damage on Gates above a Threshold
This is something many players have asked for a long time now, and it makes sense to me: The only situation in which player damage on gates is really noteworthy is either due to bugs (remember the necro signet heal?) or when the attacking force already has a large group, which might also just build 5 rams in front of a gate, anyways.
I think it would lead to more strategic play (supplies and supply management get more important) if players wouldn’t be able to knock down gates with bare hands.
Instead I’d like to suggest that player damage on gates gets either completely disabled, or it should only be possible if a certain health threshold (e.g. the current amount of hitpoints required to close a damaged gate again) is already reached. The latter would introduce some nice counterplay for both sides: the defending side has more time to react to blob-sized zergs, but once a gate is torn down, you can’t just rely on siege disabling tricks any longer.

What do you gals and guys think? Is the current implementation of the trick okay as is? If not, what would you like to see changed / removed?

Don’t use frost bow…

LordByron.8369:

As i said you don t roam a lot for sure…

If you only knew…

I don’t think this discussion will become any more productive, so I’ll leave you be in your bubble of self comfort. Godspeed!

LordByron.8369:

Despite your assuption that war is not OP tells alone how wrong you are.
I’ll just suggest you to learn what risk/reward is:

To deal massive damage you have to:
Be full dps (with dps utility).
Already have done a rotation to maximize your boons
Cast a self rooting skill with a precast of almost 4 seconds
Add another 1 second cast skill.
Your target should be DPS and sleeping for 6 seconds.

I’m fully aware of the things which sometimes appear to be overpowered on warrior. It’s not their built in tankiness, nor is it their healing signet combined with Adrenal Health and Dogged March’s regeneration, nor is it their ability to shrug off conditions pretty easily. Those are really all just neccessary to be able to compete with competent enemies. What’s really overpowered on warriors is the sword burst skill (stupidly long root and easy application via cancelling the channel) and the hammer #3 because of the long cripple. Also eviscerate builds are annoying, but we’ll see how they’ll fare after the next feature patch.

Staff eles are pretty easy to play effectively as well, and they even have better group support than most warriors due to their ranged CC abilities and the many combo fields (not only water). It only gets more complex when you either run a suboptimal build, have no semi-decent group around or simply you aren’t able to move on the battle field.

The damage with Meteor + Tornado is just stupidly high, and as stated before is an exploit. Your impact on fights as an ele is already very strong if played correctly. On lower skill levels it seems as if you have to put much more effort into it than a warrior, and that’s something I’d sign any time. But it would be very wrong to not fix exploits and balance for higher tier gameplay. Most warrior builds have low entry barriers and a low skill ceiling, whereas getting into eles can be bothersome and unrewarding at first, but also feels more rewarding (while it’s still pretty easy to pull of great combos even without much experience). Also with more and more experience there’s all this stuff which appeared to be overpowered at first, and then just becomes stupidly easy to deal with later on while you recognize that other stuff is really broken, which you did not consider before; But only if we don’t get stuck in the all-too-easy loop of “x OP because of Y” without considering the opponents’ weaknesses and strengths first.

LordByron.8369:

The state of the art is the hammertrain, the staff 11111 guardians, and stealth macro thieves i suppose.

The hammer train meta is sooo 2013… We mostly see GWEN Split & Nuke atm in large scale combat (just watch some of the more “successful” guild groups for examples – most run with more than 50% ranged / peripheral and only ~25-30% hammers in their melee ball; most CC is applied by staff-skills), and boon share in small scale fights (most groups only run one hammer, and this one is carried by the single warrior)
Also neither do thieves need macros for stealth, nor is it any “state of the art” gameplay which happens outside of your cognition, I think. Roaming-wise I see a huge influx of boon hate and lockdown builds, as well as some condi spam builds and the rare full zerker tryhards (mostly rangers, mesmers and warriors).

Stealth-reliant thieves get rarer and rarer, and only become annoying when you experience latencies, are on cooldowns or just run a build which is not good against such thieves (remember, though, that this game is built around team play).

LordByron.8369:

CC is so useful that nobody uses lightning rod…

The trait has nothing to do with the usefulness of crowd control abilities. As was already mentioned: both soft and hard CC are the most important mechanics in the current PvP and WvW meta game (not in 1vs1, but let’s not pretend that anything should be balanced for 1vs1), as it allows you to land your burst more safely. Especially in large scale combat, it’s neccessary to control your foes so that you can apply more pressure than them.

LordByron.8369:

BEcause guild raids have permastability.

Most balanced groups don’t run perma stability; For most group comps it’s a waste of potential. Current meta group builds don’t use any stability for casters and have ~18 seconds of AoE stability in the beginning, maybe some minor backup stability (Renewed Focus) and then roughly 50-60% stability plus some additional stability for warriors (if slotted), blocks and invulnerabilities in the meat ball.

If CC wasn’t as important as it is, you wouldn’t try to get a good uptime on stability and reduce condition pressure passively on melees.

LordByron.8369:

I know the role of the ele is to cats the water field when commander says water.

When I was playing staff ele, I was the one in charge to determine when to cast what and where. I was able to see when a water combo field was required, the driver or commander has other stuff to focus on. As I already said: Ele does not have to be just a water field dispenser, just like mesmers don’t have to be just veil bots. If you can’t see and use a profession’s potential, that’s your fault.

LordByron.8369:

SFR is a T1 server… nobody on official forum sees ele as anything but a waterfield dispenser.

I wouldn’t like to play with such stubborn people.

LordByron.8369:

CONDITIONS doesn t trigger retal.

Most skills which apply conditions, also deal some amount of damage -> retaliation does also affect condition builds.

LordByron.8369:

Retal works also on number of hits…reason why meteor storm and icebow 4 (also FGS for now) can kill an ele from retal in few seconds

Retaliation is a good boon. Just as you wait for stability to wear off, then using your hard-CC skill, you wait for retaliation to vanish before you cast your multi-hit-stuff, or you cancel the cast early if you cannot deal with the consequences.

LordByron.8369:

Torpedo warrior is also knew as IMMORTAL warrior
In thief forum you may read that only a bad thief dies in WWW

Warriors can be annoying, and some can run, but they are not overpowered by any means. Same goes for most thieves. Sure, you can disengage from most situations early, but this does not cap you points in Capture Point PvP nor does it win you stomps in WvW and GvG. If one commits to a fight, such builds are not very effective.

LordByron.8369:

Its not an exploit.
You don t know what an exploit is.

Unfortunately for you, I do.

I sincerely apologize if some of my writing offends you, but I want to have solid and constructive discussions, which (at least in my opinion) require solid PoV. I don’t see any vagueness in my previous post, though.

LordByron.8369:

As i said if you stand in a red circle for 4 seconds in PvE you get oneshot by almost anything.

We don’t talk about PvE but WvW and PvP balance. What you don’t want to acknowledge is, that there’s a huge difference between e.g. a lava font or well of suffering ticking for 1-3k per target (~8k AoE DPS), a meteor shower hitting for 2-4k (~12k AoE DPS) per target unbuffed, and 5-8k per target with the Tornado transformation (can sum up to 20k+ AoE DPS even with a balanced build for a full channel).

LordByron.8369:

Sure….waterbot is viable. In the game supposed to have no healers.

Oh boy… Staff Ele provides combo fields, CC and a kittenload of damage — all in one spec. Your heals are minor in group fights; most healing potential is via blasting the water fields.

LordByron.8369:

Is staff dps ele viable without meteornado?

Yes, it is. Staff ele is versatile and provides much more than raw deeps to team fights (read above).

LordByron.8369:

Its not even considered good with Meteornado and all commanders ask you to be a waterbot.

Narrow-minded commanders and players don’t make a profession or certain builds bad.

LordByron.8369:

In the mean time necrobombs don t have to deal with being squishy, their aoe last forever, and they don t even get hit by retaliation.

What? “I don’t even…” Necros suffer from retal just like any other profession.
Also Necro bombs are called “bombs” for a reason. Staff eles can provide much more high sustained AoE damage (equals higher DPS, but feels less spiky than Well-Mancer), though.

LordByron.8369:

But hey we are talking about a balance team that thinks thieves and warriors are fine in www…

They’re both fine, except for some rare eviscerate-centered warrior builds. If you can’t deal with ’em, you need to practice more.

Sharknado is a stupid exploit and it’s great to see it being fixed. There are still many things to be fixed, but I think it’s a step in the right direction overall.

nearlight.3064:

Shatter mesmers are the biggest threat for eles because they are basically just purple purple boon strippers.

While some of my fellow players always try to convince me that I should never lose to a shatter mesmer in a 1vs1, they still are the biggest threat to me, because their damage output can become overwhelming quite fast.
That’s why I try to duel good ones whenever I have a chance to. Here’s some hints I can share: Most mesmers use a pretty standard rotation for their initial burst, which mostly goes GS-1… →GS-4 (iZerker, just outrun it or dodge right), GS-2 (always dodge! some better mesmers use it for hard point-blank shatters, so it’s a good thing to pay special attention to when you’re in melee range) → GS-5 (circle strafe whenever possible, so it’s unlikely this will hit you) → GS-3 (hard to hit for the mesmer if you’re moving), then switching to staff for clone production, defense and one of their hardest hitting abilities: the iWarlock. Don’t walk through the Chaos Storm and don’t hit into their Chaos Armor if a warlock is up. Always kite the illusion at range, dodge its ovious animation (slow moving orb), then destroy it (focus target). Same goes for other illusions, and if you got time for it: clones. Without clones and illusions, a shatter mesmer’s shatters don’t hurt that much.

Also remember that on D/x you got 300+ range on most skills, shatters only hit at 240 radius. Try to kite at somewhat 600 range away from the mesmer and its clones to be able to react to a shatter (stuff running at you → dodge, destroy with Ring of Fire or Ring of Earth, teleport away or use invulnerability skills / block skills). I tried to use Evasive Arcana’s blind in air attunement against illusions and clones, but I could not make it work against shatters somehow. If you use Lightning Flash, always try to port behind the real mesmer, because it will make casting and landing harder for a short time (e.g. Mirror Blade).

Always stay calm and train your muscle memory (same goes for thieves). If you panic and lose conciousness of your surrounding, it sure will go in your enemy’s favour. Against shatter mesmers you want to watch your positioning and focus on the illusions. Don’t waste your defensive abilities (Burning Speed, Updraft, Auras if you traited them for protection) and dodges. Stay at range unless you see a window of opportunity to apply forward pressure, etc.

The same goes for burst-type thieves, btw: Stay at range unless you see a chance to put some serious pressure onto your enemy. Good luck

Go hybrid and play one of the possibly most powerful specs in the game right now, maybe?

I don’t know why some players always want to enforce certain extremes without considering individual strengths and weaknesses of the classes they are referring to.

Ele can might-stack a lot, thus boosting both direct and condition damage; If you’d give the ele even more condition output, the combination of buffed direct damage and buffed condition damage would outperform most other classes which are more reliant on conditions without being able to dish out good direct damage.

Your post also shows what’s currently wrong with condition mechanics: You only try to overload a foe with superior number of conditions (repeatedly) to wear them down fast, instead of using conditions in a smart, supportive manner. Unfortunately this is the only way most pure condition builds are able to work. Play hybrid builds and don’t have such problems whatsoever…

btw: if you want access to poison on Ele, just use the sigil of doom. It’s totally overpowered in skirmishes, even on power builds. It doesn’t fit the theme of Ele, though, as well as there is no necessity when team play is taken into consideration (you got necros, thieves and engineers for that).

Yesterday I picked my warrior after not touching it for almost half a year… Roamed with my shout support build and joined some zerg fights from time to time. It’s just stupid how easy some warrior builds are to play effectively, if your enemy is not really on top of her / his game. It’s really straight-forward and easy to play, and it ultimately has a lower skill ceiling than most other builds.
When on my ele or guardian, I always (have to) pay attention not only to foes and my boon flow, but also on my allies – Boonsharing, healing and identifying windows of opportunities require at least some attention on anything. On my warrior, I just shout, blast and CC all day long without really needing to pay attention. Warrior is really the get-go for Zerg-Play in WvW imho. (That said: I can defeat most warriors on every main char of mine in high level play – they aren’t really overpowered. Just very efficient on lower skill levels)

Warrior with hammer – your team does not rely on you activating utility skills for them. You’re completely self-reliant and self-sufficient.

Xillllix.3485:

I’m not doing it wrong, I just made a caricature of the poor balancing… I don’t blame the thief class either. I have a full ascended gear thief as well I use when I want to blow off some steam. The thief class can dodge out of your churning earth also btw, and has 4 freaking seconds to do so.

Skill recharge on the ele is the problem.

It’s not, you’re still doing it wrong.

Ele has stupid AoE and cleave spikes on almost every weapon and good sustained damage (at least on dagger mainhand) while a thief has some fancy 3 seconds (4 in PvP) single target spike skill which makes them vulnerable to point blank damage.
If you try to land a churn on an enemy without proper preparation, you’re most probably doing it wrong.
If you really think cooldowns on ele (except for RTL) are too long, you’re doing it wrong.
If you think, backstab thieves are some kind of apex predator, you’re totally wrong, especially if we talk about most ele builds not running staff.

The only really efficient thing against D/x eles are S/D acro thieves, but only due to stupid on-crit-proc-sigils which also benefit other classes, or well played trickery thieves (which most players don’t play because most of them want to go deep into shadow arts).

Anyways, this isn’t about elementalists vs thieves but necros vs thieves…

Xillllix.3485:

While casting churning earth while a thief has time to backstab you twice for 9k and your churning earth will only hit for like 6-7k if your lucky.

I don’t blame the thief class however. Eles die in mist form from conditions, meteor shower make a huge circle everyone jump out now (so our best skill is almost useless), skill recharge is ridiculous, channelling our higher dps skills takes 4 times longer than other classes for less damage, and unless we go full bunker we die in 2 hits.

You are doing it wrong.

Try to play a thief, it ain’t that easy against any semi-competent foe. D/D backstab builds have easy tells to dodge or blind C’n’D. Any shadow arts build (D/D and D/P mostly) can be wrecked by most necros via interrupts (Doom, warhorn, staff mark), weakness (traited DS, offhand dagger or SoS) and heavy damage pressure (both direct damage and conditions are very viable).

Condition thieves should be no problem: just let them put some on you, then give them back via e.g. dagger #4, staff #4 or Plague signet (most likely only the first two, since almost no useful necro build involves the signet).

Acro and trickery builds with sword mainhand are way harder to deal with due to evasiveness and good access to interrupts – your best bet is to play defensively, dodge or outrun their #3 skills, don’t waste Cooldowns during their evade frames, and estimate their initiative drain to then land your heavy hitters. Trickery D/P is quite hard to counter for most necros, I guess, but this is also why I prefer duo or group roaming over solo roaming, since you may rely on some support if things go south due to someone hard- or soft-countering your build.

White Raven.4368:

you can find whatever fight you are looking for on Deso,large or small scale.

Oh boy…

I use the exact same method on my necro to gain LF – useful stuff

hmsgoddess.3869:

everyone is going to say their server is the best

I’d say, choose a server which is likely to be matched against servers which you’d like
to play with.

Most small scale groups and solo roamers on upper tier servers are probably found on Gandara and Kodash. Both servers are very likely to be matched against Desolation, Riverside and SFR (T1 to T3 for a more generic reference). SFR has the strongest night and morning shifts in EU, followed by Desolation. If you plan on playing during EU offtimes (i.e. after ~23 GMT until ~14 GMT), you’d probably want to join a server which is likely to be paired with one of the two to get some action, because this is when most other servers don’t field many players you could fight.

I don’t know if it is true, but anything below T4 is said to aestivate atm, so I guess you wont be too happy there if you aren’t only playing during EU prime time.

Halbatros.5173:

…

The focus of your attempt to an explanation seems to be very PvE-centric, I think.

I don’t main necromancer as well, but since it has several hard- and soft-counter builds to some of my elementalist builds in PvP and WvW, I already learnt a lot about the profession, and recently started to play power / chill necro builds myself.

Halbatros.5173:

Condition necromancer has nothing to do with attrition, or at least,it has WORSE sustainability than the power necromancer.

That’s very much untrue. Condition necromancers are mostly ranged and have several ways to keep distance (chill, cripple, fear, torment pressure), boon control (boon ripping and corruption) and ways to heavily reduce both direct damage (weakness, blinds & crowd control abilities) and condition damage (condition transfer, consume condition and all the counters which also apply to mitigation of direct damage).
A conditionmancer may use deathshroud as a damage sponge or to apply some conditions via #2-#5 (and maybe dhuumfire via life blast), but life force isn’t usually used for life blast, so after all you got more life force to play sitting duck in deathshroud than power builds which require you to use life force for damage.

Halbatros.5173:

The power necromancer weaponset is the best at generating life force. Why, if the highest DPS for such build is without DS?

Dagger mainhand and warhorn offhand both require you to be in your enemy’s face to gain LF. High risk, high reward. Axe only provides mediocre LF regeneration but has more sustain via medium range. DS gives power builds some ranged damage abilities which they need to keep up with enemies who have better access to swiftness and leap abilities, but that also reduces the LF available to soak up more damage (trade in survivability for damage). Also there are several traits which enhance direct damage output e.g. via vulnerability and piercing life blast, higher crit chance and lower passive LF degeneration which are more in favour of the active usage of LF in power builds than in most condition builds. Again: DS sponge vs DS damage.

Halbatros.5173:

Glass cannon necromancer has very low passive and active defenses.

Your assertion about low active defense isn’t quite correct. If you take dagger offhand (very viable in tPvP), you got blinds and weakness. If you take warhorn, you got a strong daze and interrupt plus cripple. Focus is able to rip boons like might, fury, stability and vigor. Staff is also great for keeping your enemy at distance.

Halbatros.5173:

But not only are this weapons and traits designed to fit that mechanic, MOST of a necromancer’s skills,traits and weapons are DESIGNED with that in mind.But they changed it,and now power necromancers have more sustain and death shroud uptime than condi necromancers. That’s why you dont get healing while in DS.You were not supposed to,not as a condition/minion necromancer,because you were supposed to sustain yourself long enough before you could have your DS ready.

A condition necro is quite capable of sustaining her- or himself for quite some time until the first CC hits. This is when passive defense (e.g. armor) kicks in, which power necros usually don’t have too much of.

I don’t see what you aim for with your latter observations, as I have to assume you want to show how the stuff you describe don’t work anymore. But this is just how it works, and it works quite well so. There’s one thing which bothers me as well, which is that you can’t be healed when in Deathshroud e.g. via siphoning, but on the other hand necro is still very strong in its offensive capabilities (both direct damage and condition damage). It’s not its core functionalities which are broken, but you are more reliant on your team for defensive support, while other classes can have better self sustain, but also lack the offensive abilities necros have.

TyPin.9860:

does intelligence sigil boon have an icon I could have seen?

Yes, it’s visible in the effects bar and uses the same icon as the bloodlust stack sigil (I think) with 3 stacks (counter is attached to the icon). If you hover over the icon, you can also see that it has an activity time of 15 seconds (i.e. the 3 charges vanish if they’re not used within 15 seconds).

Another thing which I forgot to mention would be sigil of air and fire for some additional damage; if their effects proc on your clones & phantasms, they can destroy them instantly, but are then on ICD when he hit you.