I don’t see any reason to try to reverse engineer the damage coefficient based on the tooltip when I could just, you know, use the tooltip. If you think the tooltip is wrong then go ahead and prove that on your own time.
I’m gonna go ahead and say that you should pretty much never trust the tooltips in this game. I did in fact calculate the coefficients out for the majority of skills for 6 of the classes via smashing the heavy golem in the mists with steady weapons, and a good number of the tooltips are just flat out inaccurate in multiple ways, whether cooldown, damage dealt, or even number of hits done. Whenever I have access to my desktop again I’ll probably be putting it up, but in general I would say never trust the tooltip without actually testing it out first.
Also, under grenade kit, what is the “all” dps for, and what exactly did you use to calculate shrapnel dps?
It’s kind of weird how far out of line your predicted dps is compared to the analysis the other guy did. He did it as average damage overall a single grenade 1 + shrapnel would do over time via different builds and as compared to pre patch. I get that this also includes stuff like grenade 3, but still, in his analysis which was actually skewed towards condition builds, it actually had condition builds still being weaker than a crit damage build overall post patch. Maybe I’ll go over it again sometime, or just do an analysis myself.
(edited by omgwtflolbbl.7142)
It is true, Engineers can kit swap and thus get a lot of vigor. But there are other problems with this, in that it’s difficult to kit swap AND maintain dps output. Unlike Elementalists, the amount of actual benefit to constant kit rotation is highly situational.
So yes, they can get perma vigor and swiftness, but to do so they have to rotate kits. Since one kit is still much better than every other kit in nearly every situation (except healing), it’s sort of a net lose unless you’re turtling, in which case yes; Engineers can be masters of dying slowly.
If you want to see a broken class with little hope of victory as it currently stands, refer to the Engineer design.
You see a lot of vigor on these tanky water+arcane skirmisher builds. Those builds are very popular because of dapheonix’s amazing videos; but you do sacrifice so much potential burst for them. Putting a lot of points into water really nerfs your burst in PvP (in PvE, you can use the vulnerability amping trait reliably so it can balance out). You will also see them in Aura builds, but even then it’s hardly perma-vigor.
But a lot of Elementalists have to use their endurance to heal, and many burst specs lose 10% of their damage output when they start dodging so they really don’t want to. I think Rangers evade a lot.
With the popularity of weapon swap sigils (in particular 3 might on swap) and the addition of altruism runes, many people are a whole lot more eager to swap weapons/kits in combat now for the bonus. Grenades still might be the highest dps, but honestly in pvp nobody really sits there lugging grenades all day except for in sieges because, honestly, nobody with a brain will get hit by those things if they’re watching. People who run refined kits and elixir gun probably swap naturally every 10 seconds anyways to pop off Super Elixir for support, or do it when they need to remove a condition. And you still have to swap to your main weapon to get full benefits out of your toolbelt skills. People swap in and out of their kits a lot. And really, if you have the time to just sit there and spam grenade 1 for 10s or more, you probably don’t need vigor, and in the span of time you actually do use a dodge, you can unequip your kit/swap and re-equip it almost right after you’re back up (otherwise, why do you even need vigor to begin with if you’re at full endurance?).
Most people go water/arcana tree for Ele because quite frankly, the other three trees feel fairly lackluster in comparison for them. Arcana is a must if you want to constantly attunement swap, so unless you plan to sit in fire all day or something, you’re going to have a lot of points in it regardless. And you really don’t need points in water for perma vigor, as arcana already gives you all you need to do it and is easily workable into any build with its myriad of awesome bonuses (fury, boon duration, boon on attune swap, reduced attunement cooldowns, etc.).
In really high level fractals where its harder and a lot more punishing, I see your point, but in other dungeons I feel the opposite. I kind of hate it when people back way up. Boons are really strong in this game and having people way in the back when they don’t really need to be means they usually don’t get those benefits. Not to mention melee damage is naturally a lot stronger in most cases.
Untraited it is 20 seconds, 30 seconds traited. Wall of Reflection + Spirit Shield + SoA + 2nd Wall of reflection = lol for dungeons with lots of ranged stuff.
It’s amazing how many Elementalists have no idea what Swirling Winds is. It’s such a ridiculously good skill. May not have the reflect of Feedback, but the radius is stupidly big and it’s a lot safer and easier to use. Use it, stand in it, boom, you’re safe from any projectiles.
It especially confuses me when an Elementalist doesn’t carry multiple weapons. I mean seriously, Staff/Dagger/Dagger/Scepter/Focus. Same with Thieves, Dagger/Dagger/Pistol/Pistol/Sword/Shortbow. Engi is just Rifle/Pistol/Pistol/Shield (and hell, that’s what kits are there for too). That’s all they’ve got, there’s no excuse not to have one of each, just for the utility of each for just in case you’re having trouble with something. And it’s not like the clusterkitten of weapons my Warrior lugs around. If you’re having trouble with any of the dungeon content, and you aren’t carrying around multiple weapons, even just random level whites for the utility heavy ones, you’ve only got yourself to blame.
How is killing stuff which drops t5 and t6 mats (and greens, yellows and very rarely exotics) not viable? Only people who play the TP can claim that.
Mobs in cursed shore drop such things just as often, per mob. The difference is that there are FAR more of them, and they die much faster/easier than your standard silver. Which is the reason why silvers in dungeons feel unrewarding. Basically the same drops, but one is far and away much more efficient than the other.
If people wanted to farm t5/t6 mats and rares and the like from mobs, they wouldn’t be doing dungeons. They would be farming in zergs in orr, because it’s far more efficient for the time spent, and there’s far less risk of some random crappy pugs “screwing it up”.
Fractals is different, as they have much better loot drops overall there, as well as some unique stuff. Hence why I said “sans Fractals”.
Which is actually another issue in itself, but… that’s for another discussion.
Look, I pretty much just farm dungeons all day. My favorite dungeon is CoE, and I pretty much farm all paths daily, if not multiple full clears daily (I have a lot of 80s). CoE is also one of those dungeons that doesn’t actually have much to skip (assuming you’re not straight up exploiting by blinking through doors, which we never do). We usually kill everything but maybe the Champion Icebrood Wolf because its annoying and not really worth it (though with the new silver rewards it might be). And as I said, I really don’t care one way or another on the skip issue. But if you don’t understand that dungeon mobs aren’t anything special (meaning crappy for the time invested) in the loot department, then, well… you’re not going to be convinced otherwise at this point, and i’m just going to drop it.
Hell, the main reason I like to kill silvers in dungeons is it gives me sigil stacks. At the end of a CoE path, I generally fill maybe 20-30 slots in my inventory? And most of that is vendor trash, and 8-12 of those items come from chests, not mob drops. Meanwhile, in a good zerg in orr, I can max out my inventory multiple times from empty in far less time. The difference in efficiency is like night and day for anyone who actually pays attention and cares about that stuff.
good loot mobs
The thing is, most mobs don’t drop any particularly good loot. If you’re really in it to try and get great loot out of mobs in dungeons (sans Fractals, maybe), you would be far better off just going to Cursed Shore and zerg farming for a much higher rate of drops. Same old loot, but far more of it. It isn’t even comparable.
I don’t care if my group wants to skip or fight. If they want to skip everything, sure! If they want to fight everything, great! I’m always up for whatever, and in fact I often encourage my groups to man up and do stuff like not kite while Magg plants the bomb and what not. But you can’t blame people for wanting to skip mobs. They do not offer anything special as a reward, they usually aren’t very engaging to fight (hell, many bosses are snoozefests), and as a result, people don’t care to fight them. If they aren’t fun/interesting for people to fight and they provide no real incentive to kill over not killing (again, if your target is lots of loot then dungeons really aren’t the way to go), then people will naturally skip them if possible.
The prevalence of skipping is more of an issue with Anet design than how bad people are. With the current dungeon and mob design, there’s little reason in most people’s minds to fight them. If you want people to start fighting all of them, then either change their aggro patterns or increase the incentive to fight them, by improving their loot and making them interesting.
If skipping mobs was exploiting, Anet would have changed how mob aggro in dungeon works long, long ago.
It’s not like anyone is being secretive about it.
the other classes which can only dodge twice every 8-10 seconds
What?
Ele’s – perma vigor
Engi – perma vigor
Theifs – nigh infinite evadesNecros I have no idea, they seem to just facetank hard
Guards don’t need no stinkin’ dodgesWarriors – potentially have equivalent to perma vigor… kinda
- Edit: Mind you I’m not saying Ranger’s are bad off in the dodge/evade area. Just saying most classes have far better than the baseline dodging timers.
This is false with the exception to thieves…
A warrior can’t even come close to perma vigor they have sig of stamina, and gain 8s of vigor on stances (4s on frenzy), so you’re not going to be rolling around nearly as much as a ranger or thief who regenerate energy like a mad man.
Engi… they have 1 skill that gives vigor and that’s only a 1/3 chance and then they have vigor when they gain swiftness, which is only 5s and engis don’t have perma swiftness in combat, only outside (in combat would completely bone them unless they’re trying to run).
Ele, roll a staff or dagger ele and try to tell me that, ONLY scepter eles have the tools to maintain perma vigor and even then they can’t do it without gimping themselves significantly (incase you didn’t know staying in one attunement is a death sentence). that being said you can build a scepter/x ele around having TONS of dodging abilities (more so, or equal to a ranger/thief) but it forces you into a specific build and weapon set where thieves and rangers can use just about what ever they want apart from a handful of trait points.
And necros don’t dodge… ever, it’s awful, going from ranger/scepter ele —-> necro kittened me over so badly because necros are one of those plant their feet and destroy profs (kinda like guardians).
Mesmers on the other hand, they can build themselves to be pretty dodgy, but again, not to the extent of rangers or thieves.
Any Engi who uses a build that is heavy on kit swapping can easily achieve pretty much permanent Vigor. Trait Swiftness when equipping a kit, and trait Vigor on Swiftness. Bam, if you’re a heavy multi kit swapper then you have permanent Swiftness. Even if you aren’t, you could still get it with any random kit equipped but just immediately drop it afterwards. A lot of people do this with Elixir Gun. With Runes of Altruism released many will probably be doing this with Med Kit too.
Elementalist can easily maintain permanent Vigor without really sacrificing anything as well. In fact, it has by far the most kitten Vigor generation of all classes. Ignoring Vigor on Cantrip use, Arcana tree has a 33% chance on crit to proc 5 seconds of Vigor. Add in the fact that this has no internal cooldown, that Eles have insanely easy access to Fury on top of whatever crit chance they’ve geared for, that Eles easily dish out a lot of hits in a short amount of time, that most Eles run some kind of +boon duration build, and that many Eles take 2-3 cantrips, and stacking Vigor is trivial if you want to. I regularly see well over a minute of Vigor on my boon bar left after large fights with my Ele (D/D). If they really wish to roll to their hearts content, nobody can hold a candle to them in regards to utilizing +50% endurance on weapon swap due to the nature of attunement swapping (well, maybe the Engi tops them in that now due to Sigils working with kits).
Mesmer and Guardian both have a 5 point trait that grants a guaranteed 5 seconds of Vigor on crit, with a 5 second cooldown. These are both also stupidly easy to maintain, with very tiny down times in between. This really doesn’t require any explanation. In fact, this Vigor is very important and useful for keeping constant clone generation and heals on rolls.
Warriors generally don’t have much access to Vigor. Signet of Stamina is nice though, and most Warriors use GS, which provides a free dodge combined with potentially insane burst (honestly, any decent Warrior knows that Whirlwind is far superior to Hundred Blades in terms of actually “bursting”, if given the ability to utilize it to its max) on a very short cooldown. Warriors can trait into gaining 50% endurance on adrenaline use, too. With the right builds you could basically fill 100% of your endurance every 10 seconds, if you really felt the need to.
I will stay silent about Necros because, tbh, I haven’t got a single clue about Necros (never leveled one, don’t really care to either because their sound effects HUHFDSKJLFJNJ annoying).
But seriously, if you think the other classes have a hard time dodging when they want to, you’re really off the mark.
I run a full Valk Thief that focuses on constantly stealthing and dropping backstab crits via the auto crit from stealth. I spend most of my time in dungeons in melee range constantly dropping high single target damage. I could swap it up so that I can perm weakness/aoe weakness via 25 in the first tree but honestly I’m a bit selfish with my Thief compared to my other characters lol. Generally the HP buffer is enough for when I screw up, and I usually melee pretty much everything and rarely shortbow. I do still carry team useful utilities, though. If I notice the group I’m in is having trouble with some mob pulls, I keep a S/P combo on hand for blind spam tanking.
I actually calculated out the base damage coefficients (meaning 0 traits) for Guardian/Ele/Warrior/Thief/Engi/Mesmer, and that included kits for the Engi and conjures for the Ele. Unfortunately, it’s saved on a computer that isn’t currently hooked up and probably won’t be for like a week (poor foresight on my part lol), but iirc Lightning Hammer 1 combo had like a 1.1/1.1/1.8 auto chain coefficient, while Flame Axe and Fiery Greatsword had somewhere around .7-.8 each (per projectile). Numbers for Flame Axe and Fiery Greatsword off a bit because I forgot they granted Power when I did the calculations, and I may not even remember them right because I just don’t care about those two conjures tbh. Their kill time probably isn’t all that different because I believe that Flame Axe did a bit more damage per auto projectile, and even though the GS fires many at a time I think the Flame Axe throws them out pretty fast. I’d have to check my spreadsheet to be sure I remembered correctly, though. Main advantage of GS is that Firestorm is actually pretty strong given its cast time if all ticks hit, and Fiery Rush used properly actually stacks damage quite well too.
Mainhand dagger air 1 was .7/.7 for 1.4 total per attack, scepter air 1 was something horrendously bad on its own.
For comparison, I think 100 Blades was like a 5.4ish coefficient. Don’t remember exactly how long it takes to channel that (and honestly a perfect Whirlwind with Warrior GS is far, far, far, far greater DPS if you ever land one, I think it was 4.2 for a perfect hit in like half a second, as it is actually capable of hitting up to 6 times even though it doesn’t show in combat log… very buggy skill). Hip shot from Engineer rifle is about .65 coefficient. Full perfect Guardian GS Whirling Wrath did like 3.55 on a single target (the bolts that fly out can only hit one target each and are worth about 30% of the total damage if everything hits one target, surprisingly).
Yes, but at the time of the EA nerf, there were absolutely no blast finishers on roll, and on top of that, dragon’s tooth’s blast finisher was also broken. This meant that it lost 3 blast finishers/nine stacks of might, and was just a lot less amusing overall with no more incentive to roll. It’s pretty much fine now since EA water roll was awesome regardless and earth is a blast finisher again, and dragon’s tooth is finally fixed. I still roll with this whenever I’m doing some like CM that is extremely projectile heavy.
Yes, as long as you can tank the bit of damage + bleeding you get from staying close, you can just aggro the golems up to you while you stay near the boss, let them set up shop, and get out of the way. I do this if I’m stuck killing patches and I see a golem that nobody is taking care of. I don’t believe it to be any faster than properly using the rifles, though; the golems will always walk up to a certain point before they try to aggro something, and they don’t walk any faster when aggroing something compared to when subverted. While there is a small delay on how long it takes for golems to start moving after being subverting, they also explode with little delay after reaching the husk compared to having to let the golems bunker down and do their full countdown which this strategy relies on that makes it faster overall to just rifle it.
I used to use S/F in combination with Lightning Hammer in dungeons, back with the old EA. Lay down a Firewall, Arcane Wave (burst + blast), Dragon’s Tooth (burst + blast), Phoenix (burst + blast + cleanse + vigor), roll while swapping to water (double heal + double cleanse + regen + blast), Comet (daze + blast), either Trident or Freezing Gust, roll while swapping to earth (cripple + protection + blast), Magnetic Wave (burst + reflect + cleanse + blast). Afterwards, Rock Barrier/Dust Devil, Obsidian Flesh if I felt like I was taking too much damage, swap to air, let off Lightning Strike/Blind Flash. If it’d be useful, I’d use Swirling Winds. Then I’d summon a Lightning Hammer and go to town – that thing is actually absurdly powerful with its auto attack chain (very high sustained AoE dps, AoE blind + blast finisher on final strike).
This let me permanently keep up 21 stacks of Might for my entire team with boon duration runes, solo (more like 23 with constant fire attunement swaps). The rotation itself actually dealt pretty decent damage, given that Dragon’s Tooth, Phoenix, and Magnetic Wave actually burst well when they land (which is easy in PvE). Whole thing took maybe 5-6 seconds depending on how much extra stuff I decided to cast along the way (ex. Trident, Freezing Gust). Lightning Hammer naturally hits like a truck. Even though I was in full Knights gear (armor and trinkets), I was still very easily hitting 2-3k autos with the Lightning Hammer while constantly blinding/spamming blast finishers with constant Fury. I’d continue attunement swapping while using the Lightning Hammer to keep cycling Fury/Regen/Might/Protection/Swiftness for my team and to work with the extra 2% damage per boon (I also usually had like a minute+ easily of Vigor too with the Vigor on crit trait), and rolling for EA effects. There would be a little bit of downtime after finishing up a Lightning Hammer’s charges that I’d fill in with a quick Lightning Strike/Blinding Flash + Dragon’s Tooth that admittedly sucked, but by the time Dragon’s Tooth came back up again I’d repeat over again.
It may not have been the standard Staff or D/D stuff, but it was a whole lot of fun to be rolling everywhere and literally seeing a nonstop stream of blast finishers, and the damage was surprisingly decent (even if it did require a 5-6 second ramp up period). 12 blast finishers every 30 seconds, lol. Probably only Thief clusterbomb spam tops that. Ranger water fields while I was using my Hammer was hilarious, and light fields were great too for retaliation and 2% more damage.
If you can use group swiftness (or just have whoever uses the turrets use swiftness on themselves), you can just jump back up the red platforms rather than take the stairs. It’s a lot faster to do so that way. I wouldn’t jump back up the platforms without swiftness and while in combat, though.
Whirling Wrath is weird. It actually makes up like 30% of the total damage with that skill, so if you’re not hitting anything with them, you’re actually losing out quite a bit.
No other class has a skill that’s this prone to not work.
Say what. You say you’ve extensively played other classes… Engineer Flamethrower/Elementalist Magnetic Grasp/Ride the Lightning don’t come to mind? Flamethrower misses everything, Ride the Lightning has terrible tracking (admittedly, it is better now, but you used to stun yourself for ages quite often), and Magnetic Grasp suffered the same problem, but… worse.
And as for clunky… have you ever tried to play a ranger using a sword? Lock yourself in place with your auto attack. THAT’S clunky.
Path Alpha 3 does not do a PBAoE burning. That is only attached to p1/2 with Dragon’s Tooth.
Alpha cone attack (p1/3) can be avoided by standing inside his body. Hitbox for move starts about whatever his arms length is away from his body.
You do not have to walk out of the rings if he is using the earth ring version on you. Center is safe zone. If there is mist in the air, it’s ice version, and only the center circle is a damage zone. He will always target one person with ice version until they die complete/go out of range.
Easiest and fastest way to kill him by far is to have all 5 stack and melee. Switch off on condition removals if in p1/2 to remove burning (Warrior with 3x shout + soldier runes + warhorn + warhorn trait can do this solo with 100% burning removal, every time). Dragon’s Tooth does not get summoned on people in melee range. Dodge roll in p2/3whenever mass circles comes up and ice appears (which it will appear under everyone stacked if all 5 stacked). Everyone stands inside him when he cones in p1/3. Crystals will break easily from natural melee AoE.
Mark T buffs can be reflected/negated with projectile interfering skills so that he never receives them. Can also be stripped. Also can be interrupted at will to cancel spins. If you melee, you can keep hitting him while he spins by standing behind him. Picks one person to aggro for the entire fight until they die/go out of range.
Bjarl does not have unshakable. After he runs into a pillar and attacks twice or so, stagger your CCs to extend the time it takes for him to reapply armor. You can greatly decrease the amount of time it takes to kill him with a small bit of coordination.
You only need 2 people with rifles to get 100% of golems to walk into husk. Use subvert skill after the golems have walked off the initial platform and right when they stop walking. Alternatively, just aggro them close to the boss platform and use #2 skill to butt them in. You can use any normal knockback to do the same, too.
If you have swiftness, you can easily jump back up the red platforms, even while in combat.
- For the armor. I think it was a fair way to present damage data on a wild range of armor. The standard armor is 2600 for a lvl 80. On a 2600 armor whe are nerfed about 10% on skill 1. All other skill are buffed so i think i’ts a break even or a slight nerf.
- For the 969 base damage. It’s our base damage at level 80. For statistic comparaison, i don’t see why it would be better to use minimal damage. Average damage for one grenade is more representive of what will be your… average total dps ^^
The problem with the graph was that it was a little misleading. It makes it seem like the new grenades are overtaking the old grenades for grenade 1 skill when really that only has a chance of happening at the very highest armor values that you would rarely see, if even.
The 969 base damage is the “highest” weapon strength value that grenades (and all other kits) will use in order to calculate their damage. For example, when you equip a PvP Rifle, you will see under the “Attack” stat that your weapon damage is 1205. The actual range that is used is 986-1205. Similarly, equipping a PvP Pistol in the mainhand gives you 1029 under Attack stat for your weapon damage, when the full range is 876-1029. When you equip a Grenade Kit, the figure under the attack stat is 969 – meaning that using that figure means you’re always calculating as if you’re throwing the ideal, 100% damage grenade, every time. 872-876 is our assumed minimum damage for grenades that was pulled out from testing. Since you gave one side of the spectrum (max damage grenades), I decided to try a look from the other side (minimum damage grenades). If you want to try to figure out average numbers, well, there you go lol. You can figure it out from the numbers above.
You still need to fix the fact that you could use stacking Sigils beforehand, either by increasing the pre patch stats by 250 power or 250 precision.
+ % damage per boon does not take into account individual stacks of boons, only unique boons. 1 stack of Might will increase your damage by the same amount as 25 stacks of Might in regards to the trait. And as I said before, in group play where you may already have team members who Might stacked for you, this may be a non-issue. I believe a great addition to your analysis would be to include the rough individual effect of adding one stack of Might for a single grenade throw. Between stuff like Guardians hitting things with Empowering Might/Empower, Warriors using For Great Justice, Elementalists swapping to Fire and comboing with their own fire fields, etc., Might stacks were pretty easy to come by with no effort of your own with good teammates.
As I said previously, if you were somehow in a dungeon group with both my Warrior and Elementalist at the same time, there’d pretty much be only one Might stack that you’d need to fill in for yourself in order to maintain 100% uptime on 25 Might stacks. That renders the entirety of HGH useless, and in fact you would be better off with 30 into Tools as all you would lose that is somewhat significant is the extra % damage per unique boon (which would easily be made up for if you were a crit spec due to the +30 crit damage).
On a solo note, Engineer might be more capable than before thanks to the HGH buff, but in a group setting you’ve got teammates that can do that stuff for you without sacrificing so much. My old Ele build pre EA used to poop out 21 permanent stacks of Might for my entire team (38 second duration stacks on a 30 second cooldown) – pretty much anyone could fill that in with some random utilities and without sacrificing traits for it. Hence I believe you should think about making a separate bit to say what each bit would gain per stack of Might, so that people can judge depending on what they were already used to Might wise.
Also, I like your work and what you’re doing, just trying to proof it up and provide stuff for people to talk about. Even if people don’t come to the same conclusion as you, it’s nice to have accurate numbers around as a benchmark anyways.
I thought that’s supposed to be pretty basic stuff lol.
D/D – Ring of Fire, roll while swapping to Earth and using Arcane Wave, Earthquake, Churning Earth = 12 AoE stacks of Might.
S/F – Dragon’s Tooth, Firewall, Phoenix, Arcane Wave, swap to Water, Comet + whatever the heck else you want (heal/chill/whatever, you got time), roll while swapping to Earth, Magnetic Wave = 18 AoE stacks of Might.
Assumes you have Evasive Arcana.
Also, I’m fairly certain the oldest combo field takes precedence for blast finishers, not the newest. Heck, I just tested it myself with my Thief. Choking Gas = Poison, Shadow Refuge = Dark, Smokescreen = Smoke, Clusterbomb = blast finisher. Choking Gas → Shadow Refuge → Clusterbomb = Weakness, Smokescreen → Choking Gas → Clusterbomb = Stealth.
Also, OP charts all the way up to 3800 armor BEFORE he hits (or is about to hit) the supposed break even point, even with the issues pointed out before (ex. stack Sigils unaccounted for or not?). I would like you to consider how many things actually have that level of armor. With Heavy Armor, full 30 points into Toughness tree, max Toughness gear (ascended!), runes, that’s 1211 + 300 + 1049 + 165 + 916 (base Toughness) = 3641. If you want to hit 3800 equivalence WITH Protection, you still need 2850 armor beforehand, which is still very high for many tankier builds.
As far as mobs go, testing on 80 mobs, only the highest armor rated mobs come close to that, the best (only) example of which I could find was the CoE Icebrood Goliath, which from personal experience is one of the highest armored enemies out there. In comparison, Icebrood Wolves have ~2600 armor (which is about equal to the Heavy Golem in HotM test area). Champion Icebrood Wolves have ~2800-2900 armor. Icebrood Elementals have ~2500. Outside of CoE, Risen Corrupters have ~2800, Plageubearer ~2550, Preserver ~2520Champ Abom (Plinx) ~2860, Champ Ooze King ~2860. Nothing else I was able to test really came close. Protection also isn’t very common on PvE mobs.
At 3800 armor, things are vastly skewed in the favor of whatever has higher Condition Damage output compared to say, at 2500-2800 armor. Direct damage is roughly 33% weaker. If even at that high point that heavily favors one build, and with faulty testing (no Sigil), you’re still unable to break even, that speaks volumes about how much damage the builds are capable of against each other (according to OP’s numbers, condition builds are still behind prepatch power/crit builds at 3800 armor, though just barely). You also have to consider that anything thrown near the end of something’s life (meaning it will die before the conditions from that attack last their full duration) also contribute less damage, in a sense, in addition to already having to compete with other sources of condition damage.
One last issue with this is that you are applying % damage to condition damage. AFAIK, Condition damage is wholly unaffected by such things. Therefore, in your formulas where you attempted to use +5%/2x5% Sigils, your damage is overestimated. A fairly minor issue, but still something to correct. Just change your formula up a bit.
The fact that people are saying “great work with the spreadsheet” without noticing the errors kind of confuses me. Did you… actually look at the spreadsheet?
There is one other thing however that makes condition builds look much more convincing post patch with respect to this analysis, though. Condition damage is relatively static (depending on your, well, stats). Direct damage has a range that varies heavily. The 969 stat used here in this spreadsheet represents the ceiling for which the Grenade Kit can hit. Between my numbers and however the heck Cascia got his/her numbers, it’s something like 872-876 as min damage.
Calculating for all grenades hitting their minimum damage paints a slightly different picture (emphasis on slight, though). Doing this while assuming still no stack Sigil prepatch allows for the condition builds to hit a very, very slight lead on prepatch build at super high spectrum of armor. Power/Prec/Crit% build + might stacking post patch still superior to the other post patch alternatives, though. Overall though, pre patch still better than post patch builds given by OP. If you add the fact that you COULD use stack Sigils pre patch, then pre patch build once again wins at every point.
Last bits sort of moot if you’re a PvE player since the majority of monsters you’ll see I’m guessing will probably be in that 2600-3000 range, if not lower. Doubt many people are running around with super awesome maxed heavy hacker toughness armor, either, though Protection is probably more prevalent there (if it isn’t, it should be…). With Protection in WvW I’m guessing you’d probably be scratching at like a 3500 armor equivalent target.
honestly though im a big fan of just hitting the bomb kit and running around like a moron way more exciting
wall of text crits you, nerfs grenades by another 35%
Even if the author is correct with his conclusion (that they have been buffed), his reasoning and evidence is faulty. He seems to assume that the old build didn’t use stacking Sigils at all, which are quite major. If you want to say that yes, grenades are on par or have been buffed, then you’re going to have to prove it otherwise rather than point to his post. Using his own spreadsheet shows that adding in a stack Sigil to prepatch Engi increases its overall damage by roughly 9-11%.
There’s also another way to consider it – a bit simplified, but whatever.
Direct damage done = Skill Coefficient X Power X Weapon Strength / Armor
The only things that we’re changing here is Skill Coefficient and Power.
Grenade 1 lost 35% from its SC. In order for Might stacking to make up for it directly, you will need to have your Might stacks give you the equavalent to a 35% increase in Power OVER what you were cabale of achieving before. If you had, say, 2100 Power unbuffed beforehand, you’re going to need 21 stacks of Might to make that up IN ADDITION TO whatever Might you were capable of stacking before prepatch.
This leads to another issue with the analysis. It assumes that any Engineer prepatch had 0 Might stacks.
At max, with a triple Elixir HGH build + 6 constant stacks from sigil, you’re looking at an additional 9 stacks of Might compared to what you could get prepatch. I’m sure there are other ways of increasing your Might stacks solo compared to before, but yeah. The Shrapnel buff will also help close the gap as it contributes 2.5 times more than before overall, but whether its worth ~11 stacks of Might worth in increased damage compared to what it could of contributed before is debatable. Don’t forget that bleeds have severe issues of their own what with max stacks of 25, and if you’re competing with someone who actually does specialize in bleeds/conditions yours are going to get overwritten easily.
Depending on your group and playstyle from pre-patch, this could either be really simple for you to achieve or completely meaningless if you already rolled a high Might build or had a group that naturally Might buffed you a lot anyways. On my Warrior, I always keep up 9 Might stacks that jumps up to 12/15 for my team on my own, so running with me would have by default already limited you to 16 additional stacks of Might or less to improve upon. On my Ele, I used to maintain 21 AoE stacks of Might permanently for my team, so… and I still maintain 15 AoE stacks with my Ele’s current build. This is mainly an issue with the fact that OP’s numbers seem to really highly rate a Might stacking buff.
Some people pointed to Sigil of Fire in other threads, and while its nice, it’s not worth 35% on its own. You can proc it at best once every five throws, and in those five throws you’ve lost the equivalent of about 1.66 throws compared to what you used to toss out. Sigil of Fire is a 1.0 coef while a single grenade throw was like 1.5. With Shrapnel buff, maybe.
Using Steady Rifle and assuming that toolbelt skills use their weapon strengths gave me a Throw Wrench coefficient of roughly 1 per for a total of 2. I can share my stuff tomorrow if you want, ran through all the weapons and kits and conjures for Guardian/Warrior/Thief/Ele/Engi/Mesmer trying to find out what I could. Still not quite sure how to handle utilities. I decided on a variance of 876-969 for kits/conjures, close enough to get pretty good estimates anyhow. Tested everything with a power of 1839, though I did screw up a bit on Ele conjures because I forgot that you get +power on some of them. Still should be fairly close to the mark, anything that I couldn’t use Steady weapons on I just spammed a bunch of times until the min/max converged on a number using the variance mentioned before. Steady weapons on everything else possible. And actually if someone would be willing to go through and grab accurate data on how long it takes to go through animations for everything start to finish that’d be awesome, my comp doesn’t handle that too well.
Doing these tests just reinforced my belief that this game has some of the worst tooltips and descriptions I’ve seen in a game in quite a while lol. A lot of it is blatantly wrong, and a lot of stuff just doesn’t work like you’d think. For instance, from what I’ve seen, Mesmer Phantasms don’t seem to give a crap if you’re using a level 1 white or level 80 exotic to determine their damage (other than the stats on the weapon, which if you swap it then doesn’t matter since I’m pretty sure stats update on the fly for that sort of thing). Makes some sense I suppose, but still weird as heck. Ele’s have a weapon skill on earth dagger that similarly doesn’t seem to be related to the weapon at all as far as damage goes and acts like a utility. Quite a few tooltips fail to even properly mention how many hits something can deal out.
wrench is .8×2, with a 969 max, or 920 average.
1244 hit x2, 2748×2 crits.
I thought toolbelt skills still use your mainhand weapon strength. Testing toolbelt skills in mists with Steady weapons seem to clearly use Steady weapon strength “range” rather than kit weapon strength range, even if you are holding a kit out (ex. I just hit heavy golem for 88/88 with it using Steady Rifle + Toolkit out). I know in PvE/WvW you lose weapon stats by doing that (whatever pow/prec/etc. your weapon has), but from HotM testing skills like Surprise Shot and Throw Wrench still use normal weapon strength range.
(edited by omgwtflolbbl.7142)
Hrm, that’s strange. Wonder where my variance came from then. I don’t use tooltips, only actual numbers from testing since so many tooltips suck and are flat out wrong in this game, and the variance is lower than a crit can account for. Perhaps I just derped and was looking at the totally wrong numbers lol. I was doing skill coefficients for all the classes other than Ranger/Necro and the burst thing was something I checked on a whim, so I guess I just remember or read incorrectly.
Edit: Just tested it, and yeah it is 3%. I must have been thinking of something else lol. Just common sense should have told me that remembering I hit 140/180 with a 3.25 skill was wrong to begin with.
Also, just noticed, but how are you calculating crits? You’re using a x2.41 modifier for crits. Base crit damage modifier is x1.5, Zerk gear + traits should already push you up to x2.5+ afaik in WvW/PvE environment. I thought crit damage bonuses is all additive with each other.
(edited by omgwtflolbbl.7142)
For really large scale AoE dps, Staff Ele was definitely better (hey, it’s Meteor Storm, what are you going to do about it lol), but for smaller scale AoE, like Fireball/Lava Font scale AoE, Engineers had pretty much the same or better. If you assumed Lava Font was up 100% and Fireball fired once per second, it’d be almost even with old Grenades (which Lava Font isn’t up 100% and Fireball fires like once per 1.4 seconds). That’s not factoring in the ramp up that you got from stacking Vulnerability, either.
Staff Ele in fire could stack up Might on cast if they really wanted to, but honestly not very many (good) Eles go that far into Fire. Eruption did decent burst + bleeding, but swapping to Earth means you lose a lot of AoE time and doesn’t really make up for it. I know people say you should always be attunement swapping with Ele, but if your sole purpose is to do a lot of AoE damage with a Staff, sticking in fire really works just fine, if not best, since Air has terrible AoE for anything 3+, Water doesn’t really do any damage, and all Earth can really do as an AoE well for significant damage is Eruption (which has its own problems in short encounters where it’s not your opener for obvious reasons). Other weapon sets do fine swapping around a lot and maintaining relatively high damage, but in Staff pretty much all the really significant sustained AoE that doesn’t really break flow to use is either in Fire or on a pretty long cooldown.
If you’ve got 1200 range, you can sit in the back without ever having to worry about any of his attacks.
If you’re melee, just run through him when he does his cone scream. Even if you’re in a weird spot where you can’t get out of the way, you can double roll to negate most of the damage.
Many of my guildmates have no idea what Defiant is or does, despite many of those same people having been 80 and been dungeon running for quite a while. It is one of those weirder mechanics that I’ve always felt could use better implementation. There just really isn’t much of a point to coordinating groups to burn through them and interrupt key moves for the most part with most current bosses.
Testing via 0 traits + steady rifle, Volley has basically a 3 coefficient. Kill Shot lvl. 3 has a ~3.25 coefficient.
If you just tack on a *1.3 modifier on your 2600 target at the end for the + 30% burst damage (no idea if its multiplicative or additive with another modifier), you hit roughly 18.5k max. Doing the same against low armor target puts it at around 24k max. Toss some vulnerability or extra might around and it seems plenty feasible to hit 26k + for a single Kill Shot on a GC 80, I guess. Whether or not that’s how it actually is calculated (+Burst Damage%) I’m not sure, but for now it seems to fit.
Plugging in 3 for Volley and assuming full crits seems like it’ll be able to hit 17k max with your layout. Don’t forget that each shot does the same amount of damage and is decided as soon as you fire (not including crits – they’re all calculated separately as to whether each will crit or not), so assuming your crit is high enough, you just need to have the RNG gods favoring you for that first hit really (bad way of wording it but I think you get the idea).
At some point, I really ought to make a full spreadsheet with the coefficients on everything for everyone laid out lol.
Also dunno if you factored it in, but Killshot will also get +30% damage just for being a burst skill with that build. The thing in the traits tree is bugged to say +3%, but afaik it gives the full 30% (last I checked it took steady Killshot from 140ish damage to 180ish on fat golem).
Did you actually try using the skills? Not lining up with my own experience at all.
Killshot has a bugged tooltip.
Where are you getting that lv 3 Kill Shot is a 2 coef while Volley is a 3 coef?
Actually it makes perfect sense when you consider the target to be a training dummy. I mean ele’s have cooldown on their AoE and thieves have initiative costs, whereas grenades are eternally spammable. On a stationary target that’s just steady and impressive DPS!
…What do you mean mobs move? What does that have to do with math on paper, especially as it concerns the other examples, too? Who cares about the actual performance versus the potential that could possibly be squeezed out?
Incidentally be glad they still allow you to toss grenades behind you while running. Probably the best use in small-scale PvP is to throw them at your feet behind you as if they were bombs.
Since we’re talking standing targets, fireball is the ele auto and they can cast lava font and also aoe burning with basically no loss of fireball dps to greatly increase their damage output. You can also cast it while the last half of meteor shower is going off. I think the cast rate on fireball is a bit slower than grenades, though.
If you were really picky about it, you could make a thief build that basically had the ability to spam cluster bomb nonstop at medium range. Don’t forget that you can also apply three guaranteed stacks of bleeding with each. After a certain range though, thief loses out in that you can’t really just spam it super fast though, otherwise you’re just going to detonate the previous one before it reaches anywhere near the target. It’s probably a ton stronger than grenades at close range, but weaker at a range due to the travel time and detonation mechanics.
Anet balances around tournament PvP, not PvE.
If they balance around PvP, then why make PvP nerfs affect PvE nerfs?
If you’re just pugging, any class is fine honestly. It’s more about how you use your character than anything, and frankly most pugs kind of are terrible.
Guardians have great projectile nullification, and good support with decent healing/might stacking/crowd controlling/pulling, and can eat a lot of damage by default usually.
Warriors bring excellent AoE damage (assuming it’s not one of those dumb rifle only Warriors or something), quite a bit of natural beefiness, and can equip/trait themselves to make it feel like conditions don’t even exist. If needed they can bring a lot of control. Don’t underestimate damage as being “useful” to the group, either – the faster something dies, the less time it has to wear down your group and the less chance your group has of getting screwed over by something random.
Thieves can bring decent projectile nullification, and they can go glass cannon while staying alive easily by using stealth aggro drop mechanics, which means they can bring tons of damage without being a liability if played properly. Shadow Refuge is very useful for some skips, especially with less capable players as it can be like a 10+ second buffer. Blinding Pistol can make you a tank vs. most mobs, weirdly enough. Power tree + shortbow = easy permanent AoE weakness if you need it, too. Power tree + dagger = permanent single target weakness as well. Clusterbomb blast finishers with 0 cooldown can be fun to play with, too.
Elementalists have pretty good healing, and can maintain ridiculous uptime on protection + regen + swiftness + tons of might for an entire team solo along with those heals. Protection is one of the dumber and stronger buffs in the game with -33% damage received, it’s like tacking on the toughness from a full set of Knights armor for free. Not to mention that they can bring lots of good CCs, and Meteor Storm + Frost Bow will rip through some stuff in dungeon encounters like nothing else can really even come close to. They’ve got some decent aoe condition clearing too.
Mesmers can maintain stupid ridiculous reflection uptime on a lot of stuff, making fights trivial (ex. all of freaking CM). Blink + Veil + Mass Invisibility + Portal makes most skips trivial. Time Warp is pretty much broken.
Engineers equipped with grenades (which is what probably 90% of engineers do) deal a ton of AoE damage while also easily AoE stacking 18-25 stacks of Vulnerability permanently to make sure that everyone else is doing a ton of damage. They’ve also got some okay AoE healing and condition removal, depending on how they’re specced.
I’ll be honest, I’ve got little idea about the other two classes since I’ve actually yet to really use and level either of them. From what I’ve seen other players in my group do, though, the Ranger water field is pretty ridiculous with some coordination (15 second duration water field…?!?), and Necro wells are pretty useful for mass blinds/condition removal and some builds are great for applying vulnerability as well.
I will say that 2 Guardians + 2 Warriors + whatever is pretty much super easymode though. Guardians are probably the most versatile and useful overall in dungeons. In general though, you can succeed easily enough with pretty much anything as long as you play well and don’t be stubborn about what you use.
I’m thinking that roll traits that attach an effect to the middle/end of your roll position (like Warrior/Ele/Guardian) will let you get out while those that trigger at the start position of the roll will not (Engineer/Mesmer). Kind of just talking out of my kitten though, with no testing to back it up.
Once you fire the lasers, assuming all 3 where used at the same time, there’s still about 5 or so seconds where you can move around but the shield hasn’t come down yet – ample time to make the run down to the shield. 5 second estimate is kind of a random number I came up with, but the point is you can easily fire the lasers and be ready to start dpsing as soon as the shield falls, even if you want to melee it.
Going up is, of course, a different story. Either you cut your dps short and leave early so that you can start the cannons again asap for minimum shield uptime or you stay and do as much damage as possible and only leave at the last possible second when the shield is about to come up again (which means there’s more downtime between each round of attack). If you have a really bursty group I’d say just drop your burst and leave, and if you’re in a group that kind of ramps up (ex. builds lots of boons to ramp up damage) then just milk it for as long as you can.
Like stof said, you’re supposed to fire the lasers and have everyone go down. The issue is that people are afraid of failing the fall, having to run back, etc. If someone does fail the jumps relatively often, then they’re just dragging it down and slowing it down overall. If you have 2 constantly firing, 2 sitting at the bottom doing damage, and 1 switching between the two, given how long it usually takes to get back up (since most people I’ve observed can’t make the jumps back up via the red platforms), you’re probably doing the same or even less damage than just having that one guy stay up top anyways.
Honestly, a waypoint should simply be placed inside the room itself. That may seem odd, but honestly there is no reason not to. It will make no difference for the next Alpha fight, and everyone just runs through to the boss room anyways. This boss does not reset no matter what. Putting the waypoint would make people more willing to learn how to jump up and down properly.
I’ve leveled my Thief, Mesmer, and Elementalist pretty much by crafting to 35-40, then dungeon running to 80 with dailies sprinkled in. Sometimes I do the “use an 80, then swap in at the last second” method, but more often than not I’ve just taken my lowbie in and done the dungeon.
It’s not JUST FotM, but it’s a large part of it.
The best gear you can acquire right now is Ascended gear, and there’s only one source from which to acquire it. It also threatens to nullify/outdate whatever exotics you can get from dungeons or crafting, since Anet has been quite hazy about how they intend to handle it.
FotM is also very profitable to run with its comparatively high drop rate for rares and exotics vs. open world drops and otherdungeon rewards, as well as Cores/Lodestones.
FotM allows you to buy exotic back pieces and 20 slot bags.
FotM lets you farm towards your legendary while keeping on top of karma farming by allowing you to substitute karma with relics for obsidian shards.
High levels of FotM is probably the only real area of really difficult PvE available for those into challenging content.
Due to separated levels, FotM LFG messages pretty much overtake everything else ever in LA chat, making it that much more annoying to get actual LFG/M messages for other dungeons out.
In all honesty, it is somewhat stupid to NOT be running FotM if you’re playing right now. That said, I rarely run FotM, but the effects it has had on the game is extremely obvious and not at all complex. I would not say that FotM is killing GW2, but the effect is definitely not a very good one and there are some big changes needed sometime soon. For it to have been implemented in its current form shows extreme shortsightedness from Anet, honestly.
In dungeons, if I see a ranger in my group, I’ll usually get Lightning Hammer ready.
15 second water field + weapon that produces blast fields on auto attacks = temporary invulnerability, pretty much. It’s even funnier if someone else picks up the other at the same time. Gotten some massive slowdowns from rapid fire water blast finishers from multiple sources.
I think it’d be nice if new paths were made in each dungeon that let you transform any associated dungeon exotics into ascended gear.
Since ascended gear is planned to be made more accessible outside of flavor of the month, you can make some kind of weird story about how the essence of the fractals or whatever are spilling out of the gate and taking affect all around Tyria (and hence the dungeon changes). This would let you bridge the gap that people are worried about when it comes to fotm rendering other dungeons useless and old hard earned armors pointless.
(edited by omgwtflolbbl.7142)
If you’re rolling in a high enough DPS group, you can focus fire down mobs and survive in Magg for a pretty long time or even through the whole event. A while back I goaded a group into trying it as a sort of joke and we ended up finishing it pretty easily despite nobody actually really being ready for it. One person died, but he died literally 5 seconds before the event ended, and if I had actually bothered to ress him a little he would have probably lived (I was trying to kill a mob to let him rally off of it and it died right after he did – at that health, I probably should have just gone to pick him up instead of risking it).
That video is too awesome. At around 45 seconds, a bandit yells out “Don’t embarrass yourself!” and like 5 seconds later, ominous music starts playing. Nearly spit out my drink.
I can actually see this being done with a mesmer, if you could be beefy enough and achieve enough regen somehow for those times where you do slip up and get tagged. The key points of this are the Signet of Stamina (endurance regen), the free short CD dodge on GS, and the 2 second block on shield.
Other than when he used the GS to get out of range of the p3 gigantic AoE, you could probably use Blurred Frenzy to substitute for it.
Vigor on crit would help in place of Signet of Stamina (requires that you crit, but when you do you’re regaining endurance twice as fast anyways) and frees up a utility slot.
His traits are mostly there to help him deal more damage and make the solo faster, so that’s not really much of an issue.
Scepter for Mesmer is basically the same as Mace for Warrior for all intents and purposes, as he seems to use it mainly for the block when he needs it. Same thing with an offhand Sword.
Mimic can be used rather than shield to block most of those projectiles in p2 where he uses the shield most, and blink can double up for use in p3 for both bubbles and getting out of that PBAoE. Mirror for heal, too, to pop when he’s doing his projectile AoEs.
Not sure if feedback is capable of reflecting Lupicus’s mass AoE, what with how big he is. Not really sure how the two interact.
It’d take longer, but I believe it’d be possible.
As for the weird Warrior hate vibe, I’m not really sure why you’d want to even melee with an Engi, since most engi builds other than maybe bomb centric or flamethrower centric ones would really want to other than perhaps the odd rifle sg skill.
By the way, I think an Engineer in melee could actually pull this off. Swiftness on kit, vigor on swiftness, shield for AoEs effect (though I think this may not work), toolkit (which actually is better than warrior shield, same blocking duration for much shorter CD), elixir s. Engineer might not have something equivalent to WW or Blurred Frenzy like the other two classes mentioned, but they have access to much more consistent vigor. Engineer has a 3 second block on a 20 second CD vs Warrior’s 30 second CD 3 second block, so Engineer actually has something better, and it can be swapped in as fast as you can press the buttons (though he does have Fast Hands, so that’s not that big of a deal anyways, though it’s still another plus). No WW equivalent hurts, but you also have access to 100% up time on vigor, which means you’ll be able to use regular dodges 33% more anyways than with Signet of Stamina, and you can trait the shield to have a 16 second CD instead. Killing Lupicus with a toolbox would be hilarious.
I see that you dodge roll the grubs before he actually applies it to you. Do you know if it’s possible to go the other way, dodge roll the grub as it spawns to prevent it from knocking you down? I’ve never bothered to try. Given the fact that you just ate the very last one that he always spawns and stunbreak’d out of it, I’m guessing not.
Also, you can just dodge roll out of the bubble? When I’ve tried that in the past, I usually ended up getting knocked back mid roll once I hit the edge. After trying it and failing a few times I just slapped some stability on and called it a day. Is there a particular trick to it or was I just derping hard as I rolled? I noticed you did fail one or two dodges where you got knocked back after what looks like starting your roll too far from the edge, and you just EP’d out. It’s really the only thing that annoys me in Lupicus and I usually just EP/Balanced Stance out when he targets me with it, but it’d be nice to not have to do that.
Dagger Earth style Elementalist.
If dungeons are meant for lvl 80’s then they should outright close all access to them for everyone under lvl 80.I learned at the very start of this game that standing still in combat is your undoing or at least makes you so much an easy target as a tied up naked woman wit ha “Use Me” sign in the metro. Kiting is the easiest way to kill enemies.
Earth Style daggers let me put a lot of bleeding stacks on enemies, why would I want to stand when I can cripple the enemy and start walking away with putting constant supply of bleeding stacks on enemy ? makes little sense if you consider the crippled enemy bleeds itself out and is fairly too far to even attack you.I know my class well enough, i geared up to bleed enemies hard and fast, I’m no healer so I don’t even bother with healing.
Kiting might be the safest and easiest way to kill enemies… in solo PvE content.
Fyi, constant 100% kiting is generally what bad dungeon groups do. The best dungeon groups kite rarely for specific instances, and the rest of the time will pretty much stick together for boons and whatever utilities. Kiting just makes things take longer and leaves more room for error after a certain point. I’m not saying stand completely still, the very nature of D/D Ele means you’re zipping around everywhere like an ADD kid on crack, but sticking with the group rather than dragging that mob 6 miles out is more ideal for everyone. And standing still for half a second while a bandit rifleman tags you once every 10-15 seconds will hardly result in you getting rolled over, and that’s only if you don’t just dodge the dumb thing.
Dungeon PvE content requires a different approach than solo or even open world PvE content. Open world PvE is simply a joke and really doesn’t require much thought at all.
I leveled up my Elementalist from level 40 to 80 solely through dailies and dungeon running. I never actually upgraded my armor past 40/60 cabalist armor, because I liked how the armor looked and I was cheap, and wore that all the way up until 80 (which means that with dungeon downscaling, I was severely undergeared at all times. I still played a weird s/f + lightning hammer build that was virtually 100% melee all the time and had little issue. CM was actually really easy with that setup due to a 33% uptime on a huge AoE projectile nullification + spammable blinds + short CD personal reflection.
I’ve used dungeons as my main source of experience in regards to leveling my Thief, Elementalist, and Mesmer all the way to 80. I’ve never really had any issues running and dungeons on any of them while at the appropriate level. Sure, my damage output suffered massively at times, particularly as I neared 80 due to downscaling mechanics with non-ideal gear, but that was simply due to me being cheap.
If you got wrecked your first time doing a dungeon, I honestly don’t see a problem with that. Dungeons are supposed to be the “hardcore”, difficult content of PvE. And many would argue that in its current state, it’s not hard enough. You likely approached it from the completely wrong direction, which is made all the more clear from your first post. There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as you keep your head on and actually learn from it. Being 80 helps, and certainly makes things faster and smoother if they’re geared up, but is generally not a requirement. 80s fail all the time in easy dungeons like AC and CM and TA all the time, and that’s because they play poorly, not because dungeons are wtfOP.
Also, saying that you’re a “fresh player, gotten to lvl 41” followed by “I know my class well enough” as a dagger/dagger elementalist (especially as a d/d ele!) is, no offense, very unlikely, especially if you drop a comment like “I’m no healer so I don’t even bother with healing”. A simple 10 into arcana paired with proper attunement swapping actually makes Elementalist one of the more beefy of the squishies when compared with Mesmers or Thieves (though Thieves do drop aggro fairly easily). In truth, I’d say most 80s I pick up end game for random CoE pugs and such still have no idea what the heck they’re doing. 100% shortbow thieves with sig of shadows always on or signet warriors (that have no idea what the dodge button is) or rangers/mesmers who longbow/gs in melee range or eles who only believe one attunement exists and such show up all the time, and they will tell you that yes, they know what they’re doing, just after spamming double rolls and dying for the tenth time.
Furthermore, if you’re “geared up to bleed enemies hard and fast”, at that level, you’re probably a glass cannon (pow/cond or cond/prec gear), or close to one. Personally, I see no issue with glass cannons as long as you know how to dodge or are in a group that understands how to support you, but as a first time dungeon runner, many people will tell you that’s a big no.
Stupid internet connection. Deleted my reply.
Tokens are account bound.
Guardians are probably overall the best and easiest class to dungeon run with. They’re versatile, excellent boons and control, aegis, and can deal decent damage all the while. In general, Guardian can breeze through most PvE content. I’d say to just use whatever you’re most comfortable with, though.
Keep in mind that all Dredge are immune to blinds though, so if you’re a Thief that requires Blinding Powder to live in melee or a Necro that relies on the blinding well, you’re gonna have to switch tactics. If you’re planning to take a peek at path 1, make sure you bring some good, raw damage, as there’s something of a DPS race at the start.
SE path 3 is the most commonly run one by far. And saying “commonly run” is a bit misleading, because SE is probably the most unpopular dungeon of all (at least on my server – I usually see maybe 1-2 LFGs all day while I’m in LA, if even that many). Path 1 and 2 were buffed a while back and not many went back to them. As for run time, path 3 can take you anywhere from 10-15 minutes with a (very) good group to forever depending on how badly your pug sucks.
As for actually forming a group, ask in LA. Make sure you also use the LFG site in the sticky up above, too.
From off the top of my head, there’s really only one boss that will 1HKO you with little warning, that being the bomb tossing boss in I believe path 3 (the one that actually moves around), and it’s really only an issue if you decide to go melee only. The tell is very short (a fast little spin) and doesn’t give you too much time to dodge in pointblank (from range, the travel time is enough). If you play smartly though, you can negate it in many ways, and there’s always the option of falling back on ranged weapons.
The only other truly 1HKO capable move I can think of from bosses in CM is the thief boss’s 1HKO, and that’s very obviously telegraphed. She stealths, stuns a target, then ~2 seconds later does a stab or something that basically downs you instantly. That gives ample time to hit a stunbreaker and move out of the way. And worse case scenario, you get downed, your teammates pick you up, because she pretty much only does single target.
Vallog, Turmaine, and Frost should not be able to 1HKO you at all (as in, I don’t think they can actually hit hard enough to do that). The other bomb tossing boss in path 1 is a joke. I don’t believe Mad Martha can, either. Sure-Shot Seamus usually takes 2+ hits minimum to down a person, and every one of his shotgun blasts (well, the only shotgun blast he does) is well telegraphed and easily avoided without the use of endurance.
The silver bandit riflemen may be able to 1HKO you, but again, like the thief boss, if it happens, it’s purely your own fault. They’re clearly labeled with “does more damage to moving targets”, and there’s a very clear graphic when they’re aiming for you. It gives you ample time to either dodge roll, set up some kind of projectile reflection/nullification, or just stop moving to take seriously reduced damage.
The shotgun mobs may also have 1HKO potential if you eat a perfect shotgun blast to the face, but again – huge wind up time accompanied by a pretty glow. CC it, roll, reflect it. And in any case, that rarely happens anyways.
Cutpurses hurt, but only if you have no condition removal equipped. If you have no condition removal equipped while facing them, well, that’s an issue on your end, not the developers.
There are some very serious issues with CM, on that I will agree. Some very poor level and boss designs thrown in there, such as Archer invuln, Turmaine invuln, Vallog in general, etc. However, what you’re complaining about is a clear case of needing to learn how to play and tackle the instance better rather than the actual design of the dungeon itself.