Showing Posts For ryphez.8250:
Hey guys,
I have done lots of raiding in the past in a variety of games including EQ, EQ2, WoW, Rift, and Destiny and just wanted to comment about the new raid. Wall of text incoming.
First of, it’s great to have actually challenging content. I went with my guild expecting not to be able to down the Vale Guardian as we had an interesting group composition: 1 Ele, 2 Tempest, 1 Chrono, 1 Condi Reaper, 1 Druid, 2 Warrior, 1 Engi, 1 Necro. We ended up making it to the 3rd phase where we missed getting in the green circles and with our timer around 1:00. The mechanics to get there were very well done and though out. It made you really think and consider your positioning throughout the fight while trying to do damage to the boss. Once he split, we didn’t have enough condi to get the red guardian down quickly.
This leads me into thinking about past raids I’ve done and how they worked with progression. Guild Wars 2 doesn’t have a gear grind which I really like, but I feel it changes how GW2 raids are from other games. The first boss of a raid is typically an entry into mechanics and making sure your team can work well together. You don’t necessarily need the best gear, but you need to nail the mechanics (most of them at least). These usually are a relatively easy kill and a beginning to the gear progression so that when you face them after you have the raid on farm, they’re not as difficult as before. This helps give the feeling of progression in the raid that you can kill the 1st boss with relative ease because you not only know the mechanics better, but have gear to do more DPS. GW2 raids will never be able to have this as there is no gear grind. The only way that this could potentially happen is if they introduced Masteries which helped with certain bosses. I’m not necessarily in favor of this, but it makes it hard to repeat this first boss with other groups that need to learn the mechanics still.
This feeds into my biggest issue with the first boss, the enrage timer. Why the hell is there an enrage timer on the first boss of the raid that it’s mechanics have enough power to wiped you anyways. This shows the glass meta is still existent with the addition of a tank and a couple of healers. I understand you could load up on tank gear and grind it out, but if you do that, you have to deal with the mechanics for longer. Dungeons/Fractals never needed to have glass builds, they just sped up the content. There is no possibility for face tanking with the need to kill when the boss splits and go into the green circles, so I see little reason this timer needs to exist. GW2 has achievements for beating a boss within a time duration so add this as one of the achievements instead.
Finally, I think the stat system in GW2 promotes the idea of a glass build compared with other games. In Rift, you could be a Mage and know you’re going to be outside the thick of things and build yourself to have good Int + Crit Chance gear, but still be relatively fragile. In GW2, you don’t have a stat for your class which promotes the same idea as other games to build for Max DPS to do more damage. The problem in GW2, there is a Max DPS for any class that isn’t the same for every class which I think really hurts certain classes. If the enrage timer exists, this should not punish people to play the class they want to even if their class can’t do Max DPS.
I think there are a lot of good things going for raids, but I definitely think there need to be changes. I understand this isn’t content that’s supposed to be easy and I do enjoy the challenge. I don’t enjoy the fact that we have to play certain builds or classes to complete just the first boss.
TL;DR: Raids present an awesome challenge, but don’t provide the build diversity we were told
I’m using ascended Sinister trinkets because with the +20% condi duration from Viper armor/weapons, I have +100% fear duration, +80% confusion duration, +70% bleed duration, and a +50% duration for all other conditions (with consumables).
Basically I wanted to hit the +100% fear duration mark for synergy with Terror, then I invested the rest of my stats into offense via Sinister prefix.
How’s that setup working for you? Are you enjoying it more than straight Sinister?
For sure. It’s a half-way between a full burst condition (ie. Sinister) playstyle and a full sustained/DoT condition (ie. Viper) playstyle.
The condition duration from Viper will shine most in drawn out fights (WvW roaming 1v1s/skirmishes) and PvE boss fights. Yet I still also maintain fairly high condition damage from Sinister pieces for shorter fights and trash mobs.
Hands-down my favorite Necro stat setup I’ve used since I got the game.
It’s also worth considering that conditions like cripple, weakness, chill (unless you’re running Deathly Chill), and immobilize don’t benefit from condition damage, whereas all conditions benefit from condition duration. You could even include poison here, considering it tends to be more of a utility condition rather than a damage condition. That’s one of the main perks that gives value to investing in duration.
What build are you using? Sounds similar to what I want to be doing once I get my sinister jewelry!
I love the world design and the fluidity of leveling up. This was the first game I was able to level up however I wanted to, explore everything, and JUMPING PUZZLES!