Guild Wars 2

Nearly everything the OP has said is wrong.

Necromancer
1) Necros can’t inflict torment or confusion at range. They have extremely limited access to burning, and Epidemic has an extremely delayed cast time, a shrinking window that scales inversely with effectiveness, and only works against bunches of players who all have their own individual cleanse.
2)Necros don’t have easy access to 8+ seconds of fear. In order to pull that off, a dedicated terror build needs to blow every fear cooldown consecutively, and if the opponent uses stability or a stun break at the right time their whole chain and their active defense melts.

1)Necros only have permanent weakness if you fight them at point blank range, and if they continually hit both the short range Weakening Shroud and the slow to cast enfeebling blood.
2)Death Shroud greatly limits the class.
3)Plague doesn’t do anything but squat on a point for 30 seconds. A plague necro kills no one.

Engineer
1)Perma burning can eat 6K HP… in 10 seconds. Then again, power classes can hit for that much in 1/4th of a second, so this is hardly overpowered.
2)Burning at high malice is only about as effective as 6 bleeds.
3)Engineers only have permanent poison if you camp inside of their tiny poison fields and take it up. It is extremely hard to apply permanent poison as an engineer.
4)Engineers don’t have a lot of confusion. They have a skill that applies 2 stacks, the bomb skill that requires melee range, has a long delay, and a short area that is completely useless without investing in stats, and the Prybar which is much better but alas is a melee weapon locked behind a utility kit that does crap for damage otherwise.
5)Grenades and bombs are the hardest to use AoEs in the game, with their slow flight, delayed activation, wide spread that loses damage quickly.

1)Engineers don’t have permanent protection. At all. They have RNG based shotty protection and proc based protection that barely handles their weaknesses.
2)Their self rez is incredibly slow, and they can be knocked out the rez bubble, and it is pretty easy to out DPS their heal if you aren’t a condition damage.
3)Nearly everyone has permanent vigor. The difference being that engineers require two or more traits to get it.

Rangers
1)Unless you sit like a lump, ranger pets will spend most of their time chasing you and doing very little.
2)Rangers can only inflict a lot of bleeding if they blow all of their cooldowns, or if you turn your back on them and they snip you over and over again.
2)Rangers only have permanent poison if you sit right in their face, and if they’re using very specific weapon skills.
3)Rangers also have restrained access to burning. Their spirits can be killed to prevent burning, you have to loiter in their traps to take burning damage, and torch 4 has a similar problem. The only skill they have that inflicts reliable burning is torch 5, which is less than 50% duration by default.

1)Rangers only have permanent protection if you don’t kill their stone spirit.
2)If you stop or stun their pet they lose their rez, and you can likely outdamage it anyway.
3)Their weapon skill dodges root them heavily, limiting mobility and the defensive value of their dodges.
4)Unless you sit like a lump, ranger pets will spend most of their time chasing you and doing very little.

A list of one sided complaints that doesn’t weigh the weaknesses of each of the classes.

DGraves.3720:

In this case breaking rhythm has the adverse effect of distortion. The 8s bleed goes longer at a lower rhythm than the 5s bleed but only intervals that match can be compared.

For anyone wondering why it is DGraves is doing math from crazy land and refuses to explain what is going on (instead just declaring everything wrong ‘just cause’), this statement right here is the fundamental idea that DGraves has refused to budge from over the whole time he’s been fighting against the plainly understood mechanics of condition damage.

Basically, he is saying that it doesn’t matter if one bleed lasts 30 seconds and another bleed lasts 3 seconds. Because they last different lengths, they can’t be compared, and so that extra 27 seconds of bleed that inflicts damage once per second for every single one of those 27 seconds doesn’t count because reasons. The numbers displayed by the combat log, by the GUI, and in the tooltips are all lies. The system, deliberately designed by Anet to be broken, imbalanced, and deceptive.

This thinking is, of course, nonsensical. It is the equivalent to saying that a mouse is heavier than an elephant, because most of the elephant’s mass doesn’t count and they can only be compared under the same volume, and that volume must be the mouse’s because it is the smallest. You’re probably thinking “but, couldn’t we just choose a volume that encompasses the whole size of the elephant to get an accurate picture of their overall mass?”. Yes. Yes you can. Yes you should. That would be the reasonable thing to do, because that actually has real world implications, like what would happen if each respective animal stepped on you. Or, how much it would hurt if you received a 30 second bleed instead of a 3 second bleed. This “interval” of his doesn’t exist. It is an arbitrary value, and you can pick whatever value you to do whatever you want. Whereas most theorycrafters pick a volume that encompasses the full magnitude of their actions, DGraves has decided to measure a mouse against an elephant by seeing which one has heavier molecules.

I’m not even sure how DGraves has come to this belief. Maybe he believes that condition duration just squashes and stretches a fixed pool of damage that exists regardless of the duration. Maybe he believes that the increase in the number that each condition damage indicator displays is the cumulative damage inflicted by a single condition, and thus repeatedly adding more conditions does nothing. Maybe he’s never tested this idea by inflicting a single condition and seeing that the damage indicator displays the same amount each second. Maybe he doesn’t believe this and is being obtuse for the lols. But whatever the reason, one thing is clear. Discussing this further with him won’t work. It would take a dev to finally tell him that he’s wrong.

So until you see a red post, don’t post.

Because of this, engineers are really good at applying bleeds in an AoE. Their skills do more direct damage, apply more long term bleeds, and fly further. The disadvantage being that grenades are much harder to use. So, how is it that the Necromancer gets so much AoE focus? Well, that comes down to their ace move: Epidemic.

Something I didn’t include in this was the Necro auto attack, which fires off 2 × 5 bleeds every 1.25 seconds or so, and factoring barbed precision this is 9 bleed ticks per second. This is really good on a single target basis, but in AoE it isn’t that good at all, since the AoEs can hit up to 5 targets, making them 5 times better. However, in 1 vs. 1 the scepter is undoubtedly king for the Necromancer, since in long term it applies more bleeding and poison to boot. It is here that necromancers get access to something that engineers don’t: condition burst.

Engineer conditions are gradual by design. They’re good at AoE bleeds, but it takes awhile to truly build them up, and many times the RNG is not kind them. Engineers have readily available access to confusion, but not a lot of it, firing it off in short bursts as counter play more than as a source of damage. The main damage source for condition engineers comes from their incredible access to burning, and this doesn’t stack in intensity, so they can’t layer it up for greater damage.

Necromancers have the option to do two things. First, they have the option to layer up every condition they have at once. This takes a rather long combo to pull off (Grasping dead + enfeebling blood + weakening shroud + Dark Path + Mark of Blood + Putrid Mark + Signet of Spite OR Blood is Power) and that can be neutralized by good cleansing and dodge/blocks rather quickly. The second thing in their arsenal is Epidemic, which is the only technique in the game that acts as a force multiplier instead of an addition. Epidemic multiplies the damage done on one target to another, regardless of where the source of those conditions come from. Despite the fact that it is situational and unwieldy, Epidemic is arguably one of the strongest moves in the game, from both an offensive and defensive perspective.

This gives necromancers true killing power as far as a condition build goes. With the deadliest stun in game via Terror, they can lock down and burst down a single target, and with an elaborate chain + epidemic they can burst all conditions into a massive AoE.

This seems like it might be overpowered, but it really isn’t. In order to layer up massive terror, you opponent has to first be hit by it, not break out of it, and not have stability. A player with knowledge of positioning can stun break out of the combo then move out of optimal terror position, rendering the combo meaningless. When all is said and done, in both WvW and in sPVP I’ve only managed to use a full 7 second (not 100% duration) terror burst once, since most players are smart enough to know when it is coming, and to get out of the way / counter play when it does come.

With condition bursts, the fact remains that it takes forever for those conditions to actually inflict damage, even if you layer them up all at once. Counter-control and escapes completely mess up the combo, since you have to blow nearly every relevant cooldown to have meaningful condition burst, and if they happen to pack a total condition cleanse on themselves, then everything can be for not. Epidemic as a force multiplier only works against groups, so the necro always suffers from the threat of being focused down and controlled, and then with increased group cleansing there is always the threat that Epidemic will simply miss or be neutralized instantly.

I say this a lot, and I’m going to keep saying it: A condition necro is ultimately not in control of the fight. Their defense, their offense, both are in the opponents court. We just lay down our skills and see what happens, lacking a lot of the depth that other classes have in engagement.

BUG ALERT!: Reaper’s onslaught is currently bugged. I just ran another series of tests to conclude if I got the DPS timing for shroud knight wrong (spoiler, I did), and I did one with Reaper’s Onslaught and without. Started mid combat, the time for 20 attack chains was as follows:

Without: 49.565 seconds
With: 49.555 seconds.

Unless 1% of a second is a 15% increase in attack speed, Reaper’s Onslaught does absolutely nothing!

So, new AA DPS for Shroud Knight is 397. Reaper’s Onslaught or not, doesn’t matter. This means that the shroud also does more auto attack damage than the greatsword. Wow, the Greatsword is really horrendous, isn’kitten Anyway, this would go up by 15% with a properly working reaper’s onslaught, making it actually quite competitive with the dagger. With adjusted crit rates we get a scaled DPS of 846 with Reaper’s Shroud vs. 758 dagger, meaning that Reaper’s Shroud is actually good.

So, out of curiosity I decided to check the sword again. One minute. 0.7 seconds for 20 attacks. So still 3 seconds per auto attack chain.

EDIT: Onslaught tested again for good measure. Got times of 49.46 and 49.51. Reaper’s Onslaught is bugged.

Well Michael, you’ve forgotten one thing.

Swimsuits.

We want them.

Zerker is statistically the best gear in the game for PVE.

While you can live longer in tank gear, so do all the enemies. The enemies that also live longer do more damage, making the benefit of tank gear moot. Worst of all, you don’t exactly absorb attacks or hold aggro, so while you live longer, no one else does.

Death is the ultimate debuff; dead enemies do no damage. The faster an enemy dies, the less damage it does, the quicker the fight ends and you heal to full health. This all goes on top of something else: active defenses. Players all have dodges, blocks, invulnerability, evades, and blinds on cooldowns. If you kill enemies quick enough, you don’t run out of active defenses. But, when you take forever to kill enemies, you’ll use up all your blinds, dodges, and blocks, meaning you’ll take more damage in the long run.

On top of this, the faster an enemy dies, the faster you get their drops. So, it is more profitable as well.

This is where the zerker meta comes from. Though players exaggerate the necessity of zerker gear, they do not exaggerate the benefits. As for being kicked: this only happens if you join a party that demands all zerker gear, or is denoted as a “speed running” party. Other groups don’t gear check at all, so join those groups instead of zerker groups.

While skimming this thread there are several things that are going through my head.

#1: Anet is already making new content in the game to be harder than what we have now. They’re hesitant to revamp old content with good reason: It is better to make new stuff harder, than to take something easier that players might already enjoy and make it harder. I’ve been running AC daily since the patch, and about every other pug goes through this same conversation:

“OMG why is this so hard?” — after wiping on the first champ
“They recently nerfed downscaled damage here” — Me
“Lol Anet ruined AC” — everyone else.

Something to the effect of confusion and frustration. I only heard one person other than myself who actually liked the change.

#2: Difficulty breeds toxicity. “challenging group content” can be roughly translated into “Gear and build checks and seething hatred for all the other people who hold you back/didn’t carry you well enough.” I still very clearly remember watching people in chat kitten at each other for 15 minutes in a dungeon because one person didn’t like how the other one couldn’t skip by themselves. Even now, I see tequatl break down into fighting over who is ruining everything. It is no secret that the dungeon community is one of the worst communities in this game.

Granted, I would like to see things at lower levels be a bit harder in the open world than they are now. Currently, if you actually run a dungeon at the appropriate level it is a difficulty shock. That level of things should be eased into a bit better. But this is not an easy task: we have to essentially balance content for an utter newb elementalist and warrior at the same time, even though one is nearly twice as durable as the other.

I’m not sure it is a failure at all. HoT added a lot of things that are pretty decent.

#1: Harder enemies. I’ve been wanting that for awhile.
#2: Elaborate maps and more involved maps. Always a good thing.
#3: A metroid style of progression where you gain the ability to explore new areas.
#4: The elite specializations are awesome (if a bit power-creepy), and I like playing as most of them.
#5: A large series of collections and achievements for completionists.
#6: Some pretty cool looking skins.
#7: Events that are actually fun to do.

So, I like the xpac, and from what I’ve heard it has sold really well, so I wonder what your standard of failure is.

Melee skills hit for a whole lot more than ranged skills. You really need to check the math on that.

Teutos.8620:

Good explanation for everyone who was not aware of what the topic is about.

This has left the damage vs. survivability aspect of the game completely broken. While it is sound mathematically, it doesn’t work in practice due to how the game is designed.
The obvious solution is to fix the way enemies work. Of course, this is not an easy solution, since it would revolve around redesigning every enemy veteran rank and above. Then again, it was Anet’s enemy design that dug this hole in the first place.

At the end your so called obvious solution is not a solution at all. Maybe try to think of something concrete.
F.e. Do you want to change the over-time-ratio, that the damage and durability from the mobs will get constantly reduced the longer the fight goes on? I don’t think that would be a good solution at all.

The full solution, with all its little tangents, is something I posted in another thread. It was good there, so I left it there and just linked to the solution at the end of the posts. This thread is more about what the problem is, and as such stands on its own.

In short, PVE enemies currently are just filler attacks with senseless gimmicks. PVE enemies need to be made to kill you: they should kite when ranged, they should chase more effectively when melee, they should have weaker rapid attacks alongside of strong and slow attacks, etc.

The follower list is useful. It lets you know how many people are stalking you.

haviz.1340:

Another fallacy of your opening post. You compared builds while the thread title is about gear.

You’ve missed the point completely. I picked out a random build, and compared different gear loadouts with that exact same build. The only difference, and hence the only point made, was the gear difference.

haviz.1340:

They do. You can facetank lupi with 0 dodges just by using heals and tanky gear.

Another thing, no boss scales its damage by the number of participants. The always do same amount of damage, disregarding if it is a zerg of a single player.

Melandru, especially in a zerg, stops using any attacks very frequently.

Falling off the platform has nothing to do with this topic.

Clockheart deals about 1,500 dmg with his autoattack. Compare it to high level archdiviner or mossman, it’s about 15-20 times more with a similar frequency.

Unless they’ve changed it recently, bosses do scale the amount of damage they do depending on the number of participants. I’m going to go with the wiki + my own experiences on this one when they say enemy stats can be increased. You are also selectively ignoring the points I’ve brought up in my examples, and trying your best to distract from them with irrelevant facets that aren’t even correct half the time. I will not be fooled. Either stay sincere, or take it elsewhere.

From the looks of the balance choices they’ve made, it seems like the devs are so in denial about how badly they’ve botched chilling darkness that they’re gutting every other trait just to make us run chilling darkness.

It is really hard to be optimistic about a class when the balance team is taking away all of the goodies before Reaper hits the shelf.

Cyninja.2954:

And all the TC is saying is, that while 1 problem is addressed, a new even bigger one is created. The bottleneck that is tanks and healers is no mythical pony. It’s something that is very real and has been a problem in the past in other games.

Well, the OP says a lot more than that, but everything else you say here is true. My main issue isn’t that the new “tank/heal/3dps” meta will be better. I think it won’t. My issue is that the line “there will always be a meta” is a caricature used to insult and dismiss anyone who disagrees with the zerker meta. There’s a certain point in the OP where I just stopped reading and started skimming, and it was right here:

Canakun.8031:

The reason there are some detractors from this meta (which is fine, the game very clearly allows for Play How I Want groups to clear content) is because not everyone can grasp the pre-buffing, the rotations, the correct time to dodge, etc. Whether this is due to latency, age, ability or otherwise is none of my business.

I’ve been around the sun a couple dozen times, and I’ve seen this kind of superiority fueled analytic BS before. Every time somebody goes on a stint explaining why other people disagree with their one true way I die a little inside, for my faith in the human race gets knocked another notch. Take this quote and remove the kid gloves, and you get this message:

“Other people (the PHIW) don’t want to play the way the rest of us play because they’re not competent enough to do it right. For whatever reason. I don’t care why.”

Which is ridiculous. It should be self evident that preference in play and competence in play are two unrelated qualities. I shouldn’t have to explain that one doesn’t lead to the other.

Don’t let the passive wording fool you. It is just fancy dressing on top of an elitist diatribe.

Gluttony
Status: 1/10
Reasons: In theory this trait isn’t that bad. In practice, the life force gain is negligible. LF is gained mostly from kills, and even the skills themselves have minor advantages at best. All in all, gluttony is the worst life force gaining trait necromancers have, and the only reason it is ever taken is because it is forced down our throats on the soul reaping line.

Fear of Death
Status: 1/10
Reasons: This trait only works after you’ve already lost. The one second fear only means something in a devoted terror build, where even there it lacks effectiveness, and outside of this build it is a minor nuisance, or it completely ruins stacks in PVE.

Speed of Shadows
Status: 1/10
Reasons: And now we have a trait that is worse than quickening thirst. This is because using D/D, while cumbersome, doesn’t actually cost you anything. This trait exchanges life force for speed, and Death Shroud itself has almost no use for running a bit faster.

Renewing Blast
Status: 2/10
Reasons: It is not brilliant to put a healing utility outside of the healing line, especially when the healing line is so horrible. Renewing blast is a heal skill that is extremely hard to use, many times going right through players but not taking effect, and also forces you to line up friendly players in an attempt to heal them. The healing itself is only so-so, resulting in a skill that is hard to use, expensive to trait, and isn’t rewarding.

Now for the lukewarms!

Signet Mastery
Status: 5/10
Reasons: In theory, this is a good trait. Recharge reduction + decent might on activation is good. The problem is, Necromancer signets are pretty bad, have long cooldowns, and are rarely used in conjunction with each other. Because of this, the most Signet Mastery can contribute is just 3 stacks of might when you condi bomb with spite, or 3 stacks of might with emergency healing from locust. Because of this, it is almost never worth a spot.

Spiteful Spirit
Status: 6/10
Reasons: Could stand to be a bit more potent, but otherwise not too bad. It is retaliation in DS, and one of the functions of DS is to absorb bursts, so it serves its function to a decent extent. But still, an additional two seconds would really bump this trait up.

Axe Training
Status: 6/10
Reasons: This is the same as Signet Mastery, in that necro axe is really bad. This is a good damage boost and recharge boost, and on good weapons this would be an extremely powerful trait, but it isn’t on a good weapon.

Dhuumfire
Status: 5/10
Reasons: Dhuumfire has the most complicated and controversial history as far as traits go, and it may just be my bias in the matter, but as Dhuumfire stands now it is just way too cumbersome to use. You have to go fully into the power line to get it, and even then you have to sit in DS which as no condi utility, and you have to fight with DS’s cooldown, and all for a measly 3 seconds of burning. When you stack this up to every other burning skill or trait that every other profession has, Dhuumfire shows its colors as the weakest and most inconsistent method of applying burning in the game.

Weakening Shroud
Status: 5/10
Reasons: This trait used to be epic, but it was nerfed assuming Close to Death + 100% condition duration + DS flashing tactics. Because of this, the trait has become nothing more than a weak hit with negligible weakness and the tiniest bit of a bleed. Still, it is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, so it gets higher marks.

Path of Corruption
Status: 5/10
Reasons: This is one of those traits that should be innate, but instead got tacked on as a grandmaster. Dark Path itself is a weak skill that is used for mobility more than anything else, and while the boon corruption isn’t bad, it is also highly conditional and difficult to use (I.E. forcing you into melee range). Because of this, the trait gets a solid “Meh” from me, and I’m pretty sure the only reason people take it is because there aren’t any better options in the curses line.

Armored Shroud
Status: 4/10
Reasons: Though receiving slightly less damage (9% less) in Death Shroud isn’t bad, it isn’t that good, either. For one, in PVE you’re either using DS to absorb a big hit, in which the 9% reduction doesn’t change the fact that you only have two shots before the bar is depleted anyway, or you are sitting in DS to lifeblast stuff, in which the degen is where the majority of lifeforce is lost. But in PVP this trait is more useful, since life force is both harder to get, and also doesn’t get blown past as often.

TheDaiBish.9735:

Did they say every weapon? I have a hard time seeing what use a Warrior, Thief and Engineer would have for a Scepter or Focus.

Whacking stick.

Thwap!

I suppose the biggest issue right now is that the weaknesses of berserker don’t show up in most PVE.

A long time ago I mentioned in a thread evaluating defensive stats vs. offensive stats that the weakness of the glass cannon was medium-high sustained damage. Low sustained damage can be largely ignored by everyone, and high bursts of damage can be mitigated easily through blocks and dodges. If you have a reliably sustained damage, then zerker builds feel the pressure immediately and have to back off or they go down. This, ultimately, is why it is that zerker isn’t overpowered in PVP. Even when fighting against a player with PVT gear, their constant tactical use of offensive skills and auto attacks makes it so zerkers are receiving a large amount of damage back.

There is good news here, though: Anet is already designing content with high sustained damage. The Aetherblades are a fine example of this, since they have attack chains instead of attacks, and don’t push all of their offense into single skills. Molten Alliance was another example of an enemy group that was like this. Guards, mercenaries, and NPCs in WvW are like this as well. Fact is, I expect future content to continue to go up in quality like this.

They can do better, too. Enemies that attack rapidly are good because they encourage build diversity and also make confusion more useful. But Anet can do more. Anet should make it so enemies heal themselves, making stuns and poison more useful. Enemies should apply more boons to themselves on high cooldowns, making boon hate more useful. Enemies should alternate between ranged and melee weapons so you can’t just kite them everywhere. Enemies should have blocks that counterattack hard, encouraging players to watch their enemy and use unblockable skills.

In essence, PVE should be more like PVP.

I think it is a horrible idea. There is a lot of play revolving around the downed state, and the game was designed around the downed state.

Mark of Revival
Status: 5/10
Reasons: This is a better trait. While ritual of life only rewards you for accomplishing a goal, this trait actually helps you to accomplish a goal. The two actually go quite well together, albeit still flawed in that it would be better to prevent teammates from going down instead of investing time to rez them quicker. From a PVE perspective, though, Mark of Revival is nigh useless, since enemies don’t stomp. You’ll fear them for a second, which will prompt them to turn right back around and pummel you as you are rezzing your friend. The worst part is that mark of revival scatters enemies, which ruins stacks.

Near to Death
Status: 5/10
Reasons: This is one of those traits that, despite its theoretical uses, I really hate. There are a lot of “gain x effect when entering/leaving Deathshroud”, and unfortunately many of these traits have to be balanced around the assumption that DS is being spammed with the Near to Death trait. The worst example being the weakening shroud nerf. Either way, this trait is incredibly situation by itself. Near to Death is only useful in a circumstance where, assuming other “enter/exit DS” skills can be balanced by themselves, a player is both gaining a lot of life force and also needs to expel a lot of life force defensively. In essence, Near to Death is only useful in similar circumstances to Parasitic Bond, with two exceptions. The first being that it is possible to gain a lot of LF without having to kill things, and the second being that no other trait is balanced around Parasitic Bond.

Foot in the grave
Status: 6/10
Reasons: Foot in the grave is a nice idea, giving stability when entering in Deathshroud. But again, in practice, the Necro doesn’t truly have the means to make use of this trait. Firstly, necros don’t have any big bursting skill they can use, so there’s no clutch plays for stability. This means that stability here is only used defensively. Secondly, Foot in the Grave doesn’t break stuns, which means that the stability here can’t be used reactively. The end result being that stability is on/off fairly randomly, with enemy players sitting back and waiting for stability to drop before going for the kill. In PVE foot in the grave is far more useful, since you can time the stability requiring attacks, but again, the short duration makes this trait quite hard to use.

The hardest part about all of these trait issues is solving them. Sure, I can stare at a gigantic pile of manure and declare that it stinks, but this doesn’t do anything to get rid of the manure. I could look at a lot of these traits, but my answer to half of them would just be to obliterate the concept and try again.

If it were “a” trait that I needed to fix, that would be easy. But with just so many traits that should be buffed, changed, or replaced completely, its hard to know where to begin. Its nearly on the level of designing a new class from scratch.

I wouldn’t say that Anet is disappointed by players as much as I’d say that I am disappointed by other players. What is going in in Guild Wars 2 isn’t new, and I have stories from the past to tell on the issue. For a historical example:

My ex-wife City of Heroes once released something called the Mission Architect; a tool which let players design instanced story missions using various in-game tools. Given the story driven nature of the game, this would’ve let players expand on the NPCs in any way they wanted, make their own custom enemy groups, make their own custom friendly groups, write stories for their characters or other characters, and make content as difficult or as easy as possible. They wanted to reward players for their work, so anyone running these missions would still receive money and experience as if it were normal play.

So, with expansive content-designing tools and story telling devices, along with access to nearly every map and NPC and customized character creator, what is it that the players as a whole did with this tool? By and large, players made farms and exploits. Just thousands upon thousands of farms, each one exploiting some mechanic in the experience reward system to give an inordinate amount of experience. Of course, the exploits themselves would get fixed, so there was always a new “farm” to run, and the old farms would clutter the system, and the player given ratings were often based on farms, so the quality assurance of any mission you went in to was shot because of this. Eventually, people stopped going to the Mission Architect because it was cluttered with broken farms, with no way to discern story driven, humorous, dramatic, fun, all around entertaining missions from the garbage that littered the Mission Architect.

This stands out to me as a pinnacle example of the way MMORPG players are. It isn’t ‘getting tired of old content" because there was oodles of new player-made content to play, with more getting released every day. It wasn’t about “having nothing else to do” because there was always new content, and the themselves can make something interesting. It wasn’t about flaws mission design because you made your own missions, and people could fix the problems they had with the game. It wasn’t for lack of storytelling because there were always good writers around, with CoH actively drawing the comic book crowd. The developers gave the tools to the players to make their own storis, expecting the influx of peer-reviewed stories and missions to provide exponentially more content and longevity than the developers themselves could ever hope to make. What they received were countless farming exploits that ruined the Mission Architect for everyone else.

I often hear the term “escapism” attributed to MMOs, and I’d have to say that I agree now. There are many things that you can have in an MMO: awe inspiring landscapes, exploration, a sense of wonder, competition, challenge, enthralling stories of tragedy and humor, interactive and engaging gameplay, etc. The problem with this is the fact that you can get all of these things elsewhere, from TV to books to other non-MMO videogames. So, you have to truly ask what is it that draws people to an MMO, when everything the MMO advertises is available elsewhere? In the end, it amounts to players wanting a skinner box to call home, and players wanting a sense of superiority over others through statistical values (better gear, more money, higher levels) rather than actual skill (AKA something like Street Fighter).

Just got the news, and I am legit angry right now. To sum it up, to unlock the elite specializations, AKA the main reason I bought HoT in the first place, I have to

-Go through the new maps to get hero points
——-Which are then gated behind mastery points
—————With mastery points gated behind mastery points
———————-Which are locked behind story and events, AKA the "I’ll get to it later because I want to have fun with the e-spec.
—————————-Which is designed in such a scale specifically to trivialize the entirety of map completion and legacy hero points, and do nothing else.

So I need to do the story and the events to get the mastery points that allow me to get the other mastery points which allow me to get the hero points which will allow me to get the e-specs, with the entire system built solely with the intention to make all of the hero points you could’ve earned prior to this time useless.

No, this is unacceptable. You know what should’ve happened? The new e-spec should cost 200 points, and each hero point in Maguma should be worth 5. There. That way, if you bothered to do map completion or at least bothered to get all of the challenges, you can get the E-spec, but if you didn’t you can just do HoT content to get those hero points. That way, everyone wins. With the current system, everyone loses.

Besides, even if they did, it wouldn’t do much. City of Heroes tried a name purge at one point, only to find that barely any of the names that were purged got used. It works like this: when people find a name is taken, they try other names until they get one, and then they never revisit the issue. There’s only a select few players who sit and stew on a name for an endless amount of time.

I didn’t mind the difficulty (non-hero point) of Verdant Brink and Auric Basin. But Tangled Depths brought out a rage in me. This was all explored with a zerker thief and a zerker rev.

First, in Tangled Depths the mob density is ridiculous. In the other places there was at least some breathing room, but here around every corner it is +5 mobs. Second, the place is a gigantic labyrinth. It is full of long winding corridors that make up a 4-tiered maze, making navigating toward any goal and utter hell. Third, the map is incredibly cramped, to the point of being claustrophobic. I don’t feel like I’m exploring or discovering new places, as much as I am just perpetually lost. Combine all these three things, you get the feeling of confusion, frustration, and oppression.

If there were a map where I would like the enemy density toned down, it is there. I’m already lost and confused. I don’t want to be under attack literally all the time.

I’ve never encountered zerk hate in the game. Only on the forums.

I can see why, though. Ultimately, what people want in a game is for varying builds and strategies to contribute equally to the outcome of the fight, while also contributing in a different manner in the fight. For example, people want it so a healer + DPS = 2DPS because the healer keeps the DPS alive for twice as long. It is a generic example, but nonetheless represents what they want.

I’m all for this myself. Having balanced but diverse gameplay appeals to a larger playerbase and can make combat in the game much more interesting. A big complaint about the game is that combat feels homogeneous, and they have a point here. I’ve found the prevalence of zerkers in dungeons is due largely to lazy enemy design more than anything else. So when I player comes to the forums and makes a topic wanting their builds to be more useful and things other than direct damage class cannons to be viable, I can’t help but agree with them.

I keep saying this: the ferocity change isn’t as big as many people are making it out to be.

Pre-ferocity WvW build (zerker trinkets, soldiers everything else) has a 20% crit chance and 186% crit damage, before traits. Post ferocity builds will have 173% crit damage running the same stats. So, the overall drop in power comes to

(1.73 × 0.2 + 0.8) / (1.86 × 0.2 + 0.8) = 1.146 / 1.172 = 0.9778, or a 2.2% reduction in damage.

Excuse me if I am unsympathetic. Now, lets throw on 300 crit damage and 300 ferocity/crit damage from traits, just for kicks.

(1.93 × 0.35 + 0.65) / (2.16 × 0.35 + 0.65) = 1.326 / 1.406 = 0.9431, or a 5.7% reduction in damage.

Which amounts to barely anything at all.

TexZero.7910:

You could start by working on the baseline economic problems that cause people to auto farm. That’d be nice. So it likely wont happen.

That’s just absurd. The “baseline economic problem” is that people want money. Period. You can’t fix that.

Hm.. interesting point, OP. Something I’ve always wondered is why it is that the only amulets with malice as a supplementary stat are shaman and rampager. It always bugged me that if I wanted to just have conditions as a supplement, I either had to go full DPS or nearly full defense. I always kind of wanted Carrion to provide power as its main stat, then condition damage as its supplementary stat.

It is a flaw in sPVP in general. I think it may have been what guided me to using condition builds in the first place, since for the first month of the game’s release I did nothing but sPVP. The amulets themselves are fairly flawed:

Berserker: does what it says.

Celestial: just good enough to be bad at everything.

Cleric: defensive amulet through and through. Not bad, but defensive.

Knight: little known fact to anyone but a number cruncher, but the knight amulet actually provides very little offense, making it inferior to the Soldier’s amulet for anything that isn’t proc related.

Rampagers: Gives you enough precision to do nothing with it.

Shaman: Works fine as a defensive amulet.

Soldiers: arguably the best amulet since it provides good bulk and substantial power.

Valkyries: decent amulet, however you don’t have the precision to use the crit damage it provides.

In PVE and WvW we’ve resolved this issue quite easily: we can mix and match our equipment to fine-tune our builds quite precisely, and where that fails we have food buffs to take care of the rest. But in sPVP, you end up having to either go full out, go bulky, or get stats you can’t really use if you build for anything other than conditions. I think it may be for this reason that we had a bunker game for so long: bunker builds simply take advantage of every point they are given in a meaningful fashion.

What I’d love to see is either 1 of two things, since this is a problem that does more than just affect the balance of conditions in sPVP:

#1: More options to fine tune the builds via multiple jewel slots. If we’re going to get 923/644/644, then the least they can do is divide this by 6 and let use customize our stats to a point.

#2: More jewels. The fact that we don’t have a jewel that has power as a primary with precision or condition damage as a secondary is just unacceptable. The devs seriously need to make the following happen (in order of primary/secondary/secondary)

Power/Precision/Toughness or Vitality
Power/Malice/Vitality or Toughness
Precision/Critical damage/Toughness or Vitality

and so on.

…and then I remember why the condi amulets are like that.

Now, for a bit of history, there is a reason why it is the amulets were like this, specifically Carrion and Rabid. People don’t bring this up often, but condition cleansing in the game was originally substantially better than it is now. It is hard to find specific example, but one such example is Mantra of Resolve. Originally on activation, Power Cleanse would cleanse every condition the mesmer had. A build with mantras could fully cleanse themselves twice in the battle before going into the relatively short cooldown. Fighting something like this on a condition build was near suicide, since the mesmer had both the ability to wipe your offense clean, but the utilities to stall you while it was on cooldown. I also think Arcane Thievery was in a similar boat, transferring everything instead of just 3.

I think when the devs designed the game, they originally intended it to be slower paced than what it has become. Hence, why it is the only true “offensive” amulet is the berserker. But, of course, the meta spiraled out of Arenanets control.

Right now I’m wondering how it is a team of 6 people assigned to the purpose of modeling various weapon sprites/animations and writing a collection are somehow going to meaningfully contribute to living world updates in such a way that their absence would’ve been distinctly noticed in future upcoming updates.

Nike.2631:

MrH.2591:

Yeah I was being generous I guess, they really didn’t think this through at all.

Really. You think the folks whose livelihoods depend on the game and have been working towards this release for about two years now didn’t think about it?

They have different MOTIVES than you, and different goals, but there’s no question who in this conversation hasn’t “thought about it”.

Normally I agree with what you say, but in this instance… nope.

I tried to logic things out a bit ago, and the best conclusion I can come up with is that Anet didn’t fully think it through. Arenanent is a company of ideals first and foremost, and how unsubstantial their ideals are has smashed against the cold wall of reality countless times. I don’t want to recount through the entire history of GW2, but there are plenty of examples where Anets ideals has crumbled.

Through the wretched course of becoming an adult, I learned two very important lessons:

#1: People screw up their livelihoods all the time. In fact, I’d argue that it is the default setting.
#2: Never trust other people to know things for you. Chances are, they don’t, even if it is their livelihood.

To get keys?

I get a lot of tomes and writs, so every week I make a toon, farm a key, and then continue on with my life as normal.

If you’re thinking of spending gems to get an extra character slot to farm keys, I’d say no, forget it.

Alright, I did some napkin math. The time it took to complete 20 full auto attack chains with the greatsword was 1.00.56, or one minute and half a second. This comes to 3.025 seconds for the auto attack. I’ll trim this down to 3.

Comparing this to dagger again. With my base numbers, dagger does 489 DPS. The greatsword, however, does 390 DPS. The dagger auto does 25% more DPS.

Even with bitter chill, the greatsword auto is wholly useless at the moment. Now, a few other napkin math timing:

Grasping Darkness: 1.4 seconds.
Gravedigger: 2.2 seconds,
Death Spiral: 1.7 seconds
Nightfall: 1.8 seconds.

Wow… maybe I’m doing this wrong, but these numbers are horrendous. For anyone wondering, what I’m doing is using this website to time the attacks. I start the watch, wait until 10 seconds (so I can synchronize the event), and then press stop as soon as a second animation begins. I do this a couple of times, and take the lowest number I receive.

So, Gravedigger spam. Adding on the recharge, this is basically 3.2 seconds to use gravedigger and the first auto attack. This is a DPS of 359, making gravedigger spam do less damage than the auto attack in the first place. There is one corollary to this, however, in that gravedigger is a whirl finisher. While standing inside of an enemy, gravedigger will hit them with 3 whirl finisher bolts. As far as now much damage those bolts do… I don’t know. They don’t appear in my combat log. In the PVP lobby a full zerker setup has dark bolts doing 241 damage, so I assume in the overworld this will be added to whatever the target is being hit for. Against the golems in the PVP lobby, this amounts to about a 10% increase. So, in a dark field, Gravedigger spam hits for394 DPS, making it roughly the same as just auto attacking.

The DPS of other skills is as follows:
Gravedigger (skill alone): 366
Death Spiral: 215
Nightfall: 627
Grasping Darkness: 287, not including poison

Overall, wow did Anet mess up the greatsword. The only skill that has higher damage than the dagger’s auto attack is nightfall. Soul Spiral, Gravedigger, Grasping Darkness, all of them worse. There’s no point to anything. You just use the greatsword as a weapon-slot well, and stick with the dagger.

Now, I’m only so much of an expert on economics, what with playing videogames with economies and generally existing in the world, but from the sound of it you don’t understand how flipping works at all.

The thing with flipping and capital gains in general is that, in order to actually make money, you have to sell the object that you are trying to flip. If you put it at a price that no one can afford, the person who loses out the most is the guy who bought it. That is why, in the real world, some billionaire just doesn’t buy all the bread in the world and then sell it at unreasonable prices. The end result is that no one buys bread. Then, the billionaire is straight out of luck, having blown his fortune on a gigantic pile of roach food.

The same thing can be said of most supplies in the game. Though you individually can’t farm for specific mats, there is still a large income of materials in the game overall. Anyone who buys low and sells high still has to compete with the massive amount of people who find and sell their mats. This is good for the economy in several ways. First, people who are looking to flip are contributing to the players by placing various buy orders for materials, meaning there is always a market for those materials. Second, for those who don’t want to sell low to buy orders, they can sell at a price that is independent of the buying price, meaning that anyone who flips will have to keep their goods at their competitors prices.

There is nobody who needs to flip to make money. The only people who stand around flipping all day are either the ones who enjoy it, or the ones who’d rather take the risk to make money than play the game for fun anyway. As for the whole “crashing from too many flippers”, that probably won’t happen. The only way for items to be flipped is if there is an inherent value in those items. If no one needs or wants these goods, then there wouldn’t be a demand for these items. Unless the entire player base decides that vials of powerful blood are only good for trying to make money, they will retain their value.

Likewise, not everyone can play the TP for money. The economy can only handle so many flippers, largely because there is only so many items that can be bought low and sold for a higher price. Once we reach that saturation point, flipping no longer becomes profitable. The economy doesn’t crash when this happens. What happens is a bunch of people try flipping, either lose or don’t gain money, then go back to other methods of gaining money. Thus, equilibrium will be maintained.

It is pretty horrendous. Considering that you’ll be literally loitering in an armor for 10 minutes, the fact that it kicks you out in 15 seconds or so is just poorly designed.

It never surprises me how big the wave of hatred and discrimination from “open-minded” people is.

Just FYI, there are far more people who don’t approve of this than what you see on the forums. The issue is that whenever they speak up, they are heavily censored by the moderating staff. We can’t have an open discussion about these topics because Anet has taken the rather close minded view that anyone who disagrees with them is evil.

I think of this mostly from a PVE standpoint. Take of that what you will. But overall the mirage traits leave me confused as to how I’m supposed to play this class. The class mechanic wants you to sustain clones, but a bunch of the traits give bonuses to shatters, and yet the bets way to play the base class is to keep phantasms up and never shatter. This leaves me with traits that contradict each other in three different directions.

Adept Tier:

Self-Deception. Using the phantasm style of play, this trait is utterly useless. If you sustain clones and spam ambushes this trait is useful once. Shattering frequently is when this trait is at its best, but shattering focus is still a pretty terrible way to play.

Renewing Oasis. I can definitely see the PVP use of this skill. Though I do wonder how it works exactly. But in PVE this trait is basically a situational and minor reduction in condi damage. In general, if you’re in a place with conditions you’ll bring a cleanse, not loiter around taking 80% of the damage you already would’ve.

Riddle of the Sand. AKA the only trait that will be used in PVE, regardless of what build you run. Not sure how this interacts with all of the skills, though. Is it confusion per hit? Does the confusion apply to clones as well? No idea. But still, confusion on ambush is good, and unlike most entry skills you can get it back. Just wait for the illusion generating skills to recharge, activate Cry of Frustration and spawn them all again. Though if you’re running a phantasm build, shatters aren’t an option and you won’t have clones to copy the confusion, so this trait is pretty sub-par in that regard.

In PVE, there isn’t a single one of these traits that I want to take. I just have to take one, and no matter how it works the answer is always going to be Riddle of the Sand.

Master Tier:

Nomad’s Endurance: This trait is mediocre. It pairs well with the Dueling Line, but the association between condition damage and vigor is obtuse. But unlike most flat buff traits, this one contradicts with phantasms.

Shards of Glass: Mirrors are terrible, so likewise this trait is terrible. It is inconsistent, contradicts with phantasms, and gives you an ambush skill + dodge right when all your clones are dead. There’s nothing good about this trait.

Mirage Mantle: Simple. But Impotent. It does barely anything. 1 second of protection is almost no protection.

Mirrored Axes: AKA the only trait you’ll take. It’s an all around buff for the axe. Simple, and effective. But useless for power builds.

Again, most of these are terrible. Mirrored Axes is good, but the other traits are distinctly not.

Grandmaster Tier:

Speed of Sand: This trait exists just to compensate for the limitations of the mirage cloak. There is much to be said when the grandmaster minor trait exists solely to compensate for a weakness inherent to the class mechanic.

Infinite Horizon: This trait… probably should’ve been innate. The ambush skills aren’t that good. In order to make them good, you have to maintain clones and take this trait. Then, ambush skills are a good option. Is it a better option than phantasms? I don’t know. It would take extensive testing to figure that out. Depending on the answer, this trait is either really good, or pretty terrible.

Elusive Mind: Finally, a trait that is universally good. It isn’t super useful for PVE, which will have you taking the other grandmasters for damage bonuses, but only a simpleton wouldn’t see the applications for this trait in PVP and WvW. Power builds will probably end up taking this trait by default.

Dune Cloak: AKA the trait you’ll be using. Comparisons to the Lotus Training trait reveal this one to be underpowered in damage application, range, availability, versatility, but superior in flat damage buffs. This trait will work regardless of whether you shatter or use phantasms. The duration buff is basically a flat bonus, and at least the dodge does something to nearby enemies.

The grandmaster tier has good traits, but sadly the minor and one of the majors boils down to “make the class mechanic work”. From the PVE standpoint, Dunecloak is the superior trait. The 20% condi buff is going to be far more useful than clones dodging and ambushing, and if you aren’t running a condi build then you shouldn’t be a mirage.

Overall, the traits continue the contradictory nature of mesmers by emphasizing shatters and clones when phantasms are the superior playstyle. There is nothing for power builds. There is no big mechanic or trait to draw the people in to play the mirage.

Unfortunately, I am not the best at fixing problems insomuch as I am at explaining them. If I were to give a few suggestions:

#1: Make Shards of Glass innate.
#2: Make Infinite Horizon innate.
#3: Get rid of Mirage Mantle.
#4: Give Self-Deception another effect besides clone generation.
#5: Fill the now empty 3 spots in the trait line with power or phantasm friendly build options.

That is a good place to start.

Honestly, I’m a little disheartened by the LS myself. One if the biggest issues I have is that I’ll go through waves where I don’t want to play the game, with a powerful compulsion that can’t be overwritten by new shinnies or cheeky innuendo. Whatever content that goes on in the game during that time is lost to me. This includes the story I miss, the gameplay I miss, all of the unique items and drops and skins that I miss, never to be seen again. What I will get instead are the remnants of the LS that no one plays and makes little sense without context. I feel bad about players that log in, get swamped with a scarlet invasion, have to deal with spore induced illusions, and have no idea what is going. I will become that player eventually. The longer I go without playing, the more likely I am to get ganked by an unexplained mechanic that no one is enthusiastic about, since the story behind it was said and done months ago.

So much of the living story is just filler content. The devs give you a list of grindy achievements in order to get all of the miniature rewards, and I’m tired of having to kill 1000 of a certain obscure enemy to get 1/5th of the way toward a miniature. The only fun part about the achievements is the quirky names they give some of the achievements.

I can’t look past the devious way the LS tries to get players to play. I’m threatened by permanently losing skins and equipment, I’m intimidated by new mechanics and enemies that will persist to kill me in the future, I’m conditioned to try and get all of the achievements for collectables I may or may not want in the future, but it is rare for me to actually have fun with anything they put into the game. I actively chose not to do the tower of nightmares because it isn’t fun to play.

I’ve voiced a concern on these forums a few times. I get the feeling that Anet has a similar concern. They haven’t made this concern clear, however, so now it is time to make a topic about this.

The big concern, of course, is that the reaper will utterly eclipse every other necro build out there. This has further problems, particularly in regards to having to buy the reaper, but I won’t go into those.

The focus of this concern is damage. The reaper introduces two more forms of melee combat, with Shroud Knight and the Greatsword. Now, while Anet wants these to be powerful, Greatsword is going to be heavily restrained by the simple fact that the dagger cannot become obsolete. This is why in the most recent videos we’ve seen, the greatsword does relatively terrible damage when compared to other weapons of similar speed. Shroud Knight isn’t as much of a problem, because it is tied to life force. This lets Shroud Knight be as high damage and bursty as it can be. But the greatsword can be used indefinitely, and so it has to be balanced with the dagger over prolonged combat.

The worst part is, the dagger isn’t that good of a weapon. The only notable thing about it is the lifeforce generation. Otherwise it has middling DPS with low cleave, a low DPS slow life siphon with a moderate heal, and an immobilize skill. The dagger has been in need of a buff for a long time, and now the ineptitude of the dagger is forcing the greatsword down.

While I share the same concerns, I think Anet has made a mistake here:

#1: The Dagger is a defensive weapon. The burst and utilities of an offensive weapon shouldn’t be restrained by the auto attack of a defensive weapon.
#2: The high skill required to make use of the Greatsword means that it should be scaled to have higher damage, assuming that a large portion of that damage will miss.
#3: The Dagger has been in need of a buff for a long time. If the greatsword properly scaled to other slow weapons eclipses the dagger, then the dagger should get a buff, since it means that the necro dagger is currently eclipsed by other weapons of a similar speed. The Necro community is getting pretty kitten tired of this “one step forward, one step back” balancing that we’ve received over the years.
#4: The Necro is already an extremely slow class, with all of our skills taking forever to use in the first place. If the dagger skills take forever (3.5 tooltip time for life siphon and 1 tooltip time for dark pact, basically meaning it is 4 seconds and 1.4 seconds respectively), then to make the reaper actually unique the dagger should be made faster.
#5: The Greatsword is currently being made obsolete by the dagger. The Greatsword simply doesn’t have enough unique utility to justify its use.

Greatsword Auto: Does less damage, only benefit is chill.
Gravedigger: Does less damage, contributes nothing other than damage (and is bad at it)
Death Spiral: Just causes vulnerability for more damage (Focus offhand also accomplishes this)
Nightfall: Maybe in PVE this will be useful, but a long delayed blind is useless in PVP. Enemies already walk right out of our wells, and they’ll walk right out of this, too.
Reaper’s Grasp: Its a pull. Its basic function is exactly what dark pact does, and even does it on the same length and recharge.

The only advantage that Greatsword has is cleave. On 2 or fewer targets, you loose out on offense and defense.

While I would like to give a bunch of suggestions on how to improve base necro, Malchior already has a better thread on the matter.

Uruz Six.6594:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

And in these four roles, support and control were king.

Brutes and scrappers would have had something to say about that.

/e pours another 40 for my SJ/SD scrap, she was so much fun.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

If, while playing the game, the only way you can describe yourself is that you “do damage”, then you aren’t doing it right. You can do a lot of things. Why is it that you should have to sacrifice damage for utility, or vice versa? So many people insist that this must be the case, but I can’t think of a good reason why.

This. As for why, the DPS boat race meta is – from what I have seen – all about facerolling dungeon speedruns.

My highest DPS was a stalker. Kinetic Melee after the assassin strike rework and the release AT specific IO enhancements turned me from a cannon into a mass driver. That said, my strongest toon bar none was my ice control/storm summoning controller, as he was the only toon I was able to successfully solo Ghost Widow on as an Arch Villain (+1).

The PVE DPS race is a bit more than just dungeon speedruns. I made a few elaborate posts on the matter, which are currently my highest rated posts, but in short the way it goes is like this:

Damage and durability share a direct relationship with each other. The more damage you do, the less damage the enemy can fire off before they die. The more durable you are, the longer it takes for you to die, and thus the more damage you can do in the long run. These currently are fairly well balanced, except that the plethora of active defenses in the game that mitigate damage no matter what. This makes it so glass cannons can defend themselves and do a load of damage, whereas the tankier builds don’t as much of a benefit. Since PVE was designed fairly generically, there aren’t many situations that fight against active defense, so the tankier builds are left with little to no perks.

Once you reach a certain level of competence, glass cannon is objectively the best way to go in PVE. Almost regardless of situation.

To be honest, I only read about to the 3rd page, because after that it sounded a bunch like “waaah waah whaaah” and “Neayyeameaemaea” to me. So, I’ll address some of the relevant points:

On engineers and bleeding: Since I also play an engineer a lot, I have experience with this. The ability for Engineers to inflict bleeding in an AoE is readily seen by comparing their AoE bleed capabilities. For this, I will assume that the engineer is using grenadier, but ignoring condition duration.

Shrapnel Grenade: 3 bleeds, 12 second duration, recharge every 5 seconds (4 when traited). This comes to 3 × 12 / 5 = 7.2 bleed ticks per second, and 9 bleed ticks per second with the recharge increase.

Mark of Blood: 3 Bleeds, 8 seconds, duration, recharges every 6 seconds (4.75 when traited). This comes to 3 × 8 / 6 = 4 bleed ticks per second, and 5.1 bleed ticks per second with the recharge increase.

Grasping Dead: 3 bleeds, 7 second duration, recharges 10 seconds. Comes to 2.1 bleed ticks per second.

Enfeebling Blood: 2 bleeds, 10 second duration, 25 second recharge (20 when traited). Comes to 1 bleed tick per second when traited with recharge, and 0.8 bleeds per second when not traited.

If we are to ignore the cooldown on weapon swaps, the engineer has the Necromancer beat in long term damage if the necro combines all 3 AoE skills with youthful abandon. This is when things become much more complicated: we have to factor in procs.

Engineers get several procs that go along with grenades. Ignoring Incendiary Powder because engineers get many sources of burning outside of grenades, we have 2 procs that concern us:

Shrapnel: 15% chance, 12 seconds of bleed, occurs with every explosion.
Sharpshooter: 30% chance for 3 second bleed on critical hit.

Engineer grenades hit 3 times, and each of these has a chance to proc on use. It is also worth mentioning that the Sigil of Earth is much more likely to proc in these circumstances against a single target. For simplicity, I’ll just use a 25% crit rate for both classes, assuming that these are builds that have the relevant traits, but don’t bother building up too much precision. You may use different numbers if you like.

So, this means that each grenade, we get 12 × 0.15 = 1.8 bleed ticks per attack, coming to an additional 4.8 bleed ticks per attack factoring in all of the grenades. With Sharpshooter we have 0.3 × 0.25 × 3 = 0.225 bleed ticks per attack and on 3 grenades this comes to 0.675 bleed ticks per attack in total.

Necromancers themselves have a similar trait: barbed precision. This gives a 66% chance to inflict a 2 second bleed, and with a 25% crit rate this comes to 0.33 bleed ticks per attack. Since necromancers don’t get multiple attacks, this is only added to each of the bleed durations above.

Now, bleed ticks per attack and bleed ticks per second are not the same thing. If you attack more quickly than once a second, it goes up. If you attack slower than once a second, it goes down. So, for arguments sake, I will assume that the attacks are used approximately 0.75 seconds apart, increasing each of those bleed ticks per attack up by 33%. So, in total:

Engineers: 5.5 × 1.33 = 7.315 bleed ticks per second with grenades, and 16.315 bleed ticks per second with shrapnel grenade

Necromancer: 5.5 Bleed ticks per second with Mark of Blood, 2.5 with grasping dead, 1.4 with Enfeebling Blood.

EDIT: fixed a math error.

If it weren’t for the fact that so much of Liadri is fake difficulty via bad design, the whole encounter wouldn’t be so bad.

Harper.4173:

My question to you – since you went on writing such a long post – is how does this make ME the bad guy?

To be fair, it may not be you specifically. Something I’ve learned by playing the game and going to the forums, a lot, is that whenever there is a social situation where something happens that the elitist does not approve of, they will interject themselves into that conversation, demand others play like them, insult everyone who disagrees with them, and continue with this until either the others just shrug and agree, or they go away and the elitist pronounces themselves the winner in their own head. I’ve seen it happen on the forums, and in the game, and I’ve even seen it in pugs, where one player will demand that things be done in a certain way, and when no one else agrees they’ll stop everything and spend 10 minutes arguing over it.

So now that their divine rule gets thrust upon everyone else, fighting evil wherever they find it, we get several consequences from this. One is retaliatory: you’ll get players becoming hyper casualists in response to this, shutting off any and all constructive criticism, and avoiding higher end gaming because the people who occupy that niche are insufferable to them. Another is naive: you’ll get players who blindly follow the advice of elitists, not realizing it only works for extremely skilled, well experienced, and many times hyper-specialized circumstances. So they do something like run full glass cannon gear with a melee ranger, but don’t effectively know skill dodges or root cancelling so they faceplant again and again and again. Another is corruption: the lure of farming dungeons and getting sweet l00t pulls good players away from the rest of the game, effectively making the rest of the game have more trouble due to the playerbase on average being less skilled.

It could very well not be you, so long as you aren’t commanding others to play a specific way to accommodate your needs, insulting them when they don’t, and intruding yourself into places with “advice”, or encouraging other players to not play with anyone but your ilk because bads are evil.

Harper.4173:

But it’s more than that – going slow through a dungeon, wiping, generally failing are things that RUIN the game experience for me. I take far less enjoyment from a dungeon run if we’ve finished it 10 minutes later than we were supposed to and with a few wipes done. It is literally a wasted experience.

Oh, hey, me too. We’ve heard a lot about you, but that’s the problem: you, you, you, you, you. You know who else doesn’t like wiping and failing over and over again? Pretty much everyone. Though I find it horribly inconvenient to deal with inexperience or incompetence, I am soothed by the fact that behind the emotionless avatar of that n00b is another human being who is having fun just like I am. It is a tax on my patience, but it is only just. If anything, my patience should be higher, I should be less quick to anger over a videogame, because if anyone is being selfish in the matter it is me, since that other guy has no problem playing with me. Only I have the problem.

Harper.4173:

Your post borders on exaggeration – how does not wanting to play with someone make them a victim?
If I advertise a group and someone who doesn’t fit with the criteria joins I don’t harass them – I just kick them and that’s that. We both go our separate ways. How is that so wrong? Please explain.

The reason why it borderlines on exaggeration is because elitism is an ideal, and as such it has no exact set of rules or practices. Much like with politics, any individual person sits somewhere between the extremes of hyper-casualist and turbo-elitist. To find one person who does everything I listed is rare. But to find people who do some or many of the things I listed… not so rare. This is a second reason why I’m not a fan of community segregation: it has a habit of reinforcing the extremes.

Of course, I don’t fit into any extreme either. When I see an LFG asking for a zerker warrior, I respect that and don’t join up, as I have no warrior. When a player joins up with some random class + build and demands to stay there… that’s just sheer lunacy to me. As is players who go to maps/dungeons below the minimum suggested level, runs around in whites because they don’t want to spend money upgrading their armor unless it is exotic, or players who specifically troll run. I can’t defend those because, as the opposite extreme, they’ve circled the globe and smacked right into that same entitlement wall they were running from.

I’m surprised so many people think that enemies having more sustained damage would make zerker gear obsolete. That wouldn’t be the case at all. GC gear would still be viable, because it will still kill enemies before they can generate a large amount of damage. The difference would be that now, zerkers will actually be risky to play, and more defensive gear would have to use active defenses to stay alive as well.

Josh Foreman.8250:

The other question that I hope is answered in the positive is this: Can the average player skill be raised by challenging content like this? We know that X% of players don’t know about traits. We know Y% never swap out their 7-0 skills to accommodate specific challenges. And there are probably dozens of other systems that go unused by some portion of the player-base. If even 10% of that group hits a challenge like the Marionette and the subsequent tension causes them to look into these systems and they learn a new depth to the game they otherwise never would have, I think that’s a win for everybody. The average skill level rises, and in turn, we devs can make more interesting events that utilize the depth of the systems we have.

I’ve worked as an educator myself, and I can say that this simply doesn’t work. The situation described here is the exception, not the rule. It is unfortunate that I see this method teaching in college all the time, and had been subject to this method myself growing up. I don’t know if there is any direct term for this, but I’ve come to call it Educational Darwinism.

Educational Darwinism is the brilliant idea of not teaching people directly, but simply punishing them for not already knowing what you want them to know.

I hate this method, mostly because it doesn’t teach. Sure, the average grades or the average skill level will go up, but not because people are learning. It is because the people who don’t know get expelled/drop out/quit playing, and thus only the people who already know keep playing. I see it used in college and highschool, since there the growth or achievement of any individual student isn’t of concern.

If people not utilizing game mechanics is a problem, then requiring them to know game mechanics isn’t a solution. Think about it:

*The game isn’t new. If someone wanted to look up builds, traits, dodging, combo fields, etc. they would have already done it.
*There is no indication that they should learn something new. This leads to players just getting frustrated and quitting.
*There is no indication what they should learn. If they come to the conclusion that they are lacking knowledge with no one telling them somehow, they don’t know where to look. This leads to wrong ideas, frustration, and quitting.
*The whole thing feels like punishment, and so the more sensitive or defiant players will quit out of principle against an unfair system.

There are so many ways it can fail, and only one way it can succeed. Alienating the playerbase has more negative side effects than you’d think, especially in an event that requires hundreds of people.

The thing with all the defensive stats is that they scale well, but only when you increase two of them. Let me give an example.

Lets say you’re a necromancer. You have 1846 armor, and 18472 health. You have 1000 points to spend. If you put all 1000 into vitality, you’ll end up with 28472 health, which is a 54.1% increase in how much damage you can take. Put that into toughness, and you gt 2846 armor which is a 54.2% increase. But, if you 500 into both vitality and toughness, you’d get 2346 armor and 23472 health. That is 27% reduction from toughness, but that also applies to all of the extra health, so you would, to scale, have 29830 HP (a 61.4% increase overall).

It’s a concept called effective health. Because the two stats multiply each other, the best way to invest stats is so that health is roughly 10x higher than armor, then increase them at the same rate. This is where toughness kind of gets the shaft. For you see, the necro is already at the golden ratio of 1:10. Every other class… not so much. They all need a certain amount of vitality to reach the golden ratio.

Warrior: 290 Vit
Guardian: 1046 Vit
Ranger: 472 Vit
Engineer: 472 Vit
Thief: 899 Vit
Elementalist: 756 Vit
Mesmer: 328 Vit

Overall, players will end up getting more from Vitality from sheer statistical efficiency alone.

Out of sheer curiosity and petty arguments I started doing some math regarding the way damage is handled in the game, and I have come to several conclusions that toughness and vitality are ultimately inferior to straight up damage. For this, I will be operating on a few assumptions:

*The formula listed on the wiki for damage is an accurate representation of how stats interract with one another:
Damage done = (weapon damage) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor)
*The changes in tooltip damage for skills is an accurate representation of damage change ratios.
*This is in regards to PvE. In PVP and WvW these are far from the case.

If any of these are incorrect then my conclusions will be incorrect.

Now, while looking at the damage tooltips I noticed though much experimentation in the mists that if you increase your power by 916 points, you’ll have double the direct damage. Since the base amount of power at level 80 is 916, I put 2 and 2 together and saw that power is directly reponsible for how much damage you are doing. This is simple enough. Factoring in other things such as precentage increases and precision are far more complicated, so I’ll be getting into that later.

I noticed that the armor attribute is used instead of the toughness attribute for determining how much damage is reduced when struck. To anyone half decent at math, this means that toughness has a proportional decrease in effectiveness per point. But, how much of a decrease in effectiveness? Well, lets get to some maths for that. First, the basic toughness at level 80 is 916. Second, the basic defense supplied by exotic equipment at level 80 is the following:

Light armor: 960
Medium armor: 1064
Heavy armor: 1211

Adding in base toughness of 916, you get a base armor rating of…

Light: 1876
Medium: 1980
Heavy: 2127

These numbers are important, since it represents the base for how much damage is being divided by. The effectiveness of toughness is a proportion of that base armor rating.

Now, for an example I will use my level 80 engineer. My engineer is equipped in full knight equipment (which, in PvE, gives Toughness, precision, power). Ignoring the backpack, with exotic orichalcum emerald jewelry and armor and rifle, my toon has 920 bonus toughness from equipment. Add that to the base armor attribute, and I get a new armor attribute of 2900 armor. With armor being inversly related to the damage received, we can find out how much of a change this is with the following equation:

1 – 1/(new armor / base armor)
= 1 – base armor / new armor

Putting in the numbers…

1 – 1980 / 2900
= 1 – 0.683
= 0.317

So I am taking only 68.3% of the damage I would’ve taken without the toughness, or ultimately a 31.7% reduction in damage. You may be wondering: “That seems alright. What is the problem here?” Well, the problem here is that 920 power would’ve roughly doubled my damage output. A doubled damage output means an enemy would’ve been alive for half as long. An enemy alive for half as long does only half the damage it would’ve done, ultimately resuling in an indirect 50% damage reduction from the enemy. And therein lies the rub: by speccing more heavily in damage you end up taking less damage.

If you repeat this example and equation with light and heavy armor stats, you get the following ratios of reduction:

Light: 1 – 0.671 = 32.9%
Heavy: 1 – 0.698 = 30.2%

Know that these are ratios representing the change within that class, and are not viable for comparing to different classes. Each class has the same damage increase from power, though, so there is no additional math to be done there. It is also worth noting that toughness increases the efficiency of heals by those percentages, but whether it is an advantage is up to debate, because with double damage you’ll also only have to heal away half as much damage.

But what of vitality? Well, that works on a similar principle. If we were to say that the 920 toughness were 920 vitality instead, then this would add 9200 HP to the character. Going off of the different base HP of each class:

Warrior, Necromancer: 18,372
Engineer, Ranger, Mesmer: 15,082
Guardian, Thief, Elementalist: 10,805

And using this forumla:

1 – Base HP / New HP

We would get the following:

Highest base: 1 – 0.666 = 33.3%
Medium Base: 1 – 0.621 = 37.9%
Lowest base: 1 – .540 = 46.0%

So on a short term basis, vitality investment is either more effective than toughness or a lot more effective than toughness. For the lowest base HP, vitality is almost as good as investing in power. Vitality comes with the advantage that it can mitigate condition damage better, but heals remain steady in their effectiveness, although they heal less as a percentage of health. It is for this reason that vitality is often called ablative, for once the extra HP is worn away the effectiveness is gone. This, again, isn’t a problem for damage, though, since an enemy that is alive for half as long will inflict half as many conditions.

A final advantage to high damage builds is that they also reduce the damage for teammates as well. Killing an enemy twice as fast means that teammates also take half as much damage. Because of this, high damage is ultimately a cooperative form of defense, which is something neither toughness nor vitality can claim (unless you count standing around and taking hits while rezzing someone as cooperative).

This is all well and good, but you’re probably thinking that in practice it isn’t as simple as “if the enemy lives half as long, it’ll only do half the damage”. And this is correct to a certain degree: stats do not exist in a vacuum by themselves, and enemies have bursts of damage and may live for very long amounts of time despite being dealt more damage. However, it is by the game’s very design that the tools for mitigating the various problematic portions of a pure damage build are built into nearly each and every class. Taking a look at the various problems:

1) Burst damage from enemies. A lot of vets and champions may have an attack or two that is capable of bowling over a pure damage build in one hit, and toughness/vitality letting you survive that hit would be crucial. However, this is what dodging was made for: when that OHKO attack starts coming your way, you get out of the way. With copious blocking skills and reflecting skills and dodging skills with control effects, immobilizes, blinds, and vigor, the only barrier to a pure damage build surviving an encounter is how well they can read enemy patterns. Because of this, toughness and vitality become like a safety net until players get good enough that they no longer need them.

2) Conditions. Enemies can apply conditions in one of two ways: either steadily or in bursts. Steadily applied conditions benefit greatly from an enemy dying sooner, since they act like regular damage output. Burst conditions follow the same dodging mechanics as in #1, but with the added bonus that condition curing abilities can get rid of the problem before it escalates into something severe.

It is because of #1 and #2 that, eventually, players will upgrade to pure damage builds as they learn enough about the game. In the long run they survive better while accomplishing tasks faster. There is one unavoidable caveat, though:

3) High sustained damage and thresholds. There exists many enemies in the game that are incredibly durable while having high non-burst damage. They are rare, but nonetheless they are encountered on occasion. Often they are champions that seem to only have a ranged auto attack. It is here that a pure damage build suffers, since there needs to be a certain survivability threshold that they need to achieve. This threshold, of course, is how much damage the enemy does (considering all mitigation techniques like dodging and control) compared to how much the player can heal in the timeframe between healing. It is here that toughness shines, since vitality lasts but for a moment. High damage builds often have to contemplate where this threshold is when building traits, since it will allow them to beat those elusive but very difficult bosses, or they have to develop specific tactics to get around those bosses.

Vayne.8563:

Asuka Shikinami.5462:

Nage.1520:

Asuka Shikinami.5462:

People are angry for a reason.
People hate temporary content for a reason.
People hate ascended gear for a reason.
People hate class imbalance for a reason.
People hate server imbalance for a reason.
People hate constant buggy content for a reason.
People hate watching you making the same mistakes over and over for a reason.

Why don’t you understand that?

You make it sound like no one at all likes the changes. People don’t hate these things, some people do, at least in regards to temporary content and ascended gear. Some things you call mistakes, other people quite like. The balance stuff, well yeah, that needs a whole lot of work…but if you keep using the world people as if everyone things the same, you completely lose any kind of credibility.

Agreed, some people do like them. Also some people like exploiting and some people like hacking. When we refer to large groups of people their is always going to be variation about opinions on a subject, particularly if it involves change. My post did not state that every player or forum reader shared a collective opinion or my own. I did use plural terms, however given the nature of these terms and the amount of evidence that these points are shared by a considerable number of people on the forums, I believe said usage is justified.

The points I am referring to are the ones which are constantly brought up in the forums and attract a lot of negative feedback – again for a reason. If people like said content, I am also sure they have a reason for liking it. If people are angry, and are angry for a reason, maybe that reason should be considered instead of just making condescending threads about how you want people to agree with your approach.

If there were polls on these subjects, on the forums, I think we would find an overwhelming majority of people don’t like many of these points. We could say that this is only representative of the people posting in the forums not the game altogether, however this thread is only targeted towards the people in this forum.

tldr; Semantics aside, people are angry for a reason. Said changes have affected a lot of people in negative ways and they respond with negativity. If Anet doesn’t expect that or think it’s warranted giving the nature of some of these changes, they need to spend more time trying to understand their forum community and less time enforcing group think. This tldr is far too long.

I think you’re wrong about the usage being justified. Because you don’t really know how many people like something.

Assuming that people come to the forums to complain, you’re naturally going to see more complaints on the forum. It’s not an accurate indication of the entire player base…only a very vocal percentage of the playerbase.

Saying people are mad and that gives them the right to act badly is wrong anyway.

The whole thing rings from a flaw in reasoning known as the argument from ignorance. The argument from ignorance is essentially the practice of saying something is true or false because there isn’t evidence to the contrary. This shows up in debates about approval and content a lot, and in forums it always follows the same pattern:

Person 1: A is true because you see it here.
Person 2: A is not true because you see opposite here.
Person 1: Exceptions that are dwarfed by the rest
Person 2: Forums aren’t representative so it isn’t an exception.
Person 1: I have a poll that says it is.
Person 2: That poll is posted on the forum…
Person 1: There’s no proof that forums aren’t representative.
Person 2: But there’s no proof that they are.
Person 1: But there was a rise/fall of players when this happened.
Person 2: Correlation isn’t causation. A hundred things could’ve caused that.

So on and so fourth. The issue being that we don’t know jack about the population distribution and popular opinion. It is possible that the forum is either an accurate representation, or an inaccurate representation, but we have no way to prove either.

Originally I would suggest that, instead of going off of popular opinion, you would go off of the logic inherent within each argument, but this poses another problem: ultimately what the community desires isn’t always logical. From a marketing standpoint, there’s always a strong force in decision making that is “what the customer wants”. I’ll be darned if I can figure out a method of getting popular opinion from the game other than a mandatory survey of every active player, since asking for volunteers results in skewed… results.

The whole thing is just a bad situation. To end it, I would just like to mirror the paranoia that Anet might choose to listen only to positive feedback, since it is very easy to invoke the argument from ignorance to dismiss the negative.

I don’t mind the taxis. I mind finding them.

Open the LFG panel at any time, and you’ll see a near endless list of appearing and disappearing LFGs for countless events. Finding a specific one before it fills is extremely difficult.

The LFG needs more categories to split everything out of “Living World”.

Carighan.6758:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

#8: Necromancer.
(snip)
1) Sustained damage instead of burst damage. High burst is useful since travel time eases cooldowns, giving good bursts higher overall DPS.
(snip)
9)Lack of cleave, with the recently buffed dagger auto being the best necros have.

Now, I’m not disagreeing with most of what you say, but really? Do you take Condi-Necros into dungeons?
Because all dungeons I’ve ran on my Necro were as a pure DS 6/2/0/0/6 build in full zerker, and they have ample direct damage, even on-demand with Lich Form, and a very solid AE due to the very wide projectile path Life Blast / Plague Blast / Deadly Claws have.

They’re still meh for dungeons due to, as you say, their utility never being needed and hence all they can bring (like dark fields) falling flat. But their raw attacks are very potent and quite useful.

… Apparently there is a miscommunication here.

Sustained vs. burst damage is not about condi vs. direct damage. It is about how the Necromancer’s damage rotation focuses mostly on its auto attack and thus outputs a steady stream of damage. Other classes have options to unload a lot of damage all at once. For example, a thief can backstab + heartseeker an enemy into oblivion fairly quickly, or a scepter ele can… go through its rotation to kill an enemy much faster than the necro’s sustained attacks could.

On paper, these would be balanced out: after the thief blows all their initiative or an ele swaps through all their attunements, they are stuck with an inferior auto to the necro who will eventually catch up in damage. However, in practice what happens is the thief/ele kills the enemy really quickly, then recharge their skills during the travel between groups of enemies. Thus, from encounter to encounter, other classes are continually obliterating enemies, whereas the necromancer is stuck planning for the long haul on short term engagements.

Not every species is as bizarrely sexually dimorphic as humanity is. The faces are different enough to tell apart males/females at a glance.