Guild Wars 2

Right now I’m not sure dungeons can be salvaged. Ascalon Catacombs was heavily reworked in the past, and it still has the same problems.

Dungeons were designed under a set of naive assumptions by the devs: That Aesthetic pieces had no influence on the fight, and that players would stack and pound with maximum DPS. It seems like every week there is a new exploit that arises from dungeons, whether it is getting an enemy hooked on some corner, or bypassing content by glitching terrain. And after all that, the fight doesn’t last long, anyway.

To rework dungeons, they would basically have to be redesigned from scratch. Every enemy, every boss, every path, every room. When given the workload required to do this, it is more efficient to just leave dungeons where they are, and make new content.

Skill dissonance is part of what killed City of Heroes. The PVP skills, to be balanced, were altered so much from their PVE counterparts that it made PVP almost entirely foreign. This made a large wall between PVE and PVP, since players essentially had to learn two different games. The end result, most people didn’t bother with PVP.

That’s part of why the devs are so afraid of having skill splits.

Exploit. Each time one of these crops up, where someone can jump over the walls of a tower or keep, Arenanet fixes the map so it doesn’t work anymore.

I just wonder why Anet designed the events so that succeeding in defense has much lower rewards than succeeding in attack. That right there is a recipe for disaster.

And with that, I just don’t take the trait, period. Now, while the terror trait didn’t change, Necromancers have two better tools to inflict terror now: Doom was buffed by 50%, and Spectral Wall was also buffed 1000%.

Doom: Now inflicts 1.5 seconds of fear. For no condition duration, this has the potential to double the terror damage done. For 50% condition duration, it does 50% more damage, and for 100% condition duration it does 25% damage. It is pretty powerful all things considered.

Spectral Wall: this area denial + protection skill can hit the target multiple times with fear, both depending on tactics as well as how smart your opponent is. I’ve seen it used to chain fear 3 times on a single target once (doom + wall + spectral grasp + running in front of the enemy = 3 collisions with the wall), and this can also be used on groups of enemies, both PVE and Melee Trains in WvW. This move itself nearly changed the meta with Terror, because now you can reliably stack fear.

Prior to Spectral Wall, you had 2 or 3 fears at most. You used Reaper’s Mark (2 seconds), then used Doom (2 second), and that was it. Maybe you made Reaper’s mark when reviving someone, and maybe you would cause AoE fear when you were stunned (90 second cooldown), but that was it. Now with wall, you get Doom (3 seconds) + Wall (2 seconds) + Spectral Grasp (2 seconds w/ wall) + Reaper’s Mark (2 seconds) + wall again (2 seconds), and if they stun you then Reaper’s Protection (4 seconds). That is 11 or 15 seconds of fear, coming to that many ticks of Terror.

But is this nerf worthy? I’m not so sure. For one, Spectral Wall requires great positioning, and a good player can avoid many of the chain stuns quite effectively simply by not standing between the necro and the wall. Second, stability kills the whole combo and makes the user immune to fear. Third, stun breakers can interrupt the combo and kill the fear damage immediately. Fourth, without any stability, a necromancer can easily be counter-controlled as soon as that wall is up, forcing them out of position and/or causing them to burn their own stun breaker. Fifth, all of the fear skills can be dodged or blocked except for Reaper’s mark, which can’t be blocked.

The combos are far from incounterable, the damage can be easily negated, and the positioning can be interrupted quite easily. All this is on a class with no blocks, no vigor, no stability, and little to no movement skills. The fact is that by knowing how to fight necromancers while also bringing good condition cleanse and a stun breaker / stability, the terrormancer can be defeated. The biggest issue right now is that the meta hasn’t adjusted yet, so players aren’t bringing good condition cleanses or stability.

haviz.1340:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

This, I have to disagree with. Running zerkers in place that has a steady stream of attacks, such as PVP, makes zerkers an extremely high risk set. Replicating the circumstances would lead to the results. Likewise, the solution is multi-faceted in that enemies will do a whole lot more than just attack rapidly.

The only result you would get is the requirement of more heavy professions, hammer guardians especially. Spamming hammer autoattacks is not exactly extremely risky yet it is the “speed clearing” meta for high level fractals where mobs do have a steady stream of attacks (ascalon, dredges, cliffside) and there is a lot of mobs you fight at the same time so you do not cleave all of them at the same time, unlike in old dungeons.

Not this heavy nonsense again…

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Real-PvE-issue-is-not-zerks/

I already did the math for it here. “Heavy” is irrelevant.

EDIT: darn, forgot this part.

You know the meta with fractals that makes the hammer guardian useful? That’s part of what I’m aiming for. As of right now, using hammer guardian in the overworld and in dungeons is useless, since teammates can just dodge and block whatever is coming. Many people who run fractals don’t do it in full berserker gear for this same reason.

Of course, I hope for this to be done better, and do this without having enemies with ridiculous HP counts.

As far as the damage rotation goes… I don’t have the specifics on that, since I am a fairly haphazard monster. However, it will look something like this:

1)Open with Locust swarm and blood is power before engaging the enemies
2)Engage the enemies and drop wells.
3)Quickly go into death shroud and use tainted shackles, and leave Death Shroud after it has been cast.
4)Use the dagger auto attack to clean up whatever mobs remain.

Against champions, it is slightly different..

1)Same
2)Swap to focus and use Reaper’s Touch
3) Drop wells
4) Go into deathshroud, use tainted shackles and leave death shroud as fast as possible.
5)Swap to lich form and use Deathly Claws until lich form runs out.
6)After lich form ends, use the dagger auto attack to keep the enemy engaged.
7)If this is a particularly dangerous enemy, save death shroud to take hits. If not, spam death shroud quickly to gain fury.

NOTE: A lot of this will change once specializations are released. The Reaper is probably going to be a must have in dungeons. The future builds aren’t hammered out yet, so don’t worry about them too much.

Definitely.

Current daily system.
Advantages: Low maintenance so I can watch stuff on the second monitor
Disadvantages: Soul Sucking boring

Previous daily dungeons:
Advantages: Interesting and dynamic, and highly rewarding
Disadvantages: had to deal with poor community.

Maybe it is because of my extensive background in PSO and PSU, but at heart I’m a dungeon kind of guy. The raiding environment doesn’t interest me nearly as much as the dungeon environment. I like smaller teams, less pressure, more free to explore and experiment.

Don’t stalk those you block.

darkchicken.8692:

ok so i tried to make the build from what everyone says an engi always have on them with AR

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fcAQFAUlspqb3zSgF87IRoHF2+qV0jHTZH/pgcB

I couldnt possibly fit everything in there like protection injection, speedy kit, backpack regenerator (since you know, elixir gun and bomb), i couldnt get either all those elixirs to clean away with cleaning formula 409 since i had to make place for the OP elixir gun and the bomb kit. So we got no supply drop since we need elixir X for the perma balance too.

I think alot of people dont know alot about engi and they are just mad. There is only a certain quantity of traits and utility we can take and the way some of you described us, there would be a ton of different AR build.

So lets try to get this straight. At the start people were complaining of AR and perma conditions cleansing via elixirs, then we moved to hold a perma weakness while comboing in the field of the EG gun (the weakness last one second so you better not combo if you want it to be perma.., and the damage is terrible) then we moved to the fact that AR user play with bomb kit to heal and hold point.

I dont really know what we are debating anymore, only AR? Engi bunker with AR trying to make a stand on a point? Ar + Cleansing formula? Ar + protection talent?

Perhaps we should start making argument while linking a specific build because the way some people talk about it, i got way more traits and utility slots.

They aren’t debating the engineer. They’re debating the boogeyman. The boogeyman has no set form, no set build, no weaknesses, and no practicality limits. He’s under the bed, in the closet, around every corner, and he’s right behind you.

I’m the boogeyman now. It’s pretty sweet, hanging out with the lochness monster and Elvis. BTW, Elvis has lost all the weight. He’s in pretty good shape now.

You’ve done your math wrong. At 1700 condition damage, bleed does 124 damage per tick, and burn does 395 damage per tick. Your mistake was you forgot to factor in the initial 131.5 that comes with burns. 1700 × 0.155, which is burns scaling damage is 264, which is only a little more than twice the bleed.

I think you’re looking too hard at the specifics, and missing the overall picture. The type of condition is technically irrelevant, as how much damage any skill does can be adjusted by changing the stacks or duration. In the short run which kind of condition inflicted matters, because it changes how fast they can do damage. In the long run, only one thing matters: overall skill DPR. The *D*amage *P*er *R*echarge tells you much damage you’ll be sustaining with your conditions.

Its a well known forum bug. When the amount of replies exactly matches the page limit, it’ll send you to the second page where there are no replies automatically.

The irony is that, by asking the question, you fixed the forum.

I myself have mixed feelings about farming. This comes from all the different games I’ve played, which had various different takes on farming.

I myself have farmed before and do sometimes see the need to farm. This game has temporary content, and with many of the stylish things in game only coming possibly once, playing for extended amounts of time to earn them or get enough gold to buy them from other players. Sometimes you are trying out various builds and specs, and due to the uncertain nature of things you don’t want to wait a week just to see if you like how a build plays out. So you go out and grind for equipment to try things out. Maybe your guild buddies need a certain profession, and you think you can fulfill that role. So, you go out and grind to level then get the equipment. Maybe you have limited game time, and the few hours you have make it so casual play for cash doesn’t cut it when you finally get higher level. So, you farm a bit then get the gear.

I can understand players wanting to play the game a certain way. However, this does come with several caveats to have a system like this.

#1: Farming content can trivialize the rest of the game. This is a big one, and I encountered it heavily when I played Phantasy Star Universe. Due to the items in a certain area being high in demand, all of the players would flock to only one area and play only that area. This discourages players playing areas other than the farming ones, largely because there’s no one to help them and it doesn’t give as much money as easily as the farming content does. GW2 does a decent job of avoiding this, though it still does show up time to time (coughCof1cough). This drives players away, because that big and expansive world diminishes into 2 or 3 spots where you can actually do anything.

#2: Farming can trivialize or overinflate the economy. Whichever this does depends on the system in place: If the game is highly dependent on in-game shops, then farming trivializes. If the game is highly dependent on player trading, then it overinflates. While farming, players dump both a lot of gold and a lot of items into the game, and without proper sinks this can lead to there being a bunch of super expensive super rare items while the ones obtained from farming are basically crap that is ineffective at gathering enough wealth to afford the better stuff. This leads players to do two things: first they will seek out new avenues to obtain wealth until the system homogenizes, or they will just farm the same spot more now that farming isn’t as effective.

#3: Basing the game around the presence of farming discriminates against those who do not like to farm. This is a big one with Runescape, where uber boss enemies have one out of a five-hundred-thousand chance of dropping a big otherwise unobtainable and yet necessary item. Guild Wars 2 avoids this, thankfully, by using untradeable currencies for untradeable items, instead of making the RNG the literal god of fortune in the game. There are some issues with super-rare items, like seasonal skins from holidays or precursors, but it isn’t too bad.

#4: Farming is highly exploitable by botting and gold sellers. This is another big one. Whenever there is a certain spot or path or event that gives more than the others, since it is the same spot/path/event over and over again, this makes it really easy to make bots to play this area, and also attracts gold sellers. Then they hound this area, making it impossible to farm for others if it is out of an instance, and thus the best way to get money ends up being to use the now cheaper gold offers from China. Due to this, the economy still inflates in the game, but now the only means of coping are ill gotten ones.

Chaosbroker.3860:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Something I’ve suggested before, and will continue to suggest, is to make stability much more widely available than it is now. Currently, stability lasts for a few seconds on very long cooldowns, making stability in PVP nearly useless. It’s never around when you need it, and opponents can just wait a few seconds for stability to wear off.

Stability granting utilities need to be more common, and give stability for much longer durations. At the current rates, I’d say to double the availability of stability.

The problem with that method would be creating the problem again from the other end of the spectrum. In short why even play a stun play-style when your opponents all have stability access equal to or on shorter cooldowns than your stun access.

It’s not that I disagree with you necessarily, personally I feel some of the basic mechanics of the game need some tweaking. But the fact that some classes have weak or non-existent counters to certain play-styles is more of a problem than play-styles that aren’t considered “fair” exist.

I’d argue that even doubling the availability of stability will not render stun moot. Just tactical. Instead of spamming stuns non-stop, you have to actually watch your opponent and wait for the opportunity to stun them. Likewise, players with stability will have to use it at crucial moments, since blowing stability just whenever will waste that resource.

Personally I find the ability to spam wells then boonshare quickness to be too valuable to pass up. The alacrity nerf does hurt, but that was only one of the things that I do as a chrono that I can’t as a regular mesmer.

Please, for the love of all things colorful and horselike tell me that you did one last balance pass on the elite specs.

Conditions do have counterplay to them. Firstly, condition applying attacks are rarely superior to regular power attacks, so they can be dodged, blocked, evaded, blinded, countered by stun, etc. Second, conditions have cleanses. Third and most dangerous, there are classes that can transfer conditions, which is arguably the most powerful counter in the game. It literally transfers all remaining damage of an attack to someone else.

Mostly I’m just wondering that is wrong with the OP. Throughout the entire beta weekend I acquired no gruff from playing the new specs or playing with the new specs. Entire maps full of players, and not one complaint. The majority of players like playing with the new specs and classes, as it makes the game more interesting while also giving them a perspective for suggestions on how to change the classes.

The world can’t cave to every unreasonable suggestion. The fact is that having beta content merged with regular content makes for a much richer testing environment, and any issues with that fact is a personally issue that will have to be resolved yourself.

I do hate the whole “hidden updates” thing they do, where they don’t list changes to some things that are important.

babazhook.6805:

Again while I think a toggle warranted, I think what we have as dodge traits now in that spec can qualify as GM traits. As they exist now and especially Unhindered Combat they are GM+.

If they put the dodges as they exist today on a toggle and than add more GM traits they will have to weaken one or the other as the spec in comparative terms will be too much.

THAT said it also my opinion that all of these specs in comparitive terms across all the classes tend to be more powerful then exisiting specs. This might be a first glance thing and it might be they appear more powerful because they are new but it does throw a crimp in the plans to create a wider build variety.

Basically this. Aside form lotus being bugged, as by default it shouldn’t be attacking when not in combat, the elite spec is being balanced under its current mechanical assumptions. Everything on the DD is already solid, and I have the numbers to back that assertion up. If we were to just give more to the spec, then it is highly likely that DD will receive nerfs to bring it in line with other e-specs and other thief spec lines.

What the “reasonable people” (ill defined term as it is) people are asking for is souped up version of evasive arcana to be made baseline, along with 3 new grandmaster worthy traits to choose from. There are a couple of ways this can be done:

#1: Dodges can’t be changed within combat This is the best way to go about it, since it is functionally identical to our current grandmasters… bar two notes. Last I had checked, utilities and builds were locked in PVP tournaments. To be “fair” the dodges would also have to be locked, otherwise from engagement to engagement the daredevil would just counter-rotate their dodge to beat whatever class they are going to engage, or whatever comp the enemies are using. Second, with 3 new grandmasters to choose from the class will get even more versatility and unpredictability. Should the devs feel that this is too much, we’ll be hit with a nerf.

#2: Dodges can be changed within combat, but there is a cooldown between swaps. This has all of the problems of #1, but none of the solutions. A DD will still have immediate access to every dodge as it is demanded. The only difference is that, should the “demand” change fast enough, the DD might not have the ability to revert access. From the practical standpoint, any build is going to alternate between two dodges and will just sit on top of its primary dodge until the other one is desired, so barring the more extenuating circumstances there won’t be a situation where the DD is without the tool they need to use. Add on 3 extra grandmasters, and the spec will receive nerfs.

I’ve already heard other ideas. Personally I like the idea of making Escapists Absolution a minor, either merging it with Driven Fortitude or swapping the traits and buffing Driven Fortitude. I like this one, because it opens up the master tier to two traits that, while significant in power, will never be taken over the 10/10 Escapists Absolution.

Another idea I like is reducing trait-specific endurance generation and giving the DD a 50% baseline increase in endurance regen and maximum endurance. Basically perma vigor. A minor issue with the Daredevil is that all of the endurance regeneration, while already theoretically massive, is wired into Brawler’s Tenacity (particularly with Channeled Vigor), Staff Mastery, and Endurance Thief. To get the most out of the dodges, you have to be using particular physical skills with their trats, a particular weapon with its trait, and steal boosting traits. But with the soft perma-vigor change, you can open up the endurance gaining traits to do new things, increasing the power of every potential DD build. This idea is harder, though, since it requires more creativity on the part of the devs, and the players will hate it if they don’t like what is put in.

Maybe I would be more enthusiastic about the dodge toggle if there were good suggestions for the grandmasters that were opened up.

Vitality and Toughness offer around the same effectiveness for reducing damage. If you take half damage or have twice as much HP, the end effect is you live twice as long against direct damage. There are a couple of differences, though.

Vitality: This gives more effective HP on every class that isn’t a necromancer (up to a certain point when HP = Armor x 10), and is ablative in the sense that once that extra HP is gone it is gone for good.

Toughness: This increases the efficiency of healing overall, however conditions bypass toughness.

It is a bit of a tradeoff, and you can make a case for either one in many circumstances. To maximize effective HP, though, what you want to do is gain vitality until your HP is roughly equal to your armor rating, and then increase them at the same rate. For long fights in PVE, however it is arguably better to just stack a whole lot of toughness, so your heals are overall better.

I suppose the only issue with saying that players should stack vitality to deal with conditions is that players already do that. Much like how direct damage isn’t shut down completely by toughness, conditions aren’t shut down by vitality. They end up doing less damage as an overall percentage of your health, but in an objective manner they’re just doing the same damage against a bigger HP pool. This is important when you compare it to another form of survival: healing. Conditions still do the same damage relative to the amount you heal, so overall your extra health really amounts to just having an extra 8 seconds before you’re in the same boat as everyone else.

So, assuming that you don’t use Melandru Runes or Hoelbrak runes to reduce condition duration, the idea of incredible condition resistance is a bad one. If you give classes condition resistance, then it isn’t fair to the classes who don’t get it. Then condition builds complain that there is a way to objectively shut them down permanently with no counters, so then A-net throws in counters to condition resistance, and the cycle continues endlessly.

We already have cleanses, evasion, blocking, and stuns. Just use those to fight condition users, instead of stacking protection and going “hah lol you can’t hurt me!!!1111!one1!1”

darianturner.8096:

Don’t know what you want to achieve with that post, Anet doesn’t care about state of the class. Look for Thief forum and ask him the same thing, you will see.

Just play the class if you like it and find a team that brings you to the raid, it’s what I’m gonna do tomorrow with my mates anyway

Funny thing is, you can same the same thing about the ranger, warrior, and guardian forums. Eles feel like they are being actively discriminated against with recent visual changes. So that leaves… mesmer, engi, revs? Yep. Dev’s hate 6/9 classes apparently.

I’m not an elitist, but I’m not hyper casual, either. When told to stack somewhere I stack, and when crap gets bad and no one else will, I find I have to take control and coach people on how to do things.

I also find it prudent to, in every pug, either ask if other people have done that dungeon path, or say myself that I had not done that dungeon path recently. If this convo doesn’t take place, and you just start commanding people, then it comes off as obtrusive and condescending.

That said, I’d blame the lag first. Lately the lag in the game is so bad that I’ve found myself standing stationary and not moving, only to discover 5 seconds later that I’ve run off a cliff into lava ankitten ow irreversibly dead (been running SE a lot lately). When that happens, I’d be pretty ticked off, too, if another member of the team took it upon themselves to tell me to not run off the edge into lava.

I find this whole discussion to be on questionable terms in the first place. Sure, in a real world economy it is easy to see disparities in wealth, although I wouldn’t argue they are a problem unless the disparity of wealth directly causes someone to be without necessities. You can see the nice car, the better clothes, the hotter wife, the better food, and these all have an impact on personal satisfaction and all that.

But tell me, what is the impact of the divide of wealth in this game? I can see 20 players standing by the bank, all with various random skins and dyes. Which one is the Gatsby of us? Whom am I to be envious of? Is it the guy with a sword so glowy that he can’t see his enemies anymore? Is it the girl who got a precursor… but didn’t say word about selling it so I don’t even know if she did or not? I have 50 gold right now, but if I had 5000 gold instead, would players go around being jealous of my otherwise utterly invisible digital currency?

The “best off” in GW2 consists almost solely of cosmetics, titles, and the flimsiest of standards. The wealth is superfluous, and the skins are for personal use only This isn’t like other games, where mechanical performance is heavily tied to wealth. The only arguable gap is the 300-600 gold between having ascended weapons or not, and that isn’t too large of a difference. While Wanze probably has exponentially more money than I have ever made, if you put us into a PVP match you wouldn’t be able to tell us apart. Put us in Cursed Shore, and good luck picking either of us out of a crowd.

With peak performance only being about 10% difference between exotic and ascended, most players are already mechanically “best off”.

Personally, I don’t care about whether someone has “earned it” or how “fair” it is that someone gets an instant 80. All that is just frivolous nonsense. It doesn’t matter how fast someone else managed to get to 80, either.

My concern is about new players who will be doing level 80 content, but don’t know a single thing about the game. The whole leveling process is not only a necessary carrot on the stick for new players, but also a tutorial process. You learn what your skills and utilities do, you learn how enemies attack and move, you learn about dodging, conditions, crits, and various other mechanics. By the time you hit 80, you have a general working knowledge of how the game is supposed to be played. Even if you crafted your way to 80, that requires a lot of wealth and also the forethought to research how to do it.

But now, instead of having new players who don’t know what to do wandering around the starting areas, we’ll have new players who don’t know what to do in level 80 zones, messing with meta events, begging for cash, joining raids without saying a word, etc. The functioning population of the game becomes dumber once you have a “new players instantly max level” item.

The best thing necros have going for them is superior statistical bulk. Their high HP and Death Shroud gives them the highest scaled HP. They also have quite a bit of relative healing if you stack their lifeforce regen skills right.

Problem is… this is rarely useful in higher end PVE. The vast majority of bosses require you to dodge/block/LoS attacks, and they do so much damage that they can smash right through your 30k starting HP. In the overworld, and against bosses that can’t one-shot you, this high amount of face-tanking bulk is great, but the lack of active defenses otherwise can be a serious drawback.

Power necro’s playstyle is quite passive and low-key, giving me a nice break from my usual ele/engi/thief playstyle. The most complicated maneuver you’ll have to do is something called DS flashing, where you pop Death Shroud to absorb a dangerous attack, then immediately drop out of DS to continue doing damage. Otherwise, most necro play is using the auto attack, using reaper’s touch and locust swarm when it is off cooldown, and using niche utilities as they are needed.

Condi necros are a bit more active, since they rely on bursting conditions for epidemic. However, due to how conditions work, and how quickly enemies can die in PVE, it is not recommended to use a condi build.

So, power build is the way to go. I recommend full berserker, even for beginners, since necros have a lot of statistical bulk. For traits, I recommend 6/5/0/0/3 for the majority of content. For weapons, I’d recommend axe/focus and dagger/warhorn until you get the hang of things, then drop the axe and just main-hand the dagger the whole time. Utilities are usually a case by case basis, but personally I like to use consume conditions, well of darkness, well of suffering, signet of spite, and flesh golem.

Well, other than getting ascended weapons and accessories on toons, whenever I have “spare gold” it usually goes to the gem store.

First I get myself a nest-egg of about 800 gems to sit on, in case there’s some deal that comes out later. Then, whenever I see skins or services I want, I convert gold to gems and buy it.

You can probably science it out. The thing is, the stats of all the enemies are a function of their level, so there isn’t any one correct armor value for any one enemy. It is like this with HP, too.

You’ll probably have to feel out which ones have significantly higher/lower armor values.

I am definitely looking forward to traps now that they have 11/2 second cast time.. That one second cast time really limited those traps. Now it might be viable to drop them in an enemy’s face.

I don’t even run incendiary powder on my hybrid engi in WvW. Mostly because I get burning from blowtorch, rocket kick, fire bomb, and supply crate. I have near 100% burning uptime from blowtorch alone, no condi increasing runes necessary. Incendiary Powder is just redundant at that point.

And that is why IP isn’t OP. Engineers have the most access to burning out of any class in the game, both in how many ways they can apply it, and how effectively they apply it. Where for necromancers, Dhuumfire was an extremely powerful change that marked the conversion into the condi meta for the next year to come, for engineers it was monday.

#1: I’m not entirely sure, but I am 90% certain that Dagger Training only applies to the weapon skills.

#2: There is no limit to the number of pulmonary impacts you can have on an enemy at any one time.

#3: Pulmonary Impact scales with power.

#4: Brawlers Tenacity doesn’t just give endurance at the start of the fight. It gives endurance at the start of every physical skill. It is worded weirdly because many physical skills are chains, but only the first link in the chain will give endurance.

#5: Staff master’s numbers are right on the trait: 10% damage, 2 endurance per initiative spent.

#6: The stat increases are of a set percentage, so yes they do scale.

#7: There actually isn’t that much of a “lack of numbers” anywhere. There’s only one trait that currently does not list critical info, and that is weakening strikes. Weakening strikes should list a 10% damage reduction from weakened enemies.

emikochan.8504:

Only reason you see those lfgs is that the non-specific lfgs fill instantly and disappear, while the people waiting for a specific combination of classes will have to wait longer.

This is especially amusing with people that want to speed run, since it often takes longer to make the party than the time saved.

As someone who forms non-specific LFGs, this is a lie. The “80s zerk meta no necro” groups fill much faster than “casual” or “all welcome” groups. This is partly due to a lot of the dungeon running community being like minded. This is partly due to lazy players who just want to be carried. This is partly due to the acclaimed prestige of running in a highly exclusive party. This is partly due to players having alts that they can switch to, since after 3 years no one just plays one class.

When players see casual run they think “underleveled newbs that I”ll have to babysit". Even if they don’t want to run zerk meta gear, they’ll still join those parties to not have to deal with other casuals. It is sad how often it is that a zerk party will disband in the middle of the run because someone rightly notices that half the players aren’t in zerk gear. It is also sad how often it is I"ll see a casual group will disband upon seeing a ranger/necro/non-80 in the team. They’ll join up, then an underleveled ranger joins, and then they leave. What follows is then a slew of people joining, then leaving
immediately. I’ll go through over a dozen players before actually getting a casual party.

I don’t know its formal name, so I’ll call it the Groucho Marx dilemma. Based on the famous line “I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member”, there is a systematic problem where casual players don’t want to run in a casual party. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the only people who end up joining a casual run are underleveld newbs who don’t know better.

Boneheart.3561:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You know, a lot of people like to think that there’s a great plan in the works. But anyone who is in charge knows they are flying by the seat of their pants.

Evidence?

Life.

I find the lag to be a big problem. On SoR myself. Been on SoR long before we were big in WvW.

There is a certain standard that I have for entertainment, media, engineering, and inventions. It is a very simple and absolute standard, and I see no reason to move away from this standard anytime soon. This standard is a line drawn in the sand that instantly renders anything crossing that line as bad. Bad in content, bad in execution, just bad in general. The inverse of this standard does not have the same decisive nature, however, as things can be bad without crossing that line.

What is this magical line of quality, you ask? Well, it is quite simple: Anything that does not work is, by default, bad.

Just imagine if a movie cuts out halfway through, or if a videogame’s controls do not function properly, or if your car leaks all its fluids every time you drove it. Imagine that it was by some oversight or even by purposeful design that things were that way. You would say “Yeah, that movie is bad. It just breaks halfway through and they never finished it”. You would say “Yeah, this car is horrible. It drains all its fluids and breaks every 10 minutes because of it”. You would say “Yeah, that game is bad because the controls don’t respond so I can’t play the game”.

And this is why WvW is suffering. If I can’t use my skills, then it is bad design. If I can’t stay connected, it is bad design. If I can’t travel around due to the map lag, it is bad design. The system was built up and is incapable of handling the load put on it. So now the legs buckle and we’re all feeling it.

I can’t suggest a fix to the lag because I don’t know the cause of the lag. I’ve been in many circumstances when the lag seemingly came from nowhere. In the middle of the night, no large battles going, the map isn’t full, neither side is out-manned. All I know is that it seems like with every update to the game, the lag gets worse and worse. Fixing this lag should be priority #1 for anyone on the WvW development team, since until it is fixed by default WvW is bad.

The big theory floating around now is zerg balls. I am not sure if this is the true cause, but whatever. If the server can’t handle the load, then we either need a way to greatly reduce the incentive for zerg balling, or we need to reduce the number of players who are in WvW at any one time. Even if this is locking players out of WvW, as it stands right now Lag is already locking players out of WvW. Then, once the system has better optimization and it can handle greater numbers without having a seizure, then we can increase the cap again

I find a lot of necro traits to be lackluster.

In Spite Minor:

Adept: Parasitic Bond. I have seriously never seen this thing matter in any way. If they’re dead, I’ve already won and healing is useless. If I’m losing, then they’re not dying and this doesn’t come into play. The heal is for so little that even in massive zerg battles and temple events it rarely matters. I thought this just gave Life Force for the longest time.

Major: Death Into Life. Healing power is the worst scaling stat in the game, so 5% of my power being converted = 100 or so healing power on most of my builds = basically nothing at all. Regeneration gives 12 more HP a second; no one cares.

Grandmaster: Siphoned Power. At 25%, an opponent is about to kill you. In PVE you’ll get 1 stack of might if you are lucky before going down. In PVP they’ll burst you to death at this point. The might doesn’t last long enough to heal up and use either, since the heal will eat up a third of the might’s duration.

Spite Major:

Adept: Spiteful Removal. In PVP you have to win to use this trait, making it nigh useless except in large zerg vs. zerg battles, where you’re probably winning and don’t need it again anyway. In PVE you’ll be much better off just transferring or curing conditions in some manner that doesn’t involve killing the veteran first.

Master: Signet of Power. This trait seems fine until you realize that necromancers only have one signet where it’ll be worth anything (signet of spite), with everything else being defensive or utility usage.

In Curses Major:

Reaper’s precision: a 1/3 chance to get 1% life force on a critical hit. If you have, say, a 50% crit chance, then you have a 16.6% chance to gain life force with each attack. The problem here is that this trait is only useful if you are running a pure Scepter/Dagger build, which as an extremely slow attack rate. There’s so many better ways to invest points to get lifeforce that this trait will always be on the bottom of the totem poll.

Death Magic minor:

Adept: Reanimator. The jagged horror summoned by this trait is nigh useless. It never distracts anyone, dies to AoE and itself really quickly, requires you to have already won the fight to summon, and does pitiful damage easily avoided by walking. The only time this trait is any good is when combined with a grandmaster trait that causes a death nova when it inevitably dies.

Master: Protection of the Horde. To anyone who isn’t a minion master this trait is completely useless. Toughness already scales horribly, and such paltry amounts of the stat mean very little in the grand scheme of things. Even with a minion master, the most you get 120 (presuming that jagged horror lives longer than 0 seconds), which isn’t turning any heads or really changing the outcome of the battle.

Blood Magic Major:

Master: Deathly Invigoration. The amount this heals for is so low that it isn’t noticeable. 260 points every 10 seconds makes it far inferior to… pretty much everything, really. I think this trait wins the award for worst healing trait ever, since parasitic bond has at least some use when fighting endless hordes of enemies: not wasting 2 seconds on a healing skill.

Soul Reaping Minor:

Adept: Gluttony. Life force generation works in such paltry amounts that a 10% increase doesn’t do anything for a player’s offense or survivability. Either they have a build that generates life force, or they do not. This trait will not tip the scale in any direction, and the effect even in long term is negligible. When, in any fight, has any necromancer ever thought “Gee, I wish I had 10% more life force, because then I could win” and not already been at maximum? Never.

I think the annoying thing is that all of the worst traits of the necromancer are the minor traits that you have to take in that line. If you want more power, you have to get the useless heal and the useless haling power increase and the useless might-when-already-dead traits. As for improvements, I’m not nearly creative enough for those. I can just plainly says what works.

But in general, if you make things do more of what they do, they become more useful. I.E. gluttony increasing by 25% instead of 10%.

Tabootrinket.2631:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The funny part about all that is, I’ve ran the numbers a few times, and the staff is the highest damaging weapon thieves will have. It has the highest base auto attack, the highest DPS attack, the highest per-initiative damage, the highest AoE damage, and the highest modifiers attached to traits. All at the same time.

So when players say that the staff is low damaging or underpowered and it clearly isn’t… then I have to throw out their feedback as not being objective.

Numbers are bound to change for balance, and they will. Mechanism is another story.
So what will happen when those numbers get toned down ? The weapon gets forgotten.

I don’t buy it. The idea that staff is inadequate because in the future the staff may be nerfed just doesn’t make sense. You’re have to remember, the staff isn’t just max deeps. It is max deeps in every category: per initiative, on auto, at base, overall, and against multiple targets. For the staff to fall out of use, it would have to see every single category hit.

The biggest problem with spectral skills gaining lifeforce is that they are on very long recharges and are only situational at best. Their mechanic is that you have to take damage in order to gain lifeforce, which makes them at best a moot point. Remember: you are still taking hits to get lifeforce, which is used defensively. Because of this they are far inferior to a skill that simply blocks or evades damage: you don’t need to take damage to block damage.

The situations that they are used for are themselves not superbly effective. The fun thing about bunker builds is that many classes can fight a bunker build and stay alive for a long time, since bunker builds don’t do a lot of damage. This makes spectral walk and armor fulfill the role of “I can take less damage against enemies that don’t do very much damage”, which is the exact wrong place where you would need such a thing, and also the wrong situation where you would bother charging up lifeforce anyway. Considering that, with a 90 and 60 second recharge respectively, even with recharge reducing traits these skills aren’t up enough to make significant use of themselves. Given such long term fights, the life force regeneration from weapons far outpace what spectral skills will give. So instead you would have to use spectral skills for other reasons and just tack on the extra life force gain as a plus. And those other reasons are stun breakers, with one granting swiftness (not very useful in a stun breaker) and the other granting projection. Granted, Spectral Armor is excellent when you use it as a stun breaker, but on such a long recharge you never get to use it as a stun breaker. In sPVP I would go through two fights and die before that 72 second recharge finished.

I myself could never find any use for life siphoning abilities. I spent a week testing them, and I never noticed an appreciable difference in survivability. I think this boils down to a couple of factors:
#1: In order for life siphoning to be “good” you have to invest in many traits to do it. This takes away from other traits that offer, theoretically, a higher contribution to survivability than 37 life per hit.
#2: It was unreliable. Vampiric Mastery requires successful minion attacks, which doesn’t work too well because minions spend most of their time either on the other side of the map, chasing a moving target in futility, not attacking, or dead. Plus it is then necessary to invest in traits that improve minions to the point where they would drain reliably instead of attacking twice then dying.
2b. Vampiric Precision was also unreliable because it meant that you needed to invest a lot in precision to get healing, which for defensive purposes probably would’ve been better invested in toughness. Without fury or crit rate increasing abilities, Vampiric Precision only worked half the time.
2c. Enemies just walk out of wells, making Vampiric rituals nigh useless.
#3. Even though healing was improved by attacking groups of enemies, this in turn lead to groups of enemies attacking you.
#4: Necromancer’s spend a large portion of their time feared, immobilized, dazed, stunned, knocked down, or attacking distortion, evading techniques, or blocking techniques. Yes, without active defense or control the healing from their offense dwindled to nothing.
#5: The regeneration boon is far easier to apply, less constricting, and healed for more.

The biggest issue with all of the life stealing and LF regen through spectrals is that enemies that do damage aren’t some rarity that exist in localized niches. Builds that “do damage” are the norm in the game. I’m not saying that glass cannons are more common than bunkers (which factors in, actually), but that a standard all-around build will end up doing quite a bit of damage, whether through bursts or just from sustained damage. So all in all, necros have problems under many circumstances when using life stealing:

*Classes with potent controlling abilities.
*Classes with good defensive, evasive, and blocking abilities.
*Classes with burst damage.
*Classes with high damage
*Classes with good distance.

So basically any class that isn’t another necro. I don’t think that health stealing is really a salvageable mechanic with the way it is now.

So what proof is there of all this hopelessness?

For PVE, it is the engineer. The versatility of the class lets me fill any role that is needed, and the AoE damage tears up the overworld enemies like they’re wet tissue paper. Need a healer? A tank? High AoE damage? Conditions? Control? All any group needs to know is that I am there, and should any problem arise I will solve it.

For WvW: The necromancer.

I’m finding the map frustrating. Maybe it would be more fun if I didn’t have to grind to get around the map to grind to get the e-specs.

Basically the map is a gigantic multi-tiered labyrinth that gets cut off half the time and requires teamwork to get anywhere. I don’t understand the meta events, I don’t understand rally points, I don’t get the supply mechanic. All I know is that I go to escort NPCs, and then they just up and give up after awhile because “the point is lost”.

Remove: target cap on damaging AoEs.

I want to hit a million people with my marks, plz!

I don’t play every class in this game. I haven’t picked up warrior. But, among all of every other class I play, I can’t think of a single trait line that is filled with as much impotent frustration as the acrobatics line. Whether it is redundant, ineffectual, or too situational to actually be useful, nearly every single trait in this line is junk. I would occasionally put a few additional points in acrobatics before the specialization update, but now I wouldn’t take the line if it were given for free. I will rate these traits on usefulness on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the best thing ever.

Expeditious Dodger
This trait is utterly useless, in that I can’t think if a single moment on any class in which a negligible amount of swiftness after dodging would have contributed meaningfully to anything ever. Thieves are already fast, and 2 seconds of swiftness on dodging will never make a difference. This trait might as well be blank, because at least a blank trait isn’t insulting.
1/10

Fleet of Shadow
This is Expeditious Dodger’s situational but much more useful friend. Again, thieves are already highly mobile, but at least when you take this trait you’ll notice a speed boost.
2/10

Pain Response
This trait is decent, mostly because Shadow’s Embrace was changed to no longer cleanse a condition immediately upon entering stealth. It doesn’t provide anything that is novel, since Hide in Shadows already cures the exact same conditions. The regeneration is meh, but at least it helps.
5/10

Vigorous Recovery
A minute amount of endurance upon using a heal skill. This isn’t anything special, considering that most classes either get perma-vigor, or 50% vigor up time from their respective adept traits. But since no sane person will blow their heal skill for vigor, you can consider this “restore 1/2th of a dodge upon healing”. The hard part is finding where this is useful: You have to be getting pummeled so hard that you need to dodge twice and heal, but not hard enough so the vigor can tick away, giving you some endurance back. But thieves already have a million ways out of that spot, and most of them rhyme with “stealth”.
3/10

Feline Grace
This trait isn’t bad. It is ranted about a lot on the forums, mostly because of how inferior it is compared to the previous feline grace, which was immediate and stacked with vigor instead of being vigor and was more potent, but at least this isn’t as disjointed as Vigorous Recovery. You actually need endurance after you dodge.
4/10

Guarded Initiation
What the heck is this trait trying to accomplish? Remove a bunch of completely unrelated non-damaging conditions when attacking, but only at near maximum health. Should you find the need to remove vulnerability and weakness, chances are it has already been pounded into your face, making it so this trait doesn’t trigger.
1/10

My concern right now are that thieves are completely focused around two defensive tactics, blinds, and stealth.

Blinds are alright, but they’ve been nerfed on occasion, and aren’t going to be as strong in the future. With increasing access to resistance and a break bar (which I believe stops blinds), the ability to defend ourselves with blinding attacks is going to diminish.

Stealth is the OP’s main concern, and it is still a good one. While stealth gives us the ability to run away, it doesn’t ensure victory in a fight. Also, more and more classes are getting anti-stealth mechanics. Stealth can help a tricky thief sometimes avoid damage, but it isn’t a surefire thing.

What we need is a serious buff to the acro line. If we had evades longside of blinds and stealth we would be good, but currently acro is so subpar single traits are frequently more powerful than acros’ cumulative effects.

That’s the one problem with the way the Reaper is designed. Since it has no disengage, it has to be the most powerful in a straight up brawl. Otherwise, the Reaper will never be played. The class that beats the reaper will be played, since the reaper will automatically lose once seeing that class.

I’ve run a bunch of numbers on Vipers, and it is definitely the go-to condi set for any class not named Revenant.

The real question is, it is worth it to run a condi set on Mesmers right now.

Well, you’re trying to work out the logic of something that is all about feelings. Those two generally don’t go hand in hand.

Anyway, unless I am mistaken, the Total Makeover Kit is lore approved. You can magically and instantly change your entire character’s physical existence, sans the actual race of your character (though is that a lore limitation or just a mechanic limitation?). It is a wonder how anyone can be trans in Tyria when you aren’t tied to the physical body you were born in, in any sense. Maybe Sya is too poor to afford the gems.

Mesmers are illusionists and hypnotists, so Sya’s form is actually an illusion. There isn’t a physical morph there. Also, last I checked, syvlari are technically aesexual, so their physical bodies are of about as much consequence as their hair color (or leaf color… something like that). Though this wouldn’t prevent a sylvari from eventually adopting the notion that lets them feel like they were born in the wrong body later in life. The total makeover kit still exists in that regard, too.

So as far as I can tell, Sya is in the game not for any sort of in-game purpose, but to win points on a socio-political scoreboard in real life.

See ya next week everybody!

Hard to Catch
Now this is good. I don’t PVP that much anymore, but I can still see the value in a trait that nullifies a stun break and gives 2 more dodges every 30 seconds. Since people disable before the burst, this trait makes sure that not only are you not disabled, but you can dodge the burst, too.
8/10

Swindler’s Equilibrium
This is the most useless weapon related trait in the game. It very slowly incrementally reduces the recharge for steal only upon successful evasion. Unless you have a bunch of traits already packed on to steal, this is incredibly useless. In fact, it is incredibly useless even with a bunch of on steal traits, because it is unreliable and lacks any sort of potency.
1/10

Endless Stamina
This trait straddles the line between average and good, where “good” is defined as having a rating of 8 or higher. The wording is ambiguous, so I’ll explain the real effect: it caps out the endurance regen of vigor, putting it back to old numbers. So instead of gaining 7.5% endurance per second, you gain 10%. But, lets put this in reference: Under unboosted vigor, you get a dodge once every 6.67 seconds, but with Endless Stamina you get a dodge every 5 seconds. This trait, therefore, makes you dodge 33% more frequently… assuming permanent vigor. Which, with Feline Grace and Endless Stamina alone, thieves don’t get (time between dodges is 5 seconds maximum, only 4 seconds of vigor between dodges). But hey, bountiful theft becomes better.
6/10

Assassin’s Reward
Healing isn’t what thieves are known for, but lets do some math. Thieves regen initiative at 1 per second, and reward gives 69 healing per initiative spent. This comes 69 HP per second, which basically makes it the worst healing trait that thieves have. Beaten out by Signet of Malice, Invigorating Precision, Shadow’s Rejuvenation, and heck even Leeching Venoms if using two or more.
2/10

Don’t Stop
This isn’t too bad. Cutting cripple and Chill in half while negating 1 immobilize every 10 seconds isn’t that bad at all.
7/10

Upper Hand
Granted, I think it is better than Swindler’s Equilibrium, but not by much. I can see this contributing a bit to a fight, gaining one additional vigor every 6 seconds, more if using S/D or S/P, but even then I’m not sure such a minor contribution will really change all that much.
3/10

And that is it. One good trait. Three average traits, and all the rest are horrible. The sum of the contribution that the acrobatics line gives is about equivalent to Bountiful Theft. Wait, no, that would be lying, because Bountiful theft actually helps other players.

The acrobatics line gives the most minor of boosts to survival, and nothing else. No unique utility, no group support, no additional damage. Just selfish not-very-good survival. Every other line, on from what I can tell on every other class, does more than acrobatics. It is the worst line in the game.

I’d tell you how low my server got it, but so far I haven’t been able to get on anything but overflow servers.

As always, my opinions on these traits…

Revealed Training: This is kind of “Meh”. It only works on stealth thieves, so unless I am going D/D against a boss it won’t do much in PVE. In PVP I imagine it is a bit better, since this will be about a 10% increase in damage for a few seconds, but all in all I’d call this a “meh” trait. Not bad, but not really good either.

Invigorating Precision: Not bad… at first. We already have signet of malice for static heals, but for DPS builds this can be used to top yourself off. Problem is, this competes with Hidden Killer or Executioner, which can be substantial boosts to damage. Compared to the damage loss, the amount of healing gained is inconsequential.

Shadow Arts: I can see the use in this one. I use Shadow Refuge on downed players to revive them, but sometimes enemies just bash my face in while I’m healing them. The damage reduction would be pretty strong for escaping, too. It’s a bit similar to shadow rejuvenation, but since this can apply to teammates, I think it would be a better option.

Acrobatics: this trait is nigh worthless. If I am in stealth, I’m probably not going to get hit by CC. If I’m probably going to get hit by CC, then I probably can’t reveal myself easily. Also, pretty much every weapon has something I can use anyway. Sword already stuns/blinds from stealth, shortbow would immobilize and potentially stop the attack anyway, and more than likely you’ll be able to dodge or shadowstep out of the way.

Bewildering Ambush: This is a trait I"ll use. 5 stacks of confusion on steal sounds basic, but also sounds really useful for condi or hybrid builds. Definitely a nice trait.

IndigoSundown.5419:

I’ve almost never seen players stacked that closely together. It might indeed be the norm, but you couldn’t prove this by me. That said, ANet seems to feel that visual clutter and massive particle blur is visually appealing, so I’m not sure that visual presentation in combat is a big concern to them.

Massive particles and visual effects fall under a drastically different category from character models clipping. I mean, have you seen the back of Asuran Eyeballs? I still have nightmares about those things… Anyway, the thing with big particle effects is that they serve a function by themselves. The large particle effects signify actions taken by enemies/friends, and with a lack of cast bars, it is important to visually signify actions. The particle effects are also meant to signify potency in attacks, so that a player can visualize the impact of their techniques.

The clutter and blinding lights appear to be a side effect of bad foresight: Anet didn’t really test this with 20+ players on the screen, or test this with all players cluttered in melee range, or considered that should players be meleeing with no passive defenses, that particle effects can obscure tells. Of course, they attempted to rectify this with an effects reducing option and better AoE field indicators, so this serves as an admission by Anet that no, gigantic blasts of bright light are not the best design choice.

Constantly bringing up particle effects is a deflection, though. The existence of a different problem doesn’t suddenly make the current problem go away.

Again, I don’t see tons of this. Maybe it’s because I avoid the pseudo speed-runs practiced by the PuG community. This is an AI aggro issue, and could be ameliorated by changing the way mob following works — without introducing mechanics to force players to not use teamplay mechanics.

…

What I would find unsatisfying would be the game denying me the opportunity — as a matter of course — to benefit my teammates via the use of skills that: block, reflect, provide fury, provide might, provide blind, provide stability, etc. How does free-lancing actually generate a greater sense of personal contribution than using skills that actually contribute more than just one’s personal DPS?

…

Particle blur makes it much more difficult for me to see tells than proximity. Ommv.

Never, at any point in any of this, is my intent to discourage teamplay mechanics. I’m not sure exactly when this devolved into the false dilemma of disorganized chaos / stacking, but there is more out there than just the extremes.