Guild Wars 2

Stick with engineer imo. I can’t speak for fractals as I do not play them but for the other two categories…

Condi engi has been and continues to be top tier dps if you learn your rotation well. This will have you a spot on all wing 1 encounters with plenty of helpful utility for your team.

Power engi is also rather high dps and will almost certainly have higher dps than the average pug ele given its incredibly simple rotation, though a more appropriate comparison is to a thief. Xera is great for engi. Sabetha is also good as a cannon runner, rifle 5 serving as a “blink”.

Solo is where engineer really shines as you have a solution (sometimes very creative ones!) to practically every situation lurking in your skills and traits.

This is gw2efficiency’s table of magnetite shards. Assuming people don’t spend them as soon as they get them, if you are making an argument for how ‘most players have never even set foot into raids’, you’ll need to explain how more than 50% of the playerbase who’ve clocked a few thousand hours into the game – the ‘veterans’ that have supposedly been driven away in hordes by the raid content – have a few shards in their wallet.

If you don’t like the content, it’s fine. There’s other content for you to enjoy. I started this game one week after launch and I’ve never entered a PVP match. Should I have quit the game when they had the PVP seasons, PVP-exclusive skins, or devoted their resources into the Skyhammer and Capricorn maps? My neighbour does a few things that really, really irk me. Does this mean I’ll have to pack up all my things and move house?

The reluctance to experience raid content is largely driven by players who have to overcome their mindset that the raid experience is necessarily going to be like XYZ. If you spend 15 minutes in teamspeak with any static team, you know it’s a fun experience for people. Otherwise no one would be doing it.

Is there room for improvement? Always. So many have been suggested. Have an ‘easy mode’ for raid bosses with fewer mechanics and a more forgiving enrage timer, which gives you a legendary insight fragment and combine 5 fragments into one legendary insight. Have a LFG tab thing dedicated to guilds and static teams looking to recruit potential new raiders. Give alacrity, might-stacking capabilities and power/precision-enhancing traits to other classes. Make boons shared squad-wide in raid instances only and double HP of bosses to compensate for the inevitable 3 boon-givers 7 DPS meta.

But if you’ve never tried broccoli before and absolutely hate it and will never ever give it a go, there’s no improvements that anyone else can make that will make you put one in your mouth.

While more Classes should be able to give out these Class Buffs. Anet should prevent the Players from Overkilling with the Buffs and having like 20 unique Damage Buffs.

So they should either give other Classes the same Buffs we have now, or making some Buffs excluding each other ( Just for an Example. You’d either take Empower Allies or Assasins Presence because only one could give the Buff and the other one would do nothing so you take either one of them but not both. I know bad Example but I had to take something for this )

Right now the PvE Balance, has quite a few Problems like:

- A huge difference in DPS between the Classes ( something that a Skill Split would help with making the Gap smaller )

- 5 Man Boon Cap

- No Competition in giving out Boons ( Chrono is the only one giving out so much Quickness. Alacrity is Chrono only. PS has no real competition in Might Buffing )

- Either too many Damage Buffs, or not enough Classes with Damage Buffs

These Problems are Part of why we have crappy Balance in PvE now. ( Not saying that PvE Balance was good before the Balance Patch, but it was better and the best we had in PvE Balance. Its more that the last Changes got rid of the Paint that made a Car full of Rust look better now the PRoblems are much easier to see )

Thanks for the reminder. I’ve seen this species far to rarely and don’t have my own one

I think were getting a little off topic.

Of course raids aren’t the reason for the reduced revenue reporting. The game’s age, perceived content drought, pressure from other games, perceived lack of innovation, etc – all of these and a lot more that we don’t known (and will never know) are the likely culprits for that. And, for all we know, those numbers might be right in line with NCSoft’s internal projections. It literally could be a non issue for them.

This thread isn’t about whether or not raids are good or bad – or whether or not they caused 100 puppies to join a vegan cult. It should be about what we think needs to be changed (or shouldn’t be changed, if that is your opinion) and how we see that change. potentially taking place.

maddoctor.2738:

AndyS.5630:

No need to give unique buffs to more professions, they shouldn’t have been in the game in the first place.

I agree but the problem is something must be done with existing skills that provide such unique buffs. Warrior Banners, Ranger Spirits and so on. Do we remove all those skills? Wouldn’t that also hurt diversity? If we change them to non-stacking boons then there might be another problem right there.

There is a choice between reducing the amount of unique buffs, or adding more similar unique buffs to other professions, both are acceptable solutions to me, and both can help with diversity. The first would require messing up with existing skills, the second can be added through their next elite specializations without upsetting the current skills. That’s why I prefer the second option, but the first option can be great too.

I think this is the discussion we should be focusing on. Boons and boon sharing is probably the area easiest to fix.

For me, the other side of the coin is pure damage potential. Which profession/weapon combos are currently not performing up to standards, and – in those cases – do the boons/support they provide justify the lesser dps. As a few examples to consider – staff Mesmer, rifle engineer, sword revenant, staff necro, mace warrior. And would bringing their ability damage up to the point of other professions fix this issue.

Of course, this raises what I feel is still one of the biggest issues here – they absolutely HAVE TO split profession balance between PVE, PVP and WVW. With the introduction of raids, where these numbers actually matter in PVE, I think that is a must if we hope to ever resolve anything.

As the title suggests, I want to share my experience and create a progress/learning group to tackle raids. No represent needed, No stress, Just Training. Only requirement is Teamspeak (no mic needed, just listen), and a “im here to learn” attitude. We recruit any class and any players regardless of LI or other killproofs, as long as they respect the 2 rules:

Listen and respect others.

Add me in game and ill let you in the guild. Don’t reply to this post as i won’t follow the replies here.

Cheers, hopefully see you in game.

AndyS.5630:

No need to give unique buffs to more professions, they shouldn’t have been in the game in the first place.

I agree but the problem is something must be done with existing skills that provide such unique buffs. Warrior Banners, Ranger Spirits and so on. Do we remove all those skills? Wouldn’t that also hurt diversity? If we change them to non-stacking boons then there might be another problem right there.

There is a choice between reducing the amount of unique buffs, or adding more similar unique buffs to other professions, both are acceptable solutions to me, and both can help with diversity. The first would require messing up with existing skills, the second can be added through their next elite specializations without upsetting the current skills. That’s why I prefer the second option, but the first option can be great too.

Dawdler.8521:

For the explosion to be meaningfull I would do something totally off the wall, like give it a daze. Yes I know, you can pick up your jaw now!!!

Whoa now, that would almost make them not terrible. I feel my purity of purpose being violated.

Just keep the passive effect simple and the explosion meaningfull and a constant presence would work fine. For example, I’d change the medic gyro to pulse regeneration (ie it can be boonstripped etc). This would be no difference from a rev having constant regen so it cant be OP (and unlike the rev, the gyro can intentionally be targetted). Sneak gyro would be the trickiest thing but one could change it to not be constant stealth, but rather quickly hide and stealth attack on longer intervals (like, every 15s it stealth you for 3s or something)

For the explosion to be meaningfull I would do something totally off the wall, like give it a daze. Yes I know, you can pick up your jaw now!!!

Wahoo everyone!

Before you just say “OFC IT WOULD!”, think about it. Would it really be op in any game mode, to have a permanent Purgy, Shreddy, Bulwarky, Medy or Sneaky? All of them?

In WvW and PvP they still can easily be killed with a few hits. I do not play those game modes much, but form what I’ve heared Gyros there are accidentally killed by cleave anyway and considered rather bad. With this change the enemy may need to aim for them more specifically to weaken you.

For PvE I’d say it’s the best way to give Medy a chance against the HT, while Purgy acts more like a condi cleanse signet and Shreddy may become the go to for condi builds. Bulwarky would die on it’s own after it has absorbed too much damage, so no issue there either.

I would say Sneaky may be op in PvE due to the “let’s skip EVERYTHING” aspect of the skill. But the rest? It sure would help them become viable after the plenty of hits they took in the last few patches.

Opinions?

Greez!
- Ziggy

Celestial armor with celestial/zerk/viper(or whatever condi) accessories. Swap to whichever accessories you want to boost that particular build. I’ve been rolling that setup for years and I’m loving it. And my bank account is also loving it.

If you don’t already know, what you really want to do is make the cheapest set of ascended armor possible, and then mystic forge it into whatever stats you want. This makes Viper much, much cheaper. You could make zerker first, and mess around to see if you like it before converting to viper. If you want to focus on wvw, then you can also convert to celestial if you want.

Specific builds in PvE only matter in raids and T3+ fractals. WvW zerging is all about not dying and group support, and WvW roaming is most relatable to spvp. Consider what you want to do and go from there.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, How our gameplay would be affected if our Auto Attacks where actually good to use, doesnt matter the weapon, even hammer is up to join the conversation.

Think about it, would you be up to sacrifice some of our mandatory kit complexity (wich means engi with a less higher skill ceiling) for a worthy weapon AA?

Sure not 100% becuase kits will still be the kitten (in a good way), but at least freeing 1 or 2 slots and let other utilites see play, first off, they would had to beat our grenades aa, (and/or nerf grenades aa), so, they must be a great aa for not using grenade aa, if we get such aa.

So, what is your opinion on getting a change in our weapons aa?

maddoctor.2738:

I know Warriors and Mesmers won’t like this, but why not give more builds the ability to get 25 stacks of might so a PS Warrior isn’t a must have in Raids? Why not give to at least one more build the ability to give Alacrity and a good Quickness uptime? Not to everyone, but at least TWO different builds should give the same buffs, keeps them unique enough, and opens up role slots for more diversity.

No one should be able to cap stacks of might on the whole group. Ever. Under any circumstances. Because it disables any personal might sources that is brought to the balance table outside of raids. Fury and Quickness should also be changed to stack intensity just like Might.

My suggestion is splitting single Might cap into 3 caps of different levels (not necessarily appropriate solution for Fury and Quickness):

• 10 stacks — per one source except yourself
• 20 stacks — everyone else put together
• 30 stacks — everyone including yourself put together

So one good old PS Warrior will only apply 10 stacks to group mates (since excess should go to other group, it will affect 9 other people, even though individual applications are still capped at 5 people), but up to 30 to himself.

Many classes bring some group Might. While it’s possible to add a 2nd PS for group wide 20 stacks, other people should generally be able to contribute 10 stacks by themselves.

Lastly, there are always at least 10 free spots for any personal Might you can bring. Some classes are able to fill those spots, while some are not. So different people will end up with different amount of Might (usually in the 20 to 30 interval), but most importantly your personal Might is never disabled completely by the other people.

As for unique buffs, they all should be eventually changed to general boons. Boon duration cap needs to be lower: lower benefit from Concentration, lower cap (+50% extra instead of +100%), lower effect from foods and skills. No need to give unique buffs to more professions, they shouldn’t have been in the game in the first place.

Blaeys.3102:

Except it is not unavoidable. The game existed for 3+ years without the need to make this kind of compromise to profession design.

Ask any old ranger, engineer or necromancer and you will find they’ve been excluded in the past from playing content on their profession of choice. The broken diversity isn’t something new and it’s not something exclusive to raids, in fact it’s as old as the game itself. The first “meta” I remember was back in 2012 and was called “4 Warriors + 1 Mesmer” meta comp, and everyone else wasn’t needed. Or during the fiery greatsword era, go Elementalist and forget anything else.

That’s about exclusion. Now about giving abilities from one profession to the other:

For example, Rangers have Spotter which increases the Precision of allies, it would definitely fit the theme of the Thief to have a similar ability, call it Reveal Weakness.

Warriors have banners which inspire and boost the abilities of allies, why not give the Revenant an ability to summon a visage of a legend, that is stationary and provides similar benefits to a Warrior banner.

Engineers are masters of alchemy. We’ve seen powerful Hylek alchemy, for example take a look at the Hylek turrets. They can provide might and quickness for a group. An Engineer could get a potion mastery that he drops aoe fields on the ground and create similar effects to those turrets.

Removing the 1-sec cooldown from Empowering Might and the Guardian competes with a Phalanx Strength Warrior for the spot of Might Stacking.

All I’m saying is that giving the same stacking abilities to different professions doesn’t make them one of the same and it doesn’t hurt the lore or the theme, if done right.

I’m not a raider and I’m not going to pretend that I know everything about the game mode, but here is what I think about these current criticisms.

Blaeys.3102:

Where the issue started

Attempting to expand your playerbase is a good idea, as long as it doesn’t significantly impact the game for the core audience. However, the major shift in HoT was not that raids were implemented, it was the open world HoT maps themselves. Raids are meant to be side-content for a minority. The problem is that the new maps had many drawbacks, like enormous initial HP requirements, timegated metas and many areas that are outright inaccessible during specific times. All of these elements made the new maps anti-casual.

Blaeys.3102:

Playstyle diversity and the road to boring play

Raids simply exposed the balance issues that were there in the first place. Balance in this game is pretty bad, and the the primary problem in raids seem to be the profession specific buffs. Druid, Berserker and Chronomancer not only have the best unique buffs, but they also have the highest amount of unique buffs as well. Build diversity has suffered in all game modes because elite specs shoehorned professions into specific builds. As more elite specs are added it is possible that more professions will get desirable buffs for raids. However, the system that Anet created is incredibly inflexible at the moment

Blaeys.3102:

Broken storylines

I watched the recap of the raid and I didn’t feel like I missed much. Sure, I wouldn’t mind experiencing the story in some way, but it seems to be an insignificant storyline that was only made so that a raid can exist.

Blaeys.3102:

Watering down non-raid content

They haven’t watered down non-raid content as far as I can tell. Yes, the sloth boss is very undertuned but I don’t think that every single boss that gets introduced should have the same difficulty. As far as I remember the fights of the first to LW2 episodes were pretty easy, so having easy fights in the first two LW3 episodes doesn’t seem out of the ordinary for me. Also that final blob fight’s difficulty is highly dependant on your profession.

As for guild missions, it is true that they stopped working on them, but I doubt that it had anything to do with raids. They probably thought that making more of those is a bit redundant due to their reward structure. They were also working on other guild-related content instead, like guild halls and decorations.

Blaeys.3102:

Fracturing the playerbase

Raids were inevitably going to fracture the community no matter how they were implemented. When you introduce what is essentially a new game mode, some players will play it and some won’t. If Anet introduced a GvG mode, it is likely that there would be fractures in the PvP community. Some people would refurse to play the mode, while others will play it and possibly abandon some of the content they used to do.

Basically, I believe that the issues with raids stem from Anet’s general design of the HoT expansion, rather than the design of the raids themselves. An example that is very relevant to me is legendary armor. I feel dissatisfied that legendary armor is raid-only, but what is it that makes me feel that way? Is it jealousy because raiders get a shiny? I would say that it is not.

I simply feel like Anet is wasting resources on this project. They may have a small team working on raids, but how much armor development is being wasted on raids when HoT barely added to the variety of armor sets? Oh, but you see the problem is that Anet barely added any armor sets, not that raids are getting an armor set. Even if non-raiders got 1 more armor set, it still would be small amount for an expansion. The same logic also applies to the content drought, when players were complaining about the lack of content. An easy mode of raids simply wouldn’t add much content, because the raid maps themselves don’t seem to have much in them.
People need to keep in mind that when compared to other games, the raid release schedule is kinda slow. They are definitely not focusing on raids. Anet needs to make sure that the next expansion has the correct amount of content, or raids will continue to be the scapegoat. After all, it is easy to blame a game mode that minority plays and label it as a worthless addition that drained too many resources. Though in my opinion, the true pointless resource drain the WvW desert maps. Almost no WvWer liked them, and Anet had to spend a bunch of dev time on fixing all the WvW stuff that they broke. I hope that Anet has been organized properly this time, and are ready to make a good expansion that hasn’t been rushed.

(continued from above)

Broken storylines
Another big issue with the current raiding model is the inevitable fragmentation of the storyline – and disenfranchising of lore/story focused players. I know a lot of raiders disagree, but – for me – the first raid was the introduction of the story in Season Three – and definitely our primary encounter with the new antagonists.

There are a lot of people who love this game primarily for the story experience. Making it difficult to experience that story inevitably leads to disenfranchised players.

And, even worse, I do not see it getting better in the future. I really don’t know how they can use the current raid model to tell part of the Tyrian story without excluding many people who actually enjoy the story. I realize some devs tried to justify it by saying “you can go into a cleared instance,” or by adding the story as text descriptions to an NPC, but both of these ignore a simple truth – we do not want to be told the story, we want to experience the story (we are playing a video game, not reading a book or watching a movie).

Watering down non-raid content
This one is a little more subtle, but is still an issue. By calling raids “challenging” it seems as if they are giving themselves permission to forgo adding any challenge to the rest of the open world game. Even the so called open world raid bosses – the unbound guardian and sloth in Ember Bay – are jokes. The sloth especially is a pale shadow of its raid counterpart – with ZERO mechanics other than a timer (in the form of the slublings it eats). It just moves in a circle and takes damage. To say that they are giving players a taste of raiding in that fight is beyond insulting. The same is true of the lackluster fights in the living story steps they have given us so far (the latest was just a zerg of mobs similar to most open world events).

Just as bad – and probably one of the absolute worst things that came from raiding – is that Arenanet has completely abandoned other PVE group content above 5 players. A recent thread on Reddit showed us that there are zero plans for new guild missions in the foreseeable future. Given the popularity of missions when they first came out (much more than raids, imo), that is unforgivable.

Fracturing the playerbase
Yes, raids are controversial. They split the pve community into groups – one of which looks down on anything other than raiding as “kiddie content” and the other that is envious of the experience (fight mechanics, story, etc) of raids. Yes, they could partake in that content as easily as any raider, but in the current model, that means potentially compromising and changing the things they love most about their characters and how they play (they petty much have to subscribe to the Stepford Wife program in order to keep raids from being frustrating and un-fun). When your primary source of joy in the game comes from making your character unique and your own (or at least achieving the illusion of such), asking players to give that up is a really big deal.

As recently as two weeks ago, I saw this fracturing – the ill feeling between divergent groups – devastate a sister guild’s raid group. While the guild (which has more than 400 members and been around since almost the beginning of GW1, btw) remains strong, it will feel the ill will and discord from that implosion for a really long time.

How to fix it
There are topics that Arenanet has indicated they feel have run their course on the forums, and I will respect that here. All I will say is look to the raiding CDI with Chris Whitesides that started 2 years ago (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/cdi/CDI-Guilds-Raiding/first). I think the solutions are there – proposed by active players of the game.

Unfortunately, imo, Anet went into that discussion having already decided what raids in GW2 would look like. They wanted validation more than discussion. Despite that, there are a lot of great ideas in that thread (and many since then) that would make sense in the game – that would address these issues – and that I for one would love to see discussed in more detail.

Please respect each others’ opinions and need for open conversation
I realize this was a long rant – and some will dismiss it out of hand as unnecessary or stupid, but it is something that I do care a lot about (obviously). It is something that we need to make sure developers and other players alike are aware of and can weigh in on – for as long as it is an issue to people in the game.

Long post incoming. Ive spent the weekend thinking about this and most of this morning arranging those ideas and thoughts into this post. I know there will be people out there who hate and disagree with every word, but I believe these things need to be said. I would also welcome ongoing dialogue about these topics. For many of us, raids are not in a good place and changes are needed.

As of this week, raiding has been in GW2 for approximately one year. Nothing has created more ill will and division in the game more than raids. Recent forum activity is the best evidence of that.

Where the issue started
I think we need to take a realistic look at how raiding is implemented in this game, the good and the bad, and then – hopefully – inspire some real and productive discussion about how they can better fit into the current game without their current negative baggage.

The problem, imo, started with marketing. Part of the goal with Heart of Thorns was obviously to bring new players into Guild Wars 2. They should be commended for that goal, but I think their efforts were a little too shortsighted. To bring new players into the game, they needed to promote the game as something it wasn’t – challenging. In order to use the words challenging and hardcore in press material and advertising, they decided to implement raids. The word raid itself evoked visions of hardcore experiences from other games – players who had bled fighting Yogg Saron or Ragnaros in WoW would see it as something new in the game.

Adding raids was a good idea in theory, but I don’t think the developers ever looked past the marketing appeal to consider what raids would do to the game – or to consider anything other than the tired raid model used by EVERY OTHER MMO out there. Bringing in new players is good – but not when it changes fundamental philosophies that long-term existing players have come to count on. In trying to expand their market appeal, they forgot their base. Theory was good, implementation was severely lacking.

Playstyle diversity and the road to boring play
Probably the biggest impact the current raiding model is having on the game is what I call the Stepford Wife syndrome. Balancing an entire game mode around the top end performing professions inevitably leads to the majority of players playing – and even eventually looking (because of Legendary Armor) – the same. Right now, you either play to the meta or you have to struggle horrendously to even find a group to raid with.

My biggest worry now is that, to fix that, Anet will make the problem even worse. The only real way – in the current model – they can ensure every profession has an equal place is to make them all equal. Give more professions access to alacrity, might stacking, comparable dps/utility balance, etc. The problem with that approach is that the end result is rangers who play like necromancers and engineers who play like elementalists – there would be no unique feel to the professions any longer. That would be a major blow to the game.

(continued below)

maxwelgm.4315:

Take a boss like Matthias for example; his mechanics enforce certain aspects (most notably reflects) that are simply not available to some professions. So, if you have a Chrono, you know you’ll be in for Matt because you have the definitive reflect skill (Feedback), to the point people might even overlook your lazy everything else. If you have a Revenant however, you have no reflect skills whatsoever, and the group needs to count only on your damage, if even (same with Necro that doesn’t even have damage). So there you have it, a meta enforced purely mechanically with no ways of being fixed by balances, because every Necro and Rev has 9 out of 10 spots to fill while a Chrono will definitely fill that last 1 spot every single time (or does anyone use dagger storm or wall of reflection for this?). Not trying to dwell into whether this is right or wrong, but it is there, and it is a depart from the whole rest of the game, even fractals.

If the group doing Matt takes the Chrono only for Feedback, they are doing it wrong. Even if Chronos didn’t have Feedback they’d be in every single team anyway.

The main problem with diversity is that we don’t have clear roles. For example, in many other games you can go and make a team and ask for a Tank, a Healer or a DPS, but the specific build that will fit the spot is rather open in most cases. In Guild Wars 2 you are not asking for a tank, you are asking for a Chrono tank, you are not asking for a Healer, you are asking for a Druid healer, you are not asking for Offensive Support, you are asking for a PS Warrior, you are not asking for DPS, you are asking for a DPS Tempest, you are not asking for Condi DPS, you are asking for condi Rangers and so on.

And that’s the main problem with the diversity in the game. I think the best option for the game would be to open up roles to multiple builds.

Currently we have the following Healers: Tempest, Druid and Herald, why not making sure all 3 of them are excellent and can compete with each other?

Currently we have the following condi DPS: Reaper, Ranger, Engineer, Berserker, why not making sure all 3 of them are excellent and can compete with each other?

I know Warriors and Mesmers won’t like this, but why not give more builds the ability to get 25 stacks of might so a PS Warrior isn’t a must have in Raids? Why not give to at least one more build the ability to give Alacrity and a good Quickness uptime? Not to everyone, but at least TWO different builds should give the same buffs, keeps them unique enough, and opens up role slots for more diversity.

I don’t want to see “LF Druid” or “LF Chrono”, I want to see “LF Healer” and “LF for Quickness/Alacrity buffer”. It will be a huge step towards diversity.

Ask for a ROLE and not a specific BUILD

Ooops.8694:

Problem is, there are no roles in this game by design.

You’re missing the point. There may be no overly relevant roles in the very classic sense (tank with fat armor, healer who’s the only one keeping everyone alive, etc), but we still have all the different support roles, which are unique and limited to a few classes. Combined with the current target limit of the buff systems, that leads to all diversity problems.

maddoctor is on the right track when he wants to open all those roles. For that, we’d need to give all unique buffs to at least two classes. For example, give revs something that is equivalent to (and mutually exclusive with) warrior banners and suddenly you have the choice which class to take. Give eles something comparable to GotL/spotter on their heal skills and tempest healers are a thing. And so on.

Of course, some proper balance would be required to make such a system work. With the current balance, we’d just see which alternative has more DPS, e.g. mesmers would get screwed over if someone else had quickness and alacrity. I don’t know whether such a bold step would ever be feasible. Given ANet’s balance history, I doubt it. Maybe raising the buff cap to 10 targets would be the easier fix to PvE.

A valid concern. No matter what you do, I think that it would be a herculean task to get class balance right, given its current, rather dire state. Giving each class a desirable (i.e. offensive), unique group buff in combination with a general increase of the buff limit might also help a lot. With regard to this stuff, I always like to think of Wildstar. They have six absolutely unique classes, each one brings a few unique group buffs, and apart from a few major fails they’ve done a pretty admirable job at keeping the balance. At least I’ve never seen some massive stacking there, even when the race for proper world firsts was still open.

Although removing the 5 person cap would open up some diversity it might also create another problem: 1 Mesmer, 1 Warrior, 1 Ranger, 7 Elementalists or something similar. That is, get all damage buffs and fill the rest of the spots with the highest dps possible.

Before any removal of the cap can happen we need to allow more builds to offer similar buffs that do not stack. Adding damage modifiers that stack is part of the reason we are having this problem in the first place, and instead of fixing this, they added so many new damage modifiers in the game, like Druid GotL and glyph, Mesmer Alacrity. Reduce modifiers or give them to more builds is the way to go.

As for making professions look the same: this is unavoidable in many ways but if 2 professions are good at one thing, another 2 are good at another thing and so on, it won’t be a problem. I’m not saying to make all professions good on all roles.

AndyS.5630:

Obtena.7952:

Therefore, the argument that AndyS was making where the changes are bad because of how they affect exceptional raid conditions is still nonsense.

Having 10 skilled people is also an exceptional raid condition.

Maybe … but I’m not making any argument dependent on the raid condition at all, you are … so I don’t see the relevance of that statement, or anything else you said as a response to my post. To me, it’s almost like an acknowledgement … you know what exceptional raid conditions are because you claim to know of such a condition … so you should easily be able to conclude why you said makes no sense with respect to how raids are designed on and changes to things affect those extreme conditions.

maddoctor.2738:

Although removing the 5 person cap would open up some diversity it might also create another problem: 1 Mesmer, 1 Warrior, 1 Ranger, 7 Elementalists or something similar. That is, get all damage buffs and fill the rest of the spots with the highest dps possible.

Before any removal of the cap can happen we need to allow more builds to offer similar buffs that do not stack. Adding damage modifiers that stack is part of the reason we are having this problem in the first place, and instead of fixing this, they added so many new damage modifiers in the game, like Druid GotL and glyph, Mesmer Alacrity. Reduce modifiers or give them to more builds is the way to go.

As for making professions look the same: this is unavoidable in many ways but if 2 professions are good at one thing, another 2 are good at another thing and so on, it won’t be a problem. I’m not saying to make all professions good on all roles.

Except it is not unavoidable. The game existed for 3+ years without the need to make this kind of compromise to profession design.

I want the developers creating professions and specializations around what is fun to play – and what makes practical sense (or as much as you can in a fantasy setting) for those professions (is that something we would actually expect an engineer to be able to do?). Once they stop doing that, the game loses something, imo.

Now, to be realistic, there is obviously a middle ground here. There is some room to do this. However, I think the developers have to tread lightly. If the litmus test in PVE suddenly becomes “let’s do it because of raids” and nothing more, they have gone too far.

Lilandrea.7109:

Rikimaru.7890:

It’s like going to a restaurant where everyone pays the same. But some people sit at a luxury table and are served exquisite food. While others sit at a ruined table and are served leftovers while they paid the same amount of money for it.
And the reason for that is because they are new clients while those at the luxury table are regulars.

Bad analogy.

The correct one would be : “It’s like going to a restaurant where everyone pays the same. There is a nice buffet close to the tables, and another buffet with exquisite food much further from the tables. But some people are too lazy to go to the furthest buffet and are therefore stuck with normal food, whereas other people go to some lengths to get the exquisite food”.

All players have access to raids. Those who refuse to train, read guides, and generally speaking, to “git gud”, won’t get very far in raids.

Do you think we raiders became good at it overnight ? We all worked for it !

For heaven’s sake, it took me a whole month to actually SEE the blue circles on VG ! First time I saw them I even went Oooooooooooooh !! so that’s what those are !! OO !

You CAN read guides and watch videos.
You CAN start training runs yourself, try, die, rinse and repeat until you get it.
You CAN do, basically, what we all did : Learn.

But it is soooo much easier to come on the forums and complain.

You want the shinies but you don’t want to work for it.

No pain, no gain.

+1 to the better analogy.

There are a lot of people who get dragged into raiding over time. Since we started raiding in our guild we recruited around 10 people that were attracted to the mode but needed a regular group to do so. Yet half of them left quite soon when they discovered how much effort they have to put in to perform well, how much they have to learn about the game itself before even fighting against advises.
And we are somehow a casual guild! I mean we have two or three guys who finished the collection in pug (well some got carried…) and the rest is for now 7/9 boss. I remember the first week when a guy who stopped playing since had ideas about plenty of hybrid builds that were bad in every aspects just because he did not have any clue of what scaling meant, how ferocity works, how boons work ….. When at some point I got annoyed and said he was not competent enough to teach us how to play he stopped coming with us because we were “Meta fanboys while the game is made to play how I want…”
Basically if there is any issue with raiding now (outside of the fact I find itemization to be too prevalent compared to player skill), it comes from people that are a bit too stubborn and repeat mantras without understanding them. I said many times that encounters in this game are like practice mode, you have different phases where you learn the boss mechanics. This is enough of training, as long as anyone wants to learn.

As for rewards, well all legendary weapons require PvE only activities (sans Gift of battle), one backpack requires PvP and another Fractals… so having an exclusive rewards for raids is nothing to be mad at.

Ok I think I got my mes geared now, exotic comm trinkets and full ascended for rest of them, my toughness is at 1560 or so with food, I’m just wondering abt the recent change to mes that cause you to slot diff skills like for the elite.

Basically my 1st question was in regards to traits. Was there a reason to use Domination instead of illusions or whatever? I haven’t looked at the traitlines that closely so I might be missing something obvious

I’m more concerned with rotations tho, if I go to a site like metabattle it still doesn’t seem to be updated to reflect the new changes since patch. I get that I should probably be swapping weps as often as possible, using all my wells off cd and keep shattering my illusions when I can. I’m having trouble with the specifics though, things like is it worth it to bother using continuum split or whatever without slotting time warp? If so how does this figure into the rotations, as well as basic questions like how can I cast 3 phantasms in one set (sword/x) so quickly before I swap to shield as I need to do for rotations?

Sorry for asking so many questions or if many of them seem obvious.. I haven’t played my mes in many months but I’m looking to try it out again

If there is any engineer balance developer,or even a map creator,but someone who can bring this to your next Anet meeting:

Please,log in a competitive gamemode of your choice,PvP or WvW ,take a rifle engineer,try to do something.
Not kill,just do something,even try stay alive.

It’s 1 year since we got the hammer, is 1 YEAR that the rifle is a dead weapon.
I can understand 4 months,6 months, not 1 whole year and yet not a single mention to rifle in patch notes.

I actually play hammer,but is 1 year i say to my self “don’t worry they will come out with something to at least make rifle barely viable in the next months” , but after all that time…come on!

Try every setup you can , old vanilla engineer,new scrapper , then take your utility like elixirs,gadgets,turrets,gyros,and try use the rifle coupled with every setup you want.
Do it for 24 hours,do it for 1 month,just try it and tell me if that weapon doesn’t URGE some attenction in a balance meeting.

Is 1 year i play hammer and i say to my self “is just a matter of time,it’s not priority for them,so now or later they will fix it…after 4 months,after 6 months,after 8 months…they will fix it”.
It’s 1 whole year guys,1 year that engineer is “bunkered” in all his meanings into the hammer scrapper.
Come on!

Thanks.

+1
I loved rifle before hot came, I loved skill based playstyle, and I loved the way rifle worked.
Now with all this elite specs rifle is a joke, you troll yourself if u use it.
Hammer has 3 skills which have a defensive side effects, and rifle has just a self cc…
The problem is not only rifle itself, it is more that you NEED another damage kit because the cool downs are way too long.
If u are using rifle you must take FT or grenades, and that is a lose of a utility slot.
And to make grenades work well you have to use explosive trait line, that means you lose a defensive trait line.
What rifle needs is a medium buff to all directions. Cool downs, damage and survival.
Rifle should not be a over tuned weapon, I dont want that, but what it needs is that you are not forced to sacrifice utility or survive ability.
I also tried a lot of builds, and finally I lost my hope to play it ever again competitive with rifle.