Guild Wars 2

evilapprentice.6379:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

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I guess this is as good a time as any to list my changes.

#1: Drop expeditious dodger completely. Feline Grace becomes the new adept minor
#2: Endless Stamina becomes master minor. Don’t Stop becomes grandmaster minor
#3: Change Fleet of Shadow to: Granting Stealth to you or your allies also grants swiftness. 10 second swiftness duration, 15 second ICD.
#4: Pain Response now affects confusion and torment.
#5: Vigorous Recovery: This now cleanses one condition in an AoE.
#6: Double the base heal and scale healing of assassin’s reward, and make its heal an AoE with 360 range. Max 5 targets.
#7: Merge Swindler’s Equilibrium and Upper Hand, so now evades while wielding a sword both recharge steal and regain initiative, 1 second ICD. Add 5% damage bonus, and keep at the master tier.
#8: Move Hard To Catch to the Grandmaster Tier
#9: Changed Guarded Initiation to the following: Activate Assassin’s Signet when attacking a foe above a certain health threshold (90%). 45 second cooldown, and receives benefits from signet related traits.
#10: New Grandmaster Trait: Richochet. You all know what it does.

You’ll notice this leaves an open spot in the master tier. Because I lack creativity, I’ll have to leave that open for someone with better imagination to fill. Truth be told I also don’t know what to do about vigorous recovery.

I don’t mean to be rude, but all you’ve done is add damage to a defensive line. The very minor defensive buffs you’ve included do nothing to mitigate the fact that thieves still have access to roughly half the dodges they did pre-patch.

I added far more than that. Group swiftness on stealth, AoE Healing, Don’t Stop baseline, and AoE condi cleanse. Also, by giving the upper-hand merge a 1 second ICD, this allows for greater initiative regen with the sword, which itself will allow for more dodges.

Besides, there’s still an empty trait hole. If dodges are really that important to you, just add some miscellaneous vigor trait on the master tier.

My ratings are subjective. I gave it an 8/10 because Hard to Catch is good enough to make me consider taking acrobatics just to have it. I’m a fairly low-skill PVPer myself, and those “activate upon being stunned” traits save my life over and over, time and again. As far as activate when stunned traits go, Hard to Catch is really good. Not as good as Protection Injection, but definitely above Hide in Plain Sight and Retaliatory Subconscious.

Don’t stop falls into the same category for the same reason. Somewhere along the way the entire thief board got this notion in their head that the acrobatics line exists just to supplement a single weapon set. That is bad design, which is why every other specialization in the game doesn’t do it. Either you make everything nigh useless, terrified that it’ll culminate into an unstoppable beast, or you nerf the weapon set to the point where you can’t use it without the specialization.

Maugetarr.6823:

You actually got endless stamina wrong. It boosts the effectiveness of vigor by 50%, so it’s actually 5(1+0.5×1.5) = 5×1.75=8.75. So that’s 1 dodge every 5.7 seconds, not every 5.

The rest of the assessment is good.

Are you sure? Though I’m not an egg timer, when I tested it out on my thief it gave half a bar in 5 seconds.

evilapprentice.6379:

Here’s a way to fix it.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Fixing-Acrobatics/first#post5334031

The problem with your listed changes is that the line is still full of useless stuff that players have to take, making it still subpar overall. I’m still going with Pain Response, Hard to Catch, and Don’t Stop under those changes.

I guess this is as good a time as any to list my changes.

#1: Drop expeditious dodger completely. Feline Grace becomes the new adept minor
#2: Endless Stamina becomes master minor. Don’t Stop becomes grandmaster minor
#3: Change Fleet of Shadow to: Granting Stealth to you or your allies also grants swiftness. 10 second swiftness duration, 15 second ICD.
#4: Pain Response now affects confusion and torment.
#5: Vigorous Recovery: This now cleanses one condition in an AoE.
#6: Double the base heal and scale healing of assassin’s reward, and make its heal an AoE with 360 range. Max 5 targets.
#7: Merge Swindler’s Equilibrium and Upper Hand, so now evades while wielding a sword both recharge steal and regain initiative, 1 second ICD. Add 5% damage bonus, and keep at the master tier.
#8: Move Hard To Catch to the Grandmaster Tier
#9: Changed Guarded Initiation to the following: Activate Assassin’s Signet when attacking a foe above a certain health threshold (90%). 45 second cooldown, and receives benefits from signet related traits.
#10: New Grandmaster Trait: Richochet. You all know what it does.

You’ll notice this leaves an open spot in the master tier. Because I lack creativity, I’ll have to leave that open for someone with better imagination to fill. Truth be told I also don’t know what to do about vigorous recovery.

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 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

I’m fairly new to ranger, but I have my own thoughts.

#1: Our Pets need innate condition damage. When conditions were changed, this had the unfortunate result of making all conditions inflicted by the pet severely kitten and utterly useless.

#2: Our pets need a dodge command that we control somehow. Easiest method would to just make it so when we dodge (not skill dodge, but just regular ole dodge), our pet dodges along with us.

Interestingly, necros aren’t the only class to be hit by a “double nerf” like this. The recent change to mantras on mesmers also fits the bill.

#1: Mantras were changed to now recharge upon last cast instead of upon charging.
#2: Harmonious Mantras was nerfed form 4% to 3% per stack.

By themselves, either one of these nerfs would’ve made sense. But together, they are excessive.

I have a theory about this: The various balance and bugfix teams don’t communicate with each other. The half of the mantra nerf is technically a bugfix, while the other half was made assuming that the new bugged version was standard. If the teams talked, then there would’ve been no 4% to 3% nerf.

Likewise, the team in charge of general overworld and condition balancing, and the team in charge of necro balance don’t speak to each other either. So, upon seeing the problem of chill being OP, both teams tried to solve it independently. Thus, global chill was nerfed and necro chill was nerfed. And now, neither oen of them want to budge, so the players get stuck with the problem.

#1: Time Marches On. Permanent 25% movement increase.
#2: Chronophantasms. Finally, I get to use all my boosted shatter traits without losing phantasm DPS.
#3: The wells. With the trait All’s Well that Ends Well, this can easily replace mantras as the most useful utilities in PVE.
#4: Continuum Shift. That has great combos, especially with time warp. Shift, Time Warp, Time Warp again immediately. Or, just use Shift so I can have Time Warp every 60 seconds.

The hardest part about the Chronomancer is picking which line to get rid of. My current PVE build is Dom/Duel/Inspiration. I’m probably going to oust inspirations, because while it has many useful things (AoE cleanse, reflect and better focus skills, glamor boost, AoE distortion), many of those utilities will be handled by the new Chrono Traits.

Necromancers are in the rare spot where toughness and vitality both have the same efficiency for maximum effective HP. If you want to go with the biggest health per toughness ratio, raise them evenly. If you are fighting a lot of condi builds, prioritize vitality over toughness. If you are going with a healer build, toughness over vitality.

This is the eternal question that looms over my head. I run a Domination/Dueling/Inspiration mantra build, and in this build I’m never sure exactly which one to take. Keep in mind that this build doesn’t take a single shatter related trait normally.

I did some tests on a Dolyak in frostgorge, and I got the following damage using my baseline stats and gear:

Stats:
2311 Power
54.7% Crit Chance
215.9% Crit damage
+5% damage (superior sigil of force)

Mind Wrack, No Shatter Traits.
1573, 1580, 1608, 1615, Average 1594, Total 6374

Power Block: 1698

Shattered Anguish will give either a 15% or 30% boost. This is a bonus of 956 to 1,912 damage on Mind Wrack. The real kicker is that Mind Wrack is an AoE skill that hits 5 targets, so the total contribution can be upped to x5 of what it is on a single target. This is a total boost of anywhere from 4.8k to 9.5k.

I find myself shattering 3 illusioins quite frequently, given that my battle plan is to use phantasms for sustained damage. When my targeted enemy is about to die, I pop mind wrack, which usually blows up the P-Warden and 2 Swordsman from I-Leap and I-Riposte. Against oveworld enemies and dungeon elites, it isn’t uncommon for me to use Mind Wrack every 16 seconds, or once per enemy group roughly.

The advantages to power block are, of course, its weakness condi and the fact that it isn’t reliant on murdering phantasms. With MoD, Diversion, and I-Riposte, I get 7 interrupts in a 38 second period, which will come to roughly 3 interrupts per Mind Wrack. This comes to 5k damage. In theory, this could be more, since I-Riposte and MoD can simultaneously interrupt up to 5 people each, however this is a phenomenally difficult feat, with 2 simultaneous interrupts per nameless squad of enemies being rare.

Against Champions I don’t shatter that often. But, this doesn’t give power block an
immediate advantage, due to how defiance works.

The answer in this debate hinges on a single question:

Does the increased recharge from Power Block effect enemy skills?

If it does, then Power Block is the winner, due to the very unique and potent defense that it will provide. If it doesn’t, then Shattered Anguish wins due to its easier and greater damage.

What are your guy’s thoughts on this?

serenke.4806:

The only fun world boss would be tequatl because it is perfectly balanced between being an open world boss still doable with random people who know what to do and not being a “press 1 to win” zergfest.

Triple Trouble is just too much trouble for too little rewards. I guess it’s aptly named at least.

I’ve been doing it regularly, and it isn’t as hard as people think. You need to have some semblance of coordination, but it can be pugged. You just need a few things:

#1: At least 3 commanders. These guys can get a head count, so they can split up the squad into 3 equal parts.

#2: Reflectors. These are guards/mesmers/eles/engis who will periodically reflect the eggs spat out by the worm, preemtively killing 1/3rd of the adds). You need about 2 per worm, but it is possible to function with just one.

#3: A condi team. One full team per worm, 3 total. These guys will condi and CC the husks, dealing with the second third of adds. This is arguably the hardest part, since the condi’s team will be engaging the most dangerous enemies quite frequently.

And that is about it. Just say what the specific mechanic is at each worm, be sure to have 5 people do each escort event (15 total, they can be anyone), and above all know how to dodge the spit. With the larvae and husks taken care of, the ambient damage isn’t super high, so it isn’t hard to run around in glass cannon gear.

The only thing that prevents the event from being completely puggable is the whole “3 even teams” part. Nubbies don’t have the sense to split into 3 even teams without guidance.

My biggest problem with the skill evades is that it requires the current animation you are doing to finish before executing the evade, including the auto attack. This makes timing the evade nigh impossible.

I also agree with Death Blossom being too little. 1/2 second evade wouldn’t make the skill overpowered.

SoV used to suck. I think it was buffed twice, first directly and then indirectly via Signets of Suffering. That, and Consume Conditions was nerfed, so suddenly there’s an open spot.

I use it on my condi build build. The spite line’s is great even on a condi build, and it just so happened that I am already using Plague Sending and Signet of Spite. I don’t need any additional cleanses, so I take SoV and SoS to throw on a bit more pressure.

I will miss mantra supremacy.

The main thing I’ll miss is recharging partially used mantras. When dungeon running, if after engaging a group I had 1/3 charges left, I’d just blow the remaining charges and channel it so I have 3 of each by the time the next fight starts. Now, I can’t do that anymore.

What a lot of people don’t understand about the world bosses is that they weren’t designed to have the massive amount of players that currently fight them. Pre mega-server the number of players you had to fight a world boss were the number who happened to be around when the event randomly started on your server alone. This meant that, when you fought the shadow behemoth, there were at most 10 people there. Heck, I remember soloing the Inquest Golem Mark II. This was before daily chests and dragonite ore, too, so you didn’t have trains of people hopping from boss to boss.

When you have only a handful of people, some of these bosses take on a whole new level of hard. Two that stand out for me are the Risen Priestess of Lyssa and the Risen High Wizard. The Risen Priestess shoots out bouncing chaos bolts, and in a party of sub 5 people this adds an enormous amount of pressure that you don’t see in zergs. The High Wizard is relentless in his attacks, and without other players to distract him he’ll make mincemeat out of most players.

Shiki.7148:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Shiki.7148:

snip

Except that I see necros run a petting zoo in dungeons all the time. I see necromancers pre-empt other fields all the time. It doesn’t matter how often you think it happens. What matters is that it happens enough that anyone who’s run a dungeon either encounter this problem or is the problem. The issue isn’t just the fact that a necro player is more likely to be incapable, but the fact that the necromancer, when played well, still doesn’t bring a lot. Selfish support, niche utilities, bad fields and no good finishers. Things can only go wrong with a Necro.

Likewise, the lack of evades is a very serious problem. Countless enemies, especially in high level fractals, do so much damage that you can’t face-tank them. There are also many enemies (I.E. abominations) that gain bonuses when hitting players, actually making things worse for the rest of the team. Granted, there are also many circumstances where being able to facetank is valuable, such as the Clockheart or Svánigandr, but these are far and few between.

What is also really unpleasant is having to ride a new class like a bicycle to make sure they’re competent. You’d be amazed how often it is that I’ll get a ranger on my team who doesn’t even have a melee weapon, because “rangers range!”. Of course I can just kick them and wait for someone else, but that is still an inconvenient time waste that leaves no one happy.

The classes are hated for legitimate reasons. As much as I’d like to just say it’s a filthy elitist problem and that it is all sunshine and rainbows over the hill, the fact is that it isn’t.

Then, again, it is the players that are completely stupid. Tell them to stop it, and if they don’t, kick them. Don’t kick all Necros preemptively for the handfull of idiots playing the class.

You’ve missed the point entirely. I don’t kick other players or make “No ranger” LFGs. The point is that the discrimination against these classes isn’t some kind of hyper-elitist conspiracy. These classes are disliked for legitimate reasons that ultimately stem from their designs.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I have a confession to make: I hate playing with rangers. I still do, of course, but every time I see a ranger I steel myself for hard times ahead.

Boon hate. Though this is being fixed with the tempest.

Shiki.7148:

snip

Except that I see necros run a petting zoo in dungeons all the time. I see necromancers pre-empt other fields all the time. It doesn’t matter how often you think it happens. What matters is that it happens enough that anyone who’s run a dungeon either encounter this problem or is the problem. The issue isn’t just the fact that a necro player is more likely to be incapable, but the fact that the necromancer, when played well, still doesn’t bring a lot. Selfish support, niche utilities, bad fields and no good finishers. Things can only go wrong with a Necro.

Likewise, the lack of evades is a very serious problem. Countless enemies, especially in high level fractals, do so much damage that you can’t face-tank them. There are also many enemies (I.E. abominations) that gain bonuses when hitting players, actually making things worse for the rest of the team. Granted, there are also many circumstances where being able to facetank is valuable, such as the Clockheart or Svánigandr, but these are far and few between.

What is also really unpleasant is having to ride a new class like a bicycle to make sure they’re competent. You’d be amazed how often it is that I’ll get a ranger on my team who doesn’t even have a melee weapon, because “rangers range!”. Of course I can just kick them and wait for someone else, but that is still an inconvenient time waste that leaves no one happy.

The classes are hated for legitimate reasons. As much as I’d like to just say it’s a filthy elitist problem and that it is all sunshine and rainbows over the hill, the fact is that it isn’t.

Well, I’ve just been convinced to make a second sinister torch.

Linken.6345:

The problem is they see the top guys not wanting necros and rangers and oh there must a reason so we dont want them either.

Actually, the problem is that players on average have a discouraging experience either playing with or playing these classes.

I have a confession to make: I hate playing with rangers. I still do, of course, but every time I see a ranger I steel myself for hard times ahead. This is for two reasons, first being that the ranger is a newb class, and the second that they are generally ineffective.

The ranger is a class with a lot of appeal to newbies, which is unfortunate because it does the worst job at teaching the game. A new player on a ranger can get to 80 just by bearbowing, never learning the intricacies of how they’re actually expected to play. So, when one joins a group, all they’ll do is use the longbow at point blank range, spamming skills when they’re off cooldown, ruining enemy positioning and defiance. Their pet will be an uncontrolled nuisance that will attack the wrong monsters, draw aggro, and ruin skips and stealth.

Even when played well, the ranger adds very little. It starts with vulnerability, it ends with frostspotter, and there’s very little in between. Miniscule random offensive buffs, mostly. When I see a ranger on my team, I know that despite their best efforts they will not save me. They don’t have powerful defensive utilities, healing, synergy, or unique utilities to accomplish a goal.

The reason why it is rare to see a good, experienced ranger is because as a player levels up, they quickly see their own ineptitude when compared to other classes. When a thief stealths, a memser time warps, a guardian reflects, an ele ice bows, or a warrior caps might, that is a visible, distinguished, and potent contribution.

I’ve thought on this issue so much that I actually made a ranger to see what the deal was. Now, the ranger is arguably the most extreme case. Were I to rank the classes in order of peer hatred:

#1: Ranger
#2: Necro
#3: Engi
#4: Mesmer

With all other classes not hated. Mesmer straddles the line. I’ve already spoken at length on rangers, so I’ll talk about the others for a bit.

Necros are hated a lot for their petting zoo, which is an uncontrolled ranger pet x6. Necros are also hated because they are slow, and they lack evasion (which is far more important than taking the hit in many circumstances).. The last straw is how the necro’s best skills are all dark fields, which override the more useful ones. That said, Necros are in a better place regarding support, especially when running blood magic. Necros apply plenty of weakness, strip boons, give minor bouts of regular healing and damage. They can cure and transfer conditions when needed, give the whole team protection, and are decent at vulnerability.

Engineer’s are a weird one. I’d argue quite strongly that engineers are the second best class in the game. And yet, it is so painful to play next to them. Why? Well, the engineer is the hardest class to play well. It is so difficult that it actually hurt my hands, which is why I reluctantly rolled out of the class. Anyway, to be at its best, the engineer needs to be flexible with their utilities and traits, never settling on a single cookie cutter build like all other classes do. This contrary nature makes playing Engi well a rare skill. Instead, you’ll get random kit spam and inappropriate turrets. While the engineer can do nearly anything, all too often I find them doing nothing at all.

The mesmer is not really hated per se. However, a lot of players see them as inferior guardians. Mesmers only do a lot of damage when their phantasms are up, so unless that rare fight occurs, the mesmer is left lightly plinking away at the enemy with their sword.

Vlad Morbius.1759:

Finisher Total
Blast One triggers only if an enemy wanders into the mark
Whirl None
Leap None
Projectile One *20% chance to proc

The reaper gets few more finishers

Soul Spiral: Whirl Finisher
Death’s Charge: Leap Finisher
GraveDigger: Whirl Finisher

The big one is Gravedigger. As you know, it recharges instantly when striking an enemy at or below 50% health. This means that Reapers get a highly spammable whirl finisher.

For the necro inclusively, this means quite a bit. By just having reaper, necros get access to dark fields and ice fields. If you have the trait Bitter Chill, each of those ice bolts will inflict vulnerability. Combine this with nearly every other trait we’ll get, and necromancer vulnerability stacking is going to be quite good. Dare I say, worth it to bring a Reaper just for that.

Darkness Fields are another useful one. The leeching bolts do a special kind of damage that bypasses protection effects, and also heals. So, while under a darkness field, Gravedigger will spam damaging + healing bolts in addition to its own damage.l

If running well of blood, reaper’s also get to use cleansing bolts in a light field. This isn’t too useful, but it does mean that well of blood gets an additional cleanse mechanic that it lacked before. The poison fields aren’t that useful, and the ethereal field is too hard to use. But this is still group synergy: Any fire fields that get laid down will result in endless stacks of burns being applied by the necro.

Personally I don’t get a lot of the QQ from the PVE side. Yes, shouts are sub-par, but that is the only bad thing about the Reaper, period. The Greatsword is awesome, Reaper’s Shroud is awesome, the traitline is scary good, and the chill gimmick is fun to play with. We get plenty more finishers, better fields, insane vulnerability stacking, the unique ability to get 100% crit chance without a single point invested in precision, an AoE pull that was previously reserved for guardians, and a pulsing stability skill.

My biggest fear now is that regular Necro will be completely obsolete once the reaper hits.

Guess I’m one of the rarer ones. Instead of starting out on a ranger then making another toon, I started out on other toons and made a ranger to see how bad it actually is. So far I’ve found rangers to be alright, but I can see where many of the complaints come from.

The Good:

#1: I’m surprisingly tanky with Greatsword. The evade on auto is enough to face tank many boss autos with little concern. For a longer fight I like to open with Signet of the Wild + Quickening Zephyr, which gives me a lot of evade time, then I follow up with Signet of Stone.
#2: The vulnerability stacking is unreal. The build I run has both remorseless and quickdraw, and this lets me get a ton of vulnerability very quickly.
#3: The amount of self quickness I apply is quite staggering. It is on part with my interrupt mesmer at times.
#4: I do have spots of group support that help out. I give AoE fury regularly, I use spotter, and in safer environments I even have frost spirit out.
#5: I’ve never played a class that had this much reliable stability before.

The Bad:

#1: The Sword. This is a weapon so cumbersome that I cannot fathom how it made it past the alpha stages of design. It is filled with a bunch of animation locking leaps that can only be triggered after you’ve landed the first non-leap attack, making the all of the leaps and the animation locking pointless. This is the only weapon I know of that actively gets players killed for the sin of being within melee range and not having unbound the auto attack function of the weapon. So, instead of letting my hands rest while I wait for cooldowns to end, I have to mash the keyboard like an excited baby just to do the bare minimum of damage.

To top it off, the middle kick doesn’t even cleave. Meaning that it is the top DPS weapon, but only against single targets. Even if the greatsword does less damage, I can’t bring myself to use such an annoying weapon.

#2: A surprisingly large portion of damage is done by our pet. This is a problem in two ways. First is that we don’t really have the means to protect our pets or keep them alive, so in areas with a lot of cleave we can kiss our DPS goodbye. Second is that the vast majority of pet attacks and skills are single target, meaning that against multiple enemies we can kiss our DPS goodbye again.

#3: Micromanaging is hell, second only to the engineer. A ranger constantly has to make sure their pets are attacking the right targets at the right time, and as we all know pets will just randomly run off to attack something that isn’t even on your screen. This is especially bad on the condi build, which requires much more skill spam than the others.

#4: Lack of a unique meaningful mechanic. This is an observation that can be made by other players: There’s not much difference between having a ranger around than there is not having a ranger around. They are like Necros in the sense that they are there, and you assume they are contributing, but were the ranger to suddenly vanish you probably wouldn’t notice. We have vulnerability, but every class already stacks a lot of that. The pet isn’t an aid, as much as it is just a tumor that sucks away all the potency the ranger might have had.

Take a look at all of the ranger weapon skills and traits, and ask yourself if any stand out as memorable. Pick out one skill that says “This skill is the reason why I should choose ranger over another class”. If you’re like me, there isn’t one. Everything is so unremarkable.

Shouts: just command your pet to do basic stuff, most of which isn’t particularly useful. Only good one is Search and Rescue.

Spirits: Give out spotty and unreliable effects that can be killed prematurely.

Traps: Apply condis after a delay. Whoop de doo.

Survival: A grab bag of miscellaneous tricks. Spots of utility, but the only useful one is Quickening Zephyr.

Signet: This is one part where the ranger actually has decent utilities. Invulnerability, stability and increased damage, AoE condi cleanse (at the cost of 40% of your damage), and the generic but ever so useful movement signet.

Ranger: We have good signets.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

What I’m wondering is why everyone’s condi trap build have sword main hand. I can understand using the axe for bleeds, but Serpent’s strike does less than half the damage of Splitblade at more than twice the recharge.

The AA.

The AA doesn’t inflict conditions. Please explain.

What I’m wondering is why everyone’s condi trap build have sword main hand. I can understand using the axe for bleeds, but Serpent’s strike does less than half the damage of Splitblade at more than twice the recharge.

I can’t speak for PVP that much, but for PVE our utilities are fine. When compared to other classes, we have the roughly the useful/useless ratio. Oddly enough, Engineers are the exception to that rule.

Arcane Set: Shield, Brilliance, and Wave are good. AoE damage, blast finishers, and a stun break. Arcane Blast and power not as much, but on a condi build Arcane Power combined with elemental surge and fire attunement is basically 5 × 5 burning.

Brilliance and Wave being blast finishers is actually really useful. Given the right builds they can stack a lot of might and fury for the whole party, heal for the whole party, and stack swiftness for the whole party.

Conjures: Most conjures are pretty bad, only having a niche use. Ice Bow, however, is really solid. Skill #5 is a long duration stun that is great against bosses, Skill #4 is the highest damaging AoE in the game, especially against large targets, and skill 3 is insta-cast so it does quite a lot of damage in a short time. Lightning hammer also has a use, since it causes blind on auto attack and boosts power quite a bit.

Glyphs: These are half good, half bad. Glyph of elemental power is generally ineffective and shouldn’t be used. Glyph of Greater Elementals is currently the best elite, and it alongside of lesser elementals are alight if you wand additional bodies and fodder. The fire attunement elemental does decent damage, and the earth attunement one can take quite a few hits. Renewal is a somewhat gimmicky rez skill, with its activation time being so long it is better to just rez someone normally. Elemental Harmony is a solid heal.

The best glyph is elemental storms. This glyph does some pretty useful things. In fire attunement it causes burning in an AoE for awhile. In lightning attunement it acts like a secondary ice bow, maxing out vulnerability on an enemy very quickly. In Earth attunement it acts as a blind field and also inflicts bleed. The only one that isn’t really useful is water attunement.

Signets: These straddle the line on being useful. For the most part they are fairly basic, and have little depth beyond what is written on the tin. In PVE you’ll most likely end up using Signet of Fire a lot, whether it is for the crit chance increase or the burn, and restoration for some gradual healing in certain circumstances.

The cast times are only for the initial activation and animation. They don’t include the after-cast animation or server tick lag.

This makes DPS checking and balancing hard, since the listed cast times are lies meant to deceive the player.

Khristophoros.7194:

@Blood Red Arachnid

“Rise!” is the one shout I’m looking forward to, for a Death Nova build. Each time one of your minions dies you get a pretty decent poison field that pulses for damage. Getting 5 jagged horrors with Death Nova as often as this skill will be up is going to be amazing for AoE.

I find the situations in which I could maximize the benefit to be a bit… situational. In a PVP situation if I’m hitting 4-5 targets, I’m either surrounded and about to die, or I’m fighting a mesmer. In a lot of bouts, Rise! will summon 1 or 2 jagged horrors on a 40 second cooldown. This means that Bone Minions are literally twice as good as Rise! in most situations.

In a PVE scenario I can reliably hit 5 targets, but that will come to less tooltip damage than Well of Suffering. Worst part is, Well of Suffering doesn’t scale down when fighting fewer enemies.

I suppose condi reaper’s might use it. 25 ticks of AoE poisoning isn’t too bad, making it a stronger albeit uncontrollable Corrosive Poison Cloud. The hard part about this is I’m not sure Condi Reaper is better than regular ole Condi necro.

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.

In the oveworld, nearly anything can work. If that is your primary concern, just go with whatever is cool looking.

Dungeons are a bit of a different beast, especially since you can’t really play them alone. If you want to optimize performance, which is what most dungeon teams demand, you’ll have to do a couple of things.

Wear Berserker Gear. This may seem daunting at first, but as you learn to dodge big, telegraphed attacks you’ll soon find it hard to play in any other gear prefix.

For weapons, you’ll want to do something a bit odd. Keep only one main-hand weapon equipped: the dagger. The dagger has good damage and LF gain. If you need to range, you can use life blast and lich form. For off-hand, keep at least the focus. The focus is good for damage, stacking vulnerability, and removing boons. The warhorn is decent for its AoE stun and swiftness, and the off-hand dagger is good for the condi transfer and weakness.

As far as traits/specializations go, there are two ways to build the dungeon necro that I’ve found to be really effective. Spite/Curses/Blood Magic, and Spite/Curses/Soul Reaping. Now, the traits aren’t set in stone, since it changes depending on how you play, but these will make a good guideline for what to use in the future.

Spite: Spiteful Talismen, Chill of Death/Rending Shroud, Close to Death.
Curses: Plague Sending, Path of Corruption, Weakening Shroud
Blood Magic: Quickening Thirst/Ritual of Life, Vampiric Aura, Vampiric Rituals
Soul Reaping: Unyielding Blast, Spectral Mastery, Foot in the Grave.

These traits are used for something called a Flashing Build. In this build, you pop in and out of Death Shroud very quickly to take advantage of Furious Demise, Rending Shroud, and Weakening Shroud. You’ll spam Death Shroud whenever it is off cooldown, save the special exceptions where you need to take a few hits.

The difference between blood magic and soul reaping are that blood magic is a more team supportive build, while soul reaping is more personal strength.

The utilities you’ll want to take are as follows:

Heal Skill: Well of Blood if using blood magic. Consume Conditions otherwise.
Well of Suffering: This skill is a must. Does good damage, stacks a lot of vulnerability. Just make sure to use it after another player lays down a fire field.
Elite Skill: Lich form. Lich form’s auto attack does more damage than the dagger, and can hit more enemies, too. Use against bosses.

The last two utilities can be taken from a pool, and it really depends on the situation. If you are using blood magic, you’ll prioritize wells.
Well of Corruption: this does half as much damage as well of suffering, but it is still a pretty strong skill to use. The best thing about it is how easily it strips conditions away in an AoE.
Well of Power: This skill is a decent stunbreak and group condi cleanse. Use this against enemies that inflict burning, since it turns burning into Aegis.
Well of Darkness: this is a fairly potent defensive skill that takes away most damage from non-champions. If trash mobs give you problems, take this.
Blood is Power: This skill has a nice AoE might stack. This should be taken, unless the team you have is already really good at stacking might. Otherwise, take
Signet of Spite This is a flat damage boost that actually scales really well in lower levels. If there’s no use for anything else, take this for a flat damage boost.
Signet of the Locust: If there’s a long travel section where you don’t want locust swarm to hit things, but also aren’t in blood magic and thus can’t take quickening thirst, this works as a stopgap. Just switch into locust when you need to run, then swap back out afterward.
Spectral Armor: This is a decent stunbreak if, for some reason, you have to take a lot of hits to the face, hits which you can’t dodge of walk out of range of.

The rest of the utilities are meh at best, working only in specific situations. Remember to prioritize damage, so unless a problem presents itself you’ll be probably be taking Well of Suffering, Well of Corruption, and Blood is Power/Signet of Spite.

Personally, as a casual PVE player, I look forward more towards reaper shouts than I do ele shout. Lets get some references:

Wash the Pain Away: Unless the ally heal is phenomenal, I won’t be running this. To heal my allies and cleanse conditions, I just swap over to water attunement and blast arcane brilliance. In situations where healing is desperately needed, I’ll probably have switched to water/arcane trait lines, in which case I can use multiple heal + cleanses just by swapping to water and dodging. It isn’t like this provides some novel utility that necros don’t have, either. Necros can already pull/convert/transfer conditions, and if you’re in Blood Magic you’re already doing a surprising amount of healing with well of blood + vampiric aura + mark of evasion. Heck, even SoV technically heals the party for about 2k each time it gets used.

Feel the Burn: Another fire field? Basically this is an AoE damage patch, so for now I’ll treat it like a third lava font. Now, the hard part about using this skill is justifying it over arcane wave. I’m pretty sure it’ll do more damage than arcane wave, but wave blasts, making it much more versatile. Granted, necromancers would tear off their own arm to get a fire field, even more so if it causes burning.. But for an ele, this is milktoast.

Eye of the Storm: A stun break with a minor speed boost. Now personally as a stun breaker I usually take arcane shield and mist form, and for very good reason: defense. My ele’s nickname is candlelight, because one blow and she’s out. If we assume that warriors, guardians, and mesmers happen to not have their AoE stunbreak, then even then I would be hesitant to run this, because a stun break is no good if I’m not alive to enjoy it.

Aftershock: This is just a movement debuff. Now granted, while eles don’t have too many cripples and immoblizes, they do have plenty of chill. So does the reaper. Necromancers are swimming in cripples and chills. Either way, this shout is immediately inferior to the next one.

Freeze: Basically it is a weaker version of chilled to the bone. Now as an ele, I’m doing either one of two things. I’m wielding a staff, so if I really wanted to stop an enemy I’d just use frozen ground. If I’m welding a dagger, I’m probably using Frozen Burst to blast fields, and thus am already regularly chilling enemies. Keep in mind: I only use frozen ground in the most extraneous situations, and that one comes free with the staff. Freeze probably isn’t worth the slot.

Rebound: I don’t think this is a shout, but I can’t find any practical way to really use this skill. Just spam it and hope it works well.

Now the Necro shouts:

Your Soul is Mine: I can see a use for this. With Consume Conditions fallen from grace, I’ve been using the other heal skills. Well of blood with blood magic, and signet of vampirism with the condi build. But, since I’ll probably be going into Spite/Soul Reaping/Reaper, This skill is an option. It has less damage on a single target than SoV, but a faster recharge and a decent LF gain. I’ll only swap out of it if conditions prove to be an issue.

Nothing Can Save you: This is one of the ones I’ll pass. In PVE being unblockable isn’t a big help, and I’ll already be stacking massive amounts of vulnerability without needing a boon to convert.

Rise!: This is the other “pass” option. Jagged horrors just aren’t that useful.

Suffer: With chilling darkness having an ICD, Suffer provides an adequate means to stack AoE vulnerability, while also doing some damage to boot. It isn’t as good of a condi cleanse as well of power, but it also has a shorter recharge and does damage. This skill might see use.

You are all Weaklings: Given how short the recharge is, that might starts to look rather appealing. This will be great for trash, especially in groups where you don’t have someone to stack might for you. Just pop this as they all gather, bash them all to death with the sword in the 6 (boosted) or so seconds that you have high might. Combined with the spite tree, this can sustain large amounts of might for a long time.

Chilled to the Bone: This is the one I look forward to the most. If the tooltip listed on the wiki is right, this is basically a 600 radius basilisk venom boosted fire grab. The damage is massive, the chill will be useful, the stun will be helpful, and the stability won’t be utterly useless either. Granted, with its long cast time it is one of those “use this at the start of a fight” elites, and this will make it hard to strategically use stability, but it will guarantee no disables upon cleanup.

So really, ele’s aren’t in a better position with their shouts than necromancers are:: a lot of redundant and repeated utility.

Ice storm is good, but it only shines when fighting large enemies who are relatively stationary and invulnerability free. Quite frequently, I’ll drop the ice storm only to have the enemy walk right out of it, doing very little damage overall. So, it is more of a “best in particular situations” weapon than anything else.

So a little while ago, a bloodtide coast map (IP 230) closed. This isn’t unusual for a nearly empty map, but this wasn’t an empty map. This was a double guild Triple Trouble map, filled to the brim with around 150 people. Suffice to say, when the map closed and we were all ported onto different maps in varying stages of Triple Trouble, there was a lot of confusion. This event is being called the great TT sundering of 7/21/2015.

Now, last I checked, maps are only supposed to close when they have low population. Then, you get that prompt on the left side of the screen that says “this is a low pop map, would you like to volunteer, going to close in one hour, yada yada”. But, bloodtide coast IP 230 displayed no such behavior. There were no warnings, the map was not empty in the least. It just abruptly ended.

I can’t imagine this is a common occurrence, but I also can’t imagine this being an intended consequence. There might be a bug in the megaserver system.

Wow I didn’t know this was a necro thread. I just spent awhile correcting a guy who probably will never see it.

Anyway, personally I don’t mind necro threads that much. I mean, the subject is still relevant today. You can either make a thread saying the same thing, or just respond in an older one.

Obtena.7952:

Completely related to the thread … what is the thought process that a person has to go through to resurrect and respond to a thread that’s 1 year old?

I mean, do they randomly pick a page, click a thread and say “Yup, this is the one!”

I actually have a theory about this. Since the forum search function doesn’t work, I’ll have to search in google to find relevant topics. What google returns isn’t sorted by date or relevance to current builds, so I’ll get a scattershot of both recent and ancient topics.

What I imagine happens is, someone does this too look up a question (I.E. the toughness one), but forgets that the topic is a year old, and posts their opinion on it.

foofad.5162:

For each point of armor you have, the less each additional point of armor is “worth”. In other words, if you have 1000 armor and increase it by 1, 1000/1001 = .99 rather than 1 – .99 is less than 1. Of course it is. All you’re saying with that statement is that when you compare 1000 to 1001, each point contributes proportionally less to 100%. But that’s it. That’s as far as that statement extends. It’s not that armor contributes less. It’s that the more of it you have, the smaller percentage each individual point represents of the total because duh.

You have no idea what you’re talking about, because you just contradicted yourself. Every point being worth “less” is the definition of a diminishing return. You are asserting exponential growth in investments to yield identical returns, and then calling it linear. Exponential growth isn’t linear.

If you have a graphing calculator, this is quite easy to demonstrate. Armor acts as a multiplier, so its relationship with damage is geometric:

Damage = (Power X Weapon Strength X Skill Coefficient) / (Armor)

DDamage/DArmor = -(Power X Weapon Strength X Skill Coefficient) / (Armor ^ 2)

I"ll call that big part overall attack strength K, since it is a controlled variable.

DDamage/DArmor = -K/(Armor^2)

Essentially it is -1 / X ^ 2, so plot that on a graphing calculator and you’ll get something like this . This graph is the change in damage as armor is changed, and you’ll notice quite quickly that it isn’t a straight line. As you go higher up in values of armor, the change to damage is less and less For example, at double armor, each point of toughness does only 25% of what it used to.

To answer the OP’s question: Yes toughness has diminishing returns. All stats do. There is no easy way to see when how much is too much.

In PVE, you’ll want to go maximum damage (berserker, assassin, sinister). But in other game modes it is more complicated. Personally, when building defensively, I try to maximize something called “effective health”. It is basically armor times health. It is at its highest point when armor = HP x 10.

For example, lets take the guardian’s stats with no equipment. This is 11,645 health, and 2211 armor. Compared to light armor classes, you’ll take about 87% damage, so this comes to an effective health of 13,403.

Now, say you have 1000 stat points. If you put them into toughness, you’ll get 3211 armor. You’ll take about 59.8% of the damage, so this is an effective health of 19,473. If you put those stat points into vitality, then you’ll have 21,645 health, and including armor this comes to 24,879 effective health.

As you can see, you get more out of those 1000 points of you put them into vitality instead of toughness. This is the simple version: there’s advantages and disadvantages to both, and it really depends on what you’re trying to do with your build.

There actually isn’t that much to gain from auto attacks being balanced. It just makes the #1 skill boring.

By having the auto attack being imbalanced, it gives leeway to have unique and interesting traits. For example, while the engineer pistol was inferior, with Coated Bullets it could hit a massive amount of enemies all at once.

Not including other types of currency, I’ve spent around 200 gold on the MF. But, this wasn’t gambling for a precursor. I use it mostly to get money via crafting and promoting materials.

So I’ve gotten, like, 280 gold from the forge.

Jerus.4350:

Didn’t Frifox figure Staff condi mesmer to be better than zerker after the update? Thought I saw him say that somewhere, but maybe he was talking about a specific situation. TBH I haven’t touched my mesmer except once since the update. Spent the whole time seeing red warning flash across my screen… RIP free targetting feedback.

Pretty sure it was only during solo runs.

Dagger Training is one of those traits where it would almost be good… if not for the fact that it is inferior to trapper’s respite in the majority of ways. I did some rough math on the subject:

Dagger AA is 4 attacks every 2.07 seconds. In a 30 second period, this comes to 57.97 attacks. With 33% chance to inflict, 2 ticks of poison per success, this comes to 38.6 ticks of poison in a 30 second period, assuming you were camping dagger.

Needle Trap inflicts 10 seconds of poison and 3 × 10 seconds of bleed, coming to 10 poison and 30 bleed ticks in 30 seconds.

Assuming 2050 malice, this will make Dagger Training inflict 6041 damage, and Trapper’s respite will inflict 5915 damage. Now, you’re probably saying “Oh, they look about equal. I don’t see what the problem is!.” Well, here’s where we get the problems:

#1: Trapper’s respite works regardless of weapon, whereas dagger training requires you to camp dagger. On a condi build camping dagger isn’t worthwhile, and dagger training does not change this fact.
#2: Trapper’s respite also immobilizes and synergizes with other trap traits in the line.
#3: Trapper’s respite gets most of its damage from bleed, which the thief inflicts a lot more of and is also far easier to build around (caltrops, krait runes, death blossom, etc).
#4: Needle trap can hit up to 5 targets, while the dagger auto can only cleave 2.

Meaning that overall, the needle trap is just better.

There are a couple of ways this could’ve been balanced. Now, the immediate way I can think of is to make it like incendiary powder: long duration poison, 100% chance to proc, internal cooldown. To keep it roughly the same strength as trapper’s this would be 11 seconds of poison per dagger attack with an 8 second cooldown. That way, if you’re using P/D and use CnD, it inflicts poison quite regularly.

This does present a problem, though: cleave. This new model would be quite strong against any one player, but against multiple players, or AI builds, or multiple enemies, this would actually be a loss in the potential brute force that dagger training gives now.

There’s also the generic “increase poison duration to 3 seconds”. This would make it 50% more effective. This is where it gets a bit hard, since you have pit utility against raw damage. Dagger training is a DPS boost with absolutely no utility. Trapper’s respite is a DPS boost with a lot of utility, which can be traited to become even more powerful with trap specific traits. I’d say at first glance that it is a fair trade to make Dagger training 50% stronger, but Expertise to do so much more stuff.

On a somewhat separate note is Potent Poison. The thing with thieves is that they don’t actually have a lot of sources of poison, barring a single exception. Lets compare it to their other primary condition, bleed. For this comparison, I’m going to be breaking each skill into two measurements: Ticks per Second of Recharge (TPS), and AoE TPS. For weapon skills, the second of recharge is going to be initiative cost / rate of initiative gain, or roughly 1 second per initiative.

Poison Sources:
Lotus Ste: 2.90 TPS, 5.80 AoE TPS
Dagger Training: 1.29 TPS, 2.58 AoE TPS
Serpent’s Touch: 0.77 TPS, no AoE.
Choking Gas: 2 TPS, 10 AoE TPS (slow to apply)
Needle Trap: 0.42 TPS, 2.08 AoE TPS
Trapper’s Respite: a second needle trap.
Spider Venom: Special case. Assuming no teammates, 1.125 TPS, no AoE. Assuming teammates, 5.625 TPS, no AoE

Total TPS (assuming burst, no choking gas, dagger training): 6.505 TPS with no teammates, 11.01 with teammates.

Total AoE TPS: 12.36, 16.86 with venom share

Bleed Sources:
Death Blossom: 7.5 TPS, 22.5 AoE TPS
Vital Shot: 4.89 TPS, no AoE
Sneak Attack: 3.33 TPS, no AoE
Needle Trap: 1.25 TPS, 6.25 AoE
Trapper’s Respite: a second needle trap
Caltrops: 2.5 TPS, 12.5 AoE
Uncatchable: 1.2 TPS, 6 AoE

Total TPS (assuming trapper’s respite, death blossom and no sneak attack): 11.59
Total AoE TPS: 55.06

The thing with poison is that it doesn’t inflict much more damage than bleed, especially on condi builds (around 10%, give or take). Even with spider venom shared, bleeds are still doing as much damage on a single target, and 3 times as much in an AoE. Most players won’t try to focus exclusively on poison, and instead go for bleeds primarily. This only leaves serpents touch, trapper’s respite, and spider venom as reliable points where someone might inflict poison, meaning that Potent Poisons gives a 46% bonus to an extremely small portion of the actual condi damage done.

There are two ways to balance this: increase the bonus damage, or increase the duration. I would avoid going for a duration increase, since the condi duration is already capped with orrian runes and pizzas. Something along the lines of 33% increased damage, 33% increased duration would be nice.

Basandra Skye.4031:

Astral’s actually QUITE wrong. The article said that comparing the old formula and the new formula, you’d need a condition damage stat of ~700 for a given condition to deal the SAME damage with both formulas. The actual value is closer to 680 post-patch.

Check your math. Let X = condition damage, and set the two equations equal to each other to find the equivalence point.

0.05X + 42.5 = 0.06X + 22
20.5 = 0.01X
2050 = X

So you need 2050 condition damage to break even in the new system. At least for bleeds. That… is actually quite high. Most of my condi builds sit around 1450 pre-might, and thus need 20 stacks of might to do equivalent condition damage.

As far as the rest of the thread goes… this is something that concerned me with the patch before it went live. A lot of our stats have fairly simple relationships with each other, but there’s a set of hidden values that can be adjusted to change things and pull the wool over our eyes. The formula for damage is Damage = Weapon Strength X Power x Skill Coefficient / Armor. This leaves us with several additional mods to look out for.

#1: Weapon Power.
#2: Skill Coefficients.
#3: Base armor value
#4: Base HP
#5: Healing Coefficient

Good news is, Anet didn’t do too much with the new update. The only changers were to precision, and a last minute one to bleed.

I love how tanky it is. In PVP not so much, but in PVE it always surprises me how much of a beating I can actually take.

Liisjak.4509:

If you played more than 1k hours you should have been able to easily afford one from the TP.

Stupidity is not an excuse you drop on bad luck.

The point

Your head.

I’ll explain this simply: It isn’t about getting the weapon itself. It is about wealth and equality. A precursors is basically a gigantic gold bonus that falls from the sky. Literally months of work for some people, and an unfathomable amount of gold for others. It is a major time saver, enabling greater enjoyment of the game at a much faster pace and a more convenient timeframe.

This is where we get into the equality aspect. With precursors being oodles gold harvested from the hopes and dreams of the less fortunate, and with so many people who’ve apparently received one, countless players are left disenfranchised. They’re wondering “Where’s my big break? I’ve been playing the game for so long! It’s not fair!”. They think that it is some kind of conspiracy, or cosmic error that they’ve been working so hard and yet everyone else is getting their windfall.

Even if you can afford one in months time, the fact is there are other people who also could afford one, but don’t have to because it fell from the sky. So they’re sitting on top of a fat stack of cash in the same timeframe that leaves others broke.

On the personal side I know why my quartz usage went up. With the effective removal of stacking conditions, suddenly sinister gear is all the rage. I’ve made two full sets, with a 3rd being produced now.

The thing with sinister gear is that the trinkets are not nearly as cheap as the armor and weapons. Charged Ambrite Jewelry requires 5 exquisite jewels, each requiring a charged quartz. This comes to 30 charged quarts, or 750 quartz crystals for a full set. Because of these jewels, my stockpile of charged quartz vanished in a day, and I am left buying the charged sheets off of the TP.

So, two things are happening. One is that players are buying quartz to make the charged sheets to trade. The other is that players are buying quartz to make the gear directly.

The issue still hasn’t been resolved.

Personally I notice it more while playing some classes more than others. While on a thief or a necro everything is fairly clear and concise. But, play an ele or a guardian and you’re own attacks blind you.

That isn’t including all the various background effects that can inhibit your view.

Pure Heart.1456:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Just make a norn if it has all the options you want?

Yeah, got two Norn already. Want to play human, but, yuck.

Male human?

Just make a norn if it has all the options you want?

Arche.7326:

Try Necro, we still cant solo Lupi.

Necro is easy. Their massive health lets them face tank nearly anything in the game.

If you want hard, try engi. Gotta play Mozart on your keyboard to be effective with that class.

I ’m actually fine with the whole double HP + crit chance, now that it is no longer bugged. It is harder than it was before. Let me explain:

Prior to this update, the best way to fight tequatl was in soldier gear. The additional toughness and health meant that the average player could take quite a beating. But now, to do maximum damage you need glass cannon gear, and that takes away more than you’d think.

For example, I like to do Tequatl on my elementalist. In my full soldier set (soldier gear with ruby trinkets and strength runes. Zerker weapon), I have an effective power of 2998, and an effective health of 26,04 This is including things like crit chance, crit damage, toughness, but not healing. Now, I have to do Tequatl on my zerker set, which has 4220 effective power, but 12,505 effective health.

Lets compare the two. I’m gaining 40.7% more damage, but losing 48% of my overall health. Now these percentages can be a bit misleading, because they actually mean different things. So, I’ll put it in ratios, I have about 1/2th my health, but am doing only 7/5ths more damage.

Since old Teqqy couldn’t be crit, I actually had a relevant power stat of 2633. But also, teq had half of the health, so that is equivalent to 5266 power now. Overall I am doing 4/5ths the total damage, but at1/2 half the health..

Jerus.4350:

Isn’t that a knowingly going to an extreme though? It’s a 50% decrease in attack time. We know that for Mace or GS namely that the strength lies in their burst skills while having a lower auto attack. All I’m saying is it’s worth putting a <50% for assumptions in that regard, acknowledging that it’s not a full 50% increase

Also even with Sword you consider the offhand which are all burst skills. So not quite 50%. Other than hammer you won’t see a full 50% increase.

I wouldn’t say so. A 50% bonus isn’t an extreme, its the default. The overall bonus is deviated from by adding additional skills. The whole “technical” aspects of it muddy the waters a bit, mostly negative but sometimes positive (for example, Auto Attacks which apply might/vulnerability achieve higher stacks, leading to an additional damage increase). That is the issue with technicality: if you want to delve into every single possible detail you’ll end up with a 20 page document trying explain something that can be said succinctly but imprecisely with a phrase.

Because I’m either masochistic or defiant, I’ve decided to finally roll a ranger. So, I figured what I would do is wear full dire gear, and use a shortbow with a bear. The Dire gear makes sure I won’t die while doing OP condi damage, and the bear can take a lot of hits without dying. The bear distracts the enemy, and then I go pew pew from behind and stack, like, 25 bleeds really fast…

I can’t keep a straight face while writing that. But seriously, there are several things about ranger that I just don’t know/haven’t really seen explained anywhere.

My current plans are as follows: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vNAQJARTjMqQJL2qCOsAXLG2Dq92DgRnH4Au3/O4Ie6LeKpJ-TBSBwAUuEAP3fooyvIKBvp+DKdBIM/B4JAAA-e

The general strategy is to use the longbow to open the fight, first pulling with rapid fire and then ending with barrage on my location once they’ve come close enough. Then I swap to greatsword and use that for the remainder of the fight. I’ll constantly be swapping pets to make use of Clarion Bond and Zephyr’s Speed.

Or at least that’s the theory, anyway. Several questions:

#1: Why cats? I know the Jungle stalker has a sweet activation, but my rough napkin math says they don’t do particularly more damage than something like birds.

#2: Will the pet swapping strategy even work, or will my pet be dead way too often to actually make use of Clarion and Zephyr?

#3: Is Predator’ Onslaught even worth it? With barrage I’ll have about 10 seconds of cripple, but after that I’m just hoping that additional party members will be using cripple and chill. The other option is to combine remorseless with two-hand fury, which will give me random spurts of 25% damage increase + vulnerability stacking. But of the Clarion Zephyr Strat doesn’t work I can just go with Predator’s instinct… many variables here.

#4: I can go into a totally different direction with this, and use sword/warhorn with flame trap so I can double blast might and have higher single target damage. However, I am hesitant to use sword, what with it’s animation locking, lack of cleave on second AA, and more difficult evasion skills. Is everyone expecting rangers to be might blasters, or should I leave the fire fields to engi/guard/ele?

It’s actually not that hard to get ascended gear from fractals. You just have to grind to higher levels to get reliable drops.