Guild Wars 2

haviz.1340:

You seem to assume that I think that difficulty while playing with heavy armour users is easier solely because of their 13% damage reduction in contrast to light armour users. That is completely false.

Both heavy armour users, guardians and warriors are arguably the easiest professions to play at the high level with a lot of room for mistakes. This has nothing to do with their armour but rather sustain, abundance of reflections, easiness of performing optimal dps and many others. Again, if you think it’s a wrong statement, go ahead and test it “live”. I did, with scales 49-79 fotm.

People that do not use hammer guardians in high level fractals while using only full glass cannon builds are often wiping or at least going down randomly in places they shouldn’t.

Also, hammer guardian gameplay is nothing that should aimed for. It’s one of the most boring and least active gameplays in the whole game, probably on the similar level as spirit ranger.

The biggest problem with the heavies mentality is that the most elite groups aren’t enforcing it at all. The ease of use is interesting, and probably true, which is why the bearbow ranger had such popularity for awhile. But again, things shift over time, and the standard player will eventually catch up to the fact that heavies are not superior to other the other classes.

As I said, I hope to do better than the hammer fractal meta This means making hammer guardians helpful instead of not necessary, and making other forms of support more helpful, and making other build types more useful. It takes more than just faster attacks to accomplish this, but I did lay out an 10 additional points in my solution on Guangs thread about it.

As far as conditions go… I think the mess we have now is the product of a series decisions that went down since launch.

At launch, condition cleansing was originally much more powerful. I can’t provide many examples off the top of my had, but one such example is Mantra of Resolve, which used to cleanse every condition you had on a 20 second cooldown, but only once before needing a recharge. A lot of condition cleansing was like this, but as time went on full cleanses were nerfed, and conditions themselves kept getting more and more buffs.

With cleansing taking on a limited approach, spam became much more important. Originally there were no “covering” conditions at first, and dumping them all was more likely to make you lose than anything else. Now, you can spam without abandon, since so many classes don’t have a full cleanse. The ones that do have it on a long cooldown, much longer than their blocks or their dodges.

Personally, I would like to see it go back a bit to how it was around release: more full cleanses on shorter cooldowns.

fadeaway.2807:

Why did this need another new thread when as you said, we already have many?
I get that everyone wants their opinion heard and thinks it is the best, but if everyone created a thread (looks like they are doing this) then we end up making a mess of this new balance subforum.

A few reasons:

#1: So many of the threads have devolved into nitpicking and insults that, even if I were to post a big explanation as to why things are going down, the likelyhood that it’ll be read or taken into consideration by anyone, Anet included, is remote at best.

#2: The zerk threads talk about solutions, just have open discussions, or were negative responses to the idea, but none of them really bothered to delve into what exactly the problem is, why it should be fixed, how it came about, why it is unique to GW2, etc. Hell, originally I didn’t even plan to include a solution in this thread, since Guang’s thread was enough.

So much of the other threads has delved into madness that I felt an escalated voice was necessary. It is unfortunate, though, since I would like this thread to serve more as an explanation for the zerker issue, rather than to discuss particular solutions to it.

LordByron.8369:

You did wrong since being “heavy armor” is paired with extremely strong low CD utilities and uberdps.

Give all classes shake it off and endure pain etc.

Ergo, their utilities are what make them strong, and not their armor. Seriously, warriors are only middling in DPS, and guardians are paper if they get hit in GC gear.

haviz.1340:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

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

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

Not this heavy nonsense again…

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

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

EDIT: darn, forgot this part.

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

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

haviz.1340:

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

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

haviz.1340:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vargamonth.2047:

Valkyrie achieves similar results while keeping a lot more damage output, and a high enough toughness, which works a lot better as sustain tool, can also work while freeing room for damage (knight, cavalier) or proper sustain (healing power).

I think you confused Valkyrie with Knight, since Valkyrie gives vitality, and knight gives toughness. Regardless, I actually find Soldier to be ineffective when compared to knight, since the secondary power/precision is only equivalent roughly to the primary power of soldier.

Vargamonth.2047:

PVT will almost never be a viable alternative to berserker not doing enough damage to kill this kind of enemies in time. In fact, it’s quite similar, just being slower and next to incompatible

I did the math on post #2, and it shows otherwise.

Vargamonth.2047:

If berserkers are reliant on downing a boss fast enough, any party member being replaced by a PVT one just increases the risk of failure. Any berserker getting downed too soon on a PVT is not as dangerous, but still can achieve the same result.

This is still *true now. It is the zerkers curse, and why running zerker is hard in pugs, but easy in full zerk groups. That said, it isn’t completely true, since the zerker can still disengage, and the more durable players can take aggro while the zerker hangs back for a bit. The more durable players can also raise the downed easier, as they are not dependent wholly on active defense for their survival.

I run zerker in pugs the vast majority of the time. The zerkers curse is more a product of habit and mindset than anything else.

Vargamonth.2047:

A change like this would benefit mainly 2 setups or a mix of both:

The in-between of the extremes is an intra-personal mix of both extremes presented here. That said, this idea is too simplistic. A single healing guardian/engineer/elementalist/mesmer is more than capable of bolstering the sustainability of a group. The more you have, the longer GC can maintain engagement. But, the fewer you have, either the less they are needed because the other builds are either more durable and don’t need as much heal, or they do more damage and the enemy dies quicker, thus doing less damage.

Experienced players already switch seamlessly from melee engagement to ranged engagement to disengagement. The difference with these changes is that glass cannon setups will higher risk, and thus more likely to, without additional support, have to switch to range or disengage. Also, I would suggest giving more mobs ranged attacks, as well as making melee enemies more capable of chasing players.

Vargamonth.2047:

In short words:
Berserker would still be the prefered option as long as the damage output could be achieved. Non berserkers would have even a harder time joining groups since their presence doesn’t slow down the dungeon run anymore, it simply makes it fail (already happens with some bosses and tactics).

The point is that damage output would be much, much harder to achieve. The need for disengaging and the much more severe threat of downing and defeating counterbalances with builds that have more durability, and thus higher engagement and less down time.

It is big, so I’ll have to snip it up. Just remember that I’m responding to trains of thought, and not only the snippit I quote.

Vargamonth.2047:

Lets imagine enemies performing multiple small autoattacks between big spikes which are meant to be fully avoided by active defenses (common to every character).
The viability of zeker wouldn’t be just about a perfect use of active defenses, but absolutely reliant on downing the boss before the constant pressure (unavoidable, just mitigable through protection) kills players.

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

Combat does have a bit more depth to it. In particular, the steady stream of damage is meant to do two things to squishy builds:

#1: Increase risk to offset the higher kill speed of zerkers
#2: Increase disengage time. Disengage time is when the player backs off to heal and buff, attacks with ranged weapons, and also tries to lose aggro from the enemy they are fighting.

By doing this, bulkier builds can stay engaged longer (thus doing more damage) and draw enemy aggro for longer (thus letting others do more damage). Support builds that use heals will be more valuable since they recover the damage others have suffered, allowing them to stay engaged and do more damage. Protection is more important since the long-term mitigation actually mean something, weakness will be better for the same reason, regen will be better since the heal to damage ratio will be much higher, retaliation will worthwhile since enemies will suffer greater damage, confusion will also do more damage, and to help with disengage against melee enemies the soft CC from cripple/chill/immobilize will also be more useful.

The exact amount of damage is ambiguous, but that is no reason to assume that it will automatically be too low to be meaningful.

Vargamonth.2047:

That’s because vitality is basically an anti-burst stat that just offers:

There is a bit more to that. Vitality has another use, that I call “Healing capacitance”. It is a little abstract, so bear with me. In short, the more damage you can take, the more capacity you have to be healed up.

It isn’t uncommon for a player to take a big hit, then heal themselves up to maximum health, and then sit on their heal skills at max health for awhile. The player is locked into a maximum number of hits they can take before they go down, and despite how infrequently they take those hits, this limit will never change. But, with higher maximum health, when the player takes additional hits, they have that additional spare healing on hand, making them last much longer.

It is kind of hard to explain, but it is the main reason I even bother with valkyrie on my thief. In full zerker gear, my thief will die in 2 to 3 hits. In full valkyrie, I can buy an additional 1 or 2 hits. I use the signet of malice, and I spend the majority of my time either at maximum health with the signet doing nothing, and if I’m not at max health I’m kissing pavement (wherein the signet also does nothing). But, with valkyrie gear, I can survive longer and heal more. I end up surviving an additional 5 or 6 hits instead of 1 or 2, since I can heal up so much more damage without dying off. This also makes team heals more useful for me as well.

haviz.1340:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

By contrast, regular enemies in the overworld do so little damage that there is no need to dodge at all. You just plow right through regular enemies and continue on as if nothing happened. But, silvers, champs, and enemies in dungeons do so much damage that there’s no point in passive defenses.

I couldn’t disagree more with this. You completely chose to ignore sustain which is one of the biggest contributor the extreme survivability of tanky builds. Passive defense plus sustainability achieved by regen, protection and other traits (soothing mist, adrenal health, healing symbols, etc) give you so much survivability that you don’t have to use any active defense (including dodges) at all.

Sustain? Do you mean heals? Boons and Heals themselves fall into a strange spot, since while they are not fully active like dodges and blocks, they aren’t fully passive like equipment. Boons are not fully offensive or defensive, either, and often what boons you have are dependent on class specifics more than anything else. Heals are also dependent on class, and don’t discriminate on gear, since the quicker an enemy dies, the less damage you have to heal away.

But alas, the reason why I didn’t factor in boons is because they aren’t equipment dependent. I stuck with an apples to apples comparison with Obal’s build to demonstrate stat balance. When you start changing builds, you’re no longer dealing with just berserker vs. other loadouts.

Heals do not allow you to facetank everything without having to dodge. Some prime examples include the temple events in orr, where the Statue of Dwayna and Priest of Melandru will plow through however much armor and health you have, especially in a zerg. The priest of grenth uses fall damage to bypass your armor, and often will drop you from the roof multiple times, killing you regardless of build. Then there includes the molten facility bosses, who will knock you off of a platform for instant death, and also have their own instant death attacks. Then you have the clockheart, who can obliterate nearly any build with a combination of environmental damage and his big AoE attack…

The list goes on and on. For a personal example, the final boss of HotW P3 has a summoned jellyfish attack that, at base medium armor, does 11k-12k damage per hit. I have just over 12K HP on my zerker thief. I also have valkyrie gear, which would raise my HP to 18K. At 18K HP… I still die in two hits. After taking a fish to the face, I can heal up to full before I take another. So, in that circumstance, there’s no reason for me to use valkyrie there.

Nice thread. Necromancers have one of the worst trait lists, and making builds for Necros is often more about avoiding what sucks instead of taking what is good.

That said, I have my own $32.02 cents to add:

I actually find spiteful retaliation quite useful in PVP and WvW. I have it combined with weakening shroud, so if I am ever ambushed, I pop DS to absorb the burst. The combination of retaliation + weakness against a bunch of rapid attacks from a thief or a warrior is godsend, since even in my condi build retal hits for 340 damage a whack. So, when I get ambushed, I let them wail on me a bit while counterattacking with tainted shackles and life blast, and then follow up with a terror chain afterward.

That said, I’m not against a buff to the trait.

Teutos.8620:

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

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

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

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

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

I wrote this for Anet as well as the players. To talk to Anet, I have to explain everything. Unfortunately, everything is quite a lot. I’ll try to put a tl:dr in, but I get the feeling that it’ll just lead to people not reading the reasoning.

Not this again…

O.K. Let me explain it in math terms:

The base armor of the light armor classes, at level 80 and in exotics is 1836. The base armor for medium classes is 1980. The base armor for heavy classes is 2127. This means, that, comparing light to medium armor, medium armor only takes away 7.2% of damage. Comparing light to heavy, heavy armor only takes away 13.7% of damage.

This makes armor wholly insignificant when compared to HP tiers. Compare low HP (10,805) to medium (15,082), medium takes 28.4% less damage than light (as a function of damage done / total HP). High HP (18,372) takes only 41.2% less damage than low HP.

Heavy armor doesn’t mean squat. The fact is that guardians have the lowest HP tier, and because of this they have less statistical bulk that mesmers, rangers, engineers, and necromancers despite having more armor.

What makes warriors and guardians so useful are their utilities. Of course, the most elite guilds usually run a party with a makeup like ele, mesmer, guardian, thief, warrior. The whole “heavy” meta is only enforced by people who haven’t bothered to do the math, and haven’t bothered to ask someone who can do the math.

Overall it is pretty awesome. It makes for a nice toolbox of utilities you may need on occasion.

#1: Smack-Whack-Thwack: they do alright damage. Not as much as bombs, or traited nades or traited rifle, but it is acceptable. Thwack needs to cleave, and it needs to inflict more vulnerability than it does, and it needs to heal turrets more than just 5% per use.

#2: Box of Nails: This is the weakest move in the set, since its only use is to throw down while trying to run away from enemies in WvW. Otherwise the duration just isn’t long enough to make use of.

#3:Prybar: Pure awesomeness. It hits hard, has strong confusion, hits fast, and is on a low cooldown. In WvW I’ve successfully killed noobs by only using this skill + gear shield + blow torch.

#4: Gear Shield: 3 second block on a 20 second cooldown makes it arguably one of the best duration based blocks in the game.

#5: Magnet: It has a slight delay, but the pull has all sorts of use in the right circumstances. Namely, pulling people off of walls in WvW. Magnet has no projectile, so they don’t see you pulling them from above until it is too late.

It is a funny thing, but I’ve had many of the “greats” from sPVP on my ignore list for over a year because of how they act in-game. Its been so long that I can’t even remember why they are on there. Only that they ticked me off once a long time ago.

That said, the GW2 PVP community isn’t that bad. Certainly isn’t the worst I’ve seen. It is generally in the nature of PVP to attract the most insufferable punks known to man.

It is actually a really interesting phenomena to observe from beginning to end. What drives people to PVP is different for each person, but there are a lot of people who’s drives are destructive to the games themselves. These “people” want to play the game not for competition or fun, but out of a narcissistic desire for superiority, the thirst for tears from their subjects, or to cause general havoc.

It is interesting because those “people” actually require regular people to have fun with the game, since they only play so well with each other. What happens is that these guys drive everyone off, complain that there is no good PVP, then go to another game where they repeat the process.

To be honest, I’ve skipped a few pages, since most of it seems to be people quoting the dev and whining about how they’ll mess it up. Hopefully the devs wont mess up, and if they apply the Socratic Method they shouldn’t screw up too bad.

To understand why it is the zerker set dominates PVE, it is best to look at where zerker doesn’t dominate: sPVP and WvW. Running around in pure zerker in sPVP is more liable to get you killed than it is to accomplish anything: AI will tear you down, stuns will lock you down quickly, and you don’t have enough health to live through a condi bomb. In WvW zerker sees more uses, both as a ganking tool for thieves and warriors, and also in zerg gameplay, but in these contexts zerker obviously isn’t dominating, or even arguably the best choice.

So, apply the Socratic Method: What is the difference between PVP and PVE that makes it so zerker is unquestionably the best set in PVE, and only so-so in PVP? I already covered much of this on the first page of the thread, but again the best way tl;dr this is the following:

Other players are built around killing you. PVE mobs are not. PVE mobs have seemingly random gimmicks that contribute little to nothing toward how dangerous they are.

It isn’t about stat distribution, or stats working well together, or anything of the sort. It is about enemies having a series of tactics that, realistically, make running in full glass cannon gear actually dangerous.

Enemies need counter-cc. They need burst. They need to kite. They need to heal. They need fast but weaker attacks alongside of slow but strong attacks. They need to debuff. Now, this doesn’t have to be done for every enemy in the game.

These changes should prioritize vets and above, of course. Regular mobs just die too quickly, regardless of what you have them do.

Now, there are many whole goals for this change, and none of them are to stop players from running berserker.

#1: Make PVE more interesting. It’ll be a bit harder, but every class already has the tools needed to deal with most of these things.

#2: Encourage more diversity in utilities and traits. There are so many tools at our disposal (weakness, blinks, chill, poison, CC) that serve little to no purpose because they game is built in such a way that they are useless.

#3: Encourage more diversity in stats. The biggest problem with toughness, vitality, compassion, malice, and expertise is that they are objectively useless for a skilled player. By making these passive stats more useful via compelling design, this makes it so, while zerkers will overall perform worse by themselves, when combined they perform overall better.

By doing this, the game becomes more fun for everyone, and everyone wins.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

#5: Stability needs to mean something. This is for players, mostly. Currently stability has limited access, really short durations, and long cooldowns, which makes stability nigh useless. Stability needs longer durations, since the amount of CC in the game is already disproportionate to the amount defense there is against it.

#6: Enemies need to attack more frequently, but do less damage with each individual attack. Currently, you can just loldodge nearly everything in the game because enemies have big slow attacks. If enemies had rapid but weaker attacks, then passive defenses would be more important, as well as regen and protection. Not every enemy has to be reworked, but having diversity in enemy attack patterns would be a boon.

#7: Enemies need to cleave and pierce more often. One of the reasons why stacking is so effective is because when an enemy attacks, it only hits one player in that group, which means players effectively have 5x the durability while in a stack. If enemies cleaved more often, then to stack you would still have to actively block and dodge.

#8: Enemies need to have their attack rate effected by chill.

#9: Enemies need less health, and they need to heal themselves. Nearly any enemy that is veteran rank or higher needs to have less health, but also have a self heal that is on a long cooldown. This will make timed CC more important, as well as make the healing reduction from poison important in PVE.

#10: Enemies need diversified defenses. Currently, they just have high HP and nothing else. There needs to be mobs who have high toughness, mobs who use strong protection and strong regen, making condition users more important for the team, as well as boon stripping.

After all this is put in, then PVE will be interesting. Nearly every class has something they can use to deal with all of these problems, and having players deal with these challenges will make for better players and more entertaining gameplay.

Additional ideas:

#11: Enemy groups have to be built to kill you. A random group with random abilities doesn’t do anything. An enemy group with more dedicated roles (such as a debuffer, a ranged attacker, and a stunner) that follow a more coordinated behavior sets means a world of difference between mindless enemies and a legitimate threat.

Enemies need diversity in their attacks. I’ve already seen good examples of this with Aetherblades, and in Orr. Enemies with endless channels, enemies that focus on debuffing and stunning, enemies that focus on buffing, stuff like that. It should be the standard, not the exception like it is now.

I do like the idea of having regen stack in intensity, though.

I am for improving PVE, but some of your suggestions are the wrong way to do it.

#1: Aggro management. Your suggestion is to take away all the risk of running GC, specially in a pug, and instead input an easily exploitable aggro mechanic in an attempt to force people to arbitrarily build differently. The way aggro is handled now is fine. The only thing that needs to change is to make defensive stats more viable, and things will fall in line.

#2: Diminishing returns on damage. This is a bad idea, since it forces a soft trinity not through engaging or intuitive design, but by arbitrary gates that make it so players objectively hinder other players just by being as good as they can be. Your suggestion is to make everyone suffer from the condition cap, essentially. This is also unnecessary: by making enemies more threatening to pure DPS setups, you immediately make pure DPS setups do less damage. GCs will have to spend more of their time disengaged from the fray and more time kissing pavement, meaning that their damage contributions will decrease overall.

I have my own list of suggestions I made in another thread. It’s a big post, so I’ll have to cut it in half.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The annoying part is that mobs are made tanky just by their HP. It is rare for mobs to have high toughness, so there is no reason to diversify and add a condi user.

It is something Nemesis originally said, and I agree with him: PVE needs to be more like PVP. Now, when Anet hears this, they decided to put the down state on PVE enemies, which was the stupidest thing they could import. There needs to be several things ported over, and these things need to all center around one thing:

Enemies have to be built to kill you.

Its that simple. So many mobs in the game are currently build around the idea of giving them a gimmick they use once or twice without any real meaning. Mobs need to have much better AI, and more things they do with it:

#1: Primarily ranged mobs should try to kite players. Nothing to elaborate, but as players approach them, the ranged mobs should walk backward, or walk sideways away from players. In game, we currently have many pulls, leaps, cripples, chills, immobilize, and stealths, and yet we don’t have much of a reason to use them. Why? Enemies just run up to your face and fight you at point blank. There’s no one to chase and no one to run from.

#2: Mobs that grant boons should not spam boons. One of the biggest issues with fighting the dredge is that, if you remove or corrupt the boon they have, they immediately reapply it to everyone in range. This is true for most mobs that use boons on themselves: there is no reason to ever remove the boon because it just comes right back. Mobs, if having boons, should always have long duration + long cooldown, so removing them matters.

#3: Unshakeable and defiant need to be reworked. First, unshakeable needs to no longer reduce vulnerability and weakness, since champions are really the only place those conditions can be effective. Second, stacks of defiant need to dissolve on their own. Maybe one stack every 2 seconds or so. That way, you can have meaningful CC, even when only one player has CC skills.

#4: Melee mobs need to be more effective at chasing players, because currently players can just kite and shoot mobs without any additional help. Enemies need to do stuff like use swiftness, use more cripples/chills, have leaps, and also use stability. Not all at once, of course, but it would be helpful.

The purely unscientific rule of thumb I’ve used is to sit around 50%. You see, the more you increase precision, the less it matters. Going from 4% crit rate to 14% crit rate is a much bigger deal than going from 80% to 90%, since with the former you’ll crit 350% times as often, and with the latter you’ll crit only 12% more often.

50% is the sweet spot, because at that point you no longer get large percentage gains with additional precision, and you’ll be hitting crits just as often as you won’t be.

There are other ways to build this, though. Traits and equipment can change this around, and some people build for having 50% crit rate with fury if they have high fury uptime, or 50% after traits and sigils have taken effect. The guardian, for instance, has the Right-Handed Strength trait, which can give them an additional 15% crit chance when using a one handed weapon.

I wouldn’t worry too much about going a little above or below it, though.

On my hybrid build, I run around without a speed bonus quite often.

As it happens, my mesmer is a statuesque norn woman I designed specifically to be beautiful, so I don’t mind it so much.

Personally I don’t put all my eggs in one basket, and I go hybrid.

Anyway, not a lot of people have done math on the issue. What most people get is the tooltip, and that is misleading to a large degree. The tooltip assumes 2600 armor, and since the minimum is 1836, this means it can be up to 41.6% higher.

So, with that in mind, I’m going to make an arbitrary comparison between a guardian’s auto attack with his sword, and a Necromancer’s auto attack with their scepter. This is assuming a few things: Full PVT / MVT gear, exotic level gear, 300 in the relevant damage stat, and an appropriate rune/sigil. Off-hand weapon will not be considered. So, in full PVT/MVT we get the following bonuses:

Guardian:

Vitality: 698
Toughness: 698
Power: 1003 from gear + 165 from rune + 300 from stats = 1,468 Power
Runes of the Ogre bonus: 4% damage increase
Sigil of Force bonus: 5% damage increase

Total effective power: (916 + 1468) x 1.04 × 1.05 = 2603 power

Necromancer:
Vitality: 698
Toughness: 748
Malice: 1003 (from gear) + 300 (from stats) + 183 (from runes) + 83 (run undead bonus) = 1569
Total Malice with Sigil of Bursting: 1663

At 1663 condition damage, bleed does about 126 per tick, and poison does about 250 per tick. This means that the necromancer’s scepter auto chain will do 4 (126) x 2 + 4 (250) = 2008 damage over the course of 7 seconds (3 seconds to initialize the damage, 4 for the poison to tick). If you want to get technical, the motions to inflict all the damage is done in 3 seconds, so we’ll just go with that. Note that the auto attack also has a direct damage component (118 + 118 + 168), so the real total damage comes to 2,421 in 3(+4) seconds, factoring in crit chance and crit damage.

At 2603 power, the sword auto attack will do 764 × 2 +1,432 damage, or 2,960 damage in 2.5 seconds. Now, this isn’t assuming any crits, but if we factor in a 4% crit chance along with a 1.53 crit damage, we will get a further 2% increase, or about 3023 damage in 2.5 seconds.

This tooltip damage is also assuming 2600 armor. That is actually more than the necro has ATM (2584), but assuming we were fighting something like a GC mesmer, who would only have 1836 armor, then we would do 41.6% more damage, up to 4281 damage in 2.5 seconds. But, we’ll just go with the tooltip for now.

Ultimately, the guardian is doing more damage, doing it faster, doing it in power, and doing it while in heavily defensive gear. A lot of people constantly point at zerker gear, saying it is the only way to run a damage build. It really isn’t. I’ve been running a PVT guardian build in sPVP for a long time, and it does hit things quite kitten its own. One of my favorite things to do is just go around auto attacking people with the greatsword, since the combination of power + bulk means I’ll win the auto attack war. I’ve even played around with Valkyrie, which I recommend to many people, as it hits really kitten crits, and still has plenty of vitality for defense.

Those “builds” above are merely skeletons. The more modifiers you throw at it, the more things change up. But if you do throw modifiers on, you have to remember to do it to both classes: if you include trait abilities, you do it for both. If you include additional stats, you do it for both. If you include consumables, you do it for both.

We do see a lot of condi spam, and it is not because it is stronger, but because it is easier. Most condi attacks are ranged, which means they are easy to execute. They are also done in an AoE, which means they have an accumulating group damage, which is higher. They also have more passive abilities, which means it requires less skill shots or timed attacks. They have less obvious animations, making them harder to avoid. They have less direct build counters, instead yielding almost exclusively to cleanses. This makes it so that, for pole positioning and kiting, conditions are the best bet.

Power, while being stronger, is harder to use. You’ve got to be in melee range to do the best damage, and with big hits you are often relying on control effects, which have their own counter in stability and stun breakers. When it works, it pays off. Up in t1 we have melee trains, which are groups of warriors, guardians, thieves, and sometimes Rangers and Mesmers who rush in with movement skills in a large wave, and just mow everything down with power based melee attacks. These melee trains are capable of mowing down groups much larger than themselves, often splitting zergs in half once they march in.

This topic. So much this. Now, for barely related story!

A long time ago I was playing with RPG Maker 3, and one of the ideas I came up with was a continent called “Nightless”. The gimmick with Nightless was that, while in the daytime it was a level appropriate area, at night it was filled with high level boss monsters of my own design. This made it so you would never want to head to that continent at night, and unless you were insane you had to sleep off the nights indoors. It was actually kind of hard to pull off in RPG maker 3, since I had to come up with multiple versions of the same continent, and share flags across them…

I’ve always loved the idea. Another time I saw it done was with Rogue Squadron 2 on the gamecube. It used the internal clock so one of the missions changed at night. The daytime mission was really dull, since it involved flying slowly and shooting radar dishes with an Ion cannon. The nigh version was epic, since you had to fly deep in the rivers and valleys in the middle of a thunderstorm, just avoiding the radar dishes to the best of your ability. Getting past that, flying through the empire base with the only thing to navigate by being the spotlights you are trying to avoid is awesome. You actually feel really cunning and stealthy while doing that.

I would love to see something like this in Guild Wars 2. Dynamic events that depend on the weather and the daytime, as well as non-event dynamic elements that just changed around depending on the time and weather.

Though the moon phases idea is pretty cool, I would like to see something a bit more weather based. A lighting system that followed this ranking from brightest to darkest:

Sunny day
Rainy Day
Night
Severe Thunderstorm at Day
Rainy Night
Severe Thunderstorm at Night

Where with the thunderstorm at night, it is so dark that the only time you can really see anything is from the lightning flashes in the sky.

Enemies would be under a similar effect. Wherein anything more than a rainy day should obstruct make things harder to see and decrease the perception distance, enemies would similarly lose aggro distance, to the point where in a nightly thunderstorm enemies can’t see you unless you are right in their face, or have some specially nocturnal thing going on (darn dredge!).

That way, while there would be danger in not being able to see as far or as well, and that different events can happen at night, there would also be advantages in that you can walk right past many day mobs without them being able to see you.

I think Elixir H is pretty decent. With traits it can become quite good, especially in an HGH build.

However… why swiftness? This is the worst option for Elixir H to get as a healing skill. Engineers already have permanent swiftness from Speedy Kits, Infused Precision, and Elixir B + Med kit in boon builds. Engineers can also opt for power shoes for a permanent 25% movement increase. To that end, getting swiftness from Elixir H effectively means getting nothing.

Protection isn’t bad, since it takes away 33% of direct damage for 5 seconds, or 6.5 with 30 in Alchemy. Regen isn’t bad, since it is an additional 1300 heal (1690 with 30 in alchemy). That puts Elixir S at a 7k heal on a 20 second recharge when traited, which is respectable. But swiftness… swiftness is useless!

If anything, Elixir H should work exactly like Toss Elixir H, and give you vigor, regen, or protection. Or, more ideally, it should always give one option, and possibly give one of the other two.

#1: Guild wars 2 is not readily understood by viewers, nor is it easy to watch.

This is a big once, since I think this is what holds nearly all games from being a viable form of entertainment. When you think about sports, usually the camera is focused on the action using elevated or a steady dynamic angle, which lets players be in full and clear view while action takes place. Think boxing, basketball, soccer, foot ball, MMA… notice how you know exactly what is going on at all times? Yeah, that is important to the industry as a whole.

But GW2 has a back-camera perspective, which means that for anyone but the player it is jarring and confusing mess where more than half of the action happens off-screen. Otherwise, the camera is zoomed out to such a degree that all you can see are spell effects from tiny avatars in the distance. You never know who to follow, since in a team of 5 vs. 5 there are 10 different perspectives, with broadcasters viewing from the perspectives of random players, hoping to get the action on screen.

The end result? The critical points of the match is are done by players who are invisible to the audience, and the players that are visible are watching from a perspective that is whipping around, spamming effects trying to find nigh invisible players. There is nothing to engage the audience, so the viewership is limited to a few enthusiasts who are so experienced they know what is going on without seeing it.

#2: Paper/rock/scissors style gameplay. Either you have enough condi cleanses to deal with condi spam, or you do not. Either you have enough breakers to deal with stun warriors, or you don’t. Either you have enough AoE to deal with minions, or you don’t. Either you have enough bulk to survive burst, or you don’t.

So much of the PVP in the game is based around resources you need to invest your skills/traits into to beat other strategies, and these strategies are usually low maintenance and easy to pull off. This is not that interesting to watch or competitive, because the entirety of combat boils down to a flashy and highly rendered game of paper/rock/scissors.

Those are my two big ones.

I’m all for a darker night or a night slider to make things darker. Heck, one of my favorite parts of the game is the black room in the obsidian sanctum.

Guardians and Engineers are actually quite close in their utilities:

Fire fields
Group Healing
Group condi cleanse
LIght fields and retaliation
Projectile Reflection
Projectile destruction
blocks
blinds
burning
vigor stacking
Bad excuses for an AI option
Horrible at boon removal

which is quite amazing when you consider that you can’t look at any one skill in the Guardian’s kitten nal and say “that is obviously a clone of blank that Engineers have” or vice versa. The big difference seems to be that guardians focus more on direct + melee damage, while engineers focus more on range + condi damage. Guardians have more group boon stacking, whereas engineer boons tend to be more selfish. Guardians do more outright damage, where engineers can be a bit harder to kill.

As for blocks/invulnerability goes… hard to say. Engy blocking rate is highly dependent on picking the right skills for a few duration blocks, whereas nearly any guardian build will get multiple blocks with limited use from different sources. Overall, I’d say guardians are better at it, if only because it comes natural to them.

As for the OP’s stuff: I like the trait improvements and the trait merging, but it seems like a lot of the newly added traits are just filler. The addition of vulnerability causing damage is pretty cool for kindred zeal, which is the only real “unique” thing I’ve seen here.

The thing with movement and guardians is that they either have a lto of it, or they don’t. In WvW I’ve seen plenty of perma-swiftness guardians who are nigh impossible to catch. IMO, just giving guardians a 25% movement trait is the wrong way to go, since they already have plenty of movement skills. If anything, I think that they should either improve their teleports, or add new ones. Something like:

Mighty blow: range 600
Powerful Blades: Increases sword and spear damage, and increases sword range by 25%
Judges intervention: recharge reduced to 30 seconds
New trait: Virtue of justice, upon activation, now teleports you to your target (range: 600)
Zealot’s Speed: All symbols now grant swiftness (2 sec). Create a Symbol of Wrath when you are struck while below the health threshold.

Something along those lines. Anything but a Powered Shoes or Warrior’s Sprint clone.

Last I checked, direct damage from a big attack doesn’t roll over into the downed state. Making conditions roll over would just make conditions unbalanced.

That’s the risk you take when running a condi build in PVP. They take awhile to accumulate damage.

And yet, Spirit Weapon Guardians still suck…

My guess with the 5 in Valor is that it is a relic from sPVP, wherein being hit at 50% health meant a player is trying to burst you down. In those circumstances, that Aegis is a lifesaver, so what Nemesis might have done is carry that trait over from PVP to PVE, assuming that it’ll save the life of a zerker guardian who gets in way over their head.

You gotta remember that, at base, the smiting build he posted doesn’t have as many blocks that other guardians do. The presence of Valorous Defense is much more important here than it is on Obal’s balanced 10/30/0/5/25 build, since that build has focus off-hand alongside of shelter, retreat, wall of reflection, and shield of the avenger. With none of those and a full berserker build, it is understandable why he’d take that extra aegis when low.

I’ve kicked around an idea like this, and all I can say is “maybe”. Now, when I speak further, the idea I am speaking further on is this: All players, friendly and enemy, as well as NPCs, have a melee assist-like option forced on so you cannot walk through them in WvW.

All things considered, I think that would improve strategy of WvW.

The blobbing aspect of gameplay is annoying enough, and one of the things that seems to be “OP” about the whole thing is that a zerg of 50 people can, on command, gather together into a single spot to maximize the effectiveness of buffs and minimize the effectiveness of enemy AoE.

But what if that was really hard to do? If players ran into each other, then moving as a gigantic blob of players would be hard, and would require a high amount of coordination to pull off. Stacking together would be hard, because players would lump up on each other and would have to walk around each other. Running out of the stack would be hard, since if the guy in front of you isn’t moving, then you aren’t moving.

I figure that there would be three group sizes, and they would have their mobility aspect magnified by their size, and their coordination:

Small group(1-15): highly mobile, no coordination, low supply and low siege force
Medium group (16-35): average mobility, requires moderate coordination, moderate supply and average siege force
Large group (36+): low mobility, requires large coordination, high amount of supply and siege force.

I think the only detriment is that melee trains will be harder, in two ways. First, the meleers can’t blob as well, so they’ll have to spread out. This will limit the speed at which they kill. Second, enemy players can stand in the way of the melee train, making it so players will instead clash against a barrier of player bodies instead of pushing right through a zerg.

It will be harder, but I imagine it will still be an effective strategy, since to actually prevent enemy meleers from charging forward and killing everyone, you need to have your own group of meleers to stand in front of the ranged damage. Otherwise, the ranged fighters will back up on themselves, get trapped by their own back-line, and then get mowed over when they are simultaneously cleaved by two or 3 meleers in a phalanx.

Note to self: do not run minion master build in orr.

I do like this idea, but it is in the wrong place.

Mesmer clones are pure, mindless DPS that can be wracked up on enemies, and dispelled extremely quickly with a shatter, then re summoned just as fast.

But ranger pets… I can’t remember if I came up with it or if I just read someone else say it, but I am all for ranger pets dodging when their master dodges. That way, ranger pets wouldn’t worse than dead weight at lupi.

I wouldn’t say “tweaked” insomuch as I would say that it was this way from the start.

Be careful what you ask for. Necros got burning in Dhuumfire and have been regretting it ever since.

I’d argue the opposite. Higher condition duration will force players to cleanse earlier, because all of your conditions stack up and linger, making the need to cleanse much more important. With their cleanses gone, your conditions will linger for their full duration, and do much more damage for it.

To compare, using rabid weapons only increases condi damage by 6.4 per bleed, and 32 per burn. But, if you use givers to push yourself toward 100% condi duration, you’ll do things like get an extra tick out of the pistol #1 (25% increase, or 100 damage), or an extra ticks out of incendiary powder (600 damage), or an extra two ticks out of fire bomb (1200+ damage). With our short durations, that extra condi duration can really add up.

Maybe I’m just used to it in college, but I don’t have a problem with a foreign guy talking to me for an hour straight.

Anyway, I can easily tell that Nemesis isn’t as experienced with the guardian. I myself am not that experienced with PVE guardians, but I already have ideas on how to improve on his build and rotation. Particularly by using using smite + shield of wrath at point blank, following through with symbol of wrath + whirling wrath while using VoJ + blinding blade to maintain blinds while engaging multiple enemies at point blank range. Smite is good, but it only hits one target. If multiple enemies are in range (which should be the plan), then prioritizing the hammer or greatsword should be more important. 15 in zeal should make it so burning is nigh permanent on enemies anyway, especially with other teammates providing so much additional burning.

Then again, my current guardian is under level 40, so I only know so much. All I know is that my favorite spec (spirit weapons) doesn’t work that well. There are a couple of things I have to give Nemesis credit in:

#1: This is not a staff in clerics build. That is the build I usually see inexperienced players using in PVE, and Nemesis build + tactics are far preferable. 2438 power, 97% crit damage, and 99% crit chance isn’t that bad. At face value (no additional buffs), it actually outperforms my thief build (5765 EFP vs. 5624 EFP), and matches the damage modifiers. Though the story changes once I get fury going, I still find it hard to criticize that.

#2: At the end of the video, Nemesis goes through customizing the build, and brings up several changes and options that people might go for. Among these he lists

A)Unscathed Contender (and along with it, inspired virtues)
B)Runes of the Scholar
C)Switching out signets for appropriate support skills.
D)Switching torch for focus
E)Reducing precision for power in groups with high group fury and banners.

And it is on this note I watch the rather hilarious phenomenon when people introduce criticisms that Nemesis has already levied against himself.

When Nemesis refers to elitism, I think he is referring to the expectation that guardians should be dedicated to supporting and heals. I do see this on occasion, with players trying to recruit guardians specifically to be heal bot. It is a bit of a “n00b elitism” where players who don’t know enough about the game to know that they don’t know enough about the game insist on certain specs and class roles that, while making sense in a traditional MMO, are nigh rubbish in GW2.

I haven’t checked in that much, but last I checked Givers weapons (P/P) was almost a standard for condi builds. The extra damage from rabid weapons is nill compared to getting an extra tick out of your conditions.

Well OP, the big problem with the whole “Making the game hard” thing is that, the harder you make a game, the more niche you make the game, and therefore the less money you bring in, and the less money you bring in the less the devs can work on the game to make it better.

This is ultimately the biggest drawback to making the game your game. People play GW2 for a variety of reasons, and not all of them do it to be challenged. Aimless and nonspecific rants about the subject don’t help anyone. So, in the end you have to explain something to Anet:

#1: Why it is you and your kin are more important than others who disagree with you. Or,
#2: Why it is your ideas for changing the game will make more money and make it better.

And please don’t pick #1. I’m tired of people picking #1.

It is a strange turn of events that has led me to not playing sPVP. When I first got the game, I spent two months straight doing only sPVP, and I loved it. But, as always… things change.

The first thing that happened, I guess, was that I got bored of sPVP. Playing on the same maps, fighting the same builds, looking at the same red and blue character sprites, playing the same builds… a big problem was that I couldn’t get any better. Not sure if it is low graphics settings, my bad eyes, latency, or my slow reaction time, but that whole “seeing tells and reacting” stuff didn’t happen with me. To this day, in a PVP scenario I can’t see what my opponents are doing. Most of my dodging is just guessing. For more than a month straight.

I do have to agree that the same game mode gets stagnant after awhile. Then, something else happened: I played PVE. Now, after playing PVE and coming back to PVP, I found that all my PVE builds couldn’t be translated over. Whereas in PVE build diversity was so much greater, in PVP builds are extremely limited in stat allocation. Because of this, sPVP felt more constricting.

Then, my favorite build was nerfed: Engineer turret control. It was hit by bugs, and then it was nerfed, and then some of those bugs were fixed, then other aspects were nerfed. When the turrets became super bugged and much more useless, I sort of said to myself “well, I just won’t do sPVP until they fix the bugs”. That was so long ago I forgot when I said it, exactly. This distanced me from sPVP even more.

The changes to Solo Q and Team Q changed the scenery. Personally, I was a fan of the anonymous and consequence-less fighting that was hot join. I still do, actually, since builds and circumstances are unpredictable and laid back. But with so much focus on team bouts and tournaments now, a lot of the better players have left hotjoin, and if I want to PVP with them again I have to socialize more, and I’ll just end up getting yelled at by some kid half my age who doesn’t understand the meaning of “control freak”.

All in all, once I got bored of sPVP and left, there hasn’t been anything to really bring me back. None of the changes to balance have been appealing to me, everyone just runs cookie cutter builds and strategies now (which I can only blame them so much, what with almost no stat diversity), the community appears to be getting more and more hostile, I can’t improve due to biological limitations, and there are no new modes. Hell, the best thing that happened to sPVP in a long time, IMO, was Skyhammer, and that was universally panned for some reason.

The trolls in this thread are so obvious I’m surprised anyone is bothering to feed them.

From what I have seen of MMOs and online games, guild wars adds more functionality as far as juking, placement, dodging, and targeting goes. Many games, if you are in range of a skill, it will go through a hit check regardless of player orientation or speed, instead using auto target or auto-follow to do things. This leads to the game being about build checks, level comparisons, gear checks, clan size… a series of factors that lead to the battle being fully decided before the fight even begins.

Guild wars 2 has less of this. It is not completely gone, as we’ve seen with things like Diamond Skin. But on average, in any given bout between me and another player who has a build advantage over me, there is a series of smart choices I can make to win, and them a series of bad choices they can make to lose.

One of the best examples I have of this was a 1 on 1 battle between me (engineer) and a thief that we had on the Henge at the Forest of Niflhel. I was running a turret control build, and the thief was running some unknown build. Now, normally when I face a thief (especially in hotjoin), they rush to try and burst me down, get caught in the control network of the turrets, and get killed rather quickly. But this guy… didn’t. Over and over again, he would vanish out, attack me a few times, then vanish, then appear quickly on the opposite side of the pillars to snipe me with the short bow, then vanish again. He disappeared so many times and I had no idea how he was doing it. He wasn’t hitting my turrets, either. The battle was long and hard fought, and eventually he managed to down and stomp me. I was so perplexed with how hard to pin down he was that I actually asked him directly how he did that.

And he told me: He saw that I had placed my turrets mostly within the henge, so he decided to use the pillars around the henge to protect himself. Since I had runes of the ogre, a rock dog was summoned and it would chase him. From behind the pillars he would quickly switch to the dagger and use cloak and dagger on the rock dog, causing him to vanish completely without me knowing how. This left me under constant ambush, with the turrets constantly having to reposition and attack him, making it so the turrets couldn’t lock him down. With continued hit and run tactics, he was able to slowly wear me down while also damaging my turrets (who had much longer cooldowns back then), which then left me open for a more direct confrontation that I would lose.

As far as PVE is considered, it is indeed “skill based”, however it falls into the same trap that most PVE games do: everything is ultimately a puzzle The enemies are hard until you figure out a trick to it, and then they become much easier. The tricks themselves have varying degrees of difficulty, but ultimately all enemies in PVE are about figuring out how to beat them more so then they are actually performing the tactic. I can’t really blame GW2 for this in particular, because nearly every game I’ve played falls into this trap.

GW2 does differentiate itself a bit from other MMOs, since it does factor in positioning, motion, and active defense. There are games out there where everything is literally a series of hit checks, defense checks, and damage checks that involve none of the above. At that point they might as well have been turn based.

Probably not. However, turrets were one of the big attractions I had to the class. The idea that I can leave a bunch of automated support drones in hard to reach places to help you fight appeals to me. As well as situated point defense.

Zaviel.1245:

Lenor.8197:

Engies started the game horribly underpowered (Anyone remember pre-boost rifle during first BWE’s? It’ was like a kitten BB gun), horribly bugged and horribly useless. But some played it nonetheless. Then we got nerfed some more. Then we got boosted to usefulness. Since Engi (and this subforum’s community) has been to hell and back, we have literally nothing to complain about.

Unless you like using turrets….

I shed a tear for the fall of our turret brethren. I will forever miss the nade/turret control hybrid that was my build.

I mainly use the thief for dungeons, and I do this because the thief has such strong defensive utility that I can get through the dungeon almost regardless of how incompetent my teammates are..

To survive silvers and vets, there is one thing you can use that makes them a piece of cake: blinds. Using black powder with the pistol off-hand can render a group of enemies nearly useless, letting you face tank 5 mobs with little effort. Smoke screen can set up a wall that lets you block projectiles and blind whomever stands in it, which makes for a good support barrier. There are also spot blinds like Blinding Powder, Signet of Shadows, and Infiltraitor’s arrow. Another not often used option is the Cloaked in Shadow trait with the dagger off-hand, which lets you pulse blind every 3 seconds when you use Cloak and Dagger.

I like to combine Sword + Pistol myself. The sword auto attack inflicts weakness, and the pistol blinds enemies, so with the two combined the few attacks that do get through have a 50% chance of being a fumble. With the signet of malice, I regen a surprising amount of health, and if things get dire I’ll use Dagger storm in a smoke field to blind and heal for massive amounts of health.

Theives also get weakness and stuns. The sword auto is good, but there is also the cluster bomb + choking gas combo, and this works with lotus poison to cause even more weakness. Against enemies that need to be interrupted, the pistol provides plenty of defiant stripping with head shot and pistol whip, and Sword/Dagger has tactical strike to fall back on. We can spam blast finishers with cluster bomb, and this can allow us long duration stealth and weakness.

Against champions, your main weapon is skill evades. Flanking Strike, Death Blossom, Disabling Strike, Roll for initiative, Withdraw, Signet of Agility, and our few sources of vigor allow us to continually dodge champion attacks. The weapon evades work the best out of the bunch. Once you have learned the bosses patterns and tells, you can time and dodge nearly all of their attacks, letting you stay in melee range for maximum damage.

My preferred weapon choice for bosses is the sword/dagger combo. Now, D/D does more single target damage, but Flanking strike has a longer immunity duration, and the ability to steal boons is way too useful for me to give up for most fights.

Anyway, my build is pretty simple:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fYAQNAsaVlcmSP3eS4E+5Ey2jKsn4J/DklODaCnA-jAyAYrASQApCBK5VEN2ibR0YVLYqSioavRR0qlCQPhVA-e

Although two things to note: First, once I have bloodlust stacks, I switch one pistol to another with a sigil of strength. Second, I have two daggers I switch to that also have force/strength on them.

Although I have considered dropping executioner for Bountiful Theft. That AoE vigor + AoE boon transfer is delicious.

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

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

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

Engi main here. I played with Ele for awhile after being disappointed initially with the necro during launch, but then I went back to the necro because it was lower maintenance. I still question that decision to this day…

That said, I do wish for good things for the Elementalist, my fellow carpal tunnel brethren. Even when the elementalist was on top, it seemed like the ele had to fight an uphill battle just to get there. Now that the ele is doing worse than ever… I feel bad about it. Normally when mesmers or thieves lose position in the game, I’m like “yeah, whatever”. But for some reason the ele still stays in my eye.

The grass is greener here, but only because it’s secretly crab grass in disguise. Engineers get hit with at least one nerf per patch, and over time that has added up: The change in static shield hurt, the removal of 100 nades hurt and changes to kit refinement hurt, the emphasis on boon removal and stealing hurts, turrets have been uttrly destroyed (which was my favorite spec!), the nerf to grenade power hurt, the vigor nerf hurt, the removal of instantaneous cast and loss of stun breaker on Elixir R killed nearly every build everyone was using at the time, the haste change was a bit painful, the nerf to Elixir S turned one of our most useful skills and traits into a death trap… it has left us with a bit of a hard place in sPVP. Our viable stun breakers were killed, my favorite turret spec was glitched then nerfed into oblivion, our power keeps being leeched from our skills, and our appearance is terrible due to those kitten hobo-sacks. In the condition meta we didn’t have super effective condition cleanse (often forcing us into Automated Response, but hey: diamond skin), and in the stun/cc meta our stun breakers suck, and in WvW retaliation eats us for breakfast. And don’t get me started on our down state…

I suppose the reason why we’re still around is because, along with the great nerfs of 2013, so many of our other utilities and traits have been buffed that the engineer has achieved something that no other class has: unpredictability. The wide diversity in our utilities and traits has made it so, while we don’t have strong focused builds, Engis have so much diversity in builds that you never know what an engi will do until they do it.

SoR here. I go solo sometimes, but I rarely do it for long, since I tend to get attacked by groups of 5 to 15 players from BG and JQ.

Funny how that works… the fact is that a good small team is stronger than the combined of individual players. One of the funnest things I can do in WvW is to run around with a small havoc group, since with good coordination we can take out enemy squads that are more than twice our size.

The average MMO player is fairly basic at their heart. They want to do 3 things in WvW: Kill people, avoid being killed, and accomplish objectives. To do those things effectively, they’ll gather together in groups, since they have both power and safety in numbers. There will always be exceptions, such as solo thief gankers, guild vs. guild battles, but in general the strength in numbers is what causes players to gather up into groups. Whether it be a smaller team, or a gigantic, laggy zergfest.

Personally I prefer the small team. The battles between small teams are great, since there is enough people to make the fights look cool and feel important, but not so much that skills and actions take a backseat to spamming auto attack.

IMO the elementalist has a higher skill floor than the Engi. I’ve played both, and I found the engineer easier.

A simple way to put it would be this: whenever another class goes to make an action, they usually have a single button press to accomplish that goal. This “one action per click” allows players to chain their actions together to make combinations. Such an example is using Cloak and Dagger into Steal, then backstab. This requires 3 button presses, and each press performs a single action in a chain.

With the engineer… this is not so. Engineer kits require at least two presses per action: 1 to equip the kit, and then one to use the kit. A large number of engineer skills are also ground targeted, so first the engineer has to scroll over the target area, then activate the skill. The engineer also has more function buttons to use, requiring more keybinds and wider strides of the hand to use.

These extra actions add up. For example, to, say, use healing turret at the effectiveness of every other heal in the game, you have to perform 3 actions: Place healing turret, overcharge healing turret, detonate healing turret. Just to heal. If you run a bunker spec, you have to do two more actions, which are switch to elixir gun, and fire acid bomb upon overcharging the healing turret. That is 5 button presses for something that a Guardian or a Ranger gets in one press. Combine this with a condi bomb (fire kit into fire bomb + smoke bomb then into tool kit for magnet + pry bar + weapon swap for poison dart), and it takes 8 button presses to do something that necromancers could do in one or two.

While the engineer has a lot of skills, many of them are balanced around the fact that we have access to all our skills all the time. So, our skills get reduced potency under the assumption that we will be using them to make combos and to spam them. So, to be effective, you have to be chaining explosions into fields, all while flipping around with evasive skills and vigor. This is quite hard, but the end result is a player who is both potent and unpredictable.

Currently, the greatest strength of the engi comes from our ability to fight on-point. If we aren’t bunkering, our AoEs can deal good damage. The weakness in this, however, is that when caught off point, it is really hard to fight someone. The bomb kit is really hard to use when your opponent doesn’t have to stand next to you.