Guild Wars 2

Finally finished doing that. No improvement.

I’m surprised they pushed it back to 20. This was obviously an overreaction by Anet that will never get reversed, ruining the set.

10 second cooldown sounds more reasonable, since there are classes that heal every 12-15 seconds.

Engineers aren’t hated as much as they are out of focus and befuddled. Anet isn’t sure what they want the engineer to do, so every time something emerges they attack with the nerf mallet, not sure what the end result will be.

I think they should make it so defiant degrades every 2 seconds or so, and additional stacks of defiant can be removed by more CC.

Originally I thought that the server maintenance would fix this issue, but it has not.

When I started playing the game, everything ran smoothly at first. However, now when I play the game I get incredible lag spikes that last 5 to 6 seconds in length. I get these frequently, once every few minutes, and I also get them regardless of the graphics settings I use.

System specs:
Windows 7 64 bit
AMD Radeon 6750M
30 MB/sec ethernet internet connection.
Minimal Graphics Settings
4 Gigs RAM
Intel Core 2.2 GHz processor

I tried to use the driver update program, but it just gave me a “hardware incompatibility” popup.

I post this here because I am assuming there is some setting that is causing 5 second long lag spikes every minute.

I do not associate unquestioning acceptance with a show of respect. If I ask about something and all I get are defensive responses that dance around unrelated issues, then this just makes me hate them.

EDIT: confound it, I can’t write correctly to save my life.

I wonder if this would get more traffic if posted in the bugs forum.

As a whole, necromancers needed an overhaul, and the necros got it on June 26th. Reduced recharges on skills that took way too long, increased potency on skills that didn’t do enough anyway, more useful traits, various bug fixes, before casts an aftercasts were shortened enough that necromancers could get a shot off, all is good.

I have to continually express my doubt in the “overpowered” nature of necromancers. I’ve been watching a lot of videos of tournaments because I’m in too much pain to play well at the moment, and watching the videos before the June 26th patch is on par with watching videos after it. A particularly bad example was when in MiM vs. TCG, TCG ran 3 power elementalists and just stomped MiM until MiM changed their composition in the second round, which they still lost.

The comps change basically amounted to running 2 or 3 condition specs instead of 1 or 2. I still see plenty of power guardians, thieves, mesmers, and elementalists, so the art of the power build isn’t truly dead like so many people claim. The hard part is that, while watching these videos, I can’t always see the buils of the players, and don’t see their condition cleansing. I see most classes with a condition cleanse, or maybe a few spots of condition cleanses that I assume come from some rune set, and some specs not running condition cleanses at all.

I think the biggest culprit is that the previous meta crumbled from 3 different directions in a rather short time, and so everyone is looking to blame a class over it:

#1: Ample boon hate was introduced. I still see a lot of boon hate on tourney builds.
#2: The game had become largely evasion based.
#3: Rangers and Necromancers received many buffs. Along those lines include weakness and blind.

And it is these 3 things all come together to form a nasty little storm. With boon hate, protection was neutralized and it made bunkers a whole lot easier to take down. This gave the rise of evasion thieves who would steal these boons, and rangers who would use their weapon evades to avoid all damage. Now that boons were a liability, weakness was buffed, and along that rangers + necromancers were buffed heavily. The AoE nature of conditions is a perfect counter to the evasion based meta, and conditions were also effective against the boon heavy meta.

This lead to a surge of rangers and necromancers, with engineers still bothering to tag along. It is through these classes that, by sheer numbers, conditions were allowed to dominate the meta. This change was incredibly fast, with players still lingering in the boon meta state. Because of this, they suggest things like protection decreasing conditions, not realizing that most classes can corrupt, steal, or strip protection easily now.

Now, is this meta necessarily worse than being instantly burst down by two elementalists at once? Is it worse than being cleave down instantly by mesmer shatters and pulls into guardians? I’m not so sure. I still see a lot of the focusing and bursting going on, except now it is a bit slower since conditions don’t kill immediately.

But, of course, since the game will ultimately service the player, Anet is going to give the players exactly what they want, and it’ll end up hurting more than helping:

A: Passive resistance to conditions. Either this won’t solve the problem because people will just take this and still die to conditions, or it’ll be too powerful and all conditions become useless. It’ll be like in WvW where if you don’t have 100% duration, opponents just shrug off your condis because they have melandru runes and lemongrass soup. Except worse, since now they have more passive resistance.
B: Vitality resisting conditions. Now vitality becomes the end-all defensive stat (evasive meta, remember?) because all power attacks will just end up missing or blocked.
C: A lot more condition cleanses. This can ends up balancing against the few good condi classes, while leaving condi eles, warriors, mesmers, and thieves to the dust because they didn’t have the covering that other players had.

Basically, it would be like nerfing all direct damage at launch because Warriors and Thieves could 100blades and pistol whip people to death quickly.

I’m not sure if they fixed the issue that was letting engineers get 25 permanent stacks of AoE torment, regardless of build, from the new rune sets.

Anet’s gotta learn, the internal cooldowns exist for a reason.

Fast and can finish fights quick… sounds like the thief is your man.

The camera is what kills me in the fight. I have to watch the ground for nigh invisible AoEs, watch the corners and my rear for encroaching shadows, watch Liadri as she attacks, and watch for orbs that will pull me into one of the two above instant death mechanics.

But at least I get a great view of the back of my toon’s head when I enter the arena. It’s not like that is fake difficulty or anything.

N.A.S.A. forgot toilets.

I have to keep reminding myself of this fact whenever I see a massive oversight in the game design. Now, the queen’s gauntlet is fun and all, definitely better than the grindfest below. But, therein lies a problem that I am assuming Anet didn’t quite process when designing the event:

You have a gigantic zerg of players fighting a gigantic zerg of monsters, and in this exact same zone you have an event that features reflex based gameplay and one shot kill mechanics on bosses.

The problem being that, in this zone, there are immense lag spikes very frequently. These lag spikes cause people to die in the gauntlet whenever one happens next to an instant death mechanic.

I’ve done that bug, too. The overcharge breaks the net turret frequently, and it doesn’t increase the firing speed so you have an 8 second window where the overcharge does nothing.

You read that in Professor Farnsworth’s voice, didn’t you?

Anyway, I decided to do a few tests, and it turns out that terror does damage through defiant stacks.

However, it does not do damage against enemies that are completely immune to stun, such as giants.

EDIT: clarified the topic so people know what it is about before they go in.

I think what annoys me the most is that these should’ve been fixed a long time ago. My build in sPVP is crippled due to the net turret bugs.

The big issue I have with this suggestion is that weakness only reduces direct damage by a net of 25%. 50% chance at 50% damage comes to a 25% reduction.

Not knowing that those attacks were reflectable is understandable. I didn’t even know that.

However… due to how incredibly useful I’ve found reflects to be in PVE and PVP (engineer and mesmer both have plenty of them), Wall of Reflection has earned a permanent spot on my utility bar until I memorize exactly where it is needed and where it isn’t. Why anyone would refuse to use Wall of Reflect in a spot where it is useful is beyond me.

“Hey, you know there’s this skill that protects everyone while putting own a light field and doing a crap-ton of damage to enemies?”
“I don’t want to use that skill.”
“…why not?”

In PVP: condi shatter build.

In PVE: still leveling, but I will probably alternate between condi shatter build and phantasms.

EDIT: kitten kitten , would help if I answered the second question.

In PVP: The reason why I use a condi shatter build is because I’ve found it to be fun to use and quite entertaining. The biggest strength that the condi mesmer had over other condi builds was that mesmers were the first class to apply all of their conditions rapidly, but with short durations. This let the mesmers power through condition cleanses, and as soon as I would see the cleanses I would shatter a burst of confusion on my opponents. The combination of glamour reflects + ethereal fields alongside of the shatters and illusionary persona would inflict anywhere from 10 to 15 stacks of confusion on my opponents, half of that being in an AoE. All of that confusion hit hard. Very hard.

Condi mesmers are also the only condition build that I’m actually satisfied running rabid with, and this makes the condi mesmer quite tanky. The other condi builds I run (thief, engineer, necromancer) benefit so much from the extra power of carrion that I could never drop it, but with the condi mesmer it is all about the procs.

In PVE: Confusion isn’t as useful in PVE, unfortunately, so I’ll be devoted mostly to staff using there. Burning, Bleeding, and spots of torment are decent enough anyway. But I have become a fan of the phantasm build for two reasons:

#1: I like low maintenance skills like phantasms. I have a guardian spirit weapon build, an engineer turret build, and a minion master necromancer, so phantasm mesmers are right up my alley.

#2: One of the biggest problems I had while making a mesmer was figuring out how to do direct damage. Other than the sword auto attack and blurred frenzy, everything felt underwhelming. Phantasms accomplish the damage I’ve always wanted mesmers to have.

WvW does have a lot more build variety, and the different objectives lead to a different style of combat altogether. But the big thing is, the challenge was issued in WvW, so it has to be done in WvW.

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

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

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

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

In essence, PVE should be more like PVP.

^Story of my life right there. Right now, I’m not sure what it is that is causing anet to drag their feet. I’ve been waiting for numerous bugs to b fixed for over a month now.

Jesiah.2457:

Burning at high malice is only about as effective as 6 bleeds

Actually burning is equivalent to 12.42 stacks of bleeding. Making it an extremely easy application that does a lot of damage with nothing near the same effort required to get the damage out of bleeding.

One may argue that “Oh, bleeding can do more damage” yeah that’s true, but considering how much condi cleansing goes on and how some classes passively remove condis on top of their active removal, pushing beyond 12 stacks from a single source is quite a rarity, and thus makes burning insanely strong by comparison to bleeding just due to effort involved to get damage out of it.

If Thief had access to burning, I’d probably roll a condi build forever and ever. Burning IS that kitten strong.

Burning damage = 328 + 0.25 Malice
Bleed damage = 42.5 + 0.05 Malice.

At 0 malice, burning = 328/42 = 7.8 stacks of bleeding
At 1312 malice, burning = 656/108 = 6.07 stacks of bleeding
At 1968 malice, burning = 820 /141 = 5.8 stacks of bleeding

Never, under any circumstances, is burning ever equivalent to 12.42 stacks of bleeding in damage.

EDIT: Might as well include this, too. A big caveat of using burning is that you still need a lot of malice to make it strong. Using burning with no condition damage at all is a mild nuisance to enemies.

It also is extremely easy to push past 6 bleeds. Heck, most classes get 4 or 5 in a single skill.

Guess we’ll start this again.

Necromancer
1)You stated necromancers can inflict every condition at 1200 range. You just proved they can’t. Epidemic also has a much longer cast time and aftercast than staff skills
2)I use stun break, then move out of position for spectral wall. Now the necro can’t chain fear anymore, and since every necro trying to chain fear is going to go for broke, you dodge and then their reaper’s mark or doom misses. This is both the defense I use against fear chains, as well as the tactic I see used against my own fear chains.

1)Unless they’re in your face, Enfeebling blood has an extremely delayed cast time, making it hard to hit without great prediction skills.
2)DS doesn’t counter burst, it absorbs burst. DS has a finite HP pool, which is quite easy to burst past. Hence, the reason why it is necromancers are focused down first in group combat.
3)Assuming some player doesn’t just neutralize the point, or disengage and go somewhere else while you are helpless to stop him, or just DPS right through plague form because even with that gigantic bag of HP a necro can sill be killed.

Engineer
1)A whole lot more than class cannon can hit for 6K. An extremely common practice in the game is to use Valkyrie Equipment, which gives enough power and crit damage to hit as hard as a GC. Then, players just use traits to build up precision and fury, so then they do a lot of damage while not being a glass cannon. True glass cannons, however, can hit for a whole lot more than 6K.
2)Burning being OP was never a fact in the first place. What is a fact is that it only stacks in duration, and the class who uses burning has the worst access to bleeds out of the popular condition classes. Every class in the game except necromancer and thief can have permanent burning on a target. Therefore, it isn’t OP.
3)Half of poison dart volley misses.
4)Again: engineers don’t get good access to confusion. The only reliable confusion is from static shot, since concussion bomb and pry bar miss too easily.
5)Yes, the bomb kit is hard to use. The reason being that opponents don’t have Parkinsons Disease, and they just get out of the way of bombs in the long delay before they fire off. To use the bomb kit well, you have to predict your opponents movements and force them into colliding with bombs, all the while not being trained down due to being in the fray. Ergo, bombs are a lot harder to use than, say, something like shatters or marks.

1)You don’t get protection if you don’t get stunned.
2)Considering that every other revive is instantaneous, yeah 20% is slow. It can be out DPSed, and knocked out of.
3)Guardian: Vigorous protection gives permanent Vigor by itself.
Mesmer: Critical Infusion gives permanent Vigor by itself.
Elementalist: Renewing Stamina gives permanent Vigor by itself.
Ranger: Primal Reflexes gives permanent Vigor by itself.
Warrior: gets 50% vigor from warhorn. Vigorous focus gets 8 seconds per every stance used.
Thief: Vigorous Recovery gives up to 50% vigor uptime by itself, and gives vigor right when you need it. Bountiful Theft does similar.

Like I said: nearly every class has permanent vigor. The thief and the warrior require more than just a single skill or trait, and the only class with no reliable access to vigor at all is the Necromancer.

Ranger
1) No, I just don’t sit still.
2)SB only inflicts bleeding while flanking. Otherwise, to get 10 stacks of bleeding, they have to use their weapon skills and utilities and pet skill all at once.
2)Please write more coherently. I don’t understand what you are trying to say here.
3)The HP update changes nothing. The ironic thing here is that everyone complains about AoEs and passive damage, then complains about a class with a bunch of summons that are weak to AoEs and passive damage.

1)The HP change means nothing, again. Dodge protection isn’t reliable protection, since they get only 1.25 seconds of protection after the end of the roll. That is not permanent protection, either.
2)Other players having the ability to rez other players changes nothing in class balance and is not overpowered.
3)You can weapon dodge in root, however the dodge itself is rooting. Because of this, rangers are one of the few classes I can reliably hit with the bomb kit easily.
4)Again, I have no idea what you are saying here.

The big problem is, these condition builds you are complaining about aren’t bunkers. They’re offensive condition builds. You can’t bunker with a terrormancer, or an HGH grenadier.

I never really had an issue with necromancers “contributing” to the team as a whole.

Whenever I run a condition build, I give the whole team an AoE condition transfer as well as regen, and also I spread disabling + damaging conditions to everything in the room. I also use spectral wall to give everyone protection, and also I use it to do a lot of terror damage to groups of enemies trying to run past it. With chill, cripple, blind, weakness, and vulnerability being duplicated en masse every 15 seconds on a condition necro, they are definitely worth bringing to the table.

I do plenty on the power necro as well. On power necro I typically run 3 wells with the ritual of protection trait, so I have 3 skills that give AoE protection. One well causes vulnerability, which also stacks with focus vulnerability and life blast vulnerability to be quite high when fighting enemies. Another well strips boons in an AoE while doing damage, which is really useful against something like the dredge, who stack protection on themselves. The last well is a stun breaker that converts conditions on teammates, which is actually better than cleansing.

No matter what necro I’m running, I always have access to Tainted Shackles, Plague Form, and Flesh Golem. The golem is an excellent cone stun that does damage while stripping a lot of defiant stacks from an enemy. Plague form is great for tanking several hits while disabling enemies. Tainted Shackles is a large AoE immobilize, which an always help out a group, and due to the relative rarity of torment it doesn’t interfere with condition builds.

For specific fights, necros also have a toolbox of things they can use. If they need to pull, Spectral Grasp does this while causing chill. If they need to revive, Signet of Undeath does this quite nicely. For enemies with devastating boons, well of corruption and corrupt boon are always a plus. Against enemies that attack rapidly and don’t lump all of their power into single attacks, necromancers can be quite durable. Protection stacking and 2 health bars gives quite the statistical clout.

Because it is super pretendy fun time and that map is the most entertaining map Anet has?

I’m not a fan of No Items, Fox Only, Final Destination.

sid.9870:

And no, I didnt read your full post,

I stopped there. You are arguing with someone whom you are not paying attention to. Because of this, you yourself are a greater argument against yourself than anything I could ever say. You just lost without me having to lift a finger. Bravo!

At that point in fractals, enemy damage is so high that you will be bowled over no matter what you wear. Whenever you have content where numbers and damage scale upward with every single level, eventually the numbers and damage will overpower regular defenses.

If you want my advice, use an off-hand focus. Swirling winds is epic at the volcano fractal, providing a safe zone for everyone to head to.

I suppose if you read my post as a random amalgam of information in a manner other than how I wrote it and how that info pertains to other things I wrote, then yeah poison is alright because melee classes can hit for 6K, or whatever.

Anyway, to get back to the point: There is a very large difference between what a class can do, what they actually accomplish. The strengths that the OP listed, when not simply incorrect, are the kinds of things you can only pull off against noobs and the training golems. I main the engineer and necro myself, and I easily lose half of my fights because, contrary to popular belief, these classes aren’t some overpowered faceroll. Even when running condition builds, half of the opponents I end up battling have enough cleansing to wash away any damage I’d try to inflict. It is incredibly rare for me to pull off a full length fear chain (rare being I’ve only managed it once), I can’t maintain permanent poison against players because half the poison skills miss or can’t be fired off, burning takes forever to kill other players because it only stacks in duration. As a necro I get focus fired because there’s no way to defend myself. As an engineer I have to sacrifice quite a bit to accomplish a spotty vigor uptime, and half the time I just get controlled due to a lack of useful stun breakers.

On paper, an engineer/necro can do everything and anything at once while being impossible to beat. But that is only on paper. You build for everything with these classes, and you’ll end up accomplishing nothing. And BTW, mesmers have a whole lot more access to confusion than engineers do. This is especially true, since mesmers don’t have to sacrifice utilities to inflict confusion.

Nearly everything the OP has said is wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think the biggest problem is more about how players play than how they build. The slow prevalence of berserker builds didn’t come from superior skill or mathematical proofs, but out of better tactics. People discovered that by gathering together they could share boons, share the aggro equally amongst each other, all the while maintaining the highest offense possible. They discovered that, by actively engaging bosses at close range, when someone needs to pull off to heal, the boss doesn’t chase them anymore. Doing this allowed players to build more and more for offense.

The hardest time I ever had in my HotW marathon was on a power necro. Knight armor, zerker everything else; a hybrid in essence. I played through the dungeon as I always did, and I swear I downed every 5 seconds. It was odd, because I’d done this path on a power necro build a half dozen times before and I never had this problem. The issue was, as I eventually learned, that all of my teammates did nothing but stand very far back and auto attack at range. They didn’t use utilities or multiple weapon skills or even weapon swap. Just stand back, and auto attack. Because of this, I would end up drawing all of the aggro of enemies, and also maintain permanent aggro on the boss because even when I turned tail and ran, my teammates weren’t doing enough damage to draw aggro away, so the boss would chase me down and kill me. I couldn’t “not” take aggro, because until I ran forward they would just hang back doing nothing until their complaints of how “this sucked” eventually became worse than the sting of having to die.

It isn’t the first time I’ve seen it happened. Once I refused to run forward, and the team disbanded on the spot. It didn’t matter what build they had, since they couldn’t play at all. Their tactics involve letting competent players die, and then dying themselves because even with defensive stats they couldn’t defend themselves.

I think this might be why it is so many people run PVT gear. If you hang back and let people fight for you, dying one by one, then it seems like PVT gear wouldn’t be enough. The fact is, a player has to pull their weight no matter what gear they wear, because nothing can compensate for bad gear

I get the feeling most of this thread devolved into arguing with a particular troll, so now I’ll do the adult thing and analyze everything in a manner that shows how useful everything is.

I do feel partly responsible for this, since many months ago I made a thread detailing the inefficiency of investing in stats other than offense. This is largely because offense contributes to group survivability in a way that defense doesn’t: dead enemies do no damage, so if you kill an enemy twice as fast, you’ll take half the damage. Though you could argue that defense lets you take more hits and thus use more dangerous tactics to do more damage, in the end this is inferior to simply sustaining an offense, since it means you eat up your defensive advantage to accomplish a burst that many players were outputting as their standard offense to begin with. Often times, it is better to just revive the downed players who are zerkers, because if they’re outputting twice the damage, then the only time they lose out is if they are downed more time total than they are up.

So my motto for PVE has always been to build for as much offense as you could. The key phrase here being “as you could”. The fact is, not everyone is as good as everyone else, not everyone has the same tools available to them on the class they play, and not everyone necessarily enjoys a high stakes all-or-nothing brawl. There are some parts of the game that are really hard to do with a pure offensive build, due to how some enemies don’t load all of their damage into sparse attacks.

For example, I’ve been running HotW explorable mode with my Zerker thief for awhile. Path 1’s final boss has sparsely placed attacks that do high damage, and what I like to do is use Sword/Dagger #3 to avoid all of his attacks and steal his boons over and over again. This, however, is crazy, since he can kill me in 2 hits even with the permanent protection boon. Should the server lag, should I lag, or if the skill is gated behind the auto attack’s long aftercast, I would go down. This makes meleeing the boss incredibly risky, to the point that I’ve never seen anyone else do this. Ever. Frankly, I don’t expect anyone to try this, either. In contrast, path 3 has that big werewolf smack in the middle of the dungeon, and little Jacob there makes mincemeat out of my thief. He has a bunch of fast attacks that do medium to light damage against normal builds, but kills my zerker thief in 3 to 4 hits or so, which comes really fast. On my necromancer, who has a lot of bulk, that stupid werewolf isn’t a problem, so I can stay in the fray. But on my thief, I have to snipe with the shortbow or risk being torn to shreds.

Anyway, there are many advantages to being a durable build that aren’t just personal survivability. What a lot of players will do create a faux-trinity system, and load up their guardian with PVT gear, a bunch of defensive abilities, and then take point with every dungeon encounter. While that guardian is absorbing all of the enemy hits, as well as blinding enemies and giving AoE protection, the other DPSers can run in from behind and attack with full abandon. Every attack that lands against a player with high toughness does less damage than against a zerker, and players with high vitality can take more hits as a whole, so a single durability stacked player can diminish the offense of an entire enemy group. In areas where there is a lot of ambient damage around (coughgrawlfractal), zerker builds die too easily to maintain an offense, and become a liability to the group as a whole. Healing power and healing builds themselves are a direct boon to the survivability of other players. The higher the HP of the group, the less the group has to withdraw from the fray, and the more damage they can do.

You can see the that there is a diminished return for players with high durability. Having 1 player with high durability or high healing is enough to substantially improve the survivability. Having 5 of them… not so much. But outside of extremes we have builds that mix gear together. A bit of PVT, a bit of zerker, and then you can give yourself just enough survivability to take the hit, but still have a substantial amount damage. This is the preferred way to build, since hybridized builds don’t rely on other teammates to survive, and don’t become redundant when paired with each other. However, building like this requires more thought than just going for a full set, and that is a lot of players to process, apparently.

Maybe extra character alts aren’t for everyone? I mean, I don’t buy all of the town clothing options from the store, doesn’t mean someone else isn’t.

I suppose what annoys me about this change is that I don’t always get a group to go through all 3 paths. When I was getting tokens from HotW, getting anything other than path 1 was incredibly hard. So, I would just alt between toons in order to get tokens.

My concern is that Anets effort to force players into different paths will just end up with players not running the dungeons nearly as much.

I just hope thy finally fix the servers.

As for me, I’m probably going to watch Game Grumps. Got a sonic 06 marathon I’ve been meaning to get to.

condition specced builds only require 1 single stat to be effective.

I stopped reading there. Condition builds don’t require 1 stat to be effective. They require nearly all stats to be effective, sans power and crit damage. For their offense you have the standard 3:

Malice: This is how much damage conditions do.
Expertise: This is the duration of conditions. This determines, among other things, the is stacking amount of stackable conditions, and the frequency of uptime for non-stacking conditions. A 50% increase in conditiona duration is effectively a 50% increase in DPS and damage.
Precision: This determines the frequency of procs. Without precision, the hated traits of Dhuumfire or Incendiary Powder wouldn’t do anything at all.

And then we have the defensive stats of Vitality, Toughness, and healing power. The difference here being that durability is necessary for condition builds because they don’t do all of their damage up front. They have to be durable enough to outlast the enemy. Power builds don’t; they do all their damage immediately, and because of this they have the option to burst down opponents with pure DPS instead of having to build defensively.

I can’t take the suggestions of anyone who says otherwise seriously.

I’ve never been a fan of the trinity. Then again, I’ve never played a game with the trinity.

Th closest thing I played was City of Heroes, which had a 4-base syste3m of melee, range, support, and control. In that game, having enough of one usually meant that you could blow past nearly any challenge that came by. High enough damage and you could obliterate enemies before they were a threat. High enough durability and they could pound on you all day. High enough support and you make everyone else have incredibly high damage or incredibly high durability or heal away their damage. Have enough control, and you can shut down masses of enemies without taking a single hit.

Best part is, you could build for multiple things at once. My strongest character in CoH was a control/support toon. I figured out how to give them high defense and damage, and then suddenly he’s soloing some of the toughest bosses in the game. The hardest content in the game wasn’t about how much damage you had, but how much support you had. Teams that were just pure tank and DPS did neither effectively.

The whole trinity design just seems limiting and lazy. It is like they made a real time RPG, but couldn’t figure out how to deal with classes that have different focuses and roles in a multiplayer environment, so they decided to give enemies an aggro system and then give players the ability to abuse the aggro system in the worst way possible. When you are fighting the great tenebrous lord of evil darkness, he’s not going to be stupid enough to chase after the most armored, durable, and least threatening member of your party like a cat after a laser pointer. No, he’s either going to go after the player who is the most threatening, or he is going to go after the healer or support linchpin that holds your team together. But instead a gigantic monster spends all its time fighting what is essentially a gigantic shield, while other players who might as well not be wearing “armor” at all sneak behind him and poke him with a 5000 lbs sword.

Worst part is, by making some classes so much more durable than others, they now have to balance content around the fact that you’ll have a gigantic shield and a heal bot behind him, and thus they limit diversity and gameplay in this manner. As more content is added, they keep making the enemies stronger, and the tanks tankier. It isn’t tactical, it is stupid. It might as well be a game of spreadsheets at that point.

Something I’d like to see a lot more of is better AI and class design that isn’t just a scale between how durable you are and how much damage you do. The guys who draw aggro shouldn’t do it because they have some arbitrary provocation mechanic built into their class, but because not fighting them first would be suicide. I think in one of the many iterations of D&D, there was a positioning mechanic where if you ran by a warrior, they could strike you in the back for twice the damage. Because of this, you didn’t run by warriors. Putting something like this in a game makes sense, and provides deeper play.

Something else I’d like to see in a game is an intelligence based ranking system for enemies, broken up into 3 different categories:

Low intelligence: These are primitive enemies who attack based on presence and whomever is closest.

Medium intelligence: these guys start with presence, but quickly adapt and concentrate on the damage dealers, then the support roles.

High intelligence: these guys analyze your group composition before the fight begins, and instantly go after the healing and support players, as well as the squishier and less defensive players. If there is a weakness, they will find it and know it beforehand.

This would be intelligent game design, and it would add a layer of difficulty not reflected in mere stats and numbers. You’d have to make your class with forethought in mind, since building entirely to heal and nothing else will get you mercilessly slaughtered by the first high-intelligence enemy you find. The way a battle unfolds will depend greatly on the intelligence of the enemy or the skills present. You have to think about what is happening, instead of doing the same tank and spank for every encounter ever.

Honestly, the OP is how I feel as an engineer. Thankfully my sPVP build is rarely nerfed, being turrets and all. But I remember the storms of how everyone else’s builds were nerfed. First we didn’t get weapon stats or sigils, but then once we did grenades were hit hard, then they killed the 100nades build, and then they nerfed Elixir S, then they nerfed Elixir R, and then they got rid of the best haste from Elixir U, and then they removed the shield’s ability to attack while defending, each time hitting something that engineers needed to play effectively.

But yeah, the necromancer design philosophy has this problem where the more they balance the necro for 1 vs. 1 or group vs group, the more the other on suffers. Necromancers became FotM because of all of their buffs and dhuumfire, and now necros are paying for it.

I run a 30/10/0/30/0 HGH/might stacking grenadier.

Shrapnel, Enhance Performance, Grenadier
Hair Trigger
Fast Acting Elixirs, Cleaning Formula 409, HGH

Pistol/Pistol
Elixir H
Grenade Kit
Elixir B
Other (Tool Kit, Bomb Kit, Elixir U, Elixir S, usually one of those)
Supply Crate / Hounds of Balthazar

Carrion armor, rabid trinkets, x6 superior runes of strength, rampager’s pistols. Superior Sigil of Battle, Superior Sigil of Force.

I have 3 toons at 80, and each with 2 different sets of armor and trinkets that are exotic/ascended. I’m working on a 4th and 5th, too.

The game is fine as far as alting goes.

Molch.2078:

Rozbuska.5263:

I must laught on some comments here:-D My Engineer damage without Bloodlust stacks and power food:
/Edit: Bomb has half sec cast so you have 18k dps just from AA:-)

And 1/2 sec aftercast, so your AA deals about 8.5k dps.

swiftpaw.6397:

TheMaskedParadigm.3629:

tom.7468:

TheMaskedParadigm.3629:

Tier 1: Warrior, Ranger, Guardian, Thief
Tier 2: Mesmer, Elementalist
Tier 3: Engineer, Necromancer

Berserker ele and necro outdps guardians and thieves by a ton were talking as much as 2x their dps. Thieves hit hard but their cleaving damage with sword is not that strong pistolwhip got overnerfed.

Actually, you’ll find that they don’t.

Give me that necro build yo >_>

Yeah, me too.

Actually, that half second aftercast is only true for the first bomb. Afterward, there is a steady stream of bombs that go off at the same rate that you place them.

I say this a lot: any class can have high DPS when played right.

I used to think that Rangers had low DPS. That was until I saw them do something other than spam the shortbow auto attack at range. The combination of Sword, Warhorn, and utilities actually meant for offense, and a ranger can dish out a ton of mini hits all at once.

A lot of people say Necromancers have low damage, but since I play a necro I also know that isn’t true. For condi necros, Epidemic is arguably the strongest attack in the game, moving 25 stacks of bleeding, poison, burning, and torment to 5 additional enemies at 1800 condition damage. Power necros can blow through enemies with 8K damage lifeblasts that pierce, stacks might, and stacks vulnerability at the same time. They also have 100% crit rate in Death Shroud and Lich Form, to boot.

A lot of people say engineers have low DPS, but that also isn’t true. They have difficult-to-use DPS. Engineers are the best hybrid class in the game. I run a hybrid HGH grenadier build, and I end up with 2700 power, 1700 malice, 50+% chance to crit with fury, 70% condition duration once my might stacks get going. My grenades hit like a truck, and they stack masses of bleeds and poison. I also have access to cone burns and AoE burns, ensuring a permanent burn on multiple enemies at once. We’ve already seen an example of what a bomb kit can do in this thread.

Right now, I’d probably say the lowest DPS* class is the mesmer. There’s a “*” there because mesmers can inflict a ton of damage in the right circumstances, as those 18 second Lupi videos have shown us.

Ah, another thread has reminded me of the static discharge build. I tend to forget that those exist, mostly because I don’t like them that much. But anyway:

Static Discharge builds can be decent in zergs due to their bouncing attacks. Invest 15-20 points in tools to get Static Discharge and Inertial Converter, and then fill your utility bar with skills that have a low cooldown. Usually something along the lines of

Med Kit
Rifle Turret
Battering Ram/Utility Goggles
Tool Kit
Supply Crate

Or so, depending on what you want to use. Static Discharge builds are usually power builds (what with the 20% crit damage from tools), and make great use of the Rifle’s high control and mobility alongside of it’s decent auto attack range. I’d recommend getting Rifled Barrels from the firearms trait, so the Rifle’s auto attack will hit at 1200 range. Then, you can combine the control and the toolbelt skills to lay down surprisingly quick bursts of bouncing damage, as well as steady offensive damage.

Strengths of this build include its high mobility, high control, good utility, and chaining damage. It is one of the best ways to make a power build. Weaknesses are utility specific, but a big one I see is the lack of condition removal. Elixirs don’t do well in static discharge builds, and the selection of stun breakers is also somewhat low. You’ll end up having to constrain a static discharge build somehow, to accommodate for stuns and conditions. This includes things like going into various trees to get protection injection and stabilized armor, or using healing turret instead of med kit, or using Melandru Runes and Lemongrass Soup.

I’m looking for more women to play with, too. Don’t hog them all, now.

In PVP, I usually run a minion master. But, whenever I use a conditionmancer in PVP, I end up with around 50-70% condition duration on bleeds, 10-30% for other conditions, terror included. I built this way mostly out of limitations: it is really hard to get much higher than that.

In PVE and WvW, my condition necro has a 100% bleed duration, 70% for all other conditions. 40% of both comes from Rare Veggie Pizza, which I made hundreds of while leveling cooking on an alt.

I’ve considered going for more, because there is always something awesome about the 100% duration for every condition build. However, I went with the 100/70 spread for a couple of reasons:

#1: Higher stats overall. To get 100% duration you have to sacrifice quite a bit in the stat area.

#2: The majority of damage a condition necro does is with bleeds, and bleeding is a whole lot easier to get to 100 than any other condition. Building up other conditions to that duration is nice, but it just decoration on a cake at that point.

#3: For other conditions, 70% is enough.

All in all I’m satisfied with the 100/70 duration spread on my necromancer.

I don’t think that WvW has changed much as far as strategy goes. There’s a few builds I’ve run in zergs as an engi, and it is roughly the same as builds I run by myself.

The best zerg build is, IMO, the HGH or might stacking Grenadier. Load yourself up with things that stack might like the Superior Sigil of Battle, x2 Superior Runes of Altruism, Enhance Performance, HGH, and then follow it up with +might duration runes. By yourself you can load 25 stacks of might onto yourself, sustaining at around 20-25 stacks. This means you have anywhere from 700 to 875 extra power and malice on you.

With that much might, nearly any stat combination is beast. The best damage is probably rampager, but berserker is a close second. Personally I run a bizarre mix of rabid, carrion, and rampager to capitalize on the build’s ability to both a substantial amount of direct damage and condition damage, while being somewhat durable to boot. Those grenades at 1500 range hit hard, and your enemies can’t just tough them out and march forward. I’ve managed to hold back an entire zerg once just because I started spamming grenades on a bridge, and none of them wanted to run into the line of fire.

The biggest advantage is that this build works outside of zergs, too. an HGH grenadier is a force to be reckoned with, whether you are by yourself, in a small team, or in a large team. The biggest disadvantages are usually build specific: zerker or rampager die to ambush, shaman and soldier’s can’t finish the fight, and any mixture between the two ends up with a strange mixture of both being vulnerable to ambush and being unable to finish a fight. There is one universal disadvantage, and that is boon hate. Many classes can remove the might, however S/D thieves are especially deadly. If they steal your might (and likewise all of the other boons you are running), then the fight becomes nearly impossible to win.

For more organized zergs, there’s always the support build option. Engineers have access to water fields, light fields, fire fields, and a lot of blast finishers. This means that engineers have the option to apply a lot of AoE heals, might, and retaliation if need be. The build for this is slightly more complicated, and there is no real right way to do it, but one way would be the following

Weapons: Pistol/Shield
Utilities:
Healing Turret
Bomb Kit
Thumper Turret
Elixir Gun
Supply Crate

This gives you access to all 3 of those fields, and also gives you access to 6 blast finishers. That’s more than you need, since light fields are capped at 5 blast finishers. Then, you build for boon duration and whatever it is you want to do (tank? conditions? dirct damage?), and go for it. Then, when a field commander sends out the call to pull back, gather up, heal at the gate, build siege, or whatever, you just prep the blast finishers, drop down the respective field needed, and then explode them all to give players a bunch of boons.

The advantages to this build are that the mass buffs can really turn the tide in your favor. By firing off 5 blast finishers, you give everyone 15 stacks of might, or 15 x boon duration seconds or retaliation, or AoE healing for 8K to 10K damage. The disadvantages are a little more severe, however. If you have an uncooperative group, your buffs will mean little. If you don’t have a group at all, then the support engi is easy pickings. The build itself only offers minor offensive prowess on the field, having to result to the bomb kit for skirmishes. If you are willing to sacrifice a field or a blast finisher or two, it is possible to use other weapons, though. Utilities aren’t set in stone.

My motto is live and lets kill those guys. As far as build specifics go, I’m not too picky. The whole goal of the devs is to make it so all of the skills are worth a spot on your utility slot, and so I won’t criticize a player for running something different from me, or running something different from the norm.

I don’t mind the occasional duel. I like the greater build diversity and different environment.

I think people are confusing what reaction time means. Reaction time in the game would be seeing what happens, assessing the proper action, and then responding appropriately before the enemy takes another action that requires you to act differently.

It can be quite hard at times. Because of this, I reserve utility 1 for panic button that works when being ambushed, so I can quickly spam it whenever something happens. But there are flaws with this approach, namely the panic button doesn’t always work.

You know, there’s always this thing nagging in the back of my head whenever I read a topic like this. The thing is this:

Aren’t things valuable because they are rare?

It is an issue I’ve seen in a lot of MMOs where people want the rare, powerful equipment, but they want this rare and powerful equipment to be really common and easy to get. But then, that rare and powerful equipment is now extremely common, and since everyone has the equipment, it isn’t powerful anymore. It is no longer valuable.

The insane rarity of tier 6 crafting materials, I can understand to some degree. When I was trying to make an ascended backpack, I killed polar bears, skelks, and ice worms for vicious fangs, and after a few hours I barely received anything. Eventually I just gave up and bought the ingredients for a backpack later. And that isn’t the most expensive stuff some people have to buy.

This is one of those things where I have been wondering why it wasn’t in the game in the first place.