Guild Wars 2

I’ve never come across one either. The Ele can stack bleeds well and has access to some easy permanent burns, as well as some AoE burns. But Eles lack the true safety that stacking multiple conditions at once offers. Because of this, they succumb to cleanses. Also, elementalists have issues with staying alive for long enough for the conditions to truly take effect. The last problem is that, by being offensive mainly in conditions, an ele either has to sacrifice utility by being limited in attunement swaps, or sacrifice damage to swapping to attunements that don’t deal conditions.

That said, there is strong potential to hybrid. I haven’t looked up this “Kodiak” fellow, but just looking at how the class plays I can see seamless switching between direct damage and condition damage, with one augmenting the other. Because seriously: Permanent burning in a signet that is really easy to trait for.

This is one of my two complaints with temporary content, and it is the bigger of the two. If a player wants to have a particular stat distribution or, say, mix and match gear to even things out, then if they didn’t play at a particular point in time they are out of luck.

I have a hard time watching rangers and warriors.

Mostly it is due to their simplistic style of play. Most rangers I know put on zerker gear, then hang back as far away as possible and spam auto attack. Most warriors I know just use 100blades then Axe/Axe auto attack, and maybe frenzy sometimes.

Most entertaining to watch would probably be the Elementalist. Watching them flip attunements to use precise movement skills and control skills seamlessly is mesmerizing. You practically have to slow down the video just to keep track with some of these players.

nirvana.8245:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I was watching videos online, and I think this video of a D/P thief shows how much they can contribute to a zerg:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yhlrl9MwHM

Something a lot of players forget is that quick, targeted kills are really useful in a group vs. group environment. Compare it to what happens when you don’t use targeted kills, then suddenly that enemy necromancer has rooted everyone and inflicted torment, that elementalist throws down so many water fields that you can’t do any good damage, or that mesmer throw down time warp and their team proceeds to just mess you up.

Dagger storm is not “a good tanking ability” unless the zerg is completely horrid. Sure, that’s often the case. But most of us play with the frame of mind that the opponents we are going to face are of decent quality and play as such, otherwise you will get schooled. People should always pay their opponents respect, not just in this game, for this very reason. Underestimating an opponent is in this game, just like everywhere else, a common way to lose a fight.

Am I the only one that thinks this response didn’t make sense? I watch a video on blind + stealth support and targeted kills, and then someone suddenly only talks about dagger storm.

I suppose the biggest problem is coming up with a solution that would actively discourage players from balling up. Everything offered here so far has fallen short.

Take siege, for example. Siege can hit a large number of players, but you need a large number of players yourself to build up enough siege to actually matter. The bigger blob has more siege to counterattack with, so siege won’t matter.

You say to reduce player caps, but this won’t change the blobs at all. Sure, enemy blobs will have fewer numbers, but the fact is your team will have fewer numbers, too. Zerging will still be the primary form of offense, even more so now that there isn’t enough numbers to defend towers/keeps anymore. Instead, you are forcing players to abandon their communities, or to abandon WvW because they can no longer get in to WvW.

And so many people don’t suggest things at all. They yell at Anet to fix it somehow, but if you can’t think of a solution, how do you expect anet to think of a solution?

That is where I am stuck. I can’t think of something that would fix the zerg mentality, because everything that doesn’t arbitrarily limit playstyle ends up benefiting the groups that have more supply, more heals, more buffs, and more players in general.

I hit for 5K on Life blast in my power necro, and the only zerker parts are the trinkets.

Conditionmancers are king in a condi vs. condi fight. Personally I run a mixture of primarily carrion + some rabid + zerker gear, but in a pure rabid setup it’ll be a whole lot harder to win. Using that build, I would do the following:

Pull them into point blank range with magnet pull. During their stun, follow up with grenade barrage then pry bar, then the gear shield to block their attacks and maximize confusion damage. By the time gear shield comes up, the necro probably has already used their marks and is switching to a different weapon. After that, counterattack with a supply crate drop right on their head, then follow that up with static shot + blow torch + glue puddle. This is to keep the necromancer locked in place. Dodge a few times to consume elixir R since once the blind is gone the necro will try their best to fear lock you. Then, while increasing distance, attack using frozen grenade + flash grenade + shrapnel grenade, then maintain distance by alternating between pistol blind + control and grenade blind + control until burst damage is readily available. However, be careful about going into close range from now on, since through the damage you will have inevitably taken through this fight, the necromancer will be looking to seal the deal via chain-terror. If they pull you into range or if they manage to teleport to you, gear shield and/or dodge immediately, since their finisher is coming right up.

This is an attempt to control the necro into oblivion with the occasional burst attacks. The important thing to watch for against the necros are his heals and his transfers. The standard condition necro actually has only 2 ways of curing their own conditions: with consume conditions, and with Putrid Mark. Dagger #4 transfers conditions, but it isn’t good at curing them. You will unquestionably be hit with putrid mark at some point, but as soon as they use their heal, you have 25 seconds to go meshuggah with conditions, and the necro himself will have no way to deal with them. Until then, do not stack too many conditions at once, because they will be thrown right back in your face. Stagger your burns and your confusion, and also shrapnel grenade, since it is the long duration conditions that the necro will damage you most with.

That build posted is very weak to necros. There is very little condition mitigation, and no stun breakers. When fighting a class that uses a ton of conditions and stuns as an offense, it is the equivalent to fighting a thief while in Glass cannon gear without counter-burst. My advice is to not run Elixir R, since its use has diminished heavily due to recent patches. I’d go with Slick Shoes, since it provides a stun break in the tool belt while also providing a movement skill, and an excellent counter-stun for when the necro is at close range.

Got to be honest, I’m not sure how that build is supposed to do damage or contribute much of anything, really. But otherwise:

Drop supply crate on the thief’s head, follow up with glue shot to kill his burst, then use the med kits from the supply crate to heal up a bit before you continue to engage the thief.

That’s the most you can do, since that setup doesn’t have any control or any burst damage or any utility.

I wouldn’t mind increasing the AoE damage cap for player attacks, but I am afraid of what would happen if the AoE cap is removed for boons and heals.

The problem is that, the bigger group is going to have more and better boons, as well as more and better heals without a cap to them. A single engineer could heal 30 players for 11k each in zerker gear just by smashing all of their blast finishers inside of a water field. Then combine that with every other blast finisher and heal. It doesn’t sound very fair, now does it? Or imagine players stacking several guardians together to give everyone permanent retaliation, making fighting that group impossible due to the kickback received from a single attack. Or, shudder to think of it, limitless stacked stealth rendering entire zergs permanently invisible.

This requires more coordination to pull off, but this reinforces the numbers problem that happens in WvW. So, the end result is that only offensive and damaging skills can have their caps increased without causing too much imbalance.

Now, increasing the AoE cap would benefit smaller groups over large ones, and also better tactics over worse ones. So many people keep using the ridiculous example of 10 vs. 100, so I’ll stick to more realistic numbers.

In an equal sized zerg of 30 vs. 30, the group that wins is usually the one that balls up then melee trains all over the opponents, slaughtering enemies that get caught in the wake. Increased caps punish that tactic of balling up, which means that the zerg ball becomes as stupid a tactic as it sounds.

In a mismatched fight of 10 vs. 30, the AoE cap favors different groups depending on different circumstances.
A) In an open field zerg vs zerg direct fight, it favors the 30, simply because they can do more damage overall than the smaller group can.
B)In an ambush scenario, it favors the 10, largely because it makes their AoEs proportionally more potent to the 30 than if the 30 ambushed the group of 10.
C)In a defense scenario, the AoE limit favors the 10, letting them hit stacked up enemies from upon towers harder and more reliably, making the tactic of “spam water fields at the gate” riskier. 30 would not defend the tower against 10, but would rather run out and chase the enemy. However, this makes focus fire from the 10 on the doors more effective, since that is a form of zerg balling.

Overall, I would prefer if the offensive AoE cap were increased.

Back when I ran havoc groups before SoR was top tier, I used to go as far as capturing enemy towers with groups of 5. Flame rams, as it turns out, are fairly cheap and powerful.

I haven’t had a chance to play Golem Wars yet, so I am unsure how well they can defend, but prior to golem wars a coordinate group of 5 people could be quite deadly while defending a keep, even against 10 or 20 invaders.

I don’t see what the problem is.

Golems are cheap? That sounds awesome. I’ve always wanted to buy and use golems, but they were just too expensive to get. Now everyone can get golems.

Massive golem rushes? That sounds awesome. Now we can have epic golem vs. golem, siege vs. golem, and army vs. golem fights. I’d love to have a few golems running along with every zerg as mobile siege.

If your complaint is that one server is hoarding and mass producing cheap golems and for some reason your server isn’t doing that, then the complaint is about superior cooperation and tactics, and not about golems.

I could barely use bombs in sPVP as an engi, even while using a turret control build. Due to the activation time and long delay before hits, actually hitting someone with them is incredibly difficult. Most players are smart enough to just get out of the way which, by definition of a bomb engineer, is just moving about 5 feet to the left, and even then most bomb effects require enemies to stand inside of them to persist and be effective (fire bomb, smoke bomb, glue bomb).

Anyway, there is a lot of damage in the game. However, I’ve found most zerker builds to be somewhat lackluster. This is largely because the overall strength of any character in sPVP is roughly their DPS multiplied by their EHP, and zerker builds forgo survivability to just try and cap out DPS. It is for this reason that, when running a PVT necro, I’ll always win a dagger vs. dagger auto attack fight against a thief. The best zerker builds are the ones that attempt to avoid incoming damage, via stealth or evasion or stuns. Hence, why thieves and mesmers most commonly run pure DPS specs in sPVP.

I don’t think the issue is control so much. On pretty much any class you run, there’s always a limited chain of stuns and controls that you can throw forward, and to maximize this a player almost always does so at the detriment of their damage or their utility (the exception to this rule being terrormancer). The opposing enemies can counter-control you as well, and this here is yet another one of the necromancer’s weaknesses. The combination of one player controlling you while another player DPSes you down isn’t overpowered as much as it is good strategy. They’re doing overall less damage than if both players DPSed you down, but exchange that for more reliable damage and different weaknesses.

The big problem IMO is the lack of stability in the game. While we have stun breakers, they only work when you’ve already been stunned, and they don’t work against chain-stuns. As always, you can usually dodge or block or blind enemy stuns, but stuns tend to have quick activation times, making it hard to counter. Stability is only available in really short durations on very long cooldowns, making wholly unreliable as a form of anti-CC. If you wanted to go out and make a build that was largely immune to CC, it would be impossible to do it. This makes “spamming CC” an effective method in sPVP, since it can and will overload an opponent’s stun breakers.

Anet is already moving in the right direct with this. They’ve added 1 second of stability to various stun breakers. IMO, at least 1 second of stability should be on every stun breaker. Skills that grant longer durations of stability should have their recharges reduced, and their durations increased.

As a condition necro, the biggest problem I have is with enemies running right through my marks and pounding the heck out of me. When a power thief lands right on my back, marks are of little consolation.

The reason why is obvious: marks only do high damage over a length of time. Sure, my mark of blood hits for 5,085 condition damage in sPVP. But, it takes 15 seconds for it to get there, and it has a 4.8 second recharge on use. On immediate use it only hits for, like, 300 damage. That is no consolation when a guardian has leaped onto my back and is smacking me for 2k-3k a pop with their greatsword. The other marks pale in comparison as far as damage goes, with a terror based reaper’s mark coming the closest in damage terms.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the staff necromancer’s greatest weakness. You don’t need to “avoid” marks. Just power right through them, since at most you’ll be hit by 2 marks of blood before they have to switch weapons due to all marks being on cooldown.

5 toons.

Human Female Engineer. Level 80
Asura Female Necromancer. Level 80
Human Male Thief. Level 80
Norn Female Mesmer. Level 37
Sylvari Male Guardian. Level 31

Authority.6145:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Other than anonymous player on player action, there isn’t an incentive to solo. The fact is that while you are running around on the map, at any point in time a group of 10 + enemies may stumble upon you and kick the crap out of you in an instant.

WvW is based mostly on objectives. Now, most of these objectives can be accomplished quite easily with a small team. A group of 4 or 5 players can easily take camps and towers, set up siege points, and also defend towers pretty well.

So when you kill one player what do you get instantly?

You don’t really get anything instantly. You get a bit of XP, maybe a loot bag, nothing special to write home about.

I was watching videos online, and I think this video of a D/P thief shows how much they can contribute to a zerg:

Something a lot of players forget is that quick, targeted kills are really useful in a group vs. group environment. Compare it to what happens when you don’t use targeted kills, then suddenly that enemy necromancer has rooted everyone and inflicted torment, that elementalist throws down so many water fields that you can’t do any good damage, or that mesmer throw down time warp and their team proceeds to just mess you up.

The thing I’m wondering about is why it is everyone is focused on the axes auto-attack when that is the least used weapon skill whenever I run a power necro.

Using Axe/Focus and Dagger/Warhorn, whenever I’m at range the only time I ever use Axe #1 is when everything else is on cooldown. That isn’t very often, since Ghastly Claws is on a 6.4 second cooldown with Axe Mastery. What I’ll do is use Focus #4, then focus #5, then ghastly claws, then I pop over to Dagger/Warhorn and use Dagger #3 then Dagger #2, then I’ll pop into vr for awhile, then swap back to use Ghastly Claws and focus skills again.

Only when I have to keep at range does the axe ever have to use the auto attack, and that is mostly in PVE. The vulnerability stacking and damage are alright, but in the end my main source of damage comes from DS and firing off Ghastly Claws every 6 seconds. My rotation commonly involves Ghastly Claws – DS – Ghastly Claws – Other things – repeat.

Other than anonymous player on player action, there isn’t an incentive to solo. The fact is that while you are running around on the map, at any point in time a group of 10 + enemies may stumble upon you and kick the crap out of you in an instant.

WvW is based mostly on objectives. Now, most of these objectives can be accomplished quite easily with a small team. A group of 4 or 5 players can easily take camps and towers, set up siege points, and also defend towers pretty well.

They work on a tick system. However, it is a bit more complicated than that.

For bleeding, torment, and confusion, the fractional seconds don’t matter. For burning and poison, they do. The reason why is because for burning and poison, they stack in duration. So if you apply two 4.5 second burns, you get a total of 9 seconds of burning and it gets an extra tick.

To contribute to the ancillary topic at hand, the biggest issue I have with turrets is that there aren’t many ways to really “improve” them that doesn’t involve just making what they already do better:

Rifle Turret: Make it do more damage, and also take more damage.
Rocket Turret: Make it do more damage, and also take more damage, and reduce recharge.
Flame Turret: Make it take more damage.
Thumper Turret: Make it do more damage. Maybe make it take more damage. I don’t know, I never use the thing.
Net Turret: Make it take more damage, and/or give it better range.

Overall: Fix bugs, make it so they don’t target things not in Line of Sight, don’t make them target phantom objects, give them smaller hitboxes.

Their damage is somewhat subpar by themselves, but turrets can be really potent if done right. Once the bugs are fixed, Net Turret is awesome for stuns and immobilize, the rocket turret is awesome for AoE knockdown + AoE burning, the flam turret is great for cone burning. The two burning turrets are basically just “put this on your toolbar, and enemy gets 75% burn uptime)” before factoring traits.

I’d just avoid cannon mastery.

There’s nothing wrong with the line. It is just that cannons are rarely ever available to use as an effective defense. I’m in Sanctum of Rall, and half the time our towers/keeps don’t have any cannons on them at all, largely because other upgrades take a much higher priority than cannons. Then cannons are focused very quickly as soon as an enemy group attacks, and you can’t safely attack a group while on the cannon. There’s only two circumstances in which I’ve ever found cannons useful:

#1: When you are at a keep and you use one cannon to attack a far-away door on your keep that is also under attack.
#2: When two groups are fighting each other, but are doing so close to a tower/keep while not attacking it.

And so, I prioritize AC mastery and Ballista Mastery on my two WvW toons. Ballista Mastery on my engineer, and AC mastery on my necro.

Zerker Grenade Engineer can put out a lot of DPS at 1500 range.

Definitely not OP. The thing with Automated Response is that it is usually too late. By the time you hit 25% HP against a condition spamming spec, you’re already on fire and have 10 stacks of bleeding.

Jesiah.2457:

Gee … I wonder why you love this map where as others hate it. You ONLY play one of THE MOST imbalanced classes in game currently AND on top of that you can fear-spam and “one hit kill” people! Not hard to put two and two together.

Because pressing one button and landing a kill equates to pure raw skill, obviously! So naturally you’re going to support and defend this easy victory mode for yourself without testing it on other classes that don’t have such an easy time “one hit killing” players and then go on to say this map is amazing. Brilliant.

And if you ask me … any kind of one hit kill mechanic in a game like this where the emphasis is on skill and “outplaying” your opponent, just doesn’t belong. This does not support that in the slightest, it just supports making the cheesiest and most gimmicky ‘one-hit-kill’ builds you can come up with and does not really give much room, if any at all, for counter play, which is a MUST have for any game to be competitive.

This map is just trolly gimmicky garbage that doesn’t belong in competitive PvP.

Actually, half the time I was on the map was spent getting ganked by a thief who was easily twice the better player than I was. I was both outplayed on 1 v 1 and h also could kill me easily with the one-hit kills, since the thief had their own access to fear and pulls when fighting me.

You seem to misunderstand something very critical: You think that I enjoyed the map because I won. Problem with that assertion: I didn’t win. I played that map about 10 times, my team lost 7 of them.

The funny thing is, I hear players complain about how they’re neglecting PVE content for PVP all the time.

Zenith.7301:

Nope. The guardian is still on berserker with offensive traits. The support comes from his weaponset and utilities, not gear or traits.

And why in hell would I ever bring a D/P thief over a D/D one for PvE?

You don’t need those blind fields because the 3 warriors and the guardian kill everything so fast that survival is not even an issue. Guardians mitigate burst. The difference between a guardian mitigating for a group and a thief doing so is that conditions, unlike boons, have extremely nerfed durations on bosses so conditions like weakness and blind become completely useless.

The only condition that is worth anything in a dungeon is vulnerability, and warriors stack it best.

Thief’s smoke screen also only absorbs projectiles, unlike guardian wall which reflects it and thus adds to the dps of the group. Smoke Screen is still a decent utility, but a group will always bring 3 warriors if only because banners are exclusive in their benefits — no other class brings increases to primary stats, no class can stack might and fury and vulnerability while doing the damage a warrior does.

I never mentioned D/P. The peferred weapon set for dungeons is s/p, since it cleaves and outdamages backstab very quickly. Backstab only has a tooltip damage of 806, whereas Pistol Whip has a tooltip damage of 1062 and also does this in a cleave and isn’t ruined by enemy positioning. This makes it far outdamage D/anything in the long run.

You’re also bringing up an arbitrary group composition from nowhere. If you’re not going to judge classes on their individual basis, you might as well say “4 warriors + 1 mesmer” and end that nonsense immediately.

But regardless, I have seen zerker warriors and zerker guardians fall in dungeons, and I have seen them fall together to silver mobs. A lot of the guardian’s mitigation is based on targeting, so frequently a warrior will get focused and downed. Also, the only conditions that have a reduced duration on champions are Vulnerability and Weakness. This alone means a thief can easily achieve 50% uptime with weakness on a champion. What the thief also provides is defiant stripping with the off-hand pistol, indefinite dodges with the Shortbow or Sword/Dagger combination should one opt to it, and also an absolute form of aggro mitigation with stealth. While Smoke Screen only destroys projectiles, it also blinds enemies that stand inside of it and also causes blind from projectiles going through it, making it defensively superior to Wall of Reflection. Thieves do have a reflection kill in Dagger Storm, though, so this can also add to the DPS of the team. This is assuming they don’t use Basilisk Venom, the only stun that bypasses defiant, or Thieves Guild for a large increase in damage. Then again, most good players switch their utilities depending on what is needed at that point.

randomfightfan.4091:

@ blood

You don’t know how improv works. It should work as you described but the 10% extra damage is only when you pick up those planks and metal bars. The only time that trait is useful is if you’re using ele weapons. You also can’t count executioner at 10% at the start b/c it’s 0%. Saying it’s 10% at the start is misleading. And how do you maintain the 10% damage bonus from 6+ ini when you are at 6 ini (8-9 after the 1st pistol whip finishes) and less after 1 blind field or a 2nd whip?

Out of the gate you’re actually doing a bonus 25% damage with the sigil.

Ah, so the trait is bugged. Also, you can count executioner as 10% overall through something call averages. You see, if you have a 20% damage bonus, but for half the time, then this means that you have an average of a 10% damage bonus in uptime. This is fairly common practice in science to take the overall sum and divide it by the overall time to get the overall rate. Of course, you are misunderstanding what is meant by “off the bat”. This doesn’t mean that I have this damage boost when I first attack the enemy. It means I have this damage boost as a function of my build before there is any additional bonuses through might or fury.

With First Strikes, it is actually quite easy to maintain. In my own build I use steal to give me a quick boost to initiative, and with a combination of Opportunist and Signet Use initiative can be regained very quickly, allowing me to stay at nigh initiative almost indefinitely, while also stacking might to boot. Combine this with Smoke Screen for a blind field, and you can reserve initiative for pistol whip I usually only blow all my initiative on pistol whip once my enemies are at 50% health to get executioner.

Wukunlin.8461:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I’m not saying he’s off topic. I’m saying he’s changing the subject. The topic is still DPS.

my brain

Since apparently multiple people don’t understand what is going on, I’ll elaborate. His counter-point is that not every class can run a high damage build because not every class has good support skills. This is attempting to distract from the point that all classes can, indeed, do damage. Now they are attempting to discuss how it is the support skills can make one class more viable than another class, still attempting to distract from the point. The point being that all classes can do high damage. Period.

I’m not saying he’s off topic. I’m saying he’s changing the subject. The topic is still DPS.

From what I’ve played, I don’t have a problem running a thief in a dungeon party. For dungeons, I currently use full zerker in a 25/30/0/10/5 build, specced almost completely for damage.

It’s actually really easy. I use S/P, spam a blind field, and then me and the whole group can face tank the perma-blinded group. The auto attack also causes permanent weakness and cripple, so they’re slower and do 25% less damage overall when they finally get a hit off. I have an utter craptoon of damage boosts:

10% if they have a condition (which is always)
10% with a bundle (which is almost always, since I like to hold on to one until steal recharges)
20% when under 50% health (which is half the time, so it is 10%)
10% with high initiative
5% with Sigil of Force

So out of the gate I’m doing 54% more damage before a single stack of might is applied. The bosses can be harder to fight, though…

I say can because if I switch to a dagger off-hand, I can dodge half of the bosses attacks indefinitely without ever having to worry about endurance gain or dodging or even losing offense. This is quite hard to do, but it is nonetheless possible. If you pull it off, free boons. Worst case scenario I have to use the shortbow, and just spam blast finishers inside of fields to buff/heal everyone.

For PVE, I’d recommend Sword/PIstol.

It’s quite easy to win with: You use Black Powder to blind your enemy, then auto attack them with the sword. As soon as they are not blind and the blind field is gone, use black powder again. Rinse and repeat. You can now face-tank up to 5 vets in berserker gear with no problem.

If you want more skill, you can also use Sword/Dagger. Sword/Dagger has an evade on skill #3, so if you use that when an enemy attacks, you’ll dodge their attack and take no damage. Then you follow up with Lacerwhatever strike, and evade again when they attack again. If you learn the timing and repeat this over and over, you’ll be able to solo champions this way.

Dagger/Dagger has a similar dodge, although it is harder to use. What I did for D/D specs was put 10 points into Shadow Arts, so it blinds enemies every time you go into stealth. Then, when you use Cloak and Dagger, it’ll blind the enemy and let you back stab them. 3 seconds later, they’re blind again. 3 seconds later, blind again. Rinse and repeat. Doing this, you can keep a group near permanently blinded, while also being able to evade and solo champions. However, it is harder than either of the two above to do either.

I’d avoid conditions until you get to around 65+. They don’t scale well, so ultimately avoid using P/P and P/D.

Zenith.7301:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Dub.1273:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

haviz.1340:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You’re changing the subject.

How so?

You’ve brought up having to support the team on a pure DPS build. He’s not asking about support. He’s asking about damage. Support is irrelevant here.

“Support” helps increasing team damage and therefore isn’t irrelevant.

The only “support” that helps increase team damage is the “support” that is used individually to build up damage in the first place. Heals don’t increase DPS.

This is so dumb. The more risk you can mitigate for your team, the higher their melee uptime. If you don’t bring guardians to melee Mossman, his autoattacks will constantly put the group at a chance to be gibbed by the next autoattacl. Healing, protection, and block prevent that and allow them to stay in melee whereas if it were absent they’d be forced to go ranged.

Thief can arguably get higher single target than warrior, but the warrior is practical. His damage cannot be nerfed by bad positioning from other teammates, whereas your backstab can be ruined by someone turning the boss at the wrong time.

Warriors also have the better sustained cleave since for some reason warrior axe does the dagger’s damage yet it cleaves unlike the thief’s dagger which is single target.

Warriors also bring all these utilities boosting the offensive capacity of the group.

Your case is that you have to have non-pure damage specs for some content. Not what classes can have good DPS. Every class can have good DPS. Different classes can bring different utilities to the table that are better in different circumstances, but that falls into the “No crap, Sherlock!” department.

I have a hard time thinking of a damage build that doesn’t do that. You bring up D/P or D/D thief for damage. You know what the thief brings to the table? Stealth + healing in Shadow Refuge, spammable blind fields with the offhand pistol, projectile blocking with smoke screen, projectile reflection with dagger storm, etc. You bring up warriors using axes, but the fact is a warrior can’t maintain a permanent blind field that lets them face tank up to 5 enemies indefinitely. It’s a tactic I’ve been using to dungeon run for forever on my thief: Bring Sword/Pistol, use black powder, then just pistol whip the blinded enemies to oblivion at point blank range.

I’ve seen balth done several times since the risen buff.

Problem is, each one of those times was with a fairly coordinated group of about 20+ players. The hardest part of the event is that you’ll continually be ambushed from behind, and the culling makes it so you can’t see where friendly NPCs are. The solution to this is to have a team standing on rear at all times to intercept incoming risen swarms.

Afterwards, a few healers are necessary for the event to be completed. You don’t need to spec for healing as much as you need to use AoE regen and blast finishers and stuff. You can do it with one, but… you don’t want to know the rotation I had to whip out on my engi to do it.

If you want to appeal to kids, you need to throw in sex, potty humor, and violence.

Why? It’s because kids, being forbidden from seeing that stuff, want to go out and indulge in it as much as possible to make themselves be all “cool” and stuff. “Dark and Edgey” gets old by the time you graduate highschool, and when you are in college age you’d rather watch My Little Pony.

The class has more diversity, however as far as damage goes Engineers are still one of the lowest. Grenades had their direct damage nerfed by 30% when we received sigil effects and stat boosts from our weapons on kits. Though this makes other kits more useful, it hit grenades hard. That said, grenades are still the top damage dealer as far as engineers go. You can do some tricks with coated bullets to do a lot of AoE damage, but otherwise we are largely condition based still.

Most of the buffs engineers received were to alternate things. We’re better at healing and buffing and controls and stuff, but peak damage output is unchanged.

Looks like lady is using a turret spec that is similar to mine. Similar, but not quite the same.

I run a 30/0/30/10/0 grenadier + turret build, however I use healing turret + rifle while Lady used Med kit + P/P. I don’t know what trait differences there are between us, though.

Man I wish turrets weren’t so bugged. I miss using that build in PVP.

I’m only so-so at names. My Necro’s name is Tezra Conflickr. Female Asura, named after the Conflickr worm.

I love this map. It has officially replaced Temple of the Silent Storm as my favorite map. This map accomplishes something that so many of the other maps failed at: it is fun in a tactical and chaotic way.

So far, I’ve only played on it with a conditionmancer, and I loved it. My fears now have the potential to one-hit kill people, and also the counter-control can easily save me from one of devastating environmental effects. Positioning is more important than just “how far away you are from an enemy zerg”. Swiftness is now meaningful as movement and as a form of escape, and movement skills as a whole can be used tactically now.

For example, I was once one-shot by a thief who shadowstepped onto a glass pane, used scorpion wire to yank me in top of it, then shadow-returned away immediately the second it broke. It was awesome. What was also awesome was that I saw another thief attempt that trick on me again, but I dodged Scorpion wire, and he fell to his death.

I’m seeing people rocket jump all over the place, banish other players into oblivion, lay down traps around gates and glass, accidentally ride the lightning right off the edge, and snipe other players from above. Heck, with all of those launch pads half of the fights feel like they’re aerial.

This map accomplishes a very simple goal. Ultimately, the PVP in this game isn’t about how big your manhood is, how much you can pwn n00bs, who can 1 vs 1 better, who can win harder, or other things like that. It is to have fun. This map accomplishes fun in a big way: by being unpredictable, chaotic, different, and making players aware of their surroundings. IMO a lot of the QQ I hear about the map reminds me of a video I saw once:

And the end of that video sums up how I feel about it.

I agree that dredge is annoying. I once did dredge at level 28, and it is a monster. There’s several issues with the dredge fractal that combine together to make a nightmare:

#1: The dredge hard. They’re immune to blinds and stack up protection and counter-stun you.

#2: They are infinitely spawning. No matter what you do or how many dredge you kill, more are just going to show up.

#3: There’s a lot of them. I’m talking 20+ dredge in an area.

#4: Th goal of that mission is to have everyone split up and defenselessly camp switches by themselves while other players take forever to interract with a control box that stops the moment one dredge nicks you.

So you get separated up, forced to fight outnumbered 5:1 against some of the hardest enemies in the game while being unable to dodge or run because you have to stand immobile on switches, and you cannot kill or even fight back because the dredge infinitely spawn. There’s really no other tactic for this fractal other than to die repeatedly.

Dub.1273:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

haviz.1340:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You’re changing the subject.

How so?

You’ve brought up having to support the team on a pure DPS build. He’s not asking about support. He’s asking about damage. Support is irrelevant here.

“Support” helps increasing team damage and therefore isn’t irrelevant.

The only “support” that helps increase team damage is the “support” that is used individually to build up damage in the first place. Heals don’t increase DPS.

Jackums.3496:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The only class I’ve never heard as being “overpowered” is the elementalist.

I agree with the general premise of your post, but I laughed at the above.

The thing is with the elementalist is that their bunker build came at around the same time that guardian bunkers were proficient. The QQ I always noticed was about Guardians + Elementalists, and the “bunker” game in general, and nothing directed too specifically at elementalists.

haviz.1340:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You’re changing the subject.

How so?

You’ve brought up having to support the team on a pure DPS build. He’s not asking about support. He’s asking about damage. Support is irrelevant here.

Zenith.7301:

Mobs in dungeons don’t stack toughness or protection or don’t use walls.

Except in HotW and CoE and SE and Fractals and Molten Facility and Aetherblade’s Retreat. Those are just the dungeons I play frequently, and if I were to painstakingly go through every dungeon and document every boss, I’m sure that a ton of them use some form of blocking or protection or have high toughness.

DanH.5879:

stuff

The bleed stacks aren’t removed at all. It’s a funny thing, but even in random pugs, multiple condition users are rare. Let alone in a pre-mades where you know you’re going to be the only condition user. Even in groups where you have people with lolbleeds, the fact is that they aren’t build for their bleeds, and so they only cause bleeds on scattered occasions and on random enemies. A dedicated condition thief applies bleeds in a large AoE, where the bleed cap barely hampers damage if at all.

FYI, every time you try and come up with a specific boss or specific instance where conditions aren’t effective, I can just come up with a specific boss or instance where direct damage isn’t effective. You also show your n00b by saying " I won’t run conditions until they are as effective as zerker". That is just plain stupid: it would make zerker useless since conditions would then have the same damage as zerker while also having a lot more defense.

If you’re talking about dungeons, which are full of silver mobs that take forever to kill, then keeping it on for a full 20 seconds isn’t a problem.

Wall of Reflection. In PVE this almost never leaves my bar.

P/P is hard to find a spot for. I’ve only found one use for it when it was better than another setup, and that was when using a condition thief against Mai.

Zenith.7301:

Surbrus.6942:

If you’re a condition Thief that uses LDB, then you need to have a decent amount of power as well. Your strategy is not as one dimensional when you’re build takes this into account.

The very short window on the evade just means that it requires more skill and practice to make the most of it. I use LDB to evade attacks all the time… although if it is an attack I really want to evade I’ll just dodge/Withdraw/Roll for Initiative because its still really hard to evade with LDB… I’ll generally only use LDB as an evade when fighting NPC’s, to get more practice.

I use I D/D condition build on my Thief, LDB is the main sources of damage, and a small amount of my damage mitigation. Having a bit of other offensive stats helps make the build not some one dimensional gimmick build, as I can still throw in some Power based damage.

But yes, Conditions are absolutely terrible in PvE if you are not working alone. When everything is lined up perfectly for the condition burst, I can simultaneously hit the bleed cap on multiple NPC’s by myself… which means that fighting NPC’s with even one additional condition damage user means that there isn’t even going to be much additional damage being dished out… you can’t really improve too much on 25 stacks of bleed and a redundant amount of poison.

As an aside, personally I think they just need to halve the application of bleeds, and double the damage of those bleeds. Basically everyone would be applying half the stacks of bleed but doing the same amount of damage, or some other way of factoring in more condition damage if they can’t simply increase the cap due to their servers exploding from having to keep track of all those numbers or whatever.

Condition damage is terrible even if you removed the stack cap.

I think you people truly don’t understand the math behind scaling and why berserker fares so much better with gear scaling, benefitting from 25 vulnerability stacks, and haste effects.

The damage gap is huge. Condition will never be viable in dungeons in its current state. They either need to nerf berserker crit cap to 62% like spvp to bring it somewhat closer but it’ll still be an issue.

The lack of DPS meters has really done terrible things to this game, enabling people their magical thinking and letting anecdotes run false narratives.

Zerker is also weakened by barriers and protection and toughness, and also zerkers don’t have as much survivability. You only get those big beefy numbers when fighting something with no armor and no boons.

Of course, the damage is pretty good overall. If you run a full condi spec, you’ll get 3 × 20 bleeds with each death blossom. At 1400 condition damage, this does 6720 damage over the duration of those bleeds. At 1800 condition damage (that is, a fully dedicated condi build) this does 7950 damage, and it does this on top of the direct damage.

8K a pop is pretty good, considering that it bypasses protection, and you have 54% more HP than a zerker build while using it.

Seriously. I’ve done the math. Conditions are not horribly underpowered.

haviz.1340:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Pretty much every profession can do a lot of damage if you build them right.

There’s a difference between being able to deal a lot of damage and being able to deal a lot of damage while supporting your team at the same time. Not every proffesion has the latter build.

You’re changing the subject.

Hard to say. The necro doesn’t have a hard counter to shatter + distortion bursts, and also doesn’t have much to do against their dazes and stuns. The mesmer can’t stealth to avoid all of the damage done (epidemic on phantasm says hi), and also many mesmers are lacking effective enough condition cleansing and stun breaks to deal with them.

You know, there’s a thread in the necro forum asking how conditionmancers should deal with classes that have heavy condition cleanses. The response is basically “layer up conditions during fear, or die”.

The fact is that the game isn’t balanced around 1 vs 1. There will always be a class who is best at 1 vs 1. Whether it is the Thief who pops in and out of stealth and resets fights indefinitely when they don’t burst you down. The mesmer, who is nigh impossible to damage while interrupting and bursting you down. The necromancer, who has statistical bulk and high damaging stuns + conditions to wear you down. The engineer, who can kite you endlessly while laying down high direct + condition damage with grenades. The guardian, who’s cleansing and protection uptime make them impossible to kill. The ranger, who solos you with the pet while dodging and evading everything you throw at them.

I’ve heard it all, trust me. The only class I’ve never heard as being “overpowered” is the elementalist. Even though warriors suck now, there was a time when they were top tier due to bulls rush + frenzy + 100 blades killing people instantly.