Guild Wars 2

Depends on what you mean by “support”.

Generally I co8nsider Engineers to be the best support class ATM. Through stacking blast finishers in their water fields, they can heal for enormous amounts. By stacking blast finishers in their fire fields, they can provide a ton of might to do more damage. By stacking blast finishers in their light fields, they can provide a ton of retaliation. By stacking their blast finishers inside of their poison fields, they can cause a lot of weakness on enemies. By stacking their blast finishers inside of their smoke fields, engineers can stack up a lot of stealth for their group.

And that is just the support with combo finishers. Thanks to their off-hand shield, Elixir S, and Gear Shield they can block a long series of attacks that lets them tank. With elixirs and the elixir gun they can cleanse conditions from the team while also giving small buffs. They have a slow rez in Elixir R, they can put down reflection walls / smoke screens with Elixir U, give nigh permanent regeneration with the healing turret, they have two blind fields and plenty of other blinds. On the control side they have plenty of stuns, along with some of the best immobilization stacking via net turret + rifle, long duration chills with grenades, cripples with glue puddles, and pretty much every condition except torment.

If you have any team that wants more than pure DPS, an engineer can fulfill nearly every role that needs to be done, so long as they are smart enough to change their utilities to do it. About the only thing that Engineers are bad at is boon stripping, requiring the use of Acidic Elixirs and Landmines to do it.

Now, other professions also have some pretty good support. From the few I’ve played:

Mesmer: uses portals to bypass obstacles, AoE temp rez at a distance, tons of reflection skills, great healing when using a very particular tactic (Mantra of Pain + Restorative Mantras), plenty of stuns, Time Warp as the best offensive boon in the game, plenty of stealth, blinds and blocks to tank, and also great aggro management with clones. They can cleanse conditions and strip/steal boons really quickly, and also combines well with other boon classes if they use Signet of Inspiration.

Guardian: has plenty of heals and blocks, fire fields and light fields, as well as condition cleanses and tanking abilities, and also can grant a ton of protection and retaliation to allies, as well as great might stacking in a single weapon skill.

I can’t say much about Elementalists, but I also hear they are great for support.

If you build them right, nearly every profession can have a lot of DPS. It think the only exception to this ATM is ranger.

@Clockwork Bard: You can just hybridize equipment.

Anyway, I find Death Blossom to still be one of my favorite skills. I run a D/D and P/D condi thief all the time in both PVE and sPVP, and Death Blossom rocks now. The evade is short duration, however it does put the thief behind the attacking enemy, making a lot of their attacks miss. It provides a long AoE bleed that can be spammed rapidly, and with just 50% bleed duration I can maintain 25 stacks of bleeding in AoE when comboing with caltrops. This makes LDB an excellent tool for condition damage.

Conditionmancers are pretty good even with other condition builds on the team, because it amplifies the conditionmancer’s power by making Epidemic faster to use and more frequent to us. Conditiomancers mostly use conditions in AoE anyway, so any one target hitting the cap isn’t too much of a problem.

Darn it! My turret build in sPVP is crap until they get fixed.

I don’t see much of a problem at all. Dodging allows for greater build diversity without having to always resort to tanky builds, and in order to just dodge everything all bosses in the game can do, you have to learn and recognize any and all things all the bosses can do. To actually reach the point where you can “just dodge” everything is actually really difficult.

That said, there’s content in the gam that isn’t constrained wholly by dodging. Anytime enemies have a sustained damage output that is performed at range, it makes dodging non-viable. Problem is, this makes most things non-viable as well.

I wouldn’t mind greater tactics. Aetherblade’s retreat had enemies with more in-depth tactics, and I would like to see that and Molten Facility be the new norm for game content.

The biggest issue with all stats items ‘is that they give stats where a lot of classes really don’t need them.

Take mesmer for example. Mesmers have limited healing capacity, and their conditions are well separated from their direct damage attacks. So any points put into healing and condition damage is wasted.

So for “best classes”, this goes to classes that tend to do everything at once, and also hybrid well. There are 3 big candidates for all-stat items here:

Guardian
Elementalist
Engineer

Since all 3 heal, inflict conditions, and do direct damage at the same time with almost any build you choose for them. The all-stat items will probably be best used when in conjunction with other builds and not by themselves, though.

EDIT: Darn cat walked across the keyboard.

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

The answer is unquestionably yes. The biggest buff that necromancers saw to their condition damage was not burning. It was the large increase the amount of fear they had available, which is now letting terror specs inflict an incredible amount of damage. The addition of torment also helps. Dhuumfire itself is a trait-investment heavy ability that only procs off on crits and has a long cooldown. It has numerous weakness in that it is heavily build specific, contributes little to AoE and can be absorbed by mesmer clones/ranger pets/ whatever, and it is readily overwritten by nearby guardians and elementalists who have not specced into condition damage, making it unreliable in team vs. team circumstances. It only stacks in duration, making multiple sources of burning redundant and easily cleansed away, contributing no greater DPS than if only one person had burning. It is the worst scaling condition in the game, requiring 50% more malice to double damage output.

Necros received about a dozen meaningful buffs in the last patch:
#1: Greater Life Force Generation
#2: Torment + Immobilize in DS
#3: Doom duration increased by 50% at point blank range (fear)
#4: Weakness condition greatly increased with necromancers maintaining high duration.
#5: Spectral Wall now owns everyone who crosses it and makes chain-stunning three times easier (fear)
#6: We received new stunbreakers and all of our bad stun breakers now have shorter cooldowns.
#7: Poison duration from the scepter auto attack was doubled.
#8: Our slow skills are now much faster.
#9: Spectral effects now remain while in Death Shroud.
#10: Signet of Spite now provides a meaningful power boost, recharges 33% quicker, and seriously messes someone up when used.
#11: Blinds now persist until the enemy actually misses their target.
#12: Vampiric now heals for more and does more damage.

And that isn’t even mentioning Power Necro buffs or Dhuumfire. It annoys me how everyone looks at the big bright flame that Necros received and assume it is the problem when Necros have been made so much better in so many different ways.

I duo-main an Engineer and a Necromancer. I tried Dhuumfire for a few rounds in sPVP, then respec out of it since it preformed exactly how I expected to: poorly. So I went back to stacking fear for terror damage, combined now with torment and the fact that I am basically better in every way as a necro.

The secret to effective condition builds isn’t burning: it is the sheer volume of conditions. Necros can layer up poison, vulnerability, weakness, bleeding, torment, cripple, chill, blind, immobilize, torment, and whatever conditions become corrupted and transferred over. Since so many cleanses in the game are limited to a few conditions, this lets necromancers maintain their main damaging condition, bleeding, long enough that they can wear a player down. And then they finish them off by chain stunning with terror, which does 50% more damage than burning while also controlling the opponent.

Engineers work in a similar but different manner. Whereas the necros have long reliable bleeds but little access to burning, Engineers have long reliable burning but little access to bleeds. Engineers have access to every condition but torment, and the condition engineer’s job is to maintain all of them to protect their burning. They receive only one effective method of causing bleeding, and that is with Shrapnel Grenade. Everything else, from the Shrapnel Trait to the Sharpshooter trait, is all a random number generator or it is something like explosive shot where it only lasts for 2 seconds. Playing as a condi engineer, whenever you fight another player you never know if you are going to overload them them with bleeds, or if you aren’t going to get any conditions on them at all (what with how hard it is to aim grenades). So you rely on your burning, and the problem is that some guardian will mess your DPS up every 5th attack, and multiple Engineers won’t make burning any more effective.

You also have to consider that, at this moment, every class is using a condition spec since so many condition specs got buffed. Heck, I went back to using conditions on my thief now that Death Blossom is cheaper, Ricochet is twice as useful, and I get the highest stacking torment with the right build. Rangers were also nerfed and now are relying more on their condition specs. This combination of people having to use conditions and people wanting to use conditions has made temporarily saturated meta where cleanses are the ultimate form of defense instead of protection.

I stopped reading once you said burning was necessary.

That’s Nemesis’ Fear build, pre patch. Grab a snickers.

Personally, I recommend making your own builds. Using other peoples builds is nice and all, but that isn’t necessarily how you want to play, or even what you personally find most effective. As good as a lot of these build videos are, I spend at least a third of my time going “Huh? Why would I want to do that?”.

When I said “deceptively more durable” I wasn’t referencing the 0/30/20/20/0 build. I was talking about the 30/30/10/0/0 build. In a toss up I wouldn’t know which one would be more survivable between last gasp and defensive condis.

Sarie.1630:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I like to show “elitists” just as much respect and tolerance as they show other players. If they kick me for something stupid, I block them then tell everyone in friends and everyone in the guild to also block them. Seriously, their prejudice needs to end.

Players enjoy playing the game in different ways. I’m not usually one for speed clears either, but you gotta respect people’s group adverts and such, and not join those who are looking for a very specific type of player.

It is a shame that certain players feel the need to be so rude though, but eh, such is life in an MMO. Gotta take the rough with the smooth.

There’s two problems with that:

#1: These players enjoy the game by dumping on other players and being as self-entitled and selfish as possible.
#2: These players don’t advertise that they are looking for specific types of players or are doing speed runs. They just form these things, grab a few PUG players to fill their gaps, then QQ about how those PUGs aren’t playing exactly how they wanted them to.

If someone makes a post on LFG saying “CoF p1 Speed LF1M Zerk Mesmer Plz”, of course I don’t join up. But when someone says something “LF1M TA F-F” in Lions Arch, then kicks players because someone got left behind watching a cutscene while everyone else ran forward without saying a word, then that person ends up on my block list even if it wasn’t me they kicked. Heck, there’s even a thread on the dungeon forum where someone was kicked from the party because they assumed the mesmer was using the wrong elite when he really wasn’t.

Although rare, that kind of crap happens often enough that people take notice. So when it happens, I respond with just as much understanding as they give: utter blacklisting.

I could’ve sworn that whirling wrath does 7-14 attacks within 2 seconds, smite does 16 attacks rapidly, symbol of retaliation does 5 attacks, and all of these can be fired off at the same time. The tactic I’ve used on thieves in sPVP is to root them with Chains of Light or Pull them with Blinding Blade, and then burst them down from there. I just chase them with the auto attack for the most part, and then if they try and camp in a field I can use smite/whirling wrath + symbol of retaliation to overpower that field easily.

Then again I’ve never faced a “good” dagger/pistol thief, so there might be something I’m missing there.

With all my tactics and out-of-the-box thinking, the primary method I use to tackle dungeons is actually really straightforward: if it is in front of me, kill it.

And I prefer this method. Sure, it can take longer than if you just skip all of the mobs. But, it can also be shorter. I’ve seen it happen time and again when someone dies, and then they have to run back to the group, but they can’t run back to the group because there’s a hundred enemies that keep cutting them down between the two. And then someone runs back to help them, all the while an elitist is whining and writhing on the floor about the whole ordeal, and those two players can’t make it past either. Eventually after I’ve made myself a sandwhich and half eaten it, that guy manages to come back after dealing with all the repair costs, and then we eventually continue on. Only for the next enemy group we skip to snag someone, kill him, and repeat the process.

You see, I play the game to do one thing: Play the bloody game. Running past all of the content and waiting for people to catch up isn’t fun. It isn’t rewarding. It complicates things almost needlessly. You are skipping the game, and not playing it. If you just kill the enemies in front of you, then get their loot, when someone dies and has to run back they don’t get interrupted by a hundred enemies that everyone else has run past. You only get the full token reward once a day, so you might as well spend an extra few minutes getting additional loot from enemies, making everyone’s life easier.

Some of the funnest times I’ve had was figuring out how to kill an inordinate amount of bandits while inside of the den on Caudeceus Manor. So many people hate that section and skip that section, lacking both the creativity to come up with a solution and the will to come up with a solution. Instead, we have to go through some ineffective bypassing maneuver that takes over an hour and then everyone quits because no one can do it.

The fact that people insist on doing these bypasses when they just make things harder half the time baffles me.

Pure damage build:
Armor: Berserker
Runes: x6 Superior Runes of the Pack
Weapons: Sword/Pistol, Shortbow
Sigils: Superior Sigil of Force/Superior Sigil of Energy, Superior Sigil of Force
Trinkets: Full Berserker
Traits: 25/30/10/0/5
Mug, Improvisation
Furious Retaliation, Critical Haste, Executioner
Master of Deception
Utilities:
Hide in Shadows, Shadow Refuge, Assassin’s Signet, Smoke Screen, Thieves Guild
Note: Utilities and traits again are not set in stone.

Overall Goal: Use the blind field from the off-hand pistol along with the sword’s auto attack to do very high damage to up to 3 enemies within range while-face tanking up to 5 enemies. In PVE the blind field is awesome, letting you fight anything that isn’t a champion or above at point blank range indefinitely. The sword’s auto attack is powerful, causing AoE Weakness on whomever you are fighting. Pistol Whip and Headshot are used to interrupt troublesome attacks before they land, and Headshot is also great for removing defiant stacks from champions. Infiltrator’s strike is used to remove conditions when necessary and also to stop really fast moving enemies. When things are too dicey, the shortbow is swappd out, which does high damage to multiple targets at range while also providing plenty of escapes, AoE poison + weakness, and the most spammable blast finisher in the game. When your opponent hits 50% health is when things get really interesting, since at this point you get fury and executioner activates, making your damage climb that much more higher. With this build, you can plow through enemies like they were nothing while making Zerker Guardians/Warriors jealous of your mystical immunity to damage. I have not used this build in PVP.

Another note: both of these builds are a bit on a budget. I can go with better sigils and runes if I had the coin for them, but I don’t.

Anyway, you see how that works? I have a plan on how to win, then I make my build based around that plan, and then once that plan is fulfilled I keep building up related things on the side to get better and better until you eventually produce a monster of a build that does scary things, like maintain 25 stacks of AoE bleed without Rare Veggie Pizza or face-tank enemies in zerker gear.

I’m looking at the OP’s build, and I"m sorry but it just looks like random crap to me. I think the mistake here is that you don’t know how to make builds. Thankfully I have a cat asleep in my lap and nothing better to do, so I’ll help out.

When making a build, ultimately you want to have a certain goal to achieve that lets you win a fight. I often call this the “win condition”. For D/D zerker thieves, their goal is to mug then backstab an opponent before they fight back. For P/D thieves, their goal is to keep at range, popping in and out of stealth while conditions wear the enemy down. For S/D thieves, their goal is to constantly blinds/stun the opponent while stealing boons and bashing them. For shortbow thieves, the goal is to spam evades and poison fields, making the thief nigh impossible to fight.

Looking at your build, you’re all over the place. Your weapon choices don’t point to any real goal, your trait choices are random at best. You don’t have enough power to do direct damage, you don’t have enough malice to do condition damage, you don’t have anything remotely close to survivability in stats, you’re using the human racial skills which are inferior to pretty much everything. The build hasn’t even pulled off a “jack of all trades” right.

So my advice is to pick something, and then go with it.

A)Condition damage or direct damage?
B)Survivability or More Damage?
C)Stealth, Evasion, or sustained heal in healing skills?
D)Defensive utilities or offensive utilities?
E)Condition cleanses, Stun Breakers, Both or Neither?

And so on, building your… build up toward an ultimate goal toward what you want to do. Now, for two examples, I have two builds on my thief that couldn’t be any more different: a carrion condi/damage thief, and a pure zerker thief. I’ll put up their builds, and how they work. Unfortunately my main build tool is down, and my backup build tool is lagging like heck, so I’ll have to freehand it:

Condition build:
Armor: Full Carrion
Runes: x6 Superior Rune of the Centaur
Weapons: Dagger/Dagger, Pistol/Nothing, all Carrion
Sigils: Suprior Sigil of Force/Superior Sigil of Agony, Superior Sigil of Force
Trinkets: Full Carrion
Traits: 25/0/15/0/30
Mug, Dagger Training
Shadow’s Embrace
Thrill of the Crime, Bountiful Theft, Ricochet
Utilities:
Hide in Shadows, Caltrops, Shadow Refuge, Roll for Initiative, Dagger Storm.
Note: utilities are not set in stone. Sometimes Bountiful Theft is replaced with Trickster in places where enemies do not have boons to steal, and sometimes Ricochet is replaced with Trickster when fighting bosses or single enemies.

Overall goal: Use bleeding damage combined with good direct damage to kill enemies. Using Death Blossom spam + caltrops I can reach 25 stacks of bleeding on a group of enemies by myself, while also avoiding a large sum of their attacks. Then, I vanish in stealth and then engage at a distance using Pistol/Dagger. The combination of Cloak and Dagger + Sneak attack allows me to stack bleeds on multiple enemies while also spamming the fastest and largest amount of projectile finishers in the game. The combination of high swiftness uptime + high vigor uptime allows me to dodge and kite extremely effectively, while I can use stealth for cleansing conditions and for offense. This build has enough power that Heartseeker and Backstab still do plenty of damage, and the dagger auto attack also does damage via sustaining poison. At 17k health, this is incredibly durable (for, you know, a thief), and is capable of bringing down people in PVP and WVW through sheer attrition alone. You can solo champions with this build.

I’ve been running minion master in tPVP for awhile, and they are alright. The biggest advantage of minions is that their autonomy makes it so when the necromancer is being controlled or disabled (which is often), their minions are still maintaining their offense. This lets you build a tanky necromancer that uses minions as a primary form of offense while making yourself nigh indestructible. The minion master build also has plenty of decent control abilities, which lets you lock down your opponents while dealing plenty of damage to them.

Outside of minion masters, I’ve found many minions to be effective at one point or another.

Flesh Golem: He’s an all around good guy. he has fairly high melee damage, and also his charge can stun a group of enemies, blowing through defiant like it was nothing. I like to use him to initiate a fight sometimes, sucking up aggro and stunning enemies while the rest of my group lays down AoEs.

Bone Minion: These guys are pretty awesome. Putrid explosion is a pretty hard hitting AoE + blast finisher that you get to use twice. While on a 20 second recharge (16 with the traits), you can fire them off frequently, providing a nice burst damage for necros. They act as miniature guided missiles: Just point them at an enemy, then fire. They can also make for a nice AoE burst when you get ambushed by something, since they’ll hang around you and work as a point blank AoE attack.

Flesh Wurm: This can be used cleverly as a transportation skill, but it is also good against champions and bosses in general. It has far range, so you can put the wurm down and he’ll do extra damage at a distance to whatever you are fighting, including the dragon champions. Then, when things get dicey, you stun break and port right out of there.

Bone Fiend: this is similar to the flesh wurm in that it is low maintenance and can be used to fight champions. it is dissimilar in that it can immobilize. But the most creative use of the bone fined is to combine it with Spectral Wall to cause confusion with his special attack. Now that spectral wall has changed, this probably isn’t an effective tactic anymore.

Shadow Fiend: Although he has the highest damage next to the flesh golem, ultimately his melee nature gets him killed. Outside of MM builds he is the least useful minion, since all he does is an occasional blind.

Blood Fiend: I’ve never really used this one myself.

You can find necromancers occasionally running around with a minion or two while not having an MM build. Personally I have a hard time taking bone minion off my bar, because the damage + blast finishers on such a short recharge is hard to replace.

I’ve seen plenty of condition builds that were 0/30/20/20/0, and 0/30/10/30/0 before. What they would do is take advantage of the vampiric traits and the crits from rabid to heal themselves as much as possible while also stacking regeneration with the staff. This did provide 200 toughness, 200 vitality, 20% boon duration, and 200 healing, so in the end it ended up being quite tanky as condition builds go.

The 0/30/20/0/20 build is the terror build, and it is deceptively more durable if not for one trait: Last Gasp. This trait, on 60 second cooldown, gives you spectral armor at half health. So basically it gives you spectral armor when you need it, breaking stuns and generating life force while under protection. It is arguably the best defensive trait a necromancr has. This is combined with an increase LF pool, and then any one of the adept major traits in that line, such as Spectral Recharge, which would allow double spectral armor while also making wall (back then it was mostly for protection) and walk more effectively. These terror builds usually achieved 100% feat duration anyway, so the extra time in spite meant very little.

Also, rampager’s is hybrid gear. The “glass cannon equivalent” is still using rabid or carrion, however it has lost the defensive stats from traits and also has lost the few defensive abilities traits had to offer. At 30/30/10/0/0, your only defense is your offense. You need to run spectral wall, and then you have 2 utility slots to go from there, and your choices are incredibly limiting.

Actually, you can use Overcharge shot while under stability and it won’t blow you back. It’s boss when you do this.

You should always use Grenadier if you are using grenades for a source of damage. It improves the effectiveness of damage, conditions, and accuracy by 50%, making it one of the most potent traits in the game. You can get away with not using grenadier if you are just using the grenades for a poison field or for the blind/chill, but grenadier still makes those 50% more effective.

Also, grenadier makes shrapnel 50% more effective, too. If anything, for a grenadier you’d want something like Shrapnel, Enhance Performance/Short Fuse/Explosive Powder, and Grenadier to top it all off. The hard part is picking a good master trait: Short fuse increases the main bleed and the condition effectiveness by 20%, but they’re already pretty fast so with all the kit swapping it might be redundant. Explosive Powder gives a straight up damage increase, but its only worthwhile on carrion builds/power builds. Enhance performance gives might for a direct increase to damage, but only works during heals, but nonetheless goes well with might stacking builds.

This trait used to be quite epic.

I say “used to be” because Elixir S was sadly nerfed, so now this skill makes you a sitting duck to conditions, and even against power builds it is an impromptu self-interrupt that can ruin your heals, your controls, or your kills, and makes you a sitting duck with no viable defensive tactics to employ during your invulnerability. It will get you killed more often than it will save you, making this skill ultimately a negative; you literally are worse off than if you had nothing.

The only use it currently has is if you are in WvW. If A: An ambush thieve ambushes you, or B: you need to get into a keep but get snared, then this trait can save you. Problem is, there are better ways to do both that don’t require 75% of your HP.

Back when it worked right, this skill was epic. I used to run a 20/0/30/20 build with turrets, using Protection Injection and Self-regulating defenses, and it was a pain to kill. When I hit 25% health, I became invulnerable, my heal + interrupt + damage recharged instantly, and I could still manage my turrets, letting me maintain and offense and heal + contribute to the fight at the same time.

Hopefully this issue will resolve itself, and here’s how:

You know how Anet is putting different servers against each other? This isn’t just so we at SoR can get free loot bags. Ultimately they’re trying to come up with an accurate ranking system that will put servers against like-strength servers. So abandoned servers will be put next to other abandoned servers, whereas WvW behemoths will have to fight other behemoths.

The problem isn’t being ignored. It just takes forever to deal with.

Vitality and Toughness offer around the same effectiveness for reducing damage. If you take half damage or have twice as much HP, the end effect is you live twice as long against direct damage. There are a couple of differences, though.

Vitality: This gives more effective HP on every class that isn’t a necromancer (up to a certain point when HP = Armor x 10), and is ablative in the sense that once that extra HP is gone it is gone for good.

Toughness: This increases the efficiency of healing overall, however conditions bypass toughness.

It is a bit of a tradeoff, and you can make a case for either one in many circumstances. To maximize effective HP, though, what you want to do is gain vitality until your HP is roughly equal to your armor rating, and then increase them at the same rate. For long fights in PVE, however it is arguably better to just stack a whole lot of toughness, so your heals are overall better.

I suppose the only issue with saying that players should stack vitality to deal with conditions is that players already do that. Much like how direct damage isn’t shut down completely by toughness, conditions aren’t shut down by vitality. They end up doing less damage as an overall percentage of your health, but in an objective manner they’re just doing the same damage against a bigger HP pool. This is important when you compare it to another form of survival: healing. Conditions still do the same damage relative to the amount you heal, so overall your extra health really amounts to just having an extra 8 seconds before you’re in the same boat as everyone else.

So, assuming that you don’t use Melandru Runes or Hoelbrak runes to reduce condition duration, the idea of incredible condition resistance is a bad one. If you give classes condition resistance, then it isn’t fair to the classes who don’t get it. Then condition builds complain that there is a way to objectively shut them down permanently with no counters, so then A-net throws in counters to condition resistance, and the cycle continues endlessly.

We already have cleanses, evasion, blocking, and stuns. Just use those to fight condition users, instead of stacking protection and going “hah lol you can’t hurt me!!!1111!one1!1”

Attack rapidly with ranged weapons.

Seriously, the blind field from the off-hand pistol is a very small field, and it works only once every 2 seconds. If you are meleeing them, you can probably attack 3 to 4 times in those 2 seconds with the auto attack alone, so you should be able to just overpower it.

But the best option is to not stand in the blind field. They pop it, you move and then continue attacking.

Out of the classes I play, the Engineer is always the one that keeps getting hit the hardest. Sure, we get some buffs to skills that no one uses because frankly no one cares, but time and time again we end up getting hit with a nerf that strikes us at the heart of where we were powerful before. It happened twice in this most recent patch:

Elixir R, our best stun breaker, was nerfed into oblivion. It is now useless as anything but a delayed toolbelt rez.
Static Shield lost the ability to counterattack while defending and reduced its stun, making the shield nothing more than an ineffective stall tactic and yet another temporary block, which the engineer already has a few of.

And before that, we had Elixir S nerfed so we lost access to all of our utilities in that period of time. Before that, we lost in-game effectiveness from the proliferation of boon hate. Before that, we had our condition damage nerfed with a new change to incendiary powder that made it less effective. Before that, we had Kit Refinement nerfed into the ground, killing our most effective build at that time. Before that, our grenade direct damage was nerfed after the introduction of sigils on to our kits (finally). Note: these events may not necessarily be in order.

Playing as an engineer has been a continual up-hill battle. It is almost guaranteed that the strategies that you used are going to end up nerfed into the ground with every new patch, and along with that some skills are going to receive nigh meaningless buffs. The balancing strategy Arenanet has employed for engineers has basically been “Nerf the top tier engineer builds, buff useless stuff no one uses, let people figure out some new strategy for engineers that works, then nerf that, too”. Couple that with debilitating bugs that crop up in every patch, and we engineers end up dreading patch day each month. All because their design philosophy in the game is that Engineers shouldn’t do damage, even though damage is king in the game.

I can’t speak for Elemementalists and Rangers because I don’t play them. But I can speak for Engineers, and the fact that we have to stack 25 might in order to play at the effectiveness that other classes play at is a clear indicator of how messed up we are.

I like to show “elitists” just as much respect and tolerance as they show other players. If they kick me for something stupid, I block them then tell everyone in friends and everyone in the guild to also block them. Seriously, their prejudice needs to end.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

Some of the other elites can be just as deadly in wvw – Lich, Plague, Tornado, even supply Crate used in combination with a healing turret can be very solid. The difference comes in 1 Vs 1 situations.

I myself play 5 classes (engi, necro, thief, mesmer, guardian in that order) and have played elementalist for awhile, too. For half of those classes, the hard part is getting an elite that actually does something.

Engineer: You only have one elite to really use, and that is supply crate. Mortar is lolbad in every circumstance except defending towers in WvW, and even then it is still pretty bad. It roots you, has buggy shots, and does inferior damage + range to grenades. Elixir X can transform you into a brute or a tornao, and neither of those are really effective. The brute has crappy skills, and you’ll end up doing the most damage with the auto attack (and the damage isn’t even that high), and with the tornado you’ll end up chasing somone around while they kite/immobilize and shoot you. It is a stall tactic and little more, and even then it only works half the time. Elixir X can be useful underwater, though. And finally you have the supply crate, which is an AoE stun + blast finisher that drops two turrets and some med kits. The med kit heals are useful, but unless traited the turrets melt in an instant.

Necromancer: Has some really good elites. The problem is they are all build specific. Plague form is only really effective on condition builds, or else it is a cheap stalling tactic that accomplishes very little other than annoying people and possibly as blind support for a team. Lich form does great damage with the auto attack, but the other 4 skills are less than stellar, and you’ll need to be a power build to take advantage of Lich Form. Flesh Golem does good damage and works as a cone knockdown, however without minion traits it dies very quickly and does even less damage.

Guardian: All of the elites are really difficult to use. Renewed Focus just gives invulnerability and recharges your virtues, so basically all it does is let you spam virtues, then you’re invulnerable for 2 seconds. The tome’s are mostly support. The tome of Wrath does AoE burning, so it only does good damage if you run conditions (which no guardian does). It has short duration cripple + weakness, 5 stacks of might in a cone, very limited AoE quickness and fury, and the longest channel AoE stun I’ve ever seen (but thankfully it hits hard). Tome of Courage basically heals, and gives defensive buffs in the same manner. They make for alright support, but no one is going to look at them and go “Oh wow that is so strong!”, and they definitely pale in comparison to Time Warp.

Thief: Like necromancers, they have good elites but suffer from build specific syndrome. Basilisk venom is basically a fancy stun, and the best part is the short recharge. It’s good for ambushes, but unless you are running an ambush set it doesn’t contribute much. Dagger storm is a good stalling move, causing plenty of AoE bleeds and reflecting projectiles, but if you aren’t running a condition spec it is basically a stall tactic that lets people run up and melee those uber squishy and no-longer-invisible thieves. Thieves guild is great for additional offense and pressure, and is arguably one of the best elites in the game due to the chaos they can wreak while the thief pops away in stealth to backstab. They can be used in any build, however they do have a problem in that the thieves that were summoned are incredibly squishy, having only 8k health each, they’ll be melted pretty quickly by AoEs and conditions.

Someone else covered the elementalist elites. For my Engineer and my Guardian I wish I had elites that were much stronger than what I have. For my Necromancer and my Thief I wish I had elites that were more versatile. On my mesmer… I’m good.

colesy.8490:

Melee damage > range damage so stop wasting your time defending ranged weapons. If they’re absolutely necessary or melee is extremely disadvantageous (e.g. taking out the first tentacle at Jade Maw, nobody can be bothered fighting through the trash) then you have them in your inventory, but every other time, full melee.

Considering that a large amount of content in the game is, indeed, extremely disadvantageous to melee, the point stands firm. It is also advantageous to swap weapons in battle, either opening with or swapping to use smite while the GS or Hammer is on cooldown.

colesy.8490:

I know right, next time I run COF or COE I’m gonna start bringing down Alpha, Effigy and Slave Driver with my scepter because it does amazing DPS. 25k whirling wraths? Nah, I think i’ll just spam autoattack on my scepter with the occasional smite when it’s off cooldown.

Whirling Wrath: 1,251 damage, 10 second cooldown. If all projectiles hit, it is 1551 tooltip damage.
Smite: 1665 damage, 6 second cooldown. Shorter activation time

You’re thrusting your own ignorance into the debate as a form of an argument. It’s not an effective tactic. The fact that you assume I’m saying you should exclusively use the scepter in all circumstances speaks more about your intelligence than it does mine.

Well, the good news is that in WvW I once chain-feared a thief for 8 seconds of terror, doing 1350 damage per second each time, doing 10K damage to him.

It’s all good.

And with that, I just don’t take the trait, period. Now, while the terror trait didn’t change, Necromancers have two better tools to inflict terror now: Doom was buffed by 50%, and Spectral Wall was also buffed 1000%.

Doom: Now inflicts 1.5 seconds of fear. For no condition duration, this has the potential to double the terror damage done. For 50% condition duration, it does 50% more damage, and for 100% condition duration it does 25% damage. It is pretty powerful all things considered.

Spectral Wall: this area denial + protection skill can hit the target multiple times with fear, both depending on tactics as well as how smart your opponent is. I’ve seen it used to chain fear 3 times on a single target once (doom + wall + spectral grasp + running in front of the enemy = 3 collisions with the wall), and this can also be used on groups of enemies, both PVE and Melee Trains in WvW. This move itself nearly changed the meta with Terror, because now you can reliably stack fear.

Prior to Spectral Wall, you had 2 or 3 fears at most. You used Reaper’s Mark (2 seconds), then used Doom (2 second), and that was it. Maybe you made Reaper’s mark when reviving someone, and maybe you would cause AoE fear when you were stunned (90 second cooldown), but that was it. Now with wall, you get Doom (3 seconds) + Wall (2 seconds) + Spectral Grasp (2 seconds w/ wall) + Reaper’s Mark (2 seconds) + wall again (2 seconds), and if they stun you then Reaper’s Protection (4 seconds). That is 11 or 15 seconds of fear, coming to that many ticks of Terror.

But is this nerf worthy? I’m not so sure. For one, Spectral Wall requires great positioning, and a good player can avoid many of the chain stuns quite effectively simply by not standing between the necro and the wall. Second, stability kills the whole combo and makes the user immune to fear. Third, stun breakers can interrupt the combo and kill the fear damage immediately. Fourth, without any stability, a necromancer can easily be counter-controlled as soon as that wall is up, forcing them out of position and/or causing them to burn their own stun breaker. Fifth, all of the fear skills can be dodged or blocked except for Reaper’s mark, which can’t be blocked.

The combos are far from incounterable, the damage can be easily negated, and the positioning can be interrupted quite easily. All this is on a class with no blocks, no vigor, no stability, and little to no movement skills. The fact is that by knowing how to fight necromancers while also bringing good condition cleanse and a stun breaker / stability, the terrormancer can be defeated. The biggest issue right now is that the meta hasn’t adjusted yet, so players aren’t bringing good condition cleanses or stability.

I find a lot of this QQ to be largely unfounded. Then again, Anet also keeps nerfing engineers, who were the go-to condition class for awhile, and for understandable reasons, too. Engineers could single-handedly stack 25 stacks of might while rapidly applying Bleeds, Burns, Poison, Chill, Blind, Vulnerability, and with spots of confusion, cripple, weakness, and immobilization, and all of this at 1500 range in an AoE. So then engineers got their burning nerfed, substantially more boon hate put into the game, their stun breakers nerfed, their evades and their blocks nerfed, and now we aren’t top tier anymore.

Anyway, I’d argue that Dhuumfire isn’t that powerful at all, and on several conditions:

#1: To make use of dhuumire you have to make the condition equivalent of a glass cannon build. You have to go 30 into spite, and you have to have enough precision for it to proc reliably. This is powerful and all, but it decreases the necromancer’s statistical defense (toughness + vitality), and that is the only defense necromancer’s have.

#2: Other classes constantly override your burning. Warriors, Engineers, Guardians, Rangers, Mesmers, and Elementalists all do burning. Eles and Guardians do a lot of unintentional burning, and this will override the burning that Dhuumfire does. Due to the luck of the draw, this can make Dhuumfire’s proc absolutely worthless from time to time (“time” being every 5th attack by Guardians). I’d prefer it if they changed Dhuumfire to instead inflict 5 stacks of confusion for 4 seconds, or 5 stacks of torment for 4 seconds, because then every class and their grandmother won’t override the trait.

#3: Due to the recharge and single target nature of the proc, it makes the proc fairly weak from an AoE standpoint. In PVE this is pretty big, but it happens in tPVP as well. Rangers always have a pet who can end up taking the proc, Elementalists have summons that can take the proc, Mesmers spam so many clones and phantasms that they’ll take the proc, and there’s also the rare minion master necro who’s minions can take the proc as well, and thieves have ambush + thieves guild that can also absorb the proc for them. This isn’t including guardian spirit weapons or ranger spirits (those can be attacked, right?). Put them together and there’s a high likelyhood that Dhuumfire will never hit anything meaningful.

I run condi necro in PVE sometimes. They can be epic when done right. A few things to note:

#1: Run carrion, not rabid. Carrion gives you power, which does more damage than rabid’s precision. Necros don’t have good on-critical traits to take advantage of crits, so just go with carrion to get more power. Both provide the same amount of survivability for complicated mathematical reasons I’ve explained elsewhere.

#2: Use epidemic. This is the strongest skill a condition necro can have in PVE, and it is one of the best skills in the game. It can take everyone’s conditions, and spread them about everywhere. But, it uses your condition damage, so if you have 1800+ condition damage you can do a ton of damage with conditions.

#3: Your best condition damage comes in an AoE. Epidemic is great, but also you have Scepter skill #2 (grasping dead), daggers kill #5 (enfeebling blood), and staff skill #2 (mark of blood). For AoE conditions in general, the staff does it better than the scepter/dagger combined, however scepter/dagger can be better if you use epidemic.

#4: You’ll want 100% bleed duration, and as high condition duration as possible in PVE. This is because epidemic is more powerful with longer lasting conditions. There are a couple of ways of doing this, but for now, I will assume you use Rare Veggie Pizza (40%) + Hemophilia (20% bleed). This is using that pure condition build you listed. To get the last 40%, there’s a couple of ways to do it:

A) Use Giver’s Scepter + Giver’s Dagger, both with Superior Sigil of Agony. This cuts condition damage by quite a bit, but it does give you long condition duration. Also, this doesn’t work with the staff, who only gets you to 80% bleed duration.

B) Use 2x Superior Runes of the afflicted, 2x Superior Runes of the Krait, and 2x Superior rune of the Centaur. This will give you up to 45% extra bleed duration, putting you at 100%. This is better than the above since it will give you full weapon stats and frees up the Sigils.

C) Use x2 of any of the runes in B, and x4 Superior Rune of the Mad KIng. This gives you 40% bleed duration, and also more power. However, this is quite expensive.

D)I personally use x3 Runes of the Afflicted, and x3 Runes of the Krait. This only gives 30% bleed duration, but it gives a lot more condition damage than the above. In your build, you can just put a Superior Sigil of Agony somewhere and get 100% duration.

Now, currently the build that a lot of people use for PVE conditions is 30/30/10/0/0. With that, they use the trait Dhuumire to get burning, Terror to get damage on fear, and also either Greater Marks or Staff Mastery. For PVE go Staff Mastery, since the enemies aren’t that hard to hit with marks. With Dhuumfire, you only need a crit rate at around 25%, so a few rabid or rampager pieces of gear will get you that high.

I do not know if terror goes through defiant. I assume it doesn’t, however terror is still good in PVE. This is because Spectral Wall now causes fear to enemies who cross it. In PVE enemies are stupid, so they’ll keep running into the wall over and over again, getting a lot of terror damage.

I’ve found the mesmer elites to be some of the best out there. They aren’t build specific, and they can provide a ton of damage and utility when done right.

Time warp: AoE haste + Ethereal field for 10 seconds. Basically this is a 50% increase to the DPS of the people inside o fit, making it the most powerful boon in the game. The ethereal field nature lets it cause confusion and chaos armor while inside of it as well. While alone it is only meh, since it is a 10 second haste on yourself. But in a group, it is absolutely devastating.

Moa Morph: In PVE this doesn’t do much worth talking about. In PVP it is the single strongest control in the game. In a tPVP situation it is very rare for me to ever survive a Moa morph, since without any defenses or offenses this lets the opponent team focus me down and kill me very quickly.

Mass Invisibility: It makes for a nice panic button + reset button on fight, but its real use is in WvW, where it can give a small army, in combination with veil, enough stealth to run to the middle of an opposing force and cut loose.

Mesmer elites are situational, but they are extremely powerful and largely build independent. Just think about the poor engineers who have to use supply crate because everything else sucks, or the poor Guardians who’s elite only gives then 2 seconds of invulnerability, Elementalists who get dumb pet or have to conjure a weapon for themselves to use.

Empowering might grants 12 stacks of might, correct? That comes to 35 × 12 = 420 additional power and condition damage. How much that improves DPS depends on the builds of your teammates.

If they’re doing something like running rabid gear, their power will increase from 916 to 1336, giving them a 46% increase in direct damage. Their condition damage will go from around 1400 to 1820, giving them a 19% increase in bleed damage. If they are running around in zerker gear, their power goes from 2400 to 2820 (or so. Build specific zerkers vary greatly here), giving them an 18% increase in damage.

The real question is, does staying in GS do more damage than 18% x 5 players DPS + staff damage. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t, so I’d say boon away.

I’ve been using shrapnel over incendiary powder for awhile on all of my grenadier builds, and I don’t plan to make that change any time soon. This is largely a build choice, and done for several reasons:

#1: I prefer carrion to rabid, and IP needs crits to really be effective. Shrapnel does not. This is mostly for sPVP, since in PVE and WvW I use a carrion/rabid mix with zerker thrown in, and with Elixir B’s fury I achieve a 50% crit rate very easily.

#2: Nearly every build I make with grenades has alternative methods of applying burns. When using pistol/pistol, pistol #4 provides a long duration cone burn by itself. In sPVP and tPVP, post-bug fix rocket turret provides a near permanent AoE burn, and combined with the supply crate it does apply a permanent AoE burn. In PVE I’ll also run bomb kit alongside of the grenade kit, and this has another AoE burn on a short recharge. Add all of these together, and Incendiary Powder becomes redundant and relatively ineffective very quickly.

In contrast, the engineer does not have many alternate good sources for bleeding. There’s the 30% chance on crits, the pistol auto attack (which sucks for bleeds), the Elixir Gun auto attack (which hits only one target), the rifle turret (which also kind of sucks at it), and then grenade #2. Now, while grenade #2 is quite awesome, it is really nice to have other grenade skills that cause bleed as well.

If you aren’t running grenadier (shrapnel with the bomb kit kind of sucks), or you are running grenadier but don’t have any alternate sources of burning going, then incendiary powder is great for that build. But if you are running a grenadier build, I’d highly recommend using Shrapnel and going with one of the many great sources for permanent burn that the engineer has.

Turrets were pretty useful until the new bugs up and ruined them. But assuming the bugs get fixed, then turrets would be useful again. Nothing like long-range AoE permanent burning combined with potent control effects, easily stackable blast finishers, and potential interrupts in every other skill slot. I’ll address many of the complaints:

#1: Turrets are not mobile. This isn’t much of an issue, since sPVP is about defending and capturing points, and those points don’t move either. The tradeoff with turrets being immobile is that they are autonomous and long lasting, capable of persisting and fighting in areas that an engineer isn’t even in. Phantasms die when their target does, Necro minions only follow around and attack their master’s target. But turrets can hold a point and even support players who don’t have turrets.

#2: Turrets die to AoEs. This could be a problem if you throw all of your turrets into one spot. However, when capturing a point you can put turrets into far, hard to reach places while still having them preform effectively with their long range attacks. Whenever I use turrets, I’ll commonly put them on top of buildings or on bridges in the distance, making it so the only way to damage a turret is to go out of your way to attack that turret. Also an interesting bit of trivia: turrets that are mobile and follow the player around would be a lot more susceptible to AoEs. Turrets are also immune to condition damage, which means that only direct damage can kill them.

Removing hot join doesn’t encourage players to learn the game. It only encourages players to already know how to play the game, and discourages the ones who don’t without teaching tools. Unless you use a cookie cutter build with a cookie cutter playstyle, other people don’t want you on their team because you’ll be dragging their team down. There is no room for experimentation, learning new rotations and skill usage, generalized practice in using new layouts or equipment. All that would exist is tournaments, and all that would be is elitists being elite and only letting other elitists play the way they want them to play.

I like to hotjoin regularly to try out new things and get the hang of classes I haven’t played in awhile without having to deal with some elitist whining about how I’m not running a bunker guardian when they need one.

Warriors could use torment, too.

When doing comparisons and analysis and arguments, I often find myself using the tooltip information for comparing things. There are a couple of problems in doing this, though.

Issue 1: Most people have no idea where the information from the tooltip comes from. Unless you dig around the wiki for awhile, you’ll never know the tooltip arbitrarily assumes 2600 armor for your current power setting, that tooltips ignore condition specific boosts to their condition duration, or that trait specific increases to damage also aren’t displayed.

Issue 2: On activation time and recharge time, the tooltips are flat out wrong. This makes nearly every evaluation have to result to some outside timing test done by someone else, and if someone doesn’t have the necessary tools they can’t figure the timing out themselves. There are several factors that contribute to the attack rate of each skill:

A)Delay in activation. This is what is currently displayed in the tooltip, and is the time that passes before the skill can start its animation.
B)The animation. This eats up the majority of skill time, and it is completely ignored when balancing the skill. This is the biggest cause for dis-balance in the game right now, causing the auto attacks of different weapons to be only half as effective as other weapons due to the fact that their unlisted animations are twice as long.
B sub): Channel time. This is for long duration skills that last several seconds and can be interrupted mid-action, and this closely resembles the animation time of those skills.
C): Aftercast. This is another portion of animation time that, after skill usage, is the delay in time before a player can preform another action after using a particular skill. Now, the recharge time usually kicks in before aftercast, but not always. The aftercast itself isn’t displayed and is a complete unknown.
D): Server tick delay After the aftercast animation is done, the game needs to wait until the next complete server game tick before it will process information and continue with actions. This is a very small amount of time, usually less than 1/5th of a second in time, but nonetheless it adds to overall skill usage rate of the player. This information isn’t displayed, but to be fair most people don’t realize this exists. Designers included.

Issue #2 Is a big one, since Issue #1 can be dealt with mathematically. While the toolbar tooltip might not have enough space to include everything, the hero panel definitely has enough room to put in as much information on any skill as possible. It is enough to fill up an entire screen full of information, so we should definitely do that.

For the tooltip on the skill bar:

#1: Condition duration should be accurately displayed, taking into account condition specific boosts to that condition.
#2: Permanent bonuses to weapons should be factored into their tooltips. If you have yourself specced to do 5% more damage while wielding a greatsword, then greatsword attacks should reflect that 5% increase.
#3: Temporary boosts and condition specific boosts should not be reflected in tooltip damage. If you only do something like 5% more damage to bleeding targets, this should not befactored in.
#4: The direct damage of tool tips should be displayed assuming 2000 armor, and not 2600 armor like currently. To be blunt, you rarely ever see 2600 armor. It never appears in PVE, and it is rare to find in PVP as well. 2000 armor is about the armor rating of a medium-armored player with no additional boosts (1980), and this reflects the real damage done more accurately

On the hero panel, the following should be changed:

#1: All skills should now display the following information:
A)Activation delay (or Pre-cast time). Currently, this information is displayed.
B)Animation time. This is currently not displayed.
C)Aftercast delay. This is currently not displayed.
D)Recharge time. This is currently displayed.
E)Channel time when appropriate. This is currently displayed.

Server tick delay is just something devs have to consider when balancing. With all of this information available, it’ll make players more readily understand their damage output, while also making it much easier for players to critique the skills themselves. With this in mind, players can then more meaningfully contribute to the balancing of classes in the game, making the workload of the devs lighter in this regard.

From my experience, different enemies have different aggro priorities. Some prioritize players with low HP. Some with high toughness. Some with DPS. Some with low HP and Low toughness.

Seems like you drew the short stick on the agro scale.

Honestly, it sounds like you ended up with a team that was incredibly intolerant of failure or n00bs or ch00by fr00bs or whatever people hate these days, and singled out you as the cause of their problems because they thought you weren’t using time warp.

Think about it: kicked for not using timewarp. Even when you were, you have to remember that entitled elitists are themselves rarely good at the game or even competent.

Personally I’m highly tolerant of different tactics. My experience with dungeons has been made up almost solely of pugs, and I don’t have nearly the problems all of you guys complain about. Every once in awhile I’d get a group that I would swear was incompetent, but on the flip side I’d get groups that also effortlessly plow through the dungeons like they were nothing. With that said, I don’t discriminate against individual tactics, build choices, or playstyle with only one exception to the clause: that the player is actively trying to bring down the team on purpose.

I find the idea of stacking on Mai to be idiotic. Her attacks hit for high damage an AoE. A far better strategy is to just use scorpion wire or spectral grasp or magnet pull or Magnetic Shield or Blinding Blade or Into the Void to pull Mai into the lightning fields when they spawn. As long as the group is competent enough to bring down her defiant stacks or you have a thief with an off-hand pistol, it is really easy to do.

I find that so many people have complained about scepter guardians, but never bothered to actually check the damage that scepter guardians are putting out. Lets look at their 3 skills:

Orb of Wrath: 224 damage, 1/4 second channel. This skill is undoubtedly one of the hardest hitting ranged auto attacks in the game. It is very quick to fire, has 1200 range, and has a high damage for its class of ranged weaponry. Compare it to other ranged weapons of pretty much every class

Warrior Longbow: 212 damage, takes longer to fire
Warrior Rifle: 155 damage (+ 255 bleed, but requires condition damage), takes longer to fire. Arguably better in condition builds.
Thief Shortbow: 185 Damage (x 3), takes longer to fire. Arguably better against groups.
Thief pistol: 134 damage (+ 170 bleed, but requires condition damage).
Ranger Longbow: up to 317 damage at max range, takes longer to fire.
Ranger Shortbow: 134 damage (+ 128 bleeding, but requires condition damage), arguably better due to being faster.
Mesmer Greatsword: 348 at max range, but takes twice as long to activate.
Mesmer Scepter: 168-168-252 combo, and slower than the guardian’s attack rate.
Engineer Pistol: 118 Damage (+85 bleed), slower than guardian’s attack, but arguably better in large tightly packed groups.
Engineer Rifle: 251 damage. Objectively better overall.
Necromancer Staff: 246 damage, but takes longer to fire.
Necromancer Axe: 236 damage, but takes longer to fire
Necromancer Scepter: 118 + 170 bleed x 2 – 168 + 336 poison. Slower, and only better on condition builds.

So, in the end, Orb of Wrath is a fast and high damaging attack with very few attacks that are objectively better (coughHipShotcough). You’ll notice I didn’t factor in the elementalist attacks, because there’s, like, 8 of them that are used in varying rotation. The condition attacks can arguably do more damage, so long as your opponent doesn’t cleanse and/or the target doesn’t reach the condition cap. Considering this is about dungeons, the main limitation is the condition cap. Now, we move on to the next big hitter:

Smite: 1665 damage, 1200 range, 6 second recharge, 1/4th second delay time. This attack has the highest single target DPS in the game. On its own it does the same damage as 100 blades sans the final hit, but it also has a short cast time so you can keep auto attacking while smite keeps hitting the same area. It’s recharge of only 6 seconds, meaning that smite can be fired off rapidly. All in all, this makes smite add a ton to the total DPS of the guardian when used in conjunction with other skills, and by itself it has one of the highest DPS in the game.

Chains of Light: Single target immobilize that applies 3 stacks of vulnerability. It’s nothing special, but a single target immobilize is all around useful.

The only legitimate complaint I can have about the hard hitting + far range scepter is that it is largely single target. There are better options for groups of enemies. Of course, there is a place for single target damage, too. Last I checked, most players just run past all of the enemies in the dungeon to get the bosses anyway, so against the bosses this weapon is great. You can even use it in combination with different off-hands depending on what you want to do as a guardian.

Remove: target cap on damaging AoEs.

I want to hit a million people with my marks, plz!

I said it before, and I’ll say it again. The hate for conditions now is largely based on circumstance and perception. With necros buffed and a new condition, everyone is playing around with these conditions. This means there are a lot of conditions flying about, and because of that you are more likely to take notice. Direct damage also doesn’t have nearly as clear of an indicator, showing cause of death from individual skills whereas condition damage comes just from “bleeding” with no indication as to where it came from.

The whole meta has yet to adjust, too. So many players have spent their time learning to stack protection and toughness that they don’t heavily focus on condition cleanses. So, I leave you guys with a list of L2P

1)Attacks have to hit you before you can get conditions. Learn to dodge, block, blind, and stun in response.
2)Conditions can be cleansed away, and nearly every class has multiple cleansing options. If conditions are too much of a problem, then learn to bring more cleanse.
3)There is nothing wrong with stacking vitality over toughness, or investing in something other than pure DPS or pure Bunker.
4)Recognize that it is possible to be killed by direct damage/condition damage, and that you will die from either of these frequently. It is nigh impossible to make a build that is immune to everything.
5)Direct damage does more damage and does it quicker. Direct damage also benefits from all of those “increase damage by 20% when enemy is under half health” kind of things, causing it to grow geometrically and very quickly. Direct damage builds are not dead.

Seriously. I logged on to my guardian the other day, and without changing his build from months ago, went to hotjoin and killed people just by chasing them around with the auto attack, and conditions weren’t that big of a problem. Sad part was, this was an old spirit weapons build I had (30/20/0/0/20), which can probably be made better nowadays.

I still get controlled into oblivion while on my Necro. The advantage is that now I can do damage while not controlled.

I’d advise against splitting the skills up too much. Skill dissonance is what killed PVP in City of Heroes many years ago.

Honestly I think that while Zhaitan may have information, he might not be very smart. There’s a big difference between intelligence and knowledge, and being a gigantic undead beast monster he probably lacked the former. His response to most things was to throw undead at it, and the more intelligent enemies under his command tended to operate on an individual level.

We also have to think about what is meant by “powerful”. Sure, they can raise a nation from the ocean and tear a crystal scar in the desert, but these environmental effects might have no real use when fighting an army of airships. Given the right circumstances, a mouse can kill man, so the dragons face a much similar circumstance.

It is also safe to argue that Zhaitan is the weakest of the elder dragons. There are several severe limitations to his powers:

#1: His body is made up of the rotted bones of dead dragons, which can’t be too difficult to damage.
#2: A lot of his power was drained through bloodstone lore stuff that happened before.
#3: He spent a lot of energy raising orr.
#4: He can only corrupt the dead, which is the most difficult form of corruption to use against a besieging army.

Though I do agree that the fight with him was completely lacklustr. Hopefully Anet has learned from their mistakes, and with the next dragon we deal with will put up more of an engaging fight. I’d recommend using something like this as a reference material:

I like the orr events myself. There’s something that is just awesome about plowing through hundreds of nameless undead all at once.

Of course, with DR I get nothing but junk skulls half-way through any event chain, with ever greater difficulty it becomes harder to complete the events, with ever decreasing rewards I don’t get nearly as much bang for my buck, and with fewer players it is harder to get people together to do things.

I can understand any one of those things I listed if done by themselves. They work as a solution to “people just grind events in orr all day”:

A)Put in a diminishing return so people will go do something else (least popular option, since it just arbitrarily limits playstyle)
B)Make the events give less rewards because they are easy
C)Make the events much harder so they’re worth the reward.
D)Make the events less frequent so people go do other things.

But all at once? It just kills the zone needlessly.

I alternate between the two. I still haven’t decided what is better.

Power Necro: very high single target damage combined with piercing damage an some AoE.
Condi Necro: Slower but overall really high AoE damage, and more durable.