Guild Wars 2

I’ve seen abominations get dazed while auto attacking them on a D/D thief. Its just something that happens from time to time. I’m not sure why.

I’m not sure what the point of all these numbers are. Is there a goal here, or is this thread just to publicly chart down your musings and exploration on the matter?

I haven’t played a guardian in awhile, but in sPVP they are always a tough fight whenever I face one. This is mostly because I use things like turrets and minions and phantasms, which dole out damage for me since I lack in the skill department. Heck, last time I played a guardian I used spirit weapons. Anyway, hard part about guardians has always been that their AoEs slaughter my turrets and minions, and once they are all on cooldown the guardian is much bulkier and does more damage than every other class I have. It doesn’t help that I like to use condition builds, and most guardians are lolwutconditions. I’m not sure about a lack of condition pressure, though. Not many guardians capitalize on it, but there is something to be said about having an opponent who is permanently on fire.

I definitely have to disagree about disengaging. I once spent half an hour chasing a guardian who was running in short circles because me and the 2 other guys chasing him could never catch him. He kept using warding skills to stop us, the greatsword leap to jump distances we couldn’t, so much stability that we couldn’t control him, so much condition removal we could never chill him, and also permanent swiftness.

Though I do see the OP’s point, though. A-nets balancing method of whack-a-mole has been continually hitting the places where the guardian is the strongest. Boon hate existed before in limited quantities, but now it is in full swing. It is so much that Engineers, another other class that received almost no boon removal, is getting this in their elixirs.

There was a time when condition cleansing meant quite a bit more than it does now. But lately it seems like every class I fight has oodles and oodles of condition removal. I main Engineer and Necromancer the most, and even with their condition pressure I find my opponents just shrugging off everything I apply to them. But hey, at least I can pwn warriors real hard with it.

Retaliation was originally boss in WvW, and even in sPVP when a guardian could keep it up for a long duration. But then they nerfed the duration, and then they nerved the damage in WvW, and guardians are left without anything to do here, either.

With all of their defensive skills, Guardians used to be able to bunker extremely well. But thanks to boon removal, their survivability was cut substantially. Now, engineers and elementalists are the new bunkers, since they have just as many defensive abilities. Engineers get 50% more HP to start with, too.

So now I do ask myself what a Guardian’s role is supposed to be. They don’t have super high burst damage, retaliation does very little nowadays, they aren’t superb at bunkering anymore, and most builds handle their own conditions quite well. Guardians have decent controls skills, decent healing, decent AoE damage, but aren’t king in any of those. The only thing I can really think of is support specs that use things like shouts and wall of reflection to provide support and defense for other players. It seems that in all of our clamoring over the revealed debuff and bunker elementalists, the Guardian has slowly fallen into the back line.

I’m not sure how to fix it, though. As much as I like the fact that Necromancers are getting burning, I don’t like that necromancers are getting burning. A big complaint, and a somewhat valid complaint, is that classes and combat in the game are homogenized: everyone can do everything that everyone else can do. Want to apply conditions really well? Then your class of choice is anything but Guardian and Warrior. Want to clean conditions like they’re nothing? Well, that is every class but warrior. Want to be incredibly evasive and really frustrating to fight? Well, that’s any class that isn’t a necromancer. Want to have a bunch of summonable minions that fight alongside of you? Well, that’s any class but Warriors. Want to remove a bunch of boons? Your choices are theives, mesmers, necromancers, and soon engineers. Want a ton of control effects? Well, that is pretty much anyone who isn’t a ranger.

The worst part is the classes are getting more homogenized. The solution to this whole “Class A can do so and so but Class B can’t” seems to be to give Class B what Class A has. So to fix this problem, what exactly should be done with guardians? Should they make it so they remove a boon every 5 seconds with burn, so that Guardians can remove boons like all the other classes that remove a boon? Should they make it so sword attacks cause bleeding, so the guardian can be like every other condition spec? Should they make it so guardians get haste and can do insane burst damage, as it is with every class not a necromancr? Though it is true that if every class had everything we would be balanced. It is also true that it would be boring.

I wouldn’t mind a melee weapon option for Engineers, even if it is the two-handed hammer. I tried using the tool kit as a melee option, but the #1 skill sucks pretty bad. The bomb kit can be pretty cool, but it takes forever and enemies just run out of range. Mostly I just throw grenades point blank for my “melee” damage.

I think the big thing people are overlooking is that, if engineers had a dedicated melee weapon, they still wouldn’t be kitten. With the elixir gun, flamethrower, and grenade kit engineers have plenty of ranged options to go with. By adding the melee weapons, we open a lot of new specs for the engineer, who can use kits for maintaining ranged offense instead of kits for melee damage.

Danicco.3568:

With the caveat that all players are using the same weapon.

Considering that we are comparing damage output inside of a single class with different equipment sets, this is not an issue. Each weapon has a listed attack power and each skill has a coefficient, however tooltip damage already takes this into account. The skills, therefore, are judged based on their own merit, which operates independent of power. They can be considered constant.

Danicco.3568:

That only works if you assume that Power is added to final damage.
Wiki has the formula for damage which is pretty accurate, Power is multiplied by Weapon Strength and a Skill Coefficient (that’s why different skills growth differently as you invest more Power), divided by the target’s Armor.

So even if you double your Power, it doesn’t mean you’ll deal twice the damage.

The entire damage formula is multiplication, so it abides by the distributive property of mathematics. If power were “added”, then it wouldn’t abide by this property. It also isn’t added at the end, either. I demonstrated two examples of how to calculate an overall damage ratio, and the power ratio is only the first step. To demonstrate the distributive property, lets look at the formula

Damage = Power x Weapon X skill coefficient / Armor

We can assume that weapon strength, skill coefficient, and armor are constant, since doing otherwise complicates things needlessly. Why would anyone want to compare their damage by arbitrarily switching the weapon, or the skill used, or which enemy they are targeting? So, with that, we can reduce those three variables to a constant for comparison: C.

Damage = Power x C

Now, if we were to pick any value of power, and twice that value, we can divide them to find out how much bigger one is than the other. For example, lets choose 3 and 6

Damage = 3Power x C
Damage = 6Power x C

6Power x C / (3 Power X C) = 6 / 3 = 2

So doubling power will always double the damage output. Now, if you say “but if I change the weapons used…” then you are not doubling power. You are doing multiple things that have a much bigger impact overall on the build than just doubling power, both statistical and non. After all of that, doubled power will still double the damage done with these new weapons when compared to how much damage those new weapons would do without power.

The effective power used on that calculator doesn’t even account for weapon attack strength. It wouldn’t need to, though, since ultimately a weapon’s tooltip is the culmination of the weapon’s attack strength and coefficient, and since the coefficients wholly dependent on the skill used, weapon attack strength can’t be used to represent damage at all. Single handed weapons can have higher or lower coefficients, making the entire point of weapon attack strength to be rarity tiers and nothing else. “Effective Power” also isn’t clear on how much damage you’ll be doing in layman’s terms. You can see that you have 3206 effective power in a build, but what does that mean? Well, it means you do 3.5 times as much damage as if you didn’t have any offensive stats. The ratio is much easier to understand in this way.

For a bit of advice, there’s a couple of shortcuts on the math side that will let you make easier and more universal calculations. To do this, you have to consider all damage as relative in two ways:

#1: Any damage you do will be compared to the the damage someone else does on that exact same target. Because of this, specific damage done in any circumstances is irrelevant. If you wanted, you could use the tooltip for the auto attack for a benchmark, because you’ll end up with the same proportions.

#2: All damage can be expressed as a ratio of base damage. That is, the amount of damage done by attacks at 916 power, or basically if there were no investment at all in anything. So, for example, if you doubled power and added 916 points, then you would get a ratio of 2.0 (1832 / 916), meaning that you do twice the damage if you had no points at all.

It is here that I’ve lost you on these numbers. You start pulling out some damage number without any clear indication of what it means and where it comes from. It would be far easier to actually list the stats acquired instead of just a fictional “damage” number that grows out of some not clearly listed gains. Because of this, I find it hard to check your math. However, if I were to “assume” a few things, I could get the total points added to each stat via the following:

Zerker:
1003 Power
698 Precision
92% crit damage

Damage ratio from Power: 1919/1003 = 2.09
Crit Rate: 37%
Total critical modifier: 2.42 × 0.37 + 0.63 = 1.53
Overall Damage ratio: 2.09 × 1.53 = 3.20

This overall damage ratio can have any of the % modifiers attached to it, like 5% from some trait or whatever. However, it is easier to just attach these modifiers on the power level, since the crit modifier won’t change. Doing it at the power level also lets you account for things like stacking might. But regardless I digress:

Soldier’s:
1468 Power
100 Precision
30% crit damage
Additional Mods: 4% from Ogres, 5% from sigil of force, 5% “weapon trait” or whatever that is.

Damage ratio from Power: 2384/916 = 2.60
Additional Mods: 2.60 × 1.04 × 1.05 x 1.05 = 2.98
Crit Rate: 8%
Crit Mod: 1.8 × 0.08 + .92 = 1.064
Overall damage ratio: 3.17

I’m going to assume your analysis on knights is incorrect because the wiki is wrong on knight gear: the jewels from trinkets prioritizes precision and not toughness like other jewels do. This requires you to start from scratch.

Either way, the proposition that you list is fairly one-sided and unrealistic. Basically it is purporting that someone would use zerker gear without having a build or any equipment that would capitalize on zerker gear in any way whatsoever. The thing with zerker gear is that people do not run cookie cutter sets together with soldiers and zerkers. When they switch over, they change their traits based on what is needed for the upcoming situations and play accordingly.

To be fair and balanced, there are several things you need to do to compare the stats of the different sets:

#1: Zerker gear with offensive traits made for zerker gear
#2: Zerker gear with defensive traits not made for zerker gear
#3: Soldier’s gear with offensive traits made for zerker gear
#4: Soldier’s gear with fensive traits not made for zerker gear
#5-#6: Repeat with knight gear.

And then you can get a good picture of something like how little damage soldier’s gear does in a fully defensive build, and how much damage zerker gear does in a fully offensive build. Be sure to list the final stats and modifiers used so everyone else can follow along with the math you are doing.

I’ve always considered doing this. The thing with greater marks is that it doesn’t contribute statistically to the outcome of the fight. In theory, someone with better aim can do just as much with regular sized marks as someone who uses greater marks. If you are good enough with the staff, you can totally skip greater marks and be nearly just as fine.

Exceptions to this are when you are using it as a support weapon instead of an offensive weapon. The larger radius really helps with Mark of Blood and Putrid Mark.

Just went sPVPing with my necro after not doing so for awhile, and I have to say I’m not sure all of these changes would really save the Necromancer. It seems like it is just bringing us on par with other classes as far as skill use, while not actually letting necromancers exceed.

The biggest problem I’m encountering now is that, with such a high emphasis on evasion, I can never hit anything. This isn’t a problem for my engineer or my thief, however, who seem to be able to control and/or spike down people just fine. But I"m having a ton of problems with my necromancer now.

It took some thinking, and then I’m reminded of something said once by a dev somewhere (could’ve been on the State of the Game) that there are plans to reduce the cast times for necromancer skills. I think that this might be one of our bigger weaknesses at the moment. Even on my MM build, I could rarely ever hit anything, and that build is actually control heavy:

Dagger #3 has a long activation time that is ended when the target goes behind the player.
Warhorn 4 also has a somewhat lengthy activation time: It is a stun that isn’t immediate.
DS #2 is a slow flying projectile with a long activation time that almost always misses.
Focus #5 also has a lengthy activation time.
The activation time for Flesh Golem’s charge seems to be even longer now. Not sure if they changed that or if it was a change in meta that emphasizes this.
Epidemic: also has a really long and obvious cast time.
Dagger #2, Axe #2, DS # 4 are all channel skills that get interrupted easily.
Life Blast has a really long activation time.

While fighting a bunch of rangers and engineers and mesmers, I spent a third of the time stunned, a third of the time missing, and the last third of my time wonder why my skills weren’t working for some reason. I couldn’t accomplish anything because my controls wouldn’t hit, and when they did hit it was like they didn’t do anything at all. The cast times on Necromancer skills are so large that even this list of buffs won’t compensate for them. You can never get a shot off anyway.

Considering that most of our healing now comes from blast finishers in Water Fields, and those blast finishers scale pretty horribly with healing power, I’d say no it is not worth it.

Necromancers have always had this problem. We have bad stun breakers, and very little access to stability. The only way to get reliable stability is to put 30 points into Soul Reaping. Problem is, the Soul Reaping line kind of sucks.

I take it back: the soul reaping line really sucks. The master minor trait is the only good thing in the line aside from stability. The stats it gives are only meaningful to power/precision builds, since condition builds neither have a use for crit damage or have the Life Force generation to take advantage of the larger pool. Condition specs also don’t have anything to do in DS other than use the fear.

Gluttony: Might as well not exist. I’ve never seen any circumstance where I thought “Oh, if only I had 10% more life force” and had not already been full. It is a waste of space.

Fear of Death: This skill only works after you’ve already lost. I suppose some kind of terror build can take advantage of this to tick away more of an enemies health after they’ve downed, but as always it is a 1 second duration on a 90 second cooldown, and at the most you can hope you down them with it and then win the downed state fight.

Vital Persistence: This trait only works if you are trying to spam Life Blast in a zerker build. Otherwise it is completely useless.

Path of Midnight: A half decent skill, but why oh why is it only 15%? Regardless you end up taking this trait because there’s nothing else that is universally useful in that line.

Spectral Mastery: Fine if you are running spectrals.

Speed of Shadows: The speed boost is negligable. We already have swiftness and a speed signet.

Unyielding blast: This is only good for zerker necros who are using Life Blast as their main form of offense while in PVE.

Mark of Revival: it is a mild nuisance to anyone trying to stomp. I can see some use in a terror build, but again it is a 1 second stun on long cooldown, and it only works when someone else has already lost.

Decaying Swarm: A locust swarm does absolutely nothing when at low health.

Master of Terror: This is nice for terror builds that don’t want to go into the power line. However, due to how terror works, unless you get a full 100% duration, you’re only going to be getting 2 ticks out of terror anyway. So it is only useful for dedicated terror builds.

Soul Marks: Only useful for PVP hybrids. In PVE the staff auto attack generates exponentially more LF than soul marks does. In PVP power builds are much better off with the dagger/focus or even the /warhorn for LF generation. Condition builds that aren’t dedicated to the staff would be severely kitten by using the staff, and since you need 30 points for stability you can’t be dedicated to the staff.

Strength of Undeath: a 5% boost that only works when you avoid using DS completely. It’s a brilliant strategy to put traits that discourage DS in a line that focuses on DS.

So basically unless you run a full zerker build or a dedicated terror build, the Soul Reaping pool is going to be full of lackluster traits that don’t contribute meaningfully to nearly anything the necro does. Vampiric Necros, Minion Masters, non-terror condition necros, tanky necros, none of them benefit from this trait line. And for terror necros, you can’t get any of the procs because arguably the most useful one is exclusive with Master of Terror and Foot in the Grave. But you have to take it, since stability is necessary for a necro’s survival.

If you want to talk about the viability of DS as a defensive mechanic, then you have to consider quite a few things, like what build you are using and what build they are using.

If you are using a pure zerker necro, then of course DS is going to be taken down quickly. It is taken down quickly because zerker necros in general are taken down quickly. They only have 18k HP and 1836 armor.

In sPVP, whenever I use my minion master I run with full soldier’s gear, and get 1000 toughness alongside of 650 Vit and a really good protection proc. Here, my DS is a beast to take down. I find the degen here does more damage than actual enemy skills, and it is so high that I can use Life Blast multiple times for additional damage. The lack of stability isn’t an issue with minions, since minions keep attacking anyway, and the set already has really high LF generation thanks to the dagger/focus + staff combination. When fighting people 1 vs 1 or 1 vs 2, I have so much statistical bulk (40K effective HP + 34k effective HP in DS) that it almost isn’t fair.

The main caveat with survivability in DS is that it only works in small scales. In 1 vs. 1 it is excellent. In zerg vs. zerg, not so much. But thankfully they’re buffing LF generation, which also makes DS better in the long run.

I’d prefer to think about possibilities for the future than sit on my hand and do nothing. I like to dream, even if but for a moment.

tigirius.9014:

NickDollahZ.5348:

As it stands right now. I find that turrets are only useful as niche utility skills. Kinda what Gadgets should be.

I will bring Flame turret and overcharge it and use smoke bomb when I want to keep a target blinded for 9 seconds.

I will bring Net turret when I need to keep a target immobilize and I will take the sitting duck trait with Net Turret for single target vulnerability.

Thumper turret for blast finishers. Good for stacking might or stealth.

Rifle Turret staple in Static discharge builds.

Heal turret pretty self explanatory there

I never use Rocket turret in PVE.

How do you stack might with blast finishers? I’m curious.

Fire Fields. Any blast finisher used in a fire field gives, in a small AoE, 3 stacks of might for 20 seconds per blast. Engineers get two fire fields: Fire Bomb from the bomb kit, and Napalm from the Flamethrower.

You’ll need some coordination, but it pays off if done right. The engineer alone can get off 4 or 5 blast finishers inside of their own fire field. Just gotta get people go gather together and not Leeroy into the enemy groups.

If you want to swap out of turrets into something else for dungeons, then that is really hard to do. I would only consider the 30 points in inventions “necessary” for a turret build, so you could do a whole lot with it otherwise.

If you want to minimize the equipment changes needed from the turret build, then there is always the grenadier condition build:

30/10/30/0/0

That uses rabid equipment to maximize procs while laying down a lot of damage with grenades. Heck, you can use grenades WITH turrets and go two-for-one on that. Open with the chill grenade, then slowly walk backward into turret range to stack poison + bleeds like mad while having additional permanent burning. I think this might actually be better than the build I listed in the previous post…

There’s always the option to go for mostly power and forgo the condition damage. It is mostly burns, and burning does plenty of damage by itself. This lets you open up the gateway to other things, such as the kit based static discharge build

x/x/30/x/20

With 20 points to put basically wherever you want it. For this, the power is more important than condition damage, and static discharge can still work well with the rifle turret. You can also use power grenades if you want. Something I personally use is a coated bullets spec, and this can easily be modified to use turrets:

0/30/30/0/10

With primarily zerker gear, but carrion gear can work here, too. Here, you use the coated bullets of the pistol to do a lot of AoE damage, and follow that up with static discharge for more AoE damage.

The biggest thing to note is that there isn’t any “cookie cutter” builds for turrets. The one I listed isn’t even a PVE build at all. It’s my sPVP build with net turret swapped out for rifle turret. It all comes down to how you want to play. Heck, for all I know you could make a healing set out of turrets designed to maximize the effect of blast finishers in the healing turret. But, if I were to go with a “minimal investment change” strategy, probably the best to do would be to use a the modified grenadier build with carrion/rabid gear mixed together, since changing from the turrets to something else would be quite seamless.

Though I’m not sure if this can be called “the best of both worlds”, though. The thing with the inventions line is that, other than a few defensive procs and healing, the inventions trait line doesn’t do much but work with turrets. The grenadier build, the static discharge builds, the coated pistol builds, all of those would benefit greatly if those 30 points were invested into something like might stacking or more kits or better recharges on firearms,. pretty much anywhere else. The inventions line as a whole is the worst trait line for PVE in general.

Satire is truly a dying art.

There hasn’t been a single game I’ve played that had the RNG that didn’t hate me for it. I love it when game designers put in methods to obtain things through dedicated work AND through the RNG. And no, buying things from other players doesn’t count as “dedicated work”.

Guild Wars 2 actually does a fairly good job of doing this. Before gold was really easy to get, I prioritized dungeons in order to get my exotic armor sets. The first armor set I ever obtained I worked out from two dungeons: one for the stats, and another for the looks. The only gold I spent was for the transmutation stones. I had plans like this for every one of my alts, but with my growing knowledge of the game and the presence of more exotic armor sets at such relatively cheap prices, now it is easy for me to get full exotics in the stats that I want without having to go for dungeons.

But aside from dungeon armor with tokens, there is also karma armor with… karma. These provide quite a few sets that, with enough cooperation, are also quite easy to get. Originally karma was a lot harder to obtain than it is now. While these karma sets all have the same looks, they do provide a nice means of acquiring exotic gear that isn’t too stressful. Alongside of that is the new daily system with laurels and the new guild commendations, which can let players get ascended equipment without the RNG, pretty much any player is truly set as far as equipment goes, with no need for a random super expensive drop.

So to reiterate, the RNG can be dealt with by giving untradeable but guaranteed currencies (tokens, karma, laurels, ect) that, when gathered together can slowly allow players to obtain their desired equipment. Now, of course there are weapons/equipment in the game that can only be obtained as a random drop. I certainly know that getting 2 Breath of Kralkatorrik would’ve been impossible for me had I not bought them from someone more fortunate than I, and I had never received the recipe drop for Tortured Root, either. The system isn’t perfect: there are item stats and skins that are a lot harder to obtain because they only com from rare item drops. But GW2 doesn’t lock players out of content due to the RNG, which is something so many other MMOs sadly have done.

From my experience and for countless others, the mere act of failure is discouraging enough without punishing players for it. Punishment mechanics for death are just tedium that discourages players and distances them from the fun parts of the game, and akittens worst they open the door toward abuse by other players.

I prefer a different approach: one of the advantages to having little to no negative feedback on death is that it lets the devs make much harder content. When death isn’t so bad, it means that the game has the opportunity to make death more common. Currently the developers are making it so areas of the game slowly become more difficult, but the developers also need to know that with such a light punishment for death they are allowed to crank the difficulty up to extreme in different circumstances, as long as they do “difficulty” properly. There are so many mechanics in PVP and WvW that don’t get used in PVE that would make for great PVE content. Giganticus Lupicus should be the standard model for boss fights, and not the exception.

People know, but don’t do it anyway. Without a steady timer there isn’t a way to gather people up to do it. Whenever I go there and ask, all I get is silence. I haven’t heard of a single “event” where people have been forming for the Queen Karka, and likewise I have enough trouble getting people together for dungeons, let alone 4 times as many for this event.

I think they they’re both real and not real. How? Well, let me explain: Through the process of testing and developing balance changes, ideas get thrown around a lot. What we’re seeing from those “leaked” patch notes is a shorthand of considered changes and ideas that were, at some point, up for consideration by the developers.

Although they are real in that regard, it doesn’t mean they are accurate. The only way to truly know the scale of changes is to see the final live version on the 25th.

Spectral wall doesn’t deflect anything.

I’ve been using wall in WvW for forever. It gives my whole group protection when rushing, making it a game changer in zerg vs. zerg. I will miss the vulnerability though, since kiting a dumb enemy through the thing could cause a large amount of vulnerability very quickly. Also it makes for a good ethereal field, giving necromancers the little confusion they have.

We did get a healing buff. Just an indirect one: Greater Life Force gain equates to more “health” in any fight.

Now, though this is my PVP spec, the following build will probably be effective in PVE as well (with some slight modifications)

Weapon: Pistol/Shield
Sigil: Battle / Whatever
Utilities: Healing Turret, Bomb Kit, Rifle Turret, Rocket Turret, Supply Crate
Traits: 20/20/30/0/0
Equipment: Carrion/Rabid
Runes: x6 Superior Rune of the Flame Legion (x6 Rune of Strength works, too).

Trait abilities:
Explosives III, X
Firearms IV, VI
Inventions III, VII, XII

The strategy is to lay down turrets, then run up to engage an enemy group using the bomb kit and the pistol for AoE damage, luring them back into range of the turrets, whether it is merely distance or if the turrets are around the corner. The glue puddle and smoke field provide defense while the concussion and fire bombs lay out damage. The shield is there for defense as well as blast finishers. At range, the combination of the bomb kit and the rocket turret will provide permanent AoE burning to the enemy group, with the rifle turret providing bursts of bleeding and additional damage. For further defense, the supply crate can be used as a stun + blast finisher + further healing, providing additional burning should the bomb kit be too dangerous to use. Swapping in and out of the kit provides might, and healing also provides might.

Note: this is not a cookie cutter setup. If you want to heal, you can use Elixir Infused bombs + the thumper turret to lay out heals. If you want to immobilize, you can swap to the rifle and the net turret to cause more immobilization. In general, you’ll want to set up turrets when you are fighting a few enemies that don’t cover the world in AoEs. If you are fighting endless swarms of enemies or if you are fighting an enemy that covers the whole map in damaging AoEs, turrets will not contribute meaningfully. Unfortunately, you get massive AoE and swarms of enemies in the majority of content, hence why it is people don’t play turrets in PVE.

I ran a turret build for awhile, and they aren’t very strong in PVE. They do have their preferred situations though. For PVE, the biggest problem is that they haven’t had any meaningful changes in tactics, so those old guides from months ago are still viable.

For traits, you’ll want to go a full 30 into inventions to get metal plating and Rifled Barrel Turrets. Turrets in the pocket will melt in an instant, so you’ll need to give turrets long range and also give them higher armor. Some people swear by it, but 10 points in tools for deployable turrets is also nice to have, since it will let you put turrets at a distance without having to run there yourself. I personally avoid using this, since it messes up my timing with the healing turret. Something that can also be done is to put 20 into explosives for accelerant packed turrets, however in PVE this is not as useful due to how low damage they do and how little control actually matters.

The advantage to turrets is that they provide additional damage to whatever you are doing on top of your weapon skills, so turrets can lay on some rather high DPS in the long run. Nearly every turret has a place, and in the midsts of a dungeon you may want to switch out between turrets that often. The turrets themselves will do bleeding and burning, so having condition damage is recommended while running turret builds.

Rocket Turret: This is the best turret. It does AoE damage + burn at very far distances, along with a toolbelt skill that also does AoE damage. It also comes with an overcharge that causes a knockdown in AoE. I highly recommend this turret be on every turret build, and I have a really hard time coming up with a reason to switch it out.

Rifle Turret: This turret is average. It does light damage at a distance, and when overcharged it does bleeding damage. However, the best uses of the rifle turret come from other sources: it is on an extremely low cooldown, so it combos well with Accelerant Packed Turrets for a stun + damage. The toolbelt skill has the shortest cooldown of any toolbelt skill, and for this it is a must on static discharge builds. All in all, this turret makes for a good addition in both turret and non-turret builds.

Thumper Turret: This is the worst turret. It’s attack speed is slow, it does less damage than the rifle turret, the cripple effect is nearly useless, and the overcharge just scatters enemies out of AoEs. However, the Thumper Turret has use in an “out of the box” kind of way: It is 3 blast finishers in a single utility skill. Because of this, the thumper turret can be combined with the healing turret’s water field to cause massive healing, and for more varied sets the thumper turret can stack might in fire fields (bomb kit, flamethrower), retaliation in light fields (elixir gun), weakness in poison fields (grenade kit), and stealth in smoke fields (bomb kit, flame turret). However, these uses are almost all independent of turret builds, so I would not recommend using the thumper turret in a turret build.

Flame Turret: This turret is good outside of turret builds, but in turret builds it encounters a couple of problems. The cone burn is good, however it is short ranged and this leads to the flame turret dying rather quickly. It’s effect also becomes redundant with the rocket turret, who does the damage and burn better. The smoke field can be a help in special circumstances, but the timing and the short lifespan of the turret make it really hard to use effectively. All in all, the flame turret is inferior to the bomb kit in pretty much every way, and since you get a flame turret in the supply crate anyway, this is one to skip.

Net Turret: This is an excellent control turret. This turret is best used in situations where there is a champion that has high melee damage that is chasing people around (say, for example, the Mossman). The turret’s main effect is the same as spamming rifle #2, and the overcharge causes stun and immobilize for lengthy amounts of time. The turret is mostly a one-trick pony, but it is good at that trick. An alternate strategy is to use the trait Sitting Duck alongside of the net turret to stack vulnerability on a target while immobilizing them. It is situational, but this turret is definitely one to use.

Replaced? I look forward to seeing more necros while on my engineer.

Though necros get burning, engineers get a whole lot more burning. With just the pistol recharge trait I can achieve near permanent burn in a cone, and with bombs I can achieve permanent burning in an AoE, with the flame turret I can get permanent burn in a cone until they are destroyed, with the rocket turret I can get permanent AoE burn at a distance until destroyed, and that isn’t including the extra burns from crits, the Flamethrower, or the rocket boots. As it stands, Engineers are arguably the best class for burning, capable of permanently sustaining a burn on multiple targets with very little utility and trait investment. Necromancers can’t even come close to that. In fact, I imagine necromancers would fear engineers more, since engineer burns would override their burns in an instant.

But put the two together and you have something magic. Engineers get bits of confusion, better poison, and a hell-load of fire while the necromancer gets more reliable bleeds, torment, and more cripple/chill. Then, once they’re both together, the necromancer can use Epidemic to spread the conditions, doubling their effectiveness on everything in the room. When the necromancer burn procs, it isn’t like when a guardian or a ranger does it: chances are the necromancer will have high condition damage and maintain the high burn damage instead of overriding it with something half as strong.

I think the OP might be trolling. It’s genetic fallacy 101: “You don’t have to listen to criticisms of the RNG because they’re all farmers and are bad anyway.”

It does make me wonder a bit. I’m not to big on programming, but from my understanding all intensity conditions have several bits of information that is stored:

*Current Malice of User
*Current Level of User
*Identity of User
*Duration
*Order in which it is applied

With that information updated every second. I’m not sure how many bits each of these would require, but if I am to assume that all of this information can be contained in a certain hexadecimal:

Characters can be given an internal ID that identifies them, so in theory this can be stored in 16^X Bytes necessary for however many players there are in guild wars. I’m just going to assume it is at least 6 bytes, assuming that any one server can have 16 million accounts.

Malice, I imagine, would never exceed 4096 no matter how hard someone tried. However, I’ll try to be “safe” and assume that it is stored in 4 bytes, with 65k max.

Level is up to 80, so this is easily 2 bytes. Likewise, duration isn’t that long either, however I notice that the duration for each condition is rounded to the nearest 1/4th. Assuming this is pertinent information in the game’s processes, assuming a maximum duration of one minute this comes to 60 × 4 = 240 bits of information, or again roughly 2 bytes.

Order in which it is applied, given 25 stacks, also comes with 2 bytes. This is a total of (2 + 2 + 2 + 4 + 6 =) 16 bytes of information stored in each condition. With up to 25 conditions, this comes to 400 bytes of information on any one entity in the game.

Th really perplexing thing, however, is that in theory there should be no difference between adding a new condition with 25 stacks of intensity, and just giving 25 more stacks of intensity to the bleed cap. Those conditions will all store the same information, except with torment there’s an additional flag that increases damage with movement.

So I do have to wonder, with my extremely limited knowledge of programming, why it is increasing the caps are such a big deal, but adding a new condition with theoretically the same load isn’t a big deal. Maybe they’re just assuming that it won’t be stacked that high, and it’ll save information that way?

We have projectile finishers with bone fiend and the flesh wurm.

But regardless I agree that Life Blast should be a projectile finisher (20%).

Knox.8462:

Here’s a suggestion: don’t take the burning trait. Now take a deep breath and carry on.

My Mesmer sets people on fire all the time and I still manage not to lose it.

Once they’ve added burning, they’re going to balance around that burning. This gimps anyone who isn’t using burning. Hence, the dilemma.

I do hate the burning addition myself. Not only because it is unimaginative, but because its ineffective anywhere but tPVP.

People say Necromancer DPS is low, but on my condition necro I bring the whole room to half HP before the rest of my team has killed one silver enemy. Thanks to epidemic, Necromancers are the best PVE condition class in the game. Necromancers are the only condition class that gets stronger from other teammates conditions in dungeons, and not weaker like everyone else. It helps that I have 46K total HP alongside of a 4.1k tooltip burst AoE from Bone Minions. I can just sick the flesh golem on environmental objects for sustained damage, since his attacks have a tooltip power of roughly 900-900-1350 in combo, and even on my condition build I’m pretty handy with a Dagger and Life Blast. I only have around 2k power alongside of my 1.8k condition damage, so I’m not an offensive direct damage powerhouse, but aside from the conditions I’ll do things like give the whole team protection, put down chill+blind fields, give AoE regeneration and condition cleansing, instantly rez people… you know, all that “supporty” stuff people keep expecting me to do instead of bleeding the room half to death.

I still maintain that confusion would’ve been a much better condition to give necromancers access to.

#1: Very few people use confusion so the cap isn’t a problem PVE
#2: Confusion has defensive play in PVP as well as offensive potential.
#3: It fits more thematically with necromancers than burning does.

You have to look at things in more perspective than just the DPS of the attack themselves. You have to consider the following:

*How much damage is done in an AoE, and how big that AoE is.
*How long is the recharge for these attacks
*How safe are these attacks to use.

Now, 100blades warrior is currently the best DPS in the game… against 3 targets that don’t do a lot of damage back. They run up and root themselves for 3.5 seconds and then they have to wait 8 seconds to do it again. I do not know the warrior’s auto attack speed, but assuming they just auto attack during that time, you can average out how much 100blades really increases their DPS.

Necromancers have something just as potent in our arsenal. Its called epidemic. It spreads all the conditions on the target towards up to 5 targets in a very large AoE at 1200 range. On best case scenarios, we can copy 25 bleeds, poison, and burn to everything in the room every 12 seconds. From there, no almost no matter what numbers you use you’ll end up doing an insane amount of damage in that time: Going off of your listed damage of 140 per bleed (1950 malice):

25 bleeds: 140 × 25 = 3,500 DPS, x 5 targets = 17,500 DPS.
Poison: 279 DPS x 5 targets = 1,395 DPS
Burn: 816 DPS x 5 targets = 4,080 DPS

Total DPS: 22,975.

And that is for however long those conditions are sustained. It’s quite easy to reach that mark, too. Due to conditions from the necromancer being mostly in an AoE, they just need to use their AoE skills to prime a room with 11-13 stacks of bleeding, then use epidemic to give everything but their target max stacks. If you have another condition spec on your team, then this makes stacking bleeds twice as fast, letting the necro use epidemic twice as quickly and more often. It is also worth noting that epidemic goes through a lot of defenses, since it technically isn’t an “attack”. This lets it pierce things other than just protection.

Now, as for the changes, I really don’t think they help the PVE condition Necro. Sure, we get burning now. But, everyone gets burning already. Burning is currently unreliable as a form of damage in PVE because it is constantly being overwritten by a guardian or a mesmer or a ranger or engineer that isn’t using condition damage but nonetheless has burning for some reason. Because of this, Necromancers getting burning contributes very little to their overall DPS. The burning can help stoke the fire in hopes that one enemy can get a long duration to maximize epidemic with, but otherwise conditionmancer DPS isn’t changed by burning.

Probably the biggest boon to necromancers, should this change be true, is in Spectral Wall. The ability to cause fear when crossing means that Terror can tick twice, causing massive damage to anything that attempts to run across. This isn’t good for sustained damage, but hitting everything that walks by for 3k damage is still pretty good. If you have a particularly mobile boss and good teammates, they can run that boss through the spectral wall over an over again, giving themselves protection while causing 3k damage to that boss with each passing. Otherwise, putrid curse becomes a bit more valuable and Signet of Spite becomes more valuable, but again I say condition necros won’t see much of a buff. But with the powerhouse that is epidemic, I’m not sure they need one.

EDIT: Oh yeah, I forgot about Torment. Right now this condition is shaping up to be one of those conditions that doesn’t have an adequate way of stacking, and so unless the few paltry skills that get it can do it well, it won’t contribute significantly to necromancer DPS. On the bright side, it does give condition necros something to do while in Death Shroud.

Maybe I’m just ungrateful, but a lot of those changes in the pastebin I’m not looking forward to.

Tool kit: It’s a 1% damage buff. Um… yay?

Rumble: Despite running a dedicated turret build for forever, I still won’t use the thumper turret for some very good reasons. One, it has crap damage. Two, it has crap range. Three, it is really slow. Four, if someone is running turrets then the cripple is useless due to all of the immobilize and glue puddles lying around. So all in all, I get a turret that never hits, when it does it doesn’t do any damage and doesn’t contribute meaningfully in any way to any fight. The fact that the toolbelt is a stun breaker doesn’t mean a darn thing. It would be much better to just run elixir S, because then you can stability/stealth stomp an protect yourself.

Elixir X: I also never use this skill because it just isn’t worth anything. It transforms the engineer into one of two elites that never get any use on the classes they are actually built for. Making it recharge quicker just means it does nothing more often.

Fire Ice Mortar: A recharge reduction on one skill still will not warrant the use of this skill. The mortar launcher itself sucks due to all the bugs with every trait not working to boost it, alongside of the fact that it roots the user and makes them completely helpless during its usage. The attacks are incredibly slow, and the mortar is a giant target for anyone who sees one, and its skills are arguably worse than what an engineer has on-hand at any one moment. The recharge reduction means nothing because you’ll only get one shot.

Elixir R: One of the big reasons why it is that I liked to use this skill was because it was a stun breaker. I guess I can understand the nerf, since there isn’t any other revival skills that also stun break, let alone refill endurance, but I will still miss it.

Weakness Change: Originally, the fumble effect would reduce damage done by half, coming to a 25% overall damage reduction for non-crit builds. Now, if the opponent had no increase in crit damage and a 40% chance to crit, this would result in a 12.5% reduction in damage overall. Now, weakness only has a 25% chance to occur, so it ends up always being a 12.5% reduction anyway now. This is a buff to anything with high precision and crit damage, however this is a very big nerf to anything that didn’t have this (AKA pretty much every monster in PVE). And to this end, they cut the duration, too, making it overall worse than the 12.5% cut they put in. I wonder how that conversation went:

Employee A: “Hey, you know how weakness doesn’t work on crits? Well, lets make it work on crits, but now it only works half the time!”
Employee B: “…don’t most people build for a 50% crit chance anyway? Doesn’t that mean that there’s basically no change to how good weakness is?”
Employee A: “Well no, because sometimes there’s a guy with really high crits, and we gotta tone those down. We should cut the duration, too, since it’s now overpowered”.
Employee B: “But wouldn’t that duration cut mean it’s less than half as effective?”
Employee A: “They can still stack it up if you get a bunch of people to use blast finishers in a poison field. In fact, lets nerf that, too.”
Employee B: “I don’t see how this is supposed to help out the players…”
Employee A: “Then you’re just simple minded”. Employee A then goes to play his Guardian main.

Seriously. The changes to weakness didn’t buff it against anything that isn’t a dedicated zerker. It lasts for a shorter amount of time and occurs half as often in that shorter amount of time.

Sitting Duck: The biggest problem with this change is that I can no longer stack vulnerability with my turrets anymore. The internal cooldown kills that benefit, but at least I’ll get a cripple that’s half as long as the immobilization chain I lay down in the first place. This might be useful for the glue puddles, but it is an outright nerf to turret builds.

There are some really cool additions, though. Coated Bullets to master tier is going to open up a whole lot of flexibility in my PVE WvW Builds. Stabilized Armor when combined with Protection Fueled Injection is going to make it so I don’t need stunbreakers anymore, and Acidic Elixirs can add some nice boon removal, which is something we needed. Although I’ll miss the defensive functionality of Rocket Boots, now that it is a good chase and escape skill on a short cooldown I can see great use for it in WvW.

But every time these updates come out, I look at half of them and wonder what the point is.

I’d argue that you won’t even come close. Given your optimal set up, and assuming that you can, indeed, gain Life Force at a fast enough rate to recharge half of the bar in 5 seconds, I did some experimentation to find the limits of various things:

Number of Life Blasts in DS before power cut: 8
Number of attacks before DS recharges: 4 Auto attacks
Number of hits to recharge 50% of LF: 15

And this produces some interesting numbers. For example, this means that you can only peak at 8 stacks of might and 16 stacks of vulnerability. With the down time from Death Shroud’s recharge, that might dwindles away, and then you sustain at -4 stacks of might below the peak. The same thing happens with vulnerability, except it is 8 stacks of vulnerability. The interesting thing is that this might is used up outside of DS, where you aren’t doing nearly as much damage.

But lets come up with a steady DPS number. Taking the damage done in the 12 attacks that make up the rotation:

(8 × 470 + 4 × 246) / 12 = 395

which seems like it is a lot, until you realize that with infinite DS that number is 470. Then you factor in the higher sustained vulnerability (10 stacks), and you get 8% more damage, coming to 508. Then you factor in additional might (+140 power), which changes depending on initial power, but if you were to have, say, 2300 power like some zerker builds have, then this is a 6% damage increase further, coming to 538.

So, at peak life force gaining conditions, permanent DS does 36% more damage than the ideal scenario. This also neglects a few other things, such as viable build diversity. In order to get the DS recharge rate you need to devote 20 points into soul reaping for the greater recharge rate, and have to use the staff in order to hopefully gain that much LF back as quickly as possible (little hint, you won’t in the majority of circumstances). You pretty much have to go 30//10/0/0/30 in order to maximize use of Life Blast, whereas in permanent DS you only need 10/x/x/x/10.

The Gates Assassin.9827:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The pistol’s auto attack does 118 base damage with a 2 second bleed for about 85 damage. If we are to assume a full condition build (around 1600 condition damage, full bleed duration), we’d get 122 damage per tick and 4 ticks, coming to 488 bleeding damage per auto attack. If we are to “go insane” with this and assume max might, this will give us 2450 malice, 165 damage per tick, and a total of 660 damage per auto attack.

Yes. With one stack. 165 damage per tick per stack. For every nearby person to that target, you get another stack. In zergs, you can stack up 25 bleed every auto attack instantly. 25 * 165 = 4125 AOE and it can damage infinite foes.

Think about it. If you hit the first person, all nearby foes bleed. It pierces and hits another foe. Now all foes around that foe bleed. Because the second foe was close to the first foe, they both have 2 stacks of bleeding. In WvW, it’s not uncommon to have 40+ people stacked up super tight. 5 * 40 = 200 stacks of bleeding across 40 people.

I would also like to mention: This is one engineer. Imagine a zerg of these.

… I think you missed the point. The bleeding per hit from explosive shot would do 660 damage to each player for each shot. Currently in my zerker build I do twice that amount of damage to each player for each shot. Therefore making the bleed spread wouldn’t be “overpowering” because even under insane circumstances, the bleeding is far less damage than the direct damage it already inflicts.

In WvW I use x3 afflicted and 3x krait. This lets me get 100% bleed duration while giving plenty of condition damage. The condition duration is somewhat important due to how frequently people use melandru runes and lemongrass soup.

Other things that I could recommend, based on my sPVP experience, would be Earth Runes. The protection effect and the magnetic shield will bail a necromancer out of a jam time and time again. They can be used with pretty much any set, but I think they would have the most impact on power necros. They are quite expensive, though…

The Gates Assassin.9827:

It looks like it ranges quiet a bit. Gaining 400 armor at 3k armor is only ~13% less damage and gaining 400 armor at 2k armor is about 20% less damage.

Crazy. I really wish they made this system a bit less complicated.

That is just the price to pay for linearity. The fact is that the system is so simple that armor and damage follow a pretty straight line when looking at any one stat. Since the system is linear, every point you add is a smaller percentage of the previous point added. I.E. 400 toughness at 2000 armor gives more of a damage decrease than 400 toughness at 3000 armor.

Be thankful it works in this system. Non-linear systems have a habit of having either really steep drop offs, or growing exponentially out of control. I’ve played MMOs where the toughest classes are literally 200 times more durable than the squishiest classes.

I suppose the second hard part is differentiating between difficulty and bad game design. When people speak of difficulty, I keep thinking of how fractals were when they were first released: Cheesy death mechanics with no way to resurrect fallen players aside from total group suicide. I mean, any one of those by themselves would’ve been acceptable, but put together it wasn’t difficult insomuch as it was frustrating and luck based.

ReMortis.4287:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I suppose the Degen is somewhat necessary, since without the degeneration a necromancer can theoretically stand back and use piercing life blast for ridiculous damage on everything in PVE without worry, using Life Transfer to gain back the occasionally lost LF from ambient damage. Might stacks + vulnerability + piercing on an attack with a base power of 470 is insane, and the only thing that keeps it in check in PVE now is that DS degenerates.

In PVP I don’t think it would be as big of an issue. Pretty much every player just DPSes and controls a necro in DS anyway, so the lack of degen wouldn’t be too much of a problem.

Personally, however, I would make it so Life blast doesn’t lose power when Life Force is low. That way, necromancers can get more use out of Life Force.

How would that be any different than Engineers/Rangers/Eles or any other ranged class who can nuke from a distance? Life Blast only has 900 range as well. For sure the LBlast damage cutoff should be removed, as far as if DS decay was removed, not sure if it’d be such a bad thing. Could rework SR Trait 2 to remove the decay, instead of making it inherent, or increase the trait to 50% or so.

There are a couple of differences.

#1: With some very cheap traits, life blast would constantly grant might and inflict vulnerability. With no boon duration it would peak at 15 stacks, and with 66% boon duration it would cap the necro’s might by itself. It can inflict 20 stacks of vulnerability by itself as well. While piercing, on multiple targets.

#2: Life blast with a nearly full bar is one of the highest direct damage attacks in the game. It has a base tooltip of 470. The closest class that can compare (piercing damage at range) is the engineer which has a base power of 251. It is on a shorter recharge, so scaling it up to the same time as Life Blast will give it a DPS of roughly 335. This means that life blast, while granting might and vulnerability, has 40% higher DPS than Hip Shot.

This pattern is repeated by pretty much every single piercing shot in the game. Vapor Blade from Elementalists, Crack Shot warriors, Piercing Arrow’s Rangers, Trick Shot from Thieves, all of them far inferior in damage to Life Blast. The only one that comes close is the engineer, who is still beat out.

#3: Lets compare it to 100blades. 100 blades takes 3.5 seconds to activate and 8 seconds to recharge while having a base tooltip damage output of 2030. This comes to roughly 4.3 life blasts, which would take about 4.3 seconds to do. So you can say that the DPS from Life blast is around 81% of 100 blades. However, if you factor in that Life Blast can be used consistently for 8 more seconds while the warrior has to use other attacks while waiting for 100 blades to recharge, and that life blast can be used at a distance, and that Life Blast can hit more enemies per use, then Life Blast pulls ahead and becomes better than 100 blades.

It is no exaggeration when I say that Life Blast would be overpowered if it can be used at full power indefinitely. Zerker Necros, as rare as they are, prioritize using Life Blast as one of their main means of offense for a very good reason.

The Gates Assassin.9827:

I’ll make this simple:

1) If explosive shot bleeding was AoE, Coated Bullets would be crazy powerful on balled up targets. The first explosion grants 1 stack of bleeding. The second would be 2. This goes on for an infinite amount of targets. That’s why it doesn’t spread the AoE Bleed. Yes, they should update the text to make that clear.

The bleed from explosive shot is far less damaging than the direct damage it inflicts. Now, I don’t know the specific armor rating of enemies, so a lot of this is guesswork, but I’ll throw some math at this.

The pistol’s auto attack does 118 base damage with a 2 second bleed for about 85 damage. If we are to assume a full condition build (around 1600 condition damage, full bleed duration), we’d get 122 damage per tick and 4 ticks, coming to 488 bleeding damage per auto attack. If we are to “go insane” with this and assume max might, this will give us 2450 malice, 165 damage per tick, and a total of 660 damage per auto attack.

In my zerker build, I inflict twice that amount of damage with the auto attack on crits. Since my crit chance is really high (53% crit rate + high fury uptime + target the weak = roughly 78% crit rate scaled), crits are the norm, and you can say that I am inflicting crits the vast majority of the time. I don’t have my exact build memorized, so I can’t come up with a fully adjusted damage rate, however it does hammer the point home: making the bleed in explosive shot spread to additional targets wouldn’t make it overpowered.

Thing is, you kind of have to go either full zerker or full condition damage to get those extreme numbers, so they are on opposite spectrums of each other. Making the explosion bleed enemies in an AoE will simply make the pistol much more viable for condition builds, but it will definitely not be the peak damage the pistol can do. Not by a long shot.

I find myself using the pistol more and more than the rifle nowadays, and this is due to the auto attack of the pistol.

By itself, the auto attack of the pistol is somewhat subpar. Base 118 damage with a short bleed, but with the bonus that it hits in an AoE around the target it touches. So it is basically a targeted AoE auto attack, except it just goes until it hits something.

But there is one trait that rockets the auto attack to obscene levels: Coated Bullets. This makes the auto attack pierce. At the maximum range and also when firing from above or against a wall, this doubles the pistol’s auto attack damage. One for the explosion caused when hitting the target, and the second explosion caused when the bullet ends. This puts the pistol’s auto attack roughly in line with the rifle’s auto attack in damage: slightly lower but also has a bleed to help out. Interestingly, the pistol causes an explosion for each enemy it pierces, and each of those explosions hits up to 5 additional enemies. Since the attack can pierce-hit up to 5 enemies, this ends up being

5 enemies hit x 5 enemies per explosion = 25 hits.

Yes, in the right circumstances the pistol’s auto attack hits 25 times with every shot. The damage from this is somewhat chaotic, since you can hit the same 5 enemies 5 times, or you could spread the damage around a lot. But in the end, this gives the pistol’s auto attack massive potential. In some of the orr events I hit up to 1.2k with the auto attack on mobs, and hitting 25 times means I’m doing a total AoE damage of 30k with every auto attack. On my screen it causes an explosion of numbers every 0.75 seconds, and I watch as an entire undead zerg melts quickly under the pressure.

In sPVP, coated bullets is not an effective trait. Enemy players don’t tightly pack together like that, and the situations where you’ll get the double hit on a single enemy are situational. In WvW it is a little better, since there are many zerg vs. zerg fights where the melee train will bunch up, and the auto attack can shred them. Also while defending keeps, the auto attack will hit any player twice, since is firing down into the ground. This can make coated bullets a worthwhile trait, should someone not wish to spec into grenades. However, it will probably be inferior to grenades in the long run, albeit lower maintenance.

So to reiterate, the auto attack is somewhat subpar, but it can be boosted to extreme levels by a grandmaster trait.

I suppose the Degen is somewhat necessary, since without the degeneration a necromancer can theoretically stand back and use piercing life blast for ridiculous damage on everything in PVE without worry, using Life Transfer to gain back the occasionally lost LF from ambient damage. Might stacks + vulnerability + piercing on an attack with a base power of 470 is insane, and the only thing that keeps it in check in PVE now is that DS degenerates.

In PVP I don’t think it would be as big of an issue. Pretty much every player just DPSes and controls a necro in DS anyway, so the lack of degen wouldn’t be too much of a problem.

Personally, however, I would make it so Life blast doesn’t lose power when Life Force is low. That way, necromancers can get more use out of Life Force.

Use a necromancer mostly in WvW and also an engineer sometimes. For the engineer, retaliation is a pretty big deal when using grenades. 15 ticks of retaliation per attack, it hurts bad Often times while defending a keep I have to resort to using Elixir U to burst damage then run back to heal away the retaliation damage.

For the engineer it is fair though, mostly because the engineer is one of the best retaliation users in the game themselves. Elixir B can give a fairly long duration retaliation, and if they use the elixir gun they can throw a bunch of blast finishers into the light field (and encourage everyone else to do the same), giving a bunch of people long term retaliation. The light field lasts 10 seconds, so there’s no hurry.

Also, you have to think about what happens when they don’t have retaliation. When I run up to that wall with 20 stacks of might, haste, and a full grenade spec, kitten gets real, and real quick. That burst of damage and disabling conditions right on top of their siegers, killing the 3 players on the siege, then continually strafing while raining down long distance grenades with highly damaging conditions on
everyone while maintaining 20+ stacks of might while hiding behind a wall of reflect and using my own retaliation… its almost not fair. It gets worse when there’s two or more of us, so much so that a handful of grenadiers can successfully hold off any 20 man zerg dumb enough to not use catapults or retaliation. The hilarious thing about this is that the best tool to fight off the grenade raining HGH engineer is blast finisher support engineer.

Retaliation is an effective defense tactic for zergs, but the key word here is tactic. To have retaliation be meaningful to a zerg, you have to get several players who stack retaliation in an AoE and be dedicated to doing so while assaulting a keep. It is one of the few effective counters to arrow cart spam, as well as some of the more dangerous “defend the keep” builds like HGH engineers. Ultimately, if a group of enemies is so big and concentrated that you take 5k worth of retaliation damage on attack, then you need more people; You will not take that zerg by yourself.

The stealth trap wasn’t meant for thieves. It was meant for mesmers. Veil doesn’t have a target limit, and having 3 mesmers drop veils can stealth an entire zerg for a scary amount of time.

The best conditions in the game don’t even do damage. Weakness for endurance drain, vulnerability for increased damage, chill for heavy movement restriction and recharge reduction, immobilize to stop dodge and movement, and blind for defense.

The biggest advantage to damaging conditions is how easily they are applied in an AoE. Engineers and necromancers reign supreme in the condition department because of this. The AoE damage nature of conditions lets them do very high damage over time while still allowing for defensive builds, and against multiple targets there is plenty of time for the conditions to be applied. I’ll take Mark of Blood for example.

In WvW, Mark of blood on my necro does three 16 second bleeds, and does this to 5 targets. At full corruption stacks this does 135 damage per tick (1850 condition damage), coming to 32,400 damage in an AoE every 4.8 seconds. Yes, you can cleanse the conditions before they do full damage, but they’ll just be right back again (along with everything else the staff does). It is low risk, unblockable, in a large area, and at great range. If you have multiple condition necros while defending on the wall, it is a living hell to anyone trying to attack the place from all the bleeding.

The second thing conditions need to do is be applied rapidly. Conditions applied only in burst or very slowly aren’t effective since they are just wiped away, negating all of their damage. It is for this reason that condition mesmers can be very dangerous: their damage comes from conditions with short durations but applied so rapidly that cleans doesn’t do anything against them.

But, all in all, direct damage is more reliable and more powerful. Condition damage usually has to fulfill a niche, which is usually bulky AoE DPS + support. If you can’t apply conditions in an AoE in PVE, or if you can’t reapply conditions quickly in sPVP, then don’t bother with conditions.

Originally I didn’t care for mantras, but now that I’ve looked at them I myself am considering using them.

One in particular: Power Spike. This is for two reasons. The first is because the added DPS of power spike is surprisingly effective. Sure it only has a base power of 324, which is nice but isn’t super strong, but the main advantage of using Power Spike is that it is extra damage added on to whatever you are doing. So when you immobilize someone and use blurred frenzy, you can fire off two power breaks to nearly double the damage done in that time. It is great for spiking down opponents, as the name implies.

The second reason is that, in PVE I will undoubtedly go 20 into inspiration to give focus reflecting abilities, but in situations where reflects aren’t useful I will get restorative Mantra’s. 2640 Heal with every mantra chant. Now, the big thing with this is that Mantra of Pain has a 1 second recharge. With a 1 second recharge on the first Power Spikes and a 2.75 second activation time, you get that 2640 heal every 5 seconds. This is really good as far as healing goes, letting the heal from the mantras match the heal from personal healing skills in the long run. It is a great support feature for what is essentially 1 skill and 20 trait points, letting it be thrown on to nearly any build.

I’ll probably be avoiding the other mantras for the most part. Usually what they do, the mesmer has something that already works better. They have plenty of good stun breakers, plenty of good stuns, and also decent condition removal. You can make a case that when traited up, the mantras can be quite powerful. But I’ll probably stick to decoy and arcane thievery.

I think the whole thing about using condition vs. evasion can be summed up in one sentence:

Conditions need to hit first before they take effect.

Seriously. Weakness can’t be a counter to dodging because they’ll just dodge the weakness. In any instance where they don’t dodge the weakness, they can then cleanse the weakness.

I do agree that in PVE permanent vigor is easy mode.

To answer the question, toughness an vitality aren’t pointless in PVE. However, their use is limited.

First, they scale horribly compared to offensive stats. Damage reduction is based off of armor, which starts out being quite a high number. For thieves it is 1980. Now, If you were to add 300 points to it, you would only end up reducing damage by 15% where applicable. Those 300 points into power would increase power by 32% if you had no power to begin with.

But lets go with a real number. Say you had 1300 toughness and 2k power, and had 600 points you wanted to invest. Putting those 600 points into power would give you a 30% increase in damage. Putting those 600 points into toughness would give you a 25% increase in survivability. This might seem like only a slightly unfair trade until you look at how enemies act with each one. With 600 more power, enemies die quicker and thus they do less damage. A dead enemy deals no damage, after all. But with 25% decrease in damage done, enemies are content to sit and attack you for longer since they will survive longer now.

It is here where the beauty of glass cannon builds comes into play. The zerker build has so much offense in it that enemies die very quickly when compared to other builds, and this in part makes up the survivability of the zerker build: kill them before they kill you. The zerker build also goes through content quicker, and thus in the long run gets more loot than defensive builds. In higher end PVE, champions can drop players in 1-2 hits no matter what they’re wearing, so you end up having zerker gear be superior to other gear. This also emphasizes dodging and active defense, which mitigate damage well regardless of statistical fortitude. At the end, you have to make a case for using something other than zerker.

There are places where zerker does falter, however. In any case where there is a relatively high sustained damage over an insurmountable length of time, zerker builds will fall flat while more defensive builds won’t fall as flat. A good example of this is in the blizzard fractal where you have to fend off the son’s of svanir for a certain amount of time. In later fractals, there are dozens of them running about, and their combined attacks make dodging and active defense a moot point, since they will sustain damage on you regardless of what you do. Because of this, zerkers cave to the pressure while the really durable players survive.

But barely, if at all. Another thing is that some organized groups will have a player who is designated to take point and take the pain, absorbing damage while the zerkers get free hits without having to worry about their own damage.

Ultimately you don’t have to go pure zerker, since having some survivability helps. But you only need “some” since any more is just wasted excess in the majority of PVE content, and that “some” is also questionable due to how many things can be solo’d with a pure zerker build in the first place.

I’ve been adverse to the RNG for years. First game I played with one was PSO, and I hated it then. Spending days doing one mission over and over again because some 1/700 chance to drop just refused to do so. Second game after that was Runescape, where the rarer drops literally take months of no-lifing to afford, and were dropped in high risk areas that guaranteed you’d lose the drops you spend weeks grinding up for in the first place. Third game was PSU, which like it’s predecessor PSO would have things that cost so much money because obtaining it was impossible to do.

I liked what CoH did here in that, eventually, they provided a means of obtaining pretty much everything through alternate means instead of hoping for the RNG god to bless some player. And I think this should be the ultimate model for MMO’s: The RNG can bless you, but should it not bless you there is always a way in which a player can obtain something through hard work and perseverance that doesn’t involve buying it off of another lucky player. And lets be honest, the vast majority of players aren’t getting into RNG heaven.

And it is things like this make me really dislike the idea of rarely obtaining tickets from rarely obtained boxes that may or may not give them to you. The whole conversation just rings out like this in my head:

Me:“Ooh, that’s a cool new item there? How much is it?”
Anet:“You can’t buy it.”
Me: “So… is there something I can do to build up tokens that lets me purchase it?”
Anet:“I said you can’t buy it.”
Me: “So… how do you get it?”
Anet:“You need to get tickets from these boxes that can be exchanged for them”.
Me: “So do I always get a ticket from these boxes?”
Anet: “No.”
Me: “So are these boxes really easy to obtain?”
Anet: “No.”
Me:“So… there’s no realistic chance that I’ll get these things no matter how hard I try?”
Anet:“Well, you could convert all your gold to gems or buy gems to buy these boxes?”
Me: “So… if I buy the boxes then I’ll definitely get one of these things?”
Anet:“No. Its limited time only, too, so you’d better buy them up quick or else you lose the chance to get them forever.”
Me: “:(”

Seriously. In every single event that’s happened so far, from Halloween to Southsun Cove (I’m in another state so I can’t play the dragon festival), I have received squat. No limited time recipes. No rare equipment or items. No elite skins. Nothing. Every event is just another occasion where the devs and lucky players get the opportunity to take some new shiny and awesome looking item and rub it in my face how I’ll never get one. Every upcoming event is just a list of awesome things I can never obtain, no matter how perfect for my character they would be.

So yes, after awhile people really do get sick of the RNG.

There are three things to know about the RNG. The RNG thinks, the RNG feels, and the RNG hates.

Specifically, the RNG thinks you are undeserving, feels you shouldn’t win anything, and hates you and you alone.

Now, I haven’t had the best luck with the RNG on my end. I can count on one hand all of the exotics I’ve obtained from drops. I have been playing since launch, too. I can’t say that the drops are account based, though, for two very simple reasons:

#1: It has been like this for pretty much every game I’ve ever played with an RNG loot system.
#2: It is like this for the majority of players.

Funny thing how the lucky players are always a whole lot rarer than the unlucky player. This generally lends to the idea that the RNG system is working fine: the rare drops happen rarely, and so the players who get those rare drops are rare themselves. If the game was counter to this nature, with 75% of the population getting l33t l00t and the other 25% in inexplicable poverty, then this would serve as evidence to the idea that loot seems to discriminate against accounts for no discernible reason.