Rifle, hands down.
Pistol is pretty terrible for two reasons – 1. it’s a hybrid weapon, but it scales so poorly based on conditions that you do more overall DPS stacking pure power. But if you’re going to stack pure power you might as well go rifle since it scales even better.
2. It’s balanced around a 0.5 second fire time, but due to the animation the actual fire time is ~0.75 second (same as rifle), this leaves it doing much less dps then it should.
It’s a kitten shame because I like the shield alot, but the pistol is just too terrible to use.
Play something else.
If you have 5 world completions and multiple legendaries, you’ve probably sunk hundreds or even thousands of hours into the game – pretty good for $60 (or less).
Just go play a different game, and come back later if they add something else for you to do.
Chauncey von snuffles III
/thread
Can’t edit my post for some reason…
Just noticed battle standard is an elite, which explains why it’s so much better.
Why am I not surprised that’s warrior’s version of the rez skill is completely awesome and worthwhile to use even when you’re not rezzing people (though maybe not with that cooldown) while everyone else’s is terrible?
Ok, all the skills listed except battle standard are terrible and not worth using :p
All these posts and nobody has repeated “play the game your way!”?
The worst part about this change, even worse than the horrible future for PUGs, and people that are simply new to a given dungeon, is that some classes now have mandatory skills.
Rangers now need to have “Search & Rescue” and Spirit of Nature equipped.
Necromancers need to have Signet of Undeath.
Mesmers need to have Illusion of Life.
Guardians need Signet of Mercy.
Warriors need Battle Standard.
Engineers need Elixir R.
Elementalists need Glyph of Renewal.
I absolutely disagree with this.
The skills you listed are garbage and almost completely worthless in dungeons in my experience.
If a player is down – you can pick him up in just a second or two (especially if someone helps you), there’s no reason for a utility with a two minute (?) cooldown. If a player is dead, they take a long time to pick up but those abilities won’t help you at all.
I use gw2lfg to find all my groups, and while yes dungeons are harder then they were, I’ve not really had THAT much trouble. As long as your team is willing to pay attention and pick each other up, it’s not nearly as bad as people make it out to be. Though some bosses might be worse then others, I have not done every path of every dungeon since the change.
My belief is they left it in on purpose because if they haden’t, most people would never have been able to finish a dungeon ever and the game would have gotten poor reviews/bad word of mouth for being too hard.
By now, everyone has figured out how to exploit every single event that we don’t need rez zerging anymore. Everyone knows which rock to stand on so the boss can’t hurt you, or which way to run to skip 90% of the dungeon, or whatever, so they can remove rez zerging.
Can’t edit my post for some reason….
If you meant condition damage/power/toughness that combination does not exist so you will have to mix and match which will probably leave you too spread out, IMO.
For PvE, ‘zerkers, like everyone else. I find that between necro’s excellent condition removal and deathshroud’s second HP bar I don’t have very much trouble surviving as glass cannon.
If you insist on using either knight’s (toughness/power/precision) or cavalier’s (toughness/power/crit damage) then knights is better because precision is generally more valuable then crit damage.
For PvP, I don’t even know, I’d guess knight’s is the still better but I don’t PvP.
It’s incredibly unlikely you will be banned for using an actual hardware device. People are allowed to use those fancy mice with 1009489045 buttons and programmable macros that let them press one button to play the game for them, after all.
But either way I don’t think it will be a problem – unless I’m misunderstanding what the device does completely you will end up with a bad case of gorilla arm before you ever have to worry about getting banned for using it.
I guess it’s related to point #1, but I’m surprised they didn’t mention the horribly shallow combat system. Actually I’d say point #1 is not really a problem, it’s just a symptom of the shallow combat system.
There’s no tanking, no aggro management (if the game has a hate system it’s so incomprehensible it might as well be random).
There’s no control (defiant buff on anything worth controlling),
Buffs are short duration and long cooldown, and healing coefficents are almost universally terrible. There’s no mana/energy or anything like that either making support not particularly viable.
Probably 70% of your survivability comes from the two dodges every single class gets free, 20% from utilities/traits, and 10% from toughness/health. Meanwhile, due to the downed system (and to rez zerging which thankfully they are starting to fix with fractals), it’s not much of a problem if you die anyway.
Meanwhile ANet’s idea of making a fight harder is to slap on absurdly large health bars to the same boring mechanics of every other fight.
They don’t explain the roles better because there is only one role – DPS. Sure, maybe you want to sacrifice a little damage so you die in two hits instead of one, or maybe you give up a damage skill for a banner or shout, but in the end every single classes is invited to that group primarily to do DPS.
Burning gets 25% of condition damage per tick (tick is every second), so +1000 condition damage adds 250 per tick.
Bleeds get 5% of condition damage per second so +1000 condition damage adds 50 damage per tick to a bleed.
It’s not that burning does not scale well per se, it’s actually the best single condition for damage (though more then 5 bleeds and bleed is better). It’s that conditions in general scale very poorly and have severe stacking issues in groups so making a condition build is almost always a bad idea (even pistol, the “condition” weapon, scales better with power).
Except the toolbelt is our class gimmick.
No other class has adrenaline except warrior. No other class has phantasms/illusions except mesmer. No other class has deathshroud except necromancer, etc.
Why is everyone else’s class gimmick reliable, but ours is RNG?
So engi is forced to adapt to what rng gave him.
BINGO! This is why the RNG exists. If it doesn’t fit your play style, don’t build for elixers.
Except everything is so short duration and the effects are just so random it’s not realistic to adapt.
I mean, say you are out of endurance and your fighting a boss with an attack you NEED to dodge because it one-shots you… so you use toss elixer H, hoping for vigor to let you dodge, or protection so maybe you can tank it if you can’t dodge. Instead you get… regeneration. How do you adapt to that? you can’t.
Or say you’re low on health, you need a heal, you toss it out hoping for regeneration or vigor so you can either heal, or dodge away to hide and wait for elixer H cooldown. you throw it out…. and poof, you get protection which is not enough to save you from an extra hit – how can you adapt to that?
Or you toss out an elixer S trying to give your buddy stability to protect him from a pull the boss is about to do. Instead he becomes invisible which is instantly canceled by an autoattack. How do you adapt to that?
etc etc etc.
RNG can maybe work in a different game but not in this one, at least not the way they implemented it.
flamethrower is really not that great of a weapon and you’re hurting yourself by using it.
But if you insist, spec power damage. Power scales MUCH better, and the FT only applies one condition anyway so power is a lot better.
Picking up turrets needs to cut off 75% of the cooldown (it’s 25% right now iirc) so, for example, a 30 second cooldown picked up becomes 7.5 seconds.
That will make them mobile enough, IMO.
(then we just need to fix the targeting issues, poor damage, low health, high target priority and absurd vulnerability to AoE damage because they don’t dodge and maybe they will be worth using)
Enough silliness. If you increase condition duration along with condition damage (you can get +110% duration if I’m not mistaken) pistol scales better than with power/crit/crit damage. Not to mention, you can stack your conditions and still kitswap, and still have that damage ticking away.
The only problem with this is having other condition heavy players. I wish Anet would change it so that vulnerability and all other ‘debuffs’ stay like they are, but have each player be able to have his or her own stacks of bleeding/poison/burning conditions up.
I swear I need to just bookmark a thread showing why condition is so bad so I can copy paste instead of explaining it….
But whatever.
With +100% condition duration, pistol’s bleed co-efficient is 0.2. Pistol’s power co-efficient is 0.35. That’s before you factor in crit and crit damage, just raw power vs condition damage. You would need over +200% condition duration just to match the power co-efficient which is impossible.
Then factor in double hitting from coated bullets which applies the power damage twice, but the bleed only once…. and yeah. Things start looking even worse for the pistol.
(edited by BurnedToast.3781)
In a heavy condition build pistols are viable. 20-25 stacks of bleeds all ticking for 120 damage each second, in addition to poison and burning is viable unless you’re grouping with other heavy condition build players (which honestly, I think everyone’s damaging conditions should be separate to be fair, but that is another issue entirely).
I would love to see the math on how you’re sustaining 20 – 25 bleeds as a P/P engineer.
I was looking forward to getting off work today and logging in to check out Wintersday and play with new sigil ideas.
I stopped by the engi forum while patching.
Im still on the engi forum 2 hours later.
Reloading. Hoping against all odds someone will post some great thing that would obliviate the fact my build just got nuked. Which took more skill than anything short of a full on elem pro, with half the power.
I just dont feel like logging in. Maybe that could change if I read enough general discussion…
Hmm…
Well, bombs got a buff. They now benefit from a 9% better chance to proc bleeding than before, without taking any hit to their damage. That is, assuming you have the Shrapnel talent.
That’s all I got.
-Travail.
Rumor has it that all kits were stealth nerfed to make up for having sigils (just not as bad as grenade kit). This is indirectly supported by the patch notes:
This means we had to tone down some of the kits accordingly, the biggest of which was the Grenade kit.
If the bomb kit was stealth nerfed, then it almost certainly does less damage now even with a higher proc chance on shrapnel, so in fact it may not have been buffed at all but actually nerfed.
Unfortunately I don’t have any pre-patch numbers for bomb kit so I don’t know if it was stealth nerfed or not for sure.
Hey it’s ok, the buffed warriors again, so you know what class to reroll as.
Warrior buffs? You mean like Whirling Strike, Tsunami Slash, and Harpoon Pull becoming finishers? All underwater abilities … Or did you mean the 4 bug fixes warriors got like Fast Hands working for the first time ever like it was supposed to.
Hammer Shock not immobilizing you is the only real buff they got. Furious Reaction has become situationally good too now, but it was unusable before.
I’m glad they nerfed grenade damage, because it was way out of line — simply put. Now I can play my engineer without feeling like I’m doing less than I should be doing using grenade spam — which I cannot stand. Other builds like pistol/pistol condi becoming viable isn’t a bad thing you know.
Oh sure, they aren’t MAJOR buffs, but they are buffs.
The point is – every single patch warriors get buffs and positive bug fixes, and have never had a major nerf the whole the time game has been out, despite being arguably the best overall class in the game and almost certainly the most played class.
Meanwhile engineer, who is (afaik) the least played class in the game and arguably the most underpowered class gets major nerfs to go along with any minor buff they might get.
You’re absolutely right grenades were better then every other weapon option for engineer. I said the same thing myself, pre-nerf the only dps option was grenades, everything else did significantly less damage.
But what they needed to do is BUFF other weapons not nerf grenades. P/P sucked before, now grenades are nerfed and P/P STILL SUCKS – so why are you happy grenades are nerfed?
Sigils won’t make up for the fact the base damage on the FT is too low, the power co-efficient is bad, and it only has two damage attacks one of which is incredibly unreliable (and that burning as a condition sucks because of stacking issues, but that’s not a FT specific problem).
It’s still a bad weapon that should only be used for fun.
Hey it’s ok, the buffed warriors again, so you know what class to reroll as.
So he Joins guilds made by random guy spam inviting in town, inviting literally anyone who responds…. then acts surprised when the guild is stupid, lacks cohesion, and most people quit after a week
Duh?
The dungeon finder thing is spot on though. Even if you argue against it saying it will kill the community… at this point the game has no community to kill, everyone is just spamming LA with fractals for hours on end (because they can’t find a group at the proper level.. because no dungeon finder…)
Simple fact is this, a set of armor or whatever takes X amount of ectos. Those ectos have to come from somewhere.
If you’re not farming those ectos yourself, that means someone else is farming them for you. Now that the bots are (mostly) banned, it turns out real people want to get payed more for their time, so the price goes up.
So, if the price to pay someone else to farm them for you is too high then go farm them yourself. Why should other people feel obligated to farm for less gold/hr just because you don’t want to pay the current market rate?
FT #2 not working right is mostly what makes flamethrower suck.
It’s supposed to be a DPS kit (one of the developers said that specifically during one of the BWEs) however, the damage on #1 is just mediocre at best… and it’s the only reliable damage skill the kit has.
If #2 was also reliable, then it would up the dps of the kit a lot and make it maybe worth using, especially if burn was fixed to not be so terrible in groups (i.e. everyone got their own burn stack).
And yes, you can set the shot up to get it to work most of the time, but the damage is not high enough to be worth the payoff. Having to swap to rifle, netshot, swap back, dodge backwards (and/or use the push skill) just to fire it off… and then miss most or all of an autoattack while you run forward (because the explosion range on #2 is juuuuust out of autoattack range)?
It needs to do 100 blades level damage to be worth that, but sadly it’s not even close.
AFAIK there is no cap
Though after a while it hardly matters, because who cares if a mob dies with 30 seconds of bleed left on it?
The more i think about the subject the more i suspect this is a carryover from PVP tuning, where they didn’t want to see someone get a ton of conditions dumped on him quickly and melt before he could respond.
But it’s OK for a warrior to 1-hit KO killshot people from 1400 range? Yes, it does happen (if both the warrior and the target are glass cannon build).
If you got enough stacks of conditions on you to instantly melt, direct damage would have killed you too. Why is it ok for power damage to instantly melt people but not condition?
Are they bugged? Bought one 20 min ago and it never showed up in the mail or for pickup.
Try deleting some old mails.
I had the same problem during Halloween with devil horns, my mailbox was full and it didn’t tell me. By the time i realized it and deleted old mails I had like 10 pairs of devil horns waiting for me from trying to order it over and over :p
Grenades with grenadier are by far the highest dps weapon engineer has.
They also apply vulnerability very well thanks to steel packed powder and 3 crit chances for precise sights if you take that, boosting the damage even more.
Oh yeah, just for laughs, they are the highest range weapon too (despite the facts it’s stupid you can throw a grenade farther then you can shoot a rifle and that the travel time means you won’t reliably hit anything at max range)
If you can stand using them (I can’t, I don’t want to cripple myself over a video game) then any other choice is really kind of stupid, they are just so good.
Of course it’s not fun.
Gear treadmills aren’t about fun, they are about lots of tedious grinding so that you can become more powerful then everyone else and thus feel superior… at least for a little while till the goalpost is moved and you have to grind more (but that’s ok, because it stops the peons who have jobs and/or other hobbies from ever catching up to you)
My longbow’s auto-attack (“Long Range Shot”, a direct damage attack) at maximum range (which yields maximum damage) does less damage than my shortbow’s auto-attack (“Crossfire”, condition bleed) over time. If anything it’s already killing mobs faster than my direct-damage alternative, not slower. I tear up with Crossfire, where as I struggle to stay awake with Long Range Shot, so I’m not experiencing the dilemma you’re painting.
For me, the only time it becomes an issue is when there are several people placing bleed stacks on the same mob. But there’s nothing wrong or wimpy about condition attacks when hunting alone or in a normal party.
I don’t know anything about ranger, but there’s also other factors in play besides straight damage on the autoattack. For example, longbow has better range (I think?) which might mean it needs less damage as balance. The other skills might also be better (or maybe not, I honestly don’t know what skills either one has) to even it out. Or maybe the longbow traits are better. You can’t just look at one autoattack in a vacuum and say condition is fine.
On top of that, I think you will find while the tooltip damage might be better on the condition weapon, in reality if you make a damage build (not necessarily berserkers glass cannon though it shows the gap the most) the overall damage after you factor in crits is probably better on the power weapon. With just 50% crit rate and no +crit damage (not hard to get at all) you’re looking at a 25% increase in overall damage that’s not reflected on the tooltip at all.
Finally, yes condition damage is viable solo – anything is viable solo (you could probably hit 80 with no traits spent and just the default weapon/armor you start the game with). It might not even amazingly worse then power damage especially at lower levels before you get 3 stat armor (for berserkers or some other hybrid survive/dps stat setup) but the fact is, mathematically it’s worse and in practice in any sort of group content it’s severely nerfed for no reason and that needs to change.
You’re right that direct damage is wasted too, but the most the can be wasted is 1 hit minus 1 damage (if the mob had one HP left). Condition damage can waste significantly more, especially in groups. How many times do you see a mob die with 10+ bleeds? that’s a considerable amount of damage lost.
Meanwhile, your ranger example makes my point perfectly. Your ranger loads mob #1 up with conditions and switched to mob #2, meanwhile a direct damage char doing the same (or more) dps would already have killed mob #1 since his damage is all frontloaded.
How is it better to have mob #1 still attacking you while you start on mob #2?
Greatsword to any class that does not have it yet
Rifle to any class that already had greatsword.
Warrior gets nothing because he already has rifle and greatsword and already has enough stuff.
Magic find in dungeons is not just greedy, it’s kind of stupid too.
I think we can all agree magic find gear makes you weaker, which makes the whole dungeon harder for everyone. Maybe it’s a lot, maybe it’s only a little bit, but we can agree it does at least a tiny bit right?
But magic find only works on mob drops. It does not work on chests, it does not work on the rewards at the end, it does not get you more tokens or magnificent loot bags – it just works on random mob drops only.
Most dungeon runs (in my experience) are speedruns where as many mobs as possible are ignored and you only kill the bare minimum required.
That means you’re getting very little or even NO extra loot – that’s right, you’re making yourself weaker and you statistically probably don’t even get a single extra item per run.
So please, buy some real armor to wear in dungeons. I don’t care if you use magic find food if you insist (most people don’t seem to use ANY food) but… please. Wear real armor.
Advantage? That’s… actually a disadvantage.
Power does all it’s damage up front, condition damage does it over time which gives the target time to heal, cleanse, or just die which means much of your damage just falls off and is wasted.
Condition damage actually needs to be stronger not weaker then power damage to balance out the fact it’s dealt over time.
Is it going to be skewed? probably somewhat though maybe not as much as you think, since forums tend to over-represent hardcore gamers, and hardcore gamers are more likely to favor the gear treadmill.
Still, ~73% against (bottom two) vs ~16% in favor (top two) is pretty kitten it’s very hard to wave a gap like that away completely.
Confirm what?
That conditions only tick once per second, and “extra” duration is wasted? yes, that’s absolutely true. You need enough extra duration to give it an extra second or you won’t get any extra damage (the tooltip will reflect the damage another half second would do, but it’s a lie)
It’s just one more reason condition damage is bad.
Like stated in this thread, conditions are actually fine, comparable DPS until the bleed cap. So it’s not condition specs that are the problem; it’s the bleed cap.
What’s funny is this forces people to actually be picky about specs, which is something that is not supposed to happen in this game. Since I’m a condition spec, I can invite maybe one other person specced for conditions. Beyond that, nope. Never taking another.
However, condition builds are absolutely viable in structured PvP. A lot of people run them.
This is simply not true.
First, burning and poison are unique. Poison does bad damage, but burning does good damage – so right there, that’s a huge chunk gone from condition builds since many (most) classes can inflict burning.
But more importantly – if you just take power vs condition damage maybe you are correct (I still think straight power does more but I won’t argue the point and it probably depends on target armor anyway). However, power is multiplied by crit and further multiplied by crit damage while condition has nothing other then condition duration (which is bad for many reasons and only comes on runes anyway). Berserkers gear glass cannon is so much higher dps then anything condition can put out because it has 3 stats all multiplying the effects of each other
Yes, you are squishy with berserkers – but let’s be honest, it hardly matters in solo content and everyone is pretty squishy in group content where 90% of your suvivability is dodging, skill use, and standing in the right place not meatshield/toughness.
Edit: of course berserkers might not be viable in PvP, I don’t really know anything about that. This is for PvE
Flamethrower is really bad. I mean, it’s viable for PvE because basically anything is viable in PvE but it’s really not a good choice.
DPS on #1 is mediocre when you factor the burn in, and downright terrible without the burn (such as if you’re in a group or apply burn via some other source). Even at it’s best, it forces hybrid spec to get the most out of it, unlike other choices which let you stack berserkers for max damage or something else for more survivability.
#2 is too unreliable, #4 is just bad (a small burning field with no direct damage on a weapon that already has 50%+ burn uptime from the autoattack? kitten...) and #5 is too short ranged.
#3 is really the only good skill on it, short cooldown aoe pushback... no complains there.
On top of that, you lose out on your weapon stats and sigils while using the FT, which is really painful at high levels.
There’s almost no chance the price will ever go up to a worthwhile level. Might as well destroy it all.
And if enough people do this, prices will go up.
Not really, because there’s no demand for the things you make out of them and no demand for eating it directly.
I mean sure the price will go up a little but, but enough to be worth hoarding it? no, I don’t think so.
Simple, first there was a MASSIVE supply – every player in the game got hundreds or even thousands if they played a lot, and it can’t be vendored so the choice was throw it away or jam it in the AH for 2c.
Second, there’s no demand at all:
The buff for eating it is useless.
None of the cooking consumables are really worthwhile
All the equipment is too expensive to be worth it
The unique craftable skins are cheaper to just buy from the AH then to craft, because people flooded the market by farming the Halloween events non-stop. I could craft the crossing for 100+ gold (probably a lot more then that but I’m too lazy to figure it out), or just buy it for something like 20g
There’s almost no chance the price will ever go up to a worthwhile level. Might as well destroy it all.
This is also a bad idea. Why should others benefit from the stats that these players have obtained from crafting/buying while in the dungeon they need to be more alert and perform better than the rest (in terms of not getting downed, reviving others, leading etc.. dmg is not what dungeon runs are all about). I have 3 different sets of gears and accessories (full dps, tanky and mf) on my ele. I can tell you running with mf gear, glass cannon traits I do even better than the rest of my group members that are running full berserker or tanky gears/traits but it is also a lot more challenging than when I run with my full dps or tanky based gear with the same traits.
I grind out a set of berzerker’s gear and do more dps. Whole group benefits from everything dying 10% faster (or whatever).
You grind out a set of noble gear and collect more items. You alone benefit while everyone else suffers because you are dying more or doing less damage or whatever.
See the problem?
Wouldnt things like this be better in an actual instance with a raid sized group? 20 – 30 people or so.
No
It would have been really awesome as a 5 man instance though.
It wasn’t worth it, don’t be mad if you missed it.
Killing the same monster (in various sizes) that has far, far too much HP (and has to be “killed” twice each) sometimes 30 at a time, while they randomly run around one-shotting everyone for 3 hours straight at 10 fps (or less)
Just no. it was pretty much the opposite of fun, and unless you got dusk or dawn (and maybe not even then since price is probably going to tank now) a total waste of time.
The ones I have a problem with are the vet egg layers.
Makes condition builds even MORE useless? check (transfers conditions)
Condition damage is the only thing the vets are vulnerable to. They take full condition dmg but greatly reduced normal damage. Condition specs are the best for taking them down.
Hmmm, I was attacking them as a condition specced necro. Normally I can stack 12 – 15 bleeds + perma-poison, I couldn’t get more then 2 bleeds or so to stick to it and poison barely ticked at all. It just transferred it all off too fast, so I had to switch to axe despite having cond damage gear/traits because I was doing basically nothing as cond spec.
I guess they are not designed to be solo’d (though other vet mobs can be solo’ed just fine) but still, they drop conditions so fast. Axe did less damage, sure, but it didn’t seem to be THAT much less (hard to say for sure since I was “sidekicked” up to 80 from 52 so I don’t know how much I should have been doing).
Edit: I should mention this was just me and a random elementalist after the zerg had left, trying to do the escort lionguard patrol DE.
So if I’m reading this right..
Pistol gets 0.324 from power, and a 2s bleed which means 0.10 from condition damage (bleed is 0.05 per second).
Since condition damage and power are itemized at the same value, it’s still better to stack power even with the pistol? o_0 (unless you have ~+200% condition duration which is afaik impossible)
yes I know pistol has poison and (on offhand) burning, but both of those don’t stack intensity so they are… unreliable at best unless you’re solo.
Anyway, thanks a lot for testing these out, it’s very interesting information.
(and I knew EG fumigate was bad but wow…. that’s gotta be a typo)
I’m guessing that there will be more to do after the whole event is “finished” and the zone is officially open all the way.
Just a guess though, because it does seem a bit empty and, I hate to say it, pointless right now consider how much it was hyped up.
What? really? THANK YOU!
I did not know that, and it will make them significantly less annoying now that I do.
The ones I have a problem with are the vet egg layers.
Uncleansable conditions? check
Super-long stun? check
Massive life bar? Double-check, you get to kill them twice!
Makes condition builds even MORE useless? check (transfers conditions)
stupid roll attack that takes forever and makes them invulnerable (and thus take even longer to kill)? Yup we have one of those too, check.
perma-stability? check, who needs the “control” arm of GW2’s trinity right?
Everything else seems fine so far but seriously those egg layer guys are pro-trolls.