Guild Wars 2

I think there should be 3v3 or 2v2 tournaments, because some people like the strategic combat that they offer.

The maps could be fairly simple and small. Like one could be a big circular arena surrounded by lava and another one could be like a rectangular hallway with a circular center with pillars.

There could be like two gamemodes

Elimination

time limit about 10min
no spawning

Win by eliminating the enemy team

On timeout:

The team with the most amount of players wins

If equal

Team with the most amount of players not in the downed state wins

Otherwise draw – minor (or no) rewards for both teams

King of the hill

normal capture mode but just with 1 node

first team to score 150 points win

time limit about 10min

there are some custom arenas that run 1v1 matches

So basically…

What we will get:

More or better cripple/chills/pulls
Improved weakness

What we may get:

Some improvements to DS (nr5 skill)
More reliable condition damage (damage spreaded over different conditions, not just ‘pure’ bleed stacking)

What we will not get:

Access to vigor
Better access to stability
Dark Path ground targeted (again) or any other leaps

Does this mean that if I want to roam with a necromancer in WvW, I have to reroll my necro to a norn necromancer so I can use the kitty cat elite as a reliable source of escaping multiple people every 3+ minutes?

All I ask for is just having Dark Path ground targeted again as at the moment I can’t even keep up with my allies.

We would still be slow, we would still lack stability, we would still lack vigor, all I need is one reliable method of jumping 1200 or even 900 radius so I don’t need to level up a norn necromancer just because I love roaming.

Please explain how do you damage warrior banners.

please watch this

www.youtube.com/watch?client=mv-google&hl=fi&gl=GB&v=riyMsBRxXHs&nomobile=1

If the link doesn’t work search But of Corpse minion AI explained from youtube

Make scepter nr 3 burn “the opponent’s soul” for 1 second for every unique condition on foe

Hi! I’m stuck in UK for a week still, and because of that, I can’t go to play GW2 as I live in Finland. Is there any way I could get the helmets without participating in the fireworks show as they look awesome? If I was home, I would just hang in LA to get them but I feel so sad that I will not have the opportunity to get those really good looking helmets :S

I see you are trying to make an offensive DS build. Offensive DS builds can be effective in PvE, but in PvP they just tend to melt because of the fact that necros get focused.

If I would use a DS build, I would do a tanky/support build with DS, focusing on PVT/cleric/apothecary gear and using one of these setups, the weapons would be staff + dagger or axe, if there is no need for mobility, I would take an offhand dagger, note that SoL will work quite well with these builds:

TWP = take what you prefer

Condition Master, 0/0/20/20/3
DM – II/V + VI
BM – I/III/IV/VI + IX
SR – III/IV + III/IV/VII/X + XII
Consume Cond, Plague Signet, SoU/TWP, TWP, plague/FG

the idea is to gather conditions from allies and send them back and remove them while you are healing your allies and trying to CC the enemy by dancing in and out of DS, epidemic is always a valid choise, though it is a situational skill, if you go for full PVT you can also use lich, but note that if you take the revive traits it is better to go with plague as you can plague res. Notice also that the VI in BM will not scale with healing power so I would consider it only with PVT gear.

The Debuffer – 0/10/20/10/30
C – IV
DM – II/V + IX
BM – III/IV/VI
SR – II + VI + III/VII/X/(XI)

Consume cond, epidemic, TWP, TWP, plague/FG

I would take II + VI + X in SR and II in DM for the staff, the idea here is to gather LF and then dance around the enimies applying vulnerability, weakness and chill to them in and out of DS, take an axe or scepter mainhand istead of a dagger with this build, I would take some condition duration runes and maybe a rune of hydromancy to apply more chill, note also that the VI trait in BM does not scale with healing power so I would consider that only with PVT gear

They could modify LF:

Blast your foe with life force for X damage, burning their soul for 2 seconds.

They should lower the direct damge component slightly and transfer some of the damage into burning, but in exchange they should make it do full damage even when under 50% LF

Necros do have good condition damage, so I would like ANet to change some bleeding damage into burning so we wouldn’t be so dependant on it. I just wonder how that should be done… maybe replace the bleeding of Dark Path into (soul)burning? Add (soul)burning to scepter #3 doing 1 sec of burning for every unique condition on the enemy and lower the direct damage component?

I would like to see those cast times being instant, escept for flesh golem as its active is too powerful to be an instant cast.

I would also like to see a slight change into the flesh wurm:

- as we all now thief sword nr 2 was not intented to be infinite range, I think somewhat the same bug is with the flesh wurm

I would change it so that you will teleport to your wurm only if you are in the 1200 range of it as the tooltip indicates BUT if you cast the wurm port skill at over 1200 range (an icon change could be a good indicator) you would consume it, halving its cooldown and gaining half the life force you normally would.

This would make the wurm port to function similarly as other teleports and allow you to replace it instead of jumping 1200 range into the direction of it and waiting for that 40/32 sec before you can replace it.

Awesome work Jon.

Ascii.9726:

@DarnDevil IV.2143

Epidemic relies on conditions remaining on enemies for the full duration, it never happens. If you’ve had such an Epidemic then your enemy zerg was just bad, period.

No it doesn’t rely on the full duration. I can get bleeds to tic for 140 dmg (2000+ condition damage plus few stacks of might), so 20 stack of bleed do 2800 DPS. If the bleeds last even for 3 seconds, that is 8400 damage to single target with just the bleeds. Add in poison and burning and multiply that by 5 for the total damage.

The best way to get a good epidemic of is , as the name says, from a downed person. Why? They have lots of health giving you time to cast it and they cannot cleanse conditions by themselves making them gather a large amount of conditions.

The thing with DS against evades is:

In 1v1, death shroud will mitigate damage and evades do that also.
2v2 will work quite the same as DS is quite beefy but when you are up against more than 3 enimies and get focused, things start to get wild.

Evades/dodges/distortion/invulnerability all scale up with the enimies. What I mean with this is that when 2 enimies burst on you and you manage to evade it, you will evade double the damage compared to one enemy. Death shroud instead will always have the same amount of life force thus meaning it will get weaker the more enimies you have attacking you. Double the damage, halved ds duration. So the effectiveness to soak damage with ds is actually 1/x , where x is the amount of ppl while evades, dodges and invuls have a scaling of x.

However this is usually not a problem in WvW and PvE where you have critters to regain your LF and the large number of dying enimies, which can help you to regain large amounts of LF while in death shroud to soak up great numbers of damage.

In tPvP though, where you get easily focused hard by 5 ppl, it is a big problem. Your shroud will soak up roughly a friction from the damage spike, where as a well placed (stunbreak + ) dodge will soak more damage in 1-2 seconds than DS could ever handle.

I am not saying they should increase the tanking potential of DS, that would be absurd. All I’m saying is that a reliable source of some vigor, maybe 5 sec vigor on a 20sec cooldown could help a lot.

You should remember that DS is not for just tanking bursts. It is a defnsive based stance for necromancer, which has some offensive uses.

2 days after someone posted this bug it gets fixed.

WOW

ANet is definitely improving. Good job guys. I could buy some gems if you keep fixing bugs this fast.

To sum it up:

Get the stat that you need. I am not talking about maxing a stat, just doing a collection on what you should get if you feel you need something.

Get vitality if you…
- make a build where you need a fat shroud (and go deep in Soul reaping)
- need to survive more condition damage
- are going continuosly in and out (which can be hard as a necro)

Get toughness if you…
- need to survive more direct damage
- have high healing power
- need more overall sustain (remember to have condition removals!)

koopatroopa.5360:

Zenith.7301:

You cannot beat a half decent D/P thief as a powermancer. You must play a terror condi build to have any chance, and even then they can just wait out your cooldowns and keep resetting.

Necro power spec is a team spec. It’s not a duel spec and you’ll only beat bad people with it because quite frankly you don’t have the burst other classes have nor the invulnerabilities/blocks to foil spike while staying offensive. Everytime you go into DS your damage drops significantly because your only really good DPS ability is an autoattack.

This is so completely false. Just because you can’t make it work doesn’t mean it’s unviable. I have beaten plenty of good players. Using DS for damage gets you killed. Good necro’s only flash DS.

While it’s true I do not have the burst, it doesn’t really matter anyway. They don’t have the burst either because my DS eats it up.

with D/F – staff you have plenty of ways to hinder a thief (or any profession really). Necro’s just have to work a bit harder to get the same result and I’m okay with that.

If you take making theif running away as a victory then yes I aggree with you, but I think Zenith ment there is no way to kill a decent D/P thief with power necro, which I totally agree. He has to be a no brainer and engage in combat while having the shadowstep utility on CD.

flow.6043:

DarnDevil IV.2143:

flow.6043:

DarnDevil IV.2143:

and put a nr2 under your feet.

rofl

Yes, I know a theif can dodge very easily, that’s why you put the mark on the lowest cooldown for it.

I use this mainly for the information about his location and if a thief burns a dodge to avoind one staff nr2 I will be more than happy as there are much more important things to dodge.

You misunderstand.
That phrase just sounds alot like toilet humor. xD

I agree about the mark. Not to forget, you get regeneration even if the thief dodge rolls through it.

Ah, now that you said it I understand it LOL

flow.6043:

DarnDevil IV.2143:

and put a nr2 under your feet.

rofl

Yes, I know a theif can dodge very easily, that’s why you put the mark on the lowest cooldown for it.

I use this mainly for the information about his location and if a thief burns a dodge to avoind one staff nr2 I will be more than happy as there are much more important things to dodge.

@Kitedyou

I play mainly condi necro so I am not so familiar with the power necro but my suggestions are ( keeping your original spec in mind ):

When fighting:
If you are playing against an offhand dagger thief, avoid melee range as much as possible, so sticking with the staff is the best choise here. When he stealths you can throw a quick mark on the location you saw him last and put a nr2 under your feet. If you think the thief was coming for you you should dodge about 0.5-1 sec after your mark triggers on him depending on his time spent in stealth ( I recommend to try a thief to fully understand the stealth mechanics and timings ).

Dodge if you see a CnD incoming.

If you are against a dagger pistol thief, you can go on melee, just avoid staying in the blinding powder and use your dagger 2 while waiting for it to go down.

To make him run:
Use all the chills/cc you have and do as much damage as possible

To kill him:

This is the tricky part and hard to pull off.
Stealth thieves use stealth heal, DS is your best friend here. If you have dagger, interrupt them with DS3 and follow up with DS2 and try to go max dps to down them (perfect time to use BiP if it’s up) if you have staff ( against DD thieves ) interrupt with DS3 and continue with marks.

If they use shadow refuge, try to use staff nr5 to fear them off of it as they will get revealed.

If they use shadowstep, there is nothing you can do if they jump away from you and not next to your wurm or something. Only way to kill a thief is to get their shadowstep on CD and trick them to go on you, or they use shadowstep in panic and tp close to you.

If you do not have doom up when you see a thief going stealth use DS2, dagger 2 ( if on close range), DS4, dagger 3 or focus 5 as channeled skills will continue to hit if you start them before your target stealths. Same goes for skills that you have started to cast before one stealths.

In conclusion:
- avoid the burst ( the tricky part )
- use staff for offhand dagger thieves
- use chill as much as possible ( for the slow )
- save DS3 for countering the heal
- go all in after you have interrupted their heal, chill will also increase their recovering time
- use staff nr5 for shadow refuge if you can save the fear mark for it

I think many of us will agree on most of this…

The things that necromancers need:

Death Shroud
- DS5 skill, why a NEW condition? Give us a ‘fear me’ with a stunbreaker
- DS2 skill, make it a ground targeted ~1000 range 120 radius teleport aoe chill+bleed
- DS1 skill, add at least a 1 sec burning on life blast, please give us (soul) burning!
- let DS4 heal your real healthbar, scaling with healing power
- let DS1 keep its damage even when below 50%
- let us regen our LF to 50% (at least to 33%) while not in combat, helps every necro

Minions
- improve minion AI
- make all minion active skills, except golem, instant cast with no aftercast
- make us able to desummon the wurm when not in 1200 range, halving the CD and LF generation

Weapons
- add scaling to life siphoning
- improve power based aoe dmg, maybe better power scaling for staff?

General:
- improve DS in general for both offensive types and defensive use
- give us more access to stunbreakers, stability and vigor
- improve mobility slightly but not too much, ground targeted DS2 should do the trick

ManCaptain.3154:

Not to mention Necros are horrible vs burst as it is.

I just want to point out that necromancers are ment to go for sustained combat, all other builds except well bombing goes in the favor of outsurviving or outdamaging your opponent over a moderate period of time.

The key to necromancy is to avoid bursts. Same goes to all high regen/ high sustain builds out there. Even with my guardian I rely on my dodge and blocks/invulnerabilities to avoid bursts on a point.

Edit:

My point is, bursts are not the problem, the lack of stabilities And stun breakers is the thing which make bursts so hard to avoid.

I totally agree that life siphoning should scale. A flat boost in siphoning will benefit more dps builds than tankier builds. Siphoning is a survival thing and speccing for survivability should increase the effect of your survival abilities, flat boost just benefits all other builds more than high defense builds. What’s the point in getting more vitality and healing power if you can’t use the healing power to heal your health pool more effectively? Tanky builds are all about effective health, not 25+k health pool that just gets drained.

I totally agree that what necromancers really need is some more mobility…

Only rasonable choice IMO would be a condition that punishes it it is removed, so you would think twice before burning all your condition removals.

But we have terror for condition bursting and it works like a dream. You can achieve a moderate burst with undead runes and have higher dps or give up some dps with runes of the necromancer/nightmare to achieve 200% fear duration for bigger burst.

I would like to see something like channeled dash forward in a shadow form evading attacks and draining 1% life force every 13 units moved, this would make you go for about 1200 range if you have a full LF.

As for now you just pop your DS to live for 2seconds longer if you get focused by a group of ppl. At least it would actually help you live and you could kill bunnies in WvW to travel faster and keep up with everyone else. Necromancers always get left behind.

Ascii.9726:

flow.6043:

In regards to what Ascii said:
Epidemic cooldown is 15 seconds, wells: 45 or 60. And the potential damage as a condition mancer is higher than 3 wells combined.

I would take a 36 second Well of Suffering, one of the hardest hitting utility in the game that’s also a dark field, then Epidemic which can be purified off in seconds.

Well of Suffering does hit hard indeed but it is easy to dodge or run off.

Note that the damage from the conditions spread by the epidemic is calculated from the user’s condition damage and the duration is transferred thus meaning that power builds that do not have condition damage but condition duration ( the upper most trait line with every profession ), which we can mostly see in WvW, will amplify epidemic’s damage and the best aoe cleanses (shouts) have a cooldown of 20 seconds or above.

Imagine 15secs of burning and poison, few stacks of confusion and 15 stacks of bleeding for 15secs on 5 targets with 2000+ condition damage just from one good epidemic.

The npcs make your life even easier as you can epidemic from them ( lord, guards etc.)
Note also that poison reduces the effects of healing by 33% thus cutting off every third blast finisher into a water field if you want to think it that way.

Necros can do quite good spike damage, but they are all outplayed by a good player. The well bombing is the biggest burst I suppose, but many classes get out of them so easily. Other one is axe 2/life blast bursting but it reguires you to have 100% LF at the start of the fight.

Necromancers really shine in high sustained damage so if you want to do really big bursts frequently with a caster, you should roll a mesmer or an elementalist many of us is suggesting.

One high power DPS build with high reliability and moderate sustain is 30/x/20/x/x where you take near to death with all minion upgrades and use MH dagger. You should use wurm/bone minions, shadow fiend and bone fiend with flesh golem ofcourse. When you combo your dagger 3 with rigor mortis and golem knockdown (near the end of the immobilization) you can spike the dmg up with your dagger autoattacks and minions. The rest trates are either for life leaching (blood magic) or soul reaping (improved life blast, good for finishing off a fleeing enemy)

I my self like rabid undead terror condition build (0/30/20/0/20). I have about 2800 armor and I can do a moderate burst of 6k spike in 3s (2k dps from terror + bleeds + poison) with corrupt boon → doom or fear mark → doom. The cooldown for fear mark → doom burst is about 35 seconds and the cooldown for corrupt boon → burst is 40 seconds but it will reguire your target to have stability. Note that there must be at least 17sec between the bursts because of doom.

I like the sustained damage and being able to pull of a moderate burst really fast to finish someone off.

Bull Zooker.1672:

if you’re condition specced you shouldn’t drop terror for chill on blind. that would be a very bad idea.

Totally agree, terror is the trait that makes condition necromancers conditionmancers. If you do not grab terror with condition build it is better to go for a condition engineer.

Plague is really usefull for situations where you now you cannot avoid damage, in other words when you get ran over by a melee train. The extra toughness and blinding really help you to survive. I use it as a defensive skill only. My marks/scepter/epidemic/corrupt boon/doom do so much more in terms of offensive play

I use full rabid and undead runes with 0/30/20/0/20

for WvW take:

Curses – hemophilia, terror and focused rituals/lingering curse
Death Maigic – Staff mastery and greater marks
Soul Reaping – Path of the midnight and master of terror

utilities, consume conditions, corrupt boon, epidemic, signet of the locust/ well of corruption

weapons scepter + dagger or warhorn / staff

when moving alone take lingering curses and SoL (finding your zerg again, do not go solo roaming), when you find more players (zerg) take focused rituals and WoC

swap WH for dagger when you know you need more mobility and vice versa when you need more dmg

for PvE take lingering curses instead of focused rituals and utilities are consume conditions, blood is power, epidemic and SoL

weapons are the same

terror is redicuously powerfull in PvP if you do fear mark into doom or corrupt boon into doom (=3s fear, 1.1k-1.2k dps by just the fear), with adequate amounts of bleeds and poison you can pull off 6k damage spikes (2k dps), wells and corrupt boon have no use in pve except in special cases

sigils should be corruption (condition damage on kill) and earth (bleed on crit)

lowfreq.3674:

spectral grasp sometimes says obstructed or out of range when its not.

corrupt boon does nothing sometime.

please fix this

The problems with spectral grab are related to all projectiles in the game.

Corrupt boon has been fixed for a while. You need to have vision on your target, be in range of it and face towards it in order for it to work. Take note that if your target dodges or uses an evading skill or you have blind on you, corrupt boon is ment to fail as it is only ‘unblockable’.

Is there anyway to vote the years ANet worker? I want Jon Peters to get a reward from his work as he is the only one who makes me belief that the community is being listened.

Yesterday he was watching Teldo’s stream and fixing the engineer bugs, which Teldo presented to us all.

WE LOVE JON PETERS

As for now making a GC build with DS is not possible. After you somehow manage to get a full bar and try to bomb someone with LB (which does big dmg) if you get hit by 1 or 2 heart seekers (depending on the thiefs build) your LB damage will fall by 50%

I would like to see a DS tank but as for now there are too much traits you need to grab in soul reaping

I feel DS overall is quite good, but it feels like a mechanic that has not been polished/finished.

I looked at the traits and it seems to me that every trait line gives something specific to the DS:

Spite – direct damage bonuses, retaliation
Curses – condition damage and weakness, fury
Death Magic – condition removal, vulnerability
Blood Magic – aoe healing
Soul Reaping – DS and its skills CDR, vulnerability, movement speed, longer lasting DS and stability

it seems to me that spite offers direct damage, curses condition damage, death magic survivability, blood magic support and soul reaping overall DS improvements.

The traits that need improvement IMO are transfusion (blood magic), I think it should heal the users real health bar too to make it worth the points.

In soul reaping I think path of midnight and speed of shadows should be merged at least (cdr beign 5 units lower than usual and ms beign 10 units lower than other passive boosts).

What comes into the skill mechanics, LB should have half the casting time but the same LF cost (making it possible to make a power DS build), a few stacks of bleed for 4 sec should be added into it. Nr 2 projectile speed should be increased by 33%, make it ‘unreflectable’ and increase the tp range so that if you cast it in range you will tp to your target no matter what if it lands.

What comes to DS ‘dancing’ it is not worth it atm, as DS has a short aftercast making you waste 0.5-0.75 sec every time you dance. The internal cooldowns make it also discouraging. The near to death trait should remove the after cast of DS and the internal cooldowns on the DS entering traits (e.g. enfeebling shroud) in addition to the 50% CD on DS

Nemesis should be at least their coach.
I would like to play in the team but my schedules are pretty tight for the next year (marticulation examination).

I’ve played DD for a while, I play beefy hybrid 0/10/0/30/30 with 60% boon duration mostly in WvW.

Combat feels still the same.
Survivability feels still the same (I use signet heal).
Chasing feels still the same.
Escaping feels still quite the same.

Just jumping around and riding the lightning over every fence and low wall has changed.

I just feel bad for the glass cannons though… The mist form and RTL change affects them greatly where as I have not noticed any great differense. I still use mist form to avoid bursts, ress ppl ans stomp ppl and as a panic button (you can still change attunements while in mist form).

It’s just funny how Anet wanted to force ppl out of DD bunker builds and now they force ppl to use it again. And it sucks that RTL still bugs out because of terrain resulting in 40sec cd.

Yeah, it is unfair that you can burn some or all of yout utilities in order to escape. With necromancer you don’t even have to use them against 2+ people at all as there is no way you can escape those situations, OP survivability

Latest patch brought some improvements to minion AI and buffed the suvivability of wurm and golem, which is nice. I haven’t played on my necro yet after patch so I can’t say if the AI is still a problem, but there are still some space for improvement:

Flesh Wurm:
The flesh wurm is the only leap/tp ability necros can use defensively and ATM it has so big a cast time that it is just not working quite well.

I could see the casting time beign changed to instant and having after cast instead (like corrupt boon). Casting a minion would still take some time but if you need to relocation yourself quickly this could be done even in the middle of the battle (the teleport part breaking the after cast)

Furthermore, flesh wurm has a longer teleport range than 1200. The actual teleport is 1200 but if you are more than that away from your wurm, you will be teleported into the direction of it for 1200 distance. I would change this skill so that you can port to your wurm only when in range (just blinking a 1200 distance is not so necromancer like) and add a new skill when out of range.

Something like “consume”:
When out of range of the wurm, you can consume it, reducing it’s cooldown by 50% (= 20sec base, 16sec traited) and gaining 5% life force. This would allow you to change the position of wurm in combat without porting to your wurm, as of now you need to switch skills (out of combat) or port 1200 distance into the direction of your wurm if you wish to replace it.

Consume could have a 1 sec cast timer (so you can cancel it) and it should not break stuns.

UI improvements:
ATM it is hard to tell if your minion is low when there are lots of skills flying around (mainly Wv3 and big group events).

I would make a general pattern for the minion icons:
Green colored – when a minion has 50% or over hp
Yellow colored – when a minion has 50-25% hp
Red colored – when a minion is below 25% hp

only exception could be blood fiend with blue color istead of green

Mechanic improvements:
All the minion skills except flesh golem’s charge should be instant with no after cast. The reason for this is, that they are creatures bond to you so I don’t get it why you have to shake your hands in order to command them. Only “thinking” should do the trick -> instant cast not interrupting your casting. Flesh golem’s active would be too OP though.

Activations for Shadow fiend and bone fiend should take place immediately, a blind or immobilize that is hard to time (in addition to that is fails quite often) is worthless. The actives should activate immediately, reseting the autoattack timer for them.

Voxel.6473:

Should all other classes have their RTL equivalents nerfd the same way? What was wrong with RTL to begin with?

Wait, what? Did I miss the patch notes??? Is there an RTL equivalent for necros, too?

If in a tight spot just mist form (attune to water, works in mf and clears conditions) → lightning flash → armor of earth → (RTL if you have it →) FGS (attune to air if not already) and you are safe. Now you just need to think twice before going into 1v3+ fights, specially if you have cantrips on CD.

Thieves don’t even bother to chase me after I pull out my greatsword.

I would say warriors and thieves are faster if speced so, from ranger I do not know, engineer is definitely slower as both engineer and ele has perma swiftness but DD ele has more leaps and a teleport, necromancers are the slowest class in the game with no leaps and mesmers have blink and some swiftness uptime. Guardian has some leaps/teleports and some swiftness uptime so I would say elementalists are now #3 or #4 in mobility, but #1 or #2 on survivability when going for a mobile spec.

What about a condition you would like to remove before it has been too long on you? Like a condition that just thickles when removed under 10 seconds but if left alone for too long it will chunk a great amount from your health bar.

In mathemathical terms I am talking about a condition that has an exponential damage multiplier based on time it has been on a target and the damage occurs when this condition is removed or the duration expires.

A function for the damage calculation could be f(x) = 1.5 times x cubed, the damage if removed after 2 sec would be 12, after 5 seconds 188, after 10 seconds the damage will ramp up to 1500 and after 15 seconds thiss will hit for 5k, may be too overpowered with this function but this was just an example.

I really like the time bomb idea, as condition (necromancer) builds are lacking some sort of burst but I do like to keep conditions more like DoT/DoT bursting builds

I would like to see something like ‘Infection’, it would be a moderate duration condition

Infection:
After expiring or removal it deals damage based on the time it was applied or maybe the amount of bleeds or burning (condition damage scaling stable number) and poison (another condition damage scaling number).

Removes swiftness on apply.

Infection would have a really low base damage and would scale with condition damage making it a swiftness remover for non conditional builds and a “burst damage” condition for condition damage builds.

Skills that apply it would be ds #1 2 sec per hit (making it usefull for condi builds, too) when over 50% LF and ds #4 1 sec per hit, maybe the last 3 projectiles of poison dart volley 2 sec per hit and the dd thief dual skill also 3 or 2 sec if all hits land, also some ranger pets could apply it as someone mentioned.

If it would be based on conditions I would make it last longer and apply from less hits for longer duration (things like first life blast in ds to apply 10 sec of it, with piercing trait you could apply this to multiple ppl) so ppl have time to try to cleanse their conditions or infection.

If it would be based on time, I would make it do great dmg only after lasting for 5 seconds. If based on conditions, I would make it to deal great dmg when having 10+ bleeds and poison or burning and poison.

This would enable some interesting comboing with engineer volley and burning timing, thief dd 3 and poison applying timing and necromancer with bleed and poison stacking (ofcourse spreading infection with epidemic sounds SO GOOD)

I agree that a 40sec cd is a bit overkill… but let’s accept it.

The thing is, engaging on 3 or more people and working it out (with other class than the thief) is quite OP, IMHO. The 40sec cd has no effect on 1v1 battles (with a tanky build, but the glass cannons are pretty much dead now which is bad nerfing) but it will make you think twice before going into the middle of a group of players.

Why thieves can survive this then? It is because they can’t accomplish anything solo in that kind of situations. You can’t stomp with a glass cannon thief in the middle of 3 ppl if they know what they are doing.

Warrior has the greatest mobility in game on the long run but is forced to gs, the thief has the best mobility but is not so good in team fights apart from decimating ppl to downed state, otherwise they can just stay ranged or get blown up.

Ele could do all the things but I think this RTL change will balance up things in the game, glass cannon eles just need new toys to make it worth it. Grab a FGS and you can run like a wind when you need to. Let’s face it, we can still escape, now it just takes more skill and is harded to pull of when there is 2+ ppl.

That equals more balance to me, and yes I play ele and yes the 40sec cd hurts but I have a level 80 necro so we should be happy with the mobility eles have. If you want to solo roam, reroll a thief, thieves are the best solo roamers in the game.

I agree on that. I like to think that my all my conditions will get removed once every 10 seconds (that beign the cooldown of passive removals) because almost all professions will at least try to get some sort of condition removal. That said I’m not a fan boy of condition (bleeding) duration in spvp and wvw, but I do understand the benefits of it in pve (though this means you need to be the only one, who is using bleeding as a main source of damage) where boss fights do last long.

In pvp environments conditions get removed quite often so you want to re-apply them and make them hurt as much as possible in the time you are given, and you don’t want to make a fight last for ages.

Condition damage has more overall uses in terms of damage.

I just tested in spvp against heavy golem some condition duration vs damage from runes:

I used traits 0/30/20/0/20 (hemophilia and +33% duration)
I used rabid amulet with rabid jewel
I used stable scepter and dagger without sigils

The runes I tested was Superior Runes of The Undead (x6)
and the other set was Afflicted (x2), Krait (x2) and Centaur (x2) for +45% bleeding duration

I found out that when using only scepter chain 1 it takes about 15 seconds (starting from when I start casting first time and ending on golem death) to kill a heavy golem with both rune sets. All test times were between 15 and 16 seconds.

When using 1 time scepter 2 and off hand dagger 5 and then using only scepter 1 chain to finish the golem it took 13 seconds from both runesets to kill the golem.

My conclusion: Yes, condition duration makes you stack more bleeds and will make your bleeds do more damage (specially short ones) than condition damage, but poison will get a big boost from condition damage so if you are having it up almost always on your opponent condition damage is the way to go. At least with full rabid the bonus percent you get from your toughness with 20 points in death magic will equal the amount of damage you will get from +45% bleed duration.

Condition Duration, for increasing the damage from short duration bleeds
Condition Damage, for dealing the damage in shorter time and increasing poison (necros don’t have any other damage boon)

(I also tested the terror trait and I don’t find it useful, even with +50% fear duration it tics only 1 time for about 1200 damage, = 1 second of 8-9 stack bleed on my build)

Also Runes of The Undead will increase your survivability

I run hammer shout build (10/0/20/30/10) , I use valkyrie armor with soldier runes, knight accessories and cleric hammer. It’s nice to run around with 3k armor and 26.5k hp and still be able to hit for 2 to 3k crits 50% of the time

I think warriors are not so good solo roamers as thieves or DD elementalists, yes warrior has the best mobility in the game but that is on the long run. Thief and ele can jump a great distance in just a matter of seconds which lets them to catch and escape.

For guild/party roam, warriors are one of the best professions to have. Sword and warhorn offers mobility for your self and your allies and the amount of damage you deal while building tanky is just insane.

I have a razer naga hex, which works perfectly with GW2 so…

movement: wasd and mouse + right button
weapon skills: 1,2,3,4,5
healing skill: v
utility skills: q,e,r (I do strafing with mouse + a or d, r is usually my “panic” button or defensive skill)
elite: tab
dodge: shift
mark target and VoIP : buttons below my space bar on razer anansi
take assigned tarket: press scrollwheel
next target: button left from nr. 1
closest target: c

f1-f4 and weapon switch are all on my naga hex and the one extra button is look behind

I like my setup because I don’t have to change my left hand posission at all, giving me a great control on my character. Every button is nearby and easily reached when needed, though you need gaming equipement to use setup like I have

How I would fix the vapor form:

A. Make it have a short cooldown when going down (like 1 or 2 seconds).

This would make vapor form counterable with immobilize. At the moment you can cast vapor form before anyone can hit you.

B. If this isn’t enough, let movement impairing conditions affect movement speed in vapor form. I would do the changes step by step so vapor form will not end up beign useless. Personally I think that the change A would be enough.

This would make cripple and chill affect the distance an elementalist can move thus preventing him/her for running into a keep for quite a long distance.

Every profession has a counter to their downed nr. 2 skill, (stability and blind will counter the most, for thief you need to have a teleportation skill, mesmers just go invisible but you can damage them as they are nearby the original location) except elementalists. This is a game all about making plays and counterplays so I don’t get the idea why vapor form has a not counterable status

I agree that the whining about the RTL CD incease is pretty funny.
All I had to do is not to spam it every time I’m in air attunement as I used to do. Nowdays I use it only for chasing my opponents or escaping. All that 5 seconds do is make you think twice before you dive into a zerg with cantrips on CD, which is as it should be.

The thing with DD ele mobility and boons is that it will somewhat sacrifice damage. You really feel the difference when playing with a warrior, but DD eles have so much better survivability, it’s funny how well you can survive with a 50lvl DD ele in WvW

DD ele is ment to out sustain opponents where as warriors are more like stright forward smash your opponent down as fast as you can and burst him down before he heals.

RTL is quite balanced at the moment in my opinion. Vapor form is still unbalanced, it should have ~ 1.5 to 2 sec timer before it can be cast in order to be able to counter it.

I play mainly banner warrior with our guild in WvWvW:

I have cleric armor and knight accessories, the reason for knights is that they will give me some more armor I need for taking hits in the front lines and they offer a bit more damage (mainly for killing squishies). You can go full support with banners but I like to be able to pull out at least some damage. (my hammer hits for about 1 to 3k with some might stacks)

I use sword + wh / hammer, mending, FGJ, banner of tactics and strength and battle standard

my traits:
10 in strength – restorative strength for increased mending efficiency (I will use my adrenaline whenever I have earthsaker up in fights)

20 in defence – gain adrenaline when you are hit and merciless hammer (mainly for cd reduction)

30 in tactics – all the things for banners, master tier major is either +70 power to 5ppl when in combat or quick breathing (for more condition removals)

10 in dicipline for 10% increased movement speed (this helps more than you think)

this build is nice especially in sieges, you will provide 10ppl with perma regen, also you will have good condition CONVERT with quick breathing if needed. BoT will provide boon duration (this build has base 30% bd, BoT gives +10% so with a food buff or few runes you can get 60%bd and have perma swiftness on banner skill 3 but I think this is not needed), so when the zerg is moving it is easier to stack perma swiftness (also necros like if you provide them with a banner to run with your zerg as they are so slow) and BoS is nice to have in hand when running into the enemy zerg (press the switch weapon button there and start swinging that hammer, use earthshaker whenever it is up)

in zerg vs zerg battles I dive in and go back and forth, throwing my battle standard if I see downed allies, your primary goal is to cc your enimies and tank damage

the good thing about this build is that you can also change few major traits to convert it to a dungeon support build (btw, change one banner to something else in dungeons)

I’ve been looking on the different professions and specially their trait trees. I have spotted a lot of synergy in all of them but one thing pointed out. Why engineer has traits that are weaker versions than their counterparts on other professions?
The biggest of all is Adrenal Implant. I would like to ask the developers in real life how ever can it be possible that an engineer grandmaster tier major trait is equivalent to a ranger adept tier minor trait? (Adrenal Implant = Natural Vigor) I thought major traits were supposed to be more powerful than minors (of the same tier!!!).

The ranger and the engineer are both medium armored and have the same base health. They have both access to 1500 range (ranger has it for single target and engineer for AoE which has been nerfed down really hard) and both have it pretty hard against condition damage if not traited, however, ranger has more evades but that is covered with engineers’ easy access to hard cc and somewhat easy access to protection and/or blocking.

IMO they should switch Adrenal Implant to adept tier minor trait and make Adrenaline Pump grandmaster major with minor tweaks: tool belt skills that have a base cooldown of 45 seconds or longer would return 25% of endurance, all the other skills would return that normal 10%. This way it could be more rewarding to put 5 points in tools to improve Energized Armor and Evasive Powder Keg.
I play mainly warrior and necromancer (sometimes guardian, too) so this comes from neutral perspective.

There are some other traits, too that are weaker than their equivalents. Here are some I found:

(M = major, m = minor, 1 = adept tier, 2 = master tier, 3 = grandmaster tier)

Engineer Firearms: Target the Maimed (m3) —— Warrior Arms: AoO (m3)
– warriors will have a damage increase of 10% while engineers get 5%

Engineer Firearms: Sharpshooter (m1) —— Warrior Arms: Precise Strikes (m1)
– warriors have 33% chanse of triggering 1 stack of 3s bleed, engineers have 30%

Engineer Tools: Armor Mods (M3) —— Warrior Defense: Spiked Armor (M3)
– warriors have an internal cooldown of 15s, engineer have 25s

I am not saying nerf all the other classes. I am saying that maybe it is time to rise the engineer to the same level as the other classes are, at least for the traits!

Greatsword + sword and warhorn has the best moblity of all the warrior setups, specially when combined with mobile strikes. For utilities I would take bull’s charge and frenzy/endure pain and throw bolas. Elite would be signet of rage. I don’t like frenzy myself but it is really good for fast bursting and catching ppl off guard when going for solo roam.

Though I don’t suggest to solo roam as warrior because it is somewhat difficult to escape from 5+ ppl. Ele and thief are much better choises for solo roaming, at least for my experience thief has been more rewarding than warrior when doing solo roams.

Warrior shines when having other 4+ ppl around and I really enjoy party roaming as warrior. Party roams also will let you the freedom of choosing other weapons/traits as you may not need 2 mobility sets. I usually have sword and warhorn for mobility and then a weapon set of my choice depending on the build I use. Just remember to carry that greatsword with you in your bag so you can have more mobility out side of combat when you happen to need it (NOTE: not IF, it’s WHEN).

It’s funny how a simple question like which of the 3 healing skills to use can make ppl so emotional. O.o

I don’t think running a healing signet is stupid. Running a healing signet and not beign aware of bursts is stupid.
I think all of the 3 are good, none of them is bad. I’ve had really good experiences with each of them and I think warrior has one of the best sets of heling skills in the game.

Just to point out the good part of hs:
I dueled in pvp another warrior while I was using axe and shield with hs (other utilities were FGJ, SIO and SoS) and he was using gs with mending or surge. He spotted me first so with frenzy + bulls charge and I was able shook it off and dodge out with 2/3 hp left. After that I over damaged him in dps and managed to get him down to 1/3 health while I was at a little bit under 1/2 health. Then when he tried to heal I stunned him and threw an evi and gg I won.

The lesson is that with hs you can focus more on dodging ( which works really well with strength trait line and SoS) and damaging your opponent as you don’t have to stop attacking to heal yourself. Also it is not vulnerable for interrupts.

Countering is the name of the game as well as knowing your weaknesses. My build was very weak to condition damage at the start so I changed endure pain for SIO and changed to soldier runes. The key is to find the best heal for YOUR BUILD and YOUR PLAYSTYLE. I often change the healing skill when I feel something else to be better for a situation. Like in dungeons if I am playing with staff ele and gs guardian I propably don’t need so much condition removals so I would change mending to hs or as. (I prefer using hs with the build I play anyway but that is my play style)

Examples of what healing skills I would use with ‘common’ builds:

For KS build – as (ks is wvw focused spec)
For banner build – hs in pve, mending or as in pvp/wvw
For GS build – mending or as (need cond. remove or not)
For shout build – hs in pve, mending in pvp/wvw
For axe/sword + shield build – hs/mending/as, whatever feels the best

For wvw if I go melee for zerg vs zerg, I take burst heal in any case so I can get more health when I get up from downed or after retreating a bit so I can get back in the fight faster. In zerg vs zerg it is all about the spike damage.

to sum it up:
hs, + “no need to heal”, – avoiding bursts is the key

as, + really big heal with low healing power, – pretty long cooldown and vulnerable for poison

mending, +can get some unwanted confitions off of you while regaining health, -somewhat decent heal and for it to really work I usually pick 10 points in strength to remove some more conditions on heal, mending is propably the ‘for every situation’ heal