Dungeons are destroyed, so those aren’t in the picture.
Fractals have been horribly mangled by the devs… I suspect they will move back towards zerker away from the current viper/sinister meta simply because only 2 or 3 professions have strong/viable condi builds, and the entire idea of bullet sponge enemies is cancerous to PvE
No one really has any idea what to expect from raids.
I was mistaken to post in this thread, against my better judgment. Zach, you’re not going to get any constructive feedback at all in future threads because any time anyone posts on any subject, you respond as though you are debating the entire forum.
I would argue it’s a “facts zone”, and DPS is just part of the facts. You have to look at everything a build offers in actual numbers to see if it’s any good.
I am personally taking all the “I can go _” masteries, and I don’t care about things like fighting a champion exalted every day. I’d rather have practical benefits of the masteries like easier travel in the final DS fight.
Your bizarre passive aggressiveness aside, there are no truly serious players that insist on using zerker if it’s not the most efficient for group content. The thing meta-hating soldiers gear people in the old dungeon meta never got is that zerk users want to be as efficient as possible, by taking the best possible builds and gear; they weren’t simply being elitist. Those same people have since moved on to vipers for high level fractals. And those same people are going to use whatever gear is most efficient for finishing raids.
Basically, the meta is always the most effective way to be successful, and the gear worn is not based on simply liking something. Going against the meta is by very definition making your team less likely to succeed.
Zerk is almost without doubt going to be part of the raid meta. Heralds, thieves, mesmers and warriors will probably all use it. Engis will use vipers. And I suspect there will be 1-3 people per raid team that aren’t full glass. But time will tell, and the meta will be dictated by success and math instead of your very odd anger.
The first and only boss in the beta had a mechanic where he constantly attacked the guy with the most toughness, allowing other people to go ham.
I have noticed the same behavior in some HoT open world enemies. I took a WvW geared engi in to some hero challenges to open up scrapper, and my moderate level of toughness compared to other people probably in zerker and sinister made the champs attack me 100% of the several minute long fights.
It’s been 30% since I can remember. At some point someone decided it was 30% and it has never changed despite rangers’ damage massively waxing and waning. I think it’s more of a concept than a real number.
It was 30% when the PvE meta was only sword autoattack (back when you opened with hunter’s call) and it was 30% when you opened with 100% faster RF and path of scars. It’s 30% with torch on quickdraw and us being nearly tied for highest DPS in the entire game If there is anything consistent in my life, it’s 30% of our damage is in our pet.
You’re the math guy, I’m just repeating what keeps getting repeated. I saw it on reddit as well (although I generally try to avoid going there.) It may be like klonko said that it’s like the ‘30% of our damage in pets’ myth.
2% is the number that keeps being repeated on the raid forum. That’s for full ascended accessories and weapons, but exotic armor. The idea is that accessories and weapons are incredibly easy to get, and armor is much more time consuming and expensive.
Armor wise, if you need a specific set you could probably get 1 or 2 pieces and MF them into the right stat set, and then fill in the rest with exotic. I have an ascended knight’s box sitting in my bank that I don’t really want.
I agree with what Scrimshaw wrote, I think this is not good for fractals at all.
It might be useful in raids. It seems to me the general consensus is a raid composition will have extremely specialized roles, with pure DPS and pure healers, but if no one needs healing at the time, the pure healing druid will be a complete waste. This build provides reasonable damage while still being pretty much a pure healer if needed. The question is whether a zealots druid would be the better alternative.
Too early to tell if this will be useful for raids or not, which is the only place I’d want to use this. But a surprisingly coherent build, once I plowed through the text wall. You really should add a build link to your original post.
Except me and most others are half-afk processing loot, doing stuff on the TP and generally just tagging and bagging.
There is nothing else to do in the area, you don’t accidentally fight a champ. If you were just standing there and someone else triggers it, you have ample time to move 6 feet to the left to avoid the fight.
The downed players on the champion are hysterical. The attack takes like 2 seconds to go off and covers the entire friggen area in count-down circles! You don’t even have to learn the timing, it tells you exactly when to dodge.
I certainly wouldn’t complain. To play devils advocate, PS warriors do give up a lot of personal damage to run that, while SotP is part of our damage build.
I half agree with you, VB has become incredibly easy, but I don’t think the open world is the place to bump up difficulty. We’re still having “please nerf HoT” posts pop up even now, although they’ve declined pretty substantially. I think raids is the place to look for more difficult content, at least until 4 hours after their release when they’re on farm-mode.
Last point: you are right. But this game has never been able to target heal, so why say it’s bad for the druid now? I still think druids are very good at healing/support.
Target healing is another discussion I think, so is the holy trinity
We’ve never had targeted heals before. All the others are AoE, direction oriented, or auto-targeting. Or at least the majority, someone correct me if there is a targeted heal hidden away somewhere.
There is no way anet is capable of so finely tuning their raid that 2% stat differences are going to be noticeable. Maybe for their developers it is, but most of the developers are not very good players (sorry guys, but c’mon, we’ve seen your builds, they’re beyond terrible. ).
To make things clealer, 2% of a five minute burn phase is 6 seconds. And that’s if every single players is in exotics. If only 1 player is in exotics, that drops down to about half a second.
For day-to-day content it’s useless.
Raids haven’t sounded yet, but you’ll need Ascended gear for that anyway.
People keep posting on the raid forum that full ascended is only 2% better than exotic armor with ascended trinkets and weapons, so it may be of some use. We all know how “deftly” anet can sense what 2% is…
Taunt is listed under hard. Fear is a hard CC because it interrupts.
Soft = "Mechanically, they are not actual control effects (i.e. they don’t interrupt when they are applied, and traits that trigger on “disable” will not trigger on them)"
It makes for a thread full of helpful responses, is what it makes for. Your negativity is noted, but ultimately serves no purpose other than to give me something to get annoyed at and something to distract me from updating this thread.
Next time you get the urge to make such a response in this thread, write down some “skills that people know already,” in detail, with good formatting, and maybe you’ll feel a little better about yourself. And hey, if you post it, you’ll even be contributing something.
Thanks.
No it doesn’t make a thread of helpful responses, this is all a waste of time. If someone genuinely has no idea their profession has CC, they can go to the wiki for a comprehensive list instead of this jumble of repeats and ad hoc posts.
The following is a quick breakdown by class to show you some of your options (I want to make this comprehensive at some point, but I’m going to skim for now)
And yes, I’m gonna try to get this updated with everything eventually.
Anyway,
Ya I read that, but you left out so many and such obvious ones that your list was completely pointless. Nearly every response in this entire thread is people listing CCs you missed, which makes for a fun discussion. /eyeroll
Tequatl wasn’t nerfed, players were massively, massively buffed since he came out (look at triple trouble for how extreme the change was.)
Raids being hard is fine with me, but unfortunately they have killed off every type of 5 man play that was available to us. If raids are not accessible to 95% of the population, instanced play is gone.
All the professions are balanced well enough that beginner players are not going to notice any differences other than you’ll do better at what you like/are intuitively good at.
I recommend going to metabattle.com, loading the highest rated conquest build(s) for each profession, and playing 10 or so games with it. That will give you a decent feel for if you like it and are capable of playing it.
What would be fun is to see Anet nerf CoF exploit and spider exploit and then reset all those that abused it back to level 1 mastery (and remove all their mastery points too).
In what way would removing people’s effort be fun for anyone?
Well, both condi and zerker gear would be full glass. Condi would be sinister or viper. For even minimally competent PvE, active defenses (aegis, blind, etc.) trump toughness and vitality.
Organized groups will always have 25 might stacks, fury, maybe quickness/alacrity up, so that’s sort of irrelevant. Even PUGs are pretty decent about boons.
Condi gets better the longer the fight goes. So right now, condi is better in high level fractals and zerker is better in low level fractals and dungeons (because the fights are over before the condis can even take hold.)
We don’t know enough about raids to know yet.
Addendum: Not all professions may be able to output enough condis to make it worth it in long fights. Engis and rangers can do tremendous condi damage; I’m not actually sure if heralds can crank out enough condi damage to be worth it at high fractal levels. I would guess yes, but that’s just a guess.
5 CCs within 30 seconds is something even a standard ranger can do pretty easily. You need to learn the tells more than anything else, because if a ranger or druid builds around CC, he’s not going to ever run out. Fortunately you for you, many of the tells are enormous.
Edit: I guess that’s a bit vague. I think you should just look at the CC available to rangers on the wiki (there is quite a lot) and then load up those skills and pets on your own ranger to see how they work.
Elite spec weapon skins and map completion are luxuries. It may be that you really really want them, but you can enjoy the expansion without it. Difference between “need” and “want”.
It’s like saying you can’t play GW2 unless you have a legendary weapon.
No point in continuing this conversation, we’ve both said our minds.
barring exploiting a glitch, it is impossible to complete Auric Basin without Ley Line Gliding
Huh? I’ve done it and I don’t have LL Gliding. Anet always has secondary routes.
And map competition is my definition of a luxury. I’m not sure if it’s bugged or not, but I didn’t even get any rewards when I completed the maps.
All you need to enjoy the expansion is gliding and mushrooms. The rest are luxuries. I guess we can add updraft in there so you can play the final map, but updraft is level 2. So a total of 4 mastery points.
You definitely don’t need the poison mastery for anything useful.
I doubt crafting has any impact at all. The people who want to do that are “purists” that want to do the whole things themselves. It’s not only a thousand times easier to buy it from the TP, it’s often cheaper as well.
I assume the devs want us to use CA as something more than condi removal or stealth, but more utility promotes a higher level of play. Using things for multiple purposes makes for interesting game play and neat combos. You’re already punished for using CA by depleting your AF.
There is a problem in that daggers have a shorter range and only cleave 2 targets.
You’re thinking of thieves’ daggers. Weapons themselves have no range or cleave ability. Look at ele daggers or mesmer GS. You could make ranger daggers be 5100 range and cleave 15 targets.
I get dying from not dodging, I don’t know how you could throw yourself off a cliff with it though. It only does that if you don’t have a target, which means you’re button spamming on a stealthed or near-death enemy.
95% of people’s sword problems could be fixed by using rhythm instead of spamming 1.
I’d love to play DH, but I only have enough inventory on all my characters except ranger for 1 set of armor. Every single character except my ranger is in WvW gear. So I’m stuck with a DH in full clerics which sucks in open world. She has to hit pocket raptors like 6 times to kill one.
I think that they should just throw rangers a main-hand dagger as a power weapon which doesn’t animation lock you.
I think 100% of the community (including other professions) would be happy if they gave us daggers that had the exact same stats as swords, only daggers can’t follow your opponent and let you dodge. Then the player could choose which they prefer, and other professions wouldn’t be in an uproar over rangers getting a new weapon.
The story was completely shafted and extremely disappointing. They didn’t seem to have spent any resources at all on it, and even worse, forgot about most of the story that players were interested in.
1/10
Edit: GW has always had a problem of never finishing any story. The franchise has constantly started random new things that interest players, and then never, ever returning to it. It’s infuriating. HoT continues this by basically ignoring everything they’ve ever put in the game previously. In WPs video, he must spend half an hour listing things anet left out of the story: “No this, no this, no this, no this.”
It has kitten lot of HP, and 95% immunity to AOE.