Guild Wars 2

Mesmer F skills are bad currently so they have nowhere to go but up. They won’t lose phantasms unless all their weapon skills change, but if the Illusions line is changed theymay get things that make them less dependent on phantasms to deal damage in PvE.

Honestly I dunno how their new skills could possibly be worse than shatters, at least.

Anet doesn’t want people seeing how broken the dungeons are since they don’t have a team that works on them anymore.

Teleport change is pathing if I’m not mistaken. Can’t teleport up cliffs anymore.

Looking at the actual Chinese notes and not the silly Google Translate, it looks like:

- Downed #1 skill fact fixed.
- Flesh Wurm teleport nerfed (universal to all teleports)
- Plague and Lich Form pulse 3 stacks of stability every second.
- Some traits still work when downed. I can’t be assed to try to figure out which is what, I can make out Flesh of the Master, Death Nova, Vampiric, and Deadly Strength.

Zenith.7301:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Zenith.7301:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Zenith.7301:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Zenith.7301:

Since when can’t an ele manage? You got a metric ton of condi cleanses, ether renewal makes you immune to cripple spam unlike a mesmer, and if it gets really bad you just take arcane shield+mist form+ lightning flash and d/f for obsidian flesh.

On my ele I joined a run in progress for CM, the thief didn’t seem interested in coming to stealth me through, so I ran all the way from the bridge area to the endboss zone and barely suffered a scratch.

Mesmer is literally one of the worst classes to make easy runs with on a bad group, everyone likes to run ahead of you and with your limited access to speed boosts without using outside objects, it’s very easy to get put in combat run speed with a short, kittenty curtain swiftness.

And I don’t even understand how Guang can say mesmers make the best world bosses range class when the phantasms die immediately before they even do damage to Tequatl and they don’t even bother attacking objects like Jormag’s ice wall.

With that said, as much as mesmers may sufefr in PvE, the OP made a critical mistake:

Context. That statement was given in the context of an spvp centered event. Of course they’re gonna talk spvp to people in tournaments and demos.

It is true that unfortunately too much skill balancing has been done for spvp and WvW without caring for the consequences in PvE, but you have two options — you give up on the chance that the developers might do something right for a change, or you wait and see. Either way, if you’re so sure the outcome will be bad, you always have the option to not play.

In GW1 mesmers waited a very, VERY long set of years before they were revamped into usefulness.

CM isn’t Arah. I’m not talking about doing the bare minimum and running through and afking for 30 minutes while the rest of the party attempts the skip and fails repeatedly, I’m talking about helping them through it so I can avoid exactly that. Mesmer can solo clear all the turrets before Ooze they don’t wipe the bads, then portal everyone from the WP to Entities, then from the WP to Shoggroth if necessary. Then you can easily solo Stargazer, not to mention they make Lupi go much faster with pugs and generally have lots of options to escape being domed or shadowstepped by pugs trying to range Lupi.

Um, a guardian just slaps on retreat+stand your ground+purging flames with condi clear on shout and he can carry any group through any run in Arah. Good for you that you can do the run solor whiole they wait and then portal them, it’s about the same time as a guardian or thief runs the group through with aegis/stability or stealth.

And any class can solo Arah p1 it’s not a mesmer exclusive skill.

Then you have fractal 50 in which mesmer is unarguably worse than a guardian or thief, and hell guardian and thief are better in pretty much most instances for carrying a group, especially in colosus with blind spam and aegis and higher uptime on reflects when mesmer illusions are getting massacred.

Not that it’s much of a plus to a mesmer. Carrying is not something most people want to do.

I’d love to see your guardian help a pack of idiots run through a pack of illusionists or oozes with just those three skills.

If the people you choose to waste your time with are that bad, maybe you should reconsider the runs you do.

Sounds like you don’t run pugs in Arah very often. Or dungeons very much at all, if “skipped through CM without help” is your crowning achievement on ele.

Who said it was a crowning achievement, you’re just trolling and quite frankly I’m not surprised you’re running pugs so often, as insufferable a kitten you seem to be I don’t think there are many people that would tolerate your sullen kitten for long.

Sitting on several cacti seems more pleasant than carrying a conversation with you right now.

At least the people I run with know I can skip CM without help lol

Doesn’t Brazil get banned all the time for selling paths?

MrForz.1953:

Celestial, lazy. I’m continuously baffled by what the meaning of this set has become since it existed. o.o

it means your options are:

1) Run full zerk and have no defense, die in one hit, etc. Your pugs contribute no damage so you having to do this for like 5 minutes every encounter and if you mess up once you die.

2) Run full tank and just facetank everything. Your pugs still do no DPS so now no one is doing anything, and you take 20 minutes per encounter and then someone has to drop because his parents are calling him for dinner or his baby just woke up or he has class or whatever, then the pugs you get to fill the slot kick you all and sell the instance.

3) You run Celestial and facetank everything and you still have some DPS, so things still die. Not as fast as if you were zerk but you can facetank and still be able to kill things so maybe the dungeon will actually get done without requiring you to be a massive tryhard.

Obviously #3 is the best choice for pugs.

Celestial is the laziness set since it gives a lot of defensive stats (1500 total) but the DPS hit isn’t as severe as it would be if you took soldier, knight, etc. That said it really is a laziness/crutch thing rather than a conscious minmax choice, because the healing power isn’t going to benefit your allies THAT mich.

On the other hand, if you’re like me and have decided that you’re done giving pugs free rides through dungeons, but at the same time you’d like runs to end eventually, Celestial is great.

Zenith.7301:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Zenith.7301:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Zenith.7301:

Since when can’t an ele manage? You got a metric ton of condi cleanses, ether renewal makes you immune to cripple spam unlike a mesmer, and if it gets really bad you just take arcane shield+mist form+ lightning flash and d/f for obsidian flesh.

On my ele I joined a run in progress for CM, the thief didn’t seem interested in coming to stealth me through, so I ran all the way from the bridge area to the endboss zone and barely suffered a scratch.

Mesmer is literally one of the worst classes to make easy runs with on a bad group, everyone likes to run ahead of you and with your limited access to speed boosts without using outside objects, it’s very easy to get put in combat run speed with a short, kittenty curtain swiftness.

And I don’t even understand how Guang can say mesmers make the best world bosses range class when the phantasms die immediately before they even do damage to Tequatl and they don’t even bother attacking objects like Jormag’s ice wall.

With that said, as much as mesmers may sufefr in PvE, the OP made a critical mistake:

Context. That statement was given in the context of an spvp centered event. Of course they’re gonna talk spvp to people in tournaments and demos.

It is true that unfortunately too much skill balancing has been done for spvp and WvW without caring for the consequences in PvE, but you have two options — you give up on the chance that the developers might do something right for a change, or you wait and see. Either way, if you’re so sure the outcome will be bad, you always have the option to not play.

In GW1 mesmers waited a very, VERY long set of years before they were revamped into usefulness.

CM isn’t Arah. I’m not talking about doing the bare minimum and running through and afking for 30 minutes while the rest of the party attempts the skip and fails repeatedly, I’m talking about helping them through it so I can avoid exactly that. Mesmer can solo clear all the turrets before Ooze they don’t wipe the bads, then portal everyone from the WP to Entities, then from the WP to Shoggroth if necessary. Then you can easily solo Stargazer, not to mention they make Lupi go much faster with pugs and generally have lots of options to escape being domed or shadowstepped by pugs trying to range Lupi.

Um, a guardian just slaps on retreat+stand your ground+purging flames with condi clear on shout and he can carry any group through any run in Arah. Good for you that you can do the run solor whiole they wait and then portal them, it’s about the same time as a guardian or thief runs the group through with aegis/stability or stealth.

And any class can solo Arah p1 it’s not a mesmer exclusive skill.

Then you have fractal 50 in which mesmer is unarguably worse than a guardian or thief, and hell guardian and thief are better in pretty much most instances for carrying a group, especially in colosus with blind spam and aegis and higher uptime on reflects when mesmer illusions are getting massacred.

Not that it’s much of a plus to a mesmer. Carrying is not something most people want to do.

I’d love to see your guardian help a pack of idiots run through a pack of illusionists or oozes with just those three skills.

If the people you choose to waste your time with are that bad, maybe you should reconsider the runs you do.

Sounds like you don’t run pugs in Arah very often. Or dungeons very much at all, if “skipped through CM without help” is your crowning achievement on ele.

serenke.4806:

If you have done fractals before and know the “worst case scenario” of how long it could take, how hard is it to simply decide not to go into the place?

You know that it could take over an hour, so if you don’t have that time, don’t start it. We have threads such as these and people are still upset that NPE treats them like babies…

If I keep kittening up during an Arah solo and it ends up taking two hours instead of 30 minutes, i’m fine with that because it’s one me. If I do a pug Fractal and it takes two hours to get the last boss because the pug wiped on every single boss, then they can’t beat Mai and all quit, and I have to open it up to LFG again and some kittens come in and kick me and take the credit for all the kitten I had to deal with the last two hours, then yes, that’s kittened.

Anet kittens with the RNG in Fractals by adding a bunch of encounters that pugs are categorically incapable of doing, then compounds that problem by making it so anyone can join at any time and steal your instance with zero consequence, because they’d rather the content be nothing but people zerging at a dumb flower and the hardest part is remembering to afk on top of the flower instead of next to it.

I’m fine if Anet hates dungeons now and has officially taken them off their list of supported content but if Fractals are going to come up as dailies every other day, it’d be great if they weren’t the worst-designed content in the game.

The only fear I have in dungeons is bads joining hard dungeons like Arah, failing miserably and forcing me to kick them, then coming back and kicking me and negating the dungeon that I just 90% soloed as retaliation.

Bads being kicked for being bad is nothing new, if anything they have it better than ever because now the party leader can’t even tell you to carry your own weight without risking you griefing him.

Zenith.7301:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Zenith.7301:

Since when can’t an ele manage? You got a metric ton of condi cleanses, ether renewal makes you immune to cripple spam unlike a mesmer, and if it gets really bad you just take arcane shield+mist form+ lightning flash and d/f for obsidian flesh.

On my ele I joined a run in progress for CM, the thief didn’t seem interested in coming to stealth me through, so I ran all the way from the bridge area to the endboss zone and barely suffered a scratch.

Mesmer is literally one of the worst classes to make easy runs with on a bad group, everyone likes to run ahead of you and with your limited access to speed boosts without using outside objects, it’s very easy to get put in combat run speed with a short, kittenty curtain swiftness.

And I don’t even understand how Guang can say mesmers make the best world bosses range class when the phantasms die immediately before they even do damage to Tequatl and they don’t even bother attacking objects like Jormag’s ice wall.

With that said, as much as mesmers may sufefr in PvE, the OP made a critical mistake:

Context. That statement was given in the context of an spvp centered event. Of course they’re gonna talk spvp to people in tournaments and demos.

It is true that unfortunately too much skill balancing has been done for spvp and WvW without caring for the consequences in PvE, but you have two options — you give up on the chance that the developers might do something right for a change, or you wait and see. Either way, if you’re so sure the outcome will be bad, you always have the option to not play.

In GW1 mesmers waited a very, VERY long set of years before they were revamped into usefulness.

CM isn’t Arah. I’m not talking about doing the bare minimum and running through and afking for 30 minutes while the rest of the party attempts the skip and fails repeatedly, I’m talking about helping them through it so I can avoid exactly that. Mesmer can solo clear all the turrets before Ooze they don’t wipe the bads, then portal everyone from the WP to Entities, then from the WP to Shoggroth if necessary. Then you can easily solo Stargazer, not to mention they make Lupi go much faster with pugs and generally have lots of options to escape being domed or shadowstepped by pugs trying to range Lupi.

Um, a guardian just slaps on retreat+stand your ground+purging flames with condi clear on shout and he can carry any group through any run in Arah. Good for you that you can do the run solor whiole they wait and then portal them, it’s about the same time as a guardian or thief runs the group through with aegis/stability or stealth.

And any class can solo Arah p1 it’s not a mesmer exclusive skill.

Then you have fractal 50 in which mesmer is unarguably worse than a guardian or thief, and hell guardian and thief are better in pretty much most instances for carrying a group, especially in colosus with blind spam and aegis and higher uptime on reflects when mesmer illusions are getting massacred.

Not that it’s much of a plus to a mesmer. Carrying is not something most people want to do.

I’d love to see your guardian help a pack of idiots run through a pack of illusionists or oozes with just those three skills.

Anandira.8756:

I can’t believe people came on this thread just to you give you grief about running a heal guardian. I consider myself to be a semi-hc player and I wouldn’t run anything other than a full zerk party, but I would never come on your recruitement post just to tell you that what you are doing it’s bad, especially when you specified you were a casual group. To each their own!

Kudos to you for staying nice and polite, and explaining your choices. Have a free bump

It’s because he’s asking for full zerks to join his guild for dungeons but then he kittening runs clerics. Which basically tells me “our guild sucks and all our players run kitten builds, please someone good join and carry us”.

Zenith.7301:

Since when can’t an ele manage? You got a metric ton of condi cleanses, ether renewal makes you immune to cripple spam unlike a mesmer, and if it gets really bad you just take arcane shield+mist form+ lightning flash and d/f for obsidian flesh.

On my ele I joined a run in progress for CM, the thief didn’t seem interested in coming to stealth me through, so I ran all the way from the bridge area to the endboss zone and barely suffered a scratch.

Mesmer is literally one of the worst classes to make easy runs with on a bad group, everyone likes to run ahead of you and with your limited access to speed boosts without using outside objects, it’s very easy to get put in combat run speed with a short, kittenty curtain swiftness.

And I don’t even understand how Guang can say mesmers make the best world bosses range class when the phantasms die immediately before they even do damage to Tequatl and they don’t even bother attacking objects like Jormag’s ice wall.

With that said, as much as mesmers may sufefr in PvE, the OP made a critical mistake:

Context. That statement was given in the context of an spvp centered event. Of course they’re gonna talk spvp to people in tournaments and demos.

It is true that unfortunately too much skill balancing has been done for spvp and WvW without caring for the consequences in PvE, but you have two options — you give up on the chance that the developers might do something right for a change, or you wait and see. Either way, if you’re so sure the outcome will be bad, you always have the option to not play.

In GW1 mesmers waited a very, VERY long set of years before they were revamped into usefulness.

CM isn’t Arah. I’m not talking about doing the bare minimum and running through and afking for 30 minutes while the rest of the party attempts the skip and fails repeatedly, I’m talking about helping them through it so I can avoid exactly that. Mesmer can solo clear all the turrets before Ooze they don’t wipe the bads, then portal everyone from the WP to Entities, then from the WP to Shoggroth if necessary. Then you can easily solo Stargazer, not to mention they make Lupi go much faster with pugs and generally have lots of options to escape being domed or shadowstepped by pugs trying to range Lupi.

Element Two.7316:

Painbow.6059:

get them to camp lightning whip auto attack

Implying you can melee Grawl.

or Old Tom.

I don’t think Anet ever bothered to fix that sploit where you just sit inside him and melee. The only thing that hurts you is the posion ticks (the projectiles don’t do anything) and his melee punch thing which you can block or invul depending on your class.

Lishtenbird.2814:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Mesmers are gods for pug dungeons and ranging world bosses

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Mesmer is my #1 pick

Here, you said it yourself – it’s your pick and not a “god for pug dungeons”. Mesmer is as much god as a bearbow ranger. If anything, it’s either guardian which can outheal awful clueless zerker wannabes, or an ele which can buff the party and output the damage required for the party not to wipe before the 2 obvious dodges run out.

Chaos Archangel.5071:

Dude.. I know its fun to look for reasons to rage but.. This is good news.

Combined with the defiance change, all we’ve seen are things looking up for Mesmer.

For PvP and the comparatively small, but vocal community of this subforum? Yes.

For PvE? No, since we all know that mesmers will be overnerfed (because ANET-MESMERS-OP-QQ-PLS-NERF) to the extent of being overshadowed by other classes in PvE all over again.

If I pick it it IS good. That’s the point. Mesmer carries pugs through half the Arah skips and boss fights and breezes through Lupi who is the big pug killer. Back before Anet broke the LFG I used to do P1 by soloing the Ooze, portaling people through to Entities, portaling wipers to Shoggroth, carrying Lupi with reflects, then soloing Stargazer.

I’d like to see how your ele manages groups that can’t even skip the part after ooze in a group, much less solo.

I do my best.

Fractals is legit a dumb format though. It’s pretty much 3 full-length dungeons chained back to back and then a boss fight at the end specifically designed to kitten with pugs.

I think my idea is good since there’s nothing stopping you from doing all of the hourly fractals for the extra reward if you really want. Not that Anet ever gives a kitten about anything PvE cause they’re pushing the “eSports MMO” angle so hard.

TheRandomGuy.7246:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Well camping grenades and mashing 1+2 isn’t super hard. You don’t even have to watch the Shrapnel Grenade CD if you just mash both keys since the game prioritizes cooldowns over autos in most cases.

Camping grenades =/= useful engi.

Still gets you 25 vuln and decent DPS. Could do a lot worse on a maxscrub build. Could be bearbow.

Well camping grenades and mashing 1+2 isn’t super hard. You don’t even have to watch the Shrapnel Grenade CD if you just mash both keys since the game prioritizes cooldowns over autos in most cases.

1-1.5 hours is still a ridiculously long run, especially since Anet officially supports kicking people at the end of dungeons now. I wouldn’t even trust doing something short like COE with pugs now, much less fractals.

Mesmer is my #1 pick for pugging Fractals and Arah actually. Although I don’t do that very often now because of the pro-griefer changes.

Mesmers are gods for pug dungeons and ranging world bosses, and pretty much any open-world stuff you can kill in one shatter burst. You don’t have to be top tier at every single thing.

It’s more of a laziness thing. Otherwise you have to trait swap to Speedy Kits between every fight, or just not get the permavigor unless you swap kits constantly. Either way it’s a hassle and not really suited for an AFK build.

Just make it so everyone who was in the party when the dungeon was created is an “owner”. That way incoming pugs can’t just join a dungeon in progress and kick people, and similarly if you join a dungeon and they’re already halfway then you’re at least on notice that being kicked is a possibility.

Full Celestial + Giver P/S engie with Traveler runes (big defensive stats, permanent speed boost) and 6/6/0/2/0 setup is about as easy as it gets for engie. You don’t even lose that much DPS for it, I think last I checked that Celestial setup is only about 15-20% less DPS than an Assassin setup thanks to grenades also scaling pretty well with condition damage. You do still have to mash the grenades manually but that’s not hard when you have 1500 stat points invested in defensive stats and permavigor. If the grenades are too much for you you could even just camp bombs, although you’ll lose DPS that way.

Anet’s new agenda seems to be to push content that requires long time investments in a single stretch and I don’t like it. Look at Silverwastes and the whole “afk in map for an hour then fight Vinewrath for 30 minutes” format. Fractals aren’t much better tbh especially with the new ones. It’s tolerable with a good group I guess but I can’t imagine how anyone pugs any level higher than 10.

I propose:

- Instead of randomly generating fractals at entry, randomize them every two hours or so and let us pick one from the set. It could be a selection of fractals based on difficulty tier like it is now.
- You get a full reward for doing one fractal, but it scales by difficulty (i.e. Swamp gives less than Dredge).
- You get some kind of "boss token’ for doing a fractal (again scaling by difficulty, i.e. Swamp gives one and Dredge gives 3). Each player needs X tokens to enter a boss fractal, which can be done anytime. Boss fractals give higher rewards than regular ones.
- Fractals are DR’d, i.e. doing Swamp twice doesn’t get you anything. If necessary, doing a whole set could reset DR but I don’t really see that many people having a huge investment in doing multiple Fractal runs back to back.

This way, you can do fractals based on how much time you’re willing to invest rather than having to set aside 2+ hours in case your pug is bad, and even if you run into griefers who kick you at the end, you don’t lose quite as much because you get your reward at the end of each individual fractal instead of at the end of all four. Hell, I don’t even pug Arah now and that’s way shorter than some of the Fractals.

If the necro specialization could use life force to cast skills with support effects (i.e. Blood is Power becomes Bread is Power = Expend all life force to give allies might/fury/quickness based on amount spent) or summon minions (chance to summon jagged horror on hit at the cost of 10% life force per horror, or something) then Necro might actually be good in PvE content. They had lots of good support skills and minion stuff (their current minions are crap due to long CDs and low damage) in GW1.

Unfortunately, it looks like Revenants have the “spend stuff to get stuff” niche filled now so Necro is probably just straight SOL.

Clear evidence that Anet gives no kittens about anything not PvP:

- Condition damage still borked despite it being a super obvious issue from day one and them acknowledging it as an issue almost 3 years ago.

- Necromancer still crap in PvE and none of the new traits added help.

- Engies still can’t enable autocasting on grenades despite the fact that nothing moves in PvE anyway so ground target is pointless.

- Ranger sword still animation locked, despite the fact that again nothing moves.

- Elementalists of all classes keep getting DPS buffs.

- Confusion duration buffed in PvE but nothing else, demonstrating a staggering lack of awareness of what actually needs fixing.

When the game first came out the TP didn’t even work for like a week. I was banking all my greens cause i knew they would be worth a bunch when the TP finally went up (I ended up selling them for 3-4s per which was a kittenload of money back then) and I had no problems stashing all my greens for a week.

Sounds like you just need to git gud.

Simon.3794:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

I go away for a few months and come back to this kitten:

1) Warrior is supposed to be average at everything. Deal with it.

.

except the fact that warrior is not avergae at everything, but average at so little things he can do.

can he group stealth? skip? reflect projectils for team? give teamate protection?place waterfield? blind field?
nop, non of these he can do. i’m not even talking about things that he can do but insanely “average” at.

he’s “average” at a very little few things hes already limited to do, except banner.
not everything, just not everything..if you want to talk about everything, it’s definitely not warrior you are talking about.

kitten like this is the reason I quit the forums in the first place. Also the reason I came back, because arguing with stupidity is amusing.

Does your stealth/blind thief stack all the might/vuln? Does your reflect mesmer pile on banners that give huge stat buffs? Even engie can’t give fury. Warrior does all that kitten and still goes good DPS in the process, unlike your blindthief who’s puffing smoke instead of attacking like some college fratboy stoner every four seconds.

And if that still doesn’t float your boat, just delete your warrior and reroll, that’s what I did when they nerfed engies.

Blind is better now cause it was useless before. At least now it reduces the defiant gauge.

I go away for a few months and come back to this kitten:

1) Warrior is supposed to be average at everything. Deal with it.

2) Not everyone speedruns. In fact speedruns are so broken at this point there’s not much point in talking about balancing them.

3) Warrior self-buffed DPS is still good and their party buffs are still good. Even better in pugs where a Phalanx build provides pretty much all the might and a fair chunk of vuln.

It’s gonna be hilarious when it turns out you need like 100k Dragonite to make the new HoT precursors and all the clowns trashed them cause they didn’t want to stash it.

Just make it so Defiant divides bleed/burn/poison/torment duration by the max number of stacks (which scales with number of players already) and multiplies damage per tick by the same number. Easy fix.

Anet literally doesn’t care though.

The idea is that allowing you to premake the entire party actually makes it really hard to balance the encounters. Either you have 5 nerds in full ascended coordinating on VoIP to stunlock the boss with Icebow and other silly kitten, or you have some near-impossible fight that 95% of pugs wipe on instantly and consequently never attempt. Lupicus is a good example of this, he’s pretty braindead easy with a competent group but do it with a pug and you’ll find yourself soloing half the time, and the other half the time some pug will live to phase 3 and you get bubbled and die.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be 20 but I think that’s a good number. Since you can still enter with a party of 5 (which is capable of clearing the encounter on its own, if necessary) it’s not totally random, but most fights will remain moderately challenging because you’re probably going to get at least some bads in the other parties entering the instance. On the other hand it won’t be full-kitten “sit in the map with your entire guild two hours in advance so you can guarantee everyone there is good when it starts” kitten like Teq or Triple Trouble are now, because it should ideally still be doable even with 20 pugs.

And yeah, I don’t blame the AFKers. When I do Mk2 I usually hit it a few times, let myself get launched off the platform, then AFK/die until he’s close to dead then run back up and hit him a few more times. The overall DPS loss for myself not contributing is minimal and I have no control over what other people are doing so it’s not like I have a ton of incentive to tryhard. Typical kittenty world boss design, even though some of them actually have sorta interesting mechanics (the Silverwastes bosses do some funny stuff).

So, like, dungeons are dead and kitten, right? Good riddance. All the new content is zerg content, Anet obviously doesn’t care about small-group stuff outside of that lame Fractals update they did a while back that made everything 100x dumber. So let’s make the world bosses and things that people actually like better, with instanced world boss encounters.

The way I see it, most content that lets you pre-make your group comp is going to be balanced for the average pug and thus be braindead easy for an organized group (most regular dungeons) or balanced for an organized group and be inaccessible to pugs (higher-level fractals and Aetherpath). Anet obviously hates dealing with balancing that kitten which is why all the broken stuff in dungeons is still broken, and instead we get events where you zerg at a big flower and hit it and get a big pile of money after 30 minutes of semi-afk. And of course that kitten needs to be easy too, because with 100 people zerging a boss, individual contribution means squat and kitten is gonna be impossible with the average pug zerg otherwise (see: Triple Trouble or Teq). So now I go to Vinewrath in full Celestial gear and AFK with mesmer greatsword cause honestly it doesn’t matter at all if I tryhard, and if I die big whoop, 1% of the zerg’s DPS lost.

I suggest that new world content be balanced into instanced, 20-man fights:

- You get thrown into an instance with your current party, plus 3 other parties. That lets you ensure that at least 5 people are competent.
- The fight should be balanced so that it is challenging for a competent 5-man group, but not impossible. This means that at minimum, it isn’t impossible to beat a boss so long as you can get a good group together (unlike Triple Trouble which is basically impossible with a pug zerg).
- Because the boss will have enough health to tank 20 attackers for a decent amount of time, going full kitten on DPS isn’t going to be ideal, since you can’t control what 75% of the group is going to be bringing for DPS.
- Bosses all have extra high armor and reduced duration on conditions. This is an easy fix to making condition damage output from a zerg not crappy, although there’s plenty of other ways it could be done too I guess.

So yeah this game is garbage lol.

Why would you want a disenchanter that dies the instant someone takes damage? I’d rather the Disenchanter stay alive as long as possible so it can wipe boons and conditions.

New content is great and all but this is as good a chance as any to start talking about substantive overhauls to the actual content. The way I see there are a number of issues that have never really been resolved even in three years:

Condition damage
Condition damage currently suffers from several major issues:
- Cap of 25 means that pretty much all conditions will be maxed out on any high-HP mob in zerg content.
- Condition damage can’t crit, which means that it’s always going to be weaker than direct damage. This isn’t really good balance because it unbalances it in both PvE and PvP (in PvE, it’s useless because you want max DPS, while in PvP it’s overpowering because it only requires investment in one stat).
- Weapons and weapon pairings that deal both direct and condition damage are generally going to suck because direct damage requires investment in three stats, and on top of that hybrid weapons generally deal less condition and direct damage than “pure” direct damage or condition weapons.

Accordingly, I propose:
- Add a new condition called Deep Wound which can be applied by certain skills, and which is applied automatically when bleed/torment reaches 25 stacks (in PvE only). When Deep Wound is applied, affected mobs instantly take the total damage from bleed/poison/burn/torment whenever they are applied.
- Get rid of condition damage and merge it into the power stat. This will allow hybrid weapon combos to function better, and open up more viable weapon pairings.
- Allow conditions to crit. Obviously overall condition durations and intensities need to be adjusted on some weapons to match but this will both make conditions less OP in PvP (since they now require investment in two stats instead of just one) and stronger in PvE (since they can deal more overall damage if you also invest in precision).

Ferocity
Ferocity/crit damage is a bad stat overall, simply because it’s a pure damage stat yet we already have a pure damage stat (power). The fact that you can stack both of these stats to get super high damage, coupled with the fact that defense generally isn’t necessarily since most damage can be negated or dodged, means that Berserker and Assassin are pretty much the only two good gearsets for PvE, with the others sort of being “for fun” or “learning tool” sets. I propose simply getting rid of ferocity altogether (and adjusting weapon damage as necessary to compensate), which means that even if you spec full DPS, you still have the option to choose at least one other stat to build. For example, a DPS-specced class might choose condition duration to get more condition damage, or he might choose boon duration to get more buffs on allies, or healing power to help give allies more breathing room for mistakes, etc. It’s still a “DPS meta” but it’d be a lot more varied that the current “berserker or kick” meta.

Healing power
Healing power is generally the “useless stat” unless you’re running a full troll build like Nomad or something. The problem actually isn’t because the poor scaling but the fact that you generally don’t have enough opportunities to make use of it in general. Heal skills tend to have long cooldowns, or alternately requires you to sacrifice a huge amount of DPS to sit in a healing weapon (i.e. water attunement anything, or engineer medkit, etc.) when you should really just be dealing damage if possible. On the other hand, regeneration gets applied a ton passively, but the fact that it ticks for so little and stacks only in duration means that the benefit you get from healing power is going to be extremely minor. The easy fix would be to make regeneration stack in intensity instead; there’s plenty of ways to apply regeneration and it scales well enough with healing power that it might actually be worth taking healing power as the third stat in a DPS spec (see also removing ferocity, above).

Damage traits
+% damage traits are dumb and boring but they’re almost always the best choice in PvE, unless there’s something else that could be traited to boost damage even more. They also don’t scale conditions which again contributes to the direct/condition damage imbalance. PvE ele builds are literally nothing but stacking as many +% damage traits as possible. Seriously, take that kitten out. I don’t care if they all get replaced by fall damage traits, it’d still be more interesting than a build where 10 of your 14 trait points are all the same “Deal +% damage when ______” kitten.

Necromancers
Seriously, give these guys some kind of damage-boosting Order skill or something. Maybe give them a trait that puts the Signet of Vampirism effect on everything they hit. I dunno but these guys are long overdue for a PvE buff.

SKATE.1394:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

You used to be able to dodge and immediately cancel into a skill to get the dodge effect/endurance burn without actually wasting time or positioning actually rolling. It made guardians and mesmers way too good though so Anet nerfed it. I doubt they’ll revert it two years later.

I wasn’t playing when this was an option, but that sounds like a design issue. You can still implement the same length of animation delay with a stationary dodge that only nullifies the positional change, and doesn’t offer any roman-cancel type ability to do a quick spell counter.

Well I’m already spamming Anet asing them to implement YRC and FADC so let’s see how that goes.

You used to be able to dodge and immediately cancel into a skill to get the dodge effect/endurance burn without actually wasting time or positioning actually rolling. It made guardians and mesmers way too good though so Anet nerfed it. I doubt they’ll revert it two years later.

Uh you can’t just arbitrarily substitute bleed for attack speed and call that conclusive math.

Vulnerability doesn’t need time to deal damage, once it’s stacked it’s stacked, and any ramp-up time is offset by the fact that bombs also have ramp-up time and it’s much slower since they don’t have access to Grenade Barrage. And if you’re factoring in Fire Bomb and Smoke Bomb ticks the overall damage on bombs is even lower since those are both weaker than the bomb auto.

You’re forgetting that the grenades stack bleed and that the grenades will also benefit from about 15 more stacks of vulnerability Bomb 1 does more damage than Grenade 1 assuming you already have max vuln stacks but when you’re talking about solo damage, grenade wins.

I’d also like to note that the OP didn’t specify whether he’s doing dungeons or regular open-world. In regular open-world FT actually beats both grenades and bombs now.

Xae Isareth.1364:

Firstly, conditions don’t work very well in group PvE because they still havn’t found a solution for the stack limit. I think they gave up.

Bombs are probably better than grenades with a very incompetent group as the advantage grenades had was it contributed more to group DPS through vulnerability whilst bombs gave you better personal DPS. So if your group is terrible (and I mean really bad), bombs might be better as they won’t be making much use out of the extra vul.

FT camping isn’t ideal but it does have its advantages.
-It has a bigger hit area. It tags mobs like a boss in events. DPS isn’t a thing in event farms so FT is quite the king in there. It also means depending on the spread of mobs, you might end up doing more overall DPS.
-It doesn’t suffer as much from travel time and spread as grenades, and requires less effort to use (you don’t need to aim), so in frantic ranged fights with a lot of enemy movement, you might be better off.

Grenade will give you better personal DPS because of the vuln stacking. It’ll only lose if you are already capped on conditions without the grenades.

1) Grenades are better total DPS including bleed.
2) Bombs are better direct DPS not including bleed.
3) You are unlikely to cap vuln with just bombs.

Just putting that out there.

dlonie.6547:

If you’re considering selling, be warned that ANet is more or less ok with whiteknights stealing instances from sellers.

All it takes is one kitten and a friend to join, kick you, and take control of the nearly-completed instance.

As long it isn’t “habitual” (which seems to have a very relaxed definition in this case), they won’t action the griefers.

Also, I’ve gotten forum infractions in the past for making a post requesting a staff reply, so be careful about these posts. They don’t like being asked direct questions — next time just be vague and cross your fingers ;-)

On the plus side, that also means that it’s safe to steal an instance and then sell it, so you basically break even.

Purple Miku.7032:

pdavis.8031:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

pdavis.8031:

I run it and love. Yet it is circumstantial at best. In a pug dungeon run, almost always. But I will reconsider if I see an ele, then end up running it anyway, because I see they have a staff :P I often get more full signet warrior than I ever care to see, so will run it then. As far as a loss in DPS? I feel that the stacks of might make up for whatever DPS I may have lost when traiting for PS

You don’t get the extra PS stacks, only your allies, so it really depends on team DPS and how much might they’re getting without you. If your allies are getting 0 stacks without you, it’ll probably be worth it no matter how poorly specced they are, but if they’re already sitting at around 10-15 stacks with their own gear and skills, the gain is going to be pretty marginal or even negative after factoring your personal DPS loss.

True, I may not get full benefits, but I can get around 18 stacks for myself, and 20-23 stacks for the party. And that brings up my DPS to a little bit more than what I do normally.

No it doesn’t. You take a monstrous loss in personal DPS to provide the might to the others. Even if you’re in full berserker with either scholar or strength runes and full ascended, your personal DPS is so much lower that the gain from the might stacks that the party can get is relatively close to being offset…

Like, the pugs would have to be good for it to be worthwhile which makes it a totally redundant trait; if the pugs are good, they won’t require measures like this for partywide might :P

Better leave that job to the ele.

The pugs don’t actually have to be that good unless they’re specifically built for lots of might stacking and no DPS (like having multiple staff guardians spamming Empower). If you can actually add the full 25 stacks to the party the actual required break-even DPS for each individual party member is actually really low. Like full knights, no DPS spec bearbow low.

pdavis.8031:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

pdavis.8031:

I run it and love. Yet it is circumstantial at best. In a pug dungeon run, almost always. But I will reconsider if I see an ele, then end up running it anyway, because I see they have a staff :P I often get more full signet warrior than I ever care to see, so will run it then. As far as a loss in DPS? I feel that the stacks of might make up for whatever DPS I may have lost when traiting for PS

You don’t get the extra PS stacks, only your allies, so it really depends on team DPS and how much might they’re getting without you. If your allies are getting 0 stacks without you, it’ll probably be worth it no matter how poorly specced they are, but if they’re already sitting at around 10-15 stacks with their own gear and skills, the gain is going to be pretty marginal or even negative after factoring your personal DPS loss.

True, I may not get full benefits, but I can get around 18 stacks for myself, and 20-23 stacks for the party. And that brings up my DPS to a little bit more than what I do normally.

You would get the might even without Phalanx, the benefit of Phalanx is purely for other people.

pdavis.8031:

I run it and love. Yet it is circumstantial at best. In a pug dungeon run, almost always. But I will reconsider if I see an ele, then end up running it anyway, because I see they have a staff :P I often get more full signet warrior than I ever care to see, so will run it then. As far as a loss in DPS? I feel that the stacks of might make up for whatever DPS I may have lost when traiting for PS

You don’t get the extra PS stacks, only your allies, so it really depends on team DPS and how much might they’re getting without you. If your allies are getting 0 stacks without you, it’ll probably be worth it no matter how poorly specced they are, but if they’re already sitting at around 10-15 stacks with their own gear and skills, the gain is going to be pretty marginal or even negative after factoring your personal DPS loss.

dominik.9721:

Cygnus.6903:

This build is what makes a pug group decent. In any sort of organised pve group, not a single warrior should equip it, the ele will give you all the might you need.

In the current meta speedclear groups (Warrior,Engi,Guard,Ele,Thief /Mesmer)
A Phalanx warrior becomes very useful in dungeons where bossfights are longer than 15 seconds for example in coe.
In practice it’s hard to re-stack might after 15 seconds with one elementalist during the whole fight. timewarps and guardianfields can overwrite the firefield. Furthermore, if your elementalist has to re stack might he won’t be able to play with staff during bossfights. This can be a significant disadvantage sometimes.

If you have both ele and engi it should be a non-issue as the engie can keep dropping Firebombs and Napalms while the ele just auto-attacks with hammer. The ele and engi should ideally have Strength runes too so the might should last about 30 seconds which is more than enough time to do a couple of extra blasts.