You’re misunderstanding me. I don’t want it’s DPS to beat out the current kit juggling. I want some utility on it that makes it strong enough to be worthwhile without kit juggling.
If Irenio’s change is significant enough it’d already do the trick… possibly. Honestly I think it’s kind of OP to have so much DPS inside defensive skills, so I think he did well on that.
The entire point of my post is to strengthen non kit swapping builds, create more diversity, strengthen non kit skills by making you stronger in the void (I define that as the time when we’re spamming 1). Yes acid bomb is still easily the best DPS skill to have around especially considering the utility you get with the EG kit. Flame blast is still always amazing. Grenade kit with barrage and shrapnel… awesome. But I think making any other utilities even close to matching a kit is simply absurd becuase they’d be all in one single skill usage. I know you know engi… probably better than I do, but kits are kittening awesome. I just think the only way to really strengthen non kit options you have to give something that has a stand alone power to decrease that gain of juggling the kits. As strengthening the non kit skills to kit levels is simply too good.
I want an increase to sub optimal builds is all I’m saying. Many people don’t like nades (I love em) many people don’t enjoy the kit dependancy (again I love em) and I think that’s an area that should be addressed with Engi. You’ll probably still use a kit maybe 2, but the 3 kit rotation is finger intensive to the point that I can’t help but feel it limits the popularity of the profession in a negative way (again, I love engi as it is). I feel it’s one of the big limiting factors of the profession is all. I want all those FT/bomb kit spamming Engi’s to have a better option.
I think that song someone made about Engi summed it up great, “The noobfilter profession”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yva23bkjXHc
(Honestly I’m a salty old at hear kitten that drinks too much whiskey and yells at kids on my lawn, so it’s not my style to listen to this stuff, but I’m a HUGE fan of that song, so dead on and cute)
I think HOTS should be a good time to separate agony resistance from ascended armor set. I would like to see agony resistance become an account-wide stat just like magic find.
My reason for agony resistance being a bad thing tied to armor:
1. GW2 is advertised as a no-grind for stats game. However, to progress in fotm, you have to make ascended armors which are quite costly. And the ability to craft ascended armor has no correlation with one’s ability to do fractals.2. Anet wants every profession to be versatile. However, with AR tied to armor, one has to stick to one set of armor which greatly limits build variety. If you want to switch from power to condie, you have to craft a complete new set of ascended armor. This is not fun.
3. I am also forced to run with limited professions. Heavy/medium/light gear type can only be shared among three professions.
4. Ascended armor is end-game gear. Being forced to put on AR in the infusion slot makes me feel awkward. Just in order to do fractals, I won’t be able to put other types of infusion in the slot.
With the new fractal line in the mastery system, I think there should be no problem for Anet to separate the AR progression from the gear progression.
1) they’ve obviously deviated from that course of action. You can see it with the vertical progression they’re introducing with masteries, with the fact that ascended exists at all and AR which has existed for a while now.
It’s still not a grind game because it’s all optional as well. In fact you can experience all the fractals with 0 AR, it’s just extra optional difficulty levels that are opened with AR, which is hardly a grind compared to other games.
And, the fact that you use Colin’s responses about raids is a very clouded sense of reason as raids are actually going to enforce mastery requirements, which obviously goes against the ideals you’re trying to hold to.
2) As has been said many times, the control/support/damage roles are far more about skills than they are gear choices. Sure support can be bolstered by gear to become more of a healer, but the strongest support is the active support you can do with say reflects, stealth, might, vuln, fury, and then more niche or specific skills like Transfusion, Frost Spirit, EA or banners. Control really has almost no gear dependencies other than maybe some condi duration but that’s what 25% max on those conditions compared tot he 50% you can get from food, not a huge deal. Now damage is heavily influenced by gear, but because those other two aren’t you’re free to use damage gear while you do the other two, and gear has become far more of an ease of play choice than a role choice.
3) Focus on trinkets/weapons, I have a set of 60 AR trinkets and at least 2 of every weapon type ascended with AR. I can swap gear freely and hit 70 on any character, heck I’ve made characters and had them running fractal 50s within a day.
4) Choices, choices, again the idea that there is no vertical progression and there is no grind at all was a lie from the get go. We all know it, quoting the original intentions gets us nowhere. You want max stats, well you can get the stat + agony stuff, it just costs to do so. But, its’ money that honestly comes at a pretty rapid pace if you play the game. Playing about 2-3 hours a night, often in PUGs or thrown together groups of friends/acquantences I’m still pulling in well over 100g a week with a little added selective crafting (all of like 5 minutes). It’s not even close to the required devotion of any of my previous games.
Now… I say all that but I totally agree that AR is dumb, and that a split from it being character/gear bound to something account would be simply amazing. I just felt the need to play devils advocate and have a little fun
I don’t think there’s a completely right side to this argument though. I think many people do want a progression system, I think people do feel tied to their ascended armor in a positive way and would be disappointed if all that work was changed to be less meaningful to them. I think those are just as valid as he contrary opinion (which I share with you OP) in that it’s just not fun and very stifling. Hell I have trinkets/weapons to swap around but I find it a pain and will often favor playing my normal professions over the professions I want to at the time simply because I’m too lazy to swap that stuff around all the time.
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Phrasing is always confusing in these conversations
I think he was saying spoj is that it’s a 4% group buff, or a 4% increase to 4 members for an additive 16% worth of personal dps increases, so if a single player had to take it over they’d have to raise their dps by 16%, then in reality because warrior isn’t the highest dps profession in itself at that point, it’s likely closer to 20% because you have to make up for the Ele’s 4% increases which are of more value than the warrior.
And that problem doesn’t make any more sense >.< Anyways, he’s right, it’s just always confusing.
To make it as simple as possible.
10k, 10k, 10k, 10k, 10k. Now 4 of them increased by 4%
10.4k, 10.4k, 10.4k, 10.4k, 10k Now shift all the gains on to the last one
10k, 10k, 10k, 10k, 11.6k the last guy had to increase by 16%
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A raid boss having defiance doesn’t mean soft-CC won’t be valuable in a raid encounter.
Is that still true after a group skips all the trash mobs?
I am 99.9% certain that raids will be more like traditional MMO’s instead of GW2 dungeons.
In every other MMO i’ve ever played the trash mobs can’t be skipped, they auto aggro and never lose aggro until you kill them or wipe.
Additionally they specifically said that GW2 raids will be made up of part boss fights and part dynamic events. It could be that 50% of the “boss” fights are actually dynamic events where you need to hold an area from some crazy strong waves of “trash” mobs. These situations greatly benefit from weakness and chill since even if you have a bunch of stuns, you can’t keep everything stunned.
Trash mobs are actually somewhere that necros can shine since we can AOE weakness and chill. If the mobs don’t die in <10s then you can’t just burst them down.
I remember in wildstar dungeons some of the trash mob encounters took more skill and practice than the bosses did. I hope we see things like that in GW2 raids.
Well, there is barely any mob that are skipable in TA Etherlame and guess what? It doesn’t make the necromancer more wanted.
Trash are trash, not being able to skip them don’t give more meaning to any profession but if a profession allow you to skip them then it give more meaning to this profession (thief, there you are!).
The necromancer have this weird design that say that he “want to be hit” while in this game PvE, you absolutely don’t want to be hit. Now, if they design encounter where you actually want to be hitten by a boss in a contest of sustain against high health pool, then yes the necromancer will have an advantage over other profession. Otherwise, the shortcomings of the necromancer will always show themselve and the resulting meta will not be different than the current one.
I have a feeling that’s exactly the kind of content they’ll be introducing.
And, there’s a big difference between necro and reaper, reaper is MUCH more damage. Necro seems to only have a range advantage (which may be wanted honestly), and maybe a little more build flexibility.
Blind is also OP on trash, I’d imagine they’ll be aware of that and likely we’ll see either lots of fast attacking enemies to prevent that trivialization or just immunity to blind (I’d put my money on fast attacks so we can’t dodge/block/aegis/evade through it easily).
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You guys do know that hammer gives 1 stack of might PER TARGET HIT with the auto. The auto is already potentially too strong with might-stacking runes in a brawler build, and will easily keep you topped up at 25 might in teamfights.
I wouldn’t be concerned that it is too weak…
In pve… Might stacks mean nothing if you are in a good group, you will already have full might. You cant balance an auto attack on might stacks.
In pvp, if you are auto attacking THAT much you are doing something wrong. I would be just fine if they removed the might stacks and increased the base dmg of hammer 1
Lots of people talking in circles, but this pretty much sums up the problem with the hammer AA. It’s balanced around the might and vuln it produces, but it’s a redundant buff for organized PvE and meaningless in PvP where you’ll rarely get through a full chain of an AA anyways.
I also agree. I am going to wait to try it before weighing in, but tbh I was really hoping for some serious base 2h dps. Kinda sick of going through all the antics needed to bring serious dps into a fight only to have some fella wielding a 2h sword/hammer come up and basically fart on the mob I am working on and having it just fall over with one/two button pushes
On paper at least, I’d rather not have the might/vul at all, just some sick dps. Gonna try it first though.
Can always just shelve the engineer though if it doesn’t deliver and go with a necromancer 2h sword. Now that is a 2h weapon I love.
Yes this was just about PvE.
If you’re talking PVE though run in 5, 3, 4 (or 4 for blocks), 2 and you’ll be facerolling just like the warriors/guardians and future reapers.
Hammer is certainly not a bad weapon as a whole. None of those professions listed are getting some amazing 1 skills. Off the top of my head really only guardian hammer has a hefty 1 skill, and honestly that’s what I was hoping for hammer to be more in line with, but in the end hammer is solid.
My only complaint is that it simply still leaves us juggling kits to maximize our output. It didn’t really do anything to deviate from that playstyle. And, I think if we had a “stronger” 1 skill (doesn’t need to be DPS, just a reason to stick to hammer more) that we’d see alternatives to kits strengthened by having a solid option to lean on while in the void of main skills. Kits would likely still be the optimal options, but the gap would shrink and that’d allow more freedom to those not concerned with absolute min/max but just want something strong.
A raid boss having defiance doesn’t mean soft-CC won’t be valuable in a raid encounter.
This doesn’t really help at all unfortunately. It’s specifically why the effect being tied to the breakbar mechanic troubles me. Don’t want these effects on raid bosses, fine, no problem. But, what about all the other bosses with breakbars, or even trash with breakbars? What about slowing down Ettin/Mai Trin in fractals? What about chilling Imbued Shaman, Mossman, or Bloomhunger? Are these still getting breakbars?
Everything I’ve said I still stick by, I feel that the global application of immunity to breakbar is a mistake, one likely done to cut some corners and save some time (which I can respect, but still disagree with).
I think if the dps stayed low, a blast finisher could be viable. It’s a radical concept since we’ve never seen a blast finisher auto outside of Lightning Hammer, but it could definitely make things interesting.
Here’s why I think it would be balanced:
In PvP/WvW, you’ll rarely be able to spam the AA enough to get the blast finisher.In PvE, it would be a tradeoff between utility (blast on AA) or DPS (kit swapping for max dps). Even though you could conceivably grant 2 stacks of 20 sec might every 2.5ish seconds (each attack on AA is 1/2 sec, but idk aftercast times), you still probably wouldn’t stack might like a phalanx strength war.
Even if you had 100% fire field up time on every 3rd AA swing, you wouldn’t cap your group on might.
However, it’s possible that if they did keep a lower damage AA on hammer and add a blast, it may still just be better to stick to kit swapping and just bring a phalanx strength war, which kinda kills the point of having blast AAs…
First a blast of a fire field is 3 stacks of might, not 2.
But, yes you’re right. It wouldn’t be OP because it’d be locked behind a ~2.5s ramp up. To get much power out of it you’d need someone else providing fields for you as most of ours would break the chain and we could get at most a single blast with the hammer in, something we can already do many ways especially with Flame Blast on a 6s recharge.
Like you say though to get 25 stacks of might you’d need 9 blasts (2 stacks going to waste), which with a 2.5s ramp up would mean it’d take 22.5s. You’d need strength runes to pull off maxing stacks… and not ever deal with pesky guardian light fields
Nah that definitely doesnt happen. Was trying to max out chill duration by saving the big chill for last. But it never proced because of how it works.
And i just checked in Hotm. Im correct. It never overwrites no matter the duration. You have to wait for the initial stack to run out.
Cool, yeah I was under that same impression but while I was double checking the stack cap (never hurts to check, but I was right ) I saw that note and thought it was worth questioning.
It’s always the case with duration-stacking conditions: if the stack cap is reached, the oldest get shoved off. If this weren’t the case, Bitter Chill would not proc Vulnerability on the 6th application.
Since now none of those naturally scale with stats other than condition duration, I would love to see ANet re-work them, with new stacks only kicking off old if they would last longer.
This isnt true. What happens is the condition is not applied, but the proc trait still procs. You can see evidence of this by fully stacking up immob and then applying 1 more. It wont increase in duration, change or refresh. It will just carry on ticking using the previous 5 stacks until the first stack runs out and leaves a space for a new application. This is why perma immobing is slightly harder than it seems in some groups. Because people waste an immob before the first of 5 has completely ticked down.
Proc traits just always work. Afaik its because they are tied to the condition/skill so they apply at the same time/before the condition. For example dredge are immune to blind but you can still get chilling darkness and blinding exposure to proc and apply chill and vuln.
Might and stacking conditions do however overwrite the oldest stacks.
Immob is only 3 stacks. Just an fyi chill is 5 though. Other than that I believe you’re correct. Though I had to double check this on the Wiki and it’s saying for chill that longer duration stacks will replace older lower duration stacks, can’t confirm that though.
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Really? I love that traitline almost as much as I love the Hammer.
I also love the Gyro toolbelt skills. Only thing I am iffy on are the Gyros themselves.
Curious what about it in reference to dungeons/fractals? Seems like a lot of more passive stuff and things that will be possibly nice but used once in a blue moon.
All of the lines are great for PvP and pretty good for WvW.
The Adept and Minor lines need work to make them better in Dungeons/Fractals, but I think we all realize this.
That half of the line need work does not change the fact that this is probably our most synergistic traitline. A LOT more thought seems to have gone into it than—for example—the Revenant’s traitlines when we first got to play with it.
So you come into a thread talking about Dungeons/fractals and say the traits look great even though you realize that for dungeons/fractals they’re pretty kitten poor?
I said I liked it. And I like it due to its potential and the internal synergies it aims for. Never said it was great.
I think what is there is good enough as a base for further improvement. Remember, the expansion has not released yet. Instead of accepting the weakness of the line as a fait accompli I think this is the time to actively deconstruct it and give feedback.
In short, I generally disagree with how you and others are writing off the entire line as unsalvageable. Our please should definitely not be things like ‘allow non-scrappers to use hammers’ and more like: ‘where my damage modifiers at? what am I suppose to do with the F-Gyro in PvE?’.
I can agree with that. I was waiting for the beta before I went off on it more than I have.
Really? I love that traitline almost as much as I love the Hammer.
I also love the Gyro toolbelt skills. Only thing I am iffy on are the Gyros themselves.
Curious what about it in reference to dungeons/fractals? Seems like a lot of more passive stuff and things that will be possibly nice but used once in a blue moon.
All of the lines are great for PvP and pretty good for WvW.
The Adept and Minor lines need work to make them better in Dungeons/Fractals, but I think we all realize this.
That half of the line need work does not change the fact that this is probably our most synergistic traitline. A LOT more thought seems to have gone into it than—for example—the Revenant’s traitlines when we first got to play with it.
So you come into a thread talking about Dungeons/fractals and say the traits look great even though you realize that for dungeons/fractals they’re pretty kitten poor? Sorry just find it funny but good on ya, they are great for PVP/WvW, with HoT I’ll be clearing my 3rd engi’s inventory (full of ascended rings) and making him a WvW scrapper for sure.