Guild Wars 2

IMO the cast time is a bit much for the long delay/easily seen visual. But overall I still very much like Orbital with the trait, without the trait not as much. Seems a bit counter to their idea of 3 grenades baseline. Making a skill 50% more effective with a trait was too much, but now we have 100% more effective >.< Not really complaining about that part as much as just feeling it’s a little silly.

Shiki.7148:

Jerus.4350:

While it’s not unexpected… So much Salt here geez.

You don’t use Staff or Axe against tentacles, most likely you’re going to use DS. You Dagger your way through Colossi, DS down the tentacles you need to clear. Once the Colossi are down you grab a crystal and jump up top. Use staff + dark fields to trigger some leeching and use DS to “cancel” the crystal throw to save your crystal for defense/offense. With 5 necros you have a constant dark field up top there so any time a staff1 triggers projectile your team will leech and with that DS replication you’ll all always have a crystal ready. Very very easy fight.

Again I’ll say 5X necro isn’t best but god kitten it’s not bad. Probably up there in easiest 5X single profession.

Who they hell would use DS against tentacles?`And what’s more, if you cannot use staff or axe… How do you regen DS? It’s not like it conveniantly refills itself. And don’t tell me “use spectrals” because I do not want to get hit cause all tentacle-hits knock down, which is why i want to range them in the first place. Axe needed to be 900 range like, 2 years ago already.

Me

You only have to/want to clear out a few tentacles, and you’re nearly constantly killing Colossi and Squids. The goal on Maw is to knock down the Colossi asap, to do this Well of Darkness rotations at a LoS spot and daggering them down goes very quickly, then you all jump up top with some crystals. Use DS to “cancel” the crystal throw with the effect still going through. Rotate wells and keep fireing projectile finishers at Maw and you Leech it down very quickly, and boom done.

Extremely easy fight, no harder with 5X necro than any other composition, and potentially even better with the readily available dark fields for post colossus counter.

RSLongK.8961:

I am really curious on how it would perform against Mai trim and trash in the end of the drill tunel :x

Very very easily actually. Well of Darkness at the end of the Drill tunnel works pretty well, and with DS you can absorb so much damage. We wiped it out without all that much effort. We just ran in and left behind those rocks, dropped Wells (we tried to stagger Darkness a bit, but you still need more than 1 initially to cover as many enemies as you can). Then tried to position to line them up for DS piercing.

Mai Trin can be a pain, but you basically just DS your way through the pistol shots making it not a big deal. 25% runspeed trait with daggers during cannon phase is nice since I was not going to spec heavily for swiftness uptime. Sounds silly but minions are actually pretty nice there too because it seems they can be used to block Mai’s attacks (used the little jagged horrors from lich to do this during our 5man run).

If they want to put it on the shoulder they’d need new animations. They’d also need to change the name to bazooka.

Just to give a clip of what Engi is capable of for condi build, look after the first bleed to the second bleed, 19kish damage. Now it’s not always that high, burns range basically 5k-12k, bleeds from 2-6k, confusion from like 500-2000 (when they attack it’s nice), and still have decent bit of power damage thanks to sinister. Overall I’m sitting at generally 10k-20k per second flowing up and down as cooldowns come up.

Necro seems to have some potential spikes with epidemic but the consistency just doesn’t seem to be there the way it is for some other professions.

\o/ yes sticky because I didn’t even see the fractal one.

TheRandomGuy.7246:

So this just happened.

Nice photoshop work

grats

I’m a fan of the current look.

savacli.8172:

Edit: We would have builds as terrible as Double Longbow Ranger. That way he could swap to his second longbow while the cooldowns were running on his first bow….because it totally works like that right?

Hey with quick draw you could get a lot of rapid fires!

There was actually a lengthy discussion about that idea Trice, I don’t think it ever happened though but it sounded entertaining.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/Guide-Playing-Guardian-in-Dungeons/first

Literally everything you’ll need for dungeons is in there. I don’t think he’s done fractals yet, but the tools and application of such tools you learn from the dungeons carry over to fractals and watching videos like the KING fractal guides will help a lot.

I will say your teams strategies may differ from what’s explained bug again it gives a great idea for your general groups. And, it will get your mind on the right track so you can apply your tools correctly if your strategies do deviate.

Couple tips for fractals. First big thing to learn is where projectiles are the key, Bloomhunger, The last guy on Harpy fractal, and the first champ in molten duo (and the duo) come to mind. Learning the Wall→Shield→ Wall rotation is a huge help. Basically you just hit your Shield at 22s left on a traited Wall of Reflect cooldown timer, if you do this your shield will be dropping right after you toss up your second Wall of reflect for a total of 44s of projectile defense.

A note, as much as projectile defense is great while fighting Grawl Shaman, you’ll generally want to save your Shield of the Avenger for his phasing if you can, it helps a lot against the elementals and you really don’t want to be caught without anything when they come out.

Not sure on the just kill her method, but there’s always the option of backing out and clearing the waves of adds and defend the console. The Deployable Mortar helps a lot here,drop it at the edge where the adds come and it’ll pop the big guys and keep the grubs there and they hold the technicians. Clear out all the risen that come in who can’t hurt you with the Brie buff. Then once they stop coming you go and finish Brie off at your leisure.

I don’t know, Christian Bale’s voice was a bit too batman

Looking forward to see what they do. I really think we’re pretty well covered for the general weapon types. P/P = condi, P/S = defense/control, Rifle = Control/Power.

What I’m hoping for is the one thing we don’t have, a weapon that can stand on it’s own for damage. Right now at least in PVE point of view you’re simply sub par if you don’t use kits. Now I don’t want it to completely overshadow kits, but a weapon that can be used with elixirs and other utilities and not completely hamstring your effectiveness would be quite nice.

Aye, that’s true, but how many of those more casual players/guilds are willing to change their schedule?

I totally agree Eco, and it’s why I think head to head tournaments are the wrong way. That requires people change their schedules. Recording and posting and just limiting the time of entries is IMO a better option. It does lend to more devoted teams doing better, but has a much lower required time investment. You simply take certain paths a bit differently than you might in your typical daily tours and record them for a chance at extra money.

Pretty simple. As with most MMOs they believe that people enjoy gambling. So they use the random system, where it’s just a roll of the dice and the corresponding item in the loot table is given to you. It’s stupid, there’s a reason most people prefer to actually get a job rather than sitting in a casino and gambling for a living, consistency and choice is quite nice. But, games never seem to understand this and continue to throw the RNG system for rewards at us as if we enjoy it.

EcoRI.9273:

What I am about to say is strictly my opinion. I think most people in this game are pretty casual and just prefer to make gold. If you want people to join these events, you have to make it so its actually more profitable to participate in it than doing dungeon tours. People also just don’t have time to practice so you have to make a format where you don’t need to practice much to win something.

I don’t know if I agree. I mean, yes you’re not wrong most people just want to farm and get their shinies. However, I think shorter time limits and different rulesets creates a more dynamic situation. People won’t be sitting there grinding it over and over just to catch a prize, but with how readily available recording software is now people could simply do whatever path is on the list for that week/month and record it and toss their best run they catch up for the competition. Win/Don’t win, whatever, no need to grind.

That’s how it often was for my old MMOs, with an ever changing set of content you really only got a month or two where you were all set up and maxed out to really approach an optimal time before you got new content and gear out dating the old stuff and rendering it obsolete. So the speed runs generally consisted of a competition on daily/weekly farming runs you’d do.

That’s what I’d imagine a shorter competition time would do. You might get some people tryharding and grinding it out to get first place but people could still win with a good daily run of whatever path with whatever rules at whatever time. You play a little more focused and maybe take a little longer if different rules are implemented for a single path of your daily tour and you might grab some extra gold. Pretty simple idea.

I do think Monthly is better than weekly in that it’d be easier to supply decent prizes. Weekly would drain wallets pretty fast.

(screw you forums, why do I always forget to copy before submit…)

I’d be willing to donate if people participated and it was fun to watch.

I will say I always liked the initiative proposed a while back, I think it was Zelyhn. The idea being putting on restrictions to make people approach things differently. My favorite gameplay videos are easily the silly ones, but also the kitten impressive ones. Goku’s 2 button lupi solo is amazing, Sesshi makes me feel absolutely terrible in the best way, and rT’s no dodge Arah is always entertaining.

So what I’d propose is that type of thing. You could create challenging competitions or even just silly ones. Practicing of course would lead to better times, but people could just throw up casual runs they do in the format and maybe grab some gold for simply recording their screwing around.

Some ideas would be:

• RP walk only Arah path
• 5X profession runs
• Disable forward movement
• Singular weapons (everyone in group only using D/D or Staves or whatever)
• First person camera

I think it’d be entertaining to watch, and I’d be willing to toss gold at someone who made me laugh or sit in awe.

Go into Tools for your traits, grab Streamlined kits, perma swiftness is invaluable while leveling. Then Grab your kits, really all of them are worth grabbing, that blind field on Mortar is awesome and I found it extremely useful when leveling another Engi recently.

I’d suggest going towards power and using Rifle, that’s generally better, half the time you’ll come up to something you want to kill and you can just jump shot → Blunderbuss → Grenade barrage and it’s dead. Condi is an option and what I did recently, with blowtorch, flame thrower (incendiary ammo is pretty nice) and bombs/toolkit. Either direction is fine but again I’d suggest the power/rifle direction it’s generally going to be better.

At 45 you get your next trait line and I’d go explosions, makes your grenades hit harder which is the lifeblood of Engi (many complain about the free targetting, I suggest going into options and setting it to fast targetting so that when you release the button they just fire, no need to double tap, also if you have a mouse with extra buttons I’m a fan of my keybinding in that I have the 1 set to the side button on my mouse so it’s just a little squeeze and I can have them flying).

Hope that helps.

It’s not just not wanting to practice. Simply put, if I wanted to compete against people I’d probably be playing an actually good PVP game, not GW2. Competition and challenge are not synonyms. I’d like a challenge that I could casually go through with friends at a pace we determine. That doesn’t mean you couldn’t have timers pushing us, but when it comes to running instantly after finishing a fight and not being able to take a second to do whatever, well it’s just a different style. Doesn’t mean I don’t want a challenge to make me play better, it just means rushing around isn’t my style.

These tournaments and the speed run community is a group of people who want to compete but prefer the PVE and in general a more indirect competition rather than the direct PVP.

Don’t get me wrong, I used to do this type of stuff in other games, and I love watching it, sad to see this didn’t work out this time, but don’t link challenge with competition.

Forgot to add, Yes it takes a ton of practice to reach a high level, though it’s not required. You could just go in and as long as you all have the same strat in mind you could still pull out a good time. Though of course the teams that practice and perfect their stuff are likely going to wipe the floor with a team that didn’t, but I can’t help but feel that the desire to compete is a more limiting factor than the devotion to practice.

True, I’m speaking purely from an optimized rotation point of view. That 8s bomb can leave me lost a lot of the time without as much to time it with, just have to get the feeling down. Though, fire bomb is at 180 range iirc, meaning you do have to dip in and out and you want to dip in for your Blowtorch as you need 200 range to maximize it. So I don’t see it as that different. Jump Shot actually has a larger radius than both of them, Acid Bomb being 180 as well.

Yeah, I don’t use staff either, but I know when I see a pug drop a symbol from it on top of a smokefield just don’t bother blasting because chances are it’ll give retal instead of stealth, just wait it out and try again and hope the guard isn’t dumb enough to do it twice.

All I know is a guardian Staff Symbol seems to overwrite everything in my experience. Be it using Arcane wave or Cluster Bomb.

NikeEU.7690:

Iris Ng.9845:

EcoRI.9273:

Incase people haven’t heard, the event is cancelled due to lack of interest from the community to register teams.

who represent “community” here?

Anyone was free to register a team, so the community in reference was any interested trio team.

People complain that they don’t get challenging content, that anet doesn’t pay attention etc. Then when stuff like this happens they don’t participate because the truth is practicing is hard work and time consuming and they aren’t really looking to be challenged.

Wanting a challenge and jumping into a competitive scene is a very different thing.

While it’s not unexpected… So much Salt here geez.

You don’t use Staff or Axe against tentacles, most likely you’re going to use DS. You Dagger your way through Colossi, DS down the tentacles you need to clear. Once the Colossi are down you grab a crystal and jump up top. Use staff + dark fields to trigger some leeching and use DS to “cancel” the crystal throw to save your crystal for defense/offense. With 5 necros you have a constant dark field up top there so any time a staff1 triggers projectile your team will leech and with that DS replication you’ll all always have a crystal ready. Very very easy fight.

Again I’ll say 5X necro isn’t best but god kitten it’s not bad. Probably up there in easiest 5X single profession.

You can drop 2 fields next to eachother and split the blasts up between them. For example on the right you’ll have smoke, blasted by the thief and an ele for 5 stacks, Fire blasted by an Ele, warrrior and Guard/mesmer on the left.

You can’t blast together.

While the rule is “first field down” it’s not always consistent and not something you should count on because of Anets fickle coding.

Seiishizo.7162:

if you would do that, you would be done around the by the time we can live on Kepler 452b.

Hmm, so like 35-40 mins with a bunch of scrub necros on a fractal 50, seems like our scientists must be getting pretty close.

Figured I’d throw it in another post cause that one was getting long. Don’t be afraid to throw some blasts or if you use a rifle leaps into any water field. With Healing Turret and Mortar we have a lot.

The other day we were 3 manning Iceblind Fractal which can be a pain, and I was having a lot of success throwing an Orbital strike ahead of me tossing the Mortar water field below it, running up and blasting it with flamethrower and catching 2 “area healing” procs out of it, enough to help me sustain a run back to the fires.

Engis are crazy, I don’t want to scare you off, but “easy” just isn’t the name of the game, but the fact that you like Nades is excellent, because even nade spam with sporadic additions of our bigger hitters and keeping Grenade Barrage on cooldown is enough to out damage most people.

SlyDevil.3952:

Take grenades if you want to push 1 button and get the best of the meh dmg. Sinister with aristocracy runes is pretty easy in pve. Take p/p with grenades/bombs/ft/mortar. With all the chill you can generate mobs will rarely get close to you, and you can just bleed them out with conditions.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vdAQJAqalUUhatYJXwELQ7FLvF14a0FZBYG+hp13DOhBAA-ThRGABAcCAAW5Xu6B6V9H22fQ3HAAhAUMHA-e
You can swap traits around as wanted, and you can drop toolkit for bomb kit to get better damage if you don’t want the block. It’s modified off another guys build that was designed to be lazy.

I don’t know if I’d call the Sinister P/P rotation easy, at least not to optimize. If you want to run sub optimally and just try to hit your big hitters when you feel they’re up, both are “easy” but I wouldn’t call one easier than the other but you’re losing a lot of potential by not running the rotation “right”.

Still working on “perfecting” my rotation. I know a lot of quotations, I think it’s worth noting that a perfect rotation takes an autistic madman to actually pull off in a fight. When you look at the “meta” which DnT seems to hold the authority on even their rotation is lacking in optimization.

But, I find Firebomb tougher to time up than Flame Blast which is ready almost every shrapnel. After the second Fire bomb your timings are WAY off in the condi rotation. You can Blow Torch every other Fire Bomb but even there you lose a second.

Basically it’s complicated.

My suggestion is pick a path you like better, both condi and power are good, and just keep working at it trying to get comfortable just knowing the timings. At this point I kind of do a near but not quite optimal power rotation just by instinct. I’m still working on getting the condi rotation down and closer to optimal.

That said, they’re pretty darn close on potential, and you lose less on condi when you have to bring other tools for defense which is a perk, but you don’t do as much on structures compared to Zerker, so pros/cons.

I will say, the reason I love engi so much is that I can always be better, I’ve almost never run a perfect rotation. It takes an autistic madman to keep track of everything and play it to it’s limits. But even sub optimal rotations are coming in at near the top of professional potential. If you do it perfect I have no doubt that outside the Ice Bow craziness we’d be a top dog on paper… but again, that’s not practical application outside a few ridiculous players who can actually pull it off.

WTB utility skill, each hit while active increases damage output by 10% stacks to 10, when skill drops all damage taken is taken again in one spike, risk vs reward!

Haven’t even finished reading yet.

http://i.imgur.com/SlY1osN.jpg

Looking at him you might be able to guess why it took half a dozen words to convince me. “Voodoo” and “Main-hand Focus” were all I needed.

Now pair it with AH as well just to lol at your entire screen turning green with numbers

Yeah didn’t realize that.

You don’t need to blind any of the Tentacles on Maw, now, it can be nice if you want to melee, but the threat is more the Colossi. They’re ring of earth knockdown is the biggest threat as if you get that and don’t have a stunbreak ready you can bite the dust if you have a poorly timed maw call. And, you really don’t have to touch many of the tentacles, they’re portion is “timelocked” I put in quotes as you can leech your way through maw faster but you do need to get the Colossi down asap and with their projectile reflection ranging is not the best idea and that’s why tentacles are so easy, you can just pewpew. So you’ll be pulling them and the squids over and rotating blinds while you pound them down with your daggers and what not.

Not trying to say stability is useless, it can be nice, but it’s more a carry tool for the professions that have access to group versions than a tool that’s necessary as most times a dodge allows you to avoid any issue you’d be solving with it.

EcoRI.9273:

Honestly, sometimes I don’t understand why there is a swiftness problem when retreat and charge should give a permanent uptime for runs but its there. And as a result some people have resorted to blasting lightning fields. I don’t understand why some people blast lightning fields as it literally is a time waster so to counter act it, I run thrill of crime and say we aint blasting no lightning field.

Don’t always like “wasting” my retreat on swiftness when we’re coming up to a fight where the Aegis is especially powerful. If I can get it from someone who doesn’t have to sacrifice as much if anything I prefer that. One of my pet peeves is a warrior who uses his signet to go running off but can’t bother to swap in a warhorn for the group

Your job isn’t just DPS though, in that sense you’re often going to get nothing from Trickster if you’re not using Withdraw (for whatever reason) or simply don’t need it and not using Haste/Scorpion Wire which isn’t uncommon.

With that, who really cares what the meta says in this regard. The “meta builds” are the baseline builds, they are meant to be tweaked and tuned to fit situations better. If you aren’t going to gain from TotC then why not grab Flanking? If you’re not stealing boons and giving your team vigor isn’t an issue and you have Haste/Scorpion Wire on your bar makes sense to use Trickster. It’s why swapping traits on the fly was such a powerful and nice addition (well actually kinda annoying at times to do it )

What are you doing? Yes Turrets are pretty much crap, never were all that good in PVE, but now they are just crap. Bombs are bugged right now hopefully it’s fixed sooner rather than later.

Until then Nades are always the best pretty much, but if you don’t like that FT is your next best option (assuming the reason you dislike nades is the free targetting, as mortar is also an option). FT is pretty weak, but with juggernaut and HGH you can pair with Elixir Gun and use Acid Bomb (cancel it’s jump with a weapon swap) and super elixir to pump up some might and swap back to FT and…hehe fire fire hahaha. Use your Flame Blast in your Napalm. Can still bring bomb as a third utility for more fire fields to blast with flame blast and you could potentially be running at 20+ might stacks pretty consistently making the mediocre flamethrower damage not as mediocre.

But, but, if new players accidently turned them off they wouldn’t know how to get them back. Think about the new players! Your screen space is a sacrifice you should make to help those struggling.

shion.2084:

I still notice that my big ol’ bomb is canceled if I try to queue other skills up after it. I assume this is also still an outstanding bug?

Take off Static Discharge and see if it isn’t fixed. There is an issue with that trait causing toolbelt skills to fail at queueing up the next attack correctly.

Sandrox.9524:

Jerus.4350:

Sandrox.9524:

Khristophoros.7194:

Sandrox.9524:

Khristophoros.7194:

Sandrox.9524:

Petrol.9086:

Well you wrote “won’t survive Arah or high lvl fractals” which is what i reacted to, and it is perfectly viable to clear them without much trouble.

But no you won’t do better than the standard meta team. Guardians, Warriors and Eles are just too frickin strong beacuse Anet somehow think it’s balanced to give the some of the highest damage dealers the best support because reasons.

Wont survive trying to do it like the meta team.

Yes you will lol.

I just did arah today because I happen to need tokens and nobody helped me run past the mobs. I just survived because I’m tanky.

5 necros would survive running easily because they’re all tanky and you can CC the mobs with staff abilities to keep them off you while you run.

Somebody in the thread said 5 necros made things easier and I’m not surprised. The necro is the most self sufficient character and is unlikely to ever go down when played right. So if you have 5 of them your party probably won’t wipe.

I mean it’s slower because you don’t have blasts + fire fields or ice bows. But you will be able to skip whatever you need to skip and stack where you need to stack and all that.

Running past mobs is one thing,doing the instance like meta is another.It all comes to my first comment to your topic.

You can do anything like the meta team aside from reflects.

Didnt knew that Necros have quickness,blast finishers,fire fields and stability(yeah you need it to not get inturpted on your burst) omg wtf is wrong with me

How often do you really need stability? I mean I run it on Aetherblade Fractal when I guard but not very many other places, none that I can think of off the top of my head other than maybe harpies if you’re killing them.

I can give you alot.When you do speedrun and you want to do it as fast as possible,every second count,so every knockback,stun etc gonna be less dmg done.
Stability helps like in ascalon fractal jade maw fractal,the lasers thingy fractals,traumnova fractal and swamp too or in Arah,or in CoE,or even in SE.There are more this is just on top of my head.You can survive w/o stability that is no doubt.But the surviving cost you dmg and time which meta team wouldnt.

Almost every example you give there are issues you can deal with easily without stability most where you don’t even gain much and those that you do you take damage and lose scholar bonuses so…

Ascalon it’s mainly the Ballista, only really a concern at all when you’re at Dulfy and waiting on a timelock event while you kill Arrow Carts/Ballista. And, to take stability you often sacrifice damage, pretty easily argued that a dodge is worthwhile.

Arah… I guess potentially one person needs/wants it at Lupi though you can deal with it in other ways as well.

Where in CoE? maybe I’m forgetting something but I can’t think of what you’re referring to.

SE I guess potentially, but if you’re taking longer than a deep freeze to kill anything you’d need/want it on outside of maybe Tazza, well, you’re not speed running.

Thaumanova, are you refering to the portals where you can simply dodge while you’re running up and be perfectly fine not losing any damage as you’re still on the move anyways?

Jade Maw, well, blinds do wonders to prevent the only need you have for that which is that pesky rock circle from the Colossi.

And, yeah “lazer thingy” is Aetherblade and as I said helps quite a bit there, but honestly I found our 5 necro run there easier than it typically is with a guardian though to be fair Lich Form was used and has stability.

Wouldn’t it depend on group composition. And, if we’re talking about strait meta including composition you’re covered on might/fury/swiftness outside of split tactics or solo WP unlocking runs. Outside meta if you need fury Thrill seems pretty nice.

Khristophoros.7194:

spoj.9672:

Khristophoros.7194:

Azzer.8137:

Azure.8670:

Oh and to add, my fastest frac 50 ever was 1 warrior 1 ranger 3 necros. Nothing survived between wells and healing spring we meleed archdiviner into instant death

And my fastest was a fractal 50 with 2 warriors, 1 thief and 2 eles, we melee’d everything to death within 10-20 seconds.

Try getting that fire field blast off with a necromancer in your team.

Replace the warriors. The 1 thief + 2 eles can generate 25 might from blasting, no need for warriors.

1 Phalanx with banners makes a big difference in fractals. Not so much in dungeons though.

You realize phalanx has no point when you blast for 25 might, right?

Very easy to maintain while there are light fields littering the area right? Yeah…

And, the reason we used BiP in our 5 man was so we could open with that and sit at 24 might for our initial burst often dropping into lich. It allowed us to open strong and ride our other might generation through the fight. Much the same reason people prestack might instead of opening it up at the start of the fight, why waste a few ticks of wells and whatever half dozen seconds worth of stuff while we build it up?

Pistol1 needs much more than being made an explosion, its’ literally the least they can do for the skill.

spoj.9672:

Nah BiP is worse than guard staff now.

I guess I see what you’re saying, looking at it again, yeah not that impressive, we were using it as a team of 5 necros and we all bursted to 20+ stacks then maintained it through other means and were sitting pretty. But, yes 8s 30s reuse for 8 stacks… again I thought it was better than it is. I don’t know if I’d go to the extreme of staff guard being better, pulling a staff out during a fight is just… eww. But, guard is capable of keeping up 5+ stacks with their on crit trait which isn’t a big loss to get anymore with the trait reworking and strength of symbols making Honor a decent idea.

Toolbox.9375:

Pimsley.3681:

I think the healing bombs are gone forever, replaced by Bunker Down. What sucks about that is you are forced to choose amulets with high precision.

The update isn’t perfect but it’s definitely to the right direction.

No! I refuse to believe that! I need it back so I can stop being torn between Engineer and Elementalist… ;-;

While it was an interesting trait, I think between bunker down and soothing detonation their goal was to have a replacement of sorts. Problem is it’s not. Soothing Detonation needs a buff. Be it doubling (maybe even triple) the healing because we simply don’t have that many blasts to make it even remotely comparable to the old bomb heals, or make it every type of combo such that Mortar kit becomes the new Elixir Infused Bombs with it’s projectile triggers. Any way you look at it that healing build is gone right now, it’s sad, but it’s true.

Sandrox.9524:

Khristophoros.7194:

Sandrox.9524:

Khristophoros.7194:

Sandrox.9524:

Petrol.9086:

Well you wrote “won’t survive Arah or high lvl fractals” which is what i reacted to, and it is perfectly viable to clear them without much trouble.

But no you won’t do better than the standard meta team. Guardians, Warriors and Eles are just too frickin strong beacuse Anet somehow think it’s balanced to give the some of the highest damage dealers the best support because reasons.

Wont survive trying to do it like the meta team.

Yes you will lol.

I just did arah today because I happen to need tokens and nobody helped me run past the mobs. I just survived because I’m tanky.

5 necros would survive running easily because they’re all tanky and you can CC the mobs with staff abilities to keep them off you while you run.

Somebody in the thread said 5 necros made things easier and I’m not surprised. The necro is the most self sufficient character and is unlikely to ever go down when played right. So if you have 5 of them your party probably won’t wipe.

I mean it’s slower because you don’t have blasts + fire fields or ice bows. But you will be able to skip whatever you need to skip and stack where you need to stack and all that.

Running past mobs is one thing,doing the instance like meta is another.It all comes to my first comment to your topic.

You can do anything like the meta team aside from reflects.

Didnt knew that Necros have quickness,blast finishers,fire fields and stability(yeah you need it to not get inturpted on your burst) omg wtf is wrong with me

How often do you really need stability? I mean I run it on Aetherblade Fractal when I guard but not very many other places, none that I can think of off the top of my head other than maybe harpies if you’re killing them.

Mhm, as was before PS build got a big buff, the main reason it’s so nice is the allowance of other fields to be used freely without affecting your might.

Necro might capabilities are actually on the higher end, blood is power is pretty nice, it’s not Ele/Engi/War level but it’d probably be next up. Not really something I’d complain about, especially when discussing 5X nec runs where you can easily work together or even individually and be sitting at 20+ easily.

Projectile defense really is the biggest thorn in necro’s side IMO, I really wish they’d change the poison cloud to destroy those. Basically that is the reason a 5 nec team simply can’t do many things in the same way a meta team would. Some bosses if you sit and stack you’re all going to eat it even with DS because all the projectiles that are designed to be avoided are landing because you lack active defenses.

I do really wish we’d get 3 things, well 4, the fourth being competative dps potential. But, projectile destruction on poison cloud. An evade on a weapon skill, and a block on a weapon skill. My personal view is that simply mechanically we’re too far behind. Looking at Lupi which is one of the better made fights, we’re simply going to have to mitigate attacks even with 2X energy sigil you don’t have the evades to get through. Then looking at Mai Trin which is again IMO one of the better fights, it has a mechanic that “requires” blocks, now I’ve managed it fine by absorbing the shot and initial attack with DS, but if they continue with that idea of unevadeable attacks that change the fights dynamic, which I think they should, it’s something that will bite us later on.

Again though, did the 5X necro, it was surprisingly easy, although not easier than the more diverse setups. Certainly a fun change of pace though. Easily one of the best 5X profession runs though, I’d imagine Guard would be easier and Warrior pretty close though I think I’d give it to necro.

They did/do have uses in Dungeons/fractals but very few and far between. There still are a few uses, but now you have to adjust a bit.

First, the old use on Archdiviner with Net turret is dead, it gets killed by the condi fields that are negligible to players, frustrating to say the least. I’ve tried to find weird spots to put it to still use it but I’ve not had luck, if I put it on the pillar it’s killed by fire for example.

There’s a use for Net turret on Shoggorath but unlike before you need to wait until he starts running otherwise turret will almost certainly die before he starts to run in my experience, not a huge deal but a little frustrating.

Of course it’s use on Ooze (which IMO is pretty exploity) to lock him down before he gets to the Asura.

Then as you hit on there’s still a use for the thumper Turret toolbelt

Belka was another great use for turrets, you could stealth in, lay your turrets and then bounce out and the turrets would pull agro and tank for you while you freely damaged from behind. Now they get blown up because A) conditions work on them no more self repairing. Mainly a solo technique but I thought it was pretty nifty and sad it got ruined.

I’d love if Flame Turret actually dropped a smoke field, but it’s a very very tiny one that will only trigger if something is around for it to “attack” with it.

Either way this is all another great example of why PVP and PVE should have split skills. I’d go as far as to say Turrets should be invuln in PVE for them to see much more use outside the niche situations I mention (and outside HT) but of course for PVP they’re probably better now than before.

It’s only when you have Static Discharge and on the toolbelt skills (that I’ve noticed), just run a different trait (assuming you’re not running a SD focused build) and it’s all good. It certainly does need fixing though, very frustrating, Engi certainly didn’t need more button mashing.

It was the same in games I played in that you could avoid a lot through either complete avoidance or heavy mitigation. Positioning mattered. The only other game I liked the combat system as much as GW2 was DCUO and there you did a lot of rolling/running out of danger or blocking to pop a heavy mitigation (and a counter sometimes which meant knocking down the enemy).

There’s a reason that good guilds did the same we do here and focus very heavily on DPS as you can get away with very little in the way of defensive requirements.

You’re right though, self healing plays a big part in things. It’s our innate safety net. But, you will see professions like say Engi, Ele and Warrior using heals for their utility leaving them on cooldown much of the time (engi/ele for blast and warrior for the adrenaline spike), they still certainly play a part but we do have situations where they’re not used for healing, even Guard I’ll use it in a block rotation while at full health quite often. But, again you’re right, it’s not surprising that my closest comparison as far as MMOs go to GW2 is DCUO, which had the potions you mention that could really help fill any gaps in your support roles, but there you still had a strict “trinity” (it was 4 hard roles there). It was that way in that game because of the need of tanks mainly, they could simply mitigate/avoid far more than anything else and the bosses were scaled to that, so you had their big one shots you’d be avoiding that could still kill tanks, but then they had the “jabs” from the bosses that were either impossible or unreasonable/stupid to try and avoid. That pretty much forced the trinity there.