Guild Wars 2

I feel like the action camera was a nod to controller support since it would work super well with such a control scheme. It’s one of those features that no one really asked for, but must have taken quite a bit of dev time. It’s not a good business move to simply add a feature no one has asked for without a way to make money off it.

Thus, I’m going to guess console port or controller support as one of the major unveils since playing with a controller will now be a real option when using the action camera.

Tiffany.8576:

You have just discovered one of the multitude of reasons why most PvPers, I’d guess, have auto-targeting off.

This. Auto targeting is only useful in PvE if you’re using ranged weapons (it prevents you from wasting attacks on dead bodies which happen due to projectile travel time).

Using auto targeting in pvp basically means you’ll find yourself attacking clones, pets, invulnerable/blocking players, etc instead of targets that you can actually damage. Turn it off now and you’ll find PvP much easier.

Some passives have a “boon” icon while others do not. It’s currently pretty random as to what has it and what doesn’t.

What’s important to remember is that without an icon, neither the player that has it nor the opponent knows when it’s ready. Passive skills without an icon basically just adds a degree of randomness to combat.

E.g. Warrior — you’re ready to stomp and don’t know if you should be using an active stability skill or if you can rely on your passive Last Stand which may have been passively spent earlier in combat.

Knowing Anet, we’ll probably see the skins as rewards for some special one-time PvP track, which I’m totally cool with (as long as we get the skins in PvP).

This is annoying indeed, but you normally need stability/blind/invulnerability/stealth to stomp most classes anyway.

Just make sure to blind the pet or have at least 2 stacks of stability. Ranger should only be able to get 2 skills off (interrupt + taunt) during the stomp animation.

One of the best ways to deal with all the shiny glitter and sparkle effects from skills is still to turn off post-processing effects. The game looks arguably worse, but at least it doesn’t make your eyes bleed from all the flashing sparkle effects on screen in group fights.

I hope that one day they’ll add an option to turn off post-processing on just skill effects while keeping it on everything else. I’d like to have the graphics turned up without being blinded by sparkles in combat.

Burn guards are super easy to counter and outlast if you’re properly traited and set up to deal with it. If you’re not, you melt almost instantly. There’s no middle-ground so I think that’s why this particular setup creates so much controversy.

Burn guard is basically 100b + quickness + bull rush warrior from GW2 launch (before 100b and quickness were severely beaten with the nerf stick) — it destroys unprepared people and gets laughed at by others. Overall, it’s not good for the game since it results in arguments on the forums and in-game.

If a build is creating toxicity among the player base, it needs to be looked at. This includes all other builds that create a lot of toxicity among players. Anet has been good about fixing such builds in the past, such as 100 nade engi, 100b warrior, S/D evade spam thief, etc. Every one of the previously toxic builds had people that defended them and said they were balanced. They might have been, but they created toxic arguments everywhere and made PvP a terrible place to play.

Vague Memory.2817:

Playing Mes I don’t find good Necros easy to fight. You have to fight ranged, but it takes a long time to take to wear one down due to shroud’s health and 50% damage reduction tankiness. Also keeping ranged with mobility inhibitor conditions on you and a necro with +25% speed signet is pretty tough. It is doable but you can’t screw up your positioning. Running a power mes I sometimes find that by the time I almost kill a necro one of his buddies turn up because it is fairly drawn out fight.

I think this depends on your build. Blinding Dissipation and Power Block totally shut down necro if timed properly. I’m not saying necro is an easy or free kill, but their weaknesses can be exploited to give you a significant edge if you just look for the big skill casts (e.g. Signet of Spite — which pops a huge signet icon above the necro when cast with a distinct icon, making it super easy to dodge or interrupt). Their best heal (consume conditions) has a long cast time and has the necro waving his/her hand in the air for ages asking for you to interrupt. It’s basically saying “hey, look at me, please interrupt this to win.”

This game is largely based on readable skills with a few exceptions (e.g. thief has mostly instant unreadable skills). Necro has the slowest and most readable skills in the game, making it easiest to dodge, interrupt, block, blind, etc the majority of them.

I also forgot to add to my earlier post that necro has no access to vigor and therefor has fewer dodges than other professions. You can bait them to waste their dodges and then go all-in with the spike damage.

With the upcoming nerf to vampire runes, necro will have no way to mitigate spike damage. Again, I’m not saying necro is an easy or free kill, but there are definitely strong counters to them and there’s a good reason why they’re still left out of competitive play on most top tier teams.

Necro has three main weaknesses: Little access to stability, limited access to escapes/pursuit mechanics, and no invulnerability/blocks

1) Moa (Engi and Mesmer) is a crushing hard counter to MM necro. 1 skill to destroy all their minions instantly and lock them out of their other skills.

2) CC and high pressure are a counter to necro in general: Hammer warrior, d/p and thief, mesmer, engi (toolkit/rifle/flamethrower), etc. Necro has the longest cast times of all the professions and no way to mitigate being interrupted. You can prevent necro from getting off any of the big skills and can block healing most of the time if you can recognize their tells.

3) Necro does terrible against spike damage. No blocks, no invulnerability, etc, means that any coordinated spike from 1 or 2 players with high direct damage will put the necro on the run.

4) Kiting from 1200 yards is an option for some professions. Necro does terrible at max range (scepter is 900 yards, axe and dagger are shorter and staff does terrible damage). You can pluck away at the necro while taking very little damage from max range. Soften first, then go in for the kill up close if needed.

Keep blocking trolls until you stop encountering verbal abuse. The PvP community is surprisingly small, and after a little bit of blocking, your games will be either silent or full of only pleasant conversations.

It would be neat if Anet implemented a similar thing to reddit where players that were reported for abuse an X number of times got shadow muted temporarily (and permanently if it’s repeated too many times). They could scream all then wanted and no one would hear them (except maybe other trolls?)

I’m just going to chime in here since there is in fact a bug with the combat log. I’ve tested this with thief, and if you manage to “1-hit” someone, none of the damage shows up in the combat log or the death breakdown.

I’ve tested this on a might stacking glass thief and it’s easily repeatable (full signets, scholar rune, berserker amulet, pop all signets for might and extra damage increase then steal + backstab). None of the damage from steal, sigil procs, nor backstab will show up in the combat log if you down the player in a single attack.

You can down a player with one hit using drake tail sweep + maul on GS with a ranger if you’ve used signet of the wild. I’m too lazy to test it, but I bet a similar thing would happen as thief and none of the damage would get recorded properly in the combat log and death break down.

Edit: Just some quick numbers — GS maul hits for ~ 9-10k on glassy low armor builds and drake hits for 5k with tail sweep. With sigil of air + fire, it’s pretty easy to get 15k damage against someone with no armor/protection.

OnizukaBR.8537:

When players will realise that Anet never intended for you to acess everything for free? They let you play for free the base game just for you to see if you really like it or not than buy it, not stay free forever. Guild Wars 2 still is a b2p game

This. GW2 is a B2P game and always has been. They just made the barrier to entry smaller by giving away the core game for free and only charging for the expansion. This is a core game that many of us have played for 3000+ hours and bought to play. The core game took Anet nearly a decade to develop and tweak up until this point. It is extremely generous of them to offer it to new players for free. If people like it, then they can buy the expansion. If not, they have plenty of content to keep them busy for years.

This thread hurts my head. IT IS A BETA. Everything is still being balanced.

The first beta weekend, you could literally auto attack and win against all the elite specs. They were absolutely too weak.

The second beta weekend, some of the elite specs were still weak compared to core specs while others were closer to balanced.

The third beta weekend, some of the elite specs are still too weak while others are a little too strong.

So, based on the three beta events together, we have only a few elite specs being slightly too strong for one weekend. Anet is trying to balance the elite specs and that process will result in some things being too weak and some being too strong until everything is tuned properly. Balance is going to take a while.

It’s possible that it doesn’t work for technical reasons if it tracks the player position.

If it doesn’t get fixed…. Sword AA is the strongest AA in the game at the moment. I didn’t have a chance to compare the raw dps to UA, but it is likely quite close.

The changes to Malyx definitely destroyed it in PvP. It went from an interesting and skillful twist to the profession to something super boring and nearly useless. If I wanted to spam condis by facerolling on my keyboard, I could play any of the other professions. When played correctly, Malyx used to offer both support against condis and very good condi pressure. Now it does neither well.

I had a ton of fun with Malyx in the first two beta weekends. Playing it this beta weekend feels terrible. The changes to Embrace the Darkness make Pain Absorption useless/suicide in PvP. You can apply condis better while in Shiro stance with Impossible Odds AND you have better mobility, dodge, aoe stun, etc.

That necro sure was soaking up a lot of burning due to the plague signet passive. I feel like he was your MVP.

Taldren.7523:

I didn’t see anyone taking any Condi damage in your video until the very end. Half the time I was trying to figure out when you were going to start applying your conditions.

I’m with this person. I must be blind since I wasn’t seeing any big condi numbers. I can melt an entire group in seconds on my ele and guardian. Revenant isn’t nearly as potent, but the Herald definitely is a bit tanky.

This skill needs to be fixed before it can be balanced. Uneven terrain will eat up the attack entirely.

Since it’s currently broken by terrain, “in the wild” it does much less damage against a moving target on standard terrain compared to a target on flat terrain. Currently it can either destroy someone with huge crits, or do 0 damage due to terrain bugs.

What if the skill was “buffed” by simply speeding it up by 100%, so that all hits are delivered in half the current time? In other words, it keeps all of its current damage and might stacking, but just does them quicker.

This change would..
1) Make the skill do better burst damage and increase overall dps (good)
2) Allow you to stack might faster (good)
3) Reduce the evade frames/damage immunity when using the skill since the skill will complete twice as fast (good — it is an offensive skill, not a defensive skill so it shouldn’t allow high dps while evading thousands of damage).
4) Allow people to evade it using 1 dodge, block, or invulnerability skill instead of 2 (good — it gives it real counter play).

This sort of change would buff the damage potential while introducing proper counter play through defensive skills, making it a proper high-risk, high-reward skill. It will require you to properly keep track of your opponents defenses, or immob, or CC your target to make sure that you land the skill without having them dodge/block it.

UA is too strong if you compare it to any other multi-hit skill.

1) It has a very low cooldown.
2) It does not require special positioning like 100b, blurred frenzy, pistol whip, etc, all of which can be easily avoided 100% by a SINGLE dodge.
3) It automatically tracks the target and cannot be avoided by hiding behind terrain, or using line of sight, like rapid fire.
4) it cannot be avoided using teleports (just tried it on a thief and it tracks shadow stepping away, lulz)
5)It cannot be interrupted mid-attack using daze/stun due to the evades.
6) it cannot be reflected.

Every other similar skill in the game has at least 2-3 hard counters that negate it 100%. Double dodging is NOT a counter. If your opponent wastes 2 dodges against a 10s cooldown ability, they have completely lost the fight.

The matchmaker is all over the place. I was in some matches where we 3-capped the other team for the entire game (we were all solo Q). I was also in some matches where my team lost 100-500. My guess is that people are simply on vacation so there are fewer players online to match properly. At one point, I also waited in queue for 10 minutes before simply giving up.

SoloQ never worked before since teams simply sync-queued to end up in the same game/team so they could steamroll actual solo Q players. Leagues might fix the system once HoT launches. I personally have little hope given how dedicated the community is to finding exploits that will give them a competitive edge or the ability to troll others.

What we need are weekly balance patches that keep up with the hive mind of the community that’s constantly looking for exploits.

GrandHaven.1052:

ragnarokda.1805:

I think of them like Mesmers. They’re annoying if all of your skills needs a target or can be body blocked. If your build primarily does damage in an AoE then they’re easier to deal with IMO.

Yeah true, don’t have issues on my engi, but good lord i am having issues with them on thief.

Shortbow 1 and 2 = dead minions in a couple of attacks. It only takes 2 cluster bombs to wipe out all of them if they’re grouped.

This is funny. Turrets were OP because they were immune to condition damage and critical strikes, making them a hard counter to condi and berserker builds. Anet fixed turrets by making them take normal damage from crits and condis.

Necro minions have always taken damage from condis and crits, which is why they have always been easy to deal with. Every single class can wipe out all the necro minions, including the elite, in a couple of AOEs, be they condi (e.g. ring of fire) or physical (volley).

Even a full zerk 100b warrior can pop 1 cooldown (endure pain) and just 100b all the minions. It’s an easy trade between using 1 utility and putting the necro’s 3 utilities + elite on cooldown. Now that the minions don’t idle outside of combat as much, they’re MUCH easier to kill since they group up better and stand in AOE. MM will never be viable in mid or high level play. The only place it could work is against new players who get overwhelmed by the number of targets instead of just nuking all of them with a big aoe.

Projectile finishers are based on the PROJECTILE, not the field. Some projectiles have a 100% chance to be a finisher while others (spammable ones) have a 20%. It would be totally OP if spammable projectiles had a 100% projectile finisher. Imagine if auto attacks (which are mostly 20% chance of projectile finisher) had a 100% chance to apply burning if shot through a fire wall.. Totally OP. This would increase the damage of most projectile auto attacks by more than 100%. There’s already way too much burning without projectile finisher spam.

The lack of an ICD per target is obviously the problem here. Every other burning application skill has an ICD of ~ 1 second.

The skill was obviously balanced around low stacks of burning and was never intended to inflict 40+. It has a 10 second (traited) cooldown and a 5 second uptime, and it does heavy physical aoe damage on cast. Mine does 2000+ physical aoe damage in celestial gear, and up to 4k on berserker on the initial cast. That’s before the burns even kick in… That’s pretty good for a skill with a 10 second cooldown…

Ele stow-cancelled lightning whip for ultra heals and super high dps. It got patched.

Necro stow-cancelled Axe #1 for wimpy damage. It got patched anyway.

How long do we think this is going to stay before it gets patched? Aftercast on skills is there for a reason. It’s part of how the skills are balanced and designed. If the devs intended for there to be no aftercast, they could just set the aftercast time to 0 for a particular skill. This will eventually get patched too.

PlatinumMember.5274:

Peutrifectus.4830:

does it? where does this money come from then? advertisments during tournaments? entry fees?… that needs to be substantial for them to consider losing point of sale.

It should be apparent from the comments that a lot of these suggestions are ignoring the business aspect. They ignore the fact that making PvP f2p devalues the game. They are ignoring a lot of important variables, so I wouldn’t argue too much with the people here.

People who play F2P games, like Heroes of the Storm, or League of Legends spend money on skins/unlocking champions. These games both have a steady revenue stream (potentially more than GW2).

GW2 could easily open up a subset of of the trait lines for a F2P PvP-only game client and require that the rest be unlocked through gold purchases (which can be bought with cash —> gems, or earned slowly from pvping). This would be no different than how they are currently locking amulets amulets and requiring people to unlock them with gold. This is equivalent to unlocking champions in HotS and LoL.

Secondly, the cash shop already offers a ton of skins and outfits for cash purchase, much like the other games mentioned.

Lastly, GW1 already had a PvP-only access kit: http://store.guildwars.com/store/gw/en_US/pd/ThemeID.37893000/productID.304111500

Anet is NOT new to offering PvP-only access for Guild Wars. I would love to see at least this part be made available to increase the pvp player base.

Taunt has been bugged since the previous beta. I’ve had to log-out to reset my UI so I could target properly.

DaShi.1368:

Meanwhile, Necros love the burn builds. Thanks for the free damage.

Revenant too. I had so much fun melting people with my Malyx focused build during the beta. Condi transfer builds punish burn spammers super hard.

Summoning 3 phantasms and then sitting afk in stealth while they rip through your opponent is currently super hard (note my sarcasm).

Seriously, this doesn’t change anything. You can already afk-win most fights just by taking out a couple of izerkers (with the help of signet) + another random phantasm then sitting in the super long traited stealth. Even if the opponent kills your phantasms, they will have eaten 15k+ damage at that point and are a simple Mind Wrack away from death.

I play all classes and can definitely say it’s all pulls. Magnet pull is actually the most reliable with scorpion wire a close second. Spectral grasp is the most unreliable in my experiences, as is the new revenant sword #5 pull.

I had fantastic success with a rampager setup. Sword/sword with mace/axe as 2nd weapon set and Shiro + Malyx. There was nothing I couldn’t melt in seconds. I really wish there was a 2nd ranged condi weapon set, however. Physical damage has both ranged and melee weapons, but condi does not. If you look at other professions, there’s normally a long range and melee range option for both condi and physical damage setups.

Syiao.7042:

I played around with it a bit, used Carrion armor/trinkets, based Reaper trait line around Chill and I think it’s pretty cool (no pun intended).
Run in there laying down all your staff marks, then switch to GS, use skill #5 to pull them in, skill #4 to give them a few conditions, use the suffer shout to chill them again and keep wailing on them the entire time.
I was seeing chill DOT do about 1.5k damage per tick on some enemies which seemed pretty nice if it lasted longer. Maybe if the GS AA was a bit faster and chill lasted longer. Frankly, I think it’d be nice if the chill DOT was a base trait for the Reaper line. If only we had access to Rune of Grenth or Rune of the Ice.
But Reaper Shroud? I’d go as far as to say it’s perfect. I fell in love with it.

How are you seeing 1.5k chill ticks? With 1500+ condi damage it barely does 300/tick. It stacks in duration, not intensity. I just tested it again with 1300 condition damage and it ticks for 221. It’s quite useless.

On a separate note: I’ll mirror most of the comments about GS being too slow and doing too low damage. I really tried using it and it was flat out terrible (and boring).

The animations on GS need to be fixed. Both Gravedigger and Death Spiral have a huge aftercast and overly long animations that don’t actually line up with when the attack hits! Gravedigger is about 0.5s too long in the animation department relative to when the damage is delivered. The only responsive skill is #5 but it appears to be bugged. It misses 90% of the time (no joke). My guess is that it suffers from the classic terrain bug where any difference in elevation between the caster and opponent results in the skill missing.

Since this is a beta, now is the time to start tweaking the skills to make sure they feel right. The reaper shroud skills feel very responsive in contrast to the GS skills. The big wind-up on Shroud #5 is responsive, slow, and highly rewarding when it hits.

witcher.3197:

Rev needs a couple of improvements:

• They should start at maximum energy, not 50%. Currently, you enter the fight, cast 2 skills and then afk waiting for energy regen.
• Anet must either add more weapons because condi builds can’t even have a 2nd set, or remove CD from weapon swap (we have CD on legend swap, that should be enough). This way revenants can swap to the 2nd set for utility and then immediately switch back to main.
• Revenant needs ways to disengage. Basically every current teleport requires a target, can only work with line of sight, and if not then it’ll return you to where you started (Hammer 3). They just enter the fight, get focused and die atm – no teleports for disengage, no invuln, no stealth, nothing. Maybe the Jalis elite, if you can pull off a 2s+ channel that costs 50 energy while being focused, not going to happen.

Reposting Shadows is an evade and a disengage and it removes movement impairing effects. Unyielding Anguish is also a fantastic disengage since it creates a teleport wall that people can’t pass.

I disagree with all of the posts saying revenant is weak. The previous beta weekend, revenant was TERRIBLE, but now that skill queuing got fixed and damage got tweaked, I have been absolutely melting people in tPVP. It helps that I’ve played it alot across both weekends so I understand the class mechanics quite a bit better now. I’m personally quite worried that revenant is on the verge of being OP.

I’m positive the outcry about revs being subpar right now is because few are used to the energy mechanic and new skills. You don’t become amazing at playing a class in PvP in a few hours. This is especially true for people who depend on metabattle to tell them how to trait.

At first, I was getting destroyed when I went full glass berserker with Shiro since I didn’t know what the skills did, but then I learned how to use the disengage skills properly.

Here’s a quick guide to surviving as full glass Shiro in tPvP:

1) Sword #5 takes you out of the fight and lets you finish your opponent. You do not stand in the middle of a fight as a full berserker.
2) Phase traversal lets you jump into a group fight so you can sword #5 and pull out the weakest link to finish him off. Works amazingly well.
3) You can pre-cast Enchanted Daggers for extra burst damage and to keep your hp topped up. It will be off cooldown by the time you need it again.
4) Riposting Shadows is AMAZING. 3/4 second evade, removes movement impairing effects, breaks stun AND gives 50 endurance. You can spam dodge + this skill. Combined with the Enduring Recovery trait (+25 endurance when struck, 10s cooldown) and sigil of energy, you can dodge forever. It’s actually pretty broken since it also stacks with vigor. It’s the equivalent of dodge-spam thief on a heavy armor class.
5) Impossible Odds is also amazing if you use it right. Quickness on demand for stomping? Amazing. Need to burst down someone trying to res their ally? This will do it. Or, you could just Jade Winds to interrupt the res + stun.

Honestly, I’m pretty blown away. I haven’t even covered the great synergy with Malyx and Jalis. Here’s a simple combo to start a fight: Rite of the Great Dwarf at max range —> Phase Traversal into the middle of a fight and then pop Impossible Odds. You become an unkillable murder machine for a short while. Or, if you go with Malyx, you become very condi resistant and can disrupt the fight with Unyielding Anguish + power up with Embrace the Darkness (which increases your damage substantially).

The two separate healing skills also pair really well with runes that give a buff on heal (e.g. Rune of the Fighter) or damage others (e.g. Rune of Balthazar).

Hammer is also great if you want to play like a PewPew Ranger (i.e., stay at max range and dish out 5-6k crits every few seconds). The damage seemed quite close to LB ranger from what I saw, which is quite good. Hammer pairs really well with Impossible Odds since you can nuke from max range without worrying about getting killed.

Support is also quite good with Ventari + Jalis. This post is too long already so I won’t go into it.

If it’s a signet necro, you also have to dodge the signets since they convert 2 of your boons to conditions. You should note that the traited plague signet passively transfers conditions only when the necro has 3+ condis on him. If you stack only burns, it won’t transfer them back to you unless he uses his active signet/staff 4. Your other option is to stay in attunements longer to avoid building up too many boons that can be converted.

Signet necro is only really powerful against boon and condi spammers (e.g. d/d cele ele) so unless you’re playing a different build (e.g. fresh air) you’ll have a tough time.

Warrior does very poorly against mesmers. There’s no way to deal with their stealth + range + snares + interrupts + evade. You can’t force the mesmer to engage you in close range and the clones will body block your burst skills/leap skills/attacks since warrior has no teleports.

Try a class with teleports (e.g. medi guardian). It’s way easier to kill the mesmer when you can bypass the clones and apply pressure to the mesmer directly.

Zelulose.8695:

Kharr.5746:

Wow, that took you forever to kill someone standing still. A full minute an twenty seconds. I was so disappointed.

Ya it is just posted as a fun build. Perfect for annoying people in wvw or any server lol.

Have you considered grabbing scorpion wire and trolling people on Skyhammer with it? It would solve the weak DPS. You just need to pop out of stealth briefly to break the glass, or wait for them to walk over it when they leave a point and just pull them into the hole.

Have you tried celestial hambow + shouts? Great group support, very tanky, mid-tier dps, very easy to stack might up to 25 for your team while CCing the enemy team. Good control on point.

The build on metabattle is a bit off — if you go for brawler’s recovery + vigorous shouts over what’s there, you live a lot longer. You should be able to 1v1 a d/d ele pretty evenly.

Wow, that took you forever to kill someone standing still. A full minute an twenty seconds. I was so disappointed.

Attack of the clone wars? (’cause everyone will be playing mesmer).

CMF.5461:

just leaving this here……the devs know and it’s intended….

Ready Up 35

Thanks for the source. It looks like it’s working as intended. I don’t feel bad for exploiting it anymore. It’s does more damage than backstab on a 5 second cooldown without needing to be behind a target.

I’ve been pairing it with meditations for the extra tankiness + fury on my carrion build. Super tanky melt-your-face fun. Absolutely love it.

You don’t actually need to stay in torch though. Open up with #4 —> 4 to toss it, Radiant Fire procs —> #4 to toss it again. It’s 10 stacks of burning in ~ 1 second. Surely 1 second isn’t “risky” for melting someone with 3.2k burn ticks.

If you have a torch equipped, it allows you to use Zealot’s Flame + Zealot’s Fire even when it is on cooldown by triggering the trait. Basically, you get 2x Zealot’s Flame AND 2x Zealot’s Fire. That’s 10+ stacks of burning instantly by just mashing #4. It’s only supposed to grant Zealot’s Flame passively. Please fix it.

I’m surprised no one has posted about this yet. It’s part of the reason burn Guardians are melting faces right now.

Edit: Thanks for the link to ready-up. Apparently it’s working as intended. I’m going back to melting faces with my medi-carrion build. Perma-fury super tanky melt-your-face fun that does more damage than a thief.

MM is a bunker spec, you shouldn’t be trying to kill it unless you have enough aoe to burn all the minions before backup arrives.

Minions remove conditions from the necro and heal the necro if he picked up vampiric traits. You have to kill the minions if you want to have a shot at killing the necro. Going straight for the necro will just get you killed.

On the plus side, minions do not dodge and cannot be controlled to move out of aoe. You literally just need to place down some aoe and they will all die.

Things that are super effective vs MM necro:

1) Trap condi trap ranger (melts minions in about 3 seconds). Power LB ranger from long range can also dispatch the necro without ever taking a hit.
2) Shortbow berserker thief. Cluster bomb 2-3x and all the minions are dead. Then the necro is basically naked with no support and utility skills
3) D/D or Staff ele – better sustain and that fire field melts minions super quick.
4) Condi engi – bombs + grenades = dead minions.
5) Shatter mesmer (just have to make sure you use blurred frenzy and shatter in the middle of the minions). A three clone mind wrack and one blurred frenzy should kill all the minions, including the golem.
6) Celestial Hambow warrior is also quite good vs MM. Not many other real options for warrior unless you want to do stances + offhand axe.
7) Burn and medi guardian melts MM.
8) Power necro + wells obliterates MM.

Kusa.6438:

Have you ever played a Mesmer? Our condi removal sucks too. Every class needs its weakness.

I play a mesmer. I rarely die from conditions. Why? Because I don’t have to stand in an aoe field to do damage. Also, my clones/phantasms chew up the 5 target cap of most aoes in group fights. And, when I do have to be up close, I’m using evasion (sword #2) or distortion, or interrupting/dazing the target so he can’t spam his condi skills on me.

Mesmer doesn’t have a “weakness to conditons” since it takes quite a bit of effort to get condis on a mesmer to begin with.

Revenant is a front-line warrior/tank/support that doesn’t have any real way to deal with conditions at the moment and gets absolutely melted. The easily removable resistance boon is not a viable defense either since many condition builds feature very strong boon removal or boon corruption. Anet made condition builds punish boon-spamming builds.

I would hate to see Revenant become OP, but I was laughing at how easy it is to melt them when they were using the available trait trees (all tanky/support lines). Even when taking 3 full defensive specs, they were cannon fodder. If they take 1 offensive and 2 defensive trait lines, they will be even squishier.

I think the elephant in the room that’s being overlooked is the AOE condition application on instant and near-instant cast abilities.

Lately, I’ve been playing a trap condi ranger. 20k+ in condition damage (also does aoe, knockdown, cripple, and is unblockable) using a grand total of 1.5 seconds in cast time during combat? Check. Can be prepped before a fight? Check.

The risk/reward ratio for using a condition build and just spamming aoe condis is pretty funny. Entire groups of players melt before they can react. Condition fields (and some condi application skills) have very low cooldowns, near instant cast and make it so that cleanses are useless. There’s no “right” time to cleanse conditions when they’re being rapidly applied every second.

ronpierce.2760:

phokus.8934:

Scrap energy on the weapons and use cooldowns and keep energy associated with utilities.

This would be my choice. Energy is already spread thin as it is, it doesn’t need to be made worse. This is more the route that needs to be taken.

Personally, I thought the energy was fine. The entire point is to manage it rather than spamming skills mindlessly.

I think you may be misunderstanding the point of unholy sanctuary. The healing stacks with all of the lifesteal traits from blood magic. You can heal significant amounts by swapping into DS for a bit to soak up damage and using #4. With my celestial build, I heal about 5k or more in most cases.

Also, it negates a lethal hit with DS— something which is especially useful for both boss fights and PvP. It’s the only thing that will save you when you’re low on hp and your DS is on cooldown. The number of times this trait has saved me against a rogue/guardian that teleported in to try and finish me off is off the charts. It is a very powerful trait and not to be underestimated.

To reiterate: It will put you in DS on a lethal hit even if your DS is on cooldown. This is absolutely amazing for survival.