Guild Wars 2

Roe.3679:

You can feel free to check my pre-Dec. 17th pvp rankings if you think I’m such a low level player.

They aren’t going to revamp the whole class, perhaps you should get that through your head. It’s been requested, discussed, refined upon, compiled, etc for years. It’s not happening.

So rather than admit how wrong you were, the moment your bullkitten was called out you literally just resorted to telling people to stop suggesting things because you think the devs are never going to do anything.

I’m not even going to talk about kitten like “never going to be an expansion” “never going to get flying” “never going to get dueling”. You’re literally the opposite of constructive. Get off the forum you troll.

Roe.3679:

I understand what you’re trying to say, which is that this type of set up seems like it would fit a burst class/mechanic better. But in order for that to work, everything needs to change. Mesmers are everything that you’re describing. They have a resource that needs to be built up and can be rapidly expended, and they have the tools to survive without said resource. Just because getting zerged can go through your DS quickly doesn’t mean it always is gone quickly. You probably need to work on your positioning if you’re always running through a full DS bar in a few seconds.

And what awful players are you fighting that fights take so long? I kill most celes in 30 seconds, bunker guards in less than a minute. Burst classes either kill me in their opening combo or are dead shortly after. The only spec that takes awhile for me to kill is actually an mm necro, which supports the whole attrition thing more than your theory.

It seems like a burst mechanic because it is a burst mechanic. Get it through your head. The problem is that its a burst mechanic on a class that the devs don’t want to be about burst, which is why we want it changed.

You’re saying that all your fights are shorter and you’re trying to say that i’m the one fighting awful player? lmfao. What kind of kittening horrible cele ele/engi can’t kittening manage their infinite stall rotation? What kind of terrible mes/thieves are you seeing that aren’t just shadowstepping out if they miss their opener? You’re talking about play at such a low level that you’ve gone all the way out the other end and think you’re ahead or something. In tournament the cele bunkers are expected to hold for at least a solid minute when the zerk thief rotates in for a 2v1 against them, and you think you’re playing against good players when they die in 30s 1v1? LMFAO.

Quadox.7834:

Arricson Krei.9560:

“Mirror Blade can be blocked. I have zero clue why there’s a Unblockable slapped onto this trait. Yields too much damage at too high of a range. If it can be blocked, it’s fine.”

If you don’t have a clue why mirror blade is unblockable, you probably don’t know much about the game, im glad you aren’t balancing. If it weren’t unblockable, a player reflecting a mirror blade would get a clone of his own attacking the mesmer- that is just how clone generating projectiles work in this game (see scepter). That’s also why things like earth dagger 3 on ele is unblockable- it would create some weird functionality if it weren’t. That being said, i think mesmer does need nerfs, but then again, i don’t even play the game anymore so i don’t mind.

Nothing kittening wrong with that. Thats how reflection works. See scepter auto.

You don’t play the game anymore? Get out of balance discussions.

On topic: Background recharging needs to be removed. 10s ICD on blinding dissipation. And one of the following needs to happen: CS and PU get gutted, casting mantras reveals you, or MoD gets knocked down to 1 charge 600 range.

Roe.3679:

Linnael.1069:

Muchacho.2390:

Linnael.1069:

So you’re saying that if LF was high generation low-pool then it would be an attrition mechanic, but because currently it is low generation high-pool its a burst mechanic?

nice to see you agree with me.

Also not quite sure how you determined that LF would go down faster if all you did was lower the max and raise generation.

Mhh maybe i have a different definition of a burst mechanic but i dont consider a bad implemented attrition mechanic as a burst-mechanic but whatever.

What i mean with LF goes down faster is if you reduce the max LF enemy attacks will drain LF quicker (in precents) and knock you out of DS quicker. Well i guess that is what you want since it would make DS worse against burst.

You would need to completely reverse some of the core properties of the life force system to turn it into an attrition system. Sure it’s an implementation error, if by that you mean they totally implemented the wrong thing.

manveruppd.7601:

snip

This guy gets it. I’m going to ask all the people talking about whether necro should or shouldn’t be good at power burst to go and read the whole thread again.

It takes 26 seconds or so for a full life force bar to degenerate, and 51 with VP. Does that amount of time seem bursty? If it were all gone in seconds you might have a better point, but it’s not.

I mean sure, if they gave the class a ton of active defenses, changed almost all of our weapon skills, DS skills and utilities, and made DS drain quickly for hard hitting skills, you’d be right. But then we’d just be mesmers.

So you’re saying our only defensive mechanic lasts a long time if you never get hit. ok.

Read the whole thread to learn why you’re wrong. Whether the life force system is burst oriented has nothing at all to do with whether it does alot of damage, whether it soaks alot of damage, or whether you can trait for generation.

The whole kitten point is that you have to make major investments to get it to work effectively over time because its design is short-term focused. All you guys going “but VP” “but SA” “but SM” are literally just arguing against yourselves. “But you can use it long term if you bring x, y, and z.” Meanwhile anybody who knows how the game works is working with the mechanic and gets to spend slots x, y, and z on actually useful things. Why would anybody think its an attrition mechanic if to get it to be strong over time you have to invest, and to get it to be strong in short fights you do not have to invest. Its so kitten simple.

But whatever. By all means if you want to totally ignore what attrition and burst actually mean, keep thinking of DS as an attrition mechanic. Then wonder why attrition necro is literally not good in a single game mode, or come up with a different explanation for the fundamental design inconsistencies that are all over the place. I can wait.

(PS: Jeez you’re literally wrong on everything. 26 seconds is plenty bursty. Even glass vs. glass encounters are going to take at least 30s unless somebody doesn’t know what they’re doing, and the average cele fight takes like 3 minutes)

Muchacho.2390:

Linnael.1069:

So you’re saying that if LF was high generation low-pool then it would be an attrition mechanic, but because currently it is low generation high-pool its a burst mechanic?

nice to see you agree with me.

Also not quite sure how you determined that LF would go down faster if all you did was lower the max and raise generation.

Mhh maybe i have a different definition of a burst mechanic but i dont consider a bad implemented attrition mechanic as a burst-mechanic but whatever.

What i mean with LF goes down faster is if you reduce the max LF enemy attacks will drain LF quicker (in precents) and knock you out of DS quicker. Well i guess that is what you want since it would make DS worse against burst.

You would need to completely reverse some of the core properties of the life force system to turn it into an attrition system. Sure it’s an implementation error, if by that you mean they totally implemented the wrong thing.

manveruppd.7601:

snip

This guy gets it. I’m going to ask all the people talking about whether necro should or shouldn’t be good at power burst to go and read the whole thread again.

Khristophoros.7194:

Linnael.1069:

Cecilia.5179:

1: I assume you’re talking about WvW, because the only way to gain life force outside of combat is to sacrifice minions, which I wouldn’t be surprised if it was removed as an exploit eventually. Killing a deer does not really count as in between fights outside of WvW.
2: Vitality is common on burst specs with low health pools. The idea behind giving Necromancer massive amounts of vitality is that it reduces the percent of your health conditions take from you since conditions do not scale, allowing a Necromancer to “theoretically” outsustain condition builds (It is like Blissey in Pokemon: lots of hp and high “Special Defense”).
3: Life Force is better in short fights simply because it doesn’t run out as often.
4: The Devs don’t seem to know how to make attrition work without evades, heals, and teleports. Frankly, I don’t know how to make that possible either.
5: Our power specs are more popular than our condition specs because our condition specs are the weakest condition specs. (Our biggest advantage in condis is that we have a small amount of access to all of them.)

Vitality mitigating conditions is a misconception. It gives you more time to react sure but offers 0 mitigation whatsoever.

Beyond that I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. You seem to be agreeing with all my points. LF is by design better in short fights than it is in long ones, and so our condi specs suck and our burst specs are good despite the devs pushing an attrition angle.

Vit is supposedly good against conditions because armor does absolutely nothing against conditions.

Well, it’s the same as how vit gives you more time against regular damage, but instead of armor mitigating the damage, you mitigate it actively with removals.

Vitality doesn’t mitigate anything at all is the point. People feel like having more vit is better against condition classes because they get more time to react, but really bringing vitality to any sort of attrition fight is a huge mistake. The only edge case in which some vitality is useful is guards/eles, who may honestly get bursted down in the span of one or two ticks if they don’t buffer their tiny HP pool. On anybody else its better to have sustain or even better more damage and just end the encounter faster.

S/D is the easier set, so run that if you need more security or just need a backup weapon to disengage/run away. Against players GS has better damage output and more kill potential.

Cecilia.5179:

1: I assume you’re talking about WvW, because the only way to gain life force outside of combat is to sacrifice minions, which I wouldn’t be surprised if it was removed as an exploit eventually. Killing a deer does not really count as in between fights outside of WvW.
2: Vitality is common on burst specs with low health pools. The idea behind giving Necromancer massive amounts of vitality is that it reduces the percent of your health conditions take from you since conditions do not scale, allowing a Necromancer to “theoretically” outsustain condition builds (It is like Blissey in Pokemon: lots of hp and high “Special Defense”).
3: Life Force is better in short fights simply because it doesn’t run out as often.
4: The Devs don’t seem to know how to make attrition work without evades, heals, and teleports. Frankly, I don’t know how to make that possible either.
5: Our power specs are more popular than our condition specs because our condition specs are the weakest condition specs. (Our biggest advantage in condis is that we have a small amount of access to all of them.)

Vitality mitigating conditions is a misconception. It gives you more time to react sure but offers 0 mitigation whatsoever.

Beyond that I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. You seem to be agreeing with all my points. LF is by design better in short fights than it is in long ones, and so our condi specs suck and our burst specs are good despite the devs pushing an attrition angle.

Muchacho.2390:

Yeah DS may not help much for attrition currently, but you can clearly see that the principle ideas behind it have attrtion in mind. LF building up in combat and by killing enemies and not being effected by the healing debuff of poison clearly shows this. So i dont see why it would in principle be a burst mechanic. That you can store LF long before a fight even begins is just a bad implementation of those attrition principles.

And honestly even if LF generation would be increased and the max LF would be reduced (which certainly would make DS more balanced), long fights would still end the same. Your LF bar just goes up and down faster but your real health bar still only goes down and it is not like you can stay in DS all the time. The reason why necros lose the long game is because they cannot reset they real healthbar like the other “attrition” professions can (or seen the other way around prevent them from reseting thier healthbar).

So you’re saying that if LF was high generation low-pool then it would be an attrition mechanic, but because currently it is low generation high-pool its a burst mechanic?

nice to see you agree with me.

Also not quite sure how you determined that LF would go down faster if all you did was lower the max and raise generation.

Khristophoros.7194:

snip

Jeez man can you just ask yourself one question. “Is deathshroud best used in long fights or short ones” It’s such a simple concept. No, just because you can generate some over time doesn’t mean its an attrition mechanic. Is Well of Suffering an attrition skill just because i can use it more times the longer the fight is?

Defense is just as important in determing whether a class will be good at burst as offense is. Look at S/D ele. Highest burst damage in the game by a good factor of two. Totally kittening trash because ele really only has one burst-oriented defense skill (arcane shield).

Instant cast CttB would be enough. Would rather see a 1500 shadowstep on Plague form.

Click to dodge is a whole new level of beast. I am honestly impressed.

So many mesmer bandwagoners. GG fire aura suck too bad.

Sagat.3285:

Linnael.1069:

Stances should be really high uptime, but they’d have upsides and downsides so you’d want to cancel them. Something like:

“Unstoppable: You move at 15% reduced speed. No matter what”

i.e. You could be moving around while stunned chilled immobilized and knocked down, but you wouldn’t want to leave it on if that stuff has worn off because then you’d just be slowing yourself down.

No please no more self harm non rewarding mechanic corruptions are a fail already also they shouldn’t look up to war stances but higher war is being carried by Rampage so far and it’s the closest class to us.

The Mallyx corruptions also suck.

non rewarding? The thing i threw out would be a stupidly overpowered piece of kitten. are you even joking here.

Khristophoros.7194:

snip

You still don’t understand what a burst-oriented mechanic is. Life force is a defensive mechanic. Doesn’t mean it’s not a burst oriented one. Whether a system is optimized for long-term or short-term encounters is not dependent on how much damage it provides.

Take a look at the facts:

1: Life force is the slowest generating resource in the game by a long margin even in optimal cases and requires investment to generate. However, LF is easily stacked up between fights and has a large maximum pool.

2: Life force scales to vitality, another burst-oriented stat. Vitality is 100% useless past the opening of a fight unless your opponent can 100-0 partway through.

3: Life force is thus always better in a shorter fight than a longer one. This means it is a burst oriented mechanic.

4: In order to make the necro an attrition class despite it’s textbook burst oriented class design, devs had to saddle the necro with massive cast times, unreliable sources of power scaling, and some frankly overpowered patches to LF generation that only fly under the radar because its so bad at baseline.(full dagger auto chain generates 8%; spectral armor can generate 80%).

5: Necro hits live. PvP players to complain bout 0 LF at match start. WvW roamers complain about oppressive 100% LF encounters. Everybody complains about kittenty cast times and how easy to avoid our power damage is. Despite all this Necro still sees the majority of its play as a 100% zerker glass cannon

Life force is a burst mechanic on a class that the devs keep trying to turn into an attrition class, and that’s the source of most of the necro’s problems. That’s just a fact.

Now can we start talking about how to fix it? If ANet wants to push the attrition angle I suggest we cut the LF pool to a third of its current value, allow DS entry to cool down while in deathshroud, and triple all LF generation.

If ANet would like to see the burst angle see play as well, I think a pretty major overhaul of the power weapons is in order. Axe and Focus both need pretty major reworks, and dagger could be alright with either a speed or damage buff on life siphon.

Stances should be really high uptime, but they’d have upsides and downsides so you’d want to cancel them. Something like:

“Unstoppable: You move at 15% reduced speed. No matter what”

i.e. You could be moving around while stunned chilled immobilized and knocked down, but you wouldn’t want to leave it on if that stuff has worn off because then you’d just be slowing yourself down.

Shiki.7148:

Linnael.1069:

Just revert it to its ten second version. Like come on man does anybody kittening believe a ten second light field would be OP?

Legit such a simple fix. Can we just get it pushed through already? There are literally no reasons not to do it. They could literally just copy and paste the skill data from an old iteration.

Especially with the stupid AF insane hugeass firefield Tempest is getting with its 9 ticks that not only causes burn and rips boons, but with Blinding ashes also blinds. Oh and can be blasted for might. Nobody would give a rats kitten if WoB was back at 10s. At least not anyone in their right mind (which means Anet devs are excluded).

Especially now that it doesn’t even proc vampiric anymore. If they were worried about the lifesiphon getting out of hand, then its a good thing they preemptively cut it in half.

What a blowhard

Raif.9507:

Because he’s right and the forums know he’s right.

On a more serious note, it would be nice to see someone who actually understands the class to show off the elite specs. Watching Grouch demolish Chieftain with ease was more impressive than the showing of anything else. Watching Karl get interrupted while overloading twice and nearly dying (500hp) was more embarrassing than anything else. That and Rubi’s comments of “That’s so devastating” and watching 4 hits of 400 per target was nothing more than a /facepalm moment.

This goes for the other stuff to, most of the devs who tried to show killing Svanir/Chieftain almost died themselves (they even joke about it on stream) and I think it would be better to show something like Grouch demolishing rather than Karl nearly dying.

Pretty much this. Watching some of the devs PvP makes me wonder what the hell is even going on.

For those of you who aren’t getting the point, here’s the difference between burst-oriented mechanics and being good at burst damage.

Burst oriented mechanics are systems that allow you to be more effective for a short duration at a long-term cost. Entering fights with a huge bar of life force that you maxed out just by slapping a few ambients on the way there is a burst oriented mechanic. Your amount of available life force starts off very high relative to the investment you made towards generating life force during that fight (no investment at start) and then rapidly declines as the fight gets longer, because you must then consider LF generation an active priority, potentially conflicting with positioning, DPS, and healing priorities. Basically, shorter fights mean your initial LF bar does more for you and LF generation can be less of a priority. Deathshroud is better the shorter a fight is. This is a bursty mechanic.

Note this has nothing to do with whether you actually have good burst DPS. That’s exactly my point with this thread actually. The necro has a burst mechanic built into it, but the devs think its an attrition class and keep giving us slow damage over time effects and huge cast times. Their intentions and the core principles of the class conflict, which is why it has so many issues.

(Sidenote: This is also why necro has so many issues in PvP but you’ll see people complain about necro wvw roamers all the time. PvP necro starts the game with 0 initial life force, whereas roaming necros will basically always be at 100%. If you change lifeforce into a high-generation, low-pool statistic as suggested, this becomes far less of an issue.)

Can we talk about how slow generation of large resource pools which drain quickly is a burst mechanic and not an attrition one?

I don’t get why all the devs seem to think necro is an attrition class. The class defining mechanic is pretty much a textbook example of burst design. You slowly stack up a resource out of combat, have the ability to quickly turn that resource into damage, and either the enemy is dead and you can reset, or it’s GG and you lost the fight to a real attrition mechanic.

Take a look at where necro is played in pvp. Up until the signet changes it was universally zerk bomber. Why? Because necro is a burst class by design, the devs just don’t know it.

Recently they’ve patched this up with a few honestly overpowered mechanics. Two instant cast full condi transfers on a 24s cd? Yea that’ll turn anybody into a decent bruiser. But it doesn’t solve the real problems and this kind of design is only going to lead to balance issues down the road.

Either change the necro mechanic to be truly attrition based by tripling all LF generation and halving the size of DS, or start giving it more of the tools it needs to really function as a bursty profession.

1/4 is about three times as long as you need to flash fear. This is an l2p issue and would be a nerf to anybody who knows that the kitten they’re doing.

Stances or deceptions would both be so much cooler than shouts. Shouts are the most boring skill type imaginable tbh.

Just revert it to its ten second version. Like come on man does anybody kittening believe a ten second light field would be OP?

Legit such a simple fix. Can we just get it pushed through already? There are literally no reasons not to do it. They could literally just copy and paste the skill data from an old iteration.

Whether people like you or not doesn’t have much to do with how OP you are. Even when ele was super broken you didn’t see people kitten about it the way they are with mes. You know why?

Because mesmer is kittening easy to play.

Half your damage is AI, you have practically no readable animations, and you have so many built in safety nets in case you kitten up that you really have to be terrible to be seriously caught by less than 2 people. But somehow mesmers won’t even own up to the fact. Like everybody knows lb rangers and warriors are easy. We ok with that, they accept it, whatever. But mesmers somehow want you to imagine that they’re hard to play and squishy, when its just so obviously not true. You dump protection out of your kitten at the slightest provocation and have midtier health, built in invuln on every build and days of stealth. Yea thats hard to play lmao.

AzureSky.3175:

Linnael.1069:

If you play a staff ele and enter combat you will never be able to match a melee character in melee combat. Range locking isn’t a revenant only thing.

To be honest, I only do PvE, so I can’t really talk about PvP or WvW here.
But if I want to do some high melee DPS in PvE with my staff ele, I just conjure a Fiery Greatsword and burn through all the mobs.
I do not know if Fiery Greatsword can ‘match a melee character in melee combat’, but I am definitely NOT range locked.

Yes because FGS is melee or high dps.

… lolwut

Pelopidas.2140:

Could be just a bug. good thing that you mention it
I didnt know vampiric aura procs retaliation, thats huge in wvw

It doesn’t. Don’t know where people are getting that from. He mentioned retal because direct damage, which would be necessary to proc vampiric/vamp aura since the changes, would then also have to proc retal.

Gulesave.5073:

Linnael.1069:

Roy Cronacher.1576:

Thanks for the feedback. This is definitely the type of stuff we are looking for, keep it coming.

Kronos.2560:

A few skills are unable to be used unless in combat. ex
-Vengeful Hammers
-Energy Expulsion (seems to require 51 energy) kind of strange…
-Embrace the Darkness
.. I think i forgot some but those work for now.

Not sure if these would count as bugs or maybe its supposed to be like that. Either way would be nice if they get fixed. Hopefully they fix them, kind of annoying to have to sit the and summon hammers after the surprise attack has happened, instead of prepping for it.

The energy mechanic is kind of weird when out of combat right now and that’s something we’ve already addressed internally. In the next iteration you’ll see it’ll have the updated energy bar.

Basically, you can’t use the upkeep skills right now because you don’t have the upkeep to spend to use them because when you are out of combat energy upkeep drops from 5 per second base to 0 when you are resting at 50% energy. In the new version you will always be at 5 per second base, it’ll instead just cap energy at 50% out of combat. Which should solve a lot of the weirdness.

The energy expulsion issue is probably a bug as it should be costing 50 energy.

Keep it at 51. You’d be able to throw out a bunch of healing fragments to always start fights with them around, and still have regen’d your energy by the time you entered combat.

You can still do that at 50. One of the problems with 51 is that you can’t get rid of the tablet out of combat without swapping legends or moving out of tether range.

You cannot do that now. You would be able to at 50, and its a stupid mechanic that’s basically just “start every fight with a bunch of healing orbs, if you want to deal with the resummon”.

Like what did you even think I was talking about?

If you play a staff ele and enter combat you will never be able to match a melee character in melee combat. Range locking isn’t a revenant only thing.

Roy Cronacher.1576:

Thanks for the feedback. This is definitely the type of stuff we are looking for, keep it coming.

Kronos.2560:

A few skills are unable to be used unless in combat. ex
-Vengeful Hammers
-Energy Expulsion (seems to require 51 energy) kind of strange…
-Embrace the Darkness
.. I think i forgot some but those work for now.

Not sure if these would count as bugs or maybe its supposed to be like that. Either way would be nice if they get fixed. Hopefully they fix them, kind of annoying to have to sit the and summon hammers after the surprise attack has happened, instead of prepping for it.

The energy mechanic is kind of weird when out of combat right now and that’s something we’ve already addressed internally. In the next iteration you’ll see it’ll have the updated energy bar.

Basically, you can’t use the upkeep skills right now because you don’t have the upkeep to spend to use them because when you are out of combat energy upkeep drops from 5 per second base to 0 when you are resting at 50% energy. In the new version you will always be at 5 per second base, it’ll instead just cap energy at 50% out of combat. Which should solve a lot of the weirdness.

The energy expulsion issue is probably a bug as it should be costing 50 energy.

Keep it at 51. You’d be able to throw out a bunch of healing fragments to always start fights with them around, and still have regen’d your energy by the time you entered combat.

Would make more sense too. You’re sweeping a cloak into their eyes or something.

First thing I want to say is that revenant looks great. The skill effects are cool and unique, and that’s wonderful. Major props to the artists that came up with some of the new assets.

Unfortunately, it’s looking more and more like ANet doesn’t even consider effect spam when designing skills. The revenant AoEs like the road and the axe fire field are massive, opaque layers that last for a long time and cover the entire area with heavily saturated colors. Ventari’s tablet passively spits out a ridiculous amount of flowers even when its literally just sitting there, and as a big glowing object obstructs projectiles and vision, and Mallyx form shades the whole revenant black and purple, covering their silhouette with random black spikes. That’s practically active camouflage, as if asurans weren’t bad enough in pvp/wvw.

Again, I don’t want it to come across like I’m bashing the effects. They look amazing. And I dunno, maybe HoT enemies will have better telegraphing or something. But we shouldn’t have to squint through a massive haze of bricks and red layers to actually see what the target is doing. Tone some things back. Does the tablet’s passive ticking heal really need an effect at all, much less a huge ground covering flower pulse? Does the axe fire field need to literally fill in the entire rectangle with such an opaque layer? I didn’t think it was possible, but it’s literally even worse than guardians right now. There’s got to be some things they can dial back.

Those are interactions that are rarely significant considerations anyways.

To be completely honest I don’t see why we can’t just ask them to specifically code vampiric/vamp aura to work on wells especially, or buff vampiric rituals to 180 to make up for the lost siphons. I mean they’re obviously fine with the siphons from Vamp rituals still working on non-damaging wells, why not the other ones?

And then they busted it for wells. The bugfix on vamp aura was necessary sure, but honestly couldn’t they have stuck a nominal direct damage component on all the currently non-damaging wells?

Vampiric and Vampiric aura no longer work with 3/5 wells in the game. Wellstealing went from around 180/tick to ~110 for well of blood/power/darkness. That’s a 40% nerf to some of the weakest parts of the set.

I’d suggest extending this to all the other effects that were impacted, like warhorn 4 and DS5, but those aren’t really as large a part of the wellsteal build as wells are.

TL;DR: Make Well of Blood/Darkness/Power tick for like 100 direct damage, just so they can proc vampiric/vampiric aura again.

Taking both fire and air means you are going to be playing a direct damage burst spec. Taking water is useless even in the damage capacity because none of your easy kill combos are going to be able to proc all the fire damage bonuses and piercing shards at the same time. Fire/Air/Arcane is much better.

Conjures need better effects on activation. Given how core the ele’s weapon skills are to its effectiveness, conjures should be good for summoning, using the big hard hitting skills, and then dropping. It sort of fits that niche already by giving you two, but could obviously use a lot more work.

Put some cleanses/stunbreak options onto the conjure activations given how much utility you lose while holding one. Earth shield breaks stuns and is instant cast. Ice bow spawns with a cleansing wave. The lighting bolt that spawns the lightning hammer has a 180 radius daze and damage attatched to it. Flame axe spawns a ring of fire. FGS can be reactivated to melt the ground, creating a lava pool that you can dive into, shadowstepping you to the second sword you spawned. Reduce conjure CDs to 45 seconds for all of them besides the FGS.

Alone.1784:

I have seen advice like this in the past for other GW2 builds and as someone that came from the WOW theory crafting days it’s never made sense to me. Back then the recommended builds would be something like get to 66% crit then build power.

The reason being that on a given roll for if an ability will crit everything past that up to your critical chance is basically wasted stats. I have never seen a GW2 theory crafter take that into account and I’ve never understood why, have any insight?

If you do crit some of your precision is “wasted”.
If you do not crit all of your ferocity is “wasted”.

Thats sort of the simple/dirty explanation behind why DPS calculations work, but honestly if you look into the math for even a little bit you should be able to see in alot more detail why theorycrafted builds are the way they are.

Saiyan.1704:

The question is, whether or not it’s counterable. Many classes have invulnerabilities but the thing is.. you have to predict when a mesmer is going to burst. This has always been the case with Mesmers, they just became faster at delivering damage.

To be honest, it’s what the Mesmer needed as a class. It feels like they’re actually doing work in pvp now. What’s funny is, it feels some what balance in comparison to other specs because either they get the burst off… or they die. The burst dps could be tweaked between half a second to 1 second for players can react fast enough for a counter. Slow their burst too much and they’ll be back to below par.

Invulnerability skills is what’s needed to counter them. People who don’t have them will obviously not win against a Mesmer.

Are you joking. They either get the burst off or they pop their built in instant cast invulnerability and begin permastealthing. Is that what you meant?

SchmendrickTheMagician.8247:

Damage-wise and cooldown-wise (especially with the 33% cd reduction from fire now) Firegrab is fine I think.

But I’d love for it to have some other condition besides burning for it to do it’s full damage. Now with burns no longer stacking duration (and everyone packing lots of condi removal) it can be quite hard to still have burns on the enemy when you can land a firegrab.

Maybe something like “does full damage below 50% enemy health” or “does full damage as long as enemy has at least 1 condition on them” would be nice IMHO.

A heartseeker-esque modifier on top of the burn conditional would be good. There’s no reason it shouldnt just end you if you get hit with it while you’re on fire and under say 33% HP, but this happens already and realistically would just be overkill. On the other hand the any-condition thing would basically equate to always given the amount of passive vuln and long duration bleeds you throw out passively with weak spot or EA.

I’d rather this be about changing the hitbox and thereby raising the number of options you have to play into it, than just bumping the damage.

SchmendrickTheMagician.8247:

Linnael.1069:

Fresh air S/F is one of the strongest dueling specs out there. This is not a deniable fact.

Well the game isn’t balanced about 1v1 and there’s also not a single 1v1 game mode so this point is moot basically. Scepter is pretty bad in teamfights and almost always loses out against dagger mainhand in pvp/wvw.

While obviously not the end-all-be-all of the mode, the ability to 1v1 people is a very large part of how effective you can be in conquest, and is undoubtedly mandatory to play as a periph or a roamer in WvW as well. In addition, ANet has proven their willingness to nerf strong dueling specs even if they are ineffective in actual modes, simply because they are not fun to encounter, and games are about fun. See to shadow infusion d/p thieves. If you had bothered to read and respond to the entirety of the post you quoted you would have seen that my concerns about the strength of S/F fall along those lines.

Look at it this way. If we blow it like an actual horn, its the lamest kittening weapon in the game. If we use it to cast magic that has nothing to do with actually being a horn, why aren’t we just getting focus skins that look like horns? If we use it to hit people in the face, it is even lamer than blowing it.

There’s no option where warhorn isn’t just lame as balls. I don’t even care if the skills on it are wildly OP crap like “1200 radius quickness for 10s/20sCD”. I’m here to fight people not blow a horn.

Jasher.6580:

Linnael.1069:

Lopez.7369:

I also feel like this is true for every game. I would guess that 99 percent of spectators for any e-sport have played the game in some capacity before.

But it is true that too many of Guild Wars 2’s telegraphs are either too much or too little.

The reason big e-sports games get big is because they are well designed for spectators. Friends that have never played League of Legends will sit down and watch me play, and absolutely understand pretty much everything happening on a mechanical level with only a little explanation from me, or the shoutcaster if we’re watching a pro match. There’s just a massive problem with how animations and spell effects were implemented in this game. Not to even mention the “chibi smurf war” that is the natural result of one race having ridiculously impossible to read animations in PvP.

I don’t understand anything happening in any of the LoL streams. And that’s me being 100% honest.

When i say “on a mechanical level” I mean very basically. When somebody dies, you can generally see that a huge axe was dropped on their head, or a big projectile just collided with them right? In GW2 it can feel like somebody just randomly falls over to an invisible hand after being totally fine with all the other giant flame particles that have been coming out him for the last 90 seconds.

Another factor if you’re watching streams rather than a friend’s screen is that pro games can admittedly get pretty crazy in terms of actions per second. Most players wont be able to register some of the burst combos, much less the viewers, and the shoutcasters at LCS aren’t going to be explaining basics the way some amateur streamers/regular players will.

D best.3547:

Linnael.1069:

D best.3547:

Pecar.1236:

disable!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! yea disable or make solo and team unranked

No. what if I want to play with my friends that are really bad in PvP? Also making another mode wouldn’t make sense when you queue with 3 or 4 people because then you would never be able to play without a random 5th person.

1: Play hotjoin rather than inflicting that kind of skill disparity on matchmade games.
2: LFG

There’s no way to play hotjoin with partied members. No PvP player uses LFG

1: Right click → Join in.
2: And what do you think start happening once a queue started requiring a full party? Remember to think things all the way through

Look at every implementation of this effect in the game. Wherever it exists it is absolutely build defining for an entire class.

Sleight of hand has been on every meta thief build since it was introduced.

Doom singlehandedly carries terromancer out any balance mixups. ANet basically deleted a heal and elite skill from the spec and its still strong.

Now look at the new mantra of distraction lockdown build for mesmers. I haven’t seen a single mesmer not running this on their bar, because why would they not? It casts twice, has none of the downsides that steal/doom have (forced into melee/skillbar lockout), and comes on a class with invuln/stealth access to rechannel it. The traited immobilize is even more ridiculous, forcing you to blow a cleanse on top of a stunbreak unless you can afford to eat a mindwrack. All the mes has to do is wait on you to use a leap and bam, immobilized midair too.

TL;DR: Mantra of Distraction needs a drawback or point of consideration like Doom/Steal. You should have to think about when to use it, not just always throw it out whenever your opponent dares cast without stability because it has 0 downsides anyways.

D best.3547:

Pecar.1236:

disable!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! yea disable or make solo and team unranked

No. what if I want to play with my friends that are really bad in PvP? Also making another mode wouldn’t make sense when you queue with 3 or 4 people because then you would never be able to play without a random 5th person.

1: Play hotjoin rather than inflicting that kind of skill disparity on matchmade games.
2: LFG

Lopez.7369:

I also feel like this is true for every game. I would guess that 99 percent of spectators for any e-sport have played the game in some capacity before.

But it is true that too many of Guild Wars 2’s telegraphs are either too much or too little.

The reason big e-sports games get big is because they are well designed for spectators. Friends that have never played League of Legends will sit down and watch me play, and absolutely understand pretty much everything happening on a mechanical level with only a little explanation from me, or the shoutcaster if we’re watching a pro match. There’s just a massive problem with how animations and spell effects were implemented in this game. Not to even mention the “chibi smurf war” that is the natural result of one race having ridiculously impossible to read animations in PvP.

Fresh air S/F is one of the strongest dueling specs out there. This is not a deniable fact.

However, it is likewise true that most of the power on the build comes from how ridiculously OP focus is for a zerker build. 90% of the active defense built into elementalist is on the focus.

Buff Scepter, buff OH dagger by all means, but you better do it by moving active defense from the focus over to those other kits, or S/F is just going to straight up OP. Honestly moving defense off of focus would need to happen even if scepter were good; focus simply shouldn’t be as mandatory as it is for anybody that wants to play zerk.

LouDrew.1340:

Asudementio.8526:

LouDrew.1340:

Linnael.1069:

All the mesmers in this thread are pathetic. Mesmer has been viable in every meta for ages. .

Lol what a joke.

Metabattle two weeks ago had not a single meta mesmer build. I wonder why.

Your thief is leaking out. Someone is mad we can compete now.

Did your heartseeker spam get interrupted?

Mesmers are always such a classy lot, it’s boggling why y’all can’t get a blind eye cast to your situation now-or not even feigned sympathy.

We’ve been living in a dumpster for three years now and we finally just now crawl out of it and you all want to throw us right back in.

“viable”

I’m guessing you’re one of those terrible mesmers that couldn’t make it work at all before it got broken so you thought the class was just bad.

All the mesmers in this thread are pathetic. Mesmer has been viable in every meta for ages. Now all the bad ones are coming out of the woodwork because they couldn’t play it before and now that they’re facerolling on the obviously broken easymode builds they don’t want the class to go back to being balanced.

1200 range instant cast stun that casts twice and immobilizes too. Who the kitten thought of that one.

If people would actually read the post they’d find that its not about the hitbox being strange at all. Is it strange that its easier to land a “grab” from the edge of melee range than it is when you’re actually touching your opponent? Sure, but that’s always been an oddity of the skill. The problem that the new patch introduced was increasing the predictability of timing this ability, while not improving the payoff at all.

So I suggested improving the strange hitbox as a way to reduce predictability. If you could just have a touch radius pbAoE hitbox, then not only would it fit the theme of the skill better but you would be able to land it reliably as you run through or around your enemy, opening new and less easily readable ways to use the skill. Unfortunately some people then tried to turn this into a “hitbox fine as is” thing, which it never was. I can land the current hitbox just fine. The point is that if it were a better hitbox there would be more ways to land it, and therefore more ways to bait your opponent into eating one.

Laraley.7695:

Linnael.1069:

Laraley.7695:

Linnael.1069:

Laraley.7695:

got hit 12K by firegrab today, so I think it’s plenty fine.

This kind of “i got rekt” anecdotal evidence hinges on the assumption that you, the rekt, were playing well yet still suffered said rekage because the object of discussion is strong, not weak.

See if you can spot the gap in your logic here.

The point is that the skill hits this insanely hard, so I do not think there should be any changes to it.

…

Sounds like you and the ANet balance team would get along really well.

So you basically want a high damage skill to be easy to land and your argument is? If you actually suggested lowering the damage AND making it easier to hit, okay.

To get these numbers you need to be stunned or knocked down, below 50% hp, have vuln and burning on you, and the ele needs to swap into water attunement and tag you with the worst hitbox on any skill. Then the skill goes on a 40 second CD.

For a thief to get the same numbers literally all he has to do is walk through you and press 1. Then three seconds later he gets to try again. And the thief is the one with more active defense.

You’re just being willfully blind if you aren’t seeing that fire grab is one of the most pointlessly conditional hits in the game.

Laraley.7695:

Linnael.1069:

Laraley.7695:

got hit 12K by firegrab today, so I think it’s plenty fine.

This kind of “i got rekt” anecdotal evidence hinges on the assumption that you, the rekt, were playing well yet still suffered said rekage because the object of discussion is strong, not weak.

See if you can spot the gap in your logic here.

The point is that the skill hits this insanely hard, so I do not think there should be any changes to it.

…

Sounds like you and the ANet balance team would get along really well.