Guild Wars 2

If you think life leech/steals are supporting the Necromancer, I’m afraid that’s not the case. Any sort of that scales terrible for the Necromancer, even with heavy +Healing investment. The 15pt minor trait that lets you steal life every swing? 37 hp a hit. Symbols that heal or Bombs that heal completely crap on it if anything.

They actually didn’t buff anything related to survivability for necros at all, it took a small dive if anything, if you look at the patch notes, Blood is Power NO LONGER generates life force but instead grants 10 stacks of might, that might be where the increased damage is coming from.

The reason you see fewer necros these days, a lot of them already jumped ship to play Mesmers. They can take any necro spec and play it better with less hiccups. It’s a simple matter of being completely outclassed. We won’t for sure until all the bugs get cleared up but some of them are seriously hampering. Plague Signet for one is copying allied conditions to the Necro but not removing it off allies.

I recommend you to play the Necro and give it a spin in tournaments so you can have an accurate perspective. It’s not unplayable by any means, it’s just really shackled down and unable to reach full potential to compete on an even level.

Like you, Blink and Null Field are pretty much staples, there’s no reason NOT to take them almost.. Other slots jump between Arcane Thievery, Mirror Images, Portal (useful for Foefire too), or Decoy.

So yea I’d say we’re about the same.

Re-re-re-rejected~~~

In other games like WoW, sometimes when I’d get beaten these things would go through my head.

-“That guy is decked in full season arena gear! I had no chance.”
-“WTF Warglaives, you expect me to survive!?”

Now it’s

-“Ok, I kittened up my CDs there, nothing else to it.”
-“kitten mesmers..”

Healing Power isn’t useless, it’s just not worth the trouble to stack to excessive numbers as you’ll have much better overall bulk (and therefore stay alive longer to help others) if you invested elsewhere. I use mostly Knight’s weapons except for Staff which has the Cleric’s inscription.

With Cleric accessories + cleric staff, I have a decent amount of Healing Power to make outgoing heals pretty potent and my own self heal quite fat, however, I still have the advantage of Power/Vit/Tough in most everything else.

Sigil of Earth if your crit is high, otherwise Sigil of Doom (Poison on next hit after swap) is good too.

Sigil of Energy is always nice if you’re looking into a more defensive one.

My Necromancer runs a more support oriented Wells Build. I use Shaman’s Gear (Vit/Cond/Healing) and run Well of Blood, Epidemic, Well of Power, Well of Darkness.

Well of Darkness combined with the trait Chilling Darkness is one of our best combinations, my wells also grant protection. With this set up, I spread whatever conditions my party poops out, drop Wells (combo fields) to lessen the damage the party takes while sometimes “tanking” with plague or Well of Darkness.

My Life Transfer and Well of Blood are basically my fat team heals, Life Transfer ticks for ~300 healing per hit while Well of Blood does 564 x10 seconds.

Only downside to playing this build is dealing with bads that avoid your Well of Blood like red circles when you’re trying to help them. Or having to rely on DPS that tunnel vision too much because well, you’re a support.

Zii The Mad.2563:

This topic makes me sad for some reason

My thoughts exactly.. And you really can’t blame the players for this, it’s either do this or get completely shafted.

This thread just needs to get closed and the official post stickied and what not. If you check my history, you’d know that I am pretty upset about the DR myself, but they finally came out and said they know our intentions and are looking for a solution to this issue. Mission accomplished, now we just have to be patient.

Grizor.6543:

Actually the engineer can interrupt twice, the #3 ability(aoe knockback) is on a 20 sec cooldown though so good luck getting that off before you die.

Another thing, the engineer #2 ability is a pull – why would you want to pull an enemy toward you when you are dead?!

So they’re in range for your bomb..? Also, think just outside of yourself for a bit, even when downed, you can peel for your team.

OP, Necros are not the worst off, in fact Elementalists are. The fact that you’re comparing and saying how they’re better makes me /facepalm. While imbalances exist, you should properly research each of the class’ downed abilities before making claims.

Right now Mesmer and Thieves without a doubt are a league above everyone in downed, they have the most potential to stall and self bandage if given the chance.

Guardians have a AoE KB on their 2 skill making them one of the better ones too. Most others have a single target interrupt, with Elementalists having NONE of that and only a Myst form to stop stomps, usually by the time it comes off CD it’s too late. If you let them myst form, then it’s your fault.

You’re greatly underestimating something, that you NEED to take the damage. I agree, I love the new spectral walk, but it’s not the savior or messiah that will turn this class around. The issue with Necros run deeper than that and it does very little to change the status quo. Spectral Armor gives you protection for 6s, while it could be better, we’ll have to take what we’re dealt with.

But like everything else with the Necro now, you have to put yourself more in harms way than ANY other class in order to get meaningful yield from some of your skills. That’s fine and cool design but it just doesn’t work out when the yield isn’t quite on par with the risk.

Spectral Walk requires you to take damage to get any LF out of it, it also does not grant anymore than SA does without reducing your incoming damage. If you want to take those 10 bleed ticks, go ahead, it just means you’re going back into shroud. Cancelling any of these abilities early also means no LF.

Whenever I see a Necro pop either of these two, I chain CC them. (Spectral Recall does not break stun twice like thieve’s SHS). It’s quite easy to scare them into shroud once that happens and then they become sitting ducks. The easiest way to kill necros is to force them into shroud when they’re at ~33% so even if they take a few seconds to walk around as a black shade, they’re vulnerable and pretty much dead the moment they come out.

Plus Spectral Walk isn’t that great in tPvP, if you need to swiftness off the point to get some breathing room, you’re seceding the point to the other team meaning you’ll be behind in score. You can then port back but once they neutralize the point, you’re already behind.

All they need to do is scale dynamic event rewards (karma, coin etc) to the player’s level, not the scaled level. That would be incentive enough to move people around the map.

I don’t get the QQ about loot drops when downscaled, true most of it isn’t 80, but most of it is 75+ and it’s the same if you were farming in Orr. Your drops are not all 80 gear even in cursed shore.

People are in Orr just because of these reasons:

a) More events, therefore more karma.
b) Each event rewards the most karma in the game.
c) It takes a butt load of Karma to get exotic temple armor (which carries stat spreads that you can’t find on crafted gear outside of dungeons)
d) Not everyone enjoys WvW (I think they just need to find people to WvW with).

I know I would run around lower zones even if I 100% (Haven’t yet) with rewards were even, but when my goal is to get karma gear, right now the most efficient way is to stay in Orr until DR hits.

Definitely grass is greener. You might be looking at Thieves and Mesmers, but their’s outshines everyone else while downed.

Most classes like the Warrior, Engineer, and Necromancer have a skill to interrupt stomps on their 2 as well, however it is all SINGLE TARGET!

Elementalists don’t even have a way to interrupt outside of their 3, Myst form, and by the time that comes up, it’s usually too late.

Guardians are actually pretty well off, the 2 skill knocks everyone back around you, the only counter to this is stability or having one guy go for the stomp and another going straight in after the KB. The 3 skill also heals you which gives your team more leeway and time in getting you up.

Damage Formula for Bleed is as followed: 2.5 + 0.5 * Level + 0.05 * Condition Damage= per stack per second.

Going by 1350+ 350 (Blood is Power) to get 1700 Condition damage, each stack ticks for 127.5.

Without blood is power, 1350 condition damage, each stack ticks for 110. That’s an increase of 17.5 damage per stack. If you had 10 stacks of bleeds, that’s an extra 175 DPS. Oh who are we kidding, we’re PROS here, I got that guy stacked at 20 stacks all day. With 1350 Condition damage, that’s 2200 DPS, with 1700, 2550 DPS, extra 350 DPS. Wow that’s freakin’ game breaking! A 16% increase when you round it up!

/sarcasm off

Not saying power builds can’t find use for it, but BiP currently does squat for condition centric builds.

Also, comparing Adrenaline to Death Shroud is not a very good comparison.
a) Warrior’s survival aren’t balanced around Adrenaline
b) Warrior has way more methods to generate adrenaline anyway (Any weapon, just hit them, getting hit, shouts can generate them, yada yada)

A better comparison would be to the Guardian’s virtues. The design behind Guardians is that they have Virtue of Resolve and Courage that helps them block or recover from damage routinely. Their survival is further augmented by the fact that they have mitigation abilities spread all throughout their weapon sets and utilities. All in all, it’s very easy to justify the low HP Pool guardians have. And no, nothing in their skillset starts on cool down on at the beginning of a match (the equivalent of starting with 0 LF essentially).

Necros? Well, because Death Shroud is too amazing, we must build it up. The best way is to put at least 20 into SR and grab Soul Marks and always have a Staff no matter what build you run. Because Death Shroud is too amazing, you also cannot have amazing defensive cool downs. Because Death Shroud is so amazing, you shouldn’t need mobility as you can tank through everything. Because Death Shroud is so amazing, we need you to put yourself in harm’s way now to generate any with your utilities. It’s such a good mechanic that we have to restrict the options for building it pretty much to ONE weapon.

It does not matter how good you try and play with words, at the end of the day, the Necromancer took a huge hit in all areas because of Death Shroud. And Death Shroud just plain underperforms. They’ve also only made it worse from the first BWE til now.

While tPvP builds never ran BiP in the first place (outside of the first few minutes), there are better utilities for helping your team. Trying to tell others that changing one of the ONLY and previously BEST way to generate LF is a buff is well.. Pass me whatever you’re smoking please, I’d like to have a hit.

Also, don’t get too greedy sometimes, know that epidemic does have a cast time and it’s possible by wanting to spread too much two things can happen. a) some conditions or stacks fall off or b) they move out of positioning suited for massive epidemic.

I loved necros and was drawn to the aesthetics and concept behind their designs. Played it in all the BWEs, still play it from time to time even now.

However, I am upset that all our “strengths” when played to said strengths, are outperformed by Mesmers taking a similar role too. Phantasms > Minions, Staff/Sharper Images > Our condition build.

Necromancers are simply too pigeonholed right now and due to being balanced around DS, we were gutted in a lot of departments (mobility, stun breaks, damage). It’s a design that sounded good on paper but played out terribly both due to bugs and how skills function as of now.

As long as they know the threshold is simply too harsh to continue this way, our work is done here. Let’s hope the fine tuning comes soon.

My opinion is that since the stats from your gear far outweighs the bonuses you get from trait investment, it should be used as a means to amplify the intentions of your build. Even if you went with more defensive traits, if you went for more DPS oriented gear, you’re going to hit harder than one that invested his stats elsewhere.

I went for Power/Vit/Tough because I made the Guardian not to be a glass cannon or a rampaging berserker, but an immovable brick wall that could help others. The stats and traits I chose merely reflect that. It just so happens the traits I happen to be more interested in grant defensive bonuses too (Honor, Virtues).

Another thing that crossed my mind was, why can’t we just have both. If someone wants the zergy 8v8 in hot-join, let them keep it. If there were BOTH 5v5 and 8v8 rooms from the start, there wouldn’t have been a problem to begin with. This isn’t some rocket-science feature.

Seeing as ANet wanted to model their PvP rooms more in the fashion of FPS, why is it that there’s so many restrictions on how each game is ran. In fact, what happened to the “Rental sPvP Servers” people were throwing around that they said would be in for launch?

We do have enough threads whining about the lack of range, let’s try and keep just one constructive for once.

I switch between Greatsword, Staff, Hammer and Scepter/Shield depending on what’s needed. The only reason for greatsword is to pull people off walls with Binding Blade, it also works easily with Two-handed mastery which I pick up. Otherwise, Sword/Focus is one hell of a melee combo for Guardians.

Hammer and Staff is my go-to set, I use these in conjunction with consecrations. Wall of Reflection is a staple for WvW, so is “Stand Your Ground!” for any form of PvP, the last slot I switch between Purging Flames and Sanctuary.

The great thing about Hammer and Staff is the ability to block off choke points, Staff also excels at moving your group swiftly throughout the battle field.

Scepter/Shield is great for protecting your own siege engines atop castle walls, using this in junction with Staff is usually what happens. You’re simply best at helping the siege in keep defense or manning one yourself, not sure why no one wants to do this. Your skill set is perfect for this line of defense and the siege weapons easily out do any of your range options, why have such a big allergic reaction to them? If you’re good at manning siege, you easily earn back the badge of honor you spent on it, more than you’d get from not being able to hit anything on the walls. It’s also great for bouncing the people manning flame rams off to stop pressure on your door if just for a moment.

If you must, Tome of Wrath is actually really good for range AoE, sure it’s not as frequent as what other classes can utilize, but it’s there for you to use if you so choose.

Not everyone finds keep defense fun, that’s fine. Then play to the class’ strength. Form a small squad and go take supply camps where melee is more feasible. Being a greatsword hero has its place, just not all the time in siege warfare. If you have the urge, find a situation for it, don’t force it on one, you’ll only have a bad time.

Another situation where melee has it’s place is flanking the ones currently doorbashing on your keep. Of course, you’ll need numbers for this, but so does anyone in order to do exceptionally well in WvW.

At the end of the day, I don’t think WvW is enjoyable solo period, not even on my more range oriented characters. You’re simply limited by what you can do. The best way to really enjoy WvW is to have a team you can count on, then you can play to your full potential. Guardians after all, can be the heart of any group.

Also, Guardians are plenty fine in condition removal, they actually have a lot of options for that, once purging flame gets its bugfix, it’ll be even better. If you’re still dying to conditions, consider the timing in which you remove conditions next time, also seeing as Guardians do have the lowest max HP, vitality is another defense against condition damage.

Guardians are fine in WvW, the ones complaining usually refuse to man sieges or don’t want to take initiative to organize.

If you waste your condition removal by using it the moment anything sticks to you, of course it will be of no use. Condition removals are a good way to break their momentum, if you remove them in the sweet spot of 7-9 stacks before it does any lasting damage, they have to ramp everything back from 0 again. Anything less, you’re giving them the green light to DoT you up. Wait too long, well then it might be too late.

Thieves are easily overwhelmed by conditions, compared to most other classes, they are lacking much more in removals. Bring a stun break and don’t just stand still when they stealth, you can still damage them. If you can survive their initial heavy CD loaded burst, then they’re either going to have to run or die to your bleeds.

A point where an above poster did not mention about Mesmers is that condition damage against them is also an uphill battle. Like Necromancers, if they bring Arcane Thievery, they can stick the conditions you applied on them back onto you while ripping off your boons. Null Field also gives them a reset. This obviously depends on how they’re built. Also, if they have chaos armor up, don’t hit them. You’re giving them boons while giving yourself conditions. When you finally get them down, if they port, don’t stomp the clone. It’s always the second one with an arrow above their heads, don’t waste time with the illusion.

For elementalists, there’s not much to say, if anything they’re the least threatening class that easily succumbs to pressure. Don’t get hit and move out of their telegraphed moves. They will go down faster than you.

I like Power/Vit/Tough the most as it makes you a brick wall, doesn’t butcher your damage completely and nothing is wasted.

Cleric crafted gear is great as again, does not completely remove your offensive stats (and it’s relative easy to acquire), you still want to do damage in this game no matter how deep you inch your build towards support.

However, I feel healing shouldn’t be heavily stacked and it does sort of hit a point where it feels less worth it. You can easily break 800 Healing with just having a Cleric Staff + Accessories and trait points in Honor (Vitality/Healing Line) and over 1k should you be fully clothed in Cleric’s gear.

Regeneration Formula Here: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Regeneration

With 500 +Healing, your regen would tick for: 192.96
With 800 +Healing, your regen would tick for: 229.96
With 1000 +Healing, your regen would tick for 254.96

You’ll end up living longer(thus helping everyone longer) if you took the same stats and straight up have 18k vs 10k HP, your outgoing heals will still be pretty potent with some +Healing investment, just don’t make it your #1 priority. And remember, your Tome of Courage heals to full regardless of how much Healing you have.

Another thing is, Guardians share the same HP Pool as elementalists in thieves, meaning the least. I know we have a lot of condition removal skills and what not, but when everything is on CD, the only thing that will save you is more HP.

In their own words, part of the reason why GW1 had such a small PvP community was that the stepping stone into GvG and HA were RA and TA, totally different formats. This as a result alienated a lot of people from crossing over.

Well, the same thing though not to the same degree is happening here. The way 8v8 has been playing out is vastly different from what you would encounter in 5v5. ANet had reasons “so one is less accountable in the team” for this, I can’t but feel you’re looking down on how well players can adapt.

What we have instead are mindless zergs moving back and forth and those trying to learn the format as it’s meant to be played are getting overwhelmed by 5 players from all directions at control points. 8v8 rewards zerging, but the same mentality will not work in a tournament setting.

What is the best way to practice? To learn by doing, if you were training for a track meet, you may do all sorts of exercises, but you wouldn’t run a mile time trial if you were training for the 100m, you’d time trial yourself with the distance of 100m.

I can’t but feel this “we need to protect the newcomers” attitude is causing more harm than good. It’s hot-join, it doesn’t even matter if my team win or loses, so why are you so inclined to make them “account for less?”

In fact, so many posts in this section are also indirectly caused by that, you’d find that the builds people run for sPvP shenanigans are vastly different from tournaments. A perfect example is that my friend prior to trying out tournaments didn’t even see the merit in more team-oriented kits on the Engineer like the Elixir Gun or even Med Kit, he was so accustomed going to down with Dual Pistols and Full Elixirs for DPS and self-survival, it’s what the hot-join format rewarded. A lot of these OP Nerf this nerf that posts are also these glass cannons getting rolled by other glass cannons, it doesn’t give correct perspective.

If you want more people to participate in tournaments, give people an environment that has less pressure and can mirror the circumstances of a tournament setting. Getting rolled and overwhelming others with zerg vs zerg doesn’t help anyone.

I will forever praise the GW1 system, it gave space for a lot of creativity when it came to builds. Underworld was meant to be a really hard area, and how someone could come out with a way to solo and then after they nerfed it, two man it is beyond me.

If you ask me how someone even came up with the idea to use a pre-searing item to create kitten hp Monk build to farm everything, I wouldn’t know what to tell you.

However, that system also is not without its faults, in the end what we did have as well was also a lot of fluff. Hell they even had duplicate skills across the expansion packs. A lot of skills simply were mechanically inferior than others and went largely unused.

The fact that everyone could have both a primary and a secondary meant it was also a balancing nightmare. Not that balance is easy in any game, but the variety also made it a more difficult in the original guild wars. Simply by having more components and more variables to account for makes for a much more daunting task.

While I do miss the freedom in customization for both terribad and demigod builds that GW1 had, what I hope is that ANet’s streamlining of both skills and effects will lead to more balance as the game develops. Now it is my opinion that some of the more polished classes do have really interesting traits that do offer playstyle changes and customization. Now all they have to do is make sure all classes have these options to pick from.

You can hit DR just by repeating the Cathedral of Silence escort/fight chain once due to failure at the part in which you need to kill the High Priest..

I’d be more than happy to move around the world, I take part in WvW all the time when my guildies are on and it’s really fun while gain a button of Karma. However, I hate WvW when it means following the zerg solo, it’s just not an enjoyable activity when you’re on your own.

This means I go back to PvE to get some karma going. If they actually made event rewards scale to your character’s level and not just your scaled level, that would be plenty incentive to spread out all over the world.

However that is a) currently not the case and b) Orr has the most dense web of events out of any zones right now.

I get that the DR has its merits, but with this patch I can’t but feel they took a step backwards rather than forwards in fine tuning it.

Not only what you said is true, but it’s plain for the eye to see that the DR system in place is simply TOO harsh that it’s affecting people not trying to farm karma, but trying to progress in a chain.

I got hit with DR just trying to cleanse the Cathedral of Silence because the event failed and had to do it again.

It’s kind of silly that you can hit DR for Karma just by going through a CHAIN. I can’t help it if people are too busy tunneling the High Priest and failing cause no ones helping with the shades. That’s fine, we’ll just start over and escort/fight this priest again.

And yup, what do you know reduced karma rewards because apparently doing the same events just twice in a row will flag you. Well, what am I supposed to do when that’s how the event spawned and the chain works. I’m not botting, I’m just trying to progress the chain of events to cleanse the temple.

I totally understand the need for the system to be there, it was in place in the original Guild Wars as well, but the biggest difference is that it was TUNED CORRECTLY. When I was discussing this with my party members, some of them who also played GW1 did not even know it was in place until I told them, they couldn’t notice it. That’s how it should be, leave the average joe going about his business unaffected and punish the ones severely breaking the game. That is not the case with how you worked out your system in this game at all.

You already have a lot of negativity surrounding this issue, I did try to stay positive but I can’t but feel it only got worse with this patch. It simply can’t stay like this if you truly want players to enjoy your game. That’s what I’m trying to do, but knowing this can happen and has happen feels like you just kittenon everyone’s parade.

It’s natural for each class to have their own nemesis, a match up that is just very unfavorable due to the way they classes function.

In most games, Mage > Warrior, Warrior > Thieves, and Thieves > Mage. Not saying it’s set in stone, but it’s the general trend.

However, when ALL the classes in GW2 have a headache or have little they can do against Mesmers, then yea I think that is what you would call OP.

Are they amazing duelists? Yes, perhaps the strongest 1v1 class right now but that in itself is can be a characteristic that defines the class and doesn’t necessary make the class OP. However Mesmers go beyond that.

People will try and tell you that they suck in team engagements or in a group fight setting. I play a Mesmer now too and I tell you those guys are lying. Time Warp is easily one of the best group elites you can have. Much like Tome of Courage before the nerf turned every fight around with the heal, Time Warp pumps your team full off steroids for 10s.

Mesmers and Necromancers are the classes to go to when it comes to boon stripping, however Mesmers outshine Necromancers in that regard too with Null Field, the only AoE boon strip in the game that doubles as a cleanse too, hey it’s only 5s longer in CD than corrupt boon, isn’t buggy and gives you a combo field.

Necromancers have access to a lot of Dark Fields which have decent effects, however they also lack in general a lot of finishers by themselves. Mesmers have access to ethereal fields which leap/blast finishers have quite the effect (Chaos Armor). And the kicker is, they have a reliable way to self-combo this within the same weapon (Staff). This means that not only do Mesmer have the means of supplying combos, they also can take advantage of others relatively easy compared to the Necromancer. Combos are huge in team fight scenarios and Necros lose out a lot in this regard.

Mesmers are great duelists meaning they can handle themselves quite well, but their usefulness does not drop off in a bigger engagement as well. As a result, they completely outclass a lot of professions right now and that would be what you consider OP.

OT: Condition damage against Mesmer’s is an uphill battle, even with Epidemic, it doesn’t always kill their illusions fast enough. Don’t engage one 1v1 and bring a friend with you, it really is the only reliable way. Also, don’t stomp his illusions when you get him to downed. The real one is the second one that pops out after the stealth and has an arrow over its head.

Whatever you do, just don’t be a 5 Signet Warrior who has Greatsword equipped in both sets and decked in Full Berserkers.

Trends seem to be pretty in line with what I expected. Major kudos for going through with the hard work of putting this together.

And still you can have huge uptime on retaliation on a Guardian.. I know cause I play one regularly. Seriously, the change is not that bad.

Hammer gives you AoE retaliation with a self combo, you still have Stand Your Ground. The minor 15pt in Virtues 3s of Retaliation when using virtues, greatsword symbol. There are so many sources of retaliation in the Guardian’s arsenal. Notice even though I did not bring up the Signet (most won’t run it in tPvP) but it’s still ample all throughout.

If you think having near 100% or pretty much 100% uptime on retaliation was going to stay, I don’t know what to say.

I don’t get why you aren’t using the PvP locker, Tobeyeus, the PvP locker sets are the same sets you’d get in PvE..

The PvP locker lets you mix and match in the preview seeing as you can preview ANYTHING in there.. Cultural? You got it, the various different dungeon armors? Also there, karma vendors from all throughout the world? Their skins are in there too..

GW2DB’s model viewer only allows you to see the model by itself iirc.

I like the set Silver uses, you can get it from karma vendors (non exotic) all throughout the Orr maps and Fireheart Rise too. The set is called “Dark” in the PvP locker.

The loot you actually get is scaled to you level, my 80 helping out my buddies in lower zones still get 76+ stuff, the same you’d get in Orr.

The thing they messed up on though is the karma and other such rewards from dynamic events, those are scaled to your downscaled level, not your actual level. There you have an issue.

Your definition and expectation of “end game” was what they wanted to get away from and they advertised as much. If your mindset is still fixated on the “end game” you’ve grown to be accustomed to, I don’t think GW2 will ever interest you.

Just by picking up “Stand Your Ground!” which is a staple for stun breaking and stability and investing 15 pts in Virtues, you have four sources in which to gain retaliation from and relative easy to fit into a lot of builds.

You make it sound like Guardians must always reek of retaliation no matter which build they run. Every class in this game must give trade offs in order to gain something. A warrior is a CC machine if he picks up Hammer and Dual Maces, but he loses out on lol 100bs. He also is seriously vulnerable to conditions unless he runs Shouts + Rune of the Soldier compared to LOL FRENZY BULLS CHARGE!

What’s wrong with Guardians needing to pick up a few things to gain retaliation. In fact, Wrathful Spirit wasn’t even the strongest source of Retaliation in the first place. Courage is on the highest CD out of all your virtues and it triggers once every 40s. Unless you also picked up Retreat, the trait was mediocore at best.

If you want to be a Greatsword Hero on Guardian, symbol of wrath gives you retaliation. If you want to be more control oriented and defensive, you can self combo AoE retaliation with the hammer. Look at your arsenal then take a look around, even with this one tiny nerf to a largely underwhelming trait, Guardians have a crapload of retaliation relative to all the other classes and still have a huge uptime on it.

You know it deep down that Guardians have too much of it already, this shouldn’t be a boon where it’s up 100% cause that just means the only counter for it is boon removal. If Guardian’s retaliation centralizes tactics that much, it’s a tad OP don’t you think.

Well I think 20 SR is mandatory for any PvP build as Last Gasp is too good to pass up, you might as well grab Soul Marks or Mark of Revival since you’re already 15 pts in.

And how effective both Armor and Walk are at collecting LF IS related to the damage you take. Armor gives you a bit more leeway with protection, but walk does not. Both cancel should you change forms for balance reasons should you come under focus fire. I’ve killed Necros by forcing them into Shroud right away after SA popped just by using Ambush trap(the thief pulls) + spreading venoms. Instead of using fast small hits, go for larger ones and suddenly they aren’t getting much LF out of it and need to switch forms fast or die.

If anything, the minor Virtue of Retribution (3s of Retaliation when using Virtue) along with Stand Your Ground + Hammer are still ample sources of Retaliation. Wrathful Spirit didn’t seem that powerful in comparison as Courage has the longest CD out of any of the virtues, unless you also pick up Retreat. That’s going out of your way to buff two lengthy CDs.

I didn’t see the appeal in the trait because of that and remain unaffected.

Dibrom.6408:

draculthemad.6273:

Is it the 50% increase?

And really, its on EVERY attack. It doesn’t have to generate massive amounts of HP each time to drastically increase survivability.

If it was healing even for 500 it would be massively overpowered.

38 health now.
27 attacks and you’ve got yourself a 1000 health boost.
(I believe an engineer does ~150 heal per bomb attack that scales with healing)
edit
Nevermind about that engineer point, I forgot last patch they changed it to a grandmaster trait.

Huzzahs are in order, so in other words, still pretty useless. All Symbols Heals trait for Guardian is a Master level one and it ticks for ~150 base and scales with healing too.

Really, I mean really? Hammer Ring of Warding duration is 5s too, if anything this change makes sense. It brings it in line and creates consistency. 8>5s is not the end of the world.

This change does not need such a negative reaction.. Staff will still be a good weapon alongside Hammer to block off choke points in both WvW and PvP.

One of the main draws for this skill was that it was near instant Life Force. And unlike adrenaline, any amount of life force means you can go into Death Shroud.

This means that if they spiked you out of Shroud or low on LF but your heal isn’t on CD yet, you could use it and pop back into shroud and absorb a few more before you’re absolutely kittened. The 30s CD means the old BiP was a potent LF generator that you can pop most frequently.

Spectral Armor is nice and also breaks stun, but it also requires you to be hit in order to generate LF and is on a 90s CD. It also only gives protection which means when it gets too close, you sometimes do end up cancelling it early which is a bit

Spectral Walk is actually a great skill now, much like Spectral Armor, you gain 3% LF whenever you’re hit. However you do not have protection to decrease the incoming damage, if anything, you use this skill to juke and break stuns. It’s also a 60s CD meaning the old BiP was still the most frequent generator you can use.

This is all more of a PvP-centric post btw. If you’re running a Curses necromancer, Hemophilia is a given, so is Enfeebling Blood imo. The last slot with a Rabid Amulet goes to Withering Precision. This makes it very hard to sneak in a Spectral Attunement just for one utility (you’re likely running Corrupt Boon, Plague Signet and what not too).

If you’re running a Wells build, you’ll need Focused Rituals AND Chilling Darkness if you’re running Well of Darkness, no space for that too.

Signet of Undeath? Lol, if it generated in combat, now that would be something, but at this point in time 1% every 3s is very very unappealing. The active component is nice, but just have your Engineer bring Elixir R.

So yea, I’m a bit confused, on one end they say Death Shroud is great! Just get in touch with it more and utilize it better, then they go ahead and butcher a good way for Necros to learn how to use it. BiP was an amazing utility for the LF in sPvP, you probably won’t run it in tPvP but it gave you leeway solo. Now I’m sure more power-centric builds can find use for it, but it’s a shame as getting LF was more interesting and benefits the Necro more (opinion) than just straight Might x10.

Staff + Soul Marks is still a reliable way to gain LF for any Necromancer, but that also means you need to forgoe Reaper’s Mark which is also a good trait for tPvP.

But at this point in time, other than that, sans Spectral Grasp and I’m not counting Signet of Undeath, the LF generators in our utilities requires the Necromancer to put themselves in harms way before anything happens.

FYI, those that are interested in Rune of the Earth, the 6pc is kind of bugged and triggers at close to ~10% health instead of the written 25%. This may or may not turn you off the rune.

How are you doing no damage. Are you just hanging back and using your utilities and staff skills then just standing there?

Even though you can inch your build to be more supportive, it doesn’t mean you hang out back and do no damage. In fact a lot of weapons like Hammer and Mace require you to do some damage in order to get the support aspect out of them.

Life Force > Might. Disappointing change. The change to Spectral Grasp is nice though it’s still unreliable as hell..

Group up and play until you need to go? And now that Cursed shore along with the rest of Orr has more and more people in it every day (hitting 80 and what not) it’s really not as bad as you make it out to be.

I know when I hit 80 on my first character I didn’t want to do Orr as the zone was void of other characters during off-peak times (my prime due to timezones) but even off-peak now has players running around and soloing is a non issue

Seems to be quite a few people that like the idea on reddit, we’ll see

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/10r2lg/those_that_hate_underwater_combat_solution/

^^
I see a lot of thieves only using shortbow for infiltrator’s arrow when really it can be used for so much more. Though you have to account for the projectile speed, it packs a blast finisher that has no CD. You can use this to self combo with the poison cloud for AoE weakness or whatever fields your teammates have dropped.

Additionally, Disabling shot is one of the most troll skills in the game and I know I’ve wasted so many of my foes cool downs with that skill all while keeping them snared and what not.

I also see a lot of thieves because they know they have the mobility, they always run and not fight even when they could easily turn it around. If you need to step out the heat, the shortbow allows you to pick at targets from the outskirts while you wait for your CDs. The damage easily racks up and it’s very possible to go back in for the kill with your “main set.”

You hold the highest burst potential in the game, you want to use it again and again, not just once and run away. Go in for the kill when its totally skewed for you and don’t be afraid to make a last stand as running sometimes is only delaying the inevitable. Sometimes forcing a DPS race down their throats is all you need to do.

It’s been a little over a month, I was under the impression free transfers would have ended quite a long time ago.

@ Easterlily, that’s what basically the idea is, a dual spec just for underwater. They don’t have to put in thought in designing new traits or anything, just let us have a spec we can tailor for our underwater needs.

Some classes like the Engineer already have aquatic weapons included in some of their traits.

I find that mapchat is usually filled with banter and or people calling out events, it’s not too shabby.

I also never had a problem with grouping out in the open world, just by saying hello and following up with a question to see if people wanted to group up usually worked. If anything, as playtime drags on, we sometimes end up picking up more and suddenly have a full party before anyone knows it. And once you’re grouped, it’s much easier to carry a conversation in /party.

There’s not that big of a need to group in order to tackle a lot of the content that’s true, but grouping up always makes things go faster as you have more man power. Not everyone is looking to group but perhaps be more proactive in your approach. If you’re just saying a “Hi!” and then proceed stare at the other player, what do you expect the other person to do but reply a “Hey” and waltz off?

I found a lot of decent people this way that I eventually added to friends list. Some are even people I play with regularly now.

Also, not raging in sPvP helps a lot. I usually go for smaller servers outside of tournaments as I think 8v8s are too zergy. 2v2~5v5 servers are my favorite as you can usually get people to let you 1v1 or have small skirmishes. Exchange tips, friendly banter and observe good etiquette and it’s very easy to meet people even cross realm this way.

Unless it’s the server communities just being really different, then I’m glad I chose Blackgate.

You’re trying to impose old definitions of end-game on a game that’s trying to step away from that. With your mindset set like this, no amount of “end-game” will ever satisfy you.