Guild Wars 2

haha sure if you want to look at it that way. But you haven’t exactly explain how that’s related to his core issue though?

That’s 6 chances for teams to steal or for a team to recover from losing match, I’d say that makes the game dynamic and far from “randomly” rewarded.

If we separate MMR with class balance then S1 would’ve been the best MMR system if they zeroed pre-existing MMR right from the start. That mistake alone makes many long-term PvP players having more difficulty advancing than new players. Season 2 has interesting concept, but I don’t know what oversight happened that gives birth to deliberate one sided match (2-8 etc). Its pretty much remedied in season 3 though (4-6 is still achievable even if you’re 4).

In terms of balance I’d say season 3 is the best? I know I’m being pessimistic, I can’t help but feel like I’m just picking the best one out of bad ones though. Naturally players will pick the best builds to advance. But the gap between “best” and “viable” builds are so large that you might consider them as “unviable”. This HoT problem strikes diversity hard and continue to persist even until today. It is improving, but so slow that I doubt we’ll see diverse builds even at the end of 2017 or 2018.

Looking at the core problem, I think rewards are given too much for the amount of effort put in compare to the past, some related to passive proc traits, some related to over-tuned skills. But that’s a whole new problem that should be discussed elsewhere -.-

Koru.8574:

i think hes counting beast kills

except beast only reward 25.

And it’ll be the same with daredevil’s elite finisher anyway. General rule is if you see mesmer or thief you don’t engage the beast.

I think we have enough trouble with guarantee stomps everywhere to make this suggestion terrible. That’s one less reason to bring a glass power spec…

As someone stated you need at least 3 condi burst to hurt engi who brings one condi cleanse/toolbelt and elixir gun. Other times your 2-3 stacks of whatever will get outhealed by superspeed etc or not enough to kill them before they bring out another heal drone or rocket charge + acid bomb waterheal.

• With all the blocks and cleaving that hammer does it is difficult for mesmer to maintain enough illusions to build up condi bombs. This can be solved if fighting off point but then you’ll lose plenty of team scores.
• Sure reaper can pull off plenty of condi bombs like this, but their frequency is limited so any missed attempt will give engi a large room for recovery.

I think the most reliable one that can pull this condi burst frequency is condi warrior.

Both teams rushed the door, full team zerging and not defending is a team issue, and stronghold is designed for team coordination in mind. Generally we have so little teamQ population to make stronghold interesting, not to mention when the whole population in stronghold is much smaller. When you yoloQ into a more or less mute team that doesn’t respond, then its a one sided match even before the match starts.

Heck I’ll be happy to give new players logistics of stronghold during a match and win that if we can form a team that talks, which is a common thing when my guild is doing missions.

You have 1 min grace period for dc or stuff, pass that and you’ll get dishonorable. By Murphy’s law they could even assume that you unplug your router or something else to “manipulate the match”.

They did say they’ll separate PvP with PvE in the next update, I’m just not sure if that means 2 teams working on 2 modes or single team working on small changes in each mode.

For PvP I’ll be happy if they actually make imagined burden 500 damage on boon strip, as discussed in some other thread

As for PvE…as much as I want to see mesmer thrive in other role, I can’t imagine anything less than a new expansion pack can save mesmer from quickness/alacrity bot.

Just want to point out seize the moment is a trait you rarely see in PvP in all 3 seasons, chronophantasma is generally a better option (bunker, condi, whatnot) despite I put StM in my own signature lol. Generally you need chronophantasma if you don’t have dueling or you’ll be quickly deprive of illusion in HoT meta.

Perhaps you’ve find a nice spot in the population, there are some really close matches but there are quite a lot of 500-250s. Maybe its to do with rotations and recovery (or lack of recovery potential due to conquest limitations).

Many have stated this but I think its worth mentioning again: league should not allow players to progress indefinitely. It is used to see where player’s skills are in pvp population, a principle that is stated by dev for their “new competitive gaming features”.

The whole wing and achievement thing is ultimately an ill-thought out way that mislead people about this principle, despite it is used to attract more population pool. In this season we did see its limitations as player base dwindled and exhausted after many people get their wings.

There are few ways to break out of your situation, many has been through that stage as well. You could team up with people or adapt to several professions in case team comp isn’t in your favor. In the end though, the most reliable way in the long run is to improve on your own potential. It’s always worth asking ourselves “What has gone wrong in the last match? Is it team battle-wise or solo-fighting? Or is there a weakness in rotation? How do I prevent/recover when that happen again?”

P.S. One of those “guardians are in a good spot” post hidden in this thread, love it!

Vengeance is a downed 3 skill, every profession has that on CD so that players have a chance to stomp, not because who can’t kill a warrior on half health or what not. The trait does indeed need buff, but you’re looking at the wrong direction completely.

Cleansing ire was nerfed to hit rather than spent roughly 1.5-2 years ago for a good reason, and with the massive reward from the new adrenal health I see no reason to unnerf it.

I’m not sure what you’re going for dual wielding, seems like a pot shot chance to ask for perma quickness AND 20% attack speed.

All 4 are true, and I haven’t play mesmer in PvE for more than a year. Just want to point out you can still land in mob’s AoE haha

I only complain about it in PvE

Shocking aura and wall skills like static field and spectral wall for the easy option. Or else you just have to practice timing.

Its actually something worth testing because guaranteed stomp is undoubtedly a game-changing bug. Anybody done extensive testing on interrupting gyro stomp? How about knockoff? Other CC?

Alacrity decrease your CD by increase recharge rate, rather than the absolute number. So you probably won’t feel too much effect on PvP with builds you just linked up.

Just so happened that scrapper has 60% stability uptime just by evading your clones (and rest 40% most likely covered by gyros) so standard power shatter needs to play smart against a random dude who just picked up meta builds…but OP has pretty good map awareness so that’s shouldn’t be too much trouble with mesmer’s mobility.

From my experience with fatboy ele spec I can say this is also pretty good in lockdown cleric ele in focus fire, thus supporting a decent shatter mes will definitely give your team an edge in mid team fight.

All in all I think OP has pretty good control of the spec and are well aware of its weakness. That speaks more than having a meta build.

Simply too many cc and condi for d/d (which rely on close quarter fights)to survive at the moment, there is a reason why most eles are pushed into cleric build. It’s more to do with the power creep rather than the nerf they got/lack of celestial, and they may continue to be like that even when they bring back celestial (which boost several other bunkers as well).

awwww don’t sell yourself short, you probably tested all of them unless we’re talking about terribly unviable build.

Other than the power suggestion mention….group condi aye…other than the standard inspi/illusion/chrono I could think about this condi interrupt build which maybe able to provide some more group capability (while sacrificing 1v1 dueling ability). Whooping 5 condi bomb per interrupt while you have 10 stacks of might per interrupt.

Ofc people will hate you for perplexity and dire, but why worry about that when you’re just starting. You can probably add a bit more precision with rabid but power damage is kind of unnecessary without power block. Plus you don’t have as much active defenses to survive focus fire in zerg anyway so be sure to escape with blink.

This probably builds more toward controlling the enemy so your raid can focus down them, or pile gravity field on enemy tail or head when their stability runs out after initial push. Just be careful not to waste precious interrupts on opponents with stability. As for reading skills to interrupt, always better but not entirely necessary since everyone autoattacks a lot in WvW.

epoc.7941:

Trevor Boyer.6524:

The problem isn’t Revenant’s condi clear.

The problem is condis in general being too easy to apply and too frequent in application.

Hallelujah someone gets it!!! I thought DoT builds were supposed to be about wel u know DoT not bursty condi damage. While I am an advocate for condi damage in the high end doing a lot of damage currently it’s just excessive. I think part of this is just how every class has way too much access to every condition I think that conditions should be class based with a few global condis and some extra ones depending on weapons. For example a Mesmer can have confusion as a unique condi with bleeding burning and the debugging condis while supplimenting these with runes or sigils such as sigil of doom sigil of bydromancy sigil of torment. A thief for example can be an expert in poison and torment and bleeds. It give each class 3 condis they can apply consistently and maintain constant pressure and take out opponents but not just one button press and have 8 condis on you like it currently is.

That’s exactly the situation condi mesmer is in right now, torment and confusion are the only reliable condis a mesmers can apply yet people still complain about condi mesmer all the time. Though mesmer does have reduced presence since mercenary ammy change.

An interesting thing is rev and ele are the only class that still has 100% presence in pro league (1 in each team), while all other classes doesn’t have that. Naturally they make a potent combination, rev is a dps/bruiser mix class that can sustain direct damage reasonably well while ele just remove most of condis that’s piling on the rev. Not to mention meta rev is still the main counter against pretty much every power/glass builds. In the current state I suspect that they’ll continue nerf rev’s damage, aaaaaaaaand possibly increase condi clear along the way if they actually want to balance things faster than current rate.

Mace/shield war is built for close range condi burst, luckily mesmer tend to stay at backline now with other classes taking the cap/bunk role. Just wear down the warrior with your shatters if you’re playing condi. If you’re playing power you’re best to focus fire with your teammate or look for an opening to burst in and get out, unfortunately current power mesmer require too much setting and it will be hard to kill him instantly by yourself (adrenal health can recover ALOT of hp).

If you’re playing condi meta and you’re fighting that warrior 1v1, then best advice I can give is forfeit that point and bait out resistance from far before going in for the kill. Better to lose that point then lay dead for 20s (and lose that point), simply because current condi meta mesmer has no way to deal with that resistance duration unless you do bait it out in the beginning.

I’d say tracer in terms of role? You can rewind time is thematically similar to chrono. You’re there to dash in and out and disrupt backline, hopefully draw fire away from your main group or gank someone; you don’t have much dps yourself; you can’t cap point or escort and you’re quite useless in teamfights except ult. Kind of like mesmer in a way. Tbh neither tracer nor mesmer fit the typical trinity role even though both games seem to encourage that now.

I play youtube or movies while waiting for the queue. Or possibly some other game in offpeak time

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

Agree, this was one of the biggest dissapointments in pvp.

“We to lazy to fix underwater combat pvp balance”.

Boss of Anet: "ok we avoid the issue, remove Raid of capricorn’…

More likely the fundamental problem with their team structure than being lazy.

Some of you may already know this but “Profession Skill balance team” is different from “PvP balance team”. So the best we get from complaining or whatever on this forum is always MMR adjustments, remove maps or amulet changes. When it comes to skill balance team they’re responsible for not only PvP, but PvE and WvW as well. So it becomes hideous to balance and probably even futile. Ultimately the core population in GW2 is PvE, not PvP.

Just look at guardian and mesmer underwater skills and you’ll see how much rework they need to do, so I doubt they’ll pool too much resource into complete rework of underwater combat balance.

Its Dueling/Chaos/Chrono from what I see in the video, maybe leeching sigil?

I always enjoy watching roaming video, particularly when players have good skills. But to be fair your build isn’t quite suitable for roaming, unless you’re absolutely confident or going with friends. Most of the opponents shown are easy kiting ones and they didn’t actually put enough pressure on you. There are many moments when your life is low but they didn’t attempt to give that final push.

Unfortunately double range shatter is still mainly food for decent power thief (which are prevalent in WvW due to Dash disengaging ability) and your build don’t have much tools to counter that. Also focus fire will be your greatest enemy

Just something to think about for the gentleman above, but regardless this is an enjoyable video so thanks for posting that!

Interesting choice with quickness on shatter though, seeing how you tend to be deficient with illusions even when running dueling, do you notice any significant increase in personal damage when you use that trait over chronophantasma?

Is there a change recently that I was unaware of? Because last I check 5 stacks of confusion on interrupt (15s ICD) and 3 stacks of confusion on hit (25s ICD) can’t kill any decent player.

HoT maybe difficult to get used to compare to Tyria mobs due to different mechanisms. You see monsters that can heal others, opponents that can’t be simply interrupted due to defiance bar, and other more aggressive attacks and stealth in enemy npcs.

If you like condition damage, you could run something like this when solo. Wells can be used on yourself to increase scepter 3 frequency and support other people that you meet along the way. Someone else can improve on that build, I’m just improvising on the spot.

Basically this build is to maximize bleed output via pistol phantasm while you use staff auto or scepter 3. Problem is condition in PvE, especially with mesmer, is that mobs tend to stand still when attacking (so confusion works but not torment) and when they move they’re not attacking (so torment works but not confusion). So bleed is a much more reliable condition in this case. You won’t deal the best damage, sure, but it does kind of fit the condition criteria and gear loadout you want to play with in HoT maps.

I think a lot of you are missing one key information…he doesn’t have HoT. That changes the whole question isn’kitten :P

Core rangers are far from fine, but again, so does every core class.

Placing ele with thief and talks about escape skills? lol

Different classes has different ways to contribute to a game and there is a reason why mesmer and thieves mainly run as roamer – they can’t contribute as much in a teamfight compare to other classes other than some niche builds. You can escape on basically most class if you spec for it, if you don’t spec for it then why complain about escapes?

Warrior? GS 3 + 5, pop resistance and stability if you’re not confident
Rev? Riposting Shadows and Surge of the Mists is a common combination that giving you 1000+ distance without a single chance of interrupt
Engi? Stealth gyro and no one can stop you
Ranger? Celestial form stealth and superspeed and smokescale blast
Thief? Stealth and shortbow duh
Ele? FGS is the only reliable one to draw distance but no one spec that anymore
Mesmer? Stealth, phase retreat and blink. Might I add very few still uses stealth.

Even guardian can escape if you want to spec for it. I know runes of trappers is not optimal in teamfight but superspeed can give you more than enough distance if you commit to escape.
Necro is the only one that can really complain, but it does have 1200 distance wurm that you can pop in teamfight if you feel like you can’t handle it.

I’m going to get a lot of hate for this, but 24 might for 10s after 3 shatters is not that terrible in the current meta.

Scrapper can achieve 25 might for 10s with just 2-4 hammer auto-attack chains in a crowded mid fight, especially when there is a necro around. Rev basically start the fight with almost 10-14 might (or 25 might if 2 revs) on whole group. Signet necro can maintain 12 stacks of might if they know how to use their signets properly.

I know extremely high might stacks has been an indication of balance issue in the past, especially back then you see so many D/D eles that just play with their mini-games of blasting fire field rather than actually fighting opponent (and can still win). But nowadays might has little impact on outcome.

You can achieve 24 might quickly with that change, yes, but 10s later your might will wears off and you’re left with mind wreck or signet of illusion. It is rather easy to deny mesmer damage in that 10s. Not to mention pretty much every build (except thief) has enough toughness or passives to avoid getting killed by mesmer burst, even if you spec as domi/illu/chrono in this condi meta.

Building around phantasm has another huge downfall in WvW roaming: they can be “reset” by opponent. Pretty much every build you see in wvw specs around escaping when outnumbered, same abilities can be used when things go south for any 1v1 fights as well. Unfortunately our phantasm has little chasing ability, so a lot of the times you’ll see people escape from your grasp.

Regardless of how often you find staff thieves in WvW (which I find minority in my experience), You’ll often see standard D/P thief withdraw away if they find too many phantasm. They’ll reset and come back to haunt you after your phantasm stared at them in distance and disappear.

I’m probably not making this clear enough, but thanks for clearing my argument Pyro

I’m not telling anyone to “get good” or anything, but I can sort of follow their reasoning behind this system. What you’re talking about is win rate, which has little reflection of the absolute tier position a player should be in. Keep in mind League system, by principle, is not design for players to progress indefinitely, despite how much they want to sugarcoat it. Some may not agree with that principle since we did see a lot of people grind their way to legendary last season, so I understand in practice this maybe different from their ideal.

• Player A has 50% win rate with win loss win loss at a specific tier and can’t rank up because he can’t achieve win or lose streak. This is kind of unlikely but in a way he found his place in that tier.
• Player B continue to have win streak until he reach the level of his skill in the population and lose the rest of the game. Even if he still maintain 50% win rate, he would’ve been stuck on that tier/division if no significant improvement is achieved. But he did get stuck in a tier that is higher than A because the win streaks indicate he’s better than most players in player A’s tier.

I hope this kind of answer your question based on your assumption, this ofc disregards all those kittenty scenarios like afk, raging, bad rotations etc. Another thing worth noting is that the dev did say players tend to have 40/60 match up, so your assumption from the start isn’t quite right.

I don’t meant to say I told you so, but….

that’s the consequence of power playing

I would’ve cracked up rather than getting angry at this team

Though judging by the time, team and personal scores, I’d say you guys backcap them like fighting guerrilla warfare in Vietnam lol.

If you’re talking about the feeling when I first saw mes vs mes, I would love to relive that experience again. I also got that funny feeling when my illusions no longer has special name color compare to teammate’s name color.

OMFG should organise a 5 mes vs 5 mes event, preferably everyone running same race/armor, name is really pushing it but that’s a bonus.

Ross Biddle.2367:

Actually encountered one in a game last night. He was doing his thing at mid on skyhammer. At one point I had 23 stacks of bleeds on me (under resistance XD). My team kept going down so he must have been doing something amidst the chaos. So I’d just focus him in between his evades.

The whole thing was super silly

Realistically you can only achieve up to that if you spec your build to prolong bleed duration (runes and possibly amulet), drop a caltrop (unblockable) and spam death blossom on poor souls who must stay on that small node for some reason. Or on a downed player so you get to bite on anyone who wants to res him.

But to be honest though, if they actually slot caltrop in then he dropped some other vital utility for cleanse/stun break/endurance or impairing dagger for locking opponent. Such strategy will be quite silly when opponent brings a decent healbot ele.

Double D/D with energy is a one trick pony. Low stacks of poison/torment and 3-5 stacks of bleed hardly have enough condi pressure to push against mesmer/necro/ele/druid/scrapper/warrior, or even guardian and rev who knows how to rotate cleanse and evade/blocks properly. That is pretty much every class. In the end you won’t achieve much other than just evading, not to mention decapping anyone or holding a cap.

Swap a weapon set with shortbow and trickery to deadly art and you can quickly build around 6-11 stacks of buffed poisons on people who wants to stay on node or being lockdown by your impairing dagger and panic strike. Ofc you won’t be evading as much but what are you really trying to achieve with dancing dagger.

Domi/Dueling/Chrono power mesmer with support shout guard/ele is a basic setup. Most entertaining and you can still fight some outnumbered ones. You can add other comp on top of it to reduce people from recovering, such as thief for fast ganking/poison/refuge or even scrapper for bruiser role etc. WvW roaming still have quite a variety of choice but yeah if you’re by yourself then it can be difficult

I spent quite a long time on ele and I suggest you keep up poison. Usually ele who wasted CD on trying to heal back up from focus fire will be severely hampered by poison. Chill helps but its not really a must. Standard D/P Thief have reasonable amount of poison and accessible interrupts so they are quite ideal in winning against cleric ele in 2v1.

Also asking to beat cleric ele in 1v1 under limited time is highly unrealistic. They spec their entire build to survive (unlike the meta scrapper nowadays) and if you can easily counter them in 1v1 then there is really no point of bringing an ele.

Whatever power or condi, mesmer is still in the roaming role due to its mobility. However I do find power glass build a lot more punishing compare to before, I need to reconsider about closing in even if I want to burst, sometimes to the point where I feeling like a pew pew ranger that never touches combating nodes haha.

Speaking from power shatter perspective, you have very little contribution against decent foes running sustain builds (eg. cleric ele) on point. Druids can be easier to handle, but you make much less impact when either sustain builds come with teammates.

You also can’t fight current meta scrapper in close range at all due to almost every hammer skill can knock off 5k hp from you (2.2x-3.6x coefficient in every CD skill and also comes with defensive options).

You can still handle warrior (can be tough if warrior is good) and guardian with good amount of kiting, LOS and fighting from range, and we’re all so familiar with fighting thieves so I won’t elaborate on that lol. Necro can be good or bad depend on your position, I usually fight from range nowadays so that it isn’t really a problem with good cleansing rotations.

The range advantage is almost non-existent when revenant is around though, revenant is still one of the hardest match up for power shatter due to multiple gap closers and easy cleaving like sword 2. And if you don’t have illusions around the 3 blades from sword 2 could easily cost 4-6k hp. On top of all the evades and blocks, a decent revenant has more than enough tool to heal back up between mesmer’s 10s mind wreck burst intervals. You must have other ways to pressure him between this time or there could be no end to the fight.

Mesmer is an interesting one, usually I see condi mesmers that have no clue on how to fight power mesmer. And it is rather easy for me to fight them. When I do see condi mesmer who knows their kitten then it can be tough with condi cleansing. But again fighting far is the usual strategy that can be quite helpful.

In the end though, I believe none of these are new to you Ross. I doubt the meta shifted at all with the recent patches, so I’ll give power shatter a super saiyan sad state. Since warrior/guardian/thief still have limited presence in unranked (likely ranked as well) play, if you intend on power shatter you’ll be fighting hard match ups almost all the time. And you do need a team to support you as you won’t be holding nodes much, pretty much like the what power shatter has always been about lol.

I don’t see the point of objecting Helseth’s way of managing his twitch. I dislike his videos for the same reasons as many of you suggested, even to the point of stop watching altogether since 1.5 years ago.

But despite my negative feelings, he is (and it is a fact) one of the most popular GW2 pvp streamers around. Having him leave streaming is bad for business, and it definitely says something when ANet wants to push Esport.

They are still decent and are arguably the top choice in condi mesmer roaming (which I presume is what you asked since perplexity has always been terrible in WvW zergs). But that’s simply because there isn’t any particularly good runes for condi mesmer anyway.

There is a 1s duration between each pulse, if you manage to dodge right after you stun break you may dodge out the circle.

You do know you need 4-5 stacks of bleed to match the old chill dps. Any single skill other than using field combo does that?

And unblockable marks have been around for years…

Novuake.2691:

Besides condi spam power mesmer has very few weaknesses. You should try wvw roaming sometime, gives some perspective of what power mesmer can do without fearing conditions.

Balance around roaming? LMAO

Funny thing is we don’t see much power mesmers in PvP, I’d hardly call it very few weaknesses. Current power mesmer lack the burst to punch through ele and anyone healed by ele, due to fact that decent burst can only be achieved every 10s. More than sufficient time for ele to heal back their allies.

Note this is also assuming that all obvious animations and illusions hit without dying, which is unlikely when you see AoE spam and attacks with blocks/evades. And we’re also ignoring accessible protection, passive procs when health drops below 25% etc.

To top it off power mesmers can easily get eaten alive by meta revs because Shiro and sword skills can track old school “hit and run” power mesmers, part of the reason why thieves are shun out by rev in the past seasons as well. Hence you see every mother of mesmers spec maim the disillusioned and run mercenary because rev can’t handle condition.

Not a really bad patch but tbh if they’re really aiming to address underused skills then they still have a long way to go.

Ignoring the fact that overhaul power shatter is unlikely to occur, here I was thinking they’re going to address some CD or cast time with arcane thievery and iDisenchanter. They are undoubtedly even more underused than wells, and it sucks to be stuck on inspiration or chunky mantra of resolve.

P.S. Not that scepter doesn’t need some love, but I feel like they’re really narrow minded in terms of weapons. All the patches in the 3/4 year or so is all about scepters. And I just did some testing on iRiposte, imo its still not pretty in the current meta :P

Sorry I may have misinterpret this, but if you’re saying that multiclass mmorpg isn’t meant to have individual classes that are sufficient by itself, then GW2 is a very bad game

Unfortunately current PvP meta is full of bruiser builds that one build can filled most vitals roles in a battle, they can sustain and deal sufficient sustain damage that most glass specs are being pushed out. The main reason you see 5 different classes in Pro League is because of the no stacking rule.

Back to core mesmer, know that in PvP it is inevitable that you’ll face elite specs. And currently all elite specs ARE better than their core counterparts, even warrior though not by a mile like others. I’m not sure why you find that enjoyable but I can suggest some builds that allow you to survive.
Staff/Scepter+torch with Dueling/Chaos/Illusion is the standard old PU condi. You can survive quite well but don’t expect to do much in team fight.
GS/Sword+torch with Domination/Dueling/Chaos for power variant or Dueling/Chaos/Inspiration if you find condi is chewing you up.

If you’re confident about your skill, try
GS/Sword+torch or GS/Staff with Domination/Dueling/Illusion for full power shatter.
Staff/Sword+focus or Staff/Sword+pistol with Domination/Dueling/Chaos for full interrupt build.

Note all the builds listed above are rather outdated, despite they shine in the past. You should probably expect people to do better with elite spec while spending significantly less effort than you.

I love night capping Alpine garrison with my old guild (5-6 men small group) as mesmer back in the days. I’ve tried many builds with my mesmer but I always come back to full power shatter. And I must say, PU or non-PU, core mesmer is restricted to roaming and small scale battles.

Condi PU is excellent in survival and gives you enough time to run when fight isn’t in your favor, but you’ll be in even more disadvantage than full power if you face any guild group or 3+ pugs that knows the basics of condi cleansing rotations. Especially since every small group nowadays will have ele/guard that keeps the group alive from condi damage, you’ll realise you spent most time running around the map for 15-30 min just to look for a decent 1v1 or 1v2. I’ve been there in solo roaming and I must say its not a very efficient use of your time.

And no, not every core build is suitable for roaming, regardless of player skills. Roaming is more about escaping bad situations than just dueling. Power ranger is a prime example, there are so many power rangers around it baffled my mind so much. It doesn’t matter how well you can duel if you run a build that lacks running potential, you’ll die a lot. Same goes for roaming necro and guardian but they have good roles in larger WvW battles.

Making it block attacks for the duration could work. Especially given how many classes have unblockable attacks nowadays there should be no excuse like “ooooh but but but its a guaranteed res/stomp”.

Exciton.8942:

It is essentially a deleted skill. Not worth looking at again.

This pretty much sums up the balance philosophy of ANet and many members of the pvp population.

When a skill/class stands out, some people want to make sure it never sees the light again. They don’t care if it is essentially deleted, to them never see the it in action again means problem solved.

This is why GW2 has hilariously poor build diversity after 3 years.

I’m seeing at least 10 uplevels in that blob…probably did miss the tutorial.