Guild Wars 2

How about this for all you people asking why necros are broken.

The new patch gave a very wide variety of buffs to the necro.

These include:

Burning at the same level as a standard bomb/nade condi engi.
A reason to go up spite to actually get condition duration
A reason to drop the roll of team-fight support and pick up the role formerly occupied by the condi engi (just kitten kitten up)
Torment with an immob on a pretty short cooldown
Increased defensive capabilities with absurd buffs to gains on deathshroud

That said, the reason why necros are overpowered right now is simply because both burning and torment combined with the utterly massive number of junk condis, bleeds and CC, both hard and soft, in addition to their already powerful defensive mechanisms when using spectral skills. All of this is with what necros already had. The buffs just simply made necros over the top.

Furthermore their access to weakness is the most consistent in the game without having to sacrifice anything.

That isn’t even to mention epidemic, their condi transfers and how easy they are to play. Necros are a face-roll in a good player’s hands post-patch with the insane amount of death shroud gain they have."

So yes, necros are the most powerful condition class EVER at the moment. Not even was HGH with incendiary powder giving perma-burns this strong.

Necros are insane, anyone who argues otherwise has never played an engi

Yea I totally forgot about shield 5.

THAT was a huge nerf as well and similar to the elixir S nerf. Neutered our defensive capabilities even further.

Funny because the engi’s weakness has ALWAYS been defense. Not they have none. I swear to god if anyone ever sees an engi that is not dead he’s either running some inane bunker spec or a dead man walking.

Gandarel.5091:

emon.1863:

Didnt check’d Necro after patch. So how did things change ?)

Signet of Undeath got destroyed, you can no longer see players with that. +1 sec cast, now it is 3.

it might be because necros kill everything so well without undeath that they can’t justify taking it over a utility slot.

It also doesn’t hurt that deathshroud is practically free now so having a signet sit there is sorta pointless.

Also to answer the title: The state of the necro is kittening broken. They’re overpowered and desperately need a nerf before we see teams smart enough to stack them like they did eles back in the day.

Gandarel.5091:

jcbroe.4329:

Gandarel.5091:

Every newbie wants to roll a necro because they’ve heard this got buffed. It’s not op, it’s just that for a few days every single newcomer plays this class, so probably the amount of fear you got was inflicted by more necs.

Or you were dumb enough to run into spectral wall multiple times in a row.

Is that even legitimately possible?

I’m 100% I got hit with the staff fear, and with all my cleanses on cooldown, the rest of wherever the fears came from took over until I died.

Fear is a condition that stacks duration, so it is possible to stunlock you with a chain of them. But a fear usually lasts for approx. 1 sec, and ha a pretty huge CD. (usually 30-40 sec).

30-40s is not a “huge” CD. Deathshroud fear is on a 20s cooldown, traited spectral wall is on a 32s CD.

Yes, fears are incredibly OP in conjunction with all the damage they can dish out already. Terror is probably the most insane trait ever when you factor in a target with burning. You can EASILY see targets losing 3k HP per second while they’re consistently chain CC’d and soft CC’d.

People thought HGH was bad. Try having double the condi damage of HGH while actually being CC’d. Necros are simply broken.

Phantasms specs got absurd buffs and are one of the strongest specs in the entire game.

Anyone who says otherwise is seriously just talking out their kitten and crying about an incredibly minor change in comparison to the buffs that they just got.

violentlycar.5267:

Why do you have engineers so low, Ostrich? Stun break on Elixir R being removed hurt them that much?

Yes, the ramifications of this change are much larger than it would be on any other class. THe engi has already suffered nerfs to their “usable” stun breaks before. Elixir R was the last hope. It didn’t require you to spec for the cooldown because it was already pretty low, it refilled endurance and it gave us a rez utility that, when specced properly, could be used adequately for a burst of condition clear and a self rez.

This allowed us to drop a LOT of defensive mechanisms in favor of damage or other forms of defense (my favorite was backpack regenerator, pretty strong).

Now that elixir R has been destroyed we can either revert back to S (a crappy stun break in and of itself as well as having an extreme cooldown that begs for fast-acting elixirs just to make usable half the time) or go to slick shoes (the best part of slick shoes is now the stun break… have fun with that)

Simply put, the R nerf had massive ramifications for engi and I knew of no viable build on engineer that didn’t use elixir R. Not because it’s an overpowered self-rez, but because it was the best stun break that we had on a utility starved class.

Oh, and everything else got buffed in terms of them vs engi. Did I mention necros are kittenedly overpowered beyond belief? Not since shattered might gave 3 stacks of might have I seen something that stupid.

I’ll be on my warrior actually doing stuff for my team

I no longer see the point of playing engi outside of specific rifle builds with limited scope and specific roles. What makes it worse is that those rifle build’s roles are better filled by other classes/specs to a much greater degree.

I would call engi the worst class right now with very little benefit to bring over anything else ATM. Even if necros got nerfed to their previous incarnation I still wouldn’t see engis as substantially better than them like they were pre-patch.

Funny how a single stunbreak change ruined a class. It was too strong as it was, but it was the best stun break because it also gave loads of utility and condi clear. Other classes get those things from the 2 weapon sets they actually get. Engis got them from R.

Edit: If you loved condi engi I would suggest you play a 30 20 10 0 10 or 30 30 10 0 0 necro.

Post patch:

Tier S
Necromancers

Tier A
Warriors = Mesmers (would be even better if it weren’t for necros)
Guardians
Eles
Thieves

Tier B
Engis = Rangers

Med.6150:

Ostricheggs.3742:

DevO.9854:

I’d prefer Signet ressing like they had in gw1 that would save a lot of this.

They do have this and it is very prevalent. The problem is that a lot of rez signets on a lot of classes are simply lackluster.

Ironically enough, the necromancer’s is probably the best one right now but no one runs necros because they’re pretty bad, so illusion of life takes the prize

Illusion of Life is much better than the Necromancer rezz really:

- Shorter cast time
- Shorter cool down
- Ignores poison – (god knows why)
- Everybody in the target area becomes invulnerable for 1 second, whether they are down, up and kicking or rezzed (4s invul in this case) – (once again this is a divine mystery, because it doesn’t make any sense)

an illusion is still an illusion. Bunker guards cant stay on point, melee classes can’t go ham in melee and in the chaos of the fight teammates either get trained or simply aren’t able to rez you. The dynamic of the fight changes drastically with illusion in comparison to rez sig. IOL is very useful for those occasions where there is another player downed on the enemy team, but in general I’d prefer havign a full rally versus an illusion.

Med.6150:

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

Yep the Grenade-Damage is crazy. Why ppl stopped playing HGH? Because S/D.

I know people like to believe that HGH popularity has diminished, because of S/D thieves stealing their might. It’s a load of rubbish, don’t believe it. S/D thieves were not constantly taking Engineer’s might stacks and just one shot-ing everything (most of the time you wouldn’t even get their might stacks).

Reality is that HGH was and is a much more specialized build than the “node-defender”. HGH is considerably weaker in 1v1 (I know people still think this is a team game, but the smarter ones out there might have started to understand how 1v1 on side points tip the scale) and HGH can not defend itself as well when assaulted.

That feeling of pretty much being helpless and relying on your team mates to peel for you in an excessive manner, started to drive individual engineers away from the HGH build, which had the effect that other engineers just blindly followed the “old made new” engineer trend.

As far as thieves go, I am seeing fewer and fewer teams employing one these days, S/D or otherwise.

This. The problem is further worsened when peels actually don’t help to keep the engineer alive. If an HGH engi gets trained or pushes up to actually be able to deal any sort of half decent damage he’s pretty much dead. No escape mechanisms, not nothing, just two dodge rolls, one stunbreak and a kittenload of damage.

They are the weak point in a team fight. They can’t deal adequate damage when focused. They don’t have CC. They can’t peel for teammates outside of killing things (a relatively lengthy endeavor with conditions depending on the scale of the fight).

Why would I put my own team at a disadvantage by running such a build when I could drop a bit of damage and pick up CC, team support and utility? Why the hell are people not QQing about THAT instead of the condi equivalent to a d/p thief?

DevO.9854:

I’d prefer Signet ressing like they had in gw1 that would save a lot of this.

They do have this and it is very prevalent. The problem is that a lot of rez signets on a lot of classes are simply lackluster.

Ironically enough, the necromancer’s is probably the best one right now but no one runs necros because they’re pretty bad, so illusion of life takes the prize

DevO.9854:

As a ranger I cannot stop someone from ressing a teammate, unless their bad. My BM build with my insanely strong huge dps pets, can not outdamage the heal or damage the person trying to do the heal enough to stop them, focus’d or not with my bow or sword.

Now I can stop them for a second or 2 with fear or a stun, and maybe a knockback. However if some class thats tanky wants to heal someone I can not stop them unless I can flag plant them which well with a downed player who can prevent me from stomping once and another class that may have 2-3 ways of preventing me, thats more then enough time to res someone.

Not sure what I’m getting at other then Engi’s don’t have my issue.

And you don’t have the trouble that HGH engineers do with staying alive. If you truly believe that the engi has too much damage and sacrifices nothing for such a blatantly overpowered amount of AoE damage then I would seriously suggest you play the class for a while. HGH has NO CC, very few defensive mechanisms and little room for error in high level play. Combine that with serious weakness to boon-hate and the length it takes to get and maintain 25 stacks of might and there’s some serious issues with playing that build against players smarter than your average hotjoiner.

And to the above poster, people quit playing HGH because it’s a bad team build post-nerf with too many hard counters, not because of s/d. HGH’s day is done, there isn’t a kitten soul who plays it anymore that I think of as an excellent, high level engi for very good reason. The healing turret buff made multiple builds viable and people found out that if you focus the engi he’ll die. The dying too quick problem still remains in other builds, the engi gets focused and he dies, but most other builds have far more team support and CC than HGH could ever dream of.

A god kitten thief with a shortbow has more cleave than an HGH engi for the love of god. Why do you consistently maintain that a dead build is overpowered? Everyone under the sun knows that condi necros don’t cleave for kitten. Sure, they can destroy EVERYTHING if they get a little support and hit one magic utility on the downed body, but if you haven’t figured that out yet then there is no hope for you. Everyone knows that certain classes cleave and certain classes stomp and certain classes have a hard time doing either. The best way to counter serious amounts of cleave is to not have someone go down before the class with serious amounts of cleave is pressured. If you have pressure on a mesmer, thief, condi engi or anything else they’re going to have a seriously difficult time cleaving. If they’re up free-casting then you better be god kitten ed sure you have more than 1 person rezzing because otherwise you’re best off cutting your losses and running. Sometimes it’s best not to rez the downed thief getting shattered, grenaded and churning earth’d. When to do so and when not to do so is a learning curve and adds to the games difficulty via good decision making.

The small AoE is a necessary punitive measure to avoid making resses far more potent than they already are. Simply put, you friend just need to l2p or reroll till the necros see some buffs.

30 5 0 20 15 with 3 5 11 explosives, 1 9 alchemy, 6 tools, 6 undead runes, rabid ammy, battle/corruption sigil, heal turret, bomb/nade kit, elixir R, pistol/shield

Best build for engis ATM.

How is it fear mongering? I’ll be the first one to say that warrior buffs are absolutely necessary. I was one of the first ones to eulogize the warriors after the quickness nerf. They’re most definitely not in a good spot right now.

All I’m doing is pointing out there’s a fine line between warriors being not being viable at all and warriors being too strong.

Why do you think people bring 3-5 warriors in PvE? They do the most damage in the game in the shortest amount of time. Of course mobs don’t explicitly exploit warrior’s weaknesses, but once those are addressed it’s hard not to see warriors being incredibly strong.

I’m not fear mongering. Just giving my opinion. Don’t take it the wrong way

BurrTheKing.8571:

Archer Henchman.2534:

Ostricheggs.3742:

Archer Henchman.2534:

In spvp, sure, but in tpvp where you’re going to be forced into shield block, then trained the moment you come out of it with next to no mitigation in your kit, you’re going to go down early in fights.

Warriors used to do better when frenzy allowed them to roam into fights and drop a target instantly while their team had stacked stun and immob for them. Now, because their damage comes out a bit slower, they don’t have as much of a tide turning roaming presence. Same thing happened for thieves.

Are you surprised that the meta shifted to condi pressure and attrition after the two premier burst roamers got cut to pieces in terms of balance? Having 1 person at half hp when a roamer arrived simply wasn’t cutting it as a win condition anymore. Giving warriors a token few more condi removal opportunities isn’t going to do much, either, unless they’re given a relatively robust anti-condi engine. They’re just going to need to eat another nade and a half before going down.

Warriors have naturally high vitality which is a natural hard-counter to conditions. If the changes go through and the defense master trait is made available it’s not hard to consider their clears “robust” in conjunction with healing surge.

Yeah, I was expecting a few removals to be added to marginal skills, but their condi-mitigation kit was substantially improved according to the patch notes. I don’t really think their natural high hp ‘solves’ condis for them, though; they’re also the class that’s most negatively influenced by chill and crip.

That said, I’d be really unsurprised if we started seeing something akin to a shout hammer + mace/shield warrior bunker, as condi pressure was the only thing keeping them down. Combined with the new heal cds, warriors can tank up excessively hard. Skull crack is now a three second stun, most of the hammer aftercasts are being reduced, etc.

I suppose it depends how much incoming damage increments adren buildup; if its relatively high, you’ll get consistent condi removal AND incredibly powerful CC out of the deal. For burstier trait setups some of the traits, like berserker’s power, are insane. Berserker’s might with the new berserker’s stance might be very powerful too from both an adren AND condi mitigation perspective.

Anyways, warriors got WAY more than I had anticipated. I figured they’d give mending an extra condi strip or two, and add a -chill and -crip duration to a trait.

Zerker Stance does look good but the 60 second cooldown seems a bit excessive, it encourages running burst damage even more rather than sustained DPS that I think warrior is destined for. Not to mention that if the new condition can be applied frequently and in large amounts we will once again be forced into a single build with Cleansing Ire and Zerker Stance in order to be competitive. As for Shot builds I do think we may see more hammers but probably Sword instead of Mace for mobility and using Flurry as a set up for Backbreaker and to take advantage of Leg Specialist.

EDIT: I could see something like this becoming good again:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fIAQNAS8ejcOxu1OyQMRCEkCNsKMKMif4oQJWiUBxA-TsAA1CtI4SxljLDXSus1MQY9xGBA

Replace Defense I with the New Cleansing Ire. With Leg specialist and Opportunist you would basically have 100% Fury and with Unsuspecting Foe your attacks after Earthshaker will have some 84% crit chance I believe. Replace STR 3 with Physical training and suddenly you have a lower CD Bulls and Stomp. All of this means you’ll have a decent crit chance with survival and CC in addition to conditions not totally destroying you (theoretically). Because Zerkers might is being moved Restorative Strength seems the best option. Of course stability makes the whole build a bit meh but not much you can do there.

If the changes stay I’d do 30 0 20 0 20 with longbow greatsword and healing surge. It’s gonna be insane

Silinsar.6298:

Velron.3729:

lol, a bit over dramatic there. There are a lot of really great buffs in this upcoming patch, and not to just useless stuff. Acidic coating looks promising, Stabilizes Armor change is epic, Shield block not cancelling on hit is awesome, super short CDs on battering ram, stun breaker added to super speed TB for slick shoes is sweet. Plenty more too…the changes to the Firearms line and Flamethrower traits look sexy, etc.

Elixir R was probably the strongest stun breaker in the game. A stun breaker that also 100% refills your endurance AND has condition cleansing AND can self or team mate rez.

Most profession’s ally res utility is a signet, with a kittenty passive and a LONG CD with no other special effects.

You’re right about the buffs, but understand that Elixir R nerf would sure feel a bit odd.
(Assuming the leaked notes apply to the update) With Elixir S, then Elixir R – which were our best defensive utilities – nerfed, choosing a stunbreaker will be really hard:

• Elixir S is situational since it often just delays your death and enables your opponents in PvP to cap/decap a point. Unlike Eles we can’t heal ourselves while being invulnerable. It works, but its downside (basically dazing yourself and not even being able to use instant-casts) is very noticeable.
• Elixir R is no longer a option. The utility skill definately lacks something now. Nothing but endurance refill on 45sec cooldown? Very disappointing, especially when compared to Sigil of Agility. If the TB skill is the problem, they could have adjusted that one via CD increase, “res heal” decrease or duration decrease, for example. Would not make people happy either I guess, but it would be more reasonable in my opinion.
• Rocket boots is no longer a option (though it might be if it stays instant cast and despite not breaking stun can be used while stunned which would be too good to be true)
• Thumper Turret will hardly fit every build playstyle-wise and lacks a defense mechanic besides it’s stunbreak. Also, if placed, you’ll have to destroy the turret to break a stun. Doesn’t sound very tempting to me.
• Utility Goggles also misses a defensive function beside stunbreak and requires a power SD / spike build to fulfill its potential.
• Slick Shoes might be my #1 choice in the future. Although the utiity skill’s CC is a bit unreliable, Super Speed usually gets you out of the danger if there’s no immobilisation.

Not saying that these skills are bad in general, but in my opinion we need a stunbreaker that is defensive and not situational / build dependent and preferable gets you out of danger while being immobilised as well as while being stunned (most other classes have such skills and necro will kind of get one with Well of Power). Elixir S and R used to do this job. Rocket boots with self CC removed would have been my next hope but it is probably gone.

This hit the nail on the head. Sadly a-net doesn’t seem to respect the fact that we’re forced to bring kits into most viable builds which SEVERELY limits our access to stun breaks.

I’m of the opinion that elixir R deserves a nerf in its current form, but it doesn’t need an elixir S style removal from all use ever.

I would be ecstatic to see elixir R maintain the stunbreak and have some other parts of t he ability nerfed. I think the best option would be to move the stunbreak itself to the toolbelt, cut the endurance regen in half and leave the rez utility on the activated ability with a reduced CD to justify it being a rez utility. Elixir R really becomes over the top when you factor in inertial converter to allow having TWO toss R’s.

A lot of the changes seem to be a step in the right direction, but this one just took five steps back. Almost every build I can think of requires bringing R as its only stunbreak and defensive measure in general. A good 75% of viable tourney engineer builds would take a massive hit if this change goes through and I don’t wanna see that with how diverse we’ve been recently. It does need a nerf, but god kitten it we need a stun break!!!

Archer Henchman.2534:

In spvp, sure, but in tpvp where you’re going to be forced into shield block, then trained the moment you come out of it with next to no mitigation in your kit, you’re going to go down early in fights.

Warriors used to do better when frenzy allowed them to roam into fights and drop a target instantly while their team had stacked stun and immob for them. Now, because their damage comes out a bit slower, they don’t have as much of a tide turning roaming presence. Same thing happened for thieves.

Are you surprised that the meta shifted to condi pressure and attrition after the two premier burst roamers got cut to pieces in terms of balance? Having 1 person at half hp when a roamer arrived simply wasn’t cutting it as a win condition anymore. Giving warriors a token few more condi removal opportunities isn’t going to do much, either, unless they’re given a relatively robust anti-condi engine. They’re just going to need to eat another nade and a half before going down.

Warriors have naturally high vitality which is a natural hard-counter to conditions. If the changes go through and the defense master trait is made available it’s not hard to consider their clears “robust” in conjunction with healing surge.

BlueprintLFE.2358:

Ostricheggs.3742:

SkyBoX.6917:

I agree with CollegeDowntime, warriors have some great trait they just require lvl 30 points to obtain which makes the overall stats go to waste! atm they lack not only dmg, but mobility, and defense. with that being said ofc you can create a warrior with absurd amount of dmg! but you will die in less that 15sec in Tournaments. so if you want a warrior who can afflict a fair amount of dmg you need to sacrifice your survivability. ( THIS IS NOT THE CASE WITH GUARDIANS! ) atm guardians does alot more dmg than warriors, with a HUGE amount of survivability, and thats even if the warrior goes full dps!!! what i think needs to be done is do make the physical Utility skills unblockable! yes you heard right, make them unblockable not undodgeable though! the only thing warriors are good for in Tpvp atm is knocking ppl down. And thats really not good at all! taking in consideration that ppl dodge block and blind you ALL the time AND they use Stability. If i had to Remake something about the warrior i would go back the how they used to be!!! ( not that they had unblockable physical utility skills :P ) btw nerf rangers "my pet can heal me underwater even though it’s dead bug ) and make the cd longer on thief’s evade attack underwater!!! for christ sake

Currently warriors have some of the most mobility and THE most damage in the entire game. Their CC is nothing to laugh about either. It’s also worth mentioning they have the highest base stats in the game with both the highest base armor and highest base health.

That said they suck. It’s just true. They are gods against terrible players who don’t know the difference between rush and bull’s rush, but the second you enter a high end tourney with both groups voip’d you’ll need an entire team built around your damage just to do anything.

Sure it’s kittening AWESOME when you go into a team fight and kill three dudes in under five seconds, but that’s just how warriors are. It’kitten or miss, you either hit a home run or you fall on your kitten .

Of all the balance patches that have occured I’m most worried about this one because it has the biggest chance of just being a major kitten show with warriors one shotting kids everywhere.. The only thing that gives me hope is boon hate.

Ostrich here’s the thing most non warrior players don’t understand (not saying you don’t know the warrior) people say we have the most movement skills, yet they don’t realize that hey are ALL (minus savage leap) completely Annihilated by cripple and chill and now this new condition.

My 40 second utility skill (Bull Rush) is completely shut down by some class’s auto attack (their sword spams cripple). Making us completely kited at ease. These skills are thrown into almost every weapon set and are ALWAYS present in fights.

Mesmers, and guardians have been ridiculous since the beginning of the game, it’s time for warriors to have some spotlight. Of course people are afraid of warriors getting buffed. It’s laughable that they said it is going to be a bad thing, when in Reality kitten that, they are just afraid to actually have to fight a warrior and not just get a free kill by spamming cripples and chills and drinking coffee.

Screw that we NEED our time to be feared by others. We don’t have invulnerable builds (engie bunker, no offense) we have 0 options ever since they have GUTTED us by destroying frenzy.

Everyone is afraid that they will actually have to fight a deadly warrior, you guys make me sick. We haven’t been feared since launch while Every other class (minus necros) have had their time to destroy.

Today I went afk and my tourney popped while I was on my warrior. I proceeded to signet, run straight to graveyard and killed 3 people in one hundred blades. I was running 20 0 20 0 30 with longbow/GS, defensive as hell and gives condi clear just in case the leaked notes are correct.

It’s not that I’m “afraid” of fighting a warrior, I’d be glad to see warriors come around again. It would be pretty refreshing. The only problem is that I’d prefer to not have them go from complete kitten to GODS with a few changes.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

RaynStargaze.6510:

You can always just queue for tourneys and then pretend its a Deathmatch.

sometimes, i go into a 8 vs 8 game and kill people, like it is a team death match game.
works for me!

This x10

I can’t believe anyone would play hotjoins any other way.

Rerroll.9083:

Legendaries only given to top 10 players, When they lose their top 10 position they lose the weapon.

I want to punch whoever said legendaries for glory.

http://gwshack.info/?region=na

Look at how many games people on the front page have played over the last week. Leaderboards are still a joke and giving any sort of reward for them at this point would be rewarding inactivity. I can’t think of any game that simply gave the most sought after item to players who play the least.

SkyBoX.6917:

I agree with CollegeDowntime, warriors have some great trait they just require lvl 30 points to obtain which makes the overall stats go to waste! atm they lack not only dmg, but mobility, and defense. with that being said ofc you can create a warrior with absurd amount of dmg! but you will die in less that 15sec in Tournaments. so if you want a warrior who can afflict a fair amount of dmg you need to sacrifice your survivability. ( THIS IS NOT THE CASE WITH GUARDIANS! ) atm guardians does alot more dmg than warriors, with a HUGE amount of survivability, and thats even if the warrior goes full dps!!! what i think needs to be done is do make the physical Utility skills unblockable! yes you heard right, make them unblockable not undodgeable though! the only thing warriors are good for in Tpvp atm is knocking ppl down. And thats really not good at all! taking in consideration that ppl dodge block and blind you ALL the time AND they use Stability. If i had to Remake something about the warrior i would go back the how they used to be!!! ( not that they had unblockable physical utility skills :P ) btw nerf rangers "my pet can heal me underwater even though it’s dead bug ) and make the cd longer on thief’s evade attack underwater!!! for christ sake

Currently warriors have some of the most mobility and THE most damage in the entire game. Their CC is nothing to laugh about either. It’s also worth mentioning they have the highest base stats in the game with both the highest base armor and highest base health.

That said they suck. It’s just true. They are gods against terrible players who don’t know the difference between rush and bull’s rush, but the second you enter a high end tourney with both groups voip’d you’ll need an entire team built around your damage just to do anything.

Sure it’s kittening AWESOME when you go into a team fight and kill three dudes in under five seconds, but that’s just how warriors are. It’kitten or miss, you either hit a home run or you fall on your kitten .

Of all the balance patches that have occured I’m most worried about this one because it has the biggest chance of just being a major kitten show with warriors one shotting kids everywhere.. The only thing that gives me hope is boon hate.

You appear to be forgetting shadow return and the very large number of dodges in jumpers build as well as the fact that LS can be saved. Hate to say it but your post is so far off base. I’ve played with jumper a LOT. He doesn’t die much at all, even in 2v1s, and can still gibs things like a beast.

Kugkug.8795:

it is pretty simple what the pvp needs:

more modes

no downed state in instanced pvp

better matchmaking (this is prolly frustrated by the very small userbase right now)

a debuff for all bunker/tank types in instanced pvp. Tanks/bunkers ruin pvp for everyone else. Do they want pvp where most players feel forced to go bunker/tank type builds?

support for addons to customize UI to your hearts delight, add more action bars, hotkey/use ALL abilities without page swapping, give useful feedback to the players, and a huge range of other things that addons can provide. GW2 developers are hard pressed for the time to do this so they should just let the community do it for them.

balancing of the classes for pvp

also needs a hook to be addicting which is generally gear rewards with small power upgrades or flashy appearances or effects. Or for points to be used for pve gearing cuz some peeps may not be fond of the GW2 pve endgame but do want the gear.

This isn’t rocket science. Any assertions that the pvp is OK “as is” are clearly incorrect based on undisputed statistics of participation in GW2 instanced pvp.

What it “needs” is a fundamental change from some stubborn pvp design decisions from the current developer/designers.

They’re prolly also facing hard decisions as to how much time/money they should be putting into the clearly unsuccessful instanced pvp portion of the game. Does it make financial sense to do so?

I hope they do. Only bought this game for pvp and I completely regret my purchase decision. Leaving a very bad taste in my mouth for this developer. They appear stubborn beyond belief in the face of obvious failure.

Correlation does not mean causation. The reasons for why GW2 PvP “failed” are not because of downed states or lack of similarity to GW1 (it probably would have helped the game if it was similar because people like mooty would have loved it, but that’s aside the point).

It’s because of its own slew of problems that were simply ignored for a long while.

Here’s a short list:
Svaniir runes, block bug, the failed tourney system, lack of parity between classes FAR greater than how it is now, broken air runes, load screen bugs, lack of leaderboards (still not fixed, the leaderboards still suck), lack of any incentive to PvP (again still not fixed), necromancers not rallying people, ranger AI being worthless in PvP, Phantasm mesmers hitting through walls for 6k, time warp being OP as all hell, eles dying to fall damage because RTL was a piece of crap, eles not having any downed escape, staff eles with 4 blast finishers on evasive arcana, retal dealing 313824 billion damage, elixir R on a 75s CD with 25% more downed HP than previously, not being able to cleave downed bodys during resses because there was too much downed HP, thieves unloading a full init bar on dancing dagger one shotting 2 people, thieves switching from zerkers to carrion and caltrops so they can solo lord in two seconds, utility and ammy switching in general (soooo many bugs and problems with that), eles being necessary on khylo because staff or ice bow was killing treb in one hit, trebs being able to be pre-aimed and worst of all… THERE BEING A FIVE MINUTE WAIT TIME BETWEEN TOURNEY MATCHES FOR THE GAME TO START!!!!!!

I could go on if you want… It wasn’t downed state or lack of similarity to gw1, it was the fact that the game SUCKED back then

Med.6150:

But that’s exactly what’s wrong with down state. Down state promotes mindless AoE and heavily favors specific setups. As soon as somebody goes down, whether it’s on your side or the opponent’s, you see AoE rain down on that body like no tomorrow.

This is an accepted way of “team fighting”, but in my opinion it’s simply bad design, because AoE is way too strong (obviously this is the root of the problem, but other than the promise of reducing that from a couple months ago, we haven’t seen a single change in that direction. In fact some single target abilities have since then been turned into piercing and cleaving attacks) and the only semi-counter is not to pile up.

This is much less a problem for professions who are playing range builds than it is for those who have to get right on the body to make sure it’s not being rezzed up. Usually the team fight is won by the team that can drain more resources from the other team in the rezz/stomp battle over a fallen team mate and that is utterly ridiculous.

If you manage to pressure your opponent hard enough in such a battle, you will then have the upper hand, even if you lose a team mate before them, because you will kill/weaken them all at once and thus preventing the enemy from reinforcing the node.

Right now, what you really want is a bunch of ranged professions that can cleave any downed player to hell and back. If you manage to kill them all, great, if not, at least you won’t be taking much damage, because you are nowhere near the downed player, so that you can keep reinforcing the node till you win.

If you notice a large majority of classes in “melee” have unique options that allow them to survive longer than they should. The one exception being warrior, which has THE most downed body cleave in the entire game bar none.

And the problem isn’t DPSing the body when they’re downed, it’s AoE when you’re the one rezzing. Thiefs with shortbow or sword mainhand destroy downed bodys. A full shatter from a mesmer can rip an enemy’s stability and allow them to CC the rezzers. If there is a player down with a warrior up it’s a good rule of thumb to never rez that player ever ever EVER because you’ll die in a flash.

Without AoE the way it is ATM the downed state WOULD be imbalanced and that would be an understatement. AoE isn’t so much a problem at high level play outside of the downed state because good players aren’t kittened enough to get AoE’d outside of when a player goes down. If there wasn’t AoE on a downed body a team would go unpunished for having a player go down.

And about the ranged thing, there’s a kitten good reason why people don’t only bring engis and necros to a team. It’s important to actually get the opposing player downed first without dying before you cleave.

Turbo Whale.1738:

They made it ridonculously difficult to rank in PvP because they hoped they would attract 24/7 gamers ready to train for eSport Guild Wars 2 while being broadcasted all over the world. Their dreams of eSport is the reason high rank in sPvP is so hard to achieve.

Being a high rank does not equate to skill in the slightest.

A good chunk of rank 60+ are hotjoin heros.

Personally, I really don’t think the issue with the system is about rank more than it is the rewards that come with them. It takes an average player MONTHS to go from 40-50 and the rewards that come with them may or may not be what they want.

Not only does it take a metric kittenload of time to get to the next rank set, the rewards are static as well giving no incentive to rank up outside of watching a purple bar move.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Pvp_rank

PowerBottom.5796:

Ostricheggs.3742:

There’s rarely a lost or won fight that any players can blame on the downed state outside of a lack of knowledge of how to work it. You don’t down five guys while a player is downed and no one is rezzing, that’s just completely stupid.

I think there are tons of Teamfights decided by how many Evades a downed Player has, but really none of the other effects seem to matter at all in Teamfights. Even the 3rd downed Skills of many Classes don’t seem to matter at all, if they aren’t another Evade, because in every Teamfight, a Team will have tons of ways to get a safe-stomp:

1) Eles with Blinds, Mistform etc.
2) AoE-Stability from the Guard every like 25 seconds.
3) Mesmer with Distortion.
4) Invis of Thiefs, Mesmers, Engis can help sometimes too.

I haven’t had a Situation in weeks where we weren’t able to safestomp sth. in a Teamfight that had no Evades and in most cases, Teamfights win you Games, while everything else is either buying time or drawing the opponent out so you can win Teamfights. That’s mostly because of the fact, that if you win a Teamfight, you’ll most likely not only get 1 kill, but 3 or more, so you can easily take another Point back after winning the Teamfight, which will give you control over two Nodes.

In Teamfights, it’s really simple, 1 Evade will give you 4 more seconds of rezzing and with tons of Teams running Skills/Traits that severely restrict DPS on the downed Target (Shield of Absorbtion, Resolute Healer, Sanctuary, Feedback Bubble, Medcis Feedback, Walls that absorb or reflect Projectiles, even Shield of the Avenger is amazing!), thats worth a lot, even if the rezzing Players are susceptible to DPS for a longer period of time.

And this all is the case even though Teams specifically Target players first that have easy-stomp downed modes. Now imagine fights between two equally skilled Teams and equal classes, but one team had the downed-state of Thiefs, the other of Necros. Guess which Team would win?

I’ve even had it happen multiple times, that when I roam alone with an Ele and get downed, Those few seconds more of not being stomped keep me alive long enough for a Teammate to come along and rez me.

Often times the classes with the lowest health and armor have the best forms of stomp prevention. If a thief goes down in a team fight he is NOT getting up if there is a roamer cleaving him. It’ll often times kill the rezzers in the process as well. Even if they do get up the people rezzing have taken a massive hit in health “resources” that they’ll have a very difficult time recovering. How your team reacts to the downed players is far more important than the downed players and the abilities themselves. The glaring imbalances appear when the fights are smaller as I said before because the downed players become more important and stomping reliably becomes more difficult.

I play an engi because they’re overpowered.

Downed state is currently only slightly imbalanced and for almost none of the reasons listed in this thread. You CAN win 1v2s and I often times do.

The only problem that I see is that people don’t respect the downed state in everything outside of tourneys. If a person goes down on your team your first priority should be to rez that person or somehow make it so that person gets up. If a person goes down on the enemy team then your first priority should be to either cleave the body to prevent a rez or get a stomp. A very large majority of people who play PvP don’t seem to understand this and it’s depressing.

Mastering how the downed state functions is one of the most important things in this entire game. A lot of the problems with imbalanced downed states only occur in small scale fights where a guard won’t immediately stability stomp or a high DPS class won’t immediately cleave a body.

That said, downed states are minimally imbalanced because of multiple things. Take for example the fact that they’re balanced around natural health and armor pools. Eles are one of the “tankiest” classes in the game from how they’re played currently. But because they have THE lowest natural HP and armor in the entire game they get one of the best downed states in the entire game. The second major flaw is a lack of parity between classes of similar natural armor/HP such as the engis downed state vs the rangers superior one. The final major flaw is that some classes have better access to damage in their downed state than others, particularly thieves, mesmers and rangers (from their pets, which hopefully will get nerfed). Also certain classes get better condis in their downed states vs others making condition damage or power damage more or less favorable for the downed state.

It’s clear that a-net didn’t think much about balancing downed states, but in the grand scheme of things it truly doesn’t matter THAT much. There’s rarely a lost or won fight that any players can blame on the downed state outside of a lack of knowledge of how to work it. You don’t down five guys while a player is downed and no one is rezzing, that’s just completely stupid.

Geff.1930:

People seem to underestimate how much damage conditions really do because they don’t see big numbers on their screen. Therefore, I have taken it upon myself to demonstrate.

This thread is a counter to the following post:

Geff.1930:

Geff.1930:

What people don’t realize is that a 10 stack bleed or a high condition build burn does more damage than eviscerate in the same amount of time it takes for eviscerate to land. Ofcourse, they don’t see the big numbers on screen and therefore do not QQ.

In high condition dmg builds:

Burn = ~700 dmg/sec
Bleed = ~120 dmg/sec/stack

Eviscerate = instant cast 300 range leap

Now if you’ve played recently against a warrior with boon hate and were playing a boon heavy build then you know Eviscerate will take anywhere from 6k to 10k of your HP in a single shot.

So now, can you please tell me how a single tick of burn damage or even 10 ticks of bleed damage equates to 6-10k worth of damage in a single second?

The argument was going off-topic from that thread(related to dodging), so I made this new thread.

Condition damage over approximately 3 seconds (using Burn, Poison, 10 stack Bleed):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWvpUjadA2M

Eviscerate (takes approximately 2 seconds to connect from the time the key is pressed):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAR5cjA_188

Side by Side comparison:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTI7trZGyQc

Stats:
[img]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b272/Geffrey/statcomparison.png[/img]

Builds:
Warrior: 10/30/0/0/30
Ranger: 30/10/30/0/0

---

Remember:
-Condition damage cannot be blocked.
-It cannot be avoided if you are invulnerable.
-Cannot be dodged if already applied.
-Does not miss if you are blinded.
-It persists on your target if you are CC’ed, dodging or otherwise preoccupied.
-Persists if the target is out of line of sight.
-Does not trigger Retaliation.
-Most sources of conditions are persistent ground AoEs, often unavoidable by melee characters.
-Most characters can easily stack 10+ bleed stacks almost instantly just by auto attacking (the auto attack itself puts a stack, and traits allow crits to add an additional stack per attack).
-Is not mitigated by Toughness.

While I think a thread like this is long overdue, a large majority of your post is either blatantly false or misleading.

mooty.4560:

Ostricheggs.3742:

I am sorry but a lot of the problems that you list in your post are almost non-existent as problems in game to a player who has played for more than a month.

Particularly striking is the fact that you complain about LoS and centering your character with your mouse and how it detracts from your ability to use your other hand to hit keybinds. That is a non-issue like none other.

The nuisance of having to dedicate your mouse hand to spinning the camera to keep LoS is something I think a lot of players probably don’t think about since they didn’t come from GW1 and I did. As a result, I notice it and it does ultimately alter the way you play the game. The main issue is not that it’s slightly less controllable(and it is), the main issue is that the LoS mechanic doesn’t add anything meaningful other than the aforementioned figure skating dance.. which isn’t too important in my book, in fact.. one might argue it’s a detraction.

I didn’t say melee had a huge advantage. In fact, I think it’s quite the opposite.. melee is at a disadvantage in this game(mainly due to dodging). It is much harder to land melee attacks and hence it’s much harder to land attacks that can’t be spammed and tend to be more important to winning a particular fight(i.e., since you brought up warrior, eviscerate comes to mind). The point about gap closing is that you can’t be tactical about positioning and that no one has to respect position when they can simply leap into a fight, do their business(whether it’s melee focused or not) and leap out. If you don’t understand the relevance of this then you should try playing some organized PvP in a game where positioning matters.

Why don’t you try addressing the arguments objectively instead of just stating it’s incorrect?

My gripe isn’t that GW2 is a bad game, it’s not.. my gripe is that it’s a disappointment for people who loved GW1 PvP. It’s a step backward, sorry to say.

I can understand why you’d prefer GW1 PvP. GW2 is something entirely different than a lot of MMOs have tried.

As far as the entire of idea of camera movement being a detraction I would substantially disagree. The range of movement and LoS requirements make GW2 PvP far more face paced because it’s more taxing than most other MMOs. I’m not too sure how being forced to center your character for an attack is such a bad thing. Without it, GW2 would simply be boring as hell. Maybe I don’t understand what you’re referencing but the idea of removing character centering is insane.

And positioning DOES matter. I can’t believe you’re hinting otherwise. If you have played this game in a group you’d understand that often times the team that wins a fight takes advantage of a mistake in positioning from the opposite team. It might not be the case without VOIP and with noobish/solo queue group, but it’s easy to imagine that in other games the same thing would happen.

And I HAVE argued about downed state and why it’s good for the game. People aren’t used to it, people rage when they “kill” a player and he gets back up. Why people complain about it is beyond me because once you get past the initial shock of it you’ll realize it’s an incredibly balanced mechanic with more to offer the game with it than without it. That’s especially true given the lack of any dedicated healer in the game.

I am sorry but a lot of the problems that you list in your post are almost non-existent as problems in game to a player who has played for more than a month.

Particularly striking is the fact that you complain about LoS and centering your character with your mouse and how it detracts from your ability to use your other hand to hit keybinds. That is a non-issue like none other.

Then, under the same post, you complain about how easy it is to dodge abilities (dodging weapon abilities are a different story) and how melee has a huge advantage with gap closers (see: Warriors).

Simply put your diagnoses of why this game has been unsuccessful thus far is incredibly incorrect. It goes hand in hand with the above poster complaining about conquest and downed state. A very large majority of problems that have plagued this game and prevented PvP from taking off have been fixed which is why you’re seeing people come back and tournaments pop up.

Honestly, if you’re going to do something do it right. Poor jumper is suffering, either revert the changes or put thieves down warrior style. You done goofed on the returns by “fixing” LoS (hint: they still work sometimes)

On SOTG you touted thief mobility, in reality you completely neutered thief mobility.

PowerBottom.5796:

dovrak.4376:

Teldo’s build has 0 skillshots. I mean he doesn’t even use grenades, which aren’t that easy to land at range. Bombs are actually dumb, it’s similar to grenades at melee range, you just run around spamming them, waiting for that mad thief to die trying to kill you. Plus enginners have some natural tankiness, plus easy acces to vigor (a.k.a dodge spam), regen, switftness just switching kits………… I would say enginners are nw friendly actually.

This proves my Point exactly: Bad Players won’t get much out of the build. ^^’

No Skillshots? Try Skillshots were you don’t simply have to aim a cursor, but actually physically walk there.
Spamming Bombs? Try Bombs that will drastically change the outcome of an engagement if you are able to hit them.
Tankyness? try 1v1’ing a Mesmer where 1 Shatter he lands will most likely win him the fight.
Easy access to swiftness/vigor. Well, try and keep the boons up during a fight 100%, not that easy and it requires good planning and mechanics, while other classes simply get it while landing crits…. -.-°

Then, there are of course the blinds and knockbacks which open up a huge variation of possibilites. Knowing what skill to blind or interrupt is one of the most difficult aspects of the Game.

The build has so much depth to it with Multiple Combo-Fields and Blast-Finishers. Mastering the use of Smokefields + blast finishers in structured PvP is a world of it’s own. Then there are the Waterfields and the Fire Fields.

You clearly have no Idea how to play this build and how versatile and deep it is.

I personally do not think that teldos build should be run by anybody but teldo. It’s an extremely specialized build that fills an extremely specific role that is nothing but subpar in other areas. Teldo is an amazing player, but watching his stream and comparing your own achievements with that of his while playing his build is kind of insane. The only reason why he does so well in situations where his build sucks kitten is that he’s played that build forever and a day and he’s also a god amongst men

I would never recommend the build to anyone, it’s not an exceptionally difficult build, it’s just worse in a large majority of situations than other builds.

Personally, I find playing HGH at the skill cap exceptionally harder than playing those types of builds.

And to answer your question, thieves engis and bunker guards are the hardest classes IMO. Every class is hard at the skill cap, but there are under a handfull of players even close to the skillcap across any given class in the entire world. A lot of those players can play other classes at an exceptional level as well.

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

well, basically it is more like a prediciton you make. As most classes play with energy-sigils + vigor + evade skills (to name a few: updraft, whirlwind, phase-retreat, serpents strike etc.). Basically most classes have 3 dodges every 10 seconds + 1 evade skill/block skill.

Altough there is something called immobilize. The perfect counter to it, which makes it in my eyes balanced overall.

I can’t think of an immob that doesn’t have a clear, dodgeable animation. While they may be an effective “counter” in larger scale fights, in 1v1s-3v3s they’re hardly as effective given their short duration

The sheer amount of people from stormbluff on off-hours ruins the legitimacy of this entire affair.

I honestly cannot take WvW seriously when I see a zerg of 100+ facerolling everything against maybe a half dozen manvil rock dudes running around taking supply camps. I downed countless numbers of stombluff only for the entire zerg to descend on their corpse and rez him because I reached the AoE cap.

If you guys ever get tired of zerging, I’ll be in the mists.

I can say without a doubt I would quit the game IMMEDIATELY if this happened. The amount of no’s in this thread speak for themselves.

You can grind for gear in PvE if that’s your thing. I personally enjoy the game for what it is and only see the addition of gear as another imbalance. It’s like trying to play a game of chess where one side has no pawns and no queen. If you don’t enjoy the game itself and would rather grind for pixels then I’d suggest you grind some homework. It’s a better use of your time.

Edit: I genuinely mean the above statement in the kindest way possible and it’s just my personal philosophy on grinding . I don’t mean it as an insult in the slightest as I know some people do enjoy grinding for the act of grinding. I’m just joining the chorus in saying it would detract from the game.

Yea, evades in general are at times a bit over the top and it’s not just dodge rolls (I’m looking at you, rangers). It’s a pretty big balance issue, especially considering how important evades are. Vigor as well. Mesmers get a free vigor on crit trait for a measly FIVE points up their most important tree. Sigil of energy is used relatively ubiquitously for a kitten good reason.

Worst of all it appears like not a lot of thought has been put into it from a-net. I wouldn’t consider cutting the invulns on dodge just yet but I would definitely think about hampering access to vigor as well as the strength of it in general (that isn’t to even mention protection, why that thing hasn’t been nerfed is beyond me)

Thesilentflute.8761:

“OP: I don’t think HGH needs a nerf. A few other things just need a buff to get them into the meta.”

With warrior I agree If it is there plan to put warriors in this roll since they have boon hate it would be understandable that they would be able to dps a bunker down. Necro and engi are currently fighting over this role one with boon stripping and the other with pure dps. I don’t consider engi a legit bunker buster you guys have no boon stripping or boon hate just such op dps.

If they buff necro def alone after after everyone tests it we will be right back where we started If necro dmg is buffed as well engi will be replaced.
or
Lets say that engi dps becomes the bench mark all dps are brought up to this point over time. Well then there is no point in having bunkers as they are just low dps players and in turn making bunker busters pointless.

I think you don’t understand precisely why engis are bunker busters. It’s simple: Bunkers are unanimously weak to conditions because they aren’t effected by toughness and all bunkers in the current meta have low health pools making the effect of condis substantially greater.

Your hyperbole about how obscene the DPS of engineers is is blatantly mistaken.

Godofallu.2935:

Ostricheggs.3742:

For the love of christ people, the build is hardly run anymore except for the occasional noob. If almost every single person who plays engi at a decent level has given up on HGH, why the hell does it need to be nerfed?

The simple truth is that it PREVIOUSLY was incredibly overpowered and I was the first one to scream it on the highest mountain tops. I was the guy who popularized the standard variation and back in the day it simply over the top. With the changes to both incendiary powder, elixir S and the popularization of classes with lots of boon hate it’s extremely difficult to justify any nerfs to HGH.

At the end of the day it won’t matter to me, anyways. But your hatred is misplcaed for sure. If you’re having trouble with HGH engis then you seriously need to take a look at yourself rather than the build. Knowledge of the build itself is the greatest asset to beating it.

If you didn’t know what a thieves strengths and weaknesses were, how can you expect to beat him?

Just kind of curious as to why you think HGH is unplayable at the moment. I have beaten Booty Bakery and both SOAC teams while on HGH and I can even remember beating you 1v1 a few times.

That said i’m sure you are a better player than me and more experienced. When I killed you there were complains of you having no condition removal yet HGH has ok condi removal. So why is HGH trash now? Is it because of the s/d theifs? Because I will admit the good ones do give me trouble. Other then that though I feel like I can basically 1v1 anything in the game if I play well. Not counting good necros since they don’t exist of course.

OP: I don’t think HGH needs a nerf. A few other things just need a buff to get them into the meta. Oh and grenade circles would be stupid for many reasons.

In teams other builds are better. More suruvivability, more CC, more heals, more elixir R, more AoE condi removal, less weakness to boon hate and AE projectile reflects.

The only thing HGH truly trumps some of the more common builds on is damage and condi removal, but even damage is up in the air. If I ran double pistol in my current build I would melt things even quicker than HGH I believe.

It’s not a terrible build by any measure. There are simply better things out there ATM. It adds to build diversity and is an example of precisely the right kind of thing many other classes should have. It’s a good, niche build but isn’t particularly exceptional in general. Nerfing it would simply be the wrong thing to do, it’s not overpowered ATM.

The problem a lot of people have with HGH is that it dishes out SOOOOO much kittening damage and hard counters a particular set of classes with minimal condi removal and not enough of what engis are weak to. Even my current build has trouble with HGH engis because their condi removal far exceeds mine and their HP is far higher; the only time I can ever beat one is if I outplay one to the point of insanity. But I don’t immediately go QQ on the forums because I got butt-devastated by an HGH engi because I know the flaws of my build and how weak they are to things outside of my damage type.

red circles would be less effective than you’d think. Not only that but grenades themselves also spread while they’re in the air so the “circle” an engi throws down expands and ends up creating a unique bulls-eye that, when not hit, lands only 1-2 grenades instead of 3.

I personally don’t think the circles are needed and would greatly add to the clutter that people already complain about. It would be an unnecessary nerf to nades.

There’s lots of ways to play engis now in tourneys.

Most of the time it’s 30 up explosives, 15 up tools with the extra 25 points going up either alchemy or firearms, mainly 15 fire 10 alchemy. I would personally recommend bomb kit and grenades with incendiary powder up explosives. I’ve seen tool kit/nades, tool kit/e-gun (not 30 up explosives), bomb kit/FT, nade kit/FT, nade kit/tool kit, e-gun/nades and any other combination work for condis. Each have their own strengths and weaknesses, but they’re all at least somewhat viable (some moreso than others) in tourneys for condi damage. For weapons you can do p/p or p/s. For sigils you can do geomancy/battle/earth/doom. For runes you can do undead or nightmare (nightmare + earth = extra 2 seconds on the bleed, nightmare + smoldering on the mainhand = 6 seconds on incendiary powder)

For power, sadly, HGH nades seems to be the best and will probably remain so until something changes.

This advice is mainly for tourneys since I dont really do condis in WvW :P

Raven.9603:

I dont know what to say about you, Anvil Rock. I’ve hit more of your people for over 10k tonight (ranger) than I have ever on a regular basis before. Not even uplevels, many of you just arent wearing clothes or something.

And whoever was running a havok squad for AR in IOJ-BL, I’m talking about a d/d ele commander with a thief and another d/d ele running with him, you guys are freaking awesome. I saw one tag was “Team Doesnt Matter”, but I didn’t catch the commanders tag. You guys repeatedly wiped 10+ SBI with just 3-4 though, awesome job.

http://www.twitch.tv/ostricheggs/b/414088343

You’ll never see me in WvW again. That was miserable.

Hot Boy.7138:

Lupanic.6502:

I think they should nerf the damage of a warrior if they give him new stuff.

at the moment if you do not watch your back you are dead if a warrior hits you. If they are not kiteable you will die every time to them.

I agree. And I also wanted to add that I don’t understand why most of them are so easily kited. I fought a warrior the other day who was having a hard time staying on me to do damage. This warrior actually had enough common sense to switch to his rifle and killshot me for 14.5k damage. I only have 15k hp. With that said. I’m not entirely sure yet that warriors are actually bad, or are most players that pick warriors bad. Because 90% of the warriors I fight all seem to use the same build, same utilities, same weapon (greatsword), and all try the same predictable combo on me.

So far, my opinion is that most players that choose to play a warrior in a fantasy game lack some creativity , and it shows in combat when they play very predictably. The again, I’ve never played a warrior before so it might possibly be true the only correct way to play one is to use that greatsword, predictable combos, and hope for the best.

Kill shot is probably the most obvious animation in the entire game; once you learn it and its approximate cast time you should be able to dodge it 90% of the time barring they chain it with something that you should have dodged anyways.

The problem with warriors is that their standard combo’s become ABSURDLY less effective against highly skilled players. When you dodge bulls charge, shield bash and eviscerate for the fifth time in a match you’ve successfully made another warrior reroll. Same goes for arcing arrrow, bolas, kill shot, tremor etc etc. Obvious animations with big effects, long cooldowns and huge opportunity costs.

That said, their combo lands often enough for them to be effective in practice. Nobody is perfect and a well played warrior will almost always force a stun break. The true problem ATM seems to be that warriors distinctly lack the kind of survivability that every single viable melee class/spec has.

Once they give warriors more options for survivability its hard not seeing them become an amazing class. It just depends on what those options are and how strong they are. The situation is incredibly tricky and is probably the only time where I’d ever condone arena-net’s approach of slow n steady. Recently they’ve been too slow, but a few tweaks to some traits, utilities, weapons and heals might make them incredible

That’s an EXTREMELY tanky permutation of the most standard engi build out there ATM. I really wouldn’t recommend it at all, personally.

Its role in TPVP would be designed around small scale point holding and 1v1s with an emphasis on pushing far to neut and eventually kill a non-bunker back point. If that won’t work then they’d be forced to watch home and support mid despite there being better options for doing the same job.

In terms of WvW and PvE? That build is nearly worthless and too tanky to be justifiable to run

Extremely niche, absurdly tanky, good team support, relatively low damage output.

Anastasis.7258:

It’s kind of sad after reading these replies because only few of them are correct statements. Zone is basically talking right things over there so far, but that’s for the warriors who haven’t face to the reality. I guess every warriors know that they will be the first target, so why don’t you guys just use this such a good opportunity to lure your enemies to went into an over-pushing situation, and once you are down you can get up right after because you are dying in a right position. After you got up you can begin to kitten those people whoever still trying to put you down again because they have already over-pushed. You guys have to think.

Ostricheggs.3742:

zone.1073:

We can talk, talk, talk about how game-changing a warrior can be, but the reality is that a dead warrior does not change any tides. Apply pressure on the warrior, and in a matter of seconds, he’s dead and the fight goes on as if the warrior never existed.

That’s precisely what the OP is complaining about and precisely why I’m concerned about the upcoming buffs to wars.

It’s a kitten fine line that they have walk when it comes to warriors. If they give them too much survivability in addition to their incredibly strong burst, mobility and CC then we might have the second coming of the ele. I’d prefer not seeing that

I know more so than most that warriors need buffs, BAD. Their niche role simply isn’t cutting it for TPvP. Right now their weaknesses far out-weigh their strengths and are particularly exploitable by good players who know what to dodge.

Ostrich, you don’t have to worry that because those traits that buffs warrior’s survivability will only appear in the Defence tree, I know you don’t understand warrior well so I will tell you this, if a warrior add trait point on Defence tree, their dps will drop A LOT compare to the berserker setup, and yet to pursue this new trait, you are giving up too much good things. Warrior will not be able to survive long because our healing skill still suck, we still don’t have regan, we don’ t have extra healing skill. So, you are just over-concerned.

regards

I’m talking more about the future of warrior buffs than dogged march. If they actually do something substantial to change how survivable a warrior is in a standard greatsword/X spec then I can see them becoming the top class relatively quickly.

But if they continue to do as they did with dogged march up the defense tree without direct buffs to various other weapon sets, trait lines and utilities then I’m sure we won’t see warriors back in tourneys any time soon.

Does anyone know what the devs said in particular about war changes in SOTG? I remember listening to a lot of bluster about certain ideas to make warriors more viable, but I don’t remember any specifics. Their implementation of buffs to survivability without changing a lot of things concerns me. Like I said, I know it’s needed, but the entire class is a kitten show and needs a massive overhaul about as bad as anything else.

If they did the equivalent of “we’re giving warriors 10k more HP and 1k more armor” I can’t see any team not bringing a warrior. The only reason why people don’t at the moment is because they die WAY to quickly to a lot of things without the entire team being there to support the warrior.

Tsarbomba.9180:

I’m going to go out on a limb and say this will be nerfed before they fix scope. You know, making sure every other profession does no more than 30% (max under any twisted circumstances) of the damage warrior does takes priority over everything.

That as my first thought when I figured out how big ol’ bomb works with elixir X. Alas, unless you’re up above the players when throwing grenade barrage the grenades spread far too much for you to make any sort of practical use of it at such a large range as to be able to get X off before they land.

zone.1073:

We can talk, talk, talk about how game-changing a warrior can be, but the reality is that a dead warrior does not change any tides. Apply pressure on the warrior, and in a matter of seconds, he’s dead and the fight goes on as if the warrior never existed.

That’s precisely what the OP is complaining about and precisely why I’m concerned about the upcoming buffs to wars.

It’s a kitten fine line that they have walk when it comes to warriors. If they give them too much survivability in addition to their incredibly strong burst, mobility and CC then we might have the second coming of the ele. I’d prefer not seeing that

I know more so than most that warriors need buffs, BAD. Their niche role simply isn’t cutting it for TPvP. Right now their weaknesses far out-weigh their strengths and are particularly exploitable by good players who know what to dodge.

For the love of christ people, the build is hardly run anymore except for the occasional noob. If almost every single person who plays engi at a decent level has given up on HGH, why the hell does it need to be nerfed?

The simple truth is that it PREVIOUSLY was incredibly overpowered and I was the first one to scream it on the highest mountain tops. I was the guy who popularized the standard variation and back in the day it simply over the top. With the changes to both incendiary powder, elixir S and the popularization of classes with lots of boon hate it’s extremely difficult to justify any nerfs to HGH.

At the end of the day it won’t matter to me, anyways. But your hatred is misplcaed for sure. If you’re having trouble with HGH engis then you seriously need to take a look at yourself rather than the build. Knowledge of the build itself is the greatest asset to beating it.

If you didn’t know what a thieves strengths and weaknesses were, how can you expect to beat him?

Warriors are easy targets and do quite possibly the most burst damage of any class in the entire game (in the shortest amount of time). Often times a good warrior will change the tide of battle drastically either in their teams favor or in their enemy’s favor.

It’s especially true as a melee class. Think of all the melee classes their are in this game and think about their condi cleanse or escape mechanisms. While warrior might deal the most damage, their lack of ways to deal with a lot of things that the enemy team can do to them makes them an extremely easy target when they’re trying to deal damage in melee. This, combined with the fact that you’re always a huge threat that can swing fights whenever you show up, makes you targeted first.

Also, wars suck.

Darek.1836:

Ostricheggs.3742:

Thesilentflute.8761:

The nades them self are not super imbalanced or a terrible idea it is the 25 stacks of might that go along with it. What is it? 250 power and 250 condi dmg for 25 stacks of might that is the stat gain from 50 trait points.

It’s actually 875 power/condi damage. But that’s for your entire set of runes, your heal, 2 utilities, your sigil AND 30 trait points.

It doesn’t even deal the most condi damage out there, it just deals the most overall damage of any engi build out there ATM because power scales well with nades.

The sacrifice in survivability and team support more than make up for it. Lots of top tier engis, including myself, no longer run it for that reason.

LOL sorry but what build does more condi damage than HGH engis? And what CLASS comes even close to their condi damage. I think you misspoke.

That I did. I was meaning the particular permutation of HGH that everyone knows and loves does not produce the most condi damage of specs even up the same trait lines. It simply produces the most damage total.

I’m just saying that overstate HGH’s damage potential even though it is one of the hardest hitting specs in the entire game. It’s similar to backstab thieves in a way.