(edited by ProxyDamage.9826)
…Really?
Personally I’m breaking my warrior out of the PvE-only closet I had him in.
Warriors now have condition removal.
Longbow got buffed.
Sword got buffed, giving us a middle ground between a full damage weapon (axe) and a full mobility weapon (GS).
Dolyak signet got super buffed.
Heals got a small, but quite noticeable, cooldown reduction.
Honestly, while it isn’t “perfect”, this has been, by far, the best update in months, and we’re, at least, way better off than we’ve ever been in the PvP world.
In PvE we’re basically the same. Slight nerf. Barely noticeable.
I was chasing people down all month (may) using rune of speed! I play 2-4 hours of wvw every day on Jade Quarry. Don’t tell me I don’t know that zergs stop and blast powerful fields just for the swiftness. Zergs snail tail all the time because of slow pokes. Not everyone is running a 25% speed signet or swiftness yet OP writes, and I quote, “I can’t chase ANYONE down anymore”. You are so wrong I’m almost at a loss of words. I think you guys are just haters. You must like to bellyache.
Congratulations, you can kill kittenty players! Ranger is totally viable then!
that is only lousy ratio…
It is… BUT, I wanna see this tested with a full cleric build and Bloodthirsty… Might just be good enough to use.
OMG JOYGASM…. a 3 second fear…. I have it…. its instant cast….
This is going to take so much time to process all this.
I know the feeling bro… I know the feeling…. That + the new Spectral wall…. And Spectral armor being actually worth using…. We have protection! After months of being forced to face tank with vitality, we have protection!
I’m…. Sorry I need a moment.
Bumping this up since the leaks were confirmed and, as expected, every class was, for the most part, better off, while rangers got kittened so hard we’re getting free therapy.
I hope everyone that was so adamant about the leaks being “off” or “completely wrong!”, “no way”, etc… is now enjoying the taste of their own words. You know who you are. Hope they taste as good going in as they did going out.
cut for size
Ok, there are several issues here you need to take into account, and I’ll answer them to the best of my ability, hoping to be clear:
- You can do PvE with just about anything, but, if you want a solid PvE build, especially if you don’t have another character that can do PvE very well, go power build. Specifically, Berserker. In my experience the best build in this area for Necros is a well build with dagger mainhand. PvE is the world of the full-glass cannon power build because of a myriad of reasons:
- In PvE monsters don’t dodge or avoid you. Meaning you get to DPS them outright. Even without accounting for skills such as a Warrior’s HB, knowing your opponent won’t actively avoid your hits removes one of the biggest advantages of conditions and DoT. Against other players, who will actively avoid your hits, your direct damage will be inconsistent, whereas a condition once applied can’t be avoided, only cleansed. A stack of bleeds will continue ticking even if your opponent moves out of your range or hides behind a wall. Since monsters don’t avoid damage, the much higher DPS of direct damage shines.
- PvE monsters have more health than armor. As discussed above vitality is flat whereas toughness/armor provide fractional damage mitigation against direct damage. Therefore, direct damage is countered by high toughness (and protection). Meanwhile, conditions generally tick for much lower DPS, but ignore toughness completely. Therefore, their counter resides in high vitality. With very few notable exceptions (like the Karkas in Southsun) monsters in PvE, particularly the big ones, don’t come with too much toughness, but instead with a bucket load of health. And the ones that come with some toughness come with even more health… Particularly champions and “above” (legendary and world bosses) have metric tons of HP, naturally favoring direct damage and countering condition damage.
- Finally, due to the way the condition system was developed and technical limitations, conditions have stack limits per enemy, and not per player. Once an enemy has 25 bleed stacks they can only be replaced (by someone with higher condition damage), not increased, regardless of how many people are fighting. Burning and poison can only be increased in duration. This means that the effectiveness of condition builds decreases exponentially to the amount of condition builds around. In a 5 person dungeon 1 condition build is working at 100%. 2 will start stepping on each other’s toes, particularly when it comes to non-stacking conditions (like burning and poison), and more than that start becoming redundant. In big world events with many people, most condition damage will be rendered null.
- Additionally to this, it’s a well known issue of the PvE world of GW2 that there is no tanking – Monsters you can tank you don’t need to (you can, instead, spike them down, which is far more beneficial), and monsters you’d want to tank you can’t (because they’ll 1/2 hit even bunker builds), so everyone relies on killing things fast and natural mitigation (dodging, vigor, blocking, etc).
Together this means that while you can do most PvE content easily regardless of build (the PvE is mostly simple that way) if you want a “serious” PvE build, go full power and berserker’s.
- If you’re going for an “everything” approach, “one set fits all”, then I’d honestly recommend one or the other, especially if you’re a relatively new player to necros. Hybrids can work, but they require a fine mix of rabids, rampagers and carrion, and you will necessarily give something up for it. You won’t be as good as either specific build individually. Personally I started out trying this and it simply didn’t work for me. Additionally there’s no real reason to, seeing as acquiring different gear sets and exchanging builds is easy enough as is.
And that’s my 2 cents. If you need anything else feel free to ask.
EDIT: That being said, i wouldn’t be surprised if these are real
Really? That’s quite the 180 from the last time I saw you post on this issue. Namely, something along the lines of “there’s no way I’m believing these!”. Pulling a Microsoft/Xbox One are we?
Don’t get me wrong, as far as Rangers go I hope they are completely off, but if they aren’t both you and Chopps have got quite a lot of your own words to eat, considering you’ve both been quite adamant about them being complete bullkitten.
Sigh…
You’re stuck on the conceptual part of whether power without precision is better than precision without power for direct damage in a vacuum. That’s not what I’m arguing. I know this… Read everything again. Those calculations disregard “on critical” activations, attack power scales, defenses, etc, etc, etc… They’re purely a matter of “if I’m doing direct damage, how much power should I sacrifice for precision?”. That’s not what I’m arguing.
Perhaps I might have gone too fast for you, so I’ll go again, slowly:
Carrion, as a stat, is useful. What I’m telling you is that a full carrion Necro hybrid build is bad.
First of all, we have to assume he’s a condition build at least partially, otherwise Carrion or Rabid is irrelevant. If condition damage isn’t being used the right answer is “neither”, evidently.
Second, we know his weapon set: “use Scepter/Dagger mostly while occasionally swapping to Axe/Focus.”
If you’re going to go full hybrid Carrion with those, regardless of what traits you’re using, you’re just going to be bad at both.
Scepter has terrible power scaling. We know this. So power on Scepter/Dagger is irrelevant. This is a condition damage set. That’s fine. In this case, Rabid is more beneficial, as neither power or critical hits will significantly improve your damage output by themselves, but criticals will add additional bleeds and/or other effects.
So we turn to Axe/Focus. Without power and critical hit/damage, it’s not going to hit worth kitten. It has “meh” DPS as is, for full power oriented builds, but as Carrion you have neither Power as a major trait (such as Soldiers/Berserkers) or critical chance/damage (Knight’s/Berserkers), so your performance will be very, very underwhelming.
When it comes to survivability, you can argue which of them is better in Death Shroud (Knight’s diminishes damage received, while Carrion gives you more life to soak it up, and since life in DS is received in percentages, they’re more or less the same) – but outside of DS (and no you’re not going to stay in DS all day or you’re basically just a damage sponge as DS attacks are VERY underwhelming with either stats) Toughness helps you a lot more.
So there ya go. To reiterate my initial post, if you wanna go hybrid you need to mix it up, but the best idea is to just stick to condition build or power build and gear accordingly. Carrion hybrids are just bad at both.
In a vacuum Power outdamages Precision until you get ginormous amounts of Power, an amount which isn’t practical outside of keeping max might stacks up or something.
In absolute vacuum you could say so. In the sense that precision is a multiplier, so a multiplier without a base (or a very low base) is meaningless. A million times 0 is still 0.
In the actual game power without precision and crit damage hits like a dry leaf being blown by a gentle breeze. Particularly because you’ll have a decent “base” anyways (lvl 80 exotic weapons have decent damage already, regardless). So if you want to do any decent power-based damage you’ll need both power and precision. If you don’t have precision don’t bother with power-based weapons for actual damage.
The only way Precision can pull even is with on crit affects like Sigils of Earth. But even with those, kill times are basically equal in both sets from a lot of testing that I’ve done on my builds.
Data if you’d please.
Also are you matching power with conditons? Power is a lot faster in plain “killing speed”, this is a well known fact. Or a “normal” power build with no precision, vs. a normal power with precision but no power? If so why sigil of Earth? You have no condition damage or condition improving traits… Sigil or Air/Fire on the other hand, would be an improvement. You could also go with sigil of blood for some damage and extra leeching.
Only difference is Precision damage is about half contributing via conditions and conditions can and are cleansed profusely in PVP, at which point Rabid builds are prone to falling behind Carrion on damage.
Conditions are cleansed for Carrion as much as for Rabid. Except rabid will stack more conditions, leading to more damage before being cleansed, and higher survivability through higher toughness.
Something like Death Shroud, which gives you free fury upon entering is much more benefited by power already being high, as then your crits actually do good damage. You can also ‘flash’ DS for something like Doom, then still have the fury for 4 seconds for your normal attacks.
Fury is a flat 20% increase. It’s awesome when you already have decent crit chance, but otherwise it’s 1 in kittens that crit, for a couple of seconds. Not significant.
DS in rabid is just about useless outside being a sponge. Your Life Blasts do piddly damage and your Transfer is weak as well. Wells are also weak. You are just so one dimensional.
On the contrary. DS #1 is lackluster regardless (way too slow for how much damage it does), so the higher crit chance will help procs regardless.
Full Rabid actually gives you a bit too much toughness in terms of finding the ideal EHP balance.
If you’re not going over 3k you’re not wasting anything, just being a little less efficient. Better have a bit too much for perfect efficiency than nothing at all.
And Carrion vitality scales much better with Death Shroud as it heals in percentages, negating the normal advantage toughness has over vitality for normal life.
Last I checked toughness affected the damage received in DS as well, so… It’s not that big an advantage… If there’s an advantage at all… And that’s only while in DS.
I play PvE exclusively, and I don’t, and haven’t used GM. Dungeon designs don’t require it as you can usually bottle neck or drop the marks directly where you need them without pulls. I’m using scepter more often anyway.
I acknowledge that exclusive PvE and PvE/WvW builds are worlds apart.
Even if you’re running PvE only there is one thing you need to distinguish between: Are you trying to “survive” PvE, just do all the content, or trying to be efficient at it – trying to clear content with decent speed/survivability/etc ?
If the first, then yes, you don’t need GM. In fact, you don’t even need gear. I leveled my necro to 80 with a lvl 40 green staff and a horrible build. You can clear almost all content in the game naked with only your weapon – some of it you don’t even need a weapon! Even if it will be incredibly slow.
If you’re trying to be efficient at it, then don’t bother with condition builds. Due to the nature of PvE power is king, and berserker’s is the word of choice. So staff is only there for utility, if anything.
You know nothing about his build except for the weapons he is using. Therefore you can’t tell which prefix will benefit him the most.
I can tell you that regardless of what his build is, Full carrion vs. Full rabid, rabid wins every single time. Full carrion is bad. No "if"s, "and"s or "but"s.
Power without crits hits like wet noodles and might as well not be there.
Conditions can live without crits, though they benefit heavily from them.
Vitality is complimentary to Toughness. High vitality is only worth anything if you also have high toughness. Vitality is a flat survival increase, toughness is exponential (before diminishing returns, becoming parabolic once you include those). Vitality’s “worth” is exponentially increased by toughness, as each point of health absorbs “more points of damage”, per say. Otherwise it’s like having a reinforced steel door on a crap straw shanty.
Necros have inherently high vitality, and enough ways to deal with conditions (that ignore armor), but low armor. They benefit more from toughness than vit.
End result is that Carrion offers you 1 stat that’s dependent on another stat you don’t have (power), 1 stat you don’t really need (vit) and condition damage, while Rabid offers you 1 stat you need (toughness), 1 that’s really useful either ways (precision) and condition damage.
Mixing the two is another matter entirely, and depends heavily on build.
Feel free to show me one good build that benefits from full carrion though. It’d be the first I’d ever see. Full carrion just makes you worse at everything.
Rabid + Undead is a standard combo, to take advantage of Rabid Toughness.
Also, Undead runes are extra cheap, so it’s a good starting set – you can look to some more specific/interesting stuff later.
Well, the runes are cheap. The armor isn’t.
Karma and WvW tokens.
The option, Carrion, isn’t an option.
a full set of Carrion armor
Why? Carrion is there to compliment other sets. If you’re a condition build 90% of the time you want Rabid. The only thing Carrion “hybrids” are good at is being bad at both conditions and power.
Make a rabid set if you wanna be a condition build. Enjoy the benefits of high toughness and good crit chance for “on critical” triggering.
If you want to be a power build then berserker’s for PvE, and a mix of knight’s, berserker’s and/or soldier’s for PvP (depends on your build).
Thank me later.
Either ways, Runes of the Undead are my favorite with rabids for max condition damage. Runes of the Necromancer and Runes of the Nightmare are also good options.
I’m tired of pretending we only have 60 trait points. I am interested in seeing what our profession is capable of when we take advantage of the full range of options.
Then don’t take staff. I’m sorry but that’s the way it goes. You can make interesting builds without staff, but it is one of our most versatile weapons, and the only one that hits 1200 range… Which is why most necros take it.
If you’re not willing to sacrifice those 10 points (20 recommended for the 20% cdr), then don’t bother taking staff. It’s worse than taking any other weapon: it’s a useless thing taking up a weapon slot.
Just about everyone takes GM, but it’s hard to say whether our reasons for doing so are sound or not without testing them, because it is so often that sort of testing and tinkering that leads to new discoveries. It usually flops, of course, but when it doesn’t, you get stuff like the D/D Ele build that everyone uses these days, which wasn’t popular at all until daphoenix showed what it could do.
Except this is not the same issue at all. D/D was about discovering a ton of synergies that worked well together in a different build. This is like you trying to make a Necro condition build without condition damage.
What you’re “researching” is not only pretty obvious, but has been tested to death and back. Staff without greater marks gives you blockable tiny marks that are hard to aim (since they are ground targeted, miniscule, and with a slight delay on activation) and easy to avoid. Without that or 20% cooldown then you’re better off just auto-attacking with any other weapon.
You’re not going to find any hidden traits or konami codes that suddenly make staff without greater marks one hit kill enemies or have 200% life steal… Greater marks should be baseline on the staff, because without it you shouldn’t use staff. If you want those 20 points from Greater Marks and Staff Mastery, then make a build without staff.
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we want all you to see how amazing pvp is in gw2
PvE is good, PvP is one of the worst I have played in an mmo.
You’re probably the only person I’ve ever seen with that opinion. If anything has kept gw alive through those first couple “rough months” every mmo goes through, right between th novelty wearing off and having enough time to build into their game, was how good the combat was/is.
So, yeah, I’ll probably be watching. The thing you guys need to fix is having different stream quality options. 720+ tends to be a bit laggy
Well you’re clearly not interested in the discussion so just leave us to want it alone then.
I’m afraid he’s right though. Discussing whether the patch notes might be true, based on thief changes, on the ranger forums is arbitrary and pointless.
Notes might be true, might not. Until the official notes get posted, we won’t know. As is, they seem legit, including the thief changes. Most classes get interesting changes, even if I don’t necessarily agree with them. It’s just rangers that get kittened over, and over and over, for absolutely no legitimate reason I can discern.
The way I see it I think this is some internal changelog that got leaked accidentally (remember Valve’s Meet the Spy?). May or may not be the final version. Then again it could be a complete fabrication. We’ll find out in a few days.
I’ve basically been playing this build, give or take, since buffed signets, but with all the nerfs, if they’re true, it’s just not worth it. Especially as shortbow was a big part of it.
Staff without greater marks is pure masochism. Plain and simple. The AoE size is pathetic.
…What are we looking at and why do we care?
You have to see the full context and not just current balance situation.
Ok. 2 seconds of quickness, post nerf, on pet swap as a grandmaster trait is junk and I’d never take it.
It was really good as it was. Might be acceptable as Master. As Grandmaster, not really.
I thought this was so stupid obvious… Staff without Greater Marks (at least) is completely useless.
Either merge the traits or make Greater Marks default on the staff. As it is it punishes everyone. MM builds will need to sacrifice 2 MM traits for staff to be viable, and non-MM builds need to sacrifice 20 points in a kittenty tree (for non-mm builds).
Basing everything on a leak is bad. :<
Judging by what they are giving warriors (nothing they wanted, more nerfs then buffs.) Warriors got nerfed just as much as rangers did damage wise. Do you think with all the buffs they said they were giving warriors this is true?
Daecollo, even for your “usual” this post is utterly insane… Warriors got so many, quite needed, buffs… I have no idea which “leak” you read…
I know I’m polishing my warrior’s sword and rifle in antecipation.
In PvE the longbow wins hands down. Better AoE and might stacking.
In PvP it’s a whole different ball game with them both having pros and cons.
Guess I’ll keep my ranger in farm mode until this profession gets fixed.
Why bother with that? Rangers are among the worst PvE professions.
How do you figure?
What can a ranger do that other classes can’t do far better?
DPS? No. We’re nerfed to kitten in that department. It’s not even “we don’t compare to warriors, mesmers or guardians”. In full zerker we don’t compare to anyone . If we go 30 in power, burn 2 signets and elite we get a decent burst, but it has very low upkeep and still won’t match the top classes, even in that brief period.
Utility? Not even close. Mesmers reign supreme with their cc, timewarp, portal, blink…
Support? Pffft. As if. Guardians do more team support while retaining much higher DPS. If you really want more support/healing then staff ele will do way more of that while retaining way higher damage and AoE.
The thing rangers could bring to the table would be tanking, which is meaningless in PvE – things you can tank you don’t need to, and things you’d want to tank you can’t. And guardians would be better at that even…
So what’s left? Being “ball and chain”ed to stupid cripple AI? My warrior is jealous. Really.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that you can’t do PvE on them, PvE is simple for the most part, but that you’ll underperform. You can do lvl 50 fractals on them… but so can any other class, and better.
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Guess I’ll keep my ranger in farm mode until this profession gets fixed.
Why bother with that? Rangers are among the worst PvE professions.
While the shortbow range reduction is annoying in some circumstances, I’ll take the +14% damage BUFF thank you very much!
Er… The 14% damage buff is exclusive to 3 attacks that are there for utility , not damage. They don’t do any damage. Oh yay, 14% more damage! Our daze will do a whole 20 more damage. I’m as happy as they come!
#3: Rangers are the most dependent on their class mechanic… And theirs is particularly unreliable
You can build a guardian without traiting for Virtues, and still be a full build. You can build a Necro without traiting into Death Shroud. You can build a Thief without traiting Steal, and still be a perfectly viable Thief. But if you build a Ranger without traiting into the pet, you’re inherently crippled for it.
An untraited pet does almost no damage (especially now), particularly because of how poorly it hits, it can’t take more than a couple of hits, but is still accounting for “40% of a ranger!”. This is before we even account for the fact that the pet is AI, and AI, in these things, is never as good as human control – at least without cheating wildly. AI does not understand tactics. It does not understand “yomi”. It does not understand planning.
Take fighting games for example, normal AI is stupid and unchallenging to a point where you can beat it with your eyes closed. The only time AI offers any challenge is when it starts cheating wildly – reading inputs and reacting with inhuman accuracy and speed, at which point it is just patently unfair, relying on the computer letting you win more than you outsmarting it.
Hell, look at your own game. The only way the AI ever stands half a chance of fighting a human player is when it is so incredibly buffed up stat and skill wise that any human player using it would be impossible to defeat by any other human of even remotely similar skill.
When it comes to pets, it’s not like our pet is particularly more damaging than others… Mesmer phantasms do die a lot faster, but they also frontload their damage in a direct attack (that doesn’t require them running from the mesmer all the way to the opponent since they appear right next to them), and have immensely smaller cooldowns. Yeah, they’ll die a lot faster than a ranger Pet… Too bad that that’s essentially irrelevant because the Mesmer can just keep sending more and more of them, essentially rendering their pets nearly immortal in practice. And that’s before you even account for their shatters and the Mesmer’s many control mechanics (dazes, immobilizes and stuns).
A warrior’s burst (which are about to be significantly improved in utility if these notes are to be trusted), does not lag immensely on activation. Meanwhile I can’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve died on my ranger because I’ve hit my wolf’s fear, only to see him stand around for several seconds before even starting the long kitten howl animation. Or tried to stealth my jaguar to give him some extra damage, and was forced to mash the hell out of F2 till the bloody thing finally decided “yeah, ok, I’ll get on that”.
No other class relies so heavily on a mechanic that’s so utterly broken and dysfunctional – Just to be a complete character.
Meanwhile, these patch notes address none of the real problems, instead nerfing BM builds because… of reasons… because it’s the only one used.
Yeah, I know most developers are terrified of “power creep”, but sometimes the reason you need to buff things up to the level of the popular things is because of the same reason people are using those popular things – because they’re the only ones that work.
People didn’t pick shortbow over longbow because shortbow was _ better_, They picked it because longbow was bad. It’s a power weapon, on a character with inherently crippled power scales as previously mentioned. On top of that the only time it maintained an half-decent DPS was at max range, with the damage being dwarved as the enemy approached. On top of that the weapon practically offers no defense, a #2 with pathetic damage, and a #5 AoE that roots you in place seemingly forever for no particular payoff – compare to Staff Eles that offer a lot more damage and AoE range through the similar channel of Meteor Shower, while retaining higher damage, and way more utility… And no reliance on stupid broken AI.
You didn’t need to bring the shortbow’s range to 900 (unless you were going to significantly buff up its damage). You needed to change the longbow’s range to 1500 without needing to trait for it.
You needed to at least bring up the ranger’s power scalings to normal before nerfing the pet’s damage so attrociously…
You needed to fix the things that were broken instead of breaking the things that were fixed…
(Yes, it’s long, no there’s no tl;dr)
So, as we all know there has been some leaked patch notes… Now, it’s entirely possible they’re nothing more than someone’s wild fanfiction, but to be quite honest, they sound very plausible, with most classes receiving interesting and mostly needed nerfs/buffs…
… down to moment they completely screw the ranger class over, and over, and over, with absolutely no sense of direction or purpose other than “kitten rangers”.
I am disappointed. Very. With every other class receiving seemingly carefully considered changes, even ones I may not agree with but can concede to having a point, the ranger’s change list seems mostly a collection of arbitrary buffs and nerfs because of reasons.
Even if this “leak” is a lie, until different patch notes are released that break the recent trend, I remain convinced ANet completely lost sight of what they wanted the ranger class to be at some point, and is now just throwing changes around hoping to find some sort of… something.
The ranger class right now, pre-patch, is probably in the best spot it has ever been. It has a lot of flaws, in fact it is inherently flawed, but at least it has some viable builds, and it’s honestly hard to call any of them overpowered. They’re good, they’re strong, but they have issues that can be easily exploited to level the playing field. But now they’re just generally crippling everything again, to the point where I’m having issues imagining why I’d play a ranger over any other class… With pets and shortbow receiving a completely unnecessary and uncalled for nerf, what does that leave? They’ll underperform in PvP, and they already underperform in PvE.
As it is, Rangers are flawed at their core, and I’d like to approach some of that.
#1: Rangers are inherently crippled… because of reasons.
It’s no secret that Rangers’ power scalings are horrid – about 60%-70% of what they should be. According to ANet that’s because “we have a pet”. In other words, Rangers have about 60-70% damage to make up for having a class mechanic,
I’m sorry… what? What 40% of their power do Guardians sacrifice for having a passive and active burn, a passive regen with an active secondary heal and a passive block with an extra active block? What 40% scaling do Mesmers sacrifice for having more reliable “pets” with higher damage and the shattering mechanic? What 40% of their power do Thieves relinquish for stealing and spammable skills?
What’s that? Nothing? That’s the whole point of everyone having class mechanics? Well, someone forgot to tell the Ranger team that.
“Oh but if you un-nerfed the ranger’s scalings they’d be terribly OP!”. Would they? I mean…
#2: The only viable ranger builds right now are the ones that aren’t inherently nerfed.
Condition damage isn’t inherently nerfed on the ranger. Neither is defensive ability (toughness or healing ratios). Yet these are the only viable builds a ranger has. A better scaling would not significantly affect either of these, it would only give power-based builds the ability to not be 60% of an effective character. Especially now that the pets have been so viciously nerfed…
Which brings us to another issue:
Yay! Ignorance and paranoia! Let’s all rage wildly about something we know nothing about! Everyone welcome on the bandwagon! Hurrah!
Things we know about Torment:
- it was designed as a condition primarily for Necros to solve the problem of people easily running away from them without giving them significant mobility as well.
- ANet decided it would effectively compliment other classes, namely Thieves and mesmers.
That’s it. We don’t know how powerful it’ll be. We don’tknow scaling, cooldowns, durations, potential interactions with traits… nothing.
In fact, the only educated guess we can make is that it’ll scale with condition damage, since it’s a condition designed originally for Necros. And even that is tentative at best. How many thief or mesmer condition builds do you know that are really all that right now?
Yeah… calm the kitten down. Tim foil hats back in their drawers, and fingers off the fire alarms please. Jeeez…
…I sincerely hope not, as I have 8 character. Otherwise I’m one schizophrenic motherkittener.
But seriously, I take a different approach to it: I create characters. I start by creating characters with personalities. Characters that would fit the role I gave them. After I create their personality everything else falls in place. The choices I make through them become the choices I’d expect them to make.
For example, my Norn is a warrior. He’s a pragmatist that, while far from being an idiot, prefers bluntness over subterfuge. “The shortest path between two points is always a straight line”. As a strong fighter, living within Norn culture, that fit him like a glove, and growing up he’d have learned to fight his way out of most trouble. Sure, you CAN go find a key, or try to pick the lock of that bandit hideout… But it’s a lot faster to just smash the door in. And if the people inside notice? Then we’ll just have to smash them as well.
On the other hand my Necromancer is a human, a noble. Born of unknown parents, adopted by nobility, he grew up among the politics and social “plays” of the upper class. The manipulation, the “shadow plays”, the deals, the covert and overt… They excited and intrigued him. He learned the rules of the game, and how to play it like the best. He also found himself interested in the art of necromancy – after all, what is necromancy if not another form of manipulation, not only of life but of death as well! He found an old necromancer in the swamps, secretly become his student and learned from him. Though he always worked towards the good of all, he’s Machiavellian to the bone – a firm believer that the ends can very well justify the means, and while generally pleasant and amiable, he could become quite the sadistic should the need (or opportunity) arise.
Everyone of my characters was designed with such a story first and foremost. This way they become more than classes. They become actual characters.
Patently! And it’s not subjective at all xD You ppl on the internets tease
You know, I actually double checked the word just to be sure I didn’t “accidentally a different meaning”, but no, no, that’s exactly what I meant.
Swapping a hammer Warrior for a hammer guardian is ridiculous, as they’re completely different outside the fact that they wear heavy armor and use a hammer.
It’s as utterly ridiculous a notion as saying “I didn’t feel like respecing my shatter mesmer to sword, so I picked my condition bunker ranger that also uses a sword!”, or “I couldn’t be bothered finding my combat boots, so I went to war with my slippers”… Etc, etc.
Yes, the game could totally use “save alternative build” kind of features. No, your example is still utterly arbitrary and pointless.
I play whatever I feel like it at the moment. Sometimes that is what’s “hot”, sometimes it isn’t.
That said, characters are tools. If a certain class gets nerfed to the point where they can no longer perform their role effectively, or if another class is buffed to the point where they become better at a certain role than another, previously better, class, then I’ll change to that class whenever I’m looking to fulfill that role.
For example, despite loving Necro, they are quite flawed, to the point where lately I just don’t bother. I have other classes doing similar roles with less issues, so why not?
I agree that it would be nice to have pre-set builds (traits and gear) for quick switching and such. One of those “quality of life” things that many other mmos already do.
That said, your example is patently ludicrous and detracts from the valid point of the whole thing.
Man, the rapier is beautiful… would totally want 2 or 3 of those. The pistol is quite nice as well. Here’s to hoping it’s neither time limited or RNG.
I was seriously hoping this would be fixed by now… Given the “morale” mechanic in a couple of these events (namely Gates of Arah Pre-event and Balthazar chain), meaning you can’t let the escorted die too much, the current state and amount of Risen Nobles is ridiculous.
A noble by itself is fine, but when 10 or more spawn at once they simply insta-gib the NPCs. You can’t do much about that. Even granting them protection tends to be for naught.
ANet needs to either remove the morale mechanic, lower the number of risen nobles, or lower their AoE.
We maxed out the healing potential in each class to what we found its limit to be.
Numbers.
Builds used – exact builds, traits and gear.
Proper, exact, data.
I’ll take this seriously once you provide the above. Vague, ultimately meaningless, statements such as the one quoted need not apply.
Because people keep buying into it.
For all the talk and rage of Southsun’s crates, I keep seeing more and more threads about “omg I bought rich coffers and got nothing”. Hell, I bet if I checked I’d find many of those people were the ones saying they would never buy glorified lottery tickets again.
It’s kittening MW2 all over again: people learn nothing, so they get what they deserve.
Dragon beards were too powerful so they had to be nerfed.
They’ll probably fix them at some point… won’t make the kitten things any less fuglier though…
Yeah… Crab scuttle was a pain before, mostly because of the wurm mission triggering half-way through, and becoming very difficult to clear due to scaling (and nearly impossible to clear as a crab except through sheer dumb luck), but with the new events getting in the way… sheesh…
Yeah, crab scuttle needs to be reworked, preferably to also avoid the wurm area entirely.
a daily shouldn’t be something you have to actively focus on. just randomly doing whatever you want ingame for 20 minutes should award you with it. otherwise it feels forced and will alienate players.
[Citation Needed]
Wait, wait, let me guess: “Because I said so” ?
You can finish almost every daily “set” within 20 minutes of normal play. If what you want is the laurel, you can even do it on PvP, which is even faster.
nothing is ever free,
Also, I have had actually more then one free lunch.
Actually that is a misconception. You’ve never had a free lunch. Someone paid for it, and you can be sure you paid for it in some fashion as well.
The thing is that they should, unless absolutely mandatory, never hunt down “criminals” by punishing legit players as well.
As it is, the system is punishing legitimate players quite a lot… Really think they should reconsider some of their choices in this area.
…You do realize that stealth stomping isn’t even the top 3 strongest forms of stomps right? Not even Stealth + quickness (which has been severely nerfed a couple months ago). Not to mention burning the extra quickness cooldown and side effects for a stomp… Rarely desirable. Hell, most thief builds won’t even want to have it slotted, let alone used.
Invincibility stomp (Engineer and Elementalist) can only be prevented through displacement, stability stomp (a lot of char, build dependent, but mostly warrior, ele and guardian) can only be prevented by displacement or killing the enemy, and teleport stomp (thief) is the only skill that can’t be prevented through displacement alone, can be harder to “catch”/target, but can be interrupted/killed.
Comparatively all stealth stomp stops is targeted skills. Any form of untargeted attack still goes.
Biased list is biased. As a Guardian, I also have access to teleport stomp (Judge’s Intervention),
The strength of Thief’s teleport stomp is that they start the stomp, move away from the target with shadow’s return, sometimes into places they can’t be hit from, then teleport back right as the stomp is finishing. You can’t do the teleport away part with a Guardian, effectively rendering it far less useful.
‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder….’
All there really is to say on that. Kind of goes along the same lines of ’It’s so hideous it’s cute’
What one person may find ‘ugly’ another may find ‘beautiful’ (or because it’s ugly its beautiful, such as with the example you provided)
This.
As far as I’m concerned there seem to be a lot of people who love ugly. Otherwise you’d never see CoF armour, easily one of the ugliest in the game.
They start around the :00 to :07 mark, just check LA for 10 minutes every hour.
I know the average player has absolutely no concept of statistics but good heavens…
Ladies, it’s random. RNG is RNG… etc. If you notice a significant decrease, over a very large sample (let’s say 100-300, to be very generous) over a significant period of time (i.e.: not one day), then you might be on to something.
Your loot being slightly better yesterday means kitten all. It’s honestly such a ridiculous notion…
DR does not affect event participation… It affects loot drops (sort of like magic find, but in reverse, and affect quantity as well as quality), after you’ve been roaming the exact same area for long…
I honestly don’t care about skins,
ITT: “My opinion is gospel and everyone who likes things I don’t is wrong”.
I’ll say this: Most people are complaining about RNG because most people don’t like the feeling of working hard for a mere chance, for a potential to, maybe, receive what you worked for/achieving your goal.
That’s as far as I’m willing to dignify this with an answer.
Anyway, in stead of buying stuff in the gemstores I do want to support ArenaNet and so I buy the collectors edition.
Which comes with extra stuff. Which is what you paid extra for. As for “do I get a thank you for buying gems?”: Did you buy gems?
[…] didn’t buy gems.
Thanks for playing.