Guild Wars 2

Sykper.6583:

Couple thoughts:

- An NPC that you need to support/heal that provides a certain buff to your raid or debuff to the encounter boss to make the fight successful. No. Placing the fate of your group in the hands of an NPC which you have no direct control over is a stupid idea. (See, AC path 3)

- The bomb mechanic from the first boss (where you have to damage split by standing in it, or everyone takes a nuke lol) is a solid way, it can also be blocked too so that’s a really nice mechanic.

- Retaliation on a mob that also negates (or more menacingly, reflects condition damage) during a few phases in the fight is another method, that can be controlled by players simply waiting for self-healing, but Enrage Timers do exist in raids and they might have to keep doing damage to make it.

It’s kind of hard creating mechanics for healing, we should make a thread dedicated to ideas around it. Maybe even put ideas on mechanics on Crowd Control and Damage Soak.

I’ve always hated traditional MMO raid mechanics, and I’m sad to see them weaseling their way into GW2. There has to be a way to create truly challenging PvE content without including things like enrage timers and unavoidable damage.

Kidel.2057:

Quarktastic.1027:

Kidel.2057:

LughLongArm.5460:

LoL, I was palying it yesterday, and while doing Okittenpt trying to convince myself I’m getting improvemnts to my build but actually my old build is probably stronger in many spects. So ya, I think litle bufss and twiks are required, if its getting nerfed, I guss i’m back to WS,NM,BM.

Lol dude, http://imgur.com/rUAMaID
900k heal. 3 seconds to load Celestial Avatar. I give you that Druid is not good for dungeons (top kek), but in almost every other game type it’s OP.

No other healer is nearly close to it. So either nerf Druid or buff the others, since I don’t want a game where there is only 1 healer and it’s required. Raids being my top worry here.

Yes, druid heals are stronger and more easily applied. But they have little group support outside of direct healing and condition removal.

I’d gladly take a cleric guardian over any druid, even though the druid still has stronger heals.

What? Not at all. You’re only looking at druid stuff. You can still have warhorn, signets and spirits and apply perma protection and might, and also AOE revive like warriors do. Warhorn can apply might, swiftness, fury and regen if traited.

@Kitty.1502
Bunker druid is not easy at all to kill. Pretty sure it can endure any 1vs1.

I thought we were talking about team support, not 1vs1. That aside, spirits are still really easy to kill, and actually reviving an ally with spirit of nature is such an incredible feat of skill, I marvel any time someone actually manages to pull it off.

Guardians have group aegis/stability/protection/stun break, while still having strong healing. In order to do all of the things you listed as a druid, you essentially need to run 3 spirits, leaving you with only 1 stun break and zero glyphs.

Reminds me of the days before they added a minion cap in GW1.

Norjena.5172:

Anchoku.8142:

DTATL.9641:

Pompeia.5483:

Third, Gravedigger… I know it has been mentioned but it needs something to handle not being spammed for bosses/mobs that have a large HP pool. Maybe, instead of reducing the cooldown 100%, only drop it down 75% or something… I get that it is a clean-up styled skill, but it really is silly and, with the trait to leech HP on the skill, you are not going to die in these cases…

Thank you. First one I see that feels the same as I. Gravedigger is nice but for mobs with large Healthpools it’s just silly(and quite boring). Personally I feel that the full CD reduction is pointless as it has quite low CD anyway. And everything else you can only really use it on once or twice. I would rather have something else on it. The lifesteal on the trait is pretty bad though. When gravedigger is such a slow skill the amount of life stolen should be higher.

Grave Digger generates no LF. I found that if I spam it too much, I have no LF for DS. I think it is fine as it is. The lack of LF punishes players for not managing the pool well enough. It is like using up all your initiative.

U don´t need RS in pve. It does less dps then GS and especially GD spam.

You don’t need RS if your group is good at stacking might and vulnerability. Otherwise, it’s most certainly necessary. Besides, with Dhuumfire and reaper’s onslaught, RS DPS isn’t that far behind gravedigger spam.

Though, I find myself using blighter’s boon because the reaper lacks sustain without blood magic.

I haven’t seen this brought up yet, but even if it has, I’m bringing it up again.

[Decimate Defenses] needs more info. How long does the buff last? Is there a cap? What is the duration of each stack?

Currently there is no indicator whatsoever that this trait works, other than noticing more critical hits in combat, which is anecdotal at best.

Kidel.2057:

LughLongArm.5460:

LoL, I was palying it yesterday, and while doing Okittenpt trying to convince myself I’m getting improvemnts to my build but actually my old build is probably stronger in many spects. So ya, I think litle bufss and twiks are required, if its getting nerfed, I guss i’m back to WS,NM,BM.

Lol dude, http://imgur.com/rUAMaID
900k heal. 3 seconds to load Celestial Avatar. I give you that Druid is not good for dungeons (top kek), but in almost every other game type it’s OP.

No other healer is nearly close to it. So either nerf Druid or buff the others, since I don’t want a game where there is only 1 healer and it’s required. Raids being my top worry here.

Yes, druid heals are stronger and more easily applied. But they have little group support outside of direct healing and condition removal.

I’d gladly take a cleric guardian over any druid, even though the druid still has stronger heals.

krzysiek.9061:

Mobs in Verdant Brink aren’t easy now because of the “issue” but because of Druid. He heals everything and everyone and you don’t even notice.

My reaper notices. But doesn’t care because mobs in verdant brink are still easy enough.

Knighthonor.4061:

Scalpels.2809:

Knighthonor.4061:

Lol you lost all credit there. If you believe a Guardian can dish out as much healing as a single Druid…… yeah I wont argue with you on this much. Clearly you have not played healer in SPvP yet with Druid….. go back to your Power Ranger Druid dude…..

It’s obvious from all your posts that you’re a healing fanboy. I’m sure you did great in other MMOs with healing, but GW2 has never been about the heals. There’s other ways to keep people up rather than just healing through it all, which you will not be able to do. GW2 players have been doing it this entire time.

Learn the other classes.

well it is now! developers words laugh out loud

Druid is 100% healing and little else. Guardian provides strong group healing as well as Aegis/stability/protection.

My consensus after actually playing the druid: Guardian support is still better.

Scalpels.2809:

On the whole, the Druid doesn’t bring anything to the table that others can’t do and even do better.

So we’re still par for the course then.

Good to know.

Not a chance. At the current pace of the current story, we’ve got at least 15 more years of dragons to fight.

Varonth.5830:

Nyth.3492:

Ruderasta.7809:

How are you guys sticking to anyone in pvp? I can prepare a thanksgiving meal in between the second and third sword swings, and thats the one that applies our most reliable slow as this spec?

GS isn’t the best for PvP. You can make it work, but you’ll be very dependent on your secondary weapon set.

Other than that, nothing much changed. Necro’s are still horrible mobility wise; but instead of just being a bit tanky, we can now also brawl quite well in close range.

Greatsword has the same problem many weapons have. Blind spam completely removes it from the game. One blindspammer in the enemy team and that weapon becomes almost a non-factor. I guess at some point ANet realises that blind spam is a problem and throws in some diminishing returns.

Blind spam was the same way in GW1. Except it was courteous and gave you a 10% chance to actually hit your target. Downside was, it didn’t go away after one attack.

Anet has always had a penchant for hating on melee professions. Something about a risk/reward thing…I guess.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Rich Fuel.7253:

less then 10 min he died im telling you

If it took you 10 minutes to kill a trash mob then he didn’t “melt”, you beat your heads against it for a stupid amount of time because he was too hard for you to determine the mechanics.

Remember you only have 8 minutes to kill the actual boss which has 10x the hp as the red boss.

Timers are basically DPS checks anyway. Besides, does anyone know the actual mechanics of the boss yet? I’m pretty sure they won’t be identical to the red enemy.

nearlight.3064:

Yeah basically, VP is generally needed unless you take a combination of blighter’s boon/unholy martyr, which is still dependent on having allies around you to work. The other thing I can see being problematic is that spite is mandatory on most non-minion builds because mightstacking is too easy and too strong, since might is so strong in this game, and its synergy with reaper is so great.

I can get to 25 stacks of might on reaper faster than anything else I’ve ever played if I play spite/SR/reaper (the most common build for power and celestial) and I’m just a little concerned about it, since chilling force is making it a bit over the top. I’d honestly suggest nerfing spite’s sources of might, spreading them to other traitlines (ie move reaper’s might to soul reaping or curses) and raising chilling victory to compensate.

I wouldn’t worry too much, I feel like reaper’s might is going to get nerf hammered between BWE3 and launch. Probably reduced duration combined with a 1s icd.

meow one twenty.4376:

Serious question: did Death’s Charge become an Evade? I’ve been getting “Evade” popping up when I use skills against Reapers using It.

I’ve seen this evade a couple times while reaping in verdant brink. I still can’t figure out what’s causing it.

I feel like the overall difficulty of verdant brink has increased. Aside from the nerfed mushrooms (seriously…those things were broken AF) every enemy with a break bar got more difficult, as breakbars are now (for the most part) way overtuned.

So no more wading into groups of veteran punishers and mass interrupting their hammer time. And I have yet to see the wyvern’s break bar move more than 10 pixels.

Elder Angelus.6298:

Agree with the original poster, when I fought the legendary wyvern with about 50 people, we only got the breakbar to move about 3 pixels and it became a long, drawn out fight. On the upside, people would actually revive completely dead players, so that was nice to see.

I also found with my mace/mace interrupt warrior with bull rush, kick, and stomp, I had a very difficult time interrupting veterans solo. Plain veterans that had a break bar up all the time were ok, but the ones with limited windows were impossible, I couldn’t unload attacks quickly enough. Generally I would land the 3 adrenaline mace for the 3 second stun, and bullrush for 2 second knockdown, and it would only move the bar about 20%. Maybe the veterans were scaled up and I didn’t notice, but CC felt about as useful as the old defiance system. Fought champion hylek with Faren, and we only broke the break bar when it basically already dead, 10% health.

In BWE2, My reaper was completely shutting down mordrem punishers without even trying. Now that break bars have been buffed, and chill/blind/cripple affect break bars differently, I haven’t been able to break them at all.

I miss being able to wade into a huge group of punishers and slaughter them all by mashing buttons, but I do agree that needed to be changed. However, I feel like break bars are currently way overtuned…Though when I expressed that belief in the last wyvern fight I attempted, I got white-knighted into oblivion.

Knighthonor.4061:

Shirk.6421:

was afraid it’s gonna be like this. Well, crap… Here you go full condi clear every 10 or so seconds…

simply remove that trait. Rather have ability to go Form than a full condition clear.

Make it clear 2 conditions instead of all of them, and put avatar form on a 10 second cooldown ala death shroud. Then we can enter it whenever we have >10% celestial whatever….right?

Edit: better yet, make it convert those conditions to boons.

BrotherBelial.3094:

Blade.8497:

Some class are harder to learn and harder play. Some players just love it. Warrior is easy mode if you like that.

Not really. But think that if you want.

Warrior is certainly a lower skill floor profession. Whether or not it’s the lowest of them all is up for debate, but it’s not nearly as intricate or complex as say, an elementalist or engineer.

heartless.6803:

I get the feeling that it wasn’t nerfed to nerf content but because the mission was increasingly tedious and annoying after the like 3rd time. I started to log out and log back in once I zoned into that mission. It cleared me from doing that stupid mission for the 10 billionth time.

Sipers and tormentors are freaking annoying as hell. For vast majority of people that go into Maguuma they’ll get killed repeatedly from them. Because they follow the lolmeta ZERKER ONLY!!!!11!! mentality of the half-brained community.

The only time I get killed by snipers is when they lol360noscope me from offscreen, like when one spawns behind my camera. Tormentors on the other hand….their projectiles may move slowly, but they hit like trucks and are extremely hard to see amongst the green background of the jungle. I would argue for a bit more visibility there.

Agemnon.4608:

Botting goes beyond mere mechanical exploits and is downright cheating. Rangers need an uptime nerf and need to have the ability to spread mobs out removed (ranger and other classes too because instead of cleaving or AoEing that group you’re then forced to hit one at a time meaning fewer people get fewer tags) but have some compensating buffs to make up for anti-griefing measures.

Rangers need a what nerf? The ability to spread out mobs?

What am I even reading?

Chameleon Dude.1564:

I know who I am. If I’m holding alt, I’m usually trying to find something. This isn’t helpful. :s

I have several skills bound to (Alt+number). It’s annoying, but I’ve gotten used to it.

Don’t mash your auto attack key while casting a well.

The only time I’ve had an issue is when I accidentally hit 2 of my utility keys at the same time.

Lily.1935:

Rising Dusk.2408:

554883kitten.1705:

Weird, cause everyone else in my guild insists that other projectile absorptions and reflects don’t work against those projectiles. Guess I might have to get on my thief and try to see how smoke screen works in comparison.

Many of them used to, but don’t anymore. I am entirely certain that CPC blocking the normally unblockable projectiles is unintended and will be fixed in the next bug fix round. It is not critical enough that it will get hotfixed, though.

That said, I love the new CPC a lot. I wish the special effect would be updated to look like the Toxic Alliance krait AOE field, but that can happen later. Functionally it’s great right now.

The only thing I absolutely hate is the self-weakness. Seriously, any other condition, but weakness is crippling to DPS and has to be cleansed immediately or you cannot even capitalize on the projectile destruction.

Should poison. ALso, taking it with master of corrupting cripples you litterally. Which is just worse.

I feel like corruptions should force you to sacrifice health, instead of applying conditions to you.

Then you could mess with traits that do things like reduce the amount of health you sacrifice, or do things to enemies (conditions etc.) when you sacrifice health.

Spitzilla.4193:

How this could even reach live server …

The worst thing you can do to someone is to give him something and then take away :p …

It’s the status quo for rangers. See: Clarion Bond.

In all fairness though, we got to hang on to that sweet double leap finisher for 3 years. I blame quick draw for bringing it to light.

Gotta kill it faster is all.

In all seriousness though, this fight needs to be redesigned. Placing your party’s safety entirely in the hands of an NPC was a stupid design decision.

Gotejjeken.1267:

PvE players amuse me. Raids are said to be the most rewarding PvE content out there…and Druids will probably be a big part of that. Yet they are useless in PvE?

Druids will either be absolutely required for raids, or be completely undesired in raids.

If raids can be completed without massive amounts of direct healing, then druids will will serve little purpose there.

Agemnon.4608:

“How wrong depends on how much the person intends to price gouge and/or the financial circumstances in that person’s life.”

I think reselling is wrong no matter the person’s circumstances. Of course I just mean within a game itself.

“But, in a game, no one faces actual starvation, or other unbearable hardship, so it is rather different.”

Apparently you’ve never been in a heavily understaffed area of Silverwaste where teagarrifs chain knock you down and hit so hard you die in two or three hits. That’s not even considering the guaranteed damage you’ll take if you dodge through their charge. Don’t even get me started on rangers who burst down non-veteran or mobs with very little HP left so fewer people can tag them or tag an event at the last second. Ranger upstart on attacks needs a serious nerf the damage from rapid fire is too instant and too much.

Rangers need to be nerfed now?

Don’t get me wrong, my ranger can burst down veteran teragriffs and thrashers in a matter of seconds, but so can almost every other profession. For the record, I don’t use a longbow (or any other ranged weapon). Because of that, vile thrashers give me issue, but a herd of terragriffs is NP.

Yes, I have been chain CC’d to death, but mostly on my necromancer, who has very few stunbreaks and almost no stability.

I feel like the celestial avatar thing was originally going to be the elementalist’s shtick. For whatever reason, anet scrapped the idea for the elementalist and haphazardly tacked it onto the ranger.

Zenos Osgorma.2936:

Shirk.6421:

I still want to know what happens when you use the Fire Wyverns F2 while having taunt traited…

its a animtion so i’;d guess they will walk towards where the wyvern’s (hit box) was during its cast of Fire ring keeping them inside the circle untill it lands or untill they stun break it.

If taunt had a more usable range (240 is pitiful) I could see it being more usable outside of pvp. If the fire wyvern’s F2 deals decent damage along with the burning application, using taunt to keep your target in the fire field could be devastating.

If this is a big enough problem, I propose two solutions.

Allow healing in death shroud.

Convert incoming healing into life force while death shroud is active.

Laurence.6751:

Obviously the “zerg meta” build for Ranger will not include Druid trait line; however since the designer mentioned that “zerg meta” itself will be gone in HoT, I am looking forward to see what can Druid bring to the table.

Nature Magic line is still quite weak as part of a support role though.

Zerk meta will still be a thing. And if it isn’t (i.e. bosses require vit/toughness stacking) then players will just move to the next best offensive set (valkyrie/cavalier).

I personally can’t stand being a healbot, and if raids devolve into “druid or kick” I’ll just go ahead and eat that shoe.

In HoT, you will be able to rep one guild at a time, but you will be able to see (and use) the guild chat of all your current guilds.

Is that not a fair compromise?

Shadow steps and teleports should honestly work the way they work in other games. i.e. if you can place the target circle there, you can teleport there.

Would it break the game? Definitely. Would it be less frustrating? Absolutely.

Not being able to shadowstep/teleport to any place you can’t walk to without jumping is just stupid. Why bother teleporting when I can just walk?

Ok I Did It.2854:

First up, I love playing Necro, I was looking forward to playing the GS when we had access, but after playing it, I have to honestly say I don’t see where this weapon will be of any use in the game, maybe just maybe it could be used in PvP but its that slow that the chances are you will be burst down and splatted before you even get a chance,

Unless there are major changes to it, I don’t honestly see me ever using a GS.

Does anyone else feel like this.

Highest DPS in death shroud: Press 1 repeatedly
Highest DPS in lich form: Press 1 repeatedly
Highest DPS with mainhand dagger: Press 1 repeatedly….

See where I’m going with this?

At least the greatsword allows you to press something other than 1. (press 2 to win).

Lome.8239:

On a side note, Norn is actually a pretty good choice for Fractals once you reach that stage in the game. Their racial elite solos the cooling room (although Ranger can do it without it anyway).

You’ll see what I mean when you get there.

I’ve never been able to solo the reactor room as a ranger at scale 50. Though I think it’s because entering the reactor room replaces your weapons with those useless skills, which also removes any agony resistance on your weapons (even though it shouldn’t remove the agony resistance).

Moa Lith.8140:

When you reach level 80, you will have more hero points than what is required to unlock all the skills and traits (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Hero_point)

As for the race, it really depends on your personal choice. It does not have any impact on the performance of your character. The only difference between the races are the “racial skills” (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Racial_skill).

As for the other professions, it depends on your play style / what you like. For me, I prefer to use a ranged/caster character than a melee character.

I prefer melee characters personally. And melee ranger is a lot of fun (if you can learn to play around that crappy sword auto attack). It definitely has a higher skill ceiling than a pewpew longbow ranger.

I’ve been trying ranged combat again with a necromancer, but I still find myself rushing into melee range, even with lich form and death shroud having mostly ranged skills.

It looks like I was just confused by the shoddy forum design.

Almighty moderators, feel free to trash this thread at your leisure.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

It looks like a vine covered cat to me.

And I’ll attach the image for those that haven’t been to FB or Twitter to see it.

I don’t see anything but swirly artistic background colors.

You used to be able to revive him. He just kinda stood there though.

You can also get back to that side of the fort by swimming around the island. (or you used to).

I know this is likely to prevent people from flooding moderators with angry messages, but for some reason, I can’t help but find it infuriating.

I’m beginning to suspect that the moderators are actually just bots.

If you are human, Mr. forum moderator, why am I not allowed to talk to you?

Lily.1935:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Quarktastic.1027:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Quarktastic.1027:

Whirl finishers: Whirl finisher bolts are capped at 5 bolts per skill, and only deal 198 damage per bolt. It is technically a DPS increase, but again, negligible enough to not matter over the course of a fractal/dungeon run.

Not true on the cap. For example, Soul Spiral and Whirling Axe both send out far more than 5 bolts. Each one can actually shoot out more along the lines of 30 or more. Shredder Gyro puts them all to shame, though, setting off 30 whirl finishers on its own (with many, many bolts).

Whirl finishers will produce more than 5 bolts, but only the first 5 will do anything. After 5 bolts hit, the rest of the bolts do nothing.

Which is why whirl finishers are pretty much useless.

Considering there are zero texts, whether in-game or even on the wiki, or even anyone else stating this, I will have to call bullkitten on this claim.

Perhaps you are confusing things with Chilling Bolts where only the most recent 5 matter?

I was sending out about 60 chilling bolts with when I was whirling it with soul spiral in the beta. Not all of them mattered, but I was traited for vuln on chill so I could stack an entire group up with vuln really quickly. I tried it out with confusion bolts too. That was fun. got about 13 stacks since they were random. So yeah. What he’s saying is complete bunk.

My damage log must be lying to me then. I’m aware that only leeching bolts appear in the damage log, but I never saw more than 5 make contact, even while standing inside the hitbox of a large enemy. In fact, producing leeching bolts with death spiral did nothing at all. No damage recorded in the damage log, no healing. I suspect either death spiral is bugged, or leeching bolts themselves are bugged.

Electro.4173:

Multiple-leap finisher makes more sense on Rocket Charge, given that its actually 3 distinct attacks vs a single charge for Swoop. I’m fine with that difference.

Rocket Charge getting multiple evades, on the other hand… that I’m a bit jealous of in terms of Swoop. One of my biggest wants since day 1 for Swoop has been evade on the leap portion of the skill so I could use it to dash through projectiles and damage fields, but I seem to remember it being said at some point that an evade on a leap would be “overpowered”, which is why they just put the evade on the attack portion of the skill. But here comes Rocket Charge with evades on its leaps? So… evade on Swoop’s dash now?

Swoop is technically a two part skill. Quadruple leaping water fields with quick draw may have been a bit much…but imagine what a scrapper can do with that water field from their healing turret.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Quarktastic.1027:

Whirl finishers: Whirl finisher bolts are capped at 5 bolts per skill, and only deal 198 damage per bolt. It is technically a DPS increase, but again, negligible enough to not matter over the course of a fractal/dungeon run.

Not true on the cap. For example, Soul Spiral and Whirling Axe both send out far more than 5 bolts. Each one can actually shoot out more along the lines of 30 or more. Shredder Gyro puts them all to shame, though, setting off 30 whirl finishers on its own (with many, many bolts).

Whirl finishers will produce more than 5 bolts, but only the first 5 will do anything. After 5 bolts hit, the rest of the bolts do nothing.

Which is why whirl finishers are pretty much useless.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Quarktastic.1027:

Lightning hammer auto is both a blast finisher and an AoE blind. I’ll give you aegis, but blind is only 10% effective on current bosses, and on new HoT bosses, it doesn’t do anything (except damage the break bar slightly)And like I said before, weakness doesn’t affect critical hits, so it’s less reliable than outright healing.

Dude, Weakness not affecting crits was changed just a few months after launch. What have you been on?

In fact, Weakness neuters crits, since if a crit fumbles (they can) all crit damage is negated.

Besides, Lily’s point about Dark fields being better was on the offense front. Those lifesteal procs actually contribute quite a bit of damage.

Alright, I was wrong about crits, but weakness still only reduces damage 50% of the time. Against bosses with slow, powerful attacks, you’re playing damage roulette. As for dark fields being better offensively because lifesteal procs:

Projectile finishers: yes, but most rapidly spammable projectile finishers are 20% finishers. Making the damage increase negligible.

Whirl finishers: Whirl finisher bolts are capped at 5 bolts per skill, and only deal 198 damage per bolt. It is technically a DPS increase, but again, negligible enough to not matter over the course of a fractal/dungeon run.

I love trolling people with my SAB minis. Please don’t nerf them ._.

Lily.1935:

Quarktastic.1027:

Lily.1935:

Quarktastic.1027:

Two lightning hammers in a water field gives you both proactive and reactive defenses. (not that any of your proactive field combos work on bosses anyway)

GG.

Fields don’t stack. Also blind reduced the break bar last I checked, weakness still reduces their damage, frost armor gives you a passive 10% damage reduction, and stealth prevents you from getting focus fired by the boss.

GG.

I know fields don’t stack, but blast finishers do.

Do you even lightning hammer?

Blind reduces break bars, but so does other soft CC that’s more readily available (like cripple). Weakness doesn’t reduce the effectiveness of critical hits, and only lasts 50% as long on bosses. Blasting a water field heals for more than that 3 seconds of 10% damage reduction will prevent.

I’m not saying other fields aren’t useful, but in the current meta, spamming blast finishers in a water field is basically like turning on god mode.

So you’re double blasting water? That isn’t both proactive and reactive. That’s just reactive.

Healing will always be weaker than damage mitigation. This is just a fact. We know this to be true, I can prove it in ever single RPG ever mad. Thats why heals have to heal for so much. Aegis blocking a 5k attack is better than healing after the fact for 5k, blind causing an attack to miss is the same, weakness reducing the damage of all outgoing attacks are more valuable.

Lightning hammer auto is both a blast finisher and an AoE blind. I’ll give you aegis, but blind is only 10% effective on current bosses, and on new HoT bosses, it doesn’t do anything (except damage the break bar slightly)And like I said before, weakness doesn’t affect critical hits, so it’s less reliable than outright healing.

nekretaal.6485:

What does chill do to the legendary imbued shaman?

His phase transition is a skill with a cooldown. Chill lengthens this cooldown, allowing players to kill him in just 2 phases.

Brother Dulfite.5793:

Any old school players that remembers the glory of the great monk strike in gw1? We all got together in one city and refused to play until we got our way. We got our way

It was a farce and nothing came of it. I’ll bet no one even remembers why it began in the first place.

Also, Lina, Alesia, and Mhenlo never went on strike.

This was the only living story achievement I didn’t solo. Though it can be done.

Only advice anyone can offer is: get a group.

Ithamir.5928:

While the 2 sec aoe freeze from “Chilled to the bone!” is nice, the chill duration is only 9.6 secs and the skill is blockable. Reaper of Grenth when using Reaper spec will provide a 21.6 secs of unblockable chill.

That seems very potent to me. Especially under the type of encounters I described in my OP (like the Imbued Shaman). Where chilling the boss will deny him from going into the same phase/skill again, which can be very useful. Maybe even “meta”. In this particular scenario “Chilled to the bone!” can’t even be used.

Furthermore, right now the cd is irrelevant. Be it 90 seconds or 180, you will only use the skill once during the boss encounter where it’s the most crucial.

I think I may have made up my mind. Viability is more important to me than cosmetic is. Too bad that racials have such a big impact on gameplay. Unless you guys think that Reaper of Grenth will be nerfed… Ahhh I’m so torn.

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Racial skills have next to zero impact on gameplay. The Imbued shaman is the only boss encounter I can think of where applying chill actually makes the fight noticeably easier. And that’s likely to change when HoT releases and big changes come to both bosses and the fractals. The fact that chilled to the bone can be blocked and reaper of grenth cannot is also only applicable in that one specific fight.

In HoT:

Chill will apply only minor damage to break bars. The freeze from “Chilled to the bone” will apply much more damage to the bar over a shorter period of time. I was able to break most vets/elites and some champions instantly with that skill alone. The AoE freeze is also much more useful as an engagement tool, to pin enemies down long enough for you to well bomb them, as well as interrupt their initial attacks when you first aggro them.