Guild Wars 2

Guardians are and have been the most balanced class since launch. No major changes is a good thing. Most of the other classes have had rides from the top to the bottom of the balance roller coaster.

nekretaal.6485:

I didn’t say bad, I said boring.

Obviously extra toughness is something we all like. Soul Compression does look bad (unless they nerf base on-kill DS generation which none of us want them to do)

You expected a 5 and 15 point minor trait to be exciting and build defining?

We complained about those traits for a year and a half. If they are finally changed we should all be ecstatic.

Edit: assuming they are the minors, of course.

nekretaal.6485:

They both seem really boring.

I don’t understand Soul Compression at all. It is like GW1 Soul Reaping before a nerf put it on a timer: either you are in a place with a lot of stuff dies and you don’t need it, or you are in a place where hardly anything dies and you don’t need it.

Too bad that the New Grandmaster trait isn’t the new 15 point minor trait: it is about equal in power to the other 15 point minor traits.

You’re right, would much rather have jagged horrors and toughness with minions. Boo to anything that improves all necro specs.

/sarcasm

Tommyknocker.6089:

sorrow.2364:

I’m calling it right now:
Shroudbunkers 0/0/30/30/10

Not gonna be running that particular build, BUT it is about time we as a (supposedly) attrition class can bunker!

The new balance changes mentioned here:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/runes-sigils-and-balance-updates/

Also make me a very very happy necro!

Very interesting change talk, we’ll see how it looks. Dare I say I am excited for them.

Rising Dusk.2408:

The new GM trait isn’t good enough to justify ever using it over any of the other options. They should seriously do some merging and try to create traits that actually diversify the Ranger’s marksmanship role rather than compete against each other in the same builds.

They mentioned reworking some trait lines too, although I don’t know if they specifically did for ranger marksmanship.

For all you know they merged some traits and will make this new trait possible to take without giving up something else.

You’re already getting a new GM trait for skirmishing, too.

Not every trait needs to synergize with every build. Plus there will be 4 other grandmaster traits.

I think this trait can certainly have positive implications, but it depends on where you are coming from. If you’re thinking tpvp, this trait is probably meaningless. PVE too, probably. But in WvW where attrition is very valuable in roaming especially, this is a potentially powerful trait.

It also sounds fun for my just-for-kicks cleric spvp hotjoin build. But that doesn’t mean anything.

Spoj The Second.7680:

Exotic weapons have natural variance. They will hit for slightly different numbers all the time due to the weapon damage being a range. In the mists there are steady weapons (blue) which have a set weapon damage rather than a range. These will always hit for the same numbers aslong as you have no traits etc to make the damage fluctuate.

And to respond to Roe. Attack power is calculated from weapon damage and various things. But its only purpose is to display attack power on the hero panel. The damage you see from attacks doesnt use the attack power stat in any way but it does use some common things which are used in both, such as power and weapon damage. So yes attack power will fluctuate, but it has no accuracy to how your damage will change.

Ahh, i am confusing weapon damage and attack power. See? I am not well versed. So does a dagger offhand increase auto attack damage versus a focus?

Spoj The Second.7680:

Druss.6917:

Muchacho.2390:

Because Focus 4 is good for stacking vulnerablity.

Interestingly is, if i only use autoattacks, my dps with offhand dagger seems a little higher than with focus offhand (tested it on the golems in the mists). Which is strange as the weapondamage of offhands shouldnt effect the the 1-3 skills…

Auto attacks are a culmination of attack power and weapon dps, so yes having an offhand dagger will net you higher autos because daggers have higher base weapon damage than focus. However, the vulnerability, along with the multiple bounces will make your overall dps higher using a focus over time as compared to a d/d setup.

Attack power has no effect on the damage you do. It is a completely useless stat that has no effect in game. Its not used in any formula in game as far as we know.

@Muchacho
Offhands dont change your damage. I assume you didnt use steady weapons when testing or you had some traits. Because the damage is exactly the same if you do use steady weapons and have no traits or amulet. The change in damage must of been natural variance.

I wouldn’t consider myself well versed in damage formulas, but I’m fairly certain AP plays some role in auto attacks at least. That is usually why death shroud damage is higher with a staff compared to a dagger (higher AP) and with trained axe than a staff. So I could see it affecting auto attack damage, although I didn’t know that was true of offhands as well.

sirflamesword.3896:

Roe.3679:

Sometimes the system ends up with an imbalance. It happens. Realistically maybe some of the middle tiers should group up on a server and beat them back down. Or transfer down where servers are more even.

If you guys end up with maguuma in tier 3 for leagues you’ll be wishing you had DB back.

Yup, because the people in tier 1 grouped up into 3 mega servers the mid tier servers should change servers just to get it “better”. Stop, just stop

It’s kind of confusing that you put better in quotations since I didn’t use the word.

But I am not sure people who want more random match ups know what they are asking for. Assuming you are still in YB, you’re currently fighting 2 servers that really aren’t that different from yours. Asking for less stale match ups means you’ll stomp someone more or someone else will stomp you more. Either that, or you’re just waiting so you can beat up on what is left of SOR, too.

When matchups are even people QQ for more varied match ups. When match ups are varied people want fair match ups. It’s better the way you have it now.

Anyway at least my suggestion was for some action that anyone could do as opposed to QQing on the forums.

Sometimes the system ends up with an imbalance. It happens. Realistically maybe some of the middle tiers should group up on a server and beat them back down. Or transfer down where servers are more even.

If you guys end up with maguuma in tier 3 for leagues you’ll be wishing you had DB back.

Damage, boon strips and life force gen. The regen and vulnerability don’t hurt either.

Warhorn is too close range and the come sometimes misses when I am sure it should hit. I like dagger but it doesn’t help generate life force at all.

oZii.2864:

I don’t understand how warrior mobility is to high when it has always been the same since launch.

It wasn’t to high pre-buff, now it is to high? That is one of the main separations of guardians and warriors as heavies is mobility.

Where was the nerf warrior mobility bandwagon formed, when warriors didn’t have the hs, cleansing ire, dogged march? Let me guess it was ok cause they didn’t have sustain in fight so it was ok to force them to run away. Give them a little tap and they could speed racer all they want.

When one class has access to great mobility, damage, control and sustain, it does become an issue. And when you think of a warrior, it’s that crazy mobility that doesn’t really fit in. Some classes have 2 or 3 of those attributes down pat, but generally not all 4.

I find as a powermancer that most condimancers I run into in WvW are, in my opinion, bad. Most times they run through their rotation, I cleanse, and they never touch death shroud until they are super low health and I know the fight is essentially over.

A good condimancer is a much tougher fight as they’ll not only be more skillful with jukes and dodges, but will also interrupt a heal and save their fears for an opportune moment instead of trying for a big condi spike. That fight usually depends on who is the better player and had better timed dodges/interrupts.

If it simply connected when I try to use the skill I would be happy.

I’m curious – what tier are you in?

In lower tiers this may seem necessary, but in higher tiers the issue is how fast large groups can respond so many of these ideas would make that situation worse.

I’ve felt that necros need way more access to torment so people actually consider not moving, which would also work well with fear. Plus, spectral grasp could be instant to keep players close, as of right now it fails far too often – same with dark path.

I’ve always felt that signet of spite’s active should be a pull too. Make these changes and necros could turn more into that class that can be harder to escape from.

I’ve posted in a lot of these necro based threads, but I really feel that necros are so close to being where they need to be and only a few main changes could get them there.

Le Rooster.8715:

The only reason FA is holding their own is because SoS and Mag are primarily focusing esach other

Yes, the bottom server is involved because it isn’t being farmed by more numbers. Go figure.

azizul.8469:

Deli.1302:

I think someone doesn’t wanna get stomped by Dragonbrand :P

yeah..lol… too hot too handle.. but but… DB get replaced by FA, no ? FA tanking rating, no ?

FA is not tanking their rating. We are gaining in score, actually. The problem currently is that DB is gaining score so quickly that they will still pass us and force us down to tier 3.

Gravy.7589:

FA seems in a bit of trouble and is desperately trying to buy anyone or any guild atm. Best hope DB does get into tier 2 this next week as they will get focused hard and lose points. If they stay in tier 3, they will most likely gain another 50 points and to silver goes FA. Hilarious it would be as they have hit up almost all of what’s left of SBI, saying they are paying for everyone to transfer before the March patch and season 2 starts.

If anything you should be trying to grab some of DBs numbers as the more you try to pull from SBI and Sor, the more points you give DB. At least be somewhat intelligent about who you throw your gold at.

I’m not aware of any guilds that have transferred to FA, so I’m not sure the irony you’re enjoying actually exists.

It would be nice to get some SEA/OCX coverage though, as that is where we really fall behind. We regularly have a lead during NA. If we got that we would certainly compete for the top spot in tier 2.

By the league start we may end up back in gold, but it depends on how DB does to retain their score and if FA’s score gets hurt too badly from playing lower ranked servers.

Cogbyrn.7283:

Bhawb.7408:

That’s all they do to us; not die. Its not just individual anecdotes, thieves I talk to specifically state Necromancer as an impossible matchup when the Necro plays correctly, even in WvW. Yes they can often get away whenever they want, but that’s not very special.

Which Necro build is an impossible match-up, what Thief build are they using, and why is it impossible? My only guess is a condi-build, as with a Power build the amount of blindness and disappearance makes it extremely troublesome to get your damage in. At that point, the Thief’s ability to just disappear from the fight with you at a lower LF than you had before means they can just keep resetting and putting you in a disadvantageous position.

I’m all about shutting down people who grouse just for the sake of grousing, but after playing a lot of Power Necro, Thieves are extremely difficult to fight if they even half know what they’re doing.

If you are a power necro with a dagger then it can be a tough fight, but the axe makes it a much simpler fight. Axe 2 hits through stealth and axe 3 connects with no target, and will give retal if you do hit them. Plus a well fights very nicely into shadow refuge.

Plus if you run warhorn and flesh golem you have more cc than they can handle. A good thief can still kill you but most thieves can’t withstand life blast alone, let alone the cc and AOE you have.

I wouldn’t invest in the celestial gear if it were me. Necros don’t get a whole lot of of celestial unless you are really eyeing the precision and soon to be ferocity.

A thief can be forgiving short term so you will see that style of trying to gank someone pretty often. There is little to no risk for even a bad player to give it a shot. However, beware of the patient thieves that will wear you down and wait for a mistake, for they are a difficult fight.

Thieves are great at killing yaks, taking camps, and picking off enemy roamers or reinforcements. One thief can hold up quite a few players, maybe even kill a few of them. They certainly have their role.

Please see “protection of the horde”

At a higher level they actually are very similar in my opinion. Then again I use spvp for practice and new builds and alts, though, so I don’t take it super seriously. But generally it is small fights with a chance at getting zerged.

In WvW stats and numbers can be more extreme, and you will see more stealth since holding a cap is generally less important. There are also more terrain differences and more chances at using LOS to your advantage.

The one thing though is that WvW can have many different opponents all at once. Up levels, roamers and those in zerg specs can all be encountered and they are all very different. Sometime you might find that you kill 2 or even 3 players at once, but maybe none of them had a one on one build and were all zerg specced.

So I would say that it is the same essentially but there is more of a chance for randomness in WvW.

ThunderCat.8395:

How about instead of introducing more WvW currencies, we make all these new rewards available for badges of honor, and then give a ton of badges as the tournament rewards?

So that, you know, maybe I’ll have something worthwhile to spend my 10k+ useless badges of honor on.

You can always buy siege, or buy siege and sell them. Also decent for gearing up late if you ever do that.

I think what is more concerning is that servers who take a beating all league won’t even have access to the WvW skins.

I think the fact that dagger 2 is 600 range is being overlooked. You can use it to kite and gain some health or to keep up pressure when someone creates some space. For the damage and heal at range with a shorter cooldown, it’s not a bad skill. It’s sort of weird, but not bad.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

All that’s been announced for changes on Death Magic is, in fact, the 5 and 15 minors.

Any eta on this? I know it was discussed a while back but nothing was ever mentioned.

If your health is below 25% you can still gain might in full death shroud. But it’s still a bad trait in my opinion.

Your build sounds interesting. Also, what are you referring to?

Loyo.8526:

Sorry! I guess some clarification is needed; the reason I was asking was I have two builds in line. One is without Deathly Perception and one is with. the Deathly perception one had abysmal crit rate outside DS, but godly within. I know some people have it so its good both ways with well over 40% rate outside, but the purpose of this build was to be rather tanky also, so I shaved some crit rate in favor of toughness and vitality. (i wanted atleast 2.4-2.5k armor and 20k+ health without food) It is to the point that , when used correct. They both have similar toughness on paper, but the deathly perception one beats out on Effective power when in DS by 1k about along with better HP. This was the main reason for the question.

I guess some context to why the question was raised is better than letting some people who would read this thread later misguided.

I have a similar build in mind – although I am waiting until after the patch before I start purchasing any gear.

I think, for me anyway, that it is fine to have good crit in DS only as I’ve noticed that most of my kills come from life blast anyway. So if I can make it so I am much tanker and keep most of that killing power, it just seems to make sense.

Treeoflife.4031:

For someone who is sick of blob fighting…what would you say about roaming / small group tactics there? Is there a place for people in that position? or are the blobs just awful?

Enemy blobs can get a little intense but there is certainly still a place for roamers. My guild mates and I run some small groups and still have a blast.

Mattargul.9235:

Novalitus.7382:

3. Time slots. To combat the problems above, you could make WvW only accesible during certain hours of the day and night. That allows for bigger groups to enter so you have at least a big zerg vs another big zerg. You could have the portal open up at 8 PM till midnight for example and then the next morning from 9 AM till noon and from 2PM till 4 PM. That allows 8 hours of WvW pvp during the day. Which is more than enough

I think something like this is really necessary to keep WvW alive.

Chop the 24/7 WvW scoring time into 6 hour blocks. Then, add the corresponding 6 hour blocks up over a week. So, every day from, say, 6 in the morning until noon will be added up to arrive at a score for that time block. That way you don’t feel like you have to play 24/7 to make it worthwhile and not lose everything you did to night-cappers. “Smaller” servers that still field a good number during one time period will at least have one time period where they feel like they accomplish something.

Ideally, you would “save” the state of each time block every day, so that on the next day you pick up where you left off, just like what happens when ANet deploys a hotfix. (I think the yaks keep “running” during those downtimes? Anything like that would have to be stopped of course.)

If this is too complicated, as I suspect it is, then just to a clean reboot each day for the play period. You still lose your upgrades from the previous day that way, but to compensate you could make then a little cheaper.

Two options:
1) score each day instead of the week
2) score weekends separately from weekdays, as the population usually varies a lot between weekends and weekdays.

This idea exists in the CDI thread and the devs are looking into it.

Actium.8765:

LoneWolfie.1852:

Day in, day out, “some” guilds/players will hide behind them. And if we try to clear them with trebs, they just portal bomb them. This was 6 months ago, 3 months ago, and apparently players still uses ACs every single day and drag it out in a battle of 5 hours attrition.

Just going to say something about this particular part.

If they have enough numbers in the tower to portal bomb and kill everything you have set up to take the tower then either you didn’t defend them or you were outnumbered.

If you were outnumbered then chances are you wouldn’t have taken the tower to begin with.

You could always simply just treb the wall and all the siege down. It’s not really that hard.

This all over.

Also, I would perceive your 50 man group to be a bit of a problem as far as the game is concerned. I applaud the defenders you’re QQing about, they clearly have out-strategized your zerg.

Servers already are matched up pretty evenly. Exceptions are when servers break up and begin to drop in ratings, like SoR and EB currently. But otherwise servers are matched up via their glicko score with a random coefficient to keep match ups less stale. Personally I would rather fight the servers most closely matched to mine, but people complain about that.

And shutting down WvW between certain times will alienate players and is therefore a bad idea, in my opinion.

The biggest issue with this idea is that some people play on lower tier servers because they want to. Merging them with a larger server just takes that away.

It’s an interesting idea that I like but it also takes that decision away from players. If people like bigger WvW populations they can always transfer.

I moved to FA with my guild after spending time in the lower and middle tiers, and it’s been great. Enough people that there is always someone around to play with, some strong guilds who are recruiting, and right now we have great servers to fight against, too. It’s a great place for WvW.

Well I’m pretty sure that’s not correct since there aren’t that many points on any single map, and I took that screen in PVE.

I noticed this morning on FA that our score hovered around 180 points per tick, despite owning most of our own borderland and our corner of EBG. Usually that accounts for over 200 PPT.

I also noticed in the screen below that only 6 keeps are accounted for among all 3 servers – but there are 3 keeps in each map for a total of 12.

Am I missing something here? What is up with this?

I don’t think axe 2 as a whirl finisher would be that much of a buff. Guardians have a whirl on GS #2 and its a powerful AOE on a short cooldown, while axe 2 is single target, although ranged. I could be wrong though.

Always thought warhorn 4 should be a blast finisher. Making dagger 5 a blast finisher is interesting too.

But this is something that has always bothered me, since many classes have intuitive fields and finishers but necro is devoid of them almost entirely.

I usually just hit my keybind and it happens after a second or so.

Doesn’t that affect burst specs far more than a tanker spec, then?

sorrow.2364:

Roe.3679:

WA is stupid OP against baddies who can’t kite. I do find it funny that warriors are complaining about it though, since its one of a few things that may actually require more than facerolling to deal with.

There are situations in which you can’t kite.
For instance, in actual PvP.

You’re right, my guildies are always talking about the real way to pvp is by taking huge attacks to show how tough you are as a pvper. I’m not sure I understand the logic behind not getting out of the way?

Shinjo.6092:

Roe.3679:

WA is stupid OP against baddies who can’t kite. I do find it funny that warriors are complaining about it though, since its one of a few things that may actually require more than facerolling to deal with.

WA is NOT one of those few things. You can literally roll your face around WASD and avoid all damage from WA.

Lol, true. I meant facerolling 1-5, forgot that you can probably get WASD with your nose or lips.

Weakness was buffed a few months ago because it was worthless to have on someone because of its tiny damage reduction. Why reduce it again? I think adding a condition aspect is a better proposal. Perhaps a 50% chance a condition does 50% damage? Only seems fair.

It’s because a mesmer can float around in stealth while having defensive boons while they have phantasms still dealing damage. If you stick around and don’t play the weaknesses you’re fighting a lot of shadows.

Mike.5193:

Roe.3679:

If all skills were single target, wouldn’t it benefit larger numbers even more? I thought the argument was the AOE cap needed to be removed for better WvW, not eliminated completely.

For an organized group, massive single target damage is an instagib of the others. I remember the “spike” groups of GW1 (pre IWAY group tactics) where they would target one person and “spike” on the count of 3. That person would go from full health to 0 in about a second, nothing would save them short of Aegis being up. This was in 8v8 play, imagine the damage output when scaled to 50v50.

That’s what I mean. Removing AOE – ridiculous rebalancing aside – just changes it to focusing on a player instead of an area.

I’ve run a DS power necro as my main for a few months now. So from this post I can figure out a few things:

1. This mesmer build/player must be downright awful, as most mesmers are too slippery to burst down with life blast spam alone.
2. OP did little to counter these life blasts, especially reflections, dodges, blocks, or CC of any kind which is a sime counter to this play.
3. He clearly didn’t understand that life blast can be potent if spammed directly into your face.

So this seems like a L2P issue as others have mentioned.

Also I wanted to comment that a lot of necro playstyle is spamming 111111 because – I think – necros have to be so aware of their positioning moreso than other classes with more readily available defense or escapes. So I can focus more on not getting focused down while I’m still dealing damage more because the auto attacks are still powerful. It’s just my theory, though.

Just observing that a lot of these complaints are from a specific, very high population, top of tier 1 server…

WA is stupid OP against baddies who can’t kite. I do find it funny that warriors are complaining about it though, since its one of a few things that may actually require more than facerolling to deal with.