By disappointing balance preview, OP seems to mean that his favorite class didn’t get a massive buff.
I main reaper. Which class did you think I mained?
Whatever.
Scrappers needed a nerf. What did ANet do? Absolutely nothing.
Necro chill damage needs a nerf. Instead, ANet buffs scepter and corrupt boon, 2 things that were absolutely fine and shouldn’t have been touched.
Diamond skin needed a nerf. Instead, ANet gives it a haircut and a manicure.
Ranger HoT pets need a nerf. No ANet response. Ranger shortbow needed buff forever: absolutely no indication that they are even aware that this weapon exists. Compare shortbow 2 to DH longbow 2, rev hammer 2. Compare shortbow 5 with mesmer shield 5, scrapper hammer 5. It’s almost funny how broken this stuff is.
Thief did not need a buff. ANet buffed them.
Totally unacceptable changes.
Bear in mind OP the end goal is to have each class have three or more elite specs. It doesn’t matter whether or not Thief and Warrior are balanced around base specs because in the future they won’t matter. Going forward Thief and Warrior need to have their bases buffed. They are the only base classes that objectively can’t compete with elite specializations.
Engi and ele are really the only base classes that can compete with the elite specs. Ever tried base necro, ranger, mesmer, guardian etc. in ranked currently? Warrior and thief aren’t in a unique situation.
Keep in mind that this wasn’t really a preview, but 100% of the balance changes.
Seriously? I was under the impression from watching the livestream that they just picked 4 things from each profession.
I have to say I’m extremely disappointed upon seeing the new balance patch preview. My initial reaction was: ANet are you even playing the same game as us?
A couple awful changes really stand out:
Engineer:
Rocket charge CD increased by a whopping 2 seconds. This will have zero impact on the game and scrapper sustain. Where the are damage coefficient nerfs to the hammer skills? Where is the nerf to hammer 5, which is a 1200 AOE stun that is contributing immensely to the insane CC flying around? (Scrapper hammer 5 is of course not the only culprit; reapers, DH, druid’s, etc are also guilty).
Necromancer:
Boon corrupt on the scepter auto attack? Corrupt boon CD reduced to 15 s and less boons converted? ANet, ever heard of the phrase: “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it”? These skills were perfectly fine already. That scepter boon corrupt shouldn’t even be in the game, but if it were to be put in the game, it should be on the axe auto because axe needs love, is the necro boon corrupt weapon, and desperately needs an auto-chain. What game are you playing where condi reaper needs a buff? Most importantly, where is the deathly chill damage coefficient nerf? If any condi build wants to tick 700 dps, they need to ramp up and constantly apply bleeds/condi’s. Chill as a damaging condition requires zero ramp-up time and thus should not have such a high damage coefficient (0.3x+202).
Elementalist:
Diamond skin update is absolutely idiotic. Absolutely. Idiotic. Compare the new diamond skin to the necro’s shrouded removal. Shrouded removal is a very powerful trait that removes 1 condi every 3 s while in death shroud…even this is less passive than the new diamond skin because the necro has to choose to go into shroud. Condi removal on a 1 second CD? What were you thinking? That absolutely screws over condi builds like ranger and burn guard (for example) which don’t focus on applying so many different types of condi’s, but were able to break the old diamond skin with carrion…how will these builds get the ele below 75% now? Why would you make a trait that rewards condi spam? It’s going to be overpowered. What were you guys thinking giving this a 1s ICD? Did you guys even test this outside of a hotjoin? 100% curious and irritated.
Mesmer:
Well of precognition: This change is all well and good, but if it’s just pulsing aegis for 3 seconds, you should give it’s capture-point contribution back.
Ranger:
Protect me changes…do we really need more CC in this game?
Search and rescue: just a 10x better version of necro’s transfusion. Clap, clap, clap; creative.
What about ranger pets? Why are the bristleback and smokescale so much more powerful than the other pets? All other ranger pets need a serious buff to be a remotely useful class mechanic, and the bristleback and smokescale need a serious nerf to their DPS (and possibly F2 CD’s). Just compare bristleback to the river drake—they are supposed to serve the same purpose but the bristleback is vastly superior.
And hold up, just where are the shortbow buffs? Have you guys ever used this weapon? Compare ranger shortbow to scrapper hammer, or revenant hammer, or actually any weapon in the entire game. How can a weapon like the scrapper hammer even be designed with a straight face with the state of the ranger shortbow?
Thief and warrior:
This is all just wrong. It’s blatant powercreep. Remember after the June 23rd patch, after the DD cele ele fire line was nerfed? The game was incredibly balanced, and thieves and warriors did just fine. Fast forward to HoT, and now thieves and warriors are hurting a bit. But it’s important to remember that thieves and warriors are well-balanced around the base specs, and its the absolutely overpowered elite specs that are providing so much trouble. And all of the base specs are in trouble compared with the elite specs; not just thief and warrior. Solution: Stop buffing everything and just nerf all of the elite specs. The nerfs you’ve previewed thus far are going to be totally insufficient.
All I see is power creep, and a few well-intentioned but poorly designed fixes which will not help any of the underlying problems plaguing the game, ANet. I was excited to listen to the balance preview, but it just left me disappointed.
(edited by Salamander.2504)
How are you guys even disagreeing with the OP? Reaper is easily focused and downed, even with tanky amulets (which are now removed). Scrapper on the other hand can run zerker/marauder and literally run circles around your team.
The scrapper changes were laughable. ANet is blatantly powercreeping. It’s like they don’t even play the same game as us.
we never get free buffs
it will come with an unreasonable nerf somewhere irreverent as usual
We got free buffs in the June 23rd patch.
1) reaper chill nerf…
This can’t be overstated enough. I’m a reaper main and I’ve been using the Deathly Chill trait, and it desperately needs a nerf. Chill is so easy to apply, it can be applied for very long durations, and the damage is equivalent is instantly stacking 5-6 bleeds, while at the same time reducing runspeed and increasing CD’s.
That’d be fine. Might also help base-necro gain back some of its condition players~ but either way, I’d say something would have to be given to Necro. They’re already not in a super-shining place as is, even if the Chill damage is a bit much.
There’s not really enough to justify condi reaper beyond chill, and condi necro is trash until Curses is made useful again. Realistically, the chills that cannot be avoided are the ones on sigils and runes, which may be the source of your distress, as Grenth Rune + Sigil of Ice = unavoidable chill for days.
Yes, condi reaper is absolutely justified without chill damage; (1) RS 2 aoe boon corrupt on kitten CD traited with curses (as an example, but obviously we can’t recommend actually using curses); (2) dhuumfire goes from useless to OK; (3) RS 4 is insane damage with condi; (4) reaper traits give much needed LF management that scepter lacks; (5) every necro needs stability, and shroud 3 becomes an aoe fear for terrormancers. And anyways, all we’re asking is for chill damage to be nerfed, not removed.
And the issue isn’t whether chill can be avoided. Most skills in this game can be avoided; it doesn’t change the fact that some skills are too strong. Keeping near perma-chill up is a simple task to do whether in 1v1’s or teamfights, even if everything can be avoided; all we’re saying is that it shouldn’t do that much damage. In any case, Suffer is an instant cast aoe chill that can give ~5 s of chill, and if traited can be used every 13 seconds. Staff 5 and 3 can also be difficult to avoid. Just saying. Unavoidable chills aren’t the source of our distress—both ronpierce and I main reapers…
So you ended up playing reaper in legendary and esl and still think that necro/chill it s op?look at the proleague almost 0 necros there.
Necro has close to 0 chances to survive into a teamfight with 0 blocks/invuls/imunes.
So tune down chill dmg more and necro won t do any damage and die in 5 seconds in a teamfight.
Reaper chill damage and sustain under focus (lack of active defenses outside of shroud) are 2 separate issues.
Obviously my post only treats the first point, because there was no mention of a chill nerf in the patch notes preview. On the other hand, a buff to blighters boon was hinted at in the patch notes preview, which should address the second point (sustain).
Duh…
1) reaper chill nerf…
This can’t be overstated enough. I’m a reaper main and I’ve been using the Deathly Chill trait, and it desperately needs a nerf. Chill is so easy to apply, it can be applied for very long durations, and the damage is equivalent is instantly stacking 5-6 bleeds, while at the same time reducing runspeed and increasing CD’s.
That’d be fine. Might also help base-necro gain back some of its condition players~ but either way, I’d say something would have to be given to Necro. They’re already not in a super-shining place as is, even if the Chill damage is a bit much.
There’s not really enough to justify condi reaper beyond chill, and condi necro is trash until Curses is made useful again. Realistically, the chills that cannot be avoided are the ones on sigils and runes, which may be the source of your distress, as Grenth Rune + Sigil of Ice = unavoidable chill for days.
Yes, condi reaper is absolutely justified without chill damage; (1) RS 2 aoe boon corrupt on kitten CD traited with curses (as an example, but obviously we can’t recommend actually using curses); (2) dhuumfire goes from useless to OK; (3) RS 4 is insane damage with condi; (4) reaper traits give much needed LF management that scepter lacks; (5) every necro needs stability, and shroud 3 becomes an aoe fear for terrormancers. And anyways, all we’re asking is for chill damage to be nerfed, not removed.
And the issue isn’t whether chill can be avoided. Most skills in this game can be avoided; it doesn’t change the fact that some skills are too strong. Keeping near perma-chill up is a simple task to do whether in 1v1’s or teamfights, even if everything can be avoided; all we’re saying is that it shouldn’t do that much damage. In any case, Suffer is an instant cast aoe chill that can give ~5 s of chill, and if traited can be used every 13 seconds. Staff 5 and 3 can also be difficult to avoid. Just saying. Unavoidable chills aren’t the source of our distress, though—both ronpierce and I main reapers and use Deathly Chill, so if anything it’s the distress we are causing…
(edited by Salamander.2504)
They are considering a “reduction in survivability” for the scrapper… Yet make no mention about the absolutely insane tankiness of reapers and druids. Hm. I find that amusing.
It’s not really a fair comparison. Reapers and druids are tanky because they are using tanky amulets (crusader, cavalier, soldiers, carrion, celestial) when compared with scrappers. Scrappers on the other hand are even harder to kill because they have so many more active defenses, but use marauder/zerker amulet.
1) reaper chill nerf…
This can’t be overstated enough. I’m a reaper main and I’ve been using the Deathly Chill trait, and it desperately needs a nerf. Chill is so easy to apply, it can be applied for very long durations, and the damage is equivalent is instantly stacking 5-6 bleeds, while at the same time reducing runspeed and increasing CD’s.
That’d be fine. Might also help base-necro gain back some of its condition players~ but either way, I’d say something would have to be given to Necro. They’re already not in a super-shining place as is, even if the Chill damage is a bit much.
Absolutely; base necro (and base everything) being viable again is critically important. Hopefully the necro shroud changes and widespread elite spec nerfs can help with this.
1) reaper chill nerf…
This can’t be overstated enough. I’m a reaper main and I’ve been using the Deathly Chill trait, and it desperately needs a nerf. Chill is so easy to apply, it can be applied for very long durations, and the damage is equivalent is instantly stacking 5-6 bleeds, while at the same time reducing runspeed and increasing CD’s.
Aside from skill adjustments, another way we can adjust balance in PvP is by looking at the runes/sigils/amulets that are available for use through the customization panel.
I would be interested in hearing thoughts (with the high-level goals from the blog in-mind) on adding/removing various sigils/amulets/runes. In general, our goal for PvP is to be faster-paced with a higher-level of lethality than what we’re seeing in S1.
I know we’ve had this conversation a few times before, but it’s always important to have this discussion with the correct context in mind.
The first thought that comes to mind is regarding the amulets…For example, the viper amulet fills the same role as the rampager/sinister amulets (and to some extent, the berserker amulet), but offers superior DPS at no cost (i.e., the defenses are the same). Bringing these types of amulets in line and making them fill different roles is probably a step in the right direction. Wanderers makes sense: it’s a lower defense but higher damage version of rabid, but viper is just a better rampager/sinister amulet. New amulets would be great too (power toughness ferocity comes to mind).
The rune is a longer subject, as the more added, the merrier…Slight buffs to some of the older and unused runes (some of which have insanely long ICD’s that could be reduced, e.g, rune of svanir) would be great too. Some runes could have really cool synergy with certain builds but their CD’s are so long, they’ll never have be integrated into a build. For example, look at superior rune of resistance; this rune could be really great and promote new types of signet builds, but the 30 s ICD makes it useless. Nerfs to some overused/overpowered (e.g., durability) would also be welcome. Runes that offer 15% runspeed along with power/condi stats would be cool too, so that builds that don’t have access to 25% runspeed aren’t funneled into traveler runes (note that the elite specs for druid and chrono offer runspeed traits…leaving the base specs literally in the dust). Nerfs to might-stacking runes (strength, hoelbrek) should also be considered—there has been a long trend of might-stacking cele builds dominating the PvP scene, and this could be a way to help fix it. A poison version of rune of balthazar could be a cool addition (think of the tormenting rune).
(edited by Salamander.2504)
What are you all getting hyped for, slow down
These are just a bunch of empty PR promises – the same ones they made pre-HoT. Until they actually show us traits, skills, and numbers, these write-ups really don’t tell us kitten.
Good PR, bad transparency. Now would have been the time to talk to the community about proposed balance changes so that we can do this together properly. But I get it, Anet knows what’s best. Sure.
You’ll excuse me negativity, but given their track record of class balance and me getting swindled for $50 makes me a little salty.
Agreed. The one word that characterizes this blog post the most: vague. It’s hard to forget the debacles that lead to the June 23 patch and then the HoT beta weekends.
But the June 23rd patch was awesome. After the June 23rd patch, and after the DD cele ele fire nerfs, the game was very balanced. It wasn’t until HoT that things got messy again. If they repeat their balance performance from the June 23rd patch, we’re in business.
I’ve been playing purely base specs for the past 3 weeks to really get a sense for this. I got up to the end of Ruby (5 pips to diamond) with a 60% ranked win-rate before getting bored. I then made a free-to-play account to play the base specs in unranked and ranked, and it was actually quite challenging to play against new players that used the elite specs.
It’s like trying to walk underwater. You have to seriously outplay your opponents, and even then, even if you play perfectly, you might end up losing the fight by one fatal blow or cc that knocks out half your health because your opponent is just mashing all of their skills.
But hope is in sight, if the elite specs are nerfed enough: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/profession-balance-goals-for-the-winter-2016-update/
Well, apparently some underused weapons are getting a buff.
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/profession-balance-goals-for-the-winter-2016-update/
Any money on shortbow? Here’s to hoping…
I didn’t see anything about a Deathly Chill nerf. Please reduce the damage coefficient of chill damage! This is coming from a necro main.
Also, I hope ranger shortbow is one of the “less used weapons” that is getting some buffs.
(edited by Salamander.2504)
Combo finishers do not work with Juvenile Carrion Devourer F2 poison field.
Combo finishers do not work with Juvenile Carrion Devourer F2 poison field.
Combo finishers do not work with Juvenile Carrion Devourer F2 poison field.
yea its been suggested since launch u can forget about it
With that attitude it will never happen. HOPE is required to get change to happen.
Believe!
Situation is still the same.
1) Yes.
2) Rarely, but generally always at a disadvantage.
3) Don’t know.
4) Balanced with base specs, underpowered compared with elite specs.
OP is correct that Deathly Chill needs a nerf. Its way OP, which makes it appear fine compared with the rest of the elite specs. But Deathly Chill and all of the elite specs need a nerf.
I have HoT (pre-ordered!), and yet it sucks that I can’t play base classes now without bringing down my team. I miss playing them.
ANet, will the upcoming balance patch bring the elite specs back to the level of the core classes?
After playing around with it some more, I have a better grasp on what should be changed.
(1) At first I wasn’t certain this should be changed, but after playing around with it, even traited for bleeds with a viper amulet the DPS was terrible while hitting from the side. The positioning constraint on applying bleeds should be removed—this skill should always apply bleeds.
(2) What I said above still holds—this skill has no oomf. Just throwing out idea’s here; you can probably think of something better:
Option 1: Make this 1 projectile (instead of a cone of 3) that applies 3 stacks of poison, and can bounce up to 2 times to foes or yourself (depending on distance, like guardian’s focus 4), and remove piercing. If the projectile bounces back to you, gain a boon of some sort for a few seconds (resistance, vigor, or light aura, something like that).
Option 2: Make each arrow in the cone of 3 arrows apply 2 stacks of poison (rather than 1) and give them each 1 bounce rather than piercing. If all 3 arrows hit, your pet’s next attack applies a condition (a few stacks of torment or burning, something along those lines). There should be a reward for correct positioning with this skill; I’m thinking along the lines of how necro’s scepter 3 was recently buffed.
(3) Yeah, 3 seconds of swiftness needs to be changed to 3 seconds of superspeed.
(4) Change the cripple on this skill to an immobilize and bam it’s fixed.
(5) Either reduce the CD from 25 to 20 seconds, or give this thing 1 bounce.
Moderator, please link this thread to a dev. Shortbow desperately needs your help. No one uses it. No one.
(edited by Salamander.2504)
Rune of the Guardian (6) ability (burn foes who you block) doesn’t activate on ranged attacks using any of the warrior blocks.
I mostly main reaper, but have been spending some time on my base ranger and druid. I was determined to get base ranger to work against the elite specs, and I really wanted to use shortbow—its a fun weapon, but going up against tempests and scrappers (and all the elite specs) was a lesson in getting stompered. I’m not the most experienced ranger (~400 ranked games only out of 3k games total), and fewer of those games were using shortbow (to the appreciation of my solo que team), but I did have some impressions that I wanted to share, and I can only hope this topic finds its way into a dev’s lap in the same way that the necro forums helped along scepter and axe buffs, and the guardian forums helped along shield buffs.
Shortbow needs some love. Right? I’m going to drop a few ideas down and would love to hear everyone’s ideas on how to (if necessary) bring the shortbow into the realm of viability. My ideas might be poopy so go easy on me.
(1): The autoattack feels fine, but it is dependent upon positioning to do any damage. It has a damage coefficient of 0.4 (0.74/s) compared with the ranger longbow’s 0.7-0.9/s and the guardian longbow’s 0.9/s. I’m just listing the facts, as I’m not sure this needs to be changed.
(2) This is trying to be a burst skill, but it does way less damage than longbow 2 and requires you to be melee range for all 5 arrows to hit. A little underwhelming; it could be more impactful, as there isn’t much positive feedback when you manage to land it (e.g., the satisfaction you get from watching all longbow 2 arrows connect isn’t there). I would increase (double?) the damage coefficient, and maybe add some other effect like a boon or another condition perhaps?
(3) This skill seems OK, but it fills a similar role to longbow 3, but with a 1/2 s evade rather than a 3s stealth. The swiftness isn’t really that impactful. I think the skill would feel better if you replace the 3 s of swiftness with 3 s of superspeed.
(4) This is a meh skill with zero tactile feedback. It doesn’t feel good to use, and is a subpar soft-cc ability. Not sure how to change, but a complete redesign shouldn’t be out of the question.
(5) This skill is good, but what the heck is with the 25 s CD, when pointblank shot is on a 15 s CD, and the guardian knockback trait is on a 10 s CD?
(edited by Salamander.2504)
+1 remove this stupid trait
I haven’t seen that many signet on one build in a LONG TIME
Haha there should be more appreciation for how good the mesmer signets actually are. Compared to the trash guardian signets (and the poopy trait!) for example, its night and day.
The game is already easy enough it doesn’t need to be dumbed down any further.
this is not dumbing down you kitten
It’s the opposite. More information.
First, I’m not a dude, dude. Second, match manipulation is cheating according to ANET. Queue ing with low tier players is match manipulation since it places the higher level player in a “softer” match than is appropriate.
No it doesn’t, or at least thats not how its supposed to work. Matchmaking is supposed to allocate teams so each has a 50% chance of winning.
Except it doesn’t. Matchmaking is looking at players w/l ratio. If player has above 50% w/lo ratio it will put them on team that are garanteed to lose. The amount of absolutely lopsided matches compared to even just proves it (as well as match history). Matchmaking almost NEVER tries to create teams that both have 50% win chance.
Pretty sure thats not how its supposed to work, its trying to allocate players so that each team in any match has a 50% chance of winning. If its not working then thats an issue with the algorithm.
If that were the case, there would be no games with 2 and 3 pip wins, or 1 pip losses. Matchmaking actively gives you 0-20% chance of winning (3 pip win) or 20-40% chance of winning (2 pip win), and it’s not infrequent. A huge issue with this that their algorithm for estimating the victory probability must be absolute junk code, because I’ve been on the winning and losing side of 1-sided games where the winner got 3 pips, with an end score of 500-100. With a <20% chance of victory.
+1
Same thing happened to me earlier today. 1 guy (not in my party) dc’d, never came back, and we all lost 2 pips in the 4v5.
I’m fairly certain that the bunker meta is a result of the increased CC and damage.
I’m fairly certain that it isn’t the other way around.
+1 agreed. The elite specs do everything better. More CC and DPS, and they make better bunkers too. Unfortunately, not everything is overpowered equally…
Fun to watch thanks for sharing. Keep’em coming I want MORE.
Can you post your build written out? I’m interested but it looks like the gw2 build editor website is down. Thanks!
Right just had a Pvp ranked game 500-445 (defeat) Due to a player who Deliberately Tanked – how I know? simple, this ranger ran naked, left points which was ours to be capped by other team did nothing to support or assist the team, just died conveniently to allow the other team to Rally off his/her useless self.
2 confirmed people reported this player, but worst of all, my team lost Pip(s) for this? Total BS, feel bad for my team as we did well as a 4 man pug/duo and a person trying to make us lose.
More than happy to Pm people the players name and account details ingame (if they want to know)
You can run naked in this game and it’s no different than wearing armor. You will be buffed to max stats. This misconception has gotten me reported before, but it’s ignorance on the players reporting for not knowing that a character with no armor has the same “armor” stats as one with max.
You are mistaken. You need to wear the chest, legs, and boots.
There is a semi-invulni panic button for the reaper – spectral armor. A smart reaper will pop that right before shroud to gethimself some solid survivability uptime. If his overall defense is strong and enemy’s burst comes in multiple hits rather then one big one it may ineed seem reaper pushed 0 damage button. Well except he didn’t and it won’t work well against condi spam.
Shroud disables the LF gain from spectral armor, which means popping it going into shroud just gives the reaper the prot buff for the first ~6 seconds of shroud. That’s not even remotely a semi-invuln.
All reapers are defensively is a giant HP sponge. Shroud is essentially a second health bar, albeit one that heals itself via LF gain rather than standard heals.
Bolded section is false—SA works in shroud and is a great way to secure near-invuln to power damage for the first 6 seconds of shroud.
What new weapons would you guys like to see for future necro elite specs?
Personally, I’d be in favor of a main hand mace with hybrid damage or support. A lot of off hands like torch or shield sound plausible too, but I don’t want to imagine playing necro without warhorn so I wouldn’t want them as much.
Gimme a mainhand shield.
1st elite spec: Meet the “reaper”
2nd elite spec: Nail the “coffin”
I don’t honestly care what the excuse is. This is outright cheating by manipulating MMR. That’s wrong regardless of your justification that it is convenient for the players involved.
If you’re cheating and manipulating to get ahead, you shouldn’t be a diamond level player to begin with.
A number of people have gone into sufficient detail to explain why this isn’t MMR manipulation. I recently introduced a friend of mine to the game and we que’d up and got absolutely demolished for the entire night…it isn’t trivial to carry a new player.
Without any hard data on your situation , it just sounds like you want to blame anything but yourself for your continued losses. What was your w/l ratio before leagues? And after? It’s an easy trap to fall into (and to my shame I do it plenty myself, as evidenced by my pathetic QQ post in this subforum a few weeks ago), but you’ll feel a whole lot better if you just take a step back, read a book or do something else, and then try again in a few hours or the next day…
I eat reapers for breakfast with my warrior.
No you don’t, the smart ones will just wait out for berseker stance
10s enough to kill them plus there is always Healing signet.
+1 A good warrior sets the pace of that match-up.
Seems to be working fine.
Divisions should certainly represent MMR since high MMR means you’re good. If you have ruby for example and only made it there by competing against other 50th percentile players then are you really a ruby? Making league correlate with MMR would give give the badges more prestige.
Just a heads up: Even many people in the 95th percentile are overwhelmingly mediocre; I wouldn’t use that as a good metric of skill. It’s better to look at the w/l ratio if you insist on using the leaderboards for any kind of example.
…while i shouldn’t say this.. i’m glad condi chronomancer is not a thing and will hopefully never be…
Mesmer condis are torment and confusion, the two condis with the most counterplay (stop moving, stop AA). If anything, this is the one condi build a mindful/aware player should want to fight.
But you wont fight it, because ANet nerfed Maimed the Disillusioned before HoT.
Fun facts.
What is unfair about fighting 3 reaper+2 DH? Sounds like a free pip.
Got to tier 5 ruby a few days ago, and since then it’s several losses, one rough win, several loses etc. Constantly getting either complete clueless team mates, 1-2 bads that insta die when they reach a point or suicide 1vX, or 3 alright team mates vs a good team, but one pug is so awful it’s like he’s playing for the other team. Being constantly put in the team with the imbeciles or bads is starting to make my blood boil. You can’t tell who is decent or bad from a forum post so there really is no point to an angry post like this, but for God’s sake, I just don’t know what to do. It really is lost on me how anyone can be so bad.
The comps too. Stop giving me bloody warriors and 2x DH.
J/c, are the scrubs also Ruby?
Not if you bring the trait Foot in the Grave and get stability that way. But that means you can’t bring Dhuumfire or Death Perception for the extra raw damage.
1) You shouldn’t need to take a specific trait just to compensate for inherently broken design. This destroys build diversity while skirting around the actual problems.
2) One 3-second stack of Stability isn’t going to help much anyways. That’ll get you through one skill if it’s not stripped and basically force you to always open Shroud with either #4 or #5. If you want to stay in Shroud for more than a few seconds doing anything besides autoattacking, good luck.
You’re overlooking the arching power creep issue.
While stability is vital for Necromancer, that’s only because there is so much CC everywhere on extremely low cooldowns. We now have AoE CC that is massive in size so in order to make up for it there is also stability everywhere.
Dragonhunter, druids, scrappers, reapers, revenants, chronomancers, all have an insane amount of CC on low cooldowns on their traits and skills.
I really don’t think I am overlooking the power creep, though. I’ve already agreed with you in a previous post that there’s too much CC in the game, and I also acknowledge that with the amount of power creep we’ve seen, nerfs need to come down across the board. But that’s not going to be a magical fix for Reaper’s Shroud if you just leave it filled with slow-casting, highly-telegraphed, melee range abilities with no way to protect those channels. When has a setup like that ever succeeded in this game? For context, if you tripled the channel times for each skill on a Warrior’s Hammer (which hasn’t changed much in recent patches), you’d get a similar set of channel times to what Reaper’s Shroud has (if you switched the skill order around). I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t have run that even prior to the specialization patch, let alone HoT. At least regular Death Shroud gives you range and shorter channels overall.
You also didn’t address my first point. Any response to that criticism?
Just to reiterate/clarify, I’m not against nerfing Reapers, or even against revamping professions to force them to actually sacrifice things when they spec for offense or defense. I just don’t think that this particular suggestion of yours is a good implementation of that theory.
I do agree with your point about Reapers keeping stability, however, it’s very unclear if keeping it would make Reapers too strong or if removing it is too weak. I’m basing this nerf solely on the fact Necromancers always did fine without strong stability before HoT, before there was ton of CC spam and beast-mode mobility.
Resistance won’t be as weak as you’d think, as it still provides immunity to fear, taunts and snares. That being said though, it’s nearly impossible to tell without proper testing, to many factors to consider for this one boon across CC of multiple classes.
Necro’s didn’t really do “fine” before HoT…mostly just cannon-fodder in the first mid-fight due to being tossed around like a rag-doll; there’s a reason most/all necro’s went really tanky post June-23rd patch. It was kind of boring tbh, and I’m glad to finally being back to using glassier amulets.
Resistance isn’t a good idea for RS 3 because as the above poster pointed out, it really goes against the design of necros. Out of shroud, a necro can handle condition pressure through transfers, but should be generally weak to conditions in shroud. This is incredibly important because necros get a 50% power damage reduction in shroud. Reapers keep this status quo, and it’s probably a good thing to prevent them from being untouchable in shroud.
As for increasing the cooldowns of RS skills, +1 absolutely. RS 4 and RS 5 both need a 4 to 5 second* CD increase because the CC spam is out of control.
Your Deathly Chill trait change isn’t terrible, but in my opinion, the root of the problem is that chill damage is too high. Requiring a 600 radius isn’t that impactful because when you’re chilled its often not trivial to get out of range. Deathly Chill is just an improved Terror, and I think the simplest solution is to reduce the damage coefficient from 0.3->0.25.
Source: Necro main
Thanks for posting your suggestions, they are great food for thought even if people don’t agree with them.
*Edit: censor trying to prevent me saying 4 to 5 seconds
(edited by Salamander.2504)
Is it worth giving up the mid point over it though? He did that twice throughout the match. Since he channeled it twice we would get 11 points per kill, but is that worth more than getting 1 point every 2 seconds?
No. Caps are more important but ferocity is icing on the cake. It’s usually not a good idea to get them when you’re facing a competent team; it basically requires you to have put your opponents on a pretty severe death rotation.
Good thieves (1) exist; (2) carry; and (3) typically result in a win.
It’s easy to fall into groupthink, though. Thief isn’t forgiving in this meta, so you actually have to be good at it to contribute to the match. In contrast to, for example, bunker mesmer, etc.
(edited by Salamander.2504)