i find interrupt chaining to be by far the best method against Necromancers.
knock em into a wall with longbow 4, then hilt bash, then use pet taunt after that. even if they live, it will mess with them and throw them off their rotations.
I suggest using a Drake or Bear pet if you are having bad pet survivability problems. Some rangers seem to prefer ranged pets for this.
i’d be surprised if it didn’t require everything else to be unlocked, tbh. it is an ‘elite’ spec after all, and you get enough points to unlock everything just by leveling (or so i hear.)
Your pet is another whole character full of hit points that can replenish very rapidly. Effects going on it rather than the player is nothing but a positive. They have high HP for a reason. It’s only problematic in tougher pve content designed around active defenses, where pets vanish like tears in the rain.
Additionally, mixing stat combinations leads to the dominance of Celestial gear, which we have seen with Engineers and Elementalists. This is not any healthier for the game than the ’zerker meta.
Rot. Celestial build is entirely different than mixing 200 healing power/toughness into a berserker or assassins build because you want a little more sustain and/or to be better at Astral Form.
Hell, you could accomplish that much just by putting healing power primary on one of your weapons. But why would anyone ever do this when you get jack kitten from healing power?
or is asking that Druid scale better with non-Healing Power builds asking for Druid to be overpowered.
the druid scales worthlessly with healing power right now; asking for it to scale better with non-healing power builds seems like a non-sequitur.
It’s Obvious that scrapper and druid need one more BWE. If they are changing the druid’s based healing, they will push people toward the Zealot’s stats, a stat that came from a story update that ended years ago. A lot of players will be unhappy about that one.
Players don’t have to use all the same stat combo. You could mix Berserkers and Clerics, for example.
i looked through several announcement and developer blogs and while stronghold is on the HoT features list its not listed anywhere that core game players will have access to it…can anyone source this?
Reducing the healing won’t, in and of itself, make the spec impractical for power builds. It will just make them less effective at healing with druid skills. They still would gain a bunch of healing they didn’t have before, as well as various utility and CC options offered by druid.
No other class has their elite spec so thoroughly focused on a niche. Chronomancer, reaper, and scrapper can build for DPS, bunker, or support. The druid is the only spec where you are told “you heal, that’s it. If you try to be offensive, you’ll be a crappy hybrid”.
That last paragraph. That. So much that.
you shouldn’t be so fussed about it; the devs have already said theyre adding more damage to druid
Look, the other game has overcome this problem, at least when I left seven years ago, druids were great damage dealers, great healers or great tanks, depending on how they geared and specced.
the core problem with your post is that druid is not a class.
For all of the people wanting druid healing to scale better with healing power, be careful what you wish for – knowing Anets track record, they probably would go ahead and nerf the basic healing to make healing power ‘more attractive’ (remember nerf to shortbow range…)
i wouldn’t have a problem with that. The amount of healing you can have without any healingpower is pretty kitten good, especially on classes with water fields.
I think it should just be a channeled heal at the targeted location. Easier to use for both the druid and other players, since they can see the channel.
Strength of the Pack and pet choice
currently, Strength of the Pack works very well with certain pets and poorly with most pets
to build might on the player you need a lot of hits in a short timeframe which effectively means using something like a River Drake. Many other pets are incapable of building a decent amount of might, even if they spend the entire durationa ttacking.
there’s also that strength of the packs utility is reduced in many boss fights owing to the difficulty of either keeping the pet alive, or keeping in alive AND attacking. you certainly can’t use many of the shouts with it effectively.
I believe strength of the pack should be normalized to generate might over time rather than might per attack, to help make more pets viable choices
I was really excited for glyph of unity when I first saw the stream. It seemed to be a very nonlinear way of DPSing enemies in pve and pvp, and reward very aggressive, dangerous play.
but in practice it has been problematic. the core issue seems to be a negative synergy with pets, such that you will never get full mileage out of glyph of unity with a live pet. Enemies prefer to aggro the pet, which is normally a good thing…but it REALLY isn’t with Glyph of Unity. I haven’t tried this yet but the best way to get it to work seems to be a jaguar, since you can f3/f2 to have it go stealthpassive and drop aggro. But that’s a lot of work for a core ability!
I’m really not sure how to fix that without adding some dramatically powerful effects to glyph of unity, like a 1s taunt when not in Astral form.
It could be tested on a separate server set from the live game. It shouldn’t need to be on that specific hardware, just another set of servers with the same configuration and interactions. The only difference would be that they’d likely have to open it up to more than just HoT pre-purchasers to get it populated enough for a proper stress test. Having a beta for all paid accounts, or even an open beta would probably be good for marketing/hype anyway.
since the game is no longer sharded, even a close approximation beta-server could have serious flaws duplicating a live environment. this could lead to unpredictable bugs when that content is pushed live. While there have been some minor inconveniences for live players this BWE, it is at least a wash in terms of reliability versus pushing systems live that were only tested in a very limited environment.
i’m sure the commander system worked fine internally and on their test servers. it only crashed and burned when pushed live. Better now, in BWE, then on launch day.
If you have 10 people pumping out 100 damage each, 5% for each person is an extra 5 damage. So if you add the total the damage its 1000 and include the total increase % its 50 damage. Which is still 5%. NOT 50%
i think his point was that its the equivalent of half another person in terms of damage. moreso, since its more efficient and less vulnerable to aoe.
Edit: Potentially ruining the majority of the player base’s dungeon and fractal runs by having this party issue is NOT acceptable in order to open up raids for 5 minutes at a time.
it doesnt ruin runs, it just makes it impossible to use party chat or to invite new members
you can still use local and map chat and complete runs with the members you have
hey, just fyi for devs, about when the forum post went up about reenabling raids, our party in Arah broke. party chat was nonfunctional, and when a reaver tried to switch characters at the end (so he could get the loot) he was unable to rejoin the instance. we couldn’t even kick him or leave the party ourselves, thats how broke it was. It threw errors that the party or channel didn’t exist.
i think one thing that isn’t working for pets is balancing via f2 cooldown
for example, krytan drakehound vs wolf. theyre both canines, identical except for the fear vs immobilize. the wolf fear is on a longer cooldown (40s iirc) than the drakehound cooldown (…20s? i think.) but the wolf is just dramatically superior, even with beastmastery. Fear is just ridiculously more useful than immobilize, and the longer cooldowns are usually obviated by the ability to switch pets.
also, the incredibly long execute time on most pet F2s makes them extremely hard to use in PVP or against a PVE enemy that is moving.
a balance pass for pets should reduce the cast time for most f2s, particularly those on underutilized or extremely niche pets.
P.S. I can’t stand birds, their chirping drives me insane
well if you want to push the logic and cynicism far enough literally everything is a marketing trick.
it is definitely a surge and engagement probably wont last at these levels because right now is crunch time in development where theyre trying to hammer everything down and feedback is at its most important
You now have higher level fractals and raids for what you are looking for.
They didn’t add any fractals in hot, and raids don’t look very pug friendly.
It’s literally just the new zones. What’s the point of grinding up masteries to explore if it just gets you to more content you can faceroll with your autoattack?
I had way more trouble with the Silverwastes enemies between the beta spawn and Amber Sandfall than I ever did with anything in Verdant Brink. It’s a little confusing why guys that go down in a stiff breeze even have defiance bars.
What the hell? I’m all for thread consolidation, but the entire point of the beta weekend is to provide feedback. Where do you get off telling people they shouldn’t do that?
The unfortunate thing is that the open world was in a good place in BW2. That means the nerf must have been a considered decision. This leaves me very little hope that they will change it back and makes me very disheartened and saddened.
you shouldn’t read that much into it. it was their last beta weekend & their last chance to gather data before launch. so it was guaranteed to be different than bwe2 if only for the purposes of experimentation.
This is stupidly ignorant, please don’t post about classes you know nothing about.
Distortion on summon is only for phantasms, not clones, and it competes for reflection on focus which means it will never be taken in PvE because reflects are more important for your group.
wow, i sure feel bad for getting something wrong about mesmer in the ranger forum!
if you mean clones say clones, ‘illusions’ means both. in any case, its amazing how traits have tradeoffs, funny how that works.
Please tell me illusions will be added into this is well. It is very frustrating to summon an illusion and have it explode before you can do anything with it. Wasn’t so bad at all when we had on death traits but now that we don’t, we summon it and it dies before it can make an attack or be used for a shatter.
well first off wrong forum, second if you get a trait that grants illusions distortion on summon
