Guild Wars 2

Bump for Lettuce!

Congrats, awesome run

Another ex-WoW player has discovered dungeons in gw2 I see. Bloated egos of people who believe they are good players getting kicked because in truth they don’t know basics of running dungeons in gw2. Guardians who think they can tank everything, rangers who think they can just camp longbow ect. There are so many misconceptions from other games in people’s minds it’s no surprise they react this way when they finally are faced with the truth, that they in fact are not great gw2 players, but in fact are regular newbs

Unless you lot have forgotten, there is no dungeon team. The only changes we will ever see to dungoens are stealth nerfs and Living Story crap. I don’t want either.

@Sundar: do you never run high level fractals? If yes then you are doing it wrong. In fractals (especially mossman, archdiviner ect.) you should be aegis tanking the strong bosses, keeping them on you for as long as possible while your team is dealing damage (since there is no aggro mechanic it’s not really tanking, but having full ascended armor really helps for some reason). And your elite serves just that reason. An invul in place of an aegis that is on cooldown and aegis/VoR refresh for condi cleansing (another important aspect of it). Guardians shouldn’t use those skills just for themselves.

#allisvain

now applies outside of PvP too!

I think somebody mentioned my calculations thread from the balance forum. The reasoning I used in that thread is simple: ANet declared that the DPS loss on full zerk set is about 10%. They weren’t neccessarily lying, they just didn’t count in critical chance higher than roughly 50% (at which the nerf is about 11%). However, that’s the overall DPS loss. You lose way more critical damage than that (in fact the more organized you are the more critical damage you lose), and ofcourse the more critical chance you have, the more you will feel the lowered critical damage in terms of damage output.

And it turns out the estimated loss is closer to 17% including the stacking sigils on a fully buffed party than 20%, but it’s still quite a lot (estimated because changes to banner of disc. and similar stuff are not known yet).

@Rym: the scope of the nerf depends on game mode. In WvW the class that loses the most DPS will indeed be the power necro, but thief is the close 2nd (depending on the build, but many thieves run a 100% crit chance trait there too, which encompasses majority of their burst, not to mention the huge number of crit chance modifiers on thief.

In organized PvE all classes get hit for roughly the same amount (for groups)

Oh wow, thanks Forgotten Legend, can’t believe I’ve done such a trivial mistake lol xD. Gonna fix it asap

It’s always possible they were fed up with you at that point and HoB was just the last drop. Underperforming guardians can be the most frustrating thing in this game. Leaving shaite like staff auto attacking aside, running a dungeon run with a guardian and not getting a single WoR when it’s needed, missing aegis timing horrendously. Dying to conditions while the guard is happily sitting on his VoR cooldown watching his HP tick up little by little ect. can turn a saint into a demon. Trust me on this.

It’s easier for people to forgive a bad thief, or a bad ele, maybe even a bad warrior, but for god’s sake, no matter what you do, never EVER do badly as a guardian or ranger. People will eat you alive.

DISCLAIMER: my calculations might be wrong. I don’t usually do this kind of stuff, so feel free to point out logical or mathematical faults and I will do my best to correct them.

1045 ferocity (300 from traits, 745 from armor) / 15 = 69.9%
251% – old crit. damage modifier with full traits and zerker gear
new modifier 219.9% / 2.51 = 87.6%
Difference in damage: 22.4%

Similar math applies to runes from what we can tell so far:
Rune of eagle (previously 8% critical damage boost)
Rune of eagle (now 35+65 ferocity = 100 ferocity)
100/15 = 6.66
6.66/0.08 = 83.25
Estimated 26.75% critical damage bonus loss

Assuming 50% critical hit chance as a standard for DPS sets (it usually is a bit higher), on 50% of your hits you lose from 22 to 27% damage. Therefore the final damage reduction on your hits will be 22 (or 27) / 0.5, which does roughly translate into 11-13.5% damage reduction depending on a specific build across the board.

That only applies to unbuffed scenarios. In a group party setting, your critical chance will (perception stacks, banner of discipline, spotter, fury) go up to over 90% most of the time. This would effectively close to double the nerf to your damage output in organized parties (bringing it up to said 20% from calculations).

However that is not enough, seeing as stacking sigils are getting changed, so that you can no longer swap out the stacking weapon without losing the stacks themselves, you are effectively losing damage even further, as you are giving up potentially up to 12% critical chance, or 5%/10% damage modifier on your weapon.

So the DPS loss from losing the perception sigil is (for dungeon party setup dps):
54% base + 8% banner of disc. + 12% perception sigil + 20% fury = 94% crit. chance
DISCLAIMER: values are estimated from data available so far:
201% (gear) + 6.6% (runes) + 11.3% (banner of discipline) + 4.6% (butternut curry soup) = 222.5% damage modifier with 94% chance (seeing as crit chance modifiers are easy to keep up constantly unlike might), which translates to 122.5% damage increase 94% of the time.
222.5 * 0.94 + 100 * 0.06 = 215.15
222.5* 0.82 + 100 * 0.18 = 200.45
200.45/2.1515 = 93.167%
that’s 6.74% less damage if perception sigil is left out/unstacked.

Basically, dungeon groups lose about 22% damage from their gear, their rune sets will provide 27% less bonus damage on critical hits, they either give up 5% flat damage increase or 6.7% increase from stacking perception.

With perception + force + 2x night (which will possibly turn out to be the best setup for dungeons where stacking at the beginning is possible, since the bonus from perception will still apply with force+night weapon set as well as it’s original set) you lose 2.5% damage from the sigil of force, assuming you spend equivalent amounts of time on each weapon set.

Final calculation
745 (gear) + 300 (traits) + 170 (estim. banner of disc.) + 100 (runes) + 70 (estim. food) = 1385 ferocity, that’s 92.3 critical damage

old crit chance: 71% (gear) + 30% (traits) + 15% (banner of discipline) + 8% (runes) + 10% (food) = 134% critical damage

242.3/2.84 = 85%, therefore 15% decrease in final critical damage completely buffed
242.3 * 0.94 + 100 * 0.06 = 233.76
284 * 0.94 + 100 * 0.06 = 272.96

233.76/2.7296 = 14.4% dps loss from ferocity change alone + 2.5 % from sigil change

RESULT: you can expect dungeon speedrun groups (top organised ones) to lose about 17% of their damage output.

This will be somewhat reduced by the ability to swap traits (and therefore builds to match specific encounters) on the go, which will only further promote elitism (and increase the gap between casuals and elitists). The speed of clearing different dungeons will change greatly as some rapid trait swaps inside of them could significantly increase effectiveness of certain classes (mesmers with their warden’s feedback for example).

Furthermore this change is going to hit organized parties the most, while affecting PUGs the least. Basically the more casual you are the less of an effect this will have on you, while the harder you try, the less effective your efforts will become.

#gocasual #KarlForPresident #allisvain #weTESTEDitIswear

EDIT: fixed numerical mistake about the final amount of damage reduction

We don’t trust arena net. We’ve never seen them do a quality job balancing this game, yet we’ve been presented with a huge number of rushed, badly thought out, and disconnected from the real state of the game decisions. It takes them half a year to balance minor stuff and all they do is screw things up. No, we have no faith in ANet’s ability to do stuff well.

Good thing I geared my guardian along with thief. I might be playing it a lot more now…

Farming solitary mobs or farming 1 by 1: thief (cnd → backstab → aa, repeat)
Farming in AoE: guardian (eles can’t survive having a group of mobs bashing on them and lack a pull skill for ranged enemies). Warrior works too.
Zerg: staff ele or staff guardian

Dungeon speedruns with regular experienced group: ele
Dungeon speedruns without a full, or experienced, or regular group: guardian

You will grow to hate ele as a class if you don’t have good players around yourself. With ele it’s either burst the boss down so fast it doesn’t have time to hurt you, have your teammates protect you and kill the boss as your defenses are running out or examine boss’ footprints very, veeeery closely.

On the other hand a well played guardian can turn a nightmare into rainbow filled dream walk. There is not a single class in this game that can make as much of a difference for a team if played right as a guardian can. Sure, guardian is not the optimal choice for a number of dungeons at this point in time, but let me give you a few facts that may change your opinion:
- guardians already have low critical damage, yet their DPS isn’t bad at all (if you leave FGS out of the game, with it even thief dps looks bad). It can be speculated that guardian DPS will be hurt the least by the upcoming ferocity changes, seeing as their reliance on critical damage is already pretty low, which could move guardian DPS up a tier or two.
- guardians are not taken in top speedruns/dungeon guilds because people in those don’t really need the extra defenses, as they know the tells and can dodge accordingly. That’s however not a question of “trying”. We aren’t talking about mere gear selection and learning of several dungeon strategies. We are talking about long time dungeon running experience and skill, things that don’t come cheap. For any other, “lesser” party, guardian can still offer a lot.
- I wouldn’t want to run fractals 49+ without a guardian. I’d rather have 3 guardians than 3 eles if I could only pick 1 of the 2.

If I remember correctly, in one of Obal’s videos he mentions that his build (20/25/0/0/25) for guardian does more damage with cleric’s than AH build does with full zerker. That’s how bad AH is…

@SkylightMoon: if you dislike the way dungeons are run, why not join a non-skipping no-stacking guild? If you dislike running dungeons in zerker gear, why not use something you like and join a “play how you want” group? If you lack challenge, why not go fractal 50, or do arah without skipping, or solo some dungeons? Why does it have to be, that you demand that the way the rest of us like to play this game has to be taken from us. Why do you demand that we play the way you do, when none of us are forcing you to play how we do? I have yet to hear of a speedrunner who would demand, that conditions should stop working on bosses, and that ranged damage should be reflected back to it’s caster past 300 range mark, or that support skill range should be reduced, so that the guy ranging the boss doesn’t get any boons even by accident. We don’t care how others play their game, we just want to play it our way. The fact that it’s the most efficient way is on purpose, since that’s the whole point of building and running dungeons the way we do. Remember that this is a game, people don’t play it when they don’t enjoy it. If the meta were to change, the top people would find a way to do dungeons in the most efficient way, and the rest of us would learn from them and follow. That is as long as we still found it fun to play, and as long as we were willing to put up with the grind that has been introduced into gw2 as of late.

There is no point in making the content we have right now harder. ANet either needs to redesign dungeons completely, or better, come up with new dungeon content.

- berserker meta is a speedrun meta, not overall dungeon meta
- there’s more speedruns because there is no new content to beat. It gets easier on your 50th run you know, not to mention there’s nothing else to aim for than efficiency without new content
- you can’t balance dungeons around experienced people only. There are new players who have trouble beating the same dungeons we run in 5 minutes.
- ease of running a dungeon depends on the class you play, your team and your personal skill. I find meleeing stuff significantly easier with my mesmer/war than with my thief (on d/d) or LH ele when I PUG. Some classes simply have it easier than others by default.
- stacking requiring no strategy is a misconception. Stacking is a strategy that doesn’t work without specific skills and team setup. Try running cliffside 2nd seal (the fire ring one) by stacking on the far side without a thief or guardian to keep blinding the enemies and you will find out that it doesn’t turn out that well. Or fighting groups of dredge without reflects ect.
- I fail to see how holy trinity dungeon running from other games requires any more effort or skill than running a proper speedrun in gw2. I’ve played Lineage 2, WoW and several other MMOs and it all came down to paying attention to what you should be doing rather than skill. Although there is less variety in the employment of strategies in gw2, the amount itself is not any lower.

Why do I get the feeling that everybody who comes to complain on these forums about berserker gear is some godly entity who has reached the enlightened state in this game where he can effortlessly breeze through any dungeon no matter which party they end up with just by stacking in any random corner and spamming their auto attack. It seems more likely to me that those same people have simply grown tired of the game and are looking for something completely different, yet don’t feel like grinding their way through another MMO. Am I the only noob on this forum who still runs into problems from time to time? Am I the only one who dies here and there when they make a mistake? Am I the only one who thinks that berserker is not nearly as forgiving as these threads might imply? It could all come down to me just being horrible, but what does that make the sizable rest of this game’s population who don’t do as well as I do?

@messiah: do you actually play dungeons or did you just watch some videos from these forums?

I find it hard to find a point in your post which wouldn’t be completely wrong and on which I could start. But let’s see:

Skill – ability to predict future developments and to instantly adapt to the unpredictable ones
Strategy – a plan formed to counter predicted enemy movements, or a plan devised in order to secure benefits for you/your party

No stacking =
1) no party boons. GW2 doesn’t have long range boon sharing, eliminates an aspect of strategy
2) demands ranged weapons (natural stacking for full melee parties) – ranged weapons eliminate the element of skill as their reaction times, number of events you actually need to react to and their risk/reward ratio are significantly dumbed down and reduced.

Not “zerker only” =
1) I’d actually support a buff to rampager set, to bring it up to zerker level

else

this could imply tanky gear – tanky gear eliminates the element of skill, as well as element of strategy, because of lower risk/reward and lower need to react to immediate events (lupi kick for example).

“More difficult to kill bosses” – this could mean anything, but most likely not what you are trying to achieve.

“REAL strategy” – I don’t see how going ranged in tanky sets could benefit strategy at all. It actually seems to me, like it completely kills off any strategy, and any skill involved in running dungeons.

I do believe that what you want is the holy trinity, or something close to it with gw2-ish system. In which case… wrong game bro, try one of the new MMOS coming out soon

@OP: we don’t have time to bother with inexperienced, and at the same time ignorant players (those, who come unprepared, unwilling to learn or listen, yet demand something of us). For us, dungeons have long ceased to be interesting and fun as they are, and our definition of fun in dungeons is running them as fast and as effectively as possible. It thrills me to take 80% of Malrona’s HP with a well timed feedback on my mesmer, a smile spreads on my face when I see a 25k backstab pop up, I feel genuinely happy when I melee mossman on fractal difficulty lvl 50 with my d/d meta glass cannon thief and don’t die (at least not too much xD). None of that is possible when I party with soldier warriors who use rifle at max range, never ress teammates or never run banners as a principle and get offended when I tell them how to play.

I am a co-leader in a guild of 450 members all of whom are required to represent at all times, which makes for a pretty active and fairly large community. I have had to explain dungeon strategies and meta builds to people countless times as I just couldn’t refuse the party join request from a guildie when I asked for a mesmer for SE path 3 and instead a WvW condimancer has joined. (Let me use this chance to thank all the awesome dungeon community people posting guides, builds and resources to make life easier for us normal folks). In fact, I’ve had to explain those things so often, that I had to write them down and make them into a post on the guild forums.

Simply said, I have neither time, nor energy (student working a full time job) to waste on a random player who isn’t even from my own guild, to explain to them why they should be running the meta build, what the meta build is and then proceed to explain dungeon specific mechanics without as much as a VoIP app., when there’s a myriad of top-quality videos, guides and builds on the internet that would turn them from total newbs into decently prepared players (when those guides and videos can explain it many times better than I can with nothing but in-game chat).

Although I personally don’t agree with using AP as a metric for skill (even though I myself have over 11k), there is no tool available in this game to guide the shaping of your group through LFG, so that you end up with what you were looking for. Not a single time have I had the party I have asked for in LFG on the first try. Since our community lacks the intelligence not to join parties restricted in their description on LFG, the small dungeon running community resorts to using whatever means possible to assure that they get what they asked for (be it gear check, AP or whatever they can use)

Bump for LE2D2!

Bump for Lettusaur!

Bump for Lettumon

Are you doing casual or fast dungeon runs? If you are just going for casual runs that build is ok, but I wouldn’t want to get you in my party if I was doing fast runs.

Mesmers are only dungeon-viable because of reflects and team utility. If you kitten yourself by not going for either of the two (you must have both), you are screwing your group over and would be better off taking pretty much any other class… Not to mention mesmers are already not that useful in several dungeon paths as it is.

Also traveler runes are both a huge waste of gold AND dps potential in dungeons…

You can always go “it doesn’t really matter what you bring to a dungeon”, but if you think about it, you need good vuln stacking, might stacking, reflects, utility, and for easy skipping stealth (not mandatory though). And you’ve already nigh-filled your average group of 5 people.

After doing some testing it would indeed appear the GPU isn’t switching from the Intel on-board chip to the nvidia dedicated graphics card.

It would appear I have posted the thread in a wrong forum, I do apologize, if a mod sees this please move it to tech support, thank you.

EDIT2: I did manage to fix the issue by manually forcing the game to start with the NVidia chip, you have to allow it in the nvidia control panel, hope it helps someone

Having major game-wide FPS issues after updating the game today. I am running the game on a decent machine, 16 gigs of RAM, system and game on SSD, GeForce GTX 675MX (latest drivers) ect., having barely 15 FPS is just unacceptable. I am not even running the more damanding graphics stuff like AA. Is anybody else experiencing this issue? It would appear to me as if the game didn’t switch from the Intel on-board chip to my nvidia GPU.

Got windows 8.1 fully updated btw.

It seems that I rubbed you guys the wrong way, even if unintentionally. I am not trying to say that mesmer is not an awesome class, I love it just like any of you, and it is honestly amazing, but it’s not amazing because of the damage it could theoretically do, because that damage has way too many ifs, and many dungeon boss fights just don’t last long enough for mesmer to build up his DPS high enough to catch up with the rest of DPS classes that just dish it all out from the start. Mesmers are taken for their team utility, the moment you leave that utility out, mesmers will lose their place.

Also @ Pyroatheist: yes, that’s true, but at the same time that damage is brought to your team by the ele, not the mesmer. It wouldn’t matter one bit if anybody else picked up the weapon. It’s the same as calculating time warp damage increase as the mesmers’ passive damage, in which case the other weapon’s damage should be attributed to ele, and so should the damage increase from might stacks ect and we’d just end up arguing about variables. By my original statement I only meant to say, that mesmer’s active damage output throughout most boss encounters isn’t on par with other classes because of how short the boss fights actually are (and being affected by the wind-up time and the possibility of phantasms dying) and becomes worthwhile only by adding in the group utility stuff.

Feel free to argue with me guys, I am not saying you aren’t right (many of you in fact are right), but from my point of view the important part of DPS is how fast it gets the enemy killed, and mesmer doesn’t excel in that area unless you factor in reflects and time warp.

@Xyonon: Yes, I have realized that specific part was an overstatement and edited it out about 1 minute after I have submitted the post. You must have caught it before I could submit the edit, so let’s just drop that topic.

However, I still do stand by my statement that mesmer is not a dps class and their dps output (in terms of active dps, not passive DPS boost) is largely dependent on reflects and passive boosts/party boosts, which are always situational.

While theoretically mesmers could and should have good dps output, there is a number of conditions to reach that, most of which are never met at the same time. DPS is not measured, and should not be measured by theoretical damage values. If you believe mesmers can compete in terms of damage with other classes, I suggest you watch some veteran risen giant damage tests to see just how far behind mesmers’ DPS actually is. By the time a mesmer actually manages to build some of his DPS, a pantasm dies or some other problem occurs and most importantly, other classes are usually done killing the giants by then. DPS in this game is about loading it up fast and bursting the boss down, not maintaining a steady high number.

1) Mesmer is not a DPS class. Even if you build for DPS, your damage output will be miniscule compared to any other dungeon meta class. Guardians, Thieves, Eles, Warriors… all of these classes outdps a mesmer quite easily, and by quite a large margin, not to mention their damage is faster to build up and easier to maintain.

2) Mesmers are a utility class. The true dungeon support. I’d even go as far as saying that mesmers offer as much, if not more (under certain conditions) support as guardians do. This is achieved via the following:

i) Reflects. The true reason people take mesmers in their parties are those sweet sweet reflects. They are also the best way to boost your otherwise small DPS. Most mesmers build in such a way so as to maximize their reflect damage output (0/30/0/20/20 for example). That includes traiting their focus and learning how to make use of it.

ii) Mantras: each readied mantra (with 30 in dueling) provides a 4% damage boost. If you feel confident on your mesmer, you can have up to 3 different mantras up at a time (although utilities used differ from dungeon to dungeon). The important part is, that you can give stability to your party in crucial moments, cleanse conditions or daze at will once those mantras are up regradless of your current character status (stunned, knocked down, casting a spell…).

iii) Time warp: is an incredible ability that boosts your team’s DPS. Learn when to use it and your party will love you

iv) Portal: in many dungeons this utility can make or break a speedrun. Watch some speedrun vids in the dungeon forums and learn the tricks. This is the trademark ability of good mesmers and good teams.

v) Damage: while it is true that mesmer damage doesn’t soar high up in the sky with the rest of the meta dungeon classes, it doesn’t mean you should neglect it. Sword AA (which is the only weapon you should be using in main hand unless struggling with high level fractals or extremely difficult bosses) stacks vulnerability all on it’s own and rips boons off of enemies (useful on it’s own) and phantasms do deal a decent amount of damage considering just how much team utility you pack as a mesmer.

If you wanted to hear how good mesmer damage is, then I am sorry to tell you that you have picked a wrong class. Staff ele and meta build thief can easily top mesmer damage (lava font + meteor shower + ice storm from ice bow or just FGS rush against a wall make mesmer damage look obsolete, but the same ele would be hugging the floor were it not for the mesmer who reflected that malrona AoE).

Currently this appears to be the best you could aim for in terms of dungeons:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fYAQRAoY8alcmCOXcS9E95Ey2jKcn4J/DglODcqlA-jQCBYfDim8DkgAmKIQZmFRjt4qIas6aYKXER12bFRrOKgnC-e

Full berserker since assassin’s will be losing more damage than zerker will after the ferocity transformation, utilities are always situational. Thief is not the most heavily populated class for dungeons, but they are viable and in a decent spot. S/P has high survivability and self-sustain, and d/d has incredibly high damage, only outdone by FGS rush against a wall.

You are asking what is best. Berserker is best, and there is no indication pointing at any other gear coming close in the near future. Also medium armor sets are the cheapest ones to craft as ascended, since elonian leather squares are so cheap.

I commend you for your hard work figuring out how to make ele better, however what you are proposing is basically an overhaul of the class, which is just not going to happen. Many of your proposed changes are “quality of life” that would benefit ele greatly in some game modes, yet ultimately fall short in others. Also I don’t see you addressing the biggest problem of the elementalist, being lack of any form of defense, be it active or passive. This cripples the class across all game modes more than any other issue eles might have. In WvW, eles serve as nothing more than water field bots, in PvE they are treading on a thin ice with their conjured weapon builds, that might get nerfed sooner or later breaking the class in yet another game mode and in PvP they are completely broken already.

No, Mai Trin is not the actual answer. The actual answer is making the dungeon paths nobody does at this moment worth doing, like CoF path 3, SE path 2, TA Aetherpath, ect.

There are already plenty of varied encounters in this game. It’s just that effort required to complete those paths far outweighs the rewards received for completing them. I remember that CoF path 3 had several passages where damage wasn’t a priority, and am sure there are more of such paths. But why waste my time doing those when I can get rewards from 4 other dungeons for the same time invested? Just adjust the rewards for those paths adequately with their time requirements/difficulty and there will be variety in this game.

That was for the easy part, let’s not forget that everything becomes stale after time. We need new dungeons, or at least new dungeon paths. No matter how difficult content is, when you are running it for the 100th time, it WILL become trivial.

digiowl.9620:

xsquared.1926:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2VhmwLwvrM

Nerf clerics. Allowing to facetank ARAH and LUPICUS without dodging is extremely broken. This is something you can’t deny.

If it was solo, i could agree. But 5 people stacking as best they can, i would say it is barely working as intended.

Look at the skill descriptions of supportive skills. With such miniscule range/radius stacking apparently IS the intended way to beat content. Use your brain at least a little please. Or find out something about how the game actually works instead of coming up with your own stuff. Thanks.

Falunel.7645:

Let me preface this by saying that I am an elementalist- have been since launch, made and still make a daily habit of soloing champs for the hell of it, run glassy builds in organized groups.

That being said, I am in favor of nerfing Fiery Rush. No matter however which way you dice it, there’s nothing not broken about a mechanic that lets you down a boss before it can ever pull out its most threatening attacks. DPS-oriented groups should down an enemy faster than non-DPS groups, but not to the point that it trivializes the fight entirely.

However, the rest of the elite IMO should be left alone. It does good but not absurd damage considering its CD, and as with all conjures, holding a FGS locks you off from your weapon skills, where a lot of active defenses are located. So nerf Fiery Rush (reduce the damage of the trail and/or make it just do burning), but leave the rest of FGS alone.

Just a simple question: why would anybody ever bother using FGS after such a change? Fiery rush is the only reason people run the elite. The other two elites are absolutely horrible, but even so they would be far superior to FGS without the rush damage. A self-buffed warrior without signet of rage could easily outdps FGS damage if you count the rush out, and warrior is infinitely more durable and sustainable than ele is.

This is something many people seem to not understand. The 4 warrior meta isn’t dead. Not at all, it’s still looming in the shadows, omnipresent, waiting for it’s chance to take control again. Eles, rangers, and the other underdog classes are not in such a good position that they could take a few hits for the team. You hit the wrong spot, and running an ele becomes a nuisance rather than benefit to your team. I sure as hell don’t want to see my beautiful magus turned into an AC bot again.

From my point of view, you wouldn’t mind the change because you like ele as a class and would keep playing it even if it got nerfed to the ground. And well, then there are those of us, who value efficiency more than sticking to a single class no matter how much we like it. I have all characters on lvl 80, don’t particularly mind playing any of them, although I do find ele the most enjoyable. For people like me, ele losing it’s edge in dungeons would mean me having to quit playing my favorite class in favour of something more efficient.

Now don’t misunderstand, I do agree that FGS damage is over the top. But if there needs to be a change, make it so that it doesn’t gut the weapon completely. The auto attack is completely underwhelming and disappointing, I don’t even remember what the skill #2 does, that’s how horrible it is. #3 is possibly the only balanced skill on the whole weapon. #4 is the reason anyone bothers using the elite at all, and #5 is just a filler skill people use to waste time in between #3 and #4 recharges.

If a change comes to FGS, it will not be undeserved, but if the change is just a plain old nerf, it will hurt the ele class badly. FGS needs a complete overhaul, and it needs to stay a dps weapon that offers burst superior to more easily accessible alternatives.

kyubi.3620:

its not about the number of people that can do it its about the fact it can be done.

This is exactly why we can never agree on anything. Nerfing the top 1% because of irrational envy is disgusting to me. I am not in the 1%, probably never will be, but people who try to drag others down to their own level by force make me want to puke.

Where will any motivation to get better at the game be, when no matter how hard you try, you won’t be able to get results better than the scrub standing next to you? Why would people want to play dungeons at all then? This game doesn’t have gear progression like other MMOs do, everything here is about the progression of your own skill. When you nerf that, there will be NOTHING left.

@Vox: it is ok as long as it’s only doable by the top 1% of the population. That’s what being an elite (like the guys from RT) is all about. Limiting the skill ceiling is the worst thing you could do to a game, because everybody skilled will leave a game with low skill ceiling, and only the casuals will remain behind (the current situation in PvP is just like that).

And as I have said before, there is plenty of support in this game, it’s just not required for supportive characters to run tanky/supportive stats. Seeing as all content needs to be beatable by any team composition (including full zerk), nobody will bother running anything else. You cannot save this game from this fate, as that’s what it was inevitably designed for. The elite will always run zerker/rampager(provided the later will be buffed adequately).

Congratulations!

You are spouting utter nonsense. It seems to me as if you didn’t actually understand the game at all, so let me break it down to you:

Support = a player that provides benefits to others in his/her party
example: party-wide reflects, boons, heals, non-boon bonuses (quickness, frost spirit ect.)
classes: every single class in any dungeon is required to bring some form of support, the prominent support characters are ele and guardian because of the ratio of support/damage they offer.

Control = a player who alters positioning/actions of a foe so that they work in favor of the whole party
example: positioning (the oldest and most important form of control), crowd control (blinds, stuns, knockbacks), passive control such as aegis (interwined with support, but works the same as a blind in reverse)
classes: all. Positioning and some form of control like temporal courtain are mandatory in every dungeon and every party, moreover many builds/classes provide added benefit of blind fields and stuns for trash mobs, although benefit of CC is greatly reduced in gw2 due to how bosses work. That is an issue of game-design rather than dungeon meta. Unless CC works on bosses properly, it will never be viable. If it works, it could alleviate some of the pressure on support and control/damage hybrids could see the light of the day (hammer stun warrior instead of guardian’s aegis to avoid a big hit attack from a boss).

Nowhere here does gear play ANY role whatsoever. Role is determined by traits, utilities and weapon choices. Berserker is as much support, as it is control, as it is damage. The difference is made by berserker actually demanding perfect knowledge of game’s mechanics to not die and drag your party down. Clerics guardian offers no more support than equally traited zerker. It just offers more healing, which doesn’t amount to anything in this game, since that would border the trinity mechanics, which nobody wants to see here.

The issue that you have complained about has nothing to do with berserker specs whatsoever. All you have described is some builds having inferior scaling with berserker gear to others, not to mention half of those specs are viable AND useful in other game modes (somewhere even overpowered).

About gear other than zerker not earning you respect: of course it wouldn’t. Taking defensive stats in a game that relies on active defenses is the same as saying you aren’t good enough to complete the content without those. Want respect? Run those same specs with zeker (for power builds) or rampager’s (condition builds) gear and then people might come to respect you. Defensive gear has it’s place in WvW, but in PvE it’s a bicycle with training wheels and nothing is ever going to change about that.

Pets competitive? Pets require no management, no positioning and no skill. There is no direct control over pets in GW2. If pets become as good as strategies people have had to work their kitten off for, it would be a sad day for this game. Thankfully ANet is already working on fixing pets in PvP already.

Fiery greatsword: you want to make an elite skill with 180 second cooldown and limited amount of uses work like a kittening warrior greatsword on a 4s cooldown? Have you gone mad? It MUST be superior in terms of damage. And not by a small margin. I do agree that fiery rush is somewhat over the top at the moment, but you are giving up everything else on ele when you are using the FGS. Your might stacking, your fire fields, support, defensive capabilities… everything to deal MORE damage. If that damage is underwhelming, ele won’t have a single good Elite skill, and the class will fall into obscurity and get replaced by warriors in dungeons yet again.

Congrats kyubi, you are the first person that I have come to truly hate on these forums. You represent everything I loathe in the human race. Your posts are never constructive, all you are trying to do is to shape the game in your image without a single spec of regard for other players.

But to the topic: speedruns are the meta, because there is not enough new content to challenge players to do anything else. Berserkers melt in a matter of seconds when things don’t go right, and unless you are experienced in running the dungeon, things never go right. All that you hate on are guilds and groups that do manage to do the things right, and receive proper rewards for their efforts, which are still sub-par to rewards from open world content which requires no effort other than time investment. You have never backed any of your claims by your own videos and findings, you have ever only hated on things others have done, which you could not.

resets with dailies (achievements) at 00:00 gmt (for EU)

Nothing works against this sort of people. Capital letters, writing class requirements first… nothing. Some people don’t even read which path you intend to do and just assume you are going for the easiest one, and if not, you should (regardless of whether you have done it already).

Also starting your own party alone is not advisable. Get a guildie who will help you kick bads, or just wait for a good looking party to appear on LFG (I usually wait until I see a zerk run with several warriors already in the party and then just spice it up with my ele/mesmer/ranger/whatever I feel like playing).

Dagger Mainhand:
PvP: absolutely useless. Nobody runs ele, but even if somebody did (for fun ect.) they don’t run dagger mainhand, because it cannot compare with any other melee build in the current metagame. Let’s compare:
Thief – s/d and s/p are the current meta, both have frequent, close to constant evade frames, numerous teleports and still access to stealth for disengage, not to mention the option to go for range with shortbow that has great mobility/AoE/utility.
Warrior – constant HP regen, naturally tanky, numerous CC on very short cooldowns, stances that provide immunities on shorter cooldowns than most ele utilities, option to go range with biggest AoE in game and some more crowd control.
Guardian (DPS) – Shelter, Renewed Focus, Shield of Wrath, Aegis, numerous sources of blinds, incomparable healing per second with traited meditations on a pure DPS build, very high burst potential

in comparison to:
D/D ele: horrible self-sustain, locked into melee, 0 ability to live through spike, weak AoE, barely any CC.

In order for D/X ele to become viable in PvP this is just the first step, more will need to be done

PvE: dagger/focus is the “sustained DPS with self-sustain” build for dungeons/fractals because of focus’ defensive capabilities. In spite of being melee, dagger mainhand is inferior in terms of burst damage output to both staff and scepter builds (that utilize lightning hammer, which dagger doesn’t utilize as much due to inferior might stacking options). And yes, burst is useful in PvE for speedruns, where bosses die in a few seconds and therefore burst is preferable to sustained damage. In spite of being the “sustain” build, it has significant issues surviving in PUGs (provided you attempt to play optimally in terms of DPS output, and not just sit back and get carried) even compared to mesmers (the full melee ones), who have 2.5s evade window every ~9.5 seconds (traited) (compared because of being the only 2nd useful light armor class in dungeons) or guardians, who have numerous ways of negating damage on a much shorter cooldown than d/x ele (compared because of the same health pool and reliance on active defense mechanics).

d/x ele is not neccessarily in a bad spot in PvE if you know your game, but I feel that the buff will not upset the balance at all, and would be rather justified

WvW: This game has never really been balanced around WvW. There is no way it could, because it’s inherently imbalanced due to difference in gear/levels/numbers of enemies. I’ve only seen ANet address issues stemming from WvW, if they were breaking the game. This won’t break anything, it will just help an underplayed class get somewhere decent. If people complain about roaming/dueling in WvW, well that’s just a small insignificant part of the game, deal with it.

EDIT: almost forgot, about burning speed doing too much according to some, there are many skills that do many things at once. As long as they are telegraphed, it’s ok (F1 on longbow with warrior is a: combo field, direct damage, condition damage, condition cleanse).

@Travlane: a properly built thief can be just as survivable as a guardian, maybe even more. It’s just that to achieve that level of survivability you need to do heavy sacrifices that guardian doesn’t have to do, and you won’t be nearly as useful to other players as a tanky guardian is.

And no, guardian can never dodge/evade half as much as a thief can. 30 in acrobatics, withdraw, bountiful theft and you have feline grace + almost permanent vigor + active evades on weapons (s/d or s/p). With that setup you are dodging/evading more than you are actually open to attacks, not counting in blinds and/or stealth.

Please get your facts straight

@kyubi: No, there will be 0 support and 0 control people in any dungeon parties. There will still be zerker guardians in place of the support you so frivolously promote, and there will be zerker warriors (or rampager warriors) in place of control builds with mace offhand. And you think rampager rangers are going to be a thing? Sword mainhand warriors will outdps those, so they will be just as unwanted as they were before. There will be no real balance shift, just a nerf to berserkers to kitten us off.

Oh yes, I’d forgotten mesmer (seeing as I don’t play it too much myself). Mesmers already have major DPS issues in PvE. They are possibly the slowest class to build up their DPS output and their sole usefulness lies in their team utility. This utility is proportionaly interwined with berserker gear in the form of time warp. The less berserkers you have in your team, the less efficient time warp is and the less needed mesmer becomes (freeing up a space for potentially superior pick)

3) Rampager spec: If the hit to berserker gear is too big, Rampagers will take over it’s place. That will mean a meta shift not only away from berserker specs, but also towards more hybrid classes like necromancers and engineers (which would be nice if it didn’t shut out classes with poor hybrid specs). It will not be a work of balance, it will be cutting off some classes from the meta, so that others can join it now. This has happened in PvP over half a year ago and people have come to hate that blasted patch. The game mode has never recovered and many great people have left the game for good.

4) Failing to address the issues with Clerics, Dire, Soldier’s, and every other defensive stat gear uselessness in PvE. Taking the easy way out.

So what can be done to address those issues? I could come up with an elaborate solution to each of the classes’ problems, but seeing as it’s the easy way that is preferred, what needs to be done (IMO) is:

- normalization of base health/armor amongst classes (PvE/WvW, doesn’t have to occur in PvP seeing as it’s completely different balance there). This has caused much grief in PvE and WvW to many players running non-heavies. While I do understand that each class has it’s own defensive mechanics, which was the base for the decision to split them into tiers in the first place, that balance decision is mainly affecting PvP balance, yet creating a major issue in other game modes. It is high time it was addressed. It’s always easier to just re-balance warrior’s active defense mechanics than to address all the other classes’ survivability issues. The normalization doesn’t necessarily have to be aimed at the top level of HP/armor, it can be the middle one for all I care (to keep PvE challenging), and WvW players can receive a passive bonus in HP when they join it.
- if normalization is not an option, make sure class specific defenses work for all content adequately (much more balance work)
- make sure berserker spec isn’t completely destroyed, so that rampager can come into play, but not as the only contender.

Hello fellow players and ANet developers, so far we have been given a number of important information in topics regarding berserker changes, that in conjunction with each other don’t draw a pretty picture in my head. Let’s go over them:

1) berserker gear dominance is being addressed
2) critical damage is being changed
3) exact changes are going to be known this friday

Me, as well as a lot of other players, feel like this is taking the “easy” way out, and instead of addressing the true issues that lay with badly implemented dungeon boss AI, and overall difficulty of PvE content (which used to be higher during the Beta as I recall), it has been decided that berserker gear will simply be nerfed. As distasteful as I find this choice, I (along with many others) have been expecting it to happen, for obvious reasons. However, that is not why I have made this topic.

Now, depending on how the changes are pulled off, berserker gear may, or may not cease being useful in PvE/WvW (according to data from previous balance patches, it is not unreasonable to assume it very well might cease being useful altogether). But regardless of either of the outcomes coming true, there are a few issues that will arise from this:

1) Thieves will lose too much of their ability to pressure enemies (damage), and therefore their survivability will be even worse than it is now (pressure is a major factor in PvP survivability). Now, I have said this to developers a long time ago, and I even got a reply stating that I was right in my assumptions, but thieves have too much damage nested in their high tier traits, and their base damage is too low. If they want to spec more towards survivability, their damage output suffers heavily. Thanks to this, berserker plays too heavy a role in thieves’ builds compared to other classes, because damage is that much more important to them. Along with poor boon generation on their own (be it offensive or defensive) and overnerfed boon stealing, which was supposed to counter that weakness, thieves will suffer the most with this change.

In WvW stealth specs will become even more abundant, seeing as no other spec will be viable at all

In PvE thieves will cease functioning inside of the dungeons at all. Warriors and Guardians, who are naturally tanky will take over the few spots thieves, eles and rangers might have had in teams. That is under the assumption that berserker gear survives the slaughter as superior dungeon running option.

2) Elementalists: just like thieves, eles will suffer in PvE because of the gear change. Although fortunately for eles, they have abundance of damage modifiers in their traits, therefore the hit to berserker gear will not have as much of an effect on this class. Yet there is a persisting problem with ele survivability. If the hit to zerker gear is not big enough to warrant PVT meta (which I’d hate), eles will suffer just like thieves will, because there will be no advantage to taking one instead of a guardian or warrior.

Behold fellow players, this is how PvE content is made with minimal effort. All it takes is one tiny change and players will have hundreds of hours of grind to enjoy. Just like the last few patches when ascended weapons and after that armor came out!

I honestly hope I am wrong. I honestly do want to believe, that whatever they came up with, is reasonable and will make the game better. I have been hoping for the past few days, but the blog post is still nowhere to be seen.

@noobgood https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Balance-Developer-Livestream-on-Friday-at-2pm-PST/3501152

I am gonna reserve my judgement for when I actually see the changes themselves, but so far it all looks like it’s gonna be a slaughter for berserker gear, which makes me sad, because frankly I hate the notion of defensive gear playing any larger role in this game than it already does.

Will the critical damage changes be aimed at lowering the overall damage output in the game?