Guild Wars 2

Try both of them out, and pick the one which you enjoy playing the most. You get leveled to 80 inside heart of the mists anyway, so it wouldn’t put any pressure on you in terms of having to level the characters or gear them up.

Their usefulness and actual play style does not matter at this point, since meta shifts over time, and before you are actually capable of competing inside tournaments, the meta will have shifted again.

For example ele used to be unwanted for any team play shortly after launch, then a tanky spec was discovered which has shaped the ele into the most played class in all of PvP, for a number of months. Then came the nerfs that facilitated shift from tanky spec towards more hybrid spec and after the June meta shift towards conditions, the only spec people have played at all, was full glass cannon, which completely ceased to function after the rise of the warrior meta that we have now. On the other hand, mesmers have remained roughly the same since launch, with the sole exception to the rule being the loss of popularity amongst pvp-ers due to shifts within the meta-game. The only viable tournament spec has always been, and for understandable reasons for quite a long time still will be, the shatter spec. Also being the most skill intensive amongst mesmer specs btw. What did change however, was the popularity of the mesmer amongst experienced players, seeing as the class has gaping issues that have not been addressed up until now, and it’s still questionable whether the extent of changes on december 10th will do anything to improve their current state. It is expected at this point, that if mesmers are to be truly viable again (by this I mean competitive at all skill levels), a change in their standard tournament build will be needed.

Now as to the actual choice:
FUN – both are very fun to play. Both require active defense and proper setup for their burst, which makes for an active and engaging play. They both have decent skill cap, alas ele being the winner here.

DAMAGE – is highly dependent on the build you are using, but generally it takes more effort to deal sufficient damage on an elementalist when compared to the rest of classes in this game (seeing as the number of their skills and their versatility is also higher). Do not be mistaken though, elementalist is capable of major, perhaps even the highest single target burst within a compressed time frame (excluding channeled skills like 100b on a warrior) in the whole game.

Mesmer does have an easier time pulling off his burst, although mesmers do suffer because of lack of proper AoE options in other game modes (namely PvE and WvW, limiting their usefulness as a main character overall, not rendering them completely useless though).

This might not be the correct place to list these, but seeing as you are making a character to be your main, I will list their respective roles/performances in other game modes as well (do excuse this pvp players :P).

Ele: in PvE they are capable of performing well with a very specialized build. It takes a lot of skill and supportive party built around an ele to outperform a warrior though and you may have difficulty getting into parties with more “hardcore” players.
In WvW they are limited to being the group support character (using staff for fields). Some people love their performance, some are frustrated by the lack of variety.

Mesmer: in PvE they are quite popular with majority of the dungeon runner community, due to their unique utility skills that make beating a lot of content significantly easier. Lack of AoE options makes them lackluster in open world events at best.
In WvW they are limited to the roamer role, or veil (utility skill) bot for the zerg. As a roamer/duelist they are supremely effective, but their build requires heavy investment into gear not otherwise usable anywhere else.

Hope my post helps you decide

Hahahah, staff ele viable lololol.

Have you seen a glass cannon ele? The latest installment in the series goes scepter/focus, with 1 good condi clear spell, an invulnerability, a block and major burst. This build has very high damage, and tools to pull that damage off. And it’s horrible, utterly masochistic to play in any competitive environment.

Now, staff has no invulnerability. It has no burst to speak of, the only advantage over scepter is +300 range and spells that are not single target, but AoE. So basically, the only advantage a staff ele has, is the ability to cover a point with it’s AoE.

Let’s take a look at classes that don’t give a single fracking frack: thief. What does it do? It kills elementalists. Either by sticking to them on s/d and killing them in about 10 seconds, or backstabbing them for a much more frontloaded effect. Or warriors, that jump on you through all your beautiful AoEs that are not dealing nearly as much DPS as you would have hoped in this case, and proceed to smash your face in, with whichever blunt instrument they are holding at the time. And have you heard of mesmers? I heard they can blink to you and use shatters, the kind of which eats through all of ele’s HP in one combo!

I think I have demonstrated my view on staff ele becoming anything close to viable.

@OP: l2p dude, seriously. I multiclass every single profession in this game and thieves (especially backstab) are only strong in wvw right now (and even there they aren’t as broken as condi mesmers/necros/warriors or pretty much half of the stuff you see roaming).

S/F Zerker ele, glkittenter mesmer, Static Discharge engi, DPS meditation guardian, and I am pretty sure there is a number of other specs. All of these DO deal MORE DAMAGE than backstab thief does.

Not to mention the backstab spec is not even the apex build for pvp right now.

Thieves can stealth more regularly, mesmers can stealth more strategically. Stealthy mesmer builds usually run prismatic understanding trait, which makes them increadibly tanky while in stealth, but their access to stealth is rather limited by quite long cooldowns (90s veil/mass invis, 40s decoy, 24 second traited prestige, which is the only short cd stealth, then there is 1 trait that gives stealth at 25% HP). Thieves can benefit from stealth in terms of condi removal, rapid health regen if traited so and increased movement speed, mesmers only benefit by increased tankiness (which is great, but not as good as benefits thieves can get for the same investment into traits).

Now the difference in playstyle, as you have mentioned, is simple: thieves have to play actively around stealth (most of the time), while mesmers spawn clones and use stealth to get out when it gets sticky. One thing to consider though, is that condi mesmers have no pressure and little chase skills. In PvP, they are useless since they don’t contest a point, in WvW they are only good if you are slower than they are (which barely anybody is).

The only place where condi stealth mesmer outshine others are duels. They win them, most if not all of them.

Rangers are pretty good in fractals to be honest. Many people refuse to play the class properly though (the infamous bearbow rangers), which ruins our reputation in the eyes of everyone else.

For weapons, the basic kit includes: 1h sword, greatsword, axe, warhorn, longbow. Switch according to need in this order of preference: melee does better damage, especially 1h sword (our only true dps weapon). If you are having trouble surviving certain bosses/encounters with 1h sword, swap to greatsword and learn to use 3rd attack in AA chain properly, your survivability will be greatly improved. Warhorn offhand is default, axe only for bosses that require reflect skills. Longbow is for extreme situations where melee is not viable.

Gear and traits: check out Brazil’s guide on youtube. Even though we do bring some level of support with frost spirit/spotter/search and rescue, it’s nowhere near guardian level support, therefore it’s absolutely necessary to pull our own weight and deal enough damage. Assassin/zerker gear is the way to go (survivability is a matter of weapon choice, not a one of gear)

The thing with rangers is, that we can actually offer something unique and very valuable to all groups, but it’s significantly more difficult to do so compared to other classes and great amounts of people simply fail (spirits vs banners, ease of dealing damage while surviving compared to warriors ect.). If you want to play your ranger in high lvl fractals though, it is completely viable.

So you are suggesting I would either get to keep my cultural set I’ve spent a lot of time working towards when there was still no champion farming and getting gold was significantly more difficult, while I’d see cheap ripoffs running everywhere around me, or exchange it for a new skin, that would very likely be nowhere near the aesthetic beauty and uniqueness of the original T3? That sounds like a bad deal to me.

Not to mention if I knew I could get the armor on another race I wouldn’t have made a human in the first place? Where is the justice in that?

I’d like a native linux client as well

@Khallis: are you dumb? I can make hundreds of euros in the time I have spent farming the gold for t3 (I am an IT expert), value is subjective… Not to mention you can buy the gems for those “make believe” money, and it would only cost you half the price of human cultural T3 even with these horrible gem prices via gold conversion. Think a little before you press the post button.

Don’t you guys understand? All of us complained about flamekissed armor NOT because we didn’t like it, but because it was UNFAIR to us, who have spent all the effort and grind to get the original cultural T3, not to mention who made human characters, even though story wise we’d prefer to play a Norn or Sylvari. For some of us getting the 130 gold is a much bigger challenge than spending 10 bucks.

Keeping the old flamekissed set would ONLY be ok if owners of cultural armors would be given an adequate reimbursement, but then the question would arise: what would be an adequate reimbursement? For sure I’d expect a lot more than I could be offered and the whine would never end.

What ANet did was the only reasonable course of action, and has restored my faith in their ability to realize when they have made a major mistake and even fix it.

Ashen.2907:

Silferas.3841:

Anyone who says price reduction over time is a natural economic phenomenon inside of a game is downright silly. Commodity devaluation is a phenomenon that occurs because of several very specific market developments that force the price to drop lower.

1) Competition comes up with products that are objectively newer/better and therefore price reduction is the only way the company selling the product can stay competitive while working on their new big hit. This doesn’t happen in MMOs, there is no new cultural armor set, no competition that would be forcing the price down. There is just plain and obvious price fall, because ANet wants an easy and fast buck.

New armor options do not have to be cultural in order to be competition for existing cultural armor. New skins, in no small part because they are less common, are very much directly in competition with older/more common skins for the gold/gems of the purchasing public.

That is your point of view, which I personally do not agree with. In order for a product to be competitive with a product that is already on the market, it has to carry certain qualities which include but are not limited to quality of execution, pricing, prestige ect. Do you believe Ferrari is concerned over Fiat putting out a new car model? Indeed there are people who would buy Fiat because they like the look, but those are not the majority of customers and that is simply not how economy works when put into practice. Different products for different customers: customer profiling. Cultural armors are limited in acquisition by not being available easily (gem store/low cost) and therefore are not in the same product category as other skins.

Silferas.3841:

2) diminishing demand: as the item becomes “less cool” people stop wanting to buy it, so the price goes down in order to make some extra profit on those, who wanted it but could not afford before. This also does not happen in MMOs, because items don’t loose their “cool” appearance as there are no fashion fads, not to mention they are a display of status (items related to that tend to keep their prices high for very long times IRL).

This very much does occur in MMOs. Old, easily obtainable skins lose their status as they become commonplace. A cosmetic something that becomes commonplace often does lose its “cool” factor because such is often related to rarity and ease of acquisition. The amount of currency in circulation within the game has increased dramatically since launch and so something with a set price becomes more easily acquired and less rare. High priced clothing items rarely keep their full value over a period of more than a year in real life BTW.

I have yet to see an MMO where old, becoming commonplace as more and more people acquired them, skins did not lose some degree of their coolness factor. Some of the coolest most desirable weapon skins earlier on in GW1 became vendor trash later.

Also diminishing demand is inherent to such situations because there is a finite number of players, a finite demand for any given skin, and people are making that finite number smaller by purchasing it, resulting in fewer people who still want it. Unless the argument is being made that, unlike most MMOs a year post launch, the population is growing compared to launch, the demand is diminishing.

You are forgetting the key concepts here:
1) acquisition of cultural armor is very limited and therefore there is no chance of it ever becoming “vendor trash”.

2) Cultural being the most expensive set in game, still, will for a long time into the future guarantee it’s prestigious nature as an item limited to dedicated/long time players. There still is an influx of new players (majority of the ones my guild recruits are new players in this game), therefore these skins have all the conditions to retain their value (other than ANet selling them on TP).

3) although I do have to agree on your point about gold becoming more commonplace in this game as of late, I still see a huge amount of players struggling to reach a level of wealth where they could even afford to gear themselves properly. With so much gold sink in terms of new ascended crafting and the pressure to keep up with the gear treadmill this has had very little effect on the actual rarity of cultural armors. The only players I have ever seen wearing it were the ones that were dedicated to the game and earned it. My personal experience may differ from yours and that’s why we cannot find a common ground.

Anyone who says price reduction over time is a natural economic phenomenon inside of a game is downright silly. Commodity devaluation is a phenomenon that occurs because of several very specific market developments that force the price to drop lower.

1) Competition comes up with products that are objectively newer/better and therefore price reduction is the only way the company selling the product can stay competitive while working on their new big hit. This doesn’t happen in MMOs, there is no new cultural armor set, no competition that would be forcing the price down. There is just plain and obvious price fall, because ANet wants an easy and fast buck.

2) diminishing demand: as the item becomes “less cool” people stop wanting to buy it, so the price goes down in order to make some extra profit on those, who wanted it but could not afford before. This also does not happen in MMOs, because items don’t loose their “cool” appearance as there are no fashion fads, not to mention they are a display of status (items related to that tend to keep their prices high for very long times IRL).

There are more things that can be listed but I’ve just thrown this together to prove my point that arguing that prices falling on an item inside of a game being natural is downright dumb (at least under current conditions)

I’d like human medium T3 on my norn ranger and norn heavy t3 on my human guardian. Don’t really care for the rest of culturals but I am sure they will be available quite soon. Oh and I want refunds for my 5 cultural T3s and stuff attached to them like transmutation stones ect., which is about 800-ish gold altogether. I’d rather pay for them with my credit card than slave away farming gold in a game I should be enjoying.

And I’d like the legendaries too, willing to pay for them ofcourse.

I have lost faith in ANet. To get my cultural T3 on human, I had to spend weeks farming orichalcum on 7 of my lvl 80 characters. Those were 2.5 hours of my life every single day, just running around mostly hideous zones (orr) full of extremely annoying cc heavy enemies that just never give up on chasing you, endlessly contested waypoints and random events happening all over the place. I did not like farming orichalcum one bit. It made me depressed and lethargic to the point that I stopped doing anything else in the game until I had enough gold to get the items I had wanted, human cultural t3 amongst them included.

Can you imagine my disappointment every single time I see it on a trading post, non human character or even humans themselves? It’s the same piece of armor, with additional effects that are just PERFECT for ele such as the toon that wears mine!

What frustrates me the most is the fact, that I have spent hours of my life slaving away inside a freaking game [underline]working[/underline] towards getting the set, when an updated version is a swipe of a credit card away, immediately and without any effort. It’s not about the price of the item at all, like majority of the people here complain about. It’s about the effort put into it and the feeling of disappointment that makes me question my willingness to play this game ever again.

@Daishi: you are right. This is exactly what is amiss in this game (along with AI builds and AoE spam), tanky DPS builds need a slight toning down in terms of their damage.

@Nevir: do you know what the problem with conditions is? It’s getting killed by a necromancer in first 10 seconds of the fight, because he has landed signet of spite and fear on you and just kept auto attacking with scepter. Or getting owned by a spirit ranger that has a ratio of shortbow skill usage of 98:2 in favor of his auto attack. Or fighting a condi mesmer that you cannot see, for all he ever does is spawn staff clones and goes into stealth.

It is not conditions that are too strong. It’s the builds that use them that are ridiculous.

AD celestial only in pvp: it could be a nice start but it would require ridiculous amounts of rebalancing of traits on classes. Just take engi and necro: Necro can access his condition damage traitline without any issues, as it is even favorable for him to do so in many cases. Engi goes as deep as 10 trait points at most in majority of his condi builds, quite often it is 0. To make this change truly meaningful, damage traits would have to be moved into damage traitlines which would be very specialized. However if this did happen, it’d be a good change

@garethh
I’ve gone through several dictionaries (from MMO slang to Oxford) and in every single one Burst as a word was correlated with sudden, unexpected ect. Let’s end the war over words though and concentrate on the important matters at hand. I will give you the privilege of a tie in this matter seeing as you did write what you meant by burst, however amiss that definition might have been.

The condition buffs were major. Not only was there one more condition needing to be cleansed (in necros case 2), but weakness got upped from a minor annoyance to a fight changing debuff. Before it’s buff it used to hinder some of your endurance regeneration and lower only NON critical hits with a certain chance. After the buff it reduces critical damage hits as well, making power builds much weaker in both 1v1 scenarios against condition classes just as well as teamfights, where one well placed spell by a necro could effectively destroy the burst rotation of the opposing team. Power builds therefore became even more unreliable, in most cases actually weaker in comparison, while condition builds got buffed by a large margin (for example incendiary powder got changed to apply longer burning duration rather than shorter one over time AND the proc chance got upped to 100%).

Also, the reason why condition builds got buffed in the first place was not because their damage was not up to par or competitive in comparison to power builds, it was because a single guardian in the middle of the teamfight could negate majority of the condition damage thrown at his teammates just by using his shouts alone. Almost no guardian runs save yourselves anymore, as it equals suicide in the current meta. It was never about conditions not ticking for enough hp/s and needing to be brought up in terms of damage, since such a thing didn’t even happen in the first place. It was always about condition removal and it’s about the same thing even now.

You also talk about “middle of the line” specs. There are two of them now. One is the apex predator hambow warrior, that has tankiness, sustain, control, area damage and direct damage. It does everything well and therefore excels in all kinds of pvp, from duels to large teamfights. The other spec that is the jack of all trades is valkyrie ele, possibly not even played by any1 in this game anymore. It didn’t get changed very much at all, just a few changes to signet of restoration, and how it worked with evasive arcana and nobody is playing it anymore, because it doesn’t do anything well enough anymore. This is the stigma of balanced builds, you either make them too strong, or you make them useless. Also, forcing people to play a more “middle of the line” spec by nerfing direct burst specs (nobody would play burst if they couldn’t actually kill people yet still be squishy one shots for anyone on the opposing team, NOBODY would do that) would only result in more condi prevalence, seeing as condi builds are “middle of the line” in terms of tankiness/damage by nature and as I said before, easier to play and more effective as well (the only thing keeping warrior and s/d thief viable are insane regen + massive cc and spammable evades respectively). What you are suggesting is basically making everyone play specs that are similar to condi specs, just harder to play and less effective.

And now to the root of the problem: you apparently want the game to slow down in terms of ttk (time to kill) of a player, but that’s pure madness in my opinion. Have you seen how long it takes to kill players in any other competitive game out there (LoL, CS, Dota2, ect.)? It’s seconds, much faster than here in gw2. Fights between skilled players here can already take over a minute. If you made the fights any longer the game would become unbearably boring. The only way such a thing could be sufferable would be if downed state was removed from pvp, which would effectively kill off 50% of all teamwork (the other 50% being coordinated damage and point rotations), or downright removing all of the healing skills (which would require rebalancing on a whole different scale).

And one more thing: burst specs less effective at dueling? I am starting to get the feeling you must be a big fan of conditions because everything you are suggesting would blow them out of proportions so much it wouldn’t even be funny. There should be burst specs that specialize in 1v1s just as much as there should be condi specs that do so. Don’t kill off variety in a game just because you don’t like something.

Ele was amongst my first characters. I still play it on occasion in pvp, but it’s just a way of keeping myself entertained in this game. If I were you, I’d give up any hope. Although it IS true, that Anet fixes things over time, there is a major downside to their fixes. Everything they “fix” ends up being broken braindead passive play spam bullkitten. Like necros, or warriors, or rangers (remember when they had to time evades to bunker? Now they only need earth spirit!), or soon phantasm mesmers and condi eles (possibly after dec 10 patch). To be honest I hate everything that is coming with that patch. Mesmers are getting buffs in areas they don’t need buffs in (phantasm/condi specs and mantras which are useless and dumb idea in the first place) and Ele is geting a massive nerf to balanced spec in compensation for giving it a passive play option. Rest of the patch notes are equally kittenty.

If I were you I’d throw away any hope you might have left. The game was good the first year it was out (well, most of it), because Anet was trying to make it e-sports. They have changed their strategy into making it more “casual” friendly now, which translates to every kittentard noob being able to win a fight with his big PVE norn warrior or ranger.

@OP: There is a simple, yet a bit lenghty answer that works with several assumptions:

Rangers are perceived as OP, because playing a spirit ranger makes them easy yet brutally effective. Since such a large number of ranger players run spirits (especially the version running a shortbow), there is some depth to this statement. People in pvp (and especially those who take it a bit too seriously) tend to assume everybody would be running the apex spec for their class, since running a suboptimal build is wasting your class’ potential. Since you are playing a ranger, they assume you are a spirit ranger and their criteria learned over a span of many games are applied onto you. This usually means they think of you as a player (not yet knowing you are not specced into spirits) that is used to getting carried by his class (yes, spirit rangers with shortbow have no right to argue about that.. and in terms of why shortbow especially: well, it’s a weapon designed in such a way that auto-attacking alone provides the highest dps you can achieve and all other skills are optional/situational). This assumption of theirs is rooted deep in their subconscious and when they are told you do not play spirit ranger, their subconscious screams something along the lines: “omg it’s a bad player AND he’s not running a good build! we are kittened!”.

Hope my tiny bit of psychoanalysis helps you understand the problem ^^

garethh.3518:

@Silferas.3841

Here, lets start a bit simpler.
I’ll get back to that blarb in a sec.

What is the point that you think I was saying?

You were saying that critical damage scaling needs to be nerfed, because it indirectly forces condition damage to be artificially inflated to keep up with the damage requirements, as well as forces power builds into burst role. None of that is true, and in addition to that your understanding of burst is completely different from what burst means.

Burst is an extremely high amount of damage in an extremely short period of time. Like backstab thief, or shatter mesmer, or dps ele combo. Warrior and s/d thieves don’t do much damage over 2 or 3 seconds, their damage accumulates, which is also usually refered to as sustain damage, and is the only prevalent form of power damage in the current meta. This effectively renders your argument that critical damage forces builds to go burst spec invalid.

Conditions did not get inflated because of power damage. Conditions got inflated because of abundance of passive condition removal (empathetic bond, pure of voice, purity, transmutation on engi ect.) that made them obsolete during the power meta. Prior to June patch, conditions didn’t need any buffs. Passive removals needed a nerf, but it seemed easier to Anet dev team to buff condi specs and look where we are. And so weakness got overbuffed (which effectively brought down power builds while fighting condition builds by a ridiculous margin… I still remember how phantaram couldn’t kill teldo while teldo was only spaming elixir gun 1) out of proportions and a new condition has been introduced to the game in addition to buffs to necro, that’s what inflated conditions and their specs. Necro got 2 new conditions (the biggest culprit) which effectively rendered condi clears that didn’t clear more than several conditions at once obsolete and sub-par.

Another thing that is not acceptable in your post is claiming that conditions need to be able to reach power level of damage. That’s…. I will abstain from further insults. Condition specs are tanky, easier to play and do their damage more reliably in pvp, therefore their damage should NEVER even come close to glass cannon specs. Condi specs were supposed to be attrition, slowly eating away at their opponent’s HP while avoiding damage via their tankiness, weakness application, blinds and positioning and awareness. Any condition build that is capable of downing you in less than 10 seconds even if specced for it, is an abomination that should not exist.

@gareth: I might have overreacted a little bit, for that I will apologize, but your post seems no less ridiculous to me now than it did when I wrote my original post. Let me break it down to you:

Conditions:
1) ease of application: there are many ways of applying conditions, most of which are via skills that are on a very short cooldown, require little to no positioning and are quite often AoE. Their application is spread out over many different skills, which, in combination with the aforementioned, makes them much harder to negate in comparison to power damage, which I will go through later.

2) condition builds: are by nature tanky. Most condition amulets are tanky, and those that aren’t, spec partially into power damage as well. Although condition damage builds hardly come close to pure power builds in terms of DPS on paper, they (more often than not) make up for it in terms of ease of application, which in return makes condition builds the better pick for pvp in comparison to power ones. In simple words: condi builds are (in most cases) easier to play, because their way of dealing damage is more reliable in addition to being naturally tankier.

3) Ease of access and class balance: thief, elementalist, mesmer and guardian do not have tournament viable condi specs, yet all of them are on the lower end of natural health pool classes. If they want to deal damage (and still be useful to their team), they have to go berserker amulet, which makes them an easy kill. Engineer does indeed have same HP as mesmer does, but they usually end up tankier thanks to Alchemy traitline. Rangers get extra toughness while going for Empathic bond as well.

4) Damage requirement: to deal good condition damage, you basically only need condition damage as a spec. Precision comes as a secondary stat, but not an absolute requirement (believe me, settler’s necro will be still effective, just not optimal). And condition duration is not obtainable on amulets and is often obtained by traits (a luxury power specs cannot afford).

Power:
1) High burst potential: the one and only advantage that power specs bring is the ability to deal more damage over shorter periods of time. To achieve this, they have to give up on most if not all of their survivability, they have to position themselves and pull off a successful burst combo, which can be mitigated by many more ways than condition damage can (weakness, protection, toughness, dodge/is more effective against power damage because of the nature of it’s application/, block, evade, invulnerability… all of which are vastly more effective against power specs than condition specs).

2) difficulty of application: most burst specs rely on a very specific combo that they have to pull off otherwise they will not deal enough damage (with recent meta even if they do pull off their burst they won’t down their enemy majority of the time). This combo often times consist of one crowd control that locks the target in place and from 3 to 8 (or so) major damage spells that need to connect.

3) survivability (squishiness): other than hambow war and s/d thief, no power based damage build has enough survivability to rival a condition based build. This doesn’t mean that they cannot survive as long, but their defenses are very often active and tied to their damage at the same time (arcane shield, mesmer sword #2 ect.). In short, they have to give up something to survive themselves.

4) Damage requirement: Unless you spec for power, precision and critical damage, you will hardly deal an acceptable amount of damage compared to condition specs. Try comparing shaman necro to clerics guardian. Or valkyrie ele (which used to be the apex spec months ago) to rabid engi. Only when you go berserker on a power build will you deal enough damage to have a chance at downing a condi spec player of equal skill (assuming the skill level is above newbie).

And don’t forget the most important thing: power damage cannot ever equal condition damage. Power specs exist to burst and they are in the game for a reason. Giving them more survivability while taking their damage would not only kill their purpose, but create abominations like s/d thief that are not fun to play or play against. What needs to happen for this game to be balanced is the following change: conditions need to be a lot harder to apply (so their increased survivability would be justified). When it takes the same effort and risk to stack 12 bleeds, burning and poison on a single enemy as it takes for a full glass cannon mesmer to pull off a full successful shatter, then we can talk about further balancing the two.

But there is one thing that must never happen: burst classes must never become the same as condi classes. They need to be riskier, harder and they need to burst people down if they pull off their combos. Only then will the game have a chance of becoming interesting again.

5v5 only
/15char

The thing is, that pretty much everyone who has played pvp since launch/betas (there ain’t many of those people left) have built up such a high level of frustration over pvp in this game, that they(we) are basically walking explosives of rage just waiting to be ticked off by any minor thing.

EDIT: oh yeah, and if anybody wanted to drop the old l2p here, yes. It’s l2p issue. It’s not like those builds are not killable by proper specs, it’s just that the skill requirement for each side is so drastically different it’s making the fights very unfair regardless of skill.

Just look at it from this point of view: the most popular builds right now are warriors, spirit rangers, condi+stealth or phantasm mesmers, MM and/or condi necros. All of these builds have one thing in common: they are easy to play yet brutally effective. Since they are naturally tanky, they carry little risk for very high rewards and leave room for errors.

The second part of this is that there is quite a big number of players who enjoy playing power/burst setups, just for the thrill or because we simply enjoy the combo-ish feeling such a playstyle brings. But there is not a SINGLE meta-friendly burst build that would be effective enough compared to the risk it carries in comparison with the popular meta-builds. Moreover these specs get hard countered not just by their own squishiness and susceptibility to damage + CC, but even by the huge number of ways to mitigate direct damage (weakness, protection, toughness, vitality, health regen/healing, dodges, blocks, evades, invulnerabilities ect.), most of which are drastically less effective against condition damage.

Have you ever tried bursting the standard hambow warrior with a glkittenter mesmer? It doesn’t kill him, he never comes close to getting downed with your whole combo even if he lets himself get hit. He can just stand still and until your combo is ready again, his HP goes back by 50%. But if he catches you, you are in for a world of pain. That’s why most mesmers don’t play shatter anymore, they play the braindead blackwater spec or just as braindead phantasm spec.

These things combined lead to something that makes people rage quite fast and effectively. When we grow tired of playing these dumb specs, we sometimes go back to playing something we actually enjoy and have fun with, like dps ele or shatter mesmer, or d/p thief. And then after getting into any random tournament or hotjoin or wherever game, we are faced with people who are more often than not new to pvp compared to us and we get facerolled so hard we burst into tears of rage and foam starts coming out of our mouths. For we have been slain by a build that can miss any single skill in it’s rotation, and as long as he connects a few of them he is going to win. That’s what makes us rage.

Are you perhaps… dumb?

I am speechless. There have been no successful power builds in this meta for the past half year with the sole exceptions being warrior and s/d thief (none of which do burst, both are sustained), and you suggest nerf to power damage? With condition specs being so dumb and soul crushingly easy to play even for the dumbest of dumb apes? Where did you come up with this? What game do you play?

Have you even realized that it takes completely damage dedicated spec with little survivability to achieve a passing level of burst, that gets negated by any little thing in the current meta, while condition specs only invest into one stat getting tankiness in return while dealing more reliable damage?

Honestly everything you have said in your post made me angry. If you are a troll, gg, you have won the internets

NO, just no…

no

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand NO. The trait is already ridiculously overpowered as it is. It should be a grandmaster tier trait, not master minor.

The biggest problem for me is that I just cannot have fun the past few months. It’s impossible. All the strong builds are completely brain dead with no learning curve and no risk with high reward. It takes me approximately 15 minutes to grow disgusted every time I take my hambow warrior, or spirit ranger, or s/d thief, or condi terror necro, or stealth condi mesmer. With the exception of condi mesmer, those are the apex builds in pvp these days, not even mentioning the abundant MM necros and similar abominations. If I take out my old shatter mesmer and go have a lil bit of fun it’s nightmare mode everywhere.

I have stopped playing League of Legends when gw2 came out, because I was convinced this game’s mechanics were so good everybody would soon forget the cheezy stupid MOBA genre with 4 skills and nonexistent combat dynamics. This month, a little over one year later, I went back to playing LoL with my friends, because I feel there is no depth to guild wars 2 pvp at this moment. Not little depth, NONE. Every single build that takes some skill to play is overshadowed by entry skill level builds and strategies and developers not only encourage this, they apparently believe it to be alright.

I think Zanryu is either an overfed troll or just a crazed lunatic. Of course warriors can be killed. Every friggin profession can. That proves nothing. I can make a video of full bunker guardian getting killed while mashing his skills and it wouldn’t show a thing.

You need to compare what professions CAN do when played in capable hands, and how capable the hands have to be to make those professions work. Quite apparently (assuming from your videos) you are incapable of playing a warrior properly, what you have shown us is a joke.

@redslion: Gonna check it out tomorrow then mate

Brilliant, so we do have people who have decided to participate after all! Thanks for posting these builds and please do keep it rolling, get wild and stuff.

Either way we can see that there are indeed builds that can achieve similar results to what warriors can do on paper, however most of these builds are not run in real situations for PvP, and there are good reasons for that, now I’d like to discuss what those reasons are.

And in regards to the other posts: yes, I know spirit rangers don’t run zerker amulet, I have posted that just in case somebody did want to make a build like that seeing as it’s quite easy for rangers to achieve good results with any iteration of a spirit build (seeing as only one spirit actually contributes to condition damage), even one including a zerker amulet.

@ all the posts that show pure disbelief or outrage over this thread: there is a specific thing I am aiming for with this post, but as I have learned over a year of using this forum, stating facts makes people angry and very unhappy a lot more easily than leading a discussion over something and letting them realize what’s the truth of the situation.

@The Primary: sure! anyone is welcome to post a build or just freely discuss traits/mechanics

Hello fellow players, I have a game proposal for you! Especially those who like to theorycraft like myself.

I will give you 20 trait points which you can allocate however you want, with the rest of trait points allocated only into offensive or profession trait lines (you can slot 10 more into a defensive trait line if you pick an offensive trait there). In addition you can slot whichever heal you want and one defensive utility slot (the other two must go into utility heavy skills like stability or team support).

I am omitting the elite skill from this game seeing as not all classes have low cooldown elites that can be used in conjunction with lyssa runes, which will not be included in the setup based on warrior in return.

You can only use berserker’s amulet.

Your goal is to make me an offensive build (on a class other than warrior, S/D thief or spirit ranger for obvious reasons, which should be capable of either dealing sufficient burst, or locking down an enemy with CC while still allowing for good damage).

You can assume full usage of every trait you pick regardless of resource management. This build needs to be capable of healing 15600 HP within a 30 second time frame, while allowing to cleanse 18 conditions (as I said, I am assuming full usage of every trait regardless of resource management).

The build needs to have a stun breaker, be capable of surviving a glass cannon burst spike from 1 enemy (let’s say a shatter mesmer) when caught off-guard (understand as eating majority of the spike’s damage) and if the weapon choices do not include crowd control mechanics, need to be capable of bursting the target. The build also needs to have mechanics that prevent it from being kited effectively (like dogged march/berserker stance).

The purpose of this thread is not to QQ, but rather determine if Warriors are truly OP in terms of mechanics they have access to, or whether other classes have access to the same mechanics and it’s just trait allocation coupled with ease of access that makes warriors so strong right now. There have been many who advocated that Warriors are balanced right now, so let’s compare the possible builds of other classes to those of warriors and see where the truth lies.

Let the games begin!

Uh… latency guys? It’d have to be unplayable for someone. In this case the US people and Asians, since Europe is in the middle and therefore prime candidate for such server placement (I am not sure whether there is a trans-pacific connection between China and USA, although there probably is, never really cared as a European). The point is, in a game with a chinese guy and an american, the signal would have to travel across 2/3 of the globe. That’d be latency hell

Warriors need sustain nerf. I would not directly nerf the numbers themselves, seeing as warriors do need stronger healing to stay in the fight, I’d just change it so that you don’t get regen when you are not hitting people. Like gain regen (400 HP/s as healing signet passive) for 3 seconds after you hit an enemy, doesn’t stack, resets on each hit. That’d be fair imo.

1. Gameplay enjoyability and design
2. Balance
3. Rewards

I have completed the jumping puzzle. Twice. Even waited for the whole activity round to end. Didn’t get the achievement.

Since these forums are programmed so brilliantly, my whole A4 size post just got thrown into trash thanks to a login timeout message of sorts. So to make it short (and much less elaborate):

The Good:
everything that made it in, except the bugs ofc

The Bad:
you could have done all of this before PAX and it wouldn’t have mattered one bit. You’ve made us wait for cosmetics and QoL for 4 months. I am at a loss for words. I mean it seriously, this patch could have been here 3 months ago, in august. There is no excuse, NONE for this patch taking so long to prepare. Trait tooltip change must have been time consuming and annoying to finish, but come on… it’s not a 4 months worth of work.

The Missing:
The patch didn’t make the game more fun. A bit more balanced perhaps, but that’s not really what it needs right now. The builds that dominate the meta game are disgustingly boring to play and play against. The skill requirement has plummeted, the game is not fun to play anymore. This is not me getting burnt out of the game mode or anything of the sort, it’s the combat itself being dull right now. The cheese needs to go away, the skill needs to be invited (making a game casual friendly does not mean you need to make them able to compete at high level in a few days, it means preventing them from facing seasoned players in the first place). I have a change in mind that could be the inspiration for future changes to make this happen (it’s a mechanics change, not a direct nerf):

Healing Signet – the heal amount stays the same. Instead of permanent regen, after hitting an enemy the warrior would be given a buff for 3 seconds that restores their health like healing sig does now. The 3 second buff would not stack in any way, just renew the 3s duration each time the warrior hits an enemy.

What would this change do? Introduce possible counterplay, change the signet from completely passive play to semi-passive semi-active play (keeping the boon up). Also, PVE builds would be largely unaffected by the change and there would be a reason to use the sig actively now as well.

I’d be happy to provide more ideas if I see my feedback has some meaning. Feel free to contact me.

@Dirame: thanks for a good laugh dawg! ~

0/10/30/0/30 Hammer/Mace+Shield or Longbow, zerker stance, balanced stance, sig of healing, sig of rage, utility of your choice, lyssa runes, zerker amulet, one day of practice and you can compete at higher lvl pvp successfuly. That’s what I am talking about when I say warriors are OP. The GS/mace is not really OP. The one I posted IS.

1) The game needs to get more interesting. As naughty as the twitch gameplay during backstab thief era was, it was fun to play and interesting to watch. There were tankeles that trolled the far point, there were backstab thieves that could counter that, there was diversity. People complained about everything being OP but it was interesting to play back then, there was much more strategy to taking down a great ele, much more depth into playing against a great guard (except for the block bug, that had to go…). Simply said the game was more enticing. Well, it’s not now. Too many dodges, too many cheese cutter builds, too much aoe, no coordination or mechanic play (also, I don’t want to go into “why dodging that has not changed from before is so OP all of a sudden”, but let me give you a hint: there is no clear “big shot” to dodge atm so it’s just spammed randomly?).
2) Give people what they want. Deathmatch? OK. Pillow club-bashing with laser needles on a double horned pink unicorn? Sure. Just make the people want to play the game.
3) When the game gets more interesting, ANet needs to advertise that positive change. Send mails to inactive players about the new stuff, like “pvp revival time, come check it out and give us one more chance, please?”. Also, some campaign needs to be launched with a big tournament that goes over half a year consisting of smaller tournaments that actually leads to a considerable prize pool. Also, new people need to flow into pvp from outside the already existing pool (free access to the mists for a month, like the PVE trial week/yes it’s pve, none of the dudes that went for a trial week does pvp).
4) When we actually get some people playin’, we need to keep the community alive. Streamers do that (shoutcasting failed because of one simple thing: shoutcasters don’t truly create content, they just commentate on it and therefore are often left with nothing to do, also it’s much more comfortable to watch the match from a player perspective than to watch it from shoutcaster’s one, because the current spectator system is severely lacking with no split view/replay option and the lack of free camera). So support the streamers.
5) QoL: Templates, Videos, Tutorials, Progression, Rewards and all that stuff.
6) No need for dev outsourcing, just hire me
7) Never gonna happen :<

Skull Crack on an Asura, the obvious winner of the most telegraphed ability ever! It’s not like you are stunned for 50% of it’s duration and can’t really see it coming at all! But wait, there’s more! Skull Crack is actually a melee range thing, so let’s give warriors shield bash and earthshaker to close that gap between you two and waste both your dodges! But wait! You have actually managed to save a stunbreak up to this point and got out of that nasty stun? Well, even if you have managed to land some damage on that warrior it’s gone now!. Adrenal health with signet of healing and some regeneration if you accidentally CRIPPLE or TRY to STOP the warrior running at you is such a balanced mechanic. I’ve always been a fan of guardian level sustain. Especially on a glass cannon character with 0 healing power. But warrior isn’t really a glass cannon with about 18k HP and more armor than a valkyrie elementalist in spite of going zerker amulet, now is it? But it’s all ok, because warriors need to go melee range (unless they have a longbow…), unlike guardians, or d/d elementalists, or s/d elementalists, or any other of the dozens of builds that don’t get half of what warrior gets yet have to do the same thing. But warriors do have the ultimate counter. Blind. Well, it would be if they were not immune to it for a whole of 8 seconds it takes them to roflstomp you. Or they could just use the longbow with AoE that covers the whole point. But don’t mind all these small things, I am sure engineers that have no viable stun break will manage somehow. It’s not like in spite of being natural tanks with very high sustain, immunity to conditions and reduced control effect durations warriors would actually still do high damage right? WRONG!

They do

EDIT: btw, don’t get me wrong, I am not implying warriors are unbeatable (not at all). There is a number of ways to go about it. It’s just that they get the cream of the top and in the heat of battle, if you get caught by a warrior when out of energy, or with your stun break on cooldown, you are done and there is little you can do about it.

A player from Incompetent Zerglings [WvW] from Riverside [DE] abused a bug where while standing near a slope, he was invulnerable thanks to obstructed, to both projectiles, as well as melee attacks. He has abused this bug numerous times, each time waiting for his skills to recharge and his teammate to respawn, to launch a counter attack on me and my guild mate hoping to down us. Not only is this unfair (which is ok, since WvW is never fair), it is an ABUSE OF A BUG.

He needs to be banned for this transgression, yet seeing as there is no option to report players for bug abuse, I doubt it will be so. I have reported him for scamming, seeing as there is no other suitable option to report players for in this case.

So much whining over such trivial things.

WoW never had good PvP. Korean MMOs had good and complex pvp, which us western players would know nothing about, since cooperation and teamwork has always been their domain, rather than ours. The only thing WoW has ever managed to do for the western audience, was ruin the game model of MMO and twist it for many generations of players to come.

Trinity is a boring and stale system that encourages tunnel vision and makes the game not just boring to watch, but play for anybody who wants challenge as well. A trinity based game is like a dumb version of chess with only three types of figures…

I am afraid people are looking towards removal of any sophistication a game mode can have, rather than introducing it. Everybody’s asking for deathmatch and the GW2’s version of GvG (so, uh… 20v20 deathmatch? o.O’), some are even spouting some nonsense about depth and strategy in those (again… huh? ‘O.o) and would defend it to death, because apparently it’s hard to take 20 people and stack them atop each other and spam AoE on command. I’ve even seen people call it competitive! Really!

But honestly, the most popular thing in this game is zerging and killing stuff in groups. Across all game modes you can see how much of a big deal to people this is. Pick a group, stick tight for the ride and get that champion/stonemist castle/hotjoin cap point and feel good. I think taking away predefined roles from the mindless blob of players was a bit too much of a miscalculation on ANet’s part, seeing as humans are very dumb. This has introduced a lot of scenarios that people would have to think about instead of just acting in the same manner they always do, and people don’t like to think. They don’t like to strategize about rotating between points to win games, they prefer to fight over the point to the death and get angry when their duel turns into a 2v1, they don’t fancy building for a specific purpose, like decapping, when they could invest all their resources into making a balanced build that doesn’t have enough stats to accomplish anything in any role.

To be honest with you rather than going for more dumb zerging in a deathmatch game mode, I would like to see a 1v1 ranked arena.

While I would also love to see new game modes being implemented in this game, and therefore the pvp population being given the chance to revive from the coffin it has been heading into as of late, there is a number of assumptions that are rather wrong in this topic, and the whole forum.

1) Conquest IS the most competitive game mode. It has the highest skill cap, most strategic depth and complexity. The one thing ANet has done wrong was not launching it together with a supplementary “fun” game mode for more casual players to enjoy themselves, like deathmatch.

2) It is not conquest per se that’s killing gw2. The main culprit has always been the lack of features and balance updates. It has been a year and we still do not have a way to view our rating in-game. We still lack any incentive to give up going to fractals, and instead go do a few pvp matches. Most importantly though, we absolutely despise the meta-game that has been present for the past few months, many of us being unable to play the professions we like, because they would get completely destroyed by the fotm classes.

3) Game depth and complexity: although there are some broken mechanics that need either fixing, or complete rework, this game is ultimately one of the most complex and engaging MMOs to ever come out. There is plenty of build diversity and depth to the game, people just prefer to copy-paste the builds a few top players like to use (not to mention there truly is just a handful of those players present considering the point 2), instead of making their own. In reality there are dozens of viable builds for each and every class ranging from the low skill tier to top, from team arenas to solo queue, it’s just that people tend to think they are competing at the top level where they need to keep everything optimized for a specific purpose, when they don’t even truly understand the purpose itself.

4) Teamwork and dynamics: it has been the forum whiners that have killed the so-called moba depth and dynamics in this game. Remember the times when you could still adjust your build/amulet/utilities in the middle of a tpvp match to face your opponent better? That was the MOBA depth that could have been engaging in this game. But it’s gone, because of forum whiners who can’t adjust. Simple as that. And this game holds the potential for most rewarding and fun teamplay ever to be seen with the mechanics of combo fields and finishers, they just need some tweaks to be better (and some aoe skills need a major nerf to be in-line). Half of the people on this forum whine about trinity being better, and I can only say I hold such people in very low regard. Trinity doesn’t encourage teamwork, it encourages tunnel vision (read as brain dead) play with each aspect of a fight being dedicated to only one specific role. GW2’s system offers so much more…

The base of this game is incredibly good, it has potential to deliver everything we want it to, but the real problem isn’t core mechanics, or gameplay or any major design flaw, but the inability to build upon that base. In a year, we have seen the meta-game change ONCE in a big manner (some minor team tweaks cannot be considered a meta change), and the change was very forced and not welcome, we have seen but a small number of features being introduced, most of which should have been present in the game at launch, and half of which are still barely usable if at all. I still hold hopes for the future of this game, I just don’t think those hopes will come true anytime soon.

@OP http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hfYJsQAhl0

@Buzzcrave half the classes have no access to poison and smart people take longbow/hammer spec anyway. Longbow counters blind really hard and allows you to cleanse those conditions without relying on anything. To be honest the only profession that can spam enough blind to keep you down is thief with pistol offhand, but whatever, apparently the rest of the warrior community refuses to accept that they went over the roof with warrior buffs. People should grow up and realize that when you start owning all of a sudden, it’s not a miraculous increase in your skill but your build being overpowered. Nobody goes from zero to hero in a few days because of a skill, especially when playing against people who have played their professions and builds for far longer than this mace/greatsword (which isn’t even the real problem, it’s a no-brain cookie cutter but not the build that’s truly broken, which would be the cc heavy hammer/mace+shield or longbow).

Gutts.8791:

Also, Silferas complained how warriors have everything and can cope with conditions? Wait, what? We have Dogged March to help with CC, but conditions in general? What is it exactly we have that helps us cope with conditions? You mean lemongrass, which everyone else can use? Or the couple of condition removal utilities we have which pretty much everyone else gets. I’ve got a pretty solid build at the moment that I’m happy with, but I just accept the fact that I cannot go toe-toe with decent Necros. They melt me even with lemongrass. That claim is just ridiculous.

Next time read what you write, or at least do some research before, because right now it either seems like you know nothing about warrior, or are very, VERY stupid. Cleansing Ire (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Cleansing_Ire) is basically a 3 condition cleanse every 10s, and it’s just 5 more trait points investment after taking adrenal health, which most good warriors already take anyways. With proper trait setup you can cleanse 3 conditions every 7 seconds!!! No other class in game can continuously cleanse 3 conditions every 7 seconds AND have a skill that makes them IMMUNE to conditions.

Man, you went full kitten mode, never go full kitten mode…

EDIT: also.. Can’t go toe to toe with necros? Are we even playing the same game? Warriors hard counter necros lol. I don’t know what build you are running, but it’s either outdated or very stupid.

The thing that makes people think warrior is overpowered is that most of current warrior builds have extremely high efficiency at entry level. So high, that in fact seasoned pvp players find those specs hard to deal with. The combination of natural tankiness, high sustain, high damage, easy access to crowd control and resilience to conditions make warrior the most well-rounded class to play. It excels at both dueling and teamfights. It is tanky yet it deals massive damage. Never before was there a spec in this game that could do everything at the same time at a level a warrior can do it now. Eles were close long ago, but they lacked any sort of damage back then and required timing, cooldown management and some skill to be truly effective (a good thief back then could drop a cantrip ele in one good burst). This however doesn’t apply to how warriors are now. The skill is insignificant compared to the potency of the build, and that is what bothers people. The same thing applies to necromancers, they are just too easy to play brainlessly.

The core problem of warrior gameplay is that the moment you get hit by cc and your stun breaker is on cooldown the fight has ended. This wouldn’t be such a problem if your teammate could actually burst the warrior down while he is focusing on you (the way backstab thieves were countered back in the day, which is essentially what mace/GS warriors have become, except for the fact that they cannot die), but that just isn’t going to happen seeing how tanky the warrior is, or if the warrior wasn’t dealing enough damage to down you by himself while you are crowd controlled. As you have mentioned this could be achieved by making warrior’s healing scale much more with healing power, but lowering the base of the heals. Regenerative heals should be the trademark of tanky builds anyway.

+1 for Jon and this whole post.

The only thing that saddens me deeply is the amount of top players, some of which I have been following ever since beta weekends, that have decided to part ways with gw2. As I’ve been watching the guildwars2pvptv stream yesterday late night, I felt deep sadness over the discussion that took place, about Xeph, HMan and even Helseth leaving the game, and later find out that even more of the valuable members of our community have decided to go. I just hope they will eventually return to this game.

Warrior is good enough.
0/10/30/0/30
hammer/longbow
unsuspecting foe,
dogged march, cleansing ire, merciless hammer,
signet mastery, destruction of the empowered, burst mastery
- healing signet – berserker stance – balanced stance – utility of choice – signet of rage (or banner if you want more support)
zerker or valk amulet, lyssa runes, sigils of choice (fire/para/bloodlust w/e)

With this build you should have no trouble being effective. If you do, I sincerely doubt you would do well with anything else, maybe except for staff necro.

Stadig.7325:

Silferas.3841:

MM Necro is a joke, Turret Engi must be a new player (not just to the class, but to the game lol), the only tPvP viable spec you have listed is a spirit ranger. Also, I have no idea what you have been doing in the past few weeks, but warriors are the rising star of pvp as of late (since half the population has quit their mesmers and elementalists). Try the standard 0/10/30/0/30 hammer/longbow build, watch some vids of better players playing the build (phantaram or teldo both ran it for a few matches) and then tell me that warrior is weak

This sounds intersting. What is the standard 0/10/30/0/30 hammer/longbow build? Do you have more info as to what runes, amulets and such were used? Also, where did you see this?

10 – Unsuspecting Foe
30 – Dogged March, Cleansing Ire, Hammer cd/damge increase trait
30 – Signet mastery, Destruction of the Empowered, Burst Mastery

Amulet Valkyrie or Berserker (if the enemy team is more condi than power), runes lyssa

Utils: Healing Sig, Zerker Stance, Balanced stance, 3rd is up to you (some like endure pain, or dolyak sig, or some banner), elite Sig of Rage

Not my build, I think Phantaram came up with it so kudos to him. Personally I use a variation where I put 0/0/30/30/10 for inspiring banners and the other banner trait. Works quite nice with valk amulet