Guild Wars 2

I am not a PvE player. I almost only play PvP. But I don’t think it makes sense. Thematically, you “master” something by playing it. So PvE masteries come from playing PvE. WvW masteries come from playing WvW.

I agree that there is seemingly no progression in PvP after rank 80. That is why they have introduced leagues.

Just to make things clear: master of fragmentation change the “distorsion” shatter to reflect projectiles, not the “distorsion” effect. So your signet will not reflect anything but you will indeed evade the damage for 1s.

Let’s get crazy:

• reaper can actually receive healing from allies while in shroud
• spectral mastery makes your spectral skills evade for 2s (you become spectral = a ghost)
• vital persistence is now baseline
• signet of vampirism cast time reduced to 0.5s
• corruption become powerful skill using LF as a source. For example: blood is power becomes an upkeep skill which gives the enemy a debuff causing him to receive 10% more damage and condi damage (including from allies) but you loose 3% LF/s. Epidemic uses the same principle: while on, all conditions received by your target are copied to nearby enemies. Corrupt boon corrupts all boons but consume 3% LF for each boon corrupted. Consume conditions consumes 10% LF (this one is tricky, since that means you cannot heal without LF…). etc…

If you didn’t realize, those are changes I actually wish for…

SlayerSixx.5763:

Silverkey.2078:

Masteries are irrelevant to PvP. So there is no reason to give mastery experience to PvP.

There’s no reason to give anything in sPvP after you’ve unlocked all of the build items. Why give sPvPers anything at all?

@OP

That, or give us skins. Glorious, glorious skins.

You seem to take my comment in derision, but it makes sense though. Why would you care about mastering gliding if you play PvP?

The logic of the dev is simple and makes perfect sense. To have a PvE mastery, you need to play PvE. To have a WvW mastery, you need to play WvW. To unlock your elite spec, you can play both PvE and WvW since elite specs are relevant to both.

But you can’t unlock your elite spec in PvP because… it is already unlocked anyway. You can’t gain masteries because… you won’t use them anyway.

The only thing which would be relevant is allowing the legendary crafting mastery for PVP too, because fashion wars 2 is in all game modes. That is it.

Masteries are irrelevant to PvP. So there is no reason to give mastery experience to PvP.

Dreaming serpent.5197:

Bhawb.7408:

That isn’t the right way to make them strong. Removing counterplay on okay skills to make them OP isn’t how Corruptions should work, they should still have counterplay, but be powerful enough to justify other parts of your build or team being weakened to compensate. But making Consume Conditions instant cast (basically) isn’t a good way to do that.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Healing_skill I count as least 10 healing skills with a cast time of 1/4 second or less.

I believe all the healing skills that have low cast time make sense because their healing is not immediate:

• Litany of Wrath/Blood Reckoning: most of the heal based on damage you inflict
• Defiant Stance/Infuse Light: most of the heal based on the damage you take
• Well of Eternity: most of the heal after 3s
  etc…

So a low cast time would make sense for signet of vampirism (why the hell such a long cast time???), but not for CC.

I agree with nearlight that danger time + lost time favors already high crit chance. I am currently running a crusader build using this

http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQNAseRncfClphtfCmfCEgiFcjyMDylRqMAWtfpuVn1dF-TJBHABAcKAaZ/hsLDMwTAAA

and I have to dedicate so much to get this crit chance:

• I start my fights with a blank F3 to get fury
• I have to use well of action
• sigil of intelligence to get a few guaranteed crits
• I usually wait for my iAvenger for my burst

and at the end, my reward for the GM is 2s of slow.

So I really like the design and I don’t want it to be changed as the OP suggests. I think danger time is just fine, but lost time needs to be made more reliable for low-crit chance builds. Whenever you block/evade an attack the enemy is slowed for 2s with 2s ICD per target?

If you dedicate 2 players to run the condi cleanse for the whole team, you end up with conditions being useless for the enemy. Why would boon be different?

Running this would come at a high cost. Most shout classes use their shouts for support and condition cleanse. Going for the boon corruption means not as much condi cleanse.

There is not enough counterplay to boons, I don’t see why boons would be such a holy thing that we should not allow skills to remove them. 1 boon per shout is not much. Shouts have typically 20-30s CD. If you run 3 shouts, you would have 3 boon ripped every 20s. How is that OP? A shatter mesmer can remove 4 boons every 12s just with F1 (and they have other shatters). Signet of the locust “on his own” can remove 2 boons AOE every 24s.

This would fit thematically and would provide a very nice game play where boons stop to rule supreme and may have some counterplay.

Note also that I suggest “rip” boon and not “corrupt” boon, which is not as strong.

Reaper is the only one able to use this rune efficiently: we can inflict vulnerability on chill. So even 1s of chill means 3 stack of vulnerability.

Otherwise, yes it is weak.

About boon rip, I don’t think it’s a problem if they only rip one per shout. Except for mesmer and necro, barely anyone rips boon, which means that boon classes tend to dominate PvP. 1 per shout is hardly OP.

People can create boons almost as fast as they create conditions, so it makes sense to have an “inverse soldier rune”.

Squeezzy.4718:

Ross Biddle.2367:

If people couldnt see this coming for the torny meta they know nothing.

The point is that with the shift on the meta, chrono has had to find its role. Roaming DPS is out, and simply going to be a portal bot leaves to much to be desired. Thus, we see the dawn of the Utility Wizard. Bunk Chrono sitting at mid in a team fight with bruisers and/or another dedicated bunker means you create a watertight offense/defense as you buff what everybody else there can do (alacrity, buff/debuff, cc). What you can bring “1v1” is meaningless. Rotating, capturing, and holding is the only thing that matters in the end.

THIS!!!

I mentioned in a post before how it looked like chrono was more of a point fighter (which mesmers have never really been known to be) than a squishy burst roamer. After trying and failing to figure out a good build i finally settled for Fay’s awesome bunker chrono build and i love playing it.

When i play with coordinated teamates sometimes i switch Mental Defense for Illusionary Inspiration and eventhough i miss phantasmal defender my teamates are always surprised with all the boons (including alacrity and quickness) i can provide in a fight.

It was obvious for a while that chrono was designed to be a point fighter. Even before the first BWE1 I suggested chrono bunker
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Chrono-bunker/first

What I didn’t know then is that mesmer would have to run this not to die because of how dumb everything else became. And I didn’t expect Helseth to play it since it does not correspond to his style (he actually says he hates it).

And objectively, being able to team fight is what mesmers were lacking, so it fits the purpose of the specialization. Unfortunately, with our awful sustain damage, a bruiser build is not as easy to make, so we either go full burst or full bunker.

The problem is actually more complex than you seem to think. The meta gets tanky because the damage is high. If you play a thief or a shatter mesmer, you die too fast. So you have to reroll or go tankier.

High damage favors cele/bruiser, or the few classes than can sustain massively despite their offensive amulet (rev, scrapper, etc…).

So yes: power creep => tank meta. Reduce the absurd AOE damage and people will start playing more offensively.

With 25 might and fury, celestial does more direct damage than soldier. The staff AA does have a decent condi pressure, so of course this is an additional (albeit small) benefit of cele. Add the sigils and at the end of the game I could see in his stream, he had like 290k damage and 80k condi damage (and he was 1v1 or 2v2 most of the time). It’s not amazing, but at the end he gives more damage than soldier.

Then survivability should benefit soldier more. But if he felt his survivability was sufficient, then he also gets improved healing and regen for his team.

So in his case, cele may be actually be the best. Now if you play in a non-coordinated team, the extra survivability and the lack of might probably favors soldier/sentinel.

Mak.2657:

messiah.1908:

bunker mesmer can kill you in 1v1 with soldier runes or some other power runes.

Btw why soldier runes? There no shouts. Only for vitality/toughness stats?

I think he meant amulet

A bunker mesmer has a lot of evade, blocks, as well as high protection uptime. But they do have weakness.

• CC: they get one stack of stability on shatter, but have otherwise few stunbreak (there is no “one clear build” yet, but typically only one stunbreak which is the well of precognition). As a DH, you can definitely out-CC them.
• do not attack their first block. The shield block has a long CD, but if you attack while they block, the mesmer will get access to the block a second time. So by not attacking you divide their block uptime by 2
• the blocks and evades are mostly on the sword/shield. Their second set is probably a staff, and while in staff, they have none (though they have chaos armor + protection).
• if they use the well heal (they probably do), most of the heal comes after 3s if they remain in the well. Try to prevent them from being in the well after those 3s (CC)
• when they use continuum split (you will see a continuum rift), they can reset their CD, so they will probably use their longest CD at this stage (elite skill). This is also a good time to CC them. Warning, continuum split is a shatter, so they will have 1 stack of stability.

that’s all I can think of on the top of my head. I don’t think chrono bunker is too hard to kill as long as you focus your burst outside of their invuln/block. It does shine in team fights thanks to its support, but is not such a great 1v1 spec (though it can sustain a little while by rotating through the different evade/blocks waiting for reinforcements).

They need to make the “sacrifice” part not a condition. Because they assume you will transfer it, so they balance the strength around this assumption. I’d rather have a unavoidable sacrifice (straight LF or HP loss) and then a powerful effect on top. This way, the balance is easier.

nearlight.3064:

Not sure if celestial or sentinels works better for this build, but since hurting things is important in pvp, celestial has that slight edge even if theres only a little bit of might. I’m going to keep experimenting with it, but this could be a really viable build if its tuned and developed further.

Do you guys think running signet of inspiration over recall well would be viable for more boonshare? You could also run calamity or portal in that slot as well. Time warp could be useful too for even more quickness/slow sharing.

I don’t see portal make as much sense as a team fighter than it does as a roamer. When I did run my bunker build, I had time warp. The main problem with time warp is it does not sync as well with continuum split :p It has a fairly high CD and is more situational. Gravity well is a good CC, very good for coordinated burst.

I like boonshare, but this build does not generate that many boons itself. You already share your shatter boons, so it’s only adding the protection from chaotic dampening. I usually start my fight with chaos storm, retreat and chaos armor back-to-back to stack protection and then phantasm to share it with the trait.
It really works only if your team provides boons, but if this is the case, you may not need to have an extra share… Recall offers massive alacrity for everyone. Tough decision…

Teutos.8620:

Warlord of Chaos.7845:

If you are going to run 5 wells, I think running chrono runes and swapping sieze the moment with chronophant would be better. The shield and staff phants are really good so why not have more of them? Otherwise the build looks good.

I guess it is pretty much a work in progress and will most likely look quite different next time.
Personally I would also pick the chrono runes & chrono phant tho.

When I made a chrono bunker build, I ended up with the exact same traits as Helseth (but slightly different utilities and gear). Quickness on shatter is on demand instant quickness. So if you need to rez/stomp someone very fast, you shatter anyway for the stability, and now you get quickness on top. That is huge!
Quickness on well is nowhere near as easily available when you need it.

It is clear that his build only worked thanks to his team. It’s not as good to defend a point 1v2 like a cele ele. In particular, the might stacks were multiplied by his trait, but he didn’t create much.

Morality: you see Curunen. If you can’t take shattered strength, just bring in an elementalist

Only one game though

Helseth is playing a full well celestial bunker chrono
http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2/

edit: you can now watch it here
http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2/v/25267847
from 52m55s.

Chronomancer is much weaker in the new meta than mesmer was in the previous one.

Yes, chrono is an upgrade from mesmer. But a mild one compare to the other elite specs. You gain a large block/invuln uptime (shield, well of precog) , but if you take it, you cannot take torch and decoy, so no stealth. Result: Helseth and Frostball moved back to torch/decoy. Yes you gain a very strong damage and CC skill with gravity well. Result: Helseth and Frostball used the good old Moa.

At the end, the 2 only mesmers left in tournament are using the exact same skill as pre-HoT. The only strong “upgrade” is alacrity and continuum shift. Far from being as OP as the new toys most professions got.

To OP, give a try to chrono. The new meta is definitely an edge over the old meta, and mesmer just does not do that well anymore. You could also try to play different playstyles. Chrono opens a lot of new possibilities including more defensive builds, able to sustain team fights and even bunker!

I personally adjusted the new meta by going more defensive because I was getting smashed by everything. And now I enjoy it a lot.

Hi all

I often play bunker guard, and since HoT, my life has been made more difficult. But then I started to see a few bunker DH in tournaments, using LB/staff, as well as the trap heal and aegis trap, giving away the “virtue” line.

I understand that the new F2 heals more + give some mobility which is always welcome, that the aegis trap synergies very well with our heal on block. The trap heal is basically full life, but then we miss the block which helps a lot to survive (though less since HoT). But I don’t understand longbow. While the control it brings is useful, I just don’t feel it compares well to mace+shield/focus in terms of support and survivability.

Overall, do you think than bunker DH is better than bunker guard? And if yes, is LB worth it?

When playing necromancer, you have to see “support” in a broader perspective. Blood magic does offer decent “direct support” meaning effects that directly benefit your allies (healing and downed support mostly). We also have good condition handling.

But what necro shines at is “support by enemy debuff”, meaning you debuff the enemy (weakness, vulnerability, blinds, boon removal, poison, chill, CC etc…) to indirectly help your team mates.

This gives a lot of possibility to play support.

Blaine Tog.8304:

Silverkey.2078:

Condi reaper is definitely stronger than condi necro. No doubt. If you do a condi reaper, you will most likely use SR and reaper. Then you would think that curses is the last of the trio. Yet very soon after you realize that spite helps you better.

There is nothing wrong with spite being useful for condi builds. On the contrary, this is why it is one of the best designed line of the necro: it appeals to everyone. The problem is that curses should still be an overall better choice for condi, and yet isn’t.

I note also that while saying “curses is fine” you then go on each trait and describe how it is lackluster. I can’t blame you, I have the same feeling each time I go through the line.

I didn’t actually say Curse is fine, though! I think — conceptually — it’s fine for it to stick to Condition damage. Regardless of the question of whether Necros or Reapers do better as Power or Condi builds, I think it’s pretty inarguable that Engineers are worlds better at outputting Condition damage than any Necromancer build right now, so some tuning is clearly in order.

Also, you could go through every trait line for every profession in the game and come up with a list of ways to improve them. Curses probably needs it more than most, but I do think it’s semi-functional as it stands. Which Spite/SR/Reaper condi build would you suggest? I’d love to have something else to fiddle around with.

Well what I had in mind was a PvP build, may not be what you are interested in. What I use since the first betas is essentially the meta reaper build now ( http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Reaper_-_Carrion_Frostfire ). I do think that to a large extent, the core of the build would be the same for a PvE condi-reaper build.

Blaine Tog.8304:

A good write-up, though my general feeling with Curses isn’t as dour as yours seems to be.

First, I don’t have a problem with limiting Curses to condi specs. Power-users can conceptually (if not in reality) make very good use of any of the other lines, so keeping one line specific to Condi Necros is ok to me. In that light, the Minor traits are actually all quite good. They feed into each other and really help boost the value of the Necro’s Crit and Condition damage.

That said, there’s an additional dynamic at play here which your analysis (by design) doesn’t really touch on: Curses for Necromancers vs. Curses for Reapers. It’s generally been my experience that Condi Necros are not as effective as Power Necros; it just takes Condi Necros way too long to rank up their damage to any significant degree and while Epidemic-bombing groups is fun, it’s really hard to stack serious levels of Conditions on a single target, which is how most of the more difficult fights in the game tend to go. AoE is already quite plentiful in this game so specializing it at the expense of single-target doesn’t really make sense.

For Reapers, however, Curses is a game-changer. The two actually have really good synergy with each other. Their synergy is so good in so many different ways that IMO there’s actually some good debates to be had about which traits to take.

Condi reaper is definitely stronger than condi necro. No doubt. If you do a condi reaper, you will most likely use SR and reaper. Then you would think that curses is the last of the trio. Yet very soon after you realize that spite helps you better.

There is nothing wrong with spite being useful for condi builds. On the contrary, this is why it is one of the best designed line of the necro: it appeals to everyone. The problem is that curses should still be an overall better choice for condi, and yet isn’t.

I note also that while saying “curses is fine” you then go on each trait and describe how it is lackluster. I can’t blame you, I have the same feeling each time I go through the line.

Bhawb.7408:

The last trait in this tier is Terrifying Descent the unfortunate hold over from ANet’s insistence that we must have falling traits forced on us for some inconceivable reason. As most people know, the problem is that these just don’t do much of anything in 99% of the game, because taking fall damage is something that isn’t really happening regularly in combat; it is pretty specifically something that only sees niche use in WvW. However, since these traits seem mandatory, I think we are forced to do something similar to Cloaked in Shadow where the fall trait is rolled in to a related normal trait. Options include:

1. Keep the trait functionality as is, roll it into Fear of Death and replace with something new. This allows for Curses to get a new trait, and we roll more fear traits together. Of course the reverse could also happen, keeping this trait here and bringing Fear of Death into this tree for Terror synergy, which would allow Terror builds significantly more freedom of build options.
2. Combine with the buffed Chilling Darkness, change it to cast Well of Darkness on fall damage. This also opens up a trait in Curses, but doesn’t worry about the balance effect of changing Terror setups.

I agree with the fact that those traits should always be added to related non-fall traits. It will not make it OP in any actual situation. I already suggested the same for mesmers some time ago ( https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/My-take-on-mesmer-traits/first ). I like your first suggestion in particular, although I would move it to curses and not SR. We need to add synergy to curses, having the fear traits in 2 different lines is just not good.

Terror is a classic Necromancer trait. Once a huge facet of most condition builds, it is now so poor that even Deathly Chill builds, which should get amazing use out of it, don’t pick it up most of the time. This is largely due to a wealth of direct and indirect nerfs, starting with the introduction of Dhuumfire. First 17% damage reduced, then Nightmare rune nerfs, general duration nerfs when Spite was made to no longer give up to 30% condition duration, and finally the change that made conditions do partial ticks. Some of these changes are irreversible, however two good changes would be the incorporation of Fear of Death into the Curses Adept tier, and reversion of the 17% damage nerf. These shouldn’t be too strong, since most of the abuse cases of the old Terror builds are gone, and requires a large investment that precludes other strong choices.

The damage buff would probably not be enough. Currently, with reaper, chill does almost more damage than fear while we have significantly better access to chill than fear. Another problem of terror is that a big portion of our fear comes from corrupting stability, but they put it in the same tier as a “path of corruption”.

Parasitic Contagion is a classic example of a “win more” trait, which is to say a trait that is extremely weak or even useless in bad or average matchups, and then only becomes good or great when you are already winning. This same problem is why all but one of our pure on-death traits were removed, because the only time deaths happen frequently enough to be strong is when you are already winning the encounter, and the trait’s influence is meaningless; you were winning before it proc’d. This is where I’d like to adapt Bluewizard’s suggestion to reward condition transfers, and suggest a few ideas for how to make this meaningful in far larger variety of situations, without it being just a win-more trait.

I think if this would work while in shroud, this would be a good trait. With reaper, we have fairly decent condi burst. The trait in this form is a good scaling difference (we don’t have much of those) since if you manage to deal AOE condi damage (which we definitely can, even without epidemic, thanks to staff and scepter but most especially in reaper shroud) you heal for each target you hit.

Regardless, the idea would be to open it up as more of a general condition option, and also smooth out how it works. I’m also going to propose a condition-related heal for Blood Magic, which we can discuss later. The reason I’m not retaining the heal is because Curses is related to offensive conditions and crits, not healing, and Weakening Shroud provides a defensive option already.

I do agree with that though.

Anyway, that’s it for Curses. This was probably the longest, and also the one I was least sure of, so I’ll be interested to know what you guys think.

After I did my mesmer specialization guide a month ago, I wanted to continue with necro. But I got blocked by curses and blood magic. I just didn’t know where to go with it… One problem I have also is that I feel many of the spite traits should be in curses. Spite synergises well with chill and boon corruption, which I believe should belong in curses.

Crinn.7864:

Morwath.9817:

Cogbyrn.7283:

I think the idea of needing diversity and “playing how you want” in PvP are both pipe dreams that people don’t want to let go. If your class has a build that is competitive, you have the option to be competitive with that build on your favored class. Odds are, this build plays to the class’s specific strengths and fulfills a particular role.

Is that not great for people? Everyone can look at a build and say “no, I want to play differently”. But you’re in a competitive game. You can’t go into DOTA 2 and combine any skill/item build on any hero and expect to be competitive. Yes, this is an MMO, so people are more attached to their character and style. But you technically can do pretty well with all kinds of different builds. You just might not win tournaments.

What does balance and diversity would mean in GW2 PvP? Lets use Necro as example.
-> You could support others with Blood as much as Druid.
-> You could could sustain yourself with Death and/or Reaping as good as bunker Guardian.
-> You could nuke with Spite as good as Dragonhunter.
-> You could play attrition game with Curses (Terror) as good as Chillmancer. (yay! :P)
-> etc.
so…
-> Mixing Blood with Death and Soul Reaping would give durable supporter.
-> etc.
Obviously you would have decide to do one, max two things at once because Amulet choice still would limit your stat scalling with those trait lines.

That is a dangerous road to go down. Trying to make all classes able to have builds that can do all roles equally effective as any other class is nearly impossible to do without pure class homogenization.

I’m all for diversity in strategy but as long as Blood is different than Druid one of them is going to be invariably better. It’s far more effective for developers to give classes individual strengths and weaknesses than to try and get all of them performing all roles equally.

Not necessarily as long as they do each role “in their own unique way”. For example, a druid support through pure burst healing, a bunker guard has high healing and high boon support (offense and damage mitigation). A bunker chronomancer (yes, that’s a thing) does not heal much allies but support them with alacrity, quickness, blur etc… A bunker necro gives a bit of direct support (healing/down support) with a lot of enemy debuff. As long as each profession does the same role in a unique way, with different strength and weaknesses, different counters, etc… then you can have high build diversity without overlap. Also, there does not need to have perfect balance on each role. If at the end, you feel like druid support is a bit better than bunker guard, it’s fine, as long as the difference is minor enough so that a good bunker guard will do better than a above average druid.

Curunen.8729:

:o

Thanks for all the replies – a lot of food for thought and a lot of stuff to experiment with.

Yeah MtD vs Shattered Strength is a pain – the 3 stacks from Bountiful Disillusionment on F1 is not enough on its own so I suppose I should use Battle sigils and strength or hoelbrak runes.

I might not give up on it yet after all.

You Might not give up

Cogbyrn.7283:

I think the idea of needing diversity and “playing how you want” in PvP are both pipe dreams that people don’t want to let go. If your class has a build that is competitive, you have the option to be competitive with that build on your favored class. Odds are, this build plays to the class’s specific strengths and fulfills a particular role.

Is that not great for people? Everyone can look at a build and say “no, I want to play differently”. But you’re in a competitive game. You can’t go into DOTA 2 and combine any skill/item build on any hero and expect to be competitive. Yes, this is an MMO, so people are more attached to their character and style. But you technically can do pretty well with all kinds of different builds. You just might not win tournaments.

I don’t think what you discuss here is really related to the current problem. Whenever you play a non-meta build (and there’s nothing wrong with doing that), you know what it implies: if you get smashed, it’s entirely your fault.

What triggers QQ is often just bad players, but clearly also sometimes related to the class balance. It is obvious that currently, the class balance is off. And this is expected after a big change like the elite specs. Now the question is how fast will the unbalance be corrected, and will it be corrected in the right way (i.e. not destroying the build or build diversity in general but just bringing the “OP build” to a good level).

Now as for build diversity: it is not a unicorn, it exists already. Look at guardian pre-HoT. It had “burn guard” and “bunker guard” as 2 meta builds, and the power medi was not far off. It is not difficult in principle to give to a class a set of builds that perform well in their niche, since you can just tune the different weapons and trait lines. gw2 has all it needs to have a good build system with a few potentially meta roles for each class. It only requires the devs to go through every single skill and trait and give it as much attention as was given to the elite specs. Most of the time, the community has already good suggestion on how to make a useless trait or skill not useless (and yet not OP).

Among the sea of QQ, there are good ideas and constructive comments. The qualifiers for pro league are soon, so I would not be surprised if we have a large balance patch tomorrow or next week. The elite specs will most likely still dominate the non-elite classes, but at least will be (more) balanced among each other. Then, I really (naively?) believe the devs will go back to fixing the core class for the next season.

I agree with Sunshine all the way here.
Nobody like being bursted down in 2s. Even if it happened because you didn’t react well, it’s not fun. You just need to be surprised by a teleport or stealth, get CCed a bit, and hop, you’re dead before you could react. I tell you that while I main mesmer, the class that is precisely aimed at bursting you down in 2s. But if I could trade 50% of this burst against some sustained damage (that mesmer lacks completely) I would be happy.

On the other hand, yes, nobody should live a 1v2 forever, except maybe bunkerx2 vs bunker. But if something like that happens, you probably didn’t rotate properly.

This also ties in with the problem of low HP for ele, thief and to some extent guards. The problem is that they can be bursted down to fast, forcing them to play with vitality (marauder, celestial etc…) and reducing build diversity.

The idea of trait lines is that you should make compromises. All traits should be good and you should often hesitate because of competing traits. So if your argument is that “we should put RI in competition with junk traits instead of the good WF and PP” I would argue instead “let’s change those junk traits and make them good”.

Now personally, I think WF and PP are near-useless in PvP, so I never hesitated one second to choose RI. Also, RI and WF/PP are pretty much exclusive since one focus on shatters and the other on phantasms (although I could accept that PP is actually a shatter trait). So I really don’t think there is a problem here.

I’m amazed people still have this weird fantasy of chrono being OP… How many chrono do you see in tournaments?

Anyway:
God Tier: Herald, Scrapper, Dragonhunter, Druid
Good Tier: Reaper, Chrono
Viable Tier: Tempest, Daredevil
Bad Tier: Berserker

I would like to add that Berserker is probably the only once which is not OP on the pre-HoT standard. Everything above berserker is just power creep.

Bhawb.7408:

I can understand not giving us too many, but there is a pretty big difference between absolutely no usable blast finishers and too many.

I actually love the reaper for that. We finally have some finishers to combo with ourselves, like RS 4 in poison field (e.g. staff 3) for massive poison, RS 2 in ice field (e.g. RS 5) for frost aura, GS 2 in dark field of GS 4 for some leeching….

It’s not excessive, it’s just nice and interesting.

I did play a celestial build for some time before HoT. It was decent. The might stacking was done by interrupts (chaotic interruption). The main problem was the fact that it was mantra-heavy and mantras are quite annoying without stability since you don’t take bountiful disillusionment. So I did run the stab mantra which was also my stunbreak. But this mantra is just awful…

There are 2 problems in mesmer which in my opinion prevents celestial:

• bad healing power scaling of inspiration
• shattered strength and MtD competing

If those 2 were fixed, I really think a cele chaos/insp/illusion or insp/illusion/chrono would work perfect.

For defense, don’t forget double well of eternity. You don’t get 2 full heals, but you get like 1.7 heals.

The only thing I manage to do with f5 is trigger it right after I trigger gravity well since they have the same cooldown. It takes a lot of time to get use to this shatter I must say.

A powerful but difficult tool.

I really agree. I would really love if the devs went and did the same process for each core skill/trait than they did for the elite specs: asking for feedbacks and listening to them.

It could go slowly, weapon by weapon, skill categories by skill categories, traitlines by traitlines. If this was done, the balance between core and elite spec would go back to a much better state.

I second necro/reaper. I really love the theme and feeling, and reaper is just pure happiness for me.

In solo PvE, reaper is just a beast. I feel like a bulldozer passing through the maps. In organized PvE, things are quite ok, better than they were with core-necro.

In PvP, reaper can spec to be a solo beast or finally join the big team fights and use its freaking awesome scythe to grind enemies into pieces.

There is something about reaper which makes you feel invincible, even if you end up dying at the end… Quite paradoxal…

While I haven’t tried it, I strongly guess it works. This was the reason why they made the change with the grey conditions on breakbar enemies: this way you can see the conditions that affect your traits, despite the condition itself not affecting the enemy.

As someone said, I think the problem is the CC.

• a trap that you cannot leave without stability (elite trap)
• a skill that you cannot leave without stability and for which the animation is often not shown so you can’t even avoid it in the first place (LB 5)
• a trap that you should not escape except while dodging (test of faith)
• a trap that you should definitely try to escape (procession of blades)
• a trait that daze you on trap
• a trait that randomly pushes you (e.g. to cross the trap) on longbow

there such thing as too much CC. This is oppressing.

zxstanyxz.8769:

tetrodoxin.2134:

Concerning sneak gyro; I agree that the CD seems too low… but then again, I haven’t had any problems dealing with it. 20s is pretty neat for a skill like that. Mass Invis is basically a “Sneak Gyro” (4s pulse) with one single pulse (5s stealth) and it has a whopping 90s CD, and almost 2s cast time. Bigger range of course, but that seems like a huge tradeoff.

Mass Invis doesnt give away your position (gyro is always visible and cannot be invis’d) and doesnt fail to keep up with you whilst running….

You get 4s AOE stealth even if you only get the first pulse of the sneak gyro. That was the comparison tetrodoxin gave. So even if you destroy your gyro immediately, sneak gyro is clearly better than MI. The only advantage of MI would be its range, but I would personally trade immediately that for a 0s cast time.

While I won’t pretend I read everything, I am surprised you don’t mention celestial amulet. This feels like a very reasonable choice for the builds you present.

On a side note, you still see more tempest than chronomancers in tournament… Who’s OP?

The problem for me is not that it is a bad trait. It is an inappropriate trait. Current BB is a death magic trait: selfish sustain.

Reaper is all about chill and scalable defense/offense. Currently BB does not scale in team fight, while it used to. There is no tweaks in number which will change that.

So yes, BB is a useful trait. It does work well in a might stacking build. But this is not a reaper GM.

I believe the trait does not proc if you do not have currently any boon on you.

But you need to adjust your playstyle depending on the trait. I don’t know which boons you are tying to copy (your own or trying to double what the party is giving you) but you may want to wait before using your first phantasms. The great thing about this trait is precisely that it is not passive, you do have some control over it. It’s not perfect, but it’s not bad.

I think in general I agree it should be done. But that would require the devs to go through all applications and tune them. As a mesmer for example, I can pretty much provide perma regen, but I am nearly unable to have 2 stacks at the same time (except boon duration giving some slight overlap).

So not impossible, but needs some work to reach a good status.

The problem is that in the current PvP meta, people just don’t die fast enough… So while there are times where this could be useful (imagine one or 2 allies downed, one enemy down, but you cannot revive your allies and finish the enemy: you cast that and finish the enemies), but this is otherwise too situational. Your chances of killing someone after one of your allies went down are not so high.

I like that this skill has a theoretical niche (low cast time, low CD, but conditional revive skill). But mesmers utilities are just too expensive.

Seize the moment <3

I think the problem we have with our weapons is that:

• mesmer is always scarier in melee range. GS is the only true ranged weapon, but our burst is a melee burst.
• mesmer has so little AOE/cleave and almost always require a target. Except for the sword cleave, no weapon offers decent AOE abilities. That is why the wells mean so much for us.