Guild Wars 2

I find the precursor crafting way more fun that just RNG from mystic forge or grinding the 1000+ gold to buy the precursor (or even the full weapon) at the TP.

Sure, it is grinding. But the tier 1 and 3 collections are reasonably fun. And tier 2 requires a lot of grinding or gold spending, but you still have a higher sense of progression when you’re day after day checking things off of your list.

I want a hammer to use entropy…

But yes, one more main-hand, preferably mid-ranged would be good (axe, mace or pistol, but with a preference for axe)

Honestly, there is a difference between being slow and being frozen. The 2 first hits of the AA are slow, the last one feels like i’m frozen in place. I am actually fine with most other skills. Yes, gravedigger is slow, but considering its damage, it’s a good thing. On the other hand, I never feel like the AA is paying of, especially the last hit. Make the last hit the same cast as the 2 first ones, even if this means reducing its damage, chill duration and LF generation.

It’s not only that I rarely hit with my last AA skill, it’s that I’m getting bored during the cast!

Chrono lockdown (clockdown) is a fairly strong build to make a mess in a team fight.
And mantras are still improved by alacrity! Sure F5 is not great with mantras, but alacrity recharges the CD between the charges (5s for distraction becomes down to 3) and before loading (20s for distraction I believe, which makes 12s in the optimal case).

FeelsAlright.5860:

Silverkey.2078:

I so disagree with that. Being in a mesmer guild, we often play 5 mesmers. Yes, it is not a good team comp, it has flaws. But it’s fun, and not completely awful.

It makes no sense to restrict by profession for Pugs. On the other hand, a-net should be allowing build templates so that people can swap builds very fast based on their team comp.

It makes little sense to ban profession stacking in tournaments. I would rather they ban “build stacking”. So there can be 5 people of the same profession if they so wish, but they should all run different builds (different amulets and/or trait lines and/or weapons).

A trap dragonhunter is not a bunker guard. All their skills are different, their role is different, etc… A Profession does not really define anything in gw2, a build does.

There’s too many variables to be able to define a “build”. 6 choose 3 (n!/k!(n-k)!) = 20 possible combinations of trait lines. But within each one of those trait lines my rough math gives me 27 different paths. How do you define a build? Does each trait/sigil/rune/weapon need to be the same? Do you just need to select one of the 20 possible combinations? Computationally I think this would be an extremely taxing operation.

I agree, this is the non trivial part of my suggestion. But Personally I would say that if you fulfill at least 2 of those criterions:

• same amulet
• same trait lines
• same weapons
  then you have for all practical purposes the same build. While you may be able to create 2 similar builds while not fulfilling those criterion, I don’t think you can stack 4 or 5 of them like the D/D ele case.

I’d like to say that the D/D ele case which triggered the non-stacking rules is very unique. In normal situations, having 5 of the same profession is a bad idea because few professions can perform all roles (roaming, bunkering, bruising) efficiently, yet alone 1 build. And still, with the restrictions above, you may have had 2 eles, not more (and 2 eles was anyway the average at that time), because the build diversity of ele was not great.

Fay.2357:

Silverkey.2078:

Are you interested in PvE, PvP or WvW?

This is actually one situation where some advice doesn’t depend on that answer.

Chronomancer fixes an extraordinary amount of problems that Mesmer has. Uselessness in pve, no aoe pressure, lacking defense and defensive effects, exceedingly long cooldowns, all are fixed by chrono.

While elite specs aren’t “supposed” to be upgrades, chrono is just because base Mesmer is so flawed. Chrono is substantially stronger in every aspect of the game.

While I agree chrono is the answer in most game modes, the question of which build to take still does.

Justification.4851:

I always used to love WvW. But that’s also because Mesmers served no use in PvE except for that barrier with the focus where you could rebounce arrows with. In other MMO’s I always love PvE.

As Fay said above, chronomancer actually makes mesmer relevant in PvE even outside of reflects. Our own damage is still low, but we can provide to our team a very strong buff thanks to quickness (actions are faster) and alacrity (cooldown recharge faster). As we can keep those buffs for almost 100% of the time, we increase the damage of our allies by approximately 30-40%, which more than compensate for our own lack of damage.

For WvW roaming, I personally play a non-chrono build (condi shatter with prismatic understanding for stealth, dueling, chaos, illusions). But I think there are good (better) chrono variants (dropping chaos). Finally, we can now play in big WvW groups too, using chronomancer wells to support the melee train and damage the enemy one.

Are you interested in PvE, PvP or WvW?

I so disagree with that. Being in a mesmer guild, we often play 5 mesmers. Yes, it is not a good team comp, it has flaws. But it’s fun, and not completely awful.

It makes no sense to restrict by profession for Pugs. On the other hand, a-net should be allowing build templates so that people can swap builds very fast based on their team comp.

It makes little sense to ban profession stacking in tournaments. I would rather they ban “build stacking”. So there can be 5 people of the same profession if they so wish, but they should all run different builds (different amulets and/or trait lines and/or weapons).

A trap dragonhunter is not a bunker guard. All their skills are different, their role is different, etc… A Profession does not really define anything in gw2, a build does.

Exciton.8942:

Silverkey.2078:

TheFrighteningFrenchFry.3275:

As for if chrono is viable or not,t hat remains to be seen, but it’s definitely looking promising.

You’re surprisingly optimistic. While not as dead as the warrior, chrono is not in a good spot right now. The only savior would be some balance patch, fixing the power creep.

We actually have a pretty good spec.

The problem is that DH and Revenant completely overshadow us and daredevil now counters us hard again. I think ESL mesmers will fall back to the traditional sword/torch/portal/moa approach again.

I really want to play with staff and shield. But considering the following fact: DH can hit hard from range, revenant have infinite teleport with unblockable attacks, thief still deadly to us.

I agree that the problem is not us. I actually still think chrono is a bit too strong comparatively to the old meta. Not much, but the blocks are a bit too long, precog is a bit too good, and alacrity overflows. This means that chrono feels in many ways like an upgrade and not a side grade (though as you mentioned, it’s not fully impossible that mesmers decide to go back to the old PU).

The problem is all the other specs who just got better. The revenant does our roaming role almost as well, but also survives better and rocks in team fights.

One thing which I am interested in is that bunker/support mesmer finally started to appear in tournament. I’d love to see more of those and see how well they fare.

TheFrighteningFrenchFry.3275:

Silverkey.2078:

You’re surprisingly optimistic. While not as dead as the warrior, chrono is not in a good spot right now. The only savior would be some balance patch, fixing the power creep.

hehe, well, after all, aren’t we the people that stuck with mesmer? xD

I do continue main-ing my dear purple butterfly. What matters to me is finding a build I enjoy and which works well enough, and I have that. At my level, the “meta” does not matter that much. But I like watching tourneys and it saddens me to see so few mesmers

TheFrighteningFrenchFry.3275:

As for if chrono is viable or not,t hat remains to be seen, but it’s definitely looking promising.

You’re surprisingly optimistic. While not as dead as the warrior, chrono is not in a good spot right now. The only savior would be some balance patch, fixing the power creep.

And once you put all together, you understand that projectile reflections are very “niche”. You’re happy if you have it (because one of your weapon skills, a “free trait” etc…) but you would rarely spec for it intentionally. For example, as a mesmer, we have many great projectile reflections, but we very very rarely use any of them in PvP.

I think 900 is spot-on. There are things to improve on the axe, but not its range anymore (thanks R. Gee!!!)

(PvP post mostly)

The problem with metabattle is that it does not take into account concepts like:

• skill cap/ceiling
• MMR
• personal preference
• counters and synergy

Basically a meta build is “meta” only in a meta-team and against another meta-team, all of this at high MMR. Some builds are more effective for less experienced players. Some builds would be better to adapt to your or the enemy team composition. And some builds just are more fun for you than others.

There are some other websites with variety of builds suggested, with explanation, role, counters etc… Those allow the users to pick and try, get a feel of the different playstyles before making his own build. I believe that is the ideal way to get started.
The problem is that those websites are not as straightforward because of the jungle of builds, many of them not relevant anymore (balance patches). It is just easier to go to metabattle and pick the number one.

But I do believe that many still play their own builds, especially after an update like the expansion. At the end, everyone should play as they want. If people don’t feel for theory crafting and prefer just mindlessly playing, I don’t see what’s wrong with that. I personally prefer playing my own builds, though I still like to have a look at metabattle and I sometimes play the metabattle build out of the box (especially on classes I don’t master much).

I think the problem is the difference between casual and pro. A good amount of your suggestions are clearly not valid at the pro level. It makes sense to balance for pros, because this is the optimal balance assuming that all players play well and are organized. But at the same time, most of the player base is not pro level…

I pretty much agree with you. I think reaper’s shroud is enough to justify using reaper. Actually, I am currently playing some WvW with my reaper for which I haven’t unlocked anything but the shroud and the heal. And I still use it over curses.

I do feel like things could be very much improved if the devs went again through all core necro’s skills and listen to our feedbacks. Reaper should have a clear niche and not be good in all builds (since we loose range) but it is so good and polished compare to core necro that we still rather take it even on builds in which it should not make sense.

AlphatheWhite.9351:

Chrono. 25% movespeed > all. Once you don’t need the swiftness from TC, you’ll be surprised how much less appealing focus is.

So sad but true :p

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/Should-HP-be-normalized/first#post5700006

I don’t mind keeping some HP diversity. But just not to the level there is currently.

The armor difference between light and heavy is on the order of 15%.
The HP difference between low and high is 65%

That is insane! So for example, if low HP had 15922 (currently medium), high HP kept the current amount (19212) and medium had something in between (around 17500) then the balance would be much easier.

Hi

This discussion about the minstrel somewhat triggered a discussion about HP balance.

HP is a weird thing. It does not directly participate to the sustain of a player (toughness and healing power do) but you need a minimum amount to survive before you are able to use your sustain skills (heal/block/invuln etc…). Essentially, it is “burst” survivability.

I would argue that currently the HP variation between professions is a big obstacle to balance, in particular for low HP profs. It is clear that elementalist and to a large extent thieves have the lowest build diversity and I claim that this is in large part because of their low HP.

All low HP professions have been given mechanics to counter this disadvantage. But they do not necessarily work. Here was the status before the expansion:

• elementalist can sustain thanks to its water and earth attunements. The problem is that they have cooldown, so an elementalist in fire or air needs to survive the damage before their earth/water attunement are off-CD. Thus the need for elementalists to play an amulet giving them high “burst survivability” (meaning both vitality and toughness) to survive while in offensive attunements and then healing power to use their water attunement to reset all the damage they took while out of water. This means celestial (or the now removed minstrel)
• thief can sustain thanks to stealth and mobility. But fleeing or stealthing prevents attacking and prevents capping. Thus the role for thief of sneaky decap and bursting before the enemy can retaliate.
• guardian was very balanced. This is in part due to its mechanics: it has many blocks and heals ALWAYS available (by opposition to elementalist who has not access to them in its offensive attunement) and many are instant skills, and thus able to be used while suffering the burst. But another part is that thanks to its high armor, the guardian has the same passive burst survivability as a medium-HP low armor profession (I did the maths). Its only weakness is condi burst, but condis are usually slower.

Now after the expansion, the burst and CC has increased a lot, so HP has become even more needed (since the CC prevents you to use many of your defensive cooldown). Now D/D ele does not have time to rotate its attunements properly, the amount of reveal has reduced the ability of thieves to kite, and bunker guard, who managed to live despite its low HP now cannot to the same extent. Sure, on the bright side, tempest got new instant heal possibilities thanks to shouts and “Elemental Bastion” and daredevil have gotten acrobatics 2.0 to sustain thanks to dodges. But this didn’t increase build diversity, it just replaced the old with the new.

For the health (ahah) of the low HP profession and their build diversity, this HP distinction has to be removed or reduced. You cannot live with 12k HP when many classes can do this amount of damage in less than 3s while stunning you.

Yes, the minstrel amulet allowed some professions to be unkillable and it was boring to watch. But some professions need those HP “just to survive”. Obviously, the sustain would need to be adjusted (a bit) to remain balanced, but this is essential for build diversity and a healthy game.

I would argue:

• eternity > blood (no heal should have 40s CD, eternity has condi cleanse)
• suffering > calamity (calamity has more damage per cooldown, but most of the damage is at the end where it does not matter as much)
• Precognition > Well of Darkness (3s evade vs 5s blind would be approximately as strong, but the enemy can just move out of the blind well while the allies should be clever enough to remain in the evade one)
• Corruption – Recall not really comparable. Both are quite decent, but I think corruption may be more useful.

I’ve already said but I hope/expect they will remove the restriction and make all weapons and skills accessible to the core class. The only benefit of the elite specs will be the class mechanics, traits that synergies with the weapons/skills and of course a normal traitline.

That is unfortunately the sad state of inspiration. I do also feel I have better result without inspiration. Dueling is just so good… and inspiration while nice is just subpar. It feels like inspiration has good ideas but is not strong enough:

• mender’s purity: great with mantras, good but not amazing with other heals.
• medic’s feedback: the feedback is too situational. The danger is usually the cleave, not the projectiles. I would prefer null field (would protect the rezzers and potentially strip stability)
• restorative mantras: please better scaling with healing power
• persisting image… as if 20% would change the life expectancy of illusion
• inspiring distorsion: good except it uncaps. would prefer “when you gain distorsion, give blur to allies”
• warden’s feedback: too situational in PvP
• Restorative illusion: arguably the best trait in inspiration. would prefer if it was AOE and scale a bit better with healing power
• protected phantasms: as with persisting image. can have its uses… maybe
• healing prism: the healing power gain is nice. The heal is lackluster. Please make it a percentage of your own heal
• Mental defense: useful
• illusionary inspiration: useful
• temporal enchanter: please make it so that this trait applies when you cross veil/portal

I would love a mid-range power weapon with a decent AA.

I tried a few times to come up with a celestial build, but it’s difficult. Illusion is great for might stacking, but the fact that it competes with Maim is sad since the torment ends up being a large part of your condi shatter.

The best I found was a mantra interrupt dueling/chaos/inspiration. The interrupts provided the might as well as some nice util (immob). I had boonshare, so after a series of successful interrupts, I could share my might. Scepter/pistol-staff.
I had no condi on shatters, but my shatters were mostly defensive. My damage was from my weapons (scepter and pistol are quite strong in hybrid builds).
Main problem of the build… recharging the mantras.

It is clear the amount of CC and blocks/invuln has increased.
Chrono shield: 2 blocks (2 CC)
Scrapper hammer: 1 block (1 CC)
Dragonhunter: overload of CC
Revenant+herald: blocks and invuln everywhere
etc…

I did try reaper frontline soldier + rune of trooper during BWEs. First, it needs to be paired with a guardian. It has good stability in shroud, but out of it, it is more difficult. The sustain is good too. It has some interesting utilities: I went blood magic, soul reaping reaper, so I gave vampiric aura to the party, + some healing. And of course, it has high damage, especially since I went with the 50% crit in shroud.

It mostly has 2 problems:

• no form of invulnerability. This very annoying in cases where you just want to get inside your keep, passing through the enemy lines. Very often, it was just impossible. Even in plague form, you still take immobilizes and others, so it’s hopeless
• a bit part of the reaper working for frontline was blighter’s boon. It gave good sustain during the pushes and allowed to go back to nearly full shroud during the regroups. This trait has been slaughtered and just does not work anymore.

So in conclusion, it is doable and even fun. Definitely something you can enjoy in a mildly (dis-)organized group. But I don’t think it’s “good” to the level of a warrior, a guardian, or probably a revenant.

I really agree and think CC is the main problem currently. And in particular, AOE CC coming from everywhere. Though I must say the amount of AOE damage in general is quite high. Standing on a point has become a dangerous art.

The viper is a very glassy hybrid stat combination. If you want more damage, chaos is probably not the line to go. If you want more defense, chaos is great, but then you can probably run chaotic dampening or mirror of anguish.

Maybe they should have replaced with an amulet
toughness
healing power
boon duration
(so drop the vitality, increase the boon duration).

then we could have some boon duration without having more tankiness than clerics.

I think you cannot sustain long in a fight without stability. If you get stun locked, despite the instant heal on shatters, you won’t last long.

You can probably work fine for a hybrid offense/defense with dueling/inspiration/chrono or (like I’m doing currently) dueling/chaos/chrono, but you won’t be bunkering as well as chaos/insp/chrono.

I’m running a “team-fighter” build. Not tanky as a bunker, but still good support, decent sustain and quite high damage. Love it!

I do think in terms of “feeling” the AA is the main offender. When you see the frost on your sword, you actually wonder if it didn’t freeze you too. Increasing the attack speed by maybe 10%, especially on the last hit, would be amazing, even if the damage is decreased by 10% too. It’s just this kitten feeling of being frozen.

Else, I think GS is great in the middle of a messy fight.

I actually agree with the fact that I like spirit watch map. I mostly dislike the orb mechanics.

There is a clear lack of coherency for what skills you can use while carrying the orb. Why reward the passive 25% speed but not the active swiftness? For the leaps vs teleport I believe the difference is that leaps are often attacks and thus preventing them also prevents the player from fighting. But this is somewhat unfair.

I think decreasing the rate of the orb makes sense. Alternatively (or both) make so that the orb on a capped point is 30 points, on a uncapped point 15 and on a enemy point 0 but decaps. This way, you still have to play the cap game and cannot put everything on the orb.

I insist but nobody seems to notice it (or everyone think it’s stupid):
Blighter’s boon:
“You gain 100 HP or 0.5% LF every seconds for each unique boons currently on you. Maximum number of boons: 5”.

This way, there is a cap to how much we can get (500 HP or 2.5% every seconds in this example, but the values or the intervals can be adjusted). This also allows to not favor more “fast stacking of short duration boons” compared to “long duration boons”. Since we have few boons ourselves, we cannot easily cap this without allies help.

I am not the type to copy the meta. I typically play my own builds, not because I want to be different, but simply because I play what suits me.

However, I must say I have hard time getting away from signets. Shouts are pretty much the only thing I feel I can use instead.

Our best condi transfer + stun break: signet
Mobility if you can’t trait for it: signet
Our best boon removal: traited signet

Added to the fact that spite-soul reaping-reaper is one of our best combo even without BB… Spite = more chill + might to the roof.

Berengar.6951:

Also consider changing Heralds so the facets apply longer boons on a larger interval (say 7s on a 7 s interval instead of 3s on a 3s interval) if the number of AOE boon stacks being thrown around is still too high.

I think this is the main problem. Whichever healing value, the trait was unbalanced, hugely favoring classes with constant boon generation.

Which is why I suggested to have the healing/LF based on the number of boons currently on you instead of based on the number of boons applied at a given time.

For chronomancer, you have to choose if you want blocks/invuln (shield, well of precognition) or stealth (torch, decoy).

You can’t have it all.

DD was answered by glaphen. Don’t get fooled by the 3 dodges, because their endurance does not recharge faster than before.

Warrior is currently in bad state indeed. They were already borderline before the elite spec, but are now clearly outclassed.

I personally think a soldier/crusader bruiser reaper, with full (or almost) shout is great. Just jump on mid and stay there until the end of times (basically). The sustain is quite high and damage too.

Shiki.7148:

Dead.5829:

Shiki.7148:

Don’t have any pictures but it costs 400 HP to fully unlock.

250

Uhm… 200 did barely take me half way, so it definitly is not 250 except if they lowered the amount of points needed drastically. I’ll check ingame.

Which they did yesterday. It is 250 now

The excess with the old trait was that revenant stack short duration boons every seconds. If you played with a guardian instead, which stacks long duration boons but less regularly, this was not as strong. So what about:

“you are healed/LF regen every seconds depending on the number of unique boons on you”.
The amount of healing/LF would depend on the number of boons, but not linearly (maybe by putting a cap that beyond 5 boons, it does not add more).

This way, you automatically have a cap of how much healing/LF you get (let’s say 2% LF or 500 HP per second, but it can be more or less depending on what feels reasonable).
Isn’t that the best solution???

The excess with the old trait was that revenant stack short duration boons every seconds. If you played with a guardian instead, which stacks long duration boons but less regularly, this was not as strong. So what about:

“you are healed/LF regen every seconds depending on the number of unique boons on you”. The amount of healing/LF would depend on the number of boons, but not linearly (maybe by putting a cap that beyond 5 boons, it does not add more).

This way, you automatically have a cap of how much healing/LF you get (let’s say 2% LF or 500 HP per second, but it can be more or less depending on what feels reasonable).

Isn’t that the best solution???

Necro is a 1v1 beast, but gets awful the more players there are around. By relying on allies boons, it allowed to improve necro in team fights, which is normally what reaper is designed around.

But thanks to this trait, necro is even stronger in 1v1, but still as bad in team fights.

GG!

I’m in the mood for some maths…

with 1200 power, 4% crit chance: 2200 * ( 1 + 0.04*0.5)= 2244
+ 50% crit (DS): 2200 * ( 1 + 0.54*0.5) = 2794
+ 25 might : 2950 * ( 1 + 0.04*0.5) = 3009
+ 50% crit (DS) + 25 might: 2950 * ( 1 + 0.54*0.5) = 3746

with cele: 1560 * (1 + 0.307*0.87) = 1976
+ 50% crit (DS): 1560 * ( 1 + 0.807*0.87) = 2655
+ 25 might : 2310 * (1 + 0.307*0.87) = 2926
+ 50% crit (DS) + 25 might: 2310 * ( 1 + 0.807*0.87) = 3931

So basically at 25 might and with 50% crit, cele is stronger than 1200 power. Outside of shroud (without crit), both are quite close. If you can have fury cele is even better.
And since a part of the damage comes from condition (staff, transfers), the gain is more clear.

However, for reaper, cele would typically use dhuumfire instead of crit, and the gain is actually even more important.

Interestingly, it feels like the meta would have less conditions output (because guardians are moving away from burns), so the need for condition stat may be decreased.

And as you said, the healing power is not particularly useful for cele reaper. I am still happy they increased the scaling of BB with healing power.

At the end, this may be why Nos used soldier instead. With the support from his revenants, the only thing he needs is to survive the 10-ish seconds before his shroud is back off CD, so he only needed “burst survivability” which soldier provides.

edit: I don’t think my message contains any… message. It is more my reflections on the question.

My main problem is the fact that we cannot get any healing from allies. I can understand that we cannot use our healing while in shrouds, but why would we gate allies healing?

If the death shroud is our own unique “invulnerability” time, why can’t we get healed in shroud while you can heal anyone who is using any other type of invulnerability.

We know necro is strong in 1v1 but bad in team fights. What is the reason for that? No scalable defense is one, and to some extent reaper fixes it. But the fact that we cannot receive heal, that regen does not proc, etc… that is another very important one.

With this trait, we finally had the possibility to receive support from allies. Yes it was too strong. But it could have had a cap like “cannot proc more than n times every 5s”. This way, it is strong but cannot go to far.

Also, it is not like if we had very much boon generation on our own. We have close to 0 boon generation except for the might from spite. Where is build diversity?

I think it’s fine. It still does a lot of damage, but it allows “calamity” to be the damage well and “gravity” to be the CC well. If you want good damage and control, nothing simpler: put them on top of each other. That hurts bad!

Yes this was stupid. I would have understood if they put a limit to how much you could get from it. Let’s say “max 10 procs every 5s”. But that was sad.

While I understand this, I am sad.
For once we could receive support from allies. So now we’re back to our usual:
necro: the class than cannot give nor receive support from allies.

Nemesis.8593:

I would seriously like to know who made the necromancer power build with Dhuumfire in it, that has no condition duration… and utilizes berserker gear.

This is the exact reason why i still published those two videos… even though it was far later then i originally wanted and brought me no profit what so ever.
Here we go again, exactly like last time… people who have no idea about real DPS numbers, the difference between DS 1 and RS 1 based on AS, and so on… continue teaching the community.

When people told me just now there’s a PvE berserker reaper power build with dhuumfire in it on metabattle we all laughed, and i thought they were just trolling me…

I just saw it… i’m speechless…

Well… what can i say… it will just make the builds that i will publish that much more awesome, so at least there’s that.

I have only 2 ways of understanding this:

1. you think the build is fine but that they would do better damage with hybrid gear (sinister)
2. you think if he wants to be geared as a berserker, he should switch from dhuumfire to death perception

If it is 1, then I don’t know I haven’t try to estimate the DPS. Maybe sinister reaper does more damage than berserker reaper. I feel like it doesn’t, but I honestly don’t know. In PvP for sure, sinister reaper is very strong.

If it is 2… then I’m worried about your theory crafting abilities. There is such thing as overkill when it comes to crit chance (100%), and thus dhuumfire is straight out better. This is obvious since the reaper is already beyond 100%, but in particular since burning has a pretty high base damage.

note: this is one case where maths cannot lie. There is no unrealistic assumptions, this is really first grade maths (additions).

The game has been on for less than a week. Is it that bad that you haven’t “yet” gotten one of the few new armors released?

You do realize it will take some time before the next new armors are released, so a-net have to make sure not everyone gets it immediately!

It is clear one cannot have all possible stats combinations (or can we?).
If you want power, precision, toughness, you have knight amulet.

The crusader is probably not the first stat combination I would have come up with. But I actually like it a lot. It forces you in high crit builds, but if you manage to do so, you have very high sustain (toughness and healing power are the 2 sustain stats, vitality is a burst survivability stat) and high power (almost same power and ferocity as marauder). If you can take advantage of it, this is a very strong amulet.