Guild Wars 2

Raziel.8072:

So I found out the hard way, do not run transfusion if you plan on trying frontline….I still think frontline reaper is suicidal at best, I have yet to be successful with it, but hitting transfusion in the blob by accident pulls all your downed allies right into focus fire…oops….free rallies for all teh enemiez! Btw it was an accident, a twitch reaction from running core necro so long :P

Yes, it has not happened to me but I was afraid of it… But at the same time, transfusion is quite useful for the healing…

I personally enjoyed reaper frontline and had the feeling it was working well. But I haven’t had many ideal occasions to prove its efficiency. I mostly either killed easily the enemy or got my blob wiped in no time. No balanced situation where I could compare my survivability to a warrior or guardian.

Zenith.7301:

I don’t think you get to tell me how much utility I should get to choose from.

There are plenty of mobs where the unblockable upfront will be used over other wells, for example the Volcanic Fractal fire shaman inside his shell will be easily rooted by something besides a signet warrior now that I can lay a well for my party to ignore the shell’s blocks.

Same goes for Captain Arshym in Urban fractal when he opens the fight with a block or the Oooze blocking in the Thaumanova Reactor fractal at 5% hp left when the little oozes are getting near.

So, thanks, but no thanks. Let’s keep the utility universal.

I expect unblockable skills to be important in raids: they have added a lot of unblockable in elite specializations, there is probably a reason for that!

Mesmers need more vigor than most classes to proc DE. Chronomancer offers many ways to boost your illusion count, so I don’t think vigor is so useful there. Condi cleanse on the other hand is a clear weak point.

When you mention that mesmers don’t need condi cleanse because they can kite, this is a very biased idea. Wells favor a playstyle of area denial and less mobility. For this playstyle, kiting is not an option, so condition cleanse is very needed.

Ideally, I would have liked both because I like the idea of running chrono to skip dueling all and all, and because of that, vigor is a good survival tool. But I miss condition cleanse more.

Oldirtbeard.9834:

I’m not feeling it, I kept getting downed by humanoid Mordrem in the intro PS, there was this cave with killer mushrooms that kept making me their plaything, the only places I seemed to do well in were the Amber Fort PS instance, and the Faren chain with eventual Wyrven fight. I’m wondering if it was the gear they gave me Celestial, or the utilities which were wells instead of the shouts.

This sucks because I really wanted to like this as it seemed like a throw back to WoWs Deathknight when it was new.

Reaper, especially if using GS is really not ideal for fighting single enemies. Necro with dagger (or axe for that matter) still has its niche there.

Azure.8670:

GS for PVE though, due to the sheer amount of enemies hit, is fine for generation. sucks for pvp tho

It really depends. Last BWE (before they added LF on GS AA), I did play in mid all the time and my LF generation was quite high (also used the heal shout). Also, playing WvW frontline is pure happiness.
So the problem is really that GS is mechanically designed to be less efficient in 1v1 (less LF if less enemies hit), but that is also worsened by the ease to avoid being hit completely in a duel because the weapon is so slow (in a messy team fight, you will always hit something). I believe the devs did not take the last point into account in the first iteration, but they added LF on AA to make up for that.

Vlad Morbius.1759:

you really need to play the other specializations because you’re seriously mistaken. I took a tempest and wrecked critters in less than 50% of the time it took to take them don as a Reaper. Worst yet, i did this as a glass canon so you’re not seeing the whole picture here.

Ok, so let us rephrase it:

• reaper is an awesome version of necromancer. Super fun and can kill things faster in PvE.
• tempest is a worse version of elementalists according to them (I haven’t tried), which ranks it still above reaper in efficiency because eles are OP.

It is just a different focus. GS is not meant for dueling nor for sustain. It is meant for team fights. If you decide to jump in the middle of a team fight (what necros usually avoid) your LF will recharge faster.
This is a form of scalable defense necros were lacking, like the shouts. Necro is already good at dueling, reaper is a better team fighter but worse dueler.

Arche.7326:

Silverkey.2078:

In the PvP arena for example, with 2200 power, dust strike is 859 tooltip damage, life rend is 516. Since we agree on dust strike having a coef of 1.0, the coef of life rend is 516/859=0.6

One thing to be careful with: the RS damage does not depend on your equipped weapon (contrary to DS), it is the damage if you had an exotic 2-handed weapon (I think it’s a hammer to be precise).

I have not thought of it that way with the first calculation (516/859=0.6). But correct me if I’m wrong, doesn’t that mean that the avg weapon strength that RS uses is 1016? 516=(0.6*X*2200)/2600. Hammers average weapon strength for exotic should be 1048, which was what I used, but I’m probably just making a fool out of myself. As usual.

I have always had trouble reproducing the tooltip values in sPvP. I can get all values right using one reference for which I know the coefs, but I don’t know how to get absolute values there. Maybe they don’t use 2600 for the armor or maybe they don’t use exotic weapons…

In PvE, your formula works.

AlphatheWhite.9351:

Well, as long as Seize the Moment doesn’t work with Illusionary Persona, it doesn’t really deserve the GM slot anyway :P

Again, strongly agree. Also this is so incoherent with everything else that it is confusing!

AlphatheWhite.9351:

Honestly still not sure why they can’t just move IR to GM and Seize the Moment down to Master. It would solve the problem nicely.

I did suggest that after the first week-end (not against seize the moment but against the slow trait since you need one slow trait on each tier). I think this + short iCD would prevent condi shatter burst OP-ness. Or if this is not enough, “you cannot shatter during F5”, I would be fine with that, although that would be odd.

Zenith.7301:

Silverkey.2078:

Your soul is mine is actually a fairly good heal compared to our others. The healing/cooldown is the highest, only beaten by CC with a few conditions BUT it also gives LF and its CD can be drastically reduced with the shout trait (without blinding yourself!)

But in general yes, necro’s healing are weaker than other classes which have less HP… so in healing percentage of full life this is even worse…
But you know… it’s probably because the shroud is OP…

Completely disagree about shroud. I’d trade shroud for active defenses that don’t gut your damage and HP recovery any day.

Reaper Shroud is useless to me. I’d trade it for death shroud, and better yet I’d trade both shrouds in general for the active defense mechanisms of other classes.

Necromancer has no lasting power in PvE. You absorb damage and that’s about it, it’s an uphill climb after your health is low and you life force is depleted while wiating between heals that barely move you up.

I had a far better time on my Revenant and Guardian.

It was meant to be ironic. This is what devs use to say about shroud being super strong but necros didn’t know how to use it.

Zetsumei.4975:

Anchoku.8142:

chill seems completely ineffectual. the damage added is fine but the actual condition hardly seems to make a difference.

Did they increase the deathly chill damage?

They doubled it

Arche.7326:

Silverkey.2078:

I did update the wiki some hours ago, so the clef there should be the right ones (and the shroud is 0.6, 0.6, 1.2 etc…, I don’t know where you got your numbers)

Sat down with a calculator, and did some math. Unless there is a certain amount of power that should be used to get the exact number I’m unsure of what I’ve done wrong with the calculations.

In the PvP arena for example, with 2200 power, dust strike is 859 tooltip damage, life rend is 516. Since we agree on dust strike having a coef of 1.0, the coef of life rend is 516/859=0.6

One thing to be careful with: the RS damage does not depend on your equipped weapon (contrary to DS), it is the damage if you had an exotic 2-handed weapon (I think it’s a hammer to be precise).

Captain Unusual.9163:

Robert Gee.9246:

We have a tech solution in the works CC effects like slow, chill, cripple, etc on defiant creatures. I don’t want to say too much about it since I’m not sure when it will ship or how much it will change before then but we do want your traits to work on bosses.

Seems pretty clear that this is not their final solution, since this change specifically makes it so our traits don’t work on bosses, which is the exact opposite of their stated goal.

No that’s what I meant. They are planing to change this. I don’t know if chill will actually apply its effect (CD increase and soft CC) but all the traits depending on it will work (so the damage, the might, etc…).

Yep here is the post
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Chronomancer-Changes-for-Next-BWE/first#post5383336

I did update the wiki some hours ago, so the clef there should be the right ones (and the shroud is 0.6, 0.6, 1.2 etc…, I don’t know where you got your numbers)

Robert Gee said a while ago in the mesmer forum that they are working on allowing in some way chill, slow etc… on defiant bosses (which probably included break bar)

Xyonon.3987:

Precognition and Recall are both still extremly underwhelming. Gravity is barely ok but still not really worth due the too long CD. The rest is fine.

I will say recall is even worse now. With the well trait, you can have higher alacrity uptime by taking well of calamity! I just don’t get the huge CD on one of the weakest wells…

The new IR still allows burst where you can make 2 illusions before shatter, but works against sustainy builds where illusions uptime is low because of no DE or simply cleave. So it has the opposite effect to what Robert probably wanted. Adding a iCD would be much better.

Zenith.7301:

The Heals

This one of the necromancer’s most glaring flaws. The shout heal barely budges my health up, it’s too low in healing.

In fact, the necromancer is merely a damage sponge with little potential for recovery in protracted combat.

If I am kept in combat like in any holdout mission, I’m just slowly wearing away as I can’t seemingly bring up my health relative to the damage new mobs are doing.

By comparison, my revenant pops shiro’s daggers and the glint heal and he’s back to full constantly.

Something needs to be done about our heals. We can’t sustain ourselves with the new damage going out. We’re basically forced to camp reaper shroud, in which we do completely horrendous damage.

Buff well of blood and the shout. Reduce the cast time of well of blood, consume conditions, and the minion heal. Increase the healing value of all these heals or reduce their cooldown.

The shout heal has a low cooldown but miserable healing. I won’t be using it for now.

Well of Blood should be made a water field and remove conditions on pulse. Consume Conditions should basically convert the conditions into boons or grant life force per condition consumed.

Your soul is mine is actually a fairly good heal compared to our others. The healing/cooldown is the highest, only beaten by CC with a few conditions BUT it also gives LF and its CD can be drastically reduced with the shout trait (without blinding yourself!)

But in general yes, necro’s healing are weaker than other classes which have less HP… so in healing percentage of full life this is even worse…
But you know… it’s probably because the shroud is OP…

I believe in the original grand design of things, necromancer was meant as a support class in the same way as guardian…

able to tank like guardian
able to spam blind like guardians spam aegis
able to spam weakness like guardians spam protection
able to spam vulnerability like guardians spam might
able to spam blind like guardians spam aegis
able to corrupt boons like guardian cleanse conditions
and in some ways also
able to spam fear like guardians spam stability
able to spam poison like guardians spam regen

But condition cleanse became way more common than boon hate, diminishing the strength of debuff compare to boons.
And bosses were made immune or less vulnerable to debuff while nothing of the sort was made for boons.
And soon all classes got sources of most debuff while necro never got any direct support ability.

The only solution I see to rebalance partly this is

• reduce the duration on vuln on bosses to 20% (in a 5-man party) so that vuln would not be something automatic but something you have to work for.
• Allow all debuff to work on bosses but with shorter duration (not necessarily 20% since those are not as easy to maintain as vuln).
• Then, make so that bosses apply a debuff around them where boon durations are reduced in a corresponding way to condis.

Bosses should not be immune to weakness or slow while players can apply protection or quickness to themselves. Bring back a boon-debuff balance.

I am curious how useful alacrity ends up in PvP… Since offensive classes work by burst damage while defensive classes work by defensive cooldowns, it seems it will be strong, so I’ll still try a support well build, probably something like
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQNAseWncfClqhlfCufCUrhlej6cDKhQwMAugMqeUb1ZF-TpwRgAA7PMWGAA

Now an odd question is: would this nerf be a bad thing?
With a nerfed shroud, maybe they will stop thinking we should be handicapped to make up for our OP class mechanics and we will be able to be healed while in shroud, or maybe even get access to skills 6-10…

sweet dreaming…

lujate.5432:

Any new thoughts on this coming weekend?

Well they “nerfed” (I think they called it bug fix) the stability on reaper shroud but buffed GS so I’ll try again frontline reaper. Anyway I had so much fun last time that there is no way I would miss a chance to do it again

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Silverkey.2078:

Enrage mechanics make sense because:

• it ensures a full turtle party won’t work
• it adds to the difficulty (see world boss)

I guess the devs assume that a full turtle party is more likely than a full zerker, and this is probably true in the beginning. I sincerely hope full zerker will never work, but many people seem to disagree with me in the PvE forum…

Mark me down as a disagreer. Enrage mechanics as a DPS check are one of the most frustrating ways to go about it, because until most of the time has passed you aren’t sure that it’ll work or not. Likewise, it doesn’t make the bosses any harder, it just means that you have to re-instance after every failure.

I’ve seen other games do it better. Two ways in particular.

#1: Piercing damage. This was done in a game where one class can literally be 20 times more durable than another, but since this wasn’t via HP scale many of the bosses had special piercing effects that could do damage beyond passive defenses.

#2: Regen/heal mechanics. A boss with high permanent regen serves as a DPS check, except that in these fights you’ll know in about 10 seconds whether you lack the deeps or not.

I perfectly agree it is not the best way, and like you I would have loved to see a regen or possibly an actual heal with breakbar or some other interesting mechanics.

I would not be surprised if some of the changes Robert Gee worked on will make it for next week’s release. Last time he said he couldn’t push them in the patch because of time + the patch was focused on bug-fixes and not balance (this was before last week’s patch). Also, the devs mentioned they did work on elementalist OP-ness.

So my assumption: next week will be a big balance change including ele balance + necro new weapons shinies!

I am a noob guardian, but shield seems quite efficient in PvP (especially for the knock back) and is the main off-hand in ESL for bunker guardians.

I am available for a full mesmer raid if needed, but I am not an excellent player + I am on EU server but on NA pacific time…

Any idea on builds to start with (obviously will be refined as we go for encounters)? I was wondering if I should craft an exotic cleric gear… ( http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQNAsdWl0nhC0YJawKNQtGLrG05RCS0NLxO6Z5GKeAA-TJxHAB1eKAQqMwP7PAwTAAA or something similar to my current PvP build http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQNAsaWl0nhC0YJawKNQtGLrG05RSS0NLxOeRZHKeAA-TJxHAB1eKAQqMQZ7PAwTAAA)

Dadnir.5038:

Enrage mechanism are bad design… this will just strengthen the zerk meta. (I’m sure even a dev can understand that)

Hopefully, raid encounter will be designed around securing secondary objectives and not stupidly bashing a boss “as soon as you can”. We know that they can do some great things in this regard (Brill’s lair was a huge success and didn’t needed players to have a dps check).

If the encounters are designed around trash management and boss tanking while ally or players prepare an environemental mean to chunk at the boss HP, then, I believe, Every profession (necromancer included) will have it’s place in Raid. (On second though, enrage could be a periodic state where the boss destroy everything on the area, forcing player to build a new environmental thing to try and kill the boss. Well there are tons of possibilities that exclud brainless DPS and promote all kind of different gameplay. I mean, do you really think that hitting a giant foe with a sword that look like a toothpick for him is a good way to kill it?)

On the other hand, if it’s a DPS check encounter (like what we currently have in dungeon) then the actual meta will stay meta… nothing will change and necro, due to the area where he is lacking, will be pushed out of the roster (Like he already is).

Enrage mechanics make sense because:

• it ensures a full turtle party won’t work
• it adds to the difficulty (see world boss)

I guess the devs assume that a full turtle party is more likely than a full zerker, and this is probably true in the beginning. I sincerely hope full zerker will never work, but many people seem to disagree with me in the PvE forum…

Bubi.5237:

Daniel Handler.4816:

But since you think this is drivel I’ll bite. Rank the field in order of importance. Let’s see how practical your balance is.

Poison
Light
Dark
Lightning
Ethereal
Fire
Water
Ice
Smoke

Poison – useless
Light – useless
Dark – useless
Lightning – swiftness
Ethereal – useless
Fire – migh
Water – heal
Ice – useless
Smoke – stealth

Order of importance: Might > Healing > Stealth > Swiftness > Useless

If the auras would stack in time, maybe ethereal/ice would be a bit better, but this way..

And as expected, ele fields win + eles have all the finishers to use them… Design balance!

Isn’t that why legendary armor are introduced: precisely to change stats on-demand?

Xstein.2187:

Look at it this way
1 support chronomancer and 4 eles may do more dps than 5 eles
5 eles can do more dps than 1 dps mes and 4 eles if no reflects are involved.
Therefore, 1 support chronomancer and 4 eles should beat out 1 dps mes with 4 eles.

So instead of being a dead weight, let’s be a semi-alive weight

I think the build is interesting, and it is interesting to see how alacrity and quickness translate into DPS. However, in the list of things you describe the build can do, there are a few flaws. You use boonshare to prove that you can provide party buff in terms of stability, protection, might etc… but you have only 1 boonshare ability and it is not on-demand and is thus difficult to time.

Alacrity and quickness are very useful, and they may justify a place in a party even if the party does not have only elementalists. I like them mostly because they give a niche we don’t have when reflects are not so important.

I am planning to make a full program to compute party wide DPS and boons and whatever based on skill rotation of all characters… but it will take some time

DuckDuckBOOM.4097:

Only in 1 main guild but I wouldn’t mind coming if you need another mesmer.
I am very skeptical that any group (10 mesmers especially) would be able to do it though because I’m not convinced that DPS checks won’t be a thing and I think a 10 mesmer group would fail at it.

I seriously doubt there will be any form of DPS check in the beginning, until the optimal group comp is found.

Or you mean a mechanics in the fight where something has to be bursted down quickly?
If it is so that even on our glassiest build we cannot burst something, we can complain since it goes against their “promise”.

Will omfg try some full mesmer raids when they open first? According to Colin, one should be able to do the raid with whichever profession you like, so a full mesmer should work as long as we spec appropriately. Also, since I guess (hope) the content won’t be beaten immediately, we may as well try to discover its mechanics with our favorite profession.
Anyone interested?

Quickfoot Katana.8642:

You can have “defensive” roles without forcing tank gear down people’s throats. Example? Warrior with mace/sword, blocking and dodging. New Daredevil probably. ETC.

Yes you can, this is a strength of gw2. Technically, I don’t care about the gear, I care about the playstyle. If you think about it, the only gear stat that helps support is “healing power” and it scales poorly to be honest. Most of support is from boons and conditions which scale only with duration, something which is provided mostly by runes and food (and revenant :p ).
But that is precisely the point, the playstyle (and how fun it is) is not defined by the gear, the gear only provides efficiency in one or another playstyle. So if clerics proves more efficient than berserker for a specific playstyle, why would that be a terrible thing?

I keep saying this. GW2 PvE should never had stats on gear. It confuses some players (such as yourself, more familiarized with traditional MMOs) about the real purpose of GW2 combat: active. Not passive.

They created gear stats mainly because of PvP, otherwise you would have statless gear in PvE just like GW1

Which is odd since you have much fewer gear stats in PvP than PvE.
I don’t think it’s confusing: the build (weapons/utilities/traits) defines the playstyle and the gear accentuates its strength. Example: yesterday there was a PvP necromancer tournament. Defensive gears are forbidden there. Well people used their usual build (minion master in this case) but switched to an offensive gear. The defensive gear is still better with MM, in PvP, but marauder works and the playstyle is the same.

So ultimately I don’t care which gear people will use, and nobody should. But at the end, if the content is hard, defensive gear will most likely be a part of it.

Kordash.2197:

In short : i wanna tank in a game that isn’t designed for it.

Who said that exactly?

I think there is still a massive confusion about what “no hard trinity” means. Tanking still exist, although usually you don’t “just tank”, you also support. The difference of gw2 compared to others is:

• a class does not have a specific role. You can (in principle) play a DPS role or a supportive role with all classes. Classes differ in the way to do it only.
• you don’t have pure tanking or pure healing or pure offense, you have a spectrum of possibilities.
• tanking is not facetanking as most of your survivability comes from active playing. In the same way, healing is not just about looking at your team UI and clicking on the one currently low. Every role is just as fun to play.

If you look at gear prefix, you do realize there is something else than berserker (incredible huh?), if you look at specializations, you see that while the 2 first lines are mostly offensive, the 2 next ones are mostly defensive/supportive and the last one usually has options for all styles. So yes, the game is created around the possibility to tank or simply to add a bit more defenses (passive AND active) to your character while remaining mainly offensive if it is what you want/need.

Kordash.2197:

Silverkey.2078:

The current PvE content allows you to facetank with zerkers, that is what I mean. You can for sure facetank it even more with defensive stats. Actually in the current dungeons, defensive stats may even be harder because you take more time to kill.

I don’t want to use the defensive stats to be able to facetank. I seriously hope facetanking will be impossible. I just think the content will be so that you just won’t survive without some of the team speccing defensive. So the game will be impossible in a full zerker setting and extremely challenging if you have an optimal composition, and this optimal composition will involve some people in very defensive/supporty builds.

The reason why in PvP defensive builds are not necessarily easier is that offensive builds will often be used in a +1 situation with the possibility to disengage whenever the situation is not at your advantage while the defensive builds will be expected to defend the point in a 1v2 and sometimes (for a short time) 1v3, until the bulk of the team arrives.
This kind of mechanics is something they definitely can implement in a “defend blablabla” event where you have to play an unwinnable fight just to buy time for the rest of the team or a NPC.

These roles are fun to play and allow build diversity and replayability.

Haha, no.

You don’t know what facetanking is.

I’ll help you : facetanking is a concept about not avoiding or blocking damages EVER, but rather take it with high vitality or thoughness. If you prefer, we can say you are mitigiating the damage so much, that you don’t ever need to actively avoid it.

People in Berserker, exept for War in some auto attack chains (and after the said chain, either heal/avoid/die) CAN NOT facetank.

A big chunk of current dungeons can be done facetanking, especially trash mobs (those few that aren’t skipped). Then some bosses do indeed require some active defenses.

Having high vitality and toughness does NOT imply facetanking. Gw2 is designed so that passive defense will never be enough to survive in a real fight. But in a well designed encounter (which atm means only PvP), active defenses are not enough either and you need the passive toughness and healing to survive the amount of damage that was unavoidable. Sure, if you only play PvE with the enemy attacking once every 3s, you can dodge/evade/block most skills, so the devs even had to add unblockable attacks to make it somewhat challenging. But when you have more typical situations with attacks coming permanently at you, you focus your active defenses (which in PvP also include CC, blinds and other debuffing) on a few dangerous attacks (rapid fire, hundred blades, mind wrack etc…) and slowly absorb the rest. That is NOT facetanking.

Quickfoot Katana.8642:

Silverkey.2078:

But a gameplay where you can’t face tank everything, where some people will need to spec defensively to carry the group, where you will need all skills in your bar to succeed etc… sorry, but that is the least I expect from raids.

Yeah…. because Zerkers are the ones facetanking stuff.

Seriously you just want to be able to “tank” in a no-trinity MMO. Don’t bullkitten around, that’s all you want to achieve in here. And that’s okay, but don’t claim it to be the “better” solution or even the most skillfull decision. Even if you say you should specc defensively and not be able to facetank, what’s the point? What is this obsession with wanting extra defensive stats to carry you, instead of depending on your own actions?

The fact is that it is easier to be specced defensively and rely on passive defense stats to carry you rather than be specced offensively and rely on reacting through active defenses.

Guess which one is the more engaging and active. Hint: not the facetanking one.

The current PvE content allows you to facetank with zerkers, that is what I mean. You can for sure facetank it even more with defensive stats. Actually in the current dungeons, defensive stats may even be harder because you take more time to kill.

I don’t want to use the defensive stats to be able to facetank. I seriously hope facetanking will be impossible. I just think the content will be so that you just won’t survive without some of the team speccing defensive AND playing very actively, blocking/dodging/evading the deadliest skills but necessarily still absorbing a lot of damage and outhealing it. So the game will be impossible in a full zerker setting and extremely challenging if you have an optimal composition, and this optimal composition will involve some people in very defensive/supporty builds.

The reason why in PvP defensive builds are not necessarily easier is that offensive builds will often be used in a +1 situation with the possibility to disengage whenever the situation is not at your advantage while the defensive builds will be expected to defend the point in a 1v2 and sometimes (for a short time) 1v3, until the bulk of the team arrives.
This kind of mechanics is something they definitely can implement in a “defend blablabla” event where you have to play an unwinnable fight just to buy time for the rest of the team or a NPC.

These roles are fun to play and allow build diversity and replayability.

Mesmer!
We do get wasted by CC in general, but not nearly as much as necro. In particular, if we spec into it, we can have some short-lived stability on shatter which is fairly neat for stomps.

nearlight.3064:

Silverkey and zapv, you are correct that might stacking holds the build together offensively, but I still don’t think that the build holds itself together very well outside of 1v1s for the reasons that I have mentioned. Cele necro can’t 1v2 at all and doesn’t end up doing much in team fights. The ways to remedy this are by taking other skills and trait lines that often move your build away enough that other amulets work pretty than celestial with it.

I’ll give it a try. I had somewhat planed it anyway since I am for odd reasons in a very supportive mood. Currently playing mainly interrupt-bunker mesmer, bunker guardian, cele necro and even having fun with an awful no-stealth support thief build (in preparation for the beta). And I started to feel like my necro rezzing/healing abilities were on the low side so I started looking at blood magic.

Jerus.4350:

Zenith.7301:

PvP doesn’t involve tanky builds anyways. Mesmer/thief run zerker or marauder, as does warrior.

The only cele users are ele/engi and cele signet necro. Guardian can be both zerk or tanky bunker.

Either way I would not call most of pvp PVT-wearing scenarios.

Didn’t the winners of that last tournament run a PVT Engi, 2 Cele Ele, Cele Necro and some kind of probably offensive thief? Or am I mistaken on that?

It is true that current PvP has gone fairly defensive, but that has not always been that much. Ideally, I think raids should have about half/half, with variations depending on the actual encounter.

Silver, PVP has a lot more smaller hits with some nastier attacks that you actively defend. You can’t defend them all, and if you build with a bit of defense in mind you simply don’t need to. If you play a glassier build you’re looking for a quick kill or you gtfo and go to a place where you can or is an empty node to grab quickly. Or at least as I understand it, I won’t sit here and act like I’m a pro PVP player(was highly ranked in old games though so I’d like to think I’m not completely lost on the concepts).

PVE is more about active defenses, larger hits but at intervals which you can handle avoiding it all. Right now we have more than enough active defense to avoid it all (well except necros) The only thing I’d say is stressing that is a Lupi without reflects. I’d like to see the raids be built more like that. Give me something where it’s at least theoretically possible to actively defend yourself through at least for the most part.

But isn’t that a big part of the problem? The combat system of gw2 just does not work well with bosses with 1 big attack every 3s. This is why active defense trivialize the content, this is why confusion is pointless, this is why devs have put so much restrictions on debuffing (slow/chill/blinds/…) and CC. And finally, this is why class balance does not work, because the game was not originally thought this way, so ele can spec full offensive and do insane damage at low risk (devs probably didn’t think eles would risk glassy builds), necro with their insane passive sustain but absolutely no active defense end up getting wiped while having low damage (to compensate for their assumed sustain)…

Another thing is that those type of encounters are frustrating for beginners as they don’t know the mechanics and just get 1-shotted without understanding why. But then too easy or even boring once you know the mechanics since you can so easily avoid it. I joined the game fairly late, and heard people speaking about dungeons being too easy. But when I joined a PUG for the first time, I got massively destroyed and kicked soon after. And this was not my last kick!

Requiring some level of healing is not bad, and tankage would surely be a plus if we can have someone who the adds focus first as they have the toughness for example.

If raids end up being something you can do in full zerker, it will kill build diversity again, because people will want only zerkers. This seems to be a non-shared opinion, but I do hope defensive/supportive roles will be needed, so that you can play the same content hundreds of times with a different experience each time without slowing your team mates. So yes, I would dream of an optimal 10-party of the type:
2 clerics, 1 settler, 1 cele, 1 soldier, 1 rabid, 2 zerkers, 2 sinister

PVP and PVE have a completely different feeling to me, I much prefer the PVE side, I just want it harder and more complex. Making that does not mean it turns into PVP style.

Obviously I cannot go against that. We are all looking for different things in the game, and hopefully, raids will appeal to most of us.

Jerus.4350:

I want a set of fights where playing optimally is far more challenging, I don’t want it forcing people to fight in tanky setups, there’s a big difference. I want to have to actively defend myself more often where things aren’t able to be trivialized by reflects. I want other builds to have more value in that playing at the optimal level is beyond the grasp of most players even if they know the correct tactics.

This does not require adopting the style of play in PVP.

What is wrong with a tanky setup? I have been playing tank/support for the past month in PvP, and this is one of the most active playstyle I ever played! Because in gw2, passive defense is anyway weaker than active defense. The passive defense are here to fill the gap between the active defenses.

Gw2 is not any MMO, this is active combat whichever role you play. Some builds are cheesier than others, but being main mesmer, playing PU burst is cheesier than playing a cleric-bunker mesmer!

So overall I agree with all your description except that I think playing tanky is not only compatible but an integral part of that.

spoj.9672:

Build locking makes sense in PvP because you dont switch roles in PvP. Your objective is the same for the entire game. But raids are different. We have different encounters and we have been told that the mechanics vary greatly. If a raid was one boss then fair enough. But its not.

Despite what I wrote, I do agree with that. I don’t see the point in locking builds except to create artificial difficulty.

Jerus.4350:

If the raids play more like PVP than current PVE they might as well not exist to me, I won’t be doing them.

Am I missing something? Didn’t people ask for raid because current PvE is a joke? Don’t you think that if raids end up being zerker feasts, a-net has failed?
The builds will end-up being different. Even WvW and PvP builds are different. The feeling will be different, because even with improved AI and fancy mechanics, the raids will end up being “learned” as opposed to the fairly unpredictable nature of PvP.

But a gameplay where you can’t face tank everything, where some people will need to spec defensively to carry the group, where you will need all skills in your bar to succeed etc… sorry, but that is the least I expect from raids. And this is closer to PvP than current PvE.

spoj.9672:

Silverkey.2078:

I will reiterate on this, but I believe when deciding for the first team comps and builds for raids, we should look at PvP builds and not PvE builds. PvP builds are versatile enough to sustain any possible opponent since we cannot switch builds in-fight. They are also generally more focused on surviving hard content than PvE builds.

And this is good, because while far from perfect, PvP class balance is much better than PvE balance.

Ok so 9 cele eles and a thief for raids? Sounds good.

How far is that from the current PvE meta?

I will reiterate on this, but I believe when deciding for the first team comps and builds for raids, we should look at PvP builds and not PvE builds. PvP builds are versatile enough to sustain any possible opponent since we cannot switch builds in-fight. They are also generally more focused on surviving hard content than PvE builds.

And this is good, because while far from perfect, PvP class balance is much better than PvE balance.

nearlight.3064:

After doing some rudimentory testing, I discovered that cele necro dagger autoing a golem does roughly the same physical dps as a clerics necro. Golem tests aside, that opened my eyes to how worthless celestial is on necromancer, as we have said, those bleeds/torment do very little to boost that damage so the spec relies on spite might.

Now that we have more stats detail at the end of a PvP match, I had a look at the condition-direct damage ratio of my cele necro. Condis are about 30% of my damage output (a bit less than a third). With corruption + staff + condi transfer, you end up giving a very decent amount of condi and cele makes sense.
Also, I haven’t done the math, but if you use 50% added crit in DS, the extra crit damage from cele may be better than the extra power.
Finally, the reason cele works on classes like necro that can stack might is because after 25 might, the extra power is a lesser increase than the extra crits.

I think burn guards are balanced. Eles are not. Maybe staff ele in PvP is somewhat ok, but DD is a joke.

Lord Kuru.3685:

Silverkey.2078:

They definitely meant that you can take any profession, but you will have to adapt your builds. They strength of GW2 is that any profession can have a tank/support build, a DPS build, etc… So 10 cleric guardians won’t do, but 10 guardians having the appropriate builds to fill the needed roles should be able to do it.

The more casual players who got Ascended gear (especially armor) after months or years of grinding are going to really resist changing their builds.

A different build with exotic gear may be more effective, but psychologically, it’s a step down from Ascended; people don’t like that. This is going to be a real problem.

But the rewards are the solution

They definitely meant that you can take any profession, but you will have to adapt your builds. They strength of GW2 is that any profession can have a tank/support build, a DPS build, etc… So 10 cleric guardians won’t do, but 10 guardians having the appropriate builds to fill the needed roles should be able to do it.