Guild Wars 2

If a-net keeps its promise, the class roles would probably ressemble the PvP meta more than the PvE meta. The PvE assumes an all static enemy, which all hits can be avoided more or less. PvP meta assumes a difficult encounter, which makes use of all mechanics the game provides. The main difference I see is that raids seem to focus on bosses more than group of enemies which will reduce the strength of AOE/cleave.

With this reasoning, elementalists will still be god-mode and rangers low-tier. But I would argue all other classes are at a decent place.
And in this PvP meta, the necro has a role, and it is tanking + boon corruption. While some people claim that cele signet is only meta thanks to the best team using it, most acknowledge it is a strong build.

So except if I get strongly disappointed by it (not unlikely), I am confident necro and most classes will have its place.

Also, until the content is properly learned and the optimal team comp found, people will not put restrictions on classes. It is a good moment to create a positive image of the class, so take your necro out and do a good job, make people enjoy their experience with necros.

That made mantra very good and smooth to use. However, the combination of mantra of distraction and the confounding suggestion was too strong.
Harmonious mantra which increase your damage after you use a mantra was also nerfed.

UW is low on their priority, but I believe most skills will be adapted to it before the release.

Element Two.7316:

Sykper.6583:

Calling it now, well before we know anything.

There will be one encounter where you will need to have your warrior put on a hammer in the off-set to have enough CCs to break the defiance bar to stop the boss from killing your raid in one shot.

No because that means there is a party compisition requirement to complete the raid, which A-net is against and believes 10 Settler’s Necros should also be able to complete their challenging content

Not 10 settlers necro. But a few cleric necro (healing/support), a few terrormancers (CC, condis), a few power necros etc… should work. They want us to be able to play our favorite profession, but we will still need to spec according to an “optimal composition”. They want us to use the wild range of roles available to each class.

I main mesmer, but it is clear mesmer’s boon ripping abilities are nowhere near the necro. Sure, you can AA them, and slowly rip all boons, or even use null field and get a burst ripping. And to some extent, I guess mesmer can be a good second choice behind necro (although tempest is getting some too…).
But if you can facetank with your mesmer and do your AA rotation undisturbed or if the boss stands peacefully in your null field, I seriously stop raids. Necro’s boon ripping are the most easy to actually hit: the signets hit at range, locust even in AOE, the axe, “Corrupt Boon” and the DS-2 too… Those are not so easy to miss and remove many boons at a time.

Ideally, the boss would have “burst booning” like a shout guardian, and you won’t want to wait the mesmer AA to remove them 1 by 1 until you reach 25 might, fury and protection. Then necro would be good. The fact that they added boon ripping on ele probably means that raids will need it and they didn’t want to have so few classes having access to it. And that also means necro will not be “needed” as such but hopefully one of the best choices.

I don’t understand why many here think that mechanic-heavy raid would be the way to go… Having mechanics does not make a content challenging, it makes a content undoable until you figure out the mechanics and then it’s easy.
For me a good challenging group content, this is PvE instances with fun combat. Something reminiscent of PvP, but in an instanced PvE setting. I want something where I use more than 2 of the skills of my skillbar (mesmer rotation: 55651111111111111, necro rotation: 67111111111 yeah!!!). I want this feeling I have of being on a razor blade, where any error I make could be my death. I want a very mobile and dynamic enemy, which does not stand in my wells or my hundred blade…

Zenith.7301:

Anyone who’s done mai trin knows very well that necro is not a more survivable class than another class who can heal their HP to full and can do so often.

Necro heals per second is absolute garbage, and since shroud is a DPS loss arguing that life force substitutes for heals is a really bad argument since other classes heal up without gimping their DPS.

This is even more apparent with water field blasting, which won’t heal a necro in death shroud.

That is a flaw of necro design indeed, but even more of PvE design. If a boss attack once every 20s but down you in one shot, then of course damage negation is infinitely better than passive defenses. But it is easy to see from PvP that in a normal situation, necro base survivability is good without too much need to invest in it. It could be better if the devs understood that good passive defense isn’t enough without at least some active defense.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

I can really only imagine two ways raids play out.

1. No DPS check, everyone wears nomad’s and soldiers and wears the bosses down.

2. DPS check, highest dps comps and active defenses reign supreme once again.

I sincerely hope you’re wrong. I think raids will fulfill their job if and only if the optimal comp contains different roles (some support, some DPS etc…).

Sagat.3285:

perry.9645:

If they make Vampiric Aura and Spotter apply to 10 people, Ranger and Necro will have a almost guaranteed spot in Raids and even if not people can still play what they like :P

Unless they bring condition mobs I’m not sure what’s the point of necro.

Necro have a high survivability even in a full zerker setup. So while everyone will be forced to switch to soldier armor, necro in valkyrie will destroy everything.

Captain Unusual.9163:

Anchoku.8142:

Debuffing has been nearly worthless against high value targets.

And we know that the devs are working to change that.

I would say the problem is that in a 5v1 situation, they had to reduce the effect of most impairing conditions on the boss to prevent a complete lockdown. This means weakness is reduced, blinding is reduced and most CC are negated. But they didn’t do anything of the kind to boons on allies. And this hurts necro. For example, to support your team defensively, you can:

• either apply protection on them to reduce damage taken (“guardian-way”) or apply weakness on the boss to reduce the damage he gives (“necro-way”). Those are 2 nearly equivalent ways to proceed. BUT weakness is reduced on bosses while protection works perfectly.
• either apply aegis before a big blow (“guardian-way”) or apply blind (“necro-way”). Same result as before.

For offensive support, you also have might vs vulnerability. Necro is good at continuously applying vulnerability, but vuln stacks so easily 25 that it does not matter.
As a result, it is usually agreed on that boons are way stronger than conditions in PvE. This should not be! And people often say “necro have no team support” while in a sense, we have one of the best team support of the game, it is just not “direct support” but support through enemy-debuff.

I think an easy fix to all of that is to reduce the duration of all impairing condition, and especially vulnerability AND reduce the duration and efficiency of all boons to keep it balanced too. This could be applied as an area debuff from the boss.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

We don’t do damage very well

Only in a mix-maxer setting. We have good base damage compare to our survivability. If other classes need to spec more defensively, our damage immediately becomes competitive.

We don’t do boons very well
We don’t do fields very well

nope indeed, not our role.

We don’t do heals very well

We do heal decently, and most importantly, we are very good at rezzing thanks to blood magic.

We don’t do cleanses very well

We clean ourselves very well, and we have some good team cleaning. Maybe not best, but not worst by far.

Chill and Weakness don’t work on bosses, which kills what seems like our best role.

Will chill and weakness be changed to be more effective? What is the role of the necro in a raid?

This they are working on already.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Chronomancer-Changes-for-Next-BWE/first#post5383336

Boon stripping has never worked in PvE since enemies apply boons much faster than our CD’s allow us to strip them.

We have the best boon stripping abilities of all classes. Mesmer sword can remove boon continuously, but that assumes a non-moving enemy which will wait for the last attack of the chain. Null field also assumes a non-moving enemy, and has a fairly high CD. If mesmer uses shatter (which it may), it will be a DPS loss so necro will be more competitive. Thief steal is very good, but only few boons every 20s or so. If a-net do their job properly, the boss will apply burst boons and not fast reapplying like currently, so necro should have a good niche there.

PS: please don’t say rezzing, if you need to be rezzed then you have done something wrong, not right. That is not a role.

Still thinking as current PvE content. I think if nobody gets downed while playing raids even on a good team, a-net has failed.

In summary I will say, necro is currently well balanced in PvP. I would expect raids to get closer to PvP in terms of balance, in which case necro automatically gets a decent spot.

I really felt they haven’t announced anything, and the trailer is even more disappointing. I guess it need to be played to be judged properly, but I was still hoping for more informations than just “10-man content”, “masteries will be useful” and “3 path in a near future, more to come”.

Things might look different in HoT; in PvP, chaos armor is quite valuable. I guess we may have a better idea in a bit more than 1h

Bhawb.7408:

You can get 110% weakness uptime from our one trait alone, it is just fine as a GM, and theirs is fine for an adept, at most 1s too high.

Actually I wonder now, is the enfeeble part on an enfeeble-cooldown (25s)? In this case it will be quite less than 110% (more like 74% on a best case scenario)

It actually feels like they partly reintroduced the concept of “secondary profession” from gw1. Dragonhunter is clearly a ranger, reaper is just a gloomy warrior, elementalist is stepping on our boon-share/boon removal + CC toes, thief is stepping on our interrupt toes. The only “unique” specialization is the chronomancer, because it is based on a old concept for a new class.

And if you have many enemies, (PvE or WvW or often mid in PvP), you can get a mass of LF from GS and the heal-shout. GS was not meant to be a dueling weapon, it fill the niche we have been asking for a long time: making us relevant in team fights.

It’s not 1 stack bleed for 6s, it’s 2 stack for 10s + 6s weakness ON TOP of the 5s weakness every 10s. Since we can cast DS about every 10s, we have a recipe for perma weakness + additional bleed.
Also, since it triggers on shroud, we have some control over it while just crits + iCD means you can’t time it.

So our trait is way better and worthy of a GM spot.

Turamarth.3248:

You forgot 1200 range with instant cast versus 900 range projectile.
And up to 5 targets versus 1 target.

Yes, you’re right, I didn’t think about this. The 5 target limit does make up for the other stuff… Ok, skill balanced as far as I see it.

So let’s compare

• mantras of distraction: 2 cast by default, 3 if traited; distracting daggers: 3 by default
• mantra of distraction: 5s CD between uses, distracting dagger didn’t seem to have any
• mantra of distractions: 2 3/4s loading, distracting dagger: 1s loading
• distracting dagger: power block without trait

the only benefit of ours is the 5s shorter CD, but almost 2s of those are spent casting anyway. And the daze is shorter, but I have already said I would have liked shorter daze for the mantra. I see it as an interrupt tool, not a way to disable someone for a long time.

This is called balance

And if they keep it, it behaves as a double handed weapon.

ODB.6891:

stuff

We are not trying to bend PvE to help necros, we are trying to bend PvE away from its initial bad design. The game has many mechanics (immobilize, weakness, blinds, slow, chill, daze, interrupts, conditions/boon manipulation) which are negated or rendered useless by PvE content. You cannot play how you want it, because many ways you may want to play are impossible. Example, I want to be an interrupt mesmer, which is one of the key playstyle of the class. Well, my interrupt traits won’t proc very often, and if I interrupt the boss after all his defiant stacks have been removed, I am very happy with my trait proc, but my team-mate elementalist and its icebow wants to kill me now…

The proof of this failure is the huge gap between PvE and PvP. People keep complaining about “A-net should have a different PvE and PvP balance”. I disagree! Anet should have a PvE which uses all the mechanics that the game provides with a decent AI so that the PvP balance is meaningful also for PvE.

No, PvE sucks, and it just happens that the mechanics that are banned affect more necro than other classes. The solution is not to fix necro to be a second elementalist. There is not only 1 outlier, 99% of builds are outliers as far as PvE is concerned.

… and elementalists have plenty of fields and plenty of finishers… which is part of the reason they are god-mode.

I do agree though this is not our role. We have some leaps to get chaos armor, which is good on its own!

Considering how bad rangers got in the specialization update, I guess it’s probably the same problem as thief acrobatics: you got nerfed to make place for your elite spec.

Elite specialization often feel a gap in the core class. What role is currently the hardest for a thief to play? Defensive role! So this specialization answers thief’s strongest need.

All classes have strong defense/support on line 3 and 4, and line 5 usually offers both offensive and defensive aspects, so defensive builds usually has line 3, 4 and 5. But thief has line 4 defensive but in a stealthy way, which goes against the conquest game mode. Adding a “new line 4” for non-stealth defense was needed.

The problem is that developers didn’t really have much ideas of a thematically-thief way to tank except through evades, so acro and daredevil happened to overlap and they had to nerf acro to make space for daredevil… Sad but necessary I guess

The good news is that they probably overnerfed acro by fear of interaction with daredevil. Once the specialization is out, they may be able to rebalance it to make sure it makes sense to use even without daredevil.

I really tried to fix it… but they did destroy my chrono-bunker build (2 out of 3 the traits I took are now useless in my context). I’ll have to think about something new…

zapv.8051:

As opposed to what? Something that requires a perfect party comp like in other games? Maybe we will see something close to that with the supposed challenging content, but it would go completely against anet’s philosophy for general content. Currently you can do the overwhelming majority of content naked so that any build will work, this is very much intended. The reason berserker is best is because you take the most risk by having no armor, and aoe buffs effect direct damage better than condi.

If you don’t like this, why not just go play wow or something. They have forced roles, which seems to be what you want. People have been making your complaint for a long time now, and it has been explained many many times why anets decision is both justified and within their design of the game.

A-net never say they don’t want people to go for support roles, they just made sure that any class could fill that support role. This means you don’t need to wait for a guardian if you want support, anyone can play its favorite class while providing the needed role. And this is true to some extent. In PvP, most classes can do most roles, albeit not always as efficiently, and the elite specialization often provide access to a role that is currently weak in the class (for example bunker thief will most likely be possible with the new specialization).

So to come back to PvE, a well-designed and challenging PvE content would force at least a few of the party to spec for tanking and/or support, like we currently see in high tier PvP.

Robert Gee.9246:

Silverkey.2078:

It just seems they don’t want this trait to work

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-August-25-2015

There are a lot of bugs in the game and often times there are enough that we can’t get to all of them as fast as we would like. Duelist Discipline not applying to Pistol 4 didn’t get into my queue until after the cutoff date for changes to the 8/25 build. I’ve got it fixed for a future release though.

Thanks for the clarity and sorry if I sounded “pushy”. As some mentioned, the problem with that trait is that it is key to many potential builds (essentially all builds wanting to use pistol for conditions for any reason), and also that we were starting to wonder if this was a bug or if we just misunderstood it.

But this patch was great. Mender purity was very important, and for my other favorite profession (necro), the MM fix was awesome. Thanks for the transparency.

AlphatheWhite.9351:

MailMail.6534:

Phantasmal Fury is much better if you’re running condi.

Wut?
PF gives .2*8=1.6 bleeds above baseline.
DD (fixed) gives .33*8=2.64 bleeds above baseline.
By the math, DD gives 1 more bleed stack per volley per iDuelist, which is better than Phantasmal Fury for condi.

Add that to the fact that DD also has the recharge mechanic while PF does not, and pistol condi builds might actually be able to benefit from the pistol trait, where now they do not.

Full hybrid builds like Rampager builds might still get more out of PF, given the extra physical damage from phantasm crits.

I think he meant that he does not believe iDuelist will ever benefit from DD, so fury is better.

Arche.7326:

Effectivly we get roughly 30% more DPS than dagger if we spam gravedigger if a foe is below 50% hp. The coeff/s is 1.5 for gravedigger (new one) and 1.33 for dagger. But if you miss with gravedigger you are losing out on alot of damage. We will see how it turns out soon.

Yes but there is about 10% increase weapon strength. So at the end, gravedigger used to give almost the same DPS as dagger AA but is now 50% higher.

I do think thief would need some stability. With the powerful new elite and the long channeling healing for example, there will be an interrupt feast….

With gravedigger damage increase by 50%, we now give effectively 50% more damage than dagger AA when an enemy is below 50%. I haven’t calculated how good the DPS is below 50%, but that is still at least a 25% increase DPS compared to what we used to have + blind on the same weapon, good burst vulnerability, etc… while still keeping the amazing self-buffing and PUG efficiency that necro always had. This will be a clear improvement in our acceptance rate in LFG.

And indeed, in challenging group content, necro/reaper will most likely perform better comparatively:

• extra survivability without speccing for it
• weakness, blinds
• vuln will probably be harder to cap
• most likely some boons to play with (we have already seen it in open-world in HoT)
• most likely more conditions to cleanse

Duleshna.7430:

So now, we can realy on minion damage more. That leads necro to more of a support role that damage role in my mind. Therefore Cleric gear, staff and AXE come to question.

I was actually thinking about something of the type, using axe-focus/staff. The one thing that cele signet is still better at is providing boon hate to help the team. With the lesser dependence on damage (and the hinted future improvement on the weapons), we may be able to leave dagger and warhorn and do more than just bunkering a point.

for example:
http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-38cZ;1kH-D0v3oI-K0;9;4689;0058036038;9;1Uwl6Uwl63t

Bhawb.7408:

Cleric is THE best option by far, has been for a long time, made even more dominant in the specialization changes. It isn’t about the siphons, that is a tiny fraction of what Clerics does for you, it is for Transfusion, Life Siphon, regeneration, SoV or CC, and the large variety of other heals you can grab in the one build.

Ok, good to know. I knew siphons scaled terribly so I assumed the increase life force regen from vitality beats the increase healing from the few other skills. But it seems indeed transfusion and life siphon scale well with healing power. Thanks for the tip.

striker.3704:

Now that they function properly, clerics is definitely the way to go no questions asked.

As far as I know, cleric is a no-go for necromancer. I think siphons scale terribly with healing power. Also, vitality is a bad stat for most classes because it does not help sustain, but since necro life force and its generation scales with vitality, it actually helps better. So I think soldier is the way to go.

So, is MM the (second) best necro build in sPvP now?

I am actually wondering this indeed. I don’t believe this is working as initially intended because 1 bleed on 1 skill is really not worth mentioning. But they may just be afraid of this to be too strong. But considering we have to give up on phantasmal fury, it is not too strong, but still useful.

To be fair, duelist’s discipline is fairly strong on an interrupt build even without the bleeding, so it is still worth taking.

It just seems they don’t want this trait to work

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-August-25-2015

All is in the title: can you save an ally from stomping by using distorsion sharing (inspiration)?

They said the PAX prime will not have any HoT to play but only core gw2, so definitely no beta this week-end.

Well, this is indeed fairly theoretical currently since we have had only a short week-end with reaper. I just reflect based on how burning and poison used to work. The comparison with burning is meaningful since chill now has about the same damage formula as burning before the condi update.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

So, for anyone but a Reaper, Chill will be the only condition that does not stack at all.

Stupid idea.

Yes, I am very aware of that, and I hesitated to start this discussion because I felt this could potentially be stupid.

The only 2 fixes I could see is to change chill to a damaging condition for everyone OR a very weird one where chill would behave like 2 different effects, one for reaper and one for everyone else.

I know it is odd, but I decided to start the thread and see if people have good ideas about it, or maybe feel that this is a non-issue.

All damaging conditions are now intensity-stacking. This is a very good change for viability of conditions in general.
The two exceptions with HoT will be terror and chill. The main reason is obviously that those are not damaging conditions except if you are a necromancer/reaper. Also, with terror it does not matter much because it is usually done in burst, and is rarely stacked. But chill uptime can reach 100% especially if more than one person fight the same enemy. This means that the damage from reaper chill gets “diluted” on a team fight, reproducing the exact same problem as was seen before the condition update.

I believe changing to intensity-stacking would make balance easier:

• It will effectively reduce chill uptime since now, 2 consecutive chill application would not stack in duration. Thus, the chill traits which got nerfed with immense ICD can now go back to their original state.
• It will allow chill condition damage to work even in team fight with other people applying chill.

The non-damaging part (CD recharge and movement speed) would obviously not stack, similar to how poison works now.

Any opinion?

First, we cannot one-shoot people (at least not anymore). You have to practice the burst rotation on a golem, to make it fast and efficient. When you see in ESL, the combo is so fast that you almost don’t see the mesmer doing anything but the health of the enemy dropped.
The current “best build” involves PU, so survivability is about going back to stealth to prepare a next burst. But obviously, you cannot do high damage AND high survivability (you’re not an elementalist ), so dying is part of the experience, especially in the beginning.

I love staff because it makes the chaos armor easier. But I tend not to like it as much because except on large points (foefire mid) I get out of point with phase retreat too often, although I start to improve on that. It also gives boon, usually too short duration to share but it adds a bit if you have them from other sources. I don’t think it is irreplaceable, it is just good.

Still, our staff burning has never been “OP”, but with the change to burning, it has been nerfed. All classes burning application have been adjusted to make up for the lower damage of burning except mesmer.

I think restorative illusion would be much more useful if it was not a selfish trait. I still like it, a heal with instant cast is extremely useful (while rezzing for example). Also our best way to remove poison before a heal.

I definitely agree with the stability and the lack of love for mantras. 2s is barely the length of a stomp, and can be too short for a rez. But AOE stab is very useful as you can make sure the whole team can rez or support while someone else stomps. Also it is 5 stack so you’re basically sure it won’t be broken.
For chronomancer, I used bountiful disillusionment, and I really like it. I just like the additional might on interrupt. It is fairly easy to get 10-15 mights in a team fight on all interrupts while you get at most 4 from BD.

I think these are just 2 decent alternatives. For core mesmer, I prefer this build, but it is also because I have always loved the lockdown style. And I really like that this build does not really compromise anything, it is full boonshare, full mantra support and full interrupt abilities (outside of damage). With all of this, I actually look forward to play Courtyard which I usually don’t (except on my guardian).

If it wasn’t for duelist’s discipline, I would also play focus. I play guardian with shield (and not focus) precisely because I love the knock back which is so useful for this one tick to capture/uncap point.

But as I said, interrupts are key to my build and pistol is just so much better at those. Also in my experience, without the inspiration traits, the warden dies too early. Duelist on a much smaller CD is a better choice to maintain the regen/protection.

In general, power build just means your main goal is to do direct damage. One could say that the possibilities are power, condition damage, support, defense and control and builds have varied proportion of those.

In PvP, the strongest mesmer build at the moment is a power build, very strong at burst damage (killing your opponent as fast as possible) and mobility (in particular using portal in organized teams). But there are plenty of builds which are very good, and may actually be even more efficient than this one since this one really shines in organized teams. So since you are beginner, you really should try out things and find what you like.

Sword and pistol are 2 very useful weapons, which you can find in many builds. Sword does not really fit with condition damage, so you can eliminate that, but except for that, suits most playstyles. Pistol is good for both damage and interrupt (another strong point of mesmers). So that leaves you still a lot of possibilities. For PvP, you should probably look at staff or greatsword (GS) for your second set. GS is more focused on damage while staff is more defensive.
For PvE, really anything works in open world, and I would probably advise GS. For structured PvE (dungeons) people usually prefer going melee (short distance from the enemy) using sword/sword, but that do requires some good understanding of the dungeons not to die.

“Mass PvP” is a bit more difficult. Do you mean WvW for example? The “common” mesmer builds are not as good in group fights as they lack support. In WvW group fights, mesmer usually try to single out enemies out of the group and execute them. But there are decent support builds possible, you may just need to tailor yourself a bit more.

I hope this helps. Good luck in your mesmer adventures

trooper.2650:

@ silverkey
Your idea is interesting, but I fail to understand how pistol can be a bunker weapon. Ok the stun and the daze… but I hardly believe how it can help you when bunkering for example mid, and 3 enemies are focus firing you. In those situation the duelist will not last 3 sec. because a) aoe will kill it very fast b) I woul shatter it because either I need a condi cleanse or a blind to save my kitten , which is more important than some dps

Well the idea is very simple. I don’t think we have a good bunker off-hand weapon. Shield is probably the closest to that… But I chose to invest in interrupt build. Here is the reasoning for the build:

• Inspiration is a no-brainer for support, and it works best with mantras (Mender’s Purity procs best with mantra heal, Restorative Mantras is our best AOE heal).
• Mantras imply dueling. This adds blind on shatter which is also useful.
• I also want some boon support. This implies the signet but also a boon generation which comes from Chaos GM. I can choose shatter or interrupt. Interrupt gives more might, shatter gives stability. But stability is short lived, so hard to share anyway. Mantras does a better job at that. Also, since I took harmonious mantras, I don’t have much shatter material. So interrupt it is.
• Interrupt is a good idea anyway because we have mantras. So I give up the mantra of pain for the short CD heal and get mantra of distraction. Also, I can now use duelist’s discipline for a very good cooldown reduction on pistol, allowing more interrupts and also the shortest possible phantasm cooldown to still maintain some phantasm uptime (regen + protection) and shatter material.

On top of that, the interrupts from both pistol and mantra are multiple target which really is a big help in a team fight.

We don’t have the same team support or survivability as a guardian; but we have much more debuff (blind/interrupts+all the goodies from the interrupt trait). If we only go for support, a guardian will always replace us better. We have to play our own strength.