Guild Wars 2

It’s all about good illusion and shatter management in PvE. If you have a bunch of illusions spawned on a mob that is about to die you should be using Mind Wrack to finish it off sooner whilst also creating AoE damage for surrounding mobs and getting additional benefits from the use of the shatter skill.

Like P/P, Staff does usually descend into using the same skill over and over again. In a 1v1 it’s fine for some more skill exploration, but in a group fight Vault and then Vault again. This can work and Vault does enormous damage, especially in WvW (11k Vaults are recurrent on a full zerk build) but as soon as someone knows the interrupt window for Vault (like myself) killing a staff Thief begins to get trivial.

The most important thing is the ability to disengage when things head south. In this respect Daredevil, Chrono, Berserker, Scrapper and Druid are the better classes for this as they either have low CD mobility/damage mitigation skills and/or stealth. Dragonhunter, Herald and Tempest can also disengage fairly easily but it might be less successful than the other classes.

And then there’s Reapers. Poor poor Reapers – there’s no escape for you.

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

We will be adding a red circle to the incendiary mortar skill to better display the area that burning is applied.

Finally! Thank you. That tiny orange ring that can quickly apply massive burning stacks was simply not good enough.

Maybe also bring back the original Incendiary shell animation that was obvious AND made the game look cool.

It’s all in the execution really. Repair Hammers should be something that is only usable ‘between’ sieges to get siege weapons ready for the next assault. Simply not being able to use your repair hammer whilst in combat would likely suffice as mentioned above.

I really don’t want to see zergs all bent over spamming their hammers to power through damage. It will just make things so dull and sieging tactics will become even more dumbed down.

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

Sarrs.4831:

these builds are instantly countered when you run appropriate condi removal builds, you can literally ignore them because they have no pressure

If you’re feeling like you’re being hard countered by certain condition builds, then don’t fight them.

This is the best advice you will receive. WvW is not like sPvP. If you cannot win against something, do not engage. Maybe readjust your build with more cleanses and give it another shot – if you play well and cleanse appropriately plus actually avoid skills that apply conditions (just like you dodge any other attack) you might succeed. If you don’t want to adjust your build, then just pass the fight on.

Helterskelter.8490:

Doesn’t look like Thief is in a very fun place at the moment.

It’s no way near as fun now unfortunately. The class has suffered greatly since the specialisation update and HoT were released. You need both Daredevil and Trickery so build diversity is awful. It’s still very effective, but most weapon sets come down to using the same skill over and over again which makes it very boring. Thief has always been like this in some ways, but now it’s predominate across every weapon set, including D/P. I do recommend trying out another class to supplement your time with Thief if you are indeed looking for something with a little more wiggle room for build and playstyle self expression. Although expect to come up against the same lack of interesting build diversity with every other class (just to a lesser degree).

Pre-specialisation/HoT WvW was utterly fantastic and infinitely better than what we have now. The fights both small scale and large were fabulous. I miss it greatly and feel sorry for those that never got to experience the game mode sans the unmanageable power creep.

Boonshare is just hilarious these days. Perma-resistance is very much a thing that is relatively straight forward to achieve with a couple of competent Mesmers. This wouldn’t really be that much of an issue if resistance didn’t negate 100% of ALL condition damage and effects. Make resistance negate just 50% of the effectiveness of condition damage applied to you but make resistance as ubiquitous as protection so it’s uptime is less reliant on boonshare whilst also preventing players from being entirely immune to one type of damage.

Used to do it regularly with my guild pre-specialisations. 10-15 Vs 30+ was very possible if you all played well and had impeccable positioning and focus. I loved it.

We started to give up shortly after the specialisation update and then when HoT hit it didn’t really matter how well you played as a guild group, a single Herald CoR could instantly down a third of your group with very little warning. It’s still possible to tear through a blob by abusing boon stacking and Tempest ability to not actually die, but it all feels so dependent on luck now. It’s not particularly fun anymore

I do it all the time because I just want to watch the world burn.

Only kidding – I don’t use GS in PvE.

Blind on CnD could be interesting but I doubt it would change much in regards to off-hand dagger’s use – increasing cleave range would be a good idea.

I agree a Shadow Shot nerf is needed, although not necessarily the damage. I think an increased initiative cost or perhaps even a range nerf so it’s not so relentlessly spammy as a gap closer with large damage.

Dancing Dagger is pretty great since the projectile speed has been increased. I don’t think it needs anything else really.

Pulmonary Impact is a weird one. For the most part it’s fine, but when combined with Head Shot it becomes a bit too oppressive – kind of like Confounding Suggestions with Mantra of Distraction. Think you just have live with these things really.

The AoE reveal skills are all wrong and obvious band-aids from Anet to facilitate new players struggling with stealth attacks. Ideally, Anet would have designed a more robust system for revealing stealthed players that was all about a patient, aware Thief (or other class) that is actively monitoring its opponents actions before attempting an attack from stealth VS. the opponent anticipating a well timed active block to avoid the damage whilst also revealing the stealthed attacker. What we actually got was a wobbly system where revealed is only applied through eating damage from a stealthed attacker or using a ridiculous AoE reveal skill. Neither of these solutions are very good, but its too late to change anything now with all the HoT nonsense having escalated things to a point of no return.

Killing Mesmers on my Thief in WvW is becoming quite trivial again because I just have such incredibly high damage on my Daredevil. Condi Mes can be problematic but is still very doable if I’m patient and just have the right traits in place – unless it’s that PvP meta Mesmer build at which point I usually just don’t bother to engage.

Cynz.9437:

Thief is definitely better than it was in s1 however i absolutely hate the direction that Anet went with in HoT – low skill floor, spammy, overtuned mechanics, passives, powercreep etc. Even thief didn’t avoid it – it is all about dodge and headshot spam now. Really killed it for me.
At the end, in conquest they are still overshadowed by revs and are still +1 decap pet but you can do fairly well in yoloq if you are decent.

I miss the days when CDs mattered, when timing and positioning was important, when thief was expected to win 1v1 fights. But it is all gone and will be never back

I’m with you on this one. Thief is so different now. It’s all very spammy and much of the methodical nature of the class is totally gone. Dagger is all about auto-attacking opponents to death, staff is basically Vault spam, P/P is still Unload spam, sword is either auto-attack spam or pistol whip spam – there were always an element of this to the class, but it’s just everywhere now. But the old Thief simply couldn’t function with all the broken stuff implemented since the specialisation patch of last year. If I couldn’t evade for 27 years on my Daredevil I would die very quickly to any stray source of damage.

Sure it’s a giggle to kill people with a single Unload in WvW or remove half of a squishes health just with a single dagger AA chain, but it’s not very satisfying at all.

Yeah I find S/D to be pretty good now with the last changes to the auto-attack. Infiltrator’s Strike already immobilises and is a teleport gap closer, so a damage buff would be a bit silly. However, Flanking/Lancerous Strike could do with some clearing up.

I don’t think we should strive for any weapon set to be on par with D/P, lest the power creep reach even more unmanageable levels.

Yeah it seems a bit silly that you can get points just for mowing people down. It’s a lot of points of too. You get large groups of people chasing single people down and killing them in seconds to get 2 points. Sometimes see huge numbers added onto our score just because our zerg kept mowing others down. The old system where you just got points for actually stomping was kind of cool because it empowered roaming battles where you actually had to try to win your fight whilst having no effect on zergs mowing people down.

But I get the impression that maybe empowering the zerging for spamming AoE at each other for points was what Anet wanted all along.

I actually quite like the Reflect on Hammer 2. It’s a relatively short duration so it can be fun for reactively reflecting important projectile skills – I wish more skills in the game were like this personally. Cooldown should be higher though, just like many of the weapons skills introduced with HoT.

Dire is hardly an issue anymore with the enormous direct damage we can now dish out in WvW. I saw what I assume was a full dire Mes last week – it was still so easy to focus down, that it may as well have been full glass. As soon as it was out of stealth I was tearing it to pieces with my Thief. Dire used to allow for some pretty impressive 1vX scenarios, that were arguably a bit broken, but now it’s so much easier to focus them down. Dire is still pretty great for 1v1s, but it’s terrible for 1vXs now. For 1vXs I’d recommend going more hybrid with some power to kill things quicker because that is ultimately how you win in WvW now. Longevity is gone.

As for perplexity runes, though not half as scary as they used to be, the #4 bonus doesn’t need to be there. The interrupt bonus is more than enough to ensure that these runes always stay relevant. Applying three stacks to something that had the cheek to even think about targeting and hitting someone with perplexity runes is just overkill.

I’d quite like for the interrupt bonus to remain how it is for selfish reasons, as it allows for an actual effective Mistrust Mesmer build for larger group encounters.

You make an interesting point OP – it would certainly make it more interesting if Resistance was just a condition damage mitigator. It then could possibly be distributed more widely across all classes where needed.

I think I could have lived with having one less borderland to visit knowing that some people enjoy the DBL, but the thought of having a 3 month period of only DBL fills me with dread and I have no choice but to vote to have the DBL scrapped in the next poll.

^Has a point really. It’s incredibly easy (too easy) to get Might without even trying anymore on nearly every class now. As Anet are never going to do what is necessary to address the overall power creep that has occurred since June 2015, blowing 3 shatters to get 24 stacks of Might just doesn’t seem that ridiculous anymore in relation to everything else. After all, I can get 24 stacks of Might just by pressing Unload 3 times.

I wish I came across so many condi builds whilst roaming. Most of the things I come up against are full on glass maniacs and fights last all but a few seconds. It’s quite boring.

Anyway, simply taking Inspiration can trivialise some encounters against condi builds so that’s obviously your first move. You shouldn’t have too much trouble against the things you list with Inspiration. Except condi trapper Thief which you should just ignore and walk away from immediately. That person is not there to fight, they are there to, err, still don’t quite understand why anyone would bother playing it.

I want an Elite specialisation that focuses on true punishment, deception and manipulation mechanics. I want to be a real thorn in the side of the enemy team. I want to be dangerous not because I can burst people down in seconds or CC them for days, but because I can undermine everything they do. I’m talking things like, applying debuffs to targets that prevent them from healing others, being able to physically move an enemy player away to another location (a bit like the interaction of portal and Unrelenting Assault) and being able to steal endurance from a target and share it with my team.

It depends what you mean from ‘one-shot’. If you’re looking to kill people with just a single attack, then it happens regularly with Unload or Vault in WvW against Eles and other Thieves, also possibly Mesmers and Guardians with some Might. Also ye olde signet backstab build can still one-shot. However, if by ‘one-shot’ you means dealing considerable damage in say 2 seconds or less, then Thief has even more options for this than ever before. Just use Impairing Daggers channeled with Mug and Basilisk, then either a single Vault, Unload or one dagger AA chain will kill other squishes outright. No careful stealthy positioning required.

Or you could just role a Herald and one-shot 5 players with Coalescence of Ruin, 3 players with Surge of the Mists, or at least a single person with Precision Strike.

Mixed Borderlands – I think some people did enjoy the desert map, so having at least one desert borderland might be fine.
World Linking Schedule – I don’t think anyone really minds, as long as every single matchup is made interesting by ensuring that all 3 sides are populous for the week ahead.
Deployable Mortars – We don’t need these. We already have catapults and trebs.
Deployable Cannons – We don’t need these either. We already have balistas. Generally, I think it would better to maintain objective identity regarding siege.
Repair Hammer – I’m okay with supply being used to repair siege, but the cost needs to be quite high.

They really should have just disabled waypoints for Bay until the bug is fixed. With the automatic upgrade system there is no way to prevent a waypoint being built, unless you try and get your dolyaks killed.

I can see why it might be irritating people. Projectile hate is, after all, easily achieved now. It’s just sort allover the place, often where it doesn’t reaaly need to be. Tides of Time already does a ton of stuff, why does it block projectiles too? Electro-whirl is on a high damage weapons set with a block, evade and stun field – it doesn’t need a reflect every 6 seconds too. As for Defense Field, isn’t a mini feedback field that is neither channelled nor stationary that’s on just a 25 second cooldown a little too much reflect uptime? But the worst is probably Tempest reflect uptime with multiple Magnetic Aura sources to complement Swirling Winds and Magnetic Wave. It’s quite an oppressive amount of continual projectile hate for anyone to deal with.

Well I ‘learnt’ the DBL if you like and the more I understood it, the more its flaws became apparent to me. I knew all the shortcuts, mapped all the hay piles, but it didn’t make me enjoy the map more. Objectives are so geographically isolated that there is literally no objective-objetive warfare which means sieges are terriblly uninteresting. The whole map was not conducive to actually seeing and fighting other players because the distribution of objectives relative to spawn points just doesn’t enjoy the same flow/logic as we see in the ABL.

I don’t really understand why the ABL is considered ‘easy mode’. I find the difficulty of WvW comes from the players you come up against and not really how many staircases I need to ascend to get to the lord. I find far more people trying to kill me on the ABL than I ever did on the DBL, so for me the ABL is more of a challenge.

trooper.2650:

Simonoly.4352:

I run a duel/insp/chrono condi setup, but I use sceptre instead of sword and always take Mantra of Distraction to capitalise on the AoE nature of Mistrust. I just take cleansing sigils for condi remove as the only other condi builds you are likely to come up against consistently are Necros, and you can pretty much lock them down anyway (watch out for the auto-condi transfer though of course).

I made a post about bleeds v torment. In all honestly if you go full condi I think you should take illusions than dueling. But I guess it is ok if you feel ok with it. Fay gives all the tecnical details why torment is hands down better than bleeds. Have a look

Oh whoops I mentioned the wrong specialisation. I meant to say illusions rather than inspiration. Duel/illu/chrono is my go to ‘fun’ condi setup with double cleansing sigils for condi clear. I’m mostly using duelling because Mistrust is so much more interesting than the vast majority of traits in the game. Duellist’s Discpline is also kind of fun for the pistol cooldown reduction on interrupt but the bleed application is pretty dull – like most other traits.

I did try a condi setup without illusions once and it was utterly ignorable for the majority of people I used it against. Illusions is just too important for AoE condi damage which is pretty much what the game wants and demands of us in both sPvP and WvW.

I remember a player from an enemy server was constantly trebbing from the NW tower on Alpine BL into the camp below over and over again no matter who owned the camp. When we decided to breach the tower, the guy on the treb didn’t react to anything we were doing and we went in and killed the guy whilst they were still trebbing the camp below.

The following day, the same person was doing the exact same thing over and over again. We would visit this tower every night whenever we faced this server and every single time it was the same person trebbing the same spot. I can’t quite believe that anyone would want to lead their life like this, so it must have been a bot or some macros setup. It was very strange to decide to always target the camp below – all those centaur kills must have really made it worth it!

Thief does feel pretty broken in WvW right now between the unload buffs, introduction of Vault, unblockable basilisk, dagger auto-attack damage increase, Lead Attacks buff, almost complete immunity to snares from UC and now having two skills to completely reset endurance usage. Let’s not forget about the hilarious Basilisk+Impairing Dagger+Mug+Auto-attack combo that kills just about everything I use it on.

But, this is kind of just what the game is like now. I kill most people on my Ranger by just using PBS with Ancient Seeds and then using Rapid Fire with my mini-rapid fire pet doing the same. It’s so easy to kill people now.

Thief does feel pretty broken in WvW right now between the unload buffs, introduction of Vault, unblockable basilisk, dagger auto-attack damage increase, Lead Attacks buff, almost complete immunity to snares from UC and now having two skills to completely reset endurance usage. Let’s not forget about the hilarious Basilisk+Impairing Dagger+Mug+Auto-attack combo that kills just about everything I use it on.

But, this is kind of just what the game is like now. I kill most people on my Ranger by just using PBS with Ancient Seeds and then using Rapid Fire with my mini-rapid fire pet doing the same. It’s so easy to kill people now.

I run a duel/insp/chrono condi setup, but I use sceptre instead of sword and always take Mantra of Distraction to capitalise on the AoE nature of Mistrust. I just take cleansing sigils for condi remove as the only other condi builds you are likely to come up against consistently are Necros, and you can pretty much lock them down anyway (watch out for the auto-condi transfer though of course).

Eastcorn.5901:

Anything that punishes people purely for successfully landing a hit should be removed.

Things like Ranger GS’s counter-attack are fine, and things like this should exist. However, things like Rune of the Nightmare should not. Mesmer’s Mirror of Anguish, while relatively unused now, should not exist. Revenant’s Eye for an Eye should not exist. Engineer’s Self-Regulating Defenses, while important thanks to Engi’s low condi removal and overall power creep in the game, should not exist.

It is actually idiotic that they do.

Don’t forget about Hunter’s Determination! You just did the Dragonhunter a favour by giving it stability, aegis and more aegis to pick up whilst also damaging and crippling you. All this because you dared to attempt an interrupt on a Dragonhunter. You terrible person – you deserve to be punished! How about Gale Song – you CCd the Tempest and gave it and its allies free Superspeed and also broke stun for all of them! You’re a real team player for doing that! Then there’s Hard to Catch – thanks for the free dodges and swiftness! I best you wish you’d never bothered (with life in general). Oh and Last Stand! What a great person you are to give out some free stability, swiftness and vigour – you must be a lovely person in real life.

At least with Mirror of Anguish, Reaper’s protection and Protection injection the target is still CC’d (though they are still ridiculous traits that I’d happily see vanish) and Shared Anguish still CCs the pet at least. But other variants also break stun for the person using them and have ridiculous secondary effects that are entirely beneficial for the person CC’d.

Straegen.2938:

Simonoly.4352:

In WvW it has gone from “oh a condi Mes, I remember that!” to “Guys, when was the last time you saw another Mesmer of any build type in WvW?” Played a nice 7 hour session with my guild group Friday evening and we saw like two Mesmers attempting to run boon share builds and that was it. One of them switched to Reaper after we mowed them down a few times.

Condi builds have access to dire and Perplexity in WvW. With it they can have similar or higher DPS to their power counterparts while remaining durable. Power got the shaft when it needed 3 stat routing through toughness vs condi needing one or two.

If dire or perplex were in sPvP, we would see a ton of condi mesmers.

This is true, but it doesn’t really translate well in WvW anymore as the armour stat has less meaning due to inflated direct damage numbers – it’s very easy to spike down a condi Mes through their natural sustain now, well, much easier than it used to be. I’m in the process of getting my Mesmer some Viper’s/Sinister armour as the sustain of rabid/dire just isn’t worth it anymore – I need to just be killing people quicker so they have less time to use their high damage skills. So in that respects it’s just like my full zerk setup but with a different flavour.

I did see a relatively tanky condi Mes in WvW yesterday actually, but unfortunately for him, I was on my power Thief, so he exploded very quickly within 3 Unloads. I was pretty shocked – most people die after just 2 Unloads :P

I still feel adding unblockable to Basilisk Venom was an unnecessary change that just undermines any defensive positions in response to an incoming onslaught from a D/P Thief. It would have been better to just reduce the duration of or increase the cooldowns of all active blocking skills introduced with HoT. Generally I think allowing unblockable to function on non-specific attacks (Phase Traversal too) is bad for the game in many ways including spectating, where it just becomes even more unclear as to why someone’s channeled block suddenly resulted in their death.

In WvW it has gone from “oh a condi Mes, I remember that!” to “Guys, when was the last time you saw another Mesmer of any build type in WvW?” Played a nice 7 hour session with my guild group Friday evening and we saw like two Mesmers attempting to run boon share builds and that was it. One of them switched to Reaper after we mowed them down a few times.

I still use duelling with pistol in my condi build for WvW as it’s far more fun to have some interrupt effects and Magic Bullet is just such a classy skill to use. But I certainly would not be using it for sPvP when shield is so important for everything and inspiration is mandatory.

Armour is essentially meaningless in WvW now that direct damage values have been hyper inflated. A 6K Gunflame isn’t even that bad, when it actually hits people regularly for >10K. Then there’s the enormous AoE damage of stuff like Meteor Shower (7K per meteor), Coalescence of Ruin (easy 12K after blocking a thing) and Dragohunter traps (Fragments of Faith still hits people for like 8K). On my Thief I can easily dish out 7K auto-attack chains or 10-11K Vaults or 11-13K Unloads. I actually killed another Thief last week with a single Unload – that’s just miserable.

I don’t think Anet are aware of just bad things have become. Improving scoring and adding reward tracks are decent, but the core experience (the actual fighting of other players) is currently damaged and in need of some major repair.

Dagger is literally all about porting to a target and auto-attacking them to death now because 1) the auto-attack does ridiculous damage now and 2) positioning yourself to land consecutive backstabs in WvW/PvP mostly just sees you dying to myriad high damage cleave/AoE. It’s sad that this is has happened to the class, but these are just the lingering consequences of HoT.

Burst the Daredevil and if the condi stack is high enough and they have already used Shadow Return, then weapon stow to deny evade cleanse. Then just focus on survival for the 4-5 seconds it takes for the Thief to melt to the confusion stack.

^ Oh look, someone who actually understands the game. Quick catch it in a poke ball so we can use it against the next “<insert thing> spam” complaint thread.

To be viable in all roles I would probably recommend Scrapper with hammer. Great damage/sustain for small scale roaming, has decent mobility/stealth access for scouting/running from a zerg and can persist in a front line melee train. All classes can solo camps.

BeepBoopBop.5403:

Simonoly.4352:

BeepBoopBop.5403:

Simonoly.4352:

Condition damage has been nerfed in quite a few notable ways since the game was released (700 boundary thing, halved +condi duration food). I don’t think it’s a problem at all really given how most condi builds are probably a mixture of dire and rabid, and it’s so easy to burst through someone’s armour stat now given how much direct damage we can pump out. You can do some massive stacks of confusion on people with Chrono/Mes (my record is 36 stacks on one person with perplex runes/mistrust and the stars aligning for maximum group interrupts) but if someone face tanks one of my condi shatters, they would probably face tank a power shatter and be dead sooner.

700 boundary thing nerfs hybrid players, not condition players. Condi duration food was also nerfed for -condi duration. Are you kidding me, “Condition damage has been nerfed” yea ok nerfed so hard that poison and burning were allowed to stack and confusion was allowed to tick passively. Not to mention that vulnerability affects condition damage now, but protection, -damage aspects such as Bulwark Gyro, and weakness don’t.

Easy to burst through Dire? One of the tankiest stat mixes in the game? What are you on??? I would love to see you play Marauder builds if you think Dire is easy to burst through. To see how skewed conditions are vs power, go fight a Dire build as a Soldier build.

Damage done through condition partial shatters FAR outshines damage done through power partial shatters.

I burst through dire/rabid condi builds on my full glkittenter Mes all the time. I also have built with condition removal in mind so I have Inspiration which trivialises a fight against, say, a condi Mes by simply rotating my burst in a sequential manner so that I can ensure removal of a condi burst. It’s significantly easier to overcome the natural sustain achieved from the armour stat now that direct damage has been increased so much. I really have no problems with condi builds unless I have no condi cleanse. I’d say 95% of my deaths are from very high damage short CD direct damage attacks – I so rarely die from conditions even when playing with just a few cleanses simply because I understand how and when conditions are applied.

Also, of all the game modes, WvW probably has the best condition damage balance because its effectiveness scales with the player number and WvW can go from a simple 1v1 up to 30v30. It’s honestly fine and also, my point still stands that conditions have been nerfed to a point where they are completely manageable and it really is so much easier to kill dire builds now.

Inspiration mesmer has no problems with conditions. More news at 11.

Neither does my Daredevil or my Druid. This just in: GW2 has plentiful ways to manage or completely mitigate condition damage dependent on sensible and well considered build decisions (unless you’re a revenant – poor revenants). Add that to your news reel.

BeepBoopBop.5403:

Simonoly.4352:

Condition damage has been nerfed in quite a few notable ways since the game was released (700 boundary thing, halved +condi duration food). I don’t think it’s a problem at all really given how most condi builds are probably a mixture of dire and rabid, and it’s so easy to burst through someone’s armour stat now given how much direct damage we can pump out. You can do some massive stacks of confusion on people with Chrono/Mes (my record is 36 stacks on one person with perplex runes/mistrust and the stars aligning for maximum group interrupts) but if someone face tanks one of my condi shatters, they would probably face tank a power shatter and be dead sooner.

700 boundary thing nerfs hybrid players, not condition players. Condi duration food was also nerfed for -condi duration. Are you kidding me, “Condition damage has been nerfed” yea ok nerfed so hard that poison and burning were allowed to stack and confusion was allowed to tick passively. Not to mention that vulnerability affects condition damage now, but protection, -damage aspects such as Bulwark Gyro, and weakness don’t.

Easy to burst through Dire? One of the tankiest stat mixes in the game? What are you on??? I would love to see you play Marauder builds if you think Dire is easy to burst through. To see how skewed conditions are vs power, go fight a Dire build as a Soldier build.

Damage done through condition partial shatters FAR outshines damage done through power partial shatters.

I burst through dire/rabid condi builds on my full glkittenter Mes all the time. I also have built with condition removal in mind so I have Inspiration which trivialises a fight against, say, a condi Mes by simply rotating my burst in a sequential manner so that I can ensure removal of a condi burst. It’s significantly easier to overcome the natural sustain achieved from the armour stat now that direct damage has been increased so much. I really have no problems with condi builds unless I have no condi cleanse. I’d say 95% of my deaths are from very high damage short CD direct damage attacks – I so rarely die from conditions even when playing with just a few cleanses simply because I understand how and when conditions are applied.

Also, of all the game modes, WvW probably has the best condition damage balance because its effectiveness scales with the player number and WvW can go from a simple 1v1 up to 30v30. It’s honestly fine and also, my point still stands that conditions have been nerfed to a point where they are completely manageable and it really is so much easier to kill dire builds now.

Sceptre/torch + staff, Illu/insp/chrono with dire still works very well or swap insp for duelling with rabid stats and ditch torch in favour of pistol for less sustain but more condi application. Just don’t be too surprised if you still get spiked down like you’re in full zerk – direct damage in WvW is incredibly high now and toughness just doesn’t have the same effect in anymore.

Condition damage has been nerfed in quite a few notable ways since the game was released (700 boundary thing, halved +condi duration food). I don’t think it’s a problem at all really given how most condi builds are probably a mixture of dire and rabid, and it’s so easy to burst through someone’s armour stat now given how much direct damage we can pump out. You can do some massive stacks of confusion on people with Chrono/Mes (my record is 36 stacks on one person with perplex runes/mistrust and the stars aligning for maximum group interrupts) but if someone face tanks one of my condi shatters, they would probably face tank a power shatter and be dead sooner.

I still think PPK should be encouraging players to utilise the stomp mechanic more. Currently, zergs can get points by simply instantly mowing down single players with little actual effort or skill on their part. The contribution of people actually looking for fights and using all their knowledge and skill to win those fights are just undermined in the current system by having the same relative impact on PPK. Personally, I think extra points from PPK should only be awarded from stomps – something that can occur in smaller scaled, more manageable and skill led battles. After all, zergs don’t stomp because it’s quicker for everyone to just auto-attack a thing to death.

All the objectives on the ABL have synergy. There’s reasons to hold certain objectives before you move onto others and the proximity of the objectives means there’s far more flexibility to the nature of a siege encompassing multiple objectives at the same time. This has the effect of also facilitating a high throughout of fights because objectives are what bring players together.

There are a few redeeming features to the DBL, but it’s just not an interesting map to control because everything is so succinct and geographically isolated. Roaming wise, fights were so few and far between that it just became far too tedious.

My hope for the DBL when it comes back: Anet somehow have metrics for the most used parts of the map and they expand these whilst cutting out others. There are a few areas on the DBL that are conducive to a similar WvW experience offered by the ABL. The area between the north east camp, north entrance to air keep and the gate to the north east tower was a great spot for some action. However, the cliffs and steps surrounding the air keep are a wasteland and I rarely ever saw any players there. In fact, the vast majority of the time, I observed players spawning at the south east BL WP, being funnelled away from the air keep cliff area to go past the two south towers directly to the enemy spawn and perhaps fire keep. I really think that cutting out some large sections of the map could make it a better experience.

I feel like I’ve gone back in time to when Halting Strike (Power Block) on Mesmer was and still is utterly useless in PvE. And what Slowmelt suggested is exactly what was suggested in the Mesmer community about 2-3 year ago