People want condition damage nerfed into the ground because it goes against the game’s design, plain and simple. This game is about actively attacking and defending. ANET’s goal is to go e-sports, but they haven’t even decided what they want to do with the game. If they want more emphasis on builds rather than actual player skill, then they’re going to need a lot more depth when it comes to traits (not as big as diablo, per se, but much larger than what it is now). If they want more emphasis on player skill, they need to remove the cheese. No RNG sigils and runes. The condition damage stat needs to go. You can’t go from one stealth to another (every stealth is followed by a reveal for 50% or so of the original stealth’s duration. Literally everyone should be rocking zerk or, at most, soldier amulets. This is arena based play, not wvw zerging. More skill shots (great example should be in setting up 100b). Auto attacks need to do less damage. Necros, contrary to popular belief, have not been buffed as hard as people claim. The thing is, though, that they honestly are in a good place, its just that there’s so much cheese flying around that it makes it impossible for them to even hold onto the lime light for even a few seconds.
Tl;Dr
Either we get less cheese in our game and go for some actual skill based gameplay so that the PvP could grow, or we could keep everything super casual and keep the cancerous builds.
Then the same logic should apply to AW, but people see them as one and the same. Oh well, their loss not taking shelter lol.
I’m going against my better judgement here, since all of your builds are incredibly cheesy and basically play themselves, but I’ll bite.
There are two things you want to look out for vs your average, non bunker guardian.
The focus 5 shield and judge’s intervention. That’s it. Make sure you force the focus shield before you drop your major burst. Never initiate at close range. Most guards will be dumb enough to JI onto you with your GS spinning, which is exactly what you want them to do since one blink and BAM, they’re basically sitting ducks. Most guardians, after you kite their JI, will waffle around and try to block, maybe pull out their scepter to smite you, but you’re more or less in the clear at this point.
So I caved a little and decided to give burns a try. I decided to avoid the valor line entirely and managed the following :
http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-B3lBd;0NFV10D3kF-90;9;4NOQ;0157146236;4IJl3K;1jzyvjzyv0L
So in terms of sustain, this is nothing compared to running with valor, but its a really cool build that can pack a certain amount of punch if you’re observant of what’s happening. In terms of 1v1 capability, as long as you can survive the inital burst, you should be fine for the most part, but I’m afraid most of the people I’ve faced with build we’rent too good, so I’m not sure I can judge all too well on its actual effectiveness until I test a little more.
Thoughts?
An easy fix which ill be ignored as usual.
Make conditions reduced by Armor. As of now Conditions are BEFORE ARMOR.
TO balance out the insane Condition frenzy, Anet needs to make ARMOR factor in.
If you’re going that route then just make Protection effect Conditions instead of Armor..
Or why not both? I mean protection is supposed to be the opposite of vulnerability. And vulnerability now affects condi damage.
Careful, you are about to enter the “Conditions can now Crit” zone.
^This is my one true fear.
You’d think a company running a game as large as GW2 would… oh, I don’t know…. test their kitten before releasing it? Get some of the top PvPers in the loop and have them test the kitten? If they allow them to stream the testing, I doubt the people would decline and I’m sure the amount of input they’d get from the community combined with their own experience would be invaluable for balance as I’m sure they’d quickly sniff out any imbalances.
More of a reason to take cele if you want your build to live on.
Dude says the game for PVE carebears. You link a PvE video to show what? That point and click is hard? If you’re trying to prove that a game that took a second launch to not completely suck is better than what GW2 is now, then you’re going to have to lay down a stronger case.
Well, everything they’ve planned to give us during HoT will, apparently, be given to us before it, so I think its just PvE content.
A broken elite to face a broken elite. Fair, no?
I have nothing against new things, make no mistake. The problem is, in a burst heavy meta such as this, being able to mitigate damage is so valuable. Its the reason why mesmers and theives are at the top currently. They can easily avoid any and all forms of damage through stealth. You guys do know that EVERYONE is dealing craptons of damage, right? Warriors and necros can MAYBE get away with zerk/assassin amulets as well, but thats because of their ridiculously large health pool. If I recall correctly, one of the major differences between warriors and guardians is the health disparity which is made up for with….blocks. Therefore, litany is only viable vs bads since people who know how to play their class will shut you down entirely.
Nope, shelter is still better by miles. I never really cared about might of the protector (usually because I can generate kittentons of might with strength sigil, empowering might, and the great sword auto). Litany is OK for pve and that’s it. Mesmers and theives have stealth to negate damage, we have blocks. Also, when anyone sees that heal go off, 50% of the players will know to get the hell away from you to deny you the healing and the rest will just CC chain. Having to burn a 60s stability skill just to be able to use your heal to its fullest is already indication enough that shelter is the stronger heal.
If the excuse that rampage is an elite and it deserves that strength, I want such game breaking elites for guard as well. Renewed focus should lose its invuln and remove virtue CD for a whole ten seconds so the virtues can be spammed like no tomorrow. How about them apples? Unlimited blocking, 25 stacks of might, tons of regen, stacking 100 stacks of stab for 10 minutes, stacking 10 minutes of prot. How about that? You cant complain about how you cant CC or DPS the guard because he’s slow and has no range, but he can hold points forever and give everyone the finger.
Well,you can get power, toughness, healing power and ferocity. The missing vitality and crit can be easily bridged with valor or radiance’s fury/crit bonuses while using honor for the vitality bonus, which also adds might and a smidge of res support. Get creative with your build lol.
12k health is a huge risk, even at full health you’re one-shottable. Knight also offers less power as toughness is it’s primary, Assassin offers precision as it’s. Baseline power is more valuable than precision or ferocity. Same with a bit of vitality, as being dead negatively affects DPS.
A few soldier pieces will give you a bit of uh-oh factor, and add more power over knight or assassin.
I’m choosing assassin over zerker because of all the might I can generate with my build. Easily maintaining 10-15 stacks, so I’d rather have more precision to crit more and keep the might up. I’ve given up on defensive stats, for the most part. If I get stealth ganked during a fight, no amount of vit or defense will keep me alive. In sPvP, I use marauder because the power loss vs zerk is easily overlooked when you consider the HP and extra precision you’ll be getting.
According to the old lore, mesmers communed with the lord of time while staring into a mirror, therefore making them time lords. Throughout the ages, they’ve excersized their powers to the fullest extent until recently. They grew bored with their ability to dominate at will, so they allowed the mortals to believe they could be beat. That is until a few days ago. Then they decided to stick it to everyone with much energy.
Ima think of a really cool one for guard. Kek.
Stat combinations is literally the only thing separating wvw from sPvP. I don’t know why they’ve kept the stats separate, but I’m thankful. So many cheesy wvw builds -cough-condithief-cough- can’t make it through here. Imagine, for a second, if every condi spec was given the option to run dire. Imagine nomad bunker guards. Eughhh, no thanks.
He already said he’s tried stab lol. Idk op, personally, if a team mate dies and a mesmer is nearby with his mantras charged, I don’t even try. Better one guy dead than two.
Imagine a thief with 1hp, 1toughness, 1healing power and around 6k attack, 100% crit rate and around 400% ferocity.
Or a bunker with 60k HP and 6k toughness with 10k healing power.
No thanks.
Allowing for wvw style stat customization with exotic only gear would be nice, though.
I don’t think you understand what is being said. You wouldn’t be getting more stats, you only have more ways of dividing the stat pool. So you wouldn’t be getting stupid crazy numbers like the ones you listed.
So how do you suggest dividing the stats? We’ve already been given most, if not all, of the stat combinations that make sense. Well, we don’t have sinister, dire, nomad, etc but sinister is close to rampager and dire isn’t here for balance issues.
Burn isn’t op on a carrion guard, but is op on an Ele with less than half of the condition damage. I don’t understand the Ele hate lol.
You can run it on guard if your block game is on point. You won’t be able to contest points, but you’ll most likely have the most DPS you can get your hands on currently for guard. Its kinda like our zerker amulet.
Because guard can outrun a target with permanent swiftness. In fact, only three classes can kite a rampage and even they aren’t guaranteed survival.
If you cycle ALL of your defenses as a guard, it still isn’t enough. You have to pray that somehow, a teammate rolls in to support you.
Imagine a thief with 1hp, 1toughness, 1healing power and around 6k attack, 100% crit rate and around 400% ferocity.
Or a bunker with 60k HP and 6k toughness with 10k healing power.
No thanks.
Allowing for wvw style stat customization with exotic only gear would be nice, though.
This has literally been argued to death. A simple search would provide hundreds of threads of people explaining how and why conditions are cheesy.
I know that, but its still cheesy and makes me cry a little every time I see my saladman burn.
Nonono, sorry about that. I forgot to talk about your prot suggestion. It would definitely be a great idea (I personally believe they should’ve done it from the start if they made vuln buff condition damage).
They’re unviable in higher levels of play and cheesy, if you can imagine. Builds don’t have to be viable to be cheesy, but any viable build can be justified to be cheesy if you apply a certain train of logic on them. Burning, in terms of numbers, is certainly quite powerful, but playing with the amount of cleanse common to an upper tier build, I can reliably keep the high stacks off before they become an issue. Call it personal salt if you will, but conditions, while not that big of a threat in most cases (even now) are just annoying to fight against. It just rubs me and many other players the wrong way when we have to put thought into our offense and defense when all you have to do is press a few buttons at any time you like and then run in circles while doing pressuring your target passively. I don’t usually like the idea of totally destroying a spec, but ALL condition specs (and perma stealth) need to go if anet wants their PvP to progress.
Also, trying to tank damage using stats (i.e. bunker amulets) won’t take you far with all the raw burst and burning flying around.
I take no offense at all, kind sirs. I’ve just been a little salty that, being the one class in the game with a crapload of active defenses, that I have next to no idea when to use my defenses because mesmers can just kitten around in stealth and blow me into space. When I survive vs a mesmer, its because I JUST managed to whiff them and quickly counter attack before they lol@me, port off and go back into stealth. The OP’s post seemed very well thought out and laid out which is why I went ahead and agreed with it. Since you boys are so well versed with mesmer, why not squash all of these nerf threads and make one grand thread of your own with all of your suggested tweaks. I’d hate it, too, if my favourite class was nerfed by people who have little grasp of how it works. If you stay silent and let the “naysayers” convince anet to destroy your class, you’ve got no one to blame but yourselves.
…Tell us, op, why conditions deserve to be on par with zerker or marauders.
So that people use them.
“On par” means viable; I’m not endorsing bursty condi builds.
Before patch, conditions were already cheesy. Throw in amulet buffs and burning being stackable and that’s the reason why we have all these conditions flying around at the moment. Of course, I have far too many bones to pick with the way anet tweaked amulets (thieves and mesmers burst too hard as well thanks to the new zerker).
Honestly, my only gripe is how powerful burning has become. I’m running so many cleanses they may as well call me Mr. Clean. Granted, I haven’t faced many condition mesmers yet so I don’t have a solid opinion on them yet. As long as people can stack all of these cleanses and burst so kitten quickly, conditions will never be viable unless anet makes it possible to build for bunkering AND conditions.
That burning seems fair. Its almost 1k per tick in most of your pictures. Pre patch, burning would tick for 841 damage, not too much of a stretch. I’m guessing you haven’t faced any burn guardians recently.
Conditions were meant to cater to attrition based play. They shouldn’t be able to match a zerkers burst in any capacity. What takes a zerker 10 seconds to do should take you 30, but you’ll be much safer doing it while the zerker, on the other hand, could probably die in 10 seconds as well. Playing a burn guardian with the rampager amulet, if I +1 a fight, the target will quite literally die almost instantly. It doesn’t matter if they’re zerk or bunker. The smite + 2 zealots flames is 10k damage on its own. Throw in the 10 stacks of burn for 6 seconds and we’re looking at 24k damage from the burns alone. I can, quite literally, down any target I so please in a team fight
In
6
Seconds.
^all of this at 1200 range too and can be made worse if I decide to yolo with our new elite shout and mad king runes.
In contrast, my marauder medi guardian can’t kill anywhere near as fast AND has to dive into the middle of the fight to do a good chunk of his damage. Ever since anet removed the condition cap, you’ll see worldbosses eat 50+ stacks of every condition easily. Have you any idea how much damage that actually is? All while comfortably kiting from a distance?
Tell us, op, why conditions deserve to be on par with zerker or marauders.
I don’t play mes (I have one at 80 that I just fed tomes to), but you finally shed some light and helped me understand what the hell was going on. Personally, I agree with everything you said except for your inspiration point. Being a medi guard main, thanks to the patch, I can take virtues for beautiful boons (the whole reason why guardian was meta for the longest time), honor for the might and vit, AND take all the major DPS traits from valor. Of course, if I took zeal, I’d get a LITTLE more damage (actually, it’d be 22% more) but trying to deal with those god awful symbols realistically makes it 12% and honor actually offers me a more solid choice. I don’t have a problem with a sustain line (thieves get shadow arts, eles have water/arcana, engis can blast the hell out of their own water fields, etc). From what I can tell, as far as mesmer specific issues go, the fury uptime needs to be cut down and the CS trait needs to work on an actual interrupt. The rest of the issues is stealth related, and honestly, I have no idea how that’ll be fixed without either making it useless or having it become OP.
Also, lol@cancer-mancer.
(edited by SlayerSixx.5763)
Have you not been reading this forum at all? You want us to recommend a cheese play style? Seriously…?
Im going for full assassin with strength runes. Keeping your inv as small as possible with staff at the ready is good enough for me in terms of out of combat mobility. As for in combat… Im looking at nearly 4k power with 15 might, so I’m hoping in combat doesn’t last that long.
Well, you always have the choice of mixing and matching your stats. If you take the honor tree, you’ll really want precision to benefit the most from the vigor and might it provides on crit. Honor also gives you a tidy 3k HP boost, which is nice so personally, I’d aim for a mix of rampager and soldier, but how you get your stats and what mix you use is totally up to you as long as you achieve the following:
16k+ HP.
1k condition damage
40% crit rate.
2k power
By default, you’ll be sitting at around 2k+ toughness (a little more if you take valor).
Now, of course, this is all assuming exotic and no food/buffs. Those are my recommended minimum for the stats.
Assuming all those aegis procs crit, we’re looking at a ridiculous 8-9k just for timing your aegis. That’s freaking amazing. I’ll honestly consider this as a way to give thieves and mesmers a most heartykitten
I have an idea. Since zeal is an aoe based (symbols tree) we move consecration mastery to zeal in place of kindled zeal, take perfect inscriptions and put it in place of consecration mastery and then remove radiant retaliation for being so useless and put RHS there instead and place kindled zeal in the radiance adept spot. Surely, some numbers would need a little tweaking, but that seems nice IMO.
Thoughts?
BUT TEEF is literally every mesmer’s excuse. Screw that, I want perma block until I decide to attack on my guard and the ability to refresh JI three times until it goes on CD for 30s. I also want WW to have perma quickness and deal double the damage if chained with JI.
TEEF is not an excuse, and medi guards with their sustain and blocks? Really? Guardians complaining when you have a heal off cd at almost any given time. Most of those are also insta-cast let’s not forget that.
Blocks are to guardians is what DS is to necros. Blocks are to guardians is what adrenaline and generally high bursts of damage is to warriors. Blocks are to guardians is what element juggling is to elementalist. Its LITERALLY the focal point of guardian. Its what separates a support guardian from a support anything else. Its what separates a DPS guardian from a DPS anything else. Don’t cry about our blocks, please.
A 2k heal is that big of an issue? That’s literally ONE auto attack for a zerker. Thats literally four stacks of burn for a condi. If you roll up ALL the healing from your usual medi build, you’re sitting on 10k healing. 2k from that 10k is from a 72s elite, so honestly, its 8k in most situations. 8k is what our signet heal would do ALONE, freeing up other spots for other utilities. The healing is barely the reason why guardians use meditations. There’s a reason why shelter, even after all the tweaks, is still the best heal, so please, don’t try giving medi guards crap. We’re nowhere near mesmers at the moment and proof is literally available to you here on the forums and in game. You’ll find 10 mesmer complaints for every guardian complaint and you’ll continue to find it like this for a verrrrry long time.
Stalling with Death Shroud? That is literally the main point of the mechanic!
^that. I’m in support of him and I don’t even have a necro on my account lol. Honestly, power necro is fine lol. You actually have to watch out for them now. Come on people. Necros are slow and so are a lot of their big hitters. I can understand why some of you would be a little salty that you couldn’t instsgib them and placed all of your bets on that instagib, but thats kinda your fault. Balance out your build or play some stealthgank cheese.
Are guards really that big of an issue busho? Of ALL the things, guards? I ran into a warrior who seemed to be running a stance based DPS build the other day. Any time a team mate would die, he’d pop endure/balance stance and then banner them to back to life. It was especially painful when you’ve managed to miraculously come out of a 2v1. You couldn’t CC the dude. Sure, you could poison to weaken the banner, but he’d still be able to quickly charge in and finish the rest if the res for one person, or simply finish you off. How about blood magic necros with mercy runes?
Idk man. Of all the things to be salty over currently, I hardly think ressing, ESPECIALLY from a guard, should be that high on your list.
Weaker autos would be interesting, to say the least. On my guard, generating 10+ stacks of might is easy. At around 15 stacks of might, I’m doing 4-5k autos. During those times, I wonder if using literally any other skill is worth the trouble. I’d seriously be interested in seeing how they get that done.
BUT TEEF is literally every mesmer’s excuse. Screw that, I want perma block until I decide to attack on my guard and the ability to refresh JI three times until it goes on CD for 30s. I also want WW to have perma quickness and deal double the damage if chained with JI.
Workingasintendedworkingasintendedworkingasintended -huddles into fetal position in the corner -.
Or balls, depending on what team you play for :P.
Well, if we’re talking GS for mesmers, mind stab and the wave are super hard to dodge, but the izerker and mirror blade are really easy to dodge. You don’t need procodsniper360mlg reaction speed to dodge the last two. Also, if I’m not mistaken, you can tone down/turn off particle effects.
(edited by SlayerSixx.5763)
Nah, it isn’t the same thing. When a person is insta gibbed in a shooter, you know it was an explosive/knife/headshot. In mobas, the big hitters generally have some sort of build up (aka tells that allow for counterplay). You may not know exactly what the skill is called, but you know some kitten is going down. With GW2, you got medi guards, mesmers, and thieves all roflteleportstomping, shoutbow just screaming in circles over fire circles, etc.
With the power mesmers are rocking now, I’m honestly afraid of what mesmers like helseth and supcutie are capable of. I’m fairly certain they could hard carry now and wipe teams solo.
If premades aren’t fair in sPvP, then I’m afraid to ask you for your opinion on guilds in WvW and those speed clear pvelords.
Also, good luck consistently finding matches without a mesmer or three.
Don’t forget to mention that guards can pop VoC before the res for the stability, protection, and aegis since reviving a target refreshes the CD. Also that protective reviver comes with a buttload of its own boons.