@Dahkeus
Fair enough. Its just that unblockables make about as much sense as reveal. Now that there’s more in the game, it just makes me wonder why ANet isn’t just reworking PvP entirely.
@Cobrakon
Mesmer has been just about meh tier for a better part of two years, coming into competitive play recently after 6/23 and then falling off again only to come back after HoT. I don’t like chronobunk either, but let’s not deny the facts.
Slayer- all of the other classes aren’t taking it for every build. Mesmer can take Dueling, but if you want assassination you go Dom/Chao/Illusion or the bunker is Illu/Chao/Chrono. Dueling is used for stall builds or condi, focused on testing your reaction and cooldown usage- its not mandatory. I’ve never used Valor on Guardian, meanwhile Honor has been RARE. I’ve used Fast Hands once or twice. Ranger has no mandatory line, literally every line is potent. Necro same thing. Ele, most take water because they want to bunker- but the bunker build is water/earth/tempest, while an assassination build is air/arcane/tempest-fire (one or other). Revenants are new, so they are using crutches (retribution). Engineers are mandatory HGH trait, same position as us.
:D Thought I’d let you know. Oh, and I’ve had no trouble and no builds that relied on one line over all others.
You run a DPS build without the free 8k healing, ridiculously high fury uptime, and the utility CD? You run a support guard without pure of voice, the shout CD reduction, and the res trait? Yea, I don’t think you went far enough with your guard.
Not using fast hands is a huge drop in DPS. No need to comment much on that.
FA ele is a stealthless thief with less mobility and only slightly better sustain. Their DPS is also a lot worse than thief’s. Also, they can only run bunker (although that quickly disappearing on 1/26).
You either solely PvE or are being hard carried by a good WvW guild since none of this would fly in sPvP.
Not really complaining. Just confused. Like, I’m not just referring to BV. HoT is throwing around unblockables like candy. Guard has other forms of sustain which is why they’re still going strong, but its almost the equivalent of them spreading reveal like candy.
Question. Nobody has mentioned how all of these unlockable effects screw over guard the most :P. Or has guard simply faded into the background cuz traps op?
You mean like this guy?
Every time thief buffs are announced people go ham and whine their kittening kitten off in here. Thief never really had issues with mesmers to begin with and now OP wants to make us believe that it’s BV which will push Thief over the edge?
In reality whether you play with BV or not is completly irrelevant, cause you should be able to win against Mes anyway. BV is far more useful against Revenant, Guard and Scrapper than it is against Mesmers. It’s also only 2 attacks, not even a timeframe of unblockable attacks so this is clearly just another whine topic.
Either way, I think people are still blowing this out of proportion because they’re forgetting 2 things:
1) Impact Strike will still be the better elite.
2) BV still has a 1s cast time, so the thief will either have to be really lucky to catch you while you’re casting shelter or they’ll just have to stand around waiting for you to cast it before they attack anything.Sure, there’s aegis, but that never mattered much for thieves anyways. BV has had 2 charges for a while now and even a thief without BV never had to worry about it since backstab doesn’t reveal if aegis blocks and bountiful theft makes your steals burn right through it.
Traps have nothing to do with this.
Honestly, revs probably are the most vulnerable since a thief can see them use Crystalline Hibernation, cast BV, and actually land it before it’s over.
What about basically ruining focus? BV and untraited SoW have about 4s between the two in terms of CD. The guard would usually blow SoW during a CC. Assuming the thief initiates with BV out of stealth after stealing aegis, that guarantees at least backstab landing before SoW is either broken or expires.
Also, I understand that the DH virtue shield is super cheesy, but what about severely reducing its effectiveness? Thief and guard have the same health pool and deal similar damage. Every hit counts in this fight. Thief can reposition repeatedly to kite the guard’s 0 mobility melee, but what can the guard do? Chrono has no place complaining since they’ve got, basically, all of the escapes in the game (in w.e proportions). If the thief bypasses their shield, they still have as much invuln as guard, teleports AND stealths coupled with a sizeable amount of CC to counter pressure with. Guard gets all ined and a thief that simply waits out shelter can pretty much place a backstab+HS very quickly.
Also, don’t misunderstand. DPS guard will still be one of thief’s toughest matchups, especially if they’re running DH with traps still punishing people who try to go melee VS the DH. I just want to know why all the unblockables…? Why not just reduce overall blocks (not that guard had too much of to begin with) instead of introducing something like this? Next, they’ll introduce skills that go through evades/invulns/blinds because they simply don’t want to go through the process of properly balancing every class’ resources x.×.....
Warriors need good gapclosers. <—-agree.
Warriors should get superspeed. <—— don’t agree.
Why not more swiftness and finally fix the bugs?
Seeing how Anet tried so many times to “fix” those gap closers which misses half the time I assumed they’ll be left buggy, so superspeed would be some kind of bandaid.
Super speed + balanced stance + berserker stance. What’s stopping the warrior from roflstomping once the chronobunk nerfs drop? Run around and press 1 since nobody can CC or kite you. Throw in EP if you wanna 5v1. Only class that can escape this is thief or mes (and mes only with portal).
Warriors need good gapclosers. <—-agree.
Warriors should get superspeed. <—— don’t agree.
Why not more swiftness and finally fix the bugs?
Question. Nobody has mentioned how all of these unlockable effects screw over guard the most :P. Or has guard simply faded into the background cuz traps op?
Almost every team game relies on overall team performance vs personal performance, unless you’re someone like messi/ronaldo/kobe. It hurts, I understand, but you’ll simply have to ignore pips and focus on improving until your current tier is braindead easy.
The thing is, what they’re doing IS applying conditions. Unless I read wrong and DS will only cleanse one stack of one specific condition, the necro can apply 500 stacks of poison and bleed and the poison will almost instantly disappear (well, the ele would die in this case, but that’s beside the point) with the bleed following up very shortly. If they choose to simply spam all of their fears, they’ll lose. If they try to chain them back to back, earth’s embrace/armor of earth would like to say hi.
Conditions, by nature, take time to do their damage. Picture it like this. The pre-buff DS was a 90 degree waterfall. Trying to apply conditions was like trying to swim up. You could, PERHAPS, make some progress, but then you’ll very shortly be thrown back down with new scars each time, only each time you land, you’re a level ahead of where you were previously because there would be some sort of foothold for you to hold onto (burned ele CDs). The post buff DS is more like white water rapids. Definitely not as hard to scale as a waterfall, but no points to hold onto and would probably mess you up just as bad once your stamina (your CDs) is blown.
If we’re talking about an entire build, let’s not forget that ele has a metric ton of cleanses aside from just DS. It’d be literally no problem for them to deal with constantly re-applied conditions and burst condi classes like guardian cannot hold a single, tiny candle to ele post-buff.
What if they simply sped up the animations to be similar to guardian GS but with slightly toned down damage? That wouldn’t improve survivability, but it would improve the usability of necro GS.
As for survivability, I think it’d be a much more acceptable solution if they simply increased the life force gain per subsequent attack landed on the same target (just as how they made it so that fighting a warrior for too long meant they’d get to use their F1 more times in a single fight). This would make your example of facing vaans a little easier for the necro to deal with since the main argument against necro is “lol 2nd HP bar”.
^ toss traps like the previous turret toss with the subsequent cast time increase? That actually sounds amazing.
Guardians shoot a beam of light, creates the trap at the targeted location.
Why not? It’s animation is visible plus increases what you can do with the traps.
I believe this should’ve been an option in the first place. Now if only they made it so that the traps CD only began after they were triggered…..
^ toss traps like the previous turret toss with the subsequent cast time increase? That actually sounds amazing.
It cleanses one condition per second. The only condition spec that can deal with this is necro with corrupts because even base condi application from necro won’t be enough to be able to deal a consistent amount of damage. At the same time, necro can’t keep up with a fleeing ele. Say, for the sake of this argument, the ele takes ether renewal. With the amount that it heals for + all of condi removal, they’ll essentially reset your condi bombs every 18 seconds without fail while still constantly shaving off conditions in between. An 18 second window to down an ele as what is probably their most efficient counter. Don’t misunderstand, I’m not arguing that ele will still be strong after this patch (as many more experienced in the class have illustrated), but, for all intents and purposes, this is a buff to DS. At least good eles won’t have to worry about conditions as much in the coming meta.
And this is the core of it, isn’kitten You think that condition application can’t keep up with the cleanse, and I think it’s more than capable, again, things that used to have no effect now DO, as long as they’re covered. Fear, chill, poison, these are 3 deadly things you can use to break an elementalist’s attempt at heal/cleanse, on top of the usual CC and burst damage. At the end of it, the only builds that the new DS will succeed against are low-damage, slow-condi-application builds, aka bunker builds that wouldn’t be killing you in the first place.
Comparing trait to trait, I don’t see how this new DS is a buff.
You don’t seem to have read my post entirely. Dealing damage and dealing damage in a consistent manner are two wholly different things. Sure, you can drop a 700 chill and a 1k+ terror on the ele, but you’ll deal only one of them since DS will immediately cleanse one with the other being cleansed almost immediately after. At most, you’ve dealt 2k damage and the ele has already topped up with whatever rotation. Say they have regen, prot, and might up. You corrupt and then apply your fear and chill. Now the ele has to deal with fear/terror, chill, poison, weakness, and vuln. Assuming the ele is at full HP (straight up 1v1), two conditions will be cleansed and the remaining will work their effects. If the ele feels like they’re being pressured, they can simply reset and come back since a majority of their weapon skills (D/D) have low CDs while you burned a sizeable CD. Rinse and repeat until the necro either gets +1ed or the ele eventually gets you to blow your LF and its basically GG.
Burn guardian cannot, without running gimmicky sigils/runes, break through this iteration of DS (whereas they could deal with the previous with a carrion amulet).
Condi thief isnt worth mentioning.
Condi ranger is either all melee (easily kiteable) or using their iffy SB.
Condi ele? Lol.
Condi mesmer can MAYBE trouble ele with a properly timed shatter and a daze here and there.
Perhaps condi zerker can spam zerk mode mace burst and throw in some CC?
Its a cleanse per second as long they’re rotating efficiently. They’re losing some toughness now that cele is being removed, but toughness never mattered to a full condi build to begin with. Bad eles who used it as a crutch will see it as a nerf. Experienced eles who know how to manage rotations and reset fights effectively will still win vs most condi users.
2.8k toughness and 2.2k vit. Sounds squishy to me.
Is this really the biggest issue with shatter mes…?
Because unless you’re a burn guardian using all of your burst at once, you’ll do a single tick of damage before its removed. Coupled with the fact that eles have a bigger pool to work this in terms of maintaining their health before the effect deactivates, you’ve got what is essentially a buff. Imagine those eles being able to repeatedly keep themselves over 90% (considering their low health pool, that meant they’d have to constantly keep themselves from losing more than 2k HP), now they have more room to breathe with 75%. Unless you were running rabid, you have no excuse as to why you couldn’t pump out 2k damage with a single auto chain.
…What condi builds only apply a single condition at once? Seriously do people not read opening posts?
A simple example would be boon corruption, or necro condi transfer. As long as they cover their important conditions with trash ones from autos/passive traits or whatever, they can keep those condis on you.
It seems people just see the larger amount of health threshold the new DS has, and take that as a buff without considering how powerful of an effect it will actually have. At best, this new DS is about equal in easiness to break.
It cleanses one condition per second. The only condition spec that can deal with this is necro with corrupts because even base condi application from necro won’t be enough to be able to deal a consistent amount of damage. At the same time, necro can’t keep up with a fleeing ele. Say, for the sake of this argument, the ele takes ether renewal. With the amount that it heals for + all of condi removal, they’ll essentially reset your condi bombs every 18 seconds without fail while still constantly shaving off conditions in between. An 18 second window to down an ele as what is probably their most efficient counter. Don’t misunderstand, I’m not arguing that ele will still be strong after this patch (as many more experienced in the class have illustrated), but, for all intents and purposes, this is a buff to DS. At least good eles won’t have to worry about conditions as much in the coming meta.
Because unless you’re a burn guardian using all of your burst at once, you’ll do a single tick of damage before its removed. Coupled with the fact that eles have a bigger pool to work this in terms of maintaining their health before the effect deactivates, you’ve got what is essentially a buff. Imagine those eles being able to repeatedly keep themselves over 90% (considering their low health pool, that meant they’d have to constantly keep themselves from losing more than 2k HP), now they have more room to breathe with 75%. Unless you were running rabid, you have no excuse as to why you couldn’t pump out 2k damage with a single auto chain.
In most situations, a 2v2 with a guardian and warrior (for instance) vs any other class + thief, the side with the thief would consistently lose assuming similar levels of coordination and skill. Thief was always a backcapper/+1er and decent at best in a 1v1 vs players who knew what to look out for. Only reason zerk thief was meta vs a zerk anything else was because thief also brought mobility which was too valuable in conquest.
I’ll take a burst meta over a bunker meta any day.
So what I’ve collected so far is that pets represent a portion of the ranger’s stats. If that’s the case, pets should scale off of the ranger’s stats. No need for skill reworks or anything of the sort.
The HP from the honor line wasn’t made baseline.
The bullets themselves, sure, but your toon tracks.
Shouldn’t have dropped the soap.
Euhm, a few things, OP. I agree with spicing up base steal by adding a single boon strip baseline. I also agree that trickery is mandatory. What I’m confused about is why this is a problem. Guardians have relied on valor/honor for DPS/support since basically launch. Warriors with discipline. Mesmers with w.e line had deceptive evasion. Eles with water. The list goes on. My point is, simply asking for things to be made baseline so you can beef your build up with little downsides would actually be detrimental to the game overall. Would it be a change that favours thief? Of course, but it wouldn’t help the game one bit. Consider the death of the cele bunkers the single best buff to thief and just call it a day tbh.
Also, the rev stolen item is probably my favourite after the mace we get off guard.
either add 15k hp baseline or let us mix up pvp stats a bit more. ANY amulet without vitality is unplayable to thief and ele. (even healing power+toughness doesn’t save you from getting 1 shotted)
Ele and guardian*. Thief can actually work with a zerker amulet if you’re fast enough once all of the bunkers are gone. Zerker can work on guard as well, to an extent, but they’ll find it far more difficult.
As for people talking about preparedness, I usually take trickery for the steal buffs. The extra intitative barely makes a difference IMO and can easily be made into a non-factor when considering trait lines if you can actually manage your initiative properly. Thief needs other things guys, let’s not ask for the little stuff.
Unload tracks like rapid fire.
The removal of cele is actually one of the few things they’ve gotten right with the upcoming changes. Everything else, personally, I’m on the fence about. Fortunately, I don’t play ele/mesmer/rev, so I don’t think I’ll be fearing our necro overlords as much as everyone else, but I still feel like they haven’t really hit the nail on the head with this one (which is what they’ll have to do tbh). Them not making perfect changes won’t kill the game, but it’ll likely drive as many people away as they’re bringing back in. That being said, I’ll probably be playing more after the 26th.
If its better to watch, its better to play.
Nobody is against an effective pet, but these pets are too strong. Scale down the damage and increase utility. Let smoke have an F2 that destroys projectiles like swirling winds. Have bristle shoot out crippling spikes as a pbaoe. Then decrease the F1 damage.
Pacman isn’t dead because pacman actually makes sense. Avoid ghosts. Use the lanes at the sides to avoid getting cornered by ghosts. Plan your route and eat one of those ghost killing fruits if you get cornered. If you get cornered again and don’t have a fruit, RIP you.
If pacman was made by ANet:
Passively gain more move speed the more bits you eat. Passively regenerate ghost killing fruits. Passively have the ability to walk through walls if two ghosts corner you off with a 1s ICD. Passively vacuum dots every few seconds to make the game end sooner.
It’s mostly cuz every class was given wayyyy too much for HoT and its time to take it back
This.
While I do agree with you that ANet needs to greatly improve their balancing policies, I honestly do think that you should being so defensive over mesmer and think of the game as a whole. By doing this, you’ll get a lot more people on your side and possibly even make some proper change that satisfies everyone.
Also, I believe ANet needs to decide. Are they going to follow their own design scheme and ignore the players or follow the players and their many (varied) gripes? I believe one of the biggest issues here is that, in terms of design, ANet sometimes listens to their players and sometimes they just don’t. This wish-washy behaviour is, I believe, the root of this mess.
As an example:
ANet has been trying to push for conquest’s growth while a majority of their players simply want to PvP. They try to satisfy their players by introducing a bursty zerk meta but then decide that they want games to be decided around rotations and then they introduce bunkers back into the mix and so on and so forth, each cycle cranking up the buffs/nerfs to 11.
^ except marauder would probably still be a better choice in that build, considering the poor toughness scaling.
So…kittening off your players is healthy for the game? Assume you’re right, that it was their intention, and it’s true that creating drama would allow you to retain more players. I’d imagine that a population of salty players would cause incredible amounts of toxicity which would, in turn, drive more people away.
And is it not possible for them to retain more players who are happy…?
Watching a tempest run away low and use some sort of overload and aggro svanir only to get downed. Ez game ez life.
This is great, but how would EP interact with prot? Would they add onto each other or be multiplicative.
Dunno man, I’m thinking it might be too strong with a Tempest if it’s multiplicative. Though with the new Necro corruption spam it might not be an issue.
It’d be too strong with tempest if it was additive. It being multiplicative would mean that a tempest applying prot or a revenant using rite wouldnt give the warrior 100% damage resistance since there would be diminishing returns.
What if Endure Pain was this
- Take -60% damage from attacks
- Duration: 10s
- Cooldown: 35s
And Zerker stance was this
- Gain Resistance: 1s
- Boon Application Interval: 1s
- Gain Adrenaline on boon application while active: 2 Adrenaline
- Duration: 10s
- Cooldown: 35s
This is great, but how would EP interact with prot? Would they add onto each other or be multiplicative.
1. Its obvious OP is trolling.
2. I just felt like dropping a comment because something like oh…..idk…..a taunt or a CC reflect for getting hit by something, while not entirely different, is many levels worse than a very short immobilize that only procs after you’ve been hit after a certain health threshhold and shouldn’t be compared like they’re the same…?
So this + rampage would turn every warrior into a dungeon boss? You had my interest, now you have my attention.
Of burning an entire trait line that barely helps DPS. For support guards, FoW competes with the shout trait sooooooooooooo…..
Its literally a 5% uptime immobilize. Why is this even being mentioned?
Cancer would mean something other than gamebreakingly annoying or OP….?
At least warrior can heal for 420 per second. They did mention that these weren’t all the changes. Still got about…..9 days before we can start raging st ANet again.
Please enlighten me with a challenge 1v1 and I’ll demolish your life.
I am the best thief who ever existed, I will literally win so hard I alter your reality into making you realize you play a pos faceroll class full of passive cancer and still got rekt LOL hit me up anytime bro’s I’ll stream the rekkage.
Passive cancer like panic strike you mean?
1s immob every 20s so OP.
Getting focussed by more than one person should result in a death regardless of what you’re building. Giving ele a free 19k base HP (cele put them around 15-16k?), would give ele the chance to play something like the new sages amulet or even carrion. Sure, their power spikes wouldn’t be anything special considering 0 precision, but they’d heal just as hard only with a ridiculously bigger pool to sustain off of.
Why was cele such a monster to begin with? What is the main gripe you see every ele mention when talking about the removal of cele? Cele was the only amulet to give ele the health pool they needed with adequate offensive stats for them to work with. No need to mention toughness or healing power considering their poor scaling (healing power even more so than toughness).
Of course, I could’ve simply misunderstood you and you must be complaining about the fact that you simply cannot rofltank 2-3 people at a time while still dealing decent damage.
Normalizing health pools would effectively kill off warriors and place necros at a severe disadvantage. The only major difference between guardian and warrior was the huge health difference assuming the same gear. Give guardian the same HP as warrior and no one could ever justify playing warrior. Ele and druid have a ton of sustain. Giving them the same HP as warrior would turn them into even more terrifying monsters than they are currently. Also, considering the sage/menders amulets being released with the patch, would they not still work with ele? I mean, lets be honest, toughness scales very poorly vs power specs and condi bypasses it entirely. With ele still having access to a ton of 40% protection, is this really that bad of a change?
I have nothing against thief, but backstab needs one of the following for it to be fair when the buffs drop:
- if I guess correctly and dodge, he should reveal himself, not get a second chance during the same stealth.
- consecutive failed backstabs should deal less damage each time.
- backstab damage increased, but you can’t simply chain stealths back to back so you can backstab like…once every 10s.
Backstab does as much damage right now as the Reapers auto attack except with prep time, so you’ll be fine buddy.
I’m not against backstab getting a raw boost in damage so its the deadly 1v1 ability that it should be. Its just that the suggestions I placed are things that would fill in a lot of holes.
Give thief the damage they should be doing, but rewarding mindless spam just hurts.
I have nothing against thief, but backstab needs one of the following for it to be fair when the buffs drop:
- if I guess correctly and dodge, he should reveal himself, not get a second chance during the same stealth.
- consecutive failed backstabs should deal less damage each time.
- backstab damage increased, but you can’t simply chain stealths back to back so you can backstab like…once every 10s.