Guild Wars 2

Party up with another player. Make one of you the dedicated dead ragdoll. The dragon will only attack the instance owner (the person who opens the instance).

Have the instance owner die somewhere in the middle, watch the dragon attack the corpse and take your sweet time extinguishing the flames.

The fight isn’t that hard. But your post doesn’t give that much insight as to what you are doing either.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Sourde Noire.5286:

The number of files is totally irrelevant, it’s about the total size of the patch. On that note, I’d like it if they actually wrote that in the patch notes so people can have an idea whether or not to postpone it.

They can’t tell you how many files you need to download in the patch notes — it varies for everyone, depending on language choices as well as other options and when you last got an update.

(The editors on the wiki ‘discuss’ this all the time — they haven’t come to any solution for this either.)

Hm, I see. Well, a baseline could be an ‘up to date’ client but I can see the thing with the language options being an issue.

That’s nice but I’d still criticize that Reddit is used to spread this info instead of their official forums in the thread that was asking for this specifically.

dadoppelny.7945:

Sourde Noire.5286:

It’s your fault for making Quip in the first place. Quip and Dreamer players need to get banned!

You did forget about Moot I think

No, Moot doesn’t have such annoying sound effects.

It’s your fault for making Quip in the first place. Quip and Dreamer players need to get banned!

The number of files is totally irrelevant, it’s about the total size of the patch. On that note, I’d like it if they actually wrote that in the patch notes so people can have an idea whether or not to postpone it.

Only if they finally add an ‘effect’ slot to which you can apply it permanently. And make it work in all content (and not disable it in half the instanced content). And remove the 1h timer. And remove the disable on loading screens.

Gee I love that potion but all the issues …

Well, yes, but then you’d eventually split them and not keep them on the attunement. Skills and in extension of that builds are surely somewhat subjective; my point here is that the guide that’s clearly aimed at people unfamiliar with the Elementalist suggest that those things work best in conjunction with the attunement or the trait line that has the traits that enhance them.
When, as you said it yourself, Ele is about combining the things and that breaks with such grouping.
Anyway, interested to see where this guide is going.

The thing is there isn’t much else you can pick if you want some extra damage. Signet of Fire, Glyph of Storms and Ice Bow are the things you usually take along for some extra burst.

And the idea is to cast the Glyph (or anything really) when your Font is on CD. So comparing their DPS values doesn’t say much, they just add up. So it’s not a DPS loss in a Staff Tempest build, though the Lightning Storm does more damage and adds vulnerability, yes.

I think most complaints stem from exactly that. Ele is stuck at support for a while now and it’s kinda all they can do. So I’m not sure this will do anything but reenforce the complaints.

Sounds good.

Although I’d stand by the third paragraph. To me it makes it sound like certain skills are meant to be used in conjunction with certain traitlines / attunements, which is not a set rule or always the case (see Signet of Fire or Conjured Weapons). It could give the impression that you’re bound to use them in that combination when Elementalist really uses many things depending on the situation and the synergies between them.

Which is why I would suggest making a proper split between attunements in general, in synergies with certain weapons, and then looking at skillsets on their own and maybe pointing at synergies with attunements / traits (though for most the synergy will be that one trait that impacts them).

malachi.7503:

The one I always get stuck on is mob attacks that follow you. There is a dodge mechanic, If I dodge a attack, that attack should not auto redirect to hit me anyway. Whats the point of dodge then? oh look that centaur is firing a bow at me, I dodge, arrow curves in mid air and hits me anyway. ..oh that mob is tunneling underground to attack me, dodge but mob redirects in mid tunnel and hits me anyway. oh that etten is about to power strike with his club, dodge roll behind him, etten turns and hits me anyway…whats the point of dodge?

The answer here is to dodge the attack when it’s about to hit you, not way before. While some following attacks can be annoying, most can be avoided by getting ‘hit’ mid-dodge. So really, dodge is useful here. Improve your timing.

As for ranger pets, I’ve seen the bug happen where a pet on passive would still attack mobs and get you stuck in combat, which is highly annoying. Normally it shouldn’t do anything on passive though and even if it gets hit it won’t put you into combat, plus they patched it so that pets actually don’t pull any aggro, i.e. are invisible to mobs, until they attack them first.

On topic, I’ve found this combat slow to be the biggest pain in the butt in PvE since forever. To me it serves zero purpose but to annoy me and get mad at the utterly useless literal trashmob that can do nothing but put me in combat and slow me down so I have to get out of my way to melt it in 2 seconds and then wait another 2-10 seconds until GW2 decides that I’m actually ‘out of combat’ now. If the combat detection were less wonky and I’d instantly get out of combat once whatever I aggroed is dead it wouldn’t be half as bad, but so many times I just stood there waiting for it to happen even though nothing was around that I’m used to logging out my character because relogging is actually faster and more reliable than waiting.

I guess another point is to give a hindrance in Jumping Puzzles. But what with Mesmer portals that completely nullify that mechanic anyway I don’t see much point.

Ultimately it forces you to slow down and actually kill things and maybe see more of the map but after x hours in the game when you have seen everything and killed every mob more times than you can count it’s nothing but an annoyance.

The Weakness description is still wrong. It’s a 50% chance to only take 50% damage, which can be argued as a 25% effective damage decrease, but not flat 50%. It also doesn’t apply to conditions, which could be vital information for new players too.

Then I don’t get the spoilers. I suppose they should give the post structure but it’s just additional clutter.

Overall the structure could use a little work. Bundling conjured weapons (which can be argued to be really weak overall bar their fire-and-forget capabilities) with Fire attunement has little sense except for that one trait; and it has been mentioned that the additional charges are optional at best.
Bundling the Signet Skill descriptions with Earth Attument seems more like filler and really just adds clutter – again – when it should be about the attunement itself.

Come to think of it, the attunement descriptions really don’t say that much because it heavily depends on the weapon you pick alongside it. Example would be Air in staff, in which case the skills neither to burst/spike damage nor grant you much blinds.

I’d suggest going over the weapons first and then giving a recommendation which weapon synergizes the most with the given attunement or your idea of the attunement’s role (i.e. Focus excels at defensive options in Air and Earth compared to other weapons).
And in another block you can discuss the skill types and what attunements synergize with them due to traits and such.

Make a proper split between base Elementalist and Tempest, especially new players will probably be quite confused about that.

Byega.4215:

Sunshine.5014:

Out of combat, Superspeed is just a normal swiftness. In combat, Superspeed is equal to swiftness out of combat.

So why when i used “one with air” (superspeed when attuning to air), i got superspeed (66%) and not the capped (33%) one ?

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Superspeed

Because obviously he meant that superspeed nets you the movement bonus equivalent, not that the boon itself wouldn’t be applied.

You can use it to quickly resurrect Detha in the Ascalonian Catacombs to make her repair the traps at the end of her path faster.

Other than that I don’t know what the point of this skill is. That counts for most of the revival skills except for the Warbanner though.

I guess a niche use would be WvW Lord resurrection but I don’t even know if they fixed that already and there it’s also usually Warriors because of the AoE res.

Marthkus.4615:

Wander.5780:

I like the positivity in your post… however, I have to disagree. But I’ll preface with a question for you first.

What are you primarily playing? PVP/WVW/PVE and what weapons do you primarily swap out? I find revenant/herald overall very weak in PVP/VWV post nerfs, hammer especially. Hammer is still viable for PVE metas and the like where all you need to do is sit back and auto attack while working in a Hammer 2. The healing nerf to Glint shield has pretty much made shield completely useless for me, combined with the fact that sword 1 and 3 were nerfed hard so your dps with sword/shield is completely gutted. The annoying thing, is that Glint is still almost entirely a mandatory legend to have slotted, for the party buffs and perma swiftness. The only other legends worth using are Dwarf/Shiro, and even Shiro needs work to be viable.

I’m running sword/axe and Mace/sword (shield). Since I’m celi, I use Mace for more serious fights and sword to quick burst mooks.

I’m already 80 in mostly ascended, but I’m mainly doing map clear, dungeons, and some PvP right now. Normally I do a bit of everything.

I use demon stance unyielding anguish plus sword 2 to melt annoying mooks. The leech bolts add some good damage. In dungeons I’ve been running centaur/dwarf with my soilder necro mm buddy. We find the tankier specs easier for running dungeons in a straight forwarded way with random people. Centaur heals and projectile destruction is very useful in keeping sub 80s alive in combo with dwarf halving all damage, mass stab, and taunts.

In PvP, I’ve been gone for too long. I mashed buttons, killed a few people, but mainly got my teeth kicked in. It doesn’t help that my favorite spec was deemed OP and removed.

I’m waiting to unlock the elite spec as I slowly feel out the class, soloing group events at higher and higher levels.

Note: Shiro quickness gathers materials faster.

Read: Revenant is awesome in open world PvE. Well, that’s really nice for you, but literally everything works in open world PvE (and dungeons unless you want speedruns). That may be a statement to your personal enjoyment of the class, but it says nothing about the viability of the class in instanced content, PvP or WvW.

Then again you just posted you like this class, about which I’m not sure what it’s supposed to do. Start a discussion? Well, I do like Revenant (or more specifically Herald because base Revenant is garbage) a lot, I like the style and I like the idea of it. But too many broken things and unwarranted nerfs (because of PvP and WvW) butchered the fun for me.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/revenant/if-CoR-get-nerf-shouldnt-hammer-get-buff/first#post5974187

Take a number.

Around release and for some time after, it was actually cost efficient and easily possible to craft your own gear while you were levelling and equip your character with the best possible things by doing so.

After numerous patches and changes to recipes, most importantly with the addition of ascended crafting, selling the low level materials yields a lot more coin so it became better to just sell them and buy the levelled gear off the trading post.

Turning a profit with crafting is also very hard, since it’s so easy to level a craft. The only items that really net a tidy profit are the ones that are bound to time gating (again, mostly ascended crafting).

So, as of now, I’d say the only benefits of crafting are:
- easy but relatively expensive extra experience
- crafting ascended and legendary gear (which is ridiculously more expensive than buying the precursors off the trading post for the most part for the 2nd generation legendaries)

And that’s about it.

325 concentration / expertise with an ascended armor set plus weapon ascended as well. Which translates to 21,6% boon duration / condition duration.

For exotics that should be 325 / 1.05 ~ 310 expertise / concentration, meaning 20,6%.

//edit: Well, I read it as including weapons, so with or without? The weapons add 118 expertise on ascended, sooo with just armor it’s 216 – 14,4% and 206 – 13,7%.

Well, I’d be happy if I could just manually blacklist certain loot so it doesn’t get picked up / is automatically destroyed on acquire.

I’d put minor sigils/runes in there, and the Aetherkey pieces, Enchanted Map Scraps and other random junk that keeps dropping even though you don’t need it anymore.

At the same vendor next year.

If you’ve seen it for yourself, why make this thread?

The boxes were removed some time ago, having ‘collapsed from all the weight of the players that used to stand on them’.

And I wouldn’t necessarily call it an exploit. The boxes were there inside the max range. It just promoted lazy afk gameplay. Not that it’s much better now with all the people dying to the electrocution and refusing to waypoint.

The event to capture the Promenade of the Gods and followed by the capture of the Gates of Arah starts when either the pre-event chain to capture Shank Anchorage was completed successfuly or when the defense event of the Gates of Arah has failed (in which case the assault starts again at Shank Anchorage) I believe.

The defense events in Orr for temples and the Gates of Arah should pop after every 45 mins or so. Problem is that with megaservers people usually do the defense events and prevent the chain from resetting OR start the event chain to let it fail at Shank Anchorage to farm champions.

Other than that, the pre-events should run on the default of 10 minutes respawn time.

Burtnik.5218:

Malchior.5732:

Then make Unrelenting Assault the opposite: it gets stronger the more targets appear, but is weaker in a 1v1.

I was thinking about damage scaling abilities based on numbers of targets up to 100% (20% per one) if there are 5 targets in area but not sure if thats even possible in gw2.

Well, the Elementalist heal (Arcane Brilliance) does that, it heals for more the more enemies you hit with it. Technically you could just add a 0-dmg PBAoE to each strike as a check on how many targets you have and adjust damage accordingly.

As for sword, I’d have a suggestion for a rather easy fix. If you really want it to be something to single out enemies, you could have its behaviour change according to whether or not you have a target.
Precision Strike without a specific target will do what it does now (minus the hitting random junk).
Precision Strike with a designated target will fire all projectiles at the single target and ignore everything else in vicinity.

Unrelenting Assault could behave in the same way (once you remove the target requirement for the cast).

If you want to add some kind of visibility for counterplay you can just give PS an actual piercing/striking animation (of which there’s already plenty in the game for swords) for the single target and leave the wave animation for the untargeted version.
For UA I don’t know. Easiest could be have your character make a left turn for one and right turn for the other in the animation.

I feel that would improve the sword a lot. You could finally single out targets in a group or decide to keep them busy / keep up pressure with the untargeted versions.

Accursed.1890:

Pretty much same goes for Battlefield 4, The Witcher and etc., very lame FPS …

That may very well be, but in the case of GW2 it’s the engine and improving your hard- or software can only do so much. Hint: It’s not much.

Pandaman.4758:

Sourde Noire.5286:

You actually get event credit if the event mobs hit you. It’s how you can easily AFK at boss spawns like the Dredge Commissar.

On that note, I’m surprised this ridiculous troll thread is still up and running.

You shouldn’t be getting credit for that, are you sure you don’t have a trait that gives you Retaliation when you get hit by a critical or drop below a health threshold? Or playing a guardian with a trait that burns enemies that shatter your aegis? All of those count as attacks on the enemy.

And it’s not a troll thread, the OP has been convinced it’s not an exploit, he just doesn’t like it, which is an opinion he’s fully entitled to.

Yes, I was literally AFK without any traits that would do anything when I’m hit.

In my opinion, to which I’m fully entitled, this is a troll thread.

Versuvious.2568:

Wow lots of QQ regarding Rev’s strong hammer skills. Have you seen Guardians Hammer skills? No nerf or buff and not that good. Only AA is good in PVE and with ugly light fields. Slow animations on #3 and #4. Long CD on #3 and #4. Only #2 is a blast finisher wih meh range and bad uphill/downhill slope use. Very slow AA chain, bad and mixed up hammer traits. Very outdated hammer skills this time of HoT.

I still us em. I still love it even its like that I still find ways.
We are not complaining tho, just wanted to show you that your Rev Hammer skills are still good even with the nerf.

SMH
/thread

Friendly reminder that you cannot /thread your own posts, friend. :^)

But I’ll stay on topic:
Rev Hammer is still pretty meh outside of WvW due to the points that have been mentioned countless times in this thread.

It’s the game’s engine, there isn’t that much you can do, really.
Even if you jacked up your CPU and GPU you’d still get pretty meh FPS compared to other games that look the same or better.

I think they should redesign the playerbase so it doesn’t feel like it has to be able to complete everything in the game. Especially a JP that nets you a green item and a blue. If you don’t find it fun or it’s too hard for you, don’t bother.

The only thing that annoys me is that the trashmobs from the lower level attack you when you jump on the pillars below the ship and thus put you in combat. So you need to kill them and half the time they reset halfway through.

Other than that, Not So Secret does nothing that is inherently ‘unfair’. It’s just a matter of landing your jumps correctly. So I wouldn’t redesign anything except those mobs.

The Royal Terrace gets decorations for major festivals.
The Airship is ugly.

The Airship does have an Activity NPC though, for whatever reason, and the Terrace does not.

I’d recommend the Terrace simply for looks. Other than the NPC, they are both identical in terms of service.

Cinnamon Goddess.3869:

The average person does not want to constantly switch between attunements because it is annoying. Also is you are specing for a certain damage and you switch damage type then your DPS goes way down. There should at least be an option to remove switching for more of a specific damage type.

The staff is NOT great at PvE its damage is extremely disappointing especially considering how squishy the class is. If I die really easily then I should either heal extremely well or I should do MASSIVE damage, neither one of those is true. This is just a broken class and has been for years. The Revenant just illustrates this very well.

P.S. This class needs to be brought up, it is unacceptable to bring the Revenant class down.

If you find that class mechanic ‘annoying’, then don’t play the class.
In PvE staff Elementalist does criminally absurd amounts of damage (and is/was Top DPS for a long time), especially considering the ‘rotation’ is the easiest thing in the world. You even have to camp Fire for maximum DPS, so I don’t know what you’re complaining about.

In PvP, if you could just easily camp one Attunement then people would complain and it would be changed. That’s like complaining that classes need to use their utility skills or swap weapons.

As for survivability and damage in PvP, I suppose that’s true.

reikken.4961:

not scepter

.

Heh.

I suggest staff as it’s pretty much the weapon to go for in PvE. Awesome damage (unless you solo and can’t keep your target in your AoEs), great party support.

Scepter is pretty meh. You can also try Dagger/Something with a Fresh Air build, though that’s a lot harder due to melee.

Also keep in mind that you can change the stats on your Ascended gear using the Mystic Forge. You lose the runes, but that’s still cheaper than crafting a new set should you ever want another stat combo.

You actually get event credit if the event mobs hit you. It’s how you can easily AFK at boss spawns like the Dredge Commissar.

On that note, I’m surprised this ridiculous troll thread is still up and running.

PyrateSilly.4710:

Story mode is attached to the character, not the account. It should stay that way since it is a way to get XP to level up your character. The same as WP’s and crafting. All tied to the character and not the account. Take all that away and you are left with very few ways to get as much XP to level a character and every one after the first will take wwwwaaaayyyyy longer to level.

Because you can only run story mode once and it’s the absolute best way to gain xp if you actually run it.

On topic, I’d like to see that. There’s no reason for it to be this way (except for Arah maybe because of the tie into the PS but even so, meh).

Then again, nobody is doing dungeons anymore anyway. And ANet probably doesn’t care. :^)

PvP has it’s own gear anyway. WvW depends on the role you want to play (roamer, solo, group, zerg, support, whatnot).

For PvE:
The problem here is that Elementalist is really squishy (lowest HP pool and light armor for lowest innate damage mitigation) in terms of stats. And opting for maximum damage is usually the best strategy. Adding toughness won’t do much, since dying in 5 instead of 4 hits doesn’t really cut it. Vitality can give you some leeway but you don’t want to rely on it too much.

If you’re solo, you want to do as much damage as you can, because defense utilities are on long CDs and if the stuff isn’t dead by then, you may run into trouble.
If you’re in a group, you want to do as much damage as you can, because your group will add utility and your job is to burn down the enemies.

Elementalist is one of the classes where I feel going for a tankier spec is not only suboptimal but actually detrimental, because stats give you relatively little survivability in GW2. It’s about active mitigation, and you can do that in full glass too.

I’d suggest going for Marauders (Power, Prec, Ferocity, Vitality) armor and Berserker’s Weapons/Trinkets (maybe add the Marauder’s Amulet from the HoT story achievement reward).
As it was said, you gain a ton of Health compared to what little damage you lose and that’s really what people want Elementalists for: Damage. Or healing but even then you wouldn’t want Celestial.

aldd.7016:

Revenant is now a joke. DPS worst class. Must auto attack other classy better better buffs. Shiro is completely weak, because Mesmer gives 100% Quickness
Mesmer gives the whole party Quickness 100% of the time, without reve. Even the guardian of the hammer is better dps in half. COMPLETE FAILURE, I’m sad because I have full Revenant and I have to stop him playing because I no longer want to take on the raids. Reve died on the raids.

In PvE, Herald is useful as a boon bot, and that’s pretty much it. The only thing it has really going for it is the Facet of Nature, because that actually goes over the Boon Duration Cap (at least the last time I checked some time ago). But other than that it’s really meh. Might to PS war, Fury to Ele with a blast now and then. Easy Protection if you REALLY need it but then apparently Hammer Guard can do that with more damage (?) too.

But then I don’t know what base Revenant is supposed to do or bring to the table.

Looks like it’s time for my regular reminder that this game needs split balancing!

Malediktus.9250:

Seabreeze.8437:

Malediktus.9250:

This isnt communism online.

Then there are other ways to stroke your ego if it’s that important to you. You can run around with a special title for one, and they even show your PvP rank level next to your name. Appearance customization shouldn’t really be confined to that, in my opinion.

lol, communism? Okay, way to reach with that one, dude.

You mean those titles which noone even looks at? GW2 does not have a single prestigious title. I am never wearing any of the GW2 titles. Still using my GW1 titles because the GW2 titles are all too easy (eg Eternal) to get or sound stupid (eg the achievement point titles)
Anet needs to make a proper title track for GW2 like they did with GW1 before we even can consider GW2 titles as prestigious.

Well we can’t all have a million accounts and literally live in the game and thrive on pretending to be a special snowflake.

Ultimately everything that isn’t confined to limited time availability is somehow easy to get if you put enough time into it.

Gee, it’s almost like split balancing for the different modes would be a good idea.

xiiliea.9356:

Nowadays, at the start of each week, I just don’t feel like doing anything at all, in case I miss a raid from my guild or LFG. Eventually, it’s making the game boring.

I feel that this can be solved by just making raids fully puggable by a “decent” LFG group, instead of an “elite-only” group.

And then what? You join random LFGs and come here complaining that people don’t know how to play? If you lower the skill ceiling more people will try to attempt it, more LFGs with people trying to pug it and inevitably more groups that won’t make it because they’re not good enough and we’re back to square one because you need to wait for a group you know is good.
The problem is you. You find it boring to wait for a good group yet are unwilling to commit to a schedule, like most raid groups do.

Play something else while you wait or don’t raid.

One can only assume OP realized they were farmable through map rewards mid-sentence yet still somehow posted this thread.

I like both the animation and the sound effect. I even like the effect being audible over other sounds.

But yes, more visual and audio options are one of the more important things this game needs (so I can finally kill other players’ Dreamers…).

As the other said, it’s instanced group content. It’s certainly doable solo, moreso on classes like the Ranger probably, but if it was your very first attempt then it’s no surprise.

So I don’t quite get the point of this thread. You tried to solo group content and it was too hard. Surprise. This is neither a valid complaint nor does it need adressing.

Try to find a group to do it with.

DeoDose.4237:

sword #2 guarantees 3 projectiles whitch is a big dps gain, even with the sword #1 nerf

Sword 2 is at best a minor DPS gain because of the cast time and aftercast, and only if there’s literally nothing else around, which is hardly ever the case (on top of the skill targeting foliage and hidden structures outside of the map), which means a majority of the time you actually lose damage compared to Sword auto but also have to pay Energy to use it.

It’s an awful skill and the decision to ‘buff’ its damage was questionable at best. They nerfed Sword damage altogether (despite saying they want to move the damage from Sword 1 to 2 and 3). Sword 1 got a nerf of 10-20% depending on the skill in the chain, Sword 3 got a damage nerf of 23% (5/7 of the original hits with every hit now doing 10% more damage to ‘compensate’) and Sword 2 is now slightly better damage than Sword 1 if all projectiles hit.

Yeah, nah.

Kalarchis.8635:

1) This entire thread I’ve been noting that PvE = open-world for my purposes and when I say PvE I don’t mean instanced content. How you think I said hammer is strong in instanced content I have no idea.

2) It’s true that most of the balance happens around PvP, but saying that open-world doesn’t need to be balanced is nonsense. It does need it, and it gets it all the time. It shouldn’t be the focus of balance, but neither should it (or will it) be ignored or allowed to become unbalanced. The fact that all weapons are viable there has zero bearing on that.

1) Just because your definition drastically differs from pretty much everybody else’s (because open world PvE is laughably easy and thus when people refer to PvE balancing they obviously mean instanced content; also ignoring the fact that they are still PvE simply because they fit the vs. environment aspect as opposed to vs. player like PvP and WvW) doesn’t make your point any more valid.

2) Open World PvE needs ‘balancing’ in the sense that skills aren’t gamebreaking, like the Symbolic Avenger trait bug that made any content trivial by Guardian stacking. Other than that, ‘balancing’ isn’t really required in PvE other than your skills doing something when you use them and not crashing your game. And here’s why:
If your skills/build is ‘too strong’ in open world PvE, you hurt nobody. You kill trashmobs fast (oh wow, gratz) and maybe complete things a bit faster. It’s not even useful in terms of farming because of DR kicking in.

If you feel a skill or weapon is too strong in open world PvE, you can simply not use it. Out of curiosity I looked at your post history and apparently you run a full Celestial build on your Herald. How running such a build and still feeling you kill stuff too quickly is beyond me, but more power to you. You stated you rather ‘use all your cool skills than use a strong kill and be done with it 5s faster’. Well, then simply don’t use the strong skill.
You said Rev Hammer is an amazing weapon because of everything it does; I listed all the skills and why they are – in my opinion but so are your statements simply your opinion – suboptimal. If you feel they are useful then that’s because you drag out the fights artificially by using gear that isn’t focused on damage which makes the skills useful in the first place. But all of that is void once you spec for damage and then those skills become redundant or of little use in instanced PvE. Moreso in the open world.
It also disregards that pretty much all weapon skills in the game are designed with a purpose. They are usually either for straight damage, soft/hard control, evasion/kiting/blocking. I’d argue you don’t have to nor is it intended to use all your skills in every encounter. You use something when the situation requires it. For trashmobs Hammer may be fine because CoR still does decent AoE damage and trashmobs melt anyway. That doesn’t even remotely make it sufficient or even useful against elite mobs or bosses.

Which brings me to the point that we are discussing the viability of the Revenant Hammer in instanced PvE/PvP/WvW. And in that regard, your argument that ’it’s really strong in open world PvE’ is not adding anything and misses the point completely, since, as you yourself even stated, everything is viable in PvE.

Balancing becomes an issue when something isn’t used because it’s too weak / offers too little benefit (which is the case of the Hammer in instanced PvE and PvP at the moment) OR when something is too good that using anything else is an effective loss compared to that. If your argument is that you want to play how you like it and have fights that last long, none of those points apply to you anyway.

Now, when something is too strong in instanced content it’s actually having an impact. It affects the meta, whether you agree with it or not, makes certain classes favourable over others and creates a desire and neglect of certain classes which does affect people trying to participate in the content. It also affects balance of content like Raids, because the difficulty has to be measured against something and when you can easily nullify that by stacking a certain class, then something is off too. That doesn’t mean that stacking certain classes doesn’t happen anyway, simply because all your important roles are already filled.

When something is too strong in PvP, then obviously it needs to be fixed because it affects the matches, team building and offers a direct advantage over other things.
When something is too strong in WvW, the same applies. And for the Hammer, this is actually the reason it was nerfed.

Which brings me to the last point, the only one I can actually agree with you on. That we need split balancing in this game. I’ve been saying this for years and in my opinion it’s one of the worst mistakes this game is doing because of things like the Hammer now. It was too strong in one game mode, and I agree, it certainly was in WvW, and got nerfed to accomodate that mode. But since in the other modes it wasn’t as strong but just so ‘viable’, the nerf made it a lot less useful / useless.

So, to go back on topic: instanced PvE is ultimately focused on damage. Raids specifically because they actually run on time limits. So if you nerf the damage potential of a weapon, that takes away reason to take it. And as I’ve stated, the utility of the hammer is okay-ish but if you actually rely on it in combat you sacrifice 10 seconds of damage for limited utility, which means another class will probably do that using a utility skill.

As it stands, Hammer is the only option when you absolutely need a ranged weapon. And that is only because it’s literally our only ranged option. That doesn’t make it a good weapon. And for it to have any real use now they’d need to shorten some cast times or up the damage of skills. On that note, I’m pretty sure Hammer 1 does more DPS than Hammer 2 now. And Sword was nerfed for that reason. But hey.

Bottomline is, Hammer was nerfed solely because of WvW and that left it undesirable in the other game modes and that is something that warrants addressing.

Daddicus.6128:

Please read before you embarrass yourself.

It’s not the armor that’s the problem. It’s the fact that if the strategy DOES work, people will employ it together, and kill bosses faster than they otherwise should (because when they WP out, the boss drops hit points, supposedly).
[…]
The problem is the people who believe the opposite, and plan on waypointing out if they die. That’s what I’m calling an exploit.

At this point, you have to be intentionally trolling. What you are saying doesn’t even make any sense. Then again, you set your premise in stone that such an exploit exists and what should be done about it.

Event scaling works at something like 2000-3000 units range (you can observe this easily with event chains like the Eye of Zhaitan escort preevent and the amount and strength of mobs that spawn because it has awful scaling, it scales up even if the players do nothing at range).
So the people are in the event zone, scale it up, use their superhaxy exploit powers of playing a glass cannon, die, port (spending quite some money if they do it over and over) and don’t do any damage while they are running back. And that’s if we assume events/mobs scale back that quickly. And that other players are there to hold the aggro so the mob doesn’t reset.

And somehow that’s an exploit.

10/10 I’m actually mad about how asinine this is and still responded.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Oooh, we have info on that! Just posted here.

Thanks for the info.

Kalarchis.8635:

To you. I would rather have an interesting fight where I use all my cool skills than one where I spam CoR and it’s over five seconds faster. Not everyone enjoys or plays the zerker style (esp. not now that support gives event/tagging credit!)

Well, yes. And for many other people, too, I wager. Fun is surely subjective but the reason why damage is the be-all-end-it-all in PvE is that most fights (open world even moreso) don’t require anything else.
Can you use all your (cool) skills? Yes, sure. But why would you do that when the result is the same but takes longer? And after killing the same type of mob for the umptienth time I think many people rather be done with it quickly.

Point here is, most PvE content does not require you to use anything but superior damage. You can see that as a flaw, but that’s how it is at the moment. Which is why the nerf to damage output is actually detrimental. Which brings us back to the original point and away from ‘yes but in open world PvE that’s fine’, because in open world PvE everything works.

Kalarchis.8635:

….Also think people should include a “I only care about raw DPS and nothing else about the weapon matters to me.” disclaimer.

But that’s what mostly counts in PvE. And that’s why nerfs to damage in PvE are always annoying. And that’s why we neeed S-P-L-I-T B-A-L-A-N-C-I-N-G of game modes already.

It’s true, hammer does have utilities. But in PvE that’s not all too important, less so the more other classes are there that can do those things better.
Hammer auto is okay in terms of damage for how slow it is. Hammer 3 is a free evade for meh damage with a rather long animation, which is good for evading but bad for damage. Hammer 4 is pretty decent, yes, but attributing the life steal from the combo as something amazing for actual healing is laughable at best. It’s useful for the block, again at the cost of a lot of damage (because you play ranged instead of melee; or you switch back to melee right away but then how good does that make the hammer except for that one skill?). Hammer 5 is a knockdown with a huge cast time, albeit AoE, and also okay for trash mobs or to help with boss Defiance but overall nothing to write home about.
The blast finishers are useful for pre-stacking might and similar stuff, but afterwards you can swap the Hammer with something else.

Hammer was useful/used in PvE because with CoR and aligning your target you could hit it twice for pretty good ranged damage. Not only is that impossible now, the cooldown was also upped and on top of that the skill still suffers from the problem of hitting random things in the ground and whatnot (for example it’s pretty much impossible to hit the Molten Boss duo with it because the platform absorbs all the hits).
And again, PvE is all about the damage. In a group people won’t take the Revenant with his Hammer because of the amazing utility that brings or the awesome damage (it was good for ranged but that’s still worse than melee unless you’re playing staff ele). People took the Hammer so they could still somewhat pull their weight at range. We used it to clear the Orbs at Gorseval past P1. That was only possible because CoR did decent damage for a ranged skill.
The nerf to Hammer 2, which is obviously because of the Rev Hammer Trains in WvW, did nothing but remove Hammer as a viable choice from other game modes.

Engineer with Viper/Sinister gear. Great condition damage and uptime, tons of utility for solo play and group support.