Guild Wars 2

You can also easily melt the gravelings after the spider with a high damage staff elementalist. If you’re not specially worried about clearing speed, it’s a free champion bag for a really short and easy fight (easier than the skip I would say).

Derenek.8931:

spoj.9672:

What im seeing in this thread is Derenek wrongly referring to safespotting as stacking. Stacking can happen anywhere including in the open. Theres nothing exploity about it. In some situations it can cause a group to wipe.

Abusing AI by using specific spots is not stacking. Thats a safespot. But obviously stacking is a symptom because a safespot is only a small area and you cant spread a team out in a safespot.

Hopefully that clears up the misunderstanding.

ps. How is multiple people using AOE on the same location glitchy? I cannot comprehend how you can come to that conclusion. And this is completely unrelated to people stacking anyway seeing as most AOE’s are ranged ground targeted lol.

Probably because I’m in the programming camp that believes that good virtual world design is as realistic as possible. Not everyone agrees with that, I can dig it. So when I see people taking advantage of physical behaviors that are caused by imperfections in the virtual world (imperfections referring to areas in which realism isn’t really holding up well) I see it as glitchy

And we could agree with you on that if players would actually get a significant benefit from stacking on top each other (without safespoting, that’s a completely different topic).
Stacking not only doesn’t provide any benefit in dungeons (unlike open world, where you can exploit the skill target cap) but it’s actually a detrimental approach. It’s just the natural outcome of several players trying to melee a boss which is easy enough to not worry about positioning.

When players surround an enemy instead of stacking on top of each other, they effectively negate cleave damage and/or save active defenses while still in range of most AoE boon sources.
In this sense, there’s no need to introduce gimmicky mechanics to prevent stacking. A dangerous enough enemy would achieve it naturally.

Same goes for skipping.
The whole event chain leading to dungeon completion is on designers hands. So is the reward for any side event or optional bossfight.
If designers do not what some encounter to be skipped, it won’t be skipped.

Among all the mechanics and strategies that are usually pointed out as negative, only LoS is a truly problematic one. There’s not much a desginer can do if, for whatever reason, doesn’t want LoS to be a thing,
Rooting enemies in place or playing around extremely reduced leash ranges will often come with unintended drawbacks. Enclosing players in some perfectly clean battleground might feel extremely anticlimatic and would get old fast if abused.
Enemy group positioning is definitely something that could use some AI improvements.

Eirian Direstorm.9748:

Is that a bow, or a bat’leth?

Wish it were a bat’leth

I would play them a few times for fun, maybe a little longer if they had skins or achievements attached. It would be the same for any PvE content with crappy rewards.
I would probably uninstall the game too, since I can’t imagine open world content providing any sort of fun in the long run.

Thaddeus.4891:

Jesus why everybody make the same mistake everytime. Each line give you two stats, in total you get 1400 pts from trait line, not 700.

That’s what the whole second pharagraph was supposed to be about.
I don’t expect all those 700 points to be rolled into gear. I’m expecting either the base value of every secondary attribute to be set at 100 (so only 200 points remaining for gear) or a complete loss of those points.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

I hate it when I do AC with random players, only to find out that we are not doing enough collective power as a group to destroy the burrows in time. Either they have too little offense in their build, or their survivability is so poor, that they are eating dirt in mere seconds. I don’t even think it’s a case of them being bad players. They just happen to have a build that does not maximize damage enough for them to finish the dungeon.

I can’t imagine many reasons to fail AC burrow events without it being clearly players’ fault.
Precision is useless, Critical Damage is useless, some damage modifiers triggered by conditions are useless … it’s all about raw power (and might stacks), some damage modifiers and, above everything else, a GOOD WEAPON CHOICE.

A player running, lets say, a condition necromancer with no more than a basic 926 power score, can easily retrait before the event starts and get an over 50% damage boosts. It might be annoying (specially without a build saving tool), but it’s definitely doable and unrelated to gear choices.
The weapon choice is, however, the most relevant factor. Using a scepter to destroy burrows doesn’t make any sense; a dagger (probably used as an offhand weapon in the default build) would be a much more suitable weapon.

I admit that players running low power builds could be unprepared for a situation where group damage is clearly lacking.
New players that have not played the dungeon before could easily be caught off guard too.
There’s no excuse, however, for any of this to happen a second time.

If the group can just combine 7500 effective power (lvl80 score), which is an average of only 1500 per player (something that pretty much everyone can achieve with a trait / utility reallocation), and everybody uses a decent weapon, burrows shouldn’t be a problem at all.

As I see, we have 700 points in primary attributes and class mechanic.
Each primary attribute gets boosted to 1k (so +74 points), and the class mechanics gets what we could take as another 150 points. This leaves 254 points that will be reallocated in gear.

We don’t know what’s going to happen with secondary attributes.
I wouldn’t expect to see those 700 points rolled into gear, and definitely we won’t get a 74 point default attribute.
We might get a 100 default attribute (which would leave another 200 points for gear), or even all those points completely removed, with or without compensation through gear.

I’m truly impressed. Now all we need is content that uses half of this pontential :P

EcoRI.9273:

Wasn’t that the very same excuse white supremacist store owners used against black people when they refuse to service them?

Pretty much, but there’s a BIG difference: people cannot situationally chose their skin color, gender, religion (if they really have one), …
The “only meta zerker” case goes more in the line of not being allowed in some establishment while wearing a tracksuit.

It’s perfectly possible to have WoP in Zeal; you just need to provide some useful choices to the remaining tiers, like Virtuous Mallet, which is clearly a control related trait.
Giving up AH migtht look risky, but it’s not preposterous.

There are a few problems with this approach though.

Hammer isn’t that much a symbol weapon in PvP, so it barely has any sinergy with SA and minor traits.
For PvE, on the other hand, it’s not as much a control weapon and the 20% CD reduction loses most of it’s charm . The slow component could be useful (albeit the proposed rework makes it weaker. Not sure about the reasons behind that rework, it looks like a nerf to me), but definitely not necessary to make the weapon synergyze with SA and minors.
The original placement as a Virtues Master tier trait, in direct competition with Absolute Resolution, was rather unconvenient, but doesn’t like it belongs to Zeal either.
It might have slightly better synergy with WoP, specially the radius part, but none of these traits were in the original Zeal design.

This process of making Zeal more appealing to supportive builds doesn’t come with no cost, as it necessarily deprives other builds from meaningul choices. It’s quite disgusting, for example, to see the whole Master tier filled with weapon specific traits.

WoP and SA competing with each other has both positive and negative implications. The reallocation could increase diversity for supportive builds but, at the same time, prevents some more damage oriented ones from existing
For PvE, it limits the potential of some builds (which might be a good thing), but also leaves them with little reason to delve into Honor (as it is now). If not looked at, this kind of balancing could easily force some playstyles into filler specializations with no meaningful options.

IMHO, the best placement for WoP is probably Master Honor tier.
By shaving the increased duration by 1 second, it becomes far less a boost for damage PvE builds, while making it not mutually exclusive with Superior Aria makes it much more a useful choice and increases diversity for both offensive and defensive PvP and WvW builds.

Silberfisch.3046:

xDudisx.5914:

I think the best solution would be reworking reflect skills, but making bosses projectiles unblockable is a good workaround.

No, it is not, because it negates not just the reflect option but eliminates a lot of other defensive skills as well.
I’ve lost count of the times I threw an Aegis out of reflex just to remind myself afterwards “oh right, unblockable”. And Aegis is by far not the only block skill in the game, just the most obvious.

I can accept the “rework reflects” solution, although “design encounters differently” seems even more useful to me. But it’s even more work than “rework reflects”.
“Make unblockable” is just hastily applied “something” but certainly no “good workaround” or even a feasible solution.

This.

I’m not completely against some projectiles ignoring projectile specific defense. I find it cheap, unconsistent, I think designers should have think the encounter twice, maybe not release massive and long lasting anti-projectile fields to begin with … but I still can understand and accept it.

What I cannot accept is their workaround making my regular blocks useless.
Blinds? We can’t allow these to work on bosses. Reflections then? It would trivialize this encounter. Blocks maybe? Sorry, our refelction workaround needs to disable them too.
Sigh, it ALMOST make me feel like a Necromancer.

Kanashi.5104:

Sorry I half knowing threw a random number in there. I think 40s would be fine and actually may be too high. That is only 1 symbol per minute when you can produce more than that with a Hammer.

I think the fall damage trait is fine where it is at currently. I believe making RS more of a viable option is easier for the designers. We don’t want to necessarily nix traits because that will most likely never get through. It is technically better now that it also gives you Aegis. This is what I added to it, maybe it’s not enough but it’s not that terrible:

Retaliatory Subconscious
Retaliation (3 3/4s)
Aegis (3 3/4s)?
add Retalation Lasts longer

What other trait could replace the Symbol trait if it was merged instead? That line is about support and all of those traits in adept are supportive. Making it so that they provide any extra benefit to just “you” may be to selfish and the wrong direction to go.

Yes, 45-60 seconds is too much. Looking at other classes anti-CC skills 30-45, probably closer to 30, makes much more sense.
The main reason for replacing Retaliatory Subconscious is that every class has one, and only one, “when disabled” triggered trait (RS being ours), and seems far better to free a spot in honor than in virtues, since offers far less choices.

As a replacement, well, that’s complicated.
Two out of three minors improve your endurance regeneration while the third one provides a tiny AoE heal which is far more reliable for self sustain than as a healing tool.
Those minors could easily appeal to someone looking for survivability rather than support. Quite a few players are currently investing in honor just for Two Handed Mastery and Force of Will, force example.
If you want to stick to some strong concept for each line, however, there are far less possibilities. Strength in Numbers could work I guess; it’s clearly supportive and generic enough to fit in any build.

Kanashi.5104:

This makes it so that you produce a Symbol of Protection when you take falling damage OR disabled. This way it has more uses and synergies with the zeal line a bit more.

A Symbol of Protection when disabled with 10 second ICD is insane. That’s easily 45-60 second ICD worth (EDIT: Closer to 30-45 after checking other classes’ anti-CC traits).

In any case, whatever “when disabled” effect should replace Retaliatory Subconscious, which is just terrible.

The “fall damage reduction” Symbol of Protection could be merged with it.
In fact, it doesn’t matter where it goes as long as it doesn’t occupy that adept honor trait spot. A mace-only and a revive trait already make the options limited enough.

Salamander.2504:

I understand that, but I do feel that Writ of Persistence shouldn’t compete with 20% increase damage since you’d need that trait anyways just to compensate for the lack of power from Zeal (I’m paraphrasing someone else’s words in another topic here)

There’s no lack of power to compensate. The attribute points which used to be in the traitlines will be compensated, some through a base attribute increase (from 926 to 1000) and the rest through gear attribute increase.
Depending what they do with secondary attributes, the final value might result on a small gain or a small loss as long as the gear was in line with the chosen traitline.

Kanashi.5104:

Very good points and I agree with them. I’ll see if anyone else can counter argue WoP going into Zeal. We have had one above so far. These discussiosn are great.

A support Guardian is going to spec in Honor, so the question is, what makes for a more disputed contest, Writ of Persistence against Superior Aria or Zeal (with WoP as a Grandmaster) against Valor/Virtues?
Both options are viable; it’s all about how the remaining traits are aligned to reinforce a playstyle. Having, for example, Virtuous Mallet in Zeal can make a world of difference.

Hunter.4783:

Symbolic avenger is there to make up for the Power and crit% loss from the current meta.
In addition, they want to bring mace and hammer to the same level as sword and GS while making zeal more enticing

Fiery wraith is getting a nerf because now burning is getting to stack in intensity rather than duration. Which means it will not be up all the time. When you account for this, as well as the loss of 200 power, you will that unless symbolic avenger is kept at 20%, guardians will be seeing a DPS LOSS. Zealous blade is still a filler trait but nothing as exciting

And last but not least, unless you invest in honor, Symbolic avenger will be active for 4sec every 16 sec for the GS, which cuts its effective power to 5%. Keep that in mind before you warrant needless nerfs.

What Power and Crit% loss are you talking about?
We won’t lose the stats we used to get from traitlines. Some of them are going to be rolled into base stats, so we will get a bit of Vitality and Thoughness we hadn’t before, and the rest on the gear.
We’re likely going to end up with even higher overall Power, Precision and Ferocity than before or, at least, we’re going to receive the smallest hit across all classes.

VIRTUES

HONOR

VALOR

RADIANCE

ZEAL

Welcome to the world of unblockable attacks.
It seems the only way developers currently have to prevent encounters from being trivialized by reflects and other anti projectile mechanics. And yes, it’s annoying as hell.

binidj.5734:

Bearing in mind that (a) fall damage reduction is incredibly useful in most of WvW, and (b) it’s no longer possible to dip into a traitline to snag a minor; wouldn’t it be better to make fall damage mitigation a signet (or gadget for engineers)? I wouldn’t mind sacrificing a utility slot in WvW (or while doing a JP or some other specific instance) so I can move with fewer restrictions.

An utility slot still sounds like a huge investment to me. Some nourishment granting fall damage reduction for 30m / 1h could get the work done without having to touch class building options.

Merging fall damage traits with other niche ones, like downed state and/or even resurrection ones would clean some room and sounds great too.

deSade.9437:

It’s exactly what they want to achieve with this game. Just sayin’…

I know, I know. As I said earlier, it’s hard to imagine Phalanx in a PvP build (with the current system at least, there might be some options with the new one) so it probably was released with PvE in mind and exactly for this purpose.
Knowing it doesn’t make it less depresing though.

Jerus.4350:

Correct me if I’m wrong but we’re losing 20% boon duration with the change of stats and all that. At least that will make it tougher to maintain 25 stacks?

Yes, it will make it tougher, but so will do for any other might stacking build (even more, as they lack the 10% minor trait).
EDIT: Just realized that most other builds don’t have points (or so many points, at least) in the Boon Duration line. Yes, it will be tougher; it might even require some backup, which is fine.

In any case, it’s not the optimal performance, which might be tough, what bothers me.
As I said, my rant is more about the low entry – high reward. I’m fairly sure that the guys pushing the limits and going for record runs could handle pretty much anything and will chose just the mathematically beswt option.
If a bad player can’t reach the performance of a good one and averages 19 might stacks instead of lets say 25, that’s still a 76% of the optimal result without even trying, without having to care about combo fields and on a bigger radius than a blast finisher (so it allows other team members to freely disengage and go medium range for a while without so many issues).
The viability of this kind of specs feels like ANet making things even easier for bad players and/or PUGs, allowing builds to reduce what could have been a performance gap achieved by skill and/or teamwork.
This kind of “shortcuts” might easily cut the desire of players to improve, to get mechanically better, and by doing so prevent us from seeing content expecting more from the playerbase. That makes me sad :P

insanemaniac.2456:

well… on lightning hammer… the thing is, when you have a scepter ele around, you end up walking out of a boss fight with a minute of fury if hes got someone elses fire field. and you dont really need any other might stacking during the fight. you prestack might to start at 25 stacks + 1 min of fury, and the ele can maintain it by autoattacking.

i dunno. maybe the damage isnt op. but trivializing the 2 major dps boons is kinda silly. at least PS war cant maintain the 25 might with just autos and has to push 100blades every once in a while…

i have a feeling engis may start to have the same problem if mortar 1 gets that traited blast finisher and it deals dps like bomb 1. an engi can provide his own fire field and stack vuln too. maybe thats too much for 1 toon autoing.

Even if it’s achieved by spamming autos, there’s at least some minor group strategy to make LH might stacking work. It’s probably unconvenient to have something like this in the game, but I will never see PS Warrior as an improvement.

Phalanx works without even trying. Just grab a greatsword, play as you would normally do and you will cover most if not all the group might requirements.
It might demand more finesse for optimal damage, but still does fine with a crappy performance and is extremely PUG friendly.

It’s might be controversial topic, but I honestly can’t see these kind of low entry level – high reward builds as something positive for the game.
Since I can hardly think on a PvP build working around Phalanx, I’m also fairly sure on ANet disagreeing with me :P

Amins.3710:

We already have 10% and no one EVER uses it… including you, as you seem to not remember we even have this trait.

No one stands in symbols – they’re too short of a duration and with ZERO soft CC built into a weapon, it’s a completely useless trait outside of PVE…. and honestly, who really cares about pve. /grin

We have a 10% Symbol Damage increase which will remain as a minor trait. That’s completely different from the damage increase against foes inside symbols.

While balance should remain focused on sPvP, it’s far from a good idea to completely ignore how changes would work for WvW and PvE, and not only from a business standpoint (because that’s where the majority of the playerbase is).
The sPvP community is too small, and that already causes quite noticeable failures on the matchmaking system.
Those PvE and WvW players that often play sPvP as a side activity are probably invaluable to keep the whole system alive. Driving them away from the game would help no one.

The “increased damage to foes inside symbols” is the perfect example of a trait that can be tweaked between different game modes without making it confusing for players.
A 20% might be OK for PvP while a 10% seems much more reasonable for PvE.
I hope ANet takes this kind of number tweaking approach for this and several other cases. It might not be perfect but, at least, it would mean they care about how balance affects other parts of the game.

Balance is done around sPvP.
It has always been this way and it’s probably a good thing because PvE can receive further balance through content.
WvW players usually get the hardest hits. Even if most changes are PvP related, the gameplay is just too different

The problem is not about the focus itself as much as it is about how little they care / oblivious they are about the impact on different game modes.

Arken.3725:

Radiant retaliation: The dmg from retal overall is incredibly small, even with a ton of power. I see this as another weak alternative to the other two.

Calling it weak alternative is too generous.
The trait (assuming ANet fixes it because it doesn’t even work right now) is totally useless for anything but a Condition Damage build, which will work around burning for Guardians.
Making it compete with the burning damage increase + burn on block trait removes any choice at all.

Ryn.6459:

Ele stll will be on the meta, but I dont think we will stack them anymore.

For what purpose do you think ele will remain as a solid choice?

Seriously, get rid of them.
They just limit build diversity without bringing anything serious to the table

There’s hardly any reason to pick them in sPvP, and for WvW they feel trollish more than anything.
I can admit that could be fun to see them working from time to time, but in this case it could be better to make the effect baseline like many other things.

The 50% damage reduction can’t be understood as anything but a little help for explorers (which might come handy if the player is not specially good with jumping puzzles and such) or an escape mechanism for WvW roamers (which would need to kitten their builds for that edge).
All of this could easily be covered by a food/consumable.

I understand they balance around sPvP and, as a mixed player, I like it that way.
It would be great though if they could pass they proposed changes to some PvE balance/design team (which probably doesn’t even exist) and get a bit of internal feedback.
I find incredible how little they seem to care / how oblivious they are about how things will work on different game modes.

As a Guardian and Elementalist player, I use to pick the ele when I felt damage and offensive supporting is what I need.
With the proposed changes, I don’t know if elementalist is going to be a worthy pick for anything. Any build outside staff (the ones that provide better utility and are more interesting gameplay wise) seem overnerfed, and it looks like offensive support will be easily handled by warriors (among many other things; they look kinda crazy right now).

They probably have gone too far with Deadly Arts.
Minors are awesome and even what currently could be seen as no brainer choices, like executioner and mug, have serious contestants on Improvisation and Needle Trap (we will have tosee how well sinergyzes with withdraw, it might be totally insane).

On top of that, without stats tied to traitlines and both Executioner and Critical Haste gone, Critical Strikes looks underwhelming and completelly unnecessary.

It kinda looks like Deadly Arts + Trickery would be enough to outperform any current Thief build, and they will get full access to Acrobatics or Shadow Arts (which never were bad, just left the character with too litle damage or utility) on top of it.

Two words: Cleansing Ire

The trait has been the main conditional removal on warrior builds for a long time and no other adrenal skill activates it no matter if you hit an enemy or not.
The current shoutbow has other sources of cleansing and maybe could live without it, but the build itself is hybrid, biased towards condition even, so the bow is a no brainer.

AGGabriel.9230:

Vargamonth.2047:

AGGabriel.9230:

That 8/9 sec daze, plz tell me that isn’t an op advantage in a 1v1 thief vs guardian

You will get now an extra stunbreaker from reworked Indomitable Courage, so that is kinda countered unless the fight goes for too long.
And it’s not like we are not destroying thieves at this moment, so maybe they desrve some edge.

will you use a (grandmaster) stunbreaker with a godforsaken (aproxi) 70 sec cooldown and a thief will have a (aproxi) 20 sec steal do the math plz and tell me the result ( fast down state + stealth finish ) = guardian dead i don’t call that fair balance and result

There’s no need for math.
You might have to deal with an extra daze source per steal (they already said they are probably going to tone down some stolen skills btw) and you have 2 extra stunbreakers.
If the fight is long enough for the thief to steal a third time or you have your virtues/elite on CD, he’ll get some (probably deserved) edge against you. Otherwise, there are no changes.
And that’s assuming you predict (or randomly counter) none of their steals and skull cracks.
Honestly, I don’t see that double skull crack SO dangerous.

AGGabriel.9230:

That 8/9 sec daze, plz tell me that isn’t an op advantage in a 1v1 thief vs guardian

You will get now an extra stunbreaker from reworked Indomitable Courage, so that is kinda countered unless the fight goes for too long.
And it’s not like we are not destroying thieves at this moment, so maybe they desrve some edge.

Ragnarox.9601:

Vargamonth.2047:

I guess you’re talking about WvW zerg fights. A LOT of Guardians have been running with 12k HP anywhere else like forever.

Nope I have 23k hp in wvw and 20k hp in pve (pvp) with almost (80%) full zerker.

For PvP (sPvP or WvW Roaming, I completely avoid massive PvP) my only vitality boosts have usually been the one provided by sPvP Berserker Amulet or WvW Guard Mastery and one single point in Honor to cherrypick Vigorous Precision.
For PvE I usually don’t have any HP boost. I might get something if I use a hammer build or cherrypick vigor, and always as an unintended side effect (I would prefer those attribute points somewhere else). Running around 12k HP without any problem.

Honestly, WvW zerging is the only gametype where I can find useful to invest in Vitality (and still would never pick that 3k HP trait).

I guess you’re talking about WvW zerg fights. A LOT of Guardians have been running with 12k HP anywhere else like forever.

Iris Ng.9845:

More deadly spike as in Bolt to the Heart and more frequent spike as in Fresh Air?

The current version uses both Bolt to the Heart and Fresh Air though. In your words, the damage of Fresh Air is traded for the sustain of Water and/or Arcana trait line? If so, I’m a bit worried…

It would be that way only if the player choses to invest on the defensive options provided by Water and Arcana. It’s still possible to pick completely different traits, like not going into water at all and looking for some burst increase somewhere else.

A Fresh Air build with defensive emphasis on Water and Arcana would be closer to a variation of the DD Ele.
On the other hand, Arcane Lightning could be moved to Arcana and merged with Arcane Mastery, and we could have a build with Tempest Defense, Bolt to the Heart and Arcane Lightning which can’t spike so often but is extremely powerful finishing off targets.

Builds are going to change and some balance changes should be expected (The current Fresh Air build with DD ele sustain sounds kinda crazy at first sight tbh).
We need to wait and see how it works. It’s not like they can’t move the traits around and make both Fresh Air and BttH compatible if it doesn’t play like expected (the system looks, in fact, way easier to balance).

Iris Ng.9845:

Edit: I just realize the meaning of the context. So I agree with spoj.

Because they don’t want us to have both Fresh Air and Bolt to the Heart at the same time? And because it’s as “impactful” as it was designed to be?

You should probably look at it from a sPvP standpoint, which is the main balance driving force.
Having to go all deep into Air makes the usual S/F Fresh Air eles quite glassy. With the new system, they’ll be able to max a couple of defensive traitlines (like DD eles do), so
having to choose between more deadly or more frequent (baseline attunement recharge is reduced, so Fresh Air becomes less build defining) spikes could be necessary balance wise.

Without traitline stats, DD eles will lose 3k HP and 300 healing power (with most healing sources having quite high coefficients). They will recover some of this from amulet boost, but they should still be easier to burst down.
They will also lose a 30% boon duration from arcana, which is huge for them and there’s no alternate way to get.

We might think that being able to go fully into Earth on top of Water and Arcana would cover these new weaknesess, or that they could become much more deadly by going into Air.
Truth is other classes will also get their share of damage / defense boost from the third traitline, so this could be completely neutralized.

On top of this, there might be some other extremely important changes on trait allocations. If Elemental Attunement and Evasive Arcana suddenly become mutually exclusive, we would be looking at this with totally different eyes.

The meta will likely change and, even if it’s completely possible (expected even) to have some broken specs at the very beginning, the system itself is way easier to balance.

Iris Ng.9845:

…
Fresh Air is way too powerful to be anywhere else but Grand Master tier
…

Not really. If there’s no way to have nothing but full investment in the selected traitlines, there’s no need to allocate the most powerful effects at top tiers.
They can easily rearrange traits between tiers and prevent certain combinations from being possible without worrying on how powerful each isolated effect is.

Bubi.7942:

Relevant video:

http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/bwhrt5/the-final-bosman-report--undisputed-scrub-likes-bloodborne

I hope someone bothers to actually watch it

You can’t really compare GW2 with that kind of games.

Those are mostly single player games.

Most GW2 bosses (with the exception of some AC bosses which could be lacking some health) won’t die fast on a solo enviroment, so any survival advantage obtained from a short fight is not there anymore.
On top of this, there’s a way shorter access to utility, a 100% aggro bearing and a complete inability to recover from downed state (unless ranger).

There are still mechanicaly terrible fights (like Sure Shot Seamus, for example), but for the most part the difficulty increase is obvious and the advantage of raw damage isreduced to merely saving some time.
Unless there’s some true oneshot move involved, it becomes quite clear that a defensive build would provide a much easier time, so the player beating the fight on berserkers achives it by skill.

It’s when you throw 5 players in the fight, with all their combined damage, utility, control (which makes necessary to implement systems like defiant), … plus the ability to swap aggro, res each other and even take casualties, when things get out of hand.
For these cases, I totally advocate for some spiders coming down from the roof.

I would rather see some new content working up to the potential of the game before bringing in emblematic parts of GW1 like FoW and UW and turning them into a bad joke.

It’s mostly about game mechanics for me.
The class just offered a lot of damage negation through blinds, blocks, dodges and such, the kind of active defenses which I find mandatory to enjoy an action based combat.
On top of that, I’ve always played support/healer roles on classic MMORPGs, so packing a good amount of defense oriented support if needed is completely fine for me.

Cuddy.6247:

But AC isn’t designed for high levels. Buy some level 35 masterwork, or even rare, gear and say that AC bosses don’t last a little while. When we all run low level dungeons in level 80 exotics, the results are disingenuous to the difficulty scale they were making the dungeon. There’s no balance that can be found to make it a reasonable effort for a team of players level 35-45, while still requiring effort from level 80s.

While I can agree with this statement, it just brings us into some other broken aspects of the game:

• There’s an obvious lack of content for lvl80 characters
• Reward balance is pure crap

CodeHavoc.7926:

Vargamonth.2047:

Cleansing or causing conditions? If it’s the second, forget about it for now (It may change or not with the expansion).

Cleansing condis. And im not sure when this Xpack is coming, it hasnt been announced yet and im not waiting on it right now.

The best choices for condition cleansing are probably purging flames (utility) and Absolute Resolution (Virtues Master trait), which can be recharged if you pick Renewed Focus as your elite.
You can also/instead go for shout condi cleansing, picking Pure of Voice (Honor Grand Master trait) and Trooper Runes, but it limits your build A LOT.

The tankiness part is trickier.
Guardian has some quite decent active defenses which might be more than enough
depending on the content you expect to run and your ability to use them.

Sword and Greatsword both have AoE blinds. 3 points in Radiance allow you to AoE blind around you when activating Virtue of Justice and recharge it on enemy kill. This might be enough to mitigate the majority of the damage you could receive while dealing with regular mobs while exploring (for example) without investing in defensive stats or traits.

For more zerg-ish content, Altruistic Healing (Valor Grand Master) can provide you a good amount of healing and barely depends on Healing Power.
You get healed whenever you apply a boon, so it works great with symbol based weapons and Staff Empower. It’s an incredibly selfish (it only heals you), so discouraged, choice but it works quite well for new players.

For AoE healing you’ve to start investing in Healing Power and your damage will suffer a lot. Honor traitline is usually the way to go for this (specially the dodge roll heal with 3 points).

Finally you’ve meditation healing (also 6 points in Valor), which is more a PvP thing but can also work in PvE as a healing source for solo enviroments.

And then you’ve dodges, aegis (virtue of courage and Retreat shout), reflects, … A good use of them can allow you to survive most enviroments with barely any investment in tankiness and healing, so keeping a high damage output.

It’s all up to you.

Jana.6831:

I quoted you twice when you said that defensive gear “brings something to the table in some content”.
I say it doesn’t except if you aren’t “skilled enough”/don’t know the content you’re about to face or if the party you’re running with isn’t that good.

Edit: And with that I mean PvE.

And that’s something I agree with.

On my second post I already said that defensive stats are never a must and act as a difficulty slider. That’s pretty much the same.

On the first one I was pointing that most of the community is much more open minded to the use of these stats for certain pieces of content, where they can provide a clear advantage. It’s not explicit but I meant in terms of ease.
Regular dungeons, specially low level ones, are not the case because they can be completed (not talking about beating records and things like that) using incredibly simple tactics with an extrmely low skill level requeriment. Using a tanky build can work against these tactics and it’s hardly justified difficulty wise.

Jana.6831:

I’m just saying that you don’t need clerics/knights in pve and that I can survive as a full zerker in wvw as well – I also can beat cele eles if they’re not very skilled.

Except the WvW part, which I won’t say anything since I haven’t played that format for a LONG time, I completely agree with everything else.
I play almost exclusively berserker too for PvE and sPvP and I’m not exactly sure why or what are we discussing about :P