Guild Wars 2

Yeah, you’ll have better luck if you think of it as a slightly-more-than-melee range skill rather than an actual gap closer.

The answer to your question is to combine both halves of the dichotomy:

Mesmers are OP against bad players. This is true about thieves too BTW.

Mesmers have so many ways to take advantage of bad players that they seem extremely powerful when you fight against a bad player. So many of the mesmer’s core mechanics involve things that will send a bad player for a mindspin but won’t have nearly as much effect on a good player.

Hmm, maybe I was thinking of another one of those “on regen” profession traits, then. Most of them heal for less than the normal regen does.

Soloing or duoing some of the group events is fun at first but gets old fast. Almost all the group event mobs can be easily soloed, it just takes forever and you have to be “on” the whole time. Carefully soloing a group event mob for 20+ minutes because of its huge HP pool, with no risk of dying at all unless you mess up, isn’t much fun after the first time.

Didn’t read the therad but if you’re a new 80 just go 100% the 70-80 Norn zone with the hearts. It’ll take you like two hours tops. Buy a few onnomberry bars and burn through it. No risk of dying unless you’re an awful player. Will net you about 1 gold in cash total, a bunch of drops, and two level 78 exotics. Probably a total of about 4g by the time you sell everything. Will give you a decent cushion to start with.

IIRC it heals for like 1/3 as much as normal regen does, though.

Malchor’s leap suffers from being number 2 in a trilogy of zones. The novelty has worn off by the time people get there, but there’s no reason to stay there because number 3 has better rewards and is more epic. Accordingly people tend to just ignore it entirely.

It needs some identity of its own and a reason to stay there.

If your community is based on farming a single event over and over where the mobs die within a fraction of a second of when they spawn and the whole event involves just randomy spamming AOE attacks to try to tag them before they die…it sounds like we’re better off without it.

Plinx was awful. Replacing it with a dungeon grind was awful too, but the solution isn’t to bring back the old grind, which was even worse in terms of the actual “gameplay”.

Scepter is lame because the auto attack is lame and gimmicky and doesn’t work with the underlying mechanic of the class. Instead as someone else said it just becomes a gimmicky way to generate a ton of cheap clones from range who have no use except to soak damage and/or blow up.

Smoke bomb’s quite a bit less powerful now after the nerf. But still a decent survivability cooldown.

Necros have plenty of passive defense, but he’s right that warriors have a built in +250ish (IIRC) armor advantage. Not to mention warriors have access to way more mobility and 100% avoidance like block or vigor or even the 5 second 100% invuln trait.

The problems with engi arn’t really with the traits, which are pretty amazing. Engi problems have to do with bad implementation of kits and turrets mostly, along with the cast time bug on pistol auto attack.

Yeah, you’re right. Boon cap is longer I think. Condition cap is 1 minute AFAIK.

Uh I play an Engi. You are rather clueless. Engis have a lot of bugs, and some design issues, but Engi traits are pretty awesome. Certainly way better than necro ones.

Like I said, I can name like 8-10 awesome Engi traits off the top of my head that change how the class plays quite dramatically. Necro traits in contrast tend to be “+10% more this” and “+5% more that.”

What they really need is a lot more awesome cosmetic skins. Lording it over the plebs should be done by having that awesome weapon skin that is really hard to get, not by having a weapon that hits harder.

I don’t see why Anet abandoned that original philosophy. Legendaries were a good start, but they need way, way more unique, hard-to-obtain skins in the game. It is the natural way to give people their need to feel superior to others without it impacting game mechanics.

It’s not even like it takes a long time to design new skins. It takes an artist what, a few hours for a basic skin, maybe 10 hours for a legendary skin? Hardly particularly labor intensive.

Bluebird.1890:

FOTM violates this because it forces you to do only FOTM over and over for ascended gear, and not WVWVW, or PVE, or other dungeons.

Which, Chris Whiteside has already stated in the Reddit AMA, will be changing. Soon.

Again, where is the problem?

Uh the problem is that FOTM ever made it into the game the way it did. It’s not as if FOTM came down from the heavens one day and introduced itself to the developers and us and no one realized what it was until later. They made it. If they are really so dumb they didn’t realize what their creation was they shouldn’t be in charge of an MMO. The only reasonable conclusion is they were aware of what they were doing and did it anyway. That they realize now the error of their ways is better than not realizing it but it doesn’t really make me confident about the future of the game that something like FOTM ever made it into the game. Especially the way it did, completely by surprise with virtually no period for public comment or testing.

Lording it over the plebs can be accomplished in more ways than just stat advantage. that’s true. The problem is MMOs over the years have moved away from designing game content that can only be accessed by the elite and towards a model where everything is easy enough that everyone can do it. That means the only way left to allow people to feel better than their peers is through better gear obtained through an easy but very reptitive grind.

Look for example at the original EQ. Sure, gear from Vox or Nagafen was good. But the primary appeal of the gear wasn’t the stats. It was the exclusivity. If you had a cloak of flames you were cool not because you attacked 10% faster than someone with a FBSS but because you were one of 5 people on the whole server who had one.

These days content is designed so everyone can get the Cloak of Flames if they keep at it long enough. It’s not locked off by difficulty, it’s locked off by time. In that environment people naturally gravitate towards stats as the way of feeling superior.

Warriors are a much easier class to play effectively in PVE, just like in PVP. They arn’t all that much better, though. Just takes less effort. I ahve both. On a warrior you can watch TV and play without really paying attention and charge into groups of 4-5 mobs and just GS them down in like 5 seconds. On a necro you can kill groups of 4-5 mobs easily too but you have to sorta actually pay attention.

Most all boons and conditions have a 1 minute cap on duration. I assume bleeding does too. Although really BiP is the only skill that could get near the duration cap, even with 100%+ duration.

Compared to the ~5 second re-use on HB, yeah.

For tPVP necros are probably better, yes. For PVE they are both fine.

The only area warriors are clearly superior to necros is at gibbing awful players with very little effort.

nachtnebel.9168:

“We don’t make grindy games” that’s the part of the manifesto they broke.

Yep. FOTM violates the spirit of the manifesto as a whole and that specific bit of it. I don’t see how anyone can even try to argue otherwise.

Now maybe the manifesto is wrong. Maybe people want a gear treadmill. But that is very clearly not what the game was marketed as and originally supposed to be.

Devs don’t want to enter the necro forums because they realize how badly they’ve treated the class, and because so few people actually play it, not because they’re upset at the whines. The thief forums were FLOODED with whines after the thief nerfs and they still got plenty of dev posts.

In fact if anything whining seems to attract dev attention, not turn it away. Whether that attention leads anywhere useful is another question (see: Ranger).

In this game you can’t really lord it over the plebs in PVP because of the flat gear system.

But vertical progression is all about lording it over normal people, whether its PVE or PVP. No one wants to get good gear so they can do the same dungeon over again with harder numbers. That’s not how human psychology works.

Agony is a pointless mechanism because it fills a need no one has. The reason people are farming for ascended gear is because the stats are better, not because of the agony resistance.

Nope. Never have. It’s another one of those clue that condition damage in this game is poorly thought about and was put in mostly as an afterthought.

Yeah, obviously the higher HP is the big difference, but the armor is significant too.

HyDraLiNsK.2470:

Yeah. Depends on the build I guess. I’m a wellmancer, and the ground targeting trait, wells recharge 20% faster, 50% more dmg while downed (I know several classes have this), marks do 10% more dmg, etc

they are all invaluable to me. It’s not GAME CHANGING for sure, but I do a hell of a lot better with them than I did without that’s for sure.

Yeah, but I mean look at those traits. The only thing that changes the way you play is ground targeting for wells. The rest just give bigger numbers.

They are classic examples of a boring passive +% trait. The necro trees are full of these, and the ones that arn’t boring passive +%s tend to be awful, like the 5 toughness trait that spawns those useless minions who do nothing but keep you in combat longer.

Compare that to something like the engineer, which has tons of gamechanging traits like the perma swiftness/vigor combo, static discharge, piercing bullets, grenadier, healing on bombs, the condition removal traits, kit refinement, etc.

Shanna.4762:

It’s not really brilliant, this was unpopular in LOTRO, so much so that they removed it and I think effectively the same system was tried in other games and removed because it was annoying and unpopular.

The problem is it is TOO brilliant. It exposes the lie at the heart of vertical progression schemes too obviously.

Verti progressional people WANT power creep. They WANT to be able to lord it over the plebs. This is what keeps them going, not being able to do the same dungeon with a higher level of agony so they can farm more agony gear so they can do the same dungeon with higher tuned numbers.

Feast of Corruption hits for laughably low damage no matter how many conditions are on the target. I find it is barely worth casting, although obviously the calculation is different when you have 3 condition focused players and are hitting the stacking cap.

Even capped bleeds on a target is like 3k dps. From three players. That’s about what a single power glass cannon spec can put out. Again not that I particularly advise that in a dungeon, but 3 condition necros is going to be very low dps, especially on boss fights.

If you just want to run around gibbing awful players in 8v8 hotjoin even if you are awful too it’s true the warrior is a better choice than the necro.

Yeah, I agree. It’s not that necro talents are AWFUL, they’re just underwhelming and boring. Few of them change the way you play the class dramatically. Even the best necro talents tend to be boring +% talents like fury on DS or 33% longer conditions from scepter.

Your group dps must have been awful. Although admittedly that beats the average PUG where you have 4 Berserker heroes getting downed every 3 seconds any time anything touches them.

The OP’s arguments arn’t all that great but he is right that necro traits are pretty underwhelming compared to the traits many other classes get.

I think different designers must have done the traits for different classes because there are definite patterns. Necro, ele, ranger have pretty boring and bad traits trees, while mesmer, thief, engi have generally amazing ones for example.

Grenades are doubtless the highest DPS the engineer can do. But if you are playing in dungeons DPS isn’t really all that important. Dungeon groups are full of morons who spec glass cannon. The last thing most groups need is another one.

There are several viable support builds for engis that can add a lot more to the average dungeon group than yet another glass cannon dps hero.

KirinDave.6451:

I did. You were wrong about the axe before, you’re still wrong about it now. With this trait and vulnerability and bleed generation with a reasonable crit rate, you’ll exceed the effectiveness of the warrior trait within 2 auto-attacks in the worst case. It’s not exactly the grim scenario you insist on painting where every player has a condition curing fairy floating after them.

This is not “difficult.” This is not “hard.” This is not “good luck waiting for 6 more conditions.” This is trivial, the matter of 1.5-2.25 seconds.

And that’s just one way of many. For a power spec.

wat

The trait works per stack of conditions, not per condition. Having 5 stacks of vuln gives you a 2% bonus not a 10% bonus.

If you switch weapons out of combat using ~ it’ll reset the bug and you’ll have the 10 sec swap the first time in combat again. Making the bug rear its head a lot more often than just the first time you load a map.

NeverSmileWF.1684:

in that case what class is weaker?

Ranger, quite obviously. You could make an argument about warriors too, unless you just want to play 8v8 hotjoin and kill awful people over and over.

Balance is actually in a pretty good spot right now. The nerfs to mesmers, thieves and guardians have brought them into a vaguely balanced state, warriors, eles are at about the right spot. Necro and engi are both roughly balanced but need a lot of bug fixes. Rangers need a lot of work.

^^ That’s true from the perspective of the warrior, although things look a bit different from the perspective of the person attacking you. 2200 base armor already being what it is, going up to 3300 armor is a 33% reduction in damage compared to 2200, but in fact you’re going to be mitigating more like ~60% of total incoming damage.

Just in case people see 33% and think “that’s not all that much!” Basically warriors even specced as glass cannon are actually not all that much of a glass cannon when it comes to damage mitigation.

No, fractals really is an issue. It has taken a game where people actually played out in the world and funneled everyone in to LA where they just sit around spamming LFG and doing FOTM.

Orr is dead (ha, ha, I made a funny) now because of FOTM. All that work and it has been totally obsoleted and wasted by one dungeon.

Those are in trees where you’d actually benefit from the +direct damage. The main problem with 25 curses is that it gives a direct damage boost to what is pretty clearly a condition-focused tree and the trait itself is based on applying a large number of conditions.

I mean part of the problem is that pretty much ALL the necro minor traits are garbage. But this trait is certainly one of the garbageish traits.

Futuro.8036:

Mega Skeleton.8259:

Did I mention I run epidemic? I can keep bleeds, vulnerabilities and chills up on most enemies at most times, so 6% by myself, not including all the times I damage targets while they’re weakened, crippled, immobilized, feared, blinded (this is quite often). Then throw on all the other times targets are confused, burning or poisoned along with any other classes who apply the same conditions I do. I’d imagine it’s considerably higher than the 2% you seem to think. Or maybe I’m playing my class wrong.

So what your saying is you first have to get chill on the target THEN you have to get poison on the target THEN you have to get weakness on the target THEN you have to get your bleeds on the target for you to get 8% extra damage THEN you have to rely on ANOTHER class to get burning on the target THEN you have to rely on ANOTHER class to get confusion on the target for the 12% damage increase

OR a warrior just needs to auto attack to get 10% extra damage

Yep, pretty much this. It’s pretty obvious the 2% per condition trait is just poorly thought out.

Yep they really arn’t even close to even. 10% on bleed is clearly superior to 2% per condition in most situations. No amount of theorycrafting can change the reality that 2% per condition is only going to be reliably superior when fighting big PVE mobs.

Not to mention the trait is totally useless because it only affects normal damage and it’s deep in a tree that is clearly designed to be a condition damage tree if you spec that far into it.

Your suggestion was to use focus chill followed by epidemic to slow down a zerg so your team can escape. That hits 6 targets maximum. That isn’t going to slow down even a zerg that isn’t constantly curing conditions, as most zergs are. It is a joke of a suggestion that sounds like it came from a theorycrafter who has never actually done it.

Not to mention it’s completely outclassed by tools that actually CAN do that, like guardian staff 5 gandalf if terrain provides a funnel, or mesmer wall of swiftness/cripple that arn’t target limited and therefore can impact a zerg.

Ireniicus.2167:

Necros have some broken mechanics however they are still a strong class outside of pvp. In pvp their mobility is so bad it makes them a complete liability.

I really don’t think this is such a big issue. It is not much of an issue for a bunker necro, which is very strong and has access to the best bunker elite in the game and 3-4 seconds of stability every 10 seconds from speccing into DS.

Even for roamers, necro is not really as movement limited as people often say it is. It really depends on your spec. Conditionmancer is kinda unmobile. Spectral necros have walk, pull, teleport on DS, immobolize. And all necros have extensive access to cripple and/or chill.

There’s several power builds that are pretty viable too. It isn’t just conditionmancer or bust.

I just wanted to make sure you’re aware of how unrealistic and exaggerated most of your suggestions are.

I do love my zero recast epidemic!

P.S. You do realize epidemic only spreads to 5 targets, right?

Sheobix.8796:

another point: has anyone ever tried using focus chill, blindness chills, and using Epidemic to slow down the whole head of a wvw Zerg? do you know how valuable that is for one necro to be able to give a low-manned counter zerg an escape?

Only if the zerg is a bunch of pve heroes who don’t know about condition removal.

Necros arn’t bad but they are definitely broken. Not in the sense of being unplayably bad but in the sense of having a bunch of bugs that fundamentally break aspects of the class. Minions being the most obvious, but DS itself is still horribly limiting the way it cuts off access to your utilities and heal skill, doesn’t let you finish, doesn’t show what conditions are on you, etc etc.

How are these still in the game? At least give us a toggle to turn off the passive trait if we want to while you try to fix them.

They are an active nuisance and I and most other necros would probably happily turn them off if we could. Awful choice to put on a passive 5 point trait.

Engi isn’t extremely powerful, nor is it extremely weak. It is right about where it should be re: the other classes.