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Agility training should be baseline to pets, as should be any traits that grant them passive healing.
They said they wanted pets to always be available to us, but that simply is not true in many instances of the game. Pet uptime is still horrible on moving targets.
Try having your spider projectiles hit any moving target in wvw. Try to have a wolf chasing a thief. It’s not cute — a third of the time they spend chasing, and it simply kills our damage output since pets are such a huge portion of ranger damage.
Pet f2 activation times are also dreadful. It takes about 3 seconds after press to actually deliver the ability.
its a amazing how bad some ranger players are. 5 sec and you have a dead pet?…lol…I can single handedly hold a mob of ten off in cursed shore.
How many points do you have in BM? I can do the same, but i have 30 points in BM which makes my pet a force to be reckoned with, 0 points in BM is a different story because then he’s made of paper.
Against bosses in dungeons it’s even less than 5 seconds, idiot. And f3 won’t come close to saving them. A single CM explorable rifleman’s shot to most non-tank pets with 30 points in BM will one-shot them.
So take that smug demeanor elsewhere.
Tell that to my fern mastif and moa, they just keep chugging through, and they’ve been shot while MOVING which is what does the most damage. Don’t know how a bird or a cat would last, but i’m guessing not well because they have kitten poor survivability.
So cats and birds are effectively banned from the most important content? I play greatsword; it’s not like f3 actually does anything meaningful since the pet was besides me to begin with — and if I want to get it out I basically have to kill my own dps to go ranged.
its a amazing how bad some ranger players are. 5 sec and you have a dead pet?…lol…I can single handedly hold a mob of ten off in cursed shore.
How many points do you have in BM? I can do the same, but i have 30 points in BM which makes my pet a force to be reckoned with, 0 points in BM is a different story because then he’s made of paper.
Against bosses in dungeons it’s even less than 5 seconds, idiot. And f3 won’t come close to saving them. A single CM explorable rifleman’s shot to most non-tank pets with 30 points in BM will one-shot them.
So take that smug demeanor elsewhere.
It’s not worth it. You have enough boon duration to keep the boons up if you keep rotating attunements.
25 sec cd on consume conditions. offhand dagger transfer is a similar cooldown, with an incredibly slow projectile anyone will dodge. If the thief is ranged, which the screenshot shows, putrid mark won’t be doing any transfer.
So, stop talking as if you could constantly transfer conditions back against a class whose resource system is easily regenerated and friendly to spam due to traits that allow you to quickly fill it back up on top of going into stealth.
The necro is not a 1v1 class. It just doesn’t have the pressure (read: necro damage is GARBAGE) or the sustained survivability (no real regen or offheals outside your healing skill, which is a 25 sec cd) to go against current 1v1 classes. So, do the reasonable thing and stick to people who will help you stay alive.
You’ll be surprised how helpful it is to stay around a guardian or ele. Get used to being focused because you are the easiest class to train by far in guild wars.
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Crit damage +power+precision stacking gives the highest returns by far compared to any other stat stacking.
The only classes you see shining in defense only shine due to their innate abilities, not because of their gear stats. Boons are extremely potent for defensive purposes — so is CC. Guess who are the best bunkers? Guardian, ele, and engineer, all of which have ample access to boons and CC.
You won’t ever see a mesmer gearing for toughness, because its pointless. They can’t tank hits, ever. Their survivability comes from stealth avoidance and immunities, since they have no access to boons besides might.
Gearing for toughness/condi damage has horrible returns unless your class has high innate abilities that synergize. Thieves can pull off conditions unlike any other class because they can stack conditions quickly and consistently, as can engineers. Necros and rangers, not so much anymore. Neither do mesmers.
Conditions are also easily removed by so many classes for the effort it takes to stack them for non-thief/engi classes.
Some classes have significantly larger base numbers to their abilities, while others have incredibly low base numbers. Look at the ranger greatsword vs. the warrrior’s greatsword or the thief’s daggers. Damage differences are too large.
Numbers are completely out of tune. Some classes like the necro were overnerfed and are on the garbage bin besides corrupting boons and aoe fear because their own damage is so terrible and staff is their only good weapon. What do you bring a necro for besides marks and corrupt boons? Certainly not for his minions, certainly not for his spectral skills, certainly not for his damage, and certainly not for his poor survivability since he can’t play attrition without the kind of healing true attrition classes like the ele and guardian have.
I understand your a good thief, but your views are too linear, because you only seem to have one play style, and your balance changes effect the other play styles more negatively and they are the ones that need help the most.
Fix non-stealth thief weapon sets to be significantly stronger damage. (P/P, S/P.)
The Stealth is fine, but culling bug is whats killing everyone.
If changes go as you suggest, they may just have to scrap the class and redesign it, for thieves have little to no access to the boons needed to survive if you nerf stealth. (Protection/Vigor.) and they would also need more access to (Fury/Swiftness.).
Having less healing but more access to vigor would benefit the thief to where its more skilled dodge rolls and damage prevention then just healing it up.
Having protection but less stealth means the thief is seen more, but hes harder to kill, which seems to be what everyone wants anyways.
P/P burst does NOT need buffs.
Play another kitten class before you go claiming your weapons do too low damage.
Thief abilities, and particularly autoattack, do significantly more sustained and burst damage than any other class except an axe warrior’s autoattack (but axe warriors are nonexistent due to mobility issues, which the thief doesn’t have). Mesmer phantasms come close at a steeper cooldown.
Play a kitten ranger or engineer or necromancer to truly see what garbage damage is.
You realize necro condi damage is kitten, right? In the time a necro takes to get up a 9 stack bleed that will soon be cleansed, the thief can take down half his hp.
Necro is not a 1v1 class, and a match up for a support class versus one of the two strongest 1v1 classes is silly. Stay close to your guardian or ele buddy or bring a thief/mesmer friend of your own to cheese the other thief.
In this game pets would be OP if they were any harder to kill.
Did you ever do an explorable dungeon?…
He’s a PvP whiner probably bringing in the good status of pets in spvp without the context of silver/veteran mobs that 3-4 shot your pet through mere conal melee autoattacks.
I do it all the time.
Thief Opens, Protect Me, Knock Back, Barrage, Kill.
This ^
My main is a Thief (I’m just on these forums to get some ideas for my new ranger) and I can tell you my biggest weakness is being denied my opener and then knocked down or knocked back. A thief only has one skill with stability (Dagger Storm) and it’s an elite on a long cooldown. If I’m in berserker gear in a crit damage build, once you knock me down I am as good as dead. Immobilize also works but not as effective as a knock back.
That’s cute and all, but Shadow Step> Stun +Knockback. It’s a terrible thief who doesn’t have Shadow Step and Shadow Refuge to reset a fight in his favor.
Run d/d zerker on high level fractals without a guardian or bunker ele carrying your kitten with boons and come tell me that it worked. Better yet, film it.
Try an actual berserker set, no full water/arcana, and tell me how well it goes as well.
A zerker set without maximizing power/prec/crit is not an actual zerker set. You’re running a hybrid, and the fact is you won’t touch the damage of a warrior or thief, let alone my mesmer’s.
If you want to run a full zerker build, go for a scepter/dagger for frontload or a staff for lesser burst but more supportive options.
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PvP split, please….
They didn’t learn from WoW in that pets need scaling to stay relevant with stat progression and new mechanics.
Pets need AoE damage avoidance/reduction, better movement speed for uptime, and they need to earn any stat boosts the master earns himself.
This is quite funny.
100b – l2dodge noob
thief spam – l2dodge opener noob
mesmer shatter – omg OP if u dont dodge u die!!!!Yes melee in MMO’s is popular and always have a large number of people that feel they should kill everything all the time.
All three classes need damage nerfs just like bunkers need defensive nerfs.
Not in PvE mesmers don’t. Play a mesmer in PvE where your illusions get killed the moment they come out from mob autoattacks and get steamrolled by mobs whose hp you can only take 1/7 out of with a full shatter.
You’ll find these mesmer glass cannons are not so good then, and then guardians and eles and warriors with better sustained damage and survivability blow everything else out of the water in PvE.
They need to do PvE/PvP skill splits.
I have a mesmer in pve its leveling very well and easy I will never understand or agree with mesmers that claim they are weak in pve….. My main is a necro mesmer is no harder to level and in alot of cases better. That said I dont glass cannon on my mes for pve… dont know why anyone would do that.
I don’t care what your leveling experience was. I’m talking dungeons and high level PvE. Mesmer AoE is terribly limited, and their utility to a team restricted to Time Warp and Feedback while having lesser sustained damage to warriors and thieves.
This is quite funny.
100b – l2dodge noob
thief spam – l2dodge opener noob
mesmer shatter – omg OP if u dont dodge u die!!!!Yes melee in MMO’s is popular and always have a large number of people that feel they should kill everything all the time.
All three classes need damage nerfs just like bunkers need defensive nerfs.
Not in PvE mesmers don’t. Play a mesmer in PvE where your illusions get killed the moment they come out from mob autoattacks and get steamrolled by mobs whose hp you can only take 1/7 out of with a full shatter.
You’ll find these mesmer glass cannons are not so good then, and then guardians and eles and warriors with better sustained damage and survivability blow everything else out of the water in PvE.
They need to do PvE/PvP skill splits.
The fix has not been sufficient unless you’re running Hydromancer’s runes.
It’s a mix of 2 issues:
1) The horrible responsiveness of F2 skills. I literally have to mash it as my pet is doing other stuff, just for the pet to do it 2 seconds later. It needs to be immediately set to cast instead of whenever the pet feels like stopping its attacks, and the wind up on many of them like canine howls and moa squawks needs to be severely reduced.
A fear/CC or a heal or a key boon should be there when I need it, not when the pet feels like doing it.
2)Lunging animations. The wind up of these animations make them fall behind running players.
Pets will also need a passive speed boost relative to players to have any reasonable uptime, and in PvE they need AoE damage reduction passives to survive the constant melee cleave of veteran mobs and bosses. I still don’t understand why pets can’t have their own innate heals that they can use instead of forcing the ranger to a heftier switch cooldown when in dungeons often pets will go down faster than you can switch them to regen health.
Also, pet uptime against stealthing targets and detargeting mechanics is just horrendous. Against mesmers and thieves particularly my pet is rather unable to deal much damage unless I land a CC, of which there aren’t many non-pet tied CC’s (and pets are already unreliable in landing CC;s to begin with).
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You take 2 frenzy 100b to the face and tell me warriors aren’t strong either. There’s so many stuns you can break with 40-60 sec cooldown stunbreaks, and the guardian immobilizing you after the stuns as the warriors aoe the crap out of everything doesn’t help either.
Yes, mesmers seem overly strong in making you lose targets constantly while putting out such damage. But mesmer is a terrible class in PvE, and any nerfs that go into PvP must stay in PvP, as they still haven’t realized the mistake of not splitting skills.
Mesmers, thieves, and warriors are just above the rest. Yes, eles can bunker, but a bunker ele can’t kill any semi competent player who chooses to stall or retreat. The former three just pack too much burst.
And ranger pet uptime on targets is still bad.
What do you mean tankiest? mainhand sword is supremely more useful for a bunker/tank build than greatsword will ever be.
Simple PvE fix:
Confusion lasts 100% longer on NPC’s or hits for 100% more. WvW and effects against players would be unaffected.
Illusions and other minions have 50% more HP and a 70% resistance to AoE, in PvE.
They will have to split skills or this class will continue to languish in PvE due to being strong in sPvP.
For some reason the White Raven is missing vitality compared to the normal Raven. 1474 vs 2161 vitality.
Could a pass be done to balance the pet stats?
If grinding lodestones with ridiculous token prices is less efficient, people will still farm the gold to do lodestones.
There’s no point in making obtaining lodestones grindy when you can instead go farm 10g a day and make investments that will get you lodestones fasters than if you did the dungeons. Explorables need to drop lodestones from their boss chests.
And what’s the ramp up on those bleed stacks, and the probability that your illusions get wiped out by AoE in dungeons, especially high lv fractals?
There seem to be a lot of maybes with a condition build that do not exist for Berserker builds. And there is a reason why most people outside the necro and engineer do not stack conditions, because they are just comparatively inefficient.
It can’t just be a bias against using a staff over a sword that’s driving people to spec into burst builds — this has been a persistent problem since beta.
Mesmer spike can match the warrior or thief’s, but it is backloaded (meaning there is a ramp up delay before delivery in the form of getting illusions up).
Mesmer sustained damage, however, will not match a warrior or thief’s sustained damage. All their attacks hit for significant damage — their autoattack hits harder than ours.
Warrior does not just do damage with 100b; Blade Trail also does significant damage. Only Phantasms and Blurred Frenzy are abilities in our weapons that do any significant damage — Mirrored Blade and Mind Stab both do lower damage than your autoattack, and for the mainhand sword your block is dependent on mob hit delivery and hits only a single target.
The reason warriors stand above the rest is the hp difference and the extreme damage difference. Their autoattacks blow the other classes’ autoattacks out of the water, and 100b has a very low cooldown for the damage it does.
A 12k hp glass cannon dagger ele can be 1-shot by the warrior mobs lv20+ in the ascalonian fractal. A warrior with 18k hp and better armor, even if glass cannon, has the error window of 6k more hp to live through the burst and reposition. Even warriors with a mix of toughness gear are landing 12k Kill Shots — I wish any of my ranged skills on any class hit for that number.
Guardians have low HP, but they have constant prot for 33% less damage intake, aegis, blocks, and offhealing. A greatsword guardian does decent damage, but his utility of pulling mobs together and providing boons to his team cannot be undervalued.
The same goes for a bunker ele with d/d and aura sharing. I can give my team on my ele all boons at nearly permanent uptime by attunement switching. Fury, protection, regen, aoe healing. My damage is mediocre and I have no option because glass cannon d/d at 13-14k hp in explorables and fractals is not viable.
Boons and raw damage are the answer to class imbalance. Boon uptime on some classes is so potent, while other classes like the mesmer and ranger and thief cannot keep boons up anywhere at such a rate, their HP pools are smallers, and in the case of the ranger and mesmer their DPS, particularly aoe, is inferior in dungeons (because minions and pets get quickly killed in dungeons from all the aoe and conal melee 2k autoattacks).
You bring a mesmer for time warp, or a thief for shadow refuge. They don’t offer anything else. Engineers and rangers are even worse off. My Blue moa has a15 sec cd if I pet swap to reset the F2 cooldown on a measly 4 second aoe protection. My ele with his earth attunement on a 10 sec cd gives protection for more.
The utility, base survivability, and damage differences between the classes is so vast when they had advertised that while differences existed such classes would remain competitive in all roles. They simply are not competitive.
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The #1 sword for the mesmer is the same, actually. I have tested both. Only greatswird and hammer users seem to be able to melee consistently. Damn ballistas.
The cooldowns on stacking confusion are considerably larger than the cooldowns on Mindwrack and summoning phantasms.
Scepter/torch by itself does not spike enough confusion to even spike better than a mindwrack, and quite frankly I’m tired of people defending it because they’re killing upscaled players in WvW who are affected by the PvE confusion formula instead of the gimp spvp one.
WvW is a horrible mode by which to compare class balance. It’s an unfair format to begin with that allows imbalance by the presence of inflated crit damage stacking and food buffs coupled with backstab thieves. In spvp you notice backstab thieves are less effective because they can’t reach 110 crit damage bonus like they can in WvW.
And I’m especially tired of people telling me my mesmer is fine when they mean WvW zergfests and killing upscaled players while I’m talking high level fractals and Arah explorable modes.
But you die in a few seconds when your cds are down and confusion mesmers dont.
Offhand sword, decoy, and Illusionary Wave+ Deceptive Evasion say otherwise.
Confusion mesmers are absolute garbage, particularly in PvE and DE. If you think your confusion mesmer does anything meaningful in a dungeon, you need to get real.
I think you missed the point where I said “when your cds are down”. Between your glass canon and a confusion mesmer, confusion mesmers have way more survivability. Ive played both builds and confusion does plenty of damage when timed correctly.
Edit: this is in wvw btw – i dont pve so i cant comment on that aspect
And your confusion build instead relies on cooldowns to do any damage at all— you have to use glamours and jump through all the hoops to spike a confusion stack, and 12 stacks of confusion is not something you can do often either.
My shatter mesmer can just switch out berserker gear for pow/tough/precision jewels and pow/tough/vit gear and still do more sustained damage and consistent burst than a confusion mesmer while gaining survivability.
The majority of your stats come from your gear, and the mesmer’s survivability comes from them as traits don’t offer that much in survivability compared to my bunker elementalist who can pretty much permanently keep all boons on himself up just by speccing 30 arcana and 30 water for easy condition removal and high healing.
Whoop-dee-doo, a mesmer can just give 3-4 secs of protection to himself every 15 seconds. My elementalist can give himself and allies 7 seconds of protection every 10 seconds, permanent regen kept up every 10 seconds, and with Zephy’s Boon I can also share my auras that give them all fury for 10+ seconds.
Mesmer traiting outside damage specs is absolute garbage. We got Vigorous Revelations and lower cd, longer lasting glamours. That’s as far as mesmer support and survival increasing utilities go.
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But you die in a few seconds when your cds are down and confusion mesmers dont.
Offhand sword, decoy, and Illusionary Wave+ Deceptive Evasion say otherwise.
Confusion mesmers are absolute garbage, particularly in PvE and DE. If you think your confusion mesmer does anything meaningful in a dungeon, you need to get real.
And yet a berserker shatter build will do what your gimmick confusion does, but consistently, with more damage, and it doesn’t rely on fast attacking opponents or gimping your other attacks by stacking condi damage and condi duration on a profession that does no good condition damage compared to actual condition classes.
Who implied that you would rely on it as a primary function? Confusion is unavoidably integrated into the class at multiple levels, and making good use of it is just part of being an effective mesmer, regardless of build. Where do you think most of your shatter damage comes from?
No. I’m pretty sure damage my mesmer does comes from the phantasms I summon, blurred frenzy, and then shattering those phantasms alongside any clones.
Confusion is marginal damage if I run Illusionary Persona, and completely nonexistant if I run 30/30/0/0/10 instead.
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And yet a berserker shatter build will do what your gimmick confusion does, but consistently, with more damage, and it doesn’t rely on fast attacking opponents or gimping your other attacks by stacking condi damage and condi duration on a profession that does no good condition damage compared to actual condition classes.
Why were infused rings not made available for tokens as well? Just make the tokens for those rings drop at 20+….
You’ve replaced the RNG grind of getting rings with the RNG grind of farming globs and vials and shards, RNG drops, to get an infused ring.
I don’t get it. The new Prismatic Understanding is a great buff that would have given the extra push to use the torch over others in pve…and they decided to exclude it.
Even more buffs to shatter build. Looks like every mesmer will only be shattering now. Who can say no to 30~50 seconds of 3-stack might?
Underwater, signet, mantra buffs, blade training fix, all nice.Prismatic boon part works with prestige, we just made it so the duration part doesn’t because a trait to increase cast time of that skill would be bad. Sorry unclear notes there. On the IZerker he does hit correctly now but there is an issue with damage floaters not always appearing the we are now trying to track down.
Jon
Why does The Prestige need a cast time? Why can’t we just apply burning whenever we choose to emerge, or have the utility of channeling skills during The Prestige? It’s not like the torch is a super popular or strong weapon right now.
Who uses the phantasm utilities outside maybe defender? Who uses mimicry? Who uses Mantra of Pain (which, btw, does about a mainhand sword autoattack in terms of damage).
Phantasm utilities won’t be used, because their uptime isn’t that great when illusions are getting one or two shot by mobs in fractals with conal attacks. Illusion uptime in PvE and WvW is horrible, even with signet of Illusions. Mesmers rely heavily on shatters, so they won’t hold back on shattering just to keep the phantasm performing its function.
Mantras outside Mantra of Recovery and Resolve are horrible. Distraction should be a 2 sec daze. Pain needs to do significantly more damage, especially in PvE if you want it used at the opportunity cost of 3.5 sec cast times interrupting autoattacks. Concentration lasts too little.
The signets are truly horrible. Inspiration gives some random boon every 10 seconds when the proc should be every 5 seconds (it’s like nothing is learned from the undesirability of engineer random elixirs). Midnight gives passive boon duration to the class with arguably least access to boons. Signet of Illusion translates into maybe an illusion dying to 3 or two hits instead of two or one.
On my other classes, the utilities are DIFFERENT. On my mesmer, the utilities are a variant of condition removal, a stun breaker, or reflection with the exception of portal. Shadow Refuge keeps stacking stealth, heals, and has 30 seconds LESS cooldown than the crappy Veil of Invisibility, which doesn’t stack stealth anymore, provides a short stealth duration and no healing.
On Jonathan Sharp’s outline of class design, the mesmer design is puzzling. So we’re supposed to rely on illusions that just do damage for effects, yet those illusions have horrible health and susceptibility to AoE, of which there is an abundance on dungeons and WvW?
Cry of Frustration is still weak, the scepter is weak, the torch is weak, the warden is stationary and dies the moment mobs aggro on him (in some dungeons he doesn’t even last 2 seconds channeling his skill before a mob kills it with a swing or two).
They said this patch would seek to create more viable builds, but all I see is the duelist still doing the damage of greatsword warrior’s autoattack crit, the Berserker still missing his attacks, and buffs to an underwater combat most people don’t want to participate in (due to mobs underwater having too much HP and combat in general feeling slower, our useful utilities like null field not allowed underwater, and for some classes no elite options).
Mesmer was supposed to have crowd control and interrupts like in GW1, but now in GW2 classes like the hammer warrior and the engineer and the elementalist greatly overshadow him. All I’m to a group as a mesmer is a Time Warp and Portal bot. I don’t do the damage of a warrior, the aoe of an elementalists, the bunkering of a guardian or ele, or the CC of an engineer. My burst relies on the uptime of very fragile illusions who are swiped down the moment they come up in PvE, with a ramp up that athief achieves in 2 button presses of Steal and Backstab. (and it’s fine in PvE for thieves to deal that damage, I don’t care, but I have to jump through so many more hoops just to accomplish a lesser version of what other classes do).
I’d like for my mesmer to be good at something other than giving the group time warp and portals. Stealth rezzing is useless in PvE since bosses and mobs stack aoe on downed players anyway and the end result is you’ll die trying to rez even if stealthed.
I’m tired of this class being undertuned in PvE because of sPvP whining keeping changes to the class in the backburner.
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It’s WvW, where crit damage stacking is unbalanced anyways. Does not work in sPvP.
I use focus mainly for Ascalonian fractals and the harpy fractal. That is, for the projectile destruction. Comet AoE daze is nice as well for crowd control, but that’s about the only useful thing focus offers. Obsidian Flesh is not really necessary with Mist Form slotted and offhand dagger CC and escapes.
If Fire attunement for the focus were looked at, it’d become a lot more attractive/
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You can’t play D/D without a bunker build and pow/tough/vit gear below 80. You simply need those boon duration increases and the whole toolkit to compensate for your low base health and armor.
Play staff or scepter/dagger until you can run the build linked above. Even then, glass cannon d/d is not viable at all in PvE dungeons. You need to have above 1600 toughness and 16k+ HP to be able to survive in melee.
I think the problem lies as much in the fact that we don’t really have good sources of swiftness but also in the fact that we don’t really have reliable means of slowing people.
Think about it. Our pull acts as our swiftness and cripple source and it’s a rare occasion that you benefit from at least 2 of those features. On top of that we have iZerker, not available to all builds, buggy and unreliable, Chaos Storm, again not available for all and RNG dependent and Blink, all around versatile gap closer, escape/panic button. And there’s also Illusionary Leap that works only when the stars align and the gods favor you.
And all those on quite respectable cooldowns. I don’t know if more swiftness will fix the problems but I do think it’s only part of the problem.
That’s more an issue with Illusionary Leap/Swap having horrible range. It should be increased.
Stun breakers also work. Blink will save you, and Decoy can be used to clear the CC, but you need to dodge immediately after using the stunbreaker or suffer CC again.
Also, the vendor prices compared to AC rewards are strange, and the focus for AC and other dungeons is at 210 tokens, while it is at 300 CM tokens. Exotic focus.
People would also have it in their interest to buy the cheapest exotic piece and salvage it for ectos and the superior rune you need instead of spending a similar amount of tokens just on buying the rune you need.
Please, make this change ;(
Can we get a change to Deception (downed #2 ability) being targeted as well? That downed abilitie tends to port me RIGHT into aoe/mob’s attack range so often instead of saving me…
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Got some movement improvements coming for Mesmer also. Mostly more reliable swiftness.
Isn’t Signet of Midnight’s passive a good candidate for a change to speed boost? The 10% boon duration is wasted since mesmers have very little access to boons by themselves. 25% speed increase is more useful.
These projectiles, and to a lesser extent Vapor Blade, seem to have similar trouble in hitting mobile targets. Same for Stoning and Water Bolt (staff 1).
Water attunement as a whole needs re-examining of damage numbers for abilities that do not heal. The autoattacks and even the abilities that heal heal for negligible amounts to justify 1/6 or even less of the damage fire abilities are doing. I basically switch to water attunement, use the heals, and want to be quickly out of it as time spent on it is a huge hit to pressure output while the abilities without long cooldowns are purely damage based or provide negligible benefit (vulnerability for 6 seconds doesn’t make Vapor Blade that great when it hits for half the damage of its fire counterpart and even less than Lightning Whip).
Please look at water underwater as a model for water attunement on land where numbers are concerned. When water damage is so negligible and its “supportive” abilities are on such high cooldowns, traits intended for offense like 20% extra damage on vulnerable targets while on water attunement is not good at all, and the stacks provided by the Water trait for using arcane skills are too low (10 stacks should be more like it, like the Ranger’s Hunter Shot).
All the other attunements feel much better, even if scepter needs some attention to Arc Lightning and the delays for detonation on Dragon Tooth and Shatter Stone (which, like all water skills, needs numbers tuning).
The focus needs a lot of help on the Fire attunement (particularly Flame Wall) and water attunement’s chill ability on the focus could stand to be AoE or a root.
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The chanters don’t despawn at 20 because fractals get harder as you get higher. There are ways to do it but i think the encounter is a bit overtuned as well.
The harpy knock back is easy to dodge you just have to pay attention. Stay at range, the most you well ever pull if careful is 2 at a time but usually 1. Don’t bother looking for the red circle because 8 times out of 10 you can’t see it anyway. Instead look at the harpy and when you see a giant blue ball get shot from her bow simply jump to a different platform, you have plenty of time even at 900 range.
Not just chanters. The veterans keep respawning infinitely even when the boss becomes active, so it’s not like you’re culling mobs and then getting back to the boss.
You will have to fight in the current iteration both the boss with a heavy hitting agony aoe, the agony red circle spam restricting the area you can stay in, on top of his random pulling and hardhitting melee. All this while 5+ veterans, that are RANGED (so they autoattack your group to death from long distance) are machinegunning your group.
It’s obviously a broken encounter, because the increase in difficulty is obviously the appearance of several veteran mobs instead of normal ones like lv10. That’s OK, upgrade the mobs, but making you fight the boss and infinite of those upgraded, hardhitting high health mobs at the same time is not very doable short of stacking guardians.
Harpies can shoot you from different levels. Yes, you can dodge at max range, assuming you don’t get crippled midjump and fall like a rock. But, you know, this game has something called melee classes. Classes like the elementalist can’t even switch range at will, so you’re asking them to take the burden of even playing on another weaponset for an entire fractal just because this game has a fixation with punishing melee specs and rewarding ranged specs that hump the fringes.
(edited by Zenith.7301)
We were lucky enough on our run that we had a necro who could directly hit the seal on lv20 while we wiped mobs around him, because otherwise the encounter is impossible at lv20 where mobs do not despawn upon using the hammer to hit the seal, unlike lv10.
Some paths you may want to examine as well for lv20 is the rate and sequence at which all these veteran mobs spawn, and how many of those mobs should be veteran.
But the fractal DOES seem to be functioning properly on the lv10-19 tier.
Other fractals you might want to look at is the Asura one, where after killing the 4 golems in the final phase you get no cutscene and thus no prompt to be able to proceed. Harpies also need to be examined on their knockback attack at lv10+, because other than stacking guardians or classes with group stability, they fire their balls too quick, too many harpies at a time (since they’re so close to each other for aggro, so spreading them out or reducing their aggro range might help), and the balls in tandem with a rapid fire that can bring an elementalist with 1600 toughness and 19k hp down to 3-4k HP on platforms he can’t dodge in is too much.
And there’s more to the game than sPvP or wvw. PvE has little use for bunker specs, since mobs can outlive you and outdamage your survival in higher fractals better than players ever could.
You need killing power, but running a berserker geared glass cannon d/d ele on explorables and higher level fractals is plain massochism when you’ll be losing half your HP bar in a second or two all the time.
The issue is that such low HP levels and the very high cooldowns of our defensive skills make every d/d ele have to stack defensive traits and skills, whereas a warrior with 8k more hp and higher armor gets enough leeway from that advantage to be able to run any build they please without survival concerns.
It’s why in PvE you only really see warriors and guardians melee for any extended period of time. Because they bring in much higher built in survival — warriors through hp and armor advantage, guardians through healing, prtection, high armor, and aegis uptime.
(edited by Zenith.7301)
Water attunement non-heal abilities need damage buffs, cantrips/stunbreaks need some cooldown reductions (my mesmer’s stunbreaks are on 30-36 sec cd’s, why are my cantrips as a class with about 5k less hp longer cd than a mesmer or a warrior?).
And we need better elite options, alongside buffing conjures and Glyph of Storm.
Other than that I like my ele. Glyph of elementals, both elite and normal, could use an increase in HP for the elementals or give aoe damage reduction to pets ala WoW so they don’t die in 3 seconds during dungeons.
Shadow Refuge stealth stacking needs to go. They nerfed mesmer stealth skills to not stack stealth — why should shadow refuge stack stealth?
Having both an ele and an engineer, could these changes also apply to conjures as well in place of the tied in stats for the conjures? The current stats for the conjures are less than what actual weapons provide, and the stats particularly for the frost bow do not appeal at all.
I hope sigils and weapon stats apply to kits and conjures in all instances. Why should your equipped weapons become obsolete, costing you stats, when you choose to make use of your utilities that already restrict you from using other skills?
It’s good news that the technology for applying weaponstats to conjured weapons (which kits basically are as well) is being investigated.
Water attunement on land should more closely reflect water attunement underwater numbers.
Power/prec/crit damage is the way to go. Never sacrifice crit damage for power when you can have prec/crit damage in the same item.
Your returns from the dueling traitline are much better. The caveat is that you want 55%+ crit chance for a crit damage build to shine, but then it outpaces power in frontloading damage, which is what you need for PvE.