Guild Wars 2

For the simple reason that necros got minions, they will have a way easier time doing the harder PvE champs while a 10k hp berzerker ele will just flop over.

Sublimatio.6981:

Zenith.7301:

ApO.1498:

Is this a joke? Why all mmo have epic boss while anet give us a sloth boss in next raid …
I really hope it’s a joke … I try to defend anet in his choices for years, but this is too much.
Please wake up anet, you will continue to lose your players …

I mean…..

You fight Sabetha, basically an enlargened average human female model with no distinct armor or features, let alone much of a backstory.

This raid doesn’t make much sense storywise to begin with.

nobody said sabetha is a good design tho. its like queensdale flashbacks, but plz sloth, and I thought it couldn’t get any worse

(it makes sense storywise. its a jungle, of course there are wild animals and rogue ppl)

Well, yeah, but the story for these bosses is not that fleshed out. Good raids and their bosses not only have the ambiance, but characters that have a good backstory.

Even when WoW fails to establish a boss by ingame dialogue, the dungeon journal explains to you who this boss is and why he’s there, what’s his pecking order in that instance, etc.

And games like Wildstar outright show you why bosses are there and who they are.

Guild Wars 1 did well like these games, but GW2 after the explorable dungeons were wholly abandoned just gave us bosses with no backstory whatsoever.

ApO.1498:

Is this a joke? Why all mmo have epic boss while anet give us a sloth boss in next raid …
I really hope it’s a joke … I try to defend anet in his choices for years, but this is too much.
Please wake up anet, you will continue to lose your players …

I mean…..

You fight Sabetha, basically an enlargened average human female model with no distinct armor or features, let alone much of a backstory.

This raid doesn’t make much sense storywise to begin with.

atheria.2837:

Fluffball.8307:

EvilZombie.6801:

staff = pew pew pew v2.0

Can you explain this sentiment? I feel like the “pew pew” meme nonsense is based on people thinking LB is an OP damage weapon , but staff is one of the least damaging weapons in the entire game.

If staff is one of the “least” powerful in the game why am I now finally getting badge in WvW like never before at 2700+power alone and topping 3k in any zerg we run?

Staff just needs to be traited correctly with the rest of your gear and then it’s an AOE/protection monster.

So you call a staff “powerful” because it allows you to leech like a guardian in WvW? lol

I don’t think it’s so bad. It’s a jungle, it doesn’t all need to be lizards and dragons and undead.

Don’t knock it till you try it.

GW2 has far more serious issues than whether you like a sloth as a boss.

Such as this game becoming ever more like a godkitten casino, treating players like wallets with miserable class balancing rate, bare boned content updates every half year, kitten poor rewards with those few good ones hidden behind immense gold gates or RNG gates. Most cosmetics gated behind the cash shop or the gamble boxes sold in said cash shop.

Anyone who played Revenant during beta weekends knew the class was going to be broken as hell.

The highest autoattack dps in game, their teleport is tied to an immunity window and does about 3-4x as much as a mesmer’s blurred frenzy, which is stationary and doesn’t give you 7 might stacks.

Medium health, high armor, the best heal in the game with glint, ridiculous access to quickness individually, and the one class able to passively stack 10 might and perma fury on himself before an engagement.

Revenant is like a thief with high armor, even better defenses, and more HP.

It is the culmination of all the class feedback for previous crappy core classes, made into an improved new class.

Meanwhile core classes only got elite specs as a real improvement.

I just hope the sloth involves psychic powers or something as part of the encounter because the whole concept of being physically assaulted by a sloth is pretty bad.

Their entire metabolism prevents them from physical exertion, so outside of explaining it away with magic powers a sloth swiping at people is silly.

CETheLucid.3964:

Zenith.7301:

You’re not familiar to opportunity cost, are you?

One of the reasons I like the spec. Sometimes it is quite beneficial to be a druid. Other times you’re better served staying with the core trait lines.

Working that out is what determines your performance.

Zenith.7301:

What they felt robbed was of an elite spec that enhanced the mediocre offensive capabilities of the ranger and gave them a weapon with powerful aoe (which rangers don’t have).

OK.

So you/they don’t like the druid spec and wanted something else. It didn’t rob you of anything though.

That’s a stupid way to say “I don’t like it and wanted something other than what we got”. But I get the gist of it now, thanks.

Have fun arguing.

Of course we were robbed relative to others.

What single other elite spec is so one dimensional to the point where its main weapon, the elite mechanic, and most of the traits are tied to a healer role?

Any other elite spec has a variety of compatible playstyles. Druid is JUST a support spec, period. So rangers who rolled the class not wanting to play support got screwed, as EVERYONE got a power spike from elite specs except ranger, who was shoved into being a heal/buffbot.

You’re acting like I can just choose core ranger and be brought to a raid for just DPS. Don’t be dumb about it, core ranger is horrible, never has been a desirable DPS spec.

So in terms of the meta, as a ranger you are a druid and play a support class, or you don’t get brought to endgame PvE at all.

reikken.4961:

bladex.9502:

TexZero.7910:

bladex.9502:

Warrior, ele, thief, engineer

Not sure you can put engineer in high mobility and dps at the same time.

Engie has to sacrifice their dps for mobility, unlike the other 3.

Depends on what you call mobility.
Engineer has a lot of leaps out of combat, a lot less in combat, but same goes for elementalist

ele’s mobility is pretty consistently overstated
a holdover from when ride the lightning had a 15 second cooldown? (and when off hand dagger was considered good. currently taking dagger also sacrifices dps)

Burning speed is plenty of low cooldown mobility and it has a built in evade to boot.

Also, what people don’t take into account is ele’s SUPERIOR MELEE RANGE. Lightning Whip allows you to melee targets that are not in traditional melee range, making the ele one of the safest melee DPS classes. Air Overload also has generous aoe range while moving.

Meanwhile other classes actually need to move into the danger zone to melee.

CETheLucid.3964:

How can you feel robbed by something that takes absolutely nothing away from the core ranger?

Everything that makes a ranger a ranger is still there even if you spec as a druid and the whole thing is as simple as changing trait lines around in the hero menu.

Nothing gets taken away from the ranger for the sake of the druid spec. Rather, it adds to the rangers repertoire.

Getting a new thing to play with isn’t robbery. I’d think that’s quite the opposite of being robbed?

You’re not familiar to opportunity cost, are you?

What they felt robbed was of an elite spec that enhanced the mediocre offensive capabilities of the ranger and gave them a weapon with powerful aoe (which rangers don’t have).

Druid as an elite spec is a DPS neutral utility sidegrade to the ranger that comes with a mechanic that’s all about healing, which many players didn’t roll ranger for.

Eval.2371:

Matt Stacey.7415:

Looking at my current ranger I feel using the druid spec would be a waste of my 3 trait lines

Druid isnt just healing though, its good condi removal, it brings a lot of group cc and peel that compliments our sb, lb and staff. Staff is an excellent on hit weapon, great for condi application and sigil procs. Then on top of everything mentioned druid has the healing and buffing focused parts.

As Tragic said, druid gave ranger everything that it was missing from ranger, we have traits for damage condi etc, but they are bad. Druid gives us good sustain, cc and team buffing. If they could do something about our weapons low damages, and a lot of our bad/boring traits in core ranger, we’d be a solid class.

Zenith.7301:

Tragic Positive.9356:

Zenith.7301:

Core range is terrible, so sadly in raids you are forced into the druid healbot role.

Funny thing is a berzerker Tempest can put out similar healing as a berzerker druid and yet the Tempest does SOOOOOOO much more DPS.

Ever heard of Berserker Healer?
Tempest doesn’t beat this role. It’s an illusion because you see more personal DPS rather than 30% party-wide DPS boost. Tempest is just more comfortable. Not more powerful.

You’re just a buffbot, much like a Chronomancer. On an individual level, solo scenario or roaming PvP this makes no difference.

It’s also 15% more damage (3% for 5 stacks), not 30% DPS boost how the hell do you even get that math?

Glyph of empowerment, frost spirit, spotter, and grace of the land is a 30% damage increase. Its more of a burn phase for the group. When done just before a breakbar it is insane damage for the whole party.

While it may be true that support ele might do 5k more personal dps than us, we may raise an entires parties dps by 8-12k, that combined without our own would be more damage than the ele. It is common for a buffer to sacrifice personal dps, for increased group, its why we have warriors and crono’s in our parties to begin with. Being a buff bot isnt bad it makes us actually useful in the meta because frankly outside of our buffing abilities we suck across the board and are a very inflexible class.

A berzerker druid is doing nowhere near 25k DPS, and Tempests are breaking 29-30k DPS. I don’t know where you’re pulling those numbers.

Tragic Positive.9356:

Zenith.7301:

Core range is terrible, so sadly in raids you are forced into the druid healbot role.

Funny thing is a berzerker Tempest can put out similar healing as a berzerker druid and yet the Tempest does SOOOOOOO much more DPS.

Ever heard of Berserker Healer?
Tempest doesn’t beat this role. It’s an illusion because you see more personal DPS rather than 30% party-wide DPS boost. Tempest is just more comfortable. Not more powerful.

You’re just a buffbot, much like a Chronomancer. On an individual level, solo scenario or roaming PvP this makes no difference.

It’s also 15% more damage (3% for 5 stacks), not 30% DPS boost how the hell do you even get that math?

Core range is terrible, so sadly in raids you are forced into the druid healbot role.

Funny thing is a berzerker Tempest can put out similar healing as a berzerker druid and yet the Tempest does SOOOOOOO much more DPS.

Raizen.7981:

Zenith.7301:

The problem is not nomands or viper or berzerker.

The problem is that Anet buried so much of a character’s performance on gear stats.

Like, the difference in power damage between a berzerker build and a soldier/magi stat gear is IMMENSE.

And for what, so you get a few extra toughness that at best makes you tank 2 more hits?

They should just baseline effectiveness ONTO the character, and make the stat bonuses from gear VERY SLIGHT. As in, the gear offers stats in the amount of a 5-10% proportion compared to base stats.

That way, you gain a slight benefit to sort of specialize, but you are not completely incompetent at one build or task if the gear isn’t suited for it.

You’d see a lot more hybrid builds and interesting builds if the DPS cost to bringing them wasn’t so massive.

But they made sure zealot/nomad/magi/soldier/cleric gear stays in irrelevance just by HOW MUCH THOSE SETS COST YOU IN DPS.

The DPS sacrifice is way too large for the marginal defensive benefits.

What they should do is delete crit damage and condition damage. Just have ALL damage scale off the power stat.

That way, all gear has the power stat, but what distinguishes gear is what utility you bring with it. You choose either toughness, vitality, healing power, or boon duration on your gear to differentiate your roles a bit without completely gimping your performance.

It’s what Blizzard did with WoW talents. Because they realized that DPS gains always trump everything else, they made talents and customization all about UTILITY.

That’s what GW2 needs to do, normalize DPS across classes and make gear just affect the utility stats you bring.

Then each raid will have a full healing power healer, a full toughness/vit tank, and 8 probably tempests(or whatever the top dps class is) running boon duration as utility. Because there would be no reason to bring a PS war when each of them can stack might with the boon duration, there’s no reason to bring a herald for the facet of nature, since they’re all a capped already on all possible boons, there’s no reason to run any other class that’s not top dps because, why the kitten would you? and you’ll be left with a game that has exactly 3 viable builds.

Which is why you would balance the godkitten classes in PvE for DPS finally because being a Vanilla WoW buffbot class is such archaic design.

Also, you must have missed the part where I said to reduce the stats from gear so it’s not like you’d be getting 50% boon duration from gear. More on the lines of 5-10% as I said….

Nor would it replace banners or assassin’s presence or the value of facet of nature on protection uptime, etc.

The problem is not nomands or viper or berzerker.

The problem is that Anet buried so much of a character’s performance on gear stats.

Like, the difference in power damage between a berzerker build and a soldier/magi stat gear is IMMENSE.

And for what, so you get a few extra toughness that at best makes you tank 2 more hits?

They should just baseline effectiveness ONTO the character, and make the stat bonuses from gear VERY SLIGHT. As in, the gear offers stats in the amount of a 5-10% proportion compared to base stats.

That way, you gain a slight benefit to sort of specialize, but you are not completely incompetent at one build or task if the gear isn’t suited for it.

You’d see a lot more hybrid builds and interesting builds if the DPS cost to bringing them wasn’t so massive.

But they made sure zealot/nomad/magi/soldier/cleric gear stays in irrelevance just by HOW MUCH THOSE SETS COST YOU IN DPS.

The DPS sacrifice is way too large for the marginal defensive benefits.

What they should do is delete crit damage and condition damage. Just have ALL damage scale off the power stat.

That way, all gear has the power stat, but what distinguishes gear is what utility you bring with it. You choose either toughness, vitality, healing power, or boon duration on your gear to differentiate your roles a bit without completely gimping your performance.

It’s what Blizzard did with WoW talents. Because they realized that DPS gains always trump everything else, they made talents and customization all about UTILITY.

That’s what GW2 needs to do, normalize DPS across classes and make gear just affect the utility stats you bring.

I don’t understand why a video on why a top player is leaving has to turn into a flame war about strangers commenting about what kind of person he is when they don’t even know him personally or have been his guildmates.

But it has always been this kind of community that has ruined this game. Rabid white knights that quite frankly should have stayed in reddit.

Zodryn.4216:

Clearly you have more time than most other people. Since there is nothing left for you to accomplish, I understand your opinion. However, many of us have a family and a life and can’t afford as much time to this game. We shouldn’t be punished with insane amounts of grinding to level up, get the best gear, etc. I am more concerned about having content that is fun than goals that take decades for the average person to accomplish.

He’s not talking about time. He’s talking about efficiency.

To give you some perspective, our Mythic guild in WoW raided only two nights on the weekend, we cleared a mythic raid in about 2 months and then we took a break to do whatever we wanted.

By comparison, your average guild doing 3-4 4 hour raid nights took about 1-1.5 months to clear heroic, and then 3-4 to clear mythic if I’m being generous.

Efficient play gives efficient time gains. When he tells you he maxed mastery he’s probably telling you he used appropriate consumables and farmed the right events/dungeons/locations to make that mastery farm go fast.

I on the other hand have little patience for repetitive farms even when they are far more efficient as was the case with certain dungeons for mastery farming. It would take me far longer even if he and I played the same hours a day.

It’s not about free time. It’s a mindset. Sort of how some people have no qualms about switching to the optimal class and spec to play while others have attachment to their one particular class and stat/trait loadout and are willing to take the efficiency hit.

Sesshi.2610:

Zenith.7301:

pranker.3748:

Ryn.6459:

ProtoGunner.4953:

BDO looks certainly good, but it seems it will get boring pretty fast what I read about it. I’ll try it out maybe. After a short trip to BnS I noticed the high quality of GW2 which almost no other MMO has (except maybe WoW).

The problem with GW2 is not the quality but the lack of content.

By the way, raids are too easy with a dedicated group and a nightmare with pug (in the case you are willing to spend an hour to set up a group).

The content itself then is big enough, but if you look at it from a casual’s point of view. It might take another year for a random player to get a hang of raids, while more organized groups and hardcore players get over it faster than Anet anticipated.
And concluding from all the known factors right now, it does appear like Anet is trying to keep GW2 a casual game. With that comes lack of high level end-game content.

HoT is hardly casual.

It’s filled with ridiculous time and goldsinks and terrible rewards, which means if you’re not playing the auction house, your gold gain and thus ascended crafting/legendary crafting/skin acquisition crawls to a snail’s pace.

It’s even worse now because you spend so much time just camping for the right map for meta events. It’s time intensive as hell and casual players really don’t have time for that.

What’s more, the raids themselves are what’s casual. You want real raids with mechanics that set the standard, you go do mythic raids in WoW or Wildstar raids. These raids are fun but no raid that can be completed in under a day or two can be passed off as hardcore raid content.

HoT itself is even more ‘casual’ than it’s raids. I reached max mastery (161 at the time) in a week or so, reached fractal 100 2nd day (wouldve been 1st day but team wasnt there untill 7-8 hours after release) wont even talk about personal story since thats braindead afk content except migraine but i soloed that after a few tries.
About legendaries and making money? I made HOPE in a 1-2 months but that was mostly due to not wanting to do the boring and annoying collections which I just forced myself thru in a few days.
then what is left. open world? could you honestly look at the average open world player or someone that does it regularly and say they are any good? nope. TD was semi-challenging but after a few weeks ppl did it with 90%+ success rate and that was with ‘pugs’ on TS.

I still love gw2 to an extent and there are still ‘hardcore’ things to do, a lot less than before HoT and this ridiculous powercreep makes 5 man content completely faceroll and raids easy.

Yeah, I get your point of view. I think we just used the typical clash of definitions for casual.

It can mean two things: casual as in time requirements, or casual as in skill requirements.

In which case if you use the definition referring to skill requirements, I’m there with you.

I’m not even sure why Anet doubled down on boring zerg “dynamic” events for the entirety of their content for an expansion. It’s virtually one of the features I find most boring about the game.

And it’s SO different from Guild Wars 1, which offered interesting missions with optional side objectives as a measure to add difficulty, and content like Domain of Anguish and Underworld which involved far more strategy and build-making than any crap in this sequel that is a sequel just in name because it virtually abandoned everything that made GW1 unique and good.

Wildstar currently offers a model of optional challenges with additional rewards for bosses in raids such as Datascape. It makes the already tight difficulty of the encounters even more engaging AND the rewards are actually good.

It’s too bad GW2 went to the greedy side of F2P and purposely makes its rewards kitten so all there is in this game is a gold grind for mostly aesthetic rewards tied to the gem store and low RNG drops to be purchased at high prices in the auction house to drive their gem to gold conversion sales up.

Still waiting for that MMO with some modicum of decency to treat its players to something new, fun, engaging, and that doesn’t treat the players just as some Pavlovian experiment to turn them into walking ATM’s.

Miellyn.6847:

Sesshi.2610:

TheFamster.7806:

Sesshi.2610:

Ryn.6459:

Are you going to quit or just stopping the solo kittening amazing vids?

quit and will play black desert online

You’ll be back soon then when you know black desert online has no dungeons/raids/end game contents.

Other than the customization it’s losing popularity really fast even in Korea

Reference: http://cdn.gamemeca.com/gmdata/0001/016/546/160210-risell-sw1.jpg
18 is black Desert online and it has weapon upgrade system up to 20+

Black Desert has ‘permagame’, unlike wow and gw2 you always have something to do
and as for endgame, I dont think gw2 has any honestly, or at least it’s very weak
I was done with the first raid wing in 18 hours with SC group, got to fractal 100 2nd day of HoT got to max mastery in a week or so casually and have spent most of my time afking in terrace.
BDO has dungeons and raid bosses, It’s just not the traditional instanced kind that everyone is used to.
And about the popularity in KR, I think It will do much better on NA/EU, but we will see ^^

The first wing has three bosses, one was already killed during the beta. 18h for 2.5 bosses with a group that has the best statistical gear in the game is actually not that bad designwise…. Give a group with the same skill level in another game BiS gear and look how fast the bosses die there (Hint: they don’t live longer, most of the ‘difficulty’ there is gear grind, not the encounter itself)

I remember only one encounter from the last few years that was mechanical difficult and thats the elemental pair prenerf from wildstar

Yeah, don’t even try this crap. This is not remotely the case for WoW mythic and Wildstar raids where people can obtain close to BiS gear long before clear times can approach a single or two raid nights.

Wildstar’s Datascape took 7 months for the first Avatus clear. There is no time gating whatsoever close to that time period, the people were decked in BiS gear by the second month.

You’re being generous with GW2’s content difficulty. Most world first winners in WoW actually beat the race by tunneling gear to alts, crafting pieces of similar ilv to raids and buying the rest off black markets auction houses so they are in no way undergeared. And the average clear times for guilds that have geared up are certainly longer than 18hr.

Don’t try to make this about gear gating when it’s so obvious that GW2’s raid mechanics and combat are very simplistic by industry standards.

Um, you’re already a boonbot in PvE. Everything else you do for a competitive PvE environment is worthless.

Versatility is meaningless in formats that demand specialization for optimal group compositions.

pranker.3748:

Ryn.6459:

ProtoGunner.4953:

BDO looks certainly good, but it seems it will get boring pretty fast what I read about it. I’ll try it out maybe. After a short trip to BnS I noticed the high quality of GW2 which almost no other MMO has (except maybe WoW).

The problem with GW2 is not the quality but the lack of content.

By the way, raids are too easy with a dedicated group and a nightmare with pug (in the case you are willing to spend an hour to set up a group).

The content itself then is big enough, but if you look at it from a casual’s point of view. It might take another year for a random player to get a hang of raids, while more organized groups and hardcore players get over it faster than Anet anticipated.
And concluding from all the known factors right now, it does appear like Anet is trying to keep GW2 a casual game. With that comes lack of high level end-game content.

HoT is hardly casual.

It’s filled with ridiculous time and goldsinks and terrible rewards, which means if you’re not playing the auction house, your gold gain and thus ascended crafting/legendary crafting/skin acquisition crawls to a snail’s pace.

It’s even worse now because you spend so much time just camping for the right map for meta events. It’s time intensive as hell and casual players really don’t have time for that.

What’s more, the raids themselves are what’s casual. You want real raids with mechanics that set the standard, you go do mythic raids in WoW or Wildstar raids. These raids are fun but no raid that can be completed in under a day or two can be passed off as hardcore raid content.

Korean games make me sad. Lightning in a bottle.

Ven Zehn.6573:

Yea, I was thinking arcane for the additional burns, basically choosing between a more powerful Signet of Fire and +100 condi damage, or turning all Arcane skills into additional burns, as well as increased revive speed (most other Arcane benefits are from attunement swapping, which I don’t think will be done often with this build).
At least that’s what I’m assuming you’d want from arcane.
I think Arcane might be better if you took Arcane Brilliance as a heal over the shout, but with the shout, I can heal my allies as well.
With a traited Signet of Fire, you can put 2 stacks of 20s burns on every 16s, with improved crit chance. So I still think Earth is a better option than Arcane.

As for pyromancer’s training, wasn’t sure how important that would be, since the build would already have a lot of other sources of burn, not just from the weapon skills. But I do agree here, just wasn’t sure which would be better overall.

As far as requiring the target to be stationary? Only the ring of fire and fire overload are affected by that really, all the other burn skills are on target or perhaps Dragon Tooth, but that’s easy enough to aim for the most part.

Also, I also would prefer going power, but… just in case you’re having trouble finding another condi, or just another way to make Elems super versatile, this option might be here for us as well.

Also, does the direct damage modifier affect condi’s? (Harmonius Conduit?)
Also, does Sigil of Earth add much condi damage? So would that be better than Sigil of Bursting?

No. Any % damage boosts from traits do NOT affect condition damage unless they specifically state it.

Problem with condi ele compared to other competitive condi builds is that condi ele relies so much on the target being stationary.

I’d rather play my far more mobile D/Wh fresh air tempest.

DGraves.3720:

If you and I, as players, were against a group of enemies one of which is a veteran and the others regulars of the same type we would target the regulars first in most circumstances to kill them first.

Why is it that AI is forced to target enemies (players) with the highest armor? Isn’t that counterintuitive? We wouldn’t do it unless there was a gimmick reward to it but raids are always designed this way.

It confuses me. Raid bosses should target players with the lowest defense first… Because they have the lowest defense.

Because then the only classes that can run berzerker are rev and warrior given that a berk ele at 10k base HP and cloth level armor would be forced to just go PVT and do no damage whatsoever to not get torn apart.

So in essence you’d be encouraging the baseline durable classes like warrior and rev to build for DPS while the elementalists and thieves and rangers would be forced to spec into toughness/vitality, and then see that stat investment wasted because it shifts the boss’s attention to the zerker revenants and warriors by which point you are dead weight as a PVT/Knight ele/mesmer/thief.

So your “solution” would bring us back to “HEAVIES ONLY” and worsen the already pretty bad PvE class balance.

Now if we could remove that awful aftercast off Gravedigger, buff RS #1, scrap those garbage shouts and revamp those terrible PvP-centric traits, the power greatsword reaper might actually be in business.

Gaile also took a look at rangers complaining about being forced into healbots with the Druid specialization as base DPS ranger is garbage, and look where it’s left them.

Nowhere. Not a single thing has changed to make DPS rangers desirable over a healbotting druid.

Ele has a terrible design because it’s garbage at base but basically carried by celestial amulet and boon stacking to cover up for those terrible base stats and miserable innate defenses and long cd burst.

They knocked out celestial amulet and reintroduced larcenous strike thief in the form of necro. Guess what total hardcounter.

I mean how can you play a berzerker class with 10k base hp and cloth armor when thieves, revenants, and mesmers exist.

It’s virtually impossible to go toe to toe as a zerker dagger ele against a thief or rev, their burst is easier to land, more frequent, and they got better mobility and innate defenses.

Look at fire grab, it’s basically a backstab that’s harder to land with an obvious telegraph and wonky range, and a whopping 45 sec cd I mean what the hell is a 45 sec cd for Fire Grab it’s absolutely idiotic.

Then look at the arcane skills, they basically are 15-30 sec cd for a skill that hits less hard than a thief/warrior/revenant autoattack crit.

And then you have mist form/arcane shield/armor of earth on 60+ sec cd’s. No way you can run a zerker ele successfully with such a long cd on burst and such a long cd on defenses.

Kraljevo.2801:

Zenith.7301:

Mitch.4781:

Why is this a thing? Patch this crap pls.. It’s just annoying and totally unecessary. More peopel die trying to jump up on the pole than by simply fighting him normally. Honestly, it really is an easy fight.

Good luck with that, look at how long it was that people were fighting him underwater.

This game is filled with people who want the path of least resistance. It’s a gold farming game, the gameplay is a side show.

Welcome to gaming in 2016, friend. Everything handed on a silver platter.

But there are games like WoW with developers who actually have a PTR and action reports to fix this crap before it’s even implemented.

Same goes for Wildstar actually.

It’s this game where it basically encourages people to skip and exploit things as much as possible because you don’t even have a dedicated fractal/dungeon team that fixes crap in a timely manner.

The only frequent dev support they have is for their gem store updates.

Mitch.4781:

Why is this a thing? Patch this crap pls.. It’s just annoying and totally unecessary. More peopel die trying to jump up on the pole than by simply fighting him normally. Honestly, it really is an easy fight.

Good luck with that, look at how long it was that people were fighting him underwater.

This game is filled with people who want the path of least resistance. It’s a gold farming game, the gameplay is a side show.

cranos.5913:

Zenith.7301:

cranos.5913:

Zenith.7301:

50% boon duration aura and assassin’s presence. Can’t be replaced by another class

50% boon duration is unnecessary. We played without revenants tonight and there were still perma boons, including quickness and fury. Assassin’s presence is also a rather minor dps boost compared to warrior/druid so I wouldn’t be too sure about revenant. ^^

What was your comp to make facet of nature unnecessary? I’m talking specifically quickness and even convenient boons like protection.

Because I’m sure there are raids that can clear the instance without a chrono as well, but that has nothing to do with the power of utility just because the content is easy enough to be completed by any comp.

Instead of 2 revs we took 2 DH. Controversial I know, but you gotta switch up once in a while to keep things interesting. For quickness just the chrono was used tho. They just do not need a revenant to keep permanent quickness up. And before you ask, no sigil of concentration was used either, just the 30% from food/uti.

As for protection… Our revs never had large uptime on that in the first place tbh. Wasn’t rly necessary.

EDIT: I kitten ed, guardians did use FMW. That being said chronos could prob keep up perma quickness quite easily with some more boon duration stats/sigil.

Yeah, I can see the quickness can be gamed with a certain setup but to be honest you’re reducing the margin for flexibility, especially when it comes to splitting or certain interruptions with wells/time warp that don’t allow a mesmer to turret quickness on your raid. The revenant is adding 50% duration to these valuable boons which makes their usage more adaptable to positioning.

And then you lost DPS with a dragonhunter replacing the rev. For fun yeah, much like wanting to bring my reaper or saying kitten druid I’m going full DPS ranger, etc. Doesn’t reduce how strong relative to other classes revenant and warriors are.

It’s just a crappy scenario, the large disparity in utility and DPS output across classes.

cranos.5913:

Zenith.7301:

50% boon duration aura and assassin’s presence. Can’t be replaced by another class

50% boon duration is unnecessary. We played without revenants tonight and there were still perma boons, including quickness and fury. Assassin’s presence is also a rather minor dps boost compared to warrior/druid so I wouldn’t be too sure about revenant. ^^

What was your comp to make facet of nature unnecessary? I’m talking specifically quickness and even convenient boons like protection.

Because I’m sure there are raids that can clear the instance without a chrono as well, but that has nothing to do with the power of utility just because the content is easy enough to be completed by any comp.

spoj.9672:

Now you are just making stuff up. All classes are taken purely for utility or buffs. Thats what makes them popular and what makes them fun. The only class that isnt is Ele because its the top dps class. And I suppose the same could be said for necro because they have very little else to offer other than mediocre dps.

Chrono is lucky since its range of utility will never fall out of popularity. Before chrono mesmers were still meta because of portals, timewarp and reflects. Now they have even more tools. The other classes just need their utility range to be brought up to par or given encounters which further encourage them.

I know, it was so fun to be running ahead setting portals while the rest of the people were doing the actual encounter.

I imagine the veilbots in WvW have the same gratitude for their one trick pony status. Or, you can play an ele/warrior/rev and still be wanted in a group while not doing absolute dogcrap DPS.

Warrior utility will never fall out of the popular range of utility, same for revenant. That’s kind of the point about utility that increases offensive throughput such as banners, 50% boon duration aura and assassin’s presence. Can’t be replaced by another class.

And don’t bring up this crap with me about necro. You were the one shooting down in the necro forums any idea about buffing reaper shroud 1 to make reaper shroud a DPS cooldown upgrade back before Robert Gee disappeared into the nether, when it’s plain as day in my post history on those forums that reaper traits were absolute garbage for PvE as were shouts and all that carried reaper was Gravedigger which was handicapped with a huge aftercast.

I don’t need to neglect the issues with a chronomancer to appreciate those of rangers or necromancers. The point is more classes should have gotten the revenant/warrior treatment of competitive DPS+utility, and those without utility should be doing ele lv DPS.

Wethospu.6437:

Zenith.7301:

NikeEU.7690:

Mesmer is still OP in raids it’s K.

Condi warrior everyone saw that nerf coming miles away. If you made ascended gear for condi warrior you had to know this was a likely chance and you had to know what you were risking.

Chronomancer is. Mesmer is trash.

Chrono is virtually a vanilla WoW shaman, a buff stick with miserable DPS capabilities.

It’s not remotely fun to be brought to a raid just for a buff you provide otherwise they’d give you the boot for another class like rev or guardian if reflects/stability ever become a thing again.

What is fun then? Being brought because of your good looks?

Not having your class being made relevant by a single boon they could take a sledgehammer nerf to like they did alacrity and before that quickness.

Of course, being a warrior you wouldn’t really know that considering your pet class has enjoyed the best of both worlds since the game has been out. Warriors and revenants are the very definition of keystone utility coupled with competitive DPS.

Meanwhile rangers and mesmers are tossed into some niche (healbot and buffbot respectively) and thieves fell out into oblivion altogether because their niche utility was no longer relevant in a raid to compensate for DPS shortcomings. As was the case for dragonhunter since reflects or stability lost prominence.

This expansion was a scam for costing the same amount as the vanilla Guild Wars 2 which brought SOOOOOO much more content and armor/weaponsets.

NikeEU.7690:

Mesmer is still OP in raids it’s K.

Condi warrior everyone saw that nerf coming miles away. If you made ascended gear for condi warrior you had to know this was a likely chance and you had to know what you were risking.

Chronomancer is. Mesmer is trash.

Chrono is virtually a vanilla WoW shaman, a buff stick with miserable DPS capabilities.

It’s not remotely fun to be brought to a raid just for a buff you provide otherwise they’d give you the boot for another class like rev or guardian if reflects/stability ever become a thing again.

AlphatheWhite.9351:

Zenith.7301:

I mean, can anyone here say when was the last time that after previewing changes from patch notes they changed a single thing from feedback?

The feedback on Feedback and some feedback on scepter AA seems to have been noticed.

I also recall being angry about the Duelist’s Discipline nerf (before we’d even got to try the unbugged version), and suggesting something very much like what they just did as a compromise.

Those are changes that happened in subsequent patches.

What I’m talking about is when have they ever, after previewing changes and receiving feedback about them, altered those changes according to feedback before they are patched in.

99% of the time they go “here are the changes that are coming, you can see them maybe 1-2 weeks before they land, you can talk about them if you want, but they are going as is regardless of what you have to say”.

It tells you a lot about crappy development practices when this is the single MOO without a Public Test Realm deployed one month before a patch to test and gather feedback before changes are implemented and adjust accordingly.

And they don’t care about having a PTR, which pretty much tells you that they really don’t care much about player input when deciding changes about the game.

It’s not like this thread accomplishes anything.

As usual, anet devs only appear when they have game boxes to sell from vanilla/xpac sales, and once those sales windows are gone they disappear back into the nether until the next product sale comes around.

I mean, can anyone here say when was the last time that after previewing changes from patch notes they changed a single thing from feedback?

These are not WoW/FFXIV/Wildstar devs, they don’t give a kitten about player input when making balance changes outside of the two weeks they gave us before heart of thorns.

They are utterly incompetent at balancing autoattacks across classes.

I mean, revenant autoattack for sword was not only the highest autoattack in the game by a mile, but it pierced in a line as well and applied a metric ton of vulnerability.

On the other hand you have mesmer main hand sword, which is their best autoattack DPS, it was behind thief sword auto DPS by 30%, and with thief changes now mesmer mainhand sword is 55% worse than thief sword which just got buffed.

Necro axe was terrible, got a measly 10% buff, and now ele scepter didn’t even get touched.

They wouldn’t know PvE DPS balance if it punched them in the face.

lol Strider’s Defense is still worthless.

What don’t they understand that nobody will take a trait for a defense that works 50% of the time. Defenses are supposed to be reliable, not RNG.

More importantly, cooldown reduction to mainhand sword is worthless in PvE, since for some reason Serpent Strike has a greater cooldown than Rev’s Unrelenting Assault yet does less than 1/5 of UA’s damage.

I mean, 2/3 of the skills on the mainhand sword are not DPS skills you use rotationally, and in fact they are dodges you use situationally.

Worst of all, garbage like Most Dangerous Game and Nature’s Vengeance still exists.

GW2 has no DPS meters and yet its elitism and build/class demands are even worse than games like WoW. In no moment in WoW have I been denied in a PuG or seen LFG messages saying “only these classes and specs, not these others”.

And that’s with DPS meters and even further, combat logging analytic tools.

And yet you’re acting as if this game gaining a DPS meter will be the difference between elitism and not having it, as if people were so stupid as to no realize that some classes are doing so much more damage than other classes and often these very classes also have overwhelmingly good utility to boot.

You may like to stick your head in the sand, but that doesn’t mean everybody else doesn’t have alts and realize how certain classes perform compared to others while you waste people’s time with your PHIW staff condi necro.

And you know that their preview of changes is just crap that will go live regardless of feedback.

And given that these meager, pathetic balance changes took 4 months to conjure up, expect 4 months of being garbage until they realize they got it wrong, again.

It’s not like they do any meaningful changes unless it’s tied to a box sale hype train.

At least you’re not a mesmer.

They got destroyed by nerfs and their scepter buff was the same joke as ele, a 5% attack speed buff to the worst weapon in the game tied to a trait.

Anet wouldn’t know balance even if it was staring right back them.

DuckDuckBOOM.4097:

@Zenith
You really want to talk about glass ele not being viable because thief and warrior? Or a glass mesmer when everyone is playing bunker and none of those classes/builds are considered viable right now?

I’ve been running a Berserker staff Fire/Air/Tempest in PvP for ranked and I’ve been doing fine with it. Chaining 4 reflects means DHs kill themselves. Air 5+ overload wrecks the few thieves I run into. Given the bunker meta, it works pretty well as a bunker buster and actually finishing team fights. It can’t counter everything (nor should any build) but the only real “problem” build I have are a few revenants or an occasional necro in 1v1 situations when this build isn’t really meant to 1v1 anyway but +1 and end team fights. Importantly lightning rod + Air3/4 and Earth 4 and shocking aura help alot with the offensive capabilities in other attunements (those are mostly unblockable too so it helps destroy bunker mesmers). No it’s not meta but because of that, there is of course the surprise wtf moment when an enemy team wipes at the start of a game because they don’t think to focus a tempest and that actually wins me a lot of games when solo queueing in ranked. I’m looking forward to the buffs to lightning rod but that trait is non-existent in PvE builds.

Basically, they don’t need to split everything, nor will changes to GM traits necessarily buff ele like crazy in PvE because lightning rod buffs won’t. I doubt BttH will change as it’ll be kept a “PvE staff” trait and it’s too similar to other 20% more damage below 50%. I’m curious as to how they will buff Fresh Air and that will help D/X eles in PvE but when you think about it, the DPS eles that run D/X zerker in PvE are almost like thieves. Just mobile melee cleave damage with no utility. And if thieves are getting a buff to auto attack damage, I just see this as an increase in build diversity without breaking both game modes. And they could even do something screwy with Fresh Air like adding a 10% bonus damage with scepter clause. Just wait a few more hours to see what the preview says.

Get back to me when you’re winning tournaments, particularly ones with cash prizes, with a zerker/marauder ele in it.

Cyninja.2954:

Zenith.7301:

Rasimir.6239:

Actually they have announced a while back (before HoT release) that they won’t be offerring new armor skin sets on the tp anymore, only outfits.

That said, the expansion came with three sets each for light and medium (bladed, leystone, guild) and four for heavy (the former plus the mist-something armor for the revenant), as well as individual pieces for each elite specialization. Seeing how living story season two also brought two new armor sets (carapace and luminescent), I’m hoping to see more new armor with season 3 later this year.

Outfit and armor are the same crap. You can disable the helmet and even shoulders. Point is, the chunk of the looks are being made available by cash shop, and an even larger portion locked behind the gambling boxes that are black lion ticket scraps.

Besides, the armors you mentioned added is a pitiful excuse. Most of them are locked behind zerg event and gold grinds.

Core Tyria came with 8 dungeons, of each with 3 paths except arah that came with 4 in addition to the story instances. So, 33 instances.

So 8 sets of light, medium, and heavy armor behind instanced content involving groups and teamwork and not a zerg event grind where strangers mash their autoattack at a HP punching bag. That’s double what we received from an expansion alone, not including other base sets not coming from dungeons.

And this came not from garbage zerg content where all you have to do is map hop and sit with your ranged weapon mashing 1 at the boss until it dies AFK style ala Vinewrath.

Outfits and armor are by far not “the same crap”. They function different enough to warrent a distinction. You might not care about the difference (being that outfits can not be altered but togled on/off at will on every character) but a great many players who love customizing their characters do.

On topic, there were 3 full sets of armor added with HoT (4 for heavy armor users). Most cosmetic additions came in form of weapon, backpiece and glider skins though. See http://dulfy.net/2015/11/08/gw2-hot-weapons-armor-and-backpieces-guide/#Guild_Armor for details.

You trade the ability to mix and match pieces (defeating the purpose of the word “armor SET”) by gaining an outfit you don’t have to constantly spend transmutation charges on.

The point that cosmetic variety comes mainly from the cash shop still stands, and you reiterated your point about 3 sets for no reason whatsoever; I already acknowledged it and raised a counter explaining what a pitiful amount that is in comparison for what you got in vanilla GW2 and the awful HoT zerg content required to obtain that armor versus other venues for acquisition in vanilla.

Rasimir.6239:

Actually they have announced a while back (before HoT release) that they won’t be offerring new armor skin sets on the tp anymore, only outfits.

That said, the expansion came with three sets each for light and medium (bladed, leystone, guild) and four for heavy (the former plus the mist-something armor for the revenant), as well as individual pieces for each elite specialization. Seeing how living story season two also brought two new armor sets (carapace and luminescent), I’m hoping to see more new armor with season 3 later this year.

Outfit and armor are the same crap. You can disable the helmet and even shoulders. Point is, the chunk of the looks are being made available by cash shop, and an even larger portion locked behind the gambling boxes that are black lion ticket scraps.

Besides, the armors you mentioned added is a pitiful excuse. Most of them are locked behind zerg event and gold grinds.

Core Tyria came with 8 dungeons, of each with 3 paths except arah that came with 4 in addition to the story instances. So, 33 instances.

So 8 sets of light, medium, and heavy armor behind instanced content involving groups and teamwork and not a zerg event grind where strangers mash their autoattack at a HP punching bag. That’s double what we received from an expansion alone, not including other base sets not coming from dungeons.

And this came not from garbage zerg content where all you have to do is map hop and sit with your ranged weapon mashing 1 at the boss until it dies AFK style ala Vinewrath.

If core mesmer did considerably more DPS than chrono and Chronophantasma was made baseline, you’d see a possibility for core mesmers.

But it isn’t.

Mesmer utility outside wells and feedback is absolute garbage. Point one for chrono.

Chronophantasma is a band aid for the flaw inherent in the shatter mechanic, and ability that doesn’t overcome the sustained DPS loss of 3 phantasms. So mesmers want to take this if they don’t want to kitten their sustained DPS by shattering, which continuum shift and alacrity on shatter demand.

Then there’s the 25% movement speed minor, the mesmer’s only access to high movement uptimes.

And since non-chrono traits are so bad to begin with, mesmers don’t have an option.

They nerfed harmonious mantras to the ground so mantra builds are dead, and thus Dueling has no worthwhile grandmaster to a power build.

Domination has a bunch of weak interrupt centric effects, on a class who has high cooldowns on interrupts besides offhand sword #4, so the uptime on a couple of vulnerability stacks is junk for a minor trait, as is quickness on interrupt. The other is increased shatter damage as our only domination grandmaster, since power block was made totally worthless by the breakbar changes.

Illusions is another stinker, with confusion on shatter as a minor, what the hell is that. Confusion is a garbage condition, through and through. It does pitiful damage, and a minor trait that procs conditions is dumb for a line oftenh used with power specs. It’s a waste of a minor. Then the grandmaster, just like the other mesmer traitlines, is worthless. 15% extra crit to mindwrack, which is not even used in PvE much because it’s a DPS loss without chronophantasma, or a blind on block which again doesn’t work on most monsters due to breakbar.

These people have such haphazard development/balancing ideas. It’s like they’re completely divorced from how their game is actually played in serious PvE and even PvP. And they still continue to try to balance for both which as expected ends in disaster.

I just gave up, there are better MMO’s out there for PvE with serious class balance, not the usual hype train into massive gold/currency grinds and cash shop gambling boxes containing tickets for their skins released bi-weekly or monthly while the core game has barely any armors/weaponskins added that aren’t some massive gold grind/RNG drop or zerg dynamic event content.

They would never implement DPS meters, it’s basically an official admission of the terrible PvE class balance they’ve allowed to fester for so long.

The entire point of keeping DPS meters disabled is to keep data more difficult to access and to obscure claims of performance under the excuse of “we have the metrics, you don’t”.

Ithilwen.1529:

I thinks it’s pretty obvious the intent is to nerf Chronomancers out of the game. ANET hates it when Mesmers are successful.

It’s not ANET.

ANET just responds to PvP crybabies, and PvE players are held hostage as a result since they refuse to split PvE/PvP balance.

PvP will never be balanced in people’s eyes so long as developers don’t grow the balls to tell the players they don’t balance for 1v1’s but rather team fights so their bruised dueler egos can rest easy knowing their QQ is dismissed.

Class balance is easy to achieve in PvE, you just adjust for DPS. In PvP it’s impossible since people compete on different skill levels and compositions so the perception of OP varies wildly. It’s virtually impossible to balance with just some numbers tweak.

Since I also saw some posts about increasing ele DPS, I want to remind people that they don’t split PvE/PvP balance unfortunately.

DPS ele in spvp is in a garbage state, the class doesn’t have enough baked in defense into its weaponset for a PvP environment and so a zerker/marauder ele hasn’t been viable for quite a while. In fact, zerker/marauder ele not only boast a 12-14k base health pool which means a 2-shot from a half competent thief/warrior/mesmer, but their burst builds are nowhere near as effective as a thief/mesmer/revenant. Their burst build is a scepter/dagger build which is largely immobile for roaming, relies on multiple highly telegraphed skillshots to do the full burst comparable to thief/mesmer/revenant, and the cooldown on that burst is massively longer than thief/ele/revenant burst windows. What’s more, outside cantrips you have ele utilities like arcane shield and mist form on a whopping 1+ minute cd, and arcane shield dies immediately in the second chain of a revenant’s autoattack.

So you have a powerful class when it can turret in PvE but as a DPS class in PvP the ele simply cannot run zerker/marauder successfully and must result to celestial/bunker builds because of its innate frailty, high cooldowns on both burst and defensive tools and range inflexibility (no choice of ranged+melee wep combination, so all ele specs in PvP must be built to be overall effective in all scenarios).

The buffs you’re seeing to ele come from a PvP standpoint and until they split PvE/PvP balance you’ll continue to see this kind of rollercoaster balancing that satisfies neither side.

Azukas.1426:

Zenith.7301:

Azukas.1426:

Rome.7124:

Azukas.1426:

Fay.2357:

Azukas.1426:

Seriously everyone needs to stop thier kittening. Since June 23rd every big patch has made us top dog in this game.

Haha what?

Azukas.1426:

Think about the actual classes that are hurting (warrior/thief).

You mean the ones that are described as getting multiple substantial buffs in the preview?

I’m thinking your version of reality needs a second opinion.

No multiple substantial buffs were revealed. Stop with the drama. I mean someone stated that thieves will wreck us just by clicking on our names again….seriously they discussed buffing AAs….

The most alarming thing I saw was the buffing of necro/druid. Not feeling that but we’ll see.

So just cut it out and let’s see what happens.

Anet hasnt had good track record when it comes to Mesmers, you cant blame us for feeling negative. ANd I think you are underestimate how much “buffs” thieves will receive.

I’m calling it, Mesmers and Revenants will be nerfed out of meta.

Please name this track record that anet has.

As for thief the preview literally said auto attacks and acrobatics. Could there be more? Maybe but we don’t know.

Considering autoattacks constitute the majority of DPS of many classes, including the revenant’s broken kitten DPS autoattack (which is getting nerfed thank god), I don’t see how you can wave off autoattack increases.

Classes whose majority of competitive DPS comes from auto:

1- Revenant
2- Ranger mainhand sword (their only viable and very flawed weapon)
3- Condi necro, dagger necro, Reaper before 50% health Gravedigger spam.
4- Guardian
5- Staff daredevil
6- Dagger ele with lightning whip

In fact, most of the DPS inbalance in PvE in this game comes from the vast disparity in autoattack potency across the classes.

Easily because if they are auto attacking us they are standing in our wells playing to our strengths. If you can’t adjust your gameplay to account for a slight increase in thief auto attacks then you need to rethink your strat

Um, I’m not talking about PvP balance, I’m talking about PvE. I’m talking about the fact that thieves have so much more autoattack DPS than mesmers and yet it’s their autoattack that’s getting buffed while we got a miserable 10% increase a few months ago. It’s a farce.

Besides, you could make the same argument that revenants with their broken autoattack are also standing in your wells since autoattack and sword 2 is their main source of damage, yet revenants do pretty well against mesmers regardless and a while ago thieves did as well.

I mean, if you’ve played a thief you know the autoattacks are filler in between revealed debuff timers, so it’s free damage they’re getting and a thief isn’t just gonna stand there off your wells doing nothing while you pelt him from a distance with phantasms until Revealed debuff wears off and they can blackpowder heartseeker combo into a backstab.