Getting xp for killing mobs has always been subpar.
Also, no loot? Play more, put effort in, get better loot bags. What’s the issue with loot?
This may come as a complete surprise to you but some classes are absolutely inferior at tagging and AoE damage.
Time to move on to a new elite spec. Maybe the next one will be a good one. I do think that Ele needs their own condition build though at this point since Anet is pushing hard for conditions to be just as viable as power builds at least in PvE. It likely will never be fully viable in big WvW groups due to the amount of condi clear but if it is viable with these high toughness bosses I’m ok with that.
(psst, offhand dagger is already really well balanced for a frontline build minus Churning Earth which is terrible, go make Mainhand Sword ele a condi ele. Fire is burn/blind, air is vuln/weakness, earth is bleeds/cripple, water is chill)
No thanks, don’t want a condi offhand when none of the mainhands support that.
No, bleed centric builds are garbage and none of the mainhands provide any reasonable amount of burning to make a condi build remotely viable in PvE.
Leave the condi builds to engineer/ranger/necro/mesmer/mallyx rev and keep ele power centric.
I would never sacrifice Ferocious Winds for Zephyr’s Boon. Fury is such an easy boon to stack for any class, if the ele isn’t doing it by blasting persisting flames, a druid with clarion bond or Herald with facet will be providing the permafury instead at very little cost.
Same goes for swiftness, which is an even easier boon for a group to stack.
My personal suggestions would be for that trait that grants the aura on overload provide groupwide auras.
Make speedy conduit instead of giving redundant swiftness, which is easily gained by other means, give quickness to yourself and allies for X amount of time after finishing an overload.
Latent stamina should happen on any attunement swap, not just water.
Harmonious Conduit’s buff should grant 3 stacks of stability and the damage buff should last 10-12 seconds.
Tempestuous Aria should increase to 5-6 stacks of might and 6-8 seconds of weakness.
Lucid Singularity should apply to allies and grant superspeed.
The other two will become worthwhile once the warhorn isn’t kitten as hell.
As far as overloads, all of them could use adjustment, fire and air a bit more reward for the risk, it’s silly that a meteor shower can be cast from a distance and still does more damage than higher risk abilities.
Fire and air are close to good, but water and earth are huge stinkers. ZERO DPS for 4 seconds for absolutely mediocre effects. That water overload should be on the scale of the guardian’s book elite healing, and the earth overload should apply a block aura to allies so it can be used like the dragonhunter’s virtue.
The shouts are almost as bad or worse than the warhorn, they’ll need to beef up the effects as only the earth one seems worthwhile in PvE
(edited by Zenith.7301)
People wishing an end to the zerker meta are going to regret it when they make content that forces you to have several full sets of ascended gear and weapons with different stats for each encounter on hand.
You think gold sinks are bad now? Expect them to get worse when you need to sink 600+ gold per ascended set of stats. One set for power, one set for condi, one set for survival/healing.
Zenith appears to live in a world where his entire party is perfect and never gets hit by anything. No need for permanent Protection, Healing, Vigor, Regeneration, and so on – just need damage!
And you seem to live in a world where others cannot provide those without gimping their damage output like the ele does by going tempest aura specs.
Advice is not to build Tempest at all for PvE if you want DPS. You’re giving up Arcane’s 2% damage per boon (easily 10%+ damage in a group setting) and superior traits just to overload fire in staff, which is situational as it requires melee range anyways.
Tempest is a plain stinker in PvE.
As with everything in this game, they design something for PvP and PvE is an afterthought.
Except melee range is not situational. I mean, why would it be? If it was situational, then D/D won’t be practical at all, because it constantly requires melee range. Because it’s a ranged weapon, therefore it’s situational?
Okay, so you give up 2% damage increase per boon from arcane. Well, the thing is that Harmonious Conduit gives a flat 10% bonus to damage for 5 seconds after an overload. So theoretically, if you were to do a slow rotation on your attunements, you would always have a 10% dmg increase that is not dependent on a certain number of boons.
Of course, you aren’t going to do that in PvE. You are largely going to camp fire. Which means you have a 10% dmg increase for 5 seconds every 20 seconds. If you take cooldown reduction on fire abilities, this puts your meteor shower at 20 seconds which is the same cooldown as overlord. Therefore if you put a lava font -> fire overload -> meteor shower rotation, you always get a 10% damage increase to your heaviest hitting fire ability.
So when you compare that to a 2% stacking damage increase that’s inconsistent and situational, they are roughly equal in practice.
Therefore, you really aren’t losing much of a damage increase from dropping arcane. In fact, you’re gaining a huge boost to your damage output from a new ability which does 1,100 dmg a pulse in full beserker (300 less than meteor shower), stacks burn and might on pulse and has the same cooldown as a traited meteor shower.
This doesn’t even factor in the large increase in fury uptime from blasting fire fields and using auras.
The only real con to this new ability is melee range, which isn’t situational anymore than D/D is situational in PvE. It can just make using more difficult at time.
In conclusion, it’s not a plain stinker in PvE. The build I posted does potentially more damage than the traditional fire/air/arcane staff.
Dagger range is not melee range. Dagger ele has the highest max melee range and it actually allows you to attack away from the reach of most mobs. Fire overload does not.
And the arcane % is not hard or inconsistent. You’ll hev perma might, fury, and swiftness at the very least, add quickness from the chronomancer which they can provide close to 30-40 seconds of, permanent regen from the engineer turret or Glint’s facet or the Druid in your group.
You are virtually eating 3 useless traits and terrible minor traits just for the fire overload, let’s see how many times you complete it against mobs that actually force you to dodge since people whined so much about melee in the forums to the point that they’ve made mobs specifically designed to punish melee (so more people can camp and profit from ranged weapons that carry little risk).
To me it seems like Tempest is terrible for PvE on anything than staff and the staff variant probably cuts even with the vanilla build.
Advice is not to build Tempest at all for PvE if you want DPS. You’re giving up Arcane’s 2% damage per boon (easily 10%+ damage in a group setting) and superior traits just to overload fire in staff, which is situational as it requires melee range anyways.
Tempest is a plain stinker in PvE.
As with everything in this game, they design something for PvP and PvE is an afterthought.
They mindlessly follow a rotation because that rotation is how you maintain DPS in PvE.
What are you going to do, sit in fire and do fire autoattacks on dagger? Bye-bye DPS.
You gotta keep using burning speed, frozen burst to blast, earth 4 to blast again, and switch to air for the only non-garbage autoattack DPS on dagger.
It seems like you are the one who doesn’t have a clue why elementalist can only function by constantly swapping.
It will continue to be the case until the autoattacks on attunements besides fire staff and air dagger aren’t total garbage. Any autoattacks besides those two are a large DPS loss in PvE and doing an overload doesn’t come close to compensating.
And yes, you have to swap attunements to blast your fire fields to proc perma fury from persisting flames for your group. That is why they’re even bringing you.
Right now Tempest only functions as a gimmick bunker pvp spec, complete garbage in any other game format or gear set/playstyle.
How is that not a problem?
I don’t see reaper/chrono/scrapper/dragonhunter/herald being pigeonholed into a single role and a single tank stat combo.
I don’t know how you’re stuck auto-attacking for 5 seconds, I don’t have that problem. Also, if you care enough about might generation there’s Tempestuous Aria.
Yeah, that MUST be it. It cannot possibly be that the spec has several obvious flaws, that make it difficult to use…
I’d like to know what these flaws are. Care to list them?
Tip, any skill that is not burning speed on dagger is DPS negative compared to the air autoattack. Even fire autoattack is better than drake’s breath.
I know you people from PvP think Drake’s Breath is the bomb, but it’s utter garbage in PvE, as are all the other dagger skills that are not the autoattacks and burning speed.
Tempestuous area is horrendous, it requires you use the shouts which are WORTHLESS in PvE because auras are worthless in PvE except magnetic aura.
You’re better off taking arcane blast and blasting burning speed.
DPS doesn’t matter in PvP because you’re fighting targets which at best have 20k HP so anything seems decently damaging to such low health pools.
(edited by Zenith.7301)
Right now I think a lot of players are hung up on a few issues:
1) They mindlessly follow a rotation and can’t overload because they’re constantly switching attunements.
2) They’re not willing to use anything other than cantrips even though some shouts would work well in their build.
3) They don’t know how to play builds without arcane or water trait lines.If they can adapt and get around these issues, then Tempest opens up a whole lot of build options.
They mindlessly follow a rotation because that rotation is how you maintain DPS in PvE.
What are you going to do, sit in fire and do fire autoattacks on dagger? Bye-bye DPS.
You gotta keep using burning speed, frozen burst to blast, earth 4 to blast again, and switch to air for the only non-garbage autoattack DPS on dagger.
It seems like you are the one who doesn’t have a clue why elementalist can only function by constantly swapping.
It will continue to be the case until the autoattacks on attunements besides fire staff and air dagger aren’t total garbage. Any autoattacks besides those two are a large DPS loss in PvE and doing an overload doesn’t come close to compensating.
And yes, you have to swap attunements to blast your fire fields to proc perma fury from persisting flames for your group. That is why they’re even bringing you.
Right now Tempest only functions as a gimmick bunker pvp spec, complete garbage in any other game format or gear set/playstyle.
How is that not a problem?
I don’t see reaper/chrono/scrapper/dragonhunter/herald being pigeonholed into a single role and a single tank stat combo.
i do run zerk on my tempest in the junge and get along just fine, you just need to pay attention
This. Ele survivalbility never came from the base stats anyways, it’s because of the synergies in your build, so if you play it properly, you should be fine.
There might be reasons why we would want ele hp to be buffed…your complaint is not one of them.
dude im a 20k ap ele playing since launch as my main plz dont insinuate i dont know how to play my class thats just insulting
This is the build I started HoT with. It’s not full zerk because I haven’t had the chance to replace them all with ascended after I stopped doing WvW, but it doesn’t even have 15k hp. I’ve not had any trouble in HoT aside from some of the champs for hero points, which weren’t meant to be soloed anyways.
After I unlocked tempest, things got even easier despite not having changed gears. So if I’m not having trouble, obviously the problem isn’t universal.
Ps. Judging someone’s skills in PvE by looking at AP is about as effective as judging someone’s skills in PvP by looking at their glory rank. Aka not very accurate.
I also mained ele since headstart, I have 12k AP because I don’t care about a lot of the PvE achievements. So you throwing around your 20k AP doesn’t tell me anything about the way you play.Anything not full zerk is meaningless anyways, you either bring full zerk to the raid or we replace you with someone who can.
We’re not talking about raids. Obviously if we go against monsters that simplifies the combat situation to “get one-shot” or “get one shot maybe”, then we’d want the dps. That is also assuming there are no further mechanics being introduced to prevent this.
My advice to people would be to choose the grandmaster for the warhorn that increases boon duration and procs warhorn earth 4 for magnatic aura and protection when you hit 80% health.
It prevents the ridiculously OP frogs and snipers from 2-3 shotting you from range as the magnetic aura gives you time to survive and apply damage.
The problem is when there are multiple ranged mobs all focusing you from range, you are going to go down if you don’t LoS them into melee.
Also, the vets/elite/champs who punish melee will make your life as a Tempest hell.
I’m playing Tempest because I sunk some gold into Howler, but this spec is definitely weak compared to Reaper/Chrono/Revenant/Engineer and even Dragonhunter.
Not taking element bastion is a huge reduction on your own survivalbility as a tempest.
Warhorn at the moment is the most underwhelming part of tempest, gimping yourself because you want to play with your Howler is hardly a reason to ask for changes to ele hp. If anything you should be focusing on asking for warhorn to be made better. In the meantime…use focus because it has an innate reflect in earth 4 and invuln on earth 5.
Once you learn the patterns on the frogs and snipers, you just reflect everything and laugh because they hit themselves for thousands with each reflected shot. I’ve honestly never thought they were anywhere OP after my initial encounter with them in the betas.
There’s also no rules saying that you have to melee as a tempest…We can still disengage and weapon swap. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to run away.
I’m taking warhorn let alone tempest because I want to play the elite spec as advertised.
Otherwise I wouldn’t even bother to spec Tempest in PvE as all traits are terrible, what are you going to do with Elemental Bastion when on a dagger/focus you got 2 auras, both of which are terrible in a PvE setting (shocking aura doesn’t work on most mobs you need it against, since it doesn’t work on ranged mobs, champs, or even some vets thanks to breakbars making most CC useless unless coordinated with a group).
In fact, Tempest is a terrible traitline for PvE, period. The adepts are all useless, 3 secs vigor aoe or eye of the storm on cc the least mediocre of the bunch, the other one a garbage aura proc on overload finish (auras are garbage in PvE, since as a 12k hp ele you don’t even want to get hit to proc 1 stack of might or shave off 10% less damage from an attack that will still 1-2 shot you).
The minors are horrendous, swiftness when casting an overload is total garbage given the abundance of swiftness in the game or the fact you already get a speed boost while in air attunement, which will be your most frequent overload with fresh air.
Then there’s the master and grandmasters, all particularly worthless for PvE as well.
The masters have harmonious conduit having too short a duration on both effects. Should be 3 stacks of stability and 10-12 sec duration on the buff.
Tempestuous Aria has a pitiful 3 sec weakness and only 2 pitiful stacks of might, tied to shouts which are already useless in PvE with the exception of Shock and Aftershock.
Hardy conduit lasts too little and is a selfish effect with no offensive benefit to the elementalist nor group utility, just a minor to reduce the sting of being stuck channeling a 4 sec cast on a 10k base hp class.
So, yeah, I’m running a suboptimal dagger/warhorn Tempest build.
I’m running a suboptimal build anyways in any case I choose Tempest. It’s truly a terrible spec for PvE at the moment.
Yes, I know vanilla D/F without Tempest at all is plain better.
My point is the kitten elite spec we were advertised should not be such a major stinker compared to reaper/chrono/herald/dragonhunter/scrapper who are all doing great in all game formats with multiple gearsets and not just as some gimmick bunker spec.
Did you honestly think they’d remove one of the most important massive goldsinks that drive their customers to buy gems to trade for gold with real life money?
Keep dreaming.
I bought my Howl for 300g, dirt cheap compared to the ridiculous price I’d be paying for crafting it via collection.
One more of the broken promises, the whole precursor hunt was about playing the game not farming mats.
Turns out it’s not even worth it, the time you spend doing the collection is time you could farm gold and it would be even more efficient.
Look at the price of Dusk, it has barely budged, because people realized the precursor hunt did little.
i do run zerk on my tempest in the junge and get along just fine, you just need to pay attention
This. Ele survivalbility never came from the base stats anyways, it’s because of the synergies in your build, so if you play it properly, you should be fine.
There might be reasons why we would want ele hp to be buffed…your complaint is not one of them.
dude im a 20k ap ele playing since launch as my main plz dont insinuate i dont know how to play my class thats just insulting
This is the build I started HoT with. It’s not full zerk because I haven’t had the chance to replace them all with ascended after I stopped doing WvW, but it doesn’t even have 15k hp. I’ve not had any trouble in HoT aside from some of the champs for hero points, which weren’t meant to be soloed anyways.
After I unlocked tempest, things got even easier despite not having changed gears. So if I’m not having trouble, obviously the problem isn’t universal.
Ps. Judging someone’s skills in PvE by looking at AP is about as effective as judging someone’s skills in PvP by looking at their glory rank. Aka not very accurate.
I also mained ele since headstart, I have 12k AP because I don’t care about a lot of the PvE achievements. So you throwing around your 20k AP doesn’t tell me anything about the way you play.
Anything not full zerk is meaningless anyways, you either bring full zerk to the raid or we replace you with someone who can.
My advice to people would be to choose the grandmaster for the warhorn that increases boon duration and procs warhorn earth 4 for magnatic aura and protection when you hit 80% health.
It prevents the ridiculously OP frogs and snipers from 2-3 shotting you from range as the magnetic aura gives you time to survive and apply damage.
The problem is when there are multiple ranged mobs all focusing you from range, you are going to go down if you don’t LoS them into melee.
Also, the vets/elite/champs who punish melee will make your life as a Tempest hell.
I’m playing Tempest because I sunk some gold into Howler, but this spec is definitely weak compared to Reaper/Chrono/Revenant/Engineer and even Dragonhunter.
Don’t run zerker then. Ele HP is fine.
This is a nonsense reply.
If I can run zerker on reaper/revenant/chrono/warrior/engineer, but I have to use a lower damage gearset on elementalist just to function, there’s no reason whatsoever to play an elementalist over the durable classes who can use zerker.
What don’t you get about risk vs. reward, the lowest HP classes at the very least on a dagger build should be having more damage potential for the risk, but that’s not remotely true in PvE.
Tempest dagger/warhorn ele is all glass and no cannon in zerker.
I’m not foreseeing much needed Tempest buffs anytime soon…
Well, Kasmeer’s phantasms stay alive despite target death, I don’t know why mesmer phantasms can’t be the same.
Elite Specializations & Hero Point Feedback [Merged]
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Zenith.7301
You’re confusing masteries (progression that I am looking forward to) with class mechanics (that I paid for as part of an expansion).
Unlocking new abilities and new classes has always been a form of progression in video games. It has been the case for this very game, it has been the case for GW1, it has been the case for pretty much every RPG, and I could go on.
It also happens to be a more exciting form of progression than unlocking any skin that you’ll know you’ll never use. Even masteries are, in some way, a way to unlock new abilities. (HoT) Masteries just happen to be map abilities, while elite specs offer more personal character abilities.
I’m personally glad that I can enjoy a paced and gradual sense of character progression with elite specs. I want my characters to feel strong because they worked to be strong.
Again, I understand that this may be annoying for players that have a lot of alts. But that’s pretty much it.
Not a lot of alts. One of each class.
I truly pity the new revenant players who now are looking at 40+ hero challenges on top of some tyria content.
good way to learn a class imo
What, by spamming 1 in braindead dynamic events or open world pve? Please get a grip.
You don’t learn any good habits by leveling.
@Roy Cronacher, would it be possible to use this same type of system except a maybe 25% damage reduction on pets in WvW? Pets die instantly in WvW battles and it would help immensely to make some class features available in WvW… Of course percentages can always be tweaked until a balance is found.
This is not currently possible. For this change we made creatures, at the base AI level, look at what they are targeting and what they hit to adjust damage accordingly, it has nothing to do with player damage interactions. Doing this for WvW. adjusting outgoing player damage to minions, is not tech we are currently working on and likely would cause some perf issues as well. Players attack much much more often then creatures. So doing checks on each one of the damage targets from a player can become expensive very quickly. Though, that’s not to say that we won’t ever consider investigating it, but for now this change is specifically for creatures attacking player minions and we’ll be balancing it and seeing how it goes.
Couldn’t this be accomplished with a zone wide buff on minions in WvW areas with a percentage of all incoming damage reduced or greatly increase their mitigation in some way and just have the dmg adjusted as it lands? This seems like it may be a good low hanging fruit option. Because right now any and all minions/pets and even those coming with the elite specializations will be useless absolutely utterly useless in any large scale fights.
Things are rarely that simple. While you may be looking at that from a larger scale fight perspective and it would probably help there, it would create other problems such as making minions too strong and frustrating in smaller to mid scale combat with just a flat reduction always on them.
Roy, is mesmer continuum shift rift affected by this change in PvE? That temporal rift that spawns off their new shatter and it dies extremely easy to aoe in PvE.
Elite Specializations & Hero Point Feedback [Merged]
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Zenith.7301
You’re confusing masteries (progression that I am looking forward to) with class mechanics (that I paid for as part of an expansion).
Unlocking new abilities and new classes has always been a form of progression in video games. It has been the case for this very game, it has been the case for GW1, it has been the case for pretty much every RPG, and I could go on.
It also happens to be a more exciting form of progression than unlocking any skin that you’ll know you’ll never use. Even masteries are, in some way, a way to unlock new abilities. (HoT) Masteries just happen to be map abilities, while elite specs offer more personal character abilities.
I’m personally glad that I can enjoy a paced and gradual sense of character progression with elite specs. I want my characters to feel strong because they worked to be strong.
Again, I understand that this may be annoying for players that have a lot of alts. But that’s pretty much it.
Not a lot of alts. One of each class.
I truly pity the new revenant players who now are looking at 40+ hero challenges on top of some tyria content.
You people keep asking that berzerker not be the only option.
The problem isn’t berzerker, it’s that tank gear is BAD, the returns for the cost do not measure up.
If they merge toughness with boon duration and vitality with healing power, and merge ferocity with power, you would see some more gear variety going on.
They just dilute the effects too much. The cost of not having ferocity on gear simply punishes power builds too much, because power relies on 2 other stats to scale well, while condition far to a less extent.
So a sinister build can simply go dire instead for damage heavy encounters without anywhere close the huge damage loss a power build would see if it switched to knight stats instead.
And to be honest, the ship has sailed. People have invested ~600g+ in full berzerker ascended between armor and weapons. It would be a kick in the balls if you suddenly made encounters which punished them so heavily they had to dump another 600 gold on a different stat ascended set.
(edited by Zenith.7301)
Elite Specializations & Hero Point Feedback [Merged]
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Zenith.7301
Hero points need to be account bound if this crap goes through.
No way in hell I am grinding 400 hero points to unlock all elite specializations for all the classes I have.
In fact, I was mulling going Tempest figuring that I only need 140 points, and I’m at 70 so I can get 70 quick before the xpac, but this flat out tells me I can’t play Tempest at all with only 70 hero points.
You people sure jumped into the F2P grind bandwagon real quick after sarcastically deriding WoW and its grinds/spreadsheet design/RNG. You removed tokens as currency for guaranteed rewards and replaced it with detestable RNG and large gold grinds.
And now you gate even gameplay aspects like elite specializations behind Heart of Thorns progression, as if grinding masteries wasn’t enough.
Revenant is basically an improved form of core professions.
Highest sword autoattack damage (read:sustained DPS), Glint’s heal is OP as hell in PvE and WvW zergs.
Unrelenting Assault is a blurred frenzy that teleports you to the target and does three times the damage of a blurred frenzy and gives 7 might stacks.
Low cd stun breaks. Easy access to quickness. Facets are signets on steroids that apply to your group and the actives actually are not terrible.
You can get all the apologists you want, but there’s a reason why raids are filled up with revenants.
Revenant and Sinister engineer are the new ele, and people hop onto the bandwagon.
I know I’m making a revenant because I have no faith in Anet whatsoever to produce a viable offensive ranger PvE spec.
Revenant is so polished as a class compared to vanilla classes. Mallyx may be in need of help, but then against most classes that are not engineer have condition specs that suck as well.
I used to run fractals (49-50) every day for about 1.5 years. I still didn’t get dagger. In meantime i got 9 precursors and 3 legendaries. Just to give you an idea how ridicilous drop rate for specific skin is.
2 years. All skins.
Not a single precursor drop, ever. 1 legendary (ok, only because the others I don’t like).
Roy, will this affect mesmer’s Continuum Rift in PvE as well? It was dying immediately to AoE so this would help a lot.
95% looks extreme. Ohwell ;-)
Please don’t start with this crap. If you think 95% is extreme then you haven’t played PvE at a high level at all.
Mesmer illusions have 7-10k HP at most, mobs in fractal 50 swing for 7k autoattacks and some abilities hit as hard as 16-20k damage. We need that level of mitigation to sustain more fragile minions.
20k x .05 = 1k dmg.
I may not lvl 50 fractal but that seems excessive. Any other place in pve/wvw(yeah there are npcs ingame beside pve/lvl 50 fractal) it will 100% carry. I’m not upset, I can take the most glass pet over devourer and not have to manage pet or watch healthbar anymore.
Now multiply that by multiple sources. I take it you haven’t done Verdant Brink dynamic events on a mesmer. The amount of deadly AoE spam, especially on the Wyvern encounter, requires THAT kind of mitigation.
95% looks extreme. Ohwell ;-)
Please don’t start with this crap. If you think 95% is extreme then you haven’t played PvE at a high level at all.
Mesmer illusions have 7-10k HP at most, mobs in fractal 50 swing for 7k autoattacks and some abilities hit as hard as 16-20k damage. We need that level of mitigation to sustain more fragile minions.
Alpha, please do your math thing and see how 3x iDefenders compare in Alacrity uptime compared to shatter spam, pretty pls? ;p
I’m counting 2s alacrity application every 8 seconds without phantasmal haste. That’s 6 alacrity every 8 seconds at 3 phantasms.
But in that calculation I’m not figuring out the delay in delivery from the attack animations themselves, so it’s probably less than 6/8 seconds, and with illusions’ Phantasmal Haste it should mitigate that delay reasonably enough.
If you’re worried about pets tanking bosses with 95% reduction, why not remove them from the aggro table of raid/dungeon bosses?
Since aggro is so random, this help will help SOMETIMES, and what this means is that for my ranger it’ll still be risky using something like jaguars since we cannot control who a boss targets and minions are an integral part of a class’s performance.
I’m also curious why this approach won’t apply to WvW, ranger/mesmer/minion necro are virtually crippled in WvW team fights because of AoE spam.
Don’t get me wrong, this is a great step in the right direction at least, but the lack of control over mob aggro mechanisms still means the protection is random.
I just don’t know why we are so afraid of pets having 100% uptime in PvE when the very classes are BALANCED around that full pet uptime to have competitive damage output compared to classes who are not.
Also, what about boss melee cleave attacks like mossman and archdiviner and Ettin melee swings, will those count as reduced AoE when the pet is not targeted?
So you fix PvE but do not even bother of PvP or WvW for 12 skills of the engineer.
A.W.E.S.O.M.E.
/ESports
I think in most cases it’s only a really a problem in an AoE rich Zerg environment. In small numbers I don’t think it’s usually going to be as much of a problem.
However I am Not Dead certain about that. I just know that as a mesmer main, I have felt moderately fine about the status of illusions in 1v1 and small groups.
Illusions/Phantasm are generated easily by many different skills and soon traits. There is nothing to compare with turrets (utilities, long cd, hp) and soon gyros (utilities long cd, hp).
AoE in sPvP can be really rich. Try it yourself you will see how turrets are dead.
We will even have the 23rd 2 ELITES defined by AI, with kittenty hp.
Not really. Phantasms have 15-20 second cd’s, and mesmer autoattack and other ability sustained damage is so bad without ramping up 3x phantasms.
Engineers don’t heavily rely on turrets to do sustained damage anywhere as much as mesmers rely on illusions.
(edited by Zenith.7301)
frifox ran the math anyways and the differences are fairly small
With that in mind I just prefer berzerker not only due to crit caps but universal application as I can share it with my elementalist and necromancer, who both will make use of it.
Also for what it’s worth in a solo setting the berzerker pulls slightly ahead, so open world farm and leveling also favors berzerker. It’s just universally more appealing.
Twister was not bugged. At all. They nerfed it because only one guild was able to kill it, after many months. It was a nerf to difficulty.
Not bugged at all. Yup. (Link)
Twister strategy: Run in a circle when it’s casting and hope you get lucky.
Here’s the original reddit thread. (Link)
They figured out how to minimize the bug, but saying “it wasn’t bugged, it was nerfed” is the most obtuse thing ever, and clearly the thought of a forum warrior, not an actual player that attempted to progress on that fight.
How cute of you to link outdated threads when members of BG themselves later confirmed in the forums that they polished their Twister strategies after the kill and it was perfectly doable before the nerf.
You keep using the word “bug”, but I don’t think you have the faintest idea of what the word actually means. Something being obscure or unreasonably tuned is not a “bug”.
By that account the dive bombs would also be a bug considering the players had to test countless positions, facing directions, before they even noticed there were “safe” spots for them.
If you think that 5 hours and 10+ tries is considered hard then you might want to try another game. FFXIV mechanics absolutely destroy this stuff and the savage stuff is insane. The last 2 bosses in Alexanders savage the top guilds spent 8+ hour days for WEEKS trying to get the bosses down. Heck I remember WoW vanilla MC the first boss taking more than 5 hours and more than 10+ attempts…
The only reason fights take weeks to defeat in games like FFXIV and WoW is very simple: They force you fight them undergeared. I’m not saying the fights aren’t engaging, but the fact of the matter is that this is exactly how they’re tuned and how games with gear progression work. You step into a raid undergeared, and fight it at a disadvantage for a few weeks. The more you succeed or the more time goes on, your raid gradually grows in strength due to better damage, healing etc. This allows things to be easier.
What separates the best guilds from the mediocre in those games is simply how well they optimize and form strategies under the circumstances of being at a big disadvantage. This is not to discredit them, but to show that such a system would not work in this game.
Also, there’s many other reasons why a boss might not die. It could be simply bugged, making it harder than inended. In FFXIV, I remember Twintania was not killed for weeks simply because Twister was bugged. Once it was fixed, it died on the day of that patch. Sure it was “hard” but it also wasn’t enjoyable to lose due to things like that.
Twister was not bugged. At all. They nerfed it because only one guild was able to kill it, after many months. It was a nerf to difficulty.
Moreover, none of Alex Savage forces you to fight them undergeared. By the time most people get to savage floor 3 and 4 they had their ilv200+, which is exactly the item level the fight are balanced around.
Only crappy groups blame lack of progress on gear gating.
Savage Alexander is hard, as was Second Binding Coil Savage.
Datascape for Wildstar did not gear gate. The checks for mechanics were just really tight.
Problem is GW2 wants to have its cake and eat it too. It wants variable comps to be beating content, which means having no standards for performance whatsoever since PvE balance is so bad that some classes do 20-30%+ more DPS than others and some bring so much more utility while others are so much better at tanking. Generally the top classes being the classes with the most access to boons and fire/water fields as well.
If you think this game will ever be balanced in PvE, think again. The class changes patch was announced by Grouch, PvP guy, most of the changes were PvE focused as usual, and they just announced a 400k prize PvP league.
This is a PvP game with a PvE side attraction as far as balance goes.
Make sure your group also holds crystals when doing the trick by the ledge or the jade maw can wipe you with its revenge beam at 1% and reset the fight.
- Glyph of Alignment: Increased the weakness and cripple duration on this skill from 3s to 5s. Reduced the cast damage by 66%. This skill now applies 3 stacks of poison._
This is just wrong. Ranger was lacking AoE direct dmg since day 1, and when you finaly gave us option to play AoE direct dmg burst with this specialisation, now you are nerffing it. Why? We dont need more condies. Beside, skill was criting for 1900-2200, now it will be like 600-700 on crit. Realy?
They’re really fond of garbage hybrid skills that scale poorly with both power and condition damage.
It’s almost like they don’t realize that their game forces people to choose between power or condition investment and either way one half of the skill gets screwed.
It’s the shortbow with its mix of power and conditions. It’s the axe with its mix of power and condition. Neither excel at anything (power autoattack on axe, which is used as a condition weapon because the power coefficients of the auto and splitblade are garbage).
It’s the same mistake they did with Maul initially where it applied a bleed instead of vulnerability.
And they don’t learn. Meanwhile warrior and thief serve as examples of classes with weapons each dedicated to a particular stat and that’s why they work well.
None of that hybrid crap. They have to choose whether druid will be a power or condi spec (and the staff is a power weapon so far, even though a weak one). And apply the glyphs accordingly.
But I doubt it will happen.
A glyph that hits AoE 300 range for less than one autoattack worth of damage is being nerfed by 66%.
This class was most certainly not designed with PvE in mind because the poison is worthless in PvE.
I run into more people like that in PvP than anywhere else in game, but yeah, that’s definitely off the wall. You should report him and submit the unadjusted screenshots as evidence.
Because it’s mostly people from PvP settings who bleed over to PvE who bring this attitude with them.
Had a fractal 50 with an unguilded warrior with Champion title, needless to say he was overly attached to the words “kittened” and “idiot”.
OP should be grateful this was a short Arah run and not an hour long fractal 50 pug affair where you can’t even leave after extended abuse because of the time investment.
I don’t want a utility skill that always crits. It reduces the value of gear with crit. The skills themselves should hit hard enough without being a guaranteed crit.
What’s more, one dimensional damage nukes should not be a utility skill. There should be more to a utility skill than “this hits for x damage every 15-20 seconds”,
Weak footfalls is not a new thing to Gen 2 legendaries.
Look at Meteorologicus and Howler. The footfalls are minuscule and barely noticeable on my male norn.
What’s worse, Meteorologicus’s footfalls are a copy paste from bolt, except Bolt’s are just cooler.
What’s more, Meteorologics STILL hasn’t had an aura update, and in the case of Howler the footfalls have very short duration.
My wish list would be to put water and earth attunement autoattacks in line with fire/air, there’s really no reason for them to be such a DPS loss, especially with the mechanic of overloads. Right now you jump in earth/water to press a skill or two and then want to swap out of it asap.
Make Churning Earth work like Dragon Tooth, fire and forget so offhand dagger would be usable in PvE.
Reduce the cooldown of fire grab to 15-20 seconds. It’s absurd that a skill that does around the damage of a backstab has four to five times the cooldown, especially when things like 100b exists.
I find dagger play a lot more fun than staff so at some point I hope they stop holding the class back for cele d/d ele PvP balancing only and start making all ele weapons and attunements desirable and competitive.
I also hope they revamp the arcane utilities. Their value is highly undermined in high crit builds, and PVT/cele/tank builds don’t even benefit from the guaranteed crit much due to the necessity of high ferocity for power damage to be competitive.
The glyphs all need help still, and signet of water could go with clearing 1-2 conditions off yourself and allies every 10 seconds.
Reduce the CD on signet of air and add an aoe daze on it.
Would be nice if Warhorn had a RTL equivalent on air skill 4, like if you teleported into the cyclone.
THe ball from the ball lightning (warhorn air 5) should chain into a skill that lets you teleport to it. It does pitiful damage anyway might as well give it some mobility.
This is a super cool idea!
Pitiful damage? You realise that it hits 12 times against single targets? What are you even taking about?
When did you get 12 hits on a target out of that thing? Every enemy easily sidesteps it or the orb itself moves out of range of them after like… 3-4 shots.
Use it with cyclone and use it from 600 range. The orb moves about 300 range per 1.25 seconds. Firing at one projectile per 1/4 of a second you will always get 12 bolts if you keep them lock down. 1 on entering the 300 range, 5 as it moves between 300 and the target, 5 more as it moves between the target and the 300 range away, and 1 as it moves out of range.
If a character is running away on a straight line and you use it from melee range as they begin to flee they will either have to change trajectory (which brings you closer to them) or they have the potential of being hit 20 times.
In PvP when people are in capture points if they don’t leave the point or dodge (which only evades 3 projectiles) they will be hit for the full twelve.
Yeah, this won’t happen in PvE because if you are at 600 range:
1) You only do it when opening up an encounter
2) You won’t do it again because at 600 range you can’t hit with lightning whip, your main source of sustained DPS in PvE on a dagger build.
Virtually most of warhorn skills are eclipsed by what the focus has to offer defensively or the dagger offensively.
It’s this weird mediocre medium spot with gimmicky traveling/cascading abilities that don’t mesh with a melee spec or less mobile targets such as those in PvE. It really excels at nothing and worst of all is a hybrid weapon since it has burning on fire, power damage on air, and the rest are CC skills that don’t even do much against mobs with a breakbar and come on a huge cd.
At this point I don’t ever see the appeal of taking warhorn over focus on a dagger build for PvE team support. The dagger/focus provides 3 projectile defenses (swirling wind, magnetic aura, ring of earth), damage immunity, condition cleanse, aoe daze+blast finisher, ranged knockdown+long chill, fire attunement focus being the weakest but having the plus of being low cd high duration fire fields compared to warhorn.
And if they ever make offhand dagger churning earth behave like dragon tooth so its usable in PvE, offhand dagger will be the offensive option of choice.
What is warhorn for other than a signet of inspiration on a longer cooldown, no mobility, weaker defensives, weaker CC, and weaker damage.
(edited by Zenith.7301)
Can we get something done with mainhand sword autoattack? Jon Peters tried more than a year ago and couldn’t find a solution, and still today we are stuck with a weapon that makes dodging unwieldy in challenging PvE content.
It would also help if Monarch’s Leap was instant like Caithe’s ability in LS2, an evade with a casting time before the evade kicks in kinda defeats the purpose.
To OP. Would you continue to play a game that no longer offered things to strive for?
Yes?
This is a dumb question. I play Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer all the time; I have nothing to gain from it, but I play it because it’s FUN.
If a game’s combat and gameplay systems are FUN, you don’t need artificial enlongation via grind. You will play the game because it’s fun.
I mean, look at WvW. Hardly a rewarding activity in term of gold/mat/skin rewards. But people pour countless hours on it. Why? Because it’s FUN to them.
You don’t need a grind to give a game meaning. If you need to grind to keep interest in playing the game, the game wasn’t very interesting to begin with.
Some of you hamsters really love your wheels.
Ancestral Grace
Healing: 1,610 (1.0)?
Number of Targets: 5
Radius: 240
Combo Finisher: Blast
Range: 1,200
Cooldown: 15s
Ground targetedPost BWE3 changes to druid:
Ancestral Grace is now an evade and will immediately end upon reaching your destination.Ride the Lightning
Damage: 340 (1.00)?
Number of Targets: 5
Radius: 180
Range: 1,200
Cooldown: 40s , 20s if you hit a target.My question is. Why is Ride the Lightning not ground targeted and an evade? Also it could be a blast finisher now when might gain is nerfed and it’s radius increased to 240 to make it better in combat since now it’s used for movement most of the time.
You’re going to kitten and moan about rangers, one of the weakest classes, and a skill on one of the crappiest weapons, the staff?
Come on, at least look at warriors or thief who still have far better mobility.
Point is, everything about ele is balanced around cele d/d PvP QQ. It’s that simple.
Lots of broken weapons and no ele can play without water/arcana, ele can’t play berzerker stats in PvP unlike thief and mesmer, but because cele d/d exists ele will never get fixes in any game format.
Herald and Reaper.
You’re gonna get fury, setting you at 85% crit. To that add spotter adds another 7% crit chance, so you’re sitting at 92% chance. Warrior banner bumps you to 100% crit chance.
Since day/night sigils won’t work in raids, you’re looking at sigils of accuracy instead on your offhand, that would be 107% crit chance. You’re better up picking the extra power from berzerker to not overcap and waste stats.
Assassins is NOT the stat set of choice for raids come HoT.
With a ranger and spotter in a raid, you will be crit capped so BERZERKER is the stat of choice for group content.
And no, condition mesmer is not a practical build for most of PvE, including raids. Please stop misinforming people just because you can use any build in open world zerg farm.
- Grace of the Land: This trait has been re-worked. Instead of its former behavior, allies affected by your celestial avatar abilities gain 3% damage and condition damage increase for 8 seconds. This buff stacks 5 times.
mostly good changes but this one i hate. With this change you have doomed every ranger to run this trait in pve or be kicked from group/guild. The original version was unique and more situational, and therefore not compulsory.
For the sake of build diversity please reconsider.
That’s like saying that warriors are doomed to use banners or ele is doomed to camp fire on staff.
None’s forcing you to do it. Although if your group/guild is using 100% of their potential so should you.
Ele’s not doomed to camp fire on staff because staff is only better than dagger/focus on a stationary target. In the actual beta raid encounter you were testing, dagger would pull ahead because the uptime of lava font on the boss was low.
Warrior banners can be used on any trait build and weapon loadout.
It’s not a remotely good comparison. Stay away from them, you’re not very good at it.
It used to be more of an issue before you could change stats on the ascended gear.
Changing stats on ascended gear is a nonstarter. Scholar/strength runes are 70 g per set and you lose your infusions as well, unless you want to pay real life cash for upgrade extractors.
The stat change only affects when you get an ascended chest with stats you don’t want so you can change the stats of the set before you rune it up.
I’m confused by the people who are against the grind to get Ascended gear for raids.
Raids are supposed to be endgame content that takes commitment, investment and dedication. You will be spending a lot of time in raids learning the encounters and running constant trials until you and your guild finally succeed.
If people are willing to commit so much effort into doing the raids, why aren’t they willing to put in the effort into getting Ascended gear? At least the weapons and trinkets, anyway.
I got all classes at lv80. With exotic you were able to switch class, and build on demand (condi vs. power, and now with druid you need cleric stats).
So what you’re telling me is that it should be fine for me to grind 3 armor class ascended sets (which I have now thanks to doing fractal 50 for over a year), on top of that at least 3 more sets for condi builds for a total of 6 ascended sets.
If my characters are different races, since my ele is norn and uses norn racial armor and my mesmer/necro/ranger/warrior are sylvari and the thief/guard human, that means I also gotta craft separate ascended sets for those since you can’t just equip ascended armor with a racial transmutation, and you can’t even transmute it into your own since you can’t equip the gear so you can’t transmute it to be usable by another race.
So instead I gotta grab that racial gear, go to hall of monuments, get the old school skins, apply them over the ascended armor, transfer them to the other race toon, and then transmute those.
In essence, ascended is a putrid idea that only serves to restrict and create goldsinks for no reason whatsoever. The whole appeal of guild wars is switching builds and classes on the run, which exotic allowed you but ascended doesn’t.
What’s more, you can say ascended armor can change stats, but not without losing runes and infusions costing upward of 60+ gold for strength or scholar runes or 13 gold per sigil of force for weapons.
(edited by Zenith.7301)
You could always make and sell one. You can make a fair bit of profit from selling a legendary which would let you buy back all your mats and have extra gold left over.
The biggest loss would be the world completion, but that isn’t used for the new legendary weapons anyway so you don’t need it.
What, world completion isn’t required for the new ones?
THANK BUDDHA GANESHA ALMIGHTY.
You just saved me a good bit of gold since I was gonna buy Howler outright and save gift of exploration for the new legendary.
Now I can just craft my Howler Precursor.
It is exactly what Anet is doing, they are adding more rewards in HoT. It sounds like you just focus on the minor change in old content, but completely ignore the major stuff in upcoming expansion.
More rewards FOR OPEN WORLD. You have to do braindead dynamic event zergs to farm materials you want because neither dungeons or fractals provide that avenue.
Oh, boy, aren’t I glad that we got more of Silverwastes autoattack spam with useless people in clerics and soldiers just tagging everything.
A lot of player enjoyed zerging the content, from wvw to eotm, from champ train in Arah, FS to SW chest train. Did you not realize the changes Anet made is what the players want?
What a load of crap, if that were the case they wouldn’t be introducing raids or expanding fractals.
“A lot of player” can enjoy whatever they want, but that does not mean only they should have options.
It is exactly what Anet is doing, they are adding more rewards in HoT. It sounds like you just focus on the minor change in old content, but completely ignore the major stuff in upcoming expansion.
More rewards FOR OPEN WORLD. You have to do braindead dynamic event zergs to farm materials you want because neither dungeons or fractals provide that avenue.
Oh, boy, aren’t I glad that we got more of Silverwastes autoattack spam with useless people in clerics and soldiers just tagging everything.