Guild Wars 2

Chokolata.1870:

Uh how is there a lack of synergy? Jesus

This puts us in a great place for support other then healing. 7,5% from spirit, 10% from glyph and up to 15% from Grace for burn phases, along with spotter. WoW!!

Glyph is not 10%, it’s 3%. At least do your math. It’s basically 10%+spotter, which is nothing compared to a PSEA warrior giving the group 170 all stats, another 150 from empower allies, and then 25 permanent might to the group. So about 25% extra DPS for his group on top of being third place in DPS, sitting around 16k DPS.

There is no synergy between the druid line and other lines for PvE. You have a staff that does poor DPS and is healing centric but which derives no benefit from the other lines for being healing centric. Then you have the rest of our weapons, which are power/condi based and derive no benefit from the druid traitline considering both minors revolve around healing procs (which none of the non-staff weapons do), and both the adept and grandmasters offer no benefit to our other weapons let alone mesh with an offensive DPS role. And a celestial form that does NOTHING for a non-healing specced ranger.

Druid is virtually a standalone specialization for PvE. At best you’ll be a hybrid, and hybrids in optimized PvE groups suck.

But hey, since core ranger also sucks for endgame PvE, it’s not like you’re losing much. Either way the class for those who wanted to play a DPS profession is DEAD, and this is going live so enjoy your cleric staff guardian 2.0, god knows people loved those in PvE sarcasm.

And the glyphs still suck, with them nerfing the already mediocre damage of glyph of alignment and not fixing glyphs to be ground targeted for a spec whose main weapon is a ranged staff.

No changes to staff, no changes to traitline synergy with other traitlines and offensive weapons since no other weapon besides staff heals.

No changes to traits or skills to do something besides “this skill hea,s this other one also heals, and this one heals and removes conditions”.

You actually nerfed glyph of alignment.

Poison on a glyph on a class that has a weapon that is power based. Nerfing direct damage by 66% in exchange for 3 pitiful stacks of poison that do nothing in PvE.

At least we know Druid isn’t balanced with endgame PvE in mind. Thanks for making the class decisions easier as those of us who rolled ranger for DPS can now know with certainty that you’ve dashed all hopes of offensive druids/rangers being a thing in raids since all raids will now require druids for the 15% damage boost so no ranger will have the option of not picking the druid line since core ranger is trash tier in PvE.

Can we also look at making Churning Earth like Dragon’s Tooth? It’s an ability entirely unused in PvE since the channel time is so large for the damage done that it’s a DPS loss over autoattacking.

Make Churning Earth fire and forget like Dragon’s Tooth.

Reduce the cd of Fire grab as well….at least in PvE it does even less damage than a 100 blades yet it has around six times the cooldown.

To me, having to wait till Oct 23 to see the final state of the druid is unacceptable.

Primarily because we have to decide whether the class in its final product is worth playing in high end PvE as anything other than a healbot.

Tied to that is having to farm all the 140 hero points datamined as the cost of unlocking the specialization.

So why are we being asked to waste time farming hero points on a specialization that might not even be worth it at all.

More importantly, it’s a question of preparation. Ascended sets, runes, sigils.

All the other classes got several weekends of iteration and preview of the final stage of the class, yet druids and engineers got stuck with specializations that are going to release incomplete with marginal contribution from the community in their design.

We’re essentially dealing with prototypes while the other classes get polished products they know they can invest on.

Walhalla.5473:

Zenith.7301:

It’s been their modus operandi since the game’s release, nerfing any gold farm or quick wealth generation scheme to keep scarcity high.

Except when they did introduce the Gold Reward for Dungeons and the Champ Bags which also grant you small Amount of Money

They didn’t introduce gold rewards for dungeons, it was always there. People could farm dungeons all day for the rewards.

What they did is nerf that farming, and give you a static amount on a daily lockout.

Champ bags in dungeons are virtually worthless considering the amount of champions relative to open world farm.

The intention ultimately is to reduce gold gain.

Anyone who thinks these new legendaries won’t be more grindy and costly than the vanilla ones is fooling himself.

John’s Smith job description is to design systems that frustrate players enough so they open their wallets and buy gems to ease the gold grind by converting RL money to gold.

It’s been their modus operandi since the game’s release, nerfing any gold farm or quick wealth generation scheme to keep scarcity high.

And despite their claims that they nerfed gold income to stop inflation, nothing could be further from the truth. They kept nerfing gold farms and introducing more goldsinks in the form of ascended armor and yet precursor and legendary prices have only kept increasing over the years.

Glad to know my main source of income will be nerfed and I will be forced to do drooling, braindead “dynamic” events in zerg maps.

They say fractals will take up the slack, but I highly doubt it.

Fractals have a daily limit PER 10 LEVEL BRACKET. What this means is currently we have 5 brackets to get a daily from, nowhere near the same amount as dungeon paths.

A full dungeon tour nets people around 30 gold. That would mean they’d need to make each fractal bracket award 6 gold to catch up.

What’s more, FRACTALS ARE REPETITIOUS. It’s the same small selection of fractals, whereas dungeon paths are far more varied.

If you thought doing fractal 50/40/30 every day was boring and leading to burnout, wait till you do some more of that to make up for dungeon tours.

I don’t get why those of us who crave instanced content get screwed over not only by not being able to farm map rewards equivalents in instanced content, but our rewards are time gated while the open world equivalents are not.

Serpent strike needs evade for the full animation and the damage of the strike needs to be about tripled to put it in line with unrelenting assault kitten has a whopping 15 sec cd.

Monarch’s Leap should be instant cast. The jumpback’s damage when you come back in should also increase in damage.

Terra.8571:

Sondergaard.8469:

I just got done reading about the plans for the new legendaries. Yes I agree they should be difficult to acquire, but one thing that stood out to me was that you are taking away the option of earning a legendary through a variety of paths.

What I read is that if I want one of the new legendaries I have no choice but to participate in content that I don’t enjoy, and have no desire to play. Examples, World vs World and PvP.

I am not a competitive gamer, and I enjoy playing in PvE environments. When I had heard you were reworking the legendary path to put more focus on an epic journey I was initially excited for this.

Now that I’ve read that that epic journey means I have to go through areas that I would otherwise avoid like the plague (and yes I have tried them many times and never enjoyed it any of the times I did) this is just a huge turn off for me.

I want the ability to have a choice in my journey, and how I acquire my weapon. I do not want a requirement to have to spend hours, even months in content grinding away at something I absolutely do not enjoy for a weapon skin that I would really enjoy having.

Please reconsider this decision.

Legendary weapons were always designed to show a mastery of the entire game, not just PvE. After all, they can be used in all 3 formats. Previous legendaries required WvW badges which when legendaries first existed, required a lot of WvWing or doing the EB JP. Even the latter usually required some PvP ing.

These new legendaries already have made a bit easier as you can buy the PvP shards off the TP when it goes live. Even doing WvW, just join an edge of the mist train. It’s not likely you’ll have to do more than a weekend of it.

In contrast, PvP ers have to do map completion, dungeons (although reward tracks help – they’re not as efficient) and crafting. I currently spend 90% of my time in PvE (use to WvW and PvP a lot) but personally, the little bit of work you have to do in PvP is a small price even for PvE lovers.

With regards to AN decision, I don;t think they will/ need to change it.

Mastery my kitten , this post is so full of it.

From the very beginning you’ve been able to outright buy any legendary from the trading post.

You think that will change by making the precursor account bound, but it won’t.

What they replaced with collections, they introduced new tradeable mat grinds.

Which means you can outright buy ALL of the materials, be they PvP or WvW shards/memories, do none of PvP/WvW, and you can buy the new mats for the collections as well.

Essentially, you only need to do the PvE collections with nontradable mats, but you will be able to buy everything else.

They just made it grindier so more people buy gems to convert to gold. Now they’re gonna nerf gold gains from dungeons and are going to concentrate them on raids who have a weekly lockout, and fractals who have a daily lockout.

You mark my words, they’re gonna nerf gold acquisition from playing the game so that the only people making gold are Trading Post barons and those who purchase gems with RL money.

And what this new path does is introduce even more gold sinks, so if you thought lodestones were dropping in price and you wouldn’t have to spend on a precursor, guess what they introduced new goldsinks in their place.

This whole legendary journey is just a scheme to make a grind that encourages people to open their wallets and buy gems to convert to gold.

Jski.6180:

Xillllix.3485:

Glenstorm.4059:

Agreed, Overload Water should be a mobile Water field while channeling, and should leave behind a geyser/healing spring type thing that pulses the Overload’s effects and is also a Water field.

If a mobile Water field is deemed too OP then maybe a mobile Ice field. We only have one on Frozen Ground, come on. :p

I would rather have a light field or anything else that is NEW and not just a different way of doing the same thing.

I still think my idea of making the water overload make enemies float in a storm while you yourself are floating in a water bubble makes total sense. Why should the Mesmer have access to 2 new conditions and a new boons and the Elementalist to nothing new?

Light field dose not fit ele or tempest water field would be nice though but i think there a lot of it as is how about a frost field. Make water overloade a mobile frost field.
Hard cc dose not fit water atument ideal well your better for an soft cc or some type of support effect on-top of reg/condition removal.

Frost fields are useless in PvE due to breakbars, so no thanks.

Water field would be a lot better.

Miyu.8137:

They can disagree as they want, but besides 2stacks of poison for 6sec every 15sec it doesn’t have any other dmging condition.

Don’t get ne wrong, I use sword on my condi build as well and it’s one of the best builds in game in general. But the usefullnes is together with any of the real condi off-hand weapons.

Now tell me how many ppl use sword with zerker build. And it’s not like sword does low dmg, the dps is the best ranger has. (talking more about pvp than pve though)

And the best ranger has is still low damage.

It hits exactly 3 targets on only 2 parts of the 3 step chain, it hinders dodge timing unless you purposely delay the attack, lowering DPS anyways.

Ranger is only ahead of necro and mesmer, and come HoT with reaper ranger will only be ahead of mesmer in sustained DPS (and mesmer is utter crap sustained DPS in PvE so it’s a low standard to have).

TheFrighteningFrenchFry.3275:

Ross Biddle.2367:

Xaylin.1860:

Embolism.8106:

Ross Biddle.2367:

Silverkey.2078:

I saw somewhere a suggestion to simply remove the trait and instead “your control effects remove an additional stability” which I think made sense.

I’d never willfully use a control effect to remove a stack of stability -_-u

I want the control effect. If I could remove the stability it’d be in some other way prior to using my CC.

That actually sounds pretty strong with Diversion. Fits Mesmer better than Revenant anyway IMO.

What’s the point of it, though? We already got Shattered Concentration. Yes, you could use the new CS without shatters but in the end it will most likely not add much to Mesmer gameplay.

While CS should be changed I still got to say: Making it on interrupt is dumb. There is absolutely no point in using it then especially since Chaotic Interruption exists.

And don’t forget it ruining Mental Anguish, since you’d never take anything other than Power Block ever again.

If you take mantra of distraction your going to take power block anyway. With or without the change to CS.

“Making it on interrupt is dumb. There is absolutely no point in using it then especially since Chaotic Interruption exists.”

I fail to see how this is reason not to make the change. So if you go lockdown it isn’t as useful. The same goes for shatter and condition damage builds.

Not really. You take MoD to get some self peeling breathing room on classes like thief with a guaranteed stun, and because power block doesn’t remotely affect most of their crap, why not take mental anguish which adds another whopping 15% bonus to mindwrack on stunned targets and as a trait is more universal?

I know a lot of people are focusing on overloads, because they do need fixes as the main mechanic of the specialization.

But in my opinion the warhorn is the worst of it all.

Humongous cooldowns on incredibly mediocre effects.

The sole point of heat sync is as a signet of inspiration that has 5 seconds longer cooldown. 3 might stacks is very mediocre for a 30 sec cd.

And that’s the least bad one. Wildfire sucks because its base power scaling is bad and it only applies burning, BUT ELEMENTALIST IS NOT A CONDITION CLASS. There’s no viable condi ele in PvE because attunements tie up the condies applied. It’s very hybrid and as a result subpar.

Then we have the air warhorn attunement, the biggest stinker, with an orb that tickles and a revenanmt axe 5.

All of the warhorn skills have humongous cooldowns for really miserable effects, and I don’t know how warhorn can possibly hope to compete with either focus or offhand dagger. The dagger completely outclasses it in offense and mobility, and the focus eclipses it in group support as the focus brings a projectile destruction, an aoe daze, a knockdown, a complete immunity skill, an aoe reflect and condi clear.

Something will need to be done about warhorn.

SOMETHING NEEDS TO BE DONE ABOUT AUTOATTACK DAMAGE ACROSS ATTUNEMENTS. EARTH/WATER NEED TO BE BROUGHT UP WITH FIRE/AIR.

Being stuck in earth or water attunements is too big a DPS loss to ever make overloads viable in PvE. In PvE and even pvp you jump into water or earth for the utility skills and then want to jump back into fire or air to not do total garbage DPS.

Holding dagger back compared to staff in PvE as well is the low damage of channeled skills. Drake’s Breath and Cone of Cold do really poor power scaled damage and healing in PvE, so the dagger’s DPS in PvE relies solely on lightning whip spam and burning speed.

Scepter we can’t even talk about because the damage of all the autoattacks is so miserably low and all skills except dragon’s tooth and phoenix do no damage whatsoever in PvE to sustain competitive DPS.

So, not only is warhorn mediocre for PvE, it needs to be paired with a dagger that’s subpar in PvE or a scepter that’s completely worthless in most game modes.

Arcane Wave or lightning hammer to boost the mesmer/ranger/guardian.

Somebody will still whine that it’s an instant cast stun and they ate a 10k mindwrack. Duelist classes are always the most unpopular classes.

Look at guardians. The backbone of any team for most of the game, absurdly strong in all formats, but because it’s not killing people in 1v1 often, nobody ever called for guardian nerfs.

That’s just how the balancing will go until devs draw the line in the sand and tell people “No, this game is balanced around team fights, don’t bother with 1v1 complaints.”

And the truth is in an evaluation of a mesmer’s potential in team fights, CS MoD was perfectly fine and continues to be.

The problem is mantras, really.

They’re either really strong in some people’s eyes because of their instant nature, or they’re so weak in their active effect that they’re not worth the channeling.

Quite frankly I just wish they’d retool the mantras or replace them with hexes as a new category.

Confounding Suggestions isn’t really that strong when used with other mesmer CC’s that have cast/animation times.

The problem then is that mantra of distraction is kinda weak by itself when it doesn’t have CS to prop it up.

rotten.9753:

Zenith.7301:

Because my pet is not tanking the damage. I’m lucky if my jaguars don’t get 2-shot by melee cleave.

If it’s dead anyway, maybe it would be a good idea to change it to more tanky pet? Like the saying goes, dead dps is no dps.

Because on a power spec at the standard sword+axe+longbow setup, it is.

Quick draw is good for a condi build due to its reduction on bonfire, but a reduction on path of scars isn’t really going to make a huge impact, and the trait doesn’t work on whirling defense.

Sure it does, you just have to cancel it just before before it ends (they both have 5s time limit).

The drop of a jaguar to a drake is often forced but it also halves your pet’s DPS, and even the drakes kinda struggle to survive against 50 mossman/archdiviner cleave unless you spec BM instead of nature magic (losing fortifying bond so no perma 25 might, fury, etc because Anet for some incredibly stupid reason doesn’t allow the ranger to share boons with pet baseline) and make generous use of pet switch (losing might/fury stacks on your pet per switch).

I guess you can cut Whirling Defense short but cutting the duration to benefit from a trait is silly to begin with, the point stands that Quick Draw is a mediocre grandmaster trait.

I mean, all ranger grandmasters are. Look at predator’s onslaught, it’s essentially a crappier version of what thieves/warriors have (10% extra damage against foes with ANY condi, and 10% against any bleeding foe; both traits are also minors).

Cecilia.5179:

Zenith.7301:

I’ve been suggesting changes to the minors since before the first weekend when they previewed the class and it’s been promptly ignore.

As has been the fact that the shouts are utter garbage for PvE, that we will be running wells as usual, that our adept and grandmaster options in the reaper traitline are also horrendous, and that reaper shroud is a DPS loss over greatsword use so a grandmaster being tied to it pretty much becomes a poor option by default.

Change shivers of dread to make foes tremble in place while feared and for the chill to be applied after the fear wears off.

Make the other minor add a 7-10% damage increase against chilled foes.

Make chilling nova have a decent damage application on proc, on the scale of Power Block from mesmer and reduce the icd to 5-6 seconds.

Make Unrelenting Pursuit give a run speed bonus or a swiftness proc upon entering reaper shroud.

Augury of Death will remain worthless so long as shouts remain worthless, selfish garbage in PvE.

Swap Deathly Chill with Soul Eater so we have a worthwhile grandmaster. PvE necros don’t really have anything of worth in grandmaster since two of them have to deal with reaper shroud and reaper shroud is not good in PvE content since it blocks your access to healing from water fields, it does less DPS than your greatsword, it’s purely a turtling form. Deathly chill is kinda crappy anyways I don’t even know why it exists, it tickles.

I’m pretty sure the devs are trying to steer away from this “viability in PvE=DPS” mentaility. Hopefully HoT content will change some of your opinions.
Deathly Chill is good enough on condi Reapers to justify use; it would be a poor idea to move it next to Chilling Victory, which synergizes well it. Chilling Nova has to take a mixed position as an offensive choice, because it is pitted against two traits that can help both power and condi builds in more defensive ways. The damage on proc and the chill need to be good for this trait to be a decent mixed offensive option. Ideally, the ICD would be reduced or the Chill duration and proc damage would be increased. I don’t see why you’d ever want the chill after the fear. That removes the synergy with Terror. Lastly, % damage increase traits are annoying; they do nothing for condition builds, and they only serve to increase dps on power builds.

If you paid attention to the raid, the enrage timers clearly give you an idea that DPS is still king.

Most of the raids that killed the boss sported 8-9 people in glass cannon DPS gear (sinister for condi, berserker for power).

More importantly, there is nothing that matters besides raw dps and healing anymore, because the breakbar ensures that what little utility a necromancer has, is made obsolete as the breakbar is broken with ease as a group effort and it doesn’t really need chill/weakness application.

Don’t buy into the hype that the meta is changing, people. So long as enrage timers and water field blasting exists, you’ll want berserkers and sinister geared people mostly with easy water field blasting to heal up incidental damage.

Necromancer isn’t going to turn into some breakout star.

Jski.6180:

Supreme.3164:

Zenith.7301:

If I’m channeling something for 4 seconds the effects should be at the same or even greater level of damage/impact as a full 100 blades or similar skill.

Especially when it also comes at the cost of increased attunement cooldown.

Overloads wouldn’t even be that bad if they bothered to bring water and earth attunement autoattacks on all weapons up to line with fire and air so being stuck in water or earth didn’t completely destroy your damage.

Scepter autoattacks all need significant buffs however, none of this anemic garbage you gave us on the latest patch.

Karl planning to nerf dmg on fire overload so…what you ask will never happen
-Scepter is as bad as before..just not at 100%, only 90% I’d say an improvement -_-, still auto-attack is not the only thing that scepter need, the weapon is extremely slow and clunky with ridiculous casting times and after cast

Well fire overload not realy about its dmg its about being a fire field and might generator on its own with some burn and power dmg. Now air overload is a dmg power house and if you wanted to run tempest as a true dmg build you run fresh air with the ideal of comboing it with air overload for the added +10% dmg to push out high dmg right after you get an air overload off. Nothing like going air overload into BS and back into air for max dps / spike dmg. I am thinking d/wh tempest air earth is going to be a power house of dmg and support.

This is what annoys me about pvp people, they have no clue.

The might generation aspect is redundant, aka useless, in a PvE group setting where a PSEA warrior on his own is keeping the party at permanent 25 might stacks or a herald can stack 15 for the party himself.

All the uses you people find for it are obsolete in a PvE setting.

If they do end up nerfing PSEA warrior and revenant group might generation, it might be of use, but right now it just isn’t because there are way better alternatives.

Eponet.4829:

sicsempertyrannis.3510:

Eponet.4829:

Celestial elementalist is a jack of all trades. But it’s important to realise that you need to play to all your strengths in order for it to work.

With two castings of cleansing wave through Water dagger 5 and evasive arcana, they contribute somewhat to group healing and condition management.

It’s not difficult to maintain 10-20 stacks of might and permanent fury using your fire fields, 3 blast finisher weapon skills, and the blast finisher on earth attunement evasive arcana.

Dagger elementalists have high mobility, allowing them to disengage fights, as well as quickly reach objectives if things like having to reach distant switches mid fight are ever incorporated as mechanics.

Due to the design of their kit and stat selection, elementalists deal significant amounts of both direct and condition damage when stacked with might.

Celestial D/D in PvE does really, really poor damage.

Weird, when I played it, it did noticably more than my berserker mesmer.

Mesmer is the lowest damage class in PvE. As in, lower than necromancer. So I’m not sure what point you’re trying to prove when bringing up the lowest standard possible for DPS.

If I’m channeling something for 4 seconds the effects should be at the same or even greater level of damage/impact as a full 100 blades or similar skill.

Especially when it also comes at the cost of increased attunement cooldown.

Overloads wouldn’t even be that bad if they bothered to bring water and earth attunement autoattacks on all weapons up to line with fire and air so being stuck in water or earth didn’t completely destroy your damage.

Scepter autoattacks all need significant buffs however, none of this anemic garbage you gave us on the latest patch.

rotten.9753:

Zenith.7301:

If you want to complain about difficulty, then by your standards ranger should be the supreme DPS class, if you’ve ever actually tried using 1h sword against mossman or archdiviner without a guardian feeding you aegis. In fact, 1h ranger is the only class who can’t even max melee thanks to the way 1h sword works.

Dagger ele has the largest range out of all melee weapons, there’s virtually nothing forcing you to be in striking distance other than when you do burning speed, which luckily also has a built in evade.

I realise ranger sword play is quite difficult (I play it) but have you ever consider attacking your target from behind when your pet tanks the damage?

Because my pet is not tanking the damage. I’m lucky if my jaguars don’t get 2-shot by melee cleave.

rotten.9753:

Zenith.7301:

Your points are not really valid on giving up DPS for utility, because the fact is ranger gives DPS for no utility (his weapons with the exception of offhand axe have no utility whatsoever, and whirling defense has such horrendous DPS and makes you stationary so you’re giving up more DPS and survival for a reflect than an ele or engi ever will). In fact, ranger’s only utility comes from taking up a garbage traitline (skirmishing) for spotter, meaning he just wasted all minors and 2 worthless traits (the grandmasters are terrible) just for spotter, and his other utility lies in frost spirit, which comes at the opportunity cost of another DPS centric utility.

I’m quite curious why you think quick draw is terrible.

Because on a power spec at the standard sword+axe+longbow setup, it is.

Quick draw is good for a condi build due to its reduction on bonfire, but a reduction on path of scars isn’t really going to make a huge impact, and the trait doesn’t work on whirling defense.

Quick draw is good for a condi spec and that’s great because skirmishing is a condi centric build.

If power rangers could get spotter, they’d stick with marksman, beastmastery, and nature magic to stack on the damage modifiers.

Skirmishing lost its appeal post patch when the 10% damage from flanking got massively nerfed into a % crit increase from flanking, and the rest of the traits outside spotter are irrelevant to a power build.

Quick Draw can stand to be a worthwhile grandmaster if they ever buff greatsword out of garbage status by increasing the damage significantly of maul and the autoattack. Then you could run both sword and switch around.

In addition, I’d suggest buffing serpent strike’s damage considerably, it’s a 15 sec cd with a wind up and lower evasion frame than blurred frenzy/unrelenting assault, yet both of those skills do considerably more damage for some reason.

Even then, Quick Draw would be good but the rest of the traits, the minors and the adept, pretty weak still. Same goes for opening strike in the marksman minor, the fact that you need to trait into the grandmaster to make a minor usable in PvE is horrendous design.

Windsagio.1340:

Yes, it’s all a conspiracy because players just know so much more about balance than the designers do.

It does accidentally make a good point though – a meter would limit the design space something fierce because you’d kind of have to design in such a way as all classes were in the same range in the meters. Just another way that dps meters feed misery.

lol and 3 years of “ELE/ELE/WARRIOR/THIEF/GUARD ONLY” totally isn’t misery, right.

I’ve been suggesting changes to the minors since before the first weekend when they previewed the class and it’s been promptly ignore.

As has been the fact that the shouts are utter garbage for PvE, that we will be running wells as usual, that our adept and grandmaster options in the reaper traitline are also horrendous, and that reaper shroud is a DPS loss over greatsword use so a grandmaster being tied to it pretty much becomes a poor option by default.

Change shivers of dread to make foes tremble in place while feared and for the chill to be applied after the fear wears off.

Make the other minor add a 7-10% damage increase against chilled foes.

Make chilling nova have a decent damage application on proc, on the scale of Power Block from mesmer and reduce the icd to 5-6 seconds.

Make Unrelenting Pursuit give a run speed bonus or a swiftness proc upon entering reaper shroud.

Augury of Death will remain worthless so long as shouts remain worthless, selfish garbage in PvE.

Swap Deathly Chill with Soul Eater so we have a worthwhile grandmaster. PvE necros don’t really have anything of worth in grandmaster since two of them have to deal with reaper shroud and reaper shroud is not good in PvE content since it blocks your access to healing from water fields, it does less DPS than your greatsword, it’s purely a turtling form. Deathly chill is kinda crappy anyways I don’t even know why it exists, it tickles.

It would require more money spent on voice acting. I’d rather they keep the money where it matters, tuning gameplay and content not on some stupid fluff.

They’re never going to add a DPS meter because it’d reveal just how significant the disparity in class performance is. It would show the horrid job done these past years with PvE balance.

The whole point of not having meters is to keep everything obscured so that players can’t come back to developers with data to back up their complaints. Sure, people like NikeEU can make their own meter but developers can just pretend to question its accuracy or can simply look at ways to punish players announcing they’re using parsers outside the game like they did in FFXIV.

Summarizing why condi will never be a thing unless some core designs from the mesmer are touched and the class stops being balanced around 1V1 pvp QQ:

1- Highest ramp up of all condi specs.

2- Condi specs rely on illusion uptime even more than power specs do.

3- Illusion weapons and clones/phantasms have no cleave/aoe whatsoever. It is essentially a single target spec in a game all about cleaving and aoe.

4- Stuck with the worst condition lodout of all condi specs. Bleed/torment/confusion. Condi strength ranking goes Burning>>>>>Poison> Bleeding>Torment>=Confusion. Bleeding is pitifully weak, which is why necromancer sucks as well, and torment and confusion are even worse. Essentially, any spec without heavy burning focus is an inferior spekittenil conditions are rebalanced.

5- Condi weapons don’t synergize with most of our utilities or phantasms. They don’t synergize with reflects.

6- Illusion count for shattering matters, and this is hamstringed by illusion survivability.

7- Shatters kind of suck in PvE, and in the case of conditions even more as you even need heavy trait support and investment to even make shatters matter at all in burst situations.

8- frifox nicely summarized where some of WhiteAlpha’s idealized scenarios just don’t mesh with the reality of how the game is played. Much like how I was not believed when I said revenants would be top DPS, and lo and behold raids are bringing 2-3 revenant DPS.

The practicality of applying damage MATTERS, not just doing math. There’s a reason why engineers are more valued over pure mathematicians and their paygrades reflect that reality.

Let’s take the ranger as an example. A power ranger would be ranked above mesmer and necromancer in DPS and even maybe over a guardian. But that’s when it’s measured in a vaccum where a 1h sword ranger can afford to autoattack without interruption.

Due to the nature of the ranger’s 1h sword, which locks down their animation and delays their dodges, a ranger can’t really safely melee mossman or archdiviner without a guardian babying him with aegis spam. The ranger takes so much damage from being unable to dodge in time due to the weapon’s animation lock, that he needs to back off and lose DPS in the process of recovering. Or, he can delay his autoattack sequence preemptively to dodge so as to not be locked in animation, but deliberately delaying your autoattack to be able to dodge is also a DPS loss.

It’s all these little things that add up. Guardian unscathed contender is another example of a potential that is rarely met in serious content.

The mesmer works in PvE only because of the unique utility it brings, be it portal bot or now alacrity/quickness bot. In every other way it’s a deeply flawed class with mechanics that undermine the player.

Look at phantasms and shatter. Players are now forced to go into chronomancy not only because alacrity is the only thing keeping them relevant over a guardian in PvE, but because Chronophantasma is a band aid to the issue of phantasms and shatter that you need to pay a grandmaster slot for to not have your own class mechanic screw you over.

Jerus.4350:

assassin.7895:

Jerus.4350:

Curious what utility do Engi/Ele have that means they shouldn’t be able to pump out damage? I can think of some but they typically involve dropping your damage to get them. Not saying that both professions don’t have a ton of versatility and utility, but the idea of having everything all at once, I don’t think I’m on the same page.

Another reason I really want to see DPS Meters.

Fire fields, water fields, chill, many blasts, blind, block, invuln, good mobility

There are not many classes that have so much (essential) stuff, which is why they should’ve at least more DPS to be good as well.

Compared to Mesmer/Guard long lasting projectile defense, warriors 20+ might stacks with EA and banners (which can be used as blasts), or thieves stealth supremecy and chain blast options, superior blinds, better projectile defense, and mobility. Or maybe Condi cleansing options.

I don’t know, I’m fine with a toning down of Engi a slight bit, and ele, my point is more I don’t think that they have something that other professions don’t such that they shouldn’t be qualified to be right up there at the top. If there is one profession that I feel deserves top spot it’s necro, other than that I think there’s a lot of different utility options for every profession.

I’ll say the same thing I have before, IMO all professions should be right about 15k in their max DPS builds. Yes even if that means bringing Engi/Ele down. But I’m far more concerned with getting the poorly performing professions up than the high ones down is all. And the problem with Engi dps is it’s quoted as 20k, but please someone bring me a video of someone pulling it off, I want to bow to a master that I don’t believe exists

Your points are not really valid on giving up DPS for utility, because the fact is ranger gives DPS for no utility (his weapons with the exception of offhand axe have no utility whatsoever, and whirling defense has such horrendous DPS and makes you stationary so you’re giving up more DPS and survival for a reflect than an ele or engi ever will). In fact, ranger’s only utility comes from taking up a garbage traitline (skirmishing) for spotter, meaning he just wasted all minors and 2 worthless traits (the grandmasters are terrible) just for spotter, and his other utility lies in frost spirit, which comes at the opportunity cost of another DPS centric utility.

What’s more, engi also has longlasting access to projectile destruction, and mesmer reflection is not really longlasting. Feedback is half the duration of a wall of reflection more or less, and you gotta use a 90 sec cd utility to double on it, losing another utility slot in the process. Warden is a DPS loss phantasm that is immobile and dies immediately to melee cleave. Curtain has elevation issues so many projectiles ignore it and it needs to be traited to provide any utility, which involves taking up inspiration and as a result lose DPS.

So, not really, mesmer at least pays a whole lot more to bring utility over an ele, and a necromancer doesn’t even have an option to bring utility, corrosive poison cloud is projectile absorption and places 6 seconds of weakness on yourself, it’s hilariously bad.

When you point out projectile defense, an elementalist has swirling winds and ring of earth on top of magnetic aura, and if he traits in water instead of arcane (which actually does more DPS than arcane), you get aura sharing for magnetic aura share.

More importantly, combo fields/finishers are more universal than reflects. Reflects are good on fights where reflects are needed, they have zero value in fights where they are not. Combo fields and finishers are useful in EVERY fight. On top of that you have to look at the party gains from might/fury share and especially protection from elemental attunement minor.

They are not on the same league.

P.S. Chronomancer doesn’t even have much access to reflects since he has to run all wells on his utilities for alacrity share of the group, if he switches out one well for feedback, it’s not only minore reflection, but a sizable cut to the alacrity share he’s providing. He’s not going to have refletcs unless he traits for inspiration at the large expense of dueling or illusions.

Can we do something about confusion. It’s an absolutely dreadful condition for PvE as is torment.

Why not make both confusion and torment in PvE do the same damage as bleeding, but with the proc bonuses on top? They’re more restricted in application than bleeding, after all.

The illusions traitline is held back by the woeful minors such as a tiny confusion application on shatter, virtually worthless to a power mesmer and even mediocre by condi mesmer standards because the application is so small and short.

When are we also going to see a meaningful change to Cry of Frustration? It’s such a weak and irrelevant shatter, doing a tiny fraction of mindwrack’s damage with a much longer cooldown for no reason whatsoever.

And since you’re not going to make CoF more damaging due to fears of extra burst alongside Mindwrack, why not switch its utility instead? Make Cry of Frustration apply a healthy amount of cripple and slow while granting the mesmer might+fury or some otehr beneficial effect per illusion shattered.

Can we also change Diversion to apply daze duration amount based on the illusion count? It’s got a massive CD and shattering diversion with more than one clone, and especially now with illusionary persona feels like a waste unless it is to strip stability/defiance.

Jerus.4350:

Curious what utility do Engi/Ele have that means they shouldn’t be able to pump out damage? I can think of some but they typically involve dropping your damage to get them. Not saying that both professions don’t have a ton of versatility and utility, but the idea of having everything all at once, I don’t think I’m on the same page.

Another reason I really want to see DPS Meters.

Oh, I don’t know, the best access to the best combo fields (fire, water, smoke) on top of the largest amount of blast finishers, on top of easy might/fury stacking, built in aoe healing skills. In the case of ele, earth elemental glyph, lightning hammer for the classes with weaker autoattacks, glyph of elemental storm, and for both ele and engineer strong active defenses and damage delivery from safety (larger melee range for ele, same goes for engineer and both have easy access to blocks/evades/invulnerability).

Compare that to a necromancer. In the case of mesmer, outside being portal kitten they kick you for a guardian instead, and if it weren’t for alacrity botting they would have replaced you for a guardian. Same goes for rangers who don’t want to be forced into a healbot cleric stats druid.

There’s good reason why in terms of class solos/duos/trios some classes are represented while others are not. The disparity in access to boons and the good combo fields/finishers, on top of large single target and aoe DPS disparities adds to what we have seen with necro/mesmer/ranger being unwanted for general content over the others, since those three classes also happen to be at the end of the DPS spectrum.

Of course the place of these classes is called into question when they introduce something as absurdly over the top as revenant/herald. A class whose Unrelenting Assault does triple the damage of blurred frenzy, teleports you to a target, also evades, and grants 7 might stacks is a good example of how revenant just gets better versions of what other class has.

Rangers got a hotfix nerf to a gimmick spec that was wasting their heal just to boon stack, and in comes a herald who can permanently keep 12 stacks of might and perma fury on the group while maintaining all his DPS since revenant’s DPS comes from the highest mainhand sword autoattack DPS in the game (while they refuse to even buff mesmer or ranger autoattacks for garbage PvP reasons). A ranger stacking boons on himself by wasting his heal is too much, a revenant stacking it for the entire group is fine.

Really, just take out your ranger/necro/mesmer for a spin compared to ele/engi/warrior/thief. The difference in individual DPS is night and day, it’s so absurd. And it’s no coincidence that for two out of these three part of that is tied to fragile AI that gets cleaved out and doesn’t scale from runes/sigils/potions/food/ascended upgrades.

In fact, reaper and chrono are in the most precarious position due to pvp whine. Reaper rests entirely on gravedigger spam to stay relevant, yet all it takes is a QQ fountain from someone in pvp who ate a 12-14k gravedigger, and they’re already campaigning to nerf mesmer alacrity (which is the sole reason you pick a chrono over a guardian who brings easier reflect uptime, group aegis and boon uptime, and way higher DPS).

Ranger is just a pitiful pool of neglect. I mean, look at something like Most Dangerous Game or Strider’s Defense or moving Spotter from a power traitline to a traitline that is purely traps and shortbow conditions to know how utterly screwed the class is.

Ranger gets a bunch of on pet swap grandmasters/traits ignoring the fact that pets do not get baseline boon sharing with the ranger so you need a minor from crappy Nature Magic just so your pets can gain boons given to you, and when you swap pets all that might and fury is removed.

It’s just such a poorly designed class and frustrating in all aspects of the game.

This whole pity party is ridiculous. Dagger ele is one of the safest melee to play with, and staff ele was absurdly forgiving given that it’s rotation could be done a good distance away from aoe/melee cleave range while still being in range of boons.

A class with the utility of ele (and engineer, for that matter who should be getting nerfs) should not be top damage. Neither should warrior for that matter given the massive group DPS boost they provide and the incredibly forgiving perks of the class.

If you want to complain about difficulty, then by your standards ranger should be the supreme DPS class, if you’ve ever actually tried using 1h sword against mossman or archdiviner without a guardian feeding you aegis. In fact, 1h ranger is the only class who can’t even max melee thanks to the way 1h sword works.

Dagger ele has the largest range out of all melee weapons, there’s virtually nothing forcing you to be in striking distance other than when you do burning speed, which luckily also has a built in evade.

The issue with the tempest are the poorly tuned overloads, and the fact that after all these years Anet is painfully negligent in balancing autoattack damage (the bulk of sustained DPS).

If they buffed autoattacks in water and earth attunements to be in line with fire and air, the elementalist wouldn’t be in the rut it’s in in terms of NEEDING to rotate attunements just to do DPS because the moment you are stuck in water or earth your damage plummets (which is what overloads do).

Once they actually get off their kitten and balance autoattacks across classes (buff ele scepter and water/earth attunement autos for all weapons, and all class scepters except guardian for that matter; buff ranger shortbow, greatsword, 1h sword, axe mainhand; buff necromancer axe auto; buff mesmer autos on all their weapons), the differences in power DPS won’t be so painfully blatant.

Condi is a whole other can of worms as engineers just have way too much convenient condition coverage and cleaving relative to the other classes, and burning completely overtook the other conditions and eclipsed them.

Tempest won’t see such a marked clash with overloads once being stuck in water or earth stops sucking because the autoattacks now actually do competitive DPS. Tweak the traits as well a bit as the overloads and tempest should be more than fine.

Too bad all classes couldn’t receive the polished development revenant did. Revenant is what all classes should have been designed as, but we all know that once they release core classes as they are, they never actually bother to fix them, especially when PvP balance keeps trumping PvE balance.

If chill on auto is scary for a developer, they can just slap a 1-2 second cripple on the 1st and 2nd swings of the auto.

To be honest my main gripes with the reaper are the mediocre traits for PvE, the useless shouts, and a reaper shroud that is essentially a DPS loss so you don’t even want to use it in PvE unless you’re in danger of dying. Our heals are still sorta terrible, but that goes for most of our utilities that aren’t wells anyways.

Right now PvE reaper lives and dies by Gravedigger spam. The moment they touch Gravedigger for PvP whine, is the moment you’ll see the PvE reapers raising their voices again.

Star Ace.5207:

This game has no endgame, and nothing for “pros” to prove. Second, evidently you don’t know anything about me as a player. Third, thanks for being a fair example of the “unhealthiness” ANet refers to when dealing with an strict Berserker’s meta.

To be fair, the true elite players that do play what they think is “endgame content” do not necessarily behave like you, and can be very nice and reasonable, without resorting to insults when their points of views are challenged. You thus do not set a good example for the community, nor the “top players” community for that matter.

To be succint, forget about the old meta, and embrace new GW2-you can still resort to older “zerk” meta tactics, which I have nothing against, for older content. Seems like all you are trying to do is fit old meta thinking for your own convenience, rather than for what is REALLY for the benefit of all, INCLUDING the very best players.

This from the guy who smugly tells people they have self inflicted problems and fail to understand the future of the game.

It’s also kind of precious what a glowing review you gave to developers and the content they’ve made when you have said the game has no endgame content or anything remotely challenging in it.

In the meantime I’ll just chuckle at the kind of crap that comes out of votekick fodder swearing that the game is about to not be made up of zerker/sinister raids with one guy wearing knights accessories to keep aggro. Which is exactly what has just happened with the first raid content released to us.

The problem is not that it requires acended. The problem is how absurd it is to make ascended armor.

I don’t think anyone is complaining about ascended weapons, but the material costs to make ascended armor is stupidly high, especially bolts of damask, and having to make a berzerker, a sinister, and MAYBE a knights/valkyrie/cavalier set is dumb.

Full ascended armor+weapons is around 600 gold. That’s 1800 gold for three sets, or basically nearly the cost of a legendary.

Now apply that per armor class because most of us have all classes at 80, it’s now 5400 gold to make zerker+sinister+tanky armor sets for the three armor classes.

Just nerf the time gates and material costs of ascended armor and weapons. Alternatively offer ascended chests up for sale on karma/laurels/fractal currency.

Star Ace.5207:

Zenith.7301:

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

There’ll be more supportive damage for Celestial Avatar by launch… possibly from trait modifications or from skill changes.

An issue which should not be decoupled here is that Celestial Avatar felt gated behind staff use (and troll unguent), which left a ranger with one damage-focused weapon option and one support weapon. I’m making some changes to astral force rate gain to try to address this. Ideally it should be possible to build up your astral force without -needing- to run staff, but running staff should speed up the process by nature of the heals it provides. This would yield the option of running two non-staff weapons while still having Celestial Avatar available.

Celestial Avatar healing is the best available by a decent margin right now. One issue that came up is that the healing coefficients are so insignificant that running with healing stats yields very little reward.

The best healing in the game being available without using any healing power; this is not good for the game.

The berserker meta not be the only consideration requires that other stat combinations be rewarding.

Being able to run two more damage-focused weapons (if that’s your thing) and still have Celestial Avatar available should address some of your offensive concerns if you want to play a bit more offensively as a hybrid. If you want to focus on being the top offense then you probably shouldn’t be selecting the Druid specialization.

That’s all I’m going to say on the subject for now (though I will continue to read constructive feedback here and elsewhere) as there is plenty to be done in order to address these and other issues. /me ducks back to work on Scrapper and Druid.

I don’t get this position.

The problem is that healing power sucks for a variety of reasons

Healing Power as a stat comes at a great offensive cost, which means you are sacrificing any ability to do solo content or play an offensive role for the sole ability to have stronger heals.

By pushing the druid into Celestial/Settler/Zealot gear, you are making them healbots for raids, but crippled in overworld PvE, dungeons, story instances, and fractals where the role of a healbot simply isn’t needed.

What you should do is merge healing power with vitality and boon duration with toughness. Healing Power is too niche a benefit to truly ever feel attractive without being penalized

What scares me more about your proposed nerfs to baseline healing is that you remove any purpose of the Druid from offensive players wanting to run zerker/valkyrie/knights.

To you it seems fine to pick traitlines other than druid for offense, BUT THE PROBLEM IS THAT THE OTHER OFFENSIVE OPTIONS ARE SUBPAR AND UNWANTED IN META COMPS.

Vanilla offensive ranger is NOT competitive with the top offensive specs. 1h sword still isn’t fixed and is our only remotely viable DPS weapon that locks us out of dodges.

Moreover, while the other specializations somehow fit into a variety of stat options and playstyles, the druid is pigeonholed into a healbot. Why? Why is the new toy for rangers so limited and restrictive?

By making Druid THE healing spec of the game, you force rangers into a corner:

a) Druid heals will be required in raids, and as an effect all rangers who want to raid will be forced to play druid healbot.

b) Druid heals are not required. In which case the one dimensional druid spec becomes obsolete and unwanted as it loses the group considerable DPS when your raid bosses so far display strict DPS enrage timers.

Since non-druid rangers have no competitive DPS builds with the other classes, all types of rangers will not be desired in current content just as the current meta excludes them.

From a personal stance, I also DESPISE being forced into a cleric stat set, because no other of my 7 other classes wants to use cleric anywhere. That means I have to have a full ascended set of berzerker, a full ascended set of sinisters, and a full ascended set of clerics just for the ranger. This translates in cost to roughly two precursors worth of gold and immense time investment. This is what introducing ascended as opposed to keeping exotics caused for players.

Self-inflicted problem, for believing the lie that GW2 was all DPS for PvE, and that it was somehow intended. ANet never told you that-you inferred it from the current available content.

If you absolutely loathe Healing Power, instead of telling him “what he should do” as if you really knew better, is to play your DPS characters, and not use any hybrids, condition, or healing specs. Direct Damage will still be relevant anyway, and other players will fill the roles you so much dislike

Actually love this reply from Irenio, as it shows great promise for the game and that they indeed know what they are doing.

This comment has too much ignorance/incompetence to sift through, but I’ll just leave it there that every single Vale Guardian kill has been with 9-10 DPS geared toons (zerker and sinister).

Please go back to camping autoattacks on a ranged weapon in dynamic events or leeching loot bags in WvW zergs with your cleric staff guardian and leave the endgame to those of us who have actually done it. I’m starting to think you haven’t even done fractal 50 and if you have I pity those whose poor backs cringed under the weight of carrying your gimmick subpar builds.

Nike.2631:

xarallei.4279:

Sulfarius.1756:

On a more serious note I do agree that at times it feels like across the board base heals might be a bit too much but I also feel like it’s harder to balance while keeping the philosophy of “you don’t really need a healer to do stuff”… even tho raids look like you do in fact need a healer, but we’ll see!

-10% heals across the board might sound small, but I think it would have a huge impact. For better or for worse.

If they want to do this exclusively for raids I might be ok with this. But outside of that? No. Because the rest of the game you are supposed to not have to lug a healer around to do content.

Gearing for a couple hundred points of heal power is not “lugging a healer around with you.”

It is putting a boot on the Zerker’ metas neck and pressing down.

It is putting a neck on ZERKER RANGER’s neck. All the other classes will still be running zerkers. Engineers can run sinister because they’re the supreme condi spec far above others.

This change will strictly punish offensive rangers who want to make use of their elite spec.

The whole idea of druid just being a healing spec is what’s so thoroughly offensive to me. Why? I’m really wondering why rangers, who have kept asking for improved damage and offensive support, were given in turn a healbot spec as a tongue in cheek answer to lack of team support.

No other class has their elite spec so thoroughly focused on a niche. Chronomancer, reaper, and scrapper can build for DPS, bunker, or support. The druid is the only spec where you are told “you heal, that’s it. If you try to be offensive, you’ll be a crappy hybrid”.

Going to cross post to express my thoughts on the design approach to druid:

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

There’ll be more supportive damage for Celestial Avatar by launch… possibly from trait modifications or from skill changes.

An issue which should not be decoupled here is that Celestial Avatar felt gated behind staff use (and troll unguent), which left a ranger with one damage-focused weapon option and one support weapon. I’m making some changes to astral force rate gain to try to address this. Ideally it should be possible to build up your astral force without -needing- to run staff, but running staff should speed up the process by nature of the heals it provides. This would yield the option of running two non-staff weapons while still having Celestial Avatar available.

Celestial Avatar healing is the best available by a decent margin right now. One issue that came up is that the healing coefficients are so insignificant that running with healing stats yields very little reward.

The best healing in the game being available without using any healing power; this is not good for the game.

The berserker meta not be the only consideration requires that other stat combinations be rewarding.

Being able to run two more damage-focused weapons (if that’s your thing) and still have Celestial Avatar available should address some of your offensive concerns if you want to play a bit more offensively as a hybrid. If you want to focus on being the top offense then you probably shouldn’t be selecting the Druid specialization.

That’s all I’m going to say on the subject for now (though I will continue to read constructive feedback here and elsewhere) as there is plenty to be done in order to address these and other issues. /me ducks back to work on Scrapper and Druid.

I don’t get this position.

The problem is that healing power sucks for a variety of reasons

Healing Power as a stat comes at a great offensive cost, which means you are sacrificing any ability to do solo content or play an offensive role for the sole ability to have stronger heals.

By pushing the druid into Celestial/Settler/Zealot gear, you are making them healbots for raids, but crippled in overworld PvE, dungeons, story instances, and fractals where the role of a healbot simply isn’t needed.

What you should do is merge healing power with vitality and boon duration with toughness. Healing Power is too niche a benefit to truly ever feel attractive without being penalized

What scares me more about your proposed nerfs to baseline healing is that you remove any purpose of the Druid from offensive players wanting to run zerker/valkyrie/knights.

To you it seems fine to pick traitlines other than druid for offense, BUT THE PROBLEM IS THAT THE OTHER OFFENSIVE OPTIONS ARE SUBPAR AND UNWANTED IN META COMPS.

Vanilla offensive ranger is NOT competitive with the top offensive specs. 1h sword still isn’t fixed and is our only remotely viable DPS weapon that locks us out of dodges.

Moreover, while the other specializations somehow fit into a variety of stat options and playstyles, the druid is pigeonholed into a healbot. Why? Why is the new toy for rangers so limited and restrictive?

By making Druid THE healing spec of the game, you force rangers into a corner:

a) Druid heals will be required in raids, and as an effect all rangers who want to raid will be forced to play druid healbot.

b) Druid heals are not required. In which case the one dimensional druid spec becomes obsolete and unwanted as it loses the group considerable DPS when your raid bosses so far display strict DPS enrage timers.

Since non-druid rangers have no competitive DPS builds with the other classes, all types of rangers will not be desired in current content just as the current meta excludes them.

From a personal stance, I also DESPISE being forced into a cleric stat set, because no other of my 7 other classes wants to use cleric anywhere. That means I have to have a full ascended set of berzerker, a full ascended set of sinisters, and a full ascended set of clerics just for the ranger. This translates in cost to roughly two precursors worth of gold and immense time investment. This is what introducing ascended as opposed to keeping exotics caused for players.

I also want to address the “best heals in the game while running berzerker is not good for the game”.

You are getting best heals because presumably you’ve picked up the druid specialization at the expense of a more offensive traitline. So you want to not only limit our offensive trait options by designing the Druid spec, staff, and traits around just healing, but you also want to limit what stat comboes we can run and benefit from the spec with?

You already nerfed shortbow to irrelevance and disuse in order to make the longbow more attractive. It didn’t work, you had to buff the longbow so people would use it. So don’t go nerfing berzerker druids just to make healing power druids more attractive, just fix the healing power scaling so a healing power druid gains even bigger heals than the baseline berzerker, at the expected cost of completely garbage damage which is what Cleric does in PvE.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

There’ll be more supportive damage for Celestial Avatar by launch… possibly from trait modifications or from skill changes.

An issue which should not be decoupled here is that Celestial Avatar felt gated behind staff use (and troll unguent), which left a ranger with one damage-focused weapon option and one support weapon. I’m making some changes to astral force rate gain to try to address this. Ideally it should be possible to build up your astral force without -needing- to run staff, but running staff should speed up the process by nature of the heals it provides. This would yield the option of running two non-staff weapons while still having Celestial Avatar available.

Celestial Avatar healing is the best available by a decent margin right now. One issue that came up is that the healing coefficients are so insignificant that running with healing stats yields very little reward.

The best healing in the game being available without using any healing power; this is not good for the game.

The berserker meta not be the only consideration requires that other stat combinations be rewarding.

Being able to run two more damage-focused weapons (if that’s your thing) and still have Celestial Avatar available should address some of your offensive concerns if you want to play a bit more offensively as a hybrid. If you want to focus on being the top offense then you probably shouldn’t be selecting the Druid specialization.

That’s all I’m going to say on the subject for now (though I will continue to read constructive feedback here and elsewhere) as there is plenty to be done in order to address these and other issues. /me ducks back to work on Scrapper and Druid.

I don’t get this position.

The problem is that healing power sucks for a variety of reasons

Healing Power as a stat comes at a great offensive cost, which means you are sacrificing any ability to do solo content or play an offensive role for the sole ability to have stronger heals.

By pushing the druid into Celestial/Settler/Zealot gear, you are making them healbots for raids, but crippled in overworld PvE, dungeons, story instances, and fractals where the role of a healbot simply isn’t needed.

What you should do is merge healing power with vitality and boon duration with toughness. Healing Power is too niche a benefit to truly ever feel attractive without being penalized

What scares me more about your proposed nerfs to baseline healing is that you remove any purpose of the Druid from offensive players wanting to run zerker/valkyrie/knights.

To you it seems fine to pick traitlines other than druid for offense, BUT THE PROBLEM IS THAT THE OTHER OFFENSIVE OPTIONS ARE SUBPAR AND UNWANTED IN META COMPS.

Vanilla offensive ranger is NOT competitive with the top offensive specs. 1h sword still isn’t fixed and is our only remotely viable DPS weapon that locks us out of dodges.

Moreover, while the other specializations somehow fit into a variety of stat options and playstyles, the druid is pigeonholed into a healbot. Why? Why is the new toy for rangers so limited and restrictive?

By making Druid THE healing spec of the game, you force rangers into a corner:

a) Druid heals will be required in raids, and as an effect all rangers who want to raid will be forced to play druid healbot.

b) Druid heals are not required. In which case the one dimensional druid spec becomes obsolete and unwanted as it loses the group considerable DPS when your raid bosses so far display strict DPS enrage timers.

Since non-druid rangers have no competitive DPS builds with the other classes, all types of rangers will not be desired in current content just as the current meta excludes them.

From a personal stance, I also DESPISE being forced into a cleric stat set, because no other of my 7 other classes wants to use cleric anywhere. That means I have to have a full ascended set of berzerker, a full ascended set of sinisters, and a full ascended set of clerics just for the ranger. This translates in cost to roughly two precursors worth of gold and immense time investment. This is what introducing ascended as opposed to keeping exotics caused for players.

runeblade.7514:

dankid.9321:

Key points:
-Staff skills and damage are very “MEH”

Play the power druid build. Staff skills and damage become very strong.

You have no clue what strong means. Literally none.

We need DPS meters in this game so these lies can stop.

Staff auto does virtually less DPS than greatsword (which is already pretty terrible), and only more than axe autoattack (which is the worst autoattack in the game in coefficients).

The only good things about Staff are skills 3 and 5.

I ran full ascended zerker druid and you could virtually kill things faster by using PVT armor instead and a shortbow.

Staff does horrendous damage, and negligible healing. It’s like the guardian staff, but worse because at least the guardian staff heals for something wortwhile and tags targets while being a worthless damaging weapon.

imidacloprid.2948:

A lot of what this class does currently feels “right,” especially in that most of the traits do not tie you to the greatsword, but the necromancer’s lack of reliable stunbreaks or even stability (outside of foot in the grave) really sticks out in a lot of the CC-heavy fights. The Legendary Fire Wyvern sticks out in this category of “things you can’t really get yourself out of as a reaper.” What could really round this out as a melee class is some kind of trait that would apply a conditional stability, or maybe tack a microstability (like well of power) to shouts when traited or something. Necro has never really been a mobile or dodging class, and reaper definitely isn’t, so it just seems natural they’d have a few more tricks for standing their ground up their sleeve.

This is not a reaper only thing. My chronomancer was also getting screwed in melee.

Essentially, you want to hump his back at all times, and when he starts turning around just dodge the fire to stay on his back.

When he flies back down to land, wait till he does his tail swipe before getting to his back.

Turns out all the whining about berzerker melee has made them design a lot of bosses that just encourage boring ranged weapon autoattack spam.

I like masteries.

I don’t like having to grind boring dynamic events to level them up in Heart of Thorns.

iAvenger will be fine once they fix illusion survivability against aoe/cleave spam in this game.

Robert Gee made the right call to make it melee and a reliable delivery phantasm (when it does its thing, the slow and alacrity are pretty reliable).

When people want it reverted because it’s dying easily, they just want a band aid solution.

I’m glad Gee changed it to melee, because more people are going to start complaining about it dying easily, which should force Anet’s hand to do something about illusions/ranger pets/ranger spirits/necro minions/spirit weapons/engineer turrets and gyros.

They might actually have to catch up to 2015 and apply the aoe avoidance/immunity other MMO’s have been doing since early WoW to keep pet/AI reliant classes functional and viable.

Did Legendary Wyvern, might as well have sat there AFK camping autoattack since the illusions died before I could even visually see them due to all the fire in the ground and cleaves =/

The upscaling of the champ/legendary breakbars is now so steep as well that the wyvern’s breakbar before it goes up most of the time won’t even be close to 50-75% broken before it goes up in the air, greatly diminishing the value of our CC’s.

The ice bow nerf is inconsequential in PvE compared to WvW. WvW burst matters because we’re balancing against 20k hp max people that flop dead in a few seconds of attention. Not bosses with millions of HP. Even against something like archdiviner you’re looking ata round 1 minute to burn down where it would have taken a few seconds to burn a player.

In PvE ele will still shine thanks to lava font and meteor shower still continuing to do unholy amounts of damage.

I’m surprised meteor shower hasn’t been nerfed yet considering it so badly eclipses every other class’s aoe spell and is completely over the top on large hitbox objects.

But eles are used to the glory that is their class in all game formats so being brought to the level of the peasants or being confronted with a reflection of that in the form of the tempest specialization (which sucks by ele standards, but is completely fine compared to the average) makes them feel wronged.

Azumi.9572:

Zenith.7301:

Azumi.9572:

Zenith.7301:

Azumi.9572:

Kevan.8912:

another question before: what is really stopping me from doing fractals? a huge, steamy heap of money and crafting ingredients to stack AR.
what will stop me from raids? with pretty good probability, still not having ascendeds + capped masteries.

I didn’t find Ascended Armor that expensive. Only thing was the idiotic time-gating.

I made a post on here a while ago about Fractals – it was due to Mawdrey being locked behind Fractals at the time. I didn’t want to run 5 Fractals because I had this idea in my head they were extremely hard.

I sucked it up and did them. And they were easy. It was more content I got to enjoy. I made it up to Fractal level 33 before stopping due to bordem.

You never had a reason to make your Ascended Armor before (Fractals didn’t motivate you, obviously) now you do. Now you have something to work towards.

Nothing is holding you back from doing Raids or making that Armor but yourself.

And because you are holding yourself back, you want to punish and hold back others.

That’s garbage.

The cost of ascended armor varies wildly on whether you were a cloth wearer, a leather wearer, or plate wearer.

The cost and required amount of bolts of damask makes a huge impact.

My mesmer’s full ascended armor cost around 470 gold to make. It’s much cheaper on non-cloth toons.

Mine was cloth. I made all the Damask. Ran Dungeons, used Gold to buy Silk. Took maybe an hour to finish like 5 Dungeons (AC, CM, TA, CoF, CoE). All Pugged.

Like I said – only issue was the time-gate. Which was, is and always will be an idiotic mechanic in any game.

I’m not sure what purpose it serves other than punishing one set of players (Players who play a lot/have a lot of resources) for another set of players (Players who don’t play a lot/don’t have a lot of resources) to keep one set from outpacing the other.

Now we can see though, a lot of those people weren’t bothering making Ascended anyway.

And the only reason I even did it was because I was BORED with nothing else to do. Burnt out on World Bosses, PvP. I needed to try something new (Fractals) to give me a reason to keep playing.

I did it for fractals, although that’s an entirely different can of worms. Before my ascended set, when ascended armor didn’t exist, I made the +10 infusions for the rings and amulet, which amounts to about 250 gold.

So if I’m counting infusions and making the ascended armor, it runs to about 700 gold, and if I add the gold I also dumped on several weapons, it’s closer to 850 gold.

And now with their apparent raid design of punishing zerkers with high toughness mobs, it means I gotta dump all that gold in another set of sinister stats ascended armor and weapons for back up.

How much fun!

I think ascended was a terrible mistake and they should have stuck to exotics and merely tied cosmetics and rank emotes to raids.

They recently changed that. You can now switch your Ascended stats in the Mystic Forge.

You need the Insignia for the set you want, Globs of Ecto (5 I think) and a Mystic Forge item bought with Shards.

Does bring up an interesting point, though.

There is no way making different sets of Ascended is economically, or time viable. So if a Raid requires Celes. in one part, Berserker in another, Sinister in another, etc. then it’s not going to be completed in full Ascended.

The time-gate makes it so it’s simply not worth putting the effort into making 4+ different sets of gear.

And they can’t make you have the ability to change the stats on the fly, because that’s the calling card for Legendary Armor.

But then, now that I think about it – This makes Fractals come into play, since Ascended gear drops in there, and since you can Mystic forge to change stats – every piece that drops is usable for you.

Not bad.

But that’s not a solution, because changing stats on ascended items involves destroying the enhancements, particularly those 250 gold worth of +10 infusions on my rings and amulet, unless I dish out 20 bucks on the cash store for the extraction tool and then have to spend that money on gems again when I switch back.

Ascended is just a horrible inconvenience foisted upon the players as a new timesink.

And fractals are not a reliable source of ascended armor.

I’ve done fractal 50 and have 2 sets of ascended stuff off it for the months I’ve been playing it, and I have all fractal skins.

My friend who I do fractal 50 with every day, who has been doing fractals with me for the same time, only has the fractal warhorn and no ascended chests to speak for.

RNG is RNG and a terrible way to tell people “well, you have that way to gear up if you don’t want to grind gold”.

What’s more, on top of that low rng for the ascended chest, you can get a chest for the same armor slot several times without being able to complete your set.

Ross Biddle.2367:

Zenith.7301:

Embolism.8106:

Zenith.7301:

Hurray, more PvP lobbying to ruin perfectly fine PvE skills and mechanisms.

They buffed the shield to make it attractive in PvE over the other weapons, but this won’t last long if the PvP concern trolls have their way as usual.

From a PvE perspective I really want a way to conjure iAvenger quickly, reducing the Block duration helps with that and doesn’t really affect its effectiveness as a defensive skill for the same reason Confusion isn’t viable in PvE.

I think you often have good points, and I respect that; but I feel you come across as aggressive and “knee-jerky” sometimes, which makes people lash out and devolves discussions.

The PvE environment for mesmer is currently toxic and PvP people are only seeking to make it more miserable.

It’s misguided to blame PvP’rs with “PvE concerns”.

Anet needs to find a solution. Fortunately for you they’ve stated they’re looking into the pet/minion aoe issue.

PvP is a legitimate game mode and all concerns regarding it need to be freely discussed, and all problems properly resolved. Stop attacking people, and focus on providing constructive feedback for your specefic gamemode and its concerns.

If illusion survival were a PvE only concern, phantasm specs wouldn’t be wholly absent from most competitive mesmers.

Same concerns extend to WvW.

PvP is a legitimate game mode whose balancing should be CONTAINED to it.

Sadly it isn’t, and us PvE people need to deal with the fall out of your crap, such as PU, phantasm cooldown normalization, on clone death traits, Harmonious Mantras and mantra recharge. Same goes for rangers, where their crappy pets received even damage nerfs, spirits were “changed” into irrelevance because “AI builds involve no skill!”, shortbow was decimated. Necromancers and rangers have been getting crippled and moved out of PvE participation by the onslaught of your PvP centric balancing as well, since they refuse to split the formats.

I’m quite sure if the crap went the other way around we wouldn’t hear the end of it from you about the format with “idiot mobs” is hampering your PvP experience.

It gets tiring of seeing constant threads pop up in the mesmer forums from people playing other classes wanting nerfs for your underperforming PvE class because they lost a 1v1 or couldn’t kill one in hotjoin.

Azumi.9572:

Zenith.7301:

Azumi.9572:

Kevan.8912:

another question before: what is really stopping me from doing fractals? a huge, steamy heap of money and crafting ingredients to stack AR.
what will stop me from raids? with pretty good probability, still not having ascendeds + capped masteries.

I didn’t find Ascended Armor that expensive. Only thing was the idiotic time-gating.

I made a post on here a while ago about Fractals – it was due to Mawdrey being locked behind Fractals at the time. I didn’t want to run 5 Fractals because I had this idea in my head they were extremely hard.

I sucked it up and did them. And they were easy. It was more content I got to enjoy. I made it up to Fractal level 33 before stopping due to bordem.

You never had a reason to make your Ascended Armor before (Fractals didn’t motivate you, obviously) now you do. Now you have something to work towards.

Nothing is holding you back from doing Raids or making that Armor but yourself.

And because you are holding yourself back, you want to punish and hold back others.

That’s garbage.

The cost of ascended armor varies wildly on whether you were a cloth wearer, a leather wearer, or plate wearer.

The cost and required amount of bolts of damask makes a huge impact.

My mesmer’s full ascended armor cost around 470 gold to make. It’s much cheaper on non-cloth toons.

Mine was cloth. I made all the Damask. Ran Dungeons, used Gold to buy Silk. Took maybe an hour to finish like 5 Dungeons (AC, CM, TA, CoF, CoE). All Pugged.

Like I said – only issue was the time-gate. Which was, is and always will be an idiotic mechanic in any game.

I’m not sure what purpose it serves other than punishing one set of players (Players who play a lot/have a lot of resources) for another set of players (Players who don’t play a lot/don’t have a lot of resources) to keep one set from outpacing the other.

Now we can see though, a lot of those people weren’t bothering making Ascended anyway.

And the only reason I even did it was because I was BORED with nothing else to do. Burnt out on World Bosses, PvP. I needed to try something new (Fractals) to give me a reason to keep playing.

I did it for fractals, although that’s an entirely different can of worms. Before my ascended set, when ascended armor didn’t exist, I made the +10 infusions for the rings and amulet, which amounts to about 250 gold.

So if I’m counting infusions and making the ascended armor, it runs to about 700 gold, and if I add the gold I also dumped on several weapons, it’s closer to 850 gold.

And now with their apparent raid design of punishing zerkers with high toughness mobs, it means I gotta dump all that gold in another set of sinister stats ascended armor and weapons for back up.

How much fun!

I think ascended was a terrible mistake and they should have stuck to exotics and merely tied cosmetics and rank emotes to raids.

You did not specify what game formats you are seeking to play in

For example, WvW and open world PvE lend themselves to parasite builds and mouthbreathers who think their nomad/celestial setup is great because the other 20 people in the zerg carried them or they won a duel with it.

If you’re referring to PvE of any worth and challenge like dungeons/fractals/raids, you probably should look at Daredevil or Revenant, both look pretty strong.

If you’re looking for team PvP, take a look at Revenant, Chrono, Daredevil, or Dragonhunter.

Standard ele builds do most things Tempest does better. Tempest is no good for PvE, okay for WvW, and probably won’t be used in sPvP at competitive levels.

Azumi.9572:

Kevan.8912:

another question before: what is really stopping me from doing fractals? a huge, steamy heap of money and crafting ingredients to stack AR.
what will stop me from raids? with pretty good probability, still not having ascendeds + capped masteries.

I didn’t find Ascended Armor that expensive. Only thing was the idiotic time-gating.

I made a post on here a while ago about Fractals – it was due to Mawdrey being locked behind Fractals at the time. I didn’t want to run 5 Fractals because I had this idea in my head they were extremely hard.

I sucked it up and did them. And they were easy. It was more content I got to enjoy. I made it up to Fractal level 33 before stopping due to bordem.

You never had a reason to make your Ascended Armor before (Fractals didn’t motivate you, obviously) now you do. Now you have something to work towards.

Nothing is holding you back from doing Raids or making that Armor but yourself.

And because you are holding yourself back, you want to punish and hold back others.

That’s garbage.

The cost of ascended armor varies wildly on whether you were a cloth wearer, a leather wearer, or plate wearer.

The cost and required amount of bolts of damask makes a huge impact.

My mesmer’s full ascended armor cost around 470 gold to make. It’s much cheaper on non-cloth toons.

Embolism.8106:

Zenith.7301:

Hurray, more PvP lobbying to ruin perfectly fine PvE skills and mechanisms.

They buffed the shield to make it attractive in PvE over the other weapons, but this won’t last long if the PvP concern trolls have their way as usual.

From a PvE perspective I really want a way to conjure iAvenger quickly, reducing the Block duration helps with that and doesn’t really affect its effectiveness as a defensive skill for the same reason Confusion isn’t viable in PvE.

I think you often have good points, and I respect that; but I feel you come across as aggressive and “knee-jerky” sometimes, which makes people lash out and devolves discussions.

Except it does. Have you done any Verdant Brink meta events or some of the new raids? We are bombarded by aoe and pulsing damage that takes off 1/3 of your HP.

The blocks are completely fine in PvE, we need them to stay alive against some of these ridiculous mobs, the hammer frog champion was doing autoattack cleaves that take off 2/3 of your HP, the arrow frogs’ jump shots and poison AoE can 2 shot you.

Summoning the iAvenger faster changes nothing, illusions are dying upon spawn before I can even shatter them.

The PvE environment for mesmer is currently toxic and PvP people are only seeking to make it more miserable.