Guild Wars 2

Hexalot.8194:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Well, the wiki isn’t updated yet.

Currently the axe does 238 damage every 0.95 seconds. With a 10% buff, this amounts to 262 per hit, or 267 DPS. At 2 × 7 vulnerability per hit, this comes to 14.7 stacks of vulnerability sustained.

Life Blast does 345 damage within 600 range, and hits every 1.4 seconds. This comes to about 246 DPS. With unyielding blast, this comes to 14.3 stacks of vulnerability sustained.

This is… interesting. Rending claws now does more damage than life blast at any range. Unyielding Blast pierces, but Rending Claws basically bypasses any defense that isn’t a straight up block.

If anything, I’d say that axe is actually a decent weapon now.

In actual practice, the above isn’t true. If traited correctly, you can currently achieve 100% crit rate with life blast, which means its actual DPS will always be much higher than anything Axe can do.

He can pull up decimate defenses. 50% crit chance on top of your berzerker’s 45% crit chance+ fury is 100% without deathly perception.

So a reaper will indeed have 100% crit chance on axe.

Doesn’t change the fact that the axe is the crappiest ranged weapon out of all PvE classes, with one of the lowest DPS and no cleaving/group utility whatsoever.

AlphatheWhite.9351:

Zenith.7301:

It’s pretty clear he meant burst, since they balance primarily with pvp burst concerns in mind.

Don’t even bother with PvE DPS calculations to prove your point, it’s pointless since PvE balance will never take precedence.

PvE appears to be an incidental and secondary feature of the game.

I prefer to give Robert more credit than that.

I don’t believe he’d be so foolish as to bite the hand that feeds him (the people buying HoT for the content, not the pvp).

Read the necromancer forums. On my threat asking why the axe was miserably given 10% buff on auto, the reason was “because pvp” more or less (long version: not a projectile so it has no counterplay with reflection, which is only a pvp concern).

Basically, all this time necro, ranger, and mesmer have been stuck with crappy weapon DPS, it’s been because of pvp.

frifox.5283:

Also, Disenchanter is nuts. Attack every 2.46 seconds with PH, which is more or less the same as sword AA rate! 2xDisenchanters (with mimic) with your sword AA now strips 2 boons every second!

Those cute necromancers in the necromancer forums who say necro does boon strip best

It’s pretty clear he meant burst, since they balance primarily with pvp burst concerns in mind.

Don’t even bother with PvE DPS calculations to prove your point, it’s pointless since PvE balance will never take precedence.

PvE appears to be an incidental and secondary feature of the game.

Robert Gee.9246:

Azure.8670:

Dont expect any word on scepter until a few months after HoT. due to the amount of clones scepter produces, pretty sure the devs are keeping a close eye on chronomancer to see what crazy builds people come up with. Scepter may become much more popular than it is

Scepter is difficult to balance because of the clone generation on AA. As a mesmer player I’d like it if the last attack wasn’t so slow too, but increasing the speed of the final attack risks imbalancing mesmer DPS by increasing clone generation speed.

Angel de Lyssa.4716:

If the necro, already has two unique conditions (fear dps and chill dps), why not also make mesmer, have their own unique condition “wastrel”? Specialized only for the scepter.

Fear and chill are not unique to necromancer. Necromancer has traits that modify these conditions but what you’re asking for is an entirely new condition which has a lot of balance implications to it and is very unlikely to happen.

You mean burst, not DPS.

Additional clones make no DPS contribution whatsoever. The damage is tied strictly to shatters, and shatters are not enough a DPS gain PvE, in fact a DPS loss as a result of sacrificing phantasms or staff clone condi application (pve condi spec is basically summoning 3 staff clones and autoattacking with staff).

Shatter has a cooldown, and clones are capped to three. I don’t see how faster clone generation translates to more DPS at all, just more 3 clone shatter opportunities in pvp, which is only a single format.

Mesmer and necro condi DPS builds in PvE are abysmal, if husks or high toughness mobs become a thing, it’s engineers and rangers who will be taken since burn centric condi specs with high cleaving (which the mesmer does not have as a condi spec) are the strongest condi builds in PvE.

frifox.5283:

Zenith.7301:

Levetty.1279:

So Blurred Frenzy is now a dps loss?

They were so stingy with the autoattack buffs, a 10% buff is marginal when mesmer mainhand sword is so far behind, and the fact that pistol whip is blurred frenzy on steroids

Last time I tested using BF on cd was somewhere around 2% dps increase over aa. 10% buff to aa will put BF into dps-loss category (unless used in place of dodging). I’ll re-test the new coefficients and attack rates tonight just to be sure.

Yeah, it’s why I compared Blurred Frenzy to Pistol Whip and Unrelenting Assault, both skills that evade and do SO MUCH MORE DAMAGE on top of their own perks (like stunning the target or stacking might and acting as a gap closer too).

The fact that our autoattacks are weak and noncompetitive with other classes and YET they are a DPS gain over blurred frenzy is a problem.

But they started in the necromancer forums that the reason they’re conservative is PvP reasons, so it confirms my suspicion of our classes being held in PvE hell boil down to a game prioritized in PvP balance with PvE taking a backseat because they won’t do PvP/PvE splits.

It just does not bode well for raids when obviously classes won’t be earnestly balanced in PvE because PvP is all that matters.

They don’t care for balancing DPS across classes in PvE, and when raids turn out to be more of the same usual stacking of ele/guardian/warrior, they can’t act surprised.

I’m just moving from irritated to just tired and lacking any hope that this rampant class discrimination in PvE will ever be fixed because they so far won’t do anything to fix PvE if it conflicts with PvP.

What sort of message are you sending to PvE people when it’s so obvious their concerns are secondary to esports.

Raziel.8072:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Well, the wiki isn’t updated yet.

Currently the axe does 238 damage every 0.95 seconds. With a 10% buff, this amounts to 262 per hit, or 267 DPS. At 2 × 7 vulnerability per hit, this comes to 14.7 stacks of vulnerability sustained.

Life Blast does 345 damage within 600 range, and hits every 1.4 seconds. This comes to about 246 DPS. With unyielding blast, this comes to 14.3 stacks of vulnerability sustained.

This is… interesting. Rending claws now does more damage than life blast at any range. Unyielding Blast pierces, but Rending Claws basically bypasses any defense that isn’t a straight up block.

If anything, I’d say that axe is actually a decent weapon now.

I agree. I’ve never found axe to be a terrible weapon per-se but getting the range increase definitely helps a lot and the damage buff will make a big difference too. People get way too stuck on the raw damage numbers and fail completely when it come sto understanding the actual mechanics of the axe itself. Reflects have no affect on it, you can’t hide behind clones or summons, and the longer it hits you the more potential damage you can take (with vuln stacking). Other than scepter auto I don’t know of any other ranged weapon that can completely ignore positioning like this and I’ve run into many occasions where this played heavily into my favor. This is speaking purely from a pvp/wvw perspective of course. I know why the pve people whine about the damage numbers. Right now highest damage is best damage to that game mode.

It’s not “for now” in PvE.

Unless you design most mobs to carry high uptimes of reflect, the axe will be an inferior weapon in PvE by far.

I mean, this is ludicrous. A staff elementalist is chucking fireballs for 6k damage on top of 5k lava font ticks and both of them hit THREE TARGETS, and yet our SINGLE TARGET axe autoattack is an issue?

You people are living in some fantasy land if you think they will ever design mobs that make projectiles weak so axe/mesmer greatsword can shine in encounters. That would involve making mobs that make rifle/pistol/staff/longbow/shortbow/hammer for thief/warrior/ele/ranger/revenant weaker just to benefit two classes who have lower DPS weapons.

Stop sabotaging our PvE with PvP.

Robert Gee.9246:

One of the reasons we are more conservative about axe when it comes to balance is because axe uses a unique attack action in our game that cannot be avoided using positioning. Normal melee attacks have an attack arc and normal ranged attacks use projectiles. Enemy players can use positioning and movement to avoid these attacks. Axe 1 and 2 by contrast just hit you when you are in range regardless of your positioning. While some utility skills (like Corrupt Boon) also use this targeting method, it’s rare on weapon skills and thus we are wary of buffing it too much.

As for the animation on axe 1, it was changed because of an exploit with cancel casting that allowed players to get significantly more damage from the skill by continually canceling it. At the time I tried to just adjust the original animation so we could keep it but due to its construction that ended up not being feasible. The resulting animation looked extremely choppy and didn’t sync well across races. You are always welcome to make suggestions on alternate animations you’d like to see, but going back to the original animation at this point is extremely unlikely.

So PvE necromancers are being made arbitrarily noncompetitive on their weapons compared to others for the sake of PvP balance.

Please split the balancing.

Moreover, you listed the positives of an attack that tracks and is not a projectile.

By the same token, necromancer axe autoattack cannot function as a projectile finisher, cannot pierce, cannot cleave.

Axe #2 is a weaker rapid fire that doesn’t stack vulnerability.

I am so sick and tired of this class being excluded from optimal PvE groups and now raids because of PvP holding them back.

It’s been 3 years of “READ: WAR/ELE/ELE/GUARDIAN/THIEF, NO NECRO OR RANGER”

on the LFG. When will PvE class parity and performance stop taking a backseat to PvP considerations?

Levetty.1279:

So Blurred Frenzy is now a dps loss?

I also have no idea why they think Condi Mesmer is so strong when its one of the worst condi builds.

They were so stingy with the autoattack buffs, a 10% buff is marginal when mesmer mainhand sword is so far behind, and the fact that pistol whip is blurred frenzy on steroids, and Unrelenting Assault does roughly three times as much damage as blurred frenzy, teleports you, and stacks might is a joke.

Necro also got a pitiful 10% on axe auto, when the weapon is so behind the other classes, their scepter changes amount to less ramp up but the same mediocre condition dps due to nerfs to lingering curse that still make engineers and rangers and guardians far better condition classes.

Meanwhile thieves got buffs on the line of 25%+. A total joke, considering most thief weapons vastly outdamage mesmer and necromancer autoattacks and other skills. But I fear this is all done with pvp balancing in mind where they don’t want to buff mesmer or necro.

And rangers, the class with some of the worst autoattacks, including all their power weapons besides longbow, got no buffs to the autoattacks.

If they think raids will release with anywhere close to fair class representation at this level of power imbalance between classes, they got a surprise coming to them.

Maximum Potato.5923:

Now this begs the question – Storm Spirit, Frost Spirit or both?
Frost is now a 7.5% damage bonus with permanent 3 stacks of might on you and your party (15 on your pet, assuming Nature Magic), while Storm is just 15 stacks of vulnerability. Thoughts?

All three.

Frost, Sun, and Storm are our best group damage contributions.

The most replaceable will be Storm since vulnerability is easy to stack, but what this means is other classes can trait for other things and not worry about applying vulnerability.

With a ranger and storm spirit, for example, elementalists don’t even need to worry about glyph of lightning storm.

It needed way more than a 10% increase. Why was 10% settled on on all the bad autoattack weapons for necro and mesmer, while thief is receiving 25%+ damage boosts?

At least we’re not rangers, who got nothing done for they garbage weapon autoattack numbers.

I’m just plain addicted to inspiration, it’s gonna be so hard giving it up for chrono, I’m even tempted to give up dueling instead and go for Dom/Inspiration/Chrono.

But I like my permavigor from arcane, which they’re about to nerf because of course pvp takes precedence over all things.

My necromancer feels so meta when they ask me to switch him in for maw ;(

I’m all for ice bow 4 nerf.

The flaw with conjures like ice bow or fgs is that you pick them up for a single skill and then drop them.

Ideally all of the conjures would have skills that are truly temporary but an upgrade over your normal weapons.

Unfortunately for ice bow they followed the same kittenty design they forced on earth/water attunement.

Basically, earth and water attunement autoattacks are so terrible in damage because they bring “utility”, so you swap to earth and water for a few key skills and want to swap away from them as fast as possible.

Ice bow is the exact same as water attunement autos, and why nobody uses “support” builds.

Because “support” builds like the now upcoming druid sacrifice so much damage potential for redundant fluff healing when a water field being blasted is all you need to get people healed up.

They need to reconsider their approach to “support” weapons and make it so all weapons/attunements do similar sustained DPS but it’s their utility that distinguishes them. Fire for burning/blinds/might stacking, water for chill/cc/healing, air for vulnerability/cc/swiftness, earth for cripple/reflects/prot.

If they get their head out of their kitten , they can equalize autoattack damage from weapons across the board and make them a whole lot more attractive. Of course skills like meteor shower and lava font need to be toned down anyways, a staff that does much more aoe and is ranged should never be outdamaging an ele dagger frontline build.

Evapor.6849:

It’s so sad that even on reddit all those plebs rocking necro and ranger flairs think this will somehow make their class more appealing, like they are mad at the world because they picked a garbage class at launch and never bothered to change. Elementalist is a high skillcap class, smallest hp pool in the game on light armour, it only makes sense that the highest risk has the highest reward to play. Even if raids were remotely challenging I doubt icebow would be used anyway as their are much better survivability options or you could just go with the glyph of power to keep even more chill on bosses.

Don’t worry ele’s will still be able to carry raids, even if anets whack-a-mole balance policy continues the exact same thing has happened with fgs and look where eles are today.

lol this fool talking about skill cap on a class that can do the strongest DPS ingame outside melee.

Try doing mossman/archdiviner with ranger mainhand sword and get back to me about skill cap.

Tierce.5370:

If someone could point me towards a video of where the original ArenaNet comment was made, so I can get an idea of the context, that’d be great.

It occurred to me today while mulling this over that, aside from the balancing issues, ArenaNet probably doesn’t want the “bring one of everything” meta that could be a potential result of allowing 10-player buffs.

When they said that would be limiting, it’s also about how it would limit the number of solutions when solving the raid.

@thrag, scepter hammer ele.

But there’s no solving a raid. People will find the optimal setup and the expectation will be to run that setup, just like the past three years of “READ: ZERKER WAR/ELE/ELE/THIEF/GUARD ONLY!”

In the scenario they have, it will be WAR/WAR/CHRONO/CHRONO/RANGER/RANGER/REVENANT/REVENANT/ELE/ELE.

Guardian MIGHT replace either Revenant or Ranger, but no the others whose group buffs are so essential.

That leaves thief, engineer, and necromancer out. Guardian as well if you take revenants or vice versa.

In my desired scenario (10 man buffs), you got WARRIOR/ELE/CHRONO/RANGER/GUARDIAN/REV/REAPER/SCRAPPER/DAREDEVIL/1 FREE SLOT.

No class is left out, and you get a choice of extra for flexibility.

thrag.9740:

I guess we can only truly comment once we get to try it, but at face value this seems pretty disappointing.

PopeUrban.2578:

I’m waiting for the balance patch really.

Phalanx warrior as a required buff isn’t a justification to make phalanx buff more people. It’s a justification to nerf phalanx because it is deemed a “required” buff in comparison to all other avaliable buffs.

I actually think it kind of is. We can either bring 2 ps wars to get the whole party its might, or we can have one, and let that other slot be taken by a different class. Unlike staff eles, warriors don’t stack with one another.

You can nerf ps war if you want, but then groups will swap ps war for a scepter hammer ele I’d imagine. Removing warrior and replacing it with even more eles seems lame.

On a side note, because everyone keeps complaining about ps war on these forums, does anyone have the average might generation for scepter hammer ele when we assume there is always a fire field?

We gotta nerf PS, as should persisting flames.

But honestly that won’t replace warriors, because banners cannot be replaced. It’s 170 to every relevant stat plus an extra 150 power. It’s immense. It also kinda helps that warrior has the best group rez utility since the pvp pondscum managed to get spirit of nature nerfed into obsolescence.

rotten.9753:

Zenith.7301:

I mean, I was probably going to play Reaper in the expansion, but with this decision I’m not going to invest time in a class that’s going to be rejected from raid teams who care about optimization (the groups that will actually get stuff killed).

Now I’ve got my choices narrowed down to Chronomancer or Herald.

You shouldn’t consider pugging them anyway.

Who said I was gonna pug them? I said in that post I was considering joining a prospective raid team. Another case may be just convincing my FFXIV raid peeps to try these raids out since they quit GW2 long ago.

Part of joining any raid team concerned with success/efficiency is working out the team comps.

I was really looking forward to playing reaper, and with that announcement if I still decide to play reaper I’m basically screwing over my team with a suboptimal comp.

Convincing my raid group to try GW2 raids will be annoying, though ;(. Given GW2’s history of abandoning PvE content and making purely PvP balance decisions for the most part, why should they abandon FFXIV or Wildstar instead.

In FFXIV the DPS is so ridiculously well balanced. Parsing shows monk at 1300, dragoon at 1270, Ninja at 1150 (they bring a 2% raid DPS buff), and the support DPS classes of bard and machinist at around 1000 DPS. For the caster DPS, black mages are doing 1250ish, Summoners about 1200.

Within the melee DPS, the spread isn’t even greater than a 5% difference. Between melee and casters, the DPS spread does not exceed a 10% difference, and casters are balanced around better aoe/cleave.

I mean, how can I ask people to abandon much better balanced PvE MMOs for one whose developers clearly have no idea how to balance properly let alone prioritize PvE because “esports”.

Photinous.4628:

Yelloweyedemon.2860:

Everyone just think Druids are only good for healing…

People WAKE UP!

There are 2 other traitlines the ranger can pick, its old utilities and another weapon (if staff is actually needed in the first place).

What is stopping the druid to run spotter, frost spirit, maybe glyph of empowerment too, and S/A or warhorn as a second weapon set? Have that with ballanced armor stats, and you have a strong healing class with insane group support…

Just because the druid line and staff is all about healing, it does not mean that druids will just stand there spam heals…

This.

If you’re using weapons other than staff most of your druid traitline traits are obsolete, as all of them are tied to healing and no weapons other than staff heal. You would rely on celestial form to proc them, which as said already in the streams takes time and is temporary.

And celestial form does zero DPS.

If you go druid, you will kitten your damage and have no synergy whatsoever with your weapons as the staff complements none of your weapons. Staff will compete with longbow as a ranged weapon, and longbow is the dps weapon while the staff is, well, yet another hybrid weapon.

Keep living in LaLa Land though, you people with your love of hybrids are probably those bringing in rabid mesmers and rangers to groups that don’t want the dead weight.

The numbers for axe in particular need to go way up, as in same or higher than longbow ranger.

Why? Axe does not cleave, unlike fireball or traited longbow projectiles.

Single target weapons should always output more damage than cleaving weapons.

I’m not getting my hopes up just looking at the measly mesmer mainhand sword buff (the mesmer mainhand sword is behind other sword classes by more than 33%, and all mesmer mainhand sword got was a lowly 10%, making mesmer sustained DPS still trash tier).

I mean, I was probably going to play Reaper in the expansion, but with this decision I’m not going to invest time in a class that’s going to be rejected from raid teams who care about optimization (the groups that will actually get stuff killed).

Now I’ve got my choices narrowed down to Chronomancer or Herald.

What would be the point of Rampage if it can’t be a flat out better version of the necromancer’s now nerfed Lich form?

Don’t break the trend. Healing Signet> Signet of Vampirism. Rampage>Lich.

What fun is there in being a warrior if you can’t have better things than a necro.

;)

Lily.1935:

Zenith.7301:

I’d rather not have the flavor of displacing my foes off my well bombing let alone spreading mobs after the guardian/mesmer just pulled them together.

If anything I hate necromancers who use staff 5 right as I dropped my well of suffering and corruption in PvE >:(

I would say give Wail of Doom a blast finisher and a chill on top of its effect. Make Locust Swarm groupwide.

Chilling wail of doom would be awesome. But no group locus swarm. You think people hate necromancer’s now, wait till no one can stealth past mobs in dungeons thanks to trolly necromancers.

Why would you use Locust Swarm during a skip? And if they do to troll, you can troll already by just running ahead before the group.

The end solution is the same for all. Kick them.

Locust Swarm for the group would be great utility. Groupwide leeching procs and cripple for area denial, it would actually add appreciable DPS to the group for a single skill, and it’s a group peel tool by allowing your allies to peel foes off themselves or chase better.

Necromancers are in great need of more ally support, and Locust Swarm would be a great place to start.

I’d rather not have the flavor of displacing my foes off my well bombing let alone spreading mobs after the guardian/mesmer just pulled them together.

If anything I hate necromancers who use staff 5 right as I dropped my well of suffering and corruption in PvE >:(

I would say give Wail of Doom a blast finisher and a chill on top of its effect. Make Locust Swarm groupwide.

StickerHappy.8052:

Zenith.7301:

The sword buffs are not even enough to put is in competing grounds with the middle tier sword dps classes, guardian and thief.

The top tier class, revenant, has a sword auto that just blows mesmer out of the water. You might as well tickle with a feather in terms of sustained DPS.

10% is nowhere near enough to fix mesmer sustained damage to make it competitive.

And I don’t understand why people are treating it as a winner takes all game. Scepter should not be competing with sword for buffs. All our weapons’ terrible autoatacks should be gaining meaningful damage increases.

But I believe the fluff 10% comes from a fear of pvp mesmer damage, as usual.

Until the day they finally split skill balancing between PvE/PvP.

Getting a buff and yet people are not happy.

Just tell Robert to remove the 10% buff. Problem Solved.

Buffs are done for a reason, not just because. To get a skill to a certain level of performance.

It’s like saying Rangers should ask Irenio to just remove the buff to Most Dangerous Game. Guess what, the buff to MDG still won’t make it not a bad trait, people won’t use it.

And this buff will not fix mesmer DPS issue. Is it nice to see they’re listening to the fact our weapons are not having enough damage? Sure.

What I don’t look forward to is the 6 month wait in between base class balance patches to be told “well, we gave your sword a 10% damage buff already, so be happy for the next half year even though it doesn’t fix your DPS”.

Who knows, though. Maybe they’ll actually fix illusions not dying to aoe spam anymore and we’ll be able to achieve that magical 3 x phantasm 100% uptime our autoattacks are based around. My money’s not on it, but I’ll have to hope for it.

The sword buffs are not even enough to put is in competing grounds with the middle tier sword dps classes, guardian and thief.

The top tier class, revenant, has a sword auto that just blows mesmer out of the water. You might as well tickle with a feather in terms of sustained DPS.

10% is nowhere near enough to fix mesmer sustained damage to make it competitive.

And I don’t understand why people are treating it as a winner takes all game. Scepter should not be competing with sword for buffs. All our weapons’ terrible autoatacks should be gaining meaningful damage increases.

But I believe the fluff 10% comes from a fear of pvp mesmer damage, as usual.

Until the day they finally split skill balancing between PvE/PvP.

stambogalizi.8356:

Zenith.7301:

We just have to remove the monopoly on the vital boons (might, fury) from just two classes who also do some of the highest damage and provide insane utility (banners, glyphs and blast fields).

So that means nerf everyone down to the same kitten tier level and we can all be mini-necromancers. Gr8 idea m8

Totally better than giving classes the same tools but in a different manner

Yeah, because what we need is more power creep than we already got last patch.

I know your precious ele/warr is near and dear to your heart and it might be too convenient, but games are not balanced by just buffing everyone, particularly PvE.

Rising Dusk.2408:

This was very disappointing to me too. I fought really hard with them to get it spread to ten-people, but they’re just too scared of the ramifications for party compositions. They think that you simply won’t start a raid run until you have “one of every profession buff class” and you’ll opt not to run that night. Similarly, they feel like this creates some kind of “super party” that is somehow more OP than stacking the strongest classes in the first place.

I disagree with them, but whatever. It just means we’ll have to bring two warriors instead of one, among other things, limiting the flexibility for other classes to participate. Their arguments are really weak when you consider that the “optimal raid group composition” will always exist and be desired no matter what; all they do by keeping the buff sharing at 5 is prevent certain classes from making the optimal list and keep the discrimination against them.

Please keep pressing them and submitting reports from this thread.

I don’t get how this people just blatantly disregard player feedback when they come up with these idead.

How hard would it be to collaborate with rT/DnT/SC people, ask them for parses and trade PM’s to float ideas before they implement their broken mess.

3 years of “NO NECRO/NO RANGER!”, and come this xpac it’ll be “NO REAPER!” if it comes down to it, with Daredevil taking the place of Ranger.

I don’t understand how they think this is a good idea.

1 PSEA warrior and persisting flames ele per group. 1 frost spirit/spotter ranger per group. 1 chronomancer per group for alacrity/quickness sharing.

That’s 2 spots left, for which Herald/Reaper/Scrapper/Daredevil are competing.

Herald brings the group ferocity buff and 50% extra boon duration for even longer quickness uptime from the chrono.

So 2 heralds for those 2 last spots on each group.

Reaper, Scrapper, Daredevil are out.

It’s just an unbelievably dumb decision.

If they made it 10-man wide for raids, ALL professions could be included without missing out on group buffs.

Nerf meteor shower, nerf phalanx strength, nerf persisting flames, and voila suddenly you’ve got more class variety. They’ll probably have to nerf engineer a bit as well if they don’t want people stacking engineer instead of ele.

But nerfing the easy might stacking from one trait and perma fury/fire field of the other would open space for more classes to also bring their own might stacking utilities instead of being totally eclipsed. For example, ranger would become attractive with clarion bond to complement fury uptimes and they could even buff necro might stacking from Blood is Power for the group.

We just have to remove the monopoly on the vital boons (might, fury) from just two classes who also do some of the highest damage and provide insane utility (banners, glyphs and blast fields).

I love how people are acting like the heal is gonna be great with shouts, after you SPEND A TRAIT to give shouts regen and swiftness, waste a utility slot on a useless shout like Guard that does nothing for anyone.

And you WASTE your heal just to copy the boons to you even if you might not need the heal right now but will in the future.

All so you can selfishly gain protection by wasting your heal. Remind me again how slotting the useless ranger shouts helps anybody in your team?

Because swiftness and regen are terrible boons that are easily stacked by ele/guardian without needing to waste a trait.

P.S. The more I think about it, the worse the druid traitline is. If I play greatsword/longbow druid, and I take the Druid traitline to access glyphs, the minors won’t benefit me at all.

The minors are all about healing and outgoing healing, yet none of the ranger weapons besides the staff heals, so the druid minors would only be benefitting a DPS ranger in Celestial form only, where he’s doing ZERO DPS.

It would be great if they removed that stupid self weakness from poison cloud now.

In fact, just scrap the self corrupt design, being forced to take offhand dagger or plague signet just to make MY utility not HURT ME is horrible.

I’d disagree about GW1 PvE and PvP not being split significantly when it mattered. Unfortunately yours is an example I’ve lobbied for and hoped/expected to get when I bought the sequel, but it’s just obvious now they are abandoning all that split balancing that made GW1 great and have moved to an esports spvp/wvw centric market with pve as a side market that’s incidental extra revenue but not invested to seriously.

In fact, with this patch they’re only removing more PvE/PvP splits, not adding more that should have existed long ago.

White Hunter.3416:

Ele’s water attunement on staff is healing too. Where is a 500+ posts of weeping about it?
No one forces ppl to use this spec. Just think: Tempest and Dragonhunter absolutly useless in current PvE.

This is so dumb, it’s not even funny. Ele water attunement healing comes from laying a water field that people blast and the ele just switches back to high damage fire attunement to continue possessing the highest dps and utility in the game.

The ele is flexible because he has the equivalent of four weapons worth of skills. You are stuck with a support staff while the ele staff is top dps, top support, and top CC all at the same time so the ele is never forced into a gimmick role because he can seamlessly switch through them.

Erasmus.1624:

Zenith.7301:

Well, yeah. You may prefer gimmicks that are hardly ever balanced, but we prefer the hard and practical results.

Playstyles emerge from the restraints imposed on players by properly balanced mechanics. A playstyle is what happens when a player circumvents the natural restraints or drawbacks of an ability. Your hard practicality is just easy damage without a proper hard counter; nothing gets changed and no playstyle exists outside of what a tooltip says a player can do.

I’m pushing soft counterplay through multiple synergy conduits and high variety. You’re pushing what might as well be borderline runescape-tier combat in which damage is so easy to hit that it might as well be a given unless someone just decides to stand out of line of sight or chain invulnerability periods.

Zenith.7301:

In PvE, if a class is to ever be considered for a position, it needs to be competitive with the alternatives. Currently, numberswise, they’re not.

PvE and PvP only see drastic segregation when a game lacks a fundamental, coherent and inclusive design concept. PvE (especially in GW2) is going to be dominated by DPS, but the DPS doesn’t need to be so overtuned that it locks out certain classes by virtue of their lower numbers (and not by virtue of specific playstyles or execution). Anet continues to rely on HP sponges and boss invulnerability to artificially drag out boring combat when they could easily just divide up huge health pools among multiple, dangerous enemies in order to create more engaging and threatening PvE encounters.

You do realize splitting bosses would only make the engineer stronger by comparison, right? His damage is consistently cleaved and has no ramp up compared to the necromancer.

By all means suggest me a single game whose PvE combat design you approve of and I’ll see if we’re even on the same galaxy of mutual understanding.

It’s kind of weird to go around complaining about mesmer stealth and a 3 minute cooldown elite instead of what a mesmer actually uses to dump on a necro:

Interrupts (mantra of distraction, illusionary wave, diversion, magic bullet) with power block on a class with long cast times and slow animations.

By the same token a mesmer would go around whining that when you dump a well or pop lich his entire class mechanic (illusions) evaporates from cleave. Guess why no mesmers use the phantasm utilities such as iDisenchanter and iDefender.

The truth is, idiots think this will displace ele from being stacked at the expense of other classes, but it will change nothing.

Ele still has persisting flames, lava font (100% uptime fire field), and meteor shower on top of two on demand water fields, one which removes conditions, a projectile root/line of warding, glyph of lightning storm/sandstorm, and now a 90 sec cd glyph of earth elemental. And easy access to blast finishers to boot on top of doing thief/engineer level damage with the flexibility of range so they don’t need to worry about messing up max melee because they can still sit at enough of a distance and still gain all the boons.

Nothing will change unless they also touch meteor shower’s interaction with large hitbox mobs, namely capping the amount of meteors that can hit the same target, and make persisting flames not increase lava font’s duration.

I’m just curious why glyph of tides or or glyph of alignment isn’t a stunbreak.

Every other elite class got a utility that’s a stunbreak, and here we are with our only glyph stunbreak coming from having to be in celestial form to use it.

I also must say I don’t see the point of Glyph of Rejuvenation.

Glyph of Rejuvenation only has 6 seconds less cd than healing spirng, but it’s not a water field, which heals far more through group blasts, and healing spring removes conditions on pulse.

Similarly, Glyph of Tides seems so bare boned, as does Glyph of Alignment. I mean, 4.5 secs of weakness and a cripple are not that great for a utility skill.

Glyph of Equality is a crappier mantra of distraction, it dazes for 1 more second but it has quadruple the cooldown, and mantra of distraction is a 1 second aoe daze every 5 seconds for 3 charges.

Or compare it to engineer turret CC.

Glyph of Empowerment is on the weak side, 10% extra damage for 5 seconds out of 20 seconds turns out to be 2.5% party wide extra damage for a utility slot, it’s actually worse than frost spirit which is a 7% boost.

And yet, Glyph of Empowerment is the only utility glyph I’d take for PvE content.

Nova Stiker.8396:

Trevor Boyer.6524:

Eurantien.4632:

Cause Druid has so much aoe stab to stop all the CC out there.
Am I right?

Exactly.
Just tried to explain this to them in two other threads.

RAMPAGE AS ONE.
RAMPAGE AS ONE.
RAMPAGE AS ONE.

My lord, do you honestly think Druids will take Glyph of Unity? HAHAHA! No. Rampage as one, 48 second cooldown, 10 seconds of stability.

What part of aoe stab could your neurons not process?

Erasmus.1624:

Conncept.7638:

So far as math is concerned . . .

Look, I can admire one’s dedication to analysis, but are we seriously obsessing over the effectiveness of a player mashing 1? Is that the pinnacle of the game? It really feels like it (especially with condition builds). Is this what people had in mind with a rework? Is this what people had in mind when “dynamic gameplay” was the buzzword several years ago? It’s really a shame that “more passive damage” and “longer range for your attacks that are already aimed for you and potentially don’t even have projectiles to mitigate” is the “rework” that devs shove out nowadays.

Well, yeah. You may prefer gimmicks that are hardly ever balanced, but we prefer the hard and practical results.

In PvE, if a class is to ever be considered for a position, it needs to be competitive with the alternatives. Currently, numberswise, they’re not.

Quite frankly, it should apply to all sword skills as a grandmaster. It would also be a way for power mesmers to have access to some might stacking, unless they get around to buffing shattered strength.

Sadly they are averse to PTR unlike any other MMO so these undertuned buffs are going live as is. It’s, what, 3 days away from patch day? The build’s locked in.

I also thought the autoattack increases to mesmer were far to small to catch them up to thief/guardian autoattack DPS, let alone revenant.

I can only imagine if they buff ranger sword/greatsword/axe, the weapons with the worst autoattack coefficients in the game (supposedly because of a kitten pet, who actually does 17% or less of the ranger’s total DPS, the pet does not stack crit damage bonus past 70% while the owner exceeds far above that as do other classes, so 17% of the ranger’s damage assuming a jaguar is used is not even scaling at the same level as other berzerkers are).

I don’t know why they refuse to collaborate or ask DnT/rT for their parses of classes to help with class balancing of DPS in PvE, but given that the skill balance preview was done with a PvP personality and under a competitive PvP show host, I’ve got my doubts that they ever intend to balance classes for PvE DPS.

Torment won’t make scepter any better in PvE.

Necromancer will still be one of the worst PvE condi specs alongside mesmer until they shift some of the damage away from burning and into bleeding/torment/confusion.

Torment and Confusion are especially bad in PvE. Both do even less tic damage than the abysmal amount bleeding already does relative to burning, and their conditional effects will rarely trigger in PvE to make up the gap in damage they have from bleeding.

Torment and Confusion should have the same DPS as Bleeding, after bleeding is buffed with the damage shaved away from burning.

More importantly, while the engineer just cleaves all his conditions with grenades/bombs on top of his powerful fields and finishers, the necromancer needs epidemic to cleave his conditions and the mesmer doesn’t even have the luxury of epidemic.

I will say, though, looking at the guardian and thief sword, even with a 10% buff our mainhand sword will still do less damage. A 20% buff would be more along the lines.

And that’s not even comparing it to revenant sword, which is the strongest sword autoattack in the game.

Robert Gee.9246:

Warcry.1596:

We keep our minions when transformed!!!

I want to quickly clarify something about this note. The change is that specifically Plague form and Lich form will not destroy your minions. We can’t do this universally for all transforms because it can cause problems with the balance of events or story steps that transform you.

Ah, so mesmer moa and engineer moa still destroy them.

I’m still happy Lich and plague won’t transform them.

How about allowing Lich underwater as well? You can disable skills 2-5 if they’re a problem. People only use Lich for the #1 anyways and it’s just a weaker Rampage.

Or allow the flesh golem to be usable underwater ;(

Saw that stronghold match and Noscoc was getting trained to the ground right and left.

I don’t understand how people can say the necromancer shouldn’t be able to heal or use utilities in death shroud.

Most Dangerous Game is just bad. It’s on a critical strikes skirmisher traitline, not a tanking traitline.

50% of most ranger’s health is ~7-8k, a mob in Verdant Brink nukes you for that much and more.

They should set the Most Dangerous game threshold to 70% instead. Even then it would never be used in group PvE.

Nature’s Vengeance is still pathetic.

3 stacks of might, please. Phalanx Warrior swings a 100b and the group is stitting at 18+ might stacks.

The Storm Spirit should give super speed, not swiftness.

No buff to greatsword/changes to mainhand sword autoattack.

No buff to mainhand axe’s terrible autoattack damage or shortbow.

No changes to the useless shouts we have.

Pets/spirits still die to aoe spam.

I’m surprised they didn’t do that 3 target cap for meteor shower as well.

A range increase to axe is nice, but the axe auto needs a flat out buff as does rending claws.