Guild Wars 2

Dristig.9678:

Chaos Archangel.5071:

Kodama.6453:

Chaos Archangel.5071:

• What would you have done differently?

Maybe don’t use minions against an elite spec with tons of aoe?

That’s.. Much less informative than I had hoped.

Could you elaborate? What would you have run and why?

Minions have crappy AI and will just sit in the AoE getting torn up. That seems OK because of the field they leave behind when they die but it clearly isn’t doing enough damage to you.

Another thing to notice is that this build appears to be extremely starved for Life Force. he is forced into shroud with less than 50% LF several times. If this is in BWE2 then I’d say it is a build problem. in BWE1 it was all around hard but PvPing in BWE2 I didn’t really have LF problems.

You won’t really get satisfying answers IMO because you seem generally better than this player and he is running a build that will always be weak against you.

I don’t think you’ve played chronomancer at all.

The wells do paltry damage they’re actually used for the utility they provide.

Andlat Helsonr.1284:

Fighting chronomancers as a reaper is generally a bad idea. Eventually, they will win 1 v 1, especially if they decide to kite you even harder. Imagine how it would have went for you if he had decided to use the elevations on terrain to range you while you were trying to climb up, when he only needs to press staff 2. A good daredevil and a good chrono will be some of the toughest opponents for a reaper because of how much they can simply kite you while you flail around.

At least until the changes to axe, which will hopefully be good and involve a range increase to minimum 900 ;>

Ohoni.6057:

I couldn’t disagree more. Engineers are a better THIEF. Much better stealth and better melee options than the new Staff. Get in line, Guards.

Inferior blinds. Inferior damage.

Engineer utilities just happen to be the utilities of other classes on steroids.

Gyro that is shadow refuge on steroids, 30 sec cd PLUS 6 sec aoe reveal.

Gyro that does what the mesmer iDefender does, group damage mitigation but the mesmer illusion has a paltry 12k hp so it dies immediately, occupies one of the mesmer’s damaging illusion slots while doing no damage itself, and the gyro accompanies the engineer while the mesmer illusions despawn when a target dies.

On top of that that gyro that is a better version of Illusionary Defender also gives the group a reflection bubble, so it’s a Feedback+iDefender all in one.

Then you have the heal, which not only does potent healing for the group, but when activated gives 5 seconds of protection and a water field.

The group utility is so over the top, it competes with ele team utility.

If any class should be worried, it should be necromancer, ranger, and thief. Mesmer has tons of problem but it has alacrity and quickness so you’ll still bring him if only for a buffbot.

Thief is still the best blind spammer and has a ton of tricks it can pull off while being the highest single target damage class in the game.

As usual ranger and necromancer will be the ones on the chopping block.

I don’t think you have any idea about how this game works on prolonged fights to be declaring current meta builds dead on arrival in raids.

Most of your healing/defenses come from water field blasting and use of reflects/aegis/protection, not gear stat choices. Surprisingly, all available to berzerker builds.

If anything changes, people will switch to Valkyrie/Cavalier. Still same offensive focus. Don’t expect PVT’s or celestial.

Class specific condi effects are dumb. I already told him Torment and Confusion need to be functional and competitive condition in PvE regardless of class, and that some of the burning damage should be shifted to them and bleeding.

Making it so that torment doesn’t completely suck in PvE only for revenant is a really bad idea.

“Scrapper is a melee bruiser with lots of good lockdown abilities. Very good at breaking Break Bars in preparation for raids.”

Ok, so why do we need a chill centric reaper class again? AoE protection and healing for allies, water fields, a 30 sec cd shadow refuge that also reveals targets.

An illusionary defender that has more HP and is able to create a reflection field as well.

Class group utilities are plain imbalanced. Compare a 1 second cast 6 sec cd swirl that reflects projectile on the hammer to Death’s Charge, which ends at the target, is directional, and requires reaper shroud expenditure.

Compare these utilities and the traits to the reaper and it’s just plain depressing how much more useful to a group some classes will be in PvE next to Reaper.

If internally it is seen as powerful, that’s a problem with who’s testing internally and their lack of touch with the reality of how the game is played, especially at higher levels.

Yeah, shivers of dread, our adept traits, the selfish shouts, and grandmasters are all so great for PvE!

/s

Well, yeah, buying gems to convert to gold is also a fair option if you don’t wanna do any sort of farming ;p. I did just that for getting my 4 last Dreamthistle weapons.

And then Anet reintroduced the Dreamthistle weapons about 2 months after :*(

The bleed damage is pathetic, so I doubt it.

I don’t know what beta people you are talking about. Probably the fanboy reddit downvoting brigade that must only know the smell of kitten by now since their nose seems to spend all days of the year firmly shoved into the sweet kitten they love to brownnose.

Some of us have been saying these things about class since before beta release. We said not to give ranger pets, and they forced down pets without proper implementation. We told them necromancer would suffer for lack of active defenses and removing the blink from dark path, and so it happened.

We told them mesmer’s shatter mechanic was flawed in PvE with its conflict with phantasms as the main damage delivery of mesmers, that illusions and all pet based classes suffer to the aoe spam, and that PvE class damage balance was nowhere close to good.

They proceeded to gloss over these issues and for 3 years the “no ranger/no necro, ele/guard/thief/warrior preferred” PvE mantra has festered.

Waraxx.4286:

Zenith.7301:

You have to learn that with this game, doing things yourself is rarely more efficient than just farming gold/AH trading.

Ascended gear is actually one of the few exceptions to this rule. Farming fractal level 40 and 50 nets you more ascended stuff/h than SW-farming -> buy mats -> craft.

It is however time gated and might give you multiple ammont of the same armor piece. But if you want multiple sets, that isn’t an issue.

I do daily 50 and 40 and have been doing so ever since Fractured (I was scale 80 before the revamp), and you’re painting a rather colorful picture that is not necessarily true.

Fractal 50 is pure RNG, for the 30-40 minutes you spend doing it you can come empty handed. In fact, most of the time you will.

It is also time gated, unlike SW farm, whose chests and rewards have no daily lockouts.

And if you’re a trading post baron, this is even more moot. A guy in my server within 3 months of release had all the legendaries, in fact several copies of them too across his characters just from AH trading (to troll a guildie, he actually bought a legendary the guildie wanted and sent him a youtube video of him throwing it away just to troll him). Anyone involved in AH trading will have a full set of ascended in less than a day.

Better autoattack damage. Reduce the delay on dragon tooth landing.

A lot of the problem as well with the ele is how gimmicky and chained the damage delivery is.

A mesmer mindshatters, a thief lands a backstab. Their burst has the large chunk of damage in one skill.

Ele on the other hand relies on a chain of skills landing to do burst. You gotta land your phoenixes in perfect spacing, land the fire grab with its silly obvious telegraph, take some arcane utility, etc.

It’s very piecemeal, all of the spells have separated crit rolls meaning unlike mindwrack or backstab, who while also traited are very likely to crit, ele “burst” is highly variable and fragmented.

It’s a one trick pony, if the burst doesn’t land the build has no sustained damage to speak of.

It’s got limited mobility compared to dagger, and it doesn’t cleave much either like dagger does. Your advantage is purely the ranged aspect.

Don’t feel too bad about it though. Most scepter weapons in this game are deficient. Neither mesmer scepter or necro scepter are in a good state either, and the guardian scepter is in a sorta niche state — it’s not the primary weapon in any guardian setup.

Scepter occupies the same space shield does currently. Weapon types in need of help.

Necro siphons should be % based off damage. Like 1-5% of your damage is siphoned.

Story time:

Rangers didn’t use to equip longbow. It was total garbage, and shortbow autoattacks did better DPS.

They nerfed shortbow to hell, by nerfing the autoattack speed and then its range. Autoattacks were the only good thing about shortbow.

Nobody used shortbow again. Still, because longbow was still crap, nobody used longbow either.

So they used Axe/dagger+sword/torch. Until they finally buffed longbow to not be crap.

What can we learn from this terrible tale? Nerfing decent/good weapons into crap level so other crap level weapons seem more attractive does not work.

I mean, “You’re all weaklings” and “Suffer!” got neutered completely against bosses, not that shouts were any good to begin with in PvE let alone bosses.

I said we would end up using well of corruption+well of suffering+signet of spite everywhere in PvE, and it seems it will stay that way.

All our utilities in PvE outside wells are pretty much terrible and won’t see the light of day unless serious changes are made.

Blood is Power actually got nerfed with pitiful duration. BoP has a whopping 30 sec cd on a 8 second 8 stacks of might.

8 stacks of might for 8 seconds on a 30 sec cd is 26.6% uptime on 8 stacks of might.

To see how bad that is, the Herald with just the facet (one utility slot, just like how we sacrifice one utility slot for Blood is Power) maintains 10-12 might stacks for everyone around him 100% UPTIME, and can spike those to 15-18 with their f2 activation.

A Phalanx Strength warrior maintains 18+ stacks on the group with ease, if a single ele is around, the party sits at permanent 25 might stacks.

And none of their utilities/traits harm them for the paltry benefits that corruptions bring.

Death spiral should be our projectile defense, not death’s charge.

Looking at the engineer gyro’s compared to our useless shouts depresses me. Selfish shout for mediocre, redundant boons and effects.

Meanwhile engineer gets a remote finisher/rezzing tool, a remote shadow refuge+reveal pulse, an aoe condi removal pulse for the group and activated poison field, and the traits give them super speed when blasting a lightning field.

We’re still stuck with mediocre minors like shivers of dread, when we only have fear on a 30 sec cd that does 3 seconds of chill with that mediocre minor (which doesn’t affect half of pve to begin with). Cold Shoulder, a 20% damage reduction only for ourselves.

Still a class completely devoid of meaningful group utility and adept/minors/grandmaster traits of terribly little use for PvE.

Signet passives still don’t work in shroud, so I lose my power passive from signet of spite.

It’s going to make debuff/interrupt centric classes far less wanted than the boon kings of GW2, which already shapes our landscape around all game formats (boon stacking and group utility/aoe classes like ele/guard/warrior see heavy representation on ALL game formats whereas necro/ranger/mesmer/engineer see less).

I don’t like the implications for power block either (and hell, now Distracting Daggers). A grandmaster trait centered around increasing cooldowns, suddenly made totally useless in most PvE where it matters. Bunch of weapons with interrupt skills in exchange for no further group utility, all seemingly neutered.

We really need to rethink the entire combat and utilities being designed with pvp in mind, where actually all of them are used, and then seeing most of the combat in PvE neutered by over the top arbitrary limitations.

Why introduce Slow as a new condition, if it’s not gonna work on many of the content in PvE? It makes no sense. Adjust all debuff potencies on bosses but still allow them to work.

This game needs more reasons to bring classes other than ele/guard/warrior, not less.

Embolism.8106:

Chaoz.7941:

I would like to point out why can’t we reap the benefit of gs #1 hitting multiple times when we feel the agony of it hitting multiple times with retaliation and confusion? Can you put an icd of .25 sec delay on those then?

I like to point out I don’t mind the .25 sec icd, but i’m just annoyed we can only reap the negatives out of a kittenty #1 skill.

It doesn’t hit multiple times with Confusion, Confusion only procs on skill activation.

As for Retaliation, you’re a Mesmer. You have no issues stripping that Retaliation off.

Tell that to the guardian blob trains farting out retaliation far more often than you can apply null field.

Guardians are such a backbone to WvW large scale fights, and they completely punish greatsword mesmer and especially a ranger who did Barrage (which is hilariously far weaker than meteor shower yet takes of half or more of the ranger’s health away while barely tickling the ele).

It would be nice if infusing terror stayed after getting out of death shroud though….

I miss doing the underwater fractal ;(

Interrupt mesmers in GW2 are but a pale shadow of the wonderful niche mesmers used to fill in GW1.

Back then the interrupts had real bite and interrupting boss skills wasn’t cryptic since they had cast bars with obvious abilities, while in GW2 we don’t even get names to attacks so we have to datamine them, and the tells are so hilariously slight and covered by all the spell effect clutter.

The consolidation of boons/conditions actually made for a more bland combat experience with ton of class overlap (meaning classes lose identity as one class is better at might or fury application and so the might/fury from other classes isn’t as important).

Look at the condition clutter.

Burning, bleeding, torment, and confusion. In PvE, only burning is worth a kitten , bleeding is a weaker form of burn, and torment/confusion are just weaker bleeds with conditional bonuses that in niche scenarios MAY outperform a base bleed, but still be far behind burning.

It’s a metric ton of redundancy and now with the defiance bar model for soft CC we’re adding a whole new pile of conditions to the redundancy stack.

The materials are not time gated if you grind gold instead and buy them instead of trying to farm the materials to personally craft the time gated items.

You have to learn that with this game, doing things yourself is rarely more efficient than just farming gold/AH trading.

If we’re talking Dragonite ore and not the clots/woods/ingots, then you just need to go join a Silverwastes chest train and in a day you’ll have enough dragonite ore and empyreal fragments to craft a full set of ascended armor

I don’t get why they feel it’s fine to gut all conditions, especially Slow which they’ve JUST introduced to the game, if they’re not going to allow them to function in serious PvE.

If slow is too powerful, reduce the slow from 50% to 25% on boss/champs. Same goes for effect of chill or weakness.

And blind in general needs to be reduced across all classes, it’s too easily available. If blind was a more precious commodity, and it only worked on boss autoattacks, you could allow it to work on bosses.

Although making blind work on some but not all attacks would lead to the same annoying problems with Mai Trin, so I’d rather they just come up with another functionality for blind on bosses, like reducing personal enmity to a boss so groups could then play around with aggro manipulation.

Crossplay.2067:

Zenith.7301:

Yeah, let’s make PvE mobs autoattack for 7-10k damage more often, that’s bound to produce great results just to accommodate an unnecessary idea.

I’m actually amazed how you can jump to such an extreme conclusion from a simple statement. Surely you know that there are already enemies in the game that attack faster than once per second and are considered balanced, right? For that matter, what mob hits for 10k on an autoattack?

I take it you haven’t done a single fractal 50 boss, or face tanked lupicus’s autoattack projectile for that matter.

Ithir Darkleaf.7923:

Guys, guess who is getting 2 handed melee power weapon with blocks and several leaps….
The Scrapper

I love the Reaper, I seriously do. But is it only me or everything I see from the other classes (except the tempest and maybe the dragonhunter) seems more op and better than the ours? It’s always the same thing

PS.: I know we have a leap on RS but it’s not the same thing that having it on the GS for example.

They seem more CC centric, as engineers have always been.

So long as Scrapper doesn’t start dishing out the damage Reaper does, we’ll be fine.

Given how condi engineers eclipse necromancers completely and even their power specs are cuirrently better than ours, we just have to hope history does not repeat with the elite spec simply doing everything better than reaper.

Although I will say, if their lightning bolt field that dazes is not much longer cooldown than Nightfall, I’ll be annoyed. In PvE daze and blind achieve the same thing, defiance bar degeneration and with daze being the more powerful effect on top of the damage the lightning bolts do, it’s an effectively better version of Nightfall, especially against dredge who are immune to blind.

Crossplay.2067:

Zenith.7301:

Becomes trash in an instant in PvE for the same reason confusion is trash tier in PvE as well, mob attack intervals are not that great.

While that is true, I see that more as a problem with pve mobs than my idea.

Yeah, let’s make PvE mobs autoattack for 7-10k damage more often, that’s bound to produce great results just to accommodate an unnecessary idea.

Crossplay.2067:

I have a different idea for iAvenger that would be more fitting for its name and make it more useful in WvW. How about, when it is summoned, it runs into melee range of its target and blocks for 5 seconds. While it is blocking, it is completely invulnerable and whomever hits it gets 1 second of slow for every hit while the mesmer that summoned it pulses 1 seconds of alacrity to 4 people around them for every hit. In this way, it steals time from its enemies. After the block ends, the iAvenger’s “attack” goes on cooldown and it is completely vulnerable.

The pros to this is it causes anyone fighting a chronomancer to stop and consider which phantasm they are attacking as swinging blindly will put them at a great disadvantage. This goes well with the theme of mesmers playing mindgames with their opponents as they can’t just fire and forget like normal. Another plus is that any trait or rune that causes an effect on block would be triggered by the phantasm, giving it an offensive potential as well.

The counterplay is that the iAvenger actually doesn’t attack at all. Any opponent smart enough to recognize what it is can simply wait until it stops blocking to take it down. Better yet, they could use single target skills on the mesmer and ignore them completely. The only thing they would have to worry about is shatters and that wouldn’t be any different than how things are now.

What do you guys think?

Becomes trash in an instant in PvE for the same reason confusion is trash tier in PvE as well, mob attack intervals are not that great.

zapv.8051:

Zenith.7301:

It’s always felt like our worst elite to me, a turtling form meant to delay the inevitable death that is coming.

Plague should be a dangerous area denial tool, not some tickling inconvenience that periodically applies a few conditions.

The plague should apply all the conditions and have meaningful pulsing damage. Increase the duration of the conditions, 2 seconds of 2 stacks bleeding is pitiful.

Basically, it needs bite, instead of currently being used only for the blind spam.

The thing is though, delaying the inevitable for 20 seconds is really really good in conquest. Also, blinds, weakness and poison can turn a teamfight without anyone even noticing.

Yeah, but I want a use for it in PvE as well. Lich Elite has been constantly nerfed for pvp purposes, is basically a crappier rampage now with a hilarious reduction in duration, no access to utility usage, destroys minions, no damage mitigation, and it actually is not a DPS upgrade to a reaper doing his greatsword rotation.

I mean, it would be really nice for condition/hybrid necromancers to get some love in this elite.

XDeathShadowX.2619:

I was in a group fighting Mai Trin, since she pumps out so many bleeds I tend to bring well of power to put on people to cleanse them, but when someone’s downed and she’s cutting every vein in their body I place the well down and nothing happens. Is this intended? I mean the well doesn’t have a tremendous number of uses as is so having it completely void in helping downed allies survive conditions seems a bit over the top.

A lot of things don’t affect downed allies. Distortion sharing from mesmers doesn’t either.

Meanwhile things like stealth do, making thieves some of the best rezzers in the game as they remove both of you from the aggro table while they rez you, preventing the boss from bombing the downed body with lethal aoe.

It’s always felt like our worst elite to me, a turtling form meant to delay the inevitable death that is coming.

Plague should be a dangerous area denial tool, not some tickling inconvenience that periodically applies a few conditions.

The plague should apply all the conditions and have meaningful pulsing damage. Increase the duration of the conditions, 2 seconds of 2 stacks bleeding is pitiful.

Basically, it needs bite, instead of currently being used only for the blind spam.

More importantly, they are purple and fabulous, and whoever made the sound effects for them and pretty much all of the chronomancer’s audio thematics needs a raise.

Rym.1469:

DiogoSilva.7089:

Timtimtimmaah.4069:

To all the considering the Mallyx changes to be bad, consider the pre change Legendary Demon Stance:

If you play a Mallyx Rev in any group scenario, you’re gonna be next to useless due to the constant condi clears your own allies give you. Your heal skill won’t do as much and your elite would only pulse out torment.

Roy may not have presented the best solution but no pragmatic person would play Mallyx as it was – Shiro or Glint was far more impactful to the team.

Self-applied conditions had to go away.

Condi-transfering elite didn’t need to go away.

I think that’s what the community is generally arguing about in this thread.

Anet can easily add condi-transfering back to the elite while keeping its new function, and call it a day.

Yet Corruptions on Necromancer still function, together with Consume Conditions’ effectiveness based on number of conditions you had. If your allies cleansed them, then it’s the same thing.

They somehow function in a game for 3 years, but Mallyx can’t?

Function is a generous term, as nobody takes corruptions except for consume conditions (now displaced by signet of vampirism) and corrupt boon let alone specs into Master of Corruptions trait.

It’s a common confusion. Some people think 50 is a separate tier from 41-49 but it’s not.

Some people spend unholy amounts of gold on 70 AR to do 50’s thinking they’ll get extra chests, when they could keep doing 49’s with 55 AR if they wanted. The whole appeal of 50 is doing the fractal without dealing with instabilities.

So the rule of thumb is, if you can afford the AR for each, do in multiples of 10. I only have patience for 50 and occasionally 50+40, but if you have time to spare you can do each tier. I find the odds for sub 40 so stupidly low that it’s time wasted to me when I could be doing dungeon tours instead or some WvW/Tequatl/VW/TT.

I don’t think mesmer was even meant to be a bunker. The problem is it can’t be a bunker like the guardian yet in terms of sustained damage it doesn’t beat a guardian either.

Classes with less bunkering potential should have more offensive perks.

And by perks I don’t mean more burst. It could be as simple as more debuffing factors to offer a team offensive utility compared too the guardian’s defensive team utility.

Shogun.7401:

Robert Gee.9246:

Fay.2357:

Just to reiterate, could you clarify the cooldown of well of eternity? In BWE2, it was 20 seconds. Is it being moved to 25 or to 30?

Sorry that was a bit of confusion on my part. The correct recharge is 30 seconds. I’ve edited the original post to reflect this.

SaintSnow.6593:

One thing though, any clarification on the wells finally being distinguished as ally or enemy? For the last two weekends they have had ally rings on them regardless is if it is an enemy’s. Needs the red line for distinguishing.

Thanks for mentioning this, I hadn’t seen any reports on this yet so I’ll look into it.

Fnix.5608:

Not sure if I like this change at all, very sceptical about this one. Sure, I want to test it first – but placing phantasms in melee range, and only hitting one target with slow at the time is a big nerf overall to this one.

Slow is also applied AoE.

One off topic question for you.

Please consider working on thief class too. We need a better dev like you

This is a useless post.

You are openly dissing his colleague, you realize that?

laquito.5269:

Zenith.7301:

S/D thief was broken as hell; it deserved the nerfs. My S/D thief in WvW was plain stupid.

Lets see:

I love D/F+D/D

The animations for ele dagger are so pretty, and come to think of it all of them.

:’D

Why are you even replying? This isn’t the thief forum and we’re talking about scepter Ele.

Balance takes place in PvP, where S/D was already out of meta and you obviously haven’t played Daredevil in Beta, cause as of now, you’ll be better off picking no GM at all. Let the PvP players decide on balance, whilst you can continue to toddle in your wvw/pve crap.

Out of meta you dumb, negligent amoeba lol, it became that way with the nerfs to it. Clearly you have the memory of one at least, if it wasn’t for the amount of thieves running s/d in in spvp before the nerfs started coming in.

I’ll stay toddling of course, while your barely vegetative kitten continues to undertake enormous amounts of efforts at approaching serious thought.

For someone drumming up the supremacy of spvp you sure seem to be standing out in absence from any meaningful rank in the leaderboards.

Too bad the pluses are useless in PvE.

They just need to give it the rapid fire treatment. Increase the damage a bit, halve the cast.

Abilities with cooldowns should not be a DPS loss to mere autoattacking. Increasing the effective DPS of the skill also increases the value of Quickening Thirst indirectly.

Quickening Thirst right now is only useful for the running speed aspect since the dagger cooldown abilities themselves are nothing to write home about. Increasing the value of #2 and #3 would change that.

Lexan.5930:

So what does this mean for blind and weakness? Those don’t effect movement so are they considered CC?

Yes. All debuff conditions are affected by the defiance bar. Basically all of them slightly reduce the defiance bar a bit on application, but their debuff effect does not apply to a boss.

The problem is that debuffs were designed with only PvP in mind, not with PvE design in mind.

I mean, imagine a 66% recharge increase on a boss’s attack sequence. It’d be too strong, as would blind. Admittedly weakness SHOULD work just like protection currently reduces boss damage, but a part of weakness is wasted as bosses don’t have endurance bars or dodge often for it to matter.

I just think they need to rethink what these debuffing conditions do in PvE and bring some of that wonderful GW1 PvE combat back, where each class and its abilities had defined identity.

Boons and Conditions actually were for the worse of the game. They condensed effects, which means some classes were made redundant as some other class could bring the same effect, so you make a decision on WHO brings the effects the best, in which case it’s the elementalist, guardian, and warrior (and in the case of blind, thief).

Now recall GW1. Each class had identity and skill effects meaningful in PvE that another class could not eclipse/substitute. Mesmers were your masters of interrupts, and interrupts MATTERED. You then had your AoE classes in elementalist, necromancers brought orders and corruptions with either strong debuffs and potent single target. You had the more traditional tanks like warrior and dervish and even to a point assassin.

And then you had your buffers like ritualist and paragon and your healers in monks and ritualists.

What we have now thanks to boons and their supremacy, and the blandness of conditions in PvE, is Guardian/Elementalist/Warrior supremacy, with niche buffing by mesmer (in the form of quickness boon and alacrity) and stealth skips/blind spam by thief.

Conditions as a whole in PvE are a disappointment, and with the ease Phalanx Strength Warriors and Persisting Flames elementalists cap boons to their highest potential, we also make some boon utility from other classes redundant.

Now nobody cares if a ranger brings some extra might with jungle stalker or Clarion Bond when an ele/warrior can keep the group capped far more easily and effectively.

MailMail.6534:

The 30s cd is ok. It’s getting a heal boost AND 3 conditions being removed. Take into account alacrity, and you still have a competitive heal from my perspective.

It’s in line with any condi clearing heal that’s also AoE. Healing Spring is 30 sec cd and Well of Blood is 40 sec cd although admittedly Well of Blood is a weak heal.

Easy, switch out the golem’s legs for a mermaid tail! He’ll look fabulous.

Good to hear. At least my mesmer Domination traits will continue to benefit I hope

I agree that some balance must be brought between boons and conditions.

Why does protection provide the % damage reduction, but weakness can’t work on a boss? After all, weakness is actually a worse form of protection, RNG.

And I don’t understand why you would introduce slow to the mesmer only to have it be ineffective in PvE.

Instead maybe you should consider what these conditions do in PvE and split balance so that these conditions/debuffs be allowed to work in PvE and compete with boons as equals rather than as crappy a inverse of boons.

In fact while we’re at this, boon stacking by warriors/elementalists/and guardians needs the heavy nerf hammer. These classes not only max stack with ease on themselves, they share it with the group as well, and not at great cost.

Might stacking should be a group effort that takes allies bringing utilities and traits where all FIVE of them work to build 25 might stacks for SOME time, not a PSEA warrior and elementalist capping the boons for an entire fight with perma fire fields and the brokenness that is Phalanx Strength.

The problem is once the defiance bar is broken, the mob goes immune to any defiance bar affecting effects.

So the question is, once that bar irons up, will status effects still apply for the purpose of still allowing traits to proc/function? Or will people have to wait until the bar is uncovered again to start benefiting from their traits?

Roy Cronacher.1576:

I just wanted to stop in and say I’m definitely closely reading all the feedback about these changes and while I know some of you will miss some old functionality we feel it will be the right choice for the health of the game and profession for the long term. That being said I’m open to feedback and suggestions to make sure everything is awesome.

Though, I will say for mallyx most of the skills were brought into the middle-ground of meeting the condition threshold. As an example Banish Enchantment applies 3 stacks of confusion, it used to apply 2 if you didn’t meet the threshold or 4 if you did.

Also while it may be hard to see it on paper, some areas got improved such as torment application actually went up significantly. I can stack up an incredible amount internally, which is a bit scary, but we’ll have to see how it plays. It should help with making it much more of a condition damage viable build though.

Some things to note:

• Unrelenting Assault did have some bug fixes to it which should help with issues like using it and having it fail being stuck in place as it animated should no longer be a thing. It’ll just fail without playing the whole animation.
• Condition removal or resistance application has not changed, so the Revenant should have the same way to deal with taking conditions on themselves.
• The recharge for unyielding anguish was a remnant of an old change and wasn’t supposed to be there. This skill shouldn’t have a recharge and I’m thinking about lowering the energy cost from 35 to 30 to make it more usable as mobility and condition application. It also should be applying 5 seconds of torment instead of 4.
• Embrace the Darkness now applies a lot of torment in an area, twice as much as before. I’m looking at adjusting the cast time or upkeep cost for it to make it a bit more in line with the new functionality.
• Since corruption and mallyx is all about being the master of torment and being pushed more that route, I’m playing around with an idea I wanted to run by all of you. Torment is less valued in stationary fights due to the way torment functions. Since torment is the main damaging condition for Revenant, I’ve been thinking about adding functionality to a trait or maybe changing the minor 2 in corruption to increase the base damage torment does while not moving while not increasing the while moving damage to help it become more of a viable option in all areas of the game. What do you all think?

I’ll keep reading and I’ll be open to suggestions and feedback. Just try to remember it may look more devastating on paper than it actually is in game. Some areas of this build actually got stronger.

I’ll try to get it as close as possible before the next beta, but there is still time to address feedback after BWE3 before launch. Just remember playing something usually tends to give different impressions rather then just reading it. Balance is an ongoing thing though and we’ll continue to adjust as necessary even after launch. Balance is never-ending.

What I think is that this fix to torment should not be class specific.

Torment and confusion, and to a lesser extent even bleeding, are vastly undervalued conditions in PvE right now.

Why? Because burning condition specs completely eclipsed/displaced them.

You have classes like necromancer and mesmer who will essentially never build for conditions because while initially bleeding was intended to overcome burning with higher stacks, that is no longer the case and burning outperforms bleeding in every way.

So condition spec engineers and to a lesser extent rangers and guardians completely dwarf classes like necromancer/mesmer/revenant because those classes are stuck with torment/confusion, both of which are REALLY WEAK in PvE, and the necromancer in particular with bleeding.

Please don’t fix torment/confusion just for revenants. Fix it for every class so it’s a desirable condition in all game formats. It’s time engineers stop reigning supreme in condition damage.

Shave down the scaling formula for burning and add that damage into bleeding/confusion/torment/poison so that when stacked enough these conditions outpace burning.

Right now the necessary investment in condition damage for these weaker conditions doesn’t even match the returns that a celestial engineer/ele can even achieve on their own with burning….

Silverkey.2078:

Zenith.7301:

This is no different from shadow refuge, the well is fine. A shadow refuge pretty much most of the time guarantees a rez or a group opener.

Shadow refuge still allows you to cleave the refuge area. Stealth-rez is hard to counter only if the elementalist uses its downed skill 2 while the thief stealths him/her.

Blur has less counter.

In exchange for being purely defensive. Shadow refuge allows ambushes, it allows resets, and it allows peeling.

Cleaving is also relative to what class we’re talking about. Most classes are actually screwed with stealth because most of their attacks require a target.

Not every class is an ele or warrior or engineer who has the luxury of just spamming AoE.

I’ll take shadow refuge in WvW any day on my thief over 3 seconds of blurr. Stealth is silly powerful.

What I’m saying is, let’s not start fanning the flames of pvp hysteria already and ruin a skill for PvE.

A single healing rain from a staff ele provides far more healing than well of eternity due to it being a water field and the amount of blasts a meta group and the ele himself has access to.

And then there’s Geyser which also heals for a similar amount as well of eternity and is a water field as well. 2 water fields to be blasted for instant full health in a meta group from an ele.

This is no different from shadow refuge, the well is fine. A shadow refuge pretty much most of the time guarantees a rez or a group opener.

As I said, what you people are complaining about IS A CLASS MECHANICAL ISSUE WITH MESMERS/RANGERS/NECROMANCERS/ GUARDIAN SPIRIT WEAPONS THAT NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSED INSTEAD OF SWEPT UNDER THE RUG.

I’d rather they don’t replace it with a ranged phantasm because if it becomes a melee phantasm and people realize what is happening with pet/illusion classes in PvE and largescale WvW, then developers have a bigger reason to finally implement a long needed fix that every other MMO out there has.

Every MMO but this one has pets that are off/low in the aggro table and have AoE immunity/avoidance since these classes rely on the high/full reliable uptime of these minions to perform fully.

So instead of insisting on a band aid of making a phantasm ranged, ask them to fix the issue with illusions/pets/minions/ranger spirits/ guardian spirit weapons in PvE and WvW zergs.

Life steals need to be % based on damage done. 5-10% life steal on damage done would probably be a lot more valuable.

The lifesteals are too minuscule to be worthwhile in most game formats. Regen alone tends to heal more than the lifesteals, and regen is considered the weakest healing source and one of the weakest boons in the game to begin with.

PvE can just make them AoE/cleave immune just like they are to Subject Alpha’s attacks. Remove them from the aggro table to avoid exploits on bosses with no single target attacks.

For WvW it’d be of little issue to give pets/minions 70-80% aoe resistance, they still take full damage from single target attacks.

Voila, fixed minions/spirit weapons/illusions/ranger pets.