Guild Wars 2

Meta is creative. Somebody actually took some thought to come up with an optimal build, it didn’t just happen by magic. People were creative enough to experiment with synergies.

Fay.2357:

thetarot.8246:

Fay.2357:

thetarot.8246:

Alacrity is utterly pathetic

The maximum potential on alacrity is reducing the cooldown of skills by 33%. That’s far from pathetic.

A meaningless statement of the obvious. It’s like saying. “Did you know that 3 Phantasm always up on a boss, that never dies, does a lot of damage?”

Fay.2357:

thetarot.8246:

with it’s short duration,

So short that I can keep it up on an entire party for 35 solid seconds on a 45 second cooldown, and easily permanent on myself in a variety of builds.

This is relevant, and I thank you for it, If in fact, the information was not done on ‘Paper’ and in a real, relevent, situation, Such as sPvP, PvE, or WvW, and not during target dummy test where all your stars are aligned.

Edit: I know engrish.

Yes, I tested it in all paths of ac, multiple paths of CM, CoF, SE, Arah, CoE, and TA. Not only does it do 35 seconds of solid alacrity, it also does 35 seconds of solid quickness at the same time. It also shares ~10 partywide might, maintains roughly 60-70% uptime on partywide vigor, and ends up with a partywide hps from the heal well alone of over 300, all while doing decent mesmer-range damage.

PvP it’s less effective but still gets you pretty significant alacrity duration with a good rotation. WvW…would not recommend tbh.

I can confirm the build works. It’s a tad less effective in fractal 50 where the aoe spam is massive, and bosses like molten duo can and will kill the split early, but it’s a powerful and fun build nevertheless.

In fact, this version of alacrity is entirely what will keep us solidly in the meta of any raid. Allowing elementalists to cast meteor shower and ice bow more often is absolutely ridiculous.

I DO NOT SUPPORT STACKING QUICKNESS. This game does not need more ridiculous burst and going above 50% quickness is just retreading the old quickness which went to 100% and was nerfed down to 50% FOR A REASON.

Daniel Handler.4816:

Zenith.7301:

Daniel Handler.4816:

Zenith.7301:

AtomsOrSystems.9420:

EDIT:

PS. I don’t like that you make comments that from what you’ve seen in beta shield is borderline unusuable when you make comments in other threads like

You should try fractal 50 or the Verdant Brink beta mordrem. Casual AoE spam from mobs splashing everywhere for 6k+ hits a piece and unlike pvp these mobs don’t fold over/run away at the 15-20k hp damage line.
The Mordem snipers at Verdant Brink on a full reaper shroud necromancer take off the entire shroud and then some more HP in one charged shot.

Things that are perfect for blocking with either 4 or 5 on shield.

I don’t know where you’re pulling that from, but I’ve literally never said that. I even went and checked my own comments, to make sure I wasn’t having some kind of stroke. That’s definitely not my quote.

Also, yes, blocks could be helpful there. So are evades, and Aegis, and other mechanics that don’t entail the major DPS and utility loss that Mesmer shield currently does.

He’s quoting me on a pvp thread. No, those attacks are not blocked by shield 4 easily. The sniper shot leaves a trail, its most damaging part, that is multi hit. It goes through the first block and still damages you.

He ignored points of that post as well that talked about multiple mobs and aoe attacking you at a time. So an AoE that is pulsing damage per second eats up your shield 4 charge, and the sniper/stalker blasts your face off. The Shadowscale’s Unrelenting Assault is a multihit highly damaging attack that also eats through shield 4 easily.

He didn’t play the beta much.

He also didn’t pay attention to where I have said to make the shield 4 a continuous block like the warrior offhand sword and shield/ranger greatsword until hit by a melee attack. Or to summon the phantasm after channeling the skill for 1 second to put it in line with all other phantasm casts.

Come on dude, try to use your head. Shield 4 has no aftercast so you can block 2 of any multihit. If you add in scepter you can block 4 of any 5 pulse aoe. You talk about multiple mobs and shield 5 has no target limit. You talk about something shooting a projectile that I assume can be destroyed by the shield 5. With alacrity and illusions distortion is now on a 30 second cooldown. You can distort for 4 seconds, 1 more than a warriors shield, and reflect missiles, like a warriors shield. We already had a warrior shield, now we have another one.

It’s hard to reply to something so stupid. The aoe’s pulse per second, the trail pulses per second. You are blocking 2 hits off a multi hit effect that is not a projectile. Distortion destroys your phantasms, so there goes all your DPS.

Shield 5 functions as a line reflect, unfortunately for you the snipers don’t line up all perfectly in a line in front of you for all projectiles to be blocked.

I mean, you just told me to use a scepter in PvE, I’m pretty sure you are trolling.

Your level of civility is about the same as when Pyro had to start posting as Fay. Perhaps you can realise we are both people, and this is a video game.

And if you want to stick to the meta weapons then blurred frenzy and block twice. Preventing the entire attack from harming you.

You’re the one to talk about civility when you passive aggressively tell someone to “use your head”. Apparently implying someone is not using their head is a shining example of proper forum etiquette.

Embolism.8106:

Zenith.7301:

But this is not even true.

We already use defensive offhands in PvE, they’re called focus and offhand sword. The focus is a purely defensive offhand, used for projectile defense and crowd control (iwarden really does mediocre damage and is stationary).

Offhand sword has the same block shield does, on a way lower cooldown, and that block can be turned into a line wide ranged interrupt.

The shield has the same block as offhand sword, and it’s bad because it only blocks one hit. The warrior offhand sword covers all projectiles, as does the ranger block. The mesmer shield block gets popped by a single projectile and then you eat all the damage.

And what do you get in exchange for that 30 second cd block, a garbage phantasm that does no damage and applies 1 second of alacrity and 2 seconds of slow EVERY 8 SECONDS?

So you have a 30 second cooldown (basically double the cd of usual phantasms) on a crappy phantasms, that is delayed on a 2 second cast of doing nothing (DPS loss)?

Neither Focus nor OH Sword are used for personal defense in PvE. Focus is a group reflect tool, if it provided only personal reflects I can guarantee it won’t see any use in PvE; not to mention reflects have a potent offensive component. OH Sword is used for iSwordsman, the highest DPS Phantasm; not for iRiposte. It’s like saying we use OH Pistol as a CC weapon in PvE.

Truely personal defense weapons that are strong in PvP (Staff, Torch) go completely unused in PvE except in specific circumstances.

Shield 4 is actually really potent if built correctly. Assuming you can proc the Blocks easily (which, as I’ve stated, is not the case in PvE) it conjures two Phantasms, which means with Chronophantasma benefits 4x from Persistence of Memory from itself alone (remember it also benefits from PoM from any other Shattered Phantasm). This makes it an excellent Illusion generation tool and greatly reduces its CD. If the Block component had significant meaning in PvE, it would be good.

Even so Shield 4 is potent because of potential low CD blocking and Shatter fodder, not because of the power of the Phantasm. It definitely needs something given we’re sacrificing half of our offensive Phantasms for it.

Offhand sword provides essentially the same or more amount of blocking as offhand shield ovekittenriod of 30 seconds. That’s what I meant by personal defense. Reflection and personal defense are one and the same in PvE where some of your biggest threats are projectile attacks, it’s why I included focus in there.

I probably missed your “personal defense” part but I still want to say that offhand sword and focus offer personal defense options without completely gutting your damage.

2 crappy phantasms and persistence of memory is hardly an appeal, especially since persistence of memory competes with compounding power (9% increased damage) so it’s not included in any DPS centered PvE mesmer build, only on shatter PvE support builds such as the alacrity sharing wells chrono spec.

D/D ele is pvp god tier, plain simple. WvW allowing inflated stats AND food AND potions further breaks down the balance, as they can take food to heavily reduce condi duration or to proc extra healing.

I use signet of stone on archdiviner/mossman, allows me to pull my full melee burst without fear of losing my scholar bonus or being brought low in health.

Utilities are QZ/FSpirit/Signet of Stone or Signet of the Wild.

The pet makes 15% of your DPS IF it is a jaguar (way less if running a drake for fractal 50 bosses), so increasing its damage by 40% with sic em is kind of a wimpy skill compared to a 8 second 25% damage increase for both you and the pet.

DarkyAnime.4531:

Scepter isn’t weak as some people make it to be. It has really good support ability in the fire attunement with rapid procing blast finisher and decent condition damage which works well in the dungeon and low level fractals. However, Scepter has the worst sustainable damage out of the 3 weapon and many people fail to see that. I’m basing this assumption on the many PvE scepter condition builds I seen which often use utility that offer no sustainability. Anyways, dagger/focus is often the better choice for condition builds since fire skill 1 to 4 has a very high hit rate which makes it easy to proc, stack, and sustain burning.

Scepter is so bad in PvE, that peoiple use it to stack might before a pull and shortly before initiating combat, they switch weapons.

Scepter has always been kitten by terrible autoattacks, gutting its sustained DPS, and the huge delay on their lack luster skills like Dragon’s Tooth and Water 2. Dragon’s Tooth at first looks powerful, and then you realize that it’s a delayed Lava Font tick. In fact Lava Font over its duration does far more damage and serves as a permanent fire field.

Human is a safe bet. Male humans are not deformed like male norn with drooping manboobs and a hunch and huge gaps between the thighs.

Male humans also have the better male hairstyles.

Personally I like my male sylvari a lot, but that’s because I pick the most “muscular” option and I use the makeover kit to get the short cropped “masculine” hairstyle (the vanilla hairstyles for male sylvari are all too indie boy for me).

The drawback to sylvari/asura/charr is that most game armors are not cultural armors, and especially for charr/sylvari not many armors are made with those races in mind; humans look good in all armors but sylvari/charr/norn/asura look silly without the racial armors.

Daniel Handler.4816:

Zenith.7301:

AtomsOrSystems.9420:

EDIT:

PS. I don’t like that you make comments that from what you’ve seen in beta shield is borderline unusuable when you make comments in other threads like

You should try fractal 50 or the Verdant Brink beta mordrem. Casual AoE spam from mobs splashing everywhere for 6k+ hits a piece and unlike pvp these mobs don’t fold over/run away at the 15-20k hp damage line.
The Mordem snipers at Verdant Brink on a full reaper shroud necromancer take off the entire shroud and then some more HP in one charged shot.

Things that are perfect for blocking with either 4 or 5 on shield.

I don’t know where you’re pulling that from, but I’ve literally never said that. I even went and checked my own comments, to make sure I wasn’t having some kind of stroke. That’s definitely not my quote.

Also, yes, blocks could be helpful there. So are evades, and Aegis, and other mechanics that don’t entail the major DPS and utility loss that Mesmer shield currently does.

He’s quoting me on a pvp thread. No, those attacks are not blocked by shield 4 easily. The sniper shot leaves a trail, its most damaging part, that is multi hit. It goes through the first block and still damages you.

He ignored points of that post as well that talked about multiple mobs and aoe attacking you at a time. So an AoE that is pulsing damage per second eats up your shield 4 charge, and the sniper/stalker blasts your face off. The Shadowscale’s Unrelenting Assault is a multihit highly damaging attack that also eats through shield 4 easily.

He didn’t play the beta much.

He also didn’t pay attention to where I have said to make the shield 4 a continuous block like the warrior offhand sword and shield/ranger greatsword until hit by a melee attack. Or to summon the phantasm after channeling the skill for 1 second to put it in line with all other phantasm casts.

Come on dude, try to use your head. Shield 4 has no aftercast so you can block 2 of any multihit. If you add in scepter you can block 4 of any 5 pulse aoe. You talk about multiple mobs and shield 5 has no target limit. You talk about something shooting a projectile that I assume can be destroyed by the shield 5. With alacrity and illusions distortion is now on a 30 second cooldown. You can distort for 4 seconds, 1 more than a warriors shield, and reflect missiles, like a warriors shield. We already had a warrior shield, now we have another one.

It’s hard to reply to something so stupid. The aoe’s pulse per second, the trail pulses per second. You are blocking 2 hits off a multi hit effect that is not a projectile. Distortion destroys your phantasms, so there goes all your DPS.

Shield 5 functions as a line reflect, unfortunately for you the snipers don’t line up all perfectly in a line in front of you for all projectiles to be blocked.

I mean, you just told me to use a scepter in PvE, I’m pretty sure you are trolling.

Anchoku.8142:

I know what you are saying but…

…two life bars is how a lot of players and developers think.

Players and developers say a lot of things that just aren’t true in the current state of the game.

I mean Leary said reapers would be great in raids as DPS with high sustain and it took Sublimatio from rT to correct him on reddit on that false claim.

Loki.4871:

As fun as being a snotty elitist may be for you, let me steer you back to the point I was making. If you make heavy use of the shroud, it’s essentially always off cooldown in most situations.

It will always be off cooldown in 13-20 seconds (augury of death traited assumed for the lower range), being in shroud doesn’t hasten its cooldown it only means you relied on shroud to make it to the cooldown.

In this case it’s not a credit to the strength of the heal, you’re surviving because of shroud.

AtomsOrSystems.9420:

EDIT:

PS. I don’t like that you make comments that from what you’ve seen in beta shield is borderline unusuable when you make comments in other threads like

You should try fractal 50 or the Verdant Brink beta mordrem. Casual AoE spam from mobs splashing everywhere for 6k+ hits a piece and unlike pvp these mobs don’t fold over/run away at the 15-20k hp damage line.
The Mordem snipers at Verdant Brink on a full reaper shroud necromancer take off the entire shroud and then some more HP in one charged shot.

Things that are perfect for blocking with either 4 or 5 on shield.

I don’t know where you’re pulling that from, but I’ve literally never said that. I even went and checked my own comments, to make sure I wasn’t having some kind of stroke. That’s definitely not my quote.

Also, yes, blocks could be helpful there. So are evades, and Aegis, and other mechanics that don’t entail the major DPS and utility loss that Mesmer shield currently does.

He’s quoting me on a pvp thread. No, those attacks are not blocked by shield 4 easily. The sniper shot leaves a trail, its most damaging part, that is multi hit. It goes through the first block and still damages you.

He ignored points of that post as well that talked about multiple mobs and aoe attacking you at a time. So an AoE that is pulsing damage per second eats up your shield 4 charge, and the sniper/stalker blasts your face off. The Shadowscale’s Unrelenting Assault is a multihit highly damaging attack that also eats through shield 4 easily.

He didn’t play the beta much.

He also didn’t pay attention to where I have said to make the shield 4 a continuous block like the warrior offhand sword and shield/ranger greatsword until hit by a melee attack. Or to summon the phantasm after channeling the skill for 1 second to put it in line with all other phantasm casts.

Shield 4 could afford to either have an increase in protection duration or transfer conditions/give resistance.

I think it’s a good change. Necromancers were always billed as the “master of conditions” yet they were always eclipsed by engineers and rangers.

We need more useful auras for a group.

Vampiric Presence in turn could turn into an aura that says “Your group does 5% additional damage and that damage is converted to health”.

Death Magic could increase boon effectiveness on the group by 10% (as in, not buffing duration since that’s for heralds but actually increase the effect of each boon by 10%).

Loki.4871:

Myself and friend ended up two manning The Butcher in honour of the waves and I found it actually really good for a heal. Remember that it recharges while in reaper zhroud, so you can do what I did, hang on by the seat of your pants against an enemy by alternating between rs and using the shout when you briefly pop out of it. I managed to melee the fat git because of it.

I melee the fat git without shroud. His melee attacks are slow and you can just flash death shroud to eat one hit when you run out of endurance and pop back out.

To me this really sounds like those PVT guardians and d/d eles in PvE saying “well my other crappy group mates died and I was able to slowly kill the guy on my turtle setup”.

Negligent play by others is hardly a credit to a skill/build.

Anchoku.8142:

Zenith.7301:

You can take it with any stat combo because either way you’re not doing any damage with it lol. It’s both a terrible power and condition weapon damagewise, you just bring it for the aoe fear/condi transfer and occasionally chillblains.

This is exactly the point Arenanet is making. Necromancer ranged damage is not supposed to equal other professions. Lower mobility and lower ranged damage are the trades for higher melee sustain.

No one here will claim Necro staff is as good as Ele staff. If you want it improved, explain why, in the context of Necromancer’s design.

But necromancer doesn’t have higher melee sustain. Last I checked in the entire history of the game the necromancer has never been a frontline melee class and out of all the bunkers that have ever been meta, it was guardian/engineer/ele/BM ranger bunkers, not necromancers.

You people need to understand the difference between a damage sponge and a long term sustain class. A necromancer is much easier to train for a team than a mesmer/thief/elementalist, that’s why historically they’ve been the first target to hit by teams.

I get it now. You’re trying to go for a death shroud build because you are folding in crappy all zerker groups.

Here’s the bad news. Adding toughness to your build actually makes you more likely to be the target of aggro. You don’t want that, it’s easier to lose your scholar bonus.

I ran scholar on the beta weekend on verdant brink and quite frankly it’s still viable. Most of the high damage moves halve your health or have the potential to 2-shot you in zerker, so you need to learn to dodge them and blind/CC the mobs because slightly increasing your toughness is not going to do much for you.

If you give up spite, you lose 5% damage against foes with no boons, and 20% against low health targets. If you give up soul reaping, you give up a 5% damage modifier, which that power from toughness isn’t going to make up for.

Death Shroud is already lower DPS than a dagger build. Reaper Shroud will be less DPS, especially at 50% health gravedigger spam levels. Building around shroud is a waste. Get rid of that crutch and learn to dodge the damage.

So if you’re going to give up spite/soul reaping and kitten your DPS, you might as well get some group utility out of it. Blood gives you reduced wells cd, which is actually the utilities you’ll be using (you’re all weakings is kind of a redundant shout might-wise in a group setting thanks to the existence of PSEA warriors). It gives you vampiric presence for your group or healing when coming out of shroud.

Death Magic not only gimps your DPS, it’s a SELFISH traitline. So you’re reducing your DPS at no added benefit for the group.

For curses it’s mostly weakening shroud, which is just a better version of you’re all weaklings, and Target the Weak, which allows you to build for even less crit. Barbed Precision is just extra damage on crits.

Death Magic is a minionmaster/pvp traitline, nothing else.

The data mine says 170. Just hope they’re wrong and will modify it, since 170 skill points across 8 alts is DUMB

You said you’re talking PvE here and yet you mention Death Magic as the alternatives lol.

Not Blood Magic. Not Curses. But that garbage Death Magic /smh

edit: You have Relentless Pursuit. On a PvE build. Oh, god, please specify if you’re an open world PvE type of guy, this build is terrible for dungeons.

You can take it with any stat combo because either way you’re not doing any damage with it lol. It’s both a terrible power and condition weapon damagewise, you just bring it for the aoe fear/condi transfer and occasionally chillblains.

Give illusions aoe/cleave immunity, vulnerable to only single targeted attacks directed at them.

For solo strength is better. For group PvE, scholar now is king. That may change depending on the uptime on scholar for “challening” PvE content, but in general you’d have to see low uptime at >90% for scholar to become suboptimal to strength/ogre.

Or you can simply type “no exploits”. Smart use of terrain and all or whatever, I find it a waste of time but it’s no different from using an earth elemental to trivialize Big Tom or to basically prevent a boss from ever threatening you as you use it as a sandbag until it dies.

This game is just full of bad encounter/AI design, in any other game doing the encounter mechanics doesn’t become optional if you use terrain one way or use a single skill or two.

Plus even with an aura, 1 second of alacrity every 8 (the approximate attack rate of the phantasm as documented by the wiki) seconds per phantasm without phantasmal haste is atrocious for how little damage the phantasm does.

It rivals the torch’s iMage for worst phantasm of the bunch.

It’s still fairly uncommon. Very few pugs are aware of it but with time it’ll catch on.

TheRandomGuy.7246:

Oxidia.8103:

I’m not bothered by mossman exploit, but the archdiviner one. My pug party wiped around 12 times for that stupid exploit where you stack on top of the wall, we could have done it 3 times allready normal way. When i suggested normal way they acted as if i insulted everybody’s mum.

Wat. Never heard about that one.

You stand on the wall and then Archdiviner can’t melee you. The problem is most pugs are still kittened so even if they don’t die to the melee, they eat his aura blast. Also his pulling projectile still works.

It’s pretty much a fail proof way to melee Archdiviner if your party isn’t using an earth elemental or anchor guardian or chaining frost bow freezes. Which is the case for most PuGs.

It won’t be done on a meta group because you waste time running and climbing over to the broken pillar and hoping everyone drags the Archdiviner there, when instead you could frostbow freeze him and burst him down and aegis any melee swings that come after wards.

Embolism.8106:

I hope they make interrupts affect the Defiant Bar on top of proccing their effects. Although maybe that’s already the case, didn’t do much PvE during the BWEs.

With regards to the multiproc problem, just give it an ICD.

Their “solution” is already in place, mesmers just haven’t noticed.

Necromancers did. Chill doesn’t work on mobs with defiance bar, and neither does slow. Instead, they do a small contribution in decreasing the defiance bar upon application.

It’s a really, really bad solution that actually doesn’t fix anything. Especially since mobs with a defiant bar iron up the bar after being interrupted so they become entirely immune to defiance bar reducing effects for a while, which makes chill and slow useless again for that remainder.

Embolism.8106:

Well, I might as well say this again. I think the problem with shields and all defensive skills in general is not in the skills (weapons) themselves but in the way PvE has so far been designed, i.e. where personal defence is almost completely meaningless. If Anet would (re)design content so the price of going full glass is a swift death, then defensive skills (weapons) will be fine.

Shield 4 would be fine if the Block itself actually has meaning, which is the case in PvP. It is not the case in PvE, hence it becomes useless. Make PvE content challenging in the sense that staying alive is a huge part of DPS (a.k.a. not dying), then Shield 4 would be fine with no changes.

That said, iAvenger itself is pretty useless except kittenter fodder. Anet did say they’re working on Slow in PvE so we’ll wait on that, but the Alacrity is still pretty weak. TGiven how much group Alacrity you can give out with AWTEW, perhaps iAvenger shouldn’t give Alacrity at all: change it to something else? I’d like to say Quickness but that might be a bit too much as well.

But this is not even true.

We already use defensive offhands in PvE, they’re called focus and offhand sword. The focus is a purely defensive offhand, used for projectile defense and crowd control (iwarden really does mediocre damage and is stationary).

Offhand sword has the same block shield does, on a way lower cooldown, and that block can be turned into a line wide ranged interrupt.

The shield has the same block as offhand sword, and it’s bad because it only blocks one hit. The warrior offhand sword covers all projectiles, as does the ranger block. The mesmer shield block gets popped by a single projectile and then you eat all the damage.

And what do you get in exchange for that 30 second cd block, a garbage phantasm that does no damage and applies 1 second of alacrity and 2 seconds of slow EVERY 8 SECONDS?

So you have a 30 second cooldown (basically double the cd of usual phantasms) on a crappy phantasms, that is delayed on a 2 second cast of doing nothing (DPS loss)?

The shield stands only by Tides of Time, which is inferior to focus on projectile defense and the focus achieves similar crowd control with a pull that interrupts and does a knockdown on mobs, so it’s not even the 1 second stun or projectile defense that makes the shield unique, it’s the 3 seconds of quickness on a 30 sec cd assuming people stay in the line of return otherwise it’s only 1.5 seconds of quickness.

The shield is truly a weak weapon. The novelty will fade for people, at least in PvE just like Daredevil Thieves realized that the staff lacked in the single target damage of the dagger and the aoe potential of Pistol Whip so if anything it’ll be purely a PvP weapon as well.

I also don’t think people truly realize how bad our reliance on phantasms and illusions to perform is going to be. In Verdant Brink DE’s alone, and this is not even challenging raid content, the illusions were getting cleaved down by aoe spam as soon as they spawned.

It’s not uncommon for developers to change companies quietly, which is too bad because it’s nice to know who’s in charge of what.

For example, with ESO Maria Aliprando and Nick Konkle, one responsible for the huge champion points system and the other a combat lead designer, left the company quietly and nobody would have known if not for LinkedIn. For Wildstar, the stalker/esper class dev left as well without indication to the players until the company had to confirm it to players who dug the information up.

It sucks that with the game industry there’s not much transparency and reporting as to who’s exactly in charge of what, what his/her responsibilities were, and who replaced them and what is their professional history.

In the film industry, you got the credits, and you can look anyone up and get a good idea of who they are and what they’ve done. Not the case for the gaming industry, where you’re lucky if a dev even has a LinkedIn account let alone Twitter/Wikipedia pages and the gaming industry has no equivalent to iMDB

Ross Biddle.2367:

Zenith.7301:

No. No more interrupt traits, these are terrible for PvE.

You do realize mesmer interrupts are on longish cooldowns besides the offhand sword offhand and don’t work on mobs with defiance bars, right?

People take damage in PvE? What do you even need healing for?

You should try fractal 50 or the Verdant Brink beta mordrem. Casual AoE spam from mobs splashing everywhere for 6k+ hits a piece and unlike pvp these mobs don’t fold over/run away at the 15-20k hp damage line.

The Mordem snipers at Verdant Brink on a full reaper shroud necromancer take off the entire shroud and then some more HP in one charged shot.

This trolling and derailing of my thread has gotten tiresome. You clearly have nothing to contribute to a PvE thread given your self-important notions of the format, so I’m going to start reporting posts to the mods if we don’t get back on topic soon.

Dreaming serpent.5197:

If your familiar with enigner, staff is basicly an upgraded version of grenade kit. If that isn’t enough to justify it in a pvp situation, how about this:

Staff is one of the three necromancer weapons that scale effectively with enemies (the other two are warhorn and great sword).
Pvp is about both 1v1s and team fights, which is why it’s important that your weapons scale effectively. This is the reason just about every necromancer will bring staff and warhorn into pvp.

lol better grenade kit, you people are on some strong psychotropics.

Wondrouswall.7169:

Bhawb.7408:

I don’t think “profession devs” really existed before now. I believe the entire team worked on things because whenever we heard changes, we heard them from multiple sources (Sharp, Peters, Karl, etc.) instead of just one source. As a side note, Peters is gone so that’s another benefit to us in the balance department.

Wait, when did Peters leave? I thought only Sharp was gone.

His LinkedIn account says he was with Anet until June, when he transitioned over to Amazon studios as a combat designer.

Well, chaos armor is not the defensive utility mesmers use, as chaos armor is kinda garbage.

The real appeal comes from chaos storm daze+aegis and the wonderful tricks you can use with phase retreat for platform teleports. It’s a really good kiting weapon whereas the greatsword has very little tools to cope with someone who gets in your face in melee.

Hammer felt great to me. It’s one of the better ranged weapons in game.

Bhawb.7408:

Oh, and let’s not mention that staff is a poorly designed boring pile of crap to use.

;(

I remember when the staff and axe looked so cool as concepts in their pre-beta videos before release.

Staff just suffers from many of the necromancer weapons in that they’re hybrid weapons that excel at nothing. Ranger has the same issue outside longbow and their melee options (shortbow is hybrid garbage, mainhand axe is hybrid garbage that does not cleave as a condition weapon well and is too weak as a power cleaving weapon due to the horrendous autoattack).

Tim.6450:

gavyne.6847:

spoj is our resident PvE necro master, understandably he sees staff as a weak weapon. Just wanting to note that the OP is talking PvP specifically.

If axe and scepter were a bit better, I think most people would drop staf in the end.

Oh, they would. If even axe were 900 range power necros would have already dropped staff, even if the axe remains a weak weapon overall.

Staff is a consolation prize for power necros looking for ranged options, and it’s also a consolation prize in condi builds since the staff condi stacks nerf went through at the time of the dhuumfire scandal.

I just wish at the very least regen and water field blasts healed you in death shroud.

Water field blasting will be the premier raid healing strategy and gimping the necro out of healing while in death shroud because he was knocked down to dangerously low health levels— and the time he needs healing to not die the most, he doesn’t get healing— is going to be a problem.

You gotta make your own party and enforce the rule, and even then what you find in PuGs is that it will take 20+ minutes to fill a fractal 50 LFG that says “no bugged mossman”.

So saying “leave the party and make your own” is nice and all, but the truth is that the vast majority of the pugging fractal 50 community has built an expectation of bugging mossman and WILL NOT do him properly, and you will have trouble finding people to join your group in a timely manner to do him proper.

The whole PvE scene in GW2 is about convenience anyways. What gets the average pug group faster and more reliable results is what will be used even if their method is still suboptimal compared to a real meta group.

To be honest, if they fixed the kitten throwing axes from stealth and the kitten axes not bouncing from ranger pets and mesmer illusions, I think Mossman would be more frequently done by PuGs on land.

zapv.8051:

Thanks jerus, for reading the whole thread.
Zenith, my original post was not only directed at you. You responded to me responding to gavyne, sorry if I was misclear. Also, gavynes og post made it sound like he wanted the freebie run speed.

No worries, I’ve got some sand stuck up my kitten today it seems as well so I apologize for being overly aggressive.

I had to log on today to do fractal 50 and returning to my necro instead of reaper has not had good effects on me ;p.

They should, like, release the reaper already and put the changes to the spec in later patches and HoT release ;(

In PvE particularly since with the buffs to greatsword you don’t want to kitten your DPS by entering Reaper Shroud, so you will be taking far less advantage of that LF. In fact, there’s the scenario where you need the heal to keep your scholar bonus up but are capped at life force already, and you waste the life force from YSIM.

spoj also demonstrated in his Bloomhunger solo that the bloodfiend provided him with far better sustain relative to the other heals.

The Blood Fiend is super weak in WvW and spvp but in PvE the weakness is less pronounced since it’s a ranged minion and often you can position it to not be cleaved in melee if you precast him before entering melee range and opening with a ranged attack like reaper’s scythe or wells.

The above point applies as well that necro heals don’t exist in a vacuum. Many other classes have far better heals and that is precisely why the necromancer in pvp is such a juicy target to train, because he has no immunities and his recovery options are bad so a group spike is particularly devastating whereas a mesmer/thief can just blink/stealth away or a warrior can pop up immunity stances/shield stance.

Jerus.4350:

Zenith.7301:

I promise reading isn’t hard as well, you should try it. Where in hell did I suggest making the movement speed default on greatsword?

Really, point where. You have to pay by choosing relentless pursuit or Quickening Thirst. There’s no free run speed bonus talked about here.

And considering I’m not doing a careful boss pull before combat, I’m actually exploring and running through Dynamic Events, utility switch before combat is limited.

I would also caution to speak about “no one cares” when the thread itself has a few echoing viewpoints. If we’re trading the amounts of kittens we give about things, your approval or sympathy for my posts ranks pretty high in that huge pile of stinking kittens I don’t give.

gavyne.6847:

I was gonna suggest a 25% base run for wielding greatsword,

zapv.8051:

25% base run speed on GS as gavyne suggested won’t ever happen.

Before you jump on someone for not reading, try re-reading their post ya’ll need to calm down. He clearly was referring to gavyne’s post and he even clarified that.

the 66% condi duration effect in RS is just kinda of silly strong, or at least has the capability to be. I mean in WvW you would owe them some cripple/chill if you used food/hoelbrak. I agree with those saying it’s a bit much for one traitline, and it’s a ton of overlapping options. I just don’t think it’s the best idea if the goal is to get something of value in the adept line.

It wasn’t clarified. He addressed that point to me, implying I had anything to do with it.

I made a thread with MY suggestion, and he goes and brings up somebody else’s suggestion as if I had ever pushed for it. Why bring it up if it’s not relevant to what I said. If he has issues with that suggestion, he can discuss it with gavyne, instead of quoting me and making it seem like I’m asking for the sky/being greedy.

Why even mention in his reply to me somebody else’s point when it has nothing to do with what I’m doing.

edit: And now gavyne clarified. In fact, his post too was purposely distorted. Right in his very post he mentioned 25% base run speed in relation to the Blood Magic trait for daggers, and the other guy took it to mean we wanted a freebie 25% run speed on the greatsword.

Lonewolf Kai.3682:

Enrif.7359:

Gaaroth.2567:

Enrif.7359:

Lonewolf Kai.3682:

Bunnytown.7801:

I noticed this as well for the BWE2.

On a somewhat related note. Is it possible to not have our legend auras present when out of combat? The way it is now it seems the auras are always present (Which is why Ventari stood out XD).

Ugh, I’d rather seem them on all the time. Let’s you quickly know ahead of time what Legend the Revy is in if facing him before combat. Also, the Legend is supposed to be manifested with you at all times, not just out of combat. The arm glows sort of shows that. Plus, it’s a really cool effect.

I Voting for not seeing it out of Combat too! Or at all in PvE Content and make the Glow only for WvW/PvP were it matters?

pretty pretty please from an Roleplayer?

I’d never expect this from a roleplayer…only reasonable complaint is about the screenshots since the effect is “in the way”.
No other reasons for me.

Well Roleplayers are annoyed by any unwanted Glow Effects (namly Elementalist Hand Glow, Guardian perma Aegis shield and now the Revenant Hand Glow) and not only for screenshots

I don’t understand why though. Don’t those effects define the class that your roleplaying with? Or, are you roleplaying as something besides what’s in the GW universe class? IE, you’re roleplaying as Wolverine from the Marvel Universe.

They bother me more in the fact that they clash with my armor dyes.

I made my sylvari in full cultural tier 3 grey/white tints and a full set of fractal weapon skins with a grey/white theme in mind, and in comes a green or blue hand glow and clashes with my entire motif.

As said, life force gain and aoe chill/poison. The condition damage is garbage but it seems to me staff currently only becomes useful as an aoe chill/condi transfer and aoe fear tool.

The marks are also really useful against thieves. Yes, they may dodge through it in stealth or use a teleport but the mark triggers anyways and you can dodge in time before the hits land. It gives you an indication of where the stealthed thief is.

It’s a silly objection to be against % damage modifiers. Have them apply to condition damage as well as power. It’s the obvious solution instead of trying to dance around wrong design.

zapv.8051:

Zenith.7301:

zapv.8051:

Having a default run speed boost for a weapon, especially on necro will never happen. Also, either have your party stack swiftness, or swap out utils to signet of locust ooc. No point in traiting for something you can get by swapping weapons or utils ooc. As spoj said, we need to be reducing the amount of these traits necros have, not increasing it. The one in soul reaping should grant swiftness on entering DS and then it would be good.

Too late, the default run speed already exists for the dagger in blood magic, so it did happen.

Having played my chronomancer I can say not having to equip a suboptimal and largely useless signet in combat such as locust is quite a boon in Verdant Brink. Basically if I want a run speed I need to kitten myself in combat in Verdant brink by equipping Signet of the Locust.

An obvious answer would be to give the signet a good active in combat but by this point I’m really doubtful that’s gonna happen. The scepter and axe changes alone had to be delayed because of the dev workload.

EITHER WAY YOU LOOK AT IT, RELENTLESS PURSUIT AS WELL AS THE OTHER ADEPT TRAITS ARE WEAK/USELESS IN PVE. SOMETHING NEEDS TO BE DONE TO MAKE THEM ATTRACTIVE TO MORE GAME FORMATS.

Default does not mean what you think it means. Having to do something to get 25% run speed is the opposite of default (if you have to equip a trait it isn’t default). 25% base run speed on GS as gavyne suggested won’t ever happen.

LOL, learn to equip a new util before combat then, it isn’t hard I promise.

Your asking for a 4th way to get 25% run speed. Sorry no one feels bad that you don’t want to take the other 3 ways. Also, relentless pursuit is a super strong adept trait, and while it isn’t strong in pve it doesn’t need any buffs. If they want to buff the adept tier for pve, it would be to chilling nova, making it proc more or deal more damage.

I promise reading isn’t hard as well, you should try it. Where in hell did I suggest making the movement speed default on greatsword?

Really, point where. You have to pay by choosing relentless pursuit or Quickening Thirst. There’s no free run speed bonus talked about here.

And considering I’m not doing a careful boss pull before combat, I’m actually exploring and running through Dynamic Events, utility switch before combat is limited.

I would also caution to speak about “no one cares” when the thread itself has a few echoing viewpoints. If we’re trading the amounts of kittens we give about things, your approval or sympathy for my posts ranks pretty high in that huge pile of stinking kittens I don’t give.

Lily.1935:

Shiki.7148:

Hybrid would be horrible., at least for axe. Make staff more Hybrid, but Necro severely lacks a GOOD ranged power option, and you want to make axe hybrid so we won’t even HAVE a ranged power option anymore? No ty.

Zenith.7301:

No, thank you.

Hybrid weapons SUCK in PvE. Uusually, hybrid weapons have low coefficients on power and mediocre condi application without excelling in either, benefitting far less from gear tailored to one damage source.

You know, You guys sure do love to jump to conclusions. The weapon would have hybrid potential. Much like the sword for guardian has hybrid potential. Note that the sword on the guardian is not a hybrid weapon. It has no damaging conditions on it. It just functions that way with traits.

The axe suggestion I’ve made does not design it with the explicit intention of being a hybrid weapon. Its a byproduct of what happens when you have a weapon that corrupts boons and has a high Hit per second rate. This does not make it a hybrid weapon it makes it a power weapon that can also be used for hybrid.

I honestly wish you guys would read, stop, think for a moment, think some more.. And when you’re done thinking, think again before you post to make absolutely sure you know what you’re talking about… I’m sorry for being so rude but I’m really sick and tired of people missing the point over and over again when the intent is crystal clear.

The guardian mainhand sword is not used in PvE. For a reason.

zapv.8051:

Having a default run speed boost for a weapon, especially on necro will never happen. Also, either have your party stack swiftness, or swap out utils to signet of locust ooc. No point in traiting for something you can get by swapping weapons or utils ooc. As spoj said, we need to be reducing the amount of these traits necros have, not increasing it. The one in soul reaping should grant swiftness on entering DS and then it would be good.

Too late, the default run speed already exists for the dagger in blood magic, so it did happen.

Having played my chronomancer I can say not having to equip a suboptimal and largely useless signet in combat such as locust is quite a boon in Verdant Brink. Basically if I want a run speed I need to kitten myself in combat in Verdant brink by equipping Signet of the Locust.

An obvious answer would be to give the signet a good active in combat but by this point I’m really doubtful that’s gonna happen. The scepter and axe changes alone had to be delayed because of the dev workload.

EITHER WAY YOU LOOK AT IT, RELENTLESS PURSUIT AS WELL AS THE OTHER ADEPT TRAITS ARE WEAK/USELESS IN PVE. SOMETHING NEEDS TO BE DONE TO MAKE THEM ATTRACTIVE TO MORE GAME FORMATS.

spoj.9672:

What so we can have another duplicate trait/skill? Signet of the locust, speed of shadows and quickening thirst.

We actually need the opposite. We need the duplicates replaced with meaningful traits. And just have one source for 25% movement speed.

Hey, if it were up to me I’d be taking a surgical knife to most traitlines, especially Reaper which is riddled with PvP centric traits with little use for PvE (and just smash shouts into tiny pieces and remake them into group utility as they should be).

But this is the least invasive change I’m suggesting because I’m not sure if the developers by this point want to undertake the workload of revamping this stinker of a reaper traitline we have in PvE (all the adepts suck, hard, for PvE; the minors suck as well, especially Shivers of Dread, and the Grandmasters are weak as well from a PvE perspective because Reaper’s Onslaught will remain weak so long as reaper shroud remains subpar to greatsword DPS and is the only non-garbage grandmaster we have for PvE).

So by this point I’m desperate enough to ask at least for some breadcrumb changes needed for PvE reapers to not end up using a clearly PvP centric traitline before the developers move the most of their attention to Druid and Forge testing.

TheLastNobody.8319:

But we already have two speed increases, on the soul reaping and me in bed magic, both lines are pretty dang good for reaper.

Not for PvE. I’m not going to run in reaper shroud for a speed in crease in PvE to deplete my lf below the 50% threshold where I lose my 5% damage modifier, and Reaper Shroud is a DPS loss in PvE.

Blood Magic requires a dagger equipped, and you can’t take Blood Magic in PvE because it’s Spite/SR/Reaper, you’d lose the 5% damage modifier on no boons and 20% damage below 50% hp mobs on Spite, or the 5% damage bonus modifier from soul reaping.

If they buffed Vampiric Presence to be enough of a damage boost to compete with the 5% from soul reaping, and made Quickening Thirst’s run speed bonus apply to Greatsword as well, I’d consider it.

I would actually bother using this trait in PvE if that were the case, and I would actually have an adept trait to use besides a mediocre Chilling Nova (which does very little in PvE, 2s RNG chill on a 10s ICD is weak) as Augury of Death is garbage in PvE for the same reasons shouts in PvE are garbage (bosses are single target, and the effects are selfish without group utility and most boons like might redundant in a group setting with PSEA warriors).