Guild Wars 2

You nerf ele, and engineer will take his place and the ranger will be no better off. Sinister engineer is neck and neck on DPS with staff ele, provides a better water field, and provides smoke fields as well.

And quite frankly that won’t stop raid groups from stacking thieves/guardians/warriors instead since all those still perform most tasks better than a ranger.

If you’re talking about WvW even if you nerf ele, wells necromancers will be desirable over rangers for a backline ranged role.

Problem with ranger is that he’s far down the totem pole in terms of utility and DPS.

They called ranger a sustained dps class, and why it had less burst, but it doesn’t even have the top sustained damage ingame….

Its aoe/cleaving options are also woefully limited. Barrage and sword autoattacks. Traps for condition builds, which are worse than engineer grenades/bombs.

Basically, the only good thing about ranger is rapid fire (ranged single target mobile damage, ele staff and engineer do more ranged damage on stationary targets, so they’re better in PvE).

Anything else besides rapidfire’s niche, another class can do better. We’ll see what the druid brings.

yolo swaggins.2570:

Zenith.7301:

Hard CC counter my kitten . They got a 10 second cooldown stunbreak that blocks and knocks down targets kitten .

Meanwhile ranger and necromancer stunbreaks are stil 45-60+ second cd’s.

Everyone’s stun breaks have those CDs.

Yeah right lol.

Mesmer blink is 30 seconds, decoy is 32 sec cd. Stand Your ground is 24-30 sec cd. Shake it Off is 25 sec cd. Infiltrator’s Signet 30 sec cd. Ele’s air signet is 25 sec cd but most don’t use it and it’s not like ele suffers much for it.

Ranger and Necromancer have the worst stun breaks in the game. And quite frankly that doesn’t excuse a 10-15 sec cd stunbreak on a class with built in evades, teleports, and three built in dodges.

Hard CC counter my kitten . They got a 10 second cooldown stunbreak that blocks and knocks down targets kitten .

Meanwhile ranger and necromancer stunbreaks are stil 45-60+ second cd’s.

“We feel rangers can dodge too much, so even though their 50% endurance regen trait didn’t stack with vigor and thieves’ Feline Grace was far better, we’re gona nerf it down to 25% hurr durr spvp whine.”

“Oh, wait, but all those dodges need to go somewhere, why not give them to the top tier class already flooded with teleports and avoidance anyways. Here thieves, have some of the dodging we took from rangers lolololol”

Guess it’s time to give up danger time then!

Has anyone confirmed what’s the target cap? If we get 10/20 man raids, if the target cap is 5 people, that means 2/4 chronomancer buff bots.

AlphatheWhite.9351:

ODB.6891:

Embolism.8106:

Just a random idea… what if Mesmers gain access to a new type of field, say Time Field? Blast and Leap Alacrity, Whirl and Projectile Slow. The Wells would be Time Fields, and Temporal Enchanter could convert all Glamours into Time Fields.

Just a thought, I’m not actually advocating it. I’m quite okay with most of our fields being Ethereal, it makes Chaotic Dampening easier to use for Protection.

That would probably be enough to make me actually trait chrono…having time fields instead of ethereal fields. As it is…I was really hyped about chrono…until I looked at it again after the rounds of nerfs…now I can’t see a reason to want to trait it in pve…inspiration is so much better as far as group support/synergy goes. If I could get reliable and decent alacrity up time without having to use that garbage shield off hand…chrono would look a lot more appealing.

100% personal, 74% team alacrity good enough for you?
Or 100% personal, 69% team alacrity with 44% team quickness?
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1p6Byh_rZrfQtG0dsI1Y2JL_yYw_mvzt8EqrBXN2hLps/edit?usp=sharing

Granted that comes with shattering, which in turn guts your sustained damage.

They really just need to vastly increase the damage of shatters in PvE only (no WvW or spvp). That simple. Then mesmers would be happy to shatter.

morrolan.9608:

rotten.9753:

It’s hard to defend tempest after watching daredevil in action. In actually points to the fact that Karl is more than capable of designing fun elite spec.

I kind of disagree in that yes its fun and will be effective but it still shows Karl’s limitations as a designer. DD is simply a better version of acrobatics (just like tempest is another version of D/D) there’s no imagination in the design it doesn’t bring anything really new to the class like chronomancer, reaper or even dragonhunter have done. The thing with ele compared to thief is that ele has more complex mechanics thus it requires someone with creativety to get a handle on it.

New=/=better.

I’d rather get something effective, you can keep your love of inefficient gimmicks for yourself.

Ravezaar.4951:

Reapers will do fine vs Daredevil and Thief in general imho, Going for relentless pursuit and good use of Infuseing Terror and he can dance around with his kitten Stick all he wants….

A traditional Condi Necro gets again a big hit, after Berserker last week seems Condi Necro gets hard countered yet again… specially with the 1s ICD Dodge removal Master trait.

All a thief needs to do is wait out your infusing terror by dodging out and resetting the fight then re-engage while your infusing terror is on cooldown. It’s not like you will catch up to a half competent thief.

3 dodge bars to avoid all your gap closers, hell you’re lucky if the thief doesn’t just whittle you down to death with shortbow kiting.

I hope they transfer the projectile absorb, make it a reflect, and move it to Soul Spiral. A less than 1 second duration charge is pretty weak as far as absorbs go, you need sustained projectile defense not a 1-2 second duration put on a leap that displaces you and doesn’t protect you from more than 1-2 projectiles.

I mean, they had the same issue with the dragonhunter deflecting arrow.

Sigmoid.7082:

Zenith.7301:

Reaper Shroud needs a similar damage buff to greatsword auto, a 20% damage buff.

It is a resource you build up. You shouldn’t lose potential DPS in PvE by using your class mechanic.

I don’t want death shroud to be just an extra hp sponge, it should be an upgrade in damage as a transformation with limited duration that locks out your access to utilities and the elite.

With the damage boost GS is only about 5% behind dagger auto and RS auto, with a fixed reapers onslaught, is about 6% behind. If its auto got a damage boost it would out class them both by a mile while granting might,vuln, burn. Wouldnt be very fair seeing as with a fixed onslaught + dhuumfire RS auto should out damage dagger auto.

In any situation now where you can hit any more than two targets both weapons are vastly better and single target they only GS is a bit weaker till 50% then GD spam outdoes dagger auto.

GS won’t be behind dagger, when talking about GS you need to consider its DPS as a combination of the autoattack and gravedigger.

I’m sorry, but I don’t want my class mechanic balanced around pvp, keep it split between formats if necessary.

If greatsword does better DPS than reaper shroud, traits like Reaper’s Onslaught will become obsolete as you’ll never want to be in reaper’s shroud.

And no, might stack and vulnerability is worthless in PvE. In a proper PvE group the elementalist and PSEA warrior have the group capped at permanent fury and 25 might stacks the entire time, as well as 25 vulnerability.

So the reaper shroud might/vulnerability from the auto becomes redundant.

Muchacho.2390:

Dakunaito.9602:

Captain Unusual.9163:

Right, and Gravedigger was critting for 9k before the 50% damage buff. That quick and smooth rock punch won’t be hitting for 15k damage every 2 seconds. The whole point of the Greatsword is extremely slow, extremely hard hitting attacks. And now that it’s being buffed so the hard hitting part is true, the greatsword has a useful and interesting niche. Dagger is for quick, reliable damage, greatsword is for slow, huge aoe damage.

it doesn’t matter if that skill of Berserker won’t do 15k dmg. you’re totally missing the point. the point is that they have dramatically sped up the animation so that the skill is not slow and be drawback for Berserker. i’m sorry that i’m not like you and i don’t bait from the 9k crit dmg, while the skill has ~60% unnecessary animation. 1s more cast time from other 1-hit Greatsword skill isn’t justifiable. now that you mentioned hard hitting, what about rest skills? only 1 skill with high dmg? hahahaha nice joke. as for huge aoe, Gravedigger has at least 3 times more cone range than Ele Fire Grab and Drake Breath which hit 5 targets, and yet Gravedigger only hits 3 targets. how is that possible?

Gravedigger hits 5 targets though: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Gravedigger

Big whoop, PvE bosses are not 5 targets, just one, and we don’t have any other competitive DPS weapons in PvE besides greatsword….

Quarktastic.1027:

Zenith.7301:

Quarktastic.1027:

Zenith.7301:

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Zenith.7301:

Revenant will be better at taunting.

No, they won’t…

They get a “Shared Anguish” trait that has 3s on kitten CD and a 2s single target taunt in Jalis stance that costs 1/2 their energy.

We get a 240 range 5 target taunt for 2s every 15s. Clearly superior.

Jalis is a superior option on a single target (like bosses, who matter most), energy is a non-issue in that scenario. I won’t be using taunt on pet since you want to run jaguars not to gut dps, and asking your jaguar to taunt 5 mobs is a pretty good way to get him killed.

I bet you’re a lot of fun at parties.

We all know how much you hate the ranger profession. But this shooting down of every positive aspect someone comes up with has to stop. I almost feel like you’re just trolling at this point.

If you get this offended over a videogame I wouldn’t want you in my parties either. You remind me of those people that go rabid should someone criticize their prized tv show.

I main ranger, so I actually voice criticism in hopes of improvement, where all you do is apply some positive spin that leaves the class as the red headed step child of every format.

Every time someone comes up with something positive to say about rangers, you jump in and spout something about “<insert profession> does that thing better.” I’m not necessarily offended, but I’m not seeing how that kind of criticism could be constructive.

How could it not be constructive, it drives the point home that what the ranger has is NOT ENOUGH to make him meta and that changes must be made to grant him something he excels at over other classes that is desirable in organized group content and not just duels/1v1 roaming.

Tell me why I should be happy at the state of a class when playing my warrior/elementalist/thief/guardian I’ve never encountered a single LFG saying “NO WARRIOR/ELE/GUARD/THIEF, LF ranger and necromancer”. Or why most WvW GvG’s make so little use of rangers let alone why a kitten elementalist is better at ranged damage and aoe over a ranger considering the elementalist brings so much utility.

You would think classes high on utility would bring less damage and aoe, but some classes seem like they have it all and that’s something to be annoyed about.

AR is a garbage mechanic. Nothing but a gear check. It mattered when you didn’t have enough resistance to trivialize it so you actually had to dodge agony causing attacks or face being downed.

But then they went and introduced a pulsing agony aura in one of the stupidest design decisions ever made.

Quarktastic.1027:

Zenith.7301:

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Zenith.7301:

Revenant will be better at taunting.

No, they won’t…

They get a “Shared Anguish” trait that has 3s on kitten CD and a 2s single target taunt in Jalis stance that costs 1/2 their energy.

We get a 240 range 5 target taunt for 2s every 15s. Clearly superior.

Jalis is a superior option on a single target (like bosses, who matter most), energy is a non-issue in that scenario. I won’t be using taunt on pet since you want to run jaguars not to gut dps, and asking your jaguar to taunt 5 mobs is a pretty good way to get him killed.

I bet you’re a lot of fun at parties.

We all know how much you hate the ranger profession. But this shooting down of every positive aspect someone comes up with has to stop. I almost feel like you’re just trolling at this point.

If you get this offended over a videogame I wouldn’t want you in my parties either. You remind me of those people that go rabid should someone criticize their prized tv show.

I main ranger, so I actually voice criticism in hopes of improvement, where all you do is apply some positive spin that leaves the class as the red headed step child of every format.

Ah ok ;p. Though in pvp I’d argue frost aura is an even stronger asset.

Reaper Shroud needs a similar damage buff to greatsword auto, a 20% damage buff.

It is a resource you build up. You shouldn’t lose potential DPS in PvE by using your class mechanic.

I don’t want death shroud to be just an extra hp sponge, it should be an upgrade in damage as a transformation with limited duration that locks out your access to utilities and the elite.

Sigmoid.7082:

Zenith.7301:

frozen ground+ frost aura for the group ensures plenty of chill stacking. You then have the glyph and frostbow and then you can use the flash freeze shout for another round of chill plus another round of group frost aura.

The reaper can probably sustain chill on a single target better in the long run, but in terms of bursting large chill applications and aoe chill, the ele is far better.

Frost aura is on dagger and frozen ground is on staff, cant have both. Also if you did go dagger and too powerful aura would mean no cleansing water. Flash freeze is a thing i guess. Glyph, frost bow and flash freeze is all utilities gone. No room for anything else then. Frost fan caps at 5s because of stack limit as well. Only GoEP has potential while not crippling your build.

Only aoe frost aura is a thing. The others arent so much. Reaper has a base 20% duration as well. Got aoe chill on staff #3 and staff #5, Directional on GS #5 and on GS 1.C auto. RS #5 also provides aoe chill as well and can be comboed with #4 for more aoe chill, also RS #3.B terrify is aoe chill. Then utility wise you have suffer and CttB both more aoe chill. Still two utility slots left.

If you then throw in traits then chilling dark RS #2 becomes aoe chill as does GS #4 for more aoe chill all it procs on all targets. . Also chilling nova for even more aoe chill.

Most of these also have higher duration then ele chills, especially due to the innate 20% as well. Since chill also only stacks up to 5 times you can have longer chill output.

Frozen ground creates a field that you can blast to get frost aura. It’s not just on dagger when any team comp has ample access to blasts.

Luckily in our scenario ele already uses frost bow and glyph of storms in their meta build, and the third slot is optional so glyph of elemental power is actually a thing if you need chill. Nothing that actually cripples their build because two of the mentioned utilities are already used.

I mean, you just mentioned destroying builds with certain choices and yet you include necro staff, a garbage weapon, into the factor. Or Infusing Terror which you never want to use in pve as spreading mobs with aoe fear is a really bad idea.

And of all the skills you mentioned, you’re performing all those at a DPSloss to stack chill. All an ele needs to press is frozen ground+glyph of storms and switch to his normal fire rotation while the other chills and auras are applied with mere blasts or instant shouts. Your reaper needs to cycle through several lower DPS skills to apply them. Most of them conal skills not wide aoe’s.

As usual, more work for lesser results.

Zania.8461:

By far the biggest problem with rangers is that it is a VERY easy class to play in open world PvE. You take a tanky pet (bear), you equip a longbow (high ranged damage) and you just pew pew things to death. This gives rise to ‘bearbows’ – rangers who have no idea they have pets other than bears and weapons other than longbows. Whats worse is that these people are so used to soloing in open world, they have no idea how their playstyle can cause problems in organized parties (ie careless use of longbow 4).

Well played ranger provides some unique party support and deals competitive damage. Problem is that due to the large fraction of rangers being poorly played, they have a fairly bad stigma associated with them. Most groups are not willing to take a ranger not because its a bad class but because the number of players who know how to play it well is relatively small.

This is a bogus excuse. Open world PvE is easymode all the time and equally breed bad habits. I mean, a staff ele in open world pve lays a lava tomb and spams fire abll all day at distant mobs in some braindead “dynamic” event.

There are bad players in all classes.

It is also undeniable that ranger and necromancer are in the bottom spots of PvE. What little support they provide is best done by somebody else and their damage isn’t anything to write home about.

Don’t try to excuse Anet’s terrible PvE balancing.

And by random this guy means “cliffside+dredge+mai trin” most of my runs.

Esplen.3940:

Zenith.7301:

You have null field or feedback, but the mesmer himself doesn’t have any fields/finishers on any of his weapons besides the staff. And since no changes have been made that will improve the viability of staff or scepter specs in PvE, mesmers will continue to use mainhand sword and greatsword in most content.

Sword has a Leap, Staff has a Leap, Spear has a Leap, Torch has a Blast, Pistol has a Projectile, GS has a Projectile.

If we count Phantasms (which isn’t a very good representation of finishers, bar Pistol and Focus), there’s also another…
1 Projectile, 1 Leap, and 3 Whirls.

Arguably, we can only actually use up to 2 finishers depending on our weapon setups (more with water and phantasm finishers).

The reason I don’t really count Phantasm finishers is that they are unreliable (bar Pistol and Focus) due to Phantasms moving around and/or dying (although Pistol and Focus phants can die, usually a Focus phant will be dropped against an enemy that will not or can not kill it within it’s first attack cycle, which yields a significant amount of whirls. The Pistol is typically in a safe position to attack, although it has a probability based projectile finisher).

Aaaaannnnd all of these finishers mainly affect condition damage builds unless used in conjunction with a party member (projectile or whirl blind finishes are crazy).

Of course, in my opinion, if you want to count Phantasms as finishers, you must also include that a Banner is a multi-finisher (if you pick it up and press 5 you will blast with a 1s cast time and a 10s cooldown. An entire party can blast 5 times every 10 seconds and a group can blast it roughly 8-9 times every 10 seconds (pick up animations and latency)). Since a Phantasm theoretically has a large amount of finishes, so, too, does a Banner. A Banner theoretically has 121 blasts. Hue.

Unfortunately leap finishers might as well not exist in PvE, they’re not useful at all. Go blast finishers or go home.

frozen ground+ frost aura for the group ensures plenty of chill stacking. You then have the glyph and frostbow and then you can use the flash freeze shout for another round of chill plus another round of group frost aura.

The reaper can probably sustain chill on a single target better in the long run, but in terms of bursting large chill applications and aoe chill, the ele is far better.

The aoe is 180 range, it will never hit 5 targets.

You get to throw 3 daggers, each one interrupts…

It’s 3 interrupts on a 25 sec cd from this skill alone. And you have a generous 15 second window to do so.

With HoT release so soon at Oct 23

We’ve got ranger and engineer, with the seemingly more complex mechanics, still under wraps. These classes deserve to get as much testing and feedback based changes from BWE’s as the other specializations, instead of only having a month’s or less worth of testing.

Sigmoid.7082:

Zenith.7301:

Sigmoid.7082:

Im of a different mind because of how easy it should be to reapply chill as a reaper as of next beta weekend. going to test it out and see but for the time being still of the opinion comparing chill to burn chill is still the stronger condition.

…..maybe in PvP. In PvE chill is by far the inferior condition.

They were looking at chill having some impact on the break bar last i heard.

No. They were looking at TRAITS with trigger conditions (such as x on interrupt, x on chill) to make them work on bosses since interrupts are not counted against defiance bars. In the case of chill bosses have reduced condition duration and some of them even bring clears, so they want traits based on chill use to work against bosses.

But that does not mean chill becomes useful unless a boss needs to be kited and nobody can melee him or they die (in which case the reaper is screwed as a purely melee spec), or whether the boss functions a lot on ability cooldowns that chill does affect.

Unfortunately the reaper isn’t even the best at chill. That honor would go to an elementalist.

Jski.6180:

Zenith.7301:

Mara.6782:

For me tempest dont give as much new things as others give. Reaper give you more melee options, Chronomancer is like new class playing with time, Dragon hunter give guardian more ranged play, upcoming daredevil give thief options to not use stealth to survive etc.
Overloads are just normal skills that give attunements more cooldown. Sword would have give elementalist melee option making it little more like warrior just as berserk is little more like elementalist.

Don’t you even dare compare ele to reaper.

I would trade reaper being a sidegrade like tempest ele in exchange for necromancer to be remotely as good as base ele is.

A staff ele is still better than reaper, so please shut up with this QQ about weaker classes.

You are god tier.

The thing is ppl talk about the game type that best fits there argument at the time so the counter point of view going to be staff ele are bad at spvp (all though they are good at every thing else in the game). What needs to be done is to have a definer in the OP what game type they are talking about i think that will clear up a lot about tempest and ele talks. (i come from the point of view of wvw spvp from my point of view more about team work then builds if your doing random group spvp you already lost.)

So overloads work in pve because lol pve being hard and wvw (aoe is king in wvw) it dose not work well in spvp aoe not as good there but you can still build a team on the ideal of the tempest every being alone. So you can make it work if you want to.

Ele is god tier everywhere.

Staff ele for pve/wvw.

D/D ele god tier in spvp/WvW roaming.

There’s not a single game format where the ele isn’t the best class ingame. What did you expect, a further upgrade to a broken class? If you want the tempest to be good, you either assign them a special niche that doesn’t make them more powerful than they already are.

Or you nerf the base ele and make it so the tempest brings the ele back up. But don’t go thinking the ele needs even more power creep.

KevinB.9643:

Anyone else hoped the Thief specialization would be a rifle/sniper thing?

No. Rifles are ugly!

I’ve been clamoring for a monk-type class for a long time. A martial artist is far cooler.

Mara.6782:

For me tempest dont give as much new things as others give. Reaper give you more melee options, Chronomancer is like new class playing with time, Dragon hunter give guardian more ranged play, upcoming daredevil give thief options to not use stealth to survive etc.
Overloads are just normal skills that give attunements more cooldown. Sword would have give elementalist melee option making it little more like warrior just as berserk is little more like elementalist.

Don’t you even dare compare ele to reaper.

I would trade reaper being a sidegrade like tempest ele in exchange for necromancer to be remotely as good as base ele is.

A staff ele is still better than reaper, so please shut up with this QQ about weaker classes.

You are god tier.

Mesmer hardcounters necro in general, which wouldn’t be so bad if we weren’t stuck with really crappy heals with long cast times and several attacks that also have long cast times for crappy returns.

Blaine Tog.8304:

Zenith.7301:

Blaine Tog.8304:

Honestly, there is no anti-necro sentiment in dungeons, not unless you’re planning to do speed runs. I run dungeons on my necro all the time and nobody says anything negative. Just avoid LFGs that say “zerker only,” “ping equipment,” “speed run,” or the ilk and you’ll be fine. Frankly, I find that level of obsessive second-crunching to be really offputting and avoid those groups even when I’m playing one of my “meta” alts.

The majority of people only care that you play with common sense and pay attention to chat. It’s really easy to find perfectly good dungeon groups with 2 Necros, 2 Rangers, and an Engineer.

Funny, I just joined a “zerkers of the mist” LFG (from some kittenty fractal guild called “Zerkers of the Mist”) fractal 50 group, which asked pinging for gear, and I pinged all my FULL ASCENDED Zojja (berserker) gear, with +% damage sigils and full scholar rune set included.

“We don’t need a necro. Can you bring something else?”

“I can bring a ranger.”

“>>….”

And that’s when I left. I’m not going to spend 3 years playing only emenetalist/guardian/warrior/thief.

I don’t have any other MMO, neither Wildstar or WoW, where people are telling you they don’t want your fully and properly geared class, except this game and its horrible dungeon community.

Sublimatio.6981:

Blaine Tog.8304:

Ok, this is a wild exaggeration. It bears no resemblance to reality. Maybe all those groups kicked you because you’re relentlessly negative.

please note that i only expressed my own experience and it doesn’t have to match yours.
accusing me of negativity is something illogical as we’ve never played together before, therefore you can’t judge why somebody kicked me. basically whenever i join a group i get votekicked without really any word and no those groups didn’t demand any particular class in their lfg

Adding to this, it’s basically the same for ranger. And even, crazily enough, for mesmer in fractal 50 (they just prefer a guardian).

On my necro/ranger it’s not unusual to be vote kicked before I even load into the instance.

And when people say “well, make your own group”…

I tested, several times, making a fractal 50 group starting as a necro or ranger. It could take half an hour or longer to fill.

I test the same on a warrior/ele/guard, it virtually fills up within 5-10 minutes.

What’s worse, as a a necro/ranger, since you’re turned down from competent groups, you go join the only group available to you and you get paired with a burn guardian who says “I don’t care for PS warrior since might is not as important to me as you berserkers”.

And the alternative groups often available have just terrible composition. I’m talking 3 2 thieves, 1 guardian, 1 necro 1 mesmer or even worse 2 mesmersa 1 ranger 1 necro 1guardian. You’re forced into a painful run just for being the wrong class.

I mentioned groups that ask for a specific armor type for a reason.

I’m not gonna pretend to know what high-level Fractals are like for Necros because I’m still idly working my way up the scale ladder. And I’m also not gonna say how Arah is for Necros these days since Lupi is apparently bugged in a way that specifically screws up over. But I will say this: all the rest of the PvE content in this game is easy enough that you can throw pretty much whatever builds and professions you want at it and suceed just fine as long as you have a halfway decent idea what you’re doing.

I’ve been in many PUGs with 3, even 4 Necros and had a grand old time busting through dungeon runs. One time, I even had a run with 5 Necros (the only non-necro switched over to his Necro alt because we thought it would be fun). Conversely, I’ve been in PUGs with all meta specs which have wiped repeatedly because they didn’t know how to stack or dodge. Skill matters far more (for 99% of all PvE) than what you’re running.

And yet endgame PvE for most people involves fractal 50 and the lucrative Arah P1/2 runs, precisely where class discrimination is happening.

And this is bound to get worse with the upcoming raids. There’s nothing gained from reaper that will put them in a better position to be accepted over the meta classes, because even with the buffs to damage you’re not outDPS’ing a staff ele much less contributing to group dps with perma fury, might stacking, water fields, ice bow, earth elemental glyph, or meaningful projectile destruction (reaper #2 is a joke, projectile destruction on a leap is worthless, you need sustained reflection/absorption, not a projectile absorb that lasts under a second).

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Zenith.7301:

Revenant will be better at taunting.

No, they won’t…

They get a “Shared Anguish” trait that has 3s on kitten CD and a 2s single target taunt in Jalis stance that costs 1/2 their energy.

We get a 240 range 5 target taunt for 2s every 15s. Clearly superior.

Jalis is a superior option on a single target (like bosses, who matter most), energy is a non-issue in that scenario. I won’t be using taunt on pet since you want to run jaguars not to gut dps, and asking your jaguar to taunt 5 mobs is a pretty good way to get him killed.

Blaine Tog.8304:

Honestly, there is no anti-necro sentiment in dungeons, not unless you’re planning to do speed runs. I run dungeons on my necro all the time and nobody says anything negative. Just avoid LFGs that say “zerker only,” “ping equipment,” “speed run,” or the ilk and you’ll be fine. Frankly, I find that level of obsessive second-crunching to be really offputting and avoid those groups even when I’m playing one of my “meta” alts.

The majority of people only care that you play with common sense and pay attention to chat. It’s really easy to find perfectly good dungeon groups with 2 Necros, 2 Rangers, and an Engineer.

Funny, I just joined a “zerkers of the mist” LFG (from some kittenty fractal guild called “Zerkers of the Mist”) fractal 50 group, which asked pinging for gear, and I pinged all my FULL ASCENDED Zojja (berserker) gear, with +% damage sigils and full scholar rune set included.

“We don’t need a necro. Can you bring something else?”

“I can bring a ranger.”

“>>….”

And that’s when I left. I’m not going to spend 3 years playing only elementalist/guardian/warrior/thief.

I don’t have any other MMO, neither Wildstar or WoW, where people are telling you they don’t want your fully and properly geared class, except this game and its horrible dungeon community.

Sublimatio.6981:

Blaine Tog.8304:

Ok, this is a wild exaggeration. It bears no resemblance to reality. Maybe all those groups kicked you because you’re relentlessly negative.

please note that i only expressed my own experience and it doesn’t have to match yours.
accusing me of negativity is something illogical as we’ve never played together before, therefore you can’t judge why somebody kicked me. basically whenever i join a group i get votekicked without really any word and no those groups didn’t demand any particular class in their lfg

Adding to this, it’s basically the same for ranger. And even, crazily enough, for mesmer in fractal 50 (they just prefer a guardian).

On my necro/ranger it’s not unusual to be vote kicked before I even load into the instance.

And when people say “well, make your own group”…

I tested, several times, making a fractal 50 group starting as a necro or ranger. It could take half an hour or longer to fill.

I test the same on a warrior/ele/guard, it virtually fills up within 5-10 minutes. If there are two competing groups on LFG, the one without necro/ranger and most eles/heavies will get filled first.

What’s worse, as a a necro/ranger, since you’re turned down from competent groups, you go join the only group available to you and you get paired with a burn guardian who says “I don’t care for PS warrior since might is not as important to me as you berserkers”.

And the alternative groups often available have just terrible composition. I’m talking 3 2 thieves, 1 guardian, 1 necro 1 mesmer or even worse 2 mesmersa 1 ranger 1 necro 1guardian. You’re forced into a painful run just for being the wrong class.

Robert Gee.9246:

From a design perspective, Mesmers are more about providing fields and less about activating them. It’s not just blast finishers, Mesmers lack reliable sources of many other finishers too. Necromancers fill a similar role. By contrast you might notice that Warriors have lots of finishers but not many fields.

We don’t always get this balance right (and I think there is a different discussion to be had about when we don’t) but I hope that clarifies what we were going for in the case of Mesmers.

The fields mesmers provide are not valuable, at least from a PvE perspective.

Ethereal fields are one of the weakest ingame, with a procced chaos armor on leap that doesn’t benefit non-condition specs most of the time and the RNG affecting the short duration boons gained pales in comparison to a fire or water or smoke field.

More importantly, it’s not about the amount of fields, but the ease of access to them. The fire field from a warrior’s longbow is easily spammable and accessible, which in turns allows the warrior to set up might/fire aura stacking easily. Longbow is a staple warrior weapon.

Mesmer’s field comes from staff, which is never used in group content (mesmer condition specs are too weak in PvE, too much ramp up and reliant on clones that die too easily to aoe) or group PvP (condi mesmers lack meaningful cleave unlike engineer or necromancers). And I suspect condi mesmers will stay that was so long as mesmer keeps being balanced on 1v1 pvp complaints since PU/BD condi mesmers are strong in 1v1 but worthless in group content.

You have null field or feedback, but the mesmer himself doesn’t have any fields/finishers on any of his weapons besides the staff. And since no changes have been made that will improve the viability of staff or scepter specs in PvE, mesmers will continue to use mainhand sword and greatsword in most content.

Absconditus.6804:

Ross Biddle.2367:

Fay.2357:

apharma.3741:

Yeah I’ve got my eye on this but we’ll see how it goes in the reveals and stuff. Just as mesmers wouldn’t/didn’t like people crying about chrono being OP before release and everything I don’t think we should cry either.

I don’t think it seems OP, but I’m a little miffed at them giving power block mechanics to another class, particularly the one that’s immune to it.

What gets me is that they have the entire thing loaded into the utility, while we have to trait for it -_-u

Our trait is (to me) obviously a hundred times more powerful than their single skill. We can apply it to our numerous interrupts. They got one skill. I agree with Fay that it’s a bit ironic when they are for the most part immune to the mechanic however.

Then you haven’t read impacting disruption, which inflicts pulmonary impact on interrupts (which hits a ton harder than our version).

Staff/D+P thief with head shot, distracting daggers, impact strike, fist flurry, and Bandit’s defense (10 sec cd stunbreack block with a knockdown component) will be an interrupt machine. Their elite also CC’s from the getgo, and if they trait for daze on steal that’s another easy interrupt.

And that’s a staff variant. If they forgo using the staff they can play s/p or the standard d/p+shortbow build and still gain access to most of their low cooldown CC interrupts.

None of this CC which they need to trait in. Our power block costs us a grandmaster and potential mind wrack damage.

Revenant will be better at taunting.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Zenith.7301:

Substance E.4852:

Zenith.7301:

Ariete.6509:

oh ty for chiming in Heimskarl, ur signature is giving me a lot to digest, guess i’m shamelessly not very active in the forums to have missed that.

@Zenith
wut now? Where do i begin… no they don’t. Where did you came up with this? Even the wiki doesn’t mention anything… Now the case of Wilting Strike it does have a limitation: “This effect will only occur once on each target affected by abilities.” but still 4 sec of enemies hitting like wet noodle. The bird is single target, so what? The trait reads “Your pet’s command [F2] ability causes blindness to foes around it.”

Now what you could’ve said was the Beastly Warden having a 15 sec cooldown, but not even that you got right.

The thief black powder, sure it’s all right. Although due to high initiative cost, i’d say our version is more (or at least as) spammable (as) for sure.

…..

I said the blinding slash from the pet’s F2 was a single target blind. Otherwise why would you be even using birds in PvE, they’re garbage dps.

Why would you be using Ravens for Go For The Eyes and Wilting Strike? Hawk/Eagle can spam the effects every 4.75 seconds and Go For the Eyes is indeed an AoE.

Counting the amount of possible blind applications, not how often you can do it. A single blind every 4.75 seconds is a pittance, mobs will be dead by the time you can recast just for go for the eyes.

If you can kill the mobs in 5s, there is no need for blind at all.

Tell that to the Urban fractal mobs. 5 seconds is enough to wipe a group.

Substance E.4852:

Zenith.7301:

Ariete.6509:

oh ty for chiming in Heimskarl, ur signature is giving me a lot to digest, guess i’m shamelessly not very active in the forums to have missed that.

@Zenith
wut now? Where do i begin… no they don’t. Where did you came up with this? Even the wiki doesn’t mention anything… Now the case of Wilting Strike it does have a limitation: “This effect will only occur once on each target affected by abilities.” but still 4 sec of enemies hitting like wet noodle. The bird is single target, so what? The trait reads “Your pet’s command [F2] ability causes blindness to foes around it.”

Now what you could’ve said was the Beastly Warden having a 15 sec cooldown, but not even that you got right.

The thief black powder, sure it’s all right. Although due to high initiative cost, i’d say our version is more (or at least as) spammable (as) for sure.

…..

I said the blinding slash from the pet’s F2 was a single target blind. Otherwise why would you be even using birds in PvE, they’re garbage dps.

Why would you be using Ravens for Go For The Eyes and Wilting Strike? Hawk/Eagle can spam the effects every 4.75 seconds and Go For the Eyes is indeed an AoE.

Counting the amount of possible blind applications, not how often you can do it. A single blind every 4.75 seconds is a pittance, mobs will be dead by the time you can recast just for go for the eyes.

Ariete.6509:

oh ty for chiming in Heimskarl, ur signature is giving me a lot to digest, guess i’m shamelessly not very active in the forums to have missed that.

@Zenith
wut now? Where do i begin… no they don’t. Where did you came up with this? Even the wiki doesn’t mention anything… Now the case of Wilting Strike it does have a limitation: “This effect will only occur once on each target affected by abilities.” but still 4 sec of enemies hitting like wet noodle. The bird is single target, so what? The trait reads “Your pet’s command [F2] ability causes blindness to foes around it.”

Now what you could’ve said was the Beastly Warden having a 15 sec cooldown, but not even that you got right.

The thief black powder, sure it’s all right. Although due to high initiative cost, i’d say our version is more (or at least as) spammable (as) for sure.

…..

I said the blinding slash from the pet’s F2 was a single target blind. Otherwise why would you be even using birds in PvE, they’re garbage dps.

It’s funny that the only thing you people complain about Daredevil is just issues that the reaper wishes it had.

I mean, you at least got a damage modifier traits and all your traits help damage. Unlike most of the useless reaper traits who are just chill/shout gimmicks and the even more useless shouts.

No class gets to complain until they get something as bad as the necromancer shouts. You know it’s bad when even the Tempest ones are better.

Ariete.6509:

I’ve been tinkering with builds and stumbled on a possibility of making pet’s valuable for trash killing (a few fractais, Arah).

It relies on beastmastery’s Go for the eyes, Wilting Strike, and Beastly Warden then you just tie it all by calling a hawk or an eagle and just spam their F2 ability on cooldown, thus making mobs perma blind plus the weakness and taunt icing the cake. Adding SoS might be safer for added survability.

What do you think, worthwhile, irrelevant?

Bird F2 is single target. Wilting Strike and Go For The Eyes are 20 second cd’s.

Guess which class meta can spam blind on demand (read: no cd)? You guessed right, thief. Who also brings group stealth skips, and does far more damage than ranger does in PvE.

But talking about trash is useless anyways, 2 lava fonts from your eles and one 100b from your warrior will wipe out the trash before the blinds even run out.

Only fractal where blind becomes useful is Urban Fractal. And in that case you’re just using the thief’s black powder after the mesmer/guardian pulls the targets in.

Sigmoid.7082:

Im of a different mind because of how easy it should be to reapply chill as a reaper as of next beta weekend. going to test it out and see but for the time being still of the opinion comparing chill to burn chill is still the stronger condition.

…..maybe in PvP. In PvE chill is by far the inferior condition.

There’s deep irony to giving a class immune to Power Block an analogue to that very skill…

Adrian Guardian.9480:

Zenith.7301:

And the fact is, tempest will lock you out of doing DPS for a really long time.

It just isn’t acceptable in PvE. This goes as well for D/F PvE builds. Locking you out of air means your DPS plummets completely.

Put another way, they’d have to buff overloads by such a high degree to overcome the DPS loss of not using firebal+lava font or lightning whip.

I say that’s what they ought to do: buff overloads (numerically) until they overcome the DPS loss of being out of your weapon’s stronget attunement for longer. It’s a good thing the traits lack damage modifiers and other strong things, that leaves room for buffing overloads to the point that you’d always use them if you take the tempest trait line.

Valento.9852:

Wait. Are people mistaking our complaint about overloads with actual dagger skills damage coefficients? Nobody is asking the devs to increase damage to daggers! If the balancing behind overloads to make them more worth it requires D/D to be severely nerfed, so be it.

Lots of truth to this. The overload complainers mention dagger (D/D or D/W) a lot, as if its skills are so strong that they can’t afford to take the time to overload with current balance.

Azure.8670:

I have to say, Tempest is better than dragonhunter

The tempest’s mechanic may have a biger impact on playstyle than those new virtues, but longbow and traps expand the Guardian class way better than warhorn and shouts do for ele.

The amount of buffing to a single skill to overcome 20 seconds of fireball+lava font or lightning whip DPS would be so massive, the sea of tears from the pvp people would submerge the entire world.

Unfortunately they don’t split PvE/PvP balance, so another solution is warranted until they do.

It’s a powerful dueling/roaming build that will get cried about until it’s nerfed much like spirit ranger.

In this game people cry for ego balancing (1v1’s), not for team fight balance.

it’s not sustain or mitigation, it’s picking an adept trait that is marginally useful to a power reaper in that traitline…

Khristophoros.7194:

Zenith.7301:

Khristophoros.7194:

Zenith.7301:

Bhawb.7408:

You literally can’t not be able to trigger this trait in any build (MoE + Dark Path, plus most builds have either Enfeebling Blood or Mark of Blood, if not even more bleed sources), whereas forcing it to depend on crits would completely gut it for a lot of builds.

Make it based on lifesteal procs instead, since the blood traitline gets life steals on any attack by default. 3 life steals = proc.

It’s not as simple for power spec. If I want to get blood bond in pve, I’m going to nerf my DPS by dodging when I don’t need to to proc mark of blood, dark path is not available on reaper.

No PvE power necromancer uses staff, so no mark of blood, and we use offhand focus not offhand dagger, so no enfeebling blood.

You won’t get enfeebling blood from weakening shroud either because the basic reaper build will use Spite/Soul Reaping/Reaper, and only Soul Reaping would be substituted by Blood so we’ll never have a pairing of Curses+Blood as a power based reaper.

If you want the most damage possible you shouldn’t use blood magic anyway.

Blood magic is about offering some additional survivability to your team. Staff compliments that by providing regeneration and weakness.

So if you are so intent on sacrificing any defensive mechanics and range to get every last tiny bit of damage possible, you should not be using blood magic. It makes no sense to argue against staff and still use blood magic.

And furthermore, if that’s your attitude you shouldn’t even be playing necro in the first place tbh. We all know why it’s not meta. It’s because meta is about getting MAX kittenING DAMAGE.

Blood Magic is the only offensive utility traitline you offer to your group….Vampiric Presence, siphons on wells, prot on wells, reduced cd on wells.

There is virtually no reason not to go blood in favor of some selfish traitline that at best gives you a tiny extra bit of dps while being a selfish toon.

It’s like you think 33 damage per hit is a lot or something lol. Other professions aren’t as good at using it either. The necro can do like 25 hits over the first 5 seconds of a fight and get around 800 damage from the trait but can any other profession do that? Even then it’s not impressive as a party damage buff.

Nah dude I’m pretty sure you provide your team with more damage by taking spite/curses/soul reaping and increasing your own damage by a significant percentage.

It’s like you didn’t consider the cd reduction on wells and its protection uptime on 3 wells. You know, the only utility you bring to your group.

Khristophoros.7194:

Zenith.7301:

Bhawb.7408:

You literally can’t not be able to trigger this trait in any build (MoE + Dark Path, plus most builds have either Enfeebling Blood or Mark of Blood, if not even more bleed sources), whereas forcing it to depend on crits would completely gut it for a lot of builds.

Make it based on lifesteal procs instead, since the blood traitline gets life steals on any attack by default. 3 life steals = proc.

It’s not as simple for power spec. If I want to get blood bond in pve, I’m going to nerf my DPS by dodging when I don’t need to to proc mark of blood, dark path is not available on reaper.

No PvE power necromancer uses staff, so no mark of blood, and we use offhand focus not offhand dagger, so no enfeebling blood.

You won’t get enfeebling blood from weakening shroud either because the basic reaper build will use Spite/Soul Reaping/Reaper, and only Soul Reaping would be substituted by Blood so we’ll never have a pairing of Curses+Blood as a power based reaper.

If you want the most damage possible you shouldn’t use blood magic anyway.

Blood magic is about offering some additional survivability to your team. Staff compliments that by providing regeneration and weakness.

So if you are so intent on sacrificing any defensive mechanics and range to get every last tiny bit of damage possible, you should not be using blood magic. It makes no sense to argue against staff and still use blood magic.

And furthermore, if that’s your attitude you shouldn’t even be playing necro in the first place tbh. We all know why it’s not meta. It’s because meta is about getting MAX kittenING DAMAGE.

Blood Magic is the only offensive utility traitline you offer to your group….Vampiric Presence, siphons on wells, prot on wells, reduced cd on wells.

There is virtually no reason not to go blood in favor of some selfish traitline that at best gives you a tiny extra bit of dps while being a selfish toon.

Minions have a way of kittening off groups that are trying to skip/not get put in combat or messing up boss bugging strategies like rooting the ooze in thaumanova so it doesn’t eat the guy, rendering the boss unable to do anything.

Hully.7198:

I don’t know it’s really strange, we do have a weapon that will work beautifully with Blood Bond… Perhaps the requirement is what it is for a reason?

And that reason is to exclude PvE power based reapers out of the only useful Blood traitline PvE trait? Because Quickening Thirst is useless in PvE given that the dagger’s dps comes from the autoattack and you don’t care about 33% reduction on its two other crappy spells.

Adrian Guardian.9480:

Yes they convince me.
They provide melee-like power to scepter and staff, allowing you a playstyle where you switch range range back and forth (more than scepter/dagger does), and a less vulnerable way to do big AoE compared to meteor shower or churning earth.
Sure, they’re a waste if you play dagger, but I don’t really.

Zenith.7301:

Moreover, nobody will use fire or air overloads, ever. What are you gonna do, sit in water/earth and do 300-500 damage autoattacks?

They need to buff water and earth autoattacks for ele, and they need to buff all scepter autoattacks. Ele has no sustained damage whatsoever in water or earth since the autoattacks are so weak.

You’re not forced to swap attunement after overloading (though swiching back and forht between fire and air helps). I wish the warhorn trait was something like “While you have a warhorn equipped, your autoattacks deal more damage/have longer range/cause longer-lasting conditions/inflict bleeding”. Dagger on the other hand needs nerfs at this state of balance, not buffs.

I’m not forced to but I’ll have to. Not every PvE encounter just allows me to sit in fire spamming fireball and lava font until a mob is dead.

And the fact is, tempest will lock you out of doing DPS for a really long time.

It just isn’t acceptable in PvE. This goes as well for D/F PvE builds. Locking you out of air means your DPS plummets completely.

Put another way, they’d have to buff overloads by such a high degree to overcome the DPS loss of not using firebal+lava font or lightning whip.

I know people said water and earth are not supposed to do damage, but I don’t buy that. You are making a ghetto out of these attunements, where you go into them for their niche utility skills and leaving them as soon as possible to go and sit in fire/air again most of the time.

Does nobody use Battle Ping/PingZapper/WTFast? Keep reading about people with high ping. I have Pingzapper and it works great for me since in FFXIV I play a ninja and you have to perform different orders of 0.5 second skills withing 2.5 second GCD to not clip your DPS, so lag/ping is of big importance there.

Try it out, it helps a lot. I even got a Pingzapper referral so I got their paid VPN service for just $4 for two months.