Guild Wars 2

runeblade.7514:

It seems that rangers get the short end of the stick when it comes to clear/damage spread with their bow. You have to take marksman spec, which is decent-ish at best, in order to have piercing arrows. Now even then, you need to have positioning in your favor to clip more than just 1 target.

Why do you need piercing arrows? I like remorseless more than Lead the Wind. Piercing AoE is the worst kind of AoE.

Yet, dragon hunter barely needs positioning, and gets a bouncing arrow (similar to theif’s short bow auto if you haven’t watched the spotlight.) It also cripples targets on bounce.

Dragon Hunter can’t escape well without infiltrator shot or Hunter’s shot.

The 2 skill on the ranger is pretty good, nice burst and low cooldown. Yet, you once again need piercing shot in order to spread the damage. DH’s 2 is a 1 shot burst equivalent (ish) to if all your Ranger “2” skill arrows hit, and it pierces (fairly wide too as far as I can tell.)

And True shot is 1200 range.

DH doesn’t have to rely on a pet to observe the same damage as other classes. While pet’s aren’t always an issue, all too often are pets lagging behind (terrain..), dead or just bugging out.

Clearly, you haven’t seen your pet save you with knockdowns.

Ranger’s 3 grants you stealth, it’s awesome and fun. DH gives you a shot canceling enemy missiles in it’s path. That’s probably very hard to pull off, but assuming you play on high tier, you might be able to semi predict an incoming harmful hit (including a few of Ranger’s “2” shots.) If anything, it might end up getting your enemy to try and bait the shot out.

Stealth wins over small reflect. There is a ton of utility with stealth but reflecting shot is purely defensive and useless against melee players.

DH’s passives allow for burn damage without having to use a trap or weapon. One could argue that pets do that, true, but micromanaging a pet is a lot harder than pressing F1 and getting an immediate result should enemies come close to you. They also have a given leap (F2) that heals you. The F3 gives you an aoe shield..

Why would a power build need condi damage?

Ranger is not getting the short end of the stick. I think it is the opposite. DH just can’t live up to Ranger Longbow. But I guess that the sick Reflect virtue is cool.

lolololol

You talk about stealth and knockdowns as if guardians don’t have blind, aegis, renewed focus, judge’s intervention, and shelter as mitigation/escape options.

We’re talking about the most survivable class outside a cele d/d ele ingame.

Ranger longbow is garbage. It has less aoe damage, DH #2 is more DPS than rapid fire (lower cooldown relative to damage output), the entire weapon has far more group utility and actual CC, unlike that garbage barrage.

It’s lovely you talk about pet saving you as if the pet lives through any engagement with more than 5-10 people involved.

Duels/roaming =/= class value. Dueling/roaming is a virtually useless activity, it contributes nothing to your realm compared to larger skirmishes and objectives.

And if you want a dueling ranged class, you should have rolled mesmer.

It’s a terrible solution, for the same reason that not having a pet based heal sucks.

Basically, on top of having to wate your own heal when you don’t need it to heal the pet, now you also have to waste your dodges when you don’t need to just so your pet can dodge.

It’s bad.

Substance E.4852:

redcomyn.4651:

McWolfy.5924:

You can do whatever you want, your dps will be much more less with gs. In team you have 100% fury uptime.
You can go with anything but you will lose 20-50% dps

I am solo only, so I won’t get that 100% fury.

You can easily get near perma fury with clarion bond and a red moa with the traited f2.

It’s probably not worth the effort in most overworld situations to be honest as almost everything outside of silverwastes will die with a single path of scars and a couple sword hits anyway.

Using a moa detracts from any fury uptime he gets. Moa dps is horrendous, only better than bear dps.

He’s better off using clarion bond and warhorn and just put warhorn in the offhand slot of his secondary weaponset and the main sword hand on the primary weaponset so whenever he switches weapons he always has sword/warhorn and can just spam weaponswap on cooldown to get the fury and swiftness from the skirmishing minor.

Otherwise he can have sword/warhorn and axe in the 2ndary offhand and still switch on cooldown and time his call of the wild appropriately.

Using any pet besides jaguar/drake is an absolute drop in dps. bears and moas do less damage on their autoattacks than a condi spec’s single burning tick. It’s that bad.

Petrol.9086:

McWolfy.5924:

You can do whatever you want, your dps will be much more less with gs. In team you have 100% fury uptime.
You can go with anything but you will lose 20-50% dps

20-50% less eh? That’s a pretty huge gap. Where have you gotten these numbers?

Not 50%. We used to have a theorycrafter around whose name I forgot, I don’t think it was Dojo but maybe.

It’s closer to a 20-30% difference just from the weapon damage, no traits calculated in but GS is still a good gap behind 1h sword. GS also has no utility whatsoever for your group unlike the new whirling defense and even path of scars can prove useful for interrupts/pulling, or you can use warhorn for more combo blasts.

Corran.4957:

Ascalon warriors – the destroyer of groups!

Them buggers can be so annoying with there 10mile rush

For me it’s not the warriors, their leap has wind up and so do their slashing attacks. It’s the stupid monks doing nearly instant ranged conal aoe in combination.

It’s one of GW2’s main flaws, with no real aggro system to work off with you have multiple mobs deciding to hit the same person with 6-8k autoattacks it can lead to an instant-down with little counterplay other than blind spam.

It’s just cheap and encourages you to stunlock/blindspam mobs. One of their big selling points was telegraphing and attack readability.

They outright refused to adopt GW1’s system of cast bars and discernible actions under the pretext that they would have animations clearly indicating actions, but what we got instead is a cluster of many mobs all doing slight animations at the same time under the clutter of many particle effects.

They also said they MEANT for people to be downed in an encounter and that’s what their downed system is based around, but that isn’t even true. The AI is so cheesy around downed players, bosses will spam ground targeted aoe or lethal cleave on a downed person that often even ignores reflects so rezzing people without a warbanner or singet is often a death trap and not worth your time. The Fire Shaman’s meteor Shower on a downed person or Captain Arshym’s meteor shower is a good example of this.

They didn’t even remotely deliver on what they said their PvE combat system would be like. The encounters are so shallow and just a damage race instead of mechanics checks.

Which makes sense if their goal is to make every single encounter doable by a PuG group withing a single play session instead of having encounters that require players to form statics with similarly skilled players and learn and practice encounters for weeks to months.

You don’t punish anyone by applying Torment on a weapon used mainly by power builds. Torment and blleding tickle without any significant condition damage investment, so it hardly punishes them.

redcomyn.4651:

McWolfy.5924:

You can do whatever you want, your dps will be much more less with gs. In team you have 100% fury uptime.
You can go with anything but you will lose 20-50% dps

I am solo only, so I won’t get that 100% fury.

In a solo scenario you are better off with GS, for living story specifically because mobs hit much harder than usual and have obvious tells that you need to reliably dodge and the greatsword doesn’t delay your dodge timings.

The built in evade+ block>>>>> a 15 sec cd serpent strike or a delayed dodge of monarch leap. The 1h sword dodges disrupt your DPS whereas your GS defensive features have far less effect on it.

redcomyn.4651:

Zenith.7301:

Greatsword is less DPS than 1h sword. It’s not up for debate.

What’s of concern here is whether you can pull 1h sword off, or if you start dying with it you’d be better off with Greatsword. There are some fights, like Archdiviner/Molten Duo/Mossman/some of Arah where you want the reliability of Greatsword if you’re not familiar with the fight.

Either way you’re there for Spotter and Spirits. If you want an even more forgiving spec, look at condi ranger from DnT.

I agree with this. Myself, for example, I can’t get the 1h sword to work for me. I have tried withe auto attack on and off. Either way, I frequently die or nearly die. The GS just works so much better for me.

Yes, the 1h sword does do more damage. I just can’t handle it well enough to do it efficiently. I usually have to run from the fight, heal up, then go back, while my pet keeps the enemy engaged.

You may supplement it with signet of stone. It makes getting your opening burst out much less troublesome. It’s very useful in Molten Duo for example when you’re confident that the guardian is incompetent and won’t use aegis/wall in time or the ele doesn’t freeze the boss with ice bow off the start.

I just wish signet of stone had a 30-45 sec cd.

Change Monarch’s leap so the evade is instant upon button press instead of having a cast time.

Increase the damage of Serpent Strike and lower the cd to 12 seconds. For such a large wind up animation, it should hit hard when it lands.

That plus fixing so you could dodge with 1h sword reliably would make it a more interesting weapon than just something you autoattack with.

Similarly path of scars should get a cooldown reduction and whirling defense should be doubled in damage output.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

You get fractional condi ticks now so duration thresholds aren’t an issue.

Zenith.7301:

Ugh, I hope they buff ranger sword/greatsword so I can stay in zerker. I really don’t want to switch to axe, I hate that weapon. And I really don’t want to do the living story achievements, I hate solo instances and their gimmicks. That dumb labyrinth was NOT fun as a necromancer.

Labyrinth is easily done by getting a friend to just repeatedly kill the lurcher for you over and over. You only need to clear the path from Rox to the wall you need her to break, then from there you can just run past everything else to tag the other NPCs.

You can similarly do any of the other “Don’t get hit by X” achievements by partying with someone and letting them do the actual fighting while you just AFK. It is still a pain (especially the long-kitten unskippable talky bits that will hopefully not be in HOT story) but the actual skill tests aren’t that bad. They’re actually kinda fun when they don’t require a slog of waiting through terrible dialogue.

Oh nice, didn’t think of that. Thanks for the tip ;D.

xarallei.4279:

You love it. Deep down inside, you know you do.

But yeah, I’m not thrilled with condi ranger being the best. I’m hoping HoT isn’t too bad with pushing the condi builds and that zerk is still a great alternative. I would really love if they buffed the remorseless specs somehow.

They can buff it by making remorseless a major, making steady focus take the place of pets having opening strike and making that baseline.

Or better yet, remorseless should be godkitten ed baseline. Opening strike shouldn’t remain garbage without a GM trait, it should function in PvE and continued engagements like any other class traits do.

But as usual we gotta pay in grandmasters or utilities for what other classes get baked in or at lesser costs/merged.

I don’t even know why steady focus is based on full endurance instead of spent endurance like the warrior. Steady focus just creates bad habits where you don’t want to dodge to keep your damage modifier whereas the warrior version rewards you for using dodge.

Steady Focus and Light on Your Feet are even contradictory traits.

Necrotize.2974:

Zenith.7301:

Necrotize.2974:

Zenith.7301:

Just cap stealth so you can’t go beyond one blast’s worth of stealth.

Shadow Refuge should not provide stealth besides its primary pulse, if you exit it you lose stealth after 4 seconds, when Shadow Refuge ends you have 4 seconds remaining on stealth.

Apply same principle to PU mesmer, they can’t layer stealth. Applying Decoy as soon as mass invis is about to end or vice versa should not renew stealth.

Black Powder probably needs an initiative cost increase. It nullifies melee too easily.

So basically make Shadow Refuge a big “murder me” circle, neuter the main viable thief build, make stealth skipping in pve impossible/stealth based team coordination in PvP unusable, and cause a stealth/reveal interaction a thousand times more annoying than Last Refuge for thieves and mesmers alike. Oh, and nerf a skill that is already initiative intensive because not standing in a little red circle is too complicated.

Biggest issue I have is so many people like yourself call for these crippling nerfs, but really don’t offer much in the way of replacing it. Thieves in particular have an entire trait line devoted to stealth and it is one of their primary damage mitigators. What would you replace it with? Or should thief pretty much stay exactly as they are now, just without their main source of damage mitigation? Same thing for mesmers. Anet has stated before that mesmer’s main source of damage mitigation is damage prevention, IE, stealth, evades, invulns and in-combat mobility. You might as well ask to give warriors the lowest hp pool because a high hp encourages people to face tank things and not dodge, then not replace it with anything.

And I chuckled at the teleport stomp bit. You’re basically just listing qualities of the classes and asking for them to be flat out removed from the game.

God forbid there’s some counterplay to stealth skills. You list stealth skips in PvE as if skipping even requires stealth, which is a chuckle I’ll be honest, there’s not a single part in the game where that is a necessity. Even in the harpy fractal all you need is stability and some reflects while making the run. Otherwise you can stop being a noob and bring your own harpy feather kits.

Shadow Refuge is there for stealth rezzing, or drop targeting, forcing people to use aoe (which most classes that aren’t engineer or ele don’t have without long cooldowns). It’s not there to give you some free 10+ seconds of stealth.

Thief doesn’t need replacement. That would put you in line with berserker rangers, berserker engineers, and berserker ele levels of survival.

You know, so the only berk class in tournaments isn’t thief or mesmer.

But you know, keep being a dimwit and pretend like berk mesmer and thief and even warrior haven’t been the reason pushing all other classes out of berserker amulets in the meta. Anything that isn’t those three is better off running condi bunkers for that very reason, because their mobility and active defense on top of damage output/burst is inferior to a berk thief/mesmer.

You keep talking as if you know what’s best for the game and saying you know “what skills are for” but it is pretty obvious that you don’t or that you’re spouting opinions as facts. Yep, Shadow Refuge is just there for rezzing and dropping target(as if that helps since it is easily one of the most telegraphed stealth skills). That’s exactly what it says in the description: “Use only for rezzing allies. Not to be used to gain stealth for other reasons”.

Thief doesn’t need replacement ayy? Yep, that’ll put it behind zerk ele and zerk engis, which btw, aren’t exactly in a strong spot right now anyway, hence why D/D cele and Soldier Engineer are the norm. Most thieves and mesmers don’t even run zerk amulets anymore because with how much damage everyone is dealing, Marauder is by far a safer option, so you’re a bit out of touch there. Power Creep is happening hardcore, hence why no one uses Zerk amulet anymore. Marauder is just in general a much safer option that takes only a moderate hit to damage.

Keep being rude though, maybe I’ll take your insults to heart and completely agree with everything you say.

God knows we need the validation of self important tryhards like you. It’s good to know you’ll happily trade your stealth and ports for the defenses of a zerk engineer or ranger’s signet of stone.

By all means insist on the fantasy that all classes can just aoe bomb shadow refuge and thus it’s useless, because like totally all classes have spammable, lethal aoe to murder you while on shadow refuge. Or that the suggestion didn’t allow you 4 seconds of stealth to get out of it if you need to.

Nah, gotta have a skill that guarantees a rez or enough time to re-open on someone/reset the fight.

Greatsword is less DPS than 1h sword. It’s not up for debate.

What’s of concern here is whether you can pull 1h sword off, or if you start dying with it you’d be better off with Greatsword. There are some fights, like Archdiviner/Molten Duo/Mossman/some of Arah where you want the reliability of Greatsword if you’re not familiar with the fight.

Either way you’re there for Spotter and Spirits. If you want an even more forgiving spec, look at condi ranger from DnT.

Necrotize.2974:

Zenith.7301:

Just cap stealth so you can’t go beyond one blast’s worth of stealth.

Shadow Refuge should not provide stealth besides its primary pulse, if you exit it you lose stealth after 4 seconds, when Shadow Refuge ends you have 4 seconds remaining on stealth.

Apply same principle to PU mesmer, they can’t layer stealth. Applying Decoy as soon as mass invis is about to end or vice versa should not renew stealth.

Black Powder probably needs an initiative cost increase. It nullifies melee too easily.

So basically make Shadow Refuge a big “murder me” circle, neuter the main viable thief build, make stealth skipping in pve impossible/stealth based team coordination in PvP unusable, and cause a stealth/reveal interaction a thousand times more annoying than Last Refuge for thieves and mesmers alike. Oh, and nerf a skill that is already initiative intensive because not standing in a little red circle is too complicated.

Biggest issue I have is so many people like yourself call for these crippling nerfs, but really don’t offer much in the way of replacing it. Thieves in particular have an entire trait line devoted to stealth and it is one of their primary damage mitigators. What would you replace it with? Or should thief pretty much stay exactly as they are now, just without their main source of damage mitigation? Same thing for mesmers. Anet has stated before that mesmer’s main source of damage mitigation is damage prevention, IE, stealth, evades, invulns and in-combat mobility. You might as well ask to give warriors the lowest hp pool because a high hp encourages people to face tank things and not dodge, then not replace it with anything.

And I chuckled at the teleport stomp bit. You’re basically just listing qualities of the classes and asking for them to be flat out removed from the game.

God forbid there’s some counterplay to stealth skills. You list stealth skips in PvE as if skipping even requires stealth, which is a chuckle I’ll be honest, there’s not a single part in the game where that is a necessity. Even in the harpy fractal all you need is stability and some reflects while making the run. Otherwise you can stop being a noob and bring your own harpy feather kits.

Shadow Refuge is there for stealth rezzing, or drop targeting, forcing people to use aoe (which most classes that aren’t engineer or ele don’t have without long cooldowns). It’s not there to give you some free 10+ seconds of stealth.

Thief doesn’t need replacement. That would put you in line with berserker rangers, berserker engineers, and berserker ele levels of survival.

You know, so the only berk class in tournaments isn’t thief or mesmer.

But you know, keep being a dimwit and pretend like berk mesmer and thief and even warrior haven’t been the reason pushing all other classes out of berserker amulets in the meta. Anything that isn’t those three is better off running condi bunkers for that very reason, because their mobility and active defense on top of damage output/burst is inferior to a berk thief/mesmer.

Just cap stealth so you can’t go beyond one blast’s worth of stealth.

Shadow Refuge should not provide stealth besides its primary pulse, if you exit it you lose stealth after 4 seconds, when Shadow Refuge ends you have 4 seconds remaining on stealth.

Apply same principle to PU mesmer, they can’t layer stealth. Applying Decoy as soon as mass invis is about to end or vice versa should not renew stealth.

Black Powder probably needs an initiative cost increase. It nullifies melee too easily.

The teleport stomps should also be fixed. A guardian who’s forced off a stomp has to interrupt his stomp cast and come back. A thief or mesmer shouldn’t get to port out while the stomp is channeling and port back in to finish the cast safely.

Mefiq.7039:

Buff thief survi so thef wont need to be perma stealthed to not die from enemy, make ANY OTHER build than D/P viable then mby ur “stealth problem” will be fixed. Make “revealt” debuff work on endure pain signet of stone mistform and other “godmodes” so no1 will be able to spam godmode like mesmer does.

God modes have 60+ sec cd’s, far longer than your thief defensive abilities. Mist Form can’t be used offensively, signet of stone sacrifices the passive toughness while on cd. What do you sacrifice when you go into stealth? You instead gain access to your highest damaging attack and immunity against skills that require a target, which are many for most classes.

OR BETTER YET GUYS, HOW ABOUT WE SPLIT PVP/PVE SKILL BALANCE ALREADY.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if, for once in this miserable class’s existence, we actually don’t get demolished in PvE due to pvp whine?

Dirame.8521:

Zenith.7301:

Bleeds are weak as hell, burning is much stronger.

Problem with condition mancer is warriors are better at stacking bleeds than us, engineers are the kings of burning and many other cover condies, and poison is a tie between engineer/thief/ranger.

Condi necromancer excels at NOTHING in terms of condi application. It has modest access to the weakest conditions (bleeding, poison), miserable access to the strongest (burns), and worst of all his aoe condi pressure is far inferior to an engineer.

Engineers have always eclipsed all other condi builds. They get to frontload conditions more quickly, more of them are available (confusion, bleeding, poison, and birning in high amounts in one class), and to top it off engineers can apply those via aoe much better, they have better active defenses (turret heal is the best heal ingame, elixir s+ toolkit gear shield for several seconds of invulnerability).

Engineers also have lots of valuable combo fields and blast finishers, meaning they give themselves boon rather well as well as stealth, so they’re like a better necromancer who also has strong access to self buffing via might stacks and blasting water/smoke fields.

Whilst bleeds have slow damage build up and poison too, it’s the combination of Bleeds, poison, vuln, might stacks, torment and fears that make up the cusp of the damage that necro deals. They don’t need burning. They excel at fears.

Who gives a kitten about fear, it’s useless in PvE all it’s useful for ever since the defiance changes affecting fear is to get you booted out of the party for spreading mobs.

Engineer can might stack better than a necromancer and have similar bleed and poison output, with burning and confusion on top of it all. And engineer is one of the best classes at stacking vulnerability as well.

Why are you answering my post, a post obviously tailored to PvE, with PvP counterpoints?

Necromancer is among the weakest condi specs in PvE. This is not debatable, there’s plenty of spreadsheets and videos showcasing optimal DPS condi setups and builds for PvE out there. Start with DnT.

Sinister Engi>Burning Guard>Sinister Ranger= Condi warrior>Condi ele> Condi Mesmer>Necromancer.

And then there’s the fact that a condimancer, being the worst condi class for PvE also brings no group support or boosts to group DPS remotely competitive with the alternatives.

Bleeds are weak as hell, burning is much stronger.

Problem with condition mancer is warriors are better at stacking bleeds than us, engineers are the kings of burning and many other cover condies, and poison is a tie between engineer/thief/ranger.

Condi necromancer excels at NOTHING in terms of condi application. It has modest access to the weakest conditions (bleeding, poison), miserable access to the strongest (burns), and worst of all his aoe condi pressure is far inferior to an engineer.

Engineers have always eclipsed all other condi builds. They get to frontload conditions more quickly, more of them are available (confusion, bleeding, poison, and birning in high amounts in one class), and to top it off engineers can apply those via aoe much better, they have better active defenses (turret heal is the best heal ingame, elixir s+ toolkit gear shield for several seconds of invulnerability).

Engineers also have lots of valuable combo fields and blast finishers, meaning they give themselves boon rather well as well as stealth, so they’re like a better necromancer who also has strong access to self buffing via might stacks and blasting water/smoke fields.

femalehumanmeta.8351:

Therodin.2970:

I am sad about the static fractal shards i liked the randomness of what i was getting. Now it will just be a swamp somewhere between 1-20 a swamp somewhere between 20-50 and then a swamp after 50. And maybe that rotating achievement if the reward is even worth it.

This is exactly what’s going to happen when the new changes take effect. People will figure out what the quickest and easiest fractal is within each tier, and those are going to be the only ones people will want to do. It’s going to be so lame…

So what, we’re already rolling for swamp all the time. I haven’t done underwater in ages.

It’s also good people have some semblance of choice. I simply detest Dredge and Mai Trin. Dredge as mobs are an example of “toughness” gone wrong.

Dredge are just obnoxious, a single immediate hand swipe that dazes you for 3 seconds and takes off half your health is not my idea of fun.

I’m also not fond of the precision change. This will just make blind stacking even more of a necessity, solidifying the dominance of guardians, thieves, and elementalists.

Giving mobs more hp and more damage is just a lazy way to substitute for difficulty. People should be executing mechanics and multiple tasks simultaneously with some sort of coordination. That should be where difficulty comes in. Think Priestess of Dwayna, but better.

Making it so “Stack as much burst and aegis/blind so these things die before their 2 autoattacks down you” is not a fun mechanic. Ascalon fractal mob damage is already dumb enough, the big damage from mobs should not be coming from inflated autoattacks.

I agree as well with the increased toughness crap. I am NOT looking forward to grinding Sinister ascended sets. Can they erase agony as a mechanic already? Just have infusions give extra stats like magic find/vitality as some added but optional bonus.

I really don’t want to spend around 400 gold just to have a new meta set to do my content with on a single class. Moreover, stats like sinister on ascended aren’t even available via crafting, you have to grab them off some dumb living story achievements people may not want to do.

Ugh, I hope they buff ranger sword/greatsword so I can stay in zerker. I really don’t want to switch to axe, I hate that weapon. And I really don’t want to do the living story achievements, I hate solo instances and their gimmicks. That dumb labyrinth was NOT fun as a necromancer.

Lily.1935:

We’re pushing 16k responses on how much the axe is bad. I think Arena net gets it. I think they’re working on it now. But just in case, keep posting.

Keep dreaming. We’ve been pushing them on how bad axe auto and staff auto are for over 3 years. Guess what’s changed.

I mean, staff is a condition weapon with 4 conditions related skills, with a slow and weak power based autoattack attached to it.

Scepter is a condition weapon with a #3 skill that scales off of power.

Necro and ranger suck for a reason, and it’s the amount of crappy hybrid weapons they have with low autoattack damage to boot. Hybrid weapons will never work in this system, half of their component doesn’t benefit from the full stat investment coming from armor and traits.

Nachyochez.9758:

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

You don’t have to hire anyone. You already have people working on the game, so why not just tell the players what you are working on that week? It would literally take 10 minutes at the end of the day on a Friday. Not hard.

I worked in Game Design for a smaller company for two years, and am currently in school for Software Engineering; actually working on my own game engine in the BG as I write this. I say this so you’ll know what I say next is from experience:

Interacting with the community directly on a regular basis is the absolute dumbest thing a Developer can do.

In order to release a feature to the public, it needs to be cleared by the NDA. You also have to be careful how you explain the feature, since implementation is also NDA. Once you’ve got both of those taken care of, you have to write/record the update. Then the update has to be proofread, because Balthazar FORBID you have a typo, misspelling, error, mistake, or anything else the “community” can use to prove their superiority over you. Then, after you’ve got all of this cleared, cleaned, and ready to go – wasting time that you’re not spending doing the important parts of your job like coding/designing/testing/etc – something changes and that feature/bugfix/update/balance change/dye color/pixel on an ambient mob doesn’t get put in this update. Now you’re in for it!

To top it off, once the public freaks out over this they double down that you’re not responding to their outcry of vitriol.

While I am all for public releases of information, they need to be handled by the right parties. Not devs themselves.

No one can sub for a communicating dev.

Here’s a secret: community reps are incompetent when it comes to communicating about the game.

Why? Because most community reps don’t play the game, or play it at a very casual level. How can a community rep offer insight or have an ongoing conversation with players about class design and balance?

Basically, if a community rep instead of a dev had to take care of communication, he would constantly have to relay comments/questions to the developer, and then relay a response to the community.

The problem with this is that communication worsens through a middle man. The community rep paraphrases questions and filters those which interest him personally. If it were a dev instead coming through a thread, your chances of having your question seen/answered increase, because at least the dev is aware of the full variety of opinions in a thread.

The best games have direct contact between developers and players. You see it in games with the best class balance standards, they have the largest dev/player interaction.

It helps keep the devs grounded because the developers love their gimmicks, which may not translate well in-game. Look at necromancers. Their dev is obsessed with making the Reaper a chill centric specialization with traits.

Turns out it doesn’t work, because necromancers have limited access to chill, with high cooldowns and low duration and a 20% duration increase trait isn’t gonna change that. Not to mention Chill is virtually useless in PvE.

Same goes for mesmer. Robert Gee is obsessed with placing shatter and interrupt themes/traits on the mesmer traitlines, and it turns out to be a pile of crap for PvE players where those two features are garbage.

Shatters because they actually lead to less sustained damage since mesmers have lower damage on autoattacks/abilities since they’re balanced around 3x phantasm uptime, which your shatter destroys.

Interrupts are similarly bad because the mesmer has infrequent access to it with considerable cooldowns, and most importantly the defiance mechanic of a mob means most interrupts will be ignored and not trigger their related effects, which have low uptime to begin with. A 8 sec vulnerability trait on interrupt is pretty bad when your lowest cd on interrupt is 10 seconds offhand sword sacrificing your block skill. The rest of your interrupts are much larger cooldowns, easily on the 20+ sec cd scale.

Then there is harmonious mantras, with a 4% (3% now after their idiotic nerf) damage stack per mantra charge that only lasts 8 seconds means a PvE mesmer needs to chain cast mantra of pain to even maintain 4 stacks and do nothing else.

Meanwhile a warrior uses a 3 bar burst skill every 10 seconds, which is easy to do and comes naturally in combat without sacrificing anything, and they get 100% uptime on a 20% damage buff on top of their big adrenaline hot (mesmer gets 15% and is only chaining mantra of pain, which is roughly weaker than autoattack spam and doesn’t allow the mesmer to use other skills).

Players keep the developers grounded to the reality of how the game is played, since players invest far more time testing and refining the classes than developers do.

zapv.8051:

Shiki.7148:

Zenith.7301:

A little damage boost? Axe autoattack needs at least 900 range and close to a 50% damage increase.

Also remove retal from it, retal is useless as a boon, especially in PvE. Give it something useful like vigor or fury per opponent hit.

Axe AA needs to be lower DPS than Dagger though. Even if it doesn’t cleave , on 900 range there should be a DPS difference. However, the burst skill on Axe (#2) needs to be a lot harder hitting instead.

I’m pretty sure even with a 50% dps boost axe auto would still be behind dagger auto.

It’s a ranged weapon, it’s to be expected.

The point is to bring it in line with other ranged weapons, not melee weapons. The baseline should be Long Range Shot/Fireball for ranged weapon damage autoattacks.

Anet just sucks at balancing autoattacks for classes, and classes like ranger/necro/mesmer suffer for it.

striker.3704:

Zenith.7301:

Also remove retal from it, retal is useless as a boon, especially in PvE. Give it something useful like vigor or fury per opponent hit.

Everything about unholy feast and the focus skill spinal shivers is bad for PvE and great for PvP. This isn’t so much a fault of the weapon as PvE encounters not being designed properly (lack of enemies using boons, no need to cripple enemies, ect). Retaliation is in the same boat. It’s a great boon, PvE just needs to keep up.

There are mobs that apply boons. The dredge. Porblem being they apply 3-4 boons in a 4-5 second interval so any boon strip is pointless as they come immediately back up.

And it also doesn’t make a difference with the damage output of elementalist/warrior/thief, things melt with protection or without.

Retaliation could use a 600% damage increase while in PvE, and outside WvW so it doesn’t get broken there. A 400 tick per 2-3 second interval autoattack is miserable on mobs that have 30-40k hp.

Personally I still think retaliation should be a % damage reflection, 20-25% damage reflected or so. That way it becomes useful against single heavy hitters like thieves or slow attacking enemies like guardians and not totally broken against rangers/mesmers with multi hit autoattacks or its multiple procs on barrage, which means the ranger takes far more damage back than his wimpy Barrage does.

Akrasia.5469:

Rym.1469:

Bhawb.7408:

Torment would be nice, but it isn’t what is holding Condi necro back.

This

And Torment is rather meh condition anywhere outside of PvP.
PvE mobs don’t move and that means less damage than Bleeding. Even if they start moving after mysterious AI updates in xpac, I don’t believe they will be moving constantly.

Adding kitten ton of Torment is meh for PvE, but OP for PvP.
It’s situational condition.

I wouldn’t mind adding it to Grasping Dead, but first we have to balance the “FPS PVP meta”, where you have to have instant damage and instant CC in order to be “viable” DPS.

PvP mobs don’t move?
You’re one of the proponents of the boring dungeon stack tactic huh?. “Everyone stand in one spot and drop all your circles till everything is dead”. This is why GW2 PvE is dying. Hopefully HoT fulfills it promise of more challenging PvE. I’m hoping that none of the content can be won simply by standing in a corner.

And how is it op for PvP? We don’t have a lot of ways to deal with all the mobility of the other classes. Torment would help even that playing field. OP? More like balancing. And also fitting for our theme.

PvE hasn’t stacked in a corner for months. It shows you don’t even PvE when most meta groups just stack in the open.

And don’t go acting all superior about stacking and dropping circles, this is exactly what happens in WvW, with melee trains stacking for might stacks and boon share and elementalists/necromancers bombing a ring of warding target with their aoe circles.

This game has always been about aoe and stacking, because aoe spells do as muchg damage as single target spells if not more, and the way combo fields and boon generation work force groups to stack because you can’t get boons from blasting fire fields at range.

PvP is just the same, the specs that shine in spvp have always been specs with aoe to bomb a point with, case in point engineers with grenades and bombs, warrior longbow combustive shot, necro staff and wells.

The only single target spec in spvp ever has been thief.

Axe 2 should get the cast time reduction treatment of rapid fire.

Dagger 2 should be a background channel that once you press starts casting but you are able to do other things. Make it 600 range aoe, it will add considerable sustain to a necromancer getting trained.

Dagger 3 should pull the mob to the necro and immobilize them. Reduce the cast time it’s so hilariously long just like the focus 5.

Why bring weakness for high crit mobs unless they’re blind immune?

And dredge are one of the worst mob designs ingame, I hope that’s not an example they follow. Mobs with little telegraph, quick autoattacks that dze you for eternity and take off half your health is not good PvE design.

meow one twenty.4376:

Zenith.7301:

Sagat.3285:

Zenith.7301:

A little damage boost? Axe autoattack needs at least 900 range and close to a 50% damage increase.

Also remove retal from it, retal is useless as a boon, especially in PvE. Give it something useful like vigor or fury per opponent hit.

From PvP point of view you will facetank a lot so it’s not useless it’s not a negative of the weapon everything else is.

A weapon shouldn’t have a skill that’s only useful in a pvp setting. Retaliation as a boon needs rethinking. It’s just this weird clone of confusion.

Why take away something that is useful for PvP just because it doesn’t benefit you as much as others? That’s pretty selfish.

It doesn’t “benefit me as much”. It doesn’t benefit me at all, it’s worthless. And the retal is worthless in pvp still compared to other more powerful boons.

You strike me as one of those people who thought a retaliation mesmer build was a good idea.

Sagat.3285:

Zenith.7301:

A little damage boost? Axe autoattack needs at least 900 range and close to a 50% damage increase.

Also remove retal from it, retal is useless as a boon, especially in PvE. Give it something useful like vigor or fury per opponent hit.

From PvP point of view you will facetank a lot so it’s not useless it’s not a negative of the weapon everything else is.

A weapon shouldn’t have a skill that’s only useful in a pvp setting. Retaliation as a boon needs rethinking. It’s just this weird clone of confusion.

A little damage boost? Axe autoattack needs at least 900 range and close to a 50% damage increase.

Also remove retal from it, retal is useless as a boon, especially in PvE. Give it something useful like vigor or fury per opponent hit.

I think what is going to cause people to cry the most is not that the zerker specs they’ve played and gotten used to for speed clearing content may not be optimal at everything anymore.

It’s the fact that ascended gear is a huge gold gate/grind, with 400+ gold involved on just the armor not including the weapons. Now people are gonna have to grind out alternate ascended sets because the truth is, it’s 10 spirit shards per piece and if you’re looking at 80-90+ AR, it just won’t be feasible to constantly switch ascended stats given it costs 6-10 gold per insignia and 10 of the much more limited spirit shards per piece, of which you get only 3 with the daily.

What’s more, if you make ascended sinister stats optimal, that’s a problem as well because I for example had no interest in living story achievements. I just don’t find the solo instances with kittened AI fun. I don’t find the labyrinth of 1 shots as a necromancer fun.

Ascended introduced these annoying gold grinds and time gates nobody cared for, and they’re continuing that hideous feature into the expansion instead of the quick and accessible exotics model that everyone liked as it allowed them to have multiple sets with little farming involved and experiment without huge gold and time costs.

Or they scrap the whole idiotic idea of agony and AR checks on fractals and ascended items truly become optional. So people can bring their exotic sets into high level fractal and vary their builds on the fly. If they want to keep agony, they can just give exotic gear versatile infusion slots and call it a day. Make the infusions with extra stats/effects ascended only.

Sigmoid.7082:

@Zenith
Besides there being mainly 4 of 5 traits for reaper that are good for pve everything you mentioned in your post isn’t reaper specific. It’s just necro in general that suffers from all of those issues. No matter how great reaper will be unless base necro specs get some love it will always be hindered, even if it is better than base in a lot of pve situations.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Reaper

Adept options:

Chilling Nova, a marginal trait as the tooltip damage of the explosion is 103, and our access to blind from weapons is pitifully small anyways. Very low uptime on the effect.

Augury of Death is useless by proportion that shouts are useless in PvE. Relentless Pursuit is bad in PvE, always.

MINORS:

Shivers of Dread: Useless. You never want to fear mobs in PvE as it spreads them instead of keeping them in a cluster for your group to cleave down in melee.

Cold Shoulder: Crap. 20% duration increase when most chills we apply are 4 seconds or less, and our access to chills is not only fairly limited but suffers longish cooldowns.

MASTER:

Decimate Defenses is our only option. Easy trait to overcap though as with full ascended Berserker/Assassins you’re looking at 57-60% crit chance base, without 20% from fury.

Converting Decimate Defenses to 1% increased critical chance and 1% increased critical damage would lessen the overcapping issue.

All other options are garbage. Chilling Force is useless with current might stacking from warriors or eles which are a group staple as they alone can passively cap might for the group.

Soul Eater, like most of our life leech options, are terrible with their pitifully low values. The recharge requires multiple foes to take advantage of, useless in a boss fight when only one mob is hit.

GRANDMASTER:

Deathly Chill is terrible. 294 tick tooltip, on foes at or below 50%, 197 otherwise. That’s just bad considering the frequency in which we apply chill and the cooldown of our chill application skills.

Blighter’s Boon is pretty bad. Nothing much to see here. In PvE you won’t be lacking for life force. The health gain per boon is marginal.

That leaves us with Reaper’s Onslaught, which banks on the question of whether Reaper Shroud is more DPS than GS auto+grave digger, factoring a 15% attack speed into RS.

This is even made worse by the negligence of the dev team when things like signet passives don’t work in death shroud, so you’re not getting the extra power from the signet while in Reaper Shroud.

So, there you go. 3 traits that are possibly useful for PvE, and one or two of them in mediocre fashion.

Robert Gee designs with pvp in mind, period.

Roe.3679:

Mesmers and rampage toned down = net win even with our very small changes that are being way overreacted to here.

Necro is in a much stronger place than most of you seem to think.

Only from a pvp perspective. Good of you mr pvp guy to look nowhere beyond your preferred format to make claims about the status of a class.

ArchonWing.9480:

RashanDale.3609:

ArchonWing.9480:

Why does chilling darkness have a cd? When did this happen?

anet thought it’s too OP with well of darkness, plague, bitter chill and all the chill-related stuff that comes at some day with the reaper. so they made sure noone ever uses it again

I always seem to come in here and find something else that’s unbelievably bad has happened. And that’s sort of why I haven’t touched necro much since the specialization patch.

But this is the trend for necro balance. X being op if A, B, C is taken so that’s taken for granted when nerfs happen to X, screwing over builds that do not use A, B, and C.

This is not just necro balance. They just did the same to mesmer and ranger.

Mesmer’s problem was confounding suggestions paired with Mantra of Distraction, and they went in and nerfed mantra recharge, nerfed harmonious mantras coefficient bonus (from 20% to 15%, maintaining 20% required chain spamming mantra of pain and doing nothing else, unlike warrior’s Breserker Power which gives a 20% bonus for just using a 3 bars adrenaline skill every 10 seconds).

Now mantra builds for PvE and any mantra build that wasn’t shatter+confounding suggestions is destroyed to all hell, and the Dueling line has no viable grandmasters anymore for PvE, they’re all terrible.

Same crap with ranger, someone was running quickening zephyr and clarion bond in WvW and constantly switching the pet out of combat to stack the buffs, and instead of only making the skill work in combat, they went in and bludgeoned it to death with humongous internal cooldowns, Clarion Bond now doesn’t even sync with pet swap. Once agains, many other ranger builds nerfed.

Spirits were nerfed for the sake of spvp complaints, never used again in any other format since they were weak there, and their “buff” to said spirits in the patch update actually nerfed them. The “powerful” active effects are a joke and spirits were made immobile despite being just weaker, killable versions of warrior banners.

It’s all very simple. When a class like warrior can bring phalanx strength, a trait that singlehandedly grants the party 25 might stacks, empower allies for 150 power to the group, 170 power/condi damage from banner, 170 ferocity/precision from banner. Warb Banner is just a better, faster ranger’s spirit of nature.

What’s the point of bringing any other classes when warrior, ele, guardian and thief have so much better group utility and damage than the other classes? They all have immense damage and on top of that they give them the best, class exclusive utility.

Even if Reaper numbers are same or slightly higher than a GS auto chain, it changes little. Warrior 100b does more damage and it’s similarly spammable to grave digger without the health threshold.

More importantly, a warrior gets a 10% damage bonus against bleeding targets, another 20% from berserker’s power all the time unlike necro who only gets 20% on targets below 50% health.

And most important of all, banners are unique buffs exclusive to the class with no caps, unlike might or fury which become redundant once a class can stack it enough. You NEED warrior banners, no other class can substitute that buff on such a large scale.

Warrior bring perma 25 might stacks with Phalanx Strength, 30% personal damage modifier total, 170 ferocity crit damage and 170 precision for the group (banner, equivalent to revenant’s group buff and ranger’s spotter combined, but 20 stat points more more), 170 power 170 condition damage (banner, 20 more stats than empower allies).

AND on top of all those buffs in a single build that is also their DPS build, they provide Empower Allies, for another 150 power to the group.

NOTHING short of an ele can buff a group’s DPS anywhere as much as a Phalanx Strength warrior.

Reaper’s damage would have to be astronomically higher than warrior or thief to match the group DPS increase a warrior provides to his group.

And since reaper utility and PvE traits suck (and in the case of traits, are nonexistent as all of them are pvp traits) big time, nobody will bring a Reaper in a meta PvE group.

Ithamir.5928:

Zenith.7301:

I think you give them too much credit on their awareness around class design. They just don’t want to split pve/pvp skill balancing.

Their reasoning for not splitting skills in GW1 was that it would confuse players. GW1 had hundreds of skills with unique effects. It got to a point where they couldn’t avoid that anymore, and split the skills anyway. Everyone was happy. When GW2 was developed we asked them if GW2 will have split skills as well. Their answer was, and I’m paraphrasing, “we’ve learned from our past mistakes”. (I can’t provide a link to verify, it’s from my memory alone. As it was a very important issue to me, I believe that may memory does not fail me) A dodgy answer but we mostly took it as a yes. They didn’t split.

TLDR; They probably don’t split because they don’t want to confuse players. Balancing separately may have more quantity of skills to balance, but it’s much much easier to balance overall.

Noobs are gonna be confused no matter what, and will be stomped by veterans no matter what.

Instead of condescending to its playerbase as a cheap excuse to do less work, they should stick with what worked in GW1.

There will never be balancing PvE with PvP. PvE is about doing as much damage as possible to large HP targets while PvP is balanced around a maximum of 20k hp health pools.

Akrasia.5469:

The only corruption that was buffed enough to justify its conditions is BiP IMHO.

CC has become troublesome to use as the main benefit of the skill was wiping away all conditions when used with MoC now it puts 2 really nasty conditions on you which defeats the reason for the skill. I’ve switched to a more wellomancer since the patch and what they did to CC really helped make up my mind.

If they made all corruptions boost allies (Like BiP did) then they’d be worth it. CC should either remove conditions or heal allies, Corrosive Poison should provide Fury, Corrupt boons should transfer boons to allies, Epidemic should grant resistance to allies and Plague form should grant random boons to allies every pulse.

Then corruption Necros would be much more sought after in groups.

BiP is garbage, it’s actually worse than before. 8 stacks for 8 seconds is not even worth it. An ele with a fire field on his own without using utilities can give his group 12 stacks for 10+ seconds.

I far preferred the high single target might stacks over the pitifully short group might on a considerable cooldown.

It’s even worse considering all a group needs is for a warrior to 100b something and the group is at 25 might stacks permanently.

I think you give them too much credit on their awareness around class design. They just don’t want to split pve/pvp skill balancing.

I spent…$300 dollars for 3 weapon skins in gem exchange. 2 months ago.

You don’t get to complain ;p

insaneseagull.7063:

Zenith.7301:

It’s a class heavily centered around chill, which is useless in PvE. A lot of the side effects on weaponskills are poison, on a power based spec and weapon. And again, poison is kinda useless in PvE.

I haven’t read everything here but noticed that ^
Putrid Defense?

Also marginal in PvE. Reduced damage on a 10k hit still means you want to dodge or face a 2-shot.

This game’s damage is simply not meant to be facetanked.

No mesmer is gonna shatter to just blind, and they sure as hell won’t take blinding dissipation over offensive traits.

Whether the group melees or not is inconsequential. In the cliffside fractal for example the cultist archers constantly spawn and plink away at your group for range more often than your focus pull is off cooldown, which means guardian wall works better there. Same for volcanic fractal.

With mimic you’re blowing a utility slot on a 90 sec cd to have a feedback that lasts around the same time of a traited wall of reflection. Traited focus’s reflection is unreliable, with curtain having elevation issues where projectiles from elevated mobs ignore it and iWarden as most phantasms gets destroyed immediately.

Guardian projectile defense is just far more practical and requires less investment. It also comes with the luxury of not requiring them to equip a garbage offhand and suffer a dps loss just so they can have a pull/reflect option, since the guardian greatsword is also one of their best weapons at no DPS cost.

Mesmer is there for portal and Time Warp slow on a few niche cases. Anywhere else, a guardian is better, less DPS loss to the group.

Aegis on virtue is instant whereas distortion share on mesmer requires signet cast times, investment into inspiration for further group dps loss, or requires you to shatter your phantasms for distortion usage to share it.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the direction they took with inspiration, and dom/illusions/dueling should have more useful traits like those instead of a litany of pvp interrupt/shatter traits, but mesmers still have ways to go if they want to be included in a group for anything other than portal.

They are neither Blizzard or Wildstar devs. They have virtually said communicating to people on the forums is not part of their job, so they feel no compulsion to do so.

The only time they come out it’s when it’s time to hype and sell the game, they get their box sales after beta ends and retreat into hiding until the next commercial cycle.

This game doesn’t even have a public test realm. That should tell you how much they actually care about player feedback.

Reaper has no damage modifiers, and his specialization line is pretty much entirely PvP centric traits.

It’s a class heavily centered around chill, which is useless in PvE. A lot of the side effects on weaponskills are poison, on a power based spec and weapon. And again, poison is kinda useless in PvE.

It simply will not compete with elementalist/thief damage as is, both of who have 20%+ damage modifiers, extra precision and power and ferocity sources, and all of which also bring better group utility.

In short, if the reaper doesn’t have crazy high base numbers that overcome the lack of damage modifiers and makes him do even more damage than a thief, there’s no use for one.

HotHit.6783:

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

I hate to complain since we got a lot of what we needed but… Ever since the big patch I’ve found Stalker’s Strike to be almost unusable. It’s incredibly difficult to land on your targets due to how short the range is which is unfortunate because it gives quite a long duration Poison.

It’s no harder to land than hilt bash, a hilt bash that makes you invulnerable during its cast time. While I’d certainly appreciate the extra distance, this isn’t like Crippling Talon where you need to pin down an opponent but they just ignore your conditions with dashes and resistance ‘til they’re at 1050 range and at 100 health. Stalker’s strike is still an amazing defensive tool and way more consistent than serpent’s strike.

Good luck landing hilt bash on a target that is moving with swiftness up. Hilt Bash is not exactly the example to praise, as is the hilariously delayed Maul animation.

Xstein.2187:

I was thinking about it and my suggestion is to add one extra damage percentage point to compounding power. This helps make up for the pve loss of harmonious mantras and helps forge a greater identity difference between taking illusions for damage and inspiration for group support and reflects.

Yeah, because 3% to a trait based on illusion uptime in a format where illusions are immediately wiped out by cleaving autoattacks and spammed lethal AoE would be a “fix” for a completely unnecessary nerf.

By all means, don’t address confounding suggestions. Nerf a grandmaster and mantra utilities many other builds that are not a problem use.

Typical Anet balancing.

Fhaeris.9237:

Zenith.7301:

And guardian utility blows mesmer utility out of the water.

Not really.

Yes, really. Say one PvE utility that guardian does not do better besides portal.

Higher reflect uptime, their wall of reflection is placed where they need it, not dependent on a targeted mob that may or may not move out of it while the guardian can place the wall on the group unlike the mesmer who can no longer place the bubble on the group without a target.

With traited spirit shield and wall guardian has far more projectile absorption.

Stability for harpy/aether blade fractal? Hallowed Ground/Stand Your Ground is better than mantra of concentration.

Feel My Wrath has greater group quickness uptime than time warp.

And then there’s the high uptime of group protection and aegis/blinds.

Most ranger weapons need overhauls. Outside 1h sword and greatsword, all other weapons are garbage hybrid weapons that don’t benefit fully from either condi or power gear/trait investments.

The funny part is their brilliant idea to encourage rangers to use the then awful longbow was to nerf the daylights out of shortbow, and then people used neither still until they buffed longbow lol.

But I’ve given up on them having any semblance of interest in PvE balance.

Today’s update on mesmer confirmed it. Harmonious Mantras was already an inferior Berserker’s Power with much harder upkeep that required chain casting mantra of pain to maintain, and yet they nerfed it some more for PvP reasons and made mantras irrelevant again in PvE for the sake of pvp.

So, PvE people, get on with the program. This game is balanced for their spvp/WvW hype train. It’s been 3 years since explorable dungeons came out with token systems (which are now replaced with cash shop and RNG BLTC ticket items), and ever since then not a single real branched dungeon. Only years later we got a single, buggy and unrewarding path taking up the place of another one and two short fractals.

Oh, and rangers and necromancers have remained in the same standing they’ve been in since release. Eles can still permafury, warriors can single handedly permastack 25 might for the group, but clearly Clarion Bond and Quickening Zephyr was too much. And that’s on the class that does a fraction of the damage of the top classes with far more effort required considering the kitten ed broken 1h sword we’ve been stuck with ever since Jon Peters abandoned the idea of coming up with a fix for it.

There are far better PvE MMO’s out there that actually give a kitten about their customers. Just play FFXIV/Wildstar/WoW/whatever until this current development team is forced to reconsider their neglectful design practices or when it is shuffled around/replaced.

WTB the GW1 development team and practices back. This empty shell of a sequel is so superficial and undeserving of the IP it’s based on.

Guardian is not low DPS. It is only below ele/engineer/thief DPS and on par with warrior, far ahead from ranger>necro>mesmer. And guardian utility blows mesmer utility out of the water.

Which is hysterical because they’re rather pigheaded about not having a trinity and forced roles for groups/classes, yet mesmer is the equivalent of a Vanilla WoW shaman.

Drop your totem and do whatever since nothing besides those totem buffs really matters.

The mesmer is essentially pigeonholed to a single duty in a group with no other competitive functions. A complete contradiction of their design intent.

But this wouldn’t be the first time they’re caught lying. Some dev had the nerve to say rangers lacked burst because they were envisioned as a high sustained DPS class, and yet it is only ahead of mesmer and necro in terms of sustained DPS and behind the others.

This whole pretense of caring about both formats is so obviously revealed to be false by now. They don’t give a kitten about PvE balance.

apharma.3741:

Linnael.1069:

Newsflash mesmer is mandatory on every single WR speedrun team already.

It’s a pvp nerf. If you wanna complain about it not even being a problem in pvp thats fine, but lets be real here complaining about mesmer’s PvE state is flat out ridiculous.

Q4T

Edit: Pyro you have a point but then again Linnael is mainly pointing out that the 4% to 3% makes very little and is pretty much no nerf to the PvE builds.

I personally think it’s a silly change, simply reverting mantras to the clunky way of using them pre patch is enough to kill that 1 team that may have almost beaten the Abjured…once.

P.S. Not saying mesmer is in a good place damage wise in PvE but at least it does have a role unlike everything that isn’t a warrior, ele or mesmer now.

You don’t even know what you’re talking about.

Every meta team is war/ele/ele/thief/mesmer for speed clear records. So we’re talking ranger and necro being out of the meta, and guardians are heavily desired in fractal 50 over a mesmer.

Mesmer is a portal bot just like he is a portal/veil bot in WvW, a complete gimmick class with no purpose other than to blow two 75+ second cd’s and remain useless for the remainder.

The day a class gets portal other than mesmer is the day mesmer goes to chill with ranger and necro in the garbage bin of PvE.

Silverkey.2078:

Mantra of pain is still pretty much without CD. Distraction on the other hand, despite the CD reduction…

It’s neither of those. Mantra of Recovery is the obvious one. With 2 stacks per use it was our most reliable way to keep 5 stacks for the 20% modifier without permanently casting mantra of pain and doing nothing else for just 4 stacks instead.

The change is plain terrible for PvE.

And just you wait, every oxygen-deprived pvp moron is gonna start coming in here justifying the nerf and white knighting out of their pvp resentment with mesmers.