Probably before Dhuumfire was nerfed to hell their condition damage could have been better.
But pvp and the engineer class have made sure the necromancer stays eclipsed in the conditions department.
Engineer for a while even made for a better spike confusion applicator than mesmer. It still applies confusion easier than a mesmer. Engineer has a wide spread of conditions, and frontloads them much better as well on top of that condition application all being aoe/cleaved without needing something like epidemic.
It also helps their power modifiers don’t suck so horribly compared to mesmer/necro/ranger condi specs, whose condition weapons all have terrible power coefficients so a sinister set marginally benefits them.
CC, boon strip, and spike. You don’t defeat eles through sustained damage — their sustain is rather high so you need to force them to blow their cantrips.
Remember, your mindwrack and illusionary blade spikes have shorter cooldowns than their defensive skills do.
The trick is to not let them land burning speed or fire grab, do not let them lightning whip you for long, and avoid drake’s breath if you can.
Time your null field or arcane thievery for when they’ve built up their might stacks/protection to minimize both their offense and defense.
Save your decoy or blink to recharge your mantra of distraction so you can pump out CC, CC absolutely baits their longer cd cantrips and once those cantrips are baited out is when you pop em with CC+mindwrack combos.]
Mesmer, warrior, and thief are highly effective against ele because all these three classes have strong spike and CC options to keep the ele under pressure. Eles perform best against ranger/necro/guardian because those classes have inferior spike/pressure options.
Healing specs will never be good in this game. Damage in this game was not meant to be tanked.
And the reason is pvp. In this game, where there are no pvp/pve damage splits (in wow it exists via the resilience/pvp defense stat), if specializations could heal enough to outheal damage from many bosses in this game, those specs would be broken in pvp.
So groupwide healing sucks. And not only does it suck, it comes at a huge opportunity cost — metric tons of damage loss.
You see, their nail in the coffin to build diversity was STATS. Tying performance so radically to stats means the baseline function of skills is terrible without heavy stat investment, and said stats are limited enough where you can’t cover both damage and support.
There should have never been crit damage or precision or condition damage. All gear should have had a power stat that affects damage output, and the other stats should have been utilitarian choices.
There is nothing more valuable than damage in PvE, not as long as HP pools that need to be depleted exist. Look at games with the trinity, when WoW leading raid guilds optimize, they often try to get away with as few healers and tanks as the encounter will allow. Healers and tanks only exist because the encounter demands it, but the one thing you can never have too much of is damage.
GW2’s toughness, healing power, and vitality stats will never be valued above offensive stats outside pvp.
What’s worse is that this split of offenses and opportunity costs for stats actually reduces your options for weapon usage as well. You are either condi, or you are power, but you can’t be both. Sinister does not bring the synergy of power/crit/crit damage, all of these three values scaling up along each other whereas condition damage does not have this synergistic effect with power.
They realized stats on traitlines was reducing options. Now they only need to take another 2 years to follow the logical conclusion and realize that stats having such a large impact on the baseline functionality of skills is a really bad idea.
People are evaluating what they’ve been given, which is the entire point of a beta?
Which is stupid, because context matters.
If people were given p/d thief, staff guardian, or scepter/d ele or mace/shield warrior in a beta, they’d be crying about how bad the classes are and they couldn’t be more wrong.
Fact is, in PvE nothing but the offensive weapons and utilities matters. And revenant doesn’t have access to them.
It’s no coincidence either that this is the very same test weekend where a pvp format is being tested, so that garbage celestial gear/support weps are there for pvp.
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Anet is REALLY BAD at balancing autoattacks across classes.
Warriors, thieves, and fire/air attunement elementalists have potent autoattacks, while mesmer, necro, ranger and now revenant have weapons with pathetic autoattack damage.
They really don’t understand the importance of autoattacks to sustained DPS and the need for autoattacks to be relatively equal across classes.
Why are people evaluating revenants without the Shiro legend and power scaling weapons?
The weapons they currently have available are the equivalent of the guardian mace, staff, and the typical ranged weapon which is bad in PvE.
Don’t condemn a class when you haven’t even seen the power based options.
Ah, yeah, I forgot about the FGS nerf, no need to stack in order to Fiery Whirl into the corner anymore, can just use Frostbow to annihilate Legendary bosses in seconds.
No faster than a thief or mesmer is gibbing someone from stealth in WvW.
That is just the point though. You can glitch it to avoid all skill requirements, therefore the said skill requirements are redundant. Same as for corner stacking, which unless they have changed mob AI dramatically in the last 8 months, still applies and is still far more mindless than even (worst case senario) PvD in EoTM, at least there you have to be aware of your surroundings. I think you will find, though, that most of those people there and K-Training in WvW are actually PvEers.
I don’t need to trash talk skill requirements of PvE, they speak for themselves. There are maybe half a dozen encounters in the game that can be classed as somewhat challenging. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy stack’n’wack, but Havoc/Roaming in WvW is far more fun and challenging. But, you know, personal opinion and all.Back on topic, again…
I still think that CB with a 15s CD is OP and makes Warhorn redundant, so change the WH skill and CB to 20s CD, reduce the boon duration to 10s and make Windborne Notes add an additional 3 might for 10s.
How to repeat this for the nth time….. META DUNGEON RUNNERS DO NOT STACK. STACKING IS AN INEFFICIENT TACTIC NOT INCLUDED IN ANY CURRENT SPEED RUNS. IT IS IMPLEMENTED BY INCOMPETENT PICK UP GROUPS.
Do not speak to me about glitches in PvE when in PvP there are engineers one shotting people with grenade barrage, thieves and mesmers abusing stealth mechanics with little counterplay and easy getaways, and celestial d/d eles abusing stats and builds to tank multiple people through some brainless rotation spam.
Or the gimmicky warrior/guardian melee stun trains or the well necros just brainlessly bombing aoe.
If anything, there’s good reason why spvp people, particularly tournament runners, look down on WvW. Because unlike WvW, in spvp crit damage % is capped, no OP food and consumables combinations are allowed on top of celestial stats or ascended gear, and the builds used are centered around objectives gameplay and not just some dueling games.
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You know, I would love to indulge you and actually post a video, but I cannot play for another 5 months, so you will truly have to wait on that. This is truth btw.
Soloing Arah or fractal 50 is not fighting a PvE boss. You said the dungeon, if you wanted to see boss solo, you should have said so.
I have solod Mossman on F50 before, it was the easiest thing ever, it was, however about 8 months ago so I’m not sure you can still glitch him out, he just stands there and takes it. Super challenging. Those others are obviously group content and suggesting they can be done solo is ad absurdum.
I have never played BM Bunker, well, I did for about 1hr, realised it is totally boring and went back to my other builds. Btw, duelling is generally power builds.
But yeah, feel free to keep waiting.
Back on topic…
CB with a 15s CD is OP and makes Warhorn redundant, so change the WH skill and CB to 20s CD, reduce the boon duration to 10s and make Windborne Notes add an additional 3 might for 10s.
There are already videos of solos without glitching AI. Too bad you you needed to glitch it to actually do the solo, while trash talking the skill requirements of PvE as you avoid said skill requirements.
Wait, so we are not BM Bunker duelists now? PvDers instead? Confused. Are you suggesting that the entire WvW population are upscales? Seems strange to me, but that is what it looked like you just said. Spamming catapaults is somewhat required in order to get into enemy areas, btw. We cannot PvD all the time.
PvE is quite challenging though, trying to read the AI and AI teams next move and build composition and countering it is really fun, mobility around the dungeon, completing objectives etc, it is great. Oh wait. I meant, seeing how close together you can stack and then spamming skills while not moving at all. Waiting for the red circles, count 1,2, dodge, continue spamming.
Well, you will be waiting a long time for those videos, don’t hold your breath. Neither is challenging in any way, perhaps solo, but then not because of skill or tactics, because of being outnumbered. It’s like saying “I’ll be waiting for your taking down zergs solo videos, though” Nonsensical.
I thought so. Won’t be seeing any videos from you because much like most of the pvp community you’re just talk.
Soloing PvE bosses does not make you outnumbered, you’re fighting a single entity btw. If such niche gameplay like roaming/dueling in WvW which has no impact whatsoever on the outcome of the game format (zergs win the format, not some guys dueling by windmills) can be used as a measure of skill, so can the ability to complete difficult content in PvE without the protection/aid of a group.
But really, show me your tell-reading skills with archdiviner and mossman solos in fractal 50. Or Molten duo or Mai Trin. I’m really waiting since you seem to think people actually stack in PvE when that’s clearly PuG moron tactics. Stacking hasn’t been a thing for the past year, might want to update your tired cliches.
It’s not like you WvW people are original either. BM bunker, PU mesmers, d/d ele, engineers and thieves all around running the same brainless passive builds.
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PvE doesn’t count. You can complete any content with no traits, naked, easily.
We already suggested the perfect solution.
Yeah, killing upscales and beating on wooden doors or spamming catapults requires such mental gymnastics.
I’ll be waiting for your solo fractal 50 and arah videos, though.
Here was a thread discussing the trait from a perspective of PvE and people couldn’t avoid de-railing it to discuss their WvW dueling scenarios. Great.
This is why this class is always at the bottom of the pile in most facets of the game, the WvW BM bunker duelists start blabbering about “this is OP” as if any of the game formats were made with 1v1’s in mind.
So here are some facts. In any group, the warrior/eles/guardians will keep the group not only with full might stacks but perma fury as well. A ranger being able to do so makes no difference, and in fact the ranger still has to pay a larger cost for it.
I’m tired of this class being nerfed over and over and generally held back because of these 1v1/roaming obsessed people.
They completely messed up the design of this trait. (what a surprise)
You cannot just throw a weapon skill on pet swapping because:
- if you balance it with a rather high ICD it becomes extremly frustrating to use since you expect it to proc when you swap weapons especially since you want to combo the blast finisher
- if you sync the ICD with pet swap cooldowns (which is hard again because you can trait both seperately) the skill becomes relatively OP and makes the weapon itself really obsolete
What should be done is divide the trait and the weapon skill from each other. Make the trait proc on every pet swap no matter if traited or not. Make the trait effect weaker like only 10s of fury and swiftness, no might, no blast finisher. Change might stacks of warhorn skill from 1 to 5.
Doesn’t change anything. You nerf the trait for PvE and PvE rangers won’t take warhorn over offhand axe because an ele or warrior can stack might and fury without using a low dps weapon combo. The warhorn’s CoTW has a horrendously long cd for what it does, and its #4 is a DPS loss over autoattacking and brings nothing outside single target damage.
Those are the problems that need fixing with the warhorn, if the #4 skill were actually worthwhile the trait wouldn’t eclipse the weapon.
You want perma group fury (400 precision) and perma 5 might (150 power) with perma swiftness (+33% run speed) from one Adept trait?
I’m willing to compromise, take the Might away completely and make CoTW 10s Fury/Swiftness only and able to be used out of combat with a 15s CD, change the WH skill CD too.
Make Windborne Notes apply Regen and 3 Might for 10s. Then you would need both the horn and trait for all four perma.
Why would you want pets to scale with Ranger stats? Then you couldn’t have a jaguar smashing face while you load them up on condi. What they need is to put condi damage on the ones with conditions, or make Expertise Training like 700 condi damage. Actually, they should just allow application of any PvP amulet to your pet, so you can choose the stats.
Elementalists already get perma 12 stacks of might from weaponskills alone, no trait investment, so I don’t get what your fuss is about.
It doesn’t matter that this is an adept trait, you invest into the full line so the placement of the trait doesn’t matter.
And yes, I want pets to scale with ranger stats, because I don’t give a kitten about WvW or spvp duels as a BM bunker. My concerns are not about those game formats seeing as I have no interest in playing them. What I am concerned with is that the class is garbage tier in PvE, and it’s not that much better in spvp from what I am told either, so it’s good that you enjoy it for WvW roaming/duels but that bears little value to me.
In PvE it doesn’t matter that you can spec for a useless condi bunker role while the pet still does miserable damage. In PvE damage and burst are king, and the ranger fails in those roles because part of his damage (the pet) does not gain a 60%+ crit damage bonus from berzerker gear. The pets do not gain the 10% damage difference in effectiveness that comes from full ascended berserker vs. full exotics berzerker.
The pet’s performance is static and does not scale with gear upgrades or the stats from food that the ranger consumes.
Your windborne notes suggestion is useless to me as well. In PvE you don’t spec into the worthless nature magic and wilderness survival traitlines, they’re a DPS loss. The shouts themselves are terrible an nobody uses them, and 5 stacks of might isn’t going to change that.
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You can remove the instant cast when you remove the charge up time of a mantra. What the hell is the point of a skill with a 2.5 sec cast time if you can’t bank those uses for immediate use.
The reason ranger is an inferior condi spec is because unlike engineer or necro it cannot spread/cleave/aoe condi bombs anywhere as well as the other classes.
It is a single target condi spec in a game that’s all about aoe/cleave.
It’s fine what you did with Zephyr’s, but you need to do the same with Clarion bond. We should get a blast finisher on pet swap and a 15 sec icd on applying groupwide fury isn’t really OP. It’s just bad that the trait isn’t synced with the pet swap cd.
If anything, Call of The Wild should apply more might stacks, somewhere around 5. Ele with persisting flames and usual rotation can at least maintain perma fury on group and 6-9 stacks of might without doing anything special, and let’s not alk PSEA warrior perma 25 might stacks and high fury uptime for the group on top of banners which are far superior versions of spirits.
Also move fortifying bond to BM and for the love of god buff autoattack damage across all ranger weapons except perhaps longbow. Particular candidates are greatsword and mainhand axe autoattacks.
P.S. The whole pet stats fiasco should be thrown in the trash bin. What’s so hard about making pets scale off the master’s stats like mesmer illusions. Ranger pets means around 20% of the ranger’s damage does not have the full crit damage bonus rating that a full berserker ranger has because pets can’t reach a similar level.
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Nature’s Vengeance
Regardless of how you guyz believe this trait is underpowered I see a lot of potential in it.
The truth is – it’s actually a 33% boon uptime to every single boon it provides.
- 33% Protection uptime is quite high
- Swiftness combined with the effect on spirit provides around 125% uptime all by itself
- 33% Regeneration uptime has a potential to cover up uses with Windborne Notes(horn)
- 33% Vigor is not bad, either.
The only thing is Might…
… And yes – this is plain terrible. Doesn’t stack in duration but intensity. And the amount is plain horrible.Solution:
Frost Spirit – Grants 1 second of Quickness every 3 seconds.For this – your DPS from beast-mastery goes down noticeably, but your team-support goes up. And this is a grandmaster trait what we are talking about. And it should feel like it. Moreover, it would stack with other Quickness applications just as every single boon that is provided via Spirits. (Means it will be an option to prolong Guardian’s Quickness, but will not be OP at boss fights because of Mesmer’s long-lasting Quickness)
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This would make Rangers finally a choice for PvE. Spotter has a cap, Frost Spirit is not as effective as other classes’ buffs.
And since it’s only for 1 second – it won’t make it OP. This is the solution to our PvE problems.
The uptime numbers are meaningless if you can’t guarantee the protection being up when you actually need it.
If you lay a frost spirit and the boss attacks every 2 seconds or every second really, and those hits like in fractal 50 are hitting for as hard as 7-10k an autoattack from mossman, 1 second of protection on a 3 sec interval is worthless.
Compounding Power is just a flat 9% boost to everything, it’s better in pve.
If you assume illusions all die the moment they are summoned, you have to assume Compounding Power provides 0% boost, too.
Otherwise if you get to consider CP to be a 9% boost (i.e.: permanent 3 illusions up), then someone else can assume they can always run full-power shatter, phantasm or phantasm-shatter.
The difference here is phantasms have much longer cooldowns than illusions. When my phantasms get killed, I can keep Compounding power running its bonus through the clones, so the uptime of that trait is better given that clones are much easier to replace than phantasms.
Shortly before release, Jon Peters asked the mesmer community on these very forums for suggestions to Cry of Frustration since he admitted the shatter was missing something and was weak.
Nothing happened ever since.
Mesmer forums are mostly flooded by pvp mesmers anyways, it’s not like you can get helpful discussions when you post a thread about mesmer PvE and most of the posters responding are WvW mesmers who casually do dungeons.
Greatsword is a perfectly fine weapon for cleaving trash. It has your best cleaving phantasm. Mirror blade>iberserker>mindspike> swap to mh sword and spawn a 3rd clone for an easy shatter aoe burst.
Someone might say iwarden also does aoe but its dps is actually worse for the cleave than the iberserker given that the iwarden is not only stationary, but its damage channel is far longer than the phantasm gets to live in a pack of lv50 fractal or arah mobs.
Where the greatsword becomes bad is at any point you are stuck autoattacking with it. And as a ranged weapon when you are with a pug doing either the grawl shaman or molten duo it works perfectly fine since in molten duo you don’t get to melee all the time if your group doesn’t DPS correctly and reflects/aegis run out before the boss is dead.
In an ideal world you would be allowed to run sw/sw+sw/p for optimal single target boss dps, but that is not a luxury everyone will always have much less a guy who is not only less experienced with playing a mesmer but also not familiar with attack patterns in fractal 50.
Rampage is just a way better Lich Form. Of course, it’s not the first time warriors have superior versions of what other classes have.
Look at Healing signet vs. Signet of Vampirism, for one.
i disagree with it being better but defiantly situational. A warrior literally has to run up to you and catch you and if there not running immune to condi you can literally blind all there attacks.(eles burns and necro plague form) With lich form you can be fighting outside the circle and kind of snipe from a far. Most of the time lich form gets me its cause i was fighting someone on the mid of the circle and there just free casting on me. Then im sitting there going whoa i just lost 6k health then bam im down. When someone whos using rampage you clearly see him since hes a giant right on you.
If you are getting sniped by a projectile that travels slower than a snail/turtle and can simply be side-stepped, it’s your own fault.
Lich form does not even allow the use of utilities, so the necro lich form can’t even run condition immune, his projectiles can be reflected/blinded as well, and lich form in fact does not deal more damage and it doesn’t even offer CC.
In fact, the damage comparison between lich 1 spam and a deaths shroud necro build #1 spam produced similar dps in pve scenarios. A necro running dagger/focus with well of suffering actually puts out more damage doing autoattacks than using lich form, it’s why no necros use lich form in PvE.
People just see a single hit at a slower interval as “more damage” than several more hits at shorter intervals.
Rampage is just a way better Lich Form. Of course, it’s not the first time warriors have superior versions of what other classes have.
Look at Healing signet vs. Signet of Vampirism, for one.
What offends me even more is how perfect a display this video is of how bad ranger pets are at keeping up with moving targets let alone hitting them.
The pet did not just miss due to blinding ashes, it simply could not keep uptime on a moving target, because the worthless pets undergo an attack animation that makes them stationary so every time they go to attack a target the target has walked out of range.
2+ kitten years and a class mechanic is still this broken and puny.
Ranger also is just bad. Power ranger is not only bad due to the low damage coefficients outside rapidfire, but also because ranger is the one power class besides warrior with no boon removal, his power specs unlike guardian or warrior don’t have access to burning to answer classes with high protection boon uptimes like ele and other guardians.
Most importantly, ranger condi removal and stunbreaks are horrendous. Ranger condi removal is tied to a condi traitline in wilderness survival, as a grandmaster trait. This majorly screws power spec.
What’s more, the ranger’s condi removal utilities and stunbreak traits transfer negative effects to the pet, reducing the ranger’s performance, a drawback no other class suffers on his traits/utilities. Not only is Signet of Renewal a whopping 60 sec cd stunbreak that screws over your pet, its effects are actually underpowered compared to other stunbreakers.
I mean, look at Shared Anguish. CC your pet instead of you, 60 sec cd, CC’s the pet which is about 1/3 your damage and your main source of cc/utility. Compare that against Hard to Catch or Mirror of Anguish, or the warrior/ele ones.
Rangers just have really, really bad utilities. The terrible shouts like guard andprotect me weren’t even addressed (protect me is virtually a crappier endure pain, which makes the pet stop attacking to protect you and kills it in the process).
And if this weren’t insult enough, they nerfed Clarion Bond with a whopping 30 sec ICD instead of a 15 sec icd one that syncs with pet swap.
My favorite part is when people think that spinning around randomly to try to counter someone is good game design.
I have always thought it was silly that a Thief remains stealthed while spamming Backstab, though. Not many things were more frustrating than successfully dodging a Thief’s Backstab, only to be Backstabbed once my dodge roll ends. The risk/reward doesn’t seem to match up, but that goes for a whole slew of insta-cast abilities that hard-burst.
The worst part is that the thief does not actually have to hit your back. The side/flank will suffice to gain the backstab bonus.
It’s actually a very generous ability that can be used around every 6 seconds and has no telegraph/wind up unlike warrior/mesmer burst.
It also happens that the very skill the thief uses to enter backstab blinds the target (so they have to first miss an attack before they try to prevent the thief from heartseeking into BP) and creates a pretty safe melee zone for the thief.
And this is on the class with the largest amount of teleports and resets ingame so while a mesmer/ele/warrior blow their 30+ second cd’s to do a burst sequence or defend themselves, the thief has far more frequent availability to both his defenses via stealth and at the same time his defense is also his own form of offense as stealth is not only an avoidance tool but grants access to one of the strongest nukes in the game.
Initiative simply allows the thief to spam his hard hitting attacks over and over more frequently than the defensive abilities of his opponents recharge.
Look at an ele. His full burst sequence involves a 36 sec cd Fire Grab, a 20 sec cd arcane missile, on top of landing an aimed burning speed. Or even worse, landing a phoenix. If he misses any of that, he’s out of commission for a good 20 seconds until his burst skills come back up.
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Problem is in high lv pve it’s not uncommon that even iduelists die the moment they are summoned.
Try the molten duo for example, more often than not the phantasm will be dead before a 3 clone shatter after their volleys are over.
Moreover, that’s an 8 sec cd of you doing absolutely miserable damage, and having to interrupt your autoattacks for a 1 second cast time again. Compounding Power is just a flat 9% boost to everything, it’s better in pve.
in pvp I can see some uses for thios trait but I bet most people will still want compounding power for the xtra mindwrack burst that mesmers rely on as mesmer sustained damage is really bad.
Miku kinda said everything, just to sum it up with my point of view.
If you want to have fast runs, mesmer was always better than a guard, but the mesmer himself has to skip quite some loot.
For your daily dungeon runs, the loot and rewards are the things why you do them, so why should you skip them?
So here comes the guardian. He can replace the mesmer quite well, with higher self-dps and better support to get smooth runs. And now with the quickness shout, the difference isnt that huge anymore. Ofcourse, one or two portals will save up more time, but you will miss out the aegies carrier.As a result, you can run mesmer in dungeons, but unless you preskip stuff and use portals, guardian is better, when you want to be fast.
Bolded for emphasis. That’s basically the TL;DR
Probably only for bad class compositions in a fractal run. The fact is if you run warrior/ele/thief/mesmer/engi in a group (which isn’t even the ideal warrior/thief/ele/ele/mesmer setup), and they have their proper migth and fury stacking builds, defense won’t even be a problem because anything that’s a threat is dying immediately.
Guardian is mostly for carrying pug groups that don’t have a PS warrior or ele, and contain a ranger or necromancer.
I didn’t say it didn’t help. I said giving the mantra a greater recast timer IS gutting the skill. In PvE the sword offhand #4 is an interrupt on a 10 sec cd— if the mantra, which needs to be channeled after 3 uses, does no damage on its own, carries a longer cooldown, I have virtually no incentive to use it ever on PvE.
ooops. We’re talking about different things now. Confusion too stronk. Sorry! I don’t use MoD in my Signet build. I use CS, which is what I was referring to. Just to clarify, no one is suggesting a change to MoD or increasing its CD or anything. The focus is on CS and its ICD.
The use of MoD in PvE is quick stripping of defiance or reliable and frequent interrupts.
You must excuse my obvious ignorance as I do not PvE. I assume you dislike the proposed change to CS having a multi target 10s icd, because for bosses, stuns chip defiance more than daze?
With the new system it will be on a stronger tier, yes. And the fact is outside spvp most mesmers won’t be tab targeting mobs to stun with CS.
The problem is the STATS, not the skills or traits. Berserker is broken, that simple.
The way crit damage stacks with the high crit chance and all the new damage modifiers means damage has far outscaled the effectiveness of stacking toughness and vitality. Power stats synergize with each other, defensive stats do not have this anywhere close to the same extent.
Nobody is complaining that soldier/knights thieves and mesmers and guardians and warriors are melting them.
You need to, before you undermine the meaningful changes to the classes, cap crit damage in pvp formats and curb the amount of crits and extra damage procs upon said absurd spike.
Any player knows it’s not even toughness and vitality that make the biggest impact in their survival. It’s the active defenses, and the reason berserker and offensive condition builds shine is because in this game players are allowed to obtain high offensive value while still getting to keep all their active defenses. It really dwarfs the impact of toughness and vitality on your survival when classes are running around with so many teleports and blinds and built in evades and invulnerability skills/frames.
P.S. This thread is not about conditions. There are ways to curb condition damage in PvE as well, from tweaking the formula in a PvP split to also making it harder to frontload boatloads of conditions like engineers and warriors and now guardians currently can.
The CC is virtually of no issue in any other build that isn’t berserker.
The damage berserker stats are putting out while being coupled with CC is the problem, not the CC itself.
Why do you want to gut the skills when the obvious problem is that players can achieve inordinate amounts of crit damage bonus and crit chance plus % damage modifiers in a PvP setting where vitality and toughness values don’t enjoy the same multipliers/scaling.
This is factually wrong. I speak from experience when I say the CC from CS helps my support signet build a lot. In the way of conquest, hard CC is valuable in any build if you’re able to realistically take it. btw, I use Cleric’s Amulet.
No one is advocating that the skill be gutted. Can you please give a quote suggesting such? Otherwise, those claims appear to be hyperbole and conjecture. Hmm those are two nouns I’ve had to use a lot the last two days on the forums.
You do bring up a great point. Players are doing a lot of insane damage. This is a fundamental issue that needs to be looked at with a critical eye. Outside of bugs, this should be anet’s priority #1. It still doesn’t address the issue of CS combined with MoD having a short CD that prevents counterplay. Until perma dodge/aegis/stability becomes a thing, 5 seconds is just too short.
I didn’t say it didn’t help. I said giving the mantra a greater recast timer IS gutting the skill. In PvE the sword offhand #4 is an interrupt on a 10 sec cd— if the mantra, which needs to be channeled after 3 uses, does no damage on its own, carries a longer cooldown, I have virtually no incentive to use it ever on PvE.
The use of MoD in PvE is quick stripping of defiance or reliable and frequent interrupts.
Your support signet build with the mantra isn’t winning anybody tournaments in spvp, much less winning the higher tiers of competition.
This is a talking point pvp players keep parroting, that things should have cast times and counterplay, but we don’t see neither a cast time or counterplay claim to skills like blink or instant stealth in decoy use (and stealth virtually has little to no counters, just prediction games). The fact is, neither cast times nor counterplay are required for every instance in the game when it comes to pvp.
CS and PB and MoD only become a problem with berserker stats and the current state of burst. If Mindwracks aren’t critting people for 12k, people wouldn’t be complaining about the combo. The problematic part of a combo is that a mesmer can combo a stun into either a 1 or 2-shot hit, if the combo only took 1/4 of your life you would bet the forum would be more silent about it.
The proposals you make for the skill are extraneous and harm more than help, affecting non-berserker builds alike for which this combo is not broken.
Yes it was nice that Power Block now adds weakness, but it is still on “interrupt”. How often do you really “interrupt” a thief? And is weakness really GM worthy when you do? They just Consume Plasma twice and be right as rain.
I interrupt thieves nearly 90% of the times I use an interrupt. They spam attacks so regularly that you can even “accidentally” interrupt them.
Right now, if your going to duel a thief, would you pick “Power Block” as your GM?
If I’m going to duel a thief, I’m going to choose Blinding Dissipation and profit. That evens the playing field entirely, making their chances of beating you 60% instead of 90%. And most thieves aren’t as skilled as Mesmers, so that right there evens the playing field even more.
Shouldn’t a GM be just as powerful and build defining no matter the enemy?
No. Some gms directly counter certain builds. That’s why we have many to choose from. See Diamond Skin and how it counters every condi build using a Rabid or Settler’s Amulet. I get the frustration about Power Block in reference to thieves, but it now does decently well against thieves due to weakness and dmg.
@MailMail Your right, that is the issue. I’m afraid that CS being an “Adept” level trait is TOO powerful even with a 10 second ICD. And if CS stays at adept level, it will be adjust accordingly. By making CS a GM, it’s power is “justified” and has a greater chance of staying as is.
There’s no justifying a 5 second hard CC with no counterplay. There’s a sensible way to balance it. It’s a matter of if Anet will listen or not. I think it’d be better to rally around the ideas suggested, because you know Anet is going to nerf it eventually.
The CC is virtually of no issue in any other build that isn’t berserker.
The damage berserker stats are putting out while being coupled with CC is the problem, not the CC itself.
Why do you want to gut the skills when the obvious problem is that players can achieve inordinate amounts of crit damage bonus and crit chance plus % damage modifiers in a PvP setting where vitality and toughness values don’t enjoy the same multipliers/scaling.
Before the trait changes both these traits were GM and neither one was decent enough to be worthy of a GM position. With the trait changes, both traits are definitely build defining and are worthy of GM.
My opinion is that CS should be left as is and moved to the GM slot along side Power Block and Imagine Burden. Mental Anguish should be moved down to Adept or Master and its damage adjusted.
The combination of CS & Power Block is just too much. And rather then seeing one or both nerfed BACK to uselessness, I’d rather have the option to chose one or the other. And further providing Mesmer’s options in the Domination line.
Yeah, give me an even worse choice of GM’s for PvE.
I hate you pvp people. Just ask for a damage reduction aura or nerf berserker amulets in your crappy game format, why should a class that’s bottom tier dps in PvE suffer because your pvp format is poorly balanced.
Except for the part that should that backstab attempt fail because you used some long cd defenses, any smart thief can cheaply renew stealth to try again or simply port away and re-engage when the mesmer’s defenses are on cooldown.
The whole problem with the thief is that his burst and mobility are on effectively lower cd’s than the defenses of cooldown based classes’ active defenses.
They can reset at will without any counter and if they’re patient they’re gonna run the mesmer out of cd’s.
Is anyone really surprised? Thieves were already burst kings with the best mobility out of all berk classes and the best active defenses.
This patch they got 17% extra crit damage from traits, 10% extra damage modifier from having a condition on you (which they automatically apply with steal), extra damage modifier from trickery, and extra ferocity conversion on critical strikes.
Virtually, thief got the largest amount of damage modifiers on top of the highest base numbers values on their attacks on top of permanent poison uptime on the target.
And with hidden killer it’s even easier to land a backstab now since you get a free backstab every time you use steal on a target.
They also got executioner now as they don’t need to choose between the grandmasters that made them compete before.
Mesmers dps has actually improved as far as i can tell. Only nerf was the the mantra change. But in most dungeons you dont really have the space to stack loads of mantras for the old dps trait.
You’re quite right. Though actually, with mantras now recharging while charged, and harmonious mantras being mixed with empowering, it’s actually a buff to mantra builds too in a sense. the play required is much more active, but you can now keep up an 8-12% bonus by actually doing damage with mantra of pain, while only having to give up 1 utility slot instead of 3. With 2 slots sacrificed this is even easier.
My issue with this is that it is still a more convoluted version of what other classes get.
Berserker’s Power gets a whopping 20% damage boost for 10 seconds, and warriors can luckily use a burst skill every 10 seconds so they get 20% extra damage for using their class mechanic.
Fragility is another example where the mesmer gets a more convoluted version. Before it was 10% extra damage to foes that had vulnerability on them, just like the warrior/thief/ele versions. Now it’s 0.5% per stack of vulnerability, basically an extra 2.5% ove the 10% at the inconvenience of relying on your group to keep vulnerability up for you.
And I have my suspicions this is all tied to the pvp whine around mesmers. I wish they’d just nerf berserker amulets and cap crit damage % in spvp/WvW so the mesmer could stop being held back in competitive damage potential just because they have really strong burst in other game formats.
Mesmer also has the luxury of mobile stealth for the group. Shadow Refuge forces you to stop in place for 3 seconds, and so does smoke screen blasting.
The real weakness to mesmer is their AI mechanisms, since this game hate AI and murders them with aoe spam, decreasing the practical damage of mesmers and rangers alike.
Moreover, guardian doesn’t bring boon strip which might become of use down the line (and is already useful in fractals like the urban fractal where stripping 25 might stacks off the monks significantly improves your group’s survival; in the dredge fractal null field is effectively a field that grants 33% increased damage since it strips the protection dredge like to spam on themselves).
Mesmer can pull mobs to a desired place from a distance, not needing to surround himself with the mobs unlike binding blades.
The illusions are also not of insignificant use. Many are the times where my illusions in fire shaman have baited a fire arrow that could have hit somebody else or made rezzing more difficult. Same goes for mossman really.
The real frustration as a mesmer is illusion despawning upon mob death (unlike Kasmeer’s illusions who follow her around in Living Story), the phantasm ramp up without AoE damage reduction that is a standard for any other MMO.
And in HoT shatters won’t even be as much of a drawback with chronophantasm trait.
How about condi in WvW which is nuts.
It’s mainly the burning. The largest offenders on burning are ele/guardian/engi.
Nerf berserker amulet instead. I don’t hear people crying about mesmer in valkyrie/soldiers/knights amulets.
All berserker and burning centric specs are doing silly damage given how little vitality scaled up by comparison.
It’s not a “burst meta” at all. Right now everybody is still experimenting with builds, and yes, there is a lot of damage going around. You would describe intelligent play as dodging high bursts… Why not play intelligently and dodge/avoid high damage burst then?
I went over this you cant dodge while stunned or when they are in stealth that is prediction and not skill. Also the most problematic skills aren’t the ones you can dodge but the instant effect ones like Mantra of disruption when it stuns.
Mantra of Distraction. And of course it should be instant, how the hell are you supposed to interrupt 3/4 let alone 1/4 sec casts with a skill solely intended to interrupt if it’s not instant.
Rather than gutting mesmer for everybody else people like you should be arguing for the berzerker amulets to be nerfed. Just reduce crit damage in spvp to something like 25% crit damage bonus cap and the burst will come down.
People will not take mantra of recovery over signet heal for PvE. Mantra of Pain is what you’ll use to gain your mantra charges. Phantasms are too important a part of mesmer dps to forego a signet that allows you to bring a phantasm back in a game that loves to aoe bomb them to death immediately.
Mantra of Recovery however will be quite useful in select encounters like Mai Trin with restorative mantras and maybe even the Fire Shaman boss to counter sustained damage.
Well, they had the great idea of giving thieves out of all classes more damage with 17% extra crit damage traits, as if their 10% extra damage on targets with a condition and % damage increase from initiative and executioner weren’t enough.
It’s not like thieves weren’t the highest single target damage class in the game, let’s buff it some more those backstabs and HS aren’t critting high enough. And hidden thief of course granting easy backstabs on a low cd steal on a class that can now pretty much have permanent poison uptime on a target to make sure that they can’t heal for crap after they eat a 10k untelegraphed backstab from stealth.
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It is your entire mentality that has kept out necros and rangers out of PvE meta. Damage is the most valued commodity in a game with no trinity. If as a mesmer you can’t compete in damage, you’ll always be competing with a guardian for a slot as it will still be thief/ele/ele/warrior/x.
Yes, personal blame! Do it! RAAAAAGE!
Or, you know, you could just admit that single-ability or single-trait class-to-class comparisons are completely bogus and have absolutely no information you can obtain from them.
Yeah, comparing minor traits that predicate a damage boost upon the presence of a condition across classes is totally apples and oranges.
Especially when the previous version to the patch was a 10% flat when vulnerability was on the mob, just as the ele/thief versions.
Anything else, forum warrior?
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Whoa, it’s you that’s living in Lala land. Ele hasn’t brought 25 might since PS warrior happened. Sure they do the fury thing and help with sustained vuln and burst with glyph of storms assuming not needing blind (on a 60s CD). Earth elemental is situational and a brown bear does the same job.
Thief has naturally high modifiers but hey, mesmer has better modifiers than ranger, guard, necro, possibly warrior and engy too. Though we’re not top of everything so I guess that’s your beef? We still have the second most game breaking elite atm and our base damage was buffed nicely.
We also get invuln states folded into out dps options but I guess we skip that just as we skip past the silly high reflect damage we have now if we want it, or the stupid levels of support or the instant recharge on the most powerful skipping tool in the game.
Sure Mesmer has some major failings in PvE but damage modifiers isn’t one of them, it’s the reliance on phantasms and long casts for power damage.
The availability of warriors doesn’t erase the fact eles have fire fields with permanent uptime that the party can abuse if the warrior fails at mightstacking, or the fact that ele is still the main provider of perma fury, boss stuns via ice bow, and pretty much baseline access to field blasts and water fields.
Earth elemental is used pretty much in a large amount of lv50 fractals, and brown bear is garbage because you have to bring a ranger (bad enough) and gut the ranger’s damage as the bear autoattacks do less than a burning tick worth of damage.
Mesmer also doesn’t have better modifiers than warrior with berserker’s power, which is easy 100% uptime and his modifier on bleeding foes, and warrior base numbers for his weapons far surpass mesmer. Engineer far surpasses mesmer in damage while bringing potent utility of its own as well (and far easier vuln stacking).
I don’t want to hear about invuln states, thief pistol whip is virtually the same and warrior post-vigor nerf is the class with the most access to dodges since they forgot to nerf their precious stamina regen signet while nerfing everybody else’s endurance returns. or the fact that whirlwind has a built in evade frame in it as well.
Mesmer is bottom damage alongside necro, even post-changes. I know some of you are fine being a gimmick class that people bring just for the portals and veils, but I’d like a point in this game where people could bring more than one mesmer as they bring more eles or thieves.
But all this talk is verging off topic since a few posts ago considering the whole point is discussing how our minor trait is a more convoluted, group dependent version of what thieves and elementalists get for free through mere autoattacks.
9% compounding power + 12.5% fragility + 20% harmonious mantras
-> 47.15% modis.Also we got stacking ferocity.
Our modis are good as they are, we aren’t supposed to be the main damage class. Also fragility minor is ok too imo, since a) in pt you have those 25 stacks vuln and in b) in pvp you have your F3 + interrupt to get up there very fast.
It’s like we live in LaLa land in these forums. You’re not keeping up 20% modifier in PvE with mantras, you’re bursting with it and then at best you can keep up 12% if you keep casting mantra of pain.
150 ferocity is also far less than 17% extra crit damage from thief.
Your whole point about main damage class is asinine. There’s no support class. Eles bring 25 might stacks and permafury to the group on top of glyph of sandstorm and earth ele. Thieves bring black powder, smoke screen and stealth skips.
It is your entire mentality that has kept out necros and rangers out of PvE meta. Damage is the most valued commodity in a game with no trinity. If as a mesmer you can’t compete in damage, you’ll always be competing with a guardian for a slot as it will still be thief/ele/ele/warrior/x.
Your initial post was about “a solo or pvp scenario”. In that scenario you can stack 20 vulnerability using Diversion (with Dazzling) on your target with 3 clones and IP and subsequently burst it down with Mind Wrack enjoying a 10% bonus damage from Fragility.
In PVE, applying vulnerability on the target is a group effort and other classes are arguably better than mesmer, but who cares? Everyone in the party will benefit from the vulnerability, and the mesmer will benefit 50% more (37.5% vs 25% damage increase).
Solo OR pvp setting. Not just PvP setting. In a PvE group setting I was illustrating the amount of effort involved and group reliance to receive a 12.5% benefit while a thief or ele get 10% just using their own regular attacks, no complications.
And using dazzling, again as I’ve told you, doesn’t work in PvE with mobs that have defiance, and if you’re a phantasm build or anything non-shatter for that matter you’re not sustaining 20+ stacks of vulnerability at a 100% uptime because using Diversion in any place other than shatter pvp buils is DUMB.
Is it really that hard to comprehend. I mean saying mesmers get 37.5% versus others is so unbelievably dumb. That 25% vulnerability comes for EVERYBODY.
Mesmer has compounding power 9%+12.5% fragility. That’s 21.5% damage modifier.
Ele has 10%another 10% from water line10% in fire attunement.20% extra damage to targets below 50% health. Or a 30% damage modifier stacking on top of 25% vulnerability for kitten bonus on top of vulnerability or a 75% bonus to targets below 50% health.
Thief has 10% against a foe with conditions. 12% damage increase from initiative. 20% against foes below 50% health. 17% extra crit damage from traits. So 47% with vulnerability up, or 67% on a foe below 50% health and of course 17% extra crit damage on top of that.
I’m not even counting the far superior autoattack (aka sustained damage) and bread and butter nukes (backstab for thief, which doesn’t destroy his damage, unlike shatter killing phantasms, same goes for ele lava tomb or meteor shower).
So, yeah, please stick to WvW/pvp videos, you clearly haven’t looked at the numbers and how mesmer still ranks lowest in DPS (meaning not just gimmick pvp burst).
you might want to check the other minor traits in Domination
I did, and last I checked in PvE you’re not wanting to shatter anyways so it’s not like 3-6 stacks of vulnerability per mindwrack are great, and bosses with defiance are immune to interrupt mechanics so the dazzling trait doesn’t trigger.
Not like you even have much interrupts to keep up 20+ stacks of vulnerability at 100% uptime for a 10% damage boost (you won’t murder your damage output of phantasms just to use diversion to interrupt, sword interrupt is on a ~10 sec cd and pistol is even longer and the duration from vulnerability applied is less than that) from the minor similar to what thieves get just by autoattacking with dagger for full poison uptime or eles get perma burning on a target for their 10% as well.
This is why I hate PvP/WvW mesmers with a passion. All they base their opinions on is on a mindwrack/mind stab burst combo on targets whose health probably don’t exceed 23k hp and feel entitled to speak about mesmer damage output as if burst and sustained damage is the same thing.
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I don’t understand why mesmer is the one class that needs an entire group to stack 25 stacks of vulnerability to receive a similar modifier a thief has by just having poison or any condition on a target, and the same goes for warrior and elementalist.
You need 25 stacks of vulnerability for a 12.5% boost. The realistic scenario in a solo or pvp setting reduces the bonus of this minor to more likely 10 stacks at most, or a 5% boost. More than likely you’ll be looking at like 5-7 stacks on a constant uptime by yourself.
Why do thieves and elementalists get a minor that gives them a whopping 10% with easy uptime of burning/poison or any condition while the mesmer needs a dedicated group to gain full benefit from his own?
Make it 10% when a target is afflicted by vulnerability, or increase the bonus to 15-20% for the stacking version.
As it is we just have a practically inferior and highly group dependent version of what thieves, eles, and warriors get for free on their own.
And Guardians now have “Feel My Wrath” for an elite that gives fury and quickness for 5s every 30s. Compared to Time Warp which gives quickness for 10s every 180s.
Why bother having a mesmer in a group any more when the previous best PvE elite in the game is now completely overshadowed. Everything a mesmer does in PvE is better accomplished by a guardian now.
Because you only need the quickness in burst for the boss anyways. You don’t need the quickness for trash they die within a single attack cycle.
For bosses the mesmer can keep up quickness longer for the entire burst chain, and it slows the boss to boot, trivializing bosses like Lupicus even more.
What’s more, when Chronomancer is in you’ll get double time warp, so 20 seconds of aoe quickness and slow.
Now, in WvW it’s where the guardian shout is an issue, since guardians can now effectively keep up quickness on their group for very long times and unlike Time Warp it’s not stationary.
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