Guild Wars 2

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Inspirations provides much more than that:

AoE condi cleanse on heal
AoE invulnerability in emergencies (and sometimes on signet use)
Rampant reflects (which many times are needed, and are useful as they do damage, whereas warden would normally take projectile damage away)
More Durable Phantasms
And then the choice of boon duplication or enhanced glamors. Synergizes with domination to make yet another AoE invulnerability.

Essentially, inspirations provides you all those sorts of little bits and bobs that help deal with whatever random crap that fractals will throw at you.

But I do agree that duelist is almost a must-have trait line. Perma vigor, nigh perma fury on yourself, perma fury on phantasms, up to 150 ferocity fairly reliably, and more potent mantras with a temp damage boost. While most other lines have a trait or two you can use, dueling is chock full of them, whether you are running a power or condi build.

You don’t need the aoe condi clear. That’s why you got staff eles with healing rain. Or Null field/Mantra instead.

AoE invulnerability is just a perk. We haven’t had it in fractal 50’s and yet they are still easily cleared.

The rampant reflects are extraneous. You got Feedback, that’s really all you need in most circumstances.

I don’t think people realize how quickly the eles/thieves/warriors in your group are killing mobs/bosses that an iwarden reflect is really just a luxury.

Maybe in HoT we’ll have actually intense content that may demand these support items, but in the meantime the OP does not get room to complain.

You got your damage options in dom/dueling/illusions. No, you do not need inspiration even for fractal 50.

Why are you even taking inspiration. You don’t need warden’s feedback, and longer lasting glamours is not even needed with the speed you kill things right now and even before the patch.

You sound like one of those mesmers trying too hard to bring utility and complaining about sacrificing damage in the process.

Dump inspiration, pick up dueling. You can replace power block with mental anguish to burst shatter when a boss is near death or doing trash since your phantasms die immediately on trash anyways.

The mesmer and ranger forums are basically Stockholm Syndrome central.

Why are people calling for nerfs based on the experience of a 3 year old poorly designed and maintained dungeon set.

The game is to be balanced for the upcoming content not this husk that we have right now.

As far as the OP, they decided thieves didn’t have enough damage so they gave them even more damage and crit damage modifiers so that they can be the undisputed king of DPS by miles compared to all the classes who didn’t get damage modifiers.

And they didn’t address the elephant in the room for the underperforming classes which was their pitiful autoattacks and weapon skill damage values so I don’t know why you would think mesmer/ranger/necro would do any better on the DPS rankings.

If anything, they nerfed ranger by removing damage modifiers and moving spotter to the kitten skirmishing line (and they changed the 10% damage from flanking to 10% increased chance to crit, nerfing the trait).

Necro is a joke, they really didn’t do much for the damage and utterly gutted consume conditions with some gimmick design and nerfed Lich for some weird reason.

PLEASE MAKE A SPLIT OF PVE/PVP if you’re going to nerf conditions…..don’t nerf conditions back into irrelevance for pvp whining.

Also, don’t take engineer being OP as a representative of what other classes can do with conditions. Engineers have always been the true masters of conditions, not necromancers.

No, it seems working like intended because the whole point of mantras was that you get very low cooldowns in exchange for the cost of having a cast time that doesn’t let you do anything in the meantime.

It’s a very nice change for PvE and I hope duelists complaining about PU mesmers using it don’t get the heal gutted for everybody else. PvP always has the effect of ruining it for other people.

Besides, this change makes the mantra heal actually competitive as every mesmer was using ether feast or signet of illusions. And in spvp I still doubt mesmers will be using this heal as thieves got even more buffed and they will headshot interrupt your mantra cast all day all night.

They start recharging after you’ve channeled them. Is this new? I can chain mantra of recovery now.

What sucks about this is that the new dueling trait in place of confusing combatants is only a buff to solo damage. So it only affects pvp roamers who duel or spvp power builds.

But for PvE, this change is a nerf. In PvE, elementalists and warriors can provide permanent fury uptime for the entire group, so this trait is entirely wasted on the mesmer.

I’m gonna like it while soloing on my mesmer because it is true mesmer self-buffed damage is terrible with no reliable access to fury or mightstacking (just like ranger).

But in groups I’ll barely notice it. I would have rather they had given use a % damage modifier while we are affected by fury. God knows mesmer still needs some modifiers to catch up to elementalists, and as far as thieves well thieves are just gonnaa blow everyone out of the water in damage output after the patch.

Cleaving trash is a pointless criticism. Mesmers already suck at it and to be honest even fractal lv50 trash is dead in a few seconds when an elementalist/thief/warrior is in your group.

Mesmer, power or conditions, has only ever been brought for utility, not damage. In many cases, the mesmer is not even clearing trash, he’s running to the next destination to lay a portal while the rest of the group fights.

Welcome to the life of a ranger, where their rationale for making people choose a garbage weapon is to make the one good weapon they have closer to garbage.

They did this with shortbow vs. longbow. They nerfed the shorbow, from the firing rate, to the range, because they thought it would make the longbow a more attractive option.

Until they realized more than a year later that this doesn’t work, and they had to actually buff longbow to make people want to use it.

Meanwhile, shortbow for ranger is now pretty garbage. As a condition weapon it quite honestly gets outdone by axe/dagger, which has more condition coverage and is not reliant on flanking for output.

And condi ranger has always been a weak spec because it’s just a kitten engineer or necro that can’t aoe/cleave conditions like a necro or engineer can.

It doesn’t help they announced these changes a week before they go live, so this guarantees that consume conditions will go live in its nerfed state since a week before a patch is deployed, the build is already locked in for release.

P.S. No PvE necro will ever take corruption cd trait, please don’t spread misinformation. Why in hell would they, corruptions suck for damage and PvE is all about damage. Blood is power is garbage, 8 stacks of might for 8 seconds, when a lone Phalanx Strength warrior can give a group 20+ stacks of might indefinitely assuming the ele isn’t also granting 12 stacks of might via his weaponskills.

PvE necros use well of corruption and well of suffering in addition to the power signet, that’s it.

Probably rabid myself.

SlyDevil.3952:

Cough skilled play cough. Apparently being able to counter things is bad. Maybe they should make his axe unblockable because using a reflect would break part of the encounter.

Apparently so is dealing with the mechanic without trivializing it in a single “skilled” button use such as Sic Em (and even worse the engineer, which is just aoe cleave). You have the option of not doing the content, if dealing with encounter designs is such a bother.

They could have least had the courtesy to include a character slot and some bag slot expansions for veteran players.

It’s pretty outrageous they introduce a class and don’t introduce a character slot to go with it, so you pay 50 bucks for an expansion plus the 800 gems it takes to try out the new class if you got all other classes at 80.

Yeah, because they don’t apply reveal to themselves, their stealth is different. Back before they did fractal revamps and mossman at max fractal scale would stealth far more frequently and for longer time periods, he could chain stealth in short times spans without any hint of having revealed or some debuff that prevented him from entering.

Which is how it would work, because applying a reveal mechanic on them would break their attack patterns and part of the encounter mechanic.

frifoxy.6014:

The point of this thread is to collectively do some theorycrafting for mesmers who plan on running dungeons. Open world, WvW, and PvP discussion does not belong here.

DPS:

• http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-R;4k203107RWV71;9;4STW;0147056046;45sY0y;9;0kMy_0V10j

Reflect:

• http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-R;4k203107RWV71;9;4STV;0147056238;45sY0y;9;0kMy_0V10h

Condi:

• http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-R;4k2l51U7wUV71;9;4TUW;0258146048;45sY0y;9;0F81-NYih

No actual math was done but I do think these builds should be close to whatever will be meta for their respective purpose. If anyone wants to pitch in with ideas, corrections, comments, etc – feel free to do so. We have only 1 week before the patch drops

For the power variant, my build is similar, but with some exceptions.

You have the alternative of furious interruptions instead of blurred inscriptions, using signet of inspiration to align with it is a nice touch of quickness for allies if you don’t need the extra defense. Plus using a sw/sw set you’ll have a pretty low cd on interrupts.

And as for Illusions, I prefer master of fragmentation over Ineptitude. aoe diversion is actually valuable, beefier mind wrack for bursting with chronophantasm, and it makes Cry of Frustration less garbage (though we’ll probably never use it still).

I also prefer mantra of pain over mantra of resolve, lower recharge in case you need to get the 12% damage buff back up.

Yamsandjams.3267:

That won’t be happening… unless they’ve been sipping THAT kind of Kool-Aid over at the ANet office.

All people would do it run back and forth over it to stack up a bunch of swiftness, and then run around with it. This was how it was like in the betas, and that’s why they made it work the way it does now.

Of course, it would be nice if it would remember if you has already crossed it, and thus only give you one stack of swiftness per line, but I don’t think they’re setup to do that properly in their code.

Signet of inspiration got the buff though, so now there is a dedicated movespeed option for mesmers. It’s a brave new world.

See, this is a silly complaint. Eles can already give perma swiftness to groups via static field blasting.

Thieves got about 17% extra crit damage from the new traits, and 10% conversion of precision to ferocity so we’re seeing around 20%+ crit damage bonus from the trait change to thieves.

Now even staff ele won’t even be close to thief single target damage output. And pistol whip for cleaving got all the better with the 5% extra damage from the trait made baseline.

Mental Anguish should be 20/40% imo.

What most mesmers are ignorant of here are the thief changes. Not only id thief damage get buffed further with new critical strike traits…

17% extra critical damage with new traits. Ferocity from 10% of precision. They’re looking at close to a 25%+ critical damage boost from new traits.

Shadow Arts will be really stupid. Their health regen and initiative while stealthed has been merged, they take 25% less damage while stealthed, condi removal on stealth, 3 sec stealth on steal so they get a free backstab when they steal now.

On top of reduced steal recharge and longer steal range.

And this is for 1v1 purposes. If the thief wants to go full nuke, he’ll drop shadow arts and go trickery and sit on a 12% damage increase from full initiative.

S/D gets even worse since they made the buff to flanking strike baseline.

Thief damage is gonna go up the roof this balance patch and I’m betting a lot of people are totally clueless until the patch hits and they start feeling those backstabs on steroids.

Sebrent.3625:

With Marks and BM, every 16s you can get:

• 15s Fury (Marksmanship: Clarion Bond)
• 15s 1x Might (Marksmanship: Clarion Bond)
• 15s Swiftness (Marksmanship: Clarion Bond)
• 15s 3x Might (Beastmastery: Zephyr’s Speed)
• 3s Quickness (Bastmastery: Zephyr’s Speed)

And that’s before any +% boon duration.

If you throw in Nature Magic as your 3rd Specialization you can get either

• 10s Regeneration (Nature Magic: Windborne Notes … assume synergizes w/ Clarion Bond)
• 6s Vigor (Nature Magic: Vigorous Training)

That’s fine and all, except you don’t want that. You want a jaguar with fortifying bond sitting on 25 might stacks and fury instead of swapping the pet out and losing all its might stacks.

You’re saying as if this is really that good, when any meta group has a PS warrior and ele providing your group with easy 25 stacks of might and 100% fury all the time.

1s duration on a 3s pulse is just bad. You can keep the proportion the same by increasing the duration and interval of application, and at least then your chances of benefiting from the proc when you NEED it increase.

It just seems like they don’t understand why warrior banners are just better spirits. Warrior banners are portable, they do not die to a sneeze and the countless aoe ingame, and their effects don’t have some ridiculous ICD unlike spirits other than frost spirit.

And to be honest, those “powerful actives” they talked about don’t even exist. The only remotely strong active is on the storm spirit, and nobody is gonna sacrifice a utility slot for a utility that procs swiftness on hit when the value of swiftness in combat is of diminished value and next to regeneration swiftness is one of the weakest in-combat boons.

Sacrificing a 7% damage increase to the group for a measly 3 second chill? Or a single blind pulse that a thief or ele can do far better and cheaper by sacrificing sun spirit?

Nobody’s also mentioning the fact that the problem with spirits is that they don’t satisfy the utility trinity. In many cases, especially PvP, you need at least one stun breaker and one condi clear utility in your utility slots, and spirits just don’t have that. The Water spirit is still terrible.

For one, the water spirit’s heal triggers regardless of your HP, so it may be a wasted heal, and tbh the heal proc is so puny for a whopping 10 second ICD, it’s ridiculous. How can that possibly compare to a water field eles and guardians and thieves can endlessly blast on.

Water spirit is just a kitten spirit of nature, with weak, randomized healing and no condi clear.

If spirits are ever to become a thing, they need to have aoe resistance or not be attackable at all. And their proc effects and ICD’s need to be re-evaluated, especially if the benefits won’t stack so bringing more than one ranger makes the other obsolete now.

Their whole idea with corruption skills is just terrible. They’re just utilities that pigeonhole you into certain weapons in order for them to not hurt you.

Because obviously what necro needed on top of his long cast times on heal skills is to take 10% more damage after using said skill if he doesn’t have an offhand dagger or staff equipped, and for that heal to have a 5 second longer cooldown.

OreoWolf.9564:

And what stops you from transferring the vuln (or converting it to protection with well of power) after using your heal? Hmm… I guess there is always the warrior for passive condition builds…

You pay via opportunity cost. For one, it forces you into using a staff or offhand dagger to not make yourself take 10% more damage. Not all builds will use those weapons, especially power builds.

And the problem is that those builds that won’t use offhand dagger orstaff won’t use the other heals because the other heals are terrible. Well of Blood is a crappy Healing Spring with a longer cooldown that doesn’t clear conditions. The minion dies immediately to cleave and has terrible AI, and signet of vampirism is the worst necromancer heal by far.

frifoxy.6014:

Zenith.7301:

Meanwhile mesmer lost illusionary invigoration, so they got no vigor period.

Illusionary Invigoration recharges shatters at 50%, nothing to do with vigor.

> Critical Infusion: Gain vigor for 5s when you critical hit.

That trait is still here.

D’oh, my bad. I get it mixed up, I was probably thinking about Vigorous Revelations, which is indeed gone.

shakome.7458:

That vigor changed is going to affect ele….as ele is the most squishy class….

Um, no? 50% less endurance regen trait but you still have full uptime vigor with renewing stamina. You got a built in evade into staff #4 and fire dagger #3, in addition to your 2 dodges. And then you have arcane shield in a pinch if you need, assuming snad storm glyph is not thrown into consideration.

If D/F makes a comeback as a viable weaponset, even if not exactly matching staff, you then have obsidian flesh for 5 seconds of immunity and swirling winds for invincibility against projectiles.

Meanwhile mesmer lost illusionary invigoration, so they got no vigor period. Necromancer still has no vigor and their SINGLE NON GARBAGE HEAL INFLICTS A 10% DAMAGE TAKEN DEBUFF now.

But don’t worry thief can still trait for normal vigor effect and high vigor uptime, since spamming pistol whip or black powder wasn’t enough protection already.

mistsim.2748:

Wuselknusel.4082:

Protect Me isn’t as useful as it seems to be. When the pet us soaking up damage for you, it is using your toughness for the damage calculation. So Protect Me is not more than a reliable way of killing your pet as zerker.

couldn’t disagree more. protect me with Bear, maxed out BM and Beastly Warden will be super useful for frontlining. you get an aoe stun, stun break, invuln, and 2-condi cleanse on a fairly low CD. I honestly think shouts (RaO, HaO and Protect Me) will be go-to for frontline builds (6/0/6/0/6)

on another note, Go For the Eyes is a really sweet adept, a no-brainer for condi bunkers along with wilting strike. BM is looking really, really good. by far their best trait line revamp followed by Skirmishing and Wilderness Survival.

Levetty.1279:

Traps still worse then Dragon Hunters

I don’t understand this point. we generally have more survivability than guards specializing in traps, and one of our traps does an aoe knockdown which is insanely good. but I agree with your other points.

anduriell.6280:

They did some power creep with the pet, and actually the pet needs more than that as base as i pointed in other thread.

I honestly think you should try the pets first. I foresee beastmaster pets, especially birds, being insanely good in spvp. especially if youre spamming that axe #1 for might. I never thought id say this, but I also feel the bear might actually be useful for frontlining and should survive any zerg at least for a little while.

im really happy with pets now. they seem mega tough, while having a pbaoe stun and weakness if traited.

lol, frontlining. Bear autoattack does less damage than a single tick of burning and has a slower interval of action. bears don’t cleave.

What are you gonna do as a frontliner, spam GS auto and maul? You’re just a crappy warrior/guardian with nearly half the damage, less spike, and far less group utility.

Thieves got more damage and better steal, and access to Shadow Arts to boot. As if they needed more help being the supreme Berserker class.

Clearly thieves needed more damage out of all classes so we went and gave them even more damage modifiers and ferocity boosts.

Meanwhile rangers lost theirs, mesmer changed from 10% against vulnerable foes to 0.5% per stack of vulnerability (12.5% max), and necromancers…..necromancers go nuthin lol.

Class damage imbalance will be dumber than ever, if people didn’t want thieves/warriors/eles over other classes bad enough already, look forward to next tuesday.

Robert Gee, I know I’ve been a bit of a downer on you, but I gotta say I’m impressed that you’ve been reading the forums and chosen to implement really good changes that include good stuff for PvE mesmers as well.

Most of the traits have been revamped to be really well done. I do wish some stuff was made baseline like warden’s feedback but that’s minor.

Now you just need to…buff mesmer autoattacks and address illusion survivability in dungeons and wvw in regards to aoe spam.

It’s of no surprise that they balance the game in a capricious fashion.

Engineer was one of the most functional and well balanced classes across all game formats and it was the class they chose to revamp instead of ranger/mesmer/necromancer, the classes with the largest mechanical issues.

Look at the ranger ready up stuff. They got screwed. Lost damage modifiers, mediocre GM traits, most of them pvp centric.

It seems that the classes they keep giving more damage and potent utility to is the classes that already have the most of it, such as warrior/ele/thief.

By now I’m pretty sure their balance team is small to the point where they will never truly go into the entrails of the problem classes (mesmer, ranger, necro) and fix the core issues with those classes because it takes more work than their team can handle in a timely fashion.

Really, they did nothing about minions/pets and aoe, no changes to sigil/rune interactions for AI centric classes.

With the change to baseline condition damage they also indirectly screwed hybrid weapons like mesmer scepter and ranger shortbow and mainhand axe, because those weapons didn’t have sufficient conditions or base power numbers and coefficients but rather an unhappy mix of both and they come out weaker for it.

And they keep ignoring the elephant in the room, which is autoattack damage differences varying so wildly across classes and weapons, making so many of them trash.

I just don’t understand, for example in PvE, how a thief gets a CnD>backstab>autoattack chain>repeat cnd backstab on effectively a 4 sec cd. An ability that does so much more damage and scales with power far better than something like Ranger Maul (and the terribly scaling pet damage) or mesmer phantasms which have a 1 sec cast time, can be killed, and suffer cooldowns of 15+ seconds.

They really don’t want to address the issue of damage difference around classes being so wide, and it suits them because there will never be DPS parsers ingame for people to come back to them to show them just how terrible balance is.

Ranger’s strider defense encapsulates their fondness for gimmick design quite neatly. A trait for 25% CHANCE to destroy a projectile while using melee attacks and a 20% cd reduction on mainhand sword, which means a 20% reduction only 2 skills that aren’t even used exactly on cooldown but rather used tactically). And this awful trait competes with something like spotter.

anduriell.6280:

Quarktastic.1027:

Wuselknusel.4082:

Protect Me isn’t as useful as it seems to be. When the pet us soaking up damage for you, it is using your toughness for the damage calculation. So Protect Me is not more than a reliable way of killing your pet as zerker.

It’s useful in PvE to prevent getting OHKO’d by an otherwise unavoidable damage spike. Though, if signet of stone was a stun breaker, I’d never touch that shout again.

I should try to work runes of the traveler into my build so I don’t have to waste a slot for that stupid signet of the hunt.

Annnddd engie and warrior (and i guess the rest of the classes) getting passive traits to improve speed.
Will anet take in consideration my proposal of give passive effects for the pets, for example Signet of the Hunt to the cats, so at least i have a choice?

Is this really what you are going to complain about? In any organized team the eles are giving you perma swiftness if the warriors and guardians aren’t.

To top it off you have swoop combined with mainhand sword monarch’s leap (double leap trick), and ranger suddenly becomes the class with the largest travel distance on the shortest cooldowns.

Ranger problems aren’t mobility. It’s lack of group utility, lack of aoe and cleaving capacity, and really bad power coefficients on many of their weapons on top of a broken pet system.

Ltomato.8649:

You have to take Skirmishing for Spotter and the 10% flanking. Quick Draw is still a damage up, although it’s harder to calculate by how much, and it’s going to be annoying to use. Nature Magic > Beastmastery because Fortifying Bond is OP. It’s just down to whether you feel like microing for Remorseless or having consistent damage with Predator’s Onslaught.

It’s just dumb they moved spotter to skirmishing. It now means you have to take either Nature Magic or BM, which is dumb.

Fortifying Bond should be BASELINE. Why do we even need to trait for pets, which are a percentage of our damage, to benefit from boon application? It’s so ridiculous.

A lot of the BM new traits are good, if anything I’d say BM traits are some of the best changes.

They design classes in this game with PvP and open world PvE farm as a priority, it’s that simple.

We lost damage modifiers, and the biggest issue of PvE ranger, the only viable PvE weapon (mainhand sword) being a liability in lv50 fractal bosses and other challenging content went without fix.

As did pets and spirits being AoE fodder. Now I’m not even hopeful for my mesmer since they refused to fix mechanical changes.

And what’s up with shouts? The utilities in most need of fixing were completely ignored while a functional class like Engineer gets and entire revamp for no reason.

The ranger lost several damage modifiers, it’s that simple. They also nerfed the 5% extra damage with a boon up and split it to however many boons you have on you, making you particularly dependent on your team to benefit because the ranger himself has poor access and uptime to a variety of boons. Ain’t no way you’re keeping 5 boons up at full uptime to make up for the damage lost.

I can see most likely it will be Marksman, Nature Magic, and Beastmastery for the average spec. Nature Magic can be switched a bit but both skirmishing and WS suck from a PvE damage perspective.

So they didn’t even bother touching the worthless utilities that are shouts lol.

The spirits are now stationary, and the active effects kill them and are pretty much trash for PvE. 3 second chill, why would I destroy a 7% damage boost for that, or burning for a mere 8 second blind that a thief can apply far more cheaply with black powder.

And still pets and spirits will continue to be dead on arrival on large engagements in WvW and in dungeons for PvE. No changes to AoE affecting pets.

The good thing is they removed a lot of the really bad minors and traits.

But most of these traits are not that great in PvE. Skirmishing in particular, why would you want a trait that makes you lose steady focus bonus and gain half the effect for it.

No change to bad weapons either. Mainhand axe will still have a terrible autoattack damage and it will be a worse weapon as it’s a hybrid weapon and hybrid builds have been nerfed by nerfing baseline condition damage so now you have to stack condition damage. Nobody will use shortbow either. The longbow is a far superior ranged weapon.

Strider’s Defense won’t ever be used. 25% projectile destruction on melee is unreliable, people don’t want unreliable. And 20% cd reduction on sword only affects a whopping 2 skills, since sword has an autoattack with no cooldown and only 2 skills that you don’t even use as part of a damage rotation.

Most pet families will still be bad (moas still pretty bad). Most pets will still not cleave and be AoE fodder.

Ranged pets still have a 900 range for some reason and won’t smartly pathe so they can’t shoot down fort walls or up at opponents on fort walls.

Mainhand sword is still not fixed with the animation lock handicap (it is a handicap, talk about workarounds all you want but the animation lock delay for dodging purposes does not go away, you either delay your autoattack chain to preemptively dodge, lowering your damage, or you use the autoattack chain and hope you don’t get unlucky with boss attack timings).

Compared to ele and warrior the ranger gained less offensively, in fact the 10% extra damage on flanks was converted to crit, decreasing its value. Probably the ranger will continue to be out of meta while thieves, ele, warriors and either mesmer/guardian are part of it.

Engineers, already the class that counters thieves pretty handily, gets a trait to counter them even more lol.

Who wants to bet mesmers and necromancers get gimmicks.

Laraley.7695:

Erasmus.1624:

Laraley.7695:

Which still doesn’t mean the game should head this direction. I think removing things with no counterplay would be much better than adding more. I’ve said this today already and I still believe it’s what should happen.

There’s too much to remove. The gw2 playerbase’s brain has long been dented into accepting hard counters. Even if you talk about the merits of it, nobody will support it because they’re so used to pressing buttons for effortless, overpowered effects.

So? I still don’t think adding more thing with zero counterplay is good, it’s really not. Among other things it makes the game incredibly boring.

Newsflash, this game has PvE as well, not PvP. PvE people don’t want to be balanced around your PvP standards.

skowcia.8257:

Zenith.7301:

slip

You are so wrong that its not even funny.

You take raw damage from wiki and comparing it without reazling that hb needs 1 second more to finish cast (3 1/2) while rapid fire needs 2 1/2 and also provides 10 stack of vul. Now you can make comprasion and try again.

Its also funny that you comparing cd. Question is who will eat hb every 6-8seconds? Unless you have a whole team dedicated to cc your target i dont see it happening. As a ranger i just stay away and pewpew, i dont have to worry about any cc, its like autopilot. Risk vs reward is way off in this game.

Melee on paper is superior damage but in practice with the amount of kiting and cc the ranged classes can do paired with joke melee selfroot skills are coming off in terms of damage. Unless youre a thief before you even come close you will lose a good portion of hp cause ranged damage hits way too hard. Before a zerk warrior even close gap against my ranger hes usually at 50-60% hp left assuming i saw him first from far away. Its well know that ranger>war either way.

Zenith.7301:

Not even close to the same damage, apparently pvp people can’t be taken seriously when it comes to math. They’re pretty bad at it.

Ps. for that reason you cannot be taken seriously.

Too bad I can’t afford the infraction points to call you for what you are, considering you ignored the POWER COEFFICIENTS in the linked text.

I can tell you don’t do PvE, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to tell why HB does more DPS than Rapid Fire. You whine about being kited while ignoring using LOS to negate a ranger, which is why power ranger is only ever considered on a SINGLE MAP, whereas warriors exist on the meta, in tournaments, on every map.

I don’t even know why I bother, talking to you feels like it would have more deleterious effects to my IQ than watching the Tyra Banks show.

This is coming from the warrior class, who has a better version of a longbow for conquest or any teamfight than the ranger longbow will ever be.

Harrier.9380:

style.6173:

The issue isn’t that melee needs more damage. The issue is that range needs less. It is crazy that a safer ranged spec can do more damage that a higher risk melee spec. It makes no sense.

This. Right here.
Rapid Fire does pretty much the same damage as 100b while having almost 12x the range. It’s also more reliable and doesn’t make you a sitting duck.
I think more ranged skills should work like Necro’s Lifeblast – doing less damage at max range than up close, while also rewarding good positioning (with piercing trait), rather than sitting on a ledge and spamming it mindlessly.

You are so wrong it’s not even funny.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Hundred_Blades

Damage Damage (8x): 1,571 (4.21)?
Damage Final strike damage: 410 (1.10)?
Miscellaneous effect.png Number of Targets: 3

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Rapid_Fire

Damage Damage (10x): 1,320 (3.75)?
Vulnerability 40px.png10 Vulnerability: 10 s
Combo.png Combo Finisher: Physical Projectile (20% chance)

Not even close to the same damage, apparently pvp people can’t be taken seriously when it comes to math. They’re pretty bad at it.

Also not mentioned in the linked information is the fact that 100b has a 8 second cd whereas rapid fire has a 10 sec cd, 100b cannot be reflected, and of course as shown above 100b cleaves 3 targets baseline whereas if you wanna cleave with rapid fire you gotta trait for piercing and hope foes are gathered in a line.

But of course warriors have always been pretty good at whining their way into pvp godhood. They want more of the healing signet treatment.

The problem with arah is the problem with every dungeon. Trash mobs offer pretty terrible loot tables, as do the bosses, who share loot tables with open world champions (aka a dungeon boss has the same loot as braindead zergbait).

But they don’t want to improve loot, because then gold acquisition outside the trading post can’t be time gated to push people into buying gems and converting to gold.

F2P games NEVER have PvE which is reasonably rewarding. That’s the whole point of F2P, to gate everything behind horrendous RNG and high gold grinds and nearly impossible to farm mats so that people circumvent the inconvenience via cash store.

You want PvE rewards, play a game with a sub.

Condi specs for mesmer unlike engineer and warrior have horrendous cleaving potential and don’t frontload conditions anywhere near as well, in addition to having low base numbers on their power portions unlike the engineer and warrior.

Basically, on any run where thrash pulls and clears are involved, you’re a liability for the group. On bosses you have a ton of ramp up and barely break even with ele and warrior, and fall still considerably behind thief.

Mesmer in PvE by virtue of how their weaponskills and illusion mechanic works will continue to be a power based class outside PvP.

You’re also forgetting Chronomancer wells for all intents and purposes are power-centric.

Hyper Cutter.9376:

Zenith.7301:

Problem is they release “new armor” let alone weapons every other century while outfits and BLC ticket weapons happen to come out on a monthly basis.

And what minimal weapons/armor they do release achievable through the game, it’s either awful RNG or braindead open world farming not remotely tied to dungeons or fractals.

I don’t know why you put “new armor” in scare quotes, but multiple armor sets have already been datamined, presumably for HoT.

Also dungeons already have associated weapon and armor sets (and fractals have a weapon set as well).

I hope you realize how old dungeons and fractals actually are. We are talking a scale of 2+ years. After that it’s been the Luminiscent armor, a single armor set obtainable via PvE after 2 years.

Fractal weaponset has the same timeline.

The ration of armor and weaponsets introduced via the game vs. cash shop/BLC ticket scraps is entirely lopsided.

But keep white knighting all you want.

nearlight.3064:

Zenith.7301:

Mesmer still looks to be a pretty crappy condition class as well.

I actually beleive that mesmer, aside from engi, has the most potential for a condiition pve class. Staff clones that bounce to hit multiple targets will fulfill the AoE condition application on trash mobs, while pistol phantasms (with more bleeding from the revamped duelist’s discipline) and the scepter (with the 50% torment damage buff from the new trait) can both apply good condition stacking against bosses. The same problems of illusion death will occur, but with maim the disillusioned you can time shatters to spike the boss with AoE torment and confusion, provided you manage illusion cooldowns accordingly. In addition to bleed on crit, confusing combatants being buffed will apply confusion on crit as well.

You also get access to the same reflects, AoE quickness, and group stealth as before for group support, and HoT will give group alacrity and wells for support too, so I could see a condition mesmer being pretty viable in dungeons because it has that mix of support and condition application that most other condititon builds, namely necros, lack.

It will be plagued by the death of illusions to stray boss attacks, and scepter autos overwriting pistol/focus phantasms, but I think it has decent potential compared to the other condition specs that aren’t engineers.

The condition ramp up of staff is the problem. You need to be able to frontload large condition stacks not slowly build up to them, and the staff projectile bounce is what 3 targets.

In the time you’ve ramped up the stacks a direct damage build would have far bursted past that, and in the case of trash the trash will be dead before any of them get more than 3 stacks.

The reason warrior and engineer are powerful condition classes is because they frontload conditions rather well, and naturally cleave in addition to having reliable access to several of them, not the garbage RNG mesmer is subject to.

In addition to that, both warrior and engineer have high base damage nummbers and coefficients for the power-scaling portions of the skills, whereas the mesmer autoattacks do horrendous damage, especially the scepter and staff.

Chronomancer is a pvp spec, as are most of the traits. Hardly a change to the main issues of mesmer in PvE. Clones will still die right and left to aoe/cleave, they will despawn on mob death making phantasms less useful on trash, and mesmer will still require 3 phantasms to barely compete with the top classes, which involves ramp up time. Mesmer autoattacks still suck very much. Guardian reflects are still better. Phantasms still will not benefit from runes or sigils. Shatters will still be subpar in PvE, especially Cry of Frustration.

Chronomancer will fare on pvp depending on what happens with the thief specialization. If thieves get as much of a bump as mesmers got from their specialization, things won’t change thieves will probably still outclass mesmers in the meta, as they outclass all other berzerker roamers in spvp.

Mesmer still looks to be a pretty crappy condition class as well, and I’m not sure about Reaper since their traits since mostly power based as does their weaponset and reaper shroud.

Ranger can kinda work for bosses, but ranger aoe condi sucks.

Engineer and warriors seem the big winners here tbh. Guess thief can sorat play condi on bosses, but like ranger his condi spec has poor cleaving capacity.

I’m also curious how much crying will come from spvp babies when vulnerability starts affecting condi damage. Engineer is already rather strong as is condi warrior in pvp, and both of those classes apply vulnerability well enough.

I wish they’d at least look at mesmer finishers (no real blast finisher, the self combo leap finishers are pretty crappy as well) and made ethereal fields……better.

Selene.9415:

Iason Evan.3806:

It’d be nice to get a light, medium, and heavy armor set that we could earn for doing in game stuff every once in a while. I am not in any way against the gem shop stuff. Some of it I love and purchase. 2 times a year would be great. I don’t think asking for 2 sets of armor per year that we can earn in game is asking too much. We got the last few pieces early this year to finish off the 2 SW sets and then, nada y pues y pues nada.

Not getting stuff to play the game for doesn’t make me want to open up my wallet. The best way to get me to open my wallet is release content and store stuff to go along with said content. You guys are dropping the ball big time.

IIRC they’ve already said that from now on armor will be earned in-game and there will only be outfits on the gem store.

There’s new armor coming with the expansion, just like the rest of the new content.

Problem is they release “new armor” let alone weapons every other century while outfits and BLC ticket weapons happen to come out on a monthly basis.

And what minimal weapons/armor they do release achievable through the game, it’s either awful RNG or braindead open world farming not remotely tied to dungeons or fractals.

Their armor design has become so blatantly sexist.

Where there is no cloth on females, they just lazily add some discordantspraypainted clothing pattern on the male.

I’m getting quite sick of it, this game seems like Korean propaganda right now with doll like, hypersexualized females and a completely opposite reaction for male armor design.

Just make the kitten outfit gender restricted if you’re not even going to bother to design armor with men in mind anymore, designing for women first and then making some shoddy last minute adaptation for the male.

evilunderling.9265:

Distaste.4801:

Still doesn’t change that the expansion is anemic. Heck the trait re-work shouldn’t be included as part of the expansion since they screwed up the trait system. Let’s not forget that many portions of the game suffered for 3 years, getting relatively little, for the expansion to be…underwhelming.

The trait re-work isn’t considered part of the expansion, it’s being released before. And it’s a comprehensive overhaul that extends to many skills, not a piddly little ‘re-work’. The expansion part of it is the elite specs, which will introduce brand new skills.

Take a look at FFXIV Heavensward. I believe last I saw they are expanding the overall land mass by 150%.

Already pre-ordered it, thanks. Anyway, FFXIV’s open world has tiny maps and not many of them. We’re likely to see significantly more actual landmass added in Heart of Thorns.

HoT looks like a pittance compared to it and FFXIV: ARR has only been out 2 years compared to GW2’s 3. You also can’t discount what gets brought through patches. I’d almost be willing to bet that each major FFXIV patch has brought more to the game than an entire year of GW2’s does.

OK, let’s see. Typical FFXIV patch:

• One new raid — average 50 minutes, not counting time spent on progression.
• One new primal — Two short instances — about 20 minutes.
• Three new dungeons (each about the same size as a GW2 fractal) — about 75 minutes.
• Extension to main storyline — call it about an hour.

This averages to about an hour’s worth of new content per month, not counting PvP. On top of that, you get all sorts of sundry QoL improvements and minor quests and so on.

Well, the last year is widely regarded as basically a content drought, so let’s see what pittance we got then:

• Silverwastes: Call it about an hour.
• LS2: About an hour per episode (total 8 hours).
• Dry Top: We’ll say 1 hour.

Hmm… that’s interesting. GW2’s “content droughts” feature more than 75% as much activity as FFXIV’s “blisteringly fast pace of development”.

This is so dishonest. Bahamut T13 pre-echo is easily a 12-13 minute fight. In progression the enrage timer at 15 minutes was tight. The percentage of players who cleared T13 pre-echo is small. Most people in a given server haven’t even made it past Turn 9, which was patches old.

The percentage of players who even cleared Savage mode coil is even smaller.

Don’t even dare compare proper organized PvE content in FFXIV to GW2.

Full fractal 50 run is 30 minutes or 25 with an optimized group. Dungeons are done in less than 15 minutes all 3 paths except for Arah.

Silverwastes and Living Story is a faceroll joke. 8 hours of story? What? Maybe if you are no good at playing, each episode easily takes no more than 30 minutes. It is a SOLO instance that anyone, with whatever gearset or teait setup without much thought or group synergy can clear.

It’s funny how you conveniently discard progression hours, as if progression isn’t a large part of the gameplay experience, developing and perfecting the execution of strategies on unfamiliar content.

How many days did it take of progression to clear any GW2 instance/dungeon? Oh, right, not even more than ONE day. Wildstar and FFXIV have had raids which have taken more than 3-4 months for a single raid group out of thousands to complete as a world first, taking the others even more months of practice and effort.

You play GW2 for the pvp and the dress up factor, because it has one hell of an unmatched art and map building team. Its PvE content is a joke, bugged since release, with no real dedicated team, Robert Hrouda let go after a single dungeon revamp, no developer communication on dungeon forums, and 2.5+ years of stale dungeon content with classes that have been imbalanced since release while necromancers and rangers and mesmers have rotted in the background while elementalists and warriors and guardians and thieves have dominated since the very beginning.

apharma.3741:

Zenith.7301:

Thief with runes of vampirism and new trait update that allows them to take up most of shadow arts without the damage loss that they would have seen right now is just going to be dumb.

Expect the nerf pleas to get a lot louder.

Most people in spvp are playing against thieves who right now can’t afford shadow arts, but they will afford it come the trait revamp, and it helps them far more than the mesmer changes help the mesmer in this particular match up.

Currently most thieves take SA for the condi removal, granted they can’t afford the rest and keep low cool down steal (though skipping sleight of hand only increases the cool down by 6.5s) or give up other things.

With the trait changes they can’t just pick up that one trait. So now they’re going to have to pick the traits that make stealth so powerful. I mean it’s one of the only dependable condition removals they have. I know about shadow step but it is a very long cool down just for a cleanse, especially as it’s one of if not the only stun break they use.

Also we’re going to see mug, panic strikes and executioner all in the same line, all available at the same time, well under current previews.

Yeah, my problem with that condi removal trait it’s a stealth bug. It’s supposed to remove a condi for every 3 seconds in stealth, but right now it also removes a condition upon stealth application. And now they’re gonna be able to pick up the rest of SA, which is immensely powerful.

Thieves get pretty much everything at a cheaper opportunity cost. Lower cooldowns, more condensed effects and traits.

Their traitlines are rather cleaned up, their minors are all particularly strong, and their initiative mechanic is a boon without real drawbacks.

You cannot say the same of many classes. Including the mesmer.