Dont make Dungeons Harder-More builds Viable
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Zenith.7301
MF has nothing to do with it. Past two weeks I’ve been getting nothing but rings or nothing in the dailies but two weeks before that I got about 6-7 skins and was finally able to get my last one. It just comes and goes in waves.
And because it’s RNG we’re talking about, those lucky waves of yours may never actually happen for somebody else.
I have all skins but the 1h sword. My warrior buddy who has played since the inception of fractals with me has 2 skins, none of which pertain to his class.
Most of the skins I got anyways actually came before the fractal “revamp”.
Dont make Dungeons Harder-More builds Viable
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Zenith.7301
There is a way to make defensive stats used. Mechanics like pulsing damage auras that are defense checks. That go through aegis.
It’d be problematic as a fix though, because if you want a game where people are going to be downed by intent if they do not have the specific build/gear, you need to change the way downed works where bosses just aoe bomb the living hell out of downed people.
Nobody currently needs to support besides rotating aegis and maybe blasting a water field. All those traits with rezzing bonuses, traits that increase group damage mitigation, boons like regen and swiftness are virtually worthless in a combat environment because the way most encounters function in this game is you do outrageous DPS to an HP sack and hope to kill it before you run out of aegis/endurance.
When they actually bother to create more complex encounters that involve more multutasking, imagine an encounter like Priestess of Dwayna Arah p4 where constantly in the encounter somebody needs to collect tears, another person eneds to kite an add to a certain spot for another person to kill it, and open a window for the other people to DPS the boss.
Basically, split people up with tasks and critical execution checks during an encounter. More encounters that don’t just trivially allow a group to sit behind a reflection wall rotating aegis.
More bosses with adds that corrupt boons so 25 might stacks isn’t easy to maintain and can make you vulnerable, more adds who can daze/interrupt skills.
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It’s a bug they haven’t bothered to fix for years. Makes stealth spam thief builds a pain in the kitten to deal with on condi builds.
If you think it’s bad in spvp, where stealth isn’t as frequently used as it hurts capping points, imagine WvW in which thieves are BP>HS’ing every 4 seconds.
If only my ranger or necro or mesmer had such spammable access to condi clears on a skill combo that also forcefully drops target and comes with the perk of one of the stronger nukes with no telegraphs in the game.
But nope, it’s ele/warrior/thief/guardian land.
This is why we need DPS meters in this game, so mentally handicapped people aren’t allowed to say mesmer DPS in practice is high. It’s terrible, and the biggest crime of lack of dps meters is that a bunch of pvp/wvw tryhards who blow someone up with a mindwrack think the damage is fine.
The cleave works far better for me in PvE. I just do not understand why dagger got the PvE buff.
Um, because in PvE melee is all that matters and dagger is the only melee weapon, that still cleaves 1 target less than all other weapons that still outdamage the necro dagger?
Tired of my group dragging Mossman into the water. Doesn’t matter what group i get, they all wanna glitch. Fix please.
If they insist on doing him underwater it’s likely you would have faced a wipefest/roadblock if they attempted him on land. Your group is that bad and you merely dodged a bullet by glitching it.
You know, sorta how like Lupicus would be without the wall exploit or reflect damage. Fun with a competent group, or an extreme annoyance having to carry PuGs.
The biggest reward in this game isn’t even playing the game, it’s playing virtual trader at the auction house flipping and speculating. You’ll make far more with that than even silverwastes chest trains.
It comes with the territory of a F2P game, they want people buying gems to convert to currency so the game’s content is largely unrewarding.
Just did a guardian test; for some reason I can’t add it to the first post. I’ll leave it here until I can.
Guardian
The build used is the S/T + GS build on metabattle, not traited for maximum damage. Guardian DPS is a little trouble some of tests as they gain 20% damage from conditions that I can’t apply solo. On the other hand unscathed contender is not likely to be up most of the time. To counter this, I removed the 2 on-condition traits and used unscathed contender as they balance out.
Mean: 16.33 ± 0.30s; St. Dev.: 0.93sThe guardian does more damage than a 2-phantasm mesmer and is nearly on par with the 3-phantasm one. If unscathed contender were to be maintained, which it probably will be in any situation where you can maintain 3 phantasms, the guardian will pull ahead. Binding blade has a significant impact on the DPS, reducing kill-times by about 2-3 seconds due to the short duration of the fight. So the DPS advantage is also partially due to the higher burst damage of the guardian. At this point there doesn’t seem to be any reason to bring a mesmer aside from portal or time warp.
What everybody knows, really. The only reason mesmer substitutes guardian in setting records for speed runs is the portal and time warp for sensitive burns.
Mesmer damage is bottom tier damage. Justs start bringing more mesmers into your group, I even wince at having 2 mesmers in fractal 50 because I know the damage for the party is going to take a nosedive.
It’s similar to ranger and necromancer, really. Classes with pretty crappy coefficients and base numbers on their autoattacks and their 2-5 skills barely increase their DPS if not at all. And ranger has the handicap of its only competitive weapon, the mainhand sword, handicapping their dodge times (even if you turn autoattack off, the animation lock can screw you big time against fast attack bosses like archdiviner and mossman).
Hell, look at ele or engineer. So much utility…water fields, aoe CC, blast finishers and fire fields, condi clear, aoe chill, all in a single build without accounting for traits, whereas if a mesmer wants to have any significant utility, heavy trait investment is required, especially to make mantras worthwhile. And ele and engi DPS is significantly higher.
I still don’t understand how wall of reflection can have longer duration than feedback despite achieving a shorter cooldown and having the luxury of its placement not tied to the enemy but rather tied to the player. It’s like warrior banners vs. ranger spirits.
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You want more pets you’ll never use?
Do people really use moas and pigs and devourers? Or ravens/dogs outside pvp?
Because from this pve standpoint there’s only jaguar/stalker, drakes, and spiders.
I have no issues dying on my thief, I don’t know what else to say. Pistol Whip is a Blurred Frenzy on steroids, and it’s a cleave to boot unlike phantasms outside iwarden who are single target (and the dps from iwarden is pretty crappy for being a cleave phantasm, oftentimes it won’t even finish its low dps channel with any melee mobs around to quickly kill it).
The argument that mesmer DPS is low due to utility is just dumb. Thief utility is just as potent in its own way, and elementalists are the mother lode of utility while being the highest overall DPS class in the game. Hell, even warriors boast indispensable utility and yet they still outdamage a mesmer.
The fact is a mesmer only competes single target with 3 phantasms, but the class will never compete in cleave capacity.
The only times you really stack mesmers is for portal tricks to set records. In the average run the last classes you want to see more than 1 of in your group are mesmer, ranger, and ESPECIALLY necromancer (which most people don’t even want to see 1 of).
What do you mean more survivability than a thief. Pistolwhip means relativelyhigh evasion uptime. If they are weaving cloak and dagger with backstab in between autoattacks, they’re constantly shedding aggro. With black powder and smoke screen you bring immense survivability to the group.
You can also stunlock dredge mobs with pistolwhip.
Thief brings utility competitive with that of mesmer. Mesmer has portal and a 6 sec reflect, thief has shadow refuge, smoke screen, black powder for melee stacks, headshot for quick defiance stack removal, blast finishers for days.
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Necrid Bolt wouldn’t be such a problem anyways if its use was more spread out so it didn’t require double sigils of energy or more contrived setups. Look at Barrage, it’s fine, as are the kicks. But eating a projectile that bounces around people for nearly a one shot on light armor and it being an attack the boss spams in between frenzied barrage and his swipe gets to be dumb.
It’d be as simple as making the damage half or less of what it is if anet totally refuses to make more meaningful changes.
Hornet’s sting should be instant if it is ever gonna be a reliable dodge for PvE, you have to be clairvoyant to be able to use it on some mobs.
I mean, Caithe on the living story has the exact version but instant, why can’t ours be the same.
Thief;s flanking strike not only does significanlty more damage, but it’s instant as well for an evade.
Dont make Dungeons Harder-More builds Viable
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Zenith.7301
Fact is, if you’re going to keep 1/2 gear sets head and shoulders above the others in one game format, you might as well erase the other sets.
I mean, come on, if people don’t want other sets to be useful besides berk/assassin, the least anet can do is remove the ascended chests in fractals that have non-berk/assassin stats.
Why does apothecary or rabid even exist if it’s going to be so ridiculously suboptimal.
Yeah, you can run any set and complete content, but we’re talking about a sizable difference in clear times, and time is a limited commodity for people in a TEAM game, so nobody wants to inconvenience others so even thought there’s an “option” to run other setups, the reality is that the expectations are always berserker. Otherwise you’re being a scumbag to your group.
Wildstar has done action combat far better. If its endgame were 5/8/10-man based instead of the usual large raid endgame, I’d dump GW2 in an instant ;(
I wish locust swarm would grant the swarms to the other party members too.It’d be a nice little party damage boost.
Give necro the following trait: Call of The Grave, nearby allies gain 10-15% critical damage bonus while in combat. Hell, we could also gain a trait to give the group 3 seconds of quickness whenever we enter death shroud or something like that.
And make the kitten dagger cleave 3 targets already+ buff the damage, make dagger 2 work like tainted shackles where you are not locked into the channel, it just happens by itself and not only gives the health back to you but to allies as well.
:
a) Maybe make it out of bounds to place reflects up on top of the wall? This could be possible by removing the flat surface from the top of the arena.Wouldn’t traited off hand axe on ranger still one shot him with this fix?
The reflect radius on Whirling Defense is pitifully small, it takes better positioning.
Well ele sacrifices an actual slot for it. It competes with blasting staff for staff builds and final shielding or arcane mastery for other specs such as scepter builds (which have horrible sustain and need a lot extra protection against burst).
The problem to begin with was the whole idea that classes were dodging too much, and then we leave in other classes who dodge far more untouched. Apparently it was too much on mesmer and ranger so they nerfed their endurance regen traits, but meanwhile classes with far better mitigation/avoidance like thief and engineer stayed the same while warriors kept their signet endurance regen and traits for it untouched so several classes now dodge more (and in the case of warrior stances, oh what mesmers wouldn’t give for trololol immunity to conditions for such a ridiculous amount of time).
Ranger and mesmer have suffered thye same type of whine and resentment from the spvp crowd, they only see red when AI based classes are around so spirits were nerfed into irrelevance as were pets as were phantasms as were on clone death traits and so on goes the list…
Try bouncing between mesmer, necro, and ranger. It’s a festival of pain and frustration why can’t I just be happy on my D/F ele I’ll never know.
Oh, but gathering materials and WvW isn’t something widely done as well that doesn’t need encouraging?
Vital Striking, I get those mixed up all the time.
The point is the people do the ice bow 4 channel drop it and pick up the hammer and strike while the barrage goes through. For many classes the lightning hammer is an actual DPS increase over their own rotation.
You’re also presummoning phantasms before entering combat so you open the fight with 3 in any case, with signet of the ether.
If your bosses are slaughtering phantasms before they can even do their strikes, you should have used iduelists instead. The problem with phantasms on bosses is sustained damage not their first and second barrage of skills. And trash packs perhaps, nothing more aggravating than blowing a 20 sec cd skill only to have it despawn immediately.
I hope we get the kasmeer treatment where our illusions stay around after targets die and they are bound to us instead of targets.
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Um, fire field, frozen burst, arcane wave, arcane brilliance, magnetic wave. 12 stacks. Lay down a lightning hammer for people to blast fire fields afterwards. You always bring the lightning hammer regardless of what weapon you use btw, because it significantly boosts the mesmer you’re having in your meta group. Even thief with bundles bonus.
Staff will get 9 stacks with self combo.
Warrior gets Battle Standard (with a proper might stacking group you don’t need signet of rage to frontload might).
The DPS a mesmer loses from using shatters is far more than the DPS a warrior loses for going PS. It will NEVER be a thing to bring a mesmer for might stacking with shatters.
P.S. Spacing out ferocity is pointless when most bosses will die after the intial rounds of ice bow 4. There are very few bosses ingame who don’t die within said time frame. Moreover, arcane lightning is nto run in every staff build, blasting staff and aquamancer’s alacrity and earth splinters is a thing.
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I’d be fine with buffing the non-AAs of the shortbow, or simply buffing the AA of shortbow.
I think it would be easier and less error-prone for ANet to simply buff Crossfire. I think it would also give us something that we are lacking … a weapon that applies conditions via its auto-attack (without flanking).
I have always found it frustrating when I’m running a full condition build that all of my auto-attacks are just doing horrible direct damage unless my opponent is for whatever reason not even looking at me … in which case I could be horribly UP and kill that player … because they’re likely afk.
@Zenith:
I’m not a fan of that 1.5s bleed. I again direct you guys to look at the math for the other classes. Their auto-attacks allow them to do far more than that. They are already getting twice the bleed per auto-attack as Ranger shortbow but without requiring flanking. I don’t see why we couldn’t have our bleed, which is half the duration of theirs, without the flanking requirement … then work from there buffing Crossfire and/or the other Shortbow skills.
I agree, the flanking is stupid, as are flanking traits in a game where you stack for maximum benefit and protection and in order to sit inside reflect walls.
Elementalist in berserker is very difficult to play, only celestial bunker is easy: Mesmers has got a lot of tools to evade attacks, the greatest is stealth…and don’t forget you have an invulnerability always on F4. You have also a lot of boons , use Prismatic Understanding and you can achieve a great survivability. Also, an elementalist needs to invest 10 points to take that triati, we need only 5.
My main is Mesmer but I play both in PvP (always berserker scepter/focus , I don’t like celestial).No berserker mesmer takes PU, so the boon argument is moot.
It is indisputable that mesmers and necromancers have miserable access to boons and valuable combo fields/finishers, and rangers are not far behind in such dearth of boons.
I’ll give you combo fields and finishers. Boons, however … trust me, Thief’s got it worse than Mesmer. Luckily, they can snatch boons off of someone else.
Past that, I’d absolutely agree that DE and its overall necessity shag Mesmer over worse than anything vigor-related.
Thief has better access to fury and might stacks. You get 5 stacks of might per signet use+ signet mastery, fury when target gets below 50% health. Steal can be traited to give you and allies both might, fury, and swiftness as well. If you have a mesmer around in PvP, you just got access with steal to 10 seconds of every boon as well with Consume Plasma.
Meanwhile if mesmer wants might, he needs to dump traitpoints into grandmaster minor for shattered strength for a measly 3 stacks of might per shatter…. it’s pathetic. And virtually no access to fury, pitiful access to swiftness without using runes, and no real access to protection without gutting your damage by dumping points into Chaos line (toughness) and taking stealth utilities.
The only class worse off than a mesmer is necro in terms of boon access. Poor necros are a pinball to be bounced around with impunity.
I have encountered a earth camping condiele only once (thats the reason why i wrote “almost” ^^). Died against him in the first fight, because i didn’t expect a condi ele, but afterwards i won every single time. I played a trap ranger with sb and s/d if i remember correctly.
Have met a few other condiele builds that didn’t rely on autoattack from scepter, which were usually harder to beat, but still not a big problem, at least for a condi survival ranger with sb, even with the flanking requirement.And i don’t understand why you want to buff the autoattack instead of other shortbow skills.
Because autoattacks are the biggest source of sustained damage. The amount of damage buff you would need to put on a 12-20 sec recharge skill would be so massive to bring the effective DPS up to competitive levels in PvE, that PvP people would be whining right and left about losing 1/3 of their health to a single skill or more just like they do with rapid fire.
This is why the lack of DPS meters has hurt this game so much, people are so ignorant about damage dealing, they just go based off anecdotes.
And it meant very little in PvE. People didn’t have meters, but they still quickly figured out who were the most damaging classes regardless and hierarchies were still formed and necromancers/rangers excluded. Hell, mesmers are only brought for portals and reflects since mesmer sustained damage is terrible, they only have burst.
The lack of damage meters only helps developers so players can’t compile data and post it publicly to contradict what developers say.
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All conditions are useless in PvE.
Now. In HoT, we don’t know. What we do know is we’ll never have mobs that permanently move around players to make the effective dps of torment higher than bleeds.
BTW calculating greatsword DPS without mixing Maul in is pointless, it’s like calculating warrior greatsword DPS without 100b. Warrior greatsword DPS is balanced by constant 100b use, otherwise you’d see warriors just camping mainhand axe+mace offhand as mainhand axe has the strongest hitting autoattack chain in the game.
And that’s just theoretical DPS, the practical DPS of mainhand sword takes a big hit due to its animation lock, as people need to stop attacking to make sure they can dodge in time without the animation lock delaying them.
Try to use mainhand sword on fractal 50 mossman or archdiviner. You have to hamper a lot of your DPS just so you can dodge reliably instead of eating an autoattack that can take off 60-70% of your HP out.
If you use greatsword on ranger, you can time your evade portion in a rhythm to the boss’s autoattack patterns, meaning you don’t even need to dodge most of the time, no need to back out or stop attacking.
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Stats need to be removed from traits. Keep them on gear if you want, preferably the accessories/amulets mostly.
The fact that you lose to the tune of 300 power just to trait into supportive tools neuters a lot of the supportive build options.
A mesmer for example has some pickings on inspiration, as does a necromancer in blood magic, but losing 300 power on top of the offensive traits on the power/precision line makes these non-starter positions. You simply never want to give up damage for anything else.
Elementalist in berserker is very difficult to play, only celestial bunker is easy: Mesmers has got a lot of tools to evade attacks, the greatest is stealth…and don’t forget you have an invulnerability always on F4. You have also a lot of boons , use Prismatic Understanding and you can achieve a great survivability. Also, an elementalist needs to invest 10 points to take that triati, we need only 5.
My main is Mesmer but I play both in PvP (always berserker scepter/focus , I don’t like celestial).
No berserker mesmer takes PU, so the boon argument is moot.
It is indisputable that mesmers and necromancers have miserable access to boons and valuable combo fields/finishers, and rangers are not far behind in such dearth of boons.
I do feel that Stronghold favors those that have strong AoE buffs, so primarily Guardian, Warrior, and Elementalist, simply because they have the easiest time keeping the NPC’s alive. Without the constraints of capture points, AoE debuffs and damage is much weaker than in conquest.
I disagree, I feel like zerker specs are favoured, not support. There is no need to run support specs since there’s no point holding, many ways to LOS and killing stuff faster is an advantage. You probably take on support class, though, but I do feel like aoe burst specs have better time on stronghold.
Zerker specs can spit out boons through might rotations and blast fields just fine. They can still put down water fields.
The thing about warrior/ele/engi/guardian is that they’re full of utility since the skills they have themselves have high utility to begin with, without heavy need of traits to support people. Hell, ele gets all these fields for free, as does the warrior with might stacking and curing movement impairment with warhorn.
Meanwhile classes like necro/ranger, and even mesmer outside portal don’t bring as much to a group. None of those classes have any serious access to boons for the group or combo fields and combo finishers to speak of. They’re selfish classes.
The thief by contrast is also a selfish class, but it’s the best at what it does (damage and mobility for spiking down and harassment). Necro, ranger, and mesmer have little to write home about.
Plus a hefty cut to phantasm cooldowns in PvE. Nerfing their cooldowns upward due to the pathetic PvP whine that went on lands us where we are today.
Hell, instead of balancing on ever present phantasms, they should just cut the cd of a phantasm to 6.5 seconds and have the phantasm despawn after its strike, so you can’t have 3 AI spiking people down, and phantasms are not something that gets shattered,
In exchange, the coefficients and base damage need to come back up for autoattacks and blurred frenzy. Reduce the cast time of phantasms to 1/2 instead of 1. Basically make our phantasms our version of Backstab/100b/Pistol Whip.
The clone generation cd’s also need to be tweaked so 3 clone shatters can be a more practical affair.
The lower cd phantasm would make it less bloodboiling when some kitten decides to turn/walk the ettin or abomination over my 3 phantasms that took a 28 sec heal signet use to ramp up…only to get 1 shot bya cleave autoattack from a mob.
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No torment instead of bleeding, please.
Torment is a useless PvE condition as mobs don’t continually move to make it outDPS bleeding.
I’d argue that in the current meta setup, 3 of the players, Shoutbow, cele ele and cele engi are all cele. The other classes arent meta purely because the cele amulet isnt as good for them. I’m not saying we should delete it, I’m just not sure its balanced
Oh, ok, so teams don’t use thieves or mediguards. Ok.
Cele good for so many builds? Which ones?
Last I checked only ele, engineer, and maybe warrior used celestial in current meta. That’s still missing out 4 other professions that don’t use celestial at all (celestial is garbage for necro, garbage for mesmer, and garbage for ranger and thief).
Apparently 2/7 or 3/7 using cele while the other 4/7 use berzerker/valkyrie is “broken”.
PvP person hyperbole at its finest.
The elementalist also doesn’t have blurred frenzy on a 10 sec cd and his blink doesn’t break stuns, what’s your point.
Ele in berk gear also has 5k less hp than you do so he can literally get 1-shot by a thief’s backstab crit or a warrior’s eviscerate.
Take lupicus as an example. I fear very little of him on my sword/sword mesmer since not only do I have vigor, but a short cd block and blurred frenzy on top. Even if I waste a dodge I’ll be safe consistently while an ele might have to blow a 50 sec cd skill.
Now in PvP sure a celestial d/d ele is a whole different game, but you know other ele’s exist and they need those defenses, especially scepter eles and staff eles who are sitting ducks otherwise.
And it’s not a mesmer only thing, they treated the guardian the same way as mesmer.
The hilarious thing is meanwhile a s/d thief can evade spam, has an evade and root clear built into his heal, has a long vigor on heal (which is a short 15 sec cd), and with feline grace he gets 3 dodges per full bar of endurance instead of 2.
They nerfed mesmer/guard ranger and left the moest egregious case of evade spam, thieves, alone.
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lol, ele with their standard DPS build can give 12 might stacks through a normal rotation, and a warrior who will be in party not even doing Phalanx Strength can provide 5+ stacks.
Why in hell would you bring a mesmer for a measly 10-15 with 2 ramp ups worth of shatters (and kitten damage in the process) might stacks when even a PS warrior can keep an easy 25 might stacks and vulnerability stacks+ banners for the group, and an ele with a fier field from lava font can pretty much give any group with blasts permanet full might stacks and fury.
A PS warrior even does more damage than a mesmer, so it’s a moot issue.
What a useless buff to shatters in PvE, do people even PvE? The last thing we need is to be an obsolete buff bot in addition to a portal bot.
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I have been on both sides of the ranger SB and the having to attack from the side make sense…and here is why.
The AA is pretty darn rapid as it is now. most people with put earth sigil on SB to maintain that bleed stack. Imagine not needing the sigil due to changing the SB to apply bleed no matter what. That allows you to put an additional on hit or on crit sigil such as frailty and torment layering in more than enough conditions to allow 25 bleed stacks with only AA. The would require 0 skill to play a class that most ppl dislike as is. plus for only 2 trait points you can have bleed on crit…just saying.
The only way i could see them making this change is to cut the bleed duration in half as well as slightly reduce the attack speed. Also…yes classes like SS Warrior can maintain better condition damage but you are at 900 range and they are not. The SB is in a pretty strong spot as is.
Just remember everything in this game is about balance. If they buff something…they will eventually need to nerf something else to make up for it. And you may not like the buff you get as much as you dislike the impending nerf :/
I don’t give a kitten about your range argument, why do rangers have to suffer for the sake of PvP. A warrior can have plenty of uptime on the target and while he does not have 900 range, MELEE ATTACKS CLEAVE 3 TARGETS IN A CONE, WHICH RANGED WEAPONS DO NOT.
I am sick and tired of this game limiting every kitten class into a terrible state just so that pvp people don’t whine about losing duels/skirmishes.
No, it’s a single boss, no extra enemies. And PvE already has plenty of encounters if not all of them that consistently kills phantasms with truckloads of AoE. Fractals are one of them. But aoe hurts shatter just as well, short of mirror image+deceptive evasion combo your clones are also going to instantly die as soon as they spawn before you can even do a 3 clone mondwrack with IP shatter in PvE.
Then it sounds like the problem isn’t clone / phantasm longevity, but that you can’t create clones quickly or easily enough.
And you never will, because the clones literally die to a single autoattack from any high end pve mob. A single autoattack, now figure a pack of 4-5 mobs, or a boss who not only autoattacks but peppers aoe. You get to an interval of more than one clone death per second.
And even then the sustained damage of a shatter spec is garbage.
Here’s a thought. If you’re really interested in going in this direction…
Add some options to bestow serious group buffs via shatters or clone death.
If you’re worried about PvP power, make some of those buffs fairly short-range, which naturally favors stacking.
I don’t think you understand how massive they’d have to make these buffs from shatter in order to ever make shattering a 3 phantasm setup ever an option. We are talking thousands worth of DPS.
Other classes have weapons that can maintain bleeding and poison at the same time without having to be at the side or behind someone. And I’m talking about pve anyhow.
It’s the attack speed that is the problem/difference.
Other classes weapons don’t attack nearly as fast.
A sword/sword warrior is the stronger condi spec in PvE and has little issue keeping 15+ bleed stacks.
The shortbow may attack fast but it only applies one stack and its duration is pretty miserable.
The problem with the shortbow is the same as the mainhand axe, it’s a hybrid weapon and hybrid weapons suck because they neither bring enough condi spam and variety of conditions nor do they possess high power coefficients.
The issue was the same with Maul on greatsword doing bleeds on a power weapon until they changed it.
That’s what needs to happen with the ranger.
Alternatively they could merge condi damage and power into simply Power so hybrid weapons don’t suck because both condi damage and direct damage would scale from the same offensive stat.
Comparing a Warrior burst skill that hits for maybe 6k to being hit for 18k in 3 seconds seems moot. I can do maybe 8-9k damage if you stand their.
You can’t daggerstorm/reflect eviscerate or earthshaker or backstab can you.
You can’t side step backstab or eviscerate, can you.
You can heal while using those, unlike Lich, can you.
You can use defensive utility skills while using those, can you.
Yeah, I thought so. So please take the lich elite whine somewhere else.
Meta groups understand the spot of a mesmer. You bring time warp and portal with some CC.
But PuG groups are not meta groups. It is likely you don’t know the portal tricks in every dungeon, or how to stealth and portal skip in fractal and dungeons, so your main benefit as mesmer to the group is lost.
Mesmer damage in PvE is pretty bad, the only thing that keeps you in a group is your utility, and if you don’t know how to use your utility in PvE groups don’t want you.
For PuGs, generally a thief or ele will be better. The thief makes the skipping more forgiving, the guardian has more reliable reflects with larger uptime not dependent on AI, the ele has far more damage than any class in game plus might and fury stacking.
Basically, if you don’t know portal tricks/curtain pulling for stacks and stealth skips+portal, you are dead weight to the group.
Make a character of each race?
Except male norn are absurdly hideous and malformed so the norn cultural armor would look far better on a human male who actually has a chest that isn’t some drooping manboobs and they don’t hunch all over with a hulking upper body and a tiny, tiny set of very separated chicken legs.
Not to mention male norn have undersized heads relative to the size of their body. The neck is almost as wide as the head itself.
And I don’t want to play a female, there are enough Playboy models in the game as is.
You don’t have to use the Hulk body if you don’t want too. And you can adjust the head size while making him in the first place.
On topic. No. I like that there are race specific. Seeing an Asuran running around in Charr heavy would just look odd.
All of the body options are malformed. There’s not a single option where there isn’t a horrible gap between the legs, that the legs are puny relative to the upper body, that the character hunches, and that he has a drooping chest.
Everything about the posture and proportions of the male norn body are just wrong. And the funny thing is we already had the male norn models in GW1 kittenemble nothing of the GW2 ones.
PvE has a heavy reliance on projectile defence. Not having any is a major disadvantage to the class. Especially when you consider things like orrian turrets in arah, Mai trin, Imbued shaman and just about every trash mob group in the game. :P
Thats only naming a few obvious examples. There are literally projectile attacks everywhere in game. Some which you would not even normally associate as projectile attacks. Yet despite that they can be reflected and blocked with projectile defence. One really obscure example is the grenth wraiths life drain attack in arah p4. There are also melee attacks on some mobs which can be blocked with reflects.
Only issue with that Anet has been known of just making attack ignore reflect/destruction if/when it gets viewed as a problem. Reflection really should just be reworked to function similarly to retaliation in which the stats of the reflector is used for the damage as to remove gimmicks that completely favor some profession over others.
All the people in the group are in berzerker/assassin stats so I’m not sure how that would change the damage…. even if damage where not even reflected back at the mob the fact that you’re defending against something like an Orrian Hunter’s bouncing axe that nukes people for 6k+ damage per bounce would still make it so classes are favored.
The harpy fractal would be no different, or Mossman, or the amount of mobs and bosses with lethal projectiles. The damage from reflection is really the icing on the cake, the not getting downed in 2-3 hits from a projectiles is the actual motivator.
I mean they already sort of made cultural armor available to all races when they made Braham’s armor, norn cultural armor, available to all races.
Or making Balthazar’s regalia universal as well, when it’s known only humans are favored by and worship Balthazar.
500 pristine means 500 days unless you’re doing multiple scales a day, when most people don’t even do besides 50 and 40. Even with 2 scales that’s almost a year of grinding fractals, it’s a stupid grind.
Why should a tonic or a simple skin take longer to obtain than an actual legendary weapon?
I don’t even get what’s with people’s obsession with time gating rewards, it’s awful.
If you beat the content, you should get the rewards, period. Introduce achievements/challenges to be met in the fractals themselves if you want to make it so that it’s harder to get carried to a weapon (will change very little, guilds will just sell the achievement runs just like Challenge modes and heroic mounts are sold in WoW).
Time gating crap is a terrible concept to borrow, it was already bad enough with Mawdrey and the stupid plates.
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Make a character of each race?
Except male norn are absurdly hideous and malformed so the norn cultural armor would look far better on a human male who actually has a chest that isn’t some drooping manboobs and they don’t hunch all over with a hulking upper body and a tiny, tiny set of very separated chicken legs.
Not to mention male norn have undersized heads relative to the size of their body. The neck is almost as wide as the head itself.
And I don’t want to play a female, there are enough Playboy models in the game as is.
Except in PvE it would most likely do better as a long duration long(ish) CD. kitten CD with a 10s duration still gives it a high uptime, but allows it to be far stronger per cast. Its not about crowding out other skills, but if two skills are equal in power but one is high CD high effect and the other low CD low effect the first makes for a much more interesting play situation to me.
Not really. There are far more thrash pack pulls than you think, and a long cd only lessens the value of the utility if you only use it for a tiny fraction of the run.
It only gets worse when you consider fractals when mob packs come in intervals that make the well kind of pointless as a 10 sec duration skill because the lengthened duration virtually does nothing for you when those very mobs are dying in under 5 seconds anyways.
Blind fields are not used to protect against sustained damage, it’s about protecting against getting spiked down by 3-4 cultists who just leaped at you for 5-6k damage each, and then they shortly die when they miss their burst and more come in shortly after. Same applies for Urban fractal, really.
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I just hope the content shift doesn’t mean 3-4+ hour raids on a 3-5 day schedule.
One of the big appeals about GW2 is gathering with a group of friends and getting some quick fun, not scheduling your life around a videogame.
I hope the group content will at least not exceed a 2 hour affair.
One way they could go about it is forget the dumb thrash mob packs. Traversing through a bunch of them easily adds at least half an hour to the raid itself.
But I really don’t want GW2 to become like other MMO’s “endgame content”. Endgame content usually stands in for artificially lengthened content through various means of gating that I don’t care to suffer through again.
Your numbers are wildly overpowered, Ross. El.Oh.El
With careful balancing, it’s a neat idea though. With the way you describe it, it would essentially be the self-inflicted version of the burn condition. Low duration but high dmg. However, it should still scale from condition dmg. We have retaliation for that type of buff/debuff.
His numbers are not wildly overpowered for PvE at least. In fact, his suggestion is perfect.
And I don’t understand how you can say a 2-3k confusion tick as Ross suggested is OP, when autoattacks on berk specs already hit for 3k+ without much might stacks.
I know everyone wants all of our skills to have nearly nonexistant CDs, I’m saying it isn’t necessarily the best idea from a game health point of view. A 24s CD WoD is insanely strong, even if they changed nothing to how it works now (and it does need a field change).
WHICH IS WHY I SAID PVE.
You know, the much larger chunk of content likely the majority of people are playing outside WvW. Yet all the balance we see seems to come from the spvp/wvw side instead of splitting the kitten skill balancing.
I don’t think lowering the CD is necessarily the answer (though a slightly reduced one might be appropriate), I’d much prefer it be really strong and have a long duration but have a “cost” of not being able to use it associated. Dropping the CD is certainly a power boost, but it is also one that dumbs down skill usage, and also limits how strong skills can be per-use.
Nah, I’d rather have it up more often. 50 sec cd is dumb the uptime on blind from black powder vs. WoD is not even close.
And the thing is, BP’s radius difference is mitigated if you have a guardian/mesmer to pull the mobs into it.
It is true that for example in PvP WoD’s radius is an advantage, but Black Powder can be used for an easy guaranteed stomp every single time. Or to deny melee range effectiveness to someone.
All the wells in general should have cd’s no longer than 25 sec, especially in PvE.
And quite frankly for taking up a utility slot, Spoj is right in that it should do more. Glyph of Storms can either stack vulnerability, do extra aoe damage, or aoe blind.
It’s a matter of the value of the utility meriting the sacrifice of precious utility slots.
Take lightning spirit for example, why is it the first spirit rangers will forgo? Because swiftness procs are not really worth the sacrifice of a utility slot compared to 7% extra damage or the protection or in the case of spvp the burning.
The problem is ALL the utility of a necromancer is concentrated in those wells, because the weaponskills themselves do NOTHING for the group. Playing my ele or engineer, I got myriad fields I can set down to my groups benefit.
Look at D/F or Staff ele, I can set down anaoe chill field, 2 water fields, one of which applies regen and clears conditions, I can do a line of warding, a ranged root with a blast finisher on earth 2, an aoe CC stun field and a knockback on air+ aoe swiftness on the same cd as Locust Swarm which is just single target. And then there’s the fire fields. Projectile deflection for the group.
Same goes for guardian or mesmer. Guardian has roots and pulls and blocks for the group. Mesmer at least has the offhand focus for some utility with a pull/projectile deflection and some cc to take off defiance stacks on the greatsword or use illusionary wave to ghetto push mobs into a spot as well. Warrior has an aoe cc on mace from his axe/mace set, with easy high vulnerability application, or he can bring his warhorn to cure the party of movement impairment and grant them vigor.
But necromancer, and to a slightly lesser extent rangers, have no real utility built into their weaponskills. And this is why if the utility will not be given to their weaponskills, then their utility slots need to have condensed utility greater than what other classes bring in their utility slots to make up for the emptiness of group utility in their weapons.
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