I prefer that the next time they think of difficulty, it’s not behind the gold gate of increased AR checks. Also, please stop with the dumb autoattacks with little/small tells that get obstructed by the myriad spell effects in the game, especially when said autoattacks can hit for 8k+ damage.
Also, attacks like mai’s spin bolts need to follow game rules with reflects, or the game needs to communicate better that they’re immune to reflects.
The biggest offenders in terms of dumb autoattacks is the ascalonian fractal. 4+ mobs with marginally noticeable tells, especially the male mages who just pop half your health with little visual queues and it gets ridiculous when you have multiple mobs who can instantly down people based on unclear aggro rules, so what people do tp defend against such AI cheese is to blind spam and stack behind a corner so they can get burst in as the mobs path to them without fearing some random, sometimes invisible ranged attack that downs people immediately.
After watching the Gameplay of strong hold i don’t think revenant will be as over powered as people are thinking. It’s hammer auto attacks hit for 400 damage overall. That’s kinda laughable if we’re gonna be honest.
You do realize all press toons were given Celestial gear (read: kitten damage gear), and that it only had access to 3 traitlines and players haven’t had enough time to come up with proper trait synergies, right?
Sardu from TTH already says that Revenant aoe abilities hit much harder than necromancer marks, so they actually function as denial zones.
And it makes sense the hammer would do less damage. Most ranged weapons do significantly less DPS than melee ones with the exception of ele staff.
Worst thing they did for some classes alongside hybrid weapons is splitting power and condition damage. Guang got it right by suggesting they merge condi damage and power (so power affects both direct damage and conditions), and let conditions crit and adjust their damage accordingly.
Maybe it just me but I don’t buy it saying mesmer don’t have sustain dps. Sure we have bust, so does all other class, but to say we don’t have sustain dps is wrong.
Build it right and you will see sustain dps.
I have a hybrid build I run in both pvp and pve that does close to the same level of damage as a direct damage build.
Every attack is a crit, every crit bleeds. Bleed sometime criting for stupid amount once it stacks up to 15+. I have managed to stack 25 and the damage on that was stupid but this is very hard to achieve.
18 – 20 stacks can be achieved with ease, mind you this is in pve, in pvp you can get close between 10-15 Constance.
lolololol “hybrid build” that does similar damage to a direct build, as if conditions scaled with 2 stats instead of 1.
This is the problem with a game that has no dps meters, all kinds of people with no sense of math can just make up crap.
Not a good argument. That “drop the road” revenant skill grants pulsing stability, does damage and inflicts weakness. It’s also spammable if I’m not mistaken.
Hallowed ground should just not suck so much kitten. It should get resistance or something.
Hallowed ground is amazing in both pve and wvw.
Because all the class is good for is pvp skirmishes and little more. The class has no aoe and terrible sustained damage, so it’s garbage in large scale pvp and always garbage in PvE.
Anything a mesmer can do in PvE, a thief (stealthing group through mechanics) or guardian (reflects) can do better.
Only the necro is worse than a mesmer and even then in single target bosses even the necro is better.
Wow… Much salt. Such wow.
- In pvp mesmer is great in team fights, it’s just as of late I see more mesmers running condi (condi mesmer is not good in teamfights.), or a phantasm build also not good in teamfights.
- Our AOE shatter damage in PVP is great, once again most mesmers mess up their shatter combos or they try to run into the middle of a team fight to get that extra little shatter from illusionary persona (lel).
- You are vastly underestimating portal on a mesmer. Especially when playing solo I have had portal save team fights or pull the most massive jukes ever for instance no more than 5 minutes ago I had two guardians and a warrior chasing me on keep at forest I knew I wasn’t gonna cap the point so I dropped a port. They chased me all the way to the beach where they downed me, our warrior ressed me we ported back out to keep where it was a free cap. And since the guardians used ALL their mobility to chase me. We had a full cap before the next team fight. Do not try and say mesmer is bad for anything besides small skirmishes. Because that is wrong.
- Next point-Guardians CANNOT hold a higher reflect uptime than mesmer by any stretch of the imagination. In PVE a mesmer can have permanent reflects guardians only actual reflect is wall of reflection, and that is not 100% uptime.
- Also why do you hate on our AOE so much? It’s really not all that bad. Mesmer may be low tier in pvp even bottom tier but that is because any half decent thief with half a decent brain can outplay the meta mesmer builds. Not too mention the current meta is pretty skewed toward condi which in general mesmers can’t deal with all that well.
- Last but not least if you look at how pvp teams are playing there are way more small skirmishes happening in matches right now than huge balls out team battles, so even if our AOE was so bad in PvP (it’s not), it is irrelevant because most fights happen in smaller skirmishes in pvp.
WvW is something i’m not gonna touch with a 10 foot pole that RossBiddle is holding, so yeah.
So full of crap, I wonder if you do high end pve at all. The only reliable reflection you have is feedback. iWarden gets killed easily in fractal 50, or if mobs move out of its range or the mob it was casted on dies, so goes the use of iwarden. You can trait curtain if you want to gut what little damage you already had though.
Guardian will protect his group with a longer lasting wall, and a spirit shield that absorbs projectiles for well over 20+ seconds. In fact, by the time the shield ends, the wall is back up.
Of course you’re not gonna touch WvW or endgame pve or open wolrd pve. Literally every point you’ve made was completely irrelevant since I had already granted mesmers only perform in skirmishes and duels (and spvp qualifies as skirmishes).
Too bad the aspects of the game that are not spvp happen to be far larger and more populated than said spvp format, and some mesmers have no interest in WvW roaming or spvp.
Mesmers are plain crap in PvE and in WvW larger scale battles they’re little more than veil/portal bots. Shatter is such laughable damage next to lava font or meteor shower let alone a couple of pistol whip cleaves or melee frontline hammer combos, and good luck with those illusions living long enough after they spawn to get a 3 clone shatter on a zerg, not that it will do much for your 6-7k iberserker hitting a group of people when it’s cd is over 10 seconds while an ele is pelting groups people with 3k fireballs left and right and 5k meteors and 4-5k ice spikes with far more frequency.
Then you sir are playing mesmer wrong. Because i regularl do fractals, and dungeons. Never do I have the issues of losing my illusions too fast. Open world pve I’ll give you. But honestly if you hate the class so much why play it?
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Yes, I’m sure you, the guy who made a post in the dungeon forums initially admitting you hated berserker speed runs, have much to teach me about playing a mesmer in PvE.
I play the kitten class because I mained a mesmer in GW1 and somehow they found a way to not learn from gw1 and after fixing the class in gw1 many years after, they went and screwed up the class again in gw2.
If in PvE damage is king, why did you even try to go to fractals 50 with necro?
There is clearly something else to playing a certain class than big damage numbers.
Because I’m sick of playing ele/guardian? Difference is my ele/guardian join a 50 and stay in a 50.
My necro joins one 4 times and before I can even zone into the instance I’m kicked from the party. LFG advertises constantly with “warrior/ele/thief/guardian only/heavies preferred”. I have to cycle groups until I’m not kicked upon joining. This has NEVER happened with guardian/ele/warror/thief.
I know you guys love to pretend hierarchies don’t exist, but it’s not honest telling a guy who came to ask a question that everything is fine and dandy.
Because all the class is good for is pvp skirmishes and little more. The class has no aoe and terrible sustained damage, so it’s garbage in large scale pvp and always garbage in PvE.
Anything a mesmer can do in PvE, a thief (stealthing group through mechanics) or guardian (reflects) can do better.
Only the necro is worse than a mesmer and even then in single target bosses even the necro is better.
Wow… Much salt. Such wow.
- In pvp mesmer is great in team fights, it’s just as of late I see more mesmers running condi (condi mesmer is not good in teamfights.), or a phantasm build also not good in teamfights.
- Our AOE shatter damage in PVP is great, once again most mesmers mess up their shatter combos or they try to run into the middle of a team fight to get that extra little shatter from illusionary persona (lel).
- You are vastly underestimating portal on a mesmer. Especially when playing solo I have had portal save team fights or pull the most massive jukes ever for instance no more than 5 minutes ago I had two guardians and a warrior chasing me on keep at forest I knew I wasn’t gonna cap the point so I dropped a port. They chased me all the way to the beach where they downed me, our warrior ressed me we ported back out to keep where it was a free cap. And since the guardians used ALL their mobility to chase me. We had a full cap before the next team fight. Do not try and say mesmer is bad for anything besides small skirmishes. Because that is wrong.
- Next point-Guardians CANNOT hold a higher reflect uptime than mesmer by any stretch of the imagination. In PVE a mesmer can have permanent reflects guardians only actual reflect is wall of reflection, and that is not 100% uptime.
- Also why do you hate on our AOE so much? It’s really not all that bad. Mesmer may be low tier in pvp even bottom tier but that is because any half decent thief with half a decent brain can outplay the meta mesmer builds. Not too mention the current meta is pretty skewed toward condi which in general mesmers can’t deal with all that well.
- Last but not least if you look at how pvp teams are playing there are way more small skirmishes happening in matches right now than huge balls out team battles, so even if our AOE was so bad in PvP (it’s not), it is irrelevant because most fights happen in smaller skirmishes in pvp.
WvW is something i’m not gonna touch with a 10 foot pole that RossBiddle is holding, so yeah.
So full of crap, I wonder if you do high end pve at all. The only reliable reflection you have is feedback. iWarden gets killed easily in fractal 50, or if mobs move out of its range or the mob it was casted on dies, so goes the use of iwarden. You can trait curtain if you want to gut what little damage you already had though.
Guardian will protect his group with a longer lasting wall, and a spirit shield that absorbs projectiles for well over 20+ seconds. In fact, by the time the shield ends, the wall is back up.
Of course you’re not gonna touch WvW or endgame pve or open wolrd pve. Literally every point you’ve made was completely irrelevant since I had already granted mesmers only perform in skirmishes and duels (and spvp qualifies as skirmishes).
Too bad the aspects of the game that are not spvp happen to be far larger and more populated than said spvp format, and some mesmers have no interest in WvW roaming or spvp.
Mesmers are plain crap in PvE and in WvW larger scale battles they’re little more than veil/portal bots. Shatter is such laughable damage next to lava font or meteor shower let alone a couple of pistol whip cleaves or melee frontline hammer combos, and good luck with those illusions living long enough after they spawn to get a 3 clone shatter on a zerg, not that it will do much for your 6-7k iberserker hitting a group of people when it’s cd is over 10 seconds while an ele is pelting groups people with 3k fireballs left and right and 5k meteors and 4-5k ice spikes with far more frequency.
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Doing lots of damage is nice but that is hardly the only or most important thing when it comes to picking a class.
Don’t listen to this guy he has no clue. In a game made up of hp bars that need to be depleted, damage is one of the most if not the most important thing to bring.
In PvE, damage is king. There’s no question about it.
People talking about mesmer reflects clearly haven’t been with a guardian, who brings better projectile deflection anyways on top of better damage and more boons and aegis for the group.
Mesmer is only good for some spvp (pvp arenas) and dueling. That’s it. Anywhere else it’s vastly overshadowed.
I’m surprised I haven’t seen more suggestions for ele.
When I play PvE, i switch off between thief and ele. If a group doesn’t have an ele, that’s what I go to first. At first you might think neither is particularly tanky, but both have excellent endurance regeneration allowing you to not get one-shot since you’ll likely have a dodge ready. Ele has the added benefit of buffing the group nicely with 12 stacks of might and ~1 minute of fury when traited and used correctly. For a newer player you can build slightly more tanky and still be welcome as you’ll boost your group’s overall stats.
Ele is far from a beginner friendly profession. It’s far more unforgiving than a thief and getting your might rotation down and learning when to use your conjures or squish in your aoe’s is a large part of playing one effectively.
Also playing a staff ele outside a zerg in pvp requires really good skill cultivation otherwise you’re just thief bait.
Ele is an advanced profession that should not be the first choice of a beginner.
Which only makes the argument “your attacks do 70-80% of the damage of the other classes because of the pet” laughable.
That’s why you see such an amount of rangers simply running condi builds, because their condition damage is not reduced to accommodate the pet while the base values of their power based weapons are.
I’m talking about a pug situation where the dredges will be alive long enough to reapply it.
lv50 pug yesterday. 1 warrior, 2 ele, 1 guardian, 1 bombkit engineer. Dredge melted anyways without use of conditions. We didn’t even stealth at any point (though an engineer can stealth you, that engineer didn’t show the initiative to do so and the run went smooth anyways).
The damage scaling of berserker can pretty much brute force anything in this game, and when you throw in conjures and projectile deflect it gets stupidly easy.
Too much of the damage in this game is so polar. You either bring tools/class skills that completely negate it, or you face the pain train with a pug that doesn’t bring enough damage (seriously, even with pvt the survival gains are marginal versus the damage mobs do, you kill things way, way, slower but you still go down in 3 hits instead of 2; there’s no reason whatsoever to not go full damage).
I look at my D/F ele when standing on one of the switches for the dredge panel. Swirling winds, arcane shield, mist form, magnetic aura, obsidian flesh. I can last a lifetime holding that switch for the group.
There’s no way in hell my ranger or Necromancer can do the same. Not even my mesmer. And what my ele does a guardian can do as well, and even a warrior though you don’t have as good reflects (only with shield) you still have endure pain and shield stance to last a good solid seconds for the panel to be done.
Condition heavy specs are virtually worthless in most content. Some classes don’t even bring much in the way of utility to the group and nothing gets close to fire fields and the amount of blasts some classes bring, so right now a few classes can have all group needs covered while bringing the highest damage potential.
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Warrior is the one class that can be survivable and still keep its high damage builds. In order for your guardian to be survivable he has to give up DPS sources.
Warrior has Healing signet, the best heal in the game (that and the healing from 3 bar adrenaline basically gives you a free 400+ hp regen per tick, it’s insane).
Warrior also has heavy armor an a 7k base hp advantage over low hp classes. That means he can also absorb burst. Then you have stances like endure pain and shield stance on his offset (axe+shiel instead of axe+mace if your group is fine stacking vulnerability) and it’s really no contest.
All the other classes who want to build tanky will not come close to touching the damage of a warrior.
Really, either warrior or guardian. There’s good reason heavy armor professions are preferred by melee frontlines in WvW and in dungeon pugs.
Did you ever use Healsig ? Its 372, Not 400+ ..It Used to be 400+ before our nerfs because of people crying it ws too strong.Have you taken a look at incoming regen and healsources from other classes while they Still have their normal heal available with the regen incoming ? Warrs have just healsig and That’s it,it’s Far from the strongest heal ingame.
372 PLUS the healing you also get from full adrenaline trait.
It seems you haven’t used the other classes. In a group scenario everyone will have regen, so it’s pointless to say somebody will have regen.
The healing per second of healing signet outheals any single heal any other class has in the game. It is virtually a free heal you get to have passively and then you can pop a burst heal on top of that if needed.
Something tells me you haven’t played necromancer if you think your heal is “ok”.
Warrior is the one class that can be survivable and still keep its high damage builds. In order for your guardian to be survivable he has to give up DPS sources.
Warrior has Healing signet, the best heal in the game (that and the healing from 3 bar adrenaline basically gives you a free 400+ hp regen per tick, it’s insane).
Warrior also has heavy armor an a 7k base hp advantage over low hp classes. That means he can also absorb burst. Then you have stances like endure pain and shield stance on his offset (axe+shiel instead of axe+mace if your group is fine stacking vulnerability) and it’s really no contest.
All the other classes who want to build tanky will not come close to touching the damage of a warrior.
You see, I think this is the problem with player perceptions. They think high health and armor = survivability. Then you do a higher level fractal with said players and they wonder why they get one shot buy a boss despite having high health and armor. Also, that regen sustain is not as good as it seems if you’re being downed in one or two hits. Burst heals and damage immunity are more important.
Also, I’m not sure where you got the idea that a guardian has to sacrifice damage to get survivability, but this is certainly not the case. The highest damage guardian builds right now use greatsword + sword focus alt and usually build into the radiance line, which means they also get justice is blind + renewed justice. That means they have access to an aoe blind from greatsword, an aoe blind from sword, a blind from focus, a block from focus, a block from shelter, a free block from aegis + an on demand party block from aegis, and spammable aoe blinds from justice is blind, which refreshes every time an enemy is killed (which is super useful for stacking situations). I’m not even factoring in other non-heal slot skills like renewed focus.
The skills you mentioned for warrior, on the other hand, aren’t near as numerous or spammable. To put it plainly, I’d say guardians are far above warriors from a pure survivability perspective, even in full zerker gear (keeping in mind we are speaking in the context of PvE, as the original post pertained to).
You just named a bunch of skills that come off in one strike. When that fractal 50 archdiviner lands a melee on you, let’s see which is the profession that doesn’t get one shot. Same goes for the mossman dagger throw from stealth let alone his normal autoattack swings. In Colossus when the zealots are pelting you with arrows/heartseeking, all at the same time, a single blind isn’t going to prevent you from taking some hits.
When the captain in the ascalonian fractal does his fire swirl, the class that can take that hit and not be instadowned is called a warrior. Guardian’s blinds don’t even reliably work on bosses.
There’s a good reason why berk eles learn much quicker to max melee range archdiviner or mossman. Because it’s not optional, it’s quite frankly a necessity to not getting one shot by a single quick autoattack that has little tell.
How many 11.5k hp berk eles you see around in WvW versus 17k hp berk warriors? Higher health pools and the armor difference does matter. A guardian or warrior make for much better bunkers in spvp in staying inside a point and holding it than do the other classes. The difference in damage potential of a warrior vs guardian bunker is vast.
There are bad players for ALL classes, let’s not bring up the argument that because bad players gravitate toward one class, the class is underrepresented. The bias for a warrior/guardian frontline in WvW is real it’s not some figment of people’s imagination. Remove stand your ground from guardians and the WvW melee frontline would suddenly shift in proportion heavily for warriors.
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Warrior is the one class that can be survivable and still keep its high damage builds. In order for your guardian to be survivable he has to give up DPS sources.
Warrior has Healing signet, the best heal in the game (that and the healing from 3 bar adrenaline basically gives you a free 400+ hp regen per tick, it’s insane).
Warrior also has heavy armor an a 7k base hp advantage over low hp classes. That means he can also absorb burst. Then you have stances like endure pain and shield stance on his offset (axe+shiel instead of axe+mace if your group is fine stacking vulnerability) and it’s really no contest.
All the other classes who want to build tanky will not come close to touching the damage of a warrior.
Really, either warrior or guardian. There’s good reason heavy armor professions are preferred by melee frontlines in WvW and in dungeon pugs.
Because all the class is good for is pvp skirmishes and little more. The class has no aoe and terrible sustained damage, so it’s garbage in large scale pvp and always garbage in PvE.
Anything a mesmer can do in PvE, a thief (stealthing group through mechanics) or guardian (reflects) can do better.
Only the necro is worse than a mesmer and even then in single target bosses even the necro is better.
They haven’t put much in the way of armor and weaponskins into dungeons.
Look at the luminiscent armor, that is one out of how many armros in the game that have been added versus put on the gem store? And then it takes a silly amount of grinding an open world area.
Warrior and engi can stack vulnerability far more efficiently than an axe necro. On my mark is an INSTANT 10, warrior already got traits to apply vulnerability via attacking, and an ele applies vulnerability on crits or an engineer.
And the difference is all those other classes are not doing terrible damage while stacking vulnerability/applying boons.
I ran a fractal 50 yesterday and I felt it. Necro cleave is awful, and the dagger autoattack isn’t even something to write home about. Moreover people can get really kittened at your well because they’d rather have fire/water fields under them to blast on.
Then there’s also the fact that you’re doing something like the colossus, and grabbing the hammer as a necro is a liability on the third floor because you get knocked back and have no source stability to not get gibbed by all the cultists around the seal. Your death shroud makes you drop the hammer.
There’s so many disadvantages to death shroud. Can’t use important objects, can’t use conjures, can’t heal inside it. You as a necromancer bring no blast finishers or fields taht people want. Your wells are on ridiculously large cooldowns for the effect they have. Why even have a well of darkness when a thief can have black powder far more often if needed?
I have really tried to find something redeemable about the class in PvE but all I ended doing was dumping 300g worth of crafting down the drain for him on top of a bunch transmutation charges only to shelf him and send all the stuff to my ele (who I am sick of using).
If the three classes I enjoy playing (ranger, necro, mesmer), only my ranger somewhat functions. Mesmer damage is outright horrendous and you’re just there for the iwardens and feedback/pulls, which a guardian does better anyways.
I jump on my thief/warrior/ele and it’s night and day.
Unless you can sneak up on someone, not very. Since the update to point blank shot, most people will dodge that as well as most of your rapid fire. Then you are stuck with autos and the #5. Also most gank will counter you pretty hard, and will continue to rotate to do so to make you entirely a non factor. Not to say it cant be done, its just a lot harder then other choices, and the other choices either bring better sustained burst (if that makes sense) or something else.
sword+axe plays well against that. A thief who eats a path of scars is a dead thief.
Problem is power ranger brings little good utility and crap aoe (barrage is a disgrace of a skill next to ele or warrior aoe or even thief cleave with sword). And he’s vulnerable to getting trained.
A couple evades<the sheer damage blocks or escapes berk warriors or thieves bring.
And then there’s sustained damage problem. Warriors and thieves can self might stack pretty competently to do solo damage well, rangers are entirely group reliant for many important boons.
Ranger stunbreaks also have massive cooldowns for some reason, as do their condi clears and besides point blank shot they don’t bring much in term of shutdown/boons to the group. Also power ranger is the one class with virtually no boon strip whatsoever so any bunkerish class with access to prot can easily shrug them off.
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I have never gotten instakicked out of a 50 fractal on my ele or guardian. Ever.
I got on my necro the other day, had to go through 5 insta kicks upon join before i got into a group that didn’t.
Hell, they didn’t even specify preferred classes, otherwise I would have switched or not joined. Then there’s people just hunting for excuses to remove you, like you aggroed something on arah when you didn’t, or they accuse you of fearing/cc’ing the slime when you haven’t even entered death shroud and are using a dagger so you didn’t sue staff fear.
You’ll also realize how much longer your wait times for filling a group are if you are an instance owner as a necro or ranger vs. a guard or ele or warrior.
My fractals i start on guard fill up almost instantly. I can go over 20 minutes of waiting before anyone joins my ranger/necro.
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Welcome to the happy, happy world of rangers and necromancers. Even engineers sort of get the same treatment. Few groups even want a mesmer if it’s not something like a harpy fractal or arah skips.
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just you wait: nature spirit will become immortal, last longer, have a shorter cooldown, further range, more potent healing-turret abilities, and its battle standard effect will become ground targeted and completely replace both roa and entangle in both pve and pvp
How about they do just that and keep it a pve only skill. People might actually use it then.
In a group you dont need energy sigils for lupi unless you expect your group to wipe and make you solo. Although i admit its not recommend to go without unless you are experienced and running with experienced players.
Yeah, if i trust my guardians or if the group i run with has enough burst to push his phase I can trust that, but inevitably there are time where I’m going to lack those and the fact stands that my necromancer is handicapped for no good reason other than the usual pvp whine.
They love to say our DS is the reason we can’t have escapes/vigor/stability yet DS has been shown time and again to only work (and sometimes too well) in duels and small scale spvp but it’s virtually worthless in pve and large scale pvp/wvw mechanisms.
And good god the minor traits for necro and mesmer, and ranger marksman/bm lines are awful. I play ele/warrior/guardian/thief and it’s disgusting how much better their minors are.
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Its simple don’t use axe in PvE. There are a lot of weapons that are awful in PvE, and axe will probably always be one of them. They also will not split skills, it is very much against what they want to do and they’ve already said they will not split unless absolutely necessary (and no matter what you feel they won’t feel this is absolutely necessary).
And Lupi can be solo’d by Necro, so… what’s your point.
“Fixing” Axe in PvE won’t do a single thing for our PvE viability. It will just give us another weapon to sulk in the corner with.
It’s like talking to a wall…..lupi can be soloed with energy sigils or food….
It’s not just axe all necro weapons suck in PvE.
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He’s talking from a pvp perspective while my post mostly focused on a PvE perspective.
Good luck eating lupicus kicks to the face (and being launched out of position, screwing up the melee stack for the group) in death shroud because you don’t have enough endurance unless you use energy sigils or non-dps food while the rest of the classes have easy access to vigor or endurance refunds. I don’t think this guy understands how much damage PvE mobs do you can’t eat mechanics in PvE or you die regardless of what class you are without dodges.
Don’t answer my points with pvp concerns they need to split skills, I won’t tolerate 2 years of misery for the sake of pvp people.
Signets and spectrals are virtually useless in PvE.
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If they decide that the skill is primarily on offense skill (focus on the fury/might stacking) then we may be lucky to see 5 stacks on the ranger and maybe 10 on the pet.
The might stacking aspect of the skill is horrendous given how often pets actually hit moving targets in pvp. And if I’m gonna sacrifice an elite slot with a 120 sec recharge for just fury that an ele or warrior can fart anytime without using an elite, I’m gonna be annoyed.
People use RaO for the stability, otherwise it’s a terrible skill.
Well, if they’re giving the warrior 10 stacks on dolyak signet we better get something along the lines of 15.
You’ll probably prefer greatsword over 1h sword because 1h sword tends to displace bosses/mobs with its leap so you’re gonna kitten people off if you push lupi out of wall while trying to flank for your damage bonus.
…
Anet themselves have said they want to fix it, but this was back in October last year…They have said? Do you have a quote or something?
Why don’t you look it up? It was by Jon Peters why should he do the work on a quote a year ago just because you’re skeptical.
You can start by asking them what the hell happened to fractal chests to choose a weapon instead of getting repeats, or why a fractal 40-50 rewards 1.5 gold while an Arah stealth spam run that’s a fraction of the time investment gives 3g (even if fractal 50 gave 3g it still takes more time than an Arah run, so it’d still be crap).
Or what we’re supposed to do with all these pristine fractal relics.
Or why agony exists to begin with, creating dumb gold gates (hello 70 AR, how nice to spend 200+ gold to get a toon to 70 AR for fractal 50) with no reason whatsoever as agony itself is a worthless mechanic that adds no gameplay value (especially those agony checks at the end bosses).
Or why molten brothers is still so dumb to ranger pets by spamming fire circles that not even drakes can live through (since pets love to position right outside the reflect walls).
Switch fractal rewards to dragonite ore instead of empyreal fragments. Empyreal fragments can stay in normal dungeons.
I hope you guys don’t forget to change the Elite Inquests in Arah path 2. Stability is the only thing that defeats their multi-hit perma stun.
You can still likely skip them, especially with a thief around, but worst case scenario is you’ll have to clear them out and your speed run gets slightly slower.
But it opens the door for new bosses to be designed who are built with the concept of “interrupt or suffer” in mind, which would be a far superior design. S
With open world bosses.
It’s not like they’ve done meaningful instanced content lately ;p. I’d be willing to bet design will still favor open world zerg content.
no? some of the ls instances are well done.
but they arent dungeons, so nevermind, i can totally ignore your imprecise language.
Ok, I’ll grant you the Caithe instances, those were pretty cool.
I was on my necro earlier today and this guy called kiwipanda (a mesmer) had people come into his dungeon. He cycled through kicks of several people (while I was there for a while clearing the way alongside. Then a thief came in and aggroed behind me, died as we ran out of stealth and the mobs aggroed to me. He kicked me because I “aggroed”.
I then checked that same dungeon group and people were constantly kicked, and it was obvious he was using people to clear content so he could kick them and then sell the path. Because by the end he was completely alone despite saying he was gonna bring “competent” people in.
I would advise people to not even bother joining non-guild arah groups. That place is such a cesspool of the worst kind of people, it makes fractal 50 instakick of rangers and necromancers upon join look tame by comparison.
Get in a guild and do sales/dungeon run with guildies, this game has some of the most rotten people in the industry and my suspicion is on the focus on 5 man content — WoW LFD/LFR comes to mind to the kind of attitudes you find.
(edited by Zenith.7301)
But it opens the door for new bosses to be designed who are built with the concept of “interrupt or suffer” in mind, which would be a far superior design. S
With open world bosses.
It’s not like they’ve done meaningful instanced content lately ;p. I’d be willing to bet design will still favor open world zerg content.
I really don’t understand how they can allow this weapon to have so many issues for 2 years.
The only power based ranged weapon for a necromancer, with a 600 pitiful range. Useless retaliation on its third skill is apparently fine, but god forbid they give us a reliable source of vigor for PvE.
Ghastly claws, playing my ranger (which is another lacking class in this kick-happy community), is just a crappy rapid fire that doesn’t even stack vulnerability.
Then you have an autoattack that hits like a wet noodle.
Why does every necromancer skill have such a ridiculous cast time? The #3 skill, the dagger #5, everything seems to have some ridiculous delay, even wells. All while playing on my other classes I get skills that fire off pretty much immediately.
Then we have an entire collection of utilities centered on condition manipulation or minions, in a PvE game where people just cleanse conditions and mobs rarely use them or boons. Minions would seem like the one utility centered for power necromancers, but forget about that in any PvE content they’ll die to aoe immediately and they mess up speed runs.
Then we have a dagger autoattack that is no better than my ele’s lightning whip, which not only attacks from farther, but our autoattack only hits 2 targets for some reason while I on my ele can autoattack 3+ targets and burning speed an even greater amount of targets for 5-7k damage. In case you haven’t realized, burning speed is a 5-7k skill that is instant, has a built in evade, creates a fire field for blast finishers, and burns targets that remain there for even more damage.
And meanwhile my death shroud life transfer hits for the same damage, but has to be channeled for a longer time and bears no special effects.
I really don’t get the huge dearth of utility and blast finishers, having no reliable access to vigor.
I mean look at melee lupi, we can’t even have reliable amount of dodges due to no vigor or extra endurance regen (gotta have food for 40% extra, 60% less than vigor), and death shroud ever since the nerf disallowing it from absorbing a final hit without transferring over to your healthpool, can’t be even used to absorb kicks when you’re out of endurance. Death shroud also does not protect against cc.
Death Shroud should give 3 seconds of stability baseline when entering it.
Do you know why the dungeon community is tiny?
Because open world mindless zerging is already so rewarding. People hear about dungeons being nice income so they come “try” it halfheartedly. Turns out you actually need to dodge, read things, and not just spam 1 anymore.
Unlearning bad habits becomes too much work, so they simply blame the dungeon community for being too difficult and unwelcoming and go back to mindless zerg farming.
Completely agree.
The order of quality of rewards in game goes:
Open world farming > dungeons > fractalsThe order of difficulty in game, however, is:
Fractals > dungeons > open world farmingThis inverse relationship makes no sense whatsoever and results in a small, neglected and bitter dungeon community. Which is ironic because anet’s stated how they dislike “fracturing” their community…
Slight nitpick:
tp trading>open world farming>dungeons>fractals
Why do anything challenging in this game when you can play virtual tradesman and buy your way to anything.
Even as a berk necro I had to go through 5 fractal 50 joins where I was instantly kicked as soon as I finished loading in, before I got into a fractal 50 run that didn’t kick.
In arah it’s the same, fractal 50 and arah are scumbag central. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a more vile and sociopathic community, and I’ve raided in WoW top 50 guilds the people there aren’t even as close to kick happy even when carrying some random pug in a dungeon.
There was this arah run today where the mesmer basically kicked everybody and ended up himself alone. My suspicions is it was just pretext to use people to clear parts of the run for him so he could sell the path later.
(edited by Zenith.7301)
there’s not much to do as ranger currently, and I speak from a lot of experience in wvw and pvp. the most solid build atm is glassbow because it gives you most demonstrable results. condi/bunker rangers are in a pretty bad shape in the cele meta. in wvw though, they remain strong for dueling.
in pve, rangers are beastly. some of the highest damage in the game, and decent utility.
just wait for the xpac info…I think they improved the ranger a lot based on our CDI feedback.
Ranger PvE damage pales in comparison to what an ele or thief can pull off. And you bring terrible aoe to boot as outside of drakes your pets don’t cleave and barrage is a terrible aoe damage skill. You also bring less boons to a group, and the frost spirit isn’t that amazing that people won’t just bring another frostbow ele or an extra thief.
Open world PvE sure ranger does well but open world pve is braindead you just pluck at things with your bow.
OP gives a great summary. Personally I don’t know why RNG crits were added like any other generic RPG, they didn’t have anywhere near the same presence GW1 and it’s an impediment to the ‘action’ direction of GW2. Ideally I’d like to see crits turned into skill and trait based triggers rather than an awkward % based thing. Unfortunately that’s not going to happen.
The refusal for a PvP/PvE split and balancing accordingly makes conditions another big problem, they’re already great in WvW/PvP.
We definitely need more exciting traits. I don’t mind the +% for a specific weapon if it’s also providing something unique, hopefully new ones along side specialisations can help alleviate this.
Healing power is always going to be useless in PvE and hard to balance in PvP. The celestial meta showed how it can be a significant boost on Warriors and Eles. It may be useless but I’d rather see they use their resources to balance other things.
I definitely agree that Necromancers need a different type of support and had the same idea of orders being a great opportunity for support beyond the standard might/fury stacking. The weird support-healer stuff they’ve tried to press on to the profession doesn’t even work for PvP and has 0 place in PvE.
Conditions are only good in WvW as a roamer spec, not in a zerg.
With the guardian and ele and warrior trains all farting boons and condition removal faster and more often than a necromancer can strip and reapply is the very reason why everybody stacks on the boon heavy classes while the condi & strip classes like necromancer and mesmer suffer, and even ranger because rapid fire isn’t going to make you useful in a large scale battle when your pet is still dead 24/7 and ranger/necro/mesmer have all terrible aoe and provide few useful group buffs/blast fields/blast finishers.
And I can’t fathom who would think necros are fine in spvp. Necros are just an inferior engineer. Engineers can apply a wider variety of conditions than necros, bring more hard CC, and ironically are more survivable than the class with no escapes or immunities.
Inventory is a problem, sorry people. When you carry different sets of ascended gear, plus you are full of dust and empyreal fragments for crafting ascended it just gets dumb.
Increasing collection stacks to 1000 would help a lot.
I’m surprised this post hasn’t gathered more support.
Especially the comment on hybrid weapons, look at so many of the ranger weapons, especially mainhand axe and crossbow it’s just awful. Or the bleed leap on pets when cats are power based. Or elementalist’s awful earth attunement or water scepter.
Autoattacks in generals need to be balanced.
Warriors and thieves have really high autoattack damage on many of their weapons.
Warrior weapons are all focused as well, as are thief weapons. You only need one stat investment to make them shine, and even on warrior main sword where there’s a power skill, all warrior weapons have enough high base damage numbers that even their condition weapons hit hard with their power based skills.
Then you have necromancer staff, a weapon with basically 4 skills which deal with conditions, and the staff autoattack is power based. And necromancer scepter has a skill that’s power based.
Necromancers and mesmers also have terrible minor traits. Necromancer small heal on mob death, 7% of power converted to healing power? gain 1 puny stack of might when hit at 25% health? It’s garbage.
Mesmer get a bunch of short duration vulnerability stacks on dominance, which are just bad in pve.
Then you have pets, which need their aoe avoidance in pve and wvw already.
Mesmers need to have their shatters reworked for PvE, shatters are always a dps loss as a mesmer compared to phantasms, and the fact that illusions despawn after mob death really screws over mesmer dps in PvE even though mesmer dps is already really low.
Ranger pets all need to hit 3 targets with their auto-attacks baseline, they need to not be animation locked when attacking so targets dont just move away out of their range while they attack.
Ranged ranger pets need to attack from 1200 like the ranger can, the ranged disparity only puts them closer to a zerg, and their pathing from fort walls need to be fixed. Sic em needs to not break F2 skills.
Group utility also needs to be spread around. Ele, warrior, and guardian can all bring high boon stacking for a group on top of projectile deflection or many blast finishers.
Meanwhile mesmers, necromancers, and rangers bring few fields and garbage finishers/boon provision.
(edited by Zenith.7301)
I did it without issues as full berserker greatsword+LB ranger with sic em, signet of stone, and signet of the wild with Healing Spring heal.
damage+ when full endurance, spotter, predator’s onslaught, and 20 into skirmish line with 30% pet crit bonus and might for pet on crit. the rest goes into nature magic, power conversion from vitality trait and boons shared with pet.
Take drake+jaguar/jungle stalker or double drakes.
for packs open with barrage and then switch to jungle drake>f2 lightning spreay+ greatsword maul and aoe them down.
Don’t engage the floating flower looking mordrem in melee, range them down. Use longbow stealth to peel mobs off you when you need.
Blast on your healing spring with swoop.
Ranger is an inferior class to warrior/guardian/ele/thief, don’t bother. Even engineer is better.
Ranger is on the bottom tier with mesmer and necro, they only bring you for frost spirit.
You play ranger because it’s fun to you, otherwise if you’re looking for an optimal class, the pet/condition classes are not it.
(edited by Zenith.7301)
I don’t appreciate you misconstruing what I have said (or outright lying about what I’ve done) to fit your impression of me. It’s insulting and only weakens your own opinion.
Welcome to official game forums or any anonymous forum for that matter.
I’m hardly anonymous. I make myself very available.
Who said I was referring to you specifically? I’m just telling him to not get upset when people in a game forum take his statements in a way he did not intend.
It’s gonna be terrible.
I mean, if aegis can block boss attacks why can’t blind affect bosses.
I understand blind is more spammable for a class like thief or guardian but a necromancer has a long enough cd to justify it, so maybe they should just nerf the ability of thieves to spam blind and guardian leaps so blind can work on bosses.
What’s the point of condition builds if conditions are just straight out inferior versions of boons.
Are you dumb?
Did you see the implementation in the interview? It won’t work.
I don’t know why Saint said that. Anyway can you provide the sentence that Blind won’t make boss miss anymore? Because all I could find was when he talk how blind will affect the defiance bar and nothing more.
It will trigger a general stun. Basically, blind is used just to shave off stacks so the stun can go off, and they mention some blind sources like well of darkness and black powder having adjusted values.
I prefer a design where blind does exactly what it should, make an attack not hit your allies when used just as aegis protects them from said attack no matter what it is.
Blind is being lumped as a CC for spike/moment of opportunity purposes when Blind should function as a defensive condition that is to be an analogue to aegis. The new defiance system converts it from a defensive condition to a CC skill.
And this has significance in the pvp sphere as well, where blind was specifically used to avoid an attack and we hear players will now have access to defiance.
(edited by Zenith.7301)
I don’t appreciate you misconstruing what I have said (or outright lying about what I’ve done) to fit your impression of me. It’s insulting and only weakens your own opinion.
Welcome to official game forums or any anonymous forum for that matter.
It’s gonna be terrible.
I mean, if aegis can block boss attacks why can’t blind affect bosses.
I understand blind is more spammable for a class like thief or guardian but a necromancer has a long enough cd to justify it, so maybe they should just nerf the ability of thieves to spam blind and guardian leaps so blind can work on bosses.
What’s the point of condition builds if conditions are just straight out inferior versions of boons.
Are you dumb?
Did you see the implementation in the interview? It won’t work.
It’s gonna be terrible.
I mean, if aegis can block boss attacks why can’t blind affect bosses.
I understand blind is more spammable for a class like thief or guardian but a necromancer has a long enough cd to justify it, so maybe they should just nerf the ability of thieves to spam blind and guardian leaps so blind can work on bosses.
What’s the point of condition builds if conditions are just straight out inferior versions of boons.
Don’t spam 1 and disable auto attack. You don’t have to press 1111111111 repeatedly as fast as possible to succeed.
Press it once, stop. Repeat. When the situation is right, go for the full attack chain.
It’s not a broken weapon it’s just difficult to use. Thief sword isn’t much different. Have you ever tried teleporting with that thing? It looks a lot easier than it is.
Spoken like a true PvP guy who doesn’t have mobs’ attacks hitting him for 7k+ damage.
The sword needs to work so dodge and serpent strike/stalker strike can be activated mid animation.
Serpent strike does interrupt the animation.
Not during the midair leap, I’ve noticed the delay and it only gets worse in high load environments like WvW.
Playing the Caithe story mission on my alt reminds me what sword evades should feel like. They should be fluid without these input delays.
Don’t spam 1 and disable auto attack. You don’t have to press 1111111111 repeatedly as fast as possible to succeed.
Press it once, stop. Repeat. When the situation is right, go for the full attack chain.
It’s not a broken weapon it’s just difficult to use. Thief sword isn’t much different. Have you ever tried teleporting with that thing? It looks a lot easier than it is.
Spoken like a true PvP guy who doesn’t have mobs’ attacks hitting him for 7k+ damage.
The sword needs to work so dodge and serpent strike/stalker strike can be activated mid animation.