oh so theyre using utility slots on defenses but that doesnt count as speccing defensively in your twisted world
and each of those classes only has condi removal traits in defense lines…
Cleansing Fire on fire line….
And they have the option of using utility skills instead of much more expensive traiting sacrifices, an option rangers don’t have.
You’re just dense.
Yeah, easy easy easy to see these were all made with PVP/WVW in mind. There’s no way these incredibly underthought grandmaster traits were even considered with anything having to with PVE or dungeons. More I read information from the Devs the more I am convinced they do not want me to play a Ranger.
Skirmishing: Strider’s Defense – You have a 15% chance to block ranged attacks while in melee.
Again, Who is going to use this trait? Trappers won’t use it because they’re already investing points into making traps better, Interrupt Builds grab MoC, Berserker Rangers won’t use it because no one sane runs a bloody melee weapon with berserker gear
I assume you meant this towards WVW and PVP? Because I used to zerker melee on my Ranger all the time in PVE/Dungeons.
Yes i’m meaning towards PvP in general, because you can be successful being completely traitless in PvE in this game.
Not in Dungeons. Not to mention this pvp bullchit is effing up my PVE/Dungeon game.
As long as the dungeon isn’t arah, you’ll probably be able run the dungeon naked.
We can rant about the devs all day long but in the end they really have to answer the question if they ever have looked into the traits. That’s the 6. trait you want to use as LB ranger. They can’t be serious about that.
I’m really pis… unpleased right now, because this 6. trait looks like a mistake to me, one person alone would do. The next personwould notice this misery and fixes it. But there are 300 ppl over there, and atleast 30 should have looked at the traits. And noone of them realized that 6 traits you would want to use in one traitline as LB ranger are a little bit too much.
That’s not the point of PvE. The point of PvE is maximizing rewards in a time window so you can grind out legendaries/get skins/whatever.
You can also run naked in any spvp match and may end up winning because someone carried you or the other players were equally dumb.
Hell, in WvW if I zerg I can pretty much run any setup. Don’t you see all the berk longbow rangers who are a waste of space, where an ele or engineer or necromancer would do much better as ranged assailants.
Even with 17% reduction, however, condition specs will not be viable. And neither will cleric specs or any spec that isn’t a mix of power and precision.
You had to give them a second option for another 30 points investment in another bunker line while offensive rangers will still have no condi removal.
omg so you have to spec into defenses to get defenses? /wrist
Except other classes don’t, idiot. And it’s not just speccing defensive, it’s needing to go all the way into the line you poor excuse for a troll.
wow do you really think other classes dont have to spec defensively to get defenses too
I don’t think so, I know so. Thief utilities, warrior utilities, ele utilities, engineer utilities. All of them have utility skills and weaponskills that remove conditions without having to go 30 points into a defensive line.
Warrior Cleansing Ire, which is significantly better than Survival of the Fittest, is a masters trait instead of grandmaster. Thief stealth spam gets condi removal as its adept trait.
It also kills stat combos like Cavalier and Celestial and Valkyrie.
I think this will be awesome. What about 30 Air with weakness on interrupts, 30 in earth for crit damage invulnerability, and then using the Magnetic shield while staying in Earth? NO damage from your enemies xD Sure, probably no damage from you either, but still pretty fun to try out :P
Or for that matter, you could also use the flame axe or greatsword and go 30 in fire and earth, and stay in earth.
Only staff ele can make somewhat of an interrupt build, and even then ele interrupts are such high cd that the trait will not be used.
I don’t know a single ele that’ll go 30 into fire for this trait alone. Sure. It’ll help slightly. But it is more of an adept trait than a GM trait. It’s just not worth sacrificing points in water and arcana for
Nothing’s gonna ever be attractive over water and arcana so long as ele has 10k base health, cloth armor, and needs to spend 2 utilities on arcane ones to do burst every 30 seconds.
Ele is simply dead on arrival if they dont have at least 20 in water, and the attunements still take forever to recharge without points in arcana.
And finally the pet trait for AoE healing on f2. Another trait only BM bunker specs will use.
You just like skipped this one. This traits excites me. What’s wrong with BM bunker specs? They’re fun.
It’s not fun when you’ve spent 1.5 years where only BM condi bunker and spirit bunker are the only viable specs.
They really didn’t need an extra trait.
Marksman and Skirmishing in particular needed the most help alongside beastmastery, and all of them got garbage traits compared to poison master and survival of the fittest.
Honestly, PvP eles won’t ever be going 30 into fire anyway, so it’s a non-factor.
Sitting in earth isn’t viable unless the ele wants to be completely useless, so I’m seeing that more as a instant defense that they can flash into to avoid a large burst from a shatter mes or a backstab thief or something of that sort. Not too bad, just a bit more skilled counterplay.
And no ele will go 30 into earth because it’s a condition traitline and thus useless since most ele attacks are split across attunements with crappy condi coverage and no real condi damage stacking.
Not to mention an ele going into 30 earth might defend against a shatter or backstab, but will never have the spike or sustained damage to kill said classes.
Both traits are bad. Nobody goes 30 points into fire, and if they do it’ll be for persisting flames.
Earth trait is useless. No ele can sit in a single attunement, because ele autoattacks are terrible and an ele sitting on earth attunement means he’s doing no pressure whatsoever.
6 points things are changing.
Same crap different packaging.
30 points to make a weak weapon’s projectiles actually hit a moving target.
30 points to have a 15% chance to randomly block a ranged attack, on a traitline made for glass cannon rangers who won’t benefit from an unreliable source of niche mitigation (please, ranged damage isn’t even a problem for most rangers, it’s getting screwed by melee trains).
30 points for stronger poison on the bunker line you’ve been nerfing the past months. How nice of you to keep giving the only good traits to the condi bunker lines.
30 points in nature just to remove conditions. Apparently you weren’t satisfied with rangers complaining that they had to go 30 points into wilderness survival to have active condition removal. You had to give them a second option for another 30 points investment in another bunker line while offensive rangers will still have no condi removal.
And finally the pet trait for AoE healing on f2. Another trait only BM bunker specs will use.
Thanks. We really appreciate you giving warriors 10% extra speed on their dual mainhand axe/mace or mainhand sword as if they didn’t do enough damage already. Or the 100% crit chance on burst skills. It apparently also wasn’t enough that they were effective at might stacking and had ridiculous group utility in banners and vulnerability stacking, but they give 6 stacks of might to allies on top of for great justice.
Warriors clearly needed to get stronger offensively and in utility for PvE.
And that 8% nerf to healing signet will totally change things up in PvP!
At this point only thieves who know how well off they are remain as the people who defend the class. Often by pointing at equally broken warriors.
Backstab and spammable/invisible burst skills should have never been in game.
If my ele misses a fire grab, that’s 36 seconds of not having any burst besides air 2 and the arcane utility.
Thief is basically the one class that can miss a burst and try again shortly after, and in that downtime he’s not even punished with receiving damage because he can promptly restealth or port out until he can try his burst rotation as well.
There is no punishment to the class. If my necro or ele miss key skills, they are dying. There’s no such thing as resets.
Please stop pretending you know what the classes are " supposed to be".
Warriors aren’t supposed to be weak defense – they’re supposed to have little group oriented skills and low support capability.Please stop pretending you know what classes are “supposed to be”.
You’re guessing the same way the guy you quoted was. Unless that was sarcasm and I missed the point, in which case, apologies. :P
Look up the healing signet discussion about warrior. The devs themselves said they want the warrior to feel " sturdy " – that doesn’t go in line with what he said about warrior.
The devs have pretty much said over and over that they like the warrior as it is now, and that minor tweaks and adjustments are going to be made but this is the class pretty much.
Warriors are masters of weaponry who rely on speed, strength, toughness, and heavy armor to survive in battle – that to me seems to imply a good amount of survivability ( defense).
It also says rangers are masters of range, yet the warrior longbow beats the ranger’s longbow to kingdom come.
The warrior design also stated they were meant to be weak to conditions yet one of the most immune classes to them.
Poor necros are useless in PvE.
Their mainhand dagger autoattack does less damage than warrior axe mainhand, and it doesn’t even cleave. And they offer no group boons, while boons like weakness are mostly useless against bosses whereas boons work against boss attacks.
Really? Our Marksman Grandmaster is basically to allow rangers to hit targets with the reliability of warrior and engineer rifles or thief pistols?
The kitten arrows don’t even hit a sidestepping target beyond 600+ range. The velocity should be increased baseline.
It’s incredible that for 1.5 years, Rangers have been telling you that they suffer because all their traits/utilities/weapons need heavy point investment to even function, and you go ahead and waste a grandmaster trait slot on a fix that should be baked into the weapon instead of paid for.
RANGER WEAPONS AND UTILITIES SHOULD FUNCTION WITHOUT TRAIT INVESTMENT, LET ALONE 30 TRAIT POINTS.
Moreover, the power line grandmaster only covers the longbow, when bows are not used to begin with in most game formats?
Bows are of little worth in PvE, where melee weapons will always be favored over ranged ones. And in PvP bows are at a disadvantage because of their crappy defensive capabilities.
And the longbow and shortbow not only have a failure in hitting moving targets beyond 600+ range, but unlike the engineer rifle the arrows don’t even pierce baseline, which they should.
Rangers lack immensely in the aoe department. It’s that plus utility and their low innate base weapon damage and power scaling that has made them undesirable for any group content, especially WvW.
I love how thieves are comparing it to warrior healing without factoring in the part where most classes can’t hit you in stealth because stealth disables targeted attacks and ground placed aoe is not only weak but scarce and in some cases totally absent from other classes.
So while the warrior is broken and regens more, he is also not stealthed ever and is taking constant damage to counter some of the regen whereas the thief stops all damage dead on its tracks by stealthing and heals to boot.
And all of those thief perks also come with the bonus of 5-6k backstabs on medium high toughness builds.
Hell, I’m sure warriors would love being able to do eviscerates while invisible so nobody can dodge that kittened damage.
They don’t have to care about your balance. They already got your money in advance from the box sales, and they also cash in advance with the rng skin tickets off every living world update.
There’s zero incentive for them to care about player retention when they can pull months worth of subs from gem buying customers in a single month.
Well, yeah, because most warriors just follow the meta builds. Why experiment with effective dueling builds when you can copy youtube videos?
And who cares about gank squads or zergs. If a gank squad sets their eyes on you, it doesn’t matter what build you are. You will die regardless.
Hambow has much more obvious counters than the build I mention, but it gets used because it is a more versatile build.
To be quite honest for group pvp I’d rather go greatsword+longbow for the massive cleave and body coverage it has.
What I’m meaning to say is axe isn’t bad. It’s pretty stupid, in duels and PvE. It’s the highest autoattack weapon in the game after elementalist’s lightning hammer, and lightning hammer only works in pve for obvious reasons.
It just gives the impression that the axe is bad because warriors have such a variety of weapons in a ridiculously good if not OP state.
They are by far the most finished class alongside guardians, with prominence in all formats of pvp. And it’s no surprise considering that the guy who used to come on these forums all the time and disappeared as soon as people started rebuffing his ideas, Jon Peters, happened to be a dedicated warrior player. So during beta, all the warrior kinks were worked out whereas some classes are still in beta development like the ranger and engineer and mesmer.
P.S. Eviscerate is pretty much a guaranteed crit with a good mix of knights and cavalier pieces in WvW alongside high fury uptime from signet of rage. The whole point of using it was to force people to use defensives, because warrior spike skills have such low cd’s that they would be back up before the target;s defensive cd’s were back, and the target had little chance for recovery because on top of the high spike the warrior can have, he also has the high sustained from broken autoattacks to pressure.
And my statement about the change to the autoattack not mattering stays. It doesn’t matter if the final autoattack is the big damage. That just means a delay of about 2 seconds, and in a sustained damage scenario nothing changes. A target can’t waste dodges on the autoattack chain because then he eats the ridiculous eviscerate spike or the hammer stun chain (on top of hammer’s less ridiculous but still kind of ridiculous damage).
To put it another way: My 2.4k toughness bunker ranger can tank any target beating on him. Thieves are no problem, since they’re just spiky. But a warrior? My ranger might as well be glass cannon because just the axe autoattack chain alone will wear him out quick.
Warrior damage is just broken relative to other classes on an individual level.
(edited by Zenith.7301)
It’s not crap in pvp. One of the best WvW duelist roaming builds is an axe/mace+hammer lockdown+burst variant.
The reason axe doesn’t get used in tpvp is MOBILITY. In spvp it’s not only about damage, but getting around to points quickly, being able to aoe consistently, and CC. The mainhand axe lacks those with the exception of mace offhand which is a longer cd than hammer CC and lacks the aoe spam of longbow.
There is a reason why you see some warrior and thief builds in WvW that are OP in WvW that don’t exist in spvp. And the reason is spvp creates artificial incentives that are skewed toward targeted aoe and map movement. Killing the enemy is hardly the primary or most vital goal.
Warrior doesn’t need mobility in s/tPvP you think Hambow is popular in s/tPvP now because of MOBILITY? Nothing about hammer+bow say’s mobility in the slightest.
Don’t be stupid. The mobility from the weaponset is not needed given you can AoE from range, and hammer burst skill is still more mobility than what you get from mainhand axe on top of it being better aoe.
But on a weapon like the greatsword+longbow variant, which anas tarcis uses, the mobility is a huge aspect of it on top of the aoe potential. Which the mainhand axe doesn’t have.
If you’re running a 1v1 build, the axe+mace/hammer setup is easily the strongest build. It just so happens that spvp is not about 1v1 roaming.
Obviously sPvP isn’t about 1v1 roaming. To base the strength of a weapon set only on that makes no sense when that is just a side meta to WvW. Also you must be on a dead tier if you can get away with 1v1 roaming with Axe/Mace+Hammer.
You stated that axe isn’t used in s/tPvP because of mobility that is not why it isn’t used. It isn’t used because hammer is better you can build tanky and still get access to good damage on hammer. Many warriors dropped axe when they moved the damage toward the end of the auto attack chain. The auto damage is terrible now before it could pressure people to blow dodges to setup evis now it doesn’t provide that kind of pressure. People still run classic axe/shield in WvW but I think Olba is talking strictly about s/tPvP. Anything is viable in WvW if you want it to be like 1v1 roaming with Axe/Mace+Hammer to me sounds like food for gank squads.
Tarnished Coast, not quite the dead tier. Stop talking up your kitten .
The axe autoattack will do the same amount of damage at the end of the chain, and anyone who was blowing dodges on its autoattacks before was an idiot to begin with considering they were opening themselves not only to either eviscerate or the stuns, but to both instead.
Axe/mace+hammer has 3 stuns in it, with monster sustained damage, a healthy amount of snares, and the fact that it forces the opponent to choose between dodging eviscerate or dodging the hammer cc chain or dodging offhand mace’s knockdown makes it one of warriors’ more potent 1v1 sets.
Put it with condi removal, perma swiftness, endure pain+berkstance+fear me, and you will completely dominate most people. Nobody can go toe to toe with you.
And roaming isn’t a side meta. Zergs are not the only form of WvW. Said build excels in small scale skirmishes as well. It easily wears down bunkers and is fairly durable itself with plenty of cc to stop burst trains on teammates.
Really, the longbow is only particularly great in spvp because people are forced to stand on the point you just set afire and are pumping arcing shot into, because if they move off point they lose the point. This is not the case in WvW where the longbow’s main value was in two ground targeted abilities that are moved out of quickly, and the longbow’s remaining skills are fairly weak, beginning with the autoattack so it has no sustained damage whatsoever if you can’t get a target to stand in your fire field or eat an arcing shot.
(edited by Zenith.7301)
It’s not crap in pvp. One of the best WvW duelist roaming builds is an axe/mace+hammer lockdown+burst variant.
The reason axe doesn’t get used in tpvp is MOBILITY. In spvp it’s not only about damage, but getting around to points quickly, being able to aoe consistently, and CC. The mainhand axe lacks those with the exception of mace offhand which is a longer cd than hammer CC and lacks the aoe spam of longbow.
There is a reason why you see some warrior and thief builds in WvW that are OP in WvW that don’t exist in spvp. And the reason is spvp creates artificial incentives that are skewed toward targeted aoe and map movement. Killing the enemy is hardly the primary or most vital goal.
Warrior doesn’t need mobility in s/tPvP you think Hambow is popular in s/tPvP now because of MOBILITY? Nothing about hammer+bow say’s mobility in the slightest.
Don’t be stupid. The mobility from the weaponset is not needed given you can AoE from range, and hammer burst skill is still more mobility than what you get from mainhand axe on top of it being better aoe.
But on a weapon like the greatsword+longbow variant, which anas tarcis uses, the mobility is a huge aspect of it on top of the aoe potential. Which the mainhand axe doesn’t have.
If you’re running a 1v1 build, the axe+mace/hammer setup is easily the strongest build. It just so happens that spvp is not about 1v1 roaming.
It’s not a want when you need it for high level fractals. You don’t get 70+ AR magically. The weapons each grant you +5 agony alone, so they make up 10 AR right there, which is significant.
It takes 500 per weapon, and considering not all classes use 2 handers, that means 1000 dragonite ore for a weaponset.
I have 8 classes at 80.
Best case scenario of 2hander at 500 dragonite ore, with 30 ore per temple event, I’m looking at doing 17 temple events per charater for a 2hander ascended. That means 34 temple events for a 1hander+offhand. Make that 2 weaponsets per character except engineer and ele.
So for my 7 lv80 classes, that’s about 250+ temple event runs. And that’s only FOR A SINGLE STAT COMBINATION.
A few weapons have #1 skills that are too strong. Warrior Longsword
So… do you mean Greatsword, Longbow or Sword? Because let me tell you, none of them have that good of an autoattack. It’s well-known that if your target stays in range (such as in all of PvE), axe has the best autoattack out of all warrior weapons. And GS has one of the worst, especially considering the other skills on that weapon.
- Elementalist (Staff and Scepter) require attunement dancing to be at all effective when it should just be a feature adding versatility in utility.
- Thief (P/P) requires dumping all of your Initiative into Unload constantly to maintain reasonable DPS, which breaks the whole set by forcing you to sacrifice too much damage to get any utility and too much utility to get any damage.
- Elementalist should be like that on all weapons. After all, you’re given twice the skills of everyone else (in combat).
- That has more to do with the rest of the P/P set skills not being fit for a physical attacker.
Spoiler: Combat should never, ever, be about using your #1 skill over the rest. So rather than looking at nerfing the powerful #1 skills, look at bringing up the #2-#5 to match. In most cases where you have a “weak” #1 skill, it originates from something other than the skill in question. Unload on Thief wouldn’t be an issue if Thieves had cooldowns like other classes. Not that it would be a good solution.
No it doesn’t. Every weapon in the game that feels weak is weak because of their #1 skill being poorly balanced. The entire problem with Thief P/P is Vital Shot. It’s too weak to carry decent sustained DPS, so you are forced to try to compensate by spamming Unload. This breaks the entire set.
The #1 skill is the primary determinant of sustained DPS. weapons with very weak auto-attacks will always feel weak and clumsy in general game-play. It’s the main problem afflicting several weapons and several professions.
And yet there are weapons which are meta and have crap #1, like Warrior Greatsword.
Also the best DPS weapon in PvE, axe, is considered crap in PvP because of the autoattack.
It’s not crap in pvp. One of the best WvW duelist roaming builds is an axe/mace+hammer lockdown+burst variant.
The reason axe doesn’t get used in tpvp is MOBILITY. In spvp it’s not only about damage, but getting around to points quickly, being able to aoe consistently, and CC. The mainhand axe lacks those with the exception of mace offhand which is a longer cd than hammer CC and lacks the aoe spam of longbow.
There is a reason why you see some warrior and thief builds in WvW that are OP in WvW that don’t exist in spvp. And the reason is spvp creates artificial incentives that are skewed toward targeted aoe and map movement. Killing the enemy is hardly the primary or most vital goal.
(edited by Zenith.7301)
I highly support number 1 but it will not happen I think. The transition with the personal story could be very tricky.
As if personal story mattered in this game. 80 levels of personal story and all you get is a single rare at the end which you have no use for besides salvaging.
It’s horrible that I can spend 1.5 hours in a fractal and get 1 gold 30 silver to show for it and useless empyreal fragments, while I’m forced to guest hop across servers and do the idiotproof zerg DE’s in order to get my ascended weapons.
I hate DE’s. They’re casual noob central. I want dungeons and fractals to give dragonite so I don’t have to participate in mindless zerg content meant for the rabble.
People are dense because there are no DPS meters to prove to them how kittened they are.
This game basically allows people to delude themselves, and it works for developers because as long as player’s can’t meaningfully track combat logs and present parses to make said devs accountable, this kind of obfuscation is the perfect excuse they can hide behind when they choose to do nothing.
And yet bringing up ranged weapon damage is useless under a PvE context.
In PvE anyone who is competent melees, so you are failing by setting the bar at the ranged weapon line.
Also, please, Fireball doesn’t hit for 6k without might stacks and ideal conditions. I run full berk with food and at best it crits for about 4k without might stacks.
And still you guys miss the point that it’s not that great considering it’s a 4k crit OVER a 1 second activation time and its travel time.
I personally think you need to learn to play ele… In pvp they suck, in pve they are amazing. I wouldn’t speed run a dungeon without one if I can help it. Ever hear of this funny thing called fgs that can down lupi in about 30 seconds with 2 eles in the party? That’s why eles auto attacks aren’t great, because their other dps skills are off the chart. I play a full zerk staff ele, and I can out dps anyone else in my party (except warriors since warriors are OP). I rarely if ever use my auto attack.
You are an idiot. I mentioned specifically in my posts that I have a problem with all our damage being tied to conjured weapons to be competitive in PvE instead of the weaponskills. Last time I checked, FGS is not only a conjured weapon, but an elite as well.
How about you learn to read before telling people to learn something else.
I can outDPS warriors with my lightning hammer, without even needing to cheese fiery greatsword exploits.
That’s not the point. The point is that if I don’t use the fiery greatsword or lightning hammer, the sustained damage from my actual weapons is garbage.
The problem with warriors is that their skills not only do much more base damage, but the cooldowns on their weapons are all stupidly low compared to other classes.
Its amazing that a skill with the damage of 100b can have a 6 sec cd, or Arcing Arrow and most burst skills hit that hard and yet have a low cd.
The hammer is just the same. No amount of stunbreaks will save you from a hammer warrior because of how often they can stunlocks relative to defenses against stunlocking.
A warrior with hammer+axe/mace has 3 CC’s in relatively short cooldowns, and the thing is if you try to dodge the hammer CC you are going to eat an eviscerate. It’s a complete lose/lose scenario.
And yet bringing up ranged weapon damage is useless under a PvE context.
In PvE anyone who is competent melees, so you are failing by setting the bar at the ranged weapon line.
Also, please, Fireball doesn’t hit for 6k without might stacks and ideal conditions. I run full berk with food and at best it crits for about 4k without might stacks.
And still you guys miss the point that it’s not that great considering it’s a 4k crit OVER a 1 second activation time and its travel time.
Jesus, some people are just utterly mathematically inept. Linking the number of a single cooldown thing means nothing without context. Your #2 skill does not make up for the autoattack discrepancy, ever.
Try playing a warrior or thief before you try opening your mouth again.
What matters is over a certain period of time, how much damage can you sustain.
Let me give you a hint, my Warrior mainhand axe autoattacks start at 3.5k crits the initial weak hits, and the last 3 hits crit for over 5k. That’s with minimal to no might stacks.
Warrior and thief autoattacks also both cleave, have little to no cast time unlike a staff, and in the case of thieves they already supplement their already high autoattack sustained damage with cloak and dagger>backstab in between the chain.
If you fail to understand that your cooldown skills will never average out the majority of good sustained damage, and don’t understand why lightning hammer is so integral to ele PvE dps builds, then you are beyond any help.
This is why this game needs proper DPS meters, so people can stop talking out of their kitten .
P/D thieves won’t be as popular so long as their hard counter, D/P thieves, is around.
Blind spam completely ruins this build.
I prefer guardian. They’re the backbone of a group in any game format, and they’re immune to bad pugs since they make PvE so easy.
In WvW it is Guardians that allow a frontline to function. If there were no guardians, warriors wouldn’t be able to function in the first place as their stability has less uptime, Guardians give the group critical boons like retaliation and protection. Guardians grant aegis and condition cleansing.
Warriors are there mainly for the hammer and warbanner elite.
Warrior just scales insanely well with tank stats, and through things like Armored Attack and hammer’s CC, can still dish out respectable damage.
I wish I could build some of my light armored classes that way, but if I spec as something like a tank Mesmer I’m going to be doing garbage damage compared to a similarly specced Warrior.
It’s not scaling.
The base damage on warrior abilities far exceeds other classes except maybe thief.
To test this, just make a new character and level both classes. The damage of 100 blades and axe autoattack is noticeable, as is arcing arrow.
And then you add into that all the trait % damage modifiers that warriors get. And the ease of might stacking by themselves, and the high fury uptime so they can easily crit while still being in tank gear. And then they made healing signet and stances ridiculous.
The warrior just kept snowballing into broken OP ever since release.
Not really zenith, you just buff the 2-5 skills that are hard to hit with in pvp, like eruption and icespike / shatterstone.
Every auto should be reduced, along with ridiculously long pve fights.
LONG?!!!!!!!
You can’t be serious. Bosses already die in 3 minutes or less to a melee train.
I get that this is a F2P and obviously it benefits them more to sell skins, but this is getting old.
Ever since release, there hasn’t been a new set of armor or weapons released that isn’t:
A) On the gem store
B) Low RNG drop rate tradeable item meant to be worth tons of gold, and therefore tons of gem sales for gold conversion.
Are people not upset that there was a complete bait and switch on the rewards model? Why was the dungeon token system wrong compared to a model where you acquire items by trade post speculation or buying it off the gem store?
Why is actually playing the game less rewarding than playing the economy or buying from a gem shop?
I don’t get it, if anything things should be swapped around. The weapon and armor skins should come from gameplay while the flavor backpacks of every update should be on the gem store.
1 gold 30 silver for 30+ fractals is a disgrace, let alone for dungeons. I’m getting tired of this game being so unrewarding to people who don’t want to play the trading post or zerg open world events.
Let’s not even talk about tying fractals to farming ascended gear, which itself is one of the most disgusting grinds I’ve seen in MMO’s. You may have made personal reward levels account bound, but people can’t still bring whatever characters they want because the only way to have infusion slots is ascended gear, and the funny thing is that in order to get into the fractals that drop ascended gear you must have ascended gear to begin with or expect to be cheesed by end bosses agony aura.
(edited by Zenith.7301)
It will have to happen. Stat inflation is the very reason for the extreme builds.
Take condition weapons, for example. Most skills outside burning do miserable damage without stacking condition damage. The same goes for power based skills.
The huge impact of stats on weaponskill viability just restricts build variety to an incredible degree.
Yeah, disregard the troll he clearly doesn’t care about PvE in this game and thinks the only format they should cater to is his so much superior condi spam/cc spam spvp.
No format deserves to be left unbalanced. It should have worked like GW1 all along with split skills.
I use “you” in general, sorry if that wasn’t clear. I’m just saying a 42% stealth uptime means nothing if you can’t efficiently kill targets and have zero group utility.
Warriors and guardians have ruled PvE for 1.5+ years. Rangers and necros and engineers have been neglected for that longdespite promises on incoming change since the game release.
In pvp eles were ridiculous for quite a while, thieves have always been ridiculous (driving out all other berk/valk amulet players). It took them a while to change eles, and now warriors took their place. Warriors have yet to be changed.
A guardian has always been mandatory on any team, and for some reason that hasn’t changed. No other class is as mandatory as the guardian in any game format. Has that changed?
Changes come in too slow and they’re not even meaningful. Mostly fluff. In their promotion of guild wars 2 before release, they mocked WoW about waiting between expansion packs for changes, claiming that their ability to dynamically implement game changes would allow them to make immediate change.
1.5+ years later, you look at the list of changes and realize that WoW alone in a single content patch has done more class balancing changes than GW2 did in a year.
I always find stealth-“spamming” Mesmers a bit of a weird thing. We’re talking 24-30 seconds CD on one, 36-kitten on another, 90s on another and 90s on the final one.
And none lasts long either (3s, 3s, 2s, 5s respectively, +1 each for PU).
How is that stealth “spam”?
Mesmers with 20 20 30 0 0, X/T+Y, Decoy+Veil+Blink+Mass Invis have a 42,2% of stealth uptime. Veil actually stealths you for 3s (untraited), and can and WILL be used twice.
That’s actually a lot of stealth uptime.
And those mesmers are food for my minion zoo condi necro and engineer respectively, as they have no condi removal.
And what does it matter? Unlike cheesy D/P thieves you can’t die to a PU mesmer if you don’t want to. Their damage ramp up is slow, and they can’t chase worth crap.
If you died to a PU mesmer it’s because you stayed around to eat all those clone deaths and the build up of bleeds that is much slower than a necro or engineer can stack bleeds.
For the most part anyone can ignore a PU mesmer and kite him around. They only become somewhat effective when holding a point in wvw, but in any fight where the opponent can move on without losing anything it’s a waste of a spec compared to playing a phantasm mesmer, which is just as good a duelist spec and can actually kill people in a short amount of time.
I think developers miss why most rangers run condition builds. And the answer is that unlike power builds, ranger condition damage doesn’t take the arbitrary 30% damage penalty for having a pet.
A ranger’s conditions do the same damage as any condition class. A rangers power attacks do significantly less damage than any other power class. No changes to pet AI will ever make up for the fact that pets will never live up to that full 30% potential damage that the rangers paid for them, so the ranger’s penalty needs to be reduced significantly for power specs.
In fact, I don’t even understand why the penalty is so stiff given that most pets noncrit autoattack for about 700-800 damage at best. That’s literally an engineer’s burning ticks with a few might stacks. The penalty to the ranger’s power based attacks is completely disproportionate to the actual damage contributon of pets. So you end upwith two low damage dealing entities that even when put together don’t match single functioning entities like warrior, thief, or lightning hammer elementalist. Hell, not even guardians.
Furthermore, power rangers will never be viable so long as their defensive options are nonexistent, and they have no ways to deal with boon spam since they have no boon removal. Condition specs are the ranger’s only answer to the protection boon spam.
The defenses rangers have are solely tied to toughness stat stacking and regen. Serpent Strike and offhand dagger #4 mean nothing when you can lose a third or half of your health as a berserker ranger to a single attack. The only other alternative is a 64 sec traited signet invulnerability. Power rangers are all glass and no cannon.
(edited by Zenith.7301)
God, it’s obvious a lot of these comments are either from pvp players, or from people who are incompetent in high end pve and just zerg world events with suboptimal builds.
I know that the skill rotation of attunement swapping works somewhat in pvp, because the HP pools are small enough for the burst of chained skills to seem significant.
But in fractals and dungeons, where mobs don’t die to a couple of attunement swaps, the obvious issue of cooldowns on skills while attunement swapping becomes obvious.
For better or worse, autoattacks are the core of sustained damage. It’s why the pve ele meta is the lightning hammer, which is the only weapon besides fiery greatsword that can sustain autoattacks competitive to the thief and warrior.
You CANNOT make up the difference of weak autoattacks by buffing active skills. I think the math should be pretty obvious to people. In order to make up for the glaring weakness of ele autoattacks compared to warrior axe atuoattack chain and thief dagger autoattack chain, ele cooldown skills would have to be buffed to a degree that would make their burst broken in pvp.
And so the autoattacks need to be buffed if ele is to have competitive, LONG TERM SUSTAINED DAMAGE in pve that happens outside conjured weapon utilties.
And no, they are not going to nerf thief and warrior autoattacks. We’ve had warriors at what they are for about 1.5+ years, if their damage and thief damage hasn’t been reduced, don’t expect it to happen now.
Scepter autoattacks are particularly weak. 4-5k autotargeted channel may seem good to pvp’ers from the air attunement because HP pools are limited to usually no more than 23k at the top end, but when you consder that 4-5k is done upon 3 seconds, when a greatsword autoattack (which isn’t even the strongest melee weapon for either guardian or warrior) can do instant crits for 3-3.5k, Arc Lightning actually turns out to be pretty terrible damage. Even with lightning strike weaved in every few seconds.
P.S. I don’t want to dismiss the pvp perspective at all, I’m just reminding people to keep the pve perspective in mind.
To Phantaram I’d say that anything that isn’t a rifle/gun misses pretty miserably at 900+. On my ranger with the longbow any target running in a curve beyond about 700 range, my longbow autoattack will miss, easily.
It’s just an issue with how they design projectiles. And water attunement obviously suffers from the flawed design decision that because it has heals, it ought to do negligible damage, but that just places water attunement in a ghetto where you only swap to it for the heals and want to swap out as soon as possible to keep pressure up, and it devalues any traits in the water line that seek to improve water spells offensively.
It’s ironic how the 20% damage to vulnerable targets in water attunement completely developed to be abused with presetting burst or using a lightning hammer instead of it being a trait allowing water spells to do meaningful damage.
(edited by Zenith.7301)
Outside of the FGS glitch, Ele has the best damage potential with both LH hammer build or with a staff. Dagger is okay, nothing exceptional. They also have a great might and fury stacking capability.
Sorry, no. Staff doesn’t touch melee weapons ever.
If you want to do actual damage, it’s conjures one way or another.
And conjure eles only work in premades built for them. Try working with a group as a 12-13k HP ele in high level fractals without guardians rotating aegis and prot for you.
And by the way, people:
BURST =/= Sustained damage.
The OP is probably referring to the fact that ele autoattacks outside conjure weapons are so weak.
Its not 13k. Its 10805 same as thief has. Get your facts right. If you want to rely on thiefs blind spam, I suggest you taking one to your group. Blinds wont save you from boss hits, what anet has to change so everyone and their grandma would want to have thief in group for every pve encounter.
13k HP with the mandatory points in water line for the 20% extra damage on vulnerable targets and 10% extra damage when above 90% health, alongside runes of divinity/traveler since scholar runes are not as great in low hp classes.
And blinds do save you from some bosses’ attacks. Against the Archdiviner several of his attacks can miss.
(edited by Zenith.7301)
And no, swarm aint going to stick you to anyone with a teleport who also has access to swiftness, which is most teleport or leap users like warriors, thieves, and mesmers.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Summon_Flesh_Wurm
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Spectral_WalkPoor comparisons at best to leaps/blinks, since both can only take you to a per-determined point. They both work more like personal, single-use Portals.
I still find it funny that he used Mesmers in that list, since their access to Swiftness is very poor, though they are typically packing Blink.
Those are the two strongest teleports in the game, given the way Necromancer is at the moment. When used properly you can completely guarantee a win at mid-fight since you’re impossible to peel.
Good thing most of this game’s pvp doesn’t take place in heart of the mists.
The problem with thieves is that they have to stealth in order to do damage. I’ve said it many times but they need a class rework so they don’t have to rely on stealth to do damage. Its not their fault that in order for them to do damage they have to spam stealth. Nerfing stealth for them even more will be a huge nerf. They really need a complete rework. Btw the debuff is already 4 seconds. And I do agree on PU mesmers stealth. They don’t need it like thieves do. Stealth is broken the way it is now.
Not really, thief autoattack deals pretty high sustained damage. Backstab is just dumb burst so of course it will be optimal to use it.
I propose they move the damage of backstab to leaping death blossom/shadow shot as a telegraphed burst skill that people can see and counter.
They are horrendously underpowered. Especially the scepter.
It feels like whenever I can’t melee with a lightning hammer because I can get one/two shot with my 13k hp, my only option for actual damage is spamming fireball on the staff.
Every other single autoattack the ele has is pretty terrible. Lightning Whip might seem good to eles but I assure you having played warriors and thieves and guardians that lightning whip hits like wet noodles.
Essentially, in any PuG where I’m forced to range or high fractal encounter where people aren’t mitigating correctly boss hits for me, I do pitiful damage while waiting for an opportunity to be able to use my lightning hammer.
I’d like to use my weapons for once instead of having to slot a utility for a viable damage dealing weaponskill.
Also, buff base HP to 15k please. 13k hp is absurdly inadequate when you can’t rely on blind spam from a thief.
In fact, such low base HP is the primary reason why signet of restoration often goes unused, because taking a single hit means immediate danger of death with little time for building the heal sustain up with signet procs. The healing signet works for warriors because they have enough of a large HP pool to absorb burst and heal back up.
(edited by Zenith.7301)
All the ranger heals need some form of condition removal if they are ever to be used.
Heal as One can remove all conditions on you when used, reduce cd to like 15 seconds.
Troll Unguent can remove 1 condition every 3 seconds.
The water spirit needs the most help. Its proc heal should be increased to about 2k base if it will keep the 10 second internal cooldown on the proc.
The water spirit needs to give an initial heal when it comes out if it will have a cast time.
Also, each time you proc the water spirit it should remove 1 condition, and aqua surge should remove 3 conditions when used.
Base damage is bad. Even with the pet a warrior or thief autoattack chain does much more damage, and they got spike to boot.