Guild Wars 2

…….

Shaman stats.

/garbage bin

Don’t you love it that PvE gives you a condi wep. It’s telling me to go WvW with my spirit ranger.

Dirame.8521:

Zenith.7301:

Arthos Ravron.3796:

Zenith.7301:

Ezrael.6859:

Zenith.7301:

They need to nerf Stand Your Ground.

30 sec cd AoE stability for the group is so ridiculously overbudget. Other classes pay a much steeper cd for a SINGLE player stability cd.

Other classes have viable condition builds, viable ranged weapons and mobility.

Which are those classes. I count only necro and engineer, with spirit ranger somwhat cutting it.

Viable ranged weapons lol. Guardian scepter auto has the highest base damage even if the speed of the projectiles is slower to make up for it. And in a format where close quarters combat is mandated to conserve points, arguing about ranged weapons is moot.

And none of those condition builds or ranged weapons make them mandatory. You can swap a conditionmancer for a spirit ranger or engineer for largely similar results in aoe condition pressure.

You cannot build a team without a guardian bunker. No other class is as essential as a guardian.

Even if it were true, which it isn’t , don’t you think that Guards need less nerfs in terms of the thing they were meant to do? It’s not like Guardians can do anything else in Tournaments because of their wonderfully low base health?

Their DPS spec just needs a kitten snare. That’s about it.

And bring me recent tournament winners who didn’t have a single guardian in their team.

Alright I’m going to list all the possible snares that a guardian can have in a build and you tell me if they need more; 4 second immob, 3 second kd, 2 second kd, ring of warding, line of warding, Binding blade, chains of light, Zealot’s embrace and that’s not including the teleports they have but hey, they need more.

What a silly response. All of those are high cd utility slots. A single stability and the stun is gone. The immob is on the scepter, so you hope they don’t cleanse straight away given you have nothing for coverage.

And ring of warding is hammer, which dps guardians don’t use.

How are dagger tanks being gutted next patch? With the 33% increase on ini regen troll LDS evasion tanks will only be stronger, and unlike stealth builds they can hold points while evading.

Well, daggers has aoe, it just happens to suck right now since thief condi has no coverage. Leaping Death Blossom could be made into something good.

I think you mean burst cleave, because the sword auto cleaves just fine, and if you bring dagger storm that’s some annoying aoe as well.

Why would all weapons need AoE. If anything, AoE needs nerfing in PVP as it completely devalues all the single target weapons.

VOLKON.1290:

Zenith.7301:

The only cheap space I feel is at the beginning of the third level where you have to make it past the forked bridge. After that it gets a lot better.

It’s the stupid long kitten immobilizes that get you, so bring a lot of condi clear.

Unfortunately for classes like ranger you don’t have many.

That space is quite fine when you work with others and kill your way through instead of trying to run it alone. It’s designed for teamwork.

Teamwork doesn’t exist when you’re a US player in a EU server at the time when most of them are going to sleep. Stop lecturing me.

The only cheap space I feel is at the beginning of the third level where you have to make it past the forked bridge. After that it gets a lot better.

It’s the stupid long kitten immobilizes that get you, so bring a lot of condi clear.

Unfortunately for classes like ranger you don’t have many.

Arthos Ravron.3796:

Zenith.7301:

Ezrael.6859:

Zenith.7301:

They need to nerf Stand Your Ground.

30 sec cd AoE stability for the group is so ridiculously overbudget. Other classes pay a much steeper cd for a SINGLE player stability cd.

Other classes have viable condition builds, viable ranged weapons and mobility.

Which are those classes. I count only necro and engineer, with spirit ranger somwhat cutting it.

Viable ranged weapons lol. Guardian scepter auto has the highest base damage even if the speed of the projectiles is slower to make up for it. And in a format where close quarters combat is mandated to conserve points, arguing about ranged weapons is moot.

And none of those condition builds or ranged weapons make them mandatory. You can swap a conditionmancer for a spirit ranger or engineer for largely similar results in aoe condition pressure.

You cannot build a team without a guardian bunker. No other class is as essential as a guardian.

Even if it were true, which it isn’t , don’t you think that Guards need less nerfs in terms of the thing they were meant to do? It’s not like Guardians can do anything else in Tournaments because of their wonderfully low base health?

Their DPS spec just needs a kitten snare. That’s about it.

And bring me recent tournament winners who didn’t have a single guardian in their team.

Durzlla.6295:

Levetty.1279:

I don’t know where this myth that SPVP players are talented has come from considering the SPvP meta seems to be ‘go on forums and complain about all classes that aren’t yours, doubly so if class has pets’. Though they are very skilled at that I guess.

PvP players tend to be better than PvE players because if you kitten up in PvP, even just a tiny little bit like missing your cripple, it can be the difference between victory and defeat so PvPers tend to be a little better at the game as a whole.

Granted, this is only for competitive PvP players that are doing tournies regularly and are in it to win it, a hot join hero is gonna be about as good as your average zergling, and then there’s also some REALLY good PvE players too and etc.

Just by and large most PvPers tend to be better than most PvErs, but again there’s A LOT of different factors that play into it so don’t worry about it too much (like there being significantly less PvPers than PvE players).

You come to high level fractals or Arah/Aetherblade achiev/seed runs and manage not to get kicked within the first 10 minutes. Then you get to say PvP’ers are better.

It’s completely different skillsets.

Ezrael.6859:

Zenith.7301:

They need to nerf Stand Your Ground.

30 sec cd AoE stability for the group is so ridiculously overbudget. Other classes pay a much steeper cd for a SINGLE player stability cd.

Other classes have viable condition builds, viable ranged weapons and mobility.

Which are those classes. I count only necro and engineer, with spirit ranger somwhat cutting it.

Viable ranged weapons lol. Guardian scepter auto has the highest base damage even if the speed of the projectiles is slower to make up for it. And in a format where close quarters combat is mandated to conserve points, arguing about ranged weapons is moot.

And none of those condition builds or ranged weapons make them mandatory. You can swap a conditionmancer for a spirit ranger or engineer for largely similar results in aoe condition pressure.

You cannot build a team without a guardian bunker. No other class is as essential as a guardian.

I have a big male norn. My footsteps are the same as that of an asura, and for them the footsteps are noticeable. On my norn, they are too small. Please fix the scaling.

We’ve been saying it since closed beta. Don’t hope for much.

Peters said by release to mesmers that they were looking to repurpose Cry of Frustration. Guess what, nothing happened and it’s still a throaway, weak shatter.

You’ll have to wait until they decide to considerably increase their skill balance team, as it’s clear from this past year that with the resources they have, the rate of change is going to keep being rather small.

And you bring that up now? We’ve been posting about warriors since closed beta.

If warriors and guardians as master classes of the game haven’t been fixed in more than a year’s time the game has been released, what makes you think it’s gonna happen now?

They need to nerf Stand Your Ground.

30 sec cd AoE stability for the group is so ridiculously overbudget. Other classes pay a much steeper cd for a SINGLE player stability cd.

Says the bunker guardian. Play something that isn’t bunker like a power spec ranger or engi and see how “balanced” D/P thieves are then.

Rednik.3809:

ThiBash.5634:

Try casting Meteor Shower or Churning Earth as an elementalist and then see if 100b is still such a bad skill. You know, since that has the same issues as your 100b, except the recharge is much higher and the caster’s defense much, much lower…

WTT GS for fire+earth staff skillset, no problem.

Give us your stances and we’ll give you our glyphs.

Number of skills means nothing if a warrior skill can do the damage it takes bundling 3 ele skills to do the same.

By all means, if warrior is that bad, play an ele. Something tells me you won’t get that far when you can’t auto someone for 3k crits and pull off 7k crits on spirit rangers.

Butnaked.9287:

Khenzy.9348:

I’m not sure why Greatsword is so badly criticized.
You can have a build like this: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fIAQJARTjkOxwtOqQMxBE0DNsK2C1D7oOijUBxA-ToAg0CtIKSVkrITRyisFNsYJC

Which I think it’s perfectly viable. You can even use Arcing Slice for perma fury on this build as you have quite a bit of adrenaline gain (it also hits kind of hard too). You start with Longbow to force condi cleanses with Pin Down, Fun of Fire and/or Combustive Shot, you should also force some dodges and a soon heal use with Arcing Arrow included. You then switch to Greatsword for a BladeTrail (Leg Specialist)>Throw Bolas>Hundred Blades combo for a safer kill. If you make your enemy play on your terms evading blocks, blinds and forcing teleports and other means to set up your 100b+TB combo you should be fine.
If 100b fails, you always have a potential 7 immob inside 3 adren Combutive Shot>Arcing Arrow>Greatsword Autos>Whirlwind which is just as devastating.
You have it all, sustain, antiburst (Defy Pain), mobility, prolongued pressure, burst pressure, condi prevention, condi cleanse and even hard CC (immob).

My point is, Warriors have other fine and viable alternatives besides wielding a Hammer (which will still be fine afterpatch).

gs is the worst pvp weapon. All that crap your trying to do with immob is fine in theory but in practice its a different story.
1)bolas are crazy inconsistent
2)your never gonna get a full 100blades on someone unless they went to the bath room
3)the burst skill is by far the most useless warrior ability. We already have great up time on fury without it and it does crap dmg. your better using ur burst on ur 2nd weapon which in ur case is the lb(100 times better move).

only thing gs is good for is mobility and that’s exactly what your gonna need to do with it, run away.

A skull crack will net you a full 100b easily. You can also land a 100b whenever any of your allies CC’s an opponent, and most importanbtly you can stand on a point and 100b on a downed body for massive cleave damage.

LOL, warriors saying their weapons are bad. I’ll happily trade you ranger weapons and the pet and the spirits. Just give me your variety of specs and viable weapons and supremacy in the other two accompanying formats of this game.

The bombs is rarely any worry at 48 if people know what they’re doing. Stealth just trivializes it, otherwise you have somebody draw aggro/CC while someone slips by and reflects/sanctuary are used.

Quite frankly what I find more aggravating about this fractal at 48 is the switch room. No way in hell a team without a guardian is going to do the switches without difficulty/deaths. Having to stand on a switch while the 48 scaled up dredge come melee you is just dumb for something like a berserker ele or ranger.

You could say the same for Ascalon fractal LoS pulling or Mossman 48 legit. Guardian utility is broken.

Chicago Jack.5647:

Zenith.7301:

[…] maintaining high defense and still critting 6k backstabs on high toughness specs.

The only person who runs Cruuk’s build in tpvp is Cruuk. Stealth builds preform poorly in prolonged fights on points in spvp because they cannot contest them. In spvp, it is virtually impossible to one-shot backstab someone unless the thief is running a terrible build and their target is also light armor glass. For all your other concerns regarding backstab in spvp, this:

“You’re asking why a glass cannon can hit you like a truck when you can turn around and do the same thing to them. […] you can directly counter a thief with proper use of Blind, Aegis, Focus Shield, Invulnerability, Retaliation, Counter Pressure (Burst), Crowd Control (Pull, Immobilize), Large amounts of burning, AoE, etc. If I had to choose the most direct counter to my class it would be a DPS Guardian.

As for other classes such as Elementalists, Mesmers, etc. They put out more damage more often, along with providing more team utility. [L2P]" – Caed

What a stupid response. Aegis has a much larger cooldown than black powder>heartseeker stealth resets.

Pretty much every defensive cooldown is longer than it takes the thief to regen his offensive resources. The thief can reset at will.

Just wait till formats other than conquest pop up and see how suddenly stealth builds become appealing.

P.S. I don’t care about who only runs Cruuk’s build. The point is that it’s ridiculously easy to 1v1 people with it in some of the most frustrating fashions. You get so many do overs where other classes would have paid for their first mistake with death. Instead you get near melee immunity with the blind spam.

Backstab should have never existed. Shift the damage of backstab to a VISIBLE attack skill chain. Stealth skills should be utility skills like sword stealth or shortbow stealth.

You do not get stealth to give you both significant defensive and offensive benefits in a single package.

Switch to Hammer+Axe/Mace, voila you’re still OP as hell.

Warrior is the only class that can run knights and still do more damage than most zerker specs that are not mesmer or thief.

A number reduction to hammer is insignificant when you can switch to axe set in between stuns and auto people to death because axe chain is comparable to 100b as sustained damage.

All you need is to pop your IWIN stances with extra duration and become unpeelable.

Chicago Jack.5647:

Zenith.7301:

Doesn’t matter. In an open field without the worry of contesting points […]

Skill balance should not be dictated via WvW where everyone gets insane stat bonuses. L2P.

It’s not just WvW, fool. Watch Cruuk’s video and you’ll notice how cheesy it is, maintaining high defense and still critting 6k backstabs on high toughness specs.

And don’t even pretend like tpvp is any more balanced than WvW. At least in WvW staff elementalists and power necromancers exist.

Not to mention mainhand would still be used purely for the warhorn or the reflection on axe offhand. None of the greatsword skills offer meaningful PvE utility.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Ryan.8367:

Andele.1306:

Ryan.8367:

the necro class is so lucky that their op bullkitten got overshadowed by warrior’s op bullkitten or else you guys would have seen much more needed nerfs yet the condition spam is still encouraged obviously by anet ..i really cannot wait for this kittening burst condition/tank condition spam meta to be over with. it’s so kittening digusting.

Or you just need to learn to play.

what does learning to play have to do with this game being plagued with condition spam?

i think you fail to realize im not JUST talking about necros here, it extends into engis / spirit rangers, necros and now bunker regen condi warriors as well. necromancers just have the most access to it. its a kittening stupid meta overall and promotes very low skill gameplay.

No, it just promotes Warrior play. The Condition-heavy meta means you can’t just go all-out burst anymore and expect to do well, you have to put in some defensive measures as well (namely cleanses) and be smart about when you use them.

Necros are quite spoiled on that front because of Consume Conditions and Plague Signet, both of which are total cleanses, so we don’t have to worry about how many different conditions are on us in the same way (we still need to keep track, just for different reasons).

Warriors run berserker just fine. Thieves run berserker and s/d can handle necro well as can D/P condi removal 1v1 thief. Mesmer can kill necro 1v1 and most of them run berserker.

The only classes that can’t run berserkers are those who actually have to tank hits and have little to no invulnerability/shutdown potential.

It’s for this reason power necros, power rangers, and berk eles cannot exist. They get burst down too easily.

Weakening Shroud should have a 5 sec weakness.

Narcarsis.5739:

You’re asking why a glass cannon can hit you like a truck when you can turn around and do the same thing to them. As a guardian you can directly counter a thief with proper use of Blind, Aegis, Focus Shield, Invulnerability, Retaliation, Counter Pressure (Burst), Crowd Control (Pull, Immobilize), Large amounts of burning, AoE, etc. If I had to choose the most direct counter to my class it would be a DPS Guardian.

As for other classes such as Elementalists, Mesmers, etc. They put out more damage more often, along with providing more team utility.

If you’re complaining about backstab you’re playing poorly and deserve to die.

Cheers,

Caed

Doesn’t matter. In an open field without the worry of contesting points, all you need to do is to reset with black powder stealth blast spam and wait out their dodges and cooldowns while you have pretty much no meaningful cooldowns on your high burst.

1v1 built D/P shadow arts thief is cheesy as hell.

There’s a good reason why stealth stacking os getting a nerf come December, but most of you tpvp thieves can’t see why because all you see is the cleave damage on you in teamfights.

The point is that due to the spread of the mainhand axe skill, with the exception of ricochet which is a weak power based skill, the mainhand axe is primarily a condition weapon.

And so Honed Axes affecting only a condition weapon seems odd as condition weapons have no use for crit damage.

I hope someone is aware on the side of anet about this, I really like the shoulders as they ade the first plant themed armor update we have gotten, but these shoulders are borked.

Jon, would you be inclined to offer some thoughts on the axe mainhand’s autoattack in relation to the theme of the weapon (conditions)? Ricochet just does not feel good, and splitblade only works for condition heavy builds.

What about the offhand axe, particularly whirling defense?

Could you take a look at the axe trait and make it affect not only the mainhabd, but the offhand axe as well? Maybe add an additional effect to it because 10% crit dmg increase on mainhand axe that is mainly used as a condition weapon is not a very used trait.

The last thing I want in pve, where you stack and melee the boss while stacking boons, is to send myself flying 600 yards away from the boss and waste preciois DPS walking back. I’ll just use my dodge.

The gap closer as an evasion skill makes no sense. How about after using counterattacked and it is triggered, you gain a short evade or distortion period?

Maul and hilt bash need more help than swoop, to be honest.
Maul you inadvertently nerfed by changing the bleed for a mere 5 vulnerability stacks that need significant group incoming damage to make up for the damage loss personally of the bleeds.

Maul itself is rather difficult to land due to the heavy telegraphing and animation delay of the skill. Pretty much a large portion of GS damage due to its weak autoattack hinges on a maul that is easy to dodge.Hilt bash has a delay charge up before lunging so hitting moving targets with swiftness is difficult.

The vigor will not make up for the survivability loss of removing the evade. If yo nerf survival, you need to significantly bring up offense so we can kill before being burst down.

Also, swoop doesn’t need an evade. The problem of the greatsword is uptime on targets with swiftness or when you are snared. So give swoop either a swiftness proc or a 1 second root or a 6 second cripple.

The primary ranged weapons are not a mix of aoe and single target. They are 99% single target with a single long cd, low impact AoE. You can’t honestly call poison spread aoe with its miserable damage, and the same goes for barrage with a long cd and low damage compared to warrior longbow or ele staff.

And let’s be honest. What’s holding AI down on the priority list is spvpers burning hatred for AI. That’s fine and dandy, if you hadn’t been set on releasing a class whose design and mechanic is balanced around AI!

The elephant in the room not being discussed here is how with the release of ascended items we are losing out on scali.g because pets at 80 were designed with exotic stats in mind. Now as warriors and every non minion class improves at full, we only improve at a fraction of that amoint since pets don’t sce with gear upgrades.

Like most ranger shouts, it is a poor attempt at matching group utility of other classes’ shouts.

Ranger has some of the worst utility pickings after mesmer (whose only good utilities are veil, portal, field, feedback, and mantras with restorative trait; the illusion utilities and mimick are terrible).

Storm spirit is just bad for PvE, the shouts are bad, the signets are bad without signet of the beastmaster trait (and signet of renewal is a horrible 60 second cooldown stunbreaker that also kills your pet). Signet of the Wild is pitifully low healing for non bunker builds. Muddy terrain is situational, and traps require heavy trait investment to work as a mediocre comparison to necro marks/wells and engineer grenades.

It’s an issue I’ve noticed with heritage and now the new Twisted shoulders.

It’s just way out of proportion, drives me crazy.

Mesmer is not self sufficient damage. Their damage is horrendous compared to most classes. They are only brought for time warp+curtainpull+feedback. Otherwise they would be replaced by a guardian.

Also, rather than touch the greatsword third stage, buff its incredibly low autoattack damage.

People don’t use the greatsword over the mainhand sword mostly because there’s around a 13% difference in damage between the too.

Also, power specs are not run over condi specs because ranger condi’s are not halved in effectiveness when the pet is factored, while power based abilities are. Conditions bypass boons like protection; ranger power specs have no way to deal with boon spam.

And please implement aoe damage reduction to pets already. Increasing their HP even by 500% wouldn’t fix anything because of the raw damage that happens in WvW and skills like the SE path 1’s stacked mirrored blades one shotting pretty much most pets.

Make ranged pet’s range 1200 and allow melee pets besides drake to cleave.

Rangers feel useless in WvW because the pet is dead on arrival to begin with, pets don’t cleave, and rangers in general have very poor AoE damage options which are necessary in WvW.

Please don’t derail my thread. The current meta is melee because melee does the most damage, and damage is the way to make fights the safest as extending the fight is a losing gamble.

I’m addressing how in a meta of melee only guardians and warriors seem to be able to function decently in PuGs as self sufficient units.

Yes, ele can work. BUT YOU REQUIRE TEAM SUPPORT TO DO SO.

Get that through your head. A warrior supplies himself with might and fury and vuln stacking and all he needs to do damage, and has high baseline survival. Casters are not afforded this luxury.

If you don’t have a team that coordinates guardian walls and aegis and prot uptime, you simply cannot melee efficiently as an ele, and because the only viable damage weapon the ele has is the lightning hammer, it’s not like he can use any of his far inferior mainhand weapons with horrendous autoattack damage.

If melee is to remain meta, you need to allow for all classes to self sufficiently melee within reasonable margins of effectiveness.

If you won’t do that, then you need to buff ranged damage for classes you intend to stay at range, because ranged weapon damage is just garbage relative to melee.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE

Merge the weapon traits. Bow damage should be merged with cooldown. Eagle Eye could merge with spotter.

Merge the Two-handed sword trait. Cooldown and damage.

Please make axe trait also affect offhand axe for the crit damage bonus, as the mainhand axe is a CONDITION weapon and has little use for crit damage bonus.

Path of Scars could use a reduction in cooldown and Whirling Defense’s damage should be increased considering its channel time.

Please buff Barrage’s damage. It’s a really inadequate skill for its cooldown, and an aoe cripple doesn’t justify it given how efefctively elementalists with staff and engineers and necromancers control areas with not only cripple but the more powerful chill.

Gnat.9405:

If my Necro is built as melee, is he a caster?

Yes, he casts spells. You know, that big skeletal magic bite he does with his dagger auto, or his dagger #2 is a spell. Guardians are caster/melee hybrids. Your necro also puts down magical wells and when he enters death shroud he casts.

Bogy.2953:

a full zerker war has 2 dodge rolls and a block from sword 5 or evade from gs 3 thats it for defence and if he wants to have max dmng starting of he wastes a dodge for the extra dmng bonus of not having max endurance

ele has 2 dodges , arcane shield and blind from auto attack with hammer or evade on fgs 3

anything that can one shot one will more then likely one shot the other

Arcane Shield=Endure Pain. Don’t use utilities without including your own.

And no, a 17-18k HP berk warrior will not get 1 shot by what 1-shots an 11k hp berzerker elementalist. Stop lying.

And let’s not even mention healing signets. You get a passive 400ish heal regen on top of your large health pool and higher defense rating while doing the damage an elementalist needs full debuffs and boons for to match with a NON MAINHAND WEAPON. Not a single one of the elementalist mainhand weapons comes even close to competing with warrior weapons if you don’t spec lightning hammer.

Gnat.9405:

Define caster before you create a thread that will turn into calling everything an exploit.

What is there to define. Elementalist, mesmer, necromancer. Anyone that’s not a guardian or warrior is on the same boat.

Einlanzer.1627:

I can’t help but feel like a lot of the issues would be resolved if they would just close the gaps in health some. The huge difference in surivability between professions isn’t really compensated for by anything else, and Thieves and Eles struggle hard with attrition in a lot of the content without getting all that much in return for it.

Having a 10k difference in base health at level 80 is too much. It should be more like 5 or 6k.

Oh, and they need to correct ranged weapons across the board – they pretty much all have poorly tuned autoattacks and do too little damage. It’s supposed to be a risk vs. reward thing but in actuality it just screws the game up because certain professions are kinda supposed to stay at range and consequently they are punished.

It’s just beyond me how classes with superior survivability in pve like warrior and guardian can be matching or be even close to classes with much less survival.

Thief, mesmer, and elementalist should do considerably better damage than warriors and guardians to account for the risk they take in melee. As it currently is, in practical terms the average warrior and damage are able to provide much better sustained damage in addition to being strong utility classes whose utility is EXCLUSIVE to them. No other class does banner buffs, and no other class can match the reflection/aoe stability/aegis uptimes of guardians.

Otherwise, what’s the point.

Lewis Burnell.2493:

The difference is enormous on some colour sets. I had a perfect blend of pink/yellow on my T3. How this can be considered better I have absolutely no idea. It’s garish, lacks any kind of subtlety and will leave me spending hours trying to find something similar. Unfortunately the new system doesn’t allow for that either. Please change it back

AMG Lewis, I checked on my ranger as well ;(. It’s horrendous.

The greenish tonality around the edges is completely lost now, it’s all yellow. The pants lost a lot of detail and the organic feel is diminished.

And what did it get replaced with? A barely noticeable bioluminescent glow. The glow is so ridiculously small.

It’s just amazing. The amount of debuff/reflection stacking you need to do to even survive in places like 40+ ascalonian mobs, or attacks from charr mobs that have no real telling animations and can remove 90% of your health as an elementalist in berserker.

Meanwhile the warrior and guardian have several invulnerability options in addition to their higher effective health to continue doing high damage where the elementalist not only risks getting 2-shot, but has to switch to a water attunement and waste globals healing and not doing damage compared to the endure pain warrior landing axe auto crits mostly unbuffed for 3-4k.

And all this with a healing signet that is far superior to the ele healing signet.

As an elementalist you don’t even get to use daggers or scepter since the autoattacks on both weapons, especially the scepter, are so weak. If an ele wants to do any competitive damage, he MUST use lightning hammer conjure.

Staff is a WvW roaming weapon. If you like that, good for you.

It’s amazing how self sufficient warriors and guardians are in berserker gear, yet if I want to run a full berserker s/d lightning hammer elementalist and land in a mediocre to bad PuG, my life becomes 100x harder than if I had just gone the route of the Guardian or Warrior.

And the worst part? Despite the effort to succeed with that setup I still do less damage than a berk guard or warrior since I need all these team reliant debuffs to be on the target and high protection uptimes and projectile reflection to not get 1-2 shot by some mob.

It’s been well over a year and Guardians and Warriors still benefit from being the most practical and well rounded classes in the game with high damage potential, support, and staying power that none of the casters can afford to bring without heavy team coordination.

Also, thief’s feline grace, which was a supremely better endurance regen trait than ranger, didn’t get buffed. Thief’s Feline Grace stacks with vigor, while our 5 WS trait did not.

We all know that endurance regen nerf is a blanket nerf due to spirit rangers that will now hurt ALL builds regardless of their viability.

Nike.2631:

pho.9412:

endurance nerf e.e’ wtf… a big one at that.

Its global – ALL classes are seeing less endurance/vigor.

If I had to guess, the PvE content designers had a little talk with the class designers that players have so much ready-to-dodge uptime they largely IGNORE all damage spikes which leads to berserker-uber-alles gearing because your actual defensive attributes and traits are MEANINGLESS compared to the power of dodging.

In a funny way, its a backdoor fix to our pets. When players can no longer dodge every single hit (like out pets), we might see start to encounters with less dodge-or-die design.

You do realize nothing changed in pve. The vigor on crit traits are hardly touched so guardians have high vigor, and warriors never relied on vigor to begin with as they used whirlwind attack

In fact, by nerfing the self sufficiency of some classes with survival they only solidified the stacking of guardians that was already happening in high level fractals.

No ele builds will be opened. The only thing keeping elementalist alive against current damage levels in the game is the vigor and on demand access to protection.

Nothing in this patch will change other than ele’s will have to lose either attunement or renewing stamina, and they will still spec 20-30 arcane because it’s their only source of survival against spike.

Understand this: No 12k base HP class will ever cope against 6-7k crits from warriors or thieves or other burst elementalists or mesmers with the baseline survival sans the vigor and access to protection.

This is why you see most ele’s dumping points 20 water 30 arcana or the other way around. Even Phantaram needs to maintain a 1300-1400 toughness build on top of having 20 water.

A Berserker geared ele just cannot exist baseline without investment in water and arcana.

The mesmer changes are kind of neat, but what I’m gathering is that these changes won’t cause diversity by themselves because a large factor of diversity is how bad some weapons are compared to others.

The mesmer scepter is still horrible. Mesmer condition builds are not viable because their condition application ramp up is too large for the rate of condition removal. The mesmer torch phantasm is still horrible. The Warden cannot be used well at all in PvP. Things like that.

And for the Ranger, the issue has always been the lack of survival in power specs relative to condition specs, and how power specs lack the burst to justify going berserker. Pets do not scale with gear, and so the berserker/power ranger will always be inferior as a large portion of its damage is not scaling with gear.

The Two-Handed mastery trait for ranger is on the spirit line, which no power speced ranger uses because in order to make power specs remotely viable, you need 30 in marksman, and 20 at least in skirmishing. The power weapon traits should be moved to the power lines!

Another reason Power Rangers will NEVER be viable in their current state is because THEY DO NOT HAVE BOON REMOVAL. A power ranger cannot exist in a meta where classes have access to high protection uptime or lots of blocking/retal.

Also, Barrage is a horrible skill that does more damage to you from retaliation than you do to all the opponents. Please change this skill.

LightningBlaze.4913:

Is there an official announcement stating this removal?

The proposed Dec 10 patch notes. They are moving RS to the master tier, and making it compete with elemental attunement.

This is a HUGE nerf. Not only are you now forced 20 points arcana for ANY survival, but you have to decide between either having vigor, or having 3-4 secs of protection for burst.

And in that exchange we gained no meaningful source of survival besides Tempest Defense, which was already without use since we use cantrips/arcane shield for CC effects.

Without addressing survival. This is such a critical trait for offensive elementalists.

If you remove Renewing Stamina to higher tiers, you will force all elementalists to go bunker.

The weaponskills themselves just do not offer enough survival at the current damage levels of the game.

Mammoth.1975:

Zenith.7301:

Mammoth.1975:

To be fair, hammer warriors got eaten alive by the old meta. Like all warriors. You could count the number of successful NA warriors in that meta on one hand.

It’s not meta.

It’s the fact that now besides the kittened damage warriors do they got the healing signet and berserker/endure pain for godmode trolling.

Just look at that warrior in berk tank caed’s D/P thief. Any other class in berserker would die in seconds to Caed’s D/P, but not the warrior!

It’s still meta. You can’t crutch on 400 hp/s when a coordinated shatter+air spike with s/d assist will drop you in 1-3 and you can’t catch anything except a guardian to stun. You’ll be burning defensive cooldowns so fast your head will spin. Then you’ll die. As for 1v1, whatever. Ban them from your duel server or something.

Newsflash, nobody can tank that. It’s not a warrior specific issue.

Mammoth.1975:

To be fair, hammer warriors got eaten alive by the old meta. Like all warriors. You could count the number of successful NA warriors in that meta on one hand.

It’s not meta.

It’s the fact that now besides the kittened damage warriors do they got the healing signet and berserker/endure pain for godmode trolling.

Just look at that warrior in berk tank caed’s D/P thief. Any other class in berserker would die in seconds to Caed’s D/P, but not the warrior!

Withdraw is OP as hell. Incredibly short cd heal with root/snare clear and built in evade to boot.

Shelter at least is a 30 sec cd.