Our condi cleanse also cleanses all our allies condis as well though, which is great and i’d say it’d totally be worth the 60s CD IF THEY DIDN’T FUNNEL INTO OUR PET omg, i hate throwing my pet under the bus for pretty much all our condi removal, it’s stupid and makes it pretty awful for BM builds…
I mean seriously, it’d be like f Necros Well of Power took out 50% of their Life Force and put it on CD and couldn’t be used if they didn’t have at least 25% life force to begin with…
The pet always gets thrown under the bus. Protect me? Invulnerability at the cost of 30% of your damage (pet can’t attack while protecting you), and you better switch out to drake when using it.
Protect Me is basically a crappy Endure Pain. Period.
Lightning Reflexes would be used if it wasn’t for the fact that your only source of condi removal is the signet and empathic bond.
Shared Anguish? Great, warrior gets balanced stance when CC;d which is a stunbreak, free stability and swiftness. Ele gets stun aura. Necro gets aoe feared when CC’d. Thief gets black powder teleport.
Meanwhile, ranger’s shared anguish cc’s the pet, angain gutting your damage.
Ranger utilities are all about screwing over your pet so you don’t get screwed yourself. Except, that by screwing over the pet you are screwing yourself over.
Signets are useless without 30 in marksman. You always want to keep the passive on.
Everybody uses troll unguent because healing spring has a huge cooldown and since you can’t stand on it most of the time you heal for much less on 30 seconds. Heal as One is just bad.
I’m just sick of the terrible utilities we have. They all need ridiculous trait support to be close to decent, otherwise they suck baseline.
I can’t help but laugh that if the original rules were followed and the finals were best of 3 in both the EU and NA tournaments, we would have two completely different teams at PAX.
Some issues were raised about the best of 5 finals giving an advantage to the Saturday winner but that clearly wasn’t the case today! Go SYNC! Comeback kids!
I prefer best of 5 it gives better room to counterplay.
I’m very impressed by the way people adapt and don’t lose morale.
It’s a 60 second timer and spirit rangers have no stunbreak as they run all spirits..
Try dueling a good hammer+axe/mace warrior as a spirit ranger you’ll be CC’d to death.
Hell even a permastealth mighttsacking D/P thief will be able to take you down.
People complain about spirit rangers because they can activate spirits on a point and their elite can rez 2 times in a teamfight.
spvp ruins everything
Permastealth thieves are the bane of any build. Try mitigating a shadow arts BS thief 1v1 and see how many builds can actually cope with backstabs at 18-20 might stacks with permanently stackable stealth assuring you eventually land the backstab.
I think you mean shatter mesmers and thieves can be mitigated by forcing them into team fights. But in 1v1, which they can do plenty if you assign them to far point assault they are ridiculously strong.
It’s also the fact that if a guy can regularly hit you for 4-5k bursts, healing an extra 200-300 points of damage won’t be as useful as using an amulet that gives you ~4k more HP and enough toughness to reduce that damage by at least 30%.
Celestial amulet is not used because small gains cannot overcome the immense synergistic workings of specialized amulets.
So my thief can try a celestial dagger/dagger+pistol/pistol and get gibbed by a berserker D/P thief regardless because the difference between 916 toughness and 1.2k is not big enough to overcome a backstab combo, but my offensive loss is noticeable.
Thus my thief is forced to build just as spiky and I better be able to kill him faster than he kills me or play s/d to be able to spike him better than he can spike me.
The same goes for a necromancer in celestials with some vampiric trait. There are thresholds of counterpressure you need to put out to be able to win an engagement and celestial or spread stats simply do not allow for it.
If I build a necro with celestial or rampager I’ll neither be killing bunkers (my defenses are low enough that they can wear me down faster) nor be able to survive berserker mesmers/thieves.
You either need to hit like a freight train to overwhelm the enemy’s sustained and force them into quick reactions which mean mistakes, or you need to be bunkerish enough to foil the burst and wear down your opponent. And to foil a burst spec you simply need over 1800 toughness if you’re not an ele or guardian with ample access to prot.
In order for bleeds to be any good you need to stack condition damage, and the same goes for survival and power builds outside warriors (who have particularly higher base numbers so they can run knights and output the same damage of a class in berserker).
There are too many extremes, so they need to reduce the threshold where conditions deal too much damage but up the baseline effectiveness of bleeds so you don’t have to stack condition damage. Burning’s upper numbers need nerfing. I think that without investment burning should tick for 400 and with investment maybe 500-550 tops, not 800 ticks.
The same should go for all stat investments. They should be good enough to be used baseline, and adding extra stats should be a nudge, not a colossal shift in results.
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Balanced builds have no place in the game. You have to stack stats to be effective.
If you don’t get enough toughness you get gibbed. If you don’t get enough power and crit damage you can’t scratch guardians and eles and rangers.
There’s no room for in-betweens.
Please show what one of these Balanced builds looks like.
Builds with 15-10 point investments in the various trees, not 30 and 20 in 3. Builds using celestial amulets or rampager’s amulet for damage delivery variety over stacking damage type.
A build where you can run a power weapon with a defensive condi weapon.
You know, being able to build a hybrid that doesn’t suck majorly.
And no eles in valkyrie are not hybrids. They’re just abusing boon spam to be able to tank and deal damage at the same time. High protection times on classes is a design flaw.
The only class that can do power/condi damage splits is HGH engineer, again, due to broken boon spam.
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They should make storymode unlocks account bound…..
There’s a fine line between too much damage and not enough. If burst is reduced just enough that players can escape before dying, the games can turn into stalemates.
Giving power-damage builds an option for some toughness would help a lot though.
That only happens because the recovery options for bunkers are too good as well.
The ideal situation is that people will be worn down, and they’ll die eventually. Reset tools should be nerfed to the point where they’re very very long cooldowns and you can’t constantly set your hp back to full.
So no 6 second kills but no 30+ second engagements either.
Classes that have high escape should have longer cd’s on heals while classes that have less escapes should have lesser cd’s. The survivability variances between classes is too large and it skews the game toward classes that can only bu8ild glass cannons and classes that can only build bunkers.
They need to nerf offense and then tone down the boon spam defense and self-healing. Some classes like ele and guardian heal for too much given the amount of protection/regen, and stability they have access to.
Balanced builds have no place in the game. You have to stack stats to be effective.
If you don’t get enough toughness you get gibbed. If you don’t get enough power and crit damage you can’t scratch guardians and eles and rangers.
There’s no room for in-betweens.
My option would be to reduce the impact of stats. Make the baselines greater and reduce the effect of stat stacking so all abilities are good baseline but the stats sort of nudge improvements to establish identity without being mandatory for the abilities to work.
Only reason mesmer exists in wvw is null field and veil/portal. Their aoe is nonexistent because phantasms die immediately when summoned before even pulling off their ability, illusions will die to cleave/aoe when they reach the target, and mesmer doesn’t have the sustained aoe that guardian/warrior/dd ele melee trains can bring nor the expansive aoe+cc chains of staff ele and necro.
Mesmer shines the smaller the engagement, just like the ranger. As soon as engagements go beyond 5+ people, like 10v10, the ranger and mesmer lose their shine real quick.
The thief is relegated to backline harassment with all invested on shadowstep/escapes since they can’t go with the guardian/warrior melee train, and quite frankly shortbow doesn’t stand up to staff eles/necros.
I agree with most of that, except…
Have you ever participated or observed how the top guild-vs-guild (gvg) play in WvWvW? Most of them are EU guilds, which are playing far better than your average or so called “good” zerg. In fact they can demolish enemy zergs twice their size. I am talking about guilds like these:
Many of them practice and play together a lot. Their commander’s job is very difficult indeed.
Interestingly many of them also utilize some thieves and rangers to snipe enemy ranged (who tend to stay away from the melee part of clashing). I recently saw [Mya] using even more interesting composition with almost like semi-ranged guild group with rather small melee front line, softening enemy at range before the hammer melee train hits in.
Practically almost all those top guilds use one or several mesmers in their 20 man setup. Main force is of course warriors and guardians. Elementalists are traditionally the 3rd most profession, but now I have seen many of them run lots of necromancers.
Medium armor professions are the rarest in zergs. I already commented in another thread, why engineer are almost totally unseen in such top gvg:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/engineer/Do-Engineers-get-more-accepted-into-groups/first#post2480748I agree that mesmers are mostly utility & support in big fights, despite in small scale they are also very good roamers. But still I wouldn’t rank them as non-viable or as the worst WvWvW profession. I think the developers would get pretty good idea what professions to buff and which to nerf in WvWvW, just looking at the usage: which professions are most used and which are least used.
I don’t know any reasonable way how to make phantasm mesmer viable for large zergs. If you give those phantasms much more hit points they would be totally overpowered in small scale. Same problem with ranger pets, necromancer minions and engineer turrets.
Many of the Xeph’s suggestions in this thread are actually very good. I like the idea of slightly toning down the damage, yet giving a bit more sustainability. At the same time I feel that some other professions will now need some nerfing (I know players hate to have their fav profession nerfed).
You don’t give them more hitpoints.
You reduce aoe damage on pets/minions by 70-80%. You can still kill clones quick if you hit them individually, but swinging a melee weapon ro a couple of aoe fields won’t completely gut any mesmer build that isn’t shatter.
Killing enemy minions/pets should be an opportunity cost not a side benefit of cleaving your opponent.
Even with 70-80% aoe reductions phantasms most likely in team fights won’t last more than one attack, but at least you’ll get some use out of them.
Another problem with the mesmer is that in order to make shatter any good you really need to trait heavily for it. Otherwise there’s little point to shattering your phantasms.
It’s why I always advocated phantasms as utility summons instead of damage summons, because when you have two sources of damage, ultimately you’ll pick the optimal one.
If phantasms are for utility and mindwrack is the damage with reducing phantasm damage and putting utility in them while that shaved damage is put in the mesmer’s abilities (better autoattack numbers, slight increase to maybe blurred frenzy), it wouldn’t be a scenario of either speccing for phantasms and never wanting to shatter or speccing into shatters and not wanting to leave phantasms up.
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I’d be willing to see mesmer and thief buffs when and only when stealth is toned down and made more skill based. Right now it simply wouldn’t be fair to have mesmers be able to deal and absorb as much damage as some of the other classes. Stealth is just too potent.
Tone down stealth and then we’ll talk.
Remove stealth stacking so you can’t renew stealth while stealthed. Remove stealth stacking off black powder. Reduce black powder duration.
Thief sustained will need to go up quite a bit if you touch stealth though. They’ll get destroyed by guardians and warriors and dd eles if they don’t have better damage mitigation than they currently do.
They need to go down in cooldown.
If I want any amount of condi removal, and my only condi removal is signet of renewal and empathic bond, I’ve got a 60 sec cd stunbreaker, which is ridiculous.
Stunbreakers at 60 sec cd do much more than just clear conditions. For other classes they either give stability or prot or give damage immunity.
Only reason mesmer exists in wvw is null field and veil/portal. Their aoe is nonexistent because phantasms die immediately when summoned before even pulling off their ability, illusions will die to cleave/aoe when they reach the target, and mesmer doesn’t have the sustained aoe that guardian/warrior/dd ele melee trains can bring nor the expansive aoe+cc chains of staff ele and necro.
Mesmer shines the smaller the engagement, just like the ranger. As soon as engagements go beyond 5+ people, like 10v10, the ranger and mesmer lose their shine real quick.
The thief is relegated to backline harassment with all invested on shadowstep/escapes since they can’t go with the guardian/warrior melee train, and quite frankly shortbow doesn’t stand up to staff eles/necros.
People also tend to confuse the mindwrack with the whole blurred frenzy combo.
6-7k damage spike is fine. Add 3k into it while you’re rooted and it can push the envelop.
On the flip side mesmer needs the burst, because like rangers you have no sustained damage. Rangers need to burst their conditions — they don’t do steady damage through auto pressure and skill spam like other classes.
If somebody dodges splitblade/throw torch, you do no damage for a good while. If somebody dodges mindwrack/phantasm, the mesmer similarly does no damage for a good while because his sustained damage, the auto, is not good.
It’s also why scepter eles can only go for burst builds and lose to d/d eles and condi bunkers. You have no sustained damage if the burst doesn’t land completely.
If you want an example of sustained damage look at thieves and warriors and maybe power necros. Their pressure stays regardless of whether they land their burst or not. You need to peel them.
They want it to get slower to get legendaries/expensive skins because in the end it benefits them from the gem shop. If you think there aren’t people converting RL to gems for gold then you are a fool.
The entire point about f2p/b2p games is to make the really attractive vanity items (what people play RPG’s for) extremely tedious to get so there are enough people willing to throw money away to make the inconvenience vanish.
And that’s why sub MMO’s are better. When they pull greedy, grindy crap, they lose subs so their design mistakes are punished.
Video works just fine for me…
The video works. The link to the build in the video does not.
Your video’s link to the build doesn’t work anymore.
I’m really curious because one of the warriors I was dueling happened to be running with a trait for endure pain procs, so I have to wonder about a build that can take punishment yet still be able to grind high toughness targets like spirit rangers and bunker eles down.
I want to try it on my warrior.
I pet a class like p/d thief or something that can reliably kite through all the cc might give this build a run for its money, but you need a ridiculous amount of peels to survive and there are very little builds/classes that can do so. Maybe a mesmer with the right setup like crippling dissipation and blink and stealth might do it.
If I can find a good build for roaming on my warrior I’ll be very happy as I’m sick of my ranger and other classes.
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Anybody tried this with Fear Me, Berserker’s Stance and Balanced Stance? I’ve encountered several wvw warriors in it and it’s just a beastly 1v1 build. People either have to waste dodges not getting stunlocked to death by hammer, getting instead stunned by Quake into an eviscerate, or they dodge the eviscerate but have to hit hammer CC.
The sustained damage from axe autoattack is just incredibly high in a mix of knight+berk.
Lyssa Runes and Signet of Rage, high swiftness uptime and gap closers so you don’t get kited at all.
Either way all they need to kill you is axe auto you to death.
Seems like s/d thief is the only build that gives them a run for their money.
I’ve only pugged to 38. I have yet to see a pug that doesn’t facetank dredge powersuit’s agony attack
It seems like many people forget that double dodging through the ground pounds makes it really easy to avoid the agony, and the dredge’s powersuit melee even though it has no agony hits hard but has a huge delay that you can walk out of.
People are more afraid of meleeing the dredge suit when the ice elemental can actually be more obnoxious if you get chilled/cc’d right before he does a fist smash agony into the ground or drops the spikes, or you get kncked back by the adds as the icicle explosions are about to go off.
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In zerkers for zerg you’ve probably looked at axe/axe+longbow, since your only power based aoe is a 25 sec cd barrage that tickles for 1-1.2k crits in full berserker (ele just blow it out of the water, as do necro and melee cleave) and kills you with retal.
Then you’ve got axe auto for aoe at 3 target cap. Ranger has terrible aoe options, you can go for traps but that’s not sustained aoe due to the cooldowns, if you go for aoe conditions engineers and necros do it much better without having to sacrifice so many utilities and go into a prec/crit traitline for specializing in aoe conditions, and ranger traps due to pulses are very susceptible to retal damage just like ranger longbow.
And if you’re looking at aoe zergs the ranger is useless anyway. The pet will be dead in a few seconds, losing 30-40% of your potential damage, and eles and necros and engineers bring much better aoe in addition to utility.
Knights is terrible. Because the pet comprises about 30-40% of the ranger’s proportion of damage, his power based scaling is terrible.
Conditions suffer no 30-40% damage reduction or lower coefficient penalties for having pets. You do as much damage with your conditions as the other classes. The existence of the pet doesn’t gut your damage as a condi build.
Rangers also have no way to deal with boons in power specs. They don’t have ridiculous damage like the warrior to mow through boon spam, they don’t have the boon stripping of other classes, so the only option you have to deal with boon spam classes like guardians or eles or engineers is to use conditions.
And ranger just don’t have the survivability tools to stay offensive in non-bunker specs. You either go shaman/rabid and stack high toughness to have a chance to kill via conditions, or you get blown apart using knights/soldier/berk because you have all the squishiness but none of the burst.
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In exchange it doesn’t burst.
If you are seriously comparing condi burst to a 16-20 might backstab with signet popped or a full shatter>blurred frenzy or a burning speed>firegrab>arcane utilities or scepter burst, then I pity you.
but….condition build burst with conditions…sure its fine, but necros
6-7 seconds to do significant damage is not burst. When you can immediately take out half of someone’s health in 2-3 button presses then you can compare it to D/P or mesmer or warrior burst.
Bunker condi classes exist because if you are glass and not a mesmer or thief you get eaten alive by mesmers and thieves.
When an engineer can run a burst build or a ranger can use a longbow/gs burst build without being free food to mesmers and thieves and warriors and eles and prety much anything, then you’ll see less condi bunker builds.
But if you’re something outside mesmer/thief, chances are if you don’t build condi bunker you will die a lot without accomplishing much.
In exchange it doesn’t burst.
If you are seriously comparing condi burst to a 16-20 might backstab with signet popped or a full shatter>blurred frenzy or a burning speed>firegrab>arcane utilities or scepter burst, then I pity you.
Umm, what? At higher levels it requires your brain to complete them. Not sure where your going with your response. Those that fail fall out of coordination or need to watch a few more videos to get the tactics down. Lets be honest, a good player re skills depending on the fractal they get. At higher levels it is very rare not to see another player reset skills. That is a good indication the run will be successful.
Higher levels require only a bit more brain than lower ones. I’ll admit though, I’m not used to run with pugs but in 5 runs this is what I noticed:
Cliffside Fractal:
- not using projectile defenses against 1st archdiviner
- not picking hammer when it’s needed
- using projectile defenses against chanters
- using projectiles against 2nd archdiviner in his 2nd phase before/after nova.
Swampland Fractal:
- using range weapons with 2 guardians and mesmer in team (all 4 members)
- not rallying on wolves
- not using projectile defenses against mossman
Underground Facility Fractal:
- not using projectile defenses against dredges
- crippling/chilling/immoblizing last bosses
- not using knockbacks/launches when he starts to heal and he lacks debuff
- trying to rez people under fire of 50 dredges
- not using cc on dredges
Urban Battlegrounds Fractal:
- balling up just to get flame burst
- not cc’ing mobs after los’ing them
- not going melee in 1st phase of Ashyn encounter
Volcanic Fractal:
- dpsing boss when at least 1 party member has low hp/is downed
- destroying bubble as fast as possible
- running through other people after getting hit with an arrow
Uncategorized Fractal:
- using range weapons for harpies
- not using every possible projectile defenses
- killing golems in wrong orders
- facetanking baron
Overall:
- bad skills choice
- wrong skills usage
- facetanking
This is only the things I recall at the moment. Overall problem is that people watch on youtube how teams with optimal composition are able to facetank more freely than other team compositions allow them to and they try to copy it with miserable effect because they don’t pay attention to details, like cc’s, proper rotations, etc. It leads to completely brainless gameplay where they don’t think how else you could do it in case of failure or vastly different team composition.
Well tbh I stopped doing 48 before they introduced ascended amulets/earrings.
In 48 before amulets and accessories, one of the strict stipulations was if you showed a trend of getting hit by agony instead of consistently dodging agony attacks without needing to rely on the crutch of AR, you were quickly kicked.
Maybe the quality of people has deteriorated a lot since then as more AR is achievable and thus people aren’t forced to pay attention in fights anymore.
Blind is perfectly fine as it is. If thieves were so OP “spamming” blinds non stop while carving you a new one, why don’t we see teams with more than 1 thief completely dominating all the middle fights?
Because ranged attacks are not affected by melee blind fields/ D/P thieves hardcounter melee specs and dominate 1v1. Not everything is about team fights.
Also don’t forget Plague form, just countered a 1v1 in tpvp with a necro,landed all my attacks, dodged his hits and interrupted his heal,hes down to like 15%, im at 75%, bam plague form, cripple blind spam,end of plague, im down, his heal backup right after, really? anet? i win button?
Blinds need to go back or need a CD on that plague blind spam
If you lost to plague you are bad.
Sic Em is removed when you use a f2 skill. It’s a waste of a skill just bring a spirit or use zephyr instead.
With the shift in the meta, having an Elementalist on your team flat out gimps you in competitive play. How can we fix this?
By toning down spirit rangers and necromancers.
By toning down s/d thieves.
S/D thieves are pretty much an elementalist hardcounter.
Thief blind doesn’t need nerf. It’s part if our defense. We don’t have endure pain or mist form or elixir s, etc. All we got is blinds and stealth and evades. All which can be countered, unlike a endure pain or mist form, etc.
L2p or nerf it and give thieves invulns.
Sure, id trade endure pain for spamming blind or stealth, im not even asking for both, just one, and im not even going to ask some backstab skills if it is stealth we get.
enjoy your condition apply able, CC able endure pain.
Stealth has a 4-5 sec cd. Endure Pain and Mist Form have a 60-75 sec cd lol.
I’ll take stealth and a double stunbreaker in one utility (shadowstep has got to be the most OP utility in the game — it clears conditions, it has TWO stun breaks, and it’s a teleport to boot for a measly 50 sec cd).
Sigh.
4 seconds of Highly telegraphed abilities isn’t “Burst” – every LS is preceded by a whirling, swooshing stab for .5s, then an obvious .5s arm kitten animation that lets you know “LS IS COMING!”. 3-4 times in a row is 15-20 Init – even with 10/0/0/30/30 double S/D weapon switch, you just blew all or almost all your init in 4 seconds…meaning no Inf strike, no shadow return, no more tricks up your sleeve.
Also, 3.5k – 4k crits (Not hits, Crits, which apparently we can rely on to always happen) is a rather subjective number. Any S/D thief who “spams” FS/LS is running 30 acro double S/D – there’s literally no other way to support the init cost. That build sacrifices alot of power to get the traits it needs for sustained init regen. To get those kind of crits I’m probably hitting another glass spec, and those numbers aren’t impressive on glass v glass.
The third part of Sword AA costs 1.5s and 2 kittenty swings before it – if you can dodge LS and CS, you just nerfed swords DPS by a huge amount, as they’re the only abilities that do any damage for the set (and lucky for you, they have the exact same animation, so it’s super easy to know exactly which ability to dodge).
Don’t use hyperbole and made up numbers to reinforce your point, there’s enough misinformation on these boards already.
Everything in this game is telegraphed, and considering people have 3 dodges at best in the beginning of a fight, and you can root with infiltrator strike before a larcenous (it’s a saved ability you don’t need to use immediately) so they can’t dodge makes your nitpicking pointless.
Pop signet for ini, pop roll for initative, voila you have far more high sustained damage than your target can dodge, and your resources recharge a lot faster than your target’s while having high evasion time.
And yeah with prec signet and fury from either lyssa or the critical hits traitline or from stealing is pretty reliable crits. I look at upwards of 67-70% crit chance.
Don’t talk out of your kitten as if some of use don’t have thieves we play and exploit.
The sword auto is not crappy. The first 2 hits crit for 1.5-1.7 k, and cleave while the third attack is a larcenous strike in exchange for cripple and weakness instead of boon steal.
At least we know those got Legendary had to grind or pay ransom for it. Fractal skin you never know whether that person had just won a lottery ticket at level 20s.
Nope.
My guildie got gifted Dusk from Grenth event and then The Legend dropped for him on the karka event. He pretty much got his Twilight gifted to him by the lottery.
I had to grind my whole legendary because despite playing more than him and far more game types I did not win the lottery.
Fractal and dungeon skins are the only skins you can’t trivialize by playing the trading post.
I hate when you can just buy your way to “prestige” items in a game instead of having shown actual skill that deserves the reward.
So there goes one skill that could be used for Condi but instead used as pre emptive stability and takes one less clone generation.
Considering I use mantras with a phantasm build I don’t want to replace my phantasms with more clones. Decoy, blink, stability mantra. You then also have distortion to charge the mantra.
So I have decoy, mantra stability, distortion and mass invis elite to charge my mantras when under pressure.
My mantra also uses 30 in inspiration for restorative mantras so I have pretty strong healing.
Yeah, it needs buffing. But you can work with it if you’re tired of the usual builds.
Ether Feast is arguably the best heal overall, but mantra of recovery affords much better sustained with half the cooldown and the ability to use it mid-skill/cc.
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Feight if you run mantra mesmer ( I want it to be viable) against a non brain damaged d/p thief? Gl. they can SPAM interrupts on you. You will never heal.
Mantra of recovery and stealth utilities allow you plenty of opportunity for charging without interruption.
And quite frankly you can pop stability before charging it.
u can only put 2 blind fields with full init and 3 after a few sec, the only way to have perma blind some1 is that they are dumb enough to stay on the blind field forever.
If they don’t stand on the blind field, you can spam heart seeker to stack stealth and gain 16-25 stacks of might on a signet backstab spec and crit high toughness builds for 6k backstabs.
So it’s a loss either way. You need to be permablinded to keep the thief from stacking stealth and might, but being in the field keeps you blinded.
As someone stated before, on paper we can say a lot of things but the reality is that thieves DO spam blinds.
Either that or spam evade frames.
Either way it’s pretty cheesy. But it begs the question of why does it exist? Possibly because the class is weak without it? IDK, won’t really know unless we took it away.
You’re the defektive everyone talks about/to when they’re talking warrior strats/TPvP, right? If not, you can ignore this next part.
Assuming you are, don’t you think “Won’t really know unless we take it away” is a bit disingenuous? Is it really that hard to envision what you could do to a thief if they couldn’t evade alot or blind you? You’ve certainly fought some while TPvPing, you honestly can’t imagine what a free kill they’d be without those defensive tools? Come on.
When people were crying endlessly about stealth, Anet finally gave thieves another way to survive with usable, effective evades. Turns out people think those are broken too!
I think conceptually a Thief was supposed to be a get-in and out quick class. Something that can move quickly, dispense damage, and get out with out a scratch.
That comes down to intelligent teleports, stealth, and being ‘slippery’ to a target.
In-game however, it’s taken a bit further when abused by Blinds and Evades. You’re looking at a class that can teleport (on a weapon skill), teleport as a stun break, teleport to defend (or attack) a point. Then they become amplified by consistent evade frames in-combat and AoE blinds they can apply to a large portion of the enemy.
The problem then comes to light. Is a thief a sustained DPS, or a strategically placed missile that’s difficult to pin down? Warriors were supposed to be the sustained DPS, but it sometimes feels with all of a thiefs Blinds and Evades like Warriors are etched out.
So do thiefs NEED these skills? I’d arguably say yes to the evades, but no to the Blinds (atleast, the sheer amount of them right now).
Overall, I think a lot of people have gotten used to a very specific playstyle for each class. To consider or adopt a strategy that is different than norm to them comes as an insult. This drives people to new classes instead of innovating their current one.
I think this emerged because they made S/D, P/D and Sb as non-burst sets. They need the sustain to function, and unfortuately D/D and D/P have some access to thier sustain options. If they hadn’t made LS so good, S/D would have stayed in relative obscurity. S/D’s tricky to buff, buff the wrong skills and S/P would overtake it.
Except 3.5-4k crits on larcenous strike that can be chained 3-4 times isn’t sustained. It’s sheer burst with ridiculous sustained on top of it all.
The sword auto 3rd part of the chain hits nearly as hard as larcenous, costs nothing, and applies cripple and weakness.
(edited by Zenith.7301)
Spirit isn’t even that strong in WvW because it still kills slow enough to see interference.
The best roaming builds have stealth and teleports, so either phantasm mesmers, prismatic understanding mesmer, or d/p-s/d thieves with shadow arts.
No.
Bunkers require these:
-Stability/evades to stay on a point.
- CC to get people off a point.
- Be able to tank 2-3 people for a good amount of time.
-Self Replenishment
The necro may have some CC, but he has no stability so he can easily be displaced out of a point and have it decapped, and he has no self replenishment comparable to guard/ele/ranger/engineer.
No, if a group just asks for gear pings they want exo zerker gear w/ruby orbs and ruby jewels on trinkets. They only want ascended if they specifically ask for it, hell I’ve ran in PUGs where everything I have is exo/ascended and I have a rare guild backpiece and they don’t even care, probably because backpieces take quite a bit of effort/tedium to get.
And gear has an enormous effect on your ability to contribute, though I’m not entirely sure what you mean by “the effects of the gear is marginal over full exotics”.
To put it in smaller words, the difference between ascended trinkets and exotic trinkets is very very small over the course of a short battle. Groups that get their kittens in a knot over exotic trinkets can burn in a fire.
This is still off-topic. If you don’t have something constructive to add on the subject, please refrain from posting.
Yes, and I’m saying that not many groups ask for ascended.
Asking for exotic trinkets however is perfectly reasonable since they’re easy to obtain.
Except that stupid backpiece….
I have 4 ascended fractal capacitors from all my fractal leveling, but I will never farm for more ever again.
And I won’t spend 70g+ to craft one on the mystic forge ;<
The 5 gold cost backpiece should be exotic, not require 5 guild commendations ;(
I got all classes at 80, getting every single one of them full ascended is a tad crazy.
Average players who ask for pings?
I have never since beta pinged my gear nor have been asked to ping my gear.
Well, for farm runs you do.
Don’t want some kitten joining a farm run with pvt or condi gear.
In fact, a toon in full rare berserker pulls out more damage than going exotic knights or pvt.
They are nerfing farming for gold and just introducing more RNG for the ingredients necessary for a legendary.
Pay attention to the fact that they said a rare chance at t6 items. It takes 250 of each, well over 450+ ectos, then the 600g+ precursors, then 100 of a lodestone type.
You are looking at like 300-400 runs of paths of a dungeon just to have enough lodestones t6 mats if you don’t use gold to acquire them.
Legendaries have always been more efficient to buy with gold (and therefore boosting anet’s gem sales for those who want to convert rl money to gold without risk of ban), and these RNG chances to champion rewards will do nothing to make playing the actual game reward you with a legendary more efficiently than just farming the gold instead.
Noobs will deem this a godsend, but those who don’t want to play TP to gain legendaries or expensive items in reasonable time frames will be screwed by this change as it will directly impact their money-making opportunities outside playing virtual trader.
Where did you get the 30-45% figure? Did you test and compute it?
Dojo and Ursan have run figures on it if I recall correctly. It is easily at least a third of your damage, that is highly suceptible to aoe, can’t hit moving targets because its autoattacks self root, and outside the drake that third of your damage doesn’t cleave unlike all other melee classes that are not dagger necro/thief (and thief has the option to cleave via sword, making the necro the only class without cleaving on his melee set).
Necros asking for more conditions + dmg
Necro’s didn’t ask for more Condi/Dmg! We wanted/were promised more attrition.
Escape
Necro’s are happy with little/no escape. Win or Die. As it says on the tin.
The gap closer/stop them running away, immobilize after Terror, if in hug range didn’t help much. And the cook them before they run, extra damage pressure – glass cannon. Wasn’t the attrition we really had in mind.Don’t speak on behalf of all Necro’s. I am not happy with little/no escape, as I am sure are all the necros in the EU tournament that got insta-gibbed by assist trains.
As far as Mesmers are concerned, I felt that ArenaNet was trying to drop a big hint with the set of changes that came with the first round of Necro buffs – interrupts/stuns were going to be big for Mesmers.
However, I don’t feel that kind of build is really viable. I feel that the game is too fast paced with abilities with too short a cast time and teeny tiny characters with animations that are too small for an interrupt-type build to really work well.
Warrior and engineer is a much better interrupt class since CC’s fill the same puprose of interrupts and Diversion with non-stacking daze depending on clone count or it no longer being aoe as in beta makes the mesmer class as a whole a pretty poor interrupt class.
You’ve got a 600 range knockback on greatsword, diversion, and either offhand pistol or sword 1 sec daze. Neither of which outside the pistol last more than 1 second and all of which have much longer cd’s than warrior/guardian/engineer CC.
The mesmer lost all its tools from GW1 as a disabling class and was instead made a nuking class with mindrwack and illusionary berserker. Except every class can nuke and the only advantage mesmer had in aoe nuking has long been overshadowed by the cleaving capabilities of eles and necros and s/d thieves and engineers.
I heard tpvp mesmers have extremely rigid utility map. Like portal, illusion of life and stunbreak. Where should they slot null field?
Drop Illusion of Life or portal.
These were not mandatory. They are just the most team fight attractive.
Mesmers have good boonstrip, powerful ranged damage, good aoe cleave, and very good peeling outside kittened thieves who pretty much are unpeelable.
People used to say Signet of Undeath from the necro was a must have. It got dropped.
People used to say shouts were mandatory. They got dropped for meditations. Some guardians won’t even use sanctuary.
Some people said BM quickness was mandatory. It got destroyed and spirits quickly replaced it and nobody kicks rangers because they don’t have haste stomps/rezzes.
Thieves are so full of crap. Even if lyssa didn’t remove any conditions they’d still use it because with basilisk venom they get all boons for 5 seconds, including aegis.
It’s like a built in save yourselves with a lower cooldown and stability and aegis on top.
Most importantly because you’re using basilisk venom to burst popping that aegis lets you stay offensive as does stability, while allowing much more team fight sustainability via prot.
On a tiny, tiny cd.
very nice, Obal!
would it be too tough to go full melee? or is the risk reward payoff just not there?and it’s nice being able to see the Archdiviner’s tells so clearly lol
Archdiviner melees too often to be able to soak the damage so you need some disengagement time to charge energy back up.
Also, when he does his little twirl projectiles it’s much harder to dodge in melee as the projectiles hit before they actually show visually, and at that scale it can be lethal.
Bountiful interruption depends on very specific situations and with some of the less than obvious animations (lookin at you necros) it’s hard to know what needs interrupted. And mesmer interrupts aren’t nearly as spammable as other more powerful non-damaging->damaging conditions (terror). Mesmer has great versatility and a plethora of builds. But almost none of them are tournament viable because that plethora of builds can be done by another class better in tPvP while they bring more to the team.
AOE condis>necro/Engi
Great Boon Support>Guardian/ele
Great Condi Removal>Guardian/Ele
Great healing>Guard/ele/engi
Fast travel for points>Thieves (shadow trap)
Great burst>Thieves/S/D eles/Condition necros.
Inst Resses>Spirit Ranger/Elixir R (eh kinda)
See there is not one thing that mesmers can do right now that can’t be done better by another class while having better support for a team. Anet needs to do some very meaningful buffs for the mesmer in terms of damage for us to keep up with thieves and s/d eles. OR some major buffs so we can actually become meaningful bunkers.
Mesmer damage don’t need buffing. Other classes’ damage need nerfing.
Fun! I liked your rotation of the elite, didn’t feel wasted at all.
Torment is very punish to all mobile class out there such as Engine, Eles,Thief,… And by mobile, I mean they need to be constant on the move to sustain. War is giving torment which is I feel a bad idea due to its burst. And if any of these mobile class stay still and eat War full burst, they will be dead in no time. Though, it is still in the early stage of the game. Need to observe a bit more to tell..
Warriors can also run condition builds — and warrior condi builds need condi covers so torment fits perfectly.
seriously I’m too scared to pug in the 40s
Funny, I think people become more competent the higher the fractal levels. I’d much rather do a fractal 48 daily than a lv1-20. People just cause me physical pain with simple mechanics like getting a boss under the oil.
Don’t use a longbow?
some wepones are not a good choice for different situations. Longbows are not good against a large zerg with lots of a guards in it. If you want bags use an axe and run through the middle of the zerg, dodge rolling through the melee train. If you want to sit in a tower build an arrow cart and use it.Ohh and leave your zerker gear at home when entering WvWvW, and bring some defensive stats. you hate it when a bunker joins you dungeon group.
Just because the game doesn’t let you play exactly the way you want to, doest mean you should not adapt to the game and it current mechanics.
Berserker is perfectly viable in WvW, staff eles run it perfectly fine as do most ranged because every team has the 6-7 guardians and the warriors and the d/d eles running knights+valk cc’ing the crap out of touching the backline while the backline spikes.
Because stealth is kittened and should be nerfed instead of spread around. The better solution for warriors is to reduce the cd of shield stance (and give it retaliation/reflection baseline), endure pain, berserker stance, and give him better access to regenerating health.
OK, so endure pain may be too strong if you cut it to 30 sec cd. Slightly reduce the duration instead. Tweak all these defensive stances and cd’s to 25-30 sec cd’s and shave a bit of the duration. Make burst skills restore like 3-4k health at stage 3.
Stuff like that.
Stealth is just dumb and it doesn’t need to be spread around.
Pop thieves’ guild, burn down necro.
Or get on the bandwagon and faceroll with s/d.
MrBig just doesn’t want to take points in shadow arts for condi removal.