Guild Wars 2

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

I didn’t know Control wasn’t needed. Temporal Curtain and Binding Blades are two of the most powerful, and most commonly used, skills in the game in terms of PVE dungeons. Those are the epitome of control, and the sign of a good group is being able to coordinate it properly.

Your mistaken assumption that Control is irrelevant probably comes from a pug meta where you can’t count on the mesmer pull or guardian pull to be used effectively so people just deal with it and have a lot of downs or rough trash pulls or fight bosses away from walls.

As far as “Support” goes, I don’t even know what that means. If that means condition removal, reflects, blind fields, stealth, portals, and boon buffing; well then the zerker meta does that too. These are all integral concepts to organized group speed clears. My guess is you mean “Support” to be some mid line type of character who can be lazy and get carried through content by casting party buffs. Sorry, pal. In this MMO the classes that bring a lot of support (mesmer, guardian, thief) are also expected to do their fair share of dps. If you long for the days of bad players getting carried through content by being buffbots this isn’t the game for you.

Reflect and guardian/mesmer pulls are OP and you know it. They far outclass the CC/support tools of other classes.

The fact is nobody wants the necro’s chills, nobody needs poison because mobs don’t heal, nobody needs conditions because mobs don’t have high armor, nobody needs boon stripping because outside a specific type of dredge no mobs or bosses suddenly spike boons to lethal levels, and nobody needs the engineers turrets or cripple fields.

All you do is sit on a reflection wall while the guardian puts prot and aegis up for people and the warriors kill a boss in under 2 minutes.

I’d love to see one boss in this game that actually took more than a day to figure out and kill.

Marduh.4603:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I’m surprised the reveal isn’t for 9 seconds.

Says necromancer, who can fearchain to death all glasscannon.

Every 45 seconds. Backstab’s every 4 seconds

stale.9785:

Zenith.7301:

stale.9785:

Um, this problem isn’t a problem. If you’d actually LOOK at the opponent before using a skill, you’d know if he had retal up. Also note that retal doesn’t do that much damage, on it’s own. (Barrage against a group with retal being a special case.)

I think this may be one of the very few legitimate “L2P” problems I’ve seen on the forums.

Guardians can get near perma retaliation times with the right build and combo fields+ leaps and blasts on their own symbols and a 25% extra retal duration trait.

You’re being stupid if you suggest I should wait well over 15 seconds before attacking a guardian while he’s trying to kill me.

Since i’m pretty sure that even with the extra time from the trait, you can max it out at about 11 seconds, for an absolute max of 400 damage per strike… it’s really not that big a deal. If your build can’t take 4400 damage in the course of 11 seconds, that’s very much on you. If the damage is that big a deal to you, then wait for the little icon to go away, while you kite.

Against a whole zerg, well, it’s a different issue. I play ele, ranger and guardian – not once has retaliation been a significant factor in whether I win or lose. I’ve eaten retal damage, of course, specially while fighting from the walls of a keep, but never enough to worry about. Annoying, but not deadly.

Seriously, the whole thread IS a l2p issue. (This is maybe the second time I’ve said that about anything in almost a year of gw2. Not a knee jerk reaction – just honest opinion about what’s going being complained about.)

Also note, the OP is griping about retaliation when he’s fighting a single target, using a 10 hit channeled skill. This is why I say it’s a L2P issue. When someone who rolls glass cannon complains about taking damage… well, carry on, there’s nothing to see here.

Yup, about as smart as I thought. 11 seconds of retal lol, who are you trying to kid here.

4400 damage on top of burning on top of the physical portion of the actual attacks. On a 17k HP pool. That’s a quarter of your HP from just passive boon uptime.

And what the hell are you supposed to use on the longbow, the autoattack at <1000 range? Are you seriously this thick?

Nope, just trolling.

Xsorus.2507:

I actually killed a Necro with it, and Engineer..Ele’es the only one I fought solo ran the second I stacked 25 bleeds at the start of the fight (and I had an Add I had to switch to otherwise I would die)

By surprise I’m sure. Anyone who picks up on the pattern of the stacking can mitigate it easily or transfer it back at you.

It’s sort of like S/D thief, at first they destroyed because people weren’t adjusted to the build and then some builds started popping out to counter it.

Have you tried testing against Itkoviana or Amadeus? Good engineers are hard to come by.

Too few cover condis to work against classes with cleanse like engineer or necro or ele ;(

S/D thief will just shadow return to cleanse off the stack if not outright evade spam the combo.

I still prefer my bleed spirit build.

The worst part is I’m taking more damage than I am dishing out.

It’s 1k ticks on berserker gear while my ele is landing 4k meteors in berserker and 4k ice spikes and my necro with marks is dishing easily over 3k damage a second in conditions.

And it’s our only ranged aoe on a whopping 25 sec cd. What the hell.

stale.9785:

Um, this problem isn’t a problem. If you’d actually LOOK at the opponent before using a skill, you’d know if he had retal up. Also note that retal doesn’t do that much damage, on it’s own. (Barrage against a group with retal being a special case.)

I think this may be one of the very few legitimate “L2P” problems I’ve seen on the forums.

Guardians can get near perma retaliation times with the right build and combo fields+ leaps and blasts on their own symbols and a 25% extra retal duration trait.

You’re being stupid if you suggest I should wait well over 15 seconds before attacking a guardian while he’s trying to kill me.

shimmerless.4560:

the offsword/pistol comparison is sort of true i was talking with a friend about this, the difference is there are situations where sword shines (vs melee) and with d/d vs d/p it’s not really that kind of contrast.

wvw is a completely different ballgame there’s no damage cap so things can get really crazy.

There is a contrast if you’re fighting classes with pets, it’s basically free CND because pets are kittened and can’t/don’t dodge cnd and cnd for the purposes of gaining stealth is cheaper in initiative than black powder>HS and is harder to interrupt as is faster than a global on BS then a global on HS.

Dancing dagger is also a very good group aoe cripple and on targets trying to rez you can just from a distance spam a couple of bouncing daggers on 2-3 people and it’s noticeable pressure for a dagger mainhand set. It’s good for chasing too as it’s cheaper than shadow shot and affects multiple targets.

And of course for P/D builds, which may not be present in tournies but are plenty viable for just killing people in hotjoins.

It just so happens that an aoe moderate damage+ cripple and a bursty stealth granting ability that can be dodged is the less desirable of the utilities versus a blind field that combos for stealth, stomps, and shut downs melee in addition to a ranged interrupt.

Also Leaping Death Blossom is a dead skill on a d/d set as the condi build is a gimmick as you’ve only got LDB for the condi build while the rest of the skills, just like with rangers and warrior sword weapons are hybridized weapons, and hybridized weapons suck. Weapons should be dedicated, because the current design of stats playing a huge role on numbers means that you have to fully commit and hybrid builds/skills are left out in the cold in terms of scaling.

1 condi skill on a weaponset with 4 power scaling skills is just bad.

CnD is critting for 4k on my thief in wvw in addition to applyign vuln and 4 secs of stealth.

The only reason thieves switched to D/P is because nobody can evade your stealth attempt on it, you’ve got an OP blind field to shut down melee and guaranteed stomps, and you’ve got a spammable fast cast ranged interrupt.

D/D isn’t bad, D/P is just soooo much better.

It’s like saying mesmer offhand sword is bad because of offhand pistol. Offhand sword is good, but offhand pistol is just better.

That’s what happens when you get overlapping roles on weaponsets. Both offhand pistol and dagger grant stealth, so they’re bound to compete for the same niche.

Something needs to be done about it. I might as well kill myself on a guardian when 2 of my important skills on the weapon can snipe out so much of my health.

And because power builds for rangers have no way for coping with boon uptime, it means I did more damage to myself channeling rapidfire on a guardian with high protection uptime than I did to him in between the blocks, burning on blocks, and protection plus passive healing he has.

Pretty much every team in WvW has a crapload of guardians, and most of them run retal +boonspam high toughness builds.

Rangers need a way to deal with boons in power specs and retaliation needs an ICD.

Yeah, I do crap damage as well to boon spam eles and engineers and mesmers but at least they don’t have such high uptime on retaliation, so at least I’m not killing myself while doing crap damage to them.

Full berserker here, btw. I’m at the ceiling in terms of how much damage can be done, and it just isn’t enough against boon spam.

I feel forced to run just a condi build since the damage loss is trivial given the low power coefficients and the fact that condis ignore protection spam.

I’m happy with the nerf.

They should now move it from the spite line to the curses grandmaster and switch the weakness on crit grandmaster trait on curses for it.

Not that any grandmaster trait in spite will ever compete with 20% extra damage to targets below 50% for power specs. It’s just too good to pass up.

Stealth.9324:

LoL at those who crying about CC Warrior, my engine is condition, trip kit (FT,Bomb,Tool) no stun breaker will not lose to a CC Warrior at the same skill level….You guys should spend time to study rather than making these useless thread.

You’ve got 2 immunity blocks, a root, and a knockback. On top of 2 blinds.

Engineers are actually one of the few classes that can go light on stun breakers because of how many antispike skills they have.

A necromancer will get tossed around like a pinball.

You don’t balance from kittened condition spam on a point to kittened cc spam.

All the cleaves and CC’s need to be toned down. In this game anything that isn’t a guardian or ranger bunker just gets torn apart in a few seconds of cleaving/focus fire.

Jesiah.2457:

I wish I could have protection / regeneration / aegis proc every time I stealth as a thief! Please don’t try to tell me that Shadow Arts based stealth spamming thieves are even remotely overpowered, and for your information, they are not likely to have 8k backstabs and I seriously laugh at the notion that thieves can backstab every two seconds considering there’s a 4 second revealed duration. And if you honestly play that aggressive / greedily you’re going to get completely slaughtered.

Mesmers might not stealth for ridiculous periods of time, this is true, but on that exact same note this allows them to be more useful by themselves on a point, unlike a thief. Stealth spamming / prolonged duration stealth hurts the team more than it helps.

Where as trying to pick out a mesmer in the spam of clones / detargets + phantasms you’re forced to deal with … yeah, please tell me that prolonged duration stealth is somehow overpowered by comparison of not needing to rely on stealth nearly as much and having strong aoe burst damage that rivals what a thief can do … but did I mention … oh yeah this is aoe damage and it can be done from RANGE.

Please cry more about thief stealth. <3

Yeah, that’s why WvW is filled with thieves roaming instead of those OP stealth mesmers.

Just shut up. 8k backstabs are more than possible in WvW with 110% crit damage. In fact, I’ve landed as high as 12k on mine.

You don’t get a random chance at prot or regen when you stealth, instead you get something much better, a stealth that lets you spike for 6-8k regularly, and several sources for it alongside teleports and much better condition clears in your stealth build than a mesmer.

dovrak.4376:

Fortus.6175:

Zenith.7301:

Jesiah.2457:

If thieves had the benefits upon stealthing that mesmers do, then I’d be open to discuss how overpowered stealth is for thieves.

I find it amusing that Mesmers were mentioned as being done right, when they have extreme burst damage that AOE’s, plenty of stealths / target drop / where the hell is the mesmer now, mechanics, and huge uptime on regeneration, protection, and plenty of reapplications to the above including aegis, specced right. And this hardly gimps their damage.

If thieves had something similar … then I’d think stealth was actually somewhat problematic, but they don’t.

Yeah, because stealth every 32 seconds and every 90 seconds is soooooooo OP!

^ exactly this. Mesmer have access to it but very limited access.

This is not true at all.. decoy, torch offhand, mass invi, veil.. plus prismatic understanding, they have lot of stealth uptime if they want.

If you are going to use torch-hand I might as well bring up pistol/pistol thieves since both weaponsets are about as viable (that is garbage).

Veil is another 90 sec cd. 2 second stealth duration, vs thief who either gets 4 always every 4 seconds or a much longer one plus healing via shadow refuge. Torch is a 30 sec cd 3 sec stealth.

Mesmer stealth cannot be spammed like thief stealth, and mesmers with stealth builds don’t have the spike nor blind spam of D/P thieves. Just stop. Mesmers with stealth builds also can’t chase worth crap.

If you take veil and decoy, you’ve got no null field or signet of illusions. Because you HAVE to get decoy and blink, and only one utility for stealth builds is optional. Mass invisibility even has a long cast time you can chain daze with pistol offhand.

hooma.9642:

Eurantien.4632:

That is incorrect. It appears to be on CD but it actually is not.

if it just appears as on cd then im asking why that pet isnt using the ability after petswap and hammering on f2?

google.3709:

trying to use the same skill consecutive more than once is spamming it twice

but yea, skills of the same name share a cool down to prevent spam, otherwise everyone would be running x2 blur frenzy or double marks, and considering not many pets share the same f2, it probably wasn’t worth the time to make an exception from a coding type of view

i think 2 pets with own set on skills and 2x the same weaponset is somehow different.

Because you are correct.

Before cd’s would reset on pet swap, but they patched it some time ago where you can’t use two od the same f2 types in a row.

As a way to tone down ranger “burst”.

Jesiah.2457:

If thieves had the benefits upon stealthing that mesmers do, then I’d be open to discuss how overpowered stealth is for thieves.

I find it amusing that Mesmers were mentioned as being done right, when they have extreme burst damage that AOE’s, plenty of stealths / target drop / where the hell is the mesmer now, mechanics, and huge uptime on regeneration, protection, and plenty of reapplications to the above including aegis, specced right. And this hardly gimps their damage.

If thieves had something similar … then I’d think stealth was actually somewhat problematic, but they don’t.

Yeah, because stealth every 32 seconds and every 90 seconds is soooooooo OP!

So you want a warrior with basically full melee uptime. You want the charge to work, but on top of it more CC.

You know that’s not gonna fly with people who then need to deal with not only shield bash, bullsrush, leg specialist, but now a stun or root on rush and then more cripples than axe toss and blade trail?

You can’t keep warrior damage as it is and allow it full uptime. People will melt to berserker warriors and only eles and mesmers will be able to cope with the constant gap closers while the other less mobile classes get trained to the ground by the warrior.

Well, the staff is mark spam because the autoattack is so terrible. The marks outside 2 and 3 are on long cd’s.

After you’ve used the marks you’re using a terrible weapon that has no damage with a slow projectile, and the auto on the weapon is power based despite the staff being a condition weapon.

The staff is just not a weapon you can stay on. It’s the for the long cd cc’s and to complement scepter condi application. You can’t sustain conditions with the staff, but you can with the scepter.

It’s hilarious how Caffynated described necro berserker power builds as “great built in survivability for glass”.

Pretty much discredits the rest. Try running a power necro for any amount of time before you ever feel like saying stuff like this again.

As a glass necro you died to burst builds faster than anything but a glass ranger.

Power dagger necros are in a horrendous state. A melee class with no teleports, no actual burst that needed to go into a teamfight melee range but had no disengages.

Are you kidding me? Power necros were fine? This is just aggravating.

google.3709:

Not allowing a player to spam the same skill twice is cripping build diversity… interesting

Funny, this already happens with Heartseeker, which at 50% health does more damage than a raven’s slash.

The whole opening strikes is just awful.

Even if you can regain it every 15 secs it’d still be crap on a build that doesn’t carry cover conditions. Your vulnerability will get immediately cleansed midfight.

The problem with this build is it doesn’t just punishes necros.

It punishes anyone who isn’t humping a guardian.

Cool, so a bunker ranger can withstand CC.

What about any build that isn’t condi ranger? Ranger hasn’t had a viable offensive or glass build in ages. Even if you bring lightning reflexes and signet of renewal you will get steamrolled.

Stun or daze spam is just as cheap as fear spam. You lose control of your character for ridiculous periods of time while the opposing team just tunnels damage into you.

So power (non-condi) necros, rangers, and engineers are dead on arrival and these warriors will make sure the extinction is complete.

Give warriors better sustained. Healing, team utility. Don’t just give them more CC and unpeelable damage.

This game has devolved into a total arms race for who can gib the other first instead of actually being fights of attrition.

reedju.5786:

Zenith.7301:

Yeah, it was sooooo much fun being a free kill to dd eles because my conditions were getting cleansed 24/7 before I got cover conditions!

I refer you to this https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/external?l=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.twitch.tv%2Fsymbollix%2Fc%2F2622702

Also, with access to torment on staff and scepter along with the sustain they are giving us you will actually be harder to kill and have less issue getting bleeding to stick. Burning isn’t a good “cover condition” because you don’t have any idea or control over when it is going to proc. Often it will proc before your bleeds giving you 0 cover as the last condi applied is the first removed

EDIT: Fear, Chillblains, Tainted Shackles are all good examples of skillful ways to cover bleeds

That was s/d burst, dd has much more sustain.

reedju.5786:

I have said this on many threads and feel it needs to be said again. The addition of dhuumfire has completely borked the condimancer and tPvP along with it. Before a necro had good condi pressure and had to coordinate with other classes to stack bleeds/burns/poisons for a good epi that could cause chaos and mayhem. At that point we were rare in the meta, and a good necromancer was recognized as something that took skill and coordination. But with the buffs to weakness, the addition of terror and torment, the necromancer would have been put in a very strong place without burning. Like I’ve said before, burning on a necromancer basically is a statement that to be “viable” or meta worthy your condi pressure must have burning. It pushes engis and rangers out of the meta and the builds take 0 skill or timing to play. the larger marks and nerf to terror have now made the burning condi build the only meta necromancer who can stand his ground and that is incredibly upsetting seeing as we are losing unique flair for a trait copied from engi’s. Dhuumfire hasn’t (in tPvP) become a tool for hybrid builds or increased diversity, in essence balancing around it has actually limited diversity by a wide margin. The ability to put 20 into SR while still keeping the 30/20/ was actually a very substantial buff to their sustain and the small terror nerf essentially does nothing to bring them inline. If we removed Dhuumfire, kept our other changes and were allowed small and strategic ways to apply torment to a weapon set or two we would be a lot better off.

Few Suggestions:

Remove Dhuumfire

Keep corrupt at 5 boons converted, but change all condi conversion skills to work the same (only converts 5 condi’s into boons to keep things in-line, similar to the 1 sec ICD from spectral skills)

Add to scepter three: apply 1 stack of torment per condition on the target (as well the LF already gained)

Dagger #4 Deathly Swarm: add a 2% LF gain per target hit with the transfer

Change the Blast finisher on poison fields to inflict 2-3 stacks of torment instead of weakness (this change would also have potential to give condi thieves a little more dmg as well as bring down our weakness application which I know Jon is worried about)

Keep all changes from the last patch save the 17% terror nerf, this would bring condi builds up to their previous point with a small dmg buff but a large amount more sustain which is what the community originally wanted.

I know several of you have become very attached to burning, but you cannot discount the strengths of our control condi’s which have always been our unique strength. Burning (for me at least) feels like a step in the direction of homogenizing the professions which have driven me away from countless other games. With the changes to DS and LF regen, weakness in its new form, lower CDs on certain utilities, we are getting most of what we needed to stay in the fight (there a few things that would still be nice). The GC damage is too much and is not how condi is intended, that is for power builds. Also, as a necro we have two many “cover conditions” (poison, chill, weakness, torment, cripple, blind, essentially fear) to have burning and bleeding, the two highest dmg conditions in game.

EDIT: smart necros already had access to burning pre-dhuumfire through transfers, corrupts, and epi (our condition duration and dmg is used for all of those skills). It was skillful, unique, and made us feel like condi masters without an easy chance on proc no-thought-needed trait. Either we lose dhuumfire or more unique cool aspects of the profession will have to be shaved down and “brought in line”.

Yeah, it was sooooo much fun being a free kill to dd eles because my conditions were getting cleansed 24/7 before I got cover conditions!

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

djooceboxblast.9876:

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

The main part of necro being over the top dmg-wise are the marks. You can compare that to Grenades from the HGH. But without any counter to it (projectile-reflection), nor does the necro need skill to place them. They are instant (no travelling of procteile whatsoever), they are unblockable, when not triggered they remain on ground and the area of these marks are horendous. Marks are one of the main reasons why necro doesn’t require any skill at all. While grenades required you to predict the movement (also the area was slightly smaller) they had also an obvious animation, where ppl could actually dodge them. This part of depth is lost with marks in place. You can predict them but nothing else. Animation of it is not obvious and look all the same.

You clearly have little to no idea of what makes the necromancer over the top. Marks are not the problem and do not do the same amount of damage as grenades and with the newest patch most necro’s wont have unblockable marks. The marks have an extremely high cd and can not really be compared to grenades. If you make marks have a travel time like grenades then missing a mark will be way too risky. An engineers grenades have a very short cd and a miss wont be as crushing as if a necromancer misses putrid or reapers mark. And if you think the marks are so easy to hit, why do i see so many necromancers who are considered good miss mark by mark on their streams (even with greater marks)? With this said, i do agree with you that the marks need some kinda differentiation to their casting animations or visuals, so people can actually see and know what they are dodging.

Marks provde non-skilled play, as every other AoE that has no dedicated animation and is instantly in place after the cast. This denies a lot of depth to the gameplay and the class itself. Furthermore it doesn’t require any skill to be effective.
DPS-wise you’re right, the problem relies more in traits.

But marks do have animations and cast times. And really long cd’s.

Dagger 2 is 2k healing on a channel that can be interrupted just by walking through you. Focus 4 is regen without healing power, pretty crappy healing. Leeching is terrible.

Endure Pain and Berserker’s Stance alone will give you far more ffective HP than those healing skills.

Necro:

OP in spvp.

Strong in WvW

Garbage in PvE

Not to mention that with the build including soul marks you only have 10 sec cd death shroud so you can force a DS early and as soon as he comes out spike him during the 10 sec window.

But nope, apparently having a spike absorption every 10 seconds on a class with no vigor or stability or teleports or stealth is too much.

Lopez.7369:

Condition necromancers don’t get eaten alive by thieves or rangers, and they’re not outlasted by elementalists. Warriors are probably condition necromancer’s best counter in group fights, but they’re not good in one-on-one situations.

If a BM/spirit ranger loses to a conditionmancer he’s just terrible. Sit on healing spring, bring signet of renewal plus empathetic bond, and pop elite spirit for extra condi removal.

And you’ve got to be kidding me if you think a s/d thief or p/d shadow arts condi removal thief doesn’t eat necromancers.

Necromancer damage is high because epidemic exist. Change epidemic to 1-2 conditions copied and necro damage will take a hit.

Just try dueling condimancers without a pet. Their damage is nowhere near as bad, because they can’t put a condition on you and your teammate, epidemic off your teammate and suddenly doubling the condition load on you.

Conditionmancers get eaten alive by warriors and thieves and rangers and get outlasted by elementalists.

You also need to realize that death shroud seems fine because most fights in spvp don’t involve more than 4 people on a point.

In WvW Death Shroud at 30 soul reaping with spectral armor stills sees your death shroud gone in 3 seconds or less to a group of 10+, the necro has no disengage, and the inadequacy of death shroud compared to mist form or lightning flash or armor of earth or arcane shield or stealth or blink or distortion is pretty obvious.

spvp also exaggerates the value of necromancer’s epidemic because it forces people to fight on a very tight circle that also happens to be the size of marks and symbols and wells and pretty much every aoe field.

spvp doesn’t have guardian stacking or multiple staff eles running healing rain with water fields and guardian shouts, unlike spvp.

I think maybe fighting over a point should grant a buff that decreases the effectiveness of aoe skills. AoE condition skills have their durations reduced by 60%, and aoe direct damage skills are nerfed by 30%.

Or what if points detected when many people fought on it and started pulsing condition removal?

It just seems like necro is only part of the problem. After necros are removed it’ll be back to grenadiers/bomber engineers or clusterbomb spam on a point or a greatsword mesmer blowing people apart with berserker.

I know the ranger build, but can anyone link the build the thieves were using? I’ve been having the itch to use my thief but whereas I’ve never been immediately kicked upon joining as a warrior or guardian, joining a speed group as a thief is just winning the lottery with the amount of ignorance surrounding the class’s effectiveness.

I mean, there are tons of people still kittened enough that claim thieves are weak in PvE, when I consider them not only a class rivaling warriors, but with even better utility for the purposes of speed runs and skipping content. I know my 48 dailies on dredge go a lot smoother with a thief, in fact most fractals do.

Playing my thief is just so much more fun than playing a warrior ;*(.

I’d also kill to get a build for berserker ranger that can be used in speed runs/fractal 48 as well.

I mostly play warrior or mesmer or ranger.

10 stacks of vulnerability is what I expected on a skill like this. It has delay, completely telegraphed like eviscerate, and it does 4k damage crits at best without modifiers like signets or large might stacks.

If you’re not going to give it the stacks, buff maul by 15% and change the vulnerability to weakness.

Kasama.8941:

Zenith.7301:

Kasama.8941:

Zenith.7301:

Whirling Defense is terrible. It does like 6-7k damage for a 5 second channel in berserker gear (in the same time I could have easily done 10k with just sword auto cleaving) that roots you in place. You’re opening yourself up to a melee train for no reason. It’s a poor man’s counterattack.

I run Lightning Reflexes, Signet of the Hunt and Signet of Stone with beastmaster’s signet. You need these to survive in team fights with berserker gear. Maybe you could substitute signet of the hunt for muddy terrain, but I would never take entangle over RaO as I don’t fancy getting nailed by a static field into a 10 second root and then get blown to pieces.

I don’t understand the choice of offhand axe, if you don’t want to do any AoE damage. Seems like a waste of weapon slot, if you’re only using the pull. Especially since you already have increased movement speed from Signet of the Hunt or Rampage As One.

Because path of scars is just as good burst as maul, but it’s ranged to boot and has a pull.

Whirling Defense is not AoE. I’m sorry for you if you call a 6k 5 second channel AoE, but it shows clearly you haven’t played aoe specs or classes.

How can it have just as good burst, when Maul has half the recharge time?

AoE = Area of Effect. Whirling Defense hits multiple foes in an area. That’s why I call it an AoE skills.

You seem to be confusing burst with sustained. Burst is fitting a damage spike within a small time window. For the feature of a global, Path of Scars does as good if not more.

I burst with path of scars, monarch’ leap back, and my longbow is already ready to be switched to for a rapid fire. By the time I finish rapid fire, I’ve sneaked some point blank and autos, stealth with hunter if he’s in my face, and switch over to s/a where my Path of Scars should be back up.

I’m berserker as a ranger with 30 in marksman, 5 in WS, 20 in skirmishing, and 15 in NM. I cannot stay in melee with berserker gear against superior glass cannon specs so I gotta use my burst from melee weapons quickly, use a couple of the melee weapon evades to land poison while my pet is damaging the guy, and disengage back to longbow burst.

You can call WD aoe all you want, but when I told you I can already do more aoe with my sword auto or barrage if I want, there’s no point of telling me about axe offhand being an aoe weapon when you’ve got superior aoe options and the main usage of axe offhand is not in the terrible whirling defense, but having a ranged maul spike damage ability that also acts like temporal curtain from mesmer.

Killsmith.8169:

Durzlla.6295:

Btw guys, the vuln applied from Hunters Shot was 10 for 8s, the new Vuln on rapid fire is 10s per stack, so the vuln will be up longer than it would have been on hunters shot, granted it won’t be up at peak strength as long, but it’ll still be up for a while, and assuming it takes a full 2s to apply all the vuln then it’s literally a buff and means the vuln is up LONGER than before, that is all.

Uptime is the thing to look at. Also, not sure why you would assume it only takes 2 seconds to apply the vulnerability on a 4.5 second channel. Even QZ won’t let you hit the 2 second mark.

This patch barely changed the vulnerability you can apply with the longbow. Hunter’s shot without marksmanship and cooldown reduction was 66.7% uptime. Traited (cooldown and 30 MM) it had 108% uptime. Now it’s 68.9% uptime untraited and 104% uptime traited. Before and after patch, we had 0.5 seconds of overlap when traited. As long as there’s an overlap you should be able to keep 10 stacks on the target at all times.

The big difference is that you can’t apply 20 stacks of vulnerability as quickly at the start of combat. If you use opening strike, alpha strike, and rapid fire with 30 MM, you have a 2 second window where your target has 20 stacks of vulnerability. Before, you had 6.5 seconds of it, which allowed you to place the stacks early and then follow with a weapon swap -> swoop -> maul.

It also makes it so rapid fire doesn’t benefit from the vulnerability from the beginning, so longbow burst actually went down.

Kasama.8941:

Zenith.7301:

Whirling Defense is terrible. It does like 6-7k damage for a 5 second channel in berserker gear (in the same time I could have easily done 10k with just sword auto cleaving) that roots you in place. You’re opening yourself up to a melee train for no reason. It’s a poor man’s counterattack.

I run Lightning Reflexes, Signet of the Hunt and Signet of Stone with beastmaster’s signet. You need these to survive in team fights with berserker gear. Maybe you could substitute signet of the hunt for muddy terrain, but I would never take entangle over RaO as I don’t fancy getting nailed by a static field into a 10 second root and then get blown to pieces.

I don’t understand the choice of offhand axe, if you don’t want to do any AoE damage. Seems like a waste of weapon slot, if you’re only using the pull. Especially since you already have increased movement speed from Signet of the Hunt or Rampage As One.

Because path of scars is just as good burst as maul, but it’s ranged to boot and has a pull.

Whirling Defense is not AoE. I’m sorry for you if you call a 6k 5 second channel AoE, but it shows clearly you haven’t played aoe specs or classes.

uri.6521:

I can tell you from experience that mesmers and engineers especifically are no problem, ¿why? , because they use a lot of proyectiles / have a lot of multihit skills , so just find a good moment to use your axe 5 and they will eat half fo their life because of reflected proyectiles + retaliation.

Also, axe is a ranged weapon.

Mesmer auto is not reflected. Engineer bombs are not reflected. You can’t reflect all their ranged attacks. The moment you selfroot to whirling defense you’re just opening the gap further and when WD ends you are stuck with two melee weapons you can’t melee with because you just let the guy open distance.

I don’t run axe mainhand because it’s terrible on a power spec and because I use sword/axe+longbow. I’m not willing to give up the mobility/defense of the mainhand sword, and I’m not willing to give up the cc+burst+stealth of the longbow.

Whirling Defense is terrible. It does like 6-7k damage for a 5 second channel in berserker gear (in the same time I could have easily done 10k with just sword auto cleaving) that roots you in place. You’re opening yourself up to a melee train for no reason. It’s a poor man’s counterattack.

I run Lightning Reflexes, Signet of the Hunt and Signet of Stone with beastmaster’s signet. You need these to survive in team fights with berserker gear. Maybe you could substitute signet of the hunt for muddy terrain, but I would never take entangle over RaO as I don’t fancy getting nailed by a static field into a 10 second root and then get blown to pieces.

uri.6521:

And what if you run both GS and Axe / Axe, they combine very well betwen each other.

You can use path of scars, which has almost no after cast and you can cancel it with a ricochet and then start to wind up a splitblade, by the time they get pulled to you (if you hit them twice, to do so, you have to choose a time when they are not going to doge it, like when a thief starts to hearthseeker or yust running in a straight line towards / away from you) you will hit them in the face most of the time unless the pull bugs (doesent pulls them the full distance) and inmediatly swich to GS and maul them in the face and swich to a drake and hilt bash and sic em so they use their super one shot tail swipe attack.

Or something like that.

You could, but you’d have no ranged option and a mesmer/engineer would just kite/cc you to death.

Ranger melee is meant to supplement his ranged capacity. Ranger melee is pretty easy to kite/disengage from so I always want a ranged option to fall back on and chase with.

I can see it for spvp, just not wvw unless you run with a melee train and got elementalists who can stun things down for you.

NinjaSonic.1392:

GS isn’t really much more “ferocious” than Sword. I mean Sword is pretty in your face. As for Axe OH. Path of Scars is great but actually getting it to hit twice is next to impossible.

If you use it in melee range it’s actually very doable. Which this weaponset will do.

Moreover, landing Maul is just as hard as 2x PoS. It’s this kitten bear animation delayed before a hit lands, it’s as easy to dodge as warrior skills.

And when people use hilt bash as an argument I wonder who they are fighting, because 70% of the time when I use it and a target is moving away with swiftness the attack misses. You pretty much have to be on top of someone for hilt bash to hit a moving target.

If you run longbow sword/axe is also godly because you can combo monarch’s leap into a longbow switch so well.

Torch’s phantasm needs a flat out improvement.

No. This is not a skill you stack vulnerability with. Warrior axe/mace stacks 8 stacks of vulnerability for 10 seconds, without factoring in on my mark or vulnerability from crits trait.

Warrior, thief, and engineer keep up vulnerability much better than a ranger could, and greatsword is not a dungeon weapon so 25 vuln stacks is pointless as GS does terrible sustained damage compared to mainhand sword.

The fact is this is a substantial nerf to the skill. A completely unwarranted nerf, as if anything the skill needed buffing.

pot.6805:

Pinkus.2860:

While I appreciate the thought process here Jonathan, what works for one part of the game, doesn’t always work for the others. Finally Necros had a structurally strong build which only needed some damage tweaking (aka the fear damage and possibly the burn damage also) to fix the fotm 30/30/10 build. Instead, you ruin it completely by moving greater marks to the master tier. There was already a serious lack of condition build diversity and now we’re left licking our wounds. WvW was finally seeing Necros again but I guess people will just bench them again.

Necros have been part of wvw for many months.

Nowhere near as much as staff eles or the warrior/guardian frontlines.

You bring about 2-3 necros per 15-20 people. Any more than enough to put wells and you’re shooting yourself in the foot as they’re very easy to train and shut down.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I suppose my big problem with giving different classes different tools is that necros got burning instead of something else (confusion or torment or something unique).

And by something unique you mean a crappier condition.

The problem with conditions is that you have some, like burning, which are too strong at the uptime they’re applied, while others like confusion and poison are too weak. Blleds only really start threatening at 6-7 stacks.

Khenzy.9348:

JonathanSharp.7094:

Maybe 100B becomes the burst and Arcing Slice moves to the main bar?

DISCUSS!

I actually like this one, 100B is the signature move of the greatsword afterall, you could actually buff it in some interesting ways, giving it some utility per bar of adrenaline spent, slightly nerfing its direct damage and moving Arcing Slice to slot 2. You would nerf PvE damage this way (good!) while gaining more utility, specially for PvP (good!) and therefore slightly nerfing cheese combos such as Skull Crack+100B (good!) which are easy to apply, too effective and hard to counter currently.

My proposal:

Arcing Slice is moved to slot 2.
8 seconds CD, same damage, applies fury on hit 5 (?) seconds duration (you can achieve 100% fury uptime with boon duration I guess?) opening up other utility/elite choises and therefore other trait choises as well as possible new gear/equipment combos (ex. valkirie amulet). Cast time reduced from ¾ to ½.

Hundred Blades is moved to Burst (F1) slot.
Casting time remains 3½s.
Level 1 adrenaline: 1 second immobilize on 1 second of cast
Level 2 adrenaline: 1 second daze on 2 seconds of cast
Level 3 adrenaline: 1 second stun on 3 seconds of cast

I donno how could it be worded when quickness is active!

Damage coheficients changed. Now the full chain up until the last hit has it’s damage slightly reduced (like mainhand Axe), but the actual last hit of the chain has it’s damage significantly increased (even more than the current version). So now it feels much more rewarding landing that full chain. Now that it doesn’t need as much set up (just raising adrenaline bars and… maybe a paralization sigil?), it actually frees some utility/trait/gear choises (good!) therefore opening up new potential viable builds.
The good thing is that it would offer some room for counter play such as allowing a dodge when dazed or right after the stun just before the last hit will come.

The pros of this would be:
-more PvP utility or better self set up for 100b opening up new build possibilities
-no more 100B>Eviscerate for overpowered PvE DPS
-You no longer feel as pressured to take bolas, sword for the Flurry or Mace mainhand just to set up 100B.
-Greatsword is now a more selfsustained DPS weapon overall.

The cons:
-cancel Flurry into immob>100B and Skull Crack>100B would lose some of it’s charm for only 100B set ups evidently.

Thoughts?

People don’t use eviscerate or 100b in PvE. Axe/mace does more damage than 100b, and you never want to spend adrenaline as you lose the 15% extra damage from the grandmaster trait.

There is no reason whatsoever to move 100b from a weaponskill to burst. It would not change a thing in pve about warrior OP damage and it would only hurt PvP warriors.

More plant pets like the sylvan hounds.

ilr.9675:

I switch between the two constantly and I am not seeing any noticeable difference from yesterday. …maybe it’s just your choice in Gear?

I run berserker.

Sword mainhand has much more sustained damage. The damage you’d have from maul is more than made up by path of scars, which is basically a ranged maul when both hits land (and does a bit more damage actually).

On top of that you have access to a leap cripple so you are not so easily peeled with your sword auto, you’ve got poison to decrease the efficacy of heals so you stand up better to bunkers/condition specs, and monarch’s leap works much better with longbow.

The only real thing you lose is a mobile projectile blocker. In exchange for that you get a ranged aoe pull with your maul equivalent in offhand axe.

Stealth is fine. The problem is the duration and how much it can be spammed, and the fact that the classes that can spam it also do so much spike.

It’s not that a 3-4 sec stealth is unbalanced. It’s that it can be done every 4 seconds with little option to retaliate.

Unless you are a bunker in one backstab you lose 1/3-1/2 your health, and then it’s dagger auto+heartseeker for immediate loss.

The little time you have to retaliate they have blind and stealth to make sure they can’t be counterpressured before they kill you.

Increasing the cost of stealth and only giving a bonus to heartseeker at the 25% hp threshold would go a long way to fixing stealth.

If the thief somehow fails to position of stealth, due to his ini regen trait he can just keep dropping bp and heartseeking through it to extend his stealth to ridiculous periods of time before he run out of initiative.

Shiren.9532:

Zenith.7301:

Valkyrie is plenty viable. My DD ele runs it just fine and so can my guardian.

Toughness isn’t what saves you in a zerg. Blocks/immunities/evades/reflects and water fields do.

Whether you have 1.2 or 2k toughness doesn’t matter, I’ve tested my BM ranger and glass cannon ranger, and if you get rooted/stunned in a zerg and they turn their attention to you you’re dead in seconds regardless.

But you can’t block/evade/reflect and outheal everything in a zerg. You are going to take damage, that’s how it works. Looking at the builds some of the most successful open field combat guilds use in WvW, most of them (at least at what I perceive to be the top tier of play) are running P/V/T gear in addition to blocks/evades/reflects and precision use of water fields and boons.

PVT does no damage whatsoever. The ones usually running PVT are the guardians, but the backline and harassers usually run valkyrie.

The #5 still sucks by being stationary and doing terrible damage, but at least you get the burst of maul on path of scars (it actually does more damage), with a 900 range on the skill, that also pulls people.

And you get that on top of monarch’s leap, serpent’s strike (poison for more pressure), and a much better auto than greatsword.

I know some people will miss their Swoop, but just learn to use double leap on sword 2 and you’ll hardly notice the difference.

Until they actually buff greatsword auto and fix maul to not be so bad with 3 puny vuln stacks, you do much better running sword/axe.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Jzaku.9765:

JonathanSharp.7094:

I meant Arcing.

Sorry, in a meeting. My bad.

That still makes no sense and has nothing to do with rush anymore, which is the topic at hand here.

Nods, that’s just an animation change, which is possible.

Just, while we’re talking about it, I’m also just thinking about the weapon overall, how it performs in all game types, strengths, weaknesses, what would happen with adjustments, etc.

Sorry to brainstorm w/ the community in an effort to be more transparent. My bad!

This would change nothing for PvE if that’s your intent for making it the burst ability.

Axe/mace with axe autoattack does such obscene damage that it actually outsustaines 100b now.

It does more damage than the necro and thief’s single target dagger weapons, and it cleaves to boot.

So moving 100b to the burst skill would change nothing in terms of warrior broken, ridiculous damage gap over others in PvE (it’s a combination of much higher base numbers, easy might stacking and vulnerability stacking, and the only class with a group boost utility for primary stats, and specifically the incredibly good 15% extra crit damage).

Basically, you’d be hurting PvP warriors for no reason by moving 100b and the PvE meta would remain dominated by warriors and guardians as axe/mace has already replaced 100b for damage dealing.

Valkyrie is plenty viable. My DD ele runs it just fine and so can my guardian.

Toughness isn’t what saves you in a zerg. Blocks/immunities/evades/reflects and water fields do.

Whether you have 1.2 or 2k toughness doesn’t matter, I’ve tested my BM ranger and glass cannon ranger, and if you get rooted/stunned in a zerg and they turn their attention to you you’re dead in seconds regardless.

This was a video of a guy popping DS with spectral armor from a single damage source. Not a necro that got stunned and is getting trained by more than one person throughout the entire game.

What a stupid whine thread, when Phantaram’s entire little combo could have similarly been nullified by a distortion or a blurred Frenzy or a mist form/arcane shield or shield block or endure pain.

Ask people what happens when that death shroud runs out and you’ve got no teleports or disengages. You flop over like a fish as you can’t peel anything off you.

Shar.3402:

Lopez.7369:

Shar.3402:

http://www.twitch.tv/symbollix/c/2622702

this is the state of the necromancer after the patch. Balanced. Not.

That is enormously situational and impractical. I’d be surprised if people started taking Spectral Armor in the first place.

That does not make it less broken. That burst combo deals anywhere from 10 to 17k damage depending on crits. Symbolic lost 20% life force. It’s broken.

You do realize that in the time symbolic goes into death shroud he’s virtually doing no pressure?

Death Shroud is a turtling form. You can try the same combo on blurred frenzy and that 10-17k damage wouldn’t happen either.

If Death Shroud can’t tank that spike from a single class, on a 60 second cooldown, how the hell is a necromancer supposed to survive the spike from the 3 people that will be training him?

And how in hell will a power necromancer, using daggers, ever survive if he doesn’t get to sit with a scepter or staff on a ledge?