Guild Wars 2

Congrats, your maul with a 48 sec cd signet use just net you 7k-10k.

Backstab thief with signet pop lands 16k backstabs and my warrior just landed an eviscerate with no cooldowns used for 11k.

I seriously expected 10 stacks of vulnerability for the cooldown the ability has an how hard it is to land it, let alone mention that our “burst” skill hits for around 3.6-4k crits, basically at most 1k more than my guardian’s greatsword autoattack crits with pvt gear and berserker jewels/accessories.

My longbow autos non-crit at <1000 range are around 600-700 in berserker gear. That’s just terrible.

Power coefficients for the ranger need to be fixed if you want to see any ranger playing a non-condi build.

3 stacks of vulnerability in exchange for 3 bleed stacks? Are you kidding me? You actually nerfed GS damage, it’s unbelievable.

Who does the math for these changes?

Give the bleed back. Even that is better.

WTH, Maul is a puny 3 stacks for 6 seconds?

Just scrap the vulnerability and increase the damage of the skill or give it a useful conditionj instead. 3 stacks of vulnerability is nothing, you just nerfed Maul for no reason.

They think it’s good because BM bunkers use it.

Apparently just because the auto is useful for condition builds it means the weapon is fine with its grabage poison spread and # 4 skill making the pet apply bleed instead when pets apply unmodified bleed damage.

Raven.9603:

Zenith.7301:

On My mark, axe/mace, vuln on crit…. stop talking. On top of that you get vuln from the mesmer and guardian in your group.

And yes, I’m talking about specific group compositions. That’s the whole point of PvE, to optimize.

you talk about pve like its serious business. this is gw2 where anything is casual friendly. talking about optimized pve… but you have a warrior who chose rending strikes, uses axe/mace and took on-my-mark as one of his utilities. wooow. not sure if you’ve played a warrior much, let alone at end game. the guardians in groups are overwhelmingly staff/gs, theyre not bringing vulnerability. the mesmer can sustain 6stacks if using a GS, or 5 stacks using a 1h sword.

If we are talking about optimized pve the ranger would’nt have even made the team. this is about what longbow can do anywhere, not what they can do if they magically end up in a group comp that already supplies those exact same benefits. If you dont need the vulnerability for your comp after this patch you didnt need it before this patch either, so no harm done.

sword mainhand ranger has frost spirit and spotter to earn a group spot. If you opened with hunter’s shot that was an instant 10 vuln closing into melee range for boss.

Speed groups run berserk mainhand sword guardians. You don’t need staff with signet of inspiration and fgj+battle standard.

When you dismiss PvE in this game, let alone pretend to know what warriors run to begin with, it just tires me of you.

Good bye.

Raven.9603:

Zenith.7301:

Are you an idiot? The downtime of the signet is meaningless when Lupicus is killed in 46 secs-2 minutes by raw burst.

Obviously we’re talking with a kitten who’s done very little of PvE to claim that somehow remorseless will be useful to a group that can already stack vulnerability to begin with if you have 2 warriors in a group.

So all dps is relegated to 1 boss kill and 1 group comp now? The DPS sample time i used was 48 seconds just for that signet, which means Remorseless will STILL out dps SotW on a 46second Lupi kill. It would have to approach sub-40seconds to beat out remoresless by any significant amount.

Each warrior can maintain 10 stacks if using a greatsword. that leaves room for 5 stacks. 5 stacks that you can cover with Remorseless, if rapid fire is too much of a damage loss for you. Or you know, if your in a group that doesnt have have 2 greatsword warriors.

Zenith.7301:

There are simply classes that do vulnerability much better than us, and if you’re using rapid fire on a boss to stack vulnerability you should be kicked from the group anyways as any competent group expects melee stacking for much better damage and boon stacking.

If you’re only considering melee ranger options the change to longbow is irrelevant to you.

On My mark, axe/mace, vuln on crit…. stop talking. On top of that you get vuln from the mesmer and guardian in your group.

And yes, I’m talking about specific group compositions. That’s the whole point of PvE, to optimize.

If you have any doubts that the current meta group can down most bosses in this game in less than 1.5 minutes, I’m going to drop this convo with you.

Paz Shadow.9715:

^ tbh longbow rangers are easy to kill a thief with… I run full beserker, got 6 sec no damage, I can knockback, then down them with rapid fire which follows them in stealth. For a beserker ranger this is going to be great to help us dish out damage.

They just need to get behind you to break your rapid fire channel. They stealth, steal to you, and move across you to break the channel or make it stop hitting them.

Or, with the amount of s/d thieves running around, they just need to daze you as soon as they enter stealth.

Chrispy.5641:

@OP
I understand why you are angry at the skill change, but have you been reading the Ranger Forums at all? Its like every day, a new thread gets posted talking (really, Whining is more the word) about how useless the Longbow is, and how Skills 2 and 3 need to be combined and something else needs to be put on Skill 3. So yeah, In Anet even sort okittend, maybe, possibly listened to the suggestions in the forums, everyone saw this change comming for months now.

@*Everyone Else*
Darkace and Zenith have a good point, instead of straight up 10 stacks of vulnerability (20 with opening strikes), you have a gradual increase, and a gradual decrease. You will have as much vulnerability as you did before, but you have to work more for it now, using Stealth, and a kill in combination with Remorseless in order to get it up that high. But since Opening Strike doesn’t stack, there is more oppurtunities to mess it up now too.

@Zentih
I always take Remorseless over Beastmasters, because despite the increase in damage, its an increase in damage for 8 seconds every 48 seconds (or 60 untraited). The Remorseless trait gives you opening strike every time you kill an enemy, with no recharge, which means Opening Strike can get reapplied constantly over those 60 seconds over what Signet of the Wild gives you. That makes it stronger for doing damage, and faster, atleast I think so.

5% extra damage every 9.25 seconds is useless when in a PvE settings warriors can already get the boss to max vulnerability cap before the boss dies.

There are simply classes that do vulnerability much better than us, and if you’re using rapid fire on a boss to stack vulnerability you should be kicked from the group anyways as any competent group expects melee stacking for much better damage and boon stacking.

In a PvP encounter burst is far more valuable a tool than a few stacks of vulnerability that get cleansed immediately from light and water fields.

Longbow ranger will still be a free kill to thief anyways. A 3 sec stealth will change nothing when they can either stealth themselves more frequently and for 4 secs compared to our 3, and if they’re s/d they can just dodge/evade through the stealth spike and infiltrator’s strike right back to you.

Thieves are whining for the sake of whining.

Rapid Fire just needs a flat out increase in damage. It’s a 4.5 sec channel that does less damage than the autoattack at long range. For a 4.5 sec channel it’s also pretty bad damage compared to other channeled skills.

Raven.9603:

darkace.8925:

RIP Hunter’s Shot. You’ll be missed.

What part of half a dozen people telling you that the vulnerability is still there, its just moved to rapid fire, did you not understand? what part of “even more vulnerability via hunters shot+remorseless” did you not understand?

What you don’t understand is that now you have to channel a garbage attack (rapid fire does less damage than longbow auto at 1k+ range) for 5 seconds to get the same amount of vulnerability as an attack that instantly put it up before.

And no one will take remorseless over beastmaster’s when it means losing 25% damage increase cooldown from signet active.

Think before you post please.

I also doubt you’ll still see many power builds run despite these changes in pvp for the single reason that ranger power builds have no way to deal with boon spam.

You’ll still be tickling guardians and eles and lyssa rune thieves with 10+ secs of prot.

Redscope.6215:

Zenith.7301:

Redscope.6215:

Zenith.7301:

Can we please get the longbow autoattack fixed now? Remove the lower tier value, move the medium value to 0-600, and the high value to 600+ please.

The greatsword autoattack also needs buffing, please. It is quite behind the mainhand sword’s autoattack by quite a bit and it’s part of the reason why it’s not being used in PvE as it’s quite a substantial damage decrease.

Read the 3rd attack on Greatsword and you’ll realize why its damage doesn’t need an increase. You’re evading 1/2 the time you’re auto-attacking.

This doesn’t matter on PvE. You don’t need it.

So remove the evade in PvE, then increase the damage.

Otherwise, don’t OP stuff just because it doesn’t deliver big numbers.

I’m done talking with you. Giving it a 20% increase won’t OP it any more than the greatsword autoattacks from other classes critting for 3k compared to our liittle 1.5k crits in berserker.

Khayoss.2019:

This is a great patch. Blast finisher is one of the things I have been calling for loudest. One blast finisher is not enough I don’t think considering how much synergy with other players we give up to synergize with the pet, but it’s a really great start.

Longbow changes are awesome, I’m happy to try them out and might even whip out my power build gear for a while again.

Remorseless change is good, I guess, but I still have major issue with that entire line of minor traits in the Power skills tree. I think it’s subpar when compared to other classes, and if you DON’T take remorseless I think they are completely worthless. I won’t stop campaigning to see that Power line completely re-done, but overall this is a really excellent patch.

I doubt people will take remorseless when it competes with the only trait that makes signets actually useful for the ranger. Beastmaster’s signets is terribly designed because you need that trait in order for the signet actives outside Renewal to be worth it at all.

Redscope.6215:

Zenith.7301:

Can we please get the longbow autoattack fixed now? Remove the lower tier value, move the medium value to 0-600, and the high value to 600+ please.

The greatsword autoattack also needs buffing, please. It is quite behind the mainhand sword’s autoattack by quite a bit and it’s part of the reason why it’s not being used in PvE as it’s quite a substantial damage decrease.

Read the 3rd attack on Greatsword and you’ll realize why its damage doesn’t need an increase. You’re evading 1/2 the time you’re auto-attacking.

This doesn’t matter on PvE. You don’t need it.

So unless you want to make the greatsword a pvp-only weapon, the greatsword needs a sustained damage increase.

And it’s not like it will replace mainhand sword because mainhand sword now brings our only blast finisher, our only long access to fury, might and swiftness, and a ranged heavy damage attack.

Can we please get the longbow autoattack fixed now? Remove the lower tier value, move the medium value to 0-600, and the high value to 600+ please.

The greatsword autoattack also needs buffing, please. It is quite behind the mainhand sword’s autoattack by quite a bit and it’s part of the reason why it’s not being used in PvE as it’s quite a substantial damage decrease.

Other classes don’t have the damage potential warriors do. When your class can do 8k+ damage on rabid gear with one ability you can call me.

The only reason warriors aren’t shining is because they get shut down before they can unleash carnage. Let one run loose, people will die faster than if you let a thief do so.

Haviz is in fact useful. He’s the forum curmudgeon. Don’t hate — that’s his thing.

swiftpaw.6397:

haviz.1340:

I deleted my previous post and slightly edited it cause I have bad experience with mods, swiftpaw can tell you something about that.

Idk what you’re talking about, the mods love me, they’re always inboxing me messages.

Get in line, you ain’t that special.

Kodiak.3281:

Zenith.7301:

If you’re running scepter in cof it’s not a speed group.

They don’t need you to stack might. It’s called signet of inspiration, battle standards, and for great justice.

And yet somehow we’re still able to kick through COF runs super fast.

It boggles the mind.

Define “super fast”.

Jzaku.9765:

Zenith.7301:

This seems untelegraphed to you? There’s only one time a mesmer will run up to and dodge into you. And that’s when he’s going to shatter. No mesmer just chooses to come toe to toe you.

That is kind of assuming both of you are kiting each other. It’s not like melee isn’t a thing that happens in this game, even if the current state of the game is terrible for it. Every class also occasionally drops into melee combat where you can execute this. Not to mention the teleports available to mesmers.

You know not to risk melee range when you see a sword shatter spec mesmer running around, just like nobody would dare toe to toe a warrior in melee without a blind field. Because otherwise you get melted by axe auto or take a whirlwind to the face or make it easier to land a bullscharge/shield bash eviscerate.

And the mesmer teleport is a clone leap you can easily avoid, so if you get trapped in a swap it’s your own fault to begin with.

You are not entitled to melee anyone. Melee should always be an opportunity, not what’s expected.

kaplis.7195:

To anyone who says that mesmer bursts are telegraphed and easily avoidable.
+ I’ve seen Helseth do this with Phase retreat for an instant gap-closer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkITLvrFvd8&feature=youtu.be

This seems untelegraphed to you? There’s only one time a mesmer will run up to and dodge into you. And that’s when he’s going to shatter. No mesmer just chooses to come toe to toe you.

Kodiak.3281:

Zenith.7301:

Scepter is not a pve weapon.

It is a pvp weapon. Don’t use it in PvE — speed groups will kick you because your sustained damage with scepter is terrible. Scepter is a burst weapon with very little sustained.

For PvE either go staff or lightning hammer for damage. DD is almost decent and packs good aoe burst that can be useful in places like grawl shaman elementals, but that’s about it and a proper fire staff spec outdamages, and lightning hammer puts MUCH, MUCH higher DPS than any of the ele mainhand weapons.

Never been kicked in a group for using Scepter even in speed COF farm groups.

Long as I stack might they usually don’t care what I use.

If you’re running scepter in cof it’s not a speed group.

They don’t need you to stack might. It’s called signet of inspiration, battle standards, and for great justice.

Necros are a garbage 1v1 class. If you’re losing to them the problem is on you and you may just be inexperienced with them. They have no self-sustain whatsoever, once you’ve depleted their pool there’s no recovery for them. They can be CC’d to hell.

Most importantly, just standing on your healing spring makes it an I-win button against a necro, as by the time it takes him to overwhelm healing spring, empathetic bond, and signet of renewal plus spirit elite you could have killed him twice.

Necros are only really a pain in team fights where you might have a thief or ele riding you, forcing you into a defensive mode while the necro can sit and turret conditions at you unmolested on top of the spike you’re eating.

Vigor will net you far more damage avoidance than final shielding. Embrace trait is really good but the problem is the CD.

It triggers when you may not really need it, so an opponent can essentially force you to waste it.

Dingle.2743:

Nikkinella.8254:

Just be glad you didn’t waste gold on it thinking it would be good to do a condition spec because of this like I did. Warrior condition build with rife/bow can drop people literally 3 times faster than condition ele. You would think it would be the other way around because on paper our conditions have some insane numbers. Doesn’t work that way in actual combat though.

(tl;dr at the end)

Maybe not in any form of pvp (ele doesn’t have many cover conditions to protect the bleeds from removal) but the numbers -are- amazing for a condi build in PvE.

Consider this build

Numbers:
1850 condition damage (before might or kill stacks) (Bleed: 135/sec, Burn: 787/sec, Poison: 270/sec) (assume the extra 13 can be covered by infusions in a min-maxed setup if Diamond Skin really doesn’t scale with the earth adept minor)
100% sustainable bleed stacks: 24 on a large 5 target AoE (3240 dps total; ramp time is 20 seconds to max bleeds)
~90% sustainable burning on a single target while in earth, or 80% on 5 targets while in fire (attuning to fire sacrifices 3-6 seconds of bleed stacking, generally one Eruption cast, which can be worth more than gaining AoE burning is worth)
28.5 seconds of AoE poison per minute, with a 100% projectile finisher on the autoattack stacking 1.6 seconds more on a single target per shot (assume 2 autoattacks every 6 seconds = 5 projectile finishers = 8 seconds) = 36 seconds on one target total. (Poison damage is negligible in PvE but Radiation Field can easily be fit into the rotation – it’s not a huge loss for non-asura to not have this)

A standard conditionmancer has slightly higher condition damage, but can’t maintain above 12-15 bleed stacks. The elementalist in this case actually has better base numbers due to being able to maintain high stacks (and doesn’t need a utility slot to keep all the bleeds AoE, or a trait slot to inflict burning at all). A bleed-focused warrior is only just faster at stacking bleeds, doesn’t have diamond skin and only hits 3 targets at melee range, or one target (with linear pierce if traited at range) – and the warrior sucks in damage compared to zerker warriors anyways in PvE.

In a single target situation, any other weapon set will be able to reach the bleed cap as well (and faster to boot – around 14 seconds for scepter and 18 for dagger), though mainhand dagger and scepter both have to sacrifice more condition damage for Giver’s stats to be able to maintain the bleed cap. Should be noted that condi eles are exceptionally squishy due to not having room to take water and arcana to 30, and also because leaving earth attunement is basically not viable for the build. (Condi ele really, really wants to have a decent bleed capability in another attunement; a good candidate would be something like a trait to make the ice-themed attacks in water attunement apply significant bleeds

Ironically, Isaiah Cartwright thinks mono-attunement builds shouldn’t be viable but it’s the optimal way to play condi ele in PvE right now, and will be as long as ele can’t get bleeding outside of earth attunement. The core weakness of the condi build is twofold; firstly, leaving earth attunement massively reduces DPM as the stacks drop off and can’t be reapplied for up to 15 seconds depending on build; secondly, that the only damaging condition ele can stack outside of earth is plenty available through traits and utilities, meaning attuning to fire doesn’t really gain burning. Combined, this means that the condi build gains nothing from leaving earth attunement – the minor healing from water skills won’t keep you alive longer than an extra 15 seconds of maintaining bleed stacks will shorten a fight by, the damage of fire and air skills is negligible without power.

tl;dr: Condi ele build is a PvE build. This trait works just fine in PvE (though the damage boost isn’t comparable to, say, the flat +10% damage traits). Mono-earth condi ele is one of the stronger PvE condition builds in the game due to large AoE, high stacking capability and having the highest potential for condition damage in the game thanks to Diamond Skin. The tradeoff for this is being exceptionally squishy.

Condi build is never viable in PvE, what are you smoking.

Berserker will always be better than any condi build even if condi caps were removed.

Scepter is not a pve weapon.

It is a pvp weapon. Don’t use it in PvE — speed groups will kick you because your sustained damage with scepter is terrible. Scepter is a burst weapon with very little sustained.

For PvE either go staff or lightning hammer for damage. DD is almost decent and packs good aoe burst that can be useful in places like grawl shaman elementals, but that’s about it and a proper fire staff spec outdamages, and lightning hammer puts MUCH, MUCH higher DPS than any of the ele mainhand weapons.

At least s/d is VISIBLE. You can react to it. You can land a cc when they’ve finished flanking strike evade and attempt a larcenous, or you can pressure them with condition fields.

You can have counterplay against s/d because every animation is visible. The evade spam may not be too fun, maybe some initiative costs and regen stuff needs to be adjusted, but I prefer a game where s/d thieves exist even if they’re more painful than a game where a thief is dropping your target every 4 seconds and spiking you for 5-7k crits while spamming you with blind.

Compared to D/P, where only a s/d thief has enough mobility/evasion/dodges to truly foil backstab attempts since none of the other classes can port around/dodge so much as to stall a D/P backstab.

They can just make gold find affect the coin rewards from chests.

They should also let magic find affect the rewards from chests now that they’re changing it to account bound status.

The ranger just takes far to much effort for the middling results he provides.

He’s like a worse version of the lightning hammer ele. Both require heavy group composition adjustment and much more careful play, yet at least the ele can surpass a warrior’s output when provided with the right circumstances. The ranger doesn’t.

It’s just grating to play a ranger. I’ve tried that spec a long time ago, and the fact is the average warrior or guardian will provide far more consistent results at less effort put in, with much lesser risk involved.

And there’s something deeply annoying about the fact that your class mechanic is dead on arrival for most “hardcore” content because developers are pigheaded about introducing WoW’s aoe avoidance/damage reduction for pets/minions in this game.

I think people don’t understand the fact that as a ranger on a condi spec you simply have no sustained condi aoe.

Let me put it in perspective for you. Necros can aoe condi sustain. Engineers can aoe condi sustained. Eles can condi sustained.

It’s not about relying on 15 sec+ cd’s aoe fields, or the fact that you need to spec 30 into skirmishing for traps to be worth anything.

As a ranger you simply will not be able to damage groups of people anywhere as good as an ele or engineer or necro, and that’s a problem in formats where aoe sustained is crucial.

Giving axe auto a bleed would help with that sustained.

Ranger is the one ranged profession with very poor aoe options. Barrage is on a 25 sec cd, does pretty much no damage compared to other aoe skills, and our other weaponset aoe is a bonfire that needs offhand training to be the size of a trap. That’s as far as actuall aoe goes. And neither are low cd options that you can use very frequently in a teamfight compared to other classes.

obal.3218:

swiftpaw.6397:

Pet dead, pet dead, pet dead, pet dead…

They really need to do something about that -.-

Indeed. I was curious to see if it was the case after seeing it not die from Alpha’s AoE but they just died all the time here like I thought. Always bet against fractals I guess.

They’re just gonna increase pet HP like they did with mesmer illusions, and it will fix nothing because the aoe fields/cleave from bosses do such obscene damage that even if the pet had 50k hp it would die pretty quickly still.

Another problem with the pets is that none f the melee pets besides the drake cleave.

They also need to do something about mainhand sword root, or increase the greatsword’s autoattack damage by a good bit. Greatsword autoattack damage is too low.

Maul’s bleed is useless, it should be removed for 8-10 stacks of vulnerability instead. Or convert the bleed portion to straight out physical and make it give the ranger a short duration fury boon.

Another big issue with the ranger is lack of aoe burst, let alone sustained aoe outside melee cleave.

jmatb.6307:

You get a free cooldown when they die and you can use them while they live. You effectively get a great passive bonus, and two equally great active bonus for just casting a single utility x3.

It’s not hard to figure out when to use it. You use Quicksand and the chill when they get close and move away from them if you’re ranged. You blind them if you know they’re about to use something that hurts. If they’re attacking your nature renewal spirit you use your wolf to fear them, switch to another fear pet and do it again.

It is so mindless and easy compared to positioning, rotation understanding, use of CC, etc.

I’m not trolling I want those players to earn their place not ride a spec and get rewarded for doing hardly anything at all.

There’s no other pet that fears, idiot.

jmatb.6307:

lol just summoning spirits, healing, and weapon attacks are the laziest way to play i’ve seen on this game. There is no argument anybody can make otherwise.

Ele and Thief takes zero skill? They are the squishiest classes in the game if you aren’t on top of your game you will get slaughtered. They start with 10k health and have to actually press buttons to heal themselves, with an s.

A Thief and Ele, btw, have to work their butts off to get the same results as an AFK Ranger

Yeah, except for the part where thieves can spam immunity every 4 seconds with black powder and stealth.

But keep pretending as all thieves do that stealth has got counters.

jmatb.6307:

Eles have to use their skills to get that sustain though. Rangers literally just cast their heal, take certain skills and traits, and dance around like ponies. They might as well have a unicorn pet so one of my friends’ names for her ranger makes sense

Oh, sure, like it’s so hard to press water attunement and dodge soon afterwards.

I’m sure randomly pressing serpent strike and stalker strike will get you places against competent opponents. Keep believing that.

Phantaram.1265:

Completely agree with this. The perfect example of something that is nearly the complete opposite of being active is spirit ranger. Spam 1 on your shortbow and if they get close just activate all spirits! You’ve now played this class to near optimization grats. Skill needs to be a more emphasized part of the game. And if simple builds are to stay in, they shouldn’t be the strongest builds.

What are the activation times for the spirits? Have you actually played them and measured the time it takes after you press the button for the spirit to raise his hand and pound the ground for the effect? Have you looked at the cooldowns on them, and why dodging out of it wouldn’t work as well as dodging through traps?

Have you thought why ranger shortbow is 1 spam? Maybe because the rest of the skills, particularly #2, suck pretty badly? Because #4 makes the PET apply a bleed without condi damage modifiers?

It’s not exactly the rangers’ faults that their only viable builds revolve around dodging, healing, and procs given their native damage sucks, they can’t run GC at all let alone any version of a power build because the coefficients are so garbage low due to a crap AI that can’t even keep up with targets running with swiftness and take 2+ seconds to activate an f2 you needed much earlier than whenever the AI decided it felt like using it?

—

Hell, I’d love to run any build that didn’t require 30 points into Wilderness Survival or Nature Magic, let alone toughness stacking.

When you see eles able to run 1500 toughness and retain the burst they have plus all the team utility, while your ranger needs to run 2k+ toughness to be anywhere as good a bunker with nowhere near as good team fight utility, there’s something wrong.

Chokolata.1870:

i run an apothecary beastmaster build with sword torch and SB. I use projectile finishers inside bonfire with the bow for burning , Works pretty well for me :p

In which case you don’t have offhand dagger, so less poison and cripple and no chill or weakness to cover your condis from getting cleansed. And your setup doesn’t even have cleaving condi application like splitblade.

Might cut it in roaming/1v1 but it sure as hell doesn’t cut it in zerg or team fights.

Interpret Interrupt.3824:

War burst skills go on full cd if they miss. Honestly, if we lost the adrenaline, we could build it back up in the time frame. BS when it misses is able to be queued up again instantly.

This.

Eviscerate is still ~10 secs of cooldown if you miss it.

Even if you can’t land a backstab while stealthed revealed is a 4 sec cd and you don’t have cd’s to contend with. A D/P thief can just keep on BP>HS’ing until he lands a backstab.

Derps.7421:

Zenith.7301:

Jumper.9482:

Zenith.7301:

Just move their burst away from backstab and put it in a skill out of stealth.

The issue has always been a burst that is not telegraphed. Every other class’s burst can be mitigated with certainty. The thief is just guess work and a gamble.

Scepter Ele.

Mesmer pressing F1.

Also, both of these are far more valued in high end play than Thief has ever been.

What? If you can’t see a telegraphed mind wrack there’s something wrong with you.

And an ele’s air rotation alone is hardly comparable spike compared to thief or warrior spike.

Ele spike requires an air rotation combined with arcane utility use and phoenix into a 45 sec cd firegrab.

Let’s give your thief burst skills 45 sec cd’s and the crappiest consistency ever (try to land fire grabs) and see how you get away with even comparing both.

The scepter ele’s burst also requires that the ele close in distance if he’s doing anything outside of the air rotation.

Ele spike outside scepter air attunement #2 is some of the most easily telegraphed burst in the game, with way higher cd’s than other classes and delievered piecemeal meaning you need to land several in a row instead of one big hit.

Scepter ele is only pushed to the top because he can bring competitive burst on top of his team utility. Key word being the team utility in form of CC and boon share and cleansing.

I’ll take D/P burst any day of the week over ele burst if we’re talking solely of burst and not of the toolkit.

I play an ele and a warrior and i have to say eles burst is a lot easier because of how all their skills chain up and the fact that their burst is a insta gib. Warriors burst is all about timing and playing defensive then striking at the right time.

That’s only an issue with the warrior’s problem of uptime. There’s no question that if the warrior does land an eviscerate or 100b, his burst will do a lot more than what the ele could, and he can do it much more often.

It also doesn’t help that Eviscerate doesn’t have good tracking like the new Flanking Strike.

My shaman amulet BM ranger doesn’t fear taking a full burst ele’s rotation. He does fear eating an eviscerate or 100b, let alone a full whirlwind followed by that. It just isn’t happening too often because of the stationary nature of that burst.

I have no doubt that if thieves were given more group/teamfight utility, and warriors had better sustain that they would be competing with scepter eles for the burst position.

Warriors and thieves are NOT lacking in damage. In fact, besides burst, they have the potential for much higher sustained damage if it wasn’t for the fact that they get pressured to retreat early in a fight.

Jumper.9482:

Zenith.7301:

Just move their burst away from backstab and put it in a skill out of stealth.

The issue has always been a burst that is not telegraphed. Every other class’s burst can be mitigated with certainty. The thief is just guess work and a gamble.

Scepter Ele.

Mesmer pressing F1.

Also, both of these are far more valued in high end play than Thief has ever been.

What? If you can’t see a telegraphed mind wrack there’s something wrong with you.

And an ele’s air rotation alone is hardly comparable spike compared to thief or warrior spike.

Ele spike requires an air rotation combined with arcane utility use and phoenix into a 45 sec cd firegrab.

Let’s give your thief burst skills 45 sec cd’s and the crappiest consistency ever (try to land fire grabs) and see how you get away with even comparing both.

The scepter ele’s burst also requires that the ele close in distance if he’s doing anything outside of the air rotation.

Ele spike outside scepter air attunement #2 is some of the most easily telegraphed burst in the game, with way higher cd’s than other classes and delievered piecemeal meaning you need to land several in a row instead of one big hit.

Scepter ele is only pushed to the top because he can bring competitive burst on top of his team utility. Key word being the team utility in form of CC and boon share and cleansing.

I’ll take D/P burst any day of the week over ele burst if we’re talking solely of burst and not of the toolkit.

I sure as hell won’t be sending the scepter ele to kill the bunker guard or ranger or engineer over a well played mesmer or thief.

Aphoticrain.8420:

I use the Axe on a crit build and I find the auto attack to be fantastic for multiple targets with high damage. While I wouldn’t be apposed to having a bleed on the axe I don’t find it necessary since the sb offers a sustainable bleed.

Not for aoe it doesn’t. And the sb is not a condition spec weapon flexible enought to run given it only uses a single condition with a very short poison. It has no chill, it has no weakness, it has no burning, and the very lack of burning itself discards it from any condi build to begin with.

You only run SB with traps.

Ricochet also does less damage than trick shot for aoe, and if you’re running a crit build with axe you’re running the wrong weapon considering the only skill you’ll benefit from is the autoattack as splitblade and the others receive greatly reduced power scaling coefficients due to having conditions tied to them.

Storm spirit easily hits his command for like 3k damage noncrit. If you run him.

Otherwise you can run sun and earth. Some people choose to run 3 but I just will not do WvW without signet of renewal. Condi specs will wreck you and escaping while outnumbered will be much harder without a stunbreak.

Sun Spirit is basically trading a utility for the engineer’s trait of 4 sec burn on crit (ours is 3 sec, but groupwide). It gives you another source of burn besides throw torch and hoping the opponent is stupid and stands on your bonfire.

It has a clutch blind you can time for when you expect to get bursted.

Earth Spirit gives you bigger prot time, which can be paired with the trait for 5 secs of prot when taking over 10% of your HP as damage and dodge prot procs. It also carries a muddy terrain on comand. Usually if you running earth and storm you time it so earth will land the root before storm spirit hits with his lightning spike.

The spirits also allow you to body block. It’s useful when facing, say, backstab thieves just body block your back with a spirit.

It’s an awful auto attack. It’s on a condition weapon. It does a pitiful 250 damage.

Give ricochet 1-2 bleeds on a 3-4 sec duration.

Once splitblade is used axe has no sustained damage whatsoever. It makes the weapon good for bursting conditions but complete garbage in the sustained department.

If you enter protracted team fights you just feel useless as you’ve used a splitblade that shortly gets cleansed by the random water field, your torch is single target burning and bonfire is a field.

So over half the time you are basically using a useless autoattack that is tickling people for 150-250 damage.

There’s also some serious design flaw with the fact that none of the melee/survival weapons are actually condition weapons. In order for the ranger to have survival, since none of his ranged weapons have them, he needs to pick up a greatsword or sword, yet all these are power based weapons with no sustained condition damage whatsoever.

The ranger lacks sustained aoe condition application relative to the necromancer and the engineer in their respective condition builds. Hell, a condition warrior actually does better aoe conditions with double sword+combustive shot. So do eles for that matter.

Just move their burst away from backstab and put it in a skill out of stealth.

The issue has always been a burst that is not telegraphed. Every other class’s burst can be mitigated with certainty. The thief is just guess work and a gamble.

Put the burst chain into leaping death blossom. Change Heartseeker’s bonus damage to <25% HP.

Increase leaping death blossom’s evade to 1/2 seconds.

Change backstab so it does a bit of damage, not much, but instead puts 10-15 stacks of vulnerability and a cripple/weakness on the target.

That way stealth is truly a defensive mechanic with some prepping perks instead of both a defensive and offensive mechanism. It also forces the thief to drop stealth spam if he wants to do the big damage.

Jzaku.9765:

Ceraldor.3160:

SisiXuan.4178:

How about make Vit work like Power?
That when you double your current Vit you double your health pool.
It will grant those with high base hp pool class(War and Necro)massive amount of hp to compensate there lack of sustain.

???
Every class starts with the same amount of power = 916. So every class profits the same from adding a certain amount of power. It’s nothing like “some classes profit more than others” which is what you suggest with vita…

You did not read that correctly. Doubling your power doubles the damage output you produce, that’s how the scaling works for it. He is suggesting that vitality scale in such a way that doubling your vitality doubles your base HP as well, so Warrior and Necromancer will benefit more from vitality due to having high base HP. Personally I still don’t think that high HP does anything at all for “sustain”.

Necro pops lich form. His HP doubles. He still goes down faster than a prom dress.

Avoidance will always be superior to straight up tanking damage. It’s been the case in pretty much every game where the casters with mobility (mages) do far better against getting trained than the casters that have to tank it (warlock types).

Interpret Interrupt.3824:

I think it comes down to replenishing the hp pool. That is what you see with elementalists. Who cares if I have 30k hp if I can’t replenish it. But if I can replenish my 15k hp regularly, it is the equivalent of having more hp in the long run.

The difference is you as a warrior can run berk amulet and not get 2-shot by a burst combo whereas if a d/d ele goes berk instead of valkyrie he blows up.

Your traits as a warrior can be alotted to damage traitlines. No elementalist can ever skip 20 water 20 arcane. You just can’t stay alive.

Elementalists don’t have all that sustain baseline. In fact, most of it doesn’t exist if you don’t put 20 in water.

The ele is also very boon reliant to do his damage. There’s simply no competition between a warrior can do on someone versus an ele with berk amulet and 20/20 air and fire traitline investment. The gap is huge.

So they’re forced to go the water/arcana heal sustain/boon spam route to make up for their base deficiencies.

I’ll grant that this annoyance may pale in comparison to being a warrior or necro and just getting worn down. My berserker necro can try as many strips on a d/d ele as he wants and he’s still getting outsustained. My warrior needs shield stance and endure+berserker stance to have any semblance of staying power.

But the ele is not all rainbows and sunshine either.

EoNxBoNx.9213:

Nikkle.4013:

EoNxBoNx.9213:

So, I ask why this change?

Because if you blind,block or evade other classes burst they usually can’t just burst you again. People think this should be how it works with every class.

Well, a good thief should try to position themselves to get behind an enemy player, this eats time on stealth. And normally the backstab will be near the end, or at the end of stealth. So, if you have aegis, and it backstab is blocked that’s more time, if you dodge it and turn around thats even more time, and the thief is out of stealth.

I don’t understand why it is so hard to just play against stealth, and not sit there and let the thief hit.

You don’t need to be behind. Just being from the side is enough as the actual arc for backstab is very generous, just like it is for the ranger’s crossfire which also supposedly requires flanking.

swinsk.6410:

The only way block/reveal would apply reveal is if the backstab broke through the block/aegis.

This is balanced already. I lose my basi venom and assassin signet to a good aegis/block more than once in a game. That’s punishment enough for failing a burst. There’s no need to reveal a thief. Should warriors get disarmed for 4s if they don’t block anything with shield stance? No, that’s just silly.

They are effectively disarmed for the duration of shield stance… while your thief gets to use his defensive mechanic not only defensively but offensively as well as having a much lower recharge on it.

randomfightfan.4091:

Zenith.7301:

hamsteak.1368:

i think it’s great that they’re changing dungeon rewards to be more um rewarding, i just hope that gw2lfg doesn’t start looking like “LF2M ZERK WARR COE PING” etc

It will always be LF Zerker warrior regardless of what dungeon is done.

The best classes don’t change by dungeon. Guardians and warriors are still supreme everywhere in PvE.

People are just stupid and think that killing CoF will remove speed clears and farm runs.

Why do people keep saying guardians? They really aren’t that amazing. Their only amazing quality is that they can maintain aiges for the players that rarely get hit and projectile wall on the few bosses that rely on projectiles. They don’t have that much damage and they need to swap to staff to generate good might stacks. And to all the pure tank guards… why? I’ve had more useful condition rangers in my groups then I’ve had tank guardians. At least when I have a ranger in my group all the annoying particle effects from the guard doesn’t manage to blind me and make the boss completely cloaked in shiny blue crap while being surrounded by more shiny blue crap.

Berseker guardians are the class that enables warriors the best. Sorry if you can’t see that, but a fractal 48 without guardian wall/shield is a whole different experience.

Their damage is not bad, not warrior level, but upper middle, but their utility and ability to let people take risks they normally wouldn’t take makes them one of the best classes in the game.

hamsteak.1368:

i think it’s great that they’re changing dungeon rewards to be more um rewarding, i just hope that gw2lfg doesn’t start looking like “LF2M ZERK WARR COE PING” etc

It will always be LF Zerker warrior regardless of what dungeon is done.

The best classes don’t change by dungeon. Guardians and warriors are still supreme everywhere in PvE.

People are just stupid and think that killing CoF will remove speed clears and farm runs.

Miiro.3124:

that also equals zerg vs zerg to me if its over 5v5

OK champion hunter. Go back to babysitting a point and spamming evasion over it.