Guild Wars 2

This is an old build most rangers have known. The problem is your jaguar will be dead most of the time on any fight with heavy aoe fields. In some encounters you plain need guard shout to keep your pet alive. Otherwise use a drake for the cleaving and it’s slightly reduced damage compared to jaguar…

And all that effort to just do middle of the pack DPS.

Of course it makes sense, as much sense as a mesmer flinging beams through his greatsword.

The power necro needs a ranged weapon so something like an engineer parking beyond 600 range or a thief with shortbow just doesn’t demolish you from beyond 600 range and there’s nothing you can do about it.

All you need to do to kill a power necro if you aren’t a D/P thief is to just sit beyond 600 range, dodge dark path, dodge dark pact, and you’re set.

No. Make axe 900 range. Increase the auto damage.

Move the life force generation to the axe to the auto. Life force generation on every necro weapon should be on their auto. Same for scepter.

Scepter and axe have horrible life force generation because all their life force can be negated by avoiding a single attack.

Necro power weapons in general need help. More tankiness/utility, and dagger needs to cleave. Dagger is the melee weapon, axe should be the ranged weapon.

Kharr.5746:

Is that PVE skin going to help you win s/tPVP matches? No.

Is a PVE player who has the skin going to take your spot on the leaderboards or crush you in a tournament? Not unless they are better at PVP than you.

Do you have more options in sPVP skins than a PVE player who just hopped into the mists? Yes, since most skins are rank-locked or require tokens/PVP crafting components which you can only get from PVPing.

So, the question is: Are PVE players being favored? No. They worked for their skins and you worked for yours. They can’t look like you do in the mists and you can’t look like they do in PVE.

Plus, Anet has already said that they are working on the sPVP reward system. Just because it didn’t happen this patch doesn’t mean you won’t get special sPVP skins that are rank-locked like the PVE skins are achievement-locked, meaning that they will only be accessible to folks who sPVP.

Except the amount of work to unlock skins between PvE and sPvP is completely disparate. I can get a full TA set in 4 days. I will not even get close to leveling one toon to rank 60+ in the same time frame.

Assume you gotta spend 2 weeks (stupidly generous, considering you can level a toon to 80 in a week or less with wvw nightcapping) to lv to 80 before doing TA for your set. Even at 1 month spent to get TA armor it’s still a lot less than the people it took to get rank 60.

And if you’re a sylvari toon, guess what, you’re stuck with crap armors that don’t match your race because both TA and cultural are ridiculous rank requirements.

Oranisagu.3706:

while everyone discusses niche situations, my 2c:
every class with full zerker gear can reach pretty decent damage. in any case, a lot more than the same class/build in egoistical PVT gear.
as long as you use decent gear, you will usually do way more damage than the rest of your party in pugs.
as for classes:

• it’s easy to get extremely high damage output with warrior.
• guardians can dish out a lot less, but are way more durable if you go full zerker (and still more dmg than ego pvt players ofc).

where some warris often go down, an altruistic healing/pure voice guardian will just stand and do his damage, while being able to give great boons, remove condis for everyone and heal himself off of it.

A warrior/thief in knights will easily outdamage a ranger or mesmer in berserkers.

Some classes just have really low base numbers.

The problem with the mesmer is that the boon strip on his auto is really penalizing their base damage, and I assume the presence of phantasms as well. I think they mean to balance the mesmer with the presence of phantasms, but a) it takes too much ramp up, and b) only zerker and warden cleave, and warden has the longest cd of them all. Also, even with the buffs phantasms die immediately.

The phantasms may have close to 20k hp or 30k hp, but fractal 48 mobs cleave for 9k damage a piece, and it’s multiple mobs.

They don’t seem to get it through their little heads that pet classes will never be viable so long as they refuse to implement aoe resistance/avoidance for ai, and allow the ai to cleave baseline.

And in the case of rangers and necromancer and guardian spirit weapons, they need to allow the pets to scale with the master’s gear. Ai that doesn’t gain the 110% crit damage bonus or food bonuses or oil/stone/potion bonuses will be deficient ai, and the classes balanced around that deficient ai will always lag behind.

Fractal is possible without AR at all. The only possibly tricky agony skill is Mosmman axe throws from stealth. The rest are fairly simple.

Must have been this patch, because mark effects were easily wasted by someone dodging over them.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The funny thing is, I hear players complain about how they’re neglecting PVE content for PVP all the time.

Most of the balance changes that have happened have been spvp focused. Meanwhile in PvE it’s “Bring a warrior or guardian or gtfo our speed run”.

I’d like more sylvari racial armors. Unfortunately, most of the recently introduced armors are very human centric and I feel my sylvari is lacking in well-fitting options outside cultural and TA armor.

The same could be said for my male norn.

More racial armors would be great.

Bring your guardian then?

I stopped playing my mesmer many months ago when I realized my phantasm support spec was going to be useless, and that any DPS spec I tried out far underperformed against my teammates.

They need to do something about damage with the way fights are designed. Nerf guardian utility/boon uptimes, maybe touch warrior DPS a bit. Then design fights so there’s multitasking involved that also asks for something more than damage.

Like mobs that are only vulnerable to condition damage and need to be dealt with. And more boonstripping (give mobs random 25 might stacks and prot and fury to make mesmers and necros more valuable).

High vigor and endurance regen should be looked at, dodges are too plentiful outside the necro. It’s time toughness and vitality stats start gaining some value because you just can’t mitigate something with dodging.

Reduce the HP of bosses, but give them aoe damage auras that give value to stats like toughness and vitality. Introduce mechanics so that melee can’t just ball up on a boss on top of a reflect field and kill the boss in 1-2 minutes.

So….wait? Some of us have 7k+ because we have played over 10 months. If you have less than 2k you are probably fresh to the game.

Instinctual Bond is so terrible lol

I would never run without foot in grave. One guardian or warrior looks you way and you’ll spend the whole time on the floor bouncing without being able to do anything unless you carry more than one stunbreaker skill.

With berserker you can get 53-55% crit chance anyways, and someone can share fury.

InWvW without Foot In Grave it takes getting caught in one stun field to become a free bag for the 30 people chasing you.

You gotta open your achievement chest first and select the skin.

This thread can be closed now that the weapons have been revealed to function how I wanted them to function. I’m happy to be kittened and wrong for once.

Now please update Meteorologicus. It’s been nearly a year while the greatswords and all the other weapons except Minstrel got an update.

spoj.9672:

Dont know how anyone can say mesmers are unloved by devs. Mesmer is one of the tier 1 classes in both PvE and tPvP and WvW…. Not many classes can claim that. They are op, theres no denying that when you compare them to some of the other classes.

Mesmer is not a tier 1 class in PvE by any means unless you consider Lupicus and cof p1 the only PvE there is. In every other dungeon where you can’t reflect projectiles to damage the boss the mesmer is garbage and you can replace him with a warrior or guardian.

What is this vile socialism…

Why couldn’t the achievement skins be unlocked like the Hall of Monuments? The current model of one-time choosing punishes people with alts. Why is the game so punishing of alts?

If you have 4-8 characters at 80 there’s just no way you’ll be able to have enough achievement points to get each toon at least a couple of Zenith weapons.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Zenith.7301:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Dub.1273:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

haviz.1340:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You’re changing the subject.

How so?

You’ve brought up having to support the team on a pure DPS build. He’s not asking about support. He’s asking about damage. Support is irrelevant here.

“Support” helps increasing team damage and therefore isn’t irrelevant.

The only “support” that helps increase team damage is the “support” that is used individually to build up damage in the first place. Heals don’t increase DPS.

This is so dumb. The more risk you can mitigate for your team, the higher their melee uptime. If you don’t bring guardians to melee Mossman, his autoattacks will constantly put the group at a chance to be gibbed by the next autoattacl. Healing, protection, and block prevent that and allow them to stay in melee whereas if it were absent they’d be forced to go ranged.

Thief can arguably get higher single target than warrior, but the warrior is practical. His damage cannot be nerfed by bad positioning from other teammates, whereas your backstab can be ruined by someone turning the boss at the wrong time.

Warriors also have the better sustained cleave since for some reason warrior axe does the dagger’s damage yet it cleaves unlike the thief’s dagger which is single target.

Warriors also bring all these utilities boosting the offensive capacity of the group.

Your case is that you have to have non-pure damage specs for some content. Not what classes can have good DPS. Every class can have good DPS. Different classes can bring different utilities to the table that are better in different circumstances, but that falls into the “No crap, Sherlock!” department.

I have a hard time thinking of a damage build that doesn’t do that. You bring up D/P or D/D thief for damage. You know what the thief brings to the table? Stealth + healing in Shadow Refuge, spammable blind fields with the offhand pistol, projectile blocking with smoke screen, projectile reflection with dagger storm, etc. You bring up warriors using axes, but the fact is a warrior can’t maintain a permanent blind field that lets them face tank up to 5 enemies indefinitely. It’s a tactic I’ve been using to dungeon run for forever on my thief: Bring Sword/Pistol, use black powder, then just pistol whip the blinded enemies to oblivion at point blank range.

Nope. The guardian is still on berserker with offensive traits. The support comes from his weaponset and utilities, not gear or traits.

And why in hell would I ever bring a D/P thief over a D/D one for PvE?

You don’t need those blind fields because the 3 warriors and the guardian kill everything so fast that survival is not even an issue. Guardians mitigate burst. The difference between a guardian mitigating for a group and a thief doing so is that conditions, unlike boons, have extremely nerfed durations on bosses so conditions like weakness and blind become completely useless.

The only condition that is worth anything in a dungeon is vulnerability, and warriors stack it best.

Thief’s smoke screen also only absorbs projectiles, unlike guardian wall which reflects it and thus adds to the dps of the group. Smoke Screen is still a decent utility, but a group will always bring 3 warriors if only because banners are exclusive in their benefits — no other class brings increases to primary stats, no class can stack might and fury and vulnerability while doing the damage a warrior does.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Dub.1273:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

haviz.1340:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You’re changing the subject.

How so?

You’ve brought up having to support the team on a pure DPS build. He’s not asking about support. He’s asking about damage. Support is irrelevant here.

“Support” helps increasing team damage and therefore isn’t irrelevant.

The only “support” that helps increase team damage is the “support” that is used individually to build up damage in the first place. Heals don’t increase DPS.

This is so dumb. The more risk you can mitigate for your team, the higher their melee uptime. If you don’t bring guardians to melee Mossman, his autoattacks will constantly put the group at a chance to be gibbed by the next autoattacl. Healing, protection, and block prevent that and allow them to stay in melee whereas if it were absent they’d be forced to go ranged.

Thief can arguably get higher single target than warrior, but the warrior is practical. His damage cannot be nerfed by bad positioning from other teammates, whereas your backstab can be ruined by someone turning the boss at the wrong time.

Warriors also have the better sustained cleave since for some reason warrior axe does the dagger’s damage yet it cleaves unlike the thief’s dagger which is single target.

Warriors also bring all these utilities boosting the offensive capacity of the group.

Jonwar.9205:

Demon.5082:

Jonwar.9205:

Erm, probably because mesmers are doing just fine in tPvP to the point where just about every good team is running one? Secondly, mesmers have a lot of condi removal options, they just generally choose not to run them because the things that make them viable take precedence which is much the same as warriors. All of our condi removal options cut into our damage or control abilities, making it still a stretch to incorporate them into builds.

On the original topic, this skill is awesome if you know how to use it. An 8s break from a thief’s blinds or necro’s fears/condi’s is a godsend, if you can’t burst down a thief in 8s or get a necro CC’d in that period of time I think it’s a player issue.

Honestly a few bug fixes and I think warriors will be in the mediocre category, which is far better than the bottom of the heap as we were before.

Mesmers are picked in tpvp only due to their portal and Illusion of Life skills. The moment those 2 are reworked (they will be), say bye to Mesmers from tpvp. Also, you are mistaken. Mesmers have horrid condition removal. A fully specced mesmer can at the most remove 4-6 conditions every 35-40 sec which is equal to signet of stamina alone. The reason why warriors are lower placed in the pvp ladder is because of the mesmers active defenses (blurred frenzy/distortion/decoy/blink).

I like this change. It is a skill based change and not a faceroll one. A good warrior CAN kill a necro with this (provided the necro is not at max life force) but a good necro CAN survive it with dodges/spectral walk.

Challenge accepted.

One full cleanse on a kitten CD, the same as signet of stamina (untraited). Arcane thievery, 3 conditions every 36 seconds. Torch skills, 2 every 24s. Removes one on shatter, varying cooldowns and instantly recharged with signet, situational much like cleansing ire. 1 on heal every 15s. 1 from rune every 30s, but requires you to get hit a few times. I didn’t say it was viable, but neither is a warrior specced for full condition removal.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fgAQJAsPl0ziqXTzhmkwUBif6B0Bw0RVAAkU46XD

Yes though, all in all that’s basically what I was trying to say. It’s something that levels the playing field, not tips it one way or another (I actually think it should stay as immune to conditions).

To continue, I don’t think it’s really survivability that brings a warrior down anymore in comparison to the mesmer, I see the main issue being utility. Now, if warrior rez banner was brought down in cooldown to something reasonable (with nerfs to its duration) we might see this level out. Bringing a warrior at the moment is like bringing half a mesmer.

EDIT: seriously, forty five second shorthand is filtered?

Seriously, mesmer torch? Might as well force your warrior to play double axe with mace warhorn if you’re seriously gonna propose a mesmer run a torch.

Dub.1273:

Feedback was only 1/3 of his HP.

On a single global. That doesn’t seem wildly out of proportion?

At least the mesmer is a 45-36 sec cd for most of the other content, but guardians alone are ridiculously broken with wall plus a shield that can give around 20 seconds worth of projectile absorption. Due to the output of melee that very easily means well over half to two thirds of the fight a single class can defang a boss’s arsenal for the group.

I’d just rather the spirit shield be changed to provide something like the Phantasmal Defender benefit. Wall could use a slight reduction in duration. Altruistic Healing needs an ICD.

It was always stupid design to make bosses’ threaterning/lethal mechanics projectile based when you have certain classes that can trivialize projectiles.

Well done nevertheless.

It’s just as bugged as the engineer trait. It doesn’t actually reduce duration — it makes you flat out immune.

8 seconds is more than enough for a warrior to demolish a necromancer. I don’t know what dodges you’re talking about when you’re either rooted from bow 5 or stunned by either bull’s charge or shield bash and end up eating an eviscerate.

Ryan.8367:

Zenith.7301:

Ryan.8367:

Zenith.7301:

Daemon.4295:

Zenith.7301:

Diehard.1432:

How does it fare against good thief? Do we have a chance to withstand their crits before they bleed/burn to death?

Shadow Arts thieves won’t die to traps due to how much cleanse they have.

S/D thieves will just evade all over them with flanking spam.

How do you evade something you can’t see? If they trigger a stack of poison, flame, and spike the odds are already tipped well in your favor, even if they cleanse immediately. You can drop the next round of traps at or around your feet once they get in your face, so they have to sit through three more traps (remember, they pulse) plus your torch bonfire to melee you. In the meantime, you have your two sword evades plus dodges to burn their initiative and avoid damage, high toughness from rabid gear, and support from your pet, whichever you may have chosen. I really don’t find thieves problematic in comparison to other classes, at least in sPvP.

I can pretty much in my spec chain 6 flanking>larcenous combos. When each of those is still critting1.8-2k toughness people for at least 3-4k, you ain’t going to survive it. You can hold on to larcenous when they’ve wasted their sword skills.

Force them to waste traps, shadow return back, then go back in. Just steady pressure.

You forget about good use of canine cc and timed evasion skills for someone who knows what to dodge from a thief class.

You mean hat random dog leap on my thief who gets 3 dodges baseline from feline grace, has sigils of energy on both his weaponsets, and gets a 10 sec vigor (which stacks with feline grace, unlike ranger endurance regen trait) on a short 15 sec cd heal that also evades?

Good job explaining how op your class is defensively while maintaining high crit burst but besides all that glorious stuff you explained , I’d still probably beat you in a duel which is the bad part. :*(

It is not my class. It’s an alt I adopted after I’ve waited for 10 months for them to fix my ranger so I don’t have to run a toughness condition set with sword mainhand to just not be a free kill.

The difference between thief and BM is my thief is actually useful when you enter a team fight. I’m cleaving people with 3-4k just from sword autoattacks, I can strip bunkers clean of boons for my team really quickly, or I can harass their backline.

BM ranger was only really good for roaming, maybe duels (there were still classes you could not kill, like a good condi engineer with immunity to conditions at 25% trait). it was already crap in team fights. It was already crap on any build for dungeons. And yet because of spvp tears they took a sledgehammer to the awful pets.

So, I just got on with the program and instead of hoping for a development epiphany, just switched characters even after all the gold I’ve invested on my Ranger. Now with my thief I run dungeons pretty happily, I roam amazingly, I can do team fights, and it’s miles away from my experience on the ranger. If I get bored of thief for wvw team fights I just switch to my necro and voila suddenly I’m the best team class around or I can switch to my staff ele or guardian.

Either way, the point is you’ll wait longer for the ranger to be fixed than you’ll wait just getting other toons to 80 and gearing them up.

Ursan.7846:

But first, they have to release a weapon set named after you of course. Congrats!

I know. I submitted a bug report asking thet those weapons by right are mine and should be delivered immediately. I’ve yet to receive a response…

They have time to design skins for achievement, but not to finish already existing weapons….

Ryan.9387:

The problem with your thief is that you critical 3-4k if you manage to land a hit. A good Ranger will be evade spamming enough so most of your hits don’t land. With how glassy a thief is a single round of traps left uncleansed will usually kill a thief.

You’ve got 2 evades on sword and dagger, with monarch’s leap for a more delayed disengaged. Anytime you don’t have those you are rooted by my infiltrator’s strike.

I’ve got cleansing on shadow return and on a 24 sec cd signet. I’ve got cleansing every 45 sec from basilisk venom and runes of lyssa.

Ryan.8367:

Zenith.7301:

Daemon.4295:

Zenith.7301:

Diehard.1432:

How does it fare against good thief? Do we have a chance to withstand their crits before they bleed/burn to death?

Shadow Arts thieves won’t die to traps due to how much cleanse they have.

S/D thieves will just evade all over them with flanking spam.

How do you evade something you can’t see? If they trigger a stack of poison, flame, and spike the odds are already tipped well in your favor, even if they cleanse immediately. You can drop the next round of traps at or around your feet once they get in your face, so they have to sit through three more traps (remember, they pulse) plus your torch bonfire to melee you. In the meantime, you have your two sword evades plus dodges to burn their initiative and avoid damage, high toughness from rabid gear, and support from your pet, whichever you may have chosen. I really don’t find thieves problematic in comparison to other classes, at least in sPvP.

I can pretty much in my spec chain 6 flanking>larcenous combos. When each of those is still critting1.8-2k toughness people for at least 3-4k, you ain’t going to survive it. You can hold on to larcenous when they’ve wasted their sword skills.

Force them to waste traps, shadow return back, then go back in. Just steady pressure.

You forget about good use of canine cc and timed evasion skills for someone who knows what to dodge from a thief class.

You mean hat random dog leap on my thief who gets 3 dodges baseline from feline grace, has sigils of energy on both his weaponsets, and gets a 10 sec vigor (which stacks with feline grace, unlike ranger endurance regen trait) on a short 15 sec cd heal that also evades?

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Zenith.7301:

Surbrus.6942:

If you’re a condition Thief that uses LDB, then you need to have a decent amount of power as well. Your strategy is not as one dimensional when you’re build takes this into account.

The very short window on the evade just means that it requires more skill and practice to make the most of it. I use LDB to evade attacks all the time… although if it is an attack I really want to evade I’ll just dodge/Withdraw/Roll for Initiative because its still really hard to evade with LDB… I’ll generally only use LDB as an evade when fighting NPC’s, to get more practice.

I use I D/D condition build on my Thief, LDB is the main sources of damage, and a small amount of my damage mitigation. Having a bit of other offensive stats helps make the build not some one dimensional gimmick build, as I can still throw in some Power based damage.

But yes, Conditions are absolutely terrible in PvE if you are not working alone. When everything is lined up perfectly for the condition burst, I can simultaneously hit the bleed cap on multiple NPC’s by myself… which means that fighting NPC’s with even one additional condition damage user means that there isn’t even going to be much additional damage being dished out… you can’t really improve too much on 25 stacks of bleed and a redundant amount of poison.

As an aside, personally I think they just need to halve the application of bleeds, and double the damage of those bleeds. Basically everyone would be applying half the stacks of bleed but doing the same amount of damage, or some other way of factoring in more condition damage if they can’t simply increase the cap due to their servers exploding from having to keep track of all those numbers or whatever.

Condition damage is terrible even if you removed the stack cap.

I think you people truly don’t understand the math behind scaling and why berserker fares so much better with gear scaling, benefitting from 25 vulnerability stacks, and haste effects.

The damage gap is huge. Condition will never be viable in dungeons in its current state. They either need to nerf berserker crit cap to 62% like spvp to bring it somewhat closer but it’ll still be an issue.

The lack of DPS meters has really done terrible things to this game, enabling people their magical thinking and letting anecdotes run false narratives.

Zerker is also weakened by barriers and protection and toughness, and also zerkers don’t have as much survivability. You only get those big beefy numbers when fighting something with no armor and no boons.

Of course, the damage is pretty good overall. If you run a full condi spec, you’ll get 3 × 20 bleeds with each death blossom. At 1400 condition damage, this does 6720 damage over the duration of those bleeds. At 1800 condition damage (that is, a fully dedicated condi build) this does 7950 damage, and it does this on top of the direct damage.

8K a pop is pretty good, considering that it bypasses protection, and you have 54% more HP than a zerker build while using it.

Seriously. I’ve done the math. Conditions are not horribly underpowered.

Mobs in dungeons don’t stack toughness or protection or don’t use walls.

Surbrus.6942:

If you’re a condition Thief that uses LDB, then you need to have a decent amount of power as well. Your strategy is not as one dimensional when you’re build takes this into account.

The very short window on the evade just means that it requires more skill and practice to make the most of it. I use LDB to evade attacks all the time… although if it is an attack I really want to evade I’ll just dodge/Withdraw/Roll for Initiative because its still really hard to evade with LDB… I’ll generally only use LDB as an evade when fighting NPC’s, to get more practice.

I use I D/D condition build on my Thief, LDB is the main sources of damage, and a small amount of my damage mitigation. Having a bit of other offensive stats helps make the build not some one dimensional gimmick build, as I can still throw in some Power based damage.

But yes, Conditions are absolutely terrible in PvE if you are not working alone. When everything is lined up perfectly for the condition burst, I can simultaneously hit the bleed cap on multiple NPC’s by myself… which means that fighting NPC’s with even one additional condition damage user means that there isn’t even going to be much additional damage being dished out… you can’t really improve too much on 25 stacks of bleed and a redundant amount of poison.

As an aside, personally I think they just need to halve the application of bleeds, and double the damage of those bleeds. Basically everyone would be applying half the stacks of bleed but doing the same amount of damage, or some other way of factoring in more condition damage if they can’t simply increase the cap due to their servers exploding from having to keep track of all those numbers or whatever.

Condition damage is terrible even if you removed the stack cap.

I think you people truly don’t understand the math behind scaling and why berserker fares so much better with gear scaling, benefitting from 25 vulnerability stacks, and haste effects.

The damage gap is huge. Condition will never be viable in dungeons in its current state. They either need to nerf berserker crit cap to 62% like spvp to bring it somewhat closer but it’ll still be an issue.

The lack of DPS meters has really done terrible things to this game, enabling people their magical thinking and letting anecdotes run false narratives.

Daemon.4295:

Zenith.7301:

Diehard.1432:

How does it fare against good thief? Do we have a chance to withstand their crits before they bleed/burn to death?

Shadow Arts thieves won’t die to traps due to how much cleanse they have.

S/D thieves will just evade all over them with flanking spam.

How do you evade something you can’t see? If they trigger a stack of poison, flame, and spike the odds are already tipped well in your favor, even if they cleanse immediately. You can drop the next round of traps at or around your feet once they get in your face, so they have to sit through three more traps (remember, they pulse) plus your torch bonfire to melee you. In the meantime, you have your two sword evades plus dodges to burn their initiative and avoid damage, high toughness from rabid gear, and support from your pet, whichever you may have chosen. I really don’t find thieves problematic in comparison to other classes, at least in sPvP.

I can pretty much in my spec chain 6 flanking>larcenous combos. When each of those is still critting1.8-2k toughness people for at least 3-4k, you ain’t going to survive it. You can hold on to larcenous when they’ve wasted their sword skills.

Force them to waste traps, shadow return back, then go back in. Just steady pressure.

Some day, hopefully, maybe by this Christmas….

Diehard.1432:

How does it fare against good thief? Do we have a chance to withstand their crits before they bleed/burn to death?

Shadow Arts thieves won’t die to traps due to how much cleanse they have.

S/D thieves will just evade all over them with flanking spam.

For the love of all that’s good, please change this skill. Either make conditions actually worth it in PvE, or remove the bleeding altogether and make this a cleaving aoe power skill for the d/d.

This is such an iconic skill from its predecessor, it’s one of the best animation the thief has, yet it’s barely used.

And it won’t continue to be used because hybrid skills suck. Conditions are terrible for pve, the pvp thief condi build with d/d is a gimmick as only one skill on the weaponset applies and scales with condition damage, and on top of that hybrid skills have really low coefficients for power scaling so the direct damage portion isn’t even good to compensate for the useless 3 stacks of bleeds.

Any person getting hit by a ranger pet a) isn’t moving, wanting to sit a point, or b) is not dodging chill and cripple.

If you have swiftness or a speed signet and are moving, the pet will not hit you, ever. If you don’t have swiftness, but are moving, the pet will sporadically hit you but since it roots itself to attack the rate of hits going in is low.

You ain’t going to be stacking much might as it’s a 5 sec duration.

Yeah, my thoughts were to run a build like that, although I’m trying out a spirit build as well. With only needing 2 traits to run spirits now, it’s much better.

Basically, I run sun spirit, signet of the wild, and earth spirit. With 30% boon duration instead of taking the 33% longer regen trait I just take prot proc on taking greater than 10% of your health.

The sun spirit is just giving you a similar option to the engineer and necromancer trait of proccing a burn with your attacks, so I don’t have to worry about people cionstantly dodging my throw torch in duels. Earth spirit gives me 4 sec prot every 10 seconds, thanks to nature magic traitline I sit at 19-20k hp.

I run raven so he casts his own swiftness and doesn’t need signet or trait to have uptime on target, and with rampage as one i am sharing even more swiftness with my pet. My alternate is either wolf or spider, both have good cc.

I just wish we had better options for stun breaks. Signet of the Wild is a whopping 60 sec cd, and I really need it for the condi clear or engineers walk all over me.

I’m still running healing power though as it is a big part of my team utility.

Really, what we lost was the pet damage but my pets were not hitting anyone who knew to kite them to begin with, so I might as well look at the options.

With the sun spirit it’s not also you proccing the burning, but your pet as well, and with both earth and sun spirit you can get an aoe blind or a root/cripple field.

I’m still running geomancy. I like the on demand 3 stacks so I can keep conditions covered from too much cleansing.

Most people worth their salt never stand on my bonfire to begin with and throw torch is so telegraphed it gets dodged 24/7.

Between me and the pet it’s 6-7 seconds of burn procs every 10 seconds on top of the burning sources I have so the uptime on burning is much betetr against classes that cleanse.

Excalibur.9748:

Works even better on guardian. I haven’t really lost any 1v1 against guardians with S/D ever since the larcenous strike buff. They’re so afraid of it that when they see you do the first flanking strike a lot of guardians will turn the other direction and run.

S/D is basically hard counter to any boon-reliant builds, which is the way it’s meant to be so it’s all good.

S/D is a hardcounter to anything that doesn’t have aoe condition pressure. Hell, outside engineer it can kill anything, perhaps a good BM ranger or phantasm mesmer giving you a good fight. It doesn’t have a single bad matchup. Because it’s an evade with a 3-4k crit attack that you can spam maybe 6 times with ini regen traits in a row before you run out of initiative, and in the meantime sword auto hits nearly as hard.

I’m running S/D and it’s bound to get a nerf. D/P may do more burst but at least you can pressure or bunker it out. My S/D thief just evades/evades/evades/doge/dodge/dodge while doing stupid damage and stealing boons.

When I see a guardian I get so happy because it’s just free stability and prot and might stacks waiting to happen.

And it’s not like ele or guardian have any viable boons that don’t rely on boons.

The only classes I see that don’t rely on boons on their builds are necro, mesmer, and warrior pretty much.

Anet doesn’t care about PvE balancing. Just craft a warrior to 80 I’m sure by now you should have 15-40 gold to help you get him up quickly.

More team clear? Why make anything that isn’t a necro or engineer useless if they try to run a condi build.

At least the females got variety. My male sylvari got stuck either bald, branch, or floppy midlength hair. Male sylvari have no real long hair options or cropped shorter styles.

Aetherblade Retreat’s laser encounter should be enough proof that they don’t give a flying crap about pet/minion classes. The pet even makes the final encounter more of a pain because the boss will aggro to the pet and so guiding her over the electric field becomes more difficult.

Delay.6908:

Wukunlin.8461:

I agree with you but back to the title of this thread, I think we need to ask a serious question:

Does a pug-unfriendly boss fight mean it deserves a nerf?

My personal answer is no. Too many encounters have been changed unnecessarily and were probably because people complained their pug groups couldn’t do it.

Ya pretty much this, even though this boss can be tough in pugs that dont have/dont know they have reflect skills it doesn’t mean the boss needs to be nerfed. If everything becomes a faceroll with every class and 0 group coordination.. dungeons will become so easy and boring they will suck

Instead it’s the boring scenario of bring a guardian or two and the rest warriors with 1 conjure elementalist.

It’s fun if you have those classes but not so much for rangers or engineers or necromancers.

Consume condition isn’t too strong.

The other heals are just garbage. A minion with a 1.25 cast time that you then need another global to explode and heal for a garbage amount. Its good aspect is supposed to be the 900 heals on its autoattacks, yet the necromancer is not built for long term survival and you can easily be burst down so the long term healing from this skill is undervalued.

Well is the biggest pile of garbage of them all. A huge, 40 sec cd heal with mediocre healing total for the cooldown it has, and in order to outheal consume conditions or the minion heal you need to stay in it.

Most importantly, the other heals will never measure up simply because the necro without a staff or offhand dagger has no condition removal built into his power sets. A necromancer running d/d+ axe/focus only has 1 condi transfer and that’s it if he’s not running consume conditions.

And even if the other heals healed 30% more than consume conditions akittens peak, they would not overcome the damage mitigated by clearing conditions simply because havin 4 bleed stacks and poison and burning on you will easily do well over 2k damage per second.

Demon.5082:

Zenith.7301:

Or they can change epidemic to 2 conditions made aoe instead of all and put a class cap of 1 per class in matchmaking.

These are actually very good fixes.
More people should up come with suggestions like this instead of playing the “you were OP before so let me be OP now” or “this is not OP its a skill issue” excuses.
The community has to keep in mind that this attitude is what results in hard nerf hammers on anything bordering the OP state.
The people who complain just complain and the people who defend just defend while nobody is providing any useful/helpful feedback.

Daishi.6027:

IMO I think you get to much survivability for going condi build. Granted the idea is to drop condis and live until they die, but maybe the numbers aren’t right? Perhaps survivability should come more from planned or skillfull skill usage? (Doge spams and crazy regen is not my idea of skillful mind you but that’s just me)

Or how about more obvious stronger single target condi bombs and less AoE? Since that’s what’s really carrying tea fights hard.

Protection seems to be your biggest friend at this point.

Everyone cries OP mesmer and OP thief but maybe this is the legitimate counter to both? Out playing aside, I may be wrong on this but I feel like the intended cycle is supposed to be GC > Bunker > Condi > GC (not hard numbers or situations mind you but a definite advantage) I only get this feeling because it has been stated quite a few times by arena-net that bunkers were not supposed to endlessly out last GCs

Protection does not work on condition damage either :-(
Honestly, I would be satisfied if it did (then the classes with protection at least will have a fair chance).

Your order is spot on. GC kills Condi. Bunker kills GC. Condi kills Bunker. But right now GC vs Condi is a 50% chance at best while Condi still destroys Bunker.

But a guardian bunker doesn’t kill thieves or mesmers, ever. Nothing kills a thief or mesmer if it doesn’t want to die.

Yet a guardian bumps into an engineer and you can rest assure that guardian will die. He doesn’t have the escape mechanisms or burst to deal with the condi spec.

And we’re also missing in that part of the hierarchy that thief/mesmer GC kills all other GC AND condi specs. S/D thief GC kills bunkers that are not engineers just fine.

Demon.5082:

Sigh its no use. You guys just wont get it. I can totally empathize being given the short end of the stick for the past few months as a necro but that does not justify the current meta. Every necro agreed they needed survivability and not buffs to turn them into GC condition monsters.

Xsorus.2507:

I’m sorry, Are you really trying to argue that Conditions are now unbalanced as a whole because Necromancer’s got access to Burn and Torment…Really? That is what you’re trying to argue…

For the 100000000th time. I am not saying Necros are OP. Got that? I am saying the current meta of condition spam from MULTIPLE Necros + nade Engis are OP.

My reasoning is in my post which you quoted but failed to counter. I also feel that adding more condition cleanses is NOT the way to balance things. There are class builds that apply 1-2 conditions and more cleanses just screw them over.

In summary, I feel either multiple conditions (from different players) need to have a DR or something or toughness works partially on conditions. That is all I am saying.

Or they can change epidemic to 2 conditions made aoe instead of all and put a class cap of 1 per class in matchmaking.

Archer Henchman.2534:

Zenith.7301:

I can walk out of black powder. I cannot attack the thief for his 3-4 seconds of stealth. You know, because dagger necro needs to melee. Marks don’t do crap on a power spec.

And in that time out he can easily spam every 10 secs worth of ini regen he’s taking out 6-7k of my health in one invisible attack I have to gamble a guess on unlike every other telegraphed burst in the game.

Your class is cheap crap hardly punished for missing attacks thanks to how fast initiative regens and how your damage is concentrated in one or two button presses while some other class can miss a skill and have it go on a 30 sec cd.

I will not shed a tear for poor thieves being invonvenienced when they’re farming anything that isn’t a bunker.

And I don’t want to hear excuses quite honestly. I have my lv80 thief, be it s/d or d/p I farm pretty much everything in wvw and spvp unless it’s an engineer bunker. It’s such a kitten -proof class with all the escapes and resets it gets.

You can’t hit a thief while he’s in stealth when you have access to marks? You’re running power necro, which is designed to abuse the scaling on lichform in team fights and you’re trying to 1v1 a thief?

Feel free to 1v1 me in-game, toss me a pm if you’d like. I’ll explain the matchup to you and how it scales into teamfights.

It’s not that I’m actively looking for 1v1 with them. It’s that when one of them see me moving points it’s a beeline because it’s a free kill unless I’m terror specced with reaper’s defense in rabid.

There is no way whatsoever to win against a D/P thief as a berserker build of any class that isn’t a mesmer or s/d ele.

You will not beat a thief if he’s any good as a berk necro, ranger, guardian, let alone warrior.

Good way to know when someone is full of it.

My necro with 110% crit dmg iun pve (spvp cap is 62%) at best does 5k without might and at most 6k with blood is power. With power signet equipped. Stop lying.

Wethospu.6437:

Are you guys aware that you can invite people if someone leaves?

I don’t join fractals in progress because it’s usually a good indicator of a disaster group. I think many people also hold this assumption and so it makes it hard for the group to fill that spot once it’s been vacated.

I can walk out of black powder. I cannot attack the thief for his 3-4 seconds of stealth. You know, because dagger necro needs to melee. Marks don’t do crap on a power spec.

And in that time out he can easily spam every 10 secs worth of ini regen he’s taking out 6-7k of my health in one invisible attack I have to gamble a guess on unlike every other telegraphed burst in the game.

Your class is cheap crap hardly punished for missing attacks thanks to how fast initiative regens and how your damage is concentrated in one or two button presses while some other class can miss a skill and have it go on a 30 sec cd.

I will not shed a tear for poor thieves being invonvenienced when they’re farming anything that isn’t a bunker.

And I don’t want to hear excuses quite honestly. I have my lv80 thief, be it s/d or d/p I farm pretty much everything in wvw and spvp unless it’s an engineer bunker. It’s such a kitten -proof class with all the escapes and resets it gets.