Guild Wars 2

TheMightyAltroll.3485:

Zenith.7301:

Yeah….and you will definitely land that dark path on a non-braindead guy? And he wouldn’t cleanse/teleport out of the root?

Are you serious?

I land Dark Path atleast 94% of the time. Also, if he does cleanse/teleport out of it, then I can simply capture a point or he’ll still be in my wells with one less cleanse. Oh, you’re probably thinking of WvW, the place that balance doesn’t exist in.

Yeah, because spvp is so balanced by unnaturally forcing people to sit over points, artificially inflating the value of specs like grenade engineers and bunkers where in WvW those specs are made moot because people can MOVE.

Rerroll.9083:

You still need 30 in arcana. The new builds

0-30-0-10-30 – dps
0-20-0-20-30 – dps/heals
0-0-20-20-30 – bunker

Fire still 0 =(

You can skip evasive arcana. I far prefer 0/30/0/20/20.

Yeah….and you will definitely land that dark path on a non-braindead guy? And he wouldn’t cleanse/teleport out of the root?

Are you serious?

Still terrible damage. Only 2% more life force generation tied to an 8 sec cd channel people dodge.

Power build necromancers still have no ranged 900+ weapon option.

Minor traits that were bad like might at 25% health were still not changed. Same for jagged horrors or minion susceptibility to aoe.

pot.6805:

Pandabro.8743:

This discussion confuses me. They aren’t taking AWAY anything from Weakness so how could it possibly fail? It may not be meta shifting but it’ll certainly help those classes that had it a lot more than it previously had.

Take your minuta somewhere else.

A warrior is a direct damage class, we don’t have viable condi builds. Warriors such as myself are understandably worried after seeing there is a new condi Torment which will make kiting a warrior even easier (it hurts us when we move and it is already ez mode to kite warriors before Torment) and now Weakness will hurt our damage which is our only saving grace.

Yeah, because warriors like you only want to be burst machines.

If they changed weakness, I could for once bring my warhorn and be of a different use to my team, while affording myself better mobility.

And aoe weakness would be a pretty potent tool to tank as a warrior on a point during a team fight.

RyuDragnier.9476:

Hey, I never mentioned dungeons. I was talking WvW and general PvE. I consider dungeons a whole ‘nother ballpark, considering several classes that suck in general PvE are amazing in dungeons. They’re a portal to bizarro world IMO.

And for WvW, it depends on the server. I’ve seen multiple 5+ ranger teams in zergs raining down arrows on a section of the battlefield, massively damaging people in range.

And killing themselves on retaliation trains.

But, hey, let’s leave guardians the gods of this game and nerf the most stigmatized class, because spvp babies took their toys home with them when they couldn’t tank a pet on a point.

jcbroe.4329:

Guys, really, the shortbow change isn’t that serious. It still functions the same, just within a different range, which brings it in line with the amount of options other classes have for 1200 range weapons (I think mesmer is the only class now with 2 1200 range weapons, the their staff damage is pretty poor, so that makes it more of a utility weapon).
It makes the choices and pros/cons of choosing what bow to use more obvious and creates more diversity between the 2 weapons, which is a needed and healthy change on the road to creating diversity.

Obviously ranged weapons needed nerfing!

It’s not like guardians and hammer warriors were charging alongside D/D eles into blobs spamming cleaves for much better results than any ranged spec outside staff ele.

Nooooo, my shortbow hitting a single target for 800-1.1k crits was too much!

RyuDragnier.9476:

Zenith, every post I’ve ever seen you make in this subforum has always been negative, so excuse me if I don’t take you seriously.

But here’s the question, will you outright state that you were wrong if this turns out to have helped LB enough to be viable?

Yes. But when dungeons kick in and rangers are still persona nongrata, especially now since the damage nerfs, I want you in exchange to disappear from the forums if I am right

And let’s see how many team fight longbow rangers will exist when pets still die in mere seconds to the 40+ man zergs running around in wvw.

Every kitten class with this patch got stronger with the exception of the elementalist. We got nerfs to our most viable weapons and sources of damage, while receiving no meaningful compensation. The alternatives are still garbage.

Great, now you’ll need more than 20 points into Nature Magic for your shouts to have some sort of use, as if you weren’t using signet of the hunt or weren’t running Dwayna runes or healing spring. Regen and swiftness from shouts is JUST what we needed.

And protect me is a terrible shout considering it gives you protection at the cost of halving your damage.

Yeah, keep telling yourself that. When the patch hits live we’ll see the results in the forums. I’m pretty sure you’ll still be one of those longbow rangers sitting in a tower saying he does great while the staff ele next to him is actually doing the work.

Who said 50% reduction? I said the skill will still do less damage than longbow auto at range. Its damage is still terrible for a 5 sec channel.

And you think 10 sec regen on useless shouts will help my team? Newsflash, guardians already give their groups swiftness, regen, 25 stacks of might, stability, retal, AND protection with shouts.

Regen and swiftness are about the worst boons in team fights. Protection and fury and stability are much better.

Faux Sheaux.6179:

Nah, these aren’t bad patch notes. It hurts bunker rangers and 111111 pew pew shortbow rangers a bit, but it’s not game breaking. Looking at the other stuff, longbow is getting some decent buffs (double cripple duration is no joke), the spirit tree is getting an overhaul (much needed, in a good way), and we will finally have a viable group build. Ranger shout regen/swiftness is amazing. Every 15 seconds along with a pet invisibility on “guard”, an aoe stun break on “protect me”, etc etc.

Also, rapid fire isn’t getting 50% damage reduction. Not sure where you’re looking Zenith. I might be missing something, but I’ve looked it over like 5 times.

Spirits still die in a sneeze, are a 60 sec cd, with no mobility. Good luck using them.

RyuDragnier.9476:

Zenith.7301:

RyuDragnier.9476:

Zenith.7301:

You don’t make longbow more viable by making shortbow crappier.

Luckily they’re doing all of this:

Long Range Shot: Reduced the aftercast on this skill from .5 seconds to .25 seconds. Increased arrow speed by 15%
Rapid Fire: Reduced initial cast time by .4 seconds. Increased arrow speed by 15%
Point Blank Shot: Increased arrow speed by 15%
Barrage: Increased cripple duration by 50%.

Increasing arrow speed does not meaningfully affect the DPS of the weapon. It just increases the reliability of it hitting.

The longbow is not used because it does garbage DPS, and it has no defense.

If the arrows go faster, people can no longer side-step away from them. Congratulations, you fixed one of the main problems with LB, the fact that people can side-step the arrows. If we’re lucky after this month they’ll actually buff the damage output.

The only time people sidestepped my arrows was if I was an iddiot and slotted for 1500 range and sat at 1500 range firing arrows.

My arrows didn’t miss at 1200-1100 range.

And this doesn’t even touch in pve where the arrows don’t miss at all, and a 1200>900 range difference does nothing, people will still not use the longbow in PvE.

Zanthrax.6538:

Chesire.9043:

Even as a condi necro, this new condition worries me a lot. I can’t say that I agree with this at all.

I also don’t agree that Mesmers and Thieves actually need something to keep people from running from them. I ffs, look at their mobility! The only class they can’t catch is an Ele and that’s only because of RTL; hell they can probably catch them too.

I’m not whining, I’m just very concerned that this is going to destroy what fragile state of pvp we have. It may be a bit much giving it to those two professions.

Condi based builds for thief and mesmer are atm….pieces of kitten in my humble opinion….Power based builds you will see this condition and laugh as it does 0 damage therefore not having any impact on you….but on the flip side it promotes build diversity and boosts lesser played builds like condi based builds.

In spvp.

P/D thieves and condi staff mesmers run pretty strong in WvW.

P/D thieves only really lose against D/P thieves.

RyuDragnier.9476:

Zenith.7301:

You don’t make longbow more viable by making shortbow crappier.

Luckily they’re doing all of this:

Long Range Shot: Reduced the aftercast on this skill from .5 seconds to .25 seconds. Increased arrow speed by 15%
Rapid Fire: Reduced initial cast time by .4 seconds. Increased arrow speed by 15%
Point Blank Shot: Increased arrow speed by 15%
Barrage: Increased cripple duration by 50%.

Increasing arrow speed does not meaningfully affect the DPS of the weapon. It just increases the reliability of it hitting.

The longbow is not used because it does garbage DPS, and it has no defense.

Doug.9628:

please edit your post to include the fact that if these notes are real, the SB received flat damage upgrades to compensate. The LB also received a lot of love. The sky is not falling

This is so stupid. All of the shortbow’s DPS is on the autoattack. You could increase the damage of the other abilities by 40% and it would still be a DPS loss over just using the autoattack.

What love did the longbow receive besides projectile speed? You’ll still be dead as soon as someone gets close to you.

Ursan.7846:

Zenith.7301:

If you want to continue to exist. Which is optional if you’re aware of what people do when they don’t want that option.

Everything is optional.

Right. So if he doesn’t like the released content, he can choose to ignore it and ignore the achievements attached to it, because they have no impact on your gameplay. You pay no subs, you can leave this game for a few days and do something else.

I don’t see the problem?

EDIT: By framing your statement that way, you’re completely ignoring or missing the point on why people say achievements are “optional.” Namely, that the consequences of NOT doing it is minimal (or none, as some can argue.)

If you choose to stop breathing, you die. If you choose to stop taking showers, you earn social stigma. These are consequences far more significant than missing out on 10 achievement points in GW2.

The consequence is not getting the one skin you like, which may be one of the few you only liked. If you don’t care for looks, that’s fine, but looks are the only reason some people play RPG’s for.

ensoriki.5789:

Zenith.7301:

ensoriki.5789:

They’re not going to straight out drop damage like that since the game needs powerful offense in order to shift point possession in a reasonable time span.

And which are the classes that can use it? Not the bunkers.

1. Doesn’t matter if Bunker, roamer, joe across the street. It results in longer TTK. The longer it takes you to die, the longer you can defend a point. The longer that point can tick an extra point.
2. Multiple professions have weakness including those that can bunker.
3. This allows other professions if not the support to significantly extend life outside of the downed system, again raising TTK. Crits can be a 200% damage increase. No crits can mean a major drop to the damage you would take (cutting it in half).

If you’re a glass cannon Thief for instance, and you weaken the glass cannon Mesmer with your proposed “no crits guarantee” than that means he can certainly eat all 3 mind wracks. Which would let that thief sit on a node for longer if he needed to. Longer he’s alive the greater window of time his team has to come assist him, extend the time it takes to flip that node even longer. If nodes don’t flip in reasonable times the score snowballs because so many ticks occur before the node flips. Mix in these spike stops with the downed system and Im no prophet but I bet lifespans increase heavily. Why such is needed when you can actively stop many spikes with blinds, and hard CC, i don’t know. On top of protection, aegis, evades? How many buffers do people really need.

Necros don’t have aegis, or blind, or protection. They’d don’t have vigor, and they don’t have stability.

And these patch notes aren’t giving them any boons as they already said they wouldn’t be getting them, and if you earnestly believe that slightly more life force generation will make any difference while they’re getting trained by spike classes, you’re full of it.

Ditto for warrior.

SafiMoyo.5130:

So…. why pick SB over axe now?

Axe auto is terrible, so shortbow still does more sustained DPS.

Not so much, though. Ranger personal DPS will still be bad and we just ate 20-30% nerfs to pet burst.

Power builds are not for roaming, unless you like giving thieves and mesmers free wxp.

If you run a power build, you need to have support.

Longbow’s not a lot better. The issue with it is it’s got no defense whatsoever and people can easily get in your face, gutting the damage. Firing a half damage projectile faster won’t fix anything. Rapidfire will still do terrible damage.

ensoriki.5789:

They’re not going to straight out drop damage like that since the game needs powerful offense in order to shift point possession in a reasonable time span.

And which are the classes that can use it? Not the bunkers.

If it’s a means of dealing with spike damage, it simply will not work. Already it’s a 50/50 chance that it will do something for you. It’s not a reliable defensive condition, and it will save neither necros or warriors.

Lowering it to something like 33-25% proc, or even leaving it at 50% proc, simply will not fulfill its use as an antispike ability, because spike in this game is the use of 3 skills at most. Most often it’s as simple as a shatter or a backstab. If you rely on a 50/50 chance that those few spike skills will be mitigated, you’ll be disappointed in the results.

For PvE, its duration should not be reduced so drastically on bosses.

For PvP, the function should be preventing all attacks from being critical strikes. Make it 3-4 sec duration instead of 7-8. THEN it will function as a condition for mitigating spike damage.

Blackhat.4016:

ronpierce.2760:

Blackhat.4016:

Brigg.6189 basically gave you the proper answer.

High HP = Low sustain
Low HP = High sustain

That’s how it is supposed to be balanced but currently there is a problem:

High sustain > High HP

That’s why you see more ele bunkers than warrior bunkers. Giving warriors and necros heal skills which are based on their HP is a terrible idea though. First of all it would make Healing Power pointless and secondly it would make necros and warrior OP. Why would you pick a guardian or ele bunker who is susceptible to burst if you can have a warrior without that disadvantage? Ofc it feels weird to heal for 50% of your HP as a warrior while the ele goes back to 100% but that’s simply because of their base HP.

I do agree that warriors and necros need a buff when it comes to sustain but it shouldn’t be based on their HP.

I’m not sure you’re understanding what’s being said. I never said heal % of health. I said the % of health we regain from a heal is not proportionate to how much health others heal. We already lost a lot of defenses such as Invuln/Vigor/Protection to have this HP, not healing more to support a higher base HP means we have almost no sustain. I’m not talking about healing % hp, just our heals in general need to be bigger to support a higher HP pool. Read my (I believe) second or third post, and it explains why.

Sorry, I think I misunderstood your first post then.

Balancing Invuln/Vigor/Protection is a completely different topic imo since you can’t really compare them to healing. How much is 1 second of Protection in healing? As you can see this doesn’t really work.

Base HP however can be somewhat compared to healing.

Imo the heal skills should be slightly better and healing power should synergize more with the rest of a warrior or necro build. The skills they currently have are definitely not bad but healing power isn’t as good as it is on other professions like eles. Like I said before they are not supposed to heal as much but they should be able to win in a sustained fight if they spec for it.

In the end warriors and necros need small adjustments on both healing and damage mitigation.

Eles don’t necessarily use cleric for their heals not to suck.

Making heals dependent on healing power to be any good will leave the warrior and necro where they started, which is nowhere because the healing power stat only benefits one button for them (their weaponskills outside necro dagger don’t do any noticeable healing), whereas in the case of the ele and guardian they’ve got MANY healing sources outside their number 6 skill.

Sepreh.5924:

Go full berserker with dagger main hand, trait 30,0,10,0,30, drop well of corruption and well of suffering and see if the DPS is low :-p

It is low. Obviously you haven’t played a warrior or thief. They’ll be doing that amount of damage or more without having to use 40 sec cd utilities.

They hyped rangers a lot with previous patches and you saw what they got.

Yup, for a class with so much access to boons I don’t see why I’d give up 40% boon duration in runes. The might stacks duration will give you more power than just using ruby orbs, while giving you 7 sec protection on earth attunement and 3 sec long fury on attunement switch.

You miss out on crit damage but living is more important.

I love Malaqua, she’s so sassy.

Redscope.6215:

Neko.9021:

Straight-up simple question. Why does Fire Aura have have such a ginormous cooldown?

I really do want to know, and I hope every Ele out there bumps this thread until we get a good answer.

Your good answer:

You have 4 sets of ‘4’ and ‘5’ skills. That’s 4 more high-end skills than everyone else and depending on how you outfit your engineer, it can be 6 more.

Eles basically have 4 weapon sets. Their last two skills should really never fall below the 30 second cooldown mark (even though some of them are shorter and RtL has its cooldown reduced when hitting a target).

You are forgetting the drawbacks. Eles have many skills, but most of the damage on those skills, especially autoattacks, suck so you have to WEAVE all those skills to do the damage of a class that does it with 2 buttons.

Xsorus.2507:

loseridoit.2756:

Sol.4310:

\

I don’t mean to impose on your skill or anything like that I meant what I as a general comment, what I’m trying to get at is not all builds will counter all builds. You might have a solid spec and be good player, but there is no such thing as 1 build beats them all. There are fair few builds out there for classes that beat the BM/Bunker, none of this draw stuff.

So why not run them builds or them classes as they are the counter. If you can’t do it with your current build don’t try.

Also, if your drawing with someone on point fight your not being every effective to your team at all…. If anything your wasting your time fighting that point when you could be supporting your team and taking a different point.

my build is quite different. It bring group condition removal, aoe cc and enough dps to down any enemy.

I have to test it out with a premade team to understand my build in team effectiveness. however, I should be able to stand a chance on most 1 vs 1 encounters. To give you an idea of the horrible bm ranger i fought against and still lost, I traited my shield to reflect and most of them dont realize they are killing themselves until the end of the channel…..

my problem with the build is that damage is too high to be a bunker. I want the player to work at downing the enemy rather than the pet does it for them.

Oh well, I hope anet rework the class because they do not scale well against multiple enemies

The fact that you think the BM ranger is bad because he kept shooting you while reflect up is rather funny….He probably just didn’t notice it because if he’s a BM ranger and using a shortbow, He probably is doing less then 200 damage a shot to himself…

Your build is probably just bad for fighting BM Rangers, that’s generally how Builds are…they have counters….

P/D thief is a good example, Its incredibly powerful against some builds, put it against a D/P thief though, and it’ll get jacked.

Same goes for S/D thief. S/D thief gets rocked by something he can’t target and has the best blind field ingame.

S/D is just faster killing bunkers, and that’s why it is being used. But a good D/P thief with shadow arts can pretty much take anyone on and have a chance at winning, while hardcountering any glass cannon or non-bunker builds with possibly phantasm mesmer as an exception.

The problem with thieves is that they’ve got pretty low cooldowns on their best abilities due to the initiative system, and stealth is broken outside point capture as a defensive measure. It allows you to pretty much stop someone’s offense while giving you a backstab that in WvW can crit bunkers for 5-6k and easily 9k on non-bunkers.

And due to the nature of initiative you can use your burst and stealth much more often than other people can use their defensive skills and burst rotations.

The difference between the necro and warrior, is that the warrior actually has damage. Necro damage is complete garbage outside spreading bleed stacks with epidemic.

Necro power specs are inferior to other classes’ spec — their damage and survivability is bad compared to mesmer/thief/warrior.

Necro condition specs are outdone by specs that have access to burning, because burning is supremely better to bleeding as a condition.

You bring the necro for the rez signet and aoe fear, period.

Everything else, including boon stribbing, a class like mesmer or sword thief can do better on top of having much better damage.

The animation makes them look very flimsy, like parts of it are about to fall off.

Linguistically Inept.6583:

Danicco.3568:

I think they reduced it because only Thieves can blind once per second, and we’re clearly not Thieves.

necro
engi

Necro is on a well nobody uses. 60 sec cd, and only cast below you without trait.

Engineer meta specs do not include much blind outside static shot and blind grenade.

The only class that blinds reliably is D/P thief, followed by guardian.

Linguistically Inept.6583:

Danicco.3568:

I think they reduced it because only Thieves can blind once per second, and we’re clearly not Thieves.

necro
engi

Necro is on a well nobody uses. 60 sec cd, and only cast below you without trait.

Engineer meta specs do not include much blind outside static shot and blind grenade.

No amount of HP will matter if you can’t heal it.

Consider necro lich form. It still dies within a few seconds to a team despite boasting easily 40k hp.

Evasion negates all damage. Ckasses can easily spike 10k damage in their rotations outside bunkers. You can’t tank 20-30k damage.

But if you have a tool that teleports you out of reach of the focus train or spike, you effectively mitigated 30k damage.

The best way to mitigate damage is not to face tank it — it’s to stop it from happening.

And that’s why warrior or necro will simply not survive like thief or ele or mesmer or engineer, simply because even if you doubled their HP pool they’d quickly have to run for their lives as soon as a group puts their eyes on them.

Necromancers and warriors need ways to shut down the offenses headed their way if they are to survive. They cannot tank it.

Most importantly, no amount of conditions will save you from being used like a pinball if you don’t have stability. Conditions are easy to cleanse, they are not reliable for mitigating damage like boons, and you can’t apply conditions to begin with if you are being thrown around by two eles chaining updrafts into earthquakes into roots into guardian hammer.

stof.9341:

Pyriall.5027:

What? You don’t find it a bit absurd that the limiting factor in being able to run other GC builds are two profession’s gc builds?

Not as such. The very nature of GC builds in GW2 is something that kills very fast and dies very fast (when you don’t avoid the damage). So two glass canons that fight each other are bound to be something very brutal.

If thief and mesmer didn’t have any effective GC build, you’d get 1-2 other classes to be declared “the kings of GC” and preventing all the other GC builds to be effective.

…..No

A GC engineer, or necro, or ranger, or guardian, are all on even footing.

Thief and mesmer GC are all cannon and hardly glass because of all the teleports/offensive shutdowns they have. They can deliver their burst while invulnerable or untargetable, and they can reset a fight at will whereas the other GC’s do not get that luxury.

Just play something other than thief/ele mesmer and tell me thieves have it rough. Please.

Play a necro or engineer for once. If you mess up, you die. On the thief, just shadow return/stealth.

Well, engineer is better for aoe condi application. Trapper ranger has better cc than grenadier engineer — spike trap, aoe fear from wolf, knockdown from wolf, and haste on pet swap. Long lasting water field that removes conditions.

The engineer might be better just because he’s more specialized, and quite frankly engineer condi application needs nerfing or the other classes need better condi application and variety.

Engineers have better baseline access to confusion than mesmers, and bring some of the best burning to boot.

Bright.9160:

Zenith.7301:

Telling some people who normally stick to wvw, and whom you have to drag by the hair to even touch pve, what weapons to bring and what traits to use is a pretty good way of finding yourself PuGing more often. Yes, I’ll likely run more efficient groups with a PuG, but these are people whose company I ENJOY. And I want them to stop dismissing PvE so I have to get them to do it in the first place.

Why would they refuse to change weapons or traits? That’s like going into WvW with my DPS dungeon build and then complaining I get destroyed in a zerg…

Zenith.7301:

Necro has no reflects, btw. The ranger can bring whirling defense, but then his damage drops to negligible levels, is a 5 sec reflect on a 25 sec cd. No reflects from other classes besides perhaps thief is even close to on par with the reflection uptime of guardians or mesmers. Any other class combo, and you’ll have downtime on that reflection much more, while having less DPS to boot.

5 seconds reflect on 25 sec cooldown = 20% reflect uptime.

Feedback (untraited) is 6 seconds on 40s cooldown = 15% uptime.

Traited it’s 8s on 32s which is a 25% uptime.

Guardian is more OP with 25% untraited and 34% uptime when traited on Wall of Reflection. And it also has Shield of Absorption, which will give you another 4s of safety on 40s cooldown, or 10% uptime.

Smoke screen is 7s on 30s = 23% uptime

Ele staff earth 3 = 5s on 30s = 16% uptime, but you’d be better off with Swirling winds, which is 6s on 30s = 20% uptime.

So, since your team was 2 ele, a guardian and a mesmer, you could effectively go for 90% reflection/destruction uptime without even traiting for it or using Shield of the Avenger, and I’m not even counting the fact that you could use Focus 4 on a mesmer, or Focus 5 to reflect as well (since you need to trait for that). If you traited for it (not using Shield of the Avenger) you’d have 104% reflect uptime, not counting mesmer’s extra stuff… You probably had one the safest group combo possible to do that fight, and the only reason you couldn’t do it is because your friends didn’t want to retrait/change their UTILITY skills, you know, those things that you change when they situation occurs?

I’m sorry, but I don’t believe how bad some of the playerbase of this game is. I mean, I complain about some things in the game, but at least I don’t complain about fights being too hard when I didn’t even kittening change my skills or traits to accommodate for it.

A percentage is meaningless. If you can kill the boss in 45 seconds in melee, the classes with the longest reflection win out. A mesmer is 6 seconds, throw in warden, and guardian spirit shield isn’t just 4 seconds of protection. The spirit shield trigger like every 1-2 seconds for those 4 seconds of protection, which is actually much longer.

It’s a learning experience for them because they might have to adjust their play and reconsider how they approach PvE.

Let me ask you, did anyone ever tell you how to play? Or, did you figure things out through personal experience?

The other elementalist and I carried them, but in the end they got their dungeon daily achievement done and got some tokens.

And if you’re grabbing this as some sort of wish for things to be nerfed, I think you missed my replies earlier where I said I thought the change added some depth, but in a mistaken way.

Reflection trivializes encounters anyways as it did with Lupicus. I prefer games where you are forced to constantly reposition instead of plopping a chain of skills that completely gut the encounter’s threat while you tunnel damage into an HP sack.

The whole point of adding adds and secondary mechanics to encounters is so you have to divert attention and resources to different tasks. And the way this game
s pve is designed, with a few broken classes you can simply remove those mechanics. Imagine a class in a WoW raid that completely took out the threat of an important ability or mechanic in a fight. I don’t like it.

I also don’t like mechanics that punish melee just because, don’t get me wrong. The ascalonian general with fiery sword or archdiviner can get a bit dumb sometimes with few tells — but by and large classes should be balancing their approach to encounters with different tools. And that’s not happening outside reflection. The most damage always wins out because there are no other mechanics and supportive/tanking classes are not necessary, and in fact they hinder the group while not surviving any better.

randomfightfan.4091:

@ Rising

I’d be 100% fine with having good rewards at 50 and higher only IF 50 was actually unlocked and do-able. Since 48 is the highest available level atm, and has been the highest available level for months, it should have a way to work towards the skin you want. Even if token TYPES were made (like this token is for 2h weapons, this one for 1h weapons, each with ranged or melee categories), it would significantly balance out the rng hate while maintaining your illusion of prestige with the skins. I personally think type of system would be dumb and there should just be a flat 1 token for 1 skin trade since my class (I have 7 80’s but only use thief) can only use 1h weapons. On top of 2h weapons being useless for me, I’d need 2 1h melee tokens if I wanted dual dagger or s/d or anything. With the system as it is, I’ve done 130 runs (that’s 130 pristines, they were unlocked after I got to 38), almost all at 38 or 48, and I have yet to get a skin I wanted. I have a few I use but none I wanted.

I want that fractal sword and shortbow badly for my thief ;(

All the 8 skins I’ve gotten have been for my guardian =/

Nikaido.3457:

Zenith.7301:

and unlike in your video where we saw a minimal spawn of spiders, the spawn rate for us easily had us dealing with 2-3 groups of them, when wall was down.

We did the run twice in a row, and it’s a post-patch video, not before the supposed dramatic change for this boss. We didn’t see any randomness involved in the spawn rate. We were overran by spiders every time the boss died, reflect went down and had to run out of the room before leaving the dungeon to avoid a quick death.

You might think the spawn rate is different but the fact is that the boss dies quickly enough for their spawn rate to not matter much.

This isn’t even a boss that discriminates against people who aren’t in zerk gear all that much, because he doesn’t.. take critical hits… so while there may be some difference in damage between our group and any random pugger in terms of base damage boost traits, overall, it’s NOT a massive DPS difference, and even in a group with 5 people wearing full PVT you should get this boss down in no more than a minute or two minutes at MOST as long as you melee this and cycle reflect.

This is one of the few bosses in this game that doesn’t discriminate half as much between zerk and other type of gear in terms of how much damage he takes so all the whining about how impossible that fight is.. ? sigh.
And the only class that doesn’t have any reflect/projectile absorb to share/cycle with the rest of party members is.. warrior. (necro too maybe? I don’t know a lot about necro) So any mixed group with : rangers, thieves, elementalists, guardians, ele, whatever should do fine. Smoke screen is down? Time for whirling defense. Whirling def is down? Time for swirling winds. Etc. If you don’t cycle skills and have some communication in your party.. well, explorable dungeons were not made for people who don’t communicate.

And they aren’t made for kittens who don’t adapt their utility bar for the fight too. Your guardian is not.. running shield of the avenger ? mesmer.. doesn’t run focus? it’s time for a kick.

Telling some people who normally stick to wvw, and whom you have to drag by the hair to even touch pve, what weapons to bring and what traits to use is a pretty good way of finding yourself PuGing more often. Yes, I’ll likely run more efficient groups with a PuG, but these are people whose company I ENJOY. And I want them to stop dismissing PvE so I have to get them to do it in the first place.

Warrior GS/rifle doesn’t compare to a competent warrior using axe/mace for the sustained damage.

Necro has no reflects, btw. The ranger can bring whirling defense, but then his damage drops to negligible levels, is a 5 sec reflect on a 25 sec cd. No reflects from other classes besides perhaps thief is even close to on par with the reflection uptime of guardians or mesmers. Any other class combo, and you’ll have downtime on that reflection much more, while having less DPS to boot.

It was a learning experience for them. Maybe PvE won’t seem so “easy” to them now.

The problem with it is it has no mobility, and no mobility is dead.

All its damage delivery methods are staggered, yet it doesn’t have all the evasive measures of d/d to survive, and it doesn’t have tanking tools to compensate for that lack of evasion.

Eruption takes too long to happen, and several of the cast times are too long on certain skills. Healing Rain should be cast on the move, Blasting Staff should be baseline, with a trait replacing it that reduces staff ability cd’s and some other perk.

The water auto needs to go up, and the earth auto projectile needs to go up in speed, or projectiles like earth auto and necro staff and longbow auto and ranger axe should not be sidestepped because they are too slow.

If these autos are hard to land, they should at the very least hit hard when they do or have a substantial effect.

Staff has little spike outside air 2>air attunement swap bolt. Its damage has a lot of downtime for the lack of longevity the weapon has relative to dd or sd.

The aoe and cc is great — when nobody looks at you. That’s why staff ele is underpopulated in our guild, because they feel that they need to be babysat all the time to be effective when they could have the self sufficiency of d/d and provide similar support and much better burst.

Nikaido.3457:

Pyroatheist.9031:

Nikaido.3457:

trolololo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0B3ua0GEq8&feature=youtu.be

lolololo.

We feed on all the QQ, blood and tears.

[edit, just saw this gem :]

Zenith.7301:

They should perhaps reduce the groups a bit, but for once it’s nice to see an encounter in an explorable where you just can’t sit and melee the boss to death.

lolololo.

Ahhh yes, the time honored method of ‘stack and dps’. Gotta love it.

And yet within the chaos of this thread some people go and state inane things like “you can’t sit and melee the boss to death”. I am also amazed at the thought that groups with 2 mesmer, 1 guard, or 2 guard can’t deal with this. 2 mesmers can literally chain reflect one after the other so even if you have low dps you still shouldn’t have trouble with that boss.

Zenith also put emphasis on how his one warrior died in a group that had 2 ele, 1 mes and 1 guard. I really got to wonder how bad the warrior was, and how bad the rest of the group were too, for such a thing to happen. Because his group composition was nearly identical to ours save for 1 warrior. (our group : 2 war, 1 ele, 1 mes, 1 guard)

Easy. The guardian didn’t run shield, and the mesmer was greatsword/staff. It was a group with 2 pugs and nobody wanted to sit in melee.

We began the usual pug ranged strategy, and upon constantly wiping spiders we realized they wouldn’t stop spawning, and unlike in your video where we saw a minimal spawn of spiders, the spawn rate for us easily had us dealing with 2-3 groups of them, when wall was down.

So, yeah, you can’t sit in melee for this boss, when the warrior was greatsword/rifle, and when you don’t use something as obviously broken as a guardian spirit shield with the trait for extra duration.

The group comp actually started differently from you. I felt like being a disgraceful creature and bringing my necromancer, and then I switched to ele and 2 of us eles just kited ther spiders while hitting the boss as the other people were dead.

Poxxia.1547:

Zenith.7301:

Poxxia.1547:

Two classes stand out to me in this regard: Rangers and Thieves. Evades and dodges … and teleports to some degree is imho for these two ott.

Ranger has 2 evades, one with a slight delay time, and both on a 10+ sec cd.

Rangers have no burst. No, really, a 6k hit from a pet that can be kited 24/7 with swiftness is not burst.

Rangers outlast, and if you don’t give them the tools to outlast, they are useless. Because they don’t do any damage besides conditions — which take time to kill vs. thief.

First: I play a ranger (along with other classes) … even if my main is now a guardian.
I consider S/D viable, and hence I can count 3: Hornet sting on 8s CD, Serpent’s strike on 15s CD and Stalker’s Strike on 10s CD (8s with Off-hand Training, which I consider a viable trait for BM when playing condi’s).
Not to mention how good HS+ML is at escaping for a skill on such short CD.

I think you hint at S/D-thieves … and I consider them more silly than rangers atm, so using them as measure for the viability of us, is not exactly the best imho.

Pets can idd be kited, but we can equally apply quite a bit of cripple. I don’t usually have that issue with pets hitting my target with the build I use atm, though. But apart from that: It is a whole different discussion. The fact, that we are tied to a rather stupid AI, doesn’t justify, that we have access to an excessive amount of evades … imho.

Hornet Sting has a delay that makes it inherently inferior for evading. It’s a disengaging skill.

And we haven’t got quite a bit of cripples. You have a chill on axe, and a cripple on offhand dagger. A very short cripple on melee auto.

The axe projectiles are really slow and easy to dodge, so that chill barely lands on someone competent, and crippling talon is similarly slow, and for snares that have easily 10+ sec cd’s, opponents have a fair amount of condition removal in case they do not dodge them.

The pet is easily half a BM ranger’s damage, and effectively more if we’re talking about classes with massive condition removal like eles, so when a pet gets so easily kited, you pretty much do nothing..

You’re also looking at the effectiveness of these evades on a regen bunker, when these evades don’t come close to helping the mediocre state of glass cannon or offensive rangers (which don’t exist outside longbow noobs in wvw sitting behind a zerg).

BM bunker rangers exist because it’s the only viable spec outside trapper, which is also a defensive condition build.

Power build rangers are extinct because they don’t have a way of dealing with boons — they can’t steal them and they don’t have sick raw damage like warrior to mow through boons. Power builds are completely dead for a ranger since their direct damage coefficients are halved because of the pet existing, while condition damage is not halved.

The build loses some of its cheesiness without 3 spam, but S/D was always strong outside bunker killing. It had extremely high sustaine from the auto, which also crippled and applied weakness, and against someone without stability you could stunlock rather successfully.

Shadowstep and stealth are out of control. Those abilities need cooldowns, not initiative use. And quite frankly that utility is also way overbudget. A double stun breaker, teleport, that also cures conditions. A whole host of classes would kill to have heals and utilities half as good as what thieves get.

Lévis.5489:

The problem is : Condition is god tier in Spvp, WvW and solo PVE . But fall apart in dungeons and group events, due to condition cap.

False.

Increasing condi cap would change nothing.

Condi damage doesn’t scale nearly as good enough as power/crit/critdmg, condi damage does not get 25% from vulnerability stack, and most importantly even if they were close, power specs would be taken simply because burst damage is always valued more in an encounter than damage that needs ramp-up.

In a 3.5 sec ability comparsion with 100b, which can do 44k with full vulnerability and might stacks plus blood lust stacks, no condition spec in the game can do close to that damage in that time window, ever.

Most importantly, conditions are not affected by haste either. Condition specs are not affected by time warp the way power specs are.

Power builds don’t really come into strength until you reach the 65+% crit dmg thresholds. I see you’re running 48% crit damage.

In wvw an offensive power build ranges between 70-110% crit dmg.

Power builds also outperform conditions in pve because in pve keeping high might stacks and high vulnerability stacks on a target is easy. In pvp, not so much. So you see condi builds, and only few classes run power builds because their attack scale very well with power (thieves, warriors, mesmers; particularly the first two).

The issue with the ranger is that his coefficients are ghastly, and he’s balanced around the fact that his pet does 40-60% of the total damage. So power and crit dmg only affect 40-60% of the equation.

With condition damage, the ranger does not have any reduced condition damage. He applies conditions just like any engineer or necro, and his condition damage is not halved because he has a pet.

The base damage and scaling of the ranger’s direct damage skills are simply horrendous, and so you resort to condition specs.

It’s also important to note that because ranger’s burst is tied to ai, with the exception of a full signet activated maul, he will simply never function as a berserker burst class. His delivery is neither reliable or immediate.

The ranger also has no base survival outside sword evades, so he must build tanky condition regen to last enough time for his deficient pet to kill opponents with conditions. You simply cannot gib competent people the way a thief or mesmer or ele or warrior can.

emikochan.8504:

Or if they make speccing into deep fire and air able to blow people up before they can kill us, it might change things :p

Which I doubt, because the balancing issue has always been those arcane utilities. They nerfed arcane so badly, a 2k aoe (basically a melee cleave from a greatsword) on a 30 sec cd mainly used for the blast finisher.

I don’t get the point of making the ele go into utility slots to have any kind of spike. They tried that with the mesmer mantra of pain as well, and the end result is that both iterations are crappy (arcane missile is not bad, though) because if they were actually spike skills, paired with a burning speed+firegrab+air attunement switch lightning strike, it’d have people crying.

Another issue with fire/air burst specs is that unlike mesmers/thieves, we don’t have the crit modifiers that make our spike reliably crit. So s/d specs need to spec glassy, because if their rotation of air doesn’t crit, it doesn’t hurt. Backstab will always crit, phantasms get perma fury from trait, mindwrack gets an extra 15% chance to crit, etc.

It’s not just the condi removal from water — it’s sustainability. That heal on water attunement is substantial and critical to our survival, as is the heal from evasive arcana.

Arcana also provides the vital fury on attunement switch (we have no other source of fury outside zephyr’s boon, which only D/D sets can benefit from as the other weaponsets only have one aura on a long cd).

Most importantly, boon duration. With boon duration runes, switching to earth means about 7 seconds of protection. That’s just survivability you can’t live without, and the same applies for vigor on crits.

The ele also has no active defenses outside frost aura/shocking aura (made useless by stability) that are not cantrips.

Thief/mesmer active defenses are on their own weaponsets in addition to utilities, and thief/mesmer burst is done much more frequently and simply.

Frostedblaze.9017:

If I remember correctly, it used to have a shorter cooldown. However, the Earth storm is VERY strong. It basically got the entire spell nerfed.

It’s a well of darkness, except with a cast time. It’s not THAT strong.