Guild Wars 2

Not to mention that pets are easily kited. People just die because they want to stay inside a point and eat pet damage.

Pets are pretty ridiculous on classes with no in-combat mobility however like necromancer or warrior. As a necromancer you can’t outrun them most of the time.

This just show what a disgrace pets are. That duel with the thief would have probably been easier if you were just allowed to stow your pet.

That thief just used your pet on demand for cloak and dagger healing, and the pet rarely got to hit the thief since it became kitten everytime he stealthed and the time it took it to get and hit the thief the thief just kited it or went into stealth, leaving the pet dumbfounded again.

Cloak and dagger should not work on pets/minions, it’s just a ridiculous penalty to classes that rely on those mechanisms.

Also, axe damage was atrocious, you barely scratched that thief with the auto, and because he knew to dodge axe chill and always kept a distance so splitblade couldn’t land, the only thing you hit him with was throw torch, which he healed off with stealth.

I seriously question the effectiveness of axe/offhand vs. shortbow now that I’ve played so many tpvp games. The shortbow just sustains a lot more damage, and for how situational splitblade is and how generous the flanking arc is on shortbow, it’s really a matter of bringing an offhand to make up for that terrible axe mainhand sustained.

Also, ravens have a very large wind up on their attack animations, making them easy to kite. Dogs would have probably been better this duel, especially the wolf. Even jaguar would have worked because you can have him stealth when you are expecting the thief to go for a cloak and dagger.

Axe is worthless in PvE. You only take it for chill and splitblade in pvp plus offhand capacity.

Ricochet is absolutely terrible damage. I’d call it the lowest DPS auto in the game. Even when it bounces it does horrible damage.

Condition damage by itself is very weak. It’s when you bring classes that can stack it where it hurts.

Trapper rangers+ele or engi hurt a lot, because burning and bleeding will be up on you no matter what, as likely will poison.

Classes that need more ramp up and only have one strong damage condition like necro or mesmer suffer. Mesmer is random burning or bleeding, but since the nature is random and they cannot frontload the stacks consistently and with plenty of cover conditions like the ranger or engineer can, they suffer.

Also, condition mesmer is wholly lacking on the aoe department, and both the condition mesmer and necro suffer from inferior survival vs. engineer and ranger.

Too many classes also have heals hat remove conditions, particularly poison before he heal applies (rendering the condition obsolete in many cases).

Quite frankly I think only the ranger and necro should have condi cleanse on healing given their theme of condition application/manipulation (both can magnet conditions, etc).

Causic.3798:

The reason is so that people do not get pigeon-holed into playing a character how others feel is best and can play them how they want to. I don’t want someone telling “your build is bad noob, you should play this” and so I am all for not having dps meters.

So you are down for dragging down groups. In which case, who the hell would want you?

GROUPS.TEAMS. It’s not only your goals that are to be respected.

If you want to be deficient, be deficient while soloing. Don’t make other pay for your bad decisions.

And to anyone who didn’t think GW1 was elitist, get that head out of wherever you’ve stuck it in.

You try run DoA with some weird dervish build or inefficient class category, or fail to link your high Lightbringer rank abilities, and you’ll be kicked if some party accepted you without asking first. Guild Wars 1 PvE and PvP (HA) was among the most elitist environments and it didn’t have DPS meters.

Fenrir.3609:

Berzerker gear stats just need to be nerfed. Warrior and thief damage in pve needs to be brought in line with other classes — the problem is warriors and thieves burst and sustain too well and it makes boss fights extremely short.

Warriors are the lame duck in pvp, if you nerf their damage down in pve (which is pretty much all they have), then you are going to have to significantly buff their non burst specs first.

The damage split nerf comes for PvE. Done.

ArchonWing.9480:

The problem with PvE is that it is currently geared towards “DPS with enough defense to avoid death”. Sadly, any build that doesn’t fit into this mold will just feel lackluster and a waste of time.

So it’s pretty funny, since all manners of successful characters regardless of professions go for “DPS with enough defense to avoid death”. Naturally the classes that lend themselves to this sort of gameplay are easier to play.

But this is too much of a simplification. This is with the context of speedruns.

Thus to improve matters, no amount of class balancing will work until

— People get out of CoF1.

Now the naturally unimaginative and lazy option is to simply nerf that place, but it is stupid because then people will just go to the 2nd most profitable cash cow. So what we should do is give people a reason to go elsewhere. How? By making the time spent vs reward ratio up to par. You should be rewarded well in any difficult content, and still do ok elsewhere.

If you made champions drop much better than they do now, wouldn’t it be more appealing to go back to Orr events. But no, you and a zerg spend 2 minutes beating on a champion with your autoattack and they drop a blue. Thanks?

CoF p1 isn’t the only place that enables berzerker stacking. Pretty much every instance does, and for the harder ones you just throw one guardian in and the problem is solved.

Berzerker gear stats just need to be nerfed. Warrior and thief damage in pve needs to be brought in line with other classes — the problem is warriors and thieves burst and sustain too well and it makes boss fights extremely short.

I don’t think it’s intended that even certain harder bosses die in 4-6 minutes because of the raw damage warriors and thieves can frontload and sustain.

People will show the damage of rangers in a cof video but they won’t understand that the only reason it worked there is because the slave driver and other boss was burst down, with warrior banners and might/vulnerability stacking and thieves’ extreme sustain and burst.

You take a boss with higher HP or phases where he cannot be damaged, and the effectiveness of popping signet of the wild to burst a boss down goes away because after signet of the wild is used the ranger’s sustained and burst drops substantially and they can’t do it anymore for 42-60 seconds, whereas thieves and warriors keep their high sustained and their burst abilities are on much lower cd’s.

Same applies for necro lich form. You do great damage with the elite on, but after that it drops out and over long fights it averages out to much inferior total damage.

They disallowed DPS meters so that it’s harder for the playerbase and theorycrafters to gather data about performance.

This keeps current functions obscure to the playerbase so that when a developer makes a claim, it’s hard for players to refute or engage them.

It’s very clear from design decisions like not having a Public Test Realm that they take the feedback from the playerbase at large with a grain of salt.

Somoe.3621:

Zenith.7301:

Yup, it’s kind of amazing they justified the crap staff necro auto by saying it pierces, as if the crap damage it did was any good because it pierced non moving targets.

But, hey, no meaningful changes to necros or rangers.

Warriors in PvE got even MORE buffs.

I’ve literally NEVER understood how Necro’s can complain about Staff’s #1, even after playing the class myself. Necro Staff #1 pierces (unlike Guardian Scepter #1) without a trait (unlike Ranger LB #1) and is one of the best, if not the best, generators of Life Force. Necro Staff #2-4 are strong too because they give you 4 Marks to use which, when traited, are unblockable and have a huge radius.

Who gives a kitten about life force generation from necro auto? That’s what soul marks and spectral walk or dagger auto does, and much better.

We’re talking strictly about damage.

If necro staff auto cannot hit a target, it does not generate life force, period. And most classes you engage 1v1 will be able to just sidestep necrotic grasp. And in the case it does hit, you get some life force at the expense of horrible damage. On a full berserker amulet build necrotic grasp at best crit for 1.5k.

1.5k when my ranger longbow can crit 3k max ranger, and so can my ele fireball — which hits aoe.

You can melee with thief just fine. Just don’t charge into silver mobs surrounding you, because quite frankly only guardians and warriors live through that anyways.

Staff druid ranger.

Yup, it’s kind of amazing they justified the crap staff necro auto by saying it pierces, as if the crap damage it did was any good because it pierced non moving targets.

But, hey, no meaningful changes to necros or rangers.

Warriors in PvE got even MORE buffs.

hharry.1967:

StoneWolf.7930:

and the ele can be a better tank due to its mobility. where have a seen this before, you guys need to adapt like the ranger has.

Also, tell me how a ranger is better than an ele when the ele can decide when are where the fight happens?

How is a ranger more powerful than a mesmer?
How is a ranger more powerful than a necro?

Rangers can outbunker any bunker spec in game, while dealing balanced damage (the damage of a non bunker, balanced spec).
In the other hand, mesmers can survive like another class specced into semi bunker, while still being glass cannon, due to their high amount of invuls, stealth and CC. Both op imo

Bunker is not just the ability to take damage.

A ranger will never be a better bunker than a guardian because he has nowhere the amount of CC a guardian has or the team utility. Guardian aoe stability alone plus sanctuary guarantees them a spot on a team.

A guardian can control a point much better than any other class in the game.

How do you live through D/P thieves? I tried dagger necro and I simply need team peels to stay alive when I choose to go melee range.

People don’t reply because it’s a dev response you’re looking for. Technology limitations most likely.

Sword damage isn’t too low — dagger burst is just kitten compared to sword cleave. As long as backstab continues to take off half of people’s HP bars outside bunkers you won’t see thieves taking any swords where they actually have to work more for a kill.

It’s the same deal with pistol/pistol vs. shortbow. P/P/ is fine in itself, but shortbow is so much better thanks to cluster and infiltrator cheese.

Broken setups always have players wanting their other setups to be as broken strong. Similar to eles complaining about why can’t their utilities be more like cantrips when cantrips need to be nerfed instead of bringing the other utilities to that level.

Bunker eles were barely scratched by this nerf. Only the mist form healing really touched them, and now they need to space out their cantrip use to not trigger the ICD.

The ones who suffered are burst eles that relied on that heal in mist form to come out and keep momentum.

Or in which fractal 48 can he run that setup with any form of success.

scanz.4536:

Furajir.3815:

What are you guys talking about? It’s just a SKIN, aesthetic only, there aren’t going to be any stats, Anet isn’t gonna put a BP w/ ascended stats in the gemstore for purchase.

You’re missing the point. Not sure why anyone would get an ascended quiver for the stats, they can be obtained for much cheaper via other options. Most will have a quiver for aesthetic reasons and until now the only way to do so was to invest a lot of time and effort into it. However, now you’ll just be able to buy one off the gem store.

You trade one grind for the other. In the time it takes you to grind 1850 fractal relics and gotten lucky for the rng drop vials you could have farmed the gold doing something much more profitable than fractals (which are one of the most time inefficient earning methods).

I just wish I could dodge doing the chain. Like they would implement the ability to cancel the animation by dodging or using serpent/stalker strike.

Mirta.5029:

Ridley.3691:

Ah, well, I’m guessing you wouldn’t be running 8 dungeons everyday, I’d certainly consider that farming if you were, since you’d be running them much more often than the average player.

that’s 8 dungeons trough out 2 days
now farming dungeons in elite farming groups normally include 20 or so runs a day at least (look at LFGs for CoF), I just mostly tag along if a guildie needs help

Zenith.7301:

Assuming you get one charged lodestone per daily run of CoE, which doesn’t even happen most of the time, it would take you 100 days to get enough.

And this doesn’t include the 400-700g precursors. Let’s say per week you make about 15-20g playing without farming. That’s 20-35 weeks if you earn 20g a week, or 27-47 weeks at 15g a week.

That doesn’t include the 500 ectos you need either, or the completely random nature of t6 materials, where you’re lucky to get a couple of one type a day.

So you’re looking about 7 months or more of playing to get close to a legendary.

And that’s 7 months you played to get your legendary, while the random guy got a precursor drop and cut that time to about 2-3 months instead with the amount of money from selling a precursor.

Or the guy who farmed cof for about 7-10g an hour. Or the guy who played TP and got a precursor in 1-2 months.

oh gee, you understood my point that legendaries are time consuming and do take a while to get (hence, legendary).
Playing TP is risky and requires lots of knowledge about the economy and good skills at predicting stuff. That’s why almost no one can do it. The same way that buying shares is not considered cheating in real life.

That is such a pile of crap. I got my legendary via TP trading — it’s not hard. My guildie got 2 precursor drops that entirely funded his legendary.

Legendaries are not legendaries because they take long to get — something is legendary when it is an extraordinary feat, and grinds are not extraordinary feats.

Thieves are better in WvW because they can disengage better from zerg groups. A ranger while being 1v1 king in BM bunker is not very good at running away from groups.

LB rangers provide nothing a staff ele can’t do better.

Compare them in formats:

Open world Pve: Ranger. Pets is helpful and can tank mobs.

Dungeons: Thief. Shadow refuge, projectile destruction, highest single target DPS and second best aoe cleave DPS after warrior. The best spammable combo blaster in game with great aoe damage on shortbow. Ranger brings no valuable utility to a group besides healing spring and frost spirit (which you need to at least put 20 trait points into nature magic for, decreasing your value to a group as your DPS suffers).

WvW: Thief. Effective roamer, with plenty of escape mechanisms. Good in group fights with shortbow and Dagger Storm. Ranger’s pet dies in wvw immediately so a third of your damage is usually gone or can’t path to opponents from a tower.

SPVP: Ranger. Thief is great for 1v1 except against bunkers. Thief is too squishy for team fights in small spvp environments and loses value, whereas BM bunker and trapper rangers are very valuable and strong in tournie teams.

Mirta.5029:

This game has stated at the beginning that it is against all means of farming. It was designed in a way to not allow anyone to farm. You don’t need to farm to gain levels, to gain gear or to gain money. It’s not the game that’s farm inducing, it’s your view on it that’s wrong.
A legendary and other lots of material requiring weapons are supposed to be gotten over a really long period of time. I just ran CoE. Got lucky and 2 bottles of T6 blood dropped. An exotic that I salvaged and sold dropped. If I was collecting the blood I would use the money from the exotic that dropped to buy more of it. I would also sell other T6 mats that I have collected while running dungeons and fractals and buy more blood. See? Easy material management. You don’t need to farm for them

Assuming you get one charged lodestone per daily run of CoE, which doesn’t even happen most of the time, it would take you 100 days to get enough.

And this doesn’t include the 400-700g precursors. Let’s say per week you make about 15-20g playing without farming. That’s 20-35 weeks if you earn 20g a week, or 27-47 weeks at 15g a week.

That doesn’t include the 500 ectos you need either, or the completely random nature of t6 materials, where you’re lucky to get a couple of one type a day.

So you’re looking about 7 months or more of playing to get close to a legendary.

And that’s 7 months you played to get your legendary, while the random guy got a precursor drop and cut that time to about 2-3 months instead with the amount of money from selling a precursor.

Or the guy who farmed cof for about 7-10g an hour. Or the guy who played TP and got a precursor in 1-2 months.

This game does not reward people who play different aspects of the game. It rewards the lucky and those who spend time farming or playing the market.

Daecollo.9578:

Zenith.7301:

They buffed pet’s survivability? By what, increasing their hp pools to 15k hp? The only pet that got survival increases were drake with doubled hp and bear with more armor — neither of those are used in pvp.

Some pets got a 300-400-700 toughness increase.

Not the raven or jaguar, which are the DPS pets rangers take.

Nobody uses bears or drakes in pvp. Or pigs.

Whine away on your warrior, though. Given how much attention you consistently get on patches, it’s a matter of time before warriors get to have full uptime while keeping thief burst levels of damage on plate armor and about 6-7k more health.

At least thief dagger is single target.

Hanzo.9624:

I’ve been playing around with a bursty bleed build focused on maintaining constant bleed stacks when pressured. It seems like the hardest part about fighting d/p thieves is being able to continue attacking while defending and not being stuck just defending when the thief starts pressuring you hardcore. I kite as much as possible, try to dodge or DS when I expect backstab. It’s pretty easy predicting thieves movements with greater marks. I use golem all the time for every build because the cripple and knockdown are just too good. I can get a fairly consistent 15-18 stacks of bleeding going in a little bit longer than the knockdown lasts for and that puts a lot of pressure on them. Epidemic on 15 sec cool down eats the 3 min thieves guild. Plus using all aoe bleeds you can epidemic off one of the thieves guild thieves to double up conditions on the player. Do NOT save epidemic for that clutch moment. The cool down is short and using it even when the target has just poison, cripple and 5 stacks of bleeding nets you way more damage than not using it. Just DS#2 into epidemic gives you 3 stacks of bleeding and chill aoe. Not bad.

I always use flesh worm too. There’s a LOT of places where you can teleport up levels to advantageous positions. Throw it down anywhere you’re hanging around. Don’t worry about wasting it or you’ll never use it. Let it sit there and do its thing. It’ll be constantly tracking and applying poison with a decent—albeit slow—attack. It gives you 10% life force with an aoe poison on teleport. My main strategy against everyone in this build is to stack bleeds as fast as I can, chain fears plus golem knockdown when they go to heal/cleanse for more damage uptime, and use flesh worm port when they setup their burst. Generally that will put me someplace they can’t access quickly and will allow me to keep applying consistent bleed damage. When they make it up to me I’ll try and keep them feared off and crippled before running away to kite and then if needed repositioning flesh worm. Have had really no problems vs any class as a necro except when i play glass cannon builds.

It’s the case for every glass cannon except mesmer because thieves can use their burst (backstab) much more often than other classes can use defensive cooldowns, and their stealth spam allows them to control burst attempts.

This is why tanky condition builds do so well, because you can live through one backstab sequence and they can’t kite your damage. Even 4-5 bleed stacks on a rabid amulet will eat up about 1/3 of the thief’s health by itself. If you get it to tick as 7-9 for more than a few seconds and land a terror fear the thief pretty much loses all his momentum and needs to run away or die.

I’m pretty convinced you can’t win as a berk necro (or any non-mesmer/thief berserker class for that matter, maybe warrior) against a good thief. Their backstab takes too much away from your health to recover and you can’t tank heartseekers. He can kite your daggers with shortbow, and a power based staff does no damage so he’ll have little pressure on him when he disengages.

You need to be a tanky conditionmancer to have a fighting chance. Backstab and stealth spam is just too kitten against specs without teleports/invulnerabilities and no healing.

What’s more, I ran conditionmancer with well of darkness, well of corruption, and spectral walk, along with plague. Strictly a team build without specialized 1v1 utilities (in a 1v1 golem and blood fiend offer better total health return and damage/control since thief doesn’t do much in conditions).

So you’ll need a build that works in teams and with utilities for a team fight. I know many necros will run signet of undeath, but I won’t do that. Well of Darkness is too valuable for me to drop for the signet.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Zenith.7301:

Yeah, now do this outside cof p1.

Make a molten facility video where you pull this DPS not only on one mob, but several like the warrior can cleave.

The ideal is not always the practical.

I just tried this build in Molten Facility and you’ll get bounced around when your stability from signet is on cooldown, your cat and canines will die pretty quick and are useless particularly in the last boss fights with all the aoe fields (in that case you have to use moas or drakes), and the damage is quite frankly wanting when you don’t have easy might stacking like you can get in cof p1.

This build won’t even work in fractal 48+ as mobs there pretty much hit like a boss unit regularly and your pet can’t dodge so they’ll die pretty quickly if agony doesn’t get them first.

Seems like you’ve got several distinct problems here and I’m not convinced all of them are the ranger’s fault.

1) Getting knocked down by mobs is a problem for every class, even the guardian, who gets tons of AOE stability.

2) Warriors won’t deal any damage either if the group isn’t stacking might properly. At the very least, though, rangers stack fury very easily, which is much harder to get in general.

3) I just ran Molten Facility earlier today on my ranger and had no problem with using my pet to DPS down the end bosses. Even my spirit was just fine, just make sure you recall your pet if it starts taking damage from fire fields.

4) The difference in cleave ability really isn’t that different between warrior and ranger. Don’t forget that rangers still cleave with their swords, it’s only the pet that doesn’t cleave. Between Frost Spirit (which won’t die to normal mobs) and the group fury you’re probably providing, you’re still cleaving multiple mobs for more damage with your ranger than you would be with a warrior.

1) Getting knocked around means the ability to frontload daamge is important, which rangers can’t do because unlike thief backstab or warrior mainhand axe they can’t deliver huge chunkes of damage in between moments of not being on melee. Their damage is strictly from the auto, which is sustained damage.

2)This is an outright lie. Warriors by themselves without might stacking at the very least still land minimums of 11k 100b and their axe autos are critting for 3-4k without might stacking in berserker gear.

3) Videos, please. I’d love to see that mythical scenario where your jaguar isn’t dying quickly to aoe and your spirit isn’t getting targeted by the meteors. My guess is you actually went with drake, in which case you just dropped your pet DPS contribution considerably, while the other non-pet classes didn’t have to make a DPS sacrifice based on crappy ai.

4) This is what makes you lose any credibility for me. If 100b and whirlwind attack cleaves you consider to be comparable with ranger mainhand sword auto spam, I just don’t trust anything you say hereon without evidence.

spvp has more condition builds running around, especially trap rangers and engineers.

Try running a no toughness build vs. thieves or mesmers and see where that gets you. You won’t last too long.

You’ve got 3 skills that grant condition removal/transfer on a necromancer. You have no skills outside going death shroud that protect against direct damage.

The necro weakness is to direct damage trains and their kittenty weak healing. Toughness will help.

Dagger 2 in particular is a big offender. It gets cancelled all the times by people moving to the side.

The skill has also a slow activation time.

Using a ranged pet is useless when you are a melee ranger because when aoe lands on them you just can’t f3 them back to you.

Blood fiend’s attacks heal for about 900 a pop. Against classes that don’t use much conditions like thieves or warriors, fiend is actually better.

You trade some burst healing for sustained power. Granted, minions are crap in team fights.

Static discharge is a projectile and easily avoided. Mug is an instant teleport that pretty much connects with little time to dodge it unless you are clairvoyant.

Mug, unlike static discharge, gives you a fear that is better than the necro’s own fear, or a daze, or a healing tree with condition removal. You get the point.

Engineer also doesn’t get to take out half of someone’s health with 3 button presses either, and he can’t spam a skill that hits targets at half health for over 3k about 4 times.

Engineer doesn’t get to drop people’s target and repeat that obscene burst. Engineer can’t abuse ledges with infiltrator arrow. Engineer can’t run away like a thief can.

Other classes actually have to bust several cooldowns to do any burst, and it has ramp up. The thief only needs to heartseeker through a black powder.

Yeah, now do this outside cof p1.

Make a molten facility video where you pull this DPS not only on one mob, but several like the warrior can cleave.

The ideal is not always the practical.

I just tried this build in Molten Facility and you’ll get bounced around when your stability from signet is on cooldown, your cat and canines will die pretty quick and are useless particularly in the last boss fights with all the aoe fields (in that case you have to use moas or drakes), and the damage is quite frankly wanting when you don’t have easy might stacking like you can get in cof p1.

This build won’t even work in fractal 48+ as mobs there pretty much hit like a boss unit regularly and your pet can’t dodge so they’ll die pretty quickly if agony doesn’t get them first.

It’s a known issue with bows and necro staff projectiles.

Pistols and rifles and mesmer greatsword do not have this issue. Engineer pistol has this issue on the poison volley skill.

Which is pointless, because the idea is that you can use cats to begin with.

Bear does less damage than a condi spec’s burning tick. It’s that bad.

And when ranger are hitting autos for half the damage of other classes’ autos, then the kitten pet better be compensating for that. And the only pets that compensate for that are cats.

Death shroud you use for spike absorption, the fear, and maybe chasing with dark pact.

If you’re a power build, your life blast might hit hard but in that case your dagger auto hits harder.

You go into SR for the stability trait mainly or the half DS cd trait. No other reason to go into it.

Started practicing and it’s really down to avoiding/delaying the backstabs. As soon as they heartseeker through it you just lay marks and start circle strafing and dodging every few seconds.

Well of Darkness is really key here, because if they heartseek through BP, you lay down that well and they can’t come in and backstab you while you move in it.

This is as a conditionmancer with 1800 toughness. I would say this fight cannot be won by any berserker character if the thief doesn’t mess up, especially if they bring out thieves guild elite.

Power builds simply don’t do well against these thieves because they can deny your burst attempts with stealth target dropping and blind.

Also, even with 1800+ toughness the backstab thief took down nearly half of my health in one backstab and it was just a matter of meleeing me to 10k hp and finish me off with HS spam — heartseeker is pretty stupid damage beyond 50% hp so as a dagger necro you can’t even turn around and retaliate after a backstab because they’ll 2-shot you with 2 heartseekers after mug backstab while you won’t kill them in even 3 autoattack chains with dagger.

As dagger they’ll also switch to bow and just snipe you down until steal is back up.

Having Reaper’s Defense trait up is critical from my tests. If I did not have that trait fearing the thief every time he feared me, I would have lost every single match.

It’s too bad thieves have such immediate extreme burst that makes them hardcounter any class that doesn’t stack toughness. It means if you’re solo queing and don’t want to be farmed by thieves you better spec bunkerish conditions or play another thief/mesmer and outplay them.

I’m doing much better as condi rabid spec tbh. At least I don’t lose half my health in one backstab, and I don’t get kited and my staff marks actually do some damage.

Half the time my fear fails anyways so I can’t rely on it.

Is there any build that deals with these? As dagger powermancer I’m dead on arrival. Half my health goes in a backstab, can’t melee them due to Black Powder, they dodge the marks and then you can’t kite them.

They mess up, and they just shadow refuge and come back again for a second try. Lich form doesn’t work against them because they just dagger storm.

Necro axe is terrible, why are you bringing necro axe up? Its autoattack is among the worst in the game after Ricochet.

I think you may have meant necro dagger. And necro dagger is melee and doesn’t cleave like other melee weapons.

Skyro.3108:

Kravick.4906:

Bhawb.7408:

Actually yes, I believe it has been posted at least on the Mesmer forums.

That thread was complaining about condition damage in general, which mesmers have a weakness against. Funny thing is, engineers do condition damage better, so when they mention necromancers specifically, I kinda laugh.

There is many differences between condi Engis and condi Necros and both have their advantages and disadvantages. If you’re talking about raw condi DPS on a single stationary target yes, condi Engis do more DPS. But Engis also have to fight at closer ranges and are not as strong in terms of AoE condi application so they should be stronger single target. Condi Engi’s also generally lack CC and have no boon removal. There are a ton of differences between the classes honestly, I could go on and on.

But at the end of the day a good condi Necro or Engi would both give a glass cannon shatter Mesmer a good fight. And this is coming from a person who mains Necro and Mes and played a bit of Engi as well.

To the OP: If you like Necro playstyle I suggest you stick with it. It is obvious you have just started to play the class. Research builds and spectate top players. Contrary to popular opinion Necros are not UP. Top teams do runs Necros.

Engis lack CC? What the hell are frost grenades and their net turrets from supply crate then? They have short cd aoe blinds and frost, aoe poison, and to say they have no aoe condition is disingenuous given that they apply aoe poison, aoe bleeding, and proc burning from their grenades.

The only time necro has higher aoe condi is with an epidemic, which is on cd and can be cleansed unlike the engineer who can maintain sustained aoe application.

And engi grenades even in condi spec far out damage mark damage in the direct damage portion. They also have elixir S and their shields for way better survival, and their healing skills are MUCH better than ours.

The only thing necromancers have that engis don’t is boon removal, at the cost of a utility slot on 30+ sec cd’s.

Do you actually play PvE? Condition builds are a nonstarter — they deal significantly less damage to berserker gear.

This is why this game needs DPS meters, so people can’t claim ignorance as cover.

People in tpvp routinely dodge my marks as well, and not because I set them prior. I mean they see my animation and start dodging because they know outside marks staff auto is terrible damage and won’t hit them if they sidestep at larger distances.

Also, I don’t know how he’s teleporting to them, because Dark Path is such a slow projectile that’s ridiculously easy to dodge, and you can even kite it for a bit with swiftness on.

Basically, you come up against an engineer or any other class with strong power based ranged weapons will kick the stuffing out of you. Simply because staff auto is soooo bad.

Please look at ranger’s Ricochet (mainhand axe) auto as well. Its damage is outright horrendous.

Necro staff deserves similar treatment. Necros and guardians have very weak ranged autoattacks.

Necro is considerably less fun since it’s such a crappy 1v1 class.

Everything is dramatic in a speed clear. That’s why it’s called a speed clear.

A usual 20-30 min run without the SC setup vs. 6 minutes could also not be deemed dramatic, since for some people at 30 min time investment is not that big of a deal.

Power necro is good against noobs.

Once people realize staff damage is terrible and they can just range you down, you’ll die to a lot of engineers and thieves and even some warriors who know better than to walk into your little well+dagger1 spam melee zone.

That is, if you don’t have Lich form up. Obviously Lich Form should let you win any 1v1 unless they run away and reset, which many engineers and thieves and rangers and guardians and pretty much anybody can do because running away from a necro is very easy. Lich Form itself has very poor chasing potential.

In tpvp you can do a lot of damage because people HAVE to stand on points (and thus eat some of your well damage). That’s not the case for wvw where walking out of wells have no negative consequence for the outcome.

On the other hand, bear does less DPS than an engineer’s burning tick, so…..pointless test

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Zenith.7301:

Have you compared it against greatsword? I’ve been doing some testing on berserker gear since greatsword gets better the higher your power and crit damage relative to other weapons. Its auto is subpar baseline so it needs a lot of compensation from how stats stack with it+Maul.

Common misconception. The only thing that differentiates weapons is their base damage output and any relevant traits, and whether they’re 1h or 2h. Greatsword does NOT scale better with power than any other weapon in terms of direct DPS. If you double your power, you double your damage. That’s true for any weapon since the damage formula is [weapon strength] x [power] x [skill coefficient] / [armor].

In terms of overall DPS, the greatsword is okay but it’s pretty far behind the Sword. It will always be about 20% less DPS than sword no matter what, even with the +5% greatsword damage trait. That means that if you’re dealing 5.3k before banners and spirit, you’ll get about 4.2k on GS. This actually isn’t as bad as it sounds since your pet’s DPS needs to be factored in too, so you’re looking 7k vs. 8.1k, which is about 14% less. I would still recommend the 1h sword if you can manage it but GS is also a viable option if the root is getting you killed in harder content.

Here are my numbers for calculations, as promised:

Power = 1095 from gear + 120 from ruby orbs + 100 from traits + 875 from might = 2190 power = *239% base damage*
Precision = 728 from gear + 300 + traits + 84 from orbs + 70 from food = +1182 precision = +56% crit chance

Crit chance = 4% base + 56% from precision + 5% from Sigil of Accuracy 20% from fury = 85% crit chance
Crit damage = 50% base + 62% from gear + 12% from orbs + 30% from traits + 10% from food = +154%
Crit modifier = [crit chance] x [crit damage] = *140%*

Other boosts = 10% from Steady Focus + 10% from Hunter’s Tacts + 5% from Bountiful Hunting + 5% from Sigil of Force + 10% from mob-specific potion + 25% from vulnerability = *58.4%*

Damage: 202, 202, 235 over 1.8s = 355 base damage per second, multiply by all of the above and you get 5296 total.

I use the greatsword because of the projectile block and burst. Sustained against a single target the sword might seem nice, but in cof for example autoattacking acolytes will take longer than just walloping one for a 6k crit Maul.

Same principle applies in grawl shaman fractal 48+. Those elementals need to die FAST.

I do adore the playstyle of the mainhand sword, but I find that in general the greatsword gives me greater applications in many circumstances.