Guild Wars 2

You do not have the highest power, because you do not have good boon uptime. Warriors and hgh engineers can maintain easily 15+ might stacks which will bring their effective power in berserker gear over your total power.

More importantly, that power and condi damage from might stacks will affect ALL of their damage and not just 60% of it since your pet gets nothing from your traits or gear.

Jumper.9482:

Zenith.7301:

Arganthium.5638:

ensoriki.5789:

Arganthium.5638:

@OP: If you think Necros don’t have stability/stunbreakers, roll at thief. ’Nuff said.

While we lack stability.
I switched from my Sword thief to a warrior for a change of pace.
It was like night and day.
Hell even when rolling daggers it doesn’t feel the same since Shadowste kitten o good.
Thieves if anything aren’t lacking stunbreakers (except for Hard to catch not being 1 wtf).

That’s only if you run a sword build. You might as well say that necros have plenty of stability via SR XI.

If you’re going to bring up traits, you can go acrobatics and get a free shadow step out of cc, or you can slot in shadow step as a utility (if you think it’s so bad, I’ll trade you spectral walk or armor for it — at least shadowstep gets you out of the burst zone).

Necro is far more susceptible to being trained than thief is. Thief mobility cannot be compared to necro, and quite frankly meatshields with crap recovery options don’t work in this game. Playing a warrior should tell you that much that higher hp is always inferior to avoidance skills, especially in a game where the classes with said high HP have the worst healing capacity.

Because the tradeoff is that Necros do about 2x more dps than Thieves and bring more utility. Oh did I mention they have about 2x more hp as well?

Hahahahahahahahahahahaha, 2x more DPS keep dreaming.

The problem with thief is that in team fights he gets shot down if he doesn’t stay shortbow.

I’m not saying thieves are great. I’m saying that if I choose to solo queue, I sure as hell will have more fun on my thief than I would a necro. Yes, it’s moot since I could just switch to my ele or mesmer.

But know what? I have countless hours on ele main in pve so I’m pretty sick of the class and would like to play something else in pvp that I can solo queue into a free tourney with and have a relative good time.

It’s just lame that I can play an ele (s/d or d/d), a shatter mesmer, an hgh engi, a bm bunker ranger, a guardian of any sort, or a thief. But if I want to play a necro, I have to have a team babysit me, and the warrior is in a similar dilemma.

Self-sufficiency is a premium that I think I’m entitled to complain about, because ultimately I play the game for fun and as a necromancer having that fun tied to having others around to help you function is not a good thing.

Arganthium.5638:

ensoriki.5789:

Arganthium.5638:

@OP: If you think Necros don’t have stability/stunbreakers, roll at thief. ’Nuff said.

While we lack stability.
I switched from my Sword thief to a warrior for a change of pace.
It was like night and day.
Hell even when rolling daggers it doesn’t feel the same since Shadowste kitten o good.
Thieves if anything aren’t lacking stunbreakers (except for Hard to catch not being 1 wtf).

That’s only if you run a sword build. You might as well say that necros have plenty of stability via SR XI.

If you’re going to bring up traits, you can go acrobatics and get a free shadow step out of cc, or you can slot in shadow step as a utility (if you think it’s so bad, I’ll trade you spectral walk or armor for it — at least shadowstep gets you out of the burst zone).

Necro is far more susceptible to being trained than thief is. Thief mobility cannot be compared to necro, and quite frankly meatshields with crap recovery options don’t work in this game. Playing a warrior should tell you that much that higher hp is always inferior to avoidance skills, especially in a game where the classes with said high HP have the worst healing capacity.

There is not a single game as a necro where you won’t be trained by smart opponents. It’s too easy to train a necro and his only counter is abusing terrain and having a teammate peel off him.

I understand the necro is a team player at the moment, but that sucks for solo queue where you don’t get the luxury very often of people peeling for you and letting you do your stuff with wells and daggers.

DrLane.5248:

that was you on temple ?

Tapss

Yes I hate you all. Buff my necro, I don’t want to hump guardians all day for stability.

Playing an ele or mesmer you are flexible for teamfighting or roaming. If I play a necro I have to have someone babysit me in teamfights because spectral walk/armor are garbage and I got no lightning flash/mist form.

Writetyper.1985:

I heard that CC diminishes in returns if you dodge or use stunbreaks by a huge factor of 100%

I heard necros only get 2 dodges and no vigor.

Or more access to stability needs to be given to classes like necro. Just came out of a game where I would get stunlocked by 2 eles while a dragon tooth is dropped on me and phoenix and arcane utilities. Guaranteed death, and that combo was much readily available than a 60 sec cd stunbreak was available.

A game with eles or engineers around is just ridiculously unenjoyable to play.

Some classes like the necromancer are just too easy to train, while classes like mesmer and ele have plenty of outs from getting zerged. It’s just not a fun experience when you’re not a class with many immunities/teleports in this game.

P.S. I’m aware this absurd amount of CC is needed to break OP bunkers like guardians and to a lesser extent ele, but I’d rather they just nerf the amount of blocks and access to protection/stability guardians get instead.

They just need to make marksman 30 major baseline for ranger signets and have the signets affect both the ranger and pet. As a replacement the new final trait could increase the duration of signet effects or make it so passives are not lost when signets are activated like the elementalist written in stone trait.

This conversation seems pretty moot given sotg showed devs discussing raising thieves’ base damage numbers. If that happens it will easily be no contests.

I really don’t mind thieves being the top DPS class for the risk they take in playing — eles should follow them behind because the class with 13k hp in berserker should do more damage than the one with 15-17k base hp.

What I do hope is that this game will move to value more things in encounters than how quickly you can burst bosses down. Support/tankier builds are pretty much useless at the moment, as are condition builds.

Reduce the cooldowns of SoTW and SoS and SoR to 50-60 seconds.

Pitting solo or split group queues against full guild groups is just horrible. You don’t get the luxury of a full team all the time, so it would be nice if you could be queued against people in the same situation.

Might as well just gift a full guild group the victory chest from the getgo if you’re going to pit them against PuGs.

Not to mention that they said they were going to buff thief base numbers, and thieves are already one of the best DPS classes in a coordinated group.

They’ve addressed nothing of pet scaling with ascended gear stats or the difference in terms of berserker stats allowing players 110% crit dmg bonus but not to pets.

Faux Sheaux.6179:

They did that before to nerf the ranger. They know that it’s not working, so they are fixing it.

Seriously guy, just watch the video. They actually tell you what they are changing for the spirits. Everything you’ve brought up as issues with spirits were addressed in less than a minute of them talking.

They said nothing of the effect recharge, which is the issue of the spirits, not the proc chance.

And I watched the sotg so you’ll have to link the exact part where they address proc durations, because I heard nothing of the sort about doubling the durations of the effects. All I heard for spirits was the proc trait, and increased health.

Because they did something blatantly stupid by putting 10 seconds effect recharge as a blanket change to spirits when the value of a swiftness or burning proc is different to a prot proc?

Boneheaded nerfs in beta were what got rangers in such a weak state, and the same applies to necromancers.

Frost Spirit has no effect recharge. It’s a bug and expect it to be returned to an even crappier state at any point.

Make it a wvw/spvp split if you want. But not letting you heal during mist form in pve is pretty bad, especially when the format has so many ranged mobs that can hit for 3-6k damage, mist form merely delays your going down if you can’t heal it up.

Mist form also had the utility with ether renewal for PvE D/D eles to allow them to more safely heal in melee range.

Welcome our pistol/dagger overlords once they buff thief survival. As if pistol/dagger thieves weren’t bad enough already.

Any spec that is concerned with maximizing damage will have high crit anyways, unless it’s a condition build and then neither are conditions affected by % damage modifiers like vulnerability.

And if you’re running a condition build, chances are traps will be much more useful to your group for exploiting more fields and controlling targets.

They need to halve the effect recharge, or they need to buff the effects the spirits give to merit the outrageous recharges.

Aridia.3042:

Bailey.6892:

Aridia.3042:

Chopps.5047:

I am sad about retaliation though because it’s something you have to be aware of. I feel great when I notice retaliation and say “NOPE NOT ATTACKING”. Don’t you? That’s a skill thing, I think. I wonder exactly why it is being nerfed, Xsorsus?

You’re on Tier 1, you should full well know why it’s being nerfed.

Every large fight starts out with the enemy casting veil, stacks of confusion on you, and the 20+ enemies from the back with no conditions rushing in to bowl over the people in the front that are on a timeout because there’s no way to cleanse immediately from having multiple stacks of conditions on them. It basically is kill yourself or sit there and be killed.

It has nothing to do with not attacking when you’re affected, that’s only applicable in 1 v 1, especially confusion even damages you when you have buffs that are procured from dodging. Like protection on roll. Confusion in mass pvp is OP and cheesy as hell, and it’s about time it got nerfed.

Going to T2 tonight and I have to disagree, confusion and retal should not have been nerfed. And as a human ranger I do not even have access to confusion. Also screws some of the anti theif warrior builds. Over all it is a poorly thought (assuming they do) plan.

You can disagree all you want. But I don’t know what else to call it aside from OP when even dodging will get you killed. No skill should mass CC like that. PVE/sPVP/WvW are different games. They need to be balanced differently and confusion was ridiculous in the hands of a zerg. There’s a reason why it was nerfed in spvp long ago. Anet was just being stubborn and not see WvW as a real game and balance it accordingly. Up until this April patch, they still counted WvW as part of PVE and refuse to nerf it because they’re afraid it’ll render it useless in PVE, that is, until they finally decided that skill splits is the only choice left in balancing.

I’m not in a T1 server and it’s the same. Large scale, retalitation alone will take out 40% of your HP in one barrage and there’s nothing you can do about it because most wvw groups are 15+ people, and more often than not 40+ people all running with combo field triggers.

It’s very easy to say people can stop attacking when they have confusion on them because they’re in a duel/spvp situation, but once the fight gets beyond 10+ people you don’t have the luxury of standing still for a few seconds while 4-5 people are tunneling damage into you.

You either kill them faster than they kill you, or you lose. It’s that simple.

I’m very glad for these confusion changes even though I have an engineer and a mesmer because the fact is one single condition wildly outperforming others like burning and bleeds in a game format was absurd.

There’s only so many condition clears you get in a groupfight, and a 7 second CC (because you get yourself spiked for 2-3k ticks if you do attack) is just not reasonable.

Using guard completely shuts down your pet by leashing it to an area. It’s not close to a proper response to survivability, especially when wells and null fields are thrown around all over.

Ursan.7846:

Zenith.7301:

Also, Jon, have you considered, pretty please, letting us tame green moas? It would look great for sylvari.

I second this! I’m assuming you mean plant moas, not green moas? Like in the vein of sylvan hounds.

Plant moas would be nice, but if it’s a practical concerns green moas that look like macaws currently in the sylvari starting area are good enough to hold me off on additional plant pets

Aggro priority is obviously about dungeon mobs. And the reason a pet is different from a player in surviving zergs, is because there’s this thing called melee on the ranger.

If I go into a zerg as a ranger with my greatsword, I will live longer than my pet. Period. And f3 or a ranged pet won’t make a difference, because the pet still follows you within the attack range of the zerg.

The same applies for dungeons.

The guardian cannot survive those hits, but he can switch to a ranged weapon and the damage is concentrated 100% on him. The guardian’s scepter actually outdamages his melee mace.

Ranged pets, however, are garbage. They do not cleave or aoe, their projectiles are slow, and spiders in particular do absolutely horrendous damage.

The only way you will be matching a warrior in output as a ranger is by bringing a jaguar. Anything less and you’re just an inferior damage choice in dungeons, so if the jaguar can’t stay alive, you are a deficient class to take in comparison.

Stop being toxic idiots. One may not be happy at how they’re handling the ranger, but THIS IS A GOOD THING.

I’m glad they’re paying attention to skin redundancy, and I approve of the change, except I wish the head didn’t lose it’s little peripheral hairs around the end of the head, but the idea of a glowing jellyfish is quite nice.

More distinctive pets is always nice.

Also, Jon, have you considered, pretty please, letting us tame green moas? It would look great for sylvari.

The proc chance for spirits won’t be made 75%. The trait that increase proc chance is increased to add up to that amount.

So not only will you have to waste a trait to get a better proc time, but they have not changed storm spirit where swiftness buff is worthless to sacrifice a utility for when there are classes that can grant group swiftness on their weapons.

Moreover, due to the internal cooldowns of spirits at 10 seconds, it changes nothing. The effects given by the spirits will still be garbage to merit a 10 sec internal cd. They will continue to be crappy, killable banners. The frost spirit even at a 70% proc chance and with the bug of no internal cd translates to a 7% damage buff for the group — it’s just too marginal a benefit compared to what other classes bring to a group.

Increasing pet toughnessvitality will also change nothing in dungeons and zergs. Guardians in fractal 48 with over 2k toughness still lose half their health to mobs.

They need to remove that ridiculous 45 sec cd on pet death and simply make pets resilient to aoe and be below aggro priority to players.

Pet stats also need to be rebalanced. Nobody uses moas or pigs or spiders over other much superior pets, because the damage difference is vast while the support utility they trade damage for is pretty weak.

Mesmer Time Warp is group wide. It needed no compensation because it was stupidly strong, and I say this as someone who has a mesmer. Time Warp was too good and it was just a matter of time before it got nerfed.

Sebrent.3625:

The food +regen doesn’t stack with vigor. If you read about endurance regeneration, it is capped at +100% which is what vigor gives it.

You say you don’t need to dodge the pet but you also say they need to dodge the dog’s knockdown. Interesting here is that this could be 1 to 3 knockdowns you try to dodge depending on if a hyena is used and if pet swap is used quickly after the first knockdown attempt.

Your examples display a ranger that is too stubborn to swap out of greatsword when they need to and wastes cooldowns.

I’m not aware of many good rangers that try to melee a thief at the beginning of a fight when they have good ranged options to choose from.

Lastly, 2k and 3k when you’re also evading over 50% of the time is quite good. No, it’s not the 8k+ we see from glass cannons, but you can take more damage than a glass cannon. You also have a pet whom, if you use it correctly in tandem with your ranger, will be landing several hits. Take a look at some of the higher levels of play with Rangers and you’ll see several ways this is accomplished.

Do you read? I said people with access to permavigor or the stew (because classes like necro don’t have access to vigor, and if you don’t trait in wilderness survival as a ranger you don’t either, so you use the regen food).

What’s so hard to distinguish about ignoring the general impact of a pet and a knockdown leap from said pet on a cooldown? Once you dodge the pet leap you have a huge time window to just kite the hell out of the pet.

And who the hell uses hyenas in any large scale engagement like wvw or dungeons, where the summoned hyenas are promptly dispatched? But quite frankly I think I lose interest in arguing with cheerleaders.

P.S. Your GS autos don’t crit for 2-3k as bunker. Those are the numbers for my glass cannon ranger, so get off the pot. A knight build ranger instead will more likely see 1.3-1.5k crits on the auto, and the evade is on 50% of the time, WHEN YOU MIGHT NOT NEED IT. It’s like saying engineer elixirs are so great with buffs, when the fact is that people hate the mechanic because often the supposed benefit will be wasted.

WonderfulCT.6278:

Remember graveling scavengers before the patch? Well lets just say stun breakers couldn’t always save you.

Ever get kd’ed by a silver ranked graveling post patch? Notice how it is a one hit kd?

There was a huge nerf regarding kd and cheap deaths, and the current mobs that kd players are pretty easily dodged. In addition one stun breaker is able to get you up without the same graveling knocking you back down.

Except when they don’t work. I can count many times when one of them leaped at me and I dodged as it was about to land and it seem to cancel the dodge animation and knocked me down regardless.

Unfortunately my necro auto will never be as good. Buff necro damage!

Thor ele works well in cof because there’s little need for mobility or defense, but thor ele does not work very well, say, in fractal 48+. I meant more outdamaging others in terms of the practical application of their damage.

I still like threads like these because it’s nice to see people showcasing how they figure out what builds work for them in a demonstrably efficient manner.

I really wonder for example if engineers would see similar output as well — they seem to have the potential, and their sustained aoe is pretty crazy.

Syn Sity.5826:

Thieves CAN be just as good in cof as warriors, but it doesn’t mean they are. Playing a thief is much less forgiving. A bad warrior will go down occasionally and deal less dps than a good one, a bad thief will die frequently.

In cof you shouldn’t be dying to begin with regardless of what class you are. The only trash you will fight is the initial turrets, and at the speed these thieves are killing going down is hardly a concern. Just whip out pistolwhip for that part and you’ll be evading a lot of damage. You will be slower than a warrior there, but the boss kills are faster with a 2x thief combo.

Not that anyone was doubting thieves are good. After guardians and warriors they sit alongside mesmer as the next class you’d bring to a non-cof group.

Warrior and thief group damage widly outperform everyone else’s — it’s a shame really.

Yup, and the thing is you have to specialize for a build with the trait in fire and the multipliers from water trait and fire to make conjure lightning hammer work, which means when you’re not using the conjure you’re actually handicapped, since obviously you will never use normal water attunement skills (terrible damage) and by switching attunements you lose the 20% damage against vulnerable targets, and without the lightning hammer ele sustained is pretty bad by comparison.

You can get easily 10k crits with 25 stacks of might on conjure hammer auto — not even lightning whip will come close to that auto’s output.

It’s not 5% regeneration simply because many builds run with perma vigor, and some people run Orrian Truffle and meat stew food for 40% extra endurance regen.

And if you’re not dodging maul against a berserker ranger you are making it so much easier to lose, because my mauls hit for 5-6k without using signets, while my autoattacks at best hit for 3k on the last hit of the chain and mostly 2k.

You don’t need to be dodging the pet if you just strafe around as the pet will try to run up, use the animation to hit and root itself while you keep moving and negate a lot of the pet’s damage.

You dodge 3 things against a GS ranger. Maul, Hilt Bash, and the wolf’s knockdown. If he doesn’t have a wolf, you have the luxury to dodge his swoop and permakite him as he needs to use throw sword to cripple, and throwing the sword roots him in place while you can either dodge the obvious animation or let it hit and simply cleanse the condition and kite him to death.

If the ranger is smart he’ll try to close distance while shooting with the longbow and switch weapons if he gets close, because if he switches weapons and puts a 10 sec weapon swap cd and swoops from range, you can create distance against the ranger with things like thief shortbow 3 spam and have a good 6-7 free seconds of the ranger not doing anything to you.

I’m using a berserker lightning hammer build. The damage is stupidly good and the build functions well enough in dungeons. Except it doesn’t everywhere else, particularly wvw or pvp.

You have the lightning hammer which is the only weapon that does some damage. And it’s damage is tied to its auto, which requires you to sit in water attunement and have a target with vulnerability and burning on them.

This conjure is easily kited — it has one leap, and a stun field with a cast time. It has no root or cripple. So practically, this is a dead weapon in pvp right from the beginning — you have paper thin defense but no way to reliably deliver your high damage.

When an ele gets a conjure up, he pretty much gives all of his survival skills up. If you use a conjure like the ice bow to gain control, you do no damage since the frost bow auto is worthless, as is the rapid fire. It’s only worth it for the barrage and freeze.

The ele conjure weapons need to be made more selfsufficient, or builds supporting these conjures need to have way better traits to compensate for giving up your matrix of skills.

As it is, you only use a single conjure (lightning hammer) to turret DPS against pve AI, and that’s it. The fiery greatsword is also use in wvw for mobility.

Ele damage in general if you’re not playing a boon-reliant water/arcana bunker/hybrid build is pretty kitten terrible, so our build options are very limited, and our survivability is too tied to cantrips and boon abuse. If you don’t have boon duration runes or traits designed to grant boons, your base survival is terrible.

I’m actually wondering what ele builds are going to do when they implement boon punishment — it’s going to bring into the forefront the flaws of the class that were masked by the overall strengths of boons and builds designed to abuse them.

Seconding full run post. The run is not just about killing bosses.

Most importantly, it’s questioning the applicability of this outside COF1. COF1 has very little cleaving involved, so thieves shine more with more single target. You run other dungeons where adds start factoring in, and a warrior overtakes the thief easily.

Still had a warrior in there. Replace warrior with 3rd thief.

Get over it. Quickness was OP and the ranger’s reliance on it to do crap was just another flaw of the class.

You can still play berserker and hurt people. No, you won’t have the impact of an ele or engineer on zerg fights.

But a GS/lbow build is doable. The real issue still is and has always been the pet not cleaving and its kitten uptime/survivability in larger scale fights/dungeons. Then you have pets that are completely useless.

We also have outdated traits — my thief gets a damage boost combined with the signet recharge decrease in a single trait. The ranger needs a lot of his traits consolidated and some traits like piercing arrows made baseline.

Berserker is still your best build in PvE, especially dungeons. Your pet will be in the dirt so often in fractals you might as well hit hard with maul and rapid fire in between cooldowns.

By saying minions do 1.6k DPS, you mean a full minion utility bar? Because most people don’t have the luxury of running one considering you want group condi removal or utility wells in addition to a stunbreaker.

Talloc.6835:

LinkR.6190:

Talloc.6835:

Maybe you’d care less about skimpy clothing in video games if you had someone to dress skimpily for you in real life.

Let’s not turn this into personal attacks please.

Oh, but saying women should run around half naked isn’t a personal attack?

No, because my main complaint is that this game has a bunch of women running around naked in all armor types but males get only 2 actually revealing armors that are both plate. Cloth and medium armor males get crap for revealing armor.

In fact, on the gem store armor, female medium armor is skin tight jeans, while males get yet another kitten trenchcoat, and a baggy one at that.

How many baggy clothes do male characters really need? Why can’t I even get non-baggy pants on medium armor? Everything medium for males is a kitten trenchcoat.

Well, imo what gets necro is the lack of access to vigor for greater endurance regen and more dodges. Spectral Walk should act like blink on its beginning and port you back to that area you blinked to. Spectral Armor should grant a short second distortion and reduce the cd on it to at least 75 sec cd base, if not 60 sec cd baseline.

Necro’s terrible mobility/avoidance is what gets them killed. In PvP avoidance is always better mitigation than straight up facetanking damage. Look at warlocks vs. mages in WvW — much harder to train a frost mage than a warlock due to all the peeling and mobility the mage had whereas the warlock only had his demonic portal.

I’ve noticed that many vanity items are too human centric. That is, they look best on a human character.

I would really like to see more racially themed items. It would be nice if for sylvari those guild banners had planty anatomy instead.

I just feel like racial identity in the game is diminished when most of the fashion fits humans primarily with some small flexibility for other races. I wish my norn and sylvari had more armor and items more in line with norn and sylvari aesthetics.

Get Orrian Truffle and Meat Stew for extra endurance regen. Bait his null field with conditions, dodge his phantasm damage, and cc him as much as possible to reduce his pressure.

Once he uses null field that’s when you blow your epidemic and condition pressure.

Power builds won’t work against a mesmer because he can blink out of your dagger root and if he fancies he’ll just kite you with staff or greatsword and your only ranged damage on power necro is the staff, which is kitten damage he’ll outheal.

garethh.3518:

Pets have their own malice (condition dmg bonus) so each stack the pet applies will tick for its base 42~ dmg regardless of any other condition applied by anyone to the target.

This is correct.

Chase.8415:

The way it’s intended to be done is to bomb in sections, while it may appear to be an infinite spawn of dredge, it’s not. All of those enemies that spawn infinitely are actually just regular mobs and not veterans.

You’re supposed to bomb until you see veterans spawn… then you kill them in sections and then start bombing again. If you continue to bomb the door without killing the spawned veterans, it’s almost a certain party wipe.

People have that perception that because the mobs never stop, there’s no reason to kill the enemies at all.

It’s actually quite surprising on how uninformed people are about the mechanics of fractals, even in the higher tiers. People tend to follow what works for them, even if its not efficient. So when subject to a different strategy, they tend to get arrogant and disregard it.

Or, you can run a thief and mesmer and not have to do any clearing.

At 48 It takes ages to clear dredges anyways unless you stack warriors. I swear some of those dredge veterans have more HP than AC bosses.

It’s very obvious by this point we’ve got a guy downplaying the dominance of warriors because if I mained a warrior I’d love to keep the status quo as well.

It’s very simple. 100b needs a nerf. Warrior autoattacks on axe and greatsword need nerfs. Vulnerability and solo might stacking need a nerf. Spirit shield needs a hefty nerf in duration, and stand your ground needs a longer cooldown while wall of reflection needs to last less time.

Warrior banners should not be bringing buffs no other class can replace. Why are they the only class with a hefty 10% extra crit dmg group buff and primary stat buffs? Ranger spirits are a sad carcass by comparison.

GS builds really favor power/critdmg based gear. Cleric is fun, but the weakness in them is that you don’t do damage when your opponent disengages. That’s the power of conditions in pvp, that you can keep pressure even when the opponent goes defensive, and conditions ignore toughness that certain classes like ele like to stack.

Of course, power builds work well against classes like thieves who you need to burst down quick. P/D thieves will win all attrition fights if you don’t bring enough burst to negate their cloack and dagger/stealth healing windows. And with the condi removal on stealth traits plus hide in shadows certain thieves are very resilient to condition builds (while backstab thieves are weak to them because they don’t spec in the lines involving this durability).

As most roamers seem to run bunkers outside of thieves, I would suggest you stick to the condition variant. The power build will do little against a proper duel specced bunker guardian, for example, whereas a condition build will easily chew through them.

Your power variant on the other hand will do better in a group, where CC can hold people down for you and quickly dealing damage is more important.

The auto needs to be doubled if not trippled in damage done. Splitblade should pierce or the axes should bounce. Same for winter’s bite.

Rangers are really wanting for a ranged weapon with sustained aoe. Thief shortbow and ele staff and engineer grenades just put ranger to shame in ranged aoe.

Faux Sheaux.6179:

You don’t have to go apothecary to be bunker. He asked about apothecary specifically and how well it plays in PvE. My response was direct and truthful. If he wants to save money on trinkets, he can easily roll a cleric alternative.

However this is a bunker ranger thread, not a berserker ranger thread. People who are posting here are interested in bunker builds, not berserker builds. So while I really do agree with you, you’re derailing the thread by trying to convince someone not to play bunker when they have posted in a thread on the subject specifically asking questions about that subject.

You’re not wrong, but you’re preaching to the wrong crowd friend.

Well, I answered his question on whether apothecary would work in PvE. Everything can work in PvE, but I’m sure he’s interested as a new player on learning to play efficiently, and coming across a pve group that might vote kick him as soon as they realize he’s a condition build in a dungeon.

I love condition specs; I don’t want to come off like I hate them. Axe is by far my favorite ranger weapon thematically, even if it’s autoattack is absolutely terrible. I just don’t want him to have a rude awakening with PuGs if he decides to try condition builds in PvE, because I assure you he will.

He’s better off learning the hard way in dungeons. By fractal 40+ not even toughness specced guardians can afford to tank much.

It’s very important that people learn that in this game, dodging is your main mitigation tool first and foremost.

I know it’s not easy. I remember when I tried a full 12k hp berserker d/d ele for the first few times I thought it was a completely nonviable spec in pve. And then you learn why you’re wrong in time. Fractals were really good for me at 40+ because prior to the release of ascended earrings, you simply had to know how to dodge agony or you were going to go down and could cause a wipe. And it teaches you a lot about starting to pay attention to animations and patterns as opposed to tunnel visioning things and pressing buttons without much thought just because you want to keep them on cooldown (like blowing your burning speed and putting fire attunement or earth attunement on cd during phase change in Grawl Shaman, big mistake you learn to avoid).

Same thing applies to Lupicus. At first you think meleeing is insane, because that kick nearly killed you and it seemed sudden. But then you notice that he does a unique pause that telegraphs it, or the animation for the projectile storm he does that used to seem sudden to you becomes easy to detect and react to.

I’d just hate it if he went and spent over 50g per earring in apothecary accessories to find himself not doing much in dungeons or large scale WvW when he finally grasps his ranger. Because a berserker ranger is considerably more useful in 25+ zerg fights than a condi bunker spec will ever be (and quite frankly this is sadly the crap format that WvW has devolved into, where running huge zergs is so stupidly profitable over smaller skirmish groups where burst aoe damage is not the king it is in large scale battles).

You won’t overwhelm any elementalist with conditions if he’s an ele that knows how to use Ether Renewal. It just so happens that most eles use the signet heal instead, which opens them up against confusion builds.

Don’t run apothecary/conditions in pve — you’re just being a kitten to your group if you do. A berserker set is not hard to get at all. Hell, you can get your ascended apothecary stuff but still keep a berserker exotic set for pve.

Condition damage is vastly inferior vs. full berserker at 110% crit damage in PvE and WvW large scale. Keep condition sets for skirmishing/1v1.

Survivability in PvE is about vigor uptime and learning what to dodge and where to position/identify patterns. You are not meant to tank hits and it’s largely the reason why high toughness builds hold a group back in PvE and delay fights while squishier members of the team have to endure larger time windows of error due to the lower killing speed. There is not a single encounter in PvE outside mossman lv40+ fractal that you can’t brute force with berserker quickly and efficiently.

Isslair.4908:

jul.7602:

Warriors are kings of PvE because there isn’t energy or any system of attrition, so it’s based on how fast you can clear a room or kill a boss before they have a chance to unload their own offensive ability and overwhelm you.

That’s kinda like saying that dps-classes are kings of pve in trinity MMOs, and once you have tank and healer dps guys are best in slot. I don’t need to explain how wrong is that, do I?

Taking warriors as dps is just a question of comfort and speed. Taking guardian+mesmer is a question of making almost impossible fight trivial.

What a stupid claim. No fight is impossible without a guardian or mesmer. Reflection is not mandatory, just like warrior’s vastly superior DPS is not mandatory.

You don’t see groups stacking guardians or mesmers the way they stack warriors. Warriors don’t have diminishing returns — other classes do.

Have you considered the blast on water fields that Healing Spring would bring?

And by roaming I guess you’re running solo most of the time? Troll Unguent does nothing for a partner.