If you’re running Demo / Mara + Rune of Rage / Air, the damage for Arc Lightbing will go up from about 2k per channel to 2.5k per channel. Let that sink in.
I think it is closer to +600 damage on a full channel with the Fresh Air ferocity buff, assuming every damage tick crits. Running Marauder + Pack will do ~2500, estimated around ~3100 when the patch hits (might be more, like ~3700 if it’s 1.25 multiplier applied to each tick). Cast time is long anyway so it’s still some marginal DPS over 3.5s. Not counting the damage from Air/Blood/Fire sigils which people might be running. I’m thinking of testing quickness bursts with Agility/Rage Sigils.
With the lower cooldown on Arcane Shield/Final Shielding we will probably start seeing more builds taking the Arcane traitline. I’m sure someone will try it in the support build too.
Lynx Rune is basically just Rune of the Elementalist with +25% movement speed instead of +20% burn/chill duration if you want to see how it affects your stats with existing amulets.
Also for every toughness amulet stat, make a vitality amulet stat equivalent. e.g. Power, precision, vitality, concentration equivalent of Commander stats.
D/D was considered OP when these traits made it brain dead easy to stack might, something current HoT specs do easily. This was when Battle Sigil gave 3 stacks of might. Before that it actually took skill to stack enough might doing a damage rotation.
Some classes have recharge skills like Renewed Focus and Signet of Illusions.
You can’t add block uptime for weapon set combinations that are impossible to equip. For example Scrapper Hammer and Shield (Off-Hand), Tempest/Ele Staff and Focus.
Yeah it needs equivalent cooldown reduction and at least one invulnerability or block skill to be competitive in comparison to other classes in the meta.
This type of scoring rewards night capping, something we were trying to avoid. Now some servers will wake up with fully upgraded keeps on their home BL with a larger disparity in score.
Can you help by explaining what happened in your game to get these numbers? I would imagine the damage should not exceed the amulet/profession health + downstate health. 83 ticks seems like a lot. You would have had to spam a lot of skills to get that much confusion combined in downstate. Maybe someone was ressing?
Run Leadership Runes when you see a team with 2+ condi classes. You have a condi clear on legend swap and Staff 4.
I kind of wish Cleansing Sigil was in PvP but if you’re having that much trouble consider running Generosity and/or Purity Sigils at the cost of some DPS. Not worth it IMO, at which point it’s probably either a matchup, player skill or rotation problem.
Slot it as a utility and as a trait. The trait will trigger when you get CC’d even if you have stability, Aegis, Arcane Shield, or Mist Form. Eye of the Storm x2 for 10 seconds of super speed.
It is also worth noting that your overload can be interrupted with any hard CC like when blocking with Arcane Shield/Aegis or invulnerability while Mist Form. This should not happen.
You want to match servers by their population and coverage. So what that means is during a certain time of day those populations on that day of the week should match. We already have an idea of how this is calculated based on whether or not your account gets a WvW Opinion Poll (so maybe it includes some x amount of participation per hour and WvW Rank up for each skirmish).
Scaling scoring will in some ways still reward PPT gameplay while maintaining the fight focused players morale in their ability to fight other players both on WvW small scale and WvW large scale fighting.
I’m actually extremely displeased with the current state of Ele. Healbot is boring and Fresh Air is way too risky in such that it is a detriment to yourself and your team even when played perfectly. For PvE it’s great, but WvW (large group) is Staff waterbot and CC, PvP and WvW (solo or small scale) roaming shares some similarities in combat damage mitigation and DPS vs other class/comp matchups. It’s just bad.
Not like it is as advantageous as some people think because if something happens mid-macro a skilled player can more easily adapt to the new situation rather than having a macro you can’t cancel out of in a long skill chain.
Someone already pointed out the cast time/after cast vs button presses. Good. That is definitely a factor.
No tier wants them because their style of play is not fun to face. It’s not what this game should be about when your goal is literally to win by taking the fun out of this game by back capping and denying fights.
This has been imbalanced even pre-HoT. I’d have the sustain and condi clear to fight these but they would always run away. Now they don’t take much effort to do well. I realize you want to make the game easy for new players, but it’s balance choices (or lack thereof awareness of these) that are killing the fun in playing. It’s more frustrating than anything.
Well a hard counter to a class with a lot of blocks should be a class with a lot of unlockables, right? Like stab is to CC. Consequently counter pressure is present to a class that fights at close range against high damage PBAoE when your only way to mitigate it is your classes mobility or blocks/invulnerability.
I would prefer them to remain. Strategically placed monsters or ambient creatures are used to teleport with skills like JI or Guardian sword 2. It offers mobility to classes like this where there would be none and mobility on WvW is everything.
Well if you had Heroic Booster + Experience Booster + Guild WvW Reward Track Boost from Guild Hall and kept participation at 100% for the entire duration of 4 hours you could get ~14000/20000 of the reward track. You will get 314 reward track points per tick which is every 5 minutes.
Give Cleansing Water the Smite Condition treatment by allowing 2 condition removal and we won’t be forced into Earth for Diamond Skin to stay competitive. Opens up more options, though I suppose using them together would still make a superbunker.
I am only pointing out that you can currently do this by overloads only. You can also glide while in downstate Mist Form. There are plenty of opportunities in some game modes where counter-pressure is skillfully executed. I think it’s fine as is, plus you can do all of what you’re asking with Obsidian Flesh but that comes with other advantages and disadvantages.
As I see it score is just a measure of population vs coverage. You want to group servers in a tier based on that since population, server stacking and bandwagoning is a player created and player driven problem. Populations will continue to shift as players change servers for whatever reason as the wind blows. We need a design that takes this into account.
Servers with a more even population at any given time will have more competitive fights. Anyone can easily capture undefended objectives because that’s just a measure of time. We need something else...
I don’t understand how this will be any better than what we already have. Scores are just chunked into half of the time EOTM style matchups occur and consolidated smaller numbers still add up to our existing problem. People brought up nightcapping here and this doesn’t seem to address that. Maybe it would make more sense to scale the scoring somehow to the number of active players on the map across all servers currently in a matchup for that 2 hour slice of time? One server could be blobbing while the other 2 servers have like 5 people but they could be ticking for a lot less with the way it scales relative to the number of active people (participation), but I think that would make it harder to find definition in finding variations in matchups between servers per week.
In my opinion class balance made builds too easy to play and therefore not so fun to play against where they cultivate bad habits for existing players who still don’t know what they’re doing. How to fix this? Maybe make the decision of where to go more obvious with map markers, warnings (or negative points) for double caps on uncontested points. Less passives and possibly condition floaters with timers over player heads when there is stability, blinds, invulnerability, etc? Basically anything that will prevent you from landing damage. Anyone have any bright ideas for improvement?
+1 to stab strip icd if not corrupted and invulnerability stomping (Mist Form, Obsidian Flesh, Elixir S, etc, all classics).
The problem, I think, is that damage kills faster than stomping unless Search & Rescue or Gyro resurrection is happening, in which case it might be better to stomp with invulnerability when a Scrapper or Druid is present, though not many Druids run it since it’s been nerfed. The problem now seems to be that the res is too fast and uninterruptible. Think Fractal Avengers for PvE tryhards.
If the skill has a channeling/cast time (you’ll see a yellow bar above your health bar) then you can’t drop them at the same time as other skills. You’re probably thinking of the more commonly used traps like Fragments of Faith and Test of Faith + another trap with a cast time. That’s not hacking as others have pointed out and I don’t see why you would need a macro to do it.
However now it’s an on command unblockable interrupt.
I wouldn’t call it an “unblockable interrupt” though, since if you have stab up it won’t interrupt and can be mitigated. It goes through blocks so that part is unblockable, yeah.
Mobility still sucks so it’s not as good as other classes for WvW roaming or between points in PvP. Rocket Boots not far enough, doesn’t stunbreak anymore, but lots of stealth with delays in cast time (Stealth Gyro + Elixir S tool belt).
Gyros are still kind of kittened in the way that if you’re running and stop, they kitten around for a second before they move with you. You’ll run outside their range if you have super speed or swiftness in/out of combat.
The nerf should be to removing the kittening RNG from the boonstrip and condi application so players can intelligently control their and their opponent’s boons and condis. I like the idea of prioritizing damaging conditions and damage mitigation boons for removal. A priority list? Change resistance so it only affects damage related conditions and maybe if it’s up the condi clear would prioritize the movement impairing conditions so when resistance ends, condis can still do damage. This places more importance on the Expertise condi stat as it would precision for power classes. I feel this would significantly change the way condi bombs work and I think it would be more fun since it doesn’t hinge on the RNGods (not fun, this is never fun).
Deflecting Shot (LB 3) and Symbol of Energy (LB 4) are best used while kiting since they are omnidirectional skills. You can fire deflecting shot directly behind you while running.
Just going to throw this in here because obviously different people worked on the DH/Tempest specializations, but Lightning Orb (Air WH 5) does not have the same benefit…
Some inter-department politics are probably keeping balance with fun gameplay from being achieved. If the PvP team can only advise what changes can be made to skills and if the balance team seems more PvE oriented, then they’re not going to know what sorts of changes need to be made to make PvP/WvW combat fun and rewarding for skilled play. I’m expecting better things with one of the last updates allowing skill splits between PvE/PvP skills, but I’d like that for WvW too since it’s often a place where exaggerations of builds see play. By removing amulets and runes, those are only band aids to real skill balance.
Remember a few metas ago when Cele Rifle Engi was meta, it was Shrapnel (Major) and Incendiary Powder (Grandmaster) in Explosives, but skill split Incendiary Powder from Explosives into Firearms and Cele Amulet is dead on this class. Engis were forced into Soldier Amulet and weren’t quite in the greatest place at the time. It wasn’t the amulet that was the problem, but they can help to facilitate different build variations. You can move traits, adjust cooldowns, adjust the basis of what each trait does to achieve balance. It’s a delicate balance. Don’t just remove amulets or runes because that might kill possibilities for build diversity or nerf something to the point of unusability. I look at traitlines and see “this one is defensive” or “this one is offensive”, when a class has to take all defensive or all offensive traits, the class is being backed into the corner where skill matters very little or very much. Where in the latter case the player has to work a lot harder for very little reward compared to other classes.
I can see people running Glint/Mallyx with Power/Concentration stat amulets, also probably Mesmers too. That boonshare kitten in WvW is coming to PvP… maybe?
Perhaps it should also affect condition damage as well since it is so out of hand? -50? condition damage would also sort of force condi classes to trait for more condi cleanses just like power specs. Would that be fair?
