Guild Wars 2

SupahSpankeh.8452:

4) Lifeblast pierces first, second and third targets irrespective of which one is targetted – someone above claimed otherwise, and having tested it 3s ago with a few risen it’s not the case at all. It pierces normally.

You sure you were not targeting furthest away mob?

I swear i have seen LB stop the moment it hit the mob in front of me if that was my focused target, but go thru anything between me and said target.

edit: ok, tested on mist golems and there it worked. Not sure what i observed, terrain effect or whatever, but i swear i have seen the LB projectile stop after it hits the focused target even when it was traited for penetration.

Chaosgyro.6023:

You don’t need to go in the dungeon to find the sub director: he/she (too many players around to see) is in Caledonian forest. Fair warning though, null and the guy afterwards are pretty universally bugged now.

Not so much bugged as perma-zerged…

Heh, staff is nice in that is a long range AOE. It also provides us with one of two non-utility heals (staff #2 as long as your inside its AOE), the other being focus #4 if its projectile bounces of you at least once.

Sadly it seems that right now it is easier to bump damage via perma-crit than it is via conditions or boons. crit, before any damage boosts increase damage by 1.5. A full stack of might or vulnerability can at best provide 1.25. Never mind that you can build on that 1.5 to go even higher via the right gear and trait lines.

There is a reason why crit heavy professions can pack the punch they do. Never mind that one of them crit-ing on a boss mob do not exclude anyone else from doing the same…

Hmm, i kinda got off track there…

Depends on what your main play is. PVE and anything but #1 and #4 becomes “meh”. You may be able to use #3 to get a boss off your back, but you rarely need to use #2 as mobs simply do not run in any permanent sense.

Still, #1 with traits for might, vulnerability and a piercing projectile (tho it behaves differently from staff #1 in that it only pierces if your actual target is the most distant target, and the damage “canal” is not as wide as it is on staff #1) can be nasty as long as you keep you LF above 50%.

I suspect we have few stun breaks and interrupts because DS allows us to basically take the burst that are related to the use of such abilities. Remember that if a attack drives your LF to zero, it just drops you out of DS. The rest damage is not transferred to your health. Meaning that if you see a mob charging up the big one, pop DS. Maybe you can interrupt him with #3, but even if you miss that you will only see your LF zero out rather than loose a big slice of you health.

In a sense, going into DS is a bit like using a block ability on a shield carrying profession.

Meh, drop the bleed and make them instead have some kind of reverse retaliation so that they loose health each time they attack someone. That way they do not last forever, but are more reliable than they are right now. Should be simple enough to code i think.

Nuhj.8372:

Inoence.6907:

SERIOUSLY WTF? All classes except the warrior got their blast dodges removed
Reckless Dodge
and here where it says at the bottom of the page that its a blast finisher
Blast Finisher
It’s even an adept minor trait.
Well its kind of obvious because they love warriors, they are OP as hell and they didnt nerf anything in the new patch (even increased some things)

I don’t have much playtime on my Warrior but i am like 95% sure that Reckless Dodge is not a blast finisher (anymore?). Would be just another wrong/outdated info on the Wiki.

Almost as if they had some kind of trigger signal for blast finish on dodge, and someone managed to get it backwards. This so that it defaulted to blast when it should not, or something similar. Now they have fixed the underlying issue, and it fixed all professions across the board.

Stormy O.7025:

Oh, I forgot. 2 stacks of bleeding + regen. It’s still powerful. And no, it’s not a bug.

Except that mark of blood is supposed to give 3 stacks of bleeding, not 2.

It’s like they copied and pasted the mark of blood code for the trait, and forgot to modify it when they decided to update the staff mark it’s based on.

yeiks… (15 characters length, eh?)

Except that conditions are not affected by vulnerability, only direct damage are (making might the better choice in the long run).

So that’s what they were. I noticed a link to GW2guru over on reddit, but the links there were messed up (scepters and such linking to swords and hammers).

Should make for a nice change i guess. Do dagger #2 actually scale with healing power, btw?

One small note about the blood fiend, if you summon and consume in quick succession it will drop a poison nova field were your standing

so 104 condition damage, 69 toughness, 51 vitality and 18 precision.

Could help a bit i guess. Can we wear two of those?

Heh, i find myself musing if the damage increase was pr attack or in total. If they increased the damage pr attack than we would get a 80% increase thru a whole channel. A guy can dream, right?

Only when set on fire…

Well there is always Terror.

So it could be a issue of minion aggro range? Do not explain golem rage tho…

Could be why there was some reports that weapon switching helped. Initiate a fight using staff at max range, then swap to dagger once the enemy is up close?

or have something that convert overflowing condition stacks (like say applying more bleed when the stack is already full) into direct damage at some kind of ratio (1% of the incoming bleed damage perhaps?).

And that seems to be the basic problem with this game (or most others for that matter). Anything that is scaled to function acceptably while playing in a “relaxed” manner ends up being field clearing once played in a focused/intense manner. This because the game scales in a linear fashion, so a doubling of inputs result in a doubling of outputs.

So the only options are to either introduce a non-linear scaling, or tune instead for the intense cases. But non-linear scaling is more complex to work with, and tuning for intense play leads to underwhelming results for the rest.

Something of a no win situation, really.

Now that’s one hit potato

There is at least one on this forum claiming success, but then the build included 6x runes of the vampire and other ways of draining health beyond the necromancer traits.

Likely not, as in a sense the condition is still removed.

Best guess, the only way to get rid of it is to kill whatever applied it to you in the first place.

That and fall damage. It seems to apply a percentage reduction of health over time, and is not removable like other conditions. I do wonder how it will interact with a necromancers Life Force pool tho…

While i have not gone as deep into vampirism as your build has (no runes for one thing), my experience is that i can barely survive having 3 PVE mobs on me, never mind dungeon mobs. Any more and i am as likely to face the sky as walk away.

This even with wells and whatsnot siphoning health and liberal use of DS for both dealing and absorbing damage.

And during all this the mobs focus on you?

Ascii.9726:

Some very nicely times Fears, Wails and Dodges. Alot of people underestimate the potential usage for Doom but F1 > 3 > F1 is an almost instant 1.25 second Fear that can be used for alot of stuff such as interrupting, pushing people off cliffs and pushing people back into a Necro bomb.

Not so much underestimate as forget that it is there because of the 3 button combo needed to pull of at a moments notice just to interrupt someone.

Had it been sitting on its own F key, so they could quickly tap it when needed, they would likely love it and use it as much as possible.

Let me guess, drop the wells and chain-channel in tight circles to keep the mobs on them? Sure, it can work. But it is about the only time it does work and require that you pile on the traits and skills. Skills that on the utility side have a minute of cooldown each.

Ah yes, i have noticed the lack of affected width.

Staff #1 seems to hit as if there was a extra projectile to each side of the visible one.

Knote.2904:

All you can do is try to using Staff auto’s to pierce

Soul Reaping VI makes Life Blast pierce as well.

Staff marks perhaps?

except that scepters also do direct damage, and the chain comes out matching axe #1 in terms of DPS.

For damage buff you can just as well go with might. it provides just as much buff pr stack unit to direct damage, buffs condition damage as well (vulnerability seems to only buff direct) and it goes with you when you switch target without having to involve epidemic. Tho i have had a bit of fun traiting LB to stack both vulnerability and might.

As for viewing axe primarily as a secondary set, perhaps. But i prefer to pack staff simply because it allows me to go back row if i stumble into a DE without having to dive into my pack (did go scepter+dagger/dagger+dagger while leveling tho, with a staff in the pack. But ended up abandoning that as cumbersome).

Thing is, do retaliation actually reduce damage taken? All i see is it doing damage when damage is taken, nothing regarding it actually reducing anything.

Arvid.3829:

Tschuss.8462:

binidj.5734:

Nostromo.4126:

If they just added a heal skill or re-summon outside combat with no CD, I’d be happy a happy camper.

I have recently discovered (recently because I’ve only recently started using minions) that Well of Blood heals your minions and is, generally, rather more useful (not to mention reliable) than the Blood Fiend.

Wells are more bugged than Windows Vista… Blood one not only heals you and your minions, also heals the mobs. Look: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H92jXPlA0mU

That isn’t a bug with wells in general but with Vampiric Rituals.

Vampiric traits in general actually, but only really a issue when being a high level toon in a low level zone.

Oh we know axe #2 do damage, but channels are easy to interrupt if the target are in any sense aware of what he is being hit by.

Been voicing similar thoughts in the past. The main issue i have with DS is that is a third skill set you need to consider alongside your equipped weapon sets.

What is funny is that humans have a very DS like elite, Reaper of Grenth. It looks quite a bit like DS, but plays like plague in that it provides a PBAOE of chill and poison for the duration. This while still allowing you access to your other skills.

As it is, DS plays like a mashup between elemental attunements and adrenaline.

I honestly do not get the love for 3, but then i come from a PVE standpoint so any AOE effect is likely to attract attention i do not want. In PVP i can see it help build up a solid retaliation duration without resulting in 5+ opponents smacking you silly.

Thing about retaliation is that you need them to be hitting you to damage them. And unless you pop into DS to avoid the harm they are invariably going to do more damage pr hit to you than you do to them via retaliation. And if you go DS you can just as well trait for retaliation on DS entry (Spiteful Spirit).

Honestly, retaliation seems more at home on dagger than it does axe. But then i think someone said axe was a melee aoe weapon in the betas.

Starting to think necro has all the issues because the devs were busy “tuning” DS…

The thing about the axe is that #1 packs less punch than the direct damage part of scepter #1 (even when accounting for vulnerability), yet has less range. It is barely on par damage wise with staff #1, but then staff #1 has longer range and penetration.

I find myself wondering if a game should be tuned for the extreme limits (stacking everything one can get ones hands on towards a single goal) or something a bit more laid back where you do not stack to the same extreme but at least get a survivable result.

Then again most games seems to walk into the trap of linear increases, meaning that what works for a laid back scenario blows up spectacularly when the numbers gets heavily stacked. This because it is easier to calculate than some kind of diminishing return system where beyond some point the cost of stacking on more heavily outweighs the benefits gained.

kywei.9361:

I’ve found that axes are best for the level 80 events. Daggers do more dps but you die way more often to the aoes that most of the events throw at you and using a scepter is a good way to not even get bronze with the stupid low bleed cap.

Meh, just go staff. Same level of DPS, more range, and the ability to lay down a combo zone ever so often. Season with DS as you feel appropriate.

And it seems to me that those of us that can maintain a tight kite favor the axe more than the rest. Me, i have enough trouble coordinating my skill chain without the need to maintain some kind of movement without bumbling into another aggro zone.

Heh, i have for a while observed that the forum seems to bug when i make a entry that brings the thread over a page break. End result is that when i click the thread in the future all i see are the top and bottom page number bars and have to click one of them to actually see the thread posts (loosing any semblance of new posts in the process).

It almost seems as if the cooldowns are leftovers from GW1, where they had long cooldowns because they did not cost energy to use.

When single direct damage attacks can land in the neighborhood of 15k, i am not so sure. A landed condition is potential damage, not realized damage like a direct damage blow is. To get 15k out of a bleed stack it would need to run for several seconds.

Also remember that condition damage do not translate 1:1 into actual damage done. Bleed get only 5% of condition damage as a increase, or about 5 for every 100 (exotic gear tops out at about 101 pr item so a full set of 6 would give about 30 extra damage). Fire and poison do not stack in intensity, and while confusion is 3 times as effective as bleed in PVE, it gets cut in half in PVP.

Never mind that direct damage increases for each extra toon, while conditions top out once the stacks are filled.

didn’t they hard cap the fear duration to 5 seconds to fix the issue of auto-fear on CC resulting in 20+ seconds of fear under certain conditions?

Those conditions being a necro traited for auto-fear, or mesmer traited to reflect CC back tries to fear an equivalent necro or mesmer, resulting in the effect bouncing back and forth multiple times in the span of a second and racking up an impressive stack for anyone within range.

@Gamefreak

I know that. What meant was that rather than not having it stack, they should hard cap the max total boost at what the single highest boost is at present (33% from swiftness or a adept thief trait apparently). And allow us to stack the various boost until hitting said cap. Meaning that signet plus dual traited dagger would land us around the same as a signet thief or a elementalist staying in traited air attunement for 5 seconds.

If they are so worried about speed, hard cap it at 25% increase (i think that is the top end boost a thief can enjoy). That is basically what we would reach if we stacked signet and two traited daggers, and would drop by 10% for a minute each time we used the signet to heal.

This would make us the supposed inescapable death they claim we are designed to be.

Also note that a thief can reach 25% with a single signet, while we would have to stack traited melee weapons and a signet to keep up.

Edit: oh dear, looked into it and thiefs get 33% (same as swiftness boon) while stealthed via trait. No wonder they appear to rock PVP against anything short of a bunker build. If the target do not drop from the initial burst, go stealth and outrun them…

Ascii.9726:

1) Roll an Archer.
2) Buy Condition Damage, Toughness, Vitality full armour & jewel set.
3) Spec pure tank.
4) Keep perma-25 stack bleed on enemy whilst trolling in 25k health and 3k toughness.
5) ??
6) Profit.

Remind me again what the Necro is supposed to do in this game…

Now i so want to see a updated graph to the one that showed human warrior being the most played combo in the game.

Not really surprised, as they seem to have struggling with defining just what DS was supposed to be until the very last moment.

It seems to have started out as a necro-specific down state, meaning we would enter DS rather than the customary down state.

then this was modified to a triggered ability while also providing a normal down state. But as we can see from the interface, most of the down state code was carried over (likely why it has so many oddities regarding runes and traits that trigger on low health).

Then apparently people managed to turn this modified DS into a epic bunker build during the beta runs, resulting in a dash to tone it down.

Could very well be that during that dash various code was “temporarily” commented out between builds, to make sure it would not influence some internally run tests, and they forgot to reactivate it afterwards.

But yea, the irony is heavily applied here.

Best guess it is supposed to be a ghost hand similar in consistency as our Shadow Fiend.

Kardiamond.6952:

Maybe a Frostmancer could be good vs Thief, never tried one.

Not sure, as they can trait to remove conditions while stealthed stealth.