I played a few hours of HoT yesterday and a few more today. I’ve really enjoyed it.
The best part was that I got to spend some time playing with my teenage son. He had done more in beta than me, and he got started ahead of me in launch. He’s having fun leading me around, and he’s really enjoying the personal story. I’m really enjoying getting to spend some time with him.
I’ve just barely gone beyond the Verdant Brink map, and it’s clear that there’s lots more to do. I’m working on finishing up my Chronomancer elite, but it’s already fun to play even without the final trait.
It’s clear that you’ve put a ton of work into this, so I just wanted to say thank you for all the hard work. I’m looking forward to playing for a long time.
Thx!
P.S. I hope everyone who worked so hard gets some sleep and time off
Lol – colorblind, old and gullible – seems like a pretty apt description for me
Ironically, with the announcement today that non-targeted creature damage will be greatly reduced, this feature request might actually have some value (at least in PVE)
I’m not worried about having an indicator about how many total illusions I have out. I was just looking for some kind of hint to make the decision between shatter or losing the illusions. The specific cases I’m think about are things like these:
- I have two illusions out and no skill that’s going to give me another one right away and I have all my shatters available. I would probably go ahead and shatter if I saw both were low on health (especially with the free clone on two-illusion shatter)
- Or alternatively, I have three illusions up and one shatter skill available, but I would prefer to use another one. If I can see that all of them have high health, I might wait for the preferred shatter.
Of course, I might spaz out and just shatter somewhat randomly even if I had better information
I play in very low tier and only play a couple matches per day (think I’m rank 25 or so). So feel free to ignore all the rest of this
This is the condi build I’m playing right now. In matches that my team wins, it’s pretty frequent that I see “highest condition damage” noted for me. There could be lots of causes like bad opponents.
I find that I’m too slow killing one on one with this build in most fights, but it feels like I can help turn the tide in bigger fights.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQNArfWlknhy0YFawQNwtGLAH05I+QpNTQoDAaqv4KA-TJRHwAQLDIc/hAnCAAPBAA
I had fun! Isn’t that the point of a game?
I tried chrono in wvw and in a bit of pve. Here are the things I really liked:
- Movement speed is awesome.
- Gravity well is fun to use. Who knows if it’s truly best, but it’s fun
- Was nice to know I was helping allies (alacrity, condi removal and healing)
- F5 skill feels like it could take months to master, but was fun when I tried it
Hope everyone had a fun beta weekend
And I finally went back to the fine print in the wiki which solves all of this. Thanks for your patience with me
So using this:
For every second under effect of Alacrity, skills recharge 1.66 seconds
It should take about 3.6 seconds to recharge Illusionary Counter (scepter 2).
And about 6.3 seconds to recharge MindWrack (assuming alacrity is up for the whole time).
You could still get close to the number of shatters described in the model above, but it’s definitely a big difference.
Thx again for the help clarifying
OK. Part 2 of my mini-novel How does shattered strength compare to MtD?
NOTE: I started writing this before the response on Alacrity, so the calculations below may be off (the 66% versus 34% reduction difference is big). It takes a while to write something this long…
As Pyro points out, the competing trait in this build would be Maim the Disillusioned.
Here’s how I think the two of these actually play out (and again, I’m looking for input on why my on-paper analysis may be off target).
With MtD, you get a stack of torment for each shatter that hits. The build editor shows that as 739 damage for non-moving and 1478 damage moving over a 9-second span if not cleansed.
With shattered strength, you get 14.5 seconds of might for each shatter (doesn’t matter if it hits or not).
OK, so now we need to try to imagine what’s actually happening in a fight to see which is actually better. For me as a player, I tend to use Confusing Images whenever it comes up. I like the skill (especially with Malicious Sorcery). I also use the blocks basically whenever they come up (I like the defense, and it seems like people are not used to fighting against lots of blocks). And of course, the goal here is to shatter basically as often as possible. So what will that look like in a real fight?
To make things a little more simple, let’s say I’m just sitting in scepter/sword (which is my preference). In a really good 60 second window, I would ideally have something like this going on:
- Confusing images (6 times)
- Illusionary riposte (8 times)
- Illusionary counter (10 times)
- Cast phantasmal swordsman (4 times)
- Cast phantasmal disenchanter (4 times)
- Mindwrack (8 times)
- Cry of frust (5 times)
- Diversion (3 times)
This is a model and real world fights have lots of variation. If opponents never hit the blocks, you don’t have as many clones (and iDefenders) to shatter. The ether signet can get you some extra phantasms to replace some of this. But you have to pick some model to analyze.
So the difference between Shattered Strength and MtD looks something like this:
MtD: 64 max possible torment stacks. Shattering is pretty hectic at this pace, so let’s assume I get 40 actual hits. These come basically every 3.75 seconds. Let’s say someone can remove all the conditions I apply once every 10 seconds. That gives 6.25 seconds of torment from each hit. If we say that someone is moving 75% of the time, then MtD in this model should contribute something like. 40 * 898 = 35,920 damage (basically in the 60 seconds – clearly it takes time to land the first shatters and some of this is condi damage ticking after the 60-second window, but the goal here is a fairly simple model).
So now, we need to look at what shattered strength would deliver. With 16 shatters in 60 seconds, it means 4 might stacks every 3.75 seconds. With a 14.5 second duration, this comes out to about 15 stacks of might on a steady basis. You can surge at the start of the fight with the F5 skill, and the runes add some stacks. But let’s call it 13 stacks to be conservative. So that’s 390 more power and condi damage.
Using the model of attacks, this results in a direct damage increase of:
- Confusing images (6 times) = 2628
- Illusionary riposte (8 times) = 2344 (assuming you actually do block each time)
- Illusionary counter (10 times) = 1460
- Cast phantasmal swordsman (4 times) = 2216 (assuming you get 8 attacks by pausing after each shatter)
- Mindwrack (8 times) = 2376
We’ll ignore any other increases from the other shatters, auto-attacks, retaliation on the phantasms, etc. So that’s about 11,024 more direct damage.
Then here’s the condition damage side of things. There are three damaging conditions (confusion, torment, and bleed). For confusion, it averages out to about 2 stacks being applied every second with assumptions above. Half of these have 12-second durations and the other half are 5 seconds. We’re assuming the opponent cleanses all conditions every 10 seconds. To keep things simple, lets just say there are 4 stacks on every second (clearly there will be bursts that are much higher).
So at 4 stacks every second, the extra condi damage from might is equal to 18,000 – 14,640 = 3360.
If we assume a skill use every 1.5 seconds, we have 40 skill uses during this time by the opponent. So the difference from might there is 26,528 – 22,624 = 3904.
For torment (excluding MtD), there’s a scepter block every 6 seconds. Good opponents dodge this, but there’s also some torment from auto-attack. The block torment lasts 12 seconds, but we’re assuming it gets purged every 10 seconds. What really happens is that you get peaks and valleys sometimes with 10 stacks of torment on. But again, to keep things simple, let’s just call this 4 stacks of torment for the whole fight (and again use the moving 75% of the time fraction). That gives a difference of 41,850 – 34,480 = 7370 for the extra might.
Lastly, bleed comes from the sigils. It’s 3 stacks applied on swap. For this model, we’re not really imagining swapping weapons and it’s only 70 damage per second more with three bleed stacks when you add 390 condition damage. So we’ll just skip it.
So with all these assumptions, MtD adds 35,920 and Shattered Strength adds a total of 21,754. So based on this model, Pyro’s right – MtD is better. But they are close enough that it’s not a huge difference. In a scenario with a lot of condi clearing, might closes the gap more. And in terms of getting big chunks of damage when someone uses a skill with 12 confusion stacks or moves with 10 torment, the might helps make this build a little more bursty.
But since the alacrity effect make work differently than the wiki says, all of this may be out the window.
At least it probably counts as my longest forum post ever Congrats to anyone who had the patience to read this…
Well, Pyro hated the first version of this build, so let’s see how v2 goes
What I’m trying to do here is come up with a concept that does both power and condi damage (not worried about exactly 50-50 split) such that there is a strong and sustained level of damage (doesn’t need to really burst) while still giving very solid defense.
I’d love feedbadk – thx!
Edited to update gear – meant to switch to all carrion and strength runes
(edited by eldenbri.1059)
I actually prefer if scepter is left where it is at least until HoT comes out. Possibly increasing the projectile speed by 5% on auto-attack is good (this will basically be no different when you’re in melee and a small increase at range)
As it stands, this weapon seems to provide nice condition damage, nicely scaling power damage, and good opportunities to create clones. It feels like it can be used well for many builds. Given that there are only two mainhand weapons, I would much rather see this weapon left as it is with the ability to fill many roles versus taking anything away from it to push it toward another role.
I like scepter enough to finally make the commitment to a legendary weapon. I’m about halfway through creating Meteorlogicus, so I really hope I get to use it