Guild Wars 2

Axe is pretty much fine as it is, I wish other classes would have so balanced weapon in their kitten nal instead of ridiculously OP weapons. #3 could just give fixed amount of retal, though.

Dagger itself is fine except #2 needs that something either faster heal or stability with trait while channeling or whatsoever. You channel that heal but while doing that you die. There’s a little Paradox there. Also it is difficult to build up LF with dagger sometimes.

Dagger also needs a new main hand companion since axe just doesn’t cut it.

Staff is fine as it is.

Scepter too.

Off-hand dagger is probably okay, except that it’s also good for power builds while that aoe bleed is useless and #5 skill itself difficult to aim and doesn’t want to activate if there’s even tiny lag. Also #4 could just cleanse more conditions tbh with this current pvp meta where you have 20 conditions on you and you remove lol 3?? c’mon.

focus is fine except #4 should be near instant and give better regen. And less dependant on amount of enemies and friedns. LESS RNG.

horn is fine too.

What I hate about necros is this RNG hit X enemies to get more effect and get Y if something dies. It is really problematic in small scale PvP in WvW or sPvP. Also melee survivability is just laughably difficult for zerkers. You actually need to know where buttons are if you want to stay alive. Shatter incoming use your 6th sense to Dodge! (in case you have energy left)

also conditions should do damage through DS, this is important.

and shatter should just do damage directly to base hp instead of DS. it saves processing power from servers.

they should nerf staff more, it’s still too good compared to other necro weps.

i’ve been playing zerk necro in spvp since forever. works just fine even though a bit glassy. and totally just 2 dagger sets. axe is fine but dagger aa just does so much damages as long as you figure out how to manage range, have to remember life blast gives you some range and dagger #2 is ranged. you’ll really want axe against ranged guys though.

soldier is great for more tanky style but who wants to live forever

one necro is very nice in hotw. don’t run much dungeons or pve even, but people wondered sometimes why they finished so fast when i was there with my necro. i’ve even seen condi necros doing ok on videos i would go zerk though, wells are pretty good way to get rid of trash mobs, conditions or boons, not to mention blindness from blast.

cpc is really nice it’s just that most times targets walk out of it. also weakness from blast doesnt hurt..

sometimes you rally when someone kills npc on other side of the map

i’ve seen some suspicious rallying too, though. maybe sort of bug no idea..

i’ve qqed about these for long time but i really feel like putting it all together again:

1) More ways to get ascended pieces, especially backpieces. harder content? Fine. Just make it consume much less time and require no repeatable content, just limit it to one set of something per month for one account if you must. I don’t see much problem if it’s unsalvageable account bound stuff though.
2) Considering price and time effort you should be able to switch stats on that gear.
3) Omg yeah. I have a problem when it comes to acquisition of legendary weapons after playing this game since beta 2. Why not add living world progression to give you precursors eventually or something.
4) Power creep in WvW. It has become totally mess even though it has been nearly unplayable for long time. Buffs, ascended gear, WvW bonuses and add some totally op builds/game mechanics caused By less Limited space than in pvp in calculation. At launch wvw thieves were a bit strong but at least everything else was somewhat understandable. WvW really should be PvP gear and no group or individual stat bonuses. Except “legit” real skills.
5) Hambow wars, stunshatter mesms, condiengis, terrornecros, mm’s and spirit rangers kind of annoy me in spvp, even though not really related to progression. Just sayan.

They launched game unfinished and never fixed/finished it.

hotfix added grind.

rest is 90% automated live updates, gemshop items and skins or new vendors/grindable tags.

i don’t know what to say really except im losing interest finally. hope there’s something interesting games coming out next year.

I have been using similar build with 3 wells, staff and d/d. I think staff is needed cos putrid blast on wells is so good. I also went much deeper in toughness/vitality traits to get transfusion and stuff like that, forgot the spite altogether and focused on hp/armor. That way you can tank a while and works decently even with that new signet which is usually crap as long as you can keep rotation up. It doesn’t work well against certain builds though. Especially ranged kiting or excessive burn spam which happens a lot. I stopped playing it cos uhm.. I don’t like tanking and it didn’t work at all against some builds.

Kind of interesting choice to go toughness traits, looks solid on paper though. Good example how insanely good ascended gear is though :P I can only dream I still play the game when I could finally get those.

I would drop some traits and switch to other though. Axe training is not needed, focus trait is not needed, retal on heal maybe, ground targeted wells not needed. In my opinion.

Way too easy to randomly trigger aoe circle with blasts/ other finishers. Too much of that. Really. Especially aoe/blast combos. Way too many.

Downstate is fine and fun. Sometimes fight only starts when you’re downed. And some traits help a lot when downed.

However couple things:
- Rallying from long distance is not ok, there should be a limit
- Rallying from npc is questionable, although not so much of a problem in spvp
- Some downed state skills are just way over the top, like ranger pet rez in water. Fortunately water maps are not in tourneys.
- You should have /kill command/button when downed so you can die faster. Sometimes people exploit downed state when you fall just outside circle etc. Or even worse they knockback you out of circle and leave you there. This is very common tactic. Maybe there needs to be some delay like 10-15 seconds before command/button can be activated so people just don’t immediately respawn.

As long as you can use pve skills, gear and buffs in wvw it is pointless to ask any kind of balance. Also way too much cleave and aoe (not talking about single difficult to Place/cast skills but amount of aoe skills in general), I am not even going into how broken op conditions, cc, target breaking and some other things are in many situtations when taken into wvw. (not only talking about fluffy zerg balling mind you)

I think the reason why it doesn’t proc on hit is condimancers tbh. They probably wanted to make it so it’s not useful for ranged condispammers. So I don’t see it change in near future to that direction. It seems pretty obvious it was made to encourage picking some new builds instead. Or then they just didn’t really know what they were doing at all but made a good decision anyway.

Merlin Dyfed Avalon.5046:

Bellamy.9860:

Had my first soloq game with the trollbuild, was actually a decent game. Dunno if carried by team but the signet felt ok.
Also it seems like marking can’t be dodged but not 100% sure and i was once healdenied either by beeing blinded and or headshot and it went to full cd.

Tried your build in spvp and i switched it out for CC, iow went back to my basic zerker build and ditched the siphons, i can honestly say you have to know how to play and have huge balls to run full zerker siphon in spvp as a necro.

I noticed all the evades /stealth and other target reset mechanics making me waste all possible healing i would get from hitting something.. the animation and huge red dot doesn’t help either.

I am struggling to get this signet to be of any use..

I used to run zerk siphon before patch so haven’t tried it with signet yet but it was OK. you really have to pick right moments to put up some dps though since it’s not always optimal. Also really weak against hambows or engis since you got to kite their big blows and you lose siphon.

Tried new bunkery type 0/10/30/30/0 with signet again wells/staff traited and chill on blind. Doly runes and some heal sigils whatevs not sure what is optimal yet. It really does seem to work real fine in hotjoin or solo que. Even did some (I’m pretty low ranked nub) team que it was fine even there. I really do wonder if signet is really that bad, granted it probably doesn’t work for all builds a bit. And active is really bad, but then it’s signet so..

what if you dont want cultural armor

focus is most solid

dagger helps with condition removal plus has blind/weakness, it’s not so optimal than focus

horn doesn’t have very good synergy with axe, horn #5 is basicly melee dps and interrupt doesn’t fit with kiting at range, which is what you’re supposed to be doing with axe.

Phenn.5167:

This is how the Weakening Shroud nerf evolved:

1. Initial proposal was to increase the CD to match the /D skillfact—the Devs felt that Necros had too good an uptime on Weakness.
2. (Rightful) complaints about the change turning WS into a RNG skill.
3. Devs conceded the change was misguided, instead removed the ICD and decreased the duration and stacks of Bleed/Weakness.
4. When (rightful) complaints came this time, they were shot down by good ol’ Jon saying, “With 100% ConD duration and Near to Death, this is a 57% uptime on AoE Weakness, which is borderline OP.”

So there you have it: A trait balanced around an incredibly specific situation (I’m unaware of any build that has both 100% ConD duration AND NtD), and then called OP in that incredibly specific situation.

Never mind that a Thief with a SB can maintain perma-Weakness with 15 traitpoints and SB’s own self-combos.

But hey, we Necros get to sit on the bench with the Thiefs and commiserate. You know—the whole misery and company thing.

Basicly because weakening shroud helped 100% condition duration terrormancers everyone else including berserk builds got shafted.

I’ve grown to like my jagged horrors even for zerk build. I can now have flesh golem, rock dog and very likely 2 jagged little horrors it’s pretty fun. Only thing I find useless is not being able to get any fluffy horrors when 1v1.

i put on full soldier gear and 0/0/30/30/10 wells traited with reapers protection, all wells equipped except suffering, plague elite and signet it was working “ok”.

I don’t think it works without wells, d/d and staff, toughness runes or other traitlines though. And you’re still ping ponged if it comes to that, but you can hold out pretty long compared to other builds I’ve tried.

I have no idea why it worked I didn’t even read skill desc properly hehe.. Probably protection + blindness/weakness spam

Experienced hammer warriors…

In sPvP, have you ever beaten two people at once in a fight with just the 3 of you skirmishing on a point?

I can’t imagine it.

“WvW is not supposed to be balanced”

.. It would fix a lot of annoyances if it would be PvP gear only though..

I general DS works fine. For some builds better some not so much.

It just has some Basic problems:
- No healing
- Extremely vulnerable to CC and burst (= most of the damage anyway)

Then next comes really bad HP management for necromancer, unless you’re exremely tanky type you die almost instant you catch damaging conditions or take physical damage in any form, basically more glass than thief, at least they’ve base medium armor and stealth. Even though necro has good Basic heal it cannot remove permanent condispam some classes just can do, or protect itself from warrior or mesmer stun/dps burst.. So yeah.. I don’t really know how to best describe how much necro sucks when you count out condibursting points in spvp with like… 1 viable build or something.

I still do enjoy playing necro but it surely is frustrating when you run into warrior who says boo and you’re perma cc’ed despite having some stun breaks and die under 10 seconds. Yay.

burning is op no matter what class. dhuumfire is smallest of problems in that matter.

in greater scale staff etc. aoe condition blabla condinecros can burst out is just over the top but they’re not alone in that matter either it’s just how it is atm. too much aoe this and that it’s ridiculous.. who cares about focusing just drop dps bombs.

- common feature for DS take no damage from 1 second when exiting DS
- trait which heals self when exiting DS
- trait which heals self for every life blast hit
- dagger aa buff to make it give more LF for 1st and 2nd hit in chain.
- staff aa nerf to give less LF per hit.
- buff trait which removed conditions when entering DS from 1 to 3 conditions or remove stun.
- buff ret trait on DS from 3 to 5 seconds
- change enfeebling blood on DS to AoE blind and weakness for 5 seconds Or just blind. Reduced ICD.
- dagger trait in places where they make sense. Dagger 25% swiftness if you have 1 dagger and make it 10p trait. Warriors have same for any melee weapon on 10p. (yeah i know not ds traits but sorta related in my brain)
- DS#2 instant cast and faster projectile, still too slow. Make it blind instead chill. (with trait you could still chill)

traveler runes if you are rich → spectral walk if you want stun break → locust 100% uptime

Life siphon works alright. It is just that builds which benefit from it have either low hp or armor or both and it doesn’t work against high dmg bursts which happen all the time. That’s counting out minion master which is probably only truely viable siphon build until minions die in oh so frequent aoe.

I really do suggest trying out some siphon builds but do not rely too much on healing power, they’re fun to play with but do not work against high dmg pressure and it also requires that you are able to hit target with high rof dagger, which is a bit problematic too itself.

What comes to healing power I personally think it should be removed from game and healing skills should be just balanced around traits, weapons sets and utility skills.

Or you can remember WvW is not only for zerging and people just don’t give a kitten if server wins or not.

9/50

I think someone forgot mercs only exist on EB.

Rangers are fine.

98% of ranger players are just plain bad.

I blame roleplaying games and books.

CntrlAltDefeat.1465:

wall of stuff

Sorry mate, but everyone should have right to play the game different way than you like to do.

I do agree that pvp doesn’t need to give equal amount of rewards compared to dungeons but it definetly should give you something for those who like to do pvp instead of dungeons.

Doing dungeons shouldn’t feel like a punishment and doing pvp shouldn’t feel like punishment either.

The way it is currently punishes people who like to just pvp for fun were it actual spvp or wvw both, the income isn’t enough to provide reasonable advancement in rest of the game like if you focus your time on doing fractals or dungeons whatever.

I think the system they’re going to be bringing in looks somewhat reasonable though. We’ll see.

From what I gather many of those skills would just improve already brokenly strong builds, except maybe warrior coz healing signet is just that strong.

ranger → makes spirit spammers even better?
necro → makes tanky types (mm/condimancers) stronger than they already are leaves glass pretty useless as ever?
mesmer → looks pretty insane too
guardian → looks really strong for some builds which already are pretty crazy

warrior → healing signet > all
thief → unsure depends on heal amount
engi → stun seems useful for some builds..
ele → asdf who plays ele? seems nice for some builds though.

In GW1 it took very short time to get unlocks for skills you wanted.

As long as we can assume that is the case it’s ok. But knowing the new direction of b2p and all that stuff it’s going to take at least month or two to get skills you need, at least unless you’re type of player who grinds just points. That is really bad direction.

McWolfy.5924:

Nikkinella.8254:

^I’ll still be using dual pistols on my thief I don’t care how bad it is, its fun. And I have the satisfaction of knowing I killed someone with the worst weaponset thief has. And I don’t use stealth so I like rushing in all guns blazing suicide mode anyway.

if u want chalange kill somebody with ranger axe main hand

axe is very good for condibuild..

also guardian scepter is awesome.. i don’t know what people are smoking when playing wvw..

Madora.9340:

Worst trait? Hmm…I’d have to say the warrior’s bonus armor when at or above 90% health because all it takes it a crit and that bonus is gone.

As for most useless weapon, can’t believe nobody has mentioned the torch yet. I don’t see any guardians or mesmers running torches.

torch is very good in given situtations, for both.

yeah i hope we can convert them to something else, so they just don’t go into trash bin it’s basically x% glory lost otherwise.

no need for hasty changes.

WvW is not meant to be balanced.

It is just a Place where you can test the shinies you got from dungeons and other pve activities.

This is just how it is said to be afaik. (summary of what devs have said during last year or so since launch)

No one can expect much fairness there in greater scale. It is also pretty much impossible to give out any serious rewards for such.

Instead we should have more interesting stuff to do there than just zerg balling and more actual pvp forms like in for example automated GvG ladder would be great start.

I think couple things affect outcome a lot

1) Some people are more eager to win match no matter what, so they go and change class after teams have been made. This can flip the balance a lot. Suddenly match which seemed fair at start turns out complete faceroll for other team.
2) A lot strong classes massing on same team. Sometimes unless like majority of team would swap classes there’s just no chance. Take for example 2 condinecros, 2 Warriors and mesmer or engi or something.. that’s something very difficult to overcome if other team is less than optimal. Or pet/minion/clone spamming team against single target team..
3) Too low ranked player in team will have 0 effect on outcome. Rank 6 guy is not going to do anything useful, like in 95% of cases. Like.. Team with one rank 50 3xrank30ish 1xrank6 is very likely to lose to team with like rank40 3xrank30ish 1xrank 20ish.. Since rank 20 guy is likely to be at least decent if not good. There’s of course some people who can but that’s like extremely rare. They’re either one-shot-wonders or just don’t know how to play for points etc. That hurts balance a lot. I’d rather wait extra 5 minutes to get in team with equally ranked people than just lose impossible matchup. Currently it’s more like playing dice who gets more newbs or happens to get more fotm setups.

Hawk.7628:

EnemyCrusher.7324:

Once ladders are implemented, ranks will be retired. To honor the effort that players have put into the rank system, existing players will be able to keep all unlocked rank finishers and will earn a special title based on your rank to show that you were there from the start. Variants of existing rank finishers will move to the ladder system and will be used to show your current standings on the ladder from season to season. The original finishers will not be earnable again.

I have mixed feelings about the changes, but this change is the one that infuriates me. This is essentially giving exploiters permanent rewards and making them unattainable to legitimate players.

Why should players who exploited Skyhammer get to keep their cool finishers while those of us who have been playing legitimately since the beginning never get the chance to obtain them?

This right here.
Why do the skyhammer farmers get to sit at the top with their fancy emote and title while were stuck with whatever rank we can grind legitimately before the change.

Stop rewarding cheaters and exploiters, it has been happening since launch. No rollbacks for skyhammer farmers and booster exploiters, while they sit there at r60+ with 1mil+ glory and laugh.

I would be more concerned that players who actually gained their points and achievements and ranks and skins in legitimate way will be rewarded for all their trouble in decent way. It actually took me a good while getting my rank up to 36 since I don’t do much hotjoins or play spvp every day so I’ll be really disappointed if I am -again- put in some position where I am left with nothing in this game.

I am really happy that people who have HC interest in one field in game get their shinies somewhere be it fractals, wvw or spvp but it would be nice if people doing a bit of this and that would get rewards too. It is hard to get enough time in one aspect to get anything out of GW2. I really think that is what makes it feel grindy were it pvp or pve or whatever.

It is mostly irrelevant if glory farmers get accidentally rewarded too. As long as it doesn’t really take anything off from others.

depends if you farm skyhammer or actually play tournies.

Well spite is useful in theory for power builds too, it’s just that you got to pick something else to stay alive instead. With all those mesmer clones / minions / pets and stuff around you’ve no use for that extra single target signet unless you’re conditionmancer or you just try to go for big burst which is not usually very useful if you die more often.

Spite was really good and useful and pretty balanced as cover for condimancers before patches of madness™.

power necro:

1) warrior → no tools against them really you just die horribly
2) mesmer → clones/shatter will own you unless you get really lucky
3) condi necro → lawd staff and terror is so op
4) AI spammers, power weapons no cleave whatever even with wells you’re gonna struggle.
5) anything with burning, it will own you..

There are no constant 8k life blasts.

You can have spike 8k maybe more if you get full might stacks and vulnerability. Normally it is more like 4-6k when traited well with decent gear. On target below 50% hp. It’s still pretty good though. Just have to remember life blast has slow rate of fire whatevs and you don’t have many tries when LF is out so it’s not like you can go facerolling with “constant 8k hits”.

Bawi.9541

wall of text

You can play what fits your playstyle though By all means. It’s just that toughness stat, considering all variables, is maybe not the best thing ever.

And then there are people who think they are great tacticians even if they are not..

At some point of day every second team I got into had 1 hamwar who thought he was greatest player in game, went afk and started calling rest of team nabs when he couldn’t even CC one necro on enemy team. Maybe it’s new “hip” thing, I am not sure.

- Terrible balance, both class vs class and build vs build.
- Horrible targeting system and npc spam.
-No real rewards to make up for your time, this is part of GW2 you need some in-game rewards to make it feel like something.

Is it dead? Perhaps not, but if you keep playing pvp a bit you start dying inside. It is not a good sign if you go 1v1 and see other guy you just give up because you know there is absolutely no way you could win even if another guy would just spam #1.

It is doubtful those useless buffs and nerfs in next patch change gameplay in a good direction.

My buddies who actually do pve arrange them in their bank to showcase them to theirselves.

Warriors who can just kill you without thinking. No I am not just making it sound easier than it does. Hammer wars make berserk mesmer or thief look like a kitten.

:( kind of annoying. I think you cannot move the popup window. Have to test somewhere.