Part of the problem of lack of builds is just lack of useful traits/utilities. Have you guys seen that OP gadget/turret Engineer build?
Good point. I know personally I have 3 lvl 80 characters atm. A necromancer(my main), and engineer, and a guardian. On my necro and engineer I probably don’t use half or more of my utilities because they are either broken, ineffective, or just too situation often with long cooldowns. Traits to me aren’t quite as bad but it does bother me that there are some that are completely useless while others are essentially mandatory. Don’t create a lot of diversity… One of the things I was looking forward to most in gw2 was a more open experience and right now that is really lacking. Especially in PVP where if you dont use the flavor of the month weapons, build, and traits then you are basically gonna get told “your doing it wrong”. For the old gw1 players I shall from this point on refer to this effect as the shield and spear phenomenon.
Having used it for the last month I can say corrupt boon works about half the time. I usually like to pop it when other classes pop a big stack of boons to come at me so its usually close range and obviously while facing the target. I think its more of a terrain issue as I have seen it pop as obstructed a lot appearingly die to slight changes in elevation.
Its already build wars. Just with builds that have no viable build to counter them. To me thats what seems to be the biggest issue with classes seeming op and individuals who like pvp gravitating towards only playing certain classes. To me counter buolds act as a regulator of these seemingly strong builds. Ie. DD ele starts dominating pvp. If everyone has a reasonable spec to counter and starts running it then the op-ness of the build is negated and its held in check.Problem is right now most classes are so forced into builds that you cant viably spec to counter things and these builds run rampant with every power team or glory farmer jumping on the bandwagon.
Plague signet seems to be helping. I don’t mind the traps as I’m decent at avoiding those. I just think of where I would pre drop my marks and assume thats where they would put there traps. Realizing crossfire stacks bleeds from the side has explained a lot as well. I still don’t care for epmathetic bond working how is does but I really don’t think its intended. If so in its current form its basically the most powerful condition removal in the game.
Lately I have been running boon stripping/converting on my necro and chewing up the currently viewed as OP eles, guardians, and sometimes mesmers. This really got me thinking about how much a build effects how I view other classes. Thieves were a pain till I went into aoe and fears to counter them too. But what if I was a power necro? All these things wouldn’t be in my build and those classes with there builds would feel really OP. Right now rangers are kicking my kitten and I hear a power burst build helps with that. The whole thing makes me wonder how much of the QQ is build related.Also how much of it would go away if classes had more viable builds.Right now even the most complete classes only have a couple viable builds and its just not enough.
If there isnt a way to counter them (your words)and I’m playing my class to its potential I don’t really see how its L2P… Isnt learning to play finding what counters a specific class, build, or tactic?
I think the biggest issue for me personally is as a necro there is no hard counter for rangers atm. You cant condition them down, and necros don’t have the burst to be worth speccing power and losing viabilty against other classes. All this while the ranger has good trap aoe, good dd and condition dmg, good pet damage, condition removal.Overall I’m starting to feel ranger is rather balanced and mine is just not. Other than empathetic bond that is.
I have been running mostly with epidemic, corrupt boon, and flesh wurm, with plague as my elite. I can only assume they are getting my side with crossfire because I almost always get the bleed. Honestly its hard to tell atm because I like to practice in hotjoin and right now you can count on 5+ rangers per match all with a copy paste build. As far as plague signet I will try it. I used to run it a lot but after the nerf of 1 condition draw and with the long cooldown I stopped using it in favor of wurm as my stun break. Atm I run a 0/30/20/0/20 switching between straight bleeds or a 6 fear build. I own thieves with fearsn and can boon strip dd ele and guardians quite good.
A typical fight with a ranger for me goes something like this. (bear with me because I am not 100% on there rotation) From what is see they usually spam me with and ultra fast crossfire (maybe with zepher?) and stack about 20 bleeds on me in a matter of a few seconds and doing a decent chunk of direct damage. I start stacking my scepter bleeds and get about 10-15 on them and a stack of poison while they do this and maybe get about 2-3k direct damage. While this is going on there pet is chewing on me for at least 400+ per hit I think. At this point I may have taken about a quarter of there hp while I am at half or less (my build I have about 24k hp). I either dagger #4 to try to transfer the bleed or consume conditions to heal/remove it. At this point there pet removes all the conditions and they heal back up till close to full because I have done a good bit less damage than they have and I am at about 3/4 hp. Usually it is a rinse and repeat of this until I simply don’t have the cooldowns to outlast the crossfire spam.
If I try to kill the pet is seems like I am eating crossfire the whole time and by the time its dead I am too far behind to put up a good fight. You cant epidemic between the ranger and pet or vise versa to have some damage going on both because of seperation (usually aided by traps or binding roots). A necro can’t stack bleeds nearly as fast and has far less dd from stacking there bleeds. And our condition removal is at best on an 18 second CD (deathly swarm) but I think it only works if it hits and the animation is rather slow and easy to dodge. I’m decent at missing most traps and dispatching pets as needed but doing both while not getting wrecked by crossfire and stating the portion of the fight where I deal with the ranger himself is a mystery to me. I was thinking I wasn’t dodging crossfire enough but to me it seems like since its a series of very fast individual shots you can only dodge 2 of the barrage at best. I see a few ppl on here saying rangers are easily countered or l2p but not explaining anything about how to easily counter them. Unless I’m missing something REALLY obvious here I assume they are just rangers trying to keep the advantage as long as they can.
For what I have pvp’d on my ranger the conditions removed do not do anything to my pet, which is not what the tooltip really reflects. “pets periodically take conditions from you” Thats how its unintended. Also if you will notice nobody said anything about OP or buffs since patch. There are just more ppl playing ranger and they have never been much of an issue until now which is why I asked. I love how rangers give the advice all the time not to ignore there pets (which do decent damage and follow all over the map) but in the same breath say an ability that should do damage to the pet, and can be epidemic’d off does not matter.
I can counter cheesy thief spam, 100lb warrior, and dd ele easily. Mesmers I just ignore mostly because they are just an annoyance. But how do you deal with rangers now? Between double traps, there complete unintended immunity to conditions and rapid fire I have been unable to find a necromancer build capable of killing them. Rapid fire and pets particularly seem to chew me up.
Because if they developed raids, the minute a raid is released, raiders will demand the gear rewards be significantly better than 5 man gear.
So in other words, raids are the antithesis of what Arenanet wants.
Perfectly stated. Essentially there is no motivation to make larger scale content without larger reward. Larger reward exiles part of the population who don’t have the guild base to participate. Imbalance ensues…
The only thing I saw in the state of the game was little to no mention of a firm direction on balance changes for specific classes. As far as a large population is concerned this is the biggest issue on why pvp is dying. And yes it IS DYING. Add all the ratings, game modes and maps that you want but if half of the classes are always going to get stomped by ele, thief, guardian and mesmer those other people are simply not going to pvp. I get that they dont want to knock down classes but its been 6 months and they have done nothing to bring up necro in any build, engineer in many aspects, warrior in any guild beyond gs/axe, or ranger beyond trap build which is at best a cheese build that is only not countered in hotjoin. Its the plain and simple truth that getting whipped any time you face one the classes with 1+ viable strong builds is not fun. Nobody wants to wait months of doing so while things get tested. Everyone is basically forced to get farmed, quit or re-roll. Hopefully the balance changes are coming and were just not highlighted in the pre-release notes but somehow I really doubt it and like a lot of people out there who dont want to switch to a flovor of the month profession I am not really sure if its worth it to even enter the mists anymore.
I don’t think things are all that bad in GW2. Other than balance which is completely terrible atm. However I do think from a PVE/WvW standpoint there are a few simple things that could make the game a lot for fun for us mmo veterans to play.
1. Zone/Dungeon themed gear- I know this is somewhat in the game with cultural weapons and dungeon sets but I think there needs to be more variety. How about common+ themed skins that just drop off mobs specific to the zone type. Nothing insane looking but related to the content. The higher the rarity the cooler the graphic. MMO players like constructing a certain look and anet wants us to revisit and explore more areas. Specific looking loot for certain areas would certainly make me go back if I was working on a certain look.
2. Server forums- I have no clue why this is not included on here. The best part of an mmo, especially one with wvw, is server pride. We should have an official forum to recruit, share war stories, or just talk about the status of whats going on in our home realm.
3. Sell me more purdy stuff on TP- I think the quaggen backpack had more people talking and excited than the actual content in the last patch. We are MMO geeks and we like our virtual swag. I think anet is trying way to hard to use the TP to sell buffs when what they really need to do is market cosmetic items. Its like the age old saying. You give a geek a buff fish he eats for a day, you give him a virtual fake pole to wear around town he don’e eat at all. But dang it looks cool.
If they released an expansion now I don’t think I would buy it. Lately there has been too much “wait till next month” going on in the game. It seems like for the past 6 months all we have done is wait for major issues in the game to be addressed and when the time comes we get told to wait longer. I do think things will eventually balance out and get fixed and at that point I would buy an expansion.
I think there is going to HAVE to be balance issues addressed in this patch. The AOE nerf is going in this patch as far as I understand so unless they change some other things you are going to see ele, necro, engineer basically unusable if other stuff is not adjusted as well.
Agreed. Right now the game isn’t “bad”. I think balance and bugfixes are still the biggest issue. If that gets addressed and we get some decent content I think things will be ok. If the AOE nerf is a disaster and the wvw and pvp fixes promised turn out to be all crap and false promises I think people are going to give up.
Honestly I was just using a random mmo as an example. I really have no love loss with Zenimax or Bethesda as I am one of the poor fools that bought Skyrim on PS3. FYI I have both systems just bigger HD on ps3 and at the time I figured it wouldn’t matter. Really I am more interested in ppls views on what is to come with GW2.
Come February GW2 will have been out for 6 months. There have been good times and bad, but I think most can agree we have all been waiting patiently for this game to turn the corner and become what we were told it would be. Tomorrow is the beginning of the trifecta of patches touted as an “expansions worth of content” and with it lies what could be a turning point for better or worse. Will real class balance be addressed in the coming months? It needs to be because right now only half of the classes in the game are on par. Will people have a reason to play TPvP or SPvP? Currently these areas of the game are dying fast. What about wvw and the zerg? How will they break the mass armies up and breath new life into the Altaric Valley of GW2? I know personally I am excited and a nit nervous to see what lies in store for us. I really like this game but am realistic in seeing that there are massive flaws. A weak spot in the armor that could bring it all down if not repaired. With TESO on the horizon things need to change and change fast. The community has listened to a half a year of vague plans and sat by patch after patch waiting for the method of minor tweaks to make things right. And well…in all honestly its been mostly disappointing. Lately in my guild I have heard a lot of players whos decision to stay here or move to other games really depend of what is coming in the next 3 months. Will anet deliver? I am cautiously hopeful but I gotta say I don’t have the confidence that I did on the evening of August 28th. What about you?
Epidemic already does not do any damage itself and only hits 5 targets so I would be really shocked if they did anything to that. I guess they could increase the cast time but that would be extremely lame.
Maybe its wishful thinking but I really don’t think we are going to be effected much and in the long run may come out ahead. Most of our aoe is not big direct damage anyway, its group application of conditions with a bit of up front damage. Because of this I don’t think condition builds will be effected. If anything takes a hit it will probably be well of suffering which is bad being that this is a staple in any power build and even with it power builds are really lackluster for the most part. However, from what has been mentioned they intend to buff other single target skills to “bring certain builds up to the level of others”. If this holds true single target burst is more of a power build thing anyway and they may come out doing better even if well of suffering loses some damage.
One thing I see a ton of guardians do that I love to see as a necro is pop one of there utilities that gives them a bunch of buffs when they see me. This is about the worst thing you can do going into a fight with a necro. We pop corrupt boon which converts all you boons into conditions. Its the closest thing we necros have to an insta gib as it usually drains a guardian down fast.
Wells are at best mediocre damage (only 2 wells actually do any damage I believe) on a minimum 45 second cooldown. And even when specced into marks the are mostly lackluster damage with the exception of staff #4 which may hit for like 1200 and is on a 25 second CD. I find it really odd that the op bunker class that can spam hammer #2 aoe knocking everyone 10 yards off point would be concerned with wells or marks keeping you off point.
Balance was mentioned then seemed to be glossed right over. What classes are being looked at and what are some of the general new directions are they being taken? Necros and engineers are getting a bit tired of being thief and mesmer fodder.
What is being done about pet ai? This has been broken for necros since launch. Many times running MM in pvp 1 or more of our pets refuse to attach a target standing right next to them yet I have had ranger pets follow me half way across the map.
Dunno about anyone else but I want answers about out class, so I’m logging on to the twitch feed. Just thinking if we get enough of us on there asking questions they have a somewhat acknowledge us right? Who else is going?
As a necromancer I have to admit in sPvP I almost never even have attempted to stomp. About a week into the game I realized how much of an advantage other professions have and gave up on it. Now I kill players and let the professions with the IWIN button do the stomping for me.
I really don’t understand our downstate fear. Yes, in will interrupt a stomp for 1 second but the person always just literally rolls right back to you and stomps you anyway. Usually unless its a ranged class that killed me and has to move a distance to perform the stomp our fear does not even last long enough for fetid ground to come up. I have always been quite successful playing the necromancer in pve, pvp, and some wvw but have always been very confused as the technique to successfully accomplish anything from a downed state. Am I missing something obvious here or is it just that bad? I know on my guardian who I just got to 80 I am frequently able to avoid stomp to rally, on neccro I just dont see how to do this.
Ya, I say the thing about the future of the game in early 2013 being discuss later this week. I really thought we would be seeing something more specific about the January patch well before that. Initial impressions about January indicated a balance patch of sorts but at this point they seemed to have shifted target dates of patches till later in the month which is really in my opinion not a good decision. Right down we are looking at upwards of 45 days between adjustments to the game which is WAY to long when things are as bugged as they are.
Umm. Its half way through January now. When are we going to hear any news about the January update? There has been next to no communication about anything specific since Christmas.
If I play conditions and stick with other players I can easily get 10 plus kills ans I’m almost always top score or near top. Conditions is better with bigger teams. Power is more kills on small teams or if your roaming and getting into 1v1s.
I think ALL passive removal should be a grandmaster trait in a defensive line. As it stands right now most professions can spec for great passive condition removal and still do insane damage. If ppl want to bunker and spec conditions thats fine, there should be a counter for everything and they will be ours. Everyone else should have to make a conscious decision to time removals. Either that or make conditions tick for about 4x what they do.
I agree. I don’t feel that the cap really applies to pvp. I was trying to encompass as a whole both pvp and pve in those three ideas. I do believe removal and condition variety are more the issue in pvp. Stack limit is more pve and variety to a lesser extent is pve as it limits viability of multiple conditions builds in a group.
Necro is an atttrition class…ok. I’m cool with that. Survivability is decent. But can anyone really say that the balance between survivability and damage is in line the way it is currently. Take for example a 1v1 pvp fight may last what? 30 seconds? To me using the model of attrition if i stack my conditions efficiently and use the correct abilities to survive the 30 seconds by the ideal of attrition I should win the fight over a glass cannon. But in reality if you do the above due to the bleed cap you usually only end up with everything on cooldown and a glass cannon at 50-75% hp who is now going to burst you down is about 5 seconds.
I feel that this is all directly related to three things.
1.bleed cap-Needs do explanation. Its breaking our damge in pvp and even more-so in pve. Its was implemented only to drag out fights and give the illusion of more challenging content when in fact it so no different that just stacking an insane amount of hp on a mob and calling it epic battle.
2. Way to much passive condition removal and condition removal in general at no cost- classes should have to make some sacrifice or do some planning to be able to remove conditions. Right now other than warriors nearly every class can passively or actively remove conditions more efficiently than conditions can be stacked at little to no cost to them in other areas.
3. Poison needs to be a bigger element for necros- right now we have 1 viable condition to stack…bleeds. Poison or even a new condition needs to be bumped to add a viable second option.
HS is cheap and OP because there is no risk reward to it. Its basically a ranged homing attack with great damage. I love how everyone says “just dodge” when its a skill that can be spammed more than you can dodge in a given time span. To me the better attacks should be harder to land and set up. Lower dmg attacks would be just fine using hs type delivery.
Mesmers are just built to be annoying. Clone spam is cheese but its kinda there thing so I’m not as bothered by mesmers as thieves.
I’m with Luke on this. I have a few alts so I cruise a lot of class forums and by far I think the necro community has gone above and beyond to suggest viable fixes, test work around and various builds, and locate bugs that should have been fixed in BWE2. In the long run has it had ANY effect? I’m getting so tired of hearing people called whiners and being told stfu its free to play. At this point why shouldn’t they complain. What other route has worked?
I’m starting to feel that once a month are a big factor with recent “patch rage”. I know as a necro we were anxiously awaiting dec 14th and although we got some changes it was not by any means as much as we were lead to expect. They month prior the same was true for rangers. The whole thing is really starting to feel like “better luck next month” they 30 days of hype, hope, and fighting till the next let down. I don’t mind the idea of small changes but if these changes were made more often I think it would be a lot easier to take. As it stand right now my main class has another 20 days of pets that don’t work and getting drilled into the ground by shatter mesmers till they get ravaged on the 14th of January.
Actually I am REALLY impressed with mesmers atm from a community standpoint. The fact that there is a OP build that even mesmers are even calling Anet out over really shows that there are people playing this class that care about the game. They would rather have viable builds and a even match rather than an “i win” button and I respect the hell out of that.
“What? #4 WH is awesome, especially when you use the warhorn trait. Please don’t change it for a confuse, as most people use with Dagger MH, which is a power weapon. Daze = ownage. And it’s AoE”
The reason I would rather have a confusion condition is that it does damage to an enemy each time the try to use a skill and lets face it damage is an issue for us. With traits and sigils of the mesmer you can max it out at a 4 second daze which is impressive but what are you losing to get that and do we have the ability to do damage in that 4 seconds equal to or greater than that we would gain from confusion? I have never run with the 4 second daze so I honestly do not know the answer.
Also the secondary WH skill the speed boon/cripple is nice for perma swiftness in pvp, but is somewhat diminished by recent changes to swiftness for necromancers, elementalists, and thieves.
Dakiaris, I agree with your tweaks to axe. The only issue I see with it is that anet seems to like only a few specific ranges. Ie. 600, 900, 1200. I’m guessing this is due to adjustment of players estimating range when trying to outrange attacks. However I did recently notice dagger now shows 130 and I think it was 120 before.
