Guild Wars 2

KrazyFlyinChicken.5936:

manveruppd.7601:

It sounds like it’s impossible to do if your aoe targetting is set to “fast” or “fast with range indicator”

It would be much harder, yes. But not impossible.

When you click to start the cast, your character immediately turns to face the direction where the spell is meant to go.

The cast time is very short. But while your character is channeling, this is where you need to pivot your character. The wall will face the direction your character is facing at the end of the channel.

So if you use fast cast, you just have to be ready to pivot your character the minute you push the spell’s button which will mean using your right-mouse click button to change facing at the last second.

The example you saw above is just to give you an idea of how that mechanic works. If you use fast casting then that example won’t be any help to you, sadly

By pivot, do you mean just by holding down RMB and turning again? Cause I’m using A and D to strafe, don’t have turning by keyboard bound anymore. If you can do it with the RMB then I think I could manage it with practice. Neat trick though! How did you even discover it?

Low skill threshold, high skill ceiling. When I first made an elementalist alt it felt like my piano teacher had taken away the “Simple piano pieces for children without fingers” book and given me a Rachmaninoff concerto.

Agreed. The only downside is they probably wouldn’t let us corrupt stability into fear if it weren’t a condition…
Even they keep it a condition they should probably make it not stack, like Immobilise used to be.

Rennoko.5731:

It couldn’t be like blink because it would be too strong on too short a cooldown, even if you doubled the cooldown it would still be really amazing if it was an activated blink for an AOE chill + bleed.

Are you saying that simply by making it ground-targeted it will be automatically as good as a skill that is INSTANT CAST and BREAKS STUN? Come on dude, there’s no comparison there! First of all, as I explained above, making it ground targeted would actually make it harder to land due to the need to lead the target, secondly nobody ever said anything about taking the cast time away. I just think that a. it would actually make it work as a gap closer, because as it is now someone running away from you can literally outrun the projectile, and b. it would also give it some limited use as a mobility or escape skill, which we badly need!

Faster projectle would be nice, but ANET said previously they like the slow projectile because it allows you to start “pre” casting something while the projectile is in flight so that it hits right as you teleport (like dagger 3).

Um, well, yeah except above 600 or so it very often misses due to how slow it is. It’s fine if you’re fighting on the point, but if they’re running away from you the projectile can’t catch up.
Also, not sure if anyone else has encountered this, but quite often if I queue up Tainted Shackles while the projectile is in flight, Tainted Shackles cancels right when Dark Path lands and teleports me. Not always, and I haven’t figured out how to repeat the problem.

I agree it’s a great skill even as it is now, but it only works in combat! I think with just a few minor changes that won’t necesarilly make it stronger, it can also gain some utility for use in other circumstances, such as getting you across the map a couple seconds faster, or hitting an opponent even if they’re running away from you.

I’d settle for it being higher cooldown if it gave us that sort of mobility.

Bhawb.7408:

tuman.6593:

The idea is to redesing Dark Path’s mechanics. Make it similar as mesmers Blink or elementalists Lightning Flash(ofc with increased cd and other fixes). To make it nontarget and give us one more escape ability. Is it good idea or imba, your opinion?

Too strong. A 15s 900 range targeted teleport with an unblockable few bleed stacks and chill is crazy (note that elementalists with an actual utility skill have double the CD on a skill that does nothing but teleport).

It just needs to be more reliable on running targets.

Bhawb, it presumably wouldn’t be insta-cast like Blink, so you would still need to lead your target when targetting where to cast. In fact, this would make it slightly harder to land than just pressing 2, though more likely to land IF you’ve led your target properly.
Secondly, since it’s currently 1,200 (although very unreliable at that range), 900 would actually be a range nerf, and the requirement to lead your target a further range nerf (ie you’d need to be closer than 900 to lay down the aoe in front of your target – this isn’t a problem, it’s the way all aoe skills in this game work, unless they’re instant cast like Blink).

The advantage to this idea isn’t that it would make Dark Path stronger, it’s that it would go some way towards solving our mobility problems. You could use it to get to a point faster, or even to escape close combat while immobilised, a condition we’re very vulnerable to. Think about it.

KrazyFlyinChicken.5936:

Now, you only need to push 2 buttons.

- Left click to start the channel and immediately…
- Press and hold ‘W’ to walk forward in the direction of your camera’s facing.

That should get the sidewall going, and give you an idea of how the mechanics of it work.

It sounds like it’s impossible to do if your aoe targetting is set to “fast” or “fast with range indicator”

SonOfKrypton.4357:

Not my fault if you don’t want to grasp this glyph bull by the horns and ride that rodeo through all the DPS Guardians Sunrises.

That’s quite an image! Are you saying that the sun rises out of a DPS Guardian’s kitten ? How have I not noticed this before! Is it because the guardian is an Asura and they’re too small to see among the particle effects?

Yeah it does home, but it’s so slow it’s easy to outrun it! Remember the 1200 range isn’t from where you are atm, but from where you cast it. (basically what Muchacho said)

TBH I’d be happy if they made it 900 range if they made it a targeted teleport, so we could have some more mobility!

Well a little bit of duration stacking helps, but I’d say in pvp what counts isn’t stacking but reapplication! The original poison application won’t stay on long enough to run its full duration anyway. But in Chilblains case it doesn’t matter either way, since the only way you can reapply poison is with Deathly Grasp, which hardly ever hits, and the field only stays on for 3" or so anyway!

I do agree that none of my ideas will fix necromancers’ problems. The problem with us is that most of our fields and finishers come from utilities, so most builds will either have loads of one or loads of the other. That’s why Death Nova is such a good trait, cause it lets you stack a skillbar full of finishers, and gives you automatic fields to use them with – and as a bonus using the blast finishers from your minions on the poison fields from DN inflicts the only condition you can’t inflict with most standard MM builds: weakness! That’s good design there, of combo interactions letting you do something extra!

Compare that to the fields and finishers on Staff. Chilblains leaves a poison field too, but guess what? Chilblains already inflicted poison! What use is it? Are you gonna blast it with Putrid Mark for Weakness, and thereby waste your long cooldown condi cleanse which might save your skin later? Or are you gonna shoot through it with the autoattack? Which has such a slow projectile it literally can’t hit a strafing enemy, an enemy who already has poison on them from the initial Chilblains trigger? Or are you trying to hit someone BEHIND the enemy who originally triggered Chilblains? It’s just terrible, badly thought-out, and redundant.

Fix the Staff AA. It needs a MUCH faster projectile speed! Move the blast finisher from Putrid, it’s too useful for that. Not sure where it should go, probably not Mark of Blood cause it’s too short CD. Another field on MoB? Maybe. But who cares? You’d need an engi to interact with it. Fix combos in general first!

TBH this is not an initiative worth bothering with. Combo fields are a mess and the developers acknowledge it. There are too many fields and too many finishers, and virtually 3/4 of the combos are borderline useless, entirely useless or way too niche. Water is the only one that really matters, with Fire and possibly ethereal as situational seconds. And blasts are the only finishers that really matter, because projectiles are too hard to line up and usually just inflicting conditions that the field already inflicted (which is a little useful in pve, but against any enemy with a cleanse it doesn’t really matter how many times you stack duration on that poison) and whirls being so random to be completely useless

To be meaningful, they need to do three things:
1. Merge all the fields into 4-5 max, keeping only the more meaningful combo interactions and removing all the weaker ones. Nobody wants area retaliation, guys. Nobody. Just turn all the light fields into water fields already!
2. Once you do that, merge every field/finisher interaction so that it affects both friends and foes within the aoe. For example, if you decided to merge, say, dark and smoke fields, make a blast finisher give blindness to foes and stealth to allies, with a single finisher. Also, make whirl finishers affect an AOE rather than shoot out random bolts.
3. Tone some of the stronger ones down. 2 stacks of might from fire fields, and reduce healing from water fields by half. Then, to make up for that, remove all restrictions on interatctions between fields and finishers, allowing each finisher to interact with all overlapping combo fields and each combo field top have multiple finishers act on it simultaneously.
And there you go: you made it simple, you reduced the number of interactions so it’s intuitive and easy to remember, you’ve gotten rid of the obscure and useless ones, and you’ve removed people’s ability to screw their teammates over by laying down the wrong field.

I’m also in favour of a redesign. Not that it’s not good, but the projectile is just so *#@%ing unreliable! With swiftness you can actually OUTRUN IT! It’s so slow it can miss if you sidestep. You basically NEED to fear people to make sure it lands, except if you’ve cast Dark Path from max range, if you fear your target while it’s in flight they’ll actually run beyond its maximum range!

Once you’re in combat and in close range it’s ok. But if you’re a dagger necro trying to use it from a distance as a gap closer you can just forget it.

Furthermore, if they turn it into a ground-targeted teleport like Blink it’ll solve a lot of our mobility problems in pvp!

I think dishonoured only kicks in if you don’t return to the match within 2 minutes.

Yeah you’re right, I did mean “facing” rather than “LoS” throughout. But the issue remains that Marks DON’T require facing while you’re running (you can target the ground behind you and the skill works), but they DO require facing if you’re standing still, causing them to fail if you’re immobilised. That to me can’t be deliberate, it must be a bug! Doom NEVER requires facing, it still works if I’m immobilised and the target is behind me, so why do marks behave one way if you’re moving and another if standing still?

Oh and btw, when I say the skill “fails”, I don’t mean it goes on a 5" cooldown or anything, I just see the skill icon activate for a moment, as if the cast has started, but the casting animation never even starts.

The only workaround to this would be moving your cursor down to the very bottom of the screen, so thatthe mark gets cast at your feet. But when you get immonilised and jumped on you have a very narrow window to react in, so youj’d need practice to pull it off.

Yeah I got tthat, it was more in response to flow saying it’s nothing to do with game mechanics.

I spent nearly 2 years thinking it was lag-related. When the penny dropped the other night I was absolutely furious. It’s such a moronic problem, it’s never been documented anywhere, and it’s been in thge game since launch! I honestly felt like the developers don’t give a crap, they just do things at random!

Bhawb.7408:

One idea I had was to introduce Orders as toggle-based AoE effects, like Auras are handled in Path of Exile, if you’re familiar. When you turn them on, they have some negative effect, such as losing a % of your HP every second or self-stacking conditions. Those self-effects could then have play with our own skills already (like self stacking a bunch of conditions then plague signeting them off), or new traits.

The Orders themselves would give a unique, unremovable buff to allies in the area, giving them things like lifesteal, condition application, increased stats, etc. The skills would have no CDs (just maybe a 1s one per toggle) or very short ones, but would be gated by the negative effects they applied to you.

I dunno man, if they were something short duration with long cooldowns like ele Auras they’d be ok, but if they’re spammable they’ll just give birth to a crapton of utterly noxious builds like they did in GW1. As someone who had to kitten himself out to IWAY and ranger spike teams back then I can tell you it’s horribly boring to just sit in the back spamming them, and you feel dirty for being the blue veins in all that cheese. :p
I know they can be balanced by the detrimental effect on you (whether that’s bleeds or direct health loss), but that’s a hard balancing act. If they’re weak like the conditions you get with Corruptions they’re meaningless and just give you extra conditions to transfer to enemies, if they’re severe then you just sit in the back trying to keep your health up. I can only see it working if they were introduced alongside a serious buff to life stealing so you can keep your health up while staying in the fight.

Carlos.7915:

As you guys know one of the main issues and motives why Anet always hesitate on adding new things for necros is that we have ``a second health bar`` so what about giving new uses to LF?
/snip/
This way we would have to choice on a certain situation if we want to be more tanky with DS or if we want a little more mobility(F2) or group support(F3, F4)

I’d actually go further and say that necro will never work well while DS acts as a 2nd life bar. I think they should just introduce F1-F4 abilities like the ones you suggest (or like DS2-5) and make them cost life force to activate, like adrenaline for warriors. I know it’s completely removed from their original vision for the class, but it’s not working out is it? Relying on DS as your main damage mitigation mechanic means the class will never be balanced, as its capacity to absorb damage decreases linearly with each opponent hitting on you (as opposed to things like blocks, invulnerabilities, stealths, and even plain old dodges, which will negate all damage no matter how many hits you take during that time), as well as with how much life force you’ve had time to generate. If a thief jumps you when you’re empty you’re dead meat, whereas if you have a full bar he’ll waste all his initiative and barely make a dent on your actual HP!

Luke.4562:

• There can be some intriguing spell like Grenth’s Balance which would work nicely as an healing spell with some synergy with Death Shroud and an higher skillcap.

That would actually make a really interesting healing skill, yeah!

No, if you cast Doom, which doesn’t need line of sight, it works just fine. This MUST be a bug, they just work differently depending on if you#re moving or standing still!

But you CAN’T turn to face when you’re running! So either marks are bugged, or they behave completely differently depending on whether you’re moving or not!

It’s these little inconsistencies that annoy me about this game… how can you expect us to treat this thing seriously as an e-sport when there is no consistency or predictability in the way abilities behave? I’m not complaining about the fact that some skills need facing and others don’t, that’s ok, although it really SHOULD be noted on the tooltip. But when skills have DIFFERENT REQUIREMENTS WHEN YOU’RE RUNNING AND WHEN YOU’RE STANDING STILL, that’s inexplicable and borderline moronic!

GW2’s combat is a beautiful, fluid dance, but its underlying rules are a huge wet sloppy mess. It’s like each line of code in the game was coded by 25 different people who all switched workstations every half line. While stoned. And blindfolded.

ANet need to understand that the most important thing about esports is consistency! It’s knowing that when you activate X ability against an opponent with Y effects on them, Z will always happen. A small amount of RNG is ok, but when kitten behaves seemingly randomly the whole thing becomes a joke!

Also how do you expect to have a healthy, evolving metagame when each class has so many hidden and undocumented inconsistencies and foibles that it’s impossible to just pick up a class and play it effectively without months and months of training? It’s not just necromancer, I’ve been looking at attunement-dependent elementalist abilities on the wiki, and it seems some of them proc the effect of the attunement you started the cast in, and others proc the effect of the attunement you finish the cast in, with no rhyme or reason (OR DOCUMENTATION!) about which is which! It’s not even dependent on ability type either – glyphs are split right down the middle, and there’s no way to know what each will do unless you look it up on the wiki!

Ah! Good! I was worried that traiting Terror is meaningless now

In all seriousness though Fear probably should be a stun rather than a condition.

Wait I keep hearing stuff about Melandru runes and it’s never clear what people mean! Do they:

1. Reduce fear by both condition duration and stun duration reductions?

2. USED to reduce fear by both condition duration and stun duration reductions but got fixed? Or

3. Do people WANT THEM to reduce fear by both condition duration and stun duration reductions?

Tonight was the umpthillion time I died because I was immobilised, I tried to cast a Reaper’s Mark or a Putrid Mark at my feet to save myself, and the skill just didn’t go off.

I was not dazed/stunned/kitten. The skill was definitely not on cooldown. In fact, when I push the key mapped to it I could see the skill icon getting depressed. Not depressed because it doesn’t feel pretty, depressed as in the “button getting pushed down” animation that skill icons do when you activate and start casting them. However, the casting animation never began. I definitely wasn’t interrupted during the cast because the thing never went on cooldown, it just wouldn’t go off!

This has happened to me A LOT. Almost every other match I play, and I’ve been pvping since launch. Until tonight, I used to think that this a network lag issue: the client detects the keypress and shows the skill icon get “pushed down”, but the signal never makes it to the server. I get this a lot in WvW so I know it’s an issue, plus when I watch streams of people playing I see them repeatedly mashing skill buttons a lot, and I suspect it’s because it’s happened to them too.

However, tonight I started suspecting another reason for it: IMMOBILIZE. This MOSTLY happens when I’m immobilized! So I’m thinking: do Marks require LOS? So far I thought they didn’t, because when I’m moving, I can target an area behind my character and therefore out of my LOS, and the mark casts just fine. However, if I try to cast while standing still, my character will turn to face the area I’m targetting with my cast.

Can anyone confirm whether Marks need facing or not?

Bhawb.7408:

Really, I just wanted to adapt Contagion into GW2.

Bhawb, your forum posts are the only excuse I have to link to entries from the GW1 wiki nowadays, and that’s why I love you man!

http://guildwiki.gamepedia.com/Contagion

However, while it’s better than the way they did it, I still don’t like it. I would like it to be active, and I would like it to be meaningful. I don’t want to draw 1 random condition every 3" (realistically 1 every 10" cause few people sit in DS for 3"), which might make all the difference in saving my teammate because I pulled an immobilise or a stack of 19 bleeds, or it might make no difference whatsoever cause I pulled 2 stacks of invulnerability. I want to be able to control when it happens and for it to be meaningful when I use it.

I therefore propose that the trait instead modifies Life Transfer (DS4) into something like a cross between GW1 Contagion and underwater DS 4:
“Life Transfer removes 1 condition per pulse from an ally within 600 and transfers it to you. Additionally, one condition per pulse is copied from you too enemies within 600.”

The advantages this has IMHO are:
1. It’s ACTIVE.
2. It might be only once every 40", but the player does a meaningful amount of cleansing that can turn a fight around during the cast, and yet…
3. …it’s still not overpowered, firstly because it’;s still possible to draw the wrong conditions and not be abl.e to save your teammate, and secondly because….
4. …it’s got A LOT of counterplay! It’s a very long cast (with a distinctive animation and sound effect) and it’s very easy to interrupt the necro during it (even with Foot in the Grave the necro won’t have enough stability to get through the whole cast, plus stability can be corrupted), it’s a small PBAOE so you can just dodge out of it or snare the necro so he can’t get close enough, and, finally, the necro will finish the cast with 9 new conditions on them, so you have the opportunity to stunlock them to prevent him from cleansing them and just watch his health bar melt.

I think it would be pretty awesome like that frankly! However, what would be even better than my suggestion would be if they just gave us the underwater version of all the death shroud skills and be done with it! :p

Rolyate.6753:

I don’t understand why you aren’t locked in to the character you submit in to the roster. It’d do wonders for the meta.

+1! Seriously, once the match starts they shouldn’t let you change ANYTHING!

sorrow.2364:

2) This is balanced around the downed state health. Necromancers have a sub-par downed state, so does Warrior. This is because downed state health scales only on base HP, which means that Warriors and Necromancers are the most tough professions to kill just by cleave and, as a consequence, the easiest to ress.

I’m not sure you’re right about that. IMHO, the best downed state skills are the ones that can completely avoid a stomp, even when it’s being made with stability. The only ones that can do that are thieves, eles, and mesmers. Thieves and eles have low health, but mesmers have medium health, and if anything their downed state is even stronger than ele’s.

If you can’t avoid a stability stomp, the 2nd best downed state skills are the ones that interrupt in an aoe around the caster. Only rangers and guardians have those, and I don’t think anyone would argue that the ranger’s is better even though they have higher base health than the guardian (sure the guardian’s does pushback, but it also has a longer cast time and a telegraphed animation, making it super easy to dodge – also, the ranger’s 3 skill is on a lower cooldown than the guardian’s and heals for more).

I would love it if you were right and downed states were balanced according to downed health (or according to anything else forthat matter), but I think the inconsistencies between the various professions show that no such thought went into designing each class’s downed state at all.

Seriously? You can change characters MIDWAY through a tournament match????

If that’s really possible I’m surtprised it took TWO YEARS for someone to exploit it! :p

Good point about the death magic changes, I forgot about them! With those in mind then yes, it’s possible that MM is now actually stronger, if only a bit. And the greater choice of sigils also helps with their lack of mobility and utility. Maybe I shyould try it too :p

I’ve been seeing a lot more MMs in pvp since the patch, and I’m not sure why. I mean minions got a nerf, strictly speaking (Training of the Master and Vampiric Master both got mild nerfs, right?) so I don’t get why they have such a surge in popularity. Some of the sigil changes might have been beneficial to MMs but I don’t think it’d be enough to mitigate the nerfs. Has anyone here switched to MM post-patch? And if so, why, and what changes have you made to your build?

Yes please, that would be nice!

And off-topic, but another good QOL chance would be: don’t replace your health bar with your Life Force in the party window when you enter DS. A lot of times when I’m pvping and I enter DS with only a little life force left a teammate will see it and shout “DUDE YOU GOING DOWN??” because at a glance that shade of green isn’t that distinguishable from the brownish shade of red they use for HP, especially if you’re colourblind. Just show HP in the party window at all times.

infantrydiv.1620:

Warriors’ weakness, when the game was released, was supposed to be conditions. Now, equipped with cleansing ire, berserker’s stance, and a massive starting health pool, warriors are juggernauts.

Spot on. The cleansing portion of Cleansing ire would be balanced if it weren’t for how easy it is to gain adrenaline (partly due to Cleansing Ire itself for adrenaline on hit, but also Signet of Rage, Berserker Stance, and Burst Mastery for reducing the cost), and how quickly burst skills recharged.

Bhawb.7408:

Plus you still hit probably THE biggest issue with necros, we’re just so slow. NA its not a huge deal, but EU has such good rotations that having a Necro can be a liability. I’d love to see you make it work though, I’m sure its possible with the right setup.

Really wish they’d revert Dark Path to being a targeted teleport (like Blink or Lightning Flash) like it was in betas. It would solve SO MUCH of our mobility problems. You could even use it as an escape at a pinch! At the very least they could make it traitable to be like that, perhaps via Path of Corruption.

ceol.9175:

If you stay in longbow the entire time, you’re gimping yourself in the fight, and that’s the only way you’re going to keep Combustive Shot up 100% of the time.

Why would you need to stay in longbow when your weapon swaps are only on a 5" cooldown (through a MINOR trait I might add!), and you also have a blast finisher on hammer? You can easily switch back to reapply the fire field when it expires.

The fact that elementalist needs to be buffed doesn’t mean warrior needs to be nerfed.

Well imho it’s a little column A, a little column B, but the point of my post wasn’t to say warriors need a nerf or eles need a buff, but just to point out that there’s a huge discrepancy between the two.

And I’m not sure what you’re talking about with elementalists not getting the same benefit from strength runes. Rarely will a warrior or an ele be able to keep 25 stacks of might up by themselves in a fight, but they will be able to have some sort of might from their combos and weapon/attunement swapping.

To reiterate, since warriors are able to generate might more easily through fire fields, they gain a lot more benefit from the +duration% bonus of strength runes, and since they have higher armour and base health trhey’re able to benefit from the might when struck bonus more often. I don’t see why it’s so difficult to get: the more might you can generate yourself, the more benefit you get from +duration% cause you end up with more might stacks. I never said that warriors can reach 25 while eles can’t, I just said that warriors get more stacks more easily, with less weapon set juggling.

Yeah, their rotations are more complex. They also offer a bit more utility. The basic hambow build doesn’t have any mobility and barely has any sort of conditions. It’s kitten-easy to dodge out of Combustive Shot and Arcing Arrow as well as half the kitten hammer skills. “B-B-But the capture point!!” Yeah? Every class has AoE skills to force people off-point.

Come on, barely any conditions? 6 bleeds, multiple sources of burns, and immobilise? All (unlike eles) on the same weapon set, and with plenty of stuns and knockdowns on the other set? And sure, everything is dodgeable but with the longbow’s (and hammer’s!) cooldowns being so short it’s impossible to dodge them all cause you run out of energy. And no other class has such a large field with 125% uptime duration! What can you possibly compare it to? In terms of damage only necro wells come close and their uptime is only 16%! Even a staff ele with blasting staff would struggle to compete with that sort of aoe!

That’s not to say that there’s anything fundamentally wrong and gamebreaking with warrior, it’s just that everything is a tiny bit too much. Every cooldown is slightly too low, adrenaline is a tad too easy to generate, etc. It’s just everything combined that ends up being overwhelming.

ceol.9175:

infantrydiv.1620:

Elementalists also have to rotate properly, and dont have complete immunity to damage periodically.

What… are you talking about? Warriors have to do just as much rotation on a hambow build to get might stacks, and Elementalists get Mist Form and Obsidian Flesh which are truly complete immunity and not just immune from direct damage or conditions — not to mention Swirling Winds and Magnetic Wave, which reflect projectiles. Oh, and Fire Shield, which grants Might on hit.

No one is questioning that the base damage of an elementalist is greater than that of a warrior. It’s just that the warrior can put out almost as much damage on a far tankier spec, with 6,700 more health and literally 1,000 more armour!

As for Might generation, yes, hambow warriors have the edge there too, as they can keep up a permanent fire field (9" duration, 7.75" recharge), and have 2 blast finishers at 10" and 7.75" recharge, and as a bonus 2 out of those 3 skills moreover cleanse 2 condis eeach whenever they’re used! The standard cantrip d/d ele has 2 very short duration fire fields at 15" recharge each, with one being an awkward shake, 2 blast finishers at 15" and 45" recharge, plus dodging in Earth attunement if evasive arcana is traited, and all these skills are spread across THREE different attunements with 10" recharge each, whereas the warrior has a field and a finisher on the same weapon set and another finisher only a 5" recharge weapon swap away. So no, elementalists do not gain the same benefit from Strength runes even though they’re available to them just as they’re available to warrior: by not having as much access to blast finishers and fire fields they do not gain as much benefit from the +duration aspect of Strength runes, and due to their glassier nature they can’t gian as much from the #4 bonus (might when struck) either. So while Strength runes are available for everyone, they certainly don’t give the same bonus for everyone. With the amount of Might a warrior can stack their total damage output is higher than a d/d ele’s even though the ele’s base damage is higher, and, to add insult to injury, higher burning uptime than an elementalist, the quintessential burning applicator! Having these advantages while also having more armour, more health, and better healing, means that imho the hambow warrior is not merely easier to play, it is baseline better than any other build in the game, and it’s a huge imbalance that needs to be addressed.

But under my suggestion you’d be able to tag even more enemies, as combo interactions that now only affect either allies or enemies would be merged to affect both. The poison might be useful in pve but I’m sure you can get pretty high uptime anyway, and in pvp/wvw long durations are meaningless due to cleansing. And the lifeleech is totally marginal, both the damage and the healing is minor.

spoj.9672:

Dont make me sick please. He got his account rolled back, that means he hasnt lost anything other than a few days of playtime.

Do you often have proiblems with nausea? I hadn’t watched the 2nd video when I posted that.

sAdam.5876:

Thankfully all ended well. Nemesis got hiss characters restored and in upcoming days we might see new guides.

http://youtu.be/ARzm3JMVgL0

Good for him!

I assume they stole all his gold and salvaged all his armours… We should maybe drop him a few gold each to help him kit his characters back up!

JonPeters.5630:

Con: It is a pretty advanced decision that I never expect 90% of players to understand so it doesn’t solve the problem for the majority of the playerbase.

You can have it both ways by having a simple scripting system that players can customise to their heart’s content, with a reasonable default setting that you can return to at the touch of a button. Based on certain parameters it would prioritise fields in a hierarchy of 1 to 6. An example of that default could be:

If own Health < 50%, set Water priority 1, Smoke priority 2, Ethereal priority 3, Ice priority 4 etc.

You’ll be able to specify multiple rules with the highest-ranked rules taking priority over lower-ranked rules when there is a conflict. It would allow you to set parameters to check whether there are there any allies or enemies within the area of effect, or even to check which there are more of (eg if enemies > allies prioritise dark field over water field). You could even have separate priorities for different finishers. If you enjoyed tinkering you could set rules as specific as:

for projectile finishers: IF there is 1+ allies in area of effect, AND that ally has > 2 conditions on them, set light field priority 1

or

for blast finisher: If allies in aoe < 1, set dark field priority 1; IF DOWNED allies in aoe > 1, set smoke field priority 1, else set water priority 1.

It sounds complicated, but if you had a reasonable default nobody would bother, and players would share their own presets with each other so that 80% of the playerbase wouldn’t need to learn to script.

Con: Probably the most work of any of the currently proposed solutions without solving the problem for every user.

Can’t help you with that

Actually no, I CAN help you with that! There are far too many different combo fields in this game, it’s hard to see all the different ones in combat, and it’s not immediately clear or predictable what you’re gonna get from each. If you were to amalgamate them to half the number you would make the job of scripting priorities a lot easier!

For instance you could easily merge Light and Ethereal fields: what they do is pretty complementary because Retaliation (granted by Light fields) is one of the boons granted by Chaos Armour (granted by ethereal fields).

Moreover, a lot of the interactions between fields and finishers only affect either allies or enemies. By merging those interactions (and having the same finisher inflict a different effect on allies and a different effect on enemies), you could amalgamate even more fields: for instance, you could merge Dark and Smoke fields very easily, by having blast/leap finishers inflict blindness on enemies within the area, and stealth on allies within the area simultaneously. There’s plenty of other marginal fields – not many skills create frost fields, they could be merged with something else, and I think there’s only ONE (!) lightning field in the whole game!

This sort of treatment would solve another problem with combos: their redundancy. In many cases, skills that create a poison field already inflict poison, skills that leave a frost field already chill, so using a finisher on that field doesn’t reward the player with any real bonus (maybe a bit in pve, but not in pvp/wvw where there’s lots of cleansing). If you merge some fields you can get rid of the more lacklustre field/finisher interactions and keep only the more interesting and powerful combos.

The tl;dr is: by reducing the number of fields you would make it easier for players to remember what each does, reduce annoying overlaps and accidental interactions with the wrong field, keep only the most powerful combos so as to make them more meaningful and rewarding, and make it easier to coordinate team plays and cross-player combos.

Other ideas floating out there

• Fixed Priority – Always the same priority for all players.
• Time Based – The most recent or least recent field is what triggers.
• Self Priority – Your own fields take priority (this would have to be a rule that stacks on top of another system.

I don’t think any of those is perfect, but I do believe there needs to be a predictable and documented priority system, so players can know with some certainty what will happen when they drop their finishers. If my suggestion therefore sounds like too much work, you should pick one of these, it’ll be an improvement over the random system we have today.

Azure Prower.8701:

I have around 110% MF and haven’t received a single ascended item yet.

Also I don’t think MF affects it.

The devs have said that it does, unlike other chests. That’s why they[‘ve been telling us to salvage any pvp skins we don’t need before the patch.

I personally don’t have a problem with unlocks for gold/gems/skillpoints/virgins/whatever, but agree they should be account bound.

Reason? Well, a lot of people pvp on a different character than they pve on. They might have made a big burly Norn mesmer, but prefer to pvp on an asura to exploit the tiny animations. Or maybe they’re on a high level competitive team and they all agreed to have themed character names. These people shouldn’t be punished – if they want to have 2 character slots devoted to a single class that’s more gems for expansion slots, so ANet shouldn’t say no to them.

Nope. You’re all wrong.

[URL=http://s1119.photobucket.com/user/manveruppd/media/trogdor_zps38fcbe17.gif.html][IMG]http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/k629/manveruppd/trogdor_zps38fcbe17.gif[/IMG][/URL]

Dudes, in a lot of competitive games when you get fragged that’s it, you’re dead until the end of the round! Even in GW1 gvg you had to wait up to 2 whole minutes unless you got rezzed. And you’re complaining about an extra 4-5" added to the already puny 15" respawn timer? Come on, don’t be ingrates!

No wonder, I’m only jat 79% MF. Isn’t it ironic that, now that we finally have good rewards in pvp, the people who’ve spent the last 2 years doing pve can still net better loot from losses with all the magic find they’ve accumulated than the pvp’ers can get from winning? :p

Arvid.3829:

@manveruppd.7601: My point is more like Bhawb said, in that you would ideally try to achieve a balance between vitality and toughness. In scenarios where you can only pick one (pvp), both give pretty much the exact same benefit before you take condition damage and healing into account.

Yeah ok, that I can agree with. I certainly felt more survivable pre-patch when I was using Carrion with rabid jewel. But it might have more to do with the fact that there weren’t all those thieves running around with double air and fire sigils rather than that tiny bit of extra toughness :p

@Arvid, umm, I’m not sure I’m reading your post correctly but I think we both agree that if you put conditional stuff like death shroud aside toughness is better? Though possibly for different reasons?

I’ve heard the “your HP must be ten times your total armour” formula somewhere before, but on a necromancer in pvp the only amulet that’ll give you that is Soldiers, and that’s no good for a conditionmancer.

No, he’s right, no other weapon in the game has 4 traits associated with it and it’s ridiculous. Especially so many marginal ones. You might think well you don’t have to take the marginal ones. Sure: staff is a decent utility weapon even untraited. But even if you theoretically take every single trait associated with it, it would still never be a decent main weapon!

If we had decent traits associated with staff, then you could choose to take it untraited for utility or to trait it to use as your main damage-dealing weapon. But at the moment no combination of traits makes it worth using except when you need a specific thing (eg the fear), or in marginal situations like zerg vs zerg (even there you’ll just be biding time until you can drop your Wells, use your elite, or go into Death Shroud for piercing deathly perception lifeblasts).

On every other profession marginal bonuses like +10% damage would be rolled into other traits like -20% cooldown. cf the equivalent mesmer staff, sword, and GS traits, which give -20% recharge, bonus to attributes (a small one, admittedly, not equivalent to +10% damage), AND each affect a corresponding underwater weapon as a bonus. Or ranger traits, like Quick Draw, which affects both shortbow AND longbow, Blade Training which works like the mesmer ones I mentioned, or off-hand training which decreases recharge and increases range for ALL OFF-HAND WEAPONS! That’s right, 1 trait for 4 weapons! So in effect our staff traits are underpowered by being split up, and while you don’t NEED to take any of them, maybe they’d be more tempting if some of their bonuses were combined. Soul Marks would be great for Deathly Perception builds, but would you really take it over Near to Death? Of course not, but if it was combined with Spiteful Marks or Staff Training you might! Moreover, even if you accept that staff will always be a utility weapon and that you don’t need any of these traits, having all these marginal traits that we never use takes up space for potentially useful traits the devs could come up with to help in other areas!

Therefore, as I’ve on here before, I believe staff marks should be merged into two. My recommendation would be as follows:
Greater Marks, Death, adept: -20% recharge, marks become unblockable; and
Spiteful Marks, Spite, master: +10% damage on staff skills, marks generate life force.
This would allow access to decreased recharge for condition builds, and force Deathly Perception builds to invest in the Spite tree to get life force generation.
Moreover, I believe that Deathly Grasp should have its projectile speed increased x2 and its piercing property removed. Optionally, Spiteful Marks can also trait it to reintroduce the piercing property.

As an aside, is the staff even a must for utility anymore? Putrid Mark was a conditionmancer’s best team support skill and it’s been nerfed to the ground. transferring 3 conditions is still powerful, especially in this meta, but I personally could live with 1 less transfer (I used to carry warhorn instead of off-hand dagger and did ok with just staff as a condi transfer, the daze can actually be more useful than fear with swarms of Berserker Stance warriors still infesting spvp !). Personally I mostly carry it for Reaper’s Mark, which is still excellent (a skill that powerful would probably be 50-60" cooldown if it weren’t on such an otherwise mediocre weapon), though less so now than it was a year ago, since access to stability is easier for most classes. The first 2 marks are still ok for spreading a bit of aoe in team fights, but I’m sure we all drop them and immediately switch to scepter unless your vantage point is more than 900 away.

It would take a major redesign to make staff into something you stayed in all the time. It would be tricky too, because if you reduce the cooldown on Mark of Blood and Chilblains to the point where you could stack enough condis on a single target to compete with the damage on scepter, it would make it hideously overpowered in aoe! If Mark of Blood were on a 2" cooldown you could stand on a ledge and rain down bleeds in team fights to the point where you’d be doing more total damage than a staff ele in zerker gear! One possibility is to give the weapon more fields, and increase the duration of the poison field on Chilblains, so you could exploit that projectile finisher on 1 a few times (assuming they incrfease projectile speed ot something reasonable). Possibly add a short-duration dark field on Mark of Blood to get a bit of life stealing?

ArchonWing.9480:

Ignorance leads to fear, fear leads to anger, etc.

If only that were an actual trait! Continuously apply fear to ignorant enemies within 1.200.

:p

Oh god… this vitality vs toughness debate! Have we nbot wasted enough of our lives discussing this over the last 2 years?

People smarter than me have done the maths, you can dig around in the dark recesses of the forum to find their posts if you’re brave enough. Bottom line is as follows:
a. for other professions, toughness>vitality against direct damage, vitality>toughness vs conditions. However, because most condi builds (apart from necro) also deal decent(ish) direct damage, toughness is usually best (hence Knights is the go-to gear for zerg fights in wvw for most professions).
b. for necromancer, because each point of vitality is essentially 17HP rather than 10 (because it adds to your total life force), so it just about comes up even against direct damage too.
c. the statement above, however, is only true if you have a full LF bar and/or good LF generation. Most scepter builds don’t. Therefore, at the start of a match, until you’ve built up some LF, toughness>vitality.
d. the other reason to invest in vitality, conditions, isn’t as big a problem for necro due to our high number of transfers and the best cleanse in the game (consume conditions).

So, the tl;dr is: for necromancer, toughness=vitality (roughly), but only if you can build your life force before getting stuck in. I’m currently running Carrion, but those 5k FoC screenshots made my jaw drop to the floor so I might be convinced to try something different! :p

Path of corruption is indeed awesome but our raw damage is still less than before Dhuumfire was introduced. You have to be smart and opportunistic to exploit an uncovered stability or other boons that are important to the enemy’s build, and even if you use it well your damage will still be less than it was. (not that it’s easy to use it well, as even if you use it at just the right time the projectile is so slow you can only hope they’ll walk into it)

Tried this, indeed it feels very different from cantrip ele, much bigger burst but less survivability. It’s particularly vulnerable against condition classes, I kept switching to water and dodging cause of how used I was to Evasive Arcana saving my derrière! :p In the end to stand a chance against necros and engis I had to drop doom sigil for generosity as per your suggestion. It was just impossible to cleanse enough conditions otherwise!

I had a lot of fun using Magnetic Leap as an opener, especially through Ring of Fire to give myself Fire Aura. Then I could do the Earthquake→Churning Earth combo while chaining the 2 Arcane skills mid-blast to cause immobilise.

By the way, did you know that Arcane Might causes your next FIVE attacks to trigger Elemental Surge? You could try swapping it in for either blast or wave, woiuld be slightly less bursty but for team fights you could spam earth 1 for significant amounts of lockdown to let your team burst down someone!

Ultimately though I really found this build more difficult to play than the cantrip ele. D/D is pretty unforgiving even with cantrips, and without Evasive Arcana mediocre players like me who can’t spot an enemy burst a mile away and dodge with their eyes closed just don’t have enough healing. You really need to be more skilled to survive with this than with the cantrip build, but when it works the damage is pretty awesome!

There was another build floating around the forums a couple months ago from someone who made a staff-based arcane ele, and ultimately I thin k that would work better since you can blast your water fields for extra healing. Staff might not have the damage of d/d but tbh most of your burst comes from the arcane skills anyway so might be worth trying,

Since Magnetic Leap has no activation time, why can’t it be activated while channelling other skills? It would help people land Churning Earth without relying on taking a cantrip (you really shouldn’t need to spend a utility slot solely on making sure one of your weapon skills land…), and would also work for stopping them from dodging your earthquakes.

Is it a bug or is it by design?