Guild Wars 2

Vamp runes will still be viable, especially since most chronomancer builds will use stealth very sparingly if it at all, since the shield is pretty much better than torch for most conquest scenarios and it balanced vamp runes will give you a bit more sustain.

Pack runes will be what most people would probably run, since thats the most common power rune behind vamp right now on non-might stacking builds.

Why did you even mention traveler?

Anyway, for ideas that you didn’t mention, I think lyssa runes are still relevant for condition cleansing. Scholar is also an amazing choice if you want to live your life dangerously, that 10% damage modifier puts some extra butter in your burst for sure.

Ragnar the Rock.3174:

Sinister & zealot would be a no go in PvP.

Both would leave you far too vulnerable to conditions & burst due to not having any toughness or vitality.

If they were to make an amulet that had power, vitality, healing power then it would be great for guardians.

The vitality or toughness on an amulet is really a must thogh unless you massively outskill your enemy.

As for trapper runes, they don’t really have much cohesion with dragon hunter.
The stealth & super speed looks nice at first glance but when weighed against CD’s its meh.
Dh also doesn’t really bring much in the way of conditions that cannot be done better by other specs (other then cripple)

If sinister is a 4-stat amulet with vitality, then it will work fine for guardians.

The main advantage to these rune sets is that it gives you better disengage, which is a guardian’s ultimate weakness in pvp. Dragonhunter will likely work well with condition builds, even if they stay carrion, simple because the cripple gives a cover condition that is unavailable to normal burn builds, while hunter’s fortification gives good sustain that lets you survive without valor and meditations. For traps, I think fragments and procession of blades and the elite trap could be potentially very strong due to their PoB’s multiple hits and utility of the other two.

Yeah I think this build could be the goddess of 1v1s.

Also potentially excited for a sinister burn trap dragonhunter build if the sinister amulet has like 560 vitality on it to make it not completely rambo.

Sabull.5670:

Perhaps people jokingly have suggested lolo add Trapper runes to PvP. And now they are actually getting added? What the heck.

I don’t really care how meta powerful they are gonna be, but Trapper runes simply won’t be good for the game. Adding in long duration stealths for cheesy condition builds just in all honesty won’t be fun or good for the game and people will not be exited to fight against these even if they arent metabattle builds.

I’m just wondering, why, why are they being added. What good does this do.

It also gives DPS guardians a viable utility bar that doesn’t consist solely of meditations. It gives ranger an actually way to disengage, something that condi builds in particular haven’t been strong at.

And I don’t understand why people are so opposed to condi builds getting the tools they need to be viable, I mean even the sinister amulet should be huge for some classes. Condi builds have almost never been meta, because theres so much passive AoE cleanse in any remotely organized teamfight. If I go up against a support guard when playing a condi guard, mes, necro, or ranger, I think to myself, “I might as well not even both teamfighting because all the AoE cross cleansing will make me useless”.

Meanwhile most people complain about condition builds being unhealthy for the game simply because they’re fairly strong in 1v1s. Well guess what, if you want to play a frail zerker build with no condi cleanse, maybe you shouldn’t be 1v1ing a condi spec. Bring a friend or rotate somewhere where you’ll be of use.

Oh also another question, will the sinister amulet be a 3 or 4 stat (including vitality) spread?

So Grouch has confirmed in the PvP forums that trapper runes (and sinister stats) among other things (most likely a zealot ammy too) will be available next week.

I think these runes could give both DPS and burn guardians viable dragonhunter builds that don’t need meditation skills to survive. This means you can potentially drop valor altogether, which is especially good for burn dragonhunter builds that would want to stick with radiance/virtues. Meanwhile power builds can just stick with virtues and zeal and use the stealth and super speed from the trap runes for general survival and utility and repositioning for longbow bursts. Even better, the super speed helps with the dragonhunter movement speed issues that everyone here has been crying about!

Anyway those are my quick and dirty thoughts on this new gameplay style, so please let me know what you guys think and discuss~~~

nearlight out

Posting here instead of the HoT subforum thread that got power hungry mod moved, but I’m so happy for these changes Grouch! I’m doubly happy that one of my vamp rune suggestions is being taken, since those runes were no fun to play against.

Sinister stats will be really awesome! And trapper runes I think are a good idea for the game because they give DPS (and burn) guards/DHs a competitive utility choice other than meditiations for once.

I’m excited to see the full list, and I also agree with not introducing Dire/Perplex!

The biggest issue with curses is that all the good traits are in Tier 2, with the rest of the tiers being non-build defining debuff pressure or fun in theory but wholly worthless things like parasitic contagion.

I PMed Karl asking about it the other day but didn’t get a response. I can understand not needing notes for reaper/chrono/herald since they’re nearly perfect, but it seems odd to me that Tempest wouldn’t get notes when DD/DH got notes about them.

Roy Cronacher.1576:

Overall, after the last BWE, we felt like revenant was in a solid spot. For launch we mainly focused on bug fixing and a few outliers such as changing the second hit of the sword auto-attack as well as speeding up the tablet move speed.

That’s not to say that there aren’t more things we are thinking about how to improve or tweak, but we want the profession to get in more playtime and thus more feedback before we make any more larger changes. I’m definitely reading all the feedback and taking under consideration for future changes so keep up the awesome work.

I think thats fair that we don’t get notes on rev/herald, chronomancer, and reaper because they’ve been fine tuned for so long now compared to the other specs and they actually feel like they’re in a really strong place.

Daredevil and dragonhunter still needed a bit of fine-tuning and we got notes on them, and druid and scrapper, we got notes on since it was our first time testing them and they felt mostly solid for their roles.

Still, Berserker and Tempest need notes about their changes just because those specs were in a decent place during BWE3, but still felt a bit undertuned.

Linfang.1087:

On October 23 at 12:01 AM Pacific Time (UTC-7), Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns will go live!

3 AM my time. RIP sleep.

Also 3AM my time, and since I have a midterm for one of my grad classes 7 hours after launch I probably won’t get to play until the expansion has been out for like 10 hours

Ithilwen.1529:

ANET nerfed the heal on shatter to near uselesness and the blinds. It kinda works. This is a stop gap for me, hoping for better with HoT.

You meant to say bug fixed the blinds, right?

Sadly I doubt it.. but it could be something that anet will address three years from launch after everyone stops using the weapon outside of healing focused builds like how they took three years to add torment to necro scepter after years of being a horrible weapon.

As of now, if you don’t run a full support based healing build in pvp, staff will be nothing but a glowy mobility stick. This means that LB/GS would be overall more useful than using a staff in power builds and condi builds would prefer to take axe/sword/dagger/torch or your beloved shortbow since i don’t think staff would add enough on point pressure to be of use even on settlers builds that need both condi offhands and evade spam to function properly as 1v1 Heros, although maybe the staff could be a filler option in teamfights for them.

This would be cool but will probably never happen. The devs have issues implementing changes that involve creating new coding as opposed to simple changing numbers and adding effects, as evidenced by typical balance changes and the fact that teleporting through purging flames still burns you, along with so many other weird coding bugs in the game.

Silverkey.2078:

Actually I believe Frostball (and also sometimes Helseth) used Maim instead of shattered strength. It is something I had seen before from Helseth, but it feels weird in a non-condi build. The only explanation I could come up with is that since they try to burst people down, the slow might build up just doesn’t help, so the very small DPS increase from the torment is more useful. Still weird though…

This is actual quite useful compared to the mightstacks. I mean after you lose a huge chunk of your health from a burst those condis ticking for a fair amount actually provide decent pressure against someone trying to recover from said burst.

Scamcow’s done the math/data collection behind it with illusions shatter builds, but basically the condi pressure ends up doing a lot more damage over the course of the game than you’d initially think.

Too bad next Friday this build as we know it will probably just replace illusions with chronomancer

Silverkey.2078:

I am not sure nerfing the damage was the right thing. Most D/D ele ran fire/water/arcane. Having fire means they are supposed to be fairly potent damage dealer. The problem is their sustain. A bunker build would be earth/water/arcane and that would deal little damage. But fire D/D ele could sustain so much they didn’t need the earth line.

So the sustain should have been addressed, not the damage. Currently, the damage is lower, but the sustain is still too high.

I sort of agree. I think the cantrip might trait should have been changed to give 1 stack instead of none, down from the absurd 3 stacks. I barely think fire is worth using after the nerfs, even though I feel it was pretty justified.

I think the main issue is that both healing and condition cleansing are locked in water. If they moved some of that condition cleansing/management out of water and into untraited weapon skills, non-cantrip utilities (like arcanes and shouts) and earth traits, such as potentially reworking diamond skin to grant some skillful resistance uptime, then ele would be way more balanced, since you honestly wouldn’t even need water to sustain yourself reasonably well if you didn’t have to run water/cantrips just to not instadie to condis.

Josh Davis.6015:

Hmmm, new amulets. Aside from zealots, anything else you folks think would be interesting?

Yay I have a dev post here, I feel like such a social activist now!

But asides from a Zealot (or similar offensive healing power amulet), I’d say a more balanced 4 stat condition amulet would be welcome, because dire stats would probably be way too strong if objectively looking at condi rangers/mesmers in 1v1, but I think something such as way of +1050 condition damage, +1050 precision, +560 toughness, +560 vitality, would go a long way towards making condition builds more viable in higher tier play. The 1050 precision is basically there to trigger crit procs that make up most of the minor traits in condition traitlines that are essentially wasted on carrion and settler builds. A more defensive stat combo would be +1050 toughness, +1050 healing power, +560 condition damage, +560 vitality, it’d basically be a condition bunker/support stat combo with relatively weak damage output that can still be felt, and would work really well with ranger, guardian (burn heal!) and maybe even elementalist/tempest.

Right now condition builds aren’t optimal in pvp for many reasons Grouch, most of which I’m sure you’re aware of, but I’ll post them here for general information purposes. Basically the amulets that have +condition damage as the main stat don’t offer enough survivability to compensate for the fact that most of their sustained damage pressure in teamfights is negated by passive/AoE cleansing. Settlers is the most defensive condition amulet, but is overly susceptible to burst because all that healing power and toughness is meaningless against coordinated burst and CC, while the rabid and carrion builds are generally extremely fragil because their defensive stats aren’t balanced. This means that most condition builds are reserved as 1v1 heros, which is often a waste of space in a team composition since its just more efficient to bring something thats good in both teamfights and 1v1s.

Anyway, thanks for checking in Grouch!

style.6173:

nearlight.3064:

style.6173:

Zealot would make LB / staff druid OP in PvP.

It’s the same reason why dire is a bad idea. It would make a lot of condi burst builds unstoppable.

How would it be OP? And based on the scaling details I think marauder Druid will work, just not with staff since staff is basically just a mobility stick if you don’t have healing power.

They actually changed druid after last beta weekend. They are going to lower the base healing and increase the tie to heal power. In other words, marauder druid will become less effective. Zealot would give someone a ton of damage AND a ton of healing.

Well I know that, but they’re not cutting the heals by as much as I thought they would, meaning that Druid will still be viable with marauder.
A zealot or zealot-like stat combo would be better, but it wouldn’t be OP because you’d have to most likely give up your ferocity (based on the hypothetical stats) meaning you wouldn’t hit as hard but you’d be able to give more meaningful support through healing on an otherwise glassy build. And it’s still be relatively vulnerable to CC in a teamfight so it would t be OP at all.

Well I’m too busy to watch the video right now (though I will later) but if avoid saying things like,“the traps are OP” considering you’re probably referring to fragments of faiths bugged double hit when at launch it will be a primarily defensive stability giving support skill with lowish damage.

Daniel Handler.4816:

I think we should have been given a simultaneous overload. An elite f5 overload that performed all overlords at once and was uninterruptable. To complete that channel would unleash a burst that immobilized enemies and hit them with whirling brutal bolts, burning them for good measure, and healing your allies. That is a tempest. Not a bubble.

Yeah, while I didn’t expect an f5, I thought that the elite skill for the tempest could be a crazy elemental overdrive of all the elements that did something like that. But I guess they thought rebounding was more important.

I mean I’m mostly fine with the current iteration of rebound, but the elementalist really needs an offensive elite skill that can really turn the tide of a fight.

Jski.6180:

nearlight.3064:

Jski.6180:

nearlight.3064:

Jski.6180:

Well the last beta was the first time that scrapper and druid where out so they have less play by players unlike tempest who has been out for 3 betas now with a lot more info and notes and play time. If your ok with being comply unfair to the classes who got a bit shafted for play time i guess that ok.

Yeah okay, then just go back in time and stop Karl from releasing DD/DH notes if you really want to be fair to scrapper and Druid.

Is it a good thing they are done with dd/dh already? If any thing i want them to keep working on tempest elite spec till the last sec we get nothing from getting info now. Are you going to play tempest once the notes are out you know before HoT is out?

Its fun to get info and all but because HoT is so near now the more time they have to play with things over giving out info that may not be comply true and going to changes seems pointless.

Yeah basically I just want to be able to theorycraft builds a head of time so I’m not scrambling to come up with working build ideas when launch happens.

Build from BE 3 then.
http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/
Is mostly updated i am thinking about trying out an non water d/wh aura support dmg tempest build. Earth air tempest (stander d/d meta armor) with d/wh aura support set up from earth an air with WH GM (i think there is something there if its just on a 10 sec cd).

Your link isn’t working, or at least it’s not on my phone lol.

Yea I totally think those builds can work, it’s just dealing with the condis seems like it will be difficult with that setup :/

Jski.6180:

nearlight.3064:

Jski.6180:

Well the last beta was the first time that scrapper and druid where out so they have less play by players unlike tempest who has been out for 3 betas now with a lot more info and notes and play time. If your ok with being comply unfair to the classes who got a bit shafted for play time i guess that ok.

Yeah okay, then just go back in time and stop Karl from releasing DD/DH notes if you really want to be fair to scrapper and Druid.

Is it a good thing they are done with dd/dh already? If any thing i want them to keep working on tempest elite spec till the last sec we get nothing from getting info now. Are you going to play tempest once the notes are out you know before HoT is out?

Its fun to get info and all but because HoT is so near now the more time they have to play with things over giving out info that may not be comply true and going to changes seems pointless.

Yeah basically I just want to be able to theorycraft builds a head of time so I’m not scrambling to come up with working build ideas when launch happens.

style.6173:

Zealot would make LB / staff druid OP in PvP.

It’s the same reason why dire is a bad idea. It would make a lot of condi burst builds unstoppable.

How would it be OP? And based on the scaling details I think marauder Druid will work, just not with staff since staff is basically just a mobility stick if you don’t have healing power.

Jski.6180:

Well the last beta was the first time that scrapper and druid where out so they have less play by players unlike tempest who has been out for 3 betas now with a lot more info and notes and play time. If your ok with being comply unfair to the classes who got a bit shafted for play time i guess that ok.

Yeah okay, then just go back in time and stop Karl from releasing DD/DH notes if you really want to be fair to scrapper and Druid.

Fashion Mage.3712:

Saiyan.1704:

In all fairness to Karl, there has been a plethora of items asked by the Guardian community. Spirit Weapons were definitely lower priority than:

• Bow and its skillset changes
• Peels via F3 and its mechanic changes
• Burn guard/condi guard,
• Shield (omg shield! <3),
• Trap’s boons/stunbreaker/stability/dmg buffs
• DH self condi cleanse trait (although bugged)
• F3 self blocks for DH survivability
• An awesome F1 pull thingy to synergize trap playstyles – traps may actually be viable in high tier TPvP play.

tl;dr: Crappy DH changes clogged the pipeline so there were less changes (that people have been asking for for years) to the main guardian profession.
When I see it this way, I hate DH even more than I did before.

That’s also not at all specific to guardian. Every class has been having their elite spec prioritized over the base class for the release of the expansion. The most recent balance patch in general made overly conservative buffs to unperforming weapons like the scepters for elect almost and necromancer that still aren’t viable.

Thanks for the input guys, it’s a playstyle that I like a lot with base meditations and such. I assume with meditations you’d run valor/virtues/DH, but with traps would it be more feasible to take zeal or honor over valor for the symbol traits? While I’m not a fan of metabattle, they seem to think that hammer meditations works best with honor right now.

I think you’re being a tad overdramatic buddy.

Hey so I’m a fairly inexperienced guardian player, but dragonhunter has me titillated with the possibilities of builds and the like.

So from my understanding, during the trait revamp, hammer builds basically died out. Why is that? Is it because of glacial heart’s trait placement?

And do you guys think hammer builds could function better with DH since you’ll have more upclose pressure with traps (RoW them inside the traps hehehehe)? Or will it just be better to run GS/LB since GS is easier to do work with?

So I’m somewhat confused by the fact that Irenio on the Engi/Ranger forums is giving very small/vague notes about changes to to Scrapper/Druid based on beta feedback, but says that we will have to wait until the 23rd to see specific real details.

Meanwhile Karl, you have posted detailed changes for DD/DH on their respective forums, so I have to ask, will you be able to give us Tempest changes from BWE3 feedback, either vague, or detailed before the 23rd?

I know you’re probably insanely busy working on those changes, but it would be a huge help to all of the theorycrafters in this forum, myself included if you could give us some of the details soon, or at least confirmation that we’d have to wait until the 23rd if thats the case. Anyway, in either case, thanks for working so kitten Tempest and the other specs! We’re extremely grateful for all of your iterative work, and if DD/DH notes are anything to go by, I’m extremely optimistic about how Tempest will look after we see the fine-tuning you make for our beloved auramancing warhorn touting Avatar-State stormcallers!

nekretaal.6485:

Pvp: Worse spot. Reaper is worse than base necromancer because it has no ranged pressure, is slow, and chill durations are too short. Reaper Dead on arrival until Axe fixed or staff/scepter get a big buff. (Watch Nos get destroyed by Phantaram on Reaper then go turn around and destroy him on Necromancer).

If vital persistance was made partially baseline, you could make a curses/spite cele reaper and destroy eles all day long. But besides the elementalist matchup that needs a specific synergy of traits and skills to work in our favor, reaper is much better than necromancer simply due to cleave and stability in teamfights alone.

Condi Curses/SR reaper should also have the upper hand for sure against elementalists/tempests, as well as heralds/chronomancers due to their lack of cleanse. I don’t really see much benefit to running zerk/marauder reaper builds due to their fragility and lack of active defense, meanwhile a soldier’s teamfight build (like bhawbs) will probably want to avoid doing anything besides tanking a node in a 1v1.

The biggest overall counter to reaper looking purely at 1v1s will be power ranger/Druid and dragonhunter due to the ranged DPS, and DH can also CC the reaper on a point quite well with traps. This however begs the question of the reaper’s on point prescence advantage. If the ranger/druid/DH stays at range and kites you from off-point the whole time they’ll eventually be able to beat you. If they go onto the point to try to contest it, then they’ll be at a disadvantage since reaper melee pressure far outdoes anything a ranger/druid can do in melee. DH will be able to handle it a bit better due to trap CC/pressure on a point and being able to burst with GS skills.

But besides that, your challenge in this scenario would be simply to survive and hold the point in the 1v1 until someone from your team comes to break the 1v1, and in most nodes you can LoS ranged damage to an extent without giving them an opportunity for a decap. You will have to watch out fro Dragon’s Maw decaps and LB4+ancient seeds decaps though. And of course in stronghold or WvW roaming, the range counter will probably feel a lot tougher to deal with where you don’t have the safety of the node advantage and as much LoS to depend on.

In teamfights, blighter’s boon with a boon spamming ally or two should give you plenty of incidental sustain. The real challenge there is to simply avoid being bursted at the start of the game.

Anyway those are my thoughts on the matter.

tl:dr-Reaper is disadvantaged against ranged, but capture point gameplay makes this less of an issue than it would be in something like WvW.

Ross Biddle.2367:

Chaos Archangel.5071:

Hey Skcamow, here is one of the clips from the matches we played together:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98VHkMQPYWg

It doesn’t show much, unfortunately, but how smooth your beta-Mesmer looks. =P Though at one point in the clip someone on the enemy team is chastising their Mesmer because of how their damage doesn’t compare to yours

Chaos, I want to give you the benefit of the doubt, but having watched your two most recent chrono vids, I cant help but think your chrono build is innefective, or sub optimally built (or something). It’s not that it can’t do anything, but there’s constantly all these situations where I feel like you should be able to do more but you can’t :/

Just chiming in here, but I think a staff sw/shield well build would overall do better with a tankier amulet. In particular celestial comes to mind, though if you went that route it’d be wise to drop either dom or chaos for illusions to pick up maim, and if you kept Chaos and CI you could stack might fairly well with might duration runes. If you kept domination, you could make it work by using the traits to stack vulnerability to keep the sustained damage quite high for cele.

The other idea is to just conform to the meta hive-mind and use GS over staff for more focused burst damage overall, which would be a bit more optimized with marauder than staff would be, since sw/shiled gives you enough survivability.

Yeah, supcutie doesn’t really play these days that often, even though most of his comp career he played thief for serious leveled matches.

I mean you could just ask Mime and Zeromis what they think about the mesmer meta, since they’re probably the most visible mesmers in the NA tourney scene right now, but like tobascosauce has implied, its just two people that do tournaments regularly, what can we really infer from them?

And what does their guidance and wisdom really mean to us? We aren’t those top level players that actually compete, just because they say that X, Y, and Z are amazing, doesn’t mean its necessarily amazing for everyone, its just stuff that works for them. If we don’t have similar levels of mechanical skill (or even rotational skill for that matter), then what does their advice mean to us? Yes, we can try to better our gameplay by watching them, but at the end of the day its up to us to develop those skills and find the combinations on builds and whatnot that works for us.

To go full circle with this appeal to authority argument, during the few Helseth streams I watched he said that condi mesmer was really viable. I even vividly remember one time back in July or August that Helseth ran carrion condi shatter and settlers condi bunker in an ESL match against a team that TCG can beat through rotations/mechanics regardless of builds, and they steamriolled them while basically running joke builds (well the settlers one was a joke build all the way).

Being a necromancer main, this is even more obvious to me. All the necromancers really have to look up to is Noscoc. His celestial build is strong, but its not the only build and I daresay it will be completely obsolete (along with everything else) in two weeks. Yes I’ve been able to learn a lot about necromancer from his streams, but I don’t let him define the builds that I run or the role that I play. He manages to win wolrd tournaments because his skills on his class are great and he and his team are able to rotate around the necromancer’s mobility disadvantage that keeps most players from ever considering bringing it to a serious tournament.

Basically, what I’m saying is that it can be nice to look at the top players for guidance and ideas, but at the end of the day, they can’t make us better players just from their builds alone. We need to develop the mechanical and rotational skill for ourselves, and the actual build plays secondary to that, as it only defines role, while we choose how to play that role.

Well I’d say the biggest thing holding reaper back from top tier PvP is that not a ton of people play necromancer at top tier, so not a lot of people have enough experience with the class to justify playing reaper over the thief/ele/guardian/warrior they’ve been playing thats had a widespread tournament presence for nearly the entirety of the game.

The only top tier player we really have that is highly visible is Nos, other like OPN play guardian more competitvely these days, others on NA are multiclassers, while others on EU don’t amount to much at all.

Usually when people at the top level pick up a new class that they have little prior experience with, its due to flavor of the month bias, which was especially common with cele engi in the past and mesmer more recently. Reaper, while strong in its own right, won’t have that same level flavor of the month bias, simply because marauder herald and chronomancer and scrapper all have stronger levels of FotM bias.

But besides that behavioral trend that I do predict, I do beleive that reaper will see a bit more exposure just from multiclassers alone. And Reaper has excellent synergistic benefits with boonspamming builds that form the backbone of competitive teams, allowing it to fit a teamfight DPS role better than a warrior or dragonhunter will likely be able to, while still being able to be a 1v1 hero with stacked life force.

I’ve been tempted to try it before many times, but I don’t want to kitten people off with my crazy off-meta builds.

Maybe after the expansion hits I’ll give it a go.

Linnael.1069:

nearlight.3064:

Linnael.1069:

nearlight.3064:

Don’t run fire. Blinding ashes is kitten for fresh air builds, with or without the nerf that happened. Run earth over fire for geomancer’s freedom (S/F F skill profit) and written in stone and use one with air to the fullest.

Also tempest over arcane makes fresh air do wayyyyyy more damage than you could hope for with just base ele, so theres that. One fresh air S/F air/earth/tempest game I played during the last beta, I did 800K physical damage, which is more than burst ele can typically do.

Did you read the thread at all. I’m not looking for a build bro.

Oh I did, I just thought it’d be better to dispel the notion that things like blinding ashes are of even any use to a burst ele, which indirectly supports your reasoning.

If you want my actual suggestions, I just think that elementalist needs lower cooldowns on active defenses, especially through utilities. Lowering obsidian flesh’s CD from 50 to 45 or even 40 seconds would help a lot, as would lowering arcane shield’s ridicoulous CD to like 30 seconds or so.

Its kind of bullkitten that cleansing fire and the kittenty water signet are our only sources of condition removal from utilites, so we have to rely on overly traiting synergies to get that. Yeah we could trait cantrips on ele to get enough cleanse, but those skills don’t help burst builds at all in the way that say… traited quickening zephyr, entangle, troll unugent, and lightning relex help a power survival ranger well… survive, while also being able to burst people down. Water signet should remove 3 conditions on active instead of the kitten chill. One of the tempest shouts needs to remove a few condis as well, and I’d even wager to say I’d LOVE it if cleansing water got removed entirely to compensate for us getting much better personal cleanse in different areas that aren’t dependent on water/cantrips/arcane, which is one of the reasons why building tempest builds is difficult. You need to drop either or both of water/arcane to make tempest aura builds worth it, but building for cleanse that way is almost impossible.

Your negate invulnerability idea is interesting, but I’d rather they just change the vamp rune mist proc into, “you gain the vampiric aura effect on yourself” so theives/mesmers cease to be carried by them.

I like the idea of moving cleanses off of water line and into baseline functionality, but unfortunately I think that’s just too large of a change for ANet to make.

Cutting CDs on active defense is absolutely a good idea. I’d go a step further and say we need more active defense that isn’t tied to focus. Focus should be the defensive group support weapon, but as it is we’re so strapped for active mitigation that everybody runs it for personal protection. Something like: Frost Aura now removes 3 conditions when you cast the skill and Churning Earth gives you invuln while you channel could go a long way to reducing ele’s dependency on focus to play glass.

Yeah definitely. Things like sand squall provide both magnetic aura and other effects, so I could see the aura skills on other weapons being particular highlights to add more active defense too, pending trait-sustain nerfs to compensate of course.

Wasn’t ele in GW1 a glassy burst spec?

Ross Biddle.2367:

nearlight.3064:

Ross Biddle.2367:

Instead of becoming a mist, instead player becomes a vampire, gets locked in a box, and burried in the ground.

During day, player becomes a vampire and combusts due to sunlight.

This is splendidly fun idea too Ross! I myself toyed with the idea of forced vampire transformation procs, but I felt as though it would have felt too punishing on certain pvp maps that have more sun exposure. Though it might not be too much of an issue as long as raid on the capricorn never gets played on again.

In WvW they can introduce a new sunscreen consumable. Lasts for 8 hours. Washes off in water.

Thats a great idea! It should also make you immune to the Druid staff autoattack, “solarbeam” for thematic reasons, but elementalist water attacks should wash it off as well.

Ross Biddle.2367:

Instead of becoming a mist, instead player becomes a vampire, gets locked in a box, and burried in the ground.

During day, player becomes a vampire and combusts due to sunlight.

This is splendidly fun idea too Ross! I myself toyed with the idea of forced vampire transformation procs, but I felt as though it would have felt too punishing on certain pvp maps that have more sun exposure. Though it might not be too much of an issue as long as raid on the capricorn never gets played on again.

Since Vamp Runes are overcentralizing at the moment in the higher tier meta, and have even been banned by pugquest since they’re no fun and give too much active defense to glass builds, we should totally rework the runeset so situations described in this streamer’s video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyuLhIm26sc), no longer happen.

So I had a bunch of fun ideas on how to nerf these runes so they’ll be less over-centralizing.

Idea 1: Rework the bonus so that instead of becoming invulnerable mist when hit under the threshold, you do an AoE life-steal proc instead (30 second cooldown), which is similar in damage/scaling/healing as the necromancer’s signet of the locust active ability (but wouldn’t actually count as a signet).

Idea 2: Change the bonus from the mist proc to a passive lifesteal on attack effect that is the same in terms of damage/scaling/healing as the necromancer’s blood magic traits such as vampiric or vampiric aura.

Idea 3: Change the bonus from the mist proc into, “summon a vampire bat when struck, (60 second cooldown)”. Think of it as pirate runes for the all of the Twilight RP Vampire players that surely populate this game.’s pvp community The bat could even siphon life to you!

Either way, these changes would ensure that certain burst builds can’t be carried by the overly forgiving mist proc anymore, while they’d still give the most sustain to burst builds of any power based rune through the leeching/lifesteal alone. These changes also all fit the vampirism theme just as well, if not better than the mist proc does!

We can also just ban them in all major tournaments, but they’ll still continue to be a buzzkill for all of us casuals out there in ranked queue that want to feel rewarded for timing and landing our bursts correctly, so I implore the developers to consider reworking the 6th bonus of this runeset.

(Prepares to be flamed) but let me know what you think of my ideas!

Linnael.1069:

nearlight.3064:

Don’t run fire. Blinding ashes is kitten for fresh air builds, with or without the nerf that happened. Run earth over fire for geomancer’s freedom (S/F F skill profit) and written in stone and use one with air to the fullest.

Also tempest over arcane makes fresh air do wayyyyyy more damage than you could hope for with just base ele, so theres that. One fresh air S/F air/earth/tempest game I played during the last beta, I did 800K physical damage, which is more than burst ele can typically do.

Did you read the thread at all. I’m not looking for a build bro.

Oh I did, I just thought it’d be better to dispel the notion that things like blinding ashes are of even any use to a burst ele, which indirectly supports your reasoning.

If you want my actual suggestions, I just think that elementalist needs lower cooldowns on active defenses, especially through utilities. Lowering obsidian flesh’s CD from 50 to 45 or even 40 seconds would help a lot, as would lowering arcane shield’s ridicoulous CD to like 30 seconds or so.

Its kind of bullkitten that cleansing fire and the kittenty water signet are our only sources of condition removal from utilites, so we have to rely on overly traiting synergies to get that. Yeah we could trait cantrips on ele to get enough cleanse, but those skills don’t help burst builds at all in the way that say… traited quickening zephyr, entangle, troll unugent, and lightning relex help a power survival ranger well… survive, while also being able to burst people down. Water signet should remove 3 conditions on active instead of the kitten chill. One of the tempest shouts needs to remove a few condis as well, and I’d even wager to say I’d LOVE it if cleansing water got removed entirely to compensate for us getting much better personal cleanse in different areas that aren’t dependent on water/cantrips/arcane, which is one of the reasons why building tempest builds is difficult. You need to drop either or both of water/arcane to make tempest aura builds worth it, but building for cleanse that way is almost impossible.

Your negate invulnerability idea is interesting, but I’d rather they just change the vamp rune mist proc into, “you gain the vampiric aura effect on yourself” so theives/mesmers cease to be carried by them.

Lettuce.2945:

vespers.1759:

Yep I was afraid of this. Seems Anet is relying on the honeymoon period hype to sell the expansion but I have a feeling when people actually get down with the classes we’re going to be hearing a lot of complaints.

The druid is extremely one dimensional. After the initial fun of green numbers and zerg diving wears off druid will be boring as all hell. I don’t see it offering anything beyond some heals.

on the bright side ranger might finally have a meta zerg build? which is a plus i guess?

How do players not see a build beyond healing??? I took one look at traits and made a viable zerk build with it. Far superior to non beta standard zerk ranger. And let me tell you this, the build I made is the most fun I’ve ever had with ranger since playing this game. Try actually thinking for yourself for once and make a build. And you just might be impressed with the results.

I’m honestly sick and tired of seeing those posts by players who can’t think and theorycraft properly. Just because Anet sells druid as a healing class doesn’t mean it has to be one. The DPS is always going to be there no matter which traitline you take. That’s a hint for you.

I agree! Just take the “meta” power ranger build, swap out NM (or marksman) for druid and take cele shadow and ancient seeds and proceed to lay waste to your enemies while having superior cleanse, CC, mobility, and disengage then any base power ranger build!

Don’t run fire. Blinding ashes is kitten for fresh air builds, with or without the nerf that happened. Run earth over fire for geomancer’s freedom (S/F F skill profit) and written in stone and use one with air to the fullest.

Also tempest over arcane makes fresh air do wayyyyyy more damage than you could hope for with just base ele, so theres that. One fresh air S/F air/earth/tempest game I played during the last beta, I did 800K physical damage, which is more than burst ele can typically do.

They already nerfed all the synergies this trait needed to be overpowered, and I think that’s enough

Power scepter shatter builds with malicious sorcery are actually pretty decent too. It’s higher sustained damage than greatsword, but lower burst.

I’m one of those hipsters that will play tempest

Let’s also not forget that herald can can hold a point in a 1v2 with full marauder just by cycling through evades, infuse light, and crystalline hibernation. I’ve only really been able to break it with reaper, but only due to unblock able CC and boon corruption. Other burst classes struggle to take it down in a reasonable time fram.

Based on the dragonhunter and daredevil changes that Karl posted, I’d expect some fairy substantial changes to the tempest for launch. I mean dragonhunter was also regarded as one of the worst elite specs at the first beta, but now it’s been polished to the point where at the very least it provides a new niche for DPS guards in pvp because some of their tools are quite strong.

Shoe.5821:

IMO: It’s not really a contest. Longbow ranger will always lead on long range damage between 1500 range and piercing on all shots. The ranger LB also has greater straightforward utility with the self stealth and the fast interrupt.

Just want to say that a lot of rangers these days will run nature magic instead of marksmanship so they don’t have the piercing arrows from lead the wind (although I prefer it personally) but get protective ward instead.. Dragonhunter to me instead feels like it’s just standard medi guard with the option for powerful traps and extra focused ranged damage as an offset to their usual burst.

I’m sure this has been discussed multiple times before, but I want to know your guys’s opinions on the competitve viability of the power ranger (generally LB/GS) and a similar marauder amulet DH build, that I assume would use LB and either GS or Hammer with some combination of meditations and traps. I can’t evaluate this too much for myself because I’m only a novice with ranger and have very limited guardian/DH experience, since I didn’t try it during the betas, but now it seems like something I’m interested in playing.

So what things would a power ranger bring to a team that would be better than a DH? I can only really think of taunt, and with power druid traits tons of mobility and CC (possibly sustain depending on how they change the scaling). What things would a DH bring that are better than what a ranger could bring? I can think of more potentially more stability, knockback, cripple, (burn perhaps as well) and better survivability through active defense vs. healing. Which longbow is better? Does True-Shots skillshot status make it strictly inferior to rapid fire? Do the DH traps put ranger traps (and survivals for that matter) into the poopoo pile?

And most importantly, which of these builds do you think fulfills the role of ranged DPS, roaming, +1, and 1v1ing better?

They should just change the second minor into:

Bountiful Conduit-Gain boons when you overload an attunement (and those boons will be swiftness/protection/1 stack of stability)

And then change the GM minor into Singular Conduit (or some other name)-gain a stacking buff that increases your damage and outgoing healing by 1% each second for 10 seconds, with a maximum of ten stacks, all stacks will be lost when you swap attunements.

This is very very nitpicky, but why do so many people, especially on the mesmer forums spell “condi” as “condie”? Its just jarring to read and makes me think it sounds like con-die, or con-di-eh. Like what law of the english language what let you take on an e to the end of an abbreviated game mechanic term? Whats its purpose, is it supposed to be a bizzarely cuter looking spelling for the abbreviation?