Guild Wars 2

Oh I wurm first, then Life Transfer. DS cooldowns and no utilities in shroud would prevent the method you described.

I’ve used this method successfully at the mid points on Forest, Kyhlo, and Legacy, and its a viable tactic on a few other nodes as well.

I can only think of two times in the past three months that my wurm was destroyed by an enemy, either from accidental cleave or focused fire. One was by a D/D ele spamming lightning whip in a skirmish off of mid on legacy, and the other was by a roaming thief on temple, and it was my fault for placing it bad before I learned better.

Wurm lets you disengage from a 1v2 situation more reliably than with anything else. You can also do pure wonders with it and Transfusion, which can sometimes make people accuse you of hacking.

I think part of the issue described above is that Karl doesn’t communicate with his class’s communities as much or as openly as Robert does with his class’s community.

Its clear that Robert Gee reads many of the threads and tells us reasons for why things are being changed and for why concerns are not being changed. Robert’s balancing of the elite specs has shown that he’s not afraid to give each spec the buffs and fixes it needs to be competitive with base class options, and he only nerfs things after they’ve proven to be too strong.

Karl is a very talented developer, but I fear that he has trouble communicating his ideas. He almost never posts on the forums, except in the past beta to designate a mega feedback thread on the forums. He also seems really afraid to make things too powerful (ie. one step forward, two steps back mentality with tempest notes), and he doesn’t really justify it well enough. He’s nerfing the fire overload since he says its overperforming, which most of the feedback disagreed with, simply because overloads are supposed to be very powerful for the huge cost you pay to use them. He also didn’t really justify removing boon manipulation on heat sync or wildfire. For heat sync, he just said it was overperforming, when most other people have said that its one of the few skills that made tempest worth running. Yes rebound is better, and yes the traits are less awful, but based on the changes, things aren’t being tuned to the level of viability that they need to be competitive. Dragonhunter is very similar to this. Daredevil I don’t delve too much into, but it seems to be his best work, even if all of the concepts are taken from pre-nerfed acro and the staff animations are copied from revenant.

Anyway, while I don’t condone harassing the developers, I feel that there is tension due to a lack of developer interaction with 3 of the elite specs.

Yeah, I mean torment just isn’t good enough in a game where a stack of burn does 4 times as much as stack of any other condi or more. Condi mesmer is in a similar boat, however it can frontload the torment and confusion better while being unable to hold a point.

I’m also concerned that the new torment boosting trait that roy is considering will take the place of spontaneous destruction. We need more boon removal, not less.

In general the changes seemed geared towards hurting condi bunker rev’s ability in conquest. In the last beta it was literally a 2013 spirit ranger with better support. Now, it will be okay, but this and retribution trait changes will make it less viable.

It seems like Roy wants us all to play zerker shiro/glint.

Flesh wurm is perfectly viable, you just have to use your brain and know a good spot to set it up before a fight.

If you have a free spot on a build and the point of your build isn’t to stall and die on a point with Unholy Sanctuary to keep it from being decapped, then wurm should always be considered.

I think they removed player breakbars because they were too lazy or unskilled to code a new version that was appropriately balanced.

Roy Cronacher.1576:

• Embrace the Darkness now applies a lot of torment in an area, twice as much as before. I’m looking at adjusting the cast time or upkeep cost for it to make it a bit more in line with the new functionality.
• Since corruption and mallyx is all about being the master of torment and being pushed more that route, I’m playing around with an idea I wanted to run by all of you. Torment is less valued in stationary fights due to the way torment functions. Since torment is the main damaging condition for Revenant, I’ve been thinking about adding functionality to a trait or maybe changing the minor 2 in corruption to increase the base damage torment does while not moving while not increasing the while moving damage to help it become more of a viable option in all areas of the game. What do you all think?

While I am skeptical about the mallyx changes I will say that the upkeep cost of Embrace the Darkness needs to be reduced to 5 or 6, since 8 is too much for an effect thats not that amazing. Maybe also have Embrace the Darkness pulse boon removal instead of the useless 10% stat boost.

For corruption, I think a new minor trait boosting the power of torment would be helpful, however the first minor trait should be replaced instead of the second. On crit procs for conditions are immensely weak, and downright useless in Carrion or Settler amulet builds, which are the best amulets for condition builds in general. Additionally, Opportune Extraction is a very good trait, and with most of the elite specializations adding more boon dependence to the game (tempest/herald/reaper/chronomancer especially) it would be healthier for the game to have more boon removal rather than less. In fact, I’m disapointed that none of the new HoT content besides Mallyx/Corruption is featuring boon removal, since there isn’t enough boon hate in the game unless you dedicate all of your mesmer or necromancer build to it.

What if the new torment trait made it so torment did more damage on non-moving targets than moving targets (while still keeping the moving target values the same), so it could change people’s ideas about counterplay? That might be kind of cruelly overpowered though.

Regarding Dwarven Battle Training: this trait is 100% Grandmaster-Tier worthy. I recommend its place be swapped with reflexive summon, since otherwise, NO ONE would ever take Eye for an Eye in its merged state over Dwarven Battle Training, since Eye for Eye’s cooldown ruins it. Also while Redeeming Protection was basically a clone of the Engineer trait Protection Injection, I can see your reasoning for merging the trait, but it just makes it useless when another trait gives damage reduction (although easier to counter due to condi removal) and utility in the same tier. Also with herald, Redeeming Protection was probably too strong, since perma-protection was very easy to achieve. Using weakness for low cooldown damage reduction gives more counterplay.

tl:dr- We need MORE boon removal across the board, not less in this game.

A new torment trait would be great, but not at the expense of a boon removal trait.

Dwarven Battle Training is a GM-worthy trait.

Well the new weakness trait they added seems to be an apropriate subsitute. Still, they should have used that to merg/replace reflexive summon since the retribution GMs are still kind of horrible.

Well as someone who has previously pushed MM necro to the limit, I know that AI based drones won’t be viable unless we have a reliable way of waking them. Necromancer can use two blood magic traits, or a well even to heal his minions and keep them up except against extremely heavy cleave.

Engineer has group healing with heal turret and inventions. But cleansing synergy isn’t a very good heal, and medical dispersion field is terrible. Magi Bunker down also won’t work due to AI’s movement patterns (unless they specifically program it, which they won’t due to all around lazy coding in this game for the past several years).

If forge traits allow drone healing, it could work, probably with cleric or settler as an amulet, but we will have to see the details.

Xillllix.3485:

rotten.9753:

Xillllix.3485:

You guys at Anet need to get a team of people to finishTempest. As it is right now the day HoT comes out I’m never touching my elementalist again and I’m switching class.

Revenant?

Quite possibly yes, it has all possibilities: support, damage, range, condi and range. And the elite skills are cool.

I was about to jump on the revenant bandwagon myself but the Mallyx overnerf kind of ruins the build I had used, meanwhile the bursts power builds don’t really excite me as much. If I can get a viable Jalis based bruiser build I’d use it for sure, but that will be tough to build.

Meanwhile reaper is a given since it’s a natural upgrade to my current pvp main. I’ll also play chronomancer a lot since the shield and wells look really strong now. Forge is the wildcard, that I’m very excited to learn about since I love engi, I just hate its current trait system.

rotten.9753:

Jski.6180:

Adding stab to overloads is a big deal for both the ele and tempest class due to how little is lost from ele becoming a tempest.

Most specs lose nothing.

Since the first preview we lost boon-hate, boon-share and AoE stun-breaking. Is there anything else tempest can lose before the launch?

The TTH interview for the tempest reveal said we’d get super speed while overloading, and that was replaced with swiftness in the preview stream and official blogpost.

It really is 1 step forward, 2 steps backward with each iteration of tempest.

Thanks for the tips, I’ll keep playing around with it.

I think part of the issue is that my MMR is fairly high so I end up facing good thieves most of the time, and most people see scepter and immediately think, “FRESH AIR MUST KILL”, whereas seeing D/D eles make them try to pick squid hire targets instead.

Scepter has always been my favorite ele weapon despite its flaws so in glad that this playstyle seems viable, next beta I might try out some weird tempest warhorn variant without arcane, but we’ll see.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The Augury of Death change is weird. Instead of giving it a static recharge + bonus, we’re getting a lifesteal component. So now, against a single target, it still doesn’t recharge worth a darn, but now it also does a paltry hit + heal. I guess in a target rich environment this would go from a paltry heal to a minor one. Maybe that is what they were going for.

The good news is, a lot of the shouts were buffed with reduced CDs anyway, so Augury of Death being good isn’t a necessity for shouts being good. The other changes are pretty nice, though.

It lets shouts function like mini locust signets on top of their base effect. It certainly helps defensive shout-condi-clear builds out a lot, as does the hopefully more useful Rise.

OneKlicKill.4285:

LOL – kittening solidified that tempest wont be fixed. By refusing to change mechanics you have guaranteed that overloads can only ever be OP or UP (compared to base ele) because it’s NOT A NUMBERS PROBLEM

“Fire was too strong” wut… did I miss something. I ran haste runes, ramepage, marauder, carrion etc amulets, armor of earth, arcane shield, LF. Gimic as kitten builds just to get max damage overloads off haste procs under protection and blocks and I STILL couldn’t kill anyone but the glassiest of glass (I’m talking good players not mid to low tier sorry if gimmicks work on them)

Well they did provide the most important fix of all, and that is stability on overload. With that, Tempest could finally be worth playing. Sure it doesn’t add much thats new to ele, but with this change, the goal of attunement overloading they envisioned can actually have the potential to be a useful and viable mechanic, while still having room for counterplay as its only one stack.

The Rebound and Imbued Melodies rework are also very helpful. The traitline is still a little wonky, but it doesn’t seem as useless on paper anymore.

What will make or break tempest will be how bad the nerfs to base ele do to fire D/D abuse will be.

I tried this for a few games, and I got absolutely wrecked by burst, even from mere flies of the burst world like zerker ranger, and thieves just had way too much pressure on me.

And to me that doesn’t make sense. Would I blow up as fast if I ran D/D instead? The only things I can think of are the shocking aura and evade on burning speed, but I don’t think they’d matter too much, but for some reason survivng with this build just felt downright difficult against burst and focus pressure.

I think Roy’s team is just being lazy with coding. The problem with unyielding anguish and downstate 2 was that displacements went through stability. This is a video game, just change the rules of physics to allow stability to stop the displacement. But no, they got rid of it entirely because reworking the code was too hard. Thats also why they took breakbars off of all of the skills, coding to make them fun and appropriately balanced was too hard for them it seems.

I am glad that it will pulse torment now, but with embrace the darkness being useless, theres hardly a point in even running a condition revenant build now, as torment and weak burns and confusion stacks aren’t really enough. This also means that revenant’s will be pigeonholed into Shiro to have any CC at all.

Seisus.6591:

Vennyhedgie.5369:

Seisus.6591:

Wait for bw3 to test the changes before saying the legend is “gutted.” If it feels weak while playing, it will be fixed, but you can’t know how it will work 100% without playing it.

I played mallyx extensively to know this is a huge hit. It was my favorite legend, and I clocked in 60 hours of revenant last weekend. EtD was that one skill that you wouldn’t use very often but when you did it was devastating. It literally had one role and it did that perfectly, and it was also the main flavor of the legend as well as the whole point of its design: “take condis, spread them back”.

It’s like removing quickness from shiro’s impossible odds, you now just have an upkeep that gives super speed. Wow, fun!

I am gonna be trying my absolute best to make the devs reconsider such huge change.

I have not clocked as many hours on Mallyx as you have, and you have the right to refute everything I’m about to say, but please listen. I agree that the flavor of Mallyx has been sullied, but I also agree with Roy’s thought process behind it. I quite enjoyed 1v1 against condi heavy classes, but most of my time in Mallyx was during team fights. I run with several people who slot a lot of condi removal. Mallyx, to me, felt as though I was fighting both the enemy AND my own teammates. All in all, I feel the changes to Embrace the Darkness could be a step in the right direction, but they will need to be tested and, if underpowered (which it seems to be now), tuned properly by either adding new condis to the mix (maybe poison to further increase the use of Venom Enhancement) or increasing the stacks of torment applied. As I see it, all that’s been lost is a lot of flavor. Roy has been very kind to us these past few months, and seems to have the Revenants best interests at heart, so I trust him to tune Mallyx once we’ve all had a chance to test the changes and see how they stand in game.

Well, to be honest when Roy said he’d change Mallyx to be nicer with teamplay, I expected an actual solution, such as a “buff” preventing all condition cleanses while in Mallyx, or preventing condition cleanses while you have resistance. What Roy did was gut the legend and make it pretty much not worth using, since much of Mallyx revenant in a condi build’s damage came from Embrace the Darkness’s ability to copy condi bombs.

The change also screws with the whole point of resistance in the first place. The self-applied conditions were pretty negligable, but everything about this change just feels rushed, and like a horribly cheap cop out to avoid spening more manpower and time on coding an ideal solution.

There will mostly likely be a big balance patch of the base classes just prior to HoT’s release, that will include the buffs we want hopefully, and nerfs to ele and PU and fun crap like that.

Vennyhedgie.5369:

Wow I am absolutely against those mallyx changes. Mallyx was my favorite legend! I understand the change on most skills but making embrace the darkness not copy conditions anymore is a huuuuge hit. There’s no reason to use pain absorption if all those condis you absorb are not gonna get transfered back to your enemy! Do you have any idea how fun it was to embrace the darkness on a ranger with entangle?
I can understand removing the self applied condis and the change to displacement, in fact I like them more like this as mallyx was about condi manipulation instead of condi output, but I will have to please ask, reconsider the embrace the darkness condition pulse! It was what made Mallyx unique imo. Now we’re just another necro. (Ironically better than them still though)

No, even necromancers will be much better than a mallyx revenant at both boon rip and condi transfers, since now revenant will only be able to copy using pulsating pestilance, which is still a somewhat flawed trait.

Karl you followed my feedback about stability! I might actually want to play tempest now again! I mean theres still some dubious things, like the heat sync nerf, but stability from tempest traits was so needed to even make the foundation of tempest worth playing.

Well the changes pretty much gutted mallyx.

And not due to the displacement on Unyielding Anguish, I’m glad that it will pulse torment now, so it can be used for actual condition pressure.

I’m talking about Embrace the Darkness.

This skill was literally GUTTED, and it honestly destroys any chance for condition revenant builds to exist in the future. The main condition pressure of the build came from this skill in order to punish condition use against a mallyx revenant. The 10% bonus stats and the weak torment pulse isn’t worth the high upkeep cost by a large margin. Revert this nerf at once, or else we’ll only have shiro/glint zerker builds for the rest of the game’s lifetime, and do we really want that?

Disclaimer: I am happy with all of the other revenant changes, just not this one.

Well the main problem with condi mesmer is that its a 1v1 oriented build that can’t hold a point to save its life (in fact it needs to kite and go off point to survive). Basically you’re supposed to hold the point in a 1v1 until you either win, or someone comes to +1 the fight in your favor (shatter mesmer, power ranger, thieves should do that). However because so much of a mesmer’s defenses involve teleports or stealth, they really can’t hold a point at all, which is my beef with the build. Its just not ideal for conquest.

Other builds that are 1v1 oriented, such as trap or settler ranger, D/D ele, or cele or MM necro to name a few, don’t have that glaring problem. They can 1v1 just as well as condi mes, if not better, and they’re tools and defenses let them keep points from being decapped.

Although to be fair, power shatter mesmer isn’t capable of pointholding either. Its just typically given a +1/decapper role rather than a 1v1 role. Condi mes can’t really fulfill the +1er role because that necitates burst to secure a kill quickly after defensesive cooldowns are blown in a 1v1, and condi can’t do that as quickly or as reliably.

I do expect condi mesmers to be very powerful in stronghold, since portal is still great there and they’re free to roam across the map without concern for holding points, and they’re 1v1 potential really shines in that environment.

Also, Pyro, why have chrono based condi builds been seen to be more powerful? I didn’t really get a chance to try them out, but is it due to slow and alacrity and whatnot?

I’m saving up for the dreamthistle hammer skin that I’ll use on my rev. I have good skins for all the other weapons so I should have that figured out. I’ll be using the tormented sword/staff, marjory’s axe, and fractal mace. Then with the dreamthistle hammer, I will look AWESOME.

Since I’m going to go sylvari I might grind out the TA reward track to get some cool armor skins that match my evil plant look.

KingZmaN.6473:

Tao.1234:

There was a very good Mantra change while back ago, which made Mantra spec viable.

But devs reverted that change couple hours after Mantra Mesmer stomped celeddele in tourney.

Sadly, don’t expect any changes in this aspect or any answers for the next 5 years.

Thank you for your understanding.

Do you remember the change? Why is there such effort to nerf 4-Mantra builds?

They didn’t intend to nerf 4 mantra builds. The build that was nerfed used 2 mantras, the heal and distraction. Mantra of distraction was too strong when combined with power block and confounding suggestions, while the mantra heal with inspiration traits gave too much sustain to a burst based build. Also, a “bug” caused mantras to recharge in the backward after their first charge, making it so that you had very little time where you’d be vulnerable.

I do feel as though they did overnerf it by making harmonious mantras weaker, when they really should have just raised the iCD of confounding suggestions to prevent it from being a brain dead method of not having to use skill and judgement to land your bursts. Mime still plays mantras competitively, whereas most other mesmers just run PU.

Also 4 mantras was never taken, simply because portal and blink are almost mandatory on every competitive Mesmer build, but it does suck when needing an overpowered meta build has consequences for casual/fun creative builds.

Also I think after three years it’s about time to have its game breaking bug fixed, because I always have to cancel cast the signet (if I use it over plague sig) when the teammate I’m trying to revive falls under 30% downed health, which happens quite easily due to cleave.

Oh well then in that case it might work. I only pvp, so I was talking about pvp celestial stats. In WvW it would probably work much better since you can overbuffing everything, but that’s not my scope of interest so I can’t say for sure.

Laraley.7695:

nearlight.3064:

Laraley, I was simply referring to the stop drop and roll trait as a main example. Isn’t it absurd that an adept level trait can cure your build’s weakness every 9 seconds (in theory)?

And besides that, the most played ele build has double cleansing fire, two more can trip cleanses, and the water swaps and water evasive arcana. It’s too much mitigation for their weakness, but part of that is because debilitating and damaging conditions aren’t treated separately (in terms of what should cleanse what), but they should be to promote better balance.

Nearlight, did you ever think about why almost no one runs that trait?

Exactly, because other builds aren’t viable. Saying d/d ele has only a few weaknesess is correct, saying the class does isn’t. There was no word about nerfing or not nerfing d/d ele, but people seriously needs to stop consdering it the only possible build and maybe also screaming for buffing those when they want balance so much.

Phantaram runs stop drop and roll, so I wouldn’t say that’s hardly anyone.

Or are you talking about fresh air again? In which case it’s pointless to discuss since zerker thieves and mesmers have pushed nearly every zerker out of the meta for the past few years, except for medi guard in the cele meta, which doesn’t really work anymore. It’s not just a problem relegated to the scepter being a worse version of Mesmer GS, or that traits don’t support the playstyle very well.

Laraley, I was simply referring to the stop drop and roll trait as a main example. Isn’t it absurd that an adept level trait can cure your build’s weakness every 9 seconds (in theory)?

And besides that, the most played ele build has double cleansing fire, two more can trip cleanses, and the water swaps and water evasive arcana. It’s too much mitigation for their weakness, but part of that is because debilitating and damaging conditions aren’t treated separately (in terms of what should cleanse what), but they should be to promote better balance.

I’ve tried and so have many others. I don’t think it works very well though for a variety of a reasons. The main reason is that there is no hybrid weapon option, since mace’s power coefficients are too low.

Your survivability isn’t very good since revenant can’t heal through half of its health every 10 seconds like ele, and can’t spam weakness like necro (even though I’m not always too confident in celestial on necro).

The might stacking is technically there, but it’s scattered across so many trait lines that it’s cumbersome to use, and forces you to give up thing s elsewhere. The might traits in invocation and retribution also suck. Facet of strength gives you might, but in a rather slow buildup, since it’s supposed to be team might rather than personal.

You could run shiro over glint for better personal might stacking, but worse team support. Overall since revenant is geared towards doing two things well at a time, it’s best to stick with that and not go full out hybrid. A mace/axe hammer build could work if mace power damage got improved, and if the might stacking trait in retribution got better, since as cele you’d need retribution for sustain.

Ara.4569:

nearlight.3064:

Also the only thing eles are particularly weak to is chill, because it kittens up their water attunement swap cooldown, which destroys them. However, this weakness is easy to mitigate simply because eles have a lot of condition removal. Stop drop and roll also exists, but can be wasted by burns or Ally cleanse procs.

What a convoluted way to say ele has no weakness.

Yes, it necros were as resistant to their weakness as as eles are to theirs, they’d have either stunbreaks on a 6 second cooldown that works in and out of shroud or 3+stacks of stability up for 75% of the time.

They hype is real necroforum brethren.

Drarnor, in the first beta they removed boon removal from the tooltip of the fire field skill on warhorn, but I don’t know if they put it back or not.

Also the only thing eles are particularly weak to is chill, because it kittens up their water attunement swap cooldown, which destroys them. However, this weakness is easy to mitigate simply because eles have a lot of condition removal. Stop drop and roll also exists, but can be wasted by burns or Ally cleanse procs.

Nice guide man! It really helps to think about teams in terms of roles rather than how frail or tanky someone is.

I’d just like to add that many necro builds, including celestial, Cleric MM, and various other power builds are really strong duelers. They just tend to be less useful in teamfights and struggle with disengaging unless they kitten their 1v1 potential to take wurm. Power wells is a great teamfights build, but it’s survivability can be a bit low sometimes against more mobile burst specs, which is why it can be more of a liability than a help in teamfights in this meta.

Sagat.3285:

Jekkt.6045:

something i realized during the last beta weekend was the strength of reapers and how heralds slowly outdamage eles. now i won’t say that d/d is perfectly balanced (in regards to skill <-> reward) but if they indeed nerf them without compensating them otherwise (i would love a meta where dps ele would finally be viable) then ele will disappear from the pvp meta as a whole.

reaper pretty much counters d/d ele, i tested this with a necro friend, both 2000+ games on our respective classes. all the chill, the transfers, corrupts and direct damage a reaper can make use of will kill an ele over time.

on the other hand, i have played on herald and i have played on d/d ele against it, if you use your evades, blocks and cleanses well enough you can keep yourself from dying while you slowly outdamage a d/d ele.

counters are on the way

Boon hate is getting more common?

Hardly. Boon hate should be way more common than it actually is, however the problem is that the only classes that make thematic sense to have boon hate already have it (necro, Mesmer, revenant, and thief a little bit). Furthermore, none of the elite specs feature boon removal in the slightest, aside from one reape shout. Revenant has boon removal with Mallyx and corruption, but doesn’t have any chance to outpace them for that role unless they spam banish enchantment with 3+ condis on them.

I am kind of disappointed that no elite spec has boon removal as a feature. And I highly doubt Druid and forge are going to be boon crunching machines.

Cecilia.5179:

The Elite active was AWFUL. I got hit by it in one of my fights, and I was like, “Lol, that was like a worse version of Updraft.” After learning what it looked like, I don’t think I could ever get hit by that unless I had no choice.
Shield 5 simply made the Revenant last a few more seconds, because I didn’t want to waste my cc at that point. I don’t think any Revenant would’ve willingly used Soothing Bastion and get forced to use this skill.
Looking at the other two grandmaster traits, I’m left wondering, what justified them being grandmasters?

Enhanced bulwark is strong but only if you run Jalis or retribution. The stack of stability it adds lasts longer than the ones those skills/traits give and can be boosted by f2. It’s great for stomps and generally having high stab uptime.

The damage modifier trait is just the ele arcane GM bountiful power. It’s boring, but it’s not a terrible trait for a boon spam class.

I want it nerfed so bad so that players who let this and other overpowered cheesy meta builds carry their lack of real skill have to try and use their brain to come up something creative for once, instead of the same thing over and over again until you die a miserable death of boredom because GW2 is such a boring game that I find arguing and debating logic on these forums FAR more fun than playing the kitten game itself these days.

Edelweiss, you are the true hero of the necro axe.

Hammerguard.9834:

I can’t believe people are still crying about this. Why is it okay to be bursted down by a power engi, thief, guardian, or mesmer and not okay to be bursted down by condis? It’s the same thing. You have slow reaction times and you’re going to pay for it.

It’s not truly about this. The fact is that there isn’t a truly viable damage over time attrition based gameplay in this game. The closest thing to it are bruiser builds, but only because they have high sustain but tend to rely on burst damage anyway.

Ooooh this was really fun to watch! I’ll be sure to try this next BWE, I didn’t get much time to use chronomancer last time since I was busy with reaper/herald/tempest, and pushing those specs to their limit.

But as someone who used to play well necro a lot, I can say that chronomancer wells have far more potential than just basic area denial and downcleave, and these videos show it. I like how you can take this build as an offensive support build and still have offesnsive tools like powerblock and boon rip to make due.

When I run this next time I might go full ham and take portal over blink. I feel like its utility is too good to give up on any build as long as the game mode rewards good rotations and mobility.

Ahhhhh!! As a lover of both coffee and revenants I’d have a 100% chance of buying this if I could.

If they just addressed huge disparities in the difference in scaling between burning and bleeding, it would help. Right now a stack of burn is about 4.5 times as powerful as a stack of bleeds, when an ideal difference would be more like 2.5 times as powerful. If you bring bleeds up while bringing burns down simultaneously, it means you don’t have to run the risk of overnerfing or overbuffing as much.

But yeah right now getting hit with 10 burns is equivalent to being hit with 45 stacks of bleeds. That doesn’t sound totally balanced to me.

Bhawb.7408:

Don’t see anything about Reaper they would nerf for being OP, except maybe Gravedigger’s damage if they really wanted to pick something (I don’t think its worth nerfing to be clear, but at 3.0 coefficient I could see some strange justification). Honestly though, the worst changes I can imagine is not enough changes to things that need them. Robert Gee has not only made good changes, he’s made really smart ones that I think are really fun to play with (ex: Death Magic actually has some really cool unappreciated synergy w/ toughness stacking into power conversion).

HOWEVER, Robert Gee hasn’t done us wrong yet, and I think allowing our abusive relationship with our ex-dev ruin our happiness in our new pairing with Gee would be a bad thing.

Who was our former dev for this class? Was it Karl?

I just don’t think that burns should do 4.5x as much damage per stack as bleeds. Thats just a horrible idea, because it favors classes that have high burn application so much more than those that have high bleed generation, which is why things like condi necro and condi ranger struggle.

basz.6129:

So forum warriors, if playing condi is easy, and playing a power build is cheeseball, what do you pro’s run that is so difficult/does an appropriately low amount of dd/can help your team win? See what I did there? It’s obviously not you and your build; it must everyone else effectively using the changes in gameplay and build optimization. The nerve!! <3 tryhards that can’t produce. Stop coming to forum to complain, work at it if you care so much.

I agree with this sentiment. GW2 is a pretty simple game when it comes to mechanics. Its just the rotations of conquest that most people fail at.

Most meta builds are considered meta because they excel both in 1v1 and in teamfights, and many of them become easy to play due to their strengths after gaining some experience.

For pvp, Carrion Glint/Mallyx herald/retri/corruption mace/axe, and Valkyrie (or marauder) glint/shiro (or jalis) herald/invoc/devast with sword/x/hammer seem like possible meta builds.

I think a soldier’s Jalis/herald staff/hammer build could work, but I’ll have to have more time to test all the possible combinations of a power build before I can say if a brusier build is as viable as a burst or condi build.

Condi necro is very very very hard to play well right now, but it is an option for casual play. When Gee buffs scepter it could possibly work again, but right now condi necro is bad because burns got buffed while bleeds got nerfed in comparison. Right now in pvp, the only viable condi builds burst burning application. Torment centric condition mesmers are viable too, but power Mesmer outclasses them. But condi necro is too focused on weak bleed stacks, which hurts it a lot.

You still have some burst with terror and signets, and you can still 1v1 most things using a carrion amulet as long as you have the life force. The teamfights damage is pretty weak though due to AoE cleanse and general frailty.

I was too busy with revenant to try a condi reaper build, but I’d imagine it’d be viable due to better burning alone. Deathly chill needs to be buffed some more as well.

Stability is kind of needed to be a good necromancer, and reaper has pretty much all of it.

I think a condi based shoutbow would be more interesting than a great sword or longbow

Kikidori.5916:

kainjinn.7064:

nearlight.3064:

According to my knowledge, Mallyx/corruption condition copying uses your own condition damage, while neceromancer/generosity condition transfers use the applicants condition damage.

Thank you!

The play style is really fun, I just need to find a why to buff up MY condi damage now

Go Celestial instead of pure power. And get a mix of Hammer & Mace/Axe and see how that goes.

It might work with celestial, but the mace auto power coefficients are too low for it to be an effective hybrid weapon. Offhand axe works well for hybrid damage though. Might stacking might be able to help bring it up, since the mightstacking tools are there, just scattered through many trait lines with awkward conditions for many of them.

I’m also concerned about surviving with celestial stats in pvp when you can heal through half of your health every 9 seconds or spam weakness (ele and necro respectively). Protection should help with that, but it’s harder to maintain that without Retribution traits.

I did feel like reaper was the most common elite specialization. It’s also one of the more noticeable ones due to the scythe animations.

I saw chronomancer pretty often two, one double moed me and failed to kill me, while the other laid down some painful CC with the gravity well and shield skill.

I saw herald/revenant less frequently than those two. I played it and glint made the class click for me, to the point where I’m considering getting into serious pvp as a revenant when the expansion comes out. I mostly played condi-support herald builds that were really strong, but I’m looking forward to trying a bruiser build with Jalis next time, especially if it gets buffed, which it sort of needs compared to the others. I do think some of the damage on zerker builds is over the top, but crit substitution builds are nice too, with more sustain.

I tried berserker until I got bored, so threeish games, all fails at making some weird condi build. I even tried it as a shout build, and that didn’t really do anything for me. I saw only a few berserkers.

I played tempest once, but I honestly hate playing ele in general these days so I just stopped. Arcane is still too mandatory even with a spec that tries to break the mold of arcane playstyles. I also only saw one tempest player, who made it work reasonably well with the warhorn skills, but didn’t overload from what I remember.

I have a horrid memory of fighting two daredevils named Autism One and Autism two. Not only were their names disrespectful, but fighting both of the at once was irritating since they kept evading and CCing and SR rezzes eachother when they went down.

I met one dragon hunter who laid all his traps on a point, but it didn’t really hurt me as much as ranger traps did.

I can see reaper, chronomancer, and herald being meta for their classes pvp builds. The others have a chance, but compete with better base class builds, or just don’t ring enough donuts to the table.