Guild Wars 2

From my post in GD, it seems that people think dungeon token as are grinded by zerk farmers to get rares to salvages for ecto$$$. Dunno, maybe this is true, but i’ve never had enough exotic sets and alt sets and gear for alts that I could justify the use. But then, I’ve not been hard grinding since launch. Still, even people do do this, it doesn’t seem any more lucrative then hunting champs or world bosses.

So take someone who has 5 alts – they could potentially get an extra 200 tokens, assuming they ran all of their alts through CoF p1? Thats what, 6 rares to salvage or throw in the mystic forge? And consider, if they do that, they are giving up a currency they could use to get exotics, its not as if its free. I don’t really think that’s economy breaking, and it doesn’t seem out of line with the kind of rewards you could get hunting champions.

Vayne.8563:

Peetee.9406:

Have any of you guys run SE p2 or CoF p3 lately?

I hadn’t ran either since 3 months after release because of bad memories and others horror stories. But today a guildy was asking for help with both while working on Dungeon Master. Our group was able to blow through both paths without a hitch, I was shocked at how easy they were.

They’re pretty easy if you know how to do them. My guild never has problems with any of the paths in SE.

The problem with SEp2 is not difficulty, its the length that most people an issue with it – its an incredibly tedious path. Since anet claimed that gold would be assigned based on both difficulty and length, it makes little sense that path 1 which takes 15 minutes and path 2 which takes 40 awards the same amount of gold.

I love how the only people running dungeons on alts are speed run farmers, not people just trying to get gear for their alts because, you know, we need more armor than people with just one character. The name-calling also makes me really receptive to your point of view.

Tokens were never the problem with dungeon farming – it was the gold end reward and loadstones. There is no easy way to convert tokens into gold, and honestly its just a decent way to get some gear for alts or even alternate stat sets. Giving people with more characters the chance more tokens to get more armor doesn’t seem to be a balance issue for me. Gold and loadstones, yeah, I get, but account bound tokens which you can turn in to soulbound armor, which already took between 15-20 runs to get a full set anyway? I don’t think that needed a change.

I’m not sure the cost of crafting is worth it for the sort of recreational uses you mentioned…although I know there are people who make a lot more money than I do. In terms of the Mesmer portal though those are some of the fun uses for it – it’s a skill that rewards creativity and its a lot of fun to play around with.

In terms of the new item, I too am having trouble seeing a point to it. Unless you have money just burning a hole in your pocket, I don’t think it serves a purpose.

Amadan.9451:

rfdarko.4639:

Amadan.9451:

is it still considered stealth if they announce previously to the patch that they are going to do this?

Where did you see any announcement about a change to dungeon tokens?

here
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/dungeon-rewards/

and here
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/looking-ahead-guild-wars-2-in-2013/

Neither of those make any mention of changing dungeon tokens from character to account bound rewards.
In fact, the second one you linked implies the opposite –
“To encourage players to participate in a wider array of dungeon content, we’ve designed the system so if you complete the same dungeon path twice in one day, you’ll receive the normal reward for completion, but won’t receive the bonus gold reward again during that day.

Hickeroar.9734:

Not a nerf. Tokens were originally account-wide per day. They changed them to per character. Now they changed them back.

They also announced that this was coming.

I didn’t see any mention of a change to dungeon tokens – gold, yes, but not tokens, though I’m perfectly willing to be wrong if you can link me to one.

Amadan.9451:

is it still considered stealth if they announce previously to the patch that they are going to do this?

Where did you see any announcement about a change to dungeon tokens?

Dungeon armor isn’t all about the look, I use dungeons as a way to gear up my 3 other 80s with various stat sets for pve and wvw. Trying to get multiple stat combinations for multiple level 80 characters is very different then trying to get a COE chestpiece for the skin for your ele alt. And the fact is, I couldnt grind tokens with my main because dr would kick in. Instead, I would use dungeons on my alt to get tokens for that character. Then when I was on my main, I did dungeons to get tokens for her. It’s not equivalent to gold or karma or even wvw badges because you have so many different ways to get those currencies. The only close equivalent is laurels, which suffers from the same problem.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

The issue that here though is more for dungeons. Why should player ‘a’ (who has 12 characters) have the right to make 12g off a single dungeon path, while player ‘b’ (who is already penalized simply by not having the playing time of person a) can only get 2g (because he only has 2 characters). You should automatically make more just because you have more chars? The alts are nothing more than cash cows?
.

Again, this isn’t about gold, its about dungeon tokens. That is fundamental. Honestly, you are missing the point entirely. Dungeon tokens are a very specific currency used to buy soulbound armor, and also are not interchangeable between different dungeons. It is NOT in any way equivalent to a gold reward. Please, stop derailing the discussion.

A person with 2 characters might have more stuff than a person with one, but he’s not really in any sense wealthier, because he’s paying to maintain and gear 2 characters instead of one. So on the old system, sure, I could get 60 more tokens a day, but I also have 12 armor slots to fill up instead of 6. Having more characters was never an advantage.

Don’t conflate this with an argument about “only wanting rewards” – its reasonable to discuss how account bound daily rewards effect players with alts, specifically when we are talking about the acquisition of soulbound gear, not gold.

blurps.2340:

If PvE dungeons are your prefered content, reroll.

It really is that simple. Balance in that area has been terrible from the start with little to no improvements so far and changes are designed around sPvP/tPvP exclusively.

I would just add, if your goal is to be optimal, reroll. I got my dungeon master title using almost exclusively my necro, because its the class i have the most fun playing. In a pug/unoptimized group, a necromancer will do just as well as all the shout heal warriors and rangers who tell you their class "doesn’t go into melee, it’s called "range"r for a reason." However, we lack group utility, and what we have as strengths to counter act that (debuffing and condi damage) are severely handicapped by boss mechanics and condi caps. Relative to every other class in terms of dungeons, we are weakest. This post by Nike from DnT I think sums it up -

“t1: War,thief,Guard, ranger
t2: mesmer, ele, engineer
t3: necro
…
Tier 3 is the necro. They have no useful team utility, and their dps isn’t anything special. Put it this way: even if their DPS was equal to a Thief or warrior you still wouldn’t bring one because their team-utility is essentially zero. Imagining you have the four t1 professions covered, why would you ever bring a Necro ahead of one of the t2, in what possible scenario would that be optimal?”
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Best-to-worst-dungeon-dps-classes/page/2#post2567508

We are capabile, we can manage in dungeons, but it’s definely not our strength.

BBMouse.6510:

I understand Anet must have their reason doing this since they must have all sort of data/statistics showing some sort of abuse of dungeon runs, so they do nerfs.

More likely it was easier to lump the new gold rewards and tokens together in one daily account bound reward. Given the way they assigned gold rewards, I have no reason to believe “data/statistics” were used. Also if it was a considered change intended to resolve an issue with exploitation (I can’t imagine what this would be with tokens….buying rares to throw in the mystic toilet….?) it would have been in the patch notes instead of swept under the rug.

The “wider array of dungeons” argument works when it comes to gold, but not so much dungeon tokens – I can’t trade in 169 Coe tokens and 131 arah tokens to get a piece of zerker gear. And anyway, your getting soul bound armor, not t6 mats to sell so it doesn’t seem like that big a deal to make it a character bound reward. Yeah, you can get 60 more tokens than a person with one character, but you are also trying to gear out 2 chars instead of one.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Graphics-update-06-08-made-WvW-unplayable/first

+1 internal communication fail. This guy clearly doesn’t know what he’s talking about, refer to the forum above for reasonable dev responses.

The next day, I might as well do it on my main. There’s no reason to run dungeons on anything but my main now because DR will kick I regardless. If I have alts I need more armor – the armor you get from dungeons is soul bound so in my mind it makes sense to have character based daily rewards.

Maybe there should be a sticky for this topic, I see a new thread about this at least once a day :/. Usually the last topic doesn’t leave the first page before a new one pops up. I’m sure the fact that the search function is totally borked doesn’t help, but still.

A weekly model is more player friendly (as in, you are limited to doing a task 7 times in a week rather than 1 per day). Players that do play everyday can space out the tasks once per day if they choose, or get them out of the way at the start of the week so they can get on to other things. Players who are busy during the week but can set aside a number of hours in there days off have the chance to “catch up”, so to speak – they might not get all 7 done, but they have the chance too and they’ll probably be able to get more done than the 1 or 2 they would with the daily system.

That’s not to say there should be no dailies, they have there place in encouraging daily log ins. However, time gates should not be only daily – harder group content like dungeons make sense on a weekly model. Time gating has its purpose, but I think it would be good for anet to move away from the all daily model to a more diverse model of daily/weekly/ monthly rewards.

After some further discussion In the dungeon sub forum, my theory is it was collateral damage from dungeon “end rewards” being account bound. I don’t think it was a dilberabte or considered change, just a side effect that anet probably thought wasnt a big deal.

I want to put in my 2 cents at least and say as someone with 4 level 80s, it is a big deal. Before the nerf, I use to run all 3 (note: not just one path over and over) COE paths to get my toons some dungeoning berserker gear. It already took upwards of 15-20 runs to get a full set of gear, there was a time gate on it already – the way it currently works has over nerfed one of the best ways to gear out alts, and I’m not sure there was much reason for it other than it was just simpler to make the the whole end dungeon reward account bound.

One of the bigger posts in the dungeon forums is on this very issue, please anet, take a look : https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Hard-Dungeon-Token-Nerf/first

This was such a clear win for anet, a really good change going forward….and they stil managed to balls it up. The fact that CoFp1 awards the same as () SE p2 just blows my mind, there was so clearly no thought put into it what so ever. Overall the change was good, but once again anet sours the punch with more shoddy implementation.

I agree that there are better ways we could be given defense, but until they do so I say revert the change in pve and wvw. Last time it took them 10 months to get around to balancing necromancers, so I’m more on the side of “give us what little we had back for now” rather than " leave it open for a fix which may or may not come". And honestly I’m dubious that they will give us any sort of block or evade in the future . Since the dhumfire patch I haven’t seen any dev say we would, and in fact every post on the subject has instead defended the new direction of necros as condi glass cannons for the sake of class differentiation with engis.

There are even simpler answers like- impact damage could be treated differently than opponent damage. An ele in mist form or a warrior using endure pain will still die from a fall, and if the main issue really was map breaking they could have fixed it in that way way….but they didn’t. Again, that excuse is either a blatant lie or evidence of a complete lack of understanding of the necromancer class in a pve context.

A rather frustrating and unannounced change seems to have slipped its way through the most recent patch- DR on dungeon tokens are now account wide rather than character based. Why was this done? If I have more characters, I need more armor for them. I’m curious as to 1) why the change wasn’t in the patch notes and 2) what is the reason behind it?

There’s been a lot of QQing and QQing about the QQing, but that not what I’m trying to get at. What I’m curious about is whether anyone got a gold rating on T4? I haven’t seen anyone post about it, and in fact most of the guides I’ve seen are for solo play-throughs because bad scaling made it much easier to do solo.

I’m not asking to “prove” that it was too hard – that’s such a matter of opinion is useless to try and argue either way. What I want to say, though, is there is something wrong with the event if no-one got gold. IMHO the main problem was incentive – there are hard core pve’ers who definitely could have done it, but most of them are suspect of the living story to begin with and there was 0 reason to attempt it (0.00001% chance at a skin is not a reason). Arguably, getting gold on t4 is the hardest challenge in pve right now, and I can get better loot running around Queensdale for an hour.

If someone has managed gold, please post the vid – I barely got bronze and I’d love to see someone getting gold. But even if they have it, I think the dev post we got defending the difficulty of it didn’t really address the issue with it – I think there were fundamental problems with the scaling and the rewards system that should be looked into and improved for future horde mode type mini games.

On simin specifically, the “bug” is not lack of dps, it actually has nothing to do with dps, and everything to do with how fast you pull sparks. Intuitively, it seems like you have a certain amount of time to dps her, but actually the time she stealth’s again is determined by how high her health was when you started to dps her. For some reason the window to get her below 50% is kind of small – if she regenerates up to even 60% you’ll only be able to dps her down to 50. Make sure your spark pull is clean, and you should be able to break that 50% barrier even in a low dps group.

If your still having trouble, check out this vid – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmFx8KIb26Q

I agree with most of whats been said, but just in summary reoccurring /= permanent, and quality of life changes /= content.

I would be totally fine if he said “yes, I understand the point, this is the last of the living story updates to feature story content that is entirely temporary”..and he seemed to sort of be saying that in the beginning. But then he went on to say there’s loads of permanent content like “token walets and pvp solo queue”. That’s not content. It’s good stuff – great in fact, the quality of life changes have really been spot on recently, and I don’t want to dismiss them. But, they aren’t content. And if they only things that will be permanent in living story updates will QoL things…I think people will still take issue with that. It looks at least from the first part of the post, though, that we may see more permanent true story content coming a few weeks from now.

The Mexican Cookie.3690:

Staff is an interesting weapon. On the assumption that you’re running the trait that gives you +% damage per illusion up, staff is neat because it has 2 abilities that will generate illusions, and one of them is a phantasm that will park itself and generally provide you with one maintained illusion. Chaos storm is kind of neat, I won’t make an argument for why it’s great – it’s just neat; buffs/debuffs on one skill is pretty cool. Phase Retreat is also handy for getting out of lame area of effects such as Lupicus’ life drain in phase 3.

I’m not really saying that Staff is a better option than say, pistol off-hand which will give you the same, if not better buffing abilities via the duelist doing the same thing as the warden, but I think it has more merits than the GS.

I don’t know anything about Scepter, so no input there.

It certainly has more utility than GS, but it has significantly less damage. In the few cases where i need to range (say, the imbued shaman) I want to maintain decent direct damage. Yeah, I can phase retreat away, give myself a chaos shield, give my party some buffs with chaos storm, but the only thing really doing damage is my phantasmal warden. The strength of the staff is the ability to pump out clones and bounce auto attacks with all those clones to quickly rack up a colorful palette of condis on your target – a strong dueling tactic in wvw, but not something that works well in pve. The gs has very little utility, but it works for what i do when I range in pve – kite at max range and auto attack.

Mesket.5728:

To avoid the holy trinity roles such as tank and healer.

If you figure out and predict with a 100% accuracy who will keep the mob on, you might as well build that one character for tanking and go back to how we played MMOs before.

Right now you can have a very accurate guess if you ever played a melee character with a defensive build but its not a guaranteed shot.

I think that may be part of it, although the lack of taunts, self healing on every class and high damage from bosses contributes the most to the lack of a “tank” role.

The amount that toughness contributes to aggro is a case in point where lack of transparency is simply frustrating to players. To this date, people still argue if it toughness has any effect or not – but they shouldn’t have to. There is an objective answer, and the devs know. So why wont they tell us one way or the other if toughness plays a roll or not? I would love to see something like – “it’s a complected algorithm, but toughness and damage dealt do/do not contribute”. Or even, “We realise that the roll toughness plays in aggro is a hotly debated topic. However, we cannot reveal whether it does or not play a roll because ….” I don’t think there has been such a statement, and I can’t figure out why.

Its arguably a better ranged weapon in PvE than the staff or scepter, since both are condition based. In the few cases you need 1200 range its your best option, but CoF is not one of those cases.

I’m genuinely curious, have we ever been told why we can’t know more about how mob ai works? It seems like it would contribute to more strategizing and less “everyone just dps” if we could control or just better influence who holds aggro. But more than that, why does it need to be “secret”? Are they afraid it would lead to exploitation? Just seems really odd for a game like this that we know so little about mob ai.

BillFreist.1527:

1. The change to having damage spill over to your health pool was indeed to resolve falling damage

Just….what? I had assumed, being a rational person, that this was not the reason for the nerf because you can do exactly the same thing with spectral walk. If this was an issue with map breaking, then spectral walk would have been changed. Period. Or anet is so ignorant of their own class that they don’t realise spectral walk can be used that way, which honestly would surprise me.

Everything Kraag said above is valid. Please, please revert the change, it has huge impact necromancer surviablity. The fact that it was taken away because anet saw it just as a cheap gimmick used to cliff dive….it just confirms more and more my suspicion that no one on the balance team plays this class to any serious degree.

Annoying to play against isn’t the same as overpowered – i think people on both sides of this argument are right.

If you take away thieves’ access to stealth and gave no buffs to compensate, they would be underpowered – because everything they have is balanced around stealth. It’s too powerful, in the sense that it necessarily cripples everything else a thief can do in order to compensate for the strength of that one mechanic. If thieves had less access to stealth, or stealth was redesigned in such a way as to require a trade off (slower movement, less defense), this would open up the possibility of giving thieves power in other ways – ways that might not pigeon hole them into being single target burst assassins.

It’s also valid to say that stealth, as it works currently, is very frustrating to play against. Since it comes with no trade off, it’s not used to make “clutch” plays, rather it’s a constant popping in and out in a way that provides very little counter play. It’s not quite as bad as hard cc, but at least most hard cc’s have obvious tells and long cool downs. To balance this, thieves are incredibly squishy, and so the solution is not quite as simple as just “nerfing” thieves.

I can completely understand thieves getting upset at the idea of nerfing stealth, because right now it’s what’s keeping them viable. But I think in order to broaden the role of thieves, and give them power in other areas, stealth will need to be toned down. It will make the class both less frustrating to play and play against, and will hopefully reign in stealth to be something used more tactically, not spammed.

For all of the flaws flame and frost had in its implementation, that kind of story is much more what I would like out of these living story updates. It’s an interesting new development of two previously known hostile factions, and it was a new threat to tyria that made me want to log in and defend the kingdom. As was said above festivals are great, but they work best when the are the minority rather than the majority of events that occur – it helps them feel genuinely special.

I think, though, this is a matter of unfortunate timing- the first anniversary of the games release would inevitably be some kind of festival. If the next living story has another upbeat premiss with humans as the focus, though, my patience will begin to wear thin. There are so many interesting stories to tell – about the quagin, krait, skrit, tengu, kodan, grawl….there’s more than just humans out there, and more than just lions arch and queensdale.

While I’m sure they’ll be able to limit its use in such a way thakittens not game breaking…….why? Why add this? Was there a mass call for it? Surely it was obvious it would be a controversial item, so why stir the pot with something no one was asking for?

I would genuinely (not being snarky here) like to know why the devs want to add this item. To me it comes with a whole load of potential problems, and doesn’t answer any real need. There are so many QOL things I can think of that would be unambiguous improvements – bulk buying at venders, last online for friend and guild lists, more sorting options in the tp, the ability to save trait pages….I am honestly perplexed trying to figure what problem a consumable portal was trying to solve. If its “just a bit of fun”, there are a million other ways to do that that don’t utilize a class’s distinctive ability.

I agree, focus will never be my primary offhand weapon but projectile reflection and invulnerability can make a lot of hard pve content go smoother. The fire and water skills seem oddly underpowered, tho.

For pve guardian is arguably the most optimal choice, but it sounds like you’d have more fun rolling an ele – my advice is go for ele! They are not the very top in any of the game types, but they are solid in all. Unless you are wanting the absolute most optimal class for FOTM 48, there’s not much reason to pick guardian over ele beyond personal preference.

Lowering overall partial effects will help, and I understand they want to first see if that eliviates the issue enough since moving towards a standard character model would be pretty drastic for a game focused so heavily on cosmetic self expression.

But after watching the qualifiers this weekend, I can say for myself that the size of asura is an independent issue. There was one necro asura in particular who I believe was wearing the arah dungeon chest piece, and there was just no way I could tell what those stumpy little arms were up to in those big billowy sleeves. And that was with me as a spectator watching her specifically. I can only imagine what it’s like as a player. I think the fact that auras are choosen so often should be evidence enough that the small size and stocky proportions makes a difference.

Whether its good challenge or too hard, what is clear is that it’s not of a difficulty that the event should be farmed. So why is the only decent reward RNG? You’ve made an event that will challenge the minority of hard core pve’ers, and expect them to repeat it over and over to get rewards? It makes no sense to me.

If it gets to the end of the week and there is not a single group that has gotten gold, at least then hopefully he’ll realize where we are coming from. If there has been one, please post the video.

But think about this: achieving gold is arguably harder then any lvl 48 fractal. A level 48 fractal for something that’s available for 2 weeks. Shouldn’t the reward for that be something pretty special? At the moment, no one in the hard core pve is going to try this because there’s no reason to. Literally zero incentive, beyond the challenge of it.

If you’re going to make something that hard, it’s got to have a decent reward. And I’ll be amazed if there is a single group that gets gold before the end.

Ah, your right. Not sure how that got stuck in my head. You can get zerkers, rampagers and travelers from CoE.

As I said it depends almost totally on your group and how you perform. I could give you a range – somewhere between 20 mins to a few hours, but honestly its all about how many mistakes were made, how much dps you bring, etc. more than the dungeon itself. In a highly optimized group, only a few dungeons will take more that half an hour. In a pug, an hour to an hour and a half seems pretty average for the easier dungeons.

If your looking for a recommendation of a few easy dungeons besides CoF p1…HotW p1, TA up and CoE are all fairly easy. CoE gets run a lot because you can get knights and zerker gear from it, where as the stat combos from HotW and TA armor are fairly poor for PvE. Arah P3 can be very quick for an experienced group, and long for a group that’s not.

With some creativity, all classes can be made viable, even highly effective. Necromancers I think are in the worst spot right now, but then again we have yet to see very much high level optimization. Things which are accepted as facts (example: rangers suck in dungeons) can be disproved by just one person with a little patience, dedication, and theory crafting (see Brazil’s recent ranger videos). Yeah, I am pessimistic about the state of necros in dungeons – then again, I would have said the same thing about rangers a few weeks ago.

Arguments that are any variation of “I always see staff necros, necros generally tend to be worse players, necros are useless because they always sit at range and do terrible condition damage” are NOT valid arguments. Those are talking about unskilled individuals, not the class itself. Any class will do poorly if the individual plays it poorly, or does not bring the correct tools to a fight. To say that “necros tend to be worse players” is a poor attempt at conflating the issue, and has no basis in statistical fact – only anecdotal evidence.

In a pug group, the skill of the individual will vastly out way the differences of class effectiveness. Only In a dedicated, organized group will these issues of which classes are absolutely most optimal matter. If taking specific classes matters to you, find a group to run with. If you want to pug, pug, and have fun figuring out strategies that work with your team comp.

If anyone has done t4 post patch killing 50 pirates, please post the video. If the only objective was to protect the treasure, that would be one thing, but you’re clearly meant to kill mobs. At the moment, keeping your team completely free of agro seems the only possible method. For a hoard mode game type, this seems to fall under the category of “not working as intended”.

AC – p3,closely followed by p1. Most people avoid p2
CM -p2 can be fast depending on how willing you are to exploit, but I see most people running p1.
TA – up, closely followed by F/f. Unless you are in a highly organized group don’t bother with f/u
SE – p1, or p3 depending on how well you are able to run past dredge. p2 is a chore.
CoF – p1, p2 again depending on exploits. p3 is much longer.
COE – pretty much the same for all three, from what I can tell. This is the dungeon I tend to run if I’m bored with CoF.
HOTW – again, pretty much the same, though I run p1 mostly because the other 2 have underwater final bosses.
Arah – p3, p1 and 2 seem to be pretty similar. p4 is much longer than the other paths.

This is my experience from pugging, and from what I see most often on gw2lfg.
If you play with an organized group it may be different. Actual time of completion will depend mostly on the specific group, so I think it’s only useful to consider relative length.

I want to frame this as a constructive suggestion rather than complaining. As a pve necromancer I do have a lot of frustration with the recent changes, but I realize trying to argue from the negative point of view (ie what was done wrong or not addressed, or picking at Jonathan Sharps post about where he gets feedback on “overall balance”) is just going to get the same defensive response. And honestly, I don’t think there is malicious intent, and I think the pvp balance team has been working incredibly hard getting ready for the pax tournament. What I do think it shows is a lack of understanding of what necromancers need in pve. With that in mind, I want to discuss where a more appropriate split would be, that would actually address some of the problems necromancers face in dungeons and fractals.

In high level pve, there are an abundance of one-shot mechanics – moves that will dish our more damage then a full DS and health pool could tank through. Therefore, the fact that death shroud was fixed to give 100% of health was not adequate compensation for what we lost. A one shot kill is a one shot kill, without some type of invulnerability or evade. Our other forms of damage mitigation – fear, blind, chill – are all severely affected by defiant and unshakeable. With the latest patch, we lost our one pseudo invulnerability. All our active defenses are directly hindered by boss mechanics (mechanics shared by every boss in the game) and we lack mobility.

Conditions in general are in a bad spot in pve because of capping, but stack-in-duration conditions are the worst offenders. Burn is arguably the worst of the worst, since guardians an eles will spam out burns without even trying, and it’s rare to ever see a dungeon boss not constantly on fire. Splitting the change with dhumfire makes no sense – even if it was marginally useful, it can’t touch close to death which gives necros a whopping 20% more damage for half the fight. In boss fights against humongous bags of hp, it’s invaluable.

In pvp i can understand that with the buff to the ds health pool, if ds were allowed to deal with spike as well as sustained dps it might be op. However, it would be completely appropriate to give the one hit damage absorption back in pve. We would still one of the weaker classes, but at least we would have something to help us deal with one-shot mechanics on a low-mobility class.

Sigil of energy will help out a lot, and I think there’s a food that will give you vigor on crit? Over the course of the fight there are only 1 or two times when he chains his big aoe so quickly that you’ll run out of endurance. I use to use DS to take the blow but with the recent patch I’ve been using plague form. This does also require that you never dodge anything but the big overlapping red circle aoe. If your team can melee stack it makes it much easier.

The cd reduction on wells and the 1 second stability on WoP was a step in the right direction. DS overflow was a step back. The fact that we have no cleave in a dungeon meta that revolves around melee stacking is problematic – axe is the most obvious candidate for it. As stated above defiant really hurts us when fear is our equivalent of aegis or distortion. Our secondary defenses (chills,blinds, cripples) are all hit hard by unshakeable.

We will never be strong in dungeons until (or if ever) defiant and condition capping is resolved. We could be more playable of we had any tools to deal with one shot mechanics, and if we had some sort of direct damage cleave. I suspect this wont happen though because balancing at the moment is focused on class differentiation in pvp (ie making us more bursty but less survavible then engis), and giving us those things would just be giving us the “tools of other classes”.

I agree especially with the builds being secret. Because its so hectic and fast paced, the only way to get anything out of watching gw2 combat is to know what to look for.

I honestly don’t know what a person who was not totally caught up on the meta would take away from watching this. Probably just a big blur of partial effects. Going through the builds will tell viewers what to look for – how we might expect the players to act and react. Having a sense in your mind of what should play out goes a long way to interpreting that mass of particles clustered on the node.

There are a few things at issue here:

1) Is it possible? Yes. There are people who have done it post-patch.
2) Is it reasonable? That’s a question highly subject to opinion, and probably won’t be solved in a forum like this- people will argue both sides, and we don’t have an adequate way to poll the “general public”.
3) Is it working as intended? (most important, in my mind) – I think we can safely answer this as no. From the gold/silver/bronze aspect of the achievement, this is clearly meant to be a hord mode. Killing the enemies is something the game is telling you you should be doing. But with the recent patch, I will go as far as to say it is impossible to kill 50 pirates and keep the plunderers at bay in a 5 man party, with the way it currently scales. An average player will struggle to do this while killing one or two.

To me, the fact that it is possible to do this with a heavy dps party while hiding/running from all the aggressive mobs and cc’ing the pluderers to death does not mean that the event is “fine”. That says to me the event is broken, but players have found ways to overcome it regardless. Congratulations to those players, but the event is still not working as intended.

Allie Murdock.8152:

The reason why I focused my communication in that thread is because it was loaded with constructive feedback, which should always be promoted. No, it was most definitely NOT the only thread about Necromancers. Also, it was NOT the only thread that I posted in regarding the Necro changes and feedback.

Now, with that in mind; This was a change that was SPLIT between PvP and PvE. The change ONLY happened for PvPers, and it was a quick turnaround due to the fact that the tournament was starting this weekend.

This does NOT mean that we ignore the Necromancer forums. This does NOT mean we don’t make changes that benefit PvE. This does NOT mean we don’t have hotfixes specifically to help PvE players.

Appreciate your feedback, but many of the things you are claiming are simply not true.

This is disingenuous. I don’t say that lightly. It takes one recent change out of context, out of the whole host of recent changes that have all revolved around balancing the power of dhumfire in pvp. All of those changes were NOT split in PvE and WvW, and honestly? Keeping dhumfire the same in pve makes no difference – it can’t possibly compete with close to death. The fact that the split was made for dhumfire and not for DS overflow just shows how utterly out of touch the balance team is with the state of pve….

I get it. PAX is an important piece of publicity, and this is a duct-tape on the windshield type fix because the show must go on. So then, make all of those changes pvp only, not the one change that does nothing to help the state of necromancers in pve.

just to make the above juxtaposition clearer:

Allie Murdock.8152:

PvE balance is a completely different beast, as there are insane amounts of things that undergo balance changes (Different classes of creatures, dungeons, Story instances, events, etc.)… If you would like to discuss PvE, please use the appropriate sub-forums.

JonathanSharp.7094:

The reason I quickly jump into the sPvP forums is because that’s usually the best place to talk overall game balance … it’s literally just easier for me (personally) to check 1 sub forum, rather than 8