Your essentually saying you want it to be equally rewarding for clearing the dungeon 5 times slower. If healing builds and tank builds become required its back to a trinity game which is against the devs original design. Despite many people trying to build trinity roles a good proportion are happy with no trinity. And although they would prefer a bit more variety they dont want clear roles which is what you guys seem to be saying. DPS is required no matter what, you cant kill things if you dont have dps. So to make pve better the dps roles should just have other layers. Dps and cc, dps and support, dps and buff for example (for the meta). Which is actually how it already is in some regards, just not obvious enough because boss mechanics are a joke at the moment. Casual players will always play sub optimal builds, so theres no point trying to change that.
Except healing and tanking dont work in gw2. They help slightly but any player using that kind of spec would help the group much more by contributing dps and helping with damage avoidance.
So… it’s… power, precision, critical strike damage + healing power, toughness, vitality (for support heal / support tank) + condition duration (for max CC weakness + chilling).
Where do you fit them all ?
Most people when you say support they go “aaaaaa… might stacks.. sureeee we have that”. That is not support…
CoF P1 never needed healing, chilling, weakness or anything… you all stand in one corner… spam skills with time warp for 100% DPS uptime on top of high power type damage from glass cannons that never got punished for being glassy at 100% DPS uptime… = PvE design flaw.
Support does not equal tanks and healers. GW2 isnt a trinity game. Support comes in the form of boons, blinds, aegis and projectile defense (damage avoidance). Glass builds are punished very easily if attacks arent avoided properly and mitigated or the dps is lacking because someone isnt pulling their weight. CoF p1 is the only dungeon where you dont need to dodge anything. Also another form of support is used (control), which involves position of mobs and interrupting various attacks.
There is a design flaw in pve but its not for the reasons you stated. The flaw is that condition damage is sub par compared to direct damage. And that mechanics are far too simple at the moment. Skilled players will always find ways to trivalise content as fast as possible. Forcing people to start taking toughness, vitality and healing power is not good design either.
The golems in coe can be pretty nasty if you dont interrupt their knockdown moves or the ice explosion attack. Its trash like that where the daze is very useful.
Nemesis you talk as if zerker groups dont use support when infact they do but they dont give anything up to do it. Also the bleed cap is a design limitation not a choice the devs made. Even without a cap there would still be a power meta for many fights due to build up time of conditions. And other classes do plenty of sustained direct damage aoe. Necro has plenty of both condi and direct aoe. We just have better sustained aoe on our condi weapons and utilities. Nothing beats the aoe eles can put out and thats purely direct damage.
Anyway the point remains. Conditions are only good for aoe but there are alternatives to aoeing trash down. Dungeons are mostly boss fights where condition specs are pretty terrible. Fractals its a bit better because theres a lot more trash and its mostly not skippable. But still its always seemed like a really wasteful and stupid thing to me to focus your build around the smallest and least important parts of dungeons (trash clearing).
What was defines goal by creating that video anyway? Cause it seemed to me like gathering support to stop us from using FGS in speedruns because you didnt like your records being beaten by using something you refuse to use.
I guess you could run the test with some friends helping you maintain 25 might and 25 vuln permanently. Warriors with omm and spamming blast finishers in fire fields nearby should work.
You can test the base auto’s without traits and then use maths to calculate how the various traits would improve dps. Your results show hammer as best which isnt true, the only reason it beats sword and gs in that video is because of the vuln on symbol. In a group, vuln and might are gonna be fairly equal across all builds.
Guardians are able to pull off more sustained DPS, but less burst DPS.
In a solo instance however, a warrior will outdps a guardian, but when we put them both to equal footing with warrior banners, fury and 25 might, guardians actually do more DPS than warriors do. Especially when using the hammer autoattack.
Also, greatsword has the worst sustained DPS out of all guardian melee weapons, but it has the highest burst DPS. Zealots defense is a loss of DPS because of it’s aftercast.
Yeah necro utility is definately there. Its just other classes have better access to the same stuff and sacrifice less to get it.
I dont think ever going full condi is worth it. The damage is pigeon holed into long duration fights and mostly trash mobs. So id say always go beserker or rampager if you want to maximise damage and giving you more flexibility.
Necro is at the bottom of the list for dungeons and I suppose fractals. Hybrid necro is fairly decent in fractals though. The damage of all classes is pretty well balanced. Its other things which make classes picked over others (group buffs, unique utility and so on). Necro has nothing special that is worth taking in a group.
I use scepter focus for a hybrid build. And dagger offhand on a power build if I needed better weakness uptime. They are more niche roles, but they can work pretty well in some situations.
Yeah for it to be worthwhile on a condi spec you need to be standing next to 5 mobs and even then its only going to apply a maximum of 5 short duration bleeds per second(1 on each mob with very good rng). So id say dagger offhand is better, due to a guaranteed 2 stacks of 10+ second bleeds on 5 targets.
Warhorn is a very strong power offhand. It adds a long duration ticking aoe ontop of your dagger auto (dps increase just by maintaining locust swarm, each tick can hit for over 1k when the necro is fully buffed). Also it can be traited to last longer and have a shorter cooldown with just 20 points in curses. And since you will be going 20 pts in curses you may aswell go 25 for target the weak. Which makes the cripple you apply give you an extra 2% damage. You should be able to maintain about 4+ conditions permanently in an average group which would give you a permanent 8% dmg boost.
The daze on warhorn is pretty situational but if you need to remove defiant or interrupt bjarl in coe then its a pretty good skill to have.
If your group struggles with vuln I would take focus instead though (or both).
Potentially condi aoe is very good sustained damage on necro. The problem is that its only useful for prolonged trash fights. Single target dps is much better with direct damage from dagger warhorn. With a beserker build you can burst aoe with wells and DS and thats usually enough to clear a group of trash mobs in a decentish group. The only places ive found constant epidemic and condition aoe useful is in fractals like ascalon and dredge fractal. But for those Id just use the same build but change into rampager gear and equip a scepter.
Also apparently something is being done to improve conditions in pve in an upcoming patch. Whether it actually works in making speed clear groups take 1 condi class we will see.
I swap constantly on other classes but my mesmer always has sword/focus sword/sword equipped. Dont need any ranged weapons and i prefer offhand sword to pistol. I will occasionally swap for pistol on Bjarl in CoE though. If i do ever need to range something ill take scepter, but that would be on a very select few encounters in fractals which I dont do anymore and I dont take my mesmer into anyway.
Stack limit. Even playing with 4 non condi specs they will potentially take some of your stacks. Slow ramp up time. Conditions arent affected by damage modifers and vuln. Direct damage does more, doesnt have an issue of stacking and doesnt take time to build up. Direct damage scales off power, precision and crit damage. Condition damage is just 1 stat.
I cant think of a single pve orientated balance change. There were a few which were beneficial to pve either by buffing a worse class or nerfing warrior damage but they were all introduced for pvp reasons.
Actually, a lot of dungeon tactics are based on warriors on guardians and this makes groups full of heavy classes work really well. Stacking around a corner so a pile of mobs run into your dpszone, even if they do severe aoe damage back on the group, is a strategy created by heavy classes for heavy classes.
No thats just the pug meta. The top guilds and players use variety of classes because you achieve much faster clears and much better dps that way (requires more coordination and knowledge though). Thief is incredibly useful for CM, TAUP and Arah p1.
Its pretty obvious the changes made are purely because of pvp. Dont tell me you cant see that? Class balance is completely focused around pvp and for the most part it has resulted in nerfs to pve in many areas.
Maybe he wants to epidemic the condi engi’s conditions (2 condi builds is usually fine). Its a good combo in pvp and can work for trash in pve. Its just pretty sub optimal because its conditions ofcourse.
No it doesnt mean that. They can have 2 teams which know what each side wants/needs but they work with each other to keep the skills constant through all gametypes as much as possible when making changes.
Atm to get something good in pve we have to find a reason for it be needed in pvp otherwise the devs wont even consider it. I dont want to have to says to the devs, in pvp we should have orders because of this and that. When in reality its just something I want for pve.
Their current way of class balancing isnt right though. I honestly think they should have a pve class balancing team. So changes arent purely based on whats needed in pvp and just adjusted to not break pve.
Bait out the dives with dodges then los pull into the corner and burst down. If you dont have enough dps count 33 seconds and he will do the dives again.
Tbf the amount of people who dont read the lfg and just join with 500ap is getting a bit tiresome. After several awful pugs we decided to just learn to 3man coe lasers. So now we pretty much 3man every dungeon atm.
You have a 2nd hp pool, lots of blinds/chills/weakness/fears and potentionally high protection uptime via traited wells/spectral armor/runes and you NEED vigor too? Stability every 5-10 seconds traited. Not to mention having best condition removal in game with staff 4, dagger 4 and a decent functioning heal that removes all conditions.
Sorry but l2p lol.
Try meleeing lupi on a necro without endurance food and 2 energy sigils.
Yea id say mossman is the most painful kitten in the game. Mostly because his tells are almost impossible to see when hes stealthed or covered in particle effects.
I dont know any decent dungeon runners that actually show off their DM title. Showing off DM is usually a sign of someone whos so proud of being carried to get it at last.
1. LH/FGS ele
2. Thief (single target)
3. War, guard, mes, thief (cleave)
4. Ranger, engi
5. Necro
And I run 25/30//0/0/15 for dungeons and 0/30/20/20/0 for fractals. My default weapon sets are d/d and s/p swapping the s/p to s/d for stealing might from certain bosses and short bow or p/p for stuff that has to be ranged
Necro actually has higher dps than engi and about even with ranger. Problem is necro has nothing worth taking into a dungeon. Mesmer damage is also dependant on phantasms so in many fights mesmer is rock bottom for damage. Other than that your rankings are pretty accurate. Guard is slightly higher sustained dps than warrior though.
