Guild Wars 2

Yeah but focus is also good and on a much lower cooldown. Which is why it wins out in so many scenarios.

As someone who has run out of XP boosters im desparately hoping raid XP is good.

Did you test whether reapers onslaught adds more burn damage than deathly chill? I assume it doesnt. And this is pretty similar to how im leaning towards building condi necro. Even without testing.

Can we please get some bans on these safespotters. Maybe people will stop if theres some reddit drama over it.

Yeah, as much as i hate axe. I would definitely consider it better than staff. :P

And theres a very simple reason for that. Staff has no use in PvE combat other than afk exploiting in safespots. If you need range on a power build axe is actually better. And for condi builds you will always want to camp scepter for your mainhand.

Ok gonna list some dps situations.

For a greatsword + dagger rotation:
Focus > untraited warhorn
traited warhorn > traited focus (but you wont have vampiric presence so you must be second necro)

Pure dagger:
Focus > warhorn always (but you take both so it doesnt really matter)

Basically focus has always been better. But now warhorn does have one very niche situation where it is better for dps. When not talking purely about dps theres always the daze to consider though.

Lily.1935:

Take staff as your ranged weapon instead. Staff, unlike axe is one of the best weapons in the game.

Not really. Think you are getting mixed up with ele.

Alphard.6529:

deSade.9437:

Rag.3258:

spoj.9672:

Nah they werent. Fractals have never been rewarding enough.

Yes they were. Fractals have been rewarding enough.

No they weren’t.

The 50+ ascended armor and 20+ ascended weapon boxes in my bank would like to disagree.

Edit: Also the hundreds of gold from selling fractal 50/40.

Doesnt that prove the rewards were useless? The fact that you had 70+ pieces of ascended in your bank with nothing to do with them.

And im sure you can see why the gold from selling fractals shouldnt be included in your justification.

Rag.3258:

deSade.9437:

Rag.3258:

spoj.9672:

Nah they werent. Fractals have never been rewarding enough.

Yes they were. Fractals have been rewarding enough.

No they weren’t.

Yes they were

I can do this all week

Can you back up that statement with actual evidence though? :P

Its good for afk killing with minions. As the range made it more viable as a safe distance weapon. Its damage is still atrocious though.

Apolo.5942:

Gaile Gray.6029:

Gold
In this iteration, there will be several changes to how fractals give out liquid rewards (gold and items designed to convert directly into gold). The negative aspect of this change is a required decrease to the amount of keys you receive from converting a stabilizing matrix from two to one. However the upside is threefold:

• First, the quantity of free Fractal Encryption Keys you receive for completing all dailies will increase.
• Second, the amount of liquid rewards Fractal Encryptions contain will be greatly increased.
• Last, the variation of liquid rewards will be reduced. We noticed that the general perception of how much the Encryptions were rewarding players and the aggregate numbers didn’t agree, they weren’t even close. We believe that the variation was set to rely too greatly on the high valued rewards. This change will make liquid rewards from fractal farming and dailies much more predictable.

We look forward to getting these changes to you and would like to thank you for all of your constructive feedback on Fractals. We are committed to supporting fractals for the long term and we’ll be continuously monitoring them for future improvements.

Thank you,

John

These seem highly contradictory and i fail to see the need to reinvent the wheel, the fractals reward were just fine when they just gave out gold.

Nah they werent. Fractals have never been rewarding enough.

Being able to mystic forge ascended gear was about the only change that actually made a fair difference in the right direction. But it still wasnt enough to make fractal rewards satisfactory.

I assume health scaling stays though. Which is good. It might need toning down a bit though.

No chance of it being implemented before december? Or at least portions of the changes. Seems like quite a long wait. :P

I try to avoid blanket statements as much as possible these days. But regarding condi necro. I felt that was so obvious it was ok. :P

You can see it on spreadsheets but you can also see it in game really easily. Ive barely touched engi but on my first time playing condi engi i was already doing more condi damage than ive ever seen condi necro do. And that was with disastrous rotations and pathetic general play. Its true that playing condi engi to its maximum is very difficult. But even playing it really suboptimally yields very high output.

And i dont know how many times ive said to him thats not what they were for. But hes refusing to accept that. :P

Altoid.9104:

[edit] Furthermore, in other games when people say “X class deals Y DPS” I usually get really close to that value, even if it’s assuming perfect rotations. In this game I see people say values and the real value is all over the place.

This is for two reasons.

First because GW2 has way more variables in its combat system than most other MMO’s.

Second because noone factors in all the variables in spreadsheets. Because its too much work and it isnt the purpose of those spreadsheets to give a real dps value.

Theres a really good example to this. Most theorycrafting is done with the benchmark armour value of enemies being 2600. Because this is pretty standard and is what is used in tooltips. But in reality boss armour varies too much and we dont have extensive data on every single boss and champ. So its easier for comparisons sake to just take a few standard values and calculate with those. But because we arent using the matched armour values to a real boss. You will never see an accurate number because of this and the many other variables not factored in.

That doesnt mean the comparisons and data from the spreadsheets is wrong or useless though. Its the opposite. Without such calculations you would never be able to accurately compare classes and skills in this game. Your feelings certainly arent accurate and we have no dps meters to gather large pools of real data quickly. Plus player by player variance is huge.

Im convinced you cant read now.

Phantasms dont die anymore so yeah.

Cat Has Ducks.1982:

spoj.9672:

Cat Has Ducks.1982:

Of course you consider that for mesmer lol.

Not really. You wouldnt say phalanx warrior has insane dps just because it brings might and banners. You would say its moderate dps but boosts party dps so much that it justifies taking it.

You would probably say the same about chrono. Although i have no idea how good chrono dps actually is without alacrity and quickness.

You are beginning to sound like nemesis….

Actually if i was nemesis i would ignore utility completely and compare dps of a support build to another classes 3 minute cooldown burst on a pure dps build.

Dont even need to go on the defensive when hes completely missing the purpose of spreadsheets and trying to claim theres some hidden agenda. Im happy to keep repeating myself until he understands. But it seems its beyond him.

Cat Has Ducks.1982:

Of course you consider that for mesmer lol.

Not really. You wouldnt say phalanx warrior has insane dps just because it brings might and banners. You would say its moderate dps but boosts party dps so much that it justifies taking it.

You would probably say the same about chrono. Although i have no idea how good chrono dps actually is without alacrity and quickness.

Citronvand.2837:

Xephz.3185:

Spreadsheets can perhaps help to clear up some of these questions (For example build A does 18k theoretical DPS and build B does 12k theoretical DPS would mean that build B needs to have atleast 50% more DPS time to be better then build A. Such things could be evaluated through recordings and such but as said before its rather time consuming).

I think spreadsheets can help form a hypothesis. But then you should test that hypothesis and see if it is actually accurate in reality. Drawing conclusions directly from spreadsheets can get messy as we’ve seen. There are so many variables to consider, it is not just your own personal DPS and uptime, it is the groups DPS. What if one get downed but thanks to your ritual of life and last rites plus that you sacrificed personal DPS for more tankyness you can go in, in the thick of it, ress your pal and come out alive. What if your build allows other builds/classes/players to have higher DPS uptime.

It is so easy for people to draw conclusions when they just compare 2 numbers. 2 is higher than 1 therefore… When reality is much more complex. I think we as a community need to move away from this mindset of numbers vs numbers and focus more on strength and weaknesses of a certain build, how hard is it to use the build for the player, how is the support, what synergies does it have with other builds/classes e.t.c e.t.c. instead of a HUUUGE focus on personal DPS.

This is exactly the process i go through. And people should be going through this when using spreadsheets. I use it to get the raw data. Work out what is worth casting for damage and what isnt. Develop a rotation idea. Test it. Re-check it and recalculate. Create variants where you sacrifice certain skills for utility reasons, make decisions based on practicality etc etc.

For example. I calculated that dhuumfire RS camping necro is actually very close if not better for damage than a GS rotation. However that is assuming a very unrealistic rotation and permanent lifeforce. Both of which are unrealistic assumptions. But that calculation was still very important for me to come to my conclusions about GS vs RS.

Nemesis you keep missing the point. Were not trying to compare real dps. Were simply finding what deals more damage. You can factor in as many extra variables as you want to make the calculation more accurate if you want. But you dont really need to do that to work out which classes have the best dps skills and overall best dps.

This is also why i often do coefficient per second calculations alongside dps calculations. Because they are simply an average weighted skill use per second. Which is fairly accurate for quick comparisons. Only problem with them is you also need to factor in trait modifiers. Because those can make a lower cps class do more damage than a higher cps class which has less modifiers.

Prime example of this is the necro. Necro has much less damage modifiers than most classes. But it has on average high cps than most classes. But the modifiers shift the difference in favour of other classes most of the time (probably not so much with reaper).

Reaper. No need to dodge and can stay zerk.

Yeah but that’s a small portion of the overall fight. That is one of the better places. Still that’s just an example of a minority of niche situations. Which was my entire reasoning for the overrated comment. Its not good everywhere so its overrated.

Yeah see the mai trin trash. All of them die instantly except the elite and the champ. Thats not good enough justification for epidemic.

But fractal scaling is borked at the moment. So conditions are just way more effective in general. So its not really fair to kitten on high fracs. My point still stands. Majority of long fights are boss fights. And epidemic is useless there. Therefore i feel its overrated. You can disagree. Thats fine.

Eirian Direstorm.9748:

Out of curiosity, will all the people coming to Verdant Brink for the raid be counted toward the map cap after they enter the raid instance?

No, its a separate instance. Its like when you enter dungeons. When you come out you sometimes end up on a different map to the one you entered the dungeon on.

Altoid.9104:

spoj.9672:

They really dont though. Even in frac 100 the trash still die fast. Its only the bosses that have ridiculous armour and health scaling.

But that was my entire point. Epidemic doesnt make the class. Its situationally powerful. And its overrated because of that.

I’ve done 100 4 times now, twice as a power build and twice condition. A well placed epidemic is nice against the initial trash pull but of course it’s not 100% needed, but it certainly shines during the actual boss fight when the adds come out.

Uncategorized: Shaman / Ogre have a crap ton of HP and being able to epidemic on cd is a big deal. Ok on 4 golems at end at high level, they have enough hp that I personally feel its ok.

Grawl: Useful in initial pull, but extremely useful when lava adds pop out.

Swamp: It’s ok on moss, but who cares since people just bug him out anyway at this point.

Cliffside: Very useful when dealing with seals on both sides, tons of adds with a solid amount of hp. You can get off some nice condi spreads before they even reach the party.

Molten Facility: Useful on all of the trash pulls, useless on boss room.

Snowblind: This one is iffy, depends on how many elementals the group pulls but overall I think it’s worth taking as long as someone is able to group them up. Useless on boss.

Aetherblade: Epidemic is unblockable, the stupid golems at the end get the lightning shield constantly. Very good here with a bit of coordination or luck.

Molten Boss: useless

Thaumnova: Pretty solid for portal mobs, harder to avoid since the portal pull range seems to get ridiculous. Useless on boss

Aquatic: Useful because of all the jellyfish but who cares, this one is lame anyway.

Urban: Very useful up until boss, the adds deal alot of damage and don’t go splat right away.

Solid Ocean: Again useful because of all the adds that stick around, being able to take those annoying things out faster is always a plus.

Yeah see i dont know what kind of group you play in. But my group even with suboptimal class choices were melting all trash far too fast for epidemic to be meaningful on our rush to 100. I was swapping to condi for boss fights where epidemic was useless. Rest of the time i was just sticking with berserker. So i never once slotted epidemic. Although i do admit it has its uses. I did use it a fair bit in the past on ascalon and a few other places for extra aoe. But ive since learnt that a more effective approach is generally WoS, WoC and WoD and power.

I dont see why you are so determined to prove me wrong. I know epidemic is good and it has its uses. But its not good everywhere and its not good in 99% of boss fights. Which is why i consider it overrated. It certainly doesnt justify picking a condi build over power just because of epidemic. Its definitely not THAT good.

Can you universaly remove them from the game? :P

Its either something like this. Or instead of chill doing damage itself you have a unique condition that applies for the same duration as your chills and ticks damage. This way it can never be overwritten. Could also allow it to stack intensity allowing for chilling bolts from whirls to be extra useful.

They really dont though. Even in frac 100 the trash still die fast. Its only the bosses that have ridiculous armour and health scaling.

But that was my entire point. Epidemic doesnt make the class. Its situationally powerful. And its overrated because of that.

Maybe you should the rest of the thread. No one has claimed theory matches real dps….

Can someone tell me what is wrong and what is saying “necro is bad” in those quotes nemesis screenshotted. I was merely posting my theoretical findings.

And once again I explained that vid is before I optimised and was a recording test. No idea why you felt dps from a 2.5 year old test video is proof of anything.

It was true. But it was more of necro was one of the multiple lower dps classes. Which means it was roughly the same as the 4 other lower dps classes. But that statement was also usually as follows:

“Necro is bad because it is purely selfish and offers no meaningful utility. It is also one of the lower dps classes. So why should we pick necro?”

Context is important. If you ignore half the statement of course things get twisted.

Disclaimer: This statement is no longer true!

edit: Necro condi damage is weaker than other classes. Or is it outrageous to state the truth as well? Cant win with you people. Also nice of you to twist what i said into something completely different. Weaker than other classes =/ terrible at condi damage.

Epidemic is severely overrated. Its useless on bosses and on trash you barely have time to actually get a decent epidemic off.

Plus you dont even need to be a condi necro to use epidemic. :P

Spreadsheets are not why people think necro is bad. The reality of the classes previous lack of utility was the reason. Had nothing to do with dps and it had nothing to do with spreadsheets. You dont calculate utility on spreadsheets.

Ayrilana.1396:

Same time as all of their releases.

So anywhere between 4pm and 1am gmt?

Gee thats helpful!

I fully expect everything asked about in this thread will be added to the disabled list if it wasnt already.

Its a fair decision to disable slaying and night. Ive never liked what those do. They force you to get hundreds of different versions of the same weapons/pots just to min/max. This is a welcome change.

Id also be in favour of you removing them completely from the game. And maybe replacing them with a universal 10% pot and 10% sigil. Or just give us some better options in addition to force. I dont like air. I want something that makes more sense in PvE like 10% crit damage.

Golems arent really a valid comparison seeing as they are solo. And were talking group here. Condi necro solo is quite good because of the might and vuln. Which is probably why you see less of a difference.

I will be adding one to my guide. But that doesnt mean condi necros arent weak compared to other better condi classes. :P

Spreadsheets are there to give a comparison between classes and to work out priority skills for rotations. You can extrapolate and use the data to determine which classes are best at certain situations. You can also say that if dps is halved on X encounter then it would also be halved on other classes for the same encounter. This means an optimal dps comparison is still useful. Obviously you need to consider other variables such as staff ele being able to be further away to still deal max dps so their dps might only be reduced by 40% instead of 50%. This is applied mathematics. Its not something you can really explain to others. Its something you need to work out for yourself. As long as you understand the context, then the data is useful even if it comes in an unrealistic form.

GW2 is a more active combat system than most mmo’s which is why even with optimal rotations you cant necessarily ever get close to theory. Even your optimal real rotation might be vastly different on the same encounter at two different times. Simply because of the variables caused by gw2 combat.

Its actually not that time consuming once you have all the skill data calculated and the general formula’s. You literally just plug the numbers in and tally it up (i often link the formula’s so i can change armour and stat values on the fly so the whole spreadsheet refreshes with new values). The most time consuming and boring part for me is actually recording the rotation and adding up the number of each skill/proc in the rotation. Which is still much less work than adding up all the exact numbers in the combat log on a video.

Which, i might add, i dont really fancy so the recording i made on sunday is sitting there unwatched until the weekend. At this point i may scrap the idea for now just so i can get my guide updated with the important stuff. I already have a good idea of what skills are high priority in a rotation. Even if i dont have a rotation perfected and calculated. And thats all thanks to spreadsheet math followed by brief ingame checks on cast/aftercast. :>

Mostly agree. I dont think the minors are an issue. They can work well on any build. The problem is the master traits. They are condition related yet all pretty sub par for condition builds.

I agree with your first solution to chilling darkness. Revert to 1 second chill with no ICD. Since chill has a stack cap of 5 the imbalance caused by plague and this trait should no longer be an issue. Heck even keeping it at 2 seconds with no ICD would be fine. You would only get huge chill durations if people stay in your high cooldown WoD or plague for over 5 seconds and you overstack condi duration. Which i think is fair play. And even then it would only be about 10 seconds max for a high cooldown combo + condi duration (no idea how much you can get in sPvP).

Corruptions are bad so master of corruption is bad. But the line seems to be far too focused on corruptions and countering their negative effects (transfers). So for a condi build that doesnt use corruptions what is there to take? Nothing of worth. Lingering curse is also bad simply because it doesnt work in RS so that kills its use for a condi reaper.

And then the whole line lacks more general purpose traits. Things that would work on any build. Chilling of darkness and weakening shroud can technically fill this role. But CD needs to be fixed first. And we need a decent master trait to compliment. Path of Corruption is good but rather useless outside of PvP and select PvE encounters. And the rest of the line isnt strong enough to justify taking curses over other lines simply for path of corruption.

As far I can tell our best Condi build is far below engi/ranger/warrior. But our direct damage isn’t far behind the best. So I would say zerk.

This is also the problem with Condi reaper. You cant maintain bleeds and burn at the same time. Also you cant take deathly chill unless you want less burns. There’s a lot of contradictory choices with Condi reaper. Which is the reason why its so weak compared to other Condi classes.

You are right about spite though. Its pretty much pointless in a group.

Fire fields arent really “the one true combo field”. Smoke, lightning, fire and water are all equal in terms of meta usage. Well water not so much in old content.

Because grinding xp the slow way in content you have already done to death is fun. Put it this way. New players can do map comp and various things they havent experienced to gain xp in old tyria to level masteries. Veterans likely have a large amount of map completion on various characters which never awarded them progress to masteries. They are losing out. And are forced to revisit content that they dont necessarily want to do.

CoF farm gives a fair alternative that hurts noone and makes the grind less painful. Also i wouldnt have bothered doing the cof farm if dungeons and fractals actually rewarded decent amounts and still had semi decent other rewards. So if you are going to get disappointed at the devs be disappointed at the atrocious xp and reward nerfs instead.

The 5% modifier wont show an increase in stats because its not a 5% stat increase. Its a 5% damage modifier. Like bursting and force.

If you use vipers then berserker runes are best. Assuming they work. If sinister then you want 5 nightmare runes and 1 antitoxin.