Support and control are both heavily used in the current meta. But those roles have nothing to do with gear. This is where people fail to understand the game.
Just to clarify, I had used the term “support/control” to be more inclusive of the (possible) variety of different builds instead of listing off all the specific gear prefixes that are made unnecessary by design in this dps meta.
Thats the trap your falling into. Gear has nothing to do with build. Your choice of gear is representive of how much damage you expect to take and what type of damage you want to do. You take more survivable gear if you need it. If you dont, you dont. No gear is unviable. Full berserker is simply the most efficient. Nothing you do to the game will change the meta. There is a huge variety of builds. However most of them involve berserker as recommended gear because its the most efficient. Mesmer and guardian rarely use max dps trait setups because supportive traits are often required.
It really annoys me how so many people are completely dense about this subject. The roles are fine, the game is fine. The only problem is the content is old and too easy now, but it was fine a year ago when people were much worse at the game. We need new content, not fixes to the dps meta. No matter what you do to the dps meta it will always be there unless they make it completely unviable. Which will just drive 80% of players away from the game because of their ascended berserker gear becoming useless.
Support and control are both heavily used in the current meta. But those roles have nothing to do with gear. This is where people fail to understand the game.
Theres nothing bad design about everyone dps. Its a hell of a lot better than forcing people to wait for healers and tanks. Everyone does dps, different classes provide different utility. And builds are tweaked for individual expectations.
If full dps didnt work then it would be going against their play how you want philosophy. Full dps is the meta, there is always a meta. People seem to want clerics builds to clear content just as fast as full dps groups. Which just makes no sense. The only thing that needs to happen is to make it harder for full dps groups to work. So it discourages bad players from using it. This means coordinated groups can still reap the rewards but most pugs will no longer worry about gear checking as much.
PvE will never be balanced period. Yes they can give us cleave and make us decent (they already said they wanted to up our power damage a bit), but PvE is still awfully designed.
PvE needs to change to fix PvE, not the professions.
Just because pve is poorly designed doesnt mean it cant be balanced. Its actually very close to being balanced. Ranger needs a sword auto fix, engi needs some minor improvements. Necro needs some cleave and utility. The rest of the classes are pretty much fine except for warrior being way too easy for the reward you get. WvW is the only gametype that cant be balanced because zerg vs zerg is impossible to predict an outcome.
Fixing 1 or 2 professions is a lot less work then reworking the entire game. And in all honesty pve isnt that badly designed. Its just old. When pve content is this old with no new stuff it becomes faceroll because of strategies. The players constantly improve but the ai doesnt. Fractals and aetherpath are more recent content and people still struggle with those because they arent as old and unchanged as dungeons. Although in fairness a lot of encounters in fractals are better designed aswell, but they arent really any harder than dungeons when you know them well enough.
Its also very easy to improve a class in PvE without breaking it in PvP. All you have to do is add stuff which would be completely unviable in PvP. Hundred blades is a good example of this. Its powerful but rooted which makes it almost completely useless against other players.
TL;DR
Necro needs to be changed to fit pve. PvE cannot be completely changed. Its not poorly designed, its just old. Changing a single class is more realistic than reworking an entire gametype.
From what i saw, i know now the necro will never be in good spot for competitive pvp.
They said necro has good sustain (its strenghts), that they are where devs want them to be. In other words filling the atrition class.
Nuff said …..
They didn’t at all say that everything was okay. They specifically mentioned that they might bring Deathshroud up to better fill that sustain.
Quote from grouch talking about necro sustain fight and other 2 devs there agreeing with him:“I would say that necromancer fills preety well that role right now”.
Yeah and other stuff was prety general class design … strong codnitions, weak mobility blabla….. Only thing that surprised me is that our class design is weakness at sustain aoe power dmg .. meaning we will never get cleave weapon(((
Its been said countless times in the past. Whatever their intended design for necro is it needs to be reconsidered if the class is ever to become respectable in all gametypes. If they never introduce a cleave auto attack to necro then there is no hope for the class in pve. And even with cleave, a lot more needs to be done. Simply because the classes core design philosophies dont fit into the pve gametype.
I felt they brushed over the class all too briefly and have no idea what to make of the class. Their listed weakness for warrior highlight exactly how little they know about their own game. The ranger strengths made me laugh, ele has superior ranged single target damage and thats on an aoe weapon.
I think you guys should focus more on a tester match before going too big. Both rT and SC have a lot of members that could form a lot of teams. But there are always time and motivation issues. We actually had plans to do inhouse speed clear competitions like this every weekend but we struggled to get the numbers on the first week so it never caught on.
The only place where ascended gear is required is fractals. Fractals should reward all 3 types of mat. Its ridiculous that you have to do content outside of fractals to gear for higher level fractals. Im fine with buffing emp fragment drops for open worlders, just give dragonite to instance players aswell.
The devs balanced the mats according to pve, pvp and wvw. So that players could play what they like and still recieve all the mats they need. What they failed to realise is that pve is a huge gametype and has some very different communities (open world players and dungeon players). So the mats should be balanced between dungeons & fractals , open world, pvp and wvw.
At the moment me and my friends are forced to open world for measely amounts of dragonite just so we can gear our characters in ascended for fractals. This is beyond frustrating when we are the type of players that hate how unorganised and leechy open world is. We used to duo temples for fun and quick dragonite, I used to solo golem mark 2 in less than a minute. Thanks to the megaservers we can no longer small group clear world bosses and temples (which took a fraction of the time it took for a zerg to do thanks to people in leechy builds). And we cant even guest to tag multiple zerg fests for dragonite in a small play window anymore.
Thief and Ele are the two highest single-target DPS. Necro is #3 after them. I think Warrior is actually #5 after mesmer, but for AoE, they’re #2 (after Ele). Necro jumps up to #2 if he’s using Lich Form, but otherwise is down significantly lower.
While Ele has the highest DPS both on single target and AoE, they do have to swap weapons out of combat. A single target DPS build is pretty lousy at AoE and vice-versa.
oh my kitten are you serious? warrior dps vastly outshines necromancers. ele actually has some of the lowest dps, but highest potential dps. yes there’s a difference. necromancers have what, an autoattack chain? and going glass cannon build on daggers is the worst idea ever outside of pve. axe provides the best offensive support, and the best damage burst that we get, which for most necros isn’t even that much.
Not true. Axe provides nothing but vuln and burst life force generation. Dagger is more burst than axe 2 and its not even a burst weapon.
Warrior dps only outshines other classes in a solo setting. Ele has the highest dps in almost all situations. Necro will most often be bottom dps because they are selfish and lack reliable self buffing but if they are carried by group buffs they actually provide higher dps than most classes except for ele and thief.
And this thread isnt about whats viable and not viable in different gametypes. It was simply asking about max dps (most likely for pve). So dagger is relevant to the discussion even though its not as reliable in a pvp setting.
Well tbf a lot of encounters are trivialised by reflects, projectile blocks and invulns. Necro cant use those blatant exploits so it makes some things a lot more interesting.
But you are right about the content being old. They designed it to be easy enough for the new playerbase back on release and they havent changed it since. So its no wonder its ridiculously easy now.
Well yeah. 6/6/0/0/2 is the ideal trait allocation for both zerker and condi necro. So that simplifies switching a little. You can also just use condi necro traits on the zerker build and it wont affect you too much (just swap close to death).
My opinion on optimal condi necro has changed btw. You now go full rabid with aristocracy runes and a sigil of battle. And run 2-3 signets and BiP (2 if you need epidemic).
Lol ok. There was a challenge on the dungeon forums about the unholy trinity. Some guildmates of mine decided to try and take the win. Heres the result:
Bare in mind a proper speed run with an optimized party should get around 11-12 minutes. A warrior can solo the path in about 25 minutes. These classes are less popular in speedruns because they have serious deficiencies in organised group content. Its as simple as that. This probably wont change until anet introduce new utility skills and weapons and even then i question their direction considering the new grandmaster traits we recieved.
Ranger could be very good with a few changes (mainly sword auto). Engi is a pug class which provides a bit of everything but lacks the dps and unique utility to bring it into a speedrun. Necro simply doesnt have anything going in its favour for a speedrun. You can play one well and you wont slow the run down too much. But you sure as hell arent contributing anywhere near as much as other classes can.
But to answer the op’s original question. In a fully buffed setting (being carried by teammates) a necro has the upper average of single target dps. It only properly loses out to the monstrous dps of thief and ele.
If fgs is off cooldown for every fight and every fight only lasts as long as you have fgs. Then its perfectly reasonable to consider it as high dps. You dont stay dpsing for 10 minutes straight when running a dungeon. Im sure you would know this if you actually played the game Guang.
There was a 40k backstab on magecrusher. Highest coefficient single hit attacks are churning earth and killshot. I believe 100b is the highest damaging channel, but its not the highest dps channel.
Id say mesmer is the second easiest class to survive with. But yeah going from ele to warrior is a huge difference. I dont mind warrior being so strong solo, but surely the other classes should be stronger seeing as they arent quite so easy to survive with. The risk vs reward balance is so screwed when you compare classes. Ele is the only one that makes sense compared to warrior but thats only when you have fgs against a wall.
You would lose damage. But if you really want that sustain then that trait setup would be fine. And the damage wouldnt be too much to worry about in casual runs. 6/5/0/3/0 is the lifesteal variant i recommend if someone absolutely wants to lifesteal.
If anet designed dungeons for solo then they would be far too easy. Just give us hard 5 man dungeons without puzzles that require more than once person to complete.
Phase switch grub spawns on closest target. Can be a player, an npc or a clone/pet. Most groups have a specific person take the grub intentionally cause they can stunbreak out of it. Usually the guardian or mesmer does this.
My personal favourite is Wall of Partial Reflection.
In seriousness. If reflect damage is too strong the projectiles should just be destroyed instead for these encounters. Because whether they reflect or block they are an important part of active defence. Making it rng based is just awful. Its just like blind on bosses. Doesnt work and makes it completely pointless to rely on.
Did you kill enough gravelings with the traps aswell though? There are two requirements for that event. Kill the breeder and kill a certain amount of gravelings with the traps.
I was in a similar position. Played early access and for a month or so after launch. Stopped at around lvl 50 and went to LoL to play with my cod4 buddies(competative cod4 died around when gw2 came out). Got fed up with LoL and came back just before wintersday and then havent stopped since. When i quit people were already saying theres no endgame. And seeing as i had started to find the lvl grind, personal story and map completion boring by that stage, I wasnt really that interested in sticking around.
When i came back things were a bit different and I could actually start to set myself goals and find a guild. I only pugged story modes so i was relatively sheltered from the pug community back then. We had a core group within my casual guild that started to follow the meta. So i think i missed out on some of those glorious early day runs.
Bubble range is just at/outside max melee. Cant really explain accurately, you need to learn it yourself. Movement doesnt cause it directly, but you can move lupi by moving around which may put you in bubble range briefly.
If a clone or player is in bubble range it will cause a bubble. Its as simple as that. Swordsman are often the main cause of this but occasionally a warden might be out of place especially if lupi is moved. Duelists would probably cause it too but i dont know anyone who would use them on lupi lol. Keep in mind you can still use swordsmen in phase 3. Just keep an eye on their position and make sure you wont be caught in a bubble if they trigger one.
spoj, it is possible to react to mossman’s attacks from stealth. Did you see Sesshi’s video of lvl 50 mossman solo? I tried and I honestly cannot do it. The best I could get him to was one time 60% hp before wiping. It’s insanely hard.
Three things you can do during his stealth while moving (if you don’t keep moving you will get ganked):
1) strafe left and right
2) blindly evade or try to predict when he will throw his dagger because it usually is consistent. It depends on his distance from you, I think.
3) use a block/invuln
I think mossman is OK, I just hate the kitten wolves.
Yeah but thats what im saying is bad design. The fact that he can hit people while stealthed on occasion. Ive always put it down to a bug and yeah you can deal with it. But it doesnt make it good design. Theres no way to react to that. Yeah you can spam evades, strafe etkittenil he comes out of stealth but that just feels silly to me and its not guaranteed to work. I like mossman, hes a good challenging boss but the particle effects and his attacking while stealthed kind of ruins what could otherwise be a very well designed boss.
Explain? I dont see any logic in having a skill that was intended to be a range area denial become something that prevents you from fighting in both melee and range. Its cooldown is too short and duration too long for it work as an all range attack (unless they changed it?). Yeah the fights still easy, but it doesnt make sense to me. It seems like the devs didnt understand the design of the attacks (RIP Hrouda) and just listened to all the QQ on the forums and gave them what they wanted without thinking about it.
(((
