Yep, staff blink is good disengage tool, but not even close to usual utility blink (consider of liability and area of use). Distance, no choice of direction when rooted/ stunned/ knocked. That s why blink and decoy almost are “must have” utility skills to survive.
Ask yourself this: Do you want to play a class that depends on terrain glitches and bugs in order to succeed?
That’s really it.
Progress must begin somewhere. Today a glitch is fixed. Tomorrow a class is fixed.
I like to call these “trollolports”
troll-lol-ports
Because that’s what they are. They are terrain glitches that make no sense, and give needless advantage through bug abuse.
Trollolports are being deleted from the game because bugs do not belong in this game.
Immobilize and hard CC work wonders against these builds, since Death Shroud has 0 defense against them, meaning they will be forced to leave to cleanse.
Immobilize does not prevent turning. Visually it may glitch and not show the character model turning, but certain abilities that have facing requirement will automatically rotate the character to meet that requirement upon skill use. Life Blast is one of these abilities.
Each life blast has a lengthy 1 second cast time, so there is plenty of counter gameplay to this through interrupts, blinds, blocks, evades, and LoS around buildings and terrain. Applying weakness will shut down all of the Necro’s crits and severely reduce their DPS in death shroud.
From my experiences, bursting down the death shroud is the only reliable way of dealing with it. Conditions can burst the death shroud extremely fast because the Necro lacks condi removal while in death shroud. The other option is to wait for the death shroud to naturally decay because the life force drains very fast on its own without Vital Persistence trait.
Think of it this way: if the Necro is in Lich form, what would you do to counter that? Apply those same principles versus death shroud.
But as for what weapon set you had on? I can see my weapons on my char when im in death shroud.
In the middle of pvp combat, can you honestly tell the difference between, for example, dagger/warhorn and axe/dagger while in death shroud? Honestly? If so, please share your secrets because to me it just looks like a big, black, shapeshifting blob.
Customizable UI. That is really the only catch-all solution.
Give us the option to customize our UI so that we see what we want to see. If an ele player would like to fill up half of their screen to display all of their attunement skill cooldowns, or perhaps 1 or 2 attunements important to them, so be it.
If given the option to be blinded by information, or to have an over-abundance of displayed information, I’d wager that the majority of players would choose the latter, or at least have the tools and capability of doing so. Having access to this information would change the game for the better, from being a “play by feel” game, to a “play by strategy” one.
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Is anyone else bothered by this?
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve left death shroud prematurely to go heal and learn that the heal is still on cooldown.
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve wondered to myself, while in death shroud, what weapon set I have on and what I am going to do next when I leave death shroud.
Is this an intentional part of the Necro class? Memory management? Being able to mentally time your cooldowns and memorize weapon sets before entering death shroud? Because it seems like such a needless learning curve for the class. If it’s not inentional, there are so many easy UI fixes to remedy this. Thoughts?
I find the plague passive to be a non-issue because the skill is often on cooldown. As it is ticking off cooldown, you can re-position yourself in a fight so that you don’t absorb unwanted conditions.
The passive also beefs up your #4 condition transfer on staff. It feels wonderful to strip an entangle from an ally and then re-apply it to an enemy.
In pvp I find plague signet to be the most game-changing stunbreaker. The other stunbreakers are alright, more consistent and reliable, but they don’t straight up win you fights – plague signet does. They are great versus celestial engineers and eles who can output extremely long duration burns. When an engineer or ele knocks you back, you are still considered facing them, so plague signet is a reliable stunbreak in those situations.
I say play with what’s going on in the meta. If the meta is filled with celestial engineers and eles, then it’s really a no-brainer to choose the stunbreaker that wins you fights vs them.
Ranked does not have the following maps as a playable option: Courtyard, Skyhammer, Spirit Watch.
Also, ranked and unranked have separate MMR systems.
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Shout warrior is one of the only viable team healers in the game. Please do not nerf nearly-full-support builds and push the game further into actual zerg mode.
People complain that they struggle too hard 1v1 vs shout warriors but fail to realize that the shout warrior’s survivability is all that he has to offer to the team. He lives and heals/cleanses his teammates – that’s literally it.
Want to know how to end trolling? Change your chat to combat mode. Problem solved.
And your chat will actually be useful when in combat mode.
Isn’t that what the middle of Kyhlo is all about?
The main reason is as stated before. You may not prefer to play the way you are describing anywhere but unranked, but people that want a real solo queue have no other option.
^
Also, the argument of “premades vs pugs is rare” is a weak argument. Yes, the individual pug player may not experience a premade-vs-pugs scenario frequently, but that premade team will go on to continue steamrolling other pugs and spread more negative experiences to more players. That individual premade may go on to give hundreds of players negative pvp experiences.
I don’t see how that was any better than the current system.
One of the most popular and competitive games in the world, League of Legends, has a solo queue system. The reason is because it is an impartial system. Players learn and improve their mechanics more from equal-footing situations rather than getting steamrolled by premade teams vs pugs. Alternatively, premade teams gain more insight and experience from facing other premade teams rather than steamrolling pugs.
Also, from a population growth standpoint, it is beneficial to have an impartial solo queue system. When players have a negative experience in pvp, such as a premade team steamrolling pugs, the desire to participate in pvp decreases = less pvp activity = dead pvp. By having a solo queue, more players will have more positive pvp experiences, which encourages pvp participation.
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I solo queue in ranked because I see absolutely zero reason to play unranked. Unranked has disgusting skyhammer.
Really what is the point of unranked? Am I supposed to care if I win or lose in ranked? Without any visible measurement of my rating or progression, there is no weight to ranked matches.
What makes you log out for the day?
When I’m repetitively matched with/against the same players and teams multiple times in a row ad infinitum.
That’s easy to fix – wait around 8 mins before queuing again so that said team is in a match.
When I leave a match and realize I don’t wanna wait 15 minutes for another queue pop.
^
What makes you log out for the day?
When I’m repetitively matched with/against the same players and teams multiple times in a row ad infinitum.
In games like League of Legends, it’s not out of the ordinary to be matched with/against an ultra famous, ultra skilled LCS player like Bjergsen in solo queue. The difference, however, is that it would just be Bjergsen, and not his entire LCS team posse. The solo queue system would never allow that to happen, and balances itself out.
The fact that in gw2 a premade team of ultra skilled players can get together to crush pugs in queue is asinine. Perhaps for the individal pug it may not happen frequently, but that premade team will go on crushing pug team after pug team continuously, negatively affecting perhaps hundreds of players’ experiences and impressions with the game.
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Well, what are you complaining about? It looked like a fun and balanced match on their point of view at least. Shouldn’t it be what you want from the match making?
Yeah of course it was fun for them when they’re all on teamspeak versus 5 pugs. Yes they lost but did you see how much of a struggle it was, even with their aids necro team comp.
It was so far from balanced. The point is that a scenario like this should never be allowed to happen no matter how frequent or infrequent it is. A wifebeater beats up his wife once a month: does that make it alright?
On the same subject, I just got out a match between 5 pugs and Noscoc’s team from Abjured. What a coincidence.
Here it is. I’m playing leeloo, the necro they keep focusing and referring to on teamspeak:
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It rarely happens. There are dozens of threads where one player starts by complaining he’s always matched against premades, while in reality it’s 3 out of 70 games
This is subjective. On average it may “rarely” happen, but the average itself can change very quickly depending on the circumstances because of the small player pool. The average from a player pool of a million + active players is different from the average of a pool of a thousand players.
For an anecdotal example, I was playing arenas on a low traffic hour of a weekday, and was matched against a team consisting of 3/5 or 4/5 Abjured players. That’s fine if it was one game, but no, it was 6 games in a row matched against the same Abjured team. I took a 45 minute break to avoid them, came back in queue, and again was matched versus the Abjured team. It was amazingly, beautifully awful.
What we can take away from this is that many people want the same thing: a well-rounded and balanced build option for all classes.
Not everyone wants to run around exploding everyone and then getting exploded themselves. Some people have a duelist mindset and want to keep a steady, consistent tempo in a fight. The old might-stacking and the new celestial amulet trend is a nod to this “tempo” meta.
Now to address the real issue: It is problematic when the tempo builds surpass the glass cannons in burst damage, making glass builds irrelevant. It is problematic when A.I. beats players single-handedly. ArenaNet? More like “kill Sarah Connor” SkyNet with their unshakable support for turrets. How many patches in a row have turrets been buffed and have not been nerfed?
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What do you guys think a good remedy for this would be?
Should this apply to Ranked & Unranked matches or just Ranked?
Mechanics need to be as similar as possible between ranked and unranked in order for unranked to be a viable form of practice.
Can anyone remind me?
Solo queue was extremely successful: it was the most popular mode/had the most active amount of players, had the shortest queue times, was the “fairest” or most impartial and equal mode.
And then Arenanet deleted it.
??? What?
You act surprised, yet players have always exploited .
But is it really an exploit? Because ArenaNet has yet to ever acknowledge it. Is this something I need to start working on and incorporating into my own strategy to stay competitive in the meta?
Until matchmaking makes sure I NEVER get double/triple mesmer/thief games this needs to be allowed.
mid-game
A simple solution to this is to reset the respawn timer upon logging back in.
In effect, it would be like dying again and losing that much more time waiting for respawn.
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Is this meta, now? Players switching characters mid-game to rotate through elite cooldowns and other major spells with long cooldowns? I just finished a game where every single time someone died, they would swap to new characters with fresh cooldowns ready to use. Everyone was doing it, on both the opponent team and my own team.
What is the point of locking our traits and skills and equips mid-game if we can do this?
I’m sad. Please start streaming.
The abjured refuses to stream team practice after they kicked me. They won’t be doing it any time soon either. It just hurts everyone in the long run and it spread quickly. Because they don’t stream, no one else will.
I never got it through their heads that they are at the forefront of the community.
When has withholding information and education to a population ever benefited a society?
Oh yeah, never.
this was changed a LONG time ago,and,yes,nobody likes sounding like a toilet,but anet doesn’t care what we like
Huh… you’re right, it does sound like a toilet. Now I can’t get that out of my head.
Use that utility slot for whatever your team needs. Lack of a tanky support stomper would make you having Balanced Stance an asset. In a well-balanced team where there is already a dedicated stomper, having Fear Me would be invaluable for clutch gameplays. Interrupt enemy stomps for clutch ally revives, interrupt necro heals so your conditions eat them away, interrupt blockers, mess up thieves Shadow Refuge, neutralize a cap point, etc.
Axebow is good with Leg Specialist trait. Immobilize with #3 for a guaranteed eviscerate.
If anything, courtyard is a truer test of pvp skills than all of the other maps. While the conquest maps offer a lot of strategy through node and objective control, success on courtyard relies heavily on pure pvp tactics and knowledge. It’s a full-on phalanx vs phalanx, where the most competent PvPers win – not the best back-cappers, split-pushers, PvE mob farmers.
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Meditation guardian relies on blocks for survival, because they have very squishy bodies otherwise. The guardian will block without you even doing anything, because blocking is integrated into their attack rotation.
So, #1. Assume that the guardian is going to block no matter what you do.
#2. Let the guardian unload their attack rotation (which involves a lot of blocking). You can just kite and evade at this point, but don’t waste large cooldowns that will probably get whiffed by the guardian’s blocks.
#3. Now that their pants are down, use your attack rotation on them. This method has a very high success rate, so try it.
All these Warriors clinging to the only Burst skill left that doesn’t require any intelligent targeting / placement. I hope they add a single target requirement to Combustive Shot and let it be affected by Aegis and Blocks.
Combustive can, and often does, get intercepted by blocks.
The other burst, Eviscerate, is probably one of the more challenging bursts to land. The travel speed is slow. It’s very telegraphed. Can easily be whiffed. This is the primary reason for the inclusion of the Leg Specialist trait in the most updated version of this build.
He probably does not remember, but I had the pleasure of directly working with Jonathan during pvp alpha testing. That was years ago and, even then, Jonathan was extremely receptive to our feedback and suggestions, and always encouraged us to brainstorm new ideas, much like how he is today. Interacting with him was so neat because he made me feel like I could shape the game like a developer would, and there was absolutely no air of conceitedness; he’s just a very down to earth guy that’s passionate with his work.
It truly is sad to know that henceforth we will be missing an asset such as Jonathan from the team. Wishing you the best.
See this is why pre-nerf Frenzy/Bull’s Charge/Hundred Blades from beta should never have been changed. Now there is nothing to suppress these cancerous, toxic cancers from running rampant.
Build updated to accommodate recent adrenaline nerfs.
Essentially, burst skills are not meant to be spammed with maximum adrenaline effectiveness. Simple as that. I should never be able to mindlessly throw down max adren combustive shots every, single, time, as the skill goes off cooldown. What? There are 3 different stages of combustive shots? I almost didn’t even know they existed, because I’m so used to tossing out ginormous, max adrenaline fire fields 100% all the time. Now I actually have to time my burst attacks and think and use my brain? Blasphemy.
But going by that logic means that necro’s shouldn’t be able to start any fight with death shroud charged, rangers should need to enter combat, wait 5-10sec before being able to their pet out, thieves would need to wait 5-10sec upon combat to be able to use steal etc etc.
The key words in my post were:
without lifting a finger.
Warriors can still begin fights with full adrenaline with certain builds; it’s just not effortless anymore.
- Necros get locked out of 10 weapon skills while in shroud, cannot heal or receive heal support. Shroud sucks compared to adrenaline.
- Ranger pets are simply weak and are susceptible to being kited or outright killed, meaning their pets’ damage output can potentially be zero. Sucks compared to adrenaline.
- Thieves are weak. Steal moves them closer to me so I can more easily stun them, eviscerate, whatever. So many ways to counter steal.
What is the weakness of adrenaline, from the perspective of an opponent? There is no weakness. The only remote weakness is that the warrior may not have max adrenaline at the moment. That’s the only window of opportunity from the opponent’s perspective.
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Pretty sure the point of these cash prize tournaments is to make the competitive “minority” no longer a minority, but a goal that all pvp players strive toward.
These tournaments are a platform to inspire growth and competition within the pvp community, and to also bring attention to the game from outside the community.
This is how adrenaline should have worked since the beginning. I should not be able to effortlessly open up a fight with full adrenaline bars that give me increased damage, increased healing, and a max damage burst attack, without lifting a finger.
In PvP the only real negative consequence to these changes is that warriors are more vulnerable to conditions again because of the cleansing ire nerf. Warriors are now gripping their longbows more tightly than ever before due to this; I didn’t know this was possible but Anet somehow found a way to DECREASE build diversity.
“If you build celestial axebow, they will come”: http://youtu.be/Iq--3tfpr2M
Here’s an OK video. I’m fighting against multiple tanks simultaneously (even the thief was built tanky). Pay attention to the eviscerate damage.
“Small skirmishes with celestial axebow” http://youtu.be/dU8CJ3mjZGs
This video contains more fights with thieves and mesmers. Evis naturally does more damage. Near 9k evis crits on mesmers.
Sent from Nexus 5
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Here we go : My Eviscerate does 2.4k to 3xxx dmg. Is that normal with this build or am I
doing something wrong.Apart from the question about the dmg by Eviscerate, are the above reasons why you
chose axe instead of a sword main hand?
I’m glad you are enjoying the build. Celestial axebow is still effective after the update.
Evis should do around 4-5k on guardians, depending on the opponent’s build. It crits for 7k-8k+ on mesmers, thieves, etc, again depending on their build. Watch my YouTube videos to get an idea of the average eviscerate damage (link is in my signature).
Simply put, axe dishes out more burst damage. The point of the Celestial amulet is to achieve a delicate balance of consistent damage, burst damage, and condition damage. I found that main hand sword fails to deliver in the burst damage department for this build. The sword’s trade-off for burst is in its utility, and this build does not need that.
Enjoy. Happy hunting.
Sent from Nexus 5
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Ok. With the buff to Nightmare runes, and Reaper’s Protection becoming meta, the Necromancer’s control effects has risen siginificantly compared to other professions. Engi Rifle and Warrior Hammer aren’t creeping up in control, that’s for sure.
This fear build has not been in the game since day one. Nightmare Runes 3s Fear is quite recent, I assure you. And it’s a bad bad idea.
So, I’m confused. I’ve been lurking the forum looking for specific balance changes that will get me to play this game again. What rune buffs? Do you mean from the April 2014 balance patch?
Everyone asking for a nerf of strength runes does not understand that this runeset is the last thing that keeps pvp from being an all out condition war.
Rune of Strength benefits condition damage, too..
I believe the bobble heads implementation is a step in normalizing character models.
It’s basically the same thing that everyone has been asking for, but goofier looking.
I really dislike the “shaving” metaphor, because shaving implies that there are a number of problems that are growing over time, and thus a shave is required to trim down said problems, when the real solution should be more akin to pulling the weeds out by the root and ending the problems for good.