Showing Posts For thancock.6307:
Scrapper was being used pretty heavily as a disruption role in WvW by fight guilds for several months actually. I know the guild I was in would run anywhere between 2-4 scrappers in a single raid. We would all be in the same party and basically dive into the enemy backline since at the time, it was stupid OP. Since then however, backlines don’t really exist any more with this current boon toilet bowl meta and so their role was removed plus Scrapper has been hit with lots of nerfs and is no longer OP, just kinda balanced. So if you wanted to play scrapper in WvW fights, there was actually a good 4-5 month window where it was amazing. Now? I guess you could still run it, but idk if it would be all that great any more. You need to run with a scrapper buddy though. A lone scrapper in a fight wont do much
Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t almost every team have a tempest in the world finals? Pretty sure that means its in the meta. I wouldn’t expect tempest to out of no where become offensive anytime soon. The very design of tempest is defensive/support. Just hope next expansion isn’t complete garbage I guess
Mercy Runes have become the standard on guard over the last two months but if you aren’t in an organized group or guild, you wont get much use of it.
Frontline are meat shields… just like any other game, and their ONLY purpose is to guard the valuable players in the back, and get them into position where they can bomb.. Frontline are NOT meant to win the fight (hence the kitten damage they do because of toughness/vitality builds).
It is your backline people.. your pew pew blow em up rangers/druids, engies, elems necros and the like that win the fight for you and more commanders need to respect this.
The meta you’re talking about is pretty old, pirate ship hasn’t been viable since the stability buff. All of the top tier guilds are nearly 100% frontline nowadays and pug groups are going to try and mirror those compositions. If you don’t care enough to keep up then you should learn to ignore/block the people pushing for it.
100% correct. Pirate ship where there was a separated frontline, backline, and gank has been dead for months now. Any organized fighting guild at this point is essentially 100% frontline and some might have some mid-line frontline hybrids. But this backline you speak of doesn’t exist any more and its only natural that pugs are going to copy what the top guilds are doing. So if you want to be told your useful, make a healing spec or something. But backline LB druid is essentially useless
Hell no. That build he just linked you is terrible for what your asking for. Try this.
Heres a video I found thats decent: https://youtu.be/lntVIcwpWIA?t=2m29s
Well my build has nothing to do with yours, it’s a GvG / Guild staff build for organized WvW guild teams. If his goal is to do damage with staff then the build I linked makes some Ice Spikes that can reach near or above 20k crits.
Even still, high damage staff ele hasn’t been in the gvg meta for almost 8 months now. There is legit no reason to run this build
Hell no. That build he just linked you is terrible for what your asking for. Try this.
Heres a video I found thats decent: https://youtu.be/lntVIcwpWIA?t=2m29s
Sorry but as someone who was on DB, guilds left because its not a fun place for guilds to play. DB pugs are incredibly bad at fighting, there is siege everywhere so other servers respond with siege, there is absolutely no one to recruit, and there is an awful lot of whining in map chat when a guild wants to do their own thing and not worry so much about ppt every now and then. Server linking wasn’t what destroyed DB.
It desperately needs it. I don’t even play wvw right now because the balancing is such an issue. Really looking forward to seeing these changes
Someone who likes power isn’t feeling useful anymore o.o
Get over it and come cry in the corner with the rest of us power mongrels.
Its like the Nuk$ weapons stockpile you owned turned to kittens and rainbows. While the guy who build the giant trench bunker is jogging around doing the snoopy dance. Aka the opposite of ww2.
Actually in large scale combat, no one uses condition damage because most guilds have permanent resistance through durability runes and pain absorption + boon duration.
Also I would ask that anyone that disagrees with anything in this post, come up with an alternative because just complaining doesn’t get us anywhere. We need solutions.
It also hadn’t occurred to me that the balance teams are different for SPvP and WvW since they are both PvP modes but I guess that would make sense.
People are over it Arena Net. I have been actively involved in the GvG scene for a very long time now and I can’t remember the last time there was this few of guilds involved in the scene. So where have things gone wrong? This is a question I’ve thought about for a good while now and wanted to address my concerns.
To start, lets take a look at Season 1 of SPvP ater HoT came out. This season was nicknamed “The Bunker Meta” and it was so horribly boring that the main culprits, Durability Runes and high toughness amulets, were removed. Heres the issue, while this helped out SPvP, these have remained in WvW. WvW is STILL stuck in that season 1 bunker meta because instead of actually fixing the issues from SPvP, you guys took the lazy approach and just removed them from the game mode. Guilds are stacking Damage Mitigation, Healing, Resistance, and Boon Duration and essentially creating a group that is unkillable unless you single target. Do I really need to explain why groups of 20+ single targeting each other is incredibly boring? To make things even worse, many guilds have begun running Mercy Runes on their guards so the moment someone is downed, they are instantly rezzed back up.
Your game mode isn’t dying because of PPT mechanics, its dying because there isn’t too much fun to be had any more when it comes to fighting.
Now I’m not one to complain without providing at least ideas to help fix the issues. So below are listed what I think could help:
-All boon duration is cut in half in WvW.
-Damage mitigation doesn’t stack in any way. If you have 10% damage mitigation food on, but you have protection giving you 33%, instead of the 10% stacking with the 33%, it picks the highest damage mitigation available. So if you have 10% damage mitigation food, but you have protection, the protection overrides the damage mitigation food giving you 33% damage mitigation.
-Durability 4 needs to be changed. Even if boon duration in WvW were to be cut in half, this is still permanent protection and regeneration with the stats guilds are running at the moment. Any passive effect that gives a 5 man group permanent protection is incredibly unhealthy for the game
-Great Dwarf Elite needs a slight increase in energy cost. At the moment, you can just fire off Great Dwarf whenever you switch legends to it. People should have to sit in dwarf for at least a few seconds before they are able to use it. Even just an increase from 50 to 60 would be nice.
This would be a start. I really hope that this is taken seriously. It’s nice to see that Arena Net is taking an interest in fixing issues in WvW right now, but it feels like you guys are looking at the tiny things to improve the mode and not the major issues.
Thieves have countered mesmers since the game came out and its still that way. Just be patient and abuse pulm impact. If you are dying to them you are likely choosing really bad times to open on them and wasting your dodges
Nope.
Thieves haven’t countered mesmers since 2013
They completely countered mesmer pre-hot. An equally skilled thief v mesmer, the thief wins 9/10 times. Its less so post HoT but still holds true. Yes a mesmer will obliterate a bad thief but thats not what I’m really referring to. If you took Sindrenner V Helseth, Sindrenner is winning almost every time.
I can give a few pointers but every situation is different. First off, if you are running bound, you are going to struggle imo. Run dash. A basic opening I would use is bassy venom into headshot into shadow shot. This will guarentee an easy opening and its incredibly safe (stunned+blinded), you don’t always have to open with a backstab. The next thing is if you are really strugling is to run withdraw. Most memser damage comes from torment and withdraw removes torment. As for the best time to open, obviously the safest time is when you have bassy venom up but engaging once every 40 seconds is obviously not enough. Try to keep pressure with headshot (pulm impact). Once I see that i’ve interrupted, thats usually when I engage with shadow shot. The combination of shadow shot damage plus pulm impact damage plus the blind will almost always put the mesmer on the defensive. If they have sword shield up, expect a shield 4 coming and be ready to stow weapon or even better, interrupt it with bassy venom. The biggest thing is to make sure you land you steal. Consume plasma gives resistance so if you mess up and get heavy condis on you, you can negate a lot of it (since the current meta build doesn’t run any condi duration) with consume plasma.
I would definitely recommend watching some of sindrenners stuff on youtube/twitch and see how he opens and uses pulm impact. Hope this helps some people
This class is so OP.
test of faith does waaaay too much damage. You are probably going to say “well all you have to do is hit the dodge button once and it cancels the whole effect of it” but I don’t have fast enough reflexes to do that so I just stand there getting hit. And speaking of standing there getting hit. Guards have waaaay to many symbols that do too much damage. What do I even do against that? Oh, move a few feet over? Well I don’t have to brain power to think of that. And Guards have basically infinite blocks and invulnerable. Having 3 seconds of invulnerable every 90 seconds is OP. And shield of courage last 5 whole seconds. Like WTF! That’s too long. They basically do more damage than every class and are invincible. I’m stuck in Amber because guards are OP. They just won’t let me win. it’s all their fault I never do well in pvp. Even when there aren’t guards in my match I still blame them for my loss. Why hasn’t Anet nerfed them already?!?!
So what you are saying is that because you aren’t very good at this game, have bad reflexes, ect… that guards are OP. Idk what to tell you
Ele, in PvP, is now worse than ever. In this season, thiefs and eles are usually asked to reroll for something more useful, and who can blame those people who ask for it ? Ele IS out of this PvP season. Just ask yourself, how many eles have you seen in sPvP or WvW Roaming?its almost been a month, people who said “go experiment and you’ll find a meta build” are long gone. In this state, it is sure that the ele’s will get buffed sooner or later.
There will be buffs, thats for sure. Since ele still performs good enough with staff at raids, and no one in their right mind would bring a staff to PvP(unless wvw zerg), we can assume that staff will be untouched.
Offhand dagger is pretty outdated, with cooldowns that are 30-40 seconds. Water 4 skill and earth 5 may change, with long cooldown reduces on the rest of the skills.
Scepter is sort of fine at the moment, we might expect another shatterstone or flamestrike buff. Oneshotting people with those never gets old.
Focus is perfectly fine in my opinion, but we might get a tiny cooldown reduction on some skills.
For PvE, we might get a small warhorn buff. D/W has inferior damage compared to Staff and its melee so its more risky to use D/W, so it would make sense.
Traitwise, i can’t come up with an idea. But they might add fresh air kind of trait to all elements. Something like “blind/immobilize a target to reduce earth cooldown to zero, chill/condiclear to water, burn to fire” sort of traits. If offhand dagger gets buffed however, we all know which traits would be buffed.
Share YOUR ideas, suggestions or predictions!
Ice bow buffed by 50%! At least we would have 1 more skill to use. Probably wont happen.
Lol, if you are still running glass staff ele in wvw, thats on you. Been outta the meta for months now.
As for the original topic of this thread, I think you forget that some classes go months being out of the meta without receiving buffs. Ele mains might not be used to that since ele hasn’t been out of the meta for ages. In general, Anet has kind of screwed over ele though. They have expressed that they intended for ele to be a more damage focused class so as a result have nerfed the parts they didn’t want out of ele without realizing that it is just never going to contend with Rev, Warrior, DH, and scrapper (current dps classes) in terms of damage.
So in short, maybe ele will receive some slight buffs in the future, but we know its going to focus on the damage side of ele. So will these buffs place ele back in the meta, and my opinion is no. It would take buffs to ele and nerfs to the four classes above before ele can be really talked about.
This is a joke of a thread. If you know you are going to miss, stow weapon mid back-stab and no one second ICD. Now can we talk about relevant things?
Thieves have countered mesmers since the game came out and its still that way. Just be patient and abuse pulm impact. If you are dying to them you are likely choosing really bad times to open on them and wasting your dodges
So I obviously had my math wrong but w/e. It’s still insane. As for the video, just wanted to clear up that it’s not my guild, just a video I found. Either way, it feels like WvW fight are becoming less about skill. The meta sucks
There is no such thing as backline any more because of the two things listed in the title. As much as I wasn’t a fan of the pirate ship meta Pre-Hot, its gone too far the other way. Front-lines have become completely unkillable unless everyone in the zerg single targets a single individual which means that 30v30 fights (organized guild groups) can legit last 20+ minutes and if you are close to a spawn with people running back, it WONT end.
Right now front-lines are sitting at permanent 43% damage reduction (permanent protection cuz durability plus 10% damage reduction food) with about 50% uptime on 60% damage reduction (Great Dwarf plus 10% damage reduction food). And on top of this they have permanent resistance between durability runes and Pain Absorption with facet of nature popped (https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Pain_Absorption).
SO to sum it up, 60% damage reduction, permanent resistance and protection, plus heals coming from guardians, druids, and tempests. Its just too much. You guys nerfed pack runes yet leave durability completely untouched.
For those that need to see a video to realize how ridiculous this has become:
Funny enough rangers aren’t completely useless in WvW atm. They are in a MUCH better position than rangers were Pre-HoT. Thing is, the meta for large scale battles has changed but 90% of the people in WvW haven’t figured that out yet. They think its still necro well bomb pirate ship meta. During this meta, rangers were completely useless. So the style that most Pug Commanders are commanding in, yes ranger is useless. The only people that have really figured out the meta are the GvG guilds. I wouldn’t say druid is top tier but it definitely isn’t useless. But if all you are doing is following random commanders, chances are they arent running the new meta and it will probably be a while before the majority of the wvw population figures it out.
The “simple” idea of the Alpine BLs is what people like. The Alpine BLs cater to more skilled groups who don’t like the idea of relying on cheese tactics and choke fights. The dessert BLs brought both of these things with more chokes then I can count and things like mass stealth/aoe cripple ect. These things also give way to siege being more destructive and it really ruined the fun for a large portion of the people who played the game.
I really can’t find a downside to bringing back the Alpine BLs. The BLs were always typically the place where skilled guild groups went to escape the pugs of ebg anyways so I think Anet is completely justified in catering towards them here. I honestly can’t wait to log on to REAL fights in the BLs tonight. If someone can give a real reason as to why this change is bad other than “Alpine BLs are boring” I would love to hear it.
Actually almost every stance is used somewhere in the game besides centaur. Assassin and dragon are the only ones really used in SPvP yes, but just look at wvw for example. Players are using demon and dwarf in frontline builds for resistance and damage mitigation and Hammer gets a ton of play for backline rev builds.
In case you don’t believe me, here is some videos I came across the other day.
https://youtu.be/PXMc3g9ttxg
https://youtu.be/C-Mwd8BItGs?t=1m11s
First one is a frontline rev and second is a backline and you can see shiro and hammer being used. Rev has options in different game modes but there will always be a best build in SPvP for every class. If you don’t like it, look at different game modes
I read through it again to make sure I understood what you were saying as it was possible I didn’t. But you were not explicitly clear on what you were saying until now.
With that said, what you proposed is an overly complicated and clunky mechanism just to spawn a phantasm.
The only thing I’d agree with is not spawning another phantasm on Deja Vu.
Not spawning another phantasm on Deja Vu is the only thing I even proposed. I don’t know where these other conversations are coming from.
I really don’t think there are that many things about condi mes that really need to be nerfed. This is the one thing however. Shield 4 is broken because of one simple fact. It creates TWO phantasms.
With a single shield 4, I can create two phantasms, that when shattered instantly come back and thanks to traits, a third clone is created. So out of a defensive ability that blocks all incoming attacks, I also can shatter 5 clones total from it, a DEFENSIVE ability.
All I’m suggesting is only have one phantasm created at the end of echo of memory and none with deja vu. While a seemingly simple change, it reduces the shatters you get out of this skill from 5 to 2. The skill just seems a bit too strong to be able to block all incoming attacks and create that much condi pressure from blocking.
When you say “its worse than DH traps” you instantly lose a lot of credibility considering DH is the worst SPvP class right now. I don’t disagree that something needs to be done with condi mes but suggesting ideas that hurts all mesmer builds, not just condi isn’t a good way to go about it.
I’ve tried to make noise that something needs to be done about power shatter but I doubt anet will listen. Pretty much stuck condi. Its really too bad the boring spec is the only effective one
I posted that first sentence because I figured someone would bring up why I was asking for mesmer buffs while condi chrono exists. Calm down and can we please stay on the topic of power shatter.
It feels like greatsword has been neglected for a long time now. Power shatter has always been my favorite build in the game and all I’m asking is that its usable. I was thinking about this more and I think that part of the issue is that power shatter has to take domination and dueling which only leaves one trait line open which is obviously going to be chrono. There is no room in the build for defensive trait lines and if you were to take a more defensive trait line, you have to give up so much for it.
Appreciate the responses and curious what others think about the state of power shatter at the moment.
Obviously, condition chronomancer needs a nerf of some kind. I mean I could turn auto target on, put a blind fold on, and spam shatters and beat some people 1v1. But thats not why I created this. Some of us that play mesmer play it because there was a time when power shatter mesmer was the most fun and skilled build in the game. It played a lot like a thief with huge burst and your only survivability being a short invuln and stealth since you pretty much had to go muruader or full zerker to get any decent damage out of it.
Then you guys gave almost everything in the game some sort of reveal and everything’s survivability got buffed with the elite specs. Now you have no way to survive and the famous mesmer burst does about as much as a precision strike on a rev unless you take mental anguish even with scholar runes. Even in wvw where the burst was even more insane, it only does decent damage against people with no armor investment now which is basically nothing left in the game. Outside of the burst shatter mesmer has no sustain damage as greatsword auto attacks do laughable damage. I went roaming in wvw with mesmer today and “bursted” a guardian for 1.2k mind wrecks WITH mental anguish, scholar runes, utility, and food and it crit. My “burst” did somewhere around 4-5k damage and then I’m useless until mind wreck recharges. On top of all that everything in this game seems to have reveal. You guys have buffed thief so much and its still not being used in spvp meta. Shatter mesmer always played similar to thief and has gotten nothing. It is becoming near useless in all game modes.
Power shatter was always high risk high reward. Now its just extremely high risk, no reward. While it can still decimate full zerk thieves and eles, thats if the burst actually lands considering the long obvious wind-up of greatsword 2. I don’t think the base damage of mind wreck needs to be buffed, but with the amount of damage mitigation just being thrown around like its nothing, power shatter mesmer is becoming a dying build.
I just want to throw 3 ideas out there as simple potential buffs to at least make this build usable again.
1. Increase greatsword auto attack damage.
2. Buff mental anguish slightly by making shatters also ignore protection.
3. Rework empowered illusions in Domination so that the player deals increased damage per boon on the opponent.
I’m not saying all three of these need to happen since I think 2 and 3 together could be overkill but right now, power shatter just feels like a class to troll uplevels in wvw.
Couple things I can think of off the top of my head.
1. Stab being changed back to how it use to be would be amazing. That on its own would likely bring back so many players.
2. The old BLs. It’s understandable that lots of time was put into the new BLs, but the old BLs just encouraged open field fighting so much more than the new ones do. People don’t play wvw for the siege and the arrow carts, they play it because gw2 has an amazing combat system in large scale fights. It gets people excited when they come across another group their size in open field and you know the best team comes out on top.
3. Personally, I don’t care about rewards. Wvw has never been a place to make gold, and if it became one, we would get pve’rs which I don’t really care for. Maybe an increase in ascended box drops so that way people don’t need to play wvw for 2 years to get a full ascended set.
4. This ties in with skill balance but the damage mitigation in the new specializations is disgusting. A 6 minute round used to be considered a long round in 15v15 gvg. Now 15+ minute rounds happen because the frontline is almost unkillable unless they just sit there in damage. You can’t really time immobs with bombs any more either cuz theres a 90% chance they have resistance from durability runes. At least before there had to be communication to clear the immob. I don’t know how this gets fixed since I don’t really play frontline but I’m pretty sure it has something to do with the permanent protection (which mitigates 20% more damage than normal protection) and stupid amounts of healing from the tempests. In my opinion, a fix for this is to make elemental bastion work like altruistic healing and only heal the tempest but heal per aura and make elemental shielding only give yourself protection (this is all in reference to aura share). I worry that if frontline damage mitigation isn’t toned down a bit, that changing stab back to the way it was could actually make things worse.
5. Chill…. Chill was the most OP condition in the game… and that was before it ticked damage. I understand its a grandmaster trait but thats insane.
6. Finally, Lords… It takes two servers, full map blobs, teaming up to flip a t3 SMC and even then, it will take an hour. Either the lord HP needs to be significantly lowered, or emergency wp, chilling fog ect need to be put on a waaaaay longer cooldown.
These are things I have major problems with and most of the community have problems with. If these don’t get changed, I would expect that the wvw population is just going to continue to fall.
Getting the same thing. Really frustrating for this to happen on reset night