Raid team compositions in Snowcrows

[Agrippa.1693]

https://snowcrows.com/benchmarks/

I see that the full Necro profession is now pretty much non-existent in all optimal raid team compositions according to Snowcrows (with the soul exception of that 1 epi spot in Soulless Horror). Is Snowcrows overlooking something, or is the Necro (as a whole) just not good enough to be in any optimal team composition?

Also, not sure what ANet was trying to do with their last balance patch, but the Mesmer (as a whole) is at an all time high with every composition having at least 2 of them (still) and 6 (!!) fights having 7+ mesmers as optimal (although the diversity of builds within the Mesmer profession has improved: at least thumbs up for that!).

[Malediktus.9250]

I think due to class design it will always be either overpowered or underpowered, so not much Anet can do unless they rework the class completly

[Patty.3268]

Keep in mind that these are optimal team compositions, meaning there are a lot of other viable team compositions that allow for succesfull clears.

[Yasi.9065]

These comps are for very optimized speedclears, not really for "normal" raiding. Scourge or power reaper are solid dps choices in those.

Btw, for optimized speedclears, you can throw also just full dragonhunter and mirage squads at everything. Dragonhunter with its high burst is especially good if you have several of them, and mirage on your typical confusion / torment bosses.

But, Im really not a fan of balancing around the top 1%. Sure, confusion needs some tuning, its quite badly designed in PvE with how its either totally OP or totally useless. Condi renegade and dragonhunters need a slight nerf. But chrono? Just because its the preferred choice for speedclearers over fb/ren? I think thats thinking too narrowly. FB/ren comps offer way more for normal raiding and are pretty close behind highly optimized aggressive SC or LN team comps. I mean, really... does it matter that much if you kill a boss in 1minute 10 seconds, or 50 seconds on a weekly fullclear? I think not.

Honestly, its up to the raiding community to finally realize that SC comps are not for the big majority of raiders. Not for anet to nerf chrono into nothingness so nobody is ever tempted to touch it again.

[Ojimaru.8970]

@Agrippa Oculus.3726 said:Also, not sure what ANet was trying to do with their last balance patch, but the Mesmer (as a whole) is at an all time high with every composition having at least 2 of them (still) and 6 (!!) fights having 7+ mesmers as optimal (although the diversity of builds within the Mesmer profession has improved: at least thumbs up for that!).

Please don't conflate what ANet intends with what the (speed-clear) raid community chooses to do. For every balance change, the community will always optimize their setup to achieve their goals (i.e. complete their weekly raid clears in as little time as possible, or to win the next ERP tournament). Yes, it's possible for ANet to test these changes beforehand, but their sample sizes are extremely limited and may not always be able to account for the skill level of these high-end players.

[Nephalem.8921]

Epi Bounce is still fine on some bosses just not the absolute best anymore. But yes, outside of epi bounce Necro is far from optimal.Engi is only taken on 2 bosses aswell if you want to be optimal but it's at least decent on a lot of fights. It got loads of undeserved nerfs and terrible traits though. How to buff the sword build? Lets nerf bombs and don't change sword's clunkiness at all!And yes, Mesmer is still absurd. The confusion change broke it for some encounters. Mirage can achieve pre nerf epi bounce numbers on SH for example. Power chrono can provide quite high quickness with TW and insane dps. Chrono in general doesn't even need boon duration on gear for his boon role which is total bullshit in the first place.Chrono can also take almost full dps traits as a support role. Who balanced this? Why is a support build which provides alacrity + quickness able to take chronophantasma for example. Compare that to revenant who needs absurd amounts of boon duration just for alacrity.SOI needs to scale with boonduration to weaken the mesmer stack compositions + other nerfs to mirage and power chrono.

Mesmer is just the spoiled brat profession that does everything optimal or close to it. Necromancer's low dps was justified with its good self buff capabilities but power chrono can do that even better and has also top tier dps witht he dps build. Still fairly high dps witht he solo build + outside boons.

Necro is in a terrible state in pve if you play with decent players. All it excells at is ignoring game mechanics and cheesing content at the cost of dps and boons. It was designed around face tanking everyhthing. That just doesn't work with an action focused combat system. I like playing reaper and pug raids with it sometimes but everytime i do it i know i would have gotten way higher dps on every other profession. And dps IS important if you play as dps in raids. Sure you can kill it with low dps and decent players but if you wan't to carry in pugs you need to do high dps because your teammates can't 90% of the time. Seen way too many enrages and 1% wipes.Most players aren't decent so you need some high dps to carry them.

Engineer just lacks some sustained dps and it sacrifices it's health which is super bad for scholar uptime and kills you when you play without a healer in fractals or without double healer in raids. Do vg with single healer, overheat at wrong time and in the wrong sub? You're dead because of ERP reasons.Holo is also bad in fractals in experienced groups because stacking heat and losing it takes just too long. Burst cd is also too long. Engi doesn't even have a power based offhand and they gave it an aa based 1h sword with a super bad designed 2nd skill. They also nerfed engi's underwater skills because fuck that profession. POWER Holo has to take a condi offhand and the shrapnel trait because there are no power options. Why is the bombardment trait still weaker than shrapnel on a power build? It needs adds around to be even worth a choice as a grandmaster! There is also not a single reason to ever run pinpoint distribution now.

[Nephalem.8921]

@"Yasi.9065" said:These comps are for very optimized speedclears, not really for "normal" raiding. Scourge or power reaper are solid dps choices in those.

Btw, for optimized speedclears, you can throw also just full dragonhunter and mirage squads at everything. Dragonhunter with its high burst is especially good if you have several of them, and mirage on your typical confusion / torment bosses.

But, Im really not a fan of balancing around the top 1%. Sure, confusion needs some tuning, its quite badly designed in PvE with how its either totally OP or totally useless. Condi renegade and dragonhunters need a slight nerf. But chrono? Just because its the preferred choice for speedclearers over fb/ren? I think thats thinking too narrowly. FB/ren comps offer way more for normal raiding and are pretty close behind highly optimized aggressive SC or LN team comps. I mean, really... does it matter that much if you kill a boss in 1minute 10 seconds, or 50 seconds on a weekly fullclear? I think not.

Honestly, its up to the raiding community to finally realize that SC comps are not for the big majority of raiders. Not for anet to nerf chrono into nothingness so nobody is ever tempted to touch it again.

You are telling me Power chrono is fine but you want a renegade nerf? Power chrono can compete with renegade on dhuum for example. The 1 bossfight were Renegade is a stronger condi than Mirage. DH is not even that much better most of the time. It's optimal but you can replace it with DD if you don't use certain strats. Gorseval for example. They stack dh's so they can split and kill all 4 at the same time. DD doesn't bring enough vuln for that but how many groups split into 4?DH is burst reliant. It's loses a lot of value if phases become longer and can be replaced with higher sustained dps professions like weaver or DD. You can't really replace the Mirage stack because it is just SO much better than everything else on some bosses. Try playing condi engi on matthias or Twin Largos. Twin Largos just feel like they were just for mirages designed.DH burst is all it has. Nerf that and he falls into his old state again. Insta kick when you tried to join experienced groups. Power chrono + DD + Weaver can achiev fairly high numbers on vg aswell and even higher if not everyone plays at the 99.9% level.

The difference is not 90s vs 1:10. Its More like 3min vs 5min per boss if you use only subpar dps. Thats already 36min longer if you do it in all wings.

[Asum.4960]

Anet and SC wont stop until they can run 10 Mesmers on every boss and be optimal. Maybe with the next set of Elite specs.

Spirit Banner Might stacking Heal Mesmer spec inc.

[Cyninja.2954]

So let me guess, the stuff people said 2-3 days after the patch hit suddenly has reached the mainstream ears?

Just saying, non boon duration Signet was noticed very early by people (myself included as well as mentioned here on the forums). The new 5-6 Mesmer meta was also mentioned (by me too as well as others).

People were just so clueless and celebrating the supposed nerfs to chrono (which they were for the non top 1%).

So here we are, some weeks in, people again complaining and demanding change. It's a cycle of clueless complaints.

Necro is not meta for speed clears, it is a very solid safe pick as support Scourge on many bosses.

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

@"Agrippa Oculus.3726" said:https://snowcrows.com/benchmarks/

I see that the full Necro profession is now pretty much non-existent in all optimal raid team compositions according to Snowcrows (with the soul exception of that 1 epi spot in Soulless Horror). Is Snowcrows overlooking something, or is the Necro (as a whole) just not good enough to be in any optimal team composition?

Also, not sure what ANet was trying to do with their last balance patch, but the Mesmer (as a whole) is at an all time high with every composition having at least 2 of them (still) and 6 (!!) fights having 7+ mesmers as optimal (although the diversity of builds within the Mesmer profession has improved: at least thumbs up for that!).

There are plenty of comps that work well for "reliable" clears; the SC comps are designed for speed. SC's builds are important, but they aren't the only ones that work.

Unless everyone in the raid is playing at the same level as SC (hint: hardly anyone does), then variations from their recommendations are sensible. When an SC-level group plays, phases barely last long enough for a full rotation (maybe not even that for some builds) because the DPS is so high, so there's a skritt-ton of mechanics that can be ignored ... they just aren't there long enough to present a problem for those familiar with the mechanics.

It's still the case that you should ask yourself: "why aren't I running an SC build," before signing up. There are plenty of reasons; just make sure you know what yours are.

[Lord of the Fire.6870]

@Cyninja.2954 said:So let me guess, the stuff people said 2-3 days after the patch hit suddenly has reached the mainstream ears?

Just saying, non boon duration Signet was noticed very early by people (myself included as well as mentioned here on the forums). The new 5-6 Mesmer meta was also mentioned (by me too as well as others).

People were just so clueless and celebrating the supposed nerfs to chrono (which they were for the non top 1%).

So here we are, some weeks in, people again complaining and demanding change. It's a cycle of clueless complaints.

Necro is not meta for speed clears, it is a very solid safe pick as support Scourge on many bosses.

Its wasn't 2-3 days it was until the end of the first January week were people complained about what Arena.NET did in 100ths of posts calling it chronogate or chronocalypse . The funny thing was the shouter/ youtube associates in my home language didn't say much about it basically only one sentence and since then nothing but then he notice a outcry about multiboxing were I haven't read one sentence here about it.(before).

There was one other youtuber and self proclaimed pro gamer which were in absolute favor on the changes on the chrono/mesmer. Which I found a bit toxic. Searched it can't find it anymore

One of the bigger topics was how SOI works now.

[Lord of the Fire.6870]

@Nephalem.8921 said:Epi Bounce is still fine on some bosses just not the absolute best anymore. But yes, outside of epi bounce Necro is far from optimal.Engi is only taken on 2 bosses aswell if you want to be optimal but it's at least decent on a lot of fights. It got loads of undeserved nerfs and terrible traits though. How to buff the sword build? Lets nerf bombs and don't change sword's clunkiness at all!And yes, Mesmer is still absurd. The confusion change broke it for some encounters. Mirage can achieve pre nerf epi bounce numbers on SH for example. Power chrono can provide quite high quickness with TW and insane dps. Chrono in general doesn't even need boon duration on gear for his boon role which is total kitten in the first place.Chrono can also take almost full dps traits as a support role. Who balanced this? Why is a support build which provides alacrity + quickness able to take chronophantasma for example. Compare that to revenant who needs absurd amounts of boon duration just for alacrity.SOI needs to scale with boonduration to weaken the mesmer stack compositions + other nerfs to mirage and power chrono.

Mesmer is just the spoiled brat profession that does everything optimal or close to it. Necromancer's low dps was justified with its good self buff capabilities but power chrono can do that even better and has also top tier dps witht he dps build. Still fairly high dps witht he solo build + outside boons.

Necro is in a terrible state in pve if you play with decent players. All it excells at is ignoring game mechanics and cheesing content at the cost of dps and boons. It was designed around face tanking everyhthing. That just doesn't work with an action focused combat system. I like playing reaper and pug raids with it sometimes but everytime i do it i know i would have gotten way higher dps on every other profession. And dps IS important if you play as dps in raids. Sure you can kill it with low dps and decent players but if you wan't to carry in pugs you need to do high dps because your teammates can't 90% of the time. Seen way too many enrages and 1% wipes.Most players aren't decent so you need some high dps to carry them.

Engineer just lacks some sustained dps and it sacrifices it's health which is super bad for scholar uptime and kills you when you play without a healer in fractals or without double healer in raids. Do vg with single healer, overheat at wrong time and in the wrong sub? You're dead because of ERP reasons.Holo is also bad in fractals in experienced groups because stacking heat and losing it takes just too long. Burst cd is also too long. Engi doesn't even have a power based offhand and they gave it an aa based 1h sword with a super bad designed 2nd skill. They also nerfed engi's underwater skills because kitten that profession. POWER Holo has to take a condi offhand and the shrapnel trait because there are no power options. Why is the bombardment trait still weaker than shrapnel on a power build? It needs adds around to be even worth a choice as a grandmaster! There is also not a single reason to ever run pinpoint distribution now.

Like I said about the SOI changes we had discussed about and complained a lot it went on closed hears.

What you also missed is staff Ele has also been kicked out and power sword weaver is a worse choice in terms of survivabilityDeadeye with rifle is in it but can so far I heard only be used on 2-3 bossesSame goes for condi renegade because its a pure condi built.

When you flip this on fractals it getting worse .I think the general it is to say I have the feeling only the top 1% and those who are at the bottom are considered but the rest needs builds that work .At the moment neither Arena.NET nor SC can deliver them

[Jeknar.6184]

@"Agrippa Oculus.3726" said:https://snowcrows.com/benchmarks/

I see that the full Necro profession is now pretty much non-existent in all optimal raid team compositions according to Snowcrows (with the soul exception of that 1 epi spot in Soulless Horror). Is Snowcrows overlooking something, or is the Necro (as a whole) just not good enough to be in any optimal team composition?

Also, not sure what ANet was trying to do with their last balance patch, but the Mesmer (as a whole) is at an all time high with every composition having at least 2 of them (still) and 6 (!!) fights having 7+ mesmers as optimal (although the diversity of builds within the Mesmer profession has improved: at least thumbs up for that!).

Your answer is right at the bottom of their page when you select a boss: "These numbers are based on our guild runs, strategies and compositions. It is highly possible that on condition based and some DPS classes you will be able to beat these numbers, due to increased phase time and other variables." The compositions are based on their player skill and performance with each profession.

I've seen guilds cheesing multiple fights with 6+ Scourges Squads, so Necro is far from useless... If anything, I would like to see a Viable Power and Condition build for each profession, which some of them are lacking (No Power Revenant is viable for DPS role exemple. Only Alacrity bot role).

[Cyninja.2954]

@Lord of the Fire.6870 said:

@Cyninja.2954 said:So let me guess, the stuff people said 2-3 days after the patch hit suddenly has reached the mainstream ears?

Just saying, non boon duration Signet was noticed very early by people (myself included as well as mentioned here on the forums). The new 5-6 Mesmer meta was also mentioned (by me too as well as others).

People were just so clueless and celebrating the supposed nerfs to chrono (which they were for the non top 1%).

So here we are, some weeks in, people again complaining and demanding change. It's a cycle of clueless complaints.

Necro is not meta for speed clears, it is a very solid safe pick as support Scourge on many bosses.

Its wasn't 2-3 days it was until the end of the first January week were people complained about what Arena.NET did in 100ths of posts calling it chronogate or chronocalypse . The funny thing was the shouter/ youtube associates in my home language didn't say much about it basically only one sentence and since then nothing but then he notice a outcry about multiboxing were I haven't read one sentence here about it.(before).

There was one other youtuber and self proclaimed pro gamer which were in absolute favor on the changes on the chrono/mesmer. Which I found a bit toxic. Searched it can't find it anymore

One of the bigger topics was how SOI works now.

I was talking about these forums. Where by the end of the week (patch on Tuesday) Thursday and Friday people (myself included) mentioned all those things. I couldn't care less about prominent youtubers which people hang on their very words. Some of us think for ourselves and don't need some random guy with a youtube channel to tell us what to think.

Yes, the mainstream community, even youtubers took a while to mention the changes. The rest took until around now to realize what some people deduced within hours/days.

[Dadnir.5038]

@"Agrippa Oculus.3726" said:https://snowcrows.com/benchmarks/

I see that the full Necro profession is now pretty much non-existent in all optimal raid team compositions according to Snowcrows (with the soul exception of that 1 epi spot in Soulless Horror). Is Snowcrows overlooking something, or is the Necro (as a whole) just not good enough to be in any optimal team composition?

Also, not sure what ANet was trying to do with their last balance patch, but the Mesmer (as a whole) is at an all time high with every composition having at least 2 of them (still) and 6 (!!) fights having 7+ mesmers as optimal (although the diversity of builds within the Mesmer profession has improved: at least thumbs up for that!).

Some people said it, the issue is the design of the necromancer. The designers chose to put everything (defense/attack/support) onto the profession's mechanism, which is always at hand however you build, and this make it impossible to give up some things to "specialize" the necromancer into a role. As the necromancer can't give up damage, defense or "support", he can't have "competitive"/"optimal" numbers in any one of those roles for balance's sake. Thus the necromancer is forced onto the state of a "generalist" that can't sacrifice anything when "meta" comp look for "specialist" that can build higher potential by sacrificing something.

[Henry.5713]

There is optimal and there is optimal. Look at the amature raid tournament. People couldn't pull off half of the stuff which was supposed to be optimal. Meaning groups on a far lower level than Snowcrows do much better stacking necromancers on most bosses rather than the current top DPS class.Not to mention that there are quite a few bosses where Scourges do more than fine even after all of the nerfs: VG, Sabetha, Sloth, Matthias, SH, and probably more. "Epi bouncing" is no longer game breakingly strong but it is good enough. One could even argue that such groups are able to pack too much survivability considering how good the offense is, even more so if you run Firebrands for double Signet of Wrath stacking.

[Zenith.7301]

@"Yasi.9065" said:These comps are for very optimized speedclears, not really for "normal" raiding. Scourge or power reaper are solid dps choices in those.

Btw, for optimized speedclears, you can throw also just full dragonhunter and mirage squads at everything. Dragonhunter with its high burst is especially good if you have several of them, and mirage on your typical confusion / torment bosses.

But, Im really not a fan of balancing around the top 1%. Sure, confusion needs some tuning, its quite badly designed in PvE with how its either totally OP or totally useless. Condi renegade and dragonhunters need a slight nerf. But chrono? Just because its the preferred choice for speedclearers over fb/ren? I think thats thinking too narrowly. FB/ren comps offer way more for normal raiding and are pretty close behind highly optimized aggressive SC or LN team comps. I mean, really... does it matter that much if you kill a boss in 1minute 10 seconds, or 50 seconds on a weekly fullclear? I think not.

Honestly, its up to the raiding community to finally realize that SC comps are not for the big majority of raiders. Not for anet to nerf chrono into nothingness so nobody is ever tempted to touch it again.

Don't put DH in the same basket as condi renegade. One is one of the hardest dps specs to play optimally in the game with a long condi ramp up, while the other is easy burst F1+symbol+roll your face on the keyboard easy results spec ala daredevil while also having massive utility like F3 blocks, an aoe pull, and if necessary the only class with reliable mass stability for a group (they really need to spread out that boon to other classes, mesmer mantra is a sad version of stand your ground at a miserable 3.5 sec stability duration compared to double the duration of SYG).

It's already dumb that by and large the majority of specs at the top of benchmark performance are power specs and not condition specs given the disadvantages of condition damage.

[Zhaid Zhem.6508]

Don't put DH in the same basket as thief. Yes it has great panic skills and utilities, yes it has great burst, but it's not that easy to master as you can't spam keys without taking care of loop retaliation, or put symbol before the spirit sword etc. We don't really care for a burst, but when fights/phases persist, and no add to reset F1, no chrono or other DH to loop retaliation, DPS can be pretty low. Same when you get interrupted while casting F1 or a whirl.
This is still pretty newbie friendly, but we see the difference between the DH who just burst and then spam keys in panic, and the good ones.When daredevil has literally 3 keys.

Otherwise I agree condition builds are pretty low now. Renegade is too complex, dps too slow to rise, and with mesmer are mostly niche build when confusion or torment outdo others conditions/builds. And others condition build ?? Berserker ??

[Agrippa.1693]

I read a lot of comments saying that you can do very well with one or even multiple Necro's in your team, and I agree, I've seen the proof myself. I've even seen compositions without any Mesmers putting up some real good numbers (harder to find, but they're there). But I've also seen a lot if not (far) more proof of teams without any Necro's (and pretty much always with Mesmers) pulling mostly even better results. Like I said, I've heard all the stories, seen it, even been there. But why I started this topic is not at all about what's viable or not, no, it's about what's optimal! And I think it's at least a bit peculiar that highly respected guilds like Snowcrows (but also Discretize in the Fractal division) and even popular sites like Metabattle all agree that there's only one profession that does not belong there if it comes to the PvE endgame, and while we're at it, one profession that's (still) overly dominant.

So, (you might ask :) ) what's the goal of creating this topic. And to be fairly honest, I'm not entirely sure myself either, sorry :)I used to complain about (perceived) class unfairness a lot, but it's mostly useless anyway, so I learned to live with the facts. For me individually resulting in mainly playing other professions than my favourite one when it comes to the PvE endgame. I'm strange like that, but I like to be optimal, or at least strive to be so. And the good thing is, for raids, there's pretty much 8 other class options left :)But I also think there's a small part of me that really wants ANet to read this, and really do something about this. I don't say I have the solutions (cause I really don't), but I guess, that's what they are for, right?

One thing I do like to stress out, everyone that thinks that it's the (whole) community that should change their way of thinking, (including guilds/sites like SC, dT, LN, MB) is imo blatantly wrong. It even feels like denial of the facts.It's funny how you sometimes hear people saying that it's a weakness to blame ANet for personal perceived shortcomings to your favourite profession. It's like complaining about the government IRL. You're sure that you then always have something to complain about, cause they will hardly ever change the way you exactly want it. But you know what's even harder to change .... indeed: a whole community!

[Jeknar.6184]

@Zhaid Zhem.6508 said:Otherwise I agree condition builds are pretty low now. Renegade is too complex, dps too slow to rise, and with mesmer are mostly niche build when confusion or torment outdo others conditions/builds. And others condition build ?? Berserker ??

I remember there was a more simplistic version of the Condi Renegade that used only Mace+Axe but I couldn't find it anywhere anymore because all sites have overwritten it with the Shorbow one which is extremely more dificult. I used to play it myself a few times and it pulled decent numbers (It had a 33k benchmark if I remember correctly) but Chronojail kept me away from it and now it has been lost forever.

[Zhaid Zhem.6508]

Yeah I'm a bit confused if I need to swap weapons or not; I I do not doubt SB adds some DPS, but manage the legends, energy, CD... + be interrupted in rotation or looking for the cc ... rotation is not simple and I have very big gaps a test to another. In group, I just camp mace/axe, and it still do well.

[Yasi.9065]

@Zenith.7301 said:

@"Yasi.9065" said:These comps are for very optimized speedclears, not really for "normal" raiding. Scourge or power reaper are solid dps choices in those.

Btw, for optimized speedclears, you can throw also just full dragonhunter and mirage squads at everything. Dragonhunter with its high burst is especially good if you have several of them, and mirage on your typical confusion / torment bosses.

But, Im really not a fan of balancing around the top 1%. Sure, confusion needs some tuning, its quite badly designed in PvE with how its either totally OP or totally useless. Condi renegade and dragonhunters need a slight nerf. But chrono? Just because its the preferred choice for speedclearers over fb/ren? I think thats thinking too narrowly. FB/ren comps offer way more for normal raiding and are pretty close behind highly optimized aggressive SC or LN team comps. I mean, really... does it matter that much if you kill a boss in 1minute 10 seconds, or 50 seconds on a weekly fullclear? I think not.

Honestly, its up to the raiding community to finally realize that SC comps are not for the big majority of raiders. Not for anet to nerf chrono into nothingness so nobody is ever tempted to touch it again.

Don't put DH in the same basket as condi renegade. One is one of the hardest dps specs to play optimally in the game with a long condi ramp up, while the other is easy burst F1+symbol+roll your face on the keyboard easy results spec ala daredevil while also having massive utility like F3 blocks, an aoe pull, and if necessary the only class with reliable mass stability for a group (they really need to spread out that boon to other classes, mesmer mantra is a sad version of stand your ground at a miserable 3.5 sec stability duration compared to double the duration of SYG).

It's already dumb that by and large the majority of specs at the top of benchmark performance are power specs and not condition specs given the disadvantages of condition damage.

I dont know how to point this out in a civil way, but ... condi renegade is extremely easy to play as soon as you wrap your head around the whole energy management system. While there's an optimal way to spend your energy, the really important thing is to... spend it. No matter which revenant variant you are playing. And condi renegade is strong on every boss except KC and CA, and only gets countered by burst heavy dragonhunters, because they burst down bosses so fast atm, that you cant even get past your first ramp up round.

DH is op atm, way too much burst, they absolutely have to reduce that, preferably by reverting the changes to dragonhunter traits, so power firebrand doesnt get fucked. Condi renegade is a close second to that, and mirage is on third place, but only because its unsuited on a lot of bosses due to confusion being so horribly reworked (its either completely OP, or not worth at all).

And why should mesmer - again - get a SYG variant? The whole point anet made with nerfing chaos trait, was to show that they dont want mesmer to have everything. The role anet envisions for mesmer, is a dps hybrid that can extend boons someone else buffs. I really thought that was made very much clear?Honestly, it should be the other way around. Stacksize and duration on SYG has to be reduced. Not mesmer given the same.

And on this whole "see all you who whined about chrono change" side topic. To make this perfectly clear, the problem of SoI rework and chaos trait nerf is that anet did NOT fix boon application problems of other builds, that the old chaos chrono was able to gloss over. Vigor, way too rare boon, might application highly problematic without druid after SoC nerf. No clear boon categories for builds, they are sprinkled over all builds and in unfitting traitlines (best example: might on crit trait in honor traitline... wtf anet... wtf). Instead of reworking THAT first, they went and killed chaos chrono, and thereby making raiding way harder on casual raiders. Thats the problem. And thats what people have been angry about. Please, get it finally into your head and stop with the "see see... it wasnt a nerf". Because, thats been obvious to the majority from the start. Only about 1 hour after patch hit, we were talking on teamspeak already how you can now just stack power chronos with SoI instead of mantra/defender. LFG squads to test this popped up on the same evening, first with mirages on cairn, later with full runs and power chronos.

The problem with boons in gw2 is that they are incredibly strong. Honestly, Ive never played an mmo with more focus on boons and buffs than gw2. At the same time, boons are completly chaotic. Some boons here, some boons there. Some boons 5 man, others 10 man, application via traits totally unsuited to proper builds, or in case of might with internal cooldowns that make ramp up extremely long. Its absolutely horrible. Why are we playing with druid+chrono? Because thats the only working 3man buffsupport comp. Thats the only reason. Everything else needs 4 fixed builds minimum.And instead of making raiding more casual friendly with the introduction of a pure buffsupport spec (which chaos chrono could have been), no... anet went into the completely different direction of forcing 4-5 fixed builds to just cover all necessary boons in raids. Ofc that doesnt face statics and the pro raiding scene. But it hurts casual and lfg raiders so much. THATS what has/had people after patch in an uproar.

[Zenith.7301]

@Yasi.9065 said:

@Zenith.7301 said:

@Yasi.9065 said:These comps are for very optimized speedclears, not really for "normal" raiding. Scourge or power reaper are solid dps choices in those.

Btw, for optimized speedclears, you can throw also just full dragonhunter and mirage squads at everything. Dragonhunter with its high burst is especially good if you have several of them, and mirage on your typical confusion / torment bosses.

But, Im really not a fan of balancing around the top 1%. Sure, confusion needs some tuning, its quite badly designed in PvE with how its either totally OP or totally useless. Condi renegade and dragonhunters need a slight nerf. But chrono? Just because its the preferred choice for speedclearers over fb/ren? I think thats thinking too narrowly. FB/ren comps offer way more for normal raiding and are pretty close behind highly optimized aggressive SC or LN team comps. I mean, really... does it matter that much if you kill a boss in 1minute 10 seconds, or 50 seconds on a weekly fullclear? I think not.

Honestly, its up to the raiding community to finally realize that SC comps are not for the big majority of raiders. Not for anet to nerf chrono into nothingness so nobody is ever tempted to touch it again.

Don't put DH in the same basket as condi renegade. One is one of the hardest dps specs to play optimally in the game with a long condi ramp up, while the other is easy burst F1+symbol+roll your face on the keyboard easy results spec ala daredevil while also having massive utility like F3 blocks, an aoe pull, and if necessary the only class with reliable mass stability for a group (they really need to spread out that boon to other classes, mesmer mantra is a sad version of stand your ground at a miserable 3.5 sec stability duration compared to double the duration of SYG).

It's already dumb that by and large the majority of specs at the top of benchmark performance are power specs and not condition specs given the disadvantages of condition damage.

I dont know how to point this out in a civil way, but ... condi renegade is extremely easy to play as soon as you wrap your head around the whole energy management system. While there's an optimal way to spend your energy, the really important thing is to... spend it. No matter which revenant variant you are playing. And condi renegade is strong on every boss except KC and CA, and only gets countered by burst heavy dragonhunters, because they burst down bosses so fast atm, that you cant even get past your first ramp up round.

DH is op atm, way too much burst, they absolutely have to reduce that, preferably by reverting the changes to dragonhunter traits, so power firebrand doesnt get kitten. Condi renegade is a close second to that, and mirage is on third place, but only because its unsuited on a lot of bosses due to confusion being so horribly reworked (its either completely OP, or not worth at all).

And why should mesmer - again - get a SYG variant? The whole point anet made with nerfing chaos trait, was to show that they dont want mesmer to have everything. The role anet envisions for mesmer, is a dps hybrid that can extend boons someone else buffs. I really thought that was made very much clear?Honestly, it should be the other way around. Stacksize and duration on SYG has to be reduced. Not mesmer given the same.

And on this whole "see all you who whined about chrono change" side topic. To make this perfectly clear, the problem of SoI rework and chaos trait nerf is that anet did NOT fix boon application problems of other builds, that the old chaos chrono was able to gloss over. Vigor, way too rare boon, might application highly problematic without druid after SoC nerf. No clear boon categories for builds, they are sprinkled over all builds and in unfitting traitlines (best example: might on crit trait in honor traitline... kitten anet... kitten). Instead of reworking THAT first, they went and killed chaos chrono, and thereby making raiding way harder on casual raiders. Thats the problem. And thats what people have been angry about. Please, get it finally into your head and stop with the "see see... it wasnt a nerf". Because, thats been obvious to the majority from the start. Only about 1 hour after patch hit, we were talking on teamspeak already how you can now just stack power chronos with SoI instead of mantra/defender. LFG squads to test this popped up on the same evening, first with mirages on cairn, later with full runs and power chronos.

The problem with boons in gw2 is that they are incredibly strong. Honestly, Ive never played an mmo with more focus on boons and buffs than gw2. At the same time, boons are completly chaotic. Some boons here, some boons there. Some boons 5 man, others 10 man, application via traits totally unsuited to proper builds, or in case of might with internal cooldowns that make ramp up extremely long. Its absolutely horrible. Why are we playing with druid+chrono? Because thats the only working 3man buffsupport comp. Thats the only reason. Everything else needs 4 fixed builds minimum.And instead of making raiding more casual friendly with the introduction of a pure buffsupport spec (which chaos chrono could have been), no... anet went into the completely different direction of forcing 4-5 fixed builds to just cover all necessary boons in raids. Ofc that doesnt face statics and the pro raiding scene. But it hurts casual and lfg raiders so much. THATS what has/had people after patch in an uproar.

Everything is extremely easy to play when you simplyfy it to mere platitudes.

Here's a bet. Pull up SC's rotation for renegade and put it up against the rest of the specs. Aside from condi engineer and some staff weaver variants, you really don't get any specs with as long a chain of actions in its loop. Especially when you have to consider hitbox size for your grandmaser trait and how it alters the rotation.

Just looking at gw2raidar by percentiles confirms that while renegade has the higher potential of the condi specs, picking a mirage or soulbeast tends to render more reliable results, especially for pugs you keep bringing up.

I also don't get where your chrono rant came out of. The point of bringing up the mantra was not to ask for chrono buffs, but to mention that the closest thing to group stability provision any other class besides guardian has is a pale imitation in mesmer mantras, a long ass cd and fairly weaker druid elite spirit, and a gimmick herald jalis option nobody takes because Anet made sure herald sucked ass last patch courtesy of pvp.

Boons are abnormally powerful compared to debuffing conditions, but I don't see that changing anytime soon. I wish boons had been more limited and were better tied to a more fleshed out combo field/finisher system to make sure boon upkeep was a group effort and not just something one class trivially farts out.

[Yasi.9065]

@Zenith.7301 said:Everything is extremely easy to play when you simplyfy it to mere platitudes.

Yes.

@Zenith.7301 said:Here's a bet. Pull up SC's rotation for renegade and put it up against the rest of the specs. Aside from condi engineer and some staff weaver variants, you really don't get any specs with as long a chain of actions in its loop. Especially when you have to consider hitbox size for your grandmaser trait and how it alters the rotation.

See, and here's your problem. Energy management system means you dont actually have a fixed rotation. Rather you have a timeframe (until your weapon swap sigil is ready again in case of condi renegade), priority skills and "energy" pool limiting your priority skills.If you are trying to just memorize a fixed rotation, you've already lost.

@Zenith.7301 said:Just looking at gw2raidar by percentiles confirms that while renegade has the higher potential of the condi specs, picking a mirage or soulbeast tends to render more reliable results, especially for pugs you keep bringing up.

Any kind of dps on gw2raidar depends HEAVILY upon not just boons, especially instant application of all boons on start of a fight, but also on duration of fight. So while all those "general stats" are pretty numbers, they dont tell you the true story at all. Taking those numbers and jumping to conclusions - a very very bad idea. Those numbers are completely out of context, and tbh, I dont even know anyone anymore that even looks at those numbers. The really important numbers are those in each separate log, to be compared with other dps in the same log.

@Zenith.7301 said:I also don't get where your chrono rant came out of. The point of bringing up the mantra was not to ask for chrono buffs, but to mention that the closest thing to group stability provision any other class besides guardian has is a pale imitation in mesmer mantras, a long kitten cd and fairly weaker druid elite spirit, and a gimmick herald jalis option nobody takes because Anet made sure herald sucked kitten last patch courtesy of pvp.

For one thing, your post read like you want the SYG for mesmer, my apologies if I understood that incorrectly. Then the other part wasnt really in reply to you, but rather the poster a few posts up gleefully telling people "he told everyone so".Im actually currently making a build for a condi druid replacement - jalis-glint herald. DPS currently on just camping glint is already at 18k, with room for improvement. Not saying everything is fine with power revenant builds... the weaponskills are laughably weak... but its not as bad as you'd make it out to be.Thing is, "meta" only applies to the top 1% raiders. If you arent a part of that... you can play pretty much whatever, as long as you fulfill your role... in case of condi druid replacement: might, fury, swiftness, protection, some dps increase-buff, sufficient personal dps.

@Zenith.7301 said:Boons are abnormally powerful compared to debuffing conditions, but I don't see that changing anytime soon. I wish boons had been more limited and were better tied to a more fleshed out combo field/finisher system to make sure boon upkeep was a group effort and not just something one class trivially farts out.

Any kind of system would be nice already. I rather dont like all the more or less passive traits providing boons either... but maybe in gw3 we get something better, if it isnt a mobile game. ;)

[Jeknar.6184]

@Yasi.9065 said:but maybe in gw3 we get something better, if it isnt a mobile game. ;)

What? Don't you guys have phones?