Wintermute.5408

Coal just requires items IIRC that you pick from chests. More importantly, why should emboldened gangs be locked out of leg achievements? If they manage to kill Dhuum or Q1, they deserve it regardless of the mode.

TBH, Firebrand DPS seem to be nerfed to the levels unseen for guardians.

Well, with the last balance patch, all the discord pre-drama, warhorn "rework", and the glorious reaper nerf yet again, I think I got the answer to the topic title. Hey, at least we aren't warriors I guess. I was genuinely wondering why, for example, Harbinger design completely disregarded existence of all the necro fear traits, or Unholy sanctuary for example. Now I know.

Some classes should have rotations, other should offer more simplistic approach. In vanilla pretty much every class was busy spamming AA, and it sucked massive kitten.

You should try legendary trinkets. Maybe start with Aurora. Unironically, they will be a blast for you.

Well, that aged like fine milk.

I "worked" for it. I wouldn't mind if it got reduced. It should still be harder to get the regular mounts, to not invalidate them completely. But things like charged quartz or 3 separate item hunts across DF have absolutely 0 value to them.

That which is dead cannot die. Seriously, you're playing necro. What did you expect from those devs? Say thanks they didn't "rework shroud" or something, like they did with banners.

Because selling it would be pure P2W, and a lot of people would feel pressured into buying one. I'm not against reducing the requirements to farm it in-game, but selling it is an absolute "no".

I have mixed feelings on the whole topic. On one hand, the community of any game whatsoever is universally inept at offering balance changes for the game. Even the best of theorycrafters and venerated veterans will consistently offer horrible solutions, as I observed multiple times in several different games. A healthy approach from game devs is to gather feedback and information from community, but ignore the solutions offered, and instead get that info processed by a competent dedicated balancing team who actually have the general vision for the game. Problem is, the current balancing team is self-evidently not-competent, and doesn't have neither vision nor understanding. Which has been illustrated vividly long before the leaks, and only got confirmed by them. This team is unprofessional, and shouldn't remain in their current position. As long as this is the case, "listening to feedback" is worthless. And personally I'm absolutely not interested in explanations for this clown fiesta of the patch. Game needs a new, proper balancing team. Untill that team is announced, and actually starts delivering, any other attempts are worthless.

Because current balancing crew will probably need to check wiki to see what Vampiric presence is.

Hell yeah. And my friends thought I was trolling when I expected necro nerfs from the patch.

This is done purely out of boredom, and as a monument to our misadventures. I'm not sure if there's some entertainment value to be had here, but feel free to share your own stories. Thread will be continued with future horror stories as they unfold. A couple of weeks ago my friend finally got a commander tag to lead raids himself (from that point on, he's mentioned as "commander"). Since I couldn't be bothered organizing people, I just latched on to him to spare time and leech some LI. He's playing engi, mostly a heal mechanist. I'm exclusively on necro. We've decided to gather groups from pugs, using bananas as KP. Day 1: W1 run, 1 banana KP. Uneventful gathering. Me playing healscourge through VG, DPS scourge through rest of it. Vale guardian - commander tanked the boss, confusing the movement of pizza segments on the last part because he's directionally challenged sometimes. Really smooth kill otherwise. Spirit woods - nearly wiped on the last barrier because of course we did. Gorse - didn't have druid, confused direction of ghost adds clear, so nearly missed one. 1st try kill regardless. Sabetha - had a fresh guy doing cannons, who honestly admitted he has no clue. Had another guy asking to place platform markers in an order that made our eyes bleed - I didn't even know there was a spiral marker. Still no druid, so commander kited with bombs all over the place. Wiped on first pull because I was doing second cannon, and thought I could outrun the flamethrower. I thought wrong. Second pull fresh guy missed some of his jumps. Cleared regardless. W2 run, 1 banana KP. Original group disbanded, so we gathered anew. Had a guy coming who said he didn't have any bananas. When asked for avocados, he dutifuly faked 250 avocados AND 250 bananas. Hired instantly. What a chad. Sloth - extremely messy run. I went healscourge. Had people who didn't know about the tanking tag. Had a guy miss his mushroom. Had my stupid kitten dying on AOEs. Almost got a kill when my internet decided to die on me, and the group disbanded while I reconnected. End of the day. Day 2: Decided to skip raids, and do daily Kaening overlook instead. 1 banana KP. Went on DPS harbinger just to torture the commander. Despite my kitten-poor play, I wasn't allowed to die, and still came up 4th DPS. Not bad without sigils. Smooth and uneventful run otherwise. Together with comm (I just pestered him till he gave in) decided to increase the skill level of our groups, and raised KP requirements to 69 bananas. End of the day. Day 3: W2 run, 69 bananas KP. Comm on healchanist, me on healscourge for its entirety. 3 firebrands, 3 mechanists, 2 necros in the squad. PVE balance at its finest. People dutifuly fake and link precisely 69 bananas. Some guy tries to give us his kp.me link. Neither me nor comm know how to open it. Sloth - the skill level increase from bananas is palpable. Nearly wiped on bad shake, but ressed succesfully. Despite having 3 firebrands, had 0 projectile block from slubs, and got corrupted all the time. Cleared 1st try regardless. Bandit trio - uneventful. I almost managed to pull second bandit to the cage, but alas. Had some chad do mortars smooth as butter. Cleared 1st try. Mathias - completely uneventful. Nobody even dropped poison at us. Cleared 1st try. Harvest temple run, 69 bananas KP. Me on healscourge again, because by now my brain died. Only had 2 people go down on giants, and only once nearly pushed the orb to the edge. Cleared 1st try. End of the day. To be continued. Future tasks: pester commander into leading W4. He already commanded Deimos, but doesn't want to lead Mursaat overseer because "don't know mechs".

I see you never had to deal with "exclusively ranged reaper with toughness stats" teammates. Training runs are a mess, and expected to be a mess.

Because trainings exist to train mechanics? And fail in the process. Plus, expecting every DPS in your training run having access to full ranged build is naive at best.

Oh yes, Obtena and her unfailing wisdom. I'm not doing that -_-

I think I made it pretty clear that this was a salt post. Salt I had stored up over years since vanilla of maining necro, clawing through all forms of PVE endgame on it, and spending at least 5 years searching for good pants skin for her because by grenth, most light armor pants look silly on a self-respecting professional necromancer. Yes, scourge is acceptable nowadays. Quite decent, in fact. It even retains a shred of survivability, being full ranged. But, now that epi is finally put into the ground, it's just another DPS. Nothing uniqe to them. A dime a dozen. If you can confidently play any of the 40k+ DPS specs, you should and you'll be better off. That's not a theoretical number either. I actually feel the increase of speed in fractals whenever a competent willbender joins. Heal scrouge was always iffy. Yes, I play it too. No, it can't carry raids as hard as people pretend. Some bosses - absolutely. On others it's useless, on several few downright harmful to try and rez people with it, and it's nothing your resident ranger/guard/even DPS scourge can't do with signets and stuff. The only universally useful thing hsc had is being a barrier healer. It's terribly, and I mean TERRIBLY outclassed at that role by mechanist. There's simply no competition, and with amount of raw heals and utility mecha can bring, chances are people won't die to begin with. Reaper is probably the worst power spec you can run in endgame PVE now. Mind you, not at golem - in actual fights. It used to be simply one of the worst, after a process of literally non-stop buffing from its release. The nerf to shroud absorption now is crippling, and the pathetic joke of vitality from bot core doesn't even begin making up for it. While it has CC, it often can't apply it fast enough, and relies on braindead and occasionally harmful minion for big chunk of it. Just as with scourge, if you're able to play any other power DPS class, you should and you'll be better off for it. Except this time it's literally any other class. Quickness harb is trash. The thread was made a few hours before catalyst got axed off, so maybe it's worse. A moment of silence for our spiritual brothers at ele forums. Still, harb can't compete with proper quick supporters, at anything. It deals about as much damage as quickness firebrand - yet so much less. I don't want to play a DPS all the time. I want to fill as heal, without hearing "oh, sorry, we don't need healscourge". I want to fill as boon support. I want to bring something unique maybe. Yet necro is systematically negated those things, over and over, being left to bottom feed as a noob class able to carry noobs at its possible best, while other classes get boons and utility in wild abundance. Used to be we were even negated damage because "hurr you're necro have your kittening shroud". Even harb can't have nice things, like at least access to utility skills in its kitten shroud. And I'm genuinely concerned that harb will end up nerfed too for some inane reason, as usual.

We call that "proactive self-defense".

Yup. I kittening hade hydras in PoF, with burning passion. But encountering them for the first time, getting bombarded and watching the heads getting cut off, was amazing, memorable moment both for me and all of my friends. EoD.... doesn't have that kind of mobs.

It's an objectively lesser expansion. There's less stuff to do on the maps. Less events and meta-chains than even PoF. No adventures, no races. Almost no secret corners to explore - while HoT and PoF maps both unfolded over the course of several weeks as you progressed mastery, with EoD exploration i was done in 4 days. MUCH less effort put into new especs, with blatant reuse of assets and general lack of care. Speaking of asset reuse - yes. We got almost no new monsters - everything in Cantha is mostly human. And yes, new masteries are trash. That said, I disagree with endgame PVE assessment. New strikes are fantastic, and the CMs have big potential in them. As for them being delayed - raids were also delayed all the time. So it's not really anything new.

The last good fractal was Nightmare. Each next one got progressively worse and worse, becoming longer and incorporating kittenous mechanics, culminating in the utter kitten of Deepstone and Sanqua "why is the horse still talking" Peak. If Anet is unable to produce quality fractals anymore, I'd rather not get any at all.

They should start rolling old seasons into the core/respective expansion. Let's take an arbitrary number, and say that last 2 seasons +whatever is ongoing should be on sale. Make S2 and S3 free.

I just run several casts of BiP+Signet of Undeath while the group gets together. Or you can switch to harb and just blink the shroud several times. Somewhat annoying, but not too bad.

I'd dig a vampire-themed espec. With sword, obviously. Might even give BM a second breath. Not that keen on minion though. kitten pet control in this game.

I agree. You might wat to edit out the particular changes just to be safe.