Wintermute.5408

Depends on where you want to use it. It's not meta, but it's extremely useful for the purpose of "you don't get to die that easily you kitten". Once "pro" people swallow their pride a bit, that is. Generally, if you want to run endgame content with pugs, it's good to have hsc build to fall back to. It can carry any fractal, no matter how bad the mods are. It can carry a number of raid encounters. Vale guardian to negate ignored greens. Legitimate musthave on Sloth and Mathias in W2, for condi cleanse. Can save a lot of kitten on Soulless horror if you're good with pulling people. Can easily carry a bad portal strat on Twin largos in w6. Basically, it's a failsafe build. Because nobody actually runs perfect, and a lot of 30+ KP groups still fail at things, hard. However, if you're looking for dedicated barrier heal instead of just undoing others mistakes, you're probably better off with mechanist. That thing is broken.

Scourge is condition based, and the most universal and forgiving DPS of the 3. And amount of kitten you can carry on heal build in fractals is amazing. Harb deals more condition damage, but can't adapt to encounters as easily as scourge, and relies on constant melee range. While it can provide quickness, it's generally unwanted at that role. Reaper is straightforward power damage, with great AOE and CC. Whatever you pick as your first spec, I recommend rolling reaper at least second to have that option.

Even with healing power regen is absolute trash boon -_-

To be honest, most of them were protected by elite mobs. Not much of a defense, but still.

To be fair, it's 2022. With how fun it's been going so far, it might end somewhere in summer for all we know.

While that would be a fair point, we also observed 2 deaths of elder dragons without any absorption mechanisms in place. Nothing happens when Zhaitan dies. Almost nothing happens when Mordremoth dies. Both their magics got dispensed through ley network and absorbed by other elder dragons literally across the world. Honestly, Aurene never even needed to be present for any of the ED killings. We could just probably plug her into some leyline nexus and have her watch netflix or something. All 3 times she pokemoned into a more adult state was just due to massive amounts of magic consumed, so there was never an explicit reason to even carry her around. Other than abusing Kralk specific weakness, of course. She'd still grow into an elder dragon one way or the other. As for elder dragons sharing magic instead of hoarding it - I'm pretty sure all of them shared it, a lot. They had numerous champions, armies of corrupted, and whole sections of world terraformed. How is it different from Aurene branding Crystal bloom members? I mean, sure, we don't call it dragon corruption. Still the same thing though.

Did you really just compare the difficulty of GW2 and LA raids. No, you can't "just jump in and do a raid" in LA. At some point voice communication becomes mandatory there.

Hey, we ourselves go and axe off not 1, but 2 elder dragons shortly after. Nothing happened. And Balthasar in his chad wisdom was even going to absorb the magic from Primordus, so it would definitely be safer than what we did.

Let's be honest, they deserved it. Their whole rule was deeply corrupt. Imagine throwing a legitimate god of Death (who actually took his job responsibly, and didn't tolerate immortal and undead cheaters) into prison, just to have your dimwit son take the throne. And don't even get me started on what they did to Abaddon.

After taking harb through some EOD strikes, it's amazing how hard it falls apart whenever forced out of melee range. It's especially painful when you're trying to provide quickness - the whole blight management just goes completely down the drain if you're forced to throw elixirs at any real distance. There's also absolutely 0 flexibility in utility choices, unlike reaper or scourge. You just lose too much by swapping even a single elixir. While I appreciate the blight being an actual mechanic now, instead of arbitrary numbers going up and down, I also feel that it chokes the harbinger so badly, killing any and all variety within the spec. You either play it in perfect condition, with a cookie-cutter build - or you're better off playing scourge the moment any kind of flexibility is required. I guess it creates some differentiation from scourge that way? But I don't like that approach. At all.

Now that EoD is done, we know for a fact that there were no catastrophic events whatsoever to happen upon Kralk death. His magic would just go to Soo-Won anyway, get absorbed into reactor yada yada. Worst case scenario, we'd have Dragon void manifest slightly earlier. Which would be perfectly killable, probably solo, by chaddest of the gods. Would we just let Balthazar do his thing, Kralk wouln't go on rampage through Tyria and Mists, causing unspecified, but clearly terrible amount of casualties. Would we let Balthazar do his thing, Jormag and Primordus would also not go and kill gods know how many people. Balthazar original plan for dispatching them was done with surgical precision, and almost no collateral damage. Sure, his crusade over Elona caused death and suffering - but he went with all-out warfare only after we run in and started disrupting his plans like morons that we are. We as Commander caused so, so much more damage than him, as rightfully pointed out by none other that Joko (praised be). Let's face the truth - out of all the human gods, he was the only one to actually fight for the world of their loyal worshippers. Rest just kittened off, leaving humanity to almost certain doom, covering with pathetic excuse of "oh no, we could deal damage to the world if we stood up to its literal annihilation". I demand an event of formal apology from my commander to the only god that truly gave a kitten about humanity, stood up to defend it, and got killed for it by us ungrateful sobs.

Honestly, I just looked at fight description and several horror stories on reddit, remembered how Oil meta usually goes in Thunderhead, with the whole "split and organize" thing, and decided to never even attempt Marionette.

Legendary farms are completely impractical, and should be done only for vanity sake. So with that in mind - yes, it's fair, because nobody is losing much. And after getting all of the PVE leg trinkets, every single one of them pushed me to do stuff I would never do voluntarily. I've had more fun getting started with raids than doing the godforsaken "return to" story replays.

I'd rather have a second leg ring, to have the whole set available in PVE. And to have some added reason to play strikes other than just for fun (yes, I'm one of those players, and rewards for strikes are absolute trash so far). Considering CMs are advertised as raid-level, it's all going to be the same kitten anyway.

Eh. To be honest, each expansion had a number of kittening horrible especs with terrible design, and HB isn't the worst offender in history. I just hoped we won't have to wait several years yet again for things to come together. Too bad I guess.

Anka. Aetherblade asura necro. I'm willing to bet that's where the pistol came from.

I don't care enough about its DPS numbers - let people have their toys. But the healchanist absolutely should be nuked into the ground. It's another druid/healbrand support disaster in the making.

I hope for an eventual second leg ring to come with EoD, from CM strikes. Obviously, so far it's a wishful thinking. As for gold rewards - raid rewards have also been historically garbage for gold. So yay, consistency I guess. I just wish strike completion rewards were daily instead of weekly.

Dude, one thing HB does well is destroying breakbars. Shroud 5 absolutely shreds, and you have daze on one of the leaps and the pistol.

My relationship with necro is in line with the spec - it's toxic and slowly kills me, but after 7 years long quest to get her proper pair of pants, and 2 years of Tequatl farm just for weapon skins, I can't let go. Jokes aside, I do enjoy reaper and scourge. I just wish HB wasn't as much of a re-thread for the class, and for us to bring some actual group utility for a change.

This thread brought to you by pure 🧂🧂🧂 Necro has been historically garbage in endgame PVE, for almost entirety of the game's life time. In vanilla, it was absolutely worthless. No buffs, no boons, no combo fields, no damage. If you mained necro in vanilla, you were automatically excluded from endgame content of the time, and got kicked from dungeon runs literally on sight. I swear, out of 3 dungeon runs total I managed to pull off back in the day, all 3 were because people assumed I was a girl. Yay human female meta. In HoT, it was garbage. The fact that Reaper was seen as massive improvement by necro community, while still remaining absolutely worthless by any PVE metric, should tell you enough. Since HoT release, over the course of literal years, Reaper managed to heroically claw its way from "absolute trash" to "one of the worst power specs in the game". What a crowning achievement of class balance. Now it got nerfed, because of course it did. In PoF, it was broken. Scourge on release proudly claimed the title of "the most bugged piece of kitten ever". Over the course of a few weeks post release it established itself as best condi spec in the game, best power spec in the game (yes, power Scourge was a thing), then got nerfed into the ground, and THEN got bugfixed into absolute non-viability. The only thing it had of value by the end of that ride was Epidemic, which, naturally, got nerfed in the process. It took several years for torment change to arrive, and give condi Scourge competitive damage numbers by what I can only assume to be an oversight on anets side. Scourge became viable, for less than a year. Obviously, it had to get nerfed. Together with epidemic, again, because kitten you for playing necro. There was also a "support" Scourge. It was deemed not worthy of having ANY useful boon support capacity, for reasons really obvious to anybody maining that cursed class. It was allowed though to have a little bit of uniqueness, in having absolute trash healing capacity, yet providing barriers alongside. Which was a novel concept in the day, and had its place in endgame PVE for damage prevention. Obviously it had to be nerfed on EOD release, new barrier numbers with healing gear barely able to reach old barrier numbers without. However, what is really great about class balance in EOD, is appearance of Mechanist, who is able to properly heal, provide HIGHER barrier numbers than heal scourge, while giving an array of boons and alac. With an absolutely braindead mech doing most of the job. Hurray. And now we get Harbinger, trading away all of the necro survivability (which got nerfed anyway for the other necros). Being literally the worst quickness option you can take in the slot, with neither utility nor damage other quickness classes provide. However, by what I can only assume to be a bug, DPS Harbinger is able to deal high DPS (not the highest though). I humbly ask anet to investigate that unfortunate bug, and bring Harbinger damage numbers in line with something like 20k DPS, to keep the necro theme of being a class for masochists going. TLDR: I really don't know why I even bother for so long -_-

Why not just run mecha heal though? It's bonkers, and will still provide all its utility. Qhb damage is complete kitten anyway. No need to dump it even further with blood magic.

I do love living in gothic churches.

People in open world don't do damage. They never did. Old devs (you know, the ones who had a clue) themselves said that difference between casual and optimized player can reach magnitude of 10. That's difference of somebody dealing 30k DPS (which for purposes of instanced content is low end) and 3k. I can just assume those devs got fired and didn't come back. Open world players wear terrible gear - in our raid training guild we had newbies show up in mix of green and blue. This issue isn't helped at all by the game itself giving you absolute garbage in various boxes, pretending that it's "class optimal". My friend, upon boosting his guardian, got toughness+vitality exotics, and was seriously wondering why is guardian's damage so low before I explained things. Harbinger's pistols don't allow viper stats selection. Etc etc etc. Open world players run terrible builds. I myself cheesed OG HoT content with blood+death magic minion necro, who was absolutely immortal. But it deals no damage. When a guy like that showed up in a T4 fractal, it was miserable for the rest of us. So many things deal no damage. So many skills, weapons, traits and traitlines are absolutely worthless for it. Yet people run them, because they find them fun, or because they serve some niche purposes in a casual content. It's asinine to expect those people to suddenly swap to big kitten damage setup on a single map in the whole game which has no signs or warnings it's actually required. And above all - developers should stop thinking they are in any position to dictate playerbase on mass how to play the game. Which, between blanket nerfs to personal survivability, that godforsaken turtle leading into strikes, and directly stated intent to lead people towards strikes, raids and legendaries, is exactly what this new crew tries to do. The game is 10 years old by now. You can bet your kitten that in those 10 years playerbase got completely cemented in what kind of content they want and don't want to run. Those who wanted to do fractals are running them. Same for raids, even if entry barrier is entirely too high. And people who don't want to engage in content requiring damage optimization, clearly aren't going to do so now just because devs decided to strongarm them. It's one thing to lead people towards trying new stuff - I actually think new strikes do amazing job of that on their own. It's completely different when you lock that kitten turtle behind them, and literally gank people with insane difficulty spike on the last map. When people who have been avoiding that kind of content for 10 years are suddenly forced into it - well, we get what we get. Strikes are already becoming horrible to run, because of "I'm just here for my turtle" people. They don't want to be there. Hardcore crowd doesn't want them to be there. I can't blame any of the parties - I'm just sitting there unable to clear Harvest temple, because groups disband upon the slightest problem. End result will be strikes and DE dying, because the experience is horrible for both parties, and content becomes literally impossible to finish. It's been 10 years of casual open world maps, with casuals being left to their own devices, and decade of the game development actively encouraging that way of things with number of deeply terrible design choices. Yes, like those "class gear" boxes. That's without even touching on the 180 turn of the very core philosophy of the game made on HoT release, and all the self-contradictions remaining unfixed since then. You don't suddenly waltz in saying "hey guys, we are hardcore now", and expect people to follow.

I played HoT on release. When events were not nerfed yet, and were quite possible to fail. They didn't fail to boss randomly becoming invincible. They didn't fail because "muh open world group composition". No, they failed due to miscoordination. Once that coordination got nailed, event was cleared, and that was it. No LI groups, no subgroups with quickness and alac kitten. None of the so called "hard" events of old required that level of organization from random people gathered by the grace of megaserver. Current DE is kitten that has no defense. Go play raids if you like it that much.