Ashgar.3024

Druid getting Stab and Aegis. Guess OP didn't need to wait very long.

Guess i wasn't wrong.

Don't know Mesmer very well but doesn't the damage from Confusion vary wildly from fight to fight? Which is why its favored on a few (SH and TL mainly) while mostly ignored on others? That would be my guess as why Staff Mirage is a niche pick anyway. Alac Untamed is a piano-build and is melee so the damage you get while benching on a golem versus what you'll realistically get on a fight with movements and mechanics is bound to be very inconsistent. Most meta builds are meta because they're safe picks, not because they're the absolute peak of what you can get output wise.

Taking the safe assumption you main Druid (which isn't even that bad, arguably better than Support Mec on fights that require crowd control). Ranger and Engineer share the same Ascended gear so you can fairly safely "meta-slave" on Engi even while waiting for Druid to get buffed to your liking.

I literally main Specter, not trying to get my own playstyle nerfed lol. I just want Anet to look at Power and pure DPS builds and take them up a notch. It really makes no logical sense to me how much more value i get out of Specter while doing more damage than Daredevil at the same time. Same reasoning with Mec and Holo, to keep the closest example to what i have spent the most time on.

Firebrand is one of the balance team devs favorite and most played spec. Make that what you will.

Tell me with a straight face Druid, Firebrand, Scrapper, Scourge, Tempest and even Specter weren't built from the ground up to be support specs from the start.

Yeah on Golems or fights that are virtually Golems like MO, KC or CA. Its useless anywhere else. Problem is twofold with Holo. One is its damage profile, its built to exploit short high burst windows (which is also why its still great on KC and CA), which is a fun and rewarding playstyle to pull off. But the neutering of the exposed windows heavily dampened how beneficial that damage profile is with 0 compensation to Holo's fairly poor sustained damage. Honestly this isn't purely a Holo problem, most Power builds fell out of favor because of this but Holo was probably one of the builds hit the hardest by it. Second problem is simply uptime. Holo is mostly melee with few midrange cooldowns. Which means any kind of movement during a fight kills its dps. Meanwhile in Mecanist-Land most of your damage comes from a bot that will stick to the boss like glue no matter what and the rest comes from a weapon with nearly infinite range (within the scope of a boss arena anyway.) Its going to be a nightmare for Anet to try to balance a spec with 99% boss uptime, should they even want to try to balance it at all. Other games faced this issue (hello WoW BM Hunter) and the end solution was always to tune them to be low to middle of the pack benchmark wise and have them require very tight execution and manage various self-buffs and cooldowns to be competitive. This isn't what we're seeing with the Mecanist who get a huge chunk of its damage from passive procs and pet/rifle auto-attacks.

Yeah i just commented on classes i know. Most "pure" specs are currently underperforming in general, save for maybe Soulbeast, Bladesworn,(and even then these are weird cases since their core specs get Alac/Quickness now which i feel will be a balancing nightmare) and Virtuoso (40k bench from 1200 range on the move while having acess to boonstrip, portal, mass invis etc.). Even new ones like Vindicator are pretty pointless in PvE (to stick with the 3 professions i lnow well which is Thief Engi and Rev). But Vindicator is also a weird niche concept that feels overloaded in PvP but kind of pointless in PvE, just like Deadeye -.-, so not holding hopes for it.

On one hand i get where you're coming from. On the other i enjoy raiding and high end fractals and see no reason why people should drag me around if i'm making mathematically inefficient choices. Its a team game. Just don't see why people are so outraged by the idea, specially if you're more interested in casual play. In what way would Holo being actually competitive with power mecanist would ruin your casual game, for example? I'm not asking for nerfs. I want pure dps specs to get buffed.

Quickness Daredevil is technically already a thing on a handful of raid fights (Boon Thief gives Quickness). Works on Mathias, MO and Adina, basically any fights where your stolen skill is Detonate Plasma. But its a gimick anyway, only fight i still bother using it is Mathias cause the Resolution/Resistance/Stab you also get from Detonate Plasma is really valuable there while on Adina or MO it doesn't really matter. I don't think the answer is to give boon support to literally every Elite spec though. What's the problem with having pure dps builds anyway?

Specter damage traits are heavily Torment focused and Dagger Main Hand doesn't do any torment stacks at all so i don't see any practical reasons to play DD. It can "work" but you really screw yourself not playing Scepter or D/D Daredevil.

Yeah because of Stab. If they'd ever nerf it CMs would prolly become unpuggable lmao.

Literally irrelevant if you play with people who will do well regardless of what they play. Ask most end game players, they'll pick whatever provides the highest and most consistent numbers. Simple as that. I just think that it should be the "boonless" Elites as far as raw DPS is concerned. Otherwise Anet is spending a ton of money developing Roleplay specs.

Talking about Daredevil, Deadeye, Holosmith, Reaper and so on. Whats their purpose in the game when any support Elite can output just as much damage? Its nice that more elites get more boon access but the ones that don't just seem to get left behind completely. Only exception is Virtuoso cause its a fully Ranged build that has access to Mesmer's insane utility toolkit For example there's currently no reason to play Holosmith anymore, Mecanist is just better in every conceivable way except maybe raw burst damage, which got neutered with the exposed changes. Might need to look into that.

Holo has been deleted from end game PvE content from any practical point of view. Snowcrows literally deleted their Holo guide. https://snowcrows.com/builds?category=meta&profession=Engineer A pure melee build just can't compete with Mecanist, period. I just don't see why Mec absolutely needs to be a viable Tank, Healer, Alac Provider, Power DPS and cDPS all in one package. Whole point of Elite Specs is filling a niche. (Yes i'm aware FB is also a problem in that regard and i also want ti to get looked at.).

I just want Holo to have a reason to exist now that autoattack-bot is in the game. Didn't sign up for a pet class when i made my engi 5 years ago.

I was on the fence until this. This has to be a troll.

On one hand, yeah its completely ridiculous for something we interact with and see so little. On the other hand, nobody has to buy it. Joys of the free market. If it underperforms sales-wise they will readjust the prices for the next ones.

Hey i'm just going by their logic. Didn't see an addendum "doesn't apply to Thief". Personally i don't really mind if its 2 or 3, its makes sense due to how the class. Just want to see the power weapons brought up to par in the end.

Even if that's true, doesn't change the fact Thief Power builds suck pretty hard atm.

So the logic for at least part of the Engineer Rifle rework was this : Considering these 2 classes are the ones i spent about 90% of my playtime in this game over 5 years, this is particularly jarring to me. Note that I'm not complaining about the Rifle rework, obvious balance issues related directly to Mecanist aside, the new Rifle design is really fun so kudos to that. But then you have a lot of the Power Thief sets that don't follow that rule at all and honestly could use either a full rework or at least a damage bump (specially in PvE but also to a lesser extent in PvP). Pistol 2 (Bola Shot) is just a short Immob that does little damage. Sword 2 (Infiltrator's Strike) is an utility skill that does very poor damage. Rifle 2 (Skirmisher Shot) is a fairly low damage piercing "cleave" on Deadeye Scepter 2 (Shadow Sap) on Specter isn't even worth pressing as a DPS button. Even Dagger 2 (Heartseeker) feels limp compared to many abilities in the game despite the fact its meant as a very powerful and aggressive finisher Does this mean we can hope to see reworks or buffs to most of these weapons? Because while Specter is great, the rest of the Thief sets don't feel very good at the moment.

Can we address the elephants in the room at some point?

I wish i could get into FF14 but watching Asmon's stream for like half an hour this week end reminded me its just a cheap knockoff of about every actually good single player FF that came before it :/. I am overdue for another FFX playthrough though. To each their own i guess.

Hey, if i wanted to fit in and farm "karma" i know exactly what to write. A lot easier to go with the flow than being a voice of reason.