Firebeard.1746

This probably makes the most sense. Just hurts WvWers who bought the skins and want to use them outside WvW I guess XD. It's in a weird spot for sure. The other option would be to enable its masteries earned in WvW in PVE. While few would actually do anything, it'd feel better than nothing (or there could be alternative effects in PVE after they're unlocked). And really I thought i was done with PoF masteries twice already. I don't want to have to go back and earn more XD.

Pet battles? Some type of minion system? It looks like IB saga toyed with situational borrowed power and perks. I.e. you earned more rewards for the content if you had your masteries. Really it's hard to come up with a new system that we don't already have, so it may have to be something tied to the content itself. i'd love something cool, but I'm out of ideas and housing doesn't do it for me. That's not to say other people wouldn't enjoy it, I just wouldn't care.

I'm talking the emblems earnable for legendaries in PVP and WvW, will we be able to trade them for anything else valuable? With the release of the Legendary Armory in July it'd be nice to know if we'll be anything we can sink our extras into.

My experience in pvp is ele has everything but enough of everything else but damage. And given the healing nerfs they keep adding, they need to up the health pool. Heck they should do it for pve too because ele is more fragile than everyone else and does the same amount of damage. I only play the class because i enjoy it, but i feel outside support healing, the class needs some massive reworks. Whenever i dps i go down taking the same amount of damage as everyone else. I agree with your sentiment as it relates to deadeye and thief. It's allowed to do massive damage and immediately vanish indefinitely.

Seeing as how melee is almost always meta in raiding, it could be argued balancing staff mirage in this way makes obsolete against other classes from the get-go. Though, there is an argument to be made that the radius around you buffing alacrity forces you into melee range with other melee classes to get meta DPS, therefore it's fine. Either way. Again, I'm fine with it being appropriately balanced, but it's clear NICE was conflating his rotation with a pure DPS rotation.

It's funny you call my defense pathetic, when you can't read a log you just taught me to read. The log you share clearly shows 60% alac uptime from the mirage in question and the other chrono using SOI. Which, if traited extends everyone's boon duration in the squad. Also chrono shield boons buff the whole squad That's the other 36%. Sorry. Your failure to recognize this while chewing me out is pathetic. It's confusing that there are the 2 people who liked your post, obviously just showing hate for purple with no regard to real data or the logs you claim to know and love so much. So no, this is not the same rotation as yours. I assume this mirage is using condi food and you're using endurance regen food. You're conflating your rotation/circumstance with this player. I may not be a raiding guru, but you clearly aren't either. and it's insane that you try to call some massive experience trump card while making such a glaring error. While also ignoring my main point, and that's that we should be as unbiased as possible when evaluating the spec. So yes, I'm not wrong, you are biased. Your case is a solo alacrity provider, the DPS case you mention should be balanced as a 0 bd condi ren that provide 50%s alac on average (I don't imagine that extra 10% meaning much on its own as it means another support is necessary. From somewhere.) There should be niche fights where it overperforms, otherwise, the spec is useless. It's always meta to take something else. There should be fights where condi alac ren outperforms it as well. I'm fine with this being tuned properly if it's overperforming (there's a strong argument it does in the normal case, but in super optimized groups, it might not still be that strong, I saw an SH video with 100k confu ticks from condi chronos, but I don't remember the self numbers).

It's a good A-B comparison of full viper's against full viper's. Your video provides the current staff data, the benchmarks show what axe can do. I guess the Sc data could go either way depending on how much movement there is vs actions. Also i can critique the rotations in your videos. Someone providing higher alac uptime would have taken desert distoration and used shatter 4 instead of shatter 2 and clone replenishment, so your example is actually showing a DPS rotation, not a pure ambush alacrity rotation. (As a traited 2 does a lot of condi - 4 torment + a lot of confusion) The main mirage is using shatter 2. SO again, you failing to account for alacrity uptime from other sources does mean something here as it allowed the mirage to focus more on DPS than boon uptime.

NO, I was referencing SH benchmarks for axe against staff. I thought that was explicit in my post. Again, I have no issues with you being right, I just don't want this to be classic anet where it's nerfed to garbage and never seen again because of haters. And you failed to acknowledge alacrity from the other players for the top mirage in your post, so it's been hard for me to think that you've been evenhanded in your assesments.

Except it doesn't, as I'm sure SC is also taking that into account on their numbers for axe benchmarks. I'm sure there's encounters that favor torment over confusion, were you including those in your comparisons? Your arguments don't mean much either with the other staff mirages falling behind other classes and you not having a concrete point of reference to prove that they're overperforming. BTW, condi staff mirage is far from the strongest Confusion class. My main point is advocating identifying bias in these analyses, which you're clearly showing with how choreographed and scoped your comparisons are. Anet would have the best points of reference.

Your second video has renegades in it, are you sure that they're not helping with alacrity? Also it's not doing more than 40k consistently, rated DPS is 36k for the highest staff mirage. Also, while we're talking condi DPS benchmarks, axe mirage target for SH is 35k. One of the staff alacmages BARELY outdpsed it, the other fell below, significantly (I'm assuming it's a staff, don't see any of the twirling.). https://snowcrows.com/benchmarks/ The condi rens also barely fell below the top staff/staff mirage and outperformed the other. I feel like your post, especially as it relates to the second video is a gross exaggeration. I'm not saying Alacmage shouldn't be balanced if it's overtuned, but I hope the devs have the presence of mind to clearly analyze community claims, to account for over-exaggeration from haters The same goes for the first video: rated DPS isn't 40k, it's high 30s. A thief is also out-performing 2 of the other mirages. So it's very important when we analyze this DPS data that we're also comparing the best against the best. Because the averages on the alacmages don't look that impressive. It could also be the case that the other mirages are sacrificing stats and/or gameplay to be the primary alacrity providers. Just like doing 40k DPS and boon support would be OP, it would be underpowered to not be the dedicated support and underperform against other classes in full viper's. When grading confusion condi classes, they should be compared by average DPS output of the spec against other specs, not by confusion spikes. Most of your hyperbole is staring at the confu spikes, not overall DPS. Look at the meters at the end of the fights. Though I would argue it's fair for confusion to outperform on some bosses as long as it's lagging on others, because that's what confusion is supposed to be: a penalty on actions. The condi loses its flavor if that's not the case, and if it's solely balanced on its best bosses, then it underperforms on all others.

Hold up. No. I think every class should have simpler and more complex builds. Not everyone wants to roll their face across a keyboard constantly. I mean Chrono used to be meta for quick and alac, but now everyone loves alacrigade/qb combo. A reason I hear all the time is that it's not difficult to provide your boon, whereas the classic diviner's chrono rotation was a bit annoying and clutch to learn. Most of mesmer's current builds are super complicated rotations. Please, leave this ONE alone. I'm sure condi chrono stacking will still be a thing. And you still have condi axe mirage for pure DPS (assuming staff/staff becomes appropriately balanced). POwer chrono is unaltered in its rotation and STM is still complex.

Another thing to consider is the Alacrigade is also adding to overall squad power DPS with a unique profession specific buff (Assasin's presence). Well full chrono condi comps still beat those numbers using smoke fields and focus. Are the numbers you're quoting also exploiting fields? If your numbers are correct, then part of me would be like "yeah it's overpowered" but that's only in the absence of abusing smoke fields. Field effects and trait interactions should be balanced separately and against each other as they can be exploited by other classes in different ways. I.E. I wouldn't nerf all alacmirage damage based on an edge case that might be considered a high-end play strategy, I would balance that strategy against other ones (like burning bolts/fire fields). TLDR I'd balance this against double condi ren with 0% bd as a reference point. I'm not entirely disagreeing, just asking for more analysis before saying "ZOMG OP!"

I'm sorry, how is this broken when Alacrigade is pumping 24k diviner's power DPS (more than OP)? And double condi ren can cover Alacrity uptime fully in full viper's? Double Alacmirage in full viper's should be competitive with a double alacren setup doing the same. I don't know enough about the classes to know for sure, but I feel like every time purple gets a buff, the world ends. The only thing I could say is OP is maybe the amount of alacrity uptime, but even then, I don't think it's by much (OP admits to not having 100% uptime). You lose the ability to quickly replenish clones during the desert distortion by taking the regeneration for extra condi damage

Except there's a PTR and boss guides are published at the time of PTR (or shortly thereafter) not world first race. So all of this "learning experience" happens before world first. Nice try. Enrage timers + a static health pool means DPS must hit a certain point. There is a hard cap, regardless of skill for DPS output at a given ilvl, the best way around it is proc based classes if your DPS cap is below the enrage timer/boss health pool threshold (as they have more variability either way). This is why player skill is important. The more skilled you are, the more you can take advantage of favorable RNG. It's funny that a streamer, literally reported this in their stream as what they're doing and you turn around and make up all this BS just to disagree. I really wish I had the link to the stream (it's been a while) because then i could end this BS right here and now. And I think the sanest thing for them to do is do what they've done historically and provide various difficulty levels with various quantity of reward positively correlating with difficulty. The value for content, both the streamers who do it and the developers who make it, is directly correlated to the number of players involved, and this would be no different for GW2 raids. Though I want to also point out that more than difficulty and reward needs to be discussed. They need to figure out what exactly the different groups like to experience in their content and make sure that's there as well. Otherwise, people do it for loot pinata reasons and move on.

you're welcome to believe whatever you want, but you can't say Method's comp for castle Nathria wasn't proc heavy. I'm not trying to downplay their skill at all. Heck, being honest enough to realize you're more likely to win on a lucky pull is part of being skilled. My main point is that without a vertical progression illusion of difficulty (ilvls), high-end players need to be more clear on what they see as challenging, as the day any content is released, they'll have what they need to overcome it. EDIT:I've seen your response and am saddened you decided to focus on WoW players mainly instead of elite players in this game, have decided to argue against my experience and what I've viewed/heard from streamers and decided to ignore the fact that I've stated I agree that they have incredible skill many times. You're trolling and I'm done. A rational person could recognize 2 facts can be true at the same time. I'm also saddened that you've refused to acknowledge the proccing nature of many of the DPS classes they took on their Sire Denathrius kill. O well. In fact you don't even list all of them. The procs won't matter if skilled players aren't taking advantage of them/using the classes correctly.

The first part of my statement, "The Top WoW guilds are plenty skilled" is meant to acknowledge that, I'm not trying to say they aren't skilled. I'm saying their ilvls prevent them from actually being able to kill the boss. Content creators for WoW have pointed out the reliance on Proc based classes to overcome this, if you were involved in the community you'd know this. I don't disagree with you that they're incredibly skilled, but it's false to say they're not using RNG to overcome ilvl issues. An unskilled player wouldn't be able to do what they do, but their skill is only half the equation. The content creator I was watching said they calculated their chance of success at 2% on any given run.

Are you speaking from your personal beliefs or observation? In any case, anyone who believes the content isn't challenging enough needs to clearly communicate what sort of challenge they're looking for in a world of static gear progression to the devs. The Top WoW guilds are plenty skilled, but at the end of the day, they're winning their world first races using RNG because they know their ilvls haven't hit the right place yet to pass the content. Does challenging mean the guild has to pool together insane resources to build a legendary food that gives stats far greater than anything else in order to beat bosses that can't be beat in full exotic/ascended? Does it mean reaction times so tight even a skilled player can't reliably pass the mechanic? Does it mean a boss difficulty slider and somehow it's really obvious you've done the boss at a much higher level than anyone else? ~50% of the population believes an easy mode is needed according to previous polling. I would hope that top-end players would realize that perhaps an easier mode is needed if that's the case, if only for their own good. Note most WoW players don't touch mythic, but they'll watch Mythic world first races, the only reason they care is because they're still doing the same content, but at a lower level. That makes it interesting to observe and learn from more experienced players. GW2 players won't care about top-end streamers' content unless they're engaged in the same content as well, even if it's not at the same level.

If you're on your own, plenty of the expansion areas can be challenging. Some meta events are challenging when you're doing them without a full zerg. Raids in this game are pretty challenging. Have you gotten outside of the core game yet?

Okay, this all seems to contradict the assertion that raids are supposed to be easy with 3 healers, which is what I was responding to. I mean either the raids are so easy there's no use for an easy mode or they're so hard there is. I think we should go back to that. And the stance taken must apply to all bosses, imo. I also didn't intend heal scourge as full hard carry when I was thinking about it, I was just thinking the ability they have to pull people back, but that's good to know ; ) Does this mean perhaps a large portion of the raiding community doesn't want to deal with the mechanics in their current state? Or that you can fall off the wagon really easily if you don't engage in the content enough? I mean this statement can be taken so many different ways, but it implies a lot about both the raid community and the content they're consuming.

If it's in the game, my thoughts are that it's on purpose. It's not necessarily a hard carry -> it's more a backup if people screw up. This goes back to my main criticism of training runs: They're not about kills. I have never in WoW seen someone say "don't use a class, it makes it too easy!" usually, the reaction is the opposite, I'm curious if other MMOs have communities more like WoW's. And then we wonder why people don't want to play with randos and don't play content XD.

I was agreeing with this point as just an example, but for another, it's rare a trainer has ever tried to bring an HS into sloth for me. And I can't for the life of me figure out why. Doesn't boon thief also almost hard counter some mechanics as well? I'm sure there's way more than just this and 3 healers

I still think the issue for raids in general is barrier to entry, but this is a good QoL. Heck, I still feel nervous I've forgotten how to do particular mechanics, even if I've done something before. It feels like to me, to be good, I need to be doing them all the time.

This only works in some scenarios, further complicating this is this isn't taught in training runs. That's why I want training runs dead. They revolve a lot around teaching a meta that isn't necessarily about reliable kills, instructors that teach methods like that are rare in my limited experience. This is without going into how annoying the collections without raid locks are and why that requires a boss kill of every type. Also the few times I've seen LFGs for Meme groups hasn't gone over well. Apparently you can just grab 10 necros of various specs and go ham on VG according to the youtubes. Maybe if there was an alternative to snow crows that was well respected for pugging and casual players that would work.

Well if you go to EU fast farming raids are only beat by farmtrains of specific comps and require way more people and more time. ANd I don't think they are even using speed clear times. I'm seeing 30 mins for W1 and W7.

In my mind the easy mode would be a lower drip rate, so people would be engaged for longer. That gives more opportunity for them to get bored enough to try the harder modes & get involved in the community at large. And for the record, this worked for me in WoW. I got tired of LFR and tried harder things later. And when I raided in BFA later, I wasn't raiding for the gear at all, just for kicks and giggles as I would do Mythic+ as my primary gearing method. But maybe you're right, maybe raids on their own aren't fun enough because I kind of feel like the argument people will only do easy mode for legendaries is saying the content doesn't stand well on its own. I know people who actually do enjoy raiding, but they enjoy the whole 9 yards -> training, etc. They're not in LFG asking for KP and I don't know if they represent the population. If this is the case, there's no value in an easy mode at all. Or the mode at all unless there a MAJOR refactor of all the encounters. I already see raids as super profitable that, in and of itself contributes to the only other legendaries that aren't tied to a specific content (the gen1-2 weapons) as stated earlier on this thread, you could sell your experience by carrying people for a hefty coin, and you wouldn't even need to charge much to make it competitive against the best farm trains in the game.