FalsePromises.6398

I think they missed mentioning some points that it wasn't just tanky and slow, but also devastating for its debilitations and control. They gave up a lot of reactive defenses (blocks, evades, invulns, even a little bit of consistent mobility/healing/cleanse were sacrificed) for passive defenses (damage reductions, shroud health) that made them have to focus more offensively or be overwhelmed, and they were given special tools to make their offense more sustainable and harder to ignore via siphons, transfers, corrupts, debilitations, and powerful control. Necromancer is supposed to be a powerful and weighty dampener with staying power, and it kinda evolved to deal more damage as anet wanted more fairness between classes, especially in endgame PvE. Harbinger kinda hopped the tracks by removing shroud health for mobility and a little spare regen and also kinda losing some of the AoE and debilitation aspects, but scourge and reaper are definitely more true to the original.

I actually really like this idea, can't believe I never really thought of it when I was using it. The original, which obligates the teleport by tying the soul shards to it, results in skills piling up on top of each other in high speed rotations. Putting the soul shards on the spear throw itself (and making the skills better able to be queued while they're at it) would make spear MUCH more user-friendly and have a better "poke" identity, since you'll be able to throw your spear and cast Perforate from any range you please, instead of being teleported right in between their legs. This is with the idea that the Perforate recharge is also moved to Isolation from Distress too, otherwise it's not really sensible.

I think spear is a very neat and fresh set, but the resource management and ranges could stand a little fine tuning. This is speaking from a strictly PvE perspective: I haven't tested in PvP or WvW, but I do feel like these points are worth saying. The spear ranges/area effects are the biggest pain point, since they clash in application. Spear 3, 4, 5 (Addle, Isolate/Distress, Extirpate) are very much up-in-your-face skills with short/melee ranges, but that clashes with skill 2 (Perforate), a semi-mid-range frontal cone. This makes for a clunky playstyle when you use 3, 4, and 5 while in the thick of it right in an enemy's face, but you need to back up to cast Perforate effectively, since it's a longer range poking cone attack that you need to line enemies up inside instead of a point blank area effect or melee strike like the rest. I think Addle could definitely be expanded into a bit of a poking wave attack to help build on that just-out-of-melee-range poke style, and maybe a slight range increase on Extirpate (maybe from 240 -> 300) so you don't have to position AS tightly to get the most of it, allowing you to worry more about how you position for Perforate. Isolate and Distress are hard ones to touch on range-wise though, being a teleport sequence. Don't know if there's a good answer for that one unless it becomes something that isn't a teleport any more. I also think soul shards could stand an uptick in generation and a downtick in being conditional. Distress (flip of Isolate, skill 4) is the only one that feels like a reliable soul shard generator because it generates all six immediately, but that could stand to be less up and down. Maybe changing Distress from (3 guaranteed on teleport and 3 more when isolated) to (4 guaranteed on teleport and 2 more when isolated) would make the skill a little less flakey, and to make sure this doesn't make Addle's bonus effects above four soul shards too strong or guaranteed, Addle could have its bonus effect threshold increased to five soul shards. Also, the soul shards generated from Addle and Extirpate could stand to be increased by one at least. As it stands, soul shards feel like they only come from Distress. If Extirpate granted 2 per target, it'd make it much easier to get more from the skill and increase its value as a soul shard generator, and Addle could stand to generate one more soul shard on the initial hit maybe just to top off Distress when a target isn't isolated. Soul shards also feel a little too short duration. Being 10 second duration when they can only be expelled via an 8 second cooldown skill seems a bit tight. Expanding that duration to 12 or 15 seconds would make soul shards feel way more comfortable, especially when you can't guarantee you'll be in melee range at the right moment before they expire. All that said, I'm definitely enjoying using spear as a faster paced alternative to greatsword that doesn't strictly put me directly in the thick of combat. I like the idea, and look forward to its future use. Props to the designers and everyone involved with it.

The worst (and really only) offender of annoying mechanics on ranger is untamed, purely because it's just so many buttons with new binds plus having to keep an eye on that ambush buff. Meanwhile thief is probably okay to use freely in open world, but endgame and large scale content makes it start to get tedious, with regards to tiny healthpool, big punishment for weakness/blindness/downstate on deadeye, cleave issues on condi builds (think venoms and scepter), lots of forced movement or movement restrictions among its styles, annoying ally target mechanics on heal specter, etc etc etc... I mean, thief is LEAGUES better than it used to be, with how its conditional damage modifiers used to require you to stay above 90% health with 11k hp or else you lose crit rate and crit damage, and how venoms are being updated to not erase each other with multiple thieves present, but it still strikes me as more trouble than its worth. Like I hope I'm not dragging thief too hard, but ranger just seems like a better all-rounder investment, both for an exploring player and as an endgame option.

I feel like this is exaggerating an issue that isn't really there. Astral force management is not really a problem unless you're being nitpicky about certain interactions (of which deadeye has much worse versions) or trying to strictly adhere to a rotation in suboptimal environments. Soulbeast's "beastmode management" just... doesn't exist. You pick a pet and merge with it and call it a day. You might unmerge and swap pets for a spare beast skill or two in fringe cases, but that's an extra-mile solo play trick that's fun to do, by no means a requirement nor expectation anywhere else. You're largely you're just sucking in your pet for some stat boosts and a few neat skills and that's it. Untamed might get complex at its peak but it's otherwise lax: you can easily goof around and juggle the mechanic between you and your pet with zero repercussions on your own since it's practically zero cooldown. Worst thing that'll happen is you swap the mechanic at the wrong time and have to wait maybe a second to swap it to your pet and back to get it at the right moment. Of the three medium armor professions, ranger is the easiest to get into, use universally, have variegated roles with, and enjoy yourself at any skill level since it's very forgiving.

I don't know if this will really do anything for heal warrior. In my experience, one of the biggest hurdles for heal warrior (at least in PvE) is adrenaline generation, which makes Burst Mastery way more appealing than a number multiplier. You could consider it a "choice" between two support grandmasters, but I feel like just about every heal warrior will pick Burst Mastery over this new Heightened Focus iteration just for how much adrenaline refund they get out of Burst Mastery. What COULD happen that would make Heightened Focus very appealing to heal warriors is if it generated adrenaline while in combat, maybe up to a certain threshold, akin to how Eternal Life on necromancer generates life force up to a certain threshold, allowing support necromancers to focus more on utilizing their life force instead of micromanaging it. I do understand, however, that people may believe this to be antithetical to adrenaline's design in the first place. I do want to say, though, that I LOVE everything else going on with the other heal warrior buffs, especially Martial Cadence getting better consistency.

I like what's going on here, for the most part. Of course, the usual random guardian buffs aside (I swear those happen every patch), I really like seeing buffs to power tempest, heal tempest, power virtuoso, and power renegade. Excluding heal tempest, they're not forefront builds for their specs, and are notably specs that have way more infrastructure for other styles, so seeing them get some attention is an endearing show of good will. HUGE thumbs up to giving actual fury to heal tempest and giving a real distinguishing feature damage-wise to Infinite Forge, been waiting on those for AGES! The necromancer changes feel a little... hesitant, though. I had a lot of hope that we finally had a guy on the team who wasn't afraid of working with necromancer after those huge reaper QoL buffs, but it feels like he's run out of steam. I appreciate the effort being put towards power harbinger, but I don't think a temporary damage reduction window is gonna make it feel any less glassy in PvE: what it needs is either a power-specific health siphon effect or a vigor theme. It felt weird that harbinger was portrayed as this mobile, semi-martial style necromancer that abandoned shroud health and reduced their own max health, but had no vigor, endurance, or evade mechanics to compensate their core design's lack thereof (an intentional design, since necromancer was supposed to rely on shroud health and debilitation).

I think one of the issues with harbinger isn't the damage modifiers but rather the coefficients in harbinger shroud. The kit is okay for power (at least when you're using greatsword), the problem boils down to harbinger shroud's power not being competitive against other parts of its own kit, namely greatsword. Without a "second healthbar" as people like to call shroud health, you REALLY need to go all-in on making harbinger shroud the pinnacle of damage. Meanwhile, I go to the testing area and can deal higher DPS with greatsword autos and gravedigger after each chain than I can with harbinger shroud autos (both with 25 blight, soul barbs, no signet of spite), and maybe that's where the problem is. Just for PvE, buffing the power coefficients of harbinger shroud would be a start to making power harbinger feel good and unique instead of just a damage-inflated, lukewarm playstyle. Side note: buffing power coefficients would also do more for validating power quick harbinger whereas buffing traits that clash with quickness options doesn't help it.

Worst come to worst you can double the burning duration on Zealot's Flame to compensate, simple as. It'd be better than the existing iteration that desyncs over time and strangles out other offhanders. Even if you don't get a compensatory buff on Zealot's Flame, the ability to use another offhander like focus or maybe sword (not even considering pistols yet) on your second set probably winds up a total dps increase anyway, since you can perfectly get two activations of Zealot's Flame (four Zealot's Fire casts) per 10 second weapon swap loop, so it's basically an entire second offhand weapon set vs one stack of Zealot's Flame.

I missed this the first read, and I actually really like this change. That skill was poorly aged and it's great to see it usable as a reliable support effect that won't get you killed in the wrong situation.

I'm 90% sure they intend to make the THROWN fire (Zealot's Fire) into two ammo every time you activate the self flame (Zealot's Flame), not make the self flame (Zealot's Flame) into two ammo. I think they just mistyped in the post, because I see them say Zealot's Flame. It WOULD be a 50% dps loss to change Zealot's Flame (the self flame) to two ammo since you still have the same cooldown, but if you get two ammo of Zealot's Fire (the thrown fire) per cast of Zealot's Flame (the self flame), it's effectively the same with torch, and actually a 4% damage increase since Zealot's Fire with the trait and alacrity is 9.6 second cooldown compared to 10 second cooldown on the trait. It's way more sensible that they'd change the thrown fire into two ammo rather than the self flame.

Sure, it shaves off a small damage increase if you're NEVER using torch as a burnguard, but if you wanted to forgo an optimal condi damage weapon on a condi build, you've picked your battle already, to say the least. Anyway, it's a great quality of life rework that cleans up an otherwise disruptive passive effect in dps rotations for the majority of burnguards who DO use torch, and greatly benefits those who want to use other weapon sets alongside torch. It cleans up using other weapons alongside torch, and that's what matters.

A great addition to the list of highly practical traits that fix key issues for certain flawed support builds... but can't be used because they conflict with quickness/alacrity traits. If you're going to take advice from players about mechanical issues regarding support builds, what's the point if you bar the solutions from those builds by making it conflict with quickness/alacrity?

The intent is to fix the lost damage from getting zealot's flame from the passive while not wielding torch actively but still having it in your weapon sets. For instance, previously if you swapped off of sword/torch to pistol/pistol and critically hit, you'd have a chance to get zealot's flame when you weren't able to throw it for more damage. With this change, you'd have that passive packaged properly into an active torch skill, making it easier to rotate and optimize multiple weapon sets as a burn guardian. It's meant to allow you to use another offhander alongside torch without disrupting your zealot's flame procs, not to make your torch weaker.

Necromancer swords are a bit painful. Damage was way too low, animations are buggy, health costs are awkward and large, and cast times are way too long. The damage was on par with necromancer axe, the laughing stock of the class's arsenal that has an entirely different niche for burst and isn't meant for sustained damage. Literally, I tested axe/sword camping vs sword/sword camping and hit the same DPS, which is rather sad because necro doesn't need a second mainhand axe. All this and both were beaten by greatsword autoattack DPS alone. One reason was just bad power scaling and coefficients, but that's been a common theme. The sword skills themselves had long cast times and disruptive aftercasts: this was most prevalent on skill 2 and 4, but also on autoattacks. The autoattacks could not progress until the previous projectile either dissipated or hit, meaning you lost up to 35% total DPS (yes, I tested it) between melee range and max range. Going further, the sword skills' casts were too long and the effects too delayed for a practical ranged set. Sword 2 initial cast was fine, but the second cast was way too long for an effect that honestly could be ingrained into the initial skill, plus it seemed to cause an aftercast that may have been intended to force you to wait till the projectile finished moving till you casted the flip, but just resulted in disruptive, wasted time. Same was for the 4 skill, except the 4 skill had a long initial cast too. The five skill's flip effect was so useless that it felt like it could be thrown into the base skill as well, if it's literally just a fear. Lastly... not sure what was thematically supposed to be going on with sword 3. Sword 3 doesn't really fit anything: just a tad too short range for a solid mobility skill, doesn't do enough damage for a dive skill, and above all is a melee gap closer on a ranged set. I just don't think it fits, and all the goobers that pester devs for mobility on necromancer frankly just don't get that they're supposed to be pulling and debilitating enemies instead of chasing them. Swords left a LOT to be desired, but they weren't wholly bad: there was a nice concept of cast and forget damage as well as a good kite weapon. However, if this was the aim of the weapons, they should have their cast times adjusted and their flip skills merged into the initial attacks after a delay, and then have the damage scaled up. If burst becomes a problem, convert it into ticking damage like the fifth skill.