apharma.3741

My overall feeling is that some of these weapons were made by the best and the best tend to win.

WvW perspective, I have used celestial, marauder and minstrel stats and I can honestly say this weapon is either a meme or the designers (especially looking at other weapons) have completely lost the plot. It has generally poor damage on the autos, the skills are decent but slow and not especially big damage and the boons it gives are nothing special, the saving grace is AoE chaos aura on skill 3 and resistance/barrier on skill 5 but this isn't a stand out compared to other support. It needs something else like quickness, alacrity or stability. It's kind of slow and kind of clunky to use with 3/5 skills being ground targeted. Also it doesn't really work that well with other weapons for support, they have just done an overhaul of chaos and inspiration to add more support to it but that's left a lot of crossovers with rifle, for example if you go chaos you have a lot of chaos aura and so regen but what a lot of support builds lack is clone generation. Add more clone generation to rifle and it will have a lot more synergy with most weapons and roles. Make that what rifle does, makes a lot more clones faster. Auto attack: The damage is pathetic, when many other support weapons at least have decent scaling on theirs. This is to offset the healing but healing should be on skills with cool downs not on autos. Remove the heal and buff the damage so it can at least be useful on power builds. Ambush: This is not well-made. It has egregious particle effects and adds to the visual clutter plaguing mesmer, the heal is OK, and the damage is bad but being a 1s channel you can often end up interrupting yourself. The vigor is nice, but it doesn't do anything with infinite horizon except give more vigor. Maybe make it like death's judgement or fire a volley that heals and inflicts weakness with low damage but good power scaling. SKill 2: Not bad the healing is good, damage is OK but could do with a little bump but it's slow to hit, it is abysmally slow to hit where people will very likely have moved out of it. Why not make it track the target and be cast on friend or foe? Skill 3: This skill is very weird, you're trying to make a PvE and a PvP/WvW skill in one when everyone will be detonating it immediately in PvP/WvW and PvE they're not going to care about the might and fury. I would suggest buffing might and fury in traits for PvE and make this skill just abstraction. The damage and healing is good so no complaints here other than it's kinda clunky and a bit slow. Skill 4: Pointless, literally pointless. Does no damage, takes ages to shoot, does the death's judgement beam so the enemy knows it's coming. Why do we need a single target projectile stun that takes 2s to cast on a support weapon? I'd rather have something that scales with power really well but applies chill and weakness on enemies, that works for support but I guess PvE need their breakbar... Skill 5: If this was just singularity shot that pulsed barrier and 1s resistance for 3s after initial shot I would be happy with it. It works on support and resistance is always nice. The portal is just someone saying "isn't this cool" while a lot of players are saying "Sure, but it's not very useful."

Only dumb people vote for 4 week relinking when you have 5 tiers, and the proof of this is already apparent to everyone in T5 EU. WSR+Viz should be T1 right now, but instead they have to spend all this time climbing up the tiers ruining everyone's matchups for 4 weeks till they approach other bandwagon overpopulated server combos. This means no server or server like entity starting in T5 can ever get to T1, there just aren't enough weeks. This might work better with permanent relinking beta, giving more balanced unmoveable populations, but that isn't here yet and there's no concrete date set. So our last few weeks/months/years of server system will be mired in blowout match ups where 1 server dominates everyone for 2-4 weeks depending on start position and bandwagon. Well done everyone, real smart moves.

OP is right to an extent, there's A LOT of builds that hard carry the player and you have an uphill struggle or disadvantage fighting on anything with appropriate risk and reward, some examples: Cele harbinger, the damage and regen on this is nuts, enough mobility to get to safety a lot. High passive prot uptime. Cele willbender, again, tons of damage, tons of boons, defence and king of mobility at the moment. Passive prot uptime. Cele vindicator, vindicator as a legend is grosly overloaded, add in shortbow and you get an incredibly hard to kill spec that spends half it's time evading or glitching out. Deadeye, gets to dictate the fight completely and stay at a nice safe 1200 range needing only 3 or 4 buttons to win. I wish I was joking. Cele catalyst, with high protection, might stacking, stab on aura and waterfields on demand it's a very tanky spec to fight even 2v1. Druid or Soulbeast, lots of stealth, mobility, cleansing, stunbreaks, damage, it's got everything you need to fight or get out of a fight. These are just a few but there's many other build/stat/class combos that you have to play something incredibly broken to fight. Many might point out cele is the culprit, it's not, it's maybe 40% of the reason many of these builds are broken, the rest is plain biased or inept balancing. Marauder willbender jumping you for a 20k combo then running away to try again in 30s when CDs are back is every bit as broken as cele willbender, just they go from stupidly hard to kill to hard to kill. Once you get over 50% boon duration (runes for 25%, diviner armour for another 25%) a lot of these builds get very strong and one of the common aspects is passive stacking of boons or excessive defensive options within one place. So removing cele won't magically make it better, just a little better. All these builds will still be super strong. Then we come to the balance patch preview, I don't think anyone is looking at that and saying ANet is addressing real problems in any way.

I started WvW fresh on a 2 new accounts recently, where I have loads of experience but non of the gear, levels and other stuff and my experience was "Wow, this sucks as a new experience." Warclaw Everyone is riding it and you simply cannot keep up without it,some might say "ah but there's the warclaw buff" but that doesn't help when everyone is using the dodge to go a little faster when no enemies are around. One account has PoF, the other only has HoT, so one account gets to use this completely broken mechanic and the other one has a bottom of the barrel experience that is honestly the worst if you're not experienced enough to play on a class that can escape being ganked. You will get constantly ganked for not being on a warclaw. Additionally the warclaw just promotes ganking, you see packs of them going around and the moment they see someone not on a mount 4-10 of them beeline for you. Often at other times they simply won't engage unless they outnumber by quite a large amount. Was the worst addition to the game and many mobility problems could have been solved with waypoints in T3 structures and requiring seige damage to contest. Gliding Honestly it's kinda whatever most of the time, it's nice to have, especially for desert map, but in general it's most useful in niche areas and unless you're a free player or someone who just never bought the expansions you will have it. Gear This was kind of difficult to begin with and I relied on having the level 80 boost celestial gear, I do wish you could choose what it gives you at least in terms of weapons so you can run a broken cele build in WvW. Also no relics, that's a pain for a new account and they cost quite a bit. Then ANet updated the gear vendor and I can say it's 80% of the way there while runes are relatively cheap, the only drawback is there's no back item in the vendor and you still have to insert jewels into the accessories which can be a 5% or higher stat loss. On the whole pop a booster, zerg a bit and you're there for your first character and gear set. Class Balance I'm kinda cheating here as I've had too much experience with what an utterly broken, after thought mess it is. We have some skills still on PvE values and completely busted and entire other classes using PvP balance to the point they're a janky mess. However every single class has some truly unfun mechanics or aspects and some have such extreme mobility, regeneration, cleansing and damage that they feel like raid bosses if you're not playing a class that can overload them (like cele harbinger to cele ele) or isn't just as broken and it comes down to who fell asleep first or who got a friendly 3 players to join. If I was new and had willbenders jumping on me then sprinting 3,000 range away or any of the other completely unfair builds around attack I'd be playing WvW less. Stealth and revealed Honestly hats off to ANet for having 2 paths in front of them and choosing the 3rd path of jumping in boiling lava. Stealth is as obnoxious as ever with some classes like ranger and thief disappearing every 3s or camping stealth if they're low on CDs but equally marked being on sentries and watchtower makes anything that might have 1 or 2 stealth skills for a reasonably short duration just not function. Worst of all worlds and stealth really just needs changing but ANet will never do that, they're too proud to admit they made a mistake all those years ago. As a new player I'd just quit against these people and I have seen new players do just that because it's not fun, it's not engaging and it doesn't feel like you had any interaction. I have stopped bothering to do WvW dailies on my HoT account because it's such a hassle without warclaw and with kitten gear as I haven't used the 80 booster and probably won't as I'd want to play thief or mesmer and run away most of the time. Is it any wonder that a lot of people I come across seem to be more interested in extracting maximum value from pips and reward tracks?

Relic of Cowardice Heroism: If you go through an objective portal within 10s of hitting an enemy heal to max, gain 5,000 barrier and all boons for 10s. 10s cool down. Relic of skill: You gain 1% more strike and condition damage and 1% strike damage reduction and condition damage reduction per player within 600 range. Max 50 stacks.

Pretty much this but I'll also add in thieves who just sit in stealth nearby and follow you because they can. Honorable mention to those tanky celestial builds that are like a raid boss but if I'm playing equally cheesy stuff they die anyway.

The problem is perfect stats and ANet's crappy balance. Minstrel overperforms on supports, there's no garbage or less useful stat here like with clerics/magi. Trailblazer is all tank and pure one type of damage (dire might actually be better for some classes like guard), no downside here like with carrion/rabid. Celestial has all stats and didn't used to be much of a problem till do-it-all elite specs came about and they added boon duration. Only other perfect stats for builds hold a candle against this. Zerk/marauder/dragon overperforms on power builds, we see this with the amount of outlier skills getting abused due to high coefficients. The only reason people rarely if ever complained is: 1. They would complain about the outlier skill first and get that nerfed. 2. Most classes usually had to be glass and easy to kill if the spike was missed/blocked some way. 3. Most of the time couldn't stay in a fight, often having to run and try again later. However we're increasingly seeing classes that have a wealth of defensive options and can spike you from range for an absurd amount of damage with less counterplay. Soulbeast is a good example with OWP/sic'em and running away with the frankly broken dolyak stance and gs. Willbenders teleporting on you and either deleting you or sprinting to safety faster than Usain Bolt. Someone mentioned Twilight combo thieves hitting you for 15k+. These would all be fine if the player devoted more to achieving high damage and lacked the escape if they messed up but these builds don't. Additionally there's nothing stopping you doing very high consistent damage from safety/with lots of defensive tools on these power builds either. TL:DR. The problem isn't just stats or skills, it's a combination of both and the selective removal of risk and reward (from some classes but not others) as well as drawbacks.

You save a lot more by going through the astral acclaim packs, you get the pre, gift of legendary and a gift of might or magic that's close to 500g saved especially if you can buy clovers direct using currencies. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Legendary_Weapon_Starter_Kit As for MoB Just a significant lack of demand now, WvW legendary armour is pointless as there's no unique skin for the legendary version and there's a good looking open world set coming, G2/3 legendaries have been made by a lot of people who wanted them and there's the astral route for others you might not care about the skin on. I know I'm probably going down the astral route for a 2nd pistol and axe.

Celestial is OP! Look, they're doing literally half the dps of a normal raid group, these 9 extremely experienced raiders. I'd remove the first video, you can do PvE raids in full celestial but it's nowhere close to optimal. That's without mentioning it's the WvW subforum. Before someone says it, I'm not saying cele is or isn't just pointing out it's a really bad justification.

This is so wrong it's hilarious, then again NA 🤷‍♂️

Ah so he's SFR, I wonder if he also had this same viewpoint when SFR was top of EU and stacked all week round on most maps with guilds? Wheel keeps turning.

Go play WvW then, still broken there and you get to pair it with celestial to boot!

So that's what's been happening!

This, so much this. When conveying information you can usually only expect them to remember 3 things and even then primacy and recency mean only 2 really get remembered. That's the first and last things you say if someone needed the middle part explaining. @Sahne.6950 I see what you did 😄

Yeah, it's not, the trait was always meant to be used defensively, this is why it was 3s originally but 🤡M 🤡 decided that instead of addressing the aura spam, to reduce the stab. You know aura spam is an issue, everyone knows it's an issue. Instead of addressing the actual problem he's nerfing everything around his idea that catalyst should be some kind of aura god. Stop deflecting with an unhelpful comment like this you know what I'm saying is right, you even complained at length about magnetic aura spam with swirling winds.

You're acting like aura spam isn't a problem, it's made worse by the signet trait but it is also annoying with Elemental Epitome. This enabled the stab spam in the first place and was why stab was nerfed originally and is now a joke at 1s where any idea of using it tactically has gone out of the window in favour of spam.

I get you about Spectacular Sphere's and it becoming a boring trait but my main concern is that you're already getting good boons from the sphere's as well as the combo fields which are already strong enough and require thought to use properly. The might alone isn't the only problem, perma prot, perma regen, vigor, resolution and combine this with elementalists boon generation it creates a lot of high boon uptime with a lot of good boons. A boon like resistance would be a good boon and a singular boon is much easier to balance even if it's a lot more boring. Something simply being good is enough without it lighting the world (and PvP) on fire.

Ignore him, he's a troll, he's been trolling mesmer sub forum for months and admitted it was an alt account of his main that was banned. I think a better idea for Written in Stone would have been to improve or alter the passive effects.

Staunch Auras - nope, the problem is the amount of auras and the frequency of application, catalyst simply shouldn't be getting an aura based on their attunement for doing any combo finisher in any field. Hammer should have been reworked so grand finale gave you an aura when you hit with 2 or more projectiles. Then increase staunch aura stab to 2-3s. This means it's reliable, usable, readable and predictable stability on all weapons which is what the game needs. The only other ways to get lots of stability would be earth dagger 3 through fire, ice, light and chaos fields or use staff with water 4, not exactly an OP combo. Spectacular sphere - It's a nerf, that's for sure but I think it would have been better if spectacular sphere gave the same boon every attunement, resistance for 2s. The amount of different kinds of boons is a problem in it's own way as it makes strips and corrupts less able to target what they need as well as causing interaction issues like elemental attunement with catalyst and spectacular spheres giving some crazy boon uptime. Agreed with the rest, Hurl is in general just a grossly bloated skill set, toughness, barrier, resistance and then good damage, what was CMC smoking. What the biggest takeaway really is, where the balance is heading, spam is fine and they're going to reduce the duration to 1-2s, which is exactly the problem this game found itself in when it was dying in PoF. Some people liked it, some didn't but I think it's a lot more skillful and rewarding timing a big effect or avoiding it than spamming it on short cool downs in every fight. I remember the failing shadow was wanting to keep ranger counterattack (the GS block) on a 15s CD but reduce the duration to make it "more skillful" but really what it would do is allow rangers to block more important attacks as it would still be a 1.5s block and this is unfortunately where CMC seems to want to go. Writing is on the wall, ditch this sorry excuse for PvP or even the game.

The bigger issue is they nerfed signets baseline in a way they really didn't need to accommodate a problematic trait and spec.

This is spot on. Had they addressed Written in Stone they probably wouldn't have had to touch as many skills and certainly not made staunch auras into the meme 1s stab. Ah well I guess we can expect a gutted ele at the hands of frothing forum mains claiming it's never enough until they tackle the root cause Written in Stone and catalyst as a concept.

Surprise conjured weapons rework, each weapon now has an aura skill, flame axe now does massive burns, lightning hammer has perma shocking aura, magnetic shield is restored to unnerfed versions. Conjurer trait now makes casting a conjured weapon a stunbreak and they all grant auras depending on attunement.

Everything you just said sounds like your typical WvW scourge player who has auto target, snap to target, instant cast and a macro that just casts all their skills. They're not bots, they're just a product of ANet putting in these features. It's rare to see an actual bot in WvW.

Yeah, what's even more jarring is the list of changes coming on 18th July to address issues didn't include a single mention of elementalist, not a peep. Could be they sneak in a "Written in Stone is disabled in PvP" but I'm not holding my breath. We saw this last time ele was running the show in the D/D cele build, then again they hadn't set the precedent of disabling a trait due to degenerate gameplay.