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Aooogah.1673

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  1. support. it made gameplay feel more fluid than before. now that we know what we are missing, photon forge feels clunkier than it did before the patch that allowed mid-cast forge entry in the first place. It also makes it easier to micro-manage your heat levels to maximize your success in any encounter.
  2. Your stacks last 10 sec at a time. In rifle holo, you drop at 50% literally as soon as you possibly can, which is after doing corona burst twice (4 stacks)—then you do a bomb and a shrapnel grenade (4 more stacks) before going back in. Functionally, you have an overall average of like 9.9 stacks across a whole benchmark. Running storm is no tangible benefit but does mess up your rotation by overheating you faster. Being at a distance will also make it cancel the third hit of the chain by casting the first hit too quickly.
  3. It sounds like you just have no idea how to play Holosmith, which is fair since it might not be as intuitive as some other professions. Take a look at metabattle for some ideas, then make something all your own.
  4. If I swap rifle turret to battering ram, pistol to shield, and run AED, that's 150 + 100 (shield skills) + 232 (one ram) + 100 (launch ram) + 200 (static shock) + 232 (PLB) + 232 (forge 5) for a total of 1246. I could go even further and swap grenades to bombs for a further 332 totaling 1578. It isn't ideal and yes I lose a fair amount of DPS, but there's well over a third of his bar. Or I could just run rifle/bomb holo like before, and truthfully only lose around 10% of my DPS (it benches at 31-31.5K/s) instead of the above solution which costs around 25%.
  5. @Blood Red Arachnid.2493In PvE, you periodically generate might while over 100% heat using ECSU. Corona burst also generates 10 stacks and only has a 5 second cooldown. You can also do things such as blasting the fire field from flamethrower or bomb kit, or if you are running alchemy despite being in PvE, you can use some elixirs to augment this might generation. @Nephalem.8921I don't know why everyone is saying holosmith is trash in PvE. It really isn't. We handle our own might, we have a self-rez every 30 seconds through AED, we probably have more CC at any one time than almost any other build, and we have sustain with heat therapy, so you don't have to pay as much attention to us as a support, and at the same time, we do 34K DPS; even dragonhunters only do 33K. In my static I'm constantly at the top of arcDPS during our raids, unless it's Samarog where I have to gimp my damage by running shield and battering ram and holding back on PLB because if I don't do a third of his CC bar the teammate dies, despite there being 9 people on the team to do CC.
  6. @Nephalem.8921That's the point I'm making, for scrapper to replace chrono it would either have to provide the same utility or do WAY more damage instead of just a little bit more damage. Right now it isnt worth giving up the extra DPS slot it would take to replace the lost supply of boons. Acknowledging the validity of your points about holo sustain, nevertheless there are certainly some areas, particularly in minion-heavy combat, where scrapper shines above holosmith. Heat therapy does not scale with your number of targets unlike impact savant. Add in running bulwark gyro over rifle turret, and, well, that's why you can solo captain crowe in t3-t4 sirens reef as a glass scrapper but not as a holosmith.
  7. As far as I can tell, the reduction in vitality is to reduce the maximum amount of barrier we can have at any given time; our DPS on the raid golem is enough to keep it maxed out full time and our theoretical barrier without a cap would be 18000 since it lasts for 5 seconds. This more than qualifies us as a tank, and 24K is just shy of enough to make it worth using as a tank over a class that can tank as well as provide boons; scrapper tank + boon support = roughly 28K DPS, but boon tank + DPS slot = roughly 34-38K dps. They made us a truly incredible tank class, but they just...forgot to give us boons so that we could match other tanks.
  8. It's tricky. I want to say a flat, simple, "core engineer shouldn't get more power DPS than scrapper because scrapper was designed to be the melee specialization of engineer" but it isn't that simple. Power scrapper gets all that barrier to compensate for being about 10% behind core power engineer. I don't know if I would rather see a 30K dps power scrapper through further buffs to the hammer skills/scrapper traits, or if I would prefer to see elixir gun be buffed to let you apply might and quickness to allies. I am leaning toward the latter because that would cement scrapper healer's awesomeness without encroaching on holosmith's DPS space.
  9. A few notes: I love the falling damage reduction trait, it helps heaps in open world. You don't need to take that rune since vipers + your firearms traitline makes it so that your main two conditions (bleeding and burning) are at 100% duration without the rune. If you were not aware, the longest you can extend a condition's duration is 100%; you can't make it triple the base duration, for example. I would recommend the sigil of earth instead of the sigil of geomancy. You will have 100% fury uptime due to short fuse, and you will have about a 65% crit chance in total between fury and hematic focus. This beyond all shadow of a doubt guarantees that you will proc the sigil of earth's bleeding every single time that it comes off of its 2 second internal cooldown because we do so many attacks every single second. In fact, at 65% crit chance, you get two critical hits with every grenade attack because you throw three of them at a time; grenade barrage is 4 critical hits out of the 6 grenades you throw for it. That fact affects steel-packed powder and shrapnel as well because each grenade counts as a separate explosion. Sigil of battle will help a lot too since kit swaps do count as weapon swaps. As for what to replace your rune with, renegade runes are nice because they make your conditions do more damage, and the ferocity helps us since about 20% of our damage, even as a condi class, comes from power. This build is considered a glass cannon because it focuses on almost purely damage; to that end, I would recommend running forge 3 1 3 instead of forge 1 1 3 because you're going to run out of heat incredibly fast that way; you get more burning damage with solar focusing lens (which keeps thermal vision active longer), and stay in forge far longer due to lower base heat generation, allowing you to melt your enemies faster. Thermal exhaust vent was recommended above but you lose a lot of dps when you're dodging on purpose (I remember seeing a post somewhere claiming that snowcrows tested it all sorts of ways to try to make it meta but it just costs too much DPS dodging all the time). Plus, you need to save your dodges for dodging when enemies do survive to try and hit you. I would recommend sticking with PBM or giving ECSU a try and staying between 95% and 149% heat. Doing that would dramatically improve your might stacks to the point that you could switch that sigil of battle to a sigil of bursting (+5% condition damage). If you did run ECSU, you also wouldn't care about bleeding as much, again because of your incredible might generation, allowing you to switch firearms to 1 2 3 instead of 2 2 3, and swap the sigil of earth to, hmm, maybe sigil of doom for some more poison! Do note that without the burning inflicted by PBM your thermal vision may drop for a second or two here and there, but the recent patch notes made Afterburner activate for 2 hits when you deactivate forge, so it will most likely remain at 100% uptime anyway. The idea with this build is that you completely destroy most enemies before they can even do a single attack, and veterans far before things like damage reduction have time to come into play. If you were trying to solo a champion, I would have different feedback entirely such as incorporating toughness and vitality, protection uptime, maybe using pistol shield or even switching to a power build to run sword/shield. A final note about open world: in general, this game has the two types of damage class. Damage over time, or condition based, and power, or damage right now. Open world favors power classes because things die so fast. Your physical (power) damage even as a condition holosmith is going to melt most enemies far before you have a chance to ramp up your conditions on the foe because the raw damage of the photon forge is insane. Power holosmith is incredibly easy to play compared to condition holosmith, but whatever you choose to do, make sure you enjoy it, or it isn't worth running. Hope this helped!
  10. At the top is the effective power running short fuse for 100% fury uptime which gets scholar to 8669 (assuming 80% uptime on 90%+ health, which should be closer to 100% uptime on our nice barrier-rich scrapper). 50% fury uptime by not running short fuse is definitely a big loss to DPS, and short fuse vs big boomer is the main thing we're examining when we look at "scholar rune" vs "rune that helps fury uptime" Assassin's presence: Putting it together in the build editor, full meta scrapper build using infusions has you at 100% crit chance (on the raid golem) with 3797 power and 1467 ferocity for a 247.8% critical damage. Assassin's presence adds 150 ferocity to allies, which equates to 10% critical damage at 1% every 15 points of ferocity, for a total of 257.8% critical damage. This is a 4% increase in DPS which would translate your reported 27K to 25,952—a good 1.8% above the 25,500 I have been able to achieve; I would say we are at the same level but using hammer 3 in lightning fields as a replacement of that auto chain, as well as practice at cycling the med/shredder/stealth/function gyro to also maintain super speed (scrapper 1 3 3 is group-meta because might is provided and that way you get superspeed), should result in maybe 26,500 as peak sustained DPS and bursts of around 30K for the first few seconds of the fight. On another note, running firearms 3 3 2, explosives 3 2 2, tools 1 3 3, with rifle/bombs/throw mine/grenades/elite mortar kit, I have been able to sustain 26-27K DPS with the highest burst I saw being around an incredible (ignoring holosmith) 33K opener. As a power core engi without even using the benchmark hack of adding stability. You don't get the barrier running core engi, but wow, surely that's a sign that scrapper needs some significant buffs if the core spec can beat it despite being designed for condi DPS. It honestly blows my mind and really highlights just how much diversity this class really does have; I thought I already knew how diverse we are! EDIT: thought I would clarify that, from what I can tell, the reason core power engineer does more DPS than scrapper on the raid golem is because of static discharge, which helps on your toolbelts (as infrequent as they are), and because you get +10% damage when you have vigor (100% uptime on vigor on raid golem); the comparison would be object in motion for scrapper which is 100% uptime on swiftness (+5%) and...maybe 50% uptime on superspeed? 60%? If it is 60% uptime on superspeed that's 60% of a +5% modifier for an aggregate of +3% and a total of +8% damage from object in motion. The tools trait outweighs it in intensity and simplicity.
  11. Context matters: I was rebutting a desire for a buff to the pistol autoattack, and pointing out that you don't use it in condition builds and that you're doing it wrong if you are running power engineer using pistols. Nobody is arguing that core/scrapper have competition with holosmith (in PVE at least) It sounds like you don't play condition holosmith which use three kits; also, you use grenade kit fairly extensively running the current sword/pistol meta. Running rifle, you still use bomb kit and grenade kit, and that build while no longer meta is still better than sword/pistol in select fights that are very very short. I know that most suggestions focus on suggesting the positive changes rather than including the "negative" changes that would have to be included for balance's sake (such as here if they made the change you are suggesting they might introduce the 9 second weapon swap cooldown to engineer since what you are describing is effectively like an elementalist attunement). Acknowledging that, I still have to say, what you describe sounds extremely overpowered. The "examples I give that aren't even that ridiculous" could increase our DPS by as much as 20% or give us room to be near unkillable while still an offensive threat. We would be completely broken in competitive modes. I'm not saying it isn't a balancable concept, but I am saying that at face value it's a ridiculous suggestion because it removes a LOT of tradeoffs and would allow us room to bring our strongest defenses at the same time as our strongest offenses which isn't a fair balance.
  12. Pack never beats scholar in open world. Scholar has around 6% stronger hits (in full berserk gear) due to all the ferocity, and another 5% from the listed damage boost above 90% health (which should be always, because barrier); the swiftness from pack runes has a 26% uptime resulting in an overall 1.3% boost to dps instead of the 5% advertised by the scrapper trait. The extra 6 5% critical chance from 125 precision points does not outweigh the ferocity from scholar runes. I'm really not sure how this data is generated. As far as I can tell the aftercast only affects your next hammer 1, but you can go right into another ability with no problem—especially if it is coming from another kit. I think things like surprise shot or shredder gyro cancel this aftercast as well. I'll have to run some tests to confirm that delay. What boons are you applying to yourself, which conditions to golem, and what is your build and rotation? I've spent...a long time in front of that thing (close to 40 hours based on how much food/utility ive used up) and I'm pretty confident that my rotation has very little to improve on. If you apply all of the possible conditions to the golem, that results in 6% higher DPS than standard benchmark conditions due to the modified ammunition trait; if you apply all possible boons to yourself, that gets a few extra profession mechanics that raise your DPS as well. Standard benchmark conditions are bleed, burn, poison, torment, confusion, chill, cripple, blind, slow, and 25x vuln; standard boons are 25x might, fury, vigor, alacrity, quickness, regeneration, swiftness (and since scrappers uniquely get dps boost from stability, we add stability even though a raid group cant maintain perma stab); standard profession mechanics are spotter, sun spirit, frost spirit, empower allies, banner of discipline, and banner of strength. Our food is sweet and spicy butternut squash soup and our utility is potent superior sharpening stone. I am very interested to see your rotation that generates 27K DPS under those conditions on the raid golem.
  13. Currently, between the tank and the healer roles, you have someone taking the attention of the boss, someone healing, and someone providing boons. For druids, healing and boons are the same person; for boon thief, tanking and boons is the same person. For chrono tank, tanking and boons is also the same person. One of the two roles has to accomplish two of the three non-damage tasks. To replace one of these meta supports, either you have to do the same things, such as tank while providing full might and fury, or you have to do a single one of the three tasks but do it with enough DPS to justify switching some other DPS member of the party to another support role. Scrapper is the obvious tank class for Engineer, with ridiculous barrier generation in glass gear that allows for 22-23K DPS, group damage reduction through bulwark gyro, the utility of stealth, and even a spooky self-rez every 30 seconds should it need it. We all know the benefits to the class in that regard. As far as I am aware, that DPS is just shy of sufficient to allow another support role, depending on which it is, such as an alac-ren or condi quickbrand, to replace a dedicated DPS, for a net increase to group damage. Maybe we will get condition into barrier damage like we were promised, and we will have a 30K DPS tank—who's to say? The other option to make Engineer a viable support is through healing and boons. Scrapper cannot heal at the same time as tanking due to the low damage output of harrier's gear resulting in low personal barrier generation, and it does not provide any boons to speak of. The meme build of a healer holo can dish out some decent fury uptime on static fights, and you can augment a druid's might output through HGH, but that's about it. Luckily, healing as a scrapper is trivial and it is super easy to keep people capped on health. If you want to, you can cycle between bulwark gyro, stealth gyro, and the med kit toolbelt skill for a few moments to catch your breath every minute, but personal healing is very low for us. Our outgoing sustain healing definitely needs no buffs. So if we can tank but do nothing else, or we can heal but do nothing else, then I propose changes to the Elixir Gun to allow us to heal and provide boons: Currently, EG1 puts weakness and bleeding on the boss. I would increase the cast time to 1 second, up from 3/4 second, and have it instead put 8 stacks of might on allies and 4 stacks of vulnerability on enemies, 5 allies/5 enemy targets, with a base duration of 7 seconds. That way, with quickness, you can put basically full might on your party after 2 seconds, and with 100BD it will last 14 seconds; this lowers your healing output by around 15% which is honestly an acceptable nerf to our, er, Med Kit uptime. Vulnerability on enemies would be somewhat insignificant, by intent: other classes in a zerg or in a raid comp already provide plenty of vulnerability just by existing, and it is one of the easiest conditions for a group to keep pegged at 25 stacks in a PVE setting, so I picked this condition to let the elixir gun feel like it is one of the boys. Currently, EG2 puts swiftness on allies and cripple on enemies, at 3/4 sec cast time with an 8 second cooldown. I would reduce the cast time to 1/2 or 1/4 sec, up the cooldown to 9 seconds, and change swiftness to quickness, cripple to slow, with base durations of 6 seconds (obviously keep it to swiftness/cripple in competitive game modes). I would seek that EG2 be also changed to bounce significantly more between allies to apply this to everyone—something along the lines of the bounces made by Pistol 3. The reason for the high base duration would be to help Engineer get away from the current offensive metas of having to spam a skill as soon as it comes off cooldown for maximum effect, to the point of noticing a detriment for taking a few seconds to get back around to that skill. This would give you a few seconds to, say, finish casting med kit toolbelt, or to aim a throw elixir r for a rez because your teammate refuses to learn the mechanic, or to reposition yourself. With 100BD, you would now be able to provide permanent might and quickness to your party, and the time it takes you to do so results in a slight decrease to your outgoing healing through Med Kit. This can be slightly ignored through EG5, Mortar Kit 5, and even a med kit toolbelt to account for the short lull. It adds depth to gameplay and brings total outgoing healing down a little more in line with other healing classes, though we do still notably lack a variety of burst healing options; we just have the one. Since the only CC a heal scrapper really has is shield 4 and shield 5, and Engineer is accustomed to having 42 different ways to CC a boss at all times, I would also adjust EG4 to daze foes for 1/4 second on the second pulse. That way, in PVP/WvW, it is a little harder to daze foes with, and it is a very short time during which your foe would be dazed, but it still works fine on a PVE defiance bar. Asking for a lot, I would seek a poison or ethereal field out of it, but just adding a daze would be plenty helpful. Overall these changes would result in a more balanced healer instead of one that is so overpowered in one aspect of support that it can do nothing else, and these changes would give viability to the support engineer in a raid setting.
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