Besetment.9187

I feel like running Glass Staff Weaver in a squad and on tag ignores what the class and the weapon is good at. There are just so many reasons why its suboptimal: (1) Weaver is one of the most selfish classes in the game. It demands a lot of resources but unlike Rev/Necro/Guard doesn't share much utility and boons with allies in close proximity.(2) movement interrupts meteor shower and pile driver and casting times are horrible. Makes it very clunky when you need to dodge through ground poo and be constantly mobile to stay in support range of allies on tag since you will constantly interrupt your own casting.(3) melee training on tag doesn't play into Weaver's unique strength - your ability to do monster burst at greater than 1200 range by using FGS, lightning flash and burning retreat to safely overextend, burst and retreat to a distance where nobody can hit back. I don't see anything you can do in squad and on tag that you can't do better in a dedicated party, playing off tag. You might as well put all of your weavers into one sub group with a pve firebrand and take up positions where you can abuse terrain advantage and get huge flanks to free cast on enemies like they are kitty golems. What are they going to do? Spam ground targets uphill and not hit anything? Hah! Break away from their tag and chase you up to high ground so you can drop down and say see ya later? They are never going to outrange or outkite you and they put themselves in a dangerous position if they even try. Just embrace the fact that anet raised you to be a selfish git, show up fashionably late with your lacky firebrand supplying you perma offensive boons and ruin the party. Use your allies as bait, pick a target that is busy fighting someone else, get a big flank on them and pile driver/lightning surge/plasma blast until they cry. If they go down put a lava font on them and if anyone is dumb enough to attempt a rez, channel meteor shower and lightning flash to safety. If they chase you, burning retreat and let your allies kill them when they realize you still have FGS and they can never catch you.

DPS Herald is fine for pug CMs. The boon stacking is nice and gives your support players more margin for error. The dps is not so bad that its going to be the reason your groups don't clear 99 and 100. That is always due to failing group mechanics and to a lesser extent, too many people failing individual mechanics. The only problem you are likely to encounter is people asking you to switch to Support Renegade (Alacrigade or Alac as it is commonly referred to). Or they join your party thinking you are a Support and when it turns out you are on DPS Herald, they might get freaky or feel like their time is being wasted. Most pugs end up waiting the longest for a Support Renegade and there is a good reason for this: they are typically responsible for solo mechanics (like Arkk anomalies and Artsariiv ball). They are responsible a significant amount of defiance bar damage in CMs where everyone dies if you don't break bars fast enough. If No Pain, No Gain is an instability, you have to go Mallyx and boon rip. You are also responsible for providing supplemental stability, to save your entire party from death by CC. It is a meta hard carry role and has the most individual responsibility imo. I consider it to have the highest skill floor of any meta role and is probably the hardest one to learn - certainly if you don't play it well, you will be responsible for the most party wipes. That said, there is no harm having a pocket meta support. If you are comfortable with mechanics on a Support Renegade, you will have a straight up easier time on every other class. It will also enable you to play Herald since you alway have the option to switch to Support Renegade if your party just won't let it go. However, if you go the learning pug route, its going to be a bit overwhelming at first but what it will do is drill very solid fundamentals into you. Its much easier to learn CM99/100 on heal firebrand but I sometimes find the aegis and passive healing encourages sloppy play because you can simply get away with making more mistakes. Overall, I don't think CMs are fundamentally all that different from T4s. Its mostly the same mechanics you have seen in T4 but theres just more of them happening at the same time, you are under greater time pressure and failure tends to punish the whole group instead of just the individual. When making the transition from T4 to CM, I think the hardest part is realizing all those times you didn't bother to learn mechanics in T4 is coming to back to bite you. For example, in T4 100 pugs, it is common to see people getting feared by Arkk. The common excuse is: its only T4/recs. So you never learn to recognise the eye symbol above Arkk's head as a threat and never learn to turn away/about face. In T4 it is rare that getting feared will result in you getting killed. In CM100 there are more disappearing platforms, more skull bombs and concentric rings to cc you. All of this is stuff you have seen before but its all happening at the same time. So not learning the fear mechanic is going to end badly for you. You will get cc'ed with the bomb, your nova launch is on cooldown and don't have enough time to reach the dome. Or you can be standing in the dome with the bomb and you get feared out of it just as its exploding. Or you get feared into a hole in the floor, or feared into a concentric circle and stunned on a platform that is about to disappear. And if you nova launch to stunbreak out of the fear, now you don't have it for the shockwave/red puddle and you'll die to that instead. So to end with some positive words of encouragement - CMs are not as hard as you initially think they are. You are not going to do many mechanics you haven't already seen a million times in T4 already you just need to respect them and stay calm. You can do it!

The way I got into CMs was to create an LFG called "CM100 Learning". I had to wait for about 25 minutes to get the group to fill and we all had to agree in chat that we were going to be learning mainly through failure so its going to be a couple of hours. In CM100, we had to repeat Skorvald about 3 times and I can't even remember how many times we did Artsariiv. Like 10 or something. We repeated Arkk a bunch of times but due to exhaustion we ended up called it without getting the kill. That said, learning through failure is seriously underrated. We let ourselves get hit by attacks to see what would happen. Oh this one literally flings you off the arena. Oh this laser is a one shot. Oh this shockwave is a knockdown. Oh this breakbar is a defiance dps check. If you don't have enough cc, everyone dies. Oh those red puddles hurt like hell. By the end of it I was super confident that I knew everything on Skorvald and Arsariiv. Arkk I was fine with until the platforms start disappearing and then the paaanic set it, so I needed a bit more practice with positioning in tight spaces. I did beat CM100 in my second learning pug but it took a couple more groups to get really confident with it. I also had to create or join CM learning pugs for 99 too. Once you have bashed your head against 99 and 100 for a bit and gotten your first KP, you can join groups that only require "some KP" and those are decent enough - to be honest, theres no real difference between them and 50kp pugs. You can often join 50kp pugs with a lot less KP as long as you are up front about it. I used to ask "hey, is 25kp enough? If not, its cool and I'll leave". But I don't recall any situation where I was refused. However, be sure you know your mechanics because it will become a problem if you don't. If you drilled a learning group where you failed every possible way a dozen times until nothing is scary or surprising anymore, then you'll be fine. I encountered a couple of people in low KP groups that were just legends - one that springs to mind was a person with fractal god title in my second learning group. Thanks to that guy, I got my first KP. He was clearly the most experienced player in the group by a country mile and explained a whole bunch of things we were doing wrong and was patient enough to repeatedly fail with us until we got the timing and the positioning down. If you get a really disastrous non learning pug that is failing defiance checks or group mechanics like Skorvald solar blooms because nobody is kicking the ball to the edge of the arena, people generally just leave without saying anything. I haven't really seen anyone rage on people in low KP groups so I don't think you need to worry about that.

It dyes really nicely but I just can't not wear capes. Capes are the ultimate lore friendly backpieces.

If doing Ad Infinitum, definitely list in T4. There isn't many eyeballs on T1 to T3. I know I don't check them.

Should has nothing to do with it. Do it if it noticeably improves your chance of winning duels or don't. Everything else is just an elaborate and arbitrary excuse for why you are losing and/or consistently finding yourself in unfavourable 1v1s. Thinking like that isn't going to help you win. Sorry to tell you but thats scrub logic.

Ahh, wish you posted it earlier I guess. I'm down for helping people do collections but LFG is not a great place to find people who want to do anything other than dailies. I'm on EU and completed the 4th Astralaria collection recently so most of it is still fresh in my mind - I ended up getting most of them just doing dailies and solo'ed a few of them when I didn't want to wait for them to cycle into the daily rotation.

Look, I didn't disagree with your conclusion but all you are doing is paraphrasing what I already said. The only thing I disagree with is your explanation, which greatly understates how completely busted support builds are and the incorrect use of terms like infinite scaling to refer to builds that have no such thing. It is really common in T4s for people to ruin their own dps by dodging/disengaging unnecessarily because they do not trust their supports to give them aegis for We Bleed Fire and resistance to stand in fire/poison ground aoe. Even when you actually do these things. So you see people double dodging out and waiting for Mama/Siax poison to go away, even though the FB has pre-emptively cast tome 3.4 and the Ren has pre-emptively cast Pain Absorption. Ironically, this can be solved if more dps players roll a pocket support and play it every now and then, so they know what they are capable of. Its also fun, if you are into selfless teamplay.

No, it's DPS because, like in every single game that has ever existed, DPS scales infinitely with regard to the affect it has on content (Well, up until you can literally insta-kill every available target). Every additional point of DPS you get, shaves the time to kill an enemy by a fraction. With defences and healing, there's hard caps for how useful they are. If you're tanky enough to survive an encounter, that's it you gain nothing else from getting more tanky. If you can heal up all the incoming damage, that's it you gain nothing else from getting more healing. Once Tanks/Healers have met their goals of being able to survive/heal through an encounter, the only thing that's left to focus on, is DPS. Since as mentioned earlier, DPS is always relevant. The only time additional defence/healing matters, is if it allows for more DPS because the Healer/Tank can forgo their own roles and focus on DPS (In a way that outperforms both players having more balanced builds) It's a fundamental flaw at the heart of the RPG genre as a whole, there simply hasn't been invented a system where defence and healing can actually scale infinitely with an appreciable effect on encounters (Outside of mechanics that convert them into DPS). Nor has there been any attempts to provide a hard limit on DPS where it stops being beneficial to encounters from increasing it (With exception from some older JRPG's, such as when Final Fantasy had a damage cap of 9999 making additional damage stats redundant) I think this is sort of the right idea but isn't phrased in the right way. Active defense in GW2 scales infinitely. It does not matter if a boss melee swing hits you for 1000 damage or 10 billion damage. Aegis will block it either way and the incoming damage goes to zero. Same for incoming projectile damage vs projectile reflection and incoming condition damage vs resistance. Support builds are designed to remove all obstructions and interruptions to their teammate's damage output. Their teammate can stand in ground poo and just do their dps rotation with no defensive traits or utilities and without even needing to dodge in some cases (as this interrupts their rotation, lowers their dps uptime and consequently lowers their average dps). Unlike the support player, the DPS player can end the fight sooner by killing the boss faster but there is still a limit to how much damage they can do, how quickly they can do it and how quickly the boss can die (due to invuln phases). Outgoing damage does not scale infinitely and there is a strict limit in terms of how much damage your attacks can do and how many buttons you can press per unit time. You will eventually run into a wall where it is physically impossible to do more dps. Nevertheless, your dps scales aggressively with traits, boons, class specific buffs and player execution up to the point where your uptime is 100%, you have all the damage traits, you are capped on all boons, you have every class specific buff and you don't make any execution errors. At this point your dps will flat line. Damage calculation in GW2 is a multiplication of factors divided by armour rating. Most damage modifiers in GW2 interact multiplicatively. So if you think about how multiplication works, lets assume you have two 10% damage modifiers and your skill damage is 500. Your outgoing damage will be 500 x 1.1 x 1.1 = 605 damage. Compare that having a single 20% damage modifier: 500 x 1.2 = 600 damage. Notice that you get more damage with two 10% damage mods than a single 20% damage mod because they have a compound effect. This is why pve DPS builds don't take a mix of damage, utility and defensive traits. You are heavily incentivized to take all the damage traits possible, even when it makes the build more difficult and dangerous to play. The defence and utility is provided by a support who can pump out far more boons, more healing and more active defences than you can anyway. What isn't obvious to a DPS player not using a DPS meter is the effect of not having boon support, interrupting your dps rotation (for any reason) and not pressing buttons as quickly and accurately as you could. If we just consider boon support in isolation, if you don't have a full compliment of boons, your average and burst damage will literally be halved. My Power Weaver goes from 31k/s average (52k/s burst) with [sC]'s raid buffs to 15k average (27k/s burst) without. Another big determinant in DPS output is how good your execution is. It is very hard to track execution errors without analysing dps logs because they occur at a double digit millisecond timescale. In some cases you won't even see when an auto 1 slips in either side of a skill and you won't notice when and how often you accidentally cancel an auto 3 because its happening too fast. It is also very difficult to quantify how much dps you lose by disengaging for any length of time, for any reason. At some point you will have to do this to avoid getting wiped by boss mechanics, but efficient movement has a very significant impact on dps. For example, take CM Skorvald and compare your dps when you play with a portal chain vs when you don't. The difference is on the order of 1.5x average dps and that is mostly due to portal reducing dps downtime when moving between anomalies.

Distance from keeps/towers/camps to waypoints is a key determinant in how the map is played. One of the reasons EWP, mounts and gliding messed up the delicate balance of borderland play is because they allow large numbers of defenders to get into a structure way quicker and safer than what was originally intended. You can glide from defender spawn into NE tower. Gliders enable you to take shortcuts that used to be impossible without taking fatal fall damage. EWP advantage is self explanatory. If fighting on EWP, the defender can spam it for invuln. Ninja tower/keep takes used to be things that you had to orchestrate and plan based on distance from spawn and how long it would take for 50 people to port in and run to defend it. If you allow parachuting, there will be no point in attacking structures at all. It is too much of a disadvantage. Just camp your own honey pot keeps and wait till your night crew can take territory unopposed so you have more honey traps the next morning. Defenders already have an overwhelming advantage in borderlands - they have siege advantage, high ground advantage, tactivators and a free pre-buff + stealth engage from behind the safety of walls. They do not need an impossibly good spawn advantage too.

Yeah. Scourge did a little too much a little too well but the hotfix to sand shade was a proper SBooning.

The reason this is bad gameplay is because most damage modifiers in GW2 interact multiplicatively. When you also factor in stat distribution on gear, you end up with a game that heavily favours specialisation. This is why dps and support builds exist and are distinct from one another. The reason you only do 5k-9k dps is because you are trying to do too many things at once and you are limited by stats, traits and utility skill slots. If you try to heal, you are going to be a mediocre healer unless you pump +healing power and traits that give healing% bonuses. But if you go with gear and traits that boost healing, it will come at the cost of damage% and +power, +precision and +ferocity, so your damage will also be mediocre. If you specialized as a damage dealer, you would be able to do 15k/s average with boon support just by standing still and auto attacking in air attunement. If you practice an optimized rotation, depending on how good your execution is, you would be doing 20k to 35k average dps. This is one person doing as much damage as a entire party of 4 to 5 Lyttles. And these are just the averages. The burst capability of ele is absolutely mental. A Power Weaver with boon support can burst over 100k/s during exposed debuff (after breaking a defiance bar). If you have a dedicated support in the party like a heal firebrand, that player can maximise boon uptime and healing and therefore protect you in a way that you simply can't do yourself as a jack of all trades. They can use tome 3, give you resistance, reflect bubble, stability and aegis and you will be literally immune to everything.

Yeah I feel I need a dps meter too because it is incredibly hard to tell where your damage is coming from just by eyeballing it. The meter itself isn't very important to me but the data that arcDPS captures is. You can log your runs and then use analysis tools like dps.report and moxie parse the data and find out where you are doing things badly or inefficiently. I think of it as a data driven approach to self improvement rather than one based on guesses or assumptions (which are often wrong).

In blob fighting you stack up condis while doing power based damage, but until the enemy blob's support loop is overwhelmed, the condis don't really do much. They are continually being converted into boons by scrappers. In high pressure scenarios (i.e. where you get condi bombed), the tick damage is negated by resistance until they expire or cleansing field/fumigate/purge gyro comes off cooldown. Don't get me wrong though, if you are in a blob that is lacking scrappers and firebrands and you get condi bombed, then you are going to get deleted. But most squads I see already know this and do run lots of firebrands and scrappers. The ones that don't get one pushed a bunch of times, morale collapses and everyone leaves, so they don't exist for very long. Power damage is quite hard to negate compared to condi. Its instantaneous, not a damage over time effect and is harder to react to. In terms of counterplay, there is no blanket immunity to power damage unless you count block strings but these are self only and not shareable to 5 allies. Aegis is shareable to 5 allies but must be reapplied every time someone gets hit. But in blob fighting you cant tell who gets hit and when because theres so much visual noise.

WvW squad play is dominated by selfless builds that share tonnes of buffs to allies and either remove or nullify those same buffs from enemies while moving. Mindcircus did a pretty good breakdown. Firebrand is meta because it shares stability and can provide a little bit of everything else (a little too well) - healing, resistance, projectile reflection, cleanse, boon conversion, block and can reliably share pretty much every boon in the game except alacrity. Heal Tempest is a top healer but doesn't share offensive buffs like Rev and doesn't provide stability like Firebrand. It can cleanse but nowhere near the rate of Scrappers and every time a Scrapper cleanses, they convert those condis into boons so its just better. That scrappers also provide damage redirection, high superspeed uptime and stealth engage means it not even a contest really. I'm trying to think of what buffs or redesign Druid would have to get to replace a Firebrand, Scrapper or even Tempest, and I'm drawing a blank.

Alpine borderland was designed to be played across 3 maps concurrently - as a defender, as a left side attacker and as a right side attacker. Desert Borderland screws this dynamic but if you can't populate all 3 borderlands then I guess it doesn't really matter anyway. Replacing 2 of the 3 borderlands with a Desert/Drizzlewood style map would mean the defender in the Alpine Borderland will have an overwhelming advantage against the attackers but not a corresponding overwhelming disadvantage in the other 2. Alpine Borderland is (or was) designed for a defender to survive equal numbers 1v2. It is very hard for attackers to hold north towers against the defender because the spawn advantage is too great. The defender has incredible high ground advantage over both north towers and their adjacent supply camps. If you can't hold the north towers, that means you can't hold garrison either because both towers have safe trebs against it. Nowadays, people don't really use trebs to take and hold territory for a number of reasons, but long range siege determined the distance and elevation of all the structures in the borderland. The keeps and towers aren't where they are for no reason. The difference between left and right side attack is: 1) on the left (bay) side, the keep is easy to capture and difficult to hold. It can be safe trebbed from south west tower and supply camp. Back in the day, it could also be safe trebbed from garrison cliffs. When fighting in or around the keep there is limited access to high ground. 2) on the right (hills) side, the keep is difficult to capture but easy to hold. There are no safe treb spots against it. It has a safe treb against south east tower so if you lose the keep, you will also lose south east tower. Hills used to be the hardest inner to take because of the choke point into lord room. This was back when arrow carts were insane and a superior ballista could 2 shot everyone that tried to run through the choke. Hills has high elevation with many opportunities to fight with high ground advantage. The balance between the 3 borderlands has been complicated over time due to the addition of tactivators (noteably EWP and structural integrity), mounts and gliding by enabling short cuts that were are otherwise possible without taking fatal falling damage and reducing the travel time from waypoints. EWP allows any keep to be defended with an uncontestable waypoint that can be spammed for invuln. Then there is the introduction of full support builds, nerfs to siege damage etc. so bay isn't as hard to hold anymore and hills isn't as easy. Nevertheless, the distance between structures and the terrain/elevation in Alpine Borderland is designed so it is played as 1v2 across 3 maps. EBG has always been different. Unlike Alpine Borderland, it was designed to be a 1v1v1 and that is still somewhat true, despite all the changes and additions to WvW since release. Desert Borderland is weird because the placement and elevation of the towers do not create advantages to attack keeps. So it is disadvantageous if your Home BL is Desert - you have none of the terrain and spawn advantages that an alpine defender has over its own garrison and you have 2 alpine borderlands where you are the left and right side attacker, with inherent terrain and spawn disadvantages against the defenders.

One time I was kicked from a T4 pug while switching from Weaver to Firebrand. Since supports always take the longest to fill, I managed to rejoin the pug that kicked me, only to arrive in the middle of this big rant about how people don't read the lfg description. So I just said "lol, you kicked me while I was at character select". They calmed down after that but some people are live wires and their head is gone before the game even starts. Support players are always the smallest cohort in any game with dps/tanks/healers. Tanks and healers always take longest to fill. Do people just not like playing them? Do they not find the gameplay loop satisfying? Who knows. What I do know is that they are some of the most busted hard carries. Even in games like Overwatch, dps may be the largest cohort of players but it is a game that has historically been dictated by tank/support play. I've seen it where I join 2/5 on Weaver or Soulbeast and then the group will fill to 5 dps despite asking for supports. Most days I just end up switching to a support. If I ask "what do you need?", they will tell me HB 95% of the time anyway. If I give them the option of condi/power/heal firebrand, 99% of the time they will ask for the heals. Nevertheless, I don't think the solution is to be inflexible. Everyone should have a pocket support or be in the process of gearing/learning one. If enough people can flex roles, your group has so many options. You don't hit brick walls where you got no reflects for Capt Crowe, nobody is capable of providing it and nobody is willing to switch to a class that can. People get angry and they leave because all they have is hammers and everything (even their teammates) look like nails.

Ahh I remember making all of those mistakes. Good times. Look how few boons they have! How I learned dungeons was really weird though. There was this one guy in WvW that was rich and back at release you don't get to be rich if you WvW exclusively. He made all his money doing dungeons and he showed us all the corner blocking strats and AI cheese in the WvW voip server. I have no idea how he learned it or if someone taught him (and how they learned it). Hell that might explain it. Games like Tera keep trashing their own content by power creeping until only the newest stuff matters or is challenging. So you never get out of that mindset of learning through failure. But the cost of that is great boss encounters last year become irrelevant this year and you'll never have that experience again (unless you can find enough people to deliberately under level old content for old time's sake). In GW2 however, you can grab 5 noobs and still get wrecked by Subject Alpha in 2020. Silver lining perhaps?

I don't think power creep solved any issues in Tera though. If anything, it made you complacent, since you no longer need to deal with mechanics in over-levelled content, you never learn them. That was a problem Tera had that doesn't effect GW2 - it left behind a mass grave of old content, trivialised by item power scaling. When I mentioned death montages, I meant that I had a lot of fun and memorable moments in groups that wiped over and over until it became a comic strip worthy of uploading to youtube. There was a mindset in Tera that you are going to wipe a lot, so you might as well get used to it. For me at least, getting used to failure meant laughing when someone spectacularly drops the ball. And its funny because I've done it too. Getting my poop pushed in over and over did make me better at the game so it was a rite of passage in a way. I would consider Kelsaik back then to be harder than any strike mission in GW2 right now and that was levelling content in Tera. You had to learn right there and then that this is what the game does - its going to punish everyone for your mistakes and until you rectify those mistakes, the game ends here - you will not get any further than this. Despite this, I never saw anyone get kicked and I never saw entry requirements to do Kelsaik. The GW2 community just has a different attitude in pugs.

I saw an engineer only squad yesterday (or the day before) in LFG. I wonder if it ever filled and was it as amazing as it sounded...

Raid like content is puggable in other games. In Tera when Manaya's Core was endgame, I pug 3 and 2 manned hard mode (MCHM), which took a lot of fails, but I had the core mechanics down from doing normal mode, then 5 man hard mode. And I still screwed up 2 man a lot. The community just had a really different attitude. The game also does a better job of teaching you to play with a kind of raider's mindset by mercilessly one shotting everyone in the party if you don't overwrite this debuff with that one at the right time, in the right place. The last time I played Tera though, item level crept up so high you could solo MCHM in 90 seconds and ignore all mechanics. It was kinda sad to see because Shandra Manaya was a really fun boss in its day. Its funny looking back at the death montages. Is that even a thing in GW2?

I really like the idea of a musical profession since GW2 is such a rhythm heavy game when you get into things like optimising dps rotations. It would be cool to have a literal piano build for Mesmer where you harmonize with your own illusions and chain skills in different orders with set rhythm and tempo to produce buffs with different intensity levels. A bit like Octavia in Warframe where you have your own step sequencer and can write your own songs. And if you activate your skills in time with the music you get buffs. The only thing I didn't like about Octavia is it encouraged "spam" songs - where people fill the step sequencer with 1/16th notes so they don't really need any sense of rhythm at all. Also the sounds were not particularly nice. Its a shame because sample libraries are so good these days, I wonder how expensive it would be to just license kontakt player.

Siren's reef is awesome, you take that back.

You can't really compare the early days to what we have now because its just a different community mindset. In the early days of any game, there is incredible tolerance for failure among the community because the optimal strategy hasn't been found yet. Over time, the best or most used strategy becomes public knowledge and defines a metagame. It is no longer a problem that needs to be solved collaboratively. The problem has been solved by other people years ago, you just need to copy the strategy and execute it efficiently. This idea is not new to GW2 or even unique to it. Getting into Underworld in GW1 at release was an entirely different thing to getting into Underworld at the height of Terraway, which was essentially an 8 man solo/duo farm. It was much, much harder to start during Terraway meta. It requires a lot of experience with solo/duo farming strats that you will not have and the strategy itself has its own learning curve, because its complex. It didn't pop into existence in a day - it is the evolution and amalgamation of many Underworld farming strats over many years. Guild Wars 1 and 2 are really the only multiplayer games I have revisited over a long period of time. Most of the time, I like to start over in open beta and collaboratively solve game logic problems with other people, like how you did when you got into raiding in the early days. Literally everyone you ran into had the same mindset but later on, differences emerge in the knowledge, ability and goals of each player and you get this kind of friction. Raid training is sort of necessary to stop the game mode dying entirely in the medium to long term.

Its semantics really. Certain dps builds are less selfish than others and are still able to bring the burst and the average dps numbers. As such they will always be meta. Slb can bring frost spirit and Berserker can sacrifice their entire utility bar for banners and something else that provides team support. I get why Banner Slave is a distinct build from Power Berserker and can be considered a support build because you give up personal dps in your utility slots for teamwide offensive buffs. I didn't explain it very well, but there is a difference between pug meta and speedclear meta supports. In very high performing, structured groups (i.e. speed clear) the supports are in essence dps builds with slightly different traits and/or utility skills because the utility and boon support they provide to the whole party is considered more valuable than the personal dps increase. They are also expected to interrupt their dps rotation to use things like defensive tomes. In pug meta, you have things like Healbrand - where the entire build and gear loadout is different to heavily prioritize team utility and boon uptime, sacrificing all personal dps in the process. Diviner Renegade is a weird one. You have to give up crit for boon duration and your own damage output suffers considerably. Even worse, you prioritize utility and boons in almost all scenarios and will interrupt your dps rotation and disrupt your energy management to do it, not just in high incoming damage scenarios. Most of Diviner Renegade's dps comes from sword autos in assassin stance with impossible odds up. If you do nothing but camp sword/sword in assassin stance and auto attack the training golem with impossible odds, you will do 18k/s vs 21k/s with an optimized rotation. Even the optimized rotation assumes you always get to play with assassin stance and that you never have to interrupt your dps rotation for any reason, which is not always the case in fractals. In reality, you should switch to staff and use Darkrazers on breakbar. If No Pain, No Gain is an instability, you are swapping assassin stance for demon stance, always and without question. Even T4 pugs will moan at you if you don't. I get that speed clearing statics will try to squeeze all the damage out of the build but below high end speed clears, you are compromising your personal damage output all the time to help your teammates. It seems like we agree though. Personal damage output is secondary to team wide utility and boon uptime and this is why we call Diviner Renegade a support build. I think your problem is specifically with badly played Renegades. I think its a difficult build to play. Orders from Above really messes up your dps rotations. You have to deal with energy management and improvise your rotation on the fly if required. Its easy to mess up and get trapped in the wrong stance at the wrong time or not swap legends under 10% energy thereby wrecking your energy management in your new stance. It requires a lot of game knowledge to know what stances to use and when and is a hot mess to play in disorganized groups.