slave to the grind.5028

A bunch of 300+ mastery people who get their jollies trolling metas with portals, training mobs into the zerg to kill everyone, putting aviator boxes on the loot, etc.. It's an entire guild dedicated to literally just that. If this game had open world pvp they would not exist.

Unfortunately, we did not know about them when they went on sale in March. This is a terrible business practise and one of many good reasons anet is not getting a single dime from me anymore.

Just ban the entirity of [GOON] already. The fact that this guild exists is an embaressment to your game and your staff.

Wrong. People are far more willing to give cash to a company or person they think has their best interests and fun at heart. This is why so many companies go out of their way to intigrate themselves with the Zeitgeist.

Actually, seven years ago they had an entirely different skill/trait system, so even two otherwise identical builds could differ in their stats. It's been a long, long time, but I remember a friend and I basically running clones that only differed in that allegeldy small manner and we noticed significant differences in efficiency. I'm willing to bet OP was running the optimal stats for his build and equipment. Most people back then weren't.

There are literal guilds in the game at this point that are dedicated to ruining everyone else's fun. Bot farmers, like, whatever. I don't really care. But if you can organize a guild to systematically troll events and nothing is done about it, things might have gone a wee bit too far up the creek...

Yes, it's why you have multiple builds hotkeyed depending on your group composition and what you're doing. 🙄

What I think is bizarre is the conjecture between lay-offs with covid-19 and not just the unfortunate trend in the software industry to fire people who are actually mission-critical to a solid product because "they cost too much money and I want to pad my benefits some more". I don't think we should be excusing the Activision/EA business model and giving them a get out of jail free card for that, just because there was a worldwide pandemic. The writing got worse before covid was even a thing. Then you slap a fresh expac on an already diminished team and somehow, you, their boss, expects them to deliver a decent product instead of being completely overloaded with work and likely suffering the typical employee trap of "I have too many projects and I can't concentrate on them all, so I'm going to do all of them badly". It's an unfortunate fact of human behaviour and productivity as its consequence, that unless you are stringently aware of how your own mental processes work, if you are given too many tasks, you will attempt them all at once and fail badly at all of them.

WvW is a team experience and a team game mode. You do not zerg bust solo. If I kill an entire blob, it is not because I am some kind of god either. It is because the mesmer or the thief teleported or stealthed me right into the middle of them and the first thing I did was AoE fear with increased fear duration, followed by spin faster than most zerg drones can react, which possibly explodes because mid-spin a lot of people are going to be below 50% HP. About half a second later, I'm not the only one out of the portal or popping out of stealth, but I am the one who left them all at low HP and gave them a choice between "heal immediately" or "condi cleanse and evade". (If I'm popping out of stealth, I probably opened with an AoE freeze, which makes things even worse. You know, that thing no one uses because lichform is "super broken", but in scenarios like this is just that much better, followed by "Nothing can save you"...Then spin/fear.) The reason hybrid power/condi reaper is so "scary" in this constellation is because my fear lasts significantly longer, as does my chill and because my spin still does a lot of damage. It is because a wvw player's first reaction to pop out of reaper spin is to dodge and if you pop up in the middle of a zerg, those who cleanse their fear are all dodging in different directions, which essentially turns them from a zerg into easily eliminated single targets, while all their buddies are dead. It is not because of the itty bitty bleed ticks the scenario may involve. And it is most certainly not because of "luck". It is because I run with other players who have a solid grasp of group tactics. It's also most certainly not infallible, which is why it's not the only strategy to break a zerg out there. It's just an example where hybrid viper or vigilent/zerker or crusader reaper is a good bit better than zerker or crusader reaper.

I don't see condi necro on this list. What about our damage in pvp/wvw?

This, I think, is the much more pertinent issue, yes.

Timing and opportunity dependant. If you know when to engage, you can wipe an entire blob with one spin.

You know what would be great? If we could use the warclaw's abilities in pve. Gate/Condi bar break, sniff, the lance, are all things I could see uses for in pve.

Hybrid power/condi reaper is frighteningly strong. Tossing in some vipers can give you quite a bit more DPS than straight power/crit will. Especially if you chill-splode in the middle of zerg-busting.

It's accurate enough for most social sciences, hilariously enough...