Loopgru.1026

Seconding Sw/Wh for roaming and staff for zergs because reflects to the face are not fun.

I'm partial to the destroyer, reclaimed, and warband staves- all of them look more like polearms than just a stick or a wizard staff. The dragon decade anniversary staff is also pretty beefy if you like the more gilded look.

I'm not a competitive player. Like, at all. So if that's your interest, I'm not your guy. That said, revenant ticks the boxes for me to feel fun, capable, and useful, which are really my core priorities for a class/profession. Fun: Vindicator makes dopamine with big numbers. Herald is super easy and makes people happy you're there. Renegade... exists, but maybe the changes will make it more enjoyable. Capable: Cele herald is up there with Reaper as the best soloist in the game, easily steam rolling champs, HoT HPs, and solo fractals. It's also among the best duellists in the game for the same reasons. Useful: In organized play, we bring quickness, or alacrity, and high uptime group stab, all without huge sacrifices in our personal performance. Vindicator can spin on a dime from pure kurzick offense to luxon support, which feels pretty great to me. We don't have the bag of tricks that some professions (mes, engi) do, but aside from those specialist niches we offer a whole lot. Plus we look cool.

1. From what you've described, Scrapper fits better- it has much more CC and support capability, and the burst of dropping shredder gyro in a lightning field is enough to curl your toes. 2. THAT SAID, you've got multiple build templates per character- porque no los dos? Use 'em both! Swap on a whim, they're both great specs, powerful, lots of fun. They'll both work well with a shared set of power-based gear, and if you want to branch out into condi holo afterward you can pull together a dire set very cheaply. 3. You mentioned ranged, and a lot of people have jumped on that; if you want a cruise control midrange option (still short-ish range, but not melee), you could check out one of the many flamethrower-based Scrapper builds.

It feels like you're being deliberately obtuse here, so I'm about done with this exchange. This is like hearing from your spouse that "we need to talk," responding with a discussion of what to have for dinner, then saying "what? we talked!" Yes, there have been tweets from ANet. There have been (I'm sure) quotes given to the media. There have been unrelated patch notes and even a brief non-address of the Dragon's End meta issues. But there has been no communication regarding the state of this elite spec or any other. So yes, on this topic, they have been silent. Anyway. Cheers.

The goal isn't- at least it shouldn't be- silencing complaints. As established, you can't please everybody. To go back to the same tired horse, the goal is to make money. ANet makes money by selling copies of the game and through gemstore sales, both of which are intimately tied to goodwill and perception in the playerbase. Will popping up a community manager with an acknowledgement of the concerns, validation that they've been heard, and a timetable for at least further information help that? Maybe. I can't say definitely for the players as a whole, obviously, but as an individual player I would feel better.

Sorry- "gone dark" in the sense of "not communicating" not in the sense of "turned off the lights and went home." The question remains. When does going silent fix anything when you've got an upset stakeholder?

You can't please everyone, it's true. That doesn't mean that it is the best thing for the game (or for the business) to just go dark. It seems like you're pretty down on and honestly rather hostile to the player base here, or at least extremely defensive of ANet in terms of how it handles situations like these. Why? I mean, think about this in the context of your professional life (I'm assuming you have one). If a stakeholder is unhappy with an outcome, when is it ever a good idea to just stonewall? When does that ever make anything better?

Beta 2 was from September 21st to 25th, or almost 5 months ago. Beta 4 was from November 30th to December 4th, or over 3 months ago. The feedback in both cases pointed to these same issues. No mechanical changes (only numerical tweaks) were made in that period. Absent some communication to the contrary to demonstrate intent, it is not unreasonable for players to feel that their feedback was disregarded- particularly when compared to the significant changes to Vindicator (no auto-flipping of utility skills), Untamed (removal of outgoing damage penalty), and Harbinger (removal of passive sustain to double-down on the high risk/high reward theme). If ANet wants patience in this situation, it's one "we've seen your feedback, we get it, we're working on it, here's a non-binding sketch of where we think we're going to go with it next" post away.

This is where we fundamentally disagree. Usage data is by necessity time-lagged (you can only gather retrospective data on what players *have* done) and it lacks contextual information (eg is hammer usage higher because it is overtuned as it was in beta 4? or because it is new so people are testing it and trying to find some way- any way- to make it fun? or because it is an actually well-received weapon?). User-reported data is necessarily skewed negative (more people will write to complain than to praise) and it is more resource intensive to actually parse and turn into information, but it is much more immediate and typically includes context. That said, it doesn't take Alan Turing's ghost to find the signal in the noise where the feedback for this weapon is concerned. Finally... While it seems you have a strong preference for usage statistics and that's fine, the fact is that ANet specifically asked for the sort of qualitative feedback being discussed here. It was solicited because it has value. It is a useful indicator. It just wasn't acted upon- and yeah, that leads to some justifiable irritation.

This isn't a question of quantitative under performance. There's no mathematical modeling or A/B testing t wade through here. The simple fact is that most people find Catalyst hammer miserable to use and ineffective compared to other options in its current state. Plenty of polls both here and Reddit and plenty of qualitative written material point to the same thing. You can certainly argue about whether those user bases are representative of the broader player population, but I tend to believe they are. This feedback was available as early as the first catalyst beta, and has been consistent since. Hammer is not fun. Being forced to needlessly lock attunements and spam abilities or lose 30% of your DPS, and having that DPS in the form of a clunky PBAoE has been very poorly received by players.

Thing is... Anet isn't a bunch of ideologically pure artists living in a commune. It's a business. Will it serve their business objectives to deliver a stable full of largely forgettable and un-competitive elite specializations that do not align with the class fantasies or mechanical forms of fun sought by their players? Or will that chill sales of the expansion and erode playerbase loyalty (and with it gem sales)?

I was really, really surprised to see that there were no functional changes made after beta 4- based on all the feedback I was certain they'd tweak it. As it stands, hammer has a massive amount of its budgeted power tied into a skill that requires a) maintaining a very specific melee range and b) rotating rapidly and in an inflexible manner through attunements. Neither of those requirements lend themselves to PvP, WvW, or solo play, and it's honestly a huge disadvantage in group PvE as well. For my nickel, it's also just not *fun*. You are punished in terms of a substantial DPS loss if you use your skills or attunements tactically and intentionally instead of just rushing from one attunement to the next. You get forced to pick one skill from each attunement to use before rotating out of it again instead of rewarding knowledge and utilization of the full toolkit. I really hope they revise it heavily.

Mechanist is S-tier for soloing- you can roll as pure glass and the bot is still a raidboss, but if you go cele it is just pure absurdity. For my nickel it has displaced cele FB/renegade/scourge in this slot, which are still strong but not on the same level. I'd also include Vindicator in that new A-tier (behind mechanist but up w/ cele FB/renegade).

Can't speak for Virtuoso, but this is way off for Vindicator in my experience. Obviously it'll depend on your gear and overall build, but Vicky alone gives a positively absurd amount of sustain (low CD good heal, tons of regen/resistance/protection/stability, iframes, condi removal w/ heal-per-cleanse). Even Archie offers a really solid amount of sustain with a low CD, scaling heal, and if you're really feeling pressured you can go with the support dodge for yet another heal + barrier. Plus remember that you've got another full legend to play with- Jalis or Ventari add even more options here.