Hallow.7368

This game DESPERATELY needs a limited form of weak auras built into the game. You shouldn't have to look at your buff bar that's filled with 90 different exp boosting effects or whatever else to know when your, say, untamed ambush is off cd. Not to mention for untamed your pet unleash skill cds are literally hidden from you and the band-aid is that their cool downs come up roughly around the time you have to go in and out of pet unleash for ambush skills. Honestly now that I'm thinking about it this would only be a band-aid in it's self. The player's hud is just out dated desperately needs to be overhauled for gameplay clarity and a degree of customization in regards to where things are displayed.

A large part of the things you listed were what we had before/around the drop of EoD. Nobody enjoyed it. The problem with things like aegis coming only from guard and having low access to boons is simple: the meta is literally just to bring and probably even stack the classes that bring the best boon uptimes. On top of that your idea of boon changes also instantly kills boon support builds. Why would you dedicate an entire slot to a support with concentration stats when it just drops their damage to boost there infrequent boon application to slightly less infrequent? Overall you just kill build diversity, not enhance it. Boons are too baked into the core design of the game at this point. All they can do at this point is make them more accessible to lower the abnormally steep curve between new players and veteran players. Lowering the impact of boons so substantially will just delete builds from the game. And then depending on the state of them post nerf your either stack the classes with the most uptime of boons without losing much personal damage or you just run 4 DPS and a healer and ignore them. It's polarizing and unhealthy for the game state.

While I do agree with you entirely that condi virt is extremely kittening good especially for how easy it is.. I think you're ignoring a couple things. This exactly. This it's self is reason enough for the nerf because it's not healthy for the game state when you can legitimately just bring 75%-80% or more of your group as mechanist. Pretty much every single mechanist build was meta and the fact that you could just set you mech to attack the boss and then you could just go sit in a corner and it would pretty much do the fight for you was too much. For power mech your pet literally did like 90% of your damage without having to interact with it at all and for power alac mech/HAM your pet just pulsed out boons and healing/shielding. THAT'S the reason the mech changes happened. Because it's not healthy to have a mini raid boss as an AI pet that literally plays the game for you without you having to interact with it at all. That's why they've done all the weird changes like having to be near the mech etc. In all fairness core engi is such a disgusting mess that minus reworking basically the entire class.. the only way to make a new elite spec for engi that would attract players that otherwise wouldn't touch engi and it's extremely limited boring core weapons and it's kits with a stick they had to make basically an entirely separate class that could stand on its own without anything from core engi at all. It just happened to be too much. And while virt could probably do with a slight tap down in power it's not consuming the overwhelming majority of slots in a group because it's just a pure DPS class. It can pickup some situationally useful core Mesmer utility skills but that's it. Other than that it's just damage and you at least have to press some buttons even if it's very clearly much easier than most other specs. If an easy to play strong DPS build was the actual reasoning for being nerfed then shiro rev would have been gutted ages ago. Those builds have literally been "turn on impossible odds and auto chain on sword until you need to use jalis for stability or something" while being way more than passable DPS for doing so since long before I ever downloaded the game.

how was the change a nerf condi fb is sitting at 40k dps now. which is extremely good. different fb builds are extremely effective now at whatever the goal of the build is instead of being a broken "do everything" class.

Necro scepter is probably the last weapon sets that would ever need updated it's one of the best weapons in the game and gets buffed even further by lingering curse which only competes with an unnecessary sustain trait. Just to be clear lingering curse is a 50% increase to the base condi durations from scepter weapon skills which means it stacks with normal condi duration. Also wtf do you mean the autoattack is slow? There's very few weapon skills in the game with a casting time faster than .5 seconds. It's certainly not slow.

Generally speaking eagle DPS simulations take into consideration that it's damage boost on low health enemies is only active 50% of the fight (since it only is active while the boss is half hp). While scholars simulations assume that you have basically 100% uptime which means never dipping below 90% HP. I prefer usually running eagle runes on power builds since they're a lot cheaper and the damage mod condition is a constant and the dps differences is never really that much. The difference shown for reaper between scholar and eagle for reaper is honestly the smallest I've ever seen it's basically non existent. https://gyazo.com/2c4ec0227e1d4c5a5ecac41463dc742d

Curses is objectively one of the best traitlines in the entire game, but sure. Just because you don't understand that putting 4 stacks of bleeding on an enemy for 30 seconds with blood is power and then transfering your self inflicted condis from blood is power (2 stacks of bleeding and 2 stacks of torment both for 20 seconds) is a ridiculous amount of damage doesn't mean it's bad. Oh yeah and lingering curse is probably one of the most overloaded traits in the entire game. It's so ridiculously good that even condi harb uses scepter. As it's weapon swap. But the fact that you think the might generation of BiP is the purpose rather than the byproduct shows just how little you understand about the actual effectiveness of traits and utility skills. And the fact that everyone except for 1 person let you spread an "opinion" that is just nothing but objectively wrong information says a lot about how credible the OP and this forum are about calling Necro bad. Which couldn't be further from the truth btw. It's extremely strong and tons of players love having necros in their group especially scourges and harbs. Reaper is also strong after the buffs and has never actually been unplayable. The spellbreaker build you're talking about is going to get nerfed without a shadow of a doubt btw. It's a completely broken very easy to play build that rivals the current top DPS specs in damage while using a traitline meant for survivability making it borderline immortal and a weapon that evaporates break bars. It's not a good addition to your argument at all because it's only been changed EXTREMELY recently and was bugged until the winters day patch yesterday. Obviously when something is recently buffed and is blatantly overpowered and hasn't gotten follow-up tuning it's going to look "better" than a trait that isn't overbuffed. "People think they need discipline to play when they don't" well considering defense spell breaker is broken and bladesworn doesn't weapon swap the only candidate to even use discipline right now is berserker and just because you don't use it doesn't mean that the reduced weapon swap CD doesn't make the class 40x more fluid to play or that is isn't optimal. Besides that with spellbreaker and bladesworn both being power you don't really have a reason to even play power berserker so discipline IS needed for the longbow trait for condi berserker anyways. So sure I could use power traits on a condi build, but that doesn't mean it's good and suggesting otherwise is false information. You will be hard pressed to find builds that aren't pigeon holed into certain traits. It's just a fact that builds have specific traitlines that interact the best with whatever the goal of the build is. Using a suboptimal traitline proves nothing other than you know how to click your mouse and force yourself to do less damage simply so you can call yourself antimeta despite the fact that you are more or less meta chasing by (ab)using defense spellbreaker anyways.

why is that relevant again? hammer 3 is 20x more consistent now reaching the full benchmark for any class isn't realistic it's just a benchmark to compare numbers. cata will probably still be around untamed numbers

This thread reads: "they aren't making the class exactly how I want it with the specific weapon I like being the meta, so I quit" and it aged like fine milk. Like okay bye lol guess the "anet hates me because I said so" narrative won't even get dropped when deadeye is competing with catalyst for top DPS. Can't even comprehend what your issue with trickery is? It's not used on power builds because deadly arts and critical strikes give more strike damage, but it is used on condi builds and plays very nicely with them. And acrobatics? What? It does exactly what it says it does what else could it even do or be reworked into that isn't already covered by the other traits? It doesn't matter what they do to it, it will never see play in "all game modes" because it's a survivability trait on a class that already has more than enough survivability with dodges, mobility and even stealth if you choose to use it. The last thing the game needs is another thief trait line that makes them quasi immortal and uninteractive like pre rework shadow arts because that will just get you nerfs all over again just like shadowarts did.

Ok but you don't even know what they would be replacing it with. Have you ever considered that maybe the rest of the class isn't "fluid or smooth" because the foundation of the espec is riddled with flaws and is entirely carried by a bandaid trait to cover them up for pve and retardedly high % damage reductions/damage increases for pvp/wvw? In sPvP untamed just runs around with a long bow hitting people for half their health bar with the auto attack or one shot people with GS using their shadow step only to go into pet unleash and become a tank whenever someone attacks them. so congrats! you aren't playing fervant force you're playing damage modifier: the class! also you just admitted that FF is just a "small increase" in pvp and that GM 2 is better. Glad we agree that it's a bandaid trait then. Also even more reason for them to remove it.. they can make the class "fluid and smooth" without you having to use a trait that barely helps you! But yea they absolutely shouldn't remove the most problematic trait in 95% of the game just because you have concluded that for you and your 5% in an unrelated gamemode have a different optimal trait. Glad we have concluded that your post is basically irrelevant because you don't even need the trait as where said trait completely breaks the class and holds it back everywhere else. I'd love to play the defacto pet class in this game and actually get to utilize and interact with my pet in a meaningful way, but instead the only real way to play untamed the class is by using some stupid cringe gimmick that makes the class an unbalanceable, unfun spam all your buttons non stop playstyle. I was so excited for untamed on EoD release only to unlock it and see that the only reason it's ever worth using in pve over a core traitline is because of an uninteresting trait that other classes already have technically had very similar traits to in their core traits and ham fisted large damage modifiers to fix the fact that it does nothing except make your pet worse (prior to pet auto casts anyways) outside of that. It's just a bunch of sloppy ideas thrown together being forced into viability off of 1 trait.

Yes? I mean untamed is clearly better but only because FF carries it which is not healthy. So why exactly do you oppose it being removed so that untamed can have it's problems fixed? Regardless of whether it just becomes a "normal" DPS class it still has a different game play loop than SB. It uses a pet as where SB is basically just perma merged and that alone holds enough merit for some people to use it. I've seen plenty of damage build druids running around because they want to play with a pet and not forgo the entire reason they picked ranger to begin with. At the end of the day it doesn't even matter that untamed is doing it slightly differently because DPS is just DPS and in that case why even play SB if your full damage build is doing basically the exact same DPS as an untamed build that provides perma alac with only 2 spirits and 0 BD? It will be way better for the class to have FF removed so the class isn't surviving off a bandaid trait that forces untamed to be strong because it's overpowered than to let it exist and dominate the entire tree and be impossible to properly tune without messing with things that wouldn't be problems if FF was nerfed. Let's say the nerf path of scars.. so a core weapon that's like subpar got nerfed for enabling an overpowered build? Great. The only way they can tune FF is either by directly nerfing the trait which will just kill the build anyways or to increase the cool downs of utility and weapon skills and not to mention the amount you would need to increase the CDs in order to actually be impactful would be large. CD increases would also impact non FF builds way more than FF builds. So what option is there? That FF increases all your cool downs by like 50% to compensate for it's effects? This would mean that you just camp one weapon set since FF only reduces the CD on active skills and your second weapon set would have massive cool downs and make already weaker weapons like shortbow entirely unviable and serve to make the class even more clunky and unintuitive not to picking traits that nerf you to compensate for their strong effects have proven to not be compelling (boon catalyst says hi). I guess you could make it so abilities that cc don't receive the CD reduction? But then how would that be any different from removing the trait anyways since it just wouldn't be good? It just has to be removed lol.

You are comparing 2 entire different games modes and that is your issue, there's no discussion to be had here. Pvp and wvw are obviously different because you're not playing against mobs that let you hit them with your cc and chain decrease your abilities because your cc skills are constantly being refreshed. Traits that make you tankier like vow of the untamed and restorative strikes are obviously better in a pvp environment where you're dueling other players lmao but nobody kittening cares about that kitten in PvE it's basically useless. I don't understand why you feel the need to jump in on a discussion that doesn't even include you. Whether anet removing FF is a good decision or not does not affect you at all because you're already not using FF because you're playing content in which untamed fills an entirely different role and landing cc to chain refresh abilities isn't reliable (if you COULD do that then FF would then be BiS for that niche as well btw because you could spam the untamed healing skill that makes you invulnerable to damage as well as the elite that gives you a ton of stab and unique buffs damage reduction). FF completely defines the spec in all other content than wvw/pvp though so if you main those gamemodes and you don't use FF why the hell do you even care if it gets removed and why are you upset that people say the class is defined by the trait?

I mean yeah. kittening delete it and build a new spec the class has basically no point other than to be a clunky core ranger with kitten adept and master traits. An overpowered GM trait making it viable doesn't mean the class is good.. it just means it has a broken GM trait as a bandaid to force it to useful. That's not healthy. Would you cover up a surgical wound with a hello kitty bandage? FF will likely inevitably lead to unnecessary nerfs on things that are not issues without FF being present because if they nerf FF instead then the entire espec falls apart. Not fixing the problem while just covering it up instead just creates more problem later. Also you're factually incorrect. DPS druid is bad it's literally just core condi ranger except your third trait has 8 out of the 9 choices being full support options the only damaging option (ancient seeds) being a small 5 stacks of bleeding every 10 seconds on a cc'd target and is mostly only used for cheesy pvp builds or if you want to play condi druid for fun in open world (spec with a pet and doesn't have the hastle of untamed). Condi SB is the best SB build followed by hybrid SB (which is just condi gear that uses a power burst profile so it more or less has the same DPS as condi SB, but is also more burst oriented). Power SB is actually the weakest of SB's builds right now. And besides all that untamed IS rangers best condi option by a mile. Third highest DPS in the game because of the thief dagger buffs and crazy catalyst buffs and was the highest in the game prior to those. Just for comparison if you were to use alac untamed over full DPS untamed you lose 7k DPS and even then alac untamed has the exact same DPS as hybrid SB which is SB's highest DPS build and you only need 2 spirits (1 of which, storm, you use normally anyways) to provide perma alac with 0 boon duration meanwhile a druid with 100% boon duration needs 3 spirits minimum to keep up alac. All because of FF 🙂 Non FF builds probably do as much if not less damage than the offensive support builds (minus alac untamed as it's a blatant outlier to the other offensive support builds) which is like ~30k. So I mean yea I guess they could just keep stacking up the damage modifiers on untamed to ludicrous amounts until ferocious symbiosis can compete.. or they could just remove FF and address the actual problems plaguing the spec. I'm glad they chose the second option because FF is utterly impossible to balance or at least fine tune without also nerfing weapon and utility skills that would also hurt non FF builds.

That's great now how often do you see untamed without hammer or axe axe? Condi is the only played variant because it's the only one that's not completely horrible (less DPS than reaper) and despite that the only power build I could find STILL uses FF and just sits on hammer. What you seem to not understand about the ability though is that reduces all equipped skills CDs which means that, yes. Core skills/utility and even untamed skills that wouldn't even be that outstanding without FF will inevitably get balanced around the fact that FF let's you spam them which then would also hurt non FF untamed anyways. It's not like core ranger utility is even that great to begin with so needing 2 slots for cc is inconsiquential ALSO storm spirit is core, not just axe 4. Frankly without FF untamed would just be horrible and at that point why not just use core ranger with nature magic and provide alac? Or better yet just play soulbeast? FF needs to go because it's enabling a spec that is otherwise uninspired garbage and for as long as FF exists these issues can't easily be addressed because FF is the entire spec, not untamed.

Bit of a late response on my part mb, but no lol. The fact that you don't use damage is inconsequential. The whole point of the class is that you have an energy mechanic instead of long CDs, but the problem is that revs ability to generate energy is limited. You don't "use" the ability in your damage rotation, but you sure as crap use the energy that you need to cast it in the rotation. GS 2, 3 and 5 use energy.. sword 2 and 4 use energy. Channeling IO and jalis hammers use energy. There is really just no other class (that I can think of immediately, though with that being probably thief since initiative has mostly the same issues as energy) that has the issue of gimping their damage to use cc. Rev makes the trade off of having energy to have powerful utility with low cool downs, but they're stuck with set utility bars based off their 2 legends choices with both slots being locked in once you enter combat. The fact of the matter is that if I use Jade winds I'm stuck auto attacking for pretty much the rest of the time I'm in shiro. And if I'm in shiro to begin with (which you will be because IO = god tier DPS especially after the buff meaning you want to stay in shiro and channel IO for as long as you can) you never get the option to press Jade winds because you will always be below 50 energy unless you specifically do not cast your damage abilities to conserve energy. And for what? Why tf would I swap into SHIRO for break bar damage? 50 energy for 300 break bar damage is probably the most laughable thing in the game. Guess how much moa signet on Mesmer does? 600 with 0 cost to the Mesmer other than their elite slot which has no other good options anyways. Guess how much forced engagement does? 700 with 1/5th of the energy cost. Guess how much staff does? Up to 1200 depending on hitbox size for the amount of hits you can land with an additional 80 from staff 3 and 60 from staff 2. Renegade shortbow 4 and 5 do 200 each. Oh and ventari elite does 400 while also healing for a large amount and cleansing condis (is also a blast finisher with a light field in the utility kit while costing 15 less energy than jade winds). Anet could literally make jade winds cost 10-20 energy and at best you might get jade winds included in a rotation so that power rev isn't just "turn on IO/jalis hammers and auto attack while pressing x weapon ability often enough"... Which they actually buffed despite already being the only real playstyle btw so hard doubt that it would even be used then considering how overtuned IO for damage. Revenant is supposed to be about options, but mostly the way it works right now is anything but. The energy costs for a vast majority of core rev utility are blatantly overtuned for what they actually provide.. especially so in shiro. I'm sorry but I will never be able to comprehend how anyone can defend this horrendous ability or how anet could ever believe upping the power coefficient a bit would ever make it worth dumping 50 energy into. The fact that the only way to comfortably use your utility skills without locking yourself out of casting basically any other ability besides your auto chain is to either take a specific trait or be core rev is ridiculous. Traits shouldn't be bandaids that allow your class to be engaging.. the class should be engaging baseline and then traits make you stronger. The crazy part is that rev already has a function baked into the class that allows it to be engaging and could actually make spending such ridiculous amounts of energy worthwhile in ancient echo. Too bad you lose it the second you slot an espec into your traits, lol. Either way if you want cc you will get more than you could every need by just swapping into jalis instead and using forced engagement and your staff abilities, so if you're using shiro for cc I'm kinda convinced that you are objectively playing the class in an extremely suboptimal manner.