supporthero.4520

It's not about Firebrand not being able to clear content. The reworked Firebrand does even more damage and is probably easier to play too. It's about the feel of the reworked rotation. They removed the last bit of spec identity DPS Firebrand had by turning tomes into initiatve fed engi kits. Please read past the first few lines above and you will understand what I'm talking about. If I wanted to play thief or engi I would play those.

You are taking my topic about the fun DPS Firebrand in instanced content and turning it into something completely different. This was about the fun a player has performing a rotation. This has nothing to do with meta, numbers or anything like that. You can have fun performing a rotation doing 32k dps on a full dps build if the rotation is well designed. In the last few updates we have seen buffs to many other support specs. But I don't want to turn this into another discussion about meta.

Do you play the game just to see some numbers on your screen or because you enjoy the feeling of your class/spec and you are having fun with its rotation? As I said several times above: This is not about numbers but about fun. How a build feels to play. It could do 45k dps and I would still dislike the feel.

Yesterday I wrote together some thoughts on reddit on why DPS Firebrand doesn't feel fun to play in instanced content right now. I also wanted to share my thoughts on the official forums. Maybe they will read it here:

I recorded a few attempts and went frame by frame and it seems to be anywhere from 0.2 seconds to a full second. I'm not very sure. It seems very inconsistent. I figured 0.5 seconds is a good average to write down.

Together with other guardian mains from the Snow Crows Help Desk Discord I collected a list of bugs, that may affect anyone playing guardian or it's elite specs in any game mode. I also added two points of potentially unintended behavior that has been around for some time The bugs: - The Torch 4 throw, Zealots Fire, from the trait Radiant Fire consistently disappears, if it procs while you throw your weapon charge of Zealots Fire, resulting in wasting the traited charge. This only happens, if the buff of the weapons Zealots Fire runs out, while you are casting it (after 3 seconds) and the traited proc from Radiant Fire triggers in this time -> causing the traited proc to disappear. See 3:44-3:46 in the video: https://youtu.be/Qb0F_T6AMzo?t=224 - On Firebrand, if you weapon swap immediately after casting Axe 2, you will be unable to do press any skills with a cast time for about 0.5 seconds on your swapped weapon. This happens consistently. - Greatsword 2/Whirling Wrath only creates one Combo Whirl Finisher instead of creating one for every spin the character does (in this case 3). - Axe 3/Blazing Edge is not automatically facing your character towards the enemy (if you're standing still). Meaning you are also unable to cast it without facing the target. Leading to Blazing Edge not being casted in some situations. - The damage over time effect from Greatsword 5/Binding Blade can't exist more than once on the same target. This causes issues, if two or more guardians want to use this skill to cc or causes more than one guardian player to lose out on the DoTs damage in case if they are casted around the same time. Bascially any Binding Blade debuff after the first on one target goes to waste. - When two Dragonhunters use the pull/Hunter's Verdict from F1/Spear of Justice at the same time on the same target, the buff on the target persists when it should normally disappear with the use of the pull/Hunter's Verdict. This could allow a Dragonhunter, thanks to a reset from Renewed Justice, to have 2 active tethers for Big Game Hunter, which both count towards the trait. This is not very realistic, as the timer of the first tether will still run out over time but I thought still a bug worth reporting. Edit (another bug): - If Whings of Resolve/F2 on Dragonhunter is used, while channeling Renewed Focus, the jump part of F2 will not go to the target but instead causes the character to jump in place as you can see in this video (from cat): https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/380903704808652801/1011032196804509726/Gw2-64_pIqu1gI5VQ.mp4 Potentially unintended behavior: - Some weapon skills have a long aftercast, which can be interrupted by weapon stowing or sometimes moving. This can have a big impact on someone's DPS and doesn't seem intended. Some examples: (Cast time in ms - Cast time with aftercast -> cast time without aftercast): Gs4 640ms -> 240ms (-400ms saved) Gs5 830ms -> 450ms (-380ms saved) Focus 4 670ms -> 460ms (-210ms saved) Sw3 1400ms -> 1200ms (-200ms saved) It would be nice to clarify, if this is intended. It can be argued that either it is intended, because it allows skill expression or unintended and undesirable because this makes a class unnecessarily hard to play. - Renewed Justice resets are very inconsistent. Generally resets happen in instanced content on enemies that reward experience on death but this has changed over the years and is very confusing. Below is a list of Renewed Justice resets from the SC Helpdesk Discord. Some adds on Sabetha used to give resets but this changed a year ago. Making resets more consistent and understandable would help making the class more accessible, as we have this information but a beginner does not. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Qp-SskCvNjo_d6CRDY1Vy_EUwFsbsEdAPzXh48Sj-EM/edit?usp=sharing

Someone listen to these people, they know what they are talking about. Leave Condi Guard alone, when Firebrand is the issue.

Just nerf base quickness of Firebrand traits forcing qFB to invest more stats into maintaining a healthy quickness uptime. Heal and hybrid builds won't be affected by this because their job is also to help with might generation, so they run a much higher boon duration anyway. qFB's DPS would go down to 30k and back in line with power quickness builds like chrono and scrapper. I don't think the DPS of my 8 pages rotation is problematic compared to builds like cRen that deal 43k DPS with allies. You can't run Liberator's Vow to give quickness because of the 8 Pages trait and you also can't really stack several 8 Pages cFB's in the same subgroup because of the way Ashes of the Just works. But if you wanted to change anything about cFB, you would need to rework Ashes of the Just and balance cFB's DPS from there.

Apparently it now uses up the most recent stacks up and afterwards any older stacks. That makes running more then 2 Firebrands in 1 subgroup dangerous because your stacks may expire. Please fix this new bug or just avoid this mess by reworking the skill.

It now works exactly like before the August 17th patch. They reverted all the changes. You can still steal ashes etc. That's still a lot better then what we had the last two weeks imo.

Just rework Ashes of the Just. It clearly causes too many issues.

Food has quite a big impact especially for some condition builds (like 15% burning duration on quickbrand) and some people want to know how much damage a build would do. From a benchmark you get an idea how well a build can burst in X seconds etc. Without food + utils the result would look very different. Having both would be nice but most benchmarks are pretty grinded and they don't want to do them again without food 😞

Sure they aren't the only reason for PvE balance. But that was the reason why cat wanted these changes. It would barely even impact other PvE areas but would make a big difference for condi wb in instanced content.

That's exactly why PvP and WvW have different totally balance. If you take a few seconds to look at some bigger patchnotes you will notice how they adress a lot of class balance issues for raids and fractals (instanced content). There is really no need to balance your average 1k dps soldiers gear ranger on his longbow in open world, that's just farming some events while doing something on his second screen.

Raid balance wise it would make perfect sense for willbender to deal more damage then a full dps condi firebrand, since even dps firebrand is loaded with utility to make runs smoother while willbender is more squishy and doesn't contribute as much utility to a squad. It's just a fair tradeoff to keep specs unique and rewarding between each other. You may actively chose willbender over condi firebrand because the utility in your squad is covered or because you want a condi guardian class with mobility (which firebrand doesn't have any of). That's why cat is asking for that specific buff to condi/hybrid willbender. That's your opinion vs. his opinion. Nothing to be gained here since it's clear at this point that you won't convince each other or learn anything new from this discussion.