covahlam.6391

Honestly, this is making me a bit sad banner's weren't "improved" in a different direction. They could have converted the bundles into kits where initial activation equips the bundle and then either activating the skill again or swapping weapons stows the kit. Using the 5 skill would permanently drop the banner for the passive effect while increasing the cooldown on the kit to something like 60-80s, reducible by picking up the banner again. Ok, so basically no one ever used the old bundles for fighting and taking one that worked as I described above would probably still be suboptimal. However, it would be kitten nice to have the flexibility of another weapon, even if it's a poor man's option.

The wiki says gunsaber has the same base 10s swap cooldown (5s with disc) that regular weapons have. This is exactly what I was afraid of. Still locked into disc and now locked into a new weapon. IMO the fair thing would be for gunsaber to have an immutable cooldown of 5s.

Good points. With a second legend on swap, there is less need to take full advantage of both facets of the alliance legend.

I'm curious to see if anyone can make the alliance legend work in pvp given the limited stats from amulets and the flip over lockout mechanic. Things like protection and stability are always useful but some of the other supportive mechanics may be hard to use effectively on an offensive build. On the flipside (sorry), being locked into the archemorus skills for a time is rough on a more supportive build. In a way vindicator is a lot like druid in the way it oscillates between being totally defensive/supportive and offensive, which has not always worked very well. At least vindicator retains its weapon skills at all times and offers more than just healing, though.

Yes, I agree wholeheartedly. However, I was referring to how counterblow has actually worked in the past and then asking if that behavior has changed. Edit: I just conducted some tests against the ranger NPC in HotM. Counterblow still works as before. That is, the default behavior is to block a single ranged attack, but equipping the shield master trait modifies counterblow to block multiple ranged attacks. The block duration is honestly quite short, so the multi-block can be hard to notice if the enemy is just autoattacking. However, using counterblow against rapid fire provides a nice demonstration of this modification.

Hammer used to be popular on warrior and guardian, but then those weapons were kitten-canned by nerfs. The problem with Anet's current approach is that they're giving modernized versions of weapons to the new specs while failing to update those weapons on specs that already have them. This causes a lot of unhappiness as Mary the ele player doesn't want to play with hammer while Joe doesn't want to have to play ele in order to use his beloved hammer.

Is that even with shield master traited? Haven't really paid attention to counterblow in a while, but I know it used to only block multiple ranged attacks if shield master was equipped. On another note I've been running offhand mace the past few days, and it is... surprisingly not bad? Been pairing it with sword and GS on swap; rest of the build is basically standard strength spellbreaker. I like how tremor + savage leap extend my reach. Crushing blow + final thrust can be a nice 1-2 punch to finish someone off, too. Granted this has been in unranked. Back on topic, as has been suggested many times, tremor should be a cone rather than projectile. Crushing blow feels a bit like a strong auto attack and could have slightly higher reach or even a 50-100 unit dash. For mainhand mace I think I'd even be happy with an F1 leap, reliable block on 2, and one of these confusion on CC effects floating around this thread. Of course the auto chain could be faster as well. Separately, mace would already be a lot better if body blow was basically lightning rod 2.0.

They've doubled-down on a certain class identity instead of listening to what players want. This dogmatism has always been troubling IMO. Seemingly give players options but then make most of these options so subpar that players are forced into certain playstyles in order to be competitive.

Let's all hope for the latter. These could be powered by adrenaline. Utilities entirely reliant upon the new mechanic would be a disaster. While holosmith exceed skills are affected by heat, they still provide standalone effects. Hard to see the same for cartridge utilities unless the concept of a 'cartridge' is interpreted very liberally.

Yeah, perhaps that would be the best outcome given the current state of things, essentially three weapon sets available.

As we all know, core war has basic, telegraphed attacks and mostly lacks scaling defenses (this post relates to competitive settings). It also has poor ranged options that lead many to using a double melee setup. Berserker improves a warrior's ability to land attacks somewhat at the cost of defense and being even more limited outside of berserker mode. Spellbreaker provides scaling defense via full counter and improved offensive utility with dagger and boon removal. However, most would agree that even with the spellbreaker traitline, warrior is still a bit lacking in terms of defense/sustain and ability to land its hits. In a sense a "modern" warrior might look like a fusion of berserker and spellbreaker that improves upon the advantages of both specs. I was really hoping for mainhand pistol because it might have provided an anti-kiting tool and allowed warriors to provide pressure while choosing the right moment to engage in melee. Such a tool would obviously help compensate for the current lack of damage mitigation available. Frequently taking 5k in random damage just for engaging a target is currently a huge problem. So only getting offhand pistol is a bit of a disappointment in this regard. I think I also spied an evasive roll ability, presumably tied to the offhand pistol. This is actually sort of worrisome given that 1) the similar ability on rifle is bad and 2) with all mainhand weapons being melee, such an ability may actually help the enemy kite the warrior. That being said, some of the gunsaber attacks look like they extend one's range a bit and may be available to every build taking the new spec. With the right utilities (a big if given core utilities and the pattern from previous elite specs) and traits , some scaling defenses could still be on the table. So in short there are a few worrying signs from the preview, but there's still the chance the spec could address some of the current warrior shortcomings. I don't want to be too hasty in passing judgement as after all, we have only seen a small preview thus far.

I merely dabble in elementalist, but I'm really hoping for a revenant-inspired spec. Primarily ranged but with a port or two and damage reduction built into the traits and utilities. For such a "high magic" class, elementalist strangely lacks shadow steps.

Kits = no more mandatory discipline?