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Elementalist - Shortbow - Arcanist Guardian - Warhorn - Bard/Harper Mesmer - Longbow - Planewalker Revenant - Dual Pistols - Deliverer Necromancer - Hammer - Abomination Warrior - Focus - Kinetic Knight Ranger - Scepter - Feyspeaker Thief - Warhorn or Torch - Pirate/Saboteur/Arsonist Engineer - Dagger - Chirurgeon/Surgeon

Relic of the Banner Slave: Your banners now provide quickness for 7.5 seconds.

A raid mode where you get randomly assigned especs and need to work around it.

I would trade any trait for spellbreaker to have an illusionary weapon condi implementation.

In which game mode??

For Condi that would be disastrous. Everyone will go 6 Condi damage and swap their 3 stat options eg. Sinister to Vipers. Condi and bleed duration/precision mix will allow virt's to convert rampagers to vipers too. For power, a lot of auto builds like rifle mech, LI deadeye D/D, these were heavily affected during the relic patch as there are no effective relics that function well with autos, eg. Golemancer. I think the unique options should not be removed from these runes but be implemented back into the less powerful runes but leave the overpowered ones alone.

Nice try, but the 6th bonus 10% condi damage is not equivalent to 125 condi damage especially on builds that can cap CD.

At this point in time you might as well rename it to Superior Rune of the Condimancer.

Illusionary Weaponry (trait): Your power is reduced to 0. Every boon removal skill or weapon skill hit that cost a resource/has a recharge inflicts torment. All damaging conditions inflict torment instead. Your attacks don't grant adrenaline. I propose that it should replace Guard Counter or Slow Counter Synergises with Weapon Skills Sword Autos Final thrust (<50hp) Flurry 9x (cleave) Cyclone axe (cleave) Dual Strike 2x Whirling Axe 15x (cleave) Bladestorm 7x (cleave) Axe autos won't work and deal 0 damage, but sword autos will have bleed that inflicts torment instead. Using fire weapons such as bow and torch is a downgrade. Utility skills Banner of Discipline Break Enchantments Precision skills do proc bleeding that is now converted to tormenting and players will effectively hit condi duration cap with tormenting runes and sigil. This negates the need for expertise. Rabid and seraph stats will be used once condi duration cap is hit. Play like how the W/Me of old used to do in GW1.

In gw1 W/me often used illusionary weaponry to bypass blocks and physical armor. I think torment is a good candidate. I believe it can be balanced. In PvP what it means that even if you trigger a channeled block, the ticks don't end and continue to hurt. It was what W/me was meant to do. Now we don't even have spellbreaker, we just have breaker. Put the spell back in spellbreaker.

if virtuoso can have jagged mind with almost no tradeoffs, spellbreaker can have easy condi triggers.

Fire ele camping works on tempest at 40k dps now. I think they should support camping other elements on tempest. Otherwise firebrand or condi willbender are other options. For ice eg. Condi reaper is the first thing that comes to mind. Planning is needed so each will retain their identity. I think each espec adds a lot of flavour and variety to play. Soulbeast removes the pet mechanic. Mechanist removes the toolbelt. Scourge removes the second health bar. Spectre removes steal for shroud. Bladesworn removes bursts for a weapon kit. Virtuoso removes clones and so on. I think tempest can have a workaround passive grandmaster trait that allows mastery of a single element eg. Elemental bastion - switching attunements causes you to have elemental conditioning status which grants elemental bastion after 10s. Elemental bastion: Provides a permanent stat bonus based on the elemental attunement. You lose elemental bastion when you switch attunements. Fire - Condi damage and Vitality Water - Power and Healing Power Air - Precision and increased movement speed Earth - Expertise and Toughness

There is a bit of delay in response as players need to gear up and adjust to the new meta. Sometimes the player shift isn't fast enough to reflect the power shift as some op builds gets nerfed into oblivion. Unfortunately, ANet's nerf bat has very little restrain and you can see some classes being dominant and then crashing right after. However, almost every auto-build has preferred popularity, demonstrating the playerbase preference for easy builds rather than optimal builds. Here is a summary of the chart. I am not a historian, but I will try to mention all the important highlights, at least the ones that are significant to me. Mesmer Chrono has always been popular ever since it could do 10 man boons and remained popular even when it couldn't, its still popular as it is the identity of GW2. Chrono is expanding and will continue to expand further. This is because it has one of the best support utilities can has the flexibility of going both alac and quickness. No other espec can do that. Although Virtuoso (arguably not a mesmer), has a bigger marketshare, only because auto condi sceptre is kitten and there are no good condi autos for chrono. Mirage is not exactly underpowered under the right hands but it isn't exactly monkey science either. Its play rate will remain low and the very unfortunate confusion nerf recently has hit it real hard without any incentive to play it. Chrono already provides alac so there is no reason to take extra measures to play another alac class in the mesmer line. Mesmer is recommended for: Everyone Necromancer Scourge is like the legendary pokemon that is banned from tournaments. Sometimes I even forget I have a dodge button. Even Raid Academy says they will not consider validating Scourge raid logs, but everyone uses a masterball to catch it. Its not a particularly good healer, but when you raid, you bring 'enough heals', you don't need full harriers to complete raids and its one of the only especs that can sliding scale DPS into a healer to clear raids faster for exp teams. It can also do niche roles, like pylons, but unfortunately the snake can rarely pierce through the ground and not give aegis, making it unpopular to tank where group Aegis is needed (eg. Deimos). Harbinger is least popular despite providing quickness. On very mobile fights, harbinger has issues with uptime, which is a big design problem. Reaper is the power alternative (fairly recently buffed) to Scourge, which is kitten on power. Condi reaper is pretty strong as well but has a low marketshare because it relies on ice fields which is the rarest field in the game. Necromancer is recommended for: Players who can't dodge Elementalist Elementalist is fairly popular until 2017. Tempest is a gigachad healer that provides great green numbers, but green numbers are not what we need. A 180 radius restriction means might duration may be suboptimal in team fights and this requires more tricks to maintain on moving bosses. Some players will stay and main an ele healer, but a lot of marketshare will be lost to the next gigachad healer: Druid. Weaver and catalyst have too many buttons to press and the LI versions can hardly beat Tempest camping fire (39k) or tempest w 2 elements 43k or tempest w 3 elements (45k) in DPS. Don't get me started on how lousy heal quick catalyst is, its no wonder it has no marketshare. All 3 have reasons to be shunned in favor of better classes. Elementalist is recommended for: Nobody Engineer Mechanist Engineers are traditionally one of the least played classes due to complexity, kits and having less weapons to choose from and holosmith was the only viable DPS alternative, its not even good. Scrapper with recent updates is a pretty good as a healer and quick DPS, leaving holosmith collecting dust. Everything changed with the dawn of mechanist and its autoattack rifle. Despite DPS being nerfed to the ground, it is a very reliable alac provider both (when the mecha listens to you), both support DPS and healing roles, and two relatively powerful auto attack weapons, hammer and rifle. For condi, p/p plus full signet is pretty much half automated. When you play mechanist, you don't play the game, the game plays you. Mechanist is recommended for: Sleepy Joe Ranger There are only two meaningful especs in this group: Druid for its gigachad heals and recently with the update, condi DPS is really strong now. Soulbeast allows people who hates pets but like bows to actually play by removing the pet mechanic. It does both solid condi and power DPS. It is a very selfish handkite but is more popular than warrior or herald. Untamed Unplayed, please ignore this entry. Mechanist has replaced this class as the default pet DPS class. Ranger is recommended for: Gun-haters Thief Thief is a fairly unpopular class because of the time investment of complex interactions, multiple build loadouts required and having multiple equipment investment to match those load outs, legendaries are not enough, with some load outs, you can do crazy things, like solo Cairn, solo towers (and at least have portal as a backup). That kind of dedication is not what most players have signed up for. A deadeye revival occured during the Alac/Quickness balance patch which made it superpowered, but Anet's knee jerk hammered it back down, despite fairly useless solo or OW due to reliance on other teammates. The only way to make thief great again is Deadeye Quick-Heal 2024. Secretly, there are a few raiders who still enter raids/strikes with P/P (33333) deadeye or staff (22222) dodge daredevil so they can deal decent damage while having lunch at the same time, because F1-5111111 is too difficult. If rifle mecha didn't exist, these auto build would have been more popular, watch this space for staff/pistol buffs. That being said, spectre remains a fairly popular efficient eSpec because its a necromancer. Nothing is as inelegant as waving a chicken drumstick at your enemies. I main a thief now because I have a credit card, lots of gems and able to buy multiple equipment slots for each load out wishing that one day I don't need to swap characters for quick heal. Thief is recommended for: If your team has no alacrity Revenant Herald When HOT was first released revenant was less played because not everyone had the expansion and not everyone has rev unlocked. But that slowly changed. The original firebrigade team dominated the PVE meta for at least half of the raiding lifespan from 2019 to 2022, providing quickness and alacrity through firebrand and renegade. Anet had 2 daughters, and initially they preferred the younger daughter, Firebrand. Fortunately for rev mains, Anet has a new son, Quick Herald, and with a new son, goes all the inheritance, being best in slot for everything, even niche roles. Revenant is recommended for: Wanting the best quickie in the game. Guardian Firebrand When raids were first released, people needed a way to explore with 100% protection, defensive skills, aegis, burst heals and 25k DPS (7k was the average then). Hammer DH was one of the easiest ways to perform raids blind without pressing buttons. However, as people started to learn how to dodge and avoid damage, easy builds became less popular and players started chasing the stars. Better knowledge share on the wiki and online benchmarks also progressed that trend. Hammer DH fell out of favour, being a relatively selfish build compared to the alternative, Anet's favourite daughter, Firebrand, especially for fractals. Firebrand is recommended for: Firebrand Warrior In 2017 I used to main a warrior when berserker was so powerful. I switched to other classes in POF, because not having a ranged weapon is so kitten and I didn't want to be a banner slave. When someone complained that their class needs a buff, I'd mention spellbreaker and win the argument because spellbreaker deserved a buff more than anything else. It was unusable in all game modes, even pvp. When EOD came back and they did the quickness banner kitten, I mained warrior again. It was the best time for warrior. Warrior could do quickness on all its especs and even core. Spellbreaker was BiS for hand kite, being able to provide quick and hand kite at the same time. Spellbreaker was particularly buffed, with the dagger changes, and again later, hammer breaker. I am very sad that my spellbreaker can't give quickness on HK anymore, but it is less selfish than soulbeast. Now with the latest update and quickness from banners removed... if you don't play berserker, I'm not sure what you are doing. Recommended for: As long as you don't bladesworn

Heal chrono uses sceptre.

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