Roadkizzle.2157

Well the 2 skills shown so far aren't CC skills unless exploding the Beacon also Dazes. The remaining skills are the clone, phantasm, and auto attack. I don't really expect any of those to be CC skills. The CC is normally on the other skills.

No. The Texas Rangers use clubs. At least they did this year to win the World Series. I didn't see any rifles out on the diamond.

You and I must have different games installed. As I've said. I've played much more Chronomancer in GW2 than ANY other spec in the game. The Chronomancer clearly has the highest skill floor of any Mesmer build except for the Axe Mirage which is higher. The Chronomancer absolutely has the worst sustain of any Mesmer spec. The Chronomancer is the piano spec with the most rigid rotation to do anything. It fails on every count that you say a casual spec should do.

You do realize that you can play Mirage multiple ways right? You are describing Axe Mirage, which is the most complicated Mesmer spec. The recommended Mirage spec is the Staff Mirage though. With Staff Mirage you just keybind Dodge to any key on your keyboard and you press that button every few seconds as soon as your endurance bar fills up enough. Doing nothing more than that, maintaining some clones, and just using your movement keys will let you easily solo anything.

All of those are well and good. But it doesn't matter when you're only doing 20k damage instead of the 35-40k you'd be doing with a Condition build or with the other specs.

10k DPS in a meta that was averaging 45k DPS? The weapon at that point doesn't matter in the slightest. Just whichever one gives the most Life Force probably.

Well we know more now from the teaser trailer. We know skill 3 and 5. Skill 3 has a heal but you can't provide the boons from that skill to use it. The proposed changes to the Inspiration traitline though unless they add a Cooldown looks like they may heal every time you use a Shatter though. If they don't add the cooldown from Healing Prism to the shatter skill then healing will likely be higher by just shattering as much as possible instead of trying to use weapon heal skills or Mantras. The clone and phantasm skills are not known but it looks to me like there is only ever one illusion in the video so I'm expecting the clone generation to not be as fast as Scepter.

How would the Scourge support Power swords? The Swords with the damage buffs from Reaper and Harbinger traitline's in mind to get the proper damage levels needed for end game content. Without the Scourge having any damage buffs for strike damage how are you thinking you'll build a Scourge to make use of power swords? I had tried making a Scourge making use of the great life force generation of the dagger and taking advantage of the AOE sand skills... But it just didn't work. Without condi damage I just don't see the swords being better for Scourge.

Yup. It looks like I combined the first and the second part in my mind. It looks like I was being overly optimistic. So it looks like the pistols only have synergistic effects with each other. To me it seems. If MH Pistol has the same DPS as Sword and OH pistol has the same DPS as Sword then Pistol/Torch and Sword/Torch, or Sword/Pistol should all be comparable and players just choose which one... BUT if they chose Pistol/Pistol then they'd get free extra Burning Stacks on every attack boosting the DPS higher than any other weapon combination. But if Pistol/Pistol is comparable DPS to Sword/Torch then Sword/Pistol and Pistol/Torch will be lower DPS and not worth using.

But the Sword, Scepter, and Axe don't add additional damage to whatever Offhand is used either. Pistol and Torch has to be comparable to Sword and Torch. But if the Torch does more damage with the Pistol than it does with the sword then to be comparable builds the pistol will have to do less damage on its own.

You're confusing ethics for goodness You're giving great suggestions on how to be an ethical Necromancer... But is it really "good"?

The teaser videos show skills that aren't mentioned and have been showing the majority of the toolkit. They describe the leap and an AOE devouring Life Steal. But in the trailer they show dual waves going to enemies which seems like it'll be OH 5 because it uses both weapons. There are also single wave ranged attacks shown. If the swords are designed to be melee weapons then it seems like such a big stretch of the imagination that they would not have landed not even a SINGLE attack in melee in the trailer. There aren't any viable Power builds for Scourge or Harbinger. There are 3 available Power weapons for the Necromancer though. Adding a 4th one will not suddenly make a power Scourge viable. And if the weapon won't be viable for Scourge then why the hell would they be obligated to avoid putting a leap on the weapon that doesn't mesh with Scourges gameplay. The leap on Sword 3 will synergize very well with Sword 4. Leap into the middle of a bunch of enemies then suck the life out of all of them before dodging back away from the melee. If the swords are 100% range then the leap will make MUCH more sense than the Engineer jump attack. If for no other reason then to get even more enemies in range of the AOE attacks.

You only use the flip skills when you can afford to lose the life though. They mention in the teaser that the swords are good at keeping you alive but the flip skills give you the ability to burst damage as needed. Greatsword also has Blinding Night dark field and Whirl finishers giving Life Steal. But they don't feature those abilities as sustain. The life stealing on the swords was one of the most highlighted features on them. There's no way they're going to be worse than dagger.

The best hope is for them to change the Dagger Life Siphon to an AOE heal and redo Dagger 3 into something useful so the Dagger will actually be a Support weapon. It no longer has a place as a selfish Power weapon.

Either that... Or the new weapons just obsolete all 3 existing ones... Which it looks like that's the case to me. The only thing that there could be for the existing weapons over the swords is DPS. But if the DPS isn't high enough on the swords then they are dead on arrival. The Swords are not support weapons. If their DPS is below the meta then they won't have a place. Why TF would anyone take daggers over the new swords? The dagger has a lifesteal attack and a Self Bleed to Bleed the enemy... That's IT. With the swords just what they've shown you get so much more. You get the self healing, you get damage, you get flexibility from range, you get mobility, you get self sacrifice. If the self healing is worse then dagger than it really wouldn't be worth highlighting in this trailer as a feature of the weapon. What really does the Greatsword have? It has 2 cleaves and the AOE blinding. It has the pull but that is SO bad as to be effectively useless. The Greatsword has Whirl finishers. But Necro mainly has Dark fields so it does life steal but those are negligible. Condi Reaper loves the ice bolts but there is only one Ice Field and from experience it doesn't last long enough to use the weapon whirls and Shroud 4 is the Whirl finisher to use for that.

First I'm really excited for the swords for my Reaper. I don't see myself using any other weapons for it based on the introduction. I dislike this because previously Dagger was the power life steal blood magic weapon with sacrificing your health to empower your damage. Axe was the power ranged weapon. Greatsword was the power AOE cleave weapon. But now we have sword which is described as a Power ranged cleave weapon with great life stealing. And it is the only Necro weapon with leaps. There just is zero space left for the three existing Power weapons without a complete overhaul of each one. There'd be much more room in the design space to make a melee condi weapon without pushing out Pistol or Scepter.

Did you watch the video? The Necro is in melee range for less than a second between the leap attack and immediate dodge back out of melee. EVERY single attack in the trailer is at range.

The Scourge seems to be the spec least capable of using this. Everything in the Scourge line is focused on Burning and Torment. At least the Harbinger gets increased Strike damage based on Blight. Sword seems to have good life steal for the reduced health on Harbinger but it's power comes from sacrificing life so that may be too risky for Harbinger. The weapons look to me to really be geared for Reaper.

But you'll still be able to take those utilities with an Offhand pistol. The numbers have to be set so that dual pistols with damaging utilities are balanced with DPS classes. There is only a single skill that is missing from the description that you'll get with Pistol/Shield. But regardless Pistol/Pistol will have to be relatively balanced with the other builds in the game and the Mainhand Pistol will be giving a big boost in damage to the multi attack Offhands that other weapons don't give. Mainhand pistol MUST be lower damage than other weapons or there will be no reason to take the Axe for example.

Three thoughts from this: 1. This weapon looks fun as heck. 2. The weapons will be useless for Scourge and Harbinger unless they add traits that work with Power damage. 3. The Swords look to be completely destroying Dagger as life stealing power weapons, Greatsword for Power cleave, and Axe for power ranged. A rare triple whammy.

Well Sword 4 seems to do 5 hits and Sword 5 does 2 hits against 3 targets. So that will be a respectable amount of additional burning. The Torch has the Flamethrower ability with 10 hits. Will each of those hits trigger the Symbol? I don't know and I don't think we'll find out until beta. Likewise the Focus DOT does 9 hits... Will those trigger? I don't know. But the Mainhand pistol really seems to be a synergistic DPS weapon relying on boosting off hand weapons... Mainhand pistol on its own will have to be lower damage than Axe because Axe doesn't boost the damage of the offhand weapons. If Mainhand pistol does comparable damage to the Axe but also adds damage to the Torch then Pistol guardian will destroy the use of any other weapon on a DPS guardian.

I'm not basing my concern on the video but by considering that they've told us what 2 of the 3 Mainhand pistol attacks do. They describe the Auto attack as a Fast Projectile because the speed of the actual projectile is a concern in a lot of ranged attacks. The slow Projectiles like many scepters and staffs make it hard to hit fast moving targets because of the time between the projectile leaving you and getting to the target. They are mentioning the projectile speed as a reference to this. The animation does seem to be normal pistol animations... Which I think always feels very slow. There isn't a single pistol in the game with a Chain Auto attack and they didn't mention the AA having a chain so I'm expecting it to follow the trend. So it is just going to be a single shot that causes bleeding. Nothing to write home about and Guardian doesn't have any traits to boost Bleeding. Skill 3 is the Symbol Shield skills are defensive. So that means that you will only have Pistol 2 and the slow single shot auto attack to make use of the Symbol. I think the pistol will be good as an offensive weapon when paired with the Torch, Focus, and possibly sword. I just don't think Shield will be able to leverage the Pistol symbol and I don't think the Mainhand pistol will have the damage on its own to carry the build. The pistol symbol is about synergizing with other attacks but if you aren't bringing other weapons capable of capitalizing on this then you're going to be leaving a big part of its toolkit at home.

I'm sure you would. My question was getting to my thought that it seems like everyone gets so upset that their own idea of what would be a good next spec doesn't come to fruition. Yes I understand that lots of you really want a bow-harp bard spec for Mesmer... Hell I would like that too. I love the idea of bards in fantasy. But I think it's clear that the developers at Arenanet don't have that vision for the class. So I don't think there's any reason to get upset when the idea that you and the other players got in your own head doesn't materialize.

That's what I've been wanting. But I don't think it will be good at all. It seems to me the main damage will be coming from pairing the Symbol with the offhand weapon skills. The Mainhand looks to just have a slow firing single pistol shot and the symbol skill will be dependent on other weapon skills enhancing it. I don't know what the last Mainhand pistol skill will be but it would need to be very good I think to make pistol/shield be good.

Of course there are uses for interrupts and stability. I'm not arguing that. I'm just saying that I REALLY don't want to suffer through the horrible mechanics of the mantra skill type to get those when every other class gets the exact same conditions and boons without the horrible mechanics.