Vennyhedgie.5369

While I completely agree in principle, there's also the other side of the coin that everyone fails to consider. The problem is that too often in PvE, mechanics are a one hit kill without it. If you play any other MMO, there's this thing called margin of error and comback mechanics. As an example, failing a mechanic in FF14 will often give you a damage increase debuff, so that if you keep failing mechanics you will eventually die. Even so, you can still be revived after being fully dead by a healer. GW2's version of the margin of error / comeback mechanic is the rally system. You get hit, you go down, so your team has to sacrifice their damage / risk taking more damage to revive you. However, this comeback mechanic is completely invalidated by attacks that leave a lasting puddle underneath you. You can't use rescue to slowly heal yourself, because the ticking damage will cancel the animation, and your allies won't be able to revive you either because you have a fat ticking damaging AoE on you. Being able to teleport allies out of danger puddles was the way to go around this type of attacks. GW2 has no way to bring players back to life after fully defeated, so having mechanics that will one hit kill you and not allow you to revive is a bit too much. Heal scourge was, until the alacrity addition, the equivalent to a Red Mage in FF14. A class that, while not excelling at damage, was often taken for its ability to comeback in encounters. There's design space for something like that. The problem is that the class became too strong when it also got acces to the ever mandated support boon duality meta, and now we're loosing the only class that had a unique support angle to it.

I mean I'd be lying if I said I cared at this point. I stopped playing healscourge when they nerfed transfusion the first time and made the sand shade duration basically unmanagable.

I understand that all class icons have a specific color pallette chosen for them (Thief being mostly grayscale with slight desaturated reds), but I think this one does need to be updated to be an exception. Follow Up and Finisher moves should have differently shaded icons, and preferably different from one another (but still similarly colored in both slots 2 and 3 in each step). Say Follow Up has stronger blue hues and then the finishers have more eye-catching golden hues, kinda like the betas.

I may have been missled then. Curse you youtube comments.

So swaping between two spears does not trigger the burst anymore. Or did it not do that before either?

I'm having fun with Ele but it definitely needs some tweaks still. I just want Volcano to have a big initial impact because all its damage is backloaded in the animation. Warrior has had the biggest glowup since beta, and from a quick test it felt pretty good now. The forums seem pretty pleased with it so I'd say that one was a success. Thief is the one I think is designed the best, but the numbers after the nerfs now feel kinda bad. Yes, I know you can probably still bench ridiculously high on Deadeye because that class is just a nightmare to balance, but that's just a golem and in realistic scenarios it's not gonna happen. However, the kit is absolutely fantastic, the way it flows from one combo loop to maintain the buff into the other one to get the stealth attack for initiative. Very clever. Reminds me of how Dragoon works in FF14 (a combo string for buff / dot managment, another one for damage bursting, looping into one another). Revenant spear feels like absolute kitten. If anything remotely moves your damage goes straight down the toilet. It also might have high damage on static golem, but using this anywhere but raids/strikes where bosses don't really move is useless. Everything else I've not had enough interest to form an opinion of. Necro should've been condi, and mesmer has some range managment that leaves me a bit puzzled.

+1 no coffee emote, received all the rest.

Lmao what

You have literally all other weapons for this. Elementalists have been asking for a power based ranged weapon since the game came out. Plus, "elemental damage" is not a thing. The only one that sort of matches is burning, but chill does no damage, bleeding is also not necessarily derived from earth magic, it just so happens to be the most commonly associated DoT effect, and air doesn't really have any unique DoT, the closest being confusion which is not in the elementalist's kit to begin with.

God I just... I can't with this weapon. It's so horrid. I was trying it against one of those gryphon champions and between how much they move and how much enemies like to spam blinds and weakness in this expansion so far this stick is just useless

I think the main reason spear feels weak is that volcano's damage is delayed compared to the animation. Volcano doesn't actually start doing damage until the spewing rocks hit something. There's this massive blast when it first appears but it deals no damage whatsoever. The spewing rocks having the same damage reduction system as meteor shower doesn't help. Volcano should do a big impact on spawn, then minor damage with the spewing rocks. It's very odd that literally all other etchings deal more single-hit damage than volcano, as they all only hit once.

Aye, didn't mean to sound like an attack or anything, sorry.

Rebindink keys is NOT an option cause it rebinds it for literally every other weapon / class in the game. The skill should just be moved to either 2 or 3.

Pretty happy with this weapon in PvE to be honest. The only thing I'm not a huge fan of is skill 4 counting as a lead attack, as it can throw some of the combos off, but it's probably something muscle memory will settle in with time so I'm not terribly worried about it. I was able to hit 30k+ on deadeye on literaly my very first try without knowing how to play the weapon (or Deadeye for that matter) much, so that's concerning. Other tests on Daredevil / Specter were like 10k lower.

Daredevil dodge buffs should've been bumped up to 10 seconds a long time ago.

Okay wow yeah this is way worse than I expected. I was trying to be optimistic but no, this is terrible guys. This has to be looked at. What is this weapon's purpose? For a condi weapon it only has one condi. Either give it more or just remove torment and have it be a pure power weapon, as the power scaling isn't even that good. Which is sad because after some tests I got better results with a power build over a condi build. But as I said back in the preview thread, my main concern is the need to spam a ground targetted skill 5. This is cumbersome and uncomfortable. Abyssal Raze should be skill 2. This is our bread and butter. At worst it should be 3, but definitely not 5.

If anything, the mines look like FF14's Dark Knight's Abyssal drain: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/D_Q0EwVLS5A/hqdefault.jpg Honestly the entire kit's effects scream Dark Knight to me, which is honestly fine for revenants since they do have a bit of that vibe, and there's a market for edgy characters. Though I wish it kinda swapped kits with greatsword in that sense.

It doesn't have a unique effect, the Dragon legendary hammers just have a different projectile effect. It can also be seen on Revenant. Juggernaut still has the liquid silver, and Sharur has the glowy rune thing.

It's been 70 for about a year now I think. Since FF14 has been brought up though, and relating to Warrior. I've always felt like warrior was just incredibly boring to play in GW2. The OOMF just wasn't there with the skill effects in terms of impact and sound. It just doesn't sell the fantasy. It feels too floaty. On the other hand at some point I tried warriors on WoW and in FF14 and both of them actually ended up being surprisingly fun, which I wasn't expecting coming from GW2. Very satisfying attack patterns, the effects feel punchy and dangerous. The devs should really look at those and take notes.

I suppose in that case you can try Celestial or Grieving stats.

But you can already do that with Greatsword and Swords...

Thief spear stole the show for me. It's 100% a PvE weapon because I don't think you're gonna be hitting many combos considering they reset if you miss one of the skills, but I will commend them for making a weapon interesting to use in PvE on thief.

Thanks for this! I actually work on game design myself so I probably care about this kind of stuff more so than other players. Talking about numbers feels kinda moot cause those are easy to tweak, and very rarely are they relevant until we get our hands on it. I think talking about how it's gonna feel to play is more important.

The slow animation is honestly what baffles me the most. This is, and I don't use the word for emphasis, literally the slowest auto attack in the game by a huge margin. It's even slower than hammer used to be, which they just fixed on recent balance patches. I'll admit, I see the value of a slow attack. If the attack is slow on a heavy weapon like the hammer, it does make it feel impactful (assuming the damage is there). Spears are NOT a heavy looking weapon, in fact quite the opposite. They look nimble and versatile. Quickness should NEVER be considered baseline. All classes in the game now have a way to give themselves quickness, and even if you don't, you still can use quickness sigils if you need to. How did that get past even to the beta is honestly shocking.

That actually doesn't sound viable at all considering Axe is almost exclusively condi and Spear is exclusively power.