Ruisen.9471

AoE rings from allies add alot of unnecessary visual complexity to a game that already has too much visual complexity, but the current disable aoe rings option also disables half the boss mechanics from showing up on the screen. If would be nice if they can be 2 different options so you can turn off the ally ones and still see boss mechanics.

This is essentially a similar idea to power weapons in shooters: you drop a conjured weapon (you no longer get a second one), and you have a short duration to do a big burst of DPS with it. All the skills (including autoattack) would do much more DPS than regular skills, and Firey Greatsword would be similar and allow you to ramp up your condi stacks very quickly. The advantage over the kits idea: With conjured weapons as kits, either they would be best in slot and you'd always take them, or they're not the best DPS and you'd never take them. This is the case for most ele DPS utilities. But the power weapon idea allows conjured weapons to be a good situational pick, on encounters where you have short burst phases. Also, it would be nice if Tornado does does the CC more much more quickly (one hit with CC every 0.8 seconds) so that it would be more on par with moa, this elite skills does literally nothing in PvE since the CC hits way too infrequently. Since getting all of the CC takes several pulses, the total CC should be larger than moa to compensate.

They did this in HoT and most living world chapters so I have no idea why they stopped doing this.

My guess is that alot of people who are still willing to play the meta are people who a) like hard content b) are willing to put effort in order to do said hard content c) have joined public discords with other like minded people to do this. I only ever run DE with public discords, and the average DPS in VERY high (a dozen or more people doing 20k+ during burns) for a pug group of randoms, these are people doing enough DPS for strike missions. I don't think they have much of a choice for this though, if they want this content to be hard, it will only attract people who like hard content. Map cap is still a big problem though.

It happens even when its the first time I've been downed. If it hits you, it instantly kills you.

Is it a bug that the mechanic kills you completely instead of taking you to downstate? Even raid mechanics often only downstate you if you miss it.

This is probably a controversial opinion, but I'm glad staff Weaver is dead. Staff weaver was absolutely horrid to play in raiding. You lose a huge amount of DPS if the boss moved, you had really restricted mobility because Icebow 4, Meteor shower, (and FGS 4 to a lesser extent since it makes you immobile during animation) required you to be stationary, and the rotation is much longer then the current Power sword weaver rotation. You were also reliant on huge hitbox, which rarely exists. Sword weaver pretty much doesn't have any of these problems. They could increase actual ele DPS to be closer to benchmarks if they halved conjured weapon CD and remove the second one that you place on the ground. The one you place on the ground always gets lost anyway.

Weaver used to be ranged, staff was meta for years until they nerfed it to the ground.

But is there really a difference between core ele experience and playing catalyst without a hammer? On a serious note, elite specs use core traits too, so buffing core would also power creep every class. I think it would be much easier to increase variety if they could just balance different weapons to be viable.

I don't think Anet ever figured out the role for Tempest. It was designed as a support, but used as a DPS because Druid existed and it was a great DPS for awhile. Would be nice to get alac. Weaver really just needs higher DPS. It was actually played in raids back when it benchmarks over 40k. A higher DPS ceiling also lowers the skill floor because it means beginner rotations will also do better.

Earth and water won't break your DPS if you skip them on tempest, so you could just juggle between Fire and Air, which makes it a pretty easy rotation with few skills. Gale song trait also pretty much gives you a free pass every 40s (think it used to be shorter?) if you missed a dodge on bosses with knockdown like Gorseval, which helps a ton when you're new to the boss. Overloads also break stun, so you have permanent stun break built into your rotation. On tempest, you never need to check if its time to switch attunements because it is very obvious when overload air ends, and also fresh air means no CD switching back to air afterwards. Less time keeping track of switching attunements is more time looking at the boss mechanics. I also find Wash the pain away on tempest to be much more effective at saving you in raids then the heal skills you get as weaver, because you get healed during the cast instead of after the cast. Power weaver got a reputation for being insanely hard because the meta used to be using staff, which had an extremely long rotation before the rotation repeats, was extremely immobile, and it took you a long time to get access to your CC skills if you needed them. It was hell on earth to play on most bosses.

I run this in EoD strikes and it performs really well in actual strike boss scenarios. I'm usually only 1-2k behind top DPS in pug strikes just from autoattack lol. You get pretty good movement from shift signet and passive movespeed increase, so the range isn't an issue in practice. The amount of time it gives me to pay attention to boss mechanics is really nice though - builds like these are probably the only way Anet can get people to even consider looking at harder content.

I love mechanist. As an ele refugee, I now have a great time laughing at weavers who are furiously trying to click all 25 buttons in their rotation just to do the same DPS as me autoattacking the boss.

Most MMO's don't really teach you how to be good enough at your class to do raid content either, at least the ones I've played. You used to ask your guild before the days of googling it, now you just google it. I mean, people who people who don't want to do raid content will ignore it even if you put it in the game.

I don't think difficulty is the issue. HoT metas required a huge step up in player coordination at release, and yet people still play it 7 years later. Triple Trouble was extraordinarily difficult at release and its still done everyday at reset. DE meta is just broken and badly designed. The difficulty doesn't feel fair or rewarding. There are a huge number of metas in the game - having a very few difficult ones does not mean the game is no longer easy, because you still have a large variety of easy ones you can choose to play. I don't agree that old metas should be buffed though. People SHOULD have the option to go chill in an easy meta.

The AoE circles for alot of oneshot mechanics in end of dragon strikes do not render if your character model limit it set to low (aka pretty much every AoE circle in Xunai Junkyard strike, lazer beam in Kaning Overhang Strike) . This is extremely confusing since it is commonly set to low for anyone running around in meta events, and people new to strikes will get oneshot without seeing anything and be left wondering why they died. This made my intro to strikes experience alot worse because PuG groups will likely very kindly inform you that you failed obvious mechanics that you couldn't even see.

You can miss CC for so much reasons. 3 CC bars today. One was broken, but boss instantly phased to wisps so we got no exposed (this seems to happen alot for some reason). Second CC bar came up while the whole squad was at tail. If you're already at tail its too late to run back to the head to CC it. Boss seems to change sides ridiculously often now since last patch. You can overcome these problems with enough DPS, but an open world meta that relied on using DPS to overcome bad luck is not very good design.

This must have been designed by the same person who looked at Ele and said "ele isn't pressing enough buttons in the rotation yet" and created catalyst.

Catalyst is going to have to get something very compelling for people to be willing to take up the much harder rotation for Quickness support. Weaver was really hard, Catalyst is another step up.

Now that druids aren't dominant, Tempest could see play as a heal support. Tempest could also be made into a boon support DPS that gives out one of the important boons needed in raids.

I think it'll be a week or two before people get the new info that whirlpools are now reasonably breakable.

Did it again today, boss switching sides seems to have dramatically increased this patch. Nerfs seem to help though, I guess if you can't fix the boss, just nerf it so that the bugs don't matter.

They buffed the rewards quite a bit, you actually get rewards from Levi and other metas now. I'm not sure why people are still so upset as to quitting the whole game over the DE meta. There are plenty of metas that people didn't like and simply died, DE will probably join them eventually, so this isn't anything new. You don't even need to do it to get the turtle now. As for the meta itself, its unfortunate that its poorly designed such that its not always possible to CC the boss during CC bar phase due to tail. Having a CC check was also probably not a good idea - as Erise's video showed, the CC check is easily confused with a DPS check, because if you fail to break CC within the time limit, you don't get exposed DPS phase. Miss the DPS phase and you will run out of time and people will accuse each other of being bad DPS.

I don't think EMP is really the issue though. EMP isn't actually better then the CC skills that most classes have access to. But without EMP it would be impossible to get a big group to do CC since most people probably don't know what their CC skills are. Trying to force people to know what their CC skills are is probably not a good hill to die on.

Actually, now that you mention it, I can start to see where they came up with the numbers for the DPS check. If people are doing 5k on average, then with the 25% damage buff from DE that puts people up to 6k DPS average. The fight is designed around burning the boss during exposed phase and after wisp phase, so adding in the 30% DPS from exposed, and you'd expect people to be doing 7-8k DPS during the DPS phases of the fight (even more for condi since its 100% condi increase), using the same gear they were doing 5k DPS on octovines. That means, if they can guarantee that the boss will stay put during exposed, and not have a CC bar right after it moves, as well as adding in 1-2 additional CC bar phases (an open world group should be allowed to fail CC 1-2 times out of 4 or 5), that should push up success rates. Failure of CC phase should also be more telegraphed and be obvious to everyone, so that people know its the CC and have something to learn from next time, instead of just thinking that its just bad luck.