Gatvin.6510

It sounds like you've mostly decided on Necro which is a good choice for variety. You can build tanky necros, ranged damage necos, support necros and with elites you can get melee damage and more support options. They're not always the top, but they are quite satisfactory in most roles. The true king of "does it all" is the Guardian, which can do basically whatever you want. With elite specs, you can get access to some very long range damage, and more support options. Regardless of what you focus on, you will still have access to excellent defensive skills, damage, and support skills, all of which are strong in group-play as well. At various times other classes will join them at the top of the versatility tiers, especially Mesmer and Ele, but the most consistent are Necro and Guard.

Using in PvP and WvW. I'm ignoring the damage numbers for now since they're the thing most easily changed anyhow. Lots of minor improvements since last time, class is still lots of fun. Weapon-swap is still a rough spot. Since we can only use Dragon Trigger from the gunblade move set, swapping weapons at the wrong time (or by accident) can lock us out of dragon trigger at critical moments and leave us with a full rage bar we have no way to empty. Survivability seems kind of low in PvP. I'm not the best at PvP, but as far as I can tell, the only way to survive long enough to actually use the Dragon Trigger is by using the shield (which also kind of kills the idea of pistol being something we "get"). So many ranged attacks are aoe-fields that the reflect is great against some specific ranged weapons (Most ranger weapons, most thief ranged weapons) and worthless against others (Most ele, most necros, most mesmer). Mobility feels like I'm playing a necro, which isn't the worst, but we also don't have a way to pressure at range. And I'm not saying we need one, the spec is obviously designed to be up-close and personal, but we need the tools to do that. The utilities aside from flow stablizer and Tactical Reload are pretty niche. They are decent for WvW zerging, where its good to be able to drop persistent obstacles to split up the zerg and reduce incoming ranged damage. This works well in WvW zergs where the number of players is so high that you're guaranteed to block some significant damage throwing it at the right time. It's pretty bad everywhere else though. I'm not going to run a utility that has good odds of being useless if I run into another melee class or basically any caster solo or in PvP. Of these, the most critical to fix are the weapon-swap issue and the mobility issue. Survivability has improved since the last round, and it could be I just need to get better. Most classes have large numbers of utilities that are basically non-starter meme abilities (I'd love to see effort put into all classes to improve their existing utilities, but it's not a trivial task). This class needs mobility to be able to fight though, and similarly needs to flow quickly in and out of Dragon trigger. It's possible one solution here is to give the Bladesworn normal weapon swap back and make Dragon Trigger the F1. I like the gunblade moveset, and if you really want to preserve it maybe you can replace the Greatsword moveset for Bladesworn warriors so if they want to use it they can, but otherwise they can use the weapons they want. Of course, not having greatsword would be awkward, as it's warrior's most mobile weapon. In theory you could give the gunblade moveset to the pistol and make it a main-hand 2handed weapon, but I imagine that would create at least as many problems as it solves. Edit: Ran another PvP gauntlet after adjusting my build to a more standard heal-shout/condi-clear setup and performed much better. Still on Shield+Axe as the base weapons and Weapon-swap mix-ups still occasionally kill me when I try to enter Dragon Trigger, but most of the time I can start daring to dragon all over the place. The stability when entering is critical to it working. That was an excellent change. TLDR: Dragon Trigger good! Lots of fun to play! Weapon Swap/Dragon Trigger interaction is still clunky. Warrior pretty slow.

Ah, nvm then. I guess my feedback is ... maybe change the name? Having a mount with "Siege" in its name that can't be used in WvW is ... off key? Clashes? It's probably fine. It's a cool looking mount. I probably won't use it.

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong, but I still only seem to be able to equip the Warclaw mount in WvW, and I don't see any rank abilities for the siege turtle.

This spec looks and feels very cool. Not sure its a good choice for numbers, but its a very stylish one. I generally avoid one-big-pet builds in games like this because the game engine just isn't well suited to fine control of multiple objects. The best implementation of this in my opinion is the Ventari Tablet. This spec kind of isn't for me, but for the people looking for something like this, I imagine its everything they wanted. With all the usual visual QoL failures engineer has (Ah I see you want to primarily use the flame-thrower. Well I hope you didn't want to use your weapon skins!) . That said, immediate functional warning flags are the removal of toolbelt skills and the lack of stunbreak in the signet kit. Toolbelt skills are a key part of the class, with some of them being the primary reason to use some of the utilities that exist. Without toolbelts, an engineer just can't equip the Medkit for example (they probably shouldn't to begin with, but that's another story) . I'm not saying that toolbelt skills should be added in addition to the Mech, tradeoffs are important, but it seems like there might be a lot of things in base-engineer that might not work with this specialization and lead to some necessary re-working down the line in order to help smooth the edges between this specialization and the other trees. One possible solution is to tie the Mech abilities to the signets as tool belt skills, which would allow more fluid selection between existing base-engineer skills and Machinist skills, but then it becomes a question of where the pet-ai selector and stow-button goes, and mixing the ranger-pet ui with the toolbelt ui is probably a mess to build. Its a cool spec, I won't use it much as-is, but I WILL use it sometimes.

Spec seems interesting, but not particularly good. Cantrips, like cantrips in basically every class, have cooldowns that are too long to be practical unless they are really good, and none of these are particularly good. They feel very similar to the existing survival skills.The elite skill could be good, but with the current numbers, the beastmaster elite is mostly better. The pet skills seems solid. Not especially interesting, but definitely useful. Having 3 more good cooldowns isn't something I'll say no to. Hammer seems fine if this class were already specialized for melee. As it stands though, ranger is kind of built around the longbow. Hammer doesn't have any defensive skills or gap-closers to facilitate the transition from longbow to melee, and the class doesn't really want to burn utility skills or traits on getting better at melee (and doesn't have many that boost melee effectiveness to start with) when longbow is its best weapon, and failing that most of the other class weapons are ranged as well. Unleash also doesn't work terribly well to encourage players to get into melee range. Unleashing the ranger increases damage taken and dealt, which again plays into the ranged attack plan. That's an effect that you want to use when your opponent can't damage you, but you can damage them. If you want to encourage players to go double-melee weapon on a ranger they need to have access to the core pieces of other melee classes: gap closers, yanks, defensive+damage bonuses at close-range. And it does need to be pretty tightly tied to melee range or using the hammer, otherwise it will just be something existing ranger builds use to do what they already do. All that is assuming the goal here is actually make a melee ranger. If that's not the goal, I really have no idea what's going on here.

So I don't love the flavor, and other thief specs still have a lot of problems, but this works. This works very well. Specter has the ability to output functional healing basically anywhere it needs to on demand, which is something no other class does. Additionally, it gives thief boatload of built-in survivability and utility by adding an extra health bar and 5 extra cooldowns to burn, both traditional weaknesses of the class. In 5-man scenarios, the healing output shines like a diamond. If I'm paired up with someone in PvP that knows what they're doing, it feels like we can't lose. I suspect it will underwhelm in large-group scenarios like Raids and Zergs. 900 range single-target is not enough to safely or effectively engage an enemy zerg. I don't personally do large pve outside the occasional world-event, but I can imagine similar problems there. Even then though, its possible the on-demand healing at current numbers will be good enough to circumvent that. There's a lot of problems with the other thief specializations that I'd rather have fixed before adding a new one, but I can't deny that Specter is pretty solidly functional and carves out a unique niche in the game. Engineer med-kit could learn a thing or two from this spec.

It seems a bit premature for complaining about the spec when they haven't done any tests on it yet. That said, its always been the blindspot in thief design. Thief gets to be highly conditionally like 10% better than other classes at damage output in exchange for losing 80-90% of the area coverage and most of the defensive utility other classes get. Its never been a good deal. Everything you try to do with a thief, you need to solve a numbers optimization problem, master very specific timings, and your reward is, you get something roughly as good as the average build from any other class. I HOPE that won't be the case here, but I also spent all of PoF hoping they would fix Deadeye rifle's coverage issues, and they don't really even acknowledge its a problem.

I do like thinking about small edges and how I can use them to win, and stuff like this is a great example of that. It doesn't change the fact that ultimately other classes can generally do anything the thief can do better. Sure we can attack around corners with trick shot. Rangers can just send their pet in. Ranged Aoe damage effects also do this quite readily, and thief has very few of these. I came back recently after a year off, and the choking gas nerf is ridiculous. Its somewhat needed because shortbow is (still) one of thief's most versatile weapons, but it was also the thief's only real persistent zone control. I'm glad we got seal area, but it requires a lot of setup to be good and uses a very precious utility slot. Unlike other classes, our "F" skills are mostly offensive in nature. Steal ports us to our opponent's position, which means we're going to use our utility skills to survive the blender we're jumping into. Seal area isn't fast enough to work into that plan so I can basically only run it if I'm sitting pretty in a friendly zerg. At that point, I might as well just play a Dragonhunter, since my traps will be faster, I will be tankier, my range will be higher, and I even get better aoe disruption with the light-cage attack. It even comes with a built-in scorpion wire on the F skills.

I've been enjoying this in PvP. DT is definitely interrupted more often than not, but I can sometimes get it off in duels, and occasionally in group fights. (if I make it through my opponent's first round of stuns, which relies a lot on "Shake it off", and the ability to reload it with the Gunblade ult.) I like the tradeoff of getting rooted by your own technique, but in a game that intrinsically punishes standing still as much as GW2 does, anything that roots you in place needs some extreme bonuses to see real use. Dragon Trigger skill 2 has some clipping issues. Probably nothing too unusual with mobility skills, but if no one's mentioned it, I'm mentioning it here. It's not unusually to find oneself suddenly inside a wall after using DT 2 Daring Dragon has some wierd interactions with pressing attack keys repeatedly, where it will queue up an attack from the normal gunblade moveset and cancels re-entering dragon trigger.

I will say, the trait that lets you Dragon Trigger until you run out of flow is really sweet. Not necessarily useful, but spamming DT 2 is a blast. Also to the people worried about getting locked in place using DT, don't worry Deadeye has the same feature and it's worked out fine for them. 😄

What doesn't work: Augments (these feel like weaker cantrips, even with the sphere bonus they have) The Hammer (I can't seem to get good rotations within element, swapping elements doesn't work smoothly because some are ranged and some are melee) The bar telling me how charged the sphere is. Its tiny. Not impossible to use, but very easy to forget about. Spheres (I think these are supposed to be more than an on-demand combo-field, but they sure don't feel that way) What almost works: Arcane + staff : So I don't usually use arcane dps abilities because they don't have a lot of utility, but with Elemental Epitome, any combo finisher will give you an aura based on your current attunement, and all the arcane dps abilities are combo finishers. This, couple with the staff's natural ability to generate lots of fields and finishers, AND your free long-duration field from the sphere, lets you actually generate enough auras to maintain the spec-specific boosts that you get when you trigger an aura. Its fun, gives me an actual reason to run arcane abilities and... still can't stack hardened-auras and elemental empowerment very well. It IS quite fun though. As far as I can tell, elemental epitome has a 10 sec cooldown per aura, so if you disrupt your normal rotation, you can stack the auras 4 times pretty rapidly for a defensive bonus (if you picked that trait) that will last 6 seconds, and an offensive bonus that will last 15. Pretty underwhelming given the hoops you have to jump through, and once you blow all your finishers, you're almost guaranteed a dead zone before you can get your bonuses again. And because you can't guarantee that your auras will be off cooldown when you need them, you're giving up the ability to specifically respond with shocking aura to melee attacks, or magnetic aura to ranged attacks, etc. You had to burn them all and hope they were useful. Looking at the traits, what we WANT to be doing here is chaining auras. We want at least one aura at all times. If I'm doing that outside of this spec, usually I look for lots of leap finishers, since those generally generate auras, which means I have to be in melee. Alternatively Tempest is pretty good at passively generating auras, but that's another elite, so we can't use that. That mean's we're really reliant on elemental epitome, and its 10 second cooldown becomes a bottleneck to the payoff for how the traits are telling me to play. If the payoff were stronger, I wouldn't mind so much since it would create a kind of rhythm to the combat, but as is either the payoffs need to be stronger, or the cooldown needs to be shorter. Conceivably both. I'm really not sure what to do with the sphere. You need to build up energy before you can use it, and then once you use it, you need to build up energy again. However, if you use it in a tight spot when its not fully charged, you trigger a regular cooldown as well, so you can't use it again for 17 seconds or something. That means we should be getting some sweet power when sphere is active right? Actually no. Its just kind of a combo field with a long, but not exceptional, duration. Death Shroud only has a 10 second cooldown, and Scourge shades trigger both on the target location AND the caster which greatly increases usability (in addition to having generally powerful effects). Also you can have up to 3 of them. There's a lot of cool space to play with for an elementalist version of the scourge if that's what spheres are supposed to do, but they don't currently do very much at all, and I usually forget I have them. Hammer is theoretically how we center Catalyst's ability to stack auras. Give every attument a leap finisher and a combo field and we're off to the races. If sphere were more usable, that would be another option for generating fields, so the hammer could focus solely on finishers. Oddly though, hammer lacks not only fields and leap finishers, but finishers of any kind, which makes it very difficult to even use elemental epitome to trigger auras. I actually don't hate the individual attunment movesets, and it feels like a middle-rage staff alternative, but orbitals muddle the brew a bit. On the one hand, they encourage me to keep swapping attunements, but on the other, they don't seem to give me much benefit, so it often feels like I'm down a weapon skill. Last, I don't know if its a bug, but the sphere abilities list a damage as "5". That could mean many things, but either way it doesn't seem right. A few of the hammer abilities have similarly low damage values on their tooltips.

I see where you're coming from. There's a big engineer vibe to this spec. Mechanically the gunblade moveset is perfectly in line with the warrior class. It has an adrenaline mechanic. Everything the moveset does could be done as standard samurai flavor, just replace the explosions with "wind slashes" or something. You're right about the utilities being off-flavor, but most of them don't effectively replace any of the existing warrior utilities, but they do expand on the options you have. If you want to block projectiles now, you have a skill for that. If your complaint is that there are problems with the base warrior class, and that this fixes none of them, sure, that's valid. I'm not sure that's what they're looking for feedback on here. If it is, they should definitely pay closer attention to what you're saying because you (I assume) know the class quite well. I certainly feel like every expac should spend like 25% of its class design effort on making sure all the previous specs are still functional. This spec is really coherent and a ton of fun to play. If you guys don't want it, I would be quite happy if they just gave it to the engineer.

Gunblade is awesome. Easily the most coherent spec of the three. Combat flows together quite well, it has useful spec-specific skills, but doesn't invalidate the base-class skills. Everything here is functional, the only thing I would worry about here is balancing numbers. The one source of clunk is that releasing Dragon Trigger locks you in to using the gunblade for the next 9 seconds, so if you're using dragon trigger regularly, you're probably never touching your "actual" equipment.

Yeah, gunblade looks awesome, but it IS a bit of a bummer that its another case where skins have 0-impact. Its a problem Engie has had since day 1 where your weapons are awesome looking, but regardless of how cool your shield is, you'll be blocking 1/2 the time or more with the Toolkit's gear shield, or spending %70 of the time with your flamethrower up, etc.

So I don't main rev, and the class has always been confusing for me, so take what I say with a grain of salt. I think at one point I had some success with a corruption build with legendary demon. That's all still true here, and having a sub-legend swap mechanic makes it even more complicated. Can these be split up into two separate normal legends? I like the sweet dodge mechanic, but it DOES leave the spec incredibly vulnerable. Dodging is critical to wvw and pvp for ducking through the worst of incoming damage/status effects. A standard wvw command a leader will give to a zerg is "double dodge through", meaning dodge twice through the enemy's damage focus. Similar situations occur in PvP, and I haven't played PvE lately, but there's certainly times I recall wanting to double dodge through a bunch of ground that's on fire. The spec in my opinion, probably needs enough defensive mobility to be able to handle those basic fight scenarios.

Rioting won't actually do anything. They're going to give us what they're going to give us. They do try every now and then. I mostly play thief when I feel like punishing myself at this point. When I feel like drinking a bottle of wasted potential and dreaming of the occasional spots where we get things other than one-shot stunlock builds.

I would have liked more explanation on these changes for sure. I'm quite unclear what the goal here was. I generally prefer WvW when siege does things other than just punch down walls once the enemy zerg is dead. The ability to place siege (such as ballistae and arrow carts) to strategically counter a medium sized group as a smaller group while defending a fortified position and waiting for backup was a quite fun, though fairly rare, occurrance. Now its kind of pointless. Just dump your supply into the wall and you'll probably last longer. In that vein, I actually really like the banners, I just think they should actually be balanced like siege engines designed purely for zerg combat. Make them cost like 100 supply and with like a 1-minute timer when dropped so you can't stack them at spawn like golems. The goal would be to force a group to make a choice of "are we going to hunt the enemy zerg and be down 100 supply for the next base, or just avoid the zerg and go for the keep?" Warclaw nerfs seem QUITE silly, especially when compared to the shade buffs. At least it still moves faster than walking speed :lol:

Still looking for keybinds to be customizable per build. Or even just per character. PLEEEEEEEEASE <3

I'm very pleased with the direction taken in this new update. These sorts of changes are always a little scary, but it seems like the overall intent was to reduce the amount of damage and healing everyone puts out to make for slower-paced combat. I don't know that that will be better, but its 100% worth trying, and I'm very glad its being done. It does feel like condition damage wasn't nerfed as heavily, so I'll be interested to see how that shakes out as well. Also super happy to see attention given to core skills and traits, alongside updating Elite specs. Thanks for the update, I have purchased gems in support of this sort of thing.

I love this feature. I really do. I WOULD really like to see savable keybind profiles to go with it rather than the one-set-for-all-builds-and-characters we currently have. I was hoping that we'd see something to address keybinds before wintersday and the bell events came out.

All in all I'm super happy with this patch. Thief traps were basically unplayable, and thief in general lacks team utility. This patch addresses both. The smokescreen buff is also huge, bringing it in line with basically every other class's anti-projectile skill, and giving thief a usable smoke-field independent of weaponset. I'm also happy that core builds across all classes have been getting attention and not just elites. I'm sure there will be nerfs and buffs down the road as things settle, but the overall direction of this patch was fantastic. I felt good enough about this patch to buy gems.

AgreedI THINK the ideal version is:Save as many different keybind profiles as you want with different namesAll your characters have access to all the profilesEach character saves its currently selected profile separately This way you can have keybinds setup for multiple builds on the same character, and non-combat activities as well like Dragon Ball and Instruments.

Many ways this could be thought about. I THINK the ideal version is:Save as many different keybind profiles as you want with different namesAll characters have access to all the profilesEach character saves its currently selected profile separately This way you can have keybinds setup for non-combat activities as well like Dragon Ball and Instruments.

Alrighty. I'm apparently bonkers. My bad ^_^ . Mostly has to do with PVP where one needs fast access to all skills on one hand with minimal movement. Clicking is not a (real) option, so you bind to "e,s,d,f" for movement, then position your weapon and utility skills around that (q,a,z,w,f,r, etc). I overload the keys with "crtl+" bindings for my "f" skills like element swap. The trick is different classes want to use different skills at different frequencies, which some keys are better for. Consider that for the engineer, using the mortar kit (an ult skill) is something one might want to be able to swap to/out of very quickly, but for the thief's dagger storm(also an ult skill), you probably don't want to be mashing that key by accident. It might sound confusing but it smooths out gameplay a ton. It also helps simplify muscle memory across builds (even on the same character). Rather than needing to relearn where important things like"teleport skill", "stunbreak skill" and "long cd burst damage skill" are on each build. Just change the keybind so they're the same on each build. But, that's only possible when you can save profiles to your account and swap between them, which GW2 doesn't currently allow. Also, playing the musical instruments with these keybinds is nearly impossible. Anyway, I'll shut up and go to the other thread. Thanks!