gavyne.6847

Necro has an incredible presence in all game modes. But the one thing we haven't had is a real viable necro support spec that will work in WvW. I see no reason why elixirs can't be improved to take on that role, if a player chooses to play it that way. Support necro is a thing in PvE but it just doesn't work in WvW. And in return another class should be able to take scourge's spot in WvW via one of the new elites that we haven't seen. We've been playing the same stale meta, the same classes, same specs, for over 2 years. My guildies who play firebrands don't want to play fb's anymore. My scrapper friends will quit if they're forced to endure another expansion of support scrapper. Harbringer elixirs have the base design to function like firebrand's mantras. I honestly see no reason to not make it viable and good.

Speaking from WvW perspective, I play in an organized WvW squad. In order to slot a support Harbringer, it'll have to outdo Firebrands, Support Scrappers, and Tempests. Elixirs currently do not provide enough stab to take over a Firebrand's stab duty, not even close. Harbringer does not cleanse, nor does it heal, so it can't take over Support Scrapper & Tempest's jobs. Heralds, a DPS class, can provide more reliable boons than a Harbringer can with elixirs. That says something. I'm not quite sure how the current iteration of elixirs got passed through QA or even the whiteboard. I'm pretty disappointed tbh. Now to give feedback on what could be done to elixirs to make them worthwhile. 1. When you take the trait to share elixir boons, make them share its effects, such as the stunbreak and condi cleanse, those effects should be shared. This will make them more useful in organized WvW squads. Group utilities are big. 2. Boon duration on elixirs need to increase. 3. Make elixirs have 2-3 charges, like firebrand's mantras. 4. Give more shareable effects, such as superspeed, or a smoke field. Scrappers right now have a monopoly on smoke and superspeed utils, which makes them extremely hard to replace in organized WvW squads. Even Tempests have a hard time getting slotted in because of this. It is time to give another class a chance. 5. Let the heal elixir heal allies, and cure blight. There is promise, when I first learned about shareable elixirs I was a bit excited. But after seeing them and trying them, I just smh and wonder how in the world this even came to be. Remember, in order for support Harbringer to be a thing in WvW, it needs to be able to replace Firebrand's stab, Support Scrapper's cleanse/heal/boon/smoke/superspeed, and Tempest's cleanse/heals/boons. That's a tall order, you look at what's currently being played, you do have to wonder if elixirs will ever get there.

My feedback from someone that plays only WvW. Harbringer is FUN. Getting access to multiple cc's that's not fear, plus double leaps in shroud, it makes the class really enjoyable to play. As a long time necro this elite spec definitely plays different than all previous specs, which is great. I give it 9/10 for fun factor. Now the pistol, it seems like a nice weapon for solo roaming, but it's too condi focused. The most satisfying thing about pistol is the stun. When you nail the stun, it's very deadly and satisfying af. But WvW is full of reflects, and with pistol being all projectiles, I find it very hard to use it properly. I've stacked torment on myself, even stunned myself due to the amount of reflects readily available in WvW. I would like to see one of the pistol skills being ground target instead of projectile, it will help those of us that live in WvW. I rate the pistol 6/10 due to its heavy condi focus and projectile based attacks that are unreliable in WvW. This brings me to the next sadge issue, torment. The recent torment nerf completely borked this elite spec on arrival. This is a spec that feeds on torment, but in WvW everybody's moving, so you're accepting that your torment will deal 50% less damage which just feels really bad. I understand Harbringers are parsing well in PvE because you can stack on bosses and npc's often remain stationary. But this is where I feel the devs had a PvE bias when the torment nerf went in. Torment change was a huge buff to PvE, but a huge nerf in WvW, and it definitely makes Harbringer not feel as strong as it should be in WvW. Can we please get a torment split and give us the pre-nerf torment back for WvW, thanks. The elixirs are... bad. Short boons, long cooldowns, they're just very boring and there are so many other necro utils that should be used instead of elixirs. The heal elixir isn't really a heal at all. If you make it consume conditions, maybe it'll be worth it. But as-is, you're just killing yourself using it. Maybe make the heal elixir cleanse blight?! That's a thought I had. As someone who plays in an organized guild squad, there's nothing in elixirs boon sharing that makes it worth taking a boonsharing Harbringer over another boonsharing class. One thing that will help here is when you take the trait to share elixirs, you allow the stunbreak and condi cleanse to be shared as well. If we can build a boonsharing Harbringer where taking elixirs allow us to stunbreak & condi cleanse friends, then it may be worth it. I rate elixirs 4/10 right now, it needs a lot of work to be viable in WvW. Consider putting a big corrupt on one of the elixirs. Going from corrupt specialist in Scourge to virtually no corrupts in Harbringer hurts, it will make Harbringer harder to slot in as a meta class for organized WvW squads. Harbringer shroud is definitely the highlight of this new elite spec. The mobility is great, the float is A++. However there seems to be a bug with shroud 5 float, sometimes I don't see the graphics for it and my skill goes on cooldown like nothing happened. I haven't been able to reproduce it other than it happens often after I leap in with shroud 4. I give Harbringer shroud 10/10. As others have pointed out, the synergy with some traits are just not there, such as the fear traits. This really limits your choices. I feel people who build tanky condi Harbringers will make this elite spec feel overpowered in PvE and sPvP. This will create an illusion that this spec is fine, or even op (people in spvp might as for nerfs). But for WvW, especially in organized guild squads and zerg vs zerg, this spec is a bit lacking. Condi, especially with the torment nerfs, do not work well in WvW group play. As long as cleanse scrappers & tempests are a thing, and who knows what other elite specs are coming that can cleanse, the condi Harbringer builds won't work that well in WvW. And if you want to build a power based Harbringer, you pretty much can't use pistol, which is sad. One has to make tough choices in traits, with lots of sacrifices which I feel simply hurts the spec and its various viable builds.

Some feedback for you: 1. Before match-up rewards, you need to equalize loot for dps and support. It's hard enough to get people to want to play support classes in organized squads. To see support not get rewarded with loot bags is saddening. When I get bags from kills as dps, that firebrand that gave me the stab, and that scrapper that cleansed & healed me, should most definitely get the same share of loot bags. It's widely known that if you're a WvW player, you are already poor compared to PvE & PvP players. Support players should be rewarded. This leads me to #2. 2. Gold, why is it that PvP and PvE players make so much more gold than players that enjoy WvW? It's one of the 3 game modes GW2 offers. If WvW is to be cornerstone content in GW2, gold incentives should definitely be a part of match-up rewards. 3. Weekly achievements, there should be weekly achievements that reward players for # of kills, # of cleanses, # of objectives taken, # of objectives defended, etc.. Give people things to work towards and look forward to. Pips are not it, pips reward players who afk inside keeps, and they just spam repair walls or run siege for no reason other than to farm pips. 4. Competitive players love stats, and this game is seriously lacking in showcasing stats. When people click on the WvW icon, they should see a weekly top 100 in kills, top 100 in heals, top 100 in cleanses, top 100 in revives, top 100 in guild activities, top 100 in objectives taken, etc... Competitive players are all about prestige and bragging rights more than anything, loot is secondary. It's very similar to PvP. This is how you get people to play this game mode. 5. Lastly match-up rewards. The things people in GW2 care about the most loot-wise seem to be skins and shinies. So you could have temporary unique wvw skins and infusions that people can use for 1 week at a time only, and in order to use keep using them, you have to win. Ezpz, now you will have a bunch of people wanting to win the week for them cool weapons/armors skins and infusions. Again it's about bragging rights, and temporary makes it so you don't just wvw for a week and leave. You gotta keep playing wvw and win if you want to use these unique wvw skins & infusions. You don't have to stop at weapon/armor skins, it could be guild siege skins, or mount skins. Temporary skins that you can use for the week if you win. But they have to be good looking skins, things people will want to use and display.

You're self limiting due to your guild's size.try running less people if you actually want more fights. Used to run 15-20, but more and more guilds run 30+ now it becomes harder to stay small. Times have changed, seems like skilled players are consolidating into less guilds on less servers, hence creating this problem. When facing certain servers you are expected to fight multiple guilds running 25-30+ next to each other, which makes it even harder for you to compete as a small group.

What makes WvW stale is you take a squad of 20-25 players out there to raid for 2 hours, and finding no good guild groups to fight. You end up either ending raid early or run around chasing cloud or banging your head into siege filled T3 keeps that are not possible to break. Due to the tiered system, this happens way too often. There are only a handful of servers that have enough guild groups to fight during NA. And they are all spread out in different tiers, giving you potentially weeks of boring matchup before you finally find one matchup with good NA content. There are too many servers that have only offhour or odd hour content. There's nothing more frustrating than having people show up wanting to play GW2 WvW, but having no content to fight other than cloud or frustrating siege filled keeps. Or there is content, but they are on a queued map that you can't move your guild onto. So again, people log frustrated and slowly become uninterested in GW2. The key to fixing WvW staleness is to simply give me content to fight, don't make me waste 2 hours looking for content. None of the ideas posted in the original post would solve this problem. Sure, change up the meta, tweak balance, etc.. are all no brainers that the devs should already be doing. But too often you could spend weeks stuck in boring matchups. This has to be fixed, server stacking only makes the issue worse as there are now less servers with competitive content to make raiding daily worth while.

Doesn't matter how much Tempests cleanse, Scrappers flip everything they cleanse into boons thanks to Purity of Purpose. So even if a Tempest is "competitive" with Scrappers, it doesn't matter, Scrappers still win due to the single fact that they keep your whole squad with a full bar of boons with their cleanses. Why take a class that erases condi's when you can take a class that turns all the condi's into boons? Simply you wouldn't. A nerf to Purity of Purpose would bring Tempests back into meta. Tempests already got their 10 target shouts slapped. We're all waiting to see what Anet is going to do with their rumored 2nd round of support balance nerfs. Until then, if you want to play useful meta support, go with either a minstrel firebrand or support scrapper.

Purity of Purpose is the main issue with scrappers, it's too op to not carry 1 scrapper per party. Even if another class, such as Tempest, get anywhere near a scrapper's cleanse numbers, the scrapper is still better because all those cleanses are flipped into boons. A scrapper hits 1,000 cleanse? That's 1,000 boons the scrapper just gave to his/her party. Where as Tempest simply cleanse, there are no boons coming out of the cleanses. Not to mention scrapper's sneak gyro which is very valuable in WvW. But the main reason why scrappers are preferred over others is how their cleanses turn condi's into boons. There was a time when you could say "but Tempest can 10 target..." but that already got nerfed. An adjustment to Purity of Purpose is long overdue.

It's for the whales, MMO's have these to let them flush their overabundance of mats and money.

Feels like his stay was always limited and timed. He went from having a great time progressing through fractals and doing pvp with his friends, even playing with his gf in pvp. To spending a whole night dueling, solo queuing, not talking, when group queuing with his friends they weren't talking at all just doing their own things, etc.. Plus he openly talked about how he doesn't have much time left in this game, and how he needs to move away from MMO to get back to the "twitch race" (one can assume he's taking about viewership & subscribers). A strange 180. I don't think it's a problem with the game as much as he realized he needs to get back into FPS to get his viewership back up. He would've done so much better in pvp if he simply learned to focus target with his friends, and finished downs. They get so many downs but he just moves off to chase some random target, then they get rallied or rezzed.

He's getting better and his friends seem to enjoy other aspects of the game so he's probably going to keep playing. Because of him other streamers like teapot are seeing double the viewerships. So like it or not, he's getting people interested in GW2. Honestly devs should take note how confusing the game can be for brand new players jumping into pvp, and make improvements if they care to grow the game.

Nerfs to dragon banner 3 & 5 are coming next update: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/688406906?t=00h23m01s

Nice detailed post, addressed all the issues with Dragon Banner nicely. Now someone needs to ping cmc so he'll notice this thread.

Reset NA last night, 3-way map queues fighting together at the same time, and no skill lag aside from a few seconds of lag during the initial clash. Something is working.

This one is a no brainer, of course you should not be able to use F skills while carrying a banner. And Dragon Banner 5 needed to be nerfed a year ago.

Lower targets per shade also mean less corrupts going out, less barriers going out to friendlies, it's not just dps where scourges are hit. They shaved too much and unfortunately scourges will lose out on that meta spot. Scourges were not meta because they topped dps, they were meta because they provided barriers, topped corrupts, and they had a good spike damage. Top of the meters belonged to weavers, bomb kit scrappers, burnguards, and heralds. Now they provide less barriers, less corrupts, and less damage in just 1 day. I'm ok with shaking things up, but I'm not a fan of making a class unwanted in just 1 day just because Anet made a boo boo and overtuned the class that no one asked them to touch. Shows you Anet devs do not test things in WvW, and clearly shows you some of the posters that just had to respond don't really know what they're talking about.

Nerfs were needed, we knew the cd to Wells were going back up, but reducing shades to 2 targets per? Even for big shades? That effectively erases scourges from any organized squads. Scourges needed to be nerfed, not removed. Pre-patch scourges had a spot, they gave barriers, did corrupts, and had decent damage but not top of the meter (those belong to weavers, bomb kit scrappers, burnguards, etc). Most organized squads ran at a max of 1 scourge per party, sometimes even less. They were "meta" but not "overperforming". The patch made them overperfoming, they needed to be tuned down, but 2 shades effectively removes them from being wanted at all in organized squads. Now they're trash tier. cmc, why do you guys tune things without playing these classes in WvW in the first place?

All great changes, but Dragon Banner 3 and 5 should've gotten adjusted. Dragon Blast and Dragon's Breath are the real issues. A knockback should not do this much damage, and Dragon's Breath damage modifier too high for the number of targets it hits. There should also be a cap how many Dragon Banners can be picked up at once on a given map. Facing a server with a map queue while they're using 5 Dragon Banners is pretty ridiculous. And this isn't even an exaggeration. Warclaw stomp removed, finally, this is one of the best changes in a long time. People don't get to just sit on their mounts waiting to stomp a clump of downs. They actually have to gasp play their class and help out. A quick test today shows support classes actually have a chance to revive downed players. They are not insta mount stomped with zero counter-play. Ty Anet.

If they care to grow the PvP game mode, then yes, 3v3 and 2v2 should be alternating permanents. 5v5 conquest is quite difficult for players of other MMO's to get into. Deathmatch on the other hand, that's something everybody can jump into and enjoy, maybe learn a bit about classes and builds. Plus it's different than conquest, allows for different builds, variety is always a good thing when it comes to PvP. None of this matters though if they don't support it properly. It needs more maps, its own leaderboard and ladders, tournaments, etc.

I get the knock on people caring about scores in 2020, but people don't care about scores for reasons you think. In a 1 up 1 down system, scores matter because you could potentially get into a boring matchup and end up taking a week off from WvW. For an example some servers have heavy offhour coverage that keep them in certain tiers, but they lack NA presence. So for servers with heavy NA population they may opt to try to avoid matchups with those servers. Some servers have little to no organized guilds, so if you're in an organized guild squad that enjoys fighting other organized guild squads, you would try to avoid getting into a matchup with those servers. If you're a roamer type (and this forum seems to be full of them), you probably don't care either way. People don't really care about scores for notoriety, it's really just trying to get into an ideal matchup for fights so you don't have to call your guild raids early or skip them completely for a whole week. For a lot of the people in guilds, this kills people's interest in WvW more than anything. Sometimes it's better to not finish 1st, or 2nd, depending on the matchup you're looking for.

This means you're keeping this reset scramble? Would you at least reset the scores since servers are inheriting the scores of others.

Speaking only WvW, why is power scourge more meta than power reaper in wvw zergs? Because they provide barriers for the whole party, corrupt a lot of boons, and on top of it all they have a good spike that can be dropped at 900 range. They can also pop breach and trail to help stop an enemy push. Reapers are more selfish, no barriers for party (barriers help prevent people from getting one banged), and low corrupts. Reaper's biggest spike comes from shroud 4, and if interrupted at all, such as your stab gets corrupted into fear or you get bombed out of your shroud, you lose that spike and find yourself struggling to output respectable damage. It's not even that reapers are bad, they aren't bad. But there are better melee cleave options than reapers. Bomb kit scrappers have one of the highest melee cleaves ingame at the moment, and they have access to sneak gyro for squad stealth, or they could swap to mortar kit for ranged pressure. Heralds also have higher melee spikes than reapers due to roads & hammers, and they at the same time provide secondary stab, dwarf elite (50% reduction in damage), and they provide good boons. Reapers seem unnecessarily selfish and they don't even output the best melee cleave damage. That's the main issue and why reapers aren't meta for wvw zergs and organized guild squads. Reapers are great for solo/small scale roaming however, they're much better at roaming than scourges imo.

Missed the much needed dragonbanner and siege damage nerfs. cmc please spend some time in wvw, thanks.

Friends & guildies. I wouldn't be in this game without my friends and guildies.

Hit camps, especially t2/t3 camps, they will come. If you sit outside of their keeps they are just people running back to their squads, they aren't built to fight roaming builds there's zero reason for anybody to dismount and fight 2 gankers they have no chance against. If you want to fight actual roamers, look for upgraded camps.