Alquinon.2957

Virtuoso is only strong under certain conditions, a good amount of your dps still comes from your phantasms. Your sword phantasm is stationary and only has 130 range when it starts its attack, so that can easily miss if bosses move just a tiny bit. Your focus phantasm shoots its attacks at all nearby targets, so adds will attract some attacks and lower your boss dps. I swear some people don't actually play these classes in raids and only look at benchmark numbers. Right now for raids and strikes I get the opportunity to regularly play condi renegade, condi mirage, condi virtuoso, condi mechanist, power soulbeast, power bladesworn, and power daredevil. The overall balance feels pretty good because different specs shine on different fights.

I think condi mech is still a very strong spec, maybe it was overshadowed before by power mech so people didn't really catch on. J-drive is the low intensity version that still puts out very competitive dps, and it's no slouch on confusion fights if you take mace. If you want to eke out more dps you can always go the more complex rotation with jade mortar/bomb + grenade kit/pistol pistol build. I still play the J-drive pistol/pistol build on fights that have a lot of mechanics and movement. You can probably also play J-drive as an LI build if you just camp mace and focus on casting your mech skills and superconducting signet. The only downside is that mace will force you to stay melee if you don't want to swap to grenades.

Are you kidding me? Offhand pistol barely does more dps than shield in a power build. On a condi build, it does 4 stacks of burning for 16 seconds on a 12 second cooldown with half a second cast time. With alacrity it maintains 6.667 stacks of burning throughout the benchmark with a single skill, which accounts for roughly 5.3k dps. Tell me how you can get that much dps out of offhand shield lol. Also if you don't like grenade spamming you can always just camp mace, which does more dps in real fights than its benchmark since the golem doesn't really take confusion damage.

How is heal tempest "multitudes" stronger than heal mech? Have you even played it? You need to constantly cycle through your attunements to overload for alacrity, and only then you get the alacrity at the end of a full overload (meaning it's extra punishing if you have to cancel your overload, that you have to continuously channel, for whatever reason). You also have to give up the healing on auras to give alac. Firebrand's healing is weaker than mechanist's healing + barrier, the only reason why it was the "premier" support is because there weren't other good quickness sources until anet introduced things like scrapper and herald. Once again you're bringing up benchmarks that are performed in perfect conditions. In fact, right now on SC's website power mech is #14 on the benchmarks list. If we have mech at 38k, there are only 7 builds that are >= 38.5k with 2 being pretty unrealistic to pull off in raids (condi untamed and power deadeye) and 2 being essentially the same build (condi/hybrid slb). I think I'll stop wasting my time replying to someone who tells me to play the game and yet can't offer any constructive arguments without resorting to bringing up benchmarks done in perfect golem conditions by other players.

How is mech not the top support? Mechanist can easily stack alacrity on the group while the player themself is over 1200 range away doing mechanics (we can see how useful that is in the HT cm groups, everybody runs mech for that reason). It is able to stack alacrity way better than any other option out there right now. You need to play the game to understand how classes perform in real scenarios in raids/strikes. Bench numbers might look nice for some other classes but you have to consider what they need to do to hit those numbers. For example, bladesworn needs to stand in place for a few seconds waiting for their dragon trigger to charge, they need to be within 300 range of their target, and they also need to flank. You also lose 200-300k damage whenever your dragon trigger gets interrupted somehow if you're not careful. That's not very good for a lot of the encounters in the game. Meanwhile power mechanist just pew pews from any range they want, only having to step in briefly to land a rifle 2, even then around 30% of their dps is a freebie from the mech existing.

What is more arbitrary is your anecdotal evidence. 🤣 Every spec you mentioned has been nerfed so I don't know what you're on about. Just because there were op/broken builds in the past doesn't mean mech is in a healthy place right now. What kind of logic is that?

Fractals are a completely different ballgame from raids. The phases in fractals are much, much shorter so it favours burstier classes. That's why anet felt the need to change how exposed works regarding power vs condi, hoping to allow condi specs to be competitive in fractals. However, what they failed to realise is that condis are not made equally. The burstiest condi, burning, made condi firebrand oppressively strong. That's further compounded by prestacking shenanigans using the mistlock. Firebrand has been since nerfed somewhat, but I felt like they should have just removed the players' ability to prestack ashes/venoms which was super cheesy.

Grouch gives no context behind that number. Is it based on successful kills or is it based on playtime in raids? While Wingman does have its own biases, it is much more obvious to us. Wingman is focused on more tryhard groups while Grouch's number applies to all raid groups in general (we can assume). The main argument from the pro power mech people seems to be "power mech's dps is fine because it doesn't have the highest benchmark", but in reality mech has an even higher representation in the tryhard groups (who bother to upload their logs to wingman). Often times in training groups, the less experienced players are just told to bring what classes they're comfortable on. Regardless, even Grouch himself says 20% is pretty high (based on their internal numbers) and promised incoming changes to help fix that.

Take another look my guy, in the data no other era had a single spec that had over 30% representation. Right now, we have the greatest number of elite specs available and yet one single spec accounts for 32%.

Or have that as f1 and f2-f4 your mech skills, to be consistent with pretty much every other class mechanic. I don't want to find a new button to bind for f6 or f7...

Hello, I thought according to a change a while back, all stat selectable items should have stats that are available to you from the expansion you have bought. This is from the wiki. Right now I can't find any of the new stats from the raids ascended weapons I have, nor from the stat selectable trinkets that I bought from past living stories. These stats are only available on the legendaries that I have.

This post is still laughable though. Their reasoning doesn't make too much sense when you examine it closely. They want to downplay the importance of mystic coins from fractal cm's and saying how they only make up 1-2% of the overall mystic coin supply. But at the same time it is somehow important enough to warrant removing them? And then they sign off with this gem... Like really? Pretty much nobody has an issue with strikes getting better rewards, because as things currently stand the reward system for strikes is convoluted and just overall super slow in getting anything worthwhile. Anet needs to get off their high horse and stop trying to make people who are questioning this decision into self centered elitists. Why not have mystic coin sources in both strikes and fractal cms? What this is telling me is that there are other reasons that Anet won't admit to regarding this change, this is mostly just a PR/damage control answer and yet they still manage to screw it up somehow. Reading a bit between the lines here From this part I'm speculating that Anet, for some reason unknown to me, wants to push people towards more 10 man content instead of 5 man content like fractals. This is the vibe I'm getting from reading this part, but of course they can't outright say that and cause more outrage similar to when they killed off dungeons.

If you actually want to do damage on diviner renegade you need to learn how to manage your energy efficiently while juggling all the skills including your weapon skills and f3-f4. It is a much more involved build to play. Otherwise you're just an alac bot doing 5k damage. Even berserker that you seem to dismiss as a simple build has a lot more complications. You have to constantly drain and replenish your adrenaline and sometimes for different bosses you even want to change up your rotation depending on phase times. Warrior is the one class I don't play much and I can tell you the difference between my level and some of the warrior players I know is huge. On staff mirage you just auto attack and spam dodges when they are up. If you want to be extra tryhard you might even do a f2 shatter and summon a few clones every 20 seconds.

Lol people keep bringing up alac renegade. On alac renegade your dps will be pretty garbage if you play as you described (press f4 and auto attack in sword). Whereas on staff mirage, you will easily be top dps if you just summon 3 clones and chain your ambushes properly on SH, Cairn, and Largos Twins. Even on condi RR renegade, sure you can do the same same dps and output 10 man alac for about half the uptime too. But it is also a much more involved rotation that uses 2 legends and 2 sets of weapon skills. Here we have staff mirage that uses 2 weapon skills, a dodge button, auto attack, and I guess throw in an f2 if you feel like it. You're using like 30% of your kit and you're already at 90% effectiveness. Do you really think a good build?

Lol you're going to take 2 different renegade builds and cherry pick their strengths to justify that staff mirage is bad? Swapping to staff on diviner rev is a pretty big dps loss unless your group has mediocre cc and dps so you can swap back in time and have more dps uptime in sword. The problem with mirage is that while it's pretty average on most fights, on the few confusions bosses (largos, soulless horror, and cairn to some extent) it's far and ahead the best choice there is. Axe mirage was already king on those bosses and now you introduce another mirage build that outshines even that by a wide margin, that was mostly the problem. Now after the nerfs it's still arguable which mirage build is better (depends on your team comp and skill level).