MrTJpwnz.4710

Yeah the amplified wrath nerf is kinda uncalled for. Condi Firebrand builds are too strong, and should be nerfed specifically, meaning not nerfing other specs in the process.

We'll listen but ignore the player base and keep pushing the balance patch anyways.

searing pact burning duration got halved, power for power damage mod got increased to 100%, whirling light burning duration reduced to 3 seconds. Maybe some other things

Oh yeah Willbender is probably straight up worse in survivability and damage compared to condi firebrand. But to be fair the post is about firebrand, so didn't really consider willbender. Haven't tried Willbender in open world, wondering how good it is in terms of surviving, you got evade on F2 + decent heal every 5 hits when it is active, might not be too bad tbh.

From reddit from an Anet dev, the changes to firebrand might change things up a bit

As a condition damage class you are actually always a hybrid as you'll always do some power damage. Alot of condition classes have traits that apply conditions on critical hits so having both power and precision is actually not as bad as you might think in terms of damage.

Calculation is correct but you are making the mistake that both Mantra of Potence and Mantra of Solace are not affected by alacrity. They are affected which will make them both a 9.6 second cooldown. The related traits are not affected by alacrity, so liberator's vow and stalward speed stay at 7 seconds internal cooldown. This will give: 2.5/9.6+4/9.6+3/24= 0.802 --> 1/0.802 = ~1.247 meaning 24.7% boon duration required. Keep in mind that this assumes that Feel My Wrath is pressed off cooldown and doesn't have a cast time, which is not really accurate. Usually I add like 2 seconds for this making you require 26.2% boon duration. On top of this you will have the extra mantra charges that you can use for extra quickness. Firebrand runes were used intentionally to go quite a bit over the 100% quickness uptime (iirc firebrand runes would get around 110% uptime), just because mantra's were a unreliable source of quickness cause of its prioritization, which could lead to giving quickness to people from other subgroups or summoned NPC's which is not what you want.

20 seconds would probably be more balanced

8/10*1.3 = 104% uptime, assuming things stay the same and it would be on a 10 sec cooldown

I wanna start of by saying that changes to firebrand have been announced for when the xpac launches on reddit somewhere (don't know the changes yet), so things can change on monday when it releases. In general for raids you want to stay away from thoughness cause of tanking. The best DPS setup for solo gameplay/ open world would be this (ideally you'd want to swap the bursting sigil on axe/torch to sigil of strength for ~+100dps but this way its the same sigils for instanced gameplay): http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PWABc+t/lRw6YPMEGJO+KaPdA-zRRYfBxbG9cDFSlRQuFQHpgDHkgYP8WC8sC-e And is very similar gear wise to the DPS raid build for firebrand, difference being different food, and a sinister amulet instead of a viper amulet, not having the sinister amulet will be a small dps loss for when you are raiding, but nothing major. You do have to swap traits and skills around though for instanced content. Link for instanced content setup here: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PWABc+t/lRw6YVMI2IW0WfveA-zRRYfB1bG9cCFSlRQuFQHpgDHkgYP8W49sC-e If you want more survivability you might want to consider Ritualist gear set that comes with the new expansion (replace all viper pieces with Ritualist pieces), which gives you a good amount of vitality resulting in ~6k more health. Obviously bit lower dps but you also gain some boon duration which allows for perma quickness, in both solo gameplay or in group gameplay. Again alot of things can change by monday, so I'd probably suggest waiting tho I don't think the gear will change, probably just traits/skills, maybe things stay the same and its just a straight up nerf

Yeah it will need to rebalancing, right now it would mean perma fury which is probably a bit too much

There are several runes out there that have 'While in combat' effects like pack runes, which is great. But there are also some runes that didn't get this treatment and those runes are kinda bad right now cause of it. Superior sigil of Rage for example only applies it's fury once which makes the whole rune kind of bad cause it is effectively missing its 4th slot..

how is it an exploit? The game is litterally designed this way that you can swap weapons, armor, skills and traits freely when you are out of combat to give players as much freedom as possible in their gameplay. If people want to use that system to their limits then that is okay. If anything the way it is now feels very very unintuitive (if thats even a word), with boons, buffs and fields dissapearing without anything ingame telling you that it happens or why it happens. Also none will complain about things being slower now, thats not the point. Its about the gameplay that is getting dumbed down, lowering the skill ceiling, making it feel more clunky. Gw2 has the best combat system of all the mmo's, but with changes like this it is slowly getting worse and worse. Also the fact that these changes happen cause of server stability doesn't mean that using skills and swapping weapons suddenly was unintended all those years. The fact that they make these changes now does not mean that it is considered unintended right now either, if it was they would not have said that it was purely for server stability issues.

The change affects both template swapping or manual swapping

Condi WB almost benching higher than condi firebrand after ashes changes 😕 Still get some value out of ashes i guess but still, them feels

Basically damage per second (DPS) is a comparable metric across all classes. Every class can do lets say 1 million damage, but its the time in which they can pull that amount damage off that determines if the class is weak or strong as a damage dealer. Typically every class has a benchmark of its dps potential, which are done in the golem training area that can be accessed from the lion's arch Aerodome next to the bank. Incase you want to see a list of benchmarks go to snowcrows.com.

I tried power harbinger during the beta and I was very dissapointed. It doesn't even get past 30k DPS, pretty far from it even. The traits of power harbinger look pretty decent, so do the traits of the core specializations. The thing where it goes wrong with with the weapons of necro. The coefficients are way too low, and their cast times are fairly long. For offhand there isn't really an option at all that does good power damage, and are right now only used to get some life force. The pistol skills are better than a full on power weapon like axe, which makes kinda no sense either. Shroud skills are kinda weak for power (shroud 2 is okay i guess, but feels weak when thinking of shroud as your high damage kit). The traits for power are also already weaker than the condi versions by design. Power just gets a modifier of blight, condi gets same modifier to condi's + extra condi in shroud on top of that. Condi gets pistol CDR+conversion, power gets just conversion and irrelevant stab, GM trait for power does ~3.5 times less damage than the condi one. Also in general power classes are used for bursts, and the blight mechanic needing to ramp up already kind of removes the burst capabilities of power harbinger. Another thing that I find very annoying is the trait that increases crit chance by 33% only in shroud, which makes optimizing gear for harbinger a mess. I can go in much more detail but I think the point is pretty clear and obvious. Im honestly pretty baffled by the fact that after all these years necro still has kitten power weapons outside of reaper.

I mentioned it a while ago already on the forums, this skill has given so many problems, and keeps having problems. A complete rework of the skill to be something that isn't dependent on allies would be best solution imo..

Yep hope it will still keep 8 pages viable somehow, as the build/idea behind it is fun, the implementation just sucks rn. I don't think they should just nerf Ashes and replace its spot with another tome skill as its essentially still the same problem, just less impactful. They they can make some unique tome skills that are different than the other tome skills.

It depends, if person A casts ashes on people, then a second person B casts ashes on the group (while the stacks of person A are still on the group), all stacks from person A and B will use the stats from person A (i.e. first to apply). In general ashes use the stats of the firebrand that casts it. But these Ashes can be stolen if someone else uses Ashes before you, so if a heal firebrand uses ashes first, then a condi firebrand, all the ashes will be with the heal firebrands stats. Other way works aswell, if condi firebrand uses it first then heal brand, all the stacks will use the condi firebrands stats.

As pointed out on this forum, reddit and some of the bigger community discords the 'fix' to Ashes of the Just didn't work. The ashes stealing obviously needs fixing as since the changes to Ashes having a interval stealing ashes is so much more common, and it was already fairly common (Im talking mid fight procs rn, precasts always has ashes stealing). The fact that heal firebrands can ruin the groups dps by using Ashes (while he thinks that he's helping the group with some extra damage) very easily is terrible game design, and I think its a good thing that it was atleast mentioned in the patch notes, meaning that Anet agrees with this fact, eventho the fix didn't work (or didn't make it into the game yet). But even if this fix comes into the game, Ashes will still be in a terrible spot in my opinion. You will get problems with stacking firebrands, people's damage being delayed because they happen to play with another firebrand in their group, and it gets worse if a heal firebrand throws in their Ashes somewhere inbetween. I don't think playing with the same classes should be punished, nor embraced as we saw for a way too long time with Pchrono's stacking Time Warps in raids for example or Scourge stacking with Epidemic. Another issue is that Ashes damage wise is so busted right now that it is worth it to AFK in tome with 8 pages trait and do alot more damage than a rotation that doesn't stop attacking (5 pages or 8 pages). I think this is flawed, and is something that shouldn't be encouraged. Prepatch you had the option to fill in the gaps with SoJ and mantra recharging, but well that got changed. Don't get me wrong, I think 8 pages trait is fun and should have its place, but I don't think its current implementation is the right way to do this. So Ashes will still be a problem once the fix goes through as mentioned before. A possible solution would be to have separate intervals per caster, which would solve some of the problems. Now I can see that Anet is not really in favor of this change as it might allow for too much burst in condi firebrand stacked fractal groups, might be hard for them to implement, and it would also not solve the other issue with the 8 pages AFK rotation. I would be in favor for a rework of the skill, something that does not involve a buff to allies so you are not punished for playing with other firebrands. The skill should not do as much damage as Ashes does right now or else it'll obviously not solve the issue with the 8 pages rotation (haven't checked numbers but 60k-70k DPiSCT sounds good enough to fix it, for comparison right now its like 115k DPiSCT). In order to compensate this loss in damage other skills should be buffed, like torch 5 which is not too great right now. I think there's alot of problems with firebrand (Too easy quickness access, torch 4 bug, other boon/support access just to name some things), but imo the whole Ashes situation has been feeling the worst to me for a long time.

Exposed buff: This change looks right now pretty terrible, will skew things so hard in favor of high bursting condi classes in fractals, especially with all the ashes of the just pre stacking going on aswell. I'd suggest to atleast keep condi on 50% like it is now, or make both 30%. Holosmith: The nerfs are fine and not too harsh (~2.5% dps loss), but there is 1 thing that I'd personally like to see changed. This is entering forge without it interrupting your current action. Right now entering forge is clunky, not engi-like. It doesn't behave like a kit-swap, and also not like a weapon swap which makes it confusing. There was a while where entering forge would not interrupt your actions and it was so much fun playing holo in that time, so much more versatile and fun to play, and I know alot of engineer players who view this the same way. Unfortunately this got patched out at some point, but it really should come back to the state it was back then (and how it should have been from the start in my opinion). Firebrand: I think the damage output of firebrand will be fine as it is like this, both zeal and virtues seem to be decent options to go for with each their benefits. Something that does concern me still is the ease at which firebrands can give out quickness without a dps loss by using the quickness on heal trait. I think that it would be a good change to swap the trait quickfire and this quickness on heal trait around so when you want to take this trait you lose quite some damage. A slight buff to quickfire might be needed to keep quickbrand a viable option when comparing it to boon chrono.

Holo forge is so clunky from the start, the fact that it made it kit-like was such a huge QoL change. I honestly think it should've been like this from the start, and I hope it'll get reverted back so that it have kit-like behaviour.

Its good to see that FMW is being changed, but I don't think this change is not big enough to shake up the meta. You can still keep up quickness with 4 dh's and a chrono in the other subgroup. Also Time Warp deserves a similar nerf as FMW, especially with the buffs to power chrono coming up with the patch.

For me personally instabilities kinda ruined fractals for me. Instabilities are more of an annoying thing rather than making fractals more fun/challenging, and its not really like they change the way you approach the fractals either.