Squigglez.1236

I do like the concept of an offensive healer but I was finding it hard to even make a build to test this. Even after the update warrior doesn't have much support utility to compliment this. In addition to that bladesworn not having access to the heal from the burst, and since spellbreaker can't give alacrity or quickness, it felt like it was exclusively for zerker. I'm mostly just making an obligatory post as I did with rev scepter that this game wasn't made with forcing people to click allies in mind. No changes have been made to make it play any better and it's even worse that it's just a single skill. It feels bad because it is bad.

I barely even bothered testing this one, the tether just gives some boons, and mace 2+3 already gives might and doesn't risk sacrificing other maintained skills, and herald/renegade already have a method to generate might. I just wanted to post what I say, and probably will continue to say, every time targeting allies in this game sucks. The game wasn't made with that requirement in mind and there have been no changes that make it less unwieldy. Having a single skill that requires ally target means this is worse than playing specter.

To my surprise M/M ranger is probably the most fun of all the weapon sets in the beta. I enjoy hammer soulbeast and M/M feels like an extension of that with it's slam attacks. It's less damage than S/A but gives defensive boons, lets you give yourself barrier, has more cc, and only has one forced movement skill. The force of nature mechanic seemed off when I read about it but given soulbeast already tries to stack their damage in One wolf pack and Sic 'Em it feels like just another addition to your burst. It may not end up the best possible dps choice but if it's workable I may end up using these instead of S/A in open world at least.

Not sure what niche this is supposed to fill right now. The effects the bow has can be done with other sets already. Since the mechanist alacrity trait has a 1s cooldown stacking the barrier doesn't help with alacrity uptime. The heal stacks don't seem strong enough since you'll already have medkit if you're heal support, also shield lets you blast water fields. I don't think slow is that useful in PvE, it doesn't effect defiant enemies and other enemies get melted. Traits let mechs stack 10+ might just for having the bot punch things already, might is pretty easy to come by now so even the rapid 25 stacks doesn't feel super useful. I'd find it more interesting if the bow had a resource mechanic like thief initiative or firebrand pages, maybe that would let you just choose which arrows you need at any given time instead of trying to stack them in such a strange way.

Not adding anything that hasn't been said, and would preface by saying I only really tested against the golem. The flip skills suck, the damage for the weapon feels low, and the attacks feel slow. Damage for skill 2 flip is almost the same as the auto attack. Flip skill for 3 feels like sacrificing health to get a slightly altered axe 3. Flip for 5 is a short range fear. The auto chain feels slow but so does skill 4 with its 1s cast.

I want to toss my vote in with what others have said. These additions to the patch notes just use paragraphs to say the same thing the notes did in bullet points. There isn't really any explaining of why most changes were made so it doesn't add anything to understanding why they exist. Warrior was probably in the largest need of explanation of the changes and they seem to have gotten the worst. You said you didn't want banners to cover quickness by themselves but what did you want them to do? Why does warrior need a trait and 100% boon duration to maintain anything. You wanted to break warriors free of banners to give them more versatility but now builds seem to be even more set in stone with bladesworn for dps, mending for peak performance, mine, cartridges, and tactical reload to squeeze damage out of a dragon slash which already makes up over half the dps, and flow stabilizer because flow honestly sucks. You had problems with the highest level groups stacking catalysts to get dps while skipping a quickness support, but the new bladesworn brings martial cadence for a 30% quick uptime, stacking bladesworns will do the same thing, especially since they have one of the highest benches now. Also why was it decided to make banners bundles again? That's how they were in the beginning and it was annoying to move them, now holding them gives you no skills, you're the only one that can move them, and their buffs aren't worth it. Just give them a flip skill that lets you port them to your position if you don't want people to pick them up to reduce cooldown and spam for quickness. Frankly making bladesworn the only really viable warrior build is just awful. I don't play warrior much but having all your damage in that one skill means enemies that move or interrupt you just kills any contribution you can do. Other enemies are dead before you can get the flow and charge the attack. With the new balance you've just double down, it's dragon slash or play something else.

Just wanted to post here but I can't finish the wizard fight. All the reflected lightning balls register as misses.

Maybe there is still a chance they'll look into the traits so catalyst gets something more than a stat boost for going ape kitten in a field. Maybe a conversion trait to at least give some incentive to add some vitality like harbinger or weaver has.

Would like to say that elixirs still have ground target underwater.

I'd agree that necro was crap on release. I still got into groups for dungeons and later got to max fractals on necro/reaper. I get the feeling that because it was once bad some people refuse to see it's pretty good now. Reaper is probably one of the easiest open world builds to get into, and while it's true that, if played perfectly, the dps is only like 33k I find it to be pretty consistent because of how self reliant it is, in some pug groups where nobody plays perfectly it makes very little difference. Scourge had a solid spot in raids and fractals too in my experience, and harbinger gets pretty good damage for a quickness class. Epi was pretty game breaking, having one person in your party bring a single utility and clearing every add that dared to breath in range of the boss trivialized too many fights and for the new strikes would've voided mechanics. Even in the dragons end meta an unnerfed epi would've let necros purge the platform during the boss fight.

Since it feels like the balances were based on benchmark videos maybe they skipped bladesworn because it took forever for someone to make a bench video, since it doesn't do anything that well, and they were just about to release when it did come out.

Just adding my vote that the rewards are crap, there should be rewards before killing the boss, and that the entire meta takes too long. Make the pre events give drops too, or let the event start when each lane has high readiness, or make the event run every hour and half the time it takes. 2 hours of work for 20-30 chests is brutal.

I'm just going to echo what others have put here so nothing really new, just adding my voice so there's more demand for change here. I did actually beat the meta on my 6th try, I do like the design of the boss fight but there are so many flaws that this it's doomed in its current state. First and foremost the "Challenge" is in the wrong place, there's nothing wrong with asking people to dodge attacks or break a cc bar, the challenge for this meta is the massive effort in stacking a squad with subgroups that have might, fury, quickness, alac and sometimes stability. This meta shouldn't require setting up the equivalent of 5 raid squads, it's just not made for it. The group I finally succeeded in had to create a 50 man squad with 20 support classes, we had to get into a map super early so that the entire squad could make it in before the event started, then had to make sure to grind until everyone got 10 stacks of participation for the damage increase. This is WAY too much prep and is orders of magnitude more tedious and difficult than the actual fight is. The actual fight I think is fun but there's still some broken bits. Others have mentioned the attack RNG which can be brutal. She decided to switch sides too often and your timer gets eaten, same thing if she keeps putting her tail up. Additionally, you made a point to say the green mechanic shouldn't be skipped, but you know what else is being skipped? The whirlpools. The break bar on those things is insanely high, every group I've been in has just let the people in the whirlpools die, it's just not worth the time it takes to try and free them. Other stuff that needs fixed. The turtle absolutely shouldn't be locked behind this, and in my opinion you shouldn't need to do a strike mission to finish the turtle either. Some people just don't like doing instanced group content that requires they submit to a meta build. The entire meta taking 2 hours is also just awful, dragon stand starts every 2 hours but at least in that you can finish it early by doing things well. The group I passed with had most people afk for 20-30 minutes waiting for it to start because they'd already gotten their 10 buff stacks. Lastly, the rewards are crap and they're all gated behind succeeding. Your 2 hours ends up giving you less for your time than an octovine or dragon stand, and if you fail you get nothing just a complete waste of your time. Suggestions: Lower the break bar of whirlpools, give attacks that hamper dps (tail and dive) a cooldown so they can't be spammed. Add an npc or something that lets you vote to start the meta early, if enough people vote the meta starts so you don't have to wait half an hour. Link the turtle egg to something else, at the very least give the egg out for the event before the boss fight so people are much more likely to get it. Also put some rewards at the steps before the boss so failures don't just give you the finger for your time. Put more valuable rewards on success or some reason people should keep doing this after they've personally gotten their turtle, the legendary items are already dropping in price and will not sustain this. Change the fight so it doesn't require groups with perfect boons and damage classes, also I'd prefer you just remove the participation buff and lower the dps check. It's just an extra chore, make the day metas give some rewards of their own to incentivize doing them. Other somewhat related notes: Some changes are seriously needed and quick. I know some people play this for the challenge but you can't gear open world events to that, once they've done it enough to get bored they'll stop doing it and then you're left with a challenging meta nobody wants to play. Additionally, not only is the requirement of constantly doing this meta burning people out as some have as many as 20-30 failed tries, but the people who do finally finish it don't want to come back to help others, and as people are constantly trying this the other maps feel oddly empty, this one meta is taking up so much of peoples play time it's literally draining some of the life from other maps. Make the Thruster Control Unit tradable, or have it drop from the basically identical fight in story mode. I know quite a few people who dread the idea of doing a strike to finish this collection.

I almost never play ele and was actually excited about hammer. Weaver does highish damage so I figured hammer was going to be a more sturdy build. Maybe not that useful for end game stuff but it would've been fun to use in open world finally giving me a reason to play her. Then the live stream and they mentioned it was bruiser, staying in combat instead of having to dip out to heal like I do when I play weaver at all (I'm very bad at ele). In hindsight it's almost funny how off this is. Catalyst is just as squishy as any other ele build. Lvl 10 jade core, vitality stat gear and runes, defensive trait set. She still just dies. Enemies spread out and I barely manage to kill one or two before the rest melt me. I have to dodge or get cc'd for a second and those orbs are gone. Any fight that moves and my damage is basically 0 and I can't maintain those trait buffs. This spec doesn't seem to do anything aside from the quickness. I hope for some massive trait and hammer rework at least.

I liked it a lot. I realize that it's not an all the time mount. When I heard it was harder to control at higher speeds I imagined it having a higher turn radius at high speeds but it seems to slide around like a roller beetle drift. The syncing could use some work, as passenger occasionally it would just zip me to catch up with the actual position of the turtle. This gets worse if you us a WP. You can WP with your ally if it's on the same map (I don't know the restrictions) but when I did that the desync got worse. My GF was firing the cannons but I didn't see anything, I was using the stomp but she didn't see anything, and I guess the rubber band zipping thing got worse, that was until we remounted. I am curious how the masteries will change how it works. The jump can only really gain height at the very start, this means if you tap space to jump then wait a second and then hold space the turtle hovers a foot off the ground for the entire endurance bar. Lastly the way endurance works with the turtle makes the bond of vigor not really do much.

I didn't play this much just felt like saying that ambush skills need some work. It says they can only happen once per interval but I couldn't find the interval anywhere, I had no idea when they were off cooldown and just spammed the unleash swap until the icon changed. The icons look the same except green so it's not the easiest thing to detect and I think this may have an issue similar to mirage ambush in that the ambush just doesn't fire sometimes when you're auto attacking. Only other thing I really tried was the exploding ball utility thing. Says it knocks down enemies if they're hit by all of them but even standing inside hitboxes didn't seem to get all the hits sometimes. Then again I'm bad. Maybe put an effect on the skill bar so you can tell if you're the unleashed or your pet is (when you're not using hammer that is) kind of like how guardian bar gets flames when it's virtue is about to fire.

I think it's really telling that the two things people used from this spec during the first beta were the heal when you leave shadow shroud and endless night, basically the two AoE heals this spec had. I think single target is a mistake and quite a few things on this spec are illogical. It almost feels better to slot shadow savior and traversing dusk and spam sword 2, each cast can give almost 2k heals (maybe more with good gear) to 5 allies. Then when you get shadow shroud pop in for 5s then leave for another huge burst heal. This is just better than having to select individual people to heal with scepter, with which nothing has been done to make it less cumbersome. Most of the scepters heals are actually barrier which disappear after 5s anyway. Shroud skills are still bad, giving healing to one ally that you have to wait for siphon to recharge to change. They mostly apply torment which the rot venom will apply anyway if you're giving barrier to your allies so I see no reason to stay in shroud for more than the 5s required to get the max heal strength, actually it's a detriment because staying in shroud reduces the max shadow force that you can pump into your heal. The point being the way this spec feels best to play is to purposefully avoid the single target premise of it and I think that's saying something. Additionally I'd say it maybe be a good idea to swap endless night and the traversing dark trait, so wells give quickness instead of alacrity and endless night gives a single target higher alacrity uptime (if it stays single target). As others have mentioned thieves get reduced benefit from alacrity because they have no cooldowns on their weapon skills, but also quite a few classes can apply alac to themselves (through skills like frenzy, quickening zephyr, haste, etc..) but not many can apply self alac so it more valuable. Maybe make it so your tether gets healed by your actions no matter if you're in shroud or not, but if you're in shroud everyone acts as your tether letting you spread your heals out, something to make this more useable. Playing in anyway that doesn't spam the AoE heals leaves you with very little self heals, you can't target yourself for scepter attacks or as a shroud tether, if you have no allies around the tether mechanic doesn't even do anything. Even in the 2v2 scenario that gets brought up with this spec I don't see why the other team wouldn't just shiv the specter first since they can't use their support on themselves. Also action camera the one thing that could possibly help is still broken with scepter 3 saying it lacks a target and siphon going on cooldown without doing anything. I think you guys need to be honest about single target mechanics for support, there's a reason why you haven't added it in the game until now, even if you use the party menu to select allies to heal you end up just staring at the UI for the entire fight, this just doesn't look promising.

Still casting my vote for removing the power trait line, replace with traits that give support or condition damage versatility. The elixer buffs were a start but double condition duration on non-damaging conditions is pretty much useless, I actually laughed when I saw that one elixer gives blind and still gets the double duration (you could make blind last till it activates or is removed and the difference to gameplay would be minimal, blind rarely lasts it's duration as is). Consuming blight to charge things is definitely less static but it conflicts with septic corruption, which just incentivizes you to sit at the blight cap for max damage. At least make septic corruption apply a condi damage buff when you consume a blight stack, then the entire spec would be geared towards building blight to improve skill performance. It'd be better if it wasn't a static threshold either, in my opinion, and each blight stack made the skills a bit stronger somehow. Would still like the deathly haste to not just be passive generation. I also think blight generates too slow in shroud if the goal is to consume it for more conditions.

I'll admit I'm bad at builds in this game, I get that bladesworn getting 50k dps and breaking bosses with dragon trigger needed to be addressed but when I tried it today it felt weak as all hell. I like dragon slashes reduced charge time, standing still for 5s was terrible, but I couldn't even get 1/4 the damage it used to do. Right now it feels more worth while to use whirling axe on berserker instead. The cooldowns are long too, I spent so much time at max flow just waiting for dragon trigger to cooldown and the gunsabre skills feel like they never recharge. The new lush forest should almost just be replaced, it feels like mantras 2.0 except worse, at least mantras could be used twice before you sat on your hands waiting for recharge, now you use one ammo and wait for a cooldown unless the elite is recharged then you use one extra charge and then cast the elite and go back to waiting. Also dragon trigger not being available in your other weapon set is kind of a rip off since you lose your burst skill. Most specs I'd say would have a fighting chance if they were on par dps wise with an existing class but offered a different feel to play, but losing your burst would make zerker the choice even if both specs had the same dps.

I think this class suffered from a lack of focus more than the others. The sphere updates were a good step but not being able to generate energy while any sphere is down and the delay before you can place them after swapping attunements feels awful. The orbs are just impossible for me to maintain. First, just admit hammer is a melee weapon and balance it that way. Having some range on 2 attunements doesn't matter, you're blocked off from half your skills if you try to use it at range. Also the new orbs are melee radius already and don't do anything if you back off. Second, this spec is probably squishier than any other ele. I don't know why you're so afraid to give ele a passive vitality buff, but one issue with ele is that they're not always in quick reach of their skills. Putting a single block on hammer that's in earth doesn't help mitigate anything if you're in a different attunement. Either they need something passive to keep them out of downstate or hammer needs to have more skills to mitigate damage. Worse than that, this spec is juggling so many things at once that you end up locked in place. If you don't keep up with combo finishers you lose the 10% damage reduction from hardened auras and the toughness/vitality you gain from empowering auras. Drop the orbs and you lose the 5% damage reduction on earth loop. If maintaining your "Defense" requires you to stick to such a tightly timed rotation that you can't even dodge without losing all the buffs that are supposed to help survive something's broken. Third, I don't know what the idea is behind the jade orb. At first it was punishing you for recalling it, for combat ending, or if combat moved to a different area. Now you can move them faster for a while but because you can't generate energy while one is deployed it still punishes you because you have to wait for them to end before you can generate energy to place them again. They have a duration and a cooldown like all other skills why keep the energy mechanic? I also agree that it'd be a little less confusing if they were flip over skills like the overloads are.

It's good to see you're willing to change actual mechanics and rework skills instead of just trying to balance numbers. Harbinger: I like the harbinger elixers changes but since I don't think they can maintain anything except quickness it may not be chosen much for support and if the nerfs to condition damage bring it's dps under scourge it probably won't see use till it's changed. Catalyst: Really glad some changes were made to catalyst because it felt like it was being punished for just existing, you had to keep hitting every skill on cooldown or you'd lose your buffs. That said I think catalyst needs a passive survival boost not more active skills that may be in a different attunement when you're getting stomped on. A minor trait given a vitality buff would be a big help. The augment utilities lasted for such a pathetically short time for their cooldown it wasn't worth bringing, the extended duration/reduced cooldown will have to be pretty significant to make them function as is. Virtuoso: I didn't play this much but I agree it should just be power damage focused. Mirage already covers condi and since mesmer damage was boosted chronomancer as a power dps has been a thing for a while. If virtuoso doesn't have something to give it an edge over chronomancer it's hard to justify using it. Vindicator: I couldn't even judge the skills for this when the beta happened. The GS felt weak and the flip skills made it too confusing to use. That said I really hope you consider reworking Urn of Saint Viktor, this skill doesn't really serve any function. Compare it to things that regen in an area that are already in the game and the fact that this hurts you and prevents healing doesn't make sense. Necro transfusion, Ele soothing mist, guardian absolute resolve and signet of courage, even herald improved regen and renegades heal. None of them hurt you or prevent healing, I think every single one has a larger radius than the urn, have better heal scaling and sometimes other benefits. The renegade heal even shares the condition damage reduction with 5 people. The urn has no use, and the skill to smash it doesn't activate when your energy runs out, gives boons that can easily be maintained by other builds. Willbender: You changed almost every trait they had, which makes me wonder why you didn't do that for some other specs like the harbinger power line or catalyst in order to give the specs more focused playstyle with more variety in that playstyle. It also seems like a 180 to go from making them so selfish to possibly being able to give group alacrity. I don't know I'll have to poke at it next beta. Specter: I'll admit the 3 target quickness left the skill in a weird spot where it couldn't get a full party but did more than single target. The reasoning behind single target focus still hasn't been described. I hope the action cam bugs were fixed like others said but even with the action camera selecting allies is difficult if not impossible depending on how much clutter there is. If an ally is surrounded by enemies you're going to catch hell trying to heal them. The heal for shadow shroud didn't demotivate people from staying in to use shroud skills, the fact that the shroud skills don't do anything did. The heals shroud applies to your linked ally are weaker than just smacking them with scepter autos, and the conditions it applies are about on par with the condition the venom will apply for you. I think this will just have people wait the 5s and leave and still use almost no skills. Untamed: Thank you for getting rid of that visual effect, it was a blasphemy to fashion wars. I'm curious to how ambush skills will work, if they're not worth it there still won't be a reason to give your pet unleashed. In a group you'd be best served just keeping unleashed yourself since pet unleashed skills are all the same and don't do much, and you'd have most of the boons that the swapping traits can give already. Bladesworn: Attacking more often for reduced damage sounds fine to me, I hated that the best playstyle involved waiting in place 5s repeatedly. I didn't play with this as much but was weapon swap going on cooldown when dragon trigger was used get removed? Can dragon trigger be jumped into without going into gunsabre first? With so much damage focused on dragon trigger you end up stuck on gunsabre the entire time. Mechanist: Despite being the coolest elite spec I was too burned out at the time to test it much, sounds like the stat exchanges have been brought in line which sounds good. I do think that maybe it'd be better to apply the removed auto attacks to a skill in every weapon instead of forcing mace use. Skill 3 is used a lot on pistol and rifle so maybe just make weapon skill 3 activate rocket punch. I look forward to poking at these next beta. Really hoping it shows a step in the right direction since classes like vindicator felt so bad I couldn't even see how they could be made useful.

I didn't test this one much, but I wanted to throw in a vote to have the visual effect of unleashed toned down or changed somehow when it's on the player. Given how much time people spend on fashion in this game it's a shame unleashed covers you in radioactive moss and overwrites it completely. I would also encourage more consideration of making this spec work with more weapons. The comparison that was used with holosmith doesn't really work because engineer only has 2 weapons to use aside from sword and has no weapon swap. I couldn't even really think of what I would use as a secondary set with this. If the goal is to have the bunny thumper disable and destroy play style maybe remove the bonus damage against disabled foes from the hammer skills and apply it to the unleashed state itself, having the pet do more damage when you're focusing on disabling and then letting you swap and get a few hits of bonus damage yourself. Even having one skill change on the other weapons could help, could make it skill 3 or 5, something with a longer cooldown that could give a slightly different effect while unleashed.

I only did a bit of testing with this in claw of jormag and the raid practice golem. I was more testing it for support than damage so I can't comment on how balanced that is. The single target super support feels pretty unique to me. I do enjoy playing support characters and I like a few things with how this was built. The venom that lets your heal target apply torment for you allowing you to still contribute to the fight while healing is great. I also liked the trait that turned siphon to a res with a 33% health revive boost, picking up downed people almost instantly. The scepter skills were pretty good though I do think that /p outshines /d by quite a bit. The issues I had have been statedalready. I also encountered the issue of dual skills not having a target but didn't know that was because of the action camera. Single target support can work but the game really wasn't made to have people clicking on allies which I assume is why all other healing professions using ground targeting or add healing to an action that targets an enemy or nothing at all (like heal on dodge). At least if you're in a party/squad you can click their names but with no equivalent of tab targeting for allies it makes it easy for an area to be too crowded to heal well. Also I have to add my vote that shadow shroud just doesn't feel worth while. The heals/barrier on a tethered ally just don't make up for what I was missing not having scepter. Most skills apply a condition and heal/barrier your tether, but auto attacking them with scepter also gives them barrier and has them apply the torment for you. I actually forgot shroud existed most of the time, the skills don't give much utility you don't already have and you lose access to your utility skills. Right now it feels like the best option is to trait to use shroud as a heal and jump in and out as quick as possible. Also the shadow force generation for initiative is insanely low, I actually had to stop and figure out what even generated it because it felt like nothing was happening, traiting for force on torment or spamming siphon just work so much better. Lastly eternal nights 3 target limit seems to be the first 3 it hits meaning your target may not even get it if they're body blocked, maybe change it to be your target + 2 allies it passes through.

This is the one I played with the least, mostly because I had the fewest questions about it. The flow generating slowly is part of the design I imagine but it's pretty lopsided. The trait river's flow (extra flow on heal) triggers on might application with might makes right allowing for permanent 2 flow in combat compared to the other traits. You can also bring stability on movement skill which lets you use flow stabilizer for 3 flow every time. These are intended synergies I imagine but as far as I can tell each positive flow is 2 flow per second, and all the methods are kind of blown away by bringing axe mastery. The 2 flow on crit has flow capped out before dragon trigger even finishes recharge. I also think that putting weapon swap into recharge and forcing you to use gunsabre for 5-10s after a dragon slash is unnecessary. As much as people were interested in the almost 500k damage in a single skill I'd personally take a damage reduction for some more fluid gameplay with gunsabre. Having dragon slash reduce movement by 50% like the urn does for vindicator rather than rooting you in place could give it some more versatility. Maybe instead have the ability to load and save a charge periodically through combat so you can spread out the waiting. Instead of having aegis have an active block skill that if successfully used would load shots faster (If this skill blocks an attack load 4 shots kind of function) to encourage using it pretty much anywhere. As it is now only real use I see for this is waiting for a boss to change phases, charge dragon slash where he's going to be when invuln or what have you ends, and then slash to start with higher dps. I don't play pvp and only occasionally scrub it up in WvW but using this seems like a death sentence there.

I rarely play ele because none of the play styles have appealed to me. I was one of the few excited to hear they were getting hammer, and I'm still looking forward to seeing ranger. That said I think this may have been built a bit too restrictive. It seems like the elemental empowerment was meant to be the booster ele needed to improve survival along with hardened and empowering auras. I did watch the stream and it was mentioned that they were designed to be hard to maintain but a significant boost but I think the hard to maintain bit got a bit carried away. With no fields on the weapons themselves the only combo catalyst can do with themselves is with the jade sphere, even with the jade sphere fully charged to maintain 10 stacks of elemental empowerment requires going through every attunement just to cast it's finisher (fire 5, water 4, air 5, earth 5). The trait that allows finishers to give auras has a 10s cooldown per attunement. I assume this makes the class easier to play with another person supplying fields but even so there are issues. I can't find a way to maintain stacks of hardened/empowered auras myself (they both have 6s duration, as said the aura trait has 10s cooldown, the above rotation gives 4 auras but max stacks is 5 and hammer gives no auras itself without the block). This seems to have flown passed the point of making synergy to land on dependence, you need someone else to supply you enough aura to keep the buffs up and that kind of strips away having it as a survival tool. Also the trait Empowered Empowerment which gives 2% stat increase instead of 1% only if you have max of 10 stacks ends up hurting more than helping because losing 1 stack removes 11% of the stats, even at base vitality this is over a 1k hp drop from one stack expiring. The sphere is overly punishing too, energy drains outside of combat, ending the skill prematurely removes all your remaining energy and puts it on full cooldown. The cooldown is 15s in pve which is the same as the elemental empowerment, so once again without outside help you'll never maintain the traits that supposedly help with survival. The utility durations are very short, 5s for most of them, take 3/4 of a second to cast, only give full effect when next to a sphere attuned to the correct element, and aren't all too useful. The best use I could manage is to camp air, put down sphere, use the augment now that I have quickness, and use air 2 because it's one of the only skills with a decent number of quick hits. Speaking of the boons, the only one worth using is air. Quickness is much more powerful than anything else the sphere can give. Only giving 1 might isn't worth it because of how many classes can stack might now. Resistance would be better resolution, but really quickness is such powerful boon that aside from putting resistance, alacrity, and 5 might on the others I think the play is going to be to slot all bottom traits for boon duration, use a fast attacking weapon and then jump into air and drop the sphere for full duration before resuming damage. Finally the hammer, I still like the idea of more hammer users, and even enjoy some of the skills on hammer as it is, but having to blast auras and swap to maintain the skill 3 orbs means this is 100% melee and not mid-range/melee as stated. It's true air and fire are mid range but there's no point in leaving melee if you're going to need to swap to water/earth soon. On that note, if you're fighting in melee the orbs don't actually hit targets in melee range making a sort of counter synergy. There are no fields so some traits have no function with hammer and it makes combo-ing very difficult, and some of the attacks are brutally slow. I get hammer is a heavy weapon but earth 2 is so slow I'm almost mad at myself when I press it. My recommendations would be: 1. Make sphere keep energy when canceled so moving it is an option, I'd almost suggest having it regen energy when inactive and out of combat rather than degen so it's usable at the start of a fight. Make the boon durations longer for fire/water/earth so then you get the option of camping air for quickness or rotation for decent stacks of the other boons, or change the boons to 5 might, aegis, resistance, stability or something powerful so they all have some use and it's not quickness or nothing. Also lower the cooldown by 5s at least, it's already gated by energy build up. 2. Make hammer 3 orbs last longer, and maybe alter their radius based on attunement or something. The short duration of the orbs really locks you into playing a given way if you want their buffs to last any time at all. Also make the hammer attacks faster and/or more impactful, if it's a slow weapon it should be high pay off. 3. Increase the time the trait buffs last so they can be maintained if you decide to play that way, also make the grandmaster just give 2% instead of double at 10 stacks. 4. Increase the duration of utilities and preferably give them an effect for any sphere not just one as it's overly restrictive as is.