Raizel.8175

This Savage Scale Set looks really ugly though...

So much this. Especially in a MMORPG where you are supposed to spend thousands of hours in. Fact is that Necromancer in general is badly designed. We have no viable pDPS build, neither do we have viable cDPS or Support/Heal builds. Scourge is on the lower end of the DPS spectrum and - just like Harbinger - more situational than consistent. Scourge will never be a proper Heal- and/or Support-build due to the lack of role compression and Alacrity or Quickness. Harbinger is - as I've said - situational and competes with builds which are fundamentally better at what they do. Necromancer literally has no identity in PvE at this point besides being the meme-profession.

Sadly, that's neither how PvE in general nor profession identity in game design works.

While that's true, it's still very situational. In several encounters, you bleed far too much life force due to continuous incoming damage that pushing AAs beyond the 10s mark is more detrimental than beneficial. Currently, I'd rather take Spectral Grasp for life force generation rather than Well of Darkness for DPS.

I have no clue about PvP or WvW, but PvE balancing is an utter clownfiesta lately.

Going to copy this from my post in the general thread: Necromancer The increased Soul Barb duration could be nice to have to Harbinger, but will be more or less useless for Reaper since Reaper bleeds to much life force due to how Reaper Shroud works and due to the nerfs to Reaper's Shroud. Either rework a trait to make Reaper Shroud work like Harbinger Shroud as a DPS option or increase overall life force generation or buff Reaper's Shroud again. Increasing the damage of Death's Charge and Executioner's Scythe won't help much since you rather want to avoid using these skills in order to maintain a decent amount of life force. Your main DPS skills in Shroud are the auto-attack-chain and Soul Spiral anyway. The other skills are predominantly used for their functionality. I do like the idea of Chilling Strike reducing the CD of Gravedigger as this makes the auto attack chain more rewarding. In that sense, I'd increase the overall damage of Gravedigger in exchange for the below 50% gimmick though. That gimmick was always one of the reasons why Reaper had such a bad reputation after all. What has not been adressed are the massive lack of precision on Reaper - using Thief runes and thus needing to flank on a Melee bruiser is ridiculous - and Reapers 2nd weapon set. There need to be some buffs and/or redesign of core pDPS weapons like Axe, Focus and/or Warhorn.

This seems to be more of a clownfiesta rather than a well thought out balance patch. Elementalist I don't understand why Alacrity application hasn't been reworked. Currently, Tempest is a trash-tier Alacrity provider since Overloads channel for too long and can be easily interrupted. I also don't understand why Water Trident shouldn't heal anymore. I'm not much of an Elementalist-player myself since the whole profession rather belongs into trash-tier, but can't you at least bring at least Alacrity- and or -Heal-Tempst more in line with its alternatives? In my humble opinion, Support- and Heal-builds should be easy as fu** to play since their mere concept is pretty much alien to the games core gameplay. Besides that, the necessary gear for Support- and Heal-builds should also be easily acquirable. Engineer The description for the "new" Rifle Burst is confusing. Is that meant to be a single-target buff and a multi-target nerf? Because it reads like less projectiles will pierce but grenades will deal more damage. Does this even matter though outside of very distant enemies? Rifle Burst Grenade is still an AoE skill after all. I do like the buffs to Holosmith. It's a fun build to play and needed a bit more love from the community. I don't know if these changes may make Holosmith "too" powerful though. Holosmith wasn't necessarily in a bad spot after all. Please don't add the changes to Mechanical Genius. The bot AI is horrible and the bot gets stuck on whatever frequently making the bot basically useless. The idea behind these changes isn't bad, but they don't take clunky AI and bot behaviour into account. Guardian I do like the buffs to True Shot to make Longbow more viable on Dragonhunter. The Greatsword/Longbow (or Sword/Focus) rotation is currently rather fluid though meaning a CD increase could make that rotation more clunky and annoying to play. Dragonhunter is on the lower DPS spectrum anyway, so I don't see a reason why there shouldn't be a flat buff. That's all the more true since you're also buffing Sword which could push Longbow out of viability. I really don't like the Firebrand changes though. Yes, Firebrand was especially strong. I do agree with other people though that other builds simply aren't as well thought out and have to sacrifice too much in order to work as Support build. The changes to the Grandmaster traits also don't make sense. Firebrand was an easy to play and - outside of its other support-tools - perfectly balanced build. Binding the Justice passive to Quickfire is pointless and will be a huge nerf to Firebrands overall DPS potential. I don't understand why these changes have to be that extensive from the get-go. Why can't we start small in order to not break Firebrand? I do believe that a shared or preferably rather linked CD (linked as in: if you enter a tome, all other tomes go into their respective CD) for all tomes would have done the thing since you then have to decide between DPS, Healing or Functionality. Too many fundamental changes at once more likely than not will spell disaster. I also don't like the changes to tome-per-skill-costs. This will force you to take Archivist of Whispers above all other traits. How is this supposed to work anyway? Is it influenced by Alacrity? You also have to consider that you're basically gutting the Specialization-defining gameplay-feature that way. I really don't think that that's a good idea. Mesmer I don't understand why "Staxe" Mirage needs to be nerfed. You have to understand that Mirage in general is rather situational due to how Confusion works. Rather than nerfing the build itself, you may want to change how Confusion - and by extension Torment - works in PvE. Maybe it's for the best to simply standardize/equalize how these conditions work in PvE. That would prevent damage spikes in certain encounters and would enable you to use these conditions more freely in future game design. I do appreciate the buffs to Chronomancer. You may (or may not) want to increase the well-radius though to increase useability. Necromancer The increased Soul Barb duration could be nice to have to Harbinger, but will be more or less useless for Reaper since Reaper bleeds to much life force due to how Reaper Shroud works and due to the nerfs to Reaper's Shroud. Either rework a trait to make Reaper Shroud work like Harbinger Shroud as a DPS option or increase overall life force generation or buff Reaper's Shroud again. Increasing the damage of Death's Charge and Executioner's Scythe won't help much since you rather want to avoid using these skills in order to maintain a decent amount of life force. Your main DPS skills in Shroud are the auto-attack-chain and Soul Spiral anyway. The other skills are predominantly used for their functionality. I do like the idea of Chilling Strike reducing the CD of Gravedigger as this makes the auto attack chain more rewarding. In that sense, I'd increase the overall damage of Gravedigger in exchange for the below 50% gimmick though. That gimmick was always one of the reasons why Reaper had such a bad reputation after all. What has not been adressed are the massive lack of precision on Reaper - using Thief runes and thus needing to flank on a Melee bruiser is ridiculous - and Reapers 2nd weapon set. There need to be some buffs and/or redesign of core pDPS weapons like Axe, Focus and/or Warhorn. Ranger Nothing to say here. Would like to have some buffs to Greatsword though since I've always enjoyed Greatsword more than Longbow. Revenant Please make "Vindicators can no longer dodge while immobilized." PvP/WvW only since in instanced PvE, this will spell disaster - especially in fractals. Otherwise, the changes seem to be fine. I'd like to have some improvements on Alacrity generation on Renegade though. Thief Deadeye looks like a Meme now. Can't really discuss about Thief though since I rarely play Thief. Thief really lacks identity and viability in PvE though and needs some major redesigns and/or buffs. Warrior Warrior seems fine although I don't understand why you'd change Outrage. The skills was perfectly fine.

The overall polish was necessary though. Don't assume that we'll get the next living world episode quickly though. If they want to keep a certain niveau of quality, they probably should invest at least 4 months per episode instead of rushing content like Kourna.

Thank you very much for this long overdue QoL feature.

I don't know about that one. Boon removal isn't that amazing and rather situational to begin with. There are better alternatives too which offer one of the fundamental boons - especially Chrono with Sword Auto Atk. Barrier might be an argument, but even there, there are strong alternatives (like Specter, Mechanist or Scrapper). I don't really think that it's too much. Scourge is strong in WvW - no question - and has its predefined role there from which it can't really break out off, but the reason why Scourge left such huge scars during the PoF era was due to the following: Scourge left scars in PvP since we only have Conquest as PvP mode and people flat out denied playing around Scourge due to how Conquest usually works (staying on point). If we had a variety of PvP modes and people were forced to participate in each and every mode equally, Scourge wouldn't have been such a huge problem back then. Scourge - as rather slow and stationary build - probably wouldn't see any play time in modes like Capture the Flag. Scourge left a scar in PvE due to Epidemic - which is only really broken at certain bosses where you can actually use and bounce Epidemic. It's useless on bosses where you can't. Epidemic has long been deleted from the game though. The current version of Epidemic is a sad joke and shouldn't really be a reason to hold a build back. I'd also argue that Scourge - as cDPS build - is currently being kept afloat by how Torment works nowadays. If it weren't for the Torment changes, Scourge would have no function in instanced PvE - just like Reaper does currently. As for "dominating all 3 gamemodes"... Just lol... Harbinger is such a mess and could use a rework too. In all honesty, Necromancer as a profession is in a pretty weird state.

Well, it's not just Alacrity or Quickness, it's also fundamental tanking tools like blocks or Aegis. Imagine tanking bosses like Xera as Reaper. Well, they're developers. It's their job to... well... develop stuff. Being difficult/not so simple is basically a non-argument. In all honesty, it's not just Necromancer that's a mess currently. Thief is also in a weird position. Elementalist is at the very least functional. Binding Quickness and Alacrity to core skills (Spirits and Banners) is still an at least questionable idea.

Reaper was never designed as "tank" (at least if you take into account how instanced PvE works - even back in the day) - Reaper simply lacks the tools to tank properly. Just popping Shroud to eat damage doesn't do the job. Reaper was always designed as a not-so-squishy Melee Bruiser. There are other reasons why Reaper was never popular. The main one being that most Reaper players back in the day performed - on average at least - rather poorly, which is why Reaper (and Necro by extension) always and still has a rather bad reputation. One of the reasons why several people perfomed poorly is the inherently stupid Greatsword skill design with Gravedigger. The average Reaper player back when these prejudices formed mostly spammed Gravedigger without bothering with the intricacies which are necessary for a decent Reaper rotation. People thus always had the (first) impression that a Reaper will more likely than not be a hindrance. I do remember the days when you were insta-kicked from fractal or raid groups/squads if your class symbol was Necro. Solution proposed by me in another thread: Make a trait for a DPS build which makes Reaper Shroud work like Harbinger Shroud. Boom. Survivability gone. Not like Reaper Shroud is awesome in instanced PvE anyway - it's more of a hindrance than a benefit. Edit: Was this thread necro'd? D*kitten, your posts are already three months old.

I really can't be arsed to write this anew, so I'm simply going to copy what I wrote in another thread: Objectively speaking, at least concerning instanced PvE, Necromancer is easily one of the worst classes in the game. The general design is a joke at this point. Reaper is the only truly viable pDPS build Necromancer has and it's botched by several factors - one of the main problems (as you've already said) being the lack of decent weapons beside Greatsword. Necromancer literally has no decent pDPS weapons to begin with. Axe is not fully garbage, but the off-hands are all crap. Core Necromancer and Reaper both need a rework here alongside Necromancer weapons - Greatsword is pretty much fine apart from how Gravedigger works. Scourge is a mess at this point. The utility as rezz bot is only really nice for low tier gameplay squads; Scourge is and probably can never be a true healer though. Other than that, it's a somewhat situational, rather lower tier DPS that's being kept afloat thanks to the changes to Torment. Its saving grace is that it's rather easy to play and quite consistent - much like Rifle Mechanist just less reliable and, well... weaker. Scourge could probably use a rework. At this point, they could just steal the "sands of time" theme from Prince of Persia and enable Scourge to be either played as cDPS or condition-focused Alacrity Support. Harbinger is just a big fail. It's fun to play, but very, very restrictive due to how it works. While Blight is a somewhat interesting mechanic, having to juggle two diminishing resources with a rather strict rotation for proper DPS doesn't work that well in more mechanic-focused encounters. The overloaded elixirs and how Quickness works on Harbinger is also a mess and means that you can't use skills reactively, meaning you're only a 2nd rate support to begin with.

That's nonsense and you probably know that it's nonsense too. In instanced PvE (especially in raids and strike missions), Shroud is far more of a hindrance than a benefit. Due to continuous incoming damage, your life force management may become a mess - especially during certain encounters. Healing in Shroud is also a "problem" (affecting Scholar bonus), to put it lightly. Thanks to the last few balance patches, Reaper even struggles with Crit Chance and is forced to use Thief Runes. BTW: Especially cDPS builds can reach high HP numbers by using Ritualist gear at the cost of a small DPS loss. High HP really shouldn't be a deciding factor in a builds damage potential. Objectively speaking, at least concerning instanced PvE, Necromancer is easily one of the worst classes in the game. The general design is a joke at this point. Reaper is the only truly viable pDPS build Necromancer has and it's botched by several factors - one of the main problems (as you've already said) being the lack of decent weapons beside Greatsword. Necromancer literally has no decent pDPS weapons to begin with. Axe is not fully garbage, but the off-hands are all crap. Core Necromancer and Reaper both need a rework here alongside Necromancer weapons - Greatsword is pretty much fine apart from how Gravedigger works. Scourge is a mess at this point. The utility as rezz bot is only really nice for low tier gameplay squads; Scourge is and probably can never be a true healer though. Other than that, it's a somewhat situational, rather lower tier DPS that's being kept afloat thanks to the changes to Torment. Its saving grace is that it's rather easy to play and quite consistent - much like Rifle Mechanist just less reliable and, well... weaker. Scourge could probably use a rework. At this point, they could just steal the "sands of time" theme from Prince of Persia and enable Scourge to be either played as cDPS or condition-focused Alacrity Support. Harbinger is just a big fail. It's fun to play, but very, very restrictive due to how it works. While Blight is a somewhat interesting mechanic, having to juggle two diminishing resources with a rather strict rotation for proper DPS doesn't work that well in more mechanic-focused encounters. The overloaded elixirs and how Quickness works on Harbinger is also a mess and means that you can't use skills reactively, meaning you're only a 2nd rate support to begin with. I'd actually be happy if they would just do it like that. If you had the choice to trait it to work like Harbinger Shroud for additional DPS, it would be great and would satisfy both sides - even though I don't really see how removing the life force shield would lead to reduced survivability. That's unreasonable. For instanced PvE, I'd rather take Combo fields over damage mitigation. Reaper will never be a decent tank due to its competitors - simply because Reaper inherently lacks role compression. Reaper as support won't ever happen. Quickness is already covered by Harbinger and Alacrity is more suitable for Scourge. Reaper is already quite nice to have as CC bot (although what multiple Reaper/Necromancer skills do can also be done by using a Thiefs Basilisk Venom once...). You're wrong about "valuable selfish dps" though. Selfish DPS was always valuable due to role compression. Especially "Because it's better to 2 sources of alac/quick at 50% output with no investment in boon duration than a single source with 100% output but heavy investment in boon duration" is a nonsensesical argument. Instanced PvE doesn't work that way; in fact: it never did. What could be improved/changed though are Shouts (you could change some into more supportive shouts like AoE stunbreak) and core Necromancer utilities.

This is fundamentally wrong. Rifle Mechanist is still one of the strongest DPS builds in actual encounters due to how it works. Even the balancing team acknowledged that you can't purely balance around theoretical Golem benchmarks. Rifle Mechanist still dominates low and mid tier players and only falls off in high tier gameplay. On that, I can agree. Due to the drawbacks of Reaper (esp. being forced to play Melee - Necro pDPS ranged weapons are a joke - and how life force works - esp. taking in considerations the nerfs to Reaper Shroud), Reaper should bench far higher than Rifle Mechanist. Reaper should probably at least do around 37k.

Reaper needs an entire Shroud and weapon redesign that adds somewhat around 5k DPS in order to be viable. Reaper Shroud - especially in its current nerfed state - simply doesn't work properly in instanced PvE where you receive continuous damage and thus lose life force. Reaper Shroud should probably just work like Harbinger Shroud in order to work properly in instanced PvE. Reaper also needs a decent boost in accuracy. Having to use Thief runes on an already underperforming build is kinda silly to begin with. Lastly, we need a decent 2nd weapon set. Axe/Warhorn / Axe/Focus are simply too weak and either need a redesign (esp. Offhand) or buff.

Depends on what you call overperforming and which game mode you're observing. I can only really talk about PvE and there are a lot of trashy EoD specs in that regard. What's overperforming is Mechanist - Mechanist is ridiculously overperforming in almost every aspect. All other specs are kind of meh~. Specter aka Scourge 2.0 is a somewhat nice cDPS build. Its perfomance as offensive alacrity support is trash as it's far to restrictive to play (you have to at least keep 3 utilities on CD which makes it impossible to use these situational; Teapot actually made a very good video about support imbalance recently). Harbinger (as offensive Quickness support) somewhat suffers from the same problems. It's kinda fun to play as cDPS, but due to how it works, it's far less reliable than Scourge which is one of the reasons why almost every Necro player I know switched back to Scourge even though Scourge is left barely viable as is. Untamed is utter trash. In theory, it could be a really good DPS, but reality isn't a DPS golem... It's also utterly stupid to bind Alacrity to Spirits (see Specter and Harbinger). Catalyst was kinda nice before the initial nerfs. Still suffers from being Elementalist though. Bladesworn is basically a one trick pony. Bladesworn basically does what Catalyst was nerfed for - insane burst damage. Don't know why that's fine on Warrior but isn't on Elementalist. Er... Who needs Elementalist in PvE anyway, right? Binding Quickness to banners is also a stupid idea (see the examples mentioned above). Vindicator only really became a thing after getting a second dodge. It's nice to play, but still suffers from some design issues. Like most Revenant builds, CDs don't align properly to make for a nice free-flowing rotation, especially Eternity's Requiem doesn't nicely line up with Legend swaps. The dodge also needs its animation shortened so you actually "feel" when your iFrame ends - that ones quite a problem at bosses like VG/Cairn and the like. Willbender is utterly useless. It's a nice and easy to play cDPS build, but has no use whatsoever apart of being DPS. Virtuosu is the only real outlier besides Mechanist and even then only in (c) DPS potential. Apart from pure DPS, Virtuosu isn't all that amazing. TL;DR: EoD specs aren't all that great - at least in PvE. Mechanist only distorts the view on EoD specs due to being massively overpowered.

Just updated to your newest build. Yesterday (with the old build), everything worked fine. Now, the game doesn't even launch. I can login, but after the launch-countdown, the game always crashes. Please fix, I have my raid static today!

Necromancer. Core Necromancer traitlines need some sort of redesign. pDPS Reaper is a pretty scuffed build and still too weak to be competitive. Reaper Shroud currently is kinda meh~ and Axe is too weak to be a decent ranged option. Reaper still needs more love. cDPS Harbinger could also use somewhat of a buff. Most people went back to playing Scourge since Scourge doesn't have a rotation which really punishes you for screwing up. If you screw up on Harbinger though (especially with its resources), your DPS will nosedive. Ranger. I'd still like to see the nerfs to OWP reverted and Axe nerfed in return. DPS buffs are a fundamental aspect of Rangers core design - that also applies to cDPS Ranger builds (it's actually one of the main reasons why cDPS Untamed works to begin with). Just camping Axe/Axe is actually the most reasonable thing to do nowadays because - well... - you can hardly screw up your rotation that way. Engineer. pDPS Rifle Mechanist needs a nerf. It currently dominates PvE with no effort whatsoever. pDPS Holosmith could also need some love. pDPS Holosmith should - on average - perform better than pDPS Rifle Mechanist. However, it currently does not.

Can relate to this. The balancing in GW2 is simply whack. One of GW2s biggest weaknesses is that there is basically no class identity. I would really love to play some thematically amazing builds, but alas... they're weak. Why grief my own teammates with some weak build instead of playing ridiculously overpowered Mechanist?

What's even the point of this thread? You can simply use PayPal for payment, no? Do people also not understand that migrating to Steam would be bad for ArenaNet as ArenaNet would lose money due to a cut of all payments would go to Steam instead of payments going fully to ArenaNet?

This thread summed up in a single word: Entitlement.

Who said that? It's the truth that you only pay for expansions on other MMORPGs. That's the market standard. There are no "Living World episodes" in other MMORPGs after all. And yes, it's sketchy hat these episodes cost money in GW2 - since they're free if you play the game when they're being released.

That's not the fault of the Steam audience though. The way ArenaNet handles Living World episodes was always questionable. In fact, I'd say that they should generally be free. The Steam audience can rightfully expect them to be free in the first place. You only pay for expansions in other MMORPGs too, after all. TL;DR: It's ArenaNets own kitten fault.

Those gained ingame items (legendaries, infusions, etc.) and especially achievement points for achievement point rewards?