Riot Inducer.8964

This is a unique one that's for sure. The part of me that loved playing Knight Enchanter in Dragon Age Inquisition loves the aesthetic of a big honking magic blade that generates barrier so definite kudos for delivering that feeling. However the other two skills are a bit fiddly. I like the trend of powering up the other skills with the auto attacks but it is a bit annoying having to jump through so many hoops if you want to push the damaging side of the weapon. I'm not sure what the best way to improve this one is, it can do a lot for support but can also be refocused to damage without having to change too much either. It works well on a Vindicator that already has that mix of offense and support, however I don't think it will gel quite as well with other specs that have more upkeep skills to compete for those energy pips. I think the best route might be reduce the upkeep of the tether to -2 so it doesn't overwhelm upkeep heavy legends like Glint

Staff for warrior has been a real delight I got to say. It's got a good amount of boons and heals but doesn't feel completely anemic in the damage and CC department either. Only skill I had some trouble with was Line Breaker which seemed to target a bit oddly and its movement speed seems inconsistent. This one has been generally positive all around so only a few critiques: Line breaker only providing boons when Ally targeted makes taking advantage of the boons difficult as you need to have an enemy targeted for the burst skill and the heals and boons that spin off from that. Moving the Protection and Aegis to be a universal effect of the skill but keeping the healing, unblockable and stun break as the ally targeted portion would make the skill more overall useful but retain it's niche use in helping stunned allies out of a bind. An aesthetic gripe but the echoing "boing" sound used for the burst skill and the end of the auto chain gets a bit grating after a time. If it was only the burst skill it wouldn't be so bad but with it on the auto and burst it's going off every other second, especially on a berserker.

I rather liked this weapon set overall, it feels pretty in line with the rest of guardian weapons and is refreshingly straightforward after trying some of the other new weapons on offer this beta. That said there is some weirdness in the design. First the requisite guardian Symbol skill. It is worded quite oddly and makes you think it only inflicts burning if you are shooting at or attacking targets that are inside the AoE but in fact it inflicts burning on every projectile fired while within it. This means you miss out on strike damage from the skill by using it at range but do still benefit from the burning it applies. Very confusing. Second skill 5 with it's inconsistent functionality. I appreciate being able to fire it off early for reduced effect but it's very clunky to have that functionality but then also having to manually detonate the blast with another flip over skill. My critiques for this weapon set: Rewrite the symbol skill's description to illustrate that you can stand in it and shoot at targets outside of it and inflict burning that way. Make skill 5 detonate when it hits a target or make it ground targeted, it's too clunky as is. As a final aside, please update scepter. This condition oriented weapon is doing more strike damage than scepter.

This one is wild, not sure what I expected but magic hover axes was not it. That said, it does seem like a decently strong weapon if you can line the return barrages up right. I played with a condi-deadeye setup for a bit and it was quite fun in pve, not sure how good or bad it'll be in competitive modes. To offer some critiques: The power damage aspect is a bit limp, especially the stealth attack which does not benefit from power hardly at all. I don't normally comment on the visuals but the axes don't feel very "thiefy" I would prefer if the axes had a more subdued look with red or purple effects instead of the yellow and green.

I didn't really know what to expect with ranger maces but these are actually pretty solid, possibly the best of the whole beta. It actually has reasonable damage and support capabilities. The Nature's Strength mechanic is interesting, it feels cool to hulk out periodically and I'm sure there'll be a skill to matching the hulk out to line up with your most impactful skills. I'm not sure how I feel about it tbh. If you're only using off-hand mace it's very awkward to make use of as you have to stagger the use of your skills to maintain the stacks and then it takes a good 30+ seconds to achieve 6 and hulk out. Overall the weapon set is very solid but if I could offer one critique it would be to remove the Nature's Strength mechanic from the off-hand and reduce the number of stacks needed to hulk out on the main-hand. This will let the off-hand skills be buffed up with either more damage or other effects that are more useful when not paired with main-hand mace.

This one definitely needs more work. The chain detonation arrows are a neat idea and have a cool visual but they are a bit too much setup for not enough payoff. Tried on a quick-heal scrapper and the best use was chaining 2 & 4 to generate a nearly full stack of might then drop more blast finishers on the field to finish it then cycle arrows 3 & 5 alongside 2 as it comes off cooldown to chain blast finishers. Outside of this use case I can't see much, maybe you can get similar use with an alac mech by pumping out barrier from skill 2. My thoughts on improving this one: Please add some damage to this across the board. I'd recommend a large amount of damage on the initial detonation of each arrow plus bumping up the pulsing damage a fair bit to boot. The chain effects are cool but hit or miss on their potency. Skill 5 sharing out pulsing slow is great! Skill 3 sharing out sub-regen level heals is not! This weapon needs more offensive applications, aside from the low damage only half of the chain effects have an offensive aspect. What if skill 3 & 4 shared out pulsing poison and burning respectively?

Mesmer rifle has been my favorite of the weapons in this beta. It has everything you could want from a healing weapon set, solid heals, condi cleanses, boon application and even some barrier. Skill 5 is also a very unique one that I like a lot. However I'm not sold on the 1 use portal option, it's extremely niche and I don't think it would be broken if it could accept more uses (in PvE at least). I also think it would be useful if a solo mesmer could use it to teleport to the singularity like a thief shortbow 5. My main critiques of the weapon are: Improve the damage of the auto attack. Increase the casting speed of skill 2, currently it feels like there's a big delay between activating the skill and summoning the clone. Make skill 5 have more portal uses/allow the mesmer to shadowstep to the singularity.

My initial impressions of ele pistol have been mixed. The bullet system is interesting and promotes unique combos and ways to move through the skills. However it also layers extra complexity on top of weaver when trying to use it with that specialization that is frankly not worthwhile and feels like it detracts from the dual skills. With the dual skills themselves feeling exceptionally weak with their effects carved off into the bullet bonuses. The Elemental Unload skill was hidden from all skill previews and I only discovered it by reading other comments here. It is an interesting idea but seems too convoluted to activate in normal gameplay. In general the condition focus of the weapon does work and it feels like you can very quickly build up lots of bleeding and burning, faster than other ele weapons certainly. However Air attunement feels a bit left out here with it only offering small amounts of vuln application and relatively weak CC options. The auto attacks tend to feel very weak across the board, hitting slowly and weakly, it is only fortunate that the weapon encourages aggressively moving between attunements so you don't have to rely on these autos for more than a couple seconds at a time. My suggestions for the weapon: Speed up or improve the effects of the Auto Attacks Give Air Attunement a reason to exist on this weapon, some damaging conditions or stronger CCs since Power Damage is not an option. Improve the Dual Skills so they are not limp when not using both bullet bonuses. Better define if Elemental Unload or the bonuses to skills 2 and 3 are the focus of the bullet system.

I like a lot of the overall ideas with the swords but it has some serious issues atm. The overall damage is quite lackluster, numbers are easy to change so I won't linger on this but to say that the sacrifice skills should be doing the lion's share of the big numbers here. Currently they don't really feel worth the cost in most cases. All the projectiles are locked to the ground and are thus subject to tons of inconsistency and incorrectly being obstructed by the environment. This needs to be changed or the weapon will be dead on arrival. I like the idea of the sacrifice skills but the fact that every skill other than the auto has a flip over sac skill is detrimental to the overall weapon imo. It's a bit like the issue of Harbinger elixirs where the boons provided is the only real differentiation and the impact effects and blight threshold effects are all samey and lackluster. Exempting some skills from the flip over sacrifice skill mechanic will let the remaining sacrifice mechanic skills shine more. I'll do a quick rundown of thoughts on each skill. Auto chain. I think the autos should have a damage modifier for targets at close range. The sword has a rather solid gap closer leap but everything else about it is 900 range. Give the autos a boost for sticking close to enemies so there's a reason to keep leaping into melee with your ranged weapons. (other than stacking in instanced fights) Ravenous Wave/Satiate. I think this is a very solid skill it just needs way more damage, preferably weighted more towards the sacrifice part of the skill. Path of Glutton/Gorge. I like the leap and impact of the skill but I don't think this needs to be a flip over. Remove this one from the sacrifice mechanic and just make it a leap with 2 ammo charges that corrupts some boons and it's golden. Hungering Maelstrom/Gormandize. In the interest of functionally using Off-hand sword without Main-hand sword I would move the healing factor to skill 5 and the life force generation to this skill. That way you can sacrifice and heal without it being mutually exclusive or relying on MH sword. Devouring Visage/Consume. This one is suffering from poor usability to satisfy every skill having a flip over sacrifice skill. Just remove the flip over sac and have it be a launch and return skill. Removing the sacrifice and giving this skill a healing effect instead of skill 4 makes off-hand sword a neat package that can pair with non MH sword weapons well.

Just wanted to see how the community is feeling about the amount of new profession content (skills, mechanics and traits) we feel is reasonable from the new annual expansion model. SotO is a but difficult to judge given that the E-spec weapons are not technically new content. However new skills are being made for then to work with other E-specs and that is worth something. In the poll I use the term "skill set" as a rough count of one half of a full skill bar so either a weapon set or set of utility skills. Some professions aren't technically getting a full skill set with SotO's new weapon mastery but this is due to those professions having additional mechanics to account for (every elementalist weapon has 4x the skills for example). With that in mind I would rate the old Elite Specializations at about 3-4 skill sets as each included a weapon (0.5-1 set), a set of utility skills (1 set), new profession mechanic skills (0.5-1 set) and a set of accompanying traits (equivalent to 1-2 skill sets for build opportunities). I feel like SotO isn't offering much without the benefit of the E-spec weapons at only 1 skill set and I hope future annual expansions will have a bit more overall new for the professions. Am I off the mark on this thought? Should we be expecting more or less from future expansions?

Hammer Soulbeast is my most anticipated setup. It was so fun during the preview weekend I ran out of time to try most other classes. Other than that the revenant shortbow and greatsword will be fun on the other specs. I don't have too strong of feelings about the other class combos this will open up.

Not to derail further but I have yet to see a post of theirs that actually addressed any of the suggested alternatives to the current implementation of alac on scourge and their posts generally all boil down to, "Anet decided on this course of action so shut up about it." It's not actually contributing to the discussion of these threads.

That is a good point. We have a bespoke skill type and associated trait that are only on one weapon. That's weird. That said it would be a pretty big shake up for necro's entire arsenal. Would all marks be ground targeted aoe or could some be pbAoE or target locked AoE? Would they have to be the ones from staff or potentially new ones? Would they replace existing skills or just be updated versions of old skills (i.e. Enfeebling Blood just gets called a mark now)? I do like the potential of it and with the associated trait it could be a big buff to some weapons.

You misundertand me, target cap is the reason we're already nerfed to 1 shade in practice. If we could reliably maintain even two shades permanently we would be able to maintain 9 person alacrity. Nevermind thee and 12 person alac. Inverting Sand Savant would mean we're stuck with 1 shade with a 3 target limit but a non spammy duration/cooldown balance. Lower target limit is simply a reality now since as long as Scourge has an "essential boon" it cannot have 10+ target limit for its skills by default. I simply want to call a spade a spade and have Sand Savant as a way to allow Scourge to have its classic gameplay style alongside a base shade duration that isn't horrific to play.

Honestly maybe the best solution if they're committed to alac on Desert Empowerment is to invert Sand Savant. 1 shade is base and Savant grants 3 at a time. Of course the duration needs ro go up regardless but I feel like that's more livable for everyone than this "3 shades in theory but 1 in practice" thing we have now.