Malkarne.8167

Engineer is the most fun I have in a zerg, hands-down. 1. Spec into Explosives (Short Fuse, Aim-Assisted Rocket, Big Boomer). 2. Equip the Elite Mortar Kit. 3. Go into options and set ground targeting to instant. 4. Hover your mouse over the largest clump of people you see. Hold down the 1 button. Other buttons are good for flavor/area denial. 5. Collect all the loot bags with your 1500 range, Aoe, indirect-fire weapon. Laugh like a maniac while you blow everyone up and heal while you do it.

My thoughts on this: My Alacren with Diviner has ~80% boon duration iirc. You'd get 2.7 seconds of quickness per consume for 16.2 seconds total with literally every facet used. Nature gives you an extra 2 seconds so 18.2 seconds. That requires 12 button presses (2x each to activate/consume) and then you have variable activation times too. So I'll say 1 second on average to use each consume and move on to the next one so that's ~6 seconds off right there just applying quickness. You also lose all your utility skills so no CC, heals, stun break AND you're not doing much DPS while you're playing the consume piano. Now you have to swap legends with maybe 10-12 seconds of group quickness if you're really fast. It's a 10 second cooldown to legend swap so maybe, just maybe if you did it perfectly you'll have enough time to swap back to Glint to start reapplying it. ...Except Facet of Chaos has a 20 second CD, Light is 30, Nature is 20, and they're nerfing both Strength and Elements to 15 along with Darkness. It's garbage and won't be replacing anyone as the sole source of quickness. At best you can assist with it but why bother as you'll have crap DPS compared to other, better specs that you could play instead. I'm going to be trying quickness Herald in WvW but there's no way I'm bringing that to PvE groups for quickness as is. Even if you could make it work for group quickness it doesn't seem very fun or effective compared to other options. I think the quickness should be at least 5 seconds per activation as a baseline, factoring in all the cooldowns and legend swapping. That way you'd have to use 1-2 facets per legend swap and could generally save your heal, stun break, and CC for when needed and they'd also work to pad out your quickness when used. You'd probably still have to run Facet of Nature passive and stack lots of boon duration to keep permanent group quickness while still retaining some of your utilities and DPS potential. But it would at least be interesting with some options on how you go about keeping quickness up (stacking boon duration vs using more of your utilities on CD).

Oh man with enough boon duration the quickness might last longer than it takes to activate the consume skill. Why I bet with Elemental Blast and Burst of Strength getting longer cooldowns Heralds could keep quickness up on their group nearly 50% of the time with 100% boon duration! Seriously? Lmao

Yeah the CC>burst dead is the only way you're going to get them, especially as a melee. If they use a stunbreak you're SOL. If they're celestial you're probably SOL because their defenses are likely too high to burst down even if you're 100% zerker. If they get a chance to actually fight back you're SOL because their damage output and sustain is entirely out of whack. If you can outsustain them on another class you likely lack the burst to take them down. If you can do enough to bust through their sustain, well... see above. You need to catch them off guard and hope they don't stun break/counterplay at all during your burst window. If they do you're not going to live long enough to line up another one against a "good" Harb. The pressure is incessant. It's also way harder on melee because you can't play keep away like if you're ranged. They are way, way harder to deal with if you don't have significant ranged pressure. Renegade has been my best bet for killing them in a straight-up fight but I still feel way outgunned, and it feels like I have to try 10x harder than they do to squeak out a victory. They're just hilariously busted.

Yeah maybe objectively Ele's could be OP but I'd put them at the bottom of the list of priorities. A well-played Ele is probably the scariest class to fight, but they're so hard to play I don't begrudge them for being the strongest with an incredibly high skill ceiling. A bad Ele is a free kill, a good one is a hell of a fight, and a great one is kitten near unbeatable. But they earn it!

In 2-3 hours of roaming I ran into 7+ different solo roaming Harbingers. They were at least double the amount of any other class I saw I'm sure it's just because they're scrappy underdogs

Everywhere you go there's that FOTM spec. They are by far the most common class now, I barely even see Thieves anymore. Too much damage, too much sustain/mobility, and annoying as hell to fight. Yes I've beat them but frankly it's just not worth fighting them. One wrong move and you're dead before you know it. Please hurry up and fix them, roaming has been miserable since that spec came out.

I mean the thing that gets me with this is it shouldn't be that easy to do an outnumbered fight. Other classes you generally have to do a lot of kiting, positioning, use of terrain, etc. This just looks like you're running in and overpowering groups of people who are fully aware and engaging you (not blind ganking) and it seems there's very little counterplay available besides running away and not participating to begin with. Which matches up with what I see from the flood of Harbingers infesting WvW now... Granted I realize this isn't a 1 button win situation so there is some class knowledge at least needed to pull it off. But it's clearly out of whack, which you seem to even realize by stating it's OP. I'm not trying to hate on your video and I'm glad you posted it to show what's going on, but it really demonstrates how broken it currently is even after a few nerfs.

I don't even bother trying to fight Harbs as of now, I just turn around and ride away. The amount of damage they can put out is ridiculous for how survivable they can be. It's just not worth dealing with until they do a good balance pass. Neat to see it from the other side though, nice videos.

I love it for open world, it's super survivable and the TTK isn't terrible if you make sure to stack might. I put up a build on metabattle and there's a video showing it in action linked with the build. https://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Specter_-_Condi_Celestial I know aristocracy runes sound crazy but it actually synergizes well and lets you stack up to 25 might solo. You may not have those runes/dungeon tokens lying around so you can get away with the alternate runes and use dumplings for might generation. But I like being able to use ascended food and I've had great success with the aristocracy runes so they're worth it to me. Oh and if you want to play it more as support it'll work well for that too!

Weird, it worked for me Pre-EOD but I can't get it to run in DX11 mode after the expansion. It still works in DX9. I tried deleting the config directory in addons but it still doesn't work. I'm not sure what could be interfering with it then, I'm not running any other addons. 😕 Thanks for letting me know.

Has anyone been able to get the dx11 version to work? Putting it in either the bin64 or the main install directory after renaming it does nothing for me. I'm able to get dx9 to work but it's dead for dx11.

Lol you're totally right, I didn't even think of that. So now you can still be a quickness bot but it's just more terrible to do. If they really wanted to fix their issue with the quickness it provides they probably should have just massively reduced the duration so it functionally only grants it while the Endless Night channel is active. Like .25 or .50 seconds of quickness per pulse.

"Endless Night: The number of targets this ability affects has been reduced from 3 to 1." Reducing the number of targets from 3 to 1 on Endless Night is devastatingly bad. You're throwing out the baby with the bathwater by changing it like that. I played a ton of Specter during the beta and even made a big post on it in this thread, so suffice to say I had a good amount of experience with the spec. A lot of the enjoyment with Scepter came from lining up that beam to splash on targets, both friendly and enemies. It played beautifully with Specter's emphasis on shadowstepping and positioning, and moving around to land cleave like that felt very fun and unique. Please, please revert that change. I'm begging you. Maybe make it so only the target gets the Quickness/Slow but the two cleave targets only get barrier/torment with damage? At least then you'd still be able to provide barrier and have some cleave and it would also resolve your concerns about Specter providing too much Quickness to a group along with Alacrity. Just don't burn the whole functionality of Endless Night to the ground. 😞 I posted this in the main thread but it really should be emphasized how terrible this change is.

"Endless Night: The number of targets this ability affects has been reduced from 3 to 1." Reducing the number of targets from 3 to 1 on Endless Night is devastatingly bad. You're throwing out the baby with the bathwater by changing it like that. I played a ton of Specter during the beta and even made a big post on it in this thread, so suffice to say I had a good amount of experience with the spec. A lot of the enjoyment with Scepter came from lining up that beam to splash on targets, both friendly and enemies. It played beautifully with Specter's emphasis on shadowstepping and positioning, and moving around to land cleave like that felt very fun and unique. Please, please revert that change. I'm begging you. Maybe make it so only the target gets the Quickness/Slow but the two cleave targets only get barrier/torment with damage? At least then you'd still be able to provide barrier and have some cleave and it would also resolve your concerns about Specter providing too much Quickness to a group along with Alacrity. Just don't burn the whole functionality of Endless Night to the ground. 😞