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. 😞

People seemed interested in the Celestial Specter build I mentioned in the feedback thread so I thought I'd post more details in a separate thread. This may not become the Specter meta but I was able to fulfill my goals of: 1) Using one set of armor for the new elite spec (because my templates are filling up and I’m cheap); 2) Being able to perform well in open world (solo everything!), fractals, and WvW – in that order; 3) Being super fun and cool while doing the above. And after a lot of testing I settled on a Celestial Specter with tormenting runes and Sc/P – D/D in PvE and Sc/P – ???(D/P for now) for WvW. Gw2skills doesn’t have Specter loaded in yet but I made a placeholder to get an idea for numbers: http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?PaABgqhjjJYdgjt1d7D-zxIY1onvQKICirASPF8eaAx0G-e (useful for stats/equipment only except MH Scepter of course). Also, if you're using GM3 trait Strength of Shade you'll also get a decent expertise bump from your vitality with celestial, roughly 14-15% additional condi duration. So if you do take that trait you will easily have 100% poison duration along with Torment and ~95% bleed duration on D/D. PvE Open World Build Picture This was an absolute blast to play in the overworld, the solo capabilities against hard content is crazy good. If it can be kited all you have to do is spam Sc/P 3 and use your utilities as needed. This will shadowstep and heal you, immobilize your foe, then dump a bunch of torment and slow on them. It’s slow, safe, and steady damage that will also chew through breakbars like nobody’s business. Shroud is used to heal through any accidents you may have with kiting or whatever other incidental damage you take that isn’t offset with all your shadowstep heals. Mayatl Solo Champion Mushroom Queen Solo Note: I solo’d everything with krait runes as I didn’t have access to tormenting on my beta character. So sustain will be even better when it goes live! If it can’t be kited, you can use D/D to do even more damage! Mix D/D 3 and dodge to constantly evade, use your wells for healing and utility as needed, and when you’re low on initiative and endurance for dodging pop into/out of shroud to regen initiative and for a full heal with barrier! You can also dagger 5 for a stealth break, which along with your stealth attack gives you a decent chunk of barrier! Champion Avatar of Balthazar Solo As a bonus, you can also provide excellent support if you join in for group events! You can dump tons of barrier, healing, quickness, and Rot Wallow Venom (torment) on allies to ensure plenty of participation and tagging. Don’t forget that Sc/P 3 will also hit multiple targets in the path of the beam depending on what you have targeted (ally or enemy). One thing on my wish list would be for them to make it so the beam will still have an effect on allies if you have an enemy targeted. So if you’re hitting an enemy and two people are standing between you and the mob you can do damage and provide benefits to them as well. That’s probably not going to happen though… PvE Fractal – Alacrity Support DPS Why Alacrity and not healer or full DPS? I’m looking at this through the eyes of someone that PUGs T4/CM fractals and the role where I think a Specter would be most welcome in the standard composition (Healbrand/Alacrity/3xDPS). My first thought was of course playing it as a healer, but that puts you in direct competition with a HB. Now do I think you could replace a HB as a Specter? Absolutely! You provide lots of AoE barrier and heals with your shadowsteps, steals, and shroud. You can also provide perma-quickness with Sc/P, albeit with a little jank due to how it’s targeted. In addition, you can do this while providing permanent alacrity, good breakbar damage, and doing more damage than a HB thanks to Rot Wallow Venom. Honestly I could see a good Specter healer satisfying both the alac and HB role which would allow for another DPS in the group. But do I think that will be how it works, especially in PUGs? Probably not. People like HBs in PUGs because it allows you to ignore a lot of mechanics, and a lot of that has to do with two buffs specters can’t reliably provide: Aegis and Stability. Also, I think a Specter would have a hell of a time keeping up 25 might on an entire group. Could it be done, especially in sync with other group members? Absolutely! But I don’t see the whole PUG fractal meta changing to accommodate a different type of healer. There are also some reports of crazy DPS output via stacking Rot Wallow Venom on allies (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjDA4W3nYYM). But that’s under ideal targeting conditions and people were also saying Rot Wallow is bugged with the way it was applying. Suffice to say, I don’t think you’ll see those numbers on live due to real-world conditions and fixes/nerfs. Maybe Specter can also fill in for a DPS regardless, but they can also provide Alacrity which is usually a fast pass to a group. So that leaves… Fractals – The Alacrity Support DPS Build Build Picture So you’re not replacing the healer and the outlook for a Specter DPS is uncertain. But you can easily provide permanent alacrity, lots of incidental AoE healing and barrier, and outstanding breakbar capability while also doing comparable condi DPS to a power alacren. To do that you’ll need roughly 50% boon duration to maintain permanent alacrity with those 4 wells. You can get away with less if you fill all utilities with wells, but I think you’d lose damage and utility overall if you go with a different elite for that. Thieves guild is nice but with a long cooldown, and you don’t need Basilisk venom for breakbar between Shadowfall, Well of Sorrow, and Sc/P 3. I think your alac rotation will have a great flow in fractals too, as you’ll want to start with the highest CD ability and work your way down. So you’ll engage a group with Shadowfall to stack them tighter, then lay down Well of Silence to pulse stun and Well of Sorrow/Bounty to pulse boons or conditions. Then end with Well of Gloom to start some AoE healing as the pulsing daze from Silence ends and your group starts taking more damage from whatever may be left alive. Neat! For gearing considerations, you also benefit your group with healing/barrier, but you want to be able to provide decent DPS to fill the alacren’s slot. Plague doctor sounds good, but it doesn’t have any expertise which is a massive damage hit. The heavy vitality would add to your damage if you take Strength of Shadows GM, but the extra barrier and rez on steal from Shadestep seems too good to pass up for group utility. That leaves Celestial, which imo provides the best bang-for-the buck between healing, damage, and some free survivability. It’s also great for open world and WvW too so that’s convenient! If they ever put in a pure condition damage equivalent to diviner that’d be the best, but even then I think you’d get by ok with celestial since it’ll still buff your healing/barrier output. Note that I tested my condi DPS with D/D alone, so this isn’t even accounting for Rot Wallow’s potential DPS using allies. If that comes through even mostly intact on live then Specter Alacrity DPS will blow alacren out of the water. Regardless, even doing damage the “traditional” way with D/D I estimate you’ll top off at ~18-20k on a standard golem setup using celestial gear and leaning towards group support traits. I only hit ~16.5k on live but I also didn’t have ascended weapons and gear so there was a significant stat loss because of that. If buffing your allies with Rot Wallow becomes the way to DPS as a Specter then you’re already set up for that with 100% torment duration thanks to the runes. You’ll also get some steady healing from them thanks to your allies, which will offset the barrier you’ll be dumping on your allies as you shadowstep around constantly. Now will people want this over an alacren? Yes, I think they will in most circumstances and honestly either should be acceptable no matter what. While your burst damage is definitely lower, you also provide lots of barrier and healing with comparable DPS. So you’ll have some utility to offset the lack of burst. Will it suck for burning anomalies on CM Arkk? Probably, you may need to let your DPS know to target that for you. But you’ll also be really helpful with barrier and support for things like Skorvald’s burn phase and you’ll be overall better where condi is strong like CM100. WvW Specter Build Picture It was the best of roaming builds, it was the worst of roaming builds. At least that was my experience, and this is also one I never quite got to 100% of where I wanted it before the beta ended. It absolutely rocks in small groups providing support with Sc/P and it also completely, utterly destroys non-thief melee and you can easily clear camps too. I thought I just got lucky (and maybe I did) but after a while I started thinking maybe Sc/P is just that good at shutting down melee. You are always, always shadowstepping which constantly heals you. You’re constantly hitting them with immobilize, slow, and torment. And if they do manage to land some burst on you, you just go into shroud and reset your health bar with barrier on top. It almost felt dirty. Started as a 1v2, ended as an escape Specter Bros! Now the bad part is Sc/P seems to be hard-countered by other thieves, especially deadeye. It’s a slow cast so they can easily break or stealth out of the channel. It’s not bursty at all so you’ll have a hard time landing enough damage while they’re out of stealth. There are also problems against other bursty ranged characters a la rangers. They’re more than happy to kite you and have a better range so you’re actually helping them shadowstepping back with Sc/P 3. This requires another weapon to offset the weakness and I didn’t manage to find one I was completely happy with. I settled on D/P simply so I could stealth and run away, or at least break targeting in a group fight to keep healing my group. D/D might work but you don’t have a spammable gap closer if your shadowsteps are on cooldown and you have to land a hit for stealth. I felt at a big disadvantage if I couldn’t control the range. And you know what, maybe that’s ok. You can’t do everything with one spec and weapon set, right? Thieves already have all-around great solo roaming builds, I’m actually fine with this even if it ends up being more rock/paper/scissors when roaming. I can still stealth up and run away! I heard Sc/D with D/D or Sb was really good so maybe you can do that to be more well-rounded. Or maybe there’s a build with tactics that makes Sc/P work well enough with some combination I haven’t thought of. I only dabble in WvW so I’m interested to see what other people come up with! That’s all I got, thanks for coming to my TED talk RIP Beta Specter Man and Thanks for the Fun!

Yeah, D/D with Scepter swap. And I forget underwater exists so idk lol. Honestly I feel like the specs are unfinished underwater. None of the wells work and things like the Mechanist pet being completely unusable underwater makes me think (hope) they actually you know... let the new specs function underwater lol.

I spent a bunch of time in the beta with it and uh yeah I think so! If you can kite it's an easy day with Scepter and well shadowsteps. If you need to hang out in melee D/D 3, dodge, and use shadowforce to tank, regen init/endurance, and/or heal to full with barrier on top. Mayatl Solo (Sc/P Ranged) Champion Avatar of Balthazar Solo (D/D Melee) This was the build I used, full celestial (which you can also use for alac in groups, ~50% boon duration gives you easy full uptime with those wells). http://imgur.com/ReuQECW

This was exactly my take on what role a Specter will take, albeit I was looking more from the viewpoint of PUG fractals. I don't see people wanting it over a HB in the standard comp (1xHB, 1xAlac, 3xDPS), but I do think Specter will be able to fill the alac role nicely. It will have some nice advantages, namely being able to drop a ton of AoE healing and barrier on top of alac. Well of Bounty will also help top off any other boons that may end up falling off, it's a great complimentary skill to a HB/QB. I was able to get DPS comparable to my alacrigade BUT it was through conditions. So with alacrigade you'd get more burst damage and stability options, but Specter would give you more healing, barrier, and condi damage. The breakbar capability is pretty crazy on Specter too, might even be better than alacrigade. Note I tested this solo without taking Rot Wallow venom into account for damage. If that turns out super strong on live Specter may give alacrigade a run for its money as the preferred alac battery. But honestly I think either one will be great and I'd take whichever happened to fill the alac slot first.

You both make excellent points. I think Asp's point about being able to save blink is what I was really noticed now that I think about it - the good ones I've fought have done exactly that. When I do wear them down it seems like they've got blink in their back pocket more than other specs so they're able to reset really easily to cycle through their (imo) formidable defenses. Yeah sniper's cover helps as long as they're pushing, I guess it's more securing the kill with them that I've found challenging.

I don't really want to start a new topic but this kinda fits. For power rifle DE, how are you finding the new virtuoso spec? It almost feels like a hard counter to my DE. I've fought a few and it feels like they either have an invuln, evasion, or stealth on demand and more mobility to boot. And that spike damage is nutso... I had a few good long battles with them and it's hard to land kitten near anything on them. I know they have that low CD invuln on one of their F skills and I'm thinking that makes a huge difference filling in for the gap other mesmer specs (eventually) get in their defenses. I've tried a few different things but I'm not really seeing how to get through them with a rifle. Just wondering if others had similar experiences or know how best to counter.

It's not about balance, it just feels like garbage to play. It's not fun. A class entirely based on evasion now feels like it's stuck in quicksand. I loved Mirage and I've stopped playing almost entirely because I don't like having a character that feels terrible to play in WvW. Please fix it.