Vidit.7108

There is a lot of solutions to the movement issues with weakening charge that don't result in completely removing it's movement. For example it could have a range threshold since they've just shown they can add those to skills now with spears. It could require a target to allow for movement and you stay stationary without one, which stops a player from accidently killing themselves with a nearby hazard. Removing it changes a lot about how staff daredevil has functioned since it came out. We're down to Vault being the only skill they didn't drastically change. The design of the weapon has seriously faded now and the benefits haven't been especially great, helmet breaker being spamable was really slick and after this update you're better off not bothering to use it.

I've decided to give thief feedback because this change at least appears to be half listening to previous feedback, which is a big improvement from never listening. First, it's good that ally targeting has been removed from a weapon skill that was this important. Where this change falls short is in introducing another form of targeting other than in an area around the player. Skills like well of bounty already have major issues with getting players to stand in them and while other classes have similar powerful healing abilities as ground target skills they don't have the rest of their kit attached to ally targeting skills. It's now much more intensely having to manage both of these things, neither of which are simple usage. Now it's doubled the number of opportunities to misclick an ally by requiring two boon skills to ground target. Even with that I can't deny that it's better this way, but this is still far from ideal. I'm waiting to see what the boon duration and barrier amounts carried over are to tell how much better the skill is but Heal Specter is still only receiving one helpful change. Heal Specter in particular is still plagued by it's alacrity being attached to an ally it has to account for before entering shroud. The fact that it's alacrity comes from consuming a resource and must be correctly placed with very little room for error doesn't change. You might say every class needs to correctly place it's boons but they all get to decide where the boons go while Specter is still left crossing their fingers for alacrity. Additionally, much of the spec's raw healing is in some way still tied to ally targeting, as well as much of it's might. I'd say the Shadow Refuge healing boost helps but that skill has far too many drawbacks to weigh against ever using it no matter how good the healing is. Edit: I wanted to add that this still isn't really getting into the myriad of other usability issues. Presumably the player can now get barrier from it's own shadow sap without other allies around and this is a big help since it mostly can't help itself without an ally around. It's still behind the curve of what other healers can do for just themselves and also since other healers have had healing buffs, Specter really hasn't had any recent changes to it's raw healing output. While the movement of weakening charge is the bane of my existence I didn't want it completely removed in exchange for nothing. There was a lot of value in Weakening Charge that made it define staff daredevil since heart of thorns was released. For one it allowed the player to reset their position relative to the boss after using a daredevil dodge. Vault is a poor choice for doing this for many reasons but for most of all because it doesn't track the enemy. ~I would have greatly preferred that weakening charge not move the player unless an enemy was targeted.~ This would have solved new and experienced player issues with the skill without hurting it's complexity nearly as much. It will also lose it's synergy with fluid strikes which pulled acrobatics closer to relevancy (and acrobatics needs all the help it can get). As it stands it's been turned into melee unload which isn't very interesting, and probably going to lead to player complaints in the future. Balance changes to staff and daredevil have made Weakening Charge less and less useful in daredevil's damage budget so now that it is simpler too that leaves it feeling pretty lame. With this change staff identity is more or less entirely gone. It's becoming unrecognizable now that debilitating arc can't be spammed to emergency leave an enemy, staff auto attack can't be timed to reflect projectiles, dust strike can't be used as a minor range skill and finally weakening charge doesn't move the player. The most interesting thing about helmet strike was getting to spam it in Pve, also gone. The only OG skill left is Vault and I don't doubt you'll find a way to erase it eventually too. The Cluster bomb change feels like you didn't know what to do about shortbow so you improved one number to see what would happen. In fairness I don't know really what you should do about shortbow either. The trait changes are necessary adjustments toward bringing those debuffs more in line with what other classes can do. The traits still aren't good. Hidden Killer is i guess slightly better than before but still useless in PvE. I don't know what an extra two seconds will let it do other than maybe miss with a stealth attack and try a second time.

That's because stealth is presently bugged on spear, it shows up more with quickness. They were aware of it before launch and last i heard there were no plans to fix it. you can join the bug report over here

It was certainly hyped by players and marketing as a new form of healing, but the reality was that this was an additional utility benefit for dps scourge at the time. Balance changes in the IBS era changed that when players in fractals realized they could go healer-less easier than ever before if all the full dps were scourge. It sometimes fit what players would call the off-healer or secondary healer in raids because it mostly lacked ways to get lost hp back and that was bad for scholar uptime (barrier doesn't count toward hp thresholds) One of the primary changes responsible for that IBS-era Heal Scourge was about 6 months post-PoF when Scourge was allowed to use it's healing power to contribute to Vampiric Presence, it didn't function that way on launch. There was a brief period of time after the banner rework that failed where they came up with a new "design philosophy" for pve that seems to have been abandoned when they added a third person to the balance team. They were short changing might uptimes on healers and distributing uneven might amounts among boon dps. You might have noticed last patch Tempest was given more fury, it was previously a deliberate choice to make it pick between full fury uptime and some other options in the support kit. They took some might off staff for guardian that has since been added back in several ways over the last year and half. With the weapon mastery additions in Soto Heal Scrapper and Heal Chrono also had holes in their boon kit filled. AFAIK there isn't a viable healer right now that can't provide 25 might which wasn't always the case before Soto. Most boon dps don't actually struggle at all to provide many other boons, they just choose not to though there are some that just kind of can't without losing a lot of dps. A lot of boon dps have full or nearly full fury without additional boon duration like quick Deadeye and sometimes really substantial might output like with Tempest. Firebrand and Herald have some of the most spare boons. If the group needs stab or aegis, boon duration isn't usually the factor stopping the boon dps from covering it. Recent encounter design like with ToF LCM have made some boon dps less desirable due to non-boon related reasons like lacking portals

I think kind of overall your generalizations aren't that accurate to the root of things. Like the healing meta used to be wildly different when we had 10-player boons and heals. Saying, for example, Scourge was designed as a healer is kind of half truth since it wasn't expected to provide healing to 10 players, it was given strong barrier as a bonus that eventually became overbearing in the fractal game mode, but it wasn't in the mold of what came before. For a lot of it's life you didn't even need to take healing stats with it. There is also unspoken here a major balance issue that is responsible for how some of these boon providers are designed. After EOD they were raising the skill floor of a lot of healers most notably heal mech, and spreading fury/might. Since adding a new member to the balance team that's been rapidly reversing course as healing is getting easier and healers are back to always 25 might. Something like bladesworn really underprovides boons as a boon dps relative to something like alac specter. The thing I wanted to comment on is what's going on with thief. This thread by one of the people responsible for just about any heal Specter you are likely to see out in the wild sums it up. A lot of positive growth on specter has been moving away from it's original design and moving apart from core thief's. Shadow Arts is very meh, core boon support from trickery is great. Specter has more to gain from SA than Deadeye and yet does not rely on it. Further the core issue hurting it's competitiveness with other support builds is still ally targeting. It raises the skill floor with little to no benefit, and that's Specter's design, which was pointed out as an issue in beta and changes to specter have been from those initial criticisms that really did not change. After the first Specter Beta they really pivoted into only bringing up Specter's PvP viability as a healer, they continued to not make a ton of substantive changes to pve healing for about a year. Shroud's biggest drawback is just that alacrity is placed on a targeted ally, you can only lose uptime on regen and protection staying in shroud and the healing is fine. The biggest advantage DE has over DD at providing boons aside from quickness is an extra might source, both are capable of building to provide full fury uptime and the other boons are on core thief traits. It's still also a problem for them that scepter is the primary heal weapon, it's the most viable source for regen and protection and requires they engage with ally targeting. In DE's case that chokes malice generation, which it still needs in a heal build.

It looks like maybe you were trying to gear up for bigger sustain in fractals back when the fractal potions turned agony resistance into crit chance. That's assuming this was a few pieces and not an entire set of soldiers or valk. Maybe WvW would have been an okay place for that but idk if it was meta however many years ago.

This question gets kind of hard to generalize too much about because it depends on things like which tier you are on and if by best you mean ease and consistency or if you mean by speed. Since they've been handing out stability a lot recently ease and consistency has gotten a lot better on all classes. If you were trying to clear T4 with one class and valued speed, I would say you should probably switch around elite specs on mesmer depending on the fractal. Also, I've seen a lot of good times on CMs with different versions of condi rev over the years. on Ease and consistency you can probably find something for every class, however there are some which are effectively locked out of doing certain skips atm or are requiring a higher skill level to perform versus other options. There is also a lot of player skill involved with just managing things in a fractal solo that don't necessarily depend on the class. Like shuffling around movement skills and timing with the white mantle portal.

I am far from against there being difficulty tiers. Let me clarify what I mean a little bit. What they are doing is introducing the same encounter to the player base in essentially 3 game modes each with their own possible difficulty scaling. Story, Raid, and Convergence. They are also saying out loud to us the player base, that further "Raids" are contingent on the player response to this release. The newest fractal release the Lonely Tower does not have a strike mission version or a bounty board mission or a world boss meta copy of the fight that seems to possibly reward the same rewards while sharing all the mechanics (presumably). It seems to me that they've set it up to fail just a little bit. The future of fractals doesn't ride on the newest fractal competing with a different game mode while also sharing a name and mechanics that have to be balanced if they're overtuned. If it actually doesn't share mechanics like with the story versions of the strike missions sometimes don't that's potentially an even bigger confusing issue, and is also not going to help on-board new players. On the subject of the LCM, it seems much more to me that the "buzz" was mostly negative. Players bemoaning it as "mesmer only" content didn't exactly make me want to try it. Like the pre-HB-Alac ren raid meta it seems to depend on just bringing the right class capable of making the content clearable. Nothing takes the wind out of the sails of players craving hard content than finding out some classes are specifically disadvantaged from being able to clear it.

I guess we'll have to wait and see if this is any good. I think though that what sounds concerning is that you have possibly too many difficulty tiers. To recap this post and previous statements this raid features 1. A story version of the encounter in the player's personal story. 2. A 50-player convergence anet is calling the "open world" version. 3. 10 player raid version 4. 10 player cm raid version. 5. 10 player legendary CM version (which i'm going to assume like Cerus is turned out of whatever failed CM version of this fight they release first). If there is a CM convergence as well then that is 6 versions. I don't know how you will judge or collect player feedback about which version players liked or didn't like. It seems like this is ripe for confusion from players if they talk about the new raid boss but actually mean the story version or the convergence version. Also it seems somewhat inevitable that if you can do this fight with 50 less-organized people that would probably be more popular? especially if it is over faster. I hope that's not held against the raid version and it gets a fair shot. While there is mention here about rift essences is this only the convergences version that is giving these rewards? will magnetite shards be given in the raid version? how comparable are the rewards in rift essences if they each reward them? I'd be pretty concerned that if there were a CM convergence that it rewards too little for the amount of time it takes to form a CM convergence group.

You could just take dagger if you wanted to stealth with a weapon but the initiative cost versus support granted is never going to be great on a weapon skill so long as the devs don't want thief to spam stealth easily. I don't think you will ever see the ini cost of stealthing going down from where it is. Further, even if you had more stealth the benefits in shadow arts are all very lacking overall and the way the current PvE build goes you're not really using stealth that much. Having the option to play heal specter in that way would be nice but I don't think it's an inherent solution to a lot of the issues the build has. Stealth isn't in a support vacuum it has big benefits to other thief builds if you have easier or more ways of stealthing. That was the basis for removing the stealth trait for heal skills in the first place. I don't see why a whirl finisher with a field would be useful to your stealth attack, it would be good for it's own sake if paired with a light or water field but I don't see a low cost ini skill getting one of them. There is already a lot of scepter 2 spam for protection upkeep so making the skill stronger at support is going to make weapon skill stealthing far less appealing not more. It wouldn't be a bad thing at all to have from the Specter's prospective anyway and it would at least be a small improvement and give a better support field for blast finishers.

I'm not totally sure I understand what you're talking about. When you stealth you stop attacking, this is intended so that you don't misplace a stealth attack, or auto attack, and end stealth early. And it impacts all uses of stealth in the game including if you stealth other players, it's intentional. You don't return to the auto attack chain on the 1 skill afterward because you stopped using it. Separately there is an issue where you can't reliably stealth at all against certain raid bosses because they apply revealed to you and so it's not going to work correctly no matter what anyway.

On stream we didn't see damage with Daredevil's damage mods, i would expect it to be a lot stronger with them and also it looked to be doing maybe a little less power damage than i expect staff on core thief without many boons (or condis on the enemy) to do. That's not a bad place for the power damage to be if it's neck and neck with power dagger. Even if the raw weapon damage of spear is weaker the weapon has huge potential from it's ability to cast a 10% damage mod. Just about every damage build not using ritualist might be taking x/spear and use it as an opener. The condi stacks look really good as is and wouldn't be surprised to see it rival condi dagger, especially since it can easily cycle in panic strike, but again as other people are saying you won't know until people benchmark it to figure out where it stands among the other weapons.

It's good in most PvE content and PvE Scenarios. On the damage side of things it has a lot of variety and viable builds acceptable in just about all content. The only point of concern is support roles in raids, fractals, and strike CMs where they generally underperform other classes in those roles.

It sounds like in roughly the last year that Taylor is responsible for most of the improvements to thief. Particularly as it seems they've broken up the game modes between the three of them

We'll need to see some numbers to know how good or bad it will be on the various specs. The concept isn't really anything super groundbreaking, it's just adding more flip over skills. After the buggy mess Axe was on launch I'm happy with nothing groundbreaking. It could end up being a mess to balance it versus deadeye m7 or it could be fine. If you consider already that at current daredevil does a lot of dodges in a rotation, then chain casts times + dodge+utility/steal might be enough to keep us out of having to do lots of auto attacks. If it takes an entire second with quickness to go through a spear chain then the cost is a little lower than it says. The animations look fast in the preview video but what skills are actually getting used might be deceiving. Specter is really the big question mark to me. If spear has really two buttons for condi and two for power, that's not really substantively different power budget balance than staff. D/D sort of has 2 buttons for power 1 for condi, which is of course kind of spammy but that doesn't make them unviable either. The on paper description makes spear sound to me pretty familiar and just a little bit different than what thief can already do. I'm not complaining yet at this stage especially after having experimental tech being shoved onto scepter and axe.