Arheundel.6451
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Posts posted by Arheundel.6451
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What an awful system. There is no distribution of quality, a complete disaster, far worse than previous system.......
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7 hours ago, Codename T.2847 said:
My bad, I haven't played in a while and thought staunch aura among others is still 3 sec, also saw that spectacular spheres got nerfed.
Then literally what's problematic about Eles in PvP now? If you somehow die to zerker/mara amulet FA Weaver/Cata or the not nearly as bursty condi scepter Ele thats an honest to God skill issue... Have players been so scarred by that 2-3 months of Cata being a bit too strong? xD
Not really...ele got "OP" only couple of times during GW2 history, both were due to some insane burning buff -
- Around 2014 with fire trait line rework, d/d arcane/fire ele got super popular...so much that people were seeing ele more than once every 2-3 matches..a shocker for typical nerf criers
- Around 2023 with the scepter rework, cata became super strong...even though it was barely decent before scepter reworks
Every burning get buffed on ele...that's when you see the tears start running because condi damage allows the average player to succeed in GW2 as such a strong condi output allows the average player to run the safest options for ele gameplay and boom...you see more than one ele every 3-4 matches and not running some yolo burst, like power ele is one of the hardest specs in the game and not due to very hard gameplay but because everything else got powercrept to the stars and beyond. Every other class can run safe power builds with a plethora of inbuilt defensive utilities like shroud reducing dmg by 50%, stealth on demand, block/evade chain, which can be accessed while doing damage, most of the power builds in GW2 right now can be played without ever touching the dodge button.
By contrast, power ele while not being super complicated as people may think, it's still super risky compared to some other options, reason why you see an army of vindicators/rangers/reapers etc etc and not an army of zerker scepter else, why the kitten should I run a zerker scepter ele when I can feel like Goku on a reaper, vindicator, ranger etc?
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Reveal is sadly useless. Often on long cd and for those few secs, thief will just jump around or run away miles and come back
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I can confirm the OP statement. His build is unkillable....quite obnoxious and cheap but credit is due where is due, a very strong build, faced it in the pits.
Nobody can defeat what is logged off ....the epitome of invulnerability
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On 6/1/2024 at 2:36 AM, scerevisiae.1972 said:
yeah i think warhorn is ok for PVE but unfortunately really bad for WVW. just needs some of the existing skills like earth 5, air 4/5, fire 5 to come out faster / have their effects apply sooner.
hammer IMO desperately needs better balance between melee and ranged aspects, ie: not enough of the skills are ranged. again, very close to useless in WVW as doesn't have the mobility needed for melee, and the very limited ranged options don't compensate. also fire 2 and air 4 are very buggy and miss targets that are right in front of you sometimes.
it's so frustrating cause hammer could be good it's just they half-assed it like Anet so often do in order to pump out more cash shop items and the next thing. quality is like a distant afterthought.
note: am talking as a WVW-only player.Yup...the 2 x most useless weapons on ele: warhorn and hammer
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Well deserved nerf. Toxic gameplay will be dealt with
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Ranger needed a support/condi ranged aoe weapon...not another power gimmick to win some random 1v1 in the middle of nowhere, of which nobody cares except some pvp carebear
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I don't care if you give perma invulnerability, chain heal, chain block, aegis, protection....anything delete this bloody awful trait:
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Silent_Scope
This is only the 3rd time that I have wanted a trait to be deleted this badly
- ancient seed - gone thx god!
- https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Silent_Scope
- https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Infinite_Horizon
Good thing that moa form getting nerfed, just get rid of all this garbage design, please
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1 hour ago, rotten.9753 said:
There's a split between PvP and PvE, you know that? Also, Who cares about PvP, it's a dead mode.
It's not about what you or me like to play ele with and where. It's about keeping consistency across all game modes and that's the purpose in a MMO! Every single spec should be viable and fun to use everywhere, ofc with differences in traits and skills but viable everywhere regardless. Several sets of utilities and traits can be used to accommodate requests for alacrity and quickness: conjures-glyphs-arcane, several GM traits nobody ever use...but you expect Anet to nerf those few GM and that single line of utilities: cantrips, all pvp eles have been using since launch because.....
But this is a MMO, with pve-pvp-wvw and people get to enjoy it in whichever way they like. You have conjures, glyphs and arcane skills to change and give you all the alacrity you need...but out of selfishness you want Anet to change the single type of utility eles need to survive in PvP and all because you don't like pvp..hum ok?!
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On 6/1/2024 at 2:49 PM, Szatko.8132 said:
I 100% agree. I think Tempest's Latent Stamina as a very water-themed trait could be incorporated into core water traitline somehow, with Elemental Bastion taking its place instead (of course that would also mean nerfing this trait a little bit, which is fair considering how much healing this trait can provide). I really like the changes they've made to allow Tempests to provide fury as well, but I still don't really see a reason to play Tempest over something like Druid or Chrono in any PvE scenario (well, unless someone simply enjoys it). Being stuck into melee, with low radius on fire overload (180) and earth overload (240) is what limits this build's potential.
What about no? Elemental Bastion is vital for self-sustain on offensive/roaming/duelling tempest so we don't touch it. You have the other 2 useless GM , put your alacrity there!
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On 6/1/2024 at 8:07 AM, rotten.9753 said:
That's the thing, core utilities are also atrocious when it comes to support, except very few exceptions, all of them are selfish. The only exceptions I can see are:
- Signet of Water
- Glyph of Renewal (for some reason it was nerfed to 90s CD in PvE based on its PvP "performance" and was never unnerfed like Signet of Mercy was.
- Ice Bow for heals on auto attacks but it takes too long
Some utilities which are strictly selfish defensive tools could be made AoE for PvE - Arcane Shield, Armor of Earth, Cleansing Fire. There's absolutely no reason why Armor of Earth gives 10 stacks of stability for 6 seconds when there's no way to lose them (unless stripped) as one stack of stability can be removed every 0.75 seconds.
Instead, we're getting CD reductions which won't help Elementalist in high-end PvE at all.
...NO? There is absolutely no reason why the best defensive utility on ele should be touched gor pve. Have a go with all the worthless glyphs, conjure, arcane ...plenty to suggest there and make pvers happy. Cantrips are defensive tools for ele , they have been carrying ele since launch and it will stay like that! There is plenty else to go around and change for your pve content
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17 hours ago, Mevelios.4809 said:
Indeed, that's how I use it; what I had in mind is, it's a decent help on the side but not a focal point. When a single person goes down, several people ressing bring them back up in a moment, whereas should several fall Renewal of earth from the glyph can get three of them up; Arcane resurrection is a good trait, sure, and so are Evasive arcana/Elemental enchantment (could expand it to Elemental attunement although we got again the range issue, harmonizing all such AoEs to 360 radius like most healers would go a long way towards bringing any healer elementalist in line with competitors) yet all of those perks are far from mandatory, they're a convenient help at most filling a small gap on occasions. The small supportive boost from the 06/25 preview about diamond skin offering a group cleanse on any blast finisher is likely to make me disregard arcane spec in the near future, removing the near mandatory reliance on Cleansing water I felt on high condi pressure encounters, giving room for using more often Soothing power or even Powerful aura (the latter tied to earth's Elemental shielding).
On the opposite though I misread Earth's embrace merging into Earthen blast - the barrier will be personal, not a group tool. Bit of a shame, could've been interesting!
Don't discard Arcane wave; while it was more convenient before as an instant blast finisher at a distance (now a jump locking you into an animation), it can find plenty of uses from combos. CC on its own, Karakosa interaction, extra healing if blasted into a water field, 3 might stacks into a fire field for 40s (if 100% boon duration), area ice aura into an ice field (if you have any interaction with armors), 20s swiftness into a lightning field (not much but makes the difference in few occasions - think of Q2 CM) and I'll ignore the soft CCs, since in group play you shouldn't run out of it. That sort of interaction is one of the strong points of arcane spec's Evasive arcana - on top of water's healing+condi removal, the earth dodge is a blast finisher; that trait IMO is the most interesting of the entire spec. It's also the reason why I run Arcane brilliance on Qheal cata, although it could definitely see its extra healing from a successful blast finisher be made a group tool, so there's a real benefit beyond a few boons in ensuring a proper combo finisher.
The Lightning hammer can also have surprising interactions on Qheal cata, since its autoattack chain ends with a blast finisher with the added value of providing two good CC skills (and some built-in self quickness if you need a quick burst to restart your energy generation). You provide the spheres for quickness & combo fields, then you just blast 'em all away for a while. It won't hold up to encounters with high damage pressure obviously, but otherwise is a very simplistic yet working method to produce effortless boons & healing (although restricted obviously to the conjured weapon's duration and whether allies pick up the weapon on the ground or not), healing being definitely noticeable in water sphere fields. You more or less play the way an Aheal willbender does doing that with the accompanying restrictions (proximity healing only); energy's a bit of a pain to manage in that case, however a single Firestorm does roughly work as good as hammer's Invoke lightning does (albeit much slower at taking effect, so you should anticipate Firestorm's cast). The method can be used on tempest, however only the fire & air overloads produce fields so it's not as reliable!
Arcane power used to be a possibility even if having a very small impact, but no more, which is kind of a shame.
That's something I 120% agree with, the question being the implementation. Without thinking it through, I'd associate it with Soothing disruption (catalyst having trouble providing regen) so the trait also alters cantrip skills effects: Cleansing fire is thus turned into a group condi cleanse where the might stacks would be based on caster's (ele) removed conditions, while Armor of earth could be made into a group stab tool primarily with three stacks instead of the actual ten (then either barrier, either protection boon - likely not both so it doesn't become excessive, barrier being what would interest me the most out of these two). Can't tell yet what I'd think of the changes associated with remaining cantrip skills, but I'd already be afraid of making it too powerful a trait against its competitors; then there are arcane skills which are harder to approach, with the current effets of Arcane lightning. A source of aegis in the lot would be definitely welcome as a solution to either keeping Aftershock on the side for that very purpose, either saving 10 energy and earth attunement CD at all times for the earth sphere.
Still I must admit I'm not fond of tying such skill behaviour changes to a target spec, it turns these specs into must-haves. Some ground to think over!
Stay away from cantrips...changing armor of earth from personal stacks to 3 for all team? What are you even smoking? There are other game modes than PvE, this is a MMO and we are not about to turn ele in a free kill so that pvers can roleplay as guardian in pve
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First you need toughness to survive sudden burst, second you need enough knowledge to dodge, lastly you need overwhelming condi application. Willbender is like thief...just harder to face head on due to cele gear and boon uptime but it has a harder tume getting away in return
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Sad news....I still remember tagging along with Discharged Guardian and Kiss, the only tag on all maps, back on WSR. I will be there.
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I choose to delete the pvp forum.
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5 hours ago, Gotejjeken.1267 said:
Mace wasn't doing anything until the WS patch in March.
Prior to this you had Sword meta, and still do for a lot of builds, as sword still hits harder and is more useful than trying to bunker down with mace, especially now with the huge nerf to the reset.
Agree, prior to March a lot of ranger builds were using Shared Anguish for the stability and ya lot of times supplementing with skirmishing. My Druid build has always pretty much run Sk/WS, but with the WS buffs can get away with a power variant now.
Sadly, not many here are going to see or understand this, as they latch on to whatever FOTM is killing them. Since Metabattle listed M/M untamed as 'the build' (despite seeing M/M soulbeasts in ATs), will get complaints, such as this topic.
You could have agreed with the forum when boonbeast was around, every clown in town could show up and do good. These days you are much more likely to lose a game where you have an average ranger in your team, who basically lose most if not all duels on a point. Meanwhile somebody who bought the game last week, jumps on a vindicator and will stay alive for far longer than he should ....because "revenant is a class played by best players and best players tend to win" or he could be a reaper, go gun blazing on a point, press F1 amd spin to win, contributing much more than he actually should.
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6 hours ago, Sahne.6950 said:
This is totally fine, and i am all for memeing on rangers, cuz they deserve nothing but nerfs, for playing that kitten class..
But when we are honest.... ranger is probably fine the way it is right now.
Buuut i also might be biased, cuz ever since they nerfed OONGABOONGA, ranger is a free win for pretty much all ele builds.
So take it with a grain of salt.
It's no surprise, ranger at best is a silver/bronze killer...unless played by @Boyce along with Sindrener
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Quickness at the cost of sustain..lol no ty. Weaver was played perfectly before even quickness was invented. Specs like reaper gets quickness at zero cost on top of ferocity all baked into the same trait
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19 hours ago, Ram.5981 said:
Overall, I think the majority of the changes are good. But this... WTF, Anet? Did you get too many complaints that the only one-shot super glassy build on ele was killing to many people, so you nerfed the hell out of one of the main damage skills so do virtually no damage? Maybe that's a typo?
Edit: should mention <- WvW player
With this, I don't need anymore to keep a slot reserved for glass ele scepter....it's was my only reason for having a glass ele in the whole game and now....I can just run cele/condi gear on every spec and succeed 10x easier and faster...oh well...scepter is still amazing on cele gear, no biggie
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34 minutes ago, Philalive.8654 said:
Yeah, I agree that there are more issues than just boon stripping in the game.
My logic of this being able to fix more than it would first seem is basically this:
You can't really kill anyone in a decent-ish group without Strips & CC. Protection, Stability, Barrier, damage mitigation through stacking and so on are way to strong to crack no matter how many Holosmiths/Berserkers you have in your party. In my experience people start dropping when 1. Holosmith greeds slightly of stack and gets deleted or 2. Supports start falling behind after a few people down, they get CCd, etc. I'd say I'm a heal Vindicator main atm and at least I feel like as long as I'm not CCd I can basically keep my group alive through anything. When I get pulled or CCd things go south very fast (assuming the teams are fairly balanced).
So we definetly need boon strips to be able to kill anything (within reason). That's why we have Renegades and Necromancers - for boon strips. Now this role used to be filled with offensive Necromancer builds eg. Power Reaper or Power Scourge. Those builds didn't really provide much support and were quite good targets to kill, and they did alright damage but not enough to out-compete actual DPS builds. But instead of that, we now have 2 full minstrel supports that spam boons, barriers and transfuses - as well as boon strip.
This makes every squad way tankier than it has any right to be. However, if we make (somewhat) intelligent changes to the builds that are the biggest issue; the overperforming Supports with boon strip capabilities and the underperforming DPS boon strip builds. We should see that squads lean back towards at least 3 Supports, 1 DPS boon strip and 1 DPS instead of 2 supports, 2 supports with boon strip and 1 DPS that we have now.
That would DOUBLE the amount of Berserker (other flavors available) gear users in blobs at the moment which I think we can all agree is a step in the right direction. I also don't think you could really justify Celestial Support Renegade if they didn't provide boon strip so hopefully the meta that would emerge after fixing the support builds and bringing up some DPS strips would be healthier than the one we have now.
As I see it atm, the WvW meta is on fire and we need a fix with some haste. There are a lot of issues to tackle after this but imo, this is the best place to start.
Shared defenses - especially reflects, really do need some looking at in the future too. They're a scary topic to mess with though because the game is so heavily balanced towards projectiles basically not working at all.
Again: necromancers and revenants must not have access to copious boon corruption/strip under any circumstances! You're talking about professions who have access to boonbot specs like vindicator and harbinger, then you want to give them amazing boonrip ....and who's gonna stop them after??
Boonrip should be given solely to Thieves-Warriors...and even rangers in some capacity. The first two haven't got access to boonbot specs and thus makes sense to give them great boonrip and ranger could use something other than GvG druid healing meme.
We want to diversify the meta...not cement it even more by polarizing the few remaining roles in the hands of over-spammed/represented professions like necromancer and revenant, on top of that, you want to give boonrip to celebunker nightmares like harbinger and vindicator...who will stop them after?...not like now it's easy anyway, don't make it impossible but I am at least certain the current devs will come to the same conclusion.
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On 5/25/2024 at 3:52 AM, Infusion.7149 said:
@disForm.2837 If I did not have the help of some mesmers I would probably have never completed the JPs
I decided that I'd rather have a bag full of accessories, amulets than doing JP and dead metas...especially JP..no kittening thank you
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12 hours ago, Philalive.8654 said:
Hello!
I’d like to talk about the WvW meta and some balancing issues that I have with the game currently. I'm not the biggest expert on this game or in WvW, there are much more knowledgeable players than me around but none that'll waste their time writing a forum post (or even remember that the forums exist probably). But I do have some experience, I've been around Guild Wars 2 from release in 2012 and for the last couple of years been pretty deep into WvW. I've done a decent amount of blobbing in both open-field stuff as well as organized BvB in EotM. I've dabbled in GvG during the 20s hype last year among other things. Anyway,
The meta is 5-man sub-groups, generally you have a “Primary-” and a “Secondary-” support in every sub-group, they’ve been locked in for a long time. Most of the meta shifts have changed what we fill the rest of the 3 slots with.
The primary support (also known as “Firebrand”, xd) is in charge of keeping stability up on your sub-group as well as providing other boons like protection, swiftness, and so on.
The secondary support is the group's healer, they’re also responsible for the majority of the cleansing as well as some less important boons.
I think this is a strong base to build on, I don’t think there are any inherent issues with this and it’s almost as old as MMORPGs are themselves (Holy Trinity anyone?).
Recently however the meta has shifted towards squads running way more supports, not just having 2 per sub-group, but at least 3 and most of the time 4 supports per sub-group. There’s obviously nuance here but these days it looks something like this:
1 - Support Firebrand as primary support (Stability, boons, various utility).2 - Heal Vindicator as secondary support (Excellent Healing, decent cleansing, good resistance).
3 - Support Scourge as tertiary support (Transfuse, Barrier, boons, strips).
4 - Support Renegade as quaternary support (ALACRITY, Stability, Damage reduction, utility). Commonly swapped out for Support Chronomancer in a few groups (ALACRITY, lots of utility and boons).
5 - DPS Holosmith (Damage). Potentially a Berserker instead for Banner-stomps.
Honorary shout-outs to Celestial Firebrand, Support Scrapper, Support Druid, DPS Dragonhunter, DPS Tempest/Catalyst/Weaver.
Now obviously there are discussions to be had about classes, specs and builds within roles that should also be had but I’m trying to focus more on the overarching ideas here.
I feel like a lot of the changes recently on their own make sense in context and have, for the most part, good justifications (sometimes you are for sure just rolling a dice though, right?). A prevalent theme has been to buff underperformers and be cautious with nerfs (which I disagree with but isn’t necessarily the problem with current balance in WvW and another discussion to be had).
However, when we look at the result of these many changes over time it’s played out pretty poorly. We’ve ended up in a very static boonball meta.
These days as a DPS player I basically expect my party to provide me with the same boon coverage that I expect from a competent PvE raid group. We have extremely good alacrity uptime from Renegades, resistance is basically permanent from just the heal Vindicator - but just in case the Renegade can also do permanent resistance, the Firebrand does a ton of resistance and Chronomancer can do some, stability is expected to permanently be applied by the Firebrand but when that fails you have redundancy on the heal Vindi and the Renegade that is spamming road on cooldown and the Chronomancer with F4, mantra, well, etc.
We’ve had so many small buffs here and there for most of the support builds but we rarely have any nerfs, so obviously boon coverage is going to trend upwards. However, the real issue is when you, on top of these very boon-favoured support buffs, also keep nerfing basically every boon-strip and corrupt in the game.
Here are some recent-ish examples (I’ve missed a lot I’m sure):Banish Enchantment:
1 - Increased energy cost from 20 to 30 in WvW only.
2 - This skill now has a 5-second cooldown in WvW only.
Null Field:1 - Increased cooldown from 25 seconds to 35 seconds in WvW only.
2 - Reduced range from 1,200 to 900.
3 - Increased the cooldown from 35 seconds to 45 seconds in WvW only.
4 - Reduced the field duration from 5 seconds to 2 seconds in WvW only. Reduced the number of pulses from 6 to 3 in WvW only.
Well of Corruption:1 - Increased cooldown from 32 seconds to 40 seconds in WvW only.
2 - Reduced power coefficient per strike from 0.45 to 0.35 in WvW only.
3 - Reduced power coefficient per hit from 0.35 to 0.28 in WvW only.
Unholy Feast:1 - Increased power coefficient from 0.88 to 1.0. Increased bonus damage health threshold from 25% to 50%. Reduced number of boons corrupted from 2 to 1.
2 - Reduced power coefficient from 1.3 to 1.0 in WvW only.
3 - This skill now removes boons instead of converting them into conditions.
Spiteful Spirit:1 - Reduced power coefficient from 0.4 to 0.1. Reduced number of boons corrupted from 2 to 1. Reduced additional boons corrupted against foes under 50% health from 2 to 1.
2 - This trait now removes boons instead of converting them into conditions.
Devouring Darkness:1 - Reduced the number of boons corrupted from 2 to 1 in WvW only.
2 - Increased cooldown from 10 seconds to 18 seconds in WvW only.
Enfeebling Blood:1 - This skill no longer converts boons into conditions.
Lesser Enfeeble:1 - This skill no longer converts boons into conditions.
Signet of the Locust:1 - Reduced the number of boons removed from 2 to 1 in WvW only.
Break Enchantments1 - Reduced the numbers of boons removed from 4 to 2 in WvW only.
1 - Reduced the number of boons removed from 2 to 1 in WvW only.
Winds of Disenchantment1 - Reduced target cap from 10 to 5.
2 - Reduced incoming boon duration reduction from 100% to 33% in WvW only.
3 - Lowered the duration from 5 seconds to 4 seconds in WvW only.
kitten, we’ve basically taken every boon strip in the game out back and absolutely murdered them.
These massive and continuous nerfs to boon corruption and boon strip taken along with all the massive buffs to boon application (along with some realisation in the player base that boons/support are OP) have made the meta into squads with 4 supports per 1 DPS player where movement is detrimental, you’re just better off standing still, transfusing all your downs, proccing all your resurrect traits in the same place and bunkering down while letting your players do a golem rotation and praying the enemy cracks first.
It feels like moving your blob these days probably just kites you out of more beneficial AoEs than it does detrimental AoEs. There’s always been an issue that the more movement you do as a commander the more stragglers you’ll end up with, every movement risks having people off the safety of the stack dying. Inherently this makes the game bias less movement so we need skills to counter this. Unless you like standing still and doing a golem rotation but we have that already, at the golem, so let’s keep it there.
The game has shifted so strongly towards a static numbers and rotation game where it’s about you and your friends standing still and pressing buttons off cooldown (there’s some nuance, but less than there used to be) whilst praying that you win. It feels like we’re more reliant on squad composition; like finding 40 people that want to support 10 DPS, then the whole squad is relying on those 10 DPS to be competent.
A lot of the impact you could have as an individual player has been diminished. It’s shifted towards you “not screwing up” at your job instead of being able to shine with good gameplay. Newer players are heavily discouraged from playing DPS (in my experience the most popular role) since the whole squad is relying on just 10 people in a full 50 stack to do all offensive pressure on their own, if you’re not great at the game yet you have 4 people being upset because they feel like they’re 4 support players supporting someone who’s not performing their job. This used to be fine, you could get away with it much, much easier previously, which in my opinion was much healthier for everyone involved.
Fights often just break down to: shuffle slightly to the right, stand still and do a golem rotation for a few seconds, shuffle a bit again and wow we did it, they cracked. They didn’t die on a well coordinated burst (like a Well call), just cracked after x amount of time when one group started missing Illusions or lost a rally war. It feels bad when fights are just the two groups standing on top of each other pressing buttons and if either starts moving they’ll die instantly.
With Alliances actually releasing soon (I almost can’t believe it) it’s super sad that pretty much every single guildie, friend, associate, neighbour’s cat, random team chat player and even the rats all agree that the meta right now is terrible.
One of the biggest problems since the great butchering of Necromancer on July 27th has been the removal of the offensive strip/corrupt archetype (Power Reaper, Power Scourge). Virtuoso and Spellbreaker could also fill this role but never could quite live up to Necromancer's dominance in the space.
This was actually a very healthy part of the group composition meta-game, the only real issue was that it was too dominated by a single class: Necromancer. They’ve basically been replaced completely by boon stripping supports instead, which are, I think, very quite unhealthy since it very heavily promotes triple+ support sub-groups.
The choice for your boon stripping shouldn’t be between a Power Scourge that basically does strips and nothing else and a Support Scourge with transfuse and Barrier on top of the strips.
Blobs need to be less tanky and not as bunker-y as they are right now. Bringing back and promoting the offensive boon strip archetype will instead move the game back to a more reasonable state where we’re not just invincible boonballs and literally 80% of the squad is on Minstrel or Celestial.
For example I especially think it’s good if fields (wells, null field, etc) are fairly long in duration. It doesn’t really affect smaller scale stuff since they’re naturally way more mobile and will just move out of it. It only really punishes overly static and slow gameplay. Having long durations on things like Null Field, Wells, and other stuff is what used to make it so dangerous to just stand still for too long. It also promotes good strategy like cornering a group and, most importantly, discourages mindless boonballblob stacking.
Playing a boon class right now doesn’t even feel good now while they’re supposed to be all the rage, I look at my party window playing support Chronomancer and think, yup 30s resistance, yup 30s alacrity, 25 might, check that, 30s fury, 60s swiftness, 30s protection, 11 stacks of stability with 12 seconds left, 30s vigor and you think, wow, I’m really making an impact right now. Except you haven’t pressed a button yet and those boons are actually from the other 3 supports in your sub-group.
So for something more concrete instead of just a rant, here goes something.
Necromancer is the only class I haven’t played much so I’ll leave the specifics to someone more knowledgeable on the class but I feel like we need to buff the offensive traits and abilities on Necromancer, more damage, more boon strips/corrupts. Tying some extra boon corruption/boon strip to offensive traits that compete with powerful support abilities is a good start. I’d love for wells to be dangerous and impactful again but I also don’t want to just have Barrier Scourge be stronger and call it a day (although even that would be an improvement atm).
Virtuoso has a lot of potential to be an alternative to Necromancer, they’re already quite solid in terms of boon stripping. While I agree that Null Field is already a pretty loaded skill (since it cleanses as well), and I agree buffing that probably just makes Chronomancer better and not much else, I don’t think nerfing it and not providing any alternatives makes the game better. Boon strips are rare to come by so we need more alternatives and bigger commitment than just a single utility skill.
Thankfully, we already have great contenders on Virtuoso for buffs! Things like: Rain of Swords, Sword of Decimation and Thousand Cuts. They’re basically not used anywhere in the game right now (Thousand cuts on cVirt in PvE I guess) buffing them won’t mess with roaming content in any way since that type of skill is just too easy to dodge/move out of which makes them a good candidate in my eyes.
You could move Virtuoso towards more of a damage focused specialisation and actually make them worth using for the damage. This also has the added benefit of probably not touching Virtuoso’s power in GvGs as much as adding some boon strip to Sword of Decimation would for example.
I also feel like this would be healthy for Virtuoso in general, since mesmer already has very powerful utilities already, I feel it’s important to make them an actual trade-off instead of concentrating all the power to F1, F2 and traits. Having a DPS build being able to slot some utility for the squad is good, but it shouldn’t be free.
The 3rd obvious example here is Spellbreaker, it’s always been much stronger in smaller scale content compared to large scale content (not counting bubble shenanigans). My personal take on why this is the case is because the Warrior’s core weapons suffer badly from 2012-syndrome, none of them were designed for the type of combat and context that we have today in WvW. (Feels like most things that end up as good DPS in WvW are kind of by accident more than deliberate design).
Berserker works and feels much better in this context because most of your power and half your time is spent pressing F1.
I feel like a lot of why Spellbreaker struggles so much in large scale battles can be summarised quite well with looking at the Greatsword abilities:
1 - Standard auto-attack.2 - Stationary skill with no range that only makes sense if your design perspective is from 2011.
3 - Actually good skill because it's movement with evade-frames but not very impactful as an offensive tool in this context.
4 - I… uh… Yeah just don’t press 4.
5 - I… uh… Yeah just don’t press 5. This is a rare example of making something that usually feels great to have (a movement skill) actually terrible and clunky to use.
Compare this to Vindicator Greatsword (that is well designed and feels great to use):
1 - Standard Auto, decent.2 - Excellent AoE Damage with extra range, very usable
3 - Good dash, super responsive, very good AoE damage with some range.
4 - On-demand block, super useful. The follow-up doesn’t feel great though.
5 - Extremely good AoE damage with auto-aim to concentrate damage without you trying.
The rest of the weapons are good in their own context but have no place on an offensive Spellbreaker build in a blob. Longbow is a great example of a weapon completely carried by Zerker F1 that’s largely useless without it. But I’ll give Hammer some slack and say that it’s actually decent, getting CCd in the F1 leap is suffering incarnate though.
Anyway, I could talk for days about things I think should be looked at / changed but I’ll end it here and keep it at boon strips since I feel like that’s the most important change I’d like to see in the near future.
Let me know if I’m crazy or if you have better ideas, I’m all ears and hopefully the balance team will keep it in mind.Any class should be forced to sacrifice damage/defense for support and support specs/classes should have no access to boon strip and that how you change the meta. This is the reason why tempest support is dead in water, they nerfed everything that made tempest tank support...now there is only the support aka no more meta, on spellbreaker the same point more or less...to support/heal you lose dmg. You cannot go even cele tempest/spellbreaker then do dmg, support, heal and condi clear at the same time and this is why you see armies of vindicators, scrappers,chronomancers, scourges, firebrand pushing forward like an unstoppable force.
Problem is neither gear or boon application...it's a design issue, simply some professions do not sacrifice enough for what they get
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17 minutes ago, gerberlyfe.9736 said:
Put a target cap on all bubbles and walls and limit them each to 5 or 10 projectiles denied. Why does aegis block only one melee attack but then a bubble blocks infinite projectiles? it makes no sense and it's not fair or fun. It shouldn't be omega aegis designed only to immeserate and obsolete entire weapon types and classes for really no reason. You could still get strong value if there was a reasonable cap of 10 projectiles denied. There is no other effect in the game that has infinite effects like that and the fact that they bubbles are naturally chained together gives zergs an intrinsic and unnecessary advantage over roaming builds and allows harassment of spawn etc.
Often off-hours on my roaming ranger or deadeye, a group of maybe 10 of a larger server can just infinitely harass my spawn because they have access to an uncounterable trump card for many roaming builds.
Infinite projectile denial has no counterplay for most mesmer, ranger and deadeye roaming builds and other builds for no reason. Just abolish it.Cry me a kitten river! To have the balls to come here and ask to remove the only resemblance of counterplay against braindead pewpew roaming meta, you can time burst or change to melee when projectile denial is up...but that it's actually skilled/hard to pull but that's not as easy as sitting at 1200 range pewpewing from stealth and dodge BS.
P.S signed a ranger who mained the class for 6K hours. The vast vast majority of ranger mains in wvw sit at 1200 with their bow, cowering behind a wall of tanky BS but when I get in your face ( with melee ranger), most of you just start running like headless chickens with the GS.
Ranger, mesmer, thieves..you can all swap to melee weapon sets and have the mobility to get the kitten out on a whim with stealth, meanwhile the professions who rely on projectile denials can only stand there and take it all...man up and learn to play the kittening class!
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For something designed as main ranged condi weapon, it does a good job in PvE at least...it's competitive the problem: is the condi application is not enough and simply too slow for PvP environment. The weapon would have been great 5-6 years ago not now; you need to overwhelm the enemy in a short time and with decent frequency to stand a chance against all those defensive layers and this gets progressively worse as the skill level of the opponent increases.
- Landing Fire 3 is the only way to put a moving target on the defensive and you in advantage. Landing Fire 3 is very hard on moving targets and requires a hard CC like gale or earthquake
- Fire 2 should be increased to 2 x stacks of burning if there is no intention to speed up Fire 3 or instead replace Raging Ricochet with "next fire bullet deal 3 x stacks of burning.
- Air 2 daze should be increased to at least 3/4s daze in PvP/WvW or remove the daze and add confusion or torment but 1/4s daze is not enough time to capitalize on enemy, whatever you have interrupted will be up in the next fraction of a second, what even was the point? A well-placed daze should give you time to turn things around....1/4s not enough to do anything decent
- Earth 3 should be 2-3x stacks of immobilize
Do remember that eles cannot swap weapons, and we cannot change strategy or approach mid-battle
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[POLL] The Boon Ball Meta
in World vs. World
Posted
https://metabattle.com/wiki/WvW
Boons are not the main issue.....start looking at the professions involved, when you have a single class on 2 x different meta builds....you have a problem. Again boons are not the main issue....look at the profession distribution