cat.8975

It'd be solid if the ICD was either removed or reduced to 0.25s. At 1s per, it's worthless.

I'd rather they stop balancing around golem numbers, as they're often hilariously out of line with what you can get in Actual Real Encounters Against Things That Fight Back. For example, any build that heavily relies on pulsing AoEs is going to perform terribly on moving targets. Melee-centric builds struggle whenever there are mechanics that force you away from the target. Ranged builds suffer in the face of projectile destruction/reflection (nvm they haven't bothered adding this to any encounters yet so ranged builds are highly favorable whenever they do comparable golem numbers cough cough mechanist cough). There's a reason you don't see people playing Ele, even when it had 40k+ benchmarks. Deadeye, Bladesworn, and Untamed all have 40k+ builds at the moment, yet I hardly see them in groups. Should these builds be nerfed anyway to bring their golem number in line with everything else?

Great for stopping trash at the start of an encounter, not so great during prolonged fights.

The "meditrapper" build was absolutely a meta pick back in 2016 after some of the more broken HoT specs were brought in line (release Herald, anyone?), and you can verify this by checking the relevant Metabattle pages on the Wayback Machine. It has since fallen out of favor, but to claim it was never meta simply isn't true. DH continued to be very strong up until PoF launch, where it was then overshadowed by even more ridiculous builds. These days DH is playable, but I definitely wouldn't recommend it to someone new to PvP. I'd love to see the Valor builds make a comeback some day, but I don't see it happening unless they buff the hell out of Smite Condition and make the damage output of Guardians less reliant on the Radiance line. Edit: Check out this old revision of the Conquest page for a glimpse of what the PvP metagame was like back then.

This change is targeted at its performance within larger groups, actually. There's a reason this is a WvW nerf and not a PvP/PvE one. Support Scrapper having the ability to setup stealth bombs on top of everything else it does was too much.

Your other points aside, I'm really interested in why you think it interferes with movement or slows down rotations.

The wheel here is quite squeaky though. Mechanist is currently overperforming, and so it is going to get some nerfs. The nerfs are deserved. It'll still be good after them. Btw, pointing at people getting <10k dps in actual encounters as an argument about why it somehow isn't as good as the benchmark suggests is invalid. What you should instead look at is how well a spec performs relative to other specs in any given piece of content. As it stands, whenever I do an open world meta, a solid 70% of the top 10 players are usually on Mechs, if not more. If I wasn't there pumping on another class, it'd be even higher. There's clearly a huge disparity there, and so the devs are addressing it with the upcoming balance patch.

This is incorrect, actually. The two nerfs (removal of AAR procs on the mech and extra ferocity from VMD) will have no impact on the support builds, as they don't run Jade Cannons or VMD. The devs were being pretty smart with the levers they're pulling this time around.

"I'm sick of having to put 99% of my focus on my action bar and tracking cooldowns and having to run a perfect rotation just to get by." Drastic hyperbole. Most of the content in this game can be cleared with minimal effort, and is actually designed around people such as yourself. A vast majority of people play the game just like you do and get by just fine. Mech will still be very good after the slight (reminder, it's only ~10%) damage reduction.

While I agree that cScg may still be a little too strong, the effort-to-output ratio is drastically different compared to pMech. Apples and oranges and all.

Friendly reminder that Emboldened exists now. With "100% additional health, 50% increased damage, and 50% increased healing output," damage output becomes pretty irrelevant, and newer players now have a great gateway to normal raids because they can safely learn the encounters (while still earning rewards). Succeeding raid encounters in this game is almost entirely reliant on beating the mechanic checks, not the enrage timers. There are only a handful of fights that become kinda iffy if the damage is truly too low (Gorseval no updraft, Xera, Dhuum, Twin Largos), but you can still gain quite a few LI each week even if you skip those ones.

Are you forgetting about the support builds? Alac Mech and HAM will still be very good builds. This nonsense hate for "piano builds" comes off as very entitled as well, fwiw. It's not as if every other build in the game requires high APM to perform at a decent level. There are loads of builds that can reach 25-35k dps with significantly less effort than is required to reach their benchmark numbers (something something 80/20 rule). I get the feeling some of you will never be happy unless you're able to keep up w/ the "sweaty gamers" with nothing but idle gameplay.

There are plenty of low-intensity builds out there, Mech just happens to be the strongest of them at the moment. Even after shaving off ~10% of its damage, it'll still outperform most of them. Mech is insanely overtuned at the moment, so the upcoming patch is going to knock it down a little. It'll still be strong. You'll be fine.

Wow, a zerk amulet build stacking a bunch of damage modifiers against another glassy build managed to hit a high number? Shocking!

The issue is that playing any sort of offensive Guardian build in PvP without RF is suicide. There's a reason Heaven's Palm and Dragon's Maw are garbage, and it's not just because they do no damage. I suppose you could play a supportive DH, but I don't think it'd be better than core any time soon.

A step up from the 5 minute cooldown for sure, but I'm still failing to see a use case for it over a 10% damage mod or an improved f3. Their concerns over giving it damage (like the normal Fragments of Faith skill) are unwarranted, considering Dragon's Maw only has a 0.01 coefficient in competitive gamemodes... Speaking of CC coefficients... most of the changes to the Guardian CC skills were so unwarranted. Dragon's Maw & Heaven's Palm are both elites, with HP being almost impossible to land in PvP as well. Banish at 0.01 is a large part of what is currently making hammer the pathetic weapon that it is (though it is incredibly funny that it now does 300x more damage in PvE compared to PvP). Then we have all the oddball skills like Hammer of Wisdom, Bane Signet, Blazing Edge, Heated Rebuke, Daring Challenge, and Heel Crack that were never overperforming in PvP and received no compensatory buffs to make up for the removed damage. The only Guardian CC skills I agreed with nerfing were Spear of Justice, Deflecting Shot, and Binding Blade, as the builds they belonged to are already quite oppressive.

It's a meme build more than anything. Playable, but just about every other heal and/or alac build will be a better choice.

9.5k is an exception, not the norm. You're only going to be hitting that when you've aligned most of your damage mods and your target is as glassy as possible.

i don't think the reworked trait is as good as you're thinking it is

why would there be a cd? none of the guard elites are low enough for a cd to be necessary

Roiling Light is underrated if you ask me. Pretty low cooldown for an evade+stunbreak+blind+daze+leap, and is only really competing with... Contemplation of Purity. Against comps with low condi pressure, it's a solid pick. Heaven's Palm is a meme in PvP/WvW, I'll give you that, but it's very good in PvE (so not totally unused). Flash Combo and Heel Crack are the stinkers across all gamemodes.

Firebrand may be unused, but Willbender is currently fine. It could maybe use a tiny bump to its damage output, but to say people don't use the physical skills is nonsense. The heal, elite, stun-break, and spin are all great skills. The kick and shadowstep are the only stinkers in the bunch.

Willbender's damage output scales w/ player effort in a weird way, as it's one of the only builds in the game that relies heavily on hits/second. The more hits you do, the more times you'll proc your virtues, which will then tie in with either Restorative Virtues (lower cooldowns, so you can hit more, so you have lower cooldowns, so you can hit more, so you...), or Holy Reckoning (more might when soloing). Why not try it yourself? The golem is pretty accessible, and if you only care about LI performance, it should be pretty easy to check.

After thinking about it some more, the real issue w/ Zealot's Defense isn't the lack of a dual-attack skill (stop asking for these, they're never going to do it), but is instead the fact that ZD roots you in place. If you could move during the cast (maybe at like -25% or -50% speed), it'd fix many of the issues.

if you're playing support, you should be running res signet if you're not playing support, then nobody will expect you to take it simple as