Gotejjeken.1267

You don't run Glyph of Stars on immob / bleed Druid. You also don't run Glyph of Alignment (breakstun combo from Equality is WAY more valuable). For the heals, healing spring can be ok but also requires you to stand in the trap, so most situations you aren't getting full potential and traited troll unguent way better. They nerfed Druidic Clarity pretty hard, and you are missing the combo heals from Lunar Impact / Seed of Life combo. Vine surge clears immob, but lighting reflexes does also + 2 condi clear. Vine surge should only be used for kiting to create distance between you and enemy. There's also entangle which clears conditions on use with WK. Not sure why we're having this discussion anyway, because if you don't know the importance of sharpening stone you wouldn't know bleed/immob druid to begin with. Anet plz fix sharpening stone (starting to feel like that Shattered Aegis guy...)

Thanks for explanation; video must have been rendering when I posted it thus the blurry quality. And yes, the stability and other boons application was throwing me off, but think ele can pump out some mad stability now from what I was reading on PvP forums. These two things do not align. Also, for ranger part, I think we all agree the thief was pretty good but as Chips mentions would have been a much easier time if not for the cata support. Thus my 9/10 'free bags' take.

I genuinely have no idea what you mean here...

Thieves are oh so fun to fight in WvW--especially ones with sus teleporting going on, sus boon application, an account name like 'asdgf' and cata duo partner!

Ya you will get three stacks in AoE: Primal Cry - Guild Wars 2 Wiki (GW2W) EDIT: Looking at the wiki revision, maybe the three stacks IS the 'on each strike' they were talking about; I misunderstood this as poison per hit: Primal Cry: This skill now inflicts poison on each strike in addition to its other effects." Somewhat underwhelming =\.

Think Primal Cry is also not working, or at least I'm not seeing the poison per hit when I use it... I'll have to stick some PvP vids up on my YT, but you can check out some WvW roaming I do with Druid--Sharpening Stone is a big part of the build (or was) for isntant condi-removal, and bleed burst on a very short CD

Yes, you'd do 1000% better on hammer than this. It does require knowing the class pretty well however. I don't know what we're considering 'zerg fight' here, but you can't beat melee soulbeast for anything over 10-15 people. Untamed's problem is the pet, you lose it instantly when you are harassing a zerg.

Well I'm glad a Mesmer and Engineer main approve. As a Ranger main, I do not. There's zero chance a 6s CD reduction on sharpening stone is bringing condi ranger into the meta--Untamed aside, since the only reason it's there is because of FF. Rest of the ranger builds are 15 ranks or so down on Snowcrows and only even there because of stance sharing. Benchmarks also don't matter in competitive, and I'm pretty unhappy about it since I sat at about 1460 with 60% winrate last PvP season on Druid (and coming from silver 1 because I was multi-classing for lege back), having to already outplay pretty much every other spec.

The only problem is this line of reasoning means that sharpening stone should have CD reduced because apparently no one uses it. So why isn't CD reduced? It can't be 'oh they forgot', because if that's the reasoning then maybe I have a lot more Stockholm Syndrome with this game than I realized, cause that's ridiculous.

Those farmers just ignore Yaks now and afk run in SMC, no difference here. It's up to anet to make Yak escorting meaningful or get rid of them and just have keeps auto-generate supply / give camps a new purpose.

Just tested this in PvE and not getting poison per strike.

Should be major rewards for escorting yaks, they ideally are crucial to WvW. Instead, everyone drains all structures of supply and anet keeps buffing offensive siege so walls/doors aren't a thing...

This thread got super weird. Anet fix Sharpening Stone plz

Can we get an explanation for this?

Spawn should not decay rewards, and also should not give you rewards. So, if you afk at spawn you will timeout after X minutes but cannot 'AFK run' and get rewarded. You also will not decay if you need to step away.

Does this break down to: - Played meta builds - Fight other people on meta builds - Don't like other people on meta builds - Question whether some meta build is so strong a good player on non-meta can't kill them Just trying to understand this. Because none of it really has to do with bridging any skill gap--if someone is more skilled than you, you will lose no matter if you are on meta or not. Provided they actually try and stay engaged that is.

Yes, I would not rule out WH builds, as baseline CD reduction there is actually potentially a very big change.

Poison shouldn't do damage. Resistance should decrease condi duration by 33% like Resolution decreases condi damage by 33%.

Think pet swap is every 15s in or out of merge if you slot beastmastery.

Sort of, but in practice still makes no sense to me. I wouldn't consider pure stunbreak functionality to be a buff to sidenoding when you usually slot another stunbreak. A buff to the skill would be increasing either the uptime of it by either increasing duration slightly or reducing CD slightly. As the active portion is what would help boonbeast sidenode, not the stunbreak portion. So, it's still a wash to me, as you get 2 seconds less of actual useful duration for a stunbreak on 20s less CD. I personally am not popping Dolyak Stance for the stunbreak (that's what lighting reflexes or protect me is for), but for the active--and since the uptime is the same but with reduced active duration, it's a slight nerf to me. Anyway, don't really want to derail the topic any further since it isn't really about either sPvP or Dolyak...

Which is an interesting point, as I think it's actually counter-intuitive to the intended direction? It seems they wanted to nerf the effectiveness of Dolyak stance slightly, but ended up buffing it via stunbreak frequency through reducing duration because they kept uptime the same... It's actually a headache making sense of half of this.

Mag's 'working class' is discord mod. I've long thought to solve this issue they need to redesign EBG not to have easily campable keeps 3ft from spawn.

Or at least standardize them; for instance, on greatsword move the CD reduction on #5 to Two Handed Training. From my point of view at least, tying the CDs to traits forces you to take those traits. If you baseline the CDs, we get the problem we have now in that some builds were balanced and now may be overperforming, and some builds are needlessly nerfed (i.e., aforementioned builds taking sharpening stone in competitive if CD reduction is not baselined). What annoys me more is they need to enhance the condi removal capabilities of nature magic to compete with wilderness knowledge rather than half-rework wilderness knowledge and empathic bond. They could have done something like add barrier to you/pet when you use an F2 on Empathic and added the 2 condi cleanse from you/pet onto Evasive Purity / shortened that ICD to like 3-5s (as if you blow back-to-back dodges, you'll probably die no matter if you cleansed back-to-back or not).

Anet has literally said they want to stop balancing around benchmarks, which is one reason Fervent Force still exists. This is the problem with their 'everything' approach to balancing. The skills are perfectly balanced now that you have to take a trait to get the CD, they are unbalancing their own game by baselining the CD reduction. This balancing is all over the place, because we start talking about reducing charge count on sharpening stone so it can keep its CD reduction and to keep condi soulbeast out of the meta when they're buffing primal cry to place it squarely in the meta. The change to Dolyak Stance in sPvP pretty much sums up the entire philosophy: Dolyak Stance: Reduced duration from 6 seconds to 4 seconds in PvP only. Reduced cooldown from 60 seconds to 40 seconds in PvP only. The uptime of this skill is identical (10%); they are literally balancing for the sake of it and accomplishing nothing.

What even is this line of reasoning? Why would you nerf charge count on a skill no one uses? Further, why would you agree with nerfing charge count then immediately give reasoning why the skill can be ignored because no one uses it?