draxynnic.3719

Eh, not really. Some are really sensitive to having the rotation go perfectly, some are just "here are the skills that really matter, use the others as filler". Ele pistol leans pretty hard towards the former.

Snowcrows pretty explicitly still has a "anything but whatever stats give you the most DPS is for the weak!" attitude even with their open world builds, which includes explicitly refusing to post celestial builds (one of their builds does have a couple of celestial pieces, but that's probably because it precisely hits some threshold), which most non-SC players generally regard as the best builds for open world. Granted, if you're able to dodge everything and/or are keeping to relatively easy OW stuff than going full glass will work, but things like celestial for condi builds or marauder for power builds tend to result in pretty small losses in DPS in exchange for large gains in durability, making them more comfortable to play overall.

Because I'm trying to stick to the core contentions rather than an endless rebuttal war with increasingly long posts quibbling over individual sentences. At the bottom line, everyone (or at least, anyone who isn't happy to just leech) is going to have a point at which a build's performance has dropped below the point where they feel they'd be better off swapping to something else that's more effective, whether that's being driven from outside, or purely from an internal viewpoint of not wanting to let the team down by playing an underperforming build when they could be playing something better. In that context, I don't think it's reasonable to say "just change your build so you don't have to use the problematic skill" when doing so might be a big enough hit to performance to push someone below that threshold. Rocket Charge in a qscrapper build is about half your quickness generation. I think it's reasonable to presume that the means of offsetting not using Rocket Charge would be to double your boon duration, the most intuitive means of doing so being swapping to diviner's. If you are arguing in good faith here and do have an actual idea of how to change the build rather than simply throwing platitudes about not being a slave to the meta, than I'm all ears. Then we can potentially run a few tests and determine whether the performance hit is reasonable. My viewpoint is that power riflemechs are still quite capable of clearing content, so if the performance drop is roughly equivalent to going from condi mirage to power riflemech - about 25% - it's probably okay. Shall we run the test, or is good faith analysis of the severity of the problem something you're not interested in?

They used to, might even have been a minor in Corruption, but I think it was removed in exchange for putting more weight on the legend-swapping pulse.

Hrrrmn. So you don't need to have a full bar of turrets as long as you don't mind them all being the same type, and you're encouraged to use turrets with the toolkit in order to boost the turrets? I can see potential there...

Yup, and people have been saying that for years. I think they're worried, though, that a) persistent turrets that gain DPS stats will make afk farming even more prevalent, and b) that might make it even more rewarding to load a point with turrets while keeping your glass cannon self safely away from the point. Hence why I think giving them limited ammunition might have to be part of the solution. Not saying I really disagree with what you're expressing (although technically you don't have a full utility bar, it's just the toolbelt skills you're giving up rather than the actual utilities, but I think most people will say the golem skills are good enough to make up for that...), but I think the distinction is that you can't leave a jade mech to defend a location while you go off somewhere else. Heck, the "mechanical genius" change was specifically intended to enforce the engineer and mech staying close(-ish) to one another.

That is basically what you said, though: At the bottom line, I think it's better for skills to have clear use cases rather than to have some novelty value only to be ignored when the novelty wears off - and that's where most conjures are now. I don't think they should get to a point where they're showing up in Snowcrows raid builds because they boost your DPS more than the top three non-DPS utility skills available - hopefully I don't need to quote chapter and verse as to why. But I think a good position could be one where, in the notes for a melee build, they say that a particular skill could be replaced with a conjure so you're not twiddling your thumbs during a phase that has some anti-melee element to it. Or an open world (or even competitive!) build uses pistol or staff, but carries conjure hammer or shield to use in situations where the enemy is forcing you into melee and you need some more defensive ability, or when the enemy throws up some projectile hate and you need something that isn't projectiles.

It's worth noting that we also had examples of non-crab Destroyers spawning from pods in GW1, and I recall it being said that reinforcements in the final mission came from pods that were incubating in the lava. Mind you, the GW1 Destroyers had a wider variety than GW2 Destroyers, so it's possible that the Great Destroyer had a repository of more advanced Destroyer types that were lost when the Great Destroyer was, well, destroyed.

95%? 99% for some? Those are the numbers you think we're looking at here? This feels like we need a test to find out how much you actually lose by giving up the leap finishers. Do you have an alternate weaponset in mind or will it just be a matter of using hammer but doing whatever is necessary to avoid having to use Rocket Charge? I'm already planning to use Blast Gyro instead of grenades because frell grenade kit rotations, so if you have a better idea for a substitution, let me know! But I do think there is definitely a point at which a build stops being simply Not Minmaxing, and starts bleeding into Not Pulling Your Weight. Particularly since we also need to keep in mind that not everyone is going to have perfect gear and rotations, so giving up DPS by trading Berserker for Diviner means that you've got less leeway to fall down somewhere else, and more likelihood that even in a static that isn't going to kick you, people might be starting to think 'hey, Bob's firebrand, Alice's chrono, and Fred's herald can do the same job while doing 8k more DPS, maybe we should slot one of them in on quickdps instead?'

Hahahah. I didn't actually. That sort of deep dive sounds like far too much effort (is information that old even available with how many times the forum has been reset?). I was thinking about things that I didn't like at the time because they reduced some of the cool factor of those mechanics, but you know what? The professions in question are actually better off because of them! Mesmer is more fun when the majority of your damage budget isn't coming from AI that you hope doesn't get randomly destroyed, and you can use a skill that generates a clone without worrying about the DPS loss that comes from overriding a phantasm. Spirit weapons (with the possible exception of shield) have been more fun when they actually have a reliable effect rather than kittening around from one target to the next and you're lucky if it even gets around to taking a swing, let alone being in the right place. They were probably at a greater level of dysfunction than conjures are now, but if Arenanet has decided that sharing is bad for the game then, initial vision and coolness factor notwithstanding, they need to take that final step and remove it so the skill group can be rebalanced into something you'd actually use. Ideally not in an engineer-kit-style 'use one or two skills and then drop because that's slightly more DPS than anything else you could have in that slot' sense, but in a 'I can pull this out in situations where my main weapon proves totally inappropriate' sense. And you're claiming that a set of core skills actually being made useful shouldn't be done because it's powercreep? Please. Elementalist isn't exactly ruling the meta in PvE. I'm not as tuned in to the PvP or WvW meta these days, but it's been a while since I've seen ele be what people were complaining about there. I don't think elementalist being able to trade a utility skill slot for a limited ability to do what any other profession can do with a weaponswap or kit - namely, switch between a melee set of weapon skills to a ranged one - is going to overturn the meta. Might as well argue that engineer shortbow should have been frozen in its original 'cool but impractical' beta state because any improvement to a profession, however low the starting point might be, is power creep, right?

It's been a while, but from memory at the time you could bring Slick Shoes and still have the important turrets, and because your own damage wasn't important you could go full tank stats, run pistol/shield, and be pretty hard to kill yourself. At least some of those factors aren't in play now, though. Another part was that you could leave turrets on a point while being somewhere a fair distance away, maybe even (weakly) supporting another point altogether, while your turrets deterred a decap. One of the thoughts I've had was giving them a limited number of shots, but they're persistent until they have something to shoot at that expends their shots. That way they'd be a bit more like traps in that you can use them to fortify a location, but they won't generate indefinite pressure.

That might well be the point. Turrets were destroyed because it was too easy to bunker a point with turrets. The answer might end up having to be doing something similar with turrets as was done with mesmer phantasms, guardian spirit weapons, and so on - making them something that drops, rapidly expends its ammunition, and then automatically detonates rather than a persistent object.

An argument was made that if someone didn't like relying on leap finishers, they could just change their build. The problem is that when the leap finishers are about half of the quickness application, that requires sacrifice. Whether it's boosting your boon duration to cover the difference (which means losing DPS) or by switching to a weapon with more blast finishers (shortbow, which means, guess what, losing DPS). I've been in a group where kicking one player and replacing them with someone more effective turned Gorseval from repeatedly failing to an easy oneshot. Granted, it was a hi dps PUG that was barely beating the healers and we'd been aware we were basically carrying them through a few but didn't make a big deal about it until it became the reason we were failing content. Now, I haven't run the numbers to know just how much DPS you lose by shifting qscrapper into a no-leap-finishers-required build, but it wouldn't take a lot to be sufficiently below the other boondps that people who have a DPS meter will notice. Whether they care will depend on the dynamics of the group and what they're trying to do, but at that point it's a matter of arguing over how much the handicap matters rather than the existence of the handicap.

Again, you're veering into "the profession is not completely unplayable therefore it can't possibly have any problems whatsoever" arguments. The problem is evident the first time you run into something that's impractical to melee for any reason and you get tagged before you can swap off sword (or to a lesser extent, hammer or dagger). By that logic, there was no point to the mesmer phantasm rework, or the deadeye rework, or the spirit weapon rework. Nor was there any need for the reworks to the various traitlines that were basically regarded as dead on various professions over the years. There's no need for a turret rework to revive turrets (and possibly make them less of an afk farming tool) because it's still possible to play engineer and get through the story, right? Conjure sharing is holding back conjures. We know this, because it was sharing that got them nerfed into impracticality in the first place. We can retain sharing, or we can have something that can actually be brought to address one of the major problems with elementalist - that a profession that was marketed as a master of adaptability is in fact the least able to adapt to circumstances. Sometimes, making something functional requires removing properties that some regard as cool, but which are impractical.

It happened explicitly because they decided that the 'everyone picks up frost bows and rains ice on the target' gameplay was unhealthy. It would be hard to make conjure weapons useful without bringing some variant of that back. I'd even argue that it's basically impossible to make conjures balanced as something for the elementalist to use on their own without being OP with sharing. Just as one consideration, sharing is why the cooldown is so long - you can either have two people using the powerful skills simultaneously, or one person can get to use them twice if they jump through the required hoops. Remove the sharing and the cooldowns can be cut in half right away - making them far more practical as a backup weapon. Sharing is holding the entire group back, and in doing so, holding back the entire profession by extension. The unfortunate truth is that sometimes the cool thing has to be sacrificed for the functional thing. Mesmers used to have phantasms that were persistent until they or their target died, but were included in the 3-illusion limit - but this created gameplay in PvE where you wanted to have all three out at all times, and thus would avoid clone skills like the plague and only use shatters when you could immediately replace the phantasms. The current phantasm behaviour is much more functional. Guardian spirit weapons used to be a timed summon which would float around doing its thing and could be sacrificed for a strong effect. That was cooler than their current behaviour which is basically just a fire-and-forget spell, but the AI pretty much never placed the summon where you wanted it, which meant that the sacrifice usually wasn't in a good place either. The rework killed the 'bring a collection of spirit weapons' fantasy, but made the skill group as a whole actually useful. Similar situation here. ArenaNet has decided that they don't want sharing to be a good option. So to make conjures actually practical, they need to be able to balance them withour sharing.