[Silent Surf CM - Adds From Tethers Spawning On Main Platform]

This is still bugged 😆
 

[August 23 Balance Update Preview]

1 hour ago, InBedWithMySelf.8632 said:

The situation in fractals to be frank, has a bit more issues implemented into it, in most cases design wise. When they increased the condi damage modifier on break-bars to 100% my initial reaction was actually excitement, only to quick learn that these upcoming 9 ~ months of doing fractals are going to be the most depressing I've ever experienced in guild wars ever, mostly because of scourges negating almost every mechanic there (mostly with epidemic) and just making it a living nightmare to join groups. I won't ramble about that though.

 

That was specifically a scourge issue, even then scourge being so strong made it easier to access higher dps no heal strats for people you weren't flawless enough to execute comps with moa and owp stance sharing.
 

 

1 hour ago, InBedWithMySelf.8632 said:

About the execution thing, on power builds. This was only really true before they nerfed the breakbar damage modifier. Because now I regularly out perform pretty much every condi build, also with the No pain no gain changes (which still suck but at least they're equal across power and condi), actually made it possible to even run power damage in 100 now, but the biggest opportunities to outperform condition builds are definitely the shorter fights, such as old cms. Even on the nerfed catalyst, starting from air attunement, which if someone actually bothered to benchmark it, I can't imagine it even hitting 33K. Even that is enough to just outperform condition builds in old cms. 
 

Thats just not true
when the phases are that short 130% of a class bursting for more than 80k damage is much more than 200% of classes that do 37-40k dps over the same period of time.  What you might notice in your pugs is people picking up newer builds and just being bad at it. I've experienced a lot of that.


air opener 4 sphere cata hits about 35k which is depressing to say the least.

 

Quote

 but the thing with the crit on potions, it's just nonsense, there are 7 billion other better ways to give power builds an edge, and that's just out of the top of my mind.

We can agree to disagree on whether its nonsense or, not but my main gripe is that they did exactly 0 of the 7 billion ways and just gave more vitality. Thats straight up worse than before.

anywhoo this is really off topic at this point 🙂

[August 23 Balance Update Preview]

40 minutes ago, InBedWithMySelf.8632 said:

The entire post was very true, and shows understanding towards the class that so many people overlook. Good job on that.

About the fractal potions, I don't know how else to break it down but, you are so far into wrong-ville. Crit on fractal potions made no sense at all and made it so you have different builds for fractals and every other pve content.

Thank you , as i said I am an elementalist enjoyer.

nevertheless,
Different builds for different content is something most games (including gw2) contend with, you run different gear for wvw and raids, same concept. It also worked as a nice perk for legendary armour.
 

Even if it was strictly a bad thing, theres so many ways to do it without massively shafting power dps builds, that were built around having 222 AR.

 

43 minutes ago, InBedWithMySelf.8632 said:

 And the exposed debuff should definitely be equal between condi and power, but increasing it blindly is something that has collateral damage. 

It isnt blindly increasing as much as its moving the needle back to when the fractal meta was actually enjoyable. A 10 second long exposed doesnt reward anyone if even decent pugs phase the boss well within that time anyways. You can fiddle with exposed as much as you want but fractal CM fights (with exceptions) are always going to be preferential to bursty classes at the highest level because of how fast the phases are.. The only thing exposed changes did was make it incredibly unrewarding to play meta classes without the rest of the set in pugs, so your average pugs would run completely different compositions to high end groups and there was no real way to progress from the former to the latter irrespective of your personal skill

The change from 30/100 to 10/20 made it significantly worse because this shafted bursty builds even further, and the loss in precision basically  doubled down on the kick in the nuts. The best builds to play, funnily, still are the same bursty power builds (you saw slb+double cata in a skorvald record shortly before the class got nerfed), but it just became completely unfun to play because if you weren't at the tippy top of execution, now you are basically relegated to playing safe "healers carry everything"  compositions that you find in pugs. 
 

[August 23 Balance Update Preview]

I figured I'd post some rambling thoughts of an ele enjoyer on the state of ele post patch. Yelling into the void at this point.

Update overall:
kind of puzzling, sceptre was core eles best main hand power weapon, got condi coeffs buffed; and dagger was the go to ele condi main hand, which got its power coeffs buffed. Tempest got stab on a stunbreak skill and power staff was almost entirely unaffected.. 
but eh, buffs are buffs I guess.

Tempest:
heal alac tempest is now an incredibly solid build with the ability to give itself stab mid overload, share aegis along side already being able to extend boons and rebound. I'm kind of excited to play this build in fractals.
Condi alac tempest doesnt seem to hit as hard as the other alac sources and its a bit disappointing that the tempest buff was entirely just transcendent tempest since it competes with lucid singularity. I was hoping the singularity recharge reduction part of it would be split into a different trait since the rest of the tempest trait line is essentially free of any dps picks. That said it's still quite strong as an alac provider that can do perma might prot and boon extension. Power tempest is still very hitbox reliant and frankly not very good, but condi tempest should be playable post patch..

Weaver:
Power weaver is still a bit weak compared to other power classes like soulbeast and virtuoso, the dps buffs were to ride the lightning and auto attacks, I'd have preferred literally every other skill being buffed because that would improve the burst of the class , making it a bit more competitive. Sword condi weaver is still reeling after targetted nerfs (to cauterising strike and searing slash) along side general condi weaver nerfs (prim stance, sunspot and more recently signet of fire). Could do with a little more damage. Dagger cweaver is in a rather strong spot as a situational dps class near the top of the dps charts, frankly where it should be, given the amount of asterisks it comes with. Sceptre cweaver looks exciting and could be the new beginner freindly weave self weaver. a bunch of funny hybrid ideas were being looked at with the dagger coeff changes but I dont know if it'll come to fruition yet.

 

Catalyst.

Power catalyst is a "power build" with no burst to speak of, and a long ramp instead. It's in an okay spot, but it could be better and more competitive with other condi classes given the dps graph.. A small amount of cdr on the 20 second cd skills alongside another extension to EE duration would make the rotation a lot more forgiving. Despite being the 6th iteration of catalyst it still has the same issue as beta 2 where standing inside the hitbox and letting the orbs multihit leads to significantly different dps, even when the orb damage was tuned to 0 because of the condi applications and the energy generation. Honestly I think the orbs should just be long duration primordial stance at this point.  Quickness catalyst is basically just unplayable considering how incredibly little it does. The best build ive seen so far is a mediocre damage hybrid build that relies on the orbs multi hitting to apply a silly amount of condis, still rather underwhelming, without even considering the fact that it doesnt have any utility at all outside of quickness and resistance application. The -10% modifier hurts it way too much, compared to a class like fb where you can take 2 full dps fbs change traits and one util slot and have more than enough quickness for 5 people. It doesnt help that you only have 1 source of quickness, which if people miss, they'd have to live without quickness for more than 10 seconds. Maybe now that you need to sacrifice your first 3 children to the god of war to be able to give quickness, we can go back to 5 second spheres again.







Completely unrelated, the fractal potion changes are terribad, please being back precsion (or atleast an offensive power stat ) to the mist offensive potion and also put exposed back at 50/50. Right now exposed is basically useless and might as well not exist.

thnxbye

[Harbinger Feedback Thread [Merged]]

Incredibly disappointing spec I had high hopes for.

Here's a list of problems I have, put together as coherently as I can, from an endgame PvE perspective:

1>Traits are uninspiring.
You know somethings wrong when the choice between traits is "power damage based on blight vs condi damage based on blight" or even more on the nose, "fero based on vitality vs concentration based on vitality vs expertise based on vitality"

 

Surely there have to be more interesting things to do with these traits?

which brings me to

2>The lack of interaction with Blight

The only thing that is affected by blight is your damage based on the trait you chose, and your health pool.
There are no interesting blight mechanics like elixir cdr based on blight or increased elixir boon duration on blight or even things like a trait to increase the speed at which you gain blight, a trait that might make your heal skill reduce blight instead of increase it, or a trait that reduces health lost per stack of blight or even increase the maximum stacks of blight or any combination of these things. Theres so many cool things we could do with blight and we've done nothing and instead we get boring traits that are just flat dps modifiers. Also the power dps modifiers are flat out wasted because core necro doesnt have any useful power weapons and the shroud and pistol skills dont have good enough power coeffecients to mean anything.

 

3>The lack of variety and use of elixirs
As bad as the elixir icons are for color blind people, they can take solace in the fact that it doesnt matter which elixir they take since they all serve the exact same purpose, to get free +5 blight. They all have the same cooldowns and all give a piddly amount of boons that are almost irrelevant with the exception of quickness, except the elite elixir, which brings me to 

 

4>The elite elixir

who's drunk aunt made this?
"oh yea lets just add every single boon in the game, that won't be literally impossible to balance at all"

as it stands its basically useless but because of the incredible effect it provides, about 2 seconds of thinking and you realise this skill is either going to be the most broken skill in the game or the most useless skill in the game and there's basically no in between.

 

5>The shroud.
Harbinger shroud is incredible, you have the one skill which is decent damage , the 2 skill which is a bonkers amount of damage, the 3 and 4 skills are basically troll and the 5 skill which is good cc. While in shroud , the necro has no access to utilities and the shroud skills themselves dont have any sort of evade or stun breaks, so they're left to just 2 dodge rolls and prayers. The maximum dps rotation ( which hits 45k) is basically open shroud at max duration, spam 2 till you run out, close shroud and repeat. the weapons you use are almost irrelevant and again there is a lack of traits that directly affect shroud skills ( anything like using shroud 3 increases damage for 5 seconds or anything at all) that would motivate us to use shroud 3/4 , instead of just spamming 2. The damage on 2 definitely needs to be nuked and the other shroud skills need to be more useful for something of an interactive rotation that isnt spam 2 off cooldown. the utility of shroud needs to be increased a bit and the damage needs to be evened out a LOT.

 

Was so hyped for this, ended up being another boring necro spec where you just spam buttons to deal condi damage like scourge (but stronger) , 1/5 rating.

[Why SnowCrows is destroying Raiding]

@"Blumpf.2518" said:I knew stuff like this this would happen in this thread, since snowcrows is kind of a religion to a lot of people where only snowcrows is good and the rest is "crippled" "useless" "snowflake builds" "noob stuff" etc. This thread and the reactions to it shows perfectly what mindset the raiders of gw2 are trapped in. "Snowcrows is good and everything else is bad and heresy! Now burn the witch who dareth to speak against the meta!"I dont get this combination of victim and superiority complex there's so many completely reasonable replies to your rambling that you're completely ignoring.

Lets take Holo for example, most of them are running AED as healskill. Why? You can skip insta death mechanics with it at deimos and sabir and its F Skill does damage, so it will increase your DPS a bit. BUT you could also be running the healing turret which is a group heal, a group condiremove, a water field and grants regeneration. In most scenarios this would be better for the group. And the insta death mechanics can be avoided without using AED by playing the boss mechanics as intended.But as a dps holo your job is dps, and the healing is the healers job. The whole point of raids is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The more you try to spread out and try to do everything (dps and healing) the less effective you are at both. You are giving up a sizeable dps increase for close to nothing because the "advantage" of healing turret is redundant.And there was the example of soulbeast running bear stance earlier in this thread. If youre playing soulbeast and are using one wolf pack and the leader of the pack trait, take bear stance. It will heal the whole group and remove condis. And this can make a diffrence in high pressure situations were the group drops low.People already do this.Or lets take warrior as example. You can play SC Berserker warrior. What will happen most of the time is: CC bar appears, headbutt is on cooldown cause people used it to have more time in berserker mode or to fill adrenalin bar and berserker mode just ended, so you cant use your Mace F1 and end up with very low CCYou never use headbutt on berserker outside the initial strike to fill 3 adrenaline bars because its a self stun. If you can start the fight with 3 adrenaline bars (like qtp or dhuum) headbutt is pretty much pointless and people tend to take res banner anyway.But you could also play Core warrior and have your Mace F1 ready all the time with an effect 3x as strong as the berserkers F1. And since youre playing core you can also equip Battle Standard as Elite as an "oh kitten" skill that instarezzes a lot of people if needed. You could also be running the tactics traitline and use the empower allies trait, which as berserker would mean a lot of DPS loss, while as core warrior it wont reduce your DPS.You lose a lot more dps by just not taking berserker and empower allies ironically is not worth it outside of incredibly high dps groups. The right play here is to ask 9 other people in the squad with you to use their cc skills. Again the more you try to cover by yourself, the less effective you are at everything.Or lets say a CondiNecro at Gorseval or Amalgamate in Wing6. Most people will just say "kitten, this are Power-DPS bosses, play Dragonhunter!" but this bosses also have a lot of adds/orbs which can make life difficult. But if you play a power setup with one condiscourge who uses Epi there wont be any adds/orbs and people can DPS the kitten out of the boss. Necro and Epi is not "needed", but its a quality of life feature that makes the boss so much easier for everyone else.First of all condi dps has been good at gorse for a long long time. As other people have pointed out necro, and almost every other condi class have their own guides on the snowcrows page for gorseval in particular.condi scourge on conjured amalgamate is actively griefing your group. You pull the group dps down by a lot, your hand phase dps is almost non existent leading to more slams leading ,ironically, to more adds ( the very problem you claim to solve). I haven't seen a training group that actually struggle with cleaving shields with swords.This is genuinely such a bad idea it's not even funny.

But since the SC meta is like a religion nowadays, most people wont even consider this is as an alternative.

Few final notes here, a lot of ideas you posted on both this and your original post are genuinely bad. (knights is better than minstrel for tanking by so far its hilarious, bringing 2 entire banner for measly amounts of healing power and toughness is a terrible idea no matter how you put it.)As other people have noted its impossible to find a pug group that insists on following sc comps to the T, even if you try your hardest. A LOT of criticism similar to this seem to be made by people who rarely raid and also haven't spent more than 4 seconds looking at the snowcrows website. Meta builds are meta for a reason. A lot of these builds come along with thousands of hours of experience and experimentation. The more you understand why they are better and the other builds aren't nearly as good, the better you are as a raider.Also almost all boon builds on snowcrows are there with the intent of keeping 100% uptime no matter what. I'm really very very confused as to what you're referring to with that.