DraconusShade.4590

You know why people act like that? Because GW2 puts out content once every 4 years. That's 4 full years they have to be stuck with something they didn't want. That's another 4 years asking for something they never got. If GW2 had a normal dev cycle like other MMOs, people wouldn't be this upset because the next expac will be here soon. Then there's also game balance. GW2 alrwdy frustrates the playerbase with kitten balance patches that also take a really long time to arrive compared to other MMOs. It took them 4 years to get Scourge to do the things they advertised it would do. That's literally showing people a product, taking money from them and then breaking it. The egregiously long dev cycle keep stabbing them in the back and Anet doesn't seem to realise it. The community wouldn't be so divided and bitter if the cycles were faster so everyone gets to have what they want.

You do know that the primary thing that GW2 has going for it is the fact that it has pseudo-action-combat, horizontal progression and is B2P right? There are not many MMOs being made that aren't P2W cashgrabs. The major one is WoW and the other one is FF flavoured WoW. So GW2 really has had very little competition in this category because no studio wants to touch MMOs with a ten foot pole. So don't come here spouting nonsense about "9th year achievement" and bs like that. ESO came onto the same category with a kitten engine and a thousand performance bugs and it still managed to get a larger playerbase than GW2 despite the horrendous lootbox system *and a subscription incentive*. It doesn't take much to replicate what GW2 did and ESO proved it. GW2 puts out content every 4 years, it better be amazing and exactly what the community wanted.

It sounds kind of villainous. Like you would expect it to be some sort of person who tortures information out of people or something like that. You could have had a Mesmer E-spec around interrupting, dazing and all that and called it Willbender since mesmers actually do mess with people's minds.

It says the Vindicator uses the GS to fight as well as protect their allies. Maybe they get two legends or utilities that swap between Archaemon(?) and Saint Viktor. Remember that the Kurzick Saint Viktor comes from the Noble House that is known for spells and sorcery. So it might be a more support oriented style that they were showing off with the Ritualist outfit. Would be cool to get 2 legends in one E-spec. Power DPS as well as Support... I don't know at this point because there no real healers in GW2 so I wonder what the Saint Viktor buffs are.

Well... Rev has had support *options* for their current specs, I wouldn't go so far as to call them support specs like Firebrand. I would like the theme to continue with this expansion as well where Rev can have both strong offense as well as a strong support option with a ranged GS. if its melee GS I will be quite disappointed.

Yeah that's how mine looks as well. For some reason it doesnt always show that though. Sometimes its just a purple ring.

I remember a time when Chaos Storm had a mirror-like bubble effect with violet electricity inside it. I don't know why they changed that to this nonsense.

Regarding Elixirs: Outside of the elite and the quickness elixir the rest of them feel very unsatisfying to use. Why can't elixirs be changed to function differently ar max Blight stacks? 25 stacks of Blight should not only buff the damage of a DPS Harbinger but also the support abilities of a Support Harbinger. Elixirs should give greater effects ar certain stacks of Blight and that can be implemented through traits people have to choose instead of damage traits to balance it out. Why can't my quickness elixir also give alacrity at 25 stacks of Blight? I am sacrificing half my health to do a fraction of what a Firebrand does for free.

As a support player in fractals and WvW I find that the Harbinger does not compete with the current meta source of quickness whatsoever. The sustain that Harbinger has as a support spec is very good and I'm able to keep up permanent quickness very easily with my clumsy rotation I cobbled together. The main problem for boon Harbinger or basically any support spec that will come with the expansion is the existence of Firebrand. Firebrand does too much too easily across the board in every single content. They offer quickness, Aegis spam, reflects, cleanses, heals, might, stability. Everything you can think of a Firebrand offers easily and in great abundance. If you want any new support spec to be able to compete with Firebrand toe to toe you either have to give Harbinger the same sort of utility or change all the quickness to alacrity so that it can actually compete with Alacrity Renegade— which is a competition it can actually win since it offers amazing rezzing and healing of Necromancer. As it stands, no one will pick a support Harbinger over a Firebrand in any content. For that matter no one picks anything over Firebrand anyway.

I tried Plaguedoctor Boonbringer in fractals and I am easily able to maintain 100% quickness. I have 17k health with Max blight but I discovered over the course of 2 hours that all I had to in order to maintain my boons was use my elixirs (quickness, might and elite) and only flash the shroud for 5 seconds, using all the abilities and I'm back in time to catch my quickness elixir cooldown. With this "rotation" I was able to maintain only 20 stacks of blight while making sure I spent the maximum amount of time out of shroud (and thus healing constantly). During the fractal run with a full group of beta specs I was the last one fighting at every boss and I had to /gg to actually die. It's a delicate dance of using shroud for just what you need and pulling out as fast as possible to not only ensure blight stacks but also maximum time outside shroud with 25 stacks. I'm sure we'll all master it soon enough (also heal skill now heals for 4k)

Even heal renegade provides permanent Assassin's Presence, permanent alacrity and keeps up 10 stacks of might. It is used in fractals as the primary healer and in raids as a secondary healer. Fractals always ask for alacren and take at least one either the Condi Alacren or Heal Ren.

So the question is, does LF degen by max LF amount or current amount? If it's 3% of max LF then I do see the problem that you are pointing out but if it's 3% of whatever amount you have then I guess you always get 20 seconds regardless of what and it doesn't work like that so I guess it is 3% of max. Omg that means not only does your healing due to LF degen go down by a lot but so does your LF regen. That's a massive nerf to both offense and sustain due to Blight affecting LF bar. I don't know if this is something they even thought about that's insane. They really need to decouple the LF bar from Blight.

It's a 1:1 healing interaction but not percentage based. The shroud degens at a rate of 3% but you are not healed for 3% of your health, you are healed for the numerical value that 3% of your shroud is. This means that when Blight affects your LF bar you get less healing as well.

I'm not debating the time in shroud, I completely agree that the size of the pool does not matter at all when it comes to duration of the shroud but the healing doesn't work the way you think it does. Blight has no effect on whether you heal or not only the shroud does. If you are in shroud you cannot be healed by the shroud but anytime that you are not in shroud and not at 100% health with or without Blight your shroud will heal you. This healing is affected by the LF pool as you admitted and that's what I have a problem with. Since the size of the LF pool has no impact on the duration of shroud I wonder why they made Blight affect the LF bar as well. It seems like a deliberate nerf to sustain for an already fragile spec. 11k health with none of the defense mechanisms of an Elementalist. I felt better knowing that the LF sustain will always be high but finding out on stream that the LF bar is affected by Blight completely ruined the concept for me. They will have to find a way to decouple life and life force and have Blight only affect life.

This is not entirely true. They are right in saying that time spent in shroud is not affected by the LF pool since it's percentage based (and so are LF generation skills).

It actually does matter a lot. The only way a Harbinger on his own gets to sustain quickly using shroud is through the shroud decay. If your LF also is decreased by the same amount as your health then when you heal back up 5% of 100 is 5 and 5% of 1000 is 20. The healing differs as it doesn't drain 5% of LF to heal you for 5% of your health. It only heals you for whatever numerical value the shroud decayed by which means a smaller shroud equals smaller heals. They really should make it so that the shroud is not reduced by Blight.

Maybe they want you to run this with Heal Scrg in fractals. Who cares if you go down multiple times when the Scrg makes you immortal? 😂

I don't know, it feels like the Devs don't really look into these things when designing specs for certain professions. Look at Willbender's design and Harbinger's design. WB has an answer to every situation and was designed with existing specs in mind. Harbinger seems like some randome idea they came up with combining random kung fu with pistol and on top of that they don't even think about the spec's place in the current meta. So sick and tired of Guardian getting special treatment across the board. When they design a Boon Support spec for necromancer shouldn't they look at what class they would be competing with? Adding alacrity would have solved all problems without having to strip FB of anything (although I wish they did). I don't know with necromancer with every new thing they introduce there's always a massive caveat. They just managed to balance Scourge properly a few months before the drop of the new expansion and they wonder why other MMOs are more popular. At least they get their balancing act right.

It really does seem like DPS Harbinger will need a raid healer like a Heal Scourge or Heal Tempest which are never played in fractals. Sadge. But at least fractals will use Boonbringer.

DPS is not the point, people are complaining about the fragility of the class and if the enormous downsides will pay off properly in all gamemodes. They are complaining about trait synergy and managing blight. When it comes to just pure DPS and Boon Support Harbinger seems great. I don't DPS in PvE so I can't go into the details too much but stuff like losing out on Blight synergies for elixir cooldown(which is needed for blight uptime) is bad design.

The main problem is the Aegis spam of FB. Necromancer offers reflects, it offers healing and it ensures your party will never, ever wipe on any encounter. But the ability to straight up ignore boss mechanics with Aegis spamming is what makes FB so OP. Unless they strip that, I wish them luck with finding a way to get anyone to play a new support class that grants quickness.

This is why I wish they would change quickness to alacrity so Harbinger doesn't compete with FB but with Renegade. That's a match up they can actually win or draw since necromancer brings amazing rezzing potential with powerful heals as well in support spec. The problem is that unless they strip the FB of some skills no other support spec is ever going to displace them unless they design one specifically to do so by just copying skills and reflavouring them.

I think they are talking from a DPS spec standpoint. Boon Support Harbinger is in a great spot, they don't build for that much damage anyway and with boon duration/condition hybrid armour the way Heal Renegade builds they will have enough and more health and they don't care about losing out on the offensive benefits of blight. The main problem people have is the way the DPS spec of Harbinger has been handled. For the DPS spec the traits don't align properly, they also take immense punishment from blight and don't really have a way to manage it plus in PvP DPS Harbinger is going to have a hard time without nerfs to PvP version of Blight. The Boon Support Harbinger is amazing and it doesn't care about having 11k health because it won't. It is there to grant perma quickness, heals and instant 5-man rezzes.

I don’t understand why no one here realises that you are not supposed to get a lot of Blight in PvP. You cannot camp shroud in Harbinger in PvP. It heals you only when you are out of shroud. There is also the trait that ensures you can enter shroud for a few seconds with zero LF. The aim behind this spec is for you to flash shroud to access key mobility skills as well as CC during PvP. That way you avoid too much Blight. Flashing shroud is key to success on Harbinger PvP and I think its going to be a great spec once people master that.

No nerfs are needed. Absolutely none. FB offers perma quickness, aegis as well as reflects and other OP utilities for free. Meanwhile harbinger loses 50% max health while in combat and taking damage to give perma quickness. The massive trade off means the payoff must be massive too, especially since it wont be supplanting FB due to their OP utility.