Mauti.3520

I like it.

Thank you so much for the improvements to Let Loose! This will already go a long way. I also would like to add that the build still has the issue of Ambush Cooldown only starting when an Ambush is finished or canceled, which either is a direct cooldown increase for ambushes (in particular for hammer that spins ~2 seconds which roughly translates into a ~11 seconds cooldown) OR requires constant animation canceling (and missing out on damage on top of being unfun) to keep the cooldown on actual 9 seconds.

I "love" Sun Spirit. 8x Stacks of Might for 12 Seconds. Given 100% BD and perfect Alacrity this maintains 8 Stacks of Might constantly. Playing anything else of a Ranger Boon Support like a Quickness Untamed you will lack Might because it runs out before it can be reapplied. :'D

Why not Scepter? Xiuquatl and my Ranger are a perfect match. :'c

Yes it is atrocious. No, it is not your fault.

Right now it doesn't feel good to play You Unleash Pet, Unleash Ranger, Ambush - You Swap Weapon, You Unleash Pet, Unleash Ranger, Ambush. Then you basically can do your rotation before after ~10 seconds the shenanigans of constant leashing back and forth around the weapon swap starts again. 1) Leash/Unleash has an internal Cooldown which makes fast and constant swapping back and forth feel really clunky and annoying for the sake of spamming Ambushes. 2) Since you lack a whopping 25% Damage Modifier when not Unleashed it's unwise to use any ability as a filler in the ~1 Second Window Pet is unleashed. Thus my first bandaid idea is basically in the title. You swap weapon while having Let Loose equipped will instantly grant you access to the specific Ambush skill. In my book that sounds like a start, especially since you can Sync Unleash Pet F1 with a one time Leash/Unleash every ~10 seconds to have a filler.

The design isn't that bad. It's they can't do maths. 0,75 Seconds per CA is a complete and utter joke. but yeah, I can give 400-500% Regen Uptime now lmfao.

Tempest got a bit more Alac Duration. I am undecided on the Temepstous Aria changes yet, especially since you have to give up a passive stack of Stability (or Regen and Vigor). Big Trade-Off. Sadly. BUT Condi Alac Tempest should be able to pump a bit better know while also having either more leeway or can reduce Boon Duration and Heal Tempest will have a good portion more Alac leeway to play a bit more reactively and support better. I "main" Ranger and Elementalist. For now it seems I will prefer Druid Heal in WvW but going full Tempest in PvE xD

lmao 2 and 3 are targeted forward leaps now. A short one and a long one. Add Untamed Ambush Skill to the equasion and you have 3 forward leaps. What a weapon. xD

Definitely is Weaver is absolutely amazeballs right now. The chains are off and all those little tweaks over the last year worked wonders. Tempest is good. One could say it's "still not there (in PvE)" but imho it's much better than people give it credit for. Catalyst is such a double edged sword (in PvE). Really good in the right hands. Really unreliable if you don't know what do with it. Surprisingly pretty great for OW though. I am happy Room for improvements. In some directions, in some less or none at all. (but that's basically a thing for all nine classes). But I like it. Works well for me.

Surprised Sword hasn't been mentioned yet. We know too little how Sword plays and how much damage it deals, but I would be surprised big time if it doesn't outshine MH Axe in terms of raw power dps. My money (and hope) is kinda on a Hammer+Sword/Axe Quickness Untamed running either Skirm/Marks/UT or Skirm/NM/UT. The damage might not be that good for a start but that can be fixed relatively easy now that FF is finally gone for good. Makes tuning Ranger a lot more easier. Condi Untamed? Phewwww, I don't know. Condi Untamed Builds relied on FF even harder than Power Builds. Power DPS UT still has Ferocious Symbiosis, while pure Condi Builds have nothing that good in Grandmaster Tier nowadays. Except they want to provide Quickness and Ambush on each Weapon Swap for some dps increase.

I don't see it (yet). Condi Quickness Cata's biggest problem afaik is, that it essentially doesn't want to be in any other attunement than Fire. Pros: It would be very easy and reliable to play, have comfy access to some cc and utility since it can save on attunements while granting Quickness, Prot and 10+ Might Cons: The damage might be super bad and Cata still has awful Utility skills for a boon support. Since you mentioned Staff, the energy generation on that weapon is really bad. A man can hope and dream, I like the change to Quickness being global on spheres and think it's a good step. But that's it. I don't have high expectations on Quick Cata next patch. Energy, Spheres and the whole EE stacks design are still the elephant in the room draining viable options and reliability out of that Spec in PvE.

I am pleasantly surprised and look well forward towards the update. This looks really really promising and fun. Quickness Untamed looks also very realistic to play - and hyped for Condi (Alac) Druid Builds.

I love this!

Power Creep is real, but I am bit surprised to see it narrowed in on just DPS benchmarks. My Condi Weaver had a 40k benchmark 3 yeas ago - It has a 41k Benchmark now. - My Power Soulbeast had a 38k Benchmark 3 years ago - It has a 38k Benchmark now. Let's take the World Boss Drakkar as an example: If I compare Drakkar from it's release 3 years ago to now, I was already a happy little dps monkey when I just got some stacks of might and bit of fury shared back then. Still the Fight took for ever without a premade group back then. Even failed on many, many occasions. The DPS of your DPS geared player was pathetic and average at best most of the time, even when you know what you where doing. But Today you simply drown in boons and carry spam. Quickness, Might, Prot, Alacrity, Fury, Swiftness, Stability, Barrier, Heals, Rezzes. It's hard to die and enables people deal so much damage. The fact that way more classes can be Support Builds - which is a very good thing in my opinion - and the fact support builds can be considered overpowered as hell, has increased the boon and utility output dramatically, which makes everything in the game tremendously easier. Much easier than going from 35k to 40k as an average dps benchmark. The carry and leverage is much higher, - and much more evenly spread among the classes, rather than some privileged fortune childs like Firebrand and Ren - not the Dps Ceiling I would think Some fellas like Gendalf and Dadnir already touched that matter, given how crazy good "Hybrid" or Support Builds these days are, compared to your humble all in full Berserker geared DPS Holo, Weaver or Soulbeast. Boon Builds on the other hand pump insane numbers and also increase the damage und survivability of up to 4 allies dramatically. I am with you in that matter to reduce the power creep and kinda update many old Open World and instanced encounters, but just nerfing the numbers isnt the way to go I would speculate. One could think about upping the numbers on the bosses instead, for example. I have no really solution or idea, since the matter is relatively complex and the pendulum could easily swing into the opposite direction, making the stuff way too hard again. ^^

Personally I am not. I like it. - Only dislike the Hammer. I like both Tempest and Weaver as well but thing about them is they alter the playstyle of Core Ele so much and also introduce heavy drawbacks - Camping Elements with long interruptable Overloads as Tempest while Weaver delays their off hand Utilities and has a shorter but global attunement cooldown limiting it's ad hoc flexibility greatly. Catalyst is essentially Core Ele+ which to me is beneficial and good in a lot of ways, even though it might appear as "flavorless" to some. Edit: The spec itself just needs some more polishing imho and that's it.

Opinion: Bad Core Class Utilities are probably the biggest downside and limiting factor of the Class overall in PvE. For WvW and PvP they are pretty sufficient and good though. Warrior and to some degree Thief sit in a similar boat. This is mainly due to the old vanilla PvE design philosophy where classes like Necromancer or Mesmer couldn't deal damage for good while Elementalists and Warriors blasted, but the game has long changed since then. Their utilities have'nt so much. ^^

Overall recommend Power if you like it and know what you are doing. You can't go wrong that much with Condi if it's more enjoyable to you. Both are pretty viable. Condi with Scepter is more forgiving, yet Power will outshine in most Fractals and IBS Strikes. I also personally enjoy Power more since Weave Self was changed and freed us from FGS. Only Frac where I run Condi Weaver is 100 and it's CM and only IBS Strike boss I prefer Condi over Power Weaver is Whisper of Jormag. You can swap out Arcane Blast for Arcane Shield or Armor of Earth if you struggle to survive at the beginning or support is sleepy. In extreme scenarios you can also swap out Primordial Stance for another defensive Utility as well but in the long run I would recommend not give up more than Arcane Blast. Also when doing Fractals regularly I recommend the Discretize Gear Setup (optimized for Fracs with ~150AR) rather than the Raid Setup as Weakness might not be covered in several scenarios and you won't crit cap. Edit: For Strikes/Raids you can indeed sprinkle in Dragon Pieces, especially with Jade Bot Core 10, to increase your vitality since you overcap crit a bit in full berserkers as long as you play with the Weakness Trait. The DPS loss from a few Dragon Pieces is very marginal while a couple of extra HP can go a long way sometimes.

Yes, give Heal Druid a shot. It's a stronk build for organized Zerg.

Interesting. Looks a lot prettier than Virtuosos clustering my screen with laser pink goo.

Discussion about benchmarks is a bit redundant when practically ~ a dozenpeople could hit 40k and 99% of the player base would die sweating even reaching 25k+ on a static golem. I can't take anyone seriously bringing up Untamed's Benchmark as argument for a nerf. Completely out of touch. Well: They said they wanted to tone down/rework FF but wanted to give Untamed other options before they do so, which to this point they didn't. Adding some poison and upping some modifiers doesn't cut it. Untamed barely ever saw play before due to it's very demanding playstyle, incredibly unreliable clunky boon generation and simply offering not much else apart from a projectile block and a boon rip. And it was just made even less popular. That's it. Sadge.

Weaver is free. Anyway, I started blasting. Wait what, I just entered fractals and weaver is again disabled? Now it's working again. Anyway, I started blasting.

Happy

Sad

Interesting idea. In fact a little bit of self quickness would be neat, 5 seconds base sounds a bit high, but that's a numbers issue.