Silinsar.6298

You do get I'm pointing out Harb has almost no way of mitigating damage other than passive reduction and therefore them outclassing other specs in that regard is fine? How is the lack of active damage avoidance not a shortcoming of Harb? I'm not. Anyway, fine by me. I initially wanted to point out what you can do vs. Harb, why it might not be as broken as you think and illustrated my approach, because I thought players having troubles vs. Harbs might appreciate the advice.

If you are an experienced player with a good build vs a brand new player, they shouldn't be able to farm you. You can fight it with other builds, as shown, and you don't need to be a Thief to outrun, or a Warrior to chain CC them. How does it have no weakness? It doesn't have the stealth, the overall pressure of more offensive specs, the projectile hate and stability of Cata, the mobility of... pretty much every build that commits some slots to it, almost no extra evasion or blocks. And again, I'm not saying Harb's a bad 1v1 profession, it is strong. Particularly the elite alone can turn around a fight and some reflects don't work vs Shroud skills. But other than that, consider that a class which has little evasion, and limited tools for mobility always has to have the bigger numbers on paper, otherwise it will fall short at some point. It's a long fight but one you can win, stalemate or disengage from. So you might not always win, but personally I've found Death Magic easier to deal with than more offensive Harb variations. Skill levels are always a fickle argument. How do you measure that without diving deep into the matchup's dynamics and testing it with a lot of different players running the builds against each other? OP was complaining about how even new players supposedly farm more senior ones with Harb. The one in the video might not have been the best Harb I've fought but certainly a player with some experience. My impression of the meta is that it generally is quite sustain heavy - and Harb does sustain fights well when they are able to keep engaged and pressuring with conditions and corrupts. So if it is a popular meta class in your matchup that you encounter frequently, adjusting builds and playstyles to better deal with Harb is natural. That's what a metagame does, it adapts to what is strong at the moment. Dismissing builds that do that as "dumb cheese nonsense" is not an approach that is going to lead you to success.

I'd argue any of the "strongest builds other classes have" (according to OP) should have something that can exploit Harb's weaknesses. Be it a lot of avoidance / sustain, mobility, CC or overwhelming damage. Not every build has everything, but every good build should have something it can utilize against Harb. And according to OP's signature they are maining Holosmith. I won't deny that Harb is strong in a straight up 1v1 in a whitebox scenario, but a lot of what people are writing here is over-exaggerated and doesn't address that for all its strengths, Harb has downsides too.

Death Magic isn't as popular with Harbs I'm usually fighting, this has been one that used it (and was a slog to bring down, but don't tell me you can't CC or outrun it):

It's a necro. Kite and CC it.

If you knew, say 10min before, you could still go for it and would know that there's a time limit. Or choose to do something else that fits that time frame. Right now you could've been trying to capture an objective for 15min, finally are about to kill the lord, get rid of the last defenders and suddenly your momentum is lost because WvW just shuts down. There's not enough time to react accordingly.

Having the opportunity to finish a fight or capturing a objective would be nice.

See title. I don't get why we wouldn't at least a get a couple of minutes before WvW shuts down when there's a new build available.

Well, since this thread still exists and is relevant again, here's my new stuff:

Three new clips since the last update can be found in the playlist. Focused on 1v2+ situations.

Many Diamond ranks got their rank by raiding though, so you meet a lot whose performance in smallscale is similar to a Bronze / Silver rank.

Engaging with the mount, especially when you are running a ranged build against a melee-focused (!) elite spec... is not a great idea.

Honestly, while there is some truth in that explanation, it boils down to "We try to make a single thing not do too much." Which is a pretty... basic (I dare say obvious) approach of balancing a game. I think (and hope) they take much more than a few skill properties into consideration, because context, opportunity cost etc. matter. One skill within one profession / class can be underpowered or overpowered depending on what else is accessible. So it's not as simple as "CC should (not) do damage". I think they removed damage from CC too broadly (but also not thoroughly, which left some players wondering). Now they're reverting that in some cases.

If someone would be able to get you banned just because they are a sore loser you don't want to play the game anymore anyway.

I think the Quickness makes more of a difference than the PBR CD decrease. Having the 2 charges, and often periods of time where you can't use it effectively, lines up well enough. A.E.D. is better suited for "all in" builds, imo. In attrition fights, giving your opponent the opportunity to nullify most of your heal skill, and giving up the access to an extra water field and more vigor uptime, wouldn't be my preference. There are many potential tweaks that might work better in specific fights, but generally, I'll stick to Kinetic Battery + Med Kit (the reduced CD on the TB heal is nice, and the extra healing, cond removal and boons from the kit skills hard to pass up on). Also, added some new clips to the playlist.

First one switched to Cata after respawning and obviously wasn't used to it (and overextended). Second one played too defensively, giving me time to go after the other one. Weaver with the initial build + more offensive Cata would have been problematic I think. Edit: Added another clip:

Sindrener I haven't seen in ages, and it's been a while since my last fights Yama, but those didn't end well for him afair. I think my hardest fights against thief were against Hide, and those were about an even split.

I can check what recordings I have lying around and there'll surely be some fights against thieves again.

I'd say with this build I win about 8-9 out of 10 fights against most thieves (in a straight 1vs1), with some rare exceptions. It's one of the better matchups for this build. If you want to see different results, I'm afraid you'll have to refer me to someone you deem competent.

Someone you have in mind on EU?

It's been a long time since I last uploaded stuff and I'm mostly too busy or lazy to do fancy editing. So that will be... minimal. On the flip side, I'm trying to limit this to watch-worthy encounters (no "I stomp noobs for breakfast"-montages) with ingame sound, whenever Shadowplay didn't screw it up. Here's the playlist: Current build looks like this: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PegAo6lNwoYiMPWKOsWZvPA-zVpYVBFAG6gY0U4xREE4cQCnRmKgelAG+iMiMUiEQaAt9aexoFA-w Sometimes playing it more offensive or defensive, but the lack of stability, protection and a second stunbreak means I need defense for certain matchups. The build relies on pressure, mobility, CC and blinds to win fights. The harder ones usually include enemies with stab, projectile hate or just a lot of iframes. Lack of pressure from opponents gives you time to heal with combos or setup fields with mortar. The build features many rather short CDs so vs high pressure spikes (or phases in which your opponents can protect themselves) you're trying to kite and let them run out of options. Anyway, enjoy.

I'd love a core main hand power weapon to go along with shield.

This seems like a counter point but isn't refuting anything you quoted? Yeah, there's no point in going after SM as a small group during active hours. But while it's the biggest, it's also just one of many objectives. Hitting keeps serves to deactivate waypoints or drain supplies - generally you'd go for the "hidden" gates / far off treb spots and remain unnoticed as long as possible to make repairs costly, setting up future attacks on a keep. A small parties job isn't necessarily to take a T3 keep, but to soften it up or prevent it from becoming upgraded in the first place. On EB or vs the defender on alpine BL you can often sneakily go for the spawn towers while the zergs are occupied. Most (re)spawns will go through keeps and not bother checking towers. And whenever you draw the attention of a bigger group that's an opportunity for your server's main forces to attack something else with little resistance. Then there's all the miscellaneous stuff that roamers help do: scouting, denying / draining supplies, slowing down reinforcements, delaying attacks with disablers, keeping ruin buff up so you get points for kills or just grabbing some points from camps and sentries. WvW isn't just SMC and keeps on EB.

There are many tasks for smaller groups and roamers. And often, it would be the better tactic to split big zergs and hit many obstacles at once, but it remains one because of a lack of commanders / people preferring to karmatrain. I reckon as a sPvP player OP will feel more comfortable in smallscale (group sizes of 1-5) first, because sPvP experience translates better to that playstyle and scale of figths.

My impression: There often are games with only 1-2 pre-made duos in conquest. And I think more players would queue up solo more often if they wouldn't put themselves at a disadvantage by doing so. So in my opinion, a solo Q would see enough players, and it would be a better competition than mixed Q. I haven't been playing MOBAs for years, so I can't tell you if any games currently do this. As far as I remember, Bloodline Champions had you create, queue up and listed on the leaderboard as a team and it worked while the playerbase was big & active enough. But yeah, I'm not gonna argue that this is feasible for GW2 at this point. In a way, ranked ladder / season is just a perpetual tournament. Currently, team rating doesn't fit ranked because it's not a pure team queue. I'd prefer GW2 providing a pure solo Q per default, alternate between pure solo and pure (full, but not locked pre-made required) team Q off season, and focus on (and improve) tournaments for competitive team-based play.