Dantheman.3589

Silly question. It is what it is, what you spec for will partly define what it’s good at along with how actually strong it is in that role. Doesn’t matter what it should be or could be in this meta, in the end it’s still druid.

Double side node or double roamer is way to go in ranked rn

You're doing everything wrong on the Reaper. The Reaper's main defense is its offensive pressure. You have to ditch all of this defensive play you're trying to implement and understand how to land your offensive pressure and when it is the right time to apply that pressure so the CDs aren't wasted. Outside of that, Reaper defensive play isn't within fat defense selections, it's within your positioning and rotations. You referenced that you play Thief and Mesmer so you may not yet be seeing the difference in playstyle here between DPS + Roamer and Team Fighter. The difference is that on a Thief/Mesmer you're looking to jump in, deal damage, and evasively leave before taking damage so you can reproach and do it again. On a Necro that doesn't work that way at all. On a Necro you have to take damage to deal damage. What you need to do is start viewing your approach as the Reaper from the standpoint of: "When I approach and lay my pressure, will I be dealing more damage to the opponents than they will deal to me?" If the answer to that is YES then apply your pressure. If the answer is no or uncertain, keep kiting and maintain a sound position until there is an opportunity to leverage your DPS/CC pressure in a way that will Rock > Scissor the opponent's offensive push. That's what Reaper is good at. If you really want a tanky necro build, go core. Scourge isn't that great right now outside of a minion meme build that feels strong in lower tiers but gets trashed by higher tiered opponents. Scourge is insanely good rn, not as a minion mancer, but as a menders bunker which according to top 10 level necros I know is actually tankier than that bunker core build ppl played and yet can pull off good damage with boon corrupt converting to boons and also side node becuz of aoe pressure. I’d say scourge is alittle better than core, but transfusions might mess with Rez signets.However as far as recommending a build I would say recommend core if you care about how cheese it is- there’s a reason scourge was meta in 2s becuz if it didn’t win before timer you know it would win after and that’s cheesy Yeah I actually think something might be bugged with the damage on Scourge when it is wearing Mender. I have a buddy who's been playing this recently, and when we 1v1 spar to test things out, it doesn't feel like the damage is much less than if he were wearing Carrion. I mean seriously. Not too sure what's going on there but something is off about it you pay attention to it. At one point he was dueling CKOD and even CKOD had mentioned that the damage felt awfully high for a mender condi build. The reason why I suggested Core to the OP was because it's a lot easier to play than Scourge.It’s mostly due to how you can corrupt a lot of boons which reduces many of enemies defense and offense whilst giving you those boons instantly in the same intensity and without cd. If you corrupt players might it’s very ez to get 25 might not too mention focus damage is overtuned on top so I’ve seen that hit for 8k as menders. Also the aoe spam is cancer like renegade or guard on top of that- makes it insanely hard to 1v1 them on nodes, but it’s often very ez to win a 2v1 becuz they don’t have much for kiting.

You're doing everything wrong on the Reaper. The Reaper's main defense is its offensive pressure. You have to ditch all of this defensive play you're trying to implement and understand how to land your offensive pressure and when it is the right time to apply that pressure so the CDs aren't wasted. Outside of that, Reaper defensive play isn't within fat defense selections, it's within your positioning and rotations. You referenced that you play Thief and Mesmer so you may not yet be seeing the difference in playstyle here between DPS + Roamer and Team Fighter. The difference is that on a Thief/Mesmer you're looking to jump in, deal damage, and evasively leave before taking damage so you can reproach and do it again. On a Necro that doesn't work that way at all. On a Necro you have to take damage to deal damage. What you need to do is start viewing your approach as the Reaper from the standpoint of: "When I approach and lay my pressure, will I be dealing more damage to the opponents than they will deal to me?" If the answer to that is YES then apply your pressure. If the answer is no or uncertain, keep kiting and maintain a sound position until there is an opportunity to leverage your DPS/CC pressure in a way that will Rock > Scissor the opponent's offensive push. That's what Reaper is good at. If you really want a tanky necro build, go core. Scourge isn't that great right now outside of a minion meme build that feels strong in lower tiers but gets trashed by higher tiered opponents. Scourge is insanely good rn, not as a minion mancer, but as a menders bunker which according to top 10 level necros I know is actually tankier than that bunker core build ppl played and yet can pull off good damage with boon corrupt converting to boons and also side node becuz of aoe pressure. I’d say scourge is alittle better than core, but transfusions might mess with Rez signets.However as far as recommending a build I would say recommend core if you care about how cheese it is- there’s a reason scourge was meta in 2s becuz if it didn’t win before timer you know it would win after and that’s cheesy

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PSwAYd3lNwQYcsHmJm6XavaA-z5AXGZmB9WCOPAThis is your tanky necro option that’s viable

Thief damage is actually good right now- it’s just front loaded into certain skills- heart seeker, sword 3, sd 5, vault and rifle 2 to name a few. I personally don’t like it as it didn’t used to be a skillful way to play and kindof killed S/d becuz front loading the weapon damage into the back line skills reduces the actual pressure of the build, but that doesn’t mean thief players are less skilled for using new builds that take advantage of this- that’s just adapting to a new meta.

Most of it is good. I think some versions of ranger just aren’t gonna carry ats, but some work. I did one time play an average at build for ranger except accidentally with marksmanship and birds against a somewhat high level team(best of best, ranked players etc.) where after capping home and getting decap far- with this build still held vs crev and ended up 2v3 with a power rev against crev, tempest + reaper where we not only held but got multiple kills and stomps. After this I do think it’s possible to 2v2 to some extent but this some build in other matches didn’t feel as good in 1v2s so idk it maybe in a grey area. Still you pretty much covered most points about what do with a side noder like ranger who might kite alot

Maybe their builds are good but hard to perform or just good when you can actually rely in your teammates which is not the case in ranked. Yeah sometimes metabattle lists builds that are meta but only for ranked in their meta section, but there’s some many many things that they just don’t have time to consider and that may actually function at super high end in ranked. Also it can be the opposite- for example the core ranger build on godsofpvp while it’s a great build for ranked it was basically abandoned for ats for a quiet different iteration of core ranger, so it’s just a ranked build basically and yet for ranked where more memer stuff can work like valk amulet, players decided you might as well play valk- so some of the builds end up in a grey area of how up to date they are and since it’s not really possible for every site to list everything possible it’s also impossible to say exactly how perfect each build is, which is 1 reason I like metabattle becuz it allows some player feedback.Pretty much don’t expect 1 site to have everything perfect for w.e is the actuality of the gw2 pvp scene

Metabattle in many cases is reliable. There’s also godsofpvp but recently some of their builds have been bad or way out of date. Some things neither of these sites do is tell you some build that is sometimes stronger for ranked than meta builds and occasionally there’s build just as strong as meta ones that just end up not being used for tournaments like scourge rn. So yeah these sites can actually help, but no I don’t know anything about a teir list

That’s actually interesting. Not sure if ppl will like bursty retal though

Yes a lot of players, there's currently 6 people on plat 3+ and none of them are soloq, you literally make 0 sense. and you realize to stay on plat 2 soloq you have to seriously limit your play time to only weekend nights or else you will get matched with silvers who dies to auto attack, even the best player in the entire world isn't capable of carrying matches like these. there's literally max 60 people on plat 2 and 90% of them are duoq and have very limited play time, more then half of them have less the 90 games played, that's 5 hours per 7 days. like 2.5 hours for saturday and sunday and that's it. and ofc that's not their whole play time, if you want to compete at the top, 5 hours every week will not make you top players.they all just playing on ALT because they know it is impossible to maintaining their ranks without duoq/q dodging/limiting their play time to only weekend. ask any plat player if the current ranked is any bearable, it's completely unplayable. Idk what region your on but known solo qers are in plat 3 on both regions to my knowledge and yes I mean I know them and I’ve finished seasons solo q, on meme builds actually, in plat 3 also. It’s not that hard...

guards have perm retal? u gonna spam stow weapon all game long? No they don't. Only a Radiance power build has high retal uptime, and nobody is playing that, and even then it's not 100%. Symbol guard, burn guard, symbolbrand, none of them have high retal uptime. Elixir engi/holo/scrapper builds have higher uptime than guardian does. Is retal overpowered on engi? all u need is wrathful spirit on zeal to give perm retal passivelyespecially symbol builds use this How do you figure that one? How are you producing an Aegis every 4 seconds? Why don't you link the skills that are doing this. We'll wait. ye mantra heal and shield or mace and shield, on top of your initial block and active one you can useif u win ez then maybe zeal passive symbol will not proc, but otherwise u will have perm retal until every fight is over Over a 90s period, you can use F3 twice, shield 4 times, mace-3 6 times, for a total of 12 aegis over 90 seconds. That'll give you 48s of retal. And that is assuming you use those things EXACTLY on cooldown, which you would never do, since you save them for appropriate moments. Where's the other 42s coming from? 3x zealot speed and 3x valorous defense = 48 sec of retali understand it's not solely a math game, but if u save ur blocks for appropriate moments you are gonna have retal on the appropriate moment It's 36s, not 48s, and you won't be entering a fight on 50% HP. A bunker will certainly not be triggering those on cooldown. Also assumes sitting full duration in lesser symbol of wrath.Am I missing some thing using gw2 skill editor I see 2 secs x3 for zealots speed and 3 aegis for valorous defense which will end up 3x4 + 6 which is 18 secs. Is gw2 skill editor wrong?

I'll trust high ranked players I know (p3-leg). Ok than trust me. In testing the build it lost every 1v1 to the team mates that were testing core guard builds

https://www.godsofpvp.net/builds/guardian Andreas uses a very similar build Yes and it’s not viable . Metabattle has had the build that ppl have been using for ages

Retal usually does 10k+ damage on core guard where burning does just a bit more (sage amulet). People don't understand death breakdowns. Conditions, and retal, are always top of the list, because they never get "reset" by the counter. If retal has done 10k damage to you, then it's a fight that has gone on for a LONG time, and 10k damage over 90 seconds really isn't much. And you didn't answer the question. If retal is a problem on guardian, with builds that maybe have 30% uptime, why is it not a problem on engi builds with more like 80% uptime?I’d say Ragnar is right on the money. The true offender for insane retal uptime is radiance builds which while it’s possible to play some with insane dmg- they just aren’t really reliable. What ppl are talking about is probably symbol core guard which at best is like 50-60% uptime and that’s taking symbol on heal trait and one of the stun breaks that give retal which not everyone does especially on Eu where it seems like they like having a little bit extra team support builds.On a separate note- sages is pmuch garbage on core guard. To my understanding 1 player, yes 1 player ever used it and in testing it lost every duel even to the supporty menders Eu build that has been seeing play and yet it’s meant for dueling hence - No Symbol Guards Damage is not coming from only “burning and retal “. That damage is only significant in prolonged fights also where probably they tried kiting and attack the core guard either with projectiles and/or condi aoes.

I think na beat you too it. Someone played a knockback only druid in the mota, hence the mine cart memes because someone stood in a mine cart to stop them from decapping them followed by said person crying and accusing ppl of cheating

Not true, considering all elites and core specs, core engi is the worst of all of them, funny enough its elites can make up for all that and pull themselves to top tier list. Tbh they have to overkill holo and kinda nerf scrapper to slowly buff core to bring all 3 of them up together, otherwise one or another elite will end up busted with any attempt of buffing core That’s not true at all decap core engi is good enough to play in ats or ranked at a fairly high level and as such is leaps and bounds ahead of core specs like mes war rev and ele I was not aware of this build, do you know how is it like?Just use battering ram, throw mine and offhand shield. It’s insanely high knockback uptime + it has the option to rip through stab, so even if it’s not great it’ll win the side node 1v1 just by decapping and keeping the enemy unable to do damage through the knockbacks

Sure give everyone a stat to reduce condition damage after you remove all condition duration boosts and mitigators from runes etc.

How do you see that? I thought it just said who came top but no other information, unless I'm missing it In the same tab that contains your stats like healing and damage- it says how much percentage of your team you got in that stat and the percentage of the whole game. This is honestly the #1 thing to look at. For example there are some games I get 400k dmg, which isn’t bad in many cases but I’ve seen damage go up to like 1 million. So how do I know if 400k is good? I look at percentage of team- if it’s like 30% of your teams damage that’s decent since you are only 1 player out of 5 which means about 20% is average. If it’s like 40% plus you know you were carrying with your damage becuz it’s almost half your team as 1 player.Every match is different so it’s hard to judge just off numbers alone especially for kills when anyone who gets an assist technically gets a kill stat. you absolutely need to use percentage of team and game to judge how well you did

Not true, considering all elites and core specs, core engi is the worst of all of them, funny enough its elites can make up for all that and pull themselves to top tier list. Tbh they have to overkill holo and kinda nerf scrapper to slowly buff core to bring all 3 of them up together, otherwise one or another elite will end up busted with any attempt of buffing core That’s not true at all decap core engi is good enough to play in ats or ranked at a fairly high level and as such is leaps and bounds ahead of core specs like mes war rev and ele

Sure, apparently it was just 5 accounts. The guy who did it is called Tallbarr if I recall correctly. I think it was the season before the last 2v2s, but not 100% sure. Can confirm. I'm currently hovering around top 10 on NA with burn dh.Doesn’t mean a lot imo. We all know guardian is just over all great in many areas as far as ranked pug stomps. Doesn’t mean u can bring it against good players

So Eu only?

For a lot of players that are experienced, they don’t even fall below plat2 solo Qing and very good ones can even maintain plat3 which at times is semi competitive, at least as far as ranked goes. I would say if you want to play a lot of matches at one time duo q is the way to go though as 1.) comp control 2.) more fun 3.) alittle ezier to maintain or climb rating if you are guaranteed to be with a similar level player

It’s the complete opposite. If you are afk on a node and wasting a person, who cannot decap it’s time, than you are doing good enough. More than that and you are hard carrying.

I would avoid the symbol guard build on that site though. It’s worse than valluns one which is mostly set up that way for new players. If u wanna step up from valluns beginner build start with the core symbol build on metabattle.com.