RabbitUp.8294

Well, the stealth attack gives you ini even if you hit thin air so "possible" is "definite". And that means that if you finish the chain with the stealth skill, the whole chain cost you only 1 ini.

It's not theorycrafted or anything, so very much WiP. I don't think this is the best build for spear, either, but it works and I love quickness. http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PaQEQLzgxySZesWcstujdA-DyIY1og/MiTCEoCQsfBCRgWAoZGTbAA-e

You can do 2-2-2, 4, 2-2-3, stealth attack, repeat. You get to maintain the buff from 4, get ini back, and the stealth attack's condi damage makes up for losing the third part of 2.

Initiative isn't as much of a problem as it is how tied the spec is to torment. It's not like specter/dagger helps you with ini management. I'm actually playing the expansion as spear specter. Spear gives you a lot of ways to get inititative through traits, either trickery (+3 passive, and +3 on weapon swap i.e. shroud), or shadow arts (+3 on stealth). You also get 4 initiative after using finisher 3 + stealth attack. You can technically spam 2-2-3-stealth attack forever if you pick shadow arts. But the best part is the survivability. I have cele gear, and I fought an oni to try the build and I could tank it easily. You heal with 3 (middle attack), heal and block with 5, and specter gives you a sizeable barrier on stealth, with you can spam with spear.

Seconding this. Playing solo feels fine, but in group contect with quckness and my toon hidden by a bunch of aoes and other characters, I have huge trouble following my combo progress and when I do a finisher so I can use 1 or 4. Having the stealth attack icon glow, and the #4 skill swap to a different icon with a glow would help tremedously.

Minor bug: The #5 skill shows the regular skill icon in your buff bar to signify the block, but if you use a finisher to get 3 block stacks, the icon is the beta icon.

If your fun hinges on the exaxct number of condi stacks your attacks deal, then I guess this impacts you. Personally I'm havinh fun pole vaulting around, spamming stealth (which gives superspeed with the trait) and doing fine damage.

Even with alacrity, there's 4s of downtime of Justice's passive effect, which is just enough for Lethal Tempo's stacks to fall off even if you proc Justice at the last millisecond. Maybe you were using the Virtues traitline before? With the 15% cooldown reduction and perma alacrity, you can keep your stacks with only F1.

Yes, that was the reason I shelved my male sylvari engineer, he screamed like his innards exploded every time I used Jump Shot.

At the end of the animation, you stopped midair and did the stomping animation, that made you lose height. You also couldn't jumpshot to higher platforms. For example, if you know the shortcut in Not So Secret JP where you go to the area below, climb a pipe and teleport to a platform where an aetherblade dude is chilling, now you can actually clear that jump with Jump Shot.

The thing is, if you actually like kits, then you shouldn't be satisfied with the current balance/implementation. Going into a kit to use 1-2 skills before dropping it defeats the whole point of having a kit, and you might as well replace it with a utility skill.

Jumpshot looks great for asura at least. Edit: I can confirm that they indeed added more bounce, you can actually gain height using Jump shot now.

Additionally a dev commented on reddit that the autoattack will have a new animation (engi no longer shots from the hip), it shoots two bullets and a grenade, and the grenade counts as an explosion.

Boons are not a yes or no, duration matters. Permanent quickness requires investment, even to maintain only on oneself. And the context of the discussion was in comparison to fury and might.

Please don't play cleric, you will do no damage. Celestial Mech is already nigh unkillable, but you can actually fight mobs.

Then you need to reread my post. Some lag is expected, but months is stretching it. The people who grind fractals have plenty of ascended boxes and materials to get ascended armour and infusions fast. And hmech uses harrier with monk runes, so anyone who played druid has that armour already. Plus, this is not the first meta swift, there wasn't a huge lag when fb and ren overtook chrono.

You can do more with the vampire theme than just lifesteal. It's more about the theme of darkness and bats and staff like that and of course the shroud transformation. The shroud for example would be melee and mobile, with the necro attacking with their bare hands with claw animations. The life force could work similar to adrenaline, you start with 0, but you build it by dealing and taking damage, and you can only enter shroud when you have full life force. The life force doesn't protect your health, but you heal for all the damage you deal while in shroud. It could have familiars as summons, like bats and ravens, that are more supportive than minions, like ranger spirits, but mobile.

That still doesn't cover every core profession. Ranger has nothing its elite specs don't have, it would need a new F5. Engineer has an F5 toolbelt skill, but there's only so much you can put on a single button, especially when holosmith gets an entire weaponset for an F5. Similarly, thief has only one skill. They can't buff stolen skills without also buffing DD, and there's only so much you can do with Steal itself. I guess it could get an F3.

I don't see what the problem is. Boon dps hybrid builds all have some damage tradeoff. Alacmirage is arguable a bit too high currently, but the rest are mostly fine.

Classes are split between game modes, any buff would be pve-only. First of all, the support build is fine, both power quickness and heal variants. There are a few simple ways to buff dps scrapper, though. Applied Force is the obvious one, because it's competing with Kinetic Accelerators. Maybe Mass Momentum could also increase the damage of gyros, again since this trait is inaccessible to quickscrap. Explosive Temper would also benefit a lot from the new EoD tech where stacks refresh duration, so it'll more consistent, and engi in general becomes less reliant on grenade kit.

Anything that does strike damage should count as a hit for each enemy affected. So Sigil of Fire should be up to 5 hits.

"Old" firebrand dilemma? HFB can still pretty much do all those things you listed. Boon-wise they have the exact same coverage, just A->Q. Yes, mechanist has barrier on top, but FB has a lot more aegis and stability, better projectile denial, more CC (Sanctuary). Take a look at class distribution (second-to-last column). In raids and strikes, mech and fb have equal presense. Then you look at fractals, and FB has a massive 31.8% to mech's 6.2%. Plus, the summer patch introduces a major competitor for mech with alacrity druid, who again has the same boon spread as mech, but also has Search and Rescue, Spotter (pressumably) and Entangle. There's no such competitor for FB, all other quickness providers are dps hybrids.

For some reason, the pvp playerbase has unreasonable hate for ai skills. Personally, I would like a turret rework that took inspiration for mechanist's Rocket Fist, i.e. instead of the turret attacking automatically, it attacked everytime you used your autoattack or something, with an icd, so they are less passive, and they stop the problem of afk farmers (not completely, there's still necro, rev and mech for that).

It wouldn't be a problem regardless of mech/fb, all those boons could already be provided by druid even back then, they just wanted to remove some of the boon spam from chaos chrono.

Jagged mind is nice for organised pve where your damage is higher and you don't have aggro, but virtuoso is not made for hard solo content. Compared other specs, you are not only giving up the clones that tank for you, but also mirage's dodge spam. Not getting hit is always better than sustain. Mirage got a significant nerf with EoD, losing all the sustain from runes of tormenting, but it's still the best mesmer spec for the job. Power virtuoso still take Bloodsong. That's just how bad the other grandmaster are. But yeah, without jagged mind, they only have Sharper Images for bleeds, so the blade generation is slower. At the same time, both power and condi use the heal on cooldown for the phantasm resets, so you won't be getting any heals if you follow the rotation.