ZTeamG.4603

Pretty sure the reason they changed the Lvl 80 boost gear is because Soldier's is garbage, and it resulted in PvE players that thought they had good gear ("It's exotic isn't it?") having the worst gear for pretty much all content. Celestial is strong in WvW, but it still requires class knowledge and skill to be a threat, albeit not as much as a glass cannon build. That said: if you're getting bodied by someone who just bought the game and got their first character to level 80, the issue is not the gear they're wearing nor the build they're running.

That's a different tonic, the Psionic Choya combat tonic. The one shown in the video is the costume brawl Pinata Choya tonic that you get with Amnoon Oasis casino coins. Maybe they included the normal pinata choya tonic in the April Fools exceptions.

I think a better title for this would be that one of the updates broke whatever was stopping this tonic (and probably the others) from being used in WvW. For the longest time costume brawl tonics didn't work in WvW precisely because this kind of thing was being abused.

Is this old or did a recent update re-allow the Pinata Choya in WvW?

This build and variations of it (ie different stats, runes, p/p only with no shortbow, etc.) can easily be unbeatable if you have your eyes half-open and just rinse and repeat pistol 5->bounding dodge for stealth->pistol stealth attack. You do it right, and you never run out of initiative and barely give the enemy any openings to attack you (and if they do, you have more than enough stunbreaks/defensive utilities to last you forever). You don't see this build a lot though because it is incredibly boring to play it optimally and it doesn't have a good way to interact in larger scale fights. There are other combos thieves can use to get on-demand stealth, but this one being tied to the dodge means you'll never run out of initiative, especially if using all the various ways to increase endurance in WvW. Really, the only change that would would be needed to balance it is making bounding dodge not a leap finisher in WvW (then buff the power damage it does to compensate). Maybe then we'll see it be worth using the other DD dodges again and it won't be so ridiculously easy to get on-demand stealth at zero resource cost.

Maybe try using the night light/blue light filter on your computer. I find it makes bright things much easier on the eyes.

That...honestly explains a lot about your interesting takes in this thread.

In addition to what everyone else has been saying, as a ranger you have access to the only ranged AoE in the game that has absolutely no line-of-sight requirement: longbow 5 (Barrage). If you mouse over them (including setting your camera to wacky settings to do so), you can hit them. Why is this the case? Who knows, but now you can safely pew pew from not just the top of the wall, but behind it as well.

There should be a check box on the accessory. Unchecking it hides the balls.

Ah yes, nerf necro in general because harbinger is an outlier. Seriously, show us a version of the build that is as busted as you say without running cele/trailblazer. The next best thing you'll find after cele is trailblazer, then carrion or plaguedoc after that, and those--again--are a huge step down from the effectiveness of cele. Death magic is an almost wholly defensive traitline, and because of that it isn't even used by a lot of the roaming harbs out there. Furthermore, carapace isn't nearly as overbearing as you're making it out to be, since: 1. You have to be constantly applying lots of conditions--30 in 10s, starting anew every 10s thereafter--to keep max carapace up and get protection pulses. That's a tall order for the other necro specs in 1v1s. Harbinger has a much easier time of this depending on choice of traits/runes/sigils, but even it runs into the problems in (2) and (3). 2. Old carapace stacks don't get overwritten and stacks last 10s, so it's far from a perma buff unless you just let the necro whale on you the whole time. If they reach 30 stacks in the opening seconds of the fight, all those stacks will be gone 10s later and need to be regained regardless of them doing actions that would generate more carapace. 3. Like #1 and most of necro's sustain, it is reliant on the necro constantly landing hits on the enemy. If you're blocking/evading/blinding/stunning, the necro doesn't get enough carapace to maintain their defenses. Take away celestial, and you'll find harbinger and death magic not nearly as hard to deal with. Celestial is the only thing keeping protection duration long enough to outlast the reapplication pulse time. I agree that it is very strong in 1v1s, but the reasons you keep giving for the build being busted (like its mobility, which is limited, or its stability access, which is very limited) are not reasons it's busted. In fact, you keep avoiding everything except the main reasons it's busted: -Celestial stats, without which it is much glassier and has far less sustain -On-demand 25 might from the elite elixir, something that was nerfed in sPvP but strangely not nerfed in WvW. When going larger than 1v1s, harb (like all necros) is very susceptible to being focused and stunlocked into oblivion. Even in 1v1s, projectile denial will completely hamper the harb's ability to do what it wants. If you're having trouble with counterplay to the harb, check out the other person's holo 1v1s and you'll notice that what they did to counter the harbinger plays perfectly into the weaknesses I've described above.

I'm starting to think you just haven't fought any good users of the other classes and you're playing fully into the harbingers' game plan every time you run into them. 600 from shroud 3, 600 from shroud 4? If you're counting wurm, that's a long cast teleport that also burns a stunbreak if you're using it for mobility. What? A traited 1 stack of stability that lasts for 3 seconds upon entering shroud? A single stack that you have to give up elixir sharing to get? The other stab source they get is 5s of all boons from the elixir, and if you're trying to box with the harbinger during that brief period then you're doing something very wrong. I certainly wouldn't call that good stability access. Which only can be upkept if you're letting them whale on you without doing anything about it. Shroud 1 and 2 are the vast majority of the harbinger's damage. Shroud 3 and 4 can be good, but give up mobility options if you use them for damage. Even the elixirs are projectiles if you want to deal damage with them. Maybe tell us what "some of the strongest builds other classes have" that you're using are, and we can recommend you some ways to deal with harbingers.

And yet here we are in a thread about harbinger specifically when the main problem is cele in general. If it isn't harbinger it'll be renegades, virtuosos, mirages, eles, root druids, willbenders, that p/p cele daredevil build, etc. 2 short range movement skills in shroud =/= high mobility. You're still hella slow unless you take warhorn for swiftness, waste your stunbreak to get swiftness, or use different runes (which is substituting out one of your gripes with the build). It does have strong crowd control and higher burst, but those are the tradeoffs for not having an extra healthbar while still being an overall slow and vulnerable necro. Shroud 5 float could use a nerf to not reapply float after stunbreak, but I digress. In your main post it's clear the thing you don't like is the sustain, but that sustain is (1) 70% from celestial, not from the class itself, and (2) the other 30% of the sustain from necro traitlines is the only thing keeping necros in general competitive against classes with much better active damage mitigation. The nerfs harbinger itself needs are: -Put the same sPvP nerf of the elite elixir into WvW (10 might instead of 25) -Make shroud 5 unable to reapply stun to an enemy that stunbroke it. The main way to fix the issue is just to nerf cele stats in WvW, which also addresses all the other problem classes. Equalize it to the total before conc and expertise were added. Edit: Literally just put down anything that blocks projectiles and you've nullified 90% of the harbinger's damage sources.

Try running that without celestial and it won't work anywhere near as well. Even trailblazer, the 2nd-best condi option for roaming, is a huge step down. All the meta cele builds are meta for a reason, and they all have one specific thing in common: celestial stats. Harb is not the worst offender due to its limited mobility and complete lack of stealth/invulns (with only 1 non-dodge evade). The counterplay for it is about the same as the original tanky core necro, but with projectile denial being an additional counter too.

We know they have the data (or the capability to track it) for a lot of these things based on other stats, from sPvP stats for things like damage, healing, time holding circle, etc. to stats for the total number of x mob killed by players over the years. We get wxp for killing siege, so tying that to defense credit shouldn't be too different from tying player kills to it. I think the main reason they haven't expanded it is worries about abuse, but if abuse is the concern then maybe expand ways of getting participation without immediately tying 2500wxp every 3min to it.

Yeah I'm not sure what they changed about the population algorithm when they rebalanced it relatively recently, but opening up the formerly "full" (and some now full again) servers seems to have made this more common. Hopefully the next relink at least gives lower population links to the higher population servers, because that's definitely not what happened this past time.

It has been hit-or-miss whether kills inside the objective give credit for the defense event for me, but just as bad is that the boundaries of the defense event mean you can be just barely outside of some objectives and you lose any chance at credit if the person you kill ran a little too far out.

A while back, a short delay was added before you could drop out of harbinger shroud. This prevented it from immediately exiting if you pressed it twice to enter it (whether by accident or if you were experiencing minor lag and your first press didn't activate shroud right away). The delay works well when not under the effects of alacrity, but, under the effects of alacrity--which harbinger occasionally has access to from the elite elixir--the delay is sometimes too short for times when this happens. Thus, shroud sometimes ends up exiting while your finger is away from the assigned shroud button and you are trying to use one of the shroud skills instead. This bug is inconsistent to reproduce, which is what makes me think that lag may be a factor. Regardless, the bug seems to only occur when alacrity reduces the delay even further than the normal duration. Would it be possible to set the delay on F1 (the short delay upon entering shroud before you are able to exit it) to not be affected by alacrity? I think that would prevent the issue.

Yeah, it pains me since the most fun I've had in WvW has pretty much always been in one of the following: smallscale (from solo roaming to 15v15ish), disorganized large group fights over objectives ("cloud v cloud" when its over a keep siege and not just a standstill at the Ogrewatch sentry), and zerg fights back when target caps were higher. My least favorite things in the game mode are lopsided fights where an unkillable pirateship/boonblob rolls over groups that have half their numbers. Unfortunately, a lot of Anet's changes to WvW over the years reinforce the "just outnumber your enemies and karma train the objectives" playstyle. Remember, early on in the game's life, when an organized group of 15 could wade into a organized but not as good group of 50 and kill a bunch of them? Between target caps, nerfs to damage, and buffs to sustain that's not doable anymore. Population imbalance has also exacerbated the problem. On my server we often end up heavily outnumbered when defending objectives (at most we usually have a commander on one map with a group of 20-30 when the enemy team has multiple zergs of 30+ running around). With siege and such it is still usually possible to repel larger groups of attackers or at least stall them until more allies arrive, but the design of the participation system doesn't reward actually defending and driving off attackers. Previously we had the band-aid of being able to tap a wall to get defense credit and refresh participation after driving off attackers (which, if they're a much bigger group, means you got no kills or other rewards from the defense even if you destroyed their siege and drove them off). Yesterday's change basically says "If you can't get kills, just don't even try to defend. Cap it back after or go for something else if you want rewards."

Yeah this is a terrible change for WvW. With no other changes to the participation system, it is now much harder to get defense credit and refresh your participation timer if you're playing defense against a bigger group. Furthermore, this change promotes gameplay far more toxic than before. Here's an example: Let's say you're at a keep that's under attack by a group of 30. Your participation timer is running low. You have maybe a max of 4 other allies in or around the keep that might help with defense. That's a pretty common scenario on my server, at least. You could: -Try to defend with siege or disable siege. Oh wait, killing enemy siege won't give you any participation/event credit, and you definitely won't get any kills off of the stacked group of 40, and now you can't refresh your participation and get defense credit by getting a repair tap on the wall before going back to your siege. -Try to defend conventionally, cast from the wall, etc. Oh wait, that doesn't give participation/event credit either. Again, you definitely won't get any kills off of the stacked group of 40 and now you can't refresh your participation and get defense credit by getting a repair tap on the wall before going back to what you were doing. -Repair. Oh wait, now that won't give you participation/event credit. You could repair in the hopes that a larger group from your team will arrive, but on a lot of servers you'll never have a group big enough to contest the enemy zerg in off hours. Repairing just delays the inevitable if nobody cares about destroying the enemy siege or pushing the enemies back either. -Forget about actually defending the keep and go grief enemy stragglers trying to reach the zerg. Kill one of them and you get event credit and max participation. Whereas in the past you might be feeling nice and let a low rank player get to the zerg, those stragglers are now your only source of defense credit and participation in a massively outnumbered defense. This is the only rewarded gameplay in an outnumbered defense scenario. If people got annoyed at guilds that would exclusively gank stragglers in the past, just wait until this new gameplay sets in and that's all anyone outside of the big zergs does. ANet should not have implemented this change without a rework of the participation/event credit system. Some ideas: -Dealing a certain amount of damage to enemy players should give defense credit, participation, and set the timer to something like 3 or 5 min. -Destroying enemy siege should give defense credit, participation, and set the timer to 5 min. -Disabling enemy siege or catching enemies in a trap should give event credit, participation, and set the timer to 2 min. -Heck, even dying to enemies you've hit should give a 1 or 2 min grace period on the timer.

This is the way. Air keep in desert BL also has some really good spots for pulls in outer areas. I've gotten like 1 fear kill for every 50 pull kills because fear is far too short in duration and much more easily countered than pulls. To get good fear duration you need to run the fear trait (which iirc is either in a traitline that doesn't match up well with most of the builds or is competing against much better options), but even then fear can easily be stunbroken.

I'm not really sure about the bouncing specifically, but they are affected by projectile denial skills. Afaik it's the only siege weapon that has this problem. If you're shooting at a group of enemies, most likely your force ball is getting destroyed or reflected back at you.

The max out of combat speed boost underwater is only a little bit more than swiftness and can be reached with the minimum swim speed infusion. In combat, the higher swim speed infusions will be slightly more noticeable for just swimming (since realistically almost nobody will be shelling out the gold for >+24). Where you'll mainly see the difference, however, is underwater movement skills. Since your speed affects how far you go while using these underwater movement skills that already go pretty fast, any speed boosts will extend your travel distance with those skills...and those skills are already going to be the main way people quickly escape from you underwater.

It still can't really compete with the other two options (granted, they're not great either) now that the cooldown reduction is inherent in the shouts, but using it in zerg fights can provide you a little more damage and sustain from the life steal.

Definitely one point against celestial nerfs is that a lot of the classes that are good with celestial would be unviable or barely viable without it. Right now, the meta is split into: -Classes that are strong and survivable enough in power builds with berserkers/marauders. Usually these are power classes that hit like a truck and nearly one-shot builds that aren't running celestial. They usually are classes that have a lot of survival options, such as invulns, blocks, or stealth, built into the class. Off the top of my head the common ones I see are thieves, willbenders, heralds. -Condi classes, where other stat combos can work but celestial is usually the best choice. A lot of these are classes that lack survivability without the tankiness from celestial. I still stand by my previous comment that the best way to nerf celestial is to rework how +stat buffs work, changing them into "+__% of stat from gear" buffs. IE instead of might giving +30 power it gives you a "+__% of your unboosted power stat" that would equal 30 on a dedicated power combo like Berserker's.

The problems with Reaper in roaming stem from two main things: 1. Reaper needs to stay in close to maximize damage. Your ranged options are: Power: Axe, for a single target burst from Axe 2 and a mediocre AoE with Axe 3. Axe1 is just for applying vuln and poking. + a few others that are mostly utility. Condi: Staff, which has low DPS and is more for applying some pressure at range. Scepter, which has a boonstrip but is otherwise lackluster. + a few other things that are mostly utility. You get 1 gap closer (Shroud2) and up to 2 pulls depending on weapon/utility choice. 2. Necro as a whole lacks blocks, evades, and stability. You have an extra healthbar, but it is also tied to your damage. Sure you get some damage reduction with it, but it melts under pressure and can be difficult to replenish while under pressure. You have no access to blocks (aside from a couple projectile destruction things). Your only evades are your dodges. You have 1 short duration stability. And obviously you have no stealth. When you combine all these factors, you have a class that struggles under pressure, struggles to maintain pressure on targets that kite it, is very susceptible to stunlocks, and doesn't have the tools to box in close range against other close range classes. Reaper's shroud is a mechanic that is very useful in open world, where blocks/evades/invulns are not nearly as worthwhile as an extra healthbar, but against players it makes you an easy target compared to the other mechanics. Let's look at Willbender, the current king of close range. On paper it is squishier than reaper, but it has access to plenty of blocks, evades, invulns, and stability. It also has more and better gap closers to keep it on top of its targets and does more damage in general. Classes that can stay away from Reaper have an easy time beating it unless you get some hard reads on them. I've also made a celestial reaper build work, but a class that has to rely on celestial to survive and speed runes to keep up does not have all the tools to be considered a good roaming class. I used to roam on power reaper before EoD and that was already an uphill battle, but power reaper is completely outclassed by most of the new and updated specs.