Are all the devs maining Scourge or something?

[Biohazard.2043]

Condi player/necro main since day 1. Condi always reminded me on the curses necro or illusions mesmer of GW1 which I loved to play. I got into conditions because I liked the attrition playstyle that it offered and I have always run condi on my characters even during the power meta. Started as terrormancer, then frostbite reaper, and now trying scourge. IMO these "condi spikes" move away from what I have always believed a condition class was supposed to be. I'm not a great pvp player but I can easily down someone with low amounts of cc mitigation by fear chaining and running up to them and spamming scourge skills. That's not that fun.

Facing a scourge as another character if I get in melee range of the scourge I get a condition stalk out of no where and am dead in two seconds. This is no fun, and I have always been a condition build player.

Things I think should be improved to make scourge more balanced. Cast time to F2 and F3 skills. I am not sure why these are instant cast. They aren't when we have shroud. F4 and F5 should remain instant cast due to their defensive benefits (fear skill for the anti cc: fear on core, stability on reaper, has always been instant cast and shroud has also). Additionally, something should be done to the ticks for the F5. It applies quite a bit of torment. Also from another thread confusion/torment remove ticking in pvp and revert it to "dmg if performing the specific action" so at least torment gives a choice between stand still and not get damaged or move and receive damage. I don't think boon stripping is an issue. There are so many boons flying around that as a scourge I never am able to strip them completely even when traited/with boon corrupting utilities.

My two cents. Thoughts from a day 1 terrormancer.

[Cynz.9437]

No, they are just playing roulette. It is wars/necros turn now to ride the broken train. Like it was for so many other classes before ZzzZzzz. Theoretically everyone gets their turn, the only problem with it is that they never do anything to reduce powercreep and just make it worse. Compare game to 1-2 years after launch to now? It is plain spam of low CDs, AOEs and condis everywhere. Can't see crap anymore. CD management is gone. Resource management is gone. Timing? What is dat?

[Cyczer.7834]

Every balance patch something new becomes broken, condi still getting stronger by time ( considering the fact that condi > power builds since season 5 ).

But hey look at this cool mount I bought for 2 k gems ;w;

[maxwelgm.4315]

Scourges have a single and only problem, and that is the Sand Savant trait. You should never be able to pulse conditions on constant pace over an area that big. Take Savant away and you'll actually have counterplay by walking away from shades and also force the necro player to actually be skilled enough to time his interrupts with the condi bursts.

The way it is now, what I usually do is spam manifest shade on top of a point and just run around letting capping enemies die while the others chase after me for no reason.

[brannigan.9831]

You aren't allowed to complain about scourge bro apparently they were nerfed to hell already with a "bug fix". The fact they are still the number one played class in spvp doesn't mean anything at all. They are so bad they are fotm. The next time I spvp for an extended period I think I am going to log the number of scourges out of all players in all matches I play. I would bet they are 30%-35% of all classes in spvp at the moment. I admit i'm not a pro but usually in the 14500-1600 MMR Range somehwhere which isn't too bad and often faces people in the top 250 range so I think it would be a fair representation of the population of scourges above total noob level. The reason they are so popular I think is they have powerful aoe on the point in a game about holding points and strong initial defensive abilities like barrier that allow you to face tank bads long enough to kill them most of the time. It doesn't matter they are helpless after that because there are rarely after that the initial burst and barrier allows them to kill people. In a way they are like the condi version of the DH right after the first expansion. Its low skill high reward a lot of the time.