Benchmarks Are In Post Patch...

[Sensations.9507]

28 minutes ago, soul.9651 said:

Yeah ok, give scourge 42k bench, then listen to some random people wanting alac aswell on it and then lets just delete every single other spec and class from the game because at that point there would be absolute 0 reasons to play anything else.. what a great balance that would be, its not like we saw something similar with mechs before any nerfs or with scourges in the past aswell -.- .. broken spec stacking definetely doesnt happen in this game once its out there

I never asked for 42k.  Hyperbole and lying is not doing anything for our argument.  I said give it alac if its only doing 34k like it is now.  If you going to comment at least get kind of close to addressing this issue...  Full dps scourge doing 38k dps is not op...  If it is what is your stance on qFirebrand/cFirebrand/Virt/3 specs of Mech/any other 40k dps spec.....  Braindead

[soul.9651]

4 minutes ago, Sensations.9507 said:

I never asked for 42k.  Hyperbole and lying is not doing anything for our argument.  I said give it alac if its only doing 34k like it is now.  If you going to comment at least get kind of close to addressing this issue...  Full dps scourge doing 38k dps is not op...  If it is what is your stance on qFirebrand/cFirebrand/Virt/3 specs of Mech/any other 40k dps spec.....  Braindead

Like i said earlier, yes, there are other broken specs like u mentioning rn, and u need to nerf those over performing specs instead of making a new ones... But hey if u wanna people start rioting on forums yet again just like how they did with mech with ton of complaints, how they were just done with mech stacking and how op it was, then sure, keep asking for scourge buffs, see how well it will go with the gw2 community. And speaking about the forum complaints this is why they nerfed scourge multiple times, just because how people hated it beeing stacked at instanced content after the torment rework patch 🙂

[Nephalem.8921]

28 minutes ago, Sensations.9507 said:

Lying is not a good way to start a post.  Scourge does not do 1.2k barrier a second in FULL VIper gear anymore.. It hasnt in 2 years.  In full ascended viper gear right now on live tooltip on barriers are 1.1k and 500!  What alternate reality are we living in?  These tiny barriers also have a 10s and 8s cooldown respectively!  Using the 10s shroud barrier also is a dps loss and consumes lifeforce, WHICH you dont have alot of if your in actual blood support spec.  If you instead blood support with soul reaping instead of curses your dps goes down to like 5k...  Scourge might have that much SELF barrier if you count in pressing shroud 5 off cd. There are full ranged specs or "simple" rotation specs like scourge doing 38k+ dps while also giving barrier and boons.  You do not address this at all.  Dont just drop lies and then peace out without touching on a single issue.  You dont address any of the 21 classes doing 38k+ dps while giving arguably more valuable support than scourge does if its full dps viper gear.  

BTW throwing in cVirt and not mentioning 80% uptime on distortion, perma fury and a braindead rotation points out your not putting any thought into this at all.  Cmech gives barrier/might/vuln/fury has a braindead signet rotation doing 39k.  There are 6-7 specs like this..  Your argument is either ignorant or straight trolling if there is a single class doing what you are afraid scourge will do.  Much less 6 specs doing it already..

I meant 1,2k group barrier per sec which it did last time i checked to compare it to ritu specter. healers achieve usually 4-7k hps in a group setting so stacking scourges is still as effective as taking another healer.

Do you know how scourge works? F3 barrier is part of your dps rotation. Which full ranged specs do you mean? specter is single target. virtu provides just fury.

cmech gives neither might nor barrier. The only other spec able to cleave the entire boss arena without dps loss is cvirtu and it has at least weapon swap and just piercing cleave and no barrier or epi.

Edited February 22 by Nephalem.8921

[ZeftheWicked.3076]

Imho it's not the necro numbers that are the problem - it's the other professions.
Everyone and their mother going 40k dps should be curbed, and sub 40k be the plateau..

[teeth.3501]

3 minutes ago, ZeftheWicked.3076 said:

Everyone and their mother going 40k dps should be curbed, and sub 40k be the plateau..

It's a very unproductive stance. I don't want others to get worse, high average DPS contributes a lot to the current state of things where we have more diversity than ever. It's easier to argue for us to get on that level than it is for everyone else to be brought down.

[Dadnir.5038]

3 hours ago, Nephalem.8921 said:

I meant 1,2k group barrier per sec

Considering the maximum number of time you can use skills providing barrier to your group over a minute:

At 0 healing power the maximum you'll do is 425 barrier per second. (viper gear)

At 633 healing power you'll do 794 barrier per second (plaguedoctor gear)

At 1083 healing power you'll do 1057 barrier per second (plaguedoctor + blood magic + superior runes of the rebirth)

At 2331 healing power you'll achieve 1785 barrier per second. (Magi + bloodmagic + Superior runes of the rebirth + full Healing power infusion + full superior sigil of life + food). Could go to 2631 healing power with health below 50% so you'd occasionally flirt with 2k barrier per second.

 

1.2k barrier per second... That basically mean you got between 1400 and 1500 healing power. You could have achieved that below 50% health while in plaguedoctor gear with blood magic sloted + superior runes of rebirth/Scourge. Not sure whether it's really relevant as a "dps" build, thought. Even with stacking scourges, it's probably no longer considered "efficient" at this level.

 

[teeth.3501]

4 hours ago, Nephalem.8921 said:

Do you know how scourge works? F3 barrier is part of your dps rotation. Which full ranged specs do you mean? specter is single target. virtu provides just fury.

It's not, actually. It's way too high cost to fire off CD without delaying any F2s, which are cheaper and do same damage. In most fights using F3 off CD is impossible, as well as on benchmarks. Not sure you know how scourge works with your wild 1200 hps claims. 

[Sobx.1758]

28 minutes ago, teeth.3501 said:

It's not, actually. It's way too high cost to fire off CD without delaying any F2s, which are cheaper and do same damage. In most fights using F3 off CD is impossible, as well as on benchmarks. Not sure you know how scourge works with your wild 1200 hps claims. 

F3 is still part of its dps rotation and it's still passive source of aoe sustain. Scourge doesn't need to have higher dps.

Edited February 22 by Sobx.1758

[zaswer.5246]

5 hours ago, Nephalem.8921 said:

Starting an argument with LOL is not very convincing. It still has 1,2k barrier output per second and if stacked is enough to replace a healer. The only similar build is cvirtu which has no barrier and requires positioning for cleave.

Scourge requires no positioning at all. Also specter is purely single target with no cleave. It is not just the barrier. scourges are still taken over other specs because of this on some encounters. It does not even have a weapon swap. CMech is melee, specter single target. Scourge has no limitation.

 

The good old "but is has 2 healthbars" argument. 40k scourge would break the game. 40k reaper might be too much but the shroud is far less sustain than some stuff herald, warrior and virtu can do.

It has medium health at full stacks. weaver has less hp than a full stack harb. Play sword weaver if you think it is so op. even current 35k scourge will outdps it on some encounters because of the range advantage.

i wont argue that other classes have great sustains, but shroud is still amongst the best sustain mecanics, and not only that, but you have shroud, the great health pool necros have, boons and the traits from wich you can choose, also shroud is both a dps mecanic and a sustain mecanic, most others need to rely on traits, skills with inmortality, etc to get to the same point.

Lets say shroud doesnt get rid of dmg received, thats augur, and augur already does a huge amount of dmg, if augur does 40k a reaper doing 37 is more than fair id say, if herald is immortal then 40k dmg is too much too, the same way mecanist doing 40k is too much because robot does half of it

[Asum.4960]

On 2/22/2023 at 2:21 AM, Nephalem.8921 said:

We had high scourge dps in the past and it was way worse than rifle mech. It is just too braindead to play. It has 0 depth. Everyone can do 90%-95% bench on it without even trying. While being fully ranged, while spaming barrier and condi cleanse, while having extremely high health, dmg reduction and a free utility slot.

Buff reaper dps, help harb a little but no scourge dps buffs please. We had that a year ago. it was garbage.

No it wasn't worse. 

Rifle Mech was exponentially higher burst due to being power, higher damage, higher range and has significant self-boon application of vital boons - all with a far easier "rotation" in which you did fine just AA + 2+3+4 on CD, and Grenade Kit if you were feeling fancy, while the Fx skills were able to be auto-cast. 

I don't know how exactly Scourge is "braindead" to play or lacking in depth, at least compared to almost everything else out there these days. 

It's vital to finish it's AA, you got shade placement, you got LF management, you got condition management and transference timing, ICD management and 10+ buttons to rotate, in an age where specs like Vindicator can break almost 38k by just pressing 4-6 buttons on CD and Dodging without any other worry - and later statements of yours like Sand Cascade being part of the DPS rota for constant Barrier spam implies that your only experience with the spec is watching the first few seconds of a Scourge Benchmark - before LF gets too tight to generally keep doing so, even when you can run Shadow Fiend. 

 

That said, I don't think that Scourge is in need of a major DPS buff either. It's low DPS is largely compensated for by it's incredible DPS-Uptime. The more ridiculous part about Scourge is that it needs  over a freaking full minute to reach it's Benchmark DPS.

Skills like Grasping Dead desperately need a reduction in Duration and increase in Stacks. 

Yes, Condi builds are supposed to ramp, but over a minute of ramp is just beyond impractical with the average phase length in the game - and that's something getting worse and worse with power creep. 

 

That especially Power Builds, with the added advantage of burst, are starting to fairly routinely break 40k sustained DPS is a concern though - but I don't think the answer to that is to creep everything else up as well. I don't really want to see Condi builds sporting 45-50k Benchmarks by next year just to be able to keep up and catch up with 180k burst, 40k+ sustained DPS Power builds. 

Imo Anet should slowly bring things back down to a manageable 35-39k DPS, depending on DPS-uptime of builds - in the context of which Scourge would be completely fine as is today (except for the mentioned need to imo slightly lower it's bonkers ramp time).

Edited February 24 by Asum.4960

[Sobx.1758]

2 minutes ago, Asum.4960 said:

No it wasn't worse. 

Both presented a really dumb gameplay pattern, it was just for a slightly different reasons. We don't need to rank these builds to understand why they should have been -and were- nerfed.

Edited February 22 by Sobx.1758

[Asum.4960]

6 minutes ago, Sobx.1758 said:

Both presented a really dumb gameplay pattern, it was just for a slightly different reasons. We don't need to rank these builds to understand why they should have been -and were- nerfed.

I wasn't the one driving the comparison, I was just calling it out - so I'm not sure why you chose me to quote for this. 

Power Rifle Mech was a genuine outlier in terms of simplicity to performance ratio, Scourge, imo, isn't. 

There are far easier as well as higher performing builds than Scourge. The meme of Necro being simplistic to play is a poorly aged relic of the past with how much everything else has gotten simpler and simpler and stronger and stronger. 

Let's not pretend any of the builds Benching higher than Scourge are rocket science - I'd argue over half of them can be picked up and performed better at quicker and more easily.

[Sobx.1758]

2 minutes ago, Asum.4960 said:

I wasn't the one driving the comparison, I was just calling it out - so I'm not sure why you chose me to quote for this. 

Power Rifle Mech was a genuine outlier in terms of simplicity to performance ratio, Scourge, imo, isn't. 

There are far easier as well as higher performing builds than Scourge. The meme of Necro being simplistic to play is a poorly aged relic of the past with how much everything else has gotten simpler and simpler and stronger and stronger. 

Let's not pretend any of the builds Benching higher than Scourge are rocket science - I'd argue over half of them can be picked up and performed better at quicker and more easily.

I chose to quote the last post of the comment chain, it wasn't somehow limited to your post, more about "which was worse?" discussion. Understandable it wasn't clear from my short response.

If it's still not clear (because judging by you still focusing on "simplicity of use" in this response), scourge was (and is) easy to use, but its main issue was stupidly high aoe sustain while building for aoe dps which made stacking scourges trivialize everything. Power rifle mech shouldn't be buffed. Scourge shouldn't be buffed. Doesn't matter who thinks which one is/was simpler or dumber in its design -both were heavily overperforming for what they did.

[Nephalem.8921]

36 minutes ago, zaswer.5246 said:

i wont argue that other classes have great sustains, but shroud is still amongst the best sustain mecanics, and not only that, but you have shroud, the great health pool necros have, boons and the traits from wich you can choose, also shroud is both a dps mecanic and a sustain mecanic, most others need to rely on traits, skills with inmortality, etc to get to the same point.

Lets say shroud doesnt get rid of dmg received, thats augur, and augur already does a huge amount of dmg, if augur does 40k a reaper doing 37 is more than fair id say, if herald is immortal then 40k dmg is too much too, the same way mecanist doing 40k is too much because robot does half of it

No, it is not. Shroud is a terrible sustain mechanic.

Comparision starts at 1:34

 

Now addressing the barrier. Obviously the majority of scourge mains here never checked a log. F3 hits 12 targets (3 per shade). F1 trait 5.

With alacrity in viper max barrier generation 1188 * 10 / (10*0.8*0.85) + 572 * 5 / (8*0.8*0.85) + 2188 / (20*0.8*0.85)

= 2433.7.

2272.8 if you ignore f5 and only count group barrier.

So my 1200 is not just realistic, i mean i pulled it out of a log, its even stronger if f3 is used on cd which i probably did not. In case some of the defenders come with "but hitting multiple targets inflates the numbers". The 4-7k hps number for a SOLO healer was also area heal. Duo healers heal way less because most fights are not boneskinner where a healer can get 14k hps. You can not heal a full target. especially if protected by barrier from a scourge stack for example.

[Asum.4960]

1 hour ago, Sobx.1758 said:

I chose to quote the last post of the comment chain, it wasn't somehow limited to your post, more about "which was worse?" discussion. Understandable it wasn't clear from my short response.

If it's still not clear (because judging by you still focusing on "simplicity of use" in this response), scourge was (and is) easy to use, but its main issue was stupidly high aoe sustain while building for aoe dps which made stacking scourges trivialize everything. Power rifle mech shouldn't be buffed. Scourge shouldn't be buffed. Doesn't matter who thinks which one is/was simpler or dumber in its design -both were heavily overperforming for what they did.

Fair enough, but I wasn't arguing for Scourge DPS buffs - and besides, esp. after all the Barrier nerfs, I think Scourge's Support/Utility as DPS is pretty heavily overrated as remnant (and frankly, was even at it's prime). 

Sure, what's realistically <200 Barrier per second output these days is still nice, especially in it's stackable nature, but it's not exactly a game breaker. Supports are far too powerful to make that necessary, and there is better active Utility around. 

Plus Scourge just needs a proper Trait in place of Sadistic Searing to compete with Desert Empowerment for DPS Scourge, and then even that is largely gone.

As for the Cleanse from Nefarious Favor, that's outcleansed by something like a Condi Guard of any kind with Purging Flames, Cleansing Flame and Light Field interactions by a factor of 10 (not to mention coupled with the ability to just drop a 180 stat Signet, or having Tomes as FB, for group Stab, Reflects, Aegis, etc.). Something like Power Herald provides Boon Extension and Life Steal (and optionally good Stability, For Vindi as well, at a manageable DPS loss). Renegade has group healing and cdamage reduction. Specter also provides Barrier and AoE Heals. Virtuosos can provide Reflects, Portals, etc. Even Weaver shares group Barriers at this point

I really don't see Scourge being some massive outlier here either in the current balance, neither for Utility nor ease of play.

Edited February 22 by Asum.4960

[Nephalem.8921]

59 minutes ago, Asum.4960 said:

No it wasn't worse. 

Rifle Mech was exponentially higher burst due to being power, higher damage, higher range and has significant self-boon application of vital boons - all with a far easier "rotation" in which you did fine just AA + 2+3+4 on CD, and Grenade Kit if you were feeling fancy, while the Fx skills were able to be auto-cast. 

I don't know how exactly Scourge is "braindead" to play or lacking in depth, at least compared to almost everything else out there these days. 

It's vital to finish it's AA, you got shade placement, you got LF management, you got condition management and transference timing

What transference timing? You press bip and f5 together. Lf management? Most fights shower you in lf. Even ren spirits generate lf.

Also shade placement is whatever. Either the player or a shade has to be on boss. If you are melee you can throw them wherever you want. F3 and F2 will hit less allies but thats a small price for not requiring a screen.

59 minutes ago, Asum.4960 said:

 

, ICD management and 10+ buttons to rotate, in an age where specs like Vindicator can break almost 38k by just pressing 4-6 buttons on CD

You count to 1 after pressing an f skill. There are no "10 buttons to rotate". You press all the skills not on cd. I tried it once on golem and was 400 dps off benchmark. I am nowhere near vindi bench. it has aftercast cancels and requires a bug interaction for good dps. Vindicator is a terrible terrible spec. Held together by 1 bug.

59 minutes ago, Asum.4960 said:

 

and Dodging without any other worry - and later statements of yours like Sand Cascade being part of the DPS rota for constant Barrier spam implies that your only experience with the spec is watching the first few seconds of a Scourge Benchmark - before LF gets too tight to generally keep doing so, even when you can run Shadow Fiend. 

As soon as you fight stuff with adds or have rens in the group lf stops being an issue and real dps would be slightly higher than bench.

 

I disagree. Scourge meta was far worse than mech meta. Everyone was barrier capped, all adds died to shades or epi and to top it off it was rewarded with 100% exposed in fractals.

Why is nobody here on kp.me? Very suspicious. Impossible to pug in eu without and lets just ignore what happens in na.

[Asum.4960]

30 minutes ago, Nephalem.8921 said:

What transference timing? You press bip and f5 together. Lf management? Most fights shower you in lf. Even ren spirits generate lf.

Also shade placement is whatever. Either the player or a shade has to be on boss. If you are melee you can throw them wherever you want. F3 and F2 will hit less allies but thats a small price for not requiring a screen.

You count to 1 after pressing an f skill. There are no "10 buttons to rotate". You press all the skills not on cd. I tried it once on golem and was 400 dps off benchmark. I am nowhere near vindi bench. it has aftercast cancels and requires a bug interaction for good dps. Vindicator is a terrible terrible spec. Held together by 1 bug.

As soon as you fight stuff with adds or have rens in the group lf stops being an issue and real dps would be slightly higher than bench.

 

I disagree. Scourge meta was far worse than mech meta. Everyone was barrier capped, all adds died to shades or epi and to top it off it was rewarded with 100% exposed in fractals.

 

Point being, it has depth - and if you employ that same energy to discount it on other specs, neither do they. 

Both Barrier application as well as Epi have long since been nerfed. 

And my personal benching experience, as well as training others in various specs, left me with very different impression. 

But I'm not sure what the point of the argument is, so whatever.

 

Quote

Why is nobody here on kp.me? Very suspicious. Impossible to pug in eu without

I got Fractal God, Envoys Herald and stacks of old LI, LD, Cosmic Essence as well as KP to link, and I'm pugging just fine without third party website, thank you very much.

[Drarnor Kunoram.5180]

4 hours ago, teeth.3501 said:

It's a very unproductive stance. I don't want others to get worse, high average DPS contributes a lot to the current state of things where we have more diversity than ever. It's easier to argue for us to get on that level than it is for everyone else to be brought down.

When DPS gets as high as it is, encounter design breaks.  There's a very good reason to lower everyone else's DPS to make the gameplay more engaging.

[teeth.3501]

On 2/23/2023 at 2:43 AM, Drarnor Kunoram.5180 said:

When DPS gets as high as it is, encounter design breaks.  There's a very good reason to lower everyone else's DPS to make the gameplay more engaging.

When vast majority of your players can't even be expected to output half of normal damage output the build is capable of, this approach creates accessibility for newer players/ more modern audiences (?) / the dreaded C-words. It is in my understanding that that's the exact reasoning behind this being the new baseline - they want you to do okay damage even if you don't know what you're ultimately doing, still capable of clearing content on barely more than autoattacking. I personally don't see this as a "bad" thing, it's more of a choice between two evils that both have nuances consequences. 

It they really wanted to give these 40k+ dps builds a place to start putting these eggs into a basket, all they need to do is crank up HP on bosses for CM modes (as indeed they kind of do), and rather than throw countless DPS-reducing mechanics at you focus on DPS checks or such. Wishful thinking on my part, of course; they have way too many ways to go about it, and seemingly none of the interest besides what I mentioned above.

Back to the original topic, any DPS build not being on 38-40k range right now is just suboptimal and you should be playing a DPS support with exactly similar numbers, while also filling a boon role for your group. In squads/parties where "anything goes" it's a non-issue, of course, but then again - nothing really matters in those anyway. 

Another point I want to raise is, what is actually being so horrendously broken besides Gorseval? I guess you can sometimes hope to skip a phase or some mechanics if your squad total dps is doing okay, but I don't think it's all that hazardous. Honestly, compared to other games where this can become a thing, I'd say GW2's raids held up pretty well. Don't even have to go that far to see an example to the contrary - Dungeons are as screwed as they can be, and they will be screwed still even with the "make everything 30k" as a baseline, lol. 

[Nephalem.8921]

15 minutes ago, teeth.3501 said:

Another point I want to raise is, what is actually being so horrendously broken besides Gorseval? I guess you can sometimes hope to skip a phase or some mechanics if your squad total dps is doing okay, but I don't think it's all that hazardous. Honestly, compared to other games where this can become a thing, I'd say GW2's raids held up pretty well. Don't even have to go that far to see an example to the contrary - Dungeons are as screwed as they can be, and they will be screwed still even with the "make everything 30k" as a baseline, lol. 

Examples:

You ignore Adina pillars
No need to do sabir wisps even in cm
Dhuum phases after one port which trivializes the fight a lot. No need to deal with spiders if you phase that fast.
Largos cm dps check turned into a joke.
Xera complete cheese. You kill her in one place without moving. just as bad as gorseval.
Cairn and mo were always way worse than gorse with high dps

Fractal cm bosses like arkk cant use their mechanics because they die stunned. Fractal bosses except 100 are balanced for like 15k dps per player.

[Drarnor Kunoram.5180]

1 hour ago, Nephalem.8921 said:

Examples:

You ignore Adina pillars
No need to do sabir wisps even in cm
Dhuum phases after one port which trivializes the fight a lot. No need to deal with spiders if you phase that fast.
Largos cm dps check turned into a joke.
Xera complete cheese. You kill her in one place without moving. just as bad as gorseval.
Cairn and mo were always way worse than gorse with high dps

Fractal cm bosses like arkk cant use their mechanics because they die stunned. Fractal bosses except 100 are balanced for like 15k dps per player.

Hell, I've even seen mechanics get skipped entirely on Sunquaa Peak 100.  Ever seen the boss die without the storm or water twister phase?  I have!

[Nephalem.8921]

1 hour ago, Drarnor Kunoram.5180 said:

Hell, I've even seen mechanics get skipped entirely on Sunquaa Peak 100.  Ever seen the boss die without the storm or water twister phase?  I have!

Yep you can skip cc adds entirely too. At least the boss is not permastunned like skorvald.

[Asum.4960]

On 3/1/2023 at 4:57 AM, teeth.3501 said:

When vast majority of your players can't even be expected to output half of normal damage output the build is capable of, this approach creates accessibility for newer players/ more modern audiences (?) / the dreaded C-words. It is in my understanding that that's the exact reasoning behind this being the new baseline - they want you to do okay damage even if you don't know what you're ultimately doing, still capable of clearing content on barely more than autoattacking. I personally don't see this as a "bad" thing, it's more of a choice between two evils that both have nuances consequences.

If that's the goal then they need to find ways to powercreep the skill floor, without touching the skill ceiling as much as possible. 

What they are doing right now won't fix this problem, as what you describe has already been fixed since years - everything in GW2, down to even Raids, Fractals and Strikes, can already be cleared by Auto Attacking with builds made for that purpose. The content barely could be more accessible in terms of skill floor.

 

The major problem with underperformance of players in GW2 though is that there is a vast amount of players running genuinely completely non-sensical builds - and I've seen everything in that regard through helping players, from them running Cooldown Reduction Traits for Utilities they didn't run any of, running basically full Support or selfish sustain Traits while joining as DPS, using the completely wrong stat sets or random mixes for what their build tries to accomplish, etc. 

Just yesterday I had a "Power DPS DH" in my Strike group, performing well below average. It's easy to think that they just didn't play the build well/that there was a skill issue, but after some inquiry it turns out they were running Valor (Focus Mastery, without Focus and Protection being redundant because of Supports, Strength in Numbers, redundant, and Monk's Focus, without Meditations besides Litany, and.. redundant). Non of which is even remotely worth giving up Zeal or Radiance for as pDPS, losing them a massive amount of DPS for zero benefit. 

It doesn't matter how much Anet Powercreeps DH in that example, that player will still pull comparatively bad DPS - and they were at least running the right weapons and stat set for a Power DPS - even that is far from a given, so it wasn't even that bad.

 

Anet can't powercreep the game enough to make non-sensical, bad builds clear even the hardest content in the game just fine, without genuinely breaking the game at a mid to high level with fit for purpose builds.

 

Especially for the players who think it's "Elitism" or players trying to "force the meta on to them", getting defensive and hostile when they get some even friendly pointers by other players trying to explain to them that their build doesn't accomplish or contribute anything of value to the group/doesn't do the job they explicitly joined to do, nothing much will change with this kind of powercreep - they aren't utilizing the correct tools which Anet is Powercreeping to begin with, and won't change for anything or anybody. 

 

This isn't even predominantly a skill issue, but one of (lacking) knowledge and understanding of the game.

 

Soilder's, Staff, Honor, Valor, Firebrand is still going to be bad DPS, even if Anet creeps FB to 60k DPS when built and played correctly for that purpose.

Edited March 4 by Asum.4960

[Nephalem.8921]

J

This is perfectly fine. Just a couple more 1% buffs and reaper can compete with supports.