Bovan.9481

A selfish power DPS spec that doesn't rely on sharing party buffs, but _viable_ this time!

The **bump** below me is a lie.

Just to chime in my idea on how to handle all the extra insights and divinations we have. We currently have a god of fractal, PvP and WvW title but raids seem to be missing. I would happy to have a system that allows us to buy a ''God/Godess of Raiding'' title for 1000 insights and divinations. I'm a bit worried about adding more cost like magnetite shards and gaeting crystals to them simply because most people spend them on infusions and such, and I can see people getting upset who made tons of extra legendary armors. But I still think this could do the trick.

After that I'd be happy to have a sink for them like trophy shipments.

This is an irregular **bUmp**.

This is a regular **bump**.

And we are all back on track! We shall now continue with our series of regular **bump**s~

> @"Stavros.8249" said:

> and notice that the havoc one have the half uptime for vault cause its out of endurance. So the benchmark is with 5% increase from vault instead of 10%. The conclusion is a diference like 4% .

Yeah, no. Your line of thinking is a little bit off there and there are two different factors at play.

The act of spending time dodging is a short term DPS loss, but the buff from Bounding Dodger makes it come slightly ahead. It's not a ''free'' 10% damage buff, you lose damage, and then recuperate that loss and gain a little more afterwards.

The other one is is you only have so much initiative to spend on high damage attacks, and you auto-attack in between. The higher uptime you get on the Bounding Dodger buff with Staff Master will mostly be spend on more auto-attacks which makes it not have as much value compared to when you would do some high damage/DPS Weakening Charges. Study LEFT's benchmark very closely and you can see that all his initiative is spend extremely efficiently.

These are two things I felt I had to point out. Havoc Mastery is simply miles stronger in terms of the bonuses you get from it, and Staff Master's endurance and the higher Bounding Dodger uptimes simply don't really get close to it. In all honesty I forgot the exact numbers but from memory, Havoc Mastery was around 11% ahead in terms of DPS. Don't quote me on that number though because it's been months since I last looked at Staff Master. I just know it's so far behind that I simply never considered it for anything but soloing dungeons and some open world champions.

EDIT:

Okay something else I just thought of. I went over the exact video you linked and pulled together some numbers. You start with 12 initiative, and you gain 1 initiative per second. The benchmark took 1 minute and 53 seconds. Even if I ignore that you start with full endurance and literally convert every point of initiative into endurance you only end up with 250 total endurance, or 5 extra dodges which translates into 20 additional seconds of Bounding Dodger. Even taking things _that_ literally you only gain 17.69% more uptime on the Bounding Dodger buff. The endurance just isn't that big of a deal.

> @"Mor The Thief.9135" said:

> In my case I actually prefer Staff Mastery over Havoc because then having Endurance is not an issue and therefore can take the Physical Skills trait for more Fist Flurry

You can play whatever you like of course, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. But I do want to point out that taking the trait makes Fist Flurry not line up perfectly with Assassin's Signet anymore. You get more Fist Flurry casts in, but a bunch of them will do less damage compared to if you wouldn't have taken the trait.

> @"Shiyo.3578" said:

> Cool, thanks for taking the time to prove me wrong. Nice to know swords not THAT bad.

>

> I said suggested over staff because people bring up using staff and only autoing for new players or players who want an easy build.

>

> Now if they could make pistol whip, lac strike and tactical strike being worth using over autoing so sword could do 33-35k dps.

>

> ...They are a dps loss over autoing, right?

Fingers crossed we get a new elite spec with a strong sword/X dual skill. That's my hope and dream anyway, I want to use sword as well.

I don't know about Flanking and Larcenous Strike but spamming Pistol Whip perfectly in between auto-chains was definitely a DPS loss. From memory around 1.5k less? Maybe as Daredevil it's worth doing a rotation based on dodging and using Pistol Whip in certain windows or moments, but I didn't really look into that.

I never finished the benchmark but I think a ''proper'' Daredevil rotation with sword mainhand was around 28.5k DPS. I used some Pistol Whips to test it out so I'm not sure what numbers it produces if you do it right. I'm not against bringing sword up just a little bit. It would be nice to do 32k orso.

> @"Shiyo.3578" said:

> I highly doubt sword is 21k DPS autoing, **or it'd be suggested over staff**.

...what? That has absolutely nothing to do with it. You have more buttons to press instead of just starting your auto-attacks and then going afk. Weakening Charge in particular is what makes staff such a good weapon, not the autos. I actually checked this earlier in-game but I forgot the results. But I'm fairly sure sword was stronger by just auto-attacking compared to staff.

On that note, normal benchmark buffs sword auto-attacking. Enjoy~

You could have just logged in and tried this yourself.

> @"Shiyo.3578" said:

> Why the refusal to buff sword in PvE? You could double it's auto chain, stealth attack, and dual skills damage and it'd still be subpar but at least usable.

Tested this in the training facility just now. If you double the damage on sword's auto-attacks it will deal something like 42k DPS while just auto-attacking. Surely this isn't something we want to do. God forbid actually doing a rotation with it, you will end up with numbers along the lines of 50k+ DPS.

Sword is fine. The utility crammed into the weapon is good enough to make it not be one of our strongest DPS weapons. It's really not as weak as you make it out to be.

> @"BobbyT.7192" said:

> Wasn't expecting much really. I doubt the buffed skill will effect anything.

> Also not surprised that thieves get a small patch either, I should be, just no energy for it anymore.

They couldn't fit in the full notes for everything immediately. Thief in particular is said to get a lot more then we see in the notes.

I'm personally hopefull that condi Thief will be something worth considering for PvE now. In the same veins it would be nice if condi Thief in PvP could simply be a functional build instead of the abomination it seems to be every so often. Fingers crossed for the previous Assassin's Signet ''fix'' to be baked in baseline as well.

Little bit of a serious **bump** this time. Due to our schedule and the influx of applications we might need a little time to get back to you if you were to apply. We'll send you a message shortly after you apply, but we have some trials to go over before we get to focus our attention elsewhere. There might be a little delay on any new applications currently.

Help! I'm being held hostage in a **bump**ing factory!

Getting here today was a real **bump** and grind.

Ah nice, I **bump**ed into this topic again.

> @"rbbthole.9074" said:

> I still need to understand what kind of fix was done with assassin signet.

The old functionality of the signet was that it increased the damage of your next 5 attacks by 15% when activated and nothing else. At some point, they changed it so it no longer did that and instead it increased your power by 540 for 5 seconds instead instead. They never removed the old functionality and you gained the +15% damage for your next 5 hits with it.

It's now been fixed and just gives you the power.

This is great and I'm happy for it, but is there some sort of compensation for the people who crafted multiple sets of the same legendary armor or weapons so they wouldn't have to swap gear around on their account?

From Early Modern English **bump** (“a shock, blow from a collision", also "to make a heavy, hollow sound, boom”), probably of North Germanic origin. Compare Danish bump (“a thump”), Danish bumpe (“to thump”), Old Danish bumpe (“to strike with a clenched fist”).

I'll start off by saying that I like both your suggestions regarding Ferocious Strikes and Revealed Training. But beyond that I don't think Thief should be buffed to match the other classes, but other classes should be brought down. I'm not usually throwing the power creep statement around but I think it's really gotten out of control this time. When we are working on optimising phases which take 16-19 seconds in a raid I feel we've hit the point of it gone too far.

Bump.

That's it, just a bump.

> @"Irenio CalmonHuang.2048" said:

> Regarding FMW changes - we're going to see how things land after this set of changes and adjust further, if needed. We're not trying to take FMW out entirely - it should still be a decent source of group quickness, but it shouldn't be leading to stuff as dominant as it currently is.

> With some of the other changes coming in this patch, including a bugfix to Zealous Blades still granting 10% damage when it wasn't supposed to, there are enough moving pieces that we don't want to do so large a takedown that something becomes unused entirely.

Okay that's fair enough. I'm sure the skill getting nerfed into nothingness is something absolutely no one wants to see, so I'm happy to wait it out and see where it ends up. The combination of the Zealous Blades bug getting fixed alongside a reduction in ''Feel My Wrath!'' were my two biggest concerns and worries for this patch so it's good to see things getting adressed.

What does worry me is the speed of updates. Of course it takes time for changes to settle in, but if the ''Feel My Wrath!'' change doesn't end up making enough of a difference can we expect to see an update in a shorter amount of time compared to how long it's normally taken for big patches to hit the live servers? I am concerned that we may not see another update in several months even if it did not work out.

Also this will be a little bit off-topic but as I'm writing things anyway, is there any kind of internal talk or discussion going on regarding Necromancer in PvE? I'm aware it has a healthy playerbase in open world but it's a little bit sad to see how far it's behind on a lot of bosses and places in raids. This goes for both condi Scourge as well as power Reaper. I have about a thousand different questions regarding most classes and builds but Necromancer is probably up there as something I'm the most interested in, and seeing it not getting anything relevant for high-end PvE made my heart sink just a little bit.

I'm sure I can speak for the majority of the high-end PvE community that the ''Feel My Wrath!'' change is very welcome and I'm very happy to see it's seeing some adjustments. But looking at some quick math and numbers I feel the nerf isn't severe enough. We're looking at only a 4.37% lower uptime on quickness (with alacrity not counting the casttime) from it after the changes (going from 22.22% to 17.85% with alacrity) and while it's good to have it less frontloaded and being able to stack it with temporary boon durations and such, it feels to me it's not quite enough to make an impact.

I do not want to see the skill nerfed into the ground, nor do I want any kind of Guardian to fade away from raids once again, but as long as Guardian can provide a chunk of quickness with little to no loss it will still have an edge over any other class that is not able to provide the same. Another alternative to the Guardian stacking meta is simply lowering the class' damage and giving them a DPS-based elite. This way you would either decide between providing quickness or doing better damage.

I would highly encourage doing a second pass over ''Feel My Wrath!'' and see if it can be nudged just a little further. It's getting there and it's definitely a step in the right direction, but from my perspective it's just not quite there yet. Make Guardians invest into _some_ boon duration if they want to keep up quickness.

There is a carnival near my place. I love riding the **bump**er carts!

> @"Ben Phongluangtham.1065" said:

> > @"otto.5684" said:

> > > @"Ben Phongluangtham.1065" said:

> > > It's going to be somewhat chaotic for a while. And I'm sure there will be overlooked things or unintentional problems. The number of changes is so large that all possible interactions are impossible to predict. Our goal is to be able to respond relatively quickly to issues that come up. And there will probably need to be a decent size follow-up release to continue to refine. Balance is a long term commitment, not a one release solution.

> >

> > Dunno man. You guys are hyping this thing, but did not give us any info to indicate how is this patch any big. This rarely ends up well.

>

> Cmc mentioned on the WvW stream today. 800-900 objects have been changed so far. Just with the splits.

I know this is the PvP forum, and I know you're mostly tasked with competitive balance. But do you have any idea how many and if any changes are aimed at PvE in this patch? The hardcore PvE scene is starting to really grind on people's nerves with the little changes going on lately along with the current meta being extremely stale and uninteresting in terms of class diversity. The quickness issue specifically has gotten way out of hand.

Let's **bump** up the volume!