KrHome.1920

Necro at the second place because 5 necros can comfortably rip and corrupt every single boon on the opposing team right after it is applied. This is a ton of active defense. First place goes to engineer as 5 of these are immune to the necro corrupt spam and will outsustain the necros in the attrition fight. 5 perfectly rotating thieves might ruin the day for all the other classes, but I wouldn't call this a fight then but more a dumb race for capture points. The "different builds" part of the OP needs clarification. It is impossible to create 5 completely different builds (not a single shared skill and trait) without at least 2 being complete trash for each class. For some classes you even run out of weapons for 5 different builds.

Epidemic became a problem when the 25 stack limit for conditions got removed and people started stacking viper builds. That's why I called it exploit. It was an exploit of the mechanical changes to condi application, because it multiplied the intended damage increase to absurd levels. Even uncoordinated it was way too strong in every game mode, just because there did not exist a damage limit anymore. It originally was designed with the 25 stack limit in mind.

True... epidemic... that skill was more an exploit than a mechanic, so it was a deserved nerf. And we could say the same about the lich minion skill - just to a lesser extent, as it wasn't as braindead as epidemic.

Well I am a bit lost in this discussion as the only team based pve I do is some fractals every few months for the legendary I work on at this time. I have never had any issues joining a group but of course I notice the "lf xyz - no necros!" lfg posts too from time to time. Do I care? No, not really. To me it makes no sense to try to teach people in a videogame, that they might learn something, when they are so kind to let me join their group. These people just don't exist for me. They are simply not there. And if only such people are left someday, the game is dead to me and I play something else. **@topic:** > and yet anet always hits us with the nerf bat. Actually necro has constantly been buffed in pve from 2012 up till now. I can't remember one single nerf in this game mode. In 2012 core necro dealt even less damage than now and was only single target. Let that sink in! When reaper was added it dealt 33% less damage in shroud than today (you lost dps, when you stayed in shroud for longer than soul spiral). Axe and GS have seen huge damage buffs. Various necro traits got significant direct damage multipliers. All these changes catapulted reaper from 23k dps to 34k. That's a dps increase of almost 50%! Scourge is basically the same since pof release in pve (except its shade stacking bug that got fixed) while in the other 2 game modes it saw extreme nerfs.

Quick tested it: yes it's buggy and uses the 0.1 pvp/wvw modifier in pve as well, while it should use a 0.2 modifier in pve. That's why you see your healing over time numbers cut in half. The tooltip for the initial healing seems also to be wrong (but this needs further verification). Feel free to write a bug report in the bug subforum - I don't feel like it as I am on a break from the game atm.

> @"Dadnir.5038" said: > > @"Shroud.2307" said: > > Why are you joining parties that are specifically asking that you don't? > > > > You're not teaching anyone anything by disrespecting their requests. It's ignorant and borderline griefing. Start your own party and tell people you'll teach them how good Necro can be. I'll bet it'll be real popular. > > Obviously, it's always a matter of point of view but where does the disrespect start? When someone enter a group that look for a different profession or when a group refuse a profession based on prejudice? From my point of view it's disrespect only to narrowminded people, for broadminded people it's an opportunity to learn that there is more than what the rigid meta let you see. Experienced players can teach and can be taught, this is how you make progress. Refusing to teach or to be taught is how you end up roting. Unfortunately this point of view fails in face of reality, so why even trying? It's just a waste of time. Narrowminded people will always look for simple answers and copypasting metabuilds is a simple answer. Just leave these people alone - in videogames and in reality.

> @"CutesySylveon.8290" said: > There's already a giant glowy effect when it's cast that gives ot away. What more do you need? Another 1/4s cast time. He mentioned it.

Before anets fixes underwater balancing issues (and there are plenty), they should fix a lot of other stuff first ... for example the 300s cooldown traits.

I didn't read the whole wall of text. Anyway, a 1 second cooldown would break necro, as it would remove its vulnerability phase and the only fix would be to drastically reduce life force generation. Without a shroud cooldown life force would basically be health as you have access to it at any time and life force generation would basically be healing (even better than that as shroud reduces damage by 50%).

Thieves have 100% evasion uptime underwater while doing damage at the same time. Basically a broken version of unrelenting assault. So unless you are a teef: Be careful what you ask for.

> The warrior i fought 1v1 is in the Panglos Camp and we are dueling alone, then when he is about to die he stealth and i saw him on the bridge. and no i didn't lag. he vanished again came back to me like a thief. and no we dont have anyone with us. Snow Leopard (norn race elite skill) can apply stealth to any class and is extremely mobile.

Guild Wars is build wars. There is no best player as long as we don't have months of data of mirrored matches (all players play the same build at equal conditions). Additionally to that: people do often confuse "player, who produces a lot of cherrypicked video content" with skill. Both things have nothing to do with each other.

If you can get a 3060Ti for the recommended price of 399 dollars, then buy it. The card is as fast as a 2080 Super. And in general it makes no sense to buy hardware for the future. Buy when you need it! The value loss of PC components is quite high. E.g. if you need only a midrange GPU, then buy only a midrange GPU and another midrange GPU in 3 years. That's cheaper than buying a high end GPU, which you do not need, today to get the same performance as with the midrange GPU in 3 years. Buy only high end if you need high end today. Otherwise you will pay more than necessary.

> @"Arheundel.6451" said: > on necro I can pretty much run any stat and elite I like and it feels amazing , everything from core to scourge works and it's viable in all gamemodes! Scourge does not work in PvP for the same reasons ele does not work: the lack of a fitting amulet. In WvW both can work extremely good as fitting attribute combinations exist (trailblazer, celestial with 7 x 633 attribute points and a lot of viable mixed attribute options).

The damage is far from being bad after the nerf. It's a good example for what "more in line with others" stands for. The build is still a viable "dps with a bit of utility" pick.

No discussion needed. They reverted the former buff, which turned out to be overpowered and the skill now works again like originally intended.

Why do thieves think the mark/detected mechanic exists just to hassle them? It's a counter to any stealth abusing group of players in enemy territory. The game is full of party stealth sources and this mechanic is its counter. Instead of defending their broken shadow arts traitline thieves could focus on asking for buffs of acrobatics. And bringing that up because infiltrator's arrow costs 2 more initiative than before is ridiculous. Infiltrator's arrow was never meant to be a disengage tool that can be used 3 times in a row to cover 2700 range. And I do also doubt that is was some basis for thief balancing in the past.

> I don't know if someone uses it in PvP or WvW =) Take a look into the pvp forum and you will see that it's one of the main targets for core necro nerf demands. There will always be traits that fit more into one game mode than into another. And esp. for pve your best pick is usually the one that grants you the most damage. Variety in pve comes less from different buffs, debuffs or control effects but more from your class and weapon choice. The rest is just damage. We could say in pve you are experiencing just half of what the game offers mechanically because the other half is not needed (and looks to be useless to a pve player) when fighting dumb npcs.

> @"UNOwen.7132" said: > But thats the thing. Grenade Kit wasnt broken. Holo was. They didnt nerf Holo. They nerfed Grenade Kit. Nade engineer, scrapper and holo were too strong. You faced the wrong players if you didn't notice that.

> @"NorthernRedStar.3054" said: > Sb is a very expensive weapon but still 1 of the best utility weapon out there. Shortbow is not a utility weapon. Create a CS, Tr, X marauder thief and look at the shortbow damage numbers! You will be surprised. > Yeah, 'cept now when the guy other guy blinks after you (assuming they have a port / blink), you're dead 9 out of 10 times. No initiative left. You are using shortbow wrong. Your deception skills fulfill the purpose you are looking for. When I read such comments I think this nerf is a good opportunity for some thieves to start to learn their class and stop relying on absurd mobility to gain unlimited disengages.

> @"Dawdler.8521" said: > > @"Doug.4930" said: > > I can only imagine the tactics that talented commanders/drivers could implement if the limit was not in place. > I can. > > Stack 50 people. Stealth. Push and kill everything you roll over in a sea of AoE. > > Would that be much difference from zerging today? Whether 10 people could roll over 40+ given skill differences is irrelevant. If 10 can do it, 20 does it better. If 20 can do it, 40 does it better. Meta strategy would be multiple groups or at least a frontline that is more separated from the backline. This would greatly increase the skill cap in the game mode. 50 players at one spot blobbing would be an automatic loss to a more organized group and so numbers would matter less. Clouding a blob would be more effective. Everything would be better as long as you are not a player that needs to be carried by a low skill cap for your targets. Of course heal and boon application should not be unlimited as this would indeed annihilate the target uncap and everything would stay as it is but with much higher compute demands and a lot more visual clutter.

Couldn't disagree more. The patch was spot on except that they ignored purity of purpose and p/d condi thief in wvw. But condi nerfs in wvw are always something that could be discussed endlessly as sigil of cleansing is extremely strong there. So it's basically only purity of purpose. Power guardian was ridiculous. Staff is a support weapon and outdamaged other damage dealers on top of the support. Imagine necro marks would deal 5 to 10k damage. Regarding necro changes: Even as a necro player I can accept the fact that well of darkness was doing too much at once and needed its damage shaved to become reduced to what it is meant to be: a utility well. That said: Sustain is generally a problem in wvw - class wide. Nothing you could fix with a "normal" balance patch. We are at a point where every class can build for unkillability in smallscale.

The 5 player limit has only technical reasons. - The server infrastructure would explode if everyone could target everyone as the calculation demands would go through the roof. - The client side CPU demands would even be higher than they are now. I would not be surprised if several people at anet would actually like to see the limit removed as this would also remove to blob meta and force people to develop new strategies.

Infiltrator's Arrow spam got a 2 second nerf. Super "significant"! The skill was never meant to be a fast travel utility, but a reposition utility for the shortbow or what do you think why there is a blind on it? Since no thief actually cared for that purpose and everyone is just using the skill exclusively for traveling (that's an euphemism for resetting btw.) for 8 years now, it was time to reduce its impact a bit.

Assuming both wells needed a nerf, then this was the right way to do it, because they are mainly utility wells (blind + chill and corrupt + life force generation) and reducing the damage is way better than increasing the cooldown regarding that purpose. That high damage on well of darkness was pretty sure originated in increasing reaper's damage output (both power and condi) in pve, while the skill became bloated in a problematic way in the competitive modes. Not surprised about the nerf, to be honest. And I am happy they did it this way.