PVE: Is the "glass cannon" declining/going to diminish in popularity?

[Elva.6372]

> @"AliamRationem.5172" said:

> I'm not saying you can't do well with a tanky build these days, but I certainly don't see the game favoring tanky stats in PvE at all. If anything, the DPS meta is stronger than ever.

 

And that's the crux of the discussion, I see some big changes overall since game release, starting in HoT and further refined in PoF in addition to the armors that incorporate healing, power, condition damage and precision all at once.

 

Just seems the Devs are "devving" us in a different direction from the core game and I think stat focus will have change accordingly -which I think you would agree somewhat with that point.

[CptAurellian.9537]

> @"Elva.6372" said:

> > @"AliamRationem.5172" said:

> > I'm not saying you can't do well with a tanky build these days, but I certainly don't see the game favoring tanky stats in PvE at all. If anything, the DPS meta is stronger than ever.

>

> And that's the crux of the discussion, I see some big changes overall since game release, starting in HoT and further refined in PoF in addition to the armors that incorporate healing, power, condition damage and precision all at once.

>

> Just seems the Devs are "devving" us in a different direction from the core game and I think stat focus will have change accordingly -which I think you would agree somewhat with that point.

 

Nope, the devs are just throwing around random stat combos, as they have done for most of the time since beta. Sometimes something useful emerges, most of the time it's junk. Stuff like Marshal gear will always be useless due to the way stats reinforce each other.

[Skyavell.9573]

@"Elva.6372" open world PVE: don't matter what build you use or what gear you wear, you can survive easily on a full glass berserker (power) or viper (condi) if you know your class and play it well while dealing good damage to down open world mobs faster, at the same time you can use tanky af builds with tanky traits and skills and high toughness high vitality gear and still get rekt because you don't dodge/evade/block attacks and since your dps will sck it will take longer to down mobs especially champs and legendary bosses.

 

T4 fractal/raids: glass cannon dps is still king, healers like Druid and tanks like chrono have been a thing since raids came out, nothing new.

 

Pvp/wvw: glass cannon builds are still used here though obviously more survival in terms of builds than PVE since npcs are way easier to kill. Nonetheless many builds still use full berserker/viper gear.

 

So NO, full glass is not dead or dying it's still king, just need to get better at it.

[Khisanth.2948]

Why would that change when the reasons for it existing isn't going away?

 

> @"Elva.6372" said:

> > @"AliamRationem.5172" said:

> > I'm not saying you can't do well with a tanky build these days, but I certainly don't see the game favoring tanky stats in PvE at all. If anything, the DPS meta is stronger than ever.

>

> And that's the crux of the discussion, I see some big changes overall since game release, starting in HoT and further refined in PoF in addition to the armors that incorporate healing, power, condition damage and precision all at once.

>

> Just seems the Devs are "devving" us in a different direction from the core game and I think stat focus will have change accordingly -which I think you would agree somewhat with that point.

 

The game has always had stat combinations that included defensive stats. Nomad's also came before HoT and that has nothing but defensive stats.

[Astralporing.1957]

> @"Elva.6372" said:

> But I still often see the Berserker Gear being thrown about as the one size fits all solution in many of the Profession topics. I personally haven't felt that it works particularly well in the newer content areas of the game because the mobs are more punishing - I think this started in the Silverwastes and continued on from there.

You hear it because it (and its condition equivalent: viper) still _is_ the ultimate solution. Go with more tanky builds, and you will soon find that you sacrifice way too much dps for not enough survivability. Damage simply gives a better return per investment amount. And when you find that in your group people die too fast, just replace one of the dps players with a healer. It will have a better effect than going hybrid on everyone (half-baked solutions usually don't work as well as you might think).

 

The only reason you might want to go into defensive stats on a character meant for damage role, is if you happened to max your critical chance already and don't need any more precision. And that's only because there's no power/ferocity/condi damage gear.

 

By the way, HoT was the point when i stopped playing my bunker guardian. I just wasn't able to kill things fast enough, and my survivability didn't really help me out there. I might have lived far longer than on glass cannon, but by the time i killed one mob, two or three others more appeared.

[Felipe.1807]

> @"CptAurellian.9537" said:

> > @"Felipe.1807" said:

> > Oh yeah, the Zerker Meta...is dead a long time ago...the funny part is that people asked for this changes so other kinds of builds could have a place on the Meta(anything on Dungeons was viable, people in full clerics could just auto attack and dont even hit the dodge key and be able to clear Arah, and that was the "hardcore" dungeon at the time) and yet, with Raids you can easily say that people are 100% more etilist then they used to be...we went from "Play how you want" to some old boring more Trinity MMO, which is basically the antithesis of what GW2 should be.

> Oh right, the was no elitism at all during the "10k+ AP" times ... oh, wait.

>

> Actually, nothing has changed at all.

 

Nah there was a lot of "everyone welcome" kind of dungeons lol dont even try to compare it, the game have changed way to much, the "10K AP War and Ele only" was a community thing, from experience those were like 20% or less of what you would find on LFG...Anet pushed to us this more trinity kind of game, just adding a bunch mechanics to force to have "x" kind of profession and build in your group and add some kind of artificial challange...i dont mind Raids at all, is just that GW2 was supposed be the game that "people who hated MMOs would love" and yet here we are, its okay to change things a little bit, but this is a complete 180º.

[Obtena.7952]

I don't see it diminishing because the Zerker meta (and it's condi equivalent) have always been the pinnacle of optimized builds; the only question is if you can rock those builds for the content you're doing. It really depends on the player. Once I learned the NPC's 'tricks', it got much easier to move closer, and in some cases, back to the zerker builds. The real changes are the choice of traits and skills ... choosing Damage ones were the dead obvious choices in Vanilla GW2. I can still take a high DPS zerker build in most content, but I will switch up a few skills and a trait if I must.

[starlinvf.1358]

> @"Mea.5491" said:

> > @"SunTzu.4513" said:

> > Imo the main problem is stacking defstats isn't really effective. Sure you maybe will survive a few more hits but often you died nevertheless because you don't get the mobs downed fast enough.

>

> Sorry but I disagree. I play Celestial Firebrand, Ele and Engi. I use every core stat. I managed to solo the whole story without deaths on all 3 of them. I don't know what you mean by "fast enough" but the speed feels perfectly fine while my HP rarely gets under 50%. Also, when 10-20 people get downed in Palawadan during the toilet flush attack and I get hit too (because I'm stuck at the wall, happens a lot), I still survive with 20-25% HP. :) So according to my experience, having defensive stats is not a bad thing at all.

 

To be fair, the story instances are a cake walk by design- with nearly every complaint about "difficulty" being a lack of clarity on how the fight mechanics works. The problem is how people largely still fail to understand the dynamics of the game's active defenses, combined with most other games expecting you to "tank" a problem via their class designs.

Glass cannons thrived in this game because of basic mathematics. Dodging negates damage, and killing an enemy wholesale negates its DPS. Since dodging and defenses are a very limited resource, fights becoming increasingly dangerous the more drawn out they are. Coupled with the fact that a late development shift toward less dynamic enemy behavior forced all of the game's difficulty into a front loaded damage strategy. This diminished the effectiveness of Defensive stats, but still forced a trade off in player damage, and increasing time to kill. With the thresholds now very clearly defined, losing half your DPS to survive 1 to 2 more hits across an entire fight was an untenable trade for players. Since the enemys had potato behavior, and damage sponge defenses, the only logical strategy was to overwhelm them with DPS. And to no one's surprise, this was just way more effective. Dive in and unload as much damage as possible, then kite until your burst combo skills are off cool down.

 

There are is a huge list of ways they could had changed this dynamic, both in the encounter designs, and the combat dynamics...... but they didn't happen.

 

 

[Sojourner.4621]

> @"Elva.6372" said:

> > @"ReaverKane.7598" said:

> > If by "Glass Cannon" you mean the pure Zerker DPS meta, it already has, like almost 3 years ago.

> > If you mean pure DPS builds, that's a different story. DPS builds will always be relevant, and glass cannon builds will always be useful. But since raids came on the game 2 years ago, pure DPS comps have stopped being the meta, and now even Fractals use a more balanced approach with a mix of support and DPS builds.

>

> Yeah, I came back to GW2 after some years away, starting over on a new account.

>

> But I still often see the Berserker Gear being thrown about as the one size fits all solution in many of the Profession topics. I personally haven't felt that it works particularly well in the newer content areas of the game because the mobs are more punishing - I think this started in the Silverwastes and continued on from there.

 

It's complicated because now "PvE" comprises three very different game modes. In open world you really can run whatever you want and whatever you are good at. If you have trouble running full glass, try Marauder instead, or maybe Carrion if you prefer Condi. You'll still want a "damage" spec most of the time for open world because it can be really slow and boring to do open world content on a full support unless you have friends (In my own opinion ofc.) Either way, you will often see the full glass option recommended over other things, but you definitely have a lot of flexibility. It's notable that even though HoT and PoF are harder, once you learn all the mob mechanics they are still very doable on glass builds; this is especially true because many glass builds can kill the enemy before they even get a hit off, negating any mechanics they have in the first place.

 

Then you have Fractals, at that point you start to see some role diversity, to an extent. Most high end fractals you will see a Banner War, Some kind of Support Chronomancer, and often a Druid support, but sometimes something like a tempest or other support class. Beyond those three fairly set roles, you usually see two glassy DPS... Remembering of course that now with HoT we have a full glass condi setup in Viper's stats in addition to the full glass power setup of Berserker. In Fractals the two primary DPS slots do still tend to give the advantage to full zerk, because the encounters are shorter and burst damage by its nature tends to have higher output and effectiveness in those scenarios (Staff Weavers especially can put down very very high spikes of damage), where Condi tends to do more average DPS than most power specs but has a longer ramp up to full effectiveness (with the exception being epi-bounce necros, but they are a special case)

 

Once you get in to raiding, roles become even more important. First, the druid/chrono/bannerslave combo becomes absolutely vital for its ability to give both class specific buffs and every boon in the game, in addition to offering powerful sustained healing in the druid's case. Because of longer boss fights where you have the time to ramp them up, as well as the fact that the more mechanics heavy nature allows the continuously ticking conditions to tend to be better overall for raids. Bearing in mind that power weaver is still a massive out-lier in the DPS arms race, a lot of the time the DPS spots for a raid are picked not just for their damage (minimum of around 30k "vacuum" DPS to even be considered for a DPS slot) but for what else they actually bring to the party (Stance share, aegis share, cover boons, etc.). Even here, though, you'll often see the pure DPS specs running glassy builds (Full Zerk Weaver, Full Viper Firebrand, etc.)

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

> @"Elva.6372" said:

> It appears to me that with the release of HoT and especially PoF content that blithely adopting Berserker gear types may be less attractive than it was in the past.

>

 

The short version is that this is by design, and most people were on board. After the difficulty drop from beta weekend, players slowly discovered that you didn't need defensive of healing stats, and also they discovered that conditions were mechanically impotent. The enemy design was fairly basic, and by most MMO standards this would have been fine. But, because GW2 is an action MMO with innate active defenses built in to every class, this "basic design" was terribly easy to bypass. The other gear prefixes became known as training wheels on the inevitable path toward discovering berserker superiority. After all, berserker objectively was. And this... was quite boring after awhile. Now, granted, there were players who were happy with enemies being loot balloons, but the call to harder content was pretty loud.

 

With LWS1 and HoT, we saw purposeful difficulty spikes, and enemies who burst out a lot of damage in a short amount of time. Frequently, from stealth or while evading. This was part of the developers strategy to balance out gear prefixes. The theory is simple: Kill times directly translate into loot acquisition, so to be balanced you need the run-back time from death to match the increased kill times of different gear prefixes. This was meant to impact the average player, since the far end of the bell curve will just Chosen One their way through all content.

 

With the advent of raids, and also with break bars and increased fractal difficulty, other builds eventually came to prominence. Conditions were fixed, so now glass cannon condition builds work. Due to how strong they are, chronobuffers also became popular. Also, healing skills have been revamped so many times that healers are now viable for raids and fractals. These are... pretty much the only places where you'll need these. The reason for this is simple: the correlation between decreased kill times and increased received damage is a natural product of the game's design philosophy. Also, because the game was designed PVP forward, all of the player stats are in close relation to each other. You aren't going to get the vast differences in GW2 like you'll get in other games. Unless Anet redesigned the game from the ground up, these realities will continue to exist.

 

------------------------------------------

 

Now, as far as general PVE use goes, Berserker reigns supreme. While Vipers/Grieving is good, the fact is that ramp up times are relevant for the vast majority of content. Though there are parts of the game that may be harder with it, ideally it is better to rise to the challenge with glass cannon gear than to use a different set. After all, you get the best potential peak performance from GC gear, and it is far easier to change your build to be more defensive than it is to change your gear.

[Voltekka.2375]

It all depends on the game mode and the role of your class. PvE, for instance, rarely benefits from tanky gear, or even the newer PoF stats throughout every class. And that is why glass cannons with the holy trinity reign supreme. But in wvw, stat combos play a much, much bigger role. Mixing and matching can play a huge role if you play roamer, zerg, support, anything goes. This is why you see marshall eles (with cele and other mix), grieving+cele necros/power necros/support blood necro etc. PvE is about maximum efficiency (damage) with huge support (mesmer-druid). As far as I know, the only thing that changes is the support (trinity classes). Dps glass cannon will never be outdated, be it power or condi.

[ReaverKane.7598]

> @"Mea.5491" said:

> > @"SunTzu.4513" said:

> > Imo the main problem is stacking defstats isn't really effective. Sure you maybe will survive a few more hits but often you died nevertheless because you don't get the mobs downed fast enough.

>

> Sorry but I disagree. I play Celestial Firebrand, Ele and Engi. I use every core stat. I managed to solo the whole story without deaths on all 3 of them. I don't know what you mean by "fast enough" but the speed feels perfectly fine while my HP rarely gets under 50%. Also, when 10-20 people get downed in Palawadan during the toilet flush attack and I get hit too (because I'm stuck at the wall, happens a lot), I still survive with 20-25% HP. :) So according to my experience, having defensive stats is not a bad thing at all.

 

I soloed the whole story with only one death (died to that boss you need to kill to come back to life in PoF), and at least for most of HoT and PoF i used DPS stats, that's not really a token of anything, the story is designed to be easily soloable.

But yeah, defensive stats, although celestial isn't the most defensive of them all, will of course help you survive, but it will also make you take longer to do stuff alone, and will likely drag down your group if they're counting on you as a DPS.

 

> @"AliamRationem.5172" said:

> > @"Elva.6372" said:

> > > @"AliamRationem.5172" said:

> > > What else are you going to do? Tank? It's precisely because you can't tank (no usable threat mechanics!)

> > >

> > Great post, but if I may ask (honest question, not a setup) doesn't toughness act somewhat as aggro magnet?

> >

> > Wiki: "Toughness is one of the contributing factors in determining NPC aggression."

> >

>

> It's a factor, but not a reliable one. Proximity is generally more reliable that way. In other words, if you had a player stand at melee range they would be more likely to attract the boss's attention than the guy standing at 1200 range. But there really isn't an effective (reliable) way to maintain enemy hate in this game, and that's by design.

 

Well, there's a multitude of factors. If you're lower level than the mobs you'll most likely draw a lot more aggro. Take a lvl 10 char to a lvl 80 zone and have it stand next to a lvl 80 character and 8 out of 10 times the lvl 10 will get aggroed even if the lvl 80 is closer. Toughness acts the same way, you can be closer to a mob, but if it's drawn to toughness, and a guy with more toughness is within it's aggro range he'll get aggroed.

I know because i usually play a tank, and i've had a high toughness character built since 2012 (used to be my guardian, now it's my mesmer).

> @"Felipe.1807" said:

> > @"CptAurellian.9537" said:

> > > @"Felipe.1807" said:

> > > Oh yeah, the Zerker Meta...is dead a long time ago...the funny part is that people asked for this changes so other kinds of builds could have a place on the Meta(anything on Dungeons was viable, people in full clerics could just auto attack and dont even hit the dodge key and be able to clear Arah, and that was the "hardcore" dungeon at the time) and yet, with Raids you can easily say that people are 100% more etilist then they used to be...we went from "Play how you want" to some old boring more Trinity MMO, which is basically the antithesis of what GW2 should be.

> > Oh right, the was no elitism at all during the "10k+ AP" times ... oh, wait.

> >

> > Actually, nothing has changed at all.

>

> Nah there was a lot of "everyone welcome" kind of dungeons lol dont even try to compare it, the game have changed way to much, the "10K AP War and Ele only" was a community thing, from experience those were like 20% or less of what you would find on LFG...Anet pushed to us this more trinity kind of game, just adding a bunch mechanics to force to have "x" kind of profession and build in your group and add some kind of artificial challange...i dont mind Raids at all, is just that GW2 was supposed be the game that "people who hated MMOs would love" and yet here we are, its okay to change things a little bit, but this is a complete 180º.

 

That's rose tinted glasses right there mate.

For each "everyone is welcome" dungeon group there was one or two "Warrior+Zerker" or "10K+ AP" groups. Just like today there's still a lot of groups that don't ask for specifics in raids or dungeons.

And while you see more people asking for stuff like druid or chronomancer, you have to remind yourself that support builds didn't really exist back then. So your "elitism" is simply borne out of the game now allowing for more specialized game play than it used to, and people that request those specializations.

 

Not only that but almost up to HoT release conditions were simply poorly designed. The general 25 stack limit for conditions tied to the fact that most classes have passive conditions on weapon skills and that conditions would be added to the stack based on timing not on power meant that while alone you could do massive damage with a condi build, as soon as you'd hit a group content you'd often see most of the 25 stacks taken by condtions output by zerker thieves or warriors, which grew frustrating.

I played condi Ranger for the majority of the game's first year and i would use it to hunt Champions, they didn't drop champ bags back then, but it was fun, and i soloed pretty much every champion in core gw2 at the time. But then i would hit dungeons and i couldn't take my Ranger because i'd see my stacks get swiped.

So i switched to power (assassin's/Zerker) and never changed back so far.

 

[Elva.6372]

> @"ReaverKane.7598" said:

>... Toughness acts the same way, you can be closer to a mob, but if it's drawn to toughness, and a guy with more toughness is within it's aggro range he'll get aggroed.

> I know because i usually play a tank, and i've had a high toughness character built since 2012 (used to be my guardian, now it's my mesmer).

 

Haha, that explains why the other day after completing a Hero Point Challenge in PoF zone, I went AFK briefly a fair distance from the Challenge Node. Another player initiated the challenge while I was in the kitchen and the HP NPC made a beeline straight for my Guardian parked innocently near the water.

 

I popped back in the room and assisted killing the mob.

[ReaverKane.7598]

> @"Elva.6372" said:

> > @"ReaverKane.7598" said:

> >... Toughness acts the same way, you can be closer to a mob, but if it's drawn to toughness, and a guy with more toughness is within it's aggro range he'll get aggroed.

> > I know because i usually play a tank, and i've had a high toughness character built since 2012 (used to be my guardian, now it's my mesmer).

>

> Haha, that explains why the other day after completing a Hero Point Challenge in PoF zone, I went AFK briefly a fair distance from the Challenge Node. Another player initiated the challenge while I was in the kitchen and the HP NPC made a beeline straight for my Guardian parked innocently near the water.

>

> I popped back in the room and assisted killing the mob.

 

Pretty much, yeah. Having played a long time as a Berserker/Knight's and Berserker/Soldier's Guardian, i know that feeling exactly.

Now i play Valkyrie/Berserker and while i'm a lot squishier, it's equally fun to melt stuff away.

[Cerioth.7062]

I don't know. I've been running all classes on glass cannon builds in HoT and PoF content and not found any reason to change my gear stats.

[Lord of the Fire.6870]

To the main question I can only say it depends in open world and wvw you can play a lot of different stuff.

In Fractals and Raids so long you aren't a tank or healer or maybe a support you are a glass canon it is just so that with the changes which came with HoT killing speed became everything. This also translate in T4 fractals to the fact that most boss events will be skipped by meta groups its the question if they want to bring them back by making them unskippable either in the normal mode or in new CM modes of the old fractals.

 

The problem with this is to make it compatible with raids because they have the opposite philosophy and it already became a real pain how many variants of your single class with skill, traits and equip you can play with the next expansion it will blow everything a save function with a additional page for equip would be nice(like weapon swap so we need only what it different in there )

 

Anyway when you look at subject 6 from the fractal and then at the first boss of the first Hot Raid with it enrage timer you see the contradiction.

[Mea.5491]

> @"ReaverKane.7598" said:

> I soloed the whole story with only one death (died to that boss you need to kill to come back to life in PoF), and at least for most of HoT and PoF i used DPS stats, that's not really a token of anything, the story is designed to be easily soloable.

 

In my case, I wear defensive gear because I have slow reaction times and nerve issues in my hands (they're always numb). I did try glass cannon gear and I failed miserably. That's when I realized I need some toughness and vitality. Surviving for a few more hits means I have more time to react and use defensive skills. I know there are people who can solo everything in full dps gear, good for them. But I just can't do it because my abilities are different. So that's why beating story without deaths is such a big deal for me. :)

[ReaverKane.7598]

> @"Mea.5491" said:

> > @"ReaverKane.7598" said:

> > I soloed the whole story with only one death (died to that boss you need to kill to come back to life in PoF), and at least for most of HoT and PoF i used DPS stats, that's not really a token of anything, the story is designed to be easily soloable.

>

> In my case, I wear defensive gear because I have slow reaction times and nerve issues in my hands (they're always numb). I did try glass cannon gear and I failed miserably. That's when I realized I need some toughness and vitality. Surviving for a few more hits means I have more time to react and use defensive skills. I know there are people who can solo everything in full dps gear, good for them. But I just can't do it because my abilities are different. So that's why beating story without deaths is such a big deal for me. :)

 

It kinda depends on the class, but a lot of classes can be extremely durable through traits and skills and still be able to use agressive gear to do proper damage. I say this because having a focus on defensive stats, again depending on the class, might get you some flak in group content.

[Felipe.1807]

 

> > @"Felipe.1807" said:

> > > @"CptAurellian.9537" said:

> > > > @"Felipe.1807" said:

> > > > Oh yeah, the Zerker Meta...is dead a long time ago...the funny part is that people asked for this changes so other kinds of builds could have a place on the Meta(anything on Dungeons was viable, people in full clerics could just auto attack and dont even hit the dodge key and be able to clear Arah, and that was the "hardcore" dungeon at the time) and yet, with Raids you can easily say that people are 100% more etilist then they used to be...we went from "Play how you want" to some old boring more Trinity MMO, which is basically the antithesis of what GW2 should be.

> > > Oh right, the was no elitism at all during the "10k+ AP" times ... oh, wait.

> > >

> > > Actually, nothing has changed at all.

> >

> > Nah there was a lot of "everyone welcome" kind of dungeons lol dont even try to compare it, the game have changed way to much, the "10K AP War and Ele only" was a community thing, from experience those were like 20% or less of what you would find on LFG...Anet pushed to us this more trinity kind of game, just adding a bunch mechanics to force to have "x" kind of profession and build in your group and add some kind of artificial challange...i dont mind Raids at all, is just that GW2 was supposed be the game that "people who hated MMOs would love" and yet here we are, its okay to change things a little bit, but this is a complete 180º.

>

> That's rose tinted glasses right there mate.

> For each "everyone is welcome" dungeon group there was one or two "Warrior+Zerker" or "10K+ AP" groups. Just like today there's still a lot of groups that don't ask for specifics in raids or dungeons.

> And while you see more people asking for stuff like druid or chronomancer, you have to remind yourself that support builds didn't really exist back then. So your "elitism" is simply borne out of the game now allowing for more specialized game play than it used to, and people that request those specializations.

>

> Not only that but almost up to HoT release conditions were simply poorly designed. The general 25 stack limit for conditions tied to the fact that most classes have passive conditions on weapon skills and that conditions would be added to the stack based on timing not on power meant that while alone you could do massive damage with a condi build, as soon as you'd hit a group content you'd often see most of the 25 stacks taken by condtions output by zerker thieves or warriors, which grew frustrating.

> I played condi Ranger for the majority of the game's first year and i would use it to hunt Champions, they didn't drop champ bags back then, but it was fun, and i soloed pretty much every champion in core gw2 at the time. But then i would hit dungeons and i couldn't take my Ranger because i'd see my stacks get swiped.

> So i switched to power (assassin's/Zerker) and never changed back so far.

>

 

I can't say thats true cause thats not what I used to see back in the day, like i said, the etilist wannabes "Full zerker AP etc" were like 20% of what I would find, putting on LFG something like "AC path 1 2 3 everyone welcome" would give me a full group in literal seconds...trying to do the same with Raids you will probably die from old age before getting a full squad lol...and people still do dungeons these days? When I made a new character and wished to play all the of dungeons again, I had to solo it all of then cause I couldnt find people to help me with lol, only Honor of the Waves i could get another person to aid me with the last Boss(didnt really needed help, when he got there Boss was allready at 20% health)...while Support builds werent meta, they were viable, like I said, groups could clear Arah without worring about dodge when playing in full Clerics...and yeah Condi builds were great for solo content but used to suck for group...but lets not forget that thanks to the buff that condi builds got, WvW and sPvP become a full shitshow and havent really recovered since from the Trait and condi overhaul and HoT powercreep, so I dont think thats actually a good thing lol

 

[mercury ranique.2170]

Sorry for those reading my posts more often, I have tried to explain it before.

In any game, to be successful you need to do two things.

1: survive

2: win as quickly as possible

 

Know number two is debatable, but consensus is that people play to gain ingame gold, are working on personal projects or just like to be very efficiently. You might prefer a different approach and within guilds this is possible. But for the rest his is the consensus.

 

Survival is a yes no conditional situation. You either do or do not. If you don’t, you are lost,

In most game formats in gw2, it is perfectly possible to survive without any effort from your build and stats. So in short, you always meet this conditional situation and you have done a good job,

 

As for winning as quickly as possible. There is no conditional situation. The more the better.

 

So in short. You can always survive and there is no such thing as too much dps. That’s why zerker is so popular in pve.

 

What has changed is that raids and high tier fractals have been added where survivability is not guaranteed. So you need dedicated roles to do this. The elite specs you ar talking about have been added in support of this (and not to counter the zerker). It is also only in those formats that these specializations are appreciated and valued, outside people play different toons or respec.

[Charrbeque.8729]

>Berzerk or GTFO

 

The game gets stale when players only recommend 1 option because anything else will do very poorly. Now we have a need for more variety in gear choices,traits, and skills, and the game is more interesting because of it.

 

Of course, anybody doing organized group content (like raids, or PvP) are going to be picky on what everyone is equipped with and set up as. But you'd get that in any game because, that's life.

 

For open world PvE, usually players say "use whatever you want". We have a lot more choices now to experiment with to keep the game fun (instead of going all berzerker gear).

[AliamRationem.5172]

> @"Charrbeque.8729" said:

> >Berzerk or GTFO

>

> The game gets stale when players only recommend 1 option because anything else will do very poorly. Now we have a need for more variety in gear choices,traits, and skills, and the game is more interesting because of it.

>

> Of course, anybody doing organized group content (like raids, or PvP) are going to be picky on what everyone is equipped with and set up as. But you'd get that in any game because, that's life.

>

> For open world PvE, usually players say "use whatever you want". We have a lot more choices now to experiment with to keep the game fun (instead of going all berzerker gear).

 

I can agree with this.

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

The best thing to do when telling other players about the game is to tell them to drop their preconceptions about classes and roles. The best thing about this game is that you aren't reduced to being impotent or defenseless for the sake of group dynamics.

[Samnang.1879]

no. i run all dpses in berserker...

[Etterwyn.5263]

> @"EpicName.4523" said:

> Imho Marauder>Berserker in open world. I prefer to live just a tiny bit longer instead of dying after something sneezes at me.

 

Agree totally! I rarely use anything else on my Guardian. The math was done back when HOT was released and the small DPS loss is nothing compared to > 60% bigger health pool.