Dervish nerfs & buffs

I think dervishes are going to end up somewhat like rangers, in that, you almost always are going to need/want to use the +energy armor set :L

For example, the build ive been running on my dervish is, i think, extremely basic... put up a few enchants, then attack/remove them with pious assault... well, i run 12 mysticism, and i have JUST BARELY enough energy to put up 4 enchants then spam pious assault 4 times (and when i say barely, i mean BARELY with a capital B)... i dont think any of the other professions require you to run 12 in their primary line just to get by on a very basic build.

...and thats just addressing the energy!

I feel, like many of you, that 1 hp per lvl in mysticism is simply not enough. with only 70 al, the dervish is quite squishy in close combat (yes, even with the various debuffs that your enchants provide against your foes). The only reason that people were so indestructible on dervishes during the original pvp preview was because foes werent really trying to counter them... there are any number of completely evil things you can do to a dervish with a mesmer, necro, or even a ranger >

...and finally, i would like to agree with Twicky, and say that if you dont think the dervish was over-nerfed... go kill an archer NPC in a GvG with a dervish; and then with a warrior (or ranger, or assassin, or ele, or mesmer...) :P

energy should only be like 10-15 for the avatar elites. since you do have to wait 120 seconds. not like you wont have 25 energy to use it every 120 seconds while in alliance battles. but in PVE youre shit outta luck once you die.

I played a wind Devish in RA, so my health is ok.
If you play a earth Devish, you biggest health supply will be your Mysticism, and that dont look too good=P
Mystic Vigor and Pious Renewal and Mystic Regeneration do help, make me feel like iway when I try it.
if you use armor of sanctity+conviction+apply poison you will have a nice deffence. However with out some self healing skill, ar dont do much in pvp, and in RA you are the only one you can count on

I dont mind the range and all myself, I have more problem with cast time and recharge.

there are so many pull enchant skill out there and a lot of Devish skill sacrifice enchantment as well, those 20s recharge time is just too long. Not saying I cant find a good combo to overcome this, its not hard to over come. There are 3 enchant that recharge with in 10 sec, I can just use them before the atk.

and the 3/4 cast time on those offensive enchantment just wont do with out the help of knock down, and Devish get none of that. What I do now is cripple the foes first then cast the offensive enchantment. However the crippling weep require you to have some enchantment first.

Personaly I dont see how Devish suck. If you want to find a good defensive combo, you can, if you want to find a good offenisve combo, you can. But in ra they arent too good, they are good at facing small group of close range foes, where in RA would you find that~ But in ab and asponwood Devish isnt too bad, they are great mm & spirit killer and good npc killer, I have a lot of fun doing this. But I do agree a-net can buff some of the skills.

I'm surprised they nerfed the ranges. I was expecting recharge/damage nerfs all around, the skills were insane before, but nerfing the range? How many people used the Elementalist "adjacent" PBAoEs? What made them think Dervish would be any different?

Mysticisim is 100% garbage now. I know they didn't want to see another dervishway mania, but I think the CoP nerf was plenty of a nerf to be honest. That was the main way dervs were overpowered, because they could use the CoP build. After they removed that as a posibility, dervs lost a lot. And then they continued the thrasing with all the extra nerfs. I was really looking forward to playing some dervish in PvP but now it really doesn't even seem possible unless it's nubsmashing in RA.

Paragons on the other hand seem like they were created just for pvp, they have so many useful skills.

I do
Shock+aftershock+crystal wave
I agree, with the 3/4 cast time and no knockdown skill themselves, Devish's adjacent aoes are crapy in pvp.
I hope they reduce the cast time or increase the range of the skills

p.s: Dont tell me to go D/E with shock..most Devish skill cost energy, with 25en, the exhaustion is a kick in the ball, Devish arent warrior.

I am thinking of picking up a hammer

I personaly like pvp a lot(especialy gvg), one of my main concerns with the dervish in this area is as follows:
Dervishes lack the damage spiking abilities of warriors so they arent good executioners(I dont expect them to be able to kill a monk).

Dervishes to me seem to focus more on putting pressure on the opossing team, by dealing damage and causing conditions to multiple foes. I still think degen mesmers and tainters will do a better job as pressure builds.

I hope they change the dervish skills before release to contain some of the following: a solid deepwound skill, a blackoutish skill, knockdown and maybe a daze skill.




On a side note, Reaper's Sweep could serve as a killer deep wound skill if the deepwound req wasnt so hard to reach.

(Getting someone down to less then 50% and keeping them down 50% while waiting for this skill to hit with dervish attack speed is too hard in gvg)

I hope they make it opponent has to be below 75% to deepwound.

I also agree on Dervishes being overnerfed.
Currently it looks like you won't be able to survive and do your thing if you're not using a Zealous Mod for your Scythe. As it is now a lot of skills are simply too expensive. Come on, Melandrus Avatar? Once you hit the ground (and you probably will do) you won't be able to cast it again for quite some time. 23 max energy versus 25 Cast. Effectively taking a huge part of your power out of the game.
But that's also the problem with all the enchantments of the Dervish. Most only have a use if they are combined with another enchantment or a targetted removal of your own enchantment. Now well, i'd really like to do that but my energy is constantly at the bottom. And by the time i've got enough energy again to do ANYTHING, the enchantments run out. Just great.

We will probably have to wait though how a zealous scythe works out (did not have a chance to test that out) but i wouldn't be too surprised to see it being a requirement to play a Dervish. It should however grant 3 energy with each swing. A small mend to the huge energy problem.

As it is now, Dervishes are basically squishy casters with not enough energy to cast, not enough armor to tank, not enough power to do any pressure... congratulations, they're even weaker than Eles now and even more weaker than Sins used to be at the day of release.
I hope the dervish gets a huge buff again before release as it basically is quite an interesting class. If there is no buff to them, they will suffer the same fate as the Assassins. Constant dirtnappers, too hard to play except for a chosen few. Shunned and hated by the community up to a point many will delete their class.

ahh...there is so idk what ur talking about,there is one other skill that inflicts deepwound. Wearying Strike- deal +1-25dmg and inflict a deepwound on you target for 3-9 seconds, but suffer from weakness for 10seconds.
i dont really agree with having more skills to inflict deepwound, because of the fact they can hit up to 3 targets, inflicting 3 deepwounds with no drawback in 1 skill would be too overpowering.
maybe ppl should actually read all the new skills b4 making comments

ya know..so many complained bout how overpowered the Dervs were...we all knew the nerf bat was coming for them. The thing i find funny is..most of the nerfs..we player requested. Some from here and some from gameamp.com.

Remember..the whole purpose of these beta previews is to test t hings out
BEFORE it goes into the full game. Im sure that Anet will make the appropriate corrections and not follow the path they did with teh assasin

oh sooo0o0o0oo sorry... what i should have said was dervishes need some USABLE non-elite that causes deep wound. werying strike sucks. in order to use it, you neeed to bring plague touch or mend, or something to remove the weakness from yourself. now youre bringing 2 skills, just to inflict a deep wound.

Yeah Mysiticism is jacked. I'm using it now and am like "wth?" The energy regain should be 1 energy every 2 levels and the health gain is neglible. but I don't know how to improve it without overdoing it.

And any skill with an energy cost of the total energy pool can be expected to never see play time, unless it automatically kills anyone within shout range. It might see play on an ele/derv frontlnie fighter where they have the energy and support to handle it.

E/D can't use it - Forms are all Mysticism.

I really don't know why they made it cost 25 energy - the condition negating effect isn't that great; you can't be Blinded and that's the only part that really matters as any intelligent enemy will change targets for any condition causing skills once they notice it. You can, however, use focus swapping to make sure you can afford it - +15/-1 items still give that benefit even if you don't take 9 in the required attribute.

The nerf bat hit hard, at our own request. I say give it time, The dervish will be better balanced sooner or later. I just hope it won't be like the assassin'; wait to correct them just before the next expansion.

About the damage in PvE, I thought it was just fine. I completely pwned groups of 10 lvl 6 enemies at lvl 8 in 3 hits.

vital boon
chilling victory
pious assault
heart of holy flame

cast vital boon, lure a group of enemies, gang them up, cast heart of holy flame, hit someone with pious assault thus making all of them burn, use chilling victory, most of them are dead now. Fish the last bunch off using pious assault again, killing them and healing you to max health. Granted, your energy is gone but you just killed them all. I don't see any other profession do this. Especially chilling victory and heart of holy flame did insane damage. Just gotta bunch em up.
I think the damage is fine, would like to see a healing/energy gain increase though.

just my humble oppinion.

On a side note: I remember someone saying there will not be any elemental scythe upgrade (no earth damage or fire damage upgrade on scythe) but that doesn't matter much. Every avatar does elemental damage. D/Ele can thus increase their offense exponentially using conjures. Avatar of grenth + conjure frost for example. This would further increase the Dervish offense. Healing 60+ per attack should also be possible when using vicarious skills going D/mo. One could also experiment with D/w using frenzy I suppose, just gotta make sure you blind enemies or something.

Similarly, you should probably read the thread before walking in and insulting people - I'd already mentioned Warying Strike.
In all fairness, the same is true of both Sword and Hammer warriors, and that hasn't slowed them down too much.

...And yeah, I'd forgotten all about CoP (don't ask me how I'd forgotten the premier non-Dervish Dervish skill!). Since both it and Plague Touch are skills you wouldn't mind having on your bar anyway, I'm now feeling a lot better about Wearying.

Even without removing the weakness, applying multiple DWs on a 2-second recharge is pretty sweet. Plus as a Dervish most of your single-target damage is going to come from your spells... And we've established that they're pressure, not spike.

A pool of 25 energy, 4 regen, and a lot of scythe and healing skills costing 5 energy. That is far from bad. Personally I think they should have a pool of 30, but I don't think that mysticism should be changed from where it is now.

With Melandru's Avatar costing 25 you would think that the class would at least have a base pool of 30 (necros do and they have a number of 25 energy spells) and some +energy armour.

Small comparison:
Monks have a base of 30, 4 regen and many skills costing more than 5 energy, and NO WAY (except for 2ndary) to get that energy back.

Most Dervishes will no doubt be running at 10-16 mysticism. 3-5 energy per enchantment ending - AND it isn't limited to YOUR enchantments. Dervish + monk + RoF spam = excellent regen. Of course this puts players a little at odds in the random arena, but that's the chance you take.

Finally, making the energy regen of dervishes uber, or even simply nice, will mean that the zealous mod will be worth nothing - and I'm not even sure it will be all that good the way things stand now.

Well but darn, it things remain that way looks like a good proportion of players will have to learn about a little something called energy management... Funny about that, since those very same players are always complaining about how poorly monks manage their energy.

well, with a sword war its 2 skills for 2 conditions, and, theres no energy cost (im not terribly familiar with hammer so i wont comment on that)... if youre using an enchant-heavy dervish build (something along the lines of the whirling dervish premade), youre already so tight on energy that the extra 5e of a plague touch (or w/e) may come back to bite you in the arse. :P

on a related note....

alot of the energy debate, i think, comes from the fact that most people are running very similar builds atm... yknow, something like 4 enchants, a couple attack skills that remove them, and signet of piety... builds of that type are very tough on the ol' energy pool... but, as the diversity in dervish builds increases, we will probably find that alot of the dervish build options are far less energy-intensive.

That was similar to my take on them. I don't PvP so I can not comment, but PvE wise it seemed like some things still needed the nerf bat. The only difference in my skill lineup is I add the enchant that causes bleeding when it ends. With Aura of Thorns and Heart of Holy Flame you had A LOT of AoE damage putting the enchants on, and Pious Assault gave good weapon AoE damage +bleeding +fire. Vital Boon and Pious Assault was almost cheap, for essentially 10 energy and 8 second recharge you get good +damage and +self heal (sure it took two slots, but I would have pious assault anyway). Again, for PvE I found this to be quite useful. Of course, some of those are earth line too so I had to put points in that, but in the end I felt it worth it.

If enemies bunched up at all it was trivial to wipe out a HUGE bunch of them. At level 10 I could send the warrior hero out and get all the mobs in a bunch, then the rest of us run up and blew them away. I had the four of us go through quite a few 8 person areas where I was 2-5 levels lower than the henchies and enemies outside.

And, lastly, we haven't seen farming builds yet. At least to me the Dervish screams farming (built in AoE damage and skills based on having enchants on you).

I'm really looking forward to playing a dervish, even if they hit it with the nerf bat again. If it gets buffs because of PvP - even better

I agree, the Dervish seems pretty good for PvE. I'd say pretty darn good. I think that they are gonna be very popular with PvE groups that want an extra edge.

I like the Dervish just where it's at.

The Mysticism health gain should probably be doubled to make it meaningful at all. If your Dervish is too squishy, that's because he doesn't have Signet of Piety on his bar. The energy gain should stay the same. It doesn't make sense to get so much energy back for enchantments ending. Sure the energy's tight when you're solo, but imagine having someone smite off of you.

I think Dervish-smite is inevitible as a popular GvG build, even with the current nerfs in place. A Dervish and an AoE smiter sound like the perfect gank team.

i choose dervishes over warriors anbyday

I can tank three people inefninantly at once with my devrish.
how? Signet of piety.it strips one enchants and heals you for 120+ no recharge if enchant is striped.

Combine with vital boon for a 100 health increase using convition to maintain +24 armor. Then remove vital boon with signet, 1 sec cast 320+ heal. then add 2-3 more enchants( staggering impact , dustcloak with some blind)
into the mix and you wont run out of healing. Add ViM and use Vim RIght after you apply contions by removing the conditions with signe and you wont run out of mana.

Use pious attack if you feal your low on dmg , get 9 tactics and use a shield, watch yourself, +5 swaord pommel, Vital boon, conviction, pious renewal ,inabvle 130 armor and 700 health. can you say ouch? (with the low recharge on pios renewal and vital boon) your an unkillable tank. I've made teams quit because they had no way to inturupt my signet, and thus no way to kill me.

signet of piety and piious attack need 3 second recharges if encahnt is striped. because i made back to back gladiator runs. i literally was the team.. i would simply not die. the only way to kill me was to inturpt signent, and ther are ways to stop youself from being inturupted belive it or not.

i got tired of playing this and played a melandrus scythe warrio and was like LAWL. why is this goofy 25e tree form an elite? i coulddn't even aply decent pressure like before. and as far as the 120 second recharge.. heh. wow 35-40 at most seconds of fame and then you absoulutly pathetic.. disableing the first few seonds of the form with a 0e bar isn't helpfull at all. THat and the INTURUPT ME! 2 second cast time+ flaot in the air is like gods gift to a mesmer..

anyway, deverishes arn't as capable of pressure as before. when it coems to aoe dmg it doesn't exist for them. MAybe in PvE... THe silly lack of range is simply dumb.