R/ and A/ out-Dervishing the Dervish.

(I searched for any up to date thread on this, got nothing, and made this thread, if one exsists, ignore this.)

Obvious Problem: R/ and D/ use a Scythe much better than a D/ could ever do. In PvE and PvP. Dervishs are practically useless.

Counter-Point: Avatars!
Counter-counter-Point: Half of them are useless in PvE. All of them are useless in PvP('cept AoL)

Possible Solutions?

Two main solutions I've heard are to:
1. Tie the amount of enemies the scythe can hit to the Mysticism Attribute
2. Give the Dervish some form or Permanent IAS.

Problems with those are:
1. Basically changing the Scythe to a hammer? No thanks.
2. That would make the Derv OP with knockdowns.

My Solution? I don't really have one, but I think the whole thing really needs to be brought up and discussed. All I can suggest is that Dervishes in general need to be fixed in a way that they can do their job. Some of you might say **** that, GW2 will come out sooner before that. That might be true. But I want my Dervish to do something other than Solo UW. And I'm sure you guys with Dervish chars you've spent time on do too.

I don't like how scythes can hit multiple enemies, I would like to have that removed.

To fix the ranger problem, the only elite the rangers use is escape, so just make escape end on an attack.

The scythe's ridiculously high damage reach along with an assassin's primary is something you can't fix unless you change scythes or Crit Strikes.

There are several problems with Dervs right now. They are an expansion class, and so they don't have as many skills as the others, and thus less utility, which is compounded by the fact that they lack a lot of things already (maintainable IAS, Energy Management, Knockdown, etc.).Then the skills they do have are often conflicting in nature; some skills benefit by having multiple enchantments while others require enchantment removal, making your already limited choice of skills even more limited. And, of course, they are easily outdamaged with their own weapon.

The problem I see with Dervs is that Mysticism has some nice linked skills, but is arguably useless in and of itself. It is a poor mans amalgamation of soul reaping and divine favor, but nowhere near as efficient as either. I think Mysticism needs a more original spin, something that will fit the theme and maintain effectiveness. For instance, make Mysticism increase scythe damage for each enchantment, or add a percentage of armor ignoring or holy damage on top of base scythe damage, just something so that Dervishes actually have a strong suite, because as of now they are outclassed in every category by some other class.

And I think scythes hitting multiple targets should stay. It provides what is probably the only viable form of energy management (zealous swipe), and provides a little bit of a draw over a warrior for tanking and handling mobs. In PvE it is largely irrelevant, and doesn't even approach the problems with PvE balance that would deserve attention before hand. And if a Derv is hitting multiple targets in PvP, there is something terribly wrong with the people on the receiving end.

The problem here is that Mysticism and its skills are not very useful for a melee, while Expertise, Critical Strikes, and their related skills are.

IMO Warrior's Endurance W/D is better than a Dervish too (at least in PvE purposes).

Reverend also hit the big thing, I like the concept behind Mysticism but it's not really a desirable primary in the long run. The only positive thing about it is when the monks are forced to Patient Spirit your middling armor, you gain energy for it (and can that really be called positive?)

I would have to agree with you, something needs to be done with Mysticism. I would even argue that a simple change of having the effect occure on both enchantment removal and addition would help considerably.

Mysticism seems to lean towards a spellcasting class, instead of a meele one. Though one could argue the Dervish is both, I would say it can't do either class properally.

Dervs are fantastic order-ers.

Lol @ Thinking AoL is useful in Pvp.

Dervs aren't useless in PvE, they may be beaten by other classes, but they can still output their share of damage.

And your counter arguements.

1. If the dervish brings 0 in Mysticism, yeah it's basically a hammer, but then again it hits more enemies at higher levels. <-Bad Solution.
2. A permanent IAS makes a derv OP with knockdowns...I'm entirely confused, dervishes have no KD skills except for fleeting (Self KD). Are you assuming that it has GDW or brings some other class skill?

This is not a solution to the PvP problem but I would like to see aura of holy might linked to Mysticism the way "There is nothing to fear" and critical agility are linked to their primaries. That skill is getting abused on sins, rangers, warriors who, although they cant have as high of scythe mastery, can just drop this enchantment on their bar, and with NO investment (title linked) start doing ridiculous damage.

As for revamping Mysticism, they could make mysticism scale enchantment duration as well, so that, somewhat like weapon spells, you can't reach the good duration without investing in mysticism. Would that be overpowered, I don't know.

Eremite's Attack and Mystic Sweep add 50% failure with 4 or less Mysticism.

@ #2:

As in if Mysticism added IAS, A dervish with a Hammer and W/ skills would own.

Ahh okay, was thinking you meant to make HoF maintainable.

If you make 14+ Mysticism 33% or more it'd be decent I guess...but a free IAS is a bit unfair.

Warriors already have flail which is incredibly easy to activate, dervishes wouldn't be overpowered like that...they wouldn't even do as good as warriors due to armor difference.

Here's a radical thought:
What if you could only put max 9 points in a non-primary weapon attribute?

Escape: 5e 12r
Elite Stance. For 1...7...8 seconds, you move 30...42...45% faster and have a 75% chance to block attacks. This stance ends if you use a skill.
This change would prevent scythe rangers from pwning everyone with their constant 75% chance to block. But, they also get a 1337 speed increase (same as burning speed) so this skill doesn't fall into total disuse.

Then, give a slight buff to Mysticism and some Mysticism skills.

For each rank of Mysticism you can hit an additional 2 adjacent targets with your scythe. (Maximum 2 additional targets).

This change would basically be a slap in the face to everyone that's not a Dervish. Dervs would only need one point in Mysticism to hit 3 targets and 3 targets would still be the max.

I don't play a derv, but I'm sure there are at least a few Mysticism skills that could use a buff.

Let's make WE only affect axes/hammers/swords. I mean it's Warrior's Endurance, after all. Not 100 Armor Scythe Man Endurance. Ok, then let's make Critical Agility only affect daggers, because everyone hates assassins, anyway, right? Yeah, screw them. And then Escape, let's just remove it from the game. I say every ranger elite should be retooled into an interrupt, because that's their goddamn job. They need to know their place.

Wait, what's that? Nobody but dervishes can effectively wield scythes now and still nobody wants you in their group? Oh that's right, because dervishes are useless. Scythes are what people like.

tl;dr: buff dervish skills, particularly in the Mysticism line and maybe they will see some more play.

I have never understood people who think smiter's booning escape would somehow magically stop R/D's. Escape isn't even used on the R/D bar half the time anyways. Now its wounding strike.

But even when the meta was using escape for R/D, the only reason escape was on the bar is because it didn't need any other elite. If escape was nerfed back in the early days of spiritway the only thing you would see is Reapers sweep or Wounding strike subbed for attack1 and natural stride subbed for escape within minutes of the update. Such a nerf would have accomplished absolutely nothing.

/not signed
I got a better solution;
- Give us shorter but more powerful enchantments
- Implement back the original concept of faster recharge of attack skills when we remove enchantments prematurely
- Rework an elite enchantment to have effects of allowing enchantments be cast and recharge faster. (I'm looking at Arcane Zeal)

anet should rework the dervish and make it unique. now it's nothing but a lousy hybrid. i would rework the dervish with more emphasis on the basic orientation of this profession.

in fact, i would alter nearly all offense skill to have a cone-wise effect. for example, a skill which deals a certain % of the last dealt damage on a target to opponents behind it. also, i would increase the cone's range with the level of mysticism.

then i would relate the radii of effect of defensive/support enchants to the level of mysticism (min adjacent, max earshot).

with that in mind, anet might be able to create a lot of ultilities and viable combinations of skills and make the dervish a unique profession.

They can out scythe a dervish, but they can't out dervish a dervish. Dervishes have a lot of unique utility options based off their enchantments that aren't used a lot in PvP, but can be a lot of fun for some gimmicky PvE builds.

As a "hybrid" it runs into the problem that a character cannot attack and cast at the same time. As such optimizing for attacking only or for casting only end up with more powerful characters than a hybrid that is lackluster at both.

There are tons of problems with the dervish, but they all come down to the fact that with a couple of exceptions, for any build a dervish could make, some other profession could do it better.

First off, unlike assassins, dervishes were intended to be tough. However, despite having an entire attribute line devoted to tanking, they aren't as good at it as sins (even ignoring SF).

Lack of maintainable IAS really hurts the profession too.

Another problem is that the best scythe attacks for the profession generally don't benefit much from higher scythe mastery (Victorious Sweep is an exception, but a Scythe Warrior with 12 scythe mastery will do +27 damage with Mystic Sweep or Eremite's Attack, while a dervish with 14 will do +30 dmg).

Mysticism also sucks as energy management. Sins with crit strikes get even better energy management while getting a significant combat boost. Mysticism also just plain does not give the dervish enough energy to be worth it. At best, you can break even with a 5 energy enchantment. Too bad you don't get the energy until AFTER you need it. They probably did this to encourage dervishes to use skills that rip away enchantments. However, enchantments fall into 2 categories: ones that are too essential to be stripped, and those that are not. If they're the former, you're not going to strip them away willingly. If they're the latter, then they're not worth putting on your bar in the first place because they're too weak. In order for the whole "rip away enchantments for uber attack" thing to work, then the uber attack has to be AT MINIMUM twice as good as any other attack skill, in order to justify burning two skill slots on it. In practice, though, it would have to be even better than that, since enchantments have their downsides. Then, of course, there's the little detail of enchantments having recharge times that are too long for spammable attack skills that are based on enchantment removal (don't think any of those exist, either).

What mysticism SHOULD do is reduce the cost of enchantments in the same way Expertise does for other skills, in addition to some kind of combat boost (or else, again, the warriors and assassins are still going to out-derv the derv).

As for possible combat boosts that mysticism could provide to make the profession better:

- life-stealing
- health regen or health gain on hit
- innate stackable IAS
- +Dmg per enchantment per rank
- energy stealing (this would, of course, be mutually exclusive with the above suggestion of mysticism reducing enchantment spell cost, but it would be an interesting way of making dervishes useful, since they'd be the bane of all casters)
- significantly buff health gain on enchantment ending

Tying number of foes hit by a scythe to mysticism is a bad idea because it doesn't solve the problem. How often do you hit 3 enemies with a scythe? Not very. Two or one is much more common.

Furthermore, there are several skills that need to be buffed in order for dervishes to compete with warriors, sins, and rangers.

Take Vow of Silence for example. This should be a great skill. If it was, it would go a long way to making dervishes more viable, because it's a mysticisim skill (one problem with buffing stuff in the other attribute lines is that it doesn't just buff the dervish; it also buffs the W/Ds and A/Ds, leaving the dervish in the same boat he was in before). Personally, I really wish the skill was good, because I think it'd be really fun to use. Unfortunately, it's complete crap. Not only does it only last a few seconds, but it prevents you from casting the very enchantments you need to be effective, AND it prevents your own allies from even healing you. This skill hurts you more than it helps you. Compare it to Obsidian Flesh, Spellbreaker, or Shadow Form, and you can see that it is pathetically underpowered. Buff this skill. Remove it's downsides. It's not like the skill could become abusable, because melee can still hit you just as well. Make it a PvE-only buff if that's what it takes.

Then there's the avatars. AoM and AoD are okay, but the other avatars just suck. Why use AoB, when you're still not going to tank any better than a Warrior with any kind of armor-increasing skill whatsoever? Why use AoG when a Warrior or Assassin can still do more damage than you and outlast you? Why use AoL when you're still not going to outdamage the Warrior or sin? They're pointless elite skills that require you to burn one of your PvE only skills just to use them effectively.

Then there's the problem of lack of synergy with other professions. Up until recently, I was a big fan of WS+SY!, because an A/D, R/D, or W/D couldn't pull it off (or so I thought). But then I ran some numbers about a week ago and discovered that a W/D who takes a zealous scythe can in fact pull off WS+SY!, and he'll do it better than the dervish. Once again, my dervish was redundant. Redundant builds are something I hate more than anything else in the game. I spent about a week trying to find a new build that didn't involve AoM, AoD, or Orders (that no other profession could do as well). I looked through every profession with an eye for stuff I could exploit as a dervish. But everywhere I looked, it was the same story: someone else could do it better.

In the end, I ended up with a D/P that was basically a WS build with GftE and Ebon Battle Standard of Honor (it actually works pretty well if you have some MMs, and I imagine it'd be good for physicalways, too). However, the fact that it took almost a week for me to come up just with this speaks volumes about the lack of synergy between dervishes and secondary classes (largely because dervishes often already have their own equivalent versions of most skills that other classes have which could benefit them).

In summary, the dervish is bad because nearly all of his stuff either sucks or can be better utilized by other professions.

Holy crap, this. Only it wouldn't solve the whole problem.

Also, to fix A/, I think they should make crit % from skills non-stacking, and nerf the % given by WotM. If sins do not crit as much, suddenly the build becomes a lot less viable :P

R/ is the least problematic of the other two (A/ and W/) because it doesn't abuse damage, only energy management.
The only thing Scythe rangers have is blocking from Lightning Reflexes, but lose one extra PvE slot for Dwarven Stability (Heart of Fury at higher mysticism lasts just as long). Let them have their build, frankly. They don't outperform a decent Dervish.

W/'s overpoweredness lays simply on Warrior's Endurance. We all know we don't want it to be reverted back to a stance, so get rid of the useless "cannot go above X energy" clause and replace it with something more hindering to a warrior.

Dervishes shine in the middle of many enemies.

Give them a way to draw and hold enemies to their location that no other profession can copy, and Dervishes will shine more than them.

/notsigned

While I agree dervish is shadowed, they're simply shadowed the same way ritualists were.
A majority of Dervish attributes suck. It's reality. And you have no IAS either.
But truth be told: If their other attributes didn't fail so bad, they would be used so much.
Solution?

Give Dervish a non-elite Critical Agility, for starters, and then the attributes of the professions.
Give them skills that increase crit % and armor penetation. And most importantly: Give them energy management that doesn't suck.

While at it, more dervish skills that deal around +30 damage would be nice.

Not only that, but anything else anet can think of would be nice. Something to give a REASON to be a primary ritualist without nerfing non-dervs with scythes.

If the reason to be a primary dervish is the pure CRAP that is onslaught, consider a dervish the pre-buffed ritualist.

Another thing that just came to mind is removing the diminishing returns on weapon mastery. After 12 in a weapon attribute, the amount it increases your DR goes from 5 to 2. This seems kind of stupid, because to get an attribute that high you need runes (which you can only have so many of, and the more powerful ones lower your max health). Moreover, it makes weapon attribute runes underpowered compared to runes for other attributes.

If Dervishes could have 4/3 of the base damage rating of sins and warriors when it comes to scythes and had a maintainable IAS, it would also help them significantly (not sure if it'd be enough, but it would be a start at the very least).

How about...

Heart of Fury 5e 3/4c 20r
For 1...12...15 seconds you attack 33%. Whenever you successfully hit 3 enemies with a Scythe attack this enchantment is renewed.

Work the renewal effect to trigger Mysticism.

Sins will crit more, don't think would work still.

Um, there is nothing to sign, so I'm not sure what you're thinking of.

What do you mean? They will still crit more in general? Or that they will crit more with the skill? I'd say that that skill is a step in the right direction. Maybe a different method of re-application? Like:

Heart of Fury 5e 3/4c 20r
For 1...12...15 seconds you attack 33%. Whenever you lose an enchantment this enchantment is renewed?

That or something else, but setting it up like the new flail is a good idea.

Change/Augment Mysticism to add damage to weapons (or maybe just scythes) that do not deal physical damage. I'm not sure how the damage should be added, or how much, but as an example: +1 base damage per two ranks of Mysticism. It's basically half of a unremovable Conjure that requires no secondary or skill slot. It is affected by armor, but also makes bigger critical hits. The effect is a bonus if you are already using Mysticism, and even if you aren't, it doesn't require many points to gain a boost.

It's clear that the OP only cares about the ability of Dervishes to hit things to death with a scythe. I don't think Dervishes will be balanced if they gain more damage, and nerfing scythes in general certainly isn't going to fix anything. You'd have to retool a fair amount of skills to really balance melee classes in terms of desirability.

In addition to the other suggestion I made earlier. It would give Dervishes more energy to work with and restrict the usage of the two skills that allow scythes to bypass their slow speed. Warriors would still have Protector's Strike but with Eremite's and Mystic the Dervish should be able to produce more damage.

Or give a bonus to Mysticism that increases the arc and number of enemies a scythe can hit.

I.E - One additional enemy every 5 ranks if Mysticism. Forward arc hits 0-8 Mysticism and adds left and right arcs at 9-16 Mysticism.

I actually agree with this more then my previous statement.

I'd like to see Avatar of Balthazar finally seeing a much needed buff. In fact the only elites worthy of general PvE use now is WS/RS and niche avatar builds.

It'd also be nice if the Dervish forms were maintainable in PvE -without- needing another skill (a PvE one at that). just get rid of the disabling for PvE, frankly.

If that is done, Eternal Aura could use a rework to extend enchantments (that either you cast, or cast on you), or some other useful buff.

As for other Elites...

Vow of Strength needs either a revert, or a change. it went from widely used, to barely usable, because conditions are very prominent and helpful in PvE

Vow of Silence is good for running but otherwise useless, because most dervishes NEED to be able to cast spells.

Pious Renewal is crap. Rework.

Arcane Zeal could be buffed a bit. It's good for Orders dervishes, but useless otherwise

Both Grenth's Grasp, Onslaught, and MOST of the wind prayer line needs either buffed or reworked. A lot of the skills are pointless, healing of such skills is mostly minuscule, and the line is only really good for PvP.

The irony part is that most of the end effects of the offensive enchantments can be achieved by our attack skills which defeats the purpose of having them in the first place. If however the end effect is something relatively powerful and not achievable by our other skills (e.g. KD, Interrupt, Daze) then I would be stripping it away at every opportunity like we did with Eternal Aura. The problem is that most of the commonly used enchantments' active effects are highly more favorable than its end effects. This enforces us to play a dervish like we would with a elementalist and this is won't work for a frontline profession at all.

There used to be a workable Pious Renewal build back when Pious Assault was left untouched but it was unfavored simply because of it being overshadowed by overpowered skills. It does not need to be uber at all nor limited to being an attack skill. For example we take the current Pious Assault and just add in additional clause "recharge 1..3..5 seconds faster if an enchantment is removed", there we have a viable non elite scythe DW skill.


In my personal opinion, mysticism didn't fail at what it promise nor is it useless. What fail are the skills which utilizes it. Enchantments which had the right recharge and casting time for us to rip had the useless active / after effects, vice versa and the list goes on.

My solution is simple: for short recharge enchantments like Aura of Thorns, give it some utility after effect not achievable by our other skills (e.g. KD, interrupt, daze, adjacent/nearby foe losing health or energy). Whilst for long recharge enchantments which have desirable active effects like Heart of Fury, give it either a recharge or energy or casting time discount when removed before it self expires.

Lastly a rework on the spells which rips our enchantments and change it into a hex spell which give additional bonus (e.g. lengthen duration, empowered negative effect) when it detects a an enchantment is sacrifaced for its casting.

Where do enchantments that have their primary effect WHEN they're discharged fit into your analysis? I've had a lot of fun in the past taking the likes of Dust Cloak and Aura of Holy Flame, then unleashing a storm of PBAOE damage and conditions with the aid of an enchantment-stripper. Unfortunately, Pious Assault no longer grants instant recharge for this use, Pious Light is... fiddly, and Pious Restraint is in a different attribute.

Of course, this style of play is currently sub-par, but that could possibly be fixed simply by buffing the numbers rather than engaging in a significant rework of the profession.

In theory, that could also be a viable way to fix the profession. However, I don't think most dervish players play a dervish for that reason. More importantly, it would be a very different hybrid playstyle that would be very difficult to balance. There are all these questions:

Is it more powerful than normal AoE?
SHOULD it be more powerful than normal AoE?
Is it more powerful than normal melee?
SHOULD it be more powerful than normal melee?
Is this a replacement for the Nuker and Melee character at the same time?

It's a very interesting idea, but this late in the game it's too much to hope for, because it's such an unorthodox playstyle. It's the kind of thing you have to have in mind early on and build the game around, just like they had to do with healing, protting, minions, and hexing. They're not going to rebalance the whole game to fit in this playstyle (and I'm not even convinced they should). I think the best we can hope for is something along the lines of the rit and para buffs.

I wanna see wind and earth prayers get a total rework. And Pious Assault reverted.

Anyone remember those enchantment juggling builds before the Dervish was nerfed?
I wanna see that brought back. But with a mysticism buff. And more, power fuller AoE damage upon ending of an enchantment.

Thanks to Eternal Aura, it could make an awesome spike similar to AP!

The basic problem is that energy management primary attributes are fiendishly difficult to balance. In a system this complex, any vibrant equilibrium with lots of plausible builds across formats is going to be fragile indeed.

All of the energy management primary skills except Critical Stricks have been horribly imba at some point during GW's run. (While Energy Storage itself has never been OP, some of the skills that it powers have been the most horrifyingly imba skills in the game's history.) The trouble is that small changes have large impacts on what players can and cannot do with their skill bars, and those changes are almost impossible to predict.

Make Mysticism itself too powerful, and you kill every other spellcasting class in the game. (Sort of like Necros back when Soul Reaping was cheats.) However, if Mysticism is weak, it produces less energy for a melee character than Critical Strikes or Expertise, and so you would never use it for that purpose.

The solution would be to make Earth and Wind Prayers not suck, so that a primary Derv could hold its own as a caster. Unfortunately, that's hard to do without imbalancing the Derv for RA and HB.

An alternative solution would be to ramp up the Forms again with different mechanics, but those skills are so different from every skill in the game that they too are incredibly difficult to balance.

In short, fixing Dervs would be a challenging and time consuming project. You're not likely to see the dev team take that on in depth any time soon.

As of now, Linsey said she MIGHT be doing the augest update in an unofficial game chat.
I trust her as someone who wants to fix all the problems entirely and refuse dartboard skill updates. So there's a big chance that everything will go well.
And keep in mind that she DOES see your suggestions. She's just not allowed to implement them all the time. But know that threads like this aren't ignored.

My predictions for the balance:
Assassins will be reworked
Dervish will be reworked and overpowered
Big chance Shadow Form will become Koss' bitch or changed in a way to make it overpowered in different ways
Mesmers will be nerfed just for lulz
And distortion will be banished to the distortion world of Pokemon Platinum where it will be tortured to death and raeped in the hole of the ring in the skill icon by Giratina in his origin form and then be forced to watch a furry marathon of hot manaphy sex



Keep in mind that this is UNOFFICIAL, and I'm not a reputable source. But it's just my knowledge of chatting with staff members; Nothing to take seriously, but have hope that next month will be awesome - Not as Awesome as June update, but still awesome!

Actually, it strikes me as something that HAS been in the game from the start. You caould make a W/E, E/W, or just plain E/X specialising in PBAOEs right from the release of Prophecies. When Factions came out, one of the prebuilt PvP characters was an E/A built around shadowstepping in, unleashing a chain of PBAOEs, and getting out. And then Nightfall, of course, had the Dervish, which at first glance appears to be the profession for dealing with multiple opponents in melee, with multi-attack scythes, PBAOE effects, or a combination of both.

So, it's not really new, it's just fallen out of favour. That said, I do run into elementalists who play the PBAOE game in PvE occasionally.

To answer your questions, in order:
1) Not at the moment.
2) Yes. There is an increased risk involved, in that you have to be closer to the target.
3) Not at the moment (normal melee has plenty of methods for dishing out PBAOE damage and disruption, Hundred Blades, Whirlwind Attack and the MS/DB combination being just a few.)
4) Depends on the situation, but I'd say it should be better than normal melee at damaging and disrupting multiple targets and at getting through blocking effects.
5) Yes, but not as good as having conventional melee AND a conventional nuker. On the other hand, it's a party slot you can fill with something else - with ten professions and eight slots in most zones, party composition is a matter of making compromises and/or working with what's available even before you consider that some professions are often desired in multiples.

Dervishes were originally a class to juggle enchantments to fuel energy + attack skills.

Trouble is:
1) You cannot attack while casting enchantments, so DPS goes down and players shy away from using enchantments productively.
2) most derv enchantments to fuel such play are pretty useless in terms of the beginning and end effects, and the recharge is terribly high
3) Only a few attack skills require that an enchantment be lost, and they are generally bad attack skills

One of the other problems with Dervishes is that being a Nightfall class, they have a lot less skills then the core and factions classes. Balancing them should mean making skills generally and widely useful.... unfortunately Earth Prayers is the only line that succeeds in this