Sept 1st Update

never thought syncing was that big of a problem honestly. I think a lot of people are too quick to accuse and say, "that team won, actually followed targets and supported their monk! THEY MUST BE SYNCING!!111" Some teams are blatant ta balanced builds but a lot of teams people accuse of syncing don't seem to have any team synergy or even the same guild tags. {r5 here and tired of seeing bad sports accuse ppl of syncing}

No, the problem with Moebius is that the target has to be below half for Moebius to work. You can't just run up to a target and start whaling away with a lengthy recharge Moebius chain. A Moebius bar is great at cleaning up hexes, but Dervs simply are more effective mop-up engines given current available skills.

Sure, because you run out of energy. Remember Repeating Strike with Temple Strike during the Factions preview? Same basic problem - you had to run R/A, because Crit Strikes doesn't generate enough energy to permit spam. Expertise = 60% cost reduction. 13 Crit Strikes = low probability shot of 60% cost reduction? The math is not hard.

Expertise was the problem, is the problem and always will be the problem. It should only work on Ranger skills, because it was designed to synergize with those. Expertise imposes an unreasonable design constraint on all other classes that makes the game much more difficult to balance. The end.

The R/A's should be a pretty good excuse for ANet to FINALLY nerf Expertise to what it should have always been: only work on Ranger skills. They could also go around to nerfing Fast Casting to work with Mesmer spells/signets only. Divine Favor works only with Monk spells and no one ever complained. It's still a strong primary

With this new Live Team (Linsey), lots of things are changing radically anyway (loldeletehb), so why not..

That's pretty radical. Main attributes work with every class' skills, sins get crit strikes from all weapons, eles more energy to cast all spells, mesmers cast all spells faster etc.
I agree that scrubness and gimmickness of R/A's is pretty horrible but I don't think that nerfing Expertise this much is the answer.
As for me, I just went /W and took Wild Blow with me. Just shows that most of the R/A's are terribad players, because they usually have no idea what happened to their precious Escape.

Not really radical, it's just that we are too used to them working this (broken) way for so much time.

Secondary professions should exist to provide versatility to primaries, not to run builds completely made of secondary profession skills that are run better than in that profession's primary.... Me/E Water template is a nearly uninterruptable snarer that runs all Ele skills abusing Fast Casting. R/D, R/A, R/W, R/P, all of these have better e-management the actual primaries, in fact Rangers have always been frontline on lame sway teams in HA, for example. Now they have taken over GvG too.

Now that you mention Assassins, yeah nerf them too and make Critical Strikes only trigger its bonus on daggers so we kill the A/D templates while at it. A/D with scythes hits criticals better than Dervs, that can't be right.

Last but not least Wild Blow is hardly a counter to R/As, not only they usually carry another stance (Lightning Reflexes), Escape also recharges pretty fast... It's simply not viable to lineback them, they must be nerfed (even if stance removal counted as a viable counter, having a hard counter doesn't mean something isn't completely OP).

I'd be interested to see if half-effects would work as a way to kill gimmicks but not necessarily diversity. For example, instead of 4% reduction for non-Ranger skills, make it 2%. It would take 15 Expertise to make 5e dagger attacks cost 3.5e (I admittedly don't remember right now which way GW would round that). I'm sure people would still run utility things like Mending Touch, but it would probably kill spammy attacks, especially if it rounded to 4e.

Do the same for FC, calculate what the reduction would have been - for example, 34% reduction at 9 FC - then if it's a secondary spell, make it 17% reduction. They could try it for Critical Strikes (cut bonus crit% in half) too if that's really an issue.

I'm not necessarily against getting rid of the bonuses for secondaries, so if this wouldn't work, I agree that's where we should head.

Also, since this is way away from syncing, Nicholas, and XTH, inb4 the lock?

To the bolded I agree. I think it's kind of silly that a different profession can run something better than the one it was intended for. But if you nerf/alter it on one profession, it should be done to all.

I'm not going to get into the debate about secondaries, but this statement is an oversimplification. What needs to be considered is the cost of the hard counter. Hard counters that are easy to fit into builds and have varied uses beyond simply countering one overpowered tactic tend to preclude findings of overpoweredness. The most obvious example is that if something is hard-countered by a skill everyone brings anyway, it can't be overpowered.

The question of R/A vs. Wild Blow doesn't even reach this point though, because we haven't established that Wild Blow is actually a hard counter to R/As.

R/A discussion is not Sept 1st Update discussion. Move it along to Gladiator's Arena.

So what was in the build 30 mins ago?

It isn't on the wiki or the main site, so I'm assuming it wasn't anything worth mentioning. Probably a small bug or something to do with Nick again.

Oh, yeah, the update on the 5th wasn't worth mentioning.

i'm sure it downloaded 0 files, or the file was so small i didn't even see the download bar
anyway it's a suspecious ghost update XD

Nerfing expertise for like the 8th time doesn't sound like the answer. I mean, that primary has gone through so many refunctionalities already. I mean, it wasn't the SR nerf, but come on. Just leave it as is. Yes, rangers can run gimmicky stuff that is effective in certain areas because of expertise, but since when do we balance the game around RA?

might want to look into gvg also. R/A with daggers have been seen in gvg now. so yes, might be the time to tone them down.

So in GvG, we have to always deploy Warriors for melee?

Quoting incase someone missed it