Unboring the Paragon

@OP - I feel your pain. I too find the Paragon extremely boring to play. I don't mind playing the support role but many of the Paragon's skills aren't enticing enough to warrant regular use. I'm well aware that if I put my lil brain to work I can come up with tons of builds to play but it still won't fix MY problem with the Paragon. I can't quite grasp what's wrong but for whatever reason the Paragon puts me to sleep whenever I use him.

This is all personal opinion of course. There's no right or wrong.

PS - This part of The Campfire (Paragons) has the least amount of posts and is fairly inactive. Been that way for a long time now. That's not a good sign.

Most ppl only focus on dmg dealing on their own and if you ask me that is not the point of the game.

My Paragon is filling a support role but through some hexes and buffs from other professions in the team I deal enough dmg to make a difference.

I also have a fun build that is based on pure dmg and energy management that is working very well for me as well, I use that in 4 man teams or when I don't feel like doing support.

But ppl seem to whine about a class on a forum rather then seek out ways to have fun playing with a certain class.

Or you can just copy some build off pvxwiki and feel all great about your "unique" character lol.

Well, for me, I create builds left and right. Regardless if its gonna be "super effective" or not. I also refuse to even post these builds due to the elitist community, constant trolls, and overall negativity towards anything non-meta or "cookie-cutter"

Now if the community would be more open to fresh idea's, instead of always looking for the best of the best of the best ect.... I would be much more inclined to share these.

But for an example, before I took a year long break, I was able to solo farm UW smite crawlers, among other things. And just this week, when we need 2 roaring ether claws for the traveler gifts, I made a build capable of solo farming the Roaring Ethers, including the djinn that would sometimes be attacked to a group. And I can do it in HM as well with no difficulties.

Ok, getting back on topic here. I would love to see an improvement with every attribute. The mana cost for the majority of the skills are too high. There needs to be another method of balance, over energy cost. Due to the fact that as a paragon, with only 2 natural regen, it makes creating cross-class builds, for other purposes much more difficult. Say I'm trying to bring Scythe skills. Currently to be even worth the party slot to be a paragon with a scythe, you must bring much more energy management on your bar than required by any other class, since there aren't too many low cost paragon skills that have descent synergy.

Well, I hope the update will be the answer I'm looking for, It's not the end of the world if all it does is bash me into the ground even further.

I have been tinkering with builds for as long as I play.

And I know what you mean with this elitist bs, I have even been kicked from pug parties for not running a PvX build or for not using sab/discordway......

At this point I can only laugh about it and just play with Guildies and friends, occasionally I help out new players if I run into them since most of these discord elitist PvX template only using a'holes only hump around with their 3 necro heroes calling everybody a noob.........real classy, and then ppl wonder why new players are so rare in this game.......

Back on topic, I managed to get over 20 titles maxed on my Paragon without 3 necroway or PvX Wiki PvE builds so I can pretty much say that it can be done without em with ease, and it's more fun too since you made the builds yourself.

Try playing a fire ele. You literally just press 123123123123123123123 over and over again. All classes get "boring" if you play it enough times.

If you make other players do very big numbers like splinter/SoH, you'd at least be popular in pugs. Something like a "splinter chant" is the kind of skill needed. (IE change anthem of guidance to "next attack does X damage to other foes adjacent to target.) I don't know that this makes para any less boring for the player though.

Yes i know Holy Spear does conditional aoe but i didnt bring it up because you just dont get the condition very often to use it in pve. The main reason i brought up aoe dmg is because they did the same to mesmers in their update and they are a support class also. It would be fine having something like a splinter weapon type skill. The main thing i want to see is some changes in motivation, nothing drastic just some small tweaks.

My 2 cents.

Paragon skills are quite homogenized, I guess that can only be expected from a NF class with only 85ish skills (other profs would have more), it would be nice if many of the skills had a functionality change that promoted skillful gameplay.

I think the mesmer update has taught us that it is VERY easy to make any prof in this game have AOE potential, in fact off the top of my head, an easy way to give Paras AOE damage is to make it so that Blazing Spear hits adjacent foes with burning.

By Skillful Gameplay i refer to knowing when to use your skills to maximize the skill's benefit. The benefit should also be meaningful and the functionality should be less focused on situational utility ("Can't Touch This" and "Brace Yourself" though useful in certain areas, are absolutely terrible in others, it would be nice if the revamped skills did not follow "CTC" and "BY"'s direction of situational utility).

Every class in the game is going to have one or two "main" builds. The optimum build designed for either damage or prot/healing. To say that the paragon is boring as he has the one build that is optimised for PvE play is no different from saying that the necro is boring as you can either go Orders or MoP (yes you can go mm but its not as powerful).

What makes paragorn boring to play is that, besides spear attacks, almost all of its skills affect all party members or allies. All you have to do is activate your skills. No requirement for selecting targerts nor really requirement for timing either. Just c-space to build adrenaline and activate skills on recharge. Brainless and boring. On top of that you don't even see fancy numbers flying around.