Paragon -- Time for some PvP love

The Paragon is Anet's joke for PvP battles. Until there are some changes, I don't see how anyone can play it. I make three times as much Faction running any casting class and twice as much running a ranger, warrior, or a Sin. There's just not anything they can do that a secondaray Paragon can't do just as good or better.

The proximity of their shouts combined with the cost of their heals make them utterly impractical for keeping a team alive in JQ or Aspenwood. The spears fly so slow my nine year old kid can dodge them and the random nature of these two maps mean you can't sync well with your teammates at all. Sure you get FB and make haste in JQ for turtles, but so would anyone willing to put six or seven points in command.

Their hex removal is costly, condition removal weak due to the earshot restriction, and any bloke with empathy or SS can totally remove their skills. Zero AoE outside of Holy Spear and severely limited energy regen make them very poor for just about every secondary profession out there.

PvX has no great paragon builds and only one good one, which really isn't very good at all. Everyone knows they are gimped beyond use.

You can argue your case if you want in some kind of geek stand-off but facts are facts. My overall usefulness to a random pick-up team for faction points is nil. The percentage of game I win with my monk, mesmer, or ele is a clear 3-1 winner. Even my gimpy warrior can at least damage spike enough to keep things interesting, while my ranger is the all around jack-of-all-trades winner.

A paragon's usefulness in PvP could be increased I think without doing much overall damage to the game by:

1. Making Holy Spear the true anti-minion, anti-spirit PvP weapon. As it stands, it is an adreanline skill. Make it an energy skill to start. Currently, I might get off one Holy Spear which does great damage to minions, but never kills one outright. I can take them all down to 15% health, but if it takes me too much time to build and rebuild adrenaline then that spike does no good. Give it an ene drain with a short recharge and a paragon could shut down a minion master or a spirit spammer making them at least a tad bit useful.

2. Un-nerf Incoming. It's been taken down so many notches that it's basically just a silly skill to take. Especially when an extra Word of Healing or Glimmer is going to repair all the damage, recharge quicker, and cost less.

3. Faster spear chucking. Any skill that makes me wait 20 seconds to throw due to adrenaline gain better get there fast enough to score a hit. Like I said, my nine year old kid can dodge the stuff without breaking a sweat.

4. Crappy elites. I run Expel Hexes on my Paragon -- a mesmer no attribute -- just so I can have something remotely beneficial in PvP. Angelic Bond would work great as a shout that can't be removed provided it had a fast enough recharge. But the way things are now, there is no skill I can use that can't be countered almost immediately by any other class.

5. Motivation costs on all skills are too high for the low energy we're given. I take a focus item into every battle when going motivaiton, it's the only way in a place like JQ where you are running in packs of three of four. The Leadership energy gains suck when you aren't grouped up like in a PvE mission. Lower the costs on motivation skills for PvP.

6. The energy restore skills for a Paragon are terrible. There's the signet skill if target foe is burning, but that's it. The energy gain from surrounding allies is useless in Aspenwood and Jade Quarry.

The only way my paragon is useful in PvP is if I know what kind of team I'm getting on. Sure, I can luck up maybe 1 in every 5 matches and get some sync. But my mesmer, doesn't care whose on his team. Neither does my ele or my necro. Neither does any class really. Just hit enter mission and play normally -- there's no major impact. But a paragon is gimped in Random.

Like I said, make your geek arguments if you want, but we all know how much complaining starts when we're monkless or lacking AoE in JQ. No one complains about the lack of a paragon. In fact, most of us who do this often are thankful when we see a team minus the combat classes. When we see a paragon secondary on casting class though, we cheer. They can do their thing while still taking the very best of the paragon and putting it to work.

The problem is less the Paragon and more the design of the competitive missions; Guild Wars is a team game, and some classes, in particular all physicals expect Ranger, need backup to be fully effective, but in those missions you're often on your own.

pvp is balanced behind gvg and ha accordingly for some good and some bad reasons theres only about 1% of the times where pvp skills are balanced around low pvp areas; ra,jq,ab,fa, etc

for the love of god don't buff paragons

Wrong forum aside, paragons are pretty horrible anywhere. They're equally bad in PvE if they're not running imbagon. Good part is they're supposedly the next big update after Dervish?

Theres a reason they are pretty terrible. Its coz they used to be too powerful, and just like sins and dervishes to a more or less extent, theres no way for them to be balanced. They are either OP, or Underpowered.

I know people are gonna argue, and make suggestions as to how its possible to balance them, but at the moment in my mind they are fine. Just roll something else, they really arent THAT fun to play to begin with.

CMs, AB are not really considered that much in PvP balance, I think. They're fringe gametypes.

paragons need a lot of attention and you're certainly not the first to notice this. i hope Anet rolls out some skill changes soon.

to address your JQ dilemma, you might want to try running this on your paragon, I did a few months of JQ while playing my paragon, mostly drunk... getting points for the title y'know.

P/Mo
spear 12+1+1
smiting 12
healing 3

barbed spear
maiming spear
merciless spear
spear of light
castigation signet
bane signet
ray of judgment
restful breeze

if you throw RoJ at a shrine each NPC will still be alive, just barely. cycle through them with spear of light and the signets and they will be dead. crippling has obvious uses, hit the turtles or jugs with it if you see one.

OK, first off... don't post Q.Q in here then call us all geeks for potentially disagreeing with anything you are stating. If we are geeks, so are you.

Now, to your points. I will agree that playing a para in pvp is challenging. Though from your statements, I would gather that your concept of pvp focuses on JQ, FA and RA. These are 3 examples of a pvp format that is less focused on team-building. Your para can be more useful in a format that is more, shall we say, elite pvp.

Now, to the 5 points I pulled out of your post:
1) You need to think about how to build/rebuild adrenaline faster. There are several tools at your disposal from the para and warrior professions.

2) While the spear itself doesn't fire as fast as a bow, the refire rate on a spear is, I believe, right up there with the sword, thus making it quite effective for adrenaline building. Regarding your 9-year old dodging, perhaps you or your teammate should consider snaring him first. Then see if he can dodge your spears. Try playing a ranger in pvp. You will discover smart opponents will dodge their attacks too.

3) I don't have a problem with Expel Hexes. But since you seem to struggle with adrenaline and energy and spear-chucking, let me just direct you to Focused Anger+Aggresive Refrain or Soldier's Fury (without Aggressive). There are other good elites, but those two would be a good place for you to deal with your adrenaline issues.

4) Yes, leadership gain is not as effective in a 4-person team. But one of the basics of team synergy when you have a para is: The team needs to stay in shout range as much as possible, and the para needs to stand in optimal places within the team. It takes a little finesse. RA, JQ, and FA are perhaps not the places to go to find finesse, unless you are synching with some buddies.

5) Your statement should be true for any profession. Take your mesmer to RA and sometimes get randomly put into a team that already has a mesmer with the same elite. Or join RA and discover no healer, or two healers, or two monks but both are noobs with ROJ.

Overall I will agree with you that the para can be challenging in pvp. But, your arguments reflect more a need to get better at using the tools at your disposal, and playing in places that make more sense. RA is probably the worst place to go with a para. Over time, I've seen some very tough HA, TA and AB para teams. So tough, it caused para skill nerfs because many pvpers were Q.Qing.

In the end, if para isn't working for you, don't force it. Just use him as an imba in pve and everyone will love you. It sounds like you have other professions that suit you better in the pvp areas you play anyway.

I play a paragon and by no means think i am elite but I have no problem with energy or adrenalin. I use soldiers fury which takes care of both these problems because u can mostly spam your adrenalin attacks to regain energy fast. The other thing I have noticed is you dont get targeted early in pvp fights very often so you can use this to your advantage. we can also buff the hell out of our group as long as your team is smart enough to stay close to you and you are smart enough to position yourself in good spots. I am not saying paragon is the best pvp class I am too new to know what is for real but I do think we do some good. I say play what you think is fun and the rest be dammed if you are having fun you will learn to be good plus your keyboard doesnt shock you when you die all you have to do is restart.

OH BOY! Lets balance PvP for JQ, FA, and RA!

Also appealing to PvX shows that you really don't understand the game.

theyre awesome in gvg ...

u jsut need more than 1... and thye have like the 2nd best condition removal in game (its just a flesh wond) and they have plenty of SUPPORT, which is wat theyr emeant for, and NOT healers, also for the aoe part, no1 cares and they are fine for gvg and have good damage and good skills in command too

Paragons are pretty strong in PvE. The imbagon build doesn't need to be spoken for and the chants/shouts are especially strong when paired with a lot of physicals. If you can't exploit paragons in PvE, you're not doin it right. Just a pointer, consider running the more tedious builds on heroes(echo heavy builds that require micro'ing).

Some of their most powerful PvP skills have been nerfed, i.e. finale of restoration, mending refrain, soldier's fury. Also, paragons had a lot to do with the nerf to watch yourself, which in retrospect was an amazing skill that provided a party-wide fixed armor bonus. However, there's still some niche PvP uses; gvg maps that don't encourage splits, turreting. If anything, I'd say a slight buff to make the class more split friendly.. but I'm at a loss as to what that could possibly be, so...

lol
Probably because AoE is good in JQ.


Point by point:

No relevance to GvG, so maybe. 3 additional adrenaline really doesn't take too long to rebuild though.
Incoming is bad right now, but it serves a niche purpose.
That's what happens when you throw spears from max range. Quarterstep towards your target and you'll be doing a lot more damage.
It's true that Paragon elites tend to be pretty bad, but what would you really want? Defensive elites would just make spike builds harder to beat, and Cruel Spear is the only damage elite you need.
Also, don't you think that the reason Angelic Bond isn't like that is because it'd be too good?
Leadership gain is fine for 8v8.
See previous point.

tl;dr: The game is balanced around GvG. JQ doesn't matter all that much in the big picture.

JQ, FA, Ab, and RA are not serious PvP arenas. How an update effects HA and GvG ultimately decides if an update was a success. If classes are good in HA and GvG then the lower arenas will also be benefited. It is a trickle effect.
I do think paragons need to be buffed, but only the attack speed skill which i can't think of atm for some reason. I think that skill needs reworked to be more like flail.

Thing is we're already waiting long for a " dervish update " which i'm sure won't change anything in HA and GvG. However , it might lead to new " fun builds " or effective builds in JQ FA and AB .

The point is this paragon update you're suggesting , as the dervish update coming won't have any sense in those 2 main formats if other too OP builds there ( hexway , bbway and common balanced ) aren't changed at least a little.

I do think too many Paragon skills have underpowered PvP-versions, but I'm not going to support any post that complains about earshot range being too restrictive.

You're an idiot, my Paragon is my main and I use him almost exclusively. I don't Imbagon, and my parties never care (note: I pug a lot), and they enjoy the fact that I play a Paragon so well. They have plenty of good use outside of one build, every profession does. Stop living in the meta.

The problem with the paragon is ALOT of it's skills have been nerfed because in their old forms they were too easily abused when run in teams of paragons.

"Incoming!" chains for example..defensive anthem..

This thread didn't start off too well and doesn't look like it's going anywhere great either. I'd like to invite someone to bring this issue up again in the near future, but to try and tackle it in a different way, to address what can be done to the paragon for both high-end PvP and PvE. When we can establish a concrete understanding of what's wrong with the paragon and what we can do to fix the problems with them, we can talk. Until then,

Closed.