Dervish Update Preview

Uhm. so.. This everyone been waiting for..

yet, im not gonna make dervish, still i dont like em

I am waiting to see the next generation of A/D or D/A to abuse the new skills with SF.

If the mesmer update was any indicator, expect the D to be borderline broken. But to me, anything to breathe a little life into to game would be appreciated and good.

Make sure you get your nightfall vanquishes before this hits or you could be in a new world of pain with aoe dervishes and heros bunching together. Not to mention the ridiculous amount of rezzes in the desolations.

Lets just hope that they don't nerf the ........... out of it after a week or so.

Kids got their candies finally. no more QQing, phew

So now the Sin/D is going to be even more powerful.

No... way...

Reap Impurities is a brand new, self-packaged Splinter Weapon. Expect it in SCs. Think Enfeebling Blood --> Reap Impurities for good synergy with a hero bar. And I'm sure there will be many more.

Please, ANet, give the Dervish their time in the spotlight. Feel free to break the heck out of the class.

WTS Furious Scythe Snathes for 100k each.

^ It's bound to happen.

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Btw, does anybody know the new description of Mysticism? The article references it but doesn't tell us what it is.

Not only nightfall, if you havent vanquished kryta yet, i suggest people do that NOW, being that the hench in prophecies are just pretty crappy and they already get steamrolled pretty easily by the peacekeeper mobs. The peacekeeper Sibyl is already a hefty dervish and can properly rape your party if you brought the wrong hench/hero setup.

Fixed and +1

Still, seems they've done a nice and huge job. But personally i wont create a new char only for this...too lazy.

Think http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Withering_Aura

Not really. We already have instant cast skills in the game - flash enchantments are basically just moving around the triggers on existing mechanics. Moving while casting, however, may be something that the GW1 engine simply can't handle - correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there's any skill currently in the game with an activation time that can be used while moving.

Shouts can be used while moving and casting.

edit - nvm, shouts don't have activation time, but it should be the same thing as flash enchantment, just called differently and removable.

I wasn't talking about which profession is the best with something, but about unique skill mechanics, excepting those related to weapons, since those can't be moved no mater how you look at it (for example, you can't make a sword deal double strikes, or a hammer hit multiple targets without skills, or an axe attack in range like spears and bows) in the same way you can't make a necromancer have Divine Favor. It's just a quirk that goes with the profession.

Life steal is nothing even close to unique to necromancers.
Rangers, ritualists, assassins and even dervishes have life steal in some of their skills.

Ritualsits can protect a lot too, in some cases even better than monks. Damage reduction, blocking, counter-damage... they can do that too.

Dual attacks are part of dagger mastery, it's like the mutiple attacks in scythes.
Yeah, it's unique, but it's not a type of skill mechanic, it just a quirk of the weapon that skills may interact with.

Mesmers do have quite some energy steal, but necromancers and assassins (and even rangers) also have some energy denial and energy gain skills. Not energy stealing, but energy denial nevertheless.
Anyways, the number of skills that say 'steal' energy instead telling you that you 'gain' energy, it's very low. I think there's only 4 Mesmer skills that actually say that you 'steal' the energy. Meaning that you won't gain the energy if target foe's energy is 0, so 'gain' is still better than 'steal'.

Elementalists have Ride the Lightning, so shadow stepping is not really unique to assassins. The skill calls it 'Riding the Lightning', but it's actually a shadow step.

But yeah, I did forgot echoes, I like those when they are refrains, it's nice having effects that reapply themselves.

As for skills that could be turned into 'flash' enchantments for Elementalists, pretty much any Enchantment with 1 or less casting time and an initial or final effect that would be more versatile and useful to them if you could activate it while moving or while following someone would do.
For now only two Elementalist skills fit that:
* Flame Djinn's Haste.
* Burning Speed.
There are other PBAoE skills that would benefit from a Flash activation, but they are not enchantments. They are either just spells or hexes, so I wouldn't touch those, unless a clean way to turn them into Enchantments was devised.
The first one with that possibility would be Double Dragon, since it has an effect on the caster, but then you would be able to strip the effect. Still, being able to activate it without people having time to have a tea with pastries and leave before the spell is activated would compensate the effect being susceptible of removal. 3/4 may sound a short activation time, but you can't imagine how often people run away AFTER you started to activate it, without any kind of casting time decrease effect on you.

What I am most excited about: Dervish enchantment removal without removing other enchantments. This will totally be fun with maintained enchantments from other classes. Using assassin enchantments that are maintained will be great. Cause a bunch of dervish aoe damage and teleport out when you want to. Brilliant.

Sustainable avatars. Fantastic.

Overall this is the thing that will get me to play GW1 a bit again. I really like the flash enchantment thing. I can't wait to throw some SC type things together. Also, I can't wait to see what green scythes become popular because they have adrenal mods and how much adrenal snathes end up selling for lol.

A few RoJ monks, and even a SF ele with it It will be fun to try it all.

Hoping** to see this by March.

Excited, but also nervous and If they are changing 90% of the skills, it's almost a new prof.

Can't wait to see what kind of fun builds to make though...

Fun to test and and to desmatle with mesmers Kodos!

lol non elite whirling axe, in before the nerf

P.S. Bonded Dervs juggling chants can now remove only their personal enchantments. VoS recast time covered by Lyssa's Haste?

I deleted my dervish a year ago. I really regret it :[

I'm remaking one btw. Might make me play a bit again!

Runes - check
Weapon - check
Update- waiting anxiously

The market's already rising people. Might as well buy what you know you're gonna need right now

Whoo, so glad I held onto my scythe mods. The new changes sound really promising. Definitely tempted to roll a new Derv when this hits.

Whaaaaaaa....

I mean, wow. It's almost a brand new profession.

Yay! I loved my dervish main for many reasons (ok, because I love how she looks :P), but the "stopping to cast" drove me bonkers. Was getting close to switching my main to one of my warriors. The addition of flash enchantments is exactly what I needed to keep me from doing that. So so excited about this change.

Now all I need for perfect character sexiness is for these new changes to allow for a viable non-avatar dagger-derv playstyle (possible), and for Shiro's daggers requirement to be lowered to 12 dagger mastery (yeah, right). /sigh A girl can dream.

Oh man, this so much. My main is a war, and I really like how the class can unleash assaults without having to really stop. The stop-to-cast aspect of the Dervish was arguably the main reason that made my drop my Derv alt.

I'm itching to see the rest of the skill updates.

This will be really fun. It will also be fun to try some stuff out with 3 derv heroes on my monk to bond them all just to see what happens, or my ER ele

Yeah it's annoying that avatars are among the few ways to play derv uniquely, but what's the point of pimping out your toon with nice looking armor if you're going to turn into a hermaphrodite... i'm looking at you lyssa

looks good the new skills.

Since we're basically getting a new profession with all this changes,
can we get some pants for derv males as well? Please... no?... ok..

Hehe, at least we have costumes for it ^^

Sorry, I haven't read every post in this thread. I assume the ability to use flash enchantments is going to be solely linked to Mysticism. I also assume that the ability to use a scythe by other professions will now be limited to some extent.

I wouldn't be surprised to see something along the lines that the 0 cast time requires 5 mysticism or higher.

Good thing about pretty much an entire new profession (if the 90% of skill changes from first page is to be believed) it also changes every other class / build too, because of dervish secondary. New farming builds, pvp builds and so forth.

A breath of fresh air.

Yes, yes and more yes. I may need to do some Zaishen dailies since the market is going to be crazy for tomes.

I'm a bit disappointed with Twin Moon Sweep. It was one of my favorite skills, and they even said it was good, but now it's going to be harder to use. Other than that I loved the rest.

You would want them to brief us on what they're probably unsure of? It's the same with some in the GW2 crowd. How can they preview an iteration when they tell us they constantly go back to the drawing board?

"Ok guys, here's what we're working on." Two weeks later: "Well we've found that's not going to work, sorry for getting all your hopes up, but forget those ideas please." I, for one, don't want to go through that; tell me what's going to happen, there's more than enough unworkable suggestions by the community.

I'm very saddened by the people who are so happy.

There were only three skills in that preview that were worth anything at all. They were Pious Fury (which will require constant enchantment loss to be worth anything), Aura Slicer (debatable; I would say that inflicting Cracked Armor is the Necromancer's job), and Pious Assault.

But the only way Pious Assault will be worth using is if we somehow get the power to use one flash enchantment per second (any less and Pious Assault will not be able to compete with attack skill spam).

So, the question becomes: will we be able to pump out flash enchantments that often post-update? The leaks were inconclusive on that matter.

Of course, there are other big questions at play here about some of the skills from the leak, but I don't think we're supposed to talk about that.

Ohey, it's the same stuff I saw in August in the TK notes that were leaked.

Wait....why did this take so long then?

You starve a dog for days and they will get excited over the smallest morsel of food. We've been starved for months.

Except that in this metaphor, the "food" is "update to make the dervish mean something", and all this preview gives us is a message saying "here's some words about stuff that will not help the dervish one bit on it's own, but we promise there will be more".

Avatar of Balthazar
Balthazar's Fury
Sand Shards before battle then,
Aura Slicer and Mystic Twister....

can anyone honestly comprehend the massive AoE sh!tstorm that would be unleashed by just two attack skills. Go Dervish and have a Water ele with snare....omg the horror!

In PvE? Not much, seeing as how it's all elemental damage. In PvP, if more than one person gets hit with that, they deserve whatever they get.

Furthermore, Aura Slicer is adrenaline-based, meaning that by the time you get it off, you've had to get off multiple attacks, vastly cutting down on the dps potential of such a combo.

Also, what makes you think Sand Shards will not be part of the 90% of dervish skills that are being changed?

Admittedly though, the vast majority of those changes will likely just be conversion of old enchantments to flash enchantments, or something equally minor.

I'm guessing that 4 months were taken to test the imba-ness of all the "teardown" combos possible... This is the only logical explanation, you see. Looks interesting, though.

I can assure you that this was not the case.

Because flash enchantments disable one another, you are never going to get more than one such combo every few seconds (well, unless that one skill from the leaks work the way I hope it does). That will not even be enough to compete with WS builds, to say nothing of attack skill spam.

And even if I'm right about that one skill, it certainly won't be enough to break the game damage-wise.