Dervish Update Preview

I agree with most of what you wrote.

That being said, you must admit that the focus on builds like ZV and Critscythe is because of the way ANet has handled the situation and the length of time it has gone on for, similar to the Shadowform issue for Assassins.

Its basically made people get stuck in the mindset of the Dervish as a dress wearing warrior, and not a unique hybrid FUN class.

My hope for the update is as you said, to make the Dervish fun and unique with its new skillset. My fear is that it won't change the gameplay much, and Dervishes will continue to be a joke somewhat.

The real difficulty is making Mysticism from the bottom-up a primary attribute that contributes to BOTH melee and enchantments. Otherwise the Dervish will always be pigeonholed into one or the other.

I still think the best solution is to make Mysticism's primary effect enchant related, with e-management and adrenaline management the primary foci. Then allow the enchant skills, especially the flash enchants to add a req 4 Mysticism effect that tacks on additional damage to melee attacks.

Basically each flash chant would have a damage range tertiary effect that only activates if Mysticism is 4 or greater, allowing the Dervish to precisely control the tradeoff in additional scythe damage or more primary spellcasting.

So, TLDR, Mysticism is the energy/adrenaline engine, and the skills the damage upgrades to melee attacks requiring a small Mysticism investment.

I thought this was obvious, but...

The reason MoP is good is because physicals hit fast, and you can buff them to hit exponentially more. A warrior with HB and/or splinter weapon can trigger MoP 5x a second. Spells don't do that, you can cast AoE spells at most once every 2s and there is no reason to believe flash enchantments will work faster than that. Letting spells trigger MoP would be almost worthless in the grand scheme of things, they are 10x worse at doing so. Until casters get something on the level of Asuran Scan to buff their armor-affected damage or something to turn their damage armor-ignoring they will never be able to hit things that are at 130 armor for anything meaningful unless their base spell damage is in the 200s or above

AoHM makes a big difference here, because of the order in which the armor penetrations stack. A 110 AR the enemy first loses 16% from strength, down to 92 AR. Then AoHM kicks in and bumps that down to 60 AR flat. So the warrior hits for a base 40 damage per hit (I think this is right based on mental calculations). Dervs on the other hand still hit enemies as if they were at AR 78, making their base damage about 32 assuming they have 16 in scythe mastery. So its a decent amount still. That's half an OoP permanently in effect.

The real reason warriors outdamage Dervs is that they can use an effective IAS that doesn't require them to take Drunken Master + play with beer goggles the entire time. Power Attack is nice, but only icing on the top of 33% IAS.

An interesting note is that scythe sins have very similar calculations to the warrior, since critical hits act as if they enemy's armor was 20 lower. The difference being that critical hits also force maximum damage, which of course massively boosts sin damage. Not to mention they have an elite slot open for something other than energy management.

I understand perfectly that fear. I'm mostly optimistic because some of the TK Krewe have garanteed that the changes were tested enough, and the previous big skill updates (especially the mesmer one) have been quite successful.

Can't wait until the update comes out and all the changes are revealed. Hope it's this week.

Whoa, AoHM affects effective armour rating now?
I agree it's going to boost the damage difference, but not quite like that. I've not calculated the numbers though - AoHM is a bit weird.


After Drunken Master, the next best IAS is Frenzy.
Both can (and should) take Frenzy if they're not taking Drunken Master. The Warrior can take Flail if he's afraid and the Derv can take Whirling Charge or even Heart of Fury, but both should be aiming for Frenzy.

AoHM at max rank treats enemy armor as if it was 32 lower.

Frenzy is good for the 1% of the time you have a dedicated E/Mo spamming prots on you (or areas without any enchant removal, but how many of those are there?) or another player with SY permanently up (even with SY its very dangerous since armor ignoring damage still rapes you). Otherwise its just stupid. No one likes to run Drunken Master, never mind the loss of a PvE slot. Choose one out of AoHM/SY/Asuran Scan to give up and have a significantly weaker build because of it. Flail ends up being an excellent IAS while Whirling Charge and Heart of Fury are both pure junk, being outside the attribute you are using and not nearly having a full uptime.

Lies and slander.
The Assassin is the first melee/caster hybrid, with emphasis on the caster side assisting the primary damage, which is melee.
The Factions manuscript in it's entirety shows the concept. A constant threat, dagger user, critical strikes cause improved damage. Works in a chain, light armor, fast, evasive, uses magic to weaken enemies and protect themselves.

Where Dervishes are enchants, Assassins are the opposite in Hexes.

Let's get it right. Dervish is a melee that uses magic to empower them and weaken enemies.

I've always gone through the manuscript descriptions and is why I picked my professions to begin with. That they were both mixes of magic and melee.
Shadowsteps were nerfed, IMS' other then Dash aren't really up to snuff for normal use, they can get a better critical rate with other weapons then they can with daggers. Critical strikes don't cause "Massive" damage with daggers low inherit damage. Hexes and spells that support them have been nerfed or weren't good to begin with.
They've gone down to Death Blossom, Way of the Master and Shadow form.

Also recall the Assassin Deadly Arts spike builds, there is no deadly arts or critical strike staves or even daggers.

Of course everyone wants to ignore the Assassins degrading from from their concept as long as it's popular for min/maxing and farming.

Anyways...my rage on what has happened to my Assassin aside.
Having a Scythe died to Mysticism would allow you to ignore Scythe Mastery completely and for the Dervish to use Mysticism as their basis and then use melee attacks from other professions.
Something like 12 Mysticism, then Warrior Melee attacks, add some enchants and what not. Do we really need to encourage secondary abuse further?

Assassins have had issue since Factions that were never addressed and Anet just slapped bandaids around the profession. Shadowform isn't the only issue, why are we able to get better crit rates with Wotm, critical eye, scythe mastery, then with Daggers? Not to mention I could technically still tack on another specific skill to boost my non-dagger crit rates even further, though I see no reason why I would need to. Masters of daggers my ass.
WotM and Shadow form are some BS. Especially considering what SF was before Deadly Paradox came out which is all they originally had to nerf to of killed SF abuse all that time ago.

Back to Dervishes, they lost their hybridization as PvP nerfs came in, and affected PvP before the existance of the ability to split skills. So then Dervish flavor disappeared from PvE in exchange for Dervish balance in PvP. Even with the split they didn't go back to revert what they had changed, so of course the Dervish would end up as it is now, when the options it had before were stomped.

Flash enchants don't need any Mysticism Req added to them. Why should they, the whole basis of this update is that they've done some heavy reworking to skills. The dervish could be completely functional after this update. If the worry is other professions, hit the other professions, the hell should I care. Sins using other weapons used to be a gimmick, now it's a full on strategy, roflmao.

Maybe I'm just to old fashioned for this new state of affairs in Guild Wars. WD was bad, Shadow form was bad, WotM didn't exist, deadly paradox didn't exist. Shadow of haste was broken...shadow of haste wasn't broken, impale was a hex. Avatar of Grenth was enchant removal...la dee da. Ebon Dust Aura made your weapon earth based so you always got your blind on enemies in PvE and you could combo that with a mesmer in your party to pass the blind around and reduce threat of melee. Let the Dervish be itself after the update and if X profession abuses it, hit them in their knees.

Sigh.

That is the concept yes, but when was the last time it was true? Exactly how many builds OTHER than the AP Caller uses hexes, in PvE at least? As it is NOW, the Sin is a melee damage engine using quick recharge attack chains to spam AoE armor ignoring damage. While simultaneously using enchants and stances for both extra armor and IAS. Not exactly a hybrid, every melee class buffs...

Using fluff lore to pick a class is fine, so long as you realize that the lore really doesn't reflect how the class actually plays.

Neither of which are implemented very well, but at least the Derv is getting a change.

So you agree that melee is its PRIMARY function, then we're back to the problem of not being as effective as others.

Again, in perfect happy world that would be true, but not as the game actually is in reality.

Exactly, which is counter to the manuscript description. However CS may not cause massive damage, but it does act as the fuel for massive damage skills.

There are some others, but yes this is the Sin distilled to its current essence.

True, however Mysticism is primarily a spell/enchant/CASTER based attribute, which would lend itself well to a caster weapon, whereas CS is NOT.

All builds and professions suffer from premise degradation over time as the playerbase min-maxes the best builds and skills.

I'm not saying Scythes tied to Mysticism, I'm talking CASTER weapons like staves and wands. Tradeoffs.

Tradeoffs, you seem unfamiliar with the concept. Those skills allow better crit rates true, but you can't Death Blossom with a Scythe for example.

Shadow Form is really just a bad idea, as are any "invincible" skills, they promote a lack of creativity and build diversity. ANY OP skill does this.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but apart from some gimmick builds that existed, the Dervish has always been melee for the simple reason that Mysticism was a terrible primary attribute that didn't really cater to a non-melee playstyle. The joke was always:

Mysticism Change: Mysticism now does nothing

As a BUFF

If you had read my idea fully you'd see that the Mysticism requirement wasn't for the main body of the skill, it was for an extra tertiary effect that added damage to the scythe, which would allow Dervishes to hit harder than other primary professions.

Nothing wrong with being old fashioned, but you have to be wary of rosy nostalgia clouding your facts and reason.

Thats the thing though.
Anet steered away from their concepts, and now we have professions with issues.
The assassin is a dervish, the Dervish is a...I don't even know.

Most of your statements don't actually take away from what I'm saying but just highlight what I'm saying. Things aren't where they should be.

The Dervish wasn't always a physical combatant, and the Dervish bomb build is an example of that.

Again they don't necessarily need any additional side effect tossed in to boost their melee damage. The update preview already shows that they expect you to run a flash enchantment, they expect that one type of skill will always be on your bar. If they balance the Dervish based on the idea that certain skills are on your bar, then really all they need is for those skills to be good at what they do. In the same light, Monks wouldn't need Divine Favor if the health boost was already tacked on to all skills inherently.
No need to say their should be a tertiary damage boost put into Mysticism, if the idea is that the skills are what will make the difference. In which case they just need to put skills in Mysticism that they expect the players to use. Since it's the primary attribute, non dervishes can't utilize the skills to their full extent. Might as well wait and see what they're going to do in regards to skills in Mysticism.

Caster staves for Mysticism would be nice, but then we steer even further away from the concepts, and going off the path and going forward without direction has not helped.
The Dervish is a frontliner at the end of the day, for his caster aspects if they can make them worth bringing on a frontliner then GG, all is good.

I need to create a thread or something to get this sin stuff off my chest >.> im blowing up in every thread now >.<.

The Dervish is more caster than melee, the Assassin is more melee than caster. That much should be clear.

No one is complaining that sins are better than paras at chucking spears. Is it because people actually realize that's not a Paragon's primary role, or is it because chucking spears doesn't beat other physical weapons?

Don't do stuff based on what came with the box. Hamstorm taught us that

Agreed on SF. Nothing wrong with the two other skills.

Before starting to throw accusations around, consider for a moment what are your motives for making the scythe Derv-exclusive. We all want to be noble and all that, but the fact is that we are not perfect.

My main is an axe warrior (so we're kinda alike I guess, since I suppose your main uses a main weapon from its class too?). I don't care if one day the Spirit's Strength rit suddenly starts doing more dps with an axe, however. There are more than one reasons for me to play a warrior.

Define abuse?

I may be wrong, but you do seem to regard playing unorthodox builds as abusive. Are Spirit's Strength spear chuckers abusing? How about Rt/R Splinter Barrage? Do you think Vampiric Touch was balanced to be used in any other build than the Touch Ranger?

If all rangers were supposed to wield bows and all assassins were supposed to wield daggers, Expertise wouldn't affect other attack skills and Way of the Master wouldn't exist. Heck, we probably wouldn't even have secondary professions. If you're going to have to be so orthodox, Mo/N or N/Mo should be banished from the game forever because lorewise that's ridiculous.

Playing one's secondary class was once frowned upon with good reason, since such builds tended to suck (I had myself Conjure Phatasm on my Ranger). While such an attitude stayed in PvP, PvE has evolved to be much more diverse.

And diversity is good until it becomes game-breaking. Scythe wars/sins compared to scythe dervs aren't game-breaking, the numbers are simply not that far apart.

Comparison is invalid. As you said, Crit Strikes for daggers is just about only good for e-management. Even if WotM affected daggers no one would take it.

Not Masters of daggers? Who uses the daggers better?

A master is defined as being one of the best in the domain. Sins are very much masters of daggers.

Flash Enchants are only good when frequent teardown is occurring, and the whole process is supposed to be fueled by Mysticism. Whether we worry about other professions or not, using Flash Enchants and not speccing into Mysticism as a Dervish is unthinkable. So I don't see what you're so upset about...

You do seem to take this as a free opportunity to suggest a nerf for other classes, however

We should probably nerf shield sets and martial enchantment mods too, because all these casters running around with spear and shield are really killing the landscape. What are they, wannabe paras?

Bad sense of humor aside, the community is increasingly more open-minded to what works better. Stuff like Sabway wouldn't have existed otherwise.

EDIT: double ninja'ed
And btw, most of what I said is what I wanted to get off my chest regarding what people are saying towards the whole thing, so if you feel like I'm judging do take it with a grain of salt

Actually, it treats your baseline as if it were 32 higher. (The difference being that AoHM does not contribute towards the armor floor that you'd otherwise hit in cases where the monster has less than 32 armor to start with or cracked armor and less than 112 armor to start with.)

I'll come back and finish this debate with firm calculations in a few hours.

Trust Chthon to catch you on technicalities . Though the second case can be explained as AoHM simply acting after Cracked Armor's effect. Its just must easier to think of things and explain them without bringing in another variable.

@haggis.
There differences apart, the statement was true theres 2 hybrids.
You have to trust some stuff that came out of the box, something needs to let you know what your getting into, and the profession descriptions were to serve that purpose.
When I talk about the sin's degraded to 3 prime skills, I just mean to say how the state of things are. As dagger users, they're death blossom, outside of that they aren't using daggers. Once you go PvE what role do the other dual attacks have? Death blossom gives your aoe and high damage, everything else has significantly less dps, and leaves you hanging for longer with the recharge times. Critical strike is the only dual that compares since it gives you back energy.

Abuse is a secondary build on a primary being broken simple is that.
You also missed why I mentioned flash enchantments to begin with. As a response that there shouldn't be any worry about them. Not upset about it, and I'm not suggesting a nerf, I said if things got out of control with another profession using them, just nerf them, which is through things like failure rates and other methods.

I'd love the Dervish to become more support and caster than melee, but of course this never will happen because they wield scythes (although I guess you could argue for the Paragon being an exception). My only reason for 'loving' this is because I love playing support class and helping, buffing and empowering my team mates with awesome skills.

Yes I love battering players, but I like being known, or feeling that I'm acknowledged by helping out my team mates in PvE and PvP (mostly PvP) - so hopefully the new dervish skills, when mixed with other PvP professions/skills will give me another option of support.

As promised:

Assume:
1. foes are lvl 28
2. foes follow normal monster armor progression with no race bonus/penalty, so 84 for casters, 94 for ranger/sin/derv, 104 for paragon, and 124 for warrior. [EDIT: As Kunder points out, AoHM's holy conversion means that warriors are also only 104. Ignore the 124 entries please.]
3. scythe is 15^50, customized
4. derv runs 14 scythe
5. war runs 14 strength, 12 scythe
5. between attack-spam build and damage from wherever finishing things off as needed, every hit is an attack skill, so strength always factors in
7. sin runs 14 crit strikes, 12 scythe, WotM, CritEye
8. everyone uses AoHM
9. Lux/Kurz rank of 5 (max is unreasonable assumption for most players)
10. Everyone has the same attack speed so damage per hit bears the same ratio to DPS across the board.

First, calculate crit chances:

Derv base crit chance @ 14 scythe
0.14 + (1 - 0.14) * 0.5 * 2^((8*20 + 4*14 + 6*12 - 15*28 - 100)/40) = 0.147717817

War/Sin base crit chance @ 12 scythe
0.12 + (1 - 0.12) * 0.5 * 2^((8*20 + 4*12 + 6*12 - 15*28 - 100)/40) = 0.126875

Sin crit chance accounting for all sources
Crit% = 1 - ((1- 0.126875) * (1 - 0.14) * (1 - 0.14) * (1 - 0.31)) = 0.554423358

Now calculate average base damage per hit versus various monsters:

derv vs 84 (caster)
non-crit
25 * (2^(((64 + 25) - 84) / 40)) * 1.15 * 1.2 = 37.6225168 round= 38
crit
41 * (2^(((64 + 25 + 20) - 84) / 40)) * 1.15 * 1.2 = 87.2582885 round= 87
weighted average
(0.147717817 * 87) + ((1 - 0.147717817) * 38) = 45.238173

derv vs 94 (ranger/sin/derv)
non-crit
31.6366395 round= 32
crit
73.375182 round= 73
weighted average
38.0564305

derv vs 104 (paragon)
non-crit
26.6031367 round= 27
crit
61.7009275 round= 62
weighted average
32.1701236

derv vs 124 (warrior)
non-crit
18.8112584 round= 19
crit
43.6291443 round= 44
weighted average
22.6929454


war vs 84 (caster)
non-crit
25 * (2^(((60 + 25) - (84 * (1 - 0.14))) / 40)) * 1.15 * 1.2 = 43.0375622 round= 43
crit
41 * (2^(((60 + 25 + 20) - (84 * (1 - 0.14))) / 40)) * 1.15 * 1.2 = 99.8174589 round= 100
weighted average
(0.126875 * 100) + ((1 - 0.126875) * 43) = 50.231875

war vs 94 (ranger/sin/derv)
non-crit
37.0788465 round= 37
crit
85.9973484 round = 86
weighted average
43.216875

war vs 104 (paragon)
non-crit
31.9451378 round= 32
crit
74.0906852 round= 74
weighted average
37.32875

war vs 124 (warrior)
non-crit
23.711655 round= 24
crit
54.9946843 round= 55
weighted average
27.933125


sin vs 84 (caster)
non-crit
25 * (2^(((60 + 25) - 84) / 40)) * 1.15 * 1.2 = 35.1030494 round= 35
crit
41 * (2^(((60 + 25 + 20) - 84) / 40)) * 1.15 * 1.2 = 81.414862 round= 81
weighted average
(0.554423358 * 81) + ((1 - 0.554423358) * 35) = 60.5034745

sin vs 94 (ranger/sin/derv)
non-crit
29.5180284 round = 30
crit
68.4614656 round= 68
weighted average
51.0680876

sin vs 104 (paragon)
non-crit
24.8216043 round= 25
crit
57.569001 round= 58
weighted average
43.2959708

sin vs 124 (warrior)
non-crit
17.5515247 round= 18
crit
40.707431 round= 41
weighted average
30.7517372

So.....

Sin > War > Derv

But:

1. It's not true that everyone has the same attack speed. Derv has crappy IAS options (unless they use Frenzy) and sin only has 2 fixed-activation-time attacks instead of 3.

2. Remember that this is (attack skill) base damage only. These differences need to be weighed against the differences in +dmg from attack skills. (Warriors get Power Attack; Dervs get better damage on Mystic+Ermites; Sin gets Malicious Strike (if they want) and free elite(usually WS).)

3. You could run 16 Scythe/Strength/Crit Strikes instead of 14. I haven't done that set of figures, but I expect off the top of my head that dervs would catch up a bit and warriors might pass sins against high-armored targets.

Things in this preview and in this thread that are of interest to me:

- People have been droning on about Aura of Holy Might and Zealous Vow for a good 10 pages now.

- 90% of Dervish skills are being altered in some way in this update.

- The entire point of this post was to put the previous two points in the same post.

- Also: http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...ht=Zealous+Vow

...

- Dervishes are adrenaline MACHINES in PvE. Scythes can hit 3 targets. Each hit target gives 1 adrenaline.

- Twin Moon Sweep gives you how much adrenaline when you ball targets properly?

- If only there was a skill that could charge it quickly...

- Reap Impurities is a splinter bomb in a box? That's kinda cool. But it requires a condition to blow up, and conditions suck!

- I wish there was a skill that just happened to put out disposable conditions in addition to doing something really good...

- Yay, a real IAS! But it also needs a teardown. I sure hope some of them do something useful...

...

This isn't some joke update that doesn't really change anything and you'll just have a good laugh at, and I seriously doubt you'll all just go back to playing Zealous Vow once it goes live.

Bravo

One thing though - AoHM bypasses the warrior's armor bonus. So 104 should be taken to be the 'normal', though certainly there are plenty of monsters with overly high armors of 124 and beyond. Like the god damn jade armours in WiK who have 140 damned armor, I took my ele AP nuker through WiK yesterday and raged when my searing heats went from 70 DPS on the normal enemies to <20 DPS on the jades.

Interesting to see that the Sin isn't too much better off in base damage. Just goes to show how important IAS and deep wound is. Probably also has a lot to do mentally with the fact that Sins are spiking more often.

Presumably a warrior speccing into tactics for Fear Me!'s increased critical rate (coupled with his already greater critical damage from strength) would actually let his base damage be higher? An 11/11/8 split with dual major runes should take away about half the sin's critical % advantage, whereas a sin with 16 critical strikes would have negligible advantage over 14 critical strikes. Still no deep wound spam or critical agility, but nice to know.

Pious Renewal-->Pious Assault is all i have to say.

Hell, I alone just droned for 10 pages about AoHM...

If it's your implication that at least one of ZV/AoHM/Mystic/Ermites is likely to get changed, I agree.

Yes, all that and SY! spamming. AoB looks like it could be a real winner.

You mean I don't have to use Frenzy any more?

You're right. Drat. Better edit my post.

Oy vey... losing strength means changing the output on Power Attack, which means doing a complete DPS analysis on both options, which means there's no way I'm getting to it anytime soon. (And I might as well wait until after the update changes everything anyway...) At first glance, you're probably right -- If there's anything Fear Me is going to help enough to justify shunting points from Strength, it would be scythes.

Balled targets are infrequent in general. I think 7 adrenaline for TMS is a tough sell for most encounters in PvE, especially since it's a tear-down skill, which should be more accessible IMO.

AoB seems like it could cause some problems in pvp. It could open the dervish up for abusing warrior attacks in pvp, adrenal engine with warrior level armour and caster level energy.

---
Mysticism change is actually good for dervish with what they are planning, it's the engine that fuels the dervish's skills which are mostly spells anyways, like it was supposed to be. People have forgotten about 75% of the dervishes skills, which are spells because they were so terrible, but it seems like that's what Anet is aiming to change. The dervish is more of a caster with melee tacked on, if you don't agree, count the skills. It's primary is designed to benefit the class the most, which is casting, now possible through flash enchantments and teardowns.

Agreed. You'd be surprised how often efficient and quick pulls in PvE don't result in balled targets... close enough together for a scythe anyways. The adrenaline cost is a bit high but Save Yourselves is 6 and people spam that enough, it just requires something like For Great Justice.

I don't see dervishes being the adrenaline machines that warriors, paragons and sins are but they have other tools at their disposal in addition to adrenaline, so the resource pressure shouldn't be too bad.

Even against only one target, TMS+AoB will presumely give about 4 adrenaline. One extra attack (skill) and you have six. That can be done, it seems, in less than 4 seconds to keep "SY!" constantly. Paragons will still be the best because they have extra buffing options and SY fuel their energy, but dervishes might nonetheless get a buff at spamming SY.

Against 3 enemies, that will be, what, 12 adrenaline? (!!) That's crazy. And I don't know about you, but enemies ball pretty easy on nightfall/ eotn/ WiK. I don't see as many balled targets in prophecies, though, but hitting at least 2 is doable often enough.

Unblockable, 12 adrenaline, 120 self-heal, huge synergy with melee buffers, higher armor and burning for something like Reap impurities to follow. I can see scythes getting nerfed to only hit one target just because of that.

Edit: Anyone noticed how Lyssa's Haste is strategically similar to several skills from GW2, especially the guardian virtues? To use the second interrupt effectively, you have to sacrifice the passive effect bonus. It seems too strong of a skill, but you have to priotize which effects you want to take advantage of. Looks FUN.

Really, it's perfect. The Dervish and the Paragon were the last two classes released in GW1 and they are omitted for the time being in GW2 so they will get their time to shine in GW1. Hopefully, it will stay this way until they shut down the servers. Somewhere in this thread someone said that this is going live this week for the Dervishes. I know it will be a while for the Paragon build if it ever happens.

I also remember KJ saying in a thread that was deleted some months ago that they were nerfing Shadow Form in this Dervish Update. Just an FYI: He called the Flash Enchantments, and Adrenaline based Scythe skills in the same post.

Unless dervish enchantments are all on a less than 10 second cooldown, or some skills allows them to recharge faster, I don't see this update doing anything interesting for Dervishes. I'm not sure why people are discussing the adrenaline necessary to use Twin Moon Sweep when the bigger issue is having an enchantment (a dervish enchantment, mind you) constantly available to actually use it.

Whatever that Mysticism change is it better not touch my orders hero.

If 90% skills are being changed, there's a decent chance that pretty much every current derv build is going to die.
Not all enchantments would need to be fast recharging. But for it to be really reliable you would need a few decent ones with a quick cooldown.

People should start looking at synergies rather than the skills themselves. I'm fairly convinced that none of the stuff will be broken on it's own. (Flash enchantments, perma avatar, all seem fine if balanced by numbers)

However, how will a flash enchantmen interract with other profession?

What will stop a warrrior from pumping shit down with a scythe and adrenline buffs? (Battle Rage + twin moon + whilring attack)

I think the most imbalanced builds (and they will exist) will come not from stuff people are discussing now, but from the stuff people aren't discussing. Unseen/forgotten synergies.

A flash enchantment is a completely new mechanic, how will it interract with "strange" skills: insta cast glyphs? Stances? etc.

I don't see the link between flash ench and glyphs, but we have to consider some things:
1-We're discussing about a very little part of the update. We don't know how works new misticism, the real range of damage and all the other 90%+ of altered skills.
2-Would this update to derv skills buff only the derv itself, or we'll still see sins,wars and(why not?) rangers using scythes, even better than a primary derv as now?
3-Every example in the preview is referred to primary derv using derv-only skills. How that will interact with others profs ench, weapons and such is still to see.
4-I think that from now to the update relelase, and for some times later it, we'll see hordes of derv coming up where before was very few, as happened to Rits and Mezs last year.

At the beginning of the thread i said "I wont create a new char for use the derv, too lazy". And here i am with a lvl 20 derv running for vabbi....I'm a liar.

Well, Flash Enchantments do not abide by PvP (there is some PvE) spell rules in that they don't have cast times.

This might exempt them from various skills such as glyph of sacrifice, enabling the stacking of various spells on top of eachother.

Certain already existing builds, for example, require the casting of spells to work, how will these get affected by "insta" cast spells, something previously impossible. This is not some small change, this is a whole new mechanic for PvP that probably will break it in some areas.

In order to see how complicated this issue is, think of every possible way these new skills aren't meant to be used.

For example:

Avatar of Balhazar will be a permanently maintainable avatar that gives you +40 armor and speed boost. (Or whatever) What if the new mysticism somehow supplied enough energy for a derv to carry Monks skills. (Think rof etc)

It wouldn't take too long before people start throwing together skills so that they create a healer with 110 permanent base armor (thus near impossible to kill) with beast energy management.


I'm sure these are the obvious things the TK probably will have in mind and thus balance accordingly, but there is thousands of possible synergies that might create redicilously imbalanced builds. (Such as unkillable healers, rediclious damage dealers, etc) And knowing the TK and their previous updates, we should prepare for the worst.

For the worst? Why not for the best.

I think that this update will effetively pickup all the downtime the derv has suffered ^_^

Historically, updates designed to "shake things up" by buffing/changing a lot of skills in one shot have been disastrous.

In fairness there were just two screwed up skills in the massive mesmer update, mind wrack and crippling anguish. Yeah it sucked, but it was nothing like the earlier assassin and ritualist overhauls that required years of rebalancing. It did make Esurges more common on balanced teams at the time, and did a lot to make the class have presence in low end PvP, so good has come of it. TK's done a lot better than Izzy's solo work.

Change makes me play ~ its all good... I am on the fence if I will play the dervish any more than I rarely do now. But what it will do is make me work my other characters in ways to stop the dervish (enchantment removal / skill stoppers power spike etc.. it will be fun)

A good disaster would be a lot more fun than the status quo!

At least for the moment.

*Makes popcorn waiting for the train to crash*

historically big skill updates meant to shake things up have actually made the game more fun, if only temporarily before the issues with the skills are fully utilized.

I'm fairly sure alot of the "PvP" community left when NF came around, or even EOTN.

If you're talking PvE, sure. The majority of people enjoy overpowered play (I myself do aswell in PvE), hitting 2000 is simply more fun than hitting 200. However, when we're talking about 'breaking the game' and such, we're indirectly referring to PvP.

PvE doesn't need to be balanced, it's brainless buttonbash. Monsters don't care if they die in 1 second or in 10. This, however, doesn't mean there doesn't need to exist some balance tough...

For PvP, every large update made all the competitive players leave, only to get replaced by less and less competitive people. It would be hard for that to happen now, but saying every major update was good for the game is clearly nonsense. Otherwise GW wouldn't be as dead as it is now...

And thus, I'm looking forward to the overpowered play were going to have, yet at the same time am going to watch GW's gameplay get dumbed down again. Atleast that's what I'm expecting/fearing what will happen.

The Mesmer update, which was fairly large in and of itself, didn't cause that much of an outrage. It took a while for a certain spike to get fixed, sure, but that's what happens when you buff damage where damage does not need to be buffed.

They are not buffing the damage on many skills, just changing how they work. It sounds like they are making a bunch of condi-specific flashchants and giving the Dervish it's own versions of Enraging Charge, which isn't all that broken.

Im not sure why everyone is getting so excited about this....wow so now when i want to do some random dungeon or mission with my derv it might be slightly easier/faster. Dervs were never that broken or bad. If you wanted to use a derv in pve, you could easily make them useful.

What i dont understand is why they did all this work to completely redo this class, and even invent new game mechanics, all just for low end pve titles and stuff. I would much rather they spent all that time making changes to end game pve, or doing a new skill 'balance' cycle.

Update will come and everyone will have fun dicking around for a couple days on their derv alt. Then everyone who never mained derv or was never originally interested in them will move on to w/e they did before the update, and all the derv lover will continue to love dervs. it wont have any 'endgame' pve implications and we will have to wait, but it doesnt look like it will affect pvp too much either (but pvp is dead anyway so who cares.)

so, i dunno. When it comes out, ill hop on derv, explore some new builds, do a couple dungeons for shts and giggles and then after that ill probably never touch derv again.

You must not have ever played a mesmer before the mesmer update.

Well, it's true that I kind of wish they added more attributes instead more professions, making the new primary attributes alternate primaries to the old professions, so you can switch between them, but you can't have them both at the same time. Necromancers with spawning power as alternate primary, warriors with leadership, rangers with critical strikes, monks with mysticism, mesmers with the cronomancer primary, and elementalists with the summoner one.
That kind of stuff.
They would have saved in models, and kept balance with just 6 professions, while adding more possibilities.

But it's not like can change all that now, XD.