Update - Thursday, December 8, 2011

Only pointing out the weaknesses of these lines.

Listen, the amount of armour ignoring damage isn't reduced but the HP is raised. That has the same effect. If a mob has 900 hp and it's raised to 1000 hp, I have to use more attacks to kill the same mob. It makes no difference in that sense for the necro whether they reduced the damage he/she does or if the hp amount of enemies is raised.

You talk about specific roles, but I am talking about doing missions in general for titles and not so much silly UW clear builds and to have 1 curses built that is effective is very poor.

That's just like para's who have only one build called imbagon.

There is really only 1 effective curse build now. Sorry, thats the way it is. I don't think Necros are near the front of the line for getting their own update soon.

Stuff like IAU being applied after the capping of armor and the effects of Cracked Armor, and +armor from items being applied differently depending on whether its an insignia bonus or an inherent bonus. And there is stuff like EBSoH which you have to test to figure out that it doesn't work on most, but not all, armor ignoring damage. Then we have prots like SoA always applying itself after Prot Spirit but Shielding Hands applies depending on the order you cast it, even though both apply the same damage reduction effect to players.

Indecisive is a bit too tame, I find the work clusterRED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GO to be a better description.

Don't you guys never get sick of using that "one effective build" all the time?

Yep and that's the underlying problem that is made worse by this.

You see, not everybody wants to play the same build over and over and not everybody does UWSC for a living.

Some people just want to create builds with different skills but it's these crazy "efficient" builds that need to be considered that ruin it for other players that are less hardcore in that respect.

This update shows that the ele is getting some updates to make them interesting again.

Para needs that.

Necro needs that.

But the necro is one of the original classes and just has been nerfed to oblivion. It used to be my favourite class that I hardly play anymore. Let the heroes do it because it's boring.

You may say that it's the way it is, but that doesn't make it better and this HM update just makes that even worse. Hundreds of skills, but you only get to use one build.

And I am sure I am allowed to be unhappy about that.

^ You should probably try experimenting with paragoons, they're not that bad. Also, Necromancers are versatile. The only issue is people now have an understanding of what curses spells are strong and what aren't. Hence why you wouldn't gimp yourself with the bad ones. Still got Death and Blood which people DO use. Orders, Minion Mastery, soul reaping for N/x hybrid bars, etc.

I realize that higher HP reduces effectiveness of armor ignoring damage. more accurately, LESS ARMOR, reduces effectiveness of armor ignoring damage. indirectly, that is. The DPS of armor ignoring damage would remain constant while the effectiveness of armor sensitive damage would raise.

but the 'higher HP' argument can be made about armor sensitive damage as well. Higher HP just makes killing stuff harder.

The idea that Necros are in bad shape is ridiculous. They have some of the more versatile build options available to them. The only trouble lays in the fact that MOST of these builds are best left to heroes. Necro players don't have much to work with that isn't rehashing hero builds for their own.

I saw this a long time coming though. the more classes get updated, the more other classes, who were fine before, are suddenly wanting their update because people are using the newer updated classes.
But I digress, all this relays on a balance we're not even sure of yet. How much more health they'll have vs how much less armor.

Necromancers are nowhere near a bad situation. There's a big difference between only having 1 build for 1 attribute, and 1 build for the entire profession (paragons).

Another random question:

Will Doublecast skills literally "Doublecast", and trigger the effects of a spell, Backfire, twice?

Since they have already buffed up Rits and Mesmer damages, one can also say they have buffed them up for NM too. Since some are already saying eles kill slower than energy surge mesmers even in NM, then sure, go ahead and buff up eles for NM, who cares? But Anet doesn't have to scew with everyone's damages by making such a blanketing change on armor/hp ratio.

I don't see why they need to mess up everyone's damage by screwing with the armor/hp ratio. If they want to buff eles, just buff up their damage numbers enough like what they did for rits and mesmers without messing with general PvE hp/armor ratio.

They don't have to nerf armor ignoring damage and make rits and mesmers kill slower (due to higher hps) in order to buff eles. They can just buff up eles enough to make them balanced.

I won't be surprised if this update becomes a general resultant nerf to all classes since with cracked armor, we can already get -20 armor easily in HM right now without buffing hp of HM monsters. And cracked armor is very easily included into a team build.

Not true, armor ignoring damage is not affected by armor at all. Therefore less or more armor does NOT reduce nor increase effectiveness of armor IGNORING damages.

However, increasing hp DOES reduce the effectiveness of all damages in general because you would kill slower.

Judging by the individual spell descriptions, no. You are not casting two spells, rather a single spell that targets an ally and additionally affects yourself.

Rangers have like 0 effective builds right now. Can they get fixed first?

Pretty much every single skill worth using on a Ranger has in fact been nerfed over the past few years...

Totally untrue. Antidote signet is still good

More like 0 OP meta builds. The best thing about the Ranger is people are left to experiment with them rather than copy/pasting a meta build from pvx and rolling HM content like a pair of loaded dice. The Paragon shares this to but the Imbagon overshadows it.

I don't really know what you mean by "OP meta build" but there really aren't any effective builds.. AT ALL.

Things that kinda work:

AP Trappers: decent for guarding backline with dust traps/throw dirt and stuff, also get to pack PvE skills to use with AP. completely outclassed by AP Air eles, among other things like curse necros/etc. plus the fact that PvE skills + secondary elite skill makes them good doesn't really mean much for the ranger...

Ignite Arrows/EBSoH/Incendiary Arrows - gives okay damage, but no room for utility since you don't have any spare energy. completely outclassed by better dedicated damage dealers.

Barrage-type builds: see above

BHA/Prep+Concussion Shot: standard interrupt/shutdowns, completely outclassed by mesmers now which both disrupt better and deal more damage simultaneously. Not to mention technobabble is sufficient for 99% of the time anyway.

Beastmasters: they got better with bar compression of removing charm animal. Pet AI still sucks. Strike as One needs to be a non-elite 0 energy 2s cooldown shadowstep for these things to be useful at fighting rather than walking.

Pet/Bow hybrids with Enraged Lunge/Volley/Interrupts: good builds offering decent damage and disruption. but pets still take way too long to respond...



Things which used to be very effective and were nerfed for no reason:

Ebon Dust Aura: R/D blindbots were amazing, and volley+splinter weapon still allowed for decent damage.

Expert's Dexterity: allowed you to chain dagger attacks at 2s cooldown for infinite kd locks or just loads of damage. golden lotus --> jungle strike --> trampling ox/death blossom.
the new version is completely utterly useless due to the fact that Rangers need their elites either for energy management or something more substantial than an IAS.

Asuran Scan: pretty much the only thing that enabled rangers to compete with other physicals for damage dealing in PvE. the new version is completely useless.

Turrets in general: Flail was the only sustainable viable IAS. Penetrating Attack/Sundering Attack did not need an aftercast.

Barrage w/ splinter weapon (and potentially MoP) is still quite effective in dealing damage and lets you easily keep up SY. Not quite as good as melee because of the slower attack speed but you can camp EBSoH along with your caster heroes. Basically plays as an imbagon that actually hurts things.

Rangers are also very good at dagger builds with pets. Better damage than Sins actually, but with the drawback of not having SY with them. Not a big problem for the 95% of the game outside HM elite areas though.

Been playing a lot of Ranger recently on my second account, mostly because of the options. They're weaker than Warriors, Dervishes, and Assassins, but can do the job well enough to be fun and effective in most situations.

That having been said, here's what I think Rangers lack:

-IAS independent of pet/secondary. NRA is actually a fairly good skill (could be improved, but it's workable), but obviously requires a pet. There are a couple other general IAS options (Drunken Master, Flail, Lightning Reflexes and Frenzy), but they're either unsustainable or depend on a pet or secondary profession.
-Energy management. Expertise is a good system, and makes builds that have some adrenaline skills feel very spammy. With daggers though, you HAVE to bring Scavenger or some other form of gain. Bows as well have zero good options for gaining energy. It's almost the same problem as the Ele's Energy Storage... just having high energy is not management. Just making things cost less is not management.
-Bows need to be worthwhile. IA and Barrage are fine, but the builds are always just built around making the elite shine as much as possible. I'd really like to be able to do more things with a bow.

I meant that it reduces the effectiveness indirectly, due to the fact that armor-sensitive damage is more effective on targets with lower armor. Right now, in HM Armor ignoring damage is king. If you lowered the armor level, armor sensitive damage will even out when compared to armor -ignoring- damage.

And yes, increasing HP reduces effectiveness of all damage sources. I said this. This is also most certainly a GOOD thing. People have been saying HM is too easy for ages now.

Heh, so much discussion about the skill update. I'm still curious to see what happens with Nick and/or Yakkington tomorrow

Armor does not affect armor ignoring damage period! Not directly or even indirectly. Trying to twist your mind to justify indirect influence of armor on armor ignoring damage only leads to greater confusion and is probably the wrong concept.

If you lower armor level by a little while at the same time increasing hp by LOTS and LOTS, it would still be a resultant nerf to ALL damage classes. As it is right now, I can lower HM monster armor by -20, down to 60 armor, using simple cracked armor condition, without having the side effect of raising HM monster's hp.

So whether the update would be a resultant nerf or buff to all classes compared to what we already have through cracked armor, depends on how much they raise or lower hp and armor.

Most people who say this tend to avoid HM elite areas like HM DoA, and HM UW. You need to differentiate between the braggers (i.e. I also can say anything I want on the internet without proofs) and those who actually perform these HM areas, using just heroes, with proven time records, and without using cons.

Yeah, lack of good IAS is a huge problem. Frenzy is fun though

Reducing energy costs ARE energy management. The best kind of energy management, in fact. The problem is that a great many Ranger skills tend to be 10e+ and require Expertise to be brought down to the standard 5e for attack skills. Also, incredibly useful PvE skills that you really NEED cost a ton of energy and most aren't affected by Expertise.

Daggers are another matter though. 13 Expertise = 2e per skill. A whole dagger chain costs 2e with zealous daggers. Unless you are mixing in expensive Pet Attacks along with NRA you should never have problems.

Agreed. Ideally if Barrage/Volley could be buffed to IA's range and IA could have its recharge lowered to 2s or so we would have a lot more variety. Because pretty much everything in PvE needs one of those 3 skills. Barrage would be pure damage, Volley would be for other elites, IA for prep builds.

You're completely misunderstanding what I am saying.

Bolded the important parts. Nowhere in there did I say that armor ignoring damage is affected by armor lol.

In an ideal case, armor is lowered just enough so that armor ignoring damage is still worth something, and isn't completely surpassed by armor sensitive damage.

In a less than ideal case, armor is lowered too much and armor sensitive damage overtakes ignoring damage, and everything is just back to the way it was pre-HM.

Rangers have good enough AoE. What they need is either higher damage across the board, or shorter base attack speed. That along with tweaks to traps, bow attacks, and spirits.

Though, I seem to be the only one anymore that thinks balling a group up and blowing them to hell is a terribly boring way to play the game, so the only way anyone will be happy is if every class has baller AoE damage because skrew single target damage.. or something like that.

lol I guess you don't pug uw much... you should try it and you'll realize that most teams fail. even good teams take 20-30 min. is that really too short a time to earn 1 ecto from an end chest? i don't think so...

ot: capped all the ele elites for my ele, guess i'm ready for whatever comes.

Spirits could use 3/4s activation times and recharge cuts, that would make them from slow-down skill for players (and AIs "CC yourself for 5 secconds") to something that is at very least not self-inflicted disadvantage.

Well, best way for me is strong single target damage with decent AoE splash.

Well, you are right. Less armour and higher HP both reduce the effectiveness of armour ignoring damage.

The argument that higher HP makes killing stuff harder depends. Because it comes together with lowered armour, it will likely not make it harder for normal damage that doesn't ignore armour. I would think that's the point of it. Ele's will do more damage which will offset the HP gain the mobs get.

When I say the necro is in bad shape, you misunderstand me. I know that there are a few builds that are very efficient, but as you stated it's better to let heroes do them. This is part of the problem. It just isn't fun to play a necro anymore. The versatility you speak of doesn't exist so much within specific lines. Sure you can be MM in various ways but yeah it's not a fun thing to do, it's tedious at best. For curses SS, MoP can work really well, but that is for curses then is it?

And not sure what the FotM builds do with blood magic these days, but even there blood has already been nerfed with longer recharge times and even though a lot of skills are offensive skills in the blood line, it's just not a very viable line, especially now that SV will become less effective by this update, for example.

So, I still believe that this update will even further limit the options for players playing necro's. The N/Rt build is obviously untouched and so are the MM builds so the basic heroes everybody runs will not change much there.

I just feel that Anet saw that the Rit was too good of a dps choice, especially for secondaries, so they made some changes there with the spirits and nerfed some of their skills so their dps wouldn't go crazy in HM in comparison. So that's fine.

But even the SS/MoP combo will be less effective because they deal armour ignoring damage. I will say though, that a lot depends on how much the armour of mobs is lowered and how much HP they will gain. This will determine how much of an effect this will have on the necro class.

And to answer the other person about going to UW: No, I don't pug to UW much, because I hardly ever go to UW anymore at all. I just don't think it means that much anymore to me. I got two obsidian sets when it still meant something. Now it's all too easy to go farm ecto's.

I really just wonder why in this game, you either are stuck with bad builds or gimmick builds. There doesn't seem to be something in between much.

The idea that people do UW split up into smaller groups and can do this, means that it's not an elite zone anymore, but that's just my view on that. I think for pugs the biggest problem is how the quests are so easy to fail just because of a silly thing. I am sure that a pug can do UW but it takes a long time. I understand that UWSC exists, because the problem too is that in a normal way it really takes too long to complete it. Instances that take hours to complete...well, most people don't have the time for that.

Still, they saw that the ele was underused and decided to do something about that even before taking on the para problem and for me, in the mean time the necro will get nerfed because their effectiveness is lowered again. By how much, well that entirely depends on the actual changes in HM. I haven't seen numbers on that yet. I am thinking though that people will start taking more ele's instead of necro's. Of course I could be wrong, but this is my expectation. Ele enemies will certainly rip through minions (and spirits) a lot easier now too and that's another side effect that can be expected. I really cannot help but wonder how this will affect the game. It could be interesting I suppose but we'll see I guess.

The majority of bow attacks are just completely useless. For example Determined Shot, Crossfire, Called Shot, Quick Shot, Focused Shot, Arcing Shot, Precision Shot, etc. etc.

The majority of pet attacks are also useless, although not as much...
IMO there needs to be a PvE-only pet skill that costs 0 energy, has like <5s recharge, and lets your pet shadowstep to target foe.

Traps should work like bundles. You can set up a trap beforehand and carry it, and then drop it where you want to place it.

1. I'm a little puzzled how this managed to become an issue of confusion, but it seems that it has.
A. The monster armor reduction is a buff for armor-sensitive damage, while it is completely neutral with respect to armor-ignoring damage.
B. The monster hp increase is a blanket nerf to all player damage -- armor-sensitive and armor ignoring alike.
THat's it. That's all. It's not that difficult to understand.

2. Rangers... rangers... rangers... yeah. There's a LOT of things wrong with rangers -- far too many to fully discuss here. I'm only going to touch on one topic since people have brought it up: Kunder is essentially correct about the causes of rangers' energy problems:
A. You get a discount from expertise, but a-net jacked the price up on everything before giving you the discount. The net result is that your attack skills are still way too expensive, especially in light of the huge attribute cost you're paying. (FYI: Necromancers are in very much the same boat, particularly when it comes to Prophecies skills.)
B. PvE skills are generally not affected by expertise, which means that many of the best skills in the game are back-breakingly expensive for rangers. Of particular note, EBSoH is probably optimal for just about every bow build imaginable, but for the fact that it's often prohibitively expensive.
Short of completely reworking expertise, it seems that the best solution is to provide the ranger with some decent non-elite skills for re-gaining energy. Probably increase the energy gain or lower the recharge on Scavenger Strike (and/or fix the pet AI to be more reliable); and make a bow attack to serve the same purpose. (Body Shot doesn't count since it's unreliable and returns less energy than it costs to apply cracked in the first place.)

Except what you say isn't true. The actual effect I do not know because it depends on how much of an armour reduction there is and how much of a HP increase.

To give you a rough example.

A given mob has 500 hp. A life stealing skill does 50 points of life stealing. This means that you need to cast the skill 10 times.

Now the armour goes down of the mob, but he goes to 600 HP so the life stealing skill needs to be cast 12 times against the same mob.

Now the other side of it. An ele casts a spell that does 80 damage but because of the armour of the mob it does 50 damage. So also this skill needs to be cast 10 times to kill the mob of 500 hp. Now the mob gets 600 hp but his armour is reduced and suddenly the same spell does 60 damage and the ele only needs to cast the same spell 10 times still.

End result of the combination of armour decrease and hp increase in this example is that the necro will have cast the spell 12 times instead of 10 time and the ele still casts 10 times. In comparison this is a nerf for the necro because life stealing is now less effective than elemental damage.

This is just a simple example and doesn't even take the improvements to a number of ele spells, but the thing is, we don't know how much the armour will be decreased and how much hp will be added. However, as the example shows, if it's neutral towards armour affected damage, it will be an indirect nerf to armour ignoring damage.
But it may not be that way at all. At this point it is unknown to me how much armour reduction there will be and how much hp will be added. That will determine the exact effect, however, as this is supposed to be a boost for ele's I am worried about the negative effect on armour ignoring damage.

Life stealing has four effects: reducing enemy HP, gain same amount as HP, ignore armor and ignore some other protections.

I don't know how useful the last three effects are nowadays in PvE, but still elemental damage and life stealing damage shouldn't be equal because of other benefits life stealing offers. Maybe Anet should just redesign PvE the way that life stealing and elemental damage have their own moments.

Chthon's statement is completely consistent with yours. In fact, yours is an immediate corollary.

It isn't equal but I wanted to keep the example simple replace life stealing with armour ignoring damage if that helps.

Still I disagree with the 4 effects you talk of. Sure it reduces hp and ignores armour but they are linked. Life stealing usually deals with a lot lower numbers as a consequence, so you cannot treat them separately.

the life it gives the caster is insignificant compared to the damage being dealt in pve specifically, maybe in pvp it is a little better but not much I would think.

I don't know what other protections you are referring to. As a matter of fact, damage reduction reduces all types of damage, armour ignoring or not, so I don't believe that 4th one.

My point is simply that the HM changes of armour and HP can have an indirect negative effect on life degen and armour ignoring damage, simply because armour ignoring damage will take longer to do the same and the ele's damage will remain equally effective or better as far as dps is concerned.

Necro skills might have some added benefit at times, but I would suggest looking at the ele skills as they will change where a number of skill will have multiple effects. No, I think it's great for eles, not so great for a number of other classes.

And it will be interesting to see pve mobs/bosses use the new ele skills.

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I think I just mistook his point with those statements. I see what you mean.

Yeah as usual the thread discusses everything but the actual update (seen the ele update is not in " Update - Thursday, December 8, 2011"). Any ideas on what's gonna happen? I figure they're gonna hand out new gifts or something like that, really curious.

Well, that's not fair.

The original update actually contained this information and then it was pulled to be delayed as confirmed in this thread.

What's there to discuss about Yakkington anyway? There's no way to figure out what that means until something happens. My guess is new items. Done.

At least with the planned skill update there is something to discuss. I would imagine that as far as Yakkington is concerned we will have an idea what this is all about.

Did I miss anything?

Rits and mesmers damage was buffed for ALL modes of the game. PvP, NM, HM. It was so because the developers felt that those classes needed more damage to be useful. The source of the problem was on the professions themselves.

Elementalists are in a completely different situation, because they already have great base damage, but HM is more discriminatory to them than to other professions. The source of the problem lies on the mechanics of HM.

Anet is not screwing anything, they are fixing something that is screwed. Hard Mode mechanics favor some professions overs others for absolutely no reasons, and what Anet is doing now, is leveling the playfield, by making armor-ignoring damage less OP, and armor-sensitive damage equally viable.

But they don't want to buff the numbers of elementalists. Notice how they left their strongest damaging elites untouched. They want to remove the discrimination towards elementalists in one of the game's modes, and increase the number of viable strategies for them in all modes. The former because HM screws them up, the latter because it's one of the core problems of the profession.

But rits and mesmers are not balanced in the first place. They are currently the two PvE professions that are considered overpowered as a whole. Their damage is to be nerfed regardless of an elementalist buff or not. Making a third profession overpowered is not a solution, and is going to further desmotivate the use of all other professions.

It probably will be, but it depends on how much armor and HP is changed. In the current state of the game, one of the mechanics of HM (higher armor) is consistently ignored, making it easier than it should.

EDIT: After this and after the melee AI update, it'll be fun to see warriors, dervishes and elementalists back to the best hero builds, and not rely on double-mesmers and double-ritualists as much.

Well, it would appear Nick's rotation has been changed, will be interesting to see when we find him.

So, zero effective builds.

Anything will deliver Splinter Weapon, and scythes don't even need a skill to do it fast.

@Axel: Not trying to attack you. I needed to point out that what you were saying has the potential of giving others a false impression.

And that was when they created a new condition known as cracked armor which they can undoubtedly buff that condition if they wish to, without raising the hp of HM monsters.

That is the wrong way of fixing the problem. They can level the playing field without nerfing everyone. But I will hold off on my judgement until the update.

If it is a general resultant nerf, isn't it funny that some people on this thread kept asking ANet to apply the update NOW rather than later. I don't think they understand what is going on.

If they have been playing the most challenging aspects of the game, they won't think that the professions deserve a blanketing nerf. Sure easy mode (even HM vanquishing in general) is easy as they are meant to be, but then again very few people are playing in the areas that I am currently playing in (HM UW and HM DoA) with just heroes, and no cons.

TBH, i would hope to see Strength of Honor changed a % base increase for all physical damage (or nerfed a bit altogether) before anything is changed with ranger/paragon, so ranged physicals aren't automatically shafted right out the door.

Mesmers will still have a degeneration PvE skill that drains energy and a 50 AoE with degeneration skill that only rupts a single foe. Sounds great.

Maybe then they could change degeneration mechanics from "you loose x hp per seconds" to "you loose x% of your total hp per second" ?

It was stated by Anet that they are changing the mobs HP/Armor because upping the Ele's damage to compensate would turn some Hardmode Elementalists into absolute nightmares to play against.

If you wanted to remain effective, armor ignoring damage has been the only option [in hardmode] for the longest time now. It's such complete overkill currently, I doubt that upping monster health, even by 25%+, will amount to anything noticeable anywhere other than UW, DoA, and possibly Slavers and FoW. Add the new Ele's into the equation, and people will be back to exploding the endgame content at records speeds in no time.

Reliable static damage should do less than variable elemental damage. It's the ol' reliability vs. potency. Besides, I've looked over the Ele changes and there are some STUPIDLY strong combinations coming up. I'm excited to run something other than 20 Mesmers in my party.

Honestly, this update is probably going to be a good thing. I'm getting tired of Gwen's complaining. :P