Let's talk Elite Specializations.

[MrTharne]

Reading that Deadeye can just OhKO people with a good ol' 30k crit.
Meanwhile you see Soulbeast Dagger damage...

[Lotus Victoria]

Deadeye is indeed strong, but I'll stick with Daredevil, at least for now.

[zito]

tested mesmer and necro but I stopped cause the game client kept crashing every 20 minutes

So... I want to talk to the Devs at Anet directly and ask them what their thought process was for some of the most retarded, idiot decisions they have come up with and how it fucking got passed testing.

I'll start with Mirage, GS ambush skill is completely worthless, a cleave? Really? A power based cleave on a condition spec? Eventhough sword has no conditions it's ambush skill is a daze so it still works but GS is 100% useless and lazy, it doesn't even have a special animation it's literally just a cleave.

Next illusionary ambush is useless. Teleport you and your clones around your target, ok it's literally axe 3 BUT it does not have your foe drop target. So not only does that make it a terrible utility because we already have 5 million teleports (and the other 3 deception skills are default better) but that means axe is the only way to have your foes drop target. This means, a big selling point for mirage, requires an axe. There is no way other weapons can drop target since ambush does not such a stupid decision.

The major trait line for mirage is a problem. There is only 1 viable choice which is shards of glass, every time you shatter you get a mirror which gives you your ambush skill so by default this is just better than mirrored axes. The 20% reduced recharge is only 1.5 seconds and 2 seconds on skill 2 and 3 which makes it pointless because that's way too little to make a difference anywhere and the axe that summons and applies torment is severaly outclassed by the conditions you can get from scepter,axe,staff ambush skills. And I want to know who fucking came up with Mirage mantle.

Who.The.Fuck.Made.This. Trait.

Literally the most worthless piece of crap trait in the entire game. 1 second of protection. 1. Are you serious? How is that worth anything over the other 2 traits. This has to be the most boring designed trait in the game. It's like they fucking ran out of ideas whoever made this trait should be fired it's terrible.

Overall though I like Mirage but my god some traits and that 1 utility is so pointlessly stupid I don't get it.

Now scourge has been fucked. They really messed it up with traits effecting shrouds. First off Dhumfire is now mandatory. Soul reaping is now mandatory for Scourge. Dhumfire inflicts burning not only on summoning a shade but every single shroud skill activates dhumfire. That's really good. Sadly this is the only trait that's good. For WHATEVER REASON scourge channel skill is now F5 instead of F4 like Reaper and Necromancer. This mean Transfusion activates on fear instead of their channeled skill. Why. Why. Why. Why.

Desert shroud (f5) has zero ally support. Zero. The barrier only applies to yourself and only on the first pulse and it's damage is power based?????????????? on a cond spec??? And fear is only 1 second? It should be 2. Also "entire shroud traits" only work on f5 which is a 20 second cooldown base necro and reaper is 10 why would you do that? It should be a 10 second CD and numbers adjusted accordingly on barrier and damage.

Also torch has no power support meaning the only weapon to use it with is scepter. So the only weapon set viable is scepter torch staff as dagger and axe are completely useless. You might want axe or dagger to get life force back up quickly except then your stuck for 10 seconds with a power weapon in a cond spec.

The traits though are pretty well done and actually makes you feel like you're making a important decision as each line doesn't have a mandatory trait - which is how it should be. I think scorage will be great, the problem is Anet and their incompetence to balance skills. It's been 5 years and they still can't do it.

[Valeron]

Briefly tested every class out. And yeah, Soulbeast seemed like an interesting concept but the damage is not good for sure. Deadeye easily did the most damage. Weaver was slightly disappointing to me but this is just initial impression. Overall, based on my first impressions, the Revenant's Renegade was the most visually impressive and interesting. The Holosmith was pretty neat as well.

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Pair up a Deadeye and a Renegade and stuff melts in seconds.

[zito]

Tested Renegade. I really like it but the energy costs are too high. 40 ENERGY WITH CITADEL BOMBARDMENT? It only puts 3 stacks of burning on a target. What the hell? Also f3 gives 4 seconds of alacrity, it's so random, why would you use it? It's worthless. It cost 20 energy and it's 4 seconds, why would you waste energy on it when you can summon a spirit that makes everyone apply bleeds????? and that only cost 12 energy

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The reason why renegade is the mvp this expansion



exploding unicorns from another dimension

[Valeron]

Hah! Great, now I'm going to have to work on that legendary

[zito]

Hah! Great, now I'm going to have to work on that legendary

it works with all weapons btw. If you have moot equiped it summons exploding disco balls

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Renegade is sooooooooo fun. The summons are excellent. The only problem is the f1-f3 skills. F1 refreshes Fervor which is a nice situational skill but f2 and f3 are just terrible. F2 cost 40 energy for 3 stacks of burns, completely worthless. When every single skill cost energy everything other skill is better to use than wasting energy on f2. F3 is also just as terrible, 4 seconds of alacrity? 20 energy cost? Why would you EVER use this, there is no way to get perma alacrity like a chronomancer and there is no situation where you want 4 seconds of alacrity when you don't have a chrono anyway. All your CDS are SUPER SHORT and even if everything was on CD you can swap weapons and legends to things that are not on CD which is more energy cost effective than 20 energy alacrity AND even if THOSE were all on CD even if you did use alacrity to get your CDS back you would end up with little to no energy to spend.

F1 is great, F2 is only worth it if you are not using Kalla and F3 is 100% worthless because of the energy cost.

However shortbow and the spirits are super super fun and feel great. It honestly feels super close to Ritualist, if I could drop weapons like a ritualist could that would be great

[LilSaihah]

Deadeye was fun, but Kneel is such a fiddly thing. It doesn't help that you get pulled out of Kneel whenever you're crowdcontrolled.
Scourge was fun but it's so hard to get a 'realistic' look at how good it'll be because Life Force generation for them is so poop. Pooping all over everything is fun though.

[PACOX]

Reading that Deadeye can just OhKO people with a good ol' 30k crit.
Meanwhile you see Soulbeast Dagger damage...

I've played Soulbeast as tanky condi and has a blast. Dolyak Stance is bugged I think.


Mirage - I have no idea what Im doing but could dish out a crazy amount of confusion.
Soulbeast - Tanky condi. Could take on 2 people as long as one of them wasn't a Holo
Scourge - Loving it. I ditched the 3 shades for the 1 giant one. Good support
Renegade - Only hit golems but seems like it has a lot of pve condi potential
Weaver - definitely a sidegrade
Holo - I hate engis and don't care about learning the nuances of the class or spec but these guys hit hard AF.

Havent tried Spellbreaker, Deadeye, or Firebrand yet.

[DrMcNinja]

I'm very conflicted about Firebrand.

So Mantra's are pretty alright. I don't get why it has a charge-up because right now people will just avoid using the final charge to prevent it from going on cooldown since that is more efficient. So the entire concept already imploded in ANet's face. Plus, the elite skill feels incredible lackluster imo.

Tomes... I think in a vacuum seem alright. The abilities themselves are nice. But then I really do not see the point of the healing tome since we'll likely end up in some Power/Condi build, because in terms of healing we're going to be vastly inferior compared to other professions.

[zito]

Renegade - Only hit golems but seems like it has a lot of pve condi potential

yea the consensus is that it's terrible for pvp, and it is, it's got no movement no chills high energy costs no CC outside 1 skill on bow and terrible condition times and the spirits die in 2 hits of an auto attack. This is def ANOTHER support pve spec, now we got 3.

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I'm very conflicted about Firebrand.

So Mantra's are pretty alright. I don't get why it has a charge-up because right now people will just avoid using the final charge to prevent it from going on cooldown since that is more efficient. So the entire concept already imploded in ANet's face. Plus, the elite skill feels incredible lackluster imo.

Tomes... I think in a vacuum seem alright. The abilities themselves are nice. But then I really do not see the point of the healing tome since we'll likely end up in some Power/Condi build, because in terms of healing we're going to be vastly inferior compared to other professions.

firebrand can give 99% quickness uptime with alacrity from chrono and 100% boon duration

so they'll be the quickness bitch.

[Usagi Senshi]

Tried out:

Spellbreaker (its alright and gets the job done)

Soul Beast (fucking boring garbage IMO)

Firebrand (pretty interesting and does great damage)

Holosmith (great damage and abilities, love risk vs reward, does a fuck ton of damage, love the VR feel and effects)

An Asura Holosmith with Scrapper on the side will be my new main if I buy PoF

Also, why has the game been crashing so much after I'm a bit, sheesh....

Edit:

Will try out the Renegade out later and will maybe use a boost on it if I like it.

[Gray_Matter]

these new dps meters have gotten out of hand, I'm glad that one guy got banned but they need to kill the other meter.

I like the idea of DPS meter but only for me. I want to know which skills hit harder and how much various talents add so I was quite happy with the decision when it was first announced.

The problem is that people abuse things. People are using them in game to check out other players and we end up with various professions being "trash" because the meters say so. These decisions don't look at how difficult the "rotation" is or even how much of a realistic difference there is between players with different gear types. They only look at the max DPS for a profession and transpose that onto every other build/gear combination. It's really unfortunate.

I would now prefer that they change their decision and remove them from the game. All we really need is a hitto-meter in game that tells you how hard your player is hitting as a percentage of profession average. I don't even think that will help because people always find a way of picking the meta and excluding professions.

[zito]

so while I like the feel of mirage, it performs terribly which is to be expected since the one guy (whos biased to mesmers apparently) can't design specs for shit since he was primary making mirage. Half the traits are garbage and are reminiscent of launch traits (which 90% of those were garbage and they had to relaunch traits cause they were so bad) the utility skills are redundant, the elite is bad because of the range and .5 sec CD between charges and it's damage is medicore. The evades don't last long enough, 3/4 sec evade needs to be 1 second to match dodge evade and ambushes are under whelming and lazy design (GS ambush is so pathetic). It's a PvP spec which is dumb because it's whole concept is built around the desert.

The entire spec feels great but is held back by lack luster retarded design decisions that everyone was scared of Robert (that's his name right) making and he did. The entire spec is weak, it'll launch weak and nobody is gonna play it over chrono

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ambushes have ICD too!?!?!?! LOLOLOLOLOL why, they aren't even that good and it's the main way mirage is suppose to do damage and it has an ICD im dying of laughter at this point

deceptive evasion doesn't work with mirage

/sigh

[PACOX]

Firebrand and Scourge are insane in WvW zergs. Honestly didn't expect Firebrand to be a huge hit in WvW (I hadn't looked at it traits before) but that thing can throw out heals and boons like theres no tomorrow. Spellbreaker is also good for throwing damage from the enemy back into their group. Mirage is a condi mesmer sidegrade, no real improvement (not bad because thats what elites are technically supposed to do).

Don't play soulbeast if you're not willing to juggle all of its skillbars. Its a lot more complicated than what people are used to in rangers. Berserker soulbeast? Don't do it.

I might experiment with melee deadeye tomorrow...if that makes sense. I meleed a marked target and it melted so I want to see if theres more to it.


Want to have fun with Scourge/Necro? Go into WvW and pop DS underwater. Resurface and you have infinite death shroud (the abilities at least).

[Edge-]

I've gotta say...I was harsh on firebrand when I saw it and really had no expectations but...if I continue to have the same opinion over the next few days of toying around with it, it may very well sell me on PoF alone. Felt like they did kinda a poor job showing it off, because hot damn does it end up more or less delivering on what I always wanted from the class, turning it into a much more flexible class that can bounce between multiple roles intermittently, focusing a bit more on a few roles at once. Thematically I thought it didn't fit, but seeing the visual design of the full range of abilities it definitely is clicking into place more. Not 100% behind it, but I don't actively dislike it like I used to, either.

I'm super surprised, actually. The mantras are alright, can't say I'm in love with them, and some of the aspects of the initial cast don't make too much sense, but I can see definite niches/roles where they'll fit super well. The tomes though, I'm a big fan of. Definitely adds in some flexibility to allow for temporarily filling in for other roles, while helping to reinforce the role you're trying to specialize it. I'm actually pretty impressed with the design from what I gather of it.

Need to find out if there's PvE content to test it out on, I don't care for PvP and it won't be useful for my purposes. But that's a task for tomorrow/Sunday.

I'm pretty fucking stocked that I was wrong with my initial reactions, actually. This makes me pretty happy.

[Usagi Senshi]

IMMA FIRING MUH LASERZ!!!

[zito]

quite funny how things turned out before the demo. People were already doom saying firebrand and scourge yet both ended up extremely strong (especially for wvw) and everyone though that weaver would be the MVP of the demo but it turns out holosmith is everyone's favorite.

And mirage and renegade ended up being 100% crap (renegades high energy cost and low condition duration hold it back and mirage is extremely clunky and unpolished and weak)

[Valeron]

I still really like Renegade, not for pvp though.

Tried a bit of Scourge, I quite like it.

[Zephyr Storm]

Renegade got completely boned.

Energy costs are way to high, the utility summons are easily killed and can be CCed. The heal is practically nonexistent. Only one stun break and it's tied to the fucking heal. Condition removal is nowhere to be seen. Mobility is in the shitter because you can't take Herald and Renegade at the same time. Half of the Shortbow skills are bugged and don't work right currently. Only one of the F skills is any good and only when facing a large boss or tons of adds. Overall damage output on the Renegade is subpar. And it's pretty much useless in PvP, only having a somewhat niche role in WvW.

Pretty much the only thing it's got going for it is a PvE condition damage spec that seems will only be useful for open world shenanigans. And mace/axe in Mallyx legend is still a better option in that regard. You can't even hardly keep the bleeds up currently with the shortbow if you do anything other than spam autoattack.

The Renegade is pretty much dead on arrival for the vast majority of revenants. It feels like Anet was too concerned with the visuals and theme of the elite spec and totally forgot to make the gameplay of it actually work effectively.

If the spec doesn't get a major overhaul before launch (and it won't, because this is Anet), people will probably just stay with the current Revenant builds that we're already running. Absolutely pathetic.