Wisty.4135

Hey, so real quick on this, and it's three pretty major things from an organized content standpoint: 1: Elementalist Changes to Gale Song and Arcane shielding: I know you guys hate passives. Passives are bad if there's no alternative to taking them because they're so good. However, these passives and their current functionalities work exactly how I would want such defensive passives to work. Arcane shielding - give me three blocks to correct my mistakes if I end up eating massive damage, and Gale Song - give me a quick way to reposition if I end up eating an attack that CC's me. This is exactly what I would want as a player who takes these traits over the higher damage/more utility alternatives that are available. The current proposed iterations would destroy their usefulness - 3 blocks on use of an elite? How useless is that going to be in rotation of literally any spec? Rebound fights with it for identity (save from death by ignoring damage and healing), and Weave Self / Elemental Celeryseed are both used quite strictly in rotations where the passive, if taken, would be quite useless for anything but chip damage. Same goes for Eye of the Storm, where, as tempest I generate so much passive protection, even without earth traited that the additional prot on heal skill is insulting. Most times you take earth anyways, making prot not even an issue. These changes do not increase viability of the traits, but rather make them unappealing and redundant choices in most regards. 2. Scrapper gyros: Ok, gyros as they are currently are a bit strong. but reverting the functionality back to ground targeted wells in content modes that all but demand constant movement destroys their viability. Imagine you're fighting zerg v zerg in SMC lord room, spinning in circles. You drop bulwark on group to shield them from damage (bad move, but I'll allow it). your group moves out of bulwark and everyone dies. Imagine you're trying to stealth away from the lost fight with stealth gyro, but you've only got enough time to get one tick of stealth through the gyro because the enemy is hot on your tail. you get from entrance of smc lord room to top of gates before stealth wears off and you get routed. Having these become ground targeted wells reduces their overall utility and functionality in a way that I don't believe is healthy for the class or the playstyle. Please do not make these changes. 3. Berserker/defense changes: "Golly what I've always wanted is the ability to use my less effective core bursts!" - No berserker player ever. while the potential for this to increase overall damage is... certainly a good delusion, this will ultimately be a trap for newer players to the spec, wasting their adrenaline and delaying access to their actual useful primal bursts. Additionally, the change to dead or alive is bad. straight up bad. Terrible even. 2 Seconds of healing that is dependent on your damage output is in no way more beneficial than having 2 seconds of just "no I will not die" regardless of how much damage you get off. often, this passive procs when you are CC'd and undergoing massive burst windows, making your blood reckoning useless as you would have been dead before you can get meaningful damage off to heal from. Additionally, blind spam exists such that even if you could start damaging most of it would be interrupted or fail to connect anyways. This change does not make the trait more interesting, it all but kills it. Damage reduction on Grandmaster is also concerning. You don't take berserker to be a scrappy low damage sustained brawler. you take it to make things hurt in very short, very violent bursts. Transitioning it to a tankier, scrappier version of the class feels like death of the class identity. we have spellbreaker already. no one likes spellbreaker. we don't need diet spellbreaker, especially with changes proposed to defense. Also, keep the Zerk entry attack and animation. It's a very good tell that gives you enough warning to react to the incoming onslaught; having it instantaneous would almost be unfair if you're suddenly getting crit gunflamed or decapitated for 20K without a warning. Defense changes - these are a mess. The cooldowns of weapon skills that take those cooldown traits are already long enough such that without the CDR they're abysmal to use. Even with CDR, no quickness or alacrity (sparse in wvw and pvp most times) makes them still slow, clunky, and telegraphed from the 1800's. Changing the ability to recover and try again is not the way. Additionally, Rousing Resiliance is exactly what I would want from a trait that activates on stunbreak - the ability to survive burst through an additional 1000 toughness for quickly reacting or effectively anticipating a CC burst combo is GOOD. it feels good to know I read my opponent and reacted accordingly while being rewarded with the ability to survive and counter. Removing this trait, while not earth moving, makes the whole interaction a little less engaging. but hey, we get stability after CC'ing someone (this 100% is not a healthy thing without an ICD, please reconsider). There's so many more things to comment on here, but I implore you (beg you) to think about these a little more before pushing these to live. Or at the very least, use them as WVW and PVP only tests, as most of these changes would make using these traits in PVE absolutely terrible from a gameplay and class fantasy aspect. (

Big QoL thing I would like to see is a texture update passover for Gen 1 legendaries, with special focus on ones like Howler, the Underwaters, Frostfang, Rodgort, and The Minstrel. Beautiful leggies in their own right that look a little dated and with a bit more love could be perfect for the upcoming Armory Release!

Why would you ever want to take a Portal To Neverland anyways? It's not got nearly as good of loot as the chest from the Tarnished Traitor in AB or the first TD after reset. :°) A Portal To Neverland is just the worst, I swear. How could these mystery meta trolls do this?

Heya! I train raids frequently, and there's a bunch of resources for getting into them! LFG is awful for new to raid players - I would recommend Raid Academy (if you are on NA) and Crossroads Inn (if you are EU) - these discord servers are filled with many friendly players helping others get into the game mode, and TONS of resources to make them accessible. Links to the servers can be found https://snowcrows.com/raids/training/ << here https://www.snowcrows.com is a great place to get info regarding builds for every class, what classes do well on what encounters, as well as general rotation guides for how to play the classes in a raid setting. Now that said, raids are challenging especially to new players to the mode, but not unattainable! It'll take some time and some work, but you can certainly get into it! Feel free to poke me if you have any additional questions regarding this!

I like dagger WH tempest, hut it is way spookier than weaver for HK. Weaver has so many blocks and evades that it's just silly. But water arcane tempest/weaver is the way to go for sure.

Ah yes that sounds exactly like the issue I've noticed. Thanks! And I've only noticed it on the logging axe (the coolest of the three sadly). But I've run the Dreamcleaver Axe, Molten Mining Pick and Consortium Harvesting Sickle ever since they were released, but these Spirits Tools were the first that looked cool enough for me to buy new... A shame! I do hope they decide to at least give it a pass over as I feel like this shouldn't be too hard of a fix? Fingers crossed!

Exploration and combat for sure. Also charr. Exploration - maps are gorgeous and littered with secrets that are just fun to look at and find (and break on occasion). Combat - Fluid and rarely clunky, with enough variation between classes to feel unique. It just feels good to weave skills together in a rotation while maintaining active defenses such as dodging. Charr - big fluffy murdercats. What's not to love?

I've noticed when harvesting my home instance that the new (gorgeous) spirit of the wild tools sometimes will not deliver the final strike. This happens even without touching any buttons that may cancel it (weapon swap, movement, or even refiring the gather animation for rich nodes). Can anyone else confirm that this is happening? Additionally gathering strikes and animation timings for the mining and logging tools feel much slower than most other infinite tools, and even the basic unskinned tools. I cannot confirm this either, but I'd wanted to make mention of it.

Spiritslave, mechanic slave, spotter slave - all things druid does that a tempest could but won't because only subs do as they're told. But really, that's pretty much it. I personally prefer bringing a tempest over druid for most of my groups, but druid is one of those classes that does so much mediocrely enough that it's preferred. But in trainings and stuff? You better believe I'm bringing an auramancer. Rebound, raw heals, boon support and respecatble personal damage from a healer all make it shine way brighter than a submarine cosplayer.

I am curious as to these calcs - I've run boon auramancer, shoutbreaker, and heal scrapper and of those the healing style seems so wildly different between them. I'd bring auramancer for solohealing stuff like VG or SH (xtra spicy), but scrapper for stuff like Rainbow Road or WvW. Is there a methodology for accounting for the nature of healing (burst, mitigation, over time), or are all of these numbers on theoretical raw values at 100% efficiency? Just curious!

Air 5 dagger is a pain but warhorn and focus don't move you, I believe. I haven't played power weaver in so long I don't actually know what weaponsare used on it anymore. But yeah, condi tempest is definitely my recommendation for an easy ele DPS, and with kegendary gear you just swap to all harrier's for what is arguably the best bursthealer in the game (that can still provide like 8K dps if done well) as well as perma prot might fury and regen for their sub. Also more cathartic than druid. :)

Condi tempest doesn't use pickups! Three glyphs, signet of fire, dagger warhorn. Very simple rotation with high damage numbers and utility skills boil down to "generally off cooldown, but glyphs only in fire attunement." Power tempest and weaver both use pickups though, which, while a satisfying rotation are ridiculously hard to get used to.

Tempest has a generally easy rotation. Weaver is the Keyboard Buster. Power dragonhunter is middle-of-the-road in terms of complexity but there's a lot of muscle memory and optimiziation of skill use to get the most out of it - namely cancelling aftercasts while being careful not to cancel skills too early, proper positioning and placement of traps, etc. Very good DPS pick if you out in time to master it.

Condition tempest is a super easy DPS class and is acceptable on a large number of fights. Power berserker is also a good one and shares its gearset with Power bannerzerk, allowing you to fill two roles with the same class while still doing respectable damage. Condition soulbeast is also a very easy rotation, all things considered.

I'd recommend Cairn or Mursaat. Vale Guardian can get messy fast. But for a straight up DPS, Adina is easy