Pyroatheist.9031

No, it'll have a 5-target cap like every other normal aoe in the game. Additionally, if a mesmer is able to stand there burning a hilarious amount of cooldowns to slowly res people that can just get poisoned and cleaved out anyway, something has gone terribly wrong. This is a cute change but completely useless for WvW.

https://i.imgflip.com/1hfmx7.jpg

But honestly, I think reducing the number of weapons a ranger can use to 1 would help increase their skill cap. They've got the pet using skills too, they don't really need a weapon swap to overload the enemy's screen with useless information.

Now now, that might be a bit hasty. Mesmer might be just fine in WvW after they completely reinvent the class again in 2 quarters.

Such a shame.I think mesmers were born to use whips. It is a shame, but there's no chance whatsoever. We're not even getting new elite specs, let alone an entirely new weapon.

Chance is between zero and nothing.

Turns out that group WvW is a frustrating and unfun experience if nobody cleanses your conditions or gives you stability, that's why.

I'll be providing feedback based on this statement of objective. My responses will be with respect to the WvW group meta, not roaming or small havocs. General Questions Would your gameplay change as a result?Not in any major ways. Do you feel these changes would improve or worsen the state of the game?These changes, by and large, would improve the state of the game. Are you looking forward to these potential changes?Yes, some particular aspect of these changes are worth looking forward to and would be highly beneficial to the WvW group meta. What are your concerns with this set of changes?These changes primarily address classes that are possibly overperforming in WvW. However, these changes do not address the classes that are underperforming in WvW. If the objective is to bring some new options to the table of the WvW meta, more attention needs to be paid to the question of why the underperforming classes are bad, not just lowering the strength of the strong classes. What consequences do you expect would come from these changes?There would be no major meta/composition consequences from the changes listed here. Giving detection pulse back to engineers is an excellent change. Increasing the cooldown on sneak gyro goes along with that as an excellent change. Those two changes will have a significantly larger impact on group play than the sum total of the remainder of the changes here, in a positive way. Lowering the number of cleansing pulses on purge gyro is also a good change, as engineers are somewhat overtuned in their condition removal support currently. However, I would recommend that a broader look at engineer condition removal mechanics be conducted before making any changes to individual skills such as purge gyro. The sanctuary change is irrelevant. The change to Tome of Resolve would be a good change, but would likely have very little impact on actual play. Daring Challenge only grants aegis to the guardian itself, it does not grant boons to nearby allies. For this reason, the skill is extremely weak. The change would technically make it weaker, but it's already terrible. For that reason, this change would have little impact, but I'm not sure what purpose it serves. Removing aegis and retaliation from Unbroken Lines is good in that it slightly tones down the strong defensive support utility of firebrand without ruining it. It will not have major impacts on play, but it is a step in the right direction. None of the mesmer changes will have any impact whatsoever on group play in WvW. The illusion of life change will technically make the skill slightly weaker, but the duration of the effect will still be plenty long at 8 seconds, and the cooldown is already long enough at 75 that increasing it to 90 will be mostly unnoticeable. Call me biased, but I think Mesmers have been smacked around enough. They should probably be getting major buffs to group WvW capability, not more nerfs. The changes to Feast of Corruption and Devouring Darkness are good. Scourges are too powerful offensively, especially on the power side of things. The changes to Sand Cascade and Sand Flare are probably good, but do not serve a major purpose for WvW compositions. While they provide defensive support for the group, scourges are not really brought for that purpose. I would recommend instead to reduce the base amount of barrier while increasing the healing power scaling. This way the base defensive utility is reduced, but the capability for speccing into that defensive utility is increased. No impact on WvW group play. These are generally good changes. I'm concerned about the red warning rectangle from the perspective of visual clutter. While it will be nice to see the CoR coming in, there's already an enormous amount of red visual clutter from scourge shades. I'm not positive of the best way to address this, but it's worth mentioning as a concern. The change to Sight Beyond Sight is good. With detection pulse re-added to engineers, it's unlikely that many spellbreakers would take it, but having the option is always a positive thing for compositions The changes to warhorn, while interesting, are completely irrelevant for WvW group play. The roles of boon support and condition removal are already well established, and warrior would need to sacrifice far too much offensive capability to bring these defensive warhorn abilities.

Alliances is literally a project to give a data science intern 2 months and a machine running MATLAB to finish. Back when they announced alliances, they acknowledged that they basically have the tech to implement it, they just need to understand how to do it right. That makes alliances a data science, modeling, and simulation challenge, not a development project. Give any competent data scientist a dump of the last 18 months of WvW metrics, 2 months, and some modeling tools. They'd be done. The fact that alliances are still "oh we'll talk about it in a couple months" means that they haven't worked on it. At all.

because: Providing options just encourages poor play. It's like if someone came up asking for the best ways to weld without using welding goggles, and you said "well, I'm not saying it'll be very effective, but you could try squinting really tightly". It's better just to say "no, don't do that".

It's like people want to have more players running awful builds in their wvw groups, I don't really understand.

There is no build for the mesmer class in any way, shape, or form based around conditions that will do more damage than a condition scourge that plays by intermittently slapping the keyboard when the y feel like it. Any mesmer built for conditions would be an instant kick from any zerg squad because you might accidentally consume a boon that could be used by someone that isn't a free bag.

Most PvE creatures that can be interrupted aren't worth interrupting, and power Chrono really doesn't need more defense than it already has baked into the weapon skills and utilities.

FYI, before soulbeast, rangers were undesired for zerg settings as the pet was a hindrance. Soulbeasts bypass that issue by remaining merged. Fwiw soulbeasts suck in zergs too. They're only useful for driver sniping.

So what is this magic build? It's called the "anything is viable in open world PvE if you go slow enough" build.