Okay, so I've been using this build on my Scourge in WvW and it's hilarious. It has lots of damage and durability, though little in the way of team support. I'm actually getting kills and surviving fights, unlike my old shout Reaper build which made me feel like a loot bag with legs. Everyone was complaining about the nerfs Scourge received just before Path of Fire released, but I don't see any reason to complain here.
Okay, so I've been using this build on my Scourge in WvW and it's hilarious. It has lots of damage and durability, though little in the way of team support. I'm actually getting kills and surviving fights, unlike my old shout Reaper build which made me feel like a loot bag with legs. Everyone was complaining about the nerfs Scourge received just before Path of Fire released, but I don't see any reason to complain here.
The nerf was specifically to the ability to do a support role in raids. That's definitely a niche that is currently dead for the spec. More damage oriented builds are doing pretty well for themselves.
I did not find myself to jive with scourge in the 5 minutes I played it. Partly because I didn't have a decent set of condi gear I'm sure.
It's not a simple spec to be sure. A lot of tooltips are misleading or unclear. While the effects of f2-f5 like barriers, fear, condition conversion, etc. will only fire off once no matter how many shades + yourself cover the target, the damage effects listed on the f1 ability do stack. This also means that Dhuumfire, which normally adds burning to shroud skill one, gets triggered any time a shade triggers damage so three shades all hitting one target puts out a lot of burning and using the f abilities just to get those torment and burning stacks on if you have life force to spare is very potent.
This does depend on having a condi set to really take advantage of this though. It's the highest damage build available to necro by a wide margin but is strictly a condition oriented set and you trade a lot of durability in exchange for the damage.
Do the shades only trigger damage when you do a F2-F5? And I'm guessing the enemy has to be in the radius of the shades?
Placing them down with F1 also does fires off damage. The enemy has to be in range of a shade or you though you personally do not throw out the burning from Dhuumfire.
I'm still planning on unlocking mirage down the road, but taking a new character into PoF, blasting through all the easy HPs, and fully unlocking Chrono before setting foot in HoT was immensely satisfying.
I still play baseline Mesmer for open world stuff, but they really should consider just recoding the HoT HPs to be scaling vets. It's really such a nice quality of life improvement.
But do the shades do anything once they're out (after the Dhuumfire), or only if you trigger a f2-f5?
Only if you trigger an f ability including another f1.
They're not turrets so as the tooltip on f1 states, they only do stuff when a shade ability is used. But you also can place down 3 in quick succession and only have a 15 second cooldown on more charges.
Survivability is less than normal Necro or Reaper, but I find with barriers and fear I stay alive a lot longer than my Mirage. I am still working out what gear I plan on using and am looking up charts on vitality to life force conversion rates. Looks like it just boils down to more vitality being better, but since I main dagger I generate life force faster than scepter builds so I will probably just focus on Viper.
Survivability is less than normal Necro or Reaper, but I find with barriers and fear I stay alive a lot longer than my Mirage. I am still working out what gear I plan on using and am looking up charts on vitality to life force conversion rates. Looks like it just boils down to more vitality being better, but since I main dagger I generate life force faster than scepter builds so I will probably just focus on Viper.
While the shade skills powered by life force are nice, they're far from the only or even the main source of damage. Scepter 3 especially can do a lot of damage for Scourge with the bonus to Torment damage and being able to influct up to 8 stacks of it from that one skill. All the scepter skills are useful and worth casting on cooldown for a condition necro which is more than can be said for dagger even on a power necro.
Anyone play Mesmer? Thinking of using my remaining 80 boost on one and going Chronomancer. How do they fare in solo PVE? Seems like they'd be pretty tanky. Do the clones actually take aggro?
Hit or miss, phantasms might take aggro from their damage, and sometimes enemies get distracted by the clones, but if a stealth isn't involved, you can't really bank on it. Doing a burst of phantasms and wells with continuum split can still decimate a large group, though. And you gotta rely more on your evades, blocks, and dodges for survivability.
Hit or miss, phantasms might take aggro from their damage, and sometimes enemies get distracted by the clones, but if a stealth isn't involved, you can't really bank on it. Doing a burst of phantasms and wells with continuum split can still decimate a large group, though. And you gotta rely more on your evades, blocks, and dodges for survivability.
With that said, chronos have a larger array of evades, dodges, blocks and invulns compared to any other class or spec. You won't be killing things quickly, but you have access to boatloads of quickness and alacrity which will give you lots of acting power that other classes won't necessarily have solo. Once you master that, you'll find yourself able to engage in melee in situations that other classes never would be able to.
I noticed today the price of Howl has taken a MASSIVE dive. It was 175gold just a few weeks ago, and now it can be had for 60-100gold.
Makes me wonder how they'll do the process for crafting the next precursor. I can't remember if they promised all _ new legendaries for HoT, or if they just said they'd be releasing them from here on.
This is mostly just me rephrasing what EidolonOrpheus and naengwen posted, but that said;
A key thing to keep in mind is that clones only attack about once a second (and if your 1 skill at the time was an attack chain, they only use the first part of it). So between that low attack speed and how little damage clones tend to do, they generally aren't going to grab much aggro unless you're staying farther away from the mob, and even then it's not especially reliable. Phantasms are a bit better at this because they generally do much more damage (and they aren't as fragile), but it's still not something you want to completely rely upon. On the flip side, it does work here and there, as does setting up illusions to eat attacks or set off marks.
Mesmers can be fairly tanky in PvE, but a lot of that comes from active defenses. Which means you get a lot squishier if you don't see / recognize tells for attacks, get CC'd, or get swarmed with lots of little attacks (especially if it's from lots of little minions). Meanwhile you can reduce or straight up negate a lot of damage, if you can recognize what's coming and time your abilities right. Blocks, evades, distortion, reflects, stealth; the mesmer has a bunch of defensive tools in their toolbox to potentially choose from.
The downside is that their damage generally isn't great in many/most PvE scenarios. Plenty sufficient, but in general you're either going to have good burst but poor sustain, or okay sustain.
I managed to solo the champion Air Djinn in The Desolation event yesterday, even with it bouncing between platforms of enemies and the break bar time-limit. Made a mistake at the very end but two folks showed up to finish it off right as I died. I like how a lot of the events are much more like small group boss battles/encounters with phases and quirks. Not as punishing/needing a group as the HoT zone event bosses, more active than usual open world bosses.
I managed to solo the champion Air Djinn in The Desolation event yesterday, even with it bouncing between platforms of enemies and the break bar time-limit. Made a mistake at the very end but two folks showed up to finish it off right as I died. I like how a lot of the events are much more like small group boss battles/encounters with phases and quirks. Not as punishing/needing a group as the HoT zone event bosses, more active than usual open world bosses.
I suspect a lot of the HoT bosses fights are actually small group friendly if the group is skilled. Only 8 people often take down the DS bosses towards the end, I've taken down some of the VB night bosses with about 6, and I've duo'd the Wyvern Patriarch down to about the halfway point before a zerg showed up and upscaled it. It's more the preceding events often require people (running AB west with 4 people, 2 in armor is probably possible would take longer than most people have the patience for) with more player skill and knowledge the fewer people you have and, well, you've seen what a lot of players are like. But fights are subject to a lot of scaling and frankly can get harder to read with more people around.
I've killed the legendary facet bounty in a 30ish zerg and with 4 or 5 other random players around the last two nights and the latter was a lot smoother if possibly a few minutes longer to do.
I noticed today the price of Howl has taken a MASSIVE dive. It was 175gold just a few weeks ago, and now it can be had for 60-100gold.
Makes me wonder how they'll do the process for crafting the next precursor. I can't remember if they promised all _ new legendaries for HoT, or if they just said they'd be releasing them from here on.
I've heard a couple of theories on that: one is that crafting materials as a whole have taken a huge dive, thus making the crafting of precursors incredibly cheap for the moment. People are clearing T2 of the collection much more easily now than in the past, and the price of, say, Nevermore at the moment is about 1000g cheaper than it was a year ago.
The other one: you know the dwarven vaults in the highlands? Apparently you can get 5 exotics from the meta event there, and it's all impacted by magic find. I've heard at least 3 people in the past couple of days say they got precursor from it.
Through other guilds eavesdropping on dev convos I also heard that the next LS patch is going to see the release of all remaining HoT legendaries. Don't quote me on it, but apparently they want that done before the next round. I'd imagine they're not too happy about the sustainability of legendary journey development, and they're planning on taking the game's economy in a completely different direction than it was managed throughout HoT - their economist, John Smith, isn't at the company anymore. I'd suspect after the next LS they're going to devalue legendary weapons as a whole to make way for a different kind of journey.
I noticed today the price of Howl has taken a MASSIVE dive. It was 175gold just a few weeks ago, and now it can be had for 60-100gold.
Makes me wonder how they'll do the process for crafting the next precursor. I can't remember if they promised all _ new legendaries for HoT, or if they just said they'd be releasing them from here on.
I've heard a couple of theories on that: one is that crafting materials as a whole have taken a huge dive, thus making the crafting of precursors incredibly cheap for the moment. People are clearing T2 of the collection much more easily now than in the past, and the price of, say, Nevermore at the moment is about 1000g cheaper than it was a year ago.
The other one: you know the dwarven vaults in the highlands? Apparently you can get 5 exotics from the meta event there, and it's all impacted by magic find. I've heard at least 3 people in the past couple of days say they got precursor from it.
Through other guilds eavesdropping on dev convos I also heard that the next LS patch is going to see the release of all remaining HoT legendaries. Don't quote me on it, but apparently they want that done before the next round. I'd imagine they're not too happy about the sustainability of legendary journey development, and they're planning on taking the game's economy in a completely different direction than it was managed throughout HoT - their economist, John Smith, isn't at the company anymore. I'd suspect after the next LS they're going to devalue legendary weapons as a whole to make way for a different kind of journey.
My own personal theories were a bit more mundane than that: A.) No class got Warhorn as a new weapon in PoF, and now the Eles that were interested in it don't care anymore, since they now want a sword and B.) it's only a matter of time until we see a new horn, and it'll probably have a neater effect than just fog.
And now that I look at it, it's odd, Howl has been trending down for a few months, and Bolt has also been trending down, despite 2 new classes that can use swords... but the Lover is staying steady.
I also want to call BS on Anet saying they weren't adding all the new drops to material storage yet, because they wanted to let players get a sense for rarity.... but that doesn't excuse why I have so many account bound jewels and junk that I can't deposit.
So, as someone who's not played this for years (Since the event with the werid crab things just after it came out, really), is there a good summary of what's changed?
So, as someone who's not played this for years (Since the event with the werid crab things just after it came out, really), is there a good summary of what's changed?
So, as someone who's not played this for years (Since the event with the werid crab things just after it came out, really), is there a good summary of what's changed?
Well for one thing, Lion's Arch received a little remodeling.
-Loki-Don't pee in my mouth and tell me it's raining.Registered Userregular
Something I've been seeing happen sometimes - my health will start to dip, but the reduced area is pale yellow rather than dark red, then it just refills.
Is that a new mechanic? What am I doing that's causing it?
Something I've been seeing happen sometimes - my health will start to dip, but the reduced area is pale yellow rather than dark red, then it just refills.
Is that a new mechanic? What am I doing that's causing it?
That's barrier! The pale yellow gets a number of its own, that number represents how much damage you can take before the barrier is gone. It's duration isn't like a boon though, you lose it about as fast as you recover health.
Something I've been seeing happen sometimes - my health will start to dip, but the reduced area is pale yellow rather than dark red, then it just refills.
Is that a new mechanic? What am I doing that's causing it?
That's barrier! The pale yellow gets a number of its own, that number represents how much damage you can take before the barrier is gone. It's duration isn't like a boon though, you lose it about as fast as you recover health.
Yeah, us scourges toss those out all over the place, and I think weavers also make them? The jackal mount's attack also gives nearby people a barrier. They don't last long, but they're basically very temporary extra hit points that damage affects before it affects your real hp. With the loss of shroud as a scourge, they're one of the main ways I stay alive now, and besides dps they're mainly how I support nearby players.
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-Loki-Don't pee in my mouth and tell me it's raining.Registered Userregular
That's why I only see it sometimes. There must be a Scourge in the mix throwing them around.
I love me some barrier. I'd be interested to see the results on how healing stats affect it and if it's worth slotting a couple of pieces. I'm sure it isn't ideal in a raid situation but could be helpful for bounties or maybe even some fractals. I was trying to spam it in bounties yesterday and it seemed to help a bit, but the numbers are pretty low.
Speaking of Weaver, who here is playing one as there main who can fill in some details on what the sweet fuck to do with the class.. I pop onto mine and try to figure out how use them. I think I am too use to my DD. But with the weaver you lack ranged attacks and that sword is all close range smashing. I see the barrier abilities but they seem a bit lack luster (my gear is still specced for condi on my elementalist so that likely doesnt help)
Speaking of Weaver, who here is playing one as there main who can fill in some details on what the sweet fuck to do with the class.. I pop onto mine and try to figure out how use them. I think I am too use to my DD. But with the weaver you lack ranged attacks and that sword is all close range smashing. I see the barrier abilities but they seem a bit lack luster (my gear is still specced for condi on my elementalist so that likely doesnt help)
I've felt pretty powerful using weaver myself in PoF, though I've got a few defensive abilities on my bar which alot of people consider a "no-no". However if not having everything damage isn't a problem, here is what I'm doing: I have the new healing skill (forget the name), arcane shield, glyph of storms, and the new stance that gives barrier on my bar. I've mostly been using sword. I noticed you have a ton of abilities you can cycle through if your constantly changing attunements, which includes full attunement. So you could do like Fire / Air 3, then Fire / Fire 3 back to back basically, which I find handy. For defense I've found it great to just pop arcane shield if I am getting hit very hard. If I just need to heal up , I use one charge of both the barrier and the healing ability and that works well. The barrier protects you while you have a chance to heal up.
None of this is remotely optimal, I have yet to even fully unlock the spec, but I'm having fun and not dying much.
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I love me some barrier. I'd be interested to see the results on how healing stats affect it and if it's worth slotting a couple of pieces. I'm sure it isn't ideal in a raid situation but could be helpful for bounties or maybe even some fractals. I was trying to spam it in bounties yesterday and it seemed to help a bit, but the numbers are pretty low.
Healing does indeed impact barrier, but it's an all or nothing deal.
Speaking of Weaver, who here is playing one as there main who can fill in some details on what the sweet fuck to do with the class.. I pop onto mine and try to figure out how use them. I think I am too use to my DD. But with the weaver you lack ranged attacks and that sword is all close range smashing. I see the barrier abilities but they seem a bit lack luster (my gear is still specced for condi on my elementalist so that likely doesnt help)
I've put probably 20 or so hours on the Weaver so far, fully trained and I was actually pretty slick with the elementalist before I took a break. I specifically took up Weaver because I like the attunement mechanic. Most of my experience has been in sPvP and WvW, but I've done dungeons/fractals/bosses/open world a bit as well.
Weaver is a god damn difficult spec to play. I very often found myself needing to get to water/earth for a spell while I was in fire/air. I tried a myriad specs and all the weapon combinations.
I think my biggest problem was how this spec moves all the spells around. It was difficult to ensure I had the right spell available at the right time. With ele/tempest, you're a single press away from that heal or dodge you need. In weaver, I was regularly spasaming through elements trying to get to my evade, or heal, or invuln, or what have you.
With any melee/close range set up (dagger is range ~300 after all) I found that I needed to embed myself immediately. I always had to be the aggressor, and it was rather difficult to recover from getting jumped. With Magi, and stacked healing power, I was regularly able to create 4k+ barriers through dodging and regular combat. But, this required constant rotation and using dual attacks every time they came up. There was rarely a moment to plan, just frenetic action on my end. I remapped my attuement hotkeys to my mouse because I was alwaysweaving. One slip or pause and my barrier dropped and my health would halve. I actually struggled more in PvE than PvP. Because what was usually a relaxing and fun time, was just constant focus and my hands flicking all over my keyboard. I flat out didn't like sword. I always wanted to be in water main hand for the heal on hit, and found myself having to weave to a "dead" element to get water back on my main hand. The sword dual attacks are some of the best, though. Lava Skin backed right into Obsidian Flesh really messes with people and gives you a bit of a breather. But, no evades. Flame Uprising moves you approximately one foot forward, Riptide is always a backward roll (often a negative instead of a positive), and Polaric Leap is a shadowstep.
And still, my wife's Berzerker Warrior would out survive and out damage me when we'd go exploring. Every time I got ready to combo out and pour on the damage, I'd have to reel back and go into survival mode. I just don't feel that way in D/D ele/tempest.
Finally, I didn't feel like I was contributing anything. I wasn't passing out boons, I wasn't healing everyone else, I wasn't even really providing that much in control either. Just raw damage that would spike then drop off.
So I tried Scepter, and as with regular ele, it was too low damage and not enough utility. Although I did have some fun with S/D, oddly enough.
Staff. Staff is where it's at, at least in PvP. In PvE I find AoEs are pretty terrible since the monsters just like to come up and smash you in the face. I don't like weaver at all for PvE, though. In WvW and the arena, staff weaver is wholly impressive. Your spell bar is often 3-4 AoEs, and your dual attacks are hilariously powerful. I, again, found that Magi's was the best, and spec out for crits (I like arcane over air with staff). I'd run Renewal, Resonance, Mist, Earth Armor, Weave Self (spec Water since I was stacking healing). I would regularly find myself at ~20k HP, with a ~10k barrier, face tanking a warrior with Resonance up while I finished casting Meteor Shower then just mist away to put down more circles while my team fought. With every utility granting stun break and/or stability, it's very easy to ensure you're getting your spells where they need to be.
I couldn't do much solo, except hold a point or keep an enemy or two zoned out, it was difficult to mount enough damage in a single place to kill a guy (slow movers like guardians were easy though). But, I was able to control the battlefield, keep my team healed, and had more survivability than a wet napkin. It was still a frantic rotation through the elements, every time that c/d is up you'd better be weaving, but I felt a little more in control of things instead of just hoping I didn't get crit through my barrier before my endurance got up to dodge and I sure hope the c/d on my dual attack evade is up because I see another guy coming!
I don't, at all, claim to be good at ele/weaver any more. Nor do I think I was doing the best possible things with the spec. Hell, I think Weaver would do great in PvE if you spec for glyphs and always have an element up. When I was trying that, with staff, I was having a blast! Send out the two different elemtentals and bring the rain while they tank. Not super effective, but fun and fairly survivable. I did most of the Crystal Desert as Glyph Pet Staff Weaver. I'm sure there were lots of sideways glances as people rode past me and my little zoo.
I look back on my days as a bard in EQ and DAoC fondly. I loved twisting, and was proud of the days when I would manage to twist four songs because my timing was perfect. Maybe those days are behind me. Maybe my hands just aren't as dexterous as they used be. Because Weaver is fuckin' hard, man.
With Elementalist I felt like I had 20 spells to pick from depending on the situation, and was rarely defeated by my attunement timer. With Weaver I felt like I had about 8 spells, and was often downed while looking at my attunements, realizing I was still 6 seconds from the Obsidian Flesh or Swirling Winds I'd needed.
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The nerf was specifically to the ability to do a support role in raids. That's definitely a niche that is currently dead for the spec. More damage oriented builds are doing pretty well for themselves.
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It's not a simple spec to be sure. A lot of tooltips are misleading or unclear. While the effects of f2-f5 like barriers, fear, condition conversion, etc. will only fire off once no matter how many shades + yourself cover the target, the damage effects listed on the f1 ability do stack. This also means that Dhuumfire, which normally adds burning to shroud skill one, gets triggered any time a shade triggers damage so three shades all hitting one target puts out a lot of burning and using the f abilities just to get those torment and burning stacks on if you have life force to spare is very potent.
This does depend on having a condi set to really take advantage of this though. It's the highest damage build available to necro by a wide margin but is strictly a condition oriented set and you trade a lot of durability in exchange for the damage.
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Placing them down with F1 also does fires off damage. The enemy has to be in range of a shade or you though you personally do not throw out the burning from Dhuumfire.
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I still play baseline Mesmer for open world stuff, but they really should consider just recoding the HoT HPs to be scaling vets. It's really such a nice quality of life improvement.
Only if you trigger an f ability including another f1.
They're not turrets so as the tooltip on f1 states, they only do stuff when a shade ability is used. But you also can place down 3 in quick succession and only have a 15 second cooldown on more charges.
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Survivability is less than normal Necro or Reaper, but I find with barriers and fear I stay alive a lot longer than my Mirage. I am still working out what gear I plan on using and am looking up charts on vitality to life force conversion rates. Looks like it just boils down to more vitality being better, but since I main dagger I generate life force faster than scepter builds so I will probably just focus on Viper.
While the shade skills powered by life force are nice, they're far from the only or even the main source of damage. Scepter 3 especially can do a lot of damage for Scourge with the bonus to Torment damage and being able to influct up to 8 stacks of it from that one skill. All the scepter skills are useful and worth casting on cooldown for a condition necro which is more than can be said for dagger even on a power necro.
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I KNOW! IS SO GOOD!
Made a new vid btw, involves the spoiler mount
Admit it, you were thinking the same thing
Highly disappointed that you were not forcefully thrown off when you bonked your head on the bridge at the end. 7/10
I'll do it again at some point on a more interesting map. Maybe I'll run the "longest flight" achievement in TD in 30 seconds
With that said, chronos have a larger array of evades, dodges, blocks and invulns compared to any other class or spec. You won't be killing things quickly, but you have access to boatloads of quickness and alacrity which will give you lots of acting power that other classes won't necessarily have solo. Once you master that, you'll find yourself able to engage in melee in situations that other classes never would be able to.
Makes me wonder how they'll do the process for crafting the next precursor. I can't remember if they promised all _ new legendaries for HoT, or if they just said they'd be releasing them from here on.
A key thing to keep in mind is that clones only attack about once a second (and if your 1 skill at the time was an attack chain, they only use the first part of it). So between that low attack speed and how little damage clones tend to do, they generally aren't going to grab much aggro unless you're staying farther away from the mob, and even then it's not especially reliable. Phantasms are a bit better at this because they generally do much more damage (and they aren't as fragile), but it's still not something you want to completely rely upon. On the flip side, it does work here and there, as does setting up illusions to eat attacks or set off marks.
Mesmers can be fairly tanky in PvE, but a lot of that comes from active defenses. Which means you get a lot squishier if you don't see / recognize tells for attacks, get CC'd, or get swarmed with lots of little attacks (especially if it's from lots of little minions). Meanwhile you can reduce or straight up negate a lot of damage, if you can recognize what's coming and time your abilities right. Blocks, evades, distortion, reflects, stealth; the mesmer has a bunch of defensive tools in their toolbox to potentially choose from.
The downside is that their damage generally isn't great in many/most PvE scenarios. Plenty sufficient, but in general you're either going to have good burst but poor sustain, or okay sustain.
I suspect a lot of the HoT bosses fights are actually small group friendly if the group is skilled. Only 8 people often take down the DS bosses towards the end, I've taken down some of the VB night bosses with about 6, and I've duo'd the Wyvern Patriarch down to about the halfway point before a zerg showed up and upscaled it. It's more the preceding events often require people (running AB west with 4 people, 2 in armor is probably possible would take longer than most people have the patience for) with more player skill and knowledge the fewer people you have and, well, you've seen what a lot of players are like. But fights are subject to a lot of scaling and frankly can get harder to read with more people around.
I've killed the legendary facet bounty in a 30ish zerg and with 4 or 5 other random players around the last two nights and the latter was a lot smoother if possibly a few minutes longer to do.
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I've heard a couple of theories on that: one is that crafting materials as a whole have taken a huge dive, thus making the crafting of precursors incredibly cheap for the moment. People are clearing T2 of the collection much more easily now than in the past, and the price of, say, Nevermore at the moment is about 1000g cheaper than it was a year ago.
The other one: you know the dwarven vaults in the highlands? Apparently you can get 5 exotics from the meta event there, and it's all impacted by magic find. I've heard at least 3 people in the past couple of days say they got precursor from it.
Through other guilds eavesdropping on dev convos I also heard that the next LS patch is going to see the release of all remaining HoT legendaries. Don't quote me on it, but apparently they want that done before the next round. I'd imagine they're not too happy about the sustainability of legendary journey development, and they're planning on taking the game's economy in a completely different direction than it was managed throughout HoT - their economist, John Smith, isn't at the company anymore. I'd suspect after the next LS they're going to devalue legendary weapons as a whole to make way for a different kind of journey.
My own personal theories were a bit more mundane than that: A.) No class got Warhorn as a new weapon in PoF, and now the Eles that were interested in it don't care anymore, since they now want a sword and B.) it's only a matter of time until we see a new horn, and it'll probably have a neater effect than just fog.
And now that I look at it, it's odd, Howl has been trending down for a few months, and Bolt has also been trending down, despite 2 new classes that can use swords... but the Lover is staying steady.
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Everything.
Here's a chart.
In your case, it sounds like you stopped during Living Story 1.
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Well for one thing, Lion's Arch received a little remodeling.
Let's Play Final Fantasy 'II' (Ch10 - 5/17/10)
Is that a new mechanic? What am I doing that's causing it?
That's barrier! The pale yellow gets a number of its own, that number represents how much damage you can take before the barrier is gone. It's duration isn't like a boon though, you lose it about as fast as you recover health.
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Barrier
Yeah, us scourges toss those out all over the place, and I think weavers also make them? The jackal mount's attack also gives nearby people a barrier. They don't last long, but they're basically very temporary extra hit points that damage affects before it affects your real hp. With the loss of shroud as a scourge, they're one of the main ways I stay alive now, and besides dps they're mainly how I support nearby players.
edit: Mainly to itself, yeah.
CorriganX on Steam and just about everywhere else.
Speaking of Weaver, who here is playing one as there main who can fill in some details on what the sweet fuck to do with the class.. I pop onto mine and try to figure out how use them. I think I am too use to my DD. But with the weaver you lack ranged attacks and that sword is all close range smashing. I see the barrier abilities but they seem a bit lack luster (my gear is still specced for condi on my elementalist so that likely doesnt help)
I've felt pretty powerful using weaver myself in PoF, though I've got a few defensive abilities on my bar which alot of people consider a "no-no". However if not having everything damage isn't a problem, here is what I'm doing: I have the new healing skill (forget the name), arcane shield, glyph of storms, and the new stance that gives barrier on my bar. I've mostly been using sword. I noticed you have a ton of abilities you can cycle through if your constantly changing attunements, which includes full attunement. So you could do like Fire / Air 3, then Fire / Fire 3 back to back basically, which I find handy. For defense I've found it great to just pop arcane shield if I am getting hit very hard. If I just need to heal up , I use one charge of both the barrier and the healing ability and that works well. The barrier protects you while you have a chance to heal up.
None of this is remotely optimal, I have yet to even fully unlock the spec, but I'm having fun and not dying much.
Healing does indeed impact barrier, but it's an all or nothing deal.
I've put probably 20 or so hours on the Weaver so far, fully trained and I was actually pretty slick with the elementalist before I took a break. I specifically took up Weaver because I like the attunement mechanic. Most of my experience has been in sPvP and WvW, but I've done dungeons/fractals/bosses/open world a bit as well.
Weaver is a god damn difficult spec to play. I very often found myself needing to get to water/earth for a spell while I was in fire/air. I tried a myriad specs and all the weapon combinations.
I think my biggest problem was how this spec moves all the spells around. It was difficult to ensure I had the right spell available at the right time. With ele/tempest, you're a single press away from that heal or dodge you need. In weaver, I was regularly spasaming through elements trying to get to my evade, or heal, or invuln, or what have you.
With any melee/close range set up (dagger is range ~300 after all) I found that I needed to embed myself immediately. I always had to be the aggressor, and it was rather difficult to recover from getting jumped. With Magi, and stacked healing power, I was regularly able to create 4k+ barriers through dodging and regular combat. But, this required constant rotation and using dual attacks every time they came up. There was rarely a moment to plan, just frenetic action on my end. I remapped my attuement hotkeys to my mouse because I was always weaving. One slip or pause and my barrier dropped and my health would halve. I actually struggled more in PvE than PvP. Because what was usually a relaxing and fun time, was just constant focus and my hands flicking all over my keyboard. I flat out didn't like sword. I always wanted to be in water main hand for the heal on hit, and found myself having to weave to a "dead" element to get water back on my main hand. The sword dual attacks are some of the best, though. Lava Skin backed right into Obsidian Flesh really messes with people and gives you a bit of a breather. But, no evades. Flame Uprising moves you approximately one foot forward, Riptide is always a backward roll (often a negative instead of a positive), and Polaric Leap is a shadowstep.
And still, my wife's Berzerker Warrior would out survive and out damage me when we'd go exploring. Every time I got ready to combo out and pour on the damage, I'd have to reel back and go into survival mode. I just don't feel that way in D/D ele/tempest.
Finally, I didn't feel like I was contributing anything. I wasn't passing out boons, I wasn't healing everyone else, I wasn't even really providing that much in control either. Just raw damage that would spike then drop off.
So I tried Scepter, and as with regular ele, it was too low damage and not enough utility. Although I did have some fun with S/D, oddly enough.
Staff. Staff is where it's at, at least in PvP. In PvE I find AoEs are pretty terrible since the monsters just like to come up and smash you in the face. I don't like weaver at all for PvE, though. In WvW and the arena, staff weaver is wholly impressive. Your spell bar is often 3-4 AoEs, and your dual attacks are hilariously powerful. I, again, found that Magi's was the best, and spec out for crits (I like arcane over air with staff). I'd run Renewal, Resonance, Mist, Earth Armor, Weave Self (spec Water since I was stacking healing). I would regularly find myself at ~20k HP, with a ~10k barrier, face tanking a warrior with Resonance up while I finished casting Meteor Shower then just mist away to put down more circles while my team fought. With every utility granting stun break and/or stability, it's very easy to ensure you're getting your spells where they need to be.
I couldn't do much solo, except hold a point or keep an enemy or two zoned out, it was difficult to mount enough damage in a single place to kill a guy (slow movers like guardians were easy though). But, I was able to control the battlefield, keep my team healed, and had more survivability than a wet napkin. It was still a frantic rotation through the elements, every time that c/d is up you'd better be weaving, but I felt a little more in control of things instead of just hoping I didn't get crit through my barrier before my endurance got up to dodge and I sure hope the c/d on my dual attack evade is up because I see another guy coming!
I don't, at all, claim to be good at ele/weaver any more. Nor do I think I was doing the best possible things with the spec. Hell, I think Weaver would do great in PvE if you spec for glyphs and always have an element up. When I was trying that, with staff, I was having a blast! Send out the two different elemtentals and bring the rain while they tank. Not super effective, but fun and fairly survivable. I did most of the Crystal Desert as Glyph Pet Staff Weaver. I'm sure there were lots of sideways glances as people rode past me and my little zoo.
I look back on my days as a bard in EQ and DAoC fondly. I loved twisting, and was proud of the days when I would manage to twist four songs because my timing was perfect. Maybe those days are behind me. Maybe my hands just aren't as dexterous as they used be. Because Weaver is fuckin' hard, man.
With Elementalist I felt like I had 20 spells to pick from depending on the situation, and was rarely defeated by my attunement timer. With Weaver I felt like I had about 8 spells, and was often downed while looking at my attunements, realizing I was still 6 seconds from the Obsidian Flesh or Swirling Winds I'd needed.