agreed on necro swords. There's nothing I'm doing in game that requires min/maxing to a degree that overrides preference and frankly I don't see myself shooting for Cerus CM anytime soon so the swords stay.
Yeah same. That may not be tha absolute max DPS, but I just LOVE the mechanics of this weapon for my necro. It feels thematic, like the greatsword was. Much more than a scourge torch or these awful pistols for the harbinger.
Necromancer Sword (main hand) is so much fun. It feels like a nice grab bag of utility between the self healing and mobility offered by the double lunge. Plus, the slashes just go so rapidly. It's a lot of fun!
the staff for warrior was really the most surprising for me, its really great...also I adore the swords for necro, specially the offhand and the pistols for guardian are super fun and strong
I’m running dual mace and hammer untamed dps in open world and I just gotta say, the amount of cc and survivability that you can dish out is insane, outside of places with high damage I find I have a really hard time dying😂
Yes, finally being able to faceroll pve stuff on my ranger is more fun than I thought it would be. I even ran dagger axe on the other weapon slot because I used to run soulbeast. But lets be real, 90% of the time, you forget the other weapon set even exists since everything has such short cds plus you're running untamed. The only time I even died since putting on the maces was in the LWS2 quests where you get this fragile debuff that sets your hp to 1. And I've been testing out the relic of the deadeye since untamed gets cantrips. The uptime on that 10% extra damage is quite disgusting.
I've found that main Sword for necro is fantastic for WvW. It doesn't have the boon ripping and non-projectile ranged of Axe but it has mobility and good cleave on a ranged weapon. It's a pretty good choice for the mode especially since necro in WvW is notorious for being slow. I've also seen most warriors in WvW run staff for a more durable weapon build. It's really interesting in that game mode.
Great overview Lara! As an Ele main, I want to like the ele Pistol more than I do. On paper it seems great, but it practice it feels clunky and slow. I keep trying to get into the flow of it, but then find myself switching toons to play SS Condi reaper instead XD.
oh bet @pwk50 and @lorkano! I was bouncing between all 3 elite specs last week. Honestly, quick catalyst has felt the best to me, and it still feels like molasses.
@@ThrowingCrunchy i spent hours trying to figure out a rotation that foes nice dps and feels good on weaver (my fave spec of all) and I think unravel might be the key to that. Without unravel u are forced to sometimes use the weaker bullet spender or just drop dps by aa-ing, but Unravel makes ur rotation very smooth and makes so u ALWAYS can use the higher dmg bullet spender. I go fire fire -> earth fire -> earth earth -> air earth -> fire unravel -> water when unravel is still active -> fire water -> earth fire and repeat. Go into air only in weave self and then just skip it and circle water, fire and earth. Always using unravel on fire AFTER earth. This rotation is very dynamic and just feels good imo, been having a blast.
Pistol is growing on me but earth feels lackluster on it. The crowd control and buffs on water and air is suburb, and I do love a good dash, fire is of course meaty on the condis and there's some sweet ice field interactions for all elements when flipped from water. Also absolutely bonkers how many unique auras I can get at once with pistol and warhorn or tempest shouts. Still haven't tested it out on weaver since all my practiced weaver builds are crit/strike dmg, not condi. Probably would make catalyst a lot more fun for me too.
Thanks for the rundown! Appreciate the comment on the weapon skill art - I had no idea how much I cared about that until I tried the weapons out in the beta. It really makes a world of difference and the art is amazing
the big problem with wars new staff is it will get nerfed, its very strong compared to other classes and their weapons, problem with that is its on war who have a lot of issues the proffesion feeling outdated or cluncky to play, and the worst issue Anet openly admit in devstreams they have no vission for warrior, any time they get to a war segment all of them just look blank and like they have never seen the class before or a "oh right this proff exists woops we forgot about it again" -.- even bladeswarn feels like it was made for enginier but they couldnt decided between mechanist or bladeswarn but as they didnt have anything for war decided to add it to them instead of making something actualy for them like I dont know a suport "monk" eliet spec which has been asked for since we first got eliet specs -.- the class feels unloved or just uterly forgotten with quolity of life other classses get not being given t them becuase "oh right war exist woops we forgot" T.T
Man this is how I’ve felt for years and I don’t know why I punish myself with War. We’ve been asking for a decade to rework the class so discipline wasn’t mandatory for the class to feel fluid and enjoyable. By default we should have run speed and weapon swap. Our “core mechanic” as warriors is adrenaline lol. Been playing more Mesmer, thief, rev and ele. Need to give engi elite specs a shot, just need to sit down and finish those HP’s. I’ve effectively given up my main. Haven’t tried the stick yet. Maybe that will breath life into the class, outside what I consider it’s more primary identity. Berserker is still the only spec that feels warrior to me. As in throwing people around and hacking limbs off, despite Anet even screwing this up.
I've been running the sword on my support Scourge. The added mobility and easy lifeforce gain outweighs the loss of dagger 3's boon removal + immobilise for most fights.
For the single use portal mesmer rifle has, there at least is one super useful time for it. For those of us with a partner who also happens to be parkour inept a lot of times xD it makes me needing to be their pocket portal a lot easier
Yeah im having too much fun with my dual sword reaper so they're staying, im not doing super hard content that require optimal builds, just having fun playing
Haven't played in a while, so this was a perfect summary. I wasn't interested in Mesmer Rifle at all, but you've got me very interested in trying it in a support Chrono build.
As for myself, i play a necro heal / dps scourge, swords really helps with mobility, and it's perfect for a power oriented build since you with the offhand you can have permanent alacrity, quickness, 25 power, and a bunch of boons in general. Along with the warhorn and the serpent skill, you have permanent barriers on your team, good ways top passively apply heals and a decent amount of damage for a healer. The only trick is managing your life force, since missing a fear skill or your 2 can get you in an uncomfortable position
I tried engineer shortbow myself, went to dragon's stand to knock out several WV objectives at once including my 100 kills with it. Gotta say, from an open world perspective it's not nearly as bad as I was expecting. Especially on encounters where melee is restricted, (and often in those cases, mortar or grenade kits can't reach - think shadow behemoth just as one example,) this feels way better as a swap in than rifle - at least for boon dps setups.
I agree, I put it on my second team engineer and just bopped about getting 25-30 kills on the list and even solo it worked ok. I bet if I actually learned it it would be better yet.
This is what I've found, it feels great on Quickness Scrapper, you can upkeeps such a lot of boons while having a fairly good AoE alpha strike, and the ability to add damage from range. It's quickly replacing Power Rifle Mechanist for open world content. It has 2 Fields and 2 Blasts so works great alongside your other skills to combo.
@@TheRodentMastermind i haven´t even tried any boon-DPS build with shortbow, and what you say about its offensive capabilities actually surprises me. Shortbow has never been intended to be an offensive weapon, and its scaling isn´t really that good afaik. So i´m not really convinced that it´s the shortbow that really makes the difference here. Yes, it enables especially kinetic accellerators and generally anything related to blast-finishers a lot, but on the damage-side of things, the kits are what's doing the heavy lifting. So i believe that while SB working out fine (especially in open world) may be the case, i don´t think the reason for that is actually the shortbow itself, but rather the whole class around it
@@jurare89Oh definitely the ability to maintain 25 Might and Quickness is what makes it work. But it leans into that well, helping upkeep that, while allowing you to hit multiple targets at once. OFC you pair it with something like Grenades, Blast Gyro, Mine. Which means you can constantly cycle through AoE attacks from you kit, your Utilities, the Bow and your Toolbelt, you rarely need to spend much time using the auto attack. It's also got 2 abilities that proc Relic of Fireworks which makes it very easy to upkeep that too.
I personally love the new necromancer swords as the range weapon for support scourge. They feel so much better to use then the staff or the axe and still allow you to do your healing suff, while turning yourself insanly tanky trough the boost on the self heal. And because they are ranged, unlike the dagger, it is pretty easy to just stay outside of the danger zone and pull others to you to revive them.
I'm in a similar situation as you. I crafted a second legendary pistol for the new guardian twin-pistols and in the end it's still better to use a torch lol. Oh well.
I haven't been able to play since post-EoD due to my pc getting to the end of its life, but I'm kinda okay with that seeing how much new stuff I have to catch up on once I can get a new one. Great video as ever Lara ❤
s/s power reaper & scourge (even condi scourge) are SO fun compared to (maybe slightly) higher dps GS or dagger/torch. shroud & lifeforce are easy to mitigate the life drain abilities if you pay attention. i just love how much ranged dps you can do & how fast they build lifeforce and shroud, which are where the real necro's power is anyway
Yea I'm on the same boat. I realize dagger does more damage, but when I'm running around especially doing open world stuff sword/sword feels fantastic, you have the range, cleave, mobility and the damage isn't even that terrible, problem is a lot of min/maxers always have tunnel vision and they only see damage as the main thing to look for.
@@victorsoto4821 doing events & rifts in SOTO, the mobility is so much better than pure DPS. then you can just get into reaper or scourge melee & dodge back out.
Staff Bladesworn feels awesome -- the staff hits sufficiently hard, the burst healing and buffing is appreciated, and I can always switch to Dragon Trigger for CC and lethal damage. Makes soloing champs a breeze!
I will say that most of the new weapons just look cool and fun from what little I've tried! I was a little worried about pistol guard but I am very happy with what we got. Most issues on the underpowered ones just seem to be an issue with number tuning, so hopefully next balance patch will bring these in line with the rest of weapon sets.
Totally agree about the ranger maces. I was completely disinterested in them when they announced them, but now I've played with them, they have completely reignited my love for ranger lol. I've been running them on untamed in open world/meta events with a hammer with the quickness traits and the relic of the midnight king, and I absolutely love the playstyle and how smoothly everything flows. Expecting big nerfs in a couple of weeks though unfortunately, but hopefully they don't do the usual ANet sledgehammer nerf and make them basically unusable outside of specific situations, because I'm loving them as an open world weapon set.
Just tried dual pistols on my guardian tonight. Kinda fun, but the range isn't as good as longbow 2. Staff warrior looks SO fun to play! Think I'll try that one next.
I think she didnt mention it cuz this mechanic, unfortunately, doesn't really have a lot of uses. U can pre-stack the bullets before the fight and then use it once it begins, but otherwise it's not really worth doing. I hope they Anet does something about it.
I LOVE dual sword necro. I don't care if there's a dip in power, they're just too much fun to put down. I've tried Guardian pistols but I don't think I've been playing them right because I felt underpowered and found them difficult to use. It could just be that I wasn't pairing them with the correct build.
Regarding Thief Axe, our boy Phandrel released a Power Deadeye build for open world that's really fun. It doesn't feel that good in single target fightts, don't use it in instanced content, but it's really satisfying for Metas or farming or whatever. Even HoT Hero Points pretty much melt, but it's easier if you let Thieves Guild tank some of the damage. (Edit: for anyone who wants to try the Critical Strikes version of the build, definitely switch out the condi cleanse signet for Mercy)
If they would have cared more about the execution of the new story episodes it would have been really nice. The „Siege“ felt underwhelming with just the general and my character 😂
if i need to pump dps on my necro ill go condi scg, for open world however i swapped my cele harbi for a cele reaper with swords and horn on swap, comfy build using pretty much auto attack only no need for shroud unless defensively for extra hp bar, perma quick, might, fury, regen, vuln and roughly 16k dps self buffed, perfect for metas and stuff
The 5 on Guardian pistol really needs a redisgn. Even the 2nd stage can pass over the enemi you're aiming at and not do any damage. The rest is pretty enjoyable. I didn't like the elementalist pistol. I find it slow and not engaging. But I'll have to give it a try again later. I play the double sword necro with a leech-life build, and omg this is so fun to play. I run around in open world pve, with pretty decent damage and very good surviviability. I would not do great as a dps on a group content, but for open world, I'm enjoying it a lot.
I’ve wanted gun mage for ages for Elementalist. I expected Guardian pistols, instead what got Engi pistol…. Elementalist design has been lacklustre for a while now.
I feel like there are a lot of mechanics on the buff bar that are currently really hard to see. I think arenanet needs to rework the buff bar to not be so cluttered in the future. Maybe a lot of sigil, food, banner, and other longer effects could be moved else where?
Actually, main hand sword on necro might be a dps increase in real fights. You lose burst from dagger, but the ranged attacks and the ability to be at the boss's nose after every split means higher dps uptime. in Xunlai Junkyard, for example, now i am always the first guy to get to the boss. Same with harvest temple after the chomp and every split. Does it compensate the loss of dagger #2? Hard to say until we have arcdps working again.
I've played mostly engi in my time playing gw2 and I am giga-snoozing regarding shortbow as it currently is. Imo they should have either just added a toggle to mortar that does that stuff and have the shortbow do something else, or just have the shortbow be more.. active? Not the right word but idk, I don't really like necro staff either for a similar reason.
Heal bladesworn is really good because of Lush Forest and feels better than healzerker to me because adrenaline/flow isn't an issue. However, there are some feelsweirdman things about it. There's 0 reason to use a fully charged dragon trigger for alac/soldier's focus, so I think they should change daring dragon to give an incentive for fully charging it like barrier per charge or just move alac to immortal dragon and make it aoe heals/prot. And you are forced to use gunsaber after a dragon trigger for a few seconds. The gunsaber skills can be used to proc lush forest, but there's no support for the few seconds you're using it other than your shouts/banners. If they gave gunsaber support via traits like make swift as the wind aoe (we lost group swiftness without warhorn) or unshakable mountain aoe it'd be a lot better. So basically things just need moved around or made aoe to make healsworn good. I don't want them to remove alac from bladesworn to put it on spellbreaker, because other than power dps that's all bladesworn has going for it. Instead I think it would be cool to have alac AND quick on spellbreaker as a choice similar to chronomancer.
Staff on warrior is really good.. The staff itself feels amazing. The problem is.. The warrior.. lol So many fundamental problems, trait problems, main mechanic problems ( adrenaline). Warrior is just left behind in 2012 while all other classes have moved on.. lol
I hope anet will give a second usability to some of the new weapons: revenant scepter -> more strike damage + skill 3 as upkeep skill again like in the beta for aoe boons and aoe damage thief axe -> skill 3 with pistol offhand should do aoe strike damage (like the shortbow as ranged aoe condition damage weapon / it can't and shouldn't be a rival to the rifle as ranged piercing strike damage weapon) engineer shortbow -> should get conditions back like in the beta and do condition damage (like all the other shortbow skill sets at other professions) mesmer rifle -> more strike damage (but it should stay weaker than the greatsword) and balancing the weapons better with the next patch guardian pistol mainhand -> too strong (too much deadly burning) ranger maces -> too strong (nature strengh buff nail it) elementalist pistol -> to complicated with the bullet buffs
I do enjoy playing the healer in MMOs in general and it's almost always my first choice but the chronomancer is just way too much clicking and cooldown-management that I couldn't wrap my head around it. If one plays a mesmer most of the time that might not be the biggest problem but after I wanted to try a new healing-alternative after spending too much time on my ranger and especially the druid specialization the difference in gameplay hit me extremely hard.
in general i like the new weapons, what grind my gears is the recicled animations all over the place, but the change on gameplay is welcome oh one thing, A-net should really look into the UI , charge markers like pistol ele, or thief axe are imposible to read at time with all the buff moving and shuffling around, , and adding to it, in genereal players uses the smaller UI settings :/, they need to either Re-vamp it, or revise it
I play Weaver Pistol. The Pistol Dual Attack skills can have up to two additional effects based on whether you have the corresponding bullets. So if you go 2 - switch element 2 - 3 you can have both, but the Dual Attacks don't generate bullets of their own. Even then, when you combine your Pistol 3 having four different options per elemental combination (six in total, with four options each) with the four basic options where you can use them with or without their bullet effects (so four times two options more), means that Weaver Pistol 3 has 32 different options available to it. That is more options that certain builds have in total. Sure it's an absolute Moonlight Sonata to play, but I would not have it any other way.
I definitely gotta give Weaver pistol a try too! So far, I've mostly stuck to Tempest, to try to not overwhelm myself with a million new skills- but I'm definitely gonna give it a try soon!
they do generate if you dont have a bullet, the way that works feels like a bug, in the ocasion that you have an off hand bullet and have no main hand bullet you consume the bullet and dont generate, if you dont have an off hand bullet and use it you generate, if you have both you consume, basically you cant generate and consume a different bullet at the same time, you can only consume or only generate, this makes sense for all other specs but not for weaver, its a dual attack after all, its weird
imagine beeing unable to spell the letter L und constantly switch it with D ....like who are those headers doing all that heading? is it readdy that good?
all new weapons are raw...2 types of weapons, breaking completely like a war staff whose auto attack hits 3k meters on 5 targets,and the terrible scepter of the revenant which is only for one game mod pve and all the mechanics are clattering auto attacks, it took them 1 year to make a new auto attack on 3 targets.Bravo
Fun fact: Warriors is not the "dumb"/barbaric, direct, brainless, easy-to-play class like other games. Okay, they're not that complex. Could we classify it as medium difficult, perhaps? The guardians, however... damn, they have super easy builds. These pistols were made for lazy people. I loved!!
ive been doing a lot of practice with scepter for heal herald lately. the ally targeting is very weird and definitely something completely new I have had to learn by just doing it a lot. Testing out weird keybinds I never knew existed. At first I wasnt really enjoying it but i think finally am starting to get it. Ive set up keybinds for "select nearest enemy", "set personal target", and "take personal target". Before the fight starts I set a personal target, usually my boonDPS in my subgroup, and tether them as the fight starts (or optimally just before so I can activate it again as close as possible to when the boss first becomes vulnerable so all my DPS are doing their opening burst with 25 might) then select nearest enemy to go back to normal. auto attacking them and using skill 2 off cooldown for barrier. Then whenever I need a big burst of might again, I can just "take personal target" use skill 3, then select the boss again and continue as normal, making sure to consume the tether when its ready 7 seconds later. At first I was trying to use skill 3 on an ally off cooldown which was just too much for me and I soon realised most of the time it was not needed anyway. It gives out so much might but you have many other sources of might as heal herald and are usually getting some might from the rest of the subgroup too. So once I stopped using the tether off cooldown and just when required, the build became so much more playable. It is still kinda weird tho, and I can definitely see it not being a fan favorite weapon just because of this weird usability. But thats fine, the old staff autoattacking heal herald build is still pretty good.
agreed. Definitely the weapon I keep coming back to master...but ya there's still a lot of guess work with deployed axes. the GW2 UI is really starting to show it's age with this update
i know there's a lot of buzz for alac spellbreaker and sure (better than alac scourge LMAO) but the class fantasy (TO ME) always sounded less suport-y and more warrior unga bunga but with a bit more brain now also for what I run on my necro I would 100% mobility over some damage I barely feel (I run zerging wvw and open world mostly so...)
You and me both on that scepter. It's uh, not very good. It's fun! but kinda terrible. Way too clunky on 2 and 3 and the auto is amazing cleave but not enough on its own to want to use.
whoever designed this engineer shortbow weapon specs, should quit his/her job thus giving us less stress playing the game. and also for the next employee please hire someone who actually plays all aspects of the game.
I feel these weapons have been very well received, much better than the EOD ones for example! My current favorites: Condi Willbender Pistol/Torch: I like this because there are actually some good condies on pistol, not only "proc you're f1 as many times as possible" Power Soulbeast double Maces: Unga Bunga, need I say more? I haven't tried thief axe but it seems really fun also!
Your complaints about Elementalist Pistol actually just echo criticism I have about GW2 as a whole: the UI has zero customizability, and is very poorly designed for rapid information access. All of the information is clumped at the bottom of the screen, away from where your character is, and the opposite side of the screen from your target's information. The icons for buffs and debuffs are not especially easy to differentiate at a glance, are quite small versus the scale of other UI elements, and have no way of filtering or preferencing them. The things you need _the most_ rapid glance access to, your skill bars and your class UI effects, cannot be moved from the bottom of the screen, and that information is spread across literally half of the width of the screen. As an example, if I'm playing literally any Revenant build, I need to keep not only a close eye on my individual weapon abilities, my legend F abilities, but also my energy bar, my legend swap CD, and my weapon swap CD. If playing Vindicator, I also need to keep on my endurance bar and the buff from dodging. All of that information, fortunately, is concentrated in a relatively small area on the left of the bar, but it means that if I'm trying to watch my _character_ as well, to ensure I'm not standing in bad stuff, or watching an enemy (or multiple) for dangerous telegraphs, my eyes are constantly having to pop up and down across ~15-20 degrees of angle to see my target, my character, and my hotbars. And since GW2 lacks a global cooldown, I can't even really do that on a regular pace or anything, I have to be doing it constantly. Other classes are even worse about this. Condi Virtuoso, I need to be keeping track of my blades to cast my bladesongs, and also which bladesongs are off cooldown at the time. My blade income, while technically deterministic (via phantasm to clones, and bleed stacks from my own crits, phantasm attacks, and glyphs), insofar as there isn't any RNG involved (if at 100% crit with fury), _feels_ spikey and somewhat random, so I have to be keeping a constant eye on those little pips of my blades, and my bladesong CDs, while also keeping an eye on 1-2 utility effects, usually my heal for phantasm reset, any my weapon swap CD. Basically, there's a LOT of information I have to keep track of, for any class, all of it spread across the very bottom of the screen, far from where my character and my target(s) and my target's buffs/debuffs are. GW2 desperately needs the ability to customize the UI, to move, scale, hide, or tweak each element of it individually. Having come from a background of largely WoW and FFXIV over the past couple decades, the complete lack of combat UI adjustment (and the poor state of the base UI for rapid information scanning) is, imo, the _most_ crippling aspect of GW2's combat.
like guardian wasn't strong enaugh already...dont get me wron i love my guard but now with we were omnipotent previousely but now we can BULLETS GO BRRR? i dont see a god up here OTHER THAN ME! haha also heal zerker is basically an angry man with a stick bonking peaple back on their feet XD.man litterally TOO ANGRY TO DIE!
I wanted to like Thief AXE, but i was mostly on Specter...i just can't .... it's not my style...so i made the Astralaria and went back to my Condi Willbender xD The PISTOLS ARE AWESOME XD
@@Laranity it is ! I somehow always go back to my Guardian :) it was my first class in back in the day ( beta ) and i started the live game with Guardian too. Throughout the years i've had Ranger and Engineer and later Thief, but always went back to Guardian! I just love it! Willbender is just fun to play!
