Talk:"Together as One!"

This icon is a modified version of the GW2 command | "Strength of the Pack!". --DANDY ^_^ -- 19:05, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

not effecting pet?

anyone else find it wrong and maybe unintentional that this effects party members which means not your pet it seems? the icon and the name "as one" strongly imply that it would effect your pet, all the other many skills with "as one" in the title are themed around pets.

If you have this equipped...

...will your pet will travel with you? --Falconeye (talk) 04:10, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

Having already used it without any beastmastery skills on my bar, I can confirm that it does not cause your pet to travel with you, though that would be neat if it did.

That said, I am so far having a blast with this skill. Combine it with Never Rampage Alone for a permanently maintainable +15 damage boost, +25% increased attack speed, and +10 health regeneration to not only you but also your pet and with allies receiving the damage boost and part of the health Regeneration. This is a stacked skill and it's a much needed boost for PvE rangers as a whole. Soldier198 (talk) 04:18, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

Bug

I love this functionality. Gonna abuse this until it's fixed. --DANDY ^_^ -- 16:39, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

As if it wasn't already good enough.--Ruine Eternelle 17:03, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

Tried this a bit. It's actually pretty bothersome to constantly position yourself for this, for example when buffing a spirit spammer. --DANDY ^_^ -- 21:31, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

Assuming spell casting heroes, perhaps it's better to bring a shortbow instead so you're better positioned when they're in wand range. Kenducky1 (talk) 20:03, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

Does it heal the spirits? - - Ruine Eternelle 20:13, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

Gave it a quick test. It is indeed granting spirits health regeneration. Pretty nice when used on Rejuvenation. Soldier198 (talk) 20:23, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

Wow sweet. Should team up with two spirit spammers and a few MM's with Bone Fiends, so the Bones stay in range of getting buffed as well. Kenducky1 (talk) 20:26, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

Yeah pet (buffing the minions) + bow/spear (buffing the spirits) seems like the way to go. Edit : and please use the Racing Beetle . Edit2 : Can also go with Bone Minions for their higher attack speed. - - Ruine Eternelle 23:16, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

AoE

Why is this in the earshot AoE category? It's in the area, but I don't know how to change that. Mist Y (talk) 21:39, 25 April 2020 (UTC)

Because so far all shout affecting all allies have been earshot range? - - Ruine Eternelle 22:35, 25 April 2020 (UTC)

Okay well now it says nearby, which still isn't correct. Why did you revert? Do I need to provide some sort of evidence of it being applied in area range? Mist Y (talk) 23:50, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

I ran my tests and on a hero I can only put the effect if the hero is about in nearby range of me or my pet. I'm not comfortable with in-game distance, but it's smaller than "in the area" and bigger than adjacent. - - Ruine Eternelle 08:00, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

I don't know what to say. How are you testing this? https://i.imgur.com/qFZekAx.jpg As you can see in the screenshot, Goren is right on the edge of in the area, and Tao is being applied to him. Mist Y (talk) 08:20, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

Strange. Is the area bigger without a pet? Or do affected allies kind of "relay" the boost? I can't check it rn but needs more testing. - - Ruine Eternelle 08:32, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

Edit : It seems like my tests were wrong. It's indeed in the area, not nearby.--Ruine Eternelle 10:04, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

In fact it's 2 gwinches wider, but GWWiki doesn't seem concerned with microscopic inaccuracies, so "in the area" will be fine. Mist Y (talk) 14:49, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

How do you measure that ? GWToolbox ? Maybe it's worth mentioning --Ruine Eternelle 14:54, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

Yes, I used the TB distance monitor. I really wouldn't bother including a 0.621118012% inaccuracy though. There are plenty of others throughout the wiki that just don't matter for anything but the tightest calculations... and enough work to be done here already. For example, Tao is still listed in the "nearby" category. ;) Mist Y (talk) 15:11, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

Verata's Gaze has a 0 health sacrifice, yet is not in the sacrifice skills category. Should a skill be categorized by its intentional effect or actual effect ?--Ruine Eternelle 18:07, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

Yes. (InclusiveOr) - Infinite - talk 18:10, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

Actual effect. Is there any reason you wouldn't do it that way? Mist Y (talk) 21:51, 30 April 2020 (UTC)

Rule of thumb: We categorize by its actual/mechanical effect, and note/anomaly by its intended or textualized effect (i.e. what Anet says). Remember Shadowstep/Teleport as an example? After that patch, there was no reason to distinguish the two from a player's perspective. --Falconeye (talk) 03:00, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

TaO is still listed on the nearby page instead of in the area. I have no idea how to change this. Mist Y (talk) 09:35, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

Never mind - I'm a smart go-getter and worked it out all by myself! Mist Y (talk) 10:34, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

Does it stack?

Let's say the ranger is using a melee build. Are the bonuses from the pet and ranger effecting each-other for double yield, or is it a single consolidated bonus, unstackable with itself? --Neil • 08:29, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

Nope. It would be kind of busted if it did--Ruine Eternelle 08:30, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

Skill name

I like to think the name is actually a reference to the theme song from Pokémon Galactic Battles:

"And if we come, together as one,

Complete the quest, that we've begun,

We will win the battle!

Galactic Battles! Pokémon!"

but the Gladiator explanation seems more plausible... --Tomassu Lamassu (talk) 16:07, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

Way too much of a stretch Da Mystic Reaper (talk) 16:15, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

Extremely underpowered

(Problems addressed throughout the following quote figures based on 16 Expertise, however even at 20 Expertise this skill remains underpowered for the same reasons. I have tested this skill in the Domain of Anguish on Hard Mode as well as collecting extensive flat DPS statistics from the Master of Damage)

Firstly, I'm ignoring the possible presence of a pet for this analysis as aside from drawing aggro away from party members, pets are somewhat pointless if not detrimental. They contribute fairly insignificant additional DPS to the party (a Splinter Weapon Barrage or Dagger spammer Ranger does far more damage than a pet focused build or standalone build accompanied by a pet), they provide no crowd control or team support of their own and also draw focus for things such as healing away from important party members when using AI allies for support roles.

Also, if a pet ran towards an enemy group in high end areas where mid and backline heroes are usually flagged appropriately as standard practice, no melee profession heroes are used in late - end game area party configurations meaning almost none of your party would remain in the effective radius propagating from a pet under the effects of Together as One unless constantly micro managed to attack specific targets. That being said, the pet could still attack melee - close range enemies of it's own accord who have ran straight to the middle of your party / seeing as separate overlapping areas for Together as One's effects do not stack... if fighting in a small enough portion of the map or attacking the same enemy, the main way this skill would be redeemed and balanced is instead completely voided and your pet's proximity to your main group is mostly irrelevant (especially in close quarters situations).

•On to the main criticisms:

+7 health regen (14 health per second), even for the whole party, is a terribly anemic and laughable healing rate due to the cost of wasting both a PvE skill choice and your elite skill slot. The only advantage of this healing effect is the fact it has removal protection due to being a shout, but unless reworked to provide the maximum +12 health regen (24 health a second) at 16 expertise... it ultimately contributes an unnoticeable and unneeded amount of healing towards a party with the proper defences already in place. For the sake of argument, if the amount of healing were changed to +9 health regen with a threshold of 16 Expertise and you made use of a Recuperation spirit somewhere in your party, that could be a workable compromise. To experience consistent results with something of that nature however, it would require further micro management of heroes and restrict the player to using ranged rather than melee builds / to justify it being both an elite and PvE only skill, the healing would need to reach maximum potency of it's own volition.

16 damage to attacks for party members is also terrible for two reasons, namely because 99% of full AI party setups don't use regularly “attacking” members and secondly because it is outdone (or at the very least matched) by pretty much every other attack damage buff skill out there. Most of these alternatives either aren't elite, aren't PvE exclusive or have very powerful synergies with other skills such as the new Necromancer elite skill Soul Taker with Dark Aura. Again the only point of merit here is the removal protection compared to Strength of Honour or Order of Pain for example, plus the fact you can't leave an effective range / attack an unaffected target (some non elite alternatives also have those benefits too). In short, if you're a Ranger using a bow build, this skill will realistically provide +16 damage to nobody except the caster.

To address the use of this skill in full player parties, I'll concede the DPS increase for other players is considerable if playing with other physical professions on a melee range build... but the overall contribution to party utility has severely diminishing returns. The more physical players you add, the more you drastically decrease your party's effectiveness in areas which require genuine considered party setups (there's no point trying to meter this skill's effectiveness on normal mode in non elite areas where you can be very care free in how you play). This skill would be extremely useful if it affected “allies", even non-spirit allies, as Animate Bone Fiend would experience tremendous synergy from the health regen to offset natutal minion health degeneration and the application of a reasonable multi target attack boost.

Finally, this skill only just about puts the Ranger's hybrid melee abilities (purely for damage numbers) on par with other classes except Dervishes using pure variarions of those Ranger hybrid builds... PRIOR TO THE RELEASE of the new elite skills. Seven Weapons Stance Scythe / Hammer Warrior and Shadow Theft Dagger Spammer Assassin thoroughly wipe the floor with any Together as One build in single and adjacent target time-to-kill, as well as support pressure and in the Warrior's case, unparalleled crowd control via AoE “knocklocking".

My intent isn't to simply bash the Ranger profession, nor is it to tell people what to play. The length of this post is purely meant to “discuss” how terribly underpowered this skill is in spite of some people claiming it to be a godsend, especially after a balancing patch targeted specifically at these new elite skills. Thanks to the subpar balancing attempts over the life of Guildwars by the developers, the Ranger profession barely sees any use in general PvE in the current day and I think it's high time the developers corrected the general balance of the more neglected professions rather than just throwing inadequately playtested new skills into the game / something that has been the case for an extremely long time.

I don't play the DoA so I cannot personally comment on TaO's effectiveness there and how well it integrates into the already existing team comps for that area. But for general PvE usage, it is my opinion that this skill is pretty great. It adds damage to yourself, your pet, party members, and grants them all +7 health regeneration which is quite effective at reducing partywide pressure in many cases.

His analysis is also interesting because it shows how vastly different player's perspectives of a skill may be. He think it's a terrible skill. I think it's a great skill. How then should a developer be inclined to view this skill in light of polarizing opinions? With their best judgement, most likely. Soldier198 (talk) 20:38, 12 May 2020 (UTC)

As a Ranger elite skill that takes up a PvE slot I can see where he is coming from. The damage + health regeneration combination does look rather underwhelming for you to waste your elite slot on, especially if it does not significantly improve the DPS or survivability of your party. If TaO flat out increases damage for all sources of damage and not just attacks and affects all allies and not just party members then I would consider ToA over another elite skill like Barrage. If ToA is able to affect allies alone would already be a big improvement since it will affect allied minions and spirits as well significantly boosting a party's DPS and the survivability of those summons. Increasing it's range to earshot would also be a helpful buff. Da Mystic Reaper (talk) 21:54, 12 May 2020 (UTC)

For what my opinion counts, I still believe that TaO is a great skill, viable as is, and which makes attackers more interesting in PvE, which is a good direction. And 7-9 health regeneration is big. -Ruine Eternelle 22:58, 12 May 2020 (UTC)

Regen cap is 10, not 12.

TaO is an upgrade to dagger ranger and little else. It's actively worse than alternatives in bow builds because things like glass arrows exist, and the regen is functionally irrelevant in general pve. It has some edge case uses in speed clears, but even there it's just a minor quality of life enhancement for the most part. Shards of Orr is probably the most useful the skill can be, and even there it's just a filler you toss on one person to marginally improve the team's damage. That person does a tiny bit less, and the other glass arrow rangers do a little bit more. Hell, I'd argue that it's not even clear cut that it's worth bringing because the regen will rarely apply to most of the team during the run where it's useful (let alone the people in the back who are more likely to need it), and if many people die (which happens with trash runs), you lose more damage for bringing it than you gain by having it on the two other people that survived getting to fendi. Beyond that there's clown utility slots like an eoe leech in bogroots, deep, etc, but those are all optional roles where it's far from required.

I wouldn't say the skill is underpowered or anything, it just doesn't do anything that anyone should care about in the vast majority of situations beyond dagger spam, and that's perfectly fine. Not everything has to be good everywhere. If you want to cry about overpowered/underpowered, look at heroic refrain and over the limit. 76.127.242.82 23:49, 12 May 2020 (UTC)

(The below statements are based on the premise of playing without using consumables. Although helpful in speeding up content and not too difficult to obtain, they aren't needed for builds that would otherwise reliably clear content at a slower pace without them)

In general PvE, most skills are great / the only productive test of whether a skill is balanced against it's counterparts and the content (in meta or regular builds) is to use it when venturing into Winds of Change, The Fissure of Woe, The Underworld, The Domain of Anguish, The Deep, Urgoz Warren and finally Slaver's Exile (with the last 3 being a cakewalk if not faced in hard mode, although for an honest reflection of performance you should always test skills on hard mode). Seeing as all non-elite areas in the campaigns can be done quite easily on Hard Mode without the player character even bothering to lift a finger, it's not fair to gauge a skill's efficacy based on casual use as a decent (not even meta) hero setup will ensure the player's build never hits the “vital contribution to party function” barrier you're presented with in harder areas i.e. you can be fully carried through all main story content on hard mode purely by AI companions with functionally sound builds.

When you go into Fissure of Woe with a full hero party for example, even if you flag your party members, the first Skeleton Elementalist and Mesmer mob will totally flatten you with damage if you don't have a Soul Twisting Ritualist and some decent healers (you can use a Panic Mesmer to heavily alleviate the pressure although you sacrifice a not insignificant chunk of clear speed by losing an Energy Surge party role). This isnt necessarily the case if using a party buffed with Paragon shouts / chants, "Save Yourselves!" and Heroic Refrain, but that's the only exception and we're here to talk about Together as One.

A 14 health gain per second buff does absolutely nothing to mitigate potential hundreds of incoming damage per second. This is especially true for AoE damage, where single target heals (usually from Necromancers using Restoration Magic in AI parties) need to be cast in a round robin fashion in order of priority, thereby leaving those last to be healed open to the danger of being hit again and killed before that can recover. The builds and skills of your other party members do protect you however, with said health gain from Together as One becoming a token insignificance which won't usefully contribute to any success in beating hard content... nevermind making or breaking a party setup. In areas where builds and party configuration matter, that skill is utterly pointless in it's current state.

Other skills could also be balanced further in order to put professions with potentially similar roles on an equal playing field whilst maintaining their unique individual playstyles e.g. new meta Warrior pure dps builds formed around Seven Weapons Stance are still inferior to old Assassin Dagger Spammer builds, but if they made Seven Weapons Stance double the armor penetration given by the innate effect of the Strength attribute it would give you a reason to be far more indifferent between Warrior and Assassin if viewed on paper / let your preference in aesthetics and playstyle as well as the varied merits of different build's be the soul decider. With all that being said, those new Warrior builds are still a huge marked improvement over old variations that contribute well to a team and serve an important function.

This is where Together as One differs, as it provides no new higher bar for any viable variation on the Ranger playstyle / the increase in damage for Ranger Assassin hybrids for example still pales in comparison to a Pure Assassin's damage output, so if you wish to play Dagger Spammer and have your mind set on that build... Why not just role an Assassin?

Again I am not telling people how to play, but unless you're genuinely looking to handicap yourself by a considerable margin (or simply love the Ranger aesthetic to an obsessive degree) then Rangers have been forced out of the market through an irresponsible lack of balancing / it's a terrible shame as competitive variety and diversity is this game's greatest strength.

It might seem like I focus too much on AI parties when I present my reasoning, but players already have perfectly working speed clear setups for every elite area in the game and if you were to make things slightly easier then the result would be a fairly inconsequential shift in the economy. Unless you drastically messed up the balancing, things would still be comparable to how they are now.

Without tooting my own horn, it'd take me maybe a couple of months to completely balance the game's skills by myself and there are many other people who could legitimately say the same. The easiest thing they could do to rectify the state of the Ranger class and the game in general right now is to significantly raise the power floor for neglected professions by intentionally making them a little too powerful, then look at how the newly “overpowered” classes perform and how players have formulated new builds before nerfing problematic skills in gradual stages until they reach an equilibrium. This would be mitigated by proper theorycrafting and playtesting although given what we have now, I highly doubt the competency of the people responsible for such processes. In terms of accidentally raising the difficulty floor by making enemies stronger through balancing skills based on player needs, you could just partition copies of old skill variations to be monster only skills meaning they aren't affected by changes made to the new player useable duplicates.

"Why not just role an Assassin?" Because it doesn't matter? Good 7 hero teams can literally cspace alt tab afk 95% of vanquishes and HM missions. Even winds of change is mostly a joke with the right setups and even a modicum of player attention. I say that as someone who has deliberately gone through WoC and WiK with silly team builds that are not optimal. I quite literally cspaced my way through HM WoC with a modified racway setup that uses 4 paragon heroes with an orders necro, and I barely ran into real difficulties. It literally doesn't matter what the player does if you are running properly optimized hero teams.

Assassins got more out of this update than rangers did. So what? That doesn't make this skill trash. It just means that attribute boosting skills need to be balanced carefully. Surprise. They didn't do that. And now we have multiple global attribute boosting abominations in the game. If you want to complain about problems, why not start there? Or start with the fact that monks still have nothing useful to do that isn't resorting to dagger spam gimmicks because there are practically zero defensive pve skills worth pissing on? The vast majority of the good pve skills synergize with offensive player bars, and heroes are already good enough at redbarring/protting, so you wind up contributing little more than a hero if you aren't playing an offensive role. That's a far bigger issue for the game than some minor number discrepancies between perfectly viable general purpose professions. 76.127.242.82 00:16, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

I literally just said decent hero parties can negate the need for a player to interfere in combat so echoing that point means nothing past reaffirming the point I was making...

Also I wasn't justifying the skill being trash by saying x profession got more out of the update, I was saying it's trash because it literally is. The differences it makes to the way a party functions are truly miniscule given the fact it is both an elite skill and a PvE only skill, not to mention that the attribute boosting skills are balanced / Assassins are by no means overpowered thanks to Shadow Theft and Paragons using Heroic Refrain essentially veto their slot in the party as an independent entity to improve the performance of the other members in compensation, a dynamic which improves the overall effectiveness of the party reasonably beyond what it would be otherwise and thus justifying the nature of Heroic Refrain being a PvE only elite skill. Seven Weapons Stance allows Warriors to stretch their legs a lot more and seeing as the most effective builds are focused around one weapon (broken multi weapon builds would be gated off by the Warrior's low energy without Warrior's Endurance), I don't see what you're crying about. The most extreme example is Heroic Refrain which provides arguably less benefit than consets and pcons, with the added fact it's gated behind a build rotation where you have to be aware of player spacing to maintain the echo rather than just lazily clicking a few consumables...

The cap for attributes without raising it via weapon mods (a slim as hell chance) is 20 anyway, so whether you have ten or ten thousand skills that boost attributes it's completely irrelevant unless you're playing in a party full of players. Even then however you don't gain any benefit from martial playstyles as you tend to only use one weapon type like I stated above and any useable attack skills simply just “become available” if you're using a class such as Dervish which has multiple attacks across different attributes / the martial skills which are useable in “regular builds” are fairly balanced and just open up more build variation. As a spellcaster class, you would maybe get some new synergies if you had 4 or 5 high attributes... but nothing that would break the game, you'd just raise the speed of a hero party to that of a player party and decent player parties have 100% succes rates anyway (defer to my statement about the economy). The only slight power imbalance on casters would possibly come from primary attributes.

Finally roles such as ST Ritualist, SoS Ritualist, WoQ Ritualist, Imbagon, Heroic Paragon, Dervish AoE heal spam, Dervish Bonder, Prot Monk, OoU Minion Master and Panic Mesmer (I'm sure I've probably missed a fair few) are all either support roles that heal, buff or provide non direct damage which either can't be performed by heroes (at all in the case of the ones using the new PvE elites) or aren't performed half as well by heroes. The reason why offensive melee characters contribute more than heroes is because they mostly rely on sequential rotations the AI can't use, but unless you want to micro the hell out of skill bars then the consistency of actually playing a defensive support build makes you contribute a lot more. If you want to see how true that is just mimic a meta hero setup with real players and see how much faster and more reliably they blow through content.

Edit: Monk has been mostly paced out of the market due to poor balancing too, but that doesn't invalidate Ranger being in the same mess. Calling something “Viable for general purpose content” is a very dubious excuse given how easy it is to reach non “general purpose content” on a fresh account so don't try to play semantics and I wouldn't call half the DPS of a pure profession variant “minor number discrepancies”.

This is a good thing to have people with different points of view. Most players I have talked to since the update consider this skill to be great. You said you wanted to create a discussion about the skill, which is a behavior I respect. You admit that you were expecting this skill to be the overpowered godsend to save rangers (and attackers in gen) from their current situation of irrelevancy in high end areas, and as a matter of fact this seems indeed not to be it. It is disappointing, but is it really the fault of this skill or is it more about the fact you mentioned several times, that attackers in general are irrelevant in these situations? --Ruine Eternelle 07:00, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

I can see this as relevant in MTSC.

Also could you make your next posts shorter? In your own interest. - - Ruine Eternelle 07:26, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

If most of the players you've talked to think the skill is great, without meaning to attack those players personally at all I seriously doubt they're the sort of people who clear high end content or theorycraft useful builds past following PvX guides. As a user mentioned prior you can clear Winds of Change and War In Kryta easily with novelty party configurations, but almost all the other elite areas including some Winds of Change content won't let you do that.

If you play easy PvE content and that's where you find your enjoyment, great / you're perfectly entitled to enjoy the game however you wish, but my gripe is with the developers who should know such a major piece of content as the first PvE only elite skill needs to be balanced for the extremely sizeable chunk of people who play the wealth of endgame content available.

I didn't say I wanted the skill to be an overpowered godsend in order to save ranger, far from it. I want all skills to be balanced in order to make every profession equal in their usefulness but drastically different in their role and playstyle / I did theorycraft a Beast Mastery and Expertise build where if this skill applied double buff effect or two different buffs to the pet and caster which could stack when overlapped (effectively the same) it'd be very useful from a healing and support perspective (the damage has maybe one or two uses across the entire game as you said, unless of course they made it affect allies or non spirit allies instead).

The game does need fixing from a wider angle true, but at the end of the day this is the discussion thread for Together as One which is why I've zeroed in on that skill in 80% of my replies.

Just to chip in: I am working towards GWAMM on my Ranger (usually running melee builds), and I can definitely say that "Together as One!" has improved my DPS considerably with the added charm of having to worry a lot less about health degeneration. I've used it in all my HM dungeon clears, and in a significant number of vanquishes. Of course there's still a difference between, say, a random HM dungeon and HM DoA, but I do not think that a skill necessarily needs to be useful in the extreme high-end areas for it to be considered good. In the end, most professions have only a handful of elite skills that see daylight in those areas anyway, and saying that you could fix that in "a couple of months" sounds more like the Dunning-Kruger effect than anything else to me.

Also, please please please sign your comments. It common courtesy that costs you less than a second per post. -arnosluismans (talk) 20:44, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

"In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability." just putting this here in case the reader is wondering what it is. I wouldn't like it if someone told me that I have this effect (even if that'd be likely true for me as far as DoA is concerned). - - Ruine Eternelle 08:38, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

Assuming low ability isn't befitting of somebody on a random forum because you have no idea about the background of the individual you're scrutinising. In this instance, balancing skills is simply a matter of looking at existing synergies and altering figures accordingly before play-testing to see how the changes manifest in practice / refine those changes respective to the results. Having played Guild Wars for almost the full 15 years (since just before Sorrow's Furnace released) combined with thousands of hours in other far more mechanically complex games such as EVE online and Path of Exile, Guild Wars is mathematically and mechanically trivial to balance by comparison. As I also said earlier there's many other people who could happily balance the game too, especially if they come from a physics or mathematics based career background like myself where grinding through calculations is par for the course.

If you use a moped to race a man in a motorised wheelchair, the moped seems like a good vehicle with high performance in that situation. If you then use the same moped in a MotoGP race, you'll get lapped like a standing post and thoroughly outperformed by the other bikes / the same logic applies here. You can't champion the merits of something if the litmus test you've used is so relaxed it ends up denoting 90% of the things you test as "good", you have to acknowledge the context of the skill in question and apply it's performance to an appropriate testing methodology i.e. the first PvE only elite skills, given their constraints and the fact they're the progenitors of a skill type, are no doubt aimed at endgame viability and should be weighed as such. The fact that PvE Ranger is near useless outside of Daggerspam builds and this skill markedly increases the utility of said builds isn't grounds to gauge it's effectiveness, it just exemplifies how underdeveloped Rangers are as a profession e.g. this tweak just about brings Ranger DPS in line with old Way of the Assassin builds without any of the reliability or consistency, although those figures are now dwarfed by the capabilities of Shadow Theft making a comparison to Assassin DPS wholly redundant.

Indeed most professions only have half a dozen elite skills that can be used in those areas, give or take a few i.e. at a rough count the highest is Necromancer with 9 and the lowest being Ranger with 1. This just further strengthens my point however, being that the skill is even more limited than the current palette / even inside full player parties, it's unlikely that any of the new skills will see use on more than one player and said limit is hard locked in AI populated parties. Paragons can still somewhat effectively use "Save Yourselves!" in a build containing Heroic Refrain instead of Focused Anger, a perfect example of how even regular PvE only skills should be balanced in accordance with their inherent limitation.

Finally, I don't know how to sign my posts. I've only participated in the wiki for the past few months because I was tired of how stagnant the game has become due to poor development and jaded players, so I haven't really absorbed most of the wiki's functionality / my IP address constantly changes and given the dire balancing patch on the 30th of April, I no longer have enough confidence in the competency of the people presiding over this game's future to care enough about making a wiki account. How they can hit the mark perfectly with some of the new skills and totally balls up "Together as One!", Judgment Strike, Weapons of Three Forges and Over the Limit after years of data from players thoroughly exploring build potentials with an unchanging pool of skills is beyond me unless they simply don't care.

Edit: just to add, no areas in the game are "extreme" anymore and everywhere is fairly easy to clear through even without consumables. Even Domain of Anguish and The Underworld are considered easy if you devote a small amount of time to learn the area rather than just diving in.

To sign your edits, just add four tildes ~ at the end. Nice to meet a fellow scientist out there. I agree with you, they could have made us participate more (maybe with a "Design a PvE-only elite skill" contest), but it would have taken the surprise effect away. They nevertheless took time and budget for the 15. birthday, so I am happy that we got something at all.

Given the fact that the game has had nobody on it for 8 years I wouldn't be surprised if nobody at anet knows how the game works anymore in regular PvE, let alone in high-end PvE. It was bold of them to try some of the original ideas with the weapons and some of the skills. I still feel angry about the design (especially OtL as a main elementalist), but I feel that a text too long, too angry, even with a solid analysis and constructive ideas, is actually hurting my credibility. So I started some feedback draft here on my talk page. I was planning to finish it and post it on User_talk:Stephen Clarke-Willson and Feedback_talk:Stephane_Lo_Presti, but I don't think I care about it hard enough now. I am not sure if they read the skills' talk page, but it seems they read their user talk page, as the ideas I submitted for buffing Judgestrike were taken into account for the patch. --Ruine Eternelle 09:50, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

Judgement Strike is still immensely under powered after the patch though, which is what got my goat even further so to speak. The reason I doubt they sincerely tried to buff the skill is because they were worried about balancing it again if they overshot with the thematic angle they were going for, mostly down to the fact it was straying dangerously close to Earth Shaker knocklock territory and potentially pushing Warrior into even further redundancy (outside of Seven Weapons Stance DPS builds, pretty much the only thing that makes Warriors better than Monks right now is the Stonefist Insignia due to how unreliable and taxing Earthbind is to maintain).

Together as One however is just borked both thematically and mechanically / if it did something like >

"Your Beast Mastery is set to the same rank as your Expertise attribute and any buffs applied to either yourself or your pet are shared between you. Pet attack skills also now function as your attack skills, causing both you and your pet to attack accordingly. Any healing you or your pet receive is also gained by the other at half it's value"

>then you might be getting somewhere. I realise the workload implications of getting pet buffs or attacks to work on players and vice versa, but they can get off of their lazy arses and actually work for all the money people have spent on Mercenary heroes and shop content since they released their last major update rather than thinking "this small amateur level carrot on a stick will entertain the peasantry for long enough... now lads, back to running our slowly dying WoW clone cash cow".

86.129.117.92 15:25, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

Well, looks like your mind is all set. Have a nice day.--Ruine Eternelle 12:26, 2 June 2020 (UTC)

Aye well I don't just spout all this stuff for the hell of it, I regularly mess around with builds and improve upon the current PvX meta so if you want to do some endgame runs and play around a bit with ideas I'd be more than happy to show you the substance behind anything I've said.

86.129.117.92 19:08, 2 June 2020 (UTC)

CORE?

Why is this considered core if it is only available in EOTN? How does a pure Factions character obtain this "core" skill? --Goblest (talk) 13:14, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

Cap the skill, then sort your skills by campaign. You'll see that the 10 anniversary skills are all classified as core. The wiki notes stuff as is, not as it should be. Steve1 (talk) 13:27, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

Ah, that makes sense. GW needs to fix their stuff before the wiki can fix theirs. I would propose at least a note on these pages to advise of the mistake. --Goblest (talk) 23:09, 27 May 2020 (UTC)

By all means, go for it! There is a normal elite skill which has a comparable anomaly, but I can't recall which one. Steve1 (talk) 16:22, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

Test to do

Apparently this can affect other team members' pet, iirc reading the patch notes right. Will test it if i remember but need to add a note if it does. - - Ruine Eternelle 23:07, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

Done btw Ruine Eternelle 14:57, 9 June 2020 (UTC)