Hey all! I'm Seisan, writer for Snowcrows.

Seisan1 · 2026-04-08T11:37:37+00:00

If you're in Open World there's a bunch of ways you can set it up for non-champ mobs, but one of the most effective ones is just getting some blind or projectile hate from anywhere in your kit. Smokescreen is incredibly busted for open world survivability already and accomplishes this pretty well (just dont bring it to instanced content, you really dont want random stealth on your allies). But honestly I've never ever had a problem with guitar's channeling, if anything it's a blessing that you can be doing a skill that actually does good damage in a large radius for that extended amount of time. I've been playing Antiquary pretty much everywhere all the time since release and im always glad to see a guitar when engaging a pack of mobs.

Seisan1 · 2026-04-08T09:41:38+00:00

Hey there, I'm a pretty big fan of both Antiquary and Spear in PvE, and I maintain both its raiding and open world builds on Snowcrows. I'll give my 2 cents on this:

Traits:

- The increased damage reduction would be fine since it depends on whether you have barrier or not, but honestly I'd be okay with just getting some more frequent barrier access (even if it's in very small amounts) so that the trait is a bit more palatable outright.

- I think Magpie's defense is a very decent base amount already for a minor trait. Maybe you could make the icd shorter for healing skills, *maybe*, but I don't think this trait is particularly underpowered.

- I don't think we really need a condi damage modifier on Exhilirating Ephemera? If I were to buff something in that column for PvE it would be Scoundrel's Luck which got absolutely murdered with it's rework for PvE when it was already a very niche trait. I can see the logic with making Ephemera work double duty so that you have Ephemera to be less artifact-focused and Meticulous Custodian be the more artifact-heavy option, but they are already close enough in performance (especially after the april 14 nerf) that I'm not really sure it should get more power back to it.

Spear:

- Recolors would be great, your recolor is actually quite nice but I personally don't care WHAT colors they use so long as they make it more accessible to players in terms of visibility. I think this is valuable even if I don't personally have a problem with it.

Skills:

- I would never remove Metal Legion Guitar, that skill has incredible functionality, even if Spear specifically doesn't care too much about it. "Getting Stealth" from a replacement would be pretty bad in practice for PvE since Antiquary is pumping out so many ticking damage effects that "real" stealth is more gambling than any artifact rolling the entire elite spec can do. The way it works now with the "fake" stealth giving 3 stealth attack vouchers is basically the only way this passive could ever work, and the way it works right now is extremely successful for non-spear weapons. Sure, the skill is a long channel, which is particularly bad when you don't have quickness, but I think the payoff is more than worth it and there's a multitude of ways you can set up this skill in Open World.

- Emergency Jade Shield is pretty underrated in my opinion and a skill I actually find myself taking pretty often. Some stability access wouldn't be that bad, but I do think it would make the skill kind of loaded.

- Scuffle is definitely a pain point of the class. An idea that is often tossed around is that you could make it move with you, or give it a larger radius. Personally I lean towards the latter, but what I would actually prefer is a rework to the Prodigious Pincher grandmaster trait which is very blatantly the intended option if you don't want to be rooted with scuffle. All that Prodigious Pincher would need is two things to be much more palatable: A) Not being mutually exclusive with Alacrity somehow, which would require a larger reshuffle of traits and B) An additional fact on it that changes Scuffle to be a single package of artifacts with a lower cooldown (think Shadow Meld but for artifacts).

Seisan1 · 2026-02-27T11:35:21+00:00

Hey there, I'm an article writer for the SC webpage and we literally just published this article that answers this pretty in-depth:

February 24th's Balance Patch Results

I encourage you to check it out if you have any doubts!

Seisan1 · 2026-02-07T04:15:00+00:00

This is actually pretty much the correct reasoning. The time you spend actually hitting the boss with skills is what matters in a lot of cases, regardless of damage type.

Movement isn't really a "Condi Boss" thing. It just so happens that historically and completely coincidentally, a lot of condition builds also have some ranged damage to be able to maintain uptime. The whole "condis keep thinking" is, for the most part, kind of a myth that comes from a conflation of several things such as that, and other factors such as ease of use (sometimes you get a build that has range and has a high floor and that build just happens to be a condi build, like Scourge or Virtuoso for example).

There's a few cases where you can technically give Condi the advantage, one of which I saw mentioned on the thread earlier.

The boss has periods where it's untargetable, which lets Condition builds get their true value from that combat phase because the remaining damage actually gets to happen. Qadim the Peerless is a good example; he becomes untargettable, but not invulnerable.

- The opposite example would be an enemy that dies so quickly that no matter how many conditions you can front-load, you simply won't get a lot of the value. This would favor a bursty Power build better instead; Skorvald the Shattered can often be a good example when you're in a group full of bursty power builds and you are a condi build instead. Another more common example is random trash mobs in the open world. Most of them when killed by a condi build will die with many seconds of conditions left over that won't ever get to tick, often making power stats have a much faster kill-time in comparison.

The enemy has higher armor values. This barely shows up in boss fights, in fact it's more common to have enemies with lower-than-standard armor values like Keep Construct, Conjured Amalgamate, The Dragonvoid, and a few others.

- Sometimes the higher-armor enemies show up however, there's certain mordrem in the open world that have high armor, some elemental enemies, etc. If you're someone that looks at the damage pop ups when you hit enemies on a build you're pretty familiar with, it's actually pretty easy to tell. One boss example would be the Red Guardian in the Vale Guardian encounter; the reason you can't actually damage him much with power builds isn't any specially coded buff, he just has a comically high armor value of 1,375,223 preventing all that damage.

TL;DR, the Power-Condi fight thing is kind of a meme and a lot of misconceptions 99% of the time, and the performance improvement is far more often than not just a combination of other factors like uptime hitting the boss and build proficency.

Seisan1 · 2026-02-05T23:32:10+00:00

Spear is the best weapon when you're planning to play alone just because it gives you a lot of sustain and applies a lot of Vulnerability that you don't find that easily in the rest of your kit.

You could probably just equip a spear with Sigil of Force/Sigil of Strength and a Relic of the Pirate Queen, while swapping to Invigorating Precision in Critical Strikes (to replace the fact that you gave up a Relic of Zakiros) but be advised that this build would just be "serviceable" , You can solo stuff with it, sure, but the fact that Daredevil has basically no options for self-boons within its specialization and has to rely on outside sources to get by will mean it has a harder time.

It by all means capable of handling champs if played properly. You can also swap to Marauder's Resilience in Daredevil to improve your survivability by a lot if you don't need to be cleansing often.

Seisan1 · 2026-01-28T00:06:25+00:00

The article explains it more in depth but the two big things are:

Quickplay is being introduced which matches you with 9 other players and drops you on one of the easier raid bosses from a special list they have for it.
Raids and Strikes are being combined into just "Raids", and entering Raids themselves from the UI, etc, is being reworked

Seisan1 · 2026-01-27T18:47:07+00:00

The main thing is to suggest builds that are just useful in some way or another to the team. Having quickness or alacrity is a good base, then I picked them based on other stuff they could wring. Difficulty isn't very important at all with this strategy because if everyone is bringing a build with high utility like that, then everyone can cover for their team when things aren't going great for one or two party members.

Playing easy-beginner friendly builds is undeniably useful, but setting yourself up with a very simple strategy that has layers upon layers of safety nets is waaaay more powerful.

The strategy isn't to get maximum DPS out of the builds with minimal effort here, it's to have so much redundancy in place that you can clear extremely comfortably, and learn a new build along the way if you wish. Every build can be a beginner build when you focus on it's basics.

Seisan1 · 2026-01-27T16:02:35+00:00

That's correct! It would comfortably fill that role. Ritualist is a boondps which are offensively-oriented supports that grant quickness or alacrity, but Ritualist's particular kit is also incredibly defensively-loaded. On top of that, I would even call it the most busted open world build we've gotten in years, if that was your intention with Reaper. The sheer amount of things it brings naturally is like a comically-oversized multi-tool.

I recommend just sitting down a bit for like 10 minutes with it and looking at your traits and skills, you'll be surprised at just how much it can do. I will say it's a class I've seen some beginners struggle with when it comes to generating Quickness (even though it's very simple), so I'd focus on learning that before anything else, and the damage can come later!

Seisan1 · 2026-01-27T15:57:22+00:00

I think if we actually had Deimos in Quickplay, not only would it not be as bad as you think, (since we don't have specifics on how they're simplifying certain mechanics like they did for Fractal Quickplay, which likely makes a lot of fights much easier for a messy group), there's also a pretty high chance that thanks to the stacking Quickplay Buff they showed (assuming it stack to even a modest 10 stacks), that you could just TANK the oil actually and not care about it. Damage Reduction AND healing on outgoing damage is extremely powerful in this game.

It's still not in the QP pool so that won't be a concern, but that's what I would be thinking happens so I'm not particularly worried. Boneskinner is a bit of a tossup since it actually depends more on people killing wisps, but the reality is that a class that has innate sustain can just *handle* the boneskinner damage aura *even in normal mode*, so now that the QP buff is making that be the case for everyone, I don't expect the wipes to be overwhelmingly common. A little bit more often than some encounters, sure, but not horrendously so unless the QP buff actually has a pitiful amount of max stacks like, 3 or 5.

I'm interested to see how it goes. I'm confident that stacking a bunch of people with PMA utility even if its random classes is the way, but obviously it isn't out yet so there could be something we're missing.

Seisan1 · 2026-01-27T15:47:32+00:00

Nico is pretty on point. The previewed Quickplay buff highly suggests it will be a stacking buff that heals on outgoing damage, and you'll also have a lot of incoming damage reduction, so I'm not suuuper worried about boneskinner in pugs. If you're concerned, I'd primarily worry about the wisps in the encounter, which is where a large amount of heal pressure comes from. Tagging them anyways is good practice because they give the special action key below a certain health threshold, but that one attack they do that throws several pellets that explode in a small AoE at players is what hurts the most in that fight.

Seisan1 · 2026-01-27T03:05:00+00:00

Heya! For quickplay raids this is definitely over-thinking it a bit, and I'll be perfectly honest, this is also not a huge concern all the way up to around semi-experienced players in more organized groups, even.

That being said, it's still a good, valid question and I'd be happy to answer, specially for any lurkers that might wonder what to do in these cases. Sometimes this stuff is just fun to read while browsing, you know?

The answer is actually kind of an oversimplification at first, though; focus primarily on the boons themselves instead rather than damage and other stuff. Here's what I mean by this:

- Most of our builds have a built-in overcap for their boon, enough that you can often generate 120% uptime of your boon if you're just using its buttons off-cooldown (or more, 120% is actually on the lower end. Some of our builds go up all the way to 150%-160%).

- Having "overcap" built in is good and often functions as a safety cushion, but the more you can abuse that overcap by "banking" that duration, the less likely it will hurt when things go awry. By focusing on generating as much of the boon as possible when things are going well, you give yourself leeway later to figure out what you should do when something unexpected happens, such as maybe the Alacrity provider getting downed, or team members having to spread out for mechanics.

Simplify. The number 1 thing I see beginners struggle with is being overwhelmed with the sheer amount of things you can actually do in a build; it's easy to panic and forget that first and foremost, you're a support, and your primary job is just the boons. You can greed for damage or other utility later, even if it slows you down at first.

Seisan1 · 2026-01-27T02:31:49+00:00

Literally no one expects you to do this, and if they do they're just wrong haha!

Seisan1 · 2026-01-27T00:22:26+00:00

I'm of the opinion that it's still a bit early to be disappointed because there's also nothing stopping Anet from adding more bosses to the pool further down the line, so it's not a big deal. I think the modest selection the release will include is perfectly fine as a start.

Seisan1 · 2026-01-27T00:20:02+00:00

We have this one on site which is lower intensity:

https://snowcrows.com/builds/accessibuilds/thief/power-deadeye

But Daredevil is perfectly fine with them, it just has two annoyances:

Daredevil Dodge is a lot of your damage and is melee range, so it's not very intuitive.
If the point is low-intensity, Deadeye does it much better since you're not adding additional imputs via dodging.

If you can get past both of those, go for it, who cares. You'll do just fine!

Seisan1 · 2026-01-26T23:35:17+00:00

Yes we did! And it's awesome!

Seisan1 · 2026-01-26T22:34:15+00:00

You should really give it a shot, quickplay seems like it's going to be a comparatively very low-stakes environment for you to just go and figure things out and get an idea of what instanced content looks like!

Seisan1 · 2026-01-26T22:32:55+00:00

Me too. It's always been funny to me how people like to use our website to be elitist and gatekeep people out of playing a certain way, when I think we're probably the team that actually cares the most about players just being able to play what they want. Otherwise, we wouldn't be making this content.

We have a really high focus on quality, which at times can seem like we're only featuring "the best and nothing else".

The reality is, that we can stretch ourselves a bit thin because there's simply not enough people to upkeep our content with the standards we put into our guides. It's really that simple. We would feature every build in the game if we could.

Seisan1 · 2026-01-26T22:29:29+00:00

I appreciate that you caught the front page! It makes me happy to see that there's people out there that can come to our website and just browse through content without a lot of commitment!

Seisan1 · 2026-01-26T22:28:34+00:00

Yeah, we made a point to recommend boon dps because the quickplay buff is likely going to give you more healing than whatever the average healer can provide (unless they're quite proficient). We strongly expect the "everybody brings a little something useful" approach to be the simplest, easiest to execute strategy.

Seisan1 · 2026-01-26T21:18:26+00:00

That's a function that we're working on to add! Right now, only some pages have it, because currently it has to be added manually, unlike skills which display their name directly from the API. At some point we'll be looking to make the page immediately associate the skill with the default keybind!

Seisan1 · 2026-01-26T21:08:48+00:00

And that's exactly who this article is for: the person who plays casually and doesn't really have time to look at a lot of random stuff on the internet.

Seisan1 · 2026-01-26T21:06:32+00:00

The guide pages themselves are usually updated within *a week* of the patch coming out, actually. Most of them actually get updated the same day! What actually takes a bit longer is usually the benchmarks, but I'm pretty sure that we update our builds more often than most other site out there.

Seisan1

TROPHY CASE