Guild Wars 2

So what do you guys think about dungeon party members that don’t bring anything to the group versus the party members that bring useful utilities. Doesn’t matter what profession you play, if you can bring something useful would you bring it to the party or just keep everything to yourself for more solo dps?

Here’s a few things for some professions:
warriors: banners/empower allies
rangers: frost spirit/spotter
guardian: passive virtue of resolve/reflections
mesmer: reflection/timewarp
thieves: slealth/smoke screen
elementalist: passive water heal when in water attunement
engineers: extra heals i guess? not sure
necromancers: nothing useful, life transfer possible but not up long enough to matter

There are more things to list but I just put the ones I think are the main ones. Feel free to add anything I miss and your thoughts.

With my guardian i try to up party dps by using staff to stack might just prior to encounters then switching back to GS.

And where is this thread going?

Engineers brings a lot of might thru blast finishers and kits, plus vulnerability. Ah, thieves are pretty useful to cut down defiant stacks, but they’re there to dps, and just dps. It is situational but that’s pretty much what i expect from a thief aside from holding my hand on skips.

I kind of lold on ele/guardian.

useful utilities scales with your party members experience

if your party members are good, then hurray for offensive group support

but if most of your party members are too far away to get benefits, or worse – downed all the time. then you are better off transforming to maxed out self dps

also i feel like table flipping every time someone overlaps my fire fields with their kitty fields

The first field is the one chosen for finishers so it doesn’t matter if they overlap your fields.

I would rather have a warrior bringing just FGJ! and a banner than a warrior bringing shoutheal/empower allies but no banner, or three banners at the same time.
Also I would rather have an ele running scholar runes instead of some +boon duration runes. Sure you will be able to keep pretty much 25 stacks of might on your whole group, but there is no need for you to do that on your own.
I would also prefer a zerker Guardian just running WoR and stuff like Stand your ground, retreat, hold the line, purging flames, SotA, instead of a “support heal” clecrics guard with staff and maybe even crap utilities on top of it.

The whole thing with “bringing support” is that you can actually bring “too much support” and impede the progress of your group by that, because instead of doing what is needed to bring that red bar down, you spam your group with boons they might not even need in the first place.

Necro brings lots condi removal and dark fields/blinds. All high cooldown though.

Bright.9160:

And where is this thread going?

This guy. Get out of my mind.

Ethics.4519:

Bright.9160:

And where is this thread going?

This guy. Get out of my mind.

The main point of this thread is for those people that join dungeon groups and do the weirdest things with their builds.
1. They bring way too much support that it’s becomes a group of 4 people doing damage.
2. They have way too much damage but the key thing is that they are unable to keep themselves from downed/dying due to lack of skill. I, personally, would rather have someone do good damage and not dying than someone always downed and needing help.
3. I ran across this term once and it stuck to me, “Leeroys”. There are good ones that pull as many enemies as they can and stay alive than there are those that pull everything and die shortly. This is also situational because something it is good to have them to speed up the run. It’s when they cannot do it properly that it becomes frustrating.

There’s a few more, but I can’t come up with them for now.

The party members I find helpful.
1. Bringing utilities to help the party. Fire shaman in the volcano fractal is a good way to know if the party has great teamwork. Using reflection/aoes during the shield phase with lava elemental spawns.
2. Ones that are not always dying.
3. The ones that listen when they don’t know what to do in the dungeon or they are new to the method the party is doing.
4. This is probably like number 1 I mention but party members that adapt to the professions in the group and bring things to help make the run smoother.

If they read this sub-forum, they’ve heard all this before and have obviously made their decision one way or the other. If they don’t, they can’t read this post.

Basically you’re kind of Preaching to the Choir

Vox Hollow.2736:

If they read this sub-forum, they’ve heard all this before and have obviously made their decision one way or the other. If they don’t, they can’t read this post.

Basically you’re kind of Preaching to the Choir

You know what? You’re actually right, but it’ll be great if people that didn’t know about it glanced through and improved a bit.

Wicked Rin.1972:

Vox Hollow.2736:

If they read this sub-forum, they’ve heard all this before and have obviously made their decision one way or the other. If they don’t, they can’t read this post.

Basically you’re kind of Preaching to the Choir

You know what? You’re actually right, but it’ll be great if people that didn’t know about it glanced through and improved a bit.

I guess what I got from your message was rambling, question, somewhat complaint, open discussion, all combined into one. I wasn’t really sure what you even wanted as responses.

If it’s really about sharing helpful builds/utilities, then I believe it was poorly phrased and wont lead to anywhere because people are all responding differently.

Oxxy.7068:

I kind of lold on ele/guardian.

I facepalmed on eles…

We have to make more distinctions as we go on:

Selfish vs. ignorant
Selfish vs. unskilled
Selfish vs. specialized

Since I see the term “selfish” thrown out a lot when it really should be one of those three.

Anyway, I don’t think that increasing personal DPS is necessarily selfish. The faster something dies, the faster it stops doing damage, ergo the less damage you and everyone else takes.

I can sing the praises of the utilities of any class (BTW the correct answer for engineer is “everything”), but what is important is appropriateness. Nearly every utility, no matter how useful, is ultimately situational. As you learn the game, you should be swapping utilities out on a nearly boss by boss basis, depending on what you need.