Guild Wars 2

So recently I’ve seen a massive interest in dungeoning in my guild. But they’re all WvWers and killing mobs is… quite long. Not because they lack the ability to dodge or we fail often. Actually, they dodge very well and we almost never fail any battle. But, the dps is very subpar and as you know, the most you play against a mob, the greater the chance to get downed and I’ve seen huge pikes in my survivability because I’m a zerker and those battles take twice the amount of time to fight as they used to when I played in “omg zerk only” groups.

They don’t want to switch to zerker directly, so what’s the best “switching” program I could offer them? I have thought about going from soldier’s to knight to zerker, but isn’t there some cheaper alternative like switching some items one by one from pvt to zerk? If yes, which items first?

Don’t get pushy with them, I tried that on my best friend last year and it ended pretty badly. Good thing he’s still my best friend.

Just be patient, carry them if you have to, don’t pass up any opportunities to make them see that berserker is the optimal choice but be discreet about it.

Actually they are willing to go to zerk. They just want to go there a foot at a time. They don’t want to buy the full zerker stuff to only get downed because they’re not with their (huge) training wheels anymore.

In my opinion there’s no point in sugarcoating anything. Either tell it how it is, or don’t tell anything at all. They can either cooperate and learn how to play better, or they won’t.

I would tell them to seek out and learn how to play full-out DPS if they want to learn how to improve and if they aren’t interested then tbh, I just wouldn’t bother.

I went with trinkets first, then weapons, then slowly changed more and more pieces until I found (to my own surprise ) that I feel just as comfortable playing in full berserker gear as I used to be playing in full wvw gear, and really don’t get downed more often (or at least it doesn’t feel like I am). Exchanging my mesmer’s greatsword for one-handed swords was a huge step, too.

If they’ve got guild commendations, laurels, and badges of honour to spare, getting ascended trinkets is fairly painless as a starting point, especially since they can always transfer them to other characters if they don’t enjoy whatever class they tried. Once dungeons go faster, they’ll also find that they’ve got more gold to spare to get weapons and armour pieces off the trading post, with runes going last (I just got mine this weekend ).

I did the experiment on my best friend and one friend we have in common. The common friend switched to zerker with scholar runes and meta builds from his PTV home-made build guard. His reaction was, and I quote : “OMG, the mobs go down so fast, it’s way better”. He now solos some paths daily

Best friend said lol nope, loving his tank warrior too much. He got his account hacked and I made use of this occasion to have him start fresh. He sadly plays in zealots, because he wants the heals to be strong :s Still better than PTV + clerics… And I won’t try pushing him to zerker. My only requirement is that if he wants me to play with him he must play the meta build (traits and utilities wise). That way he buffs me at least xD

Fror.2163:

So recently I’ve seen a massive interest in dungeoning in my guild. But they’re all WvWers and killing mobs is… quite long. Not because they lack the ability to dodge or we fail often. Actually, they dodge very well and we almost never fail any battle. But, the dps is very subpar and as you know, the most you play against a mob, the greater the chance to get downed and I’ve seen huge pikes in my survivability because I’m a zerker and those battles take twice the amount of time to fight as they used to when I played in “omg zerk only” groups.

They don’t want to switch to zerker directly, so what’s the best “switching” program I could offer them? I have thought about going from soldier’s to knight to zerker, but isn’t there some cheaper alternative like switching some items one by one from pvt to zerk? If yes, which items first?

What dungeons are you currently doing right now? Gold really shouldn’t be a problem if your doing dungeons, you can do 30-40g if you do daily and you have the time for it.

If they have limited time, you might want to get them doing CoE all paths, CoF p1 p2 daily(shouldn’t take more than 2 hours with a full PVT group, which is shorter than usual WvW raids).

That’s roughly 300+ tokens daily, and in 4-5days they have enough tokens to buy a full berserker dungeon set.

That’s also 6g+ daily, and in 4-5days they can make/buy berserker trinkets/weapons easy.

You might also look on their builds too, there are plenty of awesome traits in WvW that are completely useless in PvE that they need to give up for more damage modifier traits, even weapon sets(staff guards, hammer warrs, scepter/staff necros etc.).

Echoing a lot of the advice here.

I would offer this suggestion. start with all the trinkets and the like. even just Exotic. Start there.

make it a normal plan to run CoF 1 and 2, and All of CoE. if not every day as often as you are all feeling up for it.

each time you have enough for a piece of Armour via tokens. pick it up and replace the counterpart piece. keep doing the runs and replace each piece when they become available.

I have some of my own people on a similar regime. so far it seems to be working and they are more confident in there abilities to adjust as needed. Yes it will take a bit to eventually make the whole swap but who knows they may become addicted and want more.

Edit: I should echo the most important part too. start with the BUILD. get the traits dungeon oriented first.

From my experience, DPS builds first (pvt do fine with DPS build) then Zerker trinkets → Zerker weapons. Once they are hooked, Zerker shoulder, gloves, boots, helms and in the end, chest and pants.

Runes of ranger + a mini as a cheaper alternative to scholar.

Also, Explain to them that the only difference in zerker is the amount of time it takes them to complete something. That is it.

Zerker is not the end all be all that people make it out to be.

In a pug setting I’ve seen all zerker groups who die left and right and been in pugs where people were mixed gear sets and we did the content faster.

Zerker is not the absolute – some players actually preform better with different gear sets.

At the end of the day – dead dps does no dps and the amount of time it takes to bring up a downed player negates any DPS advantage zerker might have had since you not only loose that player but require another to stop dps’ing to rez said player – so you are now down 2.

Azreell.1568:

If a player is using zerker and he is not comfortable with it he will die more often then if he was wearing non zerker. Hence he will be doing no dps because he was dead vs him wearing a gear set or using a spec he can play and will not die and be able to continue to dps.

Mmh. Let’s say a zerker ele + FGS 4 deals damage for the duration of the skill then goes down. I don’t think I need to do damage calculations to state that you would need a non damage dealing spec to do a proper skill rotation for a few minutes to get there…

Props to Lindybear for summoning the god of maths.

I would like a pie chart popping up at the end of each boss fight to tell you in yer face how much “DPS” or, frankly, damage contribution of each player is. Just to shut down those chanters of ‘dead DPS deal no DPS’.

Take one of them with you in a high dps group and see if they have a revelation.

Yup, I’d just recommend having them start getting zerker trinkets, and then zerker weapons. If they decide to do a new set of armor for dungeons, you could recommend Valkyrie, Knight, or Cavalier if they’re worried about survivability. Also, if gold is an issue, start taking them through CoF and CoE for those tokens, since those both have zerker stat armor/weapons.

RoseofGilead.8907:

Yup, I’d just recommend having them start getting zerker trinkets, and then zerker weapons. If they decide to do a new set of armor for dungeons, you could recommend Valkyrie, Knight, or Cavalier if they’re worried about survivability. Also, if gold is an issue, start taking them through CoF and CoE for those tokens, since those both have zerker stat armor/weapons.

This is good advice ^^

+1

Frankly I don’t ask my guildies anymore on stuff like this. More often than not they’re totally lazy and can be more unreliable than pugs with their PTV or cleric gears or “shout warrior” builds or staff eles or rangers without spotter/spirit or necros that don’t go into lich form or engineers that only use flamethrower, the list goes on really…

Dont hate the staff ele

OP: my transition to zerker went like this:

1. Full zerker trinkets, soldier’s armor/weapons
2. Zerker weapon
3. Boots, gloves, shoulders zerker
4. Rest zerker

Knight’s is a good alternative to soldier’s for the starting set as well.

Thanks all for your suggestions.

Zealot’s. Of all the sets with a tank stat, it’s got the best DPS since it has power main stat and also precision. For some reason there’s no other set that does that.

Also healing power is better than vitality or toughness IMO since filling bars faster > taking longer to kill. The latter only prolongs the inevitable while the former can keep you standing forever.

And yes, healing power scales like crap with heal skills but it works pretty well for stuff like regeneration and other “small” heals, which can add up quite a bit. It’s a pretty good deal for a DPS set, much better than Soldier or Knight.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Zealot’s. Of all the sets with a tank stat, it’s got the best DPS since it has power main stat and also precision. For some reason there’s no other set that does that.

Also healing power is better than vitality or toughness IMO since filling bars faster > taking longer to kill. The latter only prolongs the inevitable while the former can keep you standing forever.

And yes, healing power scales like crap with heal skills but it works pretty well for stuff like regeneration and other “small” heals, which can add up quite a bit. It’s a pretty good deal for a DPS set, much better than Soldier or Knight.

That’s a nice point. Zealot’s you can’t get with tokens, so it’s more annoying because of that, but if gold isn’t a problem than this is a neat idea.