Guild Wars 2

I recently joined a guild of players semi new to the game(2-3 months) and before that I had been doing a lot of pugging and having no problems. This guild I’m in now came from serious raiding in WoW so I have no doubt in my mind they are far better players than I’ll ever be, but something is lacking in our dungeon groups. We struggle quite a bit with almost any dungeon. When I succeed with PUGs 100% of the time.(Which is just plain wrong)

I’m not at all sure what the problem is. I’m thinking it could perhaps be the lack of support in their builds. I’m fairly certain from what I know of their builds they don’t have anything that really benefits anyone else other than themselves.(Also a lot of condition builds in our groups) I’m really the only one running a build to provide group wide boons and condition removal, but for all I know I could be the problem in the group since I’m not focused enough on my own DPS or my own survivability, who knows.

I guess what I’m asking is HOW important is support exactly? There seems to be three ways it can go:

- Supporting/low DPS
- Minor support/moderate DPS
- Low support/high DPS

I’m thinking all of us should focus on improving ourselves but at the same time have at least one or two abilities to help ourselves as well as help other people, but I want to know what you think.

For me, I’m a warrior running a 10, 10, 0, 30, 20 axe/warhorn, longbow build for condition removal, might and vigor. Like I said I am NOT dismissing myself as the problem here.

Snieh.4328:

This guild I’m in now came from serious raiding in WoW so I have no doubt in my mind they are far better players than I’ll ever be, but something is lacking in our dungeon groups. We struggle quite a bit with almost any dungeon. When I succeed with PUGs 100% of the time.(Which is just plain wrong)

I can tell you what the issue is.

Your guild is made by “serious raiding WoW” players who probably don’t understand that GW2 is very different from WoW. They are likely trying to play GW2 as if it were WoW, which would of course lead to death after death.

In fact, one of the worst aspects of GW2 is the mass of players from classic MMOs who cannot understand the way GW2 has been built to be different from those older, outdated games, and in doing so has actually created a better system. Unfortunately, not everyone is willing to try something new.

I guess I’ll start with a little defense. I was not attempting to vilify them in any way. They are certainly not close minded about tactics or trying new things. I just don’t know ANYTHING about their classes to be of any real help. One of them is a ranger and finding a build for them online is like pulling teeth.

Which is why I’m asking if perhaps they should be trying something supportish because I know they are willing to make the changes required to be successful. We just don’t know if what we have as builds are the problem or the tactics we’re using are.

I don’t want to sound harsh, but “serious wow raiders”, who cannot look into the traits and make a build for themselves ? I agree that some of the skills/traits are sometimes badly described, but really it doesn’t take 160IQ to look into that.

I usually go with a high dps+personal survival approach when I trait.

Always pick traits that give you vigor or other endurance regen, it helps your survival by a longshot.

Example, my guardian is 0/30/30/10/0, he brings constant AoE binds and vulnerability in the process. He carries a GS and a Staff, both bring combofields aswell as nice buffs on staff 4.

I didnt bother with empowering might since crit chance is only 30%, so I chose to get as much personal damage as I could instead from the radiance 25 pointer, that syncs well with burn, blind and vulnerability, aswell as always having condition on enemies due to being in a group. If i were to go for empowering might trait I would have to give up vulnerability aswell as blinds/burn recharge on kill. The might from the skill would not make up for the 6% vulnerability debuff (for my group) or my +10% damage from conditions, I would get 10% extra damage if endurance isnt full, but dodging should be saved for defence, not for buffing offence.

First off every member should start with looking at their defense, that is what is going to keep each of you alive if youre 1 on 1 with a mob. All the time youre on your feet youre doing damage so your DPS is going to be higher. Secondly think what skills you have that can benefit others in the group. The main way to do this is look at heals/boons you can give and more importantly what combo fields you can put down.

Look at what weapons your party are using and figure out what finishers they will use as a result. For example a banner build warrior with a rifle will use a lot of projectile and blast finishers. Placing a banner down inside a water field will enable an AOE heal which is great for the party.

Lastly think about direct DPS itself. Yes, LASTLY. If all members can stay on their feet by helping each other out then youll get boons from each other to boost damage anyway and do a lot of damage compared to when half are on the floor.

I’ll mention more survivability to the group. See if they can’t focus more on that and keeping others up. See where it goes from there. Thanks.

Firstly, try to have at least one skill that applies Weakness. Weakness reduces all non-crit damage by 50%. Paired up with the 33% damage reduction from a well timed Protection could mean that that sqishy guy survives the hit. Mass Weakness can be applied through Poison + Blast combo.

Second, know your combo’s. A well timed Water + Blast combo will provide a top-up heal that may help until your heal comes off cooldown. Look into the combo’s that your team can make

If your team is going to be a regular team, you could make a Control / Support / Damage setup. Remember though, no one person is going to be JUST this, they just specialise in it, and you should still swap and change between roles when need be. For example, our regular team consists of a Warrior that can spam Immobilise and has a lot of control ability and a Thief that can stealth everyone and apply Regen (meaning heals are less likely to be used)

Thirdly, only bring one guy who’ll be applying Bleed, and have them specialise in it, since Bleed has a 25 stack limit.

Make sure your group aren’t trying to over-specialise. In WoW, a dungeon group has one guy who is built for survivability (the tank), one guy who does mostly support (the healer), and three DPS guys who ideally have glass cannon builds. That game has moved away from people trying to do a mix of the three roles with the same character and has encouraged people to be very specialised in one role. GW2 is different. Everyone needs to pay some attention to their own survivability, every character can (or at least should) provide some support and everybody should be contributing some damage. That’s not to say everyone does all three in equal proportions… but everyone should be at least thinking about all three.

Simple check – if your guild forms a group by saying something like “Bob’s the tank, Joe will be support and the rest are DPS” then they may need to adjust their world view.

It’s probably more on lack of experience rather than anything to do with builds.

If it is anything to do with builds, it’s probably people running without enough toughness/survivability etc.

I say go a little bit more defensive for your first few runs. If you start getting a bit more comfortable, then you could probably swap out some unneeded defense for more offence. For instance, I carry both a glass cannon Berserker’s set and a bunker Soldier’s set. For new content, I’ll put on pieces of my Soldier set if I think the content is a bit too hard (or if my group has a bunch of new people to the dungeon), but once I get more comfortable with the content, I’ll change out some of my Soldiers with Berserkers.

As far as traits go, there are just some traits that I simply can’t live without. For instance, any trait that would give me Vigor and/or Endurance regeneration. In some encounters, having that extra Endurance could help in avoiding attacks that could potentially one-shot you. Subject Alpha in CoE is a notorious example in that he spams lots of AoE spells, so having that extra bit of endurance helps in avoiding those attacks.