Guild Wars 2

TurtleDragon.3108:

Arran.9182:

TurtleDragon.3108:

Regeneration and Nature’s Voice are fairly weak in PvE. The pitiful ~130 hps is not going to help you face tank a 7k auto attack. It’s more of a “nice to have” thing than something that has a great impact on survivability. It’s largely a waste of trait points and redundant when you have healing spring already. It’s also fairly easy to get regen in a party composition from eles, engis or guardians. Swiftness doesn’t help with survivability either.

The maths doesnt add up, i know this, looking at the numbers i’d of never had chosen to put anything into healing power or regens, but when playing the difference is very noticable. and i prefer noticing this differnce to noticing myself doing massive damage. As long as on a fight like p2 cof end i dont hold people up on acolytes im happy. 130+ 0.125*HealingP is nothing. for regen. I think Healing Spring Heal is 1.0.. and when i look at this i think, “pointless, not worth it at all” but when im playing it, i just feel that i dont have to do everything perfect, using GS gives me that stun/daze which i otherwise have with sword/wh/axe, and also the built in evade. i might be mistaken but is shortbow now preferable? but id rather have path of scars than shortbow, i love that skill.

If you’re getting higher regen than 130 hps, it’s because someone is using cleric’s in your group, or you’re getting heals from other sources (ie. ele in water attunement).

Acolytes in CoF aren’t a good example, since they have a disproportionately low amount of health compared to elites (silvers). Anything can look good there. It’s like saying you’re good at killing critters so damage is a non issue.

The reason i get more than 130 regen is because of my 700healing power in survival gear, so long as the regen is applied by me it does it based on my healing. I used Acolytes as an example because when the closer together thyere killed the better, and if i had too little damage and took 4 seconds longer than others, it would disrupt the group. as the next spawn would mean id be 8 seconds behind, and if there was a 3rd spawn 12 seconds, as many pugs just rambo and kill right away rather than waiting.

Arran.9182:

TurtleDragon.3108:

Arran.9182:

TurtleDragon.3108:

Regeneration and Nature’s Voice are fairly weak in PvE. The pitiful ~130 hps is not going to help you face tank a 7k auto attack. It’s more of a “nice to have” thing than something that has a great impact on survivability. It’s largely a waste of trait points and redundant when you have healing spring already. It’s also fairly easy to get regen in a party composition from eles, engis or guardians. Swiftness doesn’t help with survivability either.

The maths doesnt add up, i know this, looking at the numbers i’d of never had chosen to put anything into healing power or regens, but when playing the difference is very noticable. and i prefer noticing this differnce to noticing myself doing massive damage. As long as on a fight like p2 cof end i dont hold people up on acolytes im happy. 130+ 0.125*HealingP is nothing. for regen. I think Healing Spring Heal is 1.0.. and when i look at this i think, “pointless, not worth it at all” but when im playing it, i just feel that i dont have to do everything perfect, using GS gives me that stun/daze which i otherwise have with sword/wh/axe, and also the built in evade. i might be mistaken but is shortbow now preferable? but id rather have path of scars than shortbow, i love that skill.

If you’re getting higher regen than 130 hps, it’s because someone is using cleric’s in your group, or you’re getting heals from other sources (ie. ele in water attunement).

Acolytes in CoF aren’t a good example, since they have a disproportionately low amount of health compared to elites (silvers). Anything can look good there. It’s like saying you’re good at killing critters so damage is a non issue.

The reason i get more than 130 regen is because of my 700healing power in survival gear, so long as the regen is applied by me it does it based on my healing. I used Acolytes as an example because when the closer together thyere killed the better, and if i had too little damage and took 4 seconds longer than others, it would disrupt the group. as the next spawn would mean id be 8 seconds behind, and if there was a 3rd spawn 12 seconds, as many pugs just rambo and kill right away rather than waiting.

I have a question not based on the quote here.
Condition builds, i went for full rampager’s just to see what it was like, using sword/torch shortbow. and i found that my bleeds were doing 1000 per tick, then i had burns from both torch and trap, and poison from sword and trap, doing, tbh i cant remember the number, but i know it was a good amount. as i can only make estimates i can only guess, but it looked to be doing not much different damage, because i’d crit everything, apply bleeds with that, then burns etc, it seemed to account for the lak of power and crit damage
so what’s your opinion on condition builds

I was playing with a group of 4 berserkers in melee (2 war, guard, me) and 1 berserker mesmer the other day. The mesmer commented that he couldn’t get his spells off before the enemies were dead. That’s the main reason condi builds aren’t any good for dungeons. The second being that even power berserkers accidentally poop out a lot of conditions, and the high condi build has no guarantee of being able to do any damage at all other than the power of his autoattacks.

Oh, I just assumed 0 healing power. I feel severely gimping your damage for an extra ~90 regen is not worth the trade off. This game is designed so that damage scales much better than healing power or toughness. (ie. going from berserker to clerics is like -75% damage, to increase your regen from to 0.78% 1.3% of your health/sec. Rough estimates, I can spreadsheet the damage decrease later if you want) I think I’m done posting here, but just remember: when you trade damage stats for survivability, you also take a non-negligible amount of time longer to kill things which means taking more damage taken overall. This will also requiring more healing/defense. Less healing and more DPS can make fights shorter, similar to how trading a healer in WoW for more DPS makes some fight easier.

Condition damage builds are bad because of game mechanics. They are useless against structure fights such as the one you mentioned in CoF p2 and burrows in AC. It’s also mostly single target too. 1000 damage per tick isn’t that impressive when you can hit over 8k DPS on a ranger.

Edit: Here’s some comparisons I did for fun. Might have made a mistake but i’ll try to fix any I make:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/14qHjYQGHs2mxzxx2cuozv7nEhPrUHPhSL0YTI4V_C5I/pub
Comparison of full berserker meta vs. 20/20/0/30/0 full cleric. I don’t know your exact stats though, and would need a build link for your gear mix. Healing power still won’t outheal auto attacks from some of the harder content in this game.

TurtleDragon.3108:

Oh, I just assumed 0 healing power. I feel severely gimping your damage for an extra ~90 regen is not worth the trade off. This game is designed so that damage scales much better than healing power or toughness. (ie. going from berserker to clerics is like -75% damage, to increase your regen from to 0.78% 1.3% of your health/sec. Rough estimates, I can spreadsheet the damage decrease later if you want) I think I’m done posting here, but just remember: when you trade damage stats for survivability, you also take a non-negligible amount of time longer to kill things which means taking more damage taken overall. This will also requiring more healing/defense. Less healing and more DPS can make fights shorter, similar to how trading a healer in WoW for more DPS makes some fight easier.

Condition damage builds are bad because of game mechanics. They are useless against structure fights such as the one you mentioned in CoF p2 and burrows in AC. It’s also mostly single target too. 1000 damage per tick isn’t that impressive when you can hit over 8k DPS on a ranger.

Edit: Here’s some comparisons I did for fun. Might have made a mistake but i’ll try to fix any I make:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/14qHjYQGHs2mxzxx2cuozv7nEhPrUHPhSL0YTI4V_C5I/pub
Comparison of full berserker meta vs. 20/20/0/30/0 full cleric. I don’t know your exact stats though, and would need a build link for your gear mix. Healing power still won’t outheal auto attacks from some of the harder content in this game.

The healing power comes from the gear, so in damage gear theres 0 healing power, the only stats which would be a ‘waste’ there would be the extra 15 points in Nature magic but boon duration isn’t a bad thing

And yeh I always forget about fights where conditions are useless.

All fight with conditions are useless (relatively speaking.)

Edit: Also I’m not stalking you even though I’ve been responding to you within minutes of your postings; we’re just online at the same time lol.

Edit 2: The healing gear is a bigger sin than the healing stats. You can’t go “full zerker” stats and take healing gear. You will be useless.

TurtleDragon.3108:

Oh, I just assumed 0 healing power. I feel severely gimping your damage for an extra ~90 regen is not worth the trade off. This game is designed so that damage scales much better than healing power or toughness. (ie. going from berserker to clerics is like -75% damage, to increase your regen from to 0.78% 1.3% of your health/sec. Rough estimates, I can spreadsheet the damage decrease later if you want) I think I’m done posting here, but just remember: when you trade damage stats for survivability, you also take a non-negligible amount of time longer to kill things which means taking more damage taken overall. This will also requiring more healing/defense. Less healing and more DPS can make fights shorter, similar to how trading a healer in WoW for more DPS makes some fight easier.

Condition damage builds are bad because of game mechanics. They are useless against structure fights such as the one you mentioned in CoF p2 and burrows in AC. It’s also mostly single target too. 1000 damage per tick isn’t that impressive when you can hit over 8k DPS on a ranger.

Edit: Here’s some comparisons I did for fun. Might have made a mistake but i’ll try to fix any I make:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/14qHjYQGHs2mxzxx2cuozv7nEhPrUHPhSL0YTI4V_C5I/pub
Comparison of full berserker meta vs. 20/20/0/30/0 full cleric. I don’t know your exact stats though, and would need a build link for your gear mix. Healing power still won’t outheal auto attacks from some of the harder content in this game.

As for the comparison, the numbers look fairly accurate in terms of healing.but I have a mix of gear

Knights, Magi and clerics

Power, Precision, ToughnessToughness (inc signet passive), Vitality approx 1500. Healing power approx 700

There’s also the extra damage reduction from toughness which I believe at 1832 is +50% so 1500 is about 40%?

Sigils which you say aren’t taking in to account I Dont really know how to see how useful these are.
Water -30% chance to heal allies and self on crit for 370 scaling at 0.1 = 440 10sec cool down.

Or Blood 30% chance to steal health on crit 453 (0.1) = 523 and it also does 452 damage, and this effect states cannot occur more than once ever 2 seconds, so in theory one could do be adding 226 dps and 261.5 hps.

Sigil of renewal -444 healing every weapon swap

Or sigil of leeching – 975 healing, 974 damage on weapon swap

Depending on if you want to help yourself more or the party.

There’s also extra protection uptime from the Adept trait I can’t seem to remember off my head if there’s any other uptime on protection.

HPS with 700 HP
Sigil of water/Sigil of renewal: (370 + (0.1 * 700)) / 10 = 44 HPS
Sigil of Blood: (453 + 70) / 5= 52.3 HPS . (Wiki says ICD = 5s)
Sigil of Leeching = 97.5 HPS
Healing Spring Direct Heal: 5620 / 30.5 = 184.26 HPS
Regen: = 217.5 HPS
Rune of Water : 690 + (0.5 * 700) / 10 = 104 HPS

I believe these sigils all share an ICD so you could all have 1 active at any time

Total HPS (Water/Renewal) = 549.76 HPS
Blood: 559.06 HPS
Leeching: 603.36 HPS

Total HPS to Allies: (Water/Renewal) 365.5 HPS

EP
1500 power/precision
70% critical damage?

-25 might
-No food
-No disc banner or Frost Spirit
-Assuming 70% critical damage because you didn’t mention it
Modifiers:
-5% From Nature Magic 25

EP = 3800.

So it does about half as much DPS as you running the same trait set up with Berserker/Ranger Gear. HPS is about 2.3x better (water/renewal)

I don’t know how to model toughness and effective health unfortunately.

TurtleDragon.3108:

HPS with 700 HP
Sigil of water/Sigil of renewal: (370 + (0.1 * 700)) / 10 = 44 HPS
Sigil of Blood: (453 + 70) / 5= 52.3 HPS . (Wiki says ICD = 5s)
Sigil of Leeching = 97.5 HPS
Healing Spring Direct Heal: 5620 / 30.5 = 184.26 HPS
Regen: = 217.5 HPS
Rune of Water : 690 + (0.5 * 700) / 10 = 104 HPS

I believe these sigils all share an ICD so you could all have 1 active at any time

Total HPS (Water/Renewal) = 549.76 HPS
Blood: 559.06 HPS
Leeching: 603.36 HPS

Total HPS to Allies: (Water/Renewal) 365.5 HPS

EP
1500 power/precision
70% critical damage?

-25 might
-No food
-No disc banner or Frost Spirit
-Assuming 70% critical damage because you didn’t mention it
Modifiers:
-5% From Nature Magic 25

EP = 3800.

So it does about half as much DPS as you running the same trait set up with Berserker/Ranger Gear. HPS is about 2.3x better (water/renewal)

I don’t know how to model toughness and effective health unfortunately.

I can’t remember crit damage, i imagine around that mark though.

I think with Toughness you have to double the base toughness to gain +50% damage reduction, then it suffers massively from diminishing returns so to get another +50% you have to double it again. so 1832 would be +50% then 3664 would be another +50%

I dont know how vitality scales but i have 21k HP at 80.

I realise this isnt the optimal way to play i just find it far more interesting than Power and it isnt a full toughness/healing build that hinders my partys.

Arran.9182:

Utility Skills (Damage)

Quickening Zephyr
“Sik Em”
Signet of the Wild/Signet of the Hunt

Rampage as One/Entangle (Situation Specific)

Utility Skills (Survival)

“Sik Em”
“Protect Me”/Quickening Zephyr
Signet of Stone

Rampage as One/Spirit of Nature (Situation Specific, Exchange a trait for Vigorous Spirits if using Spirit of Nature)

You’re trying to do too much at once IMHO. Your “damage” focus has too much defense. Your “survival” focus has too much damage.

The “damage” utilities should be one extreme, the “survival” utilities should be the other extreme. And depending on the situation, you can mix and match to arrive at something in the middle. The way you have it outlined, you’ve got a “damage” build which is good for one specific situation, but ignores situations where you might want slightly more or less damage. Same for “survival” – sometimes you might want slightly more or less survival.

• Signet of the Wild shouldn’t be in the damage spec. I run it in builds where I don’t have regen. This build has regen so I’d question even including it at all.
• Signet of the Hunt seems redundant where you have Nature’s Voice all the time. Swap it for Guard and you have 100% swiftness + regen uptime. Much better than having to choose between Hunt and Wild. Guard belongs in your survival category though.
• As others have said, since you’re already traited for it, Frost Spirit is a must.
• Sic Em is a really questionable utility in PvE. The 40% extra damage for your pet is for 10 sec, so is about 10% extra damage on average. But as a combined ranger+pet total, it only works out to about 2%-3% increase to your overall damage. Assuming your pet even hits. Frost Spirit even untraited at ~3% damage increase (including downtime) works out to be better if you have just one party member. Sic Em is usually used in PvP against stealthers.
• Flame Trap is another really strong damage utility even if you aren’t a condition damage spec. Burning scales the least with condition damage, so you still do decent damage with it. It’s AOE so can hit 5 targets. And it’s one of the best fire fields in the game for blast finishers which give might. If you’re running sword+horn, there is absolutely no excuse not to take it IMHO. Especially since your build has 30% boon duration which will extend the 3 might stacks you give everyone to 26 seconds. Assuming the party averages 2500 power, that’s another 3% extra party damage even after factoring in downtime. More if others can blast in your fire field.

Knight’s/Magi’s/Clerics
Trying to balance Toughness/Vitality/Power/Precision at around 1500 each. Healing Power to 700

Again, you’re trying to do too much. If you’re going to generalize that much, you should look into Celestial armor.

I chose runes of water, this is a personal preference for the heal allies.

This is the problem I have with swapping armor to modify your stats. It makes it impossible to mix and match runes (unless you’ve got two sets of each armor with damage/defense runes – that gets expensive and takes a lot of inventory space). IMHO you’re better off with one armor set, pick defense or offense as your permanent rune set (I pick offense since there seem to be more traits and utilities you can take which increase your defense). And swap jewelry to modify the stats you’re getting from equipment.

Pets (Damage)

Jungle Stalker – Might
Red Moa – Fury

Try the river drake some time. Its F2 bounces so is guaranteed to hit if it hits at least one target. That means it often works even if the initial target moves or dies. If the pet has a lot of might stacks (which it should since you are using sword and have the 15 NM trait), its F2 is almost enough to single-handedly kill off regular mobs. One of the best offensive pets in the game against multiple targets IMHO.

After dropping healing spring I change to Reef Drake for an extra Blast finisher.

All the drakes will do a blast finisher. I tried the reef drake and its confuse attack just wasn’t that effective IMHO. It’s a rather small cone so frequently misses. And the confuse damage is pretty weak since your pet has zero condition damage. I’d use the river drake instead.

TurtleDragon.3108:

Regeneration and Nature’s Voice are fairly weak in PvE. The pitiful ~130 hps is not going to help you face tank a 7k auto attack. It’s more of a “nice to have” thing than something that has a great impact on survivability. It’s largely a waste of trait points and redundant when you have healing spring already. It’s also fairly easy to get regen in a party composition from eles, engis or guardians.

It really depends on the situation. For most PvE I agree regen is unnecessary. But it’s a must in those living story areas where you take constant damage, and in dungeons where you’re swarmed and constantly take little bits of damage here and there. No it doesn’t help against a big 7k hit. But in the time between those hits it can patch up 1-2k, greatly increasing your survivability. If you’ve ever party wiped in one of those fights where the mobs were almost dead, but so was your entire party, regen would have flipped the outcome.

Swiftness doesn’t help with survivability either.

Swiftness (or some sort of speed buff) is probably your best defense when you’re getting mobbed. You know how rangers complain pets can’t hit moving targets? Mobs are the same way. And swiftness just makes it that much easier to avoid damage from swarms of mobs by moving. Without it, you’re forced to run forward to avoid damage. With it, you can strafe and avoid damage, meaning you’re still doing damage while you’re trying to avoid taking damage. In those cases it’s one of the strongest survival abilities IMHO.

TurtleDragon.3108:

Edit: Here’s some comparisons I did for fun. Might have made a mistake but i’ll try to fix any I make:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/14qHjYQGHs2mxzxx2cuozv7nEhPrUHPhSL0YTI4V_C5I/pub
Comparison of full berserker meta vs. 20/20/0/30/0 full cleric.

You’re incorrectly comparing heals in hp/sec. It should be in effective hp/sec where effective hp = hp * armor ratio, to factor in toughness. In a case where a berseker build takes a 1k damage hit, a more defensive build might only take 700 damage (roughly, 1800 armor vs 2550 armor). So healing 100 hp/sec will patch up the damage in the defensive build in 7 sec while it takes 10 sec in the bersker build. In other words, healing is more effective with higher toughness.

I don’t know your exact stats though, and would need a build link for your gear mix. Healing power still won’t outheal auto attacks from some of the harder content in this game.

That’s the wrong way to think of it IMHO. You can’t just dismiss healing power outright because it doesn’t stand up against a single auto attack.

A fight is just your DPS vs the mob’s effective hp (armor + heals), compared to the mob’s DPS against your effective hp. If the mob’s effective hp reaches zero before yours does, you win. If your effective hp reaches zero before the mob’s does, you lose.

The heals and regen mean every second your effective hp increases by a certain amount. So if you’ve got 16k hp and can heal (using your numbers) 238 hp/sec, your effective hp is:

• 16000 + 238*t, where t is the number of seconds the fight goes on

With better armor (assuming 1800 vs 2550), your hp pool and heals become 30% more effective. And again using your numbers, 488 hp/sec heal becomes the equivalent of 697 hp/sec. So the comparison case would be:

• 22857 + 697*t

If the mob does enough DPS to kill the berserker in (say) 20 sec, that’s a total of 20760 hp damage. 20 sec into the same fight, the defensive build still has (22857 + 697*20 – 20760)*.7 = 11226 hp remaining. He’s only lost 30% the hp that the berserker build did, and could survive for 67 seconds total.

So the defensive build can survive 3.35x longer, while the beserker build kills 2.87x faster. The defensive build can win fights the berserker build cannot. Personally I can’t stand it when the fights last 3x longer. But for those who are willing to put up with that, the more power to them.

What swings this back in the berserker’s favor is the random nature of attacks, dodge timing, and luck – all of these favor the shorter fight. (I’ve done numerical statistical analyses of this before, but that’s beyond the scope of this discussion.) For an extreme case, think of a boss which fires an insta-kill skill every 15 sec which you must dodge. An offensive party which kills this boss in 35 sec is more likely to pull off the 2 dodges correctly, than a defensive party which takes 100 sec and thus needs to dodge 6 times. In a nutshell, the longer fights require greater coordination to pull off successfully. So in theory a well-coordinated defensive build party could win fights a well-coordinated offensive build party couldn’t win. But in practice in random uncoordinated PUGs, the offensive build party has a higher probability of actually managing to win most fights than the defensive build party.

Solandri.9640:

Well, I was talking about regen in the context of dungeons/fractals. It’s one of the weaker defensive boons but I enjoy having it especially when the boss has retaliation. Protection, Aegis, Stability are much stronger boon wise, and reflects/blinds/weakness help more than regen obviously.

Idk, I still think swiftness is more of a “nice to have but not required boon” for combat. I think I rely more on cripple, chill and immobolize for kiting. I guess it does have value in fractal fights where you run in and out of melee range a lot, but there are a lot of fights where you just stack and don’t need to move (but still dodge).

You are probably right on the HPS part, but this assumes everyone has toughness. A lot of people go clerics with the mindset of healing zerkers and preventing them from faceplanting. The non-toughness party members will still take the same amount of damage. The clerics party member may survive 3.35x longer, but the zerkers may not and if they die, the clerics party members would have to survive even longer. So basically, healers and DPS don’t mix well. Thanks for taking the time to check out my math btw.

Solandri.9640:

Arran.9182:

Utility Skills (Damage)

Quickening Zephyr
“Sik Em”
Signet of the Wild/Signet of the Hunt

Rampage as One/Entangle (Situation Specific)

Utility Skills (Survival)

“Sik Em”
“Protect Me”/Quickening Zephyr
Signet of Stone

Rampage as One/Spirit of Nature (Situation Specific, Exchange a trait for Vigorous Spirits if using Spirit of Nature)

You’re trying to do too much at once IMHO. Your “damage” focus has too much defense. Your “survival” focus has too much damage.

The “damage” utilities should be one extreme, the “survival” utilities should be the other extreme. And depending on the situation, you can mix and match to arrive at something in the middle. The way you have it outlined, you’ve got a “damage” build which is good for one specific situation, but ignores situations where you might want slightly more or less damage. Same for “survival” – sometimes you might want slightly more or less survival.

• Signet of the Wild shouldn’t be in the damage spec. I run it in builds where I don’t have regen. This build has regen so I’d question even including it at all.
• Signet of the Hunt seems redundant where you have Nature’s Voice all the time. Swap it for Guard and you have 100% swiftness + regen uptime. Much better than having to choose between Hunt and Wild. Guard belongs in your survival category though.
• As others have said, since you’re already traited for it, Frost Spirit is a must.
• Sic Em is a really questionable utility in PvE. The 40% extra damage for your pet is for 10 sec, so is about 10% extra damage on average. But as a combined ranger+pet total, it only works out to about 2%-3% increase to your overall damage. Assuming your pet even hits. Frost Spirit even untraited at ~3% damage increase (including downtime) works out to be better if you have just one party member. Sic Em is usually used in PvP against stealthers.
• Flame Trap is another really strong damage utility even if you aren’t a condition damage spec. Burning scales the least with condition damage, so you still do decent damage with it. It’s AOE so can hit 5 targets. And it’s one of the best fire fields in the game for blast finishers which give might. If you’re running sword+horn, there is absolutely no excuse not to take it IMHO. Especially since your build has 30% boon duration which will extend the 3 might stacks you give everyone to 26 seconds. Assuming the party averages 2500 power, that’s another 3% extra party damage even after factoring in downtime. More if others can blast in your fire field.

Knight’s/Magi’s/Clerics
Trying to balance Toughness/Vitality/Power/Precision at around 1500 each. Healing Power to 700

Again, you’re trying to do too much. If you’re going to generalize that much, you should look into Celestial armor.

Pets (Damage)

Jungle Stalker – Might
Red Moa – Fury

Try the river drake some time. Its F2 bounces so is guaranteed to hit if it hits at least one target. That means it often works even if the initial target moves or dies. If the pet has a lot of might stacks (which it should since you are using sword and have the 15 NM trait), its F2 is almost enough to single-handedly kill off regular mobs. One of the best offensive pets in the game against multiple targets IMHO.

After dropping healing spring I change to Reef Drake for an extra Blast finisher.

All the drakes will do a blast finisher. I tried the reef drake and its confuse attack just wasn’t that effective IMHO. It’s a rather small cone so frequently misses. And the confuse damage is pretty weak since your pet has zero condition damage. I’d use the river drake instead.

As for the gear, i did really want Celestials armour, unfortunately as a havent got the patience to do crafting and there are currently non on TP (and if im not mistaken this is because some of the materials are no not attainable after the living world part has passed?) i cannot use it.

I do often use drakes, especially for the blast finisher as you desbribed, i do prefer this as well because Moa’s are low damage, and tend to die fast. but if i seem to be lacking Fury i will use one, or if it’s a fights where i know i tend to get focussed on so i take protection. I use Reef Drake mainly because, i might be wrong, but the initial hit seems bigger than the others, except Salamander, and the confusion and breath hots all targets (and theyve put a little bit more design into the body)

I like signet of the hunt purely to see a nice big opening hit from hunters call, no other reason.
Signet of the wild is nice for stability, main reason why i use it that was i dont have to use rampage as one if theres no one to give stability when required.

Other utilites i change fight by fight, Sik Em i won’t use in a fight like Malrona where my pet dies a lot for example.

TurtleDragon.3108:

Idk, I still think swiftness is more of a “nice to have but not required boon” for combat. I think I rely more on cripple, chill and immobolize for kiting. I guess it does have value in fractal fights where you run in and out of melee range a lot, but there are a lot of fights where you just stack and don’t need to move (but still dodge).

Oh yeah, completely agreed in that context. If you’re stacking in melee, yeah swiftness is useless. Though I guess if sword leaps you out of the stack, you can run back more quickly.

Arran.9182:

As for the gear, i did really want Celestials armour, unfortunately as a havent got the patience to do crafting and there are currently non on TP (and if im not mistaken this is because some of the materials are no not attainable after the living world part has passed?) i cannot use it.

Exotic celestial armor is account bound when crafted. That’s why you’re not seeing it on TP. First you need to buy the recipes off TP – they’re what’s no longer obtainable as loot. As it happens (I have a bunch of these saved up and am slowly selling them), medium armor recipes are the cheapest. And with everyone going crazy over the Lion’s Arch events, the price of the recipes has come down a lot. So now’s a good time to buy if you want to go that route.

You do need 400 leatherworking though. And you’ll need quartz crystals (there’s a healthy supply of them on TP due to many people having the mine in their home instance). You’ll need 5 charged quartz crystals per armor piece or weapon, and each charged quartz crystal is 25 regular quartz crystals (time gated to one a day, so 30 days in all). So a full 6-armor set requires 750 quartz crystals, which at current prices is about 10 gold.

I like signet of the hunt purely to see a nice big opening hit from hunters call, no other reason.

You know, I’ve been meaning to test that. Does it just affect the first hit from Hunter’s Call? Or does it affect all 17 hits? I tested SoH with Path of Scars and it only affects the initial hit from that skill. But I forgot to test it with Hunter’s Call.

Signet of the wild is nice for stability, main reason why i use it that was i dont have to use rampage as one if theres no one to give stability when required.

Kinda situational, but yeah that’s a valid reason.

You know, I’ve been meaning to test that. Does it just affect the first hit from Hunter’s Call? Or does it affect all 17 hits? I tested SoH with Path of Scars and it only affects the initial hit from that skill. But I forgot to test it with Hunter’s Call.

As far as I can tell it affects the entire skill not just the first hit. Same for Whirling Defence and Barrage.
I did some testing in Fireheart Rise. 5300avg. Barrage. 7600 with Signet active.

Exotic celestial armor is account bound when crafted. That’s why you’re not seeing it on TP. First you need to buy the recipes off TP – they’re what’s no longer obtainable as loot. As it happens (I have a bunch of these saved up and am slowly selling them), medium armor recipes are the cheapest. And with everyone going crazy over the Lion’s Arch events, the price of the recipes has come down a lot. So now’s a good time to buy if you want to go that route.

You do need 400 leatherworking though. And you’ll need quartz crystals (there’s a healthy supply of them on TP due to many people having the mine in their home instance). You’ll need 5 charged quartz crystals per armor piece or weapon, and each charged quartz crystal is 25 regular quartz crystals (time gated to one a day, so 30 days in all). So a full 6-armor set requires 750 quartz crystals, which at current prices is about 10 gold.

I don’t think ill be bothering. Havent the patience for Crafting aha

I’m trying to design a full berserker damage build based around Greatsword as Primary weapon, anyone fancy giving some opinions on what would benefit

What armor/stats did you go with?

CrockyClockwork.4095:

What armor/stats did you go with?

For GS? Full Berserker Gear, Sigil of Accuracy for 5% Crit chance

Currently i’m thinking 20/20/20/0/0

20 in MM for Precision
20 in Skirmishing for Crit Damage/Chance
20 in WS for Reduced CD on GS Skills

I don’t know where to put the other 10 or if there is enough benefit from the reduced cooldown on sword skills to put 20 in WS.