Guild Wars 2

So, the OP complains about perma-stealth mesmers (whose secret technique he’s apparently mastering) and as proof provides a link to a thread where people talk about the maximum time they’ve been able to remain unnoticed, without any perma-stealth mentioned whatsoever.

There are no perma-stealth mesmers.

There are, however, people who think sweeping for mesmers means aimlessly running around with their inventory taking 70% of their screens until they’re done salvaging stuff. That concludes the sweep, and the fact that they now have to catch up with their zerg makes them think they’ve been incredibly thorough.

A necro complaining about condition mesmers, seriously?! It is virtually impossible to beat a competent necro with a condition mesmer. The key word there is competent, though. So thank you for the bags I get when people like you Alt+F4, I guess.

Azo.5860

…
- Signet of the Ether (Mesmer)
- 113.33 hps to…… 325.33 hps [if 3 illu available at the end of 3sec interval time (possibility is very low) if not use the signet yet.
…

It’s ‘0 hps to…’ since with 0 illusions it doesn’t heal at all.

I honestly cannot understand how people can think it’s better than Ether Feast. Even in ideal conditions (being able to keep 3 illusions up at all times) it heals for less than EF.

Using the active defensively helps in only very specific circumstances (you’re nearly dead but the opponent is almost dead as well), even then I’d argue that you probably wouldn’t be in that particular situation with EF, since it heals for more.

Using it offensively (popping it in the beginning of the fight to get 3 phantasms up) will work for a while I guess. It’s a new skill and all, people see 3 phantasms spawned, they get nervous. Once it becomes common knowledge that once you pop it, you’re left without any healing for 35s (28s traited, still a long time), good luck staying alive vs people who are paying attention. Sure it’ll work fine vs glass but then again, any direct damage build does.

The above doesn’t apply to PvE, I suppose the new heal can be nice in some PvE encounters.

Of course another practical weakness with the healing signet is that it is simply much worse than Ether Feast.

• It doesn’t do squat when you have no illusions up

• If you manage to keep 3 illusions up for 20 seconds you’ll still get healed for less than if you use Ether Feast when you have 3 illusions up

• Active CD is too long so if you are in a situation where you have to use it, you’ll probably die soon after anyway

I imagine it can (maybe, who knows) get some use in PvE, but frankly can’t see it being useful in any other parts of the game.

Enjoying this match-up so far! Had some small scale fights while roaming – something that was virtually impossible with Blobaddon zergfest.

I don’t mind the nightcapping; after all, it’s not against the rules or anything. They have a larger presence at night – fine. What I do mind, however, is a T1 server being in the same match with T4 ones, which means they have a much larger presence at all times, not just during the night. A lot of people simply don’t bother with WvW this week as a result – really healthy for the game.

This is fun, though: night capping Vizunah Square way. The time is 3:25AM GMT.

4 Alpha + 4 Omega golems, 40+ invaders, around 10 defenders.

I asked one of YOLO members in whisper and he said they transferred from one of lower tier servers because, and I quote “we were tired of that small-scale crap”.

Sigh.

Well, the previous patch (I think) decreased the amount of damage needed to be able to get loot. Loot bags littered the landscape after ZvZ clashes. After this patch it’s been more of ‘kill two guys solo and get kitten all’ experience that I had known and loved since betas.

Only had time for around half an hour in WvW today, but I noticed a significant decrease in the amount of loot bags dropped by players. Did I miss something in the patch notes? Stealth nerf? Stealth “fix”? Bad luck? All of the above?

From today’s patch notes:

Fixed a bug that caused some melee attacks to behave inconsistently.

Any idea what’s that about?

<rant>
Gotta love the incredible attention to detail there. I wonder if that’s how they tell the programmers what to do as well : “Somebody please go and, I don’t know, fix some stuff!”…
</rant>

Yeah that would explain it because I did go invisible (had a couple of clones out though).

Look like a bug to me, since it works correctly with lone sentry veteran mobs as far as I remember (or maybe it works correctly only for the team that initially owned the place). Anyway, I’ve definitely seen those bars decreasing, so the mechanic is already in game, hopefully this will be fixed uhm… in a few months ;>

Something very strange happened this morning and I’m not quite sure what to make of it. Our server is Red this week. So there I was soloing a Blue camp, killed all the mobs, the circle turned Red and the progress bar started to fill. At what seemed to be the very last tick of the bar a Green thief entered the circle and its colour switched to light blue (contested). So far so good, but in less than 5 seconds (we had only exchanged a couple of attacks) the camp simply flipped to Green and all the mobs spawned. Both of us were definitely still inside of the circle.

Has anyone experienced this?

Hilda Raven.8641:

…
I find it highly annoying.

My only hope is this next update starts making parts of dungeons mandatory.
…

So, because you find something annoying, you want all others to play the game the way you want? Nice.

Most people skip because they’ve done that particular path many times and frankly, killing the same trash pack loses its thrill somewhere between the 1st and the 5th run. They’re not there for the entertainment, they just want to get to the end to get the tokens/money. Nothing’s wrong with that.

If you don’t want to skip anything, simply say so in your shouts or your ad on the LFG site.

For D/D ones, step #3 (assuming you’re able to get to it) should be this:

3. /wave to them after they CC you and RTL away from you, since at that point you’re left crippled/chilled/knocked down with blink on CD and them being 1200 away.

Boomstin.3460:

Sjet.7092:

We kinda have been saying all along alot of our guys were on holidays….

Guess the other servers live in some alternative reality where there is no holidays?
Holidays do affect every server.

Indeed, a lot of people were on holidays on all servers. Which, judging by the past scores, means that PS guys who weren’t on holidays must be kinda horrible compared to those who were. So people using ‘lots of our guys were on holidays’ to explain the current, shall we say, imbalances in the scores are kinda admitting to being… bad?

Sorry, couldn’t resist. ;)

Jal.5894:

Aleph Naught.9034:

Looks like this is going to be one boring week. PS have managed to get plenty of ZvW-oriented guilds, so once everybody is tired of wiping to their invisible (yay culling) zergs (which seem to be everywhere) there will be nothing to do. For all 3 servers, actually. I really wish A-net were able to desing WvW to be more about strategy and not simply ‘who has most zergs on 24/7’ but oh well. It was fun the first two weeks.

Good luck everyone.

You are aware most of Piken’s guilds (the main force behind Piken in WvW) run with 15-25 right?

Yes I am. Add the puggers and it’s 25-30. Hardly not a zerg. And when you have a couple of those on every map there’s really no incentive to do anything. I mean, what are you guys going to do once the entire map is green, dance in SM for the rest of the week? That’s quality WvW entertainment right there ;)

That’s hardly a zerg – and culling affects everyone

I wasn’t saying culling didn’t affect everyone, it’s just that it makes zerg warfare, as bland as it is on its own, even less competitive and less fun.

Looks like this is going to be one boring week. PS have managed to get plenty of ZvW-oriented guilds, so once everybody is tired of wiping to their invisible (yay culling) zergs (which seem to be everywhere) there will be nothing to do. For all 3 servers, actually. I really wish A-net were able to desing WvW to be more about strategy and not simply ‘who has most zergs on 24/7’ but oh well. It was fun the first two weeks.

Good luck everyone.

tqhx.2190:

SORRY for all the confusion and bickering, i was doing a far simpler calculation that i thought encompassed the cri% increase vs dam% increase =(, you can see in one of my earlier posts what i THOUGHT was the way to calculate the damage increase from crit

No problem mate, as I said the conclusion about crit chance/crit damage getting devalued as the crit chance gets higher may seem counter-intuitive. ;>

And kudos for coming forward and apologizing, this is something you don’t see too often! Sorry for having been more sarcastic in my posts than I probably should have been.

Once again,

(1+.47*(.5+.89)) does not equal 1.65. Dear lord…

tqhx.2190:

Here is the formulas with MY numbers, and the result if i were to add 1% more damage, or 1% more crit;

I have 47% critical chance, and 89% bonus critical damage

SO

Original formula

(1+.47*(.5+.89))=1.65

No. It’s 1.6533

To add 1% damage i simply multiple the output by 1.01, which = 1.6665

No, 1.6533 * 1.01 = 1,669833

Now if i were to add 1% crit

(1+.48*(.5+.89))=1.6672

You got that one right.

HMM which one is higher 1.6665 or 1.6672?

So 1,669833 is greater than 1.6672. Next time use a calculator.

tqhx.2190:

Aleph Naught.9034:

Why don’t you do it yourself?

Here’s HIS formula:

LRD = P * (1 + C * (0.5 + D))

I’ve done the work for you already a couple of posts back, but since you prefer covering your eyes and ears and just repeating “you’re wrong” perhaps you could humor yourself by substituting a few numbers into it. Unless, of course, dealing with 4th grade math for two minutes is too hard for you.

Good luck.

No you didnt, you did the wrong work, which for anyone who lives in the real world accomplishes nothing. I am not simply repeating youre wrong, ive done the math above as well. Its far simpler than 4th grade math, but youre too thick to figure that one out

Of course you’ve done it. Your word is proof enough.

Why don’t you do it yourself?

Here’s HIS formula:

LRD = P * (1 + C * (0.5 + D))

I’ve done the work for you already a couple of posts back, but since you prefer covering your eyes and ears and just repeating “you’re wrong” perhaps you could humor yourself by substituting a few numbers into it. Unless, of course, dealing with 4th grade math for two minutes is too hard for you.

Good luck.

His math doesn’t say you’re right, and you’re drawing wrong conclusions from it. nowhere on his page he says that with over 200% crit damage 1% crit is > 1% damage. He says with 200% crit damage 1% crit results in 1% increase in damage. Which is poorly worded.

1% increase in general means multiplying something by 1.01. So if you have a product of 2 values A * B, extra 1% will result in 1.01 * A * B.

What he’s referring to, and you can check that in my calculations above, is adding 0.01 to one of the multipliers, e.g

(A + 0.01) * B. Which kinda looks like a 1% increase, but strictly speaking is not.

You’re confusing adding 0.01 to a damage multiplier with increasing the damage by 1 percent.

So with 1% extra crit you get, e.g.(see above) (1.5+0.01) * P = 1.51 * P
But with extra 1% damage you get 1.01 * 1.5 * P = 1.515* P

Makes sense now?

Yeah, arguing about math with people who don’t understand it is pointless. My calculations are correct, the calculations of the guy whose page you linked are also correct, I’m not sure where you were getting with saying they contradicted each other. So, let’s take a formula from his page, shall we:

LRD = P * (1 + C * (0.5 + D))

(he’s using tooltip value for D, fine, let’s stick with it).

So, for simplicity let’s assume 50% crit chance and extra 50% crit damage.

LRD = P * (1 + 0.5 * (0.5 + 0.5)) = 1.5 * P

+1% crit chance:
LRD = P * (1 + 0.51 * (0.5 + 0.5)) = 1.51 * P

+1% damage:
LRD = 1.01 * P * (1 + 0.50 * (0.5 + 0.5)) = 1.5 * P * 1.01 = 1.515 * P

Now I wonder which is greater, 1.515 or 1.51…

Another example:

70% crit chance, 50% crit damage

LRD = P * (1 + 0.7 * (0.5 + 0.5)) = 1.7 * P

+1% crit chance:
LRD = P * (1 + 0.71 * (0.5 + 0.5)) = 1.71 * P

+1% damage:
LRD = 1.01 * P * (1 + 0.7 * (0.5 + 0.5)) = 1.7 * P * 1.01 = 1.717 * P

Wow, 1% damage is again better than 1% crit.

Math is hard.

Mate, simply saying “lol you’re wrong buddy” when presented with maths sure is a nice way to embarrass oneself.

Let’s start again. Baby steps.

(1-C) percent of the time you’ll do power * base / target_armor damage

C percent of the time you’ll do power * base * D / target_armor damage

D is not the number from the tooltip, it’s 1.5 + the_number_from_tooltip / 100, which is your total crit damage multiplier

So, your sustained damage is:

(1-C) * power * base / armor + C * D * power * base / armor

which is ( 1 – C + C * D ) * power * base / armor

Now re-read my previous post.

Sigh.

Your sustained damage is

power * base * ( (1-C) + C*D ) / target armor

power, base damage and target armor are constant in the comparison, so don’t need to be taken into the account.

So we have

1-C + C*D. Which is 1 + C * (D-1)

A ‘p’ percent increase in damage results in (1+p) * ( 1 + C*(D-1) )
A ‘p’ percent increase in critical chance results in 1 + (C + p)*(D-1)

Now let’s see when the former is greater than the latter

1 + (C + p)(D-1) > (1+p) * ( 1 + C(D-1) )

1 + C * (D-1) + p * (D-1) > 1 + C*(D-1) + p * ( 1 + C*(D-1) )

p * (D-1) > p * ( 1 + C*(D-1) )

(D-1) > 1 + C*(D-1)

(D-1) – C*(D-1) > 1

(D-1) * (1-C) > 1

tqhx.2190:

once you are over 201% damage on crits, 1% to crit > 1% damage)

Not really, no, at least if you’re talking about sustained damage.

With 50% crit chance your crit damage multiplier must be > 300% for your sustained damage to benefit more from 1% extra to crit than from 1% extra to damage. And although it may seem counter-intuitive at first, the higher your crit chance, the more crit damage you need to keep 1% crit worth more than 1% damage.

Below is the formula in case you’re interested:

D – crit damage multiplier (2 for 200%, 2.01 for 201% etc.)
C – crit chance (0.5 for 50% etc.)

For crit chance increase to result in more damage than for the same % total damage increase the following must be true:

(D-1) * (1-C) > 1

Riku Shinobu.4518:

Aleph Naught.9034:

Riku Shinobu

How do you avoid this? You make a deeps build that revolves around toughness.

No. You either make a ‘deeps’ build, or a one that revolves around toughness. If a build revolves around toughness (a defensive stat), it by definition can’t be a DPS build.

Frankly, advocating running with ‘durable’ groups that take forever to kill anything leaves the impression of not being able to adjust to the fact that tanks don’t keep aggro in this game and giving up on finding actual (i.e. not ‘revolving around toughness’) DPS who know how to use skills and utilities at their disposal to avoid taking damage.

Takes forever to kill anything? You come run with us and see for yourself. That’s all I have to say to that.

For a toughness-based build, compared to one that revolves around, you know, damage – yes. Boons, dodging, healing, using combos are the things that should keep DPS alive. Having some toughness/vitality helps, but a DPS build that has toughness as the primary stat is an oxymoron.

I play a mesmer with mostly berserker gear, with some toughness and vitality thrown in. In pugs, I die as (actually less) often as warriors, despite preferring to be in melee range where mechanics allow it (a warrior keeping distance with his rifle while a guardian and a mesmer fight in melee range is always a fun sight). Adding more toughness would help my survivability way less than it would damage my DPS. It would just make fights last longer.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Diminishing_returns

Dungeons have been a central issue with diminishing returns due to their large rewards and ability to be repeated. DR will trigger if the dungeon is completed consecutively and/or in under 30 minutes. This obviously affects teams that can clear a certain dungeon mode rapidly. DR will trigger if players cycle between two dungeon modes, even if the dungeons are different. A simple method to avoid this is to do all three explorable paths in order. DR affects all rewards for completing the dungeon and any chests that spawn in the dungeon. For every point of DR, dungeon rewards will be cut in half until reaching a minimum value. This will include:

Dungeon tokens
Experience
Coin
Karma

Not sure if it’s entirely accurate, though – we did a pretty fast full AC run the other day (1-2-3) and got reduced rewards for path 3.

1. Roll a guardian or a warrior, get it to lvl8.
2. Review your definition of ‘pwning’ in PvE at lvl8. ;>

Questing on a low level mesmer is okay if you know how to play it, but for new players it’s extremely hard, especially in comparison with some other classes.

Just for the record, fine by me.

We run past the boss up the stairs as well, but this way sometimes you get 6+ adds., which… complicates things. All in all, it’s a very boring and annoying fight now. I used to mostly melee the guy on my mesmer and it was fun. I guess Anet wanted to make the fight harder, but instead they just made it longer.

Riku Shinobu

How do you avoid this? You make a deeps build that revolves around toughness.

No. You either make a ‘deeps’ build, or a one that revolves around toughness. If a build revolves around toughness (a defensive stat), it by definition can’t be a DPS build.

Frankly, advocating running with ‘durable’ groups that take forever to kill anything leaves the impression of not being able to adjust to the fact that tanks don’t keep aggro in this game and giving up on finding actual (i.e. not ‘revolving around toughness’) DPS who know how to use skills and utilities at their disposal to avoid taking damage.

Indeed. They limited the number of people being able to pass through but conveniently forgot to do anything about the increased CD or the tooltip duration being different from the actual one.

Anyway, to answer the OP:

Raiding is going to be a bit tricky for you, since this game has none, unless you mean WvW ;>

Don’t rely on your lvl8 questing experience – questing is going to be pretty hard until you’re around lvl40.

As for PvP/WvW performance – Mesmers and Thieves are the two top QQ-generating classes. So the general sentiment is that unless (knowing A-net, until) we get more nerfs, yeah, we’re doing fine.

jportell.2197:

Aleph Naught.9034:

Lordryux.9785:

because its definitly like a must now 1 mind wrack will grant you about 18 stacks of might lol

18 stacks of Might from a single Mind Wrack. Right.

From a single mindwrack and iffffff you use the mirror blade on the GS with illusionary elascticity… So much might…

No ifffff. You can’t get 18 stacks or Might from Mind Wrack, period. You can get 9 (IP doesn’t affect Shattered Strength). That ‘look at me, I get 18 stacks of Might from MW and can’t die’ is exactly the kind of BS that gets us nerfed.

The ‘staircase’ boss of path 1 has been bugged for quite some time now – 3 veteran adds respawn randomly throughout the fight, sometimes often, sometimes not. What makes me think it’s bugged is the fact that sometimes they despawn. On unlucky runs veterans spawn almost non-stop (as soon as the previous 3 have been killed/despawned). It’s not that hard by any means, just extremely annoying.

Both inner and outer surfaces of the bubble seem to work. Tested it today in Arah in the room before Lupicus on those ‘eye’ turrets. There were two shooting at us, one behind another. Feedback bubble cast on the closer one caused both turrets to take damage (the bubble was between us and the turret that was further away)

Lordryux.9785:

because its definitly like a must now 1 mind wrack will grant you about 18 stacks of might lol

18 stacks of Might from a single Mind Wrack. Right.

Can’t comment on the whole build, but this part caught my eye:

Yllnath.2573:

Changing Illussion II to Illusions IV and my sword #2 attack reflects.

Are you sure about that? The wiki says:

This trait only affects distortion caused by shattering (F4) and the trait Blurred Inscriptions. It does not affect the “Blur” buff gained from Blurred Frenzy.

Yeah, just go to the mists and attack a golem with and without the sigil. Condition damage is the same.

About your ‘direct damage’ assumption, actually, it the other way around: most (probably all) of the time something just says ‘Damage’ they mean direct damage. When something affects condition damage as well, it is specified explicitly (e.g. Might)

Vulnerability, for example, does not affect condition damage either (which I think it should btw).

Love the build and the guides. Just a bit of nitpicking, if I may:

Osicat.4139:

I here use Sigil of force, 5% dmg. This cause it apply to al my attacks al time. It buffs both rune, sigil and condition dmg.

Sigil of Force does not affect Condition Damage.

Shanos.2459:

they open with a knockdown thats really long, once you get up they have all clones up, then they knock you down again and you get hit with tonns of conditions. now whats concerning is that i have 19000 hit points and they go through it in 1 second.

So… they manage to

1. Knock you down (by your own admission, for a long time)
2. Summon clones
3. Knock you down again
4. Hit you with tons of conditions (which deal damage over TIME)
5. Hit you with something else, I suppose, since you didn’t mention any burst attacks

…

All that in 1 second?

Just how many seconds do you think there are in a day, 100?

Yeah, they confirmed it alright.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Mesmers-still-nerfed-for-world-completion/first#post1043431

Still, it would be nice if someone could ask people from a different server in their WvW group to meet up and test it. To, you know, really confirm it.

I’m not sure I trust Anet enough to assume that if it’s been fixed in sPvP it’s also been fixed in WvW.

Embolism.8106:

The star can be seen by allies but is invisible to enemies.

Did you actually check that or just repeated what one of the devs said? Because I haven’t seen a single first-hand confirmation of the star being no longer visible to enemies in WvW. And we all know that the way Anet fix their bugs is somewhat fickle.

It looks like the game still cannot recognize when characters are on the same map.

We had a party of 5 people, 2 of them were on the same map with me (not overflow), 2 others weren’t (they were on the same overflow). I had an option to join in with one person on the same map, and with one person not on the same map. I did not have the option to join in with others. And when I joined in with a person who was on the same map with me (and standing right beside me), I actually got teleported to an overflow server.

AFAIR you had to log on to GW1 at least once between January and July this year (not sure about the exact dates) in order for your names to be reserved.

Gnomegoddess you’re right, it wouldn’t be fair.

But ANet is completely silent about when they’re planning to make those names available (tomorrow? in a week? in a couple of months?) which isn’t fair either to people who are waiting for them (and the only information we have is that they were supposed to be made available around a week ago).

I’m not asking them to free the names now, I (and surely many others in the same situation) would just like to know when it is going to happen.

As far as I remember, the policy was that people were supposed to grab their reserved names during headstart or on the launch day. Yet here I am, 11 days since the headstart, being told that the name I want is a reserved GW1 name.

I understand that you have you hands full with dealing with hacked accounts, getting the TP operational, fixing the inability of players to go into dungeons / personal story instances together and whatever else you weren’t ready for at launch, but freeing those names is a simple procedure, and one you’re probably prepared for anyway.

So could you please just make those reserved names available at last?