Guild Wars 2

Metabattle is a good resource, but optimal builds/weapons change based on the situation. Also you clearly didn’t read it at all. Here’s some quotes off metabattle:

PvE: Dungeon: Guardian – GS Sword/Focus/Torch build
“Max DPS offhand for fights longer than 30s”- referring to torch
“Mace for difficult boss fights or when the Sword cleave works poorly.”

PvE: Dungeon: Guardian – Fractal Hammer
“use Shield of the Avenger for projectile heavy fights.” (thats the spirit weapon, but yes other spirit weapons are terrible)
“When appropriately traited, staying on hammer isn’t abysmal DPS. With Writ of Persistence , using only hammer auto attack is about 90-97% of the DPS of a proper GreatswordS+Hammer rotation with the same build.”

Staff is terrible for dps so you only use it in dungeons for swiftness generally, but for world bosses and general farming its good.

I’m assuming you meant pve, but in case you meant pvp as well:

The main meta guardian build is Meditation Hammer

Bunker guardian has kinda fallen out of the meta, but:
Virtue Bunker uses mace/shield + staff
Altruistic Healing Bunker uses mace and staff, with shield as a variant over focus

(In pvp staff and mace give good sustain and team support. Shield is useful for the knockback to push people off point and sometimes the projectile stopping is useful.)

For WvW:
Staff is the primary weapon in zerg builds, and a variant of meditation roamer uses scepter/torch.

Personally I found the dragon fight very fun. You just have to watch the mechanics of the fight. If your main point of the thread was to find out if people feel the same as you.. I obviously don’t.
However, you aren’t alone in thinking it is too hard. There are a lot of people who have had trouble just like you, so don’t feel bad about that. You would’ve found many topics on people having problems if you had skimmed the forums.

I will admit I did die on my first run-through of the fight.
But… heres a video of me doing it on my thief with no armor and no traits. Sorry the quality is low.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojW3MlxRUBs

Being able to figure out boss attack patterns is an important skill in any game.
When the dragon goes underground it follows a set pattern.
1. two claw attacks – you can normally just walk out of this
2. rocks – you can see where they will be from dust on the ground, again walk out of the way
3. biting attack – smaller circle than the claws, dodge or walk out. stability does not stop this from interrupting you.
4. sometimes the dragon does another rocks attack, I’m not entirely sure what causes it. I think it has to do with plants still being there but i never bothered to fully check.

How to do it:
To get the fire walk through the white fire circle – sounds obvious but some people seem to miss this. idk why
Best time to light the wall is after the 2 claw attacks, during the rocks. If you dont start the fire right away you might get hit by the bite and interrupted. If you think you wont make it just cancel out and wait for the next loop through the pattern.
You can also light the fire after the bite if it does the second rock attack.
You can sometimes light the fire during the claw attacks because braham’s shield gives stability. I don’t recommend this because you will take a lot of damage.

You can safely get rid of the bomb plants by running right between them. Just make sure its the center.

important – when you have the fire buff you can 1-shot the shadows so they don’t extinguish the ring

Heres a video of me doing it on my thief with no armor and no traits – sorry about the low quality
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojW3MlxRUBs

Being able to pick up on boss attack patterns is an important skill in any game. Personally I found this fight very entertaining. Favorite part of season 2 by far.

Also this seems like an entertaining place to link a vid of me doing it without armor or traits. Sorry the quality isn’t very good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojW3MlxRUBs

Feedback on reward tracks:
1. Please unlock the reward lines for dungeons where we have already completed the story mode before this patch. I don’t see a reason why we should need to run story modes a second time.
2. Regarding the daily lock out. I can see why custom arenas might need a lock out, but my understanding was that the arenas you get in via “play now”/ the arenas with names like 0016 were not the same as custom arenas, but these have the lockout as well. Is this intentional?