Guild Wars 2

Magileine.5210:

Blackmoa.3186:

Magileine.5210:

Jethro.9376:

Magileine.5210:

Jethro.9376:

Magileine.5210:

mazut.4296:

Serpent Siphon. Doenst grant barrier and its weak skill overall.

No, it works as intended. You don’t get the barrier on hit or on cast. You get the barrier when you pick up the “magical sands” that drop after hitting an enemy.

I do agree, however, that it is a weak skill.

If i’m right you also have to face torwards your enemy to even create these serpents. Feels like Firebrand cones

Hmm, that’s weird. I never experienced this before so I went in-game to check it. It works fine for me whether I’m facing the enemy or not.

Where did you test it?
I tried it in EB on some Moas and Sheep. No serpent has appeared while moving away and casting infront or behind me.

My bad. I initially tested this while I was standing still but facing opposite the group of golems in HotM. I went back in-game and tried running forward while pressing the “Look Behind” button and casted the skill. You were right, it did not summon any serpent. This should be a bug that the devs need to look into. The skill is already weak in itself.

while using look behind button you cant activate any groundtargeted skills, has been like that for about 2 years now i think

Works for Ele’s Phoenix and Shatterstone though

Oh man i love you, i found what caused it and probably would never have if you didnt say anything. Since release i had look behind bound to alt, and al+numbers got bound to squadmarkers which i never ever use so i didnt know and just assumed tehy broke somethign cause anet

Magileine.5210:

Jethro.9376:

Magileine.5210:

Jethro.9376:

Magileine.5210:

mazut.4296:

Serpent Siphon. Doenst grant barrier and its weak skill overall.

No, it works as intended. You don’t get the barrier on hit or on cast. You get the barrier when you pick up the “magical sands” that drop after hitting an enemy.

I do agree, however, that it is a weak skill.

If i’m right you also have to face torwards your enemy to even create these serpents. Feels like Firebrand cones

Hmm, that’s weird. I never experienced this before so I went in-game to check it. It works fine for me whether I’m facing the enemy or not.

Where did you test it?
I tried it in EB on some Moas and Sheep. No serpent has appeared while moving away and casting infront or behind me.

My bad. I initially tested this while I was standing still but facing opposite the group of golems in HotM. I went back in-game and tried running forward while pressing the “Look Behind” button and casted the skill. You were right, it did not summon any serpent. This should be a bug that the devs need to look into. The skill is already weak in itself.

while using look behind button you cant activate any groundtargeted skills, has been like that for about 2 years now i think

Dessicate: Doens’t scale with enemies hit, it ALWAYS give 10% lifeforce and 5 stacks of might, even when not hitting anything.

there is no indication it should work any other way

Dhuumfire and Unyielding blast proc with all the shroud skills. Very strong on skill 5 that pulses 7 times. not to mention the other 4 can instant cast. Reks the lord and company on legacy.

Proccing on all skills should be how it is intended, proccing on every pulse for f5 most likely isn’t, as a note it only pulses burning around shades and not around yourself.

Serpent Siphon. Doenst grant barrier and its weak skill overall.

Works exactly as the tooltip says, serpents fly to area, and when they hit they become sand you can collect for a barrier, it is ratehr kitten though.

My current build:

there was a time it was known as the signet of skill in pvp as landing it was nearly a certain kill, oh how times change.

have you considered bringing a stunbreak?

The most important thing for map exploration is reapers shroud for #2

meanwhile im bored af….

to be fair alot of the problem isnt that conditions are too strong but that there is way too much dmg reduction, i.e. how are you supposed to kill a reaper with rise up, next to a bullwark gyro and with protection if not with condis?

what are you smoking? also can i have some.
But congratulations you make the anet balance team seem quite good by comparison^^

So, we got our first look at balance changes on friday, and one thing stood out: the boon corrupt on scepter autoattack.

This seems quite strange of a change to me. Just think of all the classes that don’t use any boons (for help here the full list: )
Now think of all classes that dont get some passive boons (full list again: )

So when the game came out boon removal was used at precise timings to get an advantage, but as boon application went through the roof it kinda went to spam on cooldown as you will nearly always get some use out of it and with the corrupt boon nerf changing it to 5 boons only and later on the added randomness you probably wouldnt get stuff like stability anyway(and if you did, there was potentialy still stuff like berserker stance or resistance) so the strategic use kinda went out of the window.

Now instead of bringing boons back in line it seems like anet just wants to push the removal using teh same route, but that means we will have an environment with people having little control over the boons on them and necros corrupting those boons. This can potentialy mean you are getting perma feared by autoattacks, making all pulsing stability a liability if teh enemy team has a necro(not having stab obviously means you will be CCed to death aswell so kind of a lose/lose situation). And keep in mind that you cant realy dodge the corrupt, cause if you do, the next hit will be the same until the necro hits it at some point.
So with this change a last in first out system would be realy needed to give players some way to control what boon they will be losing, but last time i talked to devs about this they said they didn’t have the required tech for this, so it probably won’t be added in the near future.

So in my oppinion this is a very bad idea and not well thought through idea.

As a closing thought i would like to leave you with a GuildWars1 Skill that would in my oppinion be a way better addition to the game than this madness(as an elite well maybe? or a added effect of corrupt boon?): http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Well_of_the_Profane

+1
realy annoying problem that has to be fixed soon

go write all assists down and tell me what additional understanding of the games you got from it and we can talk about it, don’t forget to include your definiton of an assist though and how you are going to determine who actualy got an assist at any given time.

Morwath.9817:

Caps, decaps, assists?

for decaps and caps just count, assists are not a meaningful stat in gw2

Here you go:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B19aRw89oXn3T2g3LXh6WW1uUWs

this will be updated on a weekly basis.

fyi other than in the beta teh red orbs at the vale guardian are now suspectible to fear

condi dmg is required, necro deals more dmg than engie against moving targets, so no reason not to bring nec

DTATL.9641:

Blackmoa.3186:

make it based on missing health =P

It kinda is already as you get “Last Rites” minor with blood magic. Though that only increases the the healing you receive and not the damage. (It just scales terribly with healing power)

i ment something along the lines of: your attacks siphon 1% of your missing health

make it based on missing health =P

condi already is in a rather bad state in high tier pvp, it just is good vs unorganized teams

Nec condi dmg isn’t too bad, but is best while kiting around damaging moving enemies while engie is good at burning down enemies standing still.
screen of necro dmg vs standing enemy (so for kiting double those torment ticks):
http://imgur.com/qWH5ut7

Please sign
https://www.change.org/p/john-corpening-arenanet-joshua-davis-remove-rune-of-vampirism-from-pvp?recruiter=57772134&utm_source=share_for_starters&utm_medium=copyLink

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Lily.1935:

But base necromancer I feel so lacking. Like I’m missing something major.

Like damage?

The damage isnt THAT bad, in a group with warrior you get up to ~8k bleed ticks at times and rarely drop below 6k while also havign your poison and torment. im not saying it is incredible damage but it is far better than most people seem to think.

I’ve been doing some theorycrafting for a Raid build and ended up with a rather fun condi necro build that actualy is doing well atm aswell.

http://intothemists.com/guides/6473-raid_necro

if revenant stays at it is you can in theory get regen ticks of 888 thanks to outgoing healing modificators in a total of 128% if certain conditions are met

Ristillath.6745:

Blackmoa.3186:

Flumek.9043:

NA:
Nos
OPN- tho no succes on necro yet after patch, so no need to rewatch go4
Idk about active ones, tho i dont think anyone else has video material

Choxie is a wvwer with funny youtube clips and twitch.

EU:
Blackmoa, prototype, djooce, leeto are some esl names.
Forsaker and Posi sometimes play AG cup.
Fibi, flow and probably hollts too arent tourny player but like lets say top1000 or95% in previous standards.

For videos, forsaker also streams, but i think for average beginer hollts chanel is actualy most helpful.

P.S. once you get gud you can start watching vingador stream

pls don’t put me on any top player lists atm^^ that times are long over. i know alot of stuff but i DONT play on top level anymore

Yeah I remember your indepth expert desk analysis. Kappa

To be fair we were told we would get much longer to do our postgame stuff, so we didnt realy went indepth cause we thought we had to fill a longer timeslot. In the end it just ended up with opening statements from us and then “thx guys throw over to host” and well, that obviously isn’t the part we would go realy indepth with.
And ye we could have changed it up after the 1st time we went up, but we simply never knew if they would end up leaving us on longer or not… so ye was suboptimal but whatever, still a fun experience.

Flumek.9043:

NA:
Nos
OPN- tho no succes on necro yet after patch, so no need to rewatch go4
Idk about active ones, tho i dont think anyone else has video material

Choxie is a wvwer with funny youtube clips and twitch.

EU:
Blackmoa, prototype, djooce, leeto are some esl names.
Forsaker and Posi sometimes play AG cup.
Fibi, flow and probably hollts too arent tourny player but like lets say top1000 or95% in previous standards.

For videos, forsaker also streams, but i think for average beginer hollts chanel is actualy most helpful.

P.S. once you get gud you can start watching vingador stream

pls don’t put me on any top player lists atm^^ that times are long over. i know alot of stuff but i DONT play on top level anymore

if nothing happens i will get to fill a gap in the streaming schedule in about 2.5hours. i can try dagger reaper for you guys then

nearlight.3064:

Blackmoa.3186:

Hi guys,
just fyi i’m still at gamescom and don’t realy have alot of time to post updates to you. But some words about reaper: GS autos suck kina, the weapon is ok as a whole though. best build imho is soldier or celestial signet, depending on if you want some more tankiness or dmg, dhuumfire is mandatory though. waffle and me have a post and short interview with karl prepred, unfortunately though we have no idea when we will actually get to post it. closing words for you REAPER IS AWESOME

Yeah I noticed your testing gravitated towards soldiers builds, which are used now, albeit uncommonly, yet they work surprisingly well. Dhuumfire makes sense even on soldiers given how easy it stacks with the autos and how ludicrous incidental burning with no condi damage is.

I know you probably won’t have time to answer this right now, but do you think reaper is better off with GS+staff or dagger/WH+staff?

They will probably both work even axe should be usable as most of the job of that wesponslot is building ds and wait for its cd. pros for gs: works with intelligence sigil better than the other options(which u want for reapershroud #5) and some decent arecontroll with nightfall. the pull is basicaly impossible to hit on moving targets but u can use it in cc chains. dagger wh has better mobility and the immob aswell as the
heal. i guess its up to you but given the limited playtime we have here we opted to trying to get a feel for gs.

Hi guys,
just fyi i’m still at gamescom and don’t realy have alot of time to post updates to you. But some words about reaper: GS autos suck kina, the weapon is ok as a whole though. best build imho is soldier or celestial signet, depending on if you want some more tankiness or dmg, dhuumfire is mandatory though. waffle and me have a post and short interview with karl prepred, unfortunately though we have no idea when we will actually get to post it. closing words for you REAPER IS AWESOME

necro killed ranger though xD

spvp build: http://dulfy.net/gw2traits#build=AgQBlAXsBuQ~
equip: http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-Ng-Z;9;9;9;9;6Ukl6W;1CoF2CoF26v

Cynz.9437:

why needle trap in deadly arts lol?
why descend in shadows o.o?
venom aura? what?
i thought the standard was something like this: http://dulfy.net/2015/05/02/gw2-specialization-calculator-that_shaman/#profession=thief&traits=%22Deadly%20Arts%22,2,5,9-%22Shadow%20Arts%22,3,4,8-%22Trickery%22,3,4,8

needle trap is incredibly potent, giving 3 1/4 secs immob, poison, bleeding, vulnerability(and weakness wioth traits) on a 10 sec cooldown.
descend in shadows is a nice aoe blind on steal and additional stealth(and apparently a blast finisher aswell).
and venemous aura means you get up to 5 stuns from basilisk venom isntead of 1.
Your build obviously will work aswell but i don’t thinks hadow protector will realy be meta

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

On the Wellomancer build, swap Bloodthirst for Mark of Evasion. Or swap Vampiric Precision for Quickening Thirst.

Mark of Evasion gives more damage and healing than all siphon traits combined in practical situations, and Bloodthirst is only worth it if you plan on making heavy use of our siphon skills (Life Siphon, Signet of Vampirism, Signet of the Locust).

So, while Bloodthirst and Vampiric Precision are intended to synergize, the most effective thing to do is never use them together.

Ye you can take quickening thirst and mark of evasion, but you shoudl consider that vampiric rituals life siphon got increased by quite a bit making bloodthirst also quite a bit more powerful, also you will be using dagger so dagger#2 will be betetr and your downedstate profits from it aswell, so it wont be a wasted or bad trait by any means, also you should always take into consideration that it only offers any healign at all when you dont have regeneration already. The quickening thirst trait is a bit wierd, yes the movement speed is nice of course but teh cooldown part is a bit iffy as you benefit from 1 skill only if you take no offhand dagger as dagger#2 is traditionaly used when below teh threshold for CD. Vampiric precision is not too bad of a dmg boost btw so its not too bad, yes it could be better but boosted with bloodthirst together with vampiric and vapmiric rituals it actualy offers more sustain and more dmg.

if you play on the same level as your opponents it wont be clear, if you can see that tehy are vastly better than your team ye sure, its looking rather bleak. But you would be surprised how much you can come back from on any map, and being all emo because the firts fight didnt go too well for you doent realy help.

so this is finaly becomign an issue in na aswell? maybe we can finaly get something going then

So theres now the calculator tool on dulfy, so we can share builds
Here some builds that should be good(in my oppinion) for each class(except ranger cause like i know whats good on them xD), feel free to share oppinions/improvements.

Ele
Dagger/Dagger
Guard
Hammer dps
Mesmer
PB Mesmer
Necro
Full debuff nec
Wellomancer
Thief
D/P
Warrior
Shoutbow

i could see the elite specialisation having a trait taht makes your ds stop acting as a 2nd health bar and be a defiance bar instead

I will probably use a build that is close to my current build
Spite|Curses|Soulreaping
Scepter Focus/Staff, consume condition, corrupt boon, well of corruption, flesh wurm, plague
in spite:
reapers might, chill of death,spiteful spirit/signet mastery
in curses:
weakening shroud, path of corruption, anything(up to testing and matchups)
in Soulreaping:
Soul marks, vital persistence, foot in the grave

should be rather potent

Don’t forget infiltration runes ^^ they are not too bad on the dmg side and the stealth can help you quite a bit, especially on a downedstate build (not saying they are the best choice but they can be decent)

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Honestly, I wouldn’t mind having just Grim Specter as its own skill as an elite. Give it a 90 second cooldown and it should be good.

i’d take that xd

flow.6043:

Blackmoa.3186:

you can actually increse dps from axe auto attack by over 50% by properly stowing (after ~0.24 seconds), it’s still bad for pvp though cause the range is kitten

I tested this on training golems. I tried some macros of “1” and “stow weapon” with 0.22-0.24 sec delays. Keep in mind, it’s actually not allowed to use macros like this but you know… for science!
The bottom line is: if you don’t use a macro it is impossible to get anywhere near the regular auto attack damage. The time it takes to press and release one key and then press the other adds a significant delay, not to mention that you will never ever consistently hit .24 sec several times in a row. There’s even a noticable difference between programming one repetition and queing more, so even having to klick your macro key adds some delay to this “cheated” auto attack chain.

As to the actual damage increase, it’s not really accurate to calculate just the time it takes to execute the full chain and compare. The faster attack ramps up vulnerability more quickly, add different amounts of condition duration and you’ll max out 25 stacks quicker or slower, or not at all.
But just to give you some numbers: with a zerker amulet a heavy golem would take about 20 sec without, and 15 sec with stowing. A low power amulet or a target with more hp would actually make stowing better, something like ~35 vs 20 sec.

In conclusion, should you be an axe user, don’t bother trying this trick. You won’t be able to increase your damage against a training golem while standing still and concentrating on nothing but that timing, so no chance at making it work in actual game content.
Besides, how often do you really use the auto attack of any weapon in PvP?

To follow up i did my own messurements and i got the following numbers: 16.9 seconds without macro and 8.5 with makro 8.9 with stowing manualy so i could have gotten a bit mroe critluck on teh no macro trie but its not too far off the “perfect” stow

flow.6043:

But just to give you some numbers: with a zerker amulet a heavy golem would take about 20 sec without, and 15 sec with stowing. A low power amulet or a target with more hp would actually make stowing better, something like ~35 vs 20 sec.

You have to do a significant amount of trials to get any meaningful numbers as crit chance is a thing also to note is that you obviously wont increase dmg from on crit sigils liek air and fire(you just increase the chance of them proccing close to their cooldown), but as far as auto attack dmg goes it is a more than 50% increase as both hits of axe use the same multipliers and you hit 50% more often, and yes its not practical to use in the heat of battle, but you can do it by hand and get results that get close to a macro for limited amounts of time by chosing apropiate keybindings(any 2 standard keys next to each other, i find the stow weapon on the left easier to do) and for pve it actualy is doable, making axe a “viable” single target dps choice(0.24 sec stow on assassin/zerker gear fully buffed gives you ~18k dps on 2.6k armor targets, which isnt too bad).

The dps increse is about 33% rather than 50%, but yes that’s a bug known by few.

you get 3 hits into teh time of 1 auto attack instead of 2 (50% more) and also stack up more vulnerability so you actually get over 50% dmg increase. But even if you are doing that axe is still a bad weapon for anything remotely organized in pvp

Some words about focus:
I actually realy like my focus and mostly use it as a offhand nowadays but i have to agree it has quite alot of…weird properties. Like Leman mentioned it has a rather small coen area in front of you that it can actually hit, making it realy hard to use in close combat situations against eles or engies, it is however somewhat reliable on higher range. The #4 skill in itself is not too bad, nice lifeforce generation, decent dmg even in condi builds, provides a covering condtition that also helps your team dps a bit ad teh regen doesnt hurt either. What realy is bad about this skill though is that it does not behave like a normal projectile but instead “hugs the ground” and cant realy go uphill. so it wont fly in a line from you to teh target but instead stick as clsoe to teh ground as it can, making it sometimes get obstructed or out of raneg when it realy shouldnt. Focus #5 is a realy neat skill i personaly like alot, the boon removal is seemingly random, but it gives you amazing chase potential and makes disengaging from you realy realy hard and if traited nearly impossible. Also it is one of our few tools to get rid of mightstacks on enemies as our corrupts have them on rather low priority. So yea, focus could need some love from teh developers but it isn’t as bad as leman seems to think.

btw.: if anyone is wondering my current build that features focus: http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=;04dZ;1kHFC0x3sJkJ0;9;4JT;0J19-58C;419-3x07U;1jzyvjzyv2o

you can actually increse dps from axe auto attack by over 50% by properly stowing (after ~0.24 seconds), it’s still bad for pvp though cause the range is kitten

what this leaderboard desperatly needs is a league system like in lol or other similar games

XyAltAcc.2096:

I just noticed this while browsing the new ladder…

41-3. How is it possible that he has 27pts? Assuming the information Anet gave us, a win would always give +1 and you can at max lose 3 pts if you lose to a team <199pts you have 80-100% estimated win chance against.

So at worst this would be -9 pts from those 3 losses, how can 41-9 give 27??

we don’t know how leaving a match or rerolling effects the stuff we see on the leaderboard, so maybe he had some dc’s/rerolled a couple of times and then proceeded to win his games and still losing points for them.

It depends on when new leaderboard started to collect data.

no it doesn’t. When teh new leaderboard came online i was on 8 wins, and after the last updaet of teh leaderboard i was on 2 even though i won 2 more games in that time. Other members of the party i was in did not drop wins, in fact i clicked through teh leaderboard and didnt see a single other person have a drop in wins.

you all don’t get the point. i dropped in wins, which should be completely impossible.

http://i.imgur.com/Jt0uVNm.png

So how exactly can this happen?
So i was on 8 wins, played 2 games (won both) and now i am on 2 wins?
I think something is not quite working correctly