Guild Wars 2

HOW DO I FIX IT!!!

There probably isn’t one way that’ll work for everyone, but there are a few things that will certainly help.

#1: No stupid and arbitrary limitations.

The good news is, Anet has moved forward with some of these changes already, so it isn’t all doom and gloom. The removal of shared global procs for sigils was a step in the right direction, but there are other things that are just plain bothersome. For example, take the condition and boon duration cap. It is set at 100% (some exceptions apply), but I can’t find a good reason why it can’t just go up to 115%, or 125%. I don’t know of any other stat that has such a hard cap like this.

Removal of limitations means less blocks for players to stumble upon.

#2: In-game manual. I should never have to tab out to learn something about the game. The in-game manual should explain all of the following:

Basic gaming philosophy
-lack of trinity
-lack of dedicated roles
-lack stringent gear requirements
Experience
-how everything gives it
Conditions and what they do
-Condition cap
-Condition removal mechanics
-Condition duration
Blocks, evades, invulnerability.
-Differences between the three
-How endurance and vigor work
-What goes through each
Melee vs. Range
-Melee does more damage
-Difference between melee, spell, and projectiles
Boons and what they do
-How they stack
-How they are removed
Combo Fields
Combo Finishers
Dynamic Events
-How scaling works, even when dead
-How rewards work
-Downscaling
Cleave and AoE limits
Salvaging
UW combat
-differences in targeting and skills
Generalized overview of class specifics
-armor and health
-primary strengths and utilities
-class weaknesses
-combo fields and finishers
Finally, compendium of in-game formula
-Damage
-Crit chance
-Crit damage
-Formula for each condition
-Toughness/Armor and how they work
-Vitality and Health
Emotes

If there is anything from this list that is missing or you would like to add, please let me know.

#3: Better conveyance.

A)Ability to reduce particle effects to nearly none.
B)Cast Bars for big attacks
C)Indicators for unblockable attacks
D)Larger enemy models, as to see the telegraphs
E)Indicate enemy invulnerability periods and reflect periods better.

#4: Change how fields are displayed. Currently, we get red rings for damage, with a red/orange blotch for certain enemies, and all friendly fields are white. This… is not a good system. So, my suggestion is that all enemy damage fields become those red/orage blotches, and instead each kind of combo field gets its own individually colored ring. Red for fire, light blue for ice, purple of ethereal, black for dark, gray for smoke, dark blue for water, yellow for light, etc.

#5: There should be in-game tutorial missions that go over the basics of combat.

#6: Target HP should be displayed when their nameplate is scrolled over with the mouse. Not necessary for PVP.

#7: Bind the sheath weapon tool automatically for new players. Just pick any key not currently in use through the default settings.

#8: Set up some basic tutorial videos on the main website that will give class specific instructions on the various tricks and combos that class can do. Have them clearly labeled as “guides”.

#9: For goodness sakes, have the foreign language filter set to off by default. Seriously.

I am for improving PVE, but some of your suggestions are the wrong way to do it.

#1: Aggro management. Your suggestion is to take away all the risk of running GC, specially in a pug, and instead input an easily exploitable aggro mechanic in an attempt to force people to arbitrarily build differently. The way aggro is handled now is fine. The only thing that needs to change is to make defensive stats more viable, and things will fall in line.

#2: Diminishing returns on damage. This is a bad idea, since it forces a soft trinity not through engaging or intuitive design, but by arbitrary gates that make it so players objectively hinder other players just by being as good as they can be. Your suggestion is to make everyone suffer from the condition cap, essentially. This is also unnecessary: by making enemies more threatening to pure DPS setups, you immediately make pure DPS setups do less damage. GCs will have to spend more of their time disengaged from the fray and more time kissing pavement, meaning that their damage contributions will decrease overall.

I have my own list of suggestions I made in another thread. It’s a big post, so I’ll have to cut it in half.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The annoying part is that mobs are made tanky just by their HP. It is rare for mobs to have high toughness, so there is no reason to diversify and add a condi user.

It is something Nemesis originally said, and I agree with him: PVE needs to be more like PVP. Now, when Anet hears this, they decided to put the down state on PVE enemies, which was the stupidest thing they could import. There needs to be several things ported over, and these things need to all center around one thing:

Enemies have to be built to kill you.

Its that simple. So many mobs in the game are currently build around the idea of giving them a gimmick they use once or twice without any real meaning. Mobs need to have much better AI, and more things they do with it:

#1: Primarily ranged mobs should try to kite players. Nothing to elaborate, but as players approach them, the ranged mobs should walk backward, or walk sideways away from players. In game, we currently have many pulls, leaps, cripples, chills, immobilize, and stealths, and yet we don’t have much of a reason to use them. Why? Enemies just run up to your face and fight you at point blank. There’s no one to chase and no one to run from.

#2: Mobs that grant boons should not spam boons. One of the biggest issues with fighting the dredge is that, if you remove or corrupt the boon they have, they immediately reapply it to everyone in range. This is true for most mobs that use boons on themselves: there is no reason to ever remove the boon because it just comes right back. Mobs, if having boons, should always have long duration + long cooldown, so removing them matters.

#3: Unshakeable and defiant need to be reworked. First, unshakeable needs to no longer reduce vulnerability and weakness, since champions are really the only place those conditions can be effective. Second, stacks of defiant need to dissolve on their own. Maybe one stack every 2 seconds or so. That way, you can have meaningful CC, even when only one player has CC skills.

#4: Melee mobs need to be more effective at chasing players, because currently players can just kite and shoot mobs without any additional help. Enemies need to do stuff like use swiftness, use more cripples/chills, have leaps, and also use stability. Not all at once, of course, but it would be helpful.

HOW OTHER MMOS RUIN IT or THE ENDLESS EXCUSE BRIGADE

A lot of people now know that the new traitwork has made alt leveling a painful, unrewarding slog for the first 80 levels or so. Especially in the pre-30 era. Anet has explained why they did this. Their idea is that, players were too busy being distracted by traits, so if we don’t give players traits, they’ll spend that whole time learning how to pull off epic combos with their skills. AKA: selective pressure is boredom.

Now, this doesn’t work in part because of human nature’s tendency to take the path of least resistance, but this is compounded by the expectations that…
<.<
>.>
… other MMOs have instilled upon the gaming community. I’m talking, of course, about things such as the following:

#1: A 3 skill repetition that takes up the entirety of someone’s action chain.
#2: 80% of the game is end game, and leveling is just a time tax to get to the fun part.
#3: Classes will naturally level themselves out to fulfill their hard role (part of the 14/14/14/14/14/14 issue)
#4: All non DPS dedicated specs being a boring trudge through the muddy terrain that is conventional leveling.
#5: Terrible random number generators that range from 0 to maximum damage (in the hundreds).
#6: Endless gear tiers that trivialize content while simultaneously making things too hard to go forward.
#7: Cheaters…
#8: You’re supposed to face tank unavoidable deeps while other people support you.
#9: Maximum damage is achievable at distances, since melee fighting is reserved for other classes.

This is important, because if people come to GW2 with the experience or expectations of other MMOs in mind, then they will have over half a dozen legitimate excuses to shut their mind down, and just signet warrior through the entire leveling experience. Remember: the inspiration for players to learn in this game is boredom, so if they have any mindset other than “I should use this terrible time to learn everything about the class, including research other classes and how all the game mechanics work on different websites”, then they aren’t going to get anything out of it.

You’d be amazed how many people can play GW2 while simultaneously watching the bachelorette. They’ll grind themselves to level 80, and of course there isn’t anything in the overworld to discourage being a signet warrior, so they’ll never change. In order for a player to realize that active defense is king, you’ll have to fight against every single one of these preconceived notions about MMOs. Otherwise, players will learn nothing.

THE TROUBLING PRINCIPLES

Being both in college and been a college tutor, I’ve always had very strong opinions about the education system, primarily because I’ve been on both sides of the river. So, I tend to see what works and what doesn’t work.

Social Darwinism doesn’t work. Where as most instruction would go along the lines of “tell peeps da stuffz, yo”, social darwinism works through the philosophy of “Don’t tell, punish for not knowing”. In this case, the punishment is boredom through leveling then unexplained hostility from other players followed by unexplained failure. One particular professor I had (art appreciation) was proud of this, literally to the point of proclaiming “you should already know art!”, giving us open ended essay tests, and boasting about how ill will makes him a great professor.

The biggest problem is that the difficulty dissonance and community division drives away players. Without proper instruction, there’s nothing to differentiate between a call to learn vs. a call to stop playing the game and go do something else. The worst sensation anyone can ever have at a game is frustration, and that is exactly what difficulty dissonance causes.

I have to wonder what is so bad about just telling players how the game works, or how a class works. Anet refuses to touch this issue with a 10 foot pole.

EDIT: NOW I REMEMBER WHAT TO PUT HERE! THEORY STUFFS

O.K. Anet has talked about increasing the difficulty in the game, mostly through new content. Now, currently their selective pressure to encourage new players to improve is through boredom: give them nothing, and let them experiment with their skills first.

This reminds me a bit about the videos I saw during the beta, where the enemies were quite a bit stronger than they are right now. Enemies would, by default, kill a player if the player just stood there and attacked in melee range. So, to survive, players would have to use different attacks and skills to mitigate enemy attacks, leading them to victory.

Now, although I am still not a fan of the social darwin aspect, a game system that is more hostile but has less dissonance would do a better job of encouraging players to learn content. The curve would be a bit steeper, but also less selective to different game content. With proper instruction, this may be an option.

This has plenty of caveats, though. Players are currently very familiar with the lax version of the game, so they would experience a global difficulty shock. This also decreases the friendlyness to the casual market, and may drive away players who wouldn’t be satisfied with the game requiring more skill on the open world.

Because of this, I’m hesitant to suggest such a change. This falls into the “solution may be worse than the problem” category.

EDIT:

Gearbox.2748:

Key point missing.: Serious lack of usable data in the combat log.
In just about any game with a combat log; you have a fairly size-able data to go back and read after a fight.
Information gained there helps players when they are killed by x. or y was ineffective against a monster..
Usually in fight you do not have time to figure out exactly what happened, and here in gw2 you mostly can’t even get usable data after to improve on or figure out a mechanism.

Though I personally don’t care much for the extra data, I can’t find a good reason to dismiss this idea, so it gets in.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

#5: Stability needs to mean something. This is for players, mostly. Currently stability has limited access, really short durations, and long cooldowns, which makes stability nigh useless. Stability needs longer durations, since the amount of CC in the game is already disproportionate to the amount defense there is against it.

#6: Enemies need to attack more frequently, but do less damage with each individual attack. Currently, you can just loldodge nearly everything in the game because enemies have big slow attacks. If enemies had rapid but weaker attacks, then passive defenses would be more important, as well as regen and protection. Not every enemy has to be reworked, but having diversity in enemy attack patterns would be a boon.

#7: Enemies need to cleave and pierce more often. One of the reasons why stacking is so effective is because when an enemy attacks, it only hits one player in that group, which means players effectively have 5x the durability while in a stack. If enemies cleaved more often, then to stack you would still have to actively block and dodge.

#8: Enemies need to have their attack rate effected by chill.

#9: Enemies need less health, and they need to heal themselves. Nearly any enemy that is veteran rank or higher needs to have less health, but also have a self heal that is on a long cooldown. This will make timed CC more important, as well as make the healing reduction from poison important in PVE.

#10: Enemies need diversified defenses. Currently, they just have high HP and nothing else. There needs to be mobs who have high toughness, mobs who use strong protection and strong regen, making condition users more important for the team, as well as boon stripping.

After all this is put in, then PVE will be interesting. Nearly every class has something they can use to deal with all of these problems, and having players deal with these challenges will make for better players and more entertaining gameplay.

Additional ideas:

#11: Enemy groups have to be built to kill you. A random group with random abilities doesn’t do anything. An enemy group with more dedicated roles (such as a debuffer, a ranged attacker, and a stunner) that follow a more coordinated behavior sets means a world of difference between mindless enemies and a legitimate threat.

Enemies need diversity in their attacks. I’ve already seen good examples of this with Aetherblades, and in Orr. Enemies with endless channels, enemies that focus on debuffing and stunning, enemies that focus on buffing, stuff like that. It should be the standard, not the exception like it is now.

I do like the idea of having regen stack in intensity, though.

Harper.4173:

I could have sworn I posted this before. Something must have gone wrong.

OP – what I believe is that you can’t really fix bad players because they won’t put in the time and effort to get good.
How do you fix the " it’s just a game man, doesn’t matter if I’m good or not, I play it for the lulz" mentality?

There’s actually a teaching philosophy I’ve heard about a few times. I think it is Buddhist in origin. Anyway, it goes something like this: A good teacher can teach without the student knowing that he is learning.

There is an expectation in the game of laziness, and this expectation is vindicated regularly. But, if the game had a different expectation… you see where I am going with this.

Anyway, this actually leads into another suggestion I had awhile ago regarding the zerker meta, in which I suggested that the game be harder in specific ways to encourage more build diversity. But, the more I thought about this suggestion, the more I realized that there is a really, really big obstacle to just making the game harder. That obstacle being that it is quite hard to get good at the game. Once you know everything it is pretty easy, but knowing everything is a challenge that requires in-depth research and repetition of the content. The least one can do is amend the whole “extraneous research” aspect, and make the learning curve more about practice and learning enemies.

Heck, I’m not even “good” at the game. I just let perseverance and problem solving skills carry me through most stuff. I’m the most clumsy and haphazard player I know, but I’m darn near unstoppable if you give me time to think.

I don’t think I can “fix everyone” in a certain extent, but I’ve certainly encountered a large enough group of players who’s biggest fault is that they don’t know whats going on.

I’ve been playing a necro in sPVP since launch, and also I use a necro as my main in WvW. The necromancer, for all their strengths, has quite a few weaknesses.

The biggest problem with necros, and condition necros in general, is that both their offense and their defense is ultimately not in their own hands. While other classes get vigor or endurance regen for dodges, barriers that stop or reflect projectiles, shields that block multiple attacks, or straight up invulnerability, necromancers don’t get any of that. Their form of defense is to use blinds, chill/cripple, weakness a couple of scattered stuns, and life force generation/Death Shroud. The big problem with all these defenses is that they are stopped by stability, can be cleansed away, or require the opponent to make mistakes. Because of this, Necromancers don’t have a truly innate form of defense that they can use, other than being a big bag of HP. We have to rely on AoEs and Marks to land hits because we lack the lockdown abilities and the speed to land hits otherwise.

Combine this with the lack of mobility and disengage/maintaining engagement, and we come to what is the true problem with the necromancer: Our survivability is not in our control. How well we do is highly dependent on our opponent, and if they are built correctly AKA have a lot of condition cleanse or if they make good calls, there isn’t much the necro can do to fight back. That is the most frustrating part of using the necromancer in WvW: When I turn a corner on the map, my fate is ultimately decided by what is around that corner, and not what I can do. If there’s 4 enemy players there, I can’t escape or defeat them all so I die. If there is nothing there, then I am safe and I can continue going on. Whenever I get attacked by another player, whether I win is really about how they are built, and how good of a player they are.

I rarely ever make “skill shots” or pull wins from behind as a Necro. Either I win by a lot or I get pwned, and the lack of control on this matter just makes the Necro feel a bit helpless. They have a high skill floor, but a low skill ceiling, and this shows up a lot in play. I think this is where a lot of complaints while playing a necro comes from: while we can be considered bastions of power when on the field, we are also very helpless.

Necromancers have a lot of staying power with a full DS bar. It literally doubles our HP, giving us a ton of sustain in small scale fights. The two problems with it are that you have to get the Life Force to use it in the first place, and the second is that in large scale bouts DS melts in an instant. The bigger the fight, the more valuable dodge and reflects and blocks become, but the durability of DS is finite. Without an escape, there’s no way to stop being focused, so if you fall into that pack of ants you are done for.

Naevius.3185:

>>Without a difficult death system nothing is truly difficult in the game.

If I pose the problem “What is 2+2?”, it does not get harder just because I threaten to shoot you for a wrong answer. Your logic is flawed.

This. So much this. “Difficulty” in any challenge is how hard it is to pull it off. Severe punishments for failure don’t make things harder. They just discourage me from trying in the first place. Knowing that I failed is punishment enough.

There is an inverse proportionality between punishment and difficulty. If you make something punishing upon death, and make it really hard, no one will bother to play it. So, if you have severe punishments for death, you have to make death rare, and thus have to tone down the difficulty of the game.

I like the flip side: death is cheap, but the less costly death is, the more frequent you can make death. Low punishments means that it is possible to crank up the difficulty. Low punishments encourage me to try riskier things, like flying solo in dungeons. Low punishments let me try out new tactics, and even just have fun with everything. I can laugh about how horrible something went when I don’t have to spend a week grinding to get it all back.

If you want more stringent punishments, put them on yourself. Don’t put them on others.

Nope. PVE isn’t supposed to be easy. At least not as faceroll as PVE became in legacy content.

#4: WHAT ARE THE SOLUTIONS and WHY ARE YOU SAYING THERE SHOULD BE SOLUTION WHEN YOU SAY STACKING ISN’T A PROBLEM!!11!1!NEEEEAAAAAHHHH

The thing with stacking being counter-intuitive to standard game design and feeling awkward and all that is still a bit of an issue. This isn’t just an issue of fun, but an issue of presentation: if I show someone I want to play some videos on guild wars 2, then watching a bunch of players gather into an indecipherable blob and then smash a gigantic bear head against a wall… it just isn’t a good look.

The other thing about solving this issue is that there’s very little you can do without going all third world dictator on how people play the game. The bosses in this game aren’t too big. Take Agent Bela from Arah p2, for example. She’s just a regular asura, so if all the players go to melee her, it is night impossible to not stack.

So, for solutions, I propose more interesting boss mechanics, and more diverse mob AI.

For example: If there is a mob that likes to attack at range, give this mob a flag where they will always try to be at least 600 units away from any player, and treat this as a hard line that mob will refuse to cross. That way, when they come upon enemies stacking in a corner, they will orbit at a distance to get in range, instead of just running up to the players.

Another idea: make a boss that has a directionally dependent damage reduction: all direct damage from the front is reduced by 90%, due to heavy armor or a big shield or whatever. Then, players will have to encircle the boss, so that only one player gets reduced damage while the other 4 get full damage.

Another idea, give a boss an extremely dangerous and frequent melee cleave attack, but make it so he alternates targets after every use. That way, players will have to surround the boss, because otherwise his attacks will plow through nearly any defense.

A good example in-game is the wraiths from Arah p4, where you have to stand in different circles to attack the boss. If you get more enemies that require spacing, like a gigantic plant monster who’s buds only open for a moment at different corners of the map, but need to be attacked so there isn’t a map wide heavy DoT, then you can encourage being in different directions.

The player locked damage fields that certain bosses use (Golems in Sorrows Embrace and Fire Shaman) are also decent examples, but their attacks can be dodged. Another idea is a boss that constantly streams lightning to players and polarizes them, so that if oppositely charged players are nearby (radius = 300), they’ll receive a high DoT. That way, if this is on a fairly large sized boss, players can alternate which sides they melee.

The solutions to problems should make the game more interesting, and not just limit how people can play. I can’t stress this point enough. Now, if you aren’t going to argue my undeniably more-awesome-than-yours wisdom on matter, or if you don’t want to praise my gigantic wisdomly wisdom, then I’d like to make this a thread where people can post and critique their own ideas on how to make enemies more interesting in a manner that rewards dynamic placement and activity with bosses.

Because if we can’t come up with ideas, then how do we expect Anet to come up with ideas?

The annoying part is that mobs are made tanky just by their HP. It is rare for mobs to have high toughness, so there is no reason to diversify and add a condi user.

It is something Nemesis originally said, and I agree with him: PVE needs to be more like PVP. Now, when Anet hears this, they decided to put the down state on PVE enemies, which was the stupidest thing they could import. There needs to be several things ported over, and these things need to all center around one thing:

Enemies have to be built to kill you.

Its that simple. So many mobs in the game are currently build around the idea of giving them a gimmick they use once or twice without any real meaning. Mobs need to have much better AI, and more things they do with it:

#1: Primarily ranged mobs should try to kite players. Nothing to elaborate, but as players approach them, the ranged mobs should walk backward, or walk sideways away from players. In game, we currently have many pulls, leaps, cripples, chills, immobilize, and stealths, and yet we don’t have much of a reason to use them. Why? Enemies just run up to your face and fight you at point blank. There’s no one to chase and no one to run from.

#2: Mobs that grant boons should not spam boons. One of the biggest issues with fighting the dredge is that, if you remove or corrupt the boon they have, they immediately reapply it to everyone in range. This is true for most mobs that use boons on themselves: there is no reason to ever remove the boon because it just comes right back. Mobs, if having boons, should always have long duration + long cooldown, so removing them matters.

#3: Unshakeable and defiant need to be reworked. First, unshakeable needs to no longer reduce vulnerability and weakness, since champions are really the only place those conditions can be effective. Second, stacks of defiant need to dissolve on their own. Maybe one stack every 2 seconds or so. That way, you can have meaningful CC, even when only one player has CC skills.

#4: Melee mobs need to be more effective at chasing players, because currently players can just kite and shoot mobs without any additional help. Enemies need to do stuff like use swiftness, use more cripples/chills, have leaps, and also use stability. Not all at once, of course, but it would be helpful.

#5: Stability needs to mean something. This is for players, mostly. Currently stability has limited access, really short durations, and long cooldowns, which makes stability nigh useless. Stability needs longer durations, since the amount of CC in the game is already disproportionate to the amount defense there is against it.

#6: Enemies need to attack more frequently, but do less damage with each individual attack. Currently, you can just loldodge nearly everything in the game because enemies have big slow attacks. If enemies had rapid but weaker attacks, then passive defenses would be more important, as well as regen and protection. Not every enemy has to be reworked, but having diversity in enemy attack patterns would be a boon.

#7: Enemies need to cleave and pierce more often. One of the reasons why stacking is so effective is because when an enemy attacks, it only hits one player in that group, which means players effectively have 5x the durability while in a stack. If enemies cleaved more often, then to stack you would still have to actively block and dodge.

#8: Enemies need to have their attack rate effected by chill.

#9: Enemies need less health, and they need to heal themselves. Nearly any enemy that is veteran rank or higher needs to have less health, but also have a self heal that is on a long cooldown. This will make timed CC more important, as well as make the healing reduction from poison important in PVE.

#10: Enemies need diversified defenses. Currently, they just have high HP and nothing else. There needs to be mobs who have high toughness, mobs who use strong protection and strong regen, making condition users more important for the team, as well as boon stripping.

After all this is put in, then PVE will be interesting. Nearly every class has something they can use to deal with all of these problems, and having players deal with these challenges will make for better players and more entertaining gameplay.

But we do have a lot of power. My concern is that this power may be working against us. The devs have stated multiple times that they are not giving a necromancer the tools other classes have for survival (stealth, disengage, vigor, invulerability, etc), so to compensate in a world where active defense is the only defense, they give necros a lot of passive defense and a crap ton of damage to boot.

Do we have too much damage? I’m not so sure. We have good AoE conditions, but the fact is that necros apply bleeds slowly, only 2 every 1.5 seconds or so with the scepter, and 3 every 4.75 seconds with the staff. To get bursts of conditions as a necro, I have to do some complicated maneuvers (spectral grasp + Weakening Shroud + Dark Path + Chillblains + Mark of blood into scepter/dagger for grasping dead and enfeebling blood, coming to 13 bleeds after blowing all my cooldowns), and our ace move Epidemic is hard to use, since if they cleanse before use it does nothing and if their partner cleanses after use it does nothing.

It just doesn’t have “Oh crap I’m at the cap!” feel that Condi rangers give, or the “My cleanses, they do NOTHING!” feel that Condi mesmers give, or that “OMG I’M ON FIRE!!!” effect that engineers have. The Mes and the Ranger are tricky and hard to fight, whereas the engineer is oppressive with either direct damage or high controls. The one gimmick we have to lay on the hurt as a conditionmancer is to stagger our fears to maximize terror damage. Against classes with low HP and if we’re lucky enough to have dhuumire proc, this can be quite dangerous. However, a stun breaker and/or stability ruins the chain.

It is rare for me to run a power necro other than a tanky minion master in PVP (which dies to AoEs and becomes helpless very quickly), but Power Necros suffer from a lack of reliable AoE and also have issues at range. Without any cleave, the necro relies on wells for AoE damage, but wells have the bitter flaw that players can simply choose not to stand in them, making them hard to use to that effect. Our ranged power weapon, the Axe, has incredibly short range and does so-so damage at best. Instead, we often rely on Life Blast for our ranged attack, which eats up our defense as we are using it.

Condi necros are slow to start and not in control of their own damage, power necros have tunnel vision and highly delayed AoE, minion masters are vulnerable to AoEs. Our offensive options, for all of their statistical clout, are quite limiting and have their own weaknesses. There are countless times as a Condi Necro where, despite spamming all of my AoEs, I can’t make a dent in an enemy player’s HP because they have dodged/blocked/cleansed literally everything I have done. Instead, my HP is plummeting for their constant attacks, and I have absolutely no way to defend against them.

While the Engineer suffers from the problem that the Devs have no idea what they want the class to do, the Necro suffers from the problem where the Devs have a clear idea what they want to do, and it just doesn’t work too well.

Hello all! Are you tired of having the Chak Gerent destroy your cannon? Silly thing, doesn’t he know not to break other people’s toys? Are you also tired of there being sparse information, and “guides” that barely say anything? Never fear, for I am here! And, my dear, with my guide to TD meta event, you too can conquer the king of the jungle. All for the low price of $9.99! Yes, for a mere 10 bucks, you can get a fighting chance to conquer the king! So… don’t read further until you’ve sent me the cash.

…

…

No peeking!

…

…

Alright, at this point, I’m assuming you’ve sent me the money. So, now I will begin the guide:

Section 1: Begging for money plz I am poor
Section 2: Where and When
Section 3: General information
a)What you will need
b)General event information
c)The Chak Gerent, and how not to be eaten by giant bugs
Section 4: Lane specific information
a)Ogre
b)Rata Novus
c)SCAR
d)Nuhoch

SECTION 2
—————————————————————————————
The King of the Jungle is the name of the primary meta event for the Tangled Depths. It takes place over the entire map, but the center of this event is the Ley-Line Confluence Waypoint. The event is on a roughly two hour timer, that begins half of an hour after server reset time, and an hour from Dragon Stand Reset time.

At that time, after the event has inevitably failed (because you have not read my guide yet), the entire map will go into reset mode. Then, each lane’s specific events will reset. What you will want to do is… these events! There is plenty of time to do them, and they all unlock useful and important goodies for each of these respective lanes.

The Rata Novus and SCAR Camp waypoints will be looked at the start. You’ll have to go to Ley-Line confluence waypoint, then stroll on over to these places to do their events. Each event is fairly simple, and you need very little explanation beyond what it says on the right hand of the screen. These events are also good for practice, as they’ll have you do things that you will need to do during King of the Jungle.

Once the main chain of events is complete, there are a series of additional non-necessary events that will loop continuously until the main event begins. You can check at a glance how far along all the events are by scrolling over your map, and seeing what “tier” you are on. A tier 4 map has all of the events completed.

The events are frequently done in an hour, so a super-organized map will start gathering an hour before the event begins. A not as organized map will start organizing half an hour before the event begins. An unorganized map flails and screams and they get eaten by giant bugs.

There is a special note here about a special event: The Chak Crown. This is a boss who will spawn south of Ley-Line Confluence. He’s a pain to fight, but most importantly he will contest the waypoint, making organization difficult. I’m going to go over this event specifically. The Crown will spawn a gigantic pool of acid around himself, and throw balls that a high damaging AoE lightning field around himself. To get to the crown, you need to kill the 3 veteran chak that spawn inside the acid. Once down, the acid will vanish, and the crown will begin to stomp in place, sounding out shockwaves alongside of his regular attack. A zerg of chak will spawn around him as well. You can DPS him in this phase, but it is important that you break his breakbar when it appears, otherwise he’ll fill the whole area with acid and wipe the zerg again.

SECTION 3
————————————————————————————————————

WHAT YOU WILL NEED:

#1: $9.99 to give to me to buy this guide.
#2: Have purchased Heart of Thorns
#3: Ley-Line Confluence Waypoint
#4: Bouncing Mushroom and Gliding Masteries
#5: Full Exotic Tiered Gear.
#6: Organization. You can’t just run into this event swinging your sword wildly, hoping that if you try hard enough you’ll get it. What you’ll “get” is eaten by bugs.
#7: Damage oriented food and utility consumable. it doesn’t have to be top tier, but the difference between food and no food is immense.

WHAT I SUGGEST YOU REALLY SHOULD HAVE:

#8: Nuhoch Lore Tier 3. Not much point if you can’t buy stuff with the map currency.
#9: Damage Oriented Gear. This event is a DPS race, after all.
#10: All waypoints on the map
#11: At least 4 commanders, one for each lane.

GENERAL INFORMATION:

At about 20 minutes after the hour, a countdown will start. 25 minutes after the hour, 4 NPCs will run to the end of each lane. At 30 minutes, it is showtime. The technical “goal” of this event is to charge the cannon with ley-line energy to blast your way into Dragonstand.

The real goal of this event is to defeat the Chak Gerent. At the end of each lane the Chak Gerent will spawn. But… he doesn’t care about you. He cares about the cannon, because the Chak Gerent eats ley-line energy, so the cannon is a big ole’ metal Piñata. So the little party stealer will stay buried.

Your goal, first and foremost, is to get the Chak Gerent to emerge. Each lane has a specific mechanic that needs to be accomplished to do this. The better each lane does the mechanic, the weaker the Gerent will be when he emerges.

Each lane gets three locations where they must get the Chak Gerent to emerge. Three times that they must complete their lane specific mechanic. The Chak Gerent maintains constant HP, so the damage you do to him on the first emerge will be there on the second, and so on. This is important: if any one lane fails to get the gerent to emerge at any point in time, the whole event fails. This is what makes King of the Jungle so hard. There’s no room for error for the king.

After about 3 minutes of being emerged, the Chak Gerent will re-burrow himself, because he thinks you are beneath the king, and wants to insult you with how low he thinks you are. He will then fart, making the air in the previous area toxic, dealing a constant AoE damage to anyone standing there. Gerent will move further down the lane, and then you repeat the emerge-DPS cycle all over again.

The thing is, the king isn’t the only guy who wants that delicious gooey goodness that the cannons are collecting. On regular intervals, a squadron of regular chak will spawn up-lane, and start marching toward the cannon with surprising speed. These chak will have a big orange X on their head. These chak will not attack you, but they run surprisingly fast. These guys must be killed, because they will try and destroy the cannon. Each lane has a different tactic for taking them out, which I will go over later.

While Gerent is buried, he can attack you still. Gerent will kind of wander aimlessly in the event area, as it is hard to see while underground. If he passes under you or you stand on top if him, as indicated by the “event champ” symbol that indicates where he is, he will cause a tremor attack to sprout up and hit you. This attack isn’t lethal, but it hits very hard, and can kill in 2 or 3 hits. So, while doing the events, avoid the tunneling Gerent.

If you see someone downed, only rez them if it is safe. If you are defeated, if you are on the first two emerge events, the fastest way to get back to your lane is to use the nearest lane-specific waypoint, and take a Nuhoch Wallow back to the lane. If you are on the third emerge event, the fastest way to get back is to run from Ley-Line Confluence waypoint. If you are defeated, do not lie around. You have to run back, because your carcass is going to keep the event scaled up.

If each lane managed to kill the Gerent and protect the cannon, the event will be completed when the timer counts down. The cannons will charge, blow open a wall, and inside there will be several crystal caches, a strongbox, and a Nuhoch vendor. There will also be a black pedestal with a golden statue on top that will spawn next to Ley-Line Confluence waypoint. You can loot this statue’s south side for goodies. The map will be classified as tier 5, you will get a legendary reward chest full of all sorts of l00t, and you get to brag that you have dethroned the King. So much so that eventually, the $9.99 you paid for this guide will make itself back in rewards.

But until then, stay in your lane if your Gerent is dead. Unfortunate and sudden scaling will lead to death, so be patient, have faith in your teammates, and recommend your teammates this guide for the low price of $9.99

THE CHAK GERENT HIMSELF, OR HOW NOT TO BE EATEN BY GIANT BUGS

If you want to beat the Chak Gerent, you’ve got to know the Chak Gerent. Thankfully, as a boss he is fairly simple. I will go over each of his attacks, and what to do when facing each of these attacks.

#1: The Headlong rush. In this attack, the chak will chitter, rear back, and then make a mad dash at a hereto unknown player. This dash is very far reaching, and it can hit multiple times in stride. This attack knocks back, and is very capable of downing you whomever you are. There are two things to note about this attack: To avoid it, dodge sideways or through it. Or block it. Secondly, never stand up-lane of the chak gerent when he does not have a break bar. That is, never stand in a position such that, if Gerent were to charge you, he would head away from Ley-Line Confluence. This is important, as increased run time between events will make them much more difficult.

#2: The swipe. This attack actually isn’t too bad. He will take a fairly well telegraphed swipe, which will hit in a wide arc directly in front of him, knocking people back. This attack only hits for about 6k on light armor (no toughness), so if you are healthy you can take a few swipes. To avoid it, block, dodge, run through, dodge back, run away, or just take the punch and heal.

#3: Acid Spit. Yes, that annoying thing that all chak can do, the Gerent can do as well. He will spot a generic sized pool of acid on the floor, which does high damage so do not stand inside of it.

#4: Purple Death Donuts. Or.. more of an indigo color really. The Gerent will, without tell, drop a big glowing purple ring on the ground. This ring does massive damage, ticking for 7k per second. This ring will also slowly expand, getting to become quite huge. This purple donut will persist for what seems like forever, and it is responsible for a large number of deaths. Gerent can drop multiples of these, but usually it is one per bar breaking.

#5: Sidestep. The Chak Gerent knows how to dodge, and he will use it. He will spin around an axis, completely displacing his body from where it was previously. This technique does no damage, however it is important to note, as he will very frequently walk out of AoEs.

#6: The Avalanche. AKA the Break Bar attack. For this attack, chak Gerent will get a break bar, then he will twerk so hard that it causes the roof to fall down. The Gerent will rhythmically slam his tail on the ground, causing rocks to fall everywhere. These rocks are indicated by bright orange circles, and have a decent enough delay to step out of. The act of his butt slamming the ground also causes damage if you stand where it hits. This attack will persist easily for a full minute if not broken. So… don’t stand in the AoEs.

Now, as for the strategy for defeating Gerent, it is simple. Do not break his bar. When Gerent is dropping it like it is hot, he is stationary, and will not drop any purple death donuts. The rocks are fairly easy to avoid with minimal practice, so during this break bar attack he is extremely easy to DPS. Breaking the bar will only earn about 2 seconds of respite before Gerent starts attacking again, so there is no benefit to doing so. To avoid breaking his bar, avoid using attacks that cause any of the following:

Chill
Cripple
Immobilize
Slow
Blind
Taunt
Fear
Weakness
Daze
Stun
Blowout
Knockdown
Knockback
Pull

This will affect classes differently. Some classes will have an easy time. Some classes will have a hard time, as they will inflict conditions passively. It isn’t super-duper important to avoid all of these conditions, but you shouldn’t use hard CC ever, and keep soft CC to a minimum. I.E. don’t spam skills all willy nilly.

When Gerent is stomping, feel free to melee and range DPS him as hard as you can. He is quite large, so multi-hitting area attacks will do a lot of damage. But when Gerent is not stomping, he will be quite a bit tougher. You can still melee him, however be warned that Gerent loves to stand in his own purple donuts, making meleeing impossible. Have a good ranged DPS weapon on you at all times. There is no particular kind of DPS preferred, so direct and condi are fine.

A good benchmark is to see if you have at least 1/3rd of his health bar down by the end of the first fight. If so, you’re good to go. If not, then you’ve got to squeeze some extra DPS fast.

A minor note: the camera will adjust the FoV during the first event, but many times during the second and third events, the FoV will not adjust. So, either be ready to fight the Gerent with a zoomed up camera, or have your FoV slider adjusted to max before the fight begins.

I wrote this for Anet as well as the players. To talk to Anet, I have to explain everything. Unfortunately, everything is quite a lot. I’ll try to put a tl:dr in, but I get the feeling that it’ll just lead to people not reading the reasoning.

I read another thread earlier about classes and their leveling experiences, and I contemplated responding to this thread with a detailed list of available traits and abilities as one levels, but then my ADD kicked in and I watched Dirty Jobs repeats.

But, while formulating that post, I noticed something. I was writing the “useful traits as you level up” list for the Necro and the Engi, and they were as different as night and day. For the engi, hitting the master tier opened up so much potential. This is especially true in the explosives line, where you have to weigh having more direct damage with explosives vs. a shorter recharge of with explosives vs. might gained through healing skills (which may be more than the previous two traits) vs. strong passive proc burning. It just feels exciting to go through the trait tiers, and look at all the new toys that you unlock along the way. It is like this for the Engineer, the Elementalist, the Mesmer, the Thief… pretty much every class I have played.

Except for the Necro. Choosing traits for the necro is like pulling teeth. You have to trudge through a wasteland of traits you’ll never find useful just to pick and choose the least crappy traits. The traits for the necro don’t feel exciting or empowering. They just feel like the best of a bad situation, with most of the good traits being a recharge reduction or a few extra points of damage.

I’m going to make a list and go through all of the bad and unremarkable traits that the necro has, and while writing this list I realize that what I’m about to do for the necro, I can’t do for any class. I can’t make an expansive list of “this trait sucks and should never be used” for thief, or elementalist, or mesmer. But what is the most frustrating about this is the lack of zingers, or crucial build defining traits for the necro. When asked about leveling the necro, the only answer I can give is “How the necro plays at level 15 is exactly how they’ll play at level 80 in high end content. Their traits change nothing about them”. The necros need something like Grenadier, or Persisting Flames, or Illusionary Persona, or Bewildering Ambush, or Phalanx Strength, or Empowering Might, or Spotter. The best attribute I can give to a trait should never be “It isn’t bad”.

So, the shorthand list of traits that I think are bad, whether they’re ineffective by themselves or if they affect a part of the necro that is simply useless. I’ll go in depth as to why each one is horrible later, but for now I just want to get the list out of the way.

Parasitic Bond
Death Into Life
Siphoned Power
Death’s Embrace
Spiteful Removal
Spiteful Marks
Parasitic Contagion
Toxic Landing
Chilling Darkness
Reaper’s Precision
Withering Precision
Dark Armor
Minion Master
Shrouded Removal
Full of Life
Vampiric
Bloodthirst
Vampiric Precision
Deathly Invigoration
Vampiric Rituals
Quickening Thirst
Unholy Martyr
Gluttony
Fear of Death
Speed of Shadows
Renewing Blast

Not included on this list are traits that aren’t bad, but just aren’t good, either. Now, the lukewarm list are traits that are “alright, but won’t go out of my way to get”, and thus still contribute to the problem of blandness in necromancer performance.

Signet Mastery
Spiteful Spirit
Axe Training
Dhuumfire
Weakening Shroud
Path of Corruption
Armored Shroud
Soul Compensation
Death Shiver
Death Nova
Unholy Sanctuary
Dagger Mastery
Ritual of Life
Vampiric Master
Mark of Revival
Near to Death
Foot in the grave

The difference between a bad trait and a lukewarm trait being that, were these a single point into a single line, I’d actually take a lukewarm trait, but a bad trait I’d just avoid totally. I’m trying to be inclusive of sPVP and WvW in this list, but from the perspective of a PVE player, my choices are even more limited than the list above.

Now for an in-depth analysis!

Parasitic Bond
Status: 3/10
Reason: There is a certain philosophy that I have with traits, and that is that a trait should contribute to my victory in any fight. Parasitic bond fails because it only takes effect after you’ve won. In sPVP this is nigh useless, since in small bouts you’ll just heal up anyway. PVE has a similar problem, where this trait is only useful when engaging hordes of consecutive enemies without rest. But, even there, the problem with this trait is that the necro has horrible AoE and no cleave, so necros can’t maximize use of this trait. The only time this trait will ever mean anything is in a disorganized WvW zerg vs. zerg fight where enemies on both sides take considerable losses, and a staff necro happens to tag most people. To top it off, this trait doesn’t work while in DS, which is when many necros both need healing, and are more capable of tagging enemies.

I’ve been around the sun a few dozen times. I can give some insight as to why it is this happens. AKA, the harsh and terrible truth as to why devs won’t talk to you. Not a direct “you”, but the “you” in the general sense, so don’t take it personally.

#1: You blow things out of proportion. A change doesn’t actually have to be big before people will moan endlessly about it. This is the internet, and people are always making a big drama about something, and just because you’ve gone on to the forums and found a dozen people who agree with you doesn’t mean it is an issue even worth mentioning. You’ll get over it, and if you don’t get over it, bye. We don’t want you here.

#2: You can’t be placated. If you’ve ever tried to reason with a tantruming child, you’d find it is impossible. And of course, being an online videogame, the majority of complaints come from just that. The playerbase is young, full of hormones, and also full of life’s little frustrations over how unpopular in school they all are. You aren’t looking for a solution, you just want to be angered by something. The reason why the devs won’t subject themselves to your every beck and call is because it would only fan the flames. Calm down, kid!

#3: Your complaints are irrational. Yes, just because you’re mad about something doesn’t mean that it makes sense, or is practical in any sense. The fact is that the devs can’t make the sky blue and not blue at the same time. and yet people will be angry at others for not doing their crazy bidding Whether you’re factually wrong, the solution you propose is worse than the problem, or you’re upset over something that can’t be understood by the rational mind, what you want isn’t correct.. There’s nothing to gain from talking to someone who is insane, because sanity is a per-requisite of meaningful communication.

#4: Your complaints are illegitimate. There’s a lot of vitriol leveled at the devs not because what they’ve done is necessary bad, but because something is bad for you. Even if other players want things differently, you are there with your own uncompromising desires, dead set on trying to make the world yours instead of better. Sometimes you have an ulterior motive, sometimes you’re just trolling, other times you just don’t care what other people think. Either way, your “feedback” is flailing wildly in a crowded room: it goes nowhere and just makes people more upset.

#5: Your complaints are a minority. Angered players speak out, content players don’t. While it seems like everyone agrees with you, in fact it is an echo chamber where the same 10 people just yell at their own shadows for days on end. Ultimately, to change any complaint you have it takes resources, and if there are a handful of cantankerous players irate over something, it doesn’t mean it is worth dealing with. The quality of updates and changes is subjective, so if you find yourself constantly out-voted on the matter, accept the horrible fate that your life will be filled with nothing going your way.

#6: The devs already speak with you, but you aren’t satisfied with the exact manner or how much. It is a goalpost that can be constantly moved, so to the belligerent mind can never be sated. Yes, the emotional black holes out there are all aflutter when something isn’t said fast enough, or where they want it to be said, or whether enough is said or not. No matter how much of a dialogue is trying to be casually opened, the fact is that you will always be looking to punch a gift horse in the mouth..

In short: You aren’t worth talking to. Now, I’m going to add this on to the end:

#7: The devs are people, too. Fact is, the devs don’t know what the hell they’re doing. Most people don’t. Most things in life are gambles. They’re going to make mistakes, and they’ll feel bad about their mistakes, or they won’t realize that something is a mistake. Thing is, you’re the worst person to tell them their mistakes. For the 6 reasons above, but also because you’ve assigned a air of mysticism around their work, and thus see anything that doesn’t suit you as the actions of a defiant spirit of some kind. The whole “fester with rage in their public spaces for weeks on end” is not a good look. It is not always going to be immediate that a problem even exists.

This is one of those threads where, I wanted to say something when it was first made, but due to schedule problems I didn’t have the chance, and now the thread is 200 posts into nitpicking and fights. So, to respond to the OP:

munki.6402:

tl;dr Raids do not frighten me. The elitism that tends to be bred by Raiding annoys me. I have better things to do with my time.

Basically this. Though I’d like to expand a bit.

The biggest problem with raids is that there is a large series of expectations that are imposed on the player just by being a raid.

#1: You’re expected to already know the raid. The high tension encounters, multiple simultaneous mechanics, enrage timers and hard DPS requirements do not lend to a learning experience. Unless you happen to already be in a group of tryhards with a lot of free time at launch, you don’t get to “experiment”. You have to follow the strategy that was hammered out by the people before you, and if you don’t then you’re just wasting the time of everyone around you.

#2: You’re expected to have the necessary gear and class already. In the rest of the game, “meta builds” have become almost a joke, but in raids they’re the standard. You can’t bring a condi guard because you like how it plays and it works “well enough” in the open world. You need to have the gear already (including ascended weapons and trinkets) role that your class is expected to play, and if you don’t then go buy it.

#3: You’re expected to be good at the game, because failure leads to wipes. If you’re clumsy or have lag, the game isn’t going to slow down to hold you’re hand. It’s going to take the entire class out for a paddling because of the inadequacy of your performance, and nobody wants to spend their entire raid time waiting for the slow guy to “get gud”.

#4: By being the “hard” content, the raids attract players who want to show off how big their e-“manhood” is. So, any time you make a mistake in the raid, you get the full unrelenting wrath of social outcasts who have limitless free time to vent their misplaced frustration over how unpopular they are in middle school. If you’re lucky, you’ll get the guy who feels all big and awesome by “explaining” things to you, in which after you’ve been kicked for your second failure you’ll have gist of what to do, so hopefully you can lie your way into LFGs and guild runs until you have actually practiced the bosses. Basically, it attracts the second worst general playerbase in videogames overall, aside from PVPers.

#5: You also have to “know” the people already. The LFG is horrible for finding raids, so unless you’ve already got a guild for raiding or have a friends list full of people who raid, then you don’t have anyone to raid with.

You can just go and do tequatl. You can just go and do dungeons. You can just go and try fractals, too. You can’t just go and raid. You have to do in-depth research and preparation before you can even set foot in a raid, or you end up ticking off a lot of people and wasting a lot of time.

Yes, it is another anti-grind elite specialization thread. You have been warned, so any misgivings from beyond this point are on your head. Like, on the forehead. Below the hairline. Where everyone can see it. In public, in front of both your girl/boyfriend and your father.

There is something that has been bothering me a bit: I can’t figure out who loses. When looking at how the elite specs were handled, when their required hero point amount was changed from 175 in betas to 400 at launch, I have to think “there’s some reason why they changed this. This is to the benefit of someone who lost out on the previous system”. But… who is this person? Who is the one who is better for having to grind through all the content to get the elite spec? Who is the person that loses when elite specs cost 175 points, and what do they lose?

I’m going to do a pseudo cost-benefit analysis on the impacts of both decisions. I call it pseudo mostly because I’m just using it as a framework for how I structure my logic, as I don’t have the numbers. With all that said, lets begin:

Option A: Having the elite specs cost 400 points.
+People who want the exclusivity of grind will be happy, particularly because other players don’t get to use the e-spec.
-Players who play WvW now have to grind WvW endlessly to get their e-specs in their chosen game mode. This is compounded by alts.
-Players who want to run legacy content and aren’t interested in HoT but still want the elite specs now have to put unimaginable grind in content they don’t want to play.
-Players who wanted to run HoT with the new specs now have to run HoT without the new specs to the point where the entire map becomes repetitious and bland.
-Players who grinded out hero points on legacy content feel ripped off due to getting an incomplete and unusable spec.
-Players looking to buy HoT for the elite specs are discouraged from doing so.
-Players feel pressured into grinding HoT content.
0Players who don’t like or don’t care about e-specs aren’t affected in any way.
0Players who didn’t buy HoT aren’t affect in any way.

Overall, the system is oppressive and restricting to anyone who doesn’t crave rewards gated behind long grinds. HoT maps are now wall which restricts play for a large number of players, and as such every required step is another brick on top. Only a small subset of players are happy.

Option B: Having the elite specs cost 175 points.
+Players who WvW either have to grind half as long, or don’ t have to grind at all if they have the PVE hero points.
+Players who want to run legacy content with e-specs now have the option to do so, exclusively through legacy content.
+Players don’t feel pressured into doing HoT content, and thus can do it at their leisure. This makes it much more fun.
+Players who want to run HoT in their elite specs now get the option to do so.
+Hero points on legacy content are now not completely outmoded
+Players who still want to get Hero Points in HoT can do so.
+HoT maps are no longer a repetitious and bland grind, as they are now played exclusively for players who want to enjoy the new content in them.
+People looking to buy HoT for the elite specs are encouraged to do so.
+More alt friendly.
+Still plenty of grind for masteries.
-Players who deeply desire exclusion via grind will not be as happy.
0Players who already have grinded some for the elite specs will feel a bit ripped off now that their HoT grinding was unnecessary. This is a mixed bag, because many of these players will also be happy that they received 225 free hero points.
0Players who don’t like or don’t care about e-specs aren’t affected in any way.
0Players who didn’t buy HoT aren’t affect in any way.

Overall, nearly every player ends up better off. More convenience, less oppression, more options, more fun, more attractive prospect to buyers. There is only one type of person who will miss out: those who are personally disturbed that someone out there is having fun without grinding specific content for it.

So yes, we gotta make sure that people who want others to grind are satisfied. Everybody else? Forget them! It is all about the grinders who demand other people grind! We know that is a pleasant crowd to appeal to. They just can’t be happy with raids, masteries, and gold. Its gotta be other people that grind. I mean, how is a game supposed to function if you don’t make everyone grind the exact same stuff? The only reason why they have this opinion in the first place is because Anet changed their minds at the last second, but who says we can’t appeal to an incredibly selfish desire that Anet themselves have manufactured?

Seriously though. It should be very clear what the superior option is. It is obvious that the devs wanted the elite specs to cost 400 points, because they wanted it to be another thing that you had to very slowly work for. But why do they want it to be that way? Who loses if that isn’t the case? This isn’t an economic problem, it is an entertainment one. Who gets wronged? Who is at such a loss from a 175 point system that they will refuse to buy HoT or quit HoT? Is there a dev somewhere who’s wife is held hostage, and the ransom is requiring 400 hero points or else she eats a bullet? Is giving everybody what they want in a more open and convenient way a sin? Are elite specs really supposed to be a thing that is divided among the haves and have nots? Is there some hidden economic stat somewhere that says that unless you requiring doing literally everything currently in HoT to get the elite specs, that stocks will go into the toilet?

I’m going to reiterate my suggestion: Make elite specs cost 175-200 points. Make the hero points in HoT worth 5 instead of 10. Because then, nobody loses.

DarcShriek.5829:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Fext.3614:

no real human beings can be such a bunch of annoying drama queens like the Destiny Edge.

Clearly, you have not been around tabletop gamers for very long in your lifetime. Trust me . . . there’s worse which inhabits your Friendly Local Gaming Store.

Teachers. Teachers are the biggest drama queens I know. It seems that being around kids all day rubs off on them. Not all teachers of course, but more teachers than other professions I am familiar with.

After spending years being an adult, I can say with absolute certainty that maturity is a lie told to me by my parents in an attempt to conform my actions into something more convenient for them. The same petty antics you see on an elementary playground are what I see every day at colleges, jobs, offices, clubs, and politics. The only difference now is that, when a post-graduate engineer throws a hissy fit because he wants to eat the muffin that someone else bought to work, he can espouse philosophical and sociological justification for stealing Ted’s muffin.

I suppose what irks me the most about the Liadri fight is that Anet got “difficulty” wrong. I wrote about this in another thread, which I’ll repost some here:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

My biggest gripe is the fake difficulty of it all.

#1: The camera. It is extremely limited, making it so you can’t see what is going on. Half the fight is zoomed on the back of my character’s head.
#2: The random object pull. This would be fine if we could see the whole field, and that stupid pulling orb wouldn’t get “obstructed” every time you attacked it. But, game glitches and camera angles, ho! It isn’t like the random pull is pure RNG here.
#3: One hit kill mechanics are never fun. They just discriminate against builds.
#4: The grates on the ground make it so you can’t see the AoE circles that well. In the second phase of the fight, I basically have to guess whenever I’m in an AoE or not.
#5: OH THE LAG! This comes from two sources.
a)Zone lag. Due to the large amount of people zerging this area at 3:00 AM, every action you take can have anywhere from a 0.5 to 1 second delay on it. Because of this, you’ll end up squatting stationary in on area trying to pick up an orb of light, resulting in death.
b)There are huge lag spikes that delay the game 5-10 seconds, and you get these every few minutes. If you get one in the fight, fight is over.
#6: Time limit. Due to the extremely limited space of the gauntlet, to make it so no on can abuse the “whole server shares 6 domes” system they made, they put a time limit in the fight, so you have to rush ahead to beat the bosses when the smart thing to do otherwise would’ve been to wait for a better opportunity. Again, this just discriminates against builds.
#7: It is punishing and expensive. The truffle soups are 30 silver each, and you have to pay to get more tickets, and then you have to pay the repair bill. On average, each “fight” costs about 10 silver. Worst part is when people don’t rez you, and you have to run throughout the entire map to get another shot, getting more people to queue up before you and wasting more time off of food bonuses.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FakeDifficulty

for reference by what I mean for “Fake Difficulty”.

Fact is, a lot of players would like harder content. Problem is, hard does not mean gimmicky, frustrating, poorly designed, or grindy. Liadri was a step backward from AR and specially MF.

Well OP, the big problem with the whole “Making the game hard” thing is that, the harder you make a game, the more niche you make the game, and therefore the less money you bring in, and the less money you bring in the less the devs can work on the game to make it better.

This is ultimately the biggest drawback to making the game your game. People play GW2 for a variety of reasons, and not all of them do it to be challenged. Aimless and nonspecific rants about the subject don’t help anyone. So, in the end you have to explain something to Anet:

#1: Why it is you and your kin are more important than others who disagree with you. Or,
#2: Why it is your ideas for changing the game will make more money and make it better.

And please don’t pick #1. I’m tired of people picking #1.

Alright, time to do the math… again. Wearing no equipment at all in PVP, we get the tooltip damages for these attacks. With this data, you can get your DPS in any situation simply by calculating your effective power, then multiplying tooltip damage by effective power divided by 1000.

Staff Auto attack: 215, 254, 516. Takes 2.1 seconds, so it has a DPS of 469.
Sword Auto Attack: 284, 284, 462. Takes 2.5 seconds, so it has a DPS of 412
Dagger Auto: 198, 302, 302. Takes 2.1 seconds, so it has a DPS of 382

So the staff auto attack is the highest. Now to compare other abilities:

Heartseeker: 710 damage at below 25% health, 1 second activation time
Weakening Charge: 822 damage, 1 second activation time. Hard to use
Vault: 879 damage, 1 second activation time

These are the base damages. There are a couple of unique aspects to each auto attack: Staff reflects projectiles and stacks vulnerability. Dagger causes 8 seconds of poison and gains endurance. Sword causes vulnerability and cripple.

Going away from tooltips, in a max might situation, that poison on dagger will do 8 ticks every 2.1 seconds damage, which comes to about 3.8 ticks per second. The poison will tick for 78.5 damage, so this is an additional 298.3 DPS. Since the staff has 87 higher tooltip damage, this would mean that, for the staff to overcome the dagger poison, you would need an effective power of about 3,429. That is… very low for effective power, actually. Most zerker thieves will have that amount with just their base power plus might, let alone factoring in additional modifiers and crits. Also, most thieves are bad at stacking might.

Overall, staff auto wins. Weakening Charge wins. Staff is the highest DPS weapon we have.

I’ve seen a sharp drop in community quality pretty much everywhere. In-game, and on the forums.

I came in here expecting an unreasonable change, but a 5% reduction to max HP wouldn’t be too bad. At least on SCAR lane.

I run chak gerent regularly. Sometimes the lane I command succeeds. Sometimes the event succeeds. But each failure is on the margin: you’d be amazed how frequent it is that it requires one more nodule to emerge the gerent, or how SCAR lane needed 1% more damage. Those are the only two parts that fail.

The words “organized” are nigh meaningless. The only thing they imply is that someone has been trying to taxi others in for awhile. The hardest part about the event is getting everybody on the same page. If you do that,, I’m fairly confident the event will succeed. But boy is that hard. The average pug is insufferable in the strangest of ways:

1)They’ll only taxi in 5 minutes before the event begins then go AFK
2) They’ll refuse to listen to explanations then complain that they don’t know what to do.
3)They’ll fight you on the strategy and purposefully CC the boss because “it makes them vulnerable”.
4)They’ll run around in circles because they aren’t sure what their squad is supposed to do, no matter how much you explain.
5)They’ll join the event in masterwork gear and no masteries.
6)They’ll refuse to join squads, speak up if they have questions, or cooperate.
7) They’ll run around in full knight gear with all defensive specializations because “HoT is hard”.
8)They don’t understand what soft CC is.
9)They don’t have WPs on the map so they’ll just lie there dead.
10) A blast finisher? What’s that?
11) They’ll ignore that there’s a meta going on and try to do hero points on the same map.
12) They’ll complain about explanations and proudly boast in Map Chat that they are turning off Map Chat.
13) They’ll only try the event once and never again, ensuring that there’s a steady stream of completely new people and no experienced players.
14) They don’t have the attention span to start events early to get full rewards, then complain that rewards suck.
15) They’ll refuse to eat food, even if you put a feast right in their face.
16)They’ll join random squads and refuse to spread out.
17)They’ll enter the map expecting to be carried, no matter how many times the event has failed.
18)Dodge? What does that do?

And so on. Its like herding cats. I think the high success of guild runs is because a guild is mostly full of people on the same page. To that end, I’m not sure the event is overtuned as much as it is the community is not competent enough to do it yet.

Note to self: do not run minion master build in orr.

That is something I find annoying that other players do. There’s a certain philosophy I’ve had in MMOs for awhile, and I haven’t the foggiest why other people don’t do this:

If they form the group, it’s their rules.

It’s that simple. I haven’t encountered most of the in-game discrimination other people report to nearly the degree that they report it, and the reason why is because I read the descriptions before I join.

Shampanix.3928:

Seriously?…

Some of you behave like a little, spoiled child when mommy shows you bag of candies and says “go clean your room first to earn it” and you’re like “kitten no, mummy, gimme that noaw!” and then you go cry cus mommy won’t give it to you insta.

A more apt analogy would be that mommy implied we’d get a bag of candies for cleaning our room, so some of us went and cleaned our room for weeks. Only for mommy to say “the room never mattered. clean the garage”.

It has been mentioned before, but if someone who doesn’t discriminate explains it, this might make more sense.

The thing with GW2 is that nearly all of the defense in this game is “active”. What this means is, defending yourself isn’t really about an armor rating, or a HP bar. It is about recognizing enemy tells, blocking and blinding those attacks, maintaining distance, strafing, and dodging. Other MMOs invoke passive defense, where everything is determined by your stats beforehand.

Because of this, the roles played by any character isn’t too limited on their stat distribution. A guardian can reflect and block just as well in full zerker as well as they can in full PVT gear. But rather, the “role” they play is based on the utilities and traits they have at their disposal. This is a bit jarring, since this is different from both other MMOs, and from sPVP/WvW mode in this same game.

As for the reasons why it is different, there are several reasons:

1)In PVP, your opponent will always have relatively high sustained damage, so things such as effective HP and the overall damage to durability ratio come into play. In PVE, enemies have strong but slow and telegraphed moves. This means that in PVP active defense only avoids some damage, whereas in PVE it neutralizes nearly all of it.

A)This is also why healing is more important in PVP. Whereas you can dodge nearly everything in PVE, if you can’t dodge then you’ll never heal the massive amount of damage done. But in PVP, since you can’t dodge everything and damage is sustained, the healing contributes meaningfully to your overall health.

B)This is also why durability is important. With active defense stopping so much less, you’ll rely on your stats a lot more. The sacrifice for greater damage is meaningful, since an opponent can do comparably greater damage to your HP bar than you do to him if built right.

2)PVP objectives aren’t about killing your opponent. In sPVP, it is about point control and secondary scoring mechanics. Sure, killing helps, but it isn’t necessary to progress. In WvW, it is about group movement, siege, and holding towers/keeps (which don’t go by normal combat rules), so again it isn’t necessary to kill your opponents as much as it is to drive them off. But in PVE, it is all about death, killing enemies, and more death. So, offense became the name of the game.

3)You fully heal after fights. In games where you don’t, defensive stats and healing are important for long term sustainability, but in this game you get a clean slate for merely ending the fight. With active defense being important and limited, the faster an enemy goes down, the less damage they do and the quicker you can heal up. Because of this, DPS gear is both offensive and defensive in one.

4)The game is designed with close ratios between offense and durability. In some games, one player can have 10 to 20 times the effective HP of another character, and some characters can have 5 or 10 times the damage. In this game, the scales kitten much smaller (for example, only looking at gear + 300 Power/Prec/Crit damage and ignoring sigils/runes/trait abilities, berserker only does 50% more damage than soldiers), and this allows for players to have diverse builds while still being relatively effective. This diversity doesn’t punish players for any glaring flaws in group composition, so players are free to go full DPS without fear of being completely one shot by everything.

When you add all of these things together, you get a perfect storm that focuses on damage above all else. Ultimately, I would like to see this storm remedied, and this is most easily done by making PVE more like PVP. Put in enemies that have high sustained damage and attack frequently with quick AoEs and cleaves, have objectives that are explicitly not about killing enemies, and you’ll see build diversity become much more useful.

I wonder how long you’ve been doing these samples. I see non zerk groups and groups full of non war/guard all the time. I think you might have a memory bias here, wherein the groups you take notice of the most are the groups that have restrictions. Heck, I join pure zerk groups with my engineer and necromancer all the time, and the vast majority of the time these guys are fine with it.

That whole war/guards only thing is an extremely antiquated meta, perpetuated by players who don’t care enough to learn otherwise. The warrior can be outdamaged by Ele (highest damage overall), thief (highest non-FGS single target damage), necromancer (high single target damage), mesmer (reflects and long lived phantasms rack up damage on enemies), and probably Guardian as well. I don’t know much about rangers, but I see lupi speed clears using them all the time, so they have to be doing something. So, the only blacksheep left is the Engi, which generally hits for 5 in an AoE, is excellent at stacking vulnerability and buffs, and also has the most versatility in the game.

The only class that could use a buff in PVE is the necromancer, and that is because it lacks good cleave, and also has extremely fragmented support skills that focus on debuffs.

Death Into Life
Status: 1/10
Reasons: Necros are horrible at healing, and healing is horrible to begin with. Healing power is a badly scaling stat, and the necro has no way to make use of it.

Siphoned Power
Status: 1/10
Reasons: A single stack of might at OHKO range for 5 seconds doesn’t contribute meaningfully. At all. Ever. There is no play where 35 power/malice at 25% health for 5 seconds has ever made a difference.

Deaths Embrace
Status: 2/10
Reasons: Only takes effect after you’ve already fallen, and boosts what is horrible direct damage to begin with. 50% of nothing is still nothing.

Spiteful Removal
Status: 3/10
Reasons: This is another trait that only takes effect when you’ve already won. Necromancers are not lacking in condition removal in any way whatsoever, so at its best the trait is redundant and never there for when you need it (I.E. you are dying to conditions, and your opponent is not dying).

Spiteful Marks
Status: 3/10
Reasons: In theory this trait is fine, but in practice it is nigh useless. This is because marks have very little direct damage, with Putrid Mark being the only exception. So in the end, Spiteful Marks ends up boosting the most useless aspect of the staff in a manner that will never significantly matter.

Parasitic Contagion
Status: 1/10
Reasons: This trait is balanced off of a series of theoretical circumstances which will never occur. In sPVP, against any few targets you’ll never build up and sustain enough condition damage for this trait to be meaningful. In PVE your conditions will be overwritten, or enemies will be killed before the regen can possibly take effect, making you both horrible at doing damage and horrible at healing. In WvW large scale fights, your conditions will just be cleansed before you can heal off of them anyway. The only time this trait is useful is in solo PVE dungeons, where the condi necro has the ability to spread around massive conditions against enemies that live long enough to both build a ton of conditions and have the enemies stay alive long enough for it to matter.

Toxic Landing
Status: 1/10
Reasons: Every class has a fall damage reduction trait, but Necromancers have the second worst version of this trait next to Rangers. The poison field on fall is nearly useless, since all it does is inflict poison. Necros don’t have anything to combo meaningfully with the poison field, either.

Chilling Darkness
Status: 2/10
Reasons: I’m not sure whether this is by bug, or by design, but I never see chill meaningfully affect enemy actions. Ever. Chilling darkness just does a pittance of a chill on blind, which means that it’ll rarely ever contribute anything meaningfully to the fight. The one second chill is useless in Deathly Swarm and Signet of Spite, so the only purpose chilling darkness serves is to make it harder for players to get out of Well of Darkness, and to really stall someone when chasing another player around using Plague of Darkness.

Reapers Precision
Status: 4/10
Reasons: Assuming 50% crit rate, you’ll get about 3/20ths of a percent of life force on each hit, and while this trait doesn’t have a cooldown, Necros lack the cleave and AoE to really make use of this trait. Close, though, since this nearly made it into the lukewarm category.

Withering Precision
Status: 3/10
Reasons: This trait, however, does have a cooldown. 5 seconds of weakness every 20 seconds isn’t that good, considering a few other things. Firstly, long internal cooldown, so if you are attacked by a horde of enemies or an AI based player or multiple players, the contribution of this skill drops to nearly nothing. Second, the place where this trait would be good would be against a champion or legendary mob, but as it happens those mobs cut weakness and vulnerability duration by half, meaning that this trait gets neutralized by default. Because of this, the trait goes into the “nice idea in theory, horrible in practice” box.

Dark Armor
Status: 1/10
Reasons: The whole “toughness when channeling” thing is horrible. Channelling skills does not take up a meaningful length of time while doing anything, and taking 22% less damage (assuming minimum armor) during that time will never amount to anything, either.

Minion Master
Status: 3/10
Reasons: Nearly every other trait in this line has to deal with keeping minions alive. That’s how minions work: the longer they live, the more they do. Now, minion master works to reduce minion recharge upon their death, which seems fine, until you realize that minions spend the majority of their time alive. Because of this, the total amount of time saved by minion master is miniscule at best, shaving off a few seconds from several minutes worth of active time. There are exceptions to this rule, however, in that bone fiends and flesh worms benefit quite well, since their active causes their death, and thus you’d want them up as much as possible. Because of this, the trait isn’t completely useless, but it is still largely bad.

Shrouded Removal
Status: 1/10
Reasons: Though shrouded removal isn’t too bad in theory, it simply lacks in potency. The removal of a single condition while entering death shroud makes this trait inferior to many passive condition removals, and in a condition based fight will probably not mean very little as far as the whole fight goes. This trait is both ineffective and redundant because of this.

Full of life
Status: 3/10
Reasons: The minimum amount of HP a necro can have is 18,376, which makes 10% of the necros HP equivalent to 1,837 health. This trait, on a 30 second cooldown, will only heal 650 health, or a little over one third of the health necessary for activation. Overall, this trait simply lacks meaningful potency: the 5 seconds of regen given by this trait doesn’t mean squat in the short game, or even in the long run. It isn’t bad in concept so much as it is bad in execution.

Vampiric
Bloodthirst
Vampiric Precision
Vampiric Rituals
Vampiric Master
Status: 2/10
Reasons: The entire vampire line suffers from a very strange conflict of interest and an innate fear by developers. On the one hand, none of these traits work in deathshroud, and necros lack the cleave to truly make use of these skills. On the other hand, these traits are balanced to be slightly ineffective under peak conditions, meaning that they are all taken together and are used to maximum effectiveness. This means that, for practical purposes, the overall healing and damage contribution of vampiric traits is ineffective. The idea of having unresisted damage + healing tacked on to every individual hit of every individual attack spread out among 5 traits and multiple stat lines is simply flawed, as there is no sweet spot to balance around, and no peak to the theoretical limitations to this trait. Because of this, I argue that the whole vampire line should be scrapped, and Anet should try again.

Deathly Invigoration
Status: 3/10
Reasons: In theory this trait isn’t that bad, simply lacking potency and range. In practice, it lies below another problem: You don’t gain health in Deathsrhoud. Sure, there’s a grandmaster trait in a nigh useless line that gives regen in Death Shroud, but the lack of healing in DS has always been a mechanic that perplexed me. Deathly invigoration is one of those traits that, in practice, exists solely to attempt to overcome an issue with DS, which is the inability to heal. In practice this is just compensation for the inherent flaw in DS. Now, a second problem is that Deathly Invigoration suffers from in appropriateness. It is balanced solely on the premise of spamming DS to get effects, but in practice many players will hang in Death Shroud for extended periods of time. Meaning that, this trait gets balanced around more unrealistic circumstances than what actually occurs.

Quickening Thirst
Status: 2/10
Reasons: This is one of those movement speed buffs for a class that isn’t lacking in movement speed options. Worst part is, this is a relatively bad movement speed buff, since it requires you to wield D/D or lose the effect. When you throw on top of this Signet of the Locust, and swiftness via Locust Swarm + Spectral Walk, you get a trait that tries to fulfill a need that necros do not have in a manner that is simply unsatisfactory.

Unholy Martyr
Status: 1/10
Reasons: This is arguably the worst cleansing mechanic in the game, right up there with plague signet. A good team cleanse will usually do something like 1) actually remove the condition instead of burdening you with it 2) affect multiple people simultaneously, removing a nasty team wide condition from the entire team 3)affect teammates on-command and quickly instead of taking forever to take effect. In the end, you get a cleanse that just does more damage to you, doesn’t cleanse damaging conditions from teammates promptly or effectively, and provides no direct means of dealing with the condition itself. This is a grandmaster trait, but if it were the adept minor trait of this line, I still wouldn’t take it.

The hardest part about being civil is that I don’t want to be civil toward a monster. As much as it pains any company to hear this, the fact is that there are customers for every company that make things worse. For the community, and for the company themselves. I’ve seen it happen in many customer bases and videogame communities, and this one is no different.

Consider this: there exists players in the game who’s desires and activities are destructive to the game itself. There are players who are insufferable socially, who take every opportunity to be inflammatory, discriminatory, and hostile. The player who is not happy unless someone else isn’t. There are players who scam, attempting to rob everyone else of their work, their fun, and their peace of mind. There are gold farmers who exist solely to make a profit by selling in-game currency, using stolen credit cards to do so. There are players who do nothing but attempt to hack the game, create bots to let players easy mode their way to wealth, then sells these bots for real world money. There are players who seek only to find every profitable exploit possible, and never intended to play the game the way it is designed to be played.

Those are easy to spot, but what of the ones who aren’t? There are players in this game who, merely through suggestion and propaganda, want to destroy the identity of this game. They want endless grinding, and superiority in performance from that grinding. Players that want to abandon the combat system, replacing it with a generic trinity system with inflexible class makeup. Then there are players who discriminate as a form of personal duty, seeing other players only as tools to their own gain, and are hostile to anyone who doesn’t cave and conform to their demands. Players so entitled and selfish that they are proud of their own intolerance, and refuse to do anything but troll and insult others who don’t agree with them. There are players who seek to manipulate the competitive environment only to make their favorite class or tactic reign supreme, with no motivation for a balanced PVP game.

So take any good community, and ask them what they are supposed to do with their poisonous elements when they have no direct tools to stop it themselves? When any good community is ultimately helpless and at the mercy of those who wish to destroy that community? When the only other inevitable outcome is that the poison eventually takes full effect? Simple: you aren’t civil with them. They don’t want to reason, and they don’t want what is good for everyone. The only way to deal with those elements is to make sure they are uncomfortable, unwelcome, and not tolerated. Then, eventually when it becomes clear to them that they will not get what they want and they will not have fun doing what they do, then their only course of action is to change or leave.

Soul Compensation
Status: 5/10
Reasons: This trait is what gluttony dreams it could be. The reason why it goes onto the lukewarm list is because it shares the flaw of only taking effect after you’ve already won. In PVE you’re probably nearly full up on DS all the time anyway, and in PVP the 20% gain per death is, again, mostly negligible.

Death Shiver
Status: 5/10
Reasons: This is one of those traits that would be so much better at the adept tier. The minor AoE vulnerability on a regular basis isn’t bad, especially if you’re in a lifeblasting build. However, it is slow to apply, is inappropriate in other builds, and often is inferior to other damage buffs.

Death Nova
Status: 4/10
Reasons: It is a small hit and poison field when a minion dies. In PVE this is nearly useless, and in PVP the best application is blasting bone minions inside of the fields they leave behind. The ability to summon jagged horrors for the slaughter helps minion builds out more, but overall this trait is just lackluster.

Unholy Sanctuary
Status: 4/10
Reasons: Superior to deathly invigoration if you stay in Deathshroud for more than 4 seconds, Unholy Sanctuary is one of those traits that, again, works to try and compensate for a weakness that I’m not even sure should exist in the first place. It gives basic regeneration, with the advantage being that it is the only regen that works while in Death Shroud, but still it ranks pretty low on the list, and should definitely not be a grandmaster trait in the tough/boon line.

Dagger Mastery
Status: 6/10
Reasons: Yet another trait that suffers from the “fine in theory, doesn’t work in practice”. On the main hand, the dagger has a weak siphon skill and an average immobilize, neither of which gain any advantage for getting their recharge reduced. The off-hand is where this shines, though, since Deathly Swarm and Enfeebling blood both benefit much more greatly from a recharge reduction. Because of this, Dagger Mastery doesn’t dip into the “bad” category.

Ritual of Life
Status: 4/10
Reasons: This is one of those traits that plays with an idea, but in practice is impractical. From a support standpoint, the ideal modus operandi is preventive: to stop teammates from going down is far superior to rezzing teammates when they go down. It should be quite simple to understand: rezzing a downed teammate is kind of like fear of death, in that you can only use this trait when failing. However, given that, Ritual of life is arguably the best nigh-failure activated trait, since it essentially compensates the necro for any damage they would’ve taken while rezzing. The gradual heal from well of blood is quite weak, so as far as the rezzed goes this trait is useless. Also, this trait only activates upon a successful rez, so if you are attempting to rez someone that is surrounded by players or is being stealth/haste stomped, this trait is useless. In this sense, it is a trait that only works when you’ve won, but can only be activated when you’re about to lose. Wholly impractical, definitely.

Necros are decent at quite a few things.

The big one being epidemic, which is the only force multiplier in the game other than quickness. And despite what others above me have said, it dosn’t rely on other professions at all. A good condi necro can stack 12 to 13 bleeds in an AoE rather quickly, and then follow that up with epidemic puts 4 enemies at bleed cap, then 2 enemies half way there. No other class has nearly this potential. This also comes with all of the other conditions that get stacked along the way, such as cripple, weakness, poison, burning, chill, torment, and blind. Throw in other players, and confusion and vulnerability are also multiplied. The biggest advantage here is that epidemic, being a force multiplier, benefits from other players laying down conditions instead of losing out. Necromancer is the only condi class that can claim this, and a good condition necro will disable an entire room of mobs mere moments after entering a room, while doing a ton of damage to boot.

For a good example of what Necros can do, just look at what they do in sPVP. Despite what others above have said, the AoE and disabling potential of Necromancers transfers well to sPVP. The biggest advantage that necros have over other condition classes is that the necromancer can burst long duration conditions. Engineers, rangers, and mesmers all have to slowly build up conditions, or their conditions are extremely short duration. But necromancers lay down long duration conditions, then seal the deal with their deadliest sPVP trait: terror. With terror, the necromancer has a high damaging stun that also prevents condition cleanses, and much to the dismay of low HP classes this can kill an unprepared build outright. They get enough conditions to overwhelm cleanses, which makes them effective in the sPVP scene.

The big confusion people have is that they assume support = buffs and heals. That is a rather shallow definition. While necromancers can give everyone regeneration with marks, protection with spectral wall and wells, and random boons with Well of Power, most of the necromancer support is offensive. Necromancers have the best access to weakness in the game, cutting the direct damage of enemies by 25%. Necromancers are good at stacking vulnerability, which increases the direct damage of all other players by up to 25%. They have good AoE cripple, Chill, and Immobilize, which prevents enemies from escaping as well as prevents enemies from catching up. Then there is boon corruption and blinds, which while some other classes have more access (other classes being thief), necromancer blinds and boon corruption is still extremely useful to the team. Necros also have condition transferrence and corruption, which is superior to cleansing.

One of the cool things necros also have is extremely high Effective HP or EHP. In larger fights the necro has a weakness to being focused, however in smaller fights, Death Shroud provides a large amount of survivability. There are many bosses in the game that have rapid but weaker attacks, and against these bosses the necromancer can face-tank these bosses in bersrker gear. In PVE, against groups of enemies Life Force can regenerate surprisingly quickly, letting the necromancer sit back and blast enemies with a might stacking, vulnerability inflicting, piercing attack that hits for 6k to 8K a shot at range. Necromancers have a high sustained damage, and high EHP combines well with this to make, in all but the worst circumstances, a very deadly combination.

Though necromancers do have their flaws, don’t let that cloud your judgement. There are many things necros do wel.

Well, it’s a tough call on what exactly Anet “learned”. The problem with the whole “learn from mistakes” thing is that there’s a million ways to rationalize, deny, and explain things away. There’s arguments that somethings are wrong, and yet there are arguments that those same exact things are right.

I’m in the camp that HoT was alright:

Difficulty: Solid. I liked the need for cooperation, the harder mobs, and a terrain that isn’t just a flat plain that is easy to navigate. About this level is where I think the game should stay, but I could still see the difficulty bumped up a bit.

Story: A bit anemic. It was fairly fast and bare bones, and it felt like the story was purposely avoiding a lot of things that it should’ve covered for the sake of “mystery”, but we all know that’s just lazy writing. Probably the weakest aspect of the expansion right here.

Mastery System: This was pretty good. The masteries need to be a bit more creative, since a lot of them were “You’re now allowed to press F on this object”. It seems like an unassailable and daunting task at first, but I soon found myself capping out points and having no use for experience again. The gliding mastery was pretty awesome, though. It really did change the way that I looked at the game.

Events: Solid again. Though a lot of people hated this because it was on a timer, that is exactly what I like about it. I like the fact that I can glance at a clock and know what is going on, and what will be going on. There’s daily rewards for hero points encourages players to group up for them, and I’ve found the awards for most of the map metas to be satisfactory and the events entertaining.

Elite Specializations: Here is the prime example of ambiguity in “learned” here. The elite specializations were way too hard to acquire at first, and this was changed. It wasn’t changed because Anet thought it was a wrong decision, but because a mass of people gave GW2 a bad metacritic score for being unhappy about how elite specs were handled. So, what did Anet learn? Did they learn that their decision was bad in the first place, or are they going to try the same thing again and just convey the grind earlier in the future?

Regardless, this was initially a mixed bag, but now it is great. Getting the elite specializations at first was like pulling teeth. You had neither the masteries to get the skillpoints, nor the knowledge to get mastery points. Running through tangled depths at launch with basic gliding and mushroom jumping is the definition of grueling. But now that the requirements were lessened, it is much better. The specializations themselves are fun, and the only bad side to them is that they eclipse the other specializations.

Precursor Journey/Legendaries: Not going to lie, I haven’t done this. Once I learned that it was a massive gold and material sink, I said goodbye and never looked back.

Guild Halls: Haven’t touched this myself. But it seems awesome, at least from what WoodenPotatoes shows in his vids.

WvW Map: Haven’t really gone here myself. I grew tired of PVP and WvW awhile ago, so this remains neutral for me.

Gear Prefixes/Runes/Sigils: These are pretty good, too. As always, there’s a bunch of “play how I want” sets in the mix, but I can legitimately see players running around in Marauder, Trailblazer, and Viper. Most of the runes are pretty meh, but Berserker and Chronomancer Runes have made it on to a few builds.

New Skins: On these I’m pretty indifferent. This is a matter of aesthetics, so it’s subjective here.

Revenant: Love the new class. Though its build possibilities are placed squarely in a box, it’s a good box. And hey, thanks to Ventari I managed to reflect the dreaded Schrodinger Wurm (A triple trouble run where the server had an aneurysm and the in-server lag was several minutes long. Named so because the server’s processes were lagging so far behind that, at any point in time, you weren’t sure if you were alive or dead).

… I think that’s most things. There are somethings I’m not sure whether to include or not (raids and squads, for example), but generally I think they did things right.

I’ve still got a rage headache, so right now a 4/10.

My list of suggestions so far:

BUGFIX: The tooltips of greatsword melee attacks have 170 range listed while the dagger has a range of 130 listed. They both hit at the same range. Please increase attack range of the greatsword by 30%
BUGFIX: Life Reap currently has a blank number under its number of affected targets. Please insert the correct amount (3).
BUGFIX: Reaper’s Onslaught currently does nothing. Fix when appropriate.

Greatsword Changes:
#1: The auto attack should have their damage increased by 10%, and increase the chill duration on AA to 2 seconds base instead of 1.5 seconds.
#2: Gravedigger should receive a 35% increase in damage, and should recharge 100% of its cooldown instead of 80%
#3: Death Spiral should also receive a 35% increase in damage.
#4: Nightfall should have a consistent size of 300 radii throughout.

Reaper’s Shroud Changes
#1: Death Spiral should have its full animation time reduced from 4 seconds to 2 seconds like ti says on the tooltip.

Trait Changes
#1: Augury of Death: Change this so its base recharge is 15%, and then gives an additional 3% recharge for each enemy hit (credits to Malchior).
#2: Reduce the ICD of Chilling Nova to 10 seconds. Increase the damage it does by 50%

I haven’t tested out the shouts that much. The thing with the shouts is that right now, the base reaper is broken, and the shouts aren’t that good. If the base reaper was good, then maybe they’d be worth the time.