Guild Wars 2

Guys… what if… wait for it…
When you dodge, your pets also gain evasion. This way the pet won’t die to ridiculously easy to dodge AoE attacks, like Tazza’s Mind Stab or the Wraithlord Crusher’s hammer attack. Also works for Jade Maw’s beam thing, so if your pet swap is on cooldown, you won’t lose a pet for sure.

Huh? What do you guys think? Nothing game breaking for PvP, very easy to code, nice survivability buff to the PvE department.

I’m also having huge spikes. Latency is fine, but the package loss is terrible. Sometimes is takes up to 5 seconds to perform an action and sometimes it won’t load the map at all.

Started yesterday, and I guess for most people too, judging by the recent amount of posts in this thread.

jubskie.3152:

That’s an interesting point of discussion. Sharpened Edges and Keen Edge are similar yet very different from each other. Getting them both isn’t always possible as well. Looks like I have something to write about again

You can even get both if you don’t mind having 20 instead of 30 on BM.
May not be a big deal. More power to the ranger, a bit less to the pet. And with Apothecary/Settler’s gear the perma regeneration will probably make up for the loss of Natural Healing. You could get 2 shouts + 1 trap if you feel that the conditions from the weapons, traits and sigils are not good enough. Also, you could go for the Leeroy Jenkins build for ZvZ: Full PVT, maybe some Clerics… Swoop in, give the frontline that delicious swiftness and regen, drop a water field for them to blast and leap, remove conditions with your shouts, annoy the crap out of the enemy zerg, cancel a channeling with Hilt Bash, absorb some hits with Counterattack, and when you get low on health, Swoop back to your own group and then pull someone in with Path of Scars. I mean, if they’re dealing damage to someone with almost 2.9k armor and 28k HP, they’re not killing that Engineer in full rampager’s or that glass cannon elementalist that just finished casting his Meteor Shower. You can be double obnoxious with two Leeroys by sending in an invisible Polar Bear with “Guard” to Roar on them, then send him back with a defensive “Guard” and activate “Protect Me” and spam /laugh while they still try to kill you not knowing what is happening. Probably not the best course of action if you’re in a very, very serious WvW focused server, but could be pretty cool to do if you’re just having fun with your guild. At least beats killing yourself with Barrage.

I was kinda “meh” about the patch, but this thread got me really pumped!

jubskie.3152:

6. Perma Regen/Swiftness

• New Grandmaster trait – Nature’s Voice: Shouts apply 10 seconds of regeneration and swiftness to allies in a 360 radius. (new)
• Shout Mastery (existing)

This new GM trait is in the NM tree which means you get +30% boon duration with it. That means the swiftness and regen on you is actually 13 seconds. Adding shoutmastery to it, you can lower Guard’s cd to 12 seconds. Perma regen/swiftness yo.

Viability: Rangers can remove SotH from their bar and get near perma protection on pets and perma regen/swiftness on yourself and any allies within 360 AoE. The only thing limiting it is the x/x/x/30/10 requirement. With Faux already thinking of switching to 0/0/30/30/10 for an after patch RRR build, it might be a really good thing. (especially in small group WvW)

Add soldier runes for maximum support! Guardians ain’t got nothing on us!

Now, seriously, could be pretty good. Two shouts + Signet of Renewal + Healing Spring = Awesome condition relief. You can even get Empathic Bond if you want to go balls really deep.
Get a Red Moa with Commanding Voice and Concentration Training for 80% uptime on Fury. You can still get Keen Edge or Sharpened Edges with 30 points in BM and NM. With Rare Veggie Pizzas (or dirty cheap Koi Cakes) and a Giver’s Bow, the damage is still good but the support capabilities increased ten fold.

@Dasorine
You’re right, but I know how it works.
Let me use your own example:
Player A puts all his burns that combine into 20 seconds for 100 damage per tick. Player B does the same, but his only deals 50 damage per tick. The monster died in less than 20 seconds.
How much damage player B did with his burn?

Also, bleeds have much higher (and even) durations (you can get Shrapnel Grenades to apply 4 stacks every 4 second for more than 20 seconds) and can easily be reapplied, so the DPS lost from the fractions of seconds that didn’t tick aren’t proportionally as important.

@AntiGw
Now that is really silly.
“Number one: that becomes really unbalanced.”
So if 10 players deal 1000 damage in a course of 10 seconds, it’s unbalanced. But if 10 players deal 1000 damage in 1 second, it’s totally fine. And it’s not like it needs to be infinite: Just raise the cap proportional to the number of players attacking.

“Interesting statistic for you: every condition in the game costs server bandwidth. ‘Cause we have to track how often the condition is running, what the duration of that condition is and what the stack is. So the more stacks we allow, the more expensive it gets because we’re tracking every additional stack on there. "

So if you do all the calculations for condition damage and duration (otherwise, you wouldn’t know which one are in effect and which ones are in queue. Also it gets updated every second, confirmed by getting might on yourself and seeing that the dot damage increases), it’s bandwidth free, but if you apply it to the enemies (enemy health – damage you just calculated), it costs a truckload of money.

EDIT: Just read the rest of the interview. Thank god for this:

One of the things people have been talking about is having their own individual stack limit that they can apply, rather than an infinite amount on one boss.

Colin: Yes, it’s tough. It’s certainly something we can look at, it does drastically change the way that the professions play, right? It does say “you can no longer stack all of one type of condition”. It might change the skills on each profession if we were to do that. It would encourage a little more group play to some extent. It’s not something we’re really talking about, but it’s an interesting idea. I’d have to think a lot about what the effects of that would be overall, but it’s an interesting… interesting idea.

It wouldn’t encourage a little more group play, it would encourage it by a lot.

“it does drastically change the way that the professions play, right?”
Sure it does! And that’s an awesome thing! You’re not Riot Games, ANet, you don’t need to force a meta. Let people have more diversity!

AntiGw.9367:

The devs have stated that the reasoning behind capped stacks is bandwidth issues. Keeping track of more conditions costs them a lot of money.

This is why the stacks are limited, and also why a lot of condition durations are short.

But it doesn’t make any sense how showing and adding a couple of numbers to their script could drastically increase bandwidth, seeing the servers already have to calc each condition applied and how much condition damage the applier have at the moment, every second, so it can decide which ones are in effect.

Back in the day, I used to play Ragnarök Online. The game was really famous in my country and it was very common to see dozens of guilds in every castle. If anyone conjured an AoE spell at the head of 200 people, it would calc the damage based on the magic resistance, flat and fixed of each one of them and apply the damage instantly. Now imagine 50 people spamming their AoEs at the castle doors, (which we called “pre-casting”) while hordes and hordes of players would try to run pass it. My guess is that if a game from 2002 could do it, Guild Wars 2 that probably has some pretty amazing codes regarding positioning of the players in a 3D environment and projectile scanning could add a few more stacks of damage and increase the frequency of appliance of burn damage.

Now that we’ve got through what those conditions do, let’s see what’s the problem with them:

Bleed has only one problem, that is common to both of them: When conditions hit their maximum intensity cap (25 for bleed, 1 for burn), any additional stack is gone. It disappears. Only the 25 stacks that deal the most damage remain.

Let’s see how this is a problem in a theoretical situation: Imagine a group event where you’re required to defeat a champion monster. Now imagine that doing this event, there’s two bleed-based grenadier engineers. One of them has a SINGLE POINT of condition damage more than the other. As soon as the first hits his 25 stacks, the DPS of the second drops down abysmally. He’s been trying to get his gear for months, has bleed duration for runes and a rune of the earth on his weapon. He’s not that worried about condition removal because he know his build is good at re-applying it. But now all his 104s that popped at the bazillions from the bleeding enemy now disappear because the first one has a food with more condition damage. How fair is it?

The second hypothesis goes like this: A FT engineer is doing a dungeon. He’s got a pug that has a guardian. This guardian decided to try his amazing 100% uptime burn build. He also has better gear than the engineer. Do you know when the engineer is going to see the damage from his burn? The result of all the time farming karma for his Rabid Temple gear? Never.

Burn also suffers from an even worse scaling problem: It only ticks every second. Do you know how many 1 second burns there are? A lot. Do you know how much do those benefit from having 95% extra condition/burn duration? Zero. In order for condition duration to affect these short lived burns, you have to stack them with more burns, until you get a number that’s >= the next natural number. And if you stack all your burns at once so you can have your cooldowns sooner, do you know what happens? A single condition removal breaks all your dps.

With this problems in mind, here are suggestions for fixes:

For condition stacking, make it so that, against monsters:

Bleeds: Maximum stack is 25 + (number of nearby players x 5), being the maximum 25 from each player. It’s still bad for those two bleed engineers if they’re the only two DPSing, but being able to get to 50 when there are 5 players nearby, or 75 with 10 people seems feasible. This way you can increase your “number of bleeders per group” to a reasonable amount (that is higher than 1).

Poison and Burn: Maximum stack is equal to the number of nearby players, being the maximum of one stack of intensity per player. This way everyone can play the way they want, deal the damage they want without worrying about never seeing their damage because other player has more condition damage.

Another fix for Burn: Make it so it ticks every .5 seconds, so builds with 50 Condition Duration can benefit from it.

And that’s about it! Hope to hear from Anet and opinions from other players.

Guild Wars 2 was designed to support a wide variety of builds AND support large scale cooperative play. While both realities are true and applied to the game, both do not happen at the same time.
Malice, or Condition Damage, is an alternative way for a character to deal in contrast to Power. Abilities based on Power have their own unique variable coefficient, while abilities based on condition damage have variable duration.

The four type of damage dealing conditions (ignoring traited fear) are:

Bleed: Arguably the best condition in terms of damage dealing. It has a low Condition Damage ratio per tick, but usually has very long duration and the most important: It stacks quantitatively.

Burn: Deals a very high burst of damage with high Condition Damage ratio. In compensation, it usually has very short -and only stacks with duration.

Poison: Moderate damage that cuts the regenerating capabilities of the target. Usually lasts for long and stacks with duration.

Confusion: A special condition that damages foes when they attack. Stacks with intensity and is usually applied in moderated quantities (about five stacks) that lasts for a moderate amount of damage.

Both Confusion and Poison are “PvP” conditions that shine at crippling the actions of their targets, while Burn and Bleed are general DPS’ing conditions. While I agree that conditions are fairly balanced for sPvP, WvWvW and solo play, a Malice-based character’s usefulness can be dragged down to close to zero in group play, and it happens because of the way Conditions stack.

Confusion is admittedly accepted as not useful for PvE because it requires the enemy to attack. Your goal is to make the enemy attack as least as you can, by out-ranging, CC’ing, interrupting and chilling. Also, for longer battles, you probably want to reapply your confusion only when the last one has ended/is ending, so you can keep a higher uptime and have a more consistent DPS with it (if you apply 15 stacks of Confusion for four seconds and your and your opponent doesn’t attack once, you dealt zero damage with your condition. But if you keep 5 stacks for twelve seconds, you get a much higher chance of it being triggered. Even works against players, forcing them to either take damage or be controlled for a longer period of time). Poison doesn’t deal enough damage to be your main source of DPS, but it shines at keeping enemies “tagged” (because it lasts long and stacks with duration), making them unable to get out of battle regeneration (you know how frustrating it feels when you end a battle with a Risen Hylek and realize you have 20 seconds of stacked poison duration and no condition removal).

Bleed has the potential do deal greater DPS than Power-based damage. It stacks to 25, which some professions can easily maintain. The downside is that it takes time for it to stack and until then, you don’t deal your maximum DPS, making it very bad at dealing with low health enemies in comparison of the burst damage that comes from Power and Burn.

Burn deals “decent” burst damage, and has a very short duration. Some professions, if dedicated to do so, can apply 100% uptime burn. DPS-wise, it’s worse than bleed at 7 stacks.

RuBarBz.4972:

Cleyran Knight.8291:

Pun intended!
Just got my full Cleric set and I’m running a perma regeneration + Elixir-Infused Bombs and I gotta say this build is SOOO good and fun.
Thanks in advance!

While I’m all for Engineer PVE support builds, I’d like you to mention what content you’ve done with it. I’m only looking for builds that’ll get me through higher level fractals and made a post on Guru about bombs myself on which people kind of convinced me healing bombs is not really worth it because you’ll either be healing full health allies or when the burst hits don’t have enough healing to make up for it. So please convince me :)

My guess is that if you’re ONLY able to play each class for their utmost high end content potential, the engineer is nothing more than a grenade spammer with 25 stacks of might and if you want to do anything else to help the team, just log out of your engi and go play a Guardian.

But if you’re open minded to the versatility of professions like the engineer and the necromancer, have in mind that when using this build you should consider the bombs “collateral healing” for the melee members your group. When the kitten hits the fan, you have Healing Turret, Regenerating Mist, Healing Mist and Super Elixir (which has a very high healing coefficient) . You’re not supposed to be running around your party bombing them. The power from the cleric armor is there for a reason. And bombs have very high base damage to compensate for their unreliability (which is not a problem against dumb PvE monsters). Also, if you can keep the aggro to yourself, you will never be “wasting” the healing potential of the bombs because you can use them to sustain yourself while you tank.

Lupanic.6502:

Why Formula 409 while you have only 1 elixir?

That’s why I think there’s something wrong. It was for an extra condition removal.
But I’m starting to guess it might seem redundant when I already have Water runes and Elixir Gun to remove conditions.
Or should I drop the gun to get one more elixir?

Pun intended!
Just got my full Cleric set and I’m running a perma regeneration + Elixir-Infused Bombs and I gotta say this build is SOOO good and fun.
It is so easy for engies to keep 100% regeneration (I actually have more than 100%. If I spam all my healing spells, I can stack it to 1 minute really fast).
I decided to try it out because I used to run a Juggernaut build, but it wasn’t really quite fit for group PvE, because it lacked health sustainability, so I often had to retreat and used my Elixir Gun for ranged combat (and sick bleeding! Holy moly, it stacks bleed so fast) until I was ready to head for the vanguard again.
Then I realized I liked the utility and supporting aspects of the engineer more than the damage dealing, then I started fiddling with some builds at the PvP arenas, until I found the holy bomber! Despite having my bottom ravaged by Rangers, I came to some interesting conclusions:
-Bombs have amazing base damage. Just get a bit of power and you’ll forget you’re not a DPS build.
-If you have high toughness, your healing can get your EHP to astronomical levels (not counting other active healing skills, you can easily get 700+ Health per second from regeneration and bombs, also NOT including backpack regenerator).
-Even though you are almost melee, you can reduce the damage taken by kiting while you DPS.
-In PvP. Long range enemies with good kiting potential are your bane. Kiting in general reduces your DPS significantly. Doesn’t matter as much for PvE, because the AI doesn’t give a rat’s about dodging AoE.
-Also in PvP, If the enemies don’t have enough control to pin you down, you can run in the middle of four of them and just run away. If they chase, there’s a bomb field waiting.

So here I am! I’d like some advice, to further improve and optimize my build (I’m and engineer, after all!):

Explosives: 20 Points. Major traits are Forceful Explosives and Short Fuse.
Inventions: 30 Points. Major traits are Energized Armor (considering Cloaking Device and Protective Shield), Power Shoes and obviously Elixir Infused Bombs.
Alchemy: 20 Points. Major traits are Fast Acting Elixirs and Cleaning Formula 409 (Considering Backpack Regenerator).

I considered Tools, but I have no precision for Crit Damage and Tool Belt skills, albeit good, aren’t the focus of the build. Swift Kits are nice, but I already have Power Shoes and not many traits synch well with the build.

I use Superior Runes of Water (considering Monk), Cleric armor and my trinkets are a mishmash. I’m thinking about getting some Shaman stuff to get my base HP up, so I don’t get destroyed by really heavy burst and condition damage.

My utility skills (so far) are Healing Turret, Bomb Kit, Elixir B, Elixir Gun and Supply Crate.
I’m considering either dropping Elixir Gun for Elixir C (more self Condition Removal and Boons converted (so I can make use of my Boon Duration Increase)) or keeping the gun and dropping 409 for Backpack Regenerator and Elixir B for C (even more HoTs, I already have cleansing from Water Rune and the fumes can remove it for my team. Also Super Elixir is such an amazing heal and give the OP light Field (which I can easily trigger with a Blast Finisher for area Retaliation or even more condition removal with a Physical Projectile). The downside is that I don’t get reliable Boons (permanent Might and high upkeep time Fury, Retaliation and Swiftness from Elixir B ) for me and a random buff for my team.
Another point in favor of the Regenerator is that I don’t use Elixir H (no, seriously, this Turret is godlike. Just don’t drop and forget it. Drop, use you Cleansing burst if you need, then detonate it for the damages and to have Regenerating Mist available It has the same cooldown of Elixir H TRAITED for 20% cooldown reduction).
[Note, this is for PvE.]

Any help is very much welcome!
Thanks in advance!