Guild Wars 2

One requires players to go outside the game because the core experience has been removed from the game, the other is one where players choose not to do it because they don’t want to invest the time and effort to experience it in the game. There is no equivalency as LS1 gives players no choice. Raids do, but people just don’t want to take it. That’s not Anets responsibility.

I feel like the biggest problem has been Anet’s “do what you want” approach to high level content. They’ve discouraged a linear or strict method of progression in the early game, and this extends to the endgame progression. Without the structure of a more linear system, it’s difficult to scale up content gradually and teach players how to play the game. In the open world, nothing really hurts you so this isn’t an issue but the ramp up path to raids is really muddied. Ideally, if you can max out your fractal level and beat Nightmare CM, you should be equipped skill wise for raids. No way known that you can’t beat Escort or VG as a DPS class if you can handle Ensolyss assuming others are capable. The problem is that progression for fractals is more demanding than that of raids. Ascended trinkets and exotic gear is all that’s needed even for relative newcomers to complete all raids. The difficulty comes in learning the encounters, whereas you cannot progress in the fractal system without acquiring a full ascended set. So when Arenanet preps fractals as a stepping stone to raids, it’s kind of wasted as a lot of people looking to try raids would do so before being ready because gearing up and learning to play high end content is not a priority. They’ve been discouraged to view endgame progression as progression, and more as a buffet of activities, then get sullen when they cannot handle it.

An easy mode would help the transition and I wouldn’t mind it’s inclusion provided the raid team has additional staff taken from the LW team or newly hired so as to keep the current work flow consistent. The problem is more to do with people attacking content before they’re ready (because the entire game builds itself up as a modular thing and that you can do everything) then feeling shafted because of their expectations. An easy mode would help, but not really fix that fundamental problem. Unfortunately, because the game encourages that mindset of being super casual friendly and that you’re able to do everything, it causes certain elements of the player base to have a feeling of entitlement. That because they paid for the game, they’re entitled to access every facet of it and any difficulty barrier that they choose not to overcome means that the game is somehow discriminating against them. The idea of personal skill progression being integral to completing content doesn’t factor. It’s the games fault, it’s the elitists’ fault, etc.

Having a shardless, rewardless story mode has merit for the few people who just want easy access to lore but that is such a minute number, I don’t think it’s worth devoting resources towards. As for everyone else, an Easy Mode might help but the fundamental problem is that Guild Wars 2’s design is horizontal in nature not vertical, so it does a poor job of teaching people how to play pve content outside of the fractal progression system. But because fractals have a steeper equipment requirement than raids, and because they’re sealed off in their own world, too many people attempt raids before they’re really ready. I mean we’ve had complaints even to this day that HoT maps are too hard. Any kind of Easy Mode in raids would still be too hard for such people. I would like to see more accessibility through an improved LFG UI, perhaps integrate guild recruitment/run ads so that people can use in game tools to find new guilds and static groups. And again I’m not opposed to a rewardless story mode provided it doesn’t lengthen the time between releases. I just don’t think it does much good since the problems go further than that.

Don’t get me wrong, I love horizontal progression and not needing to worry about the gear treadmill. It just requires a bit of initiative on the part of prospective raiders if they want to start raiding. Whether that be to find training groups, join a guild, complete fractal progression and Nightmare CM, or all of the above.

Would be very interested in joining but what times are you guys based in? I’m in AU, so I could probably only make Saturday reset runs since popular playing times in NA conflict with my work schedule during the week.

As for classes I’ve got a full geared GS Condi Reaper (~29k on the Golem 4 mil small hitbox, realistic buffs) and a fully geared Magi Regen Druid. I’m fairly new to raiding (~25 LI) but confident I could do okay as either and contribute strongly to a team.

Minstrel Chrono can carry really hard in fractal pugs. Can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve been able to facetank attacks like Bloomhunger’s ground pound tantrum or cannon fire at Mai Trin to pick up a downed player.

At the core, all dps meters do is save people the trouble of parsing through the combat log so I don’t really buy this idea of measuring metrics being a new frontier of elitism. I’ll admit that it can be misused by people with poor attitudes but that’s no different to AP elitism which has largely fallen away. Just that dps meters provide something tangible to be elitist over. On the other hand, features like buff uptime on BGDM are an absolute godsend for support classes as giving them raw data about their performance since a Druid or Chronomancer gets much less feedback from damage numbers than a Tempest would. By giving the community access to instant feedback regarding their performance, I’d argue the proliferation of dps meters have increased the general skill of the player base and given many people a necessary sobering of what they actually contribute to the group. This has given rise to many optional safe builds being consciously acceptable due to easier rotations or extra utility even if the damage ceiling is lower. Power Engineer, Hammer Guardian, Magi Druid, Minstrel Chronomancer, etc.

It also gives room for theorycrafters to test their ideas and gain substantive feedback on how successful they are outside of the DPS Golem. GS Condi Reaper, Condi Daredevil, Condi Ranger, etc may not have been considered good builds without dps meters to conclusively prove their usefulness in live situations. So dps meters have contributed to build diversity in the high end pve meta.

Because of those reasons and the simple fact that it is a tool for measuring performance and self improvement, I think the good outweighs the bad.

You could probably gear up some kind of hybrid Nomad/Minstrel Chronomancer and tank provided you get enough boon duration, but I can’t imagine going fully defensive as a dps class in timed encounters leads to anything good.

Pug mentality is too inflexible for my liking but Condi Rev has a damage ceiling 25-30% lower than Condi Ranger and is much harder to reach that ceiling thanks to Torment. So it’s not viable for pugs. The thing about pugs is that you don’t know or trust the people in your group to do their job. So assuming equal skill between a condi Ranger and a condi Rev, why go for the lesser option? I think this approach has a lot of negatives, but it’s wholly understandable and has nothing to do with being mindless or speedclearing. It has to do with overcompensating as much as possible in order to get the smoothest kills.

As for how to change perceptions, it’s pretty easy, Nerfing. Prove condi Rev is good, using video proof, dps logs, guides, etc. Necro post minion nerf was trash in raids, until it was proven it’s actually competitive provided you can spin to win in your fields. Minstrel Chrono was a meme, until it was proven it was actually pretty good for progression teams and super safe comps.

Bump this back up!

Topshelf Shenanigans is a small guild of people looking for people to group up with and have fun with. We are PvE oriented, though some of us do dabble in sPvP and WvW. Most of us are around to play prime time Oceania hours. Raiding as a guild would be a nice goal to work towards and a few of our members are learning the raid system, with a handful of people at 15-25 LI.

However, our main focus for activities would be Daily T4s and the fractal system. We want to get to a stage where we can have people just hop into gchat and group up for T4s with people they like without having to pug any spots out. That said, we are always happy to help out people who are new to fractal content (we have an AR bank for such a purpose), or get people hero points to level their elite specs too.

We’re a humourous lot, with a love for sh*tposting and jokes that can be seen as politically incorrect. However, a base level of respect for one another is always paramount as we are looking to make friends and build bonds.

We don’t really have any rep rules or requirements, having a good time together is more important than a three/four letter tag.

The only real requirement we have is that people have HoT so that they aren’t barred off from raid content should we get enough members to pursue that in the future.

So if you want a fun loving group of people who are chill and happy to dish out plenty of playful banter, look no further.

We have a discord to chat about Guild Wars or anything else in life: https://discord.gg/Btcuwev

So join us there, or contact CrustyBot.3564 or Johnnie Walker.4785 for an invite/more details.

Contact a raid selling guild to hook people up with LI requirements. If a Legendary weapon is 3k on the trading post, offer 6k for a full Armor set. That’s 40g per kill. Everyone wins, you don’t need to handle the logistics or failure involved with raids and Yummy finally gets enough gold or ecto stacks to buy Arenanet by threatening to crash the economy, ez.

Nyel.1843:

The title says it all. Which class is more versatile?

I really love to “heal” or support and Revenant with Ventari seems to be really great for that but I love the Condi playstyle of the Necro as well and being some kind of Chillomancer is amazing to me (at least in theory). With Revenant I get bored pretty quickly when it comes to different DPS builds but support/heal seems to be superior.

So, can somebody explain to me which class is more versatile and offers more (effective) builds and diversity?

Revenant is a more versatile class, though fairly weak at most things. It can be a support boon expert, pumping out easy 20+ stacks of might with strength Runes and sigils. It can be a condi DPS applying Torment and burns with its mace, you have the typical power DPS build, you’ve got your Ventari build (I’m having a lot of fun messing around with a Zealot/Berserker Ventari build in fractals) then you could have a tanky build that would probably work in raids if you had a willing group.

The real problem is that although it can cover most of the roles in the game, there’s another class that’s significantly better than it at each specific role. Keep in mind my focus is on high tier fractals and raids. And look, that’s not to say you can’t play certain Rev builds and find success, like I said, I’m currently spending lots of time on a Ventari Rev. But it’s objectively less effective than competing classes.

However Rev is pretty kitten versatile, so I’d definitely go with that if versatility your primary requirement.

hathreyn.4138:

For starters I main chronomancer, I have the gear required for a chronotank build, all of my accessories save one earring are ascended, the one earring that is exotic is commander’s stats with a plat doubloon for boon duration. I have 3/6 pieces of ascended armor with the rest being exotic, leadership runes for the boon duration and ascended weapons. I have learned the rotations in the raid training area and can maintain near 100% uptime for quickness and a high alacrity uptime. I have also studied many of the fights, watching clears on youtube and reading up on the mechanics on the subreddit, forum and wiki. Not that its overly relevant, but I used to raid heavily in other games, with me main tanking in WoW from vanilla through WotLK.

My biggest issues at this time is that I am in a dead guild and I maintain an odd schedule, it was started by a friend of mine but it never got off the ground, I pretty much only rep the tag so I don’t get random guild invites. So I don’t have an organized group that I can just go and raid with. Due to my work schedule I am rarely available before midnight EST which makes it harder as I have looked into training guilds on reddit, but they all raid outside my window of availability. I have also looked into LFG for raids but the ones I have found all want people for either challenge motes or to ping LIs before they let them join. That being said what would be the best way for me to start raiding

Definitely training guilds are your best option. There’s a section here dedicated to recruitment so you could try that. Aside from that just try asking for help in LA map chat and the Aerodrome. This goes for both raiding and guilds in general. What I find is that guilds often have many people who are interested in raiding but require someone to take initiative and create a core group. So don’t be discouraged from guilds if they don’t specify that they are raid guilds if they otherwise fit your needs. For example, if a guild has a group doing T4 dailies together every day, that’s half a raid group.

Legend of Rogue.5394:

have 10 hours a day to invest…. Oh wait life

Lol. The hardest part of raiding is getting your foot in the door. It becomes significantly easier once you have that. Whether you raid casually and it takes you a session to get a single boss down once a week, or whether you do full clears in a single 2 hour session on reset, the kind of dedication needed to raid is always vastly overstated. At least in this game.

Exclusive rewards that do not serve a practical purpose but are status items should be locked behind some kind of dedicated task if Anet wishes to use them as a means of rewarding dedicated players. Due to GW2’s horizontal progression endgame, it means that players are encouraged to make their own long term goals. By saying that players should have access to everything just feels akin to using cheats to beat a single player game for the first time. More power to you, but you just rob yourself of “the journey”, which is the entire point of GW2. I don’t at all like the idea that players should be entitled to all status items simply because they have an account and that they want it. We have gemstore items and outfits for that kind of mindset. Some of which, by the way, looks better than certain Legendary Armor sets.

My only complaint is that there isn’t parity between the game modes. It’s never going to happen but even non animated exclusive ascended armor sets for fractals, spvp, wvw and open world would be nice. I know we have vendors now but it’s not the same as the envoy collection.

And it’s not like I’m someone who wants to keep Legendary Armor for myself or anything. At my current rate of raid progression and LI acquisition, we’d be deep into LW S4 before making Legendary Armor becomes an actual concern for me. It’s just the principle behind it all, what’s wrong with earning things?

zoomborg.9462:

Rev is best hand kiter meta. That and a meme.

Don’t forget meta projectile kiter at Cairn.

I like that there are prestige items that are a means of rewarding players for dedication into a particular game type. Even better, these items provide cosmetic prestige and slight QoL, instead of being a statistical improvement on what the less dedicated could earn and thus, mess with the balance.

I just wish WvW had something similarly rewarding. And although it’s unlikely, I’d love to see a different set of legendary armor being available through more traditional means.

Rev is a powerhouse in solo open world stuff. You can more or less run any build and still do open world without problems but Rev has a good combination of abilities that make it a very strong farming character. Stun break and condi cleanse on legend swap, stability, Pull, pulsing might and swiftness, strong CC even emergency button healing with Glint heal.

I wouldn’t main a character based on how quickly it can do a berry run or perform in SW but it is undeniably strong at solo open world stuff.

I miss Nemesis.

Anyway, Rev is fun, Rev is easy to play once you learn how to use Legends properly, and Rev won’t hold you back in T4 fractals to any noticeable degree unless you are tryharding. But Rev is suboptimal and the higher your level of play, the more apparent this becomes.

That said maybe it’s because of my timezones but half the people I see in pugs are Necromancers running the Sc/D & Staff build. So I’m not getting sub 25-30 minute T4s regardless. Feels bad man.

Revs provide quite powerful CC on low cooldown with Staff 5 and Glint. Plus fractal bosses have low HP so their lower DPS ceiling isn’t really an issue in good T4 parties. In many cases, the CC is worth adding on an extra minute or two onto an Ensolyss kill rather than having say an Ele or Thief with limited access to consistent hard CC.

I’d actually argue that Revenants are quite strong in a pug environment where you cannot control the composition or the skill of the players, but poor in any kind of static group where you have control over comp and idea of skill level. There is a reason why Rev isn’t looked at too kindly, though. Simply has to do with it’s low damage ceiling with not enough utility to make up for it. And that’s why it’s poorer in organised groups. Anything the Revenant can do, another class can do better.

To further complicate impressions, I find a lot of Revs in fractal pugs are not that good, as most people who would be good enough to excel on Rev would just play another class instead. Then again, I am AU so maybe it’s just a timezone thing. Revenants are weaker than equivalent classes in similar roles assuming equal skill. That said, I think people would be kitten silly to discriminate against Revs in fractals since it’s not a game type where you need to have an optimised comp to still melt bosses and encounters.

It’s just that Revenant is not in a great place at the moment and I hope it gets re-worked and/or buffed in the next balance patch or expac.

Or I don’t know, someone figure out a Revenant build that exceeds expectations in the way the tri-build Necromancer has somewhat revised it’s place in the meta. Now that build is a heap of fun to play in fractals, actually.

Mind you, I’m in the middle of making an ascended Zealot set for my Ventari Rev since I love it’s burst healing and regen capabilities in fractals. It’s not going to be part of any kind of speedclear group, but again, you don’t need to be fully optimised to do well in fractals. It’ll just be a little slower, that’s all.

I’d struggle to find an MMORPG currently more accommodating to new people. It’s a bit of a cash grab from Anet admittedly, but each episode is what, 200 gems? So $10 for all 4 episodes so far. Combined with the price drop on HoT, you’re still saving money on what you would pay compared to last week.

Most importantly, there is no additional imposition on time, as access to the maps isn’t locked behind anything aside from bare minimum story progression.

It’s definitely not like most other MMOs, where best in slot gear is continually changing when new endgame content arrives. Between farming the LS3 maps and the repeatable Caladbolg event, both of which can be done relatively quickly and at your own pace, it has to be easier than ever to obtain ascended gear. And even then you don’t need full ascended gear to attempt anything outside of T4 fractals.

Granted, someone new to the game will take much longer to accomplish these steps than a veteran. But the game does do well at providing multiple ways to partially gear up, some of which are not time or gold intensive.

Well if you have the right attitude, get the right build and find a good guild, you could farm LS3 maps for ascended trinkets and get into training raids in a couple of weeks or a month. None of this play for a year stuff. You’d ideally have full ascended gear for raiding but it’s not a hard requirement unlike T4 fractals, where agony procs just 1 shot you if your AR is too low.

What about a mode that doesn’t alter difficulty but just auto revives you like a revive orb if you go down? It would essentially be a God mode ensuring that as long as one person survives, you can just keep going. That could be the easy mode without having to fiddle with encounter difficulty or tuning mechanics. You’d lock out any kind of drops or rewards (maybe 1 shard for completion and that’s it). Gives people a chance to learn the mechanics without worrying too much about failure but would use up less development time than tuning a separate difficulty mode (hopefully).

Could call it training mode.

Ideally, I don’t think there should be an out and out easy mode but I feel like the current lfg tools and non existent in-game guild finder tools makes it a bit intimidating to step into raiding. Once you get the foot in the door though, it’s not nearly as difficult or inaccessible as people claim it is. I’m happy for a training mode as a means of compromise but my main problem with that is the infrequent releases of raids, let alone polishing, would be pushed back even further if such a thing were to be implemented.

The real problem is that there is only one spot in a squad which a non tanking Chronomancer can really hold down, and most Chronomancers can switch between tanking and non tanking roles by swapping trinkets or gear around. Since the primary role of Chronomancer as a class is to spread quickness and alacrity around to their subgroup, all Chronotanks know how to play the non tanking role – it’s the same minus tanking.

However Chronomancers in general are in short supply so there is a chance you’ll find a group who only need a non tank Chronomancer, though I wouldn’t rely on it outside of a static group or guild environment with permanent members.

As for ascended gear, ascended gear is usually better but not really necessary. The main goal is to ensure you have as much boon duration as possible while having enough toughness to gain aggro from raid bosses.

I’ll say that it’s not a cheap build as Chronomancers are usually quite expensive to gear, but you could try something like this if going ascended is a step too far:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQRAsc8OWUNKyAYEKu6kdar2zgYJmOA-TBCBQBSQJI4M/RxnAAOU/JF6H63+DA4kAARlfkCIwtWA-e

Good thing is that you could replace the trinkets with exotic Zerk (and 2/6 plat doubloons) , and Furious Sharpening Stones with a Bountiful one, then you have a respectable non tank Chronomancer build. Can keep the Armor and Weapon sets the same.

Raids have unique mechanics that must be navigated properly. Many of these mechanics instantly down you, or do a percentage of health damage if not properly navigated. When you combine that with the fact that raid bosses have soft time limits called enrage timers, it means that defensive stats are not nearly as useful as offensive ones. Raids heavily leverage active defense (dodging) and relying on teammates over just facetank damage you can otherwise avoid.

There are some exceptions where viable defensive gear is tied to a specific role (Magi Druid, Minstrel Chrono) but generally speaking, you do not want defensive stats.

Fractals unlike raids are designed in a way where you don’t see specific classes really struggle with the content so Revenant is fine. It’s single target DPS is not particularly great but for PUGs, it’s buffing can be pretty useful since you’re not guaranteed to have might, fury, etc. The cleave and cc ability of Rev is also decidedly much more useful in fractals than raids.

As for other classes, I don’t particularly like Condi Engi for fractals that much as many fractal encounters have non stationary bosses, which can mess with your DPS significantly. Though it’s stellar for raiding if you play it well. And I’m not too familiar with Power Druid but it does not translate well at all into other high end PvE content. It’s more expensive but I feel like a Viper Druid would be infinitely better if you’re going for a Druid.

In terms of overall healing, a Ventari Rev and a Healing Tempest are on par or better than a Druid. Specifically for healing. What makes the Druid so highly regarded is the suite of offensive buffs it offers in addition to its healing. Grace of the Land, Spotter, Spirits. In endgame instanced content, the game puts a high reliance on sustain through active defenses. Blocking, dodging, movement, etc to avoid damage altogether. In such cases, it’s more beneficial for the group to do more damage than to have better healing if the Druid(s) are “good enough”.

I would be pretty happy if the fractal team took the initiative to repurpose bits of raid wings into new fractals so that it could be completed as five man content. The Deimos fight would make a pretty cool fractal. As someone who has only had 3-4 raiding sessions and a grand total of 2 LI, the logistics surrounding raids is the only aspect of the argument that I can sympathise with from people who dislike raids as they currently are. But I don’t have much sympathy for those wanting an easy mode. Especially considering consensus is that the first 2-3 bosses of the new wing are easier than other wings already.

The lore exposition within the new raid can be found on YouTube or within a cleared instance (which people are happy to open for free if you ask politely in the aerodrome). The only thing you’d miss are the boss fights themselves, which begs the question, why would you waste significant amounts of development time creating a new mode for raids to satisfy people who are opposed to the inherent core philosophy of the game type (10 man, challenging group content)?

As for story, sometimes you require challenge for the story notes to be the most impactful. There are some stories where you appreciate the narrative more because you earned your progress in it. Immersion and all that. As long as the story for raids aren’t necessary to understand the main story arc, and are self contained story arcs, I don’t see the problem.

If the story in the raid is more interesting than the main one, then that’s on the team working the main story to up their game. Not on the raid team to make their stories worse or less interesting.

Einlanzer.1627:

Does anyone know where to obtain the values for healing power coefficients for skills in the game? I thought they were on the wiki, but I can’t seem to find them anywhere.

I main Revenant, so I’m most curious about Revenant, but I’m also curious about some general inter-class comparisons.

I can see them on the wiki, healing coefficient seem to be on a per-skill basis as opposed to a generalised coefficient per class.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ventari%27s_Will

Ventari’s Will has a healing coefficient of 0.4.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Natural_Harmony

Natural Harmony has a healing coefficient of 0.8. And so on.

Greetings! I’m a little interested in joining your guild. A Christian guild is a novel idea, and as a Catholic, it would be nice to have that kind of space. It would also be great to get a home base from which to expand my experience in elements of the game like Dungeons, Fractals and hopefully Raids in the future since I am fairly inexperienced. But I am a bit worried since I am Australian. You mention your peak times are in EST, but the time I usually log in come at around 2-4am EST thanks to my timezone. So how active/international would your guild be at non-EST times?

Thanks for your time and best of luck with the guild!