Guild Wars 2

Muppet.6485:

Change strafe to A and D, use your mouse for turning.

Can’t circle strafe while targetting ground AOE like that.

Personally, I go 1-4 for attunements, ARTWQ (in that order) for weapon skills, ESDF for move, XV for strafe left/right, C for heal, and shift + RTWQ for utilities and elite.

That way my fingers never need to move far in order to be able to reach everything. Weapon swap & targetting is on mouse buttons.

zenleto.6179:

Mate, did you read the whole post? He also mentioned exploration and events.

I read the post in its entirety. I was specifically addressing the false dichotomy in the beginning, not its other internal inconsistencies.

zallis.2138:

If you dont like dungeons, do PvP. If you don’t like either, why are you playing an MMO?

False dichotomy is false. Perhaps I like world exploration and dynamic events? Perhaps I like things that you don’t?

Sea of Sorrows is the unofficial Oceanic server. There’s heaps of Australians here.

Haven’t played a Thief extensively, however I believe their combat style revolves a lot more around active dodging than other professions. Dodging attacks is harder for Australians than US players. Keep that in mind.

I don’t use 3d vision (I instead have 2d surround), but a mate of mine does. He reckons it’s awesome.

Orangensaft.7139:

everyone with less than 4 hours/day cant get them?

It takes you four hours to do the daily? Usually takes me half an hour or so to knock it off, and that’s usually doing the stuff I normally do.

Many of them just ‘do themselves’ while you’re busy doing others. Really, it’s not onerous. And you don’t have to do them every day, you’re just choosing to convince yourself you have to.

Downscaling is, honestly, one of the best things about this game. When I first heard about it, I thought I’d hate downscaling. But now I’ve actually played with it, it’s awesome, and a mechanic that definitely shouldn’t go away – and nor should levelling at all.

Levelling is a way of gating areas and content. It’s also a way of gating skills and traits. For those purposes, it’s entirely valid. As you level, even playing in downscaled areas you will still be more powerful than your downscaled level will otherwise indicate because you have a wider variety of minor and major traits available to you.

Assuming you keep your gear even marginally up to date, that is.

Risen thrall running speed is crazy. They shouldn’t be able to keep up with you when you’re in OOC runspeed mode.

Something like 60-70g. Costs under 10g to level most professions (and only like 2.5g for chef).

> *Increase HP to be atleast the same as Guardian.

Done! Your wish is our command!

Staff ele works well. Hell, I levelled as staff. I spend most of my time in D/D now, but I always swap to staff for WvW and for most dungeons. Stop trying to think of Staff as a nuker, and think of it more as a control / support weapon. For those purposes, it’s excellent.

^ As above

If you’re D/D, you can maintain permanent swiftness easily, and you have nearly permanent Fury from all the attunement dancing.

In that scenario, 10 Air is likely better than 10 Fire because you get the extra 10% crit damage and also Bolt to the Heart.

Oh, and you can also then run heaps of cantrips for survival.

So… The OP thinks that theft is OK. Righto.

In your example, a reasonable person would not think that receiving a giant stream of candy for one quarter is normal. Therefore the person filling up their pockets is committing theft.

If however you paid for a handful of candy (which is nominally 30 grams or something) and you got 35 grams, a reasonable person would consider that within the bounds of normality and therefore is not committing theft.

Same thing with exploits. You wind out getting an extra of something from something that wound out being determined to be an exploit? You don’t deserve the banhammer. You go nuts and clone several hundred items from that exploit? You deserve the banhammer.

That’s pretty well what ANet did. The people who went nuts and cloned hundreds upon hundreds of snowflakes got banned. No reasonable person would think that what they were able to do was expected behaviour.

40 silver when you have 400 skill, actually. Costs 10 copper per level you have in the skill you’re going to.

I dislike it because the mobs in Orr seriously overuse Immobilize and Knockdown. Mechanics which take away control of your character should be the tool of last resort in PVE, and shouldn’t have low (or no!) cooldowns.

As it stands, freakin’ everything in Orr seems to pull you, knock you down, or immobilize you. Frequently multiple times in a row.

Because Elementalist. I’m putting down combo fields and using finishers on them nearly constantly.

Note, it is possible for dragons to spawn in overflows, they just don’t follow the timers that everyone’s using lately. I’ve personally rocked up to do Jormag, been thrown in an overflow, and had Jormag appear in the overflow at the same time.

It was an awesome fight, because we were undermanned compared to how it usually pans out.

Kunshu.5281:

Simply put, there just isn’t enough to do. You do one of three things. You PvE, you WvW, or you PvP.

Love it how you try to trivialize all the possible activities you can do in this game by lumping them into three categories.

Those three categories are pretty kitten big. There’s a lot of stuff to do in this game.

I was seeking assistance going to the old British town of kittentone, to seek a manuscript on grapes. Don’t skitten, it was a mikitten. My map was under the peakitten next to the arsenal all along.

^

Testing how the swear filter goes with substrings, please ignore

EDIT: Badly, as it turns out

As a former WoW player, I love addons. Primarily because I can’t stand the default WoW UI. It’s horrible.

That said, I do not want ANet to implement addons here. The default UI is acceptable and functional (triple-head monitor bugs notwithstanding) and puts everyone on the same playing field. I would much rather ANet just add stuff to the default UI rather than spend effort providing a UI mod API.

That all said, if I had my way, I’d dearly love a way to turn off the Living Story and SAB prompters on the objective tracker. Oh, and a way to make the objective tracker allow you to open more than four items at once (i’ve got 1440 vertical resolution, so it’s ridiculous only being allowed to use the top quarter of the right side for it). Other than that, it’s quite adequate.

And with cooldown trackers… There’s really not enough cooldowns in this game to worry about needing such a thing. Just use the default. It’s good enough.

Jack Daniels.9723:

1. Places near event chests.
2. Areas with a high population (Queensdale, Norn, and all places in #1).
3. Dungeons, all that other stuff.

This is very true. The reason why somewhere like Lornar’s Pass is abandoned is there’s nothing there that keeps drawing people back once they are done with their renown hearts. Zones that have dragon chests or other event chests tend to keep their high population, and people who are kicking around waiting for the chest to roll around will often run around the zone and wreak havoc.

There are multiple choices of maps for most level ranges. Pick the maps which have event chests in them if you really want to have company.

I topped off my 5th 80 last night (so far, Ranger, Mesmer, Guardian, Elementalist, Engineer in that order). After the Ranger, all toons have done at least 20 levels from crafting – 30 in the case of the Engineer. Crafting up your 20 levels lets you push through the wall that most profs seem to experience at some point.

There are already HEAPS of XP bonuses you can get – XP boosters (superior and normal XP boosters stack!), food for XP bonuses, and crafting XP. There is no need for additional levelling mechanics. As it stands, you can get an 80 in a few hours if you want to go nuts on crafting and just level 1-80 from crafting alone. I don’t think that’s the best strategy though.

My Engineer did a number of levels (10-15 levels or so) from me just logging him in each day and finishing off the last step of the daily with him, and hitting Queensdale for a run through the group events for half an hour. Made the slog a lot easier.

My strategy with other toons has been to just level from 1-20 through hearts, 20-30 through events in Queensdale and Kessex Hills, 30-50 through crafting, then catch up on your story, which should get you to 70 or so. From there, run around and grab all the WPs to the major events, then start the run down to Cursed Shore. Between keeping up with your storyline, picking up WPs, and doing the random dynamic events you stumble across, you should be 75-78 by the time you hit Cursed Shore, then you can just hit dynamic events to top off. Done.

Doing that, you should hit 80 with your storyline reasonably current, have the WP’s to Cursed Shore and all the major events, and you haven’t banged your head against the wall doing renown hearts too much.

I’m in the 35-40 demographic. I thought the SAB was a fun way to blow an hour, but I probably won’t be going back in there again. I like that Arenanet made that sort of thing for a laugh, but it’s just not my thing.

Why do people always assume everyone in my age bracket is pining for the early days of computer games? Bah. Nostalgia is one thing, but if you objectively look at old games and the mechanics in them, they were terrible (with a few notable exceptions). Horrible graphics, thin storylines, infuriating game mechanics… Most old games were actually really bad and they only look like there OK now through really thick rose-tinted glasses.

I’ll keep my memories of old games in the past, where it belongs. It’s always such a disappointment to run up some old game you used to love and have the nostalgia crash down when you realize that it wasn’t anywhere near as good as you remember, and a little part of your childhood dies.

No thanks.

I was killed twice yesterday by weird lag preventing me from being able to move or act (I had no conditions on me, and wasn’t knocked down). Kept rubber-banding back to the same spot again and again until I died. It was not fun in the least.

There’s few things as frustrating as dying when the controls are not responding to you in the way they should.

Elementalist attunement swapping is a HINDRANCE, not something you should be using as an argument for why Eles are better than Rangers.

Each attunement for an Ele is incomplete, and therefore Elementalists need to attunement swap frequently to get a full range of abilities which other professions can get with just their standard weapon swap. Arguably, this means that Elementalists don’t really have a class bar, since they use their class bar where other classes just use weapon swap.

Professions are balanced against each other as a whole, not just individual components. Or did you forget that Rangers get an extra set of weapon swaps (effectively what you get by swapping pets), a source of misdirection and tanking, and a permanent pet which does significant autoattack damage – oh, and can also independently throw down its own combo fields (depending on pet)?

So, I’ve been working on a Staff Elementalist. Aiming for 0/10/0/30/30 eventually (currently x/0/0/15/20 at 50ish). I’ve got some questions about the actual Elementalist playstyle.

Right now I’ve been starting in Air, and then going Air→Water→Earth→Fire, or Air→Fire→Earth→Water if I don’t need much healing going out. When doing that, I’ve been basically throwing down every ability in an attunement, then changing attunement immediately. This means I typically get a LOT of overlapping combo fields and stuff, as well as a fair bit of Might and Fury from traits.

Am i doing it wrong? Should I be swapping attunements more slowly, and spending longer in Earth/Fire? Should I be holding back some abilities for times when they are actually needed, or is just flinging out everything the way of the game?

I’ve noticed that with the time delay on Earth2, it means you can only really get a Blast finisher off Water5. Everything else doesn’t last long enough. With that in mind, for damage would Air → Earth → Fire → Water be a better rotation, and aim to drop Earth2 then immediately from a Fire 2 on top of it to get an Area Might finisher? Why is Air → Fire → Earth → Water suggested? Are there any times where it’s appropriate to just skip an Attunement entirely and spend longer in something like Fire/Earth to compensate?

I can’t help but feel I’m missing out on a lot by just hurling abilities out and juggling attunements constantly. It’s pretty showy though.

Grizledorf.5290:

On earth where I live March doesn’t start for 4 more hours and the daily’s don’t reset for 16 hours from now.

I love the ignorance displayed in this post. Love it.

Anyway, there are many, MANY timezones around the Earth. You live in one of them. Server monthly/daily resets are based on UTC (which is NOT London time, despite what others may think).

UTC is very close to GMT. GMT is not London time, which has a daylight savings offset (GMT has no DST). UTC has leap-second adjustments, GMT does not. However, most people don’t worry about that, and just think that UTC = GMT = London time. It’s close enough for most things.

I really don’t understand this. You don’t want to put in the time to get Ascended gear? DON’T. Nobody’s twisting your arm and forcing you to do this stuff.

You are able to complete pretty well all content (except the harder fractals, but they’re only there for the challenge of it) with just rares or at worst exotics.

This isn’t WoW, where you have to have the fancy gears to be able to compete reasonably in any field.

Choice is good. Pick the fields you want to focus on, and DO IT. Don’t try and do absolutely everything at once. What you’re asking for is for there to be less stuff to do just so you can feel you’ve done everything.

While I feel bad for your situation, forcing people who are already in a map out of it is not a great solution either. Guests or not.

Perhaps instead ANet should lower the threshold above which people aren’t allowed to guest to a realm?

Interesting reading. You get a +1 from me for manning up and agreeing in a public setting that you were wrong. Bravo!

That said, I’m only interested in PvE and WvW zergs and small team stuff, and don’t care about duels, so I’m still going to go staff instead of D/D.

This explains what happened to me this morning. My Ele is parked in Queensdale for running events when I only have a few minutes to play, so he typically doesn’t leave the zone. This morning I noticed my xp rewards were hugely reduced after doing 6 or so events in a short period.

Guess I’ll have to leave him in Divinity’s Reach. The DR code shouldn’t persist across logins, that’s just stupid.

Going with power & precision gear, and then using lifesteal on crit food (eg, Strawberry Cake) goes a long way to helping you stay up. Plus, the plethora of crits result in everything dying faster!

There’s quite a few patrols of wandering mobs in GW2. It’s true though that the majority of mobs just stand around scratching themselves, but saying that there are no patrols at all is false.

He’s comparing Scepter/Pistol where you autoattack and where you don’t. If you don’t autoattack then you can have 3 iDuelist. In which case the obvious statement is…

Are you surprised that the build where you attack does more damage?

What I would be thinking is you should compare Sword/Pistol to Scepter/Pistol – where you keep 3 iDuelist out with the Sword/Pistol, and only two with the Scepter/Pistol.

Think you’ll find then that the Sword/Pistol dominates.

I’d suggest Superior Runes of the Centaur until you have a better plan. They’re pretty cheap, and the swiftness on heal is awesome for getting around. Since you say you’re interested in open world PvE, swiftness is worth its weight in gold. Combine that with a Focus and you can have Swiftness on permanently.

As for sigils, choice of sigil depends on your build and what exactly you want to do. If you’re going with a high crit chance build with GS or Sword, Air and Fire are good. Just get the Major versions of them – they do the same damage as the Superior versions, but cost 10 times less. They just have less proc chance.

Just wanted to thank you again for your guide. I decided in the end to go with the Hybrid build (20/20/0/0/30) since it’s easily adaptable with no retraiting to also become Lazy Kai’s GS build. I’ve been running with the GS and Sword/Focus for PVE, and running with Staff and Sword/Sword for WvW. I’ve been toying with the idea of going Sword/Pistol for dungeons. Any thoughts on that?

Now, I’m total balls at WvW, but I put that down to me being laggy and bad, and running into enormous zergs all the time. Any pointers on good ways that someone can learn to improve in WvW? Right now I don’t feel that I’m actually learning anything, because all fights either terminate in the opponent getting stomped by my zerg, or me getting stomped by theirs.

Decided in the end to go 20/20/0/0/30 for now, power focused. That build lets me swap between Osicat’s Shattercat Hybrid build and Lazy Kai’s GW build without retraiting (just swap over a few of the major traits and a weapon swap), plus some other fun stuff in between. For WvW with that build I can run Staff & Sword/Sword, and then when I go for PVE I can swap around the major traits and run GS & Sword/Focus or GS & Sword/Pistol.

Thanks for the input all, I’ll chew on what I can do with a Staff PVE build. I like the staff, but I think I’m better off with GS for now with what I do.

Thanks for the replies all, that’s a fair bit of info to digest and think about. I’ll chew on it and make some adjustments…

Was wondering if anyone had any thoughts about the following build;

http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mcmc0mz9MMLnrmMLnrmaGG0GzVaVazk

Domination 10 – I Mental Torment
Dueling 20 – V Desperate Decoy, X Deceptive Evasion
Chaos 20 – V Debilitating Dissipation, X Chaotic Dampening
Illusions 20 – I Precise Wrack, VII Illusionary Elasticity

Utilities: Aether Feast, Mirror Images, Feedback, Null Field, Time Warp

Rampager’s Staff with Perception Sigil for main weapon
Berserker’s Sword with Fire sigil for MH secondary
Berserker’s Focus with Force sigil for OH secondary

Carrion armour with 6/6 Rune of the Centaur (combine with Focus for 100% swiftness uptime)
Rampager’s trinkets with Coral jewels

The concept here is to main the staff, using Retreat and dodge rolls to get up staff clones as fast as possible, then use those staff clones to stack conditions, bleeds, and then shatter them to stack up confusion. Swap to sword to roll in for a fire AOE and drop a Warden. Choice of utilities is to maximize Ethereal combo fields for Chaos Armor uptime.

I didn’t take Phantasmal Fury, and also skipped the additional 10 points in Domination because the idea here isn’t to generate direct damage from your Illusions, but rather to get them to stack bleeds / other conditions, which take damage from you directly. Carrion armor with Rampager’s trinkets provides very high crit chance, for taking good advantage of Sharper Images.

Does this sound it could be viable for general PVE, or is it lacking in something? Assume that I don’t have access to Rabid at this time, so it’s either Carrion, Rampager’s or Berserker. Should I be going Berserker jewellery to increase crit damage, or is the Rampager’s the better idea because of the condition dependence? And lastly, with this build, when I ran into DE’s, would it be still viable and work if I swapped on a greatsword for assistance tagging, or should I also carry around a set of Berserker’s for that?

If you want that kind of event to fail, get a bunch of people to rock up, get involved in the first wave, and then just stand back and do nothing for the second wave. The DE will scale up the number of mobs for the second wave due to all the people being involved, and then all the mobs will subsequently smash the NPCs.

There’s some events which are virtually impossible to complete due to mechanisms of the events as well. I’ve had that stupid dredge supply stealing event always fail, even with ~12 people leaving a mountainous pile of dead Dredge behind…

Recently decided to try out the Hybrid build above. Note, I’m a very fresh 80, and while I have rare armour / weapons, I’m short on cash and therefore have terrible (green) trinkets, no back to speak of, and can only afford a set of Centaur runes. I also play from Australia so have some latency issues (nothing severe, but it makes dodging harder). I spend most of my time doing PVE (renown / events), and some doing WVW, typically in a mid-size group. I avoid solo WVW roaming wherever I can.

I’ve noticed the baseline of 16k HP and 1200 toughness mentioned. Should I aim for that at all costs when starting out? At the moment I’m going 3/6 Berserker armor, 2/6 Knights (legs, head) and 1/6 Valkyrie (chest). Trinkets are all Berserker except for rings which are Knights. Using Valkyrie gems in those rings. This puts me well below the 1200 Toughness mark, but I have decent crit, and slightly over 16k health. Should I sacrifice more Berserker gear for Knight’s in the short term to get that Toughness up?

I’m pretty comfortable with the Staff for defensive purposes, but I find that it’s complete kittene for tagging in events. I’ve been swapping to Greatsword for that. I also tend to think that the Sword offhand is really better for WVW, so what do you think about swapping to Sword/Focus for PVE (for run buff and iWarden), and then using Sword/Sword for WVW (for blind)?

And lastly, shattering. I have a bad tendency to drop all my clones/phantasms and then shatter straight up. With the hybrid build, should I be leaving the phantasms alive and only shattering to spike something down? If I should be shattering straight away, should I make the first shatter F2, so that I can hold onto the F1 shatter as a surprise?

Thanks for the build, it’s been a lot of fun!

Thanks for the responses all. I’ve now hit 80 with my Mesmer as of yesterday morning (yay!). From 60-80 I changed over to a GS / Sword+Focus build (Lazy Kai’s build) and used that. But I still love the Staff.

My main concern right now is that I want to go back to Staff, preferably Staff and Sword/Focus (for perma-swiftness), but I don’t want to lose the ability to tag mobs effectively in dynamic events. I’ve also grown to really love Dueling 20 and the clones-on-dodge feature, and I’m loathe to lose that.

With the secondary weapon, I like sword/focus, but I think I have a bad habit of dodging into melee, dropping attack 2 (with a shatter), then immediately dodging away and not autoattacking with the Sword until I can swap back to my main weapon. Is this a bad idea? Should I be staying in melee, dropping the Warden etc until the weapon swap’s up, then dodging away? I feel I’m losing damage by doing that, but it also seems risky to me to hang around in melee for too long.

Does staff and sword/focus synergize reasonably well? Or would I really be better off going staff and sword/sword and just sucking up losing permanent swiftness?

Of course, the other way of looking at this thread is this…

An opponent engaged in a 1v1 with you took 13 minutes to finally kill you.

Nerf Necromancer survivability!

Currently working on levelling my Staff mesmer, and I’m looking ahead at what I’m going to with Exotics at 80.

Build (20/0/30/0/20): http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mcmc0mzMzMLnrmMLnbmG0x0GzVmVack8070V7kGW70V7owX70m8ofZ
Weapons: Staff, Sword/Focus
Utilities: Mirror Images, Feedback, Null Field
Elite: Time Warp

What I’m planning on doing at 80 is mostly PvE (dynamic events, dungeons) and WvW. I have no intention to do any sPvP at all. With this build I can typically keep high uptime on Chaos Armor and keep myself highly mobile, so I’m fairly comfortable with using a glassy build.

Which brings me to my question… What should I do for gear? Since I focus on the staff, I don’t believe Berserker’s is something I should be using. But should I be using Rampager’s or Carrion?

Rampager has the advantage of having all pure damage stats. Carrion has no Precision, which isn’t that much of a problem because I have no traits which actually benefit from crit (unless I use a sigil for that?)

Also, should my armor have the same type as my jewellery, or should I go Rampager for the 6 armor pieces, and then Carrion for all the jewellery? Or even Carrior jewellery with Knight’s gems in it? How about runes and sigils?

At the moment I’m leaning towards the following setup;

Rampager’s gear, runes of the Adventurer
Carrion jewellery, Crysocola Jewels
Sigil of Strength in staff
Sigil of Energy in Focus, Sigil of Hydromancy in Sword

I appear to be lacking some real focus in my gear. Should I just dump the whole idea of having any crit at all and just go with straight Carrion and do with Sigil of Corruption in my staff? Or does the above look reasonable and flexible?

I’m running a triple-head NVidia Surround setup using three 2560×1440 displays (total resolution 7680×1440). First of all, a big thank you to ArenaNet for making GW2 actually work with this kind of setup, pretty well out of the box!

However, there’s an issue. Because of the high pixel density I’ve got, I really want to increase the interface size from Normal to Larger. But when I do, the bottom UI elements get pushed to the right quite a long way, and the top UI elements (the event tracker and buttons etc) disappear entirely.

The two screenshots below display what I mean. Note how the minimap has been pushed onto where the third monitor would be, and the quest tracker is gone? But on Normal UI size, everything’s fine.