Guild Wars 2

Hey guys, I’ve been away from GW2 for almost 1 year and was looking to return to pvp with my mesmer. I had a few questions about how some stuff works nowadays.

1. How does the 33% increased daze duration work for the full Rune of the Mesmer set? Most dazes are 1 sec long. Does the set make dazes last 1.3 sec or 2 sec (rounded up) or 1 sec (rounded down)? If 1.3, is it even worth using over other rune sets for a CI mesmer?

2. How does sigil of paralyzation work with dazes and stuns? If I’m not mistaken, these effects were previously rounded up.

3. Does Illusionary elasticity finally work with Winds of Chaos from staff illusions?

Hey everyone,

A friend and I are looking for a pretty well populated (20+ on at a time) guild that runs an assortment of content with a pretty active guild chat and tightly knit community. Mainly looking for a guild with an active PvE side: guild missions, open world (temple, map bosses, Living world), etc. We also tend to roam in WvW (when we can get in) rather than join zergs. Having TS3/vent/etc. would be a plus.

Thanks!

Superior Rune of Speed doesn’t seem to work (6 piece bonus)

IGN: Lady Mesmerize
Server: Blackgate
Playstyle: PvE/WvW for mesmer
Role: Scholar
Hours: Varies, but mainly weekends.

For some reason, there seems to be a huge discrepancy in the quality of elites in this game. Most of the time, I tend to dislike the elites but have to take them regardless because there is nothing else to take in that slot. Hence, I have a solution that would increase build diversity and bring back the GW1 elite skill feel.

Allow us to place a utility skill in the elite skill slot with a small added bonus to that skill. For example: “Stand Your Ground” shout for guardians in the elite skill slot is now also blast finisher. “Null Field” for mesmers in the elite skill slot now lasts 2 additional seconds. “Personal Battering Ram” for engis is now a 360 degree knockback if used in the elite skill slot. These effects of course don’t have the power of a true elite, like Time Warp or Lich form, but it gives increased flexibility and works with traits which I believe is a suitable balance.

By having a small bonus effect for using a skill in the elite slot, we open up a wide variety of build options and gives us more to think about while also making that slot very valuable, rather than having it be something that doesn’t synergize with a build but you have to take it anyways.

Siphaed, I understand what you mean by having entertainment value, but can you really be entertained if you can’t see/understand what’s going on? When viewing from the perspective of the player, esp. in 1v1 fights, it is very enjoyable to watch, but overhead is a complete mess. At the end of a teamfight, I know the point was captured, but I don’t know how/why it got that way. Did the necro draw all the conditions on his teammate and then transfer it to the bunker or did he corrupt his boons? Did the engi/ele’s water blast finisher play a large role in keeping up the team? It’s hard to enjoy the outcome if the play-by-plays are very hazy.

Is it just me or did we really get shafted with the bleed duration and attack speed of the primary attack on pistols? It seems pretty insane that the only way to make pistol 1 worthwhile is to stack condition duration which is primarily from the grenades/bombs (explosives)line. Even then, it’s a 3 sec bleed which is average at best.

We need the 30 pt firearm trait “Napalm Specialist” to also add bleeding in there. I believe that this addition makes sense as the pistol’s primary trait line is firearms.

I’m looking to play an engi build in spvp/wvw that doesn’t rely on any of the major kits (FT, bomb, grenade). It’s getting a little old to play with Grenade/Bomb kit in pvp and SD doesn’t really interest me. Has anyone had any success with a primarily pistol/shield build and would like to share it?

I ended up missing the living story where Fused Gauntlets were a reward due to personal matters. Is there any way to acquire these gloves? I feel like they are one of the best designs for gloves in the entire game.

As of right now, the pistol seems more like a secondary weapon to use as a sigil holder for FT, grenades or bombs. It makes sense since engi #1 is horrible at stacking bleeds (2s…) making it a poor primary attack. However, with the introduction of the Bullet Kit, we can once again use the pistol as a primary weapon which I know a handful of us would be interested in.

Skills:
Toolbar: Reload – Short jump backwards, reducing cooldown of the last used pistol or rifle skill by 10 sec. Stunbreaker, CD: 60s
1: Silver bullets – 1s cast. Your next 3 attacks remove 1 boon. CD 15s
2: Barbed bullets – 1s cast. Your next 5 attacks apply a 6s bleed CD 15s
3: Armor piercing rounds – 1s cast. Your next 5 attacks apply 2 stacks of 6s Vulnerability. CD 15s
4: High Impact round – 1s cast. You next 2 attacks stun the target for 1s. CD40s
5: Toss gunpowder – Instant cast. Toss gunpowder into the air blinding nearby foes for 4s. Smoke field.

You can only have 1 of these bullets loaded at a time. I feel like the effects are pretty powerful, but the cast time and the toggle back and forth may seem to even it out. I feel like the addition of a kit similar to this would give the pistol (and rifle, although wouldn’t fit with static discharge) new life and more diversity.

I actually did switch to mainhand Sigil of Fire and am liking it more already. I don;t use shield b/c I have yet to find a very good use for it in PvE.

Smitten.3076:

Condition damage specs are different from Burst damage specs for a reason, even in PvE. It’s very easy to build survivable with Condition damage, not so much with burst. That’s the trade off.

I definitely don’t disagree with your point here. The Rabid armor prefix makes condition dmg + survivability easy to gear for. I don’t think anyone will argue with you on this point. However, the argument I make is more in terms of the inherent system, in addition to specific builds. Sure, you can get decent dmg with decent survivability as a Rabid-equipped condition dmg dealer, but I can do the exact same or more as a Knight-equipped Warrior or a knight-equipped guardian, since I don’t run into the inherent problem of individual burns not stacking or bleed capping, etc. Basically, if you run a condition ranger in a party with another condition ranger, only one of your burns will be counting.

Erasculio.2914:

Duke.4795:

Condition dmg specs need to do some very creative things (like Nemesis’ Hybrid Necro) to even come close to the dmg output of direct dmg specs.

The failure in your argument is that you are talking about DPS as if all sources of damage were meant to have the same rate of damage per second. Just as a thief has higher burst damage than a guardian, which doesn’t mean the guardian can’t do more damage than the thief, just because condition damage doesn’t have higher DPS than using all 5 skills in a row doesn’t mean that condition damage isn’t a viable source of damage.

But that’s the thing, you would think that over a long fight, the dmg of bleeds/burns/poison would exceed that of direct dmg. However, I believe I make my point quite clear, that condition dmg does NOT win over a long period. Even if an Axe warrior does nothing but spam 1, he, alone will do more dmg than 25 stacks of bleed over any period of time. From my experience, DoT abilities (from WoW, Dota, etc.), usually have a higher overall dmg, but compensated by being spread over time compared to direct damaging abilities. In GW2, the DoTs don’t have higher overall dmg, yet are still spread over time, in addition to being capped.

Let’s say in the future, ANet does indeed fix the dmg of DoT to be on par w/direct dmg. The capping of the conditions will still prevent DoT from being effective. Allow me to give you an example. I bring 2 warriors + 1 bleed/burn ranger each with a respective DPS of 3k. That dmg will be superior than bringing 1 warrior, 1 bleed/burn engi, and 1 burn/bleed ranger since the bleeds are capped at 25 and the burns do NOT stack, meaning either the ranger’s or the engi’s burn is doing nothing.

What I’m arguing is that direct dmg does more burst and more sustained damage than condition dmg.

I’ll definitely look into the lifesteal food for progression thru harder dungeons. Atm, I’m only running CoF and AC for alt gearing until they implement the fractal change. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that the lifesteal food is not working as intended and we will see an internal CD added soon.

With the release of the new blogpost detailing the work in the next few months, I was wondering if one of the devs could address the issue of the direct and condition dmg disparity. Btw, this is PvE only. What I mean by this is:

1) Bleeds cap at 25 resulting in a maximum cap of ~3k dmg/sec assuming about 120 dmg bleeds.
2) It’s a lot of work for 1 class alone to maintain a constant 25 stacks of bleed, so for argument’s sake, most condition dmg classes will NOT be doing 3k dmg/sec
3) Direct dmg (most notably warriors and mesmers) can do >5-6k dmg/sec with minimal effort. If you don’t believe, go check out Strife’s DPS calculation with an Axe warrior. 2.5-3k crits (with 100% crit) PER AUTOATTACK with the axe which hits like every 1/3 of a second.

Condition dmg specs need to do some very creative things (like Nemesis’ Hybrid Necro) to even come close to the dmg output of direct dmg specs. I am not advocating a nerf to direct dmg, but rather an adjustment to the condition dmg. Direct dmg gets scaling off of precision, power and crit dmg, while condition dmg scales off of only Condition dmg and condition duration. Bleeds, burns and poisons need a slightly improved condition dmg coefficient in addition to a slight raise to the bleed cap.

I too enjoy the engineer despite its state of underpoweredness and bugginess. If you think about it though, ideally, we have nowhere to go but up. We can’t really get any worse, so if you can adapt and do decently now, it will only get better.

With that said though, the versatility that the engineer brings is second to only the elementalist and there’s a strange sense of satisfaction to make something work against the odds (not from a balance perspective though).

So I was surfing the engineer forums and noticed that there weren’t many productive threads around, so I was hoping that some of the remaining knowledgeable engineers could help tweak my build. I was originally running grenades, but it got really boring and was bad for my keyboard constantly jamming 1. Here is my build (no calculator cuz it always gives bad link)

0/30/0/30/10
Pistol CD reduction, FT/EG CD Reduction and Juggernaut
Elixirs CD, Cleansing 409/Potent Elixir, HGH
Kit Refinement

Running with Dual Pistols (Superior Sigil of Earth, Superior Sigil of Battle), Elixir H for heal, Elixir B, FT, EG, Supply Crate
2 Runes of Fire, 2 runes of monk, 2 runes of water in a mix of Soldier’s armor and knight’s armor with Berserker Amulet and all exquisite ruby jewels in my accessories (Karka shell, Exotic emerald for earrings and 2 rare soldier rings)

I chose to forgo the 15% extra dmg on EG and FT b/c I never use EG for dmg anyways (mainly for super elixir and very rarely fumigate) and 15% on the FT was negligible compared to getting conditon removal or 20% more boon duration on B and H elixir effects.

Despite only running 2 elixirs, combined with boon duration and juggernaut, I can easily hold on to 17-18 stacks of might alone along with really good uptime of the other boons. FT1 does average dmg (if nothing crits 1650, if lots of crits 2.6-2.7k) but notably, it stacks bleed from superior sigil of earth and sharpshooter very well. FT2 hits for decent dmg too. However, I bring a ton of utility and support to the team with 2 super elixirs, 3 condition cleanse (if running 409 + fumigate) – not counting super elixir’s cleanse, and some boon support (kinda random boons though). It’s a lot of work to optimize the damage. I stay in FT for juggernaut, go thru my rotation, swap to pistols, use 3, 4, 2 and then swap back into the FT to maintain might stacks. With CD reduction of both pistols and FT, it’s quite a bit of rotating. I have >3.1k power with >1000 condition dmg when stacking might alone along with 2.6k armor w/FT and 21k hp (mix of soldier and knight gear w/berserker amulet and exquisite ruby jewels). Works for me.

However, I have to put this out there. I feel like we do A LOT of work just to be on par with other classes in terms of dmg. The APM when playing engi is like double than when I play my guardian. Also I think a DD aurashare build actually does all of this, but better and with a bit less work. A might stacking hybrid necromancer (scepter and axe) actually does way more dmg than this build with more survivability due to DS (no support though).

Thanks for reading.

I run all shouts in my utilities so Rune of the Soldiers 6/6 is perfect for me (lots of vit and toughness along with condi removal). For more versatility, you can run 2/2 Superior Monk, Water and Major Water for 50% Boon Duration increases which works well with any guardian build centered around boons.

So I’ve played a handful of classes and gotten a few of them to 80, but the one thing that has constantly bothered me is the lack of truly worthwhile Grandmaster traits. Of course you have some that define builds like Altruistic Healing, Grenadier, Powerful Auras, Juggernaut. However, most of the really meaningful grandmaster traits are overshadowed by the sheer number of really useless traits. For example, Grandmaster trait: Zealous Blade for Guardians is complete junk for a grandmaster trait in the “damage” line for guardians. Most guardians that don’t want to support and just want to be high damage, don’t even spec into the Zeal tree, b/c Honor and Valor are too good.

Just hoping that ANet buckles down to makeover their traits to have more worthwhile grandmaster traits and increase build diversity.

Glad to hear you enjoyed the 6 Dwayna runes. I think it’s only worth running 6 Dwayna if you use medkit to allow regen to essentially be up all the time. If you prefer the healing turret for the blast heal, I think doing Venthus’s +30% boon duration setup may be more advantageous.

Anyone else wonder why Super Elixir’s field counts as a light field? Until actually using it, I always thought that logically it would be a water field since I’m assuming you’re shooting out an elixir containing liquid.

Would Super Elixir as a water field be too powerful?

Kit explosion does not count as a blast finisher currently. Just tested it. It would have been so ridiculously broken as a finisher since it has 0 cooldown.

Hmm how are you stacking protection consistently? The % chance on Rune of Earth seems a little inconsistent and has a pretty hefty cooldown for 4s of protection.

Also, I was looking into Rune of the Water, which gives a % chance to remove a condition on hit as the 4 piece bonus, coupled with a heal (on a 10s cooldown) when you use a healing skill (medkit). I wasn’t really that impressed with the heal as it seemed to be between high 600s and low 700s (unaffected by healing power I believe), but I don’t know if that outweighs 6 sec of regen (affected by healing power) from Rune of Dwayna.

Has anyone considered Rune of Dwayna for a more sustained build? Regen scales of healing power decently which the entire set gives you like 165 healing power. You also get a 6s regen (with the +% regen duration) whenever you swap to medkit on a 10s cooldown. Coupled with elixir gun’s toolbelt skill and you can have constant regen for a while. Further addition of backpack regenerator could give us some serious guardian-like healing, esp. when considering we have 2 super elixirs.

To preface this post: I absolutely love Kit Refinement. I think that it adds an extra dimension to using kits.

Kit Refinement works great for a couple of kits like Elixir Gun, grenade, bomb, flamethrower, etc. However, I’m not sure what ANet was thinking when it came to the Med Kit’s effect. Why does it generate a tiny explosion? Shouldn’t it drop 1 medkit or something when you swap to it (on a 10-20 sec cd of course)?

Anyone know if they are planning on addressing this or have mentioned something about it?

I absolutely love the staff on the Guardian, for the most part. However, I cannot get over how bad the animation of the auto attack is on a Human Female. I know it’s pretty specific, but do any other Human Female guardians have issues with the way the character swings the staff? Why couldn’t it be like the Human Male which is more of a thrust, rather than an awkward over the head swing with an even more awkward looking posture?

On a more game-related note, has anyone tried Guardian staff with lots of Healing Power and does it work?