Showing Posts For Episcopos.5206:
Just a detail: which character class story was she playing?
She had a human/mesmer – can’t remember what specifics she chose about the story.
She didn’t have a problem with the skills, (loved the zaap from the GS).
Hi there,
I am/was a very dedicated player to this game previously, however i realized i really wanted/needed to get my partner into this game if i was to keep playing. However it did not manage to hold her interest, and while this is her personal experience, i think it does represent a group of casual/casual gamers that might have similar experiences that result in them falling short of getting into this game.
Pro’s
She liked the character customization.
She liked the various activities revolving around the ‘hearts’/events on the map.
She thought the monster/map variation was great.
Cons…
In her own words, ’ the story was so boring, i didn’t feel any reason to lvl up to find out what happens next, and therefore i had no attachment.’
— longer analysis: It’s hard to explain what makes a great storyline for the game, and i don’t doubt there are moments in gw2 where the story does become very interesting, but at the start it does seem a bit bland. Especially, say it’s over 3-4 days of lvling to reach the next story chapter because she has been busy with rl, she has suddenly forgotten all about the story.
Having said that, she did reach lvl 40, but by then i think the enjoyment she was getting out of doing the ‘heart’ events to lvl up was diminishing fast and becoming a bit tedious.
I know it’s hard for more dedicated players to imagine her position from a ‘blank state,’ but it does seem gw2 revolves around end-game content, and when we make alts we know in the long term the fun activities we will be using them for, but for new players like my gf she obviously cant get excited to grind through the bland beginning for end game content she has no experience of and therefore no excitement for.
Tl:DR – I guess the major issue is: what’s different from lvl 1-39 that grows the new player’s attachment from the game from lvl 40-79?
If this question had a great answer i think more players could be drawn to this game.
@slypheed woops! edited
Both the Bow and mace will be great for strong Aoe dmg and crowd control – it would be ideal if you could rotate between these two but it won’t seem effective given we can only pick 3 trait line options.
For example, the best mace lines will be:
1)Radiance with the single handed crit bonus, crit bonus and bonus against burning enemies/ renew justice each time you kill.
2) Zeal with the dmg bonus for symbols/burning enemies.
3) and Hon for reduce mace skill recharge rate and having symbols last longer/bigger/heal.
given burning damage will be reduced i’m skeptical that going virtues and doing damage through Supreme justice/Permeating Wrath will be more than the symbol Aoe damage + your justice will be getting renewed all the time anyway with Renewed Justice trait in radiance.
Yet If you go DH, you’ll have to give one of these trait lines up to wield the bow, which is a shame as they all compliment each other well as you could switch between range/melee Aoe dmg. Also with a powerful shot that will go threw multiple enemies every 4 seconds, fire symbol, trap on #5 and an auto that hits enemies behind it makes it awesome + when it gets intense you’ll be able to stay back at a distance and do awesome damage with the Big game hunter trait with your SoJ.
thoughts?
(edited by Episcopos.5206)
These WvW upgrades are amazing and I’m surprised they are not getting more attention, i would buy the expansion for these alone
Don’t be scared of being on top of enemies. They should be scared of you.
2) I usually don’t have a huge problem with conditions using healing signet+purging flames+contemplation. I think Purging Flames is fantastic for a few reason.
-It’s a fire combo field
-It applies 15-21 ticks of AOE burning and the condi cleanse on cast. You don’t need to sit in it
-If you get to sit in it, it reduces incoming condi duration.
-It has amazing synergy with the greatsword 5. If you pull someone back in who ran out they get the burning reapplied to them. And that’s also AOE.
-If you spin on top of someone in Purging Flames they will melt instantly. Every hit of the ability applies burning while in Purging Flames, and now stacks intensity.
Wow i wasn’t aware of these two things! definitely will keep t then.
mallis I have a few questions
1) When i go with a range one attack weapon i generally dont use sigils because i cant make much use of the swapping – if the enemy is in my face i won’t want to swap to the scepter, and if im stuck at a distance i won’t want to swap to the melee weapon. Won’t it be more beneficial to use other sigils?
2) the biggest challenge to the condi guard is we’re going to be very vulnerable to any other condi player because we are going to errr about when to use contemplation of purity. If we use it for a stun break we’ll be vulnerable to stuns for a huge amount of time, but if we use it for condi cleans it’ll be vice versa. Or if two rounds of either stuns or condi bursts come our way we’ll be in trouble. It might seem like Purging Flames is the answer until we realize we have to stay in the circle to get its full effect which seems very dangerous… but on the other hand we cant sacrifice our JI as that’s crucial to getting bursts off/surprising the enemy. I think purging flames has to be given up in favor of stability which seems like a huge blow. What are your thoughts?
After going through it over and over again im pretty confident it will actually be DH/zeal/radiance that will be the optimal choice. The reason DH is going to be great is that it offers an amazing burst that will go like this:
. JI + spear of justice (traited to also activate signet of wrath when activated and big game hunter) then symbol of wrath on GS followed with a WW that will be doing a 60-70% damage/10 % crit/ (and maybe 20%+ crit with a fury from many places), given that they’ll be taking symbol and heavy fire damage that should be an amazing combo. the crucial component in it all will be the signet of wrath that activates on spear of justice so you can carry out the max dps dmg on a still target. If they start running you can switch to bow and finish them off.
- do not not make the mistake of going with the 10% dmg bonus from retaliation or the zealots flame – the biggest challenge for guardian is not reaching the target (Ji and leap can do that ) but staying on point. landing 5 good attacks in a row is better than landing that 1 great attack.
My biggest concern is how to deal with survivability. As guardians now have more focus on complimenting their raw dmg traits with condition traits we wont be choosing the honor line as much..which has nearly all our vitality sustain traits.
Zeal is critical for me so i can get the symbols going against strong melee units, but so will radiance be for that crucial, crucial signet of wrath on justice to get the burst off, and DH finally provides a counter against being kitten’d. its so so frikken tempting to drop the interest in DH but then the burn duration drom justice wont be s high, no great big game hunter and no counter to being kittened (+ the bow will have the great function of enabling us to kill our enemies as they try run away on low health which has always been an issue for guardian).
What i’m banking my hopes on is that the passive heal on our new tomb signet thing is decent. please make it so. do not want to fall into the one tricky pony category that is the medi guard which has a drastic sustain drop after it’s initial 10 sec burst…
As for the immob on VoJ, the trait has an ICD of 30 seconds (24 if traited for signets, probably). So the cooldown of your F1 really doesn’t make a difference, sadly.
darn it! did not notice that – what a shame! I guess i’m gonna have one shot to make that burst work out haha ( will be interesting to see if you have signet of wrath equipped as a utility it will also enter into a CD when that effect is activated to prevent you following up with two imbol in a row) Taking notice of that, if you also went with wings of devastation in place of cripple bonus, you could have like 9 secs of imbol’s going on…
I think i’ll still go with cripple sigils given the guardian’s problem is sticking with the target rather than reaching it… though wings of justice is looking a lot more appealing now.will have to give it some more thought….
that is unfortunate, however the 10 sec uptime from spear of justice will really make use of any bonus’s from hitting burning opponents from zeal and radiance and its CD is still awesome ( at 900 range too) even if there are some other avenues to inflict burning from.
given that you’ll be doing 25% more damage with Big game Hunter with the Spear (this doesn’t have a let-down CD too does it?) followed with all your bonus’s when you burn and lets say you have GS with 5% damage traited, for around 10 seconds you’ll be doing 40% more damage on 25% more crit chance – and you’ll only have to wait 16 seconds (or 6 seconds if you stay connected through the whole of the spear’s duration) to do it over again. that alone is pretty awesome with any close range weapon you switch to.
Edit Looking at hammer again there is a neat trick you could do when using it with the DH. Just before you swap from the H to the Bow, activate ring of warding and either stay inside it, or have your enemy in it, then switch to bow and you can get around seconds of shots off from a safe distance.
( Excluding trait Synergy) Honestly aside from GS there is a lot to despise about nearly all our other weapons and sometimes i’ve been tempted to just run two GS and swapping them for various sigil bonus’s lol. I think the other recent thread called ‘do you love/hate your weapon sets’ showed this, but nearly every weapon apart from the GS kept coming up. Even if the bow doesnt have a good match up with other weapons, i’ll be happy if it lands close to keeping up with the GS in usefulness. edit Okay Focus is good, but there generally is always issues with the weapon you put alongside it. And what saves hammer is it’s #2 mighty blow – yet i always feel like the next 9 sec’s feels a bit wasted as i’m just waiting to do it one more time before i weapon swap straight away again.
I’ve also heard that they might change Hunter’s fortification into something more appealing when they were showcasing the traits on the DH video, will have to wait and see.
(edited by Episcopos.5206)
For one thing, that’s a sigil, and not a part of the base class. Second, that sigil has (at best) a 40% uptime in increments of 2 seconds. As much as I’d love for it to work, I don’t see it being a very reliable way to make use of that damage boost. And since the base class has zero access to cripple outside of our underwater downed state autoattack… Yeah, I’d say that that’s kind of a lack of synergy issue.
Well with the bow you’ll likely be also getting cripples from your auto attack vsing groups since it cripples if there are guys behind the target your arrow hits and you’ll get a cripple on the knock-back if you have it traited either from bow or hammer. but i wouldn’t just be looking at it for the 40% uptime to inflict %10 more damage but also the fact it will keep your enemies in your GS whirling/symbol wraths for longer, as well as a lot of our other weapon attacks which damage depends on keeping our enemies in a close range for as long as possible.
(not related with the cripple conversation but) Let’s also look at how if we’re traited into radiance with Wrath of justice which activates the imobil from signet of wrath every time we activate our virtue (spear) of justice. If you go into DH, it seems like the cooldown from virtue of justice drops from 30 secs to 16 secs when it becomes spear of justice. that means we’ll be activating a signet of wrath every 16 seconds, which will also go great with Big game hunter which inflicts vulnerability everytime we activate justice as well – made to maximum opportunity to delivery some good hits since we’ll get the imbol from signet of wrath.
I agree with others who are excited about the new changes in Hot and already have been putting a lot of thought into it even though we won’t know what our base traits will look like. Some insanely tough decisions to make…which i think is a good thing.
To me though a radiance/zeal stands at as the best combo so far.
Radiance with, with the 25% crit against burning enemies and 33% more burning damage / burn on block,
combined with zeal’s 10% damage against burning enemies, % dmg with greatsword and symbol damage
then here is the secret ingredient – with Runes of the flame legion – will make an AMAZING condi/power build.
The next biggest challenge for me will be what to choose for the third trait line (if i didnt go DH) and what utilities to go for.
The DH bow really speaks to me, because it will solve both our speed and kitten problems, as if the enemy decides to kite we can just switch to bow. For those that say it doesnt Senergy with anything else, that won’t be true if you go for the sigil that crips enemies and the trait on DH that does 10% damage on crippled enemies.
For utilities I’d go with purging flames it least Can’t figure out what the next best choice should be though…i’m thinking Save yourselves as it is an all-in-one.
For sustain i’d make sure i had around 3000 armor, around 18k health and mango pie and go for the new tomb signet that passively heals, which if it does anything over 100 tics a sec, that would give you 300 heals a sec – mango pie/resolve/elite signet.
debate about abandoning DH and just substituting a 3rd trait line
I keep thinking that maybe i should abandon the DH hype and instead make the third line traited in virtues or something. With 1h sword/focus (and those nice burning blocks) + supreme justice/permeating wrath..that would be so much fun. But then i remember guardian has a cc/kitten problem and it doesn’t matter how much damage you can do if you’re not able to hit them. + DH’s longbow 1# and 2# with true shot should mean you’ll able to hold your own just with bow.
This is what i think will be a great build with the LB. Will go LB/GS with radiance and zeal. Add sigils that cripple on crit, with 10% more damage on crippled enemies and knock back + with radiance traited to do 33% burning and 25% more crit chance on burning. Crippling and knock back every 7 sec will make it easier for my true shot to land while be able to do serious damage with Symbol of Energy due to fire and symbol bonus’s coming from zeal and radiance – Okay they won’t stand in the circle but meh, i guess i’ll be hoping to win the range battle, if its against a ranger or a mes and the auto-attack arrows bounce and hit their companions, but even without that it should go well. If they try run away i’ll probably have JI slotted, so even if they are going faster than me after i teleport they’ll have to somehow get out of the 1200 range while also getting hit by cripple hits and crit hits (since JI’s fire dmg will cause me to start critting them. I also doubt they’ll be able to out-kitten me when I can block their attacks with shield of courage and deflecting shot.
Why GS? because while the Bow will counter any kittin attempts on me, the only other option is for the opponent to get up in my face with raw melee dmg dealing attacks. Yet i’ll also have crip sigil on GS , + with all the fire damage i’ll be doing i’ll be getting a 10% dmg on burning enemies, 10% dmg from cripple and 25% crit chance from burning enemies as well. On top of that, either with blinding blades or with Wrath of justice on radiance trait i’ll activate which willl hold them down after I put down symbol of wrath followed up by whirling wrath (in a symbol i do 20% more damage to due to symbol of the avenger) it should really damage melee opponents. If they start running after that? I’ll switch to my bow and chase, and once again even with if they have a superior speed they’l have to somehow make it out of 1200 range of me in time.
Oh yeah, by the way he’s what i see would be an incredible combo with one of the traps. Put down Test of Faith that damages foes that cross, but stay just behind it so you knock them back onto it from your heavy light knock back THEN switch to GS, leap , use blinding blade, roll forward over it and pull them back over it once more!
What i think will be amazing with these combo’s is that with the strong symbol damage from GS + whirling wrath/ Wrath of justice/ cripple from bow/ you’ll be able to check heavy melee attackers while with Bow you’ll be able to check yourself from being kitten’d, yet they also offer such good AOE dmg you’ll be able to then just switch into zerg, PvE or frac fights without having to swap everything. Here’s the difference.
the DH/ zeal/radiance lines don’t compliment EACH OTHER so much as much as they CHECK COUNTERS TO YOU. For example, a 1 sword/gs will complement each other as melee attacks, but it wont matter at the end of the day if you get kittn’d to death from a distance. a staff/skepter might be good support or some type of range combo, but if you get picked off or by yourself it wont matter. It might not be said, well why not focus/Gs? well i just dont see the focus matching the bow. Your not gonna get the 10% bonus from long range attacks and it lacks the serious damage dealing as the true shot for the bow does/ the true shot will change the range game from peppering/harassing the enemy to actually being able to heavily damage them.
What i don’t understand is the first people posted in this forum around a year ago – does that mean there has been no clear solution since? (as in no large amount of people are reposing and saying “by the way this isn’t an issue for me anymore”?)
I get the same message. However, you guys mention you can stay logged in for a bit – mine never actually finishes loading the character in the map before i get the message.
info: I used to play gw2 then stopped, then after re-installing it 2 days ago i’ve never made it past this point. I am connected on an enterent cable through to a Uni-provided internet service (i live in a residential hall) but i’ve tried going trough any settings that effect this and couldnt find anything (turned fire wall off, ect)
Has anyone tried this combo? The ghost pepper poppers give 40% chance to chill on a crit (only at night unfortunately) and our Valour Glacial heart gives 50% chance on a crit. For me anyway this combo has been working really well for roaming in wvw and constantly bumping into all the range classes and in small group battles.
As a guard i really enjoy roaming around in WvW and experiencing quick skirmishes with myself or with a small group of other players. I’ve also came across this 0/0/20/30/20 build i’m lovin’ that gives me 300 health every tick, 3k-3.3k armor, 20k health around 3k power and over 1k healing power but 0 precision.
I’m starting to ‘win’ at a higher ratio than dieing now but the problem is i’m finding a lot of small challenges when running around with the guard:
1) If the enemy runs away at around 20-30% health its unlikely i’ll be able to chase them down even though i’win’ the fight i just dont kill many.
- likewise if you need to run away you’ll be in trouble.
2) While the mace and other weapons with on-your-spot symbol skills are great with the symbol healing ticks, we are barely in positions where we can optimize them. This is because there are so many ranged classes/enemy AOe spells/need to dodge roll. Even if you d activate an increase movement speed skill, you’re only keeping up with them for that boon moment, provided you are within hitting range.
3) (This is more of a non-high-hp-guardian problem) because of having low base hp, if you devote more of your points to power, anytime you reach below 60-70% health you may be putting yourself at risk of dieing in a single moment
t – even if beyond 2-3 secs later you would of been fine.
While many of these challenges are just what they are, challenges to be overcome – i do support guards been given a bit more ease to overcome these (rather than handed to them).
Hi all.
First of all i want to say that this game has been a blast of fun for me! i had only played 1 or two MMO’S and was thinking how many months it will take me to “catch up” level wise with everyone. But to my surprise i was done within 2 weeks! Really liked the leveling speed. Not having to have the burden to grind benchmark gear is a great relief. Honestly so far this has been great.
I also have became part of a decent raid-type guild who are online daily on TS, which really really enhances the experience. I cannot put enough emphasis on how much more enjoyment you get when you’re with other people. That being said though, there are a number of small things that i have found frustrating!
- The minimal amount of space and bank space when you begin is very punishing for new players! This pain is made deeper by the fact that you’re just learning and juggling about with the different equipment, which to sell to a merchant and which to sell to a trading post. Please consider giving the first 5 days extended slot space or another method.
- Sometimes the interface can be confusing. Went i entered WvWvW i didn’t know how to leave! Also it took awhile to click that LFG in the friends channel was where you could find groups- but that being said the speed of the mechanism is awesome.
- A bit too easy to blow money on repairs and waypoints at low lvls for players who are dying a lot – especially as you’re learning and trying to save up money.
- Some of the beginning areas can be very empty and give the feeling you are doing a single-player game which can be very off-putting! This is the cost of having such a wide open game.
- monsters are so tightly spaced together, it can be a real mission to find somewhere to pause if you get a phone call or someone is at the door. Or even just accidentally have another monster join in against you by mistake!
- It’s easy to forget about the story-mode, and the green pathway can be very confusing (making me waypoint 4 times between zones instead of the closest one to the green star) unless you are constantly having your map fully zoomed out.
- While there are other low players, many of these other low players are just alts of other very experienced players, so its easy to feel left behind in what’s going on in dungeons. This is especially the case in Fotm even at lvl 80. I can put ‘newb/casual/story mode in the group advertising tags and still get very serious players who will not say a word but then get angry if you have no idea what’s going on – (.which is all the time!). Or when they do attempt to explain, they just do it through jargon. They forget its not JUST this story you’re new to, but combat in general. You can’t tell someone to dodge an attack they haven’t even seen before. This is an issue because for me the only way to learn is to practice, yet having so much content based on groups means the whole group must be patient. However i’m not sure how this could be fixed as this is more of a behavioral issue. However my guild is great when i’m with them and there are definitely some nice people out there.