Guild Wars 2

Right now my build is full zerker’s for everything, and boon duration was coming from Sigil of Concentration for 33%, Food for 20%, and Rev for the last 50%. Now that it looks like I’ll need to cap out at 100%.

If I want to use Bountiful Sharpening Stones, I can get that by replacing my leg armor with Commander’s, switching runes to Leadership, and replacing my backpiece with an exotic one so I can put a plat dubloon in it. This would work pretty well but the sharpening stones are really expensive. What would be the most efficient way of getting the last 10% boon duration I need without having to spend so much money on the sharpening stones? Would replacing two accessories with exotics + Dubloons and replacing helmet with Commander’s stats be the smallest dps loss to do it?

Fail the first event after Vale Guardian repeatedly for the fastest and easiest shards possible.

DeathReign.7821:

Fizz.8763:

If you don’t want toughness, I’d recommend the sigil of Concentration again. 33% boon duration and only takes up a sigil slot. It’s pretty easy to fit all your quickness moves into the 7 seconds you get

Yours for only 133 gold!

I’d rather pay a couple hundred gold than 600 crystalline ore anyday though! :P

For a spectator, Conquest looks like a bunch of players whacking each other with wet noodles over points. It’s not visually interesting and the fun relies on you actually playing so you can notice the more subtle effects that are happening that are invisible outside of looking at player buff bars.

If you don’t want toughness, I’d recommend the sigil of Concentration again. 33% boon duration and only takes up a sigil slot. It’s pretty easy to fit all your quickness moves into the 7 seconds you get

Rather than using Leadership runes, I use Chronomancer runes and Sigil of Concentration on my MH Sword.

Both have way different feels to them. FFXIV fights have a larger number of mechanics that are harder to learn initially, but once you learn them the fights aren’t really difficult to execute. GW2 so far has very simple and easy to understand mechanics, but are harder to execute without lots of practice because the fights and combat system itself are more dynamic.

Personally, I like how GW2’s feel more so far. It feels more “actiony” and like actual combat, whereas FFXIV feels somewhat like I’m memorizing a script and executing it every time. FFXIV is more proactive whereas GW2 is more reactive.

The first half of Alex Savage (FF’s current raid) feels easier than GW2’s. The first fight would be like if Vale Guardian’s 5th phase was identical to its 3rd one instead of being harder.

However, the second half of Savage feels much, much harder. I feel like GW2’s combat system has more potential to have a higher skillcap if they choose to tune it that way though. The reason FFXIV’s are harder is because the last two fights are tuned so that any mechanic being done wrong pretty much instantly wipes the entire raid, while also having huge DPS checks throughout the entire thing. It would be like if Vale Guardian had a minute less on its enrage timer, hitting a blue AoE would not only teleport you but also stun the entire raid for several seconds, if the Green AoEs dont get exactly 4 people (5 or more on it would fail the mechanic now also), it does 2x the damage it does now and also instantly enrages him, and if anyone ever attacks a guardian they aren’t attuned to it causes a minute long 80% damage down debuff to apply to the entire raid.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it depends on if that sort of extreme difficulty is something you find appealing. There is also a story mode to their raids that’s about the same difficulty as the story dungeons in this game. Currently there is no intermediate difficulty, but the next portion of the raid will most likely be changed to have one at the expense of either the story mode or the savage difficulties.

Does anyone know when they’re supposed to be adding this?

Most people realize that it’s pointless. Gambling things like this usually make most of its money off of a really small portion of people that have really addictive personalities. The rest comes from when someone buys a few then realizes it’s not worth it. If enough people do that it adds up quite a bit.

They said it was supposed to be salvageable once the new legendaries were out, but I still can’t salvage it.

I’ve been doing pretty well with Staff Thief recently. I think it’s pretty strong :o

The blog post about it says that everyone starts at the same division, but does this mean everyone starts with the same mmr too?

Faction.4013:

The problem is that page has you taking Domination, ILLUSIONS and Chrono.

The link at the bottom of that page takes you to a video by Nike in which he chooses Domination, DUELING, and Chrono.

I’d suggest taking the advice in the video. The only change I made was taking DE. Even easier to generate the 3 clones required for CS.

Illusions is correct. Dueling would be useful in dungeons where hp pools are lower and all the bosses die quickly. In longer fights like high lvl fractals illusions is better.

What got me was the literal “press f to honor” prompt after.

Playing DH is pretty much free wins for me, I love it. You can’t just stay back from the traps because the longbow has absurdly strong ranged pressure, and you can’t just dodge all the traps because they daze and you can just use Judge’s Intervention during your cast times for instant hitting cc and damage.

That being said, Scrappers and Heralds are at least able to fight it. Anything else and you might as well afk though.

Play Scrapper and fight op with op.

This has to be a bug…. Right? Are any devs aware of this?

Search for “Chest of the Casual Fractal Hero,” each one has a fractal skin inside. It’s from an achievement so only one can be earned per account though. The other achievement chests are sellable too including the golden weapon skins.

I don’t see how having some random npc sit on the point and tell you you’re “not worthy” is interesting. Gliding or burrows should be enough to get this point imo.

What’s causing the most failures imo is people failing to deal with stalkers.

Fraeg.9837:

52.3%

Thinking about just going back to wvw

The farther you go, the harder it gets. Having to get a group to fight champions is nothing once you get to extreme mastery gated points, but since you got all the other points you’re forced to try and cheese the points without masteries anyway or never play your class in a reasonable amount of time. Some of these are also hidden behind obscure jumping puzzles and the hero point icons don’t help you find where to start AT ALL. Tangled Depths in particular has extremely misleading icons and I have spent multiple hours near the icons only to later learn that you have to start somewhere totally different to reach them.

rapthorne.7345:

Not many. Due to the timezone I’m in, getting people to help slay the champion hero points has proven almost impossible

I work a later shift than most people so I know that feeling.

Also, what makes this even crazier is that I’ve had to bypass the mastery requirements for like 5 or 6 of these points to even get them because they want me to have absurd things like ley line gliding. There was one where you have to eat rotten food and it wanted you to have adrenal mushrooms, but I got around it by using food and a regen booster and having an engineer and chronomancer spam regen and alacrity on me. Some of them are outright ridiculously hard to find because it gives you little indication of how to get there.

One of them in Tangled Depths looks like you find it around the Rata Novus lane, but you actually get there by going to some totally different area of the map and traveling a huge distance in the beetle adventure. How are you supposed to even figure that out when the hero point is nowhere near the start of the adventure?

One of them in the last map requires you to go a waypoint other than the closest one and then climb some obscure jumping puzzle, and then have to glide onto a platform that’s like 3 pixels wide and if you miss you have to start all over. Honestly, this would be really cool to have discovered, except that my ability to even play my Elite Spec relies on my finding this thing. The whole time there were like 5 or 6 people below the point trying to figure out how to get up, but the solution is in a totally different area of the map and there’s no clues to tell you that.

I’ve been playing pretty much constantly all weekend and only have 33. I should have 34 but after beating Octovine our door to the hero point never opened. There’s apparently two more I can get without really high masteries or progressing farther in the last map’s meta event. And because I’m starting with one of my alts I STILL don’t have my elite spec finished….

That’s because you can do the easy ones. I’m starting with one of my alts with no map completion, and so far I’m at 10/11, 7/11, 10/11 and 3/7 for each map. Some of these requirements are absurd, but when you only need 200hp you can just skip them. There are ones that need Adrenal Mushrooms, Ley Line Gliding, extremely hard meta-events to be completed successfully, and one where I had to swim for like 15 minutes only to die to Chak poison instantly once I found where to surface to get to the point. At this point, I’ve gotten every single point that isn’t gated by one of the final masteries in a category or a meta-event that isn’t organized enough to beat yet and I still have 60 points left before I’m maxed out.

Well rip I think i went like 3 wins 15 losses spamming games yesterday. Even when I feel like I’m constantly doing things, ill look at scoreboard and realize our team is like 100 points behind, no matter how many decaps I get or how many times I manage to successfully help in bigger fights ;-;

And then if I switch to something easy like burn guard I have no issues rolling my face on my keyboard and winning. All my classes have good win rates so far, and then thief is at like 39%

The one to Rule.2593:

if you cant do 40 hero points on day 1 idk what to say, most are " eat this" or " duel this noob"

We dont know anything about them yet though. What if they become harder to obtain this time around? What if they require masteries that take a while to earn first? And more importantly, why even require this for your core gameplay at all, when masteries have been advertised as the new form of progression this whole time?

Why not have the elite specs unlocked either right away or with very minimal effort, but have all the extras like the skins and sigils take hero points to unlock? This way people that just want the new abilities can use them right away, and if people want to unlock everything, they have the option of using their Elite spec to do so, instead of having to explore everything on the base class and not getting your elite until after having explored everything.

IGN: Zzaft
Thief type: Scholar, all game types
Server: Maguuma
Experience with Thief: I’ve mained Mesmer my whole time playing, but I just recently tried Thief and I’m finding it extremely fun. I’d like to learn it better and make it my new main class.

How will this work with Phantasmal Defender?

sinject.4607:

Fizz.8763:

Also I have one more question. I understand thief is currently really strong in high level tPvP matches, but is it still equally strong of a class in solo queue or other less organized games?

simply put, no. thief is subjugated almost entirely to support roles, meaning thief as a single player cannot make any meaningful contributions to a team of bad players against a competent team. you also risk ending up having multiple thieves on a team which very rarely pans out positively for said team.

if you soloq as thief, you have to be kitten good at thief otherwise you’re wasting a spot in the queue.

Also when DD comes out and runes and amulets change will there be any possibility of other builds being viable that have a different playstyle than the decap/+1 style of d/p?

1. vampirism change will hurt thief big time if our current sustain remains unbuffed and mesmer’s damage output remains the same. hopefully they’ll get around to nerfing mindwrack before and not after it becomes painfully obvious it needs it.
2. amulet changes wont affect us much save for sinister possibly.
3. the jury’s still out on Daredevil. haven’t played it myself but it seems to be a possible saving grace for thief given it makes us ridiculous at decaping (way more than even current thief) and essentially gives us an Acro that’s good for dueling again.

even though daredevil might seem good, contextually it’s bad. if scrapper, reaper, herald, druid, and chronomancer aren’t toned down significantly, the benefits daredevil brings will be completely overshadowed but the damage the other specializations do to thief.

Thank you for this answer. I’m going to keep practicing still, but I’ll try switching for a game if I see another thief and hopefully DD will open up more builds. I like how theif feels enough to go with the support role but I’d like to be able to fight people sometimes x.x

Also I have one more question. I understand thief is currently really strong in high level tPvP matches, but is it still equally strong of a class in solo queue or other less organized games? Also when DD comes out and runes and amulets change will there be any possibility of other builds being viable that have a different playstyle than the decap/+1 style of d/p?

Thanks for advice everyone. I’m starting to do a lot better now I think. I also changed my traits a little and even though it’s probably suboptimal I’m doing better with it, I put on acrobatics instead of DA. The movespeed in stealth seems really nice.

I see people saying to decap points and avoid 1v1 fights but a lot of the time I have trouble doing this. A lot of the time it seems like there are either people already on the side points or a lot of the time one or more people run into me on the way there. When I play other classes I can usually fight them and have a chance at winning, but when I’m thief it feels like I have to just run away because I lose fights every time. I don’t really understand what I should be doing to avoid those kinds of situations

I’m trying to learn how to play thief, but whenever I try to I end up losing just about every game and I feel like I’m totally useless and die repeatedly. I don’t have any sort of issues when I try to play other classes at all, only thief. I’m mostly trying to play d/p + sb and practicing in unranked. If someone could try and help me figure out what I’m doing wrong I’d be super grateful for it.

I don’t understand why having most people use damage gear is supposed to be bad. If they balance the damage around making everyone tank up a bit, the boss hp would have to be balanced around that anyway and you’d end up with the same gameplay regardless.

MadOtaku.8532:

Vizaerios.1765:

MadOtaku.8532:

To be fair Anet charged money for the betas, since there hasn’t been many of them and they also had little content to test having bugs that make what little content we have to test unable to be played is quite the stumble. Some people don’t have all weekend to play yet they paid money to play it, so many people have good reason to be annoyed simply passing it off as its a beta these things happen is kinda lacking.

At this rate 23rd – 23rd nov will be a month long beta. That is a standard I will be expecting. (if you fudge up Halloween well….

Faith….

They charged a price for the expansion itself the beta was just a perk that came with it. Beta testing is testing to make sure things are working. We’ve obviously shown some things are not working and they are working to fix it before the expansion goes live.

How is it an extra feature it was without a doubt the main feature for my purchase and i am pretty positive many others as well. Can you really tell me you would have pre paid if beta wasn’t included and was just random or a portal drop still. So many people pre paid for the beta.

The beta is included. You can literally play it right now. You are not being denied anything.

1 hour with a booster doesn’t sound so bad. I just wanted to make sure I’d have time since I have to raid in ff14 this weekend as well. If this beta weekend goes well I could easily see myself moving back over to this game :o

How long have masteries taken to get in previous beta weekends? Is this something I’m going to have to spend hours getting before my character even has a chance to clear the first raid boss?

Hi, I’d like an invite for NA <3

Here’s 3DMark results with each of the cards. Works better with the NVIDIA like it should:

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/2435529 (using NVIDIA)

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/2435645 (switched to Intel HD 4000, looks like it’s trying to say it’s using the NVIDIA but I made sure it wasn’t)

And GPU-Z screenshots with borderless windowed setting:

http://puu.sh/6SJjb.png (NVIDIA)

http://puu.sh/6SIWj.png (Intel)

Those were while playing the game, but it was after tabbing out from fullscreen. Other games dont give these issues as far as I’m aware, I play other games just fine.

I tried disabling the integrated card but it caused a lot of problems displaying some programs and I had to turn it back on. Made sure to update the integrated card drivers and tried using multiple versions of the NVIDIA one and that didn’t help anything at all. CPU-Z shows the link width is x16 also.

This is what GPU-Z shows when I try running the game using either card, not sure if this is useful for anyone but might as well add it:

http://puu.sh/6RUBU.png (integrated card)

http://puu.sh/6RUI6.jpg (dedicated card)

I’m having some trouble with my FPS and it’s making it a bit difficult to play. These are my specs, using a laptop because I’m a college student and use it for classes:

CPU: Intel® Core™ i7-3635QM CPU @ 2.40GHz
RAM: 8GB
GPU: GeForce GT 640M (since I’m on a laptop there’s also an Intel HD Graphics 4000)
OS: Windows 8.1

Everything has updated drivers and should be working fine. I tried messing around with settings on NVIDIA Control Panel, and one of the things I tried was switching to the integrated card for running the game. For whatever reason, switching to that made my FPS go way up instead of down. So the game is running worse for me when I try to use my dedicated GPU, which seems messed up. Is the game just horribly optimized for the NVIDIA card or is there something wrong that I should try to find/fix? The game can run somewhat decent on the integrated card but if I’m using that then I’m clearly not getting the full potential out of my computer, which already isn’t too great to begin with.

Hello! I’m still a really new player, only been playing for a bit over a week and the highest level character I have is a level 16 Mesmer. I’m having fun playing solo but I’d much rather find a guild to play with, hopefully a somewhat casual one that doesn’t mind that I’m new to this game, and to MMOs in general. :)

I’m not really sure which mode I’ll be spending most of my time in, I’ve been doing mostly PvE because I don’t feel like I have a good enough grasp of the game to do any sort of PvP or WvW yet (tried PvP a bit but felt lost), so I’d prefer to join a guild that isn’t 100% focused on only one mode.

Thanks in advance to anyone that can help me find a good guild!

So I’m VERY new to this game and I have a thief that I made as my first character that I’m enjoying, but I want to make a second one and can’t decide between whether I want my character to be an Elementalist or a Mesmer. If anyone could answer these questions for me it’d probably help me out a lot in deciding:

• Which class is more versatile? I’d like to have lots of different build options (And if the answer is different, which one has more viable builds that can be used once I get more experienced? I’m not really too concerned with a build being “viable” but it’s still nice to know)
• Which class feels the least repetitive? I don’t want to feel like I’m just casting the same combination of abilities over and over again, I want to be able to have lots of different things I can do at any given time and have to think about which of those things will work best.
• Which is harder to pick up, and which is harder to fully master?
• Which are generally better suited for PvE, WvW, and sPVP, and what roles would I generally be fulfilling in each of those? I’m not sure which I want to focus on yet but I want to know which class tends to be best suited for each.
• Which is more mobile?
• Which has higher potential damage, and which has higher potential utility, or do both of those depend entirely on builds?

If anyone can answer those questions for me it’d be greatly appreciated :D