Guild Wars 2

Ravana is really easy. Sure you need to remember the dance first but it’s by far more easier.
The mechanic-loaded monster was T9. A funny dance raid example is Thordan EX, though it’s not much harder than Ravana.
Then we have things like A4S without sac etc.

GW2 raids are incredibly lightweight mechanically. Not saying they’re easy, though.

Hmm.
First I’d take Ferocious Winds in the Air line; it’s just too good of a DPS gain. The aura trait seems a bit useless for me, because swiftness you would be getting just by swapping to staff and blasting lightning fields when running. And fury you get a plenty of from blasting fire fields.
Next, the stunbreak trait in Tempest adept section. I’ve been running on my zerk staff ele for a while with it, and I absolutely love it. There are many pesky mobs which can stun you and mess up your rotation, so you end up killing them twice longer.

Aftershock is too niche imo. Sure you can slot it instead of the signet if a need arises, but the main downside to it is that it has a cast time, imo. Also you probably should have reflects covered by someone else, if not by yourself (swirling winds, focus earth #4, earth#2).
Lightning flash is a nice utility for running and getting to finish those meteor shower casts in sticky situations, no argument here. Keep it if you feel you will need it, otherwise swap out on per-encounter basis.

As to rotations, I believe it’s the same logic as before, but staying in air for longer when OLA will be up. I’d also swap air-fire-air-water not just air-fire-water. Getting those lightning procs on swapping to air is a huge DPS boost.
The one thing I don’t know is whether it’s worth to cast OLF or not. It deals quite a lot by itself, so I might need to tackle that with the mists golem a bit before I’m convinced either option is the best.

I believe the only option to get 100% duration is to use Nightmare Runes. Swapping out ascended sinister trinkets for exotic viper’s is out of question, as it’s for high level fractals, and you probably don’t want to lose your AR.
So, I came up with this: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vdAQJAqalUUh+sYJWwWLQ7FLpFFYJuiHw3GGANw4PmGlBA-TBiHAB0r+jeKB/1CidV+F0+BkrHo2HAAAnAACBsYNA-e

Shouldn’t be terribly behind the meta build with the oh-so-expensive crystals and Berserker runes, 15% dps loss tops.

Another option is to stop at 67% burn and bleed duration which puts Fire Bomb, the skill which suffers the most from duration loss, at 5 second duration burns. That way you can still use Berserker runes, maybe even swap out Malice sigil for Bursting. You get two extra modifiers, a 6% one and a 5% one, but I believe it’s still lower DPS than the Nightmare runes option above.

Sorry I don’t have any concrete math behind these ideas, but it still might be of use to you. Or we could have someone else crunching numbers for us:)

Has anyone come up with a Chrono opener for relatively short (~ 30sec) fights?
P.S. It seems like with right traits you should be able to spam F1 shatter (which has like ~5-6 sec CD) AND have 2-3 phantasms standing at the same time.

A flurry of ideas. Dunno, they might be ridiculous: I’m sick and have fever.

1. Make a special stat which affects the way your iframes work. Basically, when you invest no points in that stat, your dodges are, like, only half (or any number here) effective. You would get hit by 50% of damage, you would get stunned for 1.5 seconds instead of 3 and so on. Of course, rebalance numbers across the board.
But if you invested in that stat, you would get full invulnerability.
2. For Kitten’s sake, remove that stat combination galore and make all gear customizable. Say, you need 2 blood, 1 venom and 1 of something else to craft a piece with ‘berserker’ stats. Or you could mix everything up and get supernomad’s of ultimate phiwness.
3. Make other stats more meaningful. Add an armor penetration stat. Make stat templates or w/e to force people to switch all that kitten mid-run: e.g. there’s a boss with a ton of armor and that shouldn’t mean classes with weak conditions automatically kitten a kitten there. Just put your arpen gear on and be able to contribute.
4. Design encounters in such a way that they offer you a choice: you could invest into that dodge stat and evade that scary room-wide kitten or you could learn the encounter and sidestep kitten without hampering your DPS.
5. Make a boss which is invulnerable to damage when not moving.
6. Give a kitten about the game…

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3ayw54/some_proof_that_burning_is_the_culprit/

And not a single man noticed that those jaw-dropping numbers were from the reflect. Kek.

More like ‘rektify’ tbh.

Thief’s No Quarter seems to double-proc at times. That is, infinite fury as long as you keep attacking.

The whole point of heal skills is that they can be interrupted. I guess an instant cast heal would be hella OP in the holy grail mode. AFAIK, there is no such skill in game (mesmer mantra is instant when you use up charges but then again you need to recharge it, so…)

Kagamiku.9731:

’cause non-PS build will still do more damage than a PS build in a solo scenario. Or if you have two warriors in a dungeon group and one is already using PS.

Strength – Restorative Strength / Forceful Greatsword / Berserker’s power
Arms – Signet Mastery / Deep Strike / Dual Wielding
Discipline – Warrior’s Sprint / DoTE / Heightened Focus

I’m not entirely sure on sigil choices or on optimal food yet. We should easily hit 100% crit chance with signet mastery so I could see sigil of strength becoming a thing, or it could stay sigil of night and sigil of force.

Runes will probably be strength and zerker armor as always.

Greatsword / AxeMace

As for skills. Signet of Might might replace signet of fury, but not sure on that. Only speculation.

Shouldn’t the warrior face some adrenaline starvation with these traits? Burst Mastery seems like a good solution in that case.

Can someone please post a possibly-meta non-PS build? I can’t quite come up with one. Is it going to be a fast hands GS/Axe one or pure GS?

FFXIV has its Primal fights. Those are just boss encounters, stripped of everything else, e.g. trash mobs—who loves fighting standard trash anyway.
It would be very nice of Anet if they took that approach. I think I can see how it might be hard to release, say, a dungeon path once per month (Anet isn’t a big developer; I believe, the number of people working on WoW/FFXIV is far greater). But nothing stops the studio from consistently making a boss fight once per month.
Dungeon lovers have been dealing with 8 dungeons and a dozen of fractals for almost 3 years; one can be pretty sure everyone would be happy as kitten if Anet begun to do so.

Well, that being said, there’s many an approach in case things come down to actually having resolution to make a certain type of content. But, I guess, that’s not the case. I mean, look at this. They’ve been catering to the ‘challenged challenge-wise’ part of game’s audience for god knows how long, and the press-1-to-win-happy-zerg-train seems to have no brakes…
Enough whining, though.

I have a strong feeling that the day of reckoning is nigh. Don’t know what else to say.

lmao. For instance, PUGging in FFXIV is faaaar more stressing than in GW2. I mean Coils and some of harder EX primals, of course.
And don’t even let me get started on MOBA games.

I’d rather say that the atmosphere in GW2 PUGs is rather amicable.

It’s funny how all those proposals essentially shift GW2’s dungeon gameplay more towards the ‘team rope jumping’ style.
And, oh the irony, said shift affects elitist zerks in some infinitesimally impeding manner. On the other hand, unorganized PUGs and PHIWs are going to suffer. In some cases, right up to good chunks of content becoming unpuggable.

Artemis Thuras.8795:

Morte.5916:

Artemis Thuras.8795:

People who want casual groups don’t want to join those who use the filters.

I think that actually “casual” people do want to join the groups with filters, so they can be carried. They just don’t want the “serious” groups to have a way of filtering them out.

And then wonder why they get kicked all the time.
Clearly they need saving from themselves

Zerkers are pre-programmed stacking farm bots, didn’t you know? No way they’re going to notice a casual leeching the run.

J Eberle.9312:

Last night I said to a friend, potato is coming.

I was right.
Potato happened.

Better beware!

Dave.2536:

My main point was still that the “min gear” requirements in FFXIV were and are a joke in terms of filtering out anything.

I’d say ilvl reqs are there to help a new player in getting some insight on which content is harder and which is easier. Otherwise you’d be stuck with a ton of raids, trials and dungeons, bewildered and clueless; where you are able to go and pull your weight.

Dave.2536:

potato metrics

Potato metrics are cancer of PUGs. The sheer number of ‘90K AP+’ listings in the LFG just demonstrates how utterly ignorant people are en masse. ‘LFG 8 heavies’ and ‘stack only’ are close second on the list.

Dave.2536:

phys.7689:

actually, from what i hear, a lot of those encounters actually were initially beat at those levels, without the echo/harder mechanics
first coil requires 70, and at the time, i dont think you could get many level 80 pieces, if any. after beating it you had some level 90 pieces,

Coil up to Turn 4 was beaten fairly quickly, with the biggest obstacle for Turn 4 being figuring out where to position all the members. Coil 5 was beaten as soon as people started getting enough lvl 90 gear from the weekly-gated Mythology tomes with some supplements from Coil 1-4.

On your other point, “someone can beat it with this gear” is not the same as “anyone can beat it with this gear”. I’m sure I could clear CoF with level 75 white gear as well, but that honestly doesn’t mean I should, or that I should have to accept someone who joins my run with that gear.

As far as Garuda HM, I suspect most (may still be an understatement) people who show up there with 48 gear are getting carried by others with much stronger gear. Given that my own group could sell 2, maybe 3, slots for Garuda HM (usually wanted Garuda + Titan), with those 2 tanking whatever material the ground there was made out of, there would be no issue at all coping with people in the party bare running minimum gear.

Twintania wasn’t killed with such an ease. Look up some info on pre-nerf Twisters and the BlueGarter FC. It’s a very entertaining read, you should check it out.

The good thing about PUGging in FFXIV is player-base segregation: DF for casuals and PF for wannabe-hardcores. Truly dedicated players form statics.
Of course, many things depend heavily on your data center’s/world’s average skill level. On the EU data center coil T7 has a success rate of 15-20% in DF from what I’ve seen (same numbers for PF ‘farm’ parties). This is incredibly low given how easy is T7 right now with all the nerfs, echo and overgear.
On Japan servers people regularly pug T13 in PF. The difference is striking as you can see.
Nevertheless, my point was the player-base segregation and the fact the game does provide at least some number of tools to point out the baddie. GW2 has nothing comparable.
AP points are bullkitten gauge. The majority of 20K+ AP players is terribad at efficient dungeoneering because they’ve spent more time grinding the Agent of Entropy and other mindless open-world content than learning how to speedrun.
You can resort to gearchecks but zerk gear is not a fairy sorcery that instantly turns a baddie into a capable and experienced player per se. Even if you ask people to tell how their trait points are allocated, it might be a deception.

At the very end it’s just better to find a group of like-minded individuals.

The biggest put-off in Anet’s content design is:

1. They make content impossible for the bads to complete on their own, so that the goods have to organize and do the content.
2. But, the goods have no option to NOT have to carry the bads through said content.

I find it rather discriminating.

GW2 dungeon bosses need hard enrage timers e.g., 2 minutes on Lupi for a group of 5 and up to 8-10 for a soloer.

There is a number of people who have put GW2 on a, ahem, standby. I wonder where did they go.
As for me, I’ve been playing a game called Initial Reality 41K lately. It has no content, visuals are rotten old, some raids are filthy easy etc. Feels so stall compared to GW2.
… if you catch my drift…

I’ve got an impression that you like to be the guy who handles most of the mechanics and carry the heaviest burden. Like healers in most of trinity MMO’s.
GW2 offers you dungeons where virtually every class must handle with mechanics and be a support in a certain sense.
Guardian handles the active defense, as well as mesmer (mesmers have other tricks too). Thief excels at invis (party-wide, which is exciting imo) and blinds (an active defense as well). Ele gameplay is very support-heavy, you will be the one handling the most of offensive support. Warriors and rangers possess unique buffs. Engineers are great with their debuffs and when played properly are pretty hard and interesting.

All in all, here goes the philosophy behind GW2 PvE: max DPS as long as all needed support is covered.
And I’ll repeat: everyone handles the mechanics in GW2. Everyone.

Yadda-yadda or, you know, Anet could’ve just made HM versions of the same old dungeons. Leave current ones to leveling and newbies, maybe even nerf them; AC can be extremely frustrating for a party of first-time scrubs learning their ropes.
In HM’s designers can and should go ham with all the crazy stuff. Be it mini-lupicæ or whatever. Hardcore players will munch that content with a great deal of joy. Anet also should not be afraid of making HM content too hard; we all know there’s always someone who makes it through, however absurdly over-the-top hard it is.
Too bad we can’t have nice things.

You can add me. Can endure pugging no more.

Nerf modern healthcare. It clearly violates intended-by-the-developer laws of natural selection. Even the weakest can reproduce nowadays which ruines the balance and fun. Hurr.

Putting an integral of sec(x) would just yield some fellas who actually know math or know about wolfram alpha. Which is nice but the test is too niche nevertheless, imo. What if I asked in a lfg message “how many adjuncts arguments a predicate ‘exploited’ has?”

By the way, “log(sin(x/2) + cos(x/2)) – log(cos(x/2) – sin(x/2)) + C” is a hella long answer.

PS. Yesterday night I tried to gather a PUG using a message which looked like “bearbows, halfwits, illiterate people and jerks only”. Well, needless to say, I got a mentally challenged warrior, a jerk, an illiterate and a necro.

Laughing at people who want heavies to be nerfed and others buffed. Imagine Elementalists DPS is buffed.

So… there will be two different queues with two different ratings: solo/duo queue and team queue.
You join a desired dungeon’s queue, matchmaking gathers 10 people and divides them into two groups. After 5 minutes of briefing time the run starts. No character changes are allowed.
The goal is to complete a dungeon path (or all paths) faster than the other group.

Every player starts with, say, 1200 rating. Multiple runs can be made within the day, though people may do this only for rating gain.
Gains should be calculated using ELO system or something similar.

Obviously, some changes must be made, i.e. fixing unintended skips, glitches and so on.

What benefits this ladder can bring to dungeoneering? Well, at least you get some real measure of any player’s experience regarding dungeon PvE.
In addition, adding competitive element to almost any sort of activity makes it very repeatable because people start do that for the sake of rating points.

And for kitten’s sake I want to see a cleric healer guardian sitting in Bronze V.

Kulvar.1239:

snip

Finally someone who knows the math. I’ve almost lost the faith in humanity.

Meta is a consequence of optimization. And optimization is inevitable. Heck, literally every process in the universe tend to optimize itself.
…
Imagine an early paleolithic tribe. A few dozen generations earlier someone invented the stone tool industry. The tribe is on the verge of chasm. Group A complains about the “meta”. They consider stoneworking as feat which overtrivializes life, which contains absolutely no challenge and interest compared to making tools with your own hands. Group B begins to alienate, by time passing they form separate tribe and they do not accept any one from the group A because they are not nearly self-sufficient in hunting and gathering thus being a burden.
What if Group A was dominant?
…
Optimization is the reason we have shinies.

Sorry for bad englando:)

Besides, knowing how to stack might/fury/vuln is the matter of equal importance with running dps gear.
People knowing all this stuff indeed are very rare birds in PUGs.

crunkfresh.9025:

guardian
mesmer
warrior
elementalist
necro
theif
ranger

in that order. also, all the people talking about rangers – the ranger we run with is a beast. i guarantee she would outplay 2/3rds of anyone in this thread. guaranteed. the class may be kitten but to take an empty spot over any ranger is a pretty kitten kitten mode statement.

Give that player a guardian and she would outplay every single one in this thread. The fact someone plays ranger godly does not make a ranger viable.

I see some people don’t realize one thing. They’re trying to use the fact that skilled rangers (necros, engis, thieves, whatever non-meta class) are exist to counter the “war, guard and mes are superior” statement.
Player skill and the game balance have nothing to do with each other. Give that skilled ranger player a guardian and you’ll see that group performance is increased drastically.

Also. I see bad rangers very often. As well as I see bad warriors.
Though, a bad mesmer or a bad guardian are more of rare sight.
I think it very much depends on complexity of leveling. Ranger basically requires a shortbow, some tanky pet and almost all low level encounters are breeze. You only need to press 1, sometimes 3.
Warriors can aggro a lot of mobs and simply kill them.
Mesmer on the other hand is very dependant on actually thinking how to kill mobs effectively, after lvl40 you need to trait well to able to AoE-clear mobs fast and so on.

Our multiple last stands today on EB keep reminded me of Orr events farming. Now I’m curious whether CoF farming or defending against teamed up Deso and VS is more profittable.

1 key, 1 ticket and it even adds fun that I used the key (which I don’t remember where I got) then realized it would not be a wise idea to open unlocked chest 5 minutes before the patch.
I don’t know though why people got so mad about tickets drop since skins are too far from being stellar IMO.
Not going to touch those RNG and gem involved stuff.

For the great justice I should notice that community in Guild Wars 2 is way less toxic than that in games like LoL or DotA which are famous for bad manners spread.
After playing forementioned games I found myself being completely okay with bad manners in GW2 because they can’t pass my “insult level”.

More on the topic. When I first time trying a dungeon I go and see some run records on youtube. Then I’ll try to gather my guildies, both experienced players who are willing to explain everything and newbies for whom this may be a great chance to run a dungeon in a friendly environment.
When I’m gathering a group for a familiar dungeon, I will either ask for experienced players to join or ask if there are first-timers.

Communication is everything, majority of players should understand it. People tend to remember better a few bad/infuriating runs than a plenty of smooth ones. From which comes that dual “hate”: experienced players remember “many” newbies, who are not willing to learn an encounter they’re facing (yes, there are such a people, sometimes I think they must be either suffering some serious mental disability or hopelessly drunk) and not so experienced players will think that dungeon players consist of bad mannered elitists, who are not willing to explain instead insulting newcomers.

So my advice would be for everyone try to be a bit more forgiving to each other and to not rage when misunderstandings happen.

So, there are teachers who are willing to explain everything and there’re grateful students, remember it, community:)

Gelltor.3015:

For some bizarre reason,all the worst examples of the COF player base for me have come from the bezerker rangers who wind up running with normal groups,then kittening at everyone for not doing it fast enough….

I have a zerker ranger, though, didn’t know anyone using them for speedruns. People surely can’t do the math.
The balance of this game is that in such a lame dungeon which is CoF p1 every single class cannot outdamage zerker warrior.
I run berserker gear on all of my characters (besides Guardian and Ele) for testing my skill. There is a huge difference in a gameplay between glasscannon Mesmer with 1800 armor and perma-protection/aegis Guardian with 2800 armor.

For those who were fed up with CoF elitists and want berserker gear: try CoE. With not so much experienced group of randoms it takes about an hour/an hour and a half to clear all 3 paths. Additionally, CoE is way more challenging and profitable (getting an exotic or charged lodestone in pretty much every run) than CoF.
And it’s hard to gather a group for CoE so it’s better for me if good players would be intersted in CoE:)

1. Moa
2. Armadillo’s
3. Dolyaks

Let me throw in my couple of coins.

I think one of the ways to describe relative smartiness of Tyria’s races is to predict to what type of civilization each race would progress.

Let’s begin with the Charr.
In present in-game epoch they’re an industrial age civilization. They have a steam powered technology and moving towards using electricity widely. That’s the real world humanity’s 19th century equivalent.
Interesting thing is that by design the Charr are a mixture of steppe civilization archetype (which are generally described as nomadic and barbaric) and the Roman Empire. Here lies the flaw. On one side the Charr are quite an centralized formation comparing to other Tyria’s races. On the other side their unity is based on military solely.
For an empire to be like Roman it is needed to be cosmopolitical. In Roman Empire there was a culture strong enough to have an influence upon many of modern cultures. And that culture was something being apart of military machine of Rome.

So, imagine 150 years have passed. Leaving Elder Dragons apart, it is very likely the Charr society will face some devastating internal conflicts. Like WW1 and WW2.
In 1475 AE we probably can see fully electricified urbanistic civilization. Just like modern humanity. The Charr probably have invented nuclear weapon and simple computers. And they’re attempting to space travel.

The Asura, on other hand, have scientific style of modern humanity right now, in 1325 AE. The whole asuran science is like mathematics of modern humanity which has a little related to actual world’s problems. I mean those high-end maximum abstract mathematics like algebraic geometry, theory of categories and so on.
The Charr are “science for the sake of real, working and useful things”. The Asura are “science for science”.
Probably, the Asura are going to invent some really advanced cybernetics. In 1475 AE they may have magic-based kins to quantum computers.
Probably, the Asura are going to invent some magic-based spacecraft. I think antigravitation is a child trick for experienced krewe. If only that krewe would become interested in antigravitation.

As we can see, the Charr and the Asura would progress practically equally.
One can say that the Asura can’t handle inventions like spacecraft because such a things require an industrial power of the whole nation. I say that the Asura would invest to spacecraft industry simply out of curiosity and plain understanding of pure possible gain. They are Mad Scientists, indeed, but they aren’t unwise enough to just ignore the possibility to move their race forward.

Speaking about other races. Scientific and technological progress requires a great amount of resources. The more territory one has the more resources he has. So, for norns and humans there’s unfavourable prognosis. Even in modern (1325 AE) Tyria with scientific methodology of the Asura facing similar to real world one’s problems and the Charr building a civilization similar to real life humanity, the Norn and Tyrian humans are simply outdated.
Just like American Indians facing Spanish colonists.

The Sylvari. The most interesting thing that their whole civilization is just 25 (sic!) years old. And they’re already count as one of “Big Five”.
Give them another 25 years and… No, they won’t conquer the world like the Charr. Instead I see them studying Biology. They’re going to have very advanced knowledge in genetics.
I know I’m just dishing assumptions out of nowhere, but it seems legit by design. I think there is at least one who could understand associations I imply.
Besides of genetics, I can see the Sylvari inventing some next-gen ethics and, wider, being the prominent one in questions of Tyria’s culture.

Sorry for mistakes, I’m not a native:)