Guild Wars 2

I don’t know about pvp, but in Raids it would be:
Ranger:

• Condi Ranger (overall very usefull)
• Condi Druid (very situational)
• Magi Druid (not really good in open World but nice to have in high level fracs and of course in raids)

Elementalist:

• Staff Tempest
• Fresh/Air Staff Tempest
• Scepter/Warhorn Tempest
  These all only require minimal trait switch and mostly change through skills, or weapons. You will only do dmg and maybe stack some might prefight in fractals, but that would be all of your support contribution. With the recent patch it got a bit more difficult to keep the dmg high, combined with the low HP I would in most situations switch to a condi ranger for dmg (sadly).

Mesmer:

• Condi Mesmer (situational, but can outdamage other classes)
• Tank Chrono (Minstrel/ Commander): Not really usefull outside of Raids.
• Utillity Chrono: Low DPS, but so much support. Very nice in fractals and a must in raids.

Warrior:
You will probably play PS with condi or power gear.

The rest of the classes aren’t useless just because I don’t mention them. They aren’t just that present in Raids/ Fracs at the moment. Or don’t have that much diversity.

Keep in mind that this is only my opinion on the matter. So maybe there is something with a bit more diversity out there that I’m simply not aware of.

BTW: PvP isn’t restricted to you level or gear. So you can just create a character, play the tutorial and play what you want in pvp.

Hello!

I’m looking for a way to get into Raids, until now I only cleard the Vale Guardian and the escort event in Wing 3 (until KC). But I do have basic knowledge on every boss.

What can I bring to the table:

• I have an Elementalist (Main) and a Condi-Druid in full gear (both 150AR) with the latest meta build. As well as good expirience in playing them.
• I also have a Guardian in full ascended armor, but he is missing some weapons.
• TS3 and yes, even a microphone! :P
• Good learning and adapting capabilities.

What I am looking for:

• Group with some expirience that knows what to do.
• Players who use meta builds.
• Weekly Raid times with or without a fixed time, but after 6 PM (Server Time)

If you have some questions, you can send me a message/pm.

Thanks for reading!

Edit: Found a Guild, so please ignore this!

We mostly call it Bug Wars 2, or Gem Wars 2

Log in, do daily fractals, get bored, talk to some Guildies who also started to play other games on a more frequent basis and really don’t know what else there is to do.
And the best part is: We are slightly over ONE month after the release of the expansion (a freaking full price expension) and we have already run out of content! WOW!

Aldath.1275:

I’m leveling a Mesmer (7), a Guardian (63) and a Ranger (32). I like the Mesmer so far, but I also feel it deals sub-par DPS; at least for now. Leveling her will be a slow, painful process but I hope it’s worth it.

Mesmer is one of the classes with the least dps in early levels because most of your damageskills are traitbased, so aslong as you don’t have all three Traitlines your dmg is pretty low. But if you reach lvl 80 and get to the point where you can “evolve” him to a chronomancer the dmg and utility goes through the roof. So it is definetly a class worth leveling.
Guardian has good dps and utility, compared to revs and warriors it is pretty low though. If you want to run fractals this is a good class, for Raids in my opinion not so much.
Ranger. This one is difficult, the ranger dmg isn’t that great and a lot of people really hate to play with this class, because there are a lot of players who just longbow 4 everything away, forgett to pull their pets back and so on. But a heal druid is pretty handy in raids, so you might want to consider this.
My advice would be to level the guardian and the mesmer, it dosn’t take that long to reach lvl 80, the bigger problem would be the ascended equip. Maybe join a beginner friendly Raid Guild, maybe they are missing one of the classes and help you to level and equip it.

Aldath.1275:

That’s a shame… I had a Herald but ended up erasing her because I found the class extremely boring to play. I have a level 10 engi, but I don’t get how to play her, since it takes me half a year to kill any mob I find with any kit…

as an engi, you have to swap your kits a lot (a freaking lot) to make good dmg. The high dps rotation of an engi is like 40 skills. So you need a lot of practice to kill the mobs.
If you have problems in the low lvl area i would recommend the rifle, grenade kit, bomb kit and a tower. With most power stats that worked for me pretty good. It still is slower than an ele.

A Condi Berserker (Warrior spec) is pretty high dps against enemys with large hitboxes like Bloomhunger or the second Raid boss.

1.
It is supposed to restrict players to play an optimized build, this was announced as challenging endgame content, you are not supposed to get in and beat the boss first try.
2.
There is room for errors! We killed the Guardian on our second kill witch more than one and a half minute remaining. If you are really needing more time some of your team isn’t playing a good build ore dosn’t know what to do!
3.
Knowledg is important, but skill too. You have to know what you are supposed to do and when you have to do it. But you also have to be able to play good enough to make this possible. For example: Your team knows what to do with the green circles, if this is screwed up it is more a problem of skill than a problem of knowledge.

To bring this up again. The timer is there to restrict to a more dmg based build. If it woudn’t exist you could just take 30minutes and tank the boss to death. That wouldn’t be a challenge at all.

Ok, we hit lvl 24 and I checked the cristal again. and looking at the picture it seems like the lvl 30 one you postet earlier. I can’t really remember the day we claimed the Guild Hall (it was on the same day, or one day after launch) but considering we have a change from 23 to 24 and the lvl33 above this post it could be every 8 lvl.
Or it could look different because you claimed the other Guild Hall.
So many questions

Edit: forgott to add the picture

Edit 2: If someone could check if there is a difference between lvl 31 and 32, that would be nice!

FrizzFreston.5290:

Well there seems to be a difference between Frostfire’s lvl 23 there and our lvl 29/30. Which is really just one crystal on the left there. So maybe it’s lvl 25?

Another theory I had was that it’s possibly the guild hall restorations that are upgraded make it look different, but I have no idea. (My guild has Arena, Warroom and Market)

We have the same buildings and are also missing Tavern 2 and Workshop 2.
So maybe it is the level, maybe you upgraded the mine a little further (we have “lvl” 2).
But I think every 5 levels would be a good possibility.

I looked for a picture we took right after we got our guild hall and made a new one right now (with lvl 23) and you can see a difference!
This is actually kinda cool

Maybe this will be included in the fractal patch, but for now the only option would be to spend even more money to get the last 15 AR through the +X infusions, so maybe one +18 and a +17 instead of two of the +10.
Considering the price it would be cheaper to get a new asc armor just to get around this^^
I would recommend to wait, this seems like something ANet has not considered, or ignored, so maybe this will be fixed.

Tigaseye.2047:

Jana.6831:

Tigaseye.2047:

snip

Ayrilana.1396:

snip

As far as I remember Anet themselves said ascended would be required to beat the bosses – but don’t ask me for a link – probably someone else knows.

Depends who you ask.

Apparently, it was a rather vague tweet, although I didn’t see it.

Some people read it as ascended required, some people read it as ascended recommended and some people as ascended required for the last boss, only.

No idea what the truth is.

http://dulfy.net/2015/09/30/gw2-ascended-gear-will-be-needed-in-raids/

@blacklionchest Earlier wing bosses can prob be killed by top tier players in mix of asc/ex. Last boss should be full asc.
Yeah

I think this clearly states that asc. should be needed.

To be honest, I’am tired of the Fotm random players. Normaly if the fractal allows it and is under 30 I run it solo as far as possible and then start looking for players. Most of the time I’am still faster as some PuG runs I had.
One thing said: If the group searches for “Meta/exp/etc. players”, don’t join if you don’t know what to do! They want to run as fast as possible through the instance and if you slow them down they have a good reason to be annoyed.
If you don’t find a party just open a new one, it normaly dosn’t even take 2 minuts to fill it and most “elitists” won’t join normal partys. So chances are you have a more casual friendly run.
But the best way is: Join a guild that has some fractal players in it. They normaly be glad that there is someone who is eager to increses his AR and level, so they have a bigger playerpool. Beside it is way more easier to explain something in TS than in the chat.

So at first, yes I’am against the timegates! I don’t think they are a good mechanic.

The Timegate for the weapon is 50 Days! If you take your time and inform yourself you see that you need the 12 Books, the (25? not sure)Deldrimor steel and the 50 charged Quartz, but you can get all three things at the same day, so you need only a total of 50 Days (still quiet a lot). If you don’t informe yourself and do it one after another it is your fault :P

Beside, I don’t believe that a lot of players could get the legendary in an instant without the timegate, you still need around 3000gold, so you will have to farm for it wich will take you more than 50 days if you aren’t a hardcore player or a TP player.

BTW: with the exception of the Book thing, you could get all the timegated stuff in advance. The Steel and the quartz where not that expensive pre HoT, so it would have cost you maybe 1 gold per day to craft them.

So yeah, I don’t like the timegate, but there are ways around it.

Stay close to him, he can reflect projektiles, so be aware of this.
After he takes some dmg he will spawn a npc that you have to bring down to 5% and then interact with a rift, then he will become friendly and helps you in the fight.
After every 2 summons, you either have to get to the shield bubble, or jump into one of the upstreams to avoid the AoE attack (the second time he will start to throw rocks at you if you choose the air option). After the AoE is over one part of the arena will disappear.
If you get him to ~10% he will spawn a lot of low health minions, you have to kill them before they reach the rift and then you have to “kill” his break bar.
Thats all to kill him

Why did you remove the Tag down feature?
Every time you want to Tag down, your only option is to leave the squad or to give the Tag to someone else.
In guild missions this can be pretty annoying because I don’t want to run around the whole time with the Tag up but I also don’t want to join my group for the fifth time.
Yeah I know that this is complaining on a pretty unimportant thing, it just bothers me.

They already introduced a “nerf” for the Raids.
If you start the Raid you get a buff (don’t remember the name, somthing like call to the mist), you get this buff only for the newest Raid wing and it gives you a 100% increase of gold and experience for every defeated Boss. So at the time you get 4 gold, with the release of the next wing you will only get 2.

Memphisjz.1405:

What i would like to see
More complicated mechanics that force build diversity / synergy. You can swap skill / traits for free outside combat and between bosses. So for me, personally, raids should have mechanics like:

- Boss does a massive knockback sometimes, everyone without 2 stacks of stability is knocked out of arena and dies
- Boss has a massive attack that can only be avoided by stacking 10 stacks of blind on the boss (yes i know blind doesn’t stack, just an example)
- Boss immune to dmg, can only reflect his projectiles. Classes without a reflect would have a different role (like killing some adds or standing in certain location)
- Boss with crazy AoE patterns all the time, or just a bullet hell boss.
- Gorseval’s wall doesn’t take normal dmg, players need to throw 10 rocks into it that fall into the arena. They spawn far away so mobility is needed (teleports, etc)
- ..

So beside the fact that this is their first Raid and there is room for improvement, i will just add one thing:
To increase the difficulty further you can just force players to play with a low defence build and implement the mentioned mechanics.

Even if they add some of this stuff players could just swap to more tanky gear and kill the boss. But if they add a mechaninc (like the high need for dps) than you also have to look for your health, do damage and do whatever mechanic is needed to kill the boss. It is just one step more challenging to do it with little defence.

And as mentioned before, you can play a Tank, a condi DPS, a Healer, a power DPS, and a DPS Support class, with a lot of different classes, playstyles and builds. So you can choose what you want to play.
Keep in mind that this was announced as challenging content, so you need to switch to an optimized build, you can’t just play something that is not efficent, because groups who min/max their builds and equipment would just burn through it.

I know this one is most likely a pretty strange/stupid request, but in a group with 10 people it happens a lot that you just have to wait, because someone went afk. So it is always a litte timekiller for me to transform into a Jackalope and run in circles, or make a costume brawl with someone.
So at least let us do something

The basic salvaging kit dosn’t work in the Raid instance, I don’t know if it is just this one because the copper-Fed seems to work just fine.

If you don’t grind it, you will wait a long time for the exp bar to fill up. I’am pretty impatient so I used the spiderfarm to level it up.
But some other things I tried:
The Dragon Stand map is a huge meta event chain with a lot of respawning and xp rewarding event mobs. This is pretty nice and because you can chose one of the three lines it didn’t get that boring. But if the event chain hits the point with the three bosses it brings nearly no xp, so you should consider joining a new map where the event isn’t that far. Wich means you will lose the Boss reward :/
The mini adventures/challenges are a good source of xp if you are able to hit the gold rank.
The masteries aren’t needed for the most part so there is no real reason to rush them

The Missions are not that bad, most of them can be done by 4 players.
First you should change the Missions to the PvE ones and not the mixed (small gear in the Guild Mission Panel).
Even if it sounds difficult, try to make a fix date with your Guild Members, if you want to have a Guild that consists only of a few people, you and your members have to participate actively in this. Keep in mind that a Guild isn’t designt for just a handfull of players. So if you don’t want other people to join your Guild you have to bring yourself into it and that means a lot of dedication.
The new system isn’t making this easier for small Guilds. Now you can choose to play only with the Guild, this will open an instance where only members can join.
You can retry as many times as you want, so try it and hope for easy Guild missions. If you build the Market and the War Room, you can unlock a special WvW Mission Slot and a PvE Mission Slot (Arena for the PvP one), so you should make this your priority.
More Missions equals a higher chance of something that is possible for few players.
If you upgrade your Guild Hall a bit you will notice that you have to spent a lot of gold for the upgrades, so the favor will become a little bit less important

Engineer with flamethrower or Guardian with staff. In Zergs you don’t really need dmg, only for the champs. So you need a class that has a fast autoattack witch a good AoE!
One downside is that you sometimes don’t make enough dmg if you don’t play full berserk, so you might consider joining a group to compensate this

NapTooN.6283:

I totally love Mai Trin for her Noob Filter, once you are through the gate, if you don’t have enough AR, everyone will see it when you die on her Platform while she is still green.

This happens at every final boss (Mai Trin, Molten Duo and Jade Maw)^^

They said the whole armor will cost the same as one legendary, so 3000+ gold is a good bet. But keeping in mind that the most new mats are pretty high at the moment, so it will probably be way more expensive in the next month.

Alphard.6529:

Frostfire.7492:

So tell me where is the difference in running 14 fractals on on day, or 2 fractals every day for a week?

So would you be happy if there was a ‘weekly’ chest instead of a daily and it awarded 14 fractal pages, so you could do it all on Sunday if you want, but then you wait until next Sunday for the weekly chest to reset?

I am against this kind of timegates, I think they serve no purpose at all.
But yeah, this would be better!

NayNay.7680:

Repetition is to be expected in the time sink that is legendary pixels.

We don’t complain about repeating content, we complain about the wait time.
If I want to build a legendary I should be able to choose when I have to spend the time. There are players who can only play at weekends, so it will take them a year because of this timegate to get it. So tell me where is the difference in running 14 fractals on on day, or 2 fractals every day for a week?
They could have made a new collection where you have to run 14 specific fractals and we would be happy.

Dulfy made an article about the known costs (it is nearly at the bottom): http://dulfy.net/2015/11/08/gw2-hot-weapons-armor-and-backpieces-guide/
So crafting the bagpack will cost you to salvage ~12 ascended armor/weapons (assuming the last recepie will only need 3 Balls of Dark Energie).
So the cost is pretty high

There is currently a bug, if you use a jumpskill at the beginning of the ramp, you will respawn on the boss area and trigger the final bossfight.
But I’am pretty sure that this is exactly the thing A-Net sees as an exploit and will not tolerate it. So I wouldn’t recommend it. If you have a farm group the champ and the mobs will only take you 1-2mins to kill, so just kill them.

This is an MMO and Guildhalls are per design not for just 3 players. I do agree that some upgrades are to expensive (the tavern restoration 2 is ~2000 Gold). But this is just a matter of time.
Anet stated that the marked will be broken to begin, and it is!
The Kegs have decreased in value the hole time, because there are some spots where you can farm the flax seeds and they will decrease even more over time, so the upgrade price will decrease as well.
And the buff can be reclaimed whenever you want, so you just have to get it once every 24 hours.
The problem I see is that the buffs are pretty useless: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_Enhancements
I really don’t see why you would even build them. You can only claim one buff at a time, they need a lot of Stuff to get and are only “usefull” if you have every upgrade.
So I would build them after every other upgrade is done, just not worth it at the moment.

So, just the positive stuff?! Thats no fun!

• The difficulty increase, this is my highest pro point. Guild Wars was never challenging in PvE, so it is nice to actually have to play the game and not run brain afk through the area.
• The Design of the areas (especially Auric Basin), it looks just so good. I even took the time to watch some of the vista animations.
• The new Elite Specilisations. It is nice that you get some new skills and the ability to play your class different.

Same problem here, after the 10th crash I stopped counting , but it was a lot more!
Dragon Stance is just a hell to play, I lost so many achievements because of this kitten, I spend hours playing those event chains and more than once lost the reward at the end…
This is such a stupid thing.

I switched servers and payed the 20€, if WvW is important to you, you have to switch.
Why? Because a lot of servers who are active in WvW have their own TS3 and Community, their own Guilds who do raids for the Server at fixed times, so that the home map is never without people. This is mostly common on the Gold Tier Servers, but some smaller servers come close to this. They put a huge effort in this, and a lot of people worked pretty hard to get the server to the top. If you switch the system to a random map system, there would just be chaos, no one could organize a thing, because you will never know in wich state the map is.
BTW we have something like this, it is called Edge of the Mist.

So, has someone found the answer to my question?

Nekomi.9562:

to be completely honest? This is just all so confusing.

An a HUGE bummer to us PvE guilds.
Missions are practically PvP and WvW built now so it’s basically “Hey do PvP or WvW or you get no guild hall you get no Favors, you want PvE MISSIONS!? HAH! Unlock it!”

In the Guild Mission panel is a small gear where you can switch your preference between PvE, PvP and WvW Guild missions, so if you switch to PvE you get only missions like Trek, Bounty, Challenge and so on. The Default choice is a mix between all sorts of Missions from every gametype.

Back to topic:
I think the difficulty is about right, we did it with 6 people and we got it at the second try. The first time we didn’t know how to kill the endboss and run out of time, but it was close, second time was pretty easy. Kill Vinetenders, kill spawns, focus the big hitters first. And for the endboss, if you knock his defiance bar down you can do a normal amount of damage, so you have to focus on this first.

BTW: I have heard from multiple Guilds who actually tried it with 20+ Members and didn’t get the Guild Hall, but after switching to smaller Groups (under 10) they got it pretty easy.

So I gained this Masterie mainly for WvW because it can be pretty hard to get all your loot in Zerg fights, but it dosn’t work. Is it supposed to work only in PvE, or is this a bug?

robertul.3679:

“fc”? Who even calls it that. I understand the germans with their “fz” but “cof” has been standard since forever. Not sure if that one is illegal but it’s pretty dodgy.

I am from germany an I couldn’t remember the name.

Back to Topic:
Even if I want to pretend to be lvl 1 again, it isn’t the same. You didn’t had to stay on one map and kill mobs to get to the next level. I really wish they had put some heart quest into the new areas, just something that distracts you once in a while and is rewarding to some extend.

I know that it would not be that much fun if you get all your masteries in one day, but to be honest it feels way to slow for me. And the worst part is that I’am not the kind of player who is amused by running around and doing the same events over and over again, just to gain the masteries I need to get my world completion again.
The Tyria masteries don’t seeme to be a problem, there seems to be a very efficent grind in fc p1 and even if they fix it, it will come with time because none of them seeme really that necessary.
But the Maguma ones are kinda boring to get. The best method I have found is using every xp booster there is and kill everything I see.
As you would guess, it is pretty boring
Most of the time the enemys dont give xp if you do an event, so it seemes rather stupid to do them, considering that some take a lot of time and the reward is only 18,000(+9000 if you use a booster)xp.
I really dont think that I will ever get the masteries completly done, just because I dont see a reason to endlessly grind, to get some things I would not really need.
So is there a better way? I hope I overlooked something

Still waiting for an offer

Hello,
I’m currently looking for a Guild with experienced players and a nice atmosphere, that run Dungeons on a regular basis, but I don’t look for a Hardcore/ Speedrun Guild.
What I can offer you:
- Ele (main), full ascended, 70ar, full zerk.
- Guard, ascended armor and most weapons, 70ar, full zerk.
- War, PS, mostly ascended armor, only exotic weapons, 55ar.
- Several other classes with exotic armor and Meta build/equip but I don’t have so much experience with them.
I run Dungeons and Fractals nearly every day (every Dungeon), so I’m quiet experienced in them.

What you should offer me:
I want a nice Guild with friendly people, you don’t have to be experts in every Dungeon or Fractal, but you should have players who are able to run atleast a lvl 40 FotM.
Weekly Guild Missions
More than 50 Member
Mostly Meta players, I don’t mind to run with people who run with theire own builds, or want to try something new out. But to make it clear: I don’t want to run a Dungeon with a full cleric Guardian! (Never again!)
I speak German and English, so it would be nice if your Guilds main language is one of them. But my English could use some improvement!

I do have one problem: Im playing a lot with my friends, most of the time we are 3-5 players and I don’t really want to leave this group. So it will be more than ones that I will run without the Guild or have already done most Dungeons or FotM. I don’t know if this is a big problem for you, but I still wanted to clarify this.

I hope to hear from you, just send me a PM with a brief introduction of your Guild!
Thanks for reading!

Have a nice day!

I was playing a lvl 50 fractal when the game decided to kick me out with no valid explanation. I tried to reconnect several times restarted the Router and PC, dosn’t help. After the fractal was over I could join back in the game. I wasted one houre because of this kitten server problems! Fix this kitten!!!

Edit: Thx for auto editing my swear words, feeling better now!

Behellagh.1468:

sirsquishy.8531:

serenke.4806:

sirsquishy.8531:

to freeze content development in favor of an expansion

is what most expansion-based games do. What did you expect?

Except that GW2 is NOT an expansion based game. Its SUPPOSED to be a bi-monthly release based game (per countless PR releases via Anet in countless interviews). If they are changing the model, it would be nice to know.

It was, players whined. They tried again, players whined some more. So now they are doing an expansion. However they have mentioned that Traits 3.0 will be out before the expansion so we may be getting a feature pack between now and HoT.

And you should know better than asking ANet to say something.

A feature pack is no content!
I played over 2000 hours of this game and there is nothing to do, WvW on my server is kinda boring, because we get in the first week two servers who just annihilate us and the week after we crush our enemys, there is just no good balance.
Dungeons and fractals lack content after two years of the same and open world is just pointless in this game.
So what should I do?
Last year we got content every 2 weeks, so there was a little diversion from the normal stuff and it worked, even when it was most of the time just one day where you completed the story and did the achievements. But know we don’t even get this or old content and it gets boring.
So what I did was stoped playing, I log in every day for the reward and thats it. My friends stopped playing nearly the same time, some of them log in from time to time but they seem not really happy about it^^
So Anet made the decision that they don’t want to make an expansion, even so the most fans said they would prefer it. But Anet was stubborn and made their content release with these little drops every few weeks. And now they got their payment. It was just not enough. To little new things, the players got bored and stopped playing, less player means less ingame sells, and less money for Anet.
So now they change their model and what happens is just sad. They didn’t give us new content to get over the waiting time. They just said that they don’t have the resources to work on the expansion and on the 2 week content.
The result is just a drop in players and with no new content even the casual players will get bored when enough time passes.
But Anet was never the fan of their hardcore players, everything has to get easier, so that new players won’t get confused. So I don’t expect that this will change.
And yes it is true, the game has lots of content if you are new! But it is not enough for nearly 3 years.
One last thing:
If you look at the content we got through the living story and the last years in general we get the following:
-Fractals of the Mist
-Silverwastes
-Dry Top
-Southsun Cove
-Living Story Part 1 and 2 (each nearly 8 chapters with 3 missions, so nearly 24 missions)
-From time to time a holliday event

That is not so much content for 3 years, and it is even less when you consider that everything of the Living story part 1 is not replayable.
So if you compare this to an expansion with one year development time it’s just not enough. Yeah you didn’t have to pay for this, thats true, but I would have spend 30-40 (€/$ or whatever) on new content and most people would agree on that. For example WoW, you pay 13 bucks per month and have to pay for the expansion and no one complains, so I’m pretty sure that the GW2 players have no problem with that.

Thanks for reading!
Have a nice day!

Dawnbreaker.6215:

Then why are we not removing gear stats from PvE? What the kitten is the point of having a CHOICE in PvE at all, if like you say you can do everything in zerker?

Because there are still some PvE enemys that are not efficent to play with Bersi equipment. Like the Husk against the Tri-Worm or Tequatle.

Dawnbreaker.6215:

If you’re not playing a guardian as a nuker then why even use zerk on it? See, it makes no sense. Also, I thought you didn’t want trinity? So why do you want variety in roles in a party? Why do you want a guardian to use reflects or a thief to skip through difficult puzzles? I thought you only wanted damage here and no class interdependence at all? According to your logic, all classes should be able to do exactly what the guardian and the thief does, there should not be a “looking for guardian” or “looking for thief” in LFG because of this, and yet there is, because as we both know that wall of reflection is useful.

I think you didn’t get that meta is more than just the Gear.
You need the reflect because some enemys will wipe your group, you need Aegis to block some attacks or you die, and stealth to skip mobs to save time.
So you put a group together where you make use of the biggest potential.
There are dungeons where you don’t need a thief, because you can run past everything or have to kill it.
There are dungeons where you can switch your guard for a mesmer, because you don’t need so much reflect.
Or you don’t need a war in AC because the banner are useless on this char lvl.
But what you need is max dps to kill the boss before he hits you to often. So everyone plays witch as many utility needed and as much dmg as possible.
You trade dmg for utility, that is why some classes are better than other for dungeons.
For example the Necro: He has very low dps and not very much utility, so he is not very popular.
The Staff+FB Ele has nerly no utility but the highest dmg possible, so he is as usefull as a guard who has high utility and low dps.

Dawnbreaker.6215:

So yeah do answer the question without going into some fallacy like “because new players need to learn”. Why is gear choice needed in PvE? You have made a very clear point that you can do everything, including supportive roles, with one single gear choice, so yeah. Why not have a gear set that provides enough HP for noobs to learn and enough damage for veterans to speedrun dungeons? Think of the valkyrie set, that would be a perfect example of an all-round set everyone can make use of. Let’s make gear choices a PvP / WvW exclusive thing and put everyone in Valkyrie/rampager-like gear.

To play meta means that you want to complete the dungeons as fast as possible, to be the most efficent.
The biggest problem here is that you have to kill certain bosses to go further, the longer you need to kill the monster, the inefficient the run.
To kill the mobs as fast as possible you take as much dmg as possible and lern how to survive with that low HP.
Why should I play Vallkyrie/rampager when I can survive in a fight against the enemy without dying with a full set of zerker? So why choose something that you don’t need just to be different?

Frost.1503:

Frostfire.7492:

The difference between ascended and exotic is ~5%!
That is not so much that you should only play ascended, my tip: Only craft the weapon, because you get 5% more dmg right away, run a few fractals and Guild missions and upgrade your trinkets and stuff, the armor is just too expensive to try something out.
I have 2 Chars ascended and the rest exotic lvl 80 armor. I have no porblems in WvW and PvE that I could blame on the equipment

Can you explain to me this 5%???
Ascended armor:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fFAQBAA-TFBXgAAK/C1Q0r+zjSQA-w
Exotic armor:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fFAQBAA-TFhFgAAKBpV+Zq+zlGCA-w
Bonus to attribute:
Ascended full set: Power=899
Exotic full set: Power=673
[(899-673)/673]*100=33.58%
Maybe i’m mistaking something but the difference is really high!
Edit: I forgot to use the infusion slot

you forgott to put the ruby jewels in the trinkets, so ascended gear just merges both stats.
then you get:
ascended: 1825 Power
exotic: 1749

I don’t think that announcing meta in LFG is a bad thing, most people who knew what this means are most of the time player who knew how to play. And I don’t like sitting in a group and wiping at ac p1 because the player don’t know what to do.
The Problem with the Gear is something that isn’t going to be changed, because:
- There is only one best, and that will never change, there can never be multiple “bests”.
- Condi dmg is bad designed for PvE, the dmg over time is way slower than pure dmg.

Your argument that you don’t have enough Gear variety used and only talk about PvE is somewhat strage, if you expand it to PvP and WvW, suddenly you have players who use nearly everything. I have only for WvW one Armor with full Tank, Tank healing, a variety of condi armors, zerker armors and two celestial. All sets with different Weapons, Sigills, Runes, etc.
So it isn’t that you can’t use them. Some are just designed to be used in other aspects of the game. But yes, I would never play my full tank guard in a dungeon!

Last thing: you can’t just claim meta is bad because it uses only one gear and claim that it has nothing to do with the traits, skills, and abilities. Meta only works because you have these to compensate the lack of a tank and healer. Try to play a full zerk ele and have a Guard in your group that never uses retreat or reflect, you can’t dodge forever. Meta is more than just the equipment!

The difference between ascended and exotic is ~5%!
That is not so much that you should only play ascended, my tip: Only craft the weapon, because you get 5% more dmg right away, run a few fractals and Guild missions and upgrade your trinkets and stuff, the armor is just too expensive to try something out.
I have 2 Chars ascended and the rest exotic lvl 80 armor. I have no porblems in WvW and PvE that I could blame on the equipment

I agree with most of it, this game is clearly lacking in lategame content.
But i would doubt that Mounts and Housing will change that. It would be nice to have this but this isn’t something that keeps you in the game.
I now have nearly 2000hours of playtime and I get bored as soon as I log into the game, if my friends would stop playing, I would too.
Besides from Dungeon/fractal farming, WvW zerg and the cursed shore farming there isn’t anything left for me (I hate PvP).
So what I would like is a new Dungeon or fractal, something more challenging.
I think it is the right way to improve the experience for casual players and new players, but to ignore the heavy players is just wrong.

In terms of the living story I agree. It would be nice to replay some or even get the ones I missed. But to be honest they didn’t bring that much content. For example the last LS, brought us the silverwaste, 8 Story parts with ~3 instances (wich seem pretty much, but most of them where only a few minutes long and after you know the story they provide no replay value). A new armor set and tons of AP.
But after you got the AP, you don’t need to replay the LS, there is no cool bossfight, and they don’t give you a reward after the first playthrough. So Anet never intended that we would play them multiple times after this ( at least with the same char).
And the Silverwaste is just boring after a while, there is nothing for me to get there.

But I don’t think we will get something pre expension. Anet seems to have transferd everyone to the expension, the lack of updates in the last two weeks is a good sign for this if you consider how many bugs you can find right now (this never happened in the past).

I think the worst part is, that I get the feeling that Anet has left us behind. Since mid January the only new content was the DragonBall Arena. Yeah they patched new Skins, Mail Stuff and Minis in the game, but that dosn’t affect what you can do in the game. So we will see, maybe we get something new tomorrow