Guild Wars 2

DeWolfe.2174:

So…. if so many have been complaining in WvW about Thieves, maybe the profession has in fact been a broken concept?

Yeah, by that logic the earth would really still be flat.

OP if you’re not joking, then the joke’s on you. Bloody hell. Also ban the muppets, they promote bullying of little green kids who look like frogs and I really find it offensive. Also Green Peace should be shut permanently down. They claim to help the environment, yet green of often associated with poison, sickess and disease. They may want to achieve peace through global death. Stop them before it’s too late.

Also those tin foil hats they sell everywhere, really don’t work – I want my money back!

This thread is full of cheese.

People will always complain, if nothing else, then about other people complaining.

Pants Are Dangerous.2079:

I know this topic must have been made a thousand time but I just wanted to shout it out there.

I love Guild Wars 2

I agree. Having three level 80 and all other classes above 50, I have experienced most of the game. I have played a lot of WvW, a bit of PvP and PvE mostly for gold and materials.

Best MMO I’ve played and doubt that will change any day soon.

I already bought an endless pick… and now they released a new version, so I’d need to have two to have a complete set of gathering tools. This sucks. Plus getting functionality that isn’t available elsewhere to gain a specific advantage by spending real cash is a crappy move.

Xae Isareth.1364:

^ the problem is what if I don’t like being a healer?

The fights really aren’t proper in a trinity based system to be honest, neither in the logical nor mechanical sense. If I was the enemy, I would go straight for the healer or at least wipe a few squishy DPS, not the guy in bulky metal armor which I can barely land a scratch on.

In a mechanical sense you are pigeonholed into doing this one role. resulting in simplistic fights which you only need to think of one aspect of it. I don’t care about keeping up my DPS as a tank, I don’t care about health management as a DPS, because if I am, it means the other people aren’t doing their jobs properly.

Also, because the system is there, you need to base any and all encounters on it. Because its so rigid, you end up massively restricting what you can make.

This added onto the infamous problem of sometimes waiting longer in a queue than actually playing the game, I would go as far as to say that the trinity is the plague of MMORPGs. GW2 hasn’t come up with a perfect system to replace it, but I can understand that, its the first AAA MMO I played which has tried, and personally for me, just it not being there is a great improvement already.

Yep I agree. For me MMOs with a trinity actually feels simplistic and the fights follow a rigid strategy. Boring.

Psyx.7368:

When I’m downed my instinct is to press all of the buttons as fast as I can

And there’s your problem.

Press #4 once. Wait. Get up.

Hmm how about that ICM? Anyone tried that?

http://wesslen.org/ICM/

It’s not a drastic change. You should just be able to enable it in options – it should be disabled by default. As the mod shows – nothing needs to change about the core game.

I haven’t tried the mod, so don’t know how well it works.

Ghostwolf.9863:

Gallows.4318:

Torment is easy to remove if you use use your skills in the right order.

nope.

Well, I’ll formulate further, it’s easy to remove if you put 10 points in shadow arts which is costly or play S/x, but otherwise it’s not if someone throws up additional conditions next to torment.

Yeah if you don’t want to use stealth at all, then it’s a lot harder. I use withdraw though with condition removal food. Shadow step clears a lot, but has a long CD. Sigil of generosity is brilliant though on a crit build. It’s more that torment is a nasty condition in itself, because without stealth it’s generally hard to remove specific conditions.

Withdraw could be patched to remove torment though, because I think HiS would be too good if it removed that as well. I play S/D and the only stealth I use is CnD. I do remove conditions on stealth though. We may have our strong condition removal on stealth, but at least it’s fairly balanced, since it’s a 10 point trait.

Not using stealth at all as a general principle, will limit your condition removal ability, but I don’t feel like I rely very much on stealth at all.

Press a button and a little reticule pops up on your screen. You use this for targeting and ground targeting. Then you don’t have to hold down M2.

I do have my M2 set up to sticky mode, but it still means I always have to position the mouse first to make ground targeting work. A reticule would also make fast ground targeting more natural.

The best thing is – it’s easy and simple to implement.

Moriwenne.3128:

Guild wars 2 is a game that launched back in august of 2012. What i remember thinking from back then wasn’t the glitches and bugs that all games have but the amount of content it had. The game brought tons of maps right from the start, spvp arenas, wvw and dungeons. For me, it’s quest delivery system was a treat and the gameplay was very different from usual trinity and fun.
For all of this I paid 50€.
After launch they worked on fixing bugs, changing what needed to be changed, improving here and there to make the game work better. Changes like the achievement points menu and the wallet were most welcomed.

But the content never stopped and since the beginning they added:
-Halloween’s Mad King
-Wintersday
-Fractals
-Spirit watch spvp map
-New Guild content (bounty, rush, upgrades, etc)
-Super Adventure Box 1 and 2
-Southsun Cove map
-Crab toss activity
-Dragon bash with moa racing woot
-Bazaar of the Four Winds and new aetherblade retreat dungeon
-wvw ranks
-Belcher’s Bluff activity
-Sanctum sprint activity
-Skyhammer spvp map
-Southsun survival activity
-Queen’s Jubilee (Crown pavilion, one of my favourites)
-Clockwork Chaos (scarlet invades)
-Tequatl boss
-New Twilight Arbor path
-wvw season
-Tower of nightmares instance
-Origins of madness worm and marionette bosses
-New skins, minis, armour, weapons

This provided loads of new pve and some new interest for spvp and wvw (although you clearly favour pve anet…why u no love pvp? whyyyyy?)

For all of this extra stuff I paid….0€!

Personally I like wvw. Albeit it being the same thing over and over again, grabbing the same keeps and towers, it is pvp, it is not scripted and situations are always new. I get to have small fights, medium fights, zerg fights and blobs fights and it’s all different. So I keep doing it. I do some daily spvp and it’s also fun and different every time. You get to try out builds and different characters.

Bottom line, I’ve got 2000+ hours into this game that I paid 50€ for and they keep putting out stuff. In my view, they owe me nothing so I’ll ask for nothing and will happily take whatever else they decide to add to the game.

THAT’S WHAT GW2 feels like!

Yep, I agree. I like GW2 a lot and it’s certainly been more fun for me than any mmo ever. I do think I’ve played or tried most MMO’s since Everquest.

robertul.3679:

There is food that lasts 20min or so. That’s around 8h for 25 pieces.
What if you swap back and forth between the +xxx stat after mob kill and static food to maximize effectiveness? What if you can’t decide between pve and wvw and keep going back and forth changing everything from build and gear to food?

Precisely. I often change food in WvW. Sometimes I use condition duration reduction, then I change my heal and use condition removal food… or I simply pop some power food. I don’t know if I’ve gotten 25 servings naturally but on days where I’ve played a lot of WvW it’s been up there.

Torment is easy to remove if you use use your skills in the right order.

Carpboy.7145:

I think this build is stronger because it has good vigor uptime, better sustain through reduced CD on mug and scavenger runes, and uncatchable. Im getting 2050 condi dmg before might or corruption stacks.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fYAQRAoY6YlYmiOHfy0E/5EB3DnaUo694rj1saFoJA-j0CB4iDimWAkkOQkIwZqERjZSo1gFRjVJjIqWpEzcbIamcpWIgFrBA-w

I’d just run sigil of battle on both weapon sets and then have a set of corruption weapons, so you just kill 13 mobs and then change back to your real weapon set.

The condition removal food, that removes a condition on heal is awesome when using withdraw.

So that’s withdraw, shadowstep, signet of agility, sigil of generosity and you could pick pain response.

For some RP event it may be normal.

Stacking in dungeons is absolutely lame. I just do it for the rewards. Once in a while I find a party with “no stacking” in the party description and it’s fun.

AN needs to fix content (including WvW), so stacking isn’t viable. In WvW it isn’t as bad, as it’s a lot more dynamic and we move around a lot.

But stacking is the single most stupid thing in GW2.

A friend of mine started playing recently and he wanted to do the daily. Feast was up and I told him to go to the tp and just buy some food. He replied back: " wow food is powerful".

Yeah. It may or may not serve a purpose – but it’s harmless and just a nice easy quick one to do.

Building up might stacks through lots of stealth is nice though. Easy to get the 25 stacks for a backstab with signets.

When using withdraw, the condition clearing food is awesome.

Running traveller with mu direct damage build now, but since I have might on stealth, dodge and signets – this may work for such a build too.

Warrior is fun, but nothing like the thief. It is however a wonderful alt class as it requires a lot less dedication and practice to play well. I like the range of different builds and how different you can play.

It’s also a bit fun comming up against a thief as a warrior alt, as you know quite well how a thief uses his skills and in particular stealth. It always makes me glad that not everyone played thief as their first class and a bit worried, that if everyone knew how the thief plays as you do when having played it since release – we’d have a much harder time in PvP/WvW.

Full berserker is not quite “meh” in PvE.

I don’t see any game now or in the somewhat near future that can match what I want in a MMO.

Core features:
- PvE without running back to the quest giver.
- PvP (open world mostly, so WvW covers this for me).
- No gear grind forever (exotics are easy, ascended achievable but hard, flat progression).
- Pick the look of your character, transfer stats.
- Defined classes with different play styles
- Quick to max level.

GW2 gives me all I want. I can’t see wild star (typical theme park mmo with actionish combat), ESO, EQN or any other mmo fulfilling my criteria. GW2 is actually the first game to do so. Enjoyed DAoC, but the levelling to join PvP was lame.

GW2 may not be perfect, but that doesn’t matter much, when no other game comes close to delivering what I want. It’s that simple for me. GW2 is the only game – I didn’t even like GW1 that much (just played it once in a while).

There is no such thing. He may have used several stealth abilities in a row.

Cloak and dagger, hide in shadows, blinding powder, shadow refuge, blinding tuft, hidden thief, instinctual response, descent of shadows etc.

Also several thieves can still manage permastealth.

But you say you fought him… if he attacks, he’s revealed. That’s not very permanent. Perhaps you’re confused about the whole concept of permastealth.

What you could do before it was fixed, was getting more initiative back than you used for the stealth combo. This specific issue has been fixed, but a thief can still stealth a lot – he just can’t do it permanently and run across the map invisible (alone that is).

Maugetarr.6823:

Modified yours to be closer to mine. Slightly lower power and crit damage, but higher might gain. Blind on stealth is great against both physical and condi damage since it negates the stupid channeled attack hitting thing.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fYAQNAsYVlUmKOHcy9E/5Ey2DfqC5JeGOVS1f4qA-jkCBYfERjUgSjUBBJ5RZN7RQsMsIas6aYKXER1WzERzG0oSBExyI-w

Aside: @ Jorun: Condimancers aren’t the biggest problem right now (imo), it’s the condi engineers with access to more conditions than necros plus better (or simply more) utilities such as stuns, pushes, pulls, immobilize, AoE blind, AoE chill, plus invulns, stealth, and blocks. Additionally, they have dhuumfire as a master level trait. Maybe they won’t have all of this on a single build, but they can have a large amount.

Compared to fighting a half decent engi, dhuumfire necros feel extremely balanced to me.

I see the idea behind this. Took 10 DA for the extra power and just used the venom might since I do use the elite. But after 2x stealth with your build I have more than +100 power from might. Good armor and blind on stealth is great. Cheers – I’ll try that out and test for a few days if I miss pain response.

The condition removal food and withdraw is quite nice. Didn’t really think about that. Withdraw cures immobilize, which is one of my major issues.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fYAQNAsYVlYmKOHcy9E/5Ey2DfqC5JeGOVS1f4qA-jEDBYfERjUgSjUBBJ1EK5RZN7JglhFRjVXDT5iIq2kDyaeIzG0oSBgtyI-w

Yep I can see you can rip a lot of boons with steal and sword – does your boon duration apply to boons you steal?

First I tried 30 acrobatics for Assassins Reward, but the healing really didn’t seem like much. After the initial healing from full initiative it heals 89 (according to the gw2-build site if that’s accurate) health per second with perfect timing.

But it’s certainly an interresting build and I’ve always liked the idea of a more all-round thief that can both do direct damage and a bit of condition damage.

I don’t think I quite understand your build.

+780 health
+404 healing power
+10% boon duration

-718 power
-26 armor
-14% crit chance
-61% crit damage

You have condition damage and duration, but only your SB can deliver condition damage. Your withdraw heal for only 164 than mine do with that healing power. It seems like a lot of damage to lose compared to the extra survivability from a bit more health and healing. I think my build may do more than 40% extra damage compared to yours and that’s not even taking my 13-15 might stacks into account when finishing people. I don’t see an extra 40-50% extra survivability. Am I missing something?

@Viking: I don’t understand that answer. The build is using S/D and SB :-)

I see what you’re saying about cleanse in stealth, but you don’t need to stay in stealth. Whenever you use CnD you’ll cleanse one condition as you enter stealth. No need to stay in stealth, which is the reason I decided not to go 15 in SA. But having multiple options for cleansing stealth is good. It’s easy in 2 seconds to put poison, torment, bleed and confusion on a target. My condition thief could in this time frame apply 12 bleed, 6 torment, poison and 3-8 confusion. and after those initial seconds the bleeds would build up quickly. And compared to necromancer and engineer the thief really isn’t great at stacking conditions.

If you’re hit by a codition necromancer, you have seconds to react. It’s not like conditions is a slow death. And once you cleanse – they’ll apply again.

I don’t really like lyssa, since the 25% movement bonus on traveller is wonderful. But of course signet of shadows would work with lyssa that gives precision. Cheers :-)

But traveller is 33 more power, 15% longer boon duration, +2% critical chance and +6% higher critical damage.

I’ve been running condition builds on warrior, necromancer and thief in WvW. I want to try something different. Knowing just how easy it can be to almost one shot people with conditions if they aren’t prepared, I want to take an anti-condition damage approach to this build.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fYAQNAsYVlUmKOHcy9E/JFy2DfqC5JuCOlWhbqTxVJfA-j0CBYfERjUgSjUBBJ5ZRrZPBsMsIas6aYKXDRVFD2amIa2gGVKgIWGB-w

I’ve tried to land around 2300 armor and over 2500 power with a decent amount of health – plus I want enough precision to take advantage of the sigil of generosity. I have all the condition clearing I can get and from playing this build for a bit, I can say that the sigil of generosity really is quite awesome. Transferring a huge bleed stack to the enemy is great, but it does require that you manage your condition clearing and pain response is not something you can control. Still I find it very valuable. The burst capability of the build feels ok, with the 13-15 might stacks that I can easily get from signets, venom and dodges.

To sum it up, the build I’m after is:
- Very resistant to condition damage
- Decent damage, with the ability to burst if you need to finish someone.
- Good crit rate (I feel 56% is actually a bit on the low side, but don’t know tbh).
- about 2300 armor.
- As much health as I can get without compromising much with the above.

I would also like 15 in SA to get 1 sec extra stealth, but I don’t know how valuable it really is. I’d miss out on other things.

Input welcome.

My advice is to put condition clearing as first priority in your build and then go from there. So many cheesy condition builds out there and uncontrolled condition damage is way off the charts. Spec for condition removal first.

I don’t know about celestial. I haven’t tried running full celestial, but on paper jack of all trades just seems like the build that is weak against the most other builds and strong against none.

NinjaEd.3946:

So the solution is run full condi clearing? I don’t get where the reasoning comes from, you can’t run into a fight and assume your enemy’s build, it will always differ. Against a guard or warrior (running back to their group) they’re likely heavy on defences and condi clearing is likely the least of your worries (can’t swap trait lines on the run). I want to kill them asap without them just waltzing through althought guardian probably has the hardest time trying that. Either way I don’t wana stick around long enough for more straggelers to appear, I’m in the mood to burst em.

Suddenly on the way to a camp I run into an engi who is condi spec’ed. I have moderate condi removal, heavy burst, sustainable evasion. However that’s not even half the issue, engineers are pro’s at outlasting in a fight and I have to either get a combo off immediately or limp away filled with conditions. These things get even much worse when they ambush you and you don’t have the upper hand to swap utility/elite/healing skills. It’s not a bad choice to run burst and its not a bad choice to run heavy condi removal, but you can’t have everything neatly nit. Staggelers and roamers are everywhere, there is no 1 build to deal with them w/o various problems along the way.

With the huge focus on condition damage you really only have the two options – condition damage build or anti-condition damage build. Power builds, even another thief most likely won’t kill you as easily as a specialized condition build will. You can’t build so you’re countering all builds of course. But condition builds are by far the biggest problem and if you don’t spec for it, they get a free kill when they meet you. You can just do a bit of condition removal, but to be honest even when going all out it’s not always enough.

What you want to do is to identify the biggest threath and make sure you can cope with that. It may mean you have to work a bit harder to kill some other builds, but at least you’ll know that there won’t be a huge population who can just steam roll you without effort.

I like Shortbus better… that will stick :-)

Cheers for sharing.

2190 armor and … 19k health I think.

Armor doesn’t matter much, but health helps.

Right now in WvW there are two viable builds. Condition damage or anti-condition damage.

Instead of having a focus on armor/health, try getting all the condition cleansing you can (except lyssa, since I find traveller more versatile, because you can always use something else in the utility slot). Pain response, shadows embrace, sigils of generosity, shadow step and condition duration reduction food. Then you’re set to go and you won’t miss the armor.

ElexOrieN.2130:

DPS = Warrior
Tank = Warrior/Guardian
Support = Guardian/Mesmer

We do have the trinity in this game it’s just that some people fail to realize it.

that’s not anything compared to the trinity. Those three play nothing like the trinity. Tanking can be done to some extent in the game, but gameplay is not comparable to the usual trinity of tank, healer and dps.

And to answer the question… GW2 with the trinity would be lame.

Perhaps your expectations of succes on the first, second or third attempt is the issue. It’s a challenge. Figure it out and help people at the event figure it out.

lol really? I understand. Most people actually enjoy content where they can just stack in a corner and pull while drinking tea.

FreekPalmer.2839:

Firstly, I would like to say that your game is awesome. I am really enjoying it.
I do have one issue though. In your land of Dragons, Undead creatures, magic and portals to distant lands there is a problem.
I am willing to allow magic to exisit and monsters to rise from the ground at any moment. Dragons to take over the world and even a giant cat-like creature throwing fireballs at a viking.
But this is just too far. I have been out in your wonderful world, exploring the depths of Orr, the beautiful caledon forest and even delving into the Ascalonian catacombs. But this is totally ruined by the fact when I chop down a Pine spaling I get a Hard wood log. I mean seriously?! am I supposed to believe this. Pine is a soft wood! This has really ruined my enjoyment of the game and I hope you address this issue post-haste.

Thankfully

Freekpalmer

p.s. This isn’t serious it’s just a little joke about the moaning in the forums. but if you could change pine to drop soft wood that would be great. Cheers guys and gals

That’s one of the more useful posts I’ve seen on the forums for a while. And that is no joke.

I wish they’d put the dodo-bird transform and mini morph in PvP on a 120 hour timer. They suck.

Things like those consumables should be gimmicks, nothing more.

Lol that arena net comment was funny, but chill. You’re all like little kids in school jumping up and down with gleeful joy as the teacher makes a grammatical error.

I have no idea what he meant. Perhaps just that it’s an error that they exist in their current form. Who knows and who cares. If you’re can’t see that the change is needed for the game to function better, then you’re either blind or in denial.

Condition damage is very very powerful. It can be countered however. I have a thief build, where I have shadows embrace, pain response, shadow step and use sigils of generosity. It’s a power-crit build and works very well against condition builds. It’s not that condition builds are easy though, but with this build they’re not completely OP and you have as much chance against them as you do a power build.

It’s a bit sad that you have to build so pecifically to counter condition builds that have easy stat combos (condition damage, toughness, vitality or healing power). With a condition build you have all your power in one stat and a lot of room for defensive stats. Use food for duration.

With a condition build you’ll meet a lot of players where it feels like a walk in the park. I have fought so many easy fights on my healing/condition build. You will once in a while however run into players who know that condition damage is over the top and needs to be controlled and then it’s no longer an easy fight. I meet a lot of players running condition builds, who seem lazy and from the playstyle it’s clear they are used to having this “I WIN” button with their rotation and when they suddenly see their conditions being removed and transferred to themself, they panic and play like utter pants.

I’d make different distinctions than a condition or power build.

What it really comes down to is a condition build or an anti-condition build.

Generally I find celestial gear quite bad for everything but crit damage and that in itself isn’t as important as power and precision. You’re better off mixing different stats anyway.

But hopefully this will mean that celestial gets an overall buff, so all stats including ferocity is the same, but slightly higher than they are now.

But when is the patch due?

Great walkthrough of the difference between soldiers and berserkers.

BUT I highly disagree that active defences are too important. Finally it’s not just a matter of facing off until the numbers, builds and gear works out who wins. Active defences is one of the big reasons I care to play this game in the first place.

Shadows embrace is nowhere enough to counter a condition build. Not at all.

Condition damage is out of control. Currently you can mitigate this somewhat by specializing in condition removal – but your dps will suffer.

The real issue is that you have to spec to specifically to survive condition builds. First condition builds have an easy time with stats, because they only need one offensive stat and can tage two defensive, plus food for the duration. Way too easy. On top of that, to fight against a condition build you need to specialize for it, whereas a condition build gets his toughness and vitality as part of his build for free.

That is the real imbalance.

I really want to ignore the NPC loitering around the trade post in Ebonhawke…. wow he’s persistently annoying.

It’s really sad playing dungeons with the “pros”. The fact that you just stack up in a corner and pull mobs is absolutely lame annoying and a waste of good fun.

Also join as a hammer warrior who just completed five dungeons with other free spirited souls only to have your non-optimized warrior kicked for not using a great sword.

Bah, whatever. I choose fun.

Make a build around condition removal. Take every trait, sigil and rune that mitigates conditions.

There is a bug, so it sometimes stop working. If this happends, unequip the battle weapon and equip it again. Test it on a mob, so you’re in combat. Fixes the issue.

Condition damage is already over the top and try interrupting a thref using HiS while you use perplexity runes. Dead thief. It’s so easy and condition builds certainly needs a nerf rather than a boost.