Guild Wars 2

He missed Skeletors “Myah!” part. Poor trolling.

For nearly a year I have been in a casual static guild group. In terms of skill I’d say about half of the players who usually run with us, are under the 50th percentile. This has given me a chance to notice what makes raids so difficult for a lot of the more casual end of the skill spectrum, at least as far as bosses we have cleared are concerned.

To give some examples :

(VG) An easy mode won’t help here. There are 3 common issues that result in wipes:
—-1) People get tunnel vision when DPSing the boss and miss green circles. This is the most common issue.
—-2) People get tunnel vision when DPSing the boss, and don’t notice blue circles, get teleported, and die. This is the second most common issue.
—-3) The tank doesn’t know how to tank properly. This is the least common issue, because there are only a few things you have to look out for to tank VG properly, and once you understand those, tanking VG is probably easier than being on the other side of VG.

The 3rd issue simply involves remembering a pattern, the first 2 issues however are common because there are a lot of players who seem to be unable to split their attention between 2 to 3 tasks. Namely, DPS rotation, green circles, blue circles. The only way to make this boss easy, is to basically make green circles and blue circles a non-issue, in which case, you might as well just make it a DPS golem.

(Gorseval) : The chronos and druids can carry the group. Not much to say here honestly. This is probably one of the easiest encounters if you just bring someone to clear orbs. Even our casual group was able to carry a completely new player who was properly geared. If people are wiping on this raid encounter, it’s because they “stand in the fire.” By which I mean, they don’t avoid simple floor mechanics.

(Sabetha): This has probably given our group the most gripe. The reason being, this one requires personal responsibility. A bad player is more of a liability alive than dead in this fight. The most common issues here are
—-1) People getting hit by flame wall. I still can’t understand why this happens. Unless you get kicked into it by a thug, it’s extremely easy to avoid. It’s a super simple mechanic, yet people keep falling victim to it over and over again.
—-2) People stand in cannon fire. Again, it’s extremely easy to avoid, you have more than enough time to get out of the glowing circle, yet people ignore it.
—-3) People get tunnel vision and fail to throw sapper bombs. Strangely enough people forgetting to go to cannons is almost never an issue, people throwing sapper bombs is a common issue.

Finally
(KC) – This one is super simple to explain
—-1) Most common problem, the orb pusher doesn’t know how to push orbs. This is by far the most common problem. Not DPS, but a faulty orb pusher. If you can get a good orb pusher, they can basically carry the group.
—-2) People not dodging KC’s stomp. Simple floor mechanic.
—-3) People not being able to lure statues onto KC.

My Point—-
It’s difficult to advocate an easy mode, or a tutorial mode, for a lot of these bosses when you know that 99% of the time the problem is simply people not paying attention. That’s it, that is what causes the majority of wipes. Matthias and Xera are probably the only raids that are significantly difficult at the moment. The rest can be accomplished easily if people simply payed attention to floor mechanics while DPSing, though the majority simply get tunnel vision and forget about them. So essentially, an easy mode for a lot of existing bosses would entail simply changing the bosses into pure DPS golems. None of the bosses do significant damage, they already are basically just tank and spank. The difficulty, is pretty much entirely in the floor mechanics, which they themselves are easy to manage, as long as you pay attention to them.

Abelisk.4527:

lucadiro.4519:

Pvp: nothing change.
Pve: we will see how the nerf of meteorshower Will work, to be honest seems a Pretty huge Nerf to me, but have to test.
Also I dont see if scepter fresh air will have any chance to come out since overload Nerf, especially while other classes, mostly condi ones, and thieves got buffs

Thief buffs? Their infinite dodge spam has been KILLED. Vault spam is DESTROYED after line-of-sight change. They have to face their enemy now to Vault them. They got completely butchered.

You don’t need to face them, it just prevents you from vaulting beyond obstacles.

The MS nerf will balance Eles on bosses with Large Hitboxes.

I mean even a Staff Ele with a poor rotation could hit 40k on the Large Golem, when the best rotation for any other class was about 36k max.

The issue is with FA Staff on small hit boxes. Someone with a REALLY good rotation could do 38k on the golem, but I, who consider myself in maybe the 80th percentile of raiders, could only consistently get about 32.5k. With Power Engi, I could manage 34k, with DWh I could manage 34k, with Theif I could manage about 33.5k.

So, the FA Staff rotation was in fact pretty difficult to pull off well. I suspect after the nerf I will maybe be able to pull off 30k tops, probably closer to 28k on average. I suspect that the best of the best will maybe be able to reach 34k. Which pretty much means that, Super Skilled FA Staff Ele = Above Average Thief.

I don’t think it matters that Revs have Alacrity. I can’t think of how to incorporate them into a group.

A dps group would need

Chrono (Quickness, Alacrity)
PS (Might, Banners, Empower Allies)
Druid (Spotter, Frost Spirit)
2 DPS to make the Chrono’s quickness useful and alacrity useful, otherwise the Chrono is less valuable than a 3rd DPS. The 2 DPS also need Druid for Spotter and Fury, otherwise they have to drop their own power in favor of more precision. There is no place for the Ventari in this group.

Group 2 :
Chrono (Quickness, Alacrity)
Condi PS (Might, benefits from Engi’s Condi buff)
_______: to be determined.
Condi Engi : Good DPS (if you can do the rotation) + Condi Buff
Condi Ranger : Easier rotation + Slightly higher condi damage than Engi.

So the _ there is the problem : It’s either a Druid or a Ventari :
Druid – You can do Healer Druid, or Condi Druid for low pressure fights.
—-Condi Druid Benefits from Engi buff, provides Spotter for more crits, and provides Sun Spirit for extra burning from everyone in the group.
—-Ventari would have to be a healer, since for the alacrity to be useful they would either have to coordinate with the chrono (high skill threshold) or keep the tablet up 100% of the time which leaves them little room for DPS. Assassin’s Presence wouldn’t do too much to help the condi group either.

I think the Druid is still the better option.

Ventari Healer is a nice idea, but Druid has just too much utility to be replaced in any scenario.

insanemaniac.2456:

J envy.5270:

Well engi’s has been the black sheep for years, before HoT they were in league with rangers and necros in tier of uselessness for PvE, the other 2 got a lot of love with the expansion, the engis did not(and so did thief’s).

Although i play all classes, It is sad it took them this long to buff my main class.

pre hot engi was meta
whatchu talkin bout

Pre-HoT meta for PVE was dungeon / fractal speed clears with a set meta group. I forget what it was but it was something like a Mesmer and 4 warriors.

To me, it seems like most raids are balanced around DPS.

I think it would be healthier to balance them around healers and mechanics. Get rid of the time gating and enrage timers and make it a gauntlet of surviving the mechanics while completing tasks, which is basically what Escort is. And as far as I have seen, most people have the most fun with escort. All except super hard core l33t raiders.

Maybe make enrage timers a repeatable challenge mote that gives you double loot once per week.

DeceiverX.8361:

Ging.6485:

They already killed Rev’s raid viability because of WvW.

This has already been proven as mathematically false. People seriously overreacted because something blatantly OP got nerfed into being reasonable.

Hell, if it exposes the rest of the power creep from HoT and gets it nerfed, win-win for everyone.

Raids tend to be a high resistance environment for everyone aside from the heavily experienced. It’s the only game type in GW2 where this is the case. Because of this, and because of the time investment that it requires, people will flock to the path of least resistance. This has already been seen in fractals with all Necro groups. Are they theoretically the fastest? No. But they have by far the least chance of failure.

Right now, Thieves have DPS comparable to Eles and very little to offer in terms of utility over Eles in a raid setting. If you do something to nerf that DPS to the point where taking an Ele is considered a solid upgrade then thieves will no longer be accepted in pick up groups, which is how the majority of the community raids.

As Jerus pointed out this might be a bad idea. It would mean screwing over the only viable Raid builds thieves have in order to help out a build designed around roaming in WvW. A simple switch would not suffice.

They already killed Rev’s raid viability because of WvW.

If they wanted purity of purpose. They should remove the damage from rocket boots, make the initial leap a leap finisher, the landing a blast finisher, and increase the base distance to 1200. Then after that increase the duration of the burning from the toolbelt skill and also give it a 1 second smoke field. That would make Rocket Boots useful.
——————————

They are really just screwing engineer over at every turn. It’s PvP meta was upper mid tier, a perfect location and they decided to nerf things. WTF is wrong with Anet when it concerns this class. They overbuff it and then they nerf it to hell.

Purity of purpose my kitten . Unless you intended that the purpose is to be completely useless.

I think what annoys me the most is the way they decide to nerf Engineer actually. Instead of nerfing certain numbers that may simply give the class a comparative advantage or disadvantage, they nerf features which totally destroy the synergy the class between its skills. They destroy the fun things about the class.

I have a few comps I want to try out, my problem is that few people play Condi PS and Condi Engi which are basically my solution to condi issues with my ideas.

And people who do play Condi Engi… don’t know how to play it properly.

Vaelen.5294:

fishball.7204:

NikeEU.7690:

Rising Dusk.2408:

Really all we need is for [qT] to make a Reddit thread that outright says what most of us know that Heralds are still perfectly valuable as one of the DPS options due to offensive support, great CC, and good-enough DPS. Once that happens, people will get in line, but for now all pubs really have to go on is Reddit overreaction.

You can take it from me, Revs are still quite good in raids

I trust this guy from qT more than you

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/58unld/revenant_and_raids_as_of_halloween_patch/d93l6n5/

We tested rev as a dps class in a full clear (3 wings) and it’s damage was terrible tbh. It’s on PS Warrior level without beeing half as useful. We really tried to find a spot for rev but unfortunately it’s in a very bad spot right now.

This is exactly the point. The nerf to SoI and FoN made Revenant as a whole USELESS for raids since its dps is subpar and it doesn’t bring much to the table like a PS does. Now when will ANET read these forums and decide to actually do some beta testing before ruining the game’s diversity?

It’s sad but yeah, if they plan to go the way they are then the only saving grace for Rev is if they make it’s DPS comparable to the rest. Unfortunately, that would require a pretty jarring PvE/PvP split. They really messed things up here.

Honestly, the fix I would do to this is : revert Rev boon duration to 50% (PvE only) and increase the base quickness on Signet of Inspiration to 6 seconds (12 with 100% boon duration). Raids were hardly trivial content as a whole. Only the top groups really had them on farm status. PuGs and lower guilds would have nights where they banged their heads on bosses for 3 hours, even ones they cleared before. They needlessly increased the difficulty and decreased the amount of viable comps for lower tier groups.

To tell you the truth. These changes only affect DPS check bosses.

You can do Sabetha and VG easily with no Chrono at all as long as the mechanics are done right. In fact I have pugged no Chrono VG and Sab and finished them with decent times.

The simple solution here is, lower Gorseval/KC etc… the DPS check bosses HP by about 5% or so, and everything should balance out decently.

Also I did a bit of testing with meta DPS classes under the assumption that there is no chrono and no Rev, and the highest DPS classes are actually Condi Engineer and Condi Ranger by about 2k. Quickness seems to do quite a bit more for power than it does for condi.

Dahkeus.8243:

Jerus.4350:

Kinda funny when Rev and it’s buffs is still very viable and the profession hardest hit is actually Necro. But, groups of pugs are called grumbles for a reason

Necro is still desired because they still fit so well on certain fights, even if they took a big hit overall.

Rev doesn’t really have any fight that requires or highlights its strengths.

The thing about Rev is, it can provide to the group (on small hit boxes) pretty much exactly what a DH can. Comparable utility and comparable DPS. Add to this, it also has the Boon Duration.

The thing about Boon Duration though is that, with 50% Boon Duration, Chronos could run full zerkers, 1 piece of boon duration food, and the sigil of concentration and everything was fine. With only 33% though and the nerfs to SoI, Chronos now have to run some boon duration gear, and with the crappy DPS Chronos do anyway, you might as well just go 100% self sustain boon duration and replace the Rev with a Thief or Ele for the extra damage.

Rev doesn’t suck, it’s in a difficult place since it’s place in raids was completely reliant on Chronos. The nerf to Chrono however forced an adjustment that doesn’t require Rev, so Rev has to be on the sidelines.

As far as Necro goes, I don’t understand why they nerfed it the way they did. It changes nothing. They lowered a Necro’s personal DPS a little, but Necro’s were never taken for their personal DPS. They were taken because of how Epi works, and because of their survivability and utility… things that are completely in tact. You have made fights slightly longer by nerfing Necro, but nothing changed over all.

ShadowLordX.5148:

Ging.6485:

ShadowLordX.5148:

Druid and Necro comp honestly isn’t particularly fast, and its even worse now post-patch. It is however exceptionally easy, and many people would rather have a comp that can easily complete all content even if it takes half of forever, than a comp that requires more personal skill of each group member and completes it far faster.

It is fast though, comparatively.

People who aren’t Necros go down, extremely easily, in a lot of Fractal events. They also have to worry about dodging and keeping themselves healed up. They also don’t have the luxury of doing damage from range.

Fractal bosses though, have fairly low HP. If Necros can epi bounce, that HP drops fast without the Necro having to worry about any of the same things the other classes have to. And as far as PS warrior goes, Necros can keep Might up decently by all running blood is power.

Druids used to be great, because they could heal minions which resulted in a lot more DPS. Since that isn’t the case anymore though, they might not be sought after as much.

Yeh except if you know what you’re doing none of that is relevant. Most fractal bosses are fairly easy to melee and die quickly to power comps. While there are some bosses that are too punishing to melee full uptime the optimal comp definitely isn’t 5 necros.

Yes for the average pug a 45 minute run might be fast because in other comps theyd wipe constantly and lose time that way. But better comps can do significantly faster (sub 30 minute) full clears, the only advantage of necro comp is it’s braindead easy and hard to die with.

Okay well let me ask you this. Assume that you have to pug a fractal. Which would you choose, waiting for a perfect comp with players who have all the experience needed to do a super fast run… Or do you pug all necroes, which are a dime a dozen these days.

ShadowLordX.5148:

Druid and Necro comp honestly isn’t particularly fast, and its even worse now post-patch. It is however exceptionally easy, and many people would rather have a comp that can easily complete all content even if it takes half of forever, than a comp that requires more personal skill of each group member and completes it far faster.

It is fast though, comparatively.

People who aren’t Necros go down, extremely easily, in a lot of Fractal events. They also have to worry about dodging and keeping themselves healed up. They also don’t have the luxury of doing damage from range.

Fractal bosses though, have fairly low HP. If Necros can epi bounce, that HP drops fast without the Necro having to worry about any of the same things the other classes have to. And as far as PS warrior goes, Necros can keep Might up decently by all running blood is power.

Druids used to be great, because they could heal minions which resulted in a lot more DPS. Since that isn’t the case anymore though, they might not be sought after as much.

Having done PuG VGs with engineers while I myself was playing something else, I have to tell you, a lot of Engineer players give the class a bad name. The reason being that they just don’t have the attention span capable of controlling seekers in between rotations. That is what makes Engi really shine during VG, the ability to hinder and move seekers as needed, yet most from what I have noticed are not capable of doing this.

When groups see that someone is incapable of doing their most important job, well then they would rather take someone else, like a Necromancer who can just shroud through seekers.

So any idea what inspired this brilliant idea?

I’m not too aware of the WvW or PvP issues with druids aside that PvP Druids are now what Scrappers used to be.

However, as far as the PvE meta goes, there were 3 viable Druid specs: Power, Condi, and Full Healing. Newer groups still benefited from the Full Healing Magi druid, while more experienced ones could use Power and Condi druids on a case by case basis. Lots of diversity there. In my mind right now, I am simply perceiving this as a threat that will eliminate the viability of Power and Condi druids in raids.

Is there something else I should be understand here? Something broken in the game that warrants this?

Tanking in GW2 is all about being able to position a boss properly.

Bosses follow the person with the highest toughness.

So it’s about, what class loses the usefulness the least while having to equip toughness gear, and that is Chronomancer.

My main was originally engineer, now I really am a Jack of All Trades in a sense since I play whatever class I need to.

There are two raid viable engineer specs from my experience : Condi P/P or Power Bombs + S/D. They both provide about the same damage.

Condi P/P:
+ Lots of Soft CCs (immob, chill, cripple, blind)
- Slow hard CCs
- Requires Stationary Target
- Difficult Rotation

Power Bombs + S/D:
+ Good Hard CCs (Rifle 4, Launch Battering Ram, Personal Battering Ram, Turret Explosion)
+ Mobile Damage
- Slightly weaker soft CCs than condi variation due to lower condi duration.

The only classes I would say optimal as tanks are Chronomancers and Necros. Chronomancers because a Chrono is pretty much exclusively a quickness bot and their damage output is negligible. Necros, because they don’t really rely on power and precision as much as they do Condi Damage and Duration, meaning they could replace a few viper pieces with some trailblazers for toughness and not lose any significant condi damage.

That said, the only reason to take an ele over a power engi on small targets is because of rebound. The damage they provide is pretty much the same and power engi has more CC.

The reasons to take a Necro over a Condi Engi in raids are 1. Necro’s have stupid survivability and an easy as hell rotation 2. Two Necros epi bouncing is more damage than 2 Engineers. If Epi ever got nerfed, Engineers as they are now would completely outclass necros in terms of damage.

Practically, I have unrealistically had

36k dps against a Large Golem doing Explosions(1,2,2), Firearms(3,1,2), Tools(1,3,2). with Bombs, Mine field, Rifle turret. Even if I do siege rounds and mix in orbital strike, it’s a DPS loss vs just spamming bombs with shrapnel. Siege Rounds isn’t a dps trait.

34k dps againt normal golem using the same setup. 33k with battering ram instead of minefield.

32k if I do grenades instead of bombs, battering ram, and rifle turret, and stay at range.

Simply speaking, if you can keep up a lot of conditions on a boss, DPS engi is on par with Daredevil and Tempest. The problem is that with every condition not on the boss you lost 2% damage.

So this a thread where you would suggest some Engi fixes that could increase quality of life without having to implement something new. I would think that these would be the most likely to be listened to, and there is one specific one I want to happen but I am sure that there are others that have some other things they would like to be tweaked so I opened this thread with that in mind.

So the adjustment that I want.

Streamlined Kits
I would like this to be slightly more useful as far as the attack portion is concerned. There is one ability from it that I love to use, but would love even more if the range on it was increased : Magnetic Bomb

I’d like the range on the to be comparable to the Guardian GS #5 and Mesmer Focus #4. That is a 600 range pull. After playing Engi for so long, I have everything committed to muscle memory. It’s one of the few classes in the game where it’s pretty much a requirement to be good at it. I can control what streamlined kit ability I want to use and when, and I love magnetic bomb… the only thing is that it’s difficult to get it just in the right place to pull all the enemies I’d like.

This will hardly affect Engi potency in PvP/WvW, nor will it make Guardian or Mesmer any less useful considering that it takes a bit more focus to use (not inadvertently switching to the wrong kit), and but most importantly it will make my life easier in fractals… It will also make Engi a bit more desired in Sabetha / Gorseval for pulling adds.

PANIC ITS WILL.2748:

Hi all. Im gearing up for high level fractals and heard that condi gear/ builds are the way to go. Keeping that in mind, which stat is the ideal one for running these high end fractals. Would it be Viper’s for the extra Power & precision or Trailblazers of the extra Vitality & Toughness?

http://qtfy.enjin.com/builds

That should help you out. Viper is the way to go though, and they have builds that show what you need to more or less cap every condi class on relevant condi duration.

For example, Necro only needs 60% (with food and utility), Engi needs 67%, while Druid needs as close to 100% as you can get do to not having any condi duration traits.

Here is the gear setup for my necro. http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRAQJArIWMGqYI1BfwGE9zBwBA-TFSAQBA4BAEQ9AhU5QHOBARU9HbqEkh7PgNlckCAilVA-w There is no build in there perse as I was just trying to see what I could do without needing viper accessories.

PANIC ITS WILL.2748:

Hi all. Im gearing up for high level fractals and heard that condi gear/ builds are the way to go. Keeping that in mind, which stat is the ideal one for running these high end fractals. Would it be Viper’s for the extra Power & precision or Trailblazers of the extra Vitality & Toughness?

http://qtfy.enjin.com/builds

That should help you out. Viper is the way to go though, and they have builds that show what you need to more or less cap every condi class on relevant condi duration.

For example, Necro only needs 60% (with food and utility), Engi needs 67%, while Druid needs as close to 100% as you can get due to not having any condi duration traits.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Ging.6485:

Update :

Just got an ascended Weapon Box from a t1 (initiate) chest today. A few days ago I got an armor chest from a t2. However for the months before this, I wasn’t getting anything from t1 or t2. So if anything I think they have improved the chance of ascended chests.

That’s not anything close to evidence that the rate has changed. I mean, it’s nice that your argument is that it’s improved whereas most people only mention the rate if they think it’s gone down. But you really need a lot more data. The combined drop rate from Adept & Initiate chests is less than half of that for expert alone and less than a third of the Master’s. Getting a single lucky drop from adept/initiate is going to change our perception of the rate, unless there’s a lot more than a month or three of data.

My point was, I thought it was impossible before. I thought that t1’s and t2’s didn’t drop ascended boxes at all.

To me, finding out that it isn’t 0% was a big deal.

Update :

Just got an ascended Weapon Box from a t1 (initiate) chest today. A few days ago I got an armor chest from a t2. However for the months before this, I wasn’t getting anything from t1 or t2. So if anything I think they have improved the chance of ascended chests.

Daddicus.6128:

Ging.6485:

However, Necros make them a mindless endeavor.

While I agree with the rest of your post, I wouldn’t call necros mindless. It’s certainly possible to play them poorly and screw the party.

There’s a difference between a decently-played necro and a poorly-played one. Aetherblade especially shows up the difference. They’re harder to kill, but the bad ones still go down eventually.

It’s probably because I have mained Engi for the entirety of me GW2 career, but in comparison Necroes are REALLY easy to play.

Necro is really really easy to play in fractals. It’s as simple as that. They have all the tools necessary to complete every fractal with minimal effort.

I main Engi, and while I can definitely out damage a Necro, I also get downed much more as a Condi Engi. In Uncategorized, as Condi Engi I have trouble with the harpies. They attack far too fast for blind to be useful against them and my reflects are either really short duration or really long cooldown. Necro can just stand behind minions if all else fails. Engi has a hard time doing the puke room in Thaumanova compared to Necro, plus the Anomaly ends up with you just running around and spamming grenades because of the highly increased rate of floor drops during the later phases.

Fractals can be done with other classes of course, any combination. However, Necros make them a mindless endeavor.

DGraves.3720:

Too many buttons just to get off an attack. One-key combat will trash two key really quickly. This and you can’t see the cooldowns since the toolbelt uses one slot for the graphic. Basically you’re fighting both blind and complicated.

If you want to add depth start by trying to remove it. If nades are spammable ask why then deconstruct from their. Maybe the answer isn’t to make them more complex but to diversify value by simply changing kit interactions.

I.E. “Explosives Expert: While both grenades and bombs are equipped in your utilities Shrapnel is improved to 20% chance to cause bleeding for 14s.”

“Chemistry Mastery: While Elixer Gun and Flamethrower are in your utilities Juggernaut now works with Elixer Gun and Flamethrower gains a chance to cause vulnerability.”

Easy peasy. Reward combinations and synergies rather than reinvent the wheel.

It was only a first draft but it was meant to be simpler not more complex.

By which I mean, arming a grenade would be equal to setting your tool kit skill to a specific attack until you change it.

Also by cooldown I meant that, as long as your toolbelt skill is on cooldown, your arm grenade skills would be too.

So essentially if you arm a flashbang, your toolbelt skill would be a flashbang until you change it. If you use it, the toolbelt skill would go to a 15 second countdown, as would your grenade kit.

Pride.1734:

100% disagreed. While PvE players may have trouble playing piano while dealing with boss mechanics this would utterly destroy engi gameplay in PvP/WvW. Kit playstyle is integral to engi like symbols are to guardians.

I don’t think the problem is that its being super hard to play, heck thats kinda what you sign up for with engi. The issue is that it doesn’t offer anything for the PvE group. Give us a trait that does something people want like grace of the land and bam engi is wanted again. Or give us some kind of utility skill other than kits thats worth bringing in a group scenario. People were running slick shoes just fine before it got decimated.

How would changing kits destroy Engi in PvP? They are barely used in PvP as it is. Grenades aren’t at all with all the projectile hate. Unless you are talking about some super niche builds that are okay against some noobs playing some classes, pretty much everyone runs Power Scrapper which only utilizes Elixir Gun.

Although I do agree that my idea isn’t fully worked out. However, I would like to see kits reworked a little to add more utility to them and drop damage, and to move that damage over to core weapons so that Engi doesn’t have to require so much effort just to meet the rewards of other classes.

It seems to be extremely rare, but ascended boxes drop from T2 boxes as well.

I was surprised. I had gotten like 20 ascended boxes over the past howmany ever months from t3’s and t4’s , but never from a t2. Yesterday, I got ascended shoulders from a t2.

ChasingTheDragon.1534:

So I was just wondering, what profession/class would give me the best chance of getting into raids / dungeons etc. ?
I’m thinking doing a chronomancer as they seem to be in demand but I dont know if thats true and if not then whats the best profession/class for me to go with to have a good chance of getting in to raids / dungeons?

Every raid generally takes 1 Chrono, 1 Rev, 2 PS Warriors, 1 or 2 Druids, and then fills the rest of the spots with a combination of Elementalists and Necros depending on the encounter.

Your best bet would probably be a PS Warrior or Elementalist, statistically speaking.

Simple answer :

Revenant : http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Herald_-_DPS/Support

This is by far the easiest class to play in raids from my experience. High survivability, easy rotation, high damage. The problem is though, raids pretty much only require one.

The rotation is easy to explain too.

Keep up facet of nature, use facet of elements on cooldown. Spam sword 1, use sword 2 on cooldown. Keep up other facets as needed for Fury, Regen, Protection.

For breakbars, use Axe 5, and then Staff 5.

That’s pretty much it.

Second would be:

PS Warrior :

This is a little harder to play than Revenant, but still really easy. Raids usually take two of these. Your goal is to keep might up. Seeing as Rev’s and Warriors can share ascended gear, I’d recommend making both if you can.

Next is :

Condi Necro : This takes a bit more skill because you usually have to take up some more complicated responsibilities. You have to time epidemics, kite mobs, run green circle in VG. It’s still 3rd easiest though.

…

Finally are Chrono, Elementalist, and Druid. The rotations and responsibilities of these classes make them somewhat stressful to play. Especially Elementalist in my opinion. Now that D/Wh has been nerfed, you need to use staff. The problem with staff is though that even though it’s long ranged, in order to get all the damage you need out of it, you are required to stay stationary. Combine that with the low survivability of the Ele, and you have a class that’s difficult to play.

The thing about meta builds is there are usually 3 components to Raids.

Doing Damage, CCing Breakbars, Performing Mechanics correctly.
There is an optimal way of doing these things. This optimal way, the metal build, was discovered by certain people after long periods of practice. So as the raids don’t become easy or trivial, they seem to in fact be balanced around the meta builds.

The way to fix this is basically … The new Swampland. Bloomhunger has low HP and no timer making DPS inconsequential, on the other hand he does super high damage, that while avoidable, requires attention to your surroundings and skills. He also has phases of stationary high damage that can either be dealt with by utilizing all ranged players, or by breaking the bar. Bloomhunger is utilizing raid mechanics without the pressures of raid timers or requiring a meta build… yet there are tons of people that still complain about the encounter.

The only thing that I would change about Bloomhunger, is to force people to CC him. Make him take reduced damage during the CC phase, and also wipe the group if they don’t CC him fast enough (within 15 seconds let’s say).

However, even that would not be enough to quell everyone’s complaints. Which means that, it is almost impossible for Anet to make a challenging raid encounter. Because people complaining about a moderately challenging fight such as new Swampland, basically boils down to people complaining about challenge as a whole.

One of the problems with Engineer and also one of its defining features is the ability to use Kits. Basically you can equip up to 6 weapons at a time. The problem is that with an MMO you have to strive to make every class be as rewarding as every other class, however with Engineer as it is, that means basically getting just as much reward as any other class but it requiring a much greater investment of skill.

So I had an idea that instead of being extra weapons, Kits should be utilities that can be changed on the fly, and base weapons should be buffed.

One example I thought of was with the Grenade Kit. Instead of simply switching to the grenade kit and spamming all the grenades on cooldown. Why not make the grenade kit have super powerful toolbelt abilities but the use of the grenade kit itself would be to switch among them. Also the toolbelt skill would have an internal cooldown, so even if you switched to a new grenade, you’d have to wait until the last one came off cooldown to use it.

For example :

1 : Arm Grenade: Grenade Barrage : (1/2) This would remain much the same, except that its cooldown would be reduced, it would be a power pressure skill.

2 : Arm Frag: Frag Barrage : (1/2) Throw 6 Frag grenades : 5 targets : Low damage : Each frag grenade applies 6 seconds of Bleed and 6 seconds of Torment. This would primarily be a condi damage grenade. 10 second cooldown.

3 : Arm Flashbang : Throw Flashbang : (1/2)Throw a flashbang at your feet. Stunbreak. 1/2 second daze, 3 seconds of blind, 3 seconds of weakness. 15 second cooldown. This would be a stunbreak used for PvP duel situations.

4 : Arm Gasbang : Chuck Gasbang : (1/2) Throw the gas grenade to a target area, makes opponents in the area choke on the gas. Radius 240. Poison Field. Duration 6 seconds. Pulses 3, Pulse Interval 2 seconds. 1 second of Blind, 1 second of Weakness, 1 second of Poison. Cooldown 20 seconds. This would be an area denial skill.

5 : Arm Frostbang : Chuck Frostbang : (1/2) Chuck a grenade into an area causing the ground to freeze over and targets standing in the area to trip. Knockdown 2 seconds, Chill 6 seconds. Cooldown 20 seconds. I mainly came up with this as a solution to break bar, + kiting mobs.

Grenadier : Reduces Cooldown on Grenades by 20%, Reduces activation time on grenades from 1/2 to 1/4.

Shrapnel : Increases condition duration caused by explosives by 33%. Explosions now apply 5 seconds of cripple.

Thermobaric Detonation : Increases Damage from explosions by 20%. All explosions are now 20% chance Blast Finishers.

The way it would work is, you switch into the grenade kit, use an arm skill to set your toolbelt skill. The toolbelt skill would be the grenade throw. The toolbelt skill would have an internal cooldown. So if you use Chuck Frostbang for example, it would put the toolbelt skill at a 20 second cooldown. You can still Arm a different grenade during this time, but you wouldn’t be able to use it until Frostbang’s 20 second cooldown is gone.

Basically what this would make Grenade kit is a kit of hotswap utilities instead of a weapon on it’s own. Along with this though, I would also suggest buffing core weapons.

Although I haven’t worked out the exact idea. One example I thought of was, why not make pistol 1 faster and have it be a 100% projectile finisher. Then have bombs be slightly weaker but leave larger and longer combo fields.

Ultra Magnus X.3078:

I quit after playing this game since the very beginning in GW1 I do not like the direction the game developers keep taking. The difficulty in the fractals is a small part to a whole in regards to the things I didn’t like changed. Ill keep this short to make the point clear, any game that forces you to give away your life in order to do well in it… Its not worth it. The last thing I enjoyed doing in this game was fractals and they took it from me by making it like a raid… So goodbye Arena net you shall not have any more of my money…

Stop being a drama queen. I have consistently cleared t4 swamp and snowblind since the change with at max 2 tries. In PUGs. The encounters are not like raids, they have slightly more advanced mechanics, that require you to solve a simple puzzle instead of just standing still and dpsing, and that is it. There is no DPS check like there is in raids, there is no enrage timer, you have all the time in the world.

The only part I have seen groups have a problem with is getting the wisps in Swampland in the second to last phase, but this is because people are conditioned to go through these things without talking at all. If everyone picks a direction, it’s really easy.

From what I have noticed,

Staff / dagger dagger offer about the same amount of damage. Staff is more versatile but dagger dagger has a simpler DPS rotation.

Sword/Dagger and Sword/Pistol are things I would only use in specific situations.
Sword/Dagger when you need boonstrip.
Sword/Pistol when you need a reliable dodge and blinds.

Talindra.4958:

I joined training raids a lot with intention to help. last week the team has issues with toughness too. and most people join training team with no knowledge what is raids about. I don’t know perhaps in the LFG system interface, there should be a warning pop up to inform players, they should do extensive research and study on each boss raid mechanics before trying to join the game. because it isn’t about failing, its about people not caring about putting effort into the game and with raids, if the team isn’t exp, one person can make the team struggle a lot a lot.

It doesn’t really even have to be extensive research. Checking a Dulfy guide, looking up a build on metabattle.com, watching a video of the fight to get an idea about what to expect. That is all I really ask for. It can take about 15 minutes.

Basically, I am asking potential students to just take a glance at some prerequisites before joining the class.

Once they learn how to do the fight adequately with a proven formula, they can experiment or go join EXP groups (by lying about insights if necessary). I am just placing this here, because it will save EVERYONE time and stress learning the fight. The biggest problem I just happened to have is people using toughness gear who don’t have to.

The chance of getting shrapnel to proc on 300 consecutive grenades is 0.67201^-249.
or 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
000000000000000000000000000067201%

Vinceman.4572:

Ging.6485:

Theoretically 2 necros should be able to do Swamp. Fleshworm during the wisp phase should allow you to travel fast enough to do 2 wisps each.

Just play a necro, and save another spot for another necro. Then carry the rest of the group.

Practically you don’t even need flesh worm. I carried 2 wisps on my own only with war horn 5 (speed), and shroud 2 (dashing a bit forward) whenever it was up. Actually it’s pretty pretty easy if you look at the percental hp of bloom and start to position near your first wisp. I recommend 28-27% because the last 2-3% are going down by conditions.

Well there you go, the rest of the fight should be trivial with epi and minions.

Theoretically 2 necros should be able to do Swamp. Fleshworm during the wisp phase should allow you to travel fast enough to do 2 wisps each.

Just play a necro, and save another spot for another necro. Then carry the rest of the group.

I have a solution for everyone.

People who find t4 fractals too hard, play the meta condi necro. It’s rediculously easy. Hell if that is too hard for you, use Dire gear instead of viper. It’ll take a century, but I assure you, you won’t die.

People who have half a brain, enjoy the game.

The problem is that unlike dungeon and fractal encounters where you can mess up as much as you want but you will pretty much be guaranteed to complete the encounter within an hour or two at the most, raids have people fail on a boss for 10+ hours with an unexperienced group.

When people say training run, its a run that trains you to be part of what has been estanlished as the easiest way to complete an encounter. That requires you to have a certain composition of builds and classes. In fractals not running a certain comp means maybe a few extra minutes doing the fractal. With a raid, not running a certain comp means not finishing any encounters at all and just wasting time.

Training runs are there to teach you how to use the right tools in the right ways to solve the raid puzzles. This prepares you for exp runs, which are for people who want to be able to finish raids quickly.

The thing about raids is, they have a pretty high skill requirement in comparison to the rest of the game.

What you have though with some new players looking into raiding is that they neither have a build that fills a certain role optimally, nor the skill/knowledge to fill that role.

Acquiring the Skill and Knowledge is what the training runs are for. However, without a good build, and I am talking about all exotics as acceptable here (just the right ones), you are dually handicapped. You are basically stepping into college level math prepared for middle school English.

The gear and the build though is easy enough to research and get before hand. It saves everyone a lot of trouble and will allow each and every player to get more mileage for their time.

That’s why as a courtesy to everyone I ask that new players looking into raids at least do some research about what type of build/gear they should use and an idea of what the encounter entails. That way you can focus on earning some useful experience.

“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” – Isaac Newton

Xhaos.1930:

Someone told me that thiefs are bad in level fractals.
Is he right ?

Not exactly. There are many fractals that a thief could fare very well in, even optimally. For example the final boss of the Chaos fractal is optimal for daredevils. They can provide super high dps while dodging his crippling attack without having a damage loss.

There are other encounters though, such as Mai Trin or the Underground Facility fractal or the Thaumanova Anomaly that are much much easier for classes that have good ranged options. Thief ranged options are quite mediocre.

Basically though, Condies/Ranged classes make pretty much every fractal about 10x easier than doing it with melee.

Jerus.4350:

Ok, that makes a lot more sense.

But, at the same time, as someone who will do 1-3 t4 clears a day, most of which are in PUGs. I just don’t see much more than “lvl XX” or “dailies” posted. I did see ‘4nec+druid meta’ once, but in general I don’t see much in terms of demands. I’m guessing EU is different then?

t4 fractals are daily endeavors with a high chance of success where you usually expect only about a 15 minute difference between running one perfectly and running one decently. People generally don’t nitpick about them. They may nitpick about Swamp or Mai Trin though since those have a relatively high chance of failure.

Zhaid Zhem.6508:

Jerus.4350:

I’m a little confused by this back and forth. Is someone suggesting that you can’t play whatever you want in fractals? Because, you can, no skill or family of skills is required. You don’t actually need blinds, you don’t need heals or condi damage, or anything. There are plenty of ways to do fractals and that includes the new ones.

Fractals, dungeons, nor raid require particular skills/classes, other players make you feel you need.

All the old meta for dungeons and fractals, like 4 war 1 mes, 2 ele + destack thief … they were not needed, but I think we all had the frustration of a kick or ragequitting players, hours of research for a pug and stupid chat commentaries because the mass of players only wanted “meta” and you were the one class to many or an engie, a necro …
I feel the same for raid, they are few able to adapt to different compo. And again theses day I have read some funny things on fractal LFG for T4 chaos or bloom.

Fractals you can have pretty much anything. Sure, certain classes/builds make things easier, but the content itself is able to be completed with just about any class/build.

Raids are a bit different. There are alternative compositions you can use, however, they are pretty limited as raids have somewhat strict requirements on what it takes to achieve a victory.

With VG there are a few primary requirements :

1. You need a way to control the boss. (1 player to tank who can reliably stay alive and move the boss in an efficient manner)

2. You need a way to strip boons to defeat the blue guardian.

3. You need a way to deal condition damage to defeat the red guardian.

4. You need to be able to either kill the boss within the allotted time, or enough healing / survivability to be able to continue fighting the boss after he is enraged and until he is dead.

Gorseval steps that up since Gorseval literally has DPS checkpoints that if you don’t meed them it’s an instant wipe.

I ended up heading a practice raid for VG yesterday, that I had just intended to join to help. However, it turned out I was the only one of any experience there. I wanted to try out a new class, but ended up Chronotanking.

There is one thing that I would like anyone who wants to learn raiding to do first though because this was our biggest problem.

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, either research the raiding meta build, or at least have a build that does not use gear with toughness on it. It’s impossible to control the fight when you have people running around in 2000+ toughness.

The mechanics of the fight can be worked on and taught rather simply, but being in a poor build, especially in one that is filled with useless stats, is a huge liability to the success of the encounter. This isn’t elitism, this is groundwork, the very minimum that has been expected for dungeons, much less raids, since anyone had any semblance of how things worked for this game.

tl;dr – Toughness and Vitality are for PvP / WvW. You do not need them in PvE. Try to avoid them for PvE content, especially raids.

Fractals aren’t raids. Fractal bosses have no enrage timer… It’s not a DPS race, at all.

You just have to learn the simple mechanics, that’s it. Raids require awareness + good skill rotation. Fractals just require awareness.

The complaint is almost saying : “I just want free loot. Thank you.”

iczek.9628:

Ging.6485:

The problem is, that people don’t know how to play matador with Bloomhunger. That’s it.

In every group I have been in, I have never gone down, yet I have seen at least 3 other people constantly down, simply because they don’t step out of the way/ dodge out of the way of Bloomhunger’s very obvious attacks. The only challenging thing about the fight is that if you don’t have a stun break, if Bloomhunger manages to knock you down, it pretty much is able to combo you until you are completely downed.

However, that can be completely avoided, by simply dodging.

I personally think that new Snowblind is more challenging because of how fast the Shaman attacks during the last phase. He focuses on one player and with his rate of attack, unless you have the other 4 constantly picking you up, you really can’t avoid his onslaught.

This has been my exact experience. I really do enjoy the new Swamp. I dodge his attacks, it’s easy by going range. On my fire ele it’s not problem. But then I see melee and even range players going down. Melee players go down because of his fist pounding. Both melee and range go down because they don’t dodge his stampede.

Then I am left alone so I leave to get ooc. Everyone is back up and we give it another go. And guess what? It happens all over again, two more times. After three attempts and I am the last one alive I leave. This is from a T1 thru T3 experience.

And then I get a group that actually knows what to do and we complete the run in one go.

To comment about Snowblind, I agree the final boss when he is a cat is nasty. He eats my fire ele up. I can most of the time get away from his attacks but being the squishy I am, I do go down from time to time.

I did try it on a thief once, and I will admit it is harder to be of use during the boss fight one melee than it is on range. If you have a concentrated effort you can break his bar before he starts his aoe attack, but when most people are ranged they won’t bother.
That said he does have fairly low HP, and thief mobility can do the wisps during the second to last phase very quickly.

Xyonon.3987:

I agree with DGraves. 15% chance on Shrapnel is an individual event occuring 3 times. If you throw 100 times a grenade auto attack (3 nades each), it would be the same as if you’d throw 100 times a solo grenade with 45% chance to proc Shrapnel.

---

Grenades have a 1s cast time, not 0.5 as mentioned ingame. Someone mentioned it somewhere :P So don’t get confused by ingame cast times – they are almost ALL wrong.

I ran a test on Excel with a random number generator. 3 random numbers between 1 and 100, result on average with at least 1 less than 16, about 39 times out of 100.

With a sample space of 100, it fluctuate between 26 and 47.

With a sample space of 1000, it’s 370 and 400.