Guild Wars 2

400 Cooking 400 Huntsman here.

Glad I got my cooking to 400 before the patches, but only because I’m lazy – it was by far the easiest thing I’ve done craftwise. Buying mats for karma made it very easy to work with a spreadsheet from google and just plow through the many discoveries, gaining a ton of EXP in the first few days since the launch. Moreover, my guildies who were levelling with me didnt not need their food mats and traded me for my extra mats, like cloth. In short, I think I had 400 cooking a soon as I was able to farm the areas with the necessary mats. It gave too much exp to me for no reason, too fast – I was 80 and still in the lvl 60-70 areas of the story. Cooking needed the patch.

Huntsman feels right to me in terms of difficulty. There were times I had to go back and farm animals for blue mats, you know, like a huntsman… This felt appropriate and I never had to farm more than an hours worth of blue mats to get to the next tier (it was the 8 per item that always slowed me down). Eventually I made my way to 400, but it happened about a week after I hit 80. I had just enough 400 mats to craft one exotic rifle, and I did – I could have sold it, but I decided to use it since the valuation wasnt much higher than the mats themselves.

That is to say, the profit simply wasnt there. I can’t see myself making money off crafting gear for others, when the margins are mere silvers and eventually everyone can craft the gear themselves. Cooking will get you no money endgame – all the finished products outside the trays of food and the magic find food sell for coppers. Ill be cooking to use the buffs myself and crafting my own gear, and that, it seems, will be that.

TL;DR Cooking needed the nerf – Huntsman felt like a hunting man – neither profession pays out at 400

This thred’ll probably get moved, but here’s a great tip:

Make use of the first ten points of tools to grab the 5s of swiftness when you put on a kit. Then no matter which kit you focus on (flamethower, nades, bombs, or e-gun) you’ll always be able to keep swiftness up by switching back and forth between kit and no kit. This lets you move around the world much faster, at all times, without forcing you to take elixir b get lucky on elixir h.

Ah, thanks for the more accurate math re the toughness issue – math never was my strong point. The conclusions we can draw from your analysis are useful and makes me consider condition damage more and more.

Condition damage could play into your builds as a form of “armor penetration” since effects like poison, bleed, and burn do damage that is not mitigated by your toughness stat. To counter condition damage builds (most of which are damage over time), you would want Vitality and healing power. IIRC there is a boon/buff/consumable or something that will decrease condition duration on your character (not to be confused with the increased condition duration traits for your skills).

Basically means that survivability will depend on a balance between ones armor and their ability to remove negative conditions. I know the engineer has a potion that converts conditions into boons – this was a lifesaver in the Cursed shore where a lot of bosses and mobs do poison or bleed damage. I think every character should reserve a slot for either a cleanse skill or stun-break skill (and switch between the two according to what they are fighting!)

Fact: press O to buy cooking mats.

That is all….srsly the most expensive mats are the Omnomberrys for max lvl magic find meals. and they are still less than 2s. Vanilla sells for coppers – you probably pay more for the 10 stacks of regular crafting mats you get at the merchant (like jugs of water)

An easy test would be reset your traits and locate a typical mob – say the neutral fireflys in most areas – and kill one with auto-attks and no traits, then another one after putting only 30 points into your power tree for the 300 power (dont take any of the traits that increase damage, you just want the 300 power). In theory, your attacks should average an additional 300 dmg – if not, then assume a different formula is used.

Its hard with no training dummies or visible armor stats on mobs. Id like to see some dummies in Lions Arch

The power attribute does scale the same for all weapon/slot skills, probably with some specific excepetions where the nature of the skill would taken into consideration.

For example, the engineers grenade kit is effected by a lot of traits dealing with explosion damage and crit effects. The primary attack in the kit throws two grenades which explode for AOE dmg. You can talent this kit to throw a third grenade on each attack – each grenade is effected by the power stat, giving the grenade primary skill a 50% damage boost.

So, by that logic, the more power you have, the more damage your AOE skills will do. AOE builds are exceptional for events and farming groups of mobs for mats, but typically lack the CC and DoT effects that the stronger, single-target skills can have. There are few AOE roots, mostly slows and this can leave glass-cannon type builds in a bad spot.

Look for traits that let your single target shots pierce and you get the best of everything (the ranger and engineer both get ranged pierce talents, probably more classes too). I use piercing pistols on my engineer with a crit build to reliably AOE crit large groups with single target attacks that also apply bleeds and some other effects.

Remember that power can only go so far – the biggest numbers will only ever be reached when you crit, so dont neglect crit chance/crit dmg as a viable, if less reliable, option. Swiftness+fury buffs are a deadly combo.

I think a few people have alluded to it – its not the difficulty of the dungoens, since challenge is a good thing for organized groups, but the reward or lackthereof that makes them offputting. Aside from being nearly impossible to PUG, the dungeons all require multiple runs to farm tokens needed to by gear that provides no stat advantages whatsoever over the top crafting gear. Worse, the weapons from the first 3 dungoens aren’t even lvl 80 – you’d be getting them for looks and looks alone.

Most people right now need to build gold reserves, not waste time and repair money with difficult instances. There is no need to do them at all, outside of completion, since walking around doing hearts, gathering mats, and crafting (especially crafting) give far too much exp anyway – I was lvl 80 well before I finished the 70-80 areas.

Basically the game gives us three end game gear options – farm PVP, farm instances, farm crafting mats. Because you get a ton of karma from events, which can also be used to buy endgame loot, I see no reason to put myself or my guildmates through the dungeon grind, when I can farm events in Cursed Shore for A TON of mats and lewts (even more with 400 chef magic find buffs on). Not to mention the Influence for your guild. Theres just no good reason to do the instances over the events.

Actually, I have a seriously related question concerning Turrets and AFK. As an engineer, I can set up my turrets in more than one place in Cursed Shore to tag enemies during events while I alt-tab and do other things on my second monitor. I’ve debated leaving my character on auto-run facing a wall to farm event gold and karma at nights….But I refrain for fear of a Blizzard-esque banhammering.

Its not like I get loot doing this either, since im not there to click corpses, just EXP for skill points, karma, and a little silver. Cursed Shore has events that run on 20-30 min timers, and are great for at-keyboard farming; however, the urge to AFK exists – would I be banned?

I suggest buying him out. He’s clearly a toxic player and very likely just a kid, so appeal to his motivations – if hes refusing to help you out, its because he has your eventual collapse already in mind. Head him off at the pass by offering something like lewt or gold or mats if he’ll just comply, and tell him that otherwise you’ll have to start a new guild and try to take as many people as you can. He either profits from stepping down or is left with a crapshoot guild with a few straggling members. If he still chooses the later option, the other members will see his insanity and likely leave with you. Hopefully it wont come to that tho….

The problem with the tool kit is that it lacks the safety of range. The idea is to cripple-kite foes around your nest of turrets, and between the cripple trait, pull and block, you can set up some fun things and farm mats in high level areas easily.

The tool kit falls off dramatically when you’re forced away from your nest. The dmg isnt as great as the crit builds and the survivability isnt as good as pistol/shield/toughness builds (tho the turret build will gain 300 toughness from invention, the traits limit you to turret buffs, not self buffs).

Its a matter of opinion, but if you are gonna use turrets, the tool kit goes hand in hand. No turrets, no kit.

I was running crit-thrower on my lvl 80 for insane cone farming(elixir B + flamethrower kit and 30 in the tree for the Juggernaut trait – the trait that grants vulnerability on crit made me a machine). But they recently nerfed the stability out of Juggernaut in favor of might stacks. Not the worst, but my survivability went way down and when you need to be up close to spam cone dmg, you cant be getting CC’d.

So I repec’d turrets, and found them to be great for farming while AFK in cursed shore. But little else since the cool downs are too long and the refire rate is pitiful.

I settled on Dual Pistols and a full Alchemy build – 30 Firearms for the pistol range, cooldown, and pierce upgrades and 30 alchemy for the recharge, duration increase, and extra might. I put the extra 10 into power for flat dmg and 33% chance to burn on crit. Basically you run with all elixirs equipped such that you can keep boons on you at all times and really, really, increase your pistol damage. Elixir B is amazing, 4 boons for 13s including Fury for crit chance, on a 32s CD. after 13s you can use the toolbelt version and toss it at yourself for 13 more sec of sweet goodness. You healing elixir works the same way and now gives you might as well. I use the quickness elixir for insane dmg while all buffed up and the toolbelt of that with put down a random combo field for you to shoot thru (even more dmg or effects). Lastly is either the shrink elixir for 3s invulnerability or the conversion elixir for those tough poison/cripple mobs. Nothing like seeing 3 negative effects become 3 positive boons! So good for PVP.

So yeah, thats how im rolling out. Your pierce pistols plus buffs and crit chance make you a monster DPS machine with lots mobility (you’ll always have swiftness on thanks to Elixir B and the healing one)

I did a bunch of this work last night; some relevant info for youse:

All base stats at 80 are 916.

The 300 Precision you get from putting 30 points into whatever tree gives you Precision will net you 12% crit chance, since 25 Precision at 80 is equal to 1% crit chance. Your Precision from gear + traits / 25 = your crit chance at lvl 80.

Power governs attk and skill damage and is calculated by weapon dmg plus traits and gear. Power is 1:1 so 300 Power from the traits would give you 300 more flat damage. The total damage of a skill (auto-attks are skills too) will be equal to the Skill damage on the tooltip plus your Attack stat (which is power + weapon damage). Keep in mind that you will never actually do this number during any attack, since your output is mitigated by the toughness of your enemy.

For example, you have 2500 Attack stat and your pistol auto attk does 200. Your 2700 dmg will hit the lvl 82 Risen with say 1500 toughness and you’ll see a white number for 1200 go off. Toughness is straightforward flat damage mitigation.

Condition duration and all the other % based stats are self-explanatory. My recommendation is to cater towards crit chance builds for DPSers (leverage the Fury boon if you can, 20% crit chance is amazing), and toughness/power or vitality/power for supports and tanks

A note on Healing power – Theres an algorithm on wiki that converts lvl 80 healing power at 100:138, meaning for every hundred points of healing power, your REGEN skills benefit 138 points. There was no algorithm for flat healing skills, but what this means is an extra 400~ points per tick on the regeneration boon. So if your primary healing method is over time heals, consider this stat. If not, consider the take less damage route and put traits in toughness.

Your mileage may vary – I did this math on my lvl 80 engineer and google, so its spotty at best. Thieves may have better Crit stats for all I know. So take from this post what you will, I know this info was helpful to me.

Does this argument apply to the cultural gear? No, because the game encourages you to buy one piece of every race (look at the achievements) by making 5 chars (they even give you 5 char slots!). 3 faction banners to unlock as well, suggesting that youre meant to play the story at least three times.

And like someone said, the stats on the faction gear arent the best anyway. You gold is better spent elsewhere. Im pretty sure you can craft better armor too

I agree with Qtin. At 80, theres a lot more guys PvE and a ton of AOE dmg that wrecks your summons and pets, so focus your traits on buffing your dmg and survivability. The arrow pierce is incredible for farming the lvl 80 zone. I personally run with quickening zypher and a red moa on passive so I can use the 15s of fury (F2) and 5s of quickness to crank out well over ten shots at like 60% crit chance in under 5s. Fury is beast.

Ive done the signet build too, it was better when levelling and using melee weapons, but the crit build is just to good to pass up, and at 80, forget melee altogether.

Im surprised no one has mentioned the Red Moa – F2 skill grants 15s of Fury (20% crit chance) on a 30s cooldown. If you really hate the pet system, just set the red moa to passive and get free crit chance every 30s. I keep a blue moa on swap for similar reason – the -33% incoming dmg for 10s is a life saver.

In short, get a blue and red moa, they help by buffing everyone, and surprisingly have the second best vitality after bears, giving them good AOE survivability.

Fury+quickness (from quickening zypher) is OP. Just saying.