Guild Wars 2

Salvaging Bone Fragments of Tequatl – Exotic Accessory granted 1 mithril ore.

I might be in the wrong here, but I was under the impression salvaging exotics grants orichalcum/ancient wood and a chance at a Dark matter glob/Ectoplasm orb. This issue might be true to all new drops added in the latest patch.

I do want longer and “harder” content. But not SAB.

There is an issue here as I see it… SAB is huge, takes a long time and instead of needing a party it is best to be soloed. I see all this time and effort spent on a “mini”-game that does not involve my character, his skills, his traits and his hard-earned gear (we are basically all playing the same class in sab). If Anet would spend this time and effort on actual new dungeons and team based content which actually uses the professions in the game I would not have a problem with it.

GLaDOS speaks the truth. All hail the artificial intelligence.

- skill lag
- AFKers/PPL waiting for res

The Gates Assassin.9827:

Get a better computer.

/thread

A game should always be playable on minimum/recommended requirements. And a better computer would have a harder time seeing the waves to the point in which he would actually have to turn ON culling, so people wouldn’t get so much in the way. :/

The people at Pax on stream would’ve beaten it but they asked them to wipe in order to not reveal the loot.

But that was a considerable smaller number and instant respawn timer which resulted in:

- Less scaling
- Less Skill lag
- Less randoms running around doing nothing or waiting for res
- Faster runs = Faster learning

I currently don’t appreciate the huge skill lag that occurs during the fight, and before the default answer (“I didn’t have the lags”) please consider different people have different internet providers across the world, internet is limited speed and traffic depending to where you live. I find it hard to believe that people in Oceania will enjoy any of this content until at least a few weeks have past.

Killface.1896:

There will be lot lot lot of adds,and with no dps meter no1 will care about your dps anyway.

Gnat.9405:

Or play what you want, participate in the mechanics, and get a few hits in

You guys do realize his on a 15 min timer, which means if you don’t dps efficiently, you lose the encounter.

I don’t know anything about alts, but my Main character has yet to receive his birthday gift. He was created during the 3-day head start for the digital deluxe edition at the same time as my girlfriends and she already received hers.

For people who say arena is not part of the fight.

Games are centred around encounters, encounters are defined as a challenge the user/player needs to overcome. The area in which the challenge takes place is part of the encounter a fight with an ogre in an open field is not the same as a fight with an ogre in a closet.

In this case a really really buggy closet.

+1 on all your posts Lafiel

I also properly learned how to use my shatter mesmer when faced with one-shot situations like Liandri. I log-out to character screen, get my guardian, buy full gear, beat Liandri, realize I’m playing the wrong class for over 1 year. Thanks Anet!

Ogre.3124:

So far I’m on Project 7 and loving the gauntlet so far. This gives an opportunity for people to do something incredibly difficult for a reward to show off that they’re good players. For those of you saying it’s impossible, the final boss has been defeated by every class now. The only fault for not succeeding in the gauntlet is your own, and you’ll have to deal with that.

The only challenge that I didn’t get done on the first try on my Warrior was the Pirates, and that took roughly 10 tries to do. Had to plan which order to kill, what to dodge, and get an order of rallying myself by strategically keeping at least one pirate around 5% health. Great learning experience and made me rethink my character almost entirely, making me a better player in the process. Can’t wait to reach the last boss and get that mini!

Bosses have been confirmed to be defeated by all classes. Achievements have not been confirmed by all classes which cripples new or single class players which do not have access to a library of Alts.

“1) Interesting gameplay challenges in the Gauntlet: many, if not most, players have had to put some thought into skills, gear, tactics to beat all levels of challenge here. I know I did. Getting players out of their usual comfort zones is a Good Thing.”

Errata:

“1) One-shot gameplay challanges in the gauntlet: many, if not most, players had to spend 30-50 gold on gear they will never use again, swap to alts because your main can’t handle certain encounters/achievments. I know I liked it. Getting players out of their usual comfort zones for 1 event only is a Good thing.”

WAT?!

Magische Boek.2530:

actually no, i didnt test this, but shouldnt it reflect all projectiles? i did everything with ranger. flipped few traits around since i dont need 1500 range and piercing arrows and im at the tier 3 endboss now. lag makes me fail

Except for distortion or dodge which just make me invulnerable. All reflects failed and got me killed instead. Because arbitrary reasons.

Magische Boek.2530:

Lonami.2987:

Elementalist here, stuck at Deadeye Dunwell (I think he’s bugged anyway, he spawns mines on top of me all the time and there’s no way I can dodge them).

It’s not fair for everyone not using full DPS gear. I need to get a new armor and weapons just because of this?

I dodge a lot, time my attacks with combos and survive, and then I get insta-downed or the timer runs away.

It’s pretty clear the only way to successfully achieve the Gauntlet is to be a berserker or a heavy condition damager. I saw a necromancer faceroll through the first 11 bosses, killing them all in 5-10 seconds with full DPS and conditions.

The Gauntlet doesn’t reward skill, it rewards DPS. Insta-downing attacks don’t help here, either, why go vitality or toughness when it won’t be useful at all?

go staff earth 3 to reflect his killshot if you dont have a DPS build :p

Does the reflect work? have you tested it? … cause kill shot can go through my reflective heal, through my feedback and mimic abilities and one shot me while they are up. Mesmer btw.

While I do disagree with OP and consider this playable by all classes.

I cannot see all classes being able to earn all achievements.

Any advice on how to kill subject 7 without killing blobs on a Mesmer ? seeing kittentering and weapons skills hit multiple targets or shoot projectiles that can be intercepted.

Tried to pull, push position but this is dependent on ooze spawning randomly, luck basically.

Leave portal at close and if you can’t manage to fight a guy 1v1, use it for juke-ing. If attacking a point and you see them coming back place the portal and run, if they pursuit go back and cap the point and be annoying. IMO if you don’t have a team and you can’t 1v1 to defend a point, just swap it out.

Always try to place your portal in close proximity to your close point when defending, but never in plain sight as to have time and scout out who is at the point, so you don’t just TP in a 3v1 or in all the ranger traps or necro marks placed on top of your portal. In the case of juke-ing someone its on a case by case basis if you want to leave your portal in plain sight.

Portal is a great skill on all maps if used properly, and even more so if used together with a team.

Eather feast, Blink, Portal, Ilussion of life, Moa Morph.

Eather feast is almost always the default heal for mesmers. Blink is specifically useful for mesmer mobility, but can be swapped out. Portal and illusion of life are necessary in my opinion. And moa morph to remove bunkers from play and/or even the playing ground for a few seconds when out numbered, be careful though aegis will block this skill.

I used to run a similar build.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fgAQNAraWlwziqXVzpGa9IhZGBH5oec9s/9yHwNA-j0xAINBRaBIVJQ5wioxWNLiGr6GTHTEVLFAErBA-w

I enjoyed my confusion build, it hits like a truck especially against fast attacking mobs and groups. The problem was with it being more staff focused since it was the fastest way of getting out illusions this was also before the sceptre buff. Even though both weapon sets are ranged I spent most of my time in melee in order to make use of illusionary persona. The pros of this build were the storms and buffs from the staff bounce to melee party members and excellent survivability, not to mention 3090 condition damage with 25 might and 25 sigil stacks.

echofoxtrot.4239:

Nretep.2564:

@build
do you really need the 10 pts in illusions ?

it was for the “distortion grants reflection” to go along with my reflection thing i had going. never used it though, so i changed it to higher % mind wrack crit chance.

dont really see any better options. thoughts?

I guess you could move the points in Domination and get confusing Enchantments. You will get +100 power, +10% condition duration, 5 Stacks of vulnerability on when you daze (using your F3 shatter, you will stack a decent ammount, if you need to burn something and have 3 illusions up.), and apply confusion on units that exit or enter your feedback and nullfield.

BuahahaXD.5014:

Well, there are lots of builds out there. How can I know which are good for what purposes? I need a general build for PvE so I think it should be quite balanced. What should I be looking for?

Considering armor: should I buy some general exotic items and upgrade them with runes or buy a preset one? Is it worth to buy karma armor (is it better/worse)?

All the builds in the list are sorted by game area and general aspect of build (mantras/shatter/phantasms etc.). You can buy or craft your own armor once you make a clear decision on your gear… all armor stat combinations can be found on wiki with general information from where you can acquire them (crafting/karma/dungeons).

All exotic armors regardless of acquisition method (craft/karma/dungons) share the same stat values if they are of the same rarity (exotic karma = exotic crafted = exotic dungeon).

As for runes, I don’t know any specific builds that use the defaul rune setup of any armor. But as a general fact runes are chosen in order to further enhance your build:

- Getting 6 runes of the same type. Generally shows that you really want the 6th bonus on an armor set. From my above post I said I’m using the Undead runes for “5% toughness is converted to condition damage” since I was using a armor stat combo which grants a decent amount of toughness + 25 points in chaos for another “5% toughness converted to condition damage” while using atunment crystal for another “6% Toughness in condition damage”.
- Mix and match runes from various sets. Is usually a method for maximizing a specific stat, for example boon heavy guardians use “Two Superior Monk and two Superior Water then two Major Water or two Major Monk” in order to get 40% extra boon duration which no other rune combination will grant unless used in this specific combination.
- Orbs. Orbs even though are of rare quality (blue) when stacked on all 6 armor pieces will grant more stats in one category than any rune set available. Quite a few berserk specs (full damage) use ruby orbs since its easy on the money while granting stats just as if you would be wearing a 7th piece of armor.

Your pve experience depends on other factors.

If your generally running dungeons with guild mates/friends, it might be best to get your build to suit your overall group. While pugging I generally just encourage to not try any support builds since if your party can’t manage the encounters, no amount of support you give them will help.

I started with a staff/condition build, with sceptre/pistol (before sceptre “buff”), using prec/tough/cond dmg with runes of undead. While playing with my support guardian friend. Boosting parties through dungeons runs was easy with the amount of healing, boons and reflection running around with the both of us, but we did encounter parties which would just die regardless of our efforts.

I had to make a big decision in my final spec when ascended gear was introduced …so I don’t just get gear I would never use, and finally reverted to a berserk shatter build. My final decision was encouraged by the fact that I always PvE with my guard friend, so he can help keep me alive while also stacking vulnerability consistently while supplying a lot of AoE damage.

So as far as PvE goes, if you have friends and guild it might be worth researching what role you fit best in your groups. If your a solo pug and feel that you can handel a glass cannon go for berserk.

Side-note: Many people, myself NOT included, consider WvW to be the current end game. And you might want to follow Nordic Natedog’s advice in getting Knights and Cavalier’s since it will allow for some survivability, I personally ran my condition build until confusion was nerfed in WvW, now I run with my normal Berserk Shatter build and I don’t feel the difference since if I get targeted by 10 people I’m gonna die regardless of how much extra survivability I have, but there are conflicting opinions on this as well.

Korsbaek.9803:

sorry the laurs gives you the chance for rings, amulets and earings but lets say you get one from guild missions, a amulet from laurs, and the othere earing from laurs and 2 rings from fractals(given the achiemnts point chest and peaks you will have enough laurs for that when you have done fractals for the 2 rings if not before) as there is so many laurs in play now

Indeed there are many Laurels in play, but its still 40 a month, and achi chest granted I personally do have 8500 points will get me a boost. But we are trying to help new and old players alike, and new players are more restricted in that manner, which is okay for a “first character”. The toughest part right now are the accessories (takes up to 8 moths only using guild commendations) which cost a lot more laurels and gold to boot, if your only going to spend laurels your going to run out of them fast.

diamondgirl.6315:

Agreed, Erika (and others) – they want me to log in every day, and artificially structure my gwar acquisition process to ‘encourage’ me to. Well, I’m not going to. Not because I am taking some sort of Stand, but because… Life. So… since I am not shelling out a monthly fee, I am more likely to just go try out a new game. No drama, just their choices informing my choices. And that bums me out, because this is such a pretty game.

The only disappointment here is the first interviews before the game came out. With thousands of quotes such as “The game is free, you can come back at any time and play and you are never left behind, since our intention is not to make the game a gear grind” – that sounds vaguely familiar to me from a lot of the pre-release announcements and media.

anzenketh.3759:

Just a question to get the feel for things. Would time-gating be ok if it was once per day per character?

For me personally that would be perfect, as I said 1 month for gear seems more than decent. I already run dungeons repeatedly on all alts and I did that before bosses dropped additional tokens, and even before that when tokens could only be taken from chests. Less account bound activities more character bound ones.

Brother Grimm, Thank you for taking your time and contributing.

“This is not about TOTAL playing time, but how much time you spend on EACH character” – Brother Grimm – July/22/2013

You say that, yet the rest of your arguments seems contradictory to that statement. If I complete a daily on my main in 1 hour and then play 7 more hours on my alts. I’m not going to acquire additional laurels, which means I have spent and equal amount on all characters yet received progress only for one.

To clarify this even further, again. If I log in right now and complete the following:

- 1 Laurel from daily

I can play the rest of my 23 hours on any character. Yet I cannot gain any more progress regardless of what character I choose to spend my time on.

So in trend with your argument: “This is not about TOTAL playing time, neither about how much time you spend on EACH character, but on how much ANet ALLOWS you to progress.” – Hastur – July/22/2013

Which currently is 1 month per character, which totals to 8 moths for all classes with no off-specs and the chance that in one of the bi-weekly patches Anet will just introduce a better stat comkittenfs/buffs a class or/and adds new skills/traits which break the meta your original gear was intended for.

Kahzee I suggest reading Tentonhammr and Sleel’s posts. You say your fine with “not having your hand held and having gear handed to you”, yet that is what we are saying as well. Limiting access to content on a time base mechanic screams “hand holding” at me more than anything.

And Anet does give you 5 character slots and sells you additional character slots, are you actually saying Anet is not encouraging multiple playthroughs of their game ? And its the fault of people who actually use or buy those extra slots, that the gear progression is so long and tedious ?

Even if I had only used the standard 5 character slots, it would still take me 5 months to progress. With a 2-week new content release schedule…. Imagine how much the game can change until I find out that Rabid gear is no longer the optimal choice for my “insert profession here” happens?

I don’t even mind the time-based progression, Like I stated. WoW and other MMOs I played did this as well, but they allowed me to complete dailies on all my characters, only lock down raids/dungeons for characters that played in said raid/dungeon (very similar to what gw is doing in its dungeons).

I know gw2 had a bot-ing problem so a lot of content is on DR, but these currencies are non-marketable, cannot be salvaged or sold to vendors.

Fact of the matter is that player should progress in a manner in which “they chose to play the game” as ANet’s policy stated. I would have liked to be able to complete dailies with all my characters during this past weekend. Go to guild missions tomorrow and complete 2 dailies and then go to guild missions with my 2nd guild the next day and skip dailies cause I don’t feel like it and not feel bad about it because I know I worked extra hard this past weekend.

I’m not asking to allow me to grind everything in 1 day or less, I don’t mind getting my ascended gear (as currently present in the game) in 1 month, that is a reasonable time limit to me. But let me simultaneously progress on all of my characters and stop holding my hand!

Matty.7395:

I have more then 1 character too, I don’t see a problem in gearing them all, of course gearing more then 1 character takes more time, but I also have the advantage of having more then 1 character…
Let’s be serious, the best gear in GW2 (exotic) is the worst joke in RPG history. As soon as you hit 80, you go shopping whit 8 golds (you probably got 30+ at least while leveling) and you have the best gear the game can offer… you have nothing to work for, sure there are skins, but you can only use one.
This game really needs a tier of gear that actually takes time and dedication to achieve.
I want to say that I hate vertical progression, I don’t want to see any higher tier after ascended, I laso hate level cap increase in mmo.
More trait points, skill upgrade, more infusion slot ecc are a much better way to progress your character. This way you actually add more to what you already have, whitout make everything you achieve so far pointless.
Ascended are not making exotic worthless, exotics were already worthless at day one.
The game needs a new type of gear, something better than exotic, a gear that you cannot buy or find whit luck, something that takes time, skill and dedication to obtain.
Sorry for my english

Hello and thank you for your reply.

While I do agree exotic gear isn’t hard to obtain, the talk here is regarding ascended gear, the new ascended armor and weapons and time constraints when gear is involved.

So let me share my concerns with your post:

- More than 1 character = more time needed to gear. yes, that should always be true
- Gear should be hard to obtain. yes, there should be a challenge involved, effort and dedication required

Which leads to

- The advantage of having more characters. what exactly is the advantage? you can swap in dungeon runs, but that’s about it. It does not help you to get gear faster because laurels and guild tokens and future resources are account bound, meaning every time I invest one of the above mentioned resources in a character, that’s one less resource going towards another character. Increasing the time needed to gear 1 character by 100% for each additional character. This goes against the “dedication” stated in your post that the player provides, because you cannot dedicate more effort in acquiring these resources because of the limitation in place.
- “a gear that you cannot buy or find whit luck, something that takes time, skill and dedication to obtain.” – As previously stated, I agree with all but time enforcements. But I also agree I shouldn’t just be able to buy my end game gear of the TP or just craft it. But, I would like that each individual character to be able to progress in a timely manor toward its final complete build without taking away form the progress of other characters created by the same player.

Thank you for reading, and your English was okay (either that or I’m as bad as you are).

kahzee.6042:

Still don’t see anything wrong with the way we get gear. It should take a while.

Kahzee this is your 2nd post, saying nothing is wrong with the system. While people are continuing to add arguments to their statements, being fair to the opinions of everyone. I really do want to understand your logic and train of thoughts but you’re not helping me. Maybe we are in the wrong, explain it to us. Thank you for your dedication and continued presence in this thread.

falchion.3652:

Agree with OP.
Effort shouldn’t be reduced to having to do time gated activities.
If I play 1hr a day for a month, or the same 30hrs in a week, the effort is not treated the same.
What seems weird is more and more content rewards are shifted towards time limitations. I understand it for holidays, events – but for it to become the new game motto is terrible. Time limited grinds are the worst – let me play at my own pace.

The dungeon token system is a nice hybrid of both. Max tokens once per char per day but can be circumvented with alts or a penalty of DR for tokens if someone wishes to get their gear faster than a daily allotment.

I can agree and relate to this. I didn’t think about covering this, but while I have 8 characters I can get 8 times the tokens by running 8 times the more dungeons! The ratio of time spent, effort put into the game and reward is perfect across the board.

But currency such as laurels and guild tokens can only be obtained by 1 character per insert arbitrary time limit. Which cripples the behavior I stated above, players with more than 1 character or people who just experience the game through more than one class or method of play.

Lonewolf Kai.3682:

Although I don’t agree with a lot of what you said, there a few things I do agree with you on:
1. The 1/day thing is extremely annoying! If I want to farm it right away, then that should be my choice. If I want to take my time, then that should be my choice.
2. Account bound equipment (can’t remember if you touched on this [wall of text dude!]). I did not like this with the current ascended gear and I the coming armor will equally be just as bad. Related to my #1, if I want to buy my gear with gold, then I should be able to buy it.

One other thing I noticed you said that had me puzzled:
“…Anet…do not:
Ask them to put effort in the game….”
^ did you just ask Anet to make players NOT put EFFORT in the game?!

If that’s what you’re getting at then that’s just silly. There should be a least some effort put into getting you’re gear.

Thanks for contributing!

I know, I know… the great wall of Chine is scared of my post. But to clarify I did say it was poorly written most likely in some areas. Those three lines of arguments that you pointed out were intended to be taken as a group of elements and mashed togather, and not be treated independently.

The fast explanation for those lines is the following:

- Don’t put me in a queue (A queue does not progress faster, depending on your actions, it only progresses as fast as the system allows it to by definition)
- AND THEN ask me to put in an effort (this is in contradiction to what I said above in parenthesis, I’m in a queue/a system that arbitrarily will not allow access to something but at the same time obligates me to work for my goal in order to get to the top of the queue)
- And finally making the progress (laurels, guild commendations in particular) be an account bound income basically punishing ALTs or multi-speced characters.

This basically forces me to stand in a queue, check on my position in the queue daily, the work to advance in the queue and then when I get to the top go back for every character/spec I want. Basically what you were saying… If I want to put 10 times the effort, I should be able, but Anet currently denies me this and treats me like a 5-year old with parental controls so I don’t injure my clicking finger, and then politely one hour later asks me to return tomorrow cause I cannot get any progress anymore today.

Hope this clears it up.

Evans.6347:

One thing to keep in mind is that once all your characters at lv80 are fully equiped with ascended stuff, there’s pretty much nothing left to do with them. Unless you want to go legendary on all them.

Also, I’m fairly certain you do not play all your professions equally. I’m sure the others can manage with exotics while you earn your way through them. Keeps you busy!

I see your point evans, but even so. I already currently “don’t have anything to do” since I have to wait for my daily to reset, my weekly guild missions to reset and the monthly to reset… see where I’m going with this ?

If I ever get my ascended in 8th months (doubtful since soon I will need to also get weapons and armor, how many months will that take?) I won’t have anything to do, but I also currently don’t have anything to do already, I want to play more guild wars, but its not letting me do it because my progress is currently blocked by their system.

Not to mention my other two points:

- it is impossible to have offspecs in my case. since that will steal progress from another character!
- Being afraid of that one big nerf or one of those new traits/skills that will force me out of my build/gear and require the process of waiting to be allowed to progress all over again.

It’s not exactly “free” Cellach, its 5000 achi points of work and you get it in a mixed bundle, but even a crafting booster is better than this, since I can waste a bit of gold and get some extra skill points in the process.

And I don’t see your point Rottram Owain, I still have all my slots maxed out, I’m not gonna buy a new slot to farm keys or to use the scroll on a profession I already got at lvl 80.

Seeing as I have 8 level 80 characters, how is this going to help me in any way sense or form ?… I’d have to buy a new character slot, use the scroll, and buy some stones or wine or something with the points and delete my character after, to get any use from this.

kahzee.6042:

Don’t see Nything wrong with thiz. You should not be instantly geared. If you were where would the fun be

I think the 3rd question in my FAQ answers this quite nicely or at least partially. I do agree you should not be instantly geared, but I currently need 8 moths of game time to gear my characters. I mean I literally only need to log in one hour per day, for 8 months, face book mechanics are not a really good approach when trying to play an MMO, since MMOs thrive on player activity and not encouraging user to go off-line because they cannot progress any more that day.

Erasculio.2914:

Hastur.6231:

- Not only are you taxing more dedicated players here, your actually limiting their ability to “grind” this

That’s a great thing. Considering how “dedicated players” is usually how people talk about grinders, limiting the grinders’ ability of receiving more rewards than other players by doing mindless, easy content for 18+ hours per day is a very good idea.

Regarding your point about alts being somewhat punished due to the “1 per day per account” limit, I agree. While I’m sure people would abuse the system if it could be used by level 1 characters, it wouldn’t hurt if the Quartz node in the personal instance was availble daily for each level 80 character in a given account. I doubt this would happen, though.

I agree whit almost all you said, but with the limiting factor. I don’t see why you would limit gear progression on ascended items seeing as they cannot be sold, salvaged or affect the economy of the game in any way, this is also pve gear so my progression on account bound, non-marketable items does not affect other players in any way, and as stated above 8 moths is slightly over doing it in terms of limitations.

On WvW side of things, It can be a bother some to some people but arguments against that are:

- Dungeon running gear is not really the most efficient way of gearing for WvW, palyers who want to WvW and need off-spec armor are also affected by the issues above
- Having some extra stats would help me survive or deal more damage in a 1v1, 5v5 maybe even a 10v10. But current tactics of WvW still make ascended gear a negligible advantage when the enemy still has superior numbers in his blob.
- Allowing me to gear all my characters will not disadvantage servers, seeing as I cannot simultaneously play all my 8 characters (which would be silly), but if I attempt to swap to another character to adapt to a situation, I would be stuck in a queue for 1 hour, until I’ll be back in wvw…I’ll just probably need to swap back to my main.

Thank you for all your replies and participation in this discussion. I would also like to point out SSalp’s post. Legendaries, exotic gear, dungeon tokens and even gold are grindable resources. Making an account bound, non marketable resource limited on account (not character mind you) is just silly.

Amun Ra.6435:

Not going to lie…didn’t bother reading most of the post…but if your issue is with not being able to gear all your alts with ascended armor/weapons…you will be able to but them from the TP.

Rings, Accessories, Amulets are unobtainable from from the TP and probably so will the armor and weapons considering the celestial armor patch. Back items as stated in my post can be obtained but are extremely expensive and result in the same process, either farm relics or farm gold, which in both cases seems acceptable but redundant seeing as they are two long grinding routes to the same destination.

Also edited topic to better reflect the post content.

Final thoughts:

I cannot possibly give a suggestion that would not brake the current system or cause fury to people. So I will just say I’ve been born in a country which 24 years ago was a communist country, and I still hear stories about going to the local supply center and waiting for hours in queue to get your 1/day liter of milk per person and such, I’m not calling ANet communists mind you, I’m only implying the same thing over and over again which is, do not:

- Put player in a queue (wait for daily/weekly/monthly)
- Ask them to put effort in the game (cause the daily/weekly/monthly is not going to solve itself)
- Make the process even slower for more characters and flexible players with more off-specs (Even the commies didn’t ask all of us to present ourselves to the queue , and under the ridiculous constraint of one at a time in the hole queue)

FAQ.

- Didn’t wow also make you grind once a week on raids ?

Yes. But the sense of progress was always there, I could always get off-spec items and by the end of the cycle new content would be available always keeping me in motion, this also caused stronger gear to now become obsolete and easier to acquire (not asking for more gear in gw2). + alt runs were fun!

- Didn’t more characters also require you to farm even more raids ?

Yes. But being a top guild player (not Ensidia/Paragon or anything but top 100), we would clear content pretty fast, raids quickly degraded into farm or alt runs and they were always good for training on the main raid. And lets be serious current content does not require TOP players.

- Ascended gear is end game gear you have to work for it! shouldn’t you?

Yes. But not by forcing players to be in a queue, most MMOs don’t scale the reward of your progress by time spent in the game and even more so by enforcing a set minimum time, and gw2 extends this even more for multi-spec/profession players. This discourages players from playing together since there will be a “time-gap” and the nature of GW2 pve is cooperation. MMOs tend to scale in difficulty instead, requesting the player to present with a lower tier of gear in order to acquire the next one. An easy method for this would be to only allow players with full exotic either by arbitrary decision or adding a stat on all exotic gear which allows the ability to damage Fractal Mobs and lowering the time spent in needing to acquire ascended gear. This creates a slick progression ladder which encourages players to go from whites to blues to greens to oranges and finally purples.

I will gladly ask any questions and would like to encourage discussion on this and civilization on expressing your opinion. Sorry for the long post, I posted this pretty late and expect grammatical errors and bad math.

TL;DR.

A poorly written post late at night about the difficulty in amassing gear for multi-spec/profession players and the current GW2 system which punishes these players + worries for the next tier of ascended gear and time based progression instead of the pinnacles of GW2 which “are”/“should be” skill, effort and dedication.

Problems with this:

- Not only are you taxing more dedicated players here, your actually limiting their ability to “grind” this. Which seems awfully counter intuitive seeing as you are selling character slots in the gem shop. (sure people can buy them for pvp, but then again they can just delete a character and make a new profession at lvl 1)
- This makes the idea of having more sets of armor or off-specs even more difficult, the way I’m seeing it now its you either have one character with a lot of armor sets or many characters who fit different roles.
- I mentioned above that the bag piece is the only exception which can also be crafted with gold, but this for me seems very obtrusive towards the idea that a character can be a self contained person and achieve everything on his own. So the choice becomes either waste time and grind gold or waste time and farm fractals with my main who is higher level and can get the relics needed faster. (this is really not a strong point, since it actually lets you grind, but non-the-less…really slow)
- 1/day resources, this will probably be the bane of my existence in gathering the necessary resources to craft 8 sets of armor and 14 sets of weapons. This again will make the chances of a profession having an off-spec almost null.
- Most of the ascended gear works around the crafting system, like most the desired good looking gear in the game, legendary weapons who only slightly dip in there with the gifts.
- Celestial gear completely skips the discovery process of the crafting system, with the requirement of actually needing the recipes as well as some previous event gear.
- Always being scared of that one big nerf that will make all your gear useless and the need of repeating this long and painful process.

Things Anet has done to make this easier:

- First of all adding the ring tokens .Having a RNG on gear, especially on account bound gear is a horrible idea.
- Adding more methods to obtain gear, Laurels and guild commendations can be used for more than 1 type of ascended gear, but this is still impractical seeing as guild commendations need to be exclusively be used on accessories in order to gain the maximum efficiency. And gratz on adding ascended gear to WvW… its not my slice of the pie but at least you get a discount of 10 laurels if I’m not mistaking and also helping the players who almost exclusively play wvw.

Things other MMOs have done to help this:

- No RNG, Currency for completing dungeons, quests etc.
- RNG, Items are not character/account bound on pickup or if they are bound then a party loot system is usually present in order to get the gear to who needs it.
- Drop and token hybrid, the player performs the necessary task and either gets Good loot on RNG and token, or gets Bad loot on RNG and badges. Badges always serve as a sense of progress towards the players goal in acquiring his end game gear.
- Bound resources not being soul bound, a simple rule of the thumb is if I can’t do anything with an item to affect the game, market or someone else they will not be 1/day. The player should not feel crippled for the effort in maintenance of more than one character, this also applies to having on character with more than one spec.

Hello Anet,

I’d like to express my worries about the trend you’ve been going on for a while. I’m a dedicated player which has all the professions (8 of them) at level 80. Ever since ascended gear was introduced I had some issues… getting all the gear for my characters takes 8 times longer.

Now sure, some would say I dug my own grave, but my arguments are simple and I don’t consider them to be to greedy or over the top.

I played other mmos, most notably WoW… I’m not asking you to turn into WoW. But wow would allow me to play 8 times as much in order to obtain my gear.

So a brief history of my leveling and adventuring:

1) My first character, a shy little Mesmer discovers the world and gets to 80
2) Experiance as much of the game as possible pve, spvp, tpvp, wvw.
3) Level up all the other professions, learn their play styles (this was surprisingly easy and fast)
4) Ascended gear introduced, run fractals every second of the day get random drops nothing ever fits my builds/gear.
5) Get a total of 5 ascended rings ever.
6) Ascended ring tokens introduced (10 = 1 ring), farm 20 tokens (no drops mind you) finally get rings for main, never do fractals again! my alts can throw themselves of a bridge. Infuse etc. (I got to F30 with 0 agony res)
7) Get back piece with relics, upgrade etc. Same story, I’m not gonna grind so many hours for my alts. (I know I can craft them, but your basically saying more alts = more gold)
8) Amulets introduced, these can only be purchased through Laurels a new currency. Obtained at 1 per day and 20 per monthly. This means you can get 1.6 amulets per month.
9) Accessories introduced, 5 gold and 12 guild tokens. Ignoring that guilds had to level up to get access to all 6 guild tokens a week, that limits you to a month to get 2 accessories for 1 character. Or you can pay 40 Laurels and 50 Ectos, which means 2 months and 20 days + gold for 2 accessories.
10) Celestial gear and the new shards 1/day resource. If I’d wanted to gear a character not only would I need the recipie before hand (which completely over rides the crafting system, as most good looking gear overrides the crafting with the forge), I would only get 1 resource per day considering I got 25 shards.

Conclusion:

I would currently need to run 160 fractals. – Rings
Complete daily and monthly for 5 Months. – Amulets
Complete Guild missions each week for 8 months or complete daily and monthly for 7.1 months + gold – Accessories
And an additional 14800 relics – Back slot

Now you’re saying you want to add new 1/day materials in order to craft ascended armor and weapons. How many months do you want me to play for 48 armor slots that I have to replace +/- weapons I’d like to use.

HuntsForge.3260:

The problem as I see it at least, isnt the difficulty the difficulty is fine. It is the fact that it’s temporary and I if I dont want to do hard content at the moment I miss out.

Temporary content should be challenging but accessible, hard content should be there all the time for players to enjoy in their own time.

+1 to you good sir

Basic geometry states that the beam will move faster the further you are from the center of the circular room. If you want to move faster than the beam chasing you move towards the center point (the boss) while keeping momentum and moving away from the beam.

During phase 3, jump on boxes, dodge, blink, block. Use stability if golems are near so they will not pull you down.

GSSBlunaspike.4153:

Aluano.1826:

Agreed, the game needed more difficult content and this was pretty good.

The game has really difficult content in it already. You can access it from anywhere by clicking on the icon right next to Hints at the top of the screen. It looks like crossed swords. There is also slightly less challenging content available (depending on server) by pressing B and selecting which level of challenge you want.

Gw2 has PvE and PvP content, both should be challenging and fun. We here are praising ANet for a fantastic addition to PvE difficulty. I’m sure people are aware that PvP is a challenging experience .

I also enjoyed ANets dungeon, but they should stop adding ridiculously hard achievements to temporary content. I got my achievements mind you, played 5 years of wow and the achieves in raids over there were all skill based, ANets only seem grindy or random (crabtacular anyone ?!).

As ZiD said, condition duration does not transfer to phantasms or clones, which makes it a stat that we do not profit off as much as other classes.

I personally roll around in Prec, Togh, Cond Dmg gear:

- Toug: Survivability and added cond dmg from tuning crystal, 5% cond dmg trait and undead runes
- Prec: For crits and extra bleeds from clones (if I can’t extend duration I might as well throw on more conds, and a more reliable bleed mechanic then staff auto attack)
- Cond damage: Because cond damage

- Food I go for proc and condition, or condition and proc. If I find a specific mob intensive area I might go with +200 cond dmg after a kill.

And sigil for staff is of course the extra 250 condition damage from corruption stacks.

I roll around with my guardian friend (and a warrior for his crit banner when I can for the fury) and she easily stacks 25 might on me while I always try and stay clsoe to get the staff to bounce on me for fury (if no warrior friend available)… 3000 cond dmg much ?

An important note: All classes can basically pull this off. So the 15% from cond from toughness is not that much if you do the math…it just makes mesmers pull a little extra… but since mesmers suck at properly stacking bleeds it kinda only gets you on equal ground with the rest of the classes for a lot more effort and stress. (but I enjoy my mesmer)

P.S.: kitten is still hilarious when you quickly stack confusion on a large group of mobs or people in WvW and watch them hit themselves for 7000k on every hit (confusion scales best with cond dmg out of all conditions.)

Snoxx…seriously… you have 2 posts in a 5 hour time window both quoting my same post ?
I have to assume your trolling , cause referring to the same post 2 times in 5 hours and taking random bits out of context really doesn’t lead me to any other conclusion than that.

If your not torlling please read the entire thread instead of just taking bits out of random posts and taking everything out of context just to lay a random argument about how thieves are OP.

And to reply to both of your posts that are out of context:

1st post: No he does not need to l2p thief, I already stated he is one of the 3 thieves I ever meet that have a positive ratio against my mesmer after 300+ games as a mesmer. Yet he has a hard time surviving cause rogues have the defense capability of a pile of leaves inside of a raging fire.
2nd post: Again with the trolling on stealth… I said he had a vit/though build, that stacks regen on stealth. So he was basically running a spec that cannot kill anyone and can’t cap points cause he has to be stealthed, and people still called him OP even if he did not kill anyone or cap any points but because they couldn’t kill him. So people will always have a problem with thieves even if they are worthless to the team.

P.S: stop taking stuff out of context and basically encouraging arguments over thieves as I already said this is a mesmer thread, and if this thread is to exist here it is to give arguments of how to counter this “5,754steal 2,826cloak-dagger 11,267backstab”…whats that you ask ? its the thread title…so stick with it and stop trolling on thieves.

The thing with this thread:

Come to mesmer forums to complain that thieves kill you
People tell you how not to get killed by thieves
Other people whine that it is impossible and thieves should be nerfed

By that logic, you have posted the message in the wrong forum, you come to the mesmer forum for mesmer advice, if you want to complain about thieves go to the thief forum and/or pvp/wvw depending on where you got owned.

On a side note I talked about my thief friend a few posts earlier, he got bored of playing the impossible class that is a thief and speced for full tough and vit build so basically you cannot kill him, but he cannot kill you and he cannot cap points since he has to be invisible to heal… I was watching him getting spammed with whispers of people yelling OP OP OP… It happened 10 times in 3 matches, so I’m pretty much convinced what ever arena net will ever do there will always be stero-types that will hate on the thief. I’ve only posted here since it was already bumped as the first post, but unless people are coming back to be constructive and listen to mesmer advice as I said you have the wrong forum stop bumping this thread.

Bravo Sonnet for a perfectly civilized and constructive argument.

I see where your coming from but IMO no game pulls punches when it comes to pvp unless it has a progression system (i.e. LoL only being able to play weekly heros and being ranked with people of same experience, starcraft leagues, wow arena ladders). GW gives you all the gear in the form of an amulet and just throws you in the game, there really is no easy way to get into pvp.

Which leads to the design of the classes, thieves can’t seem to find their place from what people say. I mean besides the “burst” there is nothing they can bring to the table. Every class can find its spot (some have really bad spots to fill like rangers :/) but thieves just seem like thats the only thing going for them, I mean every thief in the forum was getting ready to migrate to daze lock spec (e perfectly acceptable sustained cc support spec) and ANet nerfed that instantly… I donno maybe that type of anti-game where you lock down someone was not intended…yet I still see guardians keep knowing people on their butts with shields and hammers and it has the same effect as the daze only with the added bonus of keeping opposition of the point. Until they can find a spot for the thief to fill up (and the ranger) I can’t honestly whine about their burst with a clear conscience.

EDIT: oh and also everyone spec-ing instantly for berserk when they pick up pvp is not helping.

Snoxx.7943:

Sonnet.9840:

If you can’t see that a class like thief was/is a problem in PvP environment (where casuals are also involved), I don’t consider you a good player, no matter how good you are in actual combat.

Well said.

There is way too much discussion about how everyone (except the thief players of course) should learn to play and stuff. But in reality, every veteran MMO player can clearly see how overpowered and game-breaking thieves in their current state actually are.

I don’t even…what… ?

You too seem to be talking about two different things yet supporting each others opinions…

Sonnet is basically saying I’m a bad player cause thiefs are not a problem for me, or that I do not consider them a problem so that makes me a bad player…what ?! Because pvp should be casual !? or because its played by casual players ?!

So basically if I’d be a soccer fan and I’d play soccer against Arsenal… They need to be nerfed… or … I just don’t get the casual argument honestly. It’s pvp…

So I can only deduce that what Snoxx is adding to sonnets comment is that rogues don’t need to l2p just other professions. And that is basically his gripe with this.

Well if you read the post to which Sonnet actually replied you would have noticed that my friend that is a thief is basically one of the only thieves that can kill me 75% of the time and he has to WORK for it, I watch him play and he clicks and spams around as much as a mesmer.

I play a Mesmer in sPvP and tPvP, if you would log-in on my account right now and open the pvp window you will see a great big ball of purple. I have not played any of the classes and got 100 tpvp games and 200 spvp games roughly under my belt. I have only encountered 3 thieves that could kill me consistently! (meaning 80-90% of the time I’m winning, unless its a 2-3 v 1 which now seriously this is a team game and I expect to die in those situations).

1st Thief: First week of guild wars, I did not understand that my confusion build sucks in pvp
2nd Thief: A thief on in tourneys he played a completely different game from any other rogue I ever encountered, it was backstab but he never missed a hit, he always stopped when needed, kited when needed and basically handed me the beginner manual and sent me back to Mesmer school.
3rd Thief: Is one of my friends, he wins about 75% against me…but if he misses even one skill, I lay the hurt on him. And I watched him play and he is having the worst time just staying alive and running around, thieves without a team are basically crap.

Call me ignorant for not considering thievs op! Last night I was helping my gf with her pvp daily, and we got set in different teams in sPvP and we got 300-0…then I swapped to her team and I still won with 100 point difference… people would just come at me at that point and say mesmers are OP… the guardian on their team actually did that and proceeded in calling my mother a kitten and reported me for playing a mesmer, the rest of his team didn’t share the same opinion since they were 2 mesmers and a thief and I didn’t die once in that game.

It’s sad that people come and complain so so so much on these forums and there is so much hate going around… instead of just playing the game and working around problems and when there is no longer a work around a certain build or tactic than we can call it unbalanced and call nerfs on it.

Enjoy your game people. I know I’ll enjoy it in my ignorance, with the class I chose for GW2 form my experience with GW1.

Wolf fear can be dodged/blocked and guess this its useless when a mesmer is distorting. I do this to kill downed necros with efficiency. And I was implying you were dying under a feedback bubble since that’s how you aoe kill rangers who can’t stop shooting cause they lost the ESC key on the keyboard.

And it might come as a surprise I have no condition removal on my bars at all and I never did complain about confusion/ret, since I avoid taking damage or depend on team mates to remove the conditions for me.

Also confusion scales with cond dmg and ret scales with power…another unlikely spec to meet in PvP.

@ Saulius.8430
Staff has no projectile skills.

Khyras.8021:

Saulius.8430:

confusion i use as a mesmer:
etherial combo field(4x of those) + projectile finisher => confusion
F2 => confusion
some traits=>confusion

run and hide. run and hide

and about counter. for me its enough to have null field+ cleanse on heal trait. also if i wanted to be team player, i could get condition removing mantra (removes 2 conditions for all allies, 10s cooldown)

What he said proves my point.

Read before giving a seal of approval.

Those are all the skills…no mesmer has them all available at all times.

Ethereal combo fields with confusion and whirl will apply confusion, but we barely have any projectiles skills. And if we do they have no place in a condition build since confusion scales with condition damage. F2 still has a cooldown and shatters all the illusions which again a mesmer also killing of his phantasm dps in the process. And yes some traits apply confusion when you ENTER or LEAVE a 3 different utility skills…which no one mesmer will have on his bar…again only in the rare case he is playing some home brewed condition build.

TL;DR. No mesmer can simultaneously make use of all the above skills in a efficient manner without serious sacrifice in burst damage.

And considering the previous you are basically complaining of a skill that can be avoided and deals less damage over time then other DoTs which condition build classes can apply easily without making combos like mad.

Your only issue here appears that you hate it when someone stacks 8 confusion on you and your attacking with a short bow while using quickness inside a feedback bubble.

This could end up bugging numerous dynamic events. out of the question.

“And shattering allows you to daze people indefinitely which is in my opinion overpowered.”

This statement is bananas. Shattering for daze only dazes for 1 second, and it does not stack and is on like a 40 second cooldown.