Guild Wars 2

I’m not sure whether ‘compulsory’ or ‘greatly recommended’ is a better term to use for the Spotter trait.

People are asking for some guardian skills to be nerfed at the moment. Just saying… it’s not just the mesmer forums.

Useful to join a guild as well, the commendations from guild missions allow you to get relatively cheap ascended accessories.

Ascended amulet is from Laurels. Think it was 25 + 200 badges of honor in WvW for the best deal.

Zealot trinkets don’t exist so if going that route those slots are taken by berserker, while if you’re going the berserker route it’s still going to be berserker jewelry, so…

Berserker guardian builds for max dps, Zealot for carrier builds (~15% lower DPS, 120% higher HPS, double the AoE blocks/s). Mace/focus|GS is a Zealot-type build while full DPS is GS|sword/torch. Then there’s also zerk Hammer|Mace/Torch for relatively high (non-maxed) dps with a lower skill floor, for a more relaxed playstyle.

I never favoured going full dps on a class that doesn’t have particularly high dps in the first place, but if it’s your only character, different story. Burning stacks are insufficient for Sinister to be as effective, stay away from that.

Celestials are an ele/engineer stat. Mixes of Knight and Berserker have both greater DPS and survivability than celestial on the guardian.

To get 1k burn ticks with 36 condition damage you need 7 consistent stacks of burning. For 2.5k, 18 stacks.

Protip: When trying to brag about something you can’t do don’t use ridiculously high numbers. Push for the limit by all means, but don’t go double the limit… and definitely not 6 times.

A traited FMW gives 20% quickness uptime for 50% dps boost, or 10% AoE dps boost.
An untraited Discbanner gives 75% banner uptime for 170 precision+ferocity (8% critrate, 11.3% critdmg) ~ 10.5-11% AoE dps boost.

I don’t see the problem. You can perm-quickness all you want, but you pay for that by having lower personal dps x5, and missing out on damage boosts from other classes. Nerf this, and guardians will once again be using nothing but renewed focus.

There’s additional factors here when considering builds because of trait and sigil interactions, though it’s inherently complicated because of the number of possible combinations. Either way, if considering the additional factors singly:

Radiance IV Radiant Fire: Activates 6% more often under Pack => Boosts Radiance II, IX, Grandmaster; Zeal I; Honor Minor, IV. Glacial Heart is unaffected as cooldown is limiting factor.
Radiance II Inner Fire: Reduces Pack’s innate effectiveness as the % benefit from Fury is reduced
Any on-crit sigil: Activates 6% more often. All on crit sigil effects are unable to crit – for instance SS.Air’s lightning strike cannot crit – so Ferocity has no effect on these.

We use 6% as a guide since the actual boost of 125 divided by the 21 scaling factor is almost exactly 6%. The actual game system does use decimals in its critrate however.

Lastly consider that the buffs provided by pack are AoE and thus if they don’t already have full uptime on swiftness/fury it’s an additional buff over and above that on you, and the swiftness factor present on Pack that isn’t present on Scholar. How much this affects runs depends – runspeed tends to be a major consideration for guardians if we deal with Crucible of Eternity and Arah (esp. Path II), while it’s not really something you need to care about if we deal with Sorrow’s Embrace. Alternatively, if you are being buffed by teammates to full fury uptime without requiring any further input from the rune, Pack becomes less useful than Scholar is. It’s why some classes like thieves that currently have >100% fury uptime, very high mobility and high evade uptime (ergo, never get hit) are optimal on Scholar rather than Pack.

The whole discussion assumes, of course, that you stay above 90% all of the time – otherwise there isn’t really a need to do much calcs except for interest’s sake. Intrinsically precision tends to scale better than ferocity when both are available since 15 points per % with a base of ~200% is less of an impact than 21 points per % with a base of ~50% – having fewer points of ferocity awarded doesn’t help.

Considering the different kind of runes brought by party members is yet another headache since it’s difficult to get any hard numbers especially given the nature of groups having semi-random class distributions. To a first approximation it goes like ‘Strength => Mightbuffer builds’, ‘Pack => Crit-deficient builds/classes’, ‘Scholars => High-crit builds’ as this ‘tends’ to achieve the best result – 10% more DPS on an already-high DPS class contributes more to party DPS than it does on a lower one, more might uptime on something that pumps 18-22 can push party might to permanent 25 but may add only 1 stack on a lower output build, and everything else dumps AoE fury/swiftness instead. If you ever have a dedicated dungeon group where people have permanent builds they use however, it’s a completely different story.

The guardian:

• Is crit-deficient on traits (needs more precision to reach 64% critrate)
• Does damage through both burning and direct damage
• Ferocity has no effect on the former
• Precision amps both direct and burning, and burning amps both damage and critrate
• Has limited swiftness duration/no 25% skill
• Cannot maintain more than 8 stacks of might under perfect conditions

Pack runes:

• Give fury, swiftness and might
• Amps power and precision
• Extends swiftness duration

Scholar’s runes:

• Give power and ferocity
• Only gives 10% additional damage when above 90% HP

Strength runes:

• Gives power only
• Gives pemanent additional damage given might, but only 5%

Pack > Scholar > Strength

Pack is used for crit deficient classes, scholar is used for high crit classes and strength is used for high AoE might classes. Using the wrong type for the wrong class is a DPS loss at a potentially higher cost.

Assassin’s is greater scaling than berserker at low critrate, berserker is greater scaling than assassin’s at high critrate. It’s a little nifty thing called ‘diminishing returns’.

Reflect uses reflector’s precision and ferocity, but source’s power. Normal damage uses all three of your stats. Uncrittable targets (the number of which has reduced recently) uses only power.

Given the traits available to thieves that buff critrate however, berserker works better for thieves. Crit-deficient classes like engineers and mesmers use a mix of berserker and assassin – the exact maths behind where the breakpoint occurs is complicated, and the last time I posted it nobody understood it anyway, so forget it.

Just use berserker on your thief.

Amount of build diversity postpatch pre-HoT: 5C3*9(3C1) = 270 possible builds.
Amount of build diversity postpatch post-HoT: 6C3*9(3C1) = 540 possible builds.

Amount of build diversity now for a 662 combination alone: 5C2*3C1*6*9*11*6*9*11*6 = 63,510,480 possible builds. There are a lot more ways to split 14 points among 5 lines, however…

It’s a severe problem for commanding PugTeq since I almost always get suppressed halfway, and there isn’t integrated VoIP with the Squad function.

There is a severe bug on this as the Harpy Fields of Ruin skillpoint (top right corner of the map) is permanently invisible until the skillpoint itself is activated. I had no problems finding it because I already completed the world multiple times prior to this change, but new players in my guild were reporting not knowing where the heck to go.

It’ll make sense to have all these racial skills unlocked by default, as ‘basic’ abilities your character can have before they go on to learn the special abilities of their class.

Traitlines currently also include endurance regeneration, virtue regeneration, attunement recharge, life force pool, etc. It was likely Zania’s guess that since these stats will now be implanted into the baseline for the class, they will not be replaced – something I thought to be a reasonable assumption (otherwise, it would be unequivocally a buff).

Still, the wording of this {’Base attribute points on equipment will be increased so that all the gear in the game will give higher stats than it did before. This should account for most of the missing points.’} implies that the replacement is not total – ergo, the total number of points will go down slightly.

We are, of course, speculating… and chances are that exactly none of our guesses will actually be correct.

The real issue here is how mouseover on the price would make your numbers go into price, rather than into the quantity field YOU ACTUALLY CLICKED.

Actually you only have 14 trait points at present, so the total is 1400 points. After deducting the 370 points, there remains 1030 points to allocate. At present, points are allocated to equipment in the ratio 1.4:1:1 – so approximately 303 per minor and 424 for the major stat.

That said, your point is correct; if you want only three stats, 424 for a major and 303 per minor is greater than the maximum possible of 300 in all three under the current system.

Rather than ask about details, I want answers to overarching issues:

1. Will characters under the current system who have already unlocked traits/skills get to keep them, or is everything zeroed and reassigned based on the number of skill points completed? Otherwise certain builds used by people with low world completion % will completely break the moment the patch hits.

2. When is this happening? The blogpost implies it will phase in BEFORE HoT and HoT will simply tag on an additional specialisation/skill line/weapon etc to this system, but when can we realistically expect this to be?

3. Given that allowing 18 traits instead of the current 14 will throw balance out of whack, will there be a open beta to test trait balance under these new conditions?

4. Will WvW-exclusive players be forced to world-explore in PvE in order to use their desired build in WvW? At the moment they can unlock by paying directly, but if it’s going to be tagged to PvE map exploration…

5. Are these new mystic forge items a currency in the account wallet, a token, or what? What happens to skill point scrolls?

6. Can adept/master traits be selected using the higher tier trait slots?

Zerker builds that used traits in ‘defensive’ lines like the PSEA2banner warrior will now suddenly hit even harder in full zerker.

Zerker builds that used traits in ‘offensive’ lines like the DPS warrior will now suddenly hit less hard since they’ve had the equivalent of having their weapon forcibly converted to Celestial with the base stat change.

Expect metas to now start adding traits formerly in ‘defensive’ lines, and for some of the current full offense types to drop in popularity, depending on the class. Since you can’t change stats anymore by retraiting defensively, we might also start to see people carrying multiple sets – a Soldier set for uncrittables/hard-to-survive fights and a Berserker set for standard fights might become common.

The gap between Exotic and Ascended widens since the base amount of stats it’ll be multiplied by will now increase, making it harder to multiset unless you make one set of each type – or you can survive in full glass for everything.

Heropoints are limited by sum of current skillpoints on map + 80, so it definitely can’t cost that.

At a guess, they’ll probably convert skillpoints to philosopher stones, adjust all recipes to allow for this (with some more major changes on asc backpieces where this is currently the only difference in recipe), then allow for augur stones, bloodstone shards, eldritch scrolls and crystals to be bought using philosopher stones instead, which now have to be used in item form rather than character-bound currency form.

But this is a complete guess. We’ll only know if they answer the question during the AMA.

Go SP – DP – SB. SB2 airbursting on large groups of targets is one of the highest aoe dps options any class has for weak crap, and SB3 gets you the distance you need to continue using it. DP is the go-to for moving quickly through the world, and DP3-D2 generally kills most mobs outright if your gear is updated. Against Dredge, Champions and other unblindable targets, or targets that do a lot of attacks per second, use SP and learn to time SP3 so that the mobs’ attacks are during your evade frame.

You can learn S/D, D/D and P/D later. And don’t use P/P, for the love of all that’s still holy.

There are two ways.

The kite way is to use SB3/PD3 and kill them with a thousand cuts. Mediguards have no viable ranged attacks.

The debuff way is to use poison (Dagger AA, SB4) and boonstrip (Traited Steal, SD3) to remove their protection and regen, and reduce their direct heals while dpsing them to death.

Which method is better depends on how many people are fighting against how many. The first is slower, safer and requires less skill, but you have to run away in stealth if backup arrives. The second is blindingly fast, but requires very good dodging to work well.

The funny thing is that stealth thieves are pretty much the weakest build there is except for WvW roaming. You can’t deal damage when stealthed, you can’t get any cap point contribution, and yet you can still take AoE and Cleave damage. Taking any utilities for stealth simply reduce the thief’s ability to clear conditions, pull, summon, stunbreak and/or deal damage.

Most average PvP players are capable of using active defenses on backstab, and the better ones can predict where thieves will move under stealth because the number of ways to get behind a target is limited.

The thief specs that people should fear are the interrupt/cc based ones, not the weak stealth crap.

Unload has a power multiplier of 2.4 and takes 1.5 seconds and 5 initiative to execute. Cluster bomb has a power multiplier of 1.5 and takes differing amounts of time to execute, dependent on distance – but on average, 1.5 seconds, and 3 initiative to execute.

In a short engagement, unload does slightly more dps. In long engagements, shortbow does more dps due to the greatly reduced initiative cost and the much higher DPS of the shorbow AA. Against melee targets, SB3 prevents them from doing much damage at all unless they have gap closers. Against tank builds, SB4 nerfs their healing significantly while still doing high dps. Blasting the poison field also not only debuffs enemy damage, but gives them less dodge regeneration per second.

Pistol/pistol is the build that people shouldn’t use except for VERY SPECIFIC exceptions – like confusion stacking w/ a mesmer, or killing invulnerable targets by lifesteal through pairing with a necro’s dark field generators.

I can confirm this bug is occurring on my system as well. It’s getting harder to soloflect when the usual sound effects for dodging small (spit) spins and large spins don’t play.

Still in the process of finishing up Infinite Light for her.

My thief steals hearts.

I’ve fully equipped all my characters with full-ascended-everything except the engineer, who got a legendary because statswap actually means something there.

The characters all have various strengths depending on the kind of support they can bring, whether it be the ability to tank all bosses for your party that zerkthieves can offer, the mightstacking ability that PS warriors and elementalists can offer, the condition redirection that the necromancer can offer, the portal and ethereal field spam the mesmer can offer, the water field, projectile nullification and frostspotter damage boost the ranger can offer etc etc…

I spend the majority of my time in the thief because incidentally, it fulfils the most needed roles in dungeon speedrunning (AoE stealth, boss tanking, deactivating multiple locks with one character, highest cleave DPS, 1200u pull, blind spamming, and defiance stripping), as well as being the fastest character for node farming, but I wouldn’t want to ‘stop’ playing any of the other classes.

Khisanth.2948:

Jarrix.8234:

But the bosses can’t get their skills off and a lot of them were designed for 10-20 people as opposed to 150. Like GolemMKII, if you only had 10 people you couldn’t sit on the afk spot because you’d get flooded with inquest.

This is false. I’ve done the golem several times with very few people both before and after the electric floor. The most recent time was within a week ago with just two people. There is very little that changes with the golem except we killed it slightly faster than the usual blob. The only thing that really changes is that at the lower scale it spawns additional turrets to attack you. That part doesn’t make any sense so it is probably a bug.

It’s not a bug and the golem isn’t the one spawning the turrets. The turrets in question are Antipersonnel Turrets, summoned by Inquest you aggroed.

Incidentally the exact centre of Mark II is too far to attract aggro from any mob at all. If you melee, soloing Mk II is possible. with no mob distractors.

Also, zergs used to take 6 minutes to kill Mk II when I’ve killed it solo in less than 3 minutes before. Since the removal of the triple damage spot, zergs now take 8 minutes to kill – I’d suppose that if it was soloed it would die in 4-5 minutes now, but there’s no easy way to test unless I get lucky enough to be dumped onto a dying overflow again.

Carlin Sanders.3587:

not everyone hunts the commissar for the trait.

He drops a 120 gold item. =P

Salvageable makes more sense than tradeable.

Jumping puzzles?

yolo swaggins.2570:

Identical as in both are 13g? Okay.

Hayashi.3416:

an identical price in between the current prices of the two

Somewhere, an English teacher is crying.

NTDK.4897:

caiomacos.1694:

Bran.7425:

It not like defeat should be an inconvenience or anything, right?

But the thing is this is an inconvenience that rarely affect actual gameplay. I mean, its really rare to see someone die so many times in a row (so that his equipments would start to break instead of being damaged) before he could reach or pass by an armor repair. Unlike, lets say, GW1 death penalty, which really had a major impact on the party perfomance.

it works in high level fractals where you can die a lot in a row if unlucky.

It’s a non-issue in fractals as you could just log out to character select, log in, repair, and then re-enter the fractal instance.

It’s pointless at the moment. Better to, say, reduce your total stats by 5% for 5 minutes for every death you take. Add a new condition called ‘traumatised’ for that which has a stack limit of 10. Problem solved.

It’d actually mean something for WvW too, since a zerg repeatedly spam-ressing their players will now lose viability if they were killed more than once every 5 minutes, allowing an incompetent zerg to eventually wipe at the hands of smaller numbers of far more skilled players.

There’s already an interface where you can only enter season II instances if you have season II’s story activated in your account map.

Why not have it such that activating a season I story chapter automatically makes a player zone into the instance where that open world content is active, and having that chapter inactive means that the instance is in its normal state?

Even if you had 7 different versions of the same map, swapping the story chapter in that interface will determine which version a player logs into, and having none of them activated will mean the player logs into the current post-LS1 state.

Not hard to do.

Edit: Moldur already said the same thing. @Konig, the number of players per instance will be small, so its overall effect on division is significantly less than the current effect of dividing the playerbase into 4-5 different full instances of Sparkfly Fen every time Tequatl comes around.

I’m not saying it doesn’t divide the playerbase because it does, but it’s just that the division already occurs in a far greater level due to technical limitations, and so it’s not a valid counterargument. It’s like saying that animal testing is bad because it kills animals (which it does), while going on to eat meat at every meal, which is worse by at least ten thousand times in terms of the number of animals killed per person.

No. I gurarantee you that if both leather and cloth could be used for insignias, the prices will stabilise where elonian squares and damask bolts have an identical price in between the current prices of the two.

The supply of leather and cloth are nearly identical. It’s trivial to see the effect if you empty out your bank of both, play normally for three days without crafting anything, and look at the numbers in your collections at the end of the test. You don’t have to take my word for it because a simple, short test will unambiguously prove it to be the case.

The supply isn’t so much the issue. If elonian leather could be used to make the ascended insignia, I guarantee you the price of all the cloths will drop overnight.

Azrael.4960:

2) It’s a pirate base where you take out the perimeter guns, fine. But where are the guns in the walls? The whole fort is made up of old ships so there should be cannon ports, even makeshift ones, somewhere. The pirates should be firing back from within!

They do. If you look carefully you’ll notice additional cannonballs coming out from the ship even if all cannons on that side are destroyed.

It’s also why destroying cannons/killing cannoneers is ineffective and a waste of time, and everyone should run kegs for maximum chance of succeeding the pre-event. If there weren’t any internal cannons you would be able to guarantee a proc at the cost of dragging the pre out for a longer time.

Stark.1350:

Some world bosses still aren’t functioning correctly.

1.) Maw – pretty good where it’s at, but is too easy to stack on him and not have to do anything but auto attack.
2.) Shadow Behemoth – Not enough health. Doesn’t do anything beyond spawn portals – mobs from portals are irrelevant.
3.) Fire Elemental – Nowhere near enough health. Otherwise mechanics are fine.
4.) Golem Mark II – Need to remove safe spot. Rotating gun damage needs to be higher.
5.) Jormag – pretty good where it’s at.
6.) Tequatl – pretty good where it’s at.
7.) Taidha – Doesn’t do much of anything when her gate comes down. Something more needs to happen here.
8.) Megadestroyer – pretty good where it’s at.
9.) Shatterer – Needs something more. Adds are useless. Achievement here is almost impossible to get. Too easy to stand in safe spot and burn him down. Health is fine.

1) You’ve never noticed this, but some people (full berserker s/p thieves being #1 here) are evade-tanking all of the damage. Maw’s problem is that the AoE potential of the boss is weak and his damage is concentrated on a single target. You are all being carried by a single player most of the time. All you need is a single good player though, the other 80 people there can sleep while autoattacking.
2) People have to move around and break the portals when under fire from champions. The zerg lazing at the SB hitbox does nothing however. Again, it’s something about being carried.
3) Agreed on low HP. The mechanics, summons and knockbacks are fine when it doesn’t literally die in 10 seconds.
4) The melee triple damage spot was recently removed; now it’s only possible to do double damage, making ranging from the box even more viable. Removal of the box should do, since the rest of the fight isn’t bad. HP reduction might help.
5) Triple damage spot was removed, now it’s only possible to do double damage. Champion distractors in Phase II are a problem – they should just add 2 more champion boxes to the rewards, and give the spawning champions zero box drops.
6) Too easy to chain-burn. Overall HP should be reduced a lot, but the time Tequatl spends stunned after being hit by the megalaser should be halved.
7) Her movement mechanics need to be given invulnerability, rather than being stoppable by simply immobilising her.
8) Boss should give zero aggro priority to pets, clones and minions. At the moment it’s just a pointless 900 unit rangefest since it never moves away from spawn, and it never attacks anyone except one small unlucky group of players.
9) Prisons should affect a % of targets, rather than exactly 10 every time. Boss melee attacks should be widened greatly to Mark II level.
10) Ulgoth – should be given more AoE attacks. Single players are evade-tanking while zergs are sleeping again.
11) Foulbear – should be given more AoE attacks along the same issues, as well as significantly more HP or toughness.

Not all 25% passives are equal. Those that are merely 25% speed would be neutral to this kind of change, but some 25% signets also provide additional utility. The difference between this utility and their other options leads to balance changes if all classes were given a blanket 25% increase, unless the replacements are very carefully considered.

Heal, group aegis, weakness, AoE protection, projectile reflection, AoE condition cleanses, AoE resurrections and aggro redirection are ways of carrying teammates incapable of keeping themselves alive. Direct healing tends to be one of the weakest of these roles, but it doesn’t have a zero value.

The vast majority of people must be carried. Either you carry them, or you run with groups that don’t contain them. There really isn’t any way around this.

P.S. 2k for Zealot’s recipes is a waste of gold.

• What is your favorite UNLOCKED title you don in this game (optional: why)?

Grand Artisan. It requires both mastering at least 3 crafting disciplines and fully kitting out 3 different characters in full ascended armor – which reflects some level of dedication to optimality.

• If you could choose to wear ANY title what would it be?

Dungeoneer. It’s impractical to buy so many paths, so you can essentially expect all Dungeoneer holders to be masters of at least the common paths per dungeon, if not ALL the paths.

• Pick a title you genuinely respect when you see a player with it and give a reason why this title reflects a positive feeling.

Dungeoneer, Grand Artisan and Great Jungle Wurm Slayer only. The third one is because it reflects the player’s ability to cooperate with others – which is surprisingly rare.

• Pick a title you dislike seeing on a player and provide a reason why this title impacts you negatively.

GWAMM, since it reflects being lost in the glories of the past, more so than trying to be better in the present – GWAMM isn’t even earnable in GW2.

• Make up ONE title you would like to see implemented into the game and provide a brief description/objective on how to obtain it or why you would like to see it as a new title to obtain.

A title I’d want to see would be one that integrates mastery of all different characters and types of content. Requirements:

WvW Req: 20 SMC conquests, 100 Keep conquests, 500 Tower conquests, 1000 Camp conquests, 2000 Sentry Point conquests, 2000 Yak kills, 5000 player kills, 2000 defend event successes. I don’t respect WvW rank, since it’s more a mark of EoTM grinding than WVW now.

Having an account-bound commander tag, to show willingness to spend one’s resources to contribute towards a shared goal.

At least one instance of WvW map completion on all 4 maps, to prove geographical knowledge of the WvW arena.

PvE Req: Grand Artisan prerequisite, with at least 10 ascended weapons account bound. Use of at least 5000 food items and 5000 utility consumables. This reflects a player’s commitment to be a strength to their PvE teams.

Great Jungle Wurm Slayer prerequisite to prove the ability to coordinate with others.

All Personal Story and Living Story Season II achievements unlocked to prove their commitment to their characters and their role in the lore.

All Jumping Puzzle achievements unlocked to prove their ability to move precisely and with good timing.

10,000 Achievement Points minimum to show some level of dedication over time – though this is likely an auto-prerequisite given all the other requirements.

100,000 Influence contributed to a single guild to prove one’s dedication to their community, in addition to their own personal goals.

At least one instance of world completion, to prove geographical knowledge of the entirety of Tyria.

Level 80 in all 8(9) professions with all traits and skills unlocked in at least one of each class type to prove the ability to use any class in any required way.

Both Dungeon Master and Dungeoneer prerequisites, the Aetherpath meta-achievement, all Fractal achievements and Personal Reward Level 50 to prove knowledge of and ability to complete the hardest instanced content in the game.

PvP Req: At least 100 wins in each of all 8(9) professions, at least 50 wins per map type, at least 1000 points captured, at least 1000 points defended, at least 4000 kills, at least 100,000 aggregate score over all played matches. This proves an understanding of the roles of all 8 classes in PvE and the ability to be a useful addition to any team.

All WvW Reqs: ‘Veni, Vidi, Vici.’ – ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’
All PvE Reqs: ‘Tu Fui, Ego Eris.’ – ‘What you are, I was; what I am, you will be.’
All PvP Reqs: ‘Vincit Qui Se Vincit.’ – ‘Ze conquers who conquers hirself.’
All three meta-reqs: ‘Vive ut Vivas.’ – ‘Live so that you may live.’

PaxTheGreatOne.9472:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Keeper-Zealot-Gear/first#post4960094

I know, I bought them anyways. You’ll lose only about a legendaries worth.If A-net wants to change it and make the recipes free, just this remark: Ask the devs to send me bolt and I’ll be all for it. I’ll be happy with zap as well.

Zealots is still a niche, and most -meta- ppl will kick you when they notice it isn’t zerk. It only has use if you run a dedicated healer build and if not it’s useless. Oh and dedicated healers are not meta…

I have a zealot ele though, a zealot guardian, a zealot necro. Atm all with exotic armors whioch are ~80 gold to make, instead of the 2500 gold you’ll need for ascneded.

I unlocked all classes of armor and am tempted to make the light one, but I’m held back by the coming expansion. Zealot loses 35-40% DPS in favor of healing, and the healing only works for groups IMHO, not for self, as the scaling on self is mediocre, even on guardian.

Maybe you should wait and see what will be new in HoT, maybe it will be avbail;able from vendors… like zojja is now.

It loses 15% DPS in favor of 50% healing actually. The healing power you get from traits isn’t part of zealot per se, and a reduction of 30% critdmg is a reduction of 15% DPS when your critdmg is around 200%. It’s also more for group purposes since the effective sustained heal you get is heal per second * %damage reduction, and for selfhealing, each point of toughness amps %damage reduction proportionally more than healing power amps heal per second.

Only staff eles with the outgoing healing trait and guardians with at least 4 sources of AoE heal really use Zealot well, and only for high fractal/WvW content. In most other cases it’s better to run berserker/assassin instead.

Increasing all base speeds by 10% would instantly nerf all ranged builds and buff all melee builds by default. And ranged builds are ALREADY amongst the weakest builds of all.

Giving all classes +25% by default would kill the Traveler/Speed rune market, and would passively buff mesmers, guardians and rangers, while nerfing thieves, and leaving the other classes generally untouched.

Genlog.4983:

i do allot of EOTM and the first rule keep up with the train so for any lower lvl that don’t have good speed skills are left behind.

Lower levels in EoTM should be using the highest Sigil of Speed they can get anyway. It’s permanent swiftness under EoTM conditions.

You clearly have never been kicked on sight from parties once they see your skull symbol.

#discrimination4life

It’s a legacy thing. Silk used to be 7 copper each because there was no use for it once you had 400 in all crafting disciplines, and it still dropped without effort – pretty much like the thick leather of now.

Some genius decided to raise the cost of the t7 to 100 instead of 50 for everything else because he thought the supply was the problem – and the result is the current situation with silk. They haven’t changed it after they realised it was a really bad mistake as doing so would kitten off players that had already spent thousands of gold on ascended gear.

Should leather be changed to 100/mat, the price would climb as well, though not as much as it isn’t required for insignia.

All insignia requiring cloth is what really makes all forms of cloth expensive though. Jute is expensive since it can be transmuted into wool. Wool, cotton, linen and silk are expensive as they are all needed for insignia. Looking at the relative prices of linen and silk, one might even say that silk’s situation is acceptable and the real problem is cloth being needed for ascended insignia.

The imbalance here just screws over all light armor classes. It no longer affects me since all of my characters have full ascended everything, but good luck farming @ new elementalists and mesmers.

And please don’t dump ascmats into your necromancer unless you have no other characters left. It’ll only be a lifetime of pain.

What the title says. The commissar can be killed so fast that whoever completes the pre-event has a zero chance of reaching it in time if the players camping the commissar’s spawn location do not intentionally delay.

And the majority of them do not care about the people who procced the boss for them to kill in the first place.

This is a problem unique to the commissar since all other bosses that are activated by a pre-event (Shatterer, Karka Queen etc) either have copious amounts of health, or have a short delay before activation, or their pre-events end at the boss itself, or some combination of the three.

A minor variant to this is that the people who kill the vines in the Jungle Wurm pre-event has a zero chance of killing the first Avatar of Blight.

Recommended fix: Add a 15 second delay between the pre-event completion and next event phase.

If the current total size was a problem, they could easily reduce the population cap – ergo, they do not consider it a problem.

Consider however that the limits are placed per map. If 80% of players WANT to zerg, then for a map of size 120, you have 96 in the zerg and 24 spread everywhere else in the map. Assume you are someone that is spread elsewhere – that means you would, on average, meet two people per way point – or two people per heart, on most maps. That allows you to have some company.

If the size was cut to 40, maybe the 32 man zerg feels more natural, but it would mean that if you explore alone, you meet one person every TWO hearts – which would feel completely deserted.

For the problem of a giant zergball to be solved, you need to reward people for splitting up, so they do not ball up – such as, for instance, creating objectives that they have to complete simultaneously such that it is impossible for any ball to complete them because it would never move fast enough. It also helps to reduce the number of waypoints to reduce any ball’s possible mobility.

As you might have already noticed, the most recent PvE updates of Dry Top and the Silverwastes fit this archetype EXACTLY. Expect more of the same in Heart of Thorns.

And while I cannot comment on the number of instances in existence for ‘every’ world boss, I know that Tequatl generally has 4-5 instances (2 highly-organised, 1 last-minute organised, 1-2 guaranteed fail maps), Taidha Covington has 4 instances (3 successful, 1 last-minute spawn) and Triple Trouble generally has 2-3 (1 highly-organised, 1 attempted-organisation partial success, 1 guaranteed fail), while most maps outside of world bosses tend to contain exactly 1 instance. As every map has at least one instance, the number of instances in total are approximately equal to the total number of maps plus four during normal bosses, and the total number of maps plus eight during times when the Three Great Bosses (Teq, TT, KQ) overlap with the normal rotation.

Formerly, every server used to have one instance of its own map (and occasionally an overflow), leading to a minimum of the sum of servers multiplied by the sum of maps. Without a doubt, mega-servers would have allowed them to reduce hardware.

Hannelore.8153:

Between worst gear set (nomads) and best gear set (berserker) it takes only 2.5x as long for enemies to die and that is assuming that you use no conditions and every person in your party is wearing the worst possible gear. You also lose some DPS while dodging and during many other “active defense” moves.

Base power is 916. For something to take 2.5x less to die, you need 2.5x the damage, which in power is 2290. A full PTV thief is 2788 with zero crit, which is not 2.5×. It’s slightly more than 3 times.

Now we add critrate. A berserker thief will full damage spec will crit 100% of the time with 2.2x damage per crit, so it’s actually 6.6 times for one player. Assuming all the players in a party use the same build, a full damage spec will kill something 6.6 times faster. This is more pronounced for warriors, which have a higher natural critdmg%, and less pronounced for rangers, since their power stat is worth less than other classes owing to their multiplier being reduced because of their pet.

We assume, of course, that the same traits are used. Full tank defensive specs against full damage offensive specs are an even greater difference. Warriors also don’t really lose much DPS when dodging as their dodge in itself deals damage, s/p thieves use the Pistol Whip iFrames rather than dodging… etc etc.

Consider what 6.6 times means. if we had 4 players in Nomad’s gear in a dungeon, the sum total of their damage is 4/6.6, which is barely 2/3 the damage of a single player in a full-glass spec (full-glass is sometimes Berserker, sometimes Sinister, sometimes a mix of Berserker and Assassin). If the single player in full-glass gear did not ever get downed, 60% of your entire dungeon is being done by one player. That’s worse than if you had 5 players in full glass, and 3 of them were dead ALL THE TIME.

Lastly, Nomad’s is not the worst set. It’s the lowest-offense stat, but even Nomad feels good about itself when it looks at Magi. Magi has no power or condition damage for its crits to do anything at all, it has no toughness to amplify its healing power stat, its last stat is vitality that gives no sustained survivability even though with pathetic damage, long-term sustain IS the kind of survivability you need, and of course… its major stat is Healing Power… the lowest-scaling statistic type of all.

Hannelore.8153:

Learn math before trying to look cool.

Your hubris makes my calculator cry.

You do get more powerful, actually. If you fight an ascended geared level 80 in WvW in your level 20 masterworks, you have pretty much zero chance of winning. When I was lvl 4, the only thing I could do with my Guardian back then was to use exclusively control skills to keep everyone on the ground so the people in my team who actually had some damage potential could kill them.

It’s not as large as in most other MMOs, though. A full asc traited 80 is about 3-4 times the power of a lvl 2. Whereas in most other MMOs, a level difference of 5 levels is already the same kind of power gap.

And the hardest content in the game is to carry dungeons with hopeless teammates. The hardest content that doesn’t rely on artificially inflating difficulty this way would be fractals, WvW and PvP, of which only the first two need geared level 80s. But doing level 50 fractals with people who know what they’re doing cannot begin to compare with how hard carrying Honor of the Waves Path II with really bad players can be. If by endgame you want high difficulty, that’s where it’s at.

Otherwise most people just run dungeons, fractals, WvW, PvP, farms and world exploration as an ‘endgame’. Whether you consider them all as endgame, or none of them, depends on your perspective, of course.

Why spend more effort proposing solutions when in the past 3 years of repeated threads and suggestions, ArenaNet has replied with less than 3 posts in total in all the threads?

You can look through the Dev Tracker posts and observe the complete lack of anything even tangentially related.

If they ask for feedback, if they talk about changing conditions, adding input then would be good. Right now you’re just wasting effort on something that will disappear beyond the first 20 pages, before someone else restarts it in May.

And nothing will have changed.

I played another MMO where skipping was impossible because aggro tethers never break in dungeons.

Guess what happened.

4 Spellstorm CW + 1 GF Lair of the Pirate King speedruns in Neverwinter. The tactic is to run through the whole dungeon until you reach a boss, then spam freeze AoE on the boss so that all the mobs around it will first be AoE permfrozen before fracturing to bits. We literally fight 90 mobs at the same time. The Guardian is only in the party so he can proc runspeed buffs on the whole team.

If anything, it’ll increase the reward/time ratio if this was allowed in GW2, except the equivalent here would be Meteor Storm elementalists with one staff/hammer guard that traited for superior Aria with frequent applications of Wall of Reflection and Retreat.

And guess how long it took for Blade and Soul, a significantly more difficult (and also slower-levelling) MMO, to have its dungeon speedrun paths derived.

One week. Just one week for enough people to reach level cap, play a dungeon a few times, find the route and teach it to others.