Guild Wars 2

Afya.5842:

Fletch.3572:

5 people with 25 stacks of maxed out bleed will just melt everything in sight.

I never get this argument.

You aren’t supposed to. People who make this argument are mathematical ignorant.

These are really amazing guides and well written. It would be awesome to see the calculations you did but otherwise really good work!

8/10

I like the egyptian theme, but dislike yellow and sylvari necromancers in general

Personal opinion is personal of course, but I just wanted to chime in with my new found love for AC.

I don’t understand people who think that level 35s can’t do this dungeon. They can. It’s not easy, but games are not popular because they are easy but because they are fun!

I’ll rate the new AC 7 on a 10 scale measurement. To get the rating up through the roof fights like Spider shouldn’t be called bonus event and there should overall be less trash – or it should be better explained and with less HP but more dangerous abilities. Trash is just a boring waste of time (and still is in AC unfortunately) at the moment.

Thresher.3049:

Nemesis.8593:

If i missed anything or if you have any questions feel free to comment here, on in the comment section on youtube.

[…] I’m not sold on it personally as kiting agro can be just as effective as face-blocking and as a necro… we get and keep agro!

As a true comparison, if this class was worth ‘selling’ in a sense people should trade in their ‘almost functional condition gear and spec’ for PVT and dagger- it would be good to park an equivalent Warrior (or Guard) + gear and tanky-weapons (mace, shield, sword shield etc) next to the same type of mob and running some comparative vs DPS/Damage taken.

In all fairness Nemesis isn’t trying to sell you the class, rather he demonstrates the usability of this class. In his video he doesn’t dodge when he should so he can show you the strength of the build (surviving even when playing like a scrub).

In any regard I agree that kite-tanking is possible – but it’s also really annoying for other professions that have close-range immobile channel abilities (100B I’m looking at you) and in some cases can draw aggro from nearby mobs.

This video made me realize they fixed the bugs and the catastrophy that was life-leech and I just might be inspired from this video to grap my melee gear and have another go as power-mancer. That is if I can toss away my addiction to high dps numbers from my condition build that is done at safe distance and makes me look like a pro as last man standing

Kakeru.2873:

Hickeroar.9734:

Bruno Sardine.2907:

But like many things in this game… it’s great on paper and theory, but it’s execution is severely flawed.

Bah. I’m at lvl40, and I have no issues with agony at all…

Because your level 40 ._. half of the dungeons aren’t even avaliable to you yet and neither is fractals which is where Agony is and is a level 80 instance please don’t make such useless points.

Or he meant he is at FotM lvl 40…

In either case whatever point he has is moot because it’s his subjective point of view not based on a factual discussion or serves any purpose in this thread except agonizing people and you’re best off ignoring him.

I did get it since the topic of the thread is Guild Upgrades and I don’t think it’s a good idea the way you describe it (server load wise and data traffic wise).

I imagined that icon was always visible to guild members and changed to the commander icon if that was active. I guess you want it to tie itself to a guild rank.

Terrible idea to lower the cost of T3 cultural armor. It’s a gold sink and vanity item. And does that job perfectly.

I have respect for people in T3 cultural armor because they stand out. However it would be amazing to be able to work your way towards buying armor from other cultures. Perhaps through some unique storyline or by allying with that culture somehow.

Yea I realised that and I still don’t think it’s a particular good idea. The commander icon really only serves the purpose to draw non-guildies toward the commander and to give purpose to people not in guilds or in smaller guilds.

It would be self-defeating to change the commander icon into the suggested – and I don’t see why you’d particularly want to anyway.

I much prefer they would add larger size groups (fx. 30) so you can more naturally split a zerg and increase the level of complex tactics available. Essentially add an extra chat to the existing:

Ideally WvWvW maps should have the following chat channels:

Commander chat (for active commanders only)
‘Army/Raid’ chat
Group chat
Map chat

I don’t think Guild commander icon is a good idea. I’m coming from a big WvW guild myself and yes sometimes it’s annoying when strangers and non-associates join the group but that’s why it’s turned off.

Instead we use voice chat.

I’d much prefer if they would work on guild challenges and making it more sensible for guilds to claim ownership of forts/fortresses, etc. Like adding karma vendors that sell items only for members of the guild that claimed the keep/fort.

This game really needs to make guilds more special than they are now. Today it’s John Doe’s War and not Guild Wars.

I play conditionmancer in full Rapid gear and toughness really helps staying alive in dungeons when mobs and bosses lock on to you. High toughness coupled with Necro survivability and people will love you for tanking while doing massive dps.

I’m a roleplayer myself, or used to be back when job and career didn’t mean so much to me, but why do people not see that RP is just a theater and everything people do is acting?

Sex is a big part of real life, why should it not also be a part of RP?

Anyways, that’s off topic. RPers can do whatever they want and if you are too narrow minded and too scared or too insecure that you need to hate on other people to maintain a sort of selfworth you shold just go do something meaningful in life or read more books and analyze yourself!

Please respect your fellow man (and woman)!

LFG could be a kickstarter milestone then. If we reach say US$200.000 they’ll add a LFG system (it’s all in there already anyway) and put groups together (no teleport since it would cost and it’s annoying).

If you ever get to join a death match like this again, please try the dagger

I’m dead serious.

I would gladly like to fund and earmark a monetary contribution to Arenanet in order to get the dungeon redesign kickstarted.

The number of glitches and poor dungeon design wrapped in a really cool story that I’m not allowed to enjoy because the dungeon is just one extremely long tour de force in boring trash with too much health.

The bosses are mostly pretty cool except they again have far too much health and not enough interesting abilities or stuff happening (not considering Fractal dungeons here).

So would it be possible to join a kickstarter for Anet that has as a goal getting the dungeons redesigned quicker than what is currently happening?

It looks okay if you don’t combine it with a skirt type of leggings. Combined with the guild weapons it actually looks good.

This happend to us twice in a row now. Restarted the dungeon to redo it, and it happened straight away again at the chopper.

We submitted ingame bug reports with screenshots.

I tried a power tank build and I liked it. I really felt unkillable and did pretty good damage. I missed the bigger numbers but did high base damage.

I tried a glass cannon 20/20/0/0/30 and 10/30/0/0/30 build that was really amazing for damage and provided really high numbers and high dps. It felt really good but it was stressing.

I also build a high toughness, high crit build and feel like a shadow ninja or assassin which I really like because it’s able to melee everything and come out alive and provides decent group support.

Right now I’m playing a conditionmancer just to try a ranged high damage playstyle to see if I like it. I’m not sure I will though since I like the fast paced melee combat style.

For PvE the ghost mode would not be a game-breaker. In sPvP and WvW it would, but it shouldn’t be enabled for those zones. (unless you implement it so you can only see people near your corpse).

As you could predict I don’t like your inability to accept mash up team compositions. For what it’s worth the difference between light armor classes and heavy armor classes is 300 toughness (which is a lot I would admit). I don’t know what made ANet think it was balanced to grant warriors the profession with highest base health and base toughness while letting them also be one of the highest damage dealing professions!

In any regard warriors don’t bring combo-fields but they have tons of finishers. So what really make your group shine is having 2-3 classes with combo fields and 1-2 heavy finisher classes (like warrior or thief).

I also definitely doesn’t agree with a glass cannon build as needed/required or anything like it that would make your run go more smooth. Depending on the profession they tend to get killed super fast and requires team members to rally them or revive/corpse run. It’s much better to run with a more balanced build that focus on doing and enhancing damage but can also survive and be self-reliant, which your typical glass-cannon can’t.

It would be awesome if you couldn’t respawn until after everyone died and if they would code in a “ghost mode” so you can run around as a ghost spectating and get pulled back to your body upon revival.

Good write up pdfrod

Thanks!

I didn’t try the terror aspect yet. Does Fear damage tick in on creatures with Defiance in PvE?

Otherwise I think a setup of 0/30/10/0/30 for permanent fury might be a better setup?

You could look into the various karma sets for the Power/Vitality/Toughness setup. You should maximize those 3 stats and then take all the minion traits you can.

A build like this with 20/0/20/20/0 and the remaining 10 points as you wish should suffice to let you do good world PvE.

I wouldn’t recommend minions for dungeons because they are quite underwhelming and frequently die very fast in any typical fight.

TheWalkingDead.7298:

Deathshroud being useless for anything other then a power build (and even then pretty bad). No burst. Slow stacking of conditions. Extremely limited access to stability. Extremely long cool-downs on almost all of our utilities. Many traits still bugged (more then any other profession). The fact that a lot of or utilities flat out don’t work (corrupt boon missing 50% of the time, spectral grasp missing 80% of the time, people just walking out of wells) Minions (need I say more?). Oh yeah, extreme lack of combo fields/finishers. This is just off the top of my head. kthxbai.

This is not even serious – I bet that even if they make the points like you want it you’ll find something else to be annoyed at. If you don’t like the necro class play something else and don’t whine about the state of the necro, which admittedly still have major issue but not glaringly gamebreaking issues.

Yes it’s sad that minions are as useless as they are. Yes the traits are tossed around to make Curses a vastly more interesting setup than Spite for most power builds – but it’s not so broken that you can’t build a proper spite powermancer and the necro class when properly build is actually one of the strongest 1v1 classes in the game due to the amount of counters, health, escapes and debuffs.

If you don’t realize that you have no business playing a necro.

Yes I love the necro profession to the point that each time I play my Guardian or Warrior I feel something is missing and I’m weaker overall when building to do the same damage as my necro.

But the bad thing is still minions. When they are fixed the necro profession is in a very good spot

really nice guide

Helped me tons levelling cooking.

The biggest problem I have is with the flight speed of the missile. If it was anything like the bow, rifle or elementalist fireball it would be in the right place.

An even bigger problem is that marks can only be triggered by creatures and not structures – which essentially breaks the staff AoE usefulness versus any other weapon (it’s unique in its inability to aoe structures).

The axe as a short range cleave for auto-attack spam, 2 as a medium range AoE and 3 is fine as is.

That would basically make the axe into a proper weapon rather than as a secondary setup weapon for occassional use as a power focused necromancer.

Lopez.7369:

@Savan:
Like I said in my guide, a lot of people overlook Corrosive Poison Cloud because they severely underestimate weakness. Way too many people don’t realize that it effectively lowers boss damage by 12.5 to 25 percent, depending on the boss’s critical hit chance.

Corrosive cloud, Dagger 4 to send your self-weakness to the target combined with fury (to reduce the weakness effect on yourself), then dagger 5 and you have around 26 seconds of weakness on the target per each 32seconds. You can reach permanent weakness on the target with more condition duration (just need +40%).

So yeah, the cloud is amazing for its purpose.

It definitely feels awkward to build a direct damage build as a necromancer. Soul Reaping gives you good tanking abilities as a damage focused necromancer, but it shouldn’t be mandatory.

In any case we don’t really have a great setup to support a direct damage build. Dagger traits are tanking traits and the axe is just sad for damage (but a great support weapon).

Yes please. I would not miss my reanimator trait at all. That little bugger is not really worth it even if he does get some 3-4 hits in – seeing him spawn a grub on Lupus just saddens me when I can’t command it to be defensive and stay near me on phase 1.

Otherwise the trait is decent but not what I look for in a toughness trait line and it seems completely out of place.

I agree with XiL, although I’m still playing…

Minions are just not very well thought out or coded, even if there’s a few builds that do really well using Minions the very erratic behaviour of Minion AI makes it unreliable and situationally good but as a rule a very poor choice of playstyle.

It isn’t impossible since the overflow servers are just that. In effect it is asking to remove overflow as a server and just fill up zones till near bursting point (80% or something so people can go as groups) and then make mirror servers to handle the extra load.

Lopez is right. I consistently dodge out of the bubble with my human necromancer as well.

I gave up trying to get a group going for Story-mode dungeons and I have done only one in which I felt compelled to skip the videos in order to have some impatient members of the group not rage quit.

Would it be possible to recreate the Story-mode version and turn them into Dynamic Event based scaling dungeons – what I mean by this is have the dungeons scale up in difficulty when more than one player enters as a group exactly as if doing an open world DE.

I would be perfectly fine if dungeons were hard for 1 person and easier for 5 because it would allow me to explore them. They could work basically as a fractal with multiple saving points from which you could begin again.

To me that would be proper story-mode – instead of the state the story mode is in now.

I attempted to do them solo, but the trash is really painful and fights are super long.

The problem with GW2 dungeons is that they are rather lackluster in regards to difficulty as in, some abilities completely overshadows others and some mechanics are just completely harmless.

Take the last boss in CoF for example. His circle on the ground is so easily avoided it’s not even fun. His hammer attack combined with lava though is very interesting and well-thought out.

His ability to immobilize you is awesome as well and promotes teamplay…

However he hits like a wet noodle and have no gap closers or other interesting things to do and is easily kited around – and he has so much HP that it just takes ages to down him because of his frequent invulnerability stage.

He should instead just charge-jump to the middle and stomp. Or stomp in place (for example with his hammer) where he is at instead of running to the middle like a kitten and stomp. The ring should also move a lot faster than now, because as is I can fall asleep and still manage to dodge (or run out of range)!

I’m sure if Anet sat down and worked on a dungeon at a time in a scrum sort of way and reiterated on the fights to make them more interesting.

An example of a good fight is Subject Alpha when you fight him on the path choice beneath submarine. That’s an amazing fight in that tiny room where if you have the wrong tactic you’ll need to waypoint fight him (and spend 45min doing so) but if you develop the right tactic the fight lasts around 8min.

ClinkyDink I wonder why my screen splashes red with graphic that looks like crits… Must’ve just be me hitting really hard. Hephey

Because the minion AI is incredibly stupid I abandoned my notion of a wide-eyed crazy berserking necromancer who would surround himself with demonic undead minions and be right in the face of his enemy – getting buffed and healed by his fiendish minions.

It was fun to level and quite effective as well – when the minions decided they wanted to attack. A lot of the times it was only 1 or 2 minions that attacked the others just stood there or ran off to some other distant mob that wasn’t even in combat!

The flesh golem in particular would just stand there and do its idle animation while I was in combat with multiple enemies…

Death Magic Jagged Horror particularly annoyed me – they die instantly, provide no utility and are actually keeping me in combat making me almost die a few times (from lack of healing).

I also cannot replicate this on all types of mobs. I did however see this effect in CoF path 3 last night on that mob which captures you in a circle (Sentinel?).

After playing through most of the explorable dungeons in particular Arah I find the dungeons are much too easy and not very fun overall.

I don’t know if I’m particularly good at abstracting from a boring grind in order to accomplish what I want (a sleek look) but the fact is, dungeons are simply just incredibly bland and poorly designed.

They lack dynamic, they have way too much trash (that for the most part can be easily skipped by just running and using invisibility to drop aggro) and the boss fights are overly long but not difficult at all (don’t stand in red circles, use ability 1+2 and profit).

I hereby besiege Anet to create a taskforce of well-versed game designers, developers, programmers and possible some of the most eloquent and passionate gamers from these forums/other fan sites to get the fun back into dungeons.

Heck, I’m willing to sign up for something like that as a volunteer – but a better idea would probably to write up a dungeon design contest. Paizo (D&D game design company) did that very successfully (and continues to do so regularly) and so did Wizards of the Coast (how they created their most successful campaign sofar in Eberron).

No reason Anet shouldn’t do that either. The format is pretty simple, draft up a contest (for example design a trash pack encounter or a boss encounter) and make every contester write 400 words about their idea, get hundreds or thousands of contesters – choose a bunch of the best and most well written and get the public to vote down the 10 best from a selection of perhaps 15 submissions. Then choose which ones to go into the final 3 after they submit a more detailed write up of their ideas . The final 3 then expand their draft with, for example, 8000 words and you choose a winner who will help the team design the dungeon.

You could then use these submissions as inspiration for redoing the remaining dungeons and create an internal task force to execute the changes.

Everyone profits.