Guild Wars 2

If you drop 5 from CS you can get Exposed weakness for 10% more damage, which is probably better than the 5% crit damage and 50 precision you give up.

What’s the logic behind moving Exposed Weakness to the 15 point minor?
15/30/0/25/0 builds for 30% extra damage passively much?

Does anyone know of an EU server that clears this? been trying to get settlers gear for my ranger for months…

I would rather completely forgo a minor trait completely rather than have last refuge, why is it in the game? Last Refuge has not helped me in a single situation, yet it has killed me dozens of times.

What annoys me most is how it’s FORCED onto anyone wanting to go shadow arts, there’s a similar talent in trickery (Instinctual Response) but at least that is a Major Trait, so that you can avoid taking it.

How do traits like this even get past the drawing board? surely the people doing balance should of just thrown something heavy at the head of the person who came up with it and left it at that.

Swap it with slowed pulse (which is a bit lackluster in compared to the other Majors anyway) or Shadow Protector.
Failing that delete it completely and create a new minor as swapping it with any of the other adept majors would be a bit to strong for a minor trait.

If push comes to shove and those small changes are to much to ask for just give us the option to disable minor traits for gods sakes.

anyone know of a server that has these uncontested currently? I’ve been trying to buy some settlers gear for my ranger for forever however there’s never anyone at southsun on my server.

Dagger storm is fine atm, it forces ranged classes to stop attacking you or you can just use it for 8 seconds of stability.

If you bind stow/sheathe weapons you can cancel the animation when you want.

Zephyric Reaper.3049:

Lymain.6723:

What Jaycat said. Also, you may wanna try Roll for Initiative instead of Blinding Powder (at least if you’re not using Withdraw…and I guess maybe you are).

That’s quite a good idea, the extra init should be useful too. What I don’t like about it is that it’s not a good choice in certain situations (leap of faith at a cliff!) However blinding powder usually meant 1 less condition, 2 might, blindness, and movement boost for me. But I’ll see how it works out, thanks!

Personally Blinding powder is the one utility I keep on my bars for the most part, I alternate between Roll/refuge/shadowstep and smokescreen (heartseeker/Cluster combo is great) for the others, occasionally I’ll use signet of agility (for the extra dodges) or on rare occasions devourer venom for the 4s root if I find people are getting away.

As far as utilities go you can just take what you’re comfortable with, main reason I keep Blinding Powder personally is because it’s the only ‘last resort’ sort of stealth we get, that you can use while stunned, with no target and in one press as oppose to the delay on CnD(or BP into HS as D/P) or heartseeker/Cluster combo on smokescreen.

Worth mentioning with a SA build I usually stick to HiS over withdraw, however with 15+ points in Acro I take withdraw with the vigor trait because the amount of dodges you can get out is just ridiculous.

I’ve had no mobility issues with a 0/30/30/10/0 build for chasing you have heartseeker (during stealth with Fleet Shadow the range is increased on it noticeably) as for initiative regen I run the SA trait for +2 initiative on stealth and I don’t really have any issues with initiative either, so long as you think about how your spending it and not going heartseeker crazy when there’s no need to , but there’s variants for D/P that use a 20/30/20 layout in the same trees for the added init regen and dodges, since I mainly use D/D I haven’t really tested those out much though, since I’d prefer the guaranteed crit on backstabs.

I don’t think you’ll find many decent physical damage builds running with 0 in critical strikes, like I said before if you’re not pressuring your opponent then they are just going to steamroll over you since they won’t feel threatened into using defensive play.

I think you need to choose between a SA or Acrobatics spec, there’s a few of sword/dagger specs based around evasion tanking that run x/30/x/30/x I believe, however if you’re running points in shadow arts then you should be focusing more on correct positioning during stealth. There seems to be little point in taking both trees since they promote different styles of play.

At the end of the day as a thief you’re not supposed to take damage and heal it up, hence our lack of access to boons such as regen and protection (outside of S/D stealing) a thief is about mitigating the damage via stealth/dodging/positioning etc.
which is why we need high damage with physical damage specs so we can deal alot of damage in between periods of stealth/dodging.

Yes traits are better for offense, if you put 30 points into CS you would have 40% (30% more crit damage via the talents spent + 10% more damage while over 6 initiative) more damage on your backstabs and also guarantee they crit meaning you can sub out beserkers pieces for valk if needed thus giving more hp but maintaining the high crit damage.

Ofcourse you’d lose the HP from the Acrobatics line so your hp would still even out around 16k/17k depending whether you go full valks or not (I run beserkers with valk weps and I sit at around 16k hp with a 0/30/30/10/0 build) but you’d have a lot more damage meaning the enemy is pressured into playing more defensive.

You may be better going off for a condition/power/vit gearset with that current trait build you have.

Toppins.2638:

Conner.4702:

I hope you are checking the icon above the mine after sweeping for them with skill 1. The only time I had trouble making them green was when Canach was re-arming them. Otherwise it never gave me any trouble. Re-arming turns the mines yellow and they will be unable to be made friendly for a few seconds after that.

Yes, that was the only part that was obvious. I sweep with 1, find a bomb, press 2, and…. nothing. I turn around and do a little dance around the ring spamming ‘2’ and… nothing. Sometimes it will go red -> green, but it’s rare. There doesn’t seem to be a pattern to it working, either. Sometimes on the 6th time I press ‘2’ next to a bomb it goes green, just in time for him to detonate all of the mines. So then I have to wait for them to go back to red, just to be frustrated all over again.

Each ability on the minesweeper is for a different type of mine, if you’re using 2 every time (like you describer here) then ofcourse it’s only going to work on one type.

If the dagger is mainhand go crit and crit damage, if pistol is mainhand go conditions.

bottom left corner of ashford is a new waypoint (next to the guild challenge thing)

RapidSausage.4620:

capuchinseven.8395:

RapidSausage.4620:

Flubble.8093:

i don’t know about WvW, you might have better luck dumping the cats and going with the birds (they move a bit faster with their swiftness buff) or a ranged pet like a devourer/spider?

the damage won’t be worth it then, the point of speccing BM traits is to empower your pets and you taking the support role.

and currently, drakes and felines are the dps pets.

Birds are more than worth it and hit often, birds and more so ravens provide some of our best burst which is far more important in PVP than DPS.

how do ravens provide burst damage?, i thought stealthed panther is best,

Regarding birds, put 10 points in skirmishing for the 30% pet crit damage and press F2 on the raven(raven currently has the highest damaging F2 of the birds afaik, also blinds which is nice) and you can get upwards of 6k from it easily, highest I’ve gotten was about 9k on some glass build thief, even without that crit they are by far the best burst anyway due to birds basic 2k precision meaning they crit often.

If you want to go bm and make sure your pet is actually getting damage off, go sword/x (I prefer warhorn but offhand is personal preference really) evasion tanky build, take the aoe vigor on pet swap for birds in the BM tree, since you’re in melee range as soon as you swap pets your pet is on the target and also the sword basic chain is a 100% uptime 50% snare for when you need to land that burst.

Just sit there dodging their big hits with while your pet is hitting away.

As a Charr when you’re choosing an order you work with Korukhan the Blacksmith (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Korukhan_the_Blacksmith) for the whispers, I was wondering if anyone knows where you can get his chest armor?

Not as far as I can tell, just tested and the duration remains 10 seconds.
makes sense since it isn’t a ‘regeneration’ buff after all.

Drop commanding voice for mighty swap, ideally you want to be swapping pets often for the quickness + save on blowing heals on pet and mighty swap is basically 100% uptime for 3 stacks of might on the pet (since swap cd is 15 and mighty swap might stacks are 30 secs),only time you shouldn’t be swapping is when you’re in rage as one as it will remove your pets buffs.

Ccommanding voice isn’t great since pet swapping resets all the pet abilities including f2s anyway (meaning you can just cast them every 15 instead of waiting for cooldowns anyway).

If you’re swapping pets every 15 they will rarely die, that means you can probably switch out signet of stone for something else, quickening zephyr preferably however fire trap is always decent in melee and for wolf pets (as they have 2 leap finishers) even if you don’t go for high cond damage.

Perhaps also drop protect me (I don’t really like it, havn’t had much problems survivability wise if you’re careful) meaning you can take both QZ + fire trap or w/e you prefer.

Also I’d personally drop expertise training for wilderness knowledge (20% surv skills reduction) especially if you free that utility up to get zephyr.

Also just to mention pet wise I use a Jaguar (stealth for 100% crit +QZ burst during RAO) and a canine (personally I use hyena for double pet but Sylvan hound is also nice for the regen) since canines are a decent mix of dps and tank ability while also having knockdown/cripple leap finishers.

^ Empathic bond, grandmaster wilderness survival.
removes all conditions every 10 seconds so long as your pet is alive.

Trait cond removal is enough as Cempa said, + lightning gives you a decent up time of 100% endurance Regen (forgot what the buff itself is called) giving you more base dodges as well.

You should either put 5 more points into BM for fast pet swapping or take 5 points out, there’s not much point in going 10 in BM since all the T1 BM traits aren’t that great, you get much more advantage from swapping pets faster since it resets the CD for all their abilities (double wolf means you basically have a guaranteed cripple +knockdown every time you swap) and gives you quickness.

The only current BM T1 trait that seems worth it is compassion training (for faster lick my wounds) or the stacking stats thing, but those are both gimmicky, this is because the ones that reduce pet ability cds/F2 recharge time are worthless since ideally you want to be swapping pets on cooldown and of course the 20% shout cd reduction is worthless since shouts are only used as a defense/troll gimmick at the moment.

It’s because of how bows work in this game, when you aim at the closest target you will aim for the arrow to hit in the chest on them (which is why bows lead running targets).

Due to this it doesn’t take into account that you also want to hit the target behind.

You can see it best if you’re fighting something like giants as you will actually shoot up into their chest.

It is ‘working as intended’ so to speak, it’s just poorly designed when piercing arrows come into play.

Male Charr, Medium armor (Helm)

Found a bug currently with my chars helm, basically I transmuted my AC token helm to the char t2 medium armor skin while wearing it and now no matter what I do I can’t seem to apply a new dye to it, If I apply a dye this is all that happens (applied dies to all armor just to show the effect).

As you can see in the pictures the dye simply doesn’t apply like it does on the rest of the armor.

Edit : just to go into a bit more detail of what I think may have caused the bug, when I transmuted my helm I was wearing it already (The Medium armor helm from the AC tokens) and after transmuting it (to the charr t2 medium as pictured) I actually had the AC helm still on my character, even while not wearing a helm (although if I wore a helm it would show both models) this issue dissapeared after I relogged however, leaving me only with the issue of being unable to dye my current helm.

I don’t get why the shouts are even in the game, there’s literally no use for them vs other abilities, they should just be settable as an F button skill instead seems pretty basic that we should be able to control our pets past “hit that thing, don’t hit that thing” as a ranger.

Each tier only applies once, if you have 6 runes you’ll only get each of the listed bonuses once, not 6 of the first 3 of the 2nd etc.

you can cancel it if you don’t have it set as your auto attack (ctrl+right click it so there’s no arrows around the ability) however that does lead to you having to auto attack manually for each strike.