Guild Wars 2

@ Rising Dusk. Ty for those healing numbers by class. Where did you get them? I looked for such numbers, but wasn’t ever able to find them. Is there a reference or just from experience?

In the past I"ve read comments from people saying an ele outheals a druid. I suppose for individuals or in any given fight anything is possible, but is this true in general? I raid a lot, and almost always as a magi druid. I run bgdm, and the only time i’ve ever noticed i was outhealed was by another druid. Whats the consensus?

Interesting, thank you! Are you aware of any resources for the absolute numbers on this?

I tend to run druid in raids. I feel like druids have so many great utility options. Its always a sacrifice giving up one. The first one to go tends to be sun spirit, and I’ve always wondered how costly that is in terms of DPS.
Has anybody out there quantified what the DPS increase is from sun spirit assuming its used on cooldown? Obviously its going to be different in a power vs. condi subgroup, but I suspect its going to be substantial in both groups. For that matter, does anybody have the info for frost spirit? Thanks ahead of time.

Thanks for the reply. I checked my account and between proofs of heroics and the crystaline ore I already have, I could get 5 leadership runes now. So I guess its not too much to ask to do 1 or 2 more to get a full set. If I could I’d really like to slot those into legendary armor so i could swap around, but….

My experience on mesmer is pretty much limited to clicking 80 tomes of knowledge and running around with an HP train. Unfortunately, tomes of knowledge impart very little actual knowledge, and so here I am. I"ve read the standard build guides but i’m still a bit unsure how to gear up.

My goal is to eventually start raiding on my mesmer, but for now I just want to do fractals to get the feel of things. I guess i’m looking for a “training wheels” kind of build. I’m familiar with all raid and fractal content, so the training wheels are for learning chrono, not the content.

So my question is, what gear should I be using? I have lots of unused ascended chests for both weapons and armor, so fortunately cost isn’t an issue. Would you guys rec commanders or minstrels to start off with? If I like chrono I’ll prob get a set of both eventually.

I’m even more confused about runes. I will say there is a 0% chance i"m going to get leadership runes. I’m leaning towards durability runes, but I’m certainly open to suggestions.

Lastly, total noob question. The stress on boon duration for chrono is because when you share out boons its based on the chrono’s boon duration, correct?

Thanks for whatever advice you can give.

I’ve been doing fractals for a while, and I don’t think I’ve ever spent a single pristine fractal relic. As a result I’ve got about 1300, enough to get the fractal tonic. On the other hand i go though regular fractal relics like water, so I don’t have many at all. What I REALLY want are the infinite potions, which I can get if I convert essentially all of my pristines into regular relics. Would that be foolish?

I fooled around on gw2 skills and tried to compare these two scenerios. I dont know how reliable gw2 skills is, but for what its worth, going full viper with berserker runes appears to raise BOTH direct and condi damage on a necro. I base that just on looking at the skill attack damage. No way I can convert that into a dps figure.
The only thing that seems to suffer is crit chance. Based on what I saw, going all viper with bersker runes rather than sinister trinkets with nightmare runes, drops crit chance from about 41 to 36%.

I posted this in the necro forum, but havent gotten a response yet so I thought I’d post here.

So now that viper trinkets are avaliable through raiding, has the optimal gear set-up changed for necro? I had been using nightmare runes on my reaper, and now I’m wondering if there is any advantage to swtiching to berserker runes and swaping out some of my sinister trinkets for the new viper ones.

Eyeballing it my thought is that it would somewhat lower condi damage and precision, but raise direct damage and perhaps have an overall increase in total dps. Has anybody done calculations looking at this?

I dont have a condi engi, but I’d also be curious to know if engi build has changed at all

Now that viper trinkets are avaliable through raids, has anybody calculated the best gear? I’m currently running sinsiter trinkets, viper weapons, armor and mordrem loop, nightmare runes with 1 black diamond. Is it worth it to add viper trinkets and swap to Bezerker runes? I’m really only interested in this from a raid standpoint.

thanks to all for the info. The more I think about it, I think it may be the eggs giving us a problem, because it always in the later phases and we arent 100% on NOT gettign egged yet.

@ Soft black. Thanks for that great response. I’m not an ele so I cant put it to use myself, but I’ll refer my raidmates over.

We have tried lots of methods for aggroing the mobs. We have a chronotank who is trying to pull the mobs with focus, and its the method we have had the most success with, but especially in the later stages, we miss a few. So you are saying pull them once we get to the wall? I’m not sure when our tank is pulling the trigger, so I’ll pass this along. And spirits, gotcha. Will make sure they are gone. Same for mesmer clones ect..

Clarification on the ele thing. So you are saying that during the split phase, one go north and clear orbs, one go south and clear orbs? Should they not be worrying about taking down those spirits walking to gor? just go after the orbs for that time period?

My static group has been stuck on gorseval for the past month. There are two things that seem to consistently be a problem for us, and nobody is sure how to fix it.

1) when we go to the wall, we cant consistently aggro the adds to follow. Some stay back in the middle and we have no idea why. Whats the best technique for this?

2) blue orbs. We generally have 2 eles on orb duty, but its usually out of control by the last phase and we cant make it to the wall for the last updraft. I dont play ele at all, so I dont know waht it takes to clear the orbs. I guess my quesiton here is; if an ele is on orb duty, is that ALL they should be doing, or are they splitting there time between orbs and dps on gorseval? The videos of gorseval clears I have watched are all pretty clear of orbs. I dont know. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Ive seen posts in the past comparing the relative costs of the two main ways of obtaining a precursor. Is there a website that tracks this on a day to day basis as prices change?

I’m not really looking for a permanent guild. I like my guild quite a bit, but having 10 people motivated to tackle raids seems to be a bit out of reach. I’m looking for organized raid team and will join and rep a guild to make it happen.

I’m not a scrub. I know every dunegon path. I havent ever soloed lupi, but I’ve duo’ed him off the wall many a time. I dont run fractals much but was up past 40 pre HOT. I know my classes and I’m geared up full ascended in all of them and ready to go. I have the in game resources to make any new set needed. I’ve been watching every video on youtube I can get my hands on so I have a good idea of the fights, I just havent been able to actually get in them!

I’m laid back and willing to teach and be taught. What I really cant tolerate is rudeness. I cant stay in a group with people who cant speak to others with common decency. Its a game and is supposed to be fun.

I main guardian/dh, but I’m enjoying rev/herald. I’m comfortable with standard warrior. I also enjoy necro/reaper. Like I said all my toons are geared up full ascended with quality runes/sigils. I"m the kind of guy who can’t bear to NOT have BIS gear, and that includes food and utilities. All my guys have straight up DPS sets, and I just made tank gear for my guard.

My main limitation is time. I live in eastern US and am on every night usually starting 2 hours after reset. I cant be on earlier due to real life responsibilities. I’m ready, willing and able to put in 2+ hours a night into raiding. More on the weekends but again, only at night.

Feel free to PM me here or in game. Like I said, i’d be willing to join a guild if need be, but please dont expect me to rep it outside of raiding. If you are an individual in the same situation as me, we can still hook up and raid. I’m in a fun guild with good people and a dedicated TS. Lets get core team together!!

I’m not thinking anything isnt useful! Its just hard to tell what my individual actions acomplished in the big picture. I’m asking and looking for info. if you are telling me LB is a great choice, then amen!

As the tank I’d assume you would run hammer, zerk gear with a knight’s trinket to get the aggro.
maybe hammer with mace/shiled as the second set?
I can clearly see how traps would immediately become much more effective if you are the tank. The problem with my guild is many running around in tank gear baseline so the tankiest guy got the job just by default. We have a lot more planning to do… but thats part of the fun.

So I main a zerk guard/DH and used him with my guild in the raid last night. Best we did was to get to phase 2 with like 2 min left, but really we had no idea what we were doing.
I’d just like to get a discussion going about what rolls guard can play in this first raid fight.
I’ll speak from my experience, but please keep in mind I was in a fairly poorly organized group of guildies who were only just figuring out what needed to be done.

My job ended up being one of the guys running to the green circles. In that roll I felt i needed range, so I tried out both scepter/shield and long bow. The idea with shield was to keep out the red seeker balls with shield 5, but depending on how things were positioned I sometimes pushed the balls into the melee crowd on the guardian. Also, long cooldown on shield 5 so i couldnt rely on it too much.
Longbow with knockback seemed to work ok keeping some of the red balls away, but somewhat inconsistently.
Between green circles i just ranged the guard. I dont like how LB 2 roots you. Mobility seems pretty important in this fight and i had to interrupt myself a time or two to get to the green circle. My concern with LB was I dont know how effective my DPS was. Is a LB DH carrying thier weight DPSwise? I ran full ascended zerk. I’m proficient at LB, but by no means an expert.
I tried different utilities as well. At first I laid down some traps, but couldnt rely on our tank to lead the guy into them, so that wasnt helpful.
I felt I got good use out of retreat, increasing mobility for those needing to get to the green circles and some added defense with aegis.
I tried sanctuary to try to keep out the red balls from the green circle. It was more contained and predictable than shield 5, but again, a long cool down.
I got good use out of merciful intervention (i think its called). I didnt use it too often, but it got me into green circles when i was otherwise not goign to make it, and healing to party memebers is never a bad thing
For my elite I only used feel my wrath which i’d spam off cd, usually when a green circle was ending and I was stacked with others around me.
Other than that I just used bane signet, but again, wasnt sure if it was making any difference in the big picture.

So I’d LOVE to read about other peoples experiences with guard. What worked, what didnt?

Wow wow wow. ty for the info and link. This is blowing my mind. The whole conversation about fractal rewards and fractals as a gold sink is now coming into sharp focus for me. I’ll admit to being a big time fanboy of the game, but this kitten is all out of whack.

Follow my math here and tell me if I’m wrong. I count 19 total possible infusion slots. 6 armor, 2 weapon, 6 from rings, 2 from back piece, 1 amulet, 2 accessories.
My goal would be to get to 150 AR. Obviously the cost of an agony resistance infusion gets expnentially larger the higher it goes, so to keep costs reasonable we want to keep the agony infusions at the lowest level we can. So 150/19 is a bit lower than 8, so we want to use a combo of +8 and +7s to get to 150 AR. One reasonable solution would be 17 +8 inusions and 2 +7 infusions. Gives you a nice 150. Thats goign to cost, very roughly, maybe 115 gold at current prices.

For the people who created the +5 infusions with stat bonuses, they are are introuble it seems. If you kept your +5s in your armor and weapons, to get to 150 ar you have to bump everything else up to +10s and that nearly triples the price. Even if they allow people to bump the +5s up to +7 as i’ve seen suggested, you still cant make it to 150 ar. 7X19 = 133 leaving 17 ar unaccounted for. I suppose some will say that missing 17 ar wont make much difference and you can get by without it. I dont know, im nowhere near 100.

So my point in this post is just to have you guys double check that my thinking is right and im not missing some big cost saving step.
One last question. i havent dont the math on it yet. Can anybody tell me if the “bulk” agony resistance infusions for sale from the special merchant are cheaper than just crafting them? Is it just a time saving measure or is there any advantage? thanks for any input.

I’m going to piggy back on this… to attune a ring, you need an agonized essence, sold by “dessa’s krew” according to the wiki. I’ve unlocked all my fractal masteries, but nobody is selling this agonized essence. what gives? I’ve only been doing the low and mid level fractals. Does that have something to do with it?

Im quite embarassed. I took it out of the bank and put it into my inventory. I didnt realize it was an invisible type bag. Duh. all set

Several months back, a friend of mine and I had planned on joining forces and creating a legendary to sell. I have had a precursor in my possession just sitting in my bank. I never equiped it, never unlocked the skin.
The friend doesnt really play anymore so I was looking to sell it. I clicked on it today (first time since HOT) and I no longer have the option of selling it. I can preview, unlock, mail, buy more, or destory. At the bottom it says soulbound on use. Is this a bug?

Im absolutely enjoying HOT, and Halloween too! I welcome this thread and others like it. I’m SO sick and tired of the toxic posts that go up on the forums. Im all for discussions about what works and what doesnt work in the game, but some people seem downright nasty! More violets I say, less violence!!!

Obviously there are huge changes with the expansion. Im seeing the new items from the jungle now on gw2 spidy, but not much of the new crafting. I’m assuming this is a work in progress. Does anybody know if we can expect in time that gw2 spidy will be fully functional in respect to the new items and crafting recipes?

I’m following the race to discover nightfury very closely. I’m at work so i cant really participate in the scramble, but it sure is fun!! Does anybody know if this thing is only available during halloween? I heard it was, but it seems silly to me that a very cool, ascended piece is so hard to get in such a limited time. In any event, kudos to all of you working kitten the recipe for nightfury.

Glorious medium armor from pvp was a revelation for me. Perfect for my female sylvari thief. It’s athletic looking which I think is important. I Wouldn’t call it sexy per se. It’s attractive though. Like a tough cat suit.

The F skill is kind of dull. To me it doesn’t feel any different than any other attack. I like the idea of it, building up for a doozy of a hit, but I don’t notice it being particularly better. Maybe I’m not doing it right I don’t know. Educate me.
I’m coming from thief and guard who I think have fun, interesting f skills. Otherwise I really like warrior so please don’t think I’m hating on the class. Far from it.

How about giving us a mystic forge promotion recipe so people can turn a couple of the lesser vision crystals they may get randomly for a greater vision crystal?
ON this note I always thought a one handed weapon should take a lesser vision crystal to make and a two hander should take a full. I dont expect that to change, but Im just saying… for the record and all.

thanks for the info! So it will be possible to get the new pres from the mystic forge? Its not only avaliable throught the scavenger hunt? Thats pretty interesting if you can get a new pre from the MF.

Ive got a hankering to go for this title. Its obviously a huge investment, so if I do it, I want to do it right. I’ve got a few questions Im hoping you guys can help me with.

1) It doesnt have to be a mainhand/offhand combo, correct? You could be two seperate twohanders if you wanted.

2) Will this even be possible with the new legendaries that are comng with hot? My understanding is you are limited to one of the new pres per account, and that both the pres and the legendaries are account bound in which case it would be impossible to get more than one.

3) If you did want to have 2 legendaries on the same character using a mainhand/offhand combo, what would be a good choice? I mean in terms of utility in game play. Dagger dagger jumps straight to my mind as I love playing thief, many other professions can use that combo, and incinerator is very cool. Pistol pistol…nah. Quip is annoying and not that great at least on thief but I dont know about other professions. I’m sure through warrior there are a lot of possiblities, but I’m just not familiar to know what would be good. And what about revenant? Will that open up any possibilities. Is sword sword possible on revenant?

Thanks for the input.

I remember guard used to have a boon stripping trait before the last update. I was looking for it recently and couldnt find it. Did I miss it or was it removed?

I use the Logitech key pad. I forget the name, but I LOVE it. I can’t imagine playing without it. I don’t change the bindings between characters, but you can. You can easily customize it. You could even have the keys change colors with each setting, so you could have green glowing keys for your necromancer, blue for your guardian, ect.

If you were interested in buying arah runs, I dont think you will have a problem. There certainly is the potential for a scam, but I just think the possiblity of that is quite low. You can expect to pay about 5 gold for paths 1-3. Keep in mind you will get 3 back for paths 1 and 2, so that off sets the cost. Path 4 will cost much more. If all you are in it for are the tokens, avoid p4.
Dungeons, especially arah, are full of rude, difficult people. I got my shard of zhaitan item for completeing the arah collection and I remember thinking it was more of a testament to my ability to bite my tongue rather than any skill at the game. BUT!, once you get to know it, arah is far and away the most fun dungon and I still love it. So the most fun and profitiable way for you to get your tokens is to watch some youtube guides on arah paths and just jump in. You will wipe! you will have mean people say mean things to you! you may get kicked! But if you stick with it you will become a better player and you can lead teaching runs for your guildies and have a great time.

I have a few questions about Ice bow and how it can be most effectivly used.
FYI, i dont run in super organized groups. I run with my ele buddy who relieably drops ice bows during boss fights and I just want to know how best to use it. On any given dungeon run, 2 or 3 of the others are pug pick ups. We often dont have full might stacks or vuln stacks.

So my questions:
1) Is there a preferred profession to pick up the extra ice bow? Much of the time, I see the ice bow sitting there, and I pick it up becuase nobody else is. In an ideal situation though, is it best in the hands of a particular profession, all other things being equal?

2) is ice bow always a dps gain? Should someone ALWAYS pick up the extra ice bow? Is there anybody who shouldnet becuase their normal rotation is better than ice bow?

3) whats the proper ice bow rotation? My buddy usually tkaes care of the deep freeze, so I usually just drop a #4, maybe a #2 if there isnt much vuln, then I drop the bow and go back to whatever I’m normally doing. Is that the optimal? I imagine its a loss to camp ice bow to get off a second #4.

I think thats it, thanks

from a pve stanpoint, i’d agree with the other poster. Berserker will do the most damage, and for dungeons thats essentially what you want. You can find SO many people arguing about this topic. You can make up your own mind on that, but for my part, I’ve thought a lot about it, and I’m full zerker in all my characters for pve content with no regrets. On my warrior I went strength runes. Very expensive, but a drop in the bucket comapred to the total price of a full ascended armor no matter what the stats.
From a WvW standpoint, definitly ask over at wvw forum if you dont get an answer here. I dont wvw, but I understnad the builds in wvw can be different based on your expected role and what you wnat to do in wvw. So if you need/want one set to cover both pve and wvw, it may not be berserker.

I somehow find GW2 endlessly fascinating. So I’ve played for a year and a half or so. One thing that I think will keep me coming back for a long time are the different professions. So in this year and a half, I’ve really only developed 3 toons. The op mentioned leveling several different professions to 80. From my perspective, that’s the first step. Mastering a profession and really appreciating its nuances is the best part for me, and this is why I have so few characters.
Really getting to know the ins and outs of a profession involves taking your characters into all sorts of different situations and trying to do different things. So for example, my builds for pvp, dungons, and open world exploration/farming are TOTALLY different. And even within those activities it will depend on if i’m alone, with friends, or with strangers. I like to think that with my core professions I can be anywhere in game, with anybody, and be as effective as possible in any role you ask of me. Since I have 6 more professions to experiment with, I imagine i’ll be occupied for a long time to come.

My question is will be able to keep the loot we get during the beta weekend? Its not clear to me from the post.
I know some people were complaining after the last beta that they got precursor drops and couldn’t keep them. I would assume its the same situation for this upcoming beta.

luck is used to make one of the lucky ram back pieces. I think if OP used all his luck for that the market would crash. but there is hope that the use of luck in crafting would be expanding.
And remember, if you read the post about the introduction of luck, it was promoted as a reason for players NOT to merch. Anet admitted that was a non-exciting thing for players to be doing with the loot they got.

Public shoutout to GW2 support. I did submit a ticket and they did restore the dawn. So a thousand thanks to GW2 support. It was quick, and exceeded my hopes.

And its true, the problem was that I didnt expect dawn to be in teh mix. I discovered it this am when i went to take DOWN my buy order on dawn. It wasnt there, adn I looked in history and saw it was bought 16 hour prior. I put 2 and 2 together and realized my mistake.

LESSON LEARNED. But still, I stand by my orgional post…nobodyh in there right mind would EVER want to salvage a pre…so make them not salvagable.

Thanks for the supportive words guys. I will try the ticket option. The whole thing was just a perfect storm of chance. I had been trying to get rid of bl salvage kits becuase i have a bunch. THat khrysaor sword has been pretty profitable to salvage due to the air sigil. And they come in fairly frequently too, so I had been doing that for a day or two.
I put in a buy order on dawn a bit ago. I was uppercut by quite a bit, so I totally didnt expect it to fill. And I totally hadn’t noticed that the icon was the same, so I was just salaging all the swords together. One of them just happened to be dawn. Ugh. Oh well, there are worse things that could happen I suppose.

So… i just realized i salvaged dawn…. I thought I was salvaging khrysaor for the air sigil. No, it was dawn. Same skin I guess. I had no idea.

You guys HAVE to make precursors not salvageable. There are low level WHITES you can’t salvage for crying out loud. Or make it so you have to type the name in like some other items.

I’ve read a number of similar threads on this in the past. I never thought it could really happen, but it turns out it was surprisingly easy to do. I didnt even really realize it until this morning.

anyway, the pain is real. PLEASE make the change.

I am getting my obsidian shards to finish off a legendary, and I’ve been reading that people are recommending farming the silverwastes. I got a couple questions regarding this. First, has there been any “for science” info on obi shards from the bandit chests? Is there an agreed up drop rate, and does anybody know if the drop rate is modified by magic find?
Secondly, which do you think would be faster, farming chests for the shards directly, or events for karma and crests, and then bying the shards with those currencies?

I’ve done world completion on thief, guard and necro. For me, necro was the easiest for several reasons some people mentioned above. I alwyas experiment with builds, but settled on zerker as I got comfortable with the class. So reasons why necro was easiest for me
1) burst AOE in form of wells. 2) access to swiftness via warhorn. Like thief, necro has a signet givign you increased movement speed, but this is slower than swiftness. So my other adice is put a superior sigil of speed on a weapon. You can build up several min of swiftness which makes the movement speed signets unnecessairy. I was able to switch it to the flat power boost signet without loosing mobility.
Acutally, thats about it. I was pretty happy with necro and i felt I got it all done pretty efficiently.
Dont forget…SUPERIOR SIGIL OF SWIFTNESS!! all classes have enough damage potential so that you wont miss it by equiping one, and it makes a nice difference.

Its true that you can make great gold from MF promotion. I’ve taken advantage of green wood planks → soft wood planks that topped out at 4 gold per skill point. But guess what. IT SUCKS! Its boring as all get out. Going thorugh 1000 spirit shards will take SO long. Lastly, I found that the best conversion rate tends to come from the end product selling at a high price. That means you run the risk of being undercut and having your items sit on the TP. In my case, those soft wood planks sat for 6 MONTHS. They did sell though. Currently i’ve got 1000s of cotton scraps for sale which ave been up for 7 months. Im’ undercut by an entire silver, so i dont imagine they are going to sell anytime soon.
Bottom line is I dont know what to do with my spirit shards either. What I have been using them for is making legendaries and ascended gear. those take up quite a bit. I still have a ton though. I wonder how the overall rate of spirit shard acquisition will compare to old skill point acquisition.

Make trinkets part of the wardrobe so I can trarnsmute them!!
Its a crazy idea, i know, but hear me out. I recently was able to aquire the pendant of arah and the orrian pearl. Difficult to obtain, highly sought after, and kitten it I’m proud of them. I’d love to actually use them if only as a reminder for me. Maybe just to look at whenever I open my hero tab..or perhaps to ping whenever I run arah to kitten my buddies off. I’m at the point now, though, that all my gear is ascended and I dont want to use less than optimal trinkets. Thus, my idea about transmuting them. It could work exactly like everything else in the wardrobe.
There are a million clever, fun little trinkets in gw2, and it would be cool to have this kind of customization.

I used to farm TOTs in rata sum back in the day. it was SO SO SO toxic. sounds like that toxicity may be spreading to the new areas. I wish anet would make an instance that allowed this type of farming, ie the personal story.

Very cool. I love reading about the theory behind zergs. Much more to it than I ever anticipated and that gets me more excited! Thanks for the overview. I’ll be able to piece something together and get my feet wet tonight. (Or friday, lol)

Jeeze I don’t know what things are like on my server. I guess your right I just need to get in experience some wvw. I’ve been enjoying pvp and im thinkin I’ll enjoy wvw. I’m worried because all my Pve gear is berserker and I’ve been led to believe I’ll be an easy kill with that set up. I play guard, thief and necro. I Think it may be a bit difficult/expensive to experiment with gear in wvw.

Can someone give me an explanation of wvw builds? I’m really starting from ground zero here. I’ve been playing Pve and I understand that typical Pve builds won’t cut it in wvw. I’m asking about the rational behind the common wvw builds. Are the different professions expected to fill different roles? Are expectations different in the various tiers? (My server is middle of the pack). Thanks