Guild Wars 2

Hi,

Check out NPC, we are recruiting for one of our raid squads which is currently working on Spirit Vale. This squad has a focus on getting people familiarity with all of the fights in SV, and does not require prior raid experience. It is a great chance to get into raiding with people of similar experience level.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/community/lookingfor/NPC-Small-NA-PvX-Guild-Looking-for-Raiders

If you are interested in finding out more feel free to contact me in-game or on the forums.

Hi,

I am a returning NA player in the EST timezone who would like to do some raids. I have extensive raid experience in other games (since 2005) but have not yet set foot in the raids in GW2. I am looking for a guild or a group of players that will enable me to experience this content in a more structured fashion than LFG. Ideally, I am looking for:

- 18+
- requires VOIP for raids
- not a huge zerg guild
- has other players who are also new to the raids
- has scheduled raids, runs regularly
- does not require me to put raids ahead of RL
- does other stuff outside of raid times

If you think your guild or group of friends is a good match for this, please send me a message either on the forums or in-game.

About me:

I am a veteran MMO player who played GW2 from the moment it launched, spending most of my time in WvW. After a year-and-a-half or so, I took a break and recently returned because HoT caught my interest. I have 4 characters at 80 (tempest, dragonhunter, daredevil, and chrono) and am always working on another.

My main is my tempest, who has ascended jewelry, legendary staff, and exotic armor (which I am in the process of replacing with ascended). Most of my other 80s are in exotics with some ascended jewelry. I am flexible when it comes to classes / roles.

Among other things, I know how to dodge roll, move out of circles of poo, hit stuff in the face until it dies, and generally have fun. I am looking for people of similar skill and temperament. I am NOT looking for a so-called ‘hardcore’ guild, a bunch of tryhards, or people who get salty after a few wipes.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me if interested. Thank you.

Layam.9065:

3.) I’d like to be able fight and be a threat 1 v1, not fully a support character not fully a solo pvper. As I am most likely going to be puging most of my pvp experience(Through WvW and this game’s version of battlegrounds.
Is there a good middle of the road build I can use, does a bit of support, stays on the front line and helps kill opponents.

Try this one:
http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-7g-Z;1NF-40M3JG-90;9;6TT9;445A17A1;0L;5ZF18ZF188BG

Good for YOLO hotjoins. Balanced damage and survivability, good 1v1 potential, good in team fights. Make sure to self-combo GS4 + GS3 for Retaliation as often as possible. Most of your damage comes from GS1, Retaliation, and GS4.

You can also self-combo Staff #3 -> GS #3 for Retaliation, which I tend to do when initiating or joining into an ongoing fight, since it saves your CD on GS #4. Dropping a Staff #5 in a blob on a capture point is always fun, and Empower is just plain good.

You could run hammer instead of GS if you wanted, I just prefer GS, and find it a bit more efficient at killing, but that is my opinion — hammer is a strong weapon no doubt.

There are a number of builds that will do what you want, this is just 1. Although most of this is directed toward sPvP, you can make it work in WvW, provided you swap traits and utilities out frequently depending on what is happening.

You should be able to 1v1 most classes with ease, or at least force them to give up and run away. Condition-heavy builds will give you problems, but you can still win if you play your cards right. As others have noted, condi spam is a problem, but it’s a problem for many people, and just something that has to be dealt with as best as possible right now. If you want to solo on Guardian and do well there is no reason you can’t.

Guardian, because Skyhammer cannon room.

Regarding dagger thieves … as other posters have noted, you have to be able to put pressure on them while surviving their burst.

I run a pretty standard 0/0/30/30/20 AH build with GS + Staff. Your goals when fighting a dagger thief with a build like this are:

1) Get Retaliation up ASAP and keep it up as long as you can
2) Put some damage out, forcing the thief to either eat the damage or back off
3) Survive the burst
4) Avoid and/or remove Poison, mostly from their dagger #1 chain
5) Prevent the escape

So how do you do this? Generally, the first thing I do when a thief opens is drop Symbol of Wrath, GS #3 leap, Whirling Wrath. The symbol gives you 5s of retaliation (baseline untraited) and does a decent amount of damage. The leap gives you another 5s and of course blinds. With the 25% trait you’re looking at 12.5s of retal. This combined with your WW, Leap, Symbol, and GS1 damage will take a good chunk of HP from a glass thief.

A good thief will back off and not fight in your symbol, not kill themselves on retal, and not eat your WW. However, the vast vast majority are not good, and are extremely greedy, which will get them killed.

At some point they will attempt to CnD you to re-enter stealth and Backstab you again, if you can dodge the CnD great, if not (or if the thief enters stealth some other way), you must not eat a 2nd Backstab, this is pretty much make it or break it here. Your primary options are dodge roll, Shelter, or pop VoC for Aegis. I typically use Shelter after counting to 2 here because I’m still missing a chunk of HP at this point, and the advantage of using a block over a dodge is that they will be destealthed by a blocked attack.

At this point it’s pretty much rinse and repeat, filling in with GS1. You’d be surprised how low many thieves get with the initial symbol combo here. If they pop Basilisk Venom you want to break it, if they pop Thieves’ Guild you want to dodge / stability through the ranged thief’s pull (you do slot SYG right?), and if possible, drop a Symbol and pull the mobs (and hopefully the player too) into the symbol + WW, and of course keep retaliation up as much as possible.

If the fight goes on for a long time or goes outside of this general sequence, you have to improvise, but the basic ideas / priorities are the same. Also keep in mind that thieves suffer from not having stability, which leads in to the final part of the fight, which is where the thief decides that they are losing and it’s time to run.

First of all, many thieves will get away — there is not a ton you can do about this. Our chasing power sucks compared to a thief’s escape, and chasing will often just get you killed when their CDs come back up, or zerged by their 10 friends.

However, there are cases where you can anticipate ‘the bail’ and secure the kill. I usually try to pre-Binding Blade them right before I think they’re about to bail. Ideally what you want to do is pull them into your symbol + Leap + WW combo. If they use Shadow Refuge to escape you just pull them right out of the SR radius and commence beatdown.

Staff #5 can also be used to cut off their escape (especially in enclosed spaces), or during the fight you can place it in between you and the thief and watch them get knocked down (often repeatedly) — this works best when your weapon swap CD is finished so that you can immediately swap back to GS and punish them while they are down. If they stealth you just pull immediately and use whatever you have to try to finish them off while they are knocked down in stealth at your feet. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But the basic idea is you want to knock them down a lot when they are sub-50% or so, and always pre-Binding Blade and wait until they stealth to pull.

If you use your CDs correctly you have the tools to rofl all over D/D thieves. Play aggressively and don’t be afraid to put some damage out, because while they are damaging you is your best opportunity to damage them, and many of them drop super fast. Hope this helps.

Yaki.9563:

Kintari.4172:

On-demand removal of up to 15 or so conditions / minute is super strong. Apart from that, it makes it way easier to keep poison off, plus 3 separate breaks out of immobilize.

20+ points in Honor is common for AH DPS builds because of Empowering Might, putting 10 more in is not a big deal at all.

I’m pretty sure resetting virtue of justice on kill (plus an additional 100 precision, further enhancing EM) adds a lot more to DPS than removing conditions for your group.

I guess if you guys think removing conditions on shouts with long cooldowns is a “must”, you probably crap your pants in excitement over how unbelievably awesome a warhorn/shout warrior is. If only conditions got applied just once every 10 seconds, you’d surely be right!

I’m talking strictly PvP. Not really looking for “MAX DEEPS”. Mainly interested in 2 things: (1) being able to survive condi bombs in PvP (especially necro / engi), because they are far and away the biggest threat to me currently, and (2) being able to reliably keep Poison off, especially during Shelter, because it gimps AH sustain enormously.

But hey, you like to play some sort of battle cleric. That’s cool, to each his own.

On-demand removal of up to 15 or so conditions / minute is super strong. Apart from that, it makes it way easier to keep poison off, plus 3 separate breaks out of immobilize.

20+ points in Honor is common for AH DPS builds because of Empowering Might, putting 10 more in is not a big deal at all.

It’s bugged. Saw this while doing some testing on condition removal priority a couple of days ago. 2 conditions removed, no conditions converted into boons. Works in conjunction with soldier’s runes to remove 3 conditions. Been running PoV with 3 shouts ever since, don’t leave home without it.

I used to hate Skyhammer too, then I worked on my chip shot.

Play a guardian and poop on thieves.

Skyhammer PGA Tour “Hole-in-One” Tournament Mode plx

I agree with the OP. Dailies are and have always been a garbage system, in this game and every other. Most people who say they like dailies don’t actually like dailies, they like reward schedules. They’d be just as happy with a daily food-pellet lever as they are with a ‘daily quest system’.

Invul is good, but conditions will still wreck you through it if you don’t clear them. Just saying.

They look like a dredge pooped out CoF gear.

People correctly identified Quickness as a problem a long time ago. I was posting about it 5-6 months ago and I’m sure I wasn’t the first.

It’s good to see ANet finally get around to changing it. +100% attack speed is just absurd in any context, PvE, PvP, whatever. Good change. Took a little too long, but good change.

Shonie.5297:

Kintari.4172:

it’s like your saying everything has to be 100% one way or the other.
It doesn’t have to be and it’s not.

No, I’m saying it’s possible to have account bound currency and it not be a failure, and providing specific examples of this.

It’s at the discretion of Anet and what they feel is in the best interest of the game and its longevity and profitablility.

Nobody’s really debating this, but thanks for making this observation.

Feel free to scream and shout and go to bed angry or whatever it is you do, but it’s not going to change anything.

Kind of like when giving feedback about a possible world ranking reset didn’t change anything. Right?

“The goal for this system is to ensure that players always have something to constantly work towards. We want each character to have a unique experience in WvW, so World Ranks and WXP are all character-based values rather than account-based. We believe that in the long run, this will actually help incentivize players to experiment with various different ability builds for each character. It also creates a long term goal for players of multiple characters, as they can strive to rank up multiple characters to help show off their dedication to WvW.”

That’s pretty clear, right from Anet.
I’m not sure what your argument or complaint is, but any rebuttal can be directly pointed at that paragraph.

Oh look, a quote from ArenaNet. Well in that case, nevermind!

Assuming that ArenaNet is incapable of making a mistake or a poorly designed game system, then we have nothing to worry about. Can you spot the problem here?

it’s like your saying everything has to be 100% one way or the other.
It doesn’t have to be and it’s not.

No, I’m saying it’s possible to have account bound currency and it not be a failure, and providing specific examples of this.

It’s at the discretion of Anet and what they feel is in the best interest of the game and its longevity and profitablility.

Nobody’s really debating this, but thanks for making this observation.

Feel free to scream and shout and go to bed angry or whatever it is you do, but it’s not going to change anything.

Kind of like when giving feedback about a possible world ranking reset didn’t change anything. Right?

Shonie.5297:

Kintari.4172:

Shonie.5297:

If you can earn points on any class, and transfer them to other classes, people will just find the class that gives Wxp the quickest, by doing the activity that gives them the most points the quickest, and transfer the points to whatever class they want. Failed system.

You can earn dungeon tokens on any character you want, and buy stuff for your other characters.

You can earn sPvP glory on any character, and get stuff for your other characters.

You can get most legendary weapon components on any character, and use them on a different character.

You can get laurels on any character (subject to the daily lockout obviously), and use them to buy stuff for a different character.

You can get guild commendations on any character, and use them to buy stuff for a different character.

You can even transfer karma between characters now (at a less than 100% rate), and use it to buy stuff for them.

I guess all these systems are failures?

All of the above things are examples of things that are transferable between characters. I know all this.

Should I make a list of things that aren’t and pretend I’m making a point?

No, but you could try answering the question.

Shonie.5297:

If you can earn points on any class, and transfer them to other classes, people will just find the class that gives Wxp the quickest, by doing the activity that gives them the most points the quickest, and transfer the points to whatever class they want. Failed system.

You can earn dungeon tokens on any character you want, and buy stuff for your other characters.

You can earn sPvP glory on any character, and get stuff for your other characters.

You can get most legendary weapon components on any character, and use them on a different character.

You can get laurels on any character (subject to the daily lockout obviously), and use them to buy stuff for a different character.

You can get guild commendations on any character, and use them to buy stuff for a different character.

You can even transfer karma between characters now (at a less than 100% rate), and use it to buy stuff for them.

I guess all these systems are failures?

OP, I want to smash your apostrophe key.

Better encounters have existed in games that were even more “dice roll” based, the problem has little/nothing to do with the fidelity of the simulation, which engine is used, or how the combat system works.

The problem has everything to do with encounter design where the bosses don’t move around and don’t have any mechanics that pose a real threat or risk of failure, and allow players to win even if they are completely ignorant of how the encounter actually works.

It is possible to design better encounters in GW2, they just typically don’t. Grenth requires some level of understanding of the encounter, and can and does kill people. Pre-nerf Fire Elemental was overtuned, in the sense that his difficulty came from big numbers more so than mechanics, but even he was still more entertaining than any of the dragons are currently.

It’s just shoddy encounter design, plain and simple, no need to go looking any further.

It’s okay to disagree. But repeating the same exact thing every week hoping for a different outcome is the definition of insanity ;D

Then I suggest your server do something different. Also, thanks for giving me permission to disagree.

You’re implying that there would be zero close matches in a round robin style. There wouldn’t be as many, but I bet it would happen more often than you think. it would be interesting to see how servers mount up against each other. Different dynamics match up differently against each other. Also, having close matches every week is burning out the wvw base. It would be nice to have an ‘off’ week when playing easier servers.

I’m not implying anything, I’m saying it would be worse under your scheme than the current scheme, which seems pretty obvious with the data we have.

It should just spawn piles of gold and treasure, so that by the end of your time on the superior ballista you’re buried under this mountain of gold, and your realm mates have to dig you out.

Just as soon as we invent the computer with infinite resources, we’ll remove population caps from WvW.

nashwangTW.9652:

JQ’s FoO fighters not afraid Spy,this video will show you.

http://youtu.be/oUU1xKHRGZQ

Please to be watching, many hurt on spy ^^

Given the choice between (relatively) close matchups and new matchups, I’ll take close ones.

On further thought, I think the best solution is to basically make WXP an account-wide currency, but still require per-character purchases of abilities with WXP.

This way you could earn WXP on whichever character you want to play at the time based on whatever criteria you like to use, but you would still have to earn enough WXP for however many characters you are trying to max out.

In other words, make WXP earned in the same way as dungeon tokens and titles, sPvP rank/glory/items, current WvW achievements, badges of honor, most legendary weapon components, laurels, guild commendations, gold, and so on.

(please note that I am not asking for more calendar-gating, that’s a separate issue)

The important thing is giving players the latitude of playing whichever character they want while still making progress toward the same long term goal. It’s a little bit troubling that they seem to have grasped this early on and have since unlearned it.

Limit number of outstanding flame rams placed by any 1 account to some number … let’s say 10. You go past that number, and it despawns the oldest ram placed by you. Global cap stays in effect.

Yes, you can still troll with non-ram siege, yes, you can still troll specific areas against the local cap, but it’s a step in the right direction, since at least 1 person working alone won’t be able to ram-cap the entire map.

Just let anybody activate whatever structure buffs they have, regardless of the claim state of the structure. Stronger buffs override weaker / non-existent ones, call it a day. Maybe change claiming to give it a purpose again, or maybe not.

Beorn Saxon.4762:

All you alt haters need to go start some other thread asking Anet to make your pve titles character based as well as your dungeon tokens, and to scrap all karma jugs and all harvested materials need to be soul bound.

Because that’s what I hear you saying you like.

Don’t forget sPvP ranks and titles.

Geikamir.6329:

The game has done a complete 360 from how it was presented pre-launch. Most of us were under the impression that the game promoted alts and only horizontal (cosmetic) progression. This couldn’t be farther from the truth now.

Yeah it’s a bit of a head scratcher. It seems like whoever made the game pre-launch isn’t designing it now.

At least culling is supposed to be gone.

Calae.1738:

The Elementlist should have 4 weapon sets and a specific set of skills for each attunment.

Example:
If you have a staff for your fire attunment; you’ll have the 5 staff fire skills.
If you have double daggers for your air attunment; you’ll have the 5 double dagger air skills.

Giving the elementalist 5^4, or 625 possible configurations to choose from. 5 weapon set choices for fire x 5 choices for water x 5 choices for air x 5 choices for earth. Are you sure this is what you want?

I’ll be honest I didn’t read the whole thing, but I agree that making the progression character bound seems like the wrong approach. Having a system in place that makes achieving maximal effectiveness in WvW dependent on playing 1 character as opposed to many is a mistake.

If it turns out that it doesn’t take that long to max 1 character out, then it’s not a big deal if it’s character bound, so I’m reserving judgement until I see how that works.

I would have rather seen an approach where you unlock stuff via spending WXP in an account-wide fashion, but individual builds (selections from stuff you have unlocked) are stored per-character.

We’ll see how it goes.

Adine.2184:

Lets be perfectly clear about something the Ele does NOT have 4 weapon swaps in fact its 1 of only 2 classes that cant swap weapons at all . What the Ele does is Swap attunements giving them a wide array of skills to use .

Pretty sure the OP knows this and was referring to the fact that eles can switch between 4 different sets of 1-5 skills, which while not technically swapping weapons, is equivalent in a sense, as it replaces your 1-5 in the same way swapping weapons would.

However, there’s a sense in which it is not equivalent at all, and that is this: if a class were to have 4 true weapon swaps, that expands the number of combinations of weapons they can equip by a lot.

To make things simple, let’s take a class that has access to 6 different weapon sets. If they get to choose 4 of these as sets to swap between, that’s 6! / (4! * 2!), or 15, unique combinations of 4 different weapon sets that they can choose from.

Keep in mind that each 1 of these 15 possible configurations would have access to 20 total skills across all 4 weapon swaps, just like an Elementalist would with 4 attunements.

The difference is that the Elementalist cannot independently choose 4 different sets of 5 skills, an Elementalist effectively picks 1 set of 20 skills. Since they have access to 5 different weapon sets, this gives them 5 total configurations they could pick from; again, each configuration consisting of 20 skills.

So this might not accomplish what you think it will.

Leaving aside the question of whether or not every class having 4 weapon swaps is an improvement or not, your suggestion seems incomplete without some mention of what you think the Ele class-specific mechanic should then become.

In other words, if Engis had 4 weapon swaps + toolbelt skills, Guardians had 4 weapon swaps + Virtues, etc … Elementalists would have 4 weapon swaps + what exactly? Or are you suggesting that all the class-specific mechanics need to go?

Ezeriel.9574:

If you don’t like the dragons, go do something else.

Scripted fights are scripted…. once you’ve seen the movie, it stops being original.

If you want an extremely difficult challenge, that will leave you with a huge sense of accomplishment … go kill a thief, before they nerf stealth.

For an event like this, when you can stand in one spot, auto-attack, not take damage, and win, then there is a problem. You can only defend so many poorly thought out game systems with “then don’t do it” before people decide to just “not do” the game.

The more annoying thing about immobilize is how it will cause your character to resume moving when it ends, even if you let go of the movement keys during immobilize.

The world bosses are garbage from an encounter design standpoint. They almost seem like an afterthought, as if ArenaNet decided to release them unfinished in the interests of time.

It’s too bad that all of the amazing work on the artistic side of these encounters is undermined by shabby mechanics that present no real challenge or fun at all.

It’s not like ‘the world boss’ is some new and innovative construct that is being pioneered by ArenaNet either, this kind of thing has been in games for a long time now and there are well known successful examples to go by. Games I played 7 years ago or more had world boss encounters that absolutely put the GW2 ones to shame.

For starters, you can’t properly design an encounter for a highly variable number of players when you don’t put in mechanics that scale in difficulty with more players present. As long as more players = mooooaaaaarrrrrr damage and no downside other than ridiculous ability lag, these encounters will continue to be a joke as players simply bring more bodies to mash the boss with.

I’m talking about mechanics like boss heals for a crapton when somebody dies, boss makes players deal damage to players around them, boss makes players spawn nasty mobs when they die, boss pwns players with uber chain lightning of death if they stand on top of one another, stuff like that. You know, fun stuff!

The challenge here is that this requires ArenaNet to (at least in some cases) abandon their candyland notion of “more players should always = better”. This is a flawed mentality in the context of open-world encounter design, not just because servers can’t handle an open-ended number of players, but also because it makes it impossible to design anything other than a loot farm.

Culling. Skill lag I only get in the largest of battles, and I usually just switch maps if it gets too rage-inducing. Culling is everywhere.

Nerf swirling winds for all I care, it just means I can salvage my focus and won’t have to spend hours inside a structure catching treb shots. Fine with me.

Wait I can’t AFK auto-attack for welfare rares on every character anymore? The injustice! World is ending!

Boons are strong, I can see why they want some sort of counter to boons, but I’m not keen on ‘more damage against more boons’.

I’d rather see more effective / accessible ways to convert / remove / steal boons on your target, possibly including specific boons instead of just ‘a boon’. It’s a fine line to walk, and whatever they do, they need to make sure it doesn’t go too far.

It’s amazing to me that so many feel they deserve a good reward for checking a timer, waypointing to an area, and pressing 1 to win.

This so-called “playstyle” is a bad thing for the game overall, and you don’t deserve much for doing it, as long as the encounters remain as trivial as they are now.

If you spend a lot of time doing something that isn’t fun to you, but you feel you need to do because of some reward, AND more time spent doing it = more of said reward in all cases, then it is a grind.

‘Fun’ is subjective but think of it this way: would you continue to do this activity if it did not give gold/xp/karma/rank/badges/whatever it is you are trying to get? If the answer is ‘no’, then it is not fun to you.

Dailies and boss chests are not a grind because you can’t continue to put more time into them and get more stuff out, once they are done for the day they stop giving rewards.

I agree with the general sentiment OP, but I probably would have stated it as “things that aren’t challenging shouldn’t give great loot, outdoor boss events currently are not challenging, especially when more players show up than the encounter was designed for”.

Giving loot from challenging outdoor boss events is all well and good, the problem is that these events right now are really non-events and require nothing more than the ability to fog a mirror.

This is the logical conclusion of ArenaNet’s “you should never not want to see another player” design approach. The events are too easy and don’t scale in difficulty enough with added players. You can fiddle with how guesting works as much as you want, but as long as free stuff is being given out on a schedule, a ton of people are going to show up.

With an AH build, I shoot for armor between 2,800 and 3,000, crit chance somewhere between 45-55% with full consumable/sigil buffs, hit points > 16,000, and then maximize power and crit damage subject to these limits — I run with 1900ish base power and 67% additional crit damage, and use staff/GS for might stacks. These kinds of stats will give you good tankiness with decent (but not amazing) damage. I mostly WvW, with the occasional dungeon or low-level fractal.

Disabling player culling results in rendering more stuff. A higher rendering workload typically results in the same or lower FPS, all other things being equal.

It’s possible they will make some massive rendering optimizations to offset the additional workload created by the removal of player culling, but I would expect the most likely result will be seeing more characters on screen sooner, at the expense of a reduction in FPS and/or smoothness. Which would still be a win, since the end user can throw hardware at the problem to make it better. It’s anybody’s guess though really.

PopeUrban.2578:

I really do enjoy the changes to loot though I agree that it might be best if it were normalized to count the chests per account, and not per character/server, and more importantly the world bosses need to be given the dungeon treatment and actually reworked to challenge the players playing them.

I did six bosses today, and at all six bosses, for the first two I attempted to play them as I had been when we’d been seeing numbers like 5-10 people. Then I realized the extreme lag masically limited me to autoattacking with the occsional skill actually firing off.

Then I realized I was getting gold rewards for standing in one place and autoattacking.

Then I realized I was getting really good loot for standing in one place autoattacking.

And this is on a condition built pistol thief, in an event where the bleed cap never stops being full.

There’s a disconnect here, and that disconnect is that the boss events are now rewarding enough, but because they’re properly rewarding, they’ve drawn enough players to make them trivial to complete. This further enticed people to game the system by using multiple characters, guesting, and a host of other tricks to speed up their boss kills per hour and pull in more loot than is reasonable.

The chests themselves are fine, but the events, or zones, or something needs to be adjusted to prevent these massive and visually impressive bosses from being less challenging to the people fighting it than your garden variety champion. Furthermore, there need to be limits in place to prevent people from gaming the system as extensively as they are able to now.

Pretty much sums it up. Auto-attack for phat loots. The only world boss encounter that is even remotely challenging enough to warrant 1-2 rares from the chest is Grenth. I haven’t done every last one in the game, but the new Grenth is the only one I can think of where there is actually a real risk of getting wiped. And we saw how well that was received.

Heinel.6548:

Our personal nemesis is Trahearne 2.0, with the exact same appearance and demeanor. His name is Enraehart.

This won’t end well.