Guild Wars 2

large, well telegraphed attacks

THIS. THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS!

This is the single most important thing that this game is missing in dungeons/PvE.

I’m interested in this so lets think it through.
Before I go into this, I just want to say that ALL of this is pure speculation, and absolutely no fact.

According to the wiki, Volcanus requires:
1 Eldritch Scroll
100 Mystic Coin
1 Vial of Liquid Flame
250 Molten Lodestone

So we have 1 skillpoint purchase, 100 coins, a subcomponent for a Legendary gift, and a ton of lodestones. So I am going to assume the first two materials would remain the same, especially since they’re two similar weapons. The two Foefire weapons have idential mats except that one requires Greatsword blades and the other Hammer heads.

So we need a new gift and a new lodestone.

The obvious choice would be Charged. As far as the gift is concerned, the only other “vial” is quicksilver, but if you scroll up the list of Legendary materials, some weapons require a “gift of lightning”

So a possible recipe could be:
1 Eldritch Scroll
100 Mystic Coins
1 Gift of Lightning
250 Charged Lodestones

Now… if only I were rich enough to try it out.

So I’ve gotten to experiment over the past week and I’ve done a lot of farming and crafting. I own full zerker and knight sets now, including hammers, and I’m fairly settled on my playstyle.

I run a lot of dungeons and open world PvE, even a little WvW but I’m only just getting my feet wet, and my friends have come to look at me as the unstoppable force. (haha) I am running full Knight’s Armor with Soldier runes, Full Knights jewelry with Emerald gems, a Berserker’s hammer with a Ruby Orb and the Berserker Spineguard.

My spec is 0/15/30/20/5. As much as I tried to make myself love Trungalung’s build, I can’t live without Renewed Justice. It’s frequency, stacking might and spam-blinding packs is far too useful a utility.

Current stats are:
Power: 1697 (2808 Attack)
Precision: 1925 (52% Crit and 45% Crit Damage)
Toughness: 1992 (3203 Armor)
Health: 14,455 (anyone surprised here?)

My goal if I can win one on market is to socket my hammer with a Superior Sigil of Bloodlust. I spend a lot of time in open world, and I prioritize survivability, so offsetting my tank with this rune should provide a fairly consistent 250 power boost.

Now my question moving forward is my excess crit. In my PvE and PvP experiences in MMOs, including WoW & SWToR, you typically want to aim for either 25%, 33% or 50% crit. If you’re in-between you have “wasted” points, because the benefit just plain isn’t worth the stat allocation.

So I am trying to find a way to reduce my crit by 2% WITHOUT losing my toughness, or as little as possible, since that’s my primary focus.

Anyone have any thoughts on the Emerald Pendant?

@Cezton

You can, but possibly at the cost of some of your Crit %.
You can socket some of your knight’s gear with Beryl Orbs if you don’t mind losing a potential rune set. That will bump up crit damage and vitality at the cost of toughness/precision.

Regarding your stats. Are you counting a Sigil of Accuracy among your listed Crit Chance? I am running the exact same gear setup and I only have 47% listed crit.

@Brutaly

Thanks again for the detailed response.

I appreciate you taking the time. Let me make one thing clear. TOTALLY not my intention to imply that I think you should be writing a definitive set of instructions.

I think I may learn differently from some.

One thing that Trungalung gave me in his most recent reply was context. That was the specificity that I am referring to. I absolutely value your perspective that every set/spec can be viable if you have the right mindset for it.

Let me explain.

You have multiple exotic sets. That’s very fortunate. It is extremely hard to make money in this game without explicitly farming and selling materials or competitively working the marketplace.

I think as some players (I can speak only for my social circle) get into their first real rare and exotic sets, there are a lot of questions, a lot of fears. It is a HUGE “financial” commitment, and it can be very nerve wracking to think you may be committing all of your gold in the wrong direction if your preferred playstyle isn’t viable, if for instance you finally decide to go for full Berserkers only to find out you splat instantly in dungeons and feel useless, and now you’re broke.

Can you see what I mean?

So context can be very helpful. I don’t think any of us need rules telling us definitively which sets are the best, but I like having an idea of how they work beyond “assumptions”, to use your word. It’s like deciding on a credit card. Every major card is viable and obviously successful, or they wouldn’t still be in the market. But I might find that certain credit cards come with benefits that are more suited to my lifestyle.

Knowing for example that Berserker’s gear does not offer the kind of survivability that a player that enjoys rushing headlong into battle requires is valuable. Knowing that Knight’s gear is largely both PvE and PvP viable is valuable (for players looking to craft a single set to serve multiple purposes, until they have more money).
Knowing that an experienced dodger can accomplish incredible things in a Berserker set is valuable.
A good PvE question might be: does the Knight’s set provide enough DPS to complete the Lover’s Crypt explorable in time?

See what I mean?

That’s not to say there are any rules. But like any purchase, some customer’s enjoy knowing what benefits each product offers.

Having a waiter tell me that every entree on the menu is “good” doesn’t help me decide on my Dinner

THAT BEING SAID! You’ve been doing an amazing job fielding questions and I DO value your fair and balanced perspective. Promise! You too, Trungalung. You’ve committed a lot of time to helping the community and I’m grateful!

Cheers.

@Trungalung

That is a perfect answer. I think that’s the specificity a lot of us have been looking for in this thread. I appreciate it.

Ahh… If that’s the case, then we can trace some commonalities between Brutaly’s two set examples.

In both cases, Berserker’s Hammer and probably the back brace (unless you’d consider buying a Guild Defender version).
In both cases, full Knight’s set, I am assuming both with Soldier’s runes.

That would make sense, because it would let you keep the same armor for most applications, only switching out all Jewelry/Accessories for PvP or specific encounters.

Personally, my first exotics were the zerker jewelry. Now I’m wondering if I made a mistake and I should have made Knights to go with my armor. I’ll probably end up crafting a set, putting me in a position to do what I mentioned above, gear-wise.

Trungalung on the other hand frequently advertises the full Berserker/ruby setup for nearly all applications. I can only imagine the killing-speed of that set must be so much faster. I can tell you from running with a Thief/Mesmer/Engineer regularly, my Knight’s DPS is pretty pathetic, but I stay up when all of them fall over.

That being said, I’m surprised to see the Berserker’s crowd mention relative safety in dungeons. In explorables, I find my groups getting stomped left and right, and toughness just feels mandatory for survival (as if it really helps much).

That being said, my initial explorable dungeons were in Ascalon and the Butler in CM, so I may have been unfairly exposed to cruel and unusual punishment my first time around.

Oh, by the way.
Been meaning to ask you Brutaly.

What is “Berserkers spring guard with exquisite jewels”

@Trungalung

Real quick question. I’ve seen in this thread you list one of your sets as full Berserker’s. I’m assuming this is both armor and jewelry. In another thread I saw you say your armor is “runed” with Ruby Orbs.

I’ve been running a Knight’s set but I am starting to put together zerker pieces for farming/open world.

My question is, what do you use in your weapon? Another Ruby orb? or a sigil perhaps.

Trungalung.7850:

The 5 points in Radiance is only 50 precision which is only around 2-3% crit (21 precision for each % ). I already have 40% crit on both my damage and support gear sets which is plenty.

Ahh. That explains it. I was running with 15 points in Radiance so switching was bringing me from 46% crit down to about 39%.

I haven’t really decided yet if I value larger Symbols of Protection yet. I’m usually hugging whatever I’m fighting anyway, so it seems like more of a group-utility improvement.

Then again, unless I’m in a group, I’m usually not popping my Virtues, because the burn-time gained doesn’t balance out with the time lost immediately following.
Frankly my survivability is great, but compared to literally anyone I run with, my DPS is crap. That’s a huge problem with the game in that there are no taunts, no way to focus mobs onto you except for damage.

This game could very easily continue along it’s no-holy-trinity path and still employ the use of taunts — just give them to everyone. Let them be responsible about using them.
The designers talk about (and they have) bouncing bosses between party members in dungeons. I don’t really see where that’s possible. More often than not, one person (usually the glass-cannon), will get so much threat on a mob that they become permanently fixated on them for the whole fight, even if they stop doing everything.

When I played my Mesmer, I had cases where I would be downed 4-5 times, and despite not being able to attack for 30 seconds or more, every time I’d get back up, the mobs would STILL be shooting only me.

So from a PvE perspective, all this survivability is fine and dandy except that with friends it becomes questionable. I spend the entire fight chasing the monster who is chasing my thief/mesmer/engineer friend who is running for their life.

@ MysticoN and Trungalung

How does that affect your stats or gear choices if you have no points in Radiance? That’s a lot of lost Crit.

I am running full Knight’s (rare), including weapon (exotic) AND jewelry (green) at the moment, to push my crit chance to 46%.

I am hoping that as my jewelry upgrades in quality and I collect more exotic armor, my crit will push higher so I can start swapping some items out for Berserker or otherwise.

At the moment I have:

Attack: 2622
Crit: 46% (30 crit damage)
Armor: 3143
Health: 14,455

So my survivability is fantastic at the moment but I’m itching to push my damage up as my gear upgrades.

I have no idea how some people (like Zarovich) are getting the numbers they are.
I can only assume as everything becomes exotic, and I can swap over quite a few items from Knights to Berserkers, it starts to become more well-rounded.

Ahh. I’ve never seen mention of a recipe. All the descriptions make it sound like everything is Mystic Forge.

That being said, I saw no reference to Platinum Ingots either. Perhaps my sources are out of date.

Hey guys.

I wanted some clarification.
Every post I’ve been reading about Legendary crafting explicitly states that you need to take two specific professions to 400 in order to simplify the crafting part of the Legendary process.

Granted you can purchase the materials, but obviously it’s more efficient to be able to farm.

So lets talk Juggernaught.

The Juggernaught requires Gift of Metal & Vial of Qucksilver

The Gift of Metal requires ingots, not ore, of 4 different high-level metals. This is a perfect reason to level Weaponsmithing.

Vial of Quicksilver requires: Steel Ingots (I get this from Weaponsmithing), Molten Lodestones (Dungeons), Silver Doubloons (Chests), and a Gift of the Forgeman, which requires Manifestos of the Moletariate (Dungeon Tokens).

So. Can anyone shed some light on why Jewelcrafting is supposedly necessary for this Legendary?

Thanks!

@Zarovich

I’m with you on sigils. I struggle immensely with which to use. The forums indicate that the static stat (force and accuracy) do not work. I don’t particularly favor the weapon-swap sigils because quite frankly I don’t swap weapons often — my scepter/focus offset is purely for ranged and escape/ocrap moments.

So unless I am going to run with TWO hammers, and specifically make weaponswapping part of my rotation, they serve no purpose.

As for the on-crit benefits, I would tend to stay away from longer cooldown ones, and yet with hammer’s slow attack speed, I’m wary.

Orphanfryar.7694:

1/ pov/vit/tuv : what are thoses things ?

Not really my place to answer for him but I am assuming he meant Power, Vitality, Toughness.

So is the consensus that Empowered Might is generally not enough of a boon to put points in?

I tried traiting a 0/5/30/30/5 build using Superior Aria, Empowered Might, and Two Handed Mastery, but I am worried that losing Renewed Justice is going to be a tremendous loss.

On the other hand, despite it’s 1s CD, putting constant might buffs on your allies by the second is not only a good buff to your groups damage, it is a steady flow of heals for you.

So in all likelyhood. DEs and world PvE, you’d rock ‘Save Yourselves’, ‘Retreat’, and ‘Hold the Line’.

For dungeons I’m thinking swap out ‘Retreat’ for ‘Stand Your Ground’

EDIT: Whoa…didn’t realize there was a full second page >_>

@Brutaly

Sounds like a great setup.

I imagine you could go full Knight’s (with Soldier runes), and fill your jewelry with berserker, or mix in some Valkyrie jewelry until you have a decent mix with a good crit %.

In my head the ideal is to be a decent, consistent DPS setup with a tremendous tank, especially with all that self-healing, so that your allies can rely on you to keep the fight rolling while they duck out here and there to heal up between bursts.

Maybe that’s wishful thinking.

So this is a discussion among my gang.

Metal armors and which ones look good. We’ve learned that you can divide dye by material, and some dyes seem to bring out the shine in metal better than others.

For my money, Logan Thackeray seems to have the best looking armor I can think of.

The question is, what color is his armor dyed?

I threw on the cultural armor in preview and tested dyes and my money is on ‘Icing’, but there are so many dyes out there I’m sure there are a bunch I haven’t seen.

Anyone have any ideas? I can tell you for a fact that it is not Silver (although silver does look good).

Cheers!

Hey Brutaly,

Earlier in the post if I recall, you were promoting Berserker gear, and then later you mentioned cleric.

Have you seen a better crit yield since switching to Knights? Or at least enough to compensate the loss of power/precision?

Hey there Brutaly. You’ve been an amazing help in this thread. Reading it got me interested in returning to my Guardian. Just a few questions about the below:

Brutaly.6257:

Take vigorous precision as an example.

If you are up versus one mob you procc it on every crit, granting vigor and in combination with altruistic healing you gain health. So basically leech health form one and taking damage form one.

If you get two mobs you gain even more, you gain vigor for each crit and each mob which allows you to dodge more often and if using selfless daring this means that you almost have an unlimited amount of dodges. Vigor stacking in duration is infact a good thing here.

Are you implying that you yourself count as “allies”? Meaning when you crit, and it applies a vigor stack, even if it’s only on you, it counts you as an “ally” for Altruistic Healing?

Also, how does Selfless Daring turn into additional dodges?

Finally, it applies a heal when you dodge, correct? Does it also count you as an ally in this regard, and get healed aswell?

Thanks!