Guild Wars 2

I’ve been doing daily master of monuments since they introduced the new dailies, since it’s generally quicker than the third fastest PvE daily. I was never attacked by anybody at the monuments. A couple of drakes might have attacked me once, but I don’t think they’re players?

I once reported a ranger for botting. He was standing in the gate at Red Rock Bastion in Silverwastes, with heal on auto-repeat, getting a little damage from his pet and getting ressed by the NPCs whenever he died. He must have completed loads of events with credit — and scaled them up for the other ~2 people who were actually holding the fort. I waited an hour, and whispered him a few times, to make sure I wasn’t imagining it before reporting.

I looked him up later. Temp ban.

I wouldn’t advise it, myself.

FWIW, I understand the GMs mostly investigate this by looking at chat logs. If your combat logs shows “damaged mordrem mender for 237 using Bite”, I doubt they’ll worry about whether it’s by definition a skill or not.

I have sometimes wondered what WvW would be like without the whole concept of worlds. If it were the “warfare” to SPvP’s “skirmishing” — much bigger teams, much longer matches, added siege weapons, but essentially instanced arena matches.

There would be serious matches like joneirikb described, and more casual matches the just feed incoming players/parties to whichever of red/green/blue is losing.

I think WvW is basically an accident, the design path of least resistance when you have your PvE players divided into servers at launch. I think they started from that and invented the slogan “fight for the honor of your world” to market it. They didn’t start from “honor of your world” and then design a game mode to realize that.

But after a few years of “fight for your world”, I imagine the people who are left are people who think that way. So that’s what we’re going to get.

The GS might on crit trait gains you might, and the Phalanx Strength trait copies it out.

That may not be enough for 25 might on its own, but in a group with revenant and ele(s) chipping in it can hopefully do the heavy lifting.

Note that for might on crit you need actual crits. You need your banner of discipline uptime, fury, spotter and so on.

If you find yourself in a bad dungeon pug with zero group buffs from the other four players, in a low level dungeon like Ascalon Catacombs where your precision is scaled down, it’s quite possible for a raid meta PS warrior to top out around 8 might.

For more might you can wear strength runes, which increase your might duration and give you might when something hits you. You can also put a strength sigil on swap weapons, which don’t have the attack/crit rate of 100 blades.

You can get more out of your might with boon duration food (e.g. chocolate omnomberry creams), or food which gives might on crit like golden fried dumplings, or bountiful sharpening stones.

Why is EOTM based on worlds at all?

Why not send incoming players/parties to whichever team is smallest?

Hexinx.1872:

Okay … what are all these loading screens people are complaining about taking minutes long?

I must be missing something because every time I log in , I load to LA and it takes like maybe 8-10 seconds (generally acceptable imho) and I’m in LA

I had a 2 min 40 second LA load the day of the change.

I keep a kitchen timer by my PC to set alarms for various GW2 events. I figured I’d use it to count up that time.

It’s usually not that bad, more like 20 seconds. I have a middling PC but with an SSD added. But 8-10 seconds is really good, I’m envious.

Folks, I didn’t actually ask for help or advice in the OP but, well, thanks for all the help and advice. It is good of you.

Xenesis.6389:

Nobody is forcing you to?

Well, no, they’re more sort of “prodding”. Like they’re prodding when they put fractals (which most PvEers don’t do) in the PvE dailies. Or when they put the exotic berserker aquabreather (mostly useful to dungeon/fractal people) in sPvP. Or when they expect WvWers to map complete PvE. And they seem to mostly succeed in annoying everybody.

edit: Anet shouldn’t pester people into WvW against their will and hope some of them stick. They should rather make WvW interesting enough that people want to try it. Then they should make the barrier to entry as low as possible, so that people actually try it rather than saying “I’d like to try it, but the problem is…”.

Of course I have to mention how much more wvw players are “forced” to do pve to get the things they want to function in wvw

Absolutely, I agree entirely. Personally I think there should for example be a set of “Vicarious Exploration” reward tracks, one per region, to get a gift of exploration for the set.

lil devils x.6071:

Every time you die in WVW you are scoring for the other team.

Why do you think I stick to EotM?

Dawdler.8521:

Morte.5916:

There are also practical barriers. Say I like the sound of havoc groups (I do). To try that will I need a set of e.g. rabid gear? If so, that’s on the order of 100g just to try something out. Free level 76 exotic gear, that’s only usable in WvW and disintegrates after 30 hours, would be more like it.

… what? Wtf do you use, armor made of gold? A full set including weapons and sigils/runes is like 20 gold (or 10 days of doing nothing but daily). Ascended trinkets is dirt cheap. And thats not even counting the options for WvW bought gear, which is more like 7 gold + badges.

Wow, you are right. I was thinking in terms of berserker gear prices, my bad. Sorry.

Hexinx.1872:

Starting out by threatening to destroy other people’s gameplay is against the T’s and C’s.

I promise you it’s not a threat. It’s a prediction and warning.

I mean, come on. Do you think I’m in charge of the PvEers and I can tell them to do this? How can I “threaten” anybody?

I am, rather, warning people (mostly Anet) about the potential unintended consequences of having lots of people in WvW who don’t want to be there. These are especially bothersome for WvW because it has player caps, it doesn’t just spawn extra instances when the numbers grow like PvE/PvP.

At one minute intervals, run the following script on WvW maps with crafting:

If this map has gone over 75% of its max occupancy during the last 5 minutes, disable crafting on this map for the next five minutes.

Hi WvWers,

Today in EotM I finished my reward track, and almost simultaneously got the 250 badges I wanted for a discount on an ascended amulet. This has left me in in a reflective mood. I wonder should I go back and do it again? Should I try proper WvW? And it left me wondering what Anet should do to make WvW more attractive to PvEers.

So, a few thoughts:

Don’t try to force us. If you do, we will teach you the meaning of “beware of unintended consequences” by e.g. mostly-afking and repairing a wall every few minutes while we watch sitcoms in another window and the queue fro EB goes over 50.

Don’t try to bribe us. If WvW ever becomes genuinely lucrative, then the minds that brought you Tarir multiloot with disguised IP addresses will apply themselves to farming WvW. Believe me, you WvW guys are better off with it as the worst paying game mode than with that.

It needs to pay OK, like the Cursed Shore or whatever. If I can say “it’s not quite as good money as the Silverwastes, but you don’t have to do chest farms” then we’re cooking.

But the first thing WvW needs is to look fun. I think what you need is real marketing. Not by devs, by advertising professionals. Show us videos of cool fights, with voice overs by real commentators saying “now the neat thing about this is…” And make it assuming no prior knowledge of WvW, and put a link on the load screen which clearly flags it as intended for people with no WvW experience.

And once it looks like it could eventually be fun, it needs for people a way to get involved starting from “I know very little except that I’m a bit confused”.

Most of all, what I’d need is a place to start. There maybe good places to start, but I don’t know about them. Instead people jabber on assuming I already know what “push” or “max participation” mean.

There are also practical barriers. Say I like the sound of havoc groups (I do). To try that will I need a set of e.g. rabid gear? If so, that’s on the order of 100g just to try something out. Free level 76 exotic gear, that’s only usable in WvW and disintegrates after 30 hours, would be more like it.

One thing I will say for WvW, BTW… The only obnoxious WvWer I’ve encountered was in guild chat in my PvE farming guild. WvWers seem pretty chill, so much better than the dungeon commnity. Stay cool guys, maybe I’ll see you around some time.

ElenaDragon.8401:

It’s not hard to get to other crafting stations, but the WvW one was the only one that allowed you to keep your “place” in the outside world. Going to Lion’s Arch means you lose it.

Exactly. I was thinking I might take one of my gathering characters off gathering and leave him in a city to craft. Which made me wonder: if other people do the same, will it push materials prices up?

Though immediately after thinking of that, I had a 2 minute 40 second load screen in LA.

Timberline is a pleasant place to be. Looks nice, things to glide off, decent amount of water, good nodes.

I think Silverwastes is the most fun to play on, but alas to get gold out of it you have to do chestfarms. If only we could sell the keys on the TP to people who actually like doing that…

But all things considered, my favourite area is the Sorrow’s Embrace dungeon specifically paths 1 and 3. It’s the only place I still play mesmer.

If this really helps with queues fair enough, but FWIW I can’t remember seeing more than 3 people at WvW crafting and it’s usually just me when I’m there. But things like stacking sigils are borked if people have to go to LA.

And yeah, adding a normal bank NPC next to the trading post NPC would be nice.

edit: Perhaps it’s not about queues. Maybe they didn’t like people who logged off at the end of a jumping puzzle, went to WvW for banking crafting, and returned to the JP when they left WvW. Or something like that.

Obtena.7952:

Conditions in Openworld need to tick hard, not long. An optimal condi build on openworld content is a mix of sinister and zerkers, the split determined by how frequently and how many conditions you can stack. With a weapon like scepter on necro, I’m 100% sinister since the direct damage is garbage anyways.

That does sound quite plausible. Maybe it’s not for the Melandru second beacon tagging frenzy, but for a lot of harder open world PvE I could believe that does well.

Dungeons…

Unless you can get in an experienced group via guilds or friends, you’ll be in PUGs. Watch the dungeon PUG guides by Banter Bill on youtube to see how they’re done in real PUGs. Then do one path at a time. Avoid “speedclear” guides, record runs, etc — it’s completely different tactics and you’ll only confuse things.

At first you’ll have trouble with “skips”, which is where you run past mobs that aren’t worth killing. Load up on speed, condition clear and stun break skills. Also, after you finish a path that included skips, you can stay behind in the dungeon and waypoint around to practice the skips repeatedly.

Fractals… are really pretty easy combat at the lower levels, it’s the mechanics (e.g. “what am I supposed to do with this hammer?” in cliffside) that’ll get you when you start. But you can pick a fractal that’s today’s daily, read/watch a guide, and go do it. [Fractals used to be randomly assigned, which made it so much harder to prepare.]

Raids.. can’t help you, sorry.

Gear and builds… There are many guides, but I’ve found the guides on Youtube by the Death n Taxes guild easy to digest as a newbie. Look for “DnT” and your class name, or specifically these people: Nike, DEKeyzToChaos, Narc, Obal100.

There is also an older series of videos by Nike on simplified skill rotations, which used to do wonders for a new player but a lot of the classes have changed since HoT. Nike should update that

I’m pretty kitten sure anet have really, truly, and forever given up on underwater combat. If they are not putting underwater skins in teh BLCT weapons, it’s over.

gin.7158:

I saw sam video about selfish condi ranger build. It can pump out like 30k dps in the full buff situation. That’s like a rev without the support.

So it isn’t that bad, right?

Well… you are talking about “solo” and “full buffs” in the same question. That doesn’t make any sense.

If you’re going to be thinking about “solo”, you have to say no buffs except those you generate yourself or get from food. In those situations we’re generally talking about 5-8k dps, not 20-30k.

Solo dps depends a lot on what you can do with might/fury/vuln. Ranger does vuln quite well, fury very well, and can get some might by traiting for pet might on crit then copying that with “heal as one”.

My kill times on a small kitty golem in realistic open worlds builds with no buffs or food (gear not identical quality):

130s Shroud camping power reaper (25 might, 25 vuln, 100% crit from traits)
140s condi engi (would probably win if I knew the rotation)
150s d/w power tempest running meta raid rotation
145s d/w power tempest running non-meta rotation with blasts for might worked in
165s power ranger frost spotter with fury from tiger and might from heal as one
180-200s guardian (hadn’t unlocked dragonhunter), daredevil (with no party buffs, just auto attacking for max vuln and fury is close to meta rotation), power glyph buffer druid
220s mesmer
Haven’t done warrior, revenant

So I think ranger ain’t bad for solo dps (and the burst is decent too, and the flexibility). Its personal dps in a group is not that hot, but personal dps is half the story in a group.

None. They can’t balance the weapons they’ve got. Ot would be better for the game if they removed some weapons/traits/skills and focussed on getting a smaller set right.

This is a story from my engi, but…

On my fully ascended viper condi engi, I threw a single shrapnel grenade at a jotun and waited for him to die. He did so ten seconds later, with a little duration left on the bleeding. A one shot kill, but it took ten seconds.

I stacked several bleeds and burns on the next one who died in five seconds. Most of my conditions ended with less than half their damage done.

Still on my condi build/gear I killed the last with four shots of grenade kit 1, which is power and vuln with no condition damage, in about four seconds. I might have got him faster in berserker gear.

I think this sums up open world condi pretty well — you spend most of your time waiting for conditions to tick, and a lot of your damage is wasted when the trash mob dies.

I wouldn’t bother with damaging conditions in “normal” open world play except to cast Epidemic on zerg bosses surrounded by adds. That works fine in berserker gear, by the way.

If you plan to seek out open world champions and solo them, sure try condi.

Vulnerability is great though. Always use you vuln skills if it’s not at 25. So many people think 25 vuln just happens, when in open world and dungeon pugs it very frequently doesn’t.

As for fractals, I agree with BlasiuS.

MashMash.1645:

Neural.1824:

Well, obviously Anet isn’t going to do anything about it. The threads have been merged and buried. Thx Anet.

I love how they shifted it to the WvW section……..where all the people it affects will never find it now.

GG

One has to wonder whether this was a deliberate move to bury the issue, or the mods really are that out of touch with who cares about this and what forum it belongs in.

Preamble: In my last 30 dungeon pug paths I’ve kept notes on what happened with might/vuln/fury. In 23 paths where I didn’t play necro, vuln hit 25 stacks for about 25 seconds total and was typically in the range 5-10 for most of each fight. Group fury was usually absent, and never went over 50% except one TA fwd/up run where I played ranger.

Aside from that, earlier I was trying to get comfortable with the daredevil rotation from metabattle (dodge, 2x staff 2, auto attack chain, repeat). I don’t quite have it down, but it struck me that I wasn’t really getting more dps than by auto attacking. Then I realised that I had no group buffs on. My auto attacks were (eventually) stacking 16 vuln and getting maybe 50% fury, while the meta rotation gave… not nearly so much.

I figure the meta rotation assumes 25 vuln and 100% group fury, so anything the daredevil generates themself is wasted. But it’s not like that in my world.

Which leads me to wonder: if I’m not seeing the group vuln/fury in dungeon PUGs, should I just stick to auto attacks? If I can apply 10+ extra vuln, ramping up as the others generally ramp down, and all 5 players get the benefit of that…

If I’m right, should I think about a frailty sigil too?

Any advice welcome.

Rhyse.8179:

More power creep. Imagine if the next set of elite specs are as far above HOT specs as HOT elites are above core.

Yes, that’s my biggest fear too.

OriOri.8724:

All of the WvW players are just exclaiming how this is “fair” because they want PvE players to be forced to “endure” WvW just like they have to “endure” PvE to get legendary weapons.

If this thread has convinced me of anything, it’s that there are some really unpleasant WvW players.

I just got an extra set of armour to try wvw a couple of days ago, before this change went live, but maybe I’ll pass.

HardRider.2980:

They did…. months ago.

If you cba to give up with the latest information, that’s not Anets fault.

Yes, indeed they did. More than half way down 30 pages of patch notes, in a section on WvW. I gather most people don’t play WvW, so most of the people who need to know about it probably wouldn’t read that.

I play GW2 every day, I read the PvE and general parts of those notes in detail, I had conversations about meta changes off the back of those notes, and this was a complete surprise to me yesterday. Quite a few people in my guild chat this morning — regular players who are logged in every day — didn’t know about it either.

I consider this unfortunate. I urge anet to give gifts-for-badges a one month extension, under the circumstances.

bearshaman.3421

Valk is very viable for necro

To labour a point that sems to go straight past a lot of people (not necessarily you)…

Valk is not just viable, under many circumstances it’s optimal.

Valk can do more dps than beserker.

Valk can do more dps than berserker, because utility consumables that convert vitality to power etc will have a larger effect. This is most likely to work out well in an organised group (fury/spotter/banners mean you can use one crit trait and a Dps trait). And most likely in fractals, since you would likely use condi for raids and specific potions for dungeons and nothing expensive for open world.

However, as a few people said, I wouldn’t buy valk for your first ascended set, because it’s only useful on one class for some of the time. And when it’s better, it’s not that much better.

Shiyo.3578:

You’re min/maxing for more survivability

Now that’s not fair. Valk does more damage to a single target in a long fight than berserker, because vuln does cap (the necro caps it single handed), crit rate does hit 100, and sharpening stones convert vitality to damage. I spent far too long attacking innocent golems, and counting the vuln on real world dungeon bosses, to have any doubt about this.

If people want to optimise for that part of the game, fair enough.

Writing purely from a pve pov…

I’d like a selfish purely personal dps line with absolutely no group utiliy. Why? Because we already have godlike group buffing with chrono, and we have cool/clever reflects for things like Sorrow’s Embrace, but we hit like a wet noodle in open world and like all MMOs GW2 is mostly played solo.

There is a reason that chronos are a backbone of raid teams (the buffs), and that they are becoming goto tanks (they have no dps to lose by going tanky). I’m sure many of you have read the qT dps charts, where they had to use a smaller golem for mesmer…

So I want traits for might/vuln/fury/quickness, more power/precision/ferocity/condition damage/condition duration, and none of this sharable except with my phantasms. Also I would like generous access to a damaging condition other than confusion, since pve mobs don’t use many skills. And more spammable clones for shatter. Yes this is boring and generic, and I don’t give a juvenilecat.

Non-chrono mes should do almost the dps of dragonhunter, with a bit more utility.

But for something more radical… Equipping this trait line causes illusions to unsummon when you leave combat, not when their target dies, if they haven’t been killed/shattered/overwritten already. That would alleviate one of the great annoyances of mesmer which is fighting multiple risen pirates or whatever at five second intervals with your 25 second cooldowns. Also: a trait that replaces all confusion you deal with some other damaging condition.

If this makes the mes op in pvp/wvw, nerf something that is only used in those modes.

Thank you for your time.

Warlock.7136:

mine is a bit more of a possible future elite spec. when HoT announced classes were getting new weapons I pictured an ele elite spec that used rifle, firing elemental rounds at things.

I take back my “not much”. I’d like swords, so I can give my ele Infinite Light.

Not much. Pretty happy with PvE ele.

For #1 go to dulfy.net, find the gw2 guides, and find the necro guide by spoj. Those are your reference guides for fully organised competent groups.
Then watch the youtube guides by DEKeyzToChaos for something similar on video.
Then watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beuOQ_JdsA4 for an eyebrow raiser.

For #2 I think double shroud camping is hard to beat because you can get 20-25 might + vuln by auto-attacking with 100% crit chance. It does maybe 20% more DPS than the very best organized group builds when not in an organized group. See for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-b5ogp9rdo (also works fine in berserker gear with one less crit trait).

Shadelang.3012:

So if your gonna go power reaper and go so far as crafting an ascended set for it. Consider valk as well when your looking at gear types.

I’ve been looking into that myself, it’s pretty interesting.

You can get loads of health, and also the worm runes are very tempting if you expect to lose your scholar’s bonus. The DPS with no external buffs is also excellent in the dual shroud version, because you’re getting 20-25 might/vuln and 100% crit so no need for fury.

On the downside, once you go valk you find that any time you are without most of fury/banners/spotter you must take soul reaping + reaper and camp shroud. That means no speed from traits, so you will want signet of the locust for running (which won’t work in shroud).

A set of berserker gear gives you more choices. But you may not need the choices, depends how much your circumstances vary.

I am somewhat inclined to say that you should go berzerker first and see what you think, how you feel about camping shroud etc, before committing to valk.

But yes, it is a very attractive and interesting option and it will be better for many people for much of the time.

http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Ranger_-_S/A_LB_Spotter

…but with ranger runes, because in my low-end dungeon pugs I can’t assume either banner of discipline or scholar’s upkeep.

For open world swap in the speed signet when there’s lots of running, and the condi removal signet when there’s lots of condi.

I’d much rather play this than a druid build.

I just put my seventh toon through (daredevil ongoing, revenant to come). I would say the most effective was ranger (not druid that’s less dps but more group buffs) because the range/melee mix is very practical. The second best was power necro (hadn’t unlocked reaper yet). The thing these two have going for them is flexibility — the have melee and range, they can use weapon skills for regular mobs and utilities for veterans and elites for champs, they’re multispeed. This counts for a lot in open world.

I wasn’t impressed by solo power warrior at all, I think that’s a class looking for a group to buff with banners and phalanx strength. Your condi version sounds like a better idea.

Daredevil is working well in a power build with staff. It’s all about the blinding from staff 4 — that’s how you fight tendril after tendril (or whatever) and keep the full dps on instead of dodging continuously (but I still dodge plenty). Power dagger has not worked so well.

Other thoughts:
Tempest: not bad at all. Survived better than I expected, and dps is wonderful.
Power guardian/dragonhunter: ok, solid dps but sheer number/frequency of open world foes uses up the blocks and cleans which are its strength in set piece dungeon fights.
Condi engineer, : ok, lacks defence against bosses immune to its many blinds, great dps at range. Big problem is you can do fatal damage with one fire grenade but that will take 10 seconds, so you tend to actually kill things by spamming grenade 1 (which is all power/vuln) on your condi build.
Power mesmer: painful, hits like a wet noodle, another buffing class balanced for groups in PvE. I think condi might be a little better but nothing to write home about.

Thanks, that was roughly what I was hoping to hear.

Dadnir.5038:

It’s because the shroud reaper with the right traits gets might and vuln on auto-attack, leading to 25 vuln and 22-25 might with no external buffs or food. I don’t think any other class has anything like that.

Seem like you got a lot to discover about other profession in GW2.

Well, perhaps so. As I said, I’m a lower end player.

If you could point me to some examples of classes getting 22-25 might + 25 vuln for more than three quarters of a long fight, I’d be really grateful.

I mean it blew my mind a year ago when I watched Nike’s Lupi kill here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TBrT-DOqxo
…not just for the lupi solo (which I couldn’t dream of) but because he got 7-25 might and a little vuln and he was over 20 might for a lot of it.

I can stack 25 might burst on an ele or engi (in a build I wouldn’t want to use for real), but not for whole minutes. I think the old ele scepter/focus + lightning hammer rotations I learned (from DEKeyz videos) did 10-15 might on average.

Then when I applied Brazil’s “Grave Digger” build and saw my necro getting 25 vuln, plus 22 might with the target above 50% health and 25 might below, with no food and no strength runes/sigils, just by auto-attacking, and keep that up for 30 seconds out of every 40, nobody was more surprised than me. For solo open world PvE for regular players, using magic find food rather than fired golden dumplings etc, and no “practice ten hours to stack 25 might on ele”, I’m not aware of anything like that.

But I guess the builds I see on places like metabattle are group builds. Maybe there’s this whole other world of solo builds I don’t know about? Do you have any links?

Well….

When you say “PvE” that’s quite a spectrum, from running around open world to PUG dungeons to organised dungeons/fractals to raids. I’m at the low end myself, open world and dungeon PUGs. I figure you are an open worlder judging by your builds for other classes. So, from that perspective…

For what it’s worth, the best time I have on a power build for a solo unbuffed small kitty golem kill is on a shroud camping reaper. A condi engi did a little better, but golems with a million HP and 1400 toughness flatter condi.

How can this be, for a sub-par class? It’s because the shroud reaper with the right traits gets might and vuln on auto-attack, leading to 25 vuln and 22-25 might with no external buffs or food. I don’t think any other class has anything like that. Some can do it for a burst, but the reaper keeps it up all day for maybe 30 seconds out of 40. Sustained might and vuln, decent CC, good condi control, some decent bursty openers for before you go into shroud, two health bars… Reapers win hard the solo PvE fights.

There is a decent variety to necro builds. You get:
- solo reaper shroud builds for pure personal dps
- dagger/focus + greatsword + shroud + blood magic builds for proper groups, that provide some vuln + life steal to the group and expect might/fury/etc in return
- dagger/warhorn + staff death shroud (not reaper shroud) builds for when you gotta have range or tag in zergs
- scepter/dagger condi builds for hard targets that give the 30 second bleeds time to work

FWIW, I suspect “overwhelming opinion” is mostly people repeating a qT raid DPS chart from reddit. I am sure it is a fine analysis of raid DPS. But a thing to remember about raid meta builds is most of them assume that somebody else is generating 25 might and 25 vuln (and fury, and spotter, and quickness, and alacrity, and grace of the land). Solo PvE just doesn’t work like that.

I’ve been trying to improve my PvE ranger play lately, looking at meta builds and working on test golems and going in some dungeon PUGs and so on. One thing has me puzzled:

In the metabattle “power glyph buffer” build…
http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Druid_-_Power_Glyph_Buffer
… the rotation says to use your CA skills on longbow.

But it seems to me that once I’ve done Rapid Shot + Barrage + Rapid Shot + Glyph of Empowerment my 10 seconds are up, and I could swap to get a strong Path of Scars ASAP, then do the CA skills in place of low dps sword auto-attacks.

Is it perhaps that metabattle assumes quickness, and that with quickness I’d have to use longbow 1/3/4 to fill out the 10 seconds if I weren’t using CA?

I had trouble testing this for myself because I can’t charge CA fighting the test golem, and dungeon PUGs are not a controlled environment.

I’d appreciate any insight. I’m just back from AFG since before HoT, and I may have missed something stupendously obvious…

For PvE, IMHO…

Engi can do just about anything but it’s way harder to play. My fastest unbuffed solo kill on a golem in the Raid test area is on a condi engi, but the rotation is something like 38 stages and I’m still not sure I’ve got it. Power engis are mental, they do things like using skills that send them flying backwards and swap weapons as they cast them to cancel the flying backwards part. And if you don’t master all this stuff, engis kind of suck. Engi is get good or get out. You don’t have to main the engi, but it helps.

Ranger… has nominally unimpressive DPS, but they seem to do better in practice than in theory. They switch targets instantly with a bow — my ranger will kill that Grawl Berserker over yonder before the dagger/warhorn tempest with twice her theoretical dps can even get in range. Rangers with tigers generate fury, which is huge. Rangers with ranger runes get high crit rates in imperfect circumstances, and never lose their scholars bonus. Rangers with scholar runes keep their scholar’s bonus better than most classes because things aggro on the pet. Rangers who get the “power glyph buffer” build off metabattle can transform bad pugs (but not as well as a PS warrior). Rangers work a hell of a lot better in an imperfect PvE world than the meta says they should.

Warrriors… a Phalanx Strength warrior with two banners is the very best thing you can bring to a random dungeon PUG. But they need a group to buff, their personal DPS is poor to middling. But then again the low DPS is plenty for open world PvE, and the buffs are terrific when they join a group. Personally, I think they’re a bit dull to play though and there is only one really desirable warrior build unlike the other two classes.

Hi folks,

I recently returned after being AFG since before HoT, and bought the expansion after the April 19th patch. I’ve played six of my nine characters through the story, including ranger.

I mostly play open world on my own, not in the “organised groups” beloved of build theorists, so I have nobody to heal/buff and I’m not getting any group buffs.

So far I’ve stuck with my pre-HOT marksmanship + skirmishing + nature magic longbow and sword/X zerker Frostspotter build, deploying the spirit for bigger fights. The only things I’ve really changed are to acquire an Electric Wyvern for these new fangled break bars and a tiger to experiment with extra fury.

I look at druid traits and I don’t see anything that looks useful, except maybe piercing arrows from one of them. I’ve unlocked druid, but I’m not seeing a reason to use it. But I must admit that I don’t even know what “celestial avatar” is, so maybe I’m missing the point.

Have I missed something? Am I going to get any personal DPS or personal utility out of Druid?

In my opinion…

If you’re on your own, go dagger/warhorn or dagger/focus with some defensive traits and utilities.

If you’re in groups/zergs, go staff. You really just need to tag, and fire staff 5 will tag the whole event. Since you can’t see the mobs in all the visual effects to know when to use your defenses, you rely on staff’s range as your defense instead.

For builds, go on youtube and watch the guides by DEKeyzToChaos. Keep adding defensive traits and utilities to them until you stop dying too much.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Morte.5916:

What does a mesmer do about Mordrem Snipers?

Keep moving and burst them down.

That’s what I do too.

RabbitUp.8294:

just keep in mind reflect doesn’t work.

… and that’s where I finally started to fall out of love with mesmers.

Hi,

I was AFG from a bit before HoT until recently. I used to play my warrior as power zerker with GS + axe/mace, fast hands rotations or PS, banners in groups, all that kind of thing.

Lately I’ve played him in HoT, open world and story. It seems like every time I try to settle down and do some rotating I find myself in a red ring, or the mordrem sniper blinks out of 100B. So I lose a lot of DPS whilst avoiding and chasing.

This is a good thing of course — nice to have foes that aren’t just hitpoints. But I wonder should I just be living with this, is there a better way?

Should I consider range (I don’t know of any decent ranging builds but it’s been a year)?

I gave Sinister condi with Aristocracy runes a go back in the day and it didn’t impress me except against husks, but it is at least steady damage application when it’s connecting, and not so dependant on getting a key skill off, and there’s a bow.

Or is there some tactical insight that has just flown straight over my head, a way to apply melee DPS when everyone is moving?

So, basically, I need to get better at playing warrior when it’s not just a single stationary target golem, or a lone dungeon boss who’s aggroed on the ele. Advice appreciated.

What does a mesmer do about Mordrem Snipers?

I’ve just played through HoT campaign and one map completion on each in the last couple of weeks. Necro was better at fights but warrior is OK. Warrior was a lot better at zipping past Chak to map complete tangled depths, or keeping up with HP runs.

I think you have to remember that warrior is a much stronger group buffer with banners, empower allies, and phalanx strength. But they need a group to buff if you’re to get full value.

These are good suggestions, especially the whole “non-boring” slant.

The backwards fear is a bit strange and I don’t see Anet going for that, but as Yannir said the existing taunt mechanic could do something similar.

Best suggestions thread I’ve seen in a while.

If they allowed us to trade crowbars on the market, people like me who had too many and ddidn’t feel like running round VB anymore could sell them to people like you who had too few.

But no.

Because ArenaNet, who don’t let things get in the way of having fun.

Thanks, much appreciated. And so quick!