Guild Wars 2

With the new patch coming out and crafting being boosted to 500, will it be possible to upgrade current exotic weapons to ascended level? I know it was possible to do so with the triforge pendant and I really hope it will be possible with weapons as well.

I only have 2 characters but around 30 weapons between them (and I’m sure other people have a lot more than that), including some pretty expensive ones like “The Crossing”. Many weapons are required for build diversity reasons. Will they suddenly become vendor trash?

And what about dungeon tokens? Will dungeon weapons become useless?

For WvW do Staff 2,3,5 and keep 4 for condi transfer if you need to. If your foe doesn’t put conditions on you, use 4 as well. Switch to scepter/dagger, drop 2 and 5 then continue with scepter auto-attack.

I prefer sigil of earth on both staff and scepter, however sigil of geomancy is also good for the staff.

I don’t know how often Anet reads these forums but I hope they will see this suggestion and take it into consideration for a future update.

I would like a change in the UI that shows the cooldowns of Death Shroud skills when you are not in DS (preferably just above the life force bar).

For example, as a terrormancer it’s very important to know when Doom is off of cooldown to be used effectively. Sometimes I have to enter DS just to check the cooldowns on DS skills since counting seconds in your head while concentrating on a fight in PvP is not a very reliable way to keep track of such things.

It’s important to know the cooldowns of pretty much every skill in DS except Life Blast.

Because it’s much better to send 2 hobbits to throw the ring in the lava than to send an eagle to fly over it. Oh wait, wrong lore….

Rollerbeetle races were easy to rig with your friends/guildmates. You just entered the race at the EXACT same time and you would all be in the same queue.

Moa racing is just another gold sink since statistically you can’t turn a profit but it’s not open to abuse as rollerbeetle races were.

Still no downed hp fix… after 10 months….

I’ve played my necro since release with a few months pause but, having gone through all the game modes and having done all the dungeons, I can honestly say that he problem with the necromancer is a classic case of what looks good on paper doesn’t mean it will perform good in practice. People seem to love concrete examples so I’m going to compare my necro to my guard to demonstrate that fact:

necro high HP <→ guard low HP
necro light armor <→ guard heavy armor
necro spreads conditions <→ guard cleanses conditons
necro can turn boons into conditions <→ guard can turn conditions into boons
necro is good at range and sucky in melee (MH dagger) <→ guard is great in melee and sucky in range
etc

The comparison can continue and they seem to be polar opposite classes that look good on paper and perform opposite tasks. But in reality guards are heavily favored.

Conditions are easy to apply and easy to remove. For a necro this is a big problem since your CC (except for the golem charge) and a big chunk of your damage (except for pure power necro) can be nullified frequently.
Boons are almost as cheap to apply but removal is hard to come by. Every class and many mobs can cleanse conditions while few classes are actually good at removing boons and very few mobs can remove boons.
Some enemies are immune to certain conditions while your allies will never “resist” your boons. So in practice, a boon spamming guard will outperform a condition spamming necro.

A big problem with the necro is its inconsistency: you may start a fight with a full LF bar and your elite ready and that makes the necro quite strong. Most of the times however you will start with a depleted or partially filled up LF bar and 180s cds on elites makes having them in a fight inconsistent as well. LF is refilled partially by skills and partially by stuff dying around you. This makes LF unreliable since the “stuff dying around you” part is out of the player’s control. On my guard I only have to worry about internal cooldowns which is something I can fully manage. On a necro even your profession mechanic is unreliable.

Problematic for necro is access to stability. On lich form or plauge, you have godlike permastability but out of your elites you have almost none (except for crap uptime on a 30 point investment). And with 180s between elites, stability is rare on a necro. You turn from unstoppable to ragdoll in an instant once the elite expires. Again, a big inconsistency.

In pvp, mobility if very important. Poor access to cheap sources of swiftness and no access to vigor puts necro at a disadvantage in a game where everyone else hops around like flees on a hot pan.

Your main source of boons is well of power but that converts conditions to boons meaning that the boon you get is controlled by the enemy in its choice of conditions. And if you face a foe that doesn’t deliver conditions, you get no boons.

Another problem is the fact that you don’t have anything unique that you can bring to a team that can’t be done by another profession that doesn’t have your drawbacks.

On top of all of this, it’s a complex and hard to master class. This means that a necro player is more likely to make mistakes than someone playing one of the noob professions.

Unreliability and inconsistency are the biggest problems with the necromancer. Part of your performance is out of your own control and dependent on the encounters you face, sometimes even at the control of your enemy (see the well of power sentence). Other professions perform their tasks without being hindered so much by external influences whilst necro’s performance fluctuates immensely, many times out of your control. In PvP this makes necros vey easy to counter. Unless Anet makes necro play more consistent, I doubt the class will ever be fixed.

From an outside perspective (I mostly PvP with a necro), engies seem excellent in TPvP. I’ve faced very good teams in tournaments that used one or two engineers. However, I hardly see any in PvE, random arenas or WvW. Anet said they finally split balancing between PvE, WvW, SPvP but apparently they still cling on to the stupid notion that an MMO with a single competitive game mode may some day become an Esport (and all the cash that comes with it) and are focusing on balancing the least popular game mode at the expense of >90% of their customers who don’t give a crap about tournaments.

Epidemic spreads the condition on an enemy to nearby enemies. Stack as many conditions as you can on a target then use epidemic to give them to his allies. All conditions from the enemy are transferred (those applied to it by you as well as your allies) so if you’re in a team, have everyone focus stacking conditions on a single enemy and you can then turn that into an AoE. If used right it’s one of the most powerful spells in the game.

Condi necros are horrible at low level and very gear dependent. I use my condi necro for PvP/WvW and dungeons. The main problem is that condi necros have only DOTs, no burst whatsoever so fights are always long. Aim for rabid gear so you can have both condi and toughness. You have to keep your enemies at a distance with the condi necro: use the staff for chill and fear, and scepter 2 for cripple. You can also use the focus for the long 6s chill. If they still get to you use the fear from DS to make them go away. Dodge a lot as well. For the elite use plague for more condis and a big increase to hp or flesh golem and use it to knockdown foes.

I had my corrupt boon blocked by a warrior shield block. I guess it only ignores Aegis but is still “blocked” in the traditional sense.

I have the same problem on the “Desolation” server. It appears to be worldwide. I am not missing any items or progression on my characters. It’s just the buggy guild nothing more. Please, everyone send a bug report. I have the game since launch and I have never seen such a massive bug.

I play very similar to you. You already said you use CC and DS as much as possible and that is very good. I would suggest you use plague and set the 2nd skill to auto-attack. It gives you a massive hp boost and you can permablind foes as long as the elite is active.

The game mechanics heavily favor simple no-brainer classes (warriors and guardians mostly) for PvE because the fights are also simple and direct. Burst damage and outright damage mitigation usually work better than more subtle mechanics like conditions.

I’ll compare necros to guards here to give you an example: necros can spread conditions, remove boons and cc very well. Guardians can buff allies, cleanse conditions, heal and tank well (necros can tank as well, but guardians are generally better at it). The classes are polar opposites and seem balanced on paper. However, dungeons are skewed against necros because of the boss mechanics. Many bosses are immune to cc, have unremovable boons or cleanse very well, countering a lot of what a necro is good at. On the other hand, i’ve never seen any of them use powerful boon removal or anything that hinders a guardian’s mechanics.

This is why you get elitism in PvE, because of stupid and biased dungeon design. In WvW or PvP it’s a very different story and the playing field is much more leveled. Despite this unbalance, you can do any dungeon in the game with every class. If you see any elitists on the map just tell them to kitten off and to go back to WoW.

I honestly don’t know why they did this. There’s already the DR system to discourage farming. Now they’ll wonder why fewer people will do dungeon runs.

The more fundamental problem is the design ideology. There are two ways to make progression in an MMO: either vertical (WoW) or horizontal (GW). Those two can’t coexist because vertical progression kills horizontal if it’s introduced (items become too hard to acquire to be able to get enough of them for multiple builds/characters). Vertical progression is also much more popular in RPGs.

They created the game after the GW model but after 2 months realized that their player base consisted of ex-WoW players and companies usually make decisions that make the most economic sense to them. And so they introduced the FotM treadmill. Then they realised that GW1 players still exist and are trying to mend the problem (failing mostly).

They are trying to find a middle ground (the Triforge amulet can be upgraded to ascended level btw) but I’m afraid that one day Arenanet will just pick one model and stick with it. And that model is not going to be horizontal progression.

There are thousands of players that happily play signet warriors spamming 100B all day since August (or other such examples) and those players make up the majority of the population. Popularity comes at the cost of either dumbing down or catering to the majority (who are ex-WoW or ex-other MMO players) that have no problem with their hard earned BiT items suddenly becoming vendor trash after 1 year.

It’s a shame really since niche games can work just fine (EVE Online is still running after all these years) and it would be so easy to fix this (make ascended rings/amulets craftable by jewelers and you’ve fixed the problem) but I’m not optimistic about the game’s future in the eyes of GW veterans. If Arenanet holds on to their current direction, this game is not going to become another GW, it’s going to become just another MMO.

A question for some of you more experienced guardians out there:

I want to get a good armor set for support/tanking (when possible) that grants extra boon duration (which is one of the best things a guardian can have to help out the team), and I was planning on getting the AC armor set with rune of the monk.

My question is if I should use the power-tough-vit or precision-vit-healing power set?
The monk rune and water sigils appear to synergise well with the later but is it worth losing the extra vit and toughness? I plan on using mace/shield and staff with this armor.

Or should I use the HotW armor set with power-tough-vit and sanctuary rune (maybe with a hammer instead of mace/shield) and skip healing power and boon duration altogether?

I don’t have a lot of money to spend on crafting so I want to use one of the dungeon armors. My accessories are power-tough-vit oriented (not all, but that’s what I’m planning to get in the future) and they’re not gonna change (the price and time it takes to get ascended stuff makes changing accessories impractical).

I personally do not see why they implemented ascended gear in the first place because it basically widens the profession imbalances even further (a warrior or a guardian can do PvE content faster than a necro or a mesmer), but since they already implemented the rings and backpiece, it would not be fair to take them away from people who already have them. If they want to make a full set of ascended gear my suggestion would be:

1) Make the pieces cost 60 tokens or more of each dungeon. This will give a real incentive to people to start doing all the dungeons. It is currently easy to find pugs for AC or CoF, but very hard for CoE or SE. This will solve the current dungeon problem. Don’t make them cost too many tokens so that people can afford to make multiple sets for multiple builds and keep their alts up to date as far as gear is concerned.

2) Make infusions craftable using the crafting professions. If ascended gear makes no use of or has no equivalent in crafted gear, then why bother with crafting in the first place? Just for leveling an alt is not a justification for the entire crafting mechanic.

3) Be able to upgrade current gear to ascended level(a gift of upgrade or something) It takes a lot of tokens/gold to get all possible weapon combinations (except for engi). Some people have t3 cultural or Arah armor which is far harder to get than other armor sets. Will you tell them that their work has been for nothing and they have to start gearing everything all over again?

As far as I’m concerned they should focus on adding more explorable areas, improving balance, adding new skins and maybe some new skills to make more diverse builds viable instead of adding more numbers on the gear. But if they really insist on ascended this would probably be the best solution.