Guild Wars 2

One last final big middle finger to the dungeon community My one hope is that they make fractals actually rewarding but still… this is just inexcusable.

AllIsVain.6409:

Love that that dungeons weren’t even acknowledged.

Unwittingly, Cameron proved Kitty.1502’s point here. Robert Hrouda was similarly enthusiastic about trying to deliver the best dungeon experience possible a few years ago and now their existence doesn’t even get acknowledged. We, as players, don’t want this to happen to raids. His point is that we want them to grow and flourish, not be forgotten entirely like dungeons. It would be depressing to see the raid team disbanded not long after release, just like with the dungeon team.

I’m not sure how you can consider those videos valid Miku, as clearly you were line-casting hundred blades against a wall.

/s

Have “ping traits on join” lfgs started popping up yet? I’d check but that would require logging in to the game. :<

Inb4 drama wave of the summer because you used the p2 waypoint. GJ though! Also brb, changing our p2 record to “[Hawt] + Ravi” :p.

I probably could have improved it a bit but I don’t really have the energy to keep trying. I’m just happy I got sub 3. ^^

You can run discipline instead of arms if you really want I guess and still have fast hands. Not sure how the might upkeep is though.

Call it a hunch, but I think ele still wins again big hitboxes.

https://youtu.be/MSu0wl0aXl8

The bubble still misses frequently, and in phase 2 he still likes to teleport randomly all the way to Siberia, and sometimes he will go invisible while doing so and do his aoe. On top of all of that, his auto attack still hits 100% without reflects up. So yeah, he’s still completely messed up. Also it seems bizarre things can happen if you knock him into his next phase while he has Slow from time warp. One on try it seemed that his invuln ended up getting affected the by the slow, making the phase change extra long. -.-

Here’s one of the best bloopers that Miku forgot to include. :p
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12Gb3DbMsqA

10/10 Mario music.

The Ruined City of Arah: Path 1
June 12th 2015, game build 49878
Restricted time: 7 m, 18 s
——————————————-
Retaliate [rT]
Elementalist: Make It Rain Austin (Austin): https://youtu.be/IFY7r5emDm0
Elementalist: Ruby Miku (Miku): https://youtu.be/5Y9Mk3GRbPA
Mesmer: Mr Spadoinkle (Spadoinkle): https://youtu.be/xbbLi92ujWU
Thief: Xukk: https://youtu.be/FWoKJlmlX7w
Warrior: Sangi Cynia (Sangi): https://youtu.be/LRoUTNe3IEk

f11 shown here: https://youtu.be/IFY7r5emDm0?t=426

Hey guys, so it’s been a really long time since rT’s posted a record and we really wanted to do something before all of the pre-expansion nerfs come about. We decided in the past few weeks to try Arah P1, and this was the result.

It could have been faster, especially with Lupicus (we have cursed RNG -cries-), but this is still our best full run and we want to share with you the results. We have new ideas to try for after the expansion so more from us can be expected in the future!

You can come up with your own but you might like mine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DE8It42yQI
This rotation does a ton of damage in dungeons and boss fights. Generally you want to stay in fire for as long as you can unless you need the support from the other elements like water fields or immobilize. And make sure you take advantage of glyph of storms whenever you can. Used in earth it gives a large aoe blind that pulses for 10 seconds. Used in air it gives 25 vuln and a lot of aoe damage. Hope this helps. ^^

I’ve had it happen hundreds of times where the orb simply explodes in melee and kills you instantly. I can’t tell you how many p2 solo speed runs were ruined because of that bug. :< But yeah this has been around for a loooong time. I’ve said many hundreds of kitten words because of it.

If there are lots of enemies spread out in a room, then you can force them to bunch up by pulling them around a corner. This makes them much easier to kill as you can hit all of them with AoE damage, and this is the only real application for this strategy.

There used to be a skill that did insane damage when used against a wall (Fiery Rush), so back then it was common to try and pull bosses against walls, sometimes involving pulling them around bizarre corners. However, it has been nerfed, so generally there is no longer any reason to pull lone bosses away from their spawn point unless there are traps or other enemies nearby. Lots of players don’t understand this was the reason to pull them though and so will still do the same tactics expecting something special to happen lol.

Scavenger hunt time! What got changed today that didn’t make the patch notes? Anything game changing? I was kind of expecting necromancers to no longer be able to enter dungeon instances or something of that sort.

Caudecus’ Manor: Path 3
May 16th 2015, game build 48555
Restricted time: 4 m, like 12 or something s

Guild: My Mixtape Is [Fire]
Guardian: Stârfîre (Austin): https://youtu.be/wFBXFupgKv8 (F11 after end boss dies)
Mesmer: Frifõxy (Frifox): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggv_C3UFzrc
Elementalist: The Silent Ranger (Raine): No vid
Thief: Sharrizard (Shard): No vid
Necromancer: Poe Is Me (Fuego): went to bed before this run so no PoV
Gee, the might nerf really does add 100 seconds. Also I made sure not to use my hero panel to change weapons since apparently that is an exploit.

Here is how to squeeze out the absolute most dps possible from staff. You will want to sit in fire and use fireball and lava font and flame burst and meteor shower once you blow all your long cooldowns, though in a boss fight this won’t happen until 15-20 seconds into the fight.

So to counteract people deep freezing things, all stuns will now contribute toward a generic deep freeze? Am I missing something here?

Let’s compare the D/F build to the new phalanx warrior. After this update, D/F will only have somewhere around 75-85% of the damage that warrior will have (if anyone has any better math on this, please feel free to correct me.) D/F generates probably 12-15 stacks of might on average, phalanx warrior generates 25 might stacks average. Additionally, phalanx warrior gives the team 320 power, 170 condition damage, 170 precision, and 170 ferocity. Phalanx warrior also has 7k or something more hp and more armor. The D/F ele gives 100% fury uptime whereas warrior only gives 33% fury uptime. Soooooo basically for the most part d/f eles will be squisher versions of warriors with less damage and less party support. But they’ll have swirling winds, so there’s that I guess.

For a celestial ele, ferocious winds is 0.07 * 738 = 51 extra ferocity. This corresponds to about a 0.47% dps boost without fury and a 0.86% dps boost with fury.

For a zealot ele, ferocious winds is 0.07*576 = 40 extra ferocity. This corresponds to about a 0.84% dps boost without fury and a 1.16% dps boost with fury.

For a berserker ele, ferocious winds is 0.07*0 = 0 extra ferocity. This corresponds to about a 0.00% dps boost without fury and a 0.00% dps boost with fury.

If anyone is wondering, I did some quick math and this comes out to about an 8% damage nerf for D/F compared to where they are right now assuming ~4% damage from bountiful power. Making bolt to the heart an adept would bring it down to a 2% nerf. Making fresh air do 10% more damage in air would instead make this update a ~2% buff for d/f. Giving fresh air 10% damage AND allowing them to bring bolt to the heart as an adept would make this roughly an 8% dps buff for d/f. However, even with this buff I think it would still be inferior to staff dps wise. Staff on the other hand will not lose any DPS aside from the ice bow changes.

Lingering Elements makes you keep the first minor trait for each attunement for 5 seconds after swapping. So if you invest in air, you get the 10% speed in air, and you keep it for 5 seconds after swapping out of air attunement. It doesn’t (as of right now) affect damage modifier traits like internal fire and piercing shards.

I’m honestly shocked (bad pun, I know) that air training’s 10% modifier didn’t get merged into fresh air. In my opinion, Ferocious Winds needs to be removed (this trait just won’t ever be worth bringing in any game mode, ferocity is just too weak of a stat and healing power has no synergy with it), Bolt to the Heart should be moved down to adept tier, add 10% modifier while in air to fresh air, and then find a new grandmaster trait as an alternative. Otherwise I can’t see fresh air specs ever being worthwhile to run in pve or pvp.

The blast finisher is literally the only redeeming thing about lightning hammer at the moment. The damage is already very weak compared to staff. The party support was the only reason to ever bother with LH. Now that warriors will have easy access to Phalanx Strength and all their DPS traits, elementalists won’t really ever have a reason to run lightning hammer, unless it gets a significant buff. Instead however, since ANet is nerfing it, it will likely become even more useless.

They removed dungeons from the in game bug report options a few patch ago.

The spider queen change was definitely intended. I was in a guild with the dev who made the change, he had talked about it during an AC run as “imagine how people would fight her if the poison didn’t have a minimum range…”

As far as dungeons are concerned, key changes that would make rangers fit into the meta well would be:
*Allow dodging while attacking with 1h sword
*Give pets evade frames when we dodge
*Make pets not trigger traps such as volatile blossoms
*Increase the health on frost spirit (this would be minor though. Most good rangers can find clever spots to put it.)
*Boost the damage on greatsword’s autoattack chain by about 10%. At the moment, you’ll deal ~10% more damage using longbow in melee than you would with greatsword. This is just silly. This would make greatsword actually a viable alternative to sword in difficult fights.

If you want to go a step further and make rangers on roughly equal footing with warrior:
Banners currently add about ~15.6% damage (by my numbers, please correct me if I’m wrong!) to the rest of a group. Frost spirit + spotter adds about ~11.8%. If frost spirit’s damage bonus were boosted to 15%, then frost spirit and spotter would on average increase the group’s damage by ~15.4%. This would make rangers a perfectly viable alternative to a warrior in a dungeon group. You’d trade OP might stacking for higher personal dps.

Not that any of these changes would ever be implemented. :\

Molch.2078:

Then name more than one class where having more than one isn’t a waste. That’s not really an argument for or against warriors.

It’s only proof that eles are ridiculously op.

Double ranger, double thief, and double mes have all been used to great effect in record runs.

Well, cripple/immob/chill wouldn’t affect her daggerstorm since she teleports to the middle to use it. Chill might delay it. I guess maybe she’d be too easy to kite around the boxes if you could permanently cripple or immobilize her. Bleeding is just damage, she doesn’t have any (intended, she likes to reset) healing so poison doesn’t matter, vuln wouldn’t break anything, confusion might pack a punch on her though. Torment maybe would as well if you’re fighting without reflects and kiting around boxes. None of those would break any of her mechanics though. Maybe she’s a sailor and ate enough vitamin C packed limes to prevent scurvy that it prevented other conditions too.

Needs more illusionists. Really though, well done.

http://youtu.be/EoH1JCWrmkA

And you guys were worried about his ranged attack being bugged…

Rising Dusk.2408:

Purple Miku.7032:

Seems pretty obviously unintended considering you can still 1-shot him in phase 2. If they were going to “fix” anything, it’d most definitely be that.

Realize that they don’t want to just make his projectiles unblockable because that negates the entire value of those skills against GL, but it’s not as simple to somehow make the skill unable to reflect his skills on a wall. That’s a much tougher problem to solve than making his attack that he uses work in melee. It’s really impossible for us to determine intent here.

It would be very simple to fix. Just make it so the walls in his arena can’t have skills target them like half the walls in Arah leading up to Lupicus.

Also, it’s worth noting that S/D’s only fire field is a PBAoE that requires you to be in melee range to use if you want any might. At this point you may as well be running dagger/focus. If you really want to stay at range, staff is your best option.

In the Cliffside fractal, if an engi swaps kits while holding the hammer it will disappear forever and never respawn, forcing you to restart the whole fractal.

In Arah path 2, sometimes Belka’s cut scene never triggers and the instance has to be reset because she stays green. This seems to happen more when some people are still running past the trash mobs when someone activates her. Maybe it has to do with whom the NPC is following?

Not dungeon halting but annoying, also in Arah path 2, there are many spots that running into during the Alphard fight will cause her to reset to full hp. One in particular is the bone wall. The main preventative measure here is to make sure everyone is in the arena before aggroing her.

Speaking of that bone wall in Arah path 2, if the party wipes fighting Alphard the bone wall will often remain. This can be fixed by having the whole party die at the same time.

You can do some really cool things with staff in a solo. In open world PvE, generally most things will die before they can even reach you! You can use earth #4 or water #4 to slow down mobs and then lava font and meteor shower and ice bow them to death. Note that glyph of storms provides lots of blind when used in earth. For champions you probably want to summon an earth elemental. You can hide behind it while casting your meteors and ice bow barrages. It’s an amazing tank. The earth ele strategy is in my opinion one of the best solo strategies that works for almost any encounter. I’d definitely recommend the builds Ark.9586 posted, as I use the staff setups daily.

Here are some examples of staff solos, they’re in dungeons but the concept is the same:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMfT0rr7oX4
http://www.twitch.tv/007austin/c/6177507 (potato quality, sorry!)

Here’s a brief guide I made showing how to get the most damage possible from staff:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DE8It42yQI
Just swap out FGS for the earth elemental when it’s needed. Hide behind it and drop your nukes and things will die.

I would assume this is a bug, considering how many bugs were introduced in the last patch. There’s probably one range called “cone” or something that accidentally got changed, maybe it was intended for a Heart of Thorns boss being designed or something. Pretty bothersome considering the animations now are completely different from the hitbox. Start filling out your bug reports!

Yeah, none of the fire fields stack against walls now, including burning speed and burning retreat. Also, the targeted version of FGS 4 only deals about 1/5 the damage the tooltip indicates. They meant to buff the targeted rush but they forgot to actually change the damage it does.

Well in PvE you can use fgs for skill #3 and #5 then drop it, every 3 minutes. Or you can just use it to run trash runs slightly faster. An extra utility slot would be amazing though, I’d never need to choose between arcane wave and signet of fire again!

Also Rocky is an amazing tank. The other elementals just… they die really fast and if you’re pvping they are really easy to dodge. Freezy does have a nice heal though if he stays alive. They feel pretty underwhelming for an elite though.

I do agree, having more choices of elites would be nice. And this goes for all classes. I miss having hundreds of options in Guild Wars 1.

Zenith.7301:

Dub.1273:

xDudisx.5914:

Dub.1273:

Just make sure you never try ele, because once you do and see the huge difference in efficiency, you might never want to touch your warrior or guardian again.

Warrior is still very effective with their unique support from banners.

One warrior makes sense, after that they become wasted party slots. Same for guardian.

Yeah well, welcome to any other class.

At least people still stack guardians and warriors in some instances.

When in hell has a necromancer or mesmer or ranger been stacked; hell, who wants necromancers and rangers to begin with. At least your warrior functions with better versions of spirits that can’t be destroyed by casual pve aoe and can be moved around without needing 6 points of trait investment to be useful. Your greatsword and axe traits are not buried on the toughness and vitality lines, and you’re not flooded with a bunch of worthless minor traits. Your shouts don’t suck for a change (lolranger shouts), and you actually bring boons to the group (lol mesmer/necro).

Have a tissue when complaining about ele’s as a warrior lol. Warriors, thieves, and guardians get no pity from me they’re pretty much the mainstay of any team on all game formats.

Stacking rangers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHew4nFs8SM) and mesmers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC-WLNIxXGY) isn’t unheard of. Necromancers unfortunately…. yeah.

I think 10% boon duration, 10% outgoing condition duration (or maybe -10% incoming condition duration?), and the 170 healing power would be fair. Let’s compare banners to weapons. Banner of discipline’s 170 ferocity and precision is almost the same as getting 2 primary stats from a two-handed weapon. An exotic greatsword gives +179 to its main stat. If condition duration and boon duration are roughly equal value stats, then the +10% from banner of tactics is only half of the stats an exotic two handed weapon gives, as giver’s two handed weapons give 20% condi duration, not 10%.

Not sure if this makes any sense but I think it would be completely fair to either raise the boon duration to 20% or add 10% outgoing condition duration or -10% incoming condition duration. It wouldn’t really matter much sense I still couldn’t see Banner of Tactics being used anywhere but I don’t think there is much harm in buffing underused skills. Not that this would ever happen anyway, just my thoughts on it.

GrimmR.3541:

Sorry boys, funwise thief > ele.

Those are fighting words.

Pff, both of you copied my strategy of wearing berserker gear in solos. :P

If you hit each one of them as you run past, they won’t teleport.

It actually is fixed for elementalists created after 4/15/2014. Eles created before that patch still have the bugged aoe indicator.

The main challenge of Belka is outsustaining her 100% burning uptime while keeping good dps. Adding chasing her around and hoping the orb doesn’t bug just drags out the fight and drags out your practice sessions when she does bug and instakill you. It just makes the fight slower without actually adding anything of value. And Miku is right, we’re not going to bother submitting p2 records to gw2dungeons if this strategy is banned. Goku is the only person who has submitted any solo records. I’m not going to submit a solo without bugging Belka if Goku uploads a faster solo on his youtube channel with stationary Belka. There just wouldn’t be any point. I say this as one of maybe 2-3 people actually spending time practicing solo records of this path.

I really don’t think this strategy is an exploit in any way. In another thread Wethospu you said, “I would say boss must be able to use his offensive attacks. Does that sound fair?” Belka can use all of her offensive attacks while she is stationary. I don’t see any reason to make special rules for her. It’s not like the targetted wall on Lupi or the reflector gun on Wahlen where you can kill the boss instantly. I really don’t see any reason to ban this strategy. Like I said, it just makes the fight slower without adding anything of interest or value.

I have zero problem with this tactic.

It bugs very easily. You just break the bone wall. If I had to guess Wethospu, her teleport timer is probably supposed to pause when she loses aggro. So when you run back and break the bone wall to get OoC and heal up, she’s supposed to assume she has no targets and stop teleporting. Then for whatever reason it doesn’t start again.

The more you move around in that fight, the better chance for her projectile to bug and randomly explode on you with no tell, killing you instantly. I’ve had this happen enough times to be 100% okay with people stopping her teleport just to avoid it. It still happens even when she is rooted but it seems less frenquent.
Here’s an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhuJ_Z4gQXY

This would be a wonderful QoL thing. If you’re playing sword and you click your pet to check its boons you go flying…

I’ve only gotten the spear and the rifle. -.-’ At least I have my uninfused clerics rings to keep me company.