Guild Wars 2

TurtleDragon.3108:

That’s the problem with axe, you need to trait for it when you want it to be a decent reflect. The trait is in a highly defensive and undesirable traitline for PvE, meaning you give up too much damage or group support to grab. You also have to stand still and channel it, meaning you don’t get to continue moving or using skills while reflecting unlike mesmers and guardians. Whirling defense damage is inferrior dps to auto attacking, standing still can be a problem in some fights like Grawl Shaman

Path of scars is great damage, but you need to be careful not to CC bosses when they have 0 stacks of defiance. (Unless you’re trying to pull or interupt them). If you want a knockdown, other classes have much better ones and using path of scars is a giant waste of boss CC.

Mm, I think you exaggerate. In my experience, damage from reflected projectiles more than compensates for any theoretical damage loss, and the higher endurance regen helps maintain steady focus. Lower cooldown on QZ is also very convenient.

If you have other rangers in the group, I’d actually recommend 4/5/5/0/0 over 4/5/0/5/0. Traited and untraited spirits still stack, and peak strength is great with a traited WH because then the traited Call of Wild cd (28) lines up much more smoothly with the Healing Spring cd (30).

Also, with grawl shaman – Hunter’s Call, Entangle, then Path of Scars + Whirling Defense right underneath the bubble (the reflect protects both you and the root) is probably the safest and most reliable way to “solo” the bubble. Add river drake lightning to seal the deal.

For PvE, I would suggest taking full-zerker accessories anyways and adding stone spirit to your utility bar if you’re worried about one-shots. Use skale venom to inflict weakness with your all attacks and your ability to survive will shoot straight up.

Berserker gear is really all you need for PvE. You can always adjust utilities/traits/consumables to fit the situation. The gold cost for most good cons is pretty trivial compared to the amount of time you save.

I’d still prefer an ele for the conjured weapons. LH, Ice Bow, and FGS (choose the best for each fight) are all very, very strong in literally every dungeon and instance in the game.

That and it looks to me like a phalanx warrior sacrifices alot more personal dps for his build than a might-stacking ele. I would like to see a dps comparison between a standard 6/4/2/0/2 ele and a 0/6/0/6/2 warrior.

OH Axe is a very good and very underrated weapon, especially in PvE. If your group stacks properly the AoE of Whirling Defense (when traited) is a proper reflect that also stacks vuln. Compared to Feedback and Wall of Reflection it has a lower cooldown and doesn’t force the group to use a generally useless combo field.

Path of Scars, with a coefficient of 1.2, has the same damage as Backstab if it hits twice. Getting both hits is very easy if your foes are against a wall, and the interrupt will provide some active damage mitigation. The pull comes in handy if your pugs are dysfunctional.

In PvP, the pull is good for interrupting stealth stomps (no need for a target, just aim it), and if you tank up, the retaliation and reflect from Whirling Defense is surprisingly useful in zergs. The big advantage of Whirling is that’s it relatively hard to see in traffic, unlike a gigantic purple bubble or shiny wall.

I been on HoD since launch, but I’ve killed Tequatl at least 100 times now with TTS. If you’re filling Sparkfly but still not getting the kill then something’s definitely going wrong. Feel free to whisper me if you have questions on character builds, consumables, what to set up, etc.

Eh, except for warrior and necro, just about every great profession & build combo has been nerfed quite a bit over the past year. I think it’s mistake to wish thieves would be back to where they were in Sept. 2012. Rather I think warrior is next on the chopping block of doom, then probably necro again, until eventually thieves, even with 4 sec reveal, will be considered op.

All professions using berserker gear + consumables are viable in fractals. Play what suits you best.

It’s not the profession that matters, its knowing which utilities/traits to use, where to stack and when to melee (hint: as often as you can get away it). As long as you stack might, fury, vulnerability, blast finish, spam reflects/aegis/protection, melee, and blind everything in sight you’re going to be fine. And yes, that means you don’t have to play warrior/guardian/mesmer – it’s just harder to learn the other professions because their proper builds are harder to learn and take more intelligence/practice to master.

I’ll add that proximity doesn’t matter – it will choose any 5 players within the 1000 AoE. In gigantic zergs I’ve literally stood on top of my own spirits and still receive no buffs much of the time.

Still a very, very strong build in small to mid size group scenarios. I play in low-tier WvW so 1v1 2v2 5v5 10v10 happens quite often.

benOTK.4961:

Worst teammate ever? This bot during tPvP.

Spammed about a gay dating site the whole match. He spammed team and map chat, and then whisper spammed me.

We still won though, so I wasn’t too mad…. until I got him again on my team in the next match..

I think we have a winner.

Wukunlin.8461:

wait, is there a way to control who gets the pheromone?

There are pheromone plants around the edges of the boss room. Walk up to one and hit F!

Wukunlin.8461:

what do I do when the team insists that there is little use kiting the ooze into the pools?

They probably gave up on kiting because they don’t know to play. So, as in all PUG groups, take control and be willing to demonstrate how to do things.

Take the pheromone yourself and kite the ooze yourself into pools.

The smart players will see, learn, and cooperate. If you are indeed stuck with a bunch of idiots who won’t “watch and learn” then just politely leave the group.

Ok, I watched this video twice, and I see no reason for all the whine about rangers. What I did see was a poorly played glass ele, playing one the squishiest builds out there, on hands down the squishiest profession in the game, make no attempt to dodge any of the ranger player’s counterattacks.

It was already a silly decision to try to solo burst down one of tankiest builds in the game. But to try to trade damage mindlessly while on a glass cannon? That’s no different than a heartseeker spamming thief, except instead of 22222 it’s 5F1325. I don’t see how one could claim OE was playing better in this situation. Both players facerolled their keyboards (ranger faceroll is 789F2; yes, the spirits must be commanded to attack) and the glass cannon lost! That shouldn’t be a big surprise to anyone.

What is a big surprise to me is the amount of high-ranking non-ranger players who still display no clue how to play against spirit builds, post videos of themselves getting owned in very predictable ways, and then complain.

These numbers look about right, given your assumptions. I would suggest adding DPS values for the other two Longbow ranges, e.g.

Longbow – Long Range Shot (1000+ range) – 1,481 DPS
Longbow – Long Range Shot (500-1000 range)– 1,070 DPS
Longbow – Long Range Shot (0-500 range) – 823 DPS

There’s a big difference between a well-played Longbow and a poorly-played one. Power builds should swap in and out of it constantly based on the situation. You do have stealth and point-blank shot to help maintain distance as well.

If you look up patch notes dating back to 2012, ANet has been tweaking spirits for months. The cooldown starting on summon as opposed to death is an intended mechanic, not a bug. Otherwise, in the midst of every other spirit change, it would have been addressed.

As for the whine about this build:

- The spirits last as long as their cooldown. Each spirit requires 1.5 seconds to resummon. This means there’s a minimum 4.5 second window in which rangers don’t have all their spirits up. Of course, if you actually kill one or all spirits BEFORE engaging, that downtime window increases dramatically, at which point one could wait patiently and time an interrupt accordingly.

- One or two AoE skills is sufficient to destroy all spirits. One dodge after destroying them all is sufficient evade all the on-death effects. Of course, if the player dumping the AoE is more than 360 range away, no dodge is even necessary.

- The PAX qualifier going on this weekend has shown that kit engineers and S/D stealth thieves can beat spirit rangers consistently. Rangers running three spirits have no stun breaks and have no easy way of dealing with blind and daze spam. If you can’t be bothered with chaining stuns and interrupts after killing spirits then you deserve to lose.

I’ve regularly run dungeons since launch, and of the hundreds of runs I’ve probably done up to this point, I’d say 99% of them are fine, but it’s always the crappy 1% that one always remembers. One time a guildie and I were doing a TA run with 1 pug, and 2 other dudes who happened to be in the same guild. While we were autoattacking the final tree boss to death, those two guildies systematically kicked all three of us in the end out of spite. Yes, two people kicked three others!

So I also have a big problem with the kick system. If two people want to kick you, and two people disagree, then you’re screwed. Having two people being able to overrule three others in a group is blatantly unfair.

GG, but I counted only 3 fire elementals in this video. :X

I find it’s easier to surround Bloomhunger while fighting him, melee or ranged – he has a big problem hitting things that are behind him.

I didn’t read all the back-and-forth in this thread (most of the haters don’t even have geared rangers and just bandwagon), but as a ranger main myself since launch, I’ll tell you right now that 20/25/0/25/0 is a very strong build for easy content. Spotter and Frost Spirit (which scales extremely well with just about any other damage buff in the game) are non-redundant damage buffs, and because of pet damage, rangers are easily one of the best wielders of conjured ele weapons. Pets can be used to pull mobs without endangering anyone, and with good swap timing, you can bait out plenty of one-shot moves without penalty. Like all professions, bad players give it a bad name, but sword and pet mechanics require a fair amount of timing and finesse to master, and quite frankly, it’s much easier for people to call their rangers “bad” than actually take the time to learn these things.

For more difficult fights, I recommend switching from Runes of the Scholar to Runes of the Ranger, and switch from Sigil of Perception to Sigil of Bloodlust. This will give you a high baseline crit chance to work with in exchange for lower power but a much more reliable 5% bonus instead of the unreliable 10%. When you go down (one shots can and will happen in full berserker gear on any profession), it’s much better to lose power than to lose precision from a utility perspective.

Also, run 20/20/20/10 for off-hand training and wilderness expertise. You’ll still have Spotter and Frost Spirit for group dps ofc, but with the survival traits you can bring much more utility to a group. Off-hand Axe will give you a 1200 range pulling skill (that does alot of damage btw) and a reflect bubble that can rotated into your group’s routine. The warhorn cooldown will more than compensate for the loss in boon duration. Dagger will give you an extra evade, and torch will give you a large, 8 second fire field to be used with banners, lightning hammers, and other blasts.

With the 20% survival recharge trait, you can use muddy terrain/entangle for AoE immobilize when needed (grawl shaman, big groups of trash, etc.), and you can always use lightning reflexes instead of sic ’em with you feel a stun break is necessary.

Ranger DM here – I finished Arah p4 last month before the update which reduced Simin’s healing.

If you are the only ranger in the group, you should be throwing tears, not because you have the least dps in the group, but because off all the professions, you have the most consistent dps while also throwing tears. I recommend the utilities, Search and Rescue (revive downed players who are meleeing), Frost Spirit (to buff everyone’s damage, very important), and either Quickening Zephyr or Viper’s Nest, depending on your traits. If you manage to poison Simin before she goes invis, it will reduce the rate she heals, but unless you use the trap traits, Viper’s Nest is impractical.

Make sure your party fights Simin in the middle of the western wall, where no sparks spawn (any good youtube guide will show you the exact spot). Further, make sure your party has gathered and collected a huge number of tears prior to beginning.

For pets, I recommend the Jungle Stalker for Mighty Roar and the Red Moa for Furious Screech. These pet skills, combined with Zephyr’s Speed trait, will further buff the damage of your party. Because the Jungle Stalker is a low power high precision feline pet, it also has the best damage scaling when buffed with might.

Pets should set to passive at all times. During the fight, while throwing tears, micromanage your pet constantly by using SaR, Mighty Roar, and Furious Screech. You should swap pets at every opportunity. Use the quickness on pet swap to increase the speed in which you throw tears and buff the group. When Simin turns invisible, IMMEDIATELY pick up a tear, order your pet to stand down (F3 skill) and sprint to the western wall where your group pulled Simin. You should join the melee stack for this moment (your pet will follow you here), and throw your tear if necessary. If you do this quickly and correctly your pet will never draw spark aggro. If your pet draws aggro it means either you or your spark runners messed up.

For your weapon sets, use a longbow and an axe/warhorn combo. Between tear throws, use a longbow to apply vulnerability. You won’t be at maximum range for the autoattack to be effective, but in the few seconds you have between tear throws, the vulnerability stack is the best benefit you can provide to your group. Use Hunter’s Call or Barrage (with quickness) for additional damage while throwing tears. It goes without saying that Call of the Wild should be used at every opportunity.

GOOD LUCK.

Eastevil.1534:

I smell a nerf coming along. Reminds me of the old CM story farming. Now look at it, you’ll be lucky to find a group. This is why we can’t have nice things.

Yes, exactly. Enjoy the farm while you can – I don’t expect it to be around for much longer.

My guild runs TA regularly without any trouble, so I’ll outline our strategy for you:

In our experience, the nightmare vines prioritize ranged targets over melee ones. Their melee AoE stomp attack is both weak and easy to dodge, while their scatter-shot ranged attack is devastating. My general advice is that players with relatively little dodging and endurance regeneration options (especially guardians, necromancers) should melee vines whenever possible. Players with high endurance regeneration (or just outstanding dodging skills) should spread out, play at maximum possible attack range, and dodge as necessary. The key point here is that the ranged players are basically the tanks that draw aggro in the fight, while the melee ones should be doing as much damage as possible.

Now, about the fight itself, our guardian, necro, and thief always melee; mesmer rotates in and out of melee range depending on the situation; ranger plays at 1500 range using the longbow. At the beginning, only one vine spawns, which we burn down within a few seconds. Once one vine is down, two more spawn, at which point our ranger and mesmer tag both (the vines now target them with the ranged attack) while the melees move in, clear blossoms (guardian staff and necro DS are great for this) and melee them down one at a time. Once a vine goes down, an additional spawns, and the group splits accordingly.

After the 5th nightmare vine is killed, the champion vine spawns. The key here is that BEFORE the champion vine spawns, we attempt to damage the 5th and 6th regular nightmare vines evenly, with the goal of killing them both simultaneously. That way, when the champion vine spawns, it ends up being the only vine in the room.

When the champion vine reaches 75% hp, one additional nightmare vine spawns, which our ranger tags. In addition, our thief breaks off and helps kill it. At 50% hp, another vine spawns, which again is tagged by our ranger, and again our thief (and occasionally our necro) switches over and kills it.

Once the two extra vines are down, we focus down the champion as quickly as possible. Two final vines spawn at 25%, but at this point our mesmer uses time warp, which allows us to burst down the champion immediately. Between the time warp quickness and the occasional dodge, we have no trouble ignoring the last two vines.

I’ve never bothered to time the fight, but it’s pretty quick if the ranged players spread out and everyone knows how to deal with vile blossoms.

If the patch notes suggest anything, it’s that scale 30+ fractals are meant to be some of the most hardcore content in the game. People here post videos of their groups successfully completing fractals such as the grawl one at 40+, 45+, 50+, and so on.

Heck even as look at this forum page there’s a a thread with youtube vids of 50+ fractals done by a group with 3x ele’s.

A few weeks ago I noticed 40+ vids with a 2x ranger group.

Point being, if you’re going to attempt high scale fractals, maybe you should be more willing to do research and respec appropriately before calling for nerfs. Given that other groups have obviously gone MUCH further with supposedly weaker profession setups, you should have many viable alternatives available to you and your guild for scale 32.

Before you enter the dungeon at all, ask how many people intend to skip mobs. The truth is if two people want to skip, then chances are the rest of you will have to as well in the interest of cooperating. If skipping is unacceptable to you then just apologize and gracefully leave the group. Your frustration is not worth a few dungeon tokens.

Eventually you’ll find folks who will actually want to kill things and not just rely on chest loot. Once you find those people, make a few friends and ask about their guilds. A tiny bit of networking goes a long way both in game and in life. As a bonus, I’ve found that the people who regularly engage in rather than avoid combat tend to be much more skilled and more knowledgeable about the game.

Always have a longbow, especially if you’re in a group. 1500 range with trait is too good to pass up, provided you take the time to find a good vantage point. The vulnerability from Hunter’s Shot will increase the damage of your pet as well as everyone else who is hitting your target. Barrage actually does great damage if you channel it completely. Point Blank Shot will oftentimes save your life, since it’s both an interrupt and a push back. At high enough levels of power, precision, and critical damage, the overall dps competes very well with the shortbow all while tagging more mobs and collecting more loot.

If this game were deathmatch, I would agree, but right now the only mode is conquest. Thieves in stealth cannot capture or defend objectives, and with such a huge investment in toughness, vitality, healing power, etc. through traits, they have no chance of killing a competent bunker in enough time to make the point swing from an occasional kill worth it.

For conquest their builds are pretty much gimmicks that only exist to waste your time. While they are busy kiting, stealthing, and being annoying in hopes of eventually killing you 30 seconds later, they can watch you and your allies kill Svanir, Chieftain, Guild lords, or trebuchets.

^ Don’t quite agree with all of that. At any moment in a fight, thieves either offer great support or do great damage, but never both at the same time, because of how initiative works. Half of good thief play IMHO is in recognizing which combo fields are in play and then deciding whether it’s better to dps or to support.

Meanwhile, necros pretty much do everything all at once generally well. Necro will output good AoE damage while removing conditions, stripping boons, giving regeneration, and deliver good CC through cripple/chill/weakness. Terror from DS is insanely good for interrupting bosses (a great necro will prevent many one-shot party wipes in pugs) and fear, while it often splits up mobs making them harder to AoE, is still a strong emergency CC against trash.

Yes, always been that way as far as I know. Best thing you can do is have a Necro instantly interrupt it using DS → Terror.

FWIW, my guildies and I have gotten Superior Runes of the Monk and a bunch of 70+ rares from the chest at Kohler, and with a competent group (no one dies to the whirling attack), he takes only 2-3 minutes to kill max, not 5.

I’ve done about ~25 AC EM runs, and from chest loot alone I’ve gotten 3 Superior Runes of the Monk, 2 of which were from looting the chest from Kohler. 2 Superior Runes = 240 Tokens = 4 extra runs worth of bonus tokens.

In other words, Kohler is only a waste of time if your PUG’s keep dying to him.

edit: video evidence of Kohler only taking 3 min max, with a 3 man group! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjCttqquQoc

Honestly, most casuals should have no trouble with this if they stick to CoF path 1, AC path 2, and HotW path 1.

All three are easy, fast, and get groups together very quickly.

^ Null field for both boon removal on enemies and condition removal on allies is very strong. Plenty of situations arise where boon stripping helps ALOT. Graveling Howlers (AC), Risen Hunters (Arah), Dredge Disaggregators (SE) all apply a ton of boons to nearby enemies, and in each case your group will suffer much less damage if remove their might and fury stacks, AND you will kill them much more quickly if you manage to remove other boons such as regeneration and protection. A few bosses such as the Butcher in HotW and the turret golem in CoE will also go much quicker with consistent boon removal.

Best part about running 20 trait points in Inspiration as a Mesmer for support purposes is that your still deliver great DPS, because feedback is also amazing. Sometimes Feedback alone will out-dps all 4 of your other group members combined AND protect them from damage. For a few examples try it on Aldus in HotW path 1 or any of the Risen Elementalists in Arah.

I also run dungeons quite a bit with a guardian who runs 0/0/30/30/10 traits (Full Tank/Heal) with Cleric’s accessories, Soldier’s armor, and full set of soldier runes and he does very well in every path we’ve done together thus far. With condition-removing shouts, Line/Ring of Warding, and Wall of Reflection, he can protect the party extremely well, and with Empower & Altruistic Healing he has virtually no trouble keeping himself alive in the thick of things. Despite having 0 trait points in Zeal and Radiance, all his gear has power somewhere in it so even his damage isn’t as terrible as you might expect. In fact, given his 12 might stack from Empower, additional 3 might stacks from Sigil of Battle (swaps between Staff & Hammer/GS constantly), and +30% boon duration (50% if he’s using omnomberry cream for MF) and he ends up doing more damage overall than some of the “DPS” pugs we get by virtue of always being in the middle AoE-ing everything with hundreds of bonus power from might.

In short, support can and will be absolutely successful and just about every path of every dungeon. It’s up to you to figure out what builds will work best for your group and profession. If you’re not having success with it, then, well, for lack of better words, you’re doing it wrong.

If anything, I would consider a player that runs around naked in dungeons and belittles others for their inexperience to be a griefer here. I applaud you for agreeing to kick him. Players like that ultimately drag the group down with their lack of commitment and bad attitude.

In my experience, both in this game and in many others, most pugs are actually friendly and cooperative, as long as you treat them with respect (whether or not most of them are competent is a separate question ). So as I see it there’s little reason to waste time with the one or two nasty ones you encounter every once in awhile. My advice, if your active group/guild is small, is to keep a list of the nicer people you’ve grouped with and invite them for more runs.

My guild group experienced this bug yesterday, in which adds would spawn, despawn, spawn, despawn, and so on in an endless, glitchy loop. After a few failed tries, we ultimately decided just to split the group 4-1 – 4 people to fight adds constantly, while 1 person soloed Aldus, who’s actually quite easy. It was slow-going yes, but after awhile we had Aldus down and were able to finish the run.

Honestly, if your group had four first-timers in it, I wouldn’t expect a successful run. Dungeons are meant to be harder than all other content, and if your party composition and trait/utility skill setup has any obvious weaknesses (e.g. poor CC, no condition removal, etc.) then you will probably fail unless your group is very experienced.

AC in particular has one of the hardest story modes, unless you resort to mass rock throwing (which is a painfully slow way to go about it). Study each foe carefully; figure out which moves you should dodge; decide which moves you should interrupt; and decide with your group which foes you should focus down first. Coordinate combo fields and finishers (look those up in the wiki if you don’t know what I’m talking about) with your group to inflict the best conditions possible or buff/heal your party appropriately.

Keep at it, learn as much you can, and as you run dungeons, build up a friends list of the friendlier and more competent people you meet along the way.

BTW, the cave troll is a random bonus event, a bit unlucky on your first try there ><

I experienced this bug as well earlier today. I was capturing a keep in Eternal Backgrounds with a nice, big group. I muted my speakers and played on anyways (didn’t want to risk a long wait in the queue) , but after about an hour when I tried to log out and close the client, the game locked up.

edit – I should add that my pc remains perfectly stable throughout all of this. After I end GW2 using task manager, my sound works perfectly fine in all other applications I run, including other games.