Guild Wars 2

The standard price for the key fob tokens is about $25 each from RSA (minimum order 10), dropping as order size increases. That’s ignoring the licensing costs for the server side software, which are considerable.

I definitely support splitting PvE and PvP.

The login does negotiate a TLS session, so a MITM attack shouldn’t be a problem (assuming the certificate infrastructure used is good.)

The authentication is an open standard, you can run the program on a spare computer, in a VM, or if needed in your main comp.

If you are good at math you can actually generate the authentication code by hand, though doing it in 30 seconds is impossible.

I feel that CCP games’ solution to the same issue in EVE online is a good one.
They also have a real money → gold (ISK) system, where you can trade subscription time cards for gold. The RMTers (Real Money Traders, aka gold sellers) sell at a lower price than whatever the going rate is, but having an official system does help.
CCP doesn’t ban gold buyers, but they do remove that much money from your account. This can send you negative. So if you buy 100g, and spend it, you end up with a negative balance. Can’t buy anything until you farm enough extra to compensate.

I think something similar would work here. Just remove the gold, let the balance go negative. Then they’re not banned, they just can’t waypoint, repair, pay TP sales fees, or buy anything until they’ve made that much gold back. If they buy gold and don’t spend it they’re just out however much money they spent on gold.

99 little bugs in the code, 99 bugs in the code,
take one out, compile again, 100 little bugs in the code…

I’ve got bugged nodes as well, 2 showing up in Cursed Shore on Sanctum of Rall for me.

Tip: Place the wall. Charge into them & the wall. THEN explode the wall.

Not always possible/easy, but the wall is not just there to explode.

It’s Toughness * Vitality that matters, not either alone.

The storyline golem laser would be a great elite skill, though the damage would likely need to be toned down.

Here’s another fun camera bug. Stand next to an overhang.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXGbLEUrkV4

One of the things that annoyed me most about the story is the feeling of powerlessness that it causes unnecessarily.
Trahearne is not the big issue. He’s the head of the Pact, he should be giving orders. The problem is that the player is the second in command, and yet in nearly every mission at least one of the NPCs will order you around. It’s not, “Commander, they’re pinned down! We need to help them! What do we do?” choice: “Charge the ridge line” or “Sneak around via the orchard.” it’s “Commander, they’re pinned down! Charge the ridge line!” “Commander, I, random subordinate #4826, order you to personally lead a mission behind enemy lines, with no backup.”
If you were trying to make me feel like my character is a spineless wimp, you’ve succeeded.

Condition damage is inferior in scaling to normal damage.

Normal damage scales with power, precision, and crit damage. The three stats multiply, the more of one you have the more valuable each point of the other two becomes. The scaling is cubic.
Condition damage scales with Condition Damage. It’s linear scaling.
The max Power you can get is identical to the max Condition Damage you can get. So at linear scaling they’ll do the same damage.
Now, normal damage is reduced by armor, while condition damage isn’t, but armor scales linearly (like condition damage) and not cubically (like power) so power will quickly overcome armor as stats improve.

One of the biggest problems for ele is range flexibility: without the ability to swap weapons we are stuck at whatever range we chose before the fight. Conjured weapons can be good to provide range flexibility.

Also lightning hammer is good. Not “amazingly OP good” but “on-par with PVE Guardian” good.

Condition damage, and why it’s (currently) not worth the hassle in PVE:
@ lvl 80:
Bleeding: 42.5 + 0.05 * Condition Damage per stack per second. Max 25 stacks per target.
Burning: 328 + 0.25 * Condition Damage per second. Stacks duration.
Poison: 80 + 0.10 * Condition Damage per second. Stacks duration.
Confusion: 65 + 0.075 * Condition Damage per stack per attack. Stacks intensity. Depends on enemy using attacks/skills. Max 25 stacks per target.

Condition Damage thus scales linearly. Condition Duration increases total Damage done, but does not increase DPS.

Condition stacks are capped against each monster in the following manner (from what I can tell):
Burning and poison use the condition damage of the player with the highest condition damage. All other players attacking the target with burns/poison get no credit, though they do add to the duration.
Confusion stacks intensity, capping at 25 stacks per target. Multiple players’ stacks add, on a first-come-first-served basis. Players attempting to add stacks after 25 do no damage and get no credit.
Bleeding stacks intensity, capping at 25 stacks per target. Multiple players’ stacks add, on a first-come-first-served basis. Players attempting to add stacks after 25 do no damage and get no credit.

In general, 1-2 players will be able to keep the bleed count at 25 stacks. Further condition damage users are useless.

Confusion is good in PVP, since players reliably use abilities. It’s poor in most PVE, especially with slow-high-damage champion/boss attack patterns.

Bleeding is generally the best DPS condition, followed by burning, or confusion if the target can be relied on to keep using abilities.

Gear stats in GW2 have major or minor levels (% based stats also do, but of course with different numbers not relevant here).
Major: Head: 45 Shoulders: 34 Chest: 101 Gloves: 34 Legs: 67 Boots: 34
Minor: Head: 32 Shoulders: 24 Chest: 72 Gloves: 24 Legs: 48 Boots: 24
Similar for accessories & weapons.
Each gear piece has one major stat and the remaining stats are minor.

Condition DPS scales with one stat: Condition damage.
Normal DPS scales with three stats: Power, Precision, and Critical Damage.
Due to the major/minor scaling, the amount of Power you can get is identical to the amount of Condition Damage you can get.
Thus, with a Normal damage build you can get more stats than you can with a Condition damage build. Also, the stats for Normal damage are multiplicative with each other: The more Power you have the more valuable each point of Precision and Critical Damage becomes. Likewise for the other two. Effectively, Normal damage scales proportionally with the cube of your stats. Therefore Normal damage can do more DPS. That said, Condition damage is not offset by armor, so in solo situations vs high armor targets it can provide better DPS.

TL;DR:
At most 3 condition users per group: 1 Burn/bleed, 1 poison/bleed, 1 Confusion/burn/poison. Further condition users are useless. The higher the target’s armor the better Condition damage gets, and the more you want to have 1-3 Condition users in the group. For 5-man dungeon groups Condition Damage is viable. For sPVP/tPVP condition removal is prevalent, but it’s still viable. For WvWvW and world PVE events, Condition Damage is a poor choice. Always try to stack for one damage type. Mixing Condition Damage and Normal Damage is suboptimal stat budgeting, but there’s no Condition Damage/Toughness/Vitality set in the game, so go with Condition Damage/Power/Vitality (Carrion) if building Condition Damage. Condition Damage/Precision is a poor combo, because Precision adds less to damage than Power if not already stacking Power and Critical Damage.

I agree with the OP.
The main issue I have is with the camera zoom: It’s a dodge-based combat game, the bosses have “tells” in their animations to let you know when to dodge… and you can’t see them if you’re in close range or melee, because 80%+ of the boss’s model is above the camera.

Thanks for that link, it will make my project of modeling elementalist damage much easier.

Ok, Staff, Fire, 30 (6 7 12)/20 (6 8)/0/0/10 (5 8), Scholar runes/Berserker gem
60 seconds:
F1 x24 + F5 x1 (Meteor shower’s cast time makes it a poor idea single target) + F2 x13 + F3 x8
On average, 4 stacks of might are maintained in this period (attunement bonus wears off)
76256 Damage over 60 seconds = 1271 DPS

15 seconds:
F1 x6, F2 x3, F3 x2
On average, 5 stacks of might are maintained in this period
18324 Damage over 15 seconds = 1222 DPS.

BlueprintLFE, thanks for the kind words.

Dr. Tenma, hopefully later tonight I’ll have constant-attunement for fire staff with 30/20/0/0/20 build up.

Incisorr, I’m attempting to (slowly) build a model for damage in all situations.
My main is an Ele, so I started with Ele.
I’m trying to quantify damage output potential, once I have that modeled I can add mitigating factors (dodges, snares, incoming damage, values for every major and minor trait in the game, etc).
Once that is modeled numerical methods can be used to find the optimal Ele build for any given situation.
Then I can expand to other classes.
I’m not sure how much I’ll end up actually doing, a “maximum potential” model is useful in its own right, and is easily modifiable to a minimum potential (assume all conditions are immediately cleansed/all AOEs dodged out of). So ATM I’m working on:
Maximum potential damage modeling of stance-dance and constant-stance builds (this thread).
Average ability damage/healing modeling, and stat valuation (elsewhere).
Actually playing the game.

The second requires multivariable calculus, and I’m loath to scare people here off with “difficult” maths. I mostly just use it in constructing the builds I chose to test, and picking what gear to use anyway.

NinjaKnight.1340:

ChairGraveyard.2967:

I still have plenty of maps that are not complete in the game, but there is now a HUGE disincentive to go and do events/go explore the map because of the anti-farming code kicking in super fast and causing all drops to stop after a few minutes.

This is where I got the idea you were visiting low level areas. You said it yourself.

All I’m saying is that I don’t feel it is a problem. I don’t think it ruins the experience for most players, only the ones who go around mass farming continuously. There are many other things to do in the game.

This game wasn’t designed as a grind/farm game, and thank goodness for that.

There is, at the moment, ONE level 80 area in the game: Cursed Shore.
In cursed shore, most of the mobs are Risen Humanoids. They all share an anti-loot timer, no matter where you are in the zone (or neighboring 70-75 and 75-80 zones). As an Elementalist I have roughly mob-independent difficulty: one mob kills me about as fast as 10, so if I can avoid getting hit by 1 and wear it down I can avoid getting hit by 10 and wear them all down (so long as none are ranged.) From my (initial, not well controlled, takekitten grano salis) tests the anti-farm code seems to kick in at about 50-75 kills. This means that after 20-40 minutes, if not less, I have to leave Orr and go all the way up north to Frostgorge. Then after 20 minutes there… I can log out for 20 minutes, since I have to wait for the timer to reset.

This issue is exacerbated by two things: zoom and effects.
With large bosses, such as the Fire Elemental, the animation won’t be visible to a player in the fight, since the limited zoom level prevents seeing the boss. If you stand back behind the bridge and out of range you can easily see the animations and learn when to dodge, but as soon as you get close you can’t maintain a reasonable camera angle and see the boss at the same time.
Also, the spell effects from players can totally obscure the boss. It’s impossible to see the animations when enough players use enough abilities that there’s just a big white glow.

For the people saying that the boss will go down much faster with no cap:
Right now, there’s a serious disincentive to run a condition build in PVE. I know I am avoiding condition damage because of this. As time goes on more people will learn that condition damage is essentially useless for bosses/champions, and will use power builds in event-heavy areas. This will vastly increase the damage done to bosses, since there won’t be as many worthless condition damage users around.
Since condition and power builds seem to do similar overall damage that means that removing the condition cap would merely allow people to use condition damage, instead of shoehorning them into power builds. Overall the damage will likely stay nearly the same.

Quick data:
PVP gear, Scholar runes, Berserker’s amulet and Jewel, 30 (III, VI, XII)/25 (VI, IIX)/0/15 (III)/0 traits.
Power: 2304
Attack: 3299
Condition Damage: 0
Precision: 1810
Crit: 47% chance for x2.03 damage
+10% damage to burning targets, 60% chance to cause vulnerability on critical hit

Now with crits! And average vulnerability!
Earth, 60 second rotation:
E5, E1 18x, E5, E1 18x
69470 damage over 60 seconds = 1158 DPS
Earth, 15 second rotation:
E5, E1 8x
19715 damage over 15 seconds = 1314 DPS

Fire, 60 second rotation:
F4, F2, F3, F5, F1 x2, F2, F1 x3, F2, F4, F1 x2, F2, F1, F3, F1, F2, F1 x2, F4, F2, F1 x3, F2, F1 x3, F2, F3, F4, F1, F5, F2, F1 x3, F2
120220 damage over 60 seconds = 2004 DPS

Fire, 15 second rotation:
F4, F2, F3, F5, F1 x2, F2, F1 x3, F2
33918 damage over 15 seconds = 2261 DPS

TODO: Condition damage build for fire/earth standstill, then a stance-dance build. Calculate coefficients. Calculate combo field bonuses. Edit above to account for chance-based vulnerability and crits. Other weapons. Determine player runspeed, use to account for DPS increase caused by chill. More stuff I won’t list for now.

I’ll not be attempting to include combo fields in the next set, but after that (once I have determined the power coefficients for all S/D skills and can thus accurately calculate their damage as power increases) I’ll include might and combo fields.

Basically, it’s easy math (nothing more than multivariable calculus,) but lots of it and I’m a bit time-limited. Just like with physics where you learn projectile motion on a point mass with no air resistance, then a sphere, then a rigid sphere that can collide with the ground, then a sphere that deforms on collision with the ground, then a deforming sphere with air resistance… etc. If I tried to start this with all the variables I’d be unable to build the equations.

And after that, I’ll find the power coefficients for staff, then D/D, D/F, and S/F. Underwater weapons if time permits.

Also, again, please post your build (traits/stats, etc.)

Incisorr, I’m saying that the people who keep saying “Stance dance and you’ll suddenly gain tons of damage!” are wrong. “Stance dance and you’ll gain some utility.” is correct. I’ve never said anything about that, and as you point out chill can be quite important to actually get your spells to hit. I’m simply attempting to provide some data to the “Ele is UP vs Ele is fine” debate, not to tell anyone that they’re noob/can’t play/shouldn’t stancedance/should stancedance/etc.

An easy example: You can do nice damage as a pure earth condition damage S/D ele. You have a good slow to keep them in your range, good toughness, and health from Carrion gear. You’ll still swap to water when you need to heal/get more slows. But that’s a case of utility being needed, and as per the thread title this is “when utility is not needed.”

Also, I’m obviously ignoring the 25 stack global limit on bleeds, and the “highest condition damage wins, everyone else does nothing” on burns.

The radius is, in fact, larger. The graphic doesn’t change, there’s no combo field, and none of the reticules increase in size with blasting staff (bug), but the actual damage radius is testably larger.

Killer, just FYI I did the simplified version first. I’d love to see your build, as I’m currently testing various builds for both “stay in 1 element” and “stance dance constantly” playstyles. My goal is to find provably optimal strategies for various situations, this thread just came out of an interesting observation from the start of that project. I’m using PVP gear for tests including gear, since that lets others easily replicate or contribute to the testing.

Zadi.2784:

is…this….hope….for…new elementalists to not be swayed away from the profession due to the amount of “work” perceived?

Possibly, but as it currently stands we’re still below the other classes for both DPS and survivability, and the utility gain is not terribly significant given our long cooldowns.

Shisho, of course you do. You have gear and traits. Traits tend to improve single elements (10% damage while attuned to X anyone?) over swapping, except for Arcane which improves swapping. The point of not using traits is to improve the situation for the stance-dance case. The point of not using gear is to remove that as a variable, especially since different builds get different benefits from gear.

Did the math for removing the cooldown completely on theory.

I’m actually using Inkscape to design the rotations.
I’ve attached the fire rotation, each box of the grid = 0.5 seconds. Time extends to the right, box length indicates cooldown (or cast time in the case of auto attacks.) The boxes extend downward just to make it readable.

Stone shards alone would do 810 DPS, putting it almost the same as a 15s cd normal stance dance.

The hard numbers are the DPS, which I’ve already given. If you want total damage, multiply by 60.
Fire only: 48,146 damage. Stance dance, 15s cd: 48658 damage. Stance Dance, 9s cd: 54583 damage. Stance dance, theoretical cooldown removed: 61439 damage. Stone Shards only: 48600 damage.

15 second bursts:
Stone shards: 12150 damage = 810 DPS
Fire Only: 13078, 872 dps
Earth Only: 14747, 983 dps
Stance Dance 15: 16309, 1087 dps
Stance Dance 9: 16309, 1087 dps
Stance dance 0: 16855, 1124 dps
A 13% difference between the burst damage of Earth only and Stance dancing with no cooldown, and a 10% difference for Elementalists as they are now.

I wanted to know how much benefit swapping attunements really gives to Elementalist DPS, and how much of the benefit is utility.

Method:
Set traits to 0, unequip all gear except the relevant weapon(s). Record the (tooltip) damage and cooldown of all weapon skills. Calculate optimal damage rotation (via graphical optimization) in fire only over 60 seconds based on cast-time and cooldown information. Divide total damage by 60 to get DPS. Repeat for stance dancing rotation. Repeat for stance dancing rotation with 9s element return cooldown instead of 15s. Calculate DPS percent differences. Repeat for all weapon sets (Dagger/Dagger, Dagger/Focus, Scepter/Dagger, Scepter/Focus, Staff, Trident.)

Currently I only have data for Scepter/Dagger (it’s a lot of work.)
Fire attunement only: 802 DPS
Stance dancing, 15s return timer: 811 DPS
1.1% difference between fire only and stance dancing.
Stance dancing, 9s return timer (30 points in arcane): 910 DPS
13% difference between fire only and stance dancing.
Stance dancing, return timer removed: 1024 DPS
24% difference between fire only and stance dancing with the return timer removed, 12% difference between stance dancing with the 9s timer and no timer.

Sources of error:
Most trait lines currently provide significant benefits for staying in one attunement. Not having traits thus benefits stance dancing.
Cast times are not explicitly listed. I timed with a stopwatch and rounded to the nearest half second. Most (but not all) casts take about 1s.
I assume you can swap from one element to another and cast a skill instantly, with no delay. This benefits stance dancing.
I assume all skills hit, and all do their total damage instantly, possibly after a delay (eg Dragon’s Tooth drops after 2s, so if vulnerability runs out before it would do damage but after the cast I don’t add vulnerability.) Since conditions are currently stacking capped this provides benefits to Earth’s bleeds that are unlikely to be realized in a fight with another condition user who can afford to stack pure condition damage. Not counting this benefits stance dancing.
In addition, power and condition damage are additive stats, and gearing for a mix tends to be worse than focusing on one (or better, power + precision/crit damage, which are multiplicative stats.) Stance dancers do much of their damage from a combination of direct attacks and conditions, and thus have worse itemization. Not counting this benefits stance dancing.
Several sigils provide benefits when you “swap to this weapon in combat” which works on attunement swap. These may benefit stance dancers.

A 1.1% difference is not terribly significant, especially due to the increased effort required. A 13% difference is significant, but requires a heavy investment into Arcane traits. This would likely be offset by the reduced points in other trait lines (most non-staff builds take at most 10 points in Arcane, adding, say, 20 points in Air would give ~10% crit chance and +20% crit damage) In addition, almost all of my assumptions were made to benefit the stance dancers. The real DPS benefit is almost certainly lower, possibly even in favor of the non-dancer.

TL;DR: Swapping attunements provides a slight DPS benefit at best, possibly a detriment, and should be used primarily for utility. This seems to stem from the lack of synergy between trait lines and the presence of the timer to return to a previous attunement. Removing the timer to swap back to a previous attunement would increase DPS by up to about 12% for a stance dancer and up to 25% for someone converting from staying in one attunement to stance dancing.

I, too, trust Arenanet’s ability to balance. That doesn’t mean suggestions like this are a bad thing. As with any problem to balance classes you need to understand the balance issues first. Clear explanations, such as the OP, are helpful.

I swap attunements as needed for situational reasons. Swapping attunements doesn’t actually add very much DPS when using staff. (Quick back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates about 60-70 dps added at lvl 80 if you get the rotation absolutely perfect as opposed to just staying in fire.)
The issue is that the vast majority of the important, damaging cooldowns are shorter than the cooldown to swap back to the previous element, even with arcane’s bonus to recharge rate. Thus, by swapping attunements you actually are forced to miss cooldowns, so the DPS gain is offset quite a bit.

The dungeons are too binary: Either you win the fight easily, or you lose hard. There’s no fun skin-of-the-teeth victory, just faceroll-easy or wipe-all-day.

Naive Bayesian filtering is a very effective method of spam filtering used in many e-mail systems (including Google’s gMail.) It’s easy to implement, fast, and could quickly reduce the amount of gold spam in chat and mail.