Guild Wars 2

simplesimon.2084:

Feanor.2358:

Sparone.6475:

Boss fights are okay, but I am looking for a few tips for handling non-boss enemies.

1. Sandstorm (Glyph of Storms in Earth).
2. Dust storm (Warhorn 5 in Earth), if you use Warhorn obviously.

Yep sandstorm is awesome for trash mobs.

Also use your elite skill Earth Elemental. That thing can take a ridiculous amount of beatin, just make sure it’s between you and the mobs

Ithilwen.1529:

A guardian can use Staff to build near-permanent switftness. The swiftness stack lasts longer than the cooldown on the staff skill. So, each time the staff skill comes off cd, stop and build switfness.

Over time it’s possible to stack an impressive amount of quickness and run far and fast.

yeah but having to stop for swiftness kind of defeats the purpose of having swiftness

I just completed the new fractal on T4 (great job on it btw) and spent 2+ hours on the last boss alone. Nothing surprising, Bloomhunger was the same when it first came out. The boss has a few hard hitting, usually insta-down attacks that must be dodged. Once you figure out the tells, it’s easy to avoid damage.

What really challenges me is the final boss’s last bullet hell orb phase. The orbs + AOEs + knock back pulses are almost impossible to avoid. Compounded with the constant agony, it means your health will only go down. It’s essentially a matter of how long you can prolong your death.

I managed to complete the fractal because my team mate managed to solo 3 out of 5 capture points by himself after everyone was down. And he did it seemingly without being damaged, as his health was almost full throughout. What I wanna know is how do you guys survive this bullet hell phase, and how to avoid damage?

I really like this idea, then rocket charge can actually be used as evasion skill like Warrior GS3 in PvE rather than being a liability.

This does sacrifice the unique multi leap aspect of scrapper hammer but I don’t mind if it increases the overall DPS of scrapper. The multi leap finisher concept was flawed from the beginning anyway since anet didn’t want to split skills for PvE and PvP.

Flame Blast is a really good damage skill, but it has fallen off the radar due to the difficulty to pull off the full damage. The skill has two portions: first, it comes out as a little orange ball that deals a little damage. Then, you get to detonate the ball for a hefty amount of damage.

This means that to get full use out of the skill, you’d have to shoot Flame Blast through the enemy first to get the first portion of the damage, then manually detonate the Fire Ball once it has passed through the enemy to get the second portion of the damage. Note that the detonation has a 240 radius, if you are too slow in detonating the explosion will miss the enemy. If you are too fast, only the second portion of the skill will hit the enemy.

The problem is Flame Blast doesn’t automatically detonate if it hits the ground or a wall. If the enemy has some kind of obstacle behind, Flame Blast will fizzle out on the obstacle without giving a chance for manual detonation.

I think that Flame Blast should automatically detonate if it hits an obstacle. This way you still get to manually detonate if you wish to, but it will no longer just fizzle out if it hits a wall. It will always grant the second portion portion of the damage (either manually or automatically detonated).

afrocrusade.4253:

Thieves are trash everywhere.

All they bring is damage. They’re a very selfish class with utilities. They’re amazing roaming in WvW if you want to be a disease though.

The recent changes to their venomshare was made to make them more useful to a team? Think of it this way: right now, thief brings very good cc utility in raids(750 CC units). Not to mention they’re useful for stealth in the first place, as well as constant blind fields in mob-heavy encounters.

mostrol.6975:

I want it to be EZ

This is what you sound like. Frankly your aversion seems to stem from anything connected to the concept of raids, not the increased difficulty of the new fractals. If anet introduced the new fractals with the patchnotes

• Made swamp more challenging

you’d be okay with it. But if they wrote

• Stepping stone to raids

then all the complaints come out.

Agreed. Your suggestions to balance his AA sound good. Reduce damage for the first two hits and put the damage in his third chain.

Regarding your second issue I think there should be a noticeable casting animation delay before he unleashes his Spin to Win such that melee CCers have a heads up on when to start heading toward him if they’re going for a break.

But honestly right now the odds of a coordinated break (in that small time frame) for uncoordinated pugs is so low that the prevalent strategy will be to get the hell away from his AOE the moment he casts it. I for one have never seen the Archdiviner broken before his conic slam attack in T4 Cliffside (maybe once or twice) and it’s just the same for this boss.

The cheapest ascended armor is Rampagers (the rest aren’t answering OP’s question smh)

I like the idea, it’s a much appreciated QoL improvement to portal. Also grey the skill out (but not disable, just grey it out visually) whenever portal exuent is out of range of entre.

Fay.2357:

Ghotistyx.6942:

I don’t follow your rules.
Scepter is amazing in fractals

1. No it’s not.
2. How is that comment evenly remotely on topic here?

Because OP allowed only discussions about title

Electro.4173:

Not sure that would make turrets all that good even then, but it couldn’t hurt. Losing access to toolbelts is certainly a bummer.

That said, I wouldn’t want to lose the overcharge effects. Most of them are way too good to add them as the turret auto-attacks, so they’d likely just end up gone entirely. Perhaps what they could do instead is make the Detonate a chain skill off Overcharge. Any time your turret’s overcharge is on cooldown you have access to Detonate, and once the overcharge comes off cooldown the skill flips back to Overcharge again.

Sure, it would require double-tapping a turret in order to Detonate it, which may take some getting used to. But I don’t think it would be a complete gamebreaker or anything, especially since all Overcharges and Detonates are 0 cast time so you could still do a Detonate really fast. There’d probably be some complaints from people accidentally blowing up their turrets (like how some Necro players complain about exiting death shroud accidentally when trying to enter it because they double-tap) but that’s just a learning thing.

The other alternative would probably be just to make the overcharges automatic, so after X amount of attacks the turret automatically enters an overcharge state, and then use the summon flip as Detonate. But that would be a rather huge change and make turrets even more passive (and would ruin Healing Turret, though some might argue that’d be for the best).

I like the idea of overcharge being a chain skill, but instead after you overcharge you have access to the tool belt instead of detonate.

Righ now the only way to reliably get cleansing burst right after healing turret placement is to spam the crap out of the heal button so that cleansing burst starts at the very first HT tick. If detonate were to appear immediately, the turret is sure to be detonated every time (which gives less healing/s than picking it up) and the uproar in the engi community is going to be huge, especially since HT is the only turret most people play with.

Shiren.9532:

You actually can break bar him before he teleports up, the window is just incredibly small and most people will only accidentally do it.

We broke him just before he went up top, the ice spikes still fell but he was stunned in the middle of the room for us to DPS.

Actually I think it wasn’t the actual ice spike phase (which follows a fixed pattern) you were looking at, just the random ice spikes in the later phases. These usually appear when he is still on the ground so he would’ve stayed down whether you broke his bar or not. I’ve seen his bar break and him still teleporting up staight away.

It too feels like 180 on my slyvari

style.6173:

Oh Snapalope.1378:

Get a good druid which lets your team face tank her the whole fight.

This ^^.

You basically have 2 options.
1. 1 Druid 4 DPS (power or condi). The DPS should be all melee.
2. 5 DPS. Face tank as much as possible to hold her in the circles and then a lot of range after the stacks are gone

Did you guys do that on scale 100 or just mai trin in general? I haven’t done it with a druid for this facetanking strategy but it seems that the instability will put near permanent 4 agony stacks on everybody which ends up reducing healing by 93.75%.

Let’s not forget that the Scrapper was almost called the Forge… wouldn’t be so weird to have a ‘Forge’ elite spec of engineer wielding a greatsword and using medieval-esque mechanisms as utilities.

How about selectable options in options menu:

[] Mark uncommon runes and sigils as trash items
[] Mark rare runes and sigils as trash items

Granted, the other problem with green runes and sigils is that they don’t stack like trash items, causing a few different ones to clutter your inventory very easily.

The shields used to respawn if the party wiped. I’m pretty sure the non-reseting shields are an oversight and should be addressed in future patches.

Remove all aftercast from jumpshot. Increase range to 900.

As a condi engi, is rocket boot’s toolbelt higher DPS than flamethrower’s napalm now, with a 33% dmg increase and cd reduction from 17s to 15s? (Especially since rocket kick is way easier to land than napalm)

I don’t know why anyone would say the new breakbar is worse than the old (damage wise). It gives all classes access to the equivalent of an icebow 5 CC, which was the best CC to use on a boss before the defiance change. Given the choice, most groups would choose icebow 5 over some lame push/pull/launch on a boss anyway. AND 50% damage increase!

Lord Kuru.3685:

Has anyone been able to use the breakbar well in solo dungeon runs?

Any class that can solo break the bar can use it effectively in solo dungeon runs. For example as a scrapper, blast gyro takes off half the bar and rifle’s overcharged shot takes the other half, and both skills are on the exact same cooldown as the breakbar’s regeneration duration (15s). Revenants (staff 5) and necromancers (flesh golem’s charge) are also able to solo breakbars themselves.

I was under the impression that if I had done the HoT story up to a certain point with one character, I can continue on from that point with another character. Is that not the case?

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Most likely from WvW bonuses.

The annoying thing is, Blood Fiend’s healing scales incredibly well with healing power (66%!), but it’s the minion’s healing power, not yours. Right now, the only way to improve that is from a Warrior running the Tactics line giving it Might. For that to happen, though, it means there aren’t enough players in range of the Warrior for the Might to go to first.

This might just explain it. It’s also not unheard of that minions and pets will sometimes leech buffs away from other players even if player is in range, and anet should frankly look into this issue.

However where are you getting your minion heal scaling factor of 0.66 from? The wiki has no mention of it. It only mentions that ‘consume blood fiend’ scales 100% with the necro’s own healing power.

The wiki and tooltip states that Blood Fiend heals 926 health (every 3 seconds) but more often than not I see it heal for about 1k+ each time (see the attached photo). Sometimes I see it heal for 900+ instead. Blood Fiend apparently doesnt scale with healing power, and I don’t run healing power anyway.

What’s up with this discrepancy? If it’s supposed to heal 1075 every 3 seconds it’s actually one of the strongest heals in the game (358 hp/s).

reikken.4961:

Nah it’s actually slightly better dps than camping fire.

Fireball is just as bad at dps as chain lightning

Fireball may not be good DPS but Chain Lightning is definitely worse. Additionally Fireball benefits from +150 power in fire attunement and +20% damage when boss is under 50% health.

guildabd.6529:

This thing even has a cast time. Why?
There is only one good reason to use it: to farm mobs in pve with it’s toolbelt skill.

Yeah, I notice that the cast time has been flipped for shredder gyro: while other gyro are instant cast and have a cast time to self destruct, shredder has a cast time to deploy but instantly self destructs.

The only use I can think for this is to generate an on-demand superspeed field with Final Salvo. To preemptively place shredder gyro near Vale Guardian, and destruct when green circle pops, the green circle team runs through the field and never misses a green circle. You know, if green circle team happens to be struggling /shrug.

How well would epidemic work? I have not tried condi necro at raids yet but if the seekers are within 600 range of Vale Guardian they should be permanently crippled, chilled, then shrivel up to the burns and bleeds?

Sometimes, not all three grenade projectiles will connect with an enemy in the ground-targeted reticle. If an enemy isn’t roughly centered on the reticle, chances are one grenade might miss. Sometimes a stray grenade will even fly out of the reticle. Anytime this happens, the skill loses 33% damage.

Why is this so? The old ‘Grenadier’ trait that added an extra grenade to all grenade skills has been baselined, there is no reason to fiddle around with number of grenades per throw anymore.

Instead, make the engineer throw a grenade per grenade skill, and everything in the AOE reticle will reliably be hit by that grenade (up to the AOE cap). One shrapnel grenade now inflicts 3 stacks of bleeding, poison grenade 3 stacks of poison. Flash grenade 15s of blind, freeze grenade 6s of chill.

And then the 15% proc of the ‘Shrapnel’ trait can finally stop being balanced around 3 grenades and finally give bomb kit and mortar kit a chance.

Ardid.7203:

So my investment on viper armor for my engie was a really really bad deal… and a lot of raid groups looking for “Viper ascended condi build” are plainly wrong.

To be fair condi engi has the advantage of using skills that scale well with power ( such as grenade barrage, shrapnel grenade, poison grenade, big ol’ bomb, poison dart volley. Even nade autos scale reasonably well with power).

FYI you can hold down and autoattack in action cam mode (just that action cam might not be your thing)

A scrapper with rifle #4 and blast gyro can solo a fractal boss’s breakbar.These skills are ranged, meaning you can break melee unfriendly bosses from afar (like Mossman when transformed, Captain Ashym in his FGS phase, or Archdiviner) then swoop in for a melee beatdown.

The best part is that these skills come off cool down the exact same time a boss fully regens his breakbar, meaning you can always reliably break a boss for 5 seconds every 15 seconds. No more relying on pugs for CC!

I think it would be good if you could make arguments for both utilities in your spreadsheet, such as ‘low/no quickness, stationary boss, stunbreak/cripple needed -> egun’ or ‘high quickness, moving boss, need more CC -> rifle turret’.

Ranael.6423:

Yeah it could be a good idea but the issue here is that DPS in actual fights is modified by so many factors (Grace of the Land, EA, might, frost spirit, banners….) which have such a huge impact that the result from a solo test wouldn’t be really reflective of what actually happens in the fight.

Good point, add toggleable buffs too.

Ranged DPS against a constantly moving target seems to be DH, Ranger, Revenant. Ranger’s LB auto outperforms the rest if >1000 range, if not DH’s LB auto wins. Rev’s hammer auto hits the hardest of the autos but DPS is let down by its slower attack speed (25% slower).

DH hasTrue Shot every 4 seconds, which is huge damage. Ranger has Rapid Fire every 10 seconds (has a higher channeled damage than True Shot, but comparatively lower damage per second). Rev’s CoR cannot reliably hit moving targets. Even if it does hit with the final impact it’s still weaker than True Shot.

(values pulled from the wiki)

Would Hammer Guardian’s DPS ranking drop if there were no quickness for the duration? Cause I’m thinking of gearing out my guardian as well for fractals (pugging mostly)

Since a revenant healer depends on increasing outgoing healing %, does it mean it gives very powerful regeneration as well?

Gaaroth.2567:

Nimrud.5642:

SirPrizeBartSachs.4670:

Your rings can take 4 agony slots.

How come its 4? One from the basic slot, one from the pre-HoT infusion, and one from the attuned infusion… thats 3. What am I missing?

was about to write the same, did a quick research and i cannot see any possible 4th slot anywhere…

Sorry I should have phrased it better, I meant both rings take 4 agony infusions in total. Not counting the versatile infusion slot

Agony resistance wise, you should aim to have at least two ascended armor (gloves and boots are cheapest to craft) and one ascended weapon. These give 28AR or 21AR depending on whether your ascended weapon is two handed or one handed.

The rest of your AR will come from ascended trinkets (not difficult to get). Your rings can take 4 agony slots, fill them with three +10AR and one +11AR. 6 trinkets can take six additional +7 versatile infusions separately which adds 42AR. With agony infusions from rings you get 83AR from trinkets alone.

83 + 21 = 104AR. Add +5AR from the final tier of fractal mastery and you get 109AR, arguably the only AR level you ever need since you

PS: if an ascended backpiece is too expensive (the cheapest one requires 250 vicious claws) you can craft an exotic level backpiece with any crafting profession. Those have an agony infusion slot as well.

Jacob.4280:

3 illusions -> start rotation with precast something + CS -> Mimic -> Feedback -> … -> Feedback -> end CS -> Mimic -> Feedback -> … -> Feedback

can do without illusions if ur feedbacking more targets, so u dont overlap them (thus not wasting them)

Thanks, i though of something like that but if you were feedbacking one target you’d be overlapping feedback duration (as you said). Better then, to cast 3 illusions > Csplit > Feedback > Mimic > Cshift > Feedback > Mimic > Feedback > Feedback as savacli suggested?

savacli.8172:

Double confirming. Even with 0 Illusions you can still cast Mimic in CS though as stressed by others you have to make sure you cast Mimic before entering CS otherwise you’ll snap back in time before Mimic is fully cast.

This same technique is also used for things like quadruple Feedbacks for projectile hells like Uncategorized Fractals.

How do you quadruple feedback with this? Seems like you can only cast the skill three times

Base minimum from trinkets is 42 AR. If you infuse your rings with two +10 AR infusions (7g 64s each) you can get 62 AR.

You can further attune your rings (same as infusing them, except using a different recipe) with two more +10 AR infusions to get 82 AR.

This is with full exotic armor and weapons. Are you looking to just get enough AR to reach a specific scale? Or going as high as your AR would allow?

rchu.8945:

dAcIaW.5107:

I think the rewards are pretty good. Everyday I do the fractals 2, 10, 21, 40, 56, 60, 67, and the two random ones for the daily chests. This gives me about 15 gold just from selling the trash I get to the vendor. Also since the update I have already gotten an armor chest and a golden fractal skin, not bad for a week of fractaling.

hi,

I havent done FOTM in a very long time, but what do those specific FOTM levels mean? Are those providing special rewards or higher % to get some crafting materials?

Those specific levels refer to swamp, duo, swamp, duo, swamp, jade maw, swamp. It’s basically the fast fractals you can do to get your 3 tiers of fractal dailies done.

Ever since HoT specific levels are tied to specific fractals, no more RNG.

The problem I have with building around Boon duration is that high level fractals hate boons.

Keltan.1827

I can get more tomes of knowledge? I thought that was some super rare, lucky drop and was saving it for Level 79.

Yup, if you don’t play a lot of PvP you still get Tomes of Knowledge every 7 days with login rewards (if you just login everyday).

I would advise you to use Tomes early though, the benefit of going from lv18-19 is a lot more than lv79-80, because you unlock your third utility slot at lv19 while going lv79-80 has nothing new besides being able to wear lv80 gear. The breakpoints you want to hit are

• Lv21 – Unlock 1st specialization slot
• Lv31 – Unlock elite skill slot
• Lv45 – Unlock 2nd specialization slot
• Lv71 – Unlock 3rd specialization slot

Don’t worry about the experience gap between 79-80 and 18-19. Completing an event always gives a fixed percentage of the total amount of exp needed to level e.g. completing a lv16 event on a lv16 character and a lvl 26 character both gives 7% to their exp bar

They could take a leaf out of dungeon’s book. Every unique fractal done each day could grant a bonus amount of fractal encryptions. If their December fractal patch actually makes these things worth money to crack open, such as giving higher value trophies more often, it could be a decent boost to income. And would encourage fractal runners to run a diversity of fractals to maximize returns instead of just doing swamp over and over.

Give and Take
Heal skills only affect targeted allies. 600 range. If no ally is targeted, the closest ally receives the heal

Fight or flight
Being struck by an enemy has a chance to grant 2 seconds of quickness but take 20% increased damage for 2 seconds. Chance: 20%

Moa Morph
Players are occasionally transformed into moa. Up to two players may be transformed at any time. Moas do 50% more damage but take 20% more damage. Duration: 10s.

United we stand
Enemy damage scales with the number of enemies nearby. 240 radius.

Clumsy
Dodging deals damage to the player. Endurance regeneration increased by 500%.

Copycat
Being struck by an enemy while casting a skill gives a chance for the enemy to copy the skill and use it against you. This effect has a 45 second cool down per enemy. Chance: 10%.

Don’t stop
Being stationary decreases damage dealt by 50%. This does not apply to skills that root you in place.

Shatter your Phants

The concept of this playstyle is to shatter after every phantasm attack such that how often they’re attacking becomes irrelevant – you’re simply shattering after every attack, and resummoning them when they disappear to attack again. The benefits are threefold:

• Get the burst damage of shatters on top of the sustained damage of phantasms
• Phantasms attack more often
• Gain near-constant alacrity just by shattering – no shield phantasm, no wells

And the downside:

• You never have three phantasms out at once

Build: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQNAscRncfCtfi9fC2fCUrhFVjiMAKgirOZn2qFt6uusD-TRROwAjU+BY/Bi6DAr+jMlgkBQfMA-e

The spec lines will be Chrono/Illu/Dom. Insp replaces Dom if reflects are needed.

I’m sure many know the synergy between Flow of Time (alacrity on shatter), Chronophantasma (you can shatter a phantasm twice), and Persistance of memory (shattering a phantasm reduces all phantasm cooldowns by 2s). Basically the more you shatter the more alacrity you get, the faster you can pump out illusions and the faster you can shatter, which in turn gives more alacrity etc etc… you get the idea. The cleverest part of Chronomancer IMO is this synergy, which combines the best of the traditional shatter mesmer and phantasm mesmer while eliminating their flaws (Shatter mesmer has good burst but poor DPS after mind wrack is spent, Phantasm mesmer has to ignore mesmer’s class mechanic of shattering and clones for optimal DPS)

Rotation

I tinkered around in heart of the mists and came up with a rotation that best suits the playstyle concept. Because you want to shatter as often as possible between phantasm attacks, frontloaded damage phantasms such pSwordsman and pBerserker are the best while pWarden is less than satisfactory. On top of that, pSwordsman and pBerserker are phantasms that can chase mobile targets very well, again unlike pWarden.

Start in Sword/Sword:
( the ’- ’ means to pause and give a moment for your phantasm to attack before shattering)

1. pSwordsman
2. iLeap
3. pBerserker
   -
4. Diversion (20 vuln)
5. Mirror Blade (6 vuln)
6. Mind Stab (Use as filler when available)
   -
7. Mind Wrack
8. pBerserker
9. Mirror Blade
10. pSwordsman
    -
11. Cry of Frustration
12. iLeap
    -
13. Mind Wrack
14. pSwordman
15. Well (to fill time waiting for iLeap to recharge, Calamity preferred due to lowest cd and highest dmg)
16. iLeap
    (Repeat from step 3)

You provide party alacrity via wells (esp. Well of Recall) and party quickness with Timewarp (only used after continuum shift). Well of precog to allow yourself to safely carry out Well spam after continuum shift without having to dodge any AOEs or attacks, switch with Well of Action is no such danger is around.

And since you’re churning out illusions constantly and shattering constantly as well, you’ll find distortion to be very accessible(25s with constant alacrity). See your teammate downed with archdiviner going for a hammer slam? Pop your 3 clone distortion and go in for the res!

Also, Diversion with 3 clones is one of the best breakbar CCs in the game, you’re talking about a 4 second daze on a 19.5s cooldown (with all that alacrity). Pair that with illusionary wave (If you’re on greatsword) or Counter Blade + iLeap immob (if you’re on sword) means you wreck breakbars plenty, and often too.

Feel free to critique!

How do you farm cloth and leather? Specifically the lower tier ones, not the common thick leather and silk from salvaging lvl 80 blues and greens.

Here’s to hoping the fractal daily chests get patched to give ascended chests at pre-HoT levels.

If they are, fractals would seriously be the fastest and cheapest way to attain ascended gear, not raid tokens, not silverwastes farming (since raids need gear and skill and 9 other players with the same, and the costs for crafting ascended has gone way up).

It’s true that phantasm mesmer has a disadvantage in open world PvE. You summon a phantasm for the first mob, a second mob, then you have to deal with the rest of the enemies without phantasms because they’re on cooldown. It’s not like dungeons and fractals, where enemies are health sponges and phantasms stick around much longer.

That’s where Chronophantasma comes in. Paired with Persistance of Memory, you summon two phantasms on a mob and shatter after their first attack, then shatter again after their second attack. This shaves off 8 seconds from both phantasm cooldowns. Taking into consideration alacrity during shatter and cast times, you would have both phantasms almost back up if you manage to shatter your phantasms twice (i.e. the mob does not die before you can shatter a second time).