Guild Wars 2

ColinJohanson.2394:

We’ll be continuing to permanently update our dungeons and rewards for dungeons this year and beyond, these updates will be part of living world releases in the future as well as we expand the scope of living world releases to include more permanent updates to the game.

Yeah I’m not too keen on the living story content. Outside of mechanics and gameplay, the problem here is you’ve unleashed weapons of mass destruction on the world (Elder Dragons) and I just have little to no interest in ‘wasting my time’ with anything else. What’s the point of having a living world when there are half a dozen big bads out there that can literally destroy -everything-

Things I can get behind and support:
Taking out Elder Dragons or mitigating their destructiveness
Finding out what happened in Elona with Palawa Joko
Cantha
Human Gods
Whats going on with the rest of the world.

Things that I simply cannot care about:
Dredge alliance being a minor nuisance
Sad leaf man. (iunno, the whole SS content was so ridiculous I never even logged in)
Pirates. Again.

With mechanics and gameplay, I just want some group content that has more depth than a spoon.

Khisanth.2948:

Where are you getting the idea that it stacks intensity? If we are reading the same leaked notes it just means there is a cap on the weakness duration.

Possibility is high I read it wrong/read different notes. The thread I was following that was discussing them has since expired. Either outcome, the change is still a sPvP focused one, like most everything else. I’d be very surprised if any dungeon groups that for some reason still play will bother to incorporate weakness into their meta. I mean, I can think of dozens of places where it might be useful, but I doubt it would be effective.

Weakness duration has been universally nerfed across all professions. Now stacks intensity instead of duration. I’d imagine that this condi will find a new home with confusion/retaliation.

I can’t even keep a straight face; weakness was already useless in pve.

1. A complete and never-ending re-tune of PvE combat mechanics including but not limited to: actually putting mechanics into the game. This will of course mean heavy splitting of skills for sPvP and even WvW. The reasons should be obvious. Balancing professions should not begin with sPvP then trickle downward to other areas of the game. Ever.

2. Stats need to made important. Toughness should not be something 1 person (the anchor) should stack and everybody else ignores. Mobs should never hit as hard as they do now. There needs to be a clear distinction between ‘I can live with this damage (but not indefinitely), provided I have the support from my team’ kinds of damage and ‘this is obvious damage I need to make serious effort to avoid’ kinds of damage. Clutch play can be found with certain professions providing benefits against certain mechanics (through build, utility or combos), rewarding players that are capable of rubbing a few brain cells together.

3. Besides visual cues for attacks, sound should be implemented. Make enemies taunt or roar or whatever at you, not just wipe 90% of your health away from within a ball of fuzzy particle effects. The little text bits under the nameplates on certain mobs detailing their behaviour should be maintained more, especially as combat mechanics (hopefully) become more complex.

4. Defiant needs to be completely re-worked. This suggestion really should be rolled up with #1, but highlighting the effects this failed mechanic has had on PvE content should be brought to attention. Don’t ever muck up as bad as Defiant. Set Defiant as the benchmark for failure. If you ever develop something as bad as Defiant, you’ve done bad and need to go sit in the developer time-out corner.

5. Complete overhaul of the rewards system. Honestly, for all the things they did RIGHT with GW2, how could they keep the most WRONG thing with MMOs in the game?
RNG needs to go. Take it out somewhere secluded and do the right thing by everybody and just end it. Remember to salt the earth and pre-dig a couple of shallow graves ready for Agony and Magic Find.

6. Hire a dungeon dev team.
7. Set up a test realm.
8. ???
9. Free QA, feedback and profit, or something.

Not getting to do a dungeon is punishment for putting pineapple on a pizza.

You monster.

randomfightfan.4091:

When a dungeon can be solo’d by multiple people, on multiple professions, the day after it was released, you know you have a problem.

The act of soloing content goes both ways. A lot of the content in gw2 is actually made easier when you are alone and don’t have 4 other guys messing up mob mechanics/positioning or spamming your screen with obnoxious spell effects.

At the end of the day the only way we will see change is if/when anet actively develop for this aspect of the game. The dev team is MIA or has not existed, I’m not sure which. It seems pointless content and rng lootboxes is more interesting for them to spend what little resources and effort they have for the game.

This is just cruel. Seeing a dev post in the dungeon subforum, only to be fooled by a thread necro.

For shame.
10/10 tho, would be trolled again.

Easy enough as long as you have the foresight to equip a reflect/absorb/stability or have at least one guardian/thief with their eyes open.

It is a tedious fractal and the mechanic is stupid, I agree. It was funny at lvl10 when you started getting knocked off the platforms. It stops being funny entirely at lvl11.
If you are having trouble (poor group makeup or bads that refuse to swap weapons/skills etc) you can try standing on the edges of the platform and just watch the opposite edge for part of the red circle so you know its coming. This is only useful if you get targeted however. You can also try turning graphics right down to the lowest to get rid of the bloom effect so you can see the incoming balls.

Weapon skills, traits and utilities continue to be balanced around pvp. Anet will need to get very serious with skill splitting and dedicating time and effort into accommodating more exotic levels of pve.

Their continued hands-off approach to making meaningful changes to the game means it will be a warm day in Grenth’s domain before we see anything that shakes up the current meta.

Honestly, I’m beginning to wonder if a dungeon dev team ever existed in the first place.

Take a break. There are plenty of games out there that obliterate the gw2 dungeon experience.

lvl35 Control Wizard

At least you are getting skins.
me? weeks now, nothing. Not even a ring. Not that I need rings, I’ve an entire bank slot full of useless heal/cond junk as it is.
That said, I got a fractal gs on my very first ever 30 run. It’s on my warrior, who I login maybe once a week for no particular reason.

I’m waiting for patch notes. I’ll check out this new molten dungeon for sure, but if when fotm gets completely ignored for another month, I’ll go put my time elsewhere.

It’s almost like anet are allergic to my money or something. Every time I get ready to drop some dosh on gems for the month they go and balls something up.

edit: silly forum ate my post attach edit.
But while its amusing to go rabid hyperbole mode with the news, its still pretty frustrating that they refuse to bring other builds/weaponsets up to the same level of usefulness and instead just focus on whats working now and constantly tweaking it. Whats working now should evolve over time as you fix and adjust other areas of the system that are completely useless, as the devs have already seen & commented on in the video. It only takes a minutes glance at the ele traitlines to see numerous ’turtle’s defense’ type traits.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

What someone defines as fun is often different from what another person calls fun. I’m sorry our dungeon work has not appealed to you and others, but there is an audience for what we do. My hope is that in the future, we can build something that appeals to you and other folks currently not on board with our dungeon content, while still staying true to the people who have enjoyed our content thus far. Bridging that gap is not an easy process, but I am confident that such things are not impossible feats

If you guys have the ability to identify target audiences this well, then I think it’s your duty as a responsible individual/company to get the sadists that enjoy HotW some professional assistance.

yosslives.1345:

Thank you for testing this. For your runs where you didn’t get any shards, did you clear the courtyard and defend the shaman event?

Yep, I didn’t leave any run until the final boss spawned. On my last run (no shard for that one either, btw) I actually had the shaman die and the event restarted with new mobs that were dropping loot. I tried to fail that event as much as possible to see if its farmable, but its pretty hard to just make 1 guy die. The new spawns were dropping loot however. (I got a bunch more blues and a green)

I’m on my 4th run right now (alt tabbed autoattacking the door behind Dulfy)
I’ve gotten 1 shard.
I notice the loot scales up in quality. Everything just after the gate is blues, everything closer to the courtyard drops a fair amount of greens. I got my shard from the mobs near where you fight the boss, before the bit where you defend the shaman.

I’m playing my guardian, typical 0/0/30/30/10 AH build.
No armour equipped
zerker trinks

You will die often doing this, and it takes a fair while depending on the city layout you get. You might have to enter the courtyard and knock down doors/oil to get access to other areas. Remember to check the walls around the courtyard for extra groups.

Tips:
- Don’t even bother trying to gear and take on these mobs, let the npcs do the work. Typical of anet’s stance on making content ‘difficult’- mobs just hit for astronomical amounts of damage and there’s not a single thing you can do to stop it. I put on my soldiers suit (3.1k armour & ~20k hp) and equipped the -10% damage signet and popped as much protection as possible and I ate 22k rushes and back-to-back 9-12k fire blasts just as much as I did naked. Save yourself the headache of repair bills and just go naked.
- Aggro mages first, they will drop an aoe on you and instantly aggro your npc army.
- Guardian scep/focus is good for the aoe from smite & blocks/blinds from focus skills
- If you fully die, your npc army will die. If they dont respawn with you, just walk up to the wall above where you spawn and they’ll appear on you. Saves waiting ~2mins.
- Warriors will often bug out after rushing you. Use this to your advantage. Scepter immo seems to provoke them into using rush again, so you can get their attention that way, otherwise they’ll stand there being pummeled by your orbs but instantly regenning the whopping 300damage you did.
- Assassin mobs are tricky to get your army to aggro on. Stack behind the corner of a building then pull one. Hope that their heartseeker move doesn’t 1-shot you and your army aggros onto him, otherwise try and stand near a friendly npc and when they throw their dagger, move behind him so the npc aggros.
- Shouts help your allies, as do your virtues. AH still wont save you from anything however.
- Siege weapons will only ever target you. If you thought the CC in AC was bad, wait til you get to the courtyard.

Edit: 0% magic find for these as well. I have no gear or mf food or even the willpower to do another run after this one to see if it makes any difference.

I’m one of those people that never, ever gets drops.
I’m sitting at 480something/500 fractals and I’ve only ever had enough mats to infuse 2 rings (on my guardian).
My regular fractal group disbanded due to burnout/disinterest. We always killed everything. My constant bad rng luck was the subject of discussion nearly every single run we did while everyone else got at least 1 of something except me. (lots of globby gloops tho!) I pugged with some regular people afterwards but we skipped trash more often than not due to time constraints.

I took a month off gw2 and since coming back at the start of April I’ve been running 2 dailies on my ele and high 20s on my guard. I will sometimes run a 10daily on my warr/mes as well.

Total fractal mats I have ‘earned’ this month: 2shards. Both from separate Ascalon fractals and on my ele.
I’m pugging (nobody I know still wants to do fractals) and its 70% we skip maw trash, 100% chance we skip dredge/svanir forest mobs.

I currently have 3ess/0globs/2shards in the bank and my ele is now blocked from progressing (in the sense that my AR is reason enough to be kicked & replaced)
If I have it in me to bother anymore with fractals after I do another round of dailies today, I’ll toss my guard into ascalon and post what I more than likely don’t get. My guards personal reward level is only ~24 at the moment though.

My primary progression team disbanded several weeks ago just from sheer exhaustion of the grind for something that was never getting any closer. Not a single fractal is fun enough to warrant the 100+ odd runs to even have a statistical chance of getting something we want.

Right now, Im faced with a choice: throw some money at the gem store to buy a few bank slots to fill with useless rings and relics, or grab bioshock.
Thanks to anet for making the choice easy, I guess.

Some 2-way communication with devs re: dungeons would be fantastic. These things have the chance to be really awesome, but are severely let down by the fact nearly all of them are so dull and bland. Content that is simply not good enough.
I should clarify here that they all visually stunning (CoE is amazing, seriously, more of this please), the actual encounters and mechanics (or lack thereof) are the issue here.

Difficulty should be in the management and execution of mechanics, not simply bosses/trash stripping 80% of your health with basic attacks. Nor should bosses be a matter of pulling/pushing them against a wall and grinding your skills into it until they bug out and fall over dead.
AC revamp was a huge step in the right direction, minus the over-use of CC against players. Addressing the issue of seeing attack animations inside balls of particle effects will go a long way as well.

+1 OP. Mossman is the single most infuriating experience I have ever played in a dungeon. That’s saying something considering the dredge fractal, well, exists.

I’d love to see some sound being utilized with telegraphed attacks. Even if it’s something simple like ‘Die!’ as a boss winds up their ridiculous-amounts-of-damage attack. That way I know its coming and don’t have to risk an epileptic fit trying to see a specific animation inside a flashing ball of particle effects.

Some ‘rule’ consistency with bosses as well. Especially with immobilize.

Difficulty that isn’t just extra zeros at the end of how much health they have or damage they do. There is so much potential here to make stuff fun and engaging. Instead we just get hit for an extra few thousand and it takes another x minutes to kill as we advance. Who comes up with this? What did we ever do to you?

Ever since beta it was always pretty popular. You saw a lot more variety back then tho with D/F S/D and the odd staff user.

Each time there was a major trait rebalance you could see the shift.
eg: stop drop & roll nerf, EA air finisher change, zephyr’s boon moved to t1 & the addition of tempest’s defense, attunement shift nerfs etc

Leo G.4501:

You’re not suppose to sit around and get punched in the face. You get nothing profitable from being kitten slapped all day (well, there’s Retaliation, but that’s more for punishing the foe).

And nor am I expecting to. Having a chance to do something about my situation instead of just taking an astronomical amount of damage in the blink of an eye is the issue here. I realize you can’t paint the entire game with the issue because yes, I agree- many & most things are easily dodge/whatever-able. Stupidly overbalanced things like Captain Ashym fiery rush hitting me for a lazy 14k then immediately going into a fiery whirl that does another15k worth of multi-hit damage that clips you even during dodge animations. Is this sort of thing really necessary? I’m not made of blocks/dodges/whathaveyou. Yeah, its avoidable, but all it takes is a mistake by anyone and I burn a dodge/aegis on helping a team mate and boom- I’m done for should he decide to do -anything- to me. Completely cheap and unforgiving gameplay.

Leo G.4501:

And no wonder you’re getting 1-2shot, you’re staring at your health. There are other visual cues on the screen that help indicate your health (like the blood-haze boarder around your game screen) but generally, the orb is visible enough not to need to keep your eye on it.

This I know. I clearly stated the staring at my health orb as a result of combat spell effects being so obstructive. This is (mostly) an issue with large open-world events, in which I just go ranged and alt tab for mostly anyway so meh. Some mobs get hilariously covered in spell effects (esp guardian burning) that make it very difficult to see their otherwise obvious animations, certainly something that anet should know about or acknowledge.

There comes a point where any amount of defense won’t save you from cheap 1-hit kills or attacks that hit so incredibly hard and fast that it just boils down to dodge-or-die gameplay. Some of the stuff I’ve had to put up with is just unbelievable as well. I don’t know how many dodges or stunbreakers devs think I have in me, but its at least 8 less than whatever they design content around.

Part of the fun people have playing tanky characters in other games is the sense of power you have exchanging blows with a monster that is way more powerful than you. In GW2 you are constantly 1-2 (connected) hits away from death, which removes this element of satisfaction and leaves behind bad gameplay revolving around kiting/dodging all over the place.
Ever tried looking for an attack in the fuzzy ball of spell effects? Anet said they wanted people looking at the combat, not hotkeys for cooldowns etc. In these situations I find myself staring at my health orb, waiting for 90% of it to just vanish, so I can hopefully mash my dodge key in the slim chance I’ll make it out alive.

I’m with you though, OP. More exciting boss fights, less cheap mechanics that make combat more infuriating than it needs to be.

Issues:
- We found stunbreakers/stability not working against trash (if you use shake it off/balanced stance whilst being thrown through the air nothing happens, you lay on the ground for 2-4secs)
- HUGE framerate drop with the zergs of gravelings. Even standing in the room that has the p2 end boss/p1 scepter gather event with no mobs in it = ~4fps. P1 boss is super fun @ 4fps as well.
- Queen spider hitbox/invuln issues. Pushing her against walls seems to cause her to wig out and go invuln, lots of misses/evades when “attempting” to melee.
-Eat corpse/consume flesh or whatever it is- doesn’t 2-3shot you anymore but STILL no clear animation that the graveling(s) are doing it, so you don’t know to stay away from them and end up taking damage.

Thoughts:
- Way too much CC. I spend more time kissing the dirt because I’m spent on stunbreakers/cond removal that just get chained against me anyway. It sure is fun breaking out of a stun only to get immediately thrown into the dirt again! Some sort of pve-only stun immunity is long overdue.
- Boss fights still favor ranged. Fair enough you want to curb the zerker warrior hundred blades zerg but come on. Is it really necessary for anything, at all, to autoattack me for 90% of my health? It just cheapens the entire experience of collecting all my awesome loots just to see me fall over and die when something so much as breaks wind in my general direction. (devs take note: still a better mechanic than zergs of mobs) I can wipe out generations of gravelings in a single aoe storm but big ole’ pappy graveling has an adamantium skeleton, shoots frikken lazers and should he ever trip and use his claws to break his fall- would probably hit tyria with extinction level force.

Criticism aside- fun factor is getting better with more difficult content. I really enjoyed figuring out how to beat shinies from these encounters, just… stop with the cheap kitten.

Dragons tooth dropping quicker is plenty enough a buff for the skill. Ground target really isn’t needed, otherwise it just becomes a no-brainer like lava font.

Lightning autoattack really needs a do-over. It only does reasonable damage at the end of its channel, which means if you have to dodge during the animation you are losing out of a ‘huge’ chunk of dps. (being honest here, the lightning AA no matter what isnt exactly doing wowzers damage anyway, but still) I can run up to a mob on my melee professions and whack it twice with my autoattacks then dodge its counterattack and still have time to get back in range to finish part3 of my AA chain. I lose nothing. On my ele I do double digits worth of damage, dodge, and have to start again. I lose everything.
How would I fix it? A simple 3-hit attack like Water&Earth AA would do plenty to make the skill much more reliable. Rip from GW1 the Lightning Javelin or Shock Arrow skills for the visual imo.

Rock Barrier→Hurl needs some serious work done. Have you ever noticed how much damage the Hurl actually does? It is pathetic. Tooltips on these skills give you a glimpse into what anet originally had planned for this combo skill. Would be interesting to know what exactly was planned before this skill was left on the cutting room floor.

Dust Devil is great but a bit redundant since we already have an instant, no travel time blind from Lightning3. Would be nice if Dust Devil crippled targets along its (wider)path as well, if only to give it an identity. Besides, unless you run dagger offhand or 15points into earth traits, we cant get cripple anywhere else. Staff has cripple, dagger mainhand has cripple, scepter? nowhere.

Rest of your notes look good OP. Huge step in the right direction for putting reliability into ele attacks.

I’ve had two hero panel related crashes since the f&f patch went live. One just sent me to the desktop with the sound of the hero panel opening looping, no error codes at all, gw2.exe was still running as a process and I had to end it before launching the client again.

The second time was when I already had the hero panel open, I clicked the new UI element in the corner of my screen for my monthly tasks status and the game crashed & presented me with an error report to send to anet, which I did.

Proxy or not, I’d prefer to have the ability to lock out all other countries but my own. RMTers proxying into the US is of no concern to me since I don’t live in that country. I wouldn’t put it past them to do it, but if they waste that much time setting up proxies for other countries to try and find the one I live in to attempt an account breach then its time well wasted. I’d imagine many just wouldn’t bother with non-US account breach attempts after a while.

Hard to say without knowing your dungeon group makeup.

Do you have a thief/necro in the group? If so your bleeds might be severely diminished to the point where you will not be able to get a single stack in. (max 25stacks on any target) It depends on how they are specced however.

I’m not at all familiar with the Engineer profession, but when I ran a condition build, I had a lot of trouble with my burns actually doing anything when our Engineer was around. Even though I had a good amount more +cond damage than him, I was seeing my damage numbers drop well before they should have been.

You also face issues with many bosses that naturally shed conditions faster than normal. These numbers are completely made up, but say your signet of fire normally puts 12secs of burn on your target. Certain bosses will only burn for 4seconds.

It’s a fun spec to play and the damage is great, but the game just does not play nice with multiple people applying damaging conditions. Burning especially. The bosses shedding conditions thing was the nail in the coffin for me. You’d be better off with any other setup and gearing for it accordingly.

Appreciate the effort they put into trying to fix RtL, but yeah, it still bugs out here and there. I’ve thankfully not been self-CC’d on the spot, RtL simply travels through my target and I explode a few feet behind them. No explosion damage, updraft combo is almost guaranteed to miss without some fancy footwork to reposition.

Magnetic Grasp is all sorts of broken still, to the point where It’d be a good idea for a dev to double-check if the said changes to the skill actually made it to live.

Provided the projectiles don’t bug out and just sail over targets heads, earth#1 is actually pretty good if you have some +condition damage. It’s super fast cast time also means you can stack a metric kittens worth of bleeds on a target, then sink them or cover with a blind. Since you are already forced to be in melee range to get all 3 projectiles to actually hit your target, you can follow-up with the shotgun blast of earth#2.

Also, It’s a hard sell given GlyphoEH activation time underwater is super quick compared to on land, but running heal signet for underwater and spamming lightning/earth auto attack (which are very quick) can also heal you up a fair bit.

Not even a little interested in the new gear/direction here either. It reeks of War’s ward system or Lotro’s radiance. Never, ever tie progression to gear. Pretty sure this is some sort of mmo golden rule.

What concerns me more is this new Agony condition. So it constantly ticks away percentages of your health depending on how much of this gear you have? Sorry, but this is just boring and unimaginative encounter design. If this new dungeon is anything at all like the current ones, I am fully expecting the absolute worst time to be had yet. Dungeons are already plagued with condition spamming mobs with hard-CC spam and powerful attacks. I already die from chain-knockdown spamming trash that inflict poison/bleed/snares as well as deal obscene amounts of damage. Now you want me to put up with a constant percentage of my health being drained away?

No.

As well as reduced CC effectiveness, some (most?) champ/boss mobs also don’t take the full length of damage dealing conditions. eg: a 12sec burn will only last around 5secs

Mobs and players that attack very quickly or have evade attached with the animation will also hit you through the blind pulse of Glyph of Storms in earth attune. Heartseeker spamming theives are a good example, and most common. Bandit mobs also hit through it with that flurry thing they have.

I’ve no problem with the price, the only issue I have is once you have transmuted it onto your gear, its there for good. If you want to play with a different spec and gear for it, you either re-farm the hundred odd gold for another set of t3 to put on your new stuff, or destroy your old gear to bring the look with you.

Getting it in the first place is enough of an achievement. It’d be nice if there was a collections tab for cultural pieces.

Human T3 and some crafted

Reliability of many skills is just too low, thus the performance of the profession as a whole suffers. Many skills honestly do enough damage, its just the reliability of getting that damage out is so poor, it gives the impression of ‘underpoweredness’. Of course, I’m not saying that no skills at all need damage boosts, but the issue of skills being so unreliable should be addressed before mucking about with damage values.

Examples:
Drakes Claw (mainhand dagger, fire attune) needs all 3 claws to hit for it to be worthwhile. If you are standing at any distance not point-blank, you are only doing a third of the potential damage.

Vapor Blade (mainhand dagger, water attune) does half of its potential damage if and when the blade fails to return for the second hit due to hitting environmental blocks.

Breath skills all have horrible hitbox issues when you and/or targets are moving. Same with Fire Grab, Lightning Whip & Lightning Touch.

Arc Lightning (Scepter) does pitiful damage leading up to the last stages of its damage packet. If you need to dodge at any time during the skill channel, you lose the bulk of its damage.

Condition removal is pretty much everywhere, and capable of clearing entire stacks/durations of conditions, making condition builds less viable. Or even not viable at all.
The way Burning works from multiple sources is also problematic.

If making some of these gimmicky skills reliable is too difficult (like the Vapor Blade back and forth) just drop the gimmick. Using Vapor Blade as an example again- just have it detonate at the end of its animation for the return damage. Bingo, now you don’t have to try and fix the issue of environmental blocks that cripple the skill.

@Magoslich
I run full carrion. Took me a bit to get my carrion jewelry set so I was running green berserker/Valkyrie gear in there for a bit. I find crits with the ele pretty lackluster, especially given what pretty much any other profession can put out. (again- my warrior chews things up much better with a quarter of the effort and gearing) The 20k health in a dungeon outdoes any sort of toughness stacking (another expensive mistake I made) as long as you play smart and bank a dodge. That opinion changes for pvp, as I’m sure many people will point out. I don’t spvp though, given the state of the meta/thieves/bugs. I’d rather play a 16v16 2fort sniper only server than endure gw2 pvp at the moment

My build is pretty much set against the rest of my team…well, actually the guardian I run with. I find a lot of our stuff syncs well with their stuff and we have a really good melee setup going. Retaliation is king. Anyway, 20/20/20/0/10. Traits change constantly, depending on the dungeon. eg: AC explorable I’ll take burning fire since I’ll slot Cleansing Flame for the stun breaker. +3 ticks of burn works well here.

I run Carrion in PvE as D/D & S/D. It works extremely well unless you have a necro/thief/engi in the group, even if they aren’t condition spec. Bleed stacking isn’t too bad, I cannot maintain 25stacks by myself anyway. Keeping burn on a target is effortless and is massive damage, but the way GW2 handles burns from multiple sources is very silly. All it takes is an engi to get their burns up and the mob may as well flash a ‘No Vacancy’ sign in your face until it dies.

I don’t think I will ever go back to staff for PvE/Dungeons. It is incredibly s-l-o-w and to be honest, any sort of support you can give your team from it is easily out-done by many, if not all other classes. My healing shouts warrior alt blows my staff ele (forgive the pun) out of the water when it comes to usefulness. The better your group gets at dungeons, the less requirement for heavy support as well. That said- there are still a few areas in dungeons where a staff is handy due to obscene amounts of damage taken at any range not maximum.

For general world-pve, I can drop any basic mob in orr with a single Signet of Fire cast and no other damage. I typically round up a bunch of mobs, ring of fire→earth attune→glyph of storms→earthquake→churning earth→go make a cup of tea during the animation→loot

Gear, spec & playstyle is entirely useless for WvW of course. For every lucky kill you get on someone with a bleed/burn, you will have 20 that simply shrug it off or effortlessly remove thanks to trait/skill/profession synergy. Used to be fun loading up gate bashers with a bajillion bleeds and burns, but nowadays all it takes is a couple of ele/mesmers dropping rain/null fields at the gate to ruin your day.

It wasn’t BWE3, it was closer to release. Around the time they cleaned up the wording of skills across all professions and implemented the new vulnerability setup.

Arcane skills were hit pretty hard with damage reductions & an increase to recharge times, yet Arcane Power still eluded the devs and remains broken still. Certain skills were buffed (lightning whip was one of them, if you can believe it) and other skills were nerfed. Meteor Shower, Arcane skills and Hurl (scepter #2) are the ones I remember most.

‘Rock Barrier’ (Scepter #2 skill)
Nine times out of ten the animation fails to display. (the 5 rocks floating behind your character) or sometimes, it will randomly draw 2-3 of the floaty rocks. You still hurl 5 for the purpose of the ‘Hurl’ skill it transforms into.
The tooltip for Rock Barrier also states ‘Foes around you take damage, and you have five rock charges’. Nothing takes any damage around you while either casting this skill, taking damage while under the effects of this skill or from simply having the buff on you. The note about having 5 charges seems a bit redundant since you cannot control how many you expend via the ‘Hurl’ skill.

‘Burning Flame’ #2 fire magic major trait typo- ‘Conjure Flame’ should be ‘Conjure Flame Axe’