Guild Wars 2

Looks pretty good to me …

The stat change means you are speccing for the right reasons (i.e. traits/ability modifiers and not stats). Given armor can be swapped and adapted that is a perfectly good place to move the stats.

The wells are really a non-issue … if engineers can pvp with grenades, you can figure out ground targeting.

As for the three trait lines, it will depend largely on what the trait changes are. Hopefully they have learned enough by now that the garbage grandmaster traits will be mostly gone while the best master traits will be moved up. A combination of any 3 of 6 trait lines that each have 3 different grandmaster traits is more than enough build diversity as long as you don’t have a majority of grandmaster traits being awful. Most of the complaints seem to stem from 4/2/2/6/0 type builds, and those exist mostly because of minor and master traits that are much better than the grandmaster options. The argument that we will have 100 times fewer options is quite frankly pointless when each class has only 4-5 viable builds anyways. Just having a lot of permutations does not constitute build diversity when many of the traits are useless and many more are only useful in a very specific build.

I actually came to the rather sad realization recently that the engi celestial pvp rifle, power nade pve and rabid condi builds are identical or close to identical except in the weapon and stat choices. The skills and traits are so far above the alternatives that they remain identical (mostly because grenades are great and you need to go deep for grenadier, then you always want swiftness and vigor … and you have only a few points left to choose from, even the bomb variant only swaps a couple traits). The alternate build for pvp is turrets, which takes a rather specific combination of traits, all focusing on turrets, and then picks a whole lot of turret skills. Most of those traits and skills are never used outside this very specific build because their value relies entirely on synergy with the other traits and skills in the build.

My only real worry right now is with the current mandatory traits. For example speedy kits is the only reliable way engineers have of getting swiftness on a regular basis. Given the class has no dash or swiftness on weapons, the alternative would be to burn long cooldowns on sub-par utilities to get places. The problem being that if such traits remain, most engis will be using the Tool trait line just to get access to that adept trait.

That being said, Anet have an opportunity to make sure things like swiftness that most classes want are accessible in one form or another through multiple trait lines. For example the engi trait could be split so that the Tool trait line has an option for swiftness on toolkit swap while the Explosives line has swiftness on bomb or grenade kit swap and the firearms allows swiftness after a dodge roll or something.

There are several things that could make dungeons harder and make zerker sub-optimal:

- First, lock items when entering a dungeon, no swapping on the fly, this means the group has to handle all encounters in the same gear.
- Introduce mobs with very high toughness but low hp. The Husk copper at Red in the Silverwastes is a prime example. This means that to clear efficiently you will need at least 1-2 condi builds in the group. Zerker can still do it, but it will take much longer, effectively defeating the purpose of zerker
- Introduce mobs with damage mechanics like the mordrem troll champ in sw, this makes it very clear that stacking is not viable for the fight. Any kind of telegraphed high damage AoE would do really, as long as it forces movement. Ranged attacks that don’t need LOS also completely invalidate stacking (threshers … really you can see they were trying to go this direction with Silverwastes).
- Introduce some encounters with automatic damage, or very hard to dodge damage that is highly mitigated by toughness (I think the terragrifs were an attempt at this with their huge hitboxes on charge). This might not force warriors out of zerker but it will incentivise at least some survivability for most classes. Retaliation can also serve this purpose.
- Introduce encounters that deal with the “downed” state. Currently even a zerker build has a whole lot of hp when downed, maybe make a fight or two where you go straight to dead or a fight where a “Rally!” spawns a bunch of mobs (boss feeding off life force or something). This would make zerker require perfect runs as opposed to just having people stealth/invuln and rez easily when they miss a dodge.

The result of all that wouldn’t be that zerker is useless, but more that you want a couple soldier pieces or valk or knights or cavalier on each player, and each group will want a couple of condi/celestial builds to deal with the condi bosses. Given that most classes can gear/trait swap from zerker damage to condi before entering a dungeon, this is not nearly as constraining as a trinity system.

I like the idea of player kills being worth more than the keeps and towers.

Coming from DAoC, which to my knowledge was the first proper mass PvP game (and likely was the best) keeps and relics (borderland domination essentially) gave small bonuses across the board, much like the current xp track with x% damage to server members.

On the other hand, realm points, which determined realm rank and unlocked abilities, something like the mastery tracks from HoT, we obtained only by killing players. Not only that but there were hugely diminishing returns when you zerged someone, as I recall a solo kill was about 1000 rp, a full group (8 players) killing another player was around 200 rp and in a zerg you could expect about 20 rp per kill.

This meant that players who wanted to unlock the rewards would roam in 8 man groups, trying if at all possible to break zergs. And even when they lost, they likely got more rewards out of it than the zerglets did.

Now I don’t mind a little more objective focus, but getting hundreds of Wxp from each tower or keep captured in a train while gaining on 20-30 on a kill seems silly. From what I can tell a high WvW rank just means people have played since release consistently and have too much time on their hands. In DAoC it meant “Run !” because they had a trophy rack of dead player’s ears.

Anet has only a couple options to deal with population issues.

1) They can force people off certain servers by closing them, this may upset a few people who like a more empty server (though tbh tier 3 is empty enough already, unless you need a whole borderland to yourself).

2) They can make it voluntary by giving a free transfer. At very best they get lucky and a couple of big guilds from T1 move to T3 or so and try to bring a server up to T1/T2. At worst you end up with even fewer people at lower tiers and exacerbate the issue.

Bear in mind that everyone is assigned a server for WvW, and Anet has to have a server assigned even to those who haven’t entered WvW in a year or more. This causes issues with voluntary reassignment because it screws over returning players or players who just don’t pay attention to WvW but then want to try it out.

Quite frankly I don’t see the harm in removing T7/T8 and merging them up with T6/T5. It doesn’t involve splitting up any guilds or friends (do 1 to 1 server mergers), it can shake up the tiers a little bit (allowing them to compete with higher pop servers) and it doesn’t leave any players stranded.

Voluntary options just leave people stranded and could lead to the people just jumping into tier 1 servers (which is not all that productive).

Edit:
I am also for the return of PPK, I think more emphasis should be on fighting people than fighting doors. But that does nothing to population issues.

gennyt.3428:

If anything, the stability changes made it clear just how much hard CC there is in this game and that the combat system really was not designed with large scale fights in mind. I’m actually curious to see how players will adjust (apart from boring pirate shipping).

Actually, comparing back to DAoC (an amazing mass PvP game), DAoC had way more CC, but it had immunities and the zerg often lost because they would build up the opponents immunities very fast without capitalizing on it.

One thing that makes a huge difference is that this game has very little (if any) true AoE. It tended to keep zergs honest, because being all stacked on a leader made them implode if they got caught unaware and un-split.

Quite frankly I think we might all benefit from anything that splits up the blobs. I am really hoping for the new maps to have systems to encourage lots of small groups instead of large ones. A door opening similar to the dredge fractal could lead to hilarious situations.

Kasteros.9847:

Sixes.5824:

Sorel.4870:

Kasteros.9847:

3. This need skill – some players are too dull to play him

There you go. That could also explain why these same dull players can’t find a way to play around a needed change in balance instead of crying on the forums.

Yep, that’s what I was driving at.

There are solutions, they don’t involve charging headfirst into the zerg.

To be fair though, this meta will be short lived regardless given HoT is going to change a whole lot.

Man but the point is that player know how to play and they don’t rush headfirst but when u kite u die against blob cos of range cc spam form guardian, eles. Everyone know how to play new meta with this new stabil, but this don’t work against blob, actually nothing work against blobs – only other lbob can do something

So you are facing large blobs that know how to play.

Well, to be fair if you are 20v60 and they are as good as you are, you are going to lose in any game. If you want to win while outnumbered, you have to play better. If you can’t, that leaves two options:
1 – You can adapt and outplay them if the game allows for it.
2 – There is no way to outplay them because of a low skill cap, in which case you need to play a game with a higher skill cap and outplay the randoms there.

Seeing as this is a game with a somewhat competitive pvp scene, I have trouble believing there is no room to outplay 60 man blobs. There is no way the randoms following a leader in chat, with maybe half of them on TS, are anywhere near as coordinated as a respectable guild.

To be honest if the 3-5 decent guards/elementalists in that blob are out-ccing you at max range, your own long ranged players need to L2P, as per the title of this thread. Blobs are not 100% guards and elementalists, most of the characters in them are fluffy kittens (note, I mean real kittens, nothing censored) following a leader because it seems heroic and they can’t land a darn thing.

Not only that, but if you are going to play at long range, as indicated in previous posts by myself and others, you do need to rethink comps and setups a little, if your 20 man squad has 8 wars, then it’s a 12 man squad for kiting. If some guilds can do it and you haven’t figured it out yet, ask them, maybe they’ll be nice and teach you.

choovanski.5462:

if you dont like kit swapping you should either practice it or reroll. grenade kit is in the meta for WvW, PvE, and PvP so ya’ cant neglect that either.

QFT

That’s kind of like playing GW2 and saying you don’t like to dodge.

If you just want to avoid grenades though, your options are either bomb kit, flamethrower or a condition pistol build. Condi builds suck in mass PvE because of the caps, but if you just want to solo things it can work wonders. The bomb and flamethrower builds are perfectly fine for most PvE but they will get you killed a little more than grenades so you should probably go celestial/soldiers+zerker instead of pure zerker.

Oh, and if you want to try some weird melee engineer with toolkit or elixir gun condi build, keep us posted on how that goes (though I am guessing very poorly).

Edit:

For flamethrower I tend to run 6/6/0/0/2 as a hybrid grenade/ft build for PvE tagging and boss trains. You want speedy kits for PvE, there is pretty much no discussion there. For killing bosses you want the extra 2% damage per condition on the enemy and juggernaut is in the same line. I guess you can skip the grenadier, likely want to take invigorating swiftness instead.

Alternatively there are some turret builds, though they are almost certainly sub optimal for anything except solo PvE. Likely want to go deep in the turret line but I am not sure how else to build that. Tbh I kinda want to look it up now and try that out myself.

For pistols condi build just look up a PvP rabid meta build.

Sorel.4870:

Kasteros.9847:

3. This need skill – some players are too dull to play him

There you go. That could also explain why these same dull players can’t find a way to play around a needed change in balance instead of crying on the forums.

Yep, that’s what I was driving at.

There are solutions, they don’t involve charging headfirst into the zerg.

To be fair though, this meta will be short lived regardless given HoT is going to change a whole lot.

Deli.1302:

Does this map provide open spaces devoid of environmental effects for the dozens of guilds that play WvW purely for the fights?

This.

Even for players like myself, who don’t play in big guilds and havoc squads, can we please get some open space ?

Another question:
What is being done to address PvDoor? As far as I can tell most maps are blobs running from keep to keep, recapping what the opposing blob capped 5 minutes earlier.

Kasteros.9847:

Sixes.5824:

So you purposefully dismiss some of the higher range AoE classes, and then complain you can’t deal with large numbers without them getting all kinds of cc on you …

Ok.

Emmmm what?! Ranger is a higher range AoE? He just have 1 AoE skill from LB and that is all lol While necro for example have tons of em Also i wrote that u can easly kil blob, but as long as long they don’t spam ccs just imagine, 10 lanes of warding when u push and whole group don;t hvae stabillity, same goes for statics etc. Also what does ranger have good if we compare it with necro? And read my comment again I wrote that only rnager is out, rest is good, but no1 want to play engi for example

Engi has high Aoe, like crazy high. And engi has incredible cc, both single target and AoE, add to that the 3 second invulnerability in a pinch, the fact that grenades have 1500 range and can lead targets and the magnet to start things off … if people don’t want to play them that’s their fault.

I would have thought all these supposed elite players would love to pick up one of the highest skill caps (having every attack be ground targeted with a lead time makes it a lot more skillful to land than a stability hammer train).

So I don’t feel too sorry for people whining about the fact that they lost their stability spam, which is not particularly skillful and shuts down all CC across the board for relatively little cost. Now they might have to actually learn to kite, because if you are using AoE at max range, pulling from stealth and backing off when the blob gets close, not only does half the blob do nothing (the melee, the thiefs etc) but almost no CC can reach you.

The mass of CC is a big issue when you run in head first and let the opponents pop all the short ranged CC (and there is lots of that). Instead, try not charging in using stability as a crutch.

Gern.2978:

Yes and no. Yes, you are correct, there is more build diversity with celestial. No in that getting zerker gear is 10,000 times easier than celestial. You can get a full set of zerker gear in a just a couple days of doing CoE, CoF, and a some WvW without ever spending any gold. Whereas you HAVE to craft celestial gear, and even the exotic celestial gear will take you around 3 weeks or more to craft. I suggest getting zerker right away, and working on making celestial, then you will always have a good set of gear for dungeons, and eventually have a celestial set for doing anything else.

Yep, you can get exotic zerker easily, and it is sufficient for most PvE.

Then start building ascended celestial to WvW (and to some extent fractal).

As an aside, I did build the rifle and get rings/amulet in ascended zerker, the armor is not worth it.

Kasteros.9847:

The problem is that u can’t attack blob with meele. U can;t kite blob aswell, cos if u try this they will rush u with their numbers and crush with tons of ccs. U probably didn;t play for a looooong time cos blobs are already organised at ts and they don’t blindly rush into aoe storm like they used to. So any other idea of handling blob with new stabil?

Well having recently (a few weeks ago) been in quite a successful Blob v Blob fight where we kited back with only limited coordination (because we were also a blob lol), it seemed like good guard walls, freeze grenades, supply crates etc played a huge role. We were able to disengage while inflicting substantial damage, despite a coordinated push on the other side. I play on engi, my nades were doing an incredible job, especially the chill on their front line as they charged, or a supply crate (on top of the stun and net turret it likely creates targeting issues for the blob). I wouldn’t advise melee, but there are better ways of kiting than the current GWEN comps. Given the very limited instant cc at 1500 range, a good group should be able to kite, though I do hope the new borderlands have a little more open space to do it in.

As for guild versus guild, I think yank and gank with magnets or scorpion wire from stealth would do pretty well. It’s very difficult to predict given the stealth until pull and in 20v20 starting the round with 4 instant kills might just win it outright.

Edit:
Another thing to consider for guilds returning in HoT is whether or not they implement some better guild content. If there is any form of Guild v Guild or even just maps that lend themselves better to roaming 20 man groups, it could outweigh the stability change.

So you purposefully dismiss some of the higher range AoE classes, and then complain you can’t deal with large numbers without them getting all kinds of cc on you …

Ok.

blakdoxa.7520:

That’s effectively ganking. Blob chipping sounds like a good idea… but also sounds terribly time consuming having to kill a few people at a time and plus if a zerg decides to swoop in they are going to drop their AoE all over you.

Well, if you are in a 20v20 guild situation, you really only need to do it once to 4-5 people, that’s not super time consuming.

As for the zergs, causing them to swoop is exactly the point. When they charge, you AoE and CC better than they do and kite them back a little, by which point the average blob will be 30% dead and have burned a ton of cooldowns. Then you ca counter attack.

I think the main issue with the plan is that some of the elite guilds think there are only 4 classes in the game.

Coldtart.4785:

Stability can now be countered by the one mechanic it was made to counter. Explain how that is even remotely good.

That’s actually an inaccurate assessment. Stability still stops some amount of cc, it has just become a soft counter instead of a hard counter. Really CC can’t “counter” stability given that stability has no other effect. In fact using no cc at all would also “counter” stability by giving it no purpose.

As for the actual change, maybe people will make use of other mechanics a little more. Specifically I remember people complaining about the standoffs and thinking that a few engis or thieves can just yank people in for killing (stealth an engi, have them magnet someone, given the target can’t see the engi they have no real way of avoiding it).

In a 20v20 situation if you can just yank 5 people flat on their faces and slaughter them, you would just win right there. Against bigger, often disorganized, zergs pulling a few of them in will likely cause them to charge or try to save the dead, which again gives you a huge advantage. The stealth and magnet is a common spvp tactic, may be time for WvW groups to start using it.

Well, I am not currently in one of these elite guilds … but was in DAoC and the game underwent similar changes a number of times.

Just looking up NS videos on Youtube, what I see is a couple of dueling hammer trains … seems like a bunch of guard and warriors with a few necros thrown in, which makes perfect sense given you would want tons of CC and some guards because aegis does better than healing in this game.

Now, from my DAoC experience, there are several ways to deal with being outnumbered. One is the invincible assist train (in our case it was just melee burst with a couple high cc, healers defended as all hell making the train impossible to kill or cc). Another is kite and crash, you move back, forcing a zerg to overextend, then crash into them once they are too spread to properly support each other. Yet another is just to set up a death zone, and whoever crosses the line gets instagibbed, zergs tend to be too uncoordinated to rush 60 at once so you can kill off a fair few, scare them back and then push just a little so they can’t rez.

So yes, the hammer warriors may not be meta anymore, but they are likely just going to roll engis/necros/elementalists/ranger for mad AoE, incredible ranged burst or great cc of their own and kite. Personally I really hope the new borderlands are more open because the biggest issue to me is the lack of space on the WvW maps.

On an unrelated note the NS leader would be much more effective if he simply gave clear orders and stopped frantically spamming coms. You clear coms, have everyone muted except your leader and a couple deputies … and no one should ever be yelling because it is an inefficient way to convey information.

krixis.9538:

to be honest metas are there for a reason. they work and are highly effective at what they do.

ofc you have the right to do as you like and I respect that. but please don’t throw away meta or disregard it simply because you don’t want to adapt or put any effort into the game

I don’t think it’s about rejecting the meta per se.

When farming I find that the limiting factor is boredom more than efficiency. If I can farm 1 hour with this build but would get bored of the meta in 15 minutes, this is better for me.

This can work alright for solo farming things like megil, frostgorge trolls, etc. A full rabid build actually does very good damage solo (and horribly bad damage in large groups) and the toughness means you survive better (which is important when you are solo farming and accidentally agro a couple vets).

While optimal farming may involve following a train with zerker nades or flamethrower, this is not actually as far behind it as you may think because you can pierce through 10 mobs and they bleed out pretty fast. Actually in some spots I remember being able to just keep a continuous train of mobs behind me while running in circles aggroing more and bleeding them all out.

I have made this work just fine for solo PvE. Obviously horrible for mass PvE or PvP. You want to go full rabid for the crit procs and condi damage. I would also take swift kits because it will both allow you to kite and save you time between spawns, I actually ran a nade condi build (6/6/0/0/2) because you get a whole lot of bleeds off nade 2.

I think for runes I just went undead? You want to look at the break point on bleed ticks and get an extra tick.

Again, sub optimal but if you are going to do it, get rabid, ignore power altogether and solo stack 20+ bleeds.

I was in the same case as you about a month ago.

My conclusion (and I am still happy with it) is:
- For WvW you want some defense, I know quite a few people run soldiers, you can run a condi build, celestial is great … zerker is garbage.
- For solo PvE (including silverwastes and other zones where you can end up isolated) again you need sustain, you want to be able to solo vets with adds easily, so celestial is way better
- For hard dungeons (high fractals, maybe some arah paths, likely some of what is coming in HoT) the condi damage actually starts being relevant. With only 5 people, you won’t overwrite all that much and with longer fights against tougher mobs, conditions kick in alot more. That means your damage isn’t as far from zerker as you might expect. On top of that, in hard dungeons you often need to be able to take a hit and the difference between 1 hit to downed and 2 can be huge for the group. I’d take celestial here though some people will claim they can dodge everything always and never need defense … those same people blame their group when they repeatedly wipe because not a single group member can survive an attack.
- For speed run dungeons zerker all the way, that being said, for speed run dungeons you really don’t need ascended.
- For zerging in PvE zerker is better, but again you don’t need ascended.

What I am doing is getting my ascended celestial, I am still in the process given the time gate.

In fact I have been doing fractals and got 1 zerker ring as a random drop and I have enough for the second with pristine relics (after getting my celestial). So, given the mats for a second rifle are not in conflict with those for my armour, I am going to make an ascended zerker rifle.

Essentially I end up with 2.5 sets, 1 full ascended celestial, 1 full exotic zerkers and 3 ascended zerker items that are cheap and have big stats (4 when I feel like spending the laurels on a zerker amulet), namely rifle and 2 rings. So most of the time I run celestial, when I want to do a dungeon speed run or zerg PvE I can swap to my exotic zerker with a few ascended zerker pieces or even my ascended celestial with the ascended zerker pieces.

Ascended armour is expensive and has relatively low stats, I don’t intend to ever get zerkers ascended armour, that 5% stats is just not worth it for content that is easy anyways. Remember, zerker is only good for easy content, people run it when there is almost no challenge so speed is the only factor. As an aside, they have said HoT will be harder in PvE, so zerker may also become less useful for that.

So, from what I can tell I should be:
- Spending a little gold to get the rabid exotic armor I am missing and slot in the runes because I will be using this for awhile.
- Maybe spend a little gold to get the rabid trinkets (I already have the exotic rabid pistol and shield). I should probably forgo the amulet given it is the strongest and cheapest ascended one so I can probably just get that soon.
- Save up laurels and WvW badges for ascended trinkets.
- Use mats to get my huntsman to 500 and then eventually craft the ascended rabid pistol.
- Generally save kharma because I need it for the ascended recipes?

Note that I am completely ignoring the PvE build for now. I’ll swap out a few pieces for my exotic zerkers/knights armor and my zerkers rifle and go hybrid or just go full condi in PvE.

edit:
Just checked, the rabid inscription is 2 gold 9 silver while Vatlaaw’s gear is all around 1 gold 30 silver. Is there any good reason not to just buy the Vatlaaw’s gear?

edit the second:
Turns out I wasn’t a complete idiot when I first played this character and I got the rabid chest and legs. I am going to wait at least a little on the other items as they have very few stats. I did however purchase 6 runes of the undead for under 6 silver which represents a much bigger leap in stats. The rabid trinkets … the list says craftable but I can’t seem to figure out how, the unique ones are a minimum 5 gold so I can’t really afford them right now. I’ll get the laurel+badge amulet relatively soon.

Hey Arantheal, I have played a bunch more and remembered why I wasn’t full rabid in the first place … it is a lot harder to get than carrion.

Which leads me to a couple more questions:
- Is the best way to acquire it still buying the named exotics on tp?
- Is it worth getting the exotics at all or would my 10ish gold be better used towards the ascended versions?

As an aside I have started leveling my huntsman to 500, more or less following the guide (needed a berzerker’s rifle so I crafted that along the way). It definitely won’t cost me full price as I am just going to farm up most of the ori and wood.

Oh ok cool, the PvE thing makes sense now, I was wondering how JQ still had so many people.

I’m likely going to stay on the same server and see how it goes. For now I have pulled out what old power gear I have for a balanced PvE approach. I checked out what was needed for an ascended weapon and good lord lol. I thought they didn’t want a gear grind in the game. Anyways, I have enough for the plans, I’ll slowly build up the materials for one new weapon.

Wow, that is very thorough, thank you.

I did leave within a few months of launch (mostly got tired of never being able to WvW due to queues at that time) so all three new maps you described are new to me. I’ll have to look into all these ascended items, I have some badges and laurels so maybe I can get some relatively quickly. I am also a 400 huntsman so hopefully I can manage to upgrade my weapon soon enough.

For starters I am going to set up for that PvE build (at least trait and skill wise, with the gear I have it will be a more balanced stat approach) and then build towards the WvW one. These new zones should give me something to explore, I remember being so tired of killing zombies.

I’ll take you up on that actually.

Just a note on the example, I was fighting 1v1 against someone else (not a thief) and the thief pops out and gibs me. The fight was actually relatively even until the thief just shows up and destroys me (this is also why I couldnt immediately dodge or really do much at all).

Ok, so, I am looking for some form of build that would be effective in WvW. The build I posted happens to be what I have, which means I likely need to grind whatever gear is needed for another one.

A few questions for my education:
- Have they nerfed bleeds since release? Or condi in general, I remember this build doing decently because it would build up stacks and then the damage was essentially insurmountable despite healing.
- Have they changed the rune stats ? I remember 3/3 being optimal at the time.
- Is this whole ascended armor thing new?

Now for the actual build:
- I liked the tankyness, but my recent experience is that either tanky isn’t really possible, or at least it isn’t stat based (i.e. tanky is having tons of endurance regen and defensive cooldowns). Is that correct?
- I am essentially always solo because my schedule and play times are unpredictable so I can’t really commit to a guild.
- I really like the condi builds … should I maybe just roll a necro? An added bonus is that rebuilding a necro from the ground up would force me to actually play it a lot more before max level. That being said I do love the engi, and I already have one too.
- I essentially would just be playing WvW and PvE (dungeons or storyline).
- What I have is essentially that build plus a few soldiers/valkyries items and I think one berzerkers item. If there is any kind of item released somewhat recently, I have none of it. I also have a couple spare carrion pistols I think. Also have jeweller and huntsman maxed, 10 gp, some WvW badges and maybe a few dungeon tokens (but likely not enough for an item).
- Things I liked … really all the non-static engi stuff. Not a fan of turret builds or bombs. At some point I ran a silly high damage grenade build (while levelling, not max level gear).

One last question, Is the endgame still the same 8 or so dungeons and the one Orr zone, or is there some more stuff added since then? I have heard of fractals being a thing but have no clue if they are something I am interested in or not.

Did I say boring? I meant stupid :/ I thought they had the game set up so the burst wasn’t as bad as other MMOs, and here I am, 1v1 and a rogue shows up behind me, 100 to 0 within 2 seconds despite having stacked toughness and vitality …

Ok, I’ve looked through that bomb build and played a little more, there are a couple things I seem to be missing.

1) Is toughness really that far superior to vitality? I thought a 10:1 ratio was optimal but it seems like vitality gets ignored completely. As I recall conditions also don’t even take toughness or armor into account …

Anyways, likely all a moot point given WvW still seems to be one big zerg and then a 5 man camping every entrance so the soloers can’t get out … Not even a day in and I remember why this game got uninstalled. Boring unchallenging PvE, repetitive PvP and boring as hell WvW.

Hello everyone,

I used to play way back at launch, and love my engi. I had a rather niche build at the time and was wondering if it still works. This is for PvE/WvW only, not PvP.

Here is a link to it:

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=VV;4Z-Fw0o5cQFx0;9;4TT-9-58B36A;14;3KJ;1F3-H9dZJH8_Iski-M;2a;0P-U0h1d2tZo4A7-1V-7-6Rk06RO

The basic idea, as I recall, was to have lots of toughness/vitality (well balanced with the 10:1 ratio, I have 2299 total armor and 20522 health, with healing that’s essentially 10:1) and then absolutely massive condition damage. The 30% duration on all conditions + 20% on bleeds gave 2 extra ticks per bleed and I get huge bleed stacks on whoever I hit.

So what I want to know is:
- Is this kind of carion/rabid build in any way viable?
- Is there a better way to get that condition duration?
- Do I need to upgrade a bunch of gear given my long hiatus?

Any constructive comments are welcome, I am pretty clueless about what has happened in the last year or so.