Guild Wars 2

coglin.1867:

Where were you two with your feedback on this matter during the last 2+ years of discussion on the topic of new maps?

It is not like this is some new idea that they dropped out of the blue. This was overwhelmingly demanded via payer feedback.

I think I’ve disliked or disagreed with every single post of Coglin’s I’ve came across (just never bothered to say so till now). Anyways enjoy your new wvw and the direction people like you have pushed it

Ok those saying venom wells apply “pulsing immob” arent being accurate. It’s per enemy hit (even if they dodge) so first well you drop will generally use all your venom ticks up as soon as it does damage (unless you manage to hit only 2 people). The other party memebers will use up the ticks immediately with their first aoe attack as well, and not necessarily on the same targets. That being said if you know you’re going up against venoms and guardians use purging flames properly and warriors use warhorn 4 properly (not too early) then they shouldnt be that big of a problem.

Even so it being based on the venom thief’s condi duration means that each party will be putting out a potential of 60 seconds of immob divided by how many targets they hit (immob cant stack more than 3 times so maximum of 12 seconds per target if they dont run foods and such). 12 seconds of immob on an enemy is pretty op, but only if they play poorly by burning cleanses early and such.

Once expansion hits and revenants can share resistance with party I think you will find venoms wells will be pretty ineffective. It will be very difficult to actually catch someone in the bomb as they can just walk out since they will have stab and soft cc wont work.

THe venom thief in general will be getting a slight nerf since the extra venom tick trait wont be around (I think) so only 2 ticks of immob per party and 1 stab strip with basilisk venom. That being said thief will be able to run venoms while being a strong ganker again (rather than a support heavy role that venom thieves play now). They will get to go full deadly arts, full critical strikes, and full shadow arts (with venomous aura). So maybe then we will see venoms used for gank squad rather than wells, dunno (even more problematic to play against than venom wells imo).

Lol these troll threads are getting a bit out of hand. Please nerf burst, please get rid of WvW food, please nerf stab even more…I hope the anet developers have enough sense to disregard some of these or not take them serious….oh wait stab go nerfed. Well anet you may as well drive the nail in the coffin and aoe cap static and lines at 5 and get rid of – condi food. That way only 5 of a zone blob will stop and the remaning 70 can run over your group with cc and conditions (wont matter if it’s capped at 5 cause they will throw 20 at you)…well done (sarcasm).

Yeah don’t get rid of the food buffs. Don’t mind making them accessable through badges or w/e like someone suggested (but Anet probably wants to keep food as a gold sink). Anyways to all those complaining they have +40% and -40% to balance each other. If you play zerg longbow ranger and dont get hit by condi’s then guess what you have access to other foods like power + precision. All serious players play with the food that their given build requires, so it should be a non issue as every has the buff of their choosing. Like I said I generally run -40% condi or -20% saffron bread, to offset a +40% condi food using player. If the opposing players are not using food buffs then it is their fault for not taking advantage of a buff system equally accessable to anyone. Othewise you’re arguing “let me just be lazy and/or cheap and don’t let anyone have food buffs so I can continue playing without them.” You can’t argue that +/- 40% condi is op when you should be running the opposite (-40% if you arent a condi build or +40% if you are one). Or if you build has enough condi cleansing you can go -20% saffron bread, or another food entirely. Basically I’m saying the game isnt going to get better through less customization and over simplification like in spvp…not in terms of WvW at least.

coglin.1867:

Zetsumei.4975:

Belenwyn.8674:

Wait until resistance and shield generators are available. This will shift the meta another time. Just pave your way with shield domes and say bye-bye to CCs.

Open field siege? That’s the ultimate disgrace for a fights guild, guilds with any dignity will quit before resorting to this as a norm.

So out of some artificial and irrational, self limiting “dignity” that you created for yourself, you will not take the logical ad advantage? That is your problem. No need to project your irrational sense of tactics on others.

Well as a part of a fighting guild myself I can honestly say I will also quit WvW before resorting to such tactics. What you probably don’t understand is that most fighting guilds like to challenge themselves against greater numbers and push themselves to win through skill, coordination, and teamwork. Open field siege is very dull, and removes a lot of the elements of excitement (it’s not just about always winning). Unless you’ve actually raided in a HC raiding guild you probably won’t understand this, but it really ends up feeling like the most fun you can possibly have in gw2. After awhile that’s all you wanna do and everything else (like pve) seems more lackluster. For me WvW and these sort of fights were the true endgame and the gem of gw2. For those that didn’t get to experience those sort of adrenaline pumping fight in which you and everyone around you really pushing themselves to overcome great odds…well I’m sorry but you missed out imo.

Don’t have time right now but I would of liked to post a video of WvW raiding during it’s prime vs the current raids (and Pirate Ship meta), to get my point across.

met.3518:

I always found it a bit strange that it is a good thing to stack 100 people on 1sqm. That is not really realistic when you imagine that strategy in RL.
Introducing the limit of AoE damaging max. 5 ppl even more encouraged this behavior. I can remember actually using different formations for the zerg before that change. E.g. going in some sort of “line formation” after buffing up was actually useful and successful depending on the situation.

So this COULD encourage a more diverse playstyle than just 50 meelees running through all static fields with stability up and cleaning all soft cc conditions. And also the other way round – targeting AoE spells might become more interesting that just targeting that tightly packed mob (of course, depending on the commander, you also have casters not running with the pack that add a little bit of cloud around that knob)

The aoe limit of 5 discouraged people stacking in 1sq. meter as you put it. Why…because of retaliation. If you hit 20 people in the same spot with retal and no aoe limit you instantly die. So people would stack tight and buff retal…then a not so clever necro or w/e would drop a well on said group and get hit by 20+ retal procs and die. With an aoe limit of 5 you dont die, and people have less of a reason to stick so tight cause they will be taking damage faster than they can dish it out. Melee sticks tight to mitigate some damage yes, but range can’t take that sort of heat(they stick close enough to melee to be safe and not get picked off…but not so close that they are in the bomb). The reason melee can stand there is because they can use bunker skills like shelter, Virtue of courage, Defiant stance, dodges, etc. Well without stab you cant use your bunker skills properly and you pretty much die in less than a second when in a large scale fight…and no amount of tankiness will really change that.
The stab change promotes scattered unorganized range sort of play…which to me isn’t a good thing. Any melee will be useless without reliable stability on him…just becomes a ranged game. If anything make boonstripping faster/better not stability more unreliable. It will promote running into towers rather than fighting in open field (especially when against servers with larger zergs).

It’s already hard enough to go against larger groups than you, so why not make it near impossible? No anet is trying to turn wvw into a siege and defend fest, cause that is probably what their ideology of what it should be. They want it to be even more of a gold sink and have more people sieging rather than open field fighting (which imo is where the real fun is at).

You fail to see the point. It’s not about cc-ing them necessarily it’s about what will happen to you if you’re running smaller numbers than them. Also I’m not complaining about all the changes of HoT…just this one and based off what I seen so far. I’m complaining about the mechanic itself of stacking intensity. It will be a difficult mechanic to balance in both pvp and wvw. If you make the number of stacks extremely high as needed for WvW then the change will have no point in pvp. If you make the number of stacks low but with more skills giving it or shorter cd then you create problems in pvp….do you see where i am going with this?

DeadlySynz.3471:

If this goes through, this is one change that is desperately needed. Whenever a big clash ensues in WvW, it’s always the same; any and all CC is just thrown out the window as it’s nullified.

This is the one “minimal” change Anet can make to WvW to drastically shake it up because no longer will it be case of: stack might, pop stability, and run in unscathed.

I think you’re confusing stability with invunerability. Pretty sure when my group of 25 jumps into 40 we still take massive damage. If you don’t play well you die with or without stab. At least we have a chance to win though even if it’s small. With a pingpong cc meta, and stab potentially getting stripped away in seconds…that becomes an impossible scenario. I mean if you wanna argue that WvW should be all about who has the bigger zerg or the most siege and less about skill…

This change makes zero sense to me for 2 reasons.
(1) It won’t affect pvp or small scale fights because are you really gonna waste 3 of your cc on one guy (then not have any left once you break his stab). Probably not, you will wait till the stab wears off or strip it like you normally would then hit them with all your cc. Now if you are outnumbered 3 to 1 its a different story. Each one will hit you with a cc then chain the rest of their cc. My point being that this change simply increases the favor of bigger numbers not skill. This imbalance will increase dramatically as the difference in numbers increases or the scale of the fight itself increases.

(2) They say they made this change to stability because they don’t like a “blanket” defensive boon, but then they introduce Resistance simply so that their revenant’s game mechanics can work properly.

(3)This is just a bonus for you saying “ooh you should just adapt to the changes”
Don’t worry with new Revenant you can abuse these changes by having a party full of revenants with half stacking stab and half stacking resistance. Then swapping stances. 2 seconds of resistance for the party per revenant (casted up to 3 times per revenant) + lemongrass +melandru = goodbye conditions. 6 seconds of 6 stacks of stab (casted up to 4 times) per revenant for the party = broken stab in small fights…Oh revenant is ranged too so you won’t need any of those. They have 2 blasts finishers so you dont need warhorn warrior or hammer guardian. Just throw in a staff ele or two and no other class needed. Sounds like a fun meta right?

Also for those claiming guardians give perma stability. Not true, you would need 4 per party to do that. Even with 3 you only get stability continuously up for the first push. Then Virtue of courage is on a 75 second cooldown so you get gaps in the stability after that. Now that’s with 3, most groups only run 2 guardians per party though as other classes are needed for various roles.

Simple. Make more smaller maps with the max number of players allowed reduced. 20, 30, 40, or w/e number seems right. I think it would be fairly fun to have 2 keeps a few camps, and 20v20 in that map.

Sorry dawkins I didnt pay attention to the food buffs and sigils you were using. So yeah your chills should be at around 0.8 seconds per tick against melandru user and something like 2.25 seconds on non users. Chill isnt affected by stability and it will stack in duration with other necros using it. So if that is you’re strategy the way you have it set up would be the way i would go too (if i wanted to run chilling darkness along with the other necro’s in my guild). On it’s own it still seems lackluster though, because most are going to dodge out of the field and only get 1-2 ticks. Still works great with plague form though.

Nexed, I’m not saying death shivers is amazing. I’m saying that I want to put 5 points in death magic for the toughness and all the other traits. Death shiver just happens to be the best trait for its slot imo (greater marks isnt terrible either). But like i said out of all my builds i prefer the 6/2/0/0/6 most for wvw, because the damage is so much higher. I just wouldnt use it for gvg’s.

nearlight.3064:

Why would you ever use Death Shiver on that first build? I rarely go that far into death magic, and if I did it would be for greater marks (which isn’t really needed at all).

I get similar levels of toughness using mainly zerker gear with melandru runes, and a mix or zerker, knights, and cavalier trinkets, and I only go like 2 into death magic.

The first build because I like deadly strength minor trait(all the death magic minor traits are decent), as you said greater marks isnt really needed (although i have used that instead), and because vunerability is underrated. 3-9% more damage (per necro) on targets your entire guild is hitting is bad? Oh and I like the toughness it gives. As for the mix of gear, i dont like losing power to gain toughness since wells damaged is power based.

Dawkins, the build looks ok, but i dont think chilling darkness is really worth it. When people run melandru + lemongrass your chill only ticks for like .3 something seconds. It can be ok if you hit their backline (alot of which wont be running minus condi duration) and for plagueform but i feel like its pretty lackluster now. So I would trait something else or put 5 points into something like Death Magic. Also I’m kinda iffy on axe training, but that’s probably just a preference thing. I really, really like how you combined furious demise with death perception and only had to get 30% crit chance (to have 100% in DS). I dunno why i never thought about that lol.

That is my build for wvw yes, and it works well. If you get caught you have deathshroud and plagueform, so its still survivable. In my opinion necro is one of the few classes that can get away with going full glass in wvw. I do enough damage to where I can scare off most thieves or single backline harassers that come at me. But it’s not really suited for gvg’s you’re right. For GvG i’d probably use either one of these two builds.
Build 1: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fRAQNBmODbkjmaabpx3G+bT8LIyGLQcJoO72oA-T1CBwA5U/RpSrzKBxqMBwFBolmhU6AeYaZzRAo3+DBeAAkCgJhRA-w

Build 2: (if fight has a faster tempo): http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fRAQNBmODbkjmaabpx3G+bTMMIzeLYcBoO60kA-T1CBwAGVGkT9HlK9AcRAapZIlOgHm/moEczRAo3+DBeAAkCgJhRA-w

The old chill on blind trait isnt really worth it these days since most run lemongrass + melandru still. Whether you need reduced cool downs on wells, again depends on the tempo of the fights, and the play style of your guild. Also if your guild does provide a lot of aoe fury (mine doesnt) I would take out 5 points from curses.

My final necro build.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fRAQNBmODbkjmaabpxxG+bToLUQvmBQKE1EQ9YUGLLA-TVDBAB1s/gWKJ6TzwoqUUp6KnpEELlTAcBA84gAklSk80BwwRAIgHAQAAEgbezAwQH6QH6QHaXXo38o38mlCIilRA-w
I get about 4.1k power with full stacks and might, with 100% crit chance. For some reason it feels like anet tried to be slick and bug the crit chance of wells. Anything less than 90% crit chance feels like i get less crits then I should. 100% is 100% though so no fudging with that. If you do wanna go tankier get knights gear over cavalier’s always, since precision will give you more dps than ferocity (and those are basically the two traits your are choosing between). Basically knights always gives more dps with the same power and toughness that cavaliers does for any given equipment slot.
Edit: Sorry, since the build has100% crit, its one of the few instances cavaliers might be worth it.

Thanks for the reply Equareo. You’re right I think a bit more toughness would be a smart move, and I wont go ascended quiet yet till I perfect what I want to do. I think the build itself is working out though. I only got speedy kits b/c there really isnt a better trait to choose there, and I wanted access to leg mode (testing has proven it to be well worth it). I will also invest a bit less in condi duration for more power. Anyways here is the build I decided to work towards for now, if anyone else has some input it would be greatly appreciated.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fdAQFAUlUUpEr9dxkLseNSbBN2w0GxFlP/wAcUA-TVCBABKqhgH1fea/h+0B0wBC45HAQaKB9S5HAXAgAAHAcdgUAQMMC-w

Hey everyone, I was hoping to get some input on an engi build for organized raids (smaller number vs larger zergs). That being said I cant be too squishy because I am more likely to get focused when not in a huge blob of our own (will be running about 20-25 vs zerg blobs).

So after some theory crafting this is what I’ve come up with so far.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fdAQJAqelUUp+qlYxvLseNSaBN20UHxllPfxA8UA-TVCBABXqGgg6Bea/hnfAAAcCAyS5nlqawoSwMVJJAACgje0je0je0O6RP6RP6RLFAELjA-w

I wasn’t sure whether to focus on condi damage or just go for direct damage, but in my experience direct seems to work better for zergs. I focused on increased duration to keep vunerability, cripple, poison, and chill up as long as possible to interfere with cleanses, and regroup healing and to counteract the melandru +lemongrass meta (not using conditions for the damage).

Anyways, let me know what you guys think. Gearing can be costly, so I can’t experiment too much. I would really like to see engineers more sought after in WvW guilds though, so any help is appreciated.

PvE
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fMAQRBMPdG2JRFVBXWhVFsWGIWK2z+5MOUi8MKFqyYpTmJB-j0CBYLDimiAisAgEJ0ZmgJPERrFVFRjVXDT5iIq2gjRr2oDQEg5IA-w
I change trait V to VII in nature’s magic when i’m roaming around and not in dungeons. Basically i constantly swap weapons during combat to keep might stacks up. With 25 stacks from perception, and fury up i have about 93% crit chance (I swap it with another axe that has superior sigil of flame after 25 stacks). I chose the spirits cause i find the cool downs on all the other utility skills less than great, and most of the ranger utilities arent great to begin with anyways. The damage buffs from sun spirit and frost spirit are nice and affects party members too.

WvW build
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fMAQNAV8YjEVR2lVeVg2Bg2jMlET+BD9MK90L2oiJ-j0CBIhBCLEmWAmqAgsAKDtIaslgFRjVdDTHjIq2cbZ1GcBSIgDbBA-w
Strong condition build that downs pretty much any class quickly. Again, I dont find any of the utility skills better than the spirits (which work even better with condition build). Food buffs could be better, but those are the cheaper ones i prefer to use that dont cost me an arm and a leg.

The base duration for these traits is listed 6 seconds and 9 seconds. However you get only 6 seconds of both swiftness and fury (regardless of increased boon duration perks)

With my build I have about 25% increased boon duration (which for me makes them say 6.25 and 11.5 seconds). Note that the math is incorrect for one thing and Tail Wind should be listed as 7.25 seconds not 6.25 seconds. In my traits Furious Grip appears correctly at 11.5 seconds. HOWEVER i only get 6 seconds of swiftness and 6 seconds of fury on weapon swap regardless of boon duration increases. This is less than the base of the listed “9 seconds” on Furious Grip.
I use a weapon swap build for pve so it makes a fairly big impact since i am missing 4 seconds of fury out of every 10 seconds.

Everything about the sword is fine, they just need to have dodge override the attack animation. None of this “you need to move the mouse 180 degrees and click a move button then dodge” nonsense.

Hmm Skallagrim Kveldulv, Gard Blodstrup, and Hilding Hrafnson…sound too norny :P. J/k /jk they’re good. Hilding sounds kind of femine though for some reason :/ (like I’d call him Hildi for short)

My female Norn ranger

Tarzana Kneeshooter (breath-takingly awesome I know)