Guild Wars 2

As far as I know (never really spent much time in PvP), there should be a bunch of NPCs -
Golems of all possible hitbox sizes and armor ratings, good to test your rotation. There should even be one area with a massive amount of golems in one place to test AoE skills.
Class-specific NPCs that use similar skills as players.
Map NPCs from Forest of Niflhel.
Possibly some other NPCs from other maps.

That should give you plenty of space to test out your build and overall feel of the character. There is also an option to purchase (for like a silver) any white weapon if you don’t happen to have it in your inventory. Stats are all compacted into an amulet, allowing you to switch them easily. You won’t have the same amount as in PvE, but it’s close enough. Sigils and runes similar, except PvP has some different ones to PvE. Again, shouldn’t be too much of a problem, you can usually find a very similar alternative. Also if I recall correctly, you obtain elite spec in PvP without doing anything (provided you own the expansion), whereas in PvE you have to earn it, making PvP much better place to test it out.

Tbh you’d be throwing the gear out anyway, it’s soldier’s stats. If you wanna try the profession out, go to PvP.

Just let us exchange our 1000 gem pass for another one. I don’t see any reason why players should be punished for buying these earlier and Anet adding progressively more QoL to the new ones only. They should provide exactly the same amount of QoL, they cost the same in the gemstore.

I like the new version better than the old one, but still not enough to actually use it. Anet powercreeped the skins so massively, that this /supposedly/ LEGENDARY skin can be called “fine” at best.

2k gold went into it as well as thousands upon thousands of fractals, but then somebody can buy a 100g skin from the gemstore that’s way better looking and takes 1/100 of the effort this “legendary” skin took. 0/10 would never again

If you already have 2 level 80 characters, there’s no harm in boosting others to level 80 instantly. In fact, I personally never level my characters the traditional way anymore (since I already did it 5+ times), but rather keep a stack or two of tomes in my bank to boost my alts to skip the boring part where I cannot do anything and deal miserable DPS. There are just a few things to watch out for:

Level 80 boost gives you utterly useless stats. No matter your gamemode preference, soldier’s never used anywhere because it gives you literally nothing. Be prepared that you’ll have to throw away most of your gear from lvl 80 boost and instead gear your charater in another way. You can look up builds at metabattle or qtfy website (they have raid builds, but they all work extremely well in any type of PvE).

Heart of Thorns story and open-world are generally considered to be harder than core tyria (base game). As the game evolved, players became bored of old, easy content and called for more challenge. Therefore you should master the basics of the game before you move onto the expansion content. It’s not hard, but if you try to rush ahead, you might run into trouble.

Do not think that finishing the story or maps alone will mean you have “mastered” your profession. There is still instanced content like dungeons/fractals, which require much more effort and in-depth knowledge (assuming you want to contribute meaningfully and not just get carried through) and then there’s raids, which have been called “the ultimate challenging group content” by the devs.
The journey to become a good, experienced player, is a long and difficult one, but I would agree your plan sounds like a decent start.

I didn’t try out any of the new elite specs yet (Anet’s lousy attempt to force players into terrible unfun gamemodes, Imma just wait till they’re available in PvE), but I’d be perfectly content if Spellbreaker is at least useful in some small subset of PvE content. From a quick look… could it be used in high level fractals? Mesmers are usually forced to bring disenchanter for quicker boonrip – but if spellbreaker can rip boons fast enough on his own, that would give the mesmer freedom to bring some other utility than can potentialy increase team’s DPS much more – and summon a much more useful phantasm – swordsman for more DPS or avenger for more alacrity.
Also if their power-based burst DPS is higher than berserker, that would also make them very strong for coordinated parties. Even in T4 fractals it’s usually about quick burst with meta setups. At this point condi PS is usually the only condition-based build in the whole party (sometimes along with druid).

TheUndefined.1720:

• Add 2 versions of the story missions – Solo and Group or Storymode and Hardmode or whatever ; offer an achievement for the hardmode or something. With storymode, easy on the champions / number of mobs / and just overall difficulty.

Maybe you didn’t pay enough attention to the game, but it already works like that. By default, all story instances are made with a solo player in mind and all enemies are scaled to 1 player. If you open that instance with a party, all enemies will scale accordingly and get more health to compensate for higher group DPS. Everything is dynamic – instances will look different to parties of 1, 2 or 4 people…
Just because an enemy in storymode has a champion ring around his icon, that doesn’t make him the same as open-world champions, which are always scaled to AT LEAST 5 people, even if there’s 1 person fighting them. Champions in personal story are all easily soloable, their champion-status is there only to indicate that enemy is somehow important and distinguish it from the myriad of trash mobs.

Yes, HoT story was slightly harder and more demanding than core game story. That’s to be expected, players have been improving and the game cannot stagnate. There’s no shame in dying once in a while, especially if you play for the first time and are not familiar with the mechanics. But if there’s some part of the story you cannot progress even after multiple tries, it’s an indication you should look more into your build or your gameplay (or both).

Aldath.1275:

…we get recolored enemies and NPC models as bosses in fractals, Raids get so much better enemy and scenario design…

Did it occur to you that’s precisely BECAUSE raids aren’t complete faceroll (even tough they actually are lol)?

What separates raid and open world bosses are not enemy models or storytelling. In my 1 year of raiding I’ve barely paid any attention to the story aspects of raids. It’s their complex mechanics and attack patterns that make the fights so intriguing. If you dumb them down, they’ll just become the new open world bosses and all the people calling for ezmodes will immediately lose interest.

I’m not even kidding at this point. What do you think separates Keep Construct from Inquest Golem Mk II? If you think it’s the storytelling or model design you’re just being delusional. It’s the gameplay mechanics that define raids.

The key is making sure everyone’s on the same page as far as group’s goals go. If you want to take your time, run slowly through the fractal, kill every single trash mob and experience the story, make it known in the group description. Similarly, if you expect people to know their stuff and play decent builds, put it up there. Parties without any description naturally tend to fill up faster, but there’s high chance that each member will have different expectations regarding the run. Even T4 fractals are full of noobs expecting a free carry and if you want a smooth and fast run, you have to indicate it on the lfg.

You will still occasionaly have a person joining your lfg without meeting the requirements (or even reading it), but that gives you the perfect right to kick them out.

You are right – we are here to play and have fun. But everyone’s notion of what’s “fun” might be slightly different. Someone finds it fun to completely clear the fractal map of every single enemy. Someone else might find it fun to finish the fractal efficiently and in the least amount of time, not making the tiniest mistake along the way. Until people learn to read others’ minds, you’ll have to indicate to other people what you personally find “fun”.

Most people you’ll find in this subforum indeed used to speedrun dungeons at some point, but typically have moved on ever since and now focus on raids.
Population of dungeon runners at this point consists mainly of newbies just like yourself, who never got the chance to experience the content and now hop into it absolutely unprepared (despite A HUGE amount of learning materials all around the internet). In any case, I would make sure to properly mark your party as “first time run” or something similar, because even today occasionaly some former dungeon speedrunner opens up lfg and tries to find a decent party. In order to prevent confusion, your lfg should be as descriptive as possible and indicate clearly what kind of run you’re expecting.

Btw. if you don’t mind me asking, why are you talking about skipping like it was some kind of bad thing? You made it clear your goal is to farm enough dungeon tokens to afford a set of magi gear for your druid. Why would you waste time completing optional events or killing optional enemies EVERY SINGLE TIME you run through the dungeon path? It doesn’t make any sense, you’re killing your own time. Instead, you can just complete the required events and finish the dungeon in the fastest time possible (given your skill level and party comp) and get to play your desired build – druid healer – much sooner.

My finding was that the difficulty of the last boss (especially in CM) is inversely proportional to your group DPS. With a bad group and poor DPS, mechanics tend to stack, sometimes to the point when it’s physically impossible to prevent a wipe. With a good group, the fight feels much easier and there’s usually no more than 2 mechanics at a time.

If I wanted my feedback to get lost in hundreds of posts by casuals complaining about how hard the fractal is and how fractals are turning into raids, I would have done just that. But I don’t.

@Moderators:
Can you not merge threads? Ty.

After seeing the development of fractals in the recent months I had very high expectations regarding this new fractal. And they have been satisfied. I can confidently say that fractal team is by far the best dev team out there (and I have a lot of respect for all the devs) not only because of the amazing content they deliver, but also because they actively engage with the community (Hi Benjamin Arnold!) on different platforms, listen to our feedback and keep up to date with new strategies used by the players.

As far as normal mode goes, the difficulty tuning on higher scales (T3 and T4) seems to be pretty standard. It feels a bit harder because it’s unfamiliar, but after a few weeks/months, running T4 Shattered Observatory will be no different to Cliffside or Thaumanova Reactor. On lower scales (T1 and T2), it seemed a bit more difficult by comparison. T1 fractals are supposed to be easy, but 25 doesn’t feel like an introductory-type fractal. I especially hated how difficult it was to make up for other people’s mistakes. Typically, one good player is able to carry a team of newbies in any T1 fractal without much problem. Not a big deal to me, since I won’t be running lower scales anyway, but I though I may point this out because newer players might seriously struggle here.

Challenge mode was exactly what it was supposed to be. Challenging, exciting, fun. More mechanics which sometimes overlap. With a good, coordinated team, challenge mode can be done fairly easily and consistently. Nonetheless, I feel like the “ultra challenge mode” achievement is going a bit too far. I haven’t attempted it yet, but the way I understand it – one player dying at any point = immediate restart. I would therefore propose a suggestion: change it to track individual bosses instead. Similar to raid wing 1 achievement. That way people still have to beat every boss without a party member dying, but there will be less annoying restarts and less blaming when 1 person screws up (which would feel especially terrible when you’re at the last boss).

Story was alright, but I don’t pay too much attention to that anyway. It was nice to see some old, familiar faces as well as new ones being introduced.

Also low-gravity mechanic is super fun, but it feels really weird for a moment when you return to normal tyria.

Good job on this one devs, keep it up.

Cyninja.2954:

If you are unwilling to pay for the legendary trinket, get the bloodstone ones.

Arenanet is giving you options. You are complaining about one of them even though you have a perfectly valid alternative which is beyond dirt cheap.

If that wasn’t obvious from my first post, I have no desire to carry tons of unneccessary items in my inventory or pay a price (however low) whenever I want to perform an arbitrary task. That is precisely NOT a valid alternative.

I am not opposed to what Mithos suggested. A complete rework of stat and build system would be perfectly acceptable, but I’m assuming Anet doesn’t wanna do that (otherwise we would have gotten something as crucial a LOOOONG time ago), so I am taking a more realistic approach and suggesting minor changes to current model to make it better.

No matter how you look at it, whether you want the aura or the utility, 2k gold for an accessory is just too **** much.

I care.

Based on the info I have from https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/6psvx7/legendary_accessorcy_aurora_recipe_and_video/ it gives you a SINGLE piece of legendary accessory.

If it actually gave you all legendary trinkets (minus backpack) for this price, that would be perfectly reasonable.

Can we please talk about this?

Most people anticipated that the accessory would cost somewhere around 1 piece of legendary armor, i.e. ~300-400 gold. In reality its cost is closer to the whole set. This is completely insane considering you’ll have to craft a bunch of legendary trinkets, not just this one. There are 2 accessories, 2 rings, 1 amulet and a backpack (which already has an insane cost to it).

Please consider changing the cost to something sensible.

Also before someone says that you craft legendaries for the effect and not the utility, NO, I DON’T. There are different people in this game, imagine that. Someone wants a shiny aura, I want to swap builds and stats on fly, without having to carry a billion items in my inventory. And I’m willing to pay/grind for it, but not this much.

If you’re after overpriced shiny effects, you already have aura infusions for that. Legendaries are meant to serve a different purpose. Free stats swaps and build experimentation (which is why the trait system was changed a long time ago).

If it’s too late to change its current cost, then introduce another legendary trinket, without any effect to it, but with a sensible crafting recipe. I couldn’t care less if there’s some shiny effect going on, but I want the stat swap.

Also while we’re at it, let’s revisit the idea of ghost legendaries. After you’ve crafted a legendary item, you should be able to get an untradeable duplicate for a significantly reduced cost, so you can use it on alts. Doesn’t diminish the value/prestige of current legendaries in any way, since you still have to bind the original one to your account, it just gives you some nice quality of life.

@OP: I would suggest to stick with your mesmer for a little bit more. Yes, base mesmer is indeed a bit squishy, but after you unlock chronomancer, it will increase your defensive capabilities and give you an immense group support potential. And if you still struggle on the standard chronomancer build, you can try out the minstrel chrono, which trades pretty much all your personal damage for even more group support and tankiness. That build is absolutely unplayable solo (you will take hours to kill anything), but it’s very good for difficult group content, where your teammates struggle to stay alive.

Your other options would include power thief and condition necromancer. Both of these classes have the option to take a trait, which heals you based on your outgoing damage (this trait is a minor DPS loss, but that’s perfectly acceptable for open world and can be easily swapped back based on your situtation). Both of these classes are naturally very survivable (thief thanks to the amount of dodges and blinds, necromancer thanks to high health pool + both have means of projectile mitigation) and with the healing trait they become virtually immortal, while still dealing respectable damage.

Healer druid is also an option, but it suffers the same fate as minstrel chrono, in that it’s very good for group play, but absolutely unsuited for any kind of solo play.

Juanna.9837:

Now i’m looking for a build that primarily focuses on being able to take alot of damage…

And why exactly do you want to take a lot of damage? I would suggest you to learn how to utilize the dodge button.

There’s no such thing as a “high DPS + high tankiness” build. If there was, everyone would be running it. By increasing your tankiness, you inevitably HAVE TO take away from your ability to deal damage. You can’t have both at the same time. In order to be able to deal maximum amount of DPS, you have to play a build with little to no tankiness. Nonetheless, it’s EXTREMELY easy to survive on such build (we’re talking dungeons here), so there’s absolutely no reason for you to play anything else, unless you want to waste 4 other people’s time.

Not to mention there’s no easy way of controlling enemy aggro in dungeons, so you playing a tanky build basically equals to sitting there eating popcorn while the other 4 people do all the work.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

All the same, I recognize that might not be what’s best for the game.

Offering diversity is precisely something that IS best for the game. GW2 already does a great job attracting new and casual players, since it’s extremely easy and 99% of the content can be cleared by anybody and provides no challenge whatsoever. If Anet wants to seize an opportunity, they should design more content for hardcore players and long-term fans of the franchise. I see good people losing interest in this game and leaving it every day, because of the reasons mentioned above. The section of the community I’m representing wants challenge in this game. Not mindless grind. That’s gonna achieve nothing and attract noone, because this game already has plenty of it.

If we overlook the fact that Anet’s never gonna touch dungeons again (which is a shame) and give them any sort of polish, purely theoretically:

A queue could be a nice addition, provided it truly works like its PvP counterpart. People in PvP get matched based on their level of experience and skill (whether or not this works accurately is a different discussion, the system at least tries to do something) and we need the same thing in PvE. The problem is that on one side, you have seasoned veterans, who experienced the content a 100 times and know every little trick and gimmick that saves you a mere couple of frames. Our only desire is to clear content as efficiently as possible, maintaining high gold/hour ratio. On the other side, you have new players, who never set a foot in dungeons and only want to experience the content (and story), regardless of time taken. It is pretty clear these 2 types of players cannot be matched together, since they both have completely different goals and expectations.

If the proposed queue doesn’t make concious effort to match players based on this type of criteria, you will end up with a completely useless system, because parties created like this will inevitably run into problems and disband very quickly.

zealex.9410:

Yeah because doing the cm’s once and getting the skins is such an amazing feat…

It is just as much of a feat as beating the CMs a 100 times. Literally no difference. If you want mindless grind for “prestigious” skins, you already have… well… this entire game. For once I want a skill-based challenge. Dumping hundreds of hours into something you’ve already done isn’t a challenge. Soloing bosses is.

I thought that’s what most people in this subforum want. A real challenge. Something that only a handful of players can complete due to their skill and deep knowledge about the game. Not another zombie grind that can be completed by everyone given enough time.

Jarial.3452:

Every other class has the ability to tank yet none are even considered for it because alacrity is so highly sought after.

Might+banners are just as sought after as alacrity, and yet you never see a warrior tank. Why? Because your argument doesn’t make any sense, tanking has absolutely nothing to do with alacrity or desirable boons.

Tanking meta in GW2 boils down to 2 main points:

1) Chronomancers can pick up the role of a tank without sacrificing anything
Look at optimal squad composition in fights without a dedicated tank (like sabetha or sloth). Now look at squad composition in fights where you do need a dedicated tank (like VG or xera). If you replace one of the team members with a (dedicated) tank, you’re basically giving up one spot. One person, who could be doing DPS, providing boons or healing. Meanwhile, if you follow qT’s meta guide, you will have the exact same composition for these bosses, except one person is going to tank on top of his usual job of providing boons/damage. You give up virtually nothing (1 infusion or 3 knight’s trinkets are a negligible DPS loss), but you still achieve the same thing. This composition is obviously better, because you compress 2 roles into 1 spot and effectively have 1 more contributing member of the group (contributing towards killing the boss faster and easier) compared to the group with a dedicated tank.

2) Chronomancers are best suited for tanking due to having a huge amount of active defenses
This might not be so much of a factor for qT and other high-skilled groups, which can survive in almost any conditions, but it definitely comes in handy for your average GW2 player. Tank often has to face more pressure than the rest of the group, so it’s usually necessary to have means of blocking the incoming damage. In mesmer’s case, the build which does that, just so happens to be the meta build (highest support/personal damage). Any other class would have serious trouble surviving on your standard metabuild and would have to sacrifice a lot of DPS/utility to get some extra blocks/evades, which gets us back to point 1: mesmer can tank without sacrificing anything.

So as it turns out, the playerbase is not shortsighted, it is in fact you. Because if you look at the bigger picture, groups which use chronotank, have the best overall performance. Thanks to role compression, you can get the highest amount of DPS and kill the boss faster. Other classes/builds, despite being perfectly capable of tanking, will require your group to make sacrifices and lose efficiency.

That being said, if you don’t care about the clear time and want to whip out your special snowflake tank build and you have 9 like-minded people, feel free to do so. Noone is stopping you. Raids provide more than enough leeway to be able to clear them with suboptimal builds. But you can’t expect 9 random stangers (who have their own lifes and plans) to put up with nonsense strats, which lose time and provide no real benefit.

zealex.9410:

My sugestion is to make them a rare (to super rare) drop from the bosses in each cm’s and future cm’s (include the old cm’s we already have).

My suggestion is to NOT make them RNG grind fiesta like LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE in the game. Make the acquisition skill-based. CMs are fine, challenging achievements are fine, Queen Gauntlent-style gambits are fine, solo challenges (which you have to enter without party) are fine, but please, for the love of god, stop with the mindless RNG grind. For once I’d like to see an actual challenge in this game, challenge based on your skill, reactions and class knowledge. Not some stupid dice rolls that you have no control over whatsoever.

Why does everyone keep saying condi builds are expensive to make? I have like 7 condi classes and they all were dirt cheap to make. Just checked the price of black diamonds and they’re only marginally more expensive than T6 blood, which is used for power builds. Is there something that I’m missing? Did the recipe change?

The only builds I recall being expensive to make were minstrel’s and trailblazer’s (for WvW), because they use >10g upgrade components, which can cost you a lot if you’re not lucky with raid drops and have to make some pieces on your own.

Astralporing.1957:

And notice, that with lower hp and no enrage the group might go with more tanky approach to more easily survive through that.

With lower HP and no enrage timer you have 10 man dungeons.

Here’s some of the most basic info:

In order to get to the final boss, you need to clear out 4 rooms. You can do them in any order, but it’s recommended (because it will be easier) to do heat room as one of last.

In 1 room you will be fighting subject 6. High DPS parties can burst him down really quickly and completely ignore all mechanics, but since you play power reaper, I’m gonna guess that won’t be the case and you’ll have to fight him slowly. Every 25% of his HP, he will summon a veteran ooze (who has a breakbar) that will slowly move towards him. You need to break and kill this veteran ooze, otherwise he will merge with Subject 6 and regenerate his health. There will be smaller oozes periocally spawning as well, but these should not concern you too much as they have very low HP and will die to AoE dmg anyway. Also beware – after Subject 6 starts his blocking attack, every hit he takes from someone in your party (hits by companions such as minions don’t count, only from actual human players) will give him 1 stack of a buff, which makes him do an extremely devastating attack upon reaching 20 stacks. Obviously, you should stop attacking at that point.

Dormitories is another room, where 4 inquest members are trapped and must be rescued. This is very simple, just break the doors holding them in (and maybe also deal with the mobs attacking them). If you rescue them in time, you will be rewarded by 2 of these inquest members placing a debuff on the final boss, which will allow you to defeat him much faster and easier. If you fail to save the inquest in time (usually happens thanks to some jerk who rushes in without other party members being nearby), you will still be able to clear the room, but you will not have the helpful debuff for the last boss.

Then there is the laser room, very simple. It contains 3 consoles, each of them being very clearly marked on the minimap including its number. Console 1 (interacting with it) opens forcefield before console 2, which opens forcefield before console 3. Interacting with console 3 will complete the room. During all of this, you have to be avoiding champion golems and the laser attacks, feel free to utilize the shields which are prepared at the start of the room to help you with that.

Last room is the heat room. Objective is simple – get to the end. You will be taking a lot of damage periodically, which can be avoided by standing in a protective bubble. Those are created by plugging cooling rods (you get 1 for each of the rooms you cleared previously) into their spots marked on the minimap. Usually it’s recommended to use 2 cooling rods, but in highly coordinated parties you don’t even need 1. (And some builds might be able to do it solo.)

Last boss is also pretty simple, just kill him. Tiles under you will sometimes disappear, but this will be clearly telegraphed ahead of time, giving you plenty of space to move somewhere else. If you get cornered, there’s still the possibility of saving yourself with your special action key. Whenever you receive a bomb during this fight, it would be very advisable to move away from the rest of your group, so that they can safely continue to melee the boss.

If there’s still something unclear, feel free to ask.

Memes aside, I’ve genuinely never seen anyone being kicked due to their lack of DPS. Sometimes, it may have been a contributing factor justifying the decision, but usually people are kicked because they don’t understand and fail basic mechanics.

All the entiteled casuals should honestly ask themselves what do they bring to the table as an individual, how do they contribute to the party effort. Are you a support/healer? Then you obviously won’t be judged by your DPS, but rather by the amount of buffs you provide. What are my average GotL stacks? How much might do I have? Is my fury permanent? How much quickness/alacrity do I have? etc….
If you do none of these things and don’t buff your party in any meaningful way, the only other way of contributing is doing DPS. And if your DPS is terrible, it’s completely justified to question your contribution to the overall effort. You’re not providing offensive buffs or doing reasonable DPS, you’re just occupying a spot that someone else could take and acutally do something.

There will be people who misread/misuse data because they’re too stupid to understand how they work. Does that mean we should not have access to such data, no matter how critical they are?

Staff Daredevil.

@OP: No, raiding hasn’t changed at all, everyone’s still toxic delusional elitist running an elaborate scheme to prevent all newbies from joining raids. There are no boss guides available, no build guides, everyone’s expecting you to have at least one bank tab full of LIs, 60k AP, do at least 50% more DPS than official qT benchmarks and be able to 3-4 man most raid bosses. Logging onto revenant (except deimos) or necro will get you kicked instantly and everyone’s gonna report you for playing a non-existent class. There’s no training raids either, you have to be running raids from the very beginning in order to be able to join (and even then your chances are extremely slim). You also have to be white male between 20 and 40, have wealthy parents and master’s degree in quantum physics.

Nocturnal Lunacy.8563:

The person started the stomp before I was up again. Which should’ve reset it. Or were you all going to ignore that?

You seem to not understand how stomping works. It doesn’t really matter when how or why he began stomping, what matters is that he finished the stomp within range of you while you were downed.

Should stomping work like that? That’s up to debate. Feel free to suggest to Anet how to rework it, all players have the freedom to provide suggestions and feedback. But at this very moment, the stomping funcionality works EXACTLY the way it was intended to, because the devs programmed it this way.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I’m not a fan of it, because I’m against anything that I have to do more than once in terms of progression — that’s the sort of grind that drives me away from other games.

^ this exactly.

99% of people will agree onto that, because making any system character-bound is arbitrarily forcing you to repeat the exact same activity you once did for your main X times for each of your alts. Of course you can choose NOT to do it (which is what most people will do), but then you’ll be missing out on it.

You can see Anet has realized that, albeit too late. For example, gliders are bound to your account. They could have just as easily bound them to individual characters. Although nobody wants that. Nobody wants to be focred to buy that 1 favorite glider of yours X extra times from the gemstore for each of your characters (and most people would end up buying NONE rather than buying more than 1, which would negatively impact the sales), hence why buying 1 will unlock it for all characters on your account. Same stuff with everything else…

runeblade.7514:

Agony-resistance leveling will be character bound.

Please no more of this nonsense.

Currently we’re locked into a stupid outdated system because it’s deeply rooted into the game and Anet can’t do anything about it unless they’re willing to re-do everything from scratch (and even then it would have some unavoidable negative fallouts).
I recall one dev even specifically mentioning on the forums that they’ve been thinking about acc-based agony resistance (because duh – it would be like a million times better than this character-based stuff we have now), but they’ve already made their choice and it’s really hard to go back now.

It was this shortsightedness that caused Anet to do much more work than needed in order to fix all their obsolete and unpopular systems.

Everything they did from the start and all the systems they fixed – accbound dyes, skin wardrobe, accbound minis, ascended gear, legendary gear, etc… it was all to support alt-friendliness and get rid of some stupid and completely arbitrary character-binding.

Therefor, I think Anet will be very cautious with their decisions and will (hopefully) make all their future systems accbound, so they don’t have to go back later and rework them. Unfortunately, a lot of harm is already done and we have to live with it, but we can at least learn from the past mistakes and NOT make them again.

That being said, I still think there’s some merit to your suggestion if it’s tweaked a little bit. E.g. increase your permanent account agony resist by 1 point for every 2 completed levels – up to 50 points by the time you reach level 100. That would reduce the amount of agony resist you need for your alts from 150 to 100 and, in turn, would make it easier to gear your alts for FotM, but you would still require some infusions so the market would not disappear completely.

I think this quote by Nike should answer all your questions and concerns:

Deviating from the meta is fine if it makes logical sense. If you’re doing it because snowflakes gotta snowflake and it doesn’t have any upside in the fight you’re being selfish and hurting your team.

If we’re talking raids or any other coordinated group content, celestial is obviously useless. Replace any class of your choosing from the standard meta composition by a celestial revenant, you will end up with demonstrably worse performance, period. This is why meta is meta.

For solo content, feel free to run whatever you want. You’re not draggning anyone down, because you’re playing solo. If you’re concerned about efficiency, I think it’s been stated clearly enough celestial is subpar compared to meta gear, but hey – do whatever you think is FUN.

As for your original question whether celestial allows you to swap roles, that’s also been answered: No.

Ryou.2398:

Celestial is not defensive stats it is a jack of all trades stats set.

I my post I said nothing about celestial being defensive set or not. I challenged you to beat the time of a good player, who doesn’t need the “crutch” of such stat sets and can solo bloomhunger with full zerk gear. If you can best his time, it would help you make your point that the celestial set has its place in PvE. Until then, I will still consider it trash tier.

Beat his time on celestial gear and I’ll admit that it’s better than zerk.

I don’t think anybody was ever denying that. If you can demonstrably proof that you’re doing good work, nobody will question the theorycrafting behind that. That’s why I would always rather have a P/P thief who actually survives and contributes in my party than some tryhard pleb who looked up a build on qT site and thinks he’s instantly good, despite hugging floor 99% time.

That is why I never create or join FotM parties that are too restrictive with classes or builds. I am fine with people playing literally anything, as long as they meaningfully contribute.

I was merely pointing out the particular skills you’re interested in. E.g.: for rifle, you want to be using the 3rd and 5th skills (Blunderbuss and Jump Shot respectively) when they’re available to you, hence why “3+5”. Other skills are irrelevant for you as they don’t increase your DPS output compared to simple autoattacking (with bomb kit). You’ll only be using them when you need the additional effect, e.g. 4th skill on rifle serves as a CC. The DPS rotation should explain all of this stuff.

Astralporing.1957:

…refusing to adapt doesn’t impact you success chances…

So you’re saying that player choices shouldn’t matter? The game should always end up the same way no matter what you choose, what you do? Why have any kind of player input then? Let’s all just go watch a movie and not interact with the world in any way.

If you choose to play a useless build, that’s entirely on you. Learn to live with the consequences.

Doing guild missions.

Ryou.2398:

That is kind of a bad explanation

Alright, let me explain this better:

Celestial gear won’t allow you to assume the role of DPS (damage dealer), because it wastes a lot of stats on passive defense (toughness, vitality, healing power) and therefor has very poor damage potential (not to mention the hybridization of power and condi damage, which also works extremely poorly). If you want to DPS, you’ll need gear specifically focused on that – i.e. Berserker’s/Assassin’s for power damage, Viper’s/Sinister for condition damage.

It doesn’t allow you to become a support role either, because it gives you ZERO boon duration and very little healing power (compared to healing power main sets like Magi’s). I guess you would be able to provide a little bit of healing and buff uptime, but again, it’s extremely bad compared to builds that focus on that like magi druid. You could also try to compensate for the lack of boon duration by a specific rune/sigil choice, but that would lock you into that specific role – which is gonna happen anyway.

As far as tanking goes, gear has very little impact on that. In GW2, one’s ability to tank is determined by the amount of active defenses available to you without needing to alter your build, which is currently dominated by chronomancers. Also you need to have higher toughness than everyone else, but that’s extremely easy to achieve with minimal changes to your build. The fact is, that chronomancers can pick up the tank role without sacrificng aynthing (+ they are gonna be a part of the squad anyway), which makes them naturally better tanks than any other class in the game, because others would have to give something up. And gear has no impact on that (as long as you have a bit of extra toughness) – in fact, chronomancers use the same gear for tanking as they would be using otherwise, for their regular job, with the exception of toughness manipulation.

For casual stuff like open world, feel free to use celestial gear. Nobody’s gonna care and you may end up doing MORE work than people using berserker gear, because they usually fail to dodge and hug the floor 99% of the time. But keep in mind celestial’s (and other hybrid gear) performance in endgame content with coordinated groups will be EXTREMELY subpar and you’ll likely be kicked from most groups.

Please refer to the “DPS Rotation” in build guide posted by nottsgman, it basically explains everything. This build is extremely useful for you, because it’s very simple to play, offers some nice utility (prestacking might, blinding mobs, stacking stealth) and can be very useful in high-level content – fractals and raids.
Both the grenade kit and rifle are there for hard-hitting burst skills, which would be 3+5 for rifle, and 2+4+5+tool belt skill for grenade kit. Neither of these have very strong autoattack, that is why you run bomb kit primarily.

Celestial gear doesn’t allow you to switch roles, it allows you to play all roles poorly. If you want to be able to switch roles, get legendary gear.

the “wiggle” strategy to maintain uptime on its effect has a negative impact on the health of the game (and its players)

I’m gonna go visit a doctor straigt away, I just hope it’s not too late for me…

//Edit: It’s bad guys. He says I’ve been permanently inflicted with severe Delusional Elitism.

Aetherpath and Arah 4 (with the exception of Ghasem).

File Alex.9634:

why cant developers develop a system same as in fractal to let players learn and progress to higher level?

Actually, fractals are doing exactly that for raids. By the time you’re doing T4 fractals regularly, you’re perfectly ready to raid (unless of course you’re just leeching good players in fractals without contributing meaningfully, in which case you’re absolutely NOT ready for raids – but that’s not really others’ fault is it?)…
Also, if you’ve joined the game recetly, it would be stupid to attempt to raid straight away. As stated by the devs – raiding is the ultimate endgame challenging group content (key word: ENDgame) and is designed for seasoned veterans intimately faimilar with the game. If you began your journey recently, you should/will be – by definition – playing the “EARLY game”.

+ what subli said

If you’re talking about the standard chrono metabuild, then yes, it would be VERY useful. Quickness and alacrity boost group DPS insanely, portal+blink allows your group to skip a lot of sections, making the run much faster. Also, you’re able to provide reflects pretty much permanently and stack trash mobs with focus for easier cleaving.
When running low lvl dungeons, be mindful of Anet’s kittened up downscaling system, which will decrease your boon duration that would otherwise be 100% at lvl 80, possibly hindering your ability to provide quickness.
Also, the benefit of a mesmer being part of the group hugely depends on the experience of said mesmer. You won’t save any time on a portal skip if you don’t DO the portal skip.
If there are 2 mesmers in the same group, one of you should relog to a different class. If both of you only have one class, you should start a new one (the game gives everyone 5 character slots to begin with).

By bringing the golem’s HP down by 20%.

Warrior – 14%
Ranger – 13%
Guardian, Revenant, Necromancer – 12% (each)
Elementalist – 11%
Mesmer – 10%
Engineer, Thief – 8% (each)

I’d much prefer clipping. It’s a natural part of the game, nothing can be done about it. I have no idea why devs spend so much time and effort trying to prevent it, there’s just no way to avoid it. Meanwhile, the hovering effect makes it look terrible, stupid and way more immersion-killing than any form of clipping ever would.

Kycoo Grim.9463:

funny thing, Necro is still the go-to for CM 100 in Fractals or most people. Its slower, but VERY safe. I easily pull 10-12k dps as condi Necro without a chrono.

^this.

Also, even though it’s slower short term (you’ll spend more time on boss, because group DPS is lower), these necro+druid parties are actually FASTER in the long run, because they save time on not wiping.

I’ve met a lot of these tryhard elitists, who insist on stacking eles in fractals, because they have theoretically highest DPS. Maybe 1% of them would actually outdps me, because they’re genuinely good players and able to bring out the maximum potential of any class. Nonetheless, the vast majority of these players, despite thinking how good they are, actually suck and don’t understand the game whatsoever. What’s the point of forcing elementalist on yourself, if you keep dying constantly and do half as much DPS as I do on my necro?

When I pug fractals, I don’t care what class people bring. All I care about is that they survive and do reasonable DPS. I would much rather have a 12k DPS necromancer in my party, than a tryhard wannabe ele, who kittentalks everyone else and thinks how good they are, but they keep dying an pull a measly 6k at best.

Don’t get discouraged by looking at the lfg. Play whatever you want, as long as you can play it well. And avoid parties which are overly selective the team comp, they’re mostly plebs looking for carry and will disband after the first wipe, which comes very early on.