Guild Wars 2

You can tank, but to tank you need to 1. keep aggro 2. somehow survive (avoid/negate/heal damage).

Without keeping aggro you cannot tank … in GW2 aggro appears in most cases to be very simplistic based on who hits first and who does the most damage. In order to tank you therefore must have good sustained damage and should ideally hit before the more mobile burst damage classes / range damage.

I think I’m at the opposite end of the spectrum to you having got a lot of sustained damage on my guardian I am now looking to move to a Power/Toughness/Vitality gs, with the setup you describe I would say you might do better with Power/ Precision / Crit possibly even adding a +%dam / +%critchance / +power / +precision sigil to it.

Quick question: Which weapon sigils do people prefer?

Personally I tend to default back to Sigil of Force … +5% damage can never be a bad option?

Thanks for the advice.

Yes I use greatsword because it feels better and while I appreciate hammer I just dont enjoy playing with a hammer anything like as much …. so I dont.

Good advice on dropping Zealous Blade, that’ll go when I next log in, the 0/15/30/20/5 setup Kalona suggests looks interesting, I’ll give that a try otherwise revert back to something closer to what I’ve got now maybe 20(II VII) 5 5 30 (I IX XII) 10 (IV)

In terms of updating my setup I guess the steps are:

1. Replace my Rampagers (Pw Pr Cd) to something else … maybe a dungeon gs (Pw To Vi) ???

2. Replace my Karma Exotic Armour (mix of stats all over) to something else … maybe Knights Draconian (Pw Pr To) ???

3. While I quite like Sup Rune of Wurm if I’m replacing armour then I could move this to Sup Rune of Soldier (same Vi, replaces crit dam with toughness, and damage with condition removal)

Trinkets I’d probably leave where they are, I quite like the Vi (and so HP) boost they give.

Any more advice would be gratefully received.

I’ve played GW2 since it started with my first and favorite character a guardian, I have however spent the last few weeks levelling and playing new necromancer and warrior characters for variety and to get a different perspective on the game.

Coming back to my guardian I’m considering refreshing my build and would welcome any advice:
http://tinyurl.com/bpxv3mb

[edit: anyone know how to make my link work? I’m just using [url][/url] tags atm address works if cut and paste but Bad Link from above]

I mostly play PVE but some dungeon and WvW not often enough to merit a separate equipment setup.

Weapons:
Rampagers Greatsword (Power Precision Condition Damage) with Sup Rune of Force (+5%dam)
Rampagers Staff (Power Precision Condition Damage) with Sup Rune of Earth (Bleeding on Crit)

Armor:
I went for Arcon Karma Exotics as this was higher raw defence than rares and attainable when I was gold poor. (overall 101CD 146HP 68PW 176PR 120TO 152VI)

To this I added 6 Superior Runes of the Wurm as it seemed a good mix of Survivability & Damage (Vitality Crit Dam Dam)

Trinkets:
I went for pure Valkyrie (Power Toughness CritDam Healing)

Skills:
I always have Signet of Resolve, Save Yourself, Purging Flames and vary the other utility often Judges Intervention Retreat or Stand Your Ground .
I’ve not found an elite skill I really like but often default to Tome of Wrath.

Traits:
30/10/0/20/10
Honor 1 Virtues II and Save Yourself work together
Zeal II, Radiance III and Purging Flames work together
Other Traits buff my greatsword

Looking back on the build now it feels a little all over the place, it works but I’m sure could be better.
Reading many forum threads on guardian builds I can see many “This is the only way to build a good guardian” explanations but these tend to disagree with each other.

I would therefore welcome any advice or comments.

Many Thanks,

I’m not an accountant nor an economist, I’m a chemical engineer.
Day one of my University course back in 80’s the first thing we were given was an equation:
What goes In = What comes Out + Accumulation

This equation applies to pretty much all aspects of engineering and for that matter life.

In this respect, every time you kill something, gather some resources or complete a quest coins are being put into the game.
If coins accumulate in the game this will lead to inflation, not always a bad thing but does need to be managed.
In order to prevent the Inflation being uncontrolled and spiralling there must be mechanisms for coins to be removed from the game. There are actually very few in GW2 … gem purchase and tp tax are just about the only ones I can think of.
[edit: oh and wp travel]

fairly new to warrior, trying out a few different builds as I level.

I’m currently aiming at something like this:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fIAQJARTjcO5uJPOPMRCALjiA6ogKm0HaLVoMA;T4AA2ypESJlSNlSKqcM5IyxmjLHZOjKOWA

I’d welcome advice on how to improve / enhance.

Many Thanks.

I’m not sure its just toughness for all mobs, on the plinx event the final boss seems to run after and follow for absolutely ages the first person to land a hit on him irrespective of their level / toughness.

Dual wield greatsword? Swords aren’t that heavy in real life.

I have for many years taken part in battle re-enactments, I have full historically accurate Viking armour and blunted weapons of similar weight to the real things. My swords arn’t greatswords, they’re only 30inch or so blades weighing something over 1kg.

Years ago at a re-enactment / larp conference in Reading at the time called Armageddon while waiting for our display fight I was chatting with a larp’er with 2 rubber greatswords who seemed to think this was a realistic setup. Just handing him one of my swords he instantly understood why it is completely unrealistic to take something 4 times the weight in each hand and run into battle swinging them like cricket bats.

While a large man might be able to lift a greatsword in each hand (in addition to armour (mine weighs about 12kg) and a helmet (mine is about another 1.5kg), he might even be able to swing them both for a short time, being able to do so with control and put power behind them for any length of time (such as the length of a battle) is completely laughable.

That said, GW2 isnt real life, its a game and if dual wielding greatswords comes in then fantastic, my warrior and guardian will probably get them and I’ll enjoy it. Dual wielding of greatswords isnt even going to come close to being the least realistic thing in the game …. and that imo is a good thing.

I’ve only been running fire elemental for about a week, but have run several times a day over that week.
(Its not a bad option for levelling up a character which is why I’m running repeatedly).

In all those runs I’ve never really understood what happens at the boss, I just stand in the eye of the storm and autoattack … no tactics, no danger, no need to revive anyone just target hit and wait, the lag from caused by server guesting means I cant see whats going on, the number of people mean it goes down fast.

I’d much rather there was some challenge with suitable reward at the end to reward the effort not just turning up.

Emissary

you see a big sea of new faces at every event, then after a frenzy of hacking and slashing, they all vanish into thin air to different WP’s without so much as a “that was fun, bye!”. It’s depressingly anti-social, and starts to feel lonely after a while.

+1 … very very true I’ve played a lot of MUDs and MMOs over the years and find that GW2 has just about the worst sense of community, I had partly put this down to teamspeak (which I cannot use) assuming that players were chatting in ts instead of in game channels .. but perhaps not.

On your other point, I love the dynamic quests that form variable sequences … take this bridge, if you fail then fall back and defend a base camp, if you win proceed across the bridge and attack a fort etc.

To my mind dynamic events should play off each other far more than they do now with strings of 10-20 quests all dependent on the previous ones, you can either drop in / out of part of the string, or stay for the full string with rewards snowballing for more of the sequence you stay for and a big reward if you run the whole sequence to a successful finale. Far better to get a map working together rather than e.g. maw every 30 mins.

Maybe put all guests automatically into overflow on every map til they’d been on a server for (6?) hours … this would leave the non-overflow for server home players.

+1 to would like to see a statement from Anet.

I like the no chests for guests, but then I also like the one chest per account across all servers (I have 3 level 80’s and while I never guest I do feel I have to hit all chest events with all chars daily on my server … which is getting monotonous).

It may however be easier to just leave things as they are and make guesting chargeable, then those that want to move to another server to be with friends can and will get full rewards once they do but have to pay for the move which will discourage server hopping. Maybe 200gems per server move or similar would be about right.

Hey come on guys give the guy a break, yes his diction grammar and spelling is appalling but the sense is there. Theres no need to flame someone for using a pseudo-teen-urban-babble.

Personally I have a lot of sympathy with the idea that there is too much server hopping at the moment, causing:
- lag (because of too many players in a single map for an event)
- destroying a sense of community (either too much /map spam or events not being announced on /map as they start)
- deflation (with rares and exotics now becoming farmable)

While it doesn’t stop me enjoying the game with my friends I likewise have yet to see a good side to guesting.

loneknight

“The real fun is figuring out the clues dropped during conversing with NPCs & taking note of the changes in landscape along refugees’ path. "

Wow you read all that? Good on you if thats what you enjoy, for me I’m not sure theres enough time in the day to do that, I prefer to try to filter the very few bits of text that are important in the game concentrating on killing stuff and playing then grab a book if I want to read.

I got 5 fine stones (not the regular ones of which I have hundreds in my bank) on a new character yesterday. cant remember exactly how it was either personal story reward or in a dropped chest opened with a dropped key.

In 3 characters to level 80 these are however the only free ones I’ve seen so dont think this is a common drop.

In the living story Lost and Found event I have found 2 different items and returned them to the refugees in Lions Arch.

It seems that 6 are needed to complete the event.

Are you supposed to be able to find the same 2 items more than once (similar to the refugee mementos) but its just not working atm or are there other items hidden around the maps that I’ve yet to discover?

I’m a level 40 warrior atm, currently a full row of signets seem to work well for me, but having read the forums it seems that signet builds do not scale well to higher levels.

I think therefore that at some stage at or before 80 I’m going to have change to a different setup.

Is there some conventional wisdom about when signets cease to be a good option when levelling?

Also got double chests today, was also at 4/5 challenges on gaining the 4th challenge also gave me the xp for the next level simultaneously giving me 5th challenge.

Think this may be if more than one challenge is completed simultaneously when completing your dailys you get a chest for each of those challenges.
Wonder if it also works completing daily kills and daily vet kills?

MagicalPubes.3140:

My record was 42k Scholar runes with force sigil, ofc everything else zerk. 20/30/0/0/20

42k ? I’ve only just started a warrior after listening to the insane damage they do compared to my guardian … my guardians peak recorded single hit damage is just over 206k I’m therefore confused.

Love all the walls of text, having spent an entertaining morning reading every word of the Trollfest thats developed here its actually easy to summarise:

1. Some think Necro balance and skills are ok, others dont (that covers 75% of this thread).
2. For survivability that the OP asked about its mostly rock paper scissors; they can survive well if Necros suit your play style and learn to play their strengths.

Necro may be able to survive as long and in as hostile an area as Guardian can … as I said in my earlier post I can do the same run with my Necro as I do with my Guardian, but for me it takes more effort, thought and management to do so.

This to me makes Guardian more ‘survivable’.

Off on a tangent for a second, levelling and learning to play a Necro gave me insights into the game and set up of characters, skills and traits that has helped me understand how to play my guardian better. I’d thoroughly recommend anyone to level and learn more than one character.

I can only compare Necromancer with Guardian as these are the only 2 classes I’ve fully levelled and equipped.

Both have good and bad points as you’d expect, the biggest difference is that my Necromancer has around 28k hp my Guardian around 18k hp, but with heavy as oppose to Light armour and difference skills & traits Guardian is in PVE far more survivable.

As a Guardian I wander round Orr with little or no fear knowing I can kill anything that aggros me before I get hurt, as a Necromancer I can do the same wander but need to plan my route spotting and killing stuff before it kills me.

Both are however fun to play.

I’m fairly new to necro having played guardian until recently, my necro is so far only lvl 63.

I’ve talked to other necros in my guild, scanned these forums and read a number of guides and it seems that most necros prefer dagger/dagger or sceptre dagger with staff alt.

Having played around with various combinations I find that on a condition trait and built I far prefer axe/focus for a main weapon with much less used scepter/dagger alt.

I particularly dislike dagger mainhand, this dosent seem to fit with any build I can come up with (unless someones got a life drain vampire build all centered around Life Siphon).

Am I missing the reason that so many necros love dagger mainhand and hate axe so much?

You were also interested in necro vs guardian I think too.

My main is a guardian lvl 80 with 100% world completion complete personal story and a full set of exotic armour and weapons, some serious pvp levels and lots of wvw experience. I am now working on a 2nd character a necro currently level 50ish.

In my view guardian is a more intuitive character with skills that work together far better than necro.
Take the guardian greatsword, skill 5 to bind a mob then pull it, 4 to build vulnerability, some damage and set up a combo field then 2 to do insane damage and form the combo finisher, then 1 1 1 while in cooldown including a 2nd combo finisher and repeat with 3 as an alternative to 5 to jump to the mob rather than pulling it.

Necro on the other hand with dagger dagger has 5 good / useful skills that just don’t work together in that way and leave you often waiting for cooldown until your next damage burst.

Necro (oddly imo) has far more hp than guardian but survives far less well in light armour as oppose to the guardians heavy and better heals.

To answer you then I would say that for a casual player guardian is easier to play well than a necro, but once the concepts of each have been learnt the move from playing well to being very good / exceptional is going to be more about the player than the class and therefore both equally easy / hard.

I had rewards very similar to those you describe, I didnt have high expectation of reward so I wasnt disappointed, my main motivation was to finish another aspect of the game.

Better rewards would however encourage players to revisit the quest to help those that are stuck looking for a party so they can finish their personal quest. It would be really lovely to see players actively looking for those that have got to Victory or Death and forming parties for them to walk them through the quest so they can all get high level rewards rather than the current frustrating situation of players reaching Victory or Death then spending a week trying and failing to get a party together while spitting teeth at this nonsensical and silly switch from solo to group in their personal story.

Seems that this topic has been raised in this and about 7 other sections of this forum as well as forums and discussion groups outside of the official gw2 forum … enough to say this has upset a lot of people.

Does anyone know if there’s been any official response on the subject from ArenaNet ?

@mercury : so one player helping another player with their personal story isnt appropriate to the players helping players forum?

btw informing us of our deviation from your perception of the forum norms isnt players helping players therefore perhaps shouldnt be in this thread? Offtopic forum might have been a more appropriate place for you to slap our wrists.

Also seems odd to me that in guildwars (no matter what the provenance of the name) the guild plays such a small and insignificant part.
I’m a member of what I consider to be a good guild and we work together, chat and share ideas and gossip but that plays a far smaller part of the game than similar ‘guild’ chat in any other mmo or mud I’ve played.

I’ve love to see a guild castle instance built into the game, with daily & monthly quests both personal and party to be undertaken to build the castle or something similar with eyecandy builds, boons, and convenience (e.g. choose where to site guild tp bank and sellers) to give some sense of having common objectives and having something to work together towards (lets all see the progress we’re making towards being able to build a guild food buff seller).

Instead atm I earn guild influence, somehow, I’ve no idea how, or where to look to see how much I’ve earned or other members of my guild have earned and have no sense of achieving anything for my guild as I progress. Boons from the guild appear on the guild screen but I dont feel any difference at all from them. As for guild banners well I see others plant them but where I’d get one from … no idea.

I want to be an active guild member but its actually quite hard to work out how to do this other than informally through chat help. As said very odd for a game marketed as guildwars.

The last quest in the personal story (other than the walk and talk to those you met along the way congratulations quest) is called Victory or Death and starts on the Cursed Shore map near the Narthex in the dungeon.

You dont have to complete any of the dungeon story modes in order to do this personal quest.

This is however (and a big and disappointing surprise to me) not in the least soloable. You will see on map chat occassional calls : ‘lfg arah story’ or similar. This is other players at the same point as you looking to put a party together to complete this quest.

I spent a week looking to put a party of 5 together for this, couldnt find enough players and then settled for trying with a party of 3. The surprise to me was that while it took some time (45-60mins) it wasnt that hard. Running this with a party of 2 guardians and 1 warrior was about equivalent to running fractals level 1 with a party of 5.

In my view making the effectively final quest in the personal story unsoloable is a shocking, disappointing and frankly bad decision. Its the one thing that has really made me spit teeth at this game, that said it is just about the only big disappointment I’ve come across. Its a stupid decision from ANet, but everyone makes stupid decisions from time to time … I’m willing to (grudgingly) forgive this stupid mistake they’ve made.

This is really the one thing I find disappointing about GW2, I’m more used to MUDs where most players are frequently chatting and building relationships and discussing ideas, to say that this is guildwars there is very little focus on the guild and building community or relationships with other players.

Even in WOW / ROM / similar chat among guildees is far more prevalent than here. In my active and good guild 50+ players online at any time theres rarely more than 2-3 players who ever use guild chat.
I therefore dont feel I know more than a small handful of other players in the game, and none of them well enough to go to for advice or to bounce ideas off.

I’m a level 80 guardian, my setup concentrates on dps, I mainly use greatsword as a general weapon and switch to staff when in party and need to give support or for ranged attacks .
I’ve invested in a full set of heavy exotic karma armor.

What I’d like some advice on is what armor rune set I should look to upgrade this with:

Superior Rune of Divinity (6x +10 all stats +3%crit damage) looks fantastic but is very generic and very very expensive.

I was wondering if perhaps one of the following would be viable options:

Rune of the Baelfire
(25 power) (15% burning duration) (50 power) (5% chance to gain vigor for 10s when hit.) (90 power) (5% chance to cause a fire nova when hit.)

Rune of the Flame Legion
(25 power) (15% burning duration) (50 power) (5% chance to cause burning for 1 second when hit.) (90 power) (+5% damage against burning foes.)

Rune of Infiltration
(2% damage vs. foes below 50% health) (15 precision) (3% damage vs. foes below 50% health) (35 precision) (+5% damage vs. foes below 50% health) (You cloak when you’re hit below 10% health.)

link to wiki rune page : http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Rune

Any advice or other suggestions would be very welcome.

Same problem here, have been playing GW2 happily for a couple of months, no changes to firewall or virus protection. Took a weeks break from the game and come back to be unable to launch it. Stuck at Downloading 0kb. This is the case even with no firewall / virus protection running.

Have reinstalled game and run -repair neither work nor help.
Have now sent a gameadvisor report to support.

If anyone had any good ideas of what else to try I’d be grateful.