Guild Wars 2

So the thing with healing in this game, is that by they made it so every class has ways to mitigate damage that work far better than healing. Reflect/Aegis/Protection/EVADE!!! are all far better ways to mitigate damage than healing in shorter fights (99% of gw2 content).

However in some fights… namely Tequatl, a few healers are very helpful. The problem with building a “full” healing build is that healing scales poorly. A Guardian with full dps build will only heal slightly less than a guardian in cleric’s gear with healing traits.

So TLDR.. the root of the problem is that the game is too EASY, which allows for full dps builds without needing healing in any way.

RIP fun tequatl (that short time after they fixed SA and before they “fixed” crit spots) pours one out

A lot of Story dungeons are currently able to be solo’d…..

And many explorable dungeons can be solo’d as well if you are good enough.

If you refuse to play with other players… might just want to not do dungeons. You can watch all the cinematics on youtube if you are just interested in the lore.

I dont really understand why we are still arguing about this. The new specializations killed a few sub-par builds like ricochet thief (which was bad before, and awful/impossible now) and trap-throwing ranger are now gone.

HOWEVER, every single class is stronger than they were. There are now multiple “viable” builds for each class instead of just one. Almost all classes are now viable in the current “end-game” PVE content… aka dungeons/fractals. PvP and WvW builds are in almost constant flux with each week bringing out a new strong build with a counter coming up shortly thereafter, which will keep players interested in these modes playing the game and challenged.

Also, would like to add that trap ranger is now actually much stronger than before, however this is mostly due to the condi changes rather than the specializations.

Divorcing the stats from the trait lines opened up so many more opportunities on almost every class. Many traits used to be hidden behind an AWFUL stat choice that made it completely useless.

They moved these choices to your armor. So now you can make all new stat combos with your armor. Which had many people complaining “now i have to get more armor”. To which I reply…. OH NO you have to actually play the game, HEAVEN FORBID!!! Most people at this point have already played the same content a thousand times for no reason. Now you actually have a reason to farm for more stuff.

Cirran.1429:

I am curious for those who say that they want hard content, and everything is simply way too easy. Would you be satisfied it ANet gave you your hard content for the same or less reward we get now? I am just curious if you really want a challenge or just like to complain. After all the challenge of beating harder content is it’s own reward.

Cirran
P.S. I know, I know, why do harder content if I am not going to get a better reward. Thank you for making my point for me.

Honestly right now I would do it for the same or less reward. I have already done enough dungeons and stuff to get all the stuff in game that i really want. I mostly play now because i really enjoy hanging out with my guild. Even now my favorite Teq kills are when we spawn it ourselves at an off-time so there are few if any pugs on the map. These are also some of our best times for the kill.

The other reason I enjoy playing the game is because I really like how all of the combat mechanics work. And the more content really flushes out all of the different mechanics the more I like it.

This is also why we only melee Teq, you have to dodge, reflect, heal, coordinate turrets, and focus on highest dps all at the same time. I honestly would not do Teq at all if my guild did not melee it. It would be too boring.

So the question I have now… Is Teq still a “structure”?

If not, what is it?

Also… I did like it better when it was harder, it was more of a challenge and more rewarding when completed. But that is all behind us now.

Honestly I agree with the OP that it is annoying but at the same time the only things that really get annoying with this system are the portal stones and a few common items from BLC. The portal stones don’t really come up enough for it to be an inconvenience. And the minis or whatever else they decide to add to BLC that month only affect a few of us in game. While it is an inconvenience it does not affect gameplay and does not affect even close to a majority of players. With that in mind there really is no need for them to change it.

What I would rather them do is give a small price tag on all those stupid horrible minis that we get out of the BLC so I can merchant them for 2c each instead of typing in “6 Miniature Ravens” every time I open BLCs. Or even better yet allow us to trade them in the TP!

So a couple things about this topic. First of all you can still get almost the same diversity using a bunch of different armor pieces mixing and matching. I am not even going to go into whether this is the “right” thing to do. (Ideally everyone learns the enemy mechanics and times their dodges properly so they can always simply wear Berzerker). It is still possible, it just costs more in-game gold.

The next thing to remember is that the game is almost 3 years old now. MMO’s like this HAVE to change every once in a while to keep long-term players interested and spending money on the game. You must remember that ultimately Anet is a business.

If you are really looking for a RPG-style game that never changes, you really should not be playing an MMO. It is in the nature of an MMO (and in its best interest) to routinely change skills/build to keep the play-style evolving and new. If you were to look at GW1 (my favorite mmo ever) they changed skills/builds/professions almost every 8-10 months. GW2 has now changed them about every ~10 months. This is a healthy cycle for an MMO.

Getting to this particular change, I really like it. Now the traits are exactly what they are at face-value. They now simply enhance the skills you have equipped and the armor/stat choice that you have made. The opportunity costs are now much more understandable and much easier to navigate.

If they would add some legendary armor that can change stats on the fly, i would love it, but again i would expect that it would be really, really, really expensive.

ShelBlackblood.7826:

About Teqteq: I refused to log in since the pre purchase fiasco occured; kinda gave up on this game. Before, I was commanding the range zerg or turret defense groups, with explanations + placing buff food and we succeded almost 99% of the time, with complete randoms/pugs. I’ve read a lot it of this thread and watched my sister doing Teq two times after the latest patch. Most of the players were really trying their best and it looked like – at least to me – that they indeed knew what to do.

Therefore I call the whole l2p and get good talk bs. You can believe me, I killed him 50+ times and I can tell what it looks like when ppl are trying or not. Other than that, there will always be at least 10% afk, 1111 or staying dead players, you almost can’t avoid that if you aren’t in an unpersonal (+most times unfriendly) 200 man guild.

I am not arguing lack of skill nor lack of trying. What i am arguing is that RANGING cannot complete teq anymore!

It is very do-able if the zerg would just go in and melee with reflections up 100% of the time!

What i am saying is: learn to adapt!

You need 6 elementalists with a focus to time their swirling winds correctly to have 100% reflect up-time. The rest of the zerg can just dodge when needed, stun break/stabo when needed then just spam 1 in the crit spot.

So you dont need a 200+ guild, you only need 6 good elementalists and the entire fight is still trivial.

Astralporing.1957:

TinyThibault.9216:

So we are able to get 9+ minute kills without using the exploit at all.

How do you know that? Did you have no guardians at all in the dps zerg? So far all the screens i have seen of “legit” kills had still guardian symbols visible on the ground.

If you read the rest of that post… i said we beat guardians with a stick if they use symbols, typically symbols mead light fields which means no might.

I obviously cannot and should not have said at all. It is possible there were a few symbols. Here is the video from our Monday night kill. We hit 9:04.

You can see in the video there are not many guardians, and even less light fields. The only light fields were when wall of reflection was used.

Sadly, i dont have a video from our guild run saturday night where we had even fewer people with fewer guardians and almost 0 pugs. We hit 9:02 on that night.

Teq is just as killable as he was before. The fight has not changed at all if you were among us that still did melee kills before the patch because it was faster. Did we get about 2 minutes less than before the 2x health, yes. Is it now impossible, NO.

If anything is harder it is because we lost some healing from tome of courage because Signet of courage is such complete garbage now.

How about we let them fix the other glaring issues before they give us the char slot that isnt technically necessary to provide until HoT actually comes out

Dinks.2478:

It isn’t hammers, it is symbols. Both greatsword and mace had symbols. It is the Guardian meta to run GS Mace/Torch +symbolic avenger. Unless you specifically had all of your guardians turn off that trait you benefited from the bug willingly or not.

Except if, like us, at Teq we told every guardian not to use symbols, ever. Symbols are light fields, which leads to retaliation, which is useless. Light fields wipe out the fire fields which erases might stacking which leads to less dmg in the zerg (assuming the traits worked properly of course).

Did we benefit a little from this bug, probably, would it have decreased our time by 9 minutes, definitely not.

Also our teq build at the time was actually GS + scepter/focus for blasting and immobilizing creepers… so we only had the 1 symbol. This was also on a guild run, we spawned it ourselves, we had very little pugs so i can be fairly certain there were not many symbols in the zerg, 1-5 probably, 50-100 definitely not. That night we also only had 16 guardians.

Heibi.4251:

eldrin.6471:

The only thing i can say for certain is i do not like the increase in teq hp and only being able to crit in one spot.

Actually the part I don’t like is that it was only done to make the event last longer instead of “BALANCE”. And last longer most world boss events do. I saw my first Golem Mk II failure yesterday. Normally the number of folks we had would have been able to do it, but not anymore. You need far more people to complete it now. Shadow Behemoth is even worse. An event that normally takes 3-4 portal rounds to complete is now 7-9(hit 9 portal events yesterday). You can barely scratch his HP bar these days. Come on, ANeT, fix the balance correctly. Don’t do it for your bruised ego of adding in no condi limits and discovering the detrimental effects on your bosses. It wreaks of poor lazy programing.

There are a couple things i would like to mention here. you do NOT need more people, you need less stand in the corner and range people. They only serve to scale up the fight without doing the dmg they scale up for because they are not critting.

With Golem MkII you now need to walk up to its base and melee him again UNLESS you have a HUGE amount of people, or you have a ranged AoE auto attack like engineers. Single target ranged attacks cannot crit him.

If people walk up and melee the boss while moving around out of the lightning it would take the same amount of time or less than before. But people refuse to change and play this game like it was supposed to be played, with active fluid combat.

What part of stand on a barrel and shoot at the WORLD BOSS while taking no damage and killing him in a minute or two is ACTIVE FLUID COMBAT?

The changes they have made play very mush so into anet’s stance on having a fun-to-play active combat system that is not tank-n-spank, it is active for every role that you want to play.

Seriously Anet, Devs please keep this going. I think that if this keeps up you will get a lot of those people back that you had at launch with these promises! World bosses / PvE is starting to actually get fun again, not just a boring task to get 1-3 rares and then move on. THANK YOU!

eldrin.6471:

Just a point of intrest,how do you ensure no guardian’s are using the symbols exploit?

I cannot definitively say that there was not a single guardian using a symbol, but before last night with the 14:11 kill we beat it into every guardian that using a symbol is bad and should be avoided at all costs. Symbols typically lead to less might for the zerg which has been a HUGE problem in teq fights up to the crit change.

But you have to remember the problem is not that having that trait automatically means u do 200k+ per swing its only when you stack symbols. And all of our guardians at the time were using GS and beaten with a stick if we saw a light field other than wall of reflection when the commander called for it.

Also, it is very difficult to get a teq kill without guardians, not impossible, but difficult. this is NOT because of the dmg they bring. It is because their “receive the light” heal, bow of truth heal, battle presence heal, and wall of reflection is vitally important to staying alive in the zerg. Not to mention having stand your ground for all the people that refuse to have stun breakers on their bar.

further evidence, we got the 9:02 kill and 9:04 kill without knowing about the broken trait, after we found out about the broken trait we got the 14:11 kill. I mean heck we killed teq in the last burn phase before the timer started back up.

Seriously anet… fix that trait ASAP please.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Killing something using an exploit may not make pugs less being noobs, but killing things using a bug or exploit severely undermines the argument that the kill was done because of skilled play. If the kill was accomplished because of a bug, then legit or not, it’s nothing to be proud of since it had nothing to do with skilled play.

Also the argument that ANet “allowed” the bug to be applied in the 1st place is nonsensical if you know even the smallest amount about computer programming.

So we are able to get 9+ minute kills without using the exploit at all. Down from about 11+ minutes before the doubling of health.

With all guardians using symbols we got 14:11 today. Guardians are very broken right now… honestly cant wait for the fix.

And i agree you cannot argue that teq is still fine using an “exploit” or broken mechanic, however it its just as doable as before without using this. But once again people HAVE TO MELEE!!! people need to get there reflects going. If there are people on the map that absolutely refuse to get in melee tell them to just clean out fingers. The fingers are what actually kills a zerg, not Teq.

We have killed it multiple times now with more than 9 minutes to spare since the patch. It is not hard. And to answer what someone said about the poison… AGAIN…. the point is you organize. Each map needs to have a group of reflectors that deal with the poison fields incoming, they need to have teams going out to kill the fingers, they need to have 3-4 competent defense groups WITHOUT afkers scaling up each defense.

The zerg now needs to learn to actually jump the waves (or dodge), they need to stun break or stability the fears. they need to activate the healing skills during cripple fields.

I believe [TxS] were the best before this change with a 13:15 timer at the kill, and im fairly certain they could do it again or even beat it now with this change! My guild’s record was 11:20 before the condi buff, after the condi buff we got a 13:05 without trying. It NEEDED to be changed. I am in [EG] by the way.

This fight is now more fun that it has ever been.

Please anet, sincerely, do not change this. It has been a while since there was some fun “challenging group content” in this game other than TT wurm. Really like the direction you are heading! Cannot wait for the expansion to see more of this!

Tumult.2578:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Tumult.2578:

So your saying we should simply eliminate all the classes and builds that don’t have melee ability. Seriously?
Or are you saying there should be world bosses that can only be defeated by range?

Which professions don’t have melee abilities? Or are you saying that no one should need to have to switch out skills or weapons before the encounter starts?

What does melee abilities have to do with it?
Which light armor do we change out to so we can survive in the melee crit box, because the light armor classes are designed so we cant stay there.

The idea is that u have a zerg that is all working together, eles are throwing down water fields, necros using vamp aura, guardians using Receive the Light. People need to be traited for some defense. People need to know to dodge the stomps. People need a stun break/stability for the fear (or dodge/block it). People need to take an ACTIVE role in playing this game.

Standing at the back and pressing 1 is too boring, if thats something u want to do just dont do Tequatl, let those of us that want a challenge and want to be actively adapting our roles do that, its very rare in this game, let us have TWO now. (TT wurm / Teq)

Tumult.2578:

So your saying we should simply eliminate all the classes and builds that don’t have melee ability. Seriously?
Or are you saying there should be world bosses that can only be defeated by range?

ranged classes can still stand in melee range….

We got a 9:02 kill last night, its very much so not impossible and its actually quite a bit more fun now. People standing back and ranging will no longer get a kill. People will have to melee and actively take part in the battle.

It still seems weird to me that the guild wars community (or at least the vocal ones on this forum) seem to think that when there is a fight which makes you take an active part in the outcome of the fight its a bad thing. Thats what this game is based on: active combat. Anet seems to be taking a much more aggressive stance on making the combat more active with these patches and i LOVE it.

FYI, I am in [EG]. We now have 3 defense teams clearing out the mobs at the turrets, and two response teams clearing out fingers. The finger clearing really does seem to make the difference because that poison stacking will decimate a zerg now. We are now running full berzerker gear. Warriors now can run Phalanx Strength which fixes the might problem we had before. You can also now use all fields now, so time warps/symbols/water fields now no longer reduce dmg by decreasing might, they actually increase damage, its wonderful!

P.S. we also got a successful TT wurm kill last night. It was a little tight, we had about 30 seconds to spare first phase, but phase 2 is now WAY easier.