Guild Wars 2

You’ve been turned into ghosts, which only happens on P3, but you’re using the ghostbuster guns that you can only get at the end of P2.

Hmmm.

These wings are bad and the game now looks significantly worse because of them.

My favorite part about asura is how nobody on the dev team ever tried moving and attacking with one at the same time, so any of the autoattacks with twirly animations such as necro axe or elementalist dagger only twist the top half of the character while the bottom half continues running normally, making asura spaz out in a really crazy glitchy manner every time they use skill #1.

My second favorite part is how each asuran eye reflects light differently for some reason and it ends up looking suuuuper weird and ugly in most lighting situations, with one being normal and the other being this dim, creepy, dead looking thing. Some faces are worse than others. The “cute” female face that seemingly everyone goes with probably gets it the roughest.

I’ve been looking forward to spending gems on some new asura faces but all of the makeover kit specific ones have been really, really bad so far. C’mon anet – if your entire game model is based around constantly pushing stupid stuff on the gem store, put some effort into making that stupid stuff look good. The hair options were nice, at least.

This thread may be a year old but that doesn’t make it any less funny that somebody out there thought that world events where you hit 1 and alt tab were both challenging and fun to the point of perfection. Also if you somehow die while alt tabbed, it has zero effect on the outcome of the battle except that someone else gets daily revive progress before you are allowed to collect your dropped loot.

And then somebody necro’d the thread to agree.

They will never do anything about this. They -especially- will never redo all of the asuran animations to fix this.

I’d like an invite to this (NA). Haven’t done Arah in over a year and don’t remember a whole lot of it, so a refresher would be fantastic. People melee lupi now, I guess? Obal is the only guy I ever saw doing that back in the day.

VitalSuit.1980:

crosknight.3041:

ATM, like ranger, necros are underrated

Rangers actually bring something to the group though (spotter, frost spirit). Necros have diddly squat for the group.

Not only do they bring frost spirit/spotter, but they bring group permafury through warhorn + red moa, great uptime on 5 stacks of might via jungle stalker (+1 from warhorn), a fire field via flame trap, a blast finisher (two if using river drake), a fantastic water field that heals and cures conditions, and they can cleave while being just as survivable as a necromancer. Decent vulnerability output as well.

Aside from having to choose from 2 out of those 3 pets, they do all of this at once. They can also less commonly slot in other stuff like OH axe projectile reflect, stone spirit, or spirit of nature. Rangers are great. Necros can’t even compare, not only to rangers, but to any other profession in dungeons. Necros offer nothing other than average damage output against a single target.

Back on the subject of cleaving – I honestly kind of like the way it is. Necro is a single target class that can burst a whole bunch of AoE on substantial cooldowns, but can’t sustain it for more than a very small handful of seconds. Every profession needs downsides, and I think that’s one that gives the class some unique flavor.

That being said, it is a very significant downside. But there’s nothing to compensate for it at all. Necro single target is very average and they bring no meaningful group utility. Necros are fairly sturdy, but only in situations where dodging/blocking/evading/etc aren’t crucial because they’re quite bad at that sort of thing. There is no upside.

And hell, even if dagger could cleave, that would just put necros on the same level as everyone else in terms of “doing damage to enemies” while still lacking any of the utility that makes literally every single other profession appealing. It would still be the worst pick for PvE.

I don’t think making axe cleave would help all that much because axe is complete garbage. It would basically become the exact same thing as ranger mainhand axe, which is a bad weapon that nobody uses for anything other than tagging.

Beldin.5498:

NewTrain.7549:

I can’t believe that some people are actually defending zerg content. If you’re playing an RPG (MMO or otherwise) don’t you want to be the hero? Why would you want to be just a faceless drone in the swarm (since you already are in real life)?

That the same argument i always used to tell people why i hate raiding

However i suspect most of the people that are so against zergs here think that raiding is the best think since sliced bread.

Raids are alright. They typically require intense coordination between a much smaller, tight-knit group of people. Even in a group of 25, your contribution matters and your guildmates are counting on you to perform well. It can take a very long time and a whole lot of practice to progress forward, but the rewards tend to be spectacular and there’s a real sense of accomplishment involved.

Unless you’re talking about WoW’s relatively new Looking For Raid feature, it is absolutely nothing like GW2 zerg content. And to nobody’s surprise, LFR is boring garbage.

I do the full usual dungeon tour every day and swap around between all 8 of my level 80 characters for variety while doing so. Every one of then feels exceptionally useful…except the necro. Similar damage to other classes with bad cleave options and next to no useful utility. What little you have is greatly outshined by other professions. It’s a real shame because it’s my favorite class alongside ranger (who also has issues with pets being of dubious value in many situations, and the sword #1 attack)

It is the most boring garbage imaginable. My presence is utterly meaningless and for most of them all I have to do is hit 1 and alt tab. Something like teq is a bit more interesting since there’s a bit more to it and there’s some pressure to do well, but I don’t like that type of content either since there’s absolutely no way you can expect 70 random people to communicate, organize, and play effectively. Success boils down to whether I’m in an instance with TTS or not. Nothing I do can change a loss into a victory.

Haven’t played my thief in a long time, but I’ve been getting back into it lately and I want to make sure I’m acting as effectively as possible. So there’s a few things I’d love to know:

1) Using a typical meta PvE build, what should you be doing in situations where you can’t flank your target? Sword autoattacks? Dagger autoattacks? Continue using the CnD->Backstab rotation despite the drastically lower backstab damage?

2) Around how much less damage do you put out when using Pistol Whip over Sword #1?

3) Can you flank objects?

Saint.5647:

Because they play in full cleric gear or something so they don’t need to ever dodge her attacks. They don’t likely notice that they get weakness on them either. They literally do stand there and press 1 without dodging.

I guess they just assume everyone else does the same thing but they somehow ‘exploit’ it faster.

I certainly don’t bother dodging the spider queen’s attacks in full zerker using dps meta builds, on any of my characters. She gets burned down so quickly that it doesn’t matter at all, and it’s not as if I run with ultra pro groups using top notch consumables, 100% ideal builds/runes/sigils, full ascended/infused zerker, and perma 25 stacks of might/vuln. Maybe if you were doing it solo, or if your other 4 party members are semi-afk cleric bearbows.

Dungeons were a lot more fun back when people didn’t know to stack like they do now. GW2 has its fair share of problems, but this is by far the largest one to me. It’s a real bummer because 5mans are my favorite part of MMOs, but the only MMOs I can currently stand are WoW/GW2, both of which have crippling issues with dungeons these days.

Rework dungeons so that stacking isn’t the go-to strategy for 95% of all encounters, and make them more rewarding to compensate for the extra time/difficulty. How do you rework it? I dunno, I’m not a game designer and I’m not going to spend hours pondering something that I can’t affect. But something needs to be done.

It’s gotten to the point where skipping is the only fun part of dungeons because you’re doing something other than sitting still mashing your dps buttons with your camera awkwardly stuck against a corner where you probably can’t see anything. I’m honestly fine with being pigeonholed into one or two builds. That’s MMOs for ya. I’m fine with being stuck using berserker gear. None of that is ideal, but it doesn’t ruin everything. It’s just the stacking in place and wrecking bosses/trash before they can do much of anything that ruins it.

yayuuu.9420:

Just to give you example of how can this work, I’ll summon the mighty AC Spider.
Let’s say that our party is 1x ranger, 1x elementalist, 1x warrior, 1x thief and 1x mesmer. We have 2 melee classes, 1 partially melee and partially ranged (mesmer) and 2 ranged. Elementalist and Ranger can play full glass cannon and avoid poison circles staying a bit away. Warrior will get constant beating by spider’s fast melee attacks, but elementalist can throw some heals on him to keep his HP up, Thief can use his pistol whip to be immortal and heal himself. Mesmer can stay melee, but after he loose some HP, he can fall back and play ranged until his HP regenerates.

See, this right here is how dungeons used to be in the early days when we were mostly clueless and didn’t all know to stack melee. It was a lot of fun.

I’ve been WvWing with a longbow berserker sniper build a lot lately. Playing all 8 classes, I think it’s one of the more effective setups for relatively disorganized zergs since so much of that is just two sides taking potshots at eachother, which longbow rangers are quite good at. It’s not especially great or anything, but in my experience I feel pretty impotent on almost all characters in these situations, with the LB ranger feeling very slightly less so. You can also do some pretty good damage to fleeing stragglers as long as someone else can slow them down.

In anything even remotely organized though (I’m not even talking tight knit guilds or anything – just a pubbie zerg on a server VOIP with an okay commander), it’s fairly terrible. You can use barrage to cripple/damage clusters of enemies that your group is pushing to AoE, and can pick off downed people that survived the push, but I think I bring a whole lot more to the table as most (all?) other professions.

I’d also just like to say that you don’t really eat people alive with this kinda setup unless they are also squishy classes wearing berserker gear. It still takes a pretty good amount of time to down anyone with average survivability, which gives them plenty of chance to back off without you being able to pursue without overextending yourself. Even using quickening zephyr and the river drake f2 (haha, good luck getting him in there to pull that off reliably), it’s not gonna down any but the most inattentive folks before they get away, and even if they do hit the floor they’re typically gonna be surrounded by ressers. Certainly isn’t some vanilla WoW aimed shot + multishot instakill out of nowhere or whatever.

I’ve had pretty poor luck in 1v1 scenarios using it as well, but I’m also fully willing to admit that I’m just not exceptionally good at 1v1ing with a glassy longbow ranger. Haven’t had any trouble surviving in a zerg with the increased range trait, though. That + lightning reflexes keep you quite safe, though you obviously need to give up piercing arrows to get it.

TurtleDragon.3108:

GS is ~17% worst DPS than sword.

What factors into this statistic? Is it just the autoattack damage, or is it accounting for things like 2h training and warhorn?

Just logged in after taking a break to find that my necromancer looks a whole lot dumber. So, uh, how bout that looking into it thing from 5 months ago?

I got them fairly regularly in the first few weeks/months of this game’s life. Sometimes I’d even run out of chests, especially since chests seemed to have keys inside of them most of the time. Now? Never see keys.

Thief gets nerfed pretty much every patch. I’m really not sure that anybody gets nerfed as often as the thief. Engineers, maybe. Gutting mug’s damage for a heal that you almost always use when you’re already at full health doesn’t sound like much of a “reward”.

You are a crazy person.

The number of currencies is comical, but completely understandable. I don’t have a problem with it. What I do have a problem with is all of these things taking up bank space. And it’s only going to get worse. Even a collections tab for them wouldn’t help, because you surpass 250 of most of them very quickly. Let them stack much, much higher. When you’re giving up 1/4 of the default bank space solely to hold enough tokens to buy a single ascended fractal backpiece, it’s kind of ridiculous. And that’s just one out of a ton of currencies.

Remove almost all of the trash in arah. There are some fun boss fights in there, but nobody ever wants to go because it takes forever. SE2 and HotW 2 + 3 could also stand to be much shorter.

ipvrf.7420:

Where would all of you rate the mesmer or an Engineer in PvE compared to a thief?

In terms of difficulty to play? Mesmer is pretty easy, honestly. Like the thief it’s quite squishy and relies on defensive abilities/frequent dodges to keep out of harms way, but unlike the thief it isn’t crippled by going ranged, which gives the class the option to back out without losing much effectiveness. You can even play it fully ranged just fine. Totally viable in a way that thief shortbow, p/p, and p/d aren’t. The class is garbage at low levels though.

Much like an elementalist, engineer requires a lot more button pushing dexterity than other professions and tends to have a lot more abilities to worry about, but the medium ranged nature of the class makes it much more forgiving, especially if you go with a toughness-heavy rabid armor setup which is a great choice for engineers. They can also very easily pick up some great defensive traits without sacrificing a ton of damage, like backpack regenerator and perma swiftness/vigor.

I thought it was pretty rough at first but it becomes second nature fairly quickly. Now everything other than D/D Thief, Ele, and Engineer feel kinda boring by comparison.

Be warned that Engineer grenades are horrendously annoying to use though. Second only to ranger 1H sword in terms of awkwardness. It’s the most effective setup they have, but I don’t run it anymore just because it drives me insane.

mjharrison.3209:

bri.2359:

I presume this is viable builds, and this is very easy to answer!

Rangers – they have none!

Rangers are actually in pretty decent shape. Hint – use a melee weapon.

Eles OTOH….

Your melee choices on ranger are greatsword, which crits for 900 in zerker gear, or 1h sword, which is the most awkward and frustrating weapon to use in the game by miles due to the animation priority on the #1 attack which prevents you from using other abilities, repositioning, and dodging while also sending you flying off in random directions occasionally.

Yeah, this is extremely common on Charr. Really limits the number of shoulder armor pieces you can use, on a race that is already quite limited in the number of things that look okay on them.

I’d have bought some fused weapon tickets if they were reasonably priced on the gem store. Maybe 800 gems a skin. You’re not getting any sales from me with this black lion chest RNG nonsense though. Whether anet would make more money appealing to the majority of their playerbase rather than a small handful of whales, who knows. I do know that one method is much less likely to kitten people off.

The new gem store Rox quiver hovers way off people’s backs. This is more apparent for some race/bodytypes than others, but it effects nearly all of them. It also seems to be placed oddly high up. If you fix this before the quiver isn’t for sale anymore, I know I’ll pick up two more for my ranger and warrior.

I’d use minis if you didn’t constantly need to keep taking them out. Go underwater? Change zones? Log out? Die? Gotta open your bags and double click that thing again. It’s way too annoying. If I activate a minipet, just keep the thing out until I put it away. Making it disappear underwater is fine since it would require more animation work otherwise, but have it pop back out by itself when I get back on land.

For most anything outside of high fractals or CoF1, I’ll take 4 warriors and a guardian. Ideally with one banner specced warrior and the rest shout specced. Guardian using a hammer, and swapping to greatsword for the AoE pull when necessary. Unkillable setup with some pretty fantastic and very reliable damage.

Don’t really feel like a massively nerfed time warp makes up for the mesmer’s squishiness and lower dps compared to another warrior. Portal shenanigans and focus pull are pretty unnecessary.

All of these suggestions are terrible. What we need is playable karka.

MH axe is already a viable PvE alternative to greatsword. I think it’s better in most situations, since its damage isn’t so reliant on self roots and spinning into nearby walls.

lordkrall.7241:

mjharrison.3209:

Why do you guys continue to make the majority of your balance decisions around sPVP performance when hardly anyone plays it? By any measure, sPVP has been a failed experiment, why does the rest of the game have to suffer through class balance decisions that are clearly 100% targeted at sPVP?

I suppose you missed the fact that they are splitting skill changes from now on?

Tell that to the recent ele nerfs.

The retal does next to no damage. Maybe if you’re a full zerker flamethrower engineer who only uses #1 or something it could sting a bit, but I don’t notice the retaliation damage at all on anything else. The regen is very minimal. The prot totem, however, extends the fight by a considerable margin. Hit both the boss and the totem at the same time whenever possible. His whirlwind attack also gives you a nice opportunity to lay into it since you can’t really do much to the boss himself when he’s flailing around.

Being able to turn off autotargeting for specific abilities would be incredibly welcome. It’s extremely useful to have it off for mobility skills like rush, swoop, and ride the lightning, but having it turned off makes other abilities much more tedious and finicky to use. It’s also pretty silly when I autotarget and attack things when using shouts, like Retreat or Shake It Off.

Just curious. I’d like to know when I can pick up my ele again and continue doing world completion without getting annoyed at Anet’s esports balancing every time I switch to lightning attunement. In the meantime I’ve been sticking with my 80s that don’t bring down my mood whenever I log into them. Like Warrior and Guardian, forever the (boring) kings of PvE. Whatever happened to a bigger focus on separating PvE and PvP skills?

Maybe your friends just aren’t as competent as you think they are. It isn’t one of the simplest dungeons, but the pubbie groups I join tend to manage just fine the majority of the time. Usually without wipes.The only real occasional hangup is the ghost eater room, which I admit is often a bit much for a group of random people, especially with the bugs.

You’re acting like everyone just wipes all day all the time in AC and that isn’t even remotely true. If you get a few people who know what they’re doing it is an absolute breeze even without any communication or planning at all.

Surviving in dungeons on a thief is much more difficult and unforgiving than on a guardian. It’s completely possible, but expect to eat dirt a lot while learning, and when saddled with groups that aren’t especially good. It’s particularly rough when you don’t have a sturdy front line of warriors/guardians that can help take the heat in melee.

My 80 thief is far more useful in dungeons than my 80 ranger. More damage, more utility. Blind/daze/stunspam to make trash mobs a breeze, stealth, blast finishers, projectile blocking, shadow refuge ressing, AoE weakness, and the ability to chew through defiance stacks with ease on the rare occasion that it’s helpful.

The only really nice thing the ranger brings to the table is a water field via healing spring, which can only be fully taken advantage of by…a thief with a shortbow. The actual healing from healing spring is negligible, especially considering how infrequently people will stay inside the field, and how it becomes 100% worthless if other group members are already applying regen (like a banner warrior giving perma regen over a huge radius). Rangers also bring decent single target ranged DPS on the occasional boss that you should most likely keep your distance on.

Judging by anet’s typical solutions, it’s more likely that they’ll just nerf sword autoattack damage by 30%, not fixing the daze spam “problem” while also crippling PvE thieves and S/P thieves for no reason.

Ranger greatsword, haha. Okay, enjoy your 800 damage crits.

You can work around it, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be fixed. I’m sure if you tried you could beat Super Meat Boy if it had a 3 second input delay, but being able to work around that wouldn’t make the controls not garbage.

Bearzu Smash.5962:

In before “turn off autoattack”.

Still unnecessarily awkward and awful while defeating the purpose of a higher dps weapon.

If nothing else, another mainhand melee dps weapon would be nice. 1H sword is the only ranger weapon that pumps out okay damage, which makes the awkward and frustrating #1 even more of an issue. Kinda the same thing engineers face with grenades, which are almost as terrible to use as ranger sword but are similarly their best available option.

Level-based karma jugs? What a strange thing to add. Karma is already pretty worthless, and you get the larger jugs through dailies no matter what level you are – would a one time turnin of a few thousand more karma on a lowbie really be a big deal at all?

I don’t really care, since like I said, karma is pretty much worthless. It just seems like an odd thing to go through the effort of creating.

Yeah, I really wanted to pick one of these up for my Charr Thief but I won’t bother unless it’s fixed.

The website works perfectly fine. If you refuse to use it for some weird reason, then that’s on you.

If it weren’t for this complete and utter reliance on ridiculous RNG odds, I would have done the new content a fair few times. As is, though? No thanks. One run and done. It was a good dungeon but I’m not going to bother finishing it dozens of times for nothing.

The new gauntlets are also unbelievably alt-unfriendly. Anet often makes sure that it is unnecessarily difficult and time consuming to play multiple characters with things like story mode unlocks, fractal levels, and laurels, but this seems to be the only thing that you cannot overcome with enough time and effort. One per account, never any more, ever.

C’mon now, you can’t call Guardian scepter the most broken autoattack in the game when Ranger 1H sword exists.

I have an 80 of every class and I almost feel like it just causes more annoyance due to nerfs, because no matter who’s getting a really poorly thought out change in the name of balancing SPvP that nobody plays, it’s going to be one of my characters. I wouldn’t have cared about the recent RtL change if I didn’t level an elementalist.