Guild Wars 2

Getting the 5 lesser vision crystals and 1 vision crystal for a full armor set shouldn’t take you more than a day if you go at it hard. You can prolly farm up a stack of each of the 3 mats per hour and you need 1500 total. If you do it in SW you also farm Obsidian which you need to refine the mats. You also farm champion bags which drop spirit shards you need to buy augur’s stones.

As for all the other stuff, the insignia recipes cost you 21k karma which is easily done, a full set of armor costs you 18 gold and 30 laurels, however, you can buy fractal encryptions and stabilizing matrices on the TP. You can excchange the matrices for fractal encryption keys (1 for 2 keys) and start opening boxes. In my experience you get about 90% of the gold you spend on buying them from TP and you have a decent chance at dropping the recipes that normally costs laurels, so this could also be done in a day. Prepare to buy at least 1000 fractal encryptions to get a full set of 6 of the same armor type (as all 3, light, medium and heavy can drop). You also have a chance at very rare aetherized skins that even if you loot the cheapest one make sure you at least break even on buying those fractal encryptions. They also contain the 3 mats needed for the vision crystals so if you already have enough Obsidian and Spirit Shards you could skip the SW farm all together.

Finally, the actual mats for the insignia and armor parts are all buyable on the TP. It’s quite a time grind to go and make all the mats yourself so you’re better off just farming gold and buying it all. I always get all the base mats needed (e.g. bolt of damask instead of damask shoe sole or damask coat lining) and make all the pieces myself. People charge more for finished products. If you have patience you can also get all the mats on buy order. While the prices are close together you can still save a few gold if you buy order instead of buy out.

All in all, a full set will set you back at least 700 gold. Possibly more if you want to do the fractal encryption thing and alot more if you want some of the new stats on your armor + extra grinding. Prices may vary as leather and metal is cheaper than cloth so a medium and heavy set will be cheaper than a light set.

Weapons are alot cheaper averaging about 80 gold per I’d say, but follow pretty much the same process as above. A backpiece costs you on average 100 gold and 24 spirit shards and needs a special drop from fractals.

Amulets are cheap if you have badges of honor as they will only cost 20 laurels then. Guild commendations can very easily get you two accescoires for 12 commendations and 5 gold a piece. Two weeks of guild missions buys 1 so you’ll need a month of guild missions to get both. Rings can be farmed really fast by doing alot of fractal dailies for pristine relics and/or getting lucky with your daily fractal reward chest. They can also be bought for laurels and badges but are 50% more expensive than amulets. Some ascended trinkets can also be gotten from achievements like story missions or collections.

Because it’s imo the class that has the most utility/gimmicks/usefulness to offer when playing with others, because I feel it is the best class to solo Fractals/Dungeons with and because it has such a vast array of tools and being able to use and master them all in combat is amazing.

To be honest that’s all true. Once raids go on farm mode people would rather run more of the better classes like revs than use Tempest. The DPS is high but thats about it. All the previous roles Ele has had in vanilla PvE have now been taken by other classes, and they are doing it better. DPS is all they have left and such I could only see Ele being brought if a guild doesn’t have access to a third rev.

It’s probably not worth it though. Unlike dungeons were. To carry someone and make the raid harder I’d want to ask at least 5 gold per player there. But thats prolly me being not greedy enough so expect 10 gold or about 90-100 gold for a spot.

You only get 4 gold for boss kill and any rewards you get most likely will not cover the cost. At least with dungeon buying you got most of it back. Only people with lots of gold to burn (credit cards) but exceptionally bad at the game would shell 100g for a raid spot. I’d rather do it myself. I’d even get more magnesite shards from all the wiping.

Worrying about something thats not due for another 3 years rolls eyes

I don’t really understand why Fire is used over Arcane though. All the raids I’ve been in I’ve had 5 or more boons on me all the time. If you play Fresh Air ele that means anything other than OLA spam is a DPS loss so there is no use for the power boost or 10% fire dmg boost you get. The only time you go out of air is to reset your cooldown. Arcane gives you boon duration, often alot more than 10% dmg, more vigor uptime and elemental attunement. Especially since it’s no longer Ele’s job to provide might and fury as other classes do it better, i’d say maximizing personal DPS is the best choice. That means maximizing OLA damage. Hell, most of the time the air cooldown resets so fast that casting drakes breath or cone of cold takes another second that I could have spent in Air and used Lightning Whip.

Fire should only be used on staff builds and the only reason it was ever used on D/X in fractals and dungeons was because there were no revenants and Ele could give long fury the easiest.

So I’m about to craft my third ascended armor set but I’m having trouble deciding what to go for now in light of raids. I already have Assassin on Mesmer and Berserker on Necro. I was thinking getting a condition or healing set. I like healing as an ele and it worked fine in exotics vs Vale Guardian. The main problem I see though is that I think we’re slowly gravitating towards more damage oriented support. I think a few weeks from now no one will be running pure dedicated healers anymore and all the tanks will only have just enough toughness to have aggro and go full damage. At the same time, conditions don’t seem to be Ele’s strong suit. While they can definitely pile on some heavy burns it seems that in a dedicated party you’d rather have a second/third/fourth engi over a condi ele.

So far the builds I’ve traid is a condi/tank ele, a condi/heal ele, a heal/tank ele and a standard staff DPS ele. All work nicely but I just don’t really feel like I’m contributing anything that someone else can’t do. Im leaning towards just making another Berserker set and call it a day but I’m not sure.

What do you guys think Ele meta is in raids right? Would you invest in a healing or condi damage set for an ele at this time?

So you fix Trailblazer being buyable off the Nuhoch vendor but then figured ‘hey lets half kitten it for the fun of it and not fix the bug where people can’t change their ascended gear to Trailblazer in the forge’.

Are we gonna have to wait another 2 kitten weeks before this is fixed? You’re limiting raid builds with this bug.

You don’t need ascended gear to raid. Just as gear check in Dungeons/Fractals, its also the players that do it in raids. Exotic is more than fine for raiding.

That’s exactly what I have done but have not video taped it or screenshot it.

I’ve opened over 100k bags over the past year or so. This is an estimate but I opened at least 2000+ bags a week, almost all champ bags are from farming chests in SW.

About a week ago I made a post about this too where I opened shy of 100 bags to complain about this. Then someone in the thread told me I should open more. So I did. Went full farm mode and farmed almost 3000 bags and the drop rate seems about 1:32-33.

And as for being anectodal evidence. It doesn’t matter if it is. If it’s intended they can respond here and admit to it right away. If they say it’s not the case, all they have to do is check their coding and see if it’s indeed changed accidentally or still the same and I’m an outlier. Either way, only point for this thread is to get attention on the subject from the devs. Just want them to see this thread and quickly check their code to verify drop rate is lowered or I’m an outlier.

Okay so having played a few more days since my last thread I am now 100% convinced the drop rate of spirit shard was nerfed (intentionally or unintentionally) and mentioned nowhere.

A week ago: about 1 in 6 champion bags gave a spirit shard, based on opening thousands of bags.
Right now: about 1 in 30-35 champion bags gives a spirit shard, based on opening a couple thousand bags.

I would like a dev response explaining this if possible. Was this intended or is it a bug. If intended, what is the reasoning behind it? Spirit Shards were already hard to come by, only reason people have so many is because many might have had lots of skill points stacked up before conversion or generally don’t make alot of legendaries/ascended gear. For those of us that use these spirit shards daily, it’s a real pain to get them. Especially now. With raids out now and the necessity to maybe change the gear of your build between fights or simply the meta changing, its going to cost 80 spirit shards each time you conver your gear to different stats. This does not promote ‘on the fly’ adaptability between raids and fights which I thought was something you wanted to promote. Not one gear set or build for everything but rather adapting your character to every challenge it has to take. I would understand it if spirit shards were buyable in the gemstore or something. Get people to spend gems rather than farm bags for free. I’d get that. But they’re not. You have to farm champ bags to get them. Why nerf it? It makes absolutely no sense to me at all.

You really need to switch Pyromancer’s Puissance to Persisting Flames. It’s the best GM trait for fire. Consider running some Assassin’s in there to min/max.

Yeah no way in hell that build does 22k dps. Sinister engi is the highest condi DPS class/build right now and that is calculated at 20k dps and that math might even be off and overstated.

Elementalists ranks alot lower than other classes when it comes to conditions. It’s very easy to test this by doing a couple rounds on target dummy with different classes to see who kills faster/gets most stacks and duration.

Also to the people saying ‘zerk is not good in jungle low defense’ bla bla. No. Just play better. Stacking defensive stats only means less damage and some of these new creatures require serious beating to take down. Stacking defense only makes those fights last long and over time most vets will likely kill you as they have more health and more toughness than you. The best approach is to stack on as much damage as you can so that all you need is your two dodges and possibily some defensive skills (I’m running arcane shield) before the monsters are dead.

I run Air/Arcane/Tempest Assassin/Zerk mix with Strength runes and sigil and dumplings + sharpening stones. A single OLA kills everything thats not a vet in 30 mile radius instantly. For vets you have Glyph of Storms, Fresh Air bolt spam + the two Breath skills and OLA on a 6 second cooldown but often they don’t even last that long.

Condi Ele in PvE is quite bad when we’re talking Fractals/Raids etc. In the Jungle/Open World it will work but its to in any way viable for high end content. It’s not that we are bad at burning, it’s just that other classes can do so much more condition DPS than we, there is no point to ever going condi on an Ele. All we have is burn and we can a decent amount of stacks but not the most in the game. Add to that that other classes can easily stack bleeds/poison etc aswell and it doesn’t look good for Ele.

The best power based, DPS build right now is Fire/Air/Tempest if you want to go staff or Air/Tempest and then a choice between Fire or Arcane if you want to go dagger/x. The gear is indeed power/precision/ferocity mixed with some pieces of precision/power/ferociy. (Berserker and Assassin). Best runes are Scholar for the staff build and Strength for the dagger build. Sigils are Force + Strength/Air/Accuracy.

Utilities imo you want Arcane Blast/Glyph of Storms and Signet of Fire. Ice Bow is still good for break bars but I don’t use it much anymore for DPS. I just cycle overloads.

Oh we’re talking WvW? No idea then, I only play Ele there.

You don’t want to hear this, but it’s always a l2p issue. Necromancers in particular are one of the more durable classes and excel at solo play. If you are really having trouble surviving as Necro I don’t know what to tell you to be honest. Like the other guy said, as Necro, even in full zerk, there is no reason to ever die. Ofcourse everyone makes mistakes so you will die occassionally but that will always be player error. I suppose Warrior is even easier although they aren’t as great in HoT jungle because of all the ranged damage and lack of good aoe Warrior has. Mesmer can be easy depending on what build but its alot harder to play than Necro for sure. Thief is even harder. All classes can survive easily in Berserker if you trait properly and play your class right. Necro along with maybe Ranger definitely are the easiest though.

Rayden.3695:

I might be a bit biased but I’ve been in an understandiung that no one has a shortage of those things and that makes this question a bit moot for me. So is it that the shards are in short supply?

Depends on what you do with them. I’ve made 3 legendaries and crafted dozens of Vision and Lesser Vision crystals. It’s historically been one of the currencies I always lack the most of. They took away my main way of getting them: making alts and doing skill point challenges. Back when you could do that I didn’t have a shortage indeed. But the only way to get them now is by looting or by using tomes of knowledge. You also get 25 for leveling a character from 1-80. Either way I’ve always felt that since the chance to Hero Points the availability has been at an unfair level. E.g. with my last 2 legendaries I’d have all the other stuff for days but had to grind SW for champ bags that had kitten poor droprates. I mean this is a farming game so it’s all good but my problem is they took away the easy way to get them, for no apparant reason. No reason to make them harder to attain. All it does is add extra days to people crafting Ascended/Legendary.
Another way I’ve spent alot of them lately is changing my armor and weapon to new stat sets because of meta changes in HoT. Like conditions becoming more prevalent in PvE. Overall I feel it was just badly iterated when they changed all those systems. Imagine you need around ~339 to make a legendary and if you have to farm them all its at the very minimum 1700ish champ bags you need to open. The daily only rewards 3.

@ Seera

Yeah I understand how RNG works it’s just I farm SW alot and always open bags at about 100~ish at a time. Whenever it deviates it might be 1 in 7 or 1 in 4 if im lucky. I’ve never seen 1 in 41.5 bags however. Not in more than a year of farming SW daily. Also, the outlier is so extreme, the likelyhood of it indeed being bad rng is very very small.

Opened 83 champion bags, got 2. Normal rate over the past few weeks of running SW has been 1 in 5-6. This is 1 in 40. Seems too much off to be rng outlier and looks like a change in drop rate. As if they weren’t already hard to get :/

What you can do is start channeling mimic and press CS mid-channel. You will reset Mimic but you will have Echo on. What you do next is use your Utility skill once. Because of Echo the cooldown will reset. Then you Mimic again and you will gain Echo again and then you can use that Utility skill twice more. Basically this means triple Blinks, Feedbacks, Wells etc. Great thing about it is that you can even use it out of combat as 1,5 seconds is more than enough time to get this working. I mostly use it for Blink to get 3600 distance in two seconds.

We just need DPS meters to settle this stupid dispute once and for all. And we also need world of logs. It boggles my mind that we don’t. I mean it’s an MMO, what MMO that is any good has no way of tracking important stats like damage done/healing done/etc.

Both sides in this everlasting argument make good points. Neither can be proven right without a DPS meter and logs. At least IMO.

So this is PvE right? One of the main reasons why you don’t see Mesmer going condi in PvE is because the type of conditions Mesmer is best at are more suited for PvP (Torment and Confusion). They are also decent at bleeds, but so is everyone else. You will simply never approach the amount of Condi DPS a Engi/Ranger can do. You probably won’t even be able to keep up with Necro/Warrior. The output is just too low. You will do more damage as a Power mesmer. And honestly, as a mesmer, DPS is kind of a side thing. I’d suggest putting that Viper on a Necro, would suit it well there.

Ele can bunker/heal pretty good while at the same time dealing around 75% damage of sinister engi with burning. I wonder if maybe taking hybrid classes like ele can be might be better than going 1 full cleric druid or 1 full tank. I think that if you take two hybrids that deal 75% dps of normal values vs 1 that deals about 20% of normal you’ll end up with about 1/3 or 1/2 an ‘extra’ player. So instead of 9 dps and 1 healer or 8 dps 1 tank 1 healer, you’ll have 9.5 dps. If that makes sense.

I’m currently running apothecary/settler mix and that works fine. Celestial might be better as it allows you to do a bit of power damage aswell and be able to contribute to both condi only and power only targets. In any event, a pure DPS ele like fresh air D/x is really the only DPS build you could use on moving targets, but the damage of that spec, even with OLA spam is kinda bad compared to what some other power classes can do. Maybe if a tank can guarantee to keep the boss in place you can still run staff zerk.

In any event I’m very doubtful DPS ele’s will have a place in raids. I think staff will fall out of favor and I think that’s really the only way Ele can do huge sustained DPS. Revenant will outshine imo and revenant can be multiple roles aswell. I think the ideal comp will look something like this: 1 Mesmer/1 Ranger/1 Rev/1 Warrior/1 Engi minimum. You’d want at least 3 condi engi’s and at least two revs. That leaves two spots left. You might want double mesmers so you can stack alacrity on all ten people and having one extra helps with more boonstripping. For that last spot you might want a Necro/Guardian or one of those tank/heal/dps hybrids. Either that or just add more of the same classes. Honestly the way I see it: worst classes in raids will be Necro/Ele/Thief. In that order.

To be fair: 100 slots should be enough space for pretty much any player. Just fills up a bit earlier. I personally have 150 slots (not all bags are 20) but I use a whole bag just for weapons/gem store convenience items etc which is kinda like my bag of tools. Then I have another bag especially for junk items. People who can’t or won’t afford 400 gems for bag slots will also not have a whole bag full of gemstore convenience items and thus don’t need this space. People can simply get into the habit of talking to every vendor they see and sell junk. Outside of that the amount of space between me and mr 100 slots isn’t that big.

Then I’m still 20 short.

So you decided to not make +7 agony infusions that have stats on them? So now, to have enough agony for high level fractals we need to give up 70 stat points?

Can’t find this anywhere and there isn’t even a wiki page for this phantasm.
How much damage does it do and what coefficient does it have?

Necrobumping this in light of expansion.

I would like to re-open the discussion for a class change.
There are some of us out there who have been with our main character from day 1. Headstart. We’ve invested alot into our characters. Ascended gear, legendaries, bag slots. Most of all, those of us who have a true main on which we experience pretty much everything the game has to over. In this game, finish HoT’s story first, doing all the meta event’s first, exploring the jungle for the first time. We feel connected. However, sometimes changes are made to your class, or rather, not enough changes are made in comparison to others (elite specializations) that we no longer feel comfortable playing said class. We would want to change to another class. But at the same time not give up all we’ve worked for on our character. The class is just a small part of the total identity of our main character.

I am in this predicament right now and decided against rerolling purely because I have so much invested in this character. I have 100% map completion. Something I’m not to keen on doing all over again, especially right now when I’m so busy with HoT stuff. I don’t want to give up my 3 bag slots. I don’t want to give up the /age of my character. I have everything you could want on this character, too. Harvesting tools, salvage o matic, airship pass. Pretty much everything. Ofcourse I can give all the gear, utility, bags etc to a new character but then I’d have to leave my old naked main. Who has the name I want, the looks, evertyhing. Or I could delete it and remake it as a new class. But then I loose map completion, /age, bag slots.

I don’t think ‘anet would rather want you to buy a character slot’ is a good argument either. These class changes would not be free. And if they have to be double the cost of character slots to be profitable then fine. I don’t care. I’d pay 4k gems for this if I had to. People who are altoholics will keep buying the character slots anyway. Hell, I even have 9 character slots open right now. I understand it might not be so easy to code this into the game but realize that all MMO’s that are good (like WoW) have class changing options available. It’s a normal thing for MMO’s and this game should offer it too. I would strongly suggest putting it into the game and rest assured that people would shell out huge amounts of gems if they were able to preserve there ‘main’ but change classes when they don’t like the direction developers are taking their class to.

An alternative could be: being able to buy 100% map completion, 3 extra bag slots, /age transfer and anything else you might lose when you reroll to a new class at discounted prices, and only eligible for purchase if you indeed have acquired all the contents of this ‘character reroll jump start pack’ as I will call it. Then you can simply delete your main, retake the name, appearance, transfer all the items and use this new jump start pack consumable. I’m sure that would be much easier to code.

I think a good way to give Scepter a worthwile auto-attack (at least for PvE) is to make it so the Air AA’s lightning beam could jump from target to target. Kinda like a chain lighting. It could be up to 2 other targets where all 3 targets take equal damage or up to 5 targets where each subsequent target takes less damage. Along with maybe doubling or trippling the damage output when hitting the first target and/or maybe give the skill much better damage coeffcients.

Honestly if you’ve played D/F then you’ve played the Fresh Air build. The best two Tempest damage build right now are Fresh Air spam (all that changes is you stay in air for 6 seconds to wait and use OLA instead of switching back and forth to trigger the adapt minor trait lightning bolt) and the standard Staff build (all that changes is you switch out Water or Arcane for Tempest, whichever you were using. Overload Fire is a great DPS increase over just AA’íng with Fireball. Quite frankly, from a PvE perspective, nothing changed Ele playstyle. Tempest just added more choices and options for standard style gameplay. It also added the option to play as an Auramancer but if you don’t like that you don’t have to. Raids will prolly make even more new builds surface.

Yeah lol.. just make 6 minstrel exotic insignia’s and forge :/

Yeah and the fact that they remain so silent about it aside from some undercover buried post on reddit is really disheartening. One could only assume they aren’t allowed to say anything on the subject because they either a) do not know how to fix the problem currently or b) have no way of determining on their end who is eligible for rewards and who is not. If neither of these two things are the problem then it makes no sense to not have at very least replied to this 200 something pos thread saying they’re working on it and sorry for the inconvenience, eta at a later time. It still doesn’t tell us much but at least assures us it’s not a priority fix and puts the minds of most at ease. But they aren’t doing that. Which means they might not be able to fix the problem. And that is why there aren’t posting. Because they don’t wanna get peoples hopes up when it turns out its a major programming issue that has no work around and there is no way to decide who is eligible for rewards or not, short of reviewing every account individually, something they won’t do. So they post nothing at all as not to make any promises they might not be able to keep.

However, Anet, is this is the case? Why not just give everyone the rewards via mail, regardless of the fact if they are eligible or not? I mean think about it. It’s only 4 maps. It won’t take long before everyone has completed this stuff on their main characters. I have a friend who plays only an hour a day and he is 80%+ on every map as he just runs around and explores alot. Chalk it up to a mistake and just give eveyrone what they’re going to get eventually anyway. It’s not like normal map completion that could take casual player months. This is something that can be done in a few hours. Then add a vendor to each zone that checks for 100% on the map and then allows you to buy the reward from them. This is so that people’s alts can also get the rewards. Problem solved. No need to spend hours of development time on trying to fix an issue that might be too hard to fix or find a way to determine who’s eligible that doesn’t take forever.

You could even do it in phases. Start with just sending everyone the rewards of each map (and for full HoT completiong if there is one, I don’t know). Add a chest to that e-mail so people can choose with of the ‘class caches’ they get as you can’t know which character someone’s ‘main’ is. And then in a later update add a vendor to each map that allows people to buy them/unlock talking to the vendor if the character has 100% on the map. Then, if there are also rewards for full HoT completion, allow one of the items bought from the vendor to be a token. Add 4 tokens together and you can buy ‘HoT completion reward’ from the same vendor.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

I get about 20 ore every map with 70 minute map runs.

It’s slow, but not as slow as people are making it out to be.

I fully expect this stuff to drop in raids as well which is probably why it feels so rare now.

If it doesn’t drop in raids then I agree it needs a buff. So I guess i’m taking a wait and see approach. This stuff is essentially the end-game currency to get the best stuff in the game. It should be hard to get.

But they are just mats. The legendary armor will require tokens that drop from bosses and will probably be rare drops. I’m fine with that. But why do the mats have to be rare aswell? And its a mat used for kitten tons of items now, this stuff should not be more rare than obsidian or other ascended mats.

Could please add an option to allow the new ascended salvage tool the ability to salvage Vision Crystals into Lesser Vision Crystals? I have loads of these things but what I really need is 5 lesser ones so I can finish my Heavy Armor set. Or add a forge recipe that splits them up or something. Or allow me to choose for my monthly if I want a Lesser one or a normal one. Now I need to farm ~500-600 champion bags so I can get enough spirit shards to buy 5 augur’s stones. And what use are all those Vision crystals I have then? I’ve crafted all the weapons I’ll ever need.

Optimal is making sure you don’t go over 100% in a party situation, which is very easy to do as an elementalist depending on build. E.g. if you play a Fresh Air build and use Signet of Fire, you can easily get to 65% pre-fury and pre-food. Add a Ranger and Warrior to your group and you hit the cap of 100 and are essentially wasting stats. If you play a Fire Staff build though and wanna go Tempest instead of Water/Arcane, you will most likely also want to drop Signet of Fire. Then you suddenly drop to a much lower amount. To the point where you might wanna use a few Assassin’s pieces over Berserker (assuming you’re talking about Fractal Meta for PvE). I’m personally looking more to raids and am focusing more on the new maps so I run more of a defensive build with different gear and traits than what is now meta in Fractals. Even so I still have around 55% crit chance unbuffed. Crit chance is very important. The higher it is, the more consistent critical damage you deal which just means much higher DPS. The difference between 50% crit and 75% crit is huge. Crit chance and Crit damage is where the bulk of your damage comes from, take that out of the equation and DPS drops abysmally low. I think it’s a good idea to always have at least 90% fully buffed in a party enviroment. This would equate to about 50% unbuffed, 60% with food, 80% with fury and ~90% with party buffs. I wouldn’t go over 60-65% base.

Arcane is very nice indeed and if I could pick 4 trait lines I would go with Arcane. The problem is, Earth provides two important things for my build. One is condition immunity above 90% HP. Outside of OLW the build has no way to cleanse conditions. Running Arcane would make me very vulnerable to it and since i’m all toughness no vitality i’d pretty much be less powerful but not more tanky against condition enemies. Second, Earth has protection on aura. The whole reason for carrying Boon Duration is to get higher uptime on Protection as it’s one of the more important boons. Now you still get protection when switchin to Earth when you take Arcane and protection on Overloading, but you also loose the 10% damage reduction from Earth GM minor. Finally, since I’m taking Earth 3 on Master, I also get reduced durations on Chill/Cripple/Immobilize, which is very nice for disengaging. Arcane provides me with Vigor on crit, but I already have permanent Vigor. It gives Fury on attunement swap, but I already have permanent Fury. It gives 10% extra boon duration, which is definitely nice and 15% attunement recharge rate. Which is irrelevant because of Fresh Air. It gives me boons when struck, but that is going to be Fury most of the time because I will be in air 99% of the time and again, already have enough Fury. Ofcourse Elemental Attunement is really great and being able to get Protection by quickly going in and out of Earth, and Regen in Water is convenient, but redundant. In case of Protection it would actually be a step back because I have less uptime with EA than with Elemental Shielding. Finally, 8-10% damage multiplier from bountiful power, while good, is not worth IMO losing Diamond Skin, 10% dmg reduce and Protection on aura’s for.

I run the FA build with D/Wh. I think WH is quite good unlike most other people. Earth is awesome with reflects and blinds, water has a great water field and also regen, fire has a very long duration fire field and extra might stacks + sharing fury aswell. Only thing that is a bit meh = air. But when you’re in air you are either auto-attacking or using OLA. Now that we have acces to party wide magnetic aura with Aftershock I don’t really see the added value of Swirling Winds anymore, water and fire are quite abysmal too on a focus and earth is about the same. Although I prefer blinds over an invulnerable that doesn’t really do much for your party. Dagger offhand is still great but I don’t think it has a place in PvE when you have WH and Focus. For gear, I was using full Zerk at first but later switched to a more defensive set-up.

I do completely oppose all this ‘soldier gear’ crap I see everyone blabbering about. I’m pretty sure the way I’ve set up my gear is alot better. I run with cavalier’s armor and scrapper runes, knight’s weapons and zerk trinkets. I run an aura set-up with Air/Earth/Tempest. Giving me high uptime on Vigor/Fury/Might/Protection/Regen/Swiftness. I went with extra boon duration from Fried Golden Dumplings (which stack extra might in combat along with sigil of strength to keep your might stacks high) and Bountiful Maintenance Oil, for extra precision and more boon duration. 50% total. Which is more than Fire/Air/Arcane builds had using strength runes. Mandatory for this build is either Sigil of Accuracy or Fire signet. If you don’t need the 3rd utility skill than obviously signet is better as it will allow you to run with Sigil of Force.

This build can easily be adapted into a more support type build by switching air to water and being a bunker/healer role or you can switch out earth for fire in standard old content like fractals for more damage multipliers and easier to maintain fury in groups(permantent fury in this build requires good timing of shocking aura, sand squall, your sand squal proc from trait, whichever shouts you have slotted and possibly rebound. E.g. a good way is to, after might stacking, start with shocking aura > glyph of storms > OLA > switch earth and use sand squall as fury is about to drop off and get 7,5 seconds again + the extended duration squall gives. Then usually Shocking Aura is back up. If it’s not you might want to use the 1 aura you slot. E.g. if you were using Arcane Wave before I’d say Aftershock is better now as it does more than just damage and blast finisher. But Feel the Burn is also good. Alternatively you can time rebound to coincide with the rest by using it 5 seconds before your boons are gonna fall off.

My stats with his build are, unbuffed (off the top of my head, as I’m not in game right now):
~2400 power
~55% Crit chance
~205% Crit Damage
~2900 Armor
50% Boon Duration
17% extra baseline damage reduction
100% fury/regen/swiftness/might/vigor uptime
~85% protection uptime with which you take another 40% less damage.
Added side-bonus: On conditions when health is above 90%. Very useful for running around the jungle.

I suppose at the end of the day, a Zerker build can achieve better results provided you are able to stay alive. And this build could very well do that too with Zerker gear. I chose this build as it feel it is a very minimal DPS loss. It allows me to have 25 might, 25 vuln and 100% fury in a solo situation with very minimal effort and able to upkeep during combat. Something my staff build couldn’t do. So I hardly notice a damage difference. In fact, I’d say OLA spam is much better at dealing with all those highly mobile creatures than Lava Font is. I’m also very positive I deal both more damage and have more survivability than Zerk/Soldier builds. I mean who needs vitality anyway when it’s so easy to cleanse conditions in PvE situations. It’s not like you’re going to get hit with 30 burn stacks. It isn’t PvP/WvW. Vitality also makes regen less strong and makes it harder to keep bonuses like Scholar/Water/Diamond skin active. I think it’s a bad stat for PvE. Toughness isn’t great either unless you stack alot of it, which I’ve done. Switching to earth puts me over 3k armor and at that level of toughness your really start to notice. Smokescales hardly put a dent in me and instead of getting oneshot by pocket raptors they now need to hit me as a group 3 or 4 times. By that time they’re all dead already. This build also made it alot easier to solo groups of vets and do hero points with champs by myself. If I never die I can keep doing high sustained DPS and they drop like flies. When the raids come I’ll see how I’ll change this. It all depends on what role ele’s will have in raids, if they are even brought at all (something i’m not sure of). But for now, for high level Fractals and Jungle roaming I use this build and it works great. For everything else I still have my trusty zerk staff build.

Only regrettable thing about this build and tempest in general is that Warhorn (while being better than focus imo) needs some major fine tuning. Air skills are awful and Fire skills are good but just not impressive. They could use a bit more oomph. Another annoying thing is that while I think charge up time for Fire and Air Overload is totally fair and appropriate (especially considering Fresh Air spam), I feel it kinda defeats the purpose of Water and Earth overload. No one is going to stay in those attunements for 6 seconds to use those skills. It’s just bad. They are both great overloads but are never used because Air is default for D/x and Fire for Staff. I don’t see why we can’t just split it up. Why do all overloads need charge ups, for Lore/consistency? That’s just bull. Balance should come first. I’d say nerf Fire’s OL damage and make it focus more on Burns and Might stacking and remove the charge up . Keep OLA the same and simply remove Water and Earth Overload’s charge up and leave the skills as is. For both staff and d/x builds this means they are simply two skills on a 20 second cooldown, but that can now be used on demand. For Fire this means a DPS loss for staff but give something to staff it never had before and that is the ability to keep 25 might up solo. Right now OLF is better than Fireball. So make it about equal then. For Fresh air builds nothing changes as they still have to wait 6 seconds (which I feel is fair since it’s really really powerful). All specs gain access to good Water ad Earth Overloads. I imagine this will not change anything in PvP either as you still have to choose between ingivorating torrents and stab on overload. I don’t play sPvP as much as most so I wouldn’t know how OP it would be to give stab to overloads baseline along with this new change but hey, I’m just looking at it from a PvE perspective.

Nekomi.9562:

Verificus.4320:

So you have 300 something crystalline ore? That doesn’t even buy a full rune set :/ Or do you have another 500 in your material storage? Well great, than you can buy a full set. After which you’ll pretty much not be able to buy anything else. And to get this you must’ve done exclusively DS for the past week or so. I play quite alot, at least 8-10 hours a day and I have about 200 of the ore right now. Is all that ore from farming noxious pods or did you cheat here and got most of it on running all your alts through the story? In any event, with the amount of time I spend on the game per day, I could MAYBE get 80-100 ore a day, doing nothing else but DS. But ya know, I have a guild to that requires attention, friends in game I need to help and play with. So i’m looking at probably half of that. So I basically need to play more than two weeks to get a kittening rune set. You think that’s normal and fine? In two weeks I can farm enough mats to create ascended armors for all your alts. I think THAT is fair. See how unbalanced this is now? I’m not even kidding. I could craft up characters for all my character slots tomorrow and two weeks later have all of them geared in ascended armor. But I can’t even guarantee that I’ll have that rune set two weeks from now. How is that right in any way?

Well I come from a long line of MMOS that require months and years of grinding to obtain things. It’s a milestone you can’t expect a mmo to give you everything a few days into an expansion. What would be the point? If you have a JOB, A super high ranking guild that requires your 100% full attention, Kids, a family should the MMO be responsible for making these things in game more easy to obtain?

No. It just makes obtaining those items slightly much more of an achievement

And no I have not been grinding DS hard since it was released. I’ve been here 5 days days or so doing 5 runs a day all of which only take us 1 hour tops followed by a 30 pod – pod train so do the math pod – ore wise.

The point is that it’s unbalanced. I’m not some qq kid that’s lolmad over not getting his candy. A rune set should not be gated behind this level of grinding. That is just my opinion. In fact, I’d want it to be so cheap that I could buy a set and try them out and see if I like em. And if I don’t, to not have to feel remorse for permanently destroying what I just spent (according to you) 5 days of doing 5 daily DS runs on. These things should cost 10 ore tops. Increase the gold price for all I care then. Or make them sellable. I’d be happy to burn 50 gold on a set if it means I have the convenience of switching to another runeset, then back again. If I want to do this with this set I have to kitten out 1350 gems for upgrade extractors or farm again, I’ve played grindy MMO’s aswell and never had a problem with it. That was because what I was grinding for was placed properly on the reward/effort scale. E.g. heroic tier gear from heroic raids in wow. I was never in a server first type guild so we took many weeks getting full heroic geared, sometimes even months. I was fine with this. But come to me and tell my the gems/enchantments I put into my gear sockets is that grind and yeah well that’s just kittened. The pricing of some of these items simply isn’t tuned properly. Especially since this new Ore is going be required for pretty much everything end game. New ascended stuff, legendary backpacks and armor. So why would anyone burn ~18 runs of DS to get runes with this ore? There is recipes there that cost 100 of each of the mastery vendor currency. I’d argue that is alot more fair. If these runes of leadership are meant to be sort of ‘special’ because they are only sold by the DS vendor than make em require 100 of each currency like some of the other items + a small gold fee. And remove the Ore cost all together.

So you have 300 something crystalline ore? That doesn’t even buy a full rune set :/ Or do you have another 500 in your material storage? Well great, than you can buy a full set. After which you’ll pretty much not be able to buy anything else. And to get this you must’ve done exclusively DS for the past week or so. I play quite alot, at least 8-10 hours a day and I have about 200 of the ore right now. Is all that ore from farming noxious pods or did you cheat here and got most of it on running all your alts through the story? In any event, with the amount of time I spend on the game per day, I could MAYBE get 80-100 ore a day, doing nothing else but DS. But ya know, I have a guild to that requires attention, friends in game I need to help and play with. So i’m looking at probably half of that. So I basically need to play more than two weeks to get a kittening rune set. You think that’s normal and fine? In two weeks I can farm enough mats to create ascended armors for all your alts. I think THAT is fair. See how unbalanced this is now? I’m not even kidding. I could craft up characters for all my character slots tomorrow and two weeks later have all of them geared in ascended armor. But I can’t even guarantee that I’ll have that rune set two weeks from now. How is that right in any way?

Well I’m glad someone agrees :/ And they aren’t even great runes. They are only meant for highly specific builds. Only rune set with 30% boon duration but you give up alot of stats and possible other good bonuses for that. It also converts two condi’s into two boons when using an elite.

Does anyone else have a problem with this? I want a set of six runes of the leadership. One rune costs 100 crystalline ore, it is the only way to get this runes. Noxious pods aren’t even a guarantee at crystalline ore and the only other way to do it is grinding story on the 20 alts, that I oh yeah, don’t have. I would understand the price if it was more abundant or if it concerned some kind of high value item, like a very unique skin or ascended/legendary quality gear. But a set of runes? Really? I have to literally open hundreds of these stupid pods (which are RNG based again, they don’t always contain ore and the amount is abysmally low when they do) to even get something as simple as a runeset. Then picture this, somewhere down the line after the first raid wing is released, a new wing comes out that requires to change my armor. Then I can open another several hundred noxious pods. I’d ask the cost of these runes be reduce to 10 crystalline ore. Yes that’s right, only 10% of the original cost. Because they are only runes. They aren’t magical new infusions with 20 stat points, legendary armor components or tokens for ascended chests/weapons. They are merely runes. Either that, or vastly increase the droprate of this stupid ore/make it available in other ways. At least stuff like fulgurite and the other new mats can be bought on TP.

And don’t you people dare give me crap about ‘he mad cuz he has to work for something’. I’d be happy to grind DS for hours on end, day in day out, for meaningful rewards. And the vendor definitely has quite a few of those. However I do not consider the runes to be one of them. You can even see they gave it though, because all other runes for map currency cost 150. They prolly figured ‘hey lets make this 50 cheaper because it’s harder to get’. Yeah, that would be fair, if it was 33% less common. It’s more like a thousand times less common. I can farm 350+ aurellium in 1 full auric basin meta.

Superior Runes of Leadership? It’s a new rune but it isn’t on any of the three mastery vendors, nor the crafting vendors.

I think he’s dead. Honestly, I thin ArenaNet is realizing that creating a story around 6 magical all powerful elder dragons and only having enough resources and manpower to release one expansion (and two LS seasons) in a 3 year timespan is gonna mean we won’t be rid of all of them for at least another ten years. This means they cannot take the story anywhere else because people will wonder, okay what about the dragons? Are we just going to do x story and pretend the elder dragons are taking a break? I excpect more rushed kills in the future because I’m sure they understand that releasing another 4 expansions in which we kill a dragon isn’t going to get really old really fast.

Colly.4073:

But the discussion isn’t solely about people not being able to solo them its about dead maps, asking for help and nobody turning up.

I agree most can be solo’d but there are several that can’t and when you make your way to one like up in the canopy and its a champion with vets and there is hardly anyone else in the map or if there is they are just unwilling to help its frustrating as hell.

Not really a l2p issue IMO.

The maps aren’t dead. If I could get a gold for every person that asks for HP help when the entire map is doing Tarir event I could get myself another legendary. It happens so often that people completely disregard the maps progress and just go about their own business and then expect other people to drop theirs aswell to help them out :/ Be smart about it. Ask for HP help after everyone is done opening chests or in the early stages of the pylon activation. Then people will come. Also, there is many people out there who are just the type of person that once they get what they need they dont bother helping out anyone else. So one might think the map is dead but in reality the map is quite alive but is filled with people that just don’t give a kitten if you need help or not. This is bad ofcourse but cannot be put on anets shoulders. The maps are not dead. You might get thrown into an empty one everyone now and again but I always play with people and I do mostly the big meta events and we always taxi the maps to full. I command often and even when a map has just started I always get a zerg going of at least 10 people. If all of those ten people don’t respond to people that ask for help, yeah well thats tough but its not a dead map issue. Thats why people say: make friends and l2p. Then you’re not dependent on random egotistical scrubs. Its easy to find a group or friends in an MMO game. Just be social. And getting better is a matter of practice. Be selfsufficient. And a final argument i’d like to make: if you play on EU, at least 75% of people originate from some backwater patriotic country that couldn’t communicate in proper english if their life depended on it. Most EU countries have very low skill level in english and they would even go as far as talking to you for a straight ten minutes in whatever alien language they speak in a way that is similar to a dog chasing it’s own tail for hours on end. Your pleas for help might be falling on deaf or funnily enough, ignorant ears. All of these things is something anet has absolutely no control over.

Because it is. I’m not even a great player as I get completely stomped in PvP. I don’t have the reaction speed to respond when I see skill animations and try to interrupt. I press my stunbreakers a half a second late and get destroyed. Still, I can easily manage most of these challenges, all by myself. However, I treat all these Hero champs as a player. I find out their pattern, the attacks they use. What to dodge/what not. And maybe I died once or twice at first but once I get what to do I don’t die and there is enough time to kill it. It’s called dodging, being careful, using active defense, paying attention. E.g. that rolling arrowhead or w/e in Auric Basin. I see sooo many people dying there and literally let themselves get rolled over by that attack of his. I mean, stupid much? Occasionally I took risks there and might have been in it’s path aswell but then I dodge through it. Aside of those few times I simply kited it around until it died.

Pretty much l2p. Almost all of them can be duo’d and alot of them can be solo’d. The select few champs that spawn a bunch of vets along with the champ, need a group. You only need 250 hero points now and there are 400 hero points in Maguuma. Which means you can skip 15 of them. Map completion is broken right now so you have more than enough time to find a group for the remaining 15.

I think people complaining about the price of precursor crafting, and that it sometimes is even more expensive than buying it outright don’t really seem to grasp the point of it. In the past, everyone, even those playing only an hour per day due to work/family, could farm all the mats for the legendary on their own, without help or without the need for gold. It would be a very tedious process yes, but if say, you farmed SW, with EXP boosters, Karma boosters and good magic find for an hour each day and then maybe another hour to open all the chests for the keys you’d farm, you’d probably be able to get around 10-20 t6 mats/day. At this rate, a couple of months would be enough to get all the mats you need. By that time you’d also have enough obsidian, skill points/spirit shards, karma and enough gold to buy things like 100 icy runestones. However, since you’re hoarding it all, you don’t build up enough cash to be able to buy a precursor. That would require more focussed farming where you DO sell everything and make about 15 ish gold in the short time you play. This would add a couple more months to the process. Meaning that for Joe Casual, a legendary might take months, up to even a year. And this is a casual that would know how to be efficient. Most aren’t even that. Now you can work on your Precursor similarly to how you work on all the gifts that require mats. Slow and steady, never needing to make big purchases. In the end you might spend the same or more than just buying it but some people are better off paying for it in relatively small amounts rather than a large amount in one go. Most people don’t buy a house in one go either. You pay more for your house if you take a bank loan and pay interest every month than if your were to buy the house all in one go (not sure if this is how it goes in america but in europe this is how it works). Nobody thinks this is weird at all since no one would be able to buy a house if bank loans didn’t exist. And right now, almost no casuals have legendaries because they cannot pay for the precursor in one go. That’s why precursor crafting was introduced.

I soared across a bunch of different ley lines in Dragon’s Stand and none of them gave me the achievement.

The problem with these adventures is that you need gold on quite a few of them if you have any hope of ever maxing your masteries. The amount of mastery points is very scarce and you need to do virtually all achievements that reward them to be able to get everything unlocked. If they changed it so bronze and silver awarded the mastery points rather than silver and gold I wouldn’t give a flying kittycat if I never got gold. They are fun to do with friends every now and again but my only real purpose for doing them was because I needed them to progress on tiers 4 through 6 on all my masteries.

None. ‘Soldier armor for learning zerk’ is just a really dumb statement used to brush off nabs who ask too many questions as vets usually can’t be bothered to actually help new players as they usually have their heads up their kitten. If you want to maximize passive defense with the least amount of DPS loss you’re gonna have to use a calculator. I’m currently running with 2283 power, 2788 armor, 13.2k life, 59% crit, 195% crit damage, 422 healing power and 75% boon duration, all unbuffed. These aren’t perfect stats to be fair but that is quite impossible as you cannot freely change stat on gear. You will always have abit of excess in some areas. Right now I could do with lower precision as there will be situations where i’m above 100% and then its wasted. I could do with more ferocity. If there were ferocity stat infusions I’d be using those. These stats do however provide a more all round stat distribution and unlike celestial gear allows me to focus certain stats and neglect others. E.g. celestial gives somewhere around 650 healing power however I feel around 400 is sufficient to get some good regen going. Especially with my boon duration. Celestial also has low power and crit chance, somethign I have alot more of. Soldier really only adds a bit of toughness and vitality and you end up with low crit chance, similar ferocity as me and not enough toughness to feel much of a difference. Not to mention useless vitality. In a PvE situation, where you never really experience stacked conditions like in PvP, having alot of vitality would actually hurt you more than help you. It makes it harder to keep bonuses from Water trait, Scholar Runes, and Diamond Skin up, it makes your healing less effective and generally the things that one shot you would usually require a near doubling of your life to make a difference whereas alot of toughness can easily halve the damage you’re taking. My advice: use gw2 power to calculate your stats and decide from there how much damage you want to sacrifice for how much passive defense. Using that tool ensures you give up the least amount of damage.