Guild Wars 2

Hi there, I haven’t played GW2 for a while, now I want to return to game and make new Condi class.
I played only power classes before, and now want to try condi class.
Which one can you recommend and why? Building condi class from scrap would be expensive, so that’s why I’m looking for most valuable class, with high/highest condi dps, and lots of utilities to help teamplay. I’m looking for class mostly for PvE and Fractals. I love to deal lots of AoE damage, so it would be nice that the class I’m lokking for would have some nice AoE capabilities too.

Hi there, I recently wanted to test something fresh for me, create new character based on condition damage (my current characters are power based).
SO… I’ve heard that necro is currently the best condi class, is that true ? What build should I use to max condi damage output ? Ho about open world events, leveling etc? Is condi good for that too ? I mean open world events need some serious AoE damage is Condi necro capable for that like power classess ?
in the other hand if necro is not the best condi class then what class is the best for dealing massive condition damage?

No passive speed buff is the only reason I didn’t created Guardian yet…

Thank You so much for this build now maguma falls looks much better when I survive mobs attacks who would ever know that some vitality make so much difference
I switched your runes to Wurm Runes and signet of assasination along with the preciosion one and soe physical skill or shadowstep

Hi there, Can anyone suggest any good build for PvE HoT content, that are currently using ? I’m thinking to create thief, because I like it’s mobility, but how about survivality in HoT, where typical mobs can kill you in one shot ?

Hi there, can anyone suggest me any valiable build for solo HoT content with necro reaper? I would be greatful

Mea.5491:

I am a computer noob, what would be the difference if we switched to DX12?

Much better graphics, like Physical Based Rendering, and much much better performance since any modern GPU can handle DX11-DX12 better than outdated DX9
just for your imaginations look like witcher 3 looks like and imagine that GW2 would look simmilar

Right now we’ve got worse performance than high end games like GTA5 or Witcher 3 or Black Desert Online

PaxTheGreatOne.9472:

Problem is simple, the engine Gw2 uses is a modified engine from gw1, which was a heavily modded unreal engine (directx 8 if I remember correct)

Having a modified engine which was modified in 2005 and re-enginered is a bit more difficut to upgrade then other more stock engines.

Even though I really want to see a directx 12 engine, I doubt it will appear soon™

If the only thing whcih is attractive about gw2 is the engine, have fun somewhere else, and If you like gw2 for the game you’ll be back.

I’d appreciate it if Gw2 would be modded, so we could use 4+ cores instead of the 2+1 now. but this is also an engine limitation.

We’ll see what will happen.

I’ll give you example about engine modification…
World of Warcraft uses modified engine from Warcraft 3 (RTS GAME !) and now it runs on DX11 and maybe soon on DX12
I’m just tired with engine limits and constant fps drops in big battles, when in other games like GTA5, Witcher 3 or Black Desert I have constant 60 fps (due vsync)

ANet really, learn from your competition, TESO will gets DX12 support read here >> http://wccftech.com/elder-scrolls-online-dx12-upgrade-ps4-7th-core-usage-performance-improvements/
If You don’t upgrade your very old engine Your game beloved by many of us will die with natural death, because there will be better and far more advanced and optimized titles, like Black Desert Online, which look Stunning amazing, and looks better than most sinlge player AAA games today. Funny thing is that even Black Desert Looks Better than most SP game it runs a lot better than GW2, I’ve got constant 50-60 fps on max settings there, even in big fight. When in GW2 I can have drops to 10 fps on large scale events with GTX 970 !
Why is that? Answer is simple because of DX9, Windows XP unsupported system for a couple years now, and I’m asking You ANet why ? Why aren’t you upgrading your game to modern standards?
I bet WoW will get DX12 (becasue it’s support DX11 from couple years now) with next expansion, and How About GW2 ? Please release public beta dx12 client and let your community send you reports how it works.

Hello, I was wondering how good is revenant compared to warrior in PvE ? What are Your toughs ? I’ve tested them out on same gear stats (switched ascended gear to each other) and I think Revenant is slightly better in dps (specially 1 sword autoattack) and survivality because of double heal, and self perma boon, BUT what are your opinion guys ?

I’m constantly getting disconnects on events, on fractals, everywhere, I’m so frustrated because I lost so many good meta HoT map. I lost 4 or 5 Teleport to friend items because I’ve got error from the attached picture. NO i DON’T have active firewall or any AV if You ask. Game was running smooth from beginning of HoT with few crashes, but today after patch It was impossible to play anything, because I couldn’t even change map, or complete any event without this error…. I payed for content that I cannot play, and I lost many hours where I could drop something good from meta events or fractals…

Evans.6347:

By asking for good ranged AoE damage you pretty much limit yourself to elementalist and engineer, you know.

I’m not asking for purely Ranged class, but with better ranged than warrior
btw, engi good ranged class? grenade build ?

I’ve tested out DH on sPvP aswell and it’s pretty fun class, BUT there is one BIG issue for me with this class… It’s slow! DH don’t have any speed boost without staff, warrior have passive trait +25% movement speed boost, and pretty much all other classes have some kind of speed boost passively instead of Guardian/DH, this is big issue for me because i like to run fast on maps

Hello, I’m Warrior axe/axe veteran, and now I’m looking for new experience, through creating new class. I really love dps, and fast attack with axes on my warrior, and with berserker elite. I’m looking for something similar but with better heal and ranged capabilities.
I’m looking for fast attack, good AoE high dmg – mostly ranged, with some CC and heal to survive difficult situations. Is there any class that meet these requirements ? excluding elementalist, because it’s too slow on staff for me.
Please make your suggests. In addition this class is for PvE, mostly maguuma HoT.
Post your suggestions with stat and trait build please. You may include HoT Elite specs.
Thank You for support

same here, lags from yesterday and can’t login now

Apolo.5942:

I takes a tremendous amounts of time and money to rework the engine for DX12. They simply will not do it.

Your best hope is that some of the DX12 improvements are introduced into DX9 through backwards compatibility, but that is entirely on M$ side.

So You are telling me that Anet don’t have resources to upgrade their engine ? I doubt it, they are keeping over 300 people for a single game ! Blizzard’s WoW have less employees dedicated to WoW and they are upgrading their engine very often

yeah but how about dx11/12 features like HBAO, PBR, TXAA etc ? If game want to be live for many years they need to constantly upgrade it’s engine to meet current gen standards, when in the same time keeping old rendering systems for older PC configs. WoW is a great example, and I bet Blizz will add DX12 pretty soon with next expansion.

So new patch adds new graphic options – new AA and Ambient Occlusion, Do You think is this the first step to new DX 11/12 ?

Where I can find new AA settings? I really want to get rid of that blurry FXAA

New traits system looks very nice, but it would be nice to add some kind of trait saving tool like templates to quickly swap saved trait builds for different purposes. I swap traits a lot because different traits works different on game modes, f.e. dungeon or WvW.
Can You Anet add this tool to the game with new trait system ? please?

Hello, I’m curios about full damage flamethrower build, compared to other classes like warrior or ranger which can play very easy on berserker builds.
Have anyone tested flamethrower build with berserker stats ? It’s hard to keep engi alive on that ? killing mobs is fast enough to maintain alive, and how about tougher mobs like veterans or higher ?

Hello, Can You advice me what classes are fastest for doing map completion ? I was thinking about thief, what are Your suggestions ?

I have both Ranger and Ele at max lvl with ascended/exotic items. I’ll start with Ele. When You play Ele you can go to daggers, conjured or staff, that’s the main builds for ele, while playing with daggers you must be Asian player with 1000 click per second to play it good, I mean you will have to move a lot and change attu very often to maintain alive, with conjured weapons there is different story. Your best friend there will be Lightning hammer swappable with Ice Bow, and that hammer can hit hard, but again its melee, and Ele have very low survival. Last but not least, The Staff. I’d like to call it mobile artillery because it’s gamestyle is very similar. You stand behind others and shoot balls of fire with every auto attack AoE, your other skills on fire are AoE too. So You stand behind and watch for numbers, but when You are solo against lvl 80+ mobs like Orr or SilverWastes then You’ll have to do little running to stay alive, because those mobs can 2 shots kill you. Thats all for Elementalist

Now for a Ranger. I’ve discovered that it’s easiest class to level up next to guardian and warrior. I’ve noticed that mob and pet AI have been some kind improved since pre-living story GW2 (I have ranger then, but it was bugged to hell, so I deleted it and make another couple months ago). Your pet actually aggro mobs, and your cat don’t die on 2hit from simple mob. Ranger have this advantage that your pet aggro mobs so you can shoot safely from distance, and Longbow have been improved as well, on every 8s you can deal 12-15k dmg with your 2 skill on LB, but it’s single target, thats the difference between Ele and Ranger, Ele is AoE type, and Ranger Single Target, and Don’t listen to anybody that saying Ele is better at range of ranger, thats total BS, I’ve checked these 2 characters on same berserker build, Ele is good for AoE, but when it comes to deal massive ranged dmg to single target, then ranger shines, many people forget about boons and condis, but ranger at opening with skill 2 gives 15 stacks of vulnerability, that 15% increased damage on that mob for all those who are attacking it ! You can have pet to give boons too.

You can compare it very easily, on any builds site, and without any traits and armors or additional stats compare flat dmg from skills Staff ele and LB Ranger.
Ranger:
LB Basic AA – 321 dmg at max distance every 0,75s, can be improved by traits
LB Burst – 1340dmg for 2,5s burst = 536dmg/s 10s CD, CD and dmg can be improved with traits
LB AoE – 1704dmg for 2,25s = 757dmg/s

Elementalist:
S Basic AA – 317dmg every 1s
S Lava Font – 1160dmg for 4s = 290dmg/s CD 6s in one place
S AoE – 486dmg per hit if it hits at all, fast mobs can run from its range quickly, because of no slow like ranger have, and don’t forget about 3,75s casting time.

as you can see ranger flat dmg is better, furthemore if you do open world i’ts really hard to keep mobs for full duration in your lava font, that it can deal full dmg, unless you will facetank, or run around circle, but higher level mobs can hit you easily at close distance, and your survivality is like dry branch.

So people telling that ele dmg is better at ranged than ranger surely they don’t know how to play ranger. Ele is good for dungeons, when you can stack and let your team take dmg, or even bug some bosses that they can’t even hit anything, then you are safe to do your pools for stacking might lure mobs into lava fonts etc… I can agree with that. Ranger isn’t good for dungeons because of limited range where it’s shines at long distances. it’s better for fractals PUGs where most of people prefer using ranged to fight bosses, because its safer, then ranger deals best damage among all classes to single target boss.

And open world, if you do dynamic events with a lot of people then ele is better because of it’s loot vacuum AoE Staff, but when You do hard mobs like champions, then Ranger is better IMO. I can do Open world champions solo with my ranger. These classes are very different in gamestyle and it’s purposes. Ofcourse any class is good for anything but some are better than other in some cases

Yeah they didn’t said exactly that they will add dx11, but let’s be serious I love this game, but huge fps drops, game is limited to 32bit, no new effects like AO or PBR, all thanks to dx9. ANet is limiting them self in their creativity by limits of their own engine which sould be improved year by year for expanding mmo title. Every new mmo (and even 2004 mmo WoW) have dx11 support, and In every other mmo I didn’t have such big fps drops like in this game, which should be optimised long time ago.

I have 16GB RAM and 3GB on GPU, nearly whole game could be loaded into RAM, but it won’t because of it’s limits, so I’m forced to have long loading times, and occasional mini freezes during map exploration because of loading new skins of bypassing players. Best example of power dx11 is newly released GTA5, it’s HUGE Sandbox with no loading screens, with lots of effects, textures etc. and I have no loadings there, everything runs smooth on constant 60fps, 80-110fps without vsync, still don’t You see advantage of dx11 ?

ok I found a quote this was on August 2012

“For those of you who have been asking about DX11 support for Guild Wars 2, our goal with GW2 has always been to provide a gorgeous fantasy world while at the same time running on a wide range of gaming PCs.

Focusing on DX9 allows us to do this, as it’s a much wider supported graphics API than DX11 is and we wanted our game to reach as many of our fans as possible.

We will be evaluating supporting DX11 post launch. ~RB2"

There was HUGE debate about how many people have dx11 supported GPU at that time, but now everyone (or 99%) have dx11 GPU, and DX12 will be supported by todays GPUs as well, so I think that Heart of Thornes is THE BEST TIME TO ADD at least DX11 SUPPORT

You can see how much FPS boost dx11 gave to World of Warcraft in 2010 !
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/world-of-warcraft-cataclysm-directx-11-performance,2793-7.html
We now have 2015 ! and still no dx11 ? and Again I’m not talking about graphics (which should be improved by new effects like AO) but I’m talking about performance boost for every GPU based on dx11

dude You are asking for quote from first announcements of gw2 from couple years ago… all I can find about this is this screenshot showing renderer type at bottom from GW2 beta

Hey ANet ! I remember that you told us, that you will implement dx11 to your game in future, and that was said before GW2 release. I even remember renderer type option in graphic settings in gw2 beta. Now You’ve announced some time ago expansion, and I have a question for You. Do you plan implement dx11 or dx12 for that expansion or not ? dx9 is getting really old, and I’ve got 20-30fps drops on full reflection on, when in gta5 I have ultra reflections and I got constant 60fps, when here in metrica province i can get 30fps at some locations with “ALL” reflections on. I suppose this is because of dx9, and its not supported by any modern games, even World of Warcraft have dx11 and I suppose they will go for dx12 too because of it’s undeniable performance!

If You plan to develop this game for a Years like you said, You should really adapt to modern technology, I don’t talk about graphics, because it’s great already (but could be better), I’m talking about performance on new DX, that is much much better on new GPUs than on dx9.

So dear ANet, as a BIG FAN of GW2 I really really… reaaallly hope so you are planning to include dx11/12 support with new expansion, because 30 fps drops with simple reflections options on my gtx 780ti is unacceptable in modern game

I can even include SS, showing that huge fps drop, and there wasn’t even water in direction where I was looking so WTF with that?

Why most of you says that ranger isn’t that good as Ele for single target? I agree with that Ice Bow (not Frost Bow) deals massive damage with Ice Storm, but it ends here with huge CD. While ranger have every 8s ~15k dmg and auto attack deals over 3k dmg every 3/4 sec without might buffs ! while ele on same zerker build deals ~3k every 1s and include lava ~2,5k every 1,3s but boss rarelly stand in one place to deal full damage from lava when you are in ranged team

Jerus.4350:

Curious what bosses you are referring to though? In a Meta group a guard should be able to block tank Mossman/archdiviner long enough to have the rest of the group burn them down, it’s only when you run with unorganized groups or bad players that you really have to back out to range.

Yeah mossman is that example, literally I almost never fight him with meele group, except underwater bug

Sublimatio.6981:

learn to dodge and stay in melee to actually deal damage

yeah you get me wrong… I’m not sayin I wasn’t meele or I can’t dodge, All I’m sayin that I often only meele in random party, so I’m forced to use ranged weapon because my build is not tanky, to not die as only target for a boss

Hello,
I’ve just noticed if I go higher level fractals then more people kill bosses at range, because there boss can one shot your character. So in that case ranger seems to have pretty large advantage over other classes, because of superior ranged damage.
What are your thoughts ?
I know that somebody will say that every class is even, but when i see that only way to do boss is ranged in most situation, so its logical that ranger is strongest ranged class, am I right?

Lightsbane.9012:

i’m curious how much experience you have in each category to come up with that list.

Actually pretty good, since I’ve got maxed all classes in the game, and played a lot of any gametype starting from early beta of guild wars 2

The best class is the one you like playing.

these charts are to see statistically what people prefer in different situations, and to see what is repeating and what’s not. I can surprise you but many people don’t have all-in-one favorite class, and they choose the one that fits best for different role, and that’s why I’m curious abut that charts

I hope this thread will evolve into something big. Big enough to make some kind of graphical diagrams

Hello,

I was just wondering if there is a chart or something, after all the recent revamps, stating the Top Classes for certain gametypes like PvE/PvP structural/WvW among all the heroes and their builds. If anyone has any observations I would like to hear about them. Please follow my suggested rules for this charts to make it clear to read for everyone.

- Power – common berserker builds focused on power and critical stats
- Condi – common damage over time builds, focused on condition damage and duration stats
- Support – builds based more on helping allies than dealing damages, focusing on healing power and boon duration
- Tank – typical though heroes, focused on Thoughness and Vitality

From my point of view charts looks like:

Best Class for PvE Open World/Leveling:
1. Warrior (Power)
2. Ranger (Power)
3. Elementalist (Power)

Best Class for PvE Dungeons and Fractals:
1. Warrior (Power)
2. Guardian (Power/Tank)
3. Elementalist (Power/Support)

Best Class for PvP:
1. Thief (Condi/Power)
2. Engineer (Power/Tank)
3. Messmer and Necro (Condi/Power)

Best Class for WvW:
1. Guardian (Tank)
2. Elementalist (Power)
3. Engineer (Condi aka Granade build)

Great advices !
now I can see that power might be better choice because of x10 attack + critical chance, and condition damage does not give you crits.

I’m confused. What is better (armor type, runes, accessory, etc) for engi with flamethrower? Because its attacks procs with both of that stats, BUT there is no good stat equipement with both + precision.
What you suggest fellow engis?
I’ve made something like this http://tinyurl.com/m36e4k3 (safe link to gw2buildcraft.com), but still I’m not sure about that, because propably this site doesn’t cound condition damage to overall Effective Power. I don’t have lvl 80 on engi yet, but I would like to know what to focus on.
I hope I’ll find some really nice advices about my confusion.

sorry for my eng.

For now I have something like this:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fcAQFAElIqyanui6dkIUB8D6Re9bdF94xNeyA;TIADRmWA

Later on I would like to swap flamethrower with elixir gun, but for now I don’t know it is fun If I don’t like it then I’ll stick with flamethrower (for groups) and rifle (for single vets+)

I’m wondering about rocket turret It seems to deal massive damage… but I know that elixirs are much needed for engi… and I’m confused :/ again.

What do you think ?

Hello, I’ve recently created Engi Charr
I’m level around 15 and I love Flamethrower for groups of mobs, but I also like Rifle. I’ve read some on this forum that Flamethrower isn’t so good lately, so what traits and engi skills should I choose? In addition I would like to stick with rifle not double pistol.
ohhh yes and one more thing, I don’t like granade kit, so is there any way to play without it and do a good damage or be usefull on g.Events or in dungeons?
In other way pistols shoots pierce, thats the advantage, but how it works wit Elixir gun ? is Elixir gun still good choice? Or I should concentrate on other aspects?
comprehensive answer much more welcome
thx in advance fellow engineers

Thanks for answers guys, specially Chopps for great comprehensive post.
But again I would like to know how this builds works in PvE like dungeons or big events, can ranger do well without though pet ? on sPvP i can change traits as many times I wish, but sPvP is a different game for WvWvW I’m not ready yet, because just started to play as ranger. All I want is to have really high dps, how to achieve that guys?
and yes I will try build with pet, but I really like bows and GS, but power isn’t good for SB (because 3 of 5 skills are conditions), and skirmish isn’t good for GS xD because GS uses only flat damage from power

Hello, I’ve just started playing after a long break, and this time I’ve rolled for ranger, but I’m little confused about what I’ve read at this forum.
So far I know is to go to full BM (must have)
but I like to be sharpshooter… is this even possible at this point ? I’ve read that power attributes builds sucks for ranger, so longbow/GreatSword don’t proffit anymore. Condition damage seems good for shortbow, but how this works in dungeons, and mass of mobs? Please guys can you guide me? can you lighten my confusion ?
I don’t know what tratis to choose and what stats to focus on items.
Hope someone will help me
and sorry for my english