Guild Wars 2

OK, I was thinking they might have changed it to one item per profession… but I swear last night while I was playing, at some points I had the Necro fear ability, and at other times I had “Throw Gunk”.

Does the gunk come from maybe the necro pets? It’s possible I mistakenly targeted one of them when I hit Steal.

I copied the list from somewhere online. My understanding is that you have a chance to get one of 2 items from another player in sPvP, though many of these I’ve never gotten, so I’m not certain that’s accurate anymore. For example, I’ve only ever gotten the Boon item from the Mesmer and the Healing Tree from the Ranger, but I believe I have gotten both Gunk and the Fear from Necromancers.

Let me know if this is outdated:

Thief:
• Blinding Tuft: 3s of stealth and blinds nearby foes.
• Drink: Take no direct damage for 3s after using this spell. Long cast time.

Necromancer:
• Skull Fear: 3s AoE fear with a short cast time.
• Throw Gunk: Throw AoE effects/damage

Warrior:
• Shoot Rifle: Knockback + Damage
• Whirling Axe: AoE damage while moving

Engineer:
• Rusty Scrap Strike: 10s of Bleeding and Poison with 13s of Weakness
• Throw Gear: 2s stun, 900 range with long cast time and a long travel time

Mesmer:
• Consume Ectoplasm: Get all the boons in the game for 10s
• Torch Strike: 10s burn + damage

Elementalist:
• Ice Shard Stab: A melee range 10s Chill.
• Use Scepter: 50% chance for 2s melee stun – 50% chance for 10s AoE burn

Guardian:
•Use Staff: 50% chance for ranged 1s stun to 3 targets – 50% chance for fireball with 5s burn
•Mace Head Crack: 4s daze + damage.

Ranger:
•Healing Seed: Combo Field: Water, pulses 5 times, gives Regeneration and removes 2 conditions with every pulse.
•Throw Vine: Throw a vine that immobilizes your target for 5s

Also, to answer your other question, I believe poison only stacks in duration, so if you keep reapplying it you won’t be doing more damage, but the mob will be taking damage for longer.

You can find that info and tons more on the official GW2 Wiki:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Poison

Theyhave to be careful not to make them too powerful though or else the zergs in WvW will be firing off dozens of combos every second and putting out insane damage/effects/etc…

Maybe if they had them split in effectiveness between sPvP and WvW?

I really like the Smoke Screen → Projectile or Leap finisher. I use those all the time on my thief, but again, those are created and activated solely by me.

It doesn’t have a complete scoreboard, with sortable columns showing how everyone did.

All you can see is everyone’s total scores and a breakdown of your own score including number of kills, teammates revived, points neutralized, points captured, etc…

I’m at about 45 hours played. I’ve got level 15, 10, 8, 6, and 5 toons, but have been spending more than half my time in sPvP, where I’m just about to roll over to Rank 11.

Having a ton of fun. I see myself playing just as casually for the foreseeable future. An hour here, 3 hours there. Not necessarily every day.

I think it’s funny to see these people who have over 200 hours, or over 300 hours played. Seems insane to me, but I’m not a kid anymore with that kind of time. I like when they say something along the lines of “I’ve got 350 hours played so far and this game is such a grind.” Hmm, yeah… you do anything 12 hours a day 7 days a week and it’s going to feel like a grind, no matter how much fun it could have been if you’d played it with any semblance of moderation.

2) While they can go completely invisible, you can keep swinging, or doing AoE and you’ll still do damage to them, and possibly force them to run way around or otherwise disrupt their plans.

I feel like the speed boost is working when the match starts, and when I get into combat. But after I finish fighting, and I’ve been crippled or chilled, I feel like I never get the speed boost back again. Even after I go back out of combat I just “feel” slower than I was when the match began and I came flying out of the gates.

It’s just a subjective feeling at this point, but I suspect there may be a bug with reapplying the speed boost after being crippled or chilled, or slowed in some fashion.

Mac.1936:

The problem is your glory level has absolutely nothing to do with how good you are.

Aside from what I said above, this is the other problem with using player rank.

All rank shows is roughly how many games you’ve played.

I nealry always win “Top Objective Neutralizer”. I am almost always near the bottom of the list in terms of earned glory, so my rank is going up a lot more slowly. But I’d argue I’m being very useful to my team and it’d be great if there was some back-end system tracking things like that.

I think if they just upped the bonus glory for winning the match that could offset the issue. I’m always back-capping points, and I nearly always have top Objective Neutralizer and Point Capture bonus glory because I spend most of the match running between the 2 outside nodes. No one is ever defending.

Given all that my team may win the match, but nearly everyone will have more glory than me, even on the losing team, because they spend so much time in the middle killing each other back and forth.

If the win bonus were like 100 or 150 glory then I think people would play these matches more like capture point games and less like deathmatch games.

There is a lot to consider when making your build; Traits, weapon sets, sigils in those weapons, runes on your armor, your amulet.

I spent hours last night speccing out a memser with the strongest phantasms I could make. Then I decided to change and wiped out everything and recreated my mesmer to to try apply as many conditions as possible and make them as strong and as long lasting as possible. I took hours reading through the traits, reading through the runes and sigils… it is a big task if you’re not prepared to do a little homework. But it sure is satisfying when you have a concept in mind and you find a great combination of traits, weapon skills, runes, and sigils that combine into an effective build.

I would recommend going to the NPCs in the mists and fighting each class. You can try out your skills in a more controlled enviornment, try different builds, experiment with different traits, and ideally get a bit more comfortable with your chosen build without the choas of 5 enemies rushing your capture point.

I’m not sure how this would be happening since the sPvP system is a hot-join system.

I, as a rank 9 PvPer so far, can go to the game browser, choose server 74, and join it. That server could be full of Dolyak’s, or other rabbits, I don’t know, but there is nothing stopping me from joining that server, or any of the dozens of other servers that aren’t already full.

You don’t change servers between games, so I don’t think the game is shuffling players around to match them up with others near their rank. It simply shuffles the teams around between everyone who happened to join Server 74.

I have the traits that cause steal to do damage and stealth you… most of the time it works. I shadowstep over, go invisisble, and do damage, but thinking about it more closely… I tend to use it on people as they’re running at the node I’m guarding. I shadowstep to where they just were, go stealth, but they’re behind me, so if I am auto-attacking once I’m missing and therefore not coming out of stealth… I guess. Have to experiment more with that.

I like blinding powder over Shadow refuge because there isn’t a giant house hovering over a very distinct area saying “Please drop your AOEs here, I must be in this specific radius”.

The blind is nice too since people are learning they can just keep swinging and hit stealthed characters. With blinding poweder that first hit misses and then I could have gone any direction after that.

As a thief I love making my own combos all the time. I have a build that uses a lot of stealth, and one of the ways I can gain an additional stealth is to fire off my Pistol #5 skill, laying down a Smoke Field, and then use Dagger #2 (Heartseeker) from within it as a Leap finisher. Not only do I leap at my target and do some good damage, the combo stealths me for free.

Alternately I could use my Dagger #3 (Death Blossom) Whirl finisher inside the smoke field to fire blinding bolts at all nearby foes, making all of their next attacks miss.

Swap to the Shortbow and now with that Smoke field I could fire the Shortbow #2 skill into it, which is a blast finisher, and grant me and my allies area stealth.

Or start all of that over but with a poison field which I can then Leap finisher to cause weakness, blast finisher to cause area weakness, or use my whirl finisher to fling poison out in an area.

I don’t know the other fields and their resulting finishers as well as my own, but as time goes on we’ll all become more familier with them and they will become more and more important.

At the moment, whenever there is a new update, the launcher displays a number of files remaining and the progress bar moves in relation to that.

That doesn’t actually convey much useful info as each file could be any size. This causes the progress bar to stutter and leap forward, then stop while it downloads that one file.

If I see the launcher has downloaded 20 Megs, 3 files remain, and the progress bar is at 95%, how much longer until it finishes the update? We don’t know. Each of those 3 remaining files could be 20 Megs each for all we know.

They obviously know the total number of bytes the update contains. If the progress bar updated according to X out of Y bytes downloaded it would move smoothly along it’s length and we would be able to roughly estimate how much longer it’s going to take to finish.

I didn’t read thorough every page, but I’d like to suggest that the progress bar on the launcher be based off of the total remaining data to download, and not the number of files remaining.

Basing the progress bar on the number of files downloaded doesn’t actually convey useful information. Some files fly by, others are multiple megabytes and we have no idea.

Ok, so there are 3 files left to download and the progress bar is sitting at 95%… each file could be 300 Kb or could be 50 MB.

Maybe you’re thinking of dungeons. They said the game would start with 8 dungeons.

Because there are no cooldowns for thief skills, and because there is a skill queue, if you are hitting the #3 key multiple times you’ll often find yourself jumping all over the place when you didn’t mean to.

You just have to press #3 once, let the animation carry out (because you can’t do anything during that time anyway), and then decide what to do when you land; reposition yourself, turn the camera, leap right back over them again.

Just be careful not to hit the skill keys multiple times on a thief because they will queue up and fire off back to back because there are no cooldowns. This is not a problem with any other profession in the game.

I fully agree… I know a few of the icons now, but in sPvP I could steal any one of 16 items, and right after shadowstepping into the face of a warrior is not the best time to hover over the little icon and try to read what the skill does. A pop-up in the vein of the combo field pop-ups would really help.

aljar.6970:

Forgot to say, the only thing I miss from using S+P is the lack of a combo finisher or field

Technically the pistol skill #5 is both combo field + combo finisher in one skill. It lays down a smoke field and then immediately fires a projectile finisher through it, which is why the attack blinds your foe. You can fire off pistol skil #4 from inside your smoke field and you will both daze and blind your target as you combo again.

But S/P is fairly lacking aside from skill #5. I like to use S/P and then run D/D on weapon swap. I can use pistol skill #5 to lay down a smoke field and then I have 4 options as finishers:
1) Pistol skill #4 for a projectile finisher that blinds the target
2) D/D skill #2 for a leap finisher that will stealth me as I leap to my target
3) D/D skill #3 for a whirl finisher that will fling blinding bolts at all foes in the area
4) D/D skill #4 for a projectile finisher that will blind my target and bounce to multiple foes

For option #4, I’ve never checked, but does the blinding effect only apply to the first target, or will all targets the dagger bounces to be blinded?

I love using stealth and mobility to confuse my opponents… but I do dislike some of the things you’ve listed here. Let me add the Ranger warhorn ability that calls down the birds. It doesn’t matter if I stealth, there is a big bird hat on me the entire time and everyone can simply attack that area.

Do you think these kind of skills are intended to be a counter to stealth? Should the Ranger’s bird attack be cut short if I stealth, or should the birds go invisible with me, or is it working as intended?

For sPvP I’d recommend a decent amount of Toughness at least. I tried a pure Crit/Power build the other day and took 0 extra toughness, and while I did a lot of damage, I rarely had enough staying power to finish them off, or survive much beyond the first enemy.

I spec’d back to having 1800 toughness again and it just feels so much better wading into melee with my daggers and sword. If I get stunned and smacked on a few times I no longer crumple to the ground.

sPvP is so separated from the rest of the game. My guess would be that it does not count against the monthly achievement, but it is definitely just a guess.

There’s a whole separate achievements tab for PvP stuff, so I feel like the Monthly achievements are PvE only. (And possibly WvW since they’re kind of a blend of PvP and PvE)

I can vouch for toughness on a thief making a big difference.

Two days ago I decided to completely re-do my thief to have as much crit as possible. In doing so I took 0 toughness, so it was the base 916 or whatever. It was fun hitting people so hard, and critting on over half my attacks, but I died so quickly I never really got any kills in.

Yesterday I switched back to taking a good chunk of toughness and I doubled it to 1800. Playing sPvP after that felt like a world of difference as I could leap into the fray get some attacks off, get hit a few times, and not be dead 2 seconds later.

Toughness gives my thief the staying power he needs to keep stealthing, and dodging, and attacking. Without any extra toughness all it took was one stun and then a large attack and I was down. Now I can withstand that large attack, dodge away, heal, and keep coming at them.

everreal.9862:

…especially since 90% of people in pub games are running glass cannon builds. One stun or knock down to them and a quick burst combo usually does the trick, lol.

Too true… I’ve been running a thief in sPvP and just yesterday I decided to re-trait, re-gear, and just build for as much crit chance and damage as I could. I had no extra toughness at all. It was nice when I was able to get in and land a few attacks, but I would crumble so quickly I was barely getting any kills. There are just too many skills that immobilize, daze, stun, etc… You’ve got to have some kind of defense.

Last night I redid my build again and doubled my Toughness, while still maintaining a pretty decent Power, and it’s a world of difference. I can jump in and out of the melee and not just die in a couple of hits. If I’m stunned or immobilized I have a few seconds to Shadowstep out, or just take some hits without dying instantly. I don’t hit as hard for sure, but I’m in the battle long enough to finish people off.

I’ve had some luck changing which game server I’m in if I find the hot-join sPvP lacking. Each row in the PvP browser is a different server. Once you join one you’ll play game after game after game, mostly with the same people. If you’re just seeing both sizes zerging each game, drop back to the mists, select a different game server from the list, and join. You’ll have a whole new set of players and hopefully, after a couple of tries, you will find a server that is playing with a few more tactics.

Or you could decide that earning the maximum possibly glory per match is not your main goal and just play the way you want to. On my thief I’m always running back and forth between the 2 edge nodes. At the start of the match I run to the other team’s node, hide behind some terrain until they cap it, wait until everyone runs off (because no one wants to defend) and then quickly neturalize and cap their point, boosting my team out to an early lead. I almost always get the Objective Neutralizer bonus points, and often the Point Capture one as well. I may not get as many kills, but I’m helping the team and breaking a few opponents out of the main zerg to come back to get their point back from me.