Guild Wars 2

Well, I’ve been playing since release with my small guild of friends, and our Darkhaven PvEers have dwindled to… two. The rest of my guild (who were more PvP-focused) transferred to Anvil Rock to compete. This hasn’t been a problem at all, but with the looming changes that will add Guild Events, I’d like to sign up with something a bit more robust.

I have two 80’s; started the game with a Norn Ranger but I’ve come to enjoy my Engineer way more, so I’d call him my “main”. I’m a casual/hardcore dichotomy when it comes to my playstyle. I was a leading-edge raider in WoW and SWTOR for long enough, and RL commitments have cut my playtime substantially since those days. So my weekly playtime is more on the casual side, but when ingame I lean towards the more hardcore style. I’m a handful of relics and a dozen globs of ectoplasm away from upgrading my fractal capacitor, have two characters in all exotics, etc.

I’m looking for a solid guild that’s active. I’d like a quality pool of players to draw from in running Fractals, Dungeons, or even just starting new characters and levelling up together. I do have one close friend who’s about a cabon copy of me in terms of gameplay (hardcore style, casual time) who could also use a home.

If there are any Darkhaven guilds looking for a couple quality players, hit me up ingame or send me a message on the forums. Looking forward to it!

If this isn’t a troll post, then you just need to make a SLIGHT adjustment to your gameplay. If you’re not getting enough dodges, try dodging melee attacks. Yep, it works.

Crafting? Go turn logs into ten planks. Or ore into ten ingots. Done.

But I still suspect a troll… and am glad engineers wield both fire and poison.

I’d say the boss in CoF P3 is the only low point of that path. I did it for the first time with a group that’d never done it before, so we got to learn it together. It was a fun fight, but once you learn it, it’s rinse and repeat… And repeat… And repeat…

It turns into a function of time spent, rather than one of skill. A simple hit point reduction would fix this one.

Ascended items are such a minimal upgrade from exotics that I don’t see TOO much of a problem. The only problem I have is the invalidation of jewelcrafting. It’s the only craft that is now unable to make the highest tier of gear available for players.

Amulets and rings are covered. All jewelcrafting supplies are accessories.

Two things…

1). With the recent changes to fractals, it doesn’t make sense to play odd-numbered difficulties. As long as you’re playing at a level equal to or greater than your own, you’ll gain a level. The even-numbered levels have a bonus in the way of the Jade Maw.

2). Go to http://www.gw2lfg.com and you’ll be able to find groups much more easily than by advertising in /map chat.

Disagree. There’s plenty of solo content in the game. It does not make sense to ruin a grouping experience to appease a minority that wants to do it alone.

In other news, there are plenty of videos of people soloing dungeon content as they stand.

I think you’ve demonstrated the very reason they won’t allow them to be salvaged.

You have 20+ of them. If they allowed you to salvage for ectos, that’s 0-60 ectos. Multiply that by however many people have rings saved up and it’s quite an influx of ectos into the economy.

Has anyone figured out which dyes match the fractal weapon skins or the capacitors? I’ll be starting the capacitor on my engineer soon and would love to get it all coordinated.

I’m using Earth and Corruption. If you can stay up, 250 condition damage is nothing to scoff at.

I’m considering picking up another Ruinmaker and swapping to a different sigil once Corruption is fully stacked. Maybe Force?

Please, don’t take this as argument. I’m trying to understand the logic here, and definitely appreciate the discourse.

That said, how are bleeds easier to apply than direct damage? We don’t limit how many greatswords are allowed to hit a target.

@Rfreak.6591

Is my base assumption wrong, then? I considered Anet as attempting to roughly balance damage output, so a direct-damage only build would be doing about the same as a condition-focused build.

If one character is dealing X damage, and another is dealing Y+Z damage, and X=Y+Z, why do we have a need to limit Z?

Comparing single players against targets, I wasn’t aware bleeds were doing so much damage that they had to be nerfed.

Rfreak, thanks for responding… but if the bleeds come faster, what does that matter? The total damage output would still be the same as those doing direct damage. Even if the condition damage were “sped up” to the point of applying instantly for all intents and purposes, it’d still just be 50 direct and 50 condition, vs. Joe’s 100 direct. There’s no advantage.

This is likely a question best answered by Anet, but I’d like to throw this up for discussion in any case. While this is not a topic unique to Engineers, I’ve really been enjoying playing a P/P condition-based build and am particularly feeling the sting of this one.

Why is there a stack limit on damaging conditions? Specifically, why should Bleed be limited?

I’m going to use some incredibly simplistic and arbitrary numbers which SHOULD demonstrate my point, but I’ll start with the disclaimer that I understand classes are not 100% balanced, and that the numbers I’m giving are not real-game examples. They are simply given to give a context for my question.

Let’s say two characters are 100% balanced to have equal damage output. Each is attacking a target 10 times. The first (we’ll call him Joe) is dealing direct damage. The second (we’ll call him Bob) is specced for condition damage.

Joe: 10 attacks at 100 direct damage each
Bob: 10 attacks at 50 direct damage each, plus 50 condition damage applied over 2 seconds

I’ll further push this and say that both Joe and Bob are attacking once every 2 seconds.

Joe and Bob will both deal a total of 1000 damage. Joe has an advantage since his damage is instance and can not be removed, but is disadvantaged in that toughness will decrease this figure. Bob is disadvantaged since it takes longer for his damage to actually affect the target, and any condition-removing abilities will further reduce his total damage output. He has a leg up on Joe because Toughness doesn’t decrease that bleed. It can be argued that they’re both dealing the same “ideal” damage, and this is balanced. Bob’s damage just takes 2 seconds longer to “kick in”.

Now, let’s put 25 Joes and 25 Bobs to task on taking down a target. They each attack 10 times.

10 Joes: 25,000 direct damage
10 Bobs: 12,500 direct damage and 12,500 condition damage

Again… balanced. Keep in mind that in our example, we’ve just manufactured an instant, 25-deep stack of bleed that is refreshed the very instant it runs out. Let’s kick it up another notch and assume 50 Joes and 50 Bobs on the target.

Joes: 50,000 direct damage
Bobs: 25,000 direct damage and 12,5000 condition damage

Gah, what happened? Well, the Joes are holding strong and doing 50k damage to the target, but the Bobs have gone over their stack cap. Only the first 25 bleeds actually affect the target. The rest of the attacks still deal their direct damage component, but the target is essentially bleed-proof to any additional condition damage. In our setup of completely arbitrary numbers, the Bobs are dealing 75% of the damage that the Joes are.

I’d like to know the reasoning behind this, and used bleeds for my example since they’re without any additional effect placed on the target. This scenario assumes every player can only maintain a single stack of the bleed, when we know in practice GW2 allows multiple professions ways to stack those multiple bleeds. I’ve seen it argued that a stack of 100 bleeds would be ridiculous, but I don’t see how that’s different from 100 greatswords to the face. The damage is the same, so why is one being penalized?

stof.9341:

Paradox Xion.1038:

Just tried to do this for an hour with a group on Teamspeak to coordinate.

Seriously who thought the lighting the lanterns section was a good idea?

You have to win the lotto in perfectly timing the spawn rate for each of 5 groups with lighting the lanterns at exactly the same second.

This requirement for millisecond perfect timing needs to be fixed and make this a bit more reasonable for people to complete

Thanks

Seriously, the mobs only respawn when their group of 3 is killed and even so it takes them like 20s for that. More than enough to synchronize and activate the switch all together, even if you got some slowpoke in the group that takes ages to kill his adds.

This.

If your respawns are out of sync, just hold off on killing the third mob until you’re all on the same page. Did this with a pug using only ingame chat and it took about 5 minutes to work out the kinks.

So, I ran path 3 in the Citadel of Flame the other day. It was a PUG looking for two more and I figured, “why not?” I’m still wondering, “why not?”

I’m not sure whether any of us had done that path before, and it still wasn’t that big a deal. I was anticipating some long, drawn-out crawl that hardly justified the time spent. What I found was a fun run with fights that helped mix things up from the usual path 1 & 2 runs. I’ll concede that the last boss hat too many hit points (okay, we figured it out and are now rinsing and repeating… die already), but beyond that, it was a good time.

Why is this path mentioned in hushed tones in /map?

Love my dual Ruinmakers.

The subject line sums my engineer up. Is it viable to try and build a pistol-wielding, condition-based engineer?

My focus has been PvE, and I’m undecided on the decision of a shield or pistol for his offhand. What I’m curious about is whether others have had any success with the pistol, or if the kits are all but necessary at later levels.

I’ve gotten him to 60 ankittenackling over leveled class quests well enough, but I have some concerns when it comes to stacking up conditions. The most worrisome is the inability to stack bleeds higher that 6-7 with the pistol.

Echo, I’m curious why the death count means anything to you? Your personal restriction enhances the gameplay for you, and that’s great. You can take pride in playing a character who’s never died in the game.

Why not just ignore the existence of the death counter? It means nothing to you, so why would it matter that this number which no one else can see goes up by one?

In short, you consider a character dead, then he’s dead. If you don’t consider entering the Mad King’s realm to break that rule, then play on with confidence. If you DO consider entering the realm to be a “death,” then don’t enter.