Guild Wars 2

I guess it would be more clear to say it this way:
Hold RMB, Hold LMB, Release RMB, Move mouse in the direction of your other screen. The mouse pointer will show up on the empty screen.

I often find GW2 minimizing itself in the heat of combat.

Factors influencing this are:
1) I run a dual-screen setup. The second screen is unused by GW2.
2) I have Free-Look enabled, and often rotate the camera independently of my character sometimes (usually to kite while nading)
3) This causes me to use LMB (left mouse button) if I want to change direction to where i’m looking and RMB if I want to rotate the camera without changing direction yet.

I can reliably cause GW2 to minimize by doing the following things:
1) Hold RMB, rotate camera
2) While still rotating camera while holding RMB, hold LMB, release RMB, keep moving mouse while still holding LMB.

This will ‘unstick’ the mouse’s location and allow it to wander into an adjacent monitor. Clicking after the mouse pointer has wandered into an adjacent monitor will cause GW2 to minimize.

I was thinking that Sept 17 might not be the greatest since it falls on a week day, but it could work I suppose since different engies will log on at different times of the day and it would be still possible have a protest happening at any time during the day, it would just be unlikely to create much overflows. A weekend protest would have a greater impact. Another idea would be to flood the TP with a common white rifle (say, one you buy from the vendor in LA) for, say, 13s37c to show solidarity. The amount of these rifles on the TP would show how many people support the cause (you would only need to contribute one since the TP counts ‘by x sellers’)

JohnDied.3476:

As long as you don’t go grenadier in dungeons you’ll be fine. If you do, you’ll draw way more aggro than a medium class is meant to take… unless you kill everything before it kills you?

Grenadier in dungeons is good but only if your realize what an aggro magnet you are and adapt to the situation. Grenadiers make excellent pullers, especially once you’ve traited max explosives + grenadier for the extra nade range. Generally the pull strategy involves tossing nades and then immediately (while the nades are in mid-air) running back behind cover while your allies range and clash with the enemies that are coming after you. By the time the pulled targets get to the melee fighters in your party they will stop chasing you to engage your other party members and already be halfways dead, at which point you can aoe the whole lot of them. That’s the grenadier side of it, and just to prove that grenadier is a viable dungeon build.

There are a lot of other viable dungeon builds, including flamethrower (+ crit based) builds, heal-bomb builds and toolkit builds. As well as modifications of those builds that allow you to do condition-removal+support (Cleansing formula 409, plus at least 2 elixirs equipped), additional DPS, single-target crowd-control, etc (rifle is good for single-target CC, but you can augment it further through skills)

Be advised though, if you’re running explorables as a grenadier while undergeared (equipped with lesser gear than rare and exotic) you WILL be squishy and need to be constantly on your toes to whose aggro you have. There are a few defensive tactics you can use such as simply running away and dropping nades at your feet to damage the pursuer, equipping bombkit + big ol bomb to delay an enemy zerg, and traiting self-regulating defenses to save your skin from being bursted to death by a mob.

Engies are fun to run with in dungeons once you learn to adapt your skills to the situation and manage aggro properly. Engies can become quite formidable and can easily solo world PvE (including Orr) once you’ve learned how to avoid damage without using up your dodges.

People on the North American servers cannot play with people on Euro servers, not even by using overflows. It would be nice if they fixed that but I think it might cause lag issues anyways (on another game I play whenever a euro or aussie hosts a game it tends to lag more often since i’m on the other side of an ocean from them)

Noppy.1348:

@Danikat, great choice!
I made a female Norn Guardian, just a pretty girl with here GIANT sword

One question though, isn’t it hard to see what your Asura is doing in an event? (i’m serious, ‘cause i’m thinking about making my own Asura but i’m scared that i will not be able to see what i’m doing)

You should be fine. My main is an Asura and I have no problems knowing where I am at all times even when big burly Charrs are all up in my bubble. The only time where it’s difficult is during the holiday JPs when you have a big player right behind you (there are workarounds to that) but the JPs seem easier because of your size you can make more precise jumps.

Don’t be afraid of playing Asura, they’re such a fun race to be with their floppy ears and geeky quips.

You are perhaps right. However, I think that if any leveling speed should be slowed down, it should be the higher levels, like at level 60 make leveling progressively harder — though not like ‘WoW’ hard where it takes days of grinding just to gain a single level.

Sparky Sights.9174:

I’d rather the crafting stay as it is, I don’t want to spend mountains of gold on crafting of all things.

Ditto to this. Making crafting ‘harder’ by slowing down progress to max level means that people must spend more gold on crafting. I’m not talking necessarily about wealthy people who make money through the TP or know good farming techniques, but i’m talking about those who are barely scraping by (gold-wise) on their way to Level 80.

Also, the complaining would be endless. If you think all the complaining threads on the Engineer forum are bad (due to the 35% grenade damage nerf), it would only be a tiny fraction of what the complaining would be like if crafting was ‘nerfed’.

I don’t think i’m doing anything ethically wrong by posting this (since the gold sellers already know this) but message suppression triggers more frequently if you say the exact same phrase twice in a row (or otherwise frequently) that’s why gold sellers attach a bunch of random gibberish to their messages as a way to trick the message suppression algorithm.

So change it up a little bit, like by changing your wording when LFG/LFM. I can see why ANet would keep it in, like by preventing other people advertising (like their guild) from spamming the chat perhaps by using a hotkey or something, but you can get around it easily enough and it becomes not as much of a problem once you do.

I used to play a healer too in GW1. The engineer can be adapted into an ‘off-healing’ class with some healing gear, elixir and elixir gun specializations and maybe ‘heal bombing’ though the healing capability will amount to little more than say having 3 stacks of regen in a localized area which works great for mob surviability but won’t help much in situations where you or your party is getting hit by a lot of high burst damage attacks (e.g: bosses, lots of vets/silvers). You can augment area healing with nades if you prefer to stay at the back.

From my personal experience as a healer, engineer is fun to play, particularly turret-oriented engies up to level 40 or so (turrets are more early useful on, but dont scale as well at higher levels) then becoming a grenade oriented engie (or flamer) with additional healing and elixir buffing abilities. Doing AoE while applying 25 stacks of weakness on your enemies while adding a little bit of heals/buffs to the party makes the engie a nice all-around support class at high levels when you have enough trait points to spec grenadier (power 30 trait) in addition to your preferred support/survivability traits.

For other classes, you could try water ele (squishy) or guardian if you want to second as an area-buff applying tank. I’ve heard of altruistic healing builds which use the guardian’s attacks to also provide a constant stream of self and area heals. Haven’t tried it (yet) but from what I read it seems to be sort of 55-monk’ish but perhaps more tanky.

I get a pretty good return from using master kits. Salvaging 0-3 ectos from rares, but averaging at near to or slightly above 1.0 (the 3 ecto salvages can compensate for the salvages where you get no ectos). If you want to bank ectos (to sell later, craft exotics, or just keep in case you decide to go for a legendary at some point) then salvage, if you just want the money then selling works too since the worst case scenario is that you may just buy the ectos back at a later date with little to no profit loss since the buy/sell price of rare weapons/armor is slightly higher than a single ecto.

It’s kind of obvious what you’re getting into when you purchase and open one gift box.

Cathgar.7581:

And if they made them tradeable, guess what they won’t be special anymore.

Actually that is incorrect. They would still be special due to the fact that the supply is limited and will never be replenished. They would probably be worth increasing amount of gold as time goes on and continue to become rarer as collectors snatch them up and keep them. Those who were unlucky enough to get 2 of the same mini-pet would be able to sell one without issue. It’s not such an unfair thing given how expensive the wintersday chests are (people often buying them with real money → gems)

January Patch Notes

Engineer

• Fix bug with net shot sometimes missing. Net shot also nets the engineer to compensate for the bug fix.

It’s not a grind to get to Lvl.80 or full exotics because you do what YOU want to do. You are not given a quest to kill 20 foozles (repetitive, boring) and then run along to the next quest to kill 20 foozles, like you might be on WoW — THAT is a grind. There are so many ways to make it to 80 without grinding, and heck you can even get full exotics from karma vendors WITHOUT grinding.

Thats not to say that there is ‘zero’ grind. Grind is an inevitable result of an MMO where hardcore players play it well past the content that is developed for it. Which is to say you want a seamless, non-repetitive experience once you blow past all the main content. Well be prepared to either (a) run out of content, or (b) be expected to grind a little for all of the high-end post-game stuff.

To add something in for the hardcore gamers, ANet added in FotM. The problem is that for this content that ANet probably spent months developing, the players will finish it within a matter of hours so they HAVE to make it repeatable by adding in ascended items and scaling difficulty.

All endgame post-exotic stuff is grindy for the very reason that ANet simply cannot develop NEW content fast enough to keep up with the people that are beating the content. However this simply means that the content is fully optional. Your ascended gear is fractionally better than someone else’s exotics or rares but not enough where it greatly stacks the deck in your favor in things like PvP. It’s fully optional, and if grinding for one thing is getting boring then change it up or play a little less. You are not required to grind in order to PvP or run dungeons.

Also, golem grease is not only for lubricating the mechanical parts on golems.

Power suit racial is actually kind of fun for fighting champs and vets on overworld PvE — but nearly suicidal in dungeons. I use it only for fun and only for lulz, not because it actually grants much utility (skill 4 spin is good for interrupts, and skill 3 rapid punch is decent-ish but doesnt really increase your DPS very much)

This is what i’ve analyzed about the Power suit.

(1) Player is not granted a large increase to durability which would befit piloting a power suit. Try using it on a dungeon champ and watch him knock your health down to critical faster than you can blink (yes you can survive an attack that would normally kill you, but you have no mobility to escape follow-up attacks which = downed). This wouldnt be so bad if the power suit had additional mobility or attack power.
(2) Skill 1 has too large a cooldown. Not really an increase of DPS over what you would normally do. Stopping to execute a short-ranged punch against a moving mob often means that this attack will miss.
(3) Skill 2 has a large charge up time, can easily miss, AND does terribly mediocre damage.
(4) Skill 3 rapid punch looks like it’s doing lots of damage, but be reminded that the huge damage numbers you see are over a period of 10 (?) seconds?
(5) Skill 4 is pretty decent. It doesnt do great DPS and the risk of missing and wasting a long cooldown actually means that the interrupts you may pull off are balanced to the fact that you cannot otherwise control your suit while executing this attack.
(6) Skill 5 heal is okay, but do note that it won’t help terribly much since you can’t really run to safety to use it due to the slow speed of the power suit.
(7) ‘All skills on cooldown’ happens frequently and really interferes with the usability of the power suit. I think it has something to do with moving immediately before using a skill or hitting the skill button without stopping quickly enough (e.g. trying to use skill while kiting/chasing). Happens most often when trying to use skill 4 it would seem.
(8) Its slow speed and the fact that it only has AoE (which is a low radius spinning attack w/ long cd) make it a poor choice vs mobs that are comprised of more than one or two enemies.

Most of the time when I drop a power suit and someone gets in it before me I notice the following

(1) They use attack 1. Think WTF
(2) Then they use attack 2. Which is even worse.
(3) They dismount the power suit because they think it’s garbage.

Truth is it does need some improvements. I hope ANet can fix those. Fixing the ‘all abilities on cooldown’ thing as well as improving skill 1 and 2 (for example allowing the player to move while executing these attacks) would be a good start to making it even more fun and useful for PvE at least.

I see why invulnerability is added. It’s to prevent players from farming enemies by ranging them from a spot where the enemies cant possibly hit the player and to make it so that if you want to kill an enemy then you should at least do so from a place where he can kill you too.

Enemies resetting is due to excessive pulling them out of their zones. This can be exploited too. For example when fighting a boss that spawns mobs. One can bypass the difficulty of the boss by pulling him out of the zone where the mobs are and attacking him there, or go into a higher level zone and simply pull mobs to things like town guards, or keep kiting him at the edge of his zone forcing him to go run back to his ‘area’ and keep hitting him from outside of it.

It can be annoying sometimes but it’s probably a necessary evil.

Bag/bank slots, then do some BL chest gambling (because you usually get useful stuff out of BL chests). Don’t do wintersday chest gambling unless you really want an endless tonic and even then don’t expect to get it for sure since it’s gambling.

Could also buy up glue/stuffing and try get an endless princess/ventari/golem/soldier/griffon tonic through the mystic forge (1 frame + 50 stuffing + 50 glue + 1 pile glittering dust). Whichever one floats your boat the most.

On that train of thought, would it then be better to make normal hits miss for blindness duration while crits hit for normal damage and do not trigger any ‘on crit’ effects?

Regarding Super Elixir, in practice:

I’ve noticed that it only benefits static tanking vs mobs. What i’ve noticed is that teammates will ignore the field about 80% of the time, so over half the time they will run out of it simply by trying to gain additional distance from whatever is hurting them (because hurt teammates tend to like to run to heal up). In essence, SE will only work when the group is bunkering down statically vs a mob. So SE has a good chance to heal when your tanks are tanking, but doesnt work vs classes with mobility because they just run out of the field! You get one, maybe 2 heal pulse offs and the SE is otherwise wasted.

That said, how does it stack up against Healing Rain (Ele/Water Staff 5) which has similar mechanics?

What is the base healing stat on a Lvl.80 engie? And are the heals you cite based on the basic healing stat? full heal gear w/o heal bonuses from runes? or full heal gear with a specific rune set?

Legendaries are essentially vanity items, for balance reasons they won’t be stronger than normal exotics though they will gain ascended stats at some point. You can still spec giver/monk runes and all sorts of healing armor. While you won’t be max healing without accessories you can still flesh out a stat that you might otherwise need (like perhaps toughness). If you’re going to be tanking you will still benefit from those stats since a guardian needs survivability first and foremost to be an effective healing-tank.

Eastwind.7209:

Crafting is a mildly fun hobby, but it’s designed to be a black hole to prevent inflation in the game economy — nobody gets out of it what they put in.

Well, the main advantage of crafting is the XP, but yes it’s also a black hole. I probably spent 4 gold in total prior to Lvl.80 buying mats for cooking and this is with gathering being supplemented in (no straight mat purchases + power leveling). It accelerated me up to Lv.80 when I otherwise might’ve been a 60 or 70 or so but it really hurt my inventory space and extra gold in the meantime (BTW cooking is really hard on your inventory/bank space due to all the ‘intermediate’ level ingredients you need to collect for discovery purposes, i’m talking like 20 to 40 intermediate ingredients, some that are meant to be matched with karma vendor ingredients from zones you havent explored yet).

So if you’re fine with having problems keeping gold until Lvl.80 then by all means take up crafting if you want to level up faster but be prepared to spend coin on the mats you need but don’t want to go out and farm (and farming too much will slow down level progression too).

Do you get out as much as you put in? Well, thats hard to say. I would say yeah it’s worth it for the XP if you do it wisely and sometimes you can craft yourself nice things, but you can also gain those levels the old fashioned way if you don’t want to spend money to ‘unstick’ yourself from crafting with mats you’re no longer collecting (due to them being lower level mats than the areas your exploring)

Interesting mechanic. How about ‘attacks within x amount of time have a 50% chance to miss’ (stacks duration), or alternatively ‘next attack and following attacks within 3 seconds will miss’.

I recently purchased the +pow/tough/vit fractal capacitor from BUY-4373 and according to wiki.guildwars2.com the capacitor is supposed to come with an upgrade slot on top of its base stats. However I see no upgrade slot and trying to equip a seal on it (because I’m not partial to buying a 44s medallion to test) didn’t work.

I’m just wondering if the stats increase up past its base (+22/16/16) when it’s upgraded. I’m still a couple of hundred tokens short of upgrading it but I feel a bit ripped off right now.

Is that a bug or is it supposed to be that gimped pre-upgrade?

Did you try the state’s 2-letter abbreviation? Like TX or OH

I would actually like to be able to see how much +1s a post gets. It would be useful to see how much individual merit that the community is putting into those posts in general. It might consider some people to read good posts which at first glance appear to be tl;dr and perhaps not worth the effort to read.

Besides, what is the point of having a ‘+1’ button if users cannot benefit from it? (maybe it’s for moderators/devs only?)

I had no problem with karma supply on my main, even after buying everything I needed from heart NPCs. Less than a month after hitting 80, I easily had enough Karma for a temple god set. If you are concerned about having enough Karma for a temple god set then do this

(1) Dailies. Do your daily reward things. Accumulate jugs of karma. DO NOT SPEND them unless you really need the karma (and you shouldnt really need the karma if you’ve been doing dynamic events anyways).
(2) Monthlies. Do all the monthly reward accomplishments, you get 20 jugs of karma. Again save these up until…
(3) Karma Booster. It’s an item you can get from Black Lion chests. When you get one of these, activate it, then use up all of your accumulated Karma jugs for a 50% (!) boost to incoming Karma.

You will now have enough Karma to easily get a temple god set — with probably a ton of Karma to spare. Don’t worry about karma merchant stuff being expensive since you won’t be on short supply of it once you hit 80.

That’s a nice idea and I would certainly hope it would be possible in the GW2 engine without causing memory usage to ramp up dramatically.

From what I can guess how memory usage works in GW2 is that you have the ‘base assets’ for the zone which include the textures and those stay in vmem or quickly accessible. Then you have the assets (like the models and perhaps extra textures) which you would want to ‘cull’ out of the memory to keep GW2 from using too much memory, because it’s no use keeping a castle from the other side of the zone using up all your RAM or VMEM if you’re in a forest and can’t even see the castle, or that castle is otherwise being insanely optimized/LODded so that you can still see it near the end of the fog dist but doesnt need to load all its verts or even NPCs and interior objects.

However if GW2 doesnt cull aggressively and can hold the objects from two parts of the zone in memory (or even better, culls or LODs the heck out of non visible stuff since it no longer needs to be ready to stream it) then it might be able to implemented. I hope GW2 devs consider that and find ways to effectively cull/lod stuff from the teleport origin and stream or unlod the stuff at the destination in order to make that possible.

pugs on fotm are hit and miss — they do improve as you go up in levels, but expect to have a difficult time on Lvl. <10 just because not everyone knows what to do and people are less dedicated to finishing the fractal competently. If you have a hard time dealing with pugs at all, you’ll have a hard time with them on fractals too. You do need to have some resilience against these kinds of setbacks or fotm will just be frustrating for you.

mkaito.6981:

A gold sink for certain! Cheapest 20-slot container on TP right now is 11g80s. Maybe I’m just doing it wrong, but I can’t see myself sinking 48g into bags. I’m not sure I’ll ever have that much money!

Then settle for 16 slot bags and then use the gold you would otherwise spend on a bag to buy gems to buy an extra bag slot. You get more slots for cheaper and don’t have to resell, give away, or otherwise get rid of the old bag. Sounds like a good deal to me.

Bags are a gold sink and gold sinks are important for stabilizing the economy. Furthermore, donate your old bags to the guild bank, send them to a lowbie friend, or an alt. A lot of people would be glad to have the bags that you don’t want.

Because mistakes happen and getting thanked for doing your best to correct the mistakes encourages positive behavior more than having a player base that you are resentful towards?

GW2 is a huge game, more than big enough for a team of 50 or 100 support reps to watch every single player and provide a reasonable response to every complaint about cheating, botting, gold selling/buying in addition to their normal support roles. With automated systems you get the advantage of fast response time vs gold sellers, botters, etc but the disadvantage in that the system will sometimes make mistakes. If there were no automated systems, the game would be more overrun with botters, gold sellers, and gold buyers than it already is. The fact that the response time towards mistakes is reasonable is a testament to how decent that ANet support is. Hopefully they will continue to improve on the heuristics that detect unscrupulous players and fake accounts so that us legitimate players don’t have to worry about the consequences of piracy and cheating on the game (like exchange rates tanking or GW2 going away because everyone just buys from gold sellers instead of supporting ANet).

250g pear, anyone?

Sungak Alkandenes.1369:

Also, if you have a more recent mouse with a ‘side scrolling’ wheel (L/R wheel click, or whatever you call it), you can bind dodge to that. I use the right wheel click, and now the dodge is much more intuitive (mostly because I tend to circle-strafe to the right). Many folks also just use middle/wheel click as well, if you have an older wheel mouse.

Hey that’s actually a pretty neat idea.

I’ve got a mouse that has a ‘tilt wheel to scroll horizontally’ feature that’s unused in GW and 2 extra buttons that I use for ‘about face’ (which I don’t really use) and ‘heal’ (which is an awesome mousebind!). Havent thought about using the mousewheel tilt and these would probably be pretty good for that.

Elixir ground targeting isnt such a big issue if you use Fast Cast Ground Targeting. My ‘support grenadier’ playstyle uses elixirs to buff teammates that are clashing with the enemy while I am safely nading them from the back. That said, I think that elixirs could do with having less randomness applied to them.

On the subject of turrets. Turrets are fine for PvE up until Lvl 40 or so. There are 2 major flaws that I see with how turrets are implemented.
(1) Turret durability does not scale with level. Even armor plated turrets go down quickly against high level opponents. Even ‘Denton the Durable’ (a squishy NPC) seems more durable than Lv. 80 armor plated turrets.
(2) Turret AI is not intelligent at all. It seems to like attacking the spawn points for immobile objects, using up its own internal CDs on something that it cannot hit. This is more of a PvE issue than a PvP issue.

Turret detonation currently works by replacing one of your toolkit skills (e.g. F1-F4) with the chance to detonate turrets, and moves the ‘extra’ skills from the turret ability to the turret’s hotkey. I would like to suggest that this be reversed. That it would be necessary to hit the turret’s hotkey again to detonate it. The reasons for this are as follows.

(1) Less disorientation. The special function of the ‘F1’ key (for example) can still occur whether the turret is planted or not. It does not surreptitiously move to the ‘6’ key.
(2) Easier to keep track of what turret to detonate. While it may seem easy to ‘internally map’ a turret to the key, for example to know that F4 detonates the turret that is mapped to the ‘9’ skill. This becomes more difficult in the heat of combat. I know that 9 is my net turret for example, but if I have a total of 3 turrets planted then it becomes much more mentally intensive to remember that F4 will detonate my net turret when all the detonation icons in the F slots look the same. Whereas if my ‘9’ slot was to change to a detonation icon, I could more easily remember that it was my net turret since it is in the exact same spot as the net turret icon used to be.
(3) F-Keys are easier to use than the 6-0 keys. As in ‘easier to reach for’. I don’t know about you, but I have a hard enough time as an engineer switching kits. Even though I touch type, I still have to make sure that I don’t mash on the 7 key when i’m trying to activate the ‘8’ key. Using the F-keys are inherently easier to do than the 6-0 keys. It’s exactly why I have heal mapped to a mouse button instead of having to reach for it and risk mashing on skill 5 or 7.
(4) Double tap for instant explosion finisher. Some people like to use turrets as little more than explosion finishers for combo fields, this would accomplish that more easily.

Yup. I got a friend into GW2 and transferred to his world, while at about the same time he transferred to my world. We won’t be able to play with each other for a few more days.

Kerbii.7396:

“Igniting Rocket Boots!”

Male Guardian, I’ve heard him say this twice, and I have no idea what triggered it.

Possibly a stun breaking ability? Rocket boots are an engineer ability that breaks stun, immobilize, crippled and chilled in addition to leaping back and knocking the engie down.

Go into game options and turn off ‘double tap to evade’ if it’s giving you problems.

Peach Tarts give 25% MF, +60 Power, and +10% Exp bonuses and are much cheaper than Omnomberry Bars. The gold you get from monsters isnt very high anyways so you might want to consider just buying peach tarts.

Yeah, I doubt that there was some automated way to find out who was affected by the chest bug so they just send the gifts to everyone. Those who got the chest bug get the items that were in the chest as if they didnt get the bug, and those who didnt have the chest bug got the same items again. It’s probably the best thing they can do since gw2 has millions(?) of players and it would take to much manpower to investigate it and reward people individually. Gift bags for everyone!

Nicely handled!

Healer-bomber support class is very limited in what it can do. The best use of it is to provide mutual support to tanking classes — it will absolutely be wasted in battles where you need to have a lot of mobility.

My current build is an AoE grenadier class with a significant investment in group support that consists of
Traits
30 in explosives (Forceful Explosives/Short Fuse/Grenadier)
20 in elixirs (Self Regulating Defenses/Cleaning Formula 409)

Kits
Elixir H
Elixir Gun (for Super Elixir and it’s regen toolkit ability)
Grenade Kit (so you can actually do some damage)
Elixir U (for adding some aoe buffs to teammates)

Stats:
Power: You will want a lot
Precision: Good to have, it helps with crits which add to your damage capability
Condition Damage: Skip this stat, condition damage is underpowered.
Vitality: Good to have. Try to get it on all of your accessories if you can, in case you need to run fractals which penalizes you for having vitality at higher levels. You will want as much of this stat on your accessories as possible.
Toughness: Good to have.
Healing: You will want at least 150 of this stat. It helps but don’t sacrifice too much other stats for healing since it’s generally underpowered. If you can get healing via runes then you may consider doing so.
Critical Damage up: Skip this stat

Healing Skill Rotation
Elixir H (Your main self-heal. Removes a condition from you)
Super Elixir (Your main support heal. Drop this on your tanks.)
Healing Mist (Run into the middle of your group and pop this to give em regen)
Thrown Elixir H (give a small aoe buff to your teammates, remove a condition from them)
Thrown Elixir U (give a small aoe buff to your teammates, remove a condition from them)

Tactics:
Pull mobs with long range nades. Go hide behind a corner while your tanks clash with them then return and drop nades on them.
Stay at the back and nade. Drop elixirs on your teammates when they are bunched up. Drop super elixir on tanks.
As soon as your teammates start approach 50% HP drop all the support heals you can on them.
If your teammates are afflicted with multiple conditions, switch to elixir gun and use the fumigate ability to remove conditions en-masse.

Just grenade skill 1 to my knowledge.

What about sandstorms. I don’t think the majority of CD should be covered in sandstorms but they could add an interesting element to it.

1) A jumping puzzle in the sky, surrounded by a wicked sandstorm. You have to jump through the area and not get swept away by the sandstorm or you will end up at the beginning again.

2) A maze or other trial. The area is covered in blowing sand and your visibility is restricted. The only way out is to follow the clues or risk getting blown back to the beginning or the previous checkpoint in the puzzle.

3) Blowing sand appears in a part of the Crystal Desert periodically. The sand obstructs the players view and makes it easy to run into ambushes (maybe that would work for a dungeon instance).

4) An instance boss similar to the ice elemental from the ‘snow blind’ fractal. However instead of causing a blizzard, it causes a sandstorm. The boss could possibly be similar to a large wurm.

Toymaker bag is strictly for the skin. The stats are bad but you can always transmute its appearance onto a good backpiece.

That’s what I did with the Mad King Chronicles because MKC wouldnt let me equip anything but a basic lvl 1 gem on it. With transmutation though I was able to put ‘seal of the ____’ and exquisite gems on it. Toymaker bag will look good on an alt, I think.

The agony resist you have depends on your rings. Rings dropped from the FotM Lvl 10-18 daily runs as well as purchased with pristine fractal relics have no inbuilt agony resist and one infusion slot, so their AR is capped to a maximum of +5 AR.

Lvl 20-28 rings acquired from dailies have +5 built in AR, plus an infusion slot so they are capable of +10 AR.

You can make ascended backpieces (upgraded prototype fractal capacitor, endless quiver, etc) which can have agony resists as well depending on their level of upgradedness. Backpieces are expensive resource-wise and upgrading them even more so.

The agony resist needed to survive boss attacks will increase the further you go up in scale/difficulty. Generally on FotM Lvl.20 or higher you will need more than +10 AR to survive agony attacks from bosses. Some bosses can insta-kill you with agony attacks if you do not have enough AR.

Daily runs are effectively Jade Maw encounters. On every even leveled difficulty you will encounter the Jade Maw. The first time you encounter and defeat the Jade Maw on that day you will receive an extra reward at the end. The daily reward always includes fractal relics but sometimes you will also get an ascended ring. Subsequent runs on the same day will not give you that extra ‘daily’ reward.

Jumping on fence posts is good practice for when you’re bored and not sure of what to do.

Its highly situational and meant for jumps that require extreme precision. The snowflake platforms do not require very precise jumps at all. But there are a few JPs that require a high amount of precision (the pirate JP in harathi is one such JP that benefits from that extensively on the part where you have to jump on several planks that are sticking out from the wall).

Diagonal jumps of that nature can also be quickly executed in situations where you need to shave just a little bit of distance off your jump.

I think the principle behind not giving grenade 1 an autoattack is that since you are not aiming it directly at an enemy then the game doesnt know whether or not you intend to attack that enemy, or WHICH enemy you intend to attack. The targeting mechanic always works differently from grenades anyways because you must always aim them; there is no auto-aim (nor should there be due to the fact that part of skilled grenade usage is ‘leading’ your target). There are multiple frustrating situations that could arise should an auto-attack be implemented.