Guild Wars 2

YuiRS.8129:

If they buff Glacial Heart in a good way it could lead to the resurrection of the old Hammer medi Guard. Don’t know about you but I’d love that.

That’s exactly what I’m hoping for, with maybe an additional change that makes it viable for PvE as well :>

GrahamW.5397:

Tbh, it’s not overlooked because its weak, its overlooked because of the traits that it contends with. Infact outside of replacing it with a trait that’s useful for pve nothing will ever contend with absolute resolution especially in pvp/wvw where conditions are so prevalent. Moving it to a different trait line would make it a viable option but then you’re just putting another trait in its place to forever go unused because one of the other options in the trait line is so strong.

I definitely agree that it contending with absolute resolution is a problem, but I still think it’s weak after the removal of air/fire. Some burst builds survived because they still have enough damage built into them, but medi hammer took a big hit with the removal of the sigils. (There was/is a bug with glacial allowing it to proc on-crit effects twice, and a lot of the consistency of hammer burst was a result of it.)

With the release of specializations two years ago, Glacial Heart was moved from Valor to Virtues, and as a result it currently competes with Absolute Resolution. Even with this change, hammer guard was still at least a somewhat viable build, but the removal of air/fire sigils in PvP utterly trashed it.

I have a couple proposals, any number of them would immensely help:

• Increase Glacial Heart’s damage in PvP by ~80%. This number is a rough approximation of how much damage the burst lost when air/fire were removed. Even 50% would be acceptable. (Though it’s understandable that buffing passive spikes is a very dangerous game.)

• Switch Glacial Heart with Unscathed Contender or put it back to Valor as a Major trait.

• Change the proc chance from 50% on crit to 100% on crit. This would make it feel much more consistent (removing RNG from passive effects is always good IMO).

• Optional: Allow glacial to proc with any 2h weapon, not just the hammer. The cooldown reduction would still remain hammer only (similar to Right-Hand Strength), but the trait wouldn’t feel so incredibly specialized and useless in every other build.

I really miss playing hammer guard in PvP and I wish the trait wasn’t utterly useless in PvE. It’s in a really awkward spot at the moment and could certainly use some love.

Gaile Gray.6029:

• I hear [this world] is dead
• I don’t like the links between [this world] and [that world]

These are often valid concerns.

If air/fire are being removed, all the crit-based zerk/marauder builds will need some buffing to compensate. If you can’t spike people, what’s the point in playing a burst build?

pls dont kill my hammer guard it was non-viable for so long and then mighty blow + JI was fixed and it’s been fun to play

That frailty sigil is not going to be used unless you increase the duration immensely or set the ICD to 1s.

3 stacks of vuln (6 with 100% duration) is pretty worthless when you consider the ramp-up time with a 3s ICD. Wouldn’t we want this sigil to be situationally better than the proposed 5% (# of boon/condi) sigils? Keep in mind that if a target is already at 15 vuln, 3 stacks of vuln is only a 2.6% damage increase.

the only issue with skyhammer is the terrible navmesh around the side nodes

pls fix it, it’s literally impossible to port to the point from certain areas, northern node being especially bad

I’ve been playing with the Soaring Devastation trait lately, and while it’s possible to cast JI at the very end of the cast, it requires incredible timing/mashing to pull it off.

The inability to cast JI midair was a bugfix previously because you could prevent fall damage if you cast it before hitting the ground, and when they implemented it, it ruined the ability to hammer 2 + JI combo. They’ve since fixed hammer 2, but gs3 and WoR don’t work with it.

I’d rather have the bug reimplemented if it meant we could use these skills with JI again :v

I’ve been running Soaring Devastation with hammer, but I still keep ToF to force dodges & its synergies with hammer 4 and 5.

Worth mentioning the Soaring’s damage is calculated with the weapon strength of your active weapon, so a longbow is 5% higher than your one-hands, and a hammer/staff/greatsword is 10% higher. The coefficient is 1.5, putting it at 85.7% of Hammer 2’s damage. Pretty strong.

Having your F2 leap proc glacial heart + sigils when used in conjunction with SC and SC-on-heal trait can give you some surprising and disgusting burst damage. Then you have to remember that you’re also AoE healing, self cleansing, and immobing for 3s. It’s a fun trait.

I’ve seen plenty of legend x1 players get matches but it feels like the moment you climb another division it just annihilates your queue times. I thought it was supposed to treat all legendary divisions as the same? Am I just unlucky, or is something broken here?

anet pls respond i wanna play pvp sometimes

Fivedawgs.4267:

Funny because mine are around 10 max, I usually get 17 or 20 min queues in the morning.. but it average out around 10 min or even less during prime time. Are you both auspices?

I wish I could get queues to pop in the morning lol, between 6 AM and 1 PM EST queue pops are so rare that I don’t even bother anymore

honestly a little ridiculous that i can queue for ~5 hours in a day and only get one match to pop

gin.7158:

It’s very unlikely to happen LMAO. Try to play at peak hours

what are peak hours if not the 4 hour window both before and after daily reset?

I’m still a few days away from finishing this stupid backpiece and I’ve only managed to get 1 match today after 3-4 hours of queuing. I’m honestly pretty annoyed about this 3 daily match achievement now lol, this shouldn’t be something I have to worry about.

hotfix add cross division matches before season ends pls

Jaxom.7310:

and dun’t no1 say ‘well wvw is pvp so u can still pvp while u wait’. running to find your team in wvw takes almost as long as just standing around the hotm. so that dun’t count

it takes you more than an hour to find your squad in wvw? you got some tiny legs

Exciton.8942:

Nope.
It has very strong skills. Being a bit clunky makes it balanced. Giving it both strong effect and easy usage is not a good idea.

Then why isn’t it used in PvP?

Exciton.8942:

Also, don’t forget it is already meta weapon for guardian in PvE and WvW.

They can do PvP-only balance now (also you just auto attack in PvE unless you’re trying to break a bar).

the servers were rolled back after the update due to a bug, was only a couple hours. we can just be glad that stuff like this is incredibly rare and move on

On my way to legend this season, I’ve seen ONE other guardian using a hammer. The kit has potential to be incredibly strong, but the clunkiness of it holds it back.

Some potential buff ideas for criticism and discussion (note that not all of these would be needed, just a couple to help the weapon set as a whole):

• Make the 3 skill Unblockable and/or travel faster
• Speed up the third hit of the auto chain by a 1/4 second (from 1.25 to 1.0)
• Give Ring of Warding a damage or knockback component to the circular swing (much like the warrior one).

Any other ideas to help bring this weapon up to par? I know it’s been used in conjunction with longbow somewhat recently, so it probably doesn’t need much, but it’s definitely lesser than the other weapons at the moment (also staff probably needs a slight rework but that’s a different topic altogether).

Sunshine.5014:

People don’t stomp not because AoE is strong, but because Stab is meaningless. A Rev staff #5 can strip multiple stacks if not all.

This is wrong, there is an internal 0.75 second cooldown for each stack of stability removed from a player.

On the topic of suggestions: How about adding HoT stats to the Badges of Honor vendor? If the argument against it is that HoT stats are an incentive to buy expac, then just look at the scribing vendor in the guild halls. If you don’t have expac, it tells you that you can’t access this content without purchasing HoT.

Either add the stats to a new HoT-only tab on the existing vendor, or just add a new vendor if the code is too difficult/time-consuming for HoT-specific vendor tabs.

I have guildies that would love to use and experiment with the new stat sets but aren’t willing to grind out the map currencies/gold to get the gear (and they’re sitting on tons of badges).

Cross-posting to bug forum

Xyonon.3987”

Wahoo!
Sometimes I wonder HOW ANet manages to get their stuff broken like this. :P Thanks for the vid, Cat!!
Dear ANet, please fix this one as fast as possible. It affects the Engi too much to ignore this for a few weeks – that’s a major issue and totally wrecks Engi (at least in PvE).
Greez!
- Ziggs Ironeye
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/4bj49d/bomb_kit_is_broken_right_now/

source: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/engineer/Bomb-Kit-bug-1/

Xyonon.3987:

• 1+0.09*4/9 are the average of 3 stacks GotL with a 4/9 chance to get (druid gets it itself too)
• 1.25 is Vulnerability

Ah, I wasn’t assuming vuln or GotL. There’s the difference.

Xyonon.3987:

Wahoo!

---

This is exactly why you shouldn’t trust the wiki, especially not on it’s coefficients. They are almost always wrong.

First of all – the tooltip say something completly different. Even tough they may be wrong aswell – I’ve been using Takedown Round and Drop Gunk multiple times on the silver wastes puppets and yea – they are wrong xD.

The average total damage of Drop Gunk was 1935 (all 6 hits).
The average damage of Takedown Round was 2194.

• The wiki coefficients are wrong
• The tooltips are wrong (not because they are trait tooltips, the % difference is wrong aswell)
• I was wrong with my power damage (no deeper testings back then :P)
• EVERYONE IS WRONG Q_Q

From the sounds of your testing, this tells me that Drop Gunk is using 1000 weapon strength and TDR is using 691.5 weap strength (unequipped strength). These inconsistencies are really annoying, but it explains the damage values.

Edit: After looking into it myself, it seems they stealth-buffed the coefficient for Drop Gunk. It is now a 0.3, and I can assure you that it was not before. (I was the one who calculated the 0.2 on the wiki a few months ago.) I’ll update the wiki accordingly.

This means that my previous statement was not true, they both use unequipped weapon strength. Inconsistent inconsistencies.

• Bleed is now 24s and deals 6033 dmg.
• Burn is now 6s and deals 4506 dmg.
• Poison is now 13.3s and deals 3565 dmg.
• The average Sharpshooter (calcs include the crit chance!) deals 434 dmg. This x6 is 2604 dmg.

16708 condi dmg

Are you sure you’re calculating the damages correctly? For a 24s bleed to do 6033 damage, you would need 3623 condition damage. (And you would be using Berserker runes)

I think something is wrong in your formulas.

Xyonon.3987:

Important!:

btt: Takedown Round vs Drop Gunk (this is for condi engi!)

Takedown Round deals 3027 power and 471 condi damage every 10s with a 50% uptime (only above 50% HP) and therefore deals 175 DpS for the whole fight.

Drop Gunk deals average 3616 power and insane 16704 condi damage every 20s. This results into 1016 DpS wich is extremly strong imo.

Drop Gunk has a 1.2 power coefficient, while Takedown Round has a 2.0 coefficient. TDR will definitely do more direct damage than Drop Gunk.

Regarding the condi damage you have for Drop Gunk, are some conditions more common than others? Assuming it’s a 1/6 chance for all the main condis (pretty close to that if the others are incredibly rare), then you would only average ~13k condi dmg.

I don’t think Rifle Turret would beat Elixir Gun for damage. While Surprise Shot has no cast time, Acid Bomb still easily beats Surprise Shot + 2 Bomb autos for damage, and you can definitely cast it at that rate if not faster.

Pinpoint Distribution is definitely BiS in a group setting if you’re not using a rifle. I’d be more worried about the differences between using Siege Rounds and Shrapnel, as the bleeds still add quite a bit and Siege Rounds is only effectively boosting your Orbital Strike.

I believe they’ve actually commented on this one and that it’s intended. Might have been during the livestream where they showed off specializations for the first time. I’m not sure.

What’s the huge issue with the UI being on? Is it impairing other game functionality, or is it just the fact that it’s really buggy and hard to deal with? If the latter, why not just keep it on even with the bugs? That way people would still be able to get a taste of the raid content.

But if it’s affecting other areas of the game, or affecting server performance, then that’s understandable.

Something I’ve noticed: Even with small 10v10 fights in a keep, the lag occurs.

It doesn’t even require a full map. We’re getting massive spikes and “discos” while trying to hit EB red keep this morning.

they don’t show up to the enemy if you’re stealthed

it’s been that way for quite a while, same thing goes for ranger pets

Can you give us your Engineer’s setup? I’m interested.

The reason why it’s not dumb to compare Rifle auto to Bomb auto is because in almost ALL PvE content will you be stacking and aoeing the mobs/bosses down. Sometimes you wont be, but in that case grenades autos are still 50% more damage than rifle autos, AND they stack vuln/bleed/chill/poison

If you want to PvE and not bring down your team, you pretty much have to run
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fdAQFAUlUUpdr9ZxELseNSbBNq3A6TMi2+5GGgjC-TxBEABMp8Ll9HaTHAAPAA3uAAJq+zWKBJFwiKjA-e
to keep up with the damage of other meta builds. It’s roughly the same as Warrior GS build when you factor in the bleeds.

3 Blast finishers so you can maintain perma 9 might for your group, have others blast in your field as well for more.

Fun fact: Elixir Gun #4 (Acid Bomb) does ~93% as much damage as a fully channeled Hundred Blades from Warriors. You can also cancel the leap part of it, effectively making it take about a second to do and then switch back to your other kits. When you’re stacking mobs, they’ll take all the hits from it.

Rifle is used for 3+5, sometimes 2 against certain bosses (Fractals come to mind.)
Bombs are used for 2+4 for the Fields, sometimes 5 for above reason on Rifle 2. Big ol’ Bomb for blast + big damage.
EG 4 for damage spike + blast, 2 for above reasoning, 3 and 5 for group condi cleanse, toolbelt for the stun break.
Grenades: 5 for perma poison (for your GM trait 2%), 2+4 for higher damage than auto, auto spam because good damage + vuln stack for party.

Never run turrets in PvE. They don’t scale. It’s terrible. It’s passive gameplay. Don’t do it.
Same goes with Flamethrower. Passive, mindless, gameplay. Bad damage. Not worth it.

If you don’t want to run kits, play a different class. (Warrior comes to mind, if you just want to sit on one weapon.)

bigrob.3510:

Flamethrower is my main damage and the auto attack tooltip says 5x 1620 for damage.

The 5x 1620 is an INCREDIBLY misleading tooltip. That means that the sum of all 5 ticks is 1620 damage TOTAL. It’s a TERRIBLE autoattack, and flamethrower should only really be used for everything else.
#2: HUGE burst, great power coefficient if you can land both hits on someone.
#3: Powerful, low cooldown cone knockback.
#4: Fire field, burn application.
#5: No cast time pbaoe blind, perfect for stomping.
#Toolbelt: More burn.

Oh, and Attack Power is a meaningless stat, because damage is calculated by POWER * WEAPON STRENGTH rather than POWER + WEAPON STRENGTH

so gimme yer power ;D

bigrob.3510:

@Reverence.

I’m sorry, but with 3800 AP I do good damage. Maybe you have not seen one built like mine

Let me guess, you’re running a mix of Cleric’s, Soldier’s, and Sentinel’s (Maybe Apothe instead of Cleric’s). You have healing bombs, elixir gun, Healing turret, Backpack regenerator.

Your traits probably look something like 10-0-30-20-10 or 10-0-30-30-0

You aren’t going to do a lot of reliable damage, you don’t have enough aoe disruption (you have some, but not enough), and you don’t have any stability.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Cleric engineers, but they just aren’t as useful as guardian/warriors on the front line. Though the bombs can be some excellent utility.

Aberrant.6749:

@ cat as eng it’s just knowing when to cond burst them. They’ll try to run but wind up dead on the floor… or they have run away when they hit 50% hp (and were never any threat at all). You could also use something like toolkit/bombs/rocket boots for being able to dash out/pull them back in. If the thief wants to bail at 50%, then whatever, they give up a lot compared to other classes for that ability to disengage (just like wars that can dash away give up a lot). You already have the ability to tell if you’re hitting some one in stealth with mele btw…

Warriors and thieves (and mesmers, to an extent) have it far too easy when it comes to disengaging and escaping. There is literally no counterplay to it. You aren’t rewarded for fighting them. It’s just irritating. Warriors already have so much going for them, they don’t need that much mobility. Thieves should not be able to get more than twice the range of grenadier grenades between you and them before their stealth runs out. I have no idea what to do with mesmers.

The problem with them being able to run away is that then they can stalk you and return at a later time and catch you off guard and potentially kill you. The fact that they can attempt this countless times with no risk is a little broken if you ask me.

I agree with this, and also adding the ability to dye the other set of gear as well. Currently they look like trash because of how bland they are.

I’ll have to 100% agree with stealth being overpowered in the WvW scene. As a roaming engineer, I have a hell of a time catching the kitten kittens once they realize they can’t actually kill me and decide to run off. The lack of diminishing returns on stealth duration gives them so much distance between you and them before they’re revealed.

I guess you could call it a “win” if you make them run away, but where’s the loot? Where’s the WXP? Where’s the ability to shut them down and force them back to their waypoint, thus preventing them from ganking some other poor sob from your server? The suggestions made in this thread, at least the damage indicator when you HIT them, would in no way remove the effectiveness of stealth. It would instead give you counterplay to those cowards that run.

Yeah, any time you use an ability the game doesn’t care what type of ability it is, it just tries to autotarget the nearest enemy and start attacking. Solutions are to turn off autotargetting or to turn off your auto attack.

I get this all the time when I’m switching between kits for swiftness on my engineer. It’s really bizarre on the engineer because I’ll be switching from medkit to grenade kit and it will try to sneak in a rifle auto even though I don’t have the rifle out at all.

bump for thoughts

connieboy.9840:

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t enjoy bomb kit in PvP at all. It can be alright for holding a point, where they have to be on the point to cap and thus in range of your bombs, but otherwise they can just kite you all day.

That’s the point of a bunker build, though. You’re supposed to sit on a capture point and zone them out of it forever.

Here’s my variant of a bunker build:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fcAQJAqelIqicX3ynF17IRoH2/+qVkC9b5PKkbaB-TsAgzCtIuRtjbHzNyusdNa40w8DA

I take a Cleric’s amulet with a soldier jewel (Jewel for a little extra health and power)

I didn’t bother swapping out the sigils, but you can change the sigil of life to something like +5% damage if you really want, it’s not too important

This build relies on spamming bomb abilities while standing in super elixir for max healing (over 1k hp/sec), though you can also just tool kit #4 while standing in super elixir to stall your opponents while your team arrives. Not so heavy on the knockbacks in this, but I personally find bomb kit to be too good to give up to flamethrower, and bomb range/cd is too important to get a trait that will only work every 20 seconds for 1 extra knockback.

I take a mix of 3 different rune types so I can keep protection at an almost 100% uptime if CC chained, on top of the 20% decreased damage while CC’d meaning 53% total damage decrease to tell those warriors to kitten themselves.

100% regen uptime, 25% faster move speed at all times (not perma swift, but oh well), fantastic regen and aoe healing, can give allies good regen durations/condi cleanses (don’t forget about elixir gun #3!!!!), smoke bomb is too OP

Really, your biggest weaknesses have already been mentioned. Ele, mesmer, warrior, and SOMETIMES thief.

Oh, and btw, the map with the capture point underwater….you should NEVER lose that capture point with this build lol, bomb autos are faster underwater (the same bug that used to happen with grenades, but they never fixed the bombs), so you have HUGE regen/aoe damage/aoe control while underwater. The extra bit of power in this build goes great with harpoon gun #2 for finishing someone off.

Currently the “Attack” stat is just the sum of your power and weapon strength, but that sum is not used in the damage calculations. The damage is calculated by the PRODUCT of the two, so I think “Attack” should represent the product. This product is in the millions, but would be no problem as 4,613,523 could easily be represented as 4.614

I suggest this because I always hear people talk about their attack stat which doesn’t mean as much as their power, because a 10% increase in attack does not mean a 10% increase in damage, but a 10% increase in power DOES mean a 10% increase in damage.

All of those posts are irrelevant to the problem, though. The fact that the fog/weather even causes such a temperature increase in the first place is the problem, not my specific laptop gpu. (Laptop cards are built to withstand extreme heat and stress, hence why it doesn’t shut off until around 112. This isn’t a desktop card, you can’t compare the temps to such a thing. Temps vary from laptop to laptop, card to card. I’ve already taken the laptop apart for regular cleaning ect, checked on parts. It’s all fine.

My problem is not my specific laptop, but the fact that the engine is so poor with fog/weather (hence my mentioning that my friends framerates tank in these areas as well.)

I’ve already done all of those suggestions. The laptop is ~2-3 years old GTX 360m, IIRC.

I was playing WvW earlier tonight for a few hours, it peaked at 84 C. I did the Mai Trin fractal and literally had the thing shut off on me because it hit the 112 C shutoff point. I restarted and came back in and had to resize my window to approx 300-400 pixels and it STILL reached up to 109 C, but we thankfully finished it without me overheating.

I have some friends with rather good rigs that complain about frame drops in any of the new content that utilizes fog/weather effects heavily (see: all of them) which forces them to lower their settings when they had been getting fine frame rates everywhere else.

The fact that the game has been out for over a year and there isn’t a toggle for something so resource intensive that has no effect on gameplay other than to make it look prettier is absurd. From my rudimentary understanding of code, it wouldn’t be TOO terribly hard to implement, because as far as I know, the engine goes through multiple passes for each graphical effect and if something is toggled off or lowered, it uses the lower ones. It would just require them to add one more toggle to check when it goes to do the fog passes.

I literally have everything on lowest, frames limited, using subsample, lowered resolution. The game runs fine on these settings in ALL areas except those which have horrible fog/weather effects. These effects drain on the GPU like crazy sometimes to the point of overheating the kitten thing. I don’t imagine it being too hard to add an option to the settings which would help improve frame rates to quite a few people (I’ve talked to plenty that have said that these areas give them noticeable frame drops)

:( please i just want to know if we’ll ever have the option to disable fog because it would let me play this game so much more

Before anyone tells me that I should upgrade my rig, I play on a laptop that generally runs the game just fine on lowest settings and I don’t mind it. The issue I have however is when I’m in an area with heavy weather/fog effects such as the thaumanova reactor, or sometimes the swamp in Queensdale, or any other area that’s under the effect of weather. Not only does it make my frames feel sluggish (there’s a noticeable delay between when I try to move my camera with the mouse and when it actually moves), but it also causes my gpu to heat up to absolutely insane temps.

My laptop gpu generally sits around 85-95 degrees C when playing GW2, which isn’t too bad for a laptop, but in these areas it can actually bring it up to the 112 degrees safety shutoff threshold. The attached screenshot shows my temps while running the new boss fractal. (The gw2 window is not resized with an image editor; that was the actual size I had to make it in order to NOT overheat before the fight was over. It was excruciating and it could all be easily avoided with a simple toggle in the graphics options for weather/fog.)

please :^( i love this game but the fog/weather absolutely kills my ability to play in some areas for more than 5 minutes

I second everything in this post. The instruments are at least 3x louder than the boombox itself, and the inability to use it in WvW makes me sad too

bumping because I want to make sure a dev has seen this

moto you are the bane of my existence

but please can a dev see this and fix it in some way (lower the knockdown time on the rocks maybe? or add a DR sort of effect to them?)

Is it a bug that the flamethrower auto-attacks and elixir gun “fumigate” abilities go through walls? I love it, but I don’t think it was intended