Guild Wars 2

Is it just me or has the character model quality decreased a bit? The texture seems blurrier than it once was.

The model when selecting your character seems to be the same as it always has been, and also when selecting weapons or armors (or when using an appearance kit)— these are fine and the same as they’ve always been. It’s just after logging and on the main screen that the model’s quality is diminished.

I don’t think it has anything to do with my settings, since I tried to max out everything in the video options and none of it helped. Is it possible I no longer have the option to use the high level model quality that I once did?

Maybe something changed around the same time the tweaked some of the other animations (fireball, auras etc) to improve performance. Anyone know of a way to revert to the way it used to be?

I think they need to buff Master of Corruption. High reward for high risk is good, but the reward has to be worth the risk. And it’s not right now.

How about:

1. Move Lingering Curse or Parasitic Contagion to Master.
2. Move Master of Corruption to GM. Add: Cast Epidemic on crit if target has 5 or more conditions.

Too OP?

I agree the MoC concept is cool. But the effects are too weak for the price, especially in PVP. And the title Master of Corruption doesn’t make much sense, because the nec doesn’t gain any additional corruption abilities (they just build up self inflicted conditions, which they can try to transfer)

How about either:
1. all transferred conditions are doubled in intensity and duration. (I think something like this was suggested already)
or:
1. Target of transferred conditions also gets a boon corrupted for each condition.

AND
2. Gain 2% lifeforce for each condition transferred.

Came up with a fun hybrid build for dungeons. Lots of sustain, decent support for a nec, and can stack 16 might in a couple of seconds and maintain 25 stacks fairly easily.

Traits:
Spite: Spiteful Renewal / Unholy Fervor / Signets of Suffering
Curses: Plague Sending / Master of Corruption / Parasitic Contagion
Blood: Blood Bond / Vampiric Presence / Transfusion

Weapons:
Axe and dagger / dagger and warhorn

Armor and accessories: Combination zerk, rabid, cavaliers so that power is around 2000, condi is around 800-900, and crit chance is around 30-40%.

Runes: Antitoxin
Sigils: your preference

Utilities: Signet of Vampirism, Plague signet, Blood is Power, Epidemic, Plague

So the nice combo is:
1. Blood is Power: 8 might, 2 stacks of bleed on target and on self, plus 2 stacks of torment on self, which triggers 5 might on self from antitoxin runes = 13 might.
2. Deathly swarm: transfer your 2 bleed (and torment) on target. This triggers blood bond, which gives another 3 might stacks = 16 might total.

For mobs, drop enfeebling blood then use epidemic. The healing from Parasitic Contagion will be very good.

Support includes drawing condis from from Plague signet, might sharing from Blood is Power, aoe blind from Plague, some burst and healing from frequent Blood Bond proc and Signet of Vampirism, and some healing from transfusion.

Maybe I shouldn’t mention this, but I noticed that summoning bone fiend, shadow fiend, and/or the golem before a match begins will give you life force when it actually starts.

I thought they removed this?

Weirder still, I accidentally started a game as a mm after playing a power build, and forgot to change to mm traits, and I didn’t get the life force. The missing traits were: Flesh of the master, necro corruption, death nova, and vampiric presence. When I applied these traits and played another match I got the life force again. So apparently one or more of these is needed for it to work.

I’d replace shadow fiend. Bone fiends have double attacks, so that’s twice the lifesteal. Plus they’re ranged so will attack more, they cripple, they have a nice immobilize, and their attacks can cause weakness in all the poison fields you drop.

Shadow fiends do more damage but their special attack has a horrible delay. It provides a nice amount of lifeforce but it’s not really needed with mm anyway.

You are correct sir. I didn’t want to sound greedy though.

Keeping CC as it is now would be better too.

I like the idea of self-harming in order to do something worse to foes. It brings back some of the GW1 flavor.

But as lots of people have already mentioned, adding 2 conditions to yourself to cast a corruption skill, most of which are long-casting and very telegraphed moves, sounds like it is going to be suicidal in PVP. There are way too many knockdowns, stuns, etc., and opponents are going to take the casting of corruption skill as a cue to blast the nec into oblivion.

How about giving Master of Corruption 1 second of stability after using a corruption skill? This will give the nec a chance to transfer the adding self-conditions. And it would still have some counterplay with blocks, evades, dodges, blinds, and invulnerabilities.

In a few pvp matches as a mm today, I noticed a few times my minions, who were probably idle for a second or two, suddenly appearing next to my target. My target subsequently went down fast against the minion swarm.

Anyone else experience this? Did minion behavior change in one of the recent updates, or is it just lag on my part?

Probably not a good idea. People on your team will then intentionally try to lose, won’t they?

I’ve been using rune of mesmer on a 6/4/0/0/4 build.

Trait for banshee’s wail and warhorn will have a 5+ s aoe daze with a 24s cooldown (the skillbar shows only 3s duration daze, but if you test it you’ll see it’s more than that).

I use a Macbook pro as well. I’m not sure if you know this, but you can change your function settings so that the f1-f12 work in GW2, and the other functions (adjusting brightness, volume, etc) work when you include the fn button (basically the opposite of default setting).

Here’s how:

In the Keyboard tab of the Keyboard & Mouse preferences in System Preferences, select the “Use all F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys” checkbox. Uncheck the box to return to the default setting.

Also, take a look at traits that give you protection. Earth has two in adept: Earth’s Embrace and Elemental shielding.

When you get master traits there are more. In Arcana there’s Elemental Atunement, which gives you and allies Protection for 6s every time you switch to Earth, which is nice.

The original challenge, from an earlier post was: “challenge still stands somebody go make a video of a thief tanking/attacking without reprieve the priest of grenth for 7 mins.”

While Au. didn’t take 7 minutes, it was clear from the video, that he did tank/attack the priest until it was dead. And it looked like he got nowhere close to dying. Honestly, I think 10% more life on the priest and its minions would have just made the video a bit longer; the results would have been the same though. Au. owned that battle.

So if the argument was that thieves can’t tank certain bosses, I’d say it was proven wrong.

If the argument is now that thieves can’t do what guardians do, well, that would be hard to prove. And what would be the point? Guardians can’t do what thieves do either.

I run a MM build too. Used to go the standard 20/0/30/20/0, but switched recently to 0/0/30/30/10. It’s a very tanky build and damage output is pretty good.

death: III, X, XI
blood: VI, VII, XI
soul: VI

Full minion bar, though sometimes I swap bone fiend with plague signet if party members are getting too many conditions. staff / d+w. Life Force fills up very fast and switch to DS when minion skills are recharging.

Minor update: I followed some tips in the other threads, but the Gem Store still doesn’t work. The other tabs are showing an incomplete interface:

I just want to add that I’m another Mac user who isn’t able to access the BLTC anymore. A couple of weeks ago, the problem was sporadic, but sometimes I could log out and back in and get the various tabs to open.

For the last week or two (since last update?), I get nothing. Just a blank screen on the home page and the spinning icon for all the rest.

I tried clearing the applications using the activity monitor, but this didn’t work. Kind of afraid of deleting Application Support folder given the results for others…

Dang. I was actually excited when I first read about this new vamp skill. Now though, I just feel like….

Regarding the Reanimator trait:

I know this will probably never happen, and maybe the devs have already considered it, but I think it would be a much cooler trait if it activated when using a minion attack skill, instead of when an enemy is killed. Keep a CD of 15 seconds or so.

Doing this would add an extra layer of strategy to using the minion attacks and would add a level of control to building up a minion horde that’s not currently present.

MM is definitely more playable in dungeons than they used to be.

Before the buff, I was thinking of how to make minion masters similar to GW1. It’s probably not possible, though, given the skill structure of GW2. Maybe if a new signet is added and had something like:

Passive: summons a jagged horror every 30 seconds
Active: Summons 5 jagged horrors. (CD90 seconds)

Signet of the Reanimator?

yep. I just did some testing and i’m seeing the same damage as before. Odd that the tooltip would become inaccurate like that.

Here’s a better screenshot, showing level 80.

I’ve been enjoying the minion buff. Did the devs quietly nurf minion damage though???

For example, according to wiki (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Summon_Flesh_Golem), flesh golem normally does about 700 dmg. The charge, if I remember correctly, did over 1k.

Now, the damage is much lower. The same is true of other minions as well.

Chad, I can confirm that Twilight Arbor light chestpiece does glow. The glow comes and goes along with your sylvari’s natural skin glow. I believe it always glows white (spots on arms).

9/10: Love the subtle bone colors and armor in general.

Here’s mine. Kind of flowery for a nec i guess