Guild Wars 2

Garimeth.8725:

I sometimes run the standard GS+M/T zerker build with zeal-rad-virt, but I drop virtues line (GASP!) and use honor, and drop torch for shield – since I am not using torch I run the ret trait in radiance. I run the mace trait or res trait, the aegis or empowering might trait (depends on group comp) and then writ of persistence. It gives me almost constant uptime on the mace symbol if i want it. The new shield stuff is great. I swap my utilities around alot, but what i have in the link are what i use the most. I find the build is flexible and gives me alot of sustain, support, and still good pretty good dps. Give it a try if you are looking for something a little more supporty.

I was also looking at this route as well – in any case if more support was needed I would just probably swap out the GS with a Hammer to create more damage mitigation with Symbol.

I’m pretty happy that the Mace is getting more exposure with the new builds. Despite being slower than the other 1H weapons, it actually packs quite a punch and offers great sustainability also.

I would probably play around with my gear and see what I can come up with – I have three sets for my Guard at the moment. (Knight’s/Soldier’s/Beserker’s) I thought I would never have to change my Knight’s set for PVE but I guess the changes in the game is pushing me to do so.

Thanks for the comments, y’all.

I recently resumed playing Guild Wars 2 and was overwhelmed with the changes in the Builds and Traits. I find it quite better now since the system is more streamlined and the traits seem to work more closely with each other. (There are no partial points to a tree making the build neat, in some sense.)

I play mainly as a Guardian and I have been trying to read through the new builds now, and I haven’t come across any builds dedicated to support or “tanking.” Most builds are all built around Zeal-Radiance-Virtues. Every other build has also been built around Berserker equipment. The first thing I did, as a result, was to get me a set. I haven’t given it a whirl yet but I suppose I will do that soon. I just don’t know how the survivability is now compared to before, without the Honor or Valor traits being used.

I’ve never made use of the Zeal and Radiance Trees before so I am a bit lost with how to build my Guardian for PVE now. Aren’t there builds focused in Honor or Valor anymore? If anyone can point me to some guides that would be awesome.

This is just a very nerdy post but I’ll have out anyway. Is there a way for the Dev Team to maintain the names of Named Weapons when upgrading their Sigils? While upgrading is a big part of the process of making a character more effective, I was hoping that special items don’t get “spoiled” in the process.

Take for example the sword Honor of Humanity which by default has a Sigil of Bloodlust. If a class was more focused on getting stacks of Condition Damages, upgrading it with a Sigil of Corruption makes it Honor of Humanity of Corruption. In my opinion it loses its value in its namesake.

There are some combinations that can be quite unique, like Silence of Water, or Delusion of Rage but overall I think named gear should stay the way they are even after upgrading.

More so for Legendary Weapons – it’s bad enough that they lose the purple font color! While Sunrise of Rage has a ring to it. Or Sunrise of Strength, it kinda loses some of its magic.

That’s just me.

dulfy.1493:

Atm no one knows what is exactly is in them because these boxes require 5 laurels to buy and everyone atm only have 3 laurels at max. Wait for another 2 days and we will know more

Ever reliable Dulfy. Yeah coming from player experience will be a discussion in the next few days and or weeks, so I’m hoping for someone from the producer’s end to entertain us a bit. A simple yes on the pre-cursor would actually shut me up. I just want to figure out if more avenues of getting those elusive items are available to us. The Mystic Forge proves to be very costly, and going an insane number of times on a specific dungeon path for chests is just too robotic.

AesirValkyr.7418:

Just by the description of Heavy/Medium/Light Classes should tell you the answer. From the beginning, Anet has given every class a type. Heavy, Medium, or Light Armor type.

So its not class specific, its class-type specific. Plate/Leather/Cloth users.

It is actually class specific – you have Warrior Boxes and Guardian Boxes. I personally think it’s just to avoid getting something you can’t equip on that specific class, like getting a bow on a Guardian. But one could also speculate whether the same odds apply to getting Gear that is common to both. (Are the odds of getting a specific sword from Warrior Box the same as getting it on a Guardian Box, and for that matter a Thief Box?)

Hi Guild Wars 2 Team,

Was wondering if you can clarify what you meant by gears in the new Laurel Reward system.

1) What is the point of having distinct boxes for the Heavy/Medium/Light Classes? Has the Team created class exclusive equipment already? Or is it more for avoiding getting a Scepter on a Warrior, or an Axe on Guardian?

2) On a more important note, does “gear” include weapons in the lot? Is there a chance to get named, or even pre-cursor weapons from those boxes?

Hope you get to answer my queries – haven’t tried to research on the matter, and it’s always good to hope that one of the game’s representatives can take the time to answer.

Keep up the good work!

The only issue I see in this is that MF gear is largely limited in farming locations and dynamic events. Stats don’t mean so much as you go with groups to farm events. All you need to do is tag a mob to get the chance of a reward. This is improved if you’re diligent enough to find a group.

I don’t look at MF gear when taking on dungeons for the simple fact that we try to avoid unnecessary confrontations to make runs speedier. If one is so adamant with having some MF, just use a food buff. Drops in dungeons are of second importance to me as we are already guaranteed good loot at the end of every run – 26s and tokens are more than enough rewards to satisfy the lack of MF in dungeons.

There’s been talk of a Make-Over pack, however, time of availability is not yet confirmed. Or for that matter, if it’s really true.

There was even a talk about a Name Change contract.

I’m not in the habit of nagging but I think this issue has been long-argued and I have found new reason to point it again.

I know a lot of people have been asking of ways to get a hold on the starter armor pieces. The really good ones belong Guardian and the Thief. I personally lost mine selling or salvaging it, I can’t really remember which. I know it was because I had so much loot in my hands that I needed the inventory space, hence the BIG sacrifice.

I was willing to let the issue go already but the fact that I saw a Warrior running around with a Guardian’s starter Helmet (Visionary’s) and Shoulder Armor (Fanatic’s) made my brow raise last night. And just this morning another Warrior was running around with the other shoulder skin (Conqueror’s).

I don’t know which bug or oversight was used for this to happen. (I think it was through the lack of restrictions to Soulbound items during transmutation that made it possible.) The exclusiveness/uniqueness of the item was compromised.

So forget about the story/character quality of the armor – it’s all about the skin. Had I known that that was possible, I might have done the same. But there are better ways to go about it.

I AM willing to pay gems to get a hold of that piece of armor again. I know there are far better looking skins out there but the fact that I have it available when I want it makes some sort of difference for me.

I hope the guys at ANet can think of a way to make it happen. They could come up with a gem store consumable that let’s you apply the skin you chose (so it’s still tied to your personal story somehow) to the same item type. Similar to how they do it with Hall of Monuments skins.

Ex. I chose the Conqueror’s Mantle in my personal story – using the said consumable allows me to have that that skin again.

BrunoBRS.5178:

raising the level cap would cause way too many PvP balancing issues, especially considering that they’re aiming for e-sports. and honestly, i’d rather they expand on the system rather than just add bigger numbers and “eliter traits”. trait branching would have to be handled carefully too, as to not allow a single trait line to get more than 30 points in (can you imagine a thief with +600 precision and critical damage from traits only?), while still making the branches viable. that is, if they go for branches.

regarding weapons, you have the same view as me, it seems. if they want to add more weapon skills per weapon, it would have to be entire sets, and the player would have to choose which set to bring into battle. this could lead to greatsword-only warriors, for example, where instead of two different weapon sets, they’d bring one greatsword with two sets of skills. and more weapon types are inevitable, though i can’t think of many they haven’t covered that won’t fall into the “too niche” category.

For weapons, I was thinking that you have 4 Skill Sets available to you at any given time. There are a lot people wanting skills 1-5 to be allowed for customization which I think is a pain. I would rather have a whole balanced set rather than having people have a bar that just did pure damage or pure defense.

To illustrate my point, let’s say I have a Guardian. I have GS and Hammer equipped. (Which have 10 Skills in total, with a cooldown upon switch)

What think you be nice for an expansion would be is aside from switching between the two weapons each weapon has different modes (stances). From the top of my head, the most basic would be an offensive and a defensive build. We all know what the GS bar looks like now right? What if with a push of a button, you could have a different set of skills to work with. (Let me be creative here for a sec…) Whirling Wrath which is #2 Skill becomes a Blocking Skill that allows you to block range attacks for 2-3 secs on 15 or something cooldown. Something like that. Of course, stance switching will have it’s own cooldown.

This is of course, from a melee perspective or Soldier class perspective. I haven’t used Magic Classes yet or Weapon Kit Classes yet. I don’t know how to translate it to classes that have no weapon switching.

Ronah.2869:

I disagree totally. Personally, I would add “profession based armors” like in GW1 I am a huge norn warrior and I wont like to see a small asura thief wearing my imposing armor.
And zallis.2138 is right. It wouldn’t look right

Yeah much like Racial Exclusives, there should be Class Exclusives again. Wouldn’t mind working on the same range as T1, T2, T3 as it is implemented now.

This is quite an interesting topic – to answer the OP, the difference between GW2 and DOTA is that you don’t actually build DOTA characters. They are essentially pre-made, and it’s a matter of which skills you will open up first. Then comes your equipment.

This is where Traits come in. I doubt that you’ve exhausted there is to exhaust when it comes to the combination of Traits you can do on a single character.

At the moment I think what happens is there are more or less tried and tested traits that people stick to. They share the experience and they become the bench mark for the rest of the players. The traits have its limitations, granted. You pick from only 12 available per Traits, and they are further limited by Tiers.

Second comes your skills both utility and weapons. This is another thing DOTA does not have, as far as I remember how the game goes. I am confident as well that you haven’t come up with all the possible combination of skills on a single character, so that’s another point towards the system of guild wars, in terms of customization.

In the future what I imagine ANet will do is either add traits per Tier or Increasing the Level Cap by 10 to Increase the Trees by one Tier again. Or Maybe both. It’s not far from possible that ANet can bump cap up to 100 even. (Branching Trees also seem interesting as how ME3 did it for its class system)

They will most likely add more utilities/healing/elite, as there is no cap yet on how much skill points you will earn.

As for weapon skills, they could include new weapons that have their own skill sets. (this is very likely) But a more interesting thing they can do is to include “Stances,” on top of weapon switching. A great sword will have an offensive set and then a more defensive set. “Stance” changing can be predicted or read through character animation which might become a huge change in how people size up each other in PvP or WvW.

Shanna.4762:

Most of those armor skins are already available in game, though.

Do you mean other than when you get them initially? Because there are players who say they’ve lost them, sold them, or salvaged them for low end mats. If they are available somewhere in-game, please do share where or add screens as proof.

Yeah. I still share this sentiment after hours of gameplay. I am willing to pay for gems to get my shoulder armor back. I would be willing to pay 200 – 300 gems for an item with a this description:

Starter Armor Gift Pack

Double-click to produce equipment chosen during character creation. Soulbound

IF ANet is planning on Name Changer Contract, Make-over Packs, and such, this item seems HIGHLY possible.

There’s some talk about the re-modelling of the Arah armor set for Female Characters in Guru

While the intention of the re-modelling is understandable, that the visuals are a bit sensitive, the discussion has some suggestion on how to make it more aesthetically better for some who enjoy these finer details. I was all for the fix on the breast plate but the work on the leg armor needs some consideration.

1) Remodel the “underwear” to match the textures of the leg bandages, so it does not seem out of place.

2) Allow dye application on the garment similar to some leg armor sets. Being dark, colored (black) by default, it actually becomes an eyesore, even a lazy fix to some sensitivities.

3) Re-size of the underwear on the sides – some people exaggerated that it looks like granny pants or sports shorts that seem out of place with the setting of the game.

SiNoS.2147:

Its a better set for hybrid if you can find it for jewelery is my thoughts. Issue with it is i’ve yet to find it in jewelery form. Now if you want it for armor best dump a ton into power otherwise your crit damage will be less than someone rolling only power.

With the Precision/Vitality/Healing set, I was hoping to address the issue of not having Critical Hits to trigger the healing from Guardian traits like Empowering Might + Altruistic Healing. With this as Armor, I would imagine that Weapons and/or Trinkets will be Knight’s or Valkyrie. Offense becomes Second Priority with this one.

Great input everyone – for the fellow who isn’t in favor of Cleric’s (Pow/Tough/Healing), what say you for the alternative healing Set, which is (Prec/Vitality/Healing)?

I would like to have at least a set with Healing, just in case my party really needs it. Which among the two would you recommend more? Cleric’s is from craft, while the second can be obtain through dungeon rewards.

From what I understand, getting a Cleric armor set wouldn’t be much a priority, as Weapons and Trinkets will do. Got it. Thanks, so much for the replies.

Hi All,

Would like some advice on what armor set(s) should I invest on if I wish to be flexible in terms of content.

Currently I have a full set of Exotic Knight’s Set. (No Runes yet but I plan on getting Soldier Runes)

I plan on completing a set of Power/Toughness/Vitality Gear as well. (A combination of Orr Karma Vendor Armor, and/or Dungeon Reward Armor.) I currently have Shoulder piece from Orr Karma Vendor. Was wondering if it would be easier to continue collecting Karma or just to a Dungeon runs to get the other five armor pieces. Please give advice on this one.

Lastly, was wondering if I should collect materials for another Exotic Armor Crafting – this time for Cleric’s set. Or does the “Cleric” set from dungeons compare in effectiveness? Basically that’s Power/Toughness/Healing vs Precision/Vitality/Healing. What’s more Viable for support? Advice on this one too, please.

I was wondering if the Armor Sets from the three orders have Exotic Stats, as I noted that the armorer in Sanctum of Secrets only have stats equivalent to Level 80 Rares. (Chest Piece Defense 321 versus Exotic with 363)

It’s actually nice to try and figure out if I could pull off a Condition Damage Based Guardian using the Whisper Armor set. (I know there are other sets with Precision/Toughness/Condition Damage but the Whisper Set is very nice visually.)

Hi All,

I have yet to have properly upgraded items, and I was wondering if someone can clear just a bit about upgrade components.

For Armor, I read people mentioning “of the Soldier” on their gear. I looked it up, and these upgrades are called Talismans, Crests, Medallions, etc.

My question is, if you use these kinds of upgrades, will you be able to add Runes still? Or is it choosing either the two per upgrade slot?

As for trinkets, suppose I have Cleric’s Ring, I can still upgrade these with Jewels and Gemstones, right?

Sorry I’m an equipment noob, and should probably learn more about these since I’m thinking a great chunk of difficulty with me playing is that I don’t have properly upgraded gear.

Trungalung.7850:

Pretty sure it’s a flag 15% crit chance. Anet tooltip is pretty straightforward.

If that’s the case, the builder I’m referring to is inaccurate in its calculations. From 16% it bumped me to 18% with the Trait equipped. But wouldn’t the 15% top-up be OP?

How do you compute this?

Does it add (a) 15% of your current chance? Or does it (b) increase it 15% chance on top of your current chance to land?

(1)If you have 16% chance, it will be increased by approximately 2.4%
(2)If you have 16% chance, it will turn 31% which is overpowered?

And for Shattered Aegis…

Does it apply to Passive every 45s or 30s?
Does it apply to Valorous Defense? (Valor Trait)
Or just via activation (F3)?

Ojimaru.8970:

This thread was made 2 hours ago, but it seems ArenaNet has pre-empted you.

Sept 14 2012 Patch Notes”

Defender’s Shield and Honorable Shield: Merged together into the same trait.

So what Trait replaced it?

Personally, I’d just keep the death count to a minimum. What you’re doing has it kinks but to me it would just make me too overly cautious. My personal count is at 102 or 103. I admire your initiative, and good luck.

I am rather content with the fact that I am last to be dropped on dungeon/party runs.

It might not have an indicator as Boons have. Never really used this trait since +30 is not that impressive.

I have been playing my Guardian with under a Valor build, and would love to see some improvement. I would comment the same way it other Traits but Valor is what I know best at the moment. I know this is more of a suggestion type of post but I’d want fellow Guardians to take a look first, and have their thoughts as well.

First of +30% Critical Damage is Amazing. I hope that one stays spot on.

Minor Traits

• Valorous Defense: this is good.
• Courageous Return: seems useless, even if you activate Courage very often. The objective of a Guardian is to be difficult to put down.
• Might of the Protector: this is good as well. A possible twist might be is to change it to Fury. It would be such a nice burst for the Guardian. (Of course we have to change the name to Protector’s Fury or something)

Major Traits

• Meditation Mastery: okay, however, it would be nice to condense it with Focused Mind. (I don’t actually know the benefit of Focused Mind, since Meditations are quite quick by default)
• Defender’s Flame: Amazing that it’s 100% already. I don’t know about the duration of the Burning though. With too little sources of blocking, it would be nice to have a bit of duration on the Burning condition.
• Strength of the Fallen: May have its uses but, like I said, Guardians should be hard to put down.
• Strength in Number: Change to percentage, maybe 5% – 10%. +30 is just trivial.
• Purity: Okay. Additional healing would be nice for improvement.
• Retributive Armor: It would be nice if it stayed at 10%, as 5% wouldn’t really make a dent even if you stack a lot of Toughness.
• Mace of Justice: Mace isn’t really designed for damage. It would be better if it improved the healing from the Mace Skills. Or for name’s sake, we can actually have Mace have a chance to cause burning together with the original 5% increase.
• Defender’s Shield: Change to percentage of total that will not affect Retributive Armor.
• Honorable Shield: Condense with Defender’s Shield
• Focused Mind: See Meditation Mastery.
• Altruistic Healing: Okay
• Monk’s Focus: Additional effect of Protection would be great. Maybe 3secs.

That’s about it. A bit lengthy. Would like to hear your thoughts.

I support this one. Please do A-Net!

Yes, I feel the same way about my Guardians shoulder armor.

I know there are a lot of people who kept their armor pieces for the story value of it. I realized this later in the game prioritizing inventory space over the piece of armor. (which I sold for 1 Bronze coin, not even salvaging to move up the salvage achievement)

Is there a way that the skin be re-used, similar to how the Hall of Monuments work?

I’m pretty sure I’m not the first one to bring this up. And I’ll probably won’t be the last one to be gunned down.

Cheers!

ecwoodrow.7034:

Wolf is nice for the heals and knock downs. I like to use it for when my healing skill is on cooldown.

Same here – and beyond that, I think the chance to do critical damage is pretty huge in the Wolf Form. Plus you have the Fear and Interrupt as well.

The post from some MMO Blog said this is Heavy Armageddon

How about this one? Said it was Heavy Orrian but I think it’s the Light Version.

Yeah, good job to you. Here’s to being optimistic then. I just actually read it off some other forum and it got me thinking. I actually thought about re-rolling my Guardian at one point. (At about level 40) But decided not to anymore.

I just thought maybe they could consider. With all the little updates they’ve been making here and there, it wouldn’t hurt for them to give this tiny bit.

I play a Norn Guardian, and I chose Conqueror’s Mantle as my piece of armor for the story. To clear inventory space, I sold it for a pittance of 1 bronze coin, not concerned about it’s story value and that it actually looked pretty decent. (I did not have half the mind to save it to be transmuted later on.)

I wish there was some way to get it back – I’m sure willing to pay for it. But just to make a suggestion. I’d place an access for it on the Personal Story Screen. (Where you can get it back without the monetary value of 1 Bronze, though I don’t have a clue who would try to exploit that.)

I hope this gets considered but I truly love the game all the same.

Cheers to A-Net!