Guild Wars 2

ahahahahah people are just melting in WvW…. this is great

@ Poke Bird – Gear isn’t super important, just aim for a high condition damage and precision. kitten will melt once you get the rotations down.

@ Benny Snake – I was being cheap, rabid/rampagers/vipers/sinisters axe + torch would be better stats.

@ DoogySnowStalker – that’s awesome! (also I’m not surprised, the only real limit to DPS with this build is how long the enemy’s health lasts)

Well, certainly no harm done with me trying out Zephyr again… why not?

@ Tragic Positive – To be honest, the main benefit to Zephyr is the stunbreak, which I haven’t really needed as much. Otherwise I like the lower cooldown on Sharpening Stone for more condi clear and fury uptime (plus the condi spike potential).

@ Klonko – Yeah Troll Unguent is definitely a good choice. To be honest I just prefer having a big insta heal over the crazy regen. Not as convinced on quick draw… I’m really attached to the pierce effect on the shortbow.

@ Nemesis – I should try out the dagger and see how it works! Sounds interesting!

I’ve been running this build through the new HoT content and it feels EXTREMELY strong. Haven’t seriously played WvW since HoT came out, but this build should be pretty good, as it relies on direct condi application rather than enemies stupidly standing still in fire fields and whatnot.

Build link

(yes, DPS could probably be increased by Viper’s gear, but I don’t have that yet…)

Play revolves around applying as many bleeds as possible, with burning and poison as secondary damage sources. Condi clear is excellent, and you have a couple stun breaks (lightning reflexes, the pet trait, druid transform).

A few condition application combos you need to be aware of:

You have 3 entangles…. each give 5 bleeds for ~8k damage + lots of immobilize/break bar damage:

• Entangle
• Short bow 5 -> Auto-attack/Whatever (triggers “Ancient Seeds”)
• Spike trap -> Auto-attack/Whatever (triggers “Ancient Seeds”)

The Lynx provides 10-15 constant bleed stacks on its own. Use it most of the time and swap to the Wyvern for its F2 fire field, then swap back. Speaking of fire fields…

You NEED to use the fire combo fields.

• Torch 5 -> Axe 2 + Sharpening stone …. results in 10 bleed stacks + ~3 burn stacks
• Wyvern F2/Torch 5 -> Shortbow 5 -> Shortbow 4 -> Shortbow 3 …. Each of these shortbow skills is a projectile finisher that applies burning as long as you’re standing in the fire field. Your target does not need to be inside it!

Useful opener combo…

Shortbow 5 -> Shortbow 4 -> Lynx F2 -> Entangle -> Spike Trap -> (weapon swap) Torch 5 -> Axe2 -> Torch 4

What can you expect using this build?

PROS:

• You should be able to apply 25+ bleed stacks/3-4 burn stacks near instantly and maintain them indefinitely (my current record is 42 bleed stacks + 8 burn stacks). This is usually around 5k+ damage per tick (10k+ DPS is very achievable if the enemy doesn’t die first)
• DPS does not require the enemy to literally stand in fire fields or use spirits that can be killed.
• Cheap gear.
• Great AOE and single target DPS
• Perma-swiftness and reduced CC duration… kiting is effortless.
• Great condi-clear/stunbreaks.
• You can still heal using Druid…

CONS:

• You need to fully unlock Druid for the build’s full potential.
• HoT begins to feel a little too easy…

does nothing

…

completely inflexible

I really wanted to like this class.

Aside from being unable to kill anything (zero DPS even in zerker gear), the most frustrating bit about this class is that I can’t even customize it. You choose a weapon, two legends, and the traitlines that match your legends (all the traits pretty much do nothing though…), and maybe your gear (the least customizable thing in GW2). Half the fun in this game is being able to pick different utility skills and optimize a build.

At the very least, this class needs a way to swap weapons, and have multiple different utilities that can be swapped into and out of each legend to let you customize them a bit more. Right now, the legends have absolutely zero ability to be used together, and generally you get a “good” legend for your weapon/stats (like jalis + hammer + zerk) and a legend that is borderline unusable with your current setup. If you could swap out various utilities/elites/heals for each legend and then use those as a build, maybe this profession would be playable.

This might have been fixable with traits, but none of those do anything. The +50% crit chance on fury is the only remotely exciting one, but access to fury seems limited to blowing your heal ability, which is a major downside.

/end rant

Oh man, Imagined Burden was a great addition. It’s like 10-15 stacks of might which gets transferred to nearby people whenever you use a phantasm. The perma-cripple on GS also let’s you CC entire groups constantly, and fights with thieves are now really easy (they have trouble staying on you while crippled the entire time… super easy to hit with GS #3).

Also tried the new time warp… amazing. Pretty much reduces your opponents to moving in slow motion. Pumped for the chronomancer now!

Unicorns are the manliest thing ever. End of story.

It’s a thing now.

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-R;4VPkz0M7cV-71;9;4STV;0137038147;45NW020;0m9fgm9fgo-kY3-PjZ2;1EbE6FbF6FcGbFuVIF310m

Playstyle is halfway between a phantasm and shatter build. Leaving the phantasms up lets you chew through tanky players quickly, but you can stun them with the pistol and burst them down in a second or two if you get the opportunity. There’s really no disadvantage to shattering the phantasms – your GS/sword DPS is already extremely high and the heals from the shatters give a huge amount of sustain. If someone manages to make it to melee range when you don’t want them to (hello thieves), the F3 shatter shuts them down for quite awhile (1s daze + blind).

Although they’re a bit redundant, Mantra of Resolve (MoR) and the Inspiraton trait line lets you literally ignore condi players (even though they got buffed lol). Having MoR gives you an extra 2.5k heal + immunity to condi-spikes/snares, while the condition remove on shatters is a free bonus from the heal on shatter trait that makes it really difficult for anyone to keep conditions on you. Plus with the buff to blink, you literally can blink out of combat whenever you’re feeling the heat.

Start a new engineer. Pick the hobosack gift. Delete new engineer and transmute your existing engineer’s backpack to the hobosack. Problem solved!

Oh my god. Mental Torment + Duelist’s Discipline is going to be unstoppable. If you get close to someone and magic bullet them, they die.

(from melee) Magic Bullet → Illusionary Leap’s clone spawn + Mirror Images → Mind Wrack + blurred frenzy. That’s going to one-shot literally anything (since you’d be able to pull off the 4-clone +50% damage shatter + blurred frenzy before the magic bullet stun wore off). And oh yeah, Magic Bullet’s recharge is cut in half if you interrupted them.

This is going to absolutely wreck face. This is taking me back to the days when you could win 5v1s with confusion in WvW…. oh good times, good times…

I’ve done a lot of commanding with this build. Huge amount of survivability + you can burst down scrubs in seconds. The key is maintaining the proper amount of space (kite, followed by brief melee bursts here and there). Works okay for GvGs too.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fhIQNAR8alknpTtFpxMNcrNCrxg6u26MSOQAlMjrB-TVTBAB7oCSg7PolygGVCSpKBRcBAe+gAcj6Alp0DRdDYqCROqIAwTAIAACAhRDA-w

The traveler runes are key. They let you leave behind the focus in favor of a stronger weapon like the pistol (magic bullet → illusionary leap → mirror images → blurred frenzy + mind wrack will outright kill most people if magic bullet lands). Swap out mirror images for veil/portal if commanding.

I was dueling this mesmer in NSP BL today. Anyhow they were totally kicking my kitten , but was showing me a few mesmer tips here and there (to be fair, I already knew many of them, but I didn’t want to say so when they were being so nice). Finally, they’re like, “Ok, check this out…”

“PERMA-STEALTH!!! Do you want to see it?” I was like sure, why not? Pretty sure that’s not possible, but maybe he knows something I don’t…

He uses mass invis, then logs off.

…

Took me a few seconds to figure that one out. :P

Regardless of the ICD, the distortion on kill trait is still pretty fabulous. Just ran a few dungeons and I was suddenly the tankiest member of the group. Looking forward to trying it out in WvW. I can see it being pretty useful for stomping people in the middle of their friends and then getting out alive.

If you don’t suck (and are getting a lot of kills), the trait gives you near immunity to damage about 30% of the time, which is a HUGE survivability buff. imho its a huge boon to DPS-centric builds.

8/10 – good choice of armor, but the colors seem a bit drab (although it could just be the lighting).

So, the new wardrobe system… pretty awesome, right? Anyhow, I noticed that the ascended light armor chest+heritage leggings makes my Charr look like one of those third-world dictators who wears medals as a fashion statement. So I did the only responsible thing in that situation, and took lots of pictures.

BEHOLD! All hail Generalissimo Grand Poobah Inir, first of her name, ruler of Tyria and Wielder of the Blue Dorito of Truth (on occasion)!!

Why be a human when you can be awesome instead?

Charr is clearly the way to go.

I haven’t used the staff in ages (I play WvW). Ever since the confusion nerf, it hits like a wet noodle (no burst), has no high-damage AoE outside of the shatter (which you have with any weapon), and has absolutely no chase ability. Sure it can do a lot of damage once you get all of your clones up, but people can simply just walk away and you can’t do anything about it.

Everyone says that it is great for condition builds, but those don’t have much utility out of 1v1/very small group situations. Besides, I’d play my engineer if I wanted to use a condition build (it’s a lot less work to kill someone with an engineer condition build than a mesmer one).

If I were to improve the staff, I would both buff the projectile speed and damage of the autoattack. Right now all of the dps comes from the clones/iWarlock, which isn’t all that useful in WvW (outside of roaming).

I noticed that one of the merchants in the Bloodtide Coast was selling a “display of Lion’s Arch” for 50 silver. So I bought it and nothing happened. Tried again and nothing happened. Basically spent 1g on this thing and it simply ate my money.

Not too upset (it’s only 1g), but it still pretty weird how it just eats your money and doesn’t give you anything. I was curious to see what it did.

The key with light armor Charr is mixing and matching the armor sets. Here’s a few different sets I’ve accumulated. Hopefully this gives you a good idea of what’s possible.

1- Sorrow’s Embrace + WvW shoulders
2- T2 Pants/shoes, T3 chest/arms, Vigil shoulders
3- T1

Calsifer.6079:

kazi.6438:

I DID IT! I alone have braved the dangers of the EB jumping puzzle and several groups of gank squads to reach a forbidden treasure camped by no less than 7 individuals hailing from the faraway lands of the Crystal Desert!!!!

Look, I bring proof of this miraculous achievement! As an act of celebration, many CD uplevels were knocked off the top to the deaths they so rightly deserved. The intrepid guild of campers known as PDoX even set off fireworks and celebratory /sit spam to commemorate this momentous achievement! Oh glorious day! REJOICE!

Honestly, though, you guys are kittens.

Hey look! It’s me! The Bronze Invader from [QCS]! Don’t worry though, CD wasn’t just camping NSP, CD was also camping CD Hint: Knockback fire arrow traps do not differentiate between friend or foe.

Hah, yeah, the QCS people weren’t bad. I enjoyed the little fight club we had at spawn after I made it to the top. The PDoX people were the annoying ones, every single one was “kill on sight” for us. They literally had a different guild member camping the top of each part of the jumping puzzle. I know the JP is a PvP zone, but I hadn’t seen anyone troll the area that hard in months.

And I’m still a little confused why CD was killing its own people there…

I DID IT! I alone have braved the dangers of the EB jumping puzzle and several groups of gank squads to reach a forbidden treasure camped by no less than 7 individuals hailing from the faraway lands of the Crystal Desert!!!!

Look, I bring proof of this miraculous achievement! As an act of celebration, many CD uplevels were knocked off the top to the deaths they so rightly deserved. The intrepid guild of campers known as PDoX even set off fireworks and celebratory /sit spam to commemorate this momentous achievement! Oh glorious day! REJOICE!

Honestly, though, you guys are kittens.

Engineers can’t aim their rifles properly either haha…

Also, Charr have identical animations for both genders.

You can preview the ascended armor stats by using chat codes (google these). If you were to equip an entire set of armor, the stat boost is only like +30 to your primary stat and +14 to secondary stats (for the full set, NOT per piece). Also it only adds about 30 defense iirc.

Let’s be honest, one stack of might (or the bloodlust buff) gives more of a buff than the ascended armor will.

Ancient screenshot, but one of my favorite Charr bugs regardless. Occasionally I just spawn like this in WvW and run around looking like an idiot until I mash skills/take damage.

You know, people keep saying that power beats crit damage in every situation, but it really doesn’t. It’s only the case if all you do is use autoattack.

Crit damage is very easy to get equipment-wise and can really improve the dps of non-zerker builds (a small investment in crit damage goes a long way, especially if you have a high precision but low power like many condition builds). It also give a massive increase in shatter damage if you have the “precise wrack” trait. Just something to keep in mind as you put together your equipment.

Moa has a massive animation if I recall correctly and is easily dodged/interrupted.

To be honest, I don’t see it much. No one really uses it in WvW (all I play) because its pretty lackluster in big fights.

Copy-pasting the codes here (paste these into chat and you can preview in-game):
Heavy [&AgE4uwAA][&AgE5uwAA][&AgE6uwAA][&AgE7uwAA][&AgE8uwAA][&AgE9uwAA]

Medium [&AgFEuwAA][&AgFFuwAA][&AgFGuwAA][&AgFHuwAA][&AgFIuwAA][&AgFJuwAA]

Light [&AgE+uwAA][&AgE/uwAA][&AgFAuwAA][&AgFBuwAA][&AgFCuwAA][&AgFDuwAA]

The medium armor is decent, and a nice change from all the trench coats. The heavy and light armor isn’t so good. To be honest, I’m not a huge fan of the armor designs, even on humans. It’s like they’re designed to “look expensive” by having absurdly detailed textures.

That being said, I believe Anet is attempting to make a peace offering to the Charr community a bit here. You’ll notice that none of the armors have tail clipping and have “tail-flaps.”

My one wish for new sets of light armor would be more stuff that looks like battlemage armor and not more court jester/princess armor.

Currently all 2h weapons float about a quarter-inch away from the Charr character model. It would be fantastic if a back item was added that would act as a weapon mount/sheath for Charr. Adding a back item to cover up the gap would be a very simple fix for a longstanding armor bug. Ideally, this back item would have a very color neutral/class neutral appearance (like a grey leather weapon sheath or something).

Most of the people I see bashing the Traveler runes admit to having not used them. Here’s my experience with them so far:

Pros
- You cannot be outrun. You switch from being one of the slowest players to one of the fastest.
- Kiting people in WvW becomes much easier, which means you take a lot less damage. You can also disengage from zergy fights more easily, increasing survivability.
- You can use other off-hand weapons besides focus!

Cons
- You can’t use other rune sets.
- THEY’RE REALLY EXPENSIVE.

Go to GW2stuff.com, download the overlay, and then spend 2-3 days just going around hitting all the events you can instead of WvW. It’s pretty fast if you’re willing to take a break from WvW for farming

To be honest, I would rather have the ability to kick players from parties.

I fully support my server getting murdered in Silver league just so that a certain someone gets spawn camped for a full season. (*edit- especially if the spawn campers are using all ascended gear haha)

To be honest, I actually prefer matches where we are hopelessly outnumbered. Makes everything so much more satisfying whenever we manage to accomplish something during the match.

I heard we were posting pictures of Charr mesmers.

dat beard.

15chars

To be honest, veil is extremely strong already in WvW. It’s pretty much an “I win” button for a mesmer commander.

If you stand on a slope, their sword skills will glitch and stop working. True story.

FC put up a really good showing tonight in EB. The fight for ogrewatch tower was fabulous- lasted like 30 min.

I particularly liked the sylvari commander from SAS. Every time our zergs fought I would somehow bump into him for some sweet commander on commander action. Happened like 5 times lol…

I’m liking this matchup so far. NSP and DH are a pretty even match, and FC has been showing some numbers lately.

Also, update on last week: SBI has been steamrolling Yak’s Bend and Kaineng for +500 ppt since reset. Ouch.

^ this. If you can’t beat people in rares, you need to improve your play.

WvW is never fair. That’s what keeps it interesting. Honestly, having one random person from another server bump into your duel is going to kill you a lot faster than just one person wearing ascended gear.

We need to be honest, the ascended weapons are a gold/mat sink to balance out the economy. If we didn’t have ascended weapons, people would complain about how it is too easy to be a commander.

Mantra of Resolve is fantastic and completely takes the bite out of conditions. I know this is more of a PvP thread, but in WvW it completely shuts down necros and engineers (especially with the cooldown reduction trait).

The problem with mantras is that it’s incredibly difficult to use more than one in any given build and keep them charged (at least for me). It’s relatively easy to find openings to charge Mantra of Resolve repeatedly, but any more mantras after that and I lose too much dps.

I too have an engineer and mesmer. It’s great because the two playstyles are different enough to keep switching between them and not get bored.

Although a lot of people swear by stealthy condition builds for the mesmer, they really don’t compare to what the engineer can offer. You’ll notice that anything involving conditions for a mesmer takes literally forever to kill anything (whereas the engineer simply touches enemies and they implode within seconds).

If you’re going to play mesmer in WvW, you should check out the shatter builds/videos first, as those are the only builds that seem to function well in both large and small scale fights (bursty direct DPS).

I have the Traveler runes and they are fabulous. You gain a lot of in-combat mobility and it no longer takes forever to get across the map. Keep in mind that the 25% speed increase does not stack with swiftness.

What’s best about the runes? You can use other off-hand weapons without feeling guilty about it.

What’s worst about the runes? You lose whatever buff you were getting from your previous set of runes.

Yeah, devs are a kill on sight in my tier. If I see devs these days, the tag is always pretty deeply buried in an enemy zerg for safety lol…

To be honest, if a 50-point stat buff is going to make the difference between losing to someone and beating them, you probably don’t deserve to win anyways. Running food buffs or having the new ascended gear is just as much of an advantage. A lot of commanders on my server will even throw down trays of food to buff their zergs. WvW is inherently not fair by design.

That said, I would like the stat buff removed. It makes the ruins almost mandatory to hold, turning an otherwise fun new map and mechanic (points per stomp) into just another objective to be zerged, which completely defeats the purpose of making a dueling area for roamers.

Uh, don’t we already have this? The armor/weapon masters at spawn that sell exotic gear for gold+badges?

Still, more armor skins couldn’t hurt. Especially if they add some new armor for Charr that doesn’t suck.

I was hiding in Durios, while waiting to port our team’s zerg in to retake the tower. One guy sees me. He just stands over my hiding spot and starts auto-attacking me. I throw him off into the water with focus 4. He swims back up, runs back inside and tries the same thing again (I throw him off). He finally tries jumping down and knifing me to death. Knocked him off again with greatsword 5. I /laugh and he never comes back. Free tower!

Disastro.4086:

Having fun with Rocket Boots:

You vs. Zerg
Hit Slick Shoes then immediately rocket boots through them for the lulz

Definitely going to try and get a good laugh out of this next time I play.

Also, the rocket boots ability is absurdly good at breaking target. If someone is running at you or you get snared/focused, popping rocket boots and shooting past them will confuse them for a few seconds and give you some breathing room (while they try to find you again).

Daecollo.9578:

Retaliation

15char

Yes, retaliation is a hard counter to the flamethrower, but most people won’t even use it at the right time (in my WvW experience at least). The truth is, most people you’ll play against are simply too clueless to use it properly. The overwhelming majority of opponents are never going to have 100% uptime on the buff. There is no need to post “ZOMG RETALIATION” on every flamethrower thread lol…

7/10 – decent
4/10 – the abs and colors on the chest piece really weird me out
10/10 – excellent armor choice for this one, only way i could see to improve this one would be to use a more vivid yellow for contrast
——————————————————————-

Here’s my mesmer. Did a bit of a mix and match with the cultural sets and vigil armor. Oh, and I like fire and lava and flaming swords.

I have a guardian, mesmer, and engineer. Mesmer is by far the most fun, you feel like you always have something to contribute (even when things get zergy), and certain shatter builds can burst people down just as fast as a thief. Leveling to 40 is a pain, but after that it’s much easier.