Guild Wars 2

This is something I wondered about, too, however I am hesitant to change Super Elixir over to a water field for two reasons:

#1: Engineers already have two water fields. Healing turret overcharge and toolbelt skill. Changing Super Elixir to a water field really doesn’t give engineers something that they are missing.

#2: I’m not sure Super Elixir would be balanced if it was a water field. 10 second duration on a potentially 16 second cooldown… that is really powerful. Light fields have a stacking limit on retaliation, and retaliation only does so much. But that much of a healing field… just dang.

So for now, I’d keep it a light field. It’s a pretty good light field, too.

In another thread, I suggested that driven fortitude and escapists absolution be merged and baseline, due to how necessary escapists absolution is to all game modes. This can lead to a fix. If there was another trait which granted us more healing in the empty master slot (or a defensive boon like protection), then your troubles might be over.

That, or we switch the positions of EA and driven fortitude, and then double the healing that driven fortitude gives. that is also an option.

My concern is exactly how much unavoidable damage they’ll be throwing at us. The thing with standard tank/heal/dps games is that the scales between different archetypes are huge.

In GW2, the scales between them are small. The difference between someone running around in full GC as compared to, say, knights gear isn’t that big. It is only about 60% higher effective health, which may seem like a lot until you realize it just means you’ll be taking 37.5% less damage. That is less than the innate difference between some classes.

As much as I am for gear diversity, I can’t forget this fact. Gear diversity is about preference in play more than anything else, because as the game stands it currently can’t handle a traditional trinity setup.

Honestly, I’m not that hopeful at all. “Notes” isn’t a guarantee of anything, and notes being gated behind a long beta means even less. We have to wait longer to maybe see fixes to issues we’ve been waiting forever for in the first place. We don’t even get to see these notes. Gee posted basically to tell us that he’s too busy to say anything else.

I’ve avoided discussing the PVE scene because of, ultimately, that’s on the sidelines for my personal goals, but since it is brought up a lot I might as well talk about it.

Doing PVE with a necro has always been a mixed bag. This is mostly because, even if I ask beforehand in a dungeon group if someone else is running a condi build, they never respond. I have to find out later that the thief is spamming death blossom, because saying “I am” in party chat is apparently too difficult to do. Maybe they’re just afraid that they’ll get kicked for saying yes by elitists, but don’t realize we can detect a condition build from a mile away.

The overlapping of burning is an extremely big problem here. In any group, if there is a guardian, elementalist, or engineer you might as well not have Dhuumfire. Warriors, Mesmers, and Rangers also apply burning when specced for it, making it so Dhuumfire is only a safe bet when paired with thieves, and maybe warriors since they rarely run their burns.

You’ll only want to run a condition build in a premade, but when done right it is pretty good. Enemies in PVE have a lot of HP, and the damage multiplication from Epidemic can be immense in the right circumstances. Lay down 13 AoE bleeds, fire epidemic, then everything in the room is at the cap. When fighting against multiple champions and bosses, this makes taking care of all of them at once really easy. With spectral wall, you can inflict terror on a group of enemies 2 to 3 times, doing quite a bit of damage and control. Combine that with AoE weakness as well as group condition transfers and regen, and the Necro can come out on top with their conditions.

I don’t have a plan to improve condi necros in PVE because, for the most part, thy are fine. I would like to see 2 things done:

#1: Terror does full damage through defiant.
#2: Dhuumfire causes either 4/5 stacks of confusion or 4/5 stacks of torment instead of burning. Rename it something else.

And I’ll be good. For the most part, the flaws with conditionmancers are flaws with conditions in general.

For most of PVE, though, I run a much different set. Knight armor w/ ruby orbs, ruby trinkets, berserker weapons, 30/0/10/0/30 build. The good ole powermancer. There’s only a few complaints I can have with the class, and the biggest complaint is that I can’t run full zerker without becoming incredibly squishy. So, I have to run either knight trinkts or knight armor so I can survive more of a hit.

The damage isn’t too bad, but it isn’t too good, either. PVE is ruled by AoEs, and necromancers don’t have a cleave. If necros want AoE power, there’s only 3 things they can do:

1)Use a staff for it’s piercing auto attack and Putrid Mark
2)Use Wells and Bone Minions
3)Pick up Unyielding Blast.

I went with the latter. Unyielding Blast and Reapers Might lets me do piercing attacks from a distance, and they hit for around 5K each, so by hitting 3 or so enemies it does 15K per auto attack. That isn’t too bad, but unfortunately ikittens my defense with my offense, requiring me to sacrifice Death Shroud in order to do respectable damage.

The biggest problem being that, as a powermancer in PVE, you have to sacrifice a lot of utility in order to do AoE damage. We get 3 utility skills, and giving 2 of them over for AoE damage via wells means that we get one trick to let us “contribute” to our team, and with long cooldowns that is an exaggeration. It is for this reason that power mancers are stuck with running 10 in Death Magic: So they can take Ritual of Protection and go “See? I contribute! I give everyone really short protection!”.

This is two places where a conditionmancer really beats out a powermancer in PVE. They do more damage in an AoE, and they come with a whole lot more support utility by default. If conditions weren’t so messed up in PVE, the conditionmancer would be the norm.

To remedy this issue, I’ll have to take some other people’s suggestions and improve on the power weapons themselves:

Axe #1 Should cleave. Give it a small AoE and a 3 target cap.
Axe #3 Should be a blast finisher.
Dagger #2 should do 50% more damage and heal for 50% more.
Warhorn #5 should do double the damage.

Again: a lot of these ideas are not my ideas. While these sound powerful, in the grand scale of PVP these do very little. It is only in PVE that these are significant changes.

After spending an hour playing with the numbers, I have found myself way too out of practice to come to a solution to a problem.

This problem, of course, is exactly when it is that overall damage output would be better increased by investing into precision than into power, and then at what point precision becomes inefficient against power once again. Much similar calculations can be used to come up with a most efficient survivability by comparing offensive and defensive stats, which only share the relationship that one multiplies the other in the end.

In short, basically it is this: When you add 916 power, you double your damage output. When you add 916 more, you increase your damage output by another 50%. When you add 916 more, you increase your damage output by 33%. Add 916 more for 25% and so on and so fourth. There will come a point where, investing points into precision will give more offensive output than investing into power. This can also be true for survivability, where eventually investing into more HP and/or toughness will result in the player living longer than if they just made the enemy die faster.

But alas, it seems that every turn I have taken has lead me to a dead end. I’m fairly certain that the problem can’t just be solved algebraically, since that method can’t break the limit of a linear interpretation of the data. Logarithms and exponents being used to express similar behavior, but alas the critical points aren’t exponents. I’ve tried basic derivation (infinitesimal change in power vs. infinitesimal change in precision), but I keep hitting methodological blocks with that operation. Considering I haven’t had to derive any function in years, I’ve found myself out of practice and unable to remember all of the tricks of the trade, let alone remember what can be compared to something else without being total nonsense.

I’ve heard of the existence of a chart somewhere that has already solved this issu e.. However, I cannot find hide nor hair of this chart other than mention of its existence. Of course, I would have to check my math against it and use basic logic to see if it makes sense.

Right now, I’ve found myself lost at the moment. I’m sure there is some handy equation somewhere that can solve this problem in five minutes, but hell if I know what it is. Does anyone have any idea what the solution to this problem might be? As much as I’d love to continue on with this problem, it has devolved into me wandering around aimlessly while playing with numbers, not sure if they mean what I think they mean.

EDIT: Forgot to put up what I had done so far. So using some basic logic, I came up with the following:

Power: increases by 1/916% for every point.

Precision: grants an amount of power equal to

Power x (0.5 + Crit Damage) (1/2100)

So divide that by 916 to get the total percentage increase. Note, the critical damage given as a function of the original 4% crit rate is not factored in since that is not a function of precision (this makes things a bit more complicated, but I’ll get there once I solve the bloody thing). So, it should be simple to solve where

1/916 < Power / 916 x (0.5 + Crit Damage) x (1/2100)

Reduced down simply, it comes to

2100 / (0.5 + Crit Damage) < Power

Which comes to the threshold precision would outpace power. With no additional crit damage, it would take 4200 Power before precision would become more potent. With 100% crit damage, it would take 1400 Power for Precision to become more potent.

But all that… just doesn’t seem right. Mostly because it also doesn’t factor in the same diminishing return system that power is being subject to. Eventually (I assume around the 50% mark), crit rate will cease being valuable and then power will become the default investing stat.

Aomine.5012:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The premise of this whole thread is fundamentally flawed. You are positing that gold is harder to get, and everything is more expensive.

Where do you think everything comes from? Those are people selling the mats for a profit, AKA making gold. You can make gold just as easily by gathering materials and selling them. You shouldn’t be lamenting the fact that things are more expensive, you should be celebrating that it is far faster to get gold due to how much everything sells for. Since the release of HoT, I’ve been making bank. Not by running dungeons or flipping on the TP, but by just playing the game and gathering materials.

The nerf to dungeons was a nerf to the amount of gold dropped from the sky. There are still ways to make money drop from the sky that doesn’t involve running dungeons. Every event you complete, every bag you open, every item you sell to an NPC vendor, every bauble as a map reward, you are getting gold from thin air. Every player is. Gold is still being put into the economy.

You think it the wrong way. TP is not where the money used to come from.

What money used to come from is dgn/fractal gold reward and vender selling.
Gold does not magically pop out of TP. The gold you get from selling mats are gold that people originally got from dgn/fractal/vender. Now the main source: dgn/fractal has a decline in gold reward, the gold becomes much more scarce.

You have completely missed the point. The point is you can still have an income that doesn’t involve gold coming out of thin air.

I broke my regular trend with the thief. I only have one build for him, so I only have one outfit, but I alternate what is displayed at different times. First is hood on, shoulders off, and totally not stealing from that cart. Second image is shoulder’s on, hood off, and not about to deface that poster.

Outfit is anonymity hood, order of the whisper’s leggings and boots, and duelist everything else.

I’ve been adverse to the RNG for years. First game I played with one was PSO, and I hated it then. Spending days doing one mission over and over again because some 1/700 chance to drop just refused to do so. Second game after that was Runescape, where the rarer drops literally take months of no-lifing to afford, and were dropped in high risk areas that guaranteed you’d lose the drops you spend weeks grinding up for in the first place. Third game was PSU, which like it’s predecessor PSO would have things that cost so much money because obtaining it was impossible to do.

I liked what CoH did here in that, eventually, they provided a means of obtaining pretty much everything through alternate means instead of hoping for the RNG god to bless some player. And I think this should be the ultimate model for MMO’s: The RNG can bless you, but should it not bless you there is always a way in which a player can obtain something through hard work and perseverance that doesn’t involve buying it off of another lucky player. And lets be honest, the vast majority of players aren’t getting into RNG heaven.

And it is things like this make me really dislike the idea of rarely obtaining tickets from rarely obtained boxes that may or may not give them to you. The whole conversation just rings out like this in my head:

Me:“Ooh, that’s a cool new item there? How much is it?”
Anet:“You can’t buy it.”
Me: “So… is there something I can do to build up tokens that lets me purchase it?”
Anet:“I said you can’t buy it.”
Me: “So… how do you get it?”
Anet:“You need to get tickets from these boxes that can be exchanged for them”.
Me: “So do I always get a ticket from these boxes?”
Anet: “No.”
Me: “So are these boxes really easy to obtain?”
Anet: “No.”
Me:“So… there’s no realistic chance that I’ll get these things no matter how hard I try?”
Anet:“Well, you could convert all your gold to gems or buy gems to buy these boxes?”
Me: “So… if I buy the boxes then I’ll definitely get one of these things?”
Anet:“No. Its limited time only, too, so you’d better buy them up quick or else you lose the chance to get them forever.”
Me: “:(”

Seriously. In every single event that’s happened so far, from Halloween to Southsun Cove (I’m in another state so I can’t play the dragon festival), I have received squat. No limited time recipes. No rare equipment or items. No elite skins. Nothing. Every event is just another occasion where the devs and lucky players get the opportunity to take some new shiny and awesome looking item and rub it in my face how I’ll never get one. Every upcoming event is just a list of awesome things I can never obtain, no matter how perfect for my character they would be.

So yes, after awhile people really do get sick of the RNG.

Signet mastery is a lukewarm. Besides, a lot of people use a lot of these traits, but it doesn’t make them good. Best of a bad situation and all that.

Finally, another problem I see with necromancer traits is a large amount of specialization. The traits are highly specific in their uses, affecting a particular aspect, or weapon, or utility that a necro has. It is rarer to find a general “buff something” trait, or any traits that merely add something.

When making any particular build, the actually diversity available to anyone is much shorter than just crossing out the bad and many of the lukewarm traits. Once you’ve picked a gimmick (I.E. Minions), you have to pick a whole bunch of traits that affect that gimmick to make it useful, and then there’s a gigantic hole of good general utility traits that are missing for the necro, but available to every other class.

Digging up an older thread where I talked about this manner:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/PvP-What-s-the-point-of-raw-DPS/first#post3648161

People really underestimate direct damage.

Something interesting about PVP condi builds is that they’ll forgo condi duration, but not because it is more effective. The thing with condi duration is that it is more susceptible to cleanse. So, many condi builds will focus on defenses or more malice, assuming that additional ticks will probably be cleansed away anyway. But a condi duration stacked build against a build with few cleanses, and the duration adds up very quickly.

I support this idea. Although it might be better in suggestions…

Regardless I frequently have problems using skills in combat a lot due to this. I use a grenadier engineer, a staff necromancer, and a shortbow thief quite often, I can’t count how many times barrage will end up at my feet because my cursor happened to overlap with the gigantic name plate that some enemies have.

I find it funny that players will want to have harder overworld enemies and harder dungeon enemies, but in dungeons that have hard enemies they just run past them, calling them trash mobs.

I can’t really take any side of the debate seriously until that contradiction is resolved. However, I do kind of like to push myself, but I don’t want the wandering overworld to be the place to do it.

The Ready up confirmed one of my fears for Necromancer: The devs still don’t know what is going on with the necro.

For example, they say the necro should be an attrition class. So, they give us Deathshroud. But then, they took away all of the other active defenses that necromancers have. This is stupid, because then the Necromancer isn’t an attrition class anymore. They’re a “normal” class, since you haven’t given Necros additional skills. You’ve just replaced active defenses with a gimmick.

And this gimmick is arguably the worst defensive mechanic in the game. DS is just an additional HP bar that shuts you out of weapon and utility skills. It doesn’t stop conditions from being applied, it doesn’t stop CC from hitting you, it doesn’t stop burst damage, and it doesn’t stop procs.

The devs say that players should have to muscle past DS. This would be true, if we started with DS. But, because we don’t start with a life bar, other players have “muscled past DS” by default. The equivalent would be if all other classes started with their utilities on cooldown. This is also build dependent, meaning that you have to kitten specialization in order for DS to merely function properly.

The following traits should be innate to DS, and not locked down a trait line somewhere:

Unyielding Blast
Unholy Sanctuary
Path of Corruption
Deathly Invigoration
and maybe Speed of Shadows

The fact that you have to go 0/6/6/0/2 just to get basic functionality and compensate for the inherent weaknesses of DS is just pathetic.

In all my time using a necro in PVP, I never once pulled off a clutch maneuver. Not once. No, a fight was either so lopsided in my favor that the enemy didn’t stand a chance, or so lopsided in their favor that I never stood a chance. My frustrations with the necro is one of the two big reasons why I quit sPVP in the first place.

The lack of melee cleave is even more frustrating. Look, the fact is that players don’t stand next to each other in PVP. The only place cleave really helps is in PVE, and against AI builds (because we all want more of those, right guys?). So, when the devs say they don’t want necros to cleave, it isn’t an issue of PVP balance at all. All they are really saying is “No, we want necros to be permanently inferior in PVP, because we feel it should be that way”.

This will have to come after they fix the turret’s attack rate bug, damage bug, and break/stall bug.

I get the feeling that a lot of people are being overly paranoid. When the devs say “you can’t dodge it all”, I think they just mean the standard dodges that come base on every class.

Thief and Daredevil dodging are on a whole other level.

#1: We have weapon dodges, which is one dodge every 4 seconds going by initiative cost.
#2: We have 50% vigor uptime with either trickery or lolcrabatics.
#3: We have skill dodges in Withdraw and Roll for Initiative
#4: Signet of Agility’s active is 2 more dodges every 30/24 seconds.
#5: We have movement skills that move us out of danger zones.
#6: Now starting with daredevil, we get an additional dodge.
#7: Daredevils have the best endurance regen in the game, especially with brawlers tenacity. All physical skills give 10 endurance, including the 12 second block in bandits defense. That endurance is all worth about 4 seconds of vigor.
#8: Renewed Vigor gives up to 85 endurance every 16 seconds.
#9: Steal gives 50 endurance every 30/20 seconds.
#10: Daredevil dodges aren’t like other dodges. Other classes dodge to avoid damage, and don’t do damage while dodging. But with Bounding Dodge and Lotus Training, our dodge skills maintain damage, costing us relatively little.
#11: If we go defensive, the combination of escapists absolution and Unhindered Combatant menas we can’t be soft CCed into a damage patch.
#12: Staff Mastery can regen 2 endurance per initiative, which while miniscule still contributes.
#13: Our greater dodge bar means we have more endurance capacitance. Any “burn phase” or damage-less downtime has the ability to benefit the daredevil 50% more than any other class.
#14: This isn’t pertinent to dodging, but don’t forget that stealth is the best aggro management tool in the game. Should we ever want to stop focus fire on ourselves, we just blink out of existence.

Thief and daredevil dodging isn’t just “better” than other classes. It is exponentially better than other classes. It also isn’t the only survival tool we have.

Covering conditions aren’t an issue with guardian burns. With burning, important thing is the frequency at which they are applied. Guardians are very good at rapidly applying short duration burns, so cleansing means nothing when the burn is back in 2 seconds anyway.

The issue with a condi guardian is two fold:

#1: lack of conditions overall
#2: high investment requirements to be competitive.

It is really that simple. The reason why condi engineers and condi necros are so scary is because they have a lot of conditions to do damage with. Burning, bleeding, poison, confusion, torment, terror, when all these things are being applied, and all of these things are doing damage, it translates into a lot of pressure, even alongside of their direct damage.

Because of this, engis/necros get a lot of use out of condition damage. But guardians get burning, and only burning. Do you know what 33% of a burn is in extra damage? 2 bleeds. That’s it. No matter how much you invest in condition damage or condition duration, that burning will only make up a small amount of damage when compared to other classes.

Since burning only stacks in duration, the moment you are with another class that causes burning, the burn becomes a redundant condition that contributes little to nothing as far as total DPS goes.

So, the second problem is the investment required to get it that high. Burning has the lowest proportional scaling out of any condition, so make burning a viable strategy, you have to put a whole lot into condition damage. This gives returns to only burning… making investing in condition damage nigh useless.

Now, the interesting trait for guardians isn’t the increase in burn, but the retaliation change. Now, this is where Anet may be on to something. Currently, retaliation scales with power, but does so very poorly. Only about 50% higher than bleeding, and this changes depending on the game mode. For high power builds, this is a useful boon…

But if Anet does what I think they’ll do, then they’ll make retaliation scaling insane with radian retaliation. Just to go for the baseline, at 300 condition damage (the minimum needed to get the trait), to match regular retaliation it would have to scale at about 25% of the stat (on par with burning). This means that, with 1400 or so malice from a dedicated condi build, retaliation would hit for 548 a pop.

That is… quite high, actually. A dedicated retaliation condi guardian can be an incredibly scary fight under these circumstances. In PVE this might be nearly useless still, but a condi support guardian in WvW with massive retal would be a frightening thing.

Though this is all just guesswork. I don’t know how this will really turn out.

The answer is unquestionably yes. The biggest buff that necromancers saw to their condition damage was not burning. It was the large increase the amount of fear they had available, which is now letting terror specs inflict an incredible amount of damage. The addition of torment also helps. Dhuumfire itself is a trait-investment heavy ability that only procs off on crits and has a long cooldown. It has numerous weakness in that it is heavily build specific, contributes little to AoE and can be absorbed by mesmer clones/ranger pets/ whatever, and it is readily overwritten by nearby guardians and elementalists who have not specced into condition damage, making it unreliable in team vs. team circumstances. It only stacks in duration, making multiple sources of burning redundant and easily cleansed away, contributing no greater DPS than if only one person had burning. It is the worst scaling condition in the game, requiring 50% more malice to double damage output.

Necros received about a dozen meaningful buffs in the last patch:
#1: Greater Life Force Generation
#2: Torment + Immobilize in DS
#3: Doom duration increased by 50% at point blank range (fear)
#4: Weakness condition greatly increased with necromancers maintaining high duration.
#5: Spectral Wall now owns everyone who crosses it and makes chain-stunning three times easier (fear)
#6: We received new stunbreakers and all of our bad stun breakers now have shorter cooldowns.
#7: Poison duration from the scepter auto attack was doubled.
#8: Our slow skills are now much faster.
#9: Spectral effects now remain while in Death Shroud.
#10: Signet of Spite now provides a meaningful power boost, recharges 33% quicker, and seriously messes someone up when used.
#11: Blinds now persist until the enemy actually misses their target.
#12: Vampiric now heals for more and does more damage.

And that isn’t even mentioning Power Necro buffs or Dhuumfire. It annoys me how everyone looks at the big bright flame that Necros received and assume it is the problem when Necros have been made so much better in so many different ways.

I duo-main an Engineer and a Necromancer. I tried Dhuumfire for a few rounds in sPVP, then respec out of it since it preformed exactly how I expected to: poorly. So I went back to stacking fear for terror damage, combined now with torment and the fact that I am basically better in every way as a necro.

The secret to effective condition builds isn’t burning: it is the sheer volume of conditions. Necros can layer up poison, vulnerability, weakness, bleeding, torment, cripple, chill, blind, immobilize, torment, and whatever conditions become corrupted and transferred over. Since so many cleanses in the game are limited to a few conditions, this lets necromancers maintain their main damaging condition, bleeding, long enough that they can wear a player down. And then they finish them off by chain stunning with terror, which does 50% more damage than burning while also controlling the opponent.

Engineers work in a similar but different manner. Whereas the necros have long reliable bleeds but little access to burning, Engineers have long reliable burning but little access to bleeds. Engineers have access to every condition but torment, and the condition engineer’s job is to maintain all of them to protect their burning. They receive only one effective method of causing bleeding, and that is with Shrapnel Grenade. Everything else, from the Shrapnel Trait to the Sharpshooter trait, is all a random number generator or it is something like explosive shot where it only lasts for 2 seconds. Playing as a condi engineer, whenever you fight another player you never know if you are going to overload them them with bleeds, or if you aren’t going to get any conditions on them at all (what with how hard it is to aim grenades). So you rely on your burning, and the problem is that some guardian will mess your DPS up every 5th attack, and multiple Engineers won’t make burning any more effective.

You also have to consider that, at this moment, every class is using a condition spec since so many condition specs got buffed. Heck, I went back to using conditions on my thief now that Death Blossom is cheaper, Ricochet is twice as useful, and I get the highest stacking torment with the right build. Rangers were also nerfed and now are relying more on their condition specs. This combination of people having to use conditions and people wanting to use conditions has made temporarily saturated meta where cleanses are the ultimate form of defense instead of protection.

Faowri.4159:

Why do we have heterosexual relationships in storytelling? Simply because they are a facet of real life and representative of real life experience that readers/moviegoers/gamers also experience and enjoy seeing reflected in the media they consume, right?

Actually no. The important thing to know about fiction is that it is that it is ultimately fantasy. An idealation of some kind.. The fantasy is created for a myriad of motives, such as expression, profit, inspiration, condemnation, and can be used for both the exploration of a concept as well as the exploitation of a concept. It is always important to know that no pen stroke is ever non-deliberate. Fiction serves a purpose, specifically one where mere fact is inadequate.

Relatability is usually a side factor that determines marketing success. Relatability’s selling point in fiction is the ability for someone to transpose themselves onto the role of the protagonist, as the similarities make someone feel more prominent and important in society. Relatability, however, is not necessary for idealation at all. In fact, it can be a detriment to idealation: blanket relatability is often extremely bland, and more accurate portrayals of people will emphasize their negative traits, which then comes off as condemnation of one’s character.

In particular, focal romances are largely wish fulfillment that work by transposition. I’ve read enough about werewolf/vampire love triangles and seen enough romantic comedies to know that. To anyone in the right state of mind, the build of the romance itself is an expression of their desires. To everyone else, romances are bland and uninteresting.

This makes up my largest criticism of Jory/Kas: it produces nothing. Their romance in the story has succeeded in only putting their romance in the story, and were it nonexistent the story of the game wouldn’t suffer in any way. The relationships of the other characters are deeper and produce more: Rox/Braham shows the conflict of char loyalties and pride versus their fire-forged friendship, with Braham’s immaturity and abandonment issues putting additional stress and doubt on Rox’s goals. This is interesting, because it tells me about the world of tyria while also establishing dynamic and unpredictable relationships in which further stories of equal quality can and will be told. I don’t know how Rox/Braham is going to end or where it is going, so from the air of mystery, conflict, and activity I have a vested interest. The similar air of mystery and conflict exists with the Logan/Jennah relationship, which in-game wise exists mostly to provide an interpersonal conflict to resolve in Destiny’s Edge.

But Jory/Kas are… cute? Honestly I think that if this wasn’t a same-sex relationship, their romance would’ve been universally panned. I’m not the biggest fan of homosexual relationships, but in regular media same-sex relationships generally do more than just… be. Heck, my favorite movie has multiple homosexual relationships, and I don’t even care because it is played for tension, conflict, and laughs. Several things that vastly overshadow the social issue in their quality alone.

Kas/Jory has nothing to cast that shadow. Kas/Jory, for all intents and purposes, seems to exist solely to press the social issue. Or exploit it… maybe both.

I ran a turret build for awhile, and they aren’t very strong in PVE. They do have their preferred situations though. For PVE, the biggest problem is that they haven’t had any meaningful changes in tactics, so those old guides from months ago are still viable.

For traits, you’ll want to go a full 30 into inventions to get metal plating and Rifled Barrel Turrets. Turrets in the pocket will melt in an instant, so you’ll need to give turrets long range and also give them higher armor. Some people swear by it, but 10 points in tools for deployable turrets is also nice to have, since it will let you put turrets at a distance without having to run there yourself. I personally avoid using this, since it messes up my timing with the healing turret. Something that can also be done is to put 20 into explosives for accelerant packed turrets, however in PVE this is not as useful due to how low damage they do and how little control actually matters.

The advantage to turrets is that they provide additional damage to whatever you are doing on top of your weapon skills, so turrets can lay on some rather high DPS in the long run. Nearly every turret has a place, and in the midsts of a dungeon you may want to switch out between turrets that often. The turrets themselves will do bleeding and burning, so having condition damage is recommended while running turret builds.

Rocket Turret: This is the best turret. It does AoE damage + burn at very far distances, along with a toolbelt skill that also does AoE damage. It also comes with an overcharge that causes a knockdown in AoE. I highly recommend this turret be on every turret build, and I have a really hard time coming up with a reason to switch it out.

Rifle Turret: This turret is average. It does light damage at a distance, and when overcharged it does bleeding damage. However, the best uses of the rifle turret come from other sources: it is on an extremely low cooldown, so it combos well with Accelerant Packed Turrets for a stun + damage. The toolbelt skill has the shortest cooldown of any toolbelt skill, and for this it is a must on static discharge builds. All in all, this turret makes for a good addition in both turret and non-turret builds.

Thumper Turret: This is the worst turret. It’s attack speed is slow, it does less damage than the rifle turret, the cripple effect is nearly useless, and the overcharge just scatters enemies out of AoEs. However, the Thumper Turret has use in an “out of the box” kind of way: It is 3 blast finishers in a single utility skill. Because of this, the thumper turret can be combined with the healing turret’s water field to cause massive healing, and for more varied sets the thumper turret can stack might in fire fields (bomb kit, flamethrower), retaliation in light fields (elixir gun), weakness in poison fields (grenade kit), and stealth in smoke fields (bomb kit, flame turret). However, these uses are almost all independent of turret builds, so I would not recommend using the thumper turret in a turret build.

Flame Turret: This turret is good outside of turret builds, but in turret builds it encounters a couple of problems. The cone burn is good, however it is short ranged and this leads to the flame turret dying rather quickly. It’s effect also becomes redundant with the rocket turret, who does the damage and burn better. The smoke field can be a help in special circumstances, but the timing and the short lifespan of the turret make it really hard to use effectively. All in all, the flame turret is inferior to the bomb kit in pretty much every way, and since you get a flame turret in the supply crate anyway, this is one to skip.

Net Turret: This is an excellent control turret. This turret is best used in situations where there is a champion that has high melee damage that is chasing people around (say, for example, the Mossman). The turret’s main effect is the same as spamming rifle #2, and the overcharge causes stun and immobilize for lengthy amounts of time. The turret is mostly a one-trick pony, but it is good at that trick. An alternate strategy is to use the trait Sitting Duck alongside of the net turret to stack vulnerability on a target while immobilizing them. It is situational, but this turret is definitely one to use.

I’ve only been so-so paying attention to WvW/PvP, but I would like an explanation on why the trapper rune bonus was cut down by 33%.

Personally I think that players should be open to new game types. I’m mostly a solo-PVEer too, but that doesn’t mean that I suddenly can’t do raids. Just give me a group that’s willing (raid LFG plz) and the time to do it, and yeah I’ll try a raid.

It is definitely unreasonable for Anet to cater to every self-imposed limitation that gamers put on themselves. Instead of demanding “me me me”, you should be more open to the things they do.

Personally, I quit trying to argue about the time when I posted an analysis comparing two damage types, and the response I got was “nuh uh! I posted proof against this”, and I can’t find their example.

For as long as MMOs have had the RNG system, I’ve had to contend with the fact that I never, ever, in all my life, have gotten something that was significantly “rare” enough to warrant special mention. I’ve been playing these games for12 years now. And in these 12 years I’ve learned why it is that the lottery is called a stupid people tax..

#1: You aren’t going to get a precursor. Period. All the money you throw at trying to get one is figuratively going down the toilet.

#2: If you can’t measure your progress, it means you can’t make any progress. You are no closer to getting a precursor today then you were at launch. No amount of playtime or money spent entitles you to miracles.

#3: Luck is for other people. It may seem like it is for everyone, but that is because whenever someone is lucky they shout it to the skies. For every person who is lucky, there are tens of thousands who aren’t.

#4: Hard work is for you. It is much more profitable to sell and merch goods for trading than it is to buy and burn them hoping common sense is wrong. Take advantage of the fact that you can make money off of other people playing the lottery.

#5: Don’t even try to get one. It is a waste of time, money, effort, and hope. The sooner you accept failure, the sooner you can get over it and do something productive.

On the zerker thing: You probably don’t need to re-gear. You need to re-think tactics. The enemies in HoT are built specifically to make face-tanking in zerker gear ineffective, so instead of just a pure DPS strat you should go with some self-preservation strats. Non-DPS utilities, non-DPS traits, etc.

Tactics, traits, and utilities play a much bigger portion than gear. Everything else I kind of agree with, though.

Jana.6831:

RedArachnid: I do wonder if you’re really talking about solo PvE (“all just zerg running” – zerg or zerk?)
The problem thief has got since June: No boons. All other classes: Endless self stacking boons.

I suppose it is a moot question. One of the things I’ve noticed is that, while playing on HoT, very rarely am I by myself. That said, thieves are very good at stacking the best boon for themselves: Fury. Well, power thieves anyway. Condi thieves are pretty good at self stacking might and vulnerability.

The only time I end up alone is when I’m doing things like running flax farms. Doing that, I still find thief DPS to be more than sufficient. I come out swinging with 12k weakening charges and 13k vaults. Most enemies don’t live past a single fist flurry, let alone a vault-vault-bound-weakening charge combo. I can even kill enemies with impact strike.

Maybe vanilla thieves have a problem, as their best option against a group of enemies is to use black powder and then auto or pistol whip. But Daredevil Staff rips apart groups of enemies. The DD is a class that does more damage through dodging than others do through their auto attack, and so they maintain damage much more easily. Also, if you are talking about regular enemies, condition ramp up time becomes a big issue. After 2.5 seconds I’ve already killed multiple enemies.

I would include the options of “nothing”, “socializing”, “roleplaying”, “leveling for WvW”, “Merchanting”, and “Achievements”.

Full berserker. My current power necro build has full berserker armor, weapons, and trinkets with ruby orbs. Trait set is 30/0/10/0/30.

The important trait to get is Deathly Perception, which gives 50% crit rate while in death shroud. Then, with 104% crit damage, 90% chance to crit while in death shroud, you can hit easily hit for 6k+ with your attacks. You can boost it up higher using an axe with Axe Training, wielding a staff*, using Blood is power for 10 stacks of might, and probably something else I haven’t thought of or mentioned.

The good news is, with the new DS damage reduction buff and all of the increases in Life Force gain Necromancer’s received as of late, the necromancer is now innately more tanky than ever. Even in berserker gear you still have 18.4K HP at base, and a further 28.7K HP with a full LF bar for a total of about 47k HP or so. That isn’t factoring degen, though.

*Note: I have not personally tested the DPS increase from staff.

Woodenpotatoes made a video about this. It is slightly dated, but still works.

The comb is basically ele + ele + thief + guard. Thief uses venomshare for basilisk venom and devourer venom, and sometimes skelk venom. Thief also provides shadow refuge. Basically it goes like this:

1. Everybody buffs up and stealths to a zerg who’s sitting on a point.
   #2: Everyone grabs an ice bow.
   #3: The guardian warps inside and proceeds to “tank” the zerg, refusing to grant the zerg the capture point.
   #4: Everyone simultaneously drops ice bow #4 onto the group.
   #5: Bags rain from the sky.

However, as for what you are doing… I’ve never seen it done before myself. I can never find a group coordinated enough. But I can theorycraft.

#1: Signet of Malice is necessary. The healing it provides along with dagger storm is awesome.

#2: it is a little known fact that, because most venoms are instant activation, they can be used in the middle of dagger storm without interrupting. If you guys are using condi or hybrid builds, venomshare can boost your damage by quite a bit. Stagger the venoms 1 after the other, and you’ll effectively have 25 uses of those venoms in about 8 seconds. A total of 150 applications of spider venom amounts to 900 ticks of poison spread throughout the zerg, at base.

#3: Yes, an ele would be good to group with. This isn’t necessarily for burning, but for might. An ele can drop a fire field and then blast it repeatedly, giving the whole group long duration might and fury. In full zerk that amounts to a 28% increase in direct damage, and 220% increase in the damage done by bleed (110 to 350 or so). It is important that you’ll want to have the ele out of team, because the loss of an additional dagger storm means a 25% reduced damage from the burst, making all the buffs you receive to be very minor overall. Even if you can’t get group fury on everyone from the ele, thieves can still blast a ton of might with their shortbows.

#4: I can’t really give advice on which field to use without experimentation. Immediately I would say dark field, since those leeching bolts both do damage and generate health. But a smoke field would ensure more survival, and last longer than a dark field. So… depends on what you need I guess.

The strange thing is, lately all I ever see is necro and ranger hate.

You guys must broaden your horizons a bit. Necromancers are bad at torment… against a single target. In AoE, however, they are pretty good at it. You’ve got to remember that torment hits 5 targets with tainted shackles, and not just 1 like all other classes. If I were to breakdown the amount of torment ticks per recharge for all of the torment inflicting skills, it would look something like this:

Warrior: 4 seconds of torment per second of recharge
Necromancer: 3.75 seconds of torment per second of recharge
Mesmer: 3.33 seconds of torment per second of recharge
Thief: 2.5 seconds of torment per second of recharge for Shadow Strike, 0.33 seconds of torment per second of recharge for Skale Venom, but with venomous aura this becomes 2 seconds.

So the necro is second only to warrior in frequency of application.

…not sure what the question is here.

It should be obvious that the response to condition cleanses is more conditions.

If I am zerging with my condi necro build, there are always two things that I notice going on:

#1: My conditions only last for so long before being cleansed.
#2: No one else is running a staff necromancer.

Any one player’s conditions will be cleansed away, but if you throw down enough pressure on a group they’ll cave.

Rising Dusk.2408:

This isn’t an exploit, and ANet has already balanced it how they want to. It won’t and shouldn’t change.

I wouldn’t elevate Anet balancing that much.

The condi food is weird. While it does give technically more stats than any other food, it is also the only food where its primary “stat” will vanish once a certain cap is reached. I mean, sure, the other effects of food diminishes as you stack on more and more buffs, but it never outright stops.

I suppose my biggest issue is that, currently, PVE condi are kind of balanced around the assumption that you’ve got this food. I can run around no problem without consumables on power builds, but on condi builds it means so much more. While there is nothing technically wrong with balancing around consumables, the fact is I hate that it is so unfair to different build styles that one has optional consumables and the other nearly necessary.

If condi builds were brought up a bit, and the condi food was balanced, I wouldn’t mind it too much. I just have to figure out how to do that without breaking PVP.

A good lesson to learn early in life is that other people will always make mistakes and have big oversights in their designs The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

Remember: N.A.S.A. forgot toilets on their first space craft. Hundreds of scientists and engineers all working on the project, using a toilet roughly twice a day, never stopped and thought “You know, this might be important on a spacecraft”.

Enaretos.8079:

Just believe in the LB/Staff ranger to carry you through raids :>

And if he doesn’t, we’ll just yell at the druid for not being enough of a druid.

I’m not planning to participate in any raids anytime soon. For a multitude of reasons, which I will now list in no specific order:

#1: I am the most uncoordinated individual I have ever met. It takes me hours to do jumping puzzles, let alone when I have 9 angry players waiting for me to get it right. Most of my play in this game consists of pre-planning and theorycrafting, and very little consists of clutch plays and precise movements. My aptitude for anything “skill” related is incredibly low, so much so that my actual skill caps out a week within playing the game. I can’t “get gud” basically.

#2: I don’t have anyone to do it with. Nobody in my area plays GW2, and I’m a lone wolf by trade. Any PUG groups I manage to get in on will be filled full of antisocial neckbeards desperate to prove something who will rage when yet another thing in their life doesn’t go exactly right. Without a group that will understand that I’ll ruin half the attempts because my fingers up and decided to not respond to my brain, running a raid is just going to be a frustrating experience that benefits nobody.

#3: I don’t have time to do it. I keep odd hours IRL, and now that I’m going to college a surprisingly large amount of time is dedicated to that fact. The first week of raids was an exam week, so now that everybody wants “experienced”, I’ll never get in to a group.

#4:It goes against what I’ve been striving for in this game, which is gear equality and class equality. The whole point of making the game harder in specific ways was to make it so more gearsets other than full glass cannon were desirable. But, by putting an enrage timer into mix, the only gearsets that get encouraged are berserker, berserker with a piece or two of knight gear to draw aggro , and a healing set. Whereas Anet originally saw the superiority of GC gear as a problem, now they see it as a good thing. And as with classes, instead of making content that encourages a diverse set of play, we have content that is optimized around having particular groups to maximize buffs and performance, leaving classes who don’t fit that mold (I.E. thief) to be left in the dust.

#5: The ascended requirements. Back when Anet said Ascended wouldn’t be required for anything, I took their word for it, and then continued to not make ascended gear, instead spending my cash on other things like alternate armor sets and outfits. Now suddenly I’m supposed to have full ascended gear, and to get the weapons alone for my characters it is going to cost several thousand gold, let alone how long it’ll take to get the laurels for the ascended trinkets, rings, and amulets. I am simply not rich enough to take my characters into the raids.

So in short, I can never have the “skill”, I don’t have the time, the people, or the money, and I have ethical problems with how raids are made. To be frank, if the raiding community is anything like the dungeon community of old, then they’re an insufferable bunch who will make the whole thing unwelcoming to everybody but themselves; exactly how they like it.

Classes in GW2 aren’t like that. They aren’t divided up by “ranged class, magic class, melee class”, or “Tank, heal, DPS”. Each class was designed so that they can all function a multitude of ways. And as such, what groups will turn away really depends on how that particular group feels.

In general, if you want the best performance out of a class, you’ll want to be using melee skills whenever possible. Hanging back and just ranging with the bow is really limiting. The two best classes for damage at range are the elementalist and the guardian elite spec Dragonhunter, but in general to share buffs and heals you’ll all be standing close to each other and meleeing whenever possible.

If you’re just going for the nature theme, two rangers are fine. In a raid, however, to be let into a group one of you will have to be a healer, while the other probably a condi ranger.

If you want to swap out of turrets into something else for dungeons, then that is really hard to do. I would only consider the 30 points in inventions “necessary” for a turret build, so you could do a whole lot with it otherwise.

If you want to minimize the equipment changes needed from the turret build, then there is always the grenadier condition build:

30/10/30/0/0

That uses rabid equipment to maximize procs while laying down a lot of damage with grenades. Heck, you can use grenades WITH turrets and go two-for-one on that. Open with the chill grenade, then slowly walk backward into turret range to stack poison + bleeds like mad while having additional permanent burning. I think this might actually be better than the build I listed in the previous post…

There’s always the option to go for mostly power and forgo the condition damage. It is mostly burns, and burning does plenty of damage by itself. This lets you open up the gateway to other things, such as the kit based static discharge build

x/x/30/x/20

With 20 points to put basically wherever you want it. For this, the power is more important than condition damage, and static discharge can still work well with the rifle turret. You can also use power grenades if you want. Something I personally use is a coated bullets spec, and this can easily be modified to use turrets:

0/30/30/0/10

With primarily zerker gear, but carrion gear can work here, too. Here, you use the coated bullets of the pistol to do a lot of AoE damage, and follow that up with static discharge for more AoE damage.

The biggest thing to note is that there isn’t any “cookie cutter” builds for turrets. The one I listed isn’t even a PVE build at all. It’s my sPVP build with net turret swapped out for rifle turret. It all comes down to how you want to play. Heck, for all I know you could make a healing set out of turrets designed to maximize the effect of blast finishers in the healing turret. But, if I were to go with a “minimal investment change” strategy, probably the best to do would be to use a the modified grenadier build with carrion/rabid gear mixed together, since changing from the turrets to something else would be quite seamless.

Though I’m not sure if this can be called “the best of both worlds”, though. The thing with the inventions line is that, other than a few defensive procs and healing, the inventions trait line doesn’t do much but work with turrets. The grenadier build, the static discharge builds, the coated pistol builds, all of those would benefit greatly if those 30 points were invested into something like might stacking or more kits or better recharges on firearms,. pretty much anywhere else. The inventions line as a whole is the worst trait line for PVE in general.

Beetamus.6403:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Beetamus.6403:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Zerker gear will still be useful. Don’t believe the hype. If anything, PVE thieves will just have to change from No Quarter to Invigorating Precision, and heal themselves for 700 per hit.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…..

700 per hit HAHAHAHAHAHA…..

Ok, I think that’s out of my system….

No, wait… HAHAHAHAHA….

So a bit of math. On my dagger auto I will frequently hit 5k on the second and third attack. Invigorating precision recovers 15% of crit damage, and 15% of 5k is 750 health. Likewise, I also regularly hit 14k backstabs (2.1k heal) and 12k heartseekers (1.8k health per seeker), 4k-4k-7k with the sword auto (2250 health per chain per target hit), and 18k pistol whips (2.7k health per target).

This is all with No Quarter, which is exclusive against Invigorating Precision, so the actual numbers you’ll get are toned down a bit. This has two interesting behaviors. First is that a thief gets healing proportional to their crit damage, so the more damage you do coughzerkercough the more you can heal yourself. Second is that against multiple targets, the healing is so high that unless the thief gets one-shot, the thief will quickly heal up to maximum again.

Personally, I don’t think it is funny that you can’t do math. I just think it is sad.

So, a bit of common sense. Are you telling me that you can do THAT much damage just using your build? No help in the form of big might or vulnerability stacks from any other classes to help you as we are not talking optimal only runs. Otherwise we can say anything is fine.

Nope. With group buffs I do 18k backstabs. A couple more math notes on the subject:

Resting Backstab damage: 2347
Starting Power: 2,666
Crit Damage: 245.7
Crit Chance: 95%

Modifiers:
+750 Power Might
+200 Power Revealed Training
+100 Orrian Truffle Steak
x1.25 Vulnerability
x1.05 Sigil of Force
x1.1 Scholar Rune Bonus
x1.1 Exposed Weakness
x1.2 Executioner
x1.1 (Lead Attacks)

Ending Power: 3,716
Scaled non-crit power: 7,790
Crit Mod: 2.457
Power on Crit: 19,140
Overall Mod: 7.18
Final Backstab Damage: 16,850

You’re probably thinking that it isn’t 18k. Well, most groups come with a banner warrior nowadays. Throw banner of strength, banner of disciipline, and empower allies, and you’ll get the following:

Ending Power: 4036
Crit Chance: 103%
Crit Mod: 2.57
Scaled non-crit power: 8,461
Crit Power: 21,744
Final Mod: 8.16
Final Backstab Damage: 19,142

The number goes up and down 5% due to variance in weapon strength. I should also note that this isn’t an optimized build, either. I’m not using potions or night sigil, and I only have 2 ascended rings on this toon. It can go higher than that. For enemies above 50% health replace Executioner with Ferocious Strikes (10% above 50% health on crit).

The numbers I quoted you are what I get wandering around in Silverwastes. Without any might or vulnerability you get 12k backstabs. With 25 vulnerability (which isn’t hard, given how many people passively stack it) you get 15k backstabs. Due to the random amount of might, vulnerability, and team buffs that I get, the damage is between there usually.

Didn’t expect to get as much hostility as I did. Anyway, I get the feeling that a lot of the issues I’m getting come from people reading the 5 sentence version, like someone adding the diminishing returns on damage dealing when I’ve already mentioned it, first sentence of the third post. I like to use dialetic reasoning in order to come to a conclusion, so points and counterpoints are contained within the text.

That said, I completely forgot to factor in boons. I’ve always had a hard time factoring in boons because they are extremely dependent on the group dynamics, and are almost never something that can be counted on in a stand-alone setting. To this date, I have only achieved the might cap once, and it was in a large group while I was running an HGH + Juggernaut hybrid engineer. It was all well and good, except for having to use the flamethrower against a champion to achieve those numbers. But regardless, I’ll take your word for it.

When looking at relevant boons (regeneration, protection, vigor, might, and fury), the ease at which defense is obtained has to be considered. Looking at the armor levels above, the protection boon can be considered a virtual additional amount of toughness added on to the player. For low armor, it is 966 toughness. For medium, it is 1020 toughness. For heavy, it is 1096 toughness. This is assuming the base armor amount, since more of the real toughness stat will cause protection to give an even higher virtual bonus to toughness. With this knowledge, it is safe to say that defensive stats are not far harder to gain through boons than offensive stats. It is very similar to how weakness and vulnerability work, in that weakness provides a 25% damage reduction to the enemy (roughly) immediately while vulnerability needs to be stacked up to a maximum of a 25% damage increase. The bonus from weakness can be, at maximum, 625 toughness on light armor, 660 in medium, and 709 on heavy.

So, from a comparative standpoint of might vs. protection for building stats, you’ll really have to ask yourself what will be easier to maintain, a 15 stacks of might for when you need it, or protection for when you need it? The hardest part about this is that no two classes seem to have the same ability to stack up might or protection, so this decision will have to be made on a class by class basis, further complicated on a group by group basis in which might would be sustained. Then you have to look at what is lost in order to have these boons: do you sacrifice a reflection move so you can get might, or immobilizes to get fury? To get these boons to compensate for damage lost in defenses, you may very well be losing the defenses that would’ve been had otherwise. Then you also have to consider if you stacked might while still running a damage set, and how effective that would be from a survival standpoint as well.

I prefer to build on an individual basis; an inevitable constant that will always be there with every group you play with in any mission you play is the fact that you are there playing it. Other people’s presence or competence is always up in the air.

Shufflepants.9785:

Are there really people out there who believe that berzerker gear is no longer the best for pure DPS? All these people asking for a refund on their gear, if they got one, what would they replace it with given a total refund?

This. The thing about berserker gear is that, even with the 10% reduction to damage overall, it is still the best PVE gear in the game because zerker is still the fastest and highest damaging gear in the game. What people also underestimate is how small this change is. When builds are losing 20-30% off of their crit damage, they are actually losing very little overall damage, since this is on top of already having 220% or 230% crit damage.

I have a pure zerker set on every one of my toons, and I don’t even see the difference. Bombs on engi still hit for 6-8k. Thief pistol whip still hits for 20k. Lava font, fire ball, and meteors still hit for 4k each on ele. Though I disagree with the reduction caused by the ferocity change, I can’t lie to myself and say that it is significant or really impacted anything. Enemies in PVE still die before they can launch a fourth attack.

I’m not sure these changes had to deal with stacking. On one hand, the spider queen now does her AoE always. On the other hand, the golem in CoE is now easily stacked.

So… neutrality? Anyway, hidden updates are always a pain.

Saylu.8271:

I don’t agree with you. Learning is a long and tedious process. It is pointless to spoon fed people information if they unable to learn on their own. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. If they don’t actively apply what they know and seek out new knowledge to improve themselves, they will just remain stagnate.

I also do not agree with you if you think the responsibility of teaching players lies with the developers. Developers only need to teach them the basic, players need to explore the game on their own. I am not sure what their view on this, let see if we can see some of their comments on this.

Well, one of the points of making a topic like this is to get the devs attention. However I digress.

As part of my short stint in education, one of the classes I had to tutor the most was remedial math. The most interesting thing about my students was that they weren’t incapable of doing math. The hardest part of teaching fractions and order of operations was conveying the notions, or the idea of what was going on. They didn’t “get it” and once it clicked, suddenly fractions was second nature.

In contrast, the people who didn’t get it and attempt to memorize it had that nervous, lost, lack of confidence. They resolved to just memorize things, and I feel sorry for many of these people, because they would have to memorize everything up through chemistry, calculus, and advanced algebra. The biggest problem being that, no one could convey the concepts in a manner that they readily understood.

The point is, learning is only long and tedious if you don’t “get it”. There must be a certain level of understanding of what is expected, what the environment is, what the goal is, and most importantly what the tools mean. In the case of RS, these players didn’t understand economy, so they were stuck in a perpetual level of poverty. But, if they “get it”, suddenly the entire world opened up to them. Everything stops being memorization, and suddenly becomes exploration.

The players suddenly became enthusiastic, and gain far more knowledge than they ever could be taught by being eager and open. But, to get there, you need the first step. The “get it” step. Until then, the world is at best apathetic, and at worst hostile.

The vast majority of people can’t take this first step. With no direction to turn, no inspiration to drive them, no goal in sight, and not even an indication of an impending issue, people won’t take the first step. Because of this, someone has to be responsible for instructing the players on what to do. As much as I’d like to just make a high quality tutorial video mandatory viewing and accompany it with a quiz, the fact is that as a player I do not have these resources.

But Anet does. Because it is their game, they have the right, and the means, to program the instruction into the game. Currently, The game doesn’t even teach the basics. The most it does is give players a tooltip, then tells them to get creative with vague terms and no relative scales.

#1: Guild wars 2 is not readily understood by viewers, nor is it easy to watch.

This is a big once, since I think this is what holds nearly all games from being a viable form of entertainment. When you think about sports, usually the camera is focused on the action using elevated or a steady dynamic angle, which lets players be in full and clear view while action takes place. Think boxing, basketball, soccer, foot ball, MMA… notice how you know exactly what is going on at all times? Yeah, that is important to the industry as a whole.

But GW2 has a back-camera perspective, which means that for anyone but the player it is jarring and confusing mess where more than half of the action happens off-screen. Otherwise, the camera is zoomed out to such a degree that all you can see are spell effects from tiny avatars in the distance. You never know who to follow, since in a team of 5 vs. 5 there are 10 different perspectives, with broadcasters viewing from the perspectives of random players, hoping to get the action on screen.

The end result? The critical points of the match is are done by players who are invisible to the audience, and the players that are visible are watching from a perspective that is whipping around, spamming effects trying to find nigh invisible players. There is nothing to engage the audience, so the viewership is limited to a few enthusiasts who are so experienced they know what is going on without seeing it.

#2: Paper/rock/scissors style gameplay. Either you have enough condi cleanses to deal with condi spam, or you do not. Either you have enough breakers to deal with stun warriors, or you don’t. Either you have enough AoE to deal with minions, or you don’t. Either you have enough bulk to survive burst, or you don’t.

So much of the PVP in the game is based around resources you need to invest your skills/traits into to beat other strategies, and these strategies are usually low maintenance and easy to pull off. This is not that interesting to watch or competitive, because the entirety of combat boils down to a flashy and highly rendered game of paper/rock/scissors.

Those are my two big ones.

Somebody has to be last. As much as I’d like to think that there was some conspiracy going around about the devs smoking cigars and cackling around a dark table over how much they hate ranger, this simple fact cannot be ignored. Somebody has got to be last.

Of course I actually believe it. That’s why I said it. Work this out logically:

GIVEN: The survival time X DPS of gear sets are the same.
IF skill dodges are necessary to complete an objective
THEN performance will falter equally when skill dodges are absent.

In my experience, players who transition to zerker gear see a performance boost. They wonder why it is they weren’t wearing zerker gear before. This is largely because of how newbs play: They sit a maximum range plinking away with ranged weapons. When your combat style depends entirely upon kiting and keeping an enemy at a distance, all the toughness and vitality doesn’t do you much good. So, when they swap to zerker and see all those big crits (really it is a 50% or so damage increase over soldier/knight), they do better.

You’re probably confusing meta tactics with GC gear. The transition to using primarily melee weapons and burst skills carries with it both a significantly larger DPS increase than gear switching, and a significantly higher risk involved. It can be quite brutal for a new player to swap to melee combat, and it is here that I see many players falter.

And this was the case – even in GW2’s dungeons at launch. It was hard – going full berserker was considered very difficult and very few players could and would do it.
In time as players got better, more knowledgeable and learned more about the game this changed.
3 years later – can people still expect dungeons to provide the same level of challenge for veterans that they provide for new players?

That’s because it was harder. As time has gone on, the lower level content has been nerfed repeatedly.

Its at the point where even if I did get a drop, I couldn’t pay the listing fee to sell it.

Overall: the trait line consists of a bunch of subpar overload support traits for the mediocre overloads, spots of obscure and strange buffs for mediocre shouts. So, for my suggestions:

#1: Merge Lucid Singularity and Speedy Conduit as the adept master trait. This leaves an open spot in the master tier.
#2: Add a 20% cooldown trait to Tempestuous Aria.
#3: Increase the protection duration of Hardy Conduit by 2 seconds to 5 seconds base.
#4: Unstable Conduit needs to use 2 auras. First when the channel is started. Second when the channel ends. That way, the ele has 10 seconds of continuous Aura.
#5: Double the base healing and scaling healing of Elemental Bastion.

That’s all for now. Still not sure what to do with Earthen Proxy or Latent Stamina.

Personally, I avoid using the Toxic Focusing Crystal. Not because it isn’t optimum, but because it is so dang expensive. Take whatever you’re doing and shave off 1.1g per hour, and you’ve got the maintenance cost of the crystals. Put Koi Cakes on top of that, and it is 1.5 gold per hour.

I haven’t done much math on this subject, because “optimization” generally implies limitless funds. The food expense is a quality judgement more than anything. But I do wonder how much damage is lost by swapping out to viper sets until you have 100% without food bonuses. Or another option, 82% and using super veggie pizzas, which are an extremely affordable 2.8 silver.