Guild Wars 2

I’m old enough to despise children.

Happened to me once as well. Every once in awhile scarlet will pick a favorite and keep attacking them.

I get the feeling most of this thread devolved into arguing with a particular troll, so now I’ll do the adult thing and analyze everything in a manner that shows how useful everything is.

I do feel partly responsible for this, since many months ago I made a thread detailing the inefficiency of investing in stats other than offense. This is largely because offense contributes to group survivability in a way that defense doesn’t: dead enemies do no damage, so if you kill an enemy twice as fast, you’ll take half the damage. Though you could argue that defense lets you take more hits and thus use more dangerous tactics to do more damage, in the end this is inferior to simply sustaining an offense, since it means you eat up your defensive advantage to accomplish a burst that many players were outputting as their standard offense to begin with. Often times, it is better to just revive the downed players who are zerkers, because if they’re outputting twice the damage, then the only time they lose out is if they are downed more time total than they are up.

So my motto for PVE has always been to build for as much offense as you could. The key phrase here being “as you could”. The fact is, not everyone is as good as everyone else, not everyone has the same tools available to them on the class they play, and not everyone necessarily enjoys a high stakes all-or-nothing brawl. There are some parts of the game that are really hard to do with a pure offensive build, due to how some enemies don’t load all of their damage into sparse attacks.

For example, I’ve been running HotW explorable mode with my Zerker thief for awhile. Path 1’s final boss has sparsely placed attacks that do high damage, and what I like to do is use Sword/Dagger #3 to avoid all of his attacks and steal his boons over and over again. This, however, is crazy, since he can kill me in 2 hits even with the permanent protection boon. Should the server lag, should I lag, or if the skill is gated behind the auto attack’s long aftercast, I would go down. This makes meleeing the boss incredibly risky, to the point that I’ve never seen anyone else do this. Ever. Frankly, I don’t expect anyone to try this, either. In contrast, path 3 has that big werewolf smack in the middle of the dungeon, and little Jacob there makes mincemeat out of my thief. He has a bunch of fast attacks that do medium to light damage against normal builds, but kills my zerker thief in 3 to 4 hits or so, which comes really fast. On my necromancer, who has a lot of bulk, that stupid werewolf isn’t a problem, so I can stay in the fray. But on my thief, I have to snipe with the shortbow or risk being torn to shreds.

Anyway, there are many advantages to being a durable build that aren’t just personal survivability. What a lot of players will do create a faux-trinity system, and load up their guardian with PVT gear, a bunch of defensive abilities, and then take point with every dungeon encounter. While that guardian is absorbing all of the enemy hits, as well as blinding enemies and giving AoE protection, the other DPSers can run in from behind and attack with full abandon. Every attack that lands against a player with high toughness does less damage than against a zerker, and players with high vitality can take more hits as a whole, so a single durability stacked player can diminish the offense of an entire enemy group. In areas where there is a lot of ambient damage around (coughgrawlfractal), zerker builds die too easily to maintain an offense, and become a liability to the group as a whole. Healing power and healing builds themselves are a direct boon to the survivability of other players. The higher the HP of the group, the less the group has to withdraw from the fray, and the more damage they can do.

You can see the that there is a diminished return for players with high durability. Having 1 player with high durability or high healing is enough to substantially improve the survivability. Having 5 of them… not so much. But outside of extremes we have builds that mix gear together. A bit of PVT, a bit of zerker, and then you can give yourself just enough survivability to take the hit, but still have a substantial amount damage. This is the preferred way to build, since hybridized builds don’t rely on other teammates to survive, and don’t become redundant when paired with each other. However, building like this requires more thought than just going for a full set, and that is a lot of players to process, apparently.

I’m not too concerned. I’m not… much of anything, really.

The blog post was fluff. It was a gigantic tray of compliment sandwiches, complete with no-calorie content substitute.

The hardest part is, whenever I give advice, people just accuse me of being elitist and refuse to listen.

The other day on the guardian forums I mentioned how it perplexed me that people would refuse to run wall of reflection, even in areas where that skill is incredibly useful. It does damage, protects the team, makes a light field to comb off of, and can be used in any build with no required traits to be effective. The responses I received were along the lines of:

“You don’t have a right to tell me how to play!”
“You have no respect for other playstyles!”
“I choose not to use it out of principle”
“If you don’t like how others play then you should form a static group on your own”
“If you didn’t check beforehand when forming a pug, you deserve what you get”.
“I’m not responsible for keeping you alive. Learn to dodge.”

And so on. Of course, this just infuriates me. It always has, from videogames to real life.

I often say that reasoning is dead. For reasons unknown (though I could probably write a book about my theories as to this), people have stopped bothering to be self critical, and they lack the ability to respond to criticism meaningfully. The moment you mention anything, these people put up a defensive wall and spew a torrent of generic entitlement garbage from their mouths. Their standard practice in life is to surround themselves with yes-men, and to despise anyone who doesn’t unconditionally support them. They consider all those who don’t agree with them as less than human, and the thought that there is intelligence behind any decision contrary to their own never once crosses their mind.

In this sense, society has become more bigoted than ever. This is an issue that is far larger than just videogames, since it poisons society from the cultural level to the political one. However, it continues to leak downward into everyday lives, to recreational entertainment. I assume that the mass amount of information available at our fingertips has always left us with an excuse to refuse to listen, and with a prepared response for everything already said, a refusal to reason.

So, the big question becomes this: How do you help a person who refuses to be helped and fights you all the way? The answer is simple: you don’t. Instead, you exclude these people from your group, and then you only play with people who do listen to what you say. If socially ostracizing the helpless doesn’t instruct them on the error of their ways, then at least you don’t have to put up with their nonsense anymore. When someone justifies bad decisions in life with some grand philosophical statement, I don’t want to associate with these people. I don’t want to play next to a player who plays kittenome kind of political statement. It is worse than a regular bad player, because then a regular bad player can get better.

AKA: you surround yourself with your own yes-men. Negotiation and reasoning in general requires two willing parties in order to function. Either both sides are working toward an agreement, or neither of them are. When someone calls you a doodoo head and leaves the negotiation, what are you to do? The answer: the same thing. The breakdown in reasoning is contagious, and reinforces itself over and over until the whole social contract breaks down. Doing otherwise is difficult.

And yet here I am, constantly reaching out to people who despise me for it. The last reasonable man.

The healing coefficients on most things are low because when this game was first launched, the devs were really afraid of making a healing trinity. It is a fair concern. As far as most MMOs go, healing is either extremely overpowered or extremely underpowered. The scales tip from one point to the other at the slightest of nudges.

As for GW2’s system, it was designed to have high base + low scaling to make it so every class was sufficient enough at healing themselves. While the scaling on most skills appears low, the percentage return you get on non-#6 skills is pretty high. For example regeneration heals 130 HPS with no healing power, but with 900 healing power it heals for243 HPS, which is an 87% increase in the effectiveness of regeneration.

Most alternate heals are like this. Heals that apply to groups or apply regeneration have a higher percentage increase for healing power. This is to make healing power a supportive stat moreso one you invest in to become superbunker.

Bright.9160:

Except that if Anet wanted, they’d remove leashing from the game, and skipping would be an instant goner. I wonder why they haven’t done so, if they designed things to be killed 100% of the time. Oh right, but now I’m using logic, and you’re having a hard time grasping that.

Anet stated on not one, but multiple occasions that skipping is a legit tactic and totally okay. In fact, some parts of some dungeons were specifically designed for skipping. Most of Arah comes to mind for example. Some parts of CM come to mind too. The run in F/F TA as well after the valiants. I mean, why would it be that a mob that isn’t really so far away would leash right at the end of a bridge, so conveniently out of aggro range of the next mob and with only very few blossoms around?

There are plenty of examples where skipping was most likely intended as a legit tactic.

Stop trying to get your stupid ways enforced on other players. It’s annoying, and quite frankly, borders with fascism on some occasions. We’re not forcing you to skip everything, are we? We’re telling you to keep your flawed arguments to yourself, and play how you want and be happy with it. You on the other hand are telling all of us we’re wrong, not playing the game, cheating, exploiting, and should all play like you do, yet still claim to have the moral high ground.

Good luck with that, Mussolini.

This is some of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard. If you are honestly think that the only reason why leashing exists is to encourage people to skip mobs, then you need to think a whole lot harder about what would happen if all the mobs chased you everywhere no matter what. If you don’t honestly think that, then spare us your nonsense and quit trolling.

I’ve heard that excuse of “well, if Anet didn’t want us to skip, then they’d do so and so” and it is getting tiring. Last time I heard, if Anet really didn’t want us to skip, then they would’ve put arbitrary gates that forced clearing before being opened. Well, look what happens with all the recent dungeons: arbitrary gates forcing clearing. If you actually paid attention to what Hrouda said about skipping, you’d see he doesn’t condone it, and didn’t force players to fight every mob because he thinks its a sloppy and bad solution to the problem. Now that he’s gone, look what happened. Instead, the rare circumstance where Anet has designed mobs to be skipped is being used shamelessly as a sweeping justification for all skipping everywhere.

As much as I’d like to sit back and say “play how you want”, the fact is that elitists don’t. They go into every forum and insult players who do anything but run the builds and equipment they do. As if the only metric to gauge a player’s worth is how quickly they can do content and how risky they can be while doing it. Personal preference, comfort, or skill level be darned. You march on this crusade that anyone who doesn’t go for pure damage is bad for the game, and why is this done? All because the elitist despises any player who does anything but increase how fast they get coin from a dungeon.

Of course your constant push for elitism and discrimination is ruining the game for others, because now you keep pulling the better players into a hyper-refined niche that makes them incapable of handling with anything but other hyper-refined builds. So instead of having players who are good enough to run pure DPS working with regular groups and capable of playing off of regular groups, they isolate themselves and then go to the forums to post horror stories about how those backwoods pugs didn’t stack exactly when expected with no word on strategy every time they bother to venture into the rest of the community. But hey, at least we have a bunch of players who have no business running GC gear kissing dirt every 10 seconds because elitists are deeply disturbed by mentalities different from their own.

The whole “play how you want” thing would’ve gone fine until you decided you weren’t happy with how others played, so you go around demonizing them. Now we have this cultural civil war going on in this game, with the other extreme being players who now adamantly refuse any constructive criticism because they’re fed up with impossible advice given out with the purpose to be bragging rights and to increase the adviser’s income. If elitists hadn’t made a big deal about it in the first place, this never would’ve happened. The worst part is that you actually believe that players who like to fight mobs are jealous of you.

Satenia.9025:

If you are going to call ignorance, you might want to start with sweeping your own floor first. That aside, I was giving two quite specific examples of how game mechanics support concepts such as stacking or skipping. However, judging by the rest of your post, there might be the need to first clarify what exactly can be considered as stacking or skipping. As far as stacking goes, I’m referring to standing on top of each others in order to maximize the effects of cleave as well as boon distribution. As far as skipping goes, I’m talking about bypassing a series of mobs through means of stealth/swiftness in order to get to the next “gate” that the dungeon path requires to be completed (skipping a gate itself is obviously neither intended or has it been in question).

As for the rest of your post, I don’t consider the oversimplification helpful to a discussion: Cluster of “trash-mobs” (begs the question why the community even named them as such) are not necessarily diverse, on the contrary, in several dungeons they are just a bunch of the same enemy types with the same basic behaviour. Thematic placement is completely irrelevant for dungeon completion, it’s just a visual thing really. But most importantly, the main reward component comes from the completion of the dungeon aka the final reward, neither implying nor suggesting that you have to complete EVERY non-gated step of the dungeon in order to qualify.

In short, there are certain “gates” in dungeons, often resulting in a (small) chest reward. Then there is the main reward component obtained by completing the dungeon. However, the tiny reward-pieces spread across “trash-mobs” are hardly relevant in this picture and there are no indications that Anet mandatory wanted you to defeat every single one of those (lack of gates). If you bother to actually do your research on this kind of content, you will come to realize that it’s these later parts that are being skipped.

I find myself having to explain this every time: The “Argument from Ignorance” is a fallacy in which someone uses the lack of information to assert a claim. This generally takes the form of “X is true, prove me wrong”, but also takes the form of “How you do you know that X isn’t true?”. I.E., how do I know that Burger King and Enron aren’t related? In your particular example, you’re asserting that skipping is intentional because the OP doesn’t have concrete, irrefutable proof that it isn’t intentional. This is troll logic at its core, because you can sustain your point by being utterly indignant and defiant instead or rational and reasonable. To break it down:

Satenia.9025:

That aside, I was giving two quite specific examples of how game mechanics support concepts such as stacking or skipping

No, you are manipulating the mechanics hoping that whomever you’re talking to is misinformed. GW2 was designed PVP first, and as such Stealth and Swiftness were made for aggro management and active evasion. They’re meant to be used in-combat, not to avoid combat.

Satenia.9025:

(skipping a gate itself is obviously neither intended or has it been in question).

You’re distracting from the point. The issue is the profound use of gates after the initial dungeon launch. Hrouda himself said the only reason why he didn’t stop skipping is because he couldn’t come up with an elegant enough solution. Of course, he was fired, then Anet tried gates, and after everyone hated gates Anet stopped trying.

Satenia.9025:

Cluster of “trash-mobs” (begs the question why the community even named them as such) are not necessarily diverse,

You’re trying to use an exception to disprove an obvious general trend. It doesn’t work like that.

Satenia.9025:

Thematic placement is completely irrelevant for dungeon completion, it’s just a visual thing really.

Its not. Encounters and combat are part of the theme. Otherwise it’d just be a movie.

Satenia.9025:

But most importantly, the main reward component comes from the completion of the dungeon aka the final reward, neither implying nor suggesting that you have to complete EVERY non-gated step of the dungeon in order to qualify.

Here you’re either lying out misinformed. Dungeon rewards were originally spread more evenly throughout the dungeon. It was intended that you would do everything, because the rewards were everywhere. The “end completion” award was made when it was discovered that all players would do is farm the first boss over and over again. To fix the problem of people not actually playing any of the dungeon at all, the end-focused rewards were added.

This is also contradicted by the heavy use of gates in later dungeons. If they devs were happy with players running past everything and still “qualifying” for a full reward, then they wouldn’t have made it impossible to run past everything in future updates.

Satenia.9025:

However, the tiny reward-pieces spread across “trash-mobs” are hardly relevant in this picture…

Except they are. Loot, placement, and experience are facts. They do not go away because you aren’t satisfied with how much they give.

Satenia.9025:

and there are no indications that Anet mandatory wanted you to defeat every single one of those (lack of gates)

Except everything in the dungeon wants you to defeat those enemies. Dungeon skipping is the equivalent to picking up a book, only reading the first line of every page, then saying “There’s no indications that the author mandatory wanted you to read every single word on those (lack of pages)”. It is so backward, alien, and self motivated licentious thinking that of course Anet didn’t prepare for it. Silly devs thought players would actually play the game, and spent a tremendous amount of effort at launch to make rewards homogenized throughout all PVE content. It is an interesting if not depressing history of how this was changed throughout time:

First: Dungeon rewards were end-loaded so players wouldn’t just grind the first boss.
Second: Dungeon rewards were set up daily and diminishing returns were put in place so players would run something other than CoF P1.
Third: Dungeon rewards were re-balanced to encourage players to run longer dungeons instead of the same short few.
Fourth: Champ Boxes were added to make killing champions more worthwhile, as players were just skipping them.
Fifth: World bosses received large daily rewards because players were just skipping them.
Sixth: Events were altered to give no experience and loot until completion, because players were purposefully failing events to grind them.
Seventh: Map wide currencies and progress were added to encourage players to do events for greater goal, instead of just grinding the few same easy events and champs.

The history of rewards in this game all reflect on a single fact: They aren’t happy with how we are playing their game.

The entire case for skipping is based solely on the exploitation of negative space. It isn’t about making a point, but cultivating an immunity to rebuttal. So long as you can be difficult enough to stave away all the common sense, you win. You have no point.

Fenrir.3609:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You do know that people solo Lupi in melee range in full zerker gear, right? Once you get good enough, enemies don’t drop you in melee range anymore.

And? You can also solo bosses as a condi spec. The fact that if you are good you can dodge, does not alter the fact that condi specs have distinct advantages in certain aspects (survive), advantages that would become OP should the condi cap be removed and groups able to apply insane damage whilst spaming condis with impunity.

There is a clear difference between sitting in melee range on a full glass cannon spec and using a condi build which is able to a) output very large damage, b) apply that damage from a point of greater safety than a melee zerk and c) use gear that allows for greater “tank” than the zerk.

Condi in no way needs a buff (if anything if you factor in pvp, it could be argued it needs nerfing) and the cap is in place for obvious reasons.

Welcome to the conversation. Let me fill you in.

The statement I was responding to was basically saying that, since berserker gear results in faster player death, that conditions balanced out their damage, both by prolonging damage after death, and by staying alive longer.

This, of course, is wrong on two accounts. First, berserker gear doesn’t always result in faster player death. No, the seasoned GW2 player can run around in glass cannon gear in full melee weapons, making the entirety of PVE their kitten. This is the one I addressed.

There is a second one I didn’t address, which is the fallacy of lingering damage being superior. For you see, the difference between one attack that takes 0.7 seconds to activate and does 4000 damage immediately vs. another attack that takes 0.7 seconds to activate and does 1000 damage immediately with 3000 additional damage over 10 seconds is actually very little. If you have two players doing these attacks, and they both die at the same time, they will end up doing the same damage. The player who does condition damage will have their attacks linger over time, but the fact is that this lingering damage is only gradually doling out the damage that direct DPS already did.

Now that you are caught up, I will respond to your idea:

The cap is not a necessary limit to contain the beast of condition damage. I have no record of Anet ever saying this. So far, Anet has only cited processing limitations in regards to the condition cap. This is because direct damage has a much higher capacity for DPS, and it does this in two ways. First, is simply having higher damage overall. As much as I love my rabid condi build on the necro, I can’t deny that the full zerker set just blows it away in damage.

The second is the rate of damage. Condition builds can have decent DPS, but this is predicated on being at the cap, which isn’t always an easy feat to achieve. Direct damage builds come out swinging with full force, but conditions need time to build up to their cap, and reach the point where they are replacing conditions as fast as they are applied. Even if condition damage were to be equal to power damage, conditions will always lag behind power because of the time it takes to build the conditions. In the long term, this can be nigh negligable. But in short term… a power builds can kill elites before condi builds can reach the cap.

Of course, I wonder what your basis for “OP” is. If you want to talk about the combination of damage and bulk, then you are way off base. Zerker isn’t the end all-beat all combination of damage and defense. In fact, soldiers actually has a higher combination of bulk and damage. So, why is it that everyone encourages zerker, despite soldier having higher damage per effective HP? That would be kill speed.

Kill speed equals faster rewards, and thus higher GPS (or gold per second), and condition specs will never outpace direct damage specs in kill speed, unless Anet removes the cap and increases enemy HP tenfold. Then, Epidemic’s force multiplication would make conditions more powerful.

I’m actually not.

I guess it depends on the events. I don’t run around in champ trains or doing world bosses, except tequatl and triple trouble. Whenever there’s an event up, I’ll often find myself being the one to do it solo, which can mean quite a bit when you end up fighting a champion.

In legacy content, yeah some of the events can be quite boring. I find drytop and silverwastes events to be much more challenging.

I actually get this sometimes, too. Little backstory: I run with pugs only. Too hectic a schedule to keep up with any guild schedules or requirements. And, as an exclusive pug runner, I don’t run meta builds that often, and for very good reason: Meta builds are “meta” for highly coordinated groups, who have predefined roles and operate under a set of tactics that aren’t achieved in standard play.

With pugs, you don’t get that kind of insurance. Will the group stack or scramble around at range? Does this group have appropriate gear, or they running around in greens? Is this group full of healers, or are they running DPS? Is this direct damage or condi damage? If they are new to the encounter, are they going to run ahead or hang back in timid fear? Does this group know how combo fields work, or is my might stacking on engi/ele a magic trick to them? Because of this, I have to run builds that opt for maximizing utility and having potent defenses, since I need to be capable of handling any situation that arises.

What annoys me is when players start demanding that I change my build and change my playstyle with no prior discussion on the matter. When I see an LFG that says “meta builds” I don’t join up, for obvious reason above. But as of late, I have been getting random pugs that will start demanding that I play my thief/ele a particular way, using particular weapons and a particular build, then kitten incessantly if I have to stop to change my whole loadout for their sake, or if I don’t run what they demand I do. And half of the time, their reasoning is completely wrong, such as demanding inappropriate weapons for sections, or saying that support skills are useless because they already have a dedicated tank/support player.

Thankfully I haven’t had one of them join my “all welcome” groups. Because if they did, I might make an exception and kick them.

SECTION 4
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Alright, that is all well and good. After your first or second fight with the Gerent, his moves should become pretty obvious. But, if you’ve played this event, you’ve probably noticed that it mostly fails another way: some lane is unable to get the Gerent to emerge. Here is where I will tell you how to do that, and ideally how many people you should have doing that. While this section is last, it is the most important section, because if you do not have this part down, you won’t even stand a chance.

Ogre lane

This lane is the easiest. There are eggs scattered about the sides of the lane. They’re fused to the ground, but have gigantic blue glowing tops. To get the Gerent to emerge, you are to destroy as many eggs as possible. The more eggs you destroy, the better time you’ll have. The eggs respawn after awhile, too. So, the strategy for this lane is to spread out among the eggs, then kill the eggs. End of strategy. Key word here: spread out.

Ideally you’d want at least 20 people on this lane. The lane handles scaling fairly well, so extras should be sent to this and Novus lane. Keep the numbers between these two lanes about equal.

The Chak rush is not that much of a problem. When they spawn they’ll march by, so stop destroying eggs to go and kill the Chak Rush, then head back to destroying eggs.

Throughout the lane there will be temp weapons called Ogre Smashers. These are not necessary under any circumstance. If you feel these will help you do more damage, go ahead, but for the most part everyone ignores these.

The hardest part about this lane is that aggressive chak will still spawn during this event, adding a bit of pressure. They shouldn’t be too hard, though. Most will be cleaved with the eggs, and the rest can be killed fairly easily.

Novus Lane

This is the second-easiest lane. For this lane, there will be ley-energy collectors on the sides of the tunnel. Your job is to destroy these collectors, then pick up the bundles of ley energy they drop, and throw those bundles into a gigantic golem situated in the center of the lane. The more charge the golem has, the easier the lane will be. At the end of the event the Golem will arise, Gerent will emerge, and the two will engage in epic Kaiju battle.

Special note, this lane has Chak Bracers. These are flying guys who are immune to damage, buff allies, and have a break bar. They will buff the Chak Gerent, so these guys are CC on sight.

The Golem is temperamental, and will frequently stand there fantasizing about what it would be like to be a real boy. To get the Golem to do its job and actually fight Gerent, you need to get Gerent to rush into the golem. So, when Gerent emerges, if Gerent does not have a break bar, stand in-line with the golem, so that when Gerent charges the golem will accept his role in life, and start pounding the ley-eating crap out of king.

The Chak rush, again, is not much of a problem. When the squadron comes around, stop throwing bundles and attack the chak.

Ideally for this lane, you’d want 20 people. Each spread out to the 3 or 4 collectors at each event. This lane handles scaling pretty well, so extra people should go to here or Ogre. You’ll want about an equal number spread between the two lanes.

SCAR lane

This is the second hardest lane. For this lane, a couple of NPCs will charge a gignatic thumper turret. Your job is defend them as they do this. However, squadron of chak will spawn and start heading for the turret. These Chak are aggressive to everyone, and there’s a lot of them, so spread out around the thumper and kill these Chak as they spawn.

Special note: this lane also has Chak Bracers. CC on sight.

The Chak rush is not a problem. You’re already killing every chak in sight to protect the thumper. Just focus on the squadron as they run by.

Now, for the real reason why this lane is hard: You know that whole “don’t break his bar” thing above? Yeah, forget it. The Thumper Turret will automatically break the bar of Gerent. Because of that scrub turret, you will spend the vast majority (98% easily) of this fight dealing with a mobile, aggressive, purple death donut spamming Gerent. Oh those donuts, they are real. The SCAR lane Gerent is the most severe of DPS races, as the Gerent will not stay in one place for long, and it frequently is not safe to melee the gerent. For this lane, you will need high ranged damage, which is why you’ll frequently see 10 staff tempests here. High damage gear and builds are recommended.

Second note, while you don’t want Gerent rushing further into lane, you also don’t want Gerent rushing into the turret, either. I’ve never been unlucky enough to have been in a party where Gerent squeeded out a death donut on the turret, but from what I hear it leads to failure quite quickly.

For this lane, you’ll want 20 of your beefiest ranged DPSers. You won’t want more, as scaling up makes this DPS race even tighter, and random players on random classes can wreck your chances.

Nuhoch lane

This is it. The lane. The lane that makes pugging this event exponentially harder. The lane that requires taking full advantage of the squad system to complete. The whole reason why people write guides.

For this lane, your goal is to climb the sides of the lane, stand on top of the glowing fungi that stick out of the lane, stomp on the nodules, and kill the mushrooms that spawn. This is deceptively easy, as the nodule respawn rate is tight, and is tied to the mushrooms that spawn, so kill those ASAP. Spread out as much as possible to make for the most efficient stomping ever. While the mushrooms themselves do not count as “progress”, they do limit progress, so kill them.

The mushrooms themselves are tough. Vets and elites can spawn if you aren’t spread out. They do high damage, they spam knockbacks constantly (and at that height, it can be fatal), and when they die they self-destruct, capable of killing most classes in a single hit. Be mobile, bring stability, be strong, be aware, be spread out.

Bouncing Mushrooms is a necessary mastery. It makes the time you need to get on those fungi and spread out much shorter.

It is so tough that you’ll want to end the DPS phase early. 30 seconds before the Chak Gerent re-burrows, leave early and get into position to spread out and stomp mushrooms. There is some good news, though. I saved a bunch of money on my car insurance by switching to Geico. But aside from that: The Chak Gerent in this lane is the runt of the litter. He has far less health than the other lanes, so the 30 seconds you use to run early to spread out among the fungi should be no hindrance at all. Nuhoch lane is the lane most likely to get a 2nd event kill.

For this event, you will want three sub-groups in your squad. A north party, dedicated to climbing and stomping nodules on the north side of the lane. A south party, dedicated to climbing and stomping nodules on the south side of the lane. And a Chak Rush party, who is dedicated to stomping the mushrooms in the more central areas, and also dedicated solely to killing the Chak Rush.

Yes, that’s right. You see, the other lanes are lucky, in that their Chak Squadron marches right past the main event. But in Nuhoch lane, they’ll run far below the event, meaning that it takes a lethal amount of time to run down there and stop them. So, you need a party preassigned who’s job is, when the Rush starts, to go down there and kill the Rushers, then run back up to start stomping mushrooms. Everyone else must understand that their job is not to attack the Chak Rush, as if they do we all fail.

Did I mention that you need to spread out? Because whether you spread out or not means success or failure. SPREAD OUT!!! This is the hardest part that pugs can’t seem to grasp. You don’t want to have people chasing nodules and recolating, as travel time eats at the clock. You want to have as many people in as many different places as possible.

For this lane, you will want at least 16-20 of your most competent people, with 3-4 dedicated to killing the Chak Rush. For the Chak Rush group, you’ll want good control and high AoE damage. North and South squad should have an equal amount of people. You do not want many extra people in the lane, as stomping nodules is already really hard.

Now, before it happens, I will say that there is an alternate set up. I am saying this, mostly because people will kitten endlessly if I do not: A certain guild-that-should-not-be-named insists on using 24 for Nuhoch squad, and having people double up to ensure that nodule stompers stay alive. Now, while this does work, it is not necessary, so long as your current stompers are competent enough to not die, and even with extras there’s still a chance they’ll both faceplant under a single shroom’s self destruct. With that said, 24 is the absolute max that should be allowed in this lane, as any more scaling will result in the emerge event literally being impossible.

In summation: north squad, south squad, chak rush squad, bouncing mushrooms, SPREAD OUT!!!, leave gerent 30 seconds before he burrows, stomp nodules, avoid mushroom self destruct, bring stability. It is also really important to stand down-lane of the Gerent, as if he charges in the wrong direction, at eats up more precious seconds.

And that, as they say, is that. The end. Fin. That is my guide to beating the King of the Jungle. If you are satisfied with your product, great! If you are not satisfied with your product, then I have some bad news for you: you are not well. Please get in touch with a local therapist immediately.

Fay.2357:

Ross Biddle.2367:

For general mob spawn

• They target Phants anyway, and in overwhelming numbers this wont be good for the mobs. In crowded scenarios, friendlies will kill the mobs, ending the phants life -_-u

For Big Bosses

• Don’t these guys hit for a billion damage quite frequently? So like, one hit at -95% damage reduction is still going to be nine hundred and fifty million damage. I don’t know if a phant can survive that much dps -_-u

Where these damage reduction effects would really prove worthy? WvW, PvP. But yeah, cool, at least its a step in the right direction for PvE.

Some bearbow math:

5% damage taken = 20x increase in ehp.

Phantasm PvE hp is 5800. 20x that is 116,000.

Bosses hit hard, they don’t hit THAT hard.

I came here to say this, but someone beat me to it.

Now I’m not sure whether the best tactic is to shatter + well chrono or phantasm + well chrono.

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.

Don’t mistake someone being disgruntled for there being a legitimate complaint.

The big thing I have been hoping for is a fix to turrets so I can get back to sPVP.

Turrets are STILL NOT FIXED!!!

Personally, I blame myself for the following problem, since I wasn’t quick enough on the draw to dispense my wisdom to Anets eager ears before they made a series of paradoxical decisions. So, I am willing to accept everyone’s hate for the next few lines.
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Still hatin? I’ll give you a few more lines.
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Alright, that’s enough. Get over it you spiteful lil’ boi.

Enough fluff. Here’s what I’m talking about. O.K. just a bit more fluff. You’ve gotta love that bunny. This thread will be two posts: post one is what the problem is, and post 2 is what should be done as I decree it.

But to be serious now, there is a strange, almost paradoxical philosophy that Anet has developed regarding WvW, and in fault I blame the players for it because they have developed these expectations. But, I will not resolve the next few lines for my hatred, because I’m better than that. Most importantly, I’m better than you, you hateful lil’ boi.

I’ve seen a few MMOs that have a permanent faction based conflict in the overworld. DCUO and Aion are two such examples, and they are an example as to why this idea sucks: the faction based conflicts result in servers being heavily stacked in one direction or the other, turning the game into a free ride vs. gank fest depending on which side you stumble into.

WvW was designed specifically to be a three-way gank to prevent one-sided domination. If one side had superior numbers, coverage, and skill, then the two smaller sides can team up and kill the biggun’. Disproportionate populations were meant to eventually be balanced out on a server by server basis, but with changing active populations there’s no guarantees, so the whims of the seasons means one server will be roflstomped by the other quite frequently. This was expected, and so the rewards in WvW are based mostly around being in WvW, lest one server be punished for another’s inactivity.

To this end, it has always been my understanding that WvW is inherently unfair. It is a war where the treatise are shaky at best, the size of anyone’s army is up for debate, there is no standard time of engagement, and you will always be fighting on two fronts. The monetary incentives are contrary to the game’s scoring system, causing a conflict of interest in the players. So, you get into big fights for the lulz and for the thrills of large scale combat, and after each week you laugh about what happened and prepare for the next fight.

But, what Anet is doing with WvW isn’t based on this premise. No, the premise of “It’s not fair, have some fun” gets thrown out the door as soon as you have seasons, tournaments, and rankings. Now, we see complaints about 2 vs. 1s, coverage vs. coverage, buying guilds and recruiting players to shore up numbers, time zones and which one is overpowered, etc. Now, under the premise of all being fair in love and war, this is just whining. But if you have an actual competition, then these complaints are legitimate.

Think about it: When in a game of soccer have they put 3 teams on the field, and then tried to award medals for whomever won that game? When has there been a game of football where all the players wait for the other team to fall asleep so they can score touchdowns unopposed? When in a game of basketball is it fair for one team to outnumber the other on the field 3 to 1? When is there a game of chess when the players get paid for how many pawns they take, regardless of if they win? The answer to all this is “never” because these are nonsensical and stupid things, and any serious spectators will laugh in your face over how utterly ridiculous the system is.

A 3 team soccer game might be fun. I won’t argue that. But will it be fair? Absolutely not. The season has epitomized the problems with this model. I mean, look at the standings and ask yourself if anyone is surprised about the outcomes. The only upset I can see is that BG was doubleteamed, which under non-tourney standards is par for the course, but in a tournament is a cheap move.

These problems are endemic to WvW. You can’t fix cheap moves, coverage, time zones, and population differences. It is because of this that the whole tournament thing is utter rubbish. You end up having to hand out cheap, nigh meaningless rewards in a hodgepodge that strangely punishes or rewards tiering in an arbitrary manner. The whole thing ends up more convoluted than U.S. tax laws, except that the rewards have to be low or else people will feel even more ripped off for things out of their control.

If you want my advice for WvW in the future, it would be simply thus: no more tournaments. Change incentives, and add new things to WvW.

The exclusive dye system is inherently unfair. This new birthday boost just made it fair. People who either benefited or were robbed by the old system feel robbed now.

This is the nature of the world. If you fix an injustice, this is done at the expense of those who benefit from that injustice.

Right now I just think phalanx strike is the problem. It renders self-stacking might nearly useless in any group composition.

Sigmar.8614:

P.S.:

They’re not forced to farm.

Sure… they can also get the mats from the TP where their low drop rate drives prices up. So they need gold. Whiiich you can get in viable ammounts only by – you guessed it – farming.
Or playing the TP. Because everyone loves when the best source of income in a MMORPG is maintaining excel sheets for a virtual stock market.

Oh please. Mats are cheap. Linen is 5.69 silver each. You get 2 gold doing dailies, and another gold for tequatl, plus all the salvage mats. That gets you 52 linen for basically existing each day. Or you can do what I do and convert karma into cloth/leather grabbing gloves, mystic forge them, salvage the products, and end up with stacks upon stacks of the stuff. You get them as loot for running events in the lower level zones, as well as the level appropriate dungeons. Or if you want to get really technical, you can just get a level 50 character and have them open all of the various boxes and bags you get, so you’ll be showered in the stuff.

There’s no grand economic crises that suddenly makes AFK farmers into robin hood. That’s just license for greed and laziness. Gold rains from the sky, and the mats rain from the sky, and you don’t even “need” it at all. If you ran fractals you’d learn that ascended armor and weapons drops are actually quite common.

Honestly, if someone can’t or refuses to follow simple directions in the LFG, then I question the competency of that person. I don’t care for whole “zerker only”, “heavies only”, “6k+ AP” stuff either, but if I don’t fit the requirements I don’t join.

I’ve considered giving each class individual conditions to stack up. But, doubling classes isn’t the only issue with this suggestion.

The response Anet has for condition damage has always been the same: “bandwidth”. Anet hasn’t raised or removed the condi cap due to bandwidth issues. Adding additional, class based conditions, bandwidth wise, is just a more complicated means of raising the cap. Likewise, personal conditions per player runs into the same bandwidth issue.

Having a superior condition replace an inferior one is also an interesting idea, but it runs into the bandwidth issue again. You see, to have a “superior” condition take precedence, it has to calculate this superiority against every stack of conditions present. So, every time a bleed is applied it must be compared to 25 different stacks of bleeding. Put multiple players causing bleeding in the same spot, and things can get crazy really quickly.

So far, the best idea I’ve come up with is to change how conditions are handled as a whole. Currently, every condition does a series of complex calculations every second, treating each “tick” as an individualized new attack. This means that, at each tick, the game has to re-acquire your player identity, re-acquire stats, re-calculate the damage that would be done with that condition, re-check the duration of each condition, re-check the stacking number of each condition, and perform an operation on the stacking number and duration, and then actually inflict the damage against the target. That is a whole lot of calculations each second.

What I would ideally like to see is each condition acquire its damage and player identity only once. If conditions were a self contained, simple operation that just subtracted HP each second instead of some kind of personal attack each second, then the amount of bandwidth required to process this info is a whole lot smaller. The changes to the nature of conditions would be slight, but IMO preferable to how conditions run now.

There are, however, two caveats with my own “best idea”. First is assigning credit and participation to events. That is easily done: just take some percentage of the tooltip’s listed condition damage, and apply that as credit via direction damage in events. The second caveat is that, to make this suggestion work, a whole lot of the game code would have to be rewritten. Once again, my ideas fall into the practicality hole: they’ll work, but they ain’t easy.

I think the balance ideal is fundamentally broken in PVP as well. The idea with necros not having the other tools results in a very difficult balancing problem.

Necro survivability is incredibly finite at the moment, with Death Shroud as mitigation being limited by HP. In small scale fights of 1 vs. 1 or 2 vs. 2, it is currently overpowered, since a full bar gives Necromancers an incredible statistical advantage over other classes. However, when you get larger than that, DS offers very little comparative protection, being worn away quickly. Then, the necromancer’s lack of escapes and blocks/evades/invulnerability comes back in full force, getting them killed quickly.

There’s almost no balance to it. Either the necromancer is overpowered because it is a small scale fight, or the necromancer is really underpowered because it is a large scale fight. No other class seems to have such a polarized effectiveness, and the design philosophy of Anet can only make the problem worse. If you give the necros more damage or suvivability for team fights, this makes them more overpowered in small scale fights. If you scale them down their damage or survivability for small scale fights, then they become even worse in team fights and large scale fights.

Other than to drop the design philosophy, I can’t think of a solution to this problem.

It really depends on the circumstances. As far as necromancers go, they have their highest potential damage from conditions, due to how well they can spread them. Overall, I’d say play how you want and don’t worry too much about it, since there isn’t anything in the game that needs to you to run power. To get into specifics:

Dungeons: you won’t be well liked by elitists, but running a conditionmancer is fine for pugs and casuals. The only time you’ll really run into issues is when you have two or more condi builds in the same group, because then damage can start to drop off. If you have a dedicated group where you’re the only condi user, go nuts. Lately, I’m seeing few and fewer condi builds, so the chances of meeting up with another one in a pug are pretty low.

Overworld: the only time you’ll have a problem against champions and world bosses are the ones that are heavily zerged. Temple bosses, champ trains, dragon champions, the ones where there are 20 or so guys on one mob you’ll see an issue. But, in champions that aren’t fought in large groups, or areas with zergs of mobs themselves, condition builds are fine.

You’ll still do damage, since nearly all condition attacks have direct damage components, so getting credit isn’t an issue.

WvW: Conditions are pretty good here. In small scale fights (anything from 1 vs. 1 to 10 vs. 10), the AoE power from conditions and their pressure can do plenty of damage to other players. It is actually pretty good at doing damage. In zerg vs. zerg, sometimes a well formed enemy zerg will pack a cleansing, but a necro can easily maintain AoE condi pressure despite this.

Personally I just have multiple builds.

The problem with the elementalist is pretty easy to see: Instead of making the attunements based on situational usage (much like how you’d swap to a ranged weapon from a melee weapon), they designed the attunements and skills to be spammed constantly in order to be effective. So now you have to hammer the keyboard in a frenzy to accomplish what most other classes can do in one or two button presses.

You know, I’m horrible with elementalist but excellent at thief. Really. It is strange how night-and-day it is. It isn’t that thief is a stronger class than the ele. Really, the ele is the best class in the game. It isn’t that thief is more durable. They’re in the same HP tier, and the armor difference doesn’t mean much.

Its a vision problem. My elementalist has such big, flashy and explosive effects. I also made my ele a a norn, so the physical body of my toon gets in the way. I can’t see the miniscule tells that enemies have behind all of these effects. So my elementalist (and to a lesser extent, guardian) gets close and personal with the floor way too much. I end up having to spam rotations,, and my usage of defensive skills and dodges is largely reliant on the force.

The thief has minimal effects. A slight black woosh behind the weapon, and that’s it. While on my thief, I can clearly see everything that everyone is doing. I don’t blindly spam and hope for the best on the thief. I simply engage.

This has been a problem for awhile. Even with effect LoD turned down I still can’t see anything. I have pretty bad vision, too. It is spotty, never better than 20/30 even with glasses, and without glasses I am one step from legally blind. I come from a game that used to have just as many flashy effects, but had a slider where you could all but completely remove the flashing lights from other player’s attacks.

+1.

You might say we were… stealth nerfed

I’m more of a numbers guy myself. But, I do have one big, glaring issue with the tempest: The Traits. The other classes provide some versatility in their traits for different builds. But the Tempest seems hyper focused and doing very little at that, especially on the PVE side. So, in my patented arbitrary 1-10 scale, I’ll break it down.

Singularity: Not rated, because it is the gateway to the specialization as a whole.

Eye of the Storm
This trait is good. I’m a big fan of automatic stun breaks, and the AoE + superspeed aspect really make it nice. Synergizes with other shout traits, too.
7/10

Latent Stamina
This trait exists to try and get people out of water/arcane. Which is unfortunate, because water and arcane still do this much better. Not in the amount of endurance applied (after all, 10 endurance is equal to about 4 seconds of vigor), but in overall synergy. The tempest provides no additional on-swap benefits, whereas water and arcane are teeming with them. The short range makes it hard to use, too.
4/10

Unstable Conduit
I’ve always found Auras to be a bit lackluster, but this skill gives you an aura… on a 6 second delay. Now, normally an aura is something you want to use tactically: shocking aura to interrupt incoming burst, magnetic aura to reflect projectiles. On a 6 second delay during a time in which you are mostly helpless… not so much.
3/10

Speedy Conduit
Eles aren’t at a loss for speed or swiftness. Staff builds can already stack long durations of the stuff. For other builds, there’s already Signet of Air, Elemental Attunement, Zephyr’s Speed, Inscription, Glyph of Elemental Harmony, Updraft, Cyclone, Zephyr’s Boon… Yes this trait is redundant, and only serves as a minor aid for people who don’t want to be bothered to use one of the other dozen methods for getting speed.
2/10

Tempestuous Aria
Offensive and defensive in a large AoE. The problem being that shouts are meh, with many of their uses also performed by the arcane line. What is most notably missing is the “20% reduced cooldown” trait that would bump this up an extra notch. If it had that CD reduction, and if shouts were actually good, then this would be a great trait.
5/10

Earthen Proxy
The way this trait is written is deceptive, not showing how bad it really until you actually equip it. Normally, while under protection, you take 66% of the damage you would have. Under new protection, you take 60%. From an effective HP standpoint, this is a 9% increase, which isn’t that potent at all considering how low an Ele’s effective HP is.
3/10

Harmonist Conduit
This trait is basically a vastly inferior version of Elemental Enchantment, whereas instead of increasing boon duration and working always, it only works after an overload is used. This has use in PVE, however, as about half of an overlaod’kittens are after auto attacking, which makes t hem worthwhile to use whenever they are up.
5/10

Hardy Conduit
At least when you’re almost completely unprotected while using an overload, now you’ll have some protection. This trait is decent, in that it is trying to fix a gigantic flaw with the overload system. The long channels effectively mean you’re defenseless, and an Ele’s defenses are in their controls, evades, and heals. Even when used in combat, it just doesn’t feel like enough. Maybe if the protection was 5 seconds long, this would be good.
5/10

Imbued Melodies
Unfortunately, I do not have the expertise to comment fully on this trait. I immediately see a problem at first glance: Warhorn skills aren’t fast. They are slow moving and average-cast speed environmental effects. Still, though, the ability to to stun duration for allies is good, and doing it as frequently and automatically as the warhorn kills puts this into a “useful until proven otherwise” category.
7/10

Lucid Singularity
See, this is what Speedy Conduit should have been. This give Overload’s a much needed utility and actually stops a weakness instead of mildly numbing it. This trait is good, and I’d argue that it should be merged with Speedy Conduits, a nigh useless trait.
7/10. 8/10 if it gets merged with speedy conduits.

Elemental Bastion
Elementalists are good at healing, largely because of the ability to generate and blast water fields. Now this is a rather strange way of healing that is introduced. Is it good? Not really. Unless you’re already running water attunement, the only group auras you’ll be giving out are with the distinctly average shouts. This trait does not make those shouts above average. Even in cleric gear it heals less than a blast finisher in zerker gear. Unless there’s some unknown aura spamming setup that would make use of this, and not in a gimmicky manner, this trait isn’t that good.
4/10

In many of these updates, I’m glad that I play hybrids. If I want to stop doing condi damage, then I don’t need a new build. Sure, it isn’t as much DPS as just using berserker, but should a situation like this arise while on a hybrid, I’m not screwed.

Whomever they hired for the most recent bundles does not understand price discrimination. Anet isn’t going to get more money by only selling bundles. They’re getting less.

This is kind of a rant, so…

Well, I figured out how it is they plan to remove a ton of gold from the economy… the hard way. It isn’t just trading.

You probably all know about how basic ascended crafting materials take up a ton of bank space, and yet you need a lot of them in order to make a full loadout of ascended weapons (4 weapons lots, 2000 of each). These litter your bank and take up inventory slots on your character, but since it can take literal days of nonstop grinding to get all that you’ll need to craft ascended weapons, you won’t throw these crafting materials away.

There’s only one way to save space without throwing things away, and that requires refining these materials. First you need enough to get 450 in one of the crafting professions, and then you need the following:

100 ascended basic material
2 obsidian shard
10 Thermocatalytic Reagents

You’re probably wondering where I’m going with all this. Simple:

2 obsidian shards = 4,200 karma, 2 laurels, or 30 fractal relics.
10 thermocatalytic reagents = 14.96 silver.

The obsidian shards themselves are a pain, but the real tax is the reagents. These bloodstone dust and dragonite ore litter your bank and inventory space very quickly. I’ve seen players with 10 stacks+ of individual components on the day of release. If you want to empty out a space in your bank, it is really simple: you refine the material. To refine the material (250 per stack) you’ll need on average 25 reagents, which will, on average, cost 37.4 silver to an NPC store.

I hate this. I spent gold just to level crafting to get bank space, only to find that on a regular basis I am charged 37.4 silver for bank space. Keep in mind, this is a material that

A)You can’t sell to NPCs.
B)You can’t trade to other players
C)You can’t purchase when you want to use it.

Unless you want to completely forgo the ascended weapons, lose out on that juicy 5%+ advantage they give, and spend your time regularly deleting stacks of this material for doing any and everything you did before, you’re stuck with this unnamed tax on bank space.

It seems like this whole ascended crafting thing is a dig against players. Give the players a ton of materials that are worthless to everyone else, overloads your bank quickly, is expensive to gain enough levels to refine, and requires money just to convert to easy storage. I can understand if this material could be sold or bought or traded, because then you could negotiate your needs with other players without personally being inconvenienced. I can understand the costs of reagents being part of overall price of an ascended weapon, should you choose to buy an ascended weapon. I can understand if these materials required a special place to acquire them, so they wouldn’t overload your inventory unless you went looking for them.

But no, I have to pay for bank space. Each ascended weapon will require 6 stacks of these materials, and with up to 6 ascended weapons possible for every build, this eats up 36 spaces in your bank, and requires 12.45 gold after leveling crafting to open up free slots, let alone the fact that you’ll be overloaded with bloodstone dust so much quicker than the other materials that it becomes an excessive task just to deal with.

Maybe I’m just being petty, but I can’t be the only person who feels this way, can I?

Yoh.8469:

Which is exceedingly bazaar

I personally would say it is more swapmeet or mall than bazaar.

Enough joking aside, I think the lack of super-meaningful multiplayer interaction is partly because of the community. The community in this game is quite timid. I fear this may ultimately be Anets fault, though, since they follow a social darwinistic method of teaching players.

Canakun.8031:

Mate, you’re the only one struggling to prove your opinion is the legitimate one.
What I’m saying is the new meta is stricter than the previous meta, which comfortably allowed for people to play whatever they wanted.

You have a very strange definition of struggling. You also have a very strange definition of opinion. We aren’t talking opinions here. We’re discussing predictions over facts.

And in those predictions, it is very possible for you to be wrong.

ODB.6891:

I’m sorry, but that was a complete internalization of your own issues…brought to life in electronic print. He said nothing that hasn’t been openly admitted by many phiw players on these same forums.

You agree with his prejudices, and similarly feel them justified, so you are just echoing how right you think he is. And in doing so, you’ve already gotten several things wrong.

#1: He did name someone. Calls them PHIW. Detractors. You call them PHIW, too. And by giving them a name you’ve generalized a group of “others” who’s thoughts and feelings don’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you don’t say a specific name, it is still a recognizable group.
#2: The meta isn’t a consensus. It is an idea invented by a few that gets forced onto other players with such oppressive pervasiveness that others assume it true.
#3: The problem isn’t the existence of a meta. The problem is that the current meta has several facets that is undesireable to players. In particular, players want to be both useful while also being tanks and healers. This whole caricature of PHIW not wanting a meta is false, and yet it persists so much that elitists keep bringing it up over and over again. Like you just did.
#4: There were no room for exception or other people in that quote. He said that the reason (ONE reason, singular) that there were some “detractors” from the meta, is because they can’t “grasp” (understand, comprehend, to get a hold of mentally) how to play properly. Clearly labeling them as the minority, declaring them mentally incapable, and not giving any allowance for exceptions or legitimacy in difference of opinion. The implication here is that, if these people weren’t so mentally incapable, then everyone would be on board with the zerker meta. Ergo, disagree = stupid.

Either the OP is needs to learn how to write better, or the OP is an elitist who’s trying (and failing) to hide his discriminatory position. And since I just quoted the OP going out of his way to pronounce how much he is winning the argument, I’m going to go with the latter.

The problem is that everything the OP listed is what players were already doing in the first place, and it still isn’t working.

My biggest gripe with all this is that the actual hitboxes for tequatl have little to no relation to where his model actually is. I will run up and try to melee the nebulous crit spot, only to find that because tequatl has shuffled about aimlessly that the crit spot isn’t there anymore. And it isn’t like you can target the spot to hit it with ranged attacks, either.

So, if you want to make a real guide on how to defeat the new tequatl, you’re going to have to do more than re-peat the same old advice that no longer works now. We need exact map coordinates and landmarks to show where this crit spot is.

The hardest part about teaching is communication. You can vomit wisdom at someone all day, but if they don’t open their mouth, you’ll never know if anything sticks. Back at my old job, the hardest students to teach weren’t the ones who would dwell on one topic for two hours because they didn’t get it, but the ones who would give a blank stare and respond with a flat “Okaaaaaaay…” to every attempt at feedback. Those were the guys who’d flunk a test, and finally own up that they didn’t understand a thing after coming back. That is where the real failure is at.

#1: The point is start a dialogue. You have to ask them if they have any questions, and if things go wrong, you have to ask them why they deviated or what they were trying to do. If you know what is going on there, then it is much easier to remedy the situation instead of just chewing them out. You have to encourage them, otherwise they’ll just stare blankly, being too timid to say anything.

#2: You gotta be patient. Even with instruction the first run never goes well. The game is about practice, and every “teaching run” is with players who have zero practice against what they are fighting. They ain’t painting a Picasso at their first pass of the brush, no matter how much you talk about cubism.

#3: The language barrier is a pain in the rear that rears its ugly head once in awhile. Often times they aren’t stupid insomuch as you sound like total gibberish to them.

#4: You gotta say everything. As much as people whine about walls of text AKA anything longer than 50 characters, if you don’t tell them what to do, why, and what happens in failure, they’ll silently disagree with you on something, not say a word about it, then not cooperate in runs due to this disagreement. Communication in itself is a skill, and unfortunately no one teaches that skill, so you gotta ramble on at the pulpit before people get the word.

#5: Trolls exist. Sometimes people want to be stupid. These are the guys you should punish, but unfortunately it takes forever to weed them out. Often times, what we think is a troll is actually just really stupid; key difference is that trolls are malevolent, while idiots are merely unfortunate.

Also, paragraphs. Paragraphs really help on the forums. But yeah, to resolve to teach is to choose to deal with society akittens most incompetent.

Hey, if playing a human female is like playing with barbie, then playing a human male is like playing with Ken. That’s worse, btw.

With all my tactics and out-of-the-box thinking, the primary method I use to tackle dungeons is actually really straightforward: if it is in front of me, kill it.

And I prefer this method. Sure, it can take longer than if you just skip all of the mobs. But, it can also be shorter. I’ve seen it happen time and again when someone dies, and then they have to run back to the group, but they can’t run back to the group because there’s a hundred enemies that keep cutting them down between the two. And then someone runs back to help them, all the while an elitist is whining and writhing on the floor about the whole ordeal, and those two players can’t make it past either. Eventually after I’ve made myself a sandwhich and half eaten it, that guy manages to come back after dealing with all the repair costs, and then we eventually continue on. Only for the next enemy group we skip to snag someone, kill him, and repeat the process.

You see, I play the game to do one thing: Play the bloody game. Running past all of the content and waiting for people to catch up isn’t fun. It isn’t rewarding. It complicates things almost needlessly. You are skipping the game, and not playing it. If you just kill the enemies in front of you, then get their loot, when someone dies and has to run back they don’t get interrupted by a hundred enemies that everyone else has run past. You only get the full token reward once a day, so you might as well spend an extra few minutes getting additional loot from enemies, making everyone’s life easier.

Some of the funnest times I’ve had was figuring out how to kill an inordinate amount of bandits while inside of the den on Caudeceus Manor. So many people hate that section and skip that section, lacking both the creativity to come up with a solution and the will to come up with a solution. Instead, we have to go through some ineffective bypassing maneuver that takes over an hour and then everyone quits because no one can do it.

The fact that people insist on doing these bypasses when they just make things harder half the time baffles me.

I haven’t found any class to be insufficient in the overworld. Granted, Staff Ele is ahead of everyone else, but the other classes aren’t too bad.

For general overworld roaming I usually run the mantra-interrupt build. Mantra of pain is really good at bursting down miscellaneous mobs, and mantra of distraction + power lock is good at defense, too. Since the mantra nerf the build is slightly ineffective against solo champions. Build is Domination 2/3/3, dueling 1/3/1, and Inspiration 3/1/2. Full GC gear of course.

Against champions and world bosses, I use a signet + phantasm build. Domination 2/2/2, Dueling 1/3/2, and Illusions 1/2/2. If you can get x3 duelists up at a safe range, you’d be amazed how much damage they can dish out on a single target. If the boss is extremely narrow-minded and lacks AoEs, 3x swordsman is even better.

Firelysm.4967:

I’m not even dungeon runner, but i feel sorry for those that love doing dungeons, and still getting rewarded for it, but now they will be left out. What is happening right now is, that dungeons will get a decent nerf so that HoT content(NEW)¸will be more rewarded then Core (OLD) content.

But i wonder, why are Trading Post flippers still allowed to flip without punishment?

…

I just started skimming from there. Last I checked, trade is good for everyone because it is a positive sum game, flipping is beneficial for everyone, investors give money to the poor,, speculation is a fun but practical thought experiment, capital gains are a gamble, there is no inherent evil in buying low and selling high, and merchers don’t deserve punishment of any kind.

So, is there actually a point to be made here, or is the anti-trade stuff just the same ole’ paranoid tripe?

Don’t you know it isn’t enough to just win? I have to let people know that they are worse than me in all manner of existence. That’s what all the real winners do.

I think the debate about frequency and demographics is beside the point. The issue with same sex couples isn’t about distribution, but approval. For someone who doesn’t approve, the unsatisfactory number is 1. It doesn’t matter how many couples there are IRL.

But, if you want to get into the specific numbers, those vary widely on which study you look at. The Kinsey institute is where that 10% figure comes form, which is widely misinterpreted. That 10% consists of everyone who is not a 0 on the kinsey scale, and arguably nobody below 4 is homosexual going by that standard. A couple of random samples I’ve read about (polled about 5000 people) would find anywhere from 120 to 150 self-identifying homosexuals (or 4 and above on the kinsey scale), which puts the number somewhere between 2.5% to 3.5% of the population.

While you can talk about people not admitting to homosexuality, you can also about people misrepresenting homosexuality. The Kinsey scale isn’t well known, so someone who is a 1 or a 2 might think themselves fully homosexual, largely because they think the subject is black and white. Many will argue that anything other than 0 on the Kinsey scale is fully homosexual, and classify that one guy who had an experience once or twice years ago as a homosexual. There is also the shifting distribution between ages, with college age having the highest percentage of homosexuals per population, which drops off in later years. Then there’s the issue of self-identified bisexuals, and how to consider them.

Then there’s also the type of homosexuality to talk about. There are many: some who are only physically attracted but still exhibit emotional heterosexual attractions, then vice versa of that situation. Many people will have “flings” with same sex partners while still married to their heteo partner, and not consider themselves homosexual despite how an outside observer might classify them. Then there are individuals that are characterized only by a lack of affinity for the opposite gender, then there are people with strong aversions to the opposite gender, such as those who suffered abuse at a young age and find an emotional safety and comfort in same-sex relationships. Many of these people can be classified not as having a homosexual attraction, but an aversion based default in their lives. Here, the kinsey scale wouldn’t even properly apply, since sex/sexuality is multidimensional.

The hard part about talking distribution is that there is no definite definition for what constitutes homosexuality, and there is no way to properly sample or test it. I can say that 100% of the worlds population is homosexual, and there is no way to prove that statement wrong. Just cite some results of some Penile Plethysmograph tests, give generic hiding or misrepresentation statements, and make the definition of homosexuality wide enough, and it can envelope everyone. I’d argue that distributions IRL are an aside of the issue as well.

The thing with fanservice is… well… this is how many players (including me) discovered Lady Kasmeer:

https://dviw3bl0enbyw.cloudfront.net/uploads/forum_attachment/file/71543/gw032.jpg

This is her second appearance in game that I can cite, with the first only being a cutsene with Marjory. Lord Faren appeared in a speedo, but he had a role in the human personal story (wealth starting path) since launch, and is widely recognized as a more comical character.

Marjory voice, IMO at least, is overly sensual. She could read the phone book and keep men interested. So, you take someone with an overly sensual voice, and someone who’s big appearance involved wearing Tyria’s only bikini, and put them together.

This complicates things, since many people don’t like that lesbian relationships are being used for fanservice, regardless of their approval of same-sex relationships in general. Some find it patronizing to men, some find it insulting to the integrity of homosexuals.

I’m no sheep. I’m bring my own, totally unique, patent pending brand of negativity. But aside from that, there are two things you need to consider.

#1: Logic exists. It allows us to extrapolate from information that we have into areas that we don’t have. We can make predictions, and back up those predictions with evidence.

#2: We voice our concerns for a reason. We want PoF to be good. We want the elite specs to be good. But because so many of them currently aren’t good, we complain about it in a public forum with the intent to get them changed to be better.

The short of it is, never trust anyone who tells you not to think.

I always find it interesting how when I write something in generality, that players will take offense to very specific things. Anyway, I digress.

I’ve worked in customer service before. Everyone I know has. It is like a right of passage, really. And everyone I know has found it to be among the most soul crushing experience ever. Essentially you end up getting screwed from both ends: your company treats you like dirt because you’re a replaceable cog, and the customers treat you like dirt because you’re a replaceable face representing that same company. It is some kind of agoraphobic nightmare to have endless people you’ve never seen before run up and instantly hate you.

At least in real life you get the benefit of a face to face interaction, which will soften the rage. But here, this is basically being in perpetual argument with the youtube comment section.

Guess I"ll put this here: I’ve been working on the damage numbers, stripping myself down and getting the base damage of each attack (along with other miscellaneous notes). To do this, I went to southsun cove (level 80), unequiped everything except for dire exotic weapons so there was no contributions to power. I left a picture of my stats and setup below. Now, I can’t get the damage values listed on the wiki, so I took the regular weapons as a baseline. With these stats, this is what I have currently:

Dagger AA: 330, 257, 440. 2 Targets.
Life Siphon: 990, 358 Heal
Dark Pact: 275
Reaper’s Touch: 248, 4 bounces
Spinal Shivers: 165, 248, 330, 413
Locust Swarm: 66
Well of Suffering: 1596
Well of Corruption: 798

Now, we get into the stats on the reaper’s skills.

GREATSWORD

Greatsword AA: 343, 383, 444 + 1.75 seconds of chill. 3 targets.

Gravedigger: 807, 5 second recharge, 80% recharge reduction with effect. 5 targets. SPECIAL NOTE: This skill is a whirl finisher, and sends out 3 bolts each use.

Death Spiral: 366, 12 second recharge. 12 × 10 stacks of vulnerability per hit. 2% life force per hit. 3 targets. NOTE: This skill scales up life force gain per enemy hit, getting a total of up to 36% per skill use.

Nightfall: 282 per pulse. 25 second recharge. Causes blind and cripple per pulse. Dark Field. 5 targets.

Grasping Dead 403, 3 × 4 poison, 4% life force per hit. 5 targets. 30 second cooldown.

SHROUD KNIGHT

Shroud Knight AA: 246, 246, 492. 1% life force on final hit. 3 targets. BUG: final attack has no target listing.

Death’s Charge: 410, 5 targets, 6 second cooldown. 1 × 3 blind on land.

Infusing Terror: 1 second of fear. 20 second cooldown. NOTE: The skill does not persist when leaving Reaper Shroud.

Soul Spiral: 1133 damage, 11 × 4 poison if all hits connect. 40 second recharge. 2 second duration. Whirl finisher that sends out countless bolts on use.

Executioner’s Strike: 615 damage above 50%, 821 between 50% and 25%, 1026 below 25%. Chills for 1 second, ice field lasts for 5 seconds. Stuns for 1.5 seconds. 30 second recharge.

SHOUTS

“Your Soul is mine!”: 133 damage, 3,940 healing, 4% life force per target hit, 20 second cooldown.

“You Are All Weaklings!”: 133 damage, 6 seconds weakness, 4 × 5 might, 1 × 1 stability, stun break. 30 second recharge.

“Suffer!”: 266 damage, 2.25 seconds of chill, 1 condition transferred. 30 second recharge.

“Nothing can save you!”: 133 damage, 5 × 10 vulnerability per boon, up to 2 boons removed, 35 second recharge, 1 × 4 unblockable.

“Rise!”: 133 damage, 40 second recharge.

“Chilled to the Bone!”: 532 damage, 8.75 seconds of chill, 2 × 10 stability, 2 second stun. 120 second cooldown.

END OF DAMAGE NUMBERS.

Now, this is only half of the equation. The animation times listed for each attack are trimmed down guesses. The hard part is, I don’t have a recording utility that I can put a stop watch to, so everything after this point becomes napkin math.

This thread has more than doubled in size, and there are so many thoughtlines flying around that I’m not sure exactly who to respond. However, I will try to touch on a few things:

#1: Dodge and the Heal Skill are not the only forms of active defense. They are the only universal forms of active defense. Classes still have blinds, stuns, vigor, blocks, evades, invulnerability, reflects, supplementary heals, etc. Because of this, balancing around only the dodge and heal skill will result in classes with less defenses in utilities being hit harder.

This is actually a really sticky wicket, because currently active defenses do their job, and they do it very well. You are supposed to reflect a stream of bullets, you are supposed to blind a mob of wolves, you’re supposed to block on the big windup, and you’re supposed to heal after you realize you blocked too early. The problem is that, currently, enemy design is too basic, and so active defenses are capable of handling pretty much everything.

Thankfully, anet has been designing around that for awhile now. New enemy groups and new areas already have many of the suggestions I’ve made put into place.

#2: The problem is not the lack of a mandatory role system. Classes already have roles they fulfill in groups. These roles, however, are nuanced, and multiple can be fulfilled by just one class. The ability to have such diversity in utility for a single class is a strength of GW2: the flexibility opens itself up to diversity, which opens itself up to personalized play style, which makes the game more appealing to potential players.

#3: I must again say that this is not about skilled players or punishing them. The fact the better you are at the game, the better you can function in GC gear is not something I intend to change. The idea I have to fix this zerker dominance will make the game harder for everyone, but in a way that affects glass cannons more than anyone else. End result: using GC gear will still require skill. Even more so, now that the aspects that equalize gear in PVP scenarios will actually exist in PVE. The ability to kill things so fast they don’t do a lot of damage will still be a viable tactic, however balanced upon the idea that damage will be more consistent, and killing enemies will be harder.

This is, unfortunately, the greatest weakness of my suggestion. Making the game harder and more complicated (AKA harder in a different way) is not always the best direction to take the game. Hard to implement and risky outcomes… it is no wonder why Anet is going with a wide sweeping change instead.

Anyway, the thing with skill vs. less skill in gear is not an intended feature, particularly because it is a blanket statement that applies to any game, different gear specs or not. If all of the classes just had predetermined stats and no true gear choice, more skilled players would still be rewarded more than less skilled players. It is quite obvious that different gear is meant to give different advantages and disadvantages to builds, and not to serve as a psuedo-gold sink as players escalate through an arbitrary scale of gear tiers.

#4: This is not about any particular class. Every class sans Necro has loads of active defenses in their utilities, and even Necros have plenty of debuffs alongside of their Lifeforce regeneration mechanic (which acts a bit like a convoluted heal for defensive purposes). As for the subject of class balance… that is what the rest of the forum is for.

heh… gear tiers. That’s fun to say.

I think the lack of emphasis on healing is actually a good decision. Healing in games is extremely hard to balance, because it subtracts from damage directly. This usually leads to one of two outcomes:

A)Heals don’t subtract enough damage, and thus are useless.
B)Heals subtract too much, and thus are overpowered.

It is really hard to find a perfect balance for this, especially when you have two stats that improve the efficiency of healing. Hence, why most games tend to dive headfirst into one of the two options.

Though healing power sucks in general, it is like this to prevent imbalance. In sPVP, things are already bad enough with certain bunkers.

IMO, they need to change the way healing scales more than they need to change healing power. I don’t have an exact idea on how to do that, but something I find interesting is the ele trait which increases only outgoing heals. If healing power only affected outgoing heals, then you wouldn’t have a heal tank problem in sPVP, but it would also be possible to scale healing power up more.

I see complaints about armor, but from a statistical standpoint the necromancer is the second bulkiest class in the game. Armor is overrated. The HP tiers impact much more than armor does. Look at the differences between armor ratings (exotic)

Light: 1836
Medium: 1980 (7.8% higher than light)
Heavy: 2127 (15.8% higher than light, 7.4% higher than medium)

And HP ratings:

Low: 10.805
Medium: 15,082 (38.6% higher than low)
High: 18,372 (70% higher than low, 21.8% higher than medium)

And you can see how silly this “heavies only” really is. The whole “heavies only” stereotype is perpetrated by people who are too stubborn to learn that armor doesn’t mean squat in the long run, and too impatient to learn what other classes can do.

I run full zerker necro in dungeons all of the time, and it is the tankiest toon I have. Sure, it doesn’t have the endurance regen options that other classes get, but with DS and so much health, I find I’m more than capable of just tanking a few hits. Worst case scenario, I pop a meat and orrian truffle stew and carry on like nothings different.

No, the real problem with Necros in dungeons is that we lack sufficient AoE direct damage, and that we lack potent utility. Most of the things a necro can do, another class does better, and the necro doesn’t do a whole lot of things. The big role necros have, being a debuffer, is ruined by champions having halved vulnerability and weakness duration, and also by champions spamming boons whenever they get removed, and also by nearly all enemies attacking too slowly for chill and cripple to matter.

The complaints about PVE conditions is valid. But in WvW, the condi necro is a roaming bastion of power. In 1 on 1, the necro’s massive bulk means immediate advantage in the fight, and on small scale fights the condi pressure and AoE damage the necro puts out is scary. Power necros are more difficult to play, but far from impossible. Even in zergs, I find condis to be a meaningful contribution, especially with how well staff can apply them. But in zergs, necros have another unique utility: with spectral wall, the necro is the only class that can give protection to the entire zerg. A 33% reduction in damage for 5-10 seconds for 40 people is enough to make or break a charge.

The biggest flaw with the necro in sPVP is that, due to our low amount of skill evades and mobility, and utter lack of effective direct damage burst, we ultimately aren’t in control of the fight. Our opponent either has enough cleanses to neutralize the conditions, or they don’t. Our opponent either has enough bulk to survive our burst, or they don’t. Our opponent either has the stun breaks/stability to survive the condi burst, or they don’t. In the end, there’s nothing a necro can really do, other than make a build and hope that our opponents are lacking in the end.

The necro actually has two blast finishers. Putrid explosion counts as a blast finisher, and on a 20 second cooldown it is quite spammable. Bone minions don’t have a lot of control in their placement, but most circular fields will encompass them. Now, I agree that it is weird for Well of Blood to be a light field, and I agree that Well of Blood should be a water field, but I disagree that light fields are useless in WvW. Light fields blast for retaliation, so a good light field can make a zerg incredibly dangerous to attack. Unfortunately, other classes do light fields better…

But if you want to heal someone, I’d recommend getting Transfusion. It heals for about 2.6k with no healing power over a large radius. There are some other skills you can pick up, like Deathly Invigoration, but they mostly aren’t worth it.

I agree that the necro needs some tweaks, and the necro forum is full of these tweaks, but things aren’t nearly as bad as you make it out to be.

Andred.1087:

Man I dunno who you wrote all that for.

Maybe if ANet advertised the wiki as much as the gem store, we wouldn’t have this problem. Hah! :P

Long story short, I write this stuff for me. Long story slightly less short, I have a crazy brain that latches on to these subjects and runs like a freight train, and if I don’t pull that train into the station it’ll just derail into chaos. So, I write a small essay worth of information on the subject and throw in a couple of jokes for astute readers to catch (which is hard, since I’m only so-so funny).

Anyway, Emotes is now in the manual list. It isn’t combat pertinent, but it is something to know.

While I was away, I remembered something: There is actually an enemy in the game that uses a combo field effectively! You all remember the risen pirates in orr? They throw down a fire field, then leap through it to get the fire shield.

I mentioned in game tutorials, but I never actually described how to do that. There’s quite a few limitations to them, and because of these limitations I didn’t actually know how to do in-game tutorials:

#1: Not every class has access to all the different mechanics.
#2: Not every player will have purchased the same skills, if any skills at all.
#3: Not every player will have their particular required weapons.
#4: Not every player will have the prerequisite traits for combos.

The solutions to these would open up more problems. #4 would require reorganizing trait unlocks, which would tick off a lot of people. #3 could be solved by instanced lock environmental weapons, but this would cause a disconnect between actual player experiences. #2 would be a real lockdown, since it could be solved by temp weapons to make fields, but no overlap with solution #3. #1 is the biggest problem, since each class would have to get their own instance mission, and thus this would become a large load of programming and information.

But… one way to do this would be to have enemies that would blatantly use combo field interactions in their attacks. The risen pirate is a good example, but he’s a late game mob. Ideally, you’d have something that used combo fields at around level 25 to 30. A few of the more blatant ones, like fire fields, ice fields, ethereal fields, or smoke fields.

Also, having NPCs use techniques on duels and training dummies. In the original queens pavilion, there was an exhibition match between Logan and various watchknight holograms, and in this scripted battle, Logan used several attacks to counter their moves.

I’m thinking of something that was in Twilight Princess, where you’d enter into an area where that gold wolf/ancient knight would demonstrate a technique to teach you. I figure that, if you had an NPC that merely showed you some tricks (and likewise, explained them in a voice acted manner), then it wouldn’t be absolutely necessary for players to do them personally.

I’m not a fan of elitism, to put it lightly. It is a strange matter that rears its head up in nearly any game out there, and it is a bit of a difficult matter to tackle. However, after years of gaming, I figured it out. The thing with regular players is that they operate under a certain ideology when playing a game: if you accommodate me and my playstyle, I’ll accommodate your playstyle, and that way when we all accept everyone, we’re all happy. From here, particular build choices or classes are done out of entertainment, and this accommodation is done as a form of mutual respect.

The elitist has a different ideology: I’ll play the way I want, and if other people don’t play how I want, then they’re bad people and should feel bad. Then, they go around harassing other players who don’t do what the elitist wants, who don’t think what the elitist thinks. “They’re so selfish because they don’t do what I want to do, play the game how I want to play, build the way I want them to build, and how dare they question me when I assume that my way is the unspoken norm?”, the elitist believe. Sincerely. They view other players as insubordinate tools that need to be morphed for their own gain.

Elitism starts as a means to ulterior goals, and in the case of guild wars 2, the primary goal is money. By using specific tactics with specific gear and specific classes, they aim to complete content faster, which gets them digital money quicker. That’s really the only advantage to doing something quicker in this game, since faster doesn’t equate to more enjoyable or even “better” really. Now, there’s always the urge to push oneself further, or to try for an unofficial record run, or to form a group based on performance. But this doesn’t cause the exclusion and the harassment that you see from elitism. No, the driving force must be something that benefits from exclusion and provides some reward for doing so.

Whether it is just people who view others as tools who come here, or if it is regular people who adapt that way of thinking after awhile, elitism has a destructive effect on the community. It fosters superiority complexes. It punishes compromise. It seeks to eliminate diversity. Elitism is essentially the end of negotiation: Do what I want, or go away. From these negative traits, we see a sea of others emerge.

You may have noticed how trollish elitists are. This is no coincidence: To one with a superiority complex, there is nothing to gain from “reasoning”, or “empathy”. To them, it is like being compassionate to an ant on the sidewalk. Because of this, they don’t care to listen, to reason, or to respect. They get peace of mind by you feeling bad, and by you going away, because they see you as something less than worthwhile that also obtrusively takes money from their wallet. This gives them peace of mind to be contradictory, nonsensical, and hypocritical. Their goal was never to be “right” in the first place, for all of the “right” people are the ones that agree with them.

This hostility breeds more hostility from their victims, which in-turn makes the whole game more and more unpleasant for the bystanders. It has gotten to the point that I am hesitant to offer advice, because if I do I’ll be despised for being intolerant and an elitist. Makes you wonder who gave them that notion in the first place, doesn’kitten The idea of segregation in the game is horrible, since it results in different minded people who refuse to cooperate competing for the attention of content developers, which can only end in disappointment for the playerbase.

This drives away new players, who come to the game to find the community less than unwelcoming. But, as always, elitism has no problem with this. The elitist actually prefers to drive diversity away, drive players away, because this makes it easier for them to get money, and those didn’t count as “people” in the first place. Then, when there are no more dissenting opinions, they’re free to get content in the game with hard DPS checks and damage meters while not having to worry about balancing non-zerker build layouts in PVE.

The worst part is, there’s very little the community can do about it. The moderation has been lax on the issue, so the only thing the rest of the community can do is be as stubborn as the elitists, hope their group grows quicker, and when the elitists feel truly unwelcome, then just maybe they’ll go away. This is a far shot, because they sincerely believe that anyone who doesn’t approve of their antics is jealous of them.

Keeping in mind #3, pure damage will eventually have a diminishing return. If you can kill an enemy 3 times as quickly, it isn’t nearly as much of a jump in survivability than killing them twice as quickly. What also must be considered is that stats always work in groups of 3, and never alone. You can achieve an overall greater survivability, in theory, though the correct combination of stats. This does have one issue, though: any survivability above necessity is inefficient, since killing an enemy quicker does far more than contribute to survivability. It also contributes to income and free time. But, only if you are a skilled enough player, since failure at a task is time consuming and income consuming.

It is also here that this analysis falls apart in PvP and WvW. In PVP, pretty much everyone you encounter has high sustained damage that is nearly unavoidable, and so the point of maximizing survivability through damage and other traits becomes a necessity, and not something that less skilled players do to survive.

As for a way to make toughness and vitality more efficient… I have not come up with a solution yet. This is mostly because I don’t think this analysis is fully complete yet, and I’m afraid that I would break the system further with anything I suggest. But, unless I am missing my guess, toughness and vitality are overall fools errands to invest in anything but the minimum required to survive certain encounters.

I suppose that ends the bulk of this analysis on toughness. For reference, I will list a few extra formula for anyone who wants to pursue this further.

Factoring in critical hits:

1 x (chance of not hitting crit) + (1 + 0.5 + crit damage) x (chance of hitting crit) = total crititcal multiplier of damage.

So, for example, berserker armor, weapon, and jewels (not factoring backpack) give 58% crit damage and 667 precision (36% crit chance), so…

1 × .64 + 2.08 × .36 = 1.39

Or a 139% damage multiplier to power. So if power does double damage, that’ll be 2 × 1.39 = 2.78 total increase in damage. Things become more complicated when factoring in the presence of fury or other things that increase crit rate.

Condition Damage:
Bleeds do double damage 850 condition damage.
Poison does double damage at 840 condition damage.
Burns do double damage at 1312 condition damage.
Confusion does double damage at 867 condition damage.

Factoring damage increases by percentage: Things such as 5% bonus to damage when endurance isn’t full, 10% increase to rifle damage, 5% damage while under the effect of might, etc. For now, I assume a geometic relationship, multiplying the damage ratio from power by 1.05 then 1.05 then 1.10 and so on. An arithmatic relationship would be to just add them together (1.05 + 1.05 + 1.1) and multiply them afterwards. I’ll need clarification on this.