Guild Wars 2

Yeah, the way dungeons are handled in this game is awkward.

On the plus side, they’re more versatile and interactive than what you see in a lot of MMOs. Most defense is active, so you have to constantly be aware of positioning, telegraphs, and AoEs. Several bosses have gimmicks, with some being more interesting and unique than others. Many bosses are just a difficult fight. You get rewarded riskier and braver actions, and the lack of roles means that the outcome of any fight is chaotic and unpredictable.

On the minus side, the best way to run them is counterintuitive to what one would normally expect. Corner pulling isn’t anything new, but all stacking on bosses to avoid mechanics, pushing skills into walls for maximum damage, wildly disproportionate damage between ranks of enemies and kinds of enemies, disproportionate reward distribution between enemies… it makes the whole thing very random and off-putting. I can easily see how someone wouldn’t find dungeons that entertaining to them.

Just make a norn if it has all the options you want?

I generally shy away from minion master in WvW for several reasons.

#1: The large amount of AoE and large scale fights will end up killing minions quite quickly.

#2: A lot of combat is off of different heights, from on cliffs to walls. Here, minions can’t engage the enemy that effectively.

#3: Other players are almost always specced for high mobility and high stealth, making it easy for them to get away from minions in a wide open area.

In general, minions have the most trouble with mesmers and thieves, because their stealth constantly resets the minion’s aggro. There are some places where minions can be useful, but mostly it is just using flesh golem while solo roaming. I see other players with minions all the time, but for me minions never really preformed well.

Azrael.4960:

The only zerk hate seems to be on the forums.

I see it a lot in game as well.

Anyway, this thread contributes very little to the whole zerk thing. The OP’s solution to the problem is to “solve the problem”. Particularly with the trinity. Somehow.

It is a bit more complicated than that. For one, the trinity sucks. Gear is about preference in play, not role in play. The roles are more subtle, and not based upon statistical fortitude.

The only problem with disregarding balance is that when a clearly superior strategy emerges, it results in the removal of diversity because the rest of the game gets polarized around that strategy. This greatly hinders diversity in the game, instead of fostering it.

For an example: There was an old card game called Duel Masters. For a long time, a single card dominated this whole game, and its name was Corile. It had a simple effect: for the cost of 5 mana, you could summon him, then choose any creature on the field, and put it on top of the owners deck. Pacing meant everything in that game, and this ability to set you back a turn was devastating. It occurred at a crucial point in the game, setting players back a turn using a strange form of creature removal. The problem was compounded with the fact that you could use 4 of them in a 40 card deck, and that through some not-so-clever field manipulation you can use them multiple times, or an infinite number of times.

Setting the opponent back a turn potentially endlessly, combined with the -1 to card advantage it generated, it made it so the entire game was dictated by Corile. It did have one counter: if every creature you controlled generated advantage when summoned, then Corile’s benefit was moot. Because of this, you had to make decks using only creatures that had on-summon effects, or else risk infinite lockdown.

The only time Corile’s reign fell was when the game eventually outpaced Corile, making him too slow to function as a true lockdown. This was not accomplished by some change in present tactics, but through the release of new cards that worked faster to win.

Extra credit erroneously refers to what they have as imbalance. It is not the case. What they are doing is mistaking tactical paper-rock-scissors for imbalance. The idea of this is that A is beaten by B which is beaten by C which is beate n by D, repeating until eventually X is beaten by A again. It can be something as simple as a direct game rule, something as mediocre as an elemental system, or something as complex as situational weaknesses combined with precise tactics and prediction via a proper tool set.

The latter is what everyone should aim for. They shouldn’t make something imbalanced and just watch as it dominates the game in hopes that eventually someone else will become useful along the line.

Golems are already kind of overpowered…

Petoox.6570:

Thief doesn’t have highest dps, I don’t know what is ranking but Sinister engi has best and staff ele has second best.

Also, where does thief have condition cleanse? I can only remember Shadow’s Embrace in Shadow Arts but nobody uses that thing in pve, maybe for Snowblind campfire soloing but nowhere else really.

Infiltrators Strike + Infiltrators Return removes one condition each use. Spam as needed.

Outside of Sword, Hide in Shadows takes care of most damaging conditions. Withdraw and Roll for Initiative takes care of most disabling conditions. Signet of Agility is a single group cleanse, but sometimes all you need to remove is one condition. Shadowstep + Shadow Return is a stunbreaker that removes 3 of any condition.

Also, reading comprehension is a must. I said single target damage. Ele and Engi are great against groups, whereas the thief is only middling at groups. But against any one enemy, and those backstabs + heartseekers really tear through their health.

Thaddeus.4891:

The specialisation wasn’t kind to the thief tho. Where everybody was buffed a lot by the patch (Guardian when from 8-9k to 12-14k in dps), the thief didn’t move a lot in the DPS department. He lost a lot of damage modifier and wasn’t buff by the additional stats from gear (he already had 300 power, precision and ferocity from trait).

This is something that I’m actually wondering about. While the standard thief build didn’t allocate more stats, the thief didn’t walk away empty handed. With the loss of 5% from dagger training and 5% on dual skills came 1% per initiative with leading strikes. We’ve still got exposed weakness and executioner.

Of particular note is the new critical strikes line. Without it, my full zerker + scholar thief has 50% self fury uptime and 216% crit damage (effectively a 1.74 modifier off of a scaled 64% crit chance). But with critical strikes, I have full fury uptime with several other crit changes totaling to around 87% crit chance and 245% crit damage. This comes to a 2.26 modifier effectively being a 30% increase in damage overall. Also include Ferocious Strikes, which is 10% on crit above 50% health (which I’ve calculated as a 4.35% damage mod).

In total? 35.4% increase in damage from taking critical strikes. So really, I’d like to see where the numbers that say thieves are the same come from.

Look, we all know wizards don’t wear pants. Just accept it and move on.

Its so hard to just pick one. But I’ve narrowed it down to two, and both are from City of Heroes:

#1: The character and outfit design options (or the equivalent for a sword and sorcery RPG)

#2: The immense skill selection system.

I guess #1 won’t work as well in a sword + sorcery RPG, since superheroes have much more freedom in their style choices. Of course, I’d still like something like that. In City of Heroes I grew quite attached to the 10 characters I made, and each one was unique and cool looking. So much so that you could spot them from a mile off and go “oh yeah, that’s Bill. Hey Bill! Over here!”. So many other games I’ve played, this one included, the characters just sort of fade into the background as Guardian #28501. They have a dye system and an armor system, but ultimately you feel like a sum of armor parts associated with your class. In GW2 it comes down to this:

Heavy armor: big hulking pieces of metal with various dents in them for design.
Medium armor: more trenchcoats than every flasher in the world combined.
Light armor: skimpy outfits that raise the ESRB rating of the game single handed.

And it really shouldn’t. Then it is about classes and archetypes instead of individuality.

From an operational point of view, #2 is something that nearly any game should strive to make. Ultimately it again comes down to individuality, but since most people probably don’t know how City of Heroes skill system worked, I’ll explain it in order:

Step 1: Pick a class. 14 archtypes to choose from, 4 with dedicated power sets, 10 that let you picked your own.

Step 2: Pick primary power set in character creation. This was a list of 8 to 14 or so different skill sets that would give you a pool of 9 collaborating skills to choose from. The sets were sometimes shared along classes who did the same things (I.E. archetypes with ranged offense would sometimes share the same power sets), sometimes they were unique to the class.

Step 3: Pick your secondary power set in character creation. This is another list of 8 to 14 different skill sets that gave 9 skills that worked together. Again, some of these sets were shared while other sets were unique to a class, and these sets were sometimes mixed and matched with the primary power sets of other classes.

Step 4: Pick your global power pools while leveling up and playing the game. These were abilities that any class can pick up, not having any special distinction between whatever class you chose. These often included movement powers, too. There were, again, 14 of them (and more kept being added), and you can choose various skills from up to 5 different pools at once.

Step 5: Pick your ancillary or patron power pool at later levels. These were class specific pools to choose from. Ancillary power pools were 5 sets of 5 skills that you could pick from, patron pools were unlocked via story content and were 4 sets of 5 skills to choose from.

Each skill or “power” you picked had upgrade slots, and as you leveled you could choose to increase the number of slots in whatever skills you want from 1 to 6. In these slots you could customize how the power worked with enhancements. They would increase damage, increase accuracy, increase range, reduce endurance cost, reduce recharge time, reduce interrupt time, increase healing, increase resistance mod, increase endurance mod, increase defense mod, etc. There were also special enhancement sets that would give global bonuses for slotting multiples of those sets, and those sets were well rounded in themselves.

At the end, when you finally reached level 50, there were incarnate powers, which were extremely potent “nuke the room” type abilities that were available to every class, regardless of class type. Some were global buffs, others were procs, some were summons, some were defense, some were team buffs, etc. These made up the late game raid grind. There were 5 slots unlocked, and each slot had at least 8 different skills to choose form, which each had different customization trees to go down for those powers.

You couldn’t take them all. You only received, like, 20 skill slots you could pick for powers, and many powers were gated behind earlier ones in their tier.

With each individual power customizable in color, brightness, or even chosen animation style, the end result when combined with #1 was someone all to your own. When you made Bill, if you had even a shred of creativity, Bill was completely unique and there was no other character like him. From the strengths he had, the weaknesses he had, the way he played, and the way he felt, Bill was all yours, and people would recognize you for him. Whether you made him as a joke, you made him to be serious, you made him to roleplay, or you made him for teaming reasons, it was yours.

I miss that so much in GW2.

Yenn.9185:

At this point, it’s better to segregate the community between casual and speed runners. The problem is (PuG) casuals also like to speedrun, evidence to that is they still join speedrun groups despite not having zerkers. And yes, zerkers wanna be partied with other zerkers because they want fast runs.

PS. Don’t get kitten when someone says cleric gears are trash in dungeons.

Another big problem with segregation is that those who don’t fit in either camp get lumped into communities where they don’t fit, consistently polarizing the problem and making it worse. When segregating you end up shoving people into extremes while ignoring the middle ground, so you end up a bunch of people not capable of playing how they want because they neither want to be super-efficient discriminatory elitists, nor do they want to be ignore all self-improvement casuals.

When you get people who only run in the segregated groups, then it pulls those players from the game itself. Every player good at the game who decides only to run with only one group(even if they don’t want to) is taken from the possible pool of pugs. This means that, eventually, all you’ll get are new and inexperienced players, so partying with random people just gets worse and worse. The good players and the veterans aren’t there to teach them, or to even off the scales.

Wow I didn’t know this was a necro thread. I just spent awhile correcting a guy who probably will never see it.

Anyway, personally I don’t mind necro threads that much. I mean, the subject is still relevant today. You can either make a thread saying the same thing, or just respond in an older one.

Obtena.7952:

Completely related to the thread … what is the thought process that a person has to go through to resurrect and respond to a thread that’s 1 year old?

I mean, do they randomly pick a page, click a thread and say “Yup, this is the one!”

I actually have a theory about this. Since the forum search function doesn’t work, I’ll have to search in google to find relevant topics. What google returns isn’t sorted by date or relevance to current builds, so I’ll get a scattershot of both recent and ancient topics.

What I imagine happens is, someone does this too look up a question (I.E. the toughness one), but forgets that the topic is a year old, and posts their opinion on it.

If you’re craving old-school pen and paper RPG style gameplay, I have two recommendations. Shadowrun Returns: Dragonfall Director’s Cut,, and Shadowrun Returns: Hong Kong. They are really old school in how they work, and the writing, world building, and choices you have to make on your first few playthroughs are enthralling. I like the series so much that now, as I am playing through the hong kong campaign blind, I’m narrating all of the characters in character to my sis as we go through.

I suppose that is where I come from. Long before I played games online, playing a videogame was a social thing. My father would play top gun and airplane games on the NES, my siblings would sit down and try to think of ways to find hidden dungeons in Legend of Zelda, and we’d come up with elaborate fantasies together on the game itself. I suppose that’s why I like lets-plays so much, long before they were popular. A lot of it was childhood bickering, but the fact that me and my brother beat Ocarina of Time by alternating dungeons was something beautiful.

But if I were to summarize my earliest true “mutliplayer” experiences in RPGs, that would come three examples: Phantasy Star Universe, Runescape, and City of Heroes.

I had played PSO, but not online. PSU, I managed to play before the servers shut down. For quite some time, too. And, the thing with PSO and PSU was that, though it used many systems that would be archaic by today’s standards, there’s was one simple truth to the game that I have not seen since, and I miss the fact that this is no longer true. Let me pose it as a question:

You are in a game with no scaling whatsoever. You’re level 100. A random level 60 player joins your instance. Do you:
A) Yell at him because he is lower level until he leaves.
B) Kick the n00b without saying a word.
C) Be totally cool with him joining anonymously.
D) Keep him around but lament that he’ll leech rewards from you.

In every single MMO I’ve played since PSU, the answer was never C. But the way phantasy star handled stats and equipment, it wasn’t such a big deal if your teammates were lower level than you. There was no “min/maxing”, only level. The challenges were hard and didn’t scale, so every body you had helped. It was an action game after all, so if the lower level guy could handle himself, you were happy to have him around, at least to be a decoy.

So many games I’ve played are built to be the exact opposite. City of Heroes, even GW2 have systems built in that discriminate specifically against level itself, to avoid the pratfalls of a system that inadequately handles stat progression and open world challenges. With the way events scale, you can’t have lower level players joining and scaling up, because then they’re a detriment to the whole thing. The levels are superficial. But, I miss that. I miss both being the new guy everyone welcomed. I miss being the experienced guy who helps the new guy out.

The challenges of the game weren’t accommodating. They existed, whether you had a full party or not, if you had the levels or not, or if you had the gear or not. Seriously, for anyone who still has the old game, try a low level rush to ultimate difficulty in PSO going through both episodes, and suddenly it is one of the most tense and entertaining things you’ve done. You’ll learn that the first time an invisible robot one shots you with a flying head-bash out of stealth.

Second is Runescape.

Now, runescape is a very old game, and it is a very simple game. An utter grindfest. Built out of Java, it is literally a point and click adventure. You click somewhere, then your toon walked there. You clicked on a thing, then your toon did a thing. Very simple. Some would say very boring. They’re right, of course, but there was an advantage to this system. Because the interface was so simple, nearly anything could happen. The range and diversity of skills and minigames and environments, the general interactivity of the world is unlike anything I have seen since.

Want to manage your own kingdom? You could do that. Host an international port for trading and exploration? Got it. Hunt reptiles for voodoo witchdoctor potions? Got it. Manage a multi-person industrial sized blast furnace? Had that. Grow tomatoes and make pizzas? Do that, too. Delve into a roguelike randomly generated dungeon? Got it. Wander a dangerous PVP wasteland? It was there. Command armies in a turn based strategy game? Had it. And the quests… the storyline and the quests in the game are great. They’re funny, they’re interesting, they’re tense, and they add just a bit of mystery, and doing them gave you rewards other than “loot”. I still quite vividly remember having to navigate a parkour maze of a shanty town that was ruled by flying vampires who would demand blood tributes if they saw you in the open.

Nearly anything could happen, because it is just point and click. I miss that open diversity. Though the playerbase was young and the community was hostile, it still had that “the challenge exists, whether you’ve got enough people or not” system, and sometimes when a random dude ran by, you were glad he happened along. But modern MMOs aren’t like that anymore. If anything happens in GW2, 99/100 times it’s just going to be combat, where nameless loot rains from the sky, and the only thing that is important is that you survive the encounter.

The last one is City of Heroes.

Now, City of Heroes had level restrictions (and a way to bypass them eventually), a slightly shallow loot system where drops rained from the sky (but not as randomly), and a crafting system that was basically a components check. But there is something that City of Heroes did that other MMOs don’t, and that is character customization.

I’ve talked about it numerous times in the past. But basically, the character and build customization, both functionally and aesthetically, was exponentially higher than any other MMO I’ve ever played. Exponential is not an exaggeration. By today’s standards, it was literally a hundred times deeper. Every single skill was highly customizable, every skill set was highly customizable, every class had a highly customizable list of skill sets. You didn’t just pick your class. You picked your class, the skill sets that were available to that class, the skills that were in those skill sets, and then every little facet of every single skill could be customized. To top it off, after making each toon you could write a character bio and a catchphrase.

Also, you could completely design your own instanced missions and stories from scratch, and then put them up for the public to play, using either established characters or your own designs. Never has their been a game where I was more attached to the player characters than in CoH. Each one was truly unique, and many were extremely memorable. One of my favorites was a gigantic African-American guy named Hare Splittor (or Douglass Bane). He was dressed up as a gigantic pink and purple bunny with a battleaxe, and his origin story is that he is just a normal tough guy on a crusade to make it socially acceptable for men to like bunnies and tea parties by being the most aggressive and frightening vigilante possible. Anytime anyone would say anything, I’d RP a pseudo social-commentary conflict where I’d aggressively demand people be accepting of men dressed as pink bunnies. You can’t get that in experience in most games.

I’m going to paraphrase Arin Hanson here: Though videogames are covering more and more adult subject matters, by design they are catering more towards kids. They are being streamlined and simplified, and that isn’t a good thing. GW2 is not a complete “MMORPG” in the sense that I grew up with and am familiar with. It is an MMOG that stripped away a lot of the features that I’m familiar with, and it happened to take away enough of the right ones to resemble a playable game that has other people running around.

And that is it. “People running around”. I am a nameless (insert class here) using one of 3 peak builds as I traverse the world filled with people I will never remember, who will also never remember me. Whether someone is nearby or not doesn’t matter. The systems the game is built upon seem like vestiges of previous designs where those archaic systems actually mattered. Raids are more of a build check than anything else, having rigid structural requirements instead of an experience you can go through. Yes, the combat is solid, but that’s all there is.

My ideal meta is slower. DPS be wicked quick, yo!

But one other thing: I’d like the ideal meta to be incomprehensible. There wouldn’t be some kind of dominant tactic: it would be a hodgepodge of classes and builds, with every team stranger than the next. When you have no idea what the meta is, is when the meta is ideal.

All this definitely looks fun. I’m still mad that they gutted acrobatics just to make this specialization, but the specialization is still good.

So far, I’ve found grenadier engineers to be really good with pugs. You get a lot of the support abilities that guardians have, and you can dish out a lot of AoE damage at a distance.

Of course, I haven’t leveled up my guardian yet, so I can’t compare the two.

Berelious.3290:

I believe there is an old saying about looking a gift horse in the mouth…

I think there should be a saying about what kind of horse you gift.

Anyway, what I did was use the boost on an empty character slot to get my key farmer for the week. Then I deleted the after getting a black lion key.

Personally I’m highly tolerant of different tactics. My experience with dungeons has been made up almost solely of pugs, and I don’t have nearly the problems all of you guys complain about. Every once in awhile I’d get a group that I would swear was incompetent, but on the flip side I’d get groups that also effortlessly plow through the dungeons like they were nothing. With that said, I don’t discriminate against individual tactics, build choices, or playstyle with only one exception to the clause: that the player is actively trying to bring down the team on purpose.

I find the idea of stacking on Mai to be idiotic. Her attacks hit for high damage an AoE. A far better strategy is to just use scorpion wire or spectral grasp or magnet pull or Magnetic Shield or Blinding Blade or Into the Void to pull Mai into the lightning fields when they spawn. As long as the group is competent enough to bring down her defiant stacks or you have a thief with an off-hand pistol, it is really easy to do.

I find that so many people have complained about scepter guardians, but never bothered to actually check the damage that scepter guardians are putting out. Lets look at their 3 skills:

Orb of Wrath: 224 damage, 1/4 second channel. This skill is undoubtedly one of the hardest hitting ranged auto attacks in the game. It is very quick to fire, has 1200 range, and has a high damage for its class of ranged weaponry. Compare it to other ranged weapons of pretty much every class

Warrior Longbow: 212 damage, takes longer to fire
Warrior Rifle: 155 damage (+ 255 bleed, but requires condition damage), takes longer to fire. Arguably better in condition builds.
Thief Shortbow: 185 Damage (x 3), takes longer to fire. Arguably better against groups.
Thief pistol: 134 damage (+ 170 bleed, but requires condition damage).
Ranger Longbow: up to 317 damage at max range, takes longer to fire.
Ranger Shortbow: 134 damage (+ 128 bleeding, but requires condition damage), arguably better due to being faster.
Mesmer Greatsword: 348 at max range, but takes twice as long to activate.
Mesmer Scepter: 168-168-252 combo, and slower than the guardian’s attack rate.
Engineer Pistol: 118 Damage (+85 bleed), slower than guardian’s attack, but arguably better in large tightly packed groups.
Engineer Rifle: 251 damage. Objectively better overall.
Necromancer Staff: 246 damage, but takes longer to fire.
Necromancer Axe: 236 damage, but takes longer to fire
Necromancer Scepter: 118 + 170 bleed x 2 – 168 + 336 poison. Slower, and only better on condition builds.

So, in the end, Orb of Wrath is a fast and high damaging attack with very few attacks that are objectively better (coughHipShotcough). You’ll notice I didn’t factor in the elementalist attacks, because there’s, like, 8 of them that are used in varying rotation. The condition attacks can arguably do more damage, so long as your opponent doesn’t cleanse and/or the target doesn’t reach the condition cap. Considering this is about dungeons, the main limitation is the condition cap. Now, we move on to the next big hitter:

Smite: 1665 damage, 1200 range, 6 second recharge, 1/4th second delay time. This attack has the highest single target DPS in the game. On its own it does the same damage as 100 blades sans the final hit, but it also has a short cast time so you can keep auto attacking while smite keeps hitting the same area. It’s recharge of only 6 seconds, meaning that smite can be fired off rapidly. All in all, this makes smite add a ton to the total DPS of the guardian when used in conjunction with other skills, and by itself it has one of the highest DPS in the game.

Chains of Light: Single target immobilize that applies 3 stacks of vulnerability. It’s nothing special, but a single target immobilize is all around useful.

The only legitimate complaint I can have about the hard hitting + far range scepter is that it is largely single target. There are better options for groups of enemies. Of course, there is a place for single target damage, too. Last I checked, most players just run past all of the enemies in the dungeon to get the bosses anyway, so against the bosses this weapon is great. You can even use it in combination with different off-hands depending on what you want to do as a guardian.

iSmack.1768:

Do i need to sacrifice a goat? How many?
[

Do not beseech the devil for what RNGesus has control over.

I wrote this in another topic on basically the same issue. It bears repeating here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not necessarily outdated, but lately the profession I’m having the hardest time with is the Engineer. For the simple fact that it takes two-three key presses to accomplish what other classes do in one.

Originally this wasn’t as much of a problem, because the engineer was both an extremely versatile and extremely potent class. But, as other classes keep getting buffs to their damage, and as they keep getting more utilities, the engi starts losing its place. Even if in theory the engi should still be pretty top tier, at least as far as condi damage goes, in practice my DPS is kitten by the convoluted nature of it all and my utility is cut down because I have to grab kits for DPS.

I think the biggest problems with necro’s and attrition is the fact that passive defense and higher HP bars are the worst defensive mechanics in the game, period. They barely count for defense at all. I spent awhile talking about why investing in toughness and vitality amounts to only a paltry increase in survivability, so now I’ll talk about active defenses.

I’ve played 6 classes in sPVP, with only the ranger and warrior escaping my interest. And my final thoughts on the necromancer are so simply explained in one sentence:

“Boy do I get knocked down a lot…”

And it took me awhile to figure out why, but basically it is because necromancers have no active defenses. What are active defenses? Well, these are skills and abilities that you use in order to block or evade attacks, well as as control or disable your opponent. Because these require the player to actively use particular skills or traits that prevent damage, I call them active defenses.

Active defenses are important because they function without statistical fortitude and also have limitless potential when used correctly. If you think of the most damaging attack chain or skill that any class has, always know that a blocking skill or evade skill will stop it. So when a warrior goes to use 100 blades, tapping Roll for Initiative prevents 100% of the damage. Another side effect of the control effects are that they prevent your opponents defenses as well. When that warrior uses bull’s charge, this prevents the enemy not only from attacking, but also from defending as well. So all in all, blocking and evade make for a powerful defense while disabling control effects make both a good defense and offense.

Necros have none of that. Instead, their active defenses lie in using cripple and chill, which are horrible active defenses because the only thing they prevent is a melee enemy who refuses to use condition curing or teleports or leaps. They aren’t even that good at those, since most cripples are short range and half the chills just close the distance between the two. Necros have few blinds, with one being Deathly Swarm, which is slower than a hippo on Valium, and then probably the only good defense utility in Well of Darkness. They have fear, most of which are awkward skills on long recharges that apply the control for a single second on long cooldown. Of course, whenever a thief steals from you, they get a free 3 second fear that makes you perfect backstab and heartseeker fodder.

Necros are light on other controls. They have only two sources of immobilize: a short range one from a melee weapon that can’t be used for combos, and then another short range one from the loldamage bone fiend that doesn’t work half the time since minions spend half the time lollygagging across the map. They have one delayed daze in the warhorn, which doesn’t do anything else worthwhile otherwise (swiftness that does minor damage and draws aggro, slowing the player down again), and a knockback with the flesh golem’s charged attack.

Necros are also light on condition removal. There’s one in a heal, and then almost all other condition removal requires you to transfer conditions to a target. Which means you have to hit the target. Which means that if you can’t hit the target, you’re helpless against conditions. So either you use the staff and it’s strafeable auto attack, or you use plague signet which does damage to you as an intended function. Well of Power does get mention, although it works slowly and is on a long recharge. Necros have no form of vigor to grant additional dodges, no form of endurance regeneration, pitiful and expensive stability that is nigh unuseable, and horrible stun breakers to boot. Heck, I went back to running the buggy minion master build in sPVP because then I could have a stun breaker that was available more than once a minute.

The one thing that we do have is Death Shroud. Problem: it is only available once each fight, and otherwise DS doesn’t do anything but annoy your opponent. You can use it in the beginning of the fight to try and regain more lifeforce to use it again, but this ruins your panic button and doesn’t accomplish much while doing so. So instead you have DS as a panic button that most classes have the ability to plow right through with their offensive power, and your weapon choice determines how well you can regain life force. Unfortunately the best necro weapon, the scepter, regains life force so slowly that it is insulting. There are no adequate traits to regain life force, either.

Seera.5916:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Honestly, I just wonder how people fail.

It is a legitimate question. I see topics/posts with this content all the time:

“This stuff is too hard! I watched a video guide on what to do, but it didn’t work! I watched a build video, but it didn’t work! I got a group together and we still couldn’t do it! Nerf the content!”

And yet, each one of those things is a great asset to me. The biggest disadvantage to these threads is that, I don’t actually get to see the person who makes the claim play. I can’t critique them, and give them specific advice on how to help them deal with problems. I am expected to accept the notion that this player has reached some type of personal skill ceiling of which there will never be any improvement, and thus the game needs to cave to their demands.

And yet here I am, walking through hot in 8 out of 9 different classes, all in full glass cannon gear, and I’m not having a problem on any of them. I’m not exactly a “skilled player” either. In skill I’m rather average. I don’t encounter the problems that other people have. So, to give meaningful advice, I have to actually see the problem that someone is having.

If HoT is too hard, provide some type of evidence. A video of some kind, showing HoT being too hard.. That way, we can actually see the specific problems.

The problem is a video won’t show the why of the failure.

Some of us are just not that good at the game. I look at builds and the rotations just go right over my head. Loud whooshing sound and all. I can’t get movement and combat at the same time down, so there goes kiting if I’m alone. So I have to remain pretty stationary. That’s pretty deadly in HoT. It’s also pretty deadly in Cursed Shore sometimes.

I could very likely L2P may way out of my issues. But the frustration that it would cause would remove all of the fun from the game for me, so I don’t. I haven’t really played much in HoT maps so I can’t really say if they are too hard. My frustration level required for me to rage quit is not that high.

I disagree wholeheartedly. To actually see someone play the game would give a great insight into why someone fails. The best way to see what my students were having difficulty with was to have them work out a few problems as I watched, and then I could spot the mental mistakes that they were making. With videogames, it is not that different. The mental barriers are plainly visible.

This isn’t a Lupi solo, where you need to take a long series of flawless actions to succeed. You don’t need to be that good at the game. For the vast majority of enemies, there’s a simple one or two step trick that you need to follow that lets you beat them. Most of the time it boils down to the exact same thing: when the enemy does a super big and dangerous attack, step out of the way.

The funny part about all that is, I’ve ran the numbers a few times, and the staff is the highest damaging weapon thieves will have. It has the highest base auto attack, the highest DPS attack, the highest per-initiative damage, the highest AoE damage, and the highest modifiers attached to traits. All at the same time.

So when players say that the staff is low damaging or underpowered and it clearly isn’t… then I have to throw out their feedback as not being objective.

Not sure how good they’ll be in WvW but I found myself surprised at how good shouts were in PVE. “Rise!” in particular can make you nigh unstoppable when fighting enough enemies.

I would like to take this moment to talk about the death of City of Heroes. CoH was my favorite MMO ever, so much that I actually shed a tear upon learning that my favorite game was being killed. Now, you may wonder why it is this game was killed. Wait… you aren’t wondering? Pay attention anyway, since I’m making a point.

There was an infamous update that changed how the game worked forever. That update was called “Issue 6”, and among its updates was a radical change and re-balancing to PVP. In particular, every single skill in PVP was changed so that the entirety of the game’s mechanics were different from PVE. How damage was handled, how buffs/debuffs were handled, how control was handled, how heals were handled, how builds were handled, all of it was rewritten from the ground up.

This ostracized the PVP players because now everything they learned and love was ousted. This also prevented new players from getting into the PVP game, since now everything they worked for didn’t work, and they had to learn a new game from scratch.

Near its end, City of Heros had no PVP scene. Literally. You could wander into PVP maps, and be the only person there. Without the competitive playerbase, players for the game tended to play in waves: they would play the new PVE content, leave for an extended period of time until there was a lot of new content to play with. This was a subscription based game, btw, so these periods of absence would mean less profit.

This is a very big problem with the whole “separate PVP and PVE” issue. People like to seamlessly transition from one mode to another, understanding that their auto attack will do the same damage across game types. But if you rewrite everything from either game mode, you ostracize nearly the entirety of players in that game mode.

There is a different solution that I’d like to throw on the table: instead of separating PVE and PVP, just bring them together more. Make PVE more like PVP, and this problem starts to resolve itself.

I’m not sure what the question is. The post is kind of… rambly. But anyway, I’ll address the many things I have seen.

#1: Death Shroud’s use varies depending on the build. Power builds, Minion Masters, Condi Builds, support builds all use the abilities to do different things. I’ll try to go over the different things that DS is used for in each one.

Power Builds: DS is used mostly for offense. Life blast provides a high damaging, piercing, might stacking ranged attack that can decimate groups of foes in PVE, and in PVP it can lay down some serious hurt on unsuspecting players. Dark path is used as a gap closer, chilling and putting foes in range of the dagger’s rather powerful auto attack. Doom is used to force enemy movement to lay on combos, as well as a counter-stun for defense. Life Transfer is used to do decent AoE damage while tanking hits, and Tainted Shackles is used mostly for an escape, and also as a lockdown/support move with it’s AoE immobilize. DS is both popped in an out of for AoE bombing and buffs, as well as sustained to stack might/vulnerability while dealing heavy damage with Life Blast. The biggest advantage here is that Power Build’s tendency to generate a lot of LF means that they’ll have a lot of statistical bulk to use DS, and I think the best time to use DS is when the enemy is nearly dead. This gives the opponent no chance to counter attack. DS is also used to absorb burst on occasion.

Condition Builds: DS is used defensively, except when going for the kill. Life Blast is rarely used, and if it is then Life blast is being used either out of desperation, stalling, or to stack might. Condi builds resort to DS “bombing” wherein they’ll quickly pop into DS to use Weakening Shroud, followed by Tainted Shackles, and maybe a doom to top it off before exiting Death Shroud. Although it causes bleeding, Dark Path is also rarely used. Condition builds will frequently layer up a lot of conditions, then use Life Transfer to sustain themselves while the conditions tick away on the opponent. The real killer here is Terror. On terror builds, Doom does a surprisingly large amount of damage, and it is used in conjunction with other fear abilities to cause a long duration stun + high DoT. Chain fearing is usually reserved for the kill on opponents, however it is very effective at sealing the deal.

Minion Master: Here, DS is used largely for defense and control. DS itself is often used to gain retaliation, making attacking the Necromancer dangerous. Life Blast is used mostly to stall while other abilities are on cooldown. Dark path is used as a chill to let minions attack easier, and also as a gap closer. Doom is used mostly for defense against stuns, and sometimes as a control when the enemy is chilled. Life transfer is used for further tanking and stalling. Tainted Shackles is used mostly to immobilize a foe so minions can chase them down.

Support: Here, DS is used for healing. There are two traits that support builds pick up: Transfusion, and Deathly Invigoration. Transfusion makes Life Transfer an AoE heal, and while it doesn’t scale with healing power, it does heal for around 2,628 health in an AoE, so it is quite helpful. Deathly Invigoration causes DS to heal whenever it is left, so most support builds will spam F1 to pop in and out of DS quickly, healing in an AoE. The rest of the skills are used as needed depending on whether they are condi support or power support.

#2: Now, as for why it is that condi builds don’t use Life blast for offense. The reason is quite simple: it pales in comparison to our scepter. On my WvW conditionmancer, I peak at around 1,750 malice with my sigil of corruption, and have a 100% bleed duration. This makes each attack from the scepter do 1,300 damage spread throughout the bleed, alongside of the direct damage, so it hits for around 1600. now, even in a carrion build, for me Life Blast usually only hits for around 1k, but that isn’t the only disadvantage. The damage done through conditions can be spread via epidemic, making the scepter attacks into AoE attacks. Life Blast, when traited, merely pierces the enemy in a straight line.

My own build is quite fortunate, since it can use Life Blast as an offense. Other players use a rabid build for conditions, which makes it so life blast does barely any damage at all against other players.

It has been my general experience that the type of people who play mean and cheat aren’t the type of people who would abruptly stop just because the devs asked them to.

This is one of those thoughts that I have frequently. The reason why racism is bad in the real world is because it is incorrect. There’s very little difference between individuals of different physical features.

But in fantasy game settings, we aren’t dealing with the same species but with minor alterations. We’re dealing with entirely different species, which have entirely different biology. Different organs, different hormonal balance, different development pacing and stages, different lifespans and aging, different diets, and a wholly alien ecology. I can kind of understand the animosity when the other “race” is something like an intangible alien who consumes zero point energy for sustenance. The correct term would be specie-ism.

I understand the allegory that is being made, but I can’t help but think it is a bit incongruent when the other “race” is more biologically similar to a fern than a human.

There are three things to know about the RNG. The RNG thinks, the RNG feels, and the RNG hates.

Specifically, the RNG thinks you are undeserving, feels you shouldn’t win anything, and hates you and you alone.

Now, I haven’t had the best luck with the RNG on my end. I can count on one hand all of the exotics I’ve obtained from drops. I have been playing since launch, too. I can’t say that the drops are account based, though, for two very simple reasons:

#1: It has been like this for pretty much every game I’ve ever played with an RNG loot system.
#2: It is like this for the majority of players.

Funny thing how the lucky players are always a whole lot rarer than the unlucky player. This generally lends to the idea that the RNG system is working fine: the rare drops happen rarely, and so the players who get those rare drops are rare themselves. If the game was counter to this nature, with 75% of the population getting l33t l00t and the other 25% in inexplicable poverty, then this would serve as evidence to the idea that loot seems to discriminate against accounts for no discernible reason.

Healix.5819:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Honestly, I just wonder how people fail.

Try playing as a keyboard turning clicker – WASD to move (no strafing) and only clicking skills, including dodge to be fair. Only use 1 hand at a time (keyboard/mouse) and delay all your actions by a second to simulate a slow reaction time. Limit yourself to random rare gear, clear your traits, choose whichever profession you play the least and base your weapon/skill choices on whatever looks the coolest. You’re now almost at the level of the average MMO player, which is why nearly all MMOs are below easy.

I already am. But seriously, I mouse my skills and imported the old control scheme from city of heroes, so I use the keyboard primarily to turn. I imagine watching me play would be actually frustrating to someone who’s good at the game, because to change my camera I end up having to anchor myself in place for a few moments. I learned to play this game on a track pad. Granted, it was a Mac trackpad, which is the Cadillac of the trackpad world, but still.

Seera.5916:

That tells you the what they did that caused them to fail. You don’t see the reason.

It could be because the player has a disability or they could have poor internet connection in general. You just assume that any mistakes are due to lack of knowledge. Not the kittenumption to make, but the video itself doesn’t tell you that.

What they did is a direct consequence of why they did it. Cause and effect share a necessary relationship. People, being people, generally do people things, so it isn’t too hard to figure out.

If the guy playing the game has Parkinson’s disease, he’s going to mention it. I’ve seen plenty of discussions on game difficulty will someone will bring up a disability of some sort that would prevent them from getting better. But, I also see plenty of posts that proclaim the game impossible with absolutely no explanation as to why.

The problem is, you’re trying to take a very specific and rare theoretical case, and use it to abandon common sense. It is fairly easy to see the set of paradigms governing a person’s actions in the game, and once those paradigms are shifted, the world opens up to them. If some specially misshapen snowflake should come my way, I’ll take that into consideration.

Seera.5916:

Watching does nothing for me. The only way it would be remotely useful for me is if they did a dual with the game and the keyboard/mouse. Seeing the effects on the screen or the keyboard/mouse by itself will not tell me how to better play. And how one person plays is the worst for someone else. Because people have different reaction times and internet connection speeds. I’m very very hands on learning. I have to actually DO it to learn it.

That’s the thing, that’s what I do and I still die. So it’s obviously not as easy as that. Please find me and link me a build that literally says do whatever skills you want for the rotation. All of the ones I’ve seen, dictate which skill when and when to switch attunement/weapon.

There is an oft under-emphasized point of education, but nonetheless it is an important one: listening is a skill.

Yes, it is a skill. It is a shame that most people are expected to just know how to listen, and it is also a shame that people expect to just zone out at stimuli and learn things. If you intend to learn, you can’t just have knowledge drizzled all over you and expect to consume any of it.

Take an active participation in your listening. When watching a tutorial, slow the video down so you can see which skills are activated at what time. Look at the build screen to see what equipment they are using. If you’ve lost the train of thought, go back in the video and watch that part again to see what is happening. Make a mental checklist of what they are doing. Keep the video open in another window while you try out skills on a golem in the mists.

That said, there’s a strange irony in what you’ve said here. To see someone’s hands or keyboard while playing is actually nearly useless information, since keybinds can be individualized. But, there’s also a reason why it is that the build videos go over specific rotations: the builds, skills, and techniques are chosen to have the maximum combination of DPS and group support. Because of this, there is no “this build is worse for other people”.

Likewise, on pretty much any build video I’ve seen, and on nearly every metabattle page, appropriateness and discretion are encouraged. They come with a variety of weapon/utility changes for different circumstances. The rotations and skills chosen are a best case scenario. You’re still expected to dodge when a big attack is coming your way.

It doesn’t favor vitality or healing power, either.

Honestly, I just wonder what the point of a lot of this is, since it seems like many of our woes can be solved with math. I can see the use in many of these tests if you are going to figure out stuff like

Damage rotation: sum of attacks with higher damage/second than auto attack so that their total activation time is greater than their recharge. Or, basically every attack with higher DPS than auto attack if it doesn’t meet the first criteria. Buffs/debuffs handled as multipliers to the average DPS of the rotation for comparison.

Might sustain: base level of how many stacks of might are sustained given a certain rotation.

Vulnerability sustain: base level of how many stacks of vulnerability are sustained given a certain rotation.

Damage boosting thresholds: stuff like scholar runes or first strikes.

Condition sustain: uptime of burning, stacks of bleeding, etc.

And combining those to find an optimum attack set for any build. Once you figure out this baseline, then you can just apply math to figure out the other stuff:

Max might: It’s just additional power, which can be considered a percentage increase by dividing power at max might by standing power the build has otherwise. Something similar can be done with conditions, but it is highly class specific so I wont’ go into all the details.

Max vulnerability: it’s a 25% flat increase from nothing to max. For any build, it is 25-sustained vulnerability, and that is the percentage increase of your damage before applying vulnerability in the first place.

Sigils/potions: These are usually a flat percentage, which can be added on after figuring out everything above, if you use these sigils and potions.

Procs: These are already pure RNG, but follow a simplistic method: having twice the crit chance means double the procs, which means that non-cooldown procs are twice as frequent / twice as long, short cooldown procs get their additional time after cooldown reduced by a similar frequency, and long cooldown procs are nigh negligible anyway.

If you want to compare class to class, then after getting all of the sustains up there, you might as well go off of the wiki’s listed damage x 1.416 (2600/1836, or the armor adjustment for PVE) when looking at how much damage a class can do when compared to another. Compare their effective power, and then whomever is higher gets higher/lower multiplied to the wiki’s listed damage, then add on the DPS difference from sustained conditions rates, and you have your comparison.

The hardest part of it all is the DPS rotation and what condis/buffs it sustains, and once you’ve figured those out, then every other problem you encounter is simple multiplication.

Satire is truly a dying art.

If I did my math right, the most recent iteration has an auto attack that is 13.8% stronger than sword auto without vulnerability, weakening charge is basically heartseeker in an AoE at any health level, and vault is a more mobile and easier-to-control weakening charge.

As far as my build goes, for legacy PVP it is Deadly Arts (Mug, Revealed Training, Executioner), Critical Strikes (Side Strike, Practiced Tolerance, no Quarter), and Daredevil (Havoc Mastery, Pulmonary Impact, Bounding Dodger). For Heart of Thorns I instead use Panic Strike, Invigorating Precision, and Escapists Absolution. Sometimes I will also swap out to Brawler’s Tenacity and Unhindered Combatant for exploration.

Orpheal.8263:

The OP has some points and there are some things about the games economy, that I would like to see changed, even if that means that it will be negative for like 1% of the games community..

But if that 1% of the game is richer, than then 99% of the rest of the community together, then theres somethign really wrong in this game.
Clearly, it is more than understandable, that Anet wants us that we pay thignjs in the game with real money, because its more comfortable to get thast way the gold that you need for things in the game quickly.

Not really. A disparity in wealth is only a problem if it creates undue suffering. In real life, it becomes a problem when the poor are no longer able to afford necessities (food, water, shelter, safety, etc). But if you aren’t without necessities, then there isn’t really an issue. If I make 40k a year and my neighbor makes 140k a year, and I am not being deprived of anything necessary to live, then why should I care that they make more? If anything I should be glad to know someone is more fortunate than I am.

And herein lies my problem with all of these claims that the GW2 economy is broken somehow: There are no necessities in GW2. There is nobody who is being deprived of something that is necessary for them to function in the game. Sure, there are many frivolous things that you aren’t able to buy (invisible shoes, for example),but there’s no starving children in the street because invisible shoes are 4k gold. Gold is produced from thin air, and it is quite easy to acquire it either directly, or indirectly via gathering various materials. Everything is balanced around exotics, which are easily obtained through multiple means.

Orpheal.8263:

However, this doesn’t mean, that there can’t and should exist mechanics in this game, that keep the economy so far in check,

I’m going to cut this one off a bit early, because this devolves into a paragraph long run on sentence. But here are mechanics that exist in the game to keep the economy under control. There’s the TP tax, account bound and soulbound items.

Orpheal.8263:

This is called Monopoly!! And Monopolies are bad for the economy, there you can say what you want, thats fact!
Thats the reason why there exist for that in real life things like cartels, that make sure, that a monopoly doesn’t get created at all in a country, so that small portions of a market can’t rule over the a large market alone.

Not really. A monopoly isn’t necessarily good for an economy, but it isn’t necessarily bad, either. In fact, the real world is full of monopolistic competition, wherein each individual good is manufactured by one company, and the goods themselves are competing for your wallet. I.E. only Apple is allowed to make Iphones, but that won’t stop Samsung from making a similar but alternate product for you to buy.

Anyway, the problem with monopoly claims are that everything in the game appears from thin air. To have a true monopoly, you would need to have control over both the production and distribution of an item. That doesn’t happen in this game.

Orpheal.8263:

1: The Game receives a new maximum Gold Limit you can own per Account by 1000 Gold (GW1 had also a Limit, that you could own maximum 1000 Platin for the Account Chest and 100 Platin on characters) GW2 will use now the same System. You can have now maximum 1000 Gold in the chest per Account and maximum 100 Gold on your Chartacters.
This will limit the maximum Gold one will be able to store and will discourage super rich people to get richer and richer, because it iwll become more of a hassle to organize all the Gold, instead of spending it and removing it out of the Game or being maybe a bit more generous and helping out every now and then some poor players out.

This is a horrible idea that will hurt everyone and won’t accomplish the goal you set out to accomplish. I’ve played games with cash limits before. Phantasy Star Universe and City of Heroes, in particular, actually had limits on the amount of currency you could hold at any one time. This didn’t somehow limit players from becoming rich, as much as it just inconvenienced the average player. Here’s how:

#1: Alternate currencies were developed. Instead of trading meseta or influence, they would trade collections of items that were deemed more valuable. If you were to put a gold cap, players would start using stacks of ectoplasm as a currency instead of gold. In GW1, platinum became worthless, and ecto’s became the default currency of that game, too. By continually shifting investment to more valuable items, wealth can continue to accumulate.

#2: This meant that there were a large set of items that weren’t publicly traded. Due to the fact that, even if you try to arbitrarily cap wealth, work hours and rarity still exist, there will inevitably be an item that the community values more than the gold cap. There will be a lot of items, actually. And these items will never be listed for trade, precisely because they cannot accurately be valued under a limited gold system. To get the top of the line stuff, you had to be in the know, and you also had to deal with the possibility that you’d be scammed due to the complexity of the trade. Players would have to swap accounts several times to facilitate the entirety of the gold transfer before the items would be exchanged, making it dangerous to trade.

To recap, the poor people pay, and the rich still get obscenely rich. Nothing is solved.

Orpheal.8263:

2: The Trading Post Taxes get changed to the point, that they proportionally become significantly bigger for players, that are super rich, to ensure that the economy of this game stays healthy and also to discourage people to get uber rich and to try to build up monopolies of so much Gold that they become able to buy out stocks of items just to resell them then greedily for double/tripple the price for what they bought the stuff in.

Again, this wouldn’t work. It doesn’t work that well in real life either. You may have heard the term “swiss bank account”. You see, the “swiss bank account” is infamous because it is highly confidential, so rich people will dump their money into an overseas account to hide their assets and avoid taxes. The same thing would happen here. If you have disproportionate taxes for wealthy players, then the player is just going to dump their money into another account or invest into items in order to hide their wealth, so they can trade at a level that everyone else would.

You also run the problem of punishing players unfairly if you go by total assets instead of just liquid gold. Then, players who don’t have a dime end up being punished because they bought a legendary weapon at some point, and now have a permanent tax because of a cosmetic choice.

Third, if you charge a higher tax in order to discourage wealthier players, this will just hurt the poor players again. Wealthier players will respond to this shifting tax by increasing the price of their goods to compensate. Everything becomes more expensive for poor players, because now the barrier to entry on trade is that much more difficult.

Orpheal.8263:

3: Relisting Items and Preordering Items gets changed, underbidding for a lousy single copper won’t be possible anymore. Relisting and Preordering will be now only possible, if the prices are at least 5% higher/lower than what is currently the highest/lowest price. This will benefit especially parts of the market, where people constantly underbit themself to ensure, that people buy from them, but if you can just underbit people with a freaking single coppe,r its no miracly, that players stay always so super high, that many people can’t buy the things from the TP, or first after having done some obcene and absurd money grinding or beign lucky with some loot drops that give them instantly some bigger gold income if they sell it, like a unneeded precursor, or like an already unlocked very valuable dye …

This just hurts competition and stagnates the market. Underbidding people isn’t a problem because you have to eat the 5% listing price. Players in competition for selling a high value good, this can actually consume a whole lot of wealth. Likewise, relisting items and bidding differences of 1 copper aren’t actually a problem. At all. The whole point of a buy offer is to be patient and wait for players who are willing to sell the item to you. If you have a problem with someone always out bidding you, you yourself can raise the top bid by a significant amount. There’s nothing stopping you yourself from raising the price by 5%.

Relisting increases availability, and the free bidding system allows the buy and sell prices to more closely match each other. This system does not need to be fixed, at all.

Races are mostly cosmetic, but the stories have a certain flavor. IMO, Asura and Charr beginning storylines are the more interesting ones.

As for profession, it is really about how you want to play. If you’d like to be on the frontlines and in your opponents face, then Guardian, Warrior, and Necromancer are good choices. If you want to be evasive and tricky, then Thieves, Mesmers, and Elementalists are for you. If you want to sit back and shoot things, then the ranger is for you. If you want a strange bag of tricks, then the engineer is for you.

As far as “ease” goes, the classes from easiest to hardest to play are roughly

Warrior
Ranger
Guardian
Necromancer
Mesmer
Thief
Engineer
Elementalist

For PVE, thieves are about the same as they were before, in that they fulfill the exact same roles: stealth, defiance stripping, high single target damage, blind spam, etc.

Though personally I would say they were buffed on two fronts. Revealed training works really well for D/D single target rotations, giving thieves a good reason to finally go 30 into Deadly Arts. Though in full zerker, it is only an 8% or so increase in damage, it is still better than having to go with Sundering Strikes or Combined Training.

On the more defensive side, I’m finding invigorating precision to be useful. It essentially doubles the potency of Signet of Malice, and in more unorganized and chaotic settings, Invigorating precision often pays for its own damage loss by maintaining the scholar rune bonus perpetually. For the defensive-minded zerker thief, it is definitely worth a look if you find yourself constantly under 90% health, or constantly dying.

It is still hard to justify going more than 15 points into any other line. You hit shadow arts for infusion of shadow and not much else. You hit acrobatics for feline grace and not much else. You hit trickery for flanking strikes or thrill of the crime, and that is it.

I can’t speak much personally for the other categories. But, as far as I can tell, Bewildering Ambush on condi thieves is lethal in roaming/small scale WvW, and roaming/sPVP thieves are still great at bursting down non-bunker classes.

Vayne.8563:

There are certainly hard parts to it and certain jumps are pretty hard. But figuring it out is relatively hard. It’s certainly easier if people run to youtube and look up a video.

In fact, figuring out where to go and what to do is hard. In fact, it’s hard in the same way a raid is hard.

Most people figure out what to do relatively fast raiding, but it’s the execution that takes practice…SAB tribulation mode is the same way.

It requires patience, repetition and focus. But it’s the puzzle aspects that I enjoy most.

This is my experience with nearly every game ever. Most games are a puzzle. You just have to figure out the method, then suddenly it is easy.

So a little while ago, a bloodtide coast map (IP 230) closed. This isn’t unusual for a nearly empty map, but this wasn’t an empty map. This was a double guild Triple Trouble map, filled to the brim with around 150 people. Suffice to say, when the map closed and we were all ported onto different maps in varying stages of Triple Trouble, there was a lot of confusion. This event is being called the great TT sundering of 7/21/2015.

Now, last I checked, maps are only supposed to close when they have low population. Then, you get that prompt on the left side of the screen that says “this is a low pop map, would you like to volunteer, going to close in one hour, yada yada”. But, bloodtide coast IP 230 displayed no such behavior. There were no warnings, the map was not empty in the least. It just abruptly ended.

I can’t imagine this is a common occurrence, but I also can’t imagine this being an intended consequence. There might be a bug in the megaserver system.

I’ve found most of LS season 2 to be fair. One part did irk me, though, which was the fight with the dragon on top of the pale tree. The problem I had was the actual attack range was outside of the red circles/areas for many of the attacks, so I would be standing in a spot that was displayed as safe, only to take a load of damage.

1) +28 Condition Damage
2) +20% Might Duration
3) + 55 Condition Damage
4) +20% Might Duration
5) +100 Condition Damage
6) When you use a healing skill, gain 3 stacks of might for 10 seconds. (Cooldown: 10s)

No one has started a topic about these things. But, from a first glance, these runes seem like they’d be awesome for Condition based Grenadiers or Hybrids, or HGH builds in general.

The big advantage being that they give 40% might duration without having to sacrifice damage, and also give the 3 stacks of might on heal. While altruism gives boon duration in general, it also only gave out healing power for an attribute, which kind of sucks.

What do you guys think?

Sorry, I can’t put my feedback in sub 100 words. I just finished doing a writeup on the Renegade, and it is pushing 18,000 character. The short version is, everything is bad and not worth taking.

You can find it here.

I also listed my complaints and anxieties with the Mirage Traits. My complaint is I have no idea how to play the class, and also a lot of things are bad. You can find that post here.

haviz.1340:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

By contrast, regular enemies in the overworld do so little damage that there is no need to dodge at all. You just plow right through regular enemies and continue on as if nothing happened. But, silvers, champs, and enemies in dungeons do so much damage that there’s no point in passive defenses.

I couldn’t disagree more with this. You completely chose to ignore sustain which is one of the biggest contributor the extreme survivability of tanky builds. Passive defense plus sustainability achieved by regen, protection and other traits (soothing mist, adrenal health, healing symbols, etc) give you so much survivability that you don’t have to use any active defense (including dodges) at all.

Sustain? Do you mean heals? Boons and Heals themselves fall into a strange spot, since while they are not fully active like dodges and blocks, they aren’t fully passive like equipment. Boons are not fully offensive or defensive, either, and often what boons you have are dependent on class specifics more than anything else. Heals are also dependent on class, and don’t discriminate on gear, since the quicker an enemy dies, the less damage you have to heal away.

But alas, the reason why I didn’t factor in boons is because they aren’t equipment dependent. I stuck with an apples to apples comparison with Obal’s build to demonstrate stat balance. When you start changing builds, you’re no longer dealing with just berserker vs. other loadouts.

Heals do not allow you to facetank everything without having to dodge. Some prime examples include the temple events in orr, where the Statue of Dwayna and Priest of Melandru will plow through however much armor and health you have, especially in a zerg. The priest of grenth uses fall damage to bypass your armor, and often will drop you from the roof multiple times, killing you regardless of build. Then there includes the molten facility bosses, who will knock you off of a platform for instant death, and also have their own instant death attacks. Then you have the clockheart, who can obliterate nearly any build with a combination of environmental damage and his big AoE attack…

The list goes on and on. For a personal example, the final boss of HotW P3 has a summoned jellyfish attack that, at base medium armor, does 11k-12k damage per hit. I have just over 12K HP on my zerker thief. I also have valkyrie gear, which would raise my HP to 18K. At 18K HP… I still die in two hits. After taking a fish to the face, I can heal up to full before I take another. So, in that circumstance, there’s no reason for me to use valkyrie there.

There’s always a bright side: maybe ANet will mess up other classes as much as the Engi, and then we’ll all be on even ground again.

The different classes kind of fulfill different roles. So while something like Ele is arguably the strongest a group of 10 eles is definitely not the strongets.

I find a lot of this QQ to be largely unfounded. Then again, Anet also keeps nerfing engineers, who were the go-to condition class for awhile, and for understandable reasons, too. Engineers could single-handedly stack 25 stacks of might while rapidly applying Bleeds, Burns, Poison, Chill, Blind, Vulnerability, and with spots of confusion, cripple, weakness, and immobilization, and all of this at 1500 range in an AoE. So then engineers got their burning nerfed, substantially more boon hate put into the game, their stun breakers nerfed, their evades and their blocks nerfed, and now we aren’t top tier anymore.

Anyway, I’d argue that Dhuumfire isn’t that powerful at all, and on several conditions:

#1: To make use of dhuumire you have to make the condition equivalent of a glass cannon build. You have to go 30 into spite, and you have to have enough precision for it to proc reliably. This is powerful and all, but it decreases the necromancer’s statistical defense (toughness + vitality), and that is the only defense necromancer’s have.

#2: Other classes constantly override your burning. Warriors, Engineers, Guardians, Rangers, Mesmers, and Elementalists all do burning. Eles and Guardians do a lot of unintentional burning, and this will override the burning that Dhuumfire does. Due to the luck of the draw, this can make Dhuumfire’s proc absolutely worthless from time to time (“time” being every 5th attack by Guardians). I’d prefer it if they changed Dhuumfire to instead inflict 5 stacks of confusion for 4 seconds, or 5 stacks of torment for 4 seconds, because then every class and their grandmother won’t override the trait.

#3: Due to the recharge and single target nature of the proc, it makes the proc fairly weak from an AoE standpoint. In PVE this is pretty big, but it happens in tPVP as well. Rangers always have a pet who can end up taking the proc, Elementalists have summons that can take the proc, Mesmers spam so many clones and phantasms that they’ll take the proc, and there’s also the rare minion master necro who’s minions can take the proc as well, and thieves have ambush + thieves guild that can also absorb the proc for them. This isn’t including guardian spirit weapons or ranger spirits (those can be attacked, right?). Put them together and there’s a high likelyhood that Dhuumfire will never hit anything meaningful.

Not getting into that whole kit debate, I do have to agree with the OP that the way devs are acting around the classes, it makes it so there isn’t nearly as much build diversity.

You’ve got to see the opposite side, too: if they gave every class everything, then in the end there wouldn’t be any diversity. It’s a catch 22.

Nemesis.8593:

Have you ever formulated a 30 sec DPS rotation based on math… not the other way around, figure out the rotation then use math to calculate it’s damage ?

Maybe i’m doing something wrong but it is time consuming…

It is actually easier than you’d think. I’ve been on a couple of MMOs where this info was hammered out. For the sake of rotation making, there’s two steps:

1) Categorize each skills individual DPS. You don’t actually need a build to do this, either. What you do is take any skills damage, divide it by its total time (activation time + animation time + aftercast time + game tick refresh rate), and you get the skill’s DPS. For skills in a chain, take the total time of the chain.

There are three values that are important here. DPS is above. DPR, or damage per recharge, is how much DPS the skill does over its total recharge time (that is, recharge time + all the other times I listed above), and auto DPS. This step is mostly archiving. It seems like a daunting task, but if done once, you don’t need to do it again, sans balance updates.

2) Actually coming up with the rotation. Most of these are fairly simple logic checks.

A)If a weapon skill has higher DPS than the auto attack, use it when off cooldown. If not, don’t.
B)If a utility skill has a higher DPS than the auto attack, use it when off cooldown. If not, don’t.

C) When comparing similar weapons, you check an average DPS. Most of the time, this is just all the damage it will do divided by its longest recharging skill. There’s a second method, but more on that later. Once you have a weighted DPS, you go with the weapon that has a higher weight.

D) When comparing utilities, you use the one with the highest DPR. When checking buffs and debuffs, those act as a modifier to DPS, and so the overall “damage” any buff does is equal to the modified damage – unmodified damage. I.E. if a skill gives you haste for 5 seconds every 30 seconds, then technically that skill will do ((1.5 x Auto Attack DPS – Auto attack DPS) x 5 seconds) damage.

Once you have the weapons with the highest average DPS, and utilities with the highest DPR,then you have your rotation: Start with buffs, use short cooldowns first, use all higher DPS skills when they are off cooldown.

After all that, it is a traveling salesman problem. You take it to the field, see what works, and what doesn’t work, and you tweak as necessary. The specializations and gear, those work as modifiers to the above. After tweaking for awhile, you get a more comprehensive build. The more experienced you are at the game, the faster you can tweak builds. The steps above, that can all be done in a day, by hand. Heck, you can eliminate most low DPS options at a glance.

You’re probably wondering where those big random “max DPS” numbers come from. This is a “weighted DPS”, AKA the second method of comparing weapons. The weighted DPS is the DPS of all skills in a rotation, with each multiplied by the percentage of time that skill will occupy. So, for example: lets say in a very simple build the DPS rotation is 20 seconds of auto attacking at 400 DPS, 6 seconds of weapon skill 2 at 800 DPS, 4 seconds of weapon skill 4 at 1000 DPS. The weighted DPS will be 400 × 20/30 + 800 × 6/30 + 1000 × 4/30 = 560 weighted DPS.

This is where I disagree with a lot of DPS calcs. Most DPS calcs you see use 30 seconds, no matter what. I find this absurd, as there are many skills that take longer than 30 seconds to recharge. Personally, were I to calculate DPS I would use the recharge time of the slowest recharging skill as my base time. Because then, instead of calculating DPS for an arbitrary “fight” with an arbitrary travel time to fix any inconveniences, I’ll have DPS for an indefinite fight. I find indefinite fight values much more useful because, surprise surprise, I don’t actually know how long any fight is until the fight is over.

As for the applicability for all this math, I’ve always found it dubious. One of the biggest problems I have with how these DPS calcs are done is that the only numbers you ever see are the MAX EVERYTHING PERFECT COMP VEGETABLE BOSS numbers. Basically, numbers nobody will see. I’d prefer it if the DPS calcs were divided into 3 sections: Solo DPS, Max Might + Fury, Max Might + Fury + Team Buffs + Enemy Debuffs.

The rotation itself is useful as a Plan A, but not much else.

The task you have is more monumental. Factoring damage uptime is a far more complicated issue than just calculating DPS. Active defenses (dodge, block, aegis, etc) are a finite barrier that exists regardless of your stats. I find that, roughly, berserker gear has 50% higher DPS than soldiers, while soldiers has anywhere from 207% to 260% higher effective health, depending on class. That number sounds big, but the higher effective health translates roughly to receiving only 48% to 38% of the damage, whereas the higher offensive power of zerker translates to receiving only 67% damage.

The thing you have to prove is that, in the time that you spend not dodging/blocking/using active defenses of some kind (time spans which last 3/4ths of a second each time), that those extra single hits from an Auto Attack or those minor build tweaks to have less active defenses results in more damage. Or failing that, the frequency to which a player fails in glass cannon gear but succeeds in tanky gear is high enough such that the overall time a fight takes is equal. Or, failing that, that the healing provided by support builds increases the success rate or reduces the active defenses of other teammates enough to justify the damage loss from running a healing spec.

I’m not sure it is true, even for HoT. I said this in the comments of one of your videos, but youtube comments aren’t the best place for elaboration, so I’ll say it here: The zerker meta is real. Not because somebody in some obscure corner did some calculations. Because it simply felt better. It worked better.

If you dig though my posts far enough, you’d probably see where I first came to the realization myself. At the time I had an engineer with full Magic Find gear, and a full Knight Set. They had the same offensive power. I noticed, by accident, that I did just as well in MF gear as I did in Knights, especially when soloing champions or swarms of enemies. The extra toughness, it bought me a hit or two. It wasn’t really doing much for me. So, eventually I swapped it out for a full zerker set, and then was amazed with how great it felt, and how well it played. I was making less mistakes because the fights were shorter, and if I did die it was much quicker to get to where I was again.

So in short, DS is a one trick pony used once a fight that doesn’t really do much other than an AoE attack. This might be worth it if all of those missing controls, blocks, reflects, evades, condition cures, stability, and good stun breakers would amount to something useful in their place, but it doesn’t. Necros have slow and weak weapon skills alongside of utilities that are at best situational and at worst downright harmful, with the only two utilities that stand out enough to be considered good being Epidemic and Well of Darkness.

The saddest part is, almost all of this applies to PVE as well as PVP. Though cripples and chills are more useful in PVE. IMO Arenanet should abandon the idea of an attrition class with no active defenses. It is contradictory, and “This class is meant to take 100 blades to the face” is not a selling point.

EDIT: Completely forgot about weakness. Now weakness is probably the best thing a necro has for a defensive condition, except for the fact that high critical hit builds go right through it, condition curing removes the benefit completely, and it is unreliable in PVE because you never know if an enemy has a high crit chance or a low one.

Its K. I took several screenshots of things that are “zoomed out”. Max zoom, actually.

In the oveworld, nearly anything can work. If that is your primary concern, just go with whatever is cool looking.

Dungeons are a bit of a different beast, especially since you can’t really play them alone. If you want to optimize performance, which is what most dungeon teams demand, you’ll have to do a couple of things.

Wear Berserker Gear. This may seem daunting at first, but as you learn to dodge big, telegraphed attacks you’ll soon find it hard to play in any other gear prefix.

For weapons, you’ll want to do something a bit odd. Keep only one main-hand weapon equipped: the dagger. The dagger has good damage and LF gain. If you need to range, you can use life blast and lich form. For off-hand, keep at least the focus. The focus is good for damage, stacking vulnerability, and removing boons. The warhorn is decent for its AoE stun and swiftness, and the off-hand dagger is good for the condi transfer and weakness.

As far as traits/specializations go, there are two ways to build the dungeon necro that I’ve found to be really effective. Spite/Curses/Blood Magic, and Spite/Curses/Soul Reaping. Now, the traits aren’t set in stone, since it changes depending on how you play, but these will make a good guideline for what to use in the future.

Spite: Spiteful Talismen, Chill of Death/Rending Shroud, Close to Death.
Curses: Plague Sending, Path of Corruption, Weakening Shroud
Blood Magic: Quickening Thirst/Ritual of Life, Vampiric Aura, Vampiric Rituals
Soul Reaping: Unyielding Blast, Spectral Mastery, Foot in the Grave.

These traits are used for something called a Flashing Build. In this build, you pop in and out of Death Shroud very quickly to take advantage of Furious Demise, Rending Shroud, and Weakening Shroud. You’ll spam Death Shroud whenever it is off cooldown, save the special exceptions where you need to take a few hits.

The difference between blood magic and soul reaping are that blood magic is a more team supportive build, while soul reaping is more personal strength.

The utilities you’ll want to take are as follows:

Heal Skill: Well of Blood if using blood magic. Consume Conditions otherwise.
Well of Suffering: This skill is a must. Does good damage, stacks a lot of vulnerability. Just make sure to use it after another player lays down a fire field.
Elite Skill: Lich form. Lich form’s auto attack does more damage than the dagger, and can hit more enemies, too. Use against bosses.

The last two utilities can be taken from a pool, and it really depends on the situation. If you are using blood magic, you’ll prioritize wells.
Well of Corruption: this does half as much damage as well of suffering, but it is still a pretty strong skill to use. The best thing about it is how easily it strips conditions away in an AoE.
Well of Power: This skill is a decent stunbreak and group condi cleanse. Use this against enemies that inflict burning, since it turns burning into Aegis.
Well of Darkness: this is a fairly potent defensive skill that takes away most damage from non-champions. If trash mobs give you problems, take this.
Blood is Power: This skill has a nice AoE might stack. This should be taken, unless the team you have is already really good at stacking might. Otherwise, take
Signet of Spite This is a flat damage boost that actually scales really well in lower levels. If there’s no use for anything else, take this for a flat damage boost.
Signet of the Locust: If there’s a long travel section where you don’t want locust swarm to hit things, but also aren’t in blood magic and thus can’t take quickening thirst, this works as a stopgap. Just switch into locust when you need to run, then swap back out afterward.
Spectral Armor: This is a decent stunbreak if, for some reason, you have to take a lot of hits to the face, hits which you can’t dodge of walk out of range of.

The rest of the utilities are meh at best, working only in specific situations. Remember to prioritize damage, so unless a problem presents itself you’ll be probably be taking Well of Suffering, Well of Corruption, and Blood is Power/Signet of Spite.