Updated for the core specializations patch (with possibly more updates to follow as ANET tweaks things). The largest change being that the meta weapon set has shifted away from Sword to Mace, and the offhand weapon has shifted to making full advantage of both Focus and Torch.
Since there isn’t a standard way of annotating the new traits yet (the build editor that’s currently up lists Absolute Resolution as Virtues V for example, when that’s no where in the game), I’ve devised a new method: Line X-Y. Where Line is the trait line (i.e. Virtues), X is the trait level (Adept = A, Master=M, Grandmaster=G), and Y is the location at that level (Top=T, Center=C, Bottom=B), which would make something like Absolute Resolution “Virtues M-C”.
Additionally, there’s a bit of a formatting issue with the new guide for the weapon sets. It says "GS + M/(F?T) (I swear, in the editing window the arrow symbol showed perfectly). This isn’t a big enough issue to comb through and replace the “?” with a manual arrow “->”, at least not given that I’ll likely be updating things again relatively soon and can just fix it then.
As always, any suggestions or things you notice that don’t look quite right are appreciated. It’s an extremely long guide, and I wouldn’t be shocked if a few things have slipped through the cracks of my proofreading abilities.
Enjoy,
Zui
Funny that they fixed this, but didn’t fix safespotting him underwater.
They have to make turning Karma into Gold in some way painful….
They really don’t, though; it’s not too much trouble to drop the naive notion that karma shouldn’t be able to be converted to gold, when their game allows us to do exactly that. They ought to give us well-designed game systems that are efficient to use, such as vendors, the mystic forge, the trading post, et cetera. As-is, those systems are pretty much absolute garbage that people wouldn’t put up with in any other setting, and that people barely tolerate here because they otherwise like playing the game.
This will only happen if you are selling Arah. Easy solution: stop selling Arah. No one’s going to do anything to stop this from happening to you because selling dungeon paths was never supposed to be part of the game in the first place.
I’m having trouble with your reasoning. I’m sure you thought before you posted (you did, right?), so perhaps you could explain the flaw in my understanding… Here it goes…
An AC P1 or P3 group is 3/5. It advertises it is at the last boss. Two people join, enter the dungeon, and kick everyone. They invite their 3 friends. They kill the last boss. Each has made 60 tokens and ~1.5 gold for virtually no work. This dungeon is not Arah, and the people who posted the LFG were not selling.
Let’s try another one…
Let’s say the dungeon is Arah! One condition is met! But let’s say they’re part way through the dungeon and had some trouble at one of the bosses or skips, hence losing people (I had the luxury of joining a p2 group that was at Brie awhile back… they lost THREE people who tried to make the skip to her for a long time and repeatedly failed, eventually giving up). Let’s say this group is 1/5, 2/5, or 3/5. Let’s say two people merge party, and kick the original members after entering the dungeon. They now invite their friends, or not, and complete the path, either for their own personal reward, or to sell it. Now, the victims here weren’t selling. So that condition isn’t met. And yet, they faced the same abuse.
Let’s try a third, for good measure…
Let’s say I’ve soloed CM Path 3 on my Guardian, and want to give away the slots for free via the LFG. Again, let’s say it’s just two people who party merge. They enter the dungeon. Then they kick me and anyone else who joined via the LFG. They proceed to invite their friends, skip right to the end of the dungeon, and kill the last boss for 60 tokens and ~1 gold. I wasn’t selling the dungeon in this hypothetical, nor was the dungeon Arah. Yet, it still is advantageous for them to behave as the OP has suggested, and as you have dismissed.
I eagerly await you explaining why what I have suggested can happen is actually impossible, and hence only people selling Arah paths will be victimized. Thank you in advance for your reply highlighting my own flaw in understanding.
Hard (player skill requiring) and very hard content.
You’re supposed to communicate with your team and have an awareness of the fight in order to avoid the flame wall. When Sabetha will use the flame wall attack is very predictable. The updrafts aren’t meant to save you from having poor communication with your team and/or poor fight awareness.
Instead, it’s been stated that they exist for those who experience delayed glider deployment due to lag, thus allowing them to (probably) not die.
If you’re running the meta burning guardian build, you should be absolutely fine. The DPS is comparable (read: a bit worse) in single-target situations (nearly every meaningful fight in dungeons), and actually a bit better in trash fights (which basically don’t matter, but still). See Obal’s stickied thread for the build. Of course, if you’re running a sub-par burning build (in terms of DPS output, not in terms of your enjoyment obviously), you’re probably not welcome in the most demanding pugs, but you’d surely be welcome in an ‘all welcome’ group or similar, and there are plenty of those groups.
Just don’t neglect your role as a Guardian. Bring useful utility skills for your team and use them appropriately (projectile defense, stability, etc.), grant Aegis where appropriate, and so on and so forth. While they’re written from the perspective of a non-burning Guardian, basically everything in the following guides I’ve made still apply (just make sure you take Purging Flames as a burning Guardian!):
Good news, you can do Fractal 50 with a guild, or friends, or non-idiots from LFG. If you don’t like certain groups, don’t play with them. There’s nothing forcing you to do so.
As for the loot… Only RNGsus and possibly HoT fractal changes can help you.
I wouldn’t call your old build viable, given that it contributes much less to a group than a meta build will, and it seems that you are indeed concerned about making sure you’re pulling your weight. If you’re looking for good Warrior builds for instanced PvE content (and browse around if you’re looking for builds for other classes), see: http://www.dtguilds.com/forum/m/6563292/viewthread/12497977-dnt-warrior-build-9914
The reason that for every class full damage gear (Berserker’s, or for some classes like Mesmer, Assassin’s) is recommended is because if you know the encounters and can use active defense (group projectile defenses, dodging, etc.), stats like toughness and vitality are worthless. Stats like healing power, and healing in general other than your heal-slot skill, really aren’t very useful, either, since you simply cannot out heal the damage that comes in in any difficult encounter. You have to avoid the damage, not take it. So if active defenses are king, and passive defenses are not good, you might as well go full DPS. In fact, it’s better if you do, because that means things will die faster, ensuring more efficient runs, and ensuring that you have to rely on your active defenses for less overall time (after all, you don’t have infinite active defenses!).
Even if you roll a Guardian, you will still be doing a disservice to your team and yourself if you’re not wearing full damage gear (except in an extremely tiny handful of instances where a guardian can hold aggro by swapping to Knight’s armor and being able to hold aggro and block-rotate allows your group DPS to go up because no one else has to worry about extremely powerful attacks from the boss). Guardians do do a lot of support, but since passive defense really isn’t needed, there’s no reason to not to be wearing full damage gear; wearing full damage gear is another way you can help support your team. Another thing to note is, Guardians really need to know the encounter to bring support for it; they’re swapping out utility skills left and right throughout any dungeon or fractal, and in many cases retraiting between encounters (or at least, the good Guardians are).
I’m going to copy/paste a list of useful things for a group that I wrote on Reddit awhile back (was in the context of what you want to think about when building a good group):
1. Banners. You need a Warrior.
2. Swiftness. There are a lot of ways to obtain Swiftness for skips, so don’t worry about this too much.
3. Might. You want 25 stacks of might for every fight.
4. Vulnerability. You want ~25 stacks of Vulnerability at the start of every fight, and want to keep it high throughout the fight.
5. Projectile defenses. You don’t want to take damage and lose your scholar bonuses and/or have to dodge unnecessarily.
6. Stability. You don’t want to have to deal with being unable to DPS because you got CCed.
7. CC and Defiance Management. You want to be able to CC important attacks and/or disable the boss for safe DPS, and you also want to be able to strip the defiance and do it again as much as is needed.
8. Condition clears. You don’t want to be slowed during skips, or lose your scholar bonus, or get chilled in combat.
9. Aegis. You don’t necessarily need Aegis, but it sure is nice because it means you can actually avoid dodging some non-projectile attacks until the Aegis runs out, meaning you can pile on the DPS even more.
10. Blinds. If you must fight Elite or lower type mobs, you want blinds.
11. Stealth. You don’t want to have to fight anything that you don’t actually have to fight, because it wastes time and because you practically don’t get any loot for it.
12. DPS. The faster you kill things, the faster your run will be, and it’ll also probably be cleaner beause there’s less time for things to go wrong (and your active defenses won’t be depleted).
As I pointed out in the Reddit post, you don’t need everything in that list. But the more of it you have, the smoother and faster your runs will be.
As a Warrior, you’d provide numbers 12 (everyone in every group needs to provide number 12), 7 (with Mace #5), 4 (with Axe 2, Mace 4, and incidentally through other attacks), 3 (in the case your group really lacks might and you swap to a PS build, and also by helping to blast fire fields with banners and possibly warhorn 5 before fights), 2 (you can put on Warhorn during skips, and swap off when it’s time to fight again, so you can give some swiftness, and also blast fields with #5 to help stealth or stack might), and 1 (Banner of Discipline and Banner of Strength, a fantastic DPS boost!).
Not everyone agrees that an expansion is win-win. It is possible to give us everything you’d normally see in an expansion through the LS. At this rate it’ll take another 2 years to have it, but we’ll get it.
Will we get it? How do you know? Has ANET communicated something to you that they haven’t communicated to the rest of us, or did they communicate it and everyone missed it but you? If not, what evidence are you basing your statement on, and what reasoning did you use from there to determine your statement was correct enough to not just be mere random worthless speculation that merits no weight at all?
As I see it, there is no evidence to conclude we will get anything other than the following from LS:
1. Story “content”. With most of that being pure story, and small amounts being playable content.
2. Achievement Points to hunt.
3. Open world zones for maximum level players to farm in.
This is an extremely small portion of the content we’d normally see in an expansion. So small, that saying it’s anything like what we’d see in an actual expansion is pretty disingenuous. It’s also not the kind of content that has compelling repeated replay value for many players, which is a primary reason a lot of people want to see expansion-like content.
The only way we can know what we’ll be getting is if ANET tells us. They don’t need to tell us specifics. They can tell us very generally. But their communication policy in this respect is “do not communicate”. This is why this thread exists. What direction is this game actually headed? No one really knows. We’d like to know. We’d like some communication.
Either we’re not getting the whole story, or your friend ran into some idiots of exceptional rarity looking to be carried at level 13.
If it’s entirely as you described this isn’t “elitism”, and it’s not a “growing concern”. Low-probability incidents happen, and you have not established this is anything other than a low-probability incident. Furthermore, the people who kicked your friend are most certainly not “elite” by any means, neither in terms of skill, nor in terms of AP. It’s long been accepted by actual elite players that groups that set an AP-requirement are really just scrubs with lots of AP who are looking to get carried; these groups are typically worse than groups without such requirements, and nearly always worse than groups that check competence another way (like a basic reading test, e.g. “ping aquabreather”).
If it’s not entirely as you described, then again, we’re not talking about “elitism”, nor is it a “growing concern”.
If you want to establish this as an actual issue, instead of a made-up issue that you’re complaining about on the fourms for some reason, you’re going to need to present more evidence of what occurred, or better yet, present evidence of it repeatedly occurring.
Q: What Necromancer elite skill resurrects old threads?
A: “Post Reply”