Guild Wars 2

Thanks for the tips! Signet of the Hunt seems to be my best bet, and also those pack runes are not a bad idea.

Spiders are the most trustworthy. I’ve not seen them fail like other pets do.

Hi, ranger forum, a nub ranger with a question. I usually don’t solo/duo roam on my ranger and may construct a condition set for the future, but for now I’d like to use power… just because.

I’ve actually not used greatsword and used s/warhorn instead, because the lack of swiftness is frustrating. The Greatsword does have a leap but how do you guys get around quickly? This is especially important for getting away since I sometimes play with my thief friend who can obviously avoid trouble… which leads to everyone trying to kill the poor ranger.

I know there’s signet of the hunt, but that takes up a slot skill.

Sample build of what I’d like to use.:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNAQJATBjEq0yaHLUtGoPoWvABwY3aHcPwDRaXyoaA-TVCEwAE3fAmKNbVCyU5nhLAAL1FarLAwhA4xTAgMALbB-w

Would signet of the hunt be the best idea?

I think no.5 needs more swiftness, however the real offender is that #4 is somewhat bad and should, well, do something.

It’s pretty funny.

The zerker elitist crowd can be annoying but at least they keep to their own runs. If that kind of crap happens in a run not explicitly labeled a speedrun, I will not hesitate to kick people for lecturing others on how to play. Then you have the anti-zerker crowd that tries to change the game and enforce upon everyone their own made up rules about what requires skills and variety and act all surprised when people don’t see a problem.

Given I run like 5 dungeons a month or less, I could really care less about what is meta or what changes since I have 6 characters with stat combos of all kinds. So no, this fear and ignorance stuff is mere intellectual dishonesty that is suited more for political debates. In fact it’d just be better on me because I suck at dodging anyways.

Other stat sets are not worthless. They can be used for a stepping stone when you’re learning a new dungeon. It’s the same reason why we have blues,greens, and yellows. Then once you’re done with that, you can use them in wvw too.

I mean just look at any old school platformer speedruns where the players ignore the powerups and stuff. Does that mean the powerups should be removed from the game because speedrunners don’t need them?

This is a fundamental difference of perspective. I enjoy investing and adding a touch and a dash here and there to my builds without having to change my gear radically.

So yes, I play the way I want, and that happens to be zerker in dungeons. My zerker guardian and engineer provide lots of buffs and healing while outputting lots of damage. It lets me have it all, and that is fun. The price is that I have to stay awake and have to learn the content. I can get better, and I feel I should change my gameplay to get better rather than the game changing for me. A group that wants to tank out the damage can do so, and safely so— it just takes longer. If everyone agrees to it, then so what? Are you less of a human for finishing CoF a few minutes later when even a non-zerker group can finish that in less than 10 min anyways?

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The thing with all the defensive stats is that they scale well, but only when you increase two of them. Let me give an example.

Lets say you’re a necromancer. You have 1846 armor, and 18472 health. You have 1000 points to spend. If you put all 1000 into vitality, you’ll end up with 28472 health, which is a 54.1% increase in how much damage you can take. Put that into toughness, and you gt 2846 armor which is a 54.2% increase. But, if you 500 into both vitality and toughness, you’d get 2346 armor and 23472 health. That is 27% reduction from toughness, but that also applies to all of the extra health, so you would, to scale, have 29830 HP (a 61.4% increase overall).

It’s a concept called effective health. Because the two stats multiply each other, the best way to invest stats is so that health is roughly 10x higher than armor, then increase them at the same rate. This is where toughness kind of gets the shaft. For you see, the necro is already at the golden ratio of 1:10. Every other class… not so much. They all need a certain amount of vitality to reach the golden ratio.

Warrior: 290 Vit
Guardian: 1046 Vit
Ranger: 472 Vit
Engineer: 472 Vit
Thief: 899 Vit
Elementalist: 756 Vit
Mesmer: 328 Vit

Overall, players will end up getting more from Vitality from sheer statistical efficiency alone.

It’s a bit more complicated than that.

It is true that vitality is better for increasing your EHP, but EHP is not the only factor of survival, because of healing. In general, the “main” heal skill for many classes does not scale well with anything so sometimes increasing toughness, and thus your effective heals can be more effective. With additional toughness, each unit of health recovered means more. Increasing health relative to this makes it harder to recover your health.

EHP can be useful for withstanding the biggest hits so you don’t die instantly, but in bigger fights where you can use your healing skill many times over the course of a fight, then toughness starts to win out. Obviously if your base health is too low then none of this matters.

So naturally the context matters. A necromancer that relies on a death shroud that scales with health and has rather poor healing and mitigation abilities is going to approach this a lot differently then an ele or engineer who have constant ways of healing and main heal skills that have short cooldowns.

Of course, in pve, it tends to be superior anyways to pick offensive stats because of the massive enemy damage and health making long battles quite a hazard.

Elsewhere, I feel vitality is good for mostly damage builds that need to increase their EHP so they don’t instantly die, but toughness to be better for those that want to be an tanky leading character.

Still, it is very true that if you had to pick for some, vitality would be pretty wise.

Engineers lack the stability to really hang in there with the trains so they need to be carried by guardians…. but then again guardians carry everyone which is why they are often the biggest part of a zerg so I never really saw that as a problem. I believe people are too used to the whole stack and blob/surround enemy thing or think that guardians and warriors are everything. Still, there are big problems— I don’t think the best groups in this game would have refrained from experimentation and meta is meta for a reason even if it is an evolving thing.

But warriors/eles have good invuls and stabilities/stunbreaks of their own and necros have deadly boon strips while mesmers have unique utility. Engineers possess the ability to resist being trained through traits such as protection injection and stabilized armor which makes them survivable but is that enough?

That leaves the 3 medium classes kind of out there which excel at assassinating targets and often out of nowhere but to get that done requires more than just mashing a few keys. It’s no surprise that rangers, engineers, and thieves get a ton of hate, and a lot of that comes from fear and ignorance. A random backstab, a rapid fire, or grenade/blunder/acid bomb burst suddenly downing a tanky generic frontliner guy is often considered an aberration and cheese.

The existence of terrain also changes matters heavily and factors in more than people would like to admit and these tend to benefit the medium classes a lot more.

The biggest barrier though is retaliation which can often wreak havoc on the engineer’s ability to do massive sustained aoe damage. These things can be overcome, but you’d definitely have an easier time as a GWEN. Still, nothing stops you from taking a bomb/heal engineer and do good damage/healing or grenade engineer to kitten people off.

In a world where people still think 4 warrior dungeon rushes or gtfo, take everything with a grain of salt. The terms useless and not viable often get thrown around way too much in a way that creates a kind of narrow mindedness.

Well, the game could kindly send you a message that you’ve been somewhere for too long.

I guess they don’t want the mechanics to be too concrete in fear of people exploiting it…. of which they’re doing anyways.

It’s honestly a pretty archaic thing to have.

Oh, and btw don’t map stuff to F. Sometimes you’ll accidentally try to res an NPC or something and that sucks. Maybe middle mouse button?

If only there were a way to bind loot to your “1” skill.

There’s more than one map in this game.

Move!

Loki.8793:

And as a side comment, if you just run past most of the enemies in the open world, you don’t even need armor in the first place. When I run through orr with full berserkers, not once do I get hit. It’s not like it’s difficult to run past mobs in the first place.

Sure, I’ve done stuff without armor in Orr or whatnot just for kicks but it’s safer and minimizes the chances of any trouble. Like I can res for daily reviver or gather stuff without having too much issue while enemies are attack. And that’s often why I use speed runes as well. The few extra seconds of killing veterans or whatnot is largely irrelevant when they die in a few hits anyways. To me, this is more “efficient” use of my gameplay time.

I view gear as a convenience, and appreciate the game as it is currently, which is why I disagree with there really being a problem. Sometimes I will play a dungeon and some guardian will generously res me and I’ll notice a shield bubble going off . Sure, I then realize he’s using some crappy tank build, but on second thought who really cares as long as the dungeons get done? And yes, i think the current system works fine in these cases. I use zerker gear in dungeons of course though still not “meta”, but I would never call people to be executed for not being zerker.

Sorry, I appreciate the time you have put into this, but the ideas are simply no good.

The advantage of Guild Wars 2’s system is that support is independent of stats, thus making the support you decide, be custom detailed to your traits and utilities.

By forcing things into stats, you are encouraging passive play and creating even more pigeonholing while simultaneously lowering the skill cap. Currently, as long as players pick their abilities and play actively, they can play their characters as long as they play actively. They can avoid selfish play without being forced to invest in various stats. Making all these changes to cater strictly to a tiny area of the game known as “dungeon speedruns” of which the goal was arbitrarily set by certain players in search of faster loot is not good balancing at all. It’s not like pve is e-sports of any kind that requires that kind of fine tuning. You also have to factor in the damage it does to “non-meta” build that do not wish to invest in various stats.

Your premise is also fundamentally flawed. There’s always going to be something that’s optimal and thus “meta”. All you are really doing is shifting the meta to your own preference. Thus, there is really no argument on either to change so-called meta. One could argue that that means other stat sets are thus “less optimal” but that’s simply a matter of how the game works.

The goal of most pve instances is to destroy the boss. As long as that is the goal, then whatever combinations of stats that cuts the bosses down fastest willl reign supreme and people are still going to exclude base on that. Unless we put in a dungeon that every fight is truly optional.

But what happens when that’s not the goal? I don’t use berserker gear in open world because often times I am ignoring most enemies and would rather just be able to tank hits and get along with my business. It’s lower effort for really little impact. It doesn’t get my goals done any faster if I kill the random enemies faster.

If you want berserker to have competition, then fix conditions.

“When in doubt, blame a ranger”

You can; this is generally the easiest way to do it:

http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/

And when you’re done, use the “get quick link”

As with any build, it’s best to detail what you want to do (small fights, big fights, roaming, sniping random people) as some builds can be good for one thing and be completely useless in another situation.

Since you are referring to mixed trinkets and exotics which seems to be pertaining to wvw I will speak from a wvw perspective. I don’t know about the pvp game mode enough to comment on that.

I have not played warrior or mesmer, but for every other class which includes ranger, I’ve noticed toughness is generally the superior stat unless you are going for a dps build with mostly zerker and offensive traits and you’d like to pad out your survivability a bit, in which case adding a chunk of vitality may stop you from being instagibbed. But it’s not that simple.

Of course, this depends on your ability to deal with conditions so you may want some extra health to be comfortable. Rangers generally do not have as strong condition removal compared to other classes barring certain grandmaster traits so if you’re not taking these, you generally want to have a minimum amount of health. Also, if that other thread in the ranger forum is correct, toughness doesn’t mitigate retaliation so that can be an issue.

You have to realize that the main heal skill (and this is true of many classes) doesn’t scale well with healing power and thus as your health pool increases, your heal will usually not catch up with it. Thus making every unit of health worth more due to more toughness means your heals are more valuable. In losing fights, you may notice yourself not dying but being unable to really refill your life, which tends to result in an eventual death.

Tl;DR Vitality is better in quick fights where you’re just looking to not get instagibbed by thieves or whatnot while toughness tends to be better in longer fights. But given the prevalence of condition damage, having a buffer will save you more. In larger fights where cleanses and heals are more prevalent, toughness becomes increasingly better as you mostly have to worry about direct damage, the opposite is true in small groups and roaming.

It really hasn’t changed much though note that two handed weapons have 2 sigils

These zerg builds should look familiar; examples only, there are numerous minute changes that can be made depending if you want more stability or condition clear.

Damage/frontline
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fVAQJARWlsApWoNDxVI8DRRCRkjNY/Fmedw1BA-TVSBABcpkzMlgXpcoS1foa/B80FswRAQjHBAAXAAyAsMGA-w

Damage/support
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fVAQJARWlsApWoNDxVI8DNRCBl5M+PmfIEXHgLcAA-TVSBABBt/AXK5MTJ4VKHqU9H80FswRAQjHBAAXAAyAsMGA-w

Supportive
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fVAQJASWlsApWoNDxVI8DNRCRl9M8fBI2fQIkCXFAA-TVCEABLcBAiSJmVKP2SJoiq/k0+DtpLAgjAwDPCAyAsMGA-w

It is clear AOE is a big no-no in zergs. This is why no good zergs ever want necros or eles and all those wells/marks and meteors that hit tons of targets are just totally just a figment of people’s imaginations. And eles totally have high hp pools.

It’s okay though. Earlier this week some guardian was complaining that he was getting nearly owned by retaliation when he was spamming staff 1 (which most likely hits more targets over time than barrage too). I think they should make guardian staff 1 immune to retaliation in order to not disrupt my loot pickings.

Also, God forbid that that some skills are not good in certain situations. Afk attacking a zerg with a non-cleaving melee weapon.

Smite condition is a bad skill to take outside of a true meditation build. The reason it works at all is because you could spam it for low cooldown heals and condition remove with some damage with monk’s focus.

CoP isn’t a bad idea though its effectiveness rapidly declines the bigger your team is since it’s a selfish skill. At the same time HTL is sorta so-so anyways. In 1-2 person roaming, it isn’t a bad idea to take COP though please be careful against necros.

In your case, I don’t really recommend Force of Will if your current condi clear only consists of Absolute Resolution. Yes, your extra HP will drain off conditions, but the trouble comes when you are hit by immobilize and stuff. If you do want to keep that, then you may consider CoP in place of HTL. Otherwise, you’ll have to just save your condi clears for when you really need it.

Considering the balancing nightmare with the ones that already exist, don’t hold your breath.

Lol, necro was my first character, and honestly it left a pretty bad impression on Gw2. I do feel for them, though at least they excel in their niches, just not in pve at all. It’s just a class that lacks vision.

In any case, back to the ranger, they really also need a more clear vision beyond “too many players are using longbows”

You’re dealing with fixed content which has been run most likely millions of times of which every single section has been figured out and optimized. Because people know exactly when to use their active defenses, and the game generally doesn’t throw unavoidable sustained damage (which is lame anyways), they can afford to just use active defense.

I don’t get why people always complain anyways. The defense in this game comes from abilities rather than just passive stats. Even in silly wvw where you may need stats vs incidental damage, passive stats often won’t save you if you don’t use your active defenses. It seems like people are ignorant that berserker builds are just nothing but dps and have no form of defense or support or even healing which is blatantly false. It’s one thing if you think the content in the game is too easy, but what isn’t easy when it’s fixed and you’ve done it over and over and over again? That’s not a problem with zerker gear, but a problem with the encounters.

People should be glad that the healing and boons in this game are already so strong out of the box without additional investment, because otherwise they would be forced into investing in them. Wearing zerker gear doesn’t disable your water attunement or healing turret, after all.

To me this is like watching a Super Mario Bros 1 speedrun and complaining that the speedruner does not take any mushroom power ups, and thus they are useless.

tl;dr Stop forcing concepts from other games into this one.

Sorry guys. I guess I’ll stop making passive aggressive comments about how wvw is handled around these parts.

grifflyman.8102:

Blockhead Magee.3092:

For the third week in a row, we’re matched up with a server rated 120+ points over us. They owned the match-up. Three weeks in a row….

I don’t even want to take the time to calculate the odds of us getting them three weeks in a row.

DB was only 80 points below FA, but did that happen. Of course not. Why have even remotely even matches right?

This is how you get people to stop playing the game. I tried to play reset for 20 minutes. It’s impossible to defend anything when you are that out numbered. There is no viable tactic when a zerg can just PvD a gate down.

Hmm, I am on server 11 for reset night and it wasn’t that bad; though we certainly lacked the coverage and I got quite a few bags/wxp.

Of course, I still do see your point; this is pretty awful and one wonders if they want to make it so that wvw dies everywhere except the biggest servers and then toss everyone into EOTM.

“In order to improve the experience to Guild Wars 2 players, we have decided to remove the ranger class from the game. We felt that having 8 classes in the game was too complicated for newer players to handle, and also balancing 7 classes is much easier and lazier than balancing 8. We hope you will enjoy these new exciting changes and do leave your feedback in the forums so it can grow to 100 pages and we won’t read it.. Meanwhile, get ready for a new exciting purchase in the gem store that will allow you to unlock the Ranger class again!”

Crapgame.6519:

ArchonWing.9480:

Retaliation killing rangers? What? I don’t run full glass in zergs (but I still only have 17k hp on ranger), …

I know you are aware of this but that 17k HP on your/our ranger is still more than on our Guardians

Just saying…

Hmm… my guardian has slightly more hp, like 500.

(Okay, I lied; my ranger has 16932 hp because I switched my backpiece to one of those crafter ones and never updated link)
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNAQNBjYD7kRFaYx+VwWQ4axA9B16HofDgm7w0y8f/gSGVTA-T1SBwA7U5I4+D4UH5qyvIKBRpZAvOgFXEAEmg08AAAcEAIDwyWA-w

Guardian…
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fVAQJARWlsApfnNDxVI8DNRCBl1Mw+DPPEXHgLcAA-TFSBABBt/gZKBvS5Xlq/gnugFOEAacFAA4BAEAAB4m3MbezAHd5Gd5G9o1mH9mH9mlBYZLA-w

Though I’m using a food buff so the base would be 600 less. Of course, my ranger has much less vit gear and guardian invests in defensive lines as per the typical zerg builds so yea. :p

However, since I know that toughness does nothing vs retaliation now then I’d really not be that better off than a zerker ranger vs it. I guess that is sorta lame.

Retaliation killing rangers? What? I don’t run full glass in zergs (but I still only have 17k hp on ranger), but I rarely have trouble from retaliation when tossing meteors as ele or grenades as engie as long I don’t toss them into the stacking, buffing train. Compared to that , Rangers don’t even have that great AOE and killing yourself with rapid fire without any reflects is just silly.

The only point of interest is when you recklessly spam barrage into a stacking train in which case you deserve it. And yes, there’s a fire sigil in my bow.

Although retaliation ignoring armor is kinda silly…

This question has plagued me ever since I played wvw on my guardian, so I ended up taking both.

I use purging flames/melandru for my condi removal so I don’t need Pure of Voice. But my opinion isn’t going be too popular, so….

Two handed mastery is better for utility and EM is better for self-sustain due to the incredible synergy with AH. The ability to heal yourself by just hitting a bunch of enemies can make surviving big blobs pretty trivial. 2hm is superior on a hammer because it simply has too much utility, including Mighty Blow, immobolizes, warding rings.

On the GS though, I would say that 2HM is useful but not necessarily better as it’s more of a damage weapon. Interrupting your AA for WW is not a dps increase and trying to spam that off cooldown can be a liability. While leaps are incredibly useful, they aren’t exactly something you spam off cooldown, at least not to the degree of use of what a hammer can do. So it comes down to having more pulls.

What you shouldn’t say is “Take 2HM for empower” because you are not going to be able to spam that off cooldown either in any real fight. There is however, that orb of light heal.

IMO, the more organized your group is, it would lean closer to 2HM because of better might stacking and healing; also if you can coordinate your CC without having some silly ranger knocking people away then you may consider 2HM more.

Spartacus.3192:

ArchonWing.9480:

I ran this silly build last night with a friend and it was pretty durable while still being able to output noticeable damage. If we had more people; I’d use a staff, but alas…

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fVAQNAR7dlsApUo97wVI8DNRCRld+9fBI2fQIkCXFAA-TVSBABBt/QYKNMTJYEHBgrUmVp6P4pbQjLCAAPAgAAIA38mBgjucjucje0azjezjezyAssFA-w

(edited)

The clerics rings are just from rank up chests, I haven’t actually acquired any dedicated clerics gear, so this is all impromptu crap but it was funny kittening people off. I was catapulting a wall and a thief was shooting me with a shortbow to no effect! :p I’d probably want to add more clerics.

We did pretty good in some outnumbered fights though it took me a while to get used to it. Also, being able to shrug off some people’s attacks while walking away is sorta funny.

The most important thing is that Retreat! gives so much swiftness uptime that I just need a little help to attain permaswiftness, which feels a lot better than being stuck with traveler/speed runes.

Thanks for the reply. When you say shrug off attacks, where does the sustain come from? i see you have some extra Heal power so better dodges but is that enough to make it so survivable?

I was surprised myself— those dodge heals do help. I think it’s due to the popularity of condi builds and I have a lot of -condi duration. I’d see like 6-7 condis go on me and do nothing. Plus with the decent armor little tends to hurt me, so the 143/s or so from virtue of resolve and the little bit of extra dodge healing has made it pretty comfortable. Also, factoring in the regen from SY! and the increased aegis blocks and a lot of stuff doesn’t go through, thus only requiring a tiny bit of sustain to make a huge difference. In the end, it seemed like my health would only come under threat if they burst me. Personally, I’d like to get healing power to 600-700 though but I fear going too deeply in it will make me weak vs poison heavy builds.

If I had like 2600 armor after SiN and 20k hp, with trooper runes then the healing power would be pretty useless.

Now granted, you can’t afk like warriors, gotta keep active with energy sigils and use your dodges/heals as needed. If you use some of your active defenses, you can often run into like 4-5 people and pop one of your two stabilities to res or stomp. That’s usually not something I can manage on other builds as well. I’ve been considering Resolute healer because of this.

Also, note that this is strictly for small groups (1-5). Which is why I take “retreat”. Also, this build as you expect has poor dps but with unscathed contender and retreat, you can have a few seconds of burst if you set it up right. In addition retal is pretty much always on in a virtues heavy build so there’s a few hundred there and there.

Naturally as fights grow bigger, aegis grows more and more irrelevant. But as I said above, it’s nice to not be forced to take speed/traveler runes. As fights get bigger, you would take “hold the line” and probably pick up purging flames instead of SY!

Grind is when something becomes a chore, or in worse cases feels like a job.

It’s not always a bad thing; it gets derided when the content involved has no substantial interest, depth or meaning. It generally becomes really bad when it’s perceived to be a integral part of the game. Guild Wars 2 for the most part doesn’t have this beyond high level fractals that gear gate you, but this is pretty subjective. Some of us have very different definitions of required.

- Ignore requested features
- Put in stuff nobody wants
???
Profit
:(

Diminishing returns does not exist on armor! In Guild wars 2, damage is calculated as damage divided by armor. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Damage_calculation. That’s a linear equation. Yes I don’t know the individual weapon ratios and attacker strength but because there’s only one divisor and due to the beauty of algebra it doesn’t matter.

If an enemy did 10 million damage (obviously numbers are made up, but thanks to how math works, the numbers are merely for simplicity) and you have 2000 armor

10,000,000/2000 =5000

If you have 4000 armor, aka twice the armor….

10,000,000/4000 = 2500 (Half as much damage, as you’d expect from doubling your armor. (2000 armor /4000 armor = 1/2) —-> (2500 damage/5000 damage) = 1/2 aka 50% less damage then before.

So what happens with 3200 armor, a 62.5% boost? (2000 armor vs 3200 armor) = 0.625. You should take 37.5 percent less damage.

10,000,000/3200 =3125
3125/5000= 0.625
100%- 62.5%= 37.5%

Now when people talk about diminishing returns, they’re talking about how adding a fixed number to a larger number has less effect. Obviously 100 toughness means more to a person with 2200 armor then it does with someone with 3400 armor. And so they sort of accidentally land on the same conclusion, because it’s true, that’s why stacking a stat too much can be a waste due to stats being limited how they could be acquired. But what’s the difference between that and other stats? 200 power means less when you have 2500 power then when you have 1800 power. 2000 health means a lot more to someone with 12k health as opposed to 23k. So that’s why overstacking a stat can be considered less efficient. In many cases, getting excessive toughness will hurt you elsewhere, such as in damage, and also toughness doesn’t mitigate conditions.

This depends on heavily on class. You can’t just throw out stat benchmarks without knowing that. Classes with better healing or if you take a build that wants to invest in healing power benefit a ton from having more toughness, so this depends on a host of situations and variables that I don’t think it’s proper to set a general rule across all the professions. Obviously a power thief should really not head towards 3k armor at all but exceptions abound everywhere! You obviously don’t need as much armor when you’re roaming, or in small groups as opposed to zerging. And you don’t want to run glass in zergs.

Oh, advice eh?

• Dodge
• Always look around you so don’t just autoattack a door; look for trouble!
• Dip
• Duck
• Dive
• Don’t waste all your big cooldowns on NPCs or stragglers
• Get on voice chat and follow your commander like a fly on kitten
• The #1 cause of death in zergs is bad positioning; no stats will save you. If you look at the map and see that you are opposite to your sea of dots and the enemy is in between you, then you’re doing it wrong. Please resist the urge to come out to “snipe” the zerg without coordination from your group because all the other side sees is “HEY TARGET THAT BAG!”
  • Speaking of commanders. If you choose to follow one, it’s your responsibility to act with group interests in mind and not to act on your own without telling people. If you completely disagree with the commander, feel free to go off on your own group or follow someone else.
    • Do not whine or attempt to create dissent in public because this can only have 1 result— your server will fail. There’s no point to start drama and get farmed when you could be doing the farming. There are too many cases where people complain and could have accomplished something had they just shut up. Exceptions abound if people are being abusive. You fight as one, you win as one, you lose as one. The most important thing is that the group can act decisively.
      • Bullets are cool. Sue me.
• Don’t stand in red circles, if you see them…
• Dodge
• Build in vigor (or energy sigils) as needed so you can have an easier time dodging.
• Keep track of your stunbreaks and damage reduction (protection) and avoidance (blocks, invuls)
• Do not randomly spam AOEs when the enemy is stacked up tightly and buffing themselves. Chances are they will have retaliation, which can be a quick end for you if you don’t pay attention, especially if you are playing a squishier class.
• Eat food. Even low level food is often better than no food. Food with – condition duration is very helpful so you don’t need too many cleanses. Something mediocre like http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Loaf_of_Tarragon_Bread which is dirt cheap can make a difference. It just requires 2 copper (!) and a double click every 1/2 an hour to instantly gain a -14% condition duration reduction and some damage reduction when stunned which is very helpful against hammer trains. Don’t be lazy.
• Use utility consumables too. This isn’t as critical as food; If you think it’s too expensive, then just buy the level 45-60 versions.
• And if you don’t remember, dodge.

Real toxicity was at Scarlet invasions where goals did conflict heavily. I have not witnessed any where around these parts.

I ran this silly build last night with a friend and it was pretty durable while still being able to output noticeable damage. If we had more people; I’d use a staff, but alas…

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fVAQNAR7dlsApUo97wVI8DNRCRld+9fBI2fQIkCXFAA-TVSBABBt/QYKNMTJYEHBgrUmVp6P4pbQjLCAAPAgAAIA38mBgjucjucje0azjezjezyAssFA-w

(edited)

The clerics rings are just from rank up chests, I haven’t actually acquired any dedicated clerics gear, so this is all impromptu crap but it was funny kittening people off. I was catapulting a wall and a thief was shooting me with a shortbow to no effect! :p I’d probably want to add more clerics.

We did pretty good in some outnumbered fights though it took me a while to get used to it. Also, being able to shrug off some people’s attacks while walking away is sorta funny.

The most important thing is that Retreat! gives so much swiftness uptime that I just need a little help to attain permaswiftness, which feels a lot better than being stuck with traveler/speed runes.

Cleric gear has nothing to do with virtues really except for Absolute Resolution but it’s definitely not the only way to run it.

The game plays very differently on different classes. I find that pretty fun.

hybrid.5027:

You say “flaws” as if that was something apparent or true.

The things you see as flaws I see as elegant and good.

So my advice to you would be to think about what the game is and learning to appreciate it, rather than pining for what it is not.

And yea, that’s the thing.

There’s always going to be mechanics players can use to attain max efficiency. Those so called flaws separate better players from not as good ones. And there will always be better choice than others.

CMM.6712:

Home of the “player in game who sees people having fun, goes to the forum to whine and cry and complain and try to get said event/farm/whatever nerfed or taken out of the game.” How dare they have fun in my game I will make sure that something is done about this immediately!

/obvious sarcasm orrrr is it

And then they’ll complain about loot in general.

People get what they sow. Just wait until it turns into a ghost town with enough nerfs and who will be to blame? I’ll just ask my friends to carry through me through dungeons for some easy gold. Doesn’t affect me anyways. :p

Jana.6831:

ArchonWing.9480:

It’s still missing two stats. It’s no better than soldiers at best and worse given any mishaps.

And sure, zerker is best against the trash mobs and if you have time, you should switch; I’m too lazy to do it myself but it still doesn’t change these things. Also, the defense timers mean that killing stuff that much faster isn’t going to mean much unless they overrun the batteries.

Now if you’re defending the turrets, then sure, use zerker.

It’s all situational; surprising, right?

Edit: You can certainly use zerker in the dps zerg. But I think it is still inferior enough to pvt there that I would not suggest it.

It’s not just defending the turrets but the lasers which is a big part of the whole fight. And neither vitality nor toughness helps that much in that fight as when the turrents don’t cleanse and heal and if all other defensive mechanisms fail and you don’t know when to dodge you’d be dead in pvt gear as well.
Not saying that people shouldn’t wear pvt during that fight (is there a “ping your gear” during world boss events anyway?) but it’s less important than people think.

I surely hope there’s no ping gear; that’d take a long while. =p

And sure if you don’t know when to dodge you’ll die in the zerg anyways, but there is a noticeable difference with pvt gear and you are able to tank quite a few hits and continue to dps/reflect away while saving your dodges/defense for when you really need it. This argument doesn’t fly in dungeons because the damage difference is way too high but since crits don’t matter here, soldier is just the better choice.

The point about the megalaser is valid and as I said, you can swap over to zerker gear if you want for easier kills but in my experience most Teq runs are generally decided by how well the group dps’s teq down, in particular in the first phase, although sometimes we screw up a bit on the next burns. I’ve only seen teq fail due to botched laser defenses a handful of times and that was just because the group didn’t have any idea of what to do and was already struggling to damage teq.

Anyhow, my point is just to counter the generalization that pve is only zerker and everyone else should just trash their gear. If you want to tell me that you use zerker and don’t want to invest in pvt gear for just one event (and you shouldn’t) then that’s fine too.

Devildoc.6721:

ArchonWing.9480:

I slightly dislike only having 1 wp but at least it encourages more ressing and discourages dying so casually.

I think it’d be nice if WPs could be built (and destroyed by enemies if the place is lost) like they could in wvw, so there would be more advantage to sticking to one map and ensuring stuff succeeds.

“encourages ressing”

No it doesn’t.

People still say “dead people on the floor just run back you’re not doing any good dead on the floor”

So you waypoint back across the zone, and the event is finished/boss is dead by the time you get back.

There are no guarantees, but I’ve seen more ressing happen.

Obviously if it’s too dangerous to hard-res people, people aren’t going to do it or they’ll risk it failing completely.

Jana.6831:

ArchonWing.9480:

Also, what about open world? You don’t need zerker for that. In some world bosses such as teq, zerker is actually bad against teq himself.

Zerker isn’t even bad against Teq himself as the base stat is power, just like soldier’s. And since the trashmobs can still be critically hit zerker is the “better choice” for the entire fight – unless you have time to swap gear or have bad people at the turrets, but in that case the fight is doomed no matter what gear.

It’s still missing two stats. It’s no better than soldiers at best and worse given any mishaps.

And sure, zerker is best against the trash mobs and if you have time, you should switch; I’m too lazy to do it myself but it still doesn’t change these things. Also, the defense timers mean that killing stuff that much faster isn’t going to mean much unless they overrun the batteries.

Now if you’re defending the turrets, then sure, use zerker.

It’s all situational; surprising, right?

Edit: You can certainly use zerker in the dps zerg. But I think it is still inferior enough to pvt there that I would not suggest it.

Astralporing.1957:

Dalanor.5387:

Astralporing.1957:

NoTrigger.8396:

Astralporing.1957:

IndigoSundown.5419:

maha.7902:

Roles are separate from gearing.

This one statement, if people would only get it, would end most of the anti-meta discussions.

It would not, because this is the core of the problem. In the current game system, there’s no point for most of the gear sets to even exist in pve (and yet Anet keeps introducing more and more). They need to decide whether they really want that multitude of choices (but then they’ll all need to mean something, and be useful), or if they want the action system that makes most of them irrelevant (in which case they need to severely limit the options available).

wvw

Is not PvE.

It’s part of the game.

sPvP is also part of the game, and yet it can have separate stat sets. If there are some stat sets that exist for WvW, not PvE, then they should be acquirable in WvW, and WvW only.
Currently, it’s clear that for the majority of the game the action combat system and armor stat sets idea just do not work well together.

That doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. All stats “work” in either game mode. Just because it doesn’t work for speedruns doesn’t mean anything. I use my wvw gear for open world, so I don’t care for this having to acquire wvw only gear to play wvw.

Also, what about open world? You don’t need zerker for that. In some world bosses such as teq, zerker is actually bad against teq himself.

Speedrunning dungeons is merely a small part of the game. Not every stat set has to fit in the meta, as shown by Anet introducing new stat combos for the sake of completeness such as sinister and nomad.

These are all solid ideas. Badges and Karma are a bit troublesome because they are just simply overflowing.

I think the RNG issue is also a pretty bad one, but I am not sure how to solve it. Maybe fractals could drop ascended components like bolts of damask so it becomes less of an “all or nothing” thing.

I also think that ascended earrings should also be (rare) drops from chests.

Also, what do people think about 4 exotics in forge giving the possibility of ascended, or being able to mystic forge ascended jewelery into a new one?

Stooperdale.3560:

ArchonWing.9480:

Stooperdale.3560:

ArchonWing.9480:

This is 100% a player issue; and not an Anet issue. If players can’t tolerate people playing differently, then that’s their fault and they get what they deserve. And nobody is obliged to do any event anyways.

It is a GW2 design issue. GW2 is designed so that players share common goals to get shared rewards. The bigger the challenge the bigger the reward, theoretically. However this breaks down far too often and lets players get high rewards for little challenge. As soon as this happens some players target these rewards mercilessly and the common goals are discarded in favor of personal gold.

Players should be obliged to complete events (or face similar challenges) to get the highest rewards.

I think the game is designed that players can share common goals to get common rewards. But if they don’t, that’s their choice. In the end, a lot of players play for personal gain, and the developers most likely have realized this better than many others and made cooperation more efficient in most areas of the game, but not usually required.

The correct word is to encourage, not to oblige people to play how you think they should.

And in reality, people are cooperating together to ensure decent rewards, so I don’t see a problem. The only “failures” I see is when people refuse to work together and fail to tolerate different styles of play. Their fault. If it wasn’t, then why are there so many successful maps that are operating very efficiently? They’re doing something right, and others are doing it wrong.

Working as intended. 100% L2p issue. 100% L2t issue. You won’t always get your way, so compromise with people on your map. Failing that, then use the LFG system. Arenanet has already provided the tools for success, so failure can only be attributed to refusal to take advantage. The only issue is the definition of success.

Farmers always say “play as you want” and the answer is always the same – “play as you want but get rewarded appropriately”. Players should get top reward for top level challenging content. That is the encouragement. They should not get top reward for shoveling dirt. That is the problem. There is no learn to play issue as it is just shoveling dirt.

The game is not a success when the exciting, thrilling, content that players are enjoying is probably less exciting than digging up a plant in Farmville.

And people are making more by doing events and “shoveling dirt” in the downtime. Coordinating an efficient farm is considered “skill” too. But of course, it’s easier to simplify everything into unpleasant buzzwords. If you want rewards and challenge, speedrunning dungeons which is the hardest pve content anyways, is still going to beat anything else so it’s still not a problem.

Also, the reward system has many uses, and one of them is to give incentive for people to play the new area. It seems to have worked, so I would dispute this being a failure.

I would guess…

WvW only (Guardian):

(Hey, the build site doesn’t have any asc nomad trinkets. Is that true?)

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fVAQNApeWlsApWoNDxVI8DNRCBl5M+P2foFl4yA0AA-TVCEABL8EAGUJIvq/Yz+DWp0zJlB6qPAgDBwDnAAyAssAA-w

Mace is of course not needed. You would replace the symbol/mace traits with something more conventional.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fVAQJARWlsApWoNDxVI8DNRCRl9M8fBI2fQIUCXFAA-TVCEABL8EAGUJIvq/Yz+DWp0zJlB6qLAgDBwDXAAyAssAA-w

Engineer

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fdAQJAqelUUpPrtbx6KseRiaBNqzE6bkxAIyPmlPFBA-T1xGABA8AAwTJYsq/I0+DLp8jgTAwr6BIDwyCA-w

Hopefully you’ll be grouped with some responsible guardians.

The main advantage of these things is while you have less healing than a cleric, you aren’t as squishy as them due to the lack of vitality. Of course, your damage sucks even more , so you’ll need to find people to stack might on you. I would use a bloodlust sigil to compensate— it’s not like you’re going to down anyways.

I slightly dislike only having 1 wp but at least it encourages more ressing and discourages dying so casually.

I think it’d be nice if WPs could be built (and destroyed by enemies if the place is lost) like they could in wvw, so there would be more advantage to sticking to one map and ensuring stuff succeeds.

Stooperdale.3560:

ArchonWing.9480:

This is 100% a player issue; and not an Anet issue. If players can’t tolerate people playing differently, then that’s their fault and they get what they deserve. And nobody is obliged to do any event anyways.

It is a GW2 design issue. GW2 is designed so that players share common goals to get shared rewards. The bigger the challenge the bigger the reward, theoretically. However this breaks down far too often and lets players get high rewards for little challenge. As soon as this happens some players target these rewards mercilessly and the common goals are discarded in favor of personal gold.

Players should be obliged to complete events (or face similar challenges) to get the highest rewards.

I think the game is designed that players can share common goals to get common rewards. But if they don’t, that’s their choice. In the end, a lot of players play for personal gain, and the developers most likely have realized this better than many others and made cooperation more efficient in most areas of the game, but not usually required.

The correct word is to encourage, not to oblige people to play how you think they should.

And in reality, people are cooperating together to ensure decent rewards, so I don’t see a problem. The only “failures” I see is when people refuse to work together and fail to tolerate different styles of play. Their fault. If it wasn’t, then why are there so many successful maps that are operating very efficiently? They’re doing something right, and others are doing it wrong.

Working as intended. 100% L2p issue. 100% L2t issue. You won’t always get your way, so compromise with people on your map. Failing that, then use the LFG system. Arenanet has already provided the tools for success, so failure can only be attributed to refusal to take advantage. The only issue is the definition of success.

Solution to a nonexistent problem— honestly what are we trying to solve besides “I don’t like how people play?”

This is 100% a player issue; and not an Anet issue. If players can’t tolerate people playing differently, then that’s their fault and they get what they deserve. And nobody is obliged to do any event anyways.

It’s not that bad, but it does give a bad first impression.

It’s pretty bad at the start because being forced to have only 1 skill for a while, is pretty lame.

It starts to get good around level 20. Level ups give you stuff you can actually use, and other interesting tidbits as you level that are helpful for newer or more casual players. The annoyance of trait locks tends to make the last 20 levels kind of a drag as you’re just waiting to get to 80 at that point.

I do like the existence of the leveling backpack though. The ineffable stuff though is another story.

I think the progression is actually well designed in the middle but the beginning and end could use more help.

Overall, it is much better than post-trait unlock leveling and adds some novelty to leveling, but still leaves much to be desired.