Guild Wars 2

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Guhracie.3419:

I’m confused about this. Do you mean that there is a general consensus that most traits aren’t good/worth having?

I’m Ranger. According to people I ask? 90% of them which don’t begin with “Signet” and end in “Beastmaster” are worthless.

That’s not true at all. There’s plenty of strong ranger traits, such as any of the minors in wilderness survival, spotter, steady focus, survival of the fittest, eagle eye. But they tend to be clustered all in several trees and for some reason bad rangers make builds that tend to avoid all of them.

Well, obviously “play how you want” can’t be taken completely literally because you cannot satisfy everyone’s desire. But I guess it was interpreted as being rewarded to playing the way you want within a certain range of playstyles. Surely, we can’t have people idling in Lion’s Arch and being rewarded for just walking around (though you will get a little exploration xp).

Thus far, Gw2 has generally allowed players choosing a variety of content to facilitate their progression and that’s a good thing. The trouble comes when certain types of actvies are easier than other ones and are rewarded a lot more. Or a certain activity is nerfed, creating some kind of disruption or inequality.

I agree that dungeon and high end pve skins should only be gotten by playing the content. Likewise, I think that pvp exclusive stuff is also fine as well.

— Talks about the hazards of living in a fantasy world
— Projects an opinion into a group of 3 million people as some kind of monolithic entity.

And also, a pvp armor set that can only be gotten by playing pvp? Shocking. I don’t pvp and this would be like me complaining that there are pvp achievements in the dailies.

In any case, people can and will play different modes of the game. But it’s more convenient to separate them into opposing forces. There are certainly many things wrong with this game, but on the other hand I feel there’s too much of a desire to pounce on stuff and attack without really even considering things.

I believe transmute would convert incoming fear into stability. If that happened, then yes , they could be temporarily immune to CC. But you wouldn’t actually see the fear happen and the stability would pretty much just flash by.

I really have no idea.

Well, the adept traits are cheap enough for anyone, but yea you may be better off living off minor traits for quite a while. Ranges can for example, grab the wilderness survival minor trait for more endurance regen, guardians should grab vigorous precision, and thieves should grab the acrobatics minor trait (swiftness on dodge). Engies can make good use of speedy kits, and the minor is decent too.

I made a hyperbole about what if tags suddenly went up to 300g…. and this crap happens.

Honestly, I think I should just buy one for lulz but I don’t know. >.>

That’s just a symptom of the issue. You can’t force guilds to stay on a server or go to less populated ones.

WvW is coverage dominated and stale. The game mode hasn’t really changed too much besides bloodlust, so as one would expect serious players are consolidating on the higher tiers to get fights and stuff espeically as populations shrink.

Until they can breath life into this mode via new maps and/or mechanics, the overall population will get smaller and eventually just leave behind the hardcore and the occasional karma train that comes out to play (although they may be heading to eotm anyways), meaning that people would continue to stack on servers that still have activity still.

And that’s another problem. If you play during off hours, you may want to move to somewhere where you won’t have to pvd all the time. And that as many can see is a spiral into the situation we’re getting.

Unless of course, you’ve learned to realize what PPT really is.

The sigil of energy issue was truth in the past, but sigils of different types no longer share cooldowns. Swap away and dodge heal even more.

And yea, since you have so much regeneration via symbol of faith. Runes of the Water are the best choice by adding more flat heals, of which you can use more.

All and all, I have to admit I wasn’t that impressed at first, thinking it was just a bunker build but then again your build synergizes with itself and accomplishes its goal and you seemed to have considered the more standard alternatives when designing your build. So you seem to have put a lot of time optimizing it, and that I think is what makes a good build. A “true” healing guardian build.

The other point of excitement is healing breeze. I can’t part with shelter because of its blocking ability, but then since your healing is spread out instead of centralized, you actually can afford to use it. If it fails, well, it is just not as critical of a loss.

1.) Yep, I’m mocking your complaint about length.
2.) Well, clearly the point of contention here what we consider what is too tanky. You set off a cutoff limit at precision being in any stat, which I found to be arbitrary.

3.) Well duh of course my build has no cleave either. My point is that necros don’t have cleave so they have to catch up in other ways. But of course you conveniently ignored that sentence, so there’s no point arguing. Even a guardian that cleaves several opponents for several hundred damage each per hit in a zerg means that your single target damage is going to struggle to keep up.

And if you haven’t realized yet, that well is completely for utility. I picked shorter cooldown/unblockable marks/piercing life blasts to make up for my lack of contribution during cooldowns.

4.) You have control over where you wells go. Obviously in my situation where I only have one well there isn’t that big of a difference, but I prefer to have clutch control over such a thing. When I run 2-3 well builds I think, it’s very advantageous to have them pop wherever I want them to be.

5.) My point is you can’t just flat out say people are wrong when they described their experiences— you’re basically claiming our experiences are wrong when they’re most likely just different from yours. [Of course, you ignored this point, but whatever]. I mean this all started because you decided somehow that precision and ranged wells automatically disqualify a frontline build without elaboration, thus all the text walls happened. You then went off on talking about how you not dying in the frontline means you’re doing it wrong, which of course doesn’t make sense, so I decided to poke fun at you.

As for the hammer train comment, I thought you meant it was just relegated to those two purposes. Maybe you can clarify.

Well, that’s interesting.

Considering the ease of procing might this is issue particularly against guardians.

Afya.5842:

Hammer train is not the damage that kill people, it’s the CC. Most of the damage comes from backline like necro and ele. (That’s why I suggest leaving the frontline job to the hammer classes and we necro do our own things.) There is no point to hummer bomb the frontline knowing they all have stability on. As a backline you will see the whole picture clearer. You will see your team’s hammer train try to cut off enemies front and backline. And same for the enemy. As a backline your job would be to move along with the frontline, bomb enemies’ backline. But you have to move from the outer radius, not go head to head like your backline.

The CC is indeed very deadly, but in and of itself won’t kill anyone unless there’s a bit of direct damage dealt. You certainly can rely on the backline to clear people out though remember that they themselves are also being pressured by the enemy train so it’s not as straightforward. I’ve recalled many an instance, especially on my engineer, where she got hit by a bunch of hammer train hitting like wet noodles and promptly just stunbreaked/condi cleared away and thanked them for the protection proc while they were just too slow to even manage to chase her sidestepping away. I like to laugh when I get hit by a <2000 dmg multi-hitting whirling wrath (total!). Getting hit by modest 3-4k life blasts though… that hurts.

Don’t get me wrong. I think necros lack the autoattack cleave and mobility to keep up with the warriors and guardians, so they’ll need to compensate elsewhere. Still, this is a thread about frontlining so if that’s what the OP wants, that’s what they should get. It’s entirely possible that I have overcompensated in certain areas, but at least I didn’t tell anyone to use my crappy 2.3k armor spec. :p

Ascii’s wellmancer build is IMO one of the most balanced builds I’ve ever seen and contains what you want while being extremely tanky.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Ascii-s-WvW-Wellomancer-Build/2499132

Although since the build was posted, the ferocity nerf may have weakened a bit, but the general trait spread and utility selection is still sound. The main purpose of it is for wvw, but it can be used in general zergy content, with the exception of world bosses that cannot be crit— though even in cases like Teq you may just go on turret defense duty and be highly useful.

And yea don’t use staff in dungeons. It is no good considering the mechanics of them.

zapv.8051:

ArchonWing.9480:

snip text limit

Gosh what a long post, you talk a lot about yourself at the top, which is off topic. Then you say that a guard with 4% crit chance is better at dealing damage than a necro with 4% crit change (actually 9 due to 2 in curses), which is laughable. Then you say wells do bad damage without damaging gear, that’s true, but then again soldiers is the 6th highest effective power in the game ahead of gearsets like knights that you used in your build.

If that’s a long post, I fear for the literacy levels in this country.

Well, duh. How does it make any sense if I don’t detail my experiences to determine where I get my build from? lol. Maybe I should just pass my anecdotes as truth. My analogy is that I don’t even feel like stacking so much defense on a guardian who has such low base health, and they’re arguably obliged to stack on more defense. My point isn’t that a guardian in full ptv could do more damage than a necro, but if you’re not taking a necro for more damage, then why bother? If you’re going to build a brick, then a guardian’s going to provide more to the group. Oh sure, you have chill and corruption and maybe modest damage?

Oh and btw bro, you don’t have any cleave. That’s a problem with necromancers atm and already puts our damage potential behind those classes with swinging hammers. But at least you have locust swarm to make up for that. I can respect for you for that. And lol, enjoy your 9% crit chance.

The second paragraph is a mess, your basically saying that you take ranged wells so you can strip stability early, which you still won’t do because there are other boons ahead of it. You also say wells will overwrite water fields if you don’t have ranged wells. That’s dumb, as you could just as easily overwrite them with ranged wells. Your last sentence in the paragraph perfectly explains why ranged wells don’t matter. It is far to chaotic and mobile for your placement to be that bad regardless.

Common sense?

Water fields go on you. You know. Front line? You? Stacked on the hammer train? Cast on enemy coming at you. Not just at the hammer train? Okay, let’s not even talk about stability if it failed. What boons wouldn’t you want to strip?

Nexed post is also wrong. If your not on the front line and getting killed your doing it wrong. Your much safer because zergs have to focus the hammer train. That is the point of the hammer train, either it draws all the attention or it walks all over you.

Getting killed means you rally people so I have no idea what you’re talking about. You will obviously get killed more but I just thought it was funny how you phrased it.

It’s wrong because you say it’s wrong? That’s what most of your post is about. Your experience is different from others. Well, guess what, unlike you, I never made such nonsensical assumptions to begin with. On my server, the hammer train also bites off the tail of the enemy train for the overextenders, so calling it a mere distraction would be quite the disservice.

At 2000 hours played I still manage to forget to swap weapons and thus spam weapon skills for the wrong weaponset.

Most of us do stupid crap often, so no need to worry.

And some personal story parts are unusually more rough than others. The difficulty varies widely and can throw inexperienced players off.

How about making Life Blast piercing by default so necros can have an easy way of doing something other than single target direct damage?

osiris.4623:

ArchonWing.9480:

The Siphon traits are just so… pointless.

It’s just weird to have so many traits devoted to healing, which is nice, but then have a class mechanic where these things don’t work anyways.

Vampiric Master trait is a must have for Minion Masters. I use it. It adds 80 damage to each minion attack, the actual siphon healing is just incidental.

That’s actually true. I wasn’t even thinking about minions.

zapv.8051:

To archon and nexed, you aren’t frontlining if you have precision as a stat on any of your gear. Same with ranged wells, no point if your actually frontlining. Also, most people in a pug zerg aren’t running -condition duration so chilling darkness is still 25 seconds of chill.

To afya, no we aren’t built for front lining, but you can do it. Decent stability uptime, warhorn and wells make necros better than most classes at it just not as good as warriors or guardians.

But I do, and typically don’t die so I’ll just be there. I can’t even entertain the thought of doing pvt on pvt on my guardian, much less a necro. I actually run with even less armor since I don’t run melandru and nor do I have full ascended, but I figured I wanted to suggest a spec that is sturdy regardless of player reflexes. 2700 armor for a light class with the inherently decent health plus guard stacks would accomplish that and reliable access to stability and the occasional protection would do that. Personally, when I was new to wvw, I came in full zerker armor, and obviously that was kinda disastrous. I added more and more soldier gear to compensate and many hours later, I have a good idea on what the threshold is given my own abilities (which are terrible) so I see no reason to think people could play even glassier and win.

I’m pretty sure if I’m bringing in a 4% crit chance necro to fight, I’d be better off on my guardian spamming staff autoattacks— I mean in reality wells without some damage gear are pretty terrible at damage especially suffering since nobody’s gonna stand in there for 6 whole ticks. But necros excel in single target damage pressure and ranged condition management. IMO, if you discount this then I see no point in playing necro to begin with. And yes, Necros aren’t as good as Guardians and warriors at frontlining for many reasons, but one of these things is mobility. Necros don’t have gap closers so in order to sync your attacks with the guardians and warriors leaping in and beating you to the punch, that range is needed.

Also, no ranged wells? I also have to contest that. Being able to cast corruption as you’re coming in gives out a better chance of ruining their stability. If you’re casting on approach that may already be too late; and don’t forget wells have a cast time too. You just need one pulse of it. Casting it on yourself? Well, wouldn’t it suck to overwrite a water field with one of your dark fields wouldn’kitten Fights are already mobile and chaotic enough that I don’t think spending all the time for perfect placement and timing is worth it.

Necros have no end to ways in which they can buy time so your allies can heal you. It’s not like I would advocate full zerker melt in 2 seconds builds, though arguably someone would probably disagree with me there too.

And Nexed’s post sounds right to me. I think you’re actually safer @ the frontline due to the all the healing being dropped, the buffs being provided which by and far compensate for the necro’s complete lack of reliable healing. And you have FITG to back yourself up. I mean what’s the point of such a huge life pool if you can’t replenish it? And I’m merely on a pleb server in a pug zerg yet the pug guardians and eles can still do it. And yes lower tiers have blobs of people too. Pretty sure an organized group would be even better. Though actually reading that post made me reconsider chill a bit.

Muchacho.2390:

The life siphon trait for wells may be useful if you want to be in frontline.
I think something like a 0/0/2/6/6 build could work rather well.

I’ve tried it. It’s not that great because by going 6 in SR you’re going for a shroud build… which will negate your siphons. You’ll be basically contradicting your own build. I would prefer a 0/2/2/4/6 build where you take ritual of protection for your wells— I think that will do a lot more than the puny heals plus group protection is never a bad thing.

Brutal Augus.5917:

Anyone who thinks a guardian is the easiest class to play, obviously has not played one. Btw, altruistic healing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Your honestly better off with monks meditation so that contemplation of purity not only cleanses all condis, but heals based off healing power. Pair that with save yourselves and you get a guardian that can cleanse everyone’s condis without nuking themselves. If you run that with 5 trait points into your virtue line it will also allow you a nice burst. Do the math and make the comparisons and you will see what I mean.

Make a warrior OP, they have it made in the shade. I hear Anet sends them free piña coladas everytime they reset a fight too.

We’re talking about zergs here.

And TBH if you’re running COP/SY/Monk’s focus in a zerg, well, that’s why you’re having trouble.

In the end, I actually vote Necro as long as you know how to enter Death Shroud. Thing with them is that you don’t need to be at the front line and endanger yourself. Just pew pew pew and you have tons of hp buffer. Just set fast ground targeting, point at zerg and randomly push buttons. Failing that, there’s lol plague form.

This list is totally inaccurate and biased the game is dead.

/proceed to insert an inaccurate and biased anecdote as truth. Because it’s reality and everyone else is in denial.

I’ll agree to it as long as necros get a greatsword to fly out of every fight.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fRAQNBIhZakjmebLuxmG+bUMMIymKDMRFg6tRTC-TlCEAB2s/gTKx2SJITKPM4BAooaJtpPAgjAQjqa8wpAgMALbB-w

It is using tankier gear then what I’d normally run, but I already have little trouble surviving anywhere in a zerg. I’m not sure about the shrouded removal trait, but since I can only remove condis with my heal, I figure that may be a good choice.

Spectral Wall+ Well of Corruption = lots of angry people. :p Protection is nice too and spectral wall isn’t bounded by the 5 person aoe limit.

The Siphon traits are just so… pointless.

It’s just weird to have so many traits devoted to healing, which is nice, but then have a class mechanic where these things don’t work anyways.

You certainly can rely on others to give you what you need. I think a lot of people do think too selfishly (including myself) since no single player wins big fights but IMO a guardian would be wasting a lot of their talents with stability and condition removal. The thing here is that people can’t break you out of stun unless they have shielded mind.

Unlike some people around here, I do believe you can cover a particular niche with this build if you run with people you trust or just play with a lot. You’ll also need to position yourself properly (no don’t run first in). On the other hand, you can also retrait at any time out of combat so it’s also possible for people to just use this build for a fight or two.

As of late, as I’ve posted elsewhere, it’s getting harder for me to go deep into virtues because the valor tree just gives so much raw stats and abilities that one can’t really get elsewhere. The traits that rely on courage/resolve have rather long cooldowns and yes, Renewed focus does bypass these problems but it can be rather rough in extended fights. The thing is mace doesn’t have much mobility or control so you need to be more durable because you take more hits to the face— hammer has protect and gs has leaps and pulls.

But that’s just how I feel. If you’ve gone around trying these builds and find that you are keeping people up while staying alive, then it obviously can work fine. And healing power is great with dodge rolls/mace/heal sigils so you definitely have my approval over there.

Lucente.5071:

Soooo i saw this thread and i had to post on it.

Mace + Shield is not a good combo for wvw. You are much better off with hammer and CCing other players. I also play a similar build, same 0/0/2/6/6 however the traits are way different. Remember poison beats healing and you dont have a lot of condi clear.

It has its uses. Yes, hammer is better for frontlining due to its CC, but this isn’t a frontline build. OP wants to play the type of guardian that follows a little behind and delivers boons and heals to the meatshield in front of him. He keeps them alive a bit longer and thus stays alive as well. Though IMO, there needs to be a bit more damage for stuff like this.

Anyhow…

Well the thing here is that light fields I feel are too disruptive. The thing is symbol of faith is persistent so there’s a bigger chance you’ll pop a lousy light field instead. The most reliable heals you have are from Mace AA and dodge heals. Both of which benefit greatly from healing power. I think you can make good use of light fields, however I actually think making the symbols are disadvantageous for this reason.

Also, you’re using only light fields to cure conditions? If you’re talking about those cleansing bolts, those things are incredibly unreliable. Poison will ruin your healing, and that hurts your overall contribution. You’re also lacking Stand your ground, so you have no stun break and reliant completely on courage for stability.

I usually run with more damage and also prefer focus for my own reasons, but if I wanted to focus on healing, here’s how I’d approach it:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fVAQNApeWlsApVo9CxZI0ENRCRk1M2frlXHscA-TVSDABO8EAMUJ4n6Dga/BYU/JLleAcIAk4EAMqyAA-w

I prefer to give more balanced support but ultimately I think AH allows you to survive even longer so you’ll give out more healing in the longrun— AH empower heal is just too much for me to consider giving up on this sort of build, also the pulsing healing from symbol of faith would be pretty strong too.

Anyhow, I’m glad people are trying other builds rather than the typical stuff. Thanks for putting the effort in to write your thoughts in instead of just going “Omg this doesn’t work”.

PopeUrban.2578:

ArchonWing.9480:

I don’t necessarily agree about it, since traits arrive so late in this new system that I wasn’t even factoring them in until level 60. If anything the inability to play with traits earlier has made some even more clueless.

Take my thief, who has been the only character I’ve rolled since. I pretty much just bought the ones that I needed and haven’t really tried anything else.

That’s my point though, in relation to new players. You bought the ones you needed, but in order to know which ones you needed you had to carefully consider everything on offer. Well, you didn’t, because like myself you’ve been playing long enough that it was pretty easy to figure out your optimal build.

New players aren’t as well versed in GW2’s trait mechanics, which are a little complicated and esoteric in comparison to other MMOs they may have played before which usually just handhold them through a tree to prevent them from making bad or useless choices by requiring complimentary traits as a prerequisite for other traits lower on the tree.

Having spent time last month helping some new people with builds I can confidently say, at least in my experience, it has caused new players to be a lot more aware of how important traits are to defining a build, and as they hit 80 they’re much better at timing, dodging, and making the best use of their hotbar than the new players I had before that change. In the old system, newbies often bought whatever karma armor was close to their level, chose a bunch of random and unrelated traits, and later wondered why they sucked because they never had pause to think about their build. This frequently gave me headaches as I routinely found myself explaining very basic things to level 80 newbies who often had to completely re-learn the game, often had to purchase new gear, and didn’t even have a concept of “build” until they were already in content that expected them to know these things.

It’s harder for newbies now, for sure, but the end result I’ve seen is newbies being excited to go on grand adventures for specific traits they theorycrafted, and seriously weighing the pros and cons of different gear stats as early as level 15. This has resulted in an average higher skill level for newbies, and a more interesting and freeform approach to encounters for veterans.

Sure, in comparison it sucks for those of us who raised mains in the old system, and feels like a chore, but for a lot of people there was a distinct lack of personally meaningful content while leveling, and that was changed for the better. The leveling experience has definite objectives that are more personally rewarding and under your control whereas before you just completed zones and got boxes of stuff that may or may not be useful.

I’ve only received the opposite reaction. Most of the new players either want you to hand them a build or just want to get it over as quickly as possible. A lot of people don’t care about optimizing builds when leveling. And honestly, when traits aren’t available for half the leveling process, and it’s since it’s all stacked towards the end, the choices made when training aren’t really meaningful. In fact when I leveled, I often just picked minor traits and ignored the trait system completely. I ended up googling stuff, instead of being able to test and find out stuff on my own. On my 4 other characters that didn’t have to unlock traits, I came up with many different variations to check out what worked, and what was right for my playstyle so I’d already know what to get by 80. But now, I can’t even access GM traits until 80, so it’s all just speculation for those.

And honestly, the leveling process does very little to teach one had to play a class, considering you don’t really need any specific build for open world content. Now don’t get me wrong. A totally green player that has to master the basics of gameplay can learn about how to move, to dodge, and to do events. But even factoring that in, this kind of thing has little replay value beyond the first character.

IMO, it’s far more efficient to teach people by ramping up the difficulty curve. The jump from pve open world content to even explorable dungeon content is a rather huge leap. Making mid-level and high level zones harder would force people to learn to make a better build and take advantage of class mechanics.

Finally, not everyone likes pve being pushed upon us. I could argue with the old trait system, wvw was still more friendly for sub-80 players, but with these trait changes, uplevels are pretty much confined to leeching in an eotm train. I mean sure they were always at a disadvantage, but more so these days.

Behellagh.1468:

No, this goes back to commander resentment. It use to be anybody with 100g could wear the taco and insist players follow them. Then it was changes to 100g and 250 BoH so you actually had to play, in theory, WvW to earn one. Changing it to account bound sort of forces that issue.

Now the OP was planning on rewarding random players a commander’s tag. That’s like the military promoting random strangers to General for winning a raffle IMO. Didn’t have a more suitable reward that was both prize worthy and pricey other than mailing them gold and deal with the gold police.

According to OP

My dilemma came from the fact I was trying to reward people on my server for leadership and stocked up on a few for prizes.

So it wasn’t “random people”. Sending them gold would not guarantee they would use it on a tag.

In any case, it’s just a blue icon in a video game with some organizational features. Technically every PC is a pact leader, but you know. And furthermore, tags can be useful in pve too.

sevenDEADLY.5281:

It costs nothing to respec. Just how lazy of a person do you intend on being?

Even more so.

But really, it’s an interface improvement and it was in the last game. Things should go forward in terms of UI. It’s the same reason why we don’t use DOS anymore for daily computing.

Behellagh.1468:

Foghladha.2506:

Behellagh.1468:

If you were planning on selling them then why hold on to them? If you promised one to someone why didn’t you mail it when you made the promise? Why by 5 in the first place? If I had 500 gold laying around I certainly wouldn’t buy 5 of these.

As for the change, probably the old “must do content to get reward” mantra even though BoH drops (or dropped, do they still drop) from achievement chests.

Did you read what I wrote? They are Prizes for a charity event that takes place this Fall, the ExtraLife Charity Event. I was holding onto them for that event.

If they were for some event occurring in the future then why buy them with such a lead time? You couldn’t remember to save 500g and 1250 BoH and not spend them until the event was over?

Hindsight is 20/20. At the time, that seemed to be an okay thing to do.

If the change was instead to increase the book to 300g and OP could no longer afford that would you have criticized the poster for not buying them in advance? Plus it’s an issue of trust. There’s no guarantee people will intentionally or unintentionally spend the gold and not have 500g lying around— with 5 books lying around he can’t do anything else with them for the most part.

He certainly didn’t expect the game to suddenly change the rules on such an issue when nobody asked for it.

Should we not store anything in our bags or inventory in the fear that it may randomly become account bound some day?

In any case, it’s why I propose the things be vendorable. The badges will be gone forever, but at least the trouble from these fringe incidents can be mitigated a bit

PopeUrban.2578:

ArchonWing.9480:

Vol.7601:

Doesn’t take long to get 3g and 20 SP

That’s not the point. Of course it can be easily worked around, but it’s still not good design and that option might as well not exist.

This could be a minor trait that nobody uses and costs like 10 silver and it’d be just as silly.

I disagree. I think that cashing in for trait unlocks and having infinite free trait respecs any time you’re out of combat is a vastly superior system to the old system which actively prevented you from doing build swaps without going to town (or buying a gem store item)

Permanent unlocks are always a better system than constant cash sinks, and the ability to build swap on the fly allows them to make much more variant and interesting content that requires you to swap things out now and then similar to how GW1 worked.

That’s not my point. I don’t have a problem with purchasing the skill either, but the post I’m replying too dismissed the OP’s original concern that the unlock requirement was unreasonable. I doubt 3g and 20SP is of any relevance to anyone that plays the game often so that would just be telling something they already know. Basically, we have one choice that works, but the other choice is highly debatable. Just saying that one choice works is no reason to assume the other choice can’t be tweaked.

I won’t disagree free traiting anywhere has been a good thing, but it could be better I think.

Yes, it’s more expensive/harder than it used to be, but this resulted in new players actually carefully thinking about builds, wheras before we had a bunch of braindead 80s running around with no idea what any of their traits or stats did.

I don’t necessarily agree about it, since traits arrive so late in this new system that I wasn’t even factoring them in until level 60. If anything the inability to play with traits earlier has made some even more clueless.

Take my thief, who has been the only character I’ve rolled since. I pretty much just bought the ones that I needed and haven’t really tried anything else.

That said, I agree that no trait unlock challenges should be on the WvW maps. This is okay for map completion as legendary acquisition is assumed to be a thing you do after you have “finished” your character, but asking people to go to WvW for a trait challenge is asking people who probably haven’t finished their first build to PvP, and that’s a bad idea.

I think if it’s ok if the task is practical to do solo, like the side events in the borderlands that don’t impact things much. The overgrown grub is specifically hard to take down and having people focus on that can have detrimental effects on the server effort.

Another alternative is to offer multiple options. Don’t like wvw? Well you have these other choices, and you just need to pick one.

Oh, I read it wrong. That’s a pointless change! I thought it meant 1 book for 1 account.

Then it would be a good idea to at least be able to sell it back to the vendor and recover the lost gold.

I don’t like this very much. By making it soulbound it served as a gold sink and to prevent people from trivially putting it on every uplevel they have. Now every fool, including myself, will consider getting one just for lulz.

The only way to resolve this is to add speciality tags which have a gold value + some other unlock ability.

Failing this, redundant ones should be reassigned to have a vendor value of 100g to be sold back.

Vol.7601:

Doesn’t take long to get 3g and 20 SP

That’s not the point. Of course it can be easily worked around, but it’s still not good design and that option might as well not exist.

This could be a minor trait that nobody uses and costs like 10 silver and it’d be just as silly.

Breaks are good! It allows people to catch up and digest the content and developers can spend time thinking about future content. Rapid fire two week releases regardless of situation is why the first living story season was so lackluster.

And while not perfect, season two has proven to be of a higher quality. So I think this is a good way to approach things.

It is irresponsible to create bad design and then hold people responsible for it. It would be like if there’s a bug that causes backstab to do 5x more damage and then ban people for playing their own characters. Instead it should have been fixed asap. If they don’t care to enforce their intent, or at least post a statement about their intent, then said intent doesn’t exist. If they don’t care, why should anyone care?

There are many cases where killing monsters does not drop loot; if they wanted people to not prolong events in order to loot monsters, they should simply make it that monsters that spawn after a certain point don’t drop loot. Hell, just put a loot timer that counts down and disables loot depending on the event.

And they do act on their own, like how they removed the Queensdale train, even though it wasn’t an exploit, it was an example of poor balance. They at that point decided it wasn’t okay, and the game was changed to reflect this.

This also assumes fallaciously that succeeding and not failing an event is the default outcome. Am I obliged to make sure every event I play in succeeds?

Thieves are definitely easy to level, but they’re not the only ones that can make it irrelevant. Rangers can afk through 90% of open world enemies assuming you started the autoattack.

The engi NPC can be somewhat threatening and I guess the necro has all that aoe. =p

But in any case the I tried them out and the NPCs are pretty easy if you have any kind of usable build. They don’t know how to respond to stealth or ranged weapons. I picked a knights amulet with 2/0/0/6/6 s/d and it was steal (daze), cloak and dagger, daze with sword auto and the occasional shadow refuge when things got dicey.

Lonewolf Kai.3682:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Guardian doesn’t get much out of Strength because their might stacking is bad.

This made me laugh really hard.

Hmm… I guess it’s because pve builds don’t get that deep into honor to take empowering might and staff is bad. But on the other hand it shouldn’t be too hard for allies to give you might?

How does a 3/5/0/4/2 hammer guardian compare with other dps builds?

style.6173:

@OP:

A lot of people are giving you tips for fighting thieves or other roamers. In your case, you want to run with a commander in a group. Your spec, if done correctly, isn’t going to be great at 1v1 against anyone. Your best bet is to either run to the commander in a group, or wait for the commander to come back to spawn.

Remember: Any class in a roaming spec will beat a zerg spec 1v1. The most the zerg spec can hope to do is run away.

In the past I would have agreed, but nowadays you can instantly retrait. It is possible to equip a roaming build when running to the commander and then reequip as zerg gear when you reach them. I do this on my guardian when the commander is very far away and I have no confidence on fighting people off with a staff.

It can be a bit of a hassle but I think it’s more fun then hoping when the dorito comes back home. Exotic gear that isn’t zerker is rather cheap and now the temple vendors sell quite a few useful armor sets (in particular, rabid) just for karma.

It is not really OP; however many thieves in wvw choose a certain build that involves spamming smoke fields and maintaining high stealth uptime. This precisely refers to mainly one build and it’s very annoying and not very fun to fight.

In say, PvP, stealth would not be OP because you can’t cap points in stealth.

Nerfing thief blindly would cause people to gravitate more to certain builds, not less.

You could argue that stealth allows them reset fights and avoid damage, but in the end I don’t see it any worse than warriors using stances and just negating everything you throw at them… and also being able to arbitrarily disengage.

In other to land those magnificent backstabs, a thief needs to spec into heavy damage and die if anything sneezes directly at them. And they have to be revealed to do any of this.

Like any other questionable mechanic in this game, the class is too reliant on it for survival at times, and thus it can seem broken when they use it, but then again they aren’t given that many other alternatives.

Yea it’s pretty bad. I feel like i’m being rubberbanded so hard it’ll snap my neck.

Mayama.1854:

ArchonWing.9480:

The other thing is that thieves have no end to “oh crap” buttons. This includes shadowstep, blinds, and of course stealth. If you seriously think you can take them in one burst while putting yourself at risk, you better hope they’re bad. On the other hand, pressuring them enough so they’re forced to waste them is another story.

A terrormancer can kill a thief in the time of one fear. A thief will always lose a war of attrition against a condi necromancer. A good tip to handly thieves well is go into death shroud asap when the thief appears. He cant stealth for 3 seconds, gets feard and his hits are basicaly meaningless cause they only remove life force.

Condi necros and engis are a thiefs worst nightmare if they know what they are doing. I posted a video above, watch it a bit so you can understand how that guy handles his enemies.

Like I’ve said before fear and condi builds are better. And yes, it’s true you can burst down certain more glassy thieves in that time, not all thief builds are the same; shadowstep for example can stunbreak twice within 10 seconds. For example, take the fight at 2:15. The thief is able to actually absorb many blows but the necro perfectly counters and punishes the thief for even trying to approach, while also not letting the thief escape that easily. Basically, outplayed and made the thief waste his resources with constant and careful pressure while not wasting cooldowns.

[Edit: Holy crap, every necro has owned me today.]

But yes, condi builds do better these days 1v1. Though I do believe Condi Engi is much more fearsome to handle for thieves.

Achievement points do not reflect commanding ability in any way, and nor will any criteria. The fact that anyone can buy a commander tag is actually useful for impromptu runs when nobody else can lead. This is especially true in EOTM where most people are just here to train. Just be thankful. The grand majority do it to volunteer a better karma train and they certainly aren’t obliged.

Now, maybe there could be specialty tags that could be unlocked, but any criteria can always be exploited. Not to mention someone can be good at commanding but maliciously lead to wipes and stuff.

In real wvw, voice chat solves all problems as serious commanders will use that to command and if you’re not on it, then you won’t be able to follow as effectively and shouldn’t complain to begin with.

Failing that, tag up or shut up is my motto. If you are too dependent on people, you will be subject to their whims more. That’s just how everything works.

In any case, I feel the limitations suggested would hurt legitimate commanders who command a lot more than it deters trolls.

Make cleave on the third AA for both axe and dagger.

TY.

What a thief wants you to do:

1.) Run away desperately without firing a single shot.

You cannot do this. Necro is the worst at making getaways, and Thief is the best at pursuing. This is a bad, bad combo. You need to make it sure that getting near you will result in him getting hurt, and this includes use of DS4, marks, the warhorn’s locust swarm for power builds or the scepter’s cripple. In any case you will need to fight him repeatedly until you can reach a safe point.

Condi necros have a better chance to outright defeat or chase away a thief due to being naturally tankier and also the ability to transfer condis back to them. Scepter also provides too much condition pressure to be trivially cleansed off. Death Shroud Fear and Torment are powerful skills that you really want to conserve.

2.) Not understand their skills.

I didn’t really get it until I rolled a thief myself, but there’s certain notes such as the thief leaving shadow refuge prematurely instantly reveals them! Thus, bomb the crap out of their shadow refuge. At the same time if they lay a black circle on you, do NOT stand in it. The black powder will render your attacks ineffective due to blinds.

The best thing I’ve done was roll a thief and see what kind of points of vulnerability there is. It was good to seek out tough fights, especially outnumbered ones to see how a thief would take advantage of the situation to take someone out and more importantly situations where they really can’t.

3.) Be goaded into foolishly charging into them, either out of impatience or overconfidence.

I love it when people try to yolo into my thief. I’ll position myself for the burst and then slip away while you’re out of gas and kill you right there.

A good way to get people to do this is to harass them with shortbow and slowly peel away at them, slipping away when they try to retaliate. DO NOT be goaded into this game. They can’t kill you like this. Fortunately, necros have plenty of ranged options of their own to not do anything stupid.

The other thing is that thieves have no end to “oh crap” buttons. This includes shadowstep, blinds, and of course stealth. If you seriously think you can take them in one burst while putting yourself at risk, you better hope they’re bad. On the other hand, pressuring them enough so they’re forced to waste them is another story.

4.) Think invisible= invincible.
You can still hit them. If they’re low on health and you crippled/immobilized/feared them, and they stealthed, don’t just stop attacking! You might just be able to finish them off.

5.) Treat it as all or nothing game.

A knee jerk reaction when being jumped is to fire all your cooldowns off. Again, you’ll be left defenseless when the thief disengages and engages back. A smart thief will treat it as a game of attrition. Personally, I much prefer thieves that just have one trick, as those are so much easier to fight. Don’t fire off 4 marks when 1-2 does its job.

Easier said then done no doubt, but hope that helps.

Well, I don’t really feel too strongly about force of will; just thought it was a bit too bland compared with its alternatives, though there’s its uses.

I’ve never really thought of condition builds on a guardian though but I can see why it’d be useful over there.

Since folks are throwing ideas (I like the idea of merging indomitable courage with shielded mind as well as the burning virtues traits), would these be too OP?

1.) Signet of Resolve cast time reduced to 1/2s.
Currently it is completely inferior due to shelter due to the long cast time making you highly vulnerable. This would make it a bit harder to interrupt, but wouldn’t exactly make you switch over either due to shelter’s block.

2.) Renewed Focus breaks stun
Make it a true “get out of jail free” card.

3.) Virtue of Retribution— Also grants fury (3s) on virtue activation
Trait seems on the weak side, especially if we’re going deep into virtues

4.) Purity of Body— Also reduce duration of torment, poison, and bleed by 33%

5.) Retaliatory Subconscious— Also reduce confusion duration by 33%

6.) Tome of Courage + Wrath— should grant stability for 3s after activation. Sort of a big target with that book.

7.) Scepter Power— Also reduce cooldown on scepter skills

8.) Merge Kindled Zeal with Amplified Wrath. Introduce a new trait “Crippling Wrath” that cripples on burn (cooldown: 15s)

9.) Shimmering Defense— Increase threshold to 50% and also blind enemies

10.) Perfect Inscriptions— Gain Aegis after using a signet. 50% of passive effect for signets remains after signet use. It’s a gm trait that competes with a dps trait, after all and going 6 into radiance screws with your defense already.

11.) Shield of Judgement— Grant Aegis too to make shield more useful in certain situations

12.) Honorable shield— whenever you use a shield skill, you block during the casting animation. Being able to block with the shield isn’t that unreasonable is it?

13.) Focused Mastery (Who the heck takes this?)— Shield of Wrath can block 4 attacks. Ray of Judgement dazes.

14.) Force of Will— Also grants 75 Vitality to you and your allies. This trait is a bit too selfish to be in the honor tree.

15.) Battle Presence— Also grants you and your allies 150 healing power. I just find those traits that only help allies to be pretty off. Still, I think it’s pretty for either honor GM to compete with POV even with these changes. And given healing power’s lousy scaling, I think 150 is extremely conservative.

I’d rather not join the crying parade because guardians are awesome especially in wvw zergs and still easy to play namely because groups help cover our main weakness of mobility, but our blocks are simply not that great. We have nothing like the engineer’s gear shield, for example, which is on a 20s cooldown and blocks any and all attacks that aren’t unblockable. Well, actually we have shelter, but that’s our heal skill. Gear shield is merely just a skill within a utility slot.

And speaking of shields, we can block with our own shields… oh wait.

Aegis is good, and natural aegis is even better, but in larger fights when you get focused or just a lot of crap flying around, it’s not really the best. Warriors can use their invul or blocks to nullify any number of attacks in that time frame. Guardians cannot outside of their elite and to a lesser degree, shelter.

In a sense, the guardian defense is not unlike the necromancer. Their defenses are more suited for big attacks from a single enemy or two and small scale attacks and falter when focused. But the Necromancer’s death shroud is persistent as long as he can sustain life force, while the guardian’s remain single use. In some ways, even the persistency of the thief’s black powder is a more efficient defense.

Guardians aren’t individually strong, but they clearly can make the difference in wvw zerg fights with condi clears and group stability and cleave. This game just isn’t balanced around individual players.

Rasalhague.8270:

Most kiteable class, a necro can escape better with F1….

That’s a pretty cruel joke. A necro cannot run away from another class (includes guardians) unless they’re like afk or something. Necros have zero leaps or teleports that can be used to escape on a dime. And no, DS2 doesn’t count, since you can walk faster than that. Hell, even guardians can jump away. Once the necro has any form of CC landed on them, they fight or die.

There are more exotic methods of tricking people via spectral walk and the teleport wurm but those require setup and do not involve DS in any way, besides fear.

Guardians at the very least could access speed/traveler runes. In these cases, guardians will have better mobility than necros due to leaps and teleports, since the only edge the necro has by default is the speed signet or permaswiftness

If you take 6 in virtues and AH you’ll end up with something like 0/0/6/2/6 and thus lose out on empowering might, two handed mastery, dodge heals, and/or pure of voice. IMO investing so much into boon duration is not worth the loss of stats in particular health and also condition removal, but the later is more of an issue in wvw.

If you were into heavy consecration use (purging flames/reflects/hallowed ground) I think virtues would be more worth it. But on a triple shout build, there’s literally nothing to put in the first virtues slot but the retaliation duration which is okay but hardly an issue in zergs. And then Absolute Resolution is great, but over time I’ve become less and a less of a fan of any other trait in the line. Indomitable courage is nice, but the long cooldown means that blowing renewed focus is pretty much needed to make it useful.

In any case, I think having Superior Rune of the water set in armor would be better. It would give 20% boon duration as opposed to the doubloon’s 24% duration but also grant other benefits, such as increasing the effectiveness of your heal skill. If we take the base numbers on the wiki (I don’t want to account for healing power), shelter base heal is 4500~** and the water heal is 690, meaning that’s more than a 10% boost to your heal skill, plus it becomes aoe.

Generally, I think 0/1/6/6/1 with trooper seems to be the most balanced build for its purpose.

**Why does the forum censor four thousand five hundred fifty five??

New thief here, but soloing camps isn’t very much different from any other class I’ve played. The scout’s blind is extremely devastating, and very much to thieves so they must be eliminated first. Everything else pretty much does nothing to you and can be trivially kited away/stealthed away.

As many others have said, offhand pistol is great for taking them done thanks to blinds and dazes, not to mention the on-demand smoke field (pistol 5+ dagger 2) If you use offhand dagger, you can use cloak and dagger to stealth and then immediately hit them with your stealth attack. Backstab is the most famous example, though the shortbow immobilized shot can be useful too.

Just lure scouts out with shortbow, and if you can stealth to get yourself out of trouble but stay close enough so they don’t reset their health and reset, thus wasting your time. You can also make copious use of poison fields (Shortbow 4+2). This will give weakness to them, meaning you will take less damage and also screw them up when they try to heal. Many camps have a narrow space of which you can lure the guards into, such as a bench or a gap where you can just aoe them to death. Just don’t rush if you don’t feel confident.

Note that some camps are easier to solo than others. North camp on borderlands is obnoxiously wide and open, while ne camp has a really easy gap in between these two buildings on the west side. It’s great because you don’t need to bypass any guards to reach it. Also, note the camps near enemy spawns, as those will obviously see more interference. Fighting an extra player or two while you take a camp will require a lot more patience. Don’t blow all your initiative and utilities when you fight guards. It is not good to fight enemy players with such a handicap should they appear.