Guild Wars 2

I almost have the Bifrost, harde everything except the Gift of Mastery. Give me an amazing challenge please, not a stupid grind.

Arenanet: You promised Guild Wars 2 would be releases when it was ready. You broke your word.

Actually I hate all the legendary effects, sab skins, molten skins, … I want equipment that actually look usefull, like in skyrim. I only need half of the gifts of might and magic for the bifrost. I’m honestly considering to transmute the ugly thing to the skin of my CoF staff. If I could turn off the effects I would be much happier.

I went for the legendary for the challenge and because it will always be a BIS item.

Rood idea, give me a challenge!

Thanks for the compliments. Spellingcorection and proofreading helps ;-) It’s also a bit luck, my brain has good and bad days.

Yeah squad chat maybe. I would prefer commander tag with an option to only be visible for the guild members

Our guild has 495 active members, no unknowns, and a waiting list of 50 people. There are three teams of volunteers with a total of 22. We also have a board of eight and two guild leaders. We do all the guild missions every week and organize six events ourselves every week. To manage this is a lot of work and the guild interface is almost useless. Here are some things that are really frustrating:

Mailing system: If I want to send an email to the whole board, I have to do it one by one with a limitation of two per minute. When they reply, the original message is gone. So sometimes when they haven’t been online for a couple of days, it’s confusing to witch mail they are replying. Today I sent all of the volunteers a thank you present by mail and at the end I was furious with the mailing system (witch lead to this post).

Chat: If I want to talk to more then five people at the same time, party chat is not an option. Teamspeak server isn’t always possible and what do you do then? At one point I just gathered all the people I wanted to chat in to Divinity’s Reach and just used /say.

Guild Roster: It doesn’t show the account + character names so sometimes it’s confusing to know who is who. It also doesn’t show the last time somebody was online or how much of their play time people represent our guild. It also doesn’t show when somebody joined the guild.

Guild bank: You can’t see per user how much they deposited and how much they withdraw. We are contemplating if we have to start keeping an external logbook for the guild bank.

Guild calender: it’s not even there so when and where we do our events always has to be spammed through the guild chat. After the twentieth person that asks ’where’s the event today’ it really gets annoying.

Influence: Where does it come from? We are a PvX guild and want to distribute the output of the influence usage according to the origin of the influence. So how much do we use to keep up WvW buffs? Al we now is we get an average of 150k per week. And off course, those two build slots are ridiculous. We have to up speed six times more then what we can actually build. Also we still don’t know how we are going to use all the merits that we gain. We will probably just put up a hero’s banner once a day, the other stuff is just silly.

Message of the day: It’s almost useless. Couldn’t we have something similar to a daily achievement chest when members first log in for the day. That way they at least see the message. It’s also very limited in characters. We can’t even put our whole week schedule in it.

Out of game communication: not possible, where’s that extended experience app?

Currently we have to use a lot of out game systems to keep the engines running:

Member list and influence calculation tool in Excell, shared trough dropbox
Planning of meetings through Doodle
Getting feedback with Google Forms
Calendar, forum and mailing system on our Enjin site
What’s App groups on our mobile phones

We even have a board member who’s busy programming an overlay for the game so we can use it to communicate. We are also still looking to find an easy way for a to do system.

I don’t expect to be able to do all of the above trough the game itself, but a lot of it could easily be implemented. Currently, my husband and I spend more than 20 hours a week to manage everything. It’s a lot when you also work full time.

PS: English is my third language and I’m dyslectic. So hold your spelling and grammer crap, I did my best.

This dungeon is so much fun!

Attunement swapping, boon duration and self combo’s give 20+ might and constant fury. That’s a lot of damage, 700 power extra and 20% crit change. The water traits give me 20% extra damage. I can use evasive arcana as an extra damage skill. My crits have 20% to apply a condition. I also apply vulnarbility wich further increases damage.

Also, on a rotation of ten seconds I cast lava font, flame burst, ice spike, lightning surge and eruption. I see an auto attack as a waste.

The pure damage output from an 30/30/x10 pure fire ele can be the same as a swapper statwise. But it can’t make up for the loss of eruption, ice spike and lightning surge. And a pure fire ele sure misses out on a lot of support and Control. So much that it’s not worth it.

If I remember when I’m home, I’ll upload my damage calculation spreadsheet.

That I can’t change the glow, that’s fine. But the problem is that the kit changes the glow on it’s own. I don’t want any changes on my glow.

Hey

I got a black lion key as a drop and that resulted in a Self-Style hair kit. I wanted to change the hair on my sylvari for a long time and now this was the change. But I can’t change the glow. I setted this at character at the absolute minimum I could. If I preview the changes I can make with the hair kit, my glow becomes bright red.

Is the lack of option to change the glow a bugg, and thus, should I wait with using the kit?

Hoi beste Nederlandstalige

Arenanet heeft terug alle niet actieve mensen op ‘location UNKNOWN’ geplaats, waardoor we een een aantal plaatsen over hebben in onze guild. Het maakt helemaal niet uit of je nu Nederlander bent of Belg, man of vrouw, kitten of hetero, jong of oud. DIE staat open voor alle nederlandstaligen op Far Shiverpeaks. Bovendien zijn we een sociale guild waarin spontaan parties worden gemaakt, een drukke guild chat, heel veel plezier en respect voor iedereen.

We moedigen onze leden aan de game te spelen zoals ZIJ het willen door hen de kans te geven om zeer casual om te gaan met de PVE en PVP content, maar natuurlijk is het ook mogelijk er zeer competitief mee om te gaan, we hebben dan ook verschillende PVP squads die de eer van onze guild mogen verdedigen in de GW2 competities. We zullen ook zeer aanwezig zijn in de eeuwige strijd op de WvWvW maps om de keeps van Far Shiverpeaks te verdedigen.

Verder zijn we een zeer actieve guild, met elke dag in game events die we zelf organiseren. Dungeon runs, influance train, temple runs, tournooi, wvw zerg, én reeds tier 3 guild missions. We hebben ook zelf uitgewerkte concepten zoals onze ‘scavenger hunt’, ‘guild lotterij’, ‘verjaardagsfeest’ en ‘hide and seek’. Bijna elke avond zitten we boven de 100 leden online.

Laat hier een berichtje achter, of contacteer ons via de website of contacteer mij in game.

We leren je graag kennen, tot in Tyria!

http://i.imgur.com/iRvIA1g.jpg
http://dragonsinexile.enjin.com/
http://www.youtube.com/user/dragonsinexile23

This little video is from tier 2

My guild has NEVER bought influance, we just have 100+ people online for several hours every evening and throughout the weekend.

Ursan.7846:

Do you have any videos of it? Be very interesting to see!

We have a promotion team, and a youtube channel. I’m not sure if we were recording this though. Everything was focused on completion.

I’ll post links if we have uploaded video’s.

Surferboy.1649:

guys, just read it. They are a WvW Guild. 1 Million is much, but not that hard for a WvW guild. Stop offending people.
They just want to share information.

No, actually we are a fully PvX guild. We saved up all the influence we could so our WvW teams didn’t get any buffs for a while. We jumped in for them to compensate for this.

Xaaz.8472:

interpol.2397:

Really? Already cries of “nooo! my small guild”?
No one is seriously suggesting that small guilds had the intention of going for T3 Bounty to begin with, right?

Hey, genius, read above. 1 million! LAWL. Squirm back to your zerg you call a guild plz. I like to know the people in my guild.

It’s true, I can only voice regognize half of our teamspeak server.

Small guilds will eventually be able to get all the guild missions, just not as fast. Real life is full of things like this to. I’m sorry if you feel left out, or if your guild will go through a hard time now. My guild was in need of this scale of things to do for months, so we embrace it fully.

Good luck to you

You can preview through the trading post … or look it up on youtube …

This video is from november:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xavdId9COsI&playnext=1&list=PLYmqj7P7jHX8c1v6yW4cfG81JXA1qBLXT&feature=results_video

Know what you are buying ;-)

We used 1.000.000 influance to unlock everything so fast. Over 80 members participated and we had 7 commanders where we could rally to if one was found. We had 2 seconds left on the timer. So yes it’s very challenging. Finding them is the hard parth though, you can kill them with 10-15 people.

The rewards were not linked in guild chat because we jumped in WvW right after completion.

My guild, Dragons In Exile on Far Shiverpeaks, completed Tier 3 bounty hunt:

http://i.imgur.com/iRvIA1g.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/jtbOL6Z.jpg

It was very challenging and lots of fun. The guild was very enthousiastic!

So, nobody can find more research?

Lately there has been great discussions in my guild if globs of ectoplasmes count as rare crafting materials or not. Since both this forum and reddit are a an absolute pain to search through, I can’t find the answer on my own.

The information we have about it in game is conflicting. The ecto’s are placed in the bank tab of the rare crafting materials. But so are the obsidian shards and the mystic coins. Also, the tooltip displays the name of the glob in orange and thus indicating that it is an exotic. And the ecto is also considered a trophy and a crafting material.

Why does this matter? To know with which salvage kit you can get ecto’s the most sufficient. I they count als rare crafting materials then a master kit has more change then a crude kit. If they are not rare crafting materials there would be no difference. I found two researches, but they have conflicting results:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhUFMgIGLNDMdGtsQmZNcnoxd1lYV2ludU5FMjJhWnc#gid=3

http://de.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/10d69g/salvaging_for_ectoplasm_an_analysis/

So what is it now? At this moment it seems like an Platypus (the animal that can be classified as a mammal and as a bird).

PS: when I look up, I kept seeing post about ‘Anet has confirmed that ecto’s don’t depend on salvage level of salvage kits’ or something like that. But there’s never a link to the actuall post. Does it even exist?

I hope they see One Hundred Blades as an aoe, so much damage on an eight seconds cooldown

I have been a AoE ‘mage’ in every game I have played except Diablo II because I just couldn’t stand the looks of the sorceress. If I can’t play that as a main, it will be up to my guild to keep me playing because it won’t be for the game itself.

My build and playstyle is rather similar and still runs great at fractals 20+.

Three biggest differences:
30 arcane, I also have the trait that gives vigor.
Signet of restoration, I get more healing out of this because I already have permanent regeneration.
traut 10% extra damage above 90% health, I have above 90% health during 90% of the fights and this gives more damage then the fire trait.

I try for all my gear to have knight stats (or close to it). This means I only have 15000 hp, but that’s enough for since I am usually the one that dies least and rezz most.

Sigil of battle is great, that and elemental attunement gives me 10 stacks all the time.

The gift of mastery and the dungeon tokens are not a challenge. Getting enough mats for the gift of fortune and getting the precursor are the bottlenecks. Also, you don’t need to buy gems to get thousands of gold, the trading post is all people need. I spend as little time as I can while others follow it for hours, us spreadsheets and gw2spidey. I spent hours in dungeons which clearly is not as productive.

I have a job, a husband and we are boardmembers of several organizations. Life is busy so we don’t sleep much and our working hours only partially overlap. We share the account, and it’s almost our only downtime.

Justification enough for my gaming hours?

Tl:dr:I dislike legendaries because they are a symbol of wealth instead of player skill/determination. But getting a legendary is the only goal left in the game.

‘Forge your legend’ These words are what struck me the most when watching the footage back at the beginning.
Together with the manifesto, they sold the game to me. Guild Wars 2 was presented as a game without a grind, where a player’s skill was crucial for advancement and to acquire the great rewards. So I thought that when I would see a player wielding a legendary weapon, I would respect them. That a legendary would be a symbol of doing remarkable and challenging things.

But it’s not, a legendary is a symbol of wealth. Wealth that can only be gained by playing the trading post, farming lodestones/dungeon rewards or buying gems. Every component outside the gift of mastery can be bought. Even the dungeon tokens can be bought buy LFGs that sell party invites for the final boss fight. The legendaries themselves can even be traded.

So now when I see a legendary in game I think ‘great an other rich guy showing off’. I have over 1000 hours of gameplay and more then 4000 achievement points. I always did the most challenging content I could. I’m still nowhere near a legendary while marketplayers in my guild are making thousands of gold by making and selling them.

I have all the best equipment possible and have the exact look I want. Getting more gold isn’t the issue for me. Getting the legendary is, it’s the only goal left in the game. That’s sad isn’t it?

Maybe I should go back to single player game where the rewards actually do come from being the hero and where I can use mods to make the game actually difficult.

Arcane healing?

In party combat, I’m always thinking if I should control/damage/or heal. I use almost all my spells in combat and I rarely autoattack.

I always find it hard to give advice about playing the elementalist, I’ll give it a shot (fractals level 20).

The big difference between staff and daggers is not the range. It’s the ground targeting and mobility. For a staff user, the ground targeting off the spells is essential. Lava font, eruption and ice spike do heavy damage in an AoE, if the mobs remain in the AoE zone until the spell is done. (The same is true for meteor shower, but it’s a totally different skill. The radius and duration are huge, but you’re never sure what the meteors will hit). It’s totally different then the point blank and damage on cast you find in the daggers. This also means that with a staff you will move a lot less, since you have to aim where to put the ground targeted spell to optimize the effect. You also have to try and time your ground targets, learn when the boss is moving and when he will stand still.

Stats: It’s up to you to decide what set up you can use without dying a lot. My armor is full knight, staff berserker, accessories are a mix (karka shell, ascended rings, guild back pack …) My traits are 0/10/0/30/30. Don’t forget the minor trait Bountiful power, because I almost always have five boons up, it’s a damage increase of 10% on all spells. I only have 14800 hp and about 1500 toughness. But still I usually die less then my party members. This is probably because my high upkeep off protection, swiftness and regeneration. The long range doesn’t really count since half the time I’m within a 600 radius of target. Sometimes I even go melee with the staff so that the mobs stay in my AoE fields. Glyph of Storms in earth is a great utility for this tactic. I would make sure to get the renewing stamina trait. Every mob you hit with an AoE can get a critical hit and thus give you the vigor boon.

My skill rotation is usually something like this: Eruption/lava font/flameburst/meteor shower/ Ice spice/frozen ground/ lightning surge/ static field/ stoning/ schockwave/eruption… Frozen ground and static field don’t do damage, but as combo fields they contribute a lot in the fight. Heal your group when necessary with healing rain and gyser.

On fractals, most of the bosses and mobs don’t have long range. The staff has a clear advantace then. Like the Mossman, I can keep hitting him and take all the aggro. He can’t land a single melee hit so he’s never a treat. The same is true for the dredge/ice_elemental boss, the yellyfish, the golems, the svanir shaman. The ascalonian captain and the Cliffside boss are a threat because of their unpredictable leap attack. (Also, a lot of these bosses have big attacks that have some build up time. If they are close, you can just run throught hem. Since they can’t damage you if they don’t have a line of sight, your in the clear. Place a ground target AoE under their feet and they even take damage while you evade damage.

Biggest tip: burning retreat, it has saved my life a lot of times. It counts as an evade and you get twice as far then with a normal dodge.

PS: I haven’t mentioned Evasive Arcane, because I’m still in mourning over the nerf. Now I use elemental attunement/renewing stamina and blasting staff. EA can still help though.

My focus lies in dungeons and there the staff is amazing. When fighting a pack of mobs my screen is filled with damage numbers in 2000-3000 range, that hit five to ten targets. Even in boss fights I make good use of my staff. You can learn to tell when and where to cast an AoE field so that it hits.

My gear is 2/3 knight and 1/3 berserker with traits 0/10/0/30/30. I rotate through my attunements and get constantly might (at least ten stacks), regeneration, protection, swiftness, vigor and fury because my boon duration is buffed up with 90% longer duration. Each boon gives 2% extra damage and I do 10% extra damage when health is over 90%.

And you can get a lot of effect out of the combo fields. I once did a run in HotW with four guardians that used their hammer at my request. They had a blast finisher on a five seconds cooldown. Area Might/Healing/Frost Armor/Retaliation all around. They went toe to toe with bosses where the strategy is usually ‘no melee ever’ and their health rarely dropped below 50% . I stood behind, just at the edge where my elemental attunement boons would effect them. Wich was easy to do since all the fights where completely stationary. Although a PUG, it was the easiest and fastest run any of us ever had.

SPvP is a whole other story though, hardly any of the staff’s fields have any effect. I just can’t get DPS to work with a staff in sPvP. But I can be the team’s bunker in tournement.

In FotM I tried using GoR again, since people can’t waypoint when dead and I don’t like to suicide to reset and try from chekpoint. It failed to do what I asked the three times I used it:

Try 1: in earth attunement, trying to revive three downed allies very close to eachother
=> One got up
Try 2: in air attunement, trying to revive an ally out of a dangerous spot
=> Nothing happend
Try2: In water attunement, trying to revive an ally so she could start running with full health
=> Nothing happend

I’ am fully aware of the range, I used the skill in every dungeon run up until the giant nerf that made it only revive downed people.

The cast time is still over four seconds, although it states differently when you select the skill to place it in the slot.

You can time that the damage of eruption, ice spike and lightning surge hit at the exact same moment by taking advantage from the big delay on eruption and the minor delay on ice spike. It’s good for actually killing people on the walls in WvW instead of just damaging them so they run away, heal, and come back. I If the defenders pay attention they can notice the red circles or even the rocks. But usually they don’t start running/healing until they are at 50% health. ’m still figuring out at what % of their health I best launch this sequence.

This sequence also doesn’t use my fire spells which I save to take out siege weapons and build sites. Those are mainly the reason why I’m in staff range off the walls in the first place. It’s a risk but when I’m in danger of getting downed I use burning retreat to get out (or arcane shield/mistform).

A quote form the december 14 patch notes:

“We see the elementalist as the king of versatility. The skill ceiling for the Ele is exceptional, as the ability to leverage all four attunements at the right time is crucial for understanding the elemetnalist. The Ele boasts some of the best team support and control abilities in the game, as well as some great area of effect damage.”

It really says it all:
Versatility: we are not the best at anything , but we can do everything
Four attunements: Swap through them to make the most out of your character
Team support: boons and combo’s all around
Control: we can chill, criple, stun, imobilize, knock down, knock back, blind, weaken
AoE: Every weapon we got is AoE, even the dagger and focus

It also says ‘exceptional skill ceiling’. The staff is my primary weapon since the first beta weekend and i’m still learning. I have been level 80 for months and just two days ago I started using a new skill sequence that gives me burst damage on the staff.

greg.3792:

An extra quickbar slot every 80 levels and everyone would work towards that.

Interesting idea

I didn’t know that about HoM skins, it breaks the whole achievementpoint mechanic actually …

When we hit level 80 now, there isn’t really any progression. Except maybe world completion and a legendary weapon. So what could be an incentive? How can a player show progress in the game beyond level 80. The achievement points and titles do this a bit, but not a lot of people care about those. I got two ideas which I will list below. Maybe you like them, maybe you don’t, and maybe you have better ideas. All debate welcome

Give people a material reward every 1000 achievement points. The nice thing about this is that it’s very easy to get 1000 achievement points, but the difficulty to get more points is progressive. Not only do you need to do more ever tier (like weapon master), almost all achievements have a set maximum. Even if people get everything to maximum, a large part will still have to come from daily and monthly.

</strong> Achievement points=>reward </strong>
1000 => a rare
2000=> an upgraded rare
3000=> an exotic
4000=> named exotic
5000=> precursor.

Give people a rank ever 80 levels, like the mobs got. It can change the portrait in game. Maybe a different font in the chat to.

</strong> Levels => ranks </strong>
160=> Veteran
240=> Champion
320=> Legendary
400=> Unique tag like the starter bosses.

Your thoughts, please

It was a bit long, but amazing

Value for money

Actually undewater, the water attunement gives the most damage. You have to time it though. Go in with skill five, cast skill three, let it explode wich does a lot of damage and gets you out. Skill two is great, but time the explosion.

IF they get close, earth five is a blind. Earth three is very good melee damage.

Fire has a couple of good AoE including a criple.

Air, i don’t use that much

Agreed
Agreed
Agreed

But off course people would all flock to that server for the test. Do we make it a selection of the players? Like the 10 000 most active beta testers? Or randomly select a different server for a test?

Compared to other games around 55 euros/$ prices this game gives a very large amount of gameplay and content. We shouldn’t forget that. There are problems, which the One Time Events and imbalance clearly show. But actually, those events are just extras. Balance is always hard to achieve. To me the game is still great.

I still have faith that it will get amazing. For me, that means you have to do three things:
1: Fix/balance the skills and traits ASAP (TWO people out of hundreds do this now!)
2: Don’t go any further then the Ascended tier
3: Hold off the One Time Events until you can pull them off epically

To show that professions are really balanced, the kill ratio statistics would be a great

PS: yes, there is a gemstore but you don’t HAVE to use

I just went through all the pages of the elementalist section and this is what I found:
Closed treads: 6
Merged treads: 1
Changed title: 1
Request to be polite: 1
Anwsers: 3
=> we are working on main hand dagger
=> we are working on underwater combat
=> you can’t trade your elementalist character for a mesmer.

So, not very substantial on the anwsers.

Blast finishers are amazing! Ice spike blast finisher would be justified. And change earthquake, now it’s a finisher you have to cast BEFORE the field to get it. Updraft could be a finisher to, since schokwave is (although and air burst isn’t really a projectile).

I really hope the devs see this

op is the best I red in the forum so far.

For the money I paid, gw2 has amazing value. The amount of content and gameplay will keep me going for months to come.

But it’s better not to do something then do it poorly. We did not need this event. The new pve map, the fractals and the new pve zone would have been enough. Now the lag and bugs of the event casts a long shadow over the rest of the content, and over Arenanet in general.

The game is so good, but please get the big events right in the future.

I need the 30 arcane aswell for my build, thinking of taking this now:

Elemental attunement
Blasting Staff
Renewing Stamina

Now that the blastfinishers are no longer, will you still slot Evasive Arcana?

Are the effects enough for a GM trait?

Staff is great. You can kill the mobs without them ever reaching you. Open with ice spike and frozen ground. Cast eruption and schokwave. Then lava font on your eruption, flame burst, couple of auto attacks. usually mob dies.

If need be, switch to air, push them back and static field.
Or burning retreat
Or glyph of storms in earth attunement.

Ow and my favorite heal while on the run is dodging in my own gyser field.

This has gone way off topic.

I support the idea that our attunement swapping should be faster on it’s own, without traiting for it. The suggested replacement (the combo field effectiveness) would be very good for me, as a staff user. But a lot less for the other weapons.

And to Anet: DON’T NERF MY EVASIVE ARCANA!