Guild Wars 2

Vinewraith fails very rarely.
Breach fails quite a bit (mostly Indigo, or Red)
I also had some trolls that actively sabotaged breaches, often by intentionally focusing bubbles at red or similar things.

Playing late in the evening and deep into the night seems to increase success rates though.

CrashTestAuto.9108:

While I don’t actually mind a lot of the NPE (some of it is awful, particularly the way telling people about future unlocks is handled), I haven’t recommended the game to anyone since the traits patch. The NPE is over in a few hours (though the starter maps remain boring and lifeless thanks to many of the interesting bits being removed), but the traits fiasco will stick with you well beyond level 80 on every. single. character.

Yeah thats pretty much the reason why I would actively encourage people to stay the hell away from GW2 at the moment.

There is too much stuff thats needs to be fixed in order to make the game fun again and I personally dont see why Anet didnt already fix traits after the fiasco like what, 9 months ago?

So everybody that asks me if GW2 is worth playing/starting gets a big no for the time being.

Cazamar.7148:

I don’t get all the hate. It takes like a week to get level 20 and that’s taking your time and being a completionist. A little patience would have served you and your friend well. It is a great game.

If you playa terribly boring game for an entire week just to find out if it gets less boring at some point you are way to patient.

If a game is kitten for the first 2-3 hours, most people wont keep playing.

And why should they?
If the publisher cant bother to make the start fun (which is very easy), the rest of the game probably isnt better.

Fermi.2409:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Most people doing dungeons expect you to know what to do. It’s even worse if you have a high AP. They somehow think that means you do dungeons enough to know what to do without being told.

How is that an unreasonable expectation, especially if you don’t say anything at the beginning of the run?

Because there is no direct reason that AP indicate any sort of dungeon knowledge.

Its like saying somebody with driving a huge SUV must be a rap star.
Because there cant be any other way how you could get the money for that, right?

AP doesnt measure anything but how much time somebody has spend on GW2.

Even the people using it because there is no other measurement are making a fool of themselves.

Karizee.8076:

Arkinos.7245:

Guess it takes a streamer with an existing viewerbase to make GW2 worth watching.

Cant imagine that he manages to keep up interest with pve content though.
Pve in mmos is incredibly boring to watch regardless of game.

Although it was amusing to watch WoW’s viewers fall to <400 today. Really shows how much that it’s the personalities that get views – the “Twitch Celebrities”, not the games or number of players they have

Yeah if its not a moba or csgo, nobody out there gives a kitten most of the time.

Then again watching pve crap or the completely random pvp modes of GW2 isnt really fun.

Guess it takes a streamer with an existing viewerbase to make GW2 worth watching.

Cant imagine that he manages to keep up interest with pve content though.
Pve in mmos is incredibly boring to watch regardless of game.

SW chest farm gets you massive ammounts of these fragments.
You also get the Obsidian Shards to refine them along the way.

A OK.8276:

Broken or working as intended?

Just incompetent manipulation of the game economy backfiring.
Anet wanted to increase the silk price, they got what they asked for.

Not Ascended armor is basically silk gated while Leather rots and is sold to NPCs.

At this point I’d prefer if Anet simply stops trying to fix the economy, they dont seem to know how to do it right anyway.

The only reasonable change would be to reduce the cost of Bolts from 3 to 2.
Because that doesnt mess up other things.

Its quite simple to fix that: basic character models no longer show individual backpieces.

/done.

Its weird that this isnt already the case seeing how basic character models are supposed to be standardized.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

You do anything in the game except chatting, you get stuff, including just logging in. That stuff can be sold on the TP or to vendors, for which you get coin, i.e. gold. That coin can be spent on the stuff you really want.

That’s what ANet staff are saying: you don’t have to grind for specific items typically.

Obviously, playing more often or more efficiently also matters, but they aren’t saying that every thing you do is going to get you lots of gold.

Actually, with the exception of basic named Exotics (like Bonettis Rapier and similar stuff) and the Legendaries, everything is locked behind specific conditions.

Want a Dungeon weapon? You must run the dungeon.
Want a Fractal weapon? you must run high level fractals like crazy and pray to the rng gods you get the right one.
Want a specific ascended item? Run a few thousand fractals and pray for the right chest or level your crafting and make it yourself.
Carapace and Luminiscent armor is locked behind story content.

To be honest: outside of basic skins “Iron Hammer” and their recolors for higher levels of crafting/different materials, the vast majority of all skins is tied into specific activities.

bobjoelol.5163:

I Don’t see why people will be having trouble saving money for the expansion you can just it with ingame gold its months away just save 10g everyday till you got 4-6k+ gems saved up and you should have enough or close to it. Since the expansion is buyable with gems.

That is pure speculation.

I’d hope it would be available in the gemstore, but I have yet to see any official comment on this.

I dont think Anet will even comment on this pre release since they need to instant cash from preorders before the poor guys buy it ingame.

Pretty sure Anet only bothers with an expansion to found to game/ because the gemstore doesnt bring enough cash in.

To be honest: all the expansion will bring is a few hours of story and random skins you can grind for hundreds of hours.

Oh I am sorry there is no grind in GW2, because Anet says so.

Lets call it hundreds of hours of challenging lategame content thats actually about 2 hours of content you repeat furiously while being happy you play a no grind MMO.

Better preorder HoT right now!

A lot of players dont even know that all the gems you can buy ingame come from other players.

I also had a few very amusing discussions where people argued that all gems traded ingame come from Achievements and Anet doesnt actually sell gems. As well as people arguing that Anet doesnt make money from people buying gems for gold and using them in the gemstore.

The great majority of players has no grasp of economic realities of both the real world and the game, which is very sad, but true.

Getting a real ranged weapon would be nice. I personally dont like the scepter, mostly because 2 is not a reliable skill for dps.

A ranger weapon with reliable damage and some utility for kiting that doesnt have a 20s cooldown would be great

Longbow is mostly useful for fire blasts and area control.

Even if you dont pin them, using your burst and the arcing arrow is very effective for zoning, especially with intelligence sigils that give you a 100% crit on arcing arrow.

You should basically never have your arcing arrow available for an extender period of time. Use it on cooldown whenever possible.

Anet wont remove content because you dont like it, suck it up and just dont do these things if you dont want to.

Grind skins and gold just like you did before.

Its not like anything changed.

I would like to play Season1, but I will never be able to do so.

Tenrai Senshi.2017:

Just remember guys, the OP isn’t just asking about the tankiest class. He’s asking what class can survive the best while still doing lots of damage. So listing super tanky classes or builds with clerics or nomads armor, etc, is missing the mark a bit.

Since virtually all classes pop instantly vs bosses and the op emphasized durability, Nomad is not actually that bad.

Either way, unless op gives a bit more information on what he’s looking for, he wont get any useful answer.

Its hard to answer that.

As far as raw survival goes, a Nomad Warrior or Guardian will survive more than the rest.
Though they will be useless anyway.

Thaddeus.4891:

Here some dps numbers for different weapons set. It’s variable depending on what build you are using. There numbers are with a good build, in a good party (might, fury, vulnerability, etc).

- Sceptre : 11-12k dps. But it’s only good against slow/big target when you can land all hits on your smite. Otherwise it drop rapidly in dps (Lupi, Bloomhunger, etc)

- GS + Sw/F : 10-11k dps. Its the standard weapons set in PvE. Give you access to the most blind and dps, in the majority of situation.

- GS + M/F : 10-11k dps. Its always a bit less dps than Sw/F, but not by much (1-2%). It will give you more sustain healing to keep your team alive, but it will make a high uptime of light field that could screw up might blasting. Useful in some particular situation or when you have a PS Warrior.

- Hammer : 9-10k dps. Here you sacrifice some dps to gain perma protection on your team while in melee. 33% damage reduction is huge but that’s mostly for fractal. In dungeon you shouldn’t need it unless you are still learning to dodge. It’s a pain in the kitten if you use it while someone is tying to blast might.

- Sword or GS camping will be around 9k dps. It’s low dps, it have no rotation and limit what you can bring to your team.

These numbers are not possible unless all numbers on the wiki are wrong.

Which would be very annoying since the ingame numbers are wrong as well most of the time.

Its a known problem, especially for Teq.

Try to get a party that will invite you back in after the crash.

Exedore.6320:

Are you accounting for the fact that you can have Symbol of Wrath and Binding Blades (don’t use the pull) ticking at the same time as GS#2 and GS#1? I’m pretty sure those go into the PvE DPS rotation.

I actually forgot about that, but they are also somewhat situational.

You sometimes dont want to use the symbol because of combos and the damage of Binding Blades is low as well as on a 30s cooldown, having nearly zero impact on your overall dps once you calculate it with the cooldown in mind.

I also forgot to mention that I only care about pve situations.

Dyes change color based on the shader used.

There are several shaders for most materials so dyes wont even look the same on say 2 metal items or 2 leather items.

So I thought about using swords on my Guardian after getting my hands onto a very nice looking sword that I cant use on any other character.

Now here is the deal: I have a lot of chars with weird builds but my Guardian is a very much DPS focused char with full Zerk.

I went to the wiki for some numbers (Yes this is nerdy and unnecessary) but couldnt find a number for the exact duration of Whirling Wraith so I tried it and ended up with ~2.3 seconds.

Now here is the thing:

The GS chain does less dps than the Sword chain. Its 4236 dps for the sword chain at 3k power vs 3364 dps for the gs chain.

With 2.3 seconds for GS2, that skill does less dps (4123) than the sword chain at 3000 power, but only marginaly more dps than the sword chain at lower levels of power. The break even point here seems to be at about 2400 power which is basically what you have on an unbuffed full zerk Guardian anyway. This is on top of the fact that the GS2 ability is cooldown based so the effective dps are somwhere between those of GS2 and the GS chain.

So I wonder why every guide recommends GS despite having less dps than the sword even on its dps ability with a significantly weaker chain and possibly, where did my calculation go wrong? Some accurate numbers for GS2 would also be nice.

And save yourselves the trouble of metazerk discussions, I play a lot of different builds but this is for my metazerk char.

Distaste.4801:

The entire condition system needs overhauled because it is horrible. Not every class should have all conditions, conditions should have equal damage potential, and no one should be able to hit a quarter of the condition cap let alone hit the condition cap solo. Condition cleanses shouldn’t be a a cure all, let them cure a number of stacks but not the full stack unless it’s a specific condition cure. Let Healing power increase the effectiveness of condition cleanse. Finally make the conditions fire and forget, no complicated calculations and bandwidth usage per tick.

While your post sounds awesome and is indeed the best post on this topic that I have seen so far, I get the feeling Anet doesnt actually have the ressources for the major overhaul of GW2s combat system that it would take to make conditions interesting gameplay.

I am mostly disappointed that they couldnt be bothered to come up with some sort of quick and dirty fix that at least makes conditions less bad, and flat out let them rot until they find the holy grail that makes them super duper great.

Because chances are this holy grail isnt going to happen, ever.

Shiki.7148:

Photonman.6241:

Arkinos.7245:

To be honest the easier change would be to increase the bleed caps based on enemy rank.

Give Veterans, Champions, etc different bleeds caps.
This would not change sPvP at all while fixing a lot for pve.

This time a thousand!

But that would be different balancing for PvE and PvP GASP we can’t have that! – Anet.

No it wouldnt.

This would be for pve and pvp.

The fact that there are no ranked NPCs in pvp is uhhh, completely unrelated.

nightwulf.1986:

Arkinos.7245:

Do you really think that a “problem” that was here since release is really something anet considers worth fixing?

I know that development takes time. But its been 3 years and there wasnt even any sort of communication that indicates Anet has this on the radar and is working on it.

There is literally no reason to believe that Anet is doing anything to fix conditions for pve. If you can post a link to a devblog or something that would be nice, because I want conditions to be viable.
(I went for a Rampager build on my Warrior right after release, unaware thats this buils is 100% inferior to Berserker in any situation and have basically stopped playing my Warrior ever since because I like the playstyle, but its not viable)

But just saying that its going to be fixed with nothing to show for it is, well lets say bold.
And yes the fact that there is nothing to suggest that anet is working on this is evidence that Anet either doesnt seem to care about it, that they have no idea how to fix it, or that Anet is seriously terrible at communicating.

This isn’t the first time your position has been mentioned to the devs.

“I certainly agree that we need to improve effectiveness of condition damage builds against objects. We have some ideas, but none of them are simple and easy to implement/test. Rest assured it is something we recognize as a problem.

Jon (Peters) " From 2012

“Actually…(condition damage) is something we are actively looking at. We have a number of solutions that we are talking about and when we are able to figure out which one will have the least impact on balance, performance, and testing we will put that solution in place as soon as possible.

Jon (Peters)" From 2013_

It is what it is. You are talking about core combat mechanics and stuff that’s under the hood. Other mmos have taken years to implement balance changes, even stuff that might seem simple to us. I personally feel this is no different. They haven’t made any promises so I don’t really know what else to say. Would you like them to offer you a firm date on when they can fix it?

So they worked on this 3 years ago, and still havent figured out anything?

But ok I was wrong.

Arenanet isnt indifferent about this (or at least pretend to be), they are incompetent and cant find a solution.

Much better .

Disabling gem to gold would also effectively disable gold to gems.

The gem gains from AP are trivial.

nightwulf.1986:

Arkinos.7245:

To be honest the easier change would be to increase the bleed caps based on enemy rank.

Give Veterans, Champions, etc different bleeds caps.
This would not change sPvP at all while fixing a lot for pve.

But then again Anet did nothing for 3 years so its rather obvious that dont give a kitten about conditions for pve.

So, absence of evidence is the evidence of absence? This expansion must have been a rush job since they were doing nothing for three years prior like so many people claimed. I mean they didn’t tell us about it before the official announcement so it didn’t exist.

I get it. You want results and you want them now. If only development worked that way, we’d all be a little less grumpy.

Do you really think that a “problem” that was here since release is really something anet considers worth fixing?

I know that development takes time. But its been 3 years and there wasnt even any sort of communication that indicates Anet has this on the radar and is working on it.

There is literally no reason to believe that Anet is doing anything to fix conditions for pve. If you can post a link to a devblog or something that would be nice, because I want conditions to be viable.
(I went for a Rampager build on my Warrior right after release, unaware thats this buils is 100% inferior to Berserker in any situation and have basically stopped playing my Warrior ever since because I like the playstyle, but its not viable)

But just saying that its going to be fixed with nothing to show for it is, well lets say bold.
And yes the fact that there is nothing to suggest that anet is working on this is evidence that Anet either doesnt seem to care about it, that they have no idea how to fix it, or that Anet is seriously terrible at communicating.

To be honest the easier change would be to increase the bleed caps based on enemy rank.

Give Veterans, Champions, etc different bleeds caps.
This would not change sPvP at all while fixing a lot for pve.

But then again Anet did nothing for 3 years so its rather obvious that dont give a kitten about conditions for pve.

A good start for healing power would be to get useful stat combinations with it.

Right now the only “balanced” stat combination with healing power would be Zealot, and Anet decided to make Zealot gear an insane grind because you cant trade it. There is also Forsaken, but I am not even sure how or if you can get Forsaken gear right now.

Once this is fixed, Anet should rebalance basically every single heal in the game for better use of the healing power stat.

Hell since every class has so much heals, there could be some that heal a lot and dont scale well (like all heals currently do) and some that are mediocre but scale incredibly well.

@op

Celestial stats can be decent on classes that naturally use a lot of different things, I thought about getting it for my standard pve Guardian for example.

But it is mostly a matter of taste.

The optimized choice for pve is basically always Berserker.
If you dont care about dps graphs, optimal rotations and the rest of this nerd crap, Celestial is perfectly fine for pve.

Warriors are fine.
Not having top dps is absolutely okay considering the good support abilities and the fact that even full zerk warriors are insanely tanky and have the best personal sustain out of all classes without compromising their build for it.

Scholar will give the most DPS in theory, but I would personally prefer Pack runes or maybe even Ranger or Ogre runes for more reliable dps.

If you run PS you should obviously use Strength runes.

Op please.

Its fairly obvious that military equipment such as armor cant be sold to foreign citizens without the proper paperwork from the proper authorities. After all the Krytan goverment needs to make sure such equipment isnt used against the Krytan people at some point.

You merely failed to file the proper paperwork.

The commander tag needs to be “easy” to get because its used for a lot of different things.

If it would require some sort of pvp achievement the pve commanders would get screwed. Commander Tags are not a pvp only feature.

The price is kinda high, but then again if you really want one you should be able to farm it in a reasonable amount of time.

Guardian has by far the best condi management for groups thanks to Save Yourselves and stuff like Pure Voice, Trooper runes, the signet heal, etc.

Mesmer can in theory keep up with that, but it seems impractical to get Nullfield, the cleanse mantra and the other skills into one build.

Bought the Envelops every day, didnt bother with kittenty RNG and sold them on the TP for a profit.

No idea how much I made tho, not much since some people crashed the market after 2 days or so.

There is indeed too much loot, but thats because the game doesnt hand out the good stuff.

If the chance for relevant loot is close to zero, loot becomes a numbers game as you are flooded with trash. Being lucky means more trash for the salvage shredder, not getting useful items.

The fact that anet went with a random loot system for ascended quality means that there is basically only the trash up to exotics, and the god drops like pres. Nothing in between that can be handed out rarely exists. I still think ascended chests should be just that, not yxz weapon chest or abc weapon chest. Just a weapon chest, that allows picking both the type and the stats of weapons.

Not really.

Toxic behaviour is proportional to dependence on other players.
This dependence is low in GW2, and the community is decent because of that.

If your fun in a game depends on others, you are much more, lets say, critical towards them. Which in turn snowballs fast into toxic behaviour.

Mobas are toxic hellholes because your game depends on 4 other people not kittening up.

Teratus.2859:

Zerker probably will be meta for Revenant considering the Hammer is a Range weapon for them..

It’s possible Zerker might not be the meta for HoT in general though considering the new mobs could very well be designed to counter this Meta

It would amuse me greatly if this was the case
seeing hundreds of Zerker Warriors getting wasted because they are too squishy hehe

This is just flat out impossible.

If content would be too hard for Zerk warriors because they die too fast, it would be too hard for full tank/Soldier Eles because a soldier Ele is barely more durable than a Zerk Warrior.

The HP differences between classes are larger than the HP differences between builds.
As long as this is the case, Anet cant create anti zerk content because this content would be unplayable for certain classes.

You just dont get what chance means.

Anet cant do anything for you, its not their fault.

You knew there was a chance you’d end up getting an extreme result before you invested massive amounts of gold into RNG.

You knew very well what could happen, you went for it anyway.

I guess if you’d get 10 pres out of those rares you wouldnt leave the game because your account is “cursed” with unlikely Forge results huh?

Damage done greatly depends on your target, I can easily hit 4k on my kittenty exo/rare ranger if I hit something with low armor.

Not so hard with Rifle being effectively a melee weapon…

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Cazamar.7148:

Where is the best place to farm keys?

Empty character slot. Take character through the L10 PS, delete, rinse and repeat.

So basically: 9 tomes of knowledge = 1 key?

Thats actually not bad.

Ignore them, kicking them before last boss would be amusing though.

Staff first.

You can always dps in melee range with a staff if you have to, but you cant dps from range with daggers.

Reliability is more important than peak performance.

I wouldnt bother with event dailies unless there is a super convenient meta event like Teq or Claw.

The only pve dailies worth doing otherwise are harvesting, vistas and bosses if you can find the time for them.

I love how so many people argue about pointless things when op simply pointed out that karma vendors are missing a critical information.

It should not be necessary to visit a wiki before doing anything in this game to make sure you dont get screwed by intransparent game mechanics.

This has nothing to do with skill or l2p, its simply intransparent and bad design.
The chances of anet fixing this are close to zero of course, but op has a point nonetheless.

Its quite simple: a guild wants 100% rep, you either do it or leave.

No reason to make a fuss about it if a guild doesnt fit your playstyle.

I got invited into a guild by somebody that seemed nice, only to get 3 emails from some sort of officer that I must rep instantly. Since nothing like that was mentioned before or written down in the guild motd, I just left instantly because I cant be kitten d to perma rep a random guild.