Guild Wars 2

I’ll have to amend mine. I got Wolfsbane, which I sold for 60+ gold.

For as long as MMOs have had the RNG system, I’ve had to contend with the fact that I never, ever, in all my life, have gotten something that was significantly “rare” enough to warrant special mention. I’ve been playing these games for12 years now. And in these 12 years I’ve learned why it is that the lottery is called a stupid people tax..

#1: You aren’t going to get a precursor. Period. All the money you throw at trying to get one is figuratively going down the toilet.

#2: If you can’t measure your progress, it means you can’t make any progress. You are no closer to getting a precursor today then you were at launch. No amount of playtime or money spent entitles you to miracles.

#3: Luck is for other people. It may seem like it is for everyone, but that is because whenever someone is lucky they shout it to the skies. For every person who is lucky, there are tens of thousands who aren’t.

#4: Hard work is for you. It is much more profitable to sell and merch goods for trading than it is to buy and burn them hoping common sense is wrong. Take advantage of the fact that you can make money off of other people playing the lottery.

#5: Don’t even try to get one. It is a waste of time, money, effort, and hope. The sooner you accept failure, the sooner you can get over it and do something productive.

I’ve only been kicked from a dungeon for playing an engineer.

I just add them to the block list.

Talyn.3295:

ThyShadowPaladin.9521:

Talyn.3295:

I think the point is gonna be kinda moot when Chronomancer gets dropped in HoT. Seems anet wants us to have more access to quickness.

Because we’re also probbly going to be getting alot of slow casted at us.. People fail to realize that right now, you don’t fight mobs that put slow on the party.. but once they do… “PLZ Nerf this mob, slow too OP, Need more quickness” and the crying will start .

Exactly, that has been on my mind as well. They made it a boon, they let it stack and they took away most of the huge penalties that used to be associated with skills that granted quickness.

This, I am not so sure of. The history of quickness has always been a turbulent one. Originally it did double damage, and lasted for 5 seconds. It was nerfed to 1.5 damage, recieved one additional second, and kept all the negative effects.

You can actually extrapolate this from the math on this thread, but I’m assuming no one else has done this, so I’ll do it here: most quickness skills suck. I mean, sure, FMW is currently twice as strong as a banner, and Time Warp has the most powerful debuff you can put on an enemy. But FMW is 9 times stronger than the other quickness skills, so in relation most quickness has roughly the contribution of 2/9ths of a banner.

This long-term ineffectiveness means that quickness doesn’t warrant the negative effects that came with it. While I suggested 60 seconds untraited with 6 seconds of quickness, that is to put it into the scope of other quickness skills. As a whole, I wouldn’t be surprised if most quickness skills had their base recharge reduced to 45 seconds. Then, FMW 2ould go to 45 to stay equivalent.

ArkisTruefire.1746:

You’re comparing a bunch of non-elites to an elite skill.

See time warp. Also irrelevant: putting a broken skill in the “elite” box doesn’t make it right.

Zlosnica.8936:

So let me get this straight, one of the few actually good things which happened to guardian this last patch should be nerfed because you think the dungeon’s were easy? Is this some kind of joke?!?! People are never happy about anything when you give them something. “No this is broken it should not be like that”, when its suck’s “Bla bla bla we didn’t get anything” and so on. Stop crying and write useless post’s, about a class which suffers from the most from every other.

I see this kind of thinking a lot. In other forums. About their classes. Kind of funny, isn’kitten

This is not how balance is supposed to work. Giving one class inferior (debatable) prowess just so one OP skill can compensate just means that things are polarized and broken. If you feel that guardians have been nerfed unfairly, you should make a topic about that. If guardians need a skill like FMW to compete, then that means guardians should be buffed so they don’t need FMW to be so over the top.

Jerus.4350:

Why do you consider it a 1.5 increase to damage? For Hammer maybe, but the other weapons it just means you get back to auto attacks sooner. Meaning it’s not a full 1.5X damage, just a nice increase.

For hammer and main hand sword. Technically it is a DPS increase (damage per second), but I just call it damage for short. You do bring up a good point, which makes it more complicated to get the actual effect of quickness out there.

If you look at any individual skill, it is a 50% increase to DPS because the skill now only takes 2/3rds of the time to cast. In a long chain, this additional air will be filled by auto attacks, which can be considered as just having a 50% damage increase. This has a compounding effect, where you both get to auto attacks faster, and auto attacks do more damage.

Unfortunately, making a formula for this is a bit hard. To get the DPS increase overall, you’d need to take a sampled time frame, see how many attacks you can do in that period, and then compare that to a quickness period. For example, lets take the guardian greatsword. In 10 seconds, you’ll do the following:

Symbol of Wrath (0.75), whirling wrath (3), 7 auto attacks (0.83 each)

On tooltip, this comes to 4386 damage. Compare that same 10 second interval using quickness:

Symbol of Wrath (0.5), whirling wrath (2), 13 auto attacks (0.55 each)

Tooltip damage: 6395, or a 45.8% increase. This is slightly off, since the tooltip doesn’t factor in the projectiles from whirling wrath. This also doesn’t factor in things like the increased might stacks from greatsword auto attacks.

This is true for any class. DPS can be summed up as

(Auto attack x Time for auto attacks + Spike skills x Time for spike skills) / total time.

And the contribution that quickness makes is

(1.5 x Auto attack x (Time for auto + 1/3rd spike time) + Spike skills x (2/3rds spike time)) / total time.

Overall I generally consider quickness to be anywhere from 40% to 50% modifier. I go with 50% as base, because otherwise you need to go very heavily into specific weapons and builds and timing.

Hayashi.3416:

A traited FMW gives 20% quickness uptime for 50% dps boost, or 10% AoE dps boost.
An untraited Discbanner gives 75% banner uptime for 170 precision+ferocity (8% critrate, 11.3% critdmg) ~ 10.5-11% AoE dps boost..

I’d check the math again. On zerker guard I came up with a 10% increase when applied, totaling to a 7.5% when factoring in uptime. This is assuming the banner is maintained throughout multiple fights.

When traited, FMW gives a 20.8% quickness uptime, plus another 41.6% uptime on fury. This causes two stages of buffs: 1st is 1.5 × 1.14, totaling a 71% damage boost for 20.8% of the time (14.8% party DPS), then 14% DPS for the 20.8% remaining effect time (2.91%), totaling the party contribution to 17.71% party DPS.

Quickness, unlike banners, are not static additions. They are modifiers, with a straight 1.5x damage boost to action speed. So thus, while the overall contribution of banners decreases as you add more things (might, fury, spotter, etc)), quickness multiplies every single bonus. Including banners. Quickness also stacks in duration.. Banners are unique buffs that do not stack.

This isn’t the whole story, either. There’s an additional factor that needs to be considered: Fight length. If an enemy group dies in 5 seconds, then FMW effectively has 100% uptime for that incident. If the fight lass 10 seconds, 50% updtime. 24 seconds has the 20.8% uptime, but 30 seconds has 33% uptime, since it gets used again. So really, FMW actually has an oscilating uptime that bottoms out at 20.8%, giving a much higher quickness uptime in the relevant situation: the fight.

This is the reason why it is that, on the 5 guard group, we still effectively had perma quickness even though not all of us took the honor line. With the recharge being reduced from the travel time between fights, to only using the skill during relevant moments, the actual uptime of quickness is higher than calculated. The 20.8% is the minimum, assuming a permanent fight.

Now this does apply to banners, but it is not as beneficial when compared to something like FMW. FMW is a short effect on a short cooldown, where’s the banner is a long effect on a long cooldown. This causes a problem, in that the travel time between fights sees the effect tick away, doing effectively nothing. The travel time during the down time does increase the efficiency of banners, but FMW does not have an overflow issue like banners do.

Because of this, I’m not sure that a 6 second quickness (+ either 10 or 12 seconds of fury) on a 60 second cooldown would be useless, or even underpowered. It would still be 5 times stronger than all of the other quickness skills, and it would still be used in groups to increase offense (whereas renewed focus is basically an invuln skill on a 90 second cooldown). It is still twice as potent as time warp, whether both are traited or both aren’t.

That is something that I’m pretty sure Anet messed up. While they cut down the damage of burning to about half, they tripled the amount that gets applied., resulting in the rather extreme numbers we see now.

The bad part is that all of the other conditions were nerfed, but weren’t compensated. Bleeding was changed at the last second so now the breakpoint for when you’re doing equivalent damage is at +2000 malice. Bleeding was not increased to compensate for this. Poison had its damage cut in half, much like burning, but the amount of poison that gets applied was barely changed for most skills. Torment does 75% the damage of bleed, and the access to this condi is rare.

Confusion could be workable, but again we have access problems. Memsers, in spite of all of their abilities to apply confusion, don’t have a periodic or reliable way to do so. If memsers had something like sharper images, but with confusion, then we’d actually be in a pretty solid spot.

This isn’t just a mesmer issue. I have a condi thief and necro, and both of these classes suffer from the same problem: their primary sources of condition damage were nerfed, and weren’t compensated for with increased stacks like other classes were. To compete with something like warrior or engi, the amount that these classes apply would have to be doubled.

But I’ll take it slower. My suggestion is to increase bleed damage to what it was previously (when the breakpoint was about 750 malice), double the damage poison does, increase the damage of torment to be in scale with bleeding still. Confusion’s malice modifier should be increased to 0.0725 per action, and 0.0425 for standing damage.

So I was on a 5 guardian party the other day after symbolic avenger was disabled, and this 5 man glowing chainsaw cut through dungeons so fast I swear it was Photoshopped. The only organization it had was “bring a guardian and spam Feel My Wrath”. Running pure of voice was optional.

So, I sat down and decided to look at all of the quickness skills we have, and I’m pretty sure that Feel My Wrath is overpowered. Now, to compare it to other quickness giving skills/traits/blah, there’s two ways to think about it. First is the percentage uptime of quickness, which is a good metric for personal use. Second is the number of quickness “ticks” it gives out, which is the total number of seconds of quickness it outputs. This can be measured in a ticks per skill cooldown, or “ticks per second”. This is important for group use. Now, lets begin:

Frenzy: can be traited to give 7.2 seconds of quickness every 60 seconds. This is 7.2 ticks, or 12% uptime, or 0.12 ticks of quickness per second.

Elixir U: Can be traited to give 7.2 seconds of quickness every 40 seconds. This is 7.2 ticks, or 18% uptime, or 0.18 ticks of quickness per second.

Quickening Zephyr: Can be traited to give 6 seconds of quickness every 48 seconds. This is 6 ticks, or 12.5% uptime, or 0.125 ticks of quickness per second.

Haste: Can be traited to give 6 seconds of quickness every 48 seconds. This is 6 ticks, or 12.5% uptime, or 0.125 ticks of quickness per second.

Time Warp: Can be traited to give 12 seconds of quickness to the whole party every 180 seconds. This is 60 ticks, or 6.67% uptime, or 0.33 ticks per second.

Heightened focus: this one is a bit complicated, since it is situation dependent. On a single target it’ll give 4 ticks every 15 seconds, but only half the time. Against a slew of ongoing targets it’ll give quickness as you cut them down. I’m going to use a single target (champion, for example), and say that, since it is up about 44% of the time (half the time, adjusted for DPS increase from the trait), that it gives a total of 4 seconds every (adjusted) 34.1 seconds. This is 4 ticks, or 11.7% uptime, or 0.117 ticks per second.

Instinctive reaction: Not a reliable source, unless there’s some crazy ranger tactic I’m unfamiliar with that involves constantly playing at half HP.

Zephy’rs Speed: Can be traited to give 3 seconds of quickness every 16 seconds. This is 3 ticks, or an 18.8% uptime, or 0.188 ticks per second.

Flanking Strike: Just uses Haste. This is 6 ticks, or 12.5% uptime, or 0.125 ticks of quickness per second.

Furious Interruptiom: This gives 3 seconds of quickness every 5 seconds. This has a maximum stats of the following: 60% uptime, or 0.6 ticks per second.

Feel My Wrath: When traited, this gives 5 seconds of quickness every 24 seconds to the whole party. This is 25 ticks, or 20.8% uptime, or 1.04 ticks per second.

Feel my wrath has the second highest personal uptime next to the rather dodgy furious interruption, and also is the only skill that gives more ticks per second than actual seconds. This has lead to the unique phenomena where a group of guardians can get permanent quickness by spamming this skill whenever its off cooldown.

Now, I know that mesmers have low personal DPS, so the quickness for them is warranted. But are guardians in such a state that they need to give the whole party 20.8% quickness uptime to be competitive? Are perma-quickness 5 guardian pugs meant to be a thing?

I wouldn’t ask for much of a nerf. Change it to 6 seconds of quickness every 60 seconds in an AoE, not factoring in traits. That way, when traited it gives the same amount of personal quickness as haste/quickening zephyr/frenzy, but gives it to the whole team, so it is still 5 times more useful than the other skills.

Am I alone in thinking this?

Nowadays I’m not so sure. I can’t think of it as dropping a line as much as which build to go with. This is all PVE:

I’m probably always going to take spite and reaper. The might and vulnerability stacking is too good to pass up. Likewise, I can’t wait to try out bitter chill + chilling nova + decimate defenses. In my zerker builds it’ll basically max out my crit chance with little help. The next line changes where I can specialize and different playstyles.

Soul Reaping: Shroud Knight is good, and boosting it up makes it better. At base I’ll take unyielding blast, spectral mastery, foot in the grave, for fairly obvious reasons. But, soul reaping offers an alternate playstyle, where you can prioritize Shroud Knight instead of just using it as utility. Combine Reapers might, unyielding blast, vital persistence, rending shroud, reaper’s onslaught, and then either combination of chilling force + deathly perception or foot in the grave + decimate defense, and then you’ll get this nigh indestructible monster that stacks vulnerability and might endlessly. Any enemy that gets past your knight form gets obliterated with every GS cooldown instantly.

Blood Magic: I’m loving this trait line in the new build, and with the reaper specialization it’ll do its job just as well. There isn’t any really big “synergy” parts to hit, insomuch as I just want to keep vampiric rituals, vampiric presence, and last rights. The new slew of whirl finishers from the reaper adds better group synergy. Most likely it’ll be done in the ice field left from executioner’s strike, but the dark fields of wells leaves an additional damage + healing option if needed.

Curses: This has some spots of support, but it’ll mostly be good for condi reapers. Chilling darkness combined with well of darkness adds faster vulnerability stacking and weakening shroud provides defenses. By yourself, furious demise is still useful. On the condi side, deathly chill + terror looks fun to play with, but I’m not sure that a condi reaper is the best thing to go with.

Death magic: minions are meh, and the reaper doesn’t change that. Death nova and Rise! looks like it’ll be fun once or twice, but otherwise this line is really meh. Death magic is the new blood magic.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Incorrect. Anyone who likes laissez-faire, anything goes, FFA runs loses out. They’d be saddled with needing a tank and healer. Furthermore, for the meta to accept that tank and healer, then those players will need to have a build that works within the heal/damage formula. Also, once the heal/damage formula is tweaked for tanks and healers to be required, where does that leave DPS? Do they need to perform to a certain level before whatever resources the tank/healer expend to do their thing run out? Where’s the freedom and diversity if that happens?

Style of grouping is a much different beast than style of play. The “group” is not something that feels and wants. It is the individuals in that group. Thus, when dealing with balance the only thing that is important is that each person’s individual playstyle is reinforced. Grouping is a convenience thing, and is basically the LFG tool and guild chat.

Likewise, players are already losing out on grouping convenience if they aren’t running GC gear.

IndigoSundown.5419:

And still will be no matter what design decisions are made. It’s just that it might not be focused at an individual who wants to be a tank but who toes the mark on build and tactics. It will still be focused on anyone who dares to deviate from the accepted. Changing a game mechanic would just shift the focus of internet exclusion behavior, it’s not going to get rid of it.

More play preferences would be accepted. Ergo, less hate. The ire would be directed at individual incompetence, instead of widespread class systems like it is now.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Why does every gear prefix have to be useful in a dungeon meta? They’re not all useful in the WvW meta. In other games, tanks don’t typically wear their tank stuff in PvP — at least the ones I know didn’t once dual spec came in. Why can’t a prefix exist in what’s been designed as a free-for-all game that only gets used in one mode, or only by certain players who want certain things?

They have to be useful because then people who like that particular style of play will receive less hate for playing it, and will have more fun. This will also draw in the crowd who wants a holy trinity and thinks that it is the only proper way to play the game. The subject here is player appeal and marketing. The balance of gear types is actually quite similar to the balance of classes as a whole: people want to use their class in a particular mode of play. People want to use their gear in a particular mode of play. This is an issue for all game modes, not just dungeons.

Make no mistake, I don’t like the idea of hard roles. A lot of players flock to this game specifically because it doesn’t have hard roles. But evaluate it from the financial prospect, and you’ll see several things. First, that there is a very large market of players who either want to play the trinity or can’t fathom a system unlike it. Second is, while the trinity system does have a set of problems, the current system in GW2 has community and mechanical issues that would not be present in the trinity system, or would be more easily fixed in a trinity system. Third is that these players and their parents have delicious dollars. Anet is hedging its bets on the idea that players are tired of how formulaic MMOs are, and designed itself to be contrary on several aspects. The argument to go with the flow can always be made.

Its K. I took several screenshots of things that are “zoomed out”. Max zoom, actually.

Well yeah if you can clearly see a visible threat then stun it. But, given the tendency for so many elites to come pouring around a corner, the mess of polygons and bright lights frequently leaves me utterly blind in the encounter. After years I still can’t see what is going on.

But regardless, we have a new dilemma. In may groups, the enemies die really fast to melee cleave. So fast that I’ll frequently target someone to use warden, only to have them die before I can fire it off. I can spend my time waiting for a particular kind of enemy I’m watching do an animation and hope I can interrupt it, or I can interrupt rather haphazardly, going for the quickness + vulnerability stacks more than stopping any particular attack. So, I’m constantly weighing using MoD precisely to defend against a particular attack, or immediately for greater DPS. I go for the latter, given that should I need to I can use diversion or distortion if necessary.

The thing with 1200 range duelists are that, to ensure that amount of protection during an encounter, you have to be 1200 range away in the first place. Through the winding corridors of dungeons, this generally doesn’t happen. Withdrawing from a boss to use duelist takes time, so you’ll end up using it at a closer range to keep pace in the fight. Though if you do have that range, the duelist + signet of ether + duelist + warden combo works nicely. Suffice to say I’m switching to sword for the majority of circumstance now.

IndigoSundown.5419:

What stops you from playing as you want now?

Actually, the issue is far more complicated than that. Whether we should have hard roles or not isn’t just a matter of player preference, but a business decision. People like having hard roles, and they like having their playstyle reinforced by the game’s design. So, the question is if the game can be more interesting, entertaining, and appealing to the public at large if there were hard roles.

It isn’t a stupid thought. Since beta, one of the biggest legitimate complaints about GW2 is that the PVE combat is samey. From an outside perspective, watching everyone in the team do the exact same stack and smack routine with every encounter ever is both unpleasant to look at and unappealing in general. Hard roles appear to be dynamic and unique, with each player’s singular contribution being noticeable.

From the diversity standpoint no one “loses out” if tanking and healing become requirements. DPS preference players still get to DPS, but now the other two legs get to do their thing, too. The problem is that players who build bulky or healy, or heck even conditiony face not gratitude, but ire from their teammates. Telling these minority preference players to just go and hang out with each other is like telling racial minorities to do the same thing to avoid racism. It isn’t a fix, at all. The hate is still there, you’re just trying to hide yourself away from it.

While it is a community problem, it is also a design problem. So, facing the unreasonable wrath of selfish teenagers on the internet, the only reasonable solution would be to modify the game in such a way that the stat combinations that Anet put into the game are useful in that game.

Personally I think the solution to this problem is just to make the game harder, but in specific ways to encourage more than just corner pulling and bursting. You’ll still get full zerk groups, but hopefully the skill of the average player would mean that running a bunch of unaffiliated full zerkers is no longer completely superior to 4 zerks + 1 zealot.

The roles in GW2 exist. They’re just not as clearly defined and hard limited by stats like they are in other MMOs:

The Might/Fury stacker: given to warriors and eles.
Projectile reflecter/stopper: Most classes, but mesmer/guard/engi are best
Cleanser: Engi, Guard, Mesmer
Stealther: Engi, Thief
Blind Spammer: Necro, Thief, Engi, and sometimes guard
Defiance Stripper: Mesmer, Thief

And that is only a generalized overlook on what the classes can do. Many of them do so much more than that, but don’t classify as a “build” because of how unique it is. For example, Ele’s Frost Bow is a great stun + burst weapon, Mesmer portals are a great movement technique in the right spot, many of these builds will stack other things like protection, swiftness, and stability.

There’s really only two “roles” that are limited by the gear you choose.

Tanker: This one is technically an asterisk, because many thieves can distract enemies with evades endlessly, as well as many guards and mesmers can block attacks. Also the necro and warrior have so much bulk and sustain that they can face tank many champions, even in glass cannon gear.

Healer: Also an asterisk. Healing while players are still standing requires the healing power stat. But, if a player goes down, you can quickly bring them back up regardless of your stat set.

Overall I find the old holy trinity to be extremely boring. It is a system of negatives: you as a player are an incomplete unit that is hampered by weaknesses which prevent you from performing by yourself. You are good at one thing, and horrible at two things, leaving you relatively incompetent. The whole system exists to simplify the effective healing vs. effective damage formula, and it isn’t that fun at all. I can see no reason why the system has to be so restraining.

While skimming this thread there are several things that are going through my head.

#1: Anet is already making new content in the game to be harder than what we have now. They’re hesitant to revamp old content with good reason: It is better to make new stuff harder, than to take something easier that players might already enjoy and make it harder. I’ve been running AC daily since the patch, and about every other pug goes through this same conversation:

“OMG why is this so hard?” — after wiping on the first champ
“They recently nerfed downscaled damage here” — Me
“Lol Anet ruined AC” — everyone else.

Something to the effect of confusion and frustration. I only heard one person other than myself who actually liked the change.

#2: Difficulty breeds toxicity. “challenging group content” can be roughly translated into “Gear and build checks and seething hatred for all the other people who hold you back/didn’t carry you well enough.” I still very clearly remember watching people in chat kitten at each other for 15 minutes in a dungeon because one person didn’t like how the other one couldn’t skip by themselves. Even now, I see tequatl break down into fighting over who is ruining everything. It is no secret that the dungeon community is one of the worst communities in this game.

Granted, I would like to see things at lower levels be a bit harder in the open world than they are now. Currently, if you actually run a dungeon at the appropriate level it is a difficulty shock. That level of things should be eased into a bit better. But this is not an easy task: we have to essentially balance content for an utter newb elementalist and warrior at the same time, even though one is nearly twice as durable as the other.

I find it awkward, too. Though I’ve been having a much better time using Furious Interruption with Mantra of Distraction.

MoD works in an AoE and hits 5 targets, so when used against a wave of trash mobs the chances that you’re interrupting one is pretty good. This makes it so, at least against all the elites and vets, you’ll have a very high quickness uptime. I’ve been using this with mantra of pain to burst down trash really fast, sometimes it is so fast that I question if I should summon warden at all.

In general, I find there are four types of champ fights: Warden Fights, Duelist Fights, Either, or Neither. This is usually the phantasm that I’ll stick on, since the other tends to die very quickly.

Wardens: good against immobile enemies, multiple hit spots, and projectiles. Bad against melee cleave.
Duelistss: Good against melee enemies. Bad against projectiles and large AoEs.
Both: An enemy with single target damage only.
Neither: An enemy with huge map clearing non-projectile attacks.

Derigar.7810:

I’ve heard ZOOMING OUT works wonders.

That just makes the indecipherable glowing explosion of equestrian magic further away. It doesn’t help me see the tells of the boss.

While many of my concerns are being addressed, this is a topic that no one really brings up, in spite of how important it is.

To be blunt: I can’t see. It is worse for some classes than others (I’ve practically gone blind playing ele a few times), but in group content this issue always rears its head. While there are options to reduce the amount of particle effects, the sheer amount of flashing lights and glowing flames can make things nigh impossible to see. See attached picture for reference.

I am wondering/hoping if anything is being done in the HoT expansion to reduce, or at the very least give the option to reduce the blinding special effects further. If not, then you should do that.

The thing that I find troubling is the implication that “AC P1 80s only exp” is the preferred mode instead of just “AC P1 exp” for so many people. But I digress.

We’re not looking at the whole picture here. We’re looking at just power. What also should be included is versatility and defense. But first, a little history lesson: What you’re seeing in lowbie dungeons now is closer to how it originally was in the first place. The utter faceroll that 80s could pump out in sub CoF dungeons was the product of the scaling changes that occurred awhile ago. It was roughly the same time the ferocity change if I remember correctly. Yes, this scaling change made it so high levels utterly plowed through everything at lower level, so much so that there are videos of Ele’s soloing Ascalon Catacombs in 8 minutes.

So, lets take a look at a more direct comparison. I’m going to be using the two necromancers, since that set of images actually has similar classes.

Power: 17% lower
Precision: 75% higher
Vitality: 60% higher
Toughness 60% higher
Ferocity: Some vs. none
Malice: some vs. none
Healing power: some vs. none

Armor: 33% higher
Health: 75% higher
Crit Chance: 73% higher
Crit damage: 4% higher

Effective Power: 102.5 (level 80) vs. 116 (level 2) = 12% loss
Effective Health: 140,732 (level 80) vs. 60,003 (level 2) 135% gain.

Now, this is limited, but there’s another thing to consider: At higher levels, the necromancer gains access to all of their traits and utilities. A lower level necromancer doesn’t have those things. So, no fury in DS, no 20% increase against half dead enemies, no self might stacking against half dead enemies, no piercing life blast, etc.

The end result is that toons at their appropriate level have, on face value, more power at the sacrifice of everything else in substantial quantities.

Now personally, I wouldn’t mind if lowbies were as strong or stronger than scaled down 80s. Leveling up to curb stomp lower level competition is an antiquated model that Arenanet purposefully built away from in the first place. At higher levels you still get more gear choices, more build choices, more utilities, more access to the game, and more skins. Downscaling exists solely to make it so higher level players can play alongside of lower level players without being overpowered.

In PVE, depends on which build I’m using.

Condi: Signet of Vampirism.
Melee Wellomancer: Well of Blood
Deathshroud Build: Consume Conditions

That is something I’ve noticed about online games.

Challenge is fun, but only if you are by yourself. If you are in a team environment, then challenge just leads to exclusion, animosity, frustration, blaming, and toxicity overall. I’ve been in several successful and unsuccessful tequatl raids, and the key feature to each of them is how angry everyone is. Tequatl has become less about the fight, and more about several people yelling at each other in map chat during the half-hour prep.

The hardest part about tequatl is that it isn’t a puzzle. It is brute force: either you have the numbers to complete the event, or you don’t. The unbearable skill lag you get also makes it nigh impossible to preform clinch plays. The end result being that the one zerker who lucked out in the fight aimlessly harasses the air in map chat for not being good enough.

Doesn’t ice bow inflict bleed?

The problem is that everything the OP listed is what players were already doing in the first place, and it still isn’t working.

My biggest gripe with all this is that the actual hitboxes for tequatl have little to no relation to where his model actually is. I will run up and try to melee the nebulous crit spot, only to find that because tequatl has shuffled about aimlessly that the crit spot isn’t there anymore. And it isn’t like you can target the spot to hit it with ranged attacks, either.

So, if you want to make a real guide on how to defeat the new tequatl, you’re going to have to do more than re-peat the same old advice that no longer works now. We need exact map coordinates and landmarks to show where this crit spot is.

LazySummer.2568:

Please keep teq how it is right now so people will stop afk ranging the foot and actually get on the correct double damage and critical hit spot and start learning to dodge and use reflects

There’s a problem with that. Tequatl’s actual hit boxes aren’t tied to his model. They are points on the ground. The problem being that, as tequatl shuffles about, the target points actually move outside of where his hitboxes are.

But, ranged auto attacks still track to the model. When a player tries to do something (say, ice bow 4), they’ll frequently drop it to where their bullets are going, only to have 90% of the shards miss because his hitbox isn’t actually there.

Sword has more or less just been a niche weapon in PVE. I love the phantasm, but the other skills are lackluster. The only time you ever whip it out is if you absolutely need to hit something at range.

It never surprises me how big the wave of hatred and discrimination from “open-minded” people is.

Just FYI, there are far more people who don’t approve of this than what you see on the forums. The issue is that whenever they speak up, they are heavily censored by the moderating staff. We can’t have an open discussion about these topics because Anet has taken the rather close minded view that anyone who disagrees with them is evil.

Inspirations provides much more than that:

AoE condi cleanse on heal
AoE invulnerability in emergencies (and sometimes on signet use)
Rampant reflects (which many times are needed, and are useful as they do damage, whereas warden would normally take projectile damage away)
More Durable Phantasms
And then the choice of boon duplication or enhanced glamors. Synergizes with domination to make yet another AoE invulnerability.

Essentially, inspirations provides you all those sorts of little bits and bobs that help deal with whatever random crap that fractals will throw at you.

But I do agree that duelist is almost a must-have trait line. Perma vigor, nigh perma fury on yourself, perma fury on phantasms, up to 150 ferocity fairly reliably, and more potent mantras with a temp damage boost. While most other lines have a trait or two you can use, dueling is chock full of them, whether you are running a power or condi build.

I’ve been having the same problem. Every other class I play I’m able to hammer out satisfactory builds in 5 minutes, but with the Mesmer it is an exercise in frustration. The way traits are placed are so bad that mesmer actually feels nerfed from pre-patch. Personally, my worry is that Anet will look at the metrics of how often anyone takes a trait, and not realize that they’re all bad and they are taken out of necessity. The only line I actually like is Dueling.

There are two problems with most of the traits. Mesmer’s do a large portion of their damage through phantasms, and so they try to keep phantasms alive as long as possible. Thus, most shatter traits are useless. Likewise, interrupt traits will often ruin the more carefully timed tactics of teams, and are impractical to use. The thing is, so many memser traits are interrupts and shatter skills.

Domination:The entire domination line feels like a bunch of traits you have to pick in order to get Fragility and Empowered Illusions. Otherwise it is full of shatter and interrupt traits.

Chaos: This line completely lacks potency. It has random spots of protection and some minor condi stuff. The only reason people take this line is that it has Prismatic Understanding.

Inspirations: This line has some useful things. The cleanses and Warden’s Feedback is good, but the adept and master tiers are only “meh”.

Illusions: This line is also filled with shatter skills, particularly condi ones. This trait line is taken for Illusionists Celerity and Phantasmal haste, and then you get stuck with everything else.

So, if you want to do maximum damage, you take dueling, illusions, and domination. Illusions and domination do almost nothing but damage, so you end up lacking the the versatility and utility that other classes have by default. If you want those tools, you go into dueling, inspirations, then pick between illusions and domination.

Then it is a toss up. Illusions gives you 20% recharge on non-warden phantasm, 20% attack rate, 9% personal damage + 150 malice that is highly unreliable. Domination gives, among spots of vulnerability, 15% illusion damage, 12.5% personal damage on max vulnerability that is highly unreliable, and a recharge reduction on Signet of the Ether. Little to no utility and potency in either of those.

Right now, I’m experimenting with dom/duel/insp, using mantra of distraction to try and get quickness and vulnerability stacks.

I’m mixed on the updates myself.

I wrote at great lengths once about how I hated necro traits, but I’ll give an anecdote on that fact. One day, I decided to do dungeons on my necro. So, I switched from WvW condi gear into full zerker, reset my traits, and then when I saw someone was doing a 3-path run of HotW I quickly jumped up and joined.

After going through all 3 paths of HotW, I was going through my gear and traits when I noticed something: I never picked out my traits. I just reset them, and then went into dungeons. I went through 3 dungeons, and I never even noticed that I was missing every single trait + 1600 stat points. That is how minor and inconsequential all of the necro traits were. I couldn’t even imagine doing something like that with my mesmer/thief/engi/guard/ele, where I would’ve noticed immediately that some crucial traits were missing.

So many of our traits have gone from literally useless to kind of interesting. Prime example being the spite line adept traits: Parasitic Bond (heal when killing a foe, mostly useless) is becoming Reaper’s Might, a trait I would purposefully take from time to time. Death Into Life (gain healing power based on power, the epitome of useless) becomes Death’s Embrace, which is an interesting idea where you start piling on vulnerability onto a mostly dead enemy. Siphoned Power (gain 5 seconds of might when struck under 25% health, highly situational and mostly useless) is changing so that against a half-dead enemy you start stacking massive amounts of might (capping at 20 stacks by itself). Granted, these aren’t as useful as the flat-rate boosts most classes get, but I still see countless situations where these traits actually mean something.

I’m looking forward to playing around with things like spiteful spirit and rending shroud. I’m looking forward to combining Signets of Suffering with Plague Sending. I’m looking forward to weakening shroud causing a passive 50% uptime of weakness with procs alone. I’m looking forward to the entire blood magic tree actually being an option, making necros have some rather unique abilities (Group siphon, no degen when downed). And finally, I’m looking forward to life blast builds possibly being a thing again, with the combination of Reaper’s Might, Rending Shroud, a newly enhanced Unyielding Blast, an enhanced Vital Shroud, and Deathly Perception.

It is a shame what happened with corruptions, consume conditions, and plague, though.

PVE? WvW? PVP? You’ll need to specify.

For PVE, what I do is this:

#1: Start out in Earth Attunement. To start the battle, use Eruption at the enemy’s feet, and magnetic aura.
#2: Immediately switch to fire and use lava font at the location of eruption, so that eruption will blast and cause might.
#3: Use flame burst, fireball, and arcane wave, keeping the enemies in the lava font. Repeat until the enemy is dead.

If against a widespread group of enemies or a large enemy, use meteor shower after the first lava font. If fighting a champion, use drop an icebow then use the skills #5, #4, #3 in that order after using the first lava font.

On the PVE side, I’m still coming up with builds for each weapon set. Staff is fairly easy: Fire/Air/Water. I considered going into Earth for diamond skin, since it can trivialize certain effects (Grawl fractals hot foot, for example), but water has more damage modifiers and AoE magnetic aura is difficult to pass up.

The other weapon sets are a bit harder. Now that bolt to the heart is mutually exclusive with fresh air, the funky fresh tactic of combining it with elemental attunement for boon spam won’t be as good as I always wanted it to be.

Tequatl will only spawn the portals during his second through final phase. Most of the maps that fight him will DPS him down before he can start attacking in those phases, which is why you aren’t seeing portals.

There are two options.

#1: At the end of the first phase, at the very end, he has a chance of spawning portals. You can keep trying and hope for one of those.

#2: Arrive relatively late to the map, and you’ll likely end up in an overflow. These overflows often don’t have the body count to DPS tequatl to death during his vulnerable phase.

Looks like you’ll have to hold the keep at some place other than the champion…

Genesis. Twice. Both times at Honor of the Waves.

I encounter this problem sometimes, too.

The biggest issue I’ve always had with running D/D 6/6/2/0/0 builds is that it just doesn’t survive that well. I have to hope that bosses don’t preferentially target me or I can stay behind the mob to avoid cleave. When that happens, sure it does a ridiculous amount of damage. But too often I find myself kissing pavement because I’ve run out of dodges.

S/P and S/D are great for survival. They have longer dodge times, weakness on auto attack, and a built in condi cleanse. S/D can tear boons, and S/P can blind mobs and combo stealth.

It is one of the issues I’ve noticed with meta builds. They operate under the assumption that everyone else on the team is also running a meta build and doing meta strats. If they aren’t, then the weaknesses of meta builds start to shine through.

Just go with dagger. Necros already have a range attack built in: Life Blast. That, and Lich Form. Those are usually more than sufficient if you need to back off for a bit.

I don’t mind the downtime myself. It is giving me a chance to level alts and get them through their story modes. Heck, I haven’t even set foot in the silverwastes yet.

I imagine it is more about development resources than any sort of ideal. Let me explain:

Each body type needs time and money to make. Resources which can be spent elsewhere doing other things. While the model designers could spend their time making female models that run the gambit from anorexic to morbidly obese, if the vast majority of players don’t want to use these models, then those models were essentially cash thrown into the garbage.

Really, the argument isn’t whether you want to have a particular body style, but whether enough people want a particular body style to merit Anet going out of their way to make it.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Finding-the-Diminishing-Returns-in-Stats/

I had the same musings awhile ago. That was back when crit% was still just crit %. So, the updated formulas for today would be

Damage = K*Power*( 1 + ((Precision – 832)/2100)*(0.5 + Ferocity/1500)))

Applying calculus and derivating those values

d(damage)/d(power) = K*( 1 + ((Precision – 832)/2100) * (0.5 + Ferocity/1500)))
d(damage)/d(precision) = K*Power*(0.5 + Ferocity/1500)/2100
d(damage)/d(ferocity)= K*Power*(1 + ((Precision – 832)/2100))/1500

I am really hoping I got that last formula right, since again I haven’t had to use calculus in years. Anyway, the idea is that by setting these formula against each other, we can come up with a series of equations to find where each stat becomes the most efficient. In particular, when the change in power is equal to the change in precision, which is equal to the change in ferocity. Power is equivalent to precision in growth when:

Power = 2100/(0.5 + Ferocity/1500) + Precision – 832

and Power is equivalent to ferocity in growth when… gonna have to work out the math on this one.

Let U = (Precision – 832)/2100

1 + U(0.5 + Ferocity/1500) = Power/1500 * (1 + U)

1500 + U(750 + Ferocity) = Power (1 + U)

Power = (1500 + U(750+ Ferocity)) / (1 + U)

Substituting back in…

Power = (1500 + ((Precision – 832)/2100) * (750 + Ferocity)) / (1 + ((Precision – 832)/2100))

Which is.. really messy. Someone should probably check my math and methods on this. This messy equation is why most people try to go with benchmarks, and just calculate the power to precision ratio from there.

As to finding an equivalence point for when the change in damage is the same across all three? I’d say good luck with that. I can barely handle the algebra at this time. But I hope what I have provided helps.

EDIT: I kitten ed. Ferocity is expressed as a percentage point, and not a solid number. It is /1500 instead of /15, and I was just doing the conversion in my head automatically.

Race: Norn
Sex: Female
Class: Elementalist
Problem: When wearing armor, a very distinct crease appears on the back of the character model, right where the upper and lower portions of the model meet.

I have tried several different armor combinations, and have switched out both the upper and lower armor sets. A crease appears on each one. Likewise, a very visible model clipping can be seen on the front of the midsection, making it appear as if the character has completely different textures between upper and lower body.

This crease in the character vanishes when wearing neither chest pieces nor pants. But, when wearing one or the other, the bend appears again. This is apparent on any graphical setting.

Generally I just stick to ele for overworld boss events. Thief is good, but it just can’t beat meteor storm and ice bow.

But, for doing events on the thief, I usually have one of two weapon setups:

Dagger/Pistol + Shortbow, Sword/Dagger + Shortbow.

For power setups. I just love the shortbow. The bouncing arrow can sometimes hit multiple target spots, and cluster bomb definitely hits multiple spots. The cluster bombs can also be used to blast might and heals in respective fields. I find it to be so useful that I almost never take it off.

The melee weapons depend on the circumstance, particularly whether I have to strip boons or not. You can’t believe how useful larcenous strike is against champion karka. A special exception can be made for Tequatle defense teams, where I use sword/pistol for Pistol Whip and Black Powder.

My build rarely shifts from 5/6/0/0/3. My gear is either full zerkers, or soldiers with ruby orbs/exquisite ruby jewels. Utilities are usually 3 signets and shadow refuge, smoke screen, haste, or other unique skill. For each specific event:

Shadow behemoth: Dagger auto, heartseeker at half health.
Jungle Worm: Same as above.
Frozen Maw: Same as above
Covington: Same as above
Modnir Ulgoth: Same as above
Megadestroyer: Same as above. I use scorpion wire to pull it to the shore. Otherwise, shortbow.
Fire Elemental: Shortbow auto and cluster bombs
Shatterer: Shortbow and cluster bombs.
Golem Mark II: Shortbow and cluster bombs. On this boss, the shortbow will bounce between target marks, doing more damage than the dagger.

Karka Queen: I use Sword/Dagger on this. The strategy is mostly to auto attack, rolling away twice when she jumps. Use flanking strike + larcenous strike to steal away her boons. I use roll for initiative to sometimes withdraw from her jumps and rolls. Otherwise, engage at point blank range.

Claw of Jormag: First phase, I stand in the middle of the area and shoot shortbow + cluster bombs at the ice wall. You can get close enough to hit with those attacks safely. I use shadowstep to break stun. I’m careful to melee both spots with the dagger after the ice wall falls. Between each DPS period, I stand by the bombs, pick one up when the NPC says “Don’t take your eyes off of it!” and run it to the wall, then retreat back afterwards. Phase two jormag just involves killing all of the crystals, and running up to melee during DPS phase with dagger/pistol.

Evolved Jungle Worm: I rarely do this event, and have never done it with a thief. Afraid you’ll have to get advice from someone else here.

The Sunless: I usually go on the defensive teams, running smoke screen and concealed defeat. I engage enemies at point blank range, using black powder/smoke screen for defense, and pistol whip for more defense/offense. Dagger storm for projectile reflections, and concealed defeat as a trait for even more blinds/defenses. During the defense stage, the only special thing I do is use scorpion wire on the bloated plague carriers. During the DPS phase I blast might with the shortbow, then auto with the sword.

For engaging teqqy directly, I use the dagger to auto attack tendrils, and the shortbow to shoot cluster bombs at teqqy’s face. Shadowstep for stun breaks and condi cleanse. I’ve never run the turrets on a thief.

There was a thread awhile ago where the devs asked for ideas for new stat combinations. In all likelyhood, new combinations will be put into the game. With heart of thorns, it might be sooner than we think.

Personally, with traits being redone, there are a couple of stat combos I’d like to see now that deal with boon duration and condition duration as stats:

Power/Precision/Boon Duration
Malice/Condition Duration/Precision
Power/Precision/Condition Duration
Power/Healing Power/Boon Duration
Malice/Condition Duration/Boon Duration
Power/Vitality/Boon Duration
Malice/Toughness/Condition Duration

And so on. Primary stats listed first. Ideally I’d like to see the first three for PVE, and the last 4 for PVP.

I’m not sure if this is the appropriate forum, but I’ll try to help.

When you buy the “game”, you buy the account. You can download and delete the game as many times as you want. I’m not an expert on computers, but have you tried uninstalling the launcher and game, then re-downloading it?

Now, I’m only so much of an expert on economics, what with playing videogames with economies and generally existing in the world, but from the sound of it you don’t understand how flipping works at all.

The thing with flipping and capital gains in general is that, in order to actually make money, you have to sell the object that you are trying to flip. If you put it at a price that no one can afford, the person who loses out the most is the guy who bought it. That is why, in the real world, some billionaire just doesn’t buy all the bread in the world and then sell it at unreasonable prices. The end result is that no one buys bread. Then, the billionaire is straight out of luck, having blown his fortune on a gigantic pile of roach food.

The same thing can be said of most supplies in the game. Though you individually can’t farm for specific mats, there is still a large income of materials in the game overall. Anyone who buys low and sells high still has to compete with the massive amount of people who find and sell their mats. This is good for the economy in several ways. First, people who are looking to flip are contributing to the players by placing various buy orders for materials, meaning there is always a market for those materials. Second, for those who don’t want to sell low to buy orders, they can sell at a price that is independent of the buying price, meaning that anyone who flips will have to keep their goods at their competitors prices.

There is nobody who needs to flip to make money. The only people who stand around flipping all day are either the ones who enjoy it, or the ones who’d rather take the risk to make money than play the game for fun anyway. As for the whole “crashing from too many flippers”, that probably won’t happen. The only way for items to be flipped is if there is an inherent value in those items. If no one needs or wants these goods, then there wouldn’t be a demand for these items. Unless the entire player base decides that vials of powerful blood are only good for trying to make money, they will retain their value.

Likewise, not everyone can play the TP for money. The economy can only handle so many flippers, largely because there is only so many items that can be bought low and sold for a higher price. Once we reach that saturation point, flipping no longer becomes profitable. The economy doesn’t crash when this happens. What happens is a bunch of people try flipping, either lose or don’t gain money, then go back to other methods of gaining money. Thus, equilibrium will be maintained.

You can convert karma into gold indirectly. Lost Orrian Jewelboxes contain a lot of junk items you can sell, and will also frequently contain lodestones.

This is something that I wonder about, too. I can’t settle on any one build, since most of them involve taking a lot of useless traits.

Currently, the highest dps will come from Fire, Water, Air, for their straight up damage boosts as well as vulnerability stacking. Another option for FWA is to combine Powerful Aura with Zephyr’s Boon, giving the entire team Magnetic Aura along with fury and swiftness. It is slightly less DPS, but the projectile protection is nice.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see Air or Water get swapped out for other lines, though.. Earth gets Serrated Stones, Strength of Stone, Geomancer’s Defense, and Diamond skin, meaning that against condition heavy enemies you’ll have an extra layer of protection, along with a 5% damage boost and a minor condition damage boost. Another option for Earth is to get Written in Stone, which will allow you to use Air and Fire Signets with impunity while keeping their bonuses.

Arcana gets interesting defensive traits, too. Arcane energy for recharge reduction and endurance (or renewing stamina for perma-vigor), Final Shielding for defense, and then Elemental Surge for more damage. Keeping in mind that burning now stacks in intensity, an Ele inflicting burning isn’t a nuisance as much as it is just additional damage.

I myself might end up running Fire/Water/Arcane. I gotta have my vigor..

Personally, I can’t wait to not be seen as the Thief Elite spec.

Garth Thurgen.1380:

Nope. I’m saying that classes got completely thrown out because of their irrelevance. The meta for Ele was to be a Monk. You only ran Elementalist for Energy Storage, and then ran a bunch of Monk skills. The role existed for dps, but no one wanted it. That’s the definition of not being validated, and has only minor touchings in intra-class diversity (much like how it does here).

Ah, so people were validated in their roles, and the class issue is unrelated to the zerker issue today.

It’s simple: it wasn’t ever perceived as a problem And it’s still not a problem, but it’s now being perceived as one. People just understood that if they wanted to do something goofy, they wouldn’t do it with random people. .

If it was never perceived as a problem, then you wouldn’t have brought it up as a problem in the design of GW1. What you are describing is, in essence, that the players of GW1 gave up on having a fulfilling class system and had to dance around in the community in order to have fun. Maybe GW1 followed the same path that GW2 is headed down, where everyone who had the dreams of a balanced class system up and left the game for different ventures. This hardly sounds like an ideal system at all. Hell, this doesn’t even sound like a good system.

Garth Thurgen.1380:

Here, people explicitly want their style of play to be the one true law, and are willing to destroy any other person’s fun that doesn’t want it in the process. The roles exist, and they can be run just fine. The only step they can go is to become the meta, which in this game basically means it’s the only thing that can be run (it’s sort of the existential fallacy that exists with the whole “issue” in the first place).

I have been out of the forums for awhile, so I may have to defer to your judgement on this, but has the beserker debate really declined so far that people aren’t arguing for diversity anymore? Because I can’t see how the idea of the game enforcing diversity in builds is somehow going to destroy someone’s fun, unless that other person’s fun is based solely on monopolizing gameplay and being intolerant of others. It all sounds selfish and hypocritical to me.

Though I have to disagree: The other roles are not fine. The problem with berserkers isn’t what the community wants. The problem with berserkers is that it is objectively better than every other gear set in nearly the entirety of the PVE game. It makes more money, does things faster, does things better, and with little tradeoff of “skill” needed to perform effectively, and there are no limitations placed upon one who uses berserker gear..

Garth Thurgen.1380:

Similarly, the existence of an amount of people complaining only stops being argumentum ad populum when there’s a problem. There still is yet to be a problem shown that doesn’t devolve into “I don’t like this, make this something I like!”

Actually, the mere fact that everyone has a problem is itself a problem. GW2 is ultimately a business venture who’s purpose is to make money. The people who complain about the state of gear balance are dissatisfied customers who, if ignored, will take their money elsewhere. Likewise, there is not a single problem that can’t be stereotyped into “I don’t like this, make this something I like”. That is the nature of “problem”: someone has to be unhappy with something to bring it to your attention in the first place.

Garth Thurgen.1380:

Totally irrelevant. Diversity doesn’t exclusively come from balance, but from amalgamation as well. Even with perfect balance, if there are actual differences then there will always be a meta call, and thus there will always be this exact same “problem.”

The problem isn’t the existence of a meta. The problem is that the meta is all berserker gear. We can have a new, equally constricting meta that more people will be happy with because it allows them to express their desires to play certain roles. In a new meta with multiple enforced roles, it will be easier to balance classes, too, since now there is a balancing factor aside from the almighty DPS that will come in to play. The chief complaint people have about the berserker meta is the berserker part. Not the meta part.

How does the new content being different from dungeons make dungeons obsolete? I’m not seeing the connection here.

Garth Thurgen.1380:

No, they didn’t. If they did, that’s just because you were specifically never payed heed to the people who wanted to do something that you perceived as not an issue. Take GW1 for instance. In HM, Elementalist was a healer. No, you couldn’t use your fire line. No, you couldn’t use your water line. Air? HA! Oh, you want to do one of the many builds that Elementalists could do involving damage? Prepare your butt for being kicked out of your party, if not your guild as well.

Each role was perfectly fine, if you ignore the fact that anything that wasn’t straight dps, healing/protection, or tanking was absolutely not allowed, but you pretty much had to ignore most of the hundreds of skills available to you if you wanted to be a part of the meta. However, the problem still existed there. What did people do there?

They just played the game.

They got friends, and they played the game. They didn’t roam the forums, complaining about how their build wasn’t meta. They just went out and played it. Just like how you can easily run a team with a tank or two, getting healed by a healer (the fact that the tanks being “paladin style” and also being major healers being only a comment towards efficiency), and some random people for dps, people ran with sub-optimal choices that weren’t the meta calls for that class.

This game has a problem, yes, but it’s not with the game itself. It’s with people who abjectly refuse to allow for the game to exist as it is. That there must be healers, tanks, and dpsers, or the game is obviously a failure. That their specific build, no matter what it is, is what must be allowed as the major meta call. No, “being allowed to be played” is nonsense. I have played with PUGs that have run full Nomads, and no one even commented about it in party chat (though, I did comment about it to my guildie who I was duo’ing with about it). No one kicked him, no one even gave the slightest care about the fact that he was doing something that wasn’t the part of the meta. While that’s not always the case, as PUGs are filled with spiteful little kids, that’s still a pale comparison to the fact that I’ve had this girl in my guild who wanted to be a healer. We did basically every non-Arah/non-HotW dungeon with her.

So, if you want to take anything out of this, take this: don’t expect validation to be given to everyone. Just because you get it eventually doesn’t mean that someone else isn’t being shunned. And if you want to play whatever you want in this game, do it. The game is designed in such a way that the most optimal path isn’t a requirement, and you can easily find people perfectly willing to go do whatever you want to go with. If you’re desperate for validation, go get it. Don’t just complain on the forums about it. Go get it.

So you’re saying that because specific classes were designated as having specific roles, that people who wanted to play those specific roles didn’t feel validated? Because that is the issue here. Not intra-class diversity.

Your point doesn’t make sense. Because people were complacent with problems in a previous game, they shouldn’t improve the quality of this game? A large number of people having a problem with the game doesn’t mean there’s a problem with the game? It’s like saying that if you got a poorly cooked and spiced steak from a restaurant, that it was your fault for not having the taste buds to appreciate the steak.

There is no industry in the world where “shut up and stop criticizing” is a legitimate train of thought. Should this game change to encourage greater role diversity, berserker gear won’t go away, even if groups get relegated to a rigid “Soldiers, Clerics, Zerker x3” system that most games implement. The hope of people who want greater balance is just that: balance. Not supremacy. Because with balance comes diversity.