Guild Wars 2

I do wonder why so many people have an issue playing a game for what it is, and not always comparing it to other related games. “Related” being used in the most vague sense of the world.

I myself came from a rather… diversified online gaming profile. First MMO I ever played was Runescape. This was followed by Phantasy Star Universe, which was followed by City of Heroes, which was followed by Monster Hunter, which was followed by GW2.

A lot of the differences in these games, what many here would consider negatives (camera control, rooting, additional resource management, pacing, graphics, targeting system, quests) when compared to GW2, I just understood as a different experience. Having different mechanics just made the gameplay unique, and not necessarily better or worse than another game.

My favorite of the bunch above is City of Heroes, which was one of my most favorite games ever. Give me unlimited free time and a racing mind, and I could just ramble all day about the things I like in City of Heroes that are better than GW2. But, I bought and played GW2 on the release date months before CoH shut down, and I enjoyed it because GW2 is a different game that has different advantages to it.

People really need to clear their frame of reference when playing a new game. Yes, even if they are all called “MMOs”, the entire world isn’t made up of WoW, slightly different WoW, backwards WoW, upside down WoW or MoM, WoW ripoff, WoW rip-on, and WoW redacted. The sooner someone stops thinking of MMOs like this, the better off everyone will be.

Granted, it is harder to do this with MMOs than say, GW2 and chess (WTH no dodge in chess lol boring!), and in part I blame how ubiquitous the trinity system is.

There are some big differences between why CoH made fitness inherent, and what making a 25% movement increase inherent here would do.

One if the big reasons for making fitness innate in CoH because it had the endurance boost. In CoH, endurance was an additional resource that had to be managed alongside of cooldowns, and with how slowly endurance recovered, this left most players exhausted and incapable of doing anything. Nearly every build in the game was ultimately dependent on stamina, except for those that had a stamina clone in their primary powerset somewhere. Since every player could take and did take it…

Now, there are some issues with just making speed inherently faster. First and foremost, it is a balance issue. An important facet of class performance is movement speed, since it determines

A)How quickly they can get to objectives.
B)How quickly they can escape from attacks and AoEs.
C)How quickly they can close distances for burst.
D)How hard they are to hit in combat.

And also there are issues with rendering players moving at these speeds, as well as how swiftness is handled.

Motion in out of combat currently isn’t a problem, since players can just waypoint to wherever they want to go. Combine all these factors, and it just seems like adding a speed bonus causes way too many problems for a convenience.

The calculation with dagger and LB damage is pretty easy. The base damage for LB is 341, and the dagger chain is 940 base damage. The dagger takes 2.1 seconds, which comes to 447 DPS. The LB takes 1.5 seconds, which comes to 227 damage. Thus, if LB hits two targets, it will do 454 DPS, exceeding dagger damage.

Your massive flaw is that you are assuming that only your build gets buffs. If you give a buff to one build, you have to give it to another. Of course, how things will behave is quite obvious: the more precision you give, the better DP does. The more power you give, the better dagger flashing does.

Assuming full buffs, with a banner of discipline, the threshold is 0.6 seconds in DS. With strength, the threshold is 1.8 seconds , and with both discipline and strength, the threshold is 1 second. The reason why it does this is simple: the Deathly Perception build has higher power.

Differing combat styles is all well and good, except you said this:

You miss the point though. My build stacks more damage modifiers and in a decent group you should be close to 100% crit chance. So lifeblasts will hit harder potentially. There is no reason to take deathly perception unless you have low crit chance and are doing wvw/pvp.

AKA: your build does more damage life blasting than the Life blasting build does Life Blasting, because the dagger flashing build has higher precision. This is not true, of course, since the higher power of the lifeblasting build both compensates for lower precision, and makes the life blasting build stronger the more you buff precision.

What is also not true is the modifiers. The three damage modifiers the dagger flashing build has is deadly strength, runes of the scholar, and target the weak. The three modifiers the LB build has is deadly strength, runes of the scholar, and close to death. The only difference between the two is close to death and target the weak, and as it happens, those are about roughly the same as each other.

I"m pretty sure I’m out of room on the above post, so I’ll have to put this here.

If we are to assume one of two circumstances with fury uptime:

#1: The necro receives permanent fury
#2: The necro receives fury that persists long enough after DS that it finishes the fight.

Then we can change the formula above to this in a permanent fury scenario:

2484 x (0.93 × 2.64 + 0.07) = 2898 x ((0.7 + 0.3 x Y / (Y + 10)) x 2.69 + 0.3 – 0.3 x Y / (Y + 10))

They intersect at Y = -0.3! This means that, even without going into DS, under permanent fury the Deathly Perception build is stronger than the dagger flasher! Of course, this is neglecting a few traits that benefit the dagger flasher (chill of death, banshee wail), so I’m not ready to stop the presses yet, but it is an interesting outcome.

At maximum might + fury, the new threshold becomes 1. 49 seconds. So, the two builds are even but for a single life blast, then the Deathly perception build pulls forward.

This makes sense when you think about it. The less precision you have, the more fury helps out. At no precision, 4% crit rate becomes 24% crit rate, which means you’ll be hitting quite a bit harder. Apparently, the jump from 50 to 70 is larger than I expected it to be, and so much larger than the jump from 73 to 93 that it actually overshadows the benefits gained otherwise.

So, new table of thresholds!

0 might 0 fury (from team): 2.75 seconds
0 might 100% fury: 0 seconds
25 might, 0 fury (from team): 4.04 seconds
25 might, 100% fury: 1.49 seconds.

These are dependent on the additional assumptions at the beginning of this post. If the DP necro happens to receive only enough fury that it wears out while still in DS, then the numbers from the previous post apply.

Also, this assumes that life blasting is appropriate. In any circumstance where you cannot hit 2 or more enemies with life blast, the dagger flashing build will be superior by default (assuming the Deathly Perception build doesn’t get permanent fury). To be specific, at 0 might it will be about 13% stronger, and at full might + no additional fury it will be 23% stronger.

“There is no best build. Only ‘best at’.”
— Nemesis

Most of the necros support abilities come from their weapons, actually. When running a power build, you’ll have plenty of access to vulnerability, boon removal, with more limited access to snare (depending on build) and weakness. With a condi build, you’ll have more weakness and snares, but less access to vulnerability and boon removal.

Boon removal isn’t that big of a deal, since most of the time you’ll only put something like well of suffering on your hotbar for the short time you need it. Anyway, if you want to do everything, you can always condi bomb with signet of spite + epidemic. Problem is… it isn’t that effective, and you’re better off just using well of darkness to blind enemies, since that disables them completely for awhile.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Show-us-your-Mesmer/page/20#post2913091

Although the first outfit was replaced by a gem store outfit earlier this year.

It is about 5:00PM Pacific Time. The daily counters for chests and events reset at this time, making it officially the start of a new day as far as rewards are concerned.

It is a bit of a toss up between target the weak and Close to Death, though. Target the weak, at 5 conditions, has a 10% boost. Close to death gives a 20% boost, but only for half the time, so that comes out to 10% as well.

The thing with the DS builds, though, is that they focus more heavily on power than precision, and this does quite a bit of compensating. So, to compare your build to a newly updated DS build:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQNBIbDbkRrSvYTdjePhA9IXePnJqwxQ9YdcnPE-jQCBYfC0EEwkGgUBAZmFRjt4qIas6aYKXER1GcFRrOIgRB-e

The effective power between the two at full sigil stacks is about a 2.2% difference. With close to death and target the weak being arguably equal, the only variables different between the two are fury uptime and DS duration.

The unfortunate thing about furious demise is that its effectiveness is inverse of DS sustain time. This is because the recharge for DS doesn’t start ticking down until you exit DS. With no time in DS you’ll have a 71% fury up time, but every second you are in DS increases the recharge rate of DS, so at 3 seconds you’ll have 50% up time, 8 seconds you’ll have 33% up time, and 13 seconds you’ll have 25% up time.

Deathly perception just gives the flat 50% increase in DS. So, whichever one becomes stronger is dependent on how long you stay in DS during a fight. Now, I’ve comprised a formula to calculate the total effective power of the builds based on DS up time, and it is as follows:

2484 x ((0.73 + 0.2 × 5/(7 + Y)) x 2.64 + (0.27 – 0.2 × 5/(7 + Y))) = 2898 x ((0.5 + 0.5 x Y / (Y + 10)) x 2.69 + 0.5 – 0.5 x Y / (Y + 10))

Where Y = time (in seconds) in DS. Oh boy! A math problem! My algebra skills aren’t nearly up to the task, so I just graphed both sides and then found their intersect, which is at Y = 2.75 seconds.

Considering that life blast takes about 1.5 seconds, If you fire off more than a single life blast in Death Shroud in a fight, then the Deathly Perception build does more damage than the dagger flashing build. Now, this conclusion is done on various assumptions, and I will list them here:

#1: No additional input from teammates (fury or might) Fury in particular, since additional fury will help out the dagger flashing build, whereas with the Deathly Perception build additional fury does nothing while in DS. For the DP build to win out, it needs to stay in DS and contribute meaningfully for 6 seconds. This number goes down depending on when fury is applied, but I have no formula for this… yet.

#2: Might. Both builds have similar might stacking abilities, depending on if you use reaper’s might instead of chill of death on the dagger flashing build. But, if we are to assume maximum might from teammates, then the equivalence point is shifted from 2.75 seconds to 4.04 seconds. Including permanent fury, then the threshold is moved to 9.1 seconds.

#3: Health maintenance. The time spent in the scholary threshold changes between builds dependent on skill level. However, I will assume the build is weilded by uber experts and both uptimes are 100%.

#4: Rotation changes. The warhorn loses a tick from locust swarm, and in battles lasting longer than 7 + Y seconds but shorter than 10 + Y seconds, weakening shroud gets a second proc. The impact this has on battles is unknown, since the length of time spent in DS changes from fight to fight, and the amount of time to overtake a locust swarm pulse is unknown.

Otherwise, I am assuming that the circumstances where you use lifeblast or the primary dagger + focus/warhorn for both builds is identical.

This gives us a series of thresholds:

No support: 2.75 seconds (or 2 life blasts)
Permanent fury: 6 seconds (4 life blasts)
Max might: 4.04 seconds (3 life blasts)
Max might + fury: 9.1 seconds (6 life blasts)

Whichever is better depends on where you sit with your group. In highly organized GC groups with high fury and might, of course the dagger flasher is better. 9 seconds of straight up life blasts isn’t going to happen there. But, in a pug that offers little to no support, 2.75 seconds is really easy to pass. Heck, 6 seconds is really easy to pass.

EDIT: checked math and fundamentals again, resolved a nagging mental tick I had, and updated information to include permanent fury times.

Except that unshakeable does the opposite of that, and discourages people from using vulnerability and weakness because they can’t maintain a meaningful amount on a target. This just discriminates against classes and builds that stack vulnerability, since it means that their personal contribution has been arbitrarily cut in half.

There is no benefit to other players getting in stacks of vulnerability. These are not damaging conditions: one stack isn’t better than the other. More vulnerability means they are capped longer an sustain higher, and it doesn’t matter k*tten that comes from.

There is also no need to change the champions durability or power to compensate. Champions would not suddenly become paper or become feeble because of double vulnerability or weakness duration. Those conditions, after all, are the weakest buffs to offense/defense in the game.

The flashing dagger also depends on the groups you run with. In an organized GC group, flashing dagger is the way to go since enemies die to cleave way too quickly. But in unorganzed pugs, you’ll life blasting 3 or 4 enemies in a row for long periods of time, so maximizing life blast damage would be more important.

I’m starting to fall in to this “impossible to balance” crowd myself. The way things seem to be going is toward paper/rock/scissors gameplay. You either have the means to beat the opponents build, or you don’t.

The annoying part is that mobs are made tanky just by their HP. It is rare for mobs to have high toughness, so there is no reason to diversify and add a condi user.

It is something Nemesis originally said, and I agree with him: PVE needs to be more like PVP. Now, when Anet hears this, they decided to put the down state on PVE enemies, which was the stupidest thing they could import. There needs to be several things ported over, and these things need to all center around one thing:

Enemies have to be built to kill you.

Its that simple. So many mobs in the game are currently build around the idea of giving them a gimmick they use once or twice without any real meaning. Mobs need to have much better AI, and more things they do with it:

#1: Primarily ranged mobs should try to kite players. Nothing to elaborate, but as players approach them, the ranged mobs should walk backward, or walk sideways away from players. In game, we currently have many pulls, leaps, cripples, chills, immobilize, and stealths, and yet we don’t have much of a reason to use them. Why? Enemies just run up to your face and fight you at point blank. There’s no one to chase and no one to run from.

#2: Mobs that grant boons should not spam boons. One of the biggest issues with fighting the dredge is that, if you remove or corrupt the boon they have, they immediately reapply it to everyone in range. This is true for most mobs that use boons on themselves: there is no reason to ever remove the boon because it just comes right back. Mobs, if having boons, should always have long duration + long cooldown, so removing them matters.

#3: Unshakeable and defiant need to be reworked. First, unshakeable needs to no longer reduce vulnerability and weakness, since champions are really the only place those conditions can be effective. Second, stacks of defiant need to dissolve on their own. Maybe one stack every 2 seconds or so. That way, you can have meaningful CC, even when only one player has CC skills.

#4: Melee mobs need to be more effective at chasing players, because currently players can just kite and shoot mobs without any additional help. Enemies need to do stuff like use swiftness, use more cripples/chills, have leaps, and also use stability. Not all at once, of course, but it would be helpful.

#5: Stability needs to mean something. This is for players, mostly. Currently stability has limited access, really short durations, and long cooldowns, which makes stability nigh useless. Stability needs longer durations, since the amount of CC in the game is already disproportionate to the amount defense there is against it.

#6: Enemies need to attack more frequently, but do less damage with each individual attack. Currently, you can just loldodge nearly everything in the game because enemies have big slow attacks. If enemies had rapid but weaker attacks, then passive defenses would be more important, as well as regen and protection. Not every enemy has to be reworked, but having diversity in enemy attack patterns would be a boon.

#7: Enemies need to cleave and pierce more often. One of the reasons why stacking is so effective is because when an enemy attacks, it only hits one player in that group, which means players effectively have 5x the durability while in a stack. If enemies cleaved more often, then to stack you would still have to actively block and dodge.

#8: Enemies need to have their attack rate effected by chill.

#9: Enemies need less health, and they need to heal themselves. Nearly any enemy that is veteran rank or higher needs to have less health, but also have a self heal that is on a long cooldown. This will make timed CC more important, as well as make the healing reduction from poison important in PVE.

#10: Enemies need diversified defenses. Currently, they just have high HP and nothing else. There needs to be mobs who have high toughness, mobs who use strong protection and strong regen, making condition users more important for the team, as well as boon stripping.

After all this is put in, then PVE will be interesting. Nearly every class has something they can use to deal with all of these problems, and having players deal with these challenges will make for better players and more entertaining gameplay.

It is one of those things that I play around with. Currently I have x6 superior rune of tormenting on my necro, and they’re alright.

Necromancers have a lot more torment than everyone is giving them credit for. While thieves can spam shadow strike and use skale venom share to inflict a lot of torment, that is done on one target, and only for 5 seconds at a time. Necromancers only inflict 3 stacks on any one target, but they do this to 5 targets in a large AoE. Effectively, a necro inflicts 15 stacks of torment with tainted shackes, and these stacks last for 10 seconds each. And then you use epidemic…

Whether this is worth the investment or not is a different question. The reason why it works well for thieves is because they can burst 18 to 20 stacks of torment onto a single target. That is the equivalent of 30 bleeds, and all of the extra duration from tormenting runes is enough to ensure a kill.

But for Necros, additional torment is just a bit more damage in an AoE. I’m sure that the additional 3 seconds of torment (about 2k damage per enemy, or 10k damage total) on multiple enemies helps, but it doesn’t seem nearly as crucial as it does on a thief. Right now, the biggest buff the rune set has is the torment on heal, which is in itself risky to use.

As for the sigil of tormenting… it is beaten out both by the sigil of earth and the sigil of geomancy in the majority of situations. The only time the torment sigil can beat earth is if it constantly procs on 4 or more targets. That is quite hard to do, in both PVE and PVP.

The primary source of damage from condi necros is bleeding. First and foremost, you should have your bleeding sorted out, and if you have to compromise bleeding to get torment, then it isn’t worth it.

#1: Defiant no longer reduces the duration of vulnerability and weakness.
#2: enemies with primarily ranged attacks will now attempt to kite players instead of just standing still.
#3: all bosses now have a heal skill on a minute long cooldown that they use at 1/4th health.
#4: Defiant stacks will now decay over time.
#5: Rebalancing for skills for all classes.

They will still do that, except now weakness and vulnerability will be useful where they are needed most.

My favorite class to play in PVP was the engineer. I liked to use the turrets to create a defensive position that had solid control and conditions, and I would supplement that with even more control and conditions from my rifle/grenade kit. This style of play really appealed to me, since I’m actually quite bad in sPVP. I’m a bit panicky and I can’t make skill shots, and I can’t ever see enemy telegraphs (bad eyes and all that), so the high control that the turrets gave me let me hit with the grenades while also taking much of the burden off of my shoulders when fighting.

I say “was” because I haven’t sPVPed that much. Turrets broke awhile ago, and I vowed to not return to sPVP until turrets were fixed. What followed since then was an increasing list of nerfs, bugs, and meaningless buffs that accomplished nothing. I’m sticking to my vow: until my favorite spec works again, I’m not going back into sPVP.

Which is unfortunate, since while I do have ideas on how fix the classes, but since I am so woefully out of touch with how sPVP is done nowadays, I can’t even call my ideas educated guesses.

The strange thing is that, as a grenadier engineer with 80% condition duration, I can’t provide 25 stacks of vulnerability on a champion. I can sustain maybe half of that amount. I wouldn’t count the necromancer’s vulnerability out, since he does have a couple of ways to provide it quite reliably. A lot of people underestimate reaper’s touch, well of suffering, and unyielding blast. And man do I wish Death Shiver was in another trait line… anyway I digress.

1) Unless something has changed recently, being “slightly behind” an axe warrior means it is still pretty good, since the axe warrior is the highest auto attack in the game. The necro has the advantage in that the dagger is quicker and not rear loaded, whereas the axe warrior will find its combo interrupted, losing 1/3rd of the auto attack damage due to having to dodge. The necro also increases team DPS because they provide vulnerability, as well as blast finishers in combo fields.

2)Most bosses in dungeons don’t have one shot mechanics. They have strong attacks, yes, but seldom are they straight up one shots (especially against a 30K health pool). It is also rare for these strong attacks to be so rapid that the necro actually runs out of both dodges and life force while fighting the boss. The only exception I can think of is the one you mentioned already: subject alpha, path 2/3.

3)You left out boon removal, protection, and regen. Engineers are decent at snares, however I couldn’t say they do them better than necromancers. With a condi necro, grasping dead can provide near permanent cripple alone, whereas the engi only makes patches with glue puddles and nails. The engi has a good AoE chill, but that is all that is notable. When it comes down to immobilize, while the engi has some (mostly net shot, net turret, and puddles), the necro also has some (tainted shackles, dark pact, rigor mortis). Of course, the best immobilizer is a ranger elite, so…

As for weakness, it is harder to apply than it looks, since most glasses have to severely kitten themselves to apply weakness for meaningful amounts. The warrior is good at it, however this requires running hammer or mace main-hand in PVE, which would mean having to leave either GS or Axe/Axe at home. Engineers apply weakness through tranquilizer dart, a skill which is pathetically bad compared to everything else. They can use poison fields, however that would require blowing their blast finishers and losing the heals and might stacks to do this. Thieves, again to apply in meaningful amounts, need to spam blast finishers in a poison field, and blow their entire initiative bar to do this. The weakness from crippling strike is nice, but it goes away the moment you have to do anything other than auto attack. Necromancers get their weakness in longer durations from single skills, such as enfeebling blood and corrosive poison cloud, and low maintenance application from enfeeble and withering precision. The necro also rarely loses anything by combining chillblains + putrid mark, or bone fiends + CPC.

But either way, the biggest flaw with necromancer support ATM is that, currently, the game is designed in such a way that necromancer support isn’t needed. There aren’t enemies that kite players while ranging, so there’s no reason to cripple/chill/immobilize in higher levels of play. Champions have a soft immunity to weakness, cutting the shorter durations in half, and also reduce the effectiveness of vulnerability by half. And, many of the troublesome mobs with boons (like dredge, for example), have no cooldown on applying boons, and as such repeated boon removal isn’t useful on them.

#4: ITT there is never more than one target. Also, engineers only output conditions slowly, whereas the necro can burst their conditions more rapidly. Most people have already commented on this one.

Now, the fact is that Necromancers are the weakest PVE class at the moment. However, they are not as bad as you make them out to be.

I’m sorry, but why is vulnerability and weakness duration cut in half against champions again? I’ve been thinking about this, and I can’t find a good reason why it is that champions have a soft immunity to these conditions, and it does more harm than good.

A)Is it to make them last longer? Problem with this is that might stacking provides much more damage than a full stack of vulnerability does, so they’re making champions more durable by making them resistant to the weakest form of damage increase in the game.

B)Is it to make them more damaging? Champions already have attacks that can kill people in one hit, and everyone just dodges/blocks all champion attacks anyway. Protection is more potent than weakness, and vigor is more potent than weakness, and weakness is already hard to apply since it is loaded with short durations on long cooldowns, and weakness gets nerfed every patch now.

C)Is it to real in weakness and vulnerability? This doesn’t make sense, since weakness and vulnerability currently aren’t useful in most of PVE. Regular mobs are easily stopped completely with blindness, and applying a lot of vulnerability against regular mobs just means you’ve blown all your cooldowns in an enemy that dies in 5 seconds anyway.

The place where weakness and vulnerability would really shine is against stronger enemies (AKA CHAMPIONS!!!), but they are nerfed in the place where they would be best.

This causes problems for class balance. Currently, the ability to stack might and blind is more valuable than anything else, so classes that do use weakness and vulnerability primarily are at a detriment.

My suggestion is a simple proposition: Make it so defiant and champions no longer cut the duration of weakness an vulnerability.

I’ve been reading about this heavy armor thing for awhile now, and it is far overrated. At level 80:

Light armor classes with exotic gear: 1836 armor.
Heavy armor classes with exotic gear: 2127 armor.

Heavy classes get a 15.8% reduction from incoming direct damage over light armor classes. Or, to put it in a better perspective, heavy classes take 86.4% of the damage that light armor classes do. Compared to HP tiers, this extra armor is nothing, and that is with berserker gear. If you run something like Soldier’s gear, then the armor differences are only 11.5%, or taking 89.7% of the usual damage.

@OP: There are several parts where you undersell the necro:

#1: DPS. The power necro has high sustained base DPS, so much so that at full buffs the necromancer will outdamage warriors with jut their auto attack. The power necro is effective at stacking might on themselves, and have several lingering attacks that they can use to layer up multiple sources of damage at once. The real shame with necro DPS is that their only cleaves come from conditions and life blast, but regardless many people find the dagger quite useful against bosses.

#2: Survivability. Life Force is really easy to get in PVE due to waves of enemies that die quickly. This makes power builds extremely durable, since the majority of the time you’ll be life blasting multiple enemies in a row. Those enemies can only damage your LF pool while doing this, and then when you clean up with the dagger + focus later, you get your life force back. One added advantage to this is that a power necro, even a bad one, will have the effect from Scholar Runes on nearly 100% of the time. On a LF build you’ll have a bubble of 14k health that enemies have to go through before you receive real damage,, and this bubble resets really quickly.

#3: Group support. The necromancer is, at its heart, a debuffer, and is capable of applying plenty of weakness, chill, cripple, boon removal, vulnerability, and immobilization. The problem, of course, is that in PVE weakness, chill, cripple, and boon removal aren’t that useful. Now, for newbies who just run around ranging everything, having enemies who are constantly crippled/chilled and immobilized is a real bonus. But for those who melee enemies, this isn’t that useful. Weakness would be good, but against regular enemies it is far inferior to blind, and bosses have reduced weakness duration (just to spite us). Boon removal is situational and spotty, and Anet designs enemies with strong boons to constantly reapply those boons (just to spite us). So, in the end necromancers are left with mostly invulnerability, which they are decent at. If only death shiver was placed somewhere else…

As far as group buffing goes, the necro does have a few tools, but these tools tend to be scattered and hard to work into a DPS build. Ritual of Protection and Spectral wall provide group protection, with Ritual of Protection usually working when you need it, where you need it. The staff can provide close quarters permanent regen as well as occasional condi cleanse and blast finishers, and bone minions can provide further blast finishers. The focus also provides regen to allies it bounces to, and the Necro has a decent, low maintenance heal in Transfusion.

#4: Epidemic. Epidemic is one of the strongest skills in the game, since it is the only skill that is a force multiplier. It makes everyone’s conditions better and longer, and it makes them in a very large AoE, and it does this every 12 to 15 seconds. It is also important to note that epidemic spreads every condition, damaging and debuffing alike. Vulnerability, weakness, burning, blind, etc, all get spread en mass, doubling in intensity or in duration.

You also seem to be under a big misunderstanding with condi necros and epidemic. Condi necros can put all the conditions they want on all the targets already. Weakening shroud, enfeebling blood, grasping dead, mark of blood, tainted shackles, chillblains, unholy feast, corrosive poison cloud, well of suffering, well of corruption, well of darkness, locust swarm, Death Nova, Death Shiver… they all work in an AoE. What you are confusing is that epidemic is capable of spreading single target conditions, which have higher durations and shorter cooldowns than AoE conditions, and are assuming that all condi necros are doing is auto attacking then using epidemic a minute later. What epidemic really does is multiply all these AoE conditions, and it does this in a much larger AoE. And it does this to other classes conditions, again in a much larger AoE than they can provide. Also, other classes can’t “put all the conditions you want on all the targets”. The only class that comes close to this is the engineer, and they don’t do it in a 600 radius. The only thing the necro needs is burning, and since every other class does burning, and burning becomes redundant as soon as two or more people do it, and with so much ambient burning around (cough Guardians Eles), not having burning becomes a non issue in a team.

The problem with the elementalist is pretty easy to see: Instead of making the attunements based on situational usage (much like how you’d swap to a ranged weapon from a melee weapon), they designed the attunements and skills to be spammed constantly in order to be effective. So now you have to hammer the keyboard in a frenzy to accomplish what most other classes can do in one or two button presses.

The biggest problem for build diversity is that, currently, everything is being balanced around highly specialized builds. It is at the point now where skills require traits to be useful, and traits require other traits to be useful, and sometimes the necessary trait for a particular skill or other trait is dependent on yet another trait.

Any dependence on another skill or trait is a constraint to using that skill or trait. The more constraints you throw on, the less diversity you have. And no, nerfing popular builds doesn’t lead to diversity. It just leads to frustration and quitting.

Under ideal circumstances, I should be able to randomly pick out any skill from any class, and by itself that skill should be useful with no additional context or required supporting traits. The same should be said about independent traits. Then, when you have countless things that are useful by themselves, you will have build diversity. Likewise, anything that is not built this way is bad design.

I don’t think my dungon build has changed much with the updates. Still going to use a 30/10/0/0/30 Deathly Perception build. Full berserker gear, scholar runes, sigil of bloodlust, you know the drill. The update to Vital Persistence actually helps, and it seems like I can sit in DS forever now.

I also have the condition spec for a fun build. 30/30/10/0/0, full carrion with a few rampager pieces. Full torment runes, 100% torment and bleed duration, but otherwise pretty standard. It sucks how much weakening shroud was nerfed in both builds, since I really used that for group weakness and additional damage.

It is a bit disheartening all the things that are being done in these balance patches. I myself quit playing the game a few months ago, sans those OCPD times where I want to re-evaluate a build.

The scariest thing about this patch is that it was open to player feedback before implementation. I wasn’t around for this discussion, but I always assume that I am not the sole voice of reason regarding balance issues. People voiced their concerns on the matter, and yet Anet still produced a patch like this. The fact that Nemesis is losing hope on the issue hits me hard, since he is the one who made me optimistic about Necromancers in the first place.

Take, for example, the change to weakening shroud. This skill was the greatest tool for attrition that necromancers had. Without blocks, vigor, skill dodges, invulnerability, or massive heals, the necromancer’s only defenses were spots of protection, alongside of the very finite and deteriorating defense from death shroud. Now, widely available weakness for Necromancers made sense because of this:

A)It provided greater attrition to a class that is otherwise defenseless.
B)It was a debuff, making it useful for a team environment.
C)It wasn’t OP, since weakness could be cleansed or transferred
D)and it wasn’t OP because weakness is the weakest form of defense in the game.

Instead of making Weakening Shroud require greater trait investment, they just nerfed it into the ground, so now you’ll need 30 trait points, 100% condi duration somehow alongside of this, and then you’ll have to spam the skill at point blank range every 7 seconds in order to be… still nearly useless. But hey, since it has rapid application + short duration, now condition cleanses and transfers are meaningless against it.

It isn’t just the changes to necromancers. The direction this game is being taken is for hyper specialization, and going for too much specialization just leads to paper/rock/scissors gameplay. Skills require traits to be useful, and those traits require other traits to be useful, and those traits are assuming specific food and sigils/runes to be present, and it is done assuming you have other team mates who are doing certain things with their trait dependent trait dependent skills…

The cornerstone of diversity is freedom of choice. If skills and traits were made to function independent of each other, then you could pick the skills and traits you wanted, leading to diversity. But when you make a skill require a trait which itself requires a trait which also requires food and runes, this is not diversity. It is constraints.

Worst part is, I’m starting to believe that Anet is beyond hope now. If they make a massive thread asking for feedback, and upon getting that feedback still make horrible updates, then what can I we do? When the sensible is drown out by the selfish, when Anets personal agendas win out over reason, what is there to do?

Man do I miss City of Heroes.

Personally I would call the holy trinity blasphemy as far as MMOs go. Now, I myself have played several MMOs:

Runescape: Paper/rock/scissors system, no tank/heal/DPS
Phantasy Star Universe: Active combat game. Had status, debuffs, buffs, and heals, but no role restrictions.
Monster Hunter: Active combat game. Had no roles so to speak, but you could build for stuff like disabling or immunity to certain effects.
City of Heroes: Had 4 roles: melee (tank), range (DPS), support, control. Multiple classes could do multiple roles, and as such many weren’t necessary.
GW2: should go without saying.

Of all these, City of Heroes is the one that had the closest to a trinity system. It had a quadruple system, in which pretty much every “role” (in which most classes could do two or more) had enough potency to handle most situations, so the system was quite free form for most content. The game was balanced way below the peak performance for the majority of content, but also gave a difficulty slider so that you could crank up the hurt if you chose to do so. The advantage to balancing this way is that players, given enough investment, could make themselves insanely powerful and completely break the “required class” mold.

This is the online gaming experience I grew up with: The #1 priority for all of the games was to be kitten. Sure, there were specs and roles that you could do, but so long as you were awesome enough it didn’t matter. There is nothing cooler than, once your entire team has died, you soloing that big boss on a buffer/debuffer because you are so good that you can do it.

Because of this, I find necessitating the trinity to be a stupid decision. While making roles, the trinity eliminates individuality and innovation. It does this by relying on a lazy mechanic that exploits the aggro system, causing enemies to fight you only where you are strongest. Sure, if you play a linchpin class the whole team dies when you do, and this can make you feel important, but in reality you’re just a nameless cog in the machine: If you do your job no one notices or cares, and if you mess up you’re immediately despised and replaced. Group composition becomes limited because of hard DPS checks, and 2/3rds of the roles you can play aren’t DPS.

And this isn’t even real cooperation. One person runs up and gets angry with others mess up, another person plays whackamole with HP bars an heals, and the rest hang back and shoot at stuff until it dies. There is very little feedback needed. Real cooperation would involve reacting to situations, innovating solutions to them, and having abilities with specific placement and circumstances that require others to cooperate to be effective.

This is exactly what GW2 does. The support abilities are based on placement and circumstances, using AoE mechanics instead of player targeting. They are combo fields, which require active observation an action to take advantage of. They use CC as a form of defense and offense, timing appropriately to reposition and disable enemies. GW2 does all of these things nicely. It doesn’t require them, which is IMO a strength more than a weakness. This has made the combat in GW2 exciting and individualized, where good performance is noticed instead of ignored, and bad performance is compensated for instead of group killing.

The proper purpose of “roles” isn’t to force a player into a particular set up due to necessity by design. No, the proper purpose of roles is to provide unique and meaningful ways to be awesome. Every class should have different tools to handle the same encounter, and each one should go about engagements differently because they have different strengths. Not different weaknesses.

Honestly, I just wonder what the point of a lot of this is, since it seems like many of our woes can be solved with math. I can see the use in many of these tests if you are going to figure out stuff like

Damage rotation: sum of attacks with higher damage/second than auto attack so that their total activation time is greater than their recharge. Or, basically every attack with higher DPS than auto attack if it doesn’t meet the first criteria. Buffs/debuffs handled as multipliers to the average DPS of the rotation for comparison.

Might sustain: base level of how many stacks of might are sustained given a certain rotation.

Vulnerability sustain: base level of how many stacks of vulnerability are sustained given a certain rotation.

Damage boosting thresholds: stuff like scholar runes or first strikes.

Condition sustain: uptime of burning, stacks of bleeding, etc.

And combining those to find an optimum attack set for any build. Once you figure out this baseline, then you can just apply math to figure out the other stuff:

Max might: It’s just additional power, which can be considered a percentage increase by dividing power at max might by standing power the build has otherwise. Something similar can be done with conditions, but it is highly class specific so I wont’ go into all the details.

Max vulnerability: it’s a 25% flat increase from nothing to max. For any build, it is 25-sustained vulnerability, and that is the percentage increase of your damage before applying vulnerability in the first place.

Sigils/potions: These are usually a flat percentage, which can be added on after figuring out everything above, if you use these sigils and potions.

Procs: These are already pure RNG, but follow a simplistic method: having twice the crit chance means double the procs, which means that non-cooldown procs are twice as frequent / twice as long, short cooldown procs get their additional time after cooldown reduced by a similar frequency, and long cooldown procs are nigh negligible anyway.

If you want to compare class to class, then after getting all of the sustains up there, you might as well go off of the wiki’s listed damage x 1.416 (2600/1836, or the armor adjustment for PVE) when looking at how much damage a class can do when compared to another. Compare their effective power, and then whomever is higher gets higher/lower multiplied to the wiki’s listed damage, then add on the DPS difference from sustained conditions rates, and you have your comparison.

The hardest part of it all is the DPS rotation and what condis/buffs it sustains, and once you’ve figured those out, then every other problem you encounter is simple multiplication.

I don’t think stacking is an issue. Take 5 characters into melee range against a tiny champion and try not to stack on top of each other.

Anyway, what you’re saying is basically what Robert Hrouda was saying: the best way to not skip is to give incentives to not skip. Originally dungeons were like this, except that players decided it was more profitable to keep repeating the first boss over and over again instead of doing the whole dungeon. The response to this is the back-loaded reward system we have now, and the player response to that is to just skip everything.

Anyway, while the idea of tallying up everything at the end of the dungeon is nice, it does bring two big problems with it:

#1: This will punish players who have connection issues. When you make dungeons longer, you increase the likelyhood of someone’s internet keeling over, and this results in a player running 99% of the now longer dungeons, but getting jack squat for it all due to a drunk driver hitting a telephone poll.

#2: It will make it harder to recruit someone to finish the dungeon after someone else leaves. I’ve been in plenty of groups where someone would have to leave or get kicked right before the last boss. By scaling the reward to activity, there’s no incentive for someone to join up a group that is at the last boss, since they’ll get nothing for it.

Regardless of how hard it is to balance gradual rewards through the dungeon with a slight bonus at the end, this is the best solution because it helps everyone. It will result in skippers and clearers getting the same gold per hour as each other, it will not discriminate against the unfortunate with internet connections since they’ll still be rewarded for their play time, and you can still recruit people mid-run for the same reason.

But Anet chose arbitrary gates, so… this discussion might be moot.

We have to make more distinctions as we go on:

Selfish vs. ignorant
Selfish vs. unskilled
Selfish vs. specialized

Since I see the term “selfish” thrown out a lot when it really should be one of those three.

Anyway, I don’t think that increasing personal DPS is necessarily selfish. The faster something dies, the faster it stops doing damage, ergo the less damage you and everyone else takes.

I can sing the praises of the utilities of any class (BTW the correct answer for engineer is “everything”), but what is important is appropriateness. Nearly every utility, no matter how useful, is ultimately situational. As you learn the game, you should be swapping utilities out on a nearly boss by boss basis, depending on what you need.

(Not going to bother with quoting)

The champ goliath is the first boss of that map. You have to kill the initial wave of svanir (which takes, like, 10 seconds), destroy two ice totems, then you can just skip your way past everything else. The biggest obstacle to the goliath is that there’s a pack of icebrood wolves guarding the bridge to him, and they can tear a group up if they attack from behind, so before the real “DPS” test can begin you have to kill them and the adds around the goliath.

Harrahou.4518:

Attack speed comes into play a lot aswell. Thief has highest single target DPS. Thieves are something that should be utilized more…They will be in dungeon running guilds once eles get a nerf instead of a buff. Thief, can CnD Backstab combo for 20-35k every 4 seconds, and can HS span below 50% for around 15-25k. Thief is the highest single target. That all said the only thing they can provide a team other than stealth is vuln on crits…but they would have to drop some of its burst with Mug to get that…

The thief can provide a few more things other than stealth, DPS, and vul on crit. My main dungeon runner is the thief, and since I usually pug, I have found excellent use in most of the thieves abilities:

Permanent Blind Field: disables all non-champion enemies quite well.
Cleaving Weakness in sword Auto Attack
Defiant stripping Pistol Whip/Headshot
Spammable blast finisher w/ Cluster Bomb
Boom Stripping* with Larcenous Strike + Bountiful Theft
AoE endurance regen with agility signet + Bountiful Theft giving long duration AoE vigor
Great rezzing abilities with Shadow Refuge
Projectile reflection w/ Dagger storm (also out-heals enemies with signet of malice)
Projectile stopping + blind with Smokescreen
Targeted Pulls with Scorpion Wire

All in all, a good thief is someone you want around. There are some disadvantages with the thief, though:

#1: They don’t directly increase DPS that well. Most of their utilities are defensive, with the exception being that boon stealing can steal might away, as well as remove protection. Otherwise, they’ll have to blow initiative on cluster bomb in fire fields to give everyone might.

#2: Thieves become redundant really fast. All that stuff I listed above can be accomplished by one thief. Having two thieves doesn’t do it any better.

Because of this, in any sort of DPS test, unless you are testing the thief, you won’t see a thief.

*Note: boon stealing has recently been cut in half. Because of this, I am seriously considering going back to a 15/30/0/0/25 build to get Bountiful Theft again.

Broadicea.8294:

well with thief you don’t just spam backstab, it’s based on positioning (be behind them), and work backstab into your rotation. I believe above 50% target HP the proper rotation is C&D, backstab, then a full dagger auto chain, then just the FIRST hit of dagger auto, then C&D, etc. Below 50% I’m pretty sure it’s just heartseeker while above 6 initiative. Correct me if I’m wrong, pro-thieves.

That is the sPVP rotation, where revealed lasts 4 seconds. In PVE, reveal lasts 3 seconds, so you can fire off C&D immediately after one full auto attack chain. Though I haven’t done a full DPS check between HS and BS…

Anyway, I’m surprised the OP dismissed HotW so quickly.

In path 3 of HotW there is a champion so easy that the strategy for him has been “don’t bother” since release: The Champion Icebrood Goliath. His attacks are slow and incredibly low damage for their speed, meaning that nearly anyone in any gear setup can facetank him for incredible lengths of time. Certainly long enough to get an accurate baseline for DPS, even if he does have quite a lot of HP.

Though if the ooze is as good as you say, then there is only one advantage the Goliath provides, and that is being an Icebrood. You can use the Powerful Potion of Icebrood slaying to get a full 10% damage bonus (and 10% off of his attacks). Unfortunately it is still a day dungeon, though.

I guess what Anet wants us to do is not use bloodthirst. That’s the only thing I can come up with that would explain why they would buff base drain while nerfing the most important siphoning skill that would be in a siphoning build…

Which doesn’t make sense, but hey: anet logic.

I’m still pretty mad that they’ll throw in a bunch of hidden updates and not tell anyone.

The thing that annoys me is that Anet clearly didn’t think this through with turret targeting.

I have trouble naming just one skill where this can’t go wrong. The only two that comes to mind are overcharged shot and Tranquilizer art. Otherwise, every pistol skill, every shield skill, nearly every rifle skill, all grenades, bomb kit, tool kit, flamethrower, nearly every elixir gun, and pretty much all of the damaging utilities would cause this to bug out.

I suppose this is a welcome change for the turret engineer who spams tranquilizer dart. But for everyone else, it is sheer nonsense.

Ah, I thought you were just abbreviating his whole post onto that one point, and was debating his whole post with “dodging”.

He’s talking about “roles” and stuff. There’s a lot of ways to react to something than just dodging.

Ethics.4519:

Vox Hollow.2736:

Without the defensive aspects of support and control, there’s no element of reacting to the mob you’re fighting.

Dodge, block, reflect, blind, invulnerability, positioning, stability.

FTFY

I think this whole debate is temporary at best. The difficulty in the new dungeon isn’t class specifics, twitch movements, or precise action. It’s a puzzle. It’s only “hard” because the population at large hasn’t solved it yet.

When they do, magic stuff happens. I’ve been in pugs that have literally run straight up to sparki and slick, savagely beat them with no defeated players, and move on as if nothing happened. I’ve been in pugs that do the ooze section in one movement, with mere seconds to discuss “strategy”. It hasn’t happened with the clockheart yet (due to quitters mostly), but on every teaching run I’ve been on, the clockheart fight is hard until everyone “gets it”, and then suddenly clockheart is beaten like he owes us money.

Tip for Clockheart: don’t pull the hologram (unless you have something like spectral grasp or magnet). Kite the clockheart. He’ll chase you quite passionately.

Anyway, the thing with guardians is that they’re, by default, good with n00b support. It’s a shame that when my little dungeon thief perma blinds all the enemies and makes things a cakewalk, no one takes notice because it hasn’t healed anyone.

Took me a few hours, too. Thing is, that was one of the first times it was ever run, so there was no guide or anything.

In my recent runs, I’ve found that there are a few main components that eat up people’s time:

#1: New people who are hesitant to do anything, so they’ll slowly inch forward while terrified for their lives.

#2: New people who haven’t looked anything up yet, so you’ll have to sit and explain everything to them. And there is a lot to explain.

#3: New people who don’t quite know how to play yet, so they die frequently and cause the team to wipe over and over again.

#4: People who decide mid dungeon that it is the perfect time to rearrange their stamp collection.

#5: People quitting, forcing the remaining members to wait for someone else to show up.

The dungeon hasn’t been broken down to a science yet, and most of the people who run the dungeon are completely new it, and dungeons themselves sometimes. If you get a group of people who know what they’re doing and do it well enough, I imagine the dungeon, would go so much quicker than what we’re used to now.

Harper.4173:

My question to you – since you went on writing such a long post – is how does this make ME the bad guy?

To be fair, it may not be you specifically. Something I’ve learned by playing the game and going to the forums, a lot, is that whenever there is a social situation where something happens that the elitist does not approve of, they will interject themselves into that conversation, demand others play like them, insult everyone who disagrees with them, and continue with this until either the others just shrug and agree, or they go away and the elitist pronounces themselves the winner in their own head. I’ve seen it happen on the forums, and in the game, and I’ve even seen it in pugs, where one player will demand that things be done in a certain way, and when no one else agrees they’ll stop everything and spend 10 minutes arguing over it.

So now that their divine rule gets thrust upon everyone else, fighting evil wherever they find it, we get several consequences from this. One is retaliatory: you’ll get players becoming hyper casualists in response to this, shutting off any and all constructive criticism, and avoiding higher end gaming because the people who occupy that niche are insufferable to them. Another is naive: you’ll get players who blindly follow the advice of elitists, not realizing it only works for extremely skilled, well experienced, and many times hyper-specialized circumstances. So they do something like run full glass cannon gear with a melee ranger, but don’t effectively know skill dodges or root cancelling so they faceplant again and again and again. Another is corruption: the lure of farming dungeons and getting sweet l00t pulls good players away from the rest of the game, effectively making the rest of the game have more trouble due to the playerbase on average being less skilled.

It could very well not be you, so long as you aren’t commanding others to play a specific way to accommodate your needs, insulting them when they don’t, and intruding yourself into places with “advice”, or encouraging other players to not play with anyone but your ilk because bads are evil.

Harper.4173:

But it’s more than that – going slow through a dungeon, wiping, generally failing are things that RUIN the game experience for me. I take far less enjoyment from a dungeon run if we’ve finished it 10 minutes later than we were supposed to and with a few wipes done. It is literally a wasted experience.

Oh, hey, me too. We’ve heard a lot about you, but that’s the problem: you, you, you, you, you. You know who else doesn’t like wiping and failing over and over again? Pretty much everyone. Though I find it horribly inconvenient to deal with inexperience or incompetence, I am soothed by the fact that behind the emotionless avatar of that n00b is another human being who is having fun just like I am. It is a tax on my patience, but it is only just. If anything, my patience should be higher, I should be less quick to anger over a videogame, because if anyone is being selfish in the matter it is me, since that other guy has no problem playing with me. Only I have the problem.

Harper.4173:

Your post borders on exaggeration – how does not wanting to play with someone make them a victim?
If I advertise a group and someone who doesn’t fit with the criteria joins I don’t harass them – I just kick them and that’s that. We both go our separate ways. How is that so wrong? Please explain.

The reason why it borderlines on exaggeration is because elitism is an ideal, and as such it has no exact set of rules or practices. Much like with politics, any individual person sits somewhere between the extremes of hyper-casualist and turbo-elitist. To find one person who does everything I listed is rare. But to find people who do some or many of the things I listed… not so rare. This is a second reason why I’m not a fan of community segregation: it has a habit of reinforcing the extremes.

Of course, I don’t fit into any extreme either. When I see an LFG asking for a zerker warrior, I respect that and don’t join up, as I have no warrior. When a player joins up with some random class + build and demands to stay there… that’s just sheer lunacy to me. As is players who go to maps/dungeons below the minimum suggested level, runs around in whites because they don’t want to spend money upgrading their armor unless it is exotic, or players who specifically troll run. I can’t defend those because, as the opposite extreme, they’ve circled the globe and smacked right into that same entitlement wall they were running from.

I’m not a fan of elitism, to put it lightly. It is a strange matter that rears its head up in nearly any game out there, and it is a bit of a difficult matter to tackle. However, after years of gaming, I figured it out. The thing with regular players is that they operate under a certain ideology when playing a game: if you accommodate me and my playstyle, I’ll accommodate your playstyle, and that way when we all accept everyone, we’re all happy. From here, particular build choices or classes are done out of entertainment, and this accommodation is done as a form of mutual respect.

The elitist has a different ideology: I’ll play the way I want, and if other people don’t play how I want, then they’re bad people and should feel bad. Then, they go around harassing other players who don’t do what the elitist wants, who don’t think what the elitist thinks. “They’re so selfish because they don’t do what I want to do, play the game how I want to play, build the way I want them to build, and how dare they question me when I assume that my way is the unspoken norm?”, the elitist believe. Sincerely. They view other players as insubordinate tools that need to be morphed for their own gain.

Elitism starts as a means to ulterior goals, and in the case of guild wars 2, the primary goal is money. By using specific tactics with specific gear and specific classes, they aim to complete content faster, which gets them digital money quicker. That’s really the only advantage to doing something quicker in this game, since faster doesn’t equate to more enjoyable or even “better” really. Now, there’s always the urge to push oneself further, or to try for an unofficial record run, or to form a group based on performance. But this doesn’t cause the exclusion and the harassment that you see from elitism. No, the driving force must be something that benefits from exclusion and provides some reward for doing so.

Whether it is just people who view others as tools who come here, or if it is regular people who adapt that way of thinking after awhile, elitism has a destructive effect on the community. It fosters superiority complexes. It punishes compromise. It seeks to eliminate diversity. Elitism is essentially the end of negotiation: Do what I want, or go away. From these negative traits, we see a sea of others emerge.

You may have noticed how trollish elitists are. This is no coincidence: To one with a superiority complex, there is nothing to gain from “reasoning”, or “empathy”. To them, it is like being compassionate to an ant on the sidewalk. Because of this, they don’t care to listen, to reason, or to respect. They get peace of mind by you feeling bad, and by you going away, because they see you as something less than worthwhile that also obtrusively takes money from their wallet. This gives them peace of mind to be contradictory, nonsensical, and hypocritical. Their goal was never to be “right” in the first place, for all of the “right” people are the ones that agree with them.

This hostility breeds more hostility from their victims, which in-turn makes the whole game more and more unpleasant for the bystanders. It has gotten to the point that I am hesitant to offer advice, because if I do I’ll be despised for being intolerant and an elitist. Makes you wonder who gave them that notion in the first place, doesn’kitten The idea of segregation in the game is horrible, since it results in different minded people who refuse to cooperate competing for the attention of content developers, which can only end in disappointment for the playerbase.

This drives away new players, who come to the game to find the community less than unwelcoming. But, as always, elitism has no problem with this. The elitist actually prefers to drive diversity away, drive players away, because this makes it easier for them to get money, and those didn’t count as “people” in the first place. Then, when there are no more dissenting opinions, they’re free to get content in the game with hard DPS checks and damage meters while not having to worry about balancing non-zerker build layouts in PVE.

The worst part is, there’s very little the community can do about it. The moderation has been lax on the issue, so the only thing the rest of the community can do is be as stubborn as the elitists, hope their group grows quicker, and when the elitists feel truly unwelcome, then just maybe they’ll go away. This is a far shot, because they sincerely believe that anyone who doesn’t approve of their antics is jealous of them.

The funny thing is, if you say he’s saying something different, then you’re being a sociologist, too, with the added benefit of being a hypocrite.

Ethics.4519:

Broadicea.8294:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

That’s the thing: when Robert talked about skipping, he specifically said he doesn’t condone it. He spends the whole post talking about ways to fix the problem, and how previous game designs just created a different problem. The whole community segregation thing is just a temporary solution until Robert could find a way to please both worlds. But he’s gone now, so gates ahoy!

Who cares.

@BRA

Are you talking about the robert quote posted earlier? If so

1) Robert never said he “doesn’t condone skipping”. Nowhere in his whole statement does he talk about his preference towards the population skipping or not.

2) Robert does not talk about other game designs. If you’re talking about previous GW2 game designs, he also doesn’t talk about that, other than saying it didn’t work to make trash rewarding.

3) Robert specifically does say that the best solution (at the time) was to find like minded people. Form a guild and try to play with them. This is the opposite of what people are doing today and complaining about.

1)Considering that his entire post is spent detailing “human nature”, then mentions that he keeps leashing only because it is inelegant to remove it, then talks about how they’re attempting to balance the content so less people would skip, then encourages people to find others to not skip, then says he himself tries to avoid skipping, his stance is pretty clear.

2)Previous game designs. In this post, he mentions that around launch for GW2 there was an issue with players just doing the first boss and restarting the dungeon, and how this was changed to stop this problem, and that they’re afraid of buffing “trash mob” rewards for fear that this would happen again.

3)Robert says the best solution is to adjust the rewards of early game content. However, as that solution is hard to execute,, he recommends, and I quote: “For now I would encourage those not looking to skip…”, emphasis mine.

For people to somehow get the notion of widespread condolences from his post is beyond me.

That is something I find annoying that other players do. There’s a certain philosophy I’ve had in MMOs for awhile, and I haven’t the foggiest why other people don’t do this:

If they form the group, it’s their rules.

It’s that simple. I haven’t encountered most of the in-game discrimination other people report to nearly the degree that they report it, and the reason why is because I read the descriptions before I join.

That’s the thing: when Robert talked about skipping, he specifically said he doesn’t condone it. He spends the whole post talking about ways to fix the problem, and how previous game designs just created a different problem. The whole community segregation thing is just a temporary solution until Robert could find a way to please both worlds. But he’s gone now, so gates ahoy!

Spoj, you gotta realize that the DS build doesn’t use life blast against single bosses. It swaps out to the dagger and fights from there.

It is hard to item analysis like this sometimes, since different classes have different builds and trait lines. But in general, the comparison between orbs and scholar runes is basically this:

When is 4% greater crit chance and 4% greater crit damage more than 45 power + 10% of everything when over 90%?

I’ll try and answer that with a “generic” build (full berserker, +300 power, + 300 Precision, + 30% crit damage)

Ruby Orbs: 4320 effective power
Scholar runes: 4208 effective power

The difference is 112 power. The scholar bonus is 421 power. So, scholar is better if you meet the requirement 27% of the time. Note, this isn’t factoring in stuff like sigils, might, or additional bonuses.

To my knowledge, you get 20 tokens per run, regardless of how many times you ran it previously. The “first path per day” bonus awards an extra 40 tokens, coming to an overall 60 for 1st runs.

That’s cool. The thing I’m worried about though, are things like abominations and lupi, who get bonuses for striking the non-evading pets.

AntiGw.9367:

I can’t believe you wasted so much time replying to that post…

I wouldn’t call it wasted. The thing with the forums is that not everyone who visits posts, so a lot of the whole “go against the establishment” stuff is partly for the unsung readers.