Guild Wars 2

spoj.9672:

Ill more likely be using dungeon specific potions and curry butternut squash soup. But thanks for the confirmation, havent seen anyone link that trait setup for dungeons which im a bit surprised about.

It is the strongest when unbuffed, anyway. A lot of engi’s personal power comes from how well they stack might, and without more information the lack of might stacking abilities might drain power away from the build. If you have teammates that can keep might on you, then it won’t be a problem.

A lot of engi’s go with koi cakes or pizzas anyway due to their ambient condition damage. At full might a full berserker engi has 875 malice. While using pizza, its 945, and with runes of the noble it is 1,128. With that, bleed ticks for 99 damage, and that adds an extra 5,940 damage per opponent with shrapnel grenade. Though it is condition damage, so it takes awhile to build up… also burning ticks for 610 so fire bomb will deal 8.5K damage in burning over 14 seconds against 5 targets. Shrapnel itself will add roughly 9 ticks of bleeding with each grenade attack (891), and even in my full beserker build I can’t get grenade #1 to hit for more than 17,820, so it is a superior damage trait then empowering adrenaline on grenadier builds.

By comparison, without those buffs, shrapnel grenade will only do 3,881 condi damage, fire bomb will do 5,678, and the shrapnel trait will do 582 damage with grenades. Curry butternut squash soup increases damage at max might by about 7%, so you’ll have to weigh whether that extra power is worth more than a 50% damage buff to conditions.

EDIT: Oh yeah, a thing is that a lot of engis are concerned with survivability. It’s pretty easy to get, though: just put 10 points in alchemy to pick up invigorating speed. Combine that with infused precision or speedy kits and BAM: perma vigor. You also get Hidden Flask as a bonus.

I’ve found that power scales linearly as well. I have a theory on how to test weapon strength, but it’ll take me awhile to do.

Unfortunately the Effect LOD box doesn’t do a thing. I still can’t see crap while grenading on my engi.

I quinteenth on this lack of communication…. don’t tell me that isn’t a word. I know.

Another rather big thing that irritates me is that the patch notes aren’t complete. When they release the patch notes, they leave out a ton of things, like enemy buffs or random skill/trait nerfs. I usually have to find out through player help threads or the class forums that a class mechanic was nerfed somehow.

I find the idea of the trinity to be stupid and a lazy design. You get the enemy to attack a group right where it is dumbest to attack it while ignoring everything else, and then some guy sits back and spams heals so everyone else won’t die to bad guy breaking wind. The only game I’ve played that had a system like this was City of Heroes, and they had 4: Ranged + Melee (DPS and tank), support, control. Support and control were strongest of the two.

If you are standing around pressing 1 and dodging, you aren’t doing it right. Maybe it is just because I main an engineer, but I find combat to be like playing Mozart on my keyboard. I’m constantly cycling kits and abilities to change up how I engage the enemy, attack the enemy, which combo fields I lay, which combo fields I finish in, how I defend myself, and also which might stacking abilities I can use in that moment. The end result? 25 stacks of might, 2700 power 52% chance to crit, 1900 condition damage, Water fields + AoE heals, Perma Vigor, Perma swiftness, and maintaining 20 stacks of bleeding + perma poison + perma burn on 5 enemies in an AoE at 1500 range while reflecting their projectiles.

I am not getting anywhere near that by just pressing 1. Not even close. Maybe you haven’t tried to solo a difficult champion yet, or maybe you’re letting yourself be carried by a zerg, or maybe you just play an axe/axe + rifle signet warrior. Whatever the cause, there is so much more you can do by actually playing the game, no matter which class you choose.

I’m not an elitist, but I’m not hyper casual, either. When told to stack somewhere I stack, and when crap gets bad and no one else will, I find I have to take control and coach people on how to do things.

I also find it prudent to, in every pug, either ask if other people have done that dungeon path, or say myself that I had not done that dungeon path recently. If this convo doesn’t take place, and you just start commanding people, then it comes off as obtrusive and condescending.

That said, I’d blame the lag first. Lately the lag in the game is so bad that I’ve found myself standing stationary and not moving, only to discover 5 seconds later that I’ve run off a cliff into lava ankitten ow irreversibly dead (been running SE a lot lately). When that happens, I’d be pretty ticked off, too, if another member of the team took it upon themselves to tell me to not run off the edge into lava.

The priest of Melandru is only alright. It isn’t nearly as easy as the statue of dwayna, but it isn’t nearly as all as the Risen High Wizard in small groups. I’ve never managed to solo the entire priest in one go, though.

Some tips on his attacks:

He’ll throw seeds that turn into vines that immobilize and cause bleeding. This is fairly easy to avoid: just run to different area. They take awhile to take effect, so as long as you are aware of your surroundings, this is no problem.

His primary attack involves him slamming his hammer down, causing spikes to erupt from around a single targeted individual. I have found no adequate way to dodge this move, since mere strafing doesn’t seem to avoid them, so to avoid these you’ll have to dodge whenever he slams his hammer down.

His second primary attack involves creating a churning earth like attack underneath your feet. Much like the seeds, this attack is easily avoided by simply walking out of the red ring.

His most dangerous attack is a teleport attack. He’ll rather quickly bring his hammer back then immediately teleport to you and knock you back about a thousand miles. If you see him pull his hammer back into a golfing position, he’s going to teleport and bash your head in. Dodge just a quarter second after he goes into the golf swing, otherwise he’ll just bash you after you dodge.

His spinning attack is high damaging, but easy to spot. He’ll quite slowly go into a golf swing position, charge up for a moment, then spin in the direction of a target character. Dodging this attack is rather easy: if you have room to your sides and have maintained distance, you can just walk out of the way. If you have just distance, you can chill or immobilize him and he won’t reach you. If you don’t have distance, you can dodge through him and he’ll charge right past you. The hardest part of this attack is when it is comboed with Banish or the Grasping Vines, which can lock you down or put you into a corner where you can’t avoid him.

Though I have not been able to solo him, in theory I could do it. I just have to wait for that stupid metamorphosis attack to bug out so I can fight him uninterrupted.

I’ve been getting insane lag, everywhere, all the time, no matter what I am doing. The game is nigh unplayable now:

*crafting in Divinity’s Reach (not: not lions arch) is now laggy with latency spikes every 15 to 20 seconds now.
*gathering materials in any zone, I still get massive lag spikes all the time
*in instances and dungeons, incredible lag spikes all the time
*talking is now incredibly hard, since messages will take 5 to 10 seconds to appear on my screen, and I swear other people take 30 seconds before I can hear what they say.

I’m even getting new kinds of lag I had never seen before:

A)Position detection error. While running around, I’ll randomly be attacked and take damage from nothing. The reason being that the server has glitched up, and has me listed as half the map away, where enemies can attack my after-image and do damage to me while I’m running around surrounded by nothing.
B)Action lag. Now, I’m getting lag spikes where the only thing that lags is my toon. I’ll be able to stand around and chat, and take damage, but I can’t move, run, or use any skills, sometimes for 15 seconds at a time. The weird thing is, everyone else can move fine, and I can see them moving fine, and I can read their chat just fine.

It all started with the most recent patch.

I do find it interesting that any thread, no matter the subject, seems to delve into the whole exploitation/elitism debate. Its like everyone on the forums is biting their lip in anxiety for the next time they can bring it up.

As for Zelyhn’s original point, I do agree to a certain extent. As much as I like my battles to be hard and dynamic, I do hate having to constantly repair and run back. That is why I try to improve upon myself how good I am. But as I mentioned before in another thread, a year after release many of us have run dungeons so many times that it becomes routine.

The appeal of dungeons at the start of the game was the unknown: you didn’t know what was going to appear around the next corner, and you didn’t know how to solve the problem you were dealt with. Everything was new and innovative, and by inexperience everything was challenging. Now, things are so routine that you can run around in gear with literally no defense, and it doesn’t pose a problem at all.

Though I do suspect that the term “exploit” gets thrown around too much. Bosses weren’t always designed to have a particular method to defeating them, because there was no guarantee of group composition and build loadouts when facing that boss. So, instead they give the bosses and encounters different tools, and tell the player to figure it out. In this sense, as long as you are engaging the content directly, nothing is really an exploit.

That’s the purpose of refining most materials. The problem is, other materials don’t clutter your bank.

This is kind of a rant, so…

Well, I figured out how it is they plan to remove a ton of gold from the economy… the hard way. It isn’t just trading.

You probably all know about how basic ascended crafting materials take up a ton of bank space, and yet you need a lot of them in order to make a full loadout of ascended weapons (4 weapons lots, 2000 of each). These litter your bank and take up inventory slots on your character, but since it can take literal days of nonstop grinding to get all that you’ll need to craft ascended weapons, you won’t throw these crafting materials away.

There’s only one way to save space without throwing things away, and that requires refining these materials. First you need enough to get 450 in one of the crafting professions, and then you need the following:

100 ascended basic material
2 obsidian shard
10 Thermocatalytic Reagents

You’re probably wondering where I’m going with all this. Simple:

2 obsidian shards = 4,200 karma, 2 laurels, or 30 fractal relics.
10 thermocatalytic reagents = 14.96 silver.

The obsidian shards themselves are a pain, but the real tax is the reagents. These bloodstone dust and dragonite ore litter your bank and inventory space very quickly. I’ve seen players with 10 stacks+ of individual components on the day of release. If you want to empty out a space in your bank, it is really simple: you refine the material. To refine the material (250 per stack) you’ll need on average 25 reagents, which will, on average, cost 37.4 silver to an NPC store.

I hate this. I spent gold just to level crafting to get bank space, only to find that on a regular basis I am charged 37.4 silver for bank space. Keep in mind, this is a material that

A)You can’t sell to NPCs.
B)You can’t trade to other players
C)You can’t purchase when you want to use it.

Unless you want to completely forgo the ascended weapons, lose out on that juicy 5%+ advantage they give, and spend your time regularly deleting stacks of this material for doing any and everything you did before, you’re stuck with this unnamed tax on bank space.

It seems like this whole ascended crafting thing is a dig against players. Give the players a ton of materials that are worthless to everyone else, overloads your bank quickly, is expensive to gain enough levels to refine, and requires money just to convert to easy storage. I can understand if this material could be sold or bought or traded, because then you could negotiate your needs with other players without personally being inconvenienced. I can understand the costs of reagents being part of overall price of an ascended weapon, should you choose to buy an ascended weapon. I can understand if these materials required a special place to acquire them, so they wouldn’t overload your inventory unless you went looking for them.

But no, I have to pay for bank space. Each ascended weapon will require 6 stacks of these materials, and with up to 6 ascended weapons possible for every build, this eats up 36 spaces in your bank, and requires 12.45 gold after leveling crafting to open up free slots, let alone the fact that you’ll be overloaded with bloodstone dust so much quicker than the other materials that it becomes an excessive task just to deal with.

Maybe I’m just being petty, but I can’t be the only person who feels this way, can I?

The unfortunate part is, the ascended weapons have arguably the largest impact out of all ascended items, since they give a flat 5% increase to direct damage.

There’s been a lot of minor changes that add up to a whole lot:

#1: UIs are different. Going to spend a lot of time learning this.
#2: Champions give boxes 100% on death that reward silver, a masterwork or higher piece of equipment, bloodstone dust, and crafting materials.
#3: Dungeons now give 1 gold upon completely of that path once per day. This is account bound, so no more alting to run dungeon paths multiple times for a full reward.
#4: Ascended crafting exists now. It’s a pain to get up, but you can make ascended weapons now.
#5: a ton of bugfixes and balances for classes. Many play differently than they did at launch.
#6: There are many more runes and sigils out now that do a lot more things, and also new attribute distributions such as Dire and Assassin
#7: You are now awarded chests with gold for achievement points.
#8: Karma gain has been nerfed significantly pretty much everywhere.
#9: Some sylvari named Scarlet will randomly attack zones with portals that spawn twisted robots, aetherblade pirates, and molten alliance dredge/flame legion.
#10: There’s this whole living world thing going on where we get updates to the game every 2 weeks or so. Most of them story based and stuff.
#11: Herobrine was removed.
#12: There’s been a bunch of things added to sPVP. Free tournaments, solo Q, leaderboards, private PVP servers, new maps, etc.
#13: Fractals of the mists was added: it’s basically a dungeon that spawns 3 random stages from a pool of 8 or so, and then a specialty boss. There’s a lot with agony resistance and stuff, so you’ll have to look that up.
#14: a currency called Laurels was added for doing daily and monthly content.
#15: Gold is now more common and easier to earn than ever
#16: Likewise, gems are expensive as heck now.
#17: The community is more hostile than it was before.
#18: You can pick titles to appear above your characters now.
#19: More hair colors and makeover kits that can change appearances.

Those are all the ones I can think of at the moment. There’s been some expansion with new jumping puzzles and dynamic events and stuff, but nothing too important.

I’m tempted to make alts just to +1 this more.

UW combat in this game is handled poorly:

A)Classes have differing access to utilities because some classes can’t use most their stuff while UW.

B)Because of this, class specific traits that work with certain weapons and skills become dead weight you need to switch out of every time you hit a waist-hi puddle.

C)There aren’t any UW specific traits because they’d just interfere with aboveground traits, making UW “tactics” virtually nonexistent.

D)The skills we do have will sometimes behave differently, and we won’t know why.

We need UW specific traits, UW specific utilities, and an UW specific loadout. Until then, UW content ends up being some extra add-on players are forced to deal with on occasion.

The hardest part about teaching is communication. You can vomit wisdom at someone all day, but if they don’t open their mouth, you’ll never know if anything sticks. Back at my old job, the hardest students to teach weren’t the ones who would dwell on one topic for two hours because they didn’t get it, but the ones who would give a blank stare and respond with a flat “Okaaaaaaay…” to every attempt at feedback. Those were the guys who’d flunk a test, and finally own up that they didn’t understand a thing after coming back. That is where the real failure is at.

#1: The point is start a dialogue. You have to ask them if they have any questions, and if things go wrong, you have to ask them why they deviated or what they were trying to do. If you know what is going on there, then it is much easier to remedy the situation instead of just chewing them out. You have to encourage them, otherwise they’ll just stare blankly, being too timid to say anything.

#2: You gotta be patient. Even with instruction the first run never goes well. The game is about practice, and every “teaching run” is with players who have zero practice against what they are fighting. They ain’t painting a Picasso at their first pass of the brush, no matter how much you talk about cubism.

#3: The language barrier is a pain in the rear that rears its ugly head once in awhile. Often times they aren’t stupid insomuch as you sound like total gibberish to them.

#4: You gotta say everything. As much as people whine about walls of text AKA anything longer than 50 characters, if you don’t tell them what to do, why, and what happens in failure, they’ll silently disagree with you on something, not say a word about it, then not cooperate in runs due to this disagreement. Communication in itself is a skill, and unfortunately no one teaches that skill, so you gotta ramble on at the pulpit before people get the word.

#5: Trolls exist. Sometimes people want to be stupid. These are the guys you should punish, but unfortunately it takes forever to weed them out. Often times, what we think is a troll is actually just really stupid; key difference is that trolls are malevolent, while idiots are merely unfortunate.

Also, paragraphs. Paragraphs really help on the forums. But yeah, to resolve to teach is to choose to deal with society akittens most incompetent.

It isn’t uneven as much as it is out of scale. To make the standard ascended weapon, you need 500 of all 3.

The point was never to stay in DS 24/7. Who’d want to do that? If you do that, you’d lose out on damage whenever there isn’t two targets to hit. No, you pop into DS, lay waste with your skills to multiple enemies, then pop out of DS to clean up and gain a bunch of life force for the next fight. You don’t stay in DS for bosses who are by themselves, either. There, you use DS primarily for defense, instead opting to use the dagger/warhorn or dagger/focus for offense. Of course, the 30/10/0/0/30 build also pops DS for weakening shroud, too. It just doesn’t immediately pop out when there are multiple enemies to blast away at.

That whole “Necro has poor cleave” thing is the reason why you’d want to run a DS build in the first place. Because then when you do run it, you don’t have such poor cleave anymore. I’ve run every path of every dungeon except CoF and Arah (no interest in their tokens), and bosses by themselves aren’t the norm. Dungeons are chock full of places where you gather around a corner to pull a bunch of silvers, or a boss that has a ton of additional adds, or multiple bosses in one area, or bosses that summon additional adds through the fight. The biggest problem with going for single target DPS is that I run face first into places where that is not the optimal strategy in nearly every path.

If anything, they should’ve made it so it requires 10 of each material for refinement, and you just get 1/10th what you normally get now.

I’ve never been kicked from a dungeon group. I’ve left plenty, but I’ve never been kicked from one.

Most of the time, whenever someone gets into a fight or argues with another player, if they don’t indignantly run the dungeon different ways until everyone gets killed twice, they’ll happily put the whole dungeon on hold for 10 minutes while they fight it out.

So I do wonder where a lot of “They always kick me!” stuff comes from. That said, going by these forums I wouldn’t be surprised if stuff like that happened.

Now you’re just throwing words around. I already factored in coefficients. That was the first thing I did in this thread. I just did it again, too. Effective power is also very valid at comparing builds, especially when those builds use the same weapons and the same utilities. There is no difference in rotation because they’re the same weapons. I also just included all of the modifiers. There’s no need to do a “proper” DPS calculation because you’re all using the same weapons, so whatever effective stats are higher wins. But lets ignore the charity I gave before in my previous analysis by giving a 7 condition uptime, and just go with your 4: congrats, your build now has a 2.5% advantage over the deathly perception build against single targets. Whoop dee doo.

Also, your build can’t hit higher with life blast. It doesn’t use staff or axe training, so it has 10% less damage in life blast than with a deathly perception build. Target the weak doesn’t compensate for that.

Of course, deathly perception more than compensates for the loss of the signet when in DS. I’d give you the effective power, but you don’t seem to care about effective power. So tell me, if hard math isn’t what is behind how much damage you can do, then what is: spiral power, or heart of the cards?

EDIT: Just checked the wiki. I’ve found no evidence that strength of undeath is bugged. Forum search function doesn’t work.

That was done in an earlier post:

Dagger does 940 over 2 seconds, 470 DPS. Life Blast does 375 over 1.5 seconds, 250 DPS.

Without deathly perception, life blast does barely more damage than the dagger auto attack against 2 targets (like, 6% more). With it, life blast does 53% more damage against 2 targets, and even more against more.

Although I haven’t factored in the time for life transfer or tainted shackles…

Tainted shackles’ listed activation time is 0.5 seconds. It has a delayed effect, but you can use it then use another attack nearly immediately. I’ll throw in an extra 0.5 second delay just for safe measure, and say it does 292 × 5 = 1460 damage over a second, not including torment. Throw 10% on top of there for staff or axe w/ axe training (1606), and then give it the crit mod, and you’ll get 4021 adjusted base DPS. Not bad for a second.

Life transfer takes 3.5 seconds, and does 684 × 1.1 × 5 = 3762 damage. Divide it by time to get 1075. Add in the crit mod, and you get 2691 adjusted base DPS.

Jewles.6390:

what happened to the promised condition buff anet said a long time ago… did it change into a nerf instead? instead of nerfing why dont they take 4 weeks to pvp pve split the skills and not nerf pve engis to high hell (even more) haha

Anets stance on balance is that PVE is so easy anyone can do it, so jut balance for PVP.

But yeah, I’m not looking forward to this from a PVE perspective. I know in PVP it is a bit of a problem when players end up with vulnerability, weakness, burning, poison, bleed, confusion, blind, and cripple all in a matter of moments, but in PVE you need to do that just to compete.

It looks intriguing…

I’m hesitant to build this, though. Mostly because of how reliant I’ve found condition builds to be on Sharper Images.

You have to remember that condition specs don’t have a pure damage spec like power does.

Condition damage is only worthwhile in an AoE. Even in max condition gear, you’re only hitting for, like, 1800 with the scepter auto attack. It’s not that stellar. But, look at what else you can do:

Grasping dead: 14 seconds x 3 bleeds x 135 per tick x 5 enemies = 28,235 over 14 seconds
Enfeebling Blood: 20 seconds x 2 bleeds x 135 per tick x 5 enemies = 27,000 over 20 seconds
Mark of Blood: 16 seconds x 3 bleeds x 135 pr tick x 5 enemies = 32,400 over 16 seconds
Weakening shroud = enfeebling blood
Mark of evasion = 16 × 2 × 135 per tick x 5 enemies = 21,600 over 16 seconds
Blood is power + epidemic = 2 × 58 × 135 x 6 = 93,960 over a minute.
Dhuumfire + epidemic: 6 × 791 × 6 = 28,476 over 6 seconds
Tainted Shackles: 3 × 17 × 101 x 5 = 25,755 over 17 seconds or 51,510 over 17 seconds (PVP)

Epidemic on a target with 25 bleeds (average duration of 5 seconds), 15 seconds of burning, 3 stacks of 15 second torment= 84,375 + 59,325 + 22,725 = 166,425 damage.

Epidemic is arguably the strongest attack in the game, as it is the only one that is a force multiplier instead of just adding more damage.

The condition damage takes awhile to build, but for its activation time, it is well worth the damage.

Effective power is a very valid comparison for establishing base damage, especially when comparing builds. It is simple mathematics: you take the probability that you’ll crit, how hard you hit when you crit, and apply that to your amount of power to get the adjusted damage value. A player can throw all of the modifiers in the world at their build, but without a strong base power to go off of, those percents don’t mean anything. I think you are underestimating how much crit damage and power really affect DPS. Its one of the reasons why thieves hit so hard: their DPS builds all take 300 into critical strikes to get 30% crit damage and 300 precision to go with it.

Anyway, looking at modifiers becomes a bit more complicated, since most of the damage mods become conditional. But the only difference between the two builds is the presence of Target the Weak and Strength of Undeath. Thankfully, you can use these to adjust base power to get a representative base power out of your builds. So, looking at the total list of modifiers we have:

Force: 5%
Close to death: 20% (up around half the time, so we can say an average increase of 10%)
Scholar: 10% (at 90% health)

And we see how things become different. Personally, I’ve found that maintaining 90% health with the DS build is easier than maintaining 90% health with your build. How would one calculate this? For now, we’ll just assume the same base “skill” for both builds.

This leaves only one modifier that is different between the builds. So far, we have a 1.2705 increase to damage for both builds, setting them up to be

6103.4
6135.2

Now lets look at the different boosts. Strength of undead puts that second number at around 6442 for however long you maintain more than 50% DS. That’s pretty easy, actually, so we can say that one is up for 100% of the time. Target the weak depends on circumstances and team composition, but thankfully there’s a nice cutoff where target the weak surpasses strength of undead, and that is at 3 unique conditions. This makes the first number 6469.6, which then surpasses the Deathly Perception build by 0.44%. Then, each subsequent condition adds another 122 additional power to the first number.

This is when things get murkier. That build by itself can only really maintain 3 conditions on a champion constantly: bleeding, vulnerability, and then the alternation of weakness, cripple, and chill since those 3 are all shorter duration and champions cut down on weakness time. I suppose you could try and push it by using tainted shackles to get torment as well, so maybe around 4 conditions. Other teammates can probably supply poison, burning, and blind, so overall the modifier for target the weak can be put up to 7 condis on average, coming to a final value of 6958. So, to compare the two numbers, we have

6958
6442

Resulting in, at peak conditions, an 8% increase in power between the two builds.

That, by the way, is base power. This isn’t factoring deathly perception in at all. An issue I have with target the weak is that, while piling any one enemy you’ll definitely have multiple conditions up, but when fighting a group of enemies things become much more complicated, since you can’t always maintain more than 3 conditions on 3 enemies standing in a row.

The point being that, unless you have 4 or more conditions, Life Blast in your build doesn’t hit harder than my build BEFORE factoring in deathly perception. Now, lets factor in deathly perception.

Deathly perception changes the crit modifier (crit chance x crit damage + 1 – crit chance) from 1.68 to 2.47, giving an effective power while in DS of 7104 before modifiers. Including the modifiers (Force, CtD, Scholar, SoU), while in DS deathly perception gives a whopping total effective power of 9477!

So in average, in the DS build, Life blast hits a whole lot harder than your build. Whereas your build can get up to 8% advantage against bosses, my build hits 36% harder with all death shroud skills (including life transfer and tainted shackles for an AoE). On top of that, it has 15% more life force, whereas I doubt 250 condition damage is doing much for you. The math is staring you in the face; I don’t understand why you can’t accept that both builds are viable.

To my knowledge: nothing is being done.

Wethospu.6437:

The best part is when they spend minutes telling you how your Potent Slaying Potion is slowing them down. And then proceed to wipe multiples times.

Point is, don’t try to find any logic from pugs.

I second this. There’s a big difference between being skilled and having obsessive compulsive personality disorder.

Stx.4857:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The biggest problem is that Anet’s philosophy on class design is “PVP only, PVE is easy enough that everyone can do it”. And that is true to a certain extent, but when you get into all of the other little factors, such as the shiny-oriented mindset that most players have, things start to fall apart.

Personally, I’ve only encountered the whole clkittene thing once. Most of what I see is build hate and player hate, so as a whole I don’t think classes have much of an issue.

The ironic thing is, sPVP is the one that is falling apart due to viability issues.

Thank you for a helpful reply. I feel that it really does have to do with classes, in this very thread which isnt very big, there are already two examples of how certain classes are thought of as inferior.

I do think necromancers are inferior as well. I’ve played an engineer, thief, and necro in dungeons, and the necro always feels like it is just dragging along ,despite going for full berserker. The thing is, you can take 5 apothecary gear necros and complete nearly every path of every dungeon, hence Anets reluctance to give a darn about the issue. All that said, there are still times I want to play a necromancer. I hate the feeling of inferiority I have while doing so.

Don’t take the dungeon forums as a representative sample. The people here aren’t like in the game, and frankly aren’t like the other forums either.

The big problem is, if you can hit 2 or more enemies (which I find myself capable of doing a lot), then DS has higher DPS than the dagger, and not using DS is gimping offense. Necromancers now generate a lot more lifeforce than before, so in dungeons it’ll be mere moments before the LF bar is full again. DS still sucks up damage while using life blast, so it is offensive and defense at the same time.

You say it is circumstantial. The only circumstance where the dagger will beat out life blast is with bosses who are alone and are safe to melee. I imagine this is the same reason why unyielding blast is in the build you posted.

I’ll post a build, too: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQRBHbhG2IjWlexm6G9eCB6x7VLOTUhjh6x64OfIA-jAyAYrBRTRApMwUhAl8KiGbxtIas6aMlLRUNA-e

So lets compare the effective power.

Your build:
2626 Power
58% crit chance
93% crit damage (243)

Effective Power: 4804

My build:
2876 Power
43% crit chance
108% crit damage

Effective Power: 4829

This, of course, isn’t going into all of the muddier details, like which can sustain 90% health easier or which stacks might easier, or food specific bonuses, or the elite skill. Really, there’s only two things I can see going for the build you posted that would give the dagger a greater advantage:

Furious Demise
Target the Weak

And I am not sure that all of that is worth it for the loss in damage you have by not using life blast to hit multiple targets. The DS build also gets Strength of Undeath.

All in all, I can’t fault one person for running either build, since at first, second, and third glance they are on equal footing.

It really depends on build specifics. I made a post about it in another thread on these forums:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Hybrid-vs-Full-Power-dps-wise/first#post2783281

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I think you guys are underselling lifeblast when it is traited with unyielding blast and deathly perception.

On my zerker 30/0/10/0/30 build, I have a base crit chance of 49% after food buffs, and a crit damage of 252%. I’ll use this as a standard for crit mods.

The dagger does base 940 damage over 2 seconds, having a DPS of roughly 470. Life Blast does base 341, but 10% extra with axe or staff, so this comes to 375 over 1.5 seconds, or 250 base damage per second.

With deathly perception, LIfe blast has a 99% chance to crit. So, the appropriate crit mods for each of them is 1.745 for the dagger, and 2.504 for Life Blast. This comes up with an adjusted base damage of:

Dagger: 820.15
Life Blast: 626 (436.25 W/O deathly perception)

On any single target, Dagger will outdamage life blast. With piercing life blast from Unyielding Blast, if Life Blast were to hit more than 1 target, then Life Blast outdamages the dagger.

So life blast is definitely a viable form of offense. You just have to line up and hit multiple enemies with it.

Basically, Life blast is really only worth it in a few circumstances:

#1: You can’t fight at melee for a moment.
#2: You can hit 2 or more enemies with unyielding blast while using either deathly perception, axe training with an axe, or a staff.
#3: You can hit 3 or more enemies with unyielding blast while not having deathly perception, axe training with an axe, or using a staff.

The biggest problem is that Anet’s philosophy on class design is “PVP only, PVE is easy enough that everyone can do it”. And that is true to a certain extent, but when you get into all of the other little factors, such as the shiny-oriented mindset that most players have, things start to fall apart.

Personally, I’ve only encountered the whole clkittene thing once. Most of what I see is build hate and player hate, so as a whole I don’t think classes have much of an issue.

The ironic thing is, sPVP is the one that is falling apart due to viability issues.

Maybe anet has animosity toward players, but it just seems like this wasn’t handled the best way. I’m talking about

Bloodstone Dust
Dragonite Ore
Empyreal Fragments

And the fact that, by now, no one has any inventory space for any of them. The way they work is quite simple: You need 100 of each of these materials to refine into one of their components.

The problem? You only have enough room for 250 in the bank before they start to clutter your inventory. And you get a lot of these materials. And you need a lot of these materials: 100 per refinement. 5 refinements per vision crystal.

So basically these three ingredients start clutter the inventory of all of your alts, so you have to cycle through all your alts to gather your ingredients together in order to start crafting. If you happen to be waiting for the market to stabilize before getting 500 in any crafting disciplines (coughmecough), then these just occupy inventory space and eat up bank space really quickly.

Would it have been too hard just to make it so refinements only required 10 dragonite ore, but only reward 3 or so from temples? 10 Bloodstone dust per brick, but only 1 or 2 per champion box? Right now, it feels like I’m being punished with shrinking bank space for not charging headlong into crafting (OW MY WALLET!).

I think you guys are underselling lifeblast when it is traited with unyielding blast and deathly perception.

On my zerker 30/0/10/0/30 build, I have a base crit chance of 49% after food buffs, and a crit damage of 252%. I’ll use this as a standard for crit mods.

The dagger does base 940 damage over 2 seconds, having a DPS of roughly 470. Life Blast does base 341, but 10% extra with axe or staff, so this comes to 375 over 1.5 seconds, or 250 base damage per second.

With deathly perception, LIfe blast has a 99% chance to crit. So, the appropriate crit mods for each of them is 1.745 for the dagger, and 2.504 for Life Blast. This comes up with an adjusted base damage of:

Dagger: 820.15
Life Blast: 626 (436.25 W/O deathly perception)

On any single target, Dagger will outdamage life blast. With piercing life blast from Unyielding Blast, if Life Blast were to hit more than 1 target, then Life Blast outdamages the dagger.

So life blast is definitely a viable form of offense. You just have to line up and hit multiple enemies with it.

PinkFluff.6084:

Zacchary.6183:

They did. Its its to make sure people don’t get 300% too fast.

Is there any proof of this just so we aren’t going off speculation?

None that I’ve seen.

Pretty sure you can see the stat combinations in the patch notes.

I don’t think the new buffs were meant to push beyond the cap as much as they were to make boon duration easier to get a hold of.

I cannot confirm or deny a change in loot chance…

However I do worry about something like this happening. There’s always that fear that, when Anet says they’ll give everyone up to 300% permanent global magic find, that in response to this they’ll cut loot drop rates to maintain balance in the economy.

Engineer.

The engineer has a lot of burning and bleeds, and can hybrid damage well due to how easily they can stack might. Grenades can do plenty of direct damage (for a ranged weapon) as well as condition damage, and many people will use that fact to the fullest. Teamwise, the engineer has spots of support and utility, from their fields (water, light, fire, poison, smoke), to their finishers (mostly blast finishers), to their ability to reflect projectiles, to their large access of to immobilize. Whether you want to heal, stack might, or stealth, the engineer probably has what you need. Defensively the engineer has access to permanent vigor, plenty of blocks, and an evade. They have some blind fields and blinding abilities, too.

Necromancer is second. Though necros can do more condition damage in AoE with epidemic, and also have more reliable AoE conditions in general, the necromancer suffers from several problems. For one, they lack active defense (blocks, evades, vigor), so should the enemies all focus on the necromancer they will crumble. Though the necro has statistical bulk with DS, that is only good for small encounters. Second, the necromancer doesn’t have nearly the utility, with their useful skills in their arsenal not being particularly stellar or unique.

Epidemic is strong, though. Don’t count necro out of the fight immediately.

Chaba.5410:

Why let the cat out of the bag so soon?

Stuff like this makes me paranoid that there is some global conspiracy by the players, and they just aren’t letting me in on the score.

1) +28 Condition Damage
2) +20% Might Duration
3) + 55 Condition Damage
4) +20% Might Duration
5) +100 Condition Damage
6) When you use a healing skill, gain 3 stacks of might for 10 seconds. (Cooldown: 10s)

No one has started a topic about these things. But, from a first glance, these runes seem like they’d be awesome for Condition based Grenadiers or Hybrids, or HGH builds in general.

The big advantage being that they give 40% might duration without having to sacrifice damage, and also give the 3 stacks of might on heal. While altruism gives boon duration in general, it also only gave out healing power for an attribute, which kind of sucks.

What do you guys think?

Lately, there’s a lot of zerging. But Sanctrum of Rall does quite a bit of WvW as well.

I did this once in another thread:

I’ll do some math on the subject.

Assumptions:
Full Berserker vs. Full Assassin (armor, trinkets, weapons, orbs on armor)
+300 power, precision, and +30% crit damage from traits (I.E. idealistic offensive setup that most people wouldn’t run)
Ignoring Fury and Might (class + build specific)
Ignoring stacking sigils
ignoring group composition (banners)
ignoring food (situation specific)
Exotic level gear

Full berserker stats:
2339 Power
1998 Precision (55% chance to crit)
+104% crit amage

Full assassin stats:
1998 Power
2339 Precision (71% crit rate)
104% crit damage

Effective Power = Power x (Crit rate x crit damage mod + (1 – crit rate))

Berserker EFP: 4320
Assassin EFP: 4183

Overall, berserker is about 3.3% better with the conditions I listed. This is a small enough margin that I cannot write off assassin as objectively inferior in every circumstance. Depending on build specifics, particularly things like fury uptime, stat allocation, and procs, assassin may very well be superior to berserker in some circumstances.

So overall, you’ll need some special circumstances to run assassin:
On my necro: won’t be using it. With Deathly Perception and Lich form I have near 100% crit rate anyway, so berserker is better.
On my thief and mesmer: Prec/Crit damage are both in the same tier, so I’m already maxed out on precision. Besides, their power builds lack in power, so berserker wins out.

On my engineer: This is where assassin would be good. Running 30/10/0/30/0, might stacking, and I could really use the precision more than the power.

I saw an engineer solo a tower once.

I’ve seen a sharp drop in community quality pretty much everywhere. In-game, and on the forums.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Ascended-gear-11-Exo-WAY-too-much/page/2#post2736538

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I’m surprised no one has done the math for ascended weapons.

I suppose my biggest concern over ascended is that, even though it is only a 5% increase, it is a 5% increase of everything. When you have the full ascended armor, weapons, and trinkets, you’ll have 5% more of everything than if you didn’t. So, looking at the damage formula:

Damage = Power x Weapon Attack x Coefficient / Armor x Crit mod

Coefficient and armor are constant, so we can ignore that. Now, lets say that we go with a berserker ascended set, and we get 5% more attack, 5% more power, 5% more precision, and 5% more crit damage. Now, lets look at how those stats will work.

Power would be 5% more from what armor and trinkets give. You already have 916 power to start, and a full set of exotic berserker gives 1003 Power. 5% of that is 50, so you can add this 50 power onto whatever build you want. I’m going to assume a full 30 points into a power line, just for example sake, as well as ruby orbs on the armor. So, overall power raises from 2339 to 2389, which is a 2.1% increase in damag.

Precision would get a further 35 precision, which is about 1.5% crit rate. I’m also going to assume 300 precision from traits, so a full build will have 1082 precision, or kitten .5% crit rate. Ascended raises that up to 57%.

Attack power is just a flat 5% increase.

Crit damage is a kittene, since it increases by more than 5%. Where exotic trinkets give a total of 36% crit damage, the ascended gives a total of 44%. This is a total increase of 22%, and the rest of the stats will likely follow suit. So, while full exotic gives 62% crit damage, ascended will give 76% crit damage, or 14% extra. Assuming ruby orbs an at least 100 trait points, this will mean a total increase from 84 to 96. Since crit damage starts out at 150, this comes to a total increase of about 5%.

So, looking at that damage formula again:

Damage = 1.021 Power x 1.05 weapon attack x constant stuff x crit mod

old crit mod:

55% x 2.34 + 45% = 1.737

New crit mod:
57% x 2.46 + 43% = 1.832

Crit mod’s total increase is 5.5%

In the end, we have 1.02 × 1.05 × 1.055 =1.1299 = 13% increase in damage.

Note, this number can change depending on what build you use, but for now I just went with a fairly generic berserker skeleton.

Add this on top of the fact that you’ll also have 5% more armor, so you’ll take anywhere from 2.5% less damage to 2.8% less damage. When fighting another player in full ascended while you have full exotics, he hits you 13% harder, and you hit him for 2.5% less, given generic builds.

Considering that attacks hit upwards to 8k or so, that 13% is an extra 1040 damage, while you’ll instead hit for 7800. That comes to a total difference of 15.9% total effectiveness between the two of you. That is a little too high of a statistical difference for me to be comfortable.

So overall, when comparing ascended to exotic, bear in mind that the cumulative effect is much higher than advertised. You can do the math with different numbers if you so choose, but remember that the less that is invested there, the more ascended makes a difference.

NOTE: for just the weapon, it is a 5% increase in damage with additional 5% stat bonuses from the weapon.

I expect a certain evolution to take place:

Immediate launch: dungeon performance across the board falls. Believe it or not, GW2LFG has a certain player base, and the LFG tool will open up everyone to dungeon runs.

Within 1 day: community split. With larger playerbase, the “experienced” only groups will become frequent, and more intolerant of other players. The inexperienced or generally “not as good” players will group together themselves.

Within 1 week: player performance will have split so far that the “experienced” groups become hyper specialized, expecting random pugs to be equal to premade and predetermined roles in efficiency, and failing when this doesn’t happen. The less skilled will grow much more slowly in skill, but nonetheless they will grow in skill.

Within 2 months: the inexperienced players will have grown in skill enough that the average PUG group will be quite satisfactory in performance by the average player’s standards. There will still be groups that are hyperspecialized to ineptitude with regular players, or groups so “casual” that they refuse to improve their own performance even the slightest, but for the most part there won’t be a problem.

Unless I’ve missed something, the overall outlook will be good. The immediate outlook, however, will be filled with failure.

Do I really need to show a video of orr events? Just go to the final phase of the grenth event, where all of the enemies pack tightly together, for the easiest and best example of coated bullets laying waste to enemies.

EDIT:

Here’s an example. It’s not peak conditions, since the golems don’t bunch up, but this is what it looks like. Only with more numbers:

I have to stop playing grenadier regularly to preserve the tendons in my wrists.

That should tell you something.

Here’s mine. Was going for a mix of overly gothic but cheery child and half forest nymph.

I don’t own the power skins I want yet, but here’s a preview of that, too (when I get to editing)

Dirame.8521:

Secondly, my question to Anet is; “How am I supposed to use this trait with a pistol?”

Coated bullets. With coated bullets, you can hit up to 5 enemies 5 times, resulting in 25 hits with every auto attack, which amounts to quite a bit of power damage. Only hard part is getting condis on all of them.