Guild Wars 2

Specific circumstances aside, a few rules of thumb to go by in MMOs are these:

A player who thinks they are good are not always good.
A player who says they are good are not always good.
A player be OCPD over stuff in game while being hypocritical.
A player can be OCPD over stuff in the game while being wrong about it.

The hardest part about power necros is the lack of cleave. Although life blast can hit up to 5 targets, getting them all in a line is really hard to do. You’ll only end up hitting 2 if lucky, while every other melee clakittens 3 enemies reliably. Although in the right circumstances, life blast can lay waste to very closely bunched enemies.

So the thing power necro really has going for it is that they have good mid-range DPS. They’ve got a bit of cleanse, a rez, a bit of boon removal, some weakness, nothing special. If a dungeon group wants a jack of all trades, they’ll go with an Elementalist or an Engineer, because those two classes can do more, do it better, and also hit harder with AoEs.

Going to do some math on this one.

Take the 30/20/0/0/20 build we see lately. The base stats for this build are, assuming undead runes, master tuning crystal, koi cakes, and max sigil of corruption

Power: 1216
Crit Rate: 13% (23% scaled fury uptime with furious demise, peak conditions)
Crit damage: 20% (1.7)
Armor: 1886 (966 toughness)
HP: 18,376 (916 Vit)
Malice: 1523+ 48.3 + 57.96 +36.64 = 1596

I listed the buffs from undead runes and the master tuning crystal separate. Looking at the different stat allotments, we’ll get

Rabid:
Power: 1216
Crit Rate: 46% (56% with furious demise, scaled for uptime)
Crit damage: 20% (1.7)
Armor: 2584 (1664 toughness)
HP: 18,376 (916 Vit)
Malice: 1523 + 83.2 + 99.84 +36.64 = 1743

Effective Power: 1693
Effective HP: 25,856
Barbed Precision: 0.74 additional bleed ticks per hit, base duration
Bleed damage: 129 per tick

Carrion:
Power: 1914
Crit Rate: 13% (23% scaled fury uptime with furious demise)
Crit damage: 20% (1.7)
Armor: 1886 (966 toughness)
HP: 25,356 (1614 Vit)
Malice: 1523 + 48.3 + 57.96 + 64.56 = 1694

Effective Power: 2222
Effective HP: 26,040
Barbed Precision: 0.30 bleeds per hit
Bleed damage: 127 per tick

Dire:
Power: 1216
Crit Rate: 13% (23% scaled fury uptime with furious demise, peak conditions)
Crit damage: 20% (1.7)
Armor: 2584 (1664 toughness)
HP: 25,356 (1614 Vit)
Malice: 1523 + 83.2 + 99.84 +64.56 = 1771

Effective Power: 1412
Effective HP: 35,668
Barbed Precision: 0.30 bleeds per hit
Bleed damage: 131 per tick

Dire vs. Rabid:

Dire has about 37.9% higher effective HP, making it extremely tanky in comparison. Dire does 2 more damage per tick with bleeding, making the tick damage from dire only 1.6% greater than rabid. For this, it sacrifices 20% off from direct damage, and also loses out on Sigil of Earth + 0.34 bleed ticks (base duration) every attack. Those ticks from barbed precision more than compensate the tick loss, since the amount to 7% off of scepter auto attack, 1.6% off of grasping dead, 1.7% off of enfeebling blood, and additional bleed ticks added to every non-bleeding attack (such as life transfer, which equates to 3.06 bleeds in itself). Sigil of Earth has a cooldown, so it is a pain in the rear to calculate, but it is fairly safe to assume that the sigil will be firing off much more frequently, and thus contributing more, with rabid.

This means that rabid does more damage than dire. Of course, using furious demise in such a way is difficult, since one can’t always pop into DS every 10 seconds. Overall, I’d rank dire as superior to rabid for condition builds.

Dire vs. Carrion:

Dire has 37% more EHP than carrion. Carrion has 57% higher effective power. Dire has 3.1% more bleed damage than carrion, and carrion has no additional bleeding mechanics to account for this.

Overall… it is more difficult here. The biggest advantage to carrion is the extra direct damage it brings. Condition damage can be highly polarizing, after all, wherein if someone has enough cleanses you are fully neutralized. When rending curse hits, on average against base armor, for 148 more damage per attack on carrion, life blast hits for 425 more per attack, feast of corruption hits for 611 more, necrotic grasp for 308 more, putrid mark for 557 more, which is better becomes muddied. It becomes every muddy-er when you factor in that carrion can use tactics that dire can’t, like wells and non-condition weapons.

So jury is out on that one. I’ll probably be sticking with my carrion set (with bits of rampager mixed in), largely because I like the fact that, on my personal build, life blast hits harder than the scepter auto attack at 100% duration.

Full berserker. My current power necro build has full berserker armor, weapons, and trinkets with ruby orbs. Trait set is 30/0/10/0/30.

The important trait to get is Deathly Perception, which gives 50% crit rate while in death shroud. Then, with 104% crit damage, 90% chance to crit while in death shroud, you can hit easily hit for 6k+ with your attacks. You can boost it up higher using an axe with Axe Training, wielding a staff*, using Blood is power for 10 stacks of might, and probably something else I haven’t thought of or mentioned.

The good news is, with the new DS damage reduction buff and all of the increases in Life Force gain Necromancer’s received as of late, the necromancer is now innately more tanky than ever. Even in berserker gear you still have 18.4K HP at base, and a further 28.7K HP with a full LF bar for a total of about 47k HP or so. That isn’t factoring degen, though.

*Note: I have not personally tested the DPS increase from staff.

The reason why you see two sides to the story is because there is more than one way to play a condi grenadier.

If you are talking about the carrion set, then you are probably referring to me. I should probably clear this up immediately: I don’t run a condi grenadier. I run a hybrid grenadier. For the hybrid, the extra power that comes from the carrion set is more valuable than the precision that comes from the rabid set. Recently I’ve converted my trinkets to rampager, but before then I had rabid w/ chrysocola jewels, getting a good mixture of power, precision, and malice all the same.

It is hard to answer your questions because it really comes down to build specifics. There are many things to consider:

A) Your source of burning. Many grenadier builds will use Incendiary Powder as their primary source of burning. Missing out on shrapnel, they need to go with Sharpshooter for their bleeding damage, and sharpshooter needs precision. However, with steady sources of burning from something like the bomb kit, the off-hand pistol, or the rocket turret, then incendiary powder becomes redundant, and dependency on sharpshooter lowers. Sharpshooter, of course, is inferior to shrapnel by a large margin; even at 100% crit rate, sharpshooter only gives around 0.9 bleed ticks per hit at base duration, whereas shrapnel gives 1.8 bleed ticks per hit regardless of build.

B) This is a compromise on offense or defense. Many will use the shield off hand, getting several notable defensive abilities, and lose the burning from this. Since the burn is more important than the bleed, they’ll go with incendiary powder. But offensive builds can get the off-hand burn, along with shrapnel, but lose the utilities that the shield gives. In this case, picking rabid or carrion is about whether you want an offensive or defensive build.

C)Fury uptime. HGH builds will often run with Elixir B and Hidden Flask, and sometimes with the Med Kit, so those builds will have an extremely high fury uptime, and often this fury can pus the crit rate high enough to plow through whatever ails you. On a carrion set this is quite the large boon to offense, but on a rabid set the presence of fury is meh; you don’t hit that much harder at all, and the procs from sharpshooter aren’t worth much anyway. To make good use of incendiary powder, a 24% crit rate is all you need, since you’ll be launching 3 attacks per second, so 4 out of 5 times you’ll proc incendiary powder within 2 barrages.

Confused yet? So is everyone else. Hence, why no one can really agree on the best way to run a grenadier. So, to answer your questions the best I can:

1)Carrion is more powerful if you have either high fury uptime or alternate sources of burning from incendiary powder. If you have neither, rabid is your way to go.

2)This is more complicated. In general, in might stacking builds it is best to stack might. Especially if you are forgoing Enhance Performance for Short Fuse. Grenadier builds can get 70% condition uptime easily with a rare veggie pizza, and two giver’s weapons boost that to 90%. Then, you can increase either bleed or burn duration with a single sigil to 100% (reserving one spot for Sigil of Battle), so you can have your rune set free to use whatever you want. Remember: more might means more power and more condition damage.

3)That looks a lot like my sPVP build. The precision vs. carrion debate here depends on the weapon. In sPVP I use the rifle, so the carrion amulet (rampager jewel) is much more fitting. However, with the pistol/shield, you’ll be relying more heavily on sharpshooter procs, so rabid is more valuable here.

4)Berserker grenadier is arguably the highest DPS at range in the game, in competition with rampager grenadier. Grenades, with grenadier trait, have a base damage of 321 that hits up to 5 targets at 1500 range. No other range skill comes close to that. The grenades also stack vulnerability really well, which improves direct damage done by everyone. Might stacking builds can get up to 875 additional condition damage from scratch, so the grenades will do even more damage with their bleeding.

I myself have a full berserker set as well as my hybrid set. Biggest advantage is that the berserker set doesn’t become redundant as soon as another condi set is around.

My engineer is my #1 fractal guy (or girl), and the biggest use of engineers in fractals are that they can do everything. I’ve used my engi in fractal level 28.

What I mean by this is that I switch out my weapons, utilities, and specific trait abilities depending on what is needed. In general, my build is this:

30/10/0/30/0, Carrion + Berserker + rampager equipment, P/P with grenade kit, Elixir B, Elixir U, supply crate. Rare veggie pizza + tuning crystal.

The equipment is kind of a hodgepodge at the moment, but basically it is a might stacking grenadier hybrid. The damage output is pretty good, maintaining 20 stacks of might and getting around 2800 power and 1500 malice while doing so, so all of the burns and bleeds and confusion goes well with the direct damage. But the important thing to know is that I rarely ever stick with those specific traits and utilities:

Against the Fire shaman (first stage), I use the net turret to immobilize enemies. Second stage, I switch to shield off-hand, healing turret, Elixir R, Elixir U, Grenade kit and change to the perma-vigor setup to maximize dodges, heal and cleanse others nearby with blast finishers, raise the downed at a distance, rez the dead with the healing turret constantly cleansing and healing me without interrupting the rez, put down projectile stopping and burst damage for lava elementals, as well as block anything that comes my way.

At the cliffside, I switch to elixir gun, bomb kit, healing turret, and elixir R with off-hand shield. The elixir gun, healing turret, as well as the multiple blast finishers heal the group while cleansing them frequently (important for the second seal), and the bomb kit provides AoE blind, damage, and might stacking for the group whenever it is needed.

In uncategorized I switch to the shield again while using tool kit, elixir U, grenade kit, and med kit. Then, I can run up and reflect + block all of their projectiles while outputting a large amount of damage against any one target, all while getting swiftness still.

Most other changes aren’t that big. Stun breakers + cleanse for the swamp, net turret on mossman to lock him in place. Elixir X in underwater fractal to just tank the enemy spawn (grenade kit is awesome down there). Tool kit + Elixir S + Elixir U + Shield for dredge fractal to stay alive on switches, but then alt to full berserker + rifle against the final boss along with net turret instead of Elixir U to lock the boss under fire. Don’t do anything special for frozen, urban battleground, or solid ocean.

Basically, anything other than specific encounters I default back to my basic build. But you get the idea: always has the tools to do what is needed, when it is needed. It’s like we’re guardians, but with better ranged options, more control, and a boatload of condi damage. While I’ve done some low level fractals on my necro and my thief, with those two there always seems to be a point I can sit back and say “they bring nothing valuable to this encounter”. Like the dredge fractal: what is a condi necro supposed to do there? What good is the thief in the underwater fractal? What is the power necro to do in uncategorized? I honestly can’t pick out a moment in those where my other classes bring something worthwhile other than merely existing and doing generic damage.

But that is never the case for the engineer.

It is too outlandish to be false.

Dolan.3071:

^ it’d still be a better reward:time ratio to skip all the trash.

That is a prototype number, and isn’t set in stone.

Bright.9160:

Good idea Blood, and you know what would happen? We would find out the most optimal reward:time ratio in the sense of ’let’s find out which amount of trash we can kill in a timely fashion in order to get the most optimal reward out of it’.

You’re talking to the people that will always, no matter what, be the best and the fastest at doing dungeons. Even if trash would be unskippable, we would probably still do it faster than all other people in the game.

Killing mobs fast really isn’t an issue.

EDIT: Apparently the censor will strewn “kitten” across quotations and multiple lines.

Thief is actually on of the few classes I think dire will work on, simply because there are no condi procs to lose. Though losing out on the raw power carrion gives will be missed.

I"m durable enough using carrion. So durable, in fact, that I’ve switched out some of my carrion gear to rampager just to get my crit rate up.

Dire stats might be useful in PVP and WvW, but for now carrion/rampager mix in a 30/10/0/30/0 is enough for me.

I’m hoping that the magic find either gets converted to boon duration or something like that. But, knowing anet, they’ll just get rid of it and pretend that celestial wasn’t nerfed in some way.

Nearly every profession can be offensive or defensive depending on how you build them.

In general, guardians are a good mix of blocks, protection, healing, and raw damage.

It would probably be easier just to scale the end reward depending on how much you did. Something like 70% for just completing the dungeon, an additional 50% for killing everything along the way (proportional to how much you killed). Yes, I know that comes to 120%. Buff dungeon rewards, yo!

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.

EDIT:

Player Character.9467:

Too sleepy to actually write out the math, but at first glance how could the benefit of running zerker instead be lower when you’re expecting higher uptime on critchance buffs which would lower the value of additional precision?

Might. 25 stacks of might gives 875 power, while fury gives roughly 420 precision. Referring to my numbers full bersker only gives 341 additional power. At base this is a 17% increase in power. At full might, this is much smaller; a 12% difference.

Epistemic.8013:

The stat difference is as advertised, but you’re right that stat synergy makes the increase in damage higher. Zerkers in particular has great stat synergy. This isn’t unique to Ascended pieces, though. Go from Rare to Exotic and you see the same thing.

My main concern with Ascended is in WvW. The only place treadmilling will happen is there, and stat increases like this can sometimes have unintended consequences. For example, I’m wondering if damage output will outpace mitigation, and if it does will it have any significant impact on WvW.

The debate is that ascended is way too expensive and hard to get, whereas exotics are something that can be obtained relatively easily.

The contrast is that defensive sets will become more defensive, too. Soldier’s gear will have 5% more vitality, 5% more toughness, and also 5% more armor, and those will all cooperate with each other.

The radius is unknown, but it is pretty small. I would put the radius at a little larger than old mark size, so maybe 140 around while using the heal or so.

I’ve found the runes to be worth the investment myself. Probably the biggest advantage that tormenting has over perplexity is that the torment heal is an AoE, and can hit up to 5 enemies with 2 stacks of torment. When piling or in a swarm, this can accumulate into a lot of damage.

In PVP it doesn’t hit nearly as many people, but the equivalent 3 long duration bleeds does at up over time.

Another advantage to a conditionmancer is that torment is a fairly unique condition. Whereas bleeding, poison, and burn are quickly overwritten in a zerg, the torment you inflict stands alone, giving conditionmancers a unique offense and thus better way to contribute in a zerg. No class really has access to “good” torment, but necromancers are the best at it, due to the very large AoE attack they get that is independent of builds, as well as Epidemic, which they can use to multiply and spread around even more torment.

The duration increase is nice, making it so both the torment on heal and tainted shackles lasts for 20 seconds quite easily. It doesn’t seem like much against a single target, but in an AoE the contribution can be quite large. The runes themselves give about 5 ticks of torment to Tainted Shackles, which inflicts 3 stacks on 5 different targets, so overall that becomes 75 additional ticks. The heal will give about 15 ticks of torment, which does 2 stacks on 5 targets, so that becomes up to 150 additional tick from the heal as well. This gives probably the biggest bonus, so you will end up using your heal as an offense.

When building, you’ll still want to get as much bleed duration as possible, though, and this is where those runes can be a bit of a sacrifice. I’ve managed to get 100% torment + 100% bleed myself, although it does restrict my builds by quite a bit. All in all, the majority of necromancer damage still comes from bleeding, so unless you are running at least a 30/10/x/x/x build with hemophilia, I’d suggest using something else other than tormenting runes.

This might be awesome for WvW, but for the most part I’m tanky enough with a carrion + rampager mix. I’m not sure I’ll be alting anytime soon.

I never saw IP as overpowered on an engineer largely because the engineer has so many other sources of burning that IP can become redundant.

I main the turret engineer myself, and the rocket turret is capable of sustaining a near permanent burn on multiple opponents. The flame turret from the supply crate accomplishes this as well. Put them together and any opponent is nearly overloaded with quickly reapplied burns, so cleanse is of little effect.

There’s always the blowtorch and the fire bomb for additional high duration burning. Although I haven’t been in high end PVP like Ostricheggs is, so those alternate options might be so vastly inferior to the shield that they aren’t worth it.

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.

Support and control aren’t tied to the gear. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is up for debate. But the good news is, nearly everything in the support and control genre increases DPS, either directly or indirectly.

I suppose the OP is lacking context. The discussion in dungeons is whether dungeon mobs are mean to be fought or skipped, and not about specific personal story missions.

Anet is trying to get the best of both worlds, however are having trouble doing so. They’ve mentioned before that they want to increase the rewards that regular mobs give along the way, but haven’t yet for fear that they’ll overbuff regular mobs too much. That’ll lead to people just doing the beginning of the dungeon, and not ever finishing.

It is clear that when they are trying to give more incentives to fight mobs, that they aren’t perfectly content with the way people are doing things. However, they won’t resort to just locking everything behind doors, because that will just drive people away from dungeons.

I don’t mind the downed state.

The downed state, as I’ve always seen it, is an extra threshold that was added to increase the overall damage that players could inflict on each other, as a means of making burst and pinch plays meaningful. If DPS is too low, then burst has no place. If DPS is too high, then burst is king. In order to make meaningful burst without making it king, they invented the down state. This allows you to get downed via burst, but not completely defeated or neutralized. Then, either through your own actions or the actions of your team, you can recover and continue in the fight.

It also gives every class a viable method of healing without occupying their stats or slots to heal. In this sense, the down state is successful.

By contrast, if players wanted to remove the downed state, then they would have to adjust DPS to be much lower than it is now, but then make toughness and healing power less effective, and then give players a whole lot of HP so they can’t die too quickly. All of the fights would become big ole’ bag o’ HP fights, and burst wouldn’t be nearly as meaningful.

They are not scaled evenly.

The +40% condition duration is a geometric buff in that it multiplies the condition damage you have, increasing overall damage and DPS threshold by 40% of the original duration. The 70 condition damage just adds, like, 3 points more per bleed or so.

100 power + 10% crit damage is a more static buff. The 100 power just goes on top of whatever power you already have, so with 2k power it is only a 5% increase. The crit damage is a bit different, since it also multiplies by damage. To find that out, we’d have to take:

Power increase% x (Crit rate x crit damage increase % + (1-crit rate))

That is, how frequent it is that you’ll crit and hit for more times the power increase % that it also goes off of. A crit damage of 70 means you’re hitting for 220% on crits, and the food will only raise that to 230%, or a 4.5% increase on critical hits. So, in total, that will be

1.05 x (0.5 × 1.045 + 0.5) = 1.076

or a 7.6% increase in offensive power, total. So Sweet and Spicy Butternut Squash Soup ain’t got nothin’ on Rare Veggie Pizza. Armor wouldn’t really factor in to this, unless you wanted the exact number boosts that each would give (I.e. is 7.6% direct damage increase equal to 40% condition duration?), but that would require specific builds and stuff.

Likewise, the lemongrass soup is much more potent than… I can’t find the food that has 100 toughness and 70 vitality. But, if you want to know how much of a change that makes, then you need to compare them to your original armor and HP.

Armor divides direct damage, so it works with similar proportions that I used with powrr: 100 more armor means a 2.9/2.8 = 3.6% more reduction from armor. Although this is a bit deceptive, since when armor is dividing damage you ultimately have to inverse it (1 / reduction), so going off of a light armor class, that is only a 2.3% reduction in actual damage.

Vitality is pretty flat: just add 700 HP, then divide it by what you had before. So if you had, like, 15000 health, you would take 15700 and divide it by 15000 to get 4.7% more HP.

To find the total boost in durability, you’d take that 2.3% reduction in damage and multiply it with that 4.7% increase in HP like so:

1.023 × 1.047 = 1.071

or a 7.1% total increase in durability (against direct damage).

I’ve been getting it in PVE as well.

You’ll have to be patient with them, Genavelle. They’re all still reeling after my last anti-skipping assault.

Anyway, I myself detest the skipping and exploitation norm for more reasons than just skipping. I find very frequently that it is counter-intuitive. I was in a TA run earlier today where everyone spent 5 minutes waiting in a corner while trying to get someone to skip ahead, and failing over and over again. The whole time, the dungeon former was like “WHO AGGROED THEM!” and “If you lag, just do everyone a favor and quit”, and “OMG Lol srsly?” and what was probably the most annoying is that eventually the former kicked that one player who kept getting stuck behind. And it wasn’t because that player kept getting stuck. No, the reason he was kicked was because he was shooting the nightmare blossoms ahead, and the group former wanted to be the sole person who cleared the flowers, and the other guy didn’t trust him on that. This was all after the whole team managed to wipe at the nightmare vines, with the former giving these strange commands that didn’t make sense.

Standing around while listening to biting commentary from someone with a short temper is not my idea of fun. I don’t know who would find it fun. This whole time, I kept thinking “We could’ve killed all those guys twice by now, lag be darned.”

It is a very strange phenomena when people play a game to not have fun. The dungeons being monotonous and repetitive is a valid complaint, but those who find dungeons boring but keep running dungeons lose that validity. I myself got bored of sPVP after awhile. Know what happened next? I went and did something else.

It all comes down to operant conditioning by B.F. Skinner. GW2 does have some of the same mechanics that many of the more skinner-box like games have, like the flash and jingle while leveling up, randomized loot with rare chances of being valuable, time gated daily content to keep players returning for fear of missing out rewards, and so on. But not as many as other games have. But I do have a bit of a theory, though: many of us have played a skinner like game in the past, and that shaping carries over with us. Can’t remember the term for it, though…

I wouldn’t call everything you mentioned an exploit, though. Doing things like stacking and pulling around a corner, or fighting atop stairs, that’s strategy 101. Stacking maximizes the benefit of AoE abilities, that have a limited range. Pulling around the corner is run-of-the-mill bottlenecking, where you expose enemies to bursts of damage in succession in a place where they all aren’t capable of defending themselves. The high ground has camera and AoE advantages.

Its kind of hard to say. I die an average amount of times I guess.

I don’t think too much of it. Crap happens. To me. A lot. That’s been my motto in life for awhile now. But lately with the skill latency in the game being worse than before, I’m dying more often now than ever.

When running around in zerker gear, you expect that dodge or that block to work right when you need it. So when I press a button and nothing happens… I kiss pavement.

I switch my gear around a lot on my toons. I alternate from zerker gear to condi gear, and stuff like that.

You won’t believe how many times I forget to swap the trinkets or the armor or something like that when changing builds. I"ll be all like “Hey.. .shouldn’t I be doing more damage than this?” only to find out I’m still wearing rabid tirnkets.

I think the reason no one is responding is because no one knows.

I don’t even know if there’s a way to do it myself. There probably isn’t…

The big thing everyone is forgetting when comparing conditions to power is that conditions don’t have a pure DPS attribute set. Direct damage has a pure DPS set in Berserker, and Hybrid has a pure DPS set in Rampager, but condis get no equivalent. Because of this, conditions will ultimately always do less damage than a berserker and hybrid builds.

The more accurate comparison is between things like Knights, Valkyrie, Cavalier, and other sets that offer offensive and defensive stats. In this tier of equipment, we’ll find that condition damage is quite good for what you get to use it: enough defense to actually matter, an offense that goes right through enemy armor/protection/weakness, an access to very wide AoE damage, and in the necromancer’s case the ability to multiply other people’s conditions, except with your own malice.

So, if you want to compare berserker/rampager to other condition sets, you’ll have to bring up the durability increase that condi amulets bring. One of the reasons why used a condi set on my thief for so long is because the vitality from carrion meant that I wasn’t one-shot anymore. Survivability only indirectly contributes to DPS, but given that many players can’t do things in pure DPS gear, I wouldn’t force them to put something on that will only get them killed.

Though I do think people undersell the strength of hybrid sets.

The ratio for whichever stat is best is determined by:

Power > 2100 / (0.5 + Critdmg) – 832 + Precision

Which was found out in another thread using calculus:

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

Basically the higher your crit damage, the more important precision is. Although the game doesn’t have nearly enough freedom to take advantage of such a ratio.

TheMaskedParadigm.3629:

You guys never thought that there would be a two-handed infusion slot and a one-handed infusion slot? One giving like 10AR and the other giving 5AR?

Considering how they handled giver’s weapons and sigils, infusions seems like another one of those things where they’ll just put 1 on everything and pretend there isn’t an imbalance there.

I have an idea:

On MF gear, they should replace magic find with either boon duration or condition duration. Hopefully something more substantial than giver’s “whole set only gives 17%” thing they did earlier.

Well, my theory just got shot to shreds…

There is no group depth with tank/heal/DPS. You either have what you need, or you don’t.

Anyway, the control – support – DPS trio does exist in GW2. The big misconception is that the role you play is based on your gear. Not so: your role is actually based more on your traits and utilities. You can stack boons, heal other party members, and disable enemies all while wearing berserker gear. A lot of people say “its all DPS” but they still bring a mesmer with them to dungeons. The mesmer’s role is various support and control abilities that running 4 warriors does not have.

The complaint people really have isn’t really the lack of roles, but the lack of viable stat distributions.

The stat and role system is fairly free form in this sense, and there are advantages to such a freeform system. You can go with a durable controller, a DPS buffer, or a healing spec if you want. This can work nicely if done well.

Problem: it isn’t done well. With various stat distributions, there are multiple stats that do not show up in the vast majority of equipment loadouts:

A)Condition duration (expertise)
B)Boon Duration (concentration)
C)Stun duration (no specific name)

All 3 of these are central to controlling and/or support builds. You will notice, however, that basic stat distributions with these are strangely absent. Instead, the only support stat we get is healing power, and it is pretty bad as far as stats go. But rather, these things are accomplished through holiday weapons, specific rune set bonuses, and content that is being ever so slowly released in the game.

It should never have been like this. If anet wanted an effective way to spec for control or support, then they should’ve given stat distributions specifically made for control and support.

Part A for the solution is simple: implement stat distributions that grant these things. Stuff like

Expertise/Malice/ Compassion
Precision/Concentration/ Power
Power/Expertise/Toughness
Malice/Expertise/Precision

or whatever. That way, you can get builds that contribute in new an interesting ways, instead of just rolling with full DPS and resorting to other things to support and control.

Part B is to improve PVE enemy tactics, but people have already commented on that one.

Fights that are 100% predictable are boring. Minor RNG elements are added frequently to make the fight unpredictable on a level that less skilled players can occasionally get win.

It isn’t a decision as much as it is a design flaw. It’s the same reason why two-handed weapons don’t have two sigil slots.

Of course, they could also make ascended gear without infusion slots. In that case, they’ll just be mildly superior.

With HGH builds, you’ll want either more might or might duration. More might = more malice, so generally they are superior to condition runes.

There’s a few ways I’ve seen it done, and there’s a lot of variety because there isn’t a “right” way to do it. For a low maintenance might build, some people do this:

x4 superior runes of altruism, x2 might duration increasing runes
20/x/x/30/x/x
Sigil of Superior Battle

Require utility: Med kit
Required Trait: Enhance Performance

Sigil of Battle, Enhance Performance, and Runes of Altruism all proc at the same time whenever you flip to the med kit. This comes to 9 stacks of might on a single skill. They all have varying durations, but with 65% might duration you’ll get the following:

Altruism: 16.5 seconds
Sigil of Battle: 33 seconds
Enhance Performance: 24.75 seconds

So you’ll get anywhere from 18 to max stacks of might, but it’ll take 20 seconds of combat to get there. Things become a bit complicated from there, since Altruism has a 15 second cooldown instead of 10, and the Sigil only works while in combat. But you can spam the med kit outside of battle to get 15 or so stacks of might out of combat, which is really good when WvW roaming. Probably the biggest advantage to this is that there is no build dedication beyond what I listed above, an even then the 30 points in Alchemy aren’t necessary. So, you can run elixirs, kits, gadgets, turrets, whatever your heart desires.

There are a couple of other builds that use Juggernaut to get might. They usually go with the above sigil and runes, but instead have 20 in Firearms to get Juggernaut. With 65% duration this amounts to 8 stacks of might by just sitting in the Flamthrower. At 35% duration this is 6 stacks of might. This can be used in supplement with everything, whether using HGH or enhance Performance, or both.

In my personal build, I just use x6 runes of strength, along with Enhance Performance and HGH and Sigil of Battle, with Elixir H, Grenade Kit, Elixir B, then some other elixir. I only hit 20 stacks of might in general, however I have higher starting power and an additional 5% increase in damage with all of that might. The additional 140 power is equivalent to 4 stacks, so to scale sit around at 24 stacks of might in regards to power. If the 5% worked (I still hear it is bugged), this comes to a full 25, but it gives me room for 5 more actual stacks of might.

I’m also running a mix of mostly carrion, with rabid and rampager thrown in, so what I do might not be applicable to your case. So yeah… no one way to do it.

EDIT: Oh yeah, the change. More boon hate was introduced, so in sPVP a lot of people who stack might just find a thief has stolen it. In the interest of having as much utility as possible, people are running might stacking builds with as few elixirs as possible, since most of our utility is in kits.

Burning has a fairly hard cap on effectiveness. Since it only stacks in duration, it’s a very flat DPS increase: either it is there or it isn’t. Multiple burners don’t do more damage than a single burner. It is balanced in the sense that it is redundant, and can’t truly “overpower” another team by having a crapload of burners.

Hard part is, every class but thief has burn, and every class but thief and necro does burning well. Engineer’s are regarded as near the peak, but the fact is nearly very class can have permanent burning, from mesmers to warriors. Cumulative contribution suffers when two of them come together.

I’ve been having non-response skills, too. Kit switching on my engineer is now utterly maddening.

I do hate the whole “hidden updates” thing they do, where they don’t list changes to some things that are important.

Races are mostly cosmetic, but the stories have a certain flavor. IMO, Asura and Charr beginning storylines are the more interesting ones.

As for profession, it is really about how you want to play. If you’d like to be on the frontlines and in your opponents face, then Guardian, Warrior, and Necromancer are good choices. If you want to be evasive and tricky, then Thieves, Mesmers, and Elementalists are for you. If you want to sit back and shoot things, then the ranger is for you. If you want a strange bag of tricks, then the engineer is for you.

As far as “ease” goes, the classes from easiest to hardest to play are roughly

Warrior
Ranger
Guardian
Necromancer
Mesmer
Thief
Engineer
Elementalist

I remember hearing about how items in the game can’t have more than one equipment slot, so ascended gear won’t have customize-able stats beyond +5 from infusions. Exotics will still be able to take orbs and runes from whatever, so ascended gear won’t totally be superior to an exotic set.

They might make tokens necessary for crafting ascended gear, too. Tokens are already psuedo-time gated.

No problem. Ascended will only give you, like, 5% higher stats in total, and that is likely at the sacrifice of using rune sets due to infusion slot limits.

haviz.1340:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Due to the polarizing nature of the encounter, anything with high power is “best” for the boss. So

Berserker
Valkyrie
Soldiers

What about condies?

Condi’s are only good if you can burst them on really quickly, and can strike the tree multiple times like melee cleave can. I’m not sure condis can do that, though, and without crit procs most dedicated condi builds just fall flat. So I wouldn’t attempt it on anything but an engineer running bomb kit and/or, grenade kit, and elixir U for burst and projectile stopping. Then you can use the bomb kit’s fire field to stack might for everyone.

Traits being all over the place seems to be par for the course, actually, regardless of class.

The big advantage necros have is that our condi builds have 2 or so condition transfers, so at bare minimum we can match whatever the opponent throws at us while neutralizing their damage at the same time. I play a hybrid engineer quite often, and I have to be careful when fighting an opposing condi necro, because I have had long duration burning and all my bleeds thrown back in my face more than enough times to learn my lesson.

That said, I do like how a condi mesmers plays. They have little burst, but the main advantage is that they apply conditions so rapidly that they just power right through cleanse.

A big appeal of turrets is that they don’t move. You leave them somewhere, and then they do all the stuff they need to on their own while you’re having a kittentail.

Due to the polarizing nature of the encounter, anything with high power is “best” for the boss. So

Berserker
Valkyrie
Soldiers

Mesket.5728:

The only bonus event in AC is the Troll.

There is actually another bonus event in that dungeon, although I never hear anyone talk about it. After the path is chosen, at the bottom of the spiral staircase you can head backward instead of through the door to the spiders. At the base of the staircase is a torch that, if interacted with, will spawn an additional event where ghosts ambush you.

All the key mashing I’m doing to play the engi is causing my laptop’s keyboard to break. Because of that, the keys E, D, and G now only work half the time.

It is maddening to to type with.