Guild Wars 2

Th speargun needs a buff. You can use the speargun at the moment, but you use it more like a kit than anything else.

Skills #2-5 are alright. Scatter Mines has high AoE damage and short recharge, Retreating grapple puts distance, timed charge is fast and also does decent damage, and net wall is good mobility denial. Essentially it is like most kits: You pop in to use the appropriate skill, and then pop out to your main offense.

In most builds I make, I have an alternate kit for primary offense. Grenades, Elixir Gun, Bomb kit, usually one of those. The biggest problem with speargun 1 is that it is so slow, and does less damage than the rifle. If anything, it should only have a 0.75 second delay on attacks instead of a 1 second delay.

Initial premises being wrong, I’ve found that a static discharge build is good for farming. 20/30/0/0/20, in pure berserker gear with the rifle. The bouncing lightning from static discharge is good for tagging, and can also maintain a decent offense.

It is kind of hard to judge as a whole, since different classes are good at different things. Ambushing, soloing, small skirmishes, defense, assaults, GvG, and zerging are all different beasts in nature, so analyzing which class would be best for all of them is difficult.

Anyway, were I to come up with a ranking system “as a whole”, I would put it at the following:

#1: Guardian. Makes a strong frontline, great group support, can solo anything that attacks him, good mobility and decent chase. Weakness include a lack of ranged weaponry and distanced AoE, so they aren’t good at defending or too massive of a zerg.

#2: Elementalist. They have high mobility, great support skills, good water fields for healing, a ton of AoE damage, good field control, good range. Problem is they have incredibly low survivability, so they are weak to ambushes, and when locked down they die quickly.

#3: Engineer. The engineer is like the lovechild of the guardian and the elementalist. The engineer is capable of stacking a lot of boons while being somewhat mobile, while also having decent support skills and massive ranged AoE damage. The engineer doesn’t have a weakness; there is so much build diversity within engineers that what would beat one build is stopped cold by another. Problem is, the engineer suffers from the “jack of all trades, master of none” syndrome, where everything they do, someone can do better. Still, it is always good to have on by your side.

#4: Warrior. The control abilities and the offensive power, combined with decent statistical bulk makes warriors another strong frontline class. The advantage they have over the guardian is that they have more viable ranged weaponry, and can defend towers as well as they can scrap it out in a zerg. The problem is, however, that warriors are disabled fairly easy, and most of their strongest moves require assistance from other classes to lay down.

#5: Necromancer. The necro provides a lot of control and AoE pressure, and also yields the highest statistical bulk out of any class. With a full life force bar, which is surprisingly easy in WvW, the necromancer has so much HP and power that recklessly engaging one means certain death. Their AoEs work as a good deterrent, capapble of hitting around corners, and can slowly lay waste to any opposing zerg. The weakness of the necromancer is that they are slow, often trailing behind the other team. They don’t have good chase or good disengage, so necromancers are like slow moving bastions on the field.

#6: Mesmer. Most of the mesmer’s abilities rely more on small engagements, so they have difficulty finding a place in WvW. Most mesmers are relegated to utility roles, like spamming focus #4, using veil when commanded, and portaling golems. Granted, the portal technique is really useful for re-taking keeps and getting golems in an area, but because of this you only need 1 or 2 mesmers per zerg. The mesmer is good at dueling, but without forced point control the mesmer doesn’t have enough speed to chase down opponents, with most of their disengage being from stealth.

#7: Thief. The thief’s role in WvW is usually relegated to ambushes an small skirmishes, and because of this the thief is rarely ever necessary. The thief can provide targeted kills and pulls well, as well as generally harassing solo running classes that are weak to ambushing. The thief’s greatest asset is stealth and blind support on small skirmishes; stealth allows the team to avoid larger zergs as well as have an immediate advantage in team vs. team fights. But otherwise, their short range and general squishyness make thieves ineffctive for GvG, zerging, and defending.

#8: Ranger. This is the hard part. You see, I gauge the classes based on how noticeable their performance in the WvW field is, or how well they perform while under my control. The biggest problem with rangers is that, for every ranger I’ve ever engaged, they’ve amounted to nothing greater than “I’m vaguely aware that someone is shooting me. Oh, it isn’t a warrior?”. That is to say, I don’t feel their field presence at all. Which is unfortunate, since I see a lot of rangers in WvW. They’re usually defending keeps by shooting at someone, or in a zerg tagging someone at maximum range. Other than ambient fire, I don’t see rangers performing that well at all. Rangers might as well not exist. I mean, I’ll miss using their pets as epidemic bait, but otherwise… they shoot at people? I"d inquire about their chase skills, but I’ve never had to run from a ranger.

Though the OP is obviously QQing, he does bring up a common complaint I see with a lot of games. And to this common complaint, I respond with Sirlin’s “Play to win”, particularly the section on Scrubs:

http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/intermediates-guide.html

There’s a saying that “all is fair in love and war”, and that is true. If someone wants to hide behind an NPC, that isn’t childish. It’s clever. It is tactical deception. If someone doesn’t want to fight your group and they run off, then this is a tactical retreat. Had I had the option (necros, sadly, have no escape) I would run from most situations where I couldn’t win, too. No point in fighting a frivolous battle where the only thin you’ll do is lose. Stealth and disengaging are perfectly viable tactics to use, and there isn’t anything “wrong” with them.

You can. It is listed in options under “WvW character limit”.

Happened to me once as well. Every once in awhile scarlet will pick a favorite and keep attacking them.

I’ll 4th that opinion.

I hate windchimes. And now all my achievements sound like windchimes. I used to look forward to the old ding that I got from achievements. When doing something hard, it actually felt accomplishing.

These new jingle sounds like something that just annoys you alongside of the game.

Heh… I managed to accomplish “plan a” but in a manner I didn’t expect.

Trying that with my engineer and my necromancer didn’t pan out so well. But I discovered something so useful it is almost unfair. So useful that, despite the whole “use reflects and projectile destruction”, the guardian on the team didn’t even bother with it, and we still managed to succeed. Made me want to slap him silly…

Anyway, apparently the trait “Concealed Defeat” from thieves actually has a use. The hardest part about the “stand by and attack spiders while someone ranges” thing is that player downs and defeats accumulate quickly, and once one player falls the rest fall like dominoes under the zerg of spiders. Except… with the trait Concealed Defeat. That smoke screen when downed halts both silvers and unranked mobs alike, making it so it is safe to rez me every time I kicked the bucket, and likewise if I go to rez someone else and I go down, then we can both rally off of a spider now that we are well defended.

So, with signet of malice in hand, a dagger storm in reserve, smoke screens a plenty and a cunning mix of valkyrie + berserker gear, the super squishy thief stood at the forefront of the spider horde, making every defeat my victory, while other players alternated between pole positioning the tree, and withdrawing to fend off spiders. I suppose what has me so elated with this tactic is that, nowhere had I ever suspected that “berserker thief faceplants” would be a proficient and viable defense maneuver, let alone for the 10 or 15 minutes it took to kill the tree this way.

That said, I still do think that this boss needs a nerf of some kind. It is quite simple why, really:

While some teams managed to just run up and DPS the tree down while spamming reflects, other teams kite indefinitely while attacking the tree in a circle and some teams rely on a sacrificial thief to maintain an extremely high uptime with smoke screen, the fight never feels engaging, or designed well. All of the videos and tactics I’ve used and seen used are more along the lines of gaming the system than actual tactics. Like we’re abusing rules in the game to deal with bad design than actually engaging the boss in a respectable way.

I suppose there are two issues that I take with Scarlet:

#1: She’s wholly unbelievable. Preforms at savant levels in everything, evil with no conscious or remorse, and no given character flaws.

#2: No reason why she would be evil. We have no real explanation for why she is the way she is. Just “look, super evil person you gotta fight. Now ZERG!”.

I can understand invoking many villain tropes when making a character. That is all the reasons we love villains. But with Scarlet, we really have nothing to go beyond. Right now, the story is going to diverge into one of two ways, and I hate them both:

#1: She’s amassing a plan so elaborate and convoluted that at best it will look like a bad retcon and at worst just terrible writing overall.

#2: She’s the tenebrouos lord of darky darkness who does darky dark things because the heroes need someone to fight against, and I expect to see her in an 80’s era Saturday morning cartoon.

Unless Anet can pull something from nowhere that makes Scarlet meaningful as a character, then writing her as such has been a bad move.

Back when I used to play guardian in sPVP, I discovered that with 15 points in Radiance I could spam the active of Virtue of Justice quite liberally, giving my whole team a lot of burning and blinding nearby foes. In close quarters it was quite an effective strategy for piling on additional damage: use active, kill something quickly, repeat the process over and over again.

I haven’t made a build for PVE yet that uses conditions, but that is probably something to go down. Although I’d be hesitant to use only carrion gear, since the only thing you’re getting is burning.

For leveling? Conditions are scaled horribly at lower levels, so I wouldn’t recommend using a condition build until you are at least level 60, maybe higher.

Pinny.9018:

That’s all well and good, but there’s a difference between excluding the people that refuse to be helped from groups or dungeon runs or whatever and straight out shutting out EVERYONE but your own little clique on account of everyone being too stubborn to accept help, when said help is typically given in the form of massive walls of math that most people don’t give a flying finger about.

Unfortunately, pretty much everyone who adopts that “some people don’t deserve to be helped” mentality actually mean “nobody besides me and my buddies deserve to be helped”

Pretty much. The “gray” area is shrinking as more people fall into the “us vs. them” category. It reached the point where I can count on one hand the times I’ve had meaningful discussions with people on anything topical.

Anyway, it isn’t about “me and my buddies are the only one who deserve to be helped”. It is more of a natural selection type thing going on: the information is out there, and people will either get it or they will disagree with you for a stupid reason. Then, the people who “get it” will gather together and form their clique, because arguing with those who didn’t get it proves itself unfruitful and time-wasting every time it happens. These people have argued with each other before. A lot. Many of the topical social issues have been debated to death for dozens, even hundreds of years. After awhile, people stop debating, and question if debate is even useful.

Both sides feel this way; that they’re right and arguing with those guys is a waste of time, so don’t even bother. Even in something as mundane as which class and build to use in GW2 this takes place.

You can use any class in PVE. But if you want AoE damage and a lot of versatility, Engineer or Elementalist is for you. Fair warning: those classes do have a high learning curve.

You might want to look down, because you’re missing a leg.

Tree.3916:

A single YouTube search of TA F/U would result in plenty of videos on how to successfully beat this boss. Obviously anyone not able to clear any dungeon content has not used the simple search feature.

That is the interesting thing: every group I have been in has consulted youtube and consulted a guide when doing the path. It just happens that not everyone can do what is on youtube. Hence, why it is on youtube in the first place: to show off.

My opinion on this is kind of slanted, because the first class I really leveled up was the Engineer, and because of that pretty much everything is simple by comparison, except for Elementalists. However, I would put thieves at around 3rd or 4th in the difficulty scale, both in how to play and how to play well.

While leveling up the hardest part about the thief is figuring out that blinds are an excellent defense. Whether you run an off-hand pistol, or an off-hand dagger with Cloaked in Shadow, eventually you’ll find that blinds render the squishyness moot and most encounters become quite easy. Afterward, for anything that can’t be blind you kite and range it.

This leads to what I call the “mediocre thief” syndrome. Blind in melee + kite with range once that fails means that as a thief you can get through nearly everything in the game. However, you won’t be too stellar at it. There are many classes (warrior, guardian, ranger, necromancer) that encourage “lazy play” wherein their bulk or their class mechanics encourage more spammy and straightforward tactics, and this works because those classes are built for those straightforward tactics. If you do this on a thief and just throw blinds everywhere, you do worse than these simpler classes, but you’ll survive. However, it is here that players reach a skill “valley” that they can’t climb out of because they lack the gumption to try harder.

The first step out of that valley is learning to use skill evades and weapon evades, and this is a level that many players won’t achieve. Using skill evades requires you watch for patterns, tells, timing, and has an inherent risk to the tactic due to skill delay and server lag. You’ll require a certain amount of knowledge about the game before this can be achieved. But, once you get these skill evades, thief performance climbs. Instead of running around shooting every champion with the shortbow, suddenly you are right next to the axe warriror, flipping around and meleeing champion bosses in a beautiful display of acrobatics and cunning. You become the “tank” even though you are in pure berserker gear and have only 11k health.

PVP experiences a similar issue, but with different mechanics. Instead of blinds, the main thing that enables thieves yet holds them back is stealth. Stealth in the game is pretty powerful, making for a great offensive and defensive utility at the same time. Because of this, many players will latch on to stealth and use it wholly as their defense while they creep up and then try to burst someonedown. Like in PVE, this “works” in the sense that you can do a mediocre job in PVP by abusing the stealth + burst mechanic, however you won’t truly excel. The biggest problem being that people will learn your tactics really quickly, and once they can predict obvious movements that ambush strategy doesn’t work anymore.

The hill here is learning to use everything the thief has. But most importantly, movement skills. The defensive aspect of stealth combined with movement skills allows for a thief to quickly engage and disengage when it is appropriate, instead of “whenever stealth ends” like the noobish builds do. With this, the ability to predict a thief goes down the drain, and the thief can maintain control over the fight, so long as they can nimbly avoid the opponent while still maintaining an offense. Combine this with skill dodges for evasion, as well as interrupts to stop heals and skills, and you’ll end up with a player who is nigh invincible given any 1 vs. 1 circumstance.

I’m running TA in quick succession myself to get the pieces for stuff. I’ve run all three paths, so I’ll tell you the basics.

First, the nightmare court are hard as heck still. You’ll be hit by AoE fear, high damage AoE wells, a lot of poison, and just generally get your but kicked 3 vs. 5 against the court. The rest of the enemies aren’t that bad, but the nightmare court are such a pain in the rear.

In most dungeon runs, the team will be skipping most of the content without saying a word, and without any mercy to whomever is left behind. The ironic thing being that this dungeon is by far the hardest one to “run ahead” in due to the high amount of damage and CC that flies around, as well as those darn blossoms. Because of this, sometimes you’ll get one of those groups that will run ahead before you even zone in, and then they’ll sit there and complain when you can’t make it through all of the enemies that they ran through together. This can be annoying later when everyone has to stand around for 10 minutes waiting for someone who lagged behind in a previous part run past all of the enemies. You can try forming groups that specifically kill all the enemies in the way, but rarely anyone will join those.

The bosses are nothing special in themselves, with two exceptions. Both exceptions are in the forward/up path. Vevina is a pain in the rear due to her stealth, AoE attacks, bouncing attacks, and slew of conditions/buffs. Essentially she is an annoying mesmer on steroids who likes to focus on one player. Her abilities are nigh impossible to avoid when used repeatedly on a single player, so damage will stack up.

Then there is the Nightmare Tree in Forward/Up. This boss will spawn 40 or so spiders (not an exaggeration) who never die or go away, and these spiders will quickly overwhelm you. The spiders themselves keep spawning, so the fight is essentially a zerg rush against you by spiders. It’s harder than it sounds. So much so that the Forward/Up path is a thing of controversy on these forums, due to the incredible difficulty it poses.

So only do Forward/Up if you have plenty of time to kill, along with either an excellent pre-made team, an intense desire for the dungeon master achievement, or a clinically unhealthy sense of masochism.

DigitalKirin.9714:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Well, the good news is I managed to beat the path. I managed to do it with a strategy no one else really recommended. It was quite complicated, and was hard as hell.

Basically it is this: I would run in on my engineer with perma swiftness + vigor and encircle the tree once, getting all the spider’s attention. Then, after one lap, 3 more teammates would run in kiting behind the spiders, doing as much damage to the tree as possible while running in a circle. The last person was a longbow ranger who would attack the tree at maximum range, out of the way of the spiders.

The combination of me spamming grenades, + 3 others attempting to kite around + the ranger on the hill managed to slowly kill the tree. However, half of people would always die in this process.

I still say this path needs a nerf. Make it so the spiders de-spawn or something, that way you don’t have to start each subsequent fight completely overwhelmed.

This sounds incredibly intense.

Perhaps next time you guys could try this:
Have 3 people 1200 range the tree from the entrance. These people can pop reflects if they have them for the baby hatchlings if they spawn. Dodge Sideways as the “green goop” falls from the tree during the headshake animation.

Have 2 people behind them in the hallway out of range of the headshake spider eggs. These 2 people should be focusing fire on the recluses and hatchlings that may pop and aggro the forward team.

Maybe something worthwhile to try out?

That was plan A. It didn’t go so well.

The big suggestion seems to be that axe #1 and #2 should cleave. Just repeating that here.

The only time you mix rabid and carrion is if you are going for maximum effective HP, or are trying to make a defensive hybrid build.

Well, the good news is I managed to beat the path. I managed to do it with a strategy no one else really recommended. It was quite complicated, and was hard as hell.

Basically it is this: I would run in on my engineer with perma swiftness + vigor and encircle the tree once, getting all the spider’s attention. Then, after one lap, 3 more teammates would run in kiting behind the spiders, doing as much damage to the tree as possible while running in a circle. The last person was a longbow ranger who would attack the tree at maximum range, out of the way of the spiders.

The combination of me spamming grenades, + 3 others attempting to kite around + the ranger on the hill managed to slowly kill the tree. However, half of people would always die in this process.

I still say this path needs a nerf. Make it so the spiders de-spawn or something, that way you don’t have to start each subsequent fight completely overwhelmed.

Do you dodge just before the tree shakes or in the middle of the tree shaking or the end of the tree shaking? Because none of those worked.

Having now attempted it twice, I do feel like the F/U path is too difficult. I haven’t managed to get past it myself yet.

The biggest problem is, the circumstances for success and failure are determined in the first 10 seconds, and by group composition when first formed. First group I had, they ran in to melee the boss, 2 dropped instantly and couldn’t be healed up from the tree’s attacks. Once that was failed, there was no way to try again.

No matter how hard we tried to pull the innumerable spiders around the corner to prevent more spiders from spawning, it didn’t work. An endless stream of high damaging mobs just kept coming our way, reflection and projectile destroying be darned. At that point, there was nothing to do. The spiders did too much damage, you couldn’t kill the spiders quicker than they spawned, and you couldn’t kill the tree quicker than the spider’s spawned. We tried stacking and using reflects + projectile destruction. We tried kiting and circling the tree. We tried having a designated kiter while everyone else DPsed the tree. We tried having one person fight the tree while everyone else fought off spiders. We tried dodging randomly when the tree shook to avoid spawning more spiders. When limitless blind fields, projectile reflection, and stacking heals + melee attacks wasn’t enough to get through the sea of spiders… then what is?

The second group I had didn’t stand a chance either. Mostly because no one in that group had DPS gear or even played in a manner that did effective damage. On my zerker + valkyrie thief, I was over a third of the team’s damage output. Literally. I tested this on archers, and my archer solo was at half HP by the time the rest of the group brought down their archer. And that… was accomplished with my auto attack. Yeah, that team could never beat the tree. When we got there, the team was slaughtered laughably and I was left kiting the tree while surrounded by hordes of spiders from every direction.

I suppose the biggest problem is that I am at a loss on how to handle this tree in a manner that doesn’t involve getting 1 mesmer + 4 berserkers together, running in and DPSing the tree down as fast as possible. Well sure, I know that works, but I don’t have the resources to pull that off. I can’t get in on that action, because I hybrid my berserker with valkyrie gear on my thief (50% crit rate. don’t need higher), and my other classes are engineer and necromancer. People tell me to dodge when the tree shakes so more don’t spawn, people tell me to pull spiders around the corner so more don’t spawn, and to use reflects, but none of that works.

Wolfheart.1938:

Oh man, fake difficulty and bad design! If we listened to forum posters no boss would have any mechanic ever.

I went into much more detail in other places:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

My biggest gripe is the fake difficulty of it all.

#1: The camera. It is extremely limited, making it so you can’t see what is going on. Half the fight is zoomed on the back of my character’s head.
#2: The random object pull. This would be fine if we could see the whole field, and that stupid pulling orb wouldn’t get “obstructed” every time you attacked it. But, game glitches and camera angles, ho! It isn’t like the random pull is pure RNG here.
#3: One hit kill mechanics are never fun. They just discriminate against builds.
#4: The grates on the ground make it so you can’t see the AoE circles that well. In the second phase of the fight, I basically have to guess whenever I’m in an AoE or not.
#5: OH THE LAG! This comes from two sources.
a)Zone lag. Due to the large amount of people zerging this area at 3:00 AM, every action you take can have anywhere from a 0.5 to 1 second delay on it. Because of this, you’ll end up squatting stationary in on area trying to pick up an orb of light, resulting in death.
b)There are huge lag spikes that delay the game 5-10 seconds, and you get these every few minutes. If you get one in the fight, fight is over.
#6: Time limit. Due to the extremely limited space of the gauntlet, to make it so no on can abuse the “whole server shares 6 domes” system they made, they put a time limit in the fight, so you have to rush ahead to beat the bosses when the smart thing to do otherwise would’ve been to wait for a better opportunity. Again, this just discriminates against builds.
#7: It is punishing and expensive. The truffle soups are 30 silver each, and you have to pay to get more tickets, and then you have to pay the repair bill. On average, each “fight” costs about 10 silver. Worst part is when people don’t rez you, and you have to run throughout the entire map to get another shot, getting more people to queue up before you and wasting more time off of food bonuses.

If they just took this fight, and changed it so it was in an individual instance with an open camera view,not in an area suffering from zerg lag, with an opaque ground, without a time limit, and just made her attacks do immense damage instead of instant death, then Liadri would be hard for all of the right reasons.

If it weren’t for the fact that so much of Liadri is fake difficulty via bad design, the whole encounter wouldn’t be so bad.

The biggest problem I have is that all players are suggesting is a nerf to every and all conditions, dooming every condition build in every form of the game. They keep forgetting that when other classes were nerfed, what was nerfed was the damage on a few attacks. Anet didn’t go and say “alright, now all direct damage uyses only 66% of your power now” like all the QQ is suggesting.

They also exaggerate how much of an investment is needed to do direct damage. I run carrion on my necro, and in a full carrion set my Life Blast does an equal amount of damage on non-crits to my scepter in WvW. And in WvW, I have 1850 condition damage. While running in berserker gear, hitting for 4K to 6K on other players with life blast, my condition build doesn’t have nearly that much offensive potential.

Direct damage has the ability to do more damage, and does it immediately. As a form of balance, direct damage has more passive mitigating factors.

I still find skyhammer the be the funnest map. It is dynamic and engaging, and I find the flavor text to be quite comical.

I’ve never been a fan of no items, fox only, final destination.

This is something I wondered about, too, however I am hesitant to change Super Elixir over to a water field for two reasons:

#1: Engineers already have two water fields. Healing turret overcharge and toolbelt skill. Changing Super Elixir to a water field really doesn’t give engineers something that they are missing.

#2: I’m not sure Super Elixir would be balanced if it was a water field. 10 second duration on a potentially 16 second cooldown… that is really powerful. Light fields have a stacking limit on retaliation, and retaliation only does so much. But that much of a healing field… just dang.

So for now, I’d keep it a light field. It’s a pretty good light field, too.

You know, there has always been a certain philosophy I have whenever I make a suggestion or evaluate how to improve a class or some aspect of the game:

Just take what they do, and make what they do better.

And it is a really simple philosophy. It goes contrary to how the community thinks, though. Whenever some class gets a new shiny like torment or advanced boon hate or they get a new piece of equipment, other classes default response is “I want that!”. Not “I want an equivalent buff if one is needed” or “I want to possess skills to beat that”. Just straight up torment envy.

Now, I remember exactly why torment was invented. You see, over two months ago, condition necromancers had themselves a really big problem, and they shared this exact problem with condition thieves, too. The problem was this: the whole of their condition damage was stacked only into bleeding. That was it: as a condi necro and thief you either did bleeding, or you went home. This was a really big problem, because having all of their condition damage stacked into one condition meant it was incredibly easy to cleanse and neutralize their damage. So easy, in fact, that mesmers, guardians, and rangers could largely ignore condi necros due to their ambient cleansing.

And yes, they had poison as well, but poison does very little damage in comparison, and was only useful for the anti-heal properties it provided. Problem was, the opponent didn’t lose enough health to bother healing anyway. With that, necromancers would try to constantly spam covering conditions via chill, cripple, weakness, and vulnerability sometimes, but those just weren’t enough. Thieves never had an option in the first place.

And this is where torment came in. Torment was meant to be the condition that fixed conditionmancers: it provided a form of offense that was condition based, but wasn’t a bleed. Something all to their own. Would it have been enough, I’m not so sure, given that at the same time they gave necromancers burning and twice the available fear, which seems to be what everyone complains about now. It wasn’t enough for thieves, who received pitiful access to torment like… pretty much everyone did, really. So anet dropped the ball there.

But condi engineers were fine. Why? Because they didn’t have this problem. Condi engineers applied bleed, burning, poison, and confusion all at the same time, in AoE, and instantly had vulnerability, chill, and cripple as covering conditions with minimal effort. We were the first condi spam class, and Engineers are still really good at it.

So when I hear the suggestion to give engineers torment, the first question I ask is why. What problem does this solve? What does this attempt to balance? I know why necromancers, thieves, and even warriors in part were given torment: to provide additional condition damage not tied wholly to bleeding. Mesmers were given torment to buff the condition damage nature of the scepter, which had its direct damage removed. But engineers are already good on conditions.

If anything, torment on engineers would throw engineers off balance, since it gives players yet another unique condition they have to cleanse off alongside of poison, confusion, bleeding, burning, and vulnerability.

I think condition spam largely started as a means to counter a highly evasive meta. AI partners have been around for a long time, and haven’t really had too much of an impact on the game otherwise.

I know this because I’ve been running AI heavy builds since launch. Turret engineers, minion necromancers, spirit weapon guardians, and mesmers in general. Only class I have that doesn’t have an AI build is my thief. I usually run these due to my incredibly shaky hands, bad vision, and lack of gaming mouse and right click options renders my aptitude to play at a remarkably low level. Yes, I will never be one of the “skilled” players.

Anyway, in the time that I have been playing the game with largely AI partners, I have encountered the many flaws that AI partners have. These flaws haven’t changed. At all.

#1: They are vulnerable to AoE. And no, this isn’t limited to just condition spam AoEs at a distance. Classes with good melee cleave would demolish minions. If you send a bunch of AI pets to attack a greatsword wielding guardian, one symbol of wrath + whirling wrath combo later they were all dead.

#2: They are useless against soft control and high mobility. The worst thing for any minons to run into is chillblains, because once they are frozen they can’t run quick enough to do anything. The more evasive classes will spend their time running about, and minions will spend most of their time chasing that player in futility. So things like cripple and swiftness would also neutralize pets.

#3: Minions do not scale up for larger fights. In a 2 vs. 1 scenario, minions offer little to no protection and also split offense greatly. Whereas most forms of attack can hit 2 players as easily as they hit one, other than special abilities the AI pets do not cleave. So, offense gets diminished, the AI dies a lot quicker, and then

#4: should the AI fall, you become defenseless. To be effective, you have to invest a lot in the AI pets for them to be useful, and those are points other players spend in other places that don’t fade away when a narrow escape obliterates the pets.

#5: Pets generally provide no defense for being focused anyway. Yes, that rocket turret and flesh golem and hammer of wisdom can provide decent control and defense against closely clustered enemies, but they themselves won’t save you when being focused down by two or more players who are spread apart. AI generally aren’t stun breakers, aren’t stability, and are a somewhat randomized control, so because of this any AI user can find their pets neutralized by a good focus and ambush. The only innate defense that AI pets have is limited body blocking.

#6: Other than field control and some offense, AI provides very little utility. Any time you see a necromancer running a minion master build, you know they don’t have the pulls and the fears and the corruption that regular necromancers do. They have damage, and some controls that are innate to most pets, and it ends there.

#7: Other classes can combo various things off of your pets. There’s nothing worse than when a necromancer doubles up their conditions by using epidemic on a pet, or a thief uses the pet as a CnD target, letting them close in on you effortlessly, or when an engineer or mesmer ricochets some bouncing projectile, hitting you twice instead of once like if you were by yourself. Having squishy mobs surround you isn’t always the best strategy.

And I still see these flaws in every AI heavy build I have. Time has not changed them. However, there is a distinction I’ll have to make between what an AI build is, and what some people are calling an AI build.

Spirit rangers are not a true AI build. The spirits themselves are roaming buff bots that have an alternate skill available for when they are in use. Unlike Thieves Guild or Spirit Weapons, they don’t actively attack and engage the opponent, and don’t use AI at all, really.

Phantasm Mesmers, however, can be considered an AI build. Although phantasms are a bit different from every other AI, in the sense that phantasms merely appear wherever they are needed. Phantasms don’t have a true AI to themselves, because they don’t hang around and use complicated aggro management tactics. Instead, they spam their respective attacks against their target relentlessly, without needing line of sight. Being tied to weapons kills, and as well as being really spammable is something that is unique to phantasms also. These factors make phantasms incredibly powerful, and distinguish them as the best “AI” in the game, if you would call them that.

All that aside, regular AI builds can be quite potent in 1 vs. 1 scenarios, where their high control can sustain damage and assist the main player in their own damage.

Directly? No. Although on a point by point basis, there comes a point where investing into different stats gives you either more total damage or more total survivability.

But as for the damage in game, there is no limit. So run berserker and hit for 15k like the rest of us.

Still waiting on race specific swimwear that we saw some of during the karka event.

Andele.1306:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Andele.1306:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Andele.1306:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Dagger auto attack does 940 base damage in 2 seconds, coming to 470 damage per second.

Axe #2 dos 968 damage in 2.25 seconds, coming to 430 damage per second. Here’s the kicker, though: factor in axe training for an additional 15%, and you get 495 base damage per second, which puts it higher than the dagger, and gains twice the life force in that time. Of course, now that axe training is 10%, this puts it only equal to the dagger at 473 damage per second.

This thing called math that everyone seems to ignore, its not 430 (then axe 2 would be 860) its 480 and 530 if traited (last numbers rounded ofc because of weapon damage variation and simplicity).

2.25 seconds. Not 2 seconds. You have to divide axe damage by 2.25 seconds.

If you want to nitpick on the cast times in game that arent based on the skills actual damage dealing time but aftercast and initial animation then all of dagger damage should be delt in 0.25 of a second, no you can cancel axe 2 after 1.98 and it will still do full damage, same with dagger chain being done in 1.41 if you do it right or 1.79 if you let the 1 aftercast go and just cancel out of the 3>1 pause/aftercast.
Or even better, if you wanna count the additional time wasted in raising the arm and lowering it for axe, why not count the distance a dagger holder must walk to even deal damage?

Axe takes 2.25 seconds at least to do its full damage. :p

No it doesnt…

Yes it does…

The community itself is fine. You don’t have a lot of elitists, but they are still capable of doing content just fine. You don’t gt too many trolls or fights in LA, and for the most part the people there are quite helpful and understanding.

Though with the new champ farms that has been muddied a bit. Though I suspect that a lot of that has to deal with people guesting on the server to farm.

I believe it is Tarnished Coast that is the RP server.

I can’t speak for Aspenwood, but Sanctum of Rall is big in the WvW scene.

I think the biggest problem is that people still hold to this antiquated idea of a “DPS class”. For GW2, that isn’t the case at all. The ability to do damage, be durable, or support your teammates is based on the build you use, with each class accomplishing DPS in different and more complicated ways, and also supporting the group in different ways.

The second thing is how you play the class. You can go full zerker gear with 30 in power and crit damage, and 10 in precision, and still do horrible damage. There are a couple of important things to note here:

#1: Melee damage is almost always superior to range damage. The only case where that arguably isn’t the case is with engineers who don’t have melee damage.
#2: AoE damage is almost always superior to single target damage. While there are a lot of bosses by themselves that make single target damage worthwhile, you’ll be dealing with groups of enemies more often than not, so hitting multiple enemies is greater than hitting just one.

Thankfully, most melee weapons cleave, hitting multiple targets. So this takes care of both.

#3: There are multiple ways to increase group DPS, such as stacking might, stacking vulnerability, granting fury. The less obvious ways are to improve your teams survivability, because when your teammates disengage from melee range, they start doing less damage. So, keeping them in melee range for as long as possible is preferred. Things like protection, blind fields, and condition cleansing can really help the team. Finally, sometimes enemies stack up their own boons, and removing enemy boons also increases DPS. Especially protection.

#4: condition damage becomes redundant with multiple condition users, so only use condition damage when you yourself are the only dedicated condition user.

Keep these in mind when making a build, and you can get high DPS with pretty much any class.

I think the biggest problem is that the quality of voice acting is severely limited by the quality of the lines. I’ve heard most of these voice actors in other places, and they sound great there. But in GW2, they sound flat and stiff.

Guess I’ll try and simplify the math for all those who don’t quite get it (Leablo):

Whenever you increase any of your stats, you can think of this ultimately as a proportion of what you had previously. This is an effective measurement of damage and durability, since it accounts for individual circumstances and compares your performance against itself in any circumstance that you can comprehend. This is also important, since it represents the inevitable diminishing returns from your stats as you invest them.

Let me give some examples: for the first 916 points of power, your damage doubles. For the next 916 points of power, your damage increases by 50%. For the next 916 points of power, your damage increases by 33%. Because of this, eventually it is more productive to invest you stats into something else like precision and crit damage after you get enough power.

So yes, 1 toughness does have a higher effect than 100 toughness on a point by point basis. However, the difference each individual point of toughness has is incredibly small, so you stack multiple points of toughness to get a cumulative effect that you desire. But never forget that the more toughness you pile on top, the less effective it becomes. The same is true of nearly any stat.

Andele.1306:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Andele.1306:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Dagger auto attack does 940 base damage in 2 seconds, coming to 470 damage per second.

Axe #2 dos 968 damage in 2.25 seconds, coming to 430 damage per second. Here’s the kicker, though: factor in axe training for an additional 15%, and you get 495 base damage per second, which puts it higher than the dagger, and gains twice the life force in that time. Of course, now that axe training is 10%, this puts it only equal to the dagger at 473 damage per second.

This thing called math that everyone seems to ignore, its not 430 (then axe 2 would be 860) its 480 and 530 if traited (last numbers rounded ofc because of weapon damage variation and simplicity).

2.25 seconds. Not 2 seconds. You have to divide axe damage by 2.25 seconds.

If you want to nitpick on the cast times in game that arent based on the skills actual damage dealing time but aftercast and initial animation then all of dagger damage should be delt in 0.25 of a second, no you can cancel axe 2 after 1.98 and it will still do full damage, same with dagger chain being done in 1.41 if you do it right or 1.79 if you let the 1 aftercast go and just cancel out of the 3>1 pause/aftercast.
Or even better, if you wanna count the additional time wasted in raising the arm and lowering it for axe, why not count the distance a dagger holder must walk to even deal damage?

Axe takes 2.25 seconds at least to do its full damage. :p

spoj.9672:

Ghastly claws is 3 seconds. Or tooltip error? Anyway its still less dps. You cant spam axe 2 forever whereas you can spam dagger auto forever.

It’s really not. I’ve tested it a few times, and it takes up anywhere from 2.25 to 2.5 seconds to use.

EDIT: Ah, sneaky edit. Anyway, the tooltip says 2 and 1/4th second. Also, you’re not supposed to spam axe 2 forever. You’re supposed to alternate between Axe 2 and other skills with DS while you wait to recover.

Andele.1306:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Dagger auto attack does 940 base damage in 2 seconds, coming to 470 damage per second.

Axe #2 dos 968 damage in 2.25 seconds, coming to 430 damage per second. Here’s the kicker, though: factor in axe training for an additional 15%, and you get 495 base damage per second, which puts it higher than the dagger, and gains twice the life force in that time. Of course, now that axe training is 10%, this puts it only equal to the dagger at 473 damage per second.

This thing called math that everyone seems to ignore, its not 430 (then axe 2 would be 860) its 480 and 530 if traited (last numbers rounded ofc because of weapon damage variation and simplicity).

2.25 seconds. Not 2 seconds. You have to divide axe damage by 2.25 seconds.

The staff is as much a support weapon as it is a condition weapon, and it does have some appeal in power builds.

Mark of Blood gives AoE regen, Chillblains chills and the poison field can cause weakness, Putrid Mark does hit really hard for power build, and reaper’s mark is just a large stun. The main power appeal of the staff comes from necrotic grasp. It is a piercing attack with a decent base power, so against tightly clumped enemies or enemies in a row, the staff outdamages every other weapon for power necros. Though most people will be using unyielding blast, which is more powerful at close range, so because of this many players see the staff as redundant.

spoj.9672:

Loyo.8526:

I honestly would love to take axe on most occasions, And I dont mind it in PvE because I can always use it.

However, In PvE I usually really need that spike damage that dagger has and use many immobilize to stick to the target making Dagger more attractive. The big problem moreso is the way Axe 2 works. Its amazing burst DPS and is good because if you do run stuff on crit (traits or even on hit) then it can proc a good deal. But dodging this is too much of a DPS loss to me compared to an auto. That and the whole running behind deal. I might try it again now that i learned you can stand still and your character will turn, but I can’t see a reason to stand still besides letting them DPS on me heavy themselves.

And no, the 15% doesn’t make it outrank Dagger in damage.

Axe #2 is longer than the dagger auto chain and does less damage.

Dagger auto attack does 940 base damage in 2 seconds, coming to 470 damage per second.

Axe #2 dos 968 damage in 2.25 seconds, coming to 430 damage per second. Here’s the kicker, though: factor in axe training for an additional 15%, and you get 495 base damage per second, which puts it higher than the dagger, and gains twice the life force in that time. Of course, now that axe training is 10%, this puts it only equal to the dagger at 473 damage per second.

Anyway, I rarely use the axe myself for the auto attack. The axe is best used in particularly strange scenarios, and should itself never be the permanent weapon of the power necro. Some examples include:

A) When you need to disengage from melee range, but still want to maintain an offense. Then, you’ll usually do something like Focus #4 + Axe #2 + Death Shroud for a few seconds, followed by Axe #2 again once you leave DS, then focus #4 again, then switch back to the dagger and sally forth after your heal has recharged.

B) If I am ever trying to run past a bunch of mobs, axe #3 makes a nice AoE cripple if they’ve already engaged me.

C)There are also those rare enemies, like the high risen priest, who can launch a ton of small damaging attacks. In these scenarios, the long duration retaliation can really rack up damage. I like to use Axe #3, then engage at point blank in DS and just watch as the enemy ticks up 6k or so damage against my life force, which I just gain back again soon.

D)The biggest appeal of the axe is that it is a spell: It has no flight path, and because of this it can be used to bypass reflect skills and area denial skills in order to do damage. It is a big help against something like the Plunderer from HotW Path 1, who spins around reflecting projectiles for several seconds. Once he starts doing this, I just swap to the axe and attack with it. This is really the only time you’ll ever use the auto attack, when Life Blast isn’t a viable option but you can’t melee either.

So all in all, axe is best as a secondary weapon, used mostly for situations where the dagger can’t really be used, or for those special purposes like kiting enemies or maximizing retaliation damage.

Looks like he has also figured out that condition spam was a response to the evasion meta. I better step up my game soon, or Helseth might come up with something before me next time. Though I’m betting his next video will be about the lack of stability in the game.

Anyway, I suppose the biggest problem with his suggestions are that they are opposed to each other: if you are going to have less dodges, you have to make dodges meaningful. The only way to make dodges meaningful is to have high burst damage in the game.

If you reduce both overall damage and overall dodges, you end up with less of an action MMO and more with a turn based one. At that point, you might as well take the effective power and effective HP of the two characters, multiply them together, and then whomever is highest wins. Because of this, you need to have meaningful burst which necessitates high damage. Then, with bursts and high damage, you need enough skills to mitigate those bursts, and the easiest way to give that to every class is with dodges.

Though I do agree that, currently, the damage and evasion are a bit ridiculous. I would attribute this more to two things in general:

#1: the general inefficiency of defensive stats. Even though most builds now have some form of defense, the fact remains that everyone still gears largely for offense. The reason why is quite simple: dead players deal no damage. The quicker the opponent dies, the less damage you yourself take. The defensive stats in the game are largely ineffective, so even when you invest 1000 points into toughness or vitality, your opponent gets a greater return investing that into power or crit damage.

#2: The ease at which every class can dodge. Rangers, Mesmers, Engineers, Guardians, and Elementalists all have extremely easy access to permanent vigor. requiring only minor and adept traits. Thieves and Warriors have access to high vigor uptime, and the necromoancer has almost no vigor at all. Mesmers, Rangers, and Thieves have a large access to skill dodges (blurred frenzy, flanking strike, etc.), which they can use to evade enemies nearly permanently.

No class should ever be able to permanently evade. As for my fixes to these problems, It would be quite long, however:

#1: All weapon skills that evade should no longer give invincibility frames. Their evasion will be only in movement and changing position.
#2: Only thieves and elementalists should have access to permanent vigor. All other classes should either have limited access to vigor (33% up time at most, but I see 25% uptime as a reasonable starting point), or no vigor at all. Maybe rangers can have a higher uptime as well. Maybe. Also, permanent vigor will not be granted by an adept trait, but by a grandmaster major or minor trait.
#3: There should never be procs that do a substantial amount of damage. Procs are ultimately unavoidable and therefore have nothing to do with skill.
#4: Give nearly every class a whole lot more stability. I am talking about doubling the boon duration for nearly every stability granting skill in the game, and giving classes who don’t have a lot of stability skills that grant stability. That way, CC is to be used tactically instead of spammed.
#5: increase the effectiveness of invested toughness and vitality by about 20% or so. For vitality this is easy: each point in vitality gives 12 health instead of 10. Toughness is harder, since you’ll have to tweak the armor value at the end with some kind of multiplier that raises the influence of toughness by 20%.

And that would be to start.

I have 5 toons, but I did make a 6th slot just in case.

The thing I find funny is that people theorize that others act this way because it is online and misses the social cues. I act like this in real life, too. But online, its like everyone also has aspergers.

Anyway, something I’m noticing is the lack of perspective from the players, so allow me to give the other side of the debate: videogames are a lot like drugs that operate on operant conditioning methods to provide a sense of satisfaction far beyond basic biological needs. Reckless use of videogames leads to compulsion and to addiction, which can ruin education, ruin relationships, and ruin lives. When people make videogames, they make more than just entertainment. They are making a device which operates on psychologically subconscious principles that compels people to play the game, sometimes even when they really don’t want to play the game.

“Even when they don’t want to play the game” is the big one here. Often times, people will find themselves trapped in the more skinner-box like games, returning only for fear of losing out on the new better-than-ever limited time and necessary for PVP weapon, or for fear that their town will become overrun with weeds and the next time they play will be a boring grind to remove them all, or that their guild will disband because there is a mandatory attendance requirement for all those who joined. You hear complaints about it from guild wars 2, as well. The whole “time gating is annoying”, “dailies feel like work”, “No more temporary content”, those are complaints about factors that are in the game that compel players to do things that they don’t want to, otherwise they end up missing out. GW2 is a bit more lenient with this, because they don’t actively punish players for not participating as much as they just deny rewards (laurels, specific skins, mystic coins), and it just happens that everyone else will end up getting these rewards, so you are only indirectly punished for not playing the game.

Put all of that together, and you’ll find there is quite a lot of animosity toward the developers. This is one side of the coin. There is another which makes people hate developers:

Sometimes it is about a passion that is strong in the game. When there are things that players love to do, when they get an unholy amount of enjoyment from the way they play the games. The hard part is, then the way they play the games gets changed. Classes become “balanced” in a way that their favorite methods are ruined completely, bugs get introduced that linger around for months that ruin certain playstyles (coughfixturretsnowcough), sometimes things get outright removed from the game that people loved to do. Think about the current champion farms, then think about all of the people who lose out. The people who liked to do dungeons, the people who liked to do chest events, the people who liked to do fractals, the people who liked to do dynamic events, all these are diminished because the champion farm has taken away people who would otherwise be doing all of those things.

So when people find out that the one true joy of their lives is being ruined by the devs, they respond with unnatural hostility.

This isn’t just true for videogame developers. Any place where there is some kind of power struggle that compels people toward a behavior, whether it be illegal like drugs or “legal” like oppressive economies and governments, you will see this hated. Any place where the passion is killed, you will see that hatred crop it. I wouldn’t call anyone “responsible” over the issue as much as I’d say it is an unfortunate fact of reality.

There’s a big difference between punishing and difficulty. I perfer games that don’t punish you at all, because then you can crank up the difficulty to extreme levels. Anyway, as to what I think:

1. I have no idea. I say this because we are currently anticipating the release of ascended armor alongside of 100 extra levels in crafting disciplines, and from this we may very well see the surplus of gold and crafting supplies readily eaten up in the future. Of course, if it isn’t eaten up in the future, then it is bad for the economy.

2. I am seeing the skins and the mats commonly dropped by champions falling in price despite the influx of gold, so they are losing value slowly.

3. For the rewards they give, yes. Long before this update I was soloing many champions. They are giant bags of HP, and when 50 players run and attack them, they whittle down to nothing in an instant. Then everyone gets about 10 silver worth of stuff for it.

4. Mostly I just despite the community for it. There are some lone champions wandering around that I like to solo, and when I kill these guys that coffer makes for a nice bonus. I didn’t expect the community to default to fighting champions to the exclusion of everything else. Even civility. Anyway, I do think the rewards for these champions are a little too high. IMO, a champion should only give out an equal amount to a dynamic event, whereas right now they give out 3 times that much.

It doesn’t favor vitality or healing power, either.

Then you have to sacrifice sigil of force or fire and switch to an inferior weapon just to dodge. The damage lost here from no more sigil of force is roughly on par with what you would lose with just going in knight armor and keeping the sigil of force or fire.