Guild Wars 2

I cannot agree with this change any more than I do right now. One ot he hardest part about the Risen Priestess of Dwayna event is that sometimes a player will drag the enemies down to the Historian, and then to prevent the bug me and 2 or 3 other people have to figure out a way to kill all of the enemies surrounding Vermoth while also pulling them away and keeping them away. It makes the entire fight more than twice as hard, because instead of just focusing on the acolytes, you have to actively aggro everything in range or else they will lose interest and run right back to Vermoth again.

While making builds for both the engineer and the necromancer I have encountered quite a bit of bloat. For example, Necromancer Marks are sub-par unless you have the skills for them. This requires

20 points in Spite for Spiteful Marks
20 points in Death Magic for Greater Marks and Staff Mastery
20 points in Soul Reaping for Soul Marks

And that leaves no points for condition damage, given that the main offense of marks comes form mark of blood. Ultimately to make a functioning build, you end up having to sacrifice certain staff traits for things that are more necessary and easier to build around.

However I digress: a lot of the trait bloat comes from the different kits that the engineer uses. A lot of these kits have their functions spread about different trees, making effectively using these kits require large investment. The problem arises when you take into consideration that most engineers, to be truly effective, use 2 or even 3 kits. Most kits can’t be used without traits, either, since those kits are balanced on those powerful traits thus making them necessary to function properly (coughgrenadiercough wheezejuggernauthack). This severely limits build possibilities with kits, since you’ll end up neglecting something so much that it isn’t very useful.

The only attrition build I’ve found that works is using PVT minions in sPVP. It deals with a lot of the weaknesses that a necromancer has, and adds a few strengths, too.

Though technically in WvW I run sort-of an attrition build, since I run full Carrion, but I do have plenty of direct damage overall. The bleeds hurt in the long run, but hitting your opponent with wells and life blast hurt immediately.

I do miss capes from City of Heroes, but I’d like capes on spandex clad aliens rather than faux-medieval tree elves.

If I wanted to play an ugly character I’d look in the mirror.

Thieves IMO are a minor nuisance. I main a necro in WvW, and any thief attacking me by himself is just asking to be brushed off. With several times the statistical bulk, access to weakness and retaliation, as well as fear and pull skills I have downed many, many thieves that have tried to ambush me.

What you have to remember is that WvW isn’t about randomly pwning n00bs. It is about capturing and defending objective points. Individual kills mean very little as far as progress goes.

I haven’t played in sPVP in awhile, but IMO right now endurance is too easy to get in PVE and WvW as well.

The main two classes I play are the Engineer and the Necromancer, and on the Engineer I frequently have permanent vigor. With the trait that gives vigor on swiftness combined with one of the two traits that grants swiftness, and with Elixir H thrown on top I end up with permanent vigor on the support class. Should that permanent vigor fail somehow, Elixir R makes a great backup endurance regeneration. I have to say that permanent vigor is easymode in PVE, where you can solo temple bosses simply because you can dodge every single one of their attacks every time they attack. In WvW I’ve tried running with permanent vigor, and it greatly increases my defensive abilities in 1 vs. 1 combat. So much so that I could win even though I suck at skillshots with the grenade kit.

Keep in mind that this is the engineer. This isn’t the thief or the ranger that are complained about by the OP. This isn’t the elementalist or the mesmer which also have access to such a thing along with more evasive skills. This is the clunky, kit swapping, self-stunning, eternal underdog that is the engineer. The class who’s idea of an escape skill is a self-inflicted concussion caused by the explosive failure of their rocket boots.

My Necromancer feels like a slug compared to every other class I own, and I can easily see why. Those dodges are so valuable to me in WvW, where I can shrug off an entire zerg of limitless size because I can just flip around over and over again, evading a limitless number of attacks while also ruining any skillshots from enemy skills.

I suppose a counter-argument to the whole endurance debate is that the only class who doesn’t have it is the necromancer. Just from memory, Guardians, Elementalists, Engineers, and Mesmers very easily get permanent Vigor while Rangers and Thieves get weapon evasion skills along with harder to obtain permanent vigor, E and Warriors get some endurance regen and the hardest to obtain permanent vigor. So, it can be said that pretty much every class can flip around like ninjas due to how easily they can get endurance.

…except the Necromancer…

But I do think there should be more control over endurance. Half the classes shouldn’t get permanent vigor from an adept trait.

As for classes, there are two classes that I have been actively avoiding playing, and those are Warrior and Ranger. One for how common they are, and two because I can’t get in to their respective mechanics. Inevitably I’ll end up making a warrior due to my unnatural insistence on symmetry (so I’ll have 2 heavy, 2 medium, 2 light), but I’m holding that off until I get every other class I’ve made to 80.

For races, I’m avoiding the char largely because I don’t like their attitude on certain things. The whole race just feels embittered.

…not sure what the question is here.

I’ve been running carrion in my necromancer, and I don’t plan to change that anytime soon. I do it for many reasons:

#1: It is easier to hybrid with. You can combine carrion with Power gear to get high power and high condition damage easily, whereas rabid you don’t have any power to hybrid with.

#2: Necromancers don’t have good procs to go with. We get some life-force gain and barbed precision, but that does very little in the long run. The most we can do is use sigils, but with rabid the only sigil you can use is Earth. Sigil of Earth is good in 1v1, but as a WvW Necro the added power is much better for my AoEs.

#3: Necromancer’s have better scaling with vitality than other classes. Since Life Force grows with maximum health and LF is generated on a percentage basis, this provides an alternate form of healing that scales up with vitality. Because of this, vitality has both immediate survivability and long-term survivability on the Necromancer.

Personally I would’ve gone with more confusion instead of burning. Confusion has defensive play, fits thematically more than burning, and lets the necromancer contribute more condition damage in a group environment. Burning is just yet another thing that will be overwritten by the nearest Guardian or Engineer or Elementalist or Memser or Ranger or Warrior, in that order.

Retaliation isn’t defensive because it doesn’t defend. At all.

Anyway, it is true that spiteful spirit is somewhat useless in PVE. I have found that most retaliation is useless in PVE. Much like confusion, the enemies have high damaging but infrequent attacks, an this makes it so retaliation does barely anything.

The trait is fine, though. Because in tPVP and WvW it is incredibly boss. It increases the offensive potential of Death Shroud quite a bit, especially when Death Shroud is used defensively against damage spikes.

HGH is only good in WvW where you have the ability to build up and sustain might, and also have tall walls and zergs to protect them from boon rips. Although it is dangerous for a S/D thief to rip boons amidst the hurricane of explosions that will follow, a zerker thief having 25 stacks of might that lasts for 20 seconds is a beast on the field.

I think the issue is that the “leet” players are often the most unbearable players in the game. The worst experiences I’ve had in this game have all come from the same type of person: The player who is good at the game, but in their head they are great at the game and use this as justification for being just plain unpleasant. They’ll try to control how others play the dungeon and throw tantrums when they don’t get their way, with biting back commentary the whole time if the group doesn’t go with their plan, and then yelling at the group when their plan doesn’t work. They’ll spend the whole time criticizing how other people play the game, and 90% of the time they’re wrong about what happened or why it happened. The kind of players who will go on LFG, invite you to their team and then go on a different mission while saying you are stupid for wanting to go on a certain path.

The interesting thing is that these players are actually good at the game. But as soon as you get someone who goes into LA and brags about how good they are, all this does is remind those players of intolerable punks who ruin everyone’s day because they can’t have fun at the game themselves.

So if someone is a good player, they should just keep it to themselves. If they feel the need to tell people they are good, then something is wrong.

I’m not sure exactly what you are asking here. What is a “heal per healing power” supposed to mean? If you are dividing healing power by the heal, then you get this for units:

Healing Power/ Health Increase

Which means that you need more and more healing power to get a proportional health increase at that level. What those numbers (4.8, 5.5) is how much healing power it takes for every health point increase. That number increasing is showing the increasing inefficiency of healing power.

As for why that number increases, it is quite simple: the bombs have an initial healing amount of 145. Healing power is adding on top of that, so the overall contribution of healing power gets larger and larger. As the contribution gets larger, the percentage that the initial 145 contributes gets smaller and smaller, and likewise how much heal per heal power you are getting gets more and more inefficient. In theory, if you had infinite healing power, that number would reach 10.

Why 10? Because it is the multiplicative inverse of 0.1, and as you heal more and more that initial 145 from bombs contributes less and less to the total. Anyway, the big thing to understand is that this number, although an interesting bit of trivia on limits, in the game it is ultimately meaningless. There is really only one thing to look at when dealing with healing power:

How much healing you are doing in proportion to how much heal you do without healing power. Basically this is “Am I healing 50% more, or 100% more?” and so on. You can look at this as an increase in survivability by charting how much you are healing over time, and comparing that to how much you would heal over time without compassion or how much damage you would mitigate with toughness or how much more damage you can take with vitality. The formula for this is a pretty simple new over old:

Total healing w/ healing power
———————————————————————
Total healing w/o healing power

And depending on how things work, you can consider those heals as an addition to your teammates survivability as well.

That is it as of now. I’ve considered making some formula to determine things like when healing power becomes more or less efficient for survivability than toughness and vitality, but that gets… complicated. Very complicated, considering that the whole thing is dependent on particular tactics and strategies used by the individual, and that there is no unified formula or way to interpret “survivability”.

Bhawb.7408:

Is burning the only thing we need? No. Burning does, however, have the chance to fix our offensive problems in Condition builds, and depending on how it is implemented has the chance to help out other build types; just based on how high base damage it is (and low scaling).

No one is saying we don’t need more than just burning. Minions, power builds, support, hybrid, every build we have still needs slight work on the defensive front (and some others), but this is a start to fixing our offense. And if you talk to any of the current top PvP Necros, you’ll see why burning is required.

The whole point of the argument is that we should get better use of poison and also access to confusion, since access to confusion would be a more reliable form of DPS in a group environment than burn. Nowhere am I suggesting that these changes above are all that we need.

flow.6043:

Interesting… although the title is kinda misleading, because you could have made your point regardless of whether or not we get burning.

In favor of your agenda, I think dropping poison from the scepter’s auto attack would be counter productive. Reapplying it more freqeuently (even with a short duration) should give you much more single target uptime than a skill that has a 10 second cooldown, because conditions get cleansed.
And another stack of bleeding on the scepter, with the 25 stack limit… I don’t know if this is such a good idea. So maybe keep Putrid Curse as it is and just add poison to Feast?

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Our skills can’t get permanent up-time by themselves, even with recharge reductions and 100% condition duration.

With 100% duration, Ligering Curse and Staff Mastery: Chilblains inflicts 12 seconds of poison on a 16 sec CD. On top of that you just need 1 Putrid Curse (4,5 sec poison).
And let’s not forget the transferable selfinflicted poison on Corrupt Boon.
Epidemic on all of that and you perma poison 5 targets… unless they cleanse.

Also, condition transfer (especially with Putrid Mark) is a rather unique feature of the necromancer. There is only the mesmer’s Arcane Thievery, which transfers 3 conditions like Deathly Swarm.
So when people complain that we don’t have access to a certain condition I always have to think: Putrid Mark.
In PvP this mark gives you access to every condition your opponent has. 1 hour of burning and 10 stacks confusion? Right back at you, and take some Epidemic with that, kthxbye.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see some more conditions for us, but the access to everything is already there.

The biggest issue I’ve had with the auto attacking being the primary source of poison is that, being the 3rd hit of a somewhat slow auto attack, it isn’t ever fired off in a PVP scenario. The auto attack chain is almost always interrupted by something else that needs to be used, or interrupted by enemy control. Because of this, even with the auto attack causing poison my opponents are rarely poisoned by it. The extra bleed added to the auto attack is more or less to put it on the same level as other condition auto attacks, which do apply bleeds with every strike instead of 2/3rds of the time. The rate at which necromancers can inflict bleeds is increased, and this also lets them deal with condition cleansing better.

I must also stress that other classes get permanent poison using a single skill with little assistance. They just need to use pistol #2, or just need to use serpent’s touch. Thieves require a bit of assistance with permanent poison in the venom or practical sustainability with the shortbow. Sure, if you layer up multiple of skills while specced for maximum condition duration you can get permanent poison, but no other class has to go through half that effort to sustain poison. Because of this, thy can devote their stats to others places where it is needed.

The problem with condition transferring is that the ball isn’t in the necromancer’s court. In order to get the extra benefit from confusion or burning, you have to hope your enemy applies that condition in a long enough duration for you to take advantage of it. Because if this, it is a less than reliable form of damage.

There really isn’t that much healing in the game. Drop the trinity notion before proceeding further.

Now, as for “hybrids” this usually refers to the type of damage done and not if you do damage. Nearly all builds do damage. There are two main forms of damage in the game: Conditions, and Direct Damage. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, but until you get to know more about the game I would suggest defaulting to direct damage, since it doesn’t have as many issues as condition damage at the moment.

Hybrid builds attempt to utilize both conditions and direct damage at the same time. If done right, these can do quite a bit of damage, and can have more options for versatility in builds. In general, though, going for pure direct damage (Berserker equipment) outdamages everything else, even condition builds.

Then it comes down to how survivable you want to be, and how much offense you want to sacrifice for that durability. With the ability to swap out equipment pieces and traits, you can come up with all kinds of stat distributions.

Now, Necromancers currently have two ways to acquire confusion. Ignoring playing an asura, the two ways both involve using Spectral Wall and a combo finisher. One is to use Nectrotic Transversal or Putrid Explosion in the wall to get Chaos Armor, and then hope that on strike the chaos armor gives confusion. The other is to use Grasping Dead along with the Flesh Worm or Bone Fiend through the field in hopes that it’ll trigger confusion as a combo finisher. Both of these are woefully unpredictable and inadequate.

I’m looking at confusion because, unlike burns, confusion isn’t capped out at 25 stacks just by having an engineer or mesmer on the team. It also isn’t available in some capacity to nearly every class like burn is. No, confusion provides a productive outlit in which a condition necromancer can contribute damage to a foe without having to worry about the condition cap. It isn’t overpowered in WvW anymore, so it would be a fairly safe bet that Necromancers getting confusion would contribute meaningfully to the class without making them overpowered. It isn’t like necromancers can avoid enemy attacks anyway. Also, it makes more sense that a class that raises the dead and exchanges life force might cause confusion instead of causing things to burst into flame somehow.

Unlike with poison, I do not have a specific suggestion for confusion. With the devs working on making trait changes, I would like to suggest there be a trait that can apply confusion in the new Necromancer lineup instead of burning. It would be far better for the class if this was done (especially alongside of the poison change). However, I will leave the creativity up to others and the devs on this issue, as I currently have no ideas how to implement such a thing.

I was writing a post in another thread, and this got me thinking a bit about the conditions we get as a necromancer. Or rather… the lack thereof. Now, burning on the Necromancer does sound nice. At first, anyway, But in situations other than 1 vs. 1, it seems like the Necromancer will just become something that is yet again redundant to Guardians and Engineers and Elementalists with their permanent burns. Even as an engineer it feels like half the time I am redundant in a fight since enemies are already permanently on fire anyway. As a necromancer, this sentiment will just be returned to me.

What I would really like to see is more of the conditions we already have. Currently for our DoTs we have bleeding and… on occasion poison and confusion if we do some very particular tricks to get it / run an asura. But lets think about how well we do our other main DoT, poison, and compare it to how other classes do it.

Engineer: Gets permanent AoE uptime with grenades #4, permanent single target uptime with pistol #2 + condition duration or recharge trait, and permanent cone uptime form pistol #2 with coated bullets.

Thief: gets permanent AoE uptime from choking gas but needs to sustain choking gas to retain the effect if there is no condition duration increases. Also gets uptime from the poison field + projectile finishers. Gets permanent single target uptime with Spider Venom + condition duration bonus or venom recharge or extra strike from venoms. Those are all in the same trait line. Also gets permanent single-target duration as long as auto attack is sustained.

Ranger: Gets permanent single target duration from Stalker’s Strike. Gets AoE permanent duration from Poison Volley, but only at point blank range. Gets permanent AoE poison duration with Viper’s Nest + Trap Potency Trait.

Necromancer: Gets permanent single target uptime only as long as scepter auto attack is sustained. Gets temporary AoE duration with Death Nova and Chillblains.

As far as poison goes, the Necromancer is the worst at it. We’re the only class with poison that really struggles to sustain it against an enemy. Our skills can’t get permanent up-time by themselves, even with recharge reductions and 100% condition duration. While using a conditionmancer in WvW, my opponents are never poisoned because the only source I can really use is Chillblains, which gives me a 56% sustain with my current set up. There is never a situation where just auto-attacking with the scepter is productive or even possible. Corrosive poison cloud is horrible because it stops poisoning as soon as my enemies walk out of it, and it punishes me with weakness for using it. Death Nova competes with boon removal and is only useful when my minions die off.

Being the worst at poison would be understandable if there was some kind of hierarchy with how well classes can use poison, but there isn’t one. It is just 3 classes that have permanent poison, and then there’s the Necromancer who doesn’t get it.

For this, I would recommend a rather simple change to the scepter:

Putrid Curse now does 5 second bleed like the rest of the skills instead of poison, and Feast of Corruption now does a 7 second poison.

And the following change to corrosive poison cloud:

Corrosive Poison Cloud now ticks once every 2 seconds, lasts for 8 seconds, and does 5 seconds of poison per tick.

This would give conditionmancers more access to poison that is on-par with other classes access to poison: Permanent with just a few trait points or traits. The damage will certainly help, and the anti-heal factor will be a big contributor now that it is actually around to be used.

EDIT: Fixed name error.

I could never find a place for deployable turrets in sPVP. In most of the fights I engage in, just putting the turrets down where I am is sufficient enough. Once all of the control starts flying, most people can’t destroy them. If they do destroy them, the turrets go boom and I get access to my toolbelt. When taking a point I"ll make a short lap around the area to spread turrets far enough apart that they don’t get all hit by the same AoEs.

Deployable turrets is much more fun in WvW. The cool thing about them is that you can throw the turrets on top of the walls of a tower or keep, and they provide can then hit things that you couldn’t hit originally, like those guys who hide on arrow carts sometimes. Although you would have to fully trait up turrets to make the best use of this, and turrets just aren’t as useful in WvW in the first place.

Being a holdover from City of Heroes, I’ve hosted dozens of raids myself. In fact, I started to become somewhat famous in my server for hosting the raids.

But from what I hear about raids in other games, I don’t think they are as blessed as the ones in CoH was. We all remember that audio clip of the guy hosting a raid who starts screaming obscenities about how someone messed up and are getting -50 DKP or whatever that is supposed to be. I get the feeling CoH raids were far easier due to the “potion system” in that game being lenient, and I think my server was particularly good at them. Heck, I still have the guide videos on youtube for most of them (abridged due to time, of course).

Anyway, there are a series of things that make raids as a whole rather unenjoyable in different gaming circles, as well as things that are just unenjoyable as a whole on the raiding aspect:

1): Incompetence grows exponentially with group size. When people say they want a 30 main raid, I continually picture this as 30 people who aren’t paying attention, 30 people who will disconnect, 30 people actively trying to troll the group, 30 people refusing to cooperate because they want to do it their way, 30 people with a superiority complex, 30 people who don’t speak english, and 30 people who turn chat off and refuse to listen. I have a hard enough time dealing with 4 players and all of the above, let alone piling 25 more on to that.

2): It’ll be a slaughterfest. The way the game is designed around personal safety and avoiding damage, making an event that auto scales for 30 people basically means that every attack will be a OHKO like it is with scaled up champions in the game.

3): It’ll be a lag fest. We already have culling issues, and even at minimum graphics my 4gb processor still messes up. LIkewise, people with older or slower computers end up with the short stick when it comes to raids.

4): Wouldn’t be able to see anything from all the effects.

5): Our players become nameless. In small content a single player has a noticable impact on how things play out, and you can formulate short term strategies based on what is needed to be done. In a group of 30, it’ll just be all DPS, DPS, and more DPS. Due to the AoE limits you won’t be able to heal the group or buff the group or defend the group or even do a ton of damage to an enemy zerg scaled to the size of 30 people.

6): Smaller servers will have a much harder time forming a raid than the larger servers do.

7): It is either a grind or it is never run. If it gives tokens or relies on the RNG, it’ll be an endless grind. If it just gives the reward out for succeeding, it’ll never be run by anyone more than once.

So in the end, you can’t see everything that is killing you in one hit while you have to reel in the incompetence of half the players, the absence of a quarter, and the whiney superiority complex of the remaining quarter, and you have to do this every day in succession for a week. Frankly, it just doesn’t sound appealing. It sounds more like a job then any actual “fun”.

The difference between pizza and lemongrass is that pizza still caps out at 100% condition duration, whereas lemongrass takes effect after all duration boons. In this line, Lemongrass trumps Pizza because Pizza just makes Lemongrass take more away.

Although I don’t have much of a problem with lemongrass when I go WvW with my condition necro. I think the big thing people are forgetting is that when you go for lemongrass and get condition resistance, you loose out on the buffs you can get from other foods. There are some pretty strong ones, such as might on dodge + 40% endurance regen rate (Bowl of Orrian Truffle and Meat Stew), Lifesteal on Crit (Omnomberry Ghost), the ability to cause constant might gain + chill (Ghost Pepper Popper), 85 HP/Sec (Mango Pie), or the raw power that Butternut squash gives.

For something like a Warrior that has little condition removal, this food is amazing. But for something like an engineer or a necromancer, they’ll want longer condition duration + damage. The thief wants raw power. Guardians and Elementalists already ignore conditions, so they go for more power or the HP regen or the extra dodges. I don’t know what rangers and mesmers go for, but if their behavior is any indication they go for raw power, too.

So all in all it is great if you are a warrior. If not, they’re something else you’ll want to get instead.

I can’t even get in to WvW. In SoR the queue is full for half hour at a time (that is how long I waited before I got in). Apparently SoR is going full force in this one to have a big show of presence.

Mostly its because I remember back in the day when SoR was being stomped by other servers. I used to join up small “havoc” groups that would run around capturing camps and stuff while everyone spawn camped.

deviller.9135:

No AOE cap, no cap retal incoming. You do barage/meteor, hit 60 people, 200*60 = 12000, for 1 hit. (boon capped ? Sure, you can make sure there are 12 guardian inside your zerg, make party, each party has a guard + any class with blast finisher (boon favor party) = all 60 get retal.). Remove AOE cap just make zerg bigger and bigger and the one who can put retal boon in entire zerg win the battle.

I calculated it out once assuming the removal of the boon target limit, and you only need 4 guardians for permanent uptime, assuming realistic circumstances:

Lets say that you have a guardian with 30 in virtues and 10 in Honor, with the trait Superior Aria. This gives Stand Your Ground a 24 second recharge while having a 6.5 second duration Vengeance. Then you take 24 / 6.5 and you’ll come up with 4 guardians for permanent retaliation uptime. As an extra bonus, this also gives permanent stability uptime.

Now, there are many ways you can make guardian builds to do this, but I chose this method over more extreme ones because it requires minimal investment. 40 trait points and one trait, and then you are good to go. Hence, why it is I am so afraid of removing a boon target cap.

I think the biggest reason why gear treadmills are effective is because it is a quantifiable improvement. When players grind out endlessly for these things, they can manage it because it truly feels like self improvement to them. The irony is thick here. At the end you get bigger numbers, get shinier gear, and become part of a more exclusive club.

I’m an immigrant from City of Heroes, though, so I’m full of alts with different builds and wearing spandex while shouting cheesy catchphrases from atop buildings.

I’ve been waiting for the second sigil for awhile now here. I’d prefer if they gave us the second sigil and just made it so one handed weapons didn’t suck as much or fix whatever arbitrary mental block Anet has on the issue.

Mesmers mess up my turret networks so bad it isn’t even funny. I haven’t done sPVP with my minion necro in a bit, but I doubt they have improved as far as chasing mesmers go.

^Technically poison is the worst DPS condition. It is only good for its anti-heal ability, and in PVE this is incredibly rare.

That said, I’d make a modified “convert to direct damage” system for poison and burning, since I am not sure that the game can handle giving everyone individual stacks for poison and burning.

For poison and burning, I would suggest there be a time cap instead of a stacking cap. For Burns it will be 15 seconds, and for poison it’ll be 1 minute. Any condition applied that would extend beyond this cap will instead do direct damage equal to the difference between the current duration and the cap, multiplied by how much damage that condition would do.

So, lets say you have a 10 second burn on an enemy. A 100% condition duration engineer does an 8 second burn with their crit proc. When this happens, the burn duration goes up to 15 seconds, and then the rest of the burn will do 3 x (burn damage) in direct damage to the enemy.

In addition, the poison and burning dots will retain the highest condition damage from whomever inflicted them, with lower condition damage just contributing to duration or doing direct damage. I’m fairly confident in saying that there isn’t need to be any changes to how confusion works, since achieving 25 caps is an incredibly difficult feat, let alone sustaining 25 caps of confusion or even surpassing them.

Personally I don’t have a problem with thieves. I like to think of ambush thieves (AKA backstab thieves) as the initiation into higher PVP. At first they seem like they are overpowered and way too strong and can get away from everything, but as you learn more about the game and get better at your class the threat of the ambush thief diminishes.

I thought this way before the haste nerf, too. I currently have 3 toons at 80 and 5 toons that I’ve gone into sPVP with: Engineer, Necromancer, Guardian, Mesmer, and my own Thief. Every single one of them has ways of dealing with a backstab thief. On my engineer, they’ll either get caught in my turrets or they’ll be burst down just as quickly with grenades and bombs or blown back by something else. Necromancer just pops Death Shroud to blow their entire haste and follows up with marks + wells inside of their shadow refuge. My own thief just vanishes into thin air and counter attacks just as well. My guardian just chases them around auto attacking, and my mesmer distortion’s and blocks the assault or teleports away then responds with stealth as well.

The most dangerous thieves are the ones that keep their distance, attacking primarily with the shortbow or the pistol. These are the tricky guys, because they aren’t bellying themselves up by spamming heartseeker, and they can maintain a steady offense while using stealth as a very effective defense. The scary part is that these guys CAN burst down an opponent quickly. They just choose to do it when it’ll win the fight, and not do it as quickly as possible in hopes that they’re attacking a newb. They’re evasive, capable of disengaging using something other than shadow refuge, and have more build diversity.

I find mesmers to be far more dangerous than the thief. They’re just as hard to catch, can just as easily disengage, all the while having twice as many tools at their disposal and also having more reliable burst. Plus, Moa Morph is just plain OP in 1 vs. 1. I won’t be calling for a thief nerf anytime soon.

Personally I like the long duration of your tutorial videos. With so many choices going in to whatever is chosen for a build, making something so comprehensive is bound to take forever. I know that if I were to explain all of the synergy that results from my builds, it would take an hour, too. Maybe it is just a holdover from college, but I can listen to someone with a foreign accent explain things for endless amounts of time. In fact, whenever I read your posts I automatically sub-vocalize it with your voice.

I prefer that to things like “Look at the highest max hit I can get!” stuff. This is a holdover from when I used to argue about balance in Runescape many years ago, and the big thing I always had to get past people was that the maximum hit that someone can do in some circumstance isn’t representative of the overall performance. This still shows up in these forums a lot, when people point at a channeled skill on a warrior or thief and say “Look at how big these numbers are! They obviously aren’t fair to #insert class here# that can’t hit that high”. And yet, so many don’t pay attention to the other things that contribute to that hit, such as if support classes gave them maximum might or the vulnerability stacks or if that enemy takes more damage or if that hit just happens to be a ton of crits.

Though that video will help to appeal to those who discriminate against necros because they don’t appear to hit big, beefy crits. Of course, they ignore that in peak conditions the necro does up to 100k damage every 12 seconds with epidemic, or that a coated bullets engineer can do 27k damage per auto attack, or that the thief’s sword auto attack chain hits for 11k on 3 different enemies. I’m sure the ranger has something like that, too, but since I haven’t played one I wouldn’t know.

Good luck on the CoF run. As much as I’d love to team up with you, unfortunately neither of the equipment sets I have on my necro are zerker. Also I’ve never run Cof1 in my life.

I have two sets on my engineer. One is full zerker, the other is a mix of rabid and carrion stuff.

I usually go for carrion when going with condition damage, since the power does more damage from direct damage than going for crits does. Though I do lose some of the procs, for an engineer it really isn’t that bad. With high fury uptime and Target the Weak, an engineer has a lot more precision than their equipment screen shows. The burn proc is highly reliable in the first place, and I get enough from the bleed proc as is. Steel packed explosives procs on regular hits (or is it shrapnel? One of those causes bleeds in grenades).

Although I usually combine the carrion an zerker gear in PVE. It gives me a lot of power while also giving me plenty of condition damage. Sometimes I go full zerker, but in WvW I usually go with the full carrion + rabid and stack might for additional power.

subcrazy.1098:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

stuff

I just want to talk about boons they wont have 100% up time on anything unless they are organized zerg which I know is out there and that’s cool. The reason boons are not on 100% of the time is cause u cant zergball no more you need to spread out and if ur not by ur guard (for example) your not getting boons from him no more cause your out of range.

There’s a problem with that, though. If the group gathers together AND stacks retaliation up, then they lose the need to ever fragment themselves. They can just stack up all the boons they want because whomever attacks them will be hit with 50 ticks of retaliation for every attack. Even if you assume it only does about 200 damage per tick that comes to 10,000 damage with every AoE. It’s enough to drop a zerker elementalist or thief in one attack. Even while wandering around when not in combat, they can keep permanent uptime on retaliation without using blast finishers. They can also keep permanent stealth up, and also have better stability.

Removing the AoE caps on boons just helps the bigger groups get stronger and smaller groups fall behind. The bigger groups get more classes, they get more boons, and they get better boons. They also get better heals, and more AoEs to fight back with. Ultimately, the boon target cap MUST remain in place, especially if the AoE target damage cap is removed.

From my experience, the greatest weapon against an engineer is distance. This is true in both sPVP and WvW, but my advice will continue on assuming this is WvW.

Although we have some far reaching options, using them at max range makes them ineffective. Our skills usually have one or two far reaching abilities, but the rest are only good at short or medium range. Because of this, the most effective strategy a thief can use is to keep us at arms length with the shortbow or the pistol. Use whatever evasive skills you have to maintain distance and avoid the big shots, while using teleports + stealth to keep the engineer confused and occupied. Doing this, you can eventually take down an engineer.

Many will recommend using the sword/dagger combo to strip boons, however keep in mind this is VERY dangerous to pull off. At point blank range against an engineer you will be hit very hard with chilling grenades, confusion from bombs/prybar, and probably a 14 second burn afterwards. Engineers respond to ambushed by using all of our strongest kit skills at point blank range, and even without the might stacks they can kill a thief very quickly. Remember: Engineers do get haste as well.

Another important thing is cleansing conditions. This is usually an important thing anyway, but against the engineer it is really important for several reasons. One, engineers get every condition. Two, engineers get a lot of conditions. Three, engineers get a lot of control as well. Without proper cleansing, being caught in the control network a turrent engineer has spells certain death. Devoted condition engineers get some very nasty burns and bleeds, and will usually have chills/cripples/immobilize as backups. Certain builds are also really effective at poison and confusion, and sometimes all at once. Without adequate condition cleansing the engineer will out endurance you, since you will be permanently on fire and they have 60% more HP to start with.

The effectiveness of particular tactics does depend on what the engineer is running. Boon stealing, for example is no use against an engi that doesn’t stack boons. Keeping distance is very hard against an engineer who the toolkit or supply crate. A power/zerker engineer can nigh obliterate you with the rifle auto attack alone, and match you hit for hit at range. Ambushing an engineer can be anywhere from the best tactic (support/healing engineers) to a really bad idea (grenadiers and Protection Fueled Injection), and due to the very wide diversity between builds there is never a way that a thief can ever safely claim they can counter any engineer they find.

Regardless, I still recommend distance as the number one survival tactic a thief can use. It is the most effective against the most builds, and against the builds it isn’t effective with hopefully you can disengage. For a thief this is really hard, though, since they don’t have good range either, and they lack the engineer’s true weakness: boon stacking.

I’ve found Hounds of Balthazar to be superior to the elites I get on my Engineer. I’ve been able to pull off a whole lot more with the puppies than I have with supply crate, mortar, or elixir X

I’ve personally held a tower against a group of 30 by myself before. It isn’t that hard to figure out how to do it, either. I went up to a vantage point that gave me a view of the door, and then built a superior arrow cart up there by myself. I sat there waiting for awhile, and then when a large enemy group came up and started making rams, I rained down damage against them and they had to abandon their pursuit. This group lacked the wit to defeat me, so I was all proud afterward.

That said, I wouldn’t mind more equipment that either punishes large groups or strengthens the little man. The hard part about this is that most things that help the little man also help the big one even more. Take the AoE limits. Now, a lot of players are saying that removing the AoE limits will benefit the little guy, but the fact is that it benefits the giant zergs more. Without the AoE boon limit, zergs would be running around permanently under maximum might, invisible, and with 100% uptime on retaliation. So instead you would have to get rid of the AoE limit for just damaging attacks, but even then this leads to more abuse via retaliation, since instead of just 5 ticks you can now be hit for 50 ticks. Removing the AoE cap, even on just offense, makes the whole game about retaliation then.

Lets say you want more mobile siege that isn’t as expensive as golems, letting groups get mobility and strength. That’s nice, until you realize that zergs can make them too, and so zergs change from giant balls of players to giant balls of players and roaming chariots. Since the bigger groups have more people and more supplies that have better abilities to make these things.

Lets say you want to make damaging traps in WvW. It sounds great, because when players bunch up they’ll take a ton of damage, and with the low cost of traps it can make defense and offense better. But then, the zerg balls get these traps, too, and suddenly your small group can’t wander anywhere because damage traps litter the field and are in every camp, every tower, and every keep.

Lets say you want to remove the in-keep waypoints. That way, it is easier to assault different points on the map while making it harder for a giant zerg ball to rush in and stomp you. Problem is, the giant zerg ball can do this too, so without the sheer numbers to defend the towers and keeps the zerg ball will just run through everything, smashing through defenses like they’re paper while taking everything and your group can’t get there fast enough to defend. Because they stay together they stay alive, and by staying alive they can maintain more presence at the frontlines.

I wrack my mind with this frequently. I’ll think of something that I think will help out the little man, but then I think about it more and I discover that it’ll help out the big groups more. At the end of the day, pretty whomever has superior numbers has the advantage. The best things I can come up with are the removal of the AoE damage cap (which CAN bite you back but won’t always), and damaging traps which indeed are more effective against tightly packed groups. At the same time, this will make things harder for smaller groups, but it can give them an edge if used right.

Personally I’d just get rid of all waypoints other than the entrance. That way, defense is more important than offense.

If you so desire to know it, then you can do the legwork. Like I said, the math isn’t too complicated..

Also your argument for a DPS meter is flawed. If you want a DPS meter because combat is too complicated to do math with, then the meter is useless because it can’t apply any meaningful real-time information to the fight that isn’t readily observed by just looking at the screen. The most it could do is tell you how much you did afterward, and in the end all that will ever be is a fraction of the damage from a steady maximum calculated out mathematically.

Deniara Devious.3948:

Could you please tell me couple of examples of the creative use of a siege?

So you ask for examples then declare me wrong before I respond…

Do me favor, prove to me that you can even listen to what I say, Mr. “I bold important things because they’re just so true”.

And the hardest part about all this is coordination. You see, there is no one there to teach you the proper timing on when to push, when to veil, when to lay down the stun fields, where the melee train should go, where the ranged group should sit, where to focus the choke points, when to bunch up and use blast finishers, when to use what field, when to lay down siege, what siege to use, what targets to single out, what to pull, where the best treb points are, how to blindly treb, where to put traps, and for all of the things I have forgotten to mention. You have to learn the timing for things, and get the feel for the combat. Then you can start to build up counter strategies, like laying down AoEs against stealthed melee trains, stacking stability patches into choke points to run right through them, and using decoy groups so you can counter-pincer an enemy zerg.

I think people who think it is just a numbers game haven’t seen some of the tactics I have. I have been on both the winning and losing side to these tactics, and they are incredibly effective.

What usually happens (in SoR, anyway. Since I’ve seen other servers do this I assume they do it, too) is we get into mumble or raidcall or something like that with each other, and then we have a commander who is good enough to actually command on the field give orders. We’ll do our standard “how many guardians, how many staff elementalists, how many necromancers, how many mesmers” tallying to get our specs before we run off.

Then, we’ll try every method in the book to take other people down. What we’ll do a lot of the time is we’ll break off into two distinct groups that travel together: the melee group and the range group. The melee group is full of thieves, guardians, warriors, mesmers, and a few support players. The range group is full of elementalists, necromancers, engineers, rangers, and also some support players or players that don’t quite fit the bill.

The two groups, often times having individual commanders, will act differently. The melee group will hold point while the range group attacks form afar. The melee group will push while the range group will provide support to push. The melee group will self sacrifice while the range group retreats. The melee group will siege while the range group provides defense for that siege. Ultimately, with a series of walls and pulls, the melee group provides the most DPS, and by charging forward they can fragment enemy groups while getting tons of kills. The most important tactic is pincer formation, in which we attack an enemy group from two angles. Since they can only look one way and support tends to only function in one way, a well done pincer maneuver can put the end on a larger and superiorly equipped zerg.

Then there are also the class specific tactics that get used. The mesmers are often on the melee group because they have veil, and the melee group will often stack veil so they can run in undetected, then burst DPS the center of an enemy zerg as hard as possible inside of a time warp. Once the core of the zerg is either dead or dying, their strategy falls apart and lets the rangers control and kill them off. As the necro I often run in the melee group so I can use spectral wall to give everyone protection, and then use Putrid Mark in the melee train to transfer their conditions away, making the melee train nigh unstoppable for 8 seconds. When you have 10 or so people bashing everything in sight with a hammer and greatsword, those 8 seconds means victory. Antoher thing done is the groups will bunch up, while having an elementalist/engy drop a fire field so they can spam blast finishers to stack up 25 stacks of might, and once that is enough they’ll use a light field to get massive retaliation. Often times the best weapon against an arrow cart is mass retaliation, so knowing when to stack might and when to stack retaliation is quite important for the zerg. The elementalists with staves will use the lightning field to stun the enemy, while guardians will use warding to lock opponents down and defend a spot, and then necromancers will use well of corruption to remove stability, making a big control spot at a choke point in which everyone can use everything else and obliterate whomever comes through. This controlling choke point tactic is capable of downing zergs of nearly any size when done right, due to how zergs tend to trail behind themselves as time goes on.

The thieves are excellent at bursting down troublesome targets. I’m not talking about those wimpy ambush thieves that attack for no reason. I’m talking about coordinated thieves that target a single guardian or elementalist or memser in the group, and hit them at the same time. This takes out the time warp or the portal or the lighting field or whatever is causing the problem. The rangers and engineers provide wonderful offensive pressure at maximum range, and the rangers can provide great single target pressure at that range as well.

Personally I like the idea of siege. It lets many classes contribute to different situations regardless of their specs, and depending on the siege it encourages creativity in use. It is unfortunate that we don’t see that much creativity in siege nowadays. Mostly it is just “lay down rams at the gate” or “put trebs real far away to break a wall” or something like that.

When used right it can also let the little man do a ton of damage to zergs. One of my favorite things to do is precariously place a superior arrow cart in a spot that lets me target the whole gate of a tower and keep, and wait for some zerg to rush in. Then I call my buddies over and watch as the combined effort of my arrow cart with their attacks + ballista, and watch as the loot bags just pile up. It seriously lets me defend a keep single-handed.

I do think there should be more kinds of siege. What I’d like to see is more mobile siege. Golems are nice, but what also would be cool are chariots, or something else like that that is mobile while also lower in cost and effectiveness. That way you can get a cavalry effect going with siege, instead of having to run up and then build it right in an enemy group’s face.

The real question is, can math include those things, period. My math isn’t some kind of special brand. Math is math.

As for dodges and screw ups, unless someone has managed to make some differential equation that counts for both personal skill and whatever skill level your opponent has, then no there isn’t anything that can calculate that for someone. There also isn’t any reason to know what the overall DPS during the fight was, since all that will be is a fraction of the maximum you can pull off, so building for a high steady rate is still the best thing to do.

If you wanted to, you could go deep into experimentation by taking the summation of hundreds of fights to find the median dodge frequency, but you can calculate the maximum dodge frequency under various conditions. Just remember that the baseline for endurance regeneration is 1 dodge every 10 seconds or 20 seconds for a full bar, and then you can feel free to add on vigor or other endurance regenerating abilities. Dodges also last for 3/4ths of a second.

Healing sills can definitely be accounted for. In fact, there’s more than one way to account them. You can us healing skills as either a factor of survivability, or as a factor for sustaining damage. You can combine this with toughness and vitality to find out durability, and then you can either use DPS to find how much more likely you are to survive a fight. Or, if you are more offensively focused, you can use this survivability to find out how long you can sustain DPS in different circumstances.

So much is possible if you want to put the grunt work to get the numbers for it.

Frankly, I would mind if WXP was on a character by character basis if it was a little easier to get. I’ve been waiting to get arrow cart mastery on my main WvW toon for about a week now, but in all the things I have been doing lately I have yet to get a single WxP level on that oon.

I’m in SoR, and I worked hard to get as far as I did in WvW. We also have good commanders with better strategies than “push and pull back”. I can’t count how many times I’ve been in a zerg vs. zerg fight where, through better tactics, SoR won despite being outnumbered. I’ve spent a lot of time tweaking my build and coming up with tactics that aren’t to just pwn random wandering n00bs, but to actually win at WvW. And the results have been awesome.

If the problem is that you can’t get your DPS without a DPS meter, then I would suggest you get better math skills. The formulas this game uses for damage aren’t complicated, even with the RNG aspect involved. The hardest part would be determining the overall time it takes to execute attacks (recharge + activation time + animation time), and even then you can round part of that off due to how ubiquitous animation time is.

Damage is as follows:

Damage = Power x Weapon Strength x Skill Coefficient / Armor

Power = Your Power stat
Weapon Strength = The range of power that is listed on each weapon. RNG applies here.
Skill Coefficient = A certain multiplier that is attached to each skill that does damage. This is not displayed.
Armor = Opponents armor value.

The tooltip each skill uses is based on the average weapon strength, and assumes an opponent with 2600 armor. Because of this, you can calculate how much damage you’ll do against any amount of armor by multiplying the tool tip by 2600/(Desired Armor Value).

Crits works as such:

Damage x ((1.5 +Crit damage) x (Precision – 832)/21 + 1 – (Prec – 832)/21 )

Or basically

Damage x (How much crits hurt x How often you crit + how often you don’t crit)

This whole " how often you crit" thing comes into play quite a bit often. For procs without a cooldown, you can find the DPS it contributes by basically doing

(Prec – 832)/21 x Probability of Proc occurring x Damage proc will inflict.

For procs with a cooldown it is more complicated. I prefer to use 90% likelyhood as a baseline for figuring out how long it’ll take to proc after the cooldown is reached. By assuming so many “hits” until something procs, you can take the time of those hits and add it to the recharge to get the total effective recharge. Specifically it is:

X hits (round up) = log(0.1) / log (1 – proc chance x (prec – 832)/21)

Or basically

X hits = -1 / log( 1 – proc chance x crit chance)

And if it is a proc chance that isn’t based on crits, then you can just forget the crit rate portion of that calculation. So, for example, if we wanted to find out how many hits it would take for a superior sigil of ice to proc with a 50% crit chance, we’ll get

X = -1 / log (1 – 0.3 × 0.5)
X = 14.16
X = 15 hits

And then after taking your average hit rate an multiply that by X to get the additional recharge time. So if you landed 1 attack per second, that would be 15 seconds, or a total of 25 seconds to cause a chill (90% certainty). I left the log (0.1) in there because some people will use 50% as a benchmark instead of 90% like I do. Ultimately it is arbitrary what you choose, and likewise any damage meter will choose an arbitrary value for this as well.

BTW, the original formula before I solved it looked like this:

1 – (1 – crit chance x proc chance)^# = 0.9

If you wanted to go through every permutation in which every skill can work, we’ll be here all day. But, here are the basics as to how to calculate your DPS. If it is so crucial to know your damage per time, then figure it out on your own instead of demanding some extra feature that does all the work for you and is used to discriminate against players. DPS isn’t some mystical proportion divined by a prophetic program. It is just run of the mill number crunching and mild experimentation.

Necromancers can be insane with AoE bleeds if they run an epidemic build. Necromancers also have something that is nearly unique in how well they can transfer conditions. Seriously, against a conditionmancer it is nigh impossible for another condition class to beat them, since the conditionmancers will just throw everything right back at them.

Necros also have a lot of stuns in an AoE instead of single target. Necromancers have great scaling with vitality due to life force generation, we arguably have the best pull in the game due to spectral grasp. Necromancers have the highest HP pool tied with warriors as well, and with Death Shroud this makes them have the highest statistical durability out of every class.

Necromancers can stack weakness and vulnerability pretty well. Spectral Wall, IMO, is a really awesome ability in WvW, since it allows you to give an entire zerg protection. This can determine the winner or loser of a zerg vs. zerg fight single-handed. Along that vein, necromancers are also the only class that has instantaneous and unblockable long-distance AoE attacks, which make them great at arms length. Necromancers can be decent healers, too, what with the ability to use two Well of Bloods (one on heal skill, one on revival), + healing with life transfer + permanent regen from the staff + good condition transferring abilities.

Necromancers also have the best dark combo fields in the game. Though dark fields aren’t super useful, since all they do is blind and life steal so make of that what you will. Necromancers also are the only class that has a lot of life stealing. While each individual steal isn’t much, when compounded together to the point of obscenity they become quite effective.

Personally I use Weakening Shroud to get enfeebling blood. It’s on a much shorter recharge and works right when you need it.

#4.5: To combat this, several regulations are put in place that harm the players. Most of us hate the diminishing return thing because it comes back to bite us unintentionally. Other games will sometimes have other features, like ones that require spontaneous puzzle solving before the game gets locked or others require captcha that are impossible to read to get through, or something else like that.

I myself have mixed feelings about farming. This comes from all the different games I’ve played, which had various different takes on farming.

I myself have farmed before and do sometimes see the need to farm. This game has temporary content, and with many of the stylish things in game only coming possibly once, playing for extended amounts of time to earn them or get enough gold to buy them from other players. Sometimes you are trying out various builds and specs, and due to the uncertain nature of things you don’t want to wait a week just to see if you like how a build plays out. So you go out and grind for equipment to try things out. Maybe your guild buddies need a certain profession, and you think you can fulfill that role. So, you go out and grind to level then get the equipment. Maybe you have limited game time, and the few hours you have make it so casual play for cash doesn’t cut it when you finally get higher level. So, you farm a bit then get the gear.

I can understand players wanting to play the game a certain way. However, this does come with several caveats to have a system like this.

#1: Farming content can trivialize the rest of the game. This is a big one, and I encountered it heavily when I played Phantasy Star Universe. Due to the items in a certain area being high in demand, all of the players would flock to only one area and play only that area. This discourages players playing areas other than the farming ones, largely because there’s no one to help them and it doesn’t give as much money as easily as the farming content does. GW2 does a decent job of avoiding this, though it still does show up time to time (coughCof1cough). This drives players away, because that big and expansive world diminishes into 2 or 3 spots where you can actually do anything.

#2: Farming can trivialize or overinflate the economy. Whichever this does depends on the system in place: If the game is highly dependent on in-game shops, then farming trivializes. If the game is highly dependent on player trading, then it overinflates. While farming, players dump both a lot of gold and a lot of items into the game, and without proper sinks this can lead to there being a bunch of super expensive super rare items while the ones obtained from farming are basically crap that is ineffective at gathering enough wealth to afford the better stuff. This leads players to do two things: first they will seek out new avenues to obtain wealth until the system homogenizes, or they will just farm the same spot more now that farming isn’t as effective.

#3: Basing the game around the presence of farming discriminates against those who do not like to farm. This is a big one with Runescape, where uber boss enemies have one out of a five-hundred-thousand chance of dropping a big otherwise unobtainable and yet necessary item. Guild Wars 2 avoids this, thankfully, by using untradeable currencies for untradeable items, instead of making the RNG the literal god of fortune in the game. There are some issues with super-rare items, like seasonal skins from holidays or precursors, but it isn’t too bad.

#4: Farming is highly exploitable by botting and gold sellers. This is another big one. Whenever there is a certain spot or path or event that gives more than the others, since it is the same spot/path/event over and over again, this makes it really easy to make bots to play this area, and also attracts gold sellers. Then they hound this area, making it impossible to farm for others if it is out of an instance, and thus the best way to get money ends up being to use the now cheaper gold offers from China. Due to this, the economy still inflates in the game, but now the only means of coping are ill gotten ones.