Guild Wars 2

Just run epidemic in dungeons. Then you can kill off the entire room really quickly after you do 80k worth of damage every 12 seconds.

Think that is an exaggeration? The bleeds from epidemic copy your condition damage, so if you are running a condition build and have 1600 or so condition damage, with bleeds doing 120 damage per tick. If an enemy has 25 bleeds (which is quite easy in a dungeon), each of them with an average duration of 7 seconds, and you copy that to 5 additional enemies, then

120 dps x 25 bleeds x 7 seconds x 5 enemies = 105,000 damage.

And with the right trait, you can do this every 12 seconds. You can always tell when you have a good condition necro on the team when every enemy in the room is half dead once you’re finished with the first silver rank enemy. It’s really nice when you can kill all the adds without changing focus from the champion. The trait to reduce the recharge is nice but it isn’t necessary, since most of the time you’ll only need to use epidemic once per group.

Of course if you don’t want to run a condition build, you can always do something else. You could try a well melee build, then throw down some wells to give protection and do damage while healing and converting boons into conditions. Follow up with some bone minions for wandering targetable AoE blast finishers, and if you’re taking the aggro you can use the flesh golem to double your damage output with his high damage. Thankfully the dagger’s auto attack does 30% more damage than the thief’s exact replica of that auto attack, and you can get permanent retaliation to yourself if you opt for the axe. Or if you want to use support, you could always use spectral wall with spectral attunement, so you can have a protection + vulnerability granting ethereal field that lasts for 16 seconds. Use the staff to transfer (not just cure, but transfer) all conditions your group has to your enemies while giving everyone in that same proximity permanent regeneration. If that doesn’t work, they do have the fastest charging instant rez at 144 seconds for up to 3 people.

Necromancers have a lot of problems with their skills and their design philosophy. However, those problems are mostly in sPVP. In PVE and WvW, Necromancers are pretty good. Get a team with cooperation (recognize spectral wall, use combo finishers in darkness fields, stack conditions on one target ASAP, etc), and Necromancers are great.

Harbinger.8637:

I think it’s a bugged on my server. There’s an area where there are +20 stacked Risen. Like I’ve only seen Gates of Arah event finished twice in the past couple of months.

Those are the risen at the end of the event. They pose a big threat but there is a way to beat them by yourself. You see, if you manage to preserve the entire clan’s morale, then it is possible for all of them to die but still have enough morale to all be rezzed and continue the event. This has to be done tactically, and is best at the poison cloud section of the event, because lets face it: they’ll all die there anyway no matter what you do. Then, once they are all dead, you can run up and take out that horde of risen very quickly.

The advantage to that horde is that it is tightly packed. Because of this AoE effects can just tear them up. I have been able to kill all of them in one go on two different classes solo: On my thief I would go into stealth, drop smoke screen and caltrops on them, lay down the poison cloud for weakness, then switch to d/d and spam death blossom on the group. The nobles only use their AoE as a gap closer, so maintaining close distance is key. Once initiative is usesd up, I use a closely circling Dagger Storm to apply more bleeds, then afterward vanish in stealth and lay down caltrops again, repeating the process soon afterward.

On the engineer I used hounds of balthazsar, then smoke bomb + fire bomb, then I followed that up with the pistol’s auto attack + coated bullets to do massive AoE damage to the whole group. They didn’t last very long after that.

The really hard part of this, of course, is getting them to the poison cloud phase alive. I’ve only managed to do it once, and that was a fluke since the majority of enemies didn’t even spawn on that run. Every time they die earlier than the poison cloud, and not once have I managed to get them to survive that part. At the poison cloud they scatter, so you can’t heal them up.

Orr was a good place me. I used to go there because the events were fun.

Being insta-gibbed by invisible mobs and failing events 10 seconds into them is not fun. Now… I just don’t play as much anymore.

I agree with the OP on the thief. I have leveled the engineer, the necromancer, and the thief to level 80, and so far the thief is the only one I really don’t like playing to much. Why? Well, it’s quite simple to just say what you said:

“Thief go melee, Thief go splat”.

The low amount of HP the class has makes it, in PVE, so frail that it is nearly impossible to fight any mob in melee that isn’t by itself. The main defense of the thief is dodging, but that doesn’t work at all. The weapon skills for dodging don’t interrupt animations from previous skills, and due to the lag behind ending animations and the use of the next skill, I never know whether that quarter-second dodge from Death Blossom will fire off immediately or fire off 3/4ths of a second later (and yes, I have timed that large of a delay in the skill). Given that the dodge skills have a margin for error of three times their own length, this makes any active evasion at its best a fluke on this class. Even the sword and the shortbow’s evasion won’t fire off when you need it.

The best strategy for melee I’ve found so far is to use sword/pistol. Fire off pistol #5 for the smoke cloud, then swing away with the sword’s auto attack, cleaving multiple enemies at once. The second best strategy is to spam death blossom on a condition build then hide while the conditions do the damage. Pretty much everything else I’ve tried really doesn’t work. S/D has some stuns but they are short duration, and the evade doesn’t work. D/P does laughable damage to a single target, with a signature skill that will just get you killed. D/D gives death blossom, but for anything that isn’t a condition thief will be killed when there is more than one target.

The worst part of this is that, at the end of the day, the DPS I’m getting from the thief is inferior to the necromancer and the engineer. The engineer has its own problems, sure, but at melee range the rifle in combination with the bomb kit or even the elixir kit can do good damage, and it does this in large AoEs. At a distance, grenades hit the condition cap by themselves and a coated bullets pistol can hit for 26k damage total over an enemy group with their auto attack alone. And that is coming from a support class. The necromancer’s dagger auto is, kitten for tat, stronger than the thieves identical attack chain. Even then, there are a ton of things to fall back on, such as wells and minions for high sustained damage and the always present death shroud for strong single target damage. Necros do their best AoE damage with conditions thanks to epidemic, which WILL melt the face off of everything in the room. That’s quite a lot coming from a class that is, by default, around 80% more durable than the thief.

The thief’s trick is high single target burst damage. This is decent in PVP (personally I’ve never had a problem with ambush thieves), but in PVE it is useless. First, most overworld enemies are too weak to use this on, and anything that is a veteran and higher has such a high HP count that burst damage is completely useless. Second, there is rarely ever a single enemy there to fight. In high level events on the overworld the game spawns more enemies than the computer can process, and in dungeons you’ll get 5 or so silver mobs with every single group encounter..

The only other trick they have is stealth, and while it is nice to sneak past a bunch of mobs in a dungeon and rez the dead without being hassled, ultimately stealth in PVE ends up being a 4 second “aggro free” time before the thief goes back to being pummeled. Other than a few miscellaneous tricks like Smoke Screen and Bountiful Theft, the thief doesn’t have any real useful support skills. And certainly not ones that work at melee range.

I have a motto: anything that doesn’t work is, by default, bad. No matter how innovative the design of something is, how novel the idea behind it, how much money went into it, etc. If it doesn’t work, it is bad.

I do wish more resources were put into bugfixing than what are currently. I can’t use my engineer in sPVP anymore because none of the turret traits work.

Personally, I don’t want my off-days to be the overall determiner of how valuable I am as a player.

I have multiple toons because I tend to create a little fantasy land in my head where all of my toons have personality and interact with each other and stuff. It’s like my own personal action/comedy/drama show that I write in my head as things go along.

Also I like to play the game in different styles. Each class feels and plays so different that I have to think differently with each one.

The horrible ranged weapons are a problem for many classes. They should be fixed for many classes:

Scepter Guardian
Longbow Warrior
Staff Elementalist
Thief Shortbow
Staff Necromancer

Are a few that come to mind. If the projectile isn’t homing, then make it faster. No class is fun when an opponent can beat you just by wiggling.

Also see the other side of that law:

Sufficiently analyzed magic is completely indistinguishable from technology.

The hardest part about perpetually having magic is that magic can only violates the nature of things once. Then, once that new phenomena is discovered and studied, then that new knowledge becomes the nature of the universe. Indeed, the laws of physics are constantly changing. For awhile we thought matter could not be created or destroyed, but then we learned off mass energy conversion. Then we thought that energy couldn’t be created or destroyed, but then we learned about virtual particles spawned from the uncertainty principle that dictated nuclear strong force.

Inevitably it will come to an end. Every time the laws of physics are broken, they mend and restructure into something else that incorporates the previous law-breaking phenomena. To come up with something that is “magic” that will not eventually be broken down into a naturalistic explanation is truly a remarkable feat. To this day I haven’t seen a fantasy setting ever accomplish such a feat.

I agree with the OP. That DR is nasty, and it makes me paranoid that I’m just wasting my time when I’m looking for specific crafting components.

Particularly the first event. I’ve spent the last hour trying to do this event, and I have to say it is impossible. There are several reasons why, but it basically boils down to this: the event was designed back when there were meant to be a ton of weak mobs all over orr. Since the mobs have been buffed, the event has become too difficult. The first problem is as follows:

#1: The NPCs die stupidly easy. There are several parts where a veteran behemoth just charges right through the group, and he can kill them almost instantly once his frenzy is up.

#2: The enemies are all Risen Nobles. The problem being that Risen Nobles have a teleport + damage AoE power. This attack cannot be interrupted because it is instantaneous. This attack cannot be stopped; not even killing the noble will stop the damage patch. This attack is used in swarms, with 6 or 7 nobles using it simultaneously. This attack cannot be out-healed, due to its high damage and the fact that there are 7 of them at one spot.

#3: The friendly AI is too stupid to not stand in the damage patch, and pretty much every enemy will ignore all players and go straight for the NPCs. This is made worse by the fact that enemies surround the NPCs and cannot be intercepted.

#4: This is not a group event. It is a regular event, even though no single player can complete it.

#5: There is no NPC to start the event. The event just starts regardless if anyone is ready, which means that the NPCs just suicide themselves against the first wave of enemies. This makes forming a group for this event impossible, since no on is willing to stand around waiting for the event to restart after it has already failed.

Combine all of these and you get what is an impossible event to complete. Much like the balthazar event chain, it needs a revision to make possible.

To get that high, max might is usually required. I myself rarely tick for more than 140. I use full carrion gear, 6 runes of the afflicted (the duration is better than the damage increase from undead), along with tuning crystals and rare veggie pizza. At that point I’m usually at 1600+ condition damage, which hits for 123 or so per tick.

However, I don’t have completely pure condition equipment. There are a few things that can be added to really push it:

Armor/Weapons/Trinkets: Rabid
Runes: x6 Runes of the Afflicted
Sigils: Sigil of Superior Corruption / Earth
Build: 20/30/20/0/0
Food: Rare veggie pizza + quality tuning crystal

Sits at 1674 condition damage. The sigil of Corruption adds an additional 250 to come to 1924. 25 stacks of might can come to a total of 2799 (rounded to 2800). This causes bleeds to tick for 182 damage.

I can’t see a way to get higher than that.

In the SoR/JQ/BG fights, melee is everywhere. It’s high damage and quick execution make it the preferred medium to killing things. There are several places where it shows up:

*I use a staff necromancer, and while I don’t generally melee myself, I do use Spectral Grasp a lot. Whether chasing someone down, pulling someone off a wall, or in a zerg vs. zerg fight, I like to pop Spectral Grasp to yank one enemy into melee range. Then the meleers (guardians and thieves mostly) focus on that stunned + chilled enemy, killing him almost instantly. Also, if in an organized group going for a push, I’ll lay down Spectral Wall to give an entire zerg protection. Then the meleers jump ahead and lay waste.

*In more organized zergs, there will be several “Push” guardians. What they’ll do is rush forward with stability, then stagger their walls of reflection. This allows their team to rush forward behind the safety of the wall, and in response the other zerg has to run back. While doing this, the guardians melee to death anything that crosses the wall. Little note: here is when I like to use Spectral Grasp. Doing this over and over again, these 3 or 4 guardians can push back an enemy zerg quite far, even when grossly outnumbered.

*If there are several mesmers in the group, the use of Veil + Mass Invisibility can be outright deadly. MI has a 10 target limit instead of 5, and Veil is a wall so it has a limitless target limit. What several mesmers will do is lay down 2 or 3 veils and use MI while someone uses swiftness. Then, when the entire zerg has stealth for 12 seconds or so, they wall run into the middle of an enemy group and just raise hell.

*Portal. Often times a mesmer will squeak their way past a defensive wall, then set up a portal. Immediately afterward, 20 or so melee classes will rush in using all of their burst skills. It can melt enemy zerges in seconds. The mesmers will often run in and use Blurred Frenzy and spam clones, exploding them for mass confusion.

*Ambush thieves will often join a zerg, and their primary job is to find any troublesome class (skirting mesmer, pushing guardian, the guy manning siege), and then hit them with everything they’ve got. They use something like Mug to close the distance and hit hard, follow up with backstab + heartseeker, ending with a stealth stomp. Sometimes even downing the enemy player is enough, since it creates an opening for teammates. These ambush thieves are worse in WvW than they are in sPVP, since they can come from anywhere and have the ridiculous DPS of zerker gear.

And those are the main ways I see melee being used. There are, of course, zerg balls and melee trains and all that, too.

I have my concerns, but I’m willing to get rid of the AoE cap just to see what happens.

My concerns are basically the following:

#1: Necromancers. Get, like, 5 of these guys together to run up and use Life Transfer on an enemy zerge. No more zerge. Also marks and wells can be devastating without any limits. Marks hit once so they aren’t limited by retaliation, are instantaneous, and have long range.

#2: Stealth. Particularly Thief Shadow Refuge. Just get 5 of them together to use Shadow Refuge and then a zerge of any size is now completely and permanently invisible. That is, of course, until they come out of nowhere and attack a group.

#3: Retaliation. Any advantage gained by having limitless AoE is immediately countered by the fact that a zerge could have retaliation on every toon. Specced up, 4 guardians could give an entire group permanent retaliation.

So if anything, I’d make it so damaging attacks have unlimited AoE while boons do not have unlimited AoE. That permanent stealth + retaliation thing is nasty.

Conditions only do good damage in long term. In short term they don’t do anything, so it is fairly safe to let 10 bleeds or so stack up before bothering to cleanse them.

I’d suggest making offense your defense. If an enemy is constantly under control, being burst down, or generally on the defensive then they can’t apply a ton of conditions.

Times like this make me miss the City of Heroes community. Even when that game went to F2P everyone there was fairly nice, and also fairly smart. Hell, they even made a charity once.

Anyway, I do have some horror stories of previous games. There was one game called Runescape, and yes it is a f2p MMO. The way that game is designed, resource nodes are designed so once taken by any player they become unavailable to all players. Monster drops are given wholly to whomever tags the monster first, regardless of anyone else’s contribution. PVP in non-minigames is run entirely by a “loser loses all equipment, money, and inventory” system where it is killed and then get killed in a lawless wasteland. High end equipment in the game so expensive that it literally takes months to save up enough cash to get them, doing nothing but grinding for cash.

Needless to say, the community there is horrible. Throughout the entire game, everyone is your enemy. Your teammates want you to die so they can steal your stuff, other players hate how you take their mines/trees/fishing spots, and there is little to no cooperation. Anyway, once I was in a clan chat that a lot of people frequented, and there were two guys who didn’t want me there. Mostly because I reported them for breaking the rules (graphic language, real life threats, sharing stolen movies, ect). So their response to this was to do nothing but rapid fire insults and threats at me nonstop for 3 hours.

Three hours… I don’t have the fortitude in my wrists and fingers to do nothing but type insults as quickly as possible nonstop for that time. How people can accomplish that is amazing, and how people can resolve to do that is horrifying.

As a kid, when I grew up I learned of “trolls” being those angsty brats who did things just for attention. The often repeated mantra was “if you ignore them then they’ll go away”. Much like advice on bullying, this doesn’t work largely because the trolls/bullies know these mantras, and so act in a way accordingly once encountered. For trolls, this results in players who will do nothing but stand around and yell at people for hours on end, even when there is a 90% chance that the people are ignoring them via in-game function. Even without any sort of response or feed forward from their “victims”. And these aren’t angsty preteens looking for acknowledgement. These are middle-aged homeowners, college graduates, fathers and mothers.

It is fascinating, but in a bad way. The obsession these people have, the pure malice in their actions, it is confounding to any reasonable person how they could behave as such.

I see people doing the temples and event chains all the time. The only time I ever have a problem forming a group for them is at 2:00 AM.

You say it is too broad, but then list healing for over half of the examples.

I’ve currently raised an Engineer, Necromancer, and Thief to 80 in that order.

I’ve always liked the underdog classes. The way I see it, classes in these games can be treated in the same manner as economics. The advantage to the underdog classes is that, though they are not overall as good as the other classes they tend to have several tricks or “commodities” that they uniquely provide, and since these classes are much rarer, these commodities become more valuable.

In PVE I main the engineer. I like its utility and AoE damage. I do hate that the engineer keeps getting nerfed, though. I make builds to play the way I want to play, and not necessarily to to make them as powerful as possible, so whenever one of these things gets hit it tends to affect how well I can do.

In WvW I main the necromancer. I love how effect it is there. Skills that are only average or good become great in the WvW environment.

The thief, many people don’t consider this to be an underdog, but it really comes down to where it is being used. In low rank sPVP sure the thief is everywhere, but once you get into higher sPVP they disappear. At the high end, most players can deal with the ambush. In PVE their burst damage isn’t worth anything to those large bags of HP that make up champions and dungeon enemies. I find playing the thief about equally as difficult as the necromancer because of this.

As someone who is struggling to buy exotic sets for each of my toons, I find gold to be extremely useful. Unless I go into uber purchase mode and spend all my time investing, I don’t see any way that I will come even close to that amount of gold.

If you were to start a charity, all I’d ask for is 50 gold. That should be more than enough to outfit my remaining toons.

He was nerfed. He goes down a whole lot quicker now than he did before. I can practically solo him now.

Unless I misheard, isn’t the revert to 3 seconds only for PVE?

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the most stolen book is the Guinness Book of World Records. Anyway, I don’t know of any guides, but having a level 80 thief I can give some advice.

The two biggest things a thief can do is burst DPS and evasion. Usually, when you make a build, you’ll pick one of the two to focus on. Personally I went with an evasive condition build that focuses more on staying alive than on raw DPS. The two biggest thief builds in the game are of these two.

First I’ll talk evasion. The thief has a lot of skills (usually #3 on the weapon bar, as well as roll for initiative and withdraw) that give them a dodging effect, and using this dodging effect correctly can let the thief stay alive for awhile. There are some weapon sets that don’t have this dodge skill, though (pistol/pistol, sword/pistol, etc). If you aren’t blowing all the initiative onto DPS, then it is worthwhile to have enough to use these dodge skills should the situation arise. This is important, because with the lowest base health in the game, any attack you don’t dodge can potentially kill you.

Stealth is important, since it can be used for offense and defense. It lets you position, close distances, and get away, so you’ll almost always want some form of stealth somewhere.

Bursting is done almost purely with the Mug trait and D/D weapon set. You use mug to attack and poison the enemy, then use Cloak and Dagger to go into stealth, then fire off backstabs from behind. Using things like the Devourer Venom to lock them in place, Haste to increase attack speed and break their defensive stun, Assassin Signet to increase power, and Shadow Refuge to escape makes the bursting potential of the thief great. However, in a pure DPS build, with all of your traits and abilities geared for offense, the thief can and will go out like a candle to the slightest opposing breeze. Many sets will sacrifice power to use Shadow Refuge as a defense mechanism should the burst fail.

Stealing is an interesting mechanic. The bundle you get is often more useful than not, but the big thing that steal does is close the distance between you and the target, working even while stunned or immobilized. But the biggest part of Steal is the different traits you can get. Mug is used mostly for ambush builds, but is always good to have. Serpents touch is there by default, and it works well with Lotus Poison in the same trait line for some defensive measures. Hidden Thief, although somewhat buggy with Mug and Serpent’s Touch, can make the ambush work even quicker, and can be used quite defensively in attrition builds (especially when combined with Infusion of Shadow and Kleptomaniac for quick initiative gain). There’s also a daze, AoE fury/might/swiftness, but the best IMO is Bountiful Theft, which gives AoE vigor and also steals 2 boons and grants them in an AoE, too. Use that on a boon elementalist, and if you hijack 10 stacks of might and protection you’ve practically won the fight.

Unfortunately, in PVP all thieves are kind pidgeonholed into either attrition or burst damage. In PVE you can have some support builds like AoE venoms and boon ripping and projectile destruction, but also in hard PVE the glass cannon isn’t nearly as effective. When approaching high end tPVP and Dungeons/Fractals, thieves tend to disappear…

Anyway, I currently run a 25/0/15/0/30 condition thief, using a similar spec for both PVE and PVP. D/D + Shortbow. Utilities are Caltrops, Roll for Initiative, then something else I change my mind on a lot. Elite is Dagger Storm.

Deadly Arts III, IX. Shadow Arts VI. Trickery V, VII, VIII. Sigils and runes aren’t set since I don’t have them yet, but currently using x6 superior rune of the centaur for power, bleed duration, and swiftness.

I quit listening to the game music after awhile. Now I just put on a full album by Nightwish or Xandria or Within Temptation and play to that. I recently discovered a new band called Icon For Hire that’s pretty good, too.

I guess my issue with this is that, if they’re making gadgets just like signets, then why don’t they just give the engineer signets and be done with it?

I’d rather have something unique to the class instead of a retextured signet.

I… do not have this issue. Over on SoR you can form a group on occasion to do pretty much every temple except balthazar. It is really simple to do them, actually. You only need a team of about 5 competent players, and every single chest event in orr can be completed by them.

It sounds more like this is a server community issue than it is something that Arenanet can fix. Are they supposed to tell players not to gather into incomprehensible hordes and expect them to listen?

This boon hate thing is minor at best. Mostly because the new mechanics in play are kind of already in play.

Thieves: There is a trait that, once discovered, I have never taken off any build. It is called Bountiful Theft. It gives AoE vigor for 15 seconds, and also steals 2 boons from a target and gives them in an AoE, too. I use this ability liberally in game, due to how good it is. Worst case scenario it’s vigor, and best case scenario it’s fury + 25 stacks of might.

Warriors: These guys don’t get “boon hate” as much as they get a tool that helps them deal with the fact that they don’t do much in the first place. The anti-blocking abilities are a bit of a bigger worry, but to be fair warriors were getting pwned by pretty much anything that could block their controls.

At least it isn’t an arcane thievery mesmer, which steals all your boons and sets you on fire with your own justice.

Doesn’t a dedicated HGH condition build set around 1800 or so condition damage?

Fact is that, after being hit by the prybar, enemies will be taking 1000 damage for every action for 10 seconds. It’s not 2000 damage, but 1000 damage is still pretty good.

It’s not that big a deal, really. Warriors get a minor damage boost, but the fact is we get fury, might, swiftness, and retaliation all at once. It has got to compensate for any buff the warrior gets.

It won’t be too bad. As soon as you pop the boons a thief will try and steal them or a necromancer will corrupt them or something like that will happen.

Isaac.6041:

Confusion is not the most powerful condition. Poison and even burning are worse to deal with. With poison, you get reduced healing power.

Maybe ArenaNet has some concrete data that confusion is killing a lot of players, but in my personal experience, poison causes more trouble for players in sPvP, WvW and PvE.

I imagine that is because poison and burning are far more common than confusion. Confusion only reliably comes from two sources: mesmers and engineers. Engineers are rare in WvW, and when they are present they are usually throwing grenades. On occasion you’ll see a max condi duration engineer, and those are a severe pain to deal with once they stack confusion, but doing so there is hard because their confusion skills are scattered between kits and hard to hit with. Mesmers in WvW usually use a physically offensive build while using utility skills like veil and portal.

In all my time in WvW, I can safely say I haven’t encountered a single confusion spec mesmer or engineer. I can’t comment on the nerf because I really haven’t experienced confusion anywhere other than sPVP.

I use P/P in PVE more than anywhere else. Against world bosses where conditions are nigh useless, what I’ll do is make some changes to my traits that allow me to have a ton of initiative regeneration, and then I can spam Unload for the entirety of the fight. It has pretty good DPS, too, so I do a lot of damage with it.

If I’m fighting champions who are by themselves with a small number of people, the P/P is pretty good, too. I run a carrion set, so the conditions are pretty good. One of the things I like to do is use Headshot to remove all stacks of defiant, that way should the situation arise another player can use meaningful control against the champ. Sometimes what I’ll also do is, if there is something like a fire field up, I’ll spam Body Shot to confuse, burn, chill, or steal life from the enemy.

Best defense at point blank is definitely black powder, though. Just pop that and watch as groups of enemies miss. Though that is much better for sword/pistol, since the sword cleaves.

I’m surprised people are so adverse to PVP. Back in games where you lost everything on you and every cent you ever made, it made sense to hate PVP, but in these newer games where your punishment is the very tiny repair fee, I just don’t quite get it. People have to change their mindset and not cry out “Oh why me?” any time someone on another server picks a fight.

If you want to talk condition damage vs. pure damage balance, there are a couple of solutions to this that are quite easy.

#1: Have a limitless condition cap only on champions and world bosses. That’s the place where people are hurt by the cap the most, so tackling the problem here directly would work.

#2: Increase the armor of half the enemies to higher levels. An important facet in direct vs. condition damage is that conditions go right through armor, while direct damage can be mitigated by it. Currently, however, highly armored enemies are a rarity in the game. Because of this, there is never a tactical point where anyone would want to go with conditions.

If you want to just have players not using zerkers… well that is quite a bit harder. Since the majority of defense in this game is active defense via dodging, blocking, and controlling, increasing the damage output from enemies won’t end well. It’ll just end up discriminating against less durable classes and less skilled players. If you give enemies more HP, then it just makes zerkers more valuable since they end the fight quicker than others. If you give them debilitating conditions, then players just complain about the conditions and also put a bit of condition removal in their build.

The way a trinity system is implemented is usually by having player DPS or survivability be exponentially more potent than the others. In a system where everything is so close, where players are fighting for a 30% increase in survivability through stats, a proper mandating of builds will never occur. The fact is that DPS will be king until one player can be 5 times more durable than another and the game is built around that fact.

Frankly, I’d recommend rampager or rabid/carrion for the grenadier set. It’s conditions are sick, and he best part is they are in an AoE. On a proc set you will cap 5 enemies on bleeds very easily.

For PVE, it is the engineer. The versatility of the class lets me fill any role that is needed, and the AoE damage tears up the overworld enemies like they’re wet tissue paper. Need a healer? A tank? High AoE damage? Conditions? Control? All any group needs to know is that I am there, and should any problem arise I will solve it.

For WvW: The necromancer.

I do dungeons all the time myself. Before gold became easy to get, dungeons were my primary source to get exotic gear. I still plan to get exotic sets for half of my toons from dungeons.

I find that leveling up in any class adds identity to that class, while giving a ton of different tricks to that class. I’ve leveled up 3 classes so far, and none of them felt the same.

I actually wrote a topic about this a long time ago. It was titled “Tough issues”, and it went into the mathematics behind how stats and damage are calculated.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Tough-issues/first

If anything, I’d recommend reading the first page of the topic. Short story is:

*Toughness scales horribly when compared to power and condition damage.
*Vitality scales better on low HP classes but only works once.
*Dead enemies do no damage, so faster enemy = less damage done = more survivability

There are a few places where toughness and vitality come into play, particularly in PVP and survivability thresholds when fighting enemies with high sustained damage.

Of course, it is also worth it to look at rampager and carrion sets as well as zerker. There are a few instances (grenadier engineers and necromancers) where rampager will outpace zerker, simply because of how big an influence conditions have to those classes. Carrion is also worth mentioning since it focuses on the two best scaling stats on combat, even if they act independently of each other.

I find it funny that players will want to have harder overworld enemies and harder dungeon enemies, but in dungeons that have hard enemies they just run past them, calling them trash mobs.

I can’t really take any side of the debate seriously until that contradiction is resolved. However, I do kind of like to push myself, but I don’t want the wandering overworld to be the place to do it.

From my experience in sPVP and WvW, the hardest thieves to fight were never the glass cannons. The thing with the glass cannon thief ganking people in one shot is that so many things can go wrong, and they will go wrong as soon as they attack a competent player. I have plenty of stories where a thief ambushed me, and ended up being beaten by something stupid like my Necro’s dagger auto attack or my Guardians symbol of wrath + whirling wrath, my mesmer’s shatter, or how many times an ambush thief ended up getting hilariously stuck in the web of turret control that my engineer has.

No, the hardest thieves I’ve ever fought were based around evasion and attrition. I’ve modeled my own thief off of a similar concept: carrion built trickster thief running d/d then shortbow. The strategy is to run up and use choking gas for AoE weakness, then caltrops + deathblossom on an enemy or group, combine that with things like Roll for Initiative and Steal to gain initiative, follow up with dagger storm if things are particularly hectec, and then after all of those long duration and high damaging bleeds are applied, I vanish in stealth and just wait for them to do their thing. Then afterward if they survive I engage with a combination of short bow and dagger evasion tactics, stacking more bleeds and poison as time goes on. The whole time that my opponent can’t see me or catch me is time that those bleeds just tick away their health.

Although I do feel ineffective at times, though. Being condition based, one good AoE cleanse can sometimes be the end of that strategy. I try to layer up poison + weakness + cripple as well as the bleeds, but on occasion there’s that one guardian who’ll just wreck the whole strategy.

I used it for awhile, but ultimately I went back to minion master for sPVP. The biggest problem with Wall is that, once it is put down, your opponent knows exactly where you intend to prolong the fight. Lava fonts and grenades will rain from the sky around that location. It is rare for me to ever have a player run through it and not cleanse their conditions, let alone run through it twice or more. Teammates usually have a habit of not realizing it is a gigantic simmering protection boon, so they’ll not run through it and instead try to combo off of it.

Spectral Armor is great… when it’s around. But that 72 second recharge when traited is painful.

Spectral walk I’ve never really bothered using. I mostly use spectral skills on power builds, since on condition builds I end up dedicating my resources to other things like Corrupt Boon and Epidemic and stuff. On power and hybrid builds, I almost always have the warhorn for swiftness, and so Walk is almost always left out of any spectral build I make.

Spectral grasp is meh in sPVP. I tried to use it for a chill build, but the biggest problem was that a chill only works at a distance, and with SG that distance was always closed rather quickly. I’d end up running away to get some range, and then they’d snipe my back or just cleanse and chase after me. The best use of SG IMO is to yank an enemy from the enemy crowd to the friendly crowd, where he can be focused and killed quickly. It is for this reason that SG is incredibly useful in WvW.

All in all, I’d have to say that spectrals aren’t half bad. They’re a bit awkward to use and I find them lacking sometimes, but overall they’re alright. Wall, in particular, can make or break a fight depending on if teammates will recognize it as a standing protection boon.

I’ve only known about half of those events, and I still felt like I was “in the know”. it’s cool when you or a couple friends of yours know about obscure chest events, and it lets you get a bunch of rares that most people normally don’t know about.

I found most of those by accident, actually. Was doing an event chain, then suddenly I’ve got a chest.

P/P is largely a condition spec, and conditions are pretty bad for leveling overall. Also it is single target, so you usually only want to pair it with multi targeting abilities.

That said, Unload doe shave some pretty good DPS.

Sorem.9157:

Am i the only necro that actually thinks my class is overpowered ? (At least at tPvP)

In theory, the support skills (shortest cooldown instant rez, amazing tanking with plague form, epidemic, corrupt boon,) that a necro has can be extremely powerful when paired up with a practiced, communicating team of other players of equal competence.

In theory. I have yet to find such a thing myself.

I would have vastly different ranks for class abilities.

#1: Mesmer. The shatters turn any of those illusions into either raw damage, condition damage, disabling, or evasion. The traits here really make it much better, allowing for a whole lot more confusion, more raw damage, reflection, AoE control, as well as being able to trigger on demand. There’s a reason why shatter mesmers are tier 1 in PVP.

#2: Elementalist. The element swaps are arguably better than a weapon swap, since you get twice as many skills. There are many traits that grant buffs upon switching or within attunements, and with so many different abilities on hand the fact is that an elementalist will almost always have the right skill on hand.

#3: Engineer. The toolbelt skills literally double engineer utilities, and can be given up to a 30% recharge from stats alone. This is ranked lower than the elementalist, though, since the toolbelt is done to compensate for kits taking up utility slots, and the fact that it is very rare for the utility and the corrosponding toolbelt to be really useful.

#4: Guardian. The 3 Virtues are awesome signet-like abilities. Their passives and their actives do pretty much the same things, with burning (best condition for non-condition based classes to use), healing, as well as single attack blocks. These increase in potency greatly when combined with all of the trait abilities, which do things like constantly apply retaliation, recharge nearly instantly, and grant AoE boons. The guardian is arguably equal or on better ground with the engineer.

#5: Necromancer. Although I consider DS below average, it does have its uses. The auto attack has fairly high damage (a little less than twice the staff’s auto attack), it has a somewhat weak teleport skill, and instant fear, and life transfer is great for tanking and AoE damage. It can be traited to give many buffs, heal, cleanse conditions, and even uses Enfeebling Blood. The reason why it is so down on the list is because it is wholly unreliable in PVP, it’s underwater abilities suck, and it is nigh useless on condition builds. In PVE it is also hard to use against single champions, who won’t let the player generate Lifeforce as easily.

#6: Warriors. Their ability is basically an extra weapon skill with a delay, or slowly growing buffs. Those are pretty decent buffs, though.

#7: Thieves. Stealing is quite random and doesn’t do much most of the time. It has some traits that make it more useful, but all in all it is an afterthought to the majority of thieves.

#8: Rangers. They have a bunch of abilities to control their pet. I suppose you could talk about the benefits of their pets vs. being by themselves, but really I just see this as something necessary for any pet class to function.

As for how I would improve things: the biggest issue with necromancer’s life force is that they’ve sacrificed so much control and defensive abilities to get it. In PVP and when fighting bosses in PVE, Deathshroud in no way compares to something like vigor or reflection skills or blocking skills. The best thing I think that can be done for DS is to have skills that generate Life Force be more plentiful or have the skills that already do generate lifeforce do it better. That way, the PVP and boss weakness of DS not being around when you need it is resolved.

For my power necro in sPVP most of the time I just wail on the downed party with the dagger auto attack to build up lifeforce. In WvW I use downed players as bait to stack bleeds and use epidemic.

Though in 2 vs 1 there are very few things you can do to truly “stomp safely”. Here are some suggestions to help out:

#1: Use bone fiend and/or dagger #3 to immobilize the second player while you stomp the first.

#2: Use Well of Darkness to make half of your opponent’s attacks miss.

#3: Use that opportunity to do something like stack swarm of locust, well of suffering, and bone minion’s putrid explosion while downing. Often times the second player will try to run in and combo you while you stomp, but bone minions can be detonated without interrupting a stomp. It can do a surprising amount of back damage.

#4: Use Flesh Golem’s charge and/or the warhorn’s daze to stun a target for a large amount of time.

#5: Place a bunch of marks on the downed player. The marks won’t trigger until the second player runs in and activates all them.

And unfortunately those are our best options. Though to be fair, well of darkness is pretty good.

I had a similar dilemma with using a rifle build in WvW. I didn’t have the condition stats for the pistol, so the damage of the rifle was all I had to go for. The way I resolved this dilemma was to not use the engineer for WvWvW.

Should I make suggestions, however, I’d probably say something like…

10/30/0/20/10

Incendiary Powder, Sitting Duck, Rifled Barrels, Rifle Mod, other abilities and stuff. The 30 in firearms is the most important.

The only “required” utility would be the net turret. Use the net turret and the rifle to spam immobilize and vulnerability on a target, as well as a few stuns. This lets lining up the rifle’s higher damaging attacks go much more smoothly. Careful though, since it only works mid range. I went with the distance increase, since in WvW the shorter range of the rifle will lead to many complications. The damage increase is fairly basic, and the setup will give you many chances to crit with incendiary powder.

As for other stuff to use, I can’t really say much because I never figured it out. You could try going full elixirs, mostly to get the most out of elixir U. You could try going for a rifle/grenadier hybrid, which will let one cover somewhat for the other’s weaknesses. You could also try going full turrets, which can be quite effective in very small fights, but in keep defense/assault your only real weapon is the super bugged mortar elite. You can even try going with Static Discharge, but that is only meh.

Hammer or mace, I’m fine with either. Though a hammer would be better IMO.

It would lead to a pretty interesting set up. Whereas engineers currently attack from range then use kits (bomb and toolkit) for melee damage, it would be cool to see an engineer that attacks in melee then uses kits (grenade, elixir) to fight at a distance.

Of course, the obvious question in my mind is that, given the fact that sylvari have the external organs, why is it that they haven’t made the obvious gender pairing due to how the parts “fit together”.