Guild Wars 2

Overwhelming power, here. Max Solo DPS and group buffing builds here. Not necessarily meta, as “meta” builds assume you are with a group who is also running “meta” builds. But yeah, I’ve got full zerker and scholars on most toons, with few exceptions. Also I have full vipers on a lot of toons, too.

Thanks to the way the classes were balanced, even going full glass I still have greater statistical bulk than most enemies. That way, things die faster and I get more money.

At some point in time, I do wonder when this discussion became about legendary armor, instead of about then nature of raiding in MMOs as a whole.

The only metric I saw was a red post saying that there were about 30% participation rate for raids. Don’t care enough to go digging for it.

Use the LFG to taxi into a map right after the reset.

As memory serves, Anet came down this path kicking and screaming the whole way. They wanted to implement level 80 progression “their way”, via optional and quartered off fractals. They wanted to have meaningful story impacts “their way”, via single time events and limit availability dungeons. They wanted to have hardcore content “their way” via open world gigantic bosses like Tequatl and Triple Trouble. They wanted to give unique rewards “their way” by making limited time skins that were hard to find, creating a pseudo-value to them. They wanted the game to expand “their way” by having the living story add new places and elements as things went along.

While ideally it seems like a good idea, ideals don’t pay the bills. It’s funnier if you think of me saying the word “bills” with a horrible rap accent, like “beelz”, so it rhymes. However I digress. The monetization system of GW2 functions in two ways. Either A) You get new people to buy the game/xpac, or B) You get people who already own the game to buy gems with real money. Raid and grind, those are the best way to do it. I’m not going to go into all the reasons why.

Personally I was a dungeon man. Though I despised the community for how it became highly aggressive anal retentives over frivolous things, making it the worst subcommunity in the game, I’m a fan of getting a small ragtag group together and crawling through a dungeon. What I’d really like to see is a good randomly generated dungeon system, a la Binding of Isaac or Runescape’s Dungeoneering. Though GW2 is so stripped away that I’m not sure you even could make an engaging randomly generated dungeon.

Vayne.8563:

Anet really did want to do something different and a fan base that simple couldn’t adapt to it changed the plan in my opinion. That’s why we’re stuck with stuff like ascended gear and why raids have finally made it here. Because Anet couldn’t change the genre as much as they expected they would be able to. Fair enough I suppose. They have to make the games for players.

I’m not sure if it was necessarily a community fault insomuch as it is design flaws in the system. GW2 was very much built on the backs of games that fully embraced gear grinds at the level cap and extremely finely tuned multiplayer content that requires this gear to be successful.

I mentioned it before, but it bears more elaboration. GW2 is a game that worked by stripping away the features of other games. Part of it was to deal with inequality. Part of it was for convenience. But, by taking away so much, the end result was a game that had a world that was aesthetically pleasing but functionally bland. In this essence, the failings of GW2 themselves serve as an interesting case study. Some of the issues were fixed, but think about this from the perspective of GW2’s launch.

#1: The loot and quest system. A lot of games have almost exclusively enemy specific drops, and these drops have a unique value for what they would be used for. Usually some kind of crafting or resource, or even the equipment types themselves. This drives players toward explorations, because each obscure monster in obscure corners of the world is a new capitalistic venture.

GW2 largely abandoned this feature, wanting all content to be equally rewarding. Some crafting components were “gatherable” at launch, via fighting a certain kind of enemy at a certain level, but the way the loot system handled everything made this slow and impractical. So, most enemies have a set of generic global drops and junk items that serve no purpose. The end result was that, there was little reason to care about enemy types or locations. If I find an obscure creature in a cave somewhere, you weren’t interesting in seeing what it “dropped”, because it dropped the same bland stuff. At launch, champion events roamed the map unhindered, because there was absolutely no reason to fight a champion mob.

The entire bestiary of GW2 existed so you could look at it. The heart quests and events themselves were also a bust. Heart quests were basically busywork with paltry rewards and vendors that sold items nobody would use. The dynamic events rewarded a paltry amount of coin and a useless currency that is karma. After having experienced them once, unless you hit a “grind spot” where you could mass slaughter enemies spawned by scaled up events, there wasn’t any reason to do dynamic events.

This also meant that there was no reason to visit lower level zones, even if you scaled down.

#2: Leveling and stats. Now, in games prior, your level carried over to everything. It was how strong you were, in PVE and PVP, bolstering both your physical presence and the techniques available to you. It was how much work you had put into your toon, and because the level was everything, it was a strong sense of growth and progression.

GW2, wanting to get rid of imbalances, made it so PVP and WvW auto scaled, fumble became mandatory as enemy level increased slowly, and made it so with the exception of Health and Armor, all players had identical stats no matter what class they started with. The end result was that leveling wasn’t a goal or even interesting. It was a content throttle. An obstacle for you to overcome in order to… be in GW2.

#3: Gear tiers and types. Now, previous MMOs had gear that was special, in that they did special or unique things, or had unique buffs or stats on them. The tiers themselves were important, as they bolstered your stats and gave you special advantages. You wanted to work toward new gear. Sometimes, it even changed what you could do or how your class performed.

GW2, wanting to remove imbalance and make everything fair, removed all special properties from gear (including its drop locations), and just made the tier and gear prefix important. This made all of the drops in the game bland: though weapons looked different, everything was functionally identical, so the new aesthetics of weapons entertained you for but a moment. You achieved the “peak” fairly quickly via exotic gear, but because everything was balanced around exotic gear, it is as if the entire gear system was a content throttle. Everything your class could do was decided and restricted very early on. Even legendary weapons were there just to look nice and boast about how much money you blew.

#4: Auto healing. Most MMOs were about the journey, in the sense that your health regenerated slowly and you used consumables regularly for healing. Many games had a “rest” command or something similar, where you could accelerate health growth.

GW2, wanting to be convenient and be about the duels and PVP, removed that for convenience. However, a lot of game’s economies and build systems were built around fighting that inconvenience. Now that you always auto-healed after a fight, we encountered something new in MMOs: the Berserker Meta. In a normal game, going full glass cannon is dangerous precisely because it magnified the wear and tear that you received as you wandered the world. But now, there was no reason not to go full cannon and obliterate enemies, healing away all damage afterward with wolverine like regeneration. Though this is a change I don’t mind too much personally, the fact is that a lot of people do, since it changed hard roles of combat into softer roles, and made body counts more important than anything else. This also lead to the WvW Zerg meta.

#5: Travel. A lot of games have a quicktravel or teleportation system of some kind, but a lot of the journey from one place to another was done by hopping onto a mount or a vehicle or a train of some kind, and traversing the dangerous but gorgeous terrain the world had built into it.

GW2, wanting to remove the wait and make things convenient, removed this system. This mean that traveling was something you did once and then you would just waypoint your way around to get to places. There was no exclusivity to locations other than their level throttle, and the entire “world” of GW2 effectively disappeared after you saw it once.

Keep in mind, these flaws compounded on each other, and quite heavily so. Any one of these would be a single flaw of a game, but when you put it together, you suddenly understand why it is that a large portion of the MMO community ended up not liking GW2 and requesting that it be changed. We had

A) A world that was basically a waypoint map
B) That was restricted by archaic systems that don’t fit into the game and would just throttle your performance
C) That lead to places that offered no unique capitalistic of functional ventures to gain
D) With a homogenized combat system that made everything feel very “samey” and a gear prefix system that reinforced this functionally
E) And the same old “fetch seven bear kitten” busywork disguised as hearts and “dynamic” events.

And this was all made by cutting things away from previous MMOs. It didn’t replace these with new features or built upon a new system. So of course there was a community falling out and a cry for something to “do” in the game. This wasn’t because there was fault in the community. GW2 was bland on the operational level.

I’ve had no problem with it in PVE.

To be frank, I’m not sure what you mean. You say “grinding”. Grinding what, exactly?

A)Mastery point experience? In that case, since it is account bound you just play whatever you feel like.
B) Events and meta events? Either one will fly there, too. Though for each meta I tend to favor the following classes:
Verdant Brink: Reaper
Auric Basin: Daredevil
Tangled Depths: Tempest
Dragon Stand: Chronomancer
C) EOTM? Either Flamethrower scrapper or staff guard.
D) Raids? Don’t know. I don’t have a raid group.
E) Fractals? Generally anything.

If you’re craving old-school pen and paper RPG style gameplay, I have two recommendations. Shadowrun Returns: Dragonfall Director’s Cut,, and Shadowrun Returns: Hong Kong. They are really old school in how they work, and the writing, world building, and choices you have to make on your first few playthroughs are enthralling. I like the series so much that now, as I am playing through the hong kong campaign blind, I’m narrating all of the characters in character to my sis as we go through.

I suppose that is where I come from. Long before I played games online, playing a videogame was a social thing. My father would play top gun and airplane games on the NES, my siblings would sit down and try to think of ways to find hidden dungeons in Legend of Zelda, and we’d come up with elaborate fantasies together on the game itself. I suppose that’s why I like lets-plays so much, long before they were popular. A lot of it was childhood bickering, but the fact that me and my brother beat Ocarina of Time by alternating dungeons was something beautiful.

But if I were to summarize my earliest true “mutliplayer” experiences in RPGs, that would come three examples: Phantasy Star Universe, Runescape, and City of Heroes.

I had played PSO, but not online. PSU, I managed to play before the servers shut down. For quite some time, too. And, the thing with PSO and PSU was that, though it used many systems that would be archaic by today’s standards, there’s was one simple truth to the game that I have not seen since, and I miss the fact that this is no longer true. Let me pose it as a question:

You are in a game with no scaling whatsoever. You’re level 100. A random level 60 player joins your instance. Do you:
A) Yell at him because he is lower level until he leaves.
B) Kick the n00b without saying a word.
C) Be totally cool with him joining anonymously.
D) Keep him around but lament that he’ll leech rewards from you.

In every single MMO I’ve played since PSU, the answer was never C. But the way phantasy star handled stats and equipment, it wasn’t such a big deal if your teammates were lower level than you. There was no “min/maxing”, only level. The challenges were hard and didn’t scale, so every body you had helped. It was an action game after all, so if the lower level guy could handle himself, you were happy to have him around, at least to be a decoy.

So many games I’ve played are built to be the exact opposite. City of Heroes, even GW2 have systems built in that discriminate specifically against level itself, to avoid the pratfalls of a system that inadequately handles stat progression and open world challenges. With the way events scale, you can’t have lower level players joining and scaling up, because then they’re a detriment to the whole thing. The levels are superficial. But, I miss that. I miss both being the new guy everyone welcomed. I miss being the experienced guy who helps the new guy out.

The challenges of the game weren’t accommodating. They existed, whether you had a full party or not, if you had the levels or not, or if you had the gear or not. Seriously, for anyone who still has the old game, try a low level rush to ultimate difficulty in PSO going through both episodes, and suddenly it is one of the most tense and entertaining things you’ve done. You’ll learn that the first time an invisible robot one shots you with a flying head-bash out of stealth.

Second is Runescape.

Now, runescape is a very old game, and it is a very simple game. An utter grindfest. Built out of Java, it is literally a point and click adventure. You click somewhere, then your toon walked there. You clicked on a thing, then your toon did a thing. Very simple. Some would say very boring. They’re right, of course, but there was an advantage to this system. Because the interface was so simple, nearly anything could happen. The range and diversity of skills and minigames and environments, the general interactivity of the world is unlike anything I have seen since.

Want to manage your own kingdom? You could do that. Host an international port for trading and exploration? Got it. Hunt reptiles for voodoo witchdoctor potions? Got it. Manage a multi-person industrial sized blast furnace? Had that. Grow tomatoes and make pizzas? Do that, too. Delve into a roguelike randomly generated dungeon? Got it. Wander a dangerous PVP wasteland? It was there. Command armies in a turn based strategy game? Had it. And the quests… the storyline and the quests in the game are great. They’re funny, they’re interesting, they’re tense, and they add just a bit of mystery, and doing them gave you rewards other than “loot”. I still quite vividly remember having to navigate a parkour maze of a shanty town that was ruled by flying vampires who would demand blood tributes if they saw you in the open.

Nearly anything could happen, because it is just point and click. I miss that open diversity. Though the playerbase was young and the community was hostile, it still had that “the challenge exists, whether you’ve got enough people or not” system, and sometimes when a random dude ran by, you were glad he happened along. But modern MMOs aren’t like that anymore. If anything happens in GW2, 99/100 times it’s just going to be combat, where nameless loot rains from the sky, and the only thing that is important is that you survive the encounter.

The last one is City of Heroes.

Now, City of Heroes had level restrictions (and a way to bypass them eventually), a slightly shallow loot system where drops rained from the sky (but not as randomly), and a crafting system that was basically a components check. But there is something that City of Heroes did that other MMOs don’t, and that is character customization.

I’ve talked about it numerous times in the past. But basically, the character and build customization, both functionally and aesthetically, was exponentially higher than any other MMO I’ve ever played. Exponential is not an exaggeration. By today’s standards, it was literally a hundred times deeper. Every single skill was highly customizable, every skill set was highly customizable, every class had a highly customizable list of skill sets. You didn’t just pick your class. You picked your class, the skill sets that were available to that class, the skills that were in those skill sets, and then every little facet of every single skill could be customized. To top it off, after making each toon you could write a character bio and a catchphrase.

Also, you could completely design your own instanced missions and stories from scratch, and then put them up for the public to play, using either established characters or your own designs. Never has their been a game where I was more attached to the player characters than in CoH. Each one was truly unique, and many were extremely memorable. One of my favorites was a gigantic African-American guy named Hare Splittor (or Douglass Bane). He was dressed up as a gigantic pink and purple bunny with a battleaxe, and his origin story is that he is just a normal tough guy on a crusade to make it socially acceptable for men to like bunnies and tea parties by being the most aggressive and frightening vigilante possible. Anytime anyone would say anything, I’d RP a pseudo social-commentary conflict where I’d aggressively demand people be accepting of men dressed as pink bunnies. You can’t get that in experience in most games.

I’m going to paraphrase Arin Hanson here: Though videogames are covering more and more adult subject matters, by design they are catering more towards kids. They are being streamlined and simplified, and that isn’t a good thing. GW2 is not a complete “MMORPG” in the sense that I grew up with and am familiar with. It is an MMOG that stripped away a lot of the features that I’m familiar with, and it happened to take away enough of the right ones to resemble a playable game that has other people running around.

And that is it. “People running around”. I am a nameless (insert class here) using one of 3 peak builds as I traverse the world filled with people I will never remember, who will also never remember me. Whether someone is nearby or not doesn’t matter. The systems the game is built upon seem like vestiges of previous designs where those archaic systems actually mattered. Raids are more of a build check than anything else, having rigid structural requirements instead of an experience you can go through. Yes, the combat is solid, but that’s all there is.

Personally I’d just like to see the auto attacks get buffed a bit. Though I’m mostly from a PVE perspective.

I’ve found mesmer to be a bit of a mixed bag as well.

Hardest part is that the quality of the class seems to swing wildly between updates. Pre-HoT, there was a period where my mesmer seemed to just plain melt face with mantras and phantasms. They had been buffed, but then they were nerfed, and the mesmer felt bad.

HoT Launches. Suddenly, I have a hard time doing anything other than my mesmer. That alacrity, those wells, that quickness spamming, I was a miniature chainsaw that spawned and made other players into chainsaws. My phantasms were suddenly safe. The second that HoT launched, mesmers were on top of the world.

But then nerfs, nerfs, and more nerfs. Now, it only feels like my mesmer contributes on rare occasion. I’m still running that ole well + quickness + inspiration signet build, but I’m not sure that it is the best build anymore. I’m hoping that other skills (particularly the auto attacks) will receive buffs to balance things out a bit more.

I deleted mesmer once before. Now I have a different mesmer. But, this time I’m just going to keep it around. Particularly because I have full ascended gear for him, but also because the next inevitable upswing is coming eventually.

FrizzFreston.5290:

The problem is people thinking they “need” a zerg for certain meta events, but in most cases it’s really just 3 to 5 players or so.

Okay there’s less room for mistakes that way, sure. And a zerg usually gets things done soo much easier.

But people also don’t try much anymore without a zerg.

I would recommend just trying to make a party or squad and just to go for it.

Pretty much this. Most of the events in the game, even “group events” were built assuming that only 5 players could do it. Unless you’re talking about huge map metas, everything can be accomplished with a small team.

That said, I’ve found that my investment into a commander tag has nearly paid for itself. It’s an instant zerg spawning mechanism.

Well, technically they are, but not in the way you think.

Yes, boon duration and condition duration are nothing new. They’ve been around for forever. The new expertise and concentration stats just standardized how they were applied (somewhat).

However, the gear prefixes from HoT are better than the ones from Legacy GW2 on a technicality: they have more point. If you compare the total number of points added by Valkyrie to something like Marauder, the fact is that Marauder has more total stat points, making it the all-around better armor set.

This gets a bit more technical when you go into theorycrafting builds, particularly when dealing with enrage timers, so HoT armor prefixes aren’t always better than legacy ones. But, they do add more points overall.

To be fair, the final boss was actually somewhat decent. A bit on the visual clutter side, but it was nice to fight something that wasn’t a horde of mordrem or a reskinned vinetooth.

bloodletting wolf.2837:

The problem is that you are only looking at the auto attack of the hammer not the entire kit. Hammer is in a real good spot right now (can’t speak for PvE though).

The thing is, one doesn’t lead to another. Yes, hammer skills 2-5 are sexy as hell, but they serve a different purpose from the auto attack.

Auto attacks themselves exist as the baseline damage of the weapon. They are the minimum DPS output that a class has given no additional skills or inputs. And as such, they don’t always affect the PVP balance of the class.

What the auto attack does change is two things. First is the skill floor., AKA ease of use. Classes with high auto attacks are fairly easy to play, being capable in most player’s hands. I.E. Thief and Necromancer both have strong auto attacks on their melee weapons, meaning that it is easy to be passable at the class. You just walk up and press 1 once, then let things take care of themselves. It isn’t the peak performance of the class, not by a long shot, but this does make the baseline easier to play.

Second is build diversity. When a class has a poor auto attack, the end result is a narrowing of viable builds. You have to keep picking utilities and traits specifically to deal with the inability to do damage. This kills the versatility of the class. Take, for example, the humble Mesmer. Mesmer auto attacks are probably the worst in the game, having the same base DPS as Engi Hammer but fewer mods. The end result being that Memsers end up with but a single viable way to play the class. In PVE this is the quickness sharing chrono, a build made specifically because Mesmers can’t do damage on their own. In PVP it is condi shatter.

Hence, here is my problem. When making a melee engi, I am stuck with a single build: Explosives/Firearms/Scrapper Bomb kit – Grenade kit – Elixir Gun – Mortar. You can’t take away any of those bits. You need the bomb kit for its auto attack and fire field. You need grenades for a ranged offense and the damage they do. You need elixir gun for acid bomb, the stun break, and a condi cleanse. Mortar for orbital strike and blind field. And that is it. There are so many other utilities that I could take, but replacing any one of those skills results in my performance taking a huge hit, specifically because the class was designed to be kitten unless you spam every high damage utility you could possibly slot.

A stronger auto attack means less gimping, more build diversity, and more ease of play. It does not mean that engineers will suddenly become overpowered and kill everybody else in PVP by just auto attacking people.

Stand The Wall.6987:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

This is written from a PVE perspective mostly.

… and this is the fault in your logic. if anet had separated the skills for each game mode then i would agree. any buff to hammer from a pvp perspective would only serve to further push them more over the top.

Thankfully this buff would probably do very little in PVP. Maybe more engineer build diversity.

What people don’t realize is that my suggestion would take the hammer auto, and would raise its base damage from 370 dps to 444 dps. Relative to other class autos, that’s still fairly low. It is on par with some guardian auto attacks, but those come with a burn proc, and if you include the mods it is about on par with necro auto attacks, sans all the unique things those do like LF generation and chill. The buff is far from unreasonable.

Since you haven’t dealt with DGraves that much, let me demonstrate something. Keep in mind this is a man who has fought for months that everybody has condition damage wrong.

DGraves.3720:

First, bomb auto attack has the highest coefficient in the game for an auto

False. Thieves are higher for every single melee weapon.

DGraves.3720:

Second, comparing secondary effects of traits is ineffective.

False again. Traits pertaining to specific weapons only are always important.

DGraves.3720:

If we were to do that your analysis is worthless since Hammer literally gives itself (when traited) quickness boosting it’s own DPS by 50% (it’s a little higher, actually).

False. That isn’t a hammer specific trait. Hammer doesn’t give itself that boost from that trait either: it cannot stack enough might.

DGraves.3720:

So does flamejet when you take Juggernaut.

False. Juggernaut doesn’t stack enough might to gain the quickness bonus. You need additional traits.

DGraves.3720:

You are selectively choosing Shrapnel as a “natural decision” in the bomb trait line but ignoring many other traits that make weapons viable.

False again. I’m looking only at traits that pertain to a specific weapon, since any trait that applies to any weapon will just cancel out in the comparison. Shrapnel applies to bombs/grenades/mortar. Not hammer or toolkit.

When I say everything he says is wrong, there is not an iota of exaggeration there. He is factually incorrect on every single point and is readily understood and such by anyone with even a passing knowledge of the game. Your endorsements of his claims just undermine you as a whole.

DGraves.3720:

Manuhell.2759:

Applied Force works on everything, though. And those needed might stacks will be provided by someone else in party/raid settings, either way. So the end result is that you’ll still be using that quickness with bomb autoattacks, rather than hammer ones.
Yet again, people are convinced that the hammer is so strong, despite no one actually using it in any optimized setting. Go figure.

In a Raid setting

See? He’s already lying. He completely ignored half of the party/raid setting by just saying “raid”. He is trying to distract from the point as a whole. He doesn’t have any actual factual proof for what he is saying, so he is reducing everything to nitpicking nonsense.

No, it does not make sense. Having good utilities does not necessitate a bad auto attack. The fabric of the universe isn’t going to rend asunder just because the hammer auto gets a 20% boost to direct damage.

You’re pulling a false dilemma completely out of thin air. There is no weapon that suffers if the hammer and toolkit autos get a buff. There is no weapon that will have “the same strong auto attack” given my suggestion. You’re making up a situation that doesn’t resemble my suggestion in any way to try and argue against me, and even then you’re wrong: they should both have a sufficient auto attack, because one weapon should not be needlessly nerfed to compensate for the bad design of another.

I’ll ask again: Who loses?

Xyonon.3987:

I can just repeat myself Blood Red Arachnid.2493 – hammer auto is not strong, but it’s good enough because the whole kit is super strong. It’s not supposed to wreck.

+ what DGraves said.

#1: DGraves is factually wrong in nearly everything he says. It is best to just ignore him.
#2: What you’re saying doesn’t make sense. The hammer auto being poor is not somehow justified by the weapon having decent utility.

The reward box at the end.

insanemaniac.2456:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

insanemaniac.2456:

if autos do more damage than skills that “only” do damage, then there is no point to having those skills. yes the auto sucks, and the reason is that you can almost always be doing something better, unlike other classes where you get stuck on a weapon and cant just do other things while your hard hitter(s) recharge.

that said, i really really hate that toolkit 3rd auto is single target.

#1: My suggestions would not make the autos do more damage than “damage only” skills.
#2: The fact that you have to be playing Schubert on your keyboard to play the engineer is bad design. If the engineer isn’t supposed to be using an auto attack, then why don’t they just remove the auto attacks for skills that are actually useful?
#3: If your assertion is that the Engineer should never be auto attacking, then buffing auto attacking would mean that the peak performance of the engineer wouldn’t increase. It would just allow for a more relaxed playstyle.

there are 8 other classes to play that are more relaxed. its unfortunate they feel mostly like cliche fantasy instead of cliche scifi, imo :/

idk, when someone makes a thread saying “i dont want the engineer to be what the devs seem to want it to be” it just seems kinda… like it aint gonna happen. plus, if you dont wanna play piano, grab dat flamethrower build and turn on dat autotargeting.

It has been my experience that the devs are somewhat aimless regarding class ideals, and will periodically make dumb decisions regarding balance. But, since you remain convinced that the hammer and tool kit can’t have higher auto damage because of power cosmic or something like that, let me rephrase this in a different way:

Who loses? If the hammer and the tool kit get a 20% stronger overall auto attack, who is the person who loses?

In PVP? No one loses. The players who lose to engi are losing because of the combination of “damage skill”, and raising the auto damage of the hammer/toolkit to a passable level isn’t suddenly going to make more people die. The peak engi stays the peak engi.

In PVE? No one loses. So people who have hand health problems ore aren’t good at DPS calcs do a bit more damage. This is to the benefit of people as a whole, not to their detriment.

I certainly know who wins. Players who aren’t good at mashing their keyboard. Players who would like a less active playstyle with their class. Players who would like to use a utility set other than bomb-grenade-elixiir-mortar. Players who run alternate builds than the standard meta. Players who play along side of those players who fit into the previous categories.

So, if nobody loses, and everybody wins, then why hasn’t this happened yet?

You know that “account jump start” thing that’s been sitting on the promo page since launch? Well, I finally accumulated enough gold to convert to gems to buy the thing.

I made, like, 110g back off of the dyes and the claim ticket I managed to get. Now bank space isn’t a worry.

insanemaniac.2456:

if autos do more damage than skills that “only” do damage, then there is no point to having those skills. yes the auto sucks, and the reason is that you can almost always be doing something better, unlike other classes where you get stuck on a weapon and cant just do other things while your hard hitter(s) recharge.

that said, i really really hate that toolkit 3rd auto is single target.

#1: My suggestions would not make the autos do more damage than “damage only” skills.
#2: The fact that you have to be playing Schubert on your keyboard to play the engineer is bad design. If the engineer isn’t supposed to be using an auto attack, then why don’t they just remove the auto attacks for skills that are actually useful?
#3: If your assertion is that the Engineer should never be auto attacking, then buffing auto attacking would mean that the peak performance of the engineer wouldn’t increase. It would just allow for a more relaxed playstyle.

Xyonon.3987:

Wahoo!

Just gonna leave this here for you.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/engineer/All-Skills-Damage-for-Power-and-Condi-3/first#post5996853

Those are all skills used by the current strongest (damage wise) raid builds, calculated with raid envoirment values.

---

I think toolkit should apply weakness rather than buffing the damage. It should be annoying, not dangerious. However they could increase the attack speed of the last hit in the chain, it’s a bit too slow.

Hammer is totally fine imo. 2nd best aa we have and also grants might and causes vulnerability. It’s pretty strong, I’m happy with it.

Greez!
- Ziggy

Here’s the thing: The hammer is totally “not fine”. And I’m not leaving this up to opinion. Over the past day or so I cataloged the base damage done by auto attacks of the various weapons of every class I play. Here were the results:

Guardian: (note, passive burn is always an effect).
Longbow 317
Greatsword: 438. 1.05 damage mod. 2-6 might.
Sword: 441 15% crit chance mod
Mace: 346. 15% crit chance mod (though technically the symbol increases this to 382)
Hammer: 444. 506 with Zeal trait line. 2 vuln.
Scepter: 296. Orb of Wrath increases this to 394. 15% crit rate mod.

Revenant:
Staff: 426.
Sword: 477. 1.1 damage mod. 8.8 vuln.
Hammer: 297

Thief:
Staff: 595. 15 Vuln
Dagger: 582, 3.57 poison
Sword: 548
Pistol: 217
Shortbow: 206, x 3 against multiple targets.

Necro:
Life Rend: 376. 433 w/ traits. 18 or 20.7 might. Cap invuln with trait.
Dagger: 474.
Greatsword: 469.
Axe: 288. 1.1 damage mod.
Life Blast: 355 at close range.

Mesmer:
Sword: 379 w/o boon. 4 vuln. 319 w/ boon.
Greatsword: 264 at max range.

Elementalist:
Fireball + Lavafont: 512. 1.1 damage mod
Lightning Whip: 472. 9% crit chance mod.

So, taken among all the melee weapons, the Engineer Hammer is 3rd place for worst auto attack, ahead of mesmer sword, maybe guardian’s mace sans burning. I haven’t checked Ranger or Warrior, but I am fairly confident it is below those as well.

Here’s the thing, the “weaker” auto attacks all do something. Guard Mace heals for quite a bit. Mesmer Sword tears boons away. The Engi Hammer auto just does damage, and the small amount of might/vuln is just a further damage bonus that’s meaningless if other teammates cover it for you.

The engineer isn’t exactly swimming in additional modifiers, either. You’ll get a situational 5%, a 7%, that fluctuating “based on condi” trait, and some critical chance modifiers that basically every class has. I’m not going to lie: playing my scrapper feels like crap right now, even using the build that you’ve posted. I’m so busy swapping through kits just to do damage that I have barely any utility. Even when playing my mesmer I feel like I’m having more of an impact, because even if my personal damage is low it is worth it to see all my teammates turn into chainsaws when I give them 24 seconds of quickness and cut their cooldowns.

Probably one of my biggest laments about the scrapper is that the auto attack for the hammer will never be useful. The hammer adds plenty of utility skills, but the auto attack itself is just plain sub-par. This is written from a PVE perspective mostly.

For this analysis, I will work with the following basis. These numbers will be acquired via the tooltip values when standing in the mists, while wearing no equipment that boosts or alter stats, and with no traits that alter or manipulate stats or weapons. The damage will be rounded to the nearest whole number, where the buffs or conditions will be rounded to the nearest 1/10th. With that out of the way, here are the numbers:

Hammer Auto: (313 + 313 + 391) / 2.75 = 370 DPS. 5.8 might, 5.8 vuln x1.1 damage for traits.
Bomb Auto: (444) / 0.84 = 529 DPS. x1.1 damage from traits. 6 vuln from traits. 2.14 bleed ticks per second from traits.
Flame Jet: (890) / 2.57 = 346 DPS. 0.8 burn ticks per second. 5 might
Grenade: (117 × 3) / 1 = 351 DPS. x1.1 damage from traits. 15 vuln from traits. 5.4 bleed ticks per second from traits.
Hip Shot: (266) / 0.764 from traits = 348 DPS.
Tool Kit: (284 + 284 + 622) /3.23 = 368 DPS. x1.1 damage from traits. 7.4 vuln.

I currently have no animation time for Mortar Shot. Complete scaled DPS is as follows. Note: “In a group” means that any benefit from might and vulnerability essentially don’t exist, as the group will handle those.

Hammer: 407 in a group. 459 solo.
Bomb: 582 in a group. 617 solo. 2.14 bleed ticks either way.
Flame Jet: 346 in a group. 366 solo. 0.8 burn ticks either way.
Grenade: 386 in a group. 444 solo. 5.4 bleed ticks either way.
Hip Shot: 348 either way
Tool Kit: 405 in a group. 435 solo.

So basically, the Hammer auto is beat out by the bomb auto no matter what, the grenade auto if you have shrapnel, and is roughly on par with just swinging a wrench with the tool kit. So the hammer is nothing special.

However, it is “nothing special” in a painful way. First, the bomb auto serves the exact same function, but much better. 42% more damage, 360 degree attack radius, no reliance on completing skill chains to maximize damage, and it still stacks vulnerability for the group. It is available regardless if you have an elite spec or not.

Second, is that the hammer auto does nothing special. Grenades and hip shot, those are ranged attacks that can be done from afar. The tool kit, for all its inferiority, still cripples and does that silly “repair turrets” thing. The flamethrower can self stack a load of might with the right traits, and is excellent for tagging mobs in zergs due to its wide cone attack. But the hammer’s gimmick is that it slowly stacks a small amount of might and vuln in a lopsided way, and nothing else.

This means that hammer auto (and also, by extension, the tool kit) are wasted space. They are skills that have very little purpose in existing, serving only to be that weird thing your character does while you wait for useful skills to be off cooldown.

So, my suggestion, is simply as follows:

#1: Increase the damage from for every skill in the hammer auto attack chain by 20%. It is still weaker than the bomb, but now we at least have a reason not to grenade enemies in the face on a power build.

#2: Increase the damage of Smack and Whack from the Tool Kit’s auto attack chain by 42%. The damage is way too end-loaded on this skill set.

The difficulty has improved quite a bit. Now, you can’t kill everything by just walking up and auto attacking.

The difficulty of the overworld gets overrated. Except the Chak, those guys are nasty. But most enemies have fairly obvious patterns with obvious animations. So long as you are paying attention to what kind of enemy it is, you shouldn’t have much trouble surviving the jungle. It’ll take some experience to learn what the guys do, but once you do it isn’t so bad.

The wiki is wrong. Its 872 damage at 1000 power.

Zodryn.4216:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Well, I just happened to recently calculate the base DPS values of the three main-hand weapons that thief can use.

Staff: 595 base DPS
Dagger: 582 base DPS + 3.57 poison TPS
Sword: 548 DPS

In a max might situation, the staff auto beats out the dagger auto only when you have 21,384 effective power. That is…. extremely hard to reach, so as far as autos go, you’ll want to stick with dagger.

Are those calculations purely based on damage coeffs? If so, it’s important to note that when you are alone, staff is actually better thanks to the vulnerability application. I did some testing in the Mists and posted the result here. If your party provides vuln and might, dagger is probably better.

Edit: spelling

They are done using “tooltip values”. What I do is stand in the mists completely nude of any equipment buffs, so I get what their damages are at 1000 power, no modifier. This gets “base damage”, which is easy to work with. If you want to find how much damage you’ll do, take the base damage, and multiply it by effective power / 1000l. These comparisons were done assuming the enemies are already debuffed to the nines from other sources. Otherwise, it gets complicated.

On the one hand, staff auto sustains about 15 stacks of vulnerability, technically increasing its DPS by 15%. On the other hand, a lot of the work that staff does isn’t by using the auto attack, but by pacing weakening strikes and vault with bound.

The lowest poison can tick for is 33.5. Since the dagger auto sustains 3.57 poison ticks, this technically adds, at no might, 119.6 extra DPS on top of whatever you’re doing. Because of the disjoint between power and condi damage, this is either a lot or not that much. For example, my full zerker thief sits at 10,633 effective power under fury, including all of the various trait buffs rune buffs, and sigil buffs. This would give my thief, standing completely by itself, the following for auto attack DPS:

Staff: 6325 × 1.15 = 7274
Dagger: 6187 + 119.6 = 6307
Sword: 5835

Though it looks like sword is left in the dust, it is still a viable defensive weapon, as its auto puts permanent weakness on enemies, and comes with other useful utilities (condi cleanse and warps on demand, boon stealing and a long dodge). But that is more of a PVP thing.

Factoring in might gets complicated. Technically, full might raises effective power 27.7%, coming to 13,578 total. But, it’s effect on condi damage is much bigger. Suddenly, instead of doing 33.5 damage per tick, poison is doing 78.5 per tick, adding 280 on top. If the enemy has max vulnerability from sources other than yourself (which is fairly common), then you’ll get auto attack dps which looks like this:

Staff: 8079 (x 1.25 for vuln)
Dagger: 7930 + 280 (x 1.25 for vuln)
Sword: 7441 (x 1.25 for vuln)

Its only a 1.6% difference, but technically dagger still wins out. From there, you just go with ancillary bonuses. Each weapon does different stuff, so go with the one that has what you need.

Personally, I’m more of a sword/staff guy. Staff is pure offense, sword is high defense. But those are fairly active playstyles. The most passive playstyle you can have is Dagger/Pistol. You just use Black Powder on occasion, then auto attack down anything that crosses your path with overwhelming force.

To be frank, I’m not sure GW2 isn’t dying in the first place.

Well, I just happened to recently calculate the base DPS values of the three main-hand weapons that thief can use.

Staff: 595 base DPS
Dagger: 582 base DPS + 3.57 poison TPS
Sword: 548 DPS

In a max might situation, the staff auto beats out the dagger auto only when you have 21,384 effective power. That is…. extremely hard to reach, so as far as autos go, you’ll want to stick with dagger.

However, the greatest strengths of the staff isn’kittens auto attack. The staff comes with several other strong skills:

Weakening Charge is much higher DPS than the auto attack, and attacks multiple targets. its hard to use, though.
Bound is an excellent evade skill which also does more damage than the auto attack. This makes staff the only weapon where the skill evade is a DPS gain.

So really, dagger vs. staff depends on how active of a playstyle you want. D/P is good for passive and relaxed play, while the Staff is better for chaotic and aggressive play.

TexZero.7910:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Coulter.2315:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Andulias.9516:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

…

So just don’t play raids. Why the hell is this still a discussion?! You don’t like them, don’t play them, there, solved your issue!

Raid exclusive rewards and further orienting of content (such as PVE class balancing) towards raids means that this is a train no one gets off of.

So in order to get a certain shiney weapon or armour you’re prepared to damage a successful raid system that thousands of people enjoy? I hope you don’t really want to do that.

In particular, ascended accessories for the HoT stat prefixes are raid exclusive. I’m fine with ascended viper’s trinkets being available in raids. I’m fine with them being available most easily in raids. My biggest problem is, that they are available nowhere else.

Which they said, they’re working on for LS3 rewards….so why do we have to do any damage to Raids ?

Why can’t some patience be exercised by players ?

You must be thinking of someone else. From the logical side, I can’t find any reason to now have raids. It is just that they bother me personally.

Coulter.2315:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Andulias.9516:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

…

So just don’t play raids. Why the hell is this still a discussion?! You don’t like them, don’t play them, there, solved your issue!

Raid exclusive rewards and further orienting of content (such as PVE class balancing) towards raids means that this is a train no one gets off of.

So in order to get a certain shiney weapon or armour you’re prepared to damage a successful raid system that thousands of people enjoy? I hope you don’t really want to do that.

In particular, ascended accessories for the HoT stat prefixes are raid exclusive. I’m fine with ascended viper’s trinkets being available in raids. I’m fine with them being available most easily in raids. My biggest problem is, that they are available nowhere else.

Immediately, you have Skale Venom mislabeled as Skelk Venom and you have the duration of torment taking the duration of bleed instead of torment.

Other than that, this reminds me of the impracticality of it all. From the looks of things, it looks like you hybridized viper and sinister, and went with geomancy/agony for additional sigils, and then have an hereto unknown rotation that somehow procs geomancy every 9 seconds, and I have to dig to find precisely what I am supposed to be doing with it.

Fact is, the Berserker Rune vs. Other rune debate is exceedingly simple. Just go by a skill by skill basis: On each skill, which does more: the other rune setup, or the berserker rune setup? Once you have that for the skills in the rotation, debates over.

Technically, the innate skill delay isn’t just the lag. It is the setting time for which the skill will take place. It is extremely short (1/10th of a second, at most), but it is present for every skill that doesn’t automatically chain into another. With thieves, sometimes the setting will bug out, and it’ll take half a second before a skill activates. It isn’t lag, because additional inputs can still be read and processed in this time, like changing direction.

Likewise, when we’re talking about a time period of a few seconds, 1/2 of a second is a pretty big deal. It is the difference between the whole combo taking 1.6 seconds and 2.1 seconds. This time is important, because you can’t animation cancel into the next skill: you have to wait for this animation to finish before you can perform another attack, and thus this aftercast is as much a part of the animation.

Thankfully, Palm strike has a pretty big indicator of when you can begin an attack again. The animation doesn’t use the weapon, so the weapon will vanish for the entirety of the skill, and when the animation finishes the weapon will magically appear into your hands again (though technically it is slightly longer, since the withdrawing portion has the weapon displayed for slightly longer than you can actually use it).

The stopwatch I’m using is here. It is a simple watch: I just keep my mouse key on the start/stop button, then press it as soon as I see the display animation on the skill begin. My innate reaction time is a factor, which is why when I do it at regular speed I get 2.4 seconds, but at 1/4th speed I get 2.3 seconds.

Of course, this is straining at a gnat. If you recalculate using 2.3 seconds instead of 2.5 seconds, you get an addition of +9 DPS for staff attacks instead of +6.

That aftercast time is actually quite substantial. It is nearly equal in length to the animation going inward for the palm strike. You stopped your clock when palm strike did damage, but this isn’t the entire time of the animation. You should’ve stopped the clock after you gained the ability to begin a second attack, which is about the time the incinerators appear in your hands again.

You also started your clock not when you pressed the key, but when the animation after pressing the key begins. This delay exists and adds more time for the skill to take effect. Your video is easily off by 0.75 seconds because of this, and when I take a stop watch to your video I’m getting 2.4 seconds from button press to weapon retraction, easily.

EDIT: Just tried another experiment. Instead, I did a stopwatch time for the entire proper animation at 1/4ths speed. I’m getting times of 9.2 seconds. Divide it by four, and you get around 2.3 seconds animation time.

So I’m not actually going to get the math. I’m going to get a picture that asserts that the logic I have is wrong without explaining how.

Lesson of the day: the tooltips for the activation times for skills in this game are lies. All of them.

The total animation time includes 3 components, only one of which is actually listed.

#1: The activation time
#2: The animation time
#3: The aftercast delay

Put these together, and you get the total animation time. For this particular post, I sat down with a stop watch and timed First Flurry + Palm strike again and again, 20+ times. And each time, the total animation time came back as 2.5 seconds (average. Sometimes it was 2.42 sometimes it was 2.61, etc).

Zodryn.4216:

@
Like Respite, Needle Trap is good for the might if you are alone. Otherwise, ID is basically king. Besides the conditions and CC, ID also deals respectable direct damage, which no other option has.

Important!
Despite the tooltips, PP does not multiply your poison duration by 1.33. It is a flat 33%, and will not increase beyond the 100% cap.

Runes and Sigils
The extra damage from Berserker or Thorn runes make them superior to other options that increase condi duration, but run what you like. Malice and Bursting are both good sigil options, but I believe Doom and Geomancy are actually better, which is nice since they are cheap. I’ll have to check the numbers on Earth.

The hard part about the utility is that each one has some pretty big strengths and weaknesses.

Needle Trap It immobilizes, unloads all of its condis in an instant, it occupies trait buffs that otherwise don’t go to much, it can hit 5 targets all gathered in a group, and it certain situations it can be precast. Problems are that it requires point blank range to use, it is difficult to aim and use properly, and if you find you really want panic strikes then without the traits it offers very little.

Caltrops: This is the highest damaging condi skill the thief has, no trait bonuses needed. It persists, has a large AoE, and it cripples. Cons are that it takes so long to even dish out its condis that often times, the enemy is dead before caltrops could take full effect, making the skill a lot weaker in practice.

ID: It breaks bars, is usable at a distance, and is a combo finisher so you can get some burns/confuse/poison out of it, and it deals a bit of direct damage. Cons are that it only hits one target, and as far as condi damage goes it is the lowest.

The reason why I listed those as debates is because I each time I switch out one for the other, I always find myself wanting to use the other utility. For the most part I default to needle trap or Smoke Screen, but against the more stubborn bosses I’ll use caltrops and against the more mobile enemies I’ll use ID.

Now, as far as the rune sets go, I seriously doubt that berserker runes are always better than condi duration runes. Let me explain, with math.

Technically condi duration has a diminishing return, in that the static additions are worth less and less the more you have of it. So while Sigil of Malice effectively increases your DPS by 10% at 100% condi duration, at 190% condi duration it only increases your overall condi duration by 5.26% of itself, or rather a 5.26% increase in damage.

That… is right at the cap. As it happens, the condi duration from most runes starts at 10%, meaning that unless you go over the cap with condition duration, adding 10% to the duration is better than adding 5% extra damage.

Now, if you have a build that has capped its relevant condition damage durations, but somehow has not done so using a rune set, then it would be better to use Berserker Runes. Although this raises an issue: Long ago, I calculated the damage of various condis when comparing sinister vs. viper at full might scenarios. The only way to reach 100% condi duration without a rune set is to use full Viper, but using Sinister + the rune set would give you the following advantages in damages:

Bleed: 8.4%
Burning: 6.7%
Poison: 7.1%
Confusion: 7.4%, 6.8%
Torment: 8.4%

All of which are higher than 5% that Berserker Runes would give.

As of right now, I haven’t seen a shred of math to prove that Berserker Runes are better, anywhere. And all of the math I have done says that they are not better. Technically, if you were to compare the sets as far as effective direct damage goes, then viper + berserker runes is 10% more effective power. That basically means that Death Blossom will do 800 damage direct instead of 727 damage direct. Compare that to its condition component of 8,580 bleed vs. 9,300 bleed, and you’ll see my skepticism of the value of direct damage here.

So yeah, I went with afflicted runes. Mostly because thief condi damage is divided heavily between bleed and poison.

KestrelGirl.9267:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

My advice would be to get a condi set if you’re going to use condi venoms. Other than immobilize and stun, venoms just aren’t that good for a power build.

I myself have a condi set.

Full Viper
x6 superior rune of the afflicted. It boosts both poison and bleed.
x1 Sigil of Malice, x 2 Sigil of Earth (contemplating changing). D/D and P/D.

The utilities and build tend to be up in the air, and change depending on the encounter. The build is really about which traits to use where. In general, it looks something like this:

Deadly Arts: Dagger Training, Deadly Trapper, Potent Poison
Shadow Arts: Shadow’s Embrace, Leeching Venoms, Venomous Aura
Daredevil: Weakening Strikes, Escapist Absolution, Lotus Training.

Utilities Skelk Venom, Needle Trap, Spider Venom, Skale Venom, Basilisk Venom.

A build like that can get you through a lot of things. The general thing you’ll want to do is pre-cast venoms. Since venoms sit on top of you for 30 seconds and recharge in 32 seconds, you’ll want to cast them long before you enter combat. Then you can double up your venoms, giving you better burst for the encoutner. A similar thing can be done with needle trap, if you expect to see enemies coming soon.

However, there are times when you’d want to swap one trait for another.

Trait Debate One Dagger Training vs. Trapper’s Respite. Dagger’s auto hits 2.38 times per second, which comes to around 1.57 base poison ticks per second. Needle trap with deadly trapper hits for 0.42 poison ticks per second, but 1.25 bleed ticks per second. Now, while it seems like Dagger Training is the clear cut winner, it isn’t always. If you have to disengage and use another weapon, Trapper’s Respite can pull ahead in use, since you can lay it in wait. You can also double cast the trap from Trapper’s Respite if timed well, adding to its usage. If you’re in a situation where you can pre-cast traps or will need to attack from range a lot, Trapper’s Respite can beat out Dagger Training. If you’re attacking multiple enemies that are too spread out of traps and will be using the dagger mainly, then Dagger Training wins.

Trait Debate Two: Shadow’s Embrace vs. Concealed Defeat. This is a complicated one, since it has to deal with your healing skill. I have skelk venom because of the extra buffs and healing, and the ability to pre-cast can help out. But, the thief has got a lot of good healing skills.

Withdraw: any trait set up is good.
Signet of Malice: Any trait setup is good.
Hide in Shadows: Take Concealed Defeat.
Skelk Venom: Any is good
Channeled Vigor: Brawler’s Tenacity.

Trait Debate 3: Escapist Absolution vs. Impacting Disruption. Turns out, Pulmonary Impact still hits remarkably hard for most condi builds. If you have an off-hand pistol or are good at interrupting with Basilisk venom, then having the Pulmonary impacts dish out a solid 4k hit on basilisk venom. Generally I go with escapists absolution, since I budgeted my equipment and don’’t have a condi-offhand pistol, but it is still an option.

Trait Debate 4 Brawler’s Tenacity vs. Weakening Strikes. The thing with condi builds is that, they still have good use for physical skills. Channeled Vigor is a good heal, Impairing daggers is decent at culling a breakbar and doing damage, and Bandit’s Defense is an excellent all around skill, providing that much needed stun break, block, and stun all in one. It is highly likely that you’ll end up running at least one of these skills, so the decreased recharge and extra endurance is beneficial if you do.

Then we have the utilities. Each of the heals has advantages and disadvantages. Channeled vigor lets you dodge more for Lotus Training and can heal a lot if you have the endurance, so it gets high marks. Signet of Malice has arguably the highest healing, but offers no other benefits. Skelk Venom buffs and spreads, but is an overall weak heal. Hide in Shadows lets you cleanse condis and use stealth skills.

The venoms are usually a no-brainer. But the final utility skill is always up for debate.

#1: Needle Trap. It’s solid, easy to trait for. Does decent damage to enemies stacked or in a line, and the immob + might + vuln is good. Hard to use sometimes, though.
#2: Caltrops. High damage skill. Applies 2.2 bleed ticks per recharge in a large area, but it is really slow to fully apply, and many enemies will either die earlier or just walk out of range. Always a solid option, though.
#3: Smokescreen. Blinds are good. Projectile stopping is good. Smoke Fields are good. A defensive option, always solid.
#4: Bandit’s Defense. It’s a great personal stunbreaker and stunner itself, and with such a short cooldown you’ll find it is up when you need it.
#5: Impairing Daggers: 0.96 poison ticks per activation. But, it fires at range, and the immobilize/slow shreds break bars.
#6: Signet of Shadows for when you just want to run.
#7: Shadow Refuge for when you really need stealth.

With full viper and traits with afflicted runes you end up with 38.5% condition damage alongside of 68.5% bleed and 53.5% x 1.33 poison duration. Add on the sigil of malice, you get 48.5% all, 78.5% bleed, 63.5% x 1.33 poison. Add in the condi food, you get 68.5% all, 98.5% bleed, and 83.5% x 1.33 poison. I am unsure if this increases poison duration over the cap, but assuming it doesn’t, you basically have max poison and bleed duration, with respectable duration for everything else.

Skelk Venom? I wouldn’t run that. I’d probably keep my original heal. Also, mainhand pistol is even more debatable; it’s considered the weakest weapon Thief has at least in PvE. Shortbow also has some condi. Why not use it?

The pistol is underrated.
#1: The pistol auto has higher directt DPS as the shortbow against a single target (178/0.82 vs. 196 /0.95). This is before bleed.
#2: Bleed. It isn’t much, but for condi builds it is good.
#3: Sneak Attack is a great way to open out of stealth.
#4: Shadow Strike works as a good disengage skill and inflicts torment.

I’ve always found it a gigantic pain in the rear to use the shortbow as a condi weapon. First, because cluster bomb takes forever, and is difficult to aim. Second, choking gas only does the same condi damage as a 1 × 8 poison attack, and with a 4 initiative cost it has an effective recharge of 4 seconds. I find continually that, if I am not dodging and death blossoming all over a group, that I need to hang back, and with that the pistol auto will have a higher sustained condi DPS over the shortbow.

1. The timings for the attacks are as follows:

Fist Flurry 1.5 seconds
Palm Strike: 1 second
Pulmonary Impact: 2 seconds after palm strike.

As for the whole damage, no I did not include the delay time for pulmory impact in the overall damage time. This is because Pulmonary impact doesn’t eat up any additional animation time when it is ticking away, allowing for consecutive action. Effectively, PI is a power based condition.

2. Because of this, the entire damage of the Fist Flurry + Palm Strike + Pulmonary Impact trio is wholly contained in the 2.5 second animation time that the two skills have. Auto attacking during the time Pulmonary takes to activate doesn’t actually add damage to the fist flurry combo, moreso than it just means that Palm Strike’s full damages has a delayed effect. It is far easier to compress all the damage done by the combo into its animation, rather than complicating it with throwing in additional attacks that will just return the same result anyway.

3. The inaccuracy of the wiki has been troubling as of late. A lot of the information is info that was acquired from tooltips during the beta release, and as such doesn’t reflect a true “base value”. Rather, the wiki shows the stats of these skills while in Knights Gear.

4. Sigil procs are meaningless to the skill. Most sigils have a cooldown of at least 1 second, many are much longer, and the sigils would’ve gone off with the cleaving auto attacks of the melee weapons anyway. You’re not going to get a statistically significant higher proc density from fist Flurry, and even if you did, the slow attack speed of palm strike would’ve immediately counterbalanced any advantage gained.

Andulias.9516:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

…

So just don’t play raids. Why the hell is this still a discussion?! You don’t like them, don’t play them, there, solved your issue!

Raid exclusive rewards and further orienting of content (such as PVE class balancing) towards raids means that this is a train no one gets off of.

They really weren’t. Each enemy in the dungeons had specific mechanics that were meant to be used to beat them. Take Ascalon Catacombs for example. There, you were supposed to interrupt the breeders, stun break the scavengers, and dodge/engage the tunnelers at melee range. Even the ghosts themselves had nasty effects: you had to kite the warriors, reflect the rangers and mages, stay out of the AoEs of the necromancers and mages. To a bunch of level 35’s pre NPE with no formal organization, this was utter hell. I remember spending hours in that dungeon just trying to get to Colossus Rumblus.

It was only later that we figured out tactics (stack, corner pull, mass buff, blind spam) that neutralized most of the enemies, and still after that came a series of character buffs and enemy nerfs that rendered the dungeons non-challenging.

I suppose the biggest issue I have with raids is that it is a reversal of the “play how you want” motto that Anets had before.

One of the advantages to dungeons was that, unless I was being outright stupid, it was doable. Whether I was on tanky gear or full DPS gear, no matter what class I happened to bring, the problems presented before me were solvable. If not by luck, then by patience, problem solving skills, and tenacity. Yes, there was a “Zerker meta”, but this meta was encouraged only by the players, was hard to enforce, and wasn’t really necessary for the dungeon.

I would enjoy anonymous dungeon running. Just grab a few people easily and go. Usually any event, even the harder ones, had a somewhat simple explanation on how to get through them. Failing that, I am usually fairly competent with the classes I play, so I could carry the pugs if they were tenacious enough.

But raids are… different. First, by desiring to pull in a hardcore crowed, raids did away with that whole “play whatever gear prefix you want” thing, and the whole “play whatever class you want” thing. Suddenly, those obscure charts located on random guild web pages that supposedly tracked DPS mattered, so much so that groups were failing just because they lacked the right classes and gear. No longer could I have loose rotations to use skills as needed, or could I pick a sub-optimal setup because I preferred defensive utilities over offensive ones. Now it’s “go glass, get it perfect, or go home”. You also had to bring a healer, too.

So, design philosophy dashed to bits for the sake of the “leet”. In theory there isn’t anything wrong with Anet having raids, but personally I am bothered by the whole thing. In all likelihood I"ll never be able to enter into the raids for several reasons:

#1: I an competent in mind only. Not in body. I am captain fumble fingers, descendant from the great mad random pressers when the immigrated over via a typo. “Perfection” is something that I can never achieve, ever, and so round after round will consist of me failing the whole boss because I pressed the wrong button or am in the wrong spot.

#2: I hate elitists. They generally bring the room down, and I’ve seen their attitudes poison and kill entire communities before, ruining games for everything. I was glad that most of the content in the game was fairly anti-elitist until raids. So, I would have to prostrate myself in front of people that I would sooner punch in the face than have try to force a friendly conversation with, begging them to take someone they hate along with them.

#3: Since I pug dungeons and run solo in the overworld, I have gear and rune sets chosen specifically to suit those needs, and not the needs of a 10 man group (particularly, going for group buffs instead of minor self buffs, sigil of strength/corruption instead of sigil of accuracy, refusal to eat food because food is so expensive, etc). So, I’m sub-optimal for raid groups by design, and building myself for raids will just hamstring me everywhere else.

#4: I cannot find a group to play with. The lack of an LFG that is suitable is definitely hindering things, but everyone talks about doing raids with “friends”. Antisocial by nature, I don’t make “friends” in online games, and nobody I know IRL plays GW2. I certainly haven’t been invited to or seen advertised any raid guilds. Also, due to my odd hours, I can’t make any commitments, since my infamous (anti)sleep schedule means that I can be around at literally any hour of the day. Heck, even writing this I’m on prescription strength tranquilizers that I took 6 hours ago, and they have absolutely no effect.

#5: The ship has sailed. Enough time has passed, so that the tolerance for my incompetence at play is no longer tolerable. This was a “get in or get out” situation, and I’m already out. Players are no longer expecting to “learn” at these raids, they are expecting to win.

#6: To be frank, I can’t keep track of all the things that are going on. I’m 1 step from legally blind, and even with my glasses I can’t see through the myriad of flashing colors and objects to discern, at a glance, what is going on and where I should be. Watching WP’s guide for the Sabetha fight literally made my head hurt, and I have no idea how I am supposed to remember, comprehend, and perceive all of that. I’ve played raids in City of Heroes and DCUO, and they have nothing on what GW2 raids bring.

In short, GW2 raids are this inaccessible and unassailable wall filled with unbearable people, and I stand alone.

Naw. Dungeons were fine, especially when run at the appropriate level. I remember joining groups struggling to get past generic silver enemies. You had to enter the lover’s crypt with a prayer, due to how often teams would wipe and wipe and quit out of frustration. The obliterated spider path from TA is still infamous to this day.

However, dungeons were designed assuming more random set of tactics. Anet didn’t expect players to LoS enemies into a corner and full zerker them down under a blind field, let alone after a series of player buffs and enemy nerfs and the later requirement that everyone be level 80.

I don’t get the image.

Hey, its O.K. for males to gaze.

laokoko.7403:

The thing is Anet comes out to say they put very little resource in making raids.

If that’s the case, I really question what Anet is doing for the dungeon and fractal community for the past 3 years.

Nothing. Nearly every addition to dungeons has flopped, so they classified dungeons as cost-production inefficient and moved on.

Wrong forum? Should be in ele subforum?

Anyway, I usually run staff tempest. Fire 1/1/1, Air 3/2/1, Tempest 3/3/3 or 1/3/2. With counting down from the top. Utilities are whatever, but generally some form of Arcane Brilliance + Arcane Wave + Arcane Shield + Aftershock + Summon Greater Elemental.

There was a time, however brief, in which Fist Flurry + Palm Strike was a viable and powerful technique in the PVE world. However, those days have passed.

After way too long of a time, a realization came to me. The increase in damage from auto attacks on the thief meant that there was in increase in damage from haste. And also, by comparison, the advantage of Fist Flurry + Palm strike had gone down as well. So much so, that fist flurry is basically reduced to a highly conditional 2 second stun. Let me demonstrate:

Standing in the mists on my Daredevil, with absolutely nothing equipped but my skibbies, and no sort of anything that would modify any of my skills, I get the following damage values for the auto attacks of these respective weapons. Note, that these are base values, and as such are modified by effective power.

Staff Auto: (293 + 293 + 688) / 2.14 = 595 DPS
Dagger Auto: (284 + 302 + 391) / 1.68 = 582 DPS + 3.57 poison TPS
Sword Auto: (284 + 284 + 462) / 1.88 = 548 DPS

It doesn’t matter which one is highest right now. Just keep these numbers in mind. Now, lets look at the two “DPS” skills in question: Haste and Fist Flurry + Palm Strike.

What haste does is, for 6 seconds, grants you quickness. This means that you’ll do 1.5x AA damage for 6 seconds. Since the listed values up there are damage per second, this means that Haste will add the additional amount of damage:

Staff: 1,785
Dagger: 1,746 + 10.71 bleeds
Sword: 1,644

And since it will do this every 60 seconds, you can consider this a DPS boost applied every 60 seconds. So, taking how much damage it does and dividing the time between doing it we can get the additional DPS that haste does:

Staff: 29.75
Dagger: 29.1 + 0.18 poison
Sword: 27.4

Keep in mind these are base values, and scale directly with effective power. If you have an effective power of 10k, then these will be 10x higher.

Now, as for our dear, dear Fist Flurry. This is the value that we have now:

Fist Flurry 995
Palm Strike 465
Pulmonary Impact: 872 (365)*

*This is where things get complicated, since Pulmonary Impact cannot crit, it cannot scale with effective power. However, I have a workaround. Standing in full berserker gear at a level 80 zone, while under the effects of fury I have a scaled crit damage of 268.7 (including traits), and a critical chance of 82.3%. No food or outside buffs. Using a very simple formula, this gives me a crit mod of 2.388. Now, you’re probably wondering why I’ve done this. Well, the logic works like this: since Pulmonary impact can’t crit, it is effectively doing damage equal to base damage / crit mod, since all other attacks have the crit mod. Since I get a resting crit mod of 2.388, this means that the scaled damage for Pulmonary Impact will be 365.

With that all out of the way, the total activation time as measured by a stop watch about twenty times or so is 2.5 seconds. This means the skills inflict about 730 DPS.

“But wait!” You say, failing to realize time and again that you should wait for my entire explanation before sounding off like a doofus, “That looks plenty high. What’s the problem, BRA dawg?”. Well, consider that if you weren’t doing Fist flurry, you were probably doing an auto attack. And this means that really, you are only doing an additional damage of

Staff: 135
Dagger: 148 – 3.57 poison
Sword: 182

And since you did this once every 22.5 seconds, then this comes to a total additional DPS of

Staff 6
Dagger: 6.6 – 0.16 bleed
Sword: 8.1

Yep. That’s it. If you have an average DPS of 595 with staff auto attacks, throwing in an extra fist flurry + palm strike nets you a DPS of 601. That’s all it gives you.

“But wait!” you say, forgetting your place again you insolent little… anyway. Yes, you are probably saying that it fulfills the niche of being a “stun” whereas haste just adds damage. Well, that’s where other techniques come in.

Ignoring our high stunning elites, if we were to compete our utilities on a slot for slot basis, there are already utilities that can do what palm strike does, but better.

#1: Haste. If you’re going for damage, haste adds more in any situation in which you do not have guaranteed permanent quickness. Which, I’m sorry to say against those “elitists” who insist that every party has a quickness spamming Mesmer, is not going to happen, because combat is complicated and quickness falls. A lot.

#2: Bandit’s Defense. This is an extremely useful skill. First, it is a block. Second, it is a stun break. Third, if you do block an attack, Reflexive strike is a 2 second knockdown which does just as much breakbar damage as Palm Strike. This skill fills many niches in a build.

#3: Impairing Daggers. The still only has 398 DPS, so over the course of 25 seconds you will lose about 8 points – 0.96 poison ticks off of your DPS. But, it has three advantages. First is that it does 50% more breakbar damage than the other skills. Second, as a combo finisher it comes with other effects. Third is that it is a ranged skill. And as a ranged skill, it is capable of being used while disengaging or chasing an enemy, which are periods where you would normally not be doing any DPS at all, which compensates for the loss that it would provide.

Keep in mind, to come to the defense of Fist Flurry, several things need to happen.

A) Be engaged in melee at all times. No disengaging or chasing.
B) Permanent Quickness
C) Enemy has permanent immobilize and slow
D) Fighting against only a single enemy, as Fist Flurry does not cleave
E) Be requiring no additional utility to the degree where a 1% gain in DPS is preferable to every other utility the Thief has.

And that just plain isn’t going to happen.

“But what” shush. I know you’re talking to talk about crit rates. And again, this is something I’ve worked out. The additional damage that pulmonary impact inflicts becomes more valuable as the crit mod decreases. But, at what point will it become equal to something like haste? There’s a simple formula for that:

0.5 × 6 x AA damage x Crit Mod / 60 = ((584 – AA damage) x Crit Mod + 874 / 2.5) /22.5

Sole for crit mod. First, with Staff auto

29.75 Crit Mod = -0.49 Crit Mod + 15.54
Crit Mod = 0.518

Since the lowest critical damage modifier is 1.02, it is impossible for one to match the damage of another.

With all that, Fist Flurry has found itself out of a job. While the boost to auto damage for thieves was definitely a good update, this has had the unfortunate effect that skills that used to be used for damage before now find themselves not being used at all. Chief among those is Fist Flurry, but also Impact Strike (380 DPS, assuming 3.5 second activation time).

So with this, I will say two things.

#1: Many skills need buffs to their damage to make them worthwhile again. In particular, Impact Strike, Pistol Whip, Fist Flurry/Palm Strike, Flanking Strike/Larcenous Strike, and maybe even Pistol Whip need a buff. If skills do not receive a buff to DPS, then they need to receive a buff to utility of some kind (I.E. Fist flurry causing a 2 second daze).
#2: Until then, I will have to bury Fist Flurry until the day that the devs shine on it.

So, one last uppercut, for memories. I will miss this very fun and thematic skill very much.

The ascended sinister trinkets, no. You can get those via story achievements. The armor, yes you have to craft.

Viper you have to craft, but getting the recipes isn’t too bad.

My advice would be to get a condi set if you’re going to use condi venoms. Other than immobilize and stun, venoms just aren’t that good for a power build.

I myself have a condi set.

Full Viper
x6 superior rune of the afflicted. It boosts both poison and bleed.
x1 Sigil of Malice, x 2 Sigil of Earth (contemplating changing). D/D and P/D.

The utilities and build tend to be up in the air, and change depending on the encounter. The build is really about which traits to use where. In general, it looks something like this:

Deadly Arts: Dagger Training, Deadly Trapper, Potent Poison
Shadow Arts: Shadow’s Embrace, Leeching Venoms, Venomous Aura
Daredevil: Weakening Strikes, Escapist Absolution, Lotus Training.

Utilities Skelk Venom, Needle Trap, Spider Venom, Skale Venom, Basilisk Venom.

A build like that can get you through a lot of things. The general thing you’ll want to do is pre-cast venoms. Since venoms sit on top of you for 30 seconds and recharge in 32 seconds, you’ll want to cast them long before you enter combat. Then you can double up your venoms, giving you better burst for the encoutner. A similar thing can be done with needle trap, if you expect to see enemies coming soon.

However, there are times when you’d want to swap one trait for another.

Trait Debate One Dagger Training vs. Trapper’s Respite. Dagger’s auto hits 2.38 times per second, which comes to around 1.57 base poison ticks per second. Needle trap with deadly trapper hits for 0.42 poison ticks per second, but 1.25 bleed ticks per second. Now, while it seems like Dagger Training is the clear cut winner, it isn’t always. If you have to disengage and use another weapon, Trapper’s Respite can pull ahead in use, since you can lay it in wait. You can also double cast the trap from Trapper’s Respite if timed well, adding to its usage. If you’re in a situation where you can pre-cast traps or will need to attack from range a lot, Trapper’s Respite can beat out Dagger Training. If you’re attacking multiple enemies that are too spread out of traps and will be using the dagger mainly, then Dagger Training wins.

Trait Debate Two: Shadow’s Embrace vs. Concealed Defeat. This is a complicated one, since it has to deal with your healing skill. I have skelk venom because of the extra buffs and healing, and the ability to pre-cast can help out. But, the thief has got a lot of good healing skills.

Withdraw: any trait set up is good.
Signet of Malice: Any trait setup is good.
Hide in Shadows: Take Concealed Defeat.
Skelk Venom: Any is good
Channeled Vigor: Brawler’s Tenacity.

Trait Debate 3: Escapist Absolution vs. Impacting Disruption. Turns out, Pulmonary Impact still hits remarkably hard for most condi builds. If you have an off-hand pistol or are good at interrupting with Basilisk venom, then having the Pulmonary impacts dish out a solid 4k hit on basilisk venom. Generally I go with escapists absolution, since I budgeted my equipment and don’’t have a condi-offhand pistol, but it is still an option.

Trait Debate 4 Brawler’s Tenacity vs. Weakening Strikes. The thing with condi builds is that, they still have good use for physical skills. Channeled Vigor is a good heal, Impairing daggers is decent at culling a breakbar and doing damage, and Bandit’s Defense is an excellent all around skill, providing that much needed stun break, block, and stun all in one. It is highly likely that you’ll end up running at least one of these skills, so the decreased recharge and extra endurance is beneficial if you do.

Then we have the utilities. Each of the heals has advantages and disadvantages. Channeled vigor lets you dodge more for Lotus Training and can heal a lot if you have the endurance, so it gets high marks. Signet of Malice has arguably the highest healing, but offers no other benefits. Skelk Venom buffs and spreads, but is an overall weak heal. Hide in Shadows lets you cleanse condis and use stealth skills.

The venoms are usually a no-brainer. But the final untility skill is always up for debate.

#1: Needle Trap. It’s solid, easy to trait for. Does decent damage to enemies stacked or in a line, and the immob + might + vuln is good. Hard to use sometimes, though.
#2: Caltrops. High damage skill. Applies 2.2 bleed ticks per recharge in a large area, but it is really slow to fully apply, and many enemies will either die earlier or just walk out of range. Always a solid option, though.
#3: Smokescreen. Blinds are good. Projectile stopping is good. Smoke Fields are good. A defensive option, always solid.
#4: Bandit’s Defense. It’s a great personal stunbreaker and stunner itself, and with such a short cooldown you’ll find it is up when you need it.
#5: Impairing Daggers: 0.96 poison ticks per activation. But, it fires at range, and the immobilize/slow shreds break bars.
#6: Signet of Shadows for when you just want to run.
#7: Shadow Refuge for when you really need stealth.

With full viper and traits with afflicted runes you end up with 38.5% condition damage alongside of 68.5% bleed and 53.5% x 1.33 poison duration. Add on the sigil of malice, you get 48.5% all, 78.5% bleed, 63.5% x 1.33 poison. Add in the condi food, you get 68.5% all, 98.5% bleed, and 83.5% x 1.33 poison. I am unsure if this increases poison duration over the cap, but assuming it doesn’t, you basically have max poison and bleed duration, with respectable duration for everything else.

Yeah, no. Personally I find it hard to accept the quality of character of someone who’s been specifically tasked with placating and handling me on an emotional level. What Gaile does isn’t necessarily because she’s a good person. She does what she does because it is her job to manipulate the community into trusting and liking her. There’s a difference between being warmly welcomed, and dealing with someone who’s job is to make it feel like you’re warmly welcomed.

It’s like when you start to think of your psychiatrist as a friend. They’re not your friend, its their job.