Guild Wars 2

A thought occurs: don’t you make decent bank from doing the AB meta? Last I checked, opening all the chests resulted in me getting all 80 inventory slots filled with loot.

If the grind was consuming and cost oodles of money, I would definitely understand the sentiment. Doing the AB meta 50 times and ending up spending hundreds of gold just to get an achievement point and a title, yeah that is horrible. But if you’re making money doing this achievement, then its not much different from grinding for a legendary or for full ascended. To buy Juggernaut I spent literally a week running a chest train in Silverwastes.

CETheLucid.3964:

Khyan.7039:

mauried.5608:

This isnt what anyone wants to hear, but by simple definition the best MMO is the one that has the most players, and makes the most money for its creator.
You can guess which one that is.

True for companies, false for their players.

I mean that sounds solid in theory but one wonders, why if it’s false for their players do the players remain?

Why not… leave?

“this game is crap and I hate it, but I’m going to continue playing and funding it financially!”

Skinner box mechanisms and a passable quality overall. Also, “everyone else plays this game”.

There’s a saying I have in life: “Luck is for other people”.

The thing is, when someone gets lucky they shout it to the skies. When the 1000 other people don’t get lucky, they say nothing.

mauried.5608:

This isnt what anyone wants to hear, but by simple definition the best MMO is the one that has the most players, and makes the most money for its creator.
You can guess which one that is.

In a perfect world, yes. But, there are three factors that affect the success of an MMO that aren’t related to how good it is at all.

#1: Release order. MMOs require massive time investments, which mean that once someone plays one MMO, they don’t want to play another.
#2: Brand name. Yes, an MMO can be sold on the silliest of ideas if it happens to have widespread recognition, like Warcraft does.
#3: Luck. Luck plays a surprisingly large factor when dealing with a business. You’d be amazed how often it is that something successful is only so due to coincidence. Meet the right person, release at the exact right time for the maximum amount of potential buyers, avoid strange lawsuits that force down your game, etc.

It is one of those things that I’ve found quite interesting, in that in all of World of Warcraft’s life, no one is exactly sure why it is that World of Warcraft became as popular as it is.

Julischka Bean.7491:

Wow, thanks everyone for all your tips and offers to help.

As soon as I read the builds suggested, I logged into the game to see how my build compared.

I run:

Blood Magic: 2-2-1 Because I run Dagger/Warhorn as one of my weapon changes, and I also use Well Of Suffering

Death Magic: 1,1,1 Need to take care of my minions

Spite: 2-3-3 because Axe/Warhorn is my second weapon swap…I know I am using Warhorn twice, but i love it..especially in Orr.

In my Utilities I have Summon Shadow Fiend, Summon Bone Minion, Well Of Suffering, and Summon Flesh Golem. My Superior Runes of Speed grants me speedy travel time so I can use Well Of Suffering instead of the travel signet.

Ohhhhh, I almost forgot…I have a question. I have Superior Sigil Of Force on my main hands, but on the off hands instead of my usual sigil of Accuracy, I have Superior Sigil Of Bursting.

Sigil Of Force adds 5% Damage,

Sigil Of Bursting adds 6% to current condition damage.

Can these two be used together? I am using them together, and they seem to be working well together..but are they?

I decided upon Bursting over Accuracy because my Stats are all Berserker and wanted a boost to condition damage no matter how small…sort of covering all bases.

And grinding at first in HoT sounds good…it’s like getting my feet wet before taking the plunge…and if I see any events starting I can go ahead and join.

I have to go make breakfast and run errands but I will be back

Lisa-Very inquisitive

The thing with minions is that they’re very low-utility. Sure, you have a sizable mass that can take a few hits, but find yourself stunned and poisoned and you’ll wishing they did something other than melt to sniper fire.

Personally, pre-reaper, I had the following build:

Gear: Full Berserker
Runes: Scholar
Sigils: Force / Strength.

Weapons: Dagger/Focus, Warhorn
Utilities: Consume Conditions (or Well of Blood), Well of Suffering, Well of Corruption, Well of Darkness/Signet of Spite/Well of Power, Lich form.

Spite: Spiteful Talismen, Chill of Death, Close to death. This is a fairly basic build, set to maximize damage as much as possible.

Curses: Plague Sending, Path of Corruption, Weakening Shroud. This is the part that is critical to the build, because curses gives you furious demise. Otherwise these traits are mostly utility traits.

Blood Magic: Quickening Thirst, Vampiric Presence, Vampiric Rituals. A close competitor with soul reaping, but now that life blast pierces there is not as much reason to go into that build. In group scenarios, go with Ritual of Life instead of Quickening Thirst, as you’ll likely have swiftness on you anyway. Ritual of Life is very underrated.

This is a “shroud flashing” build. The idea of this build is fairly simple: By blinking in and out of death shroud rapidly, you can give yourself a high fury time, as well as inflict weakness to enemies around you. The off-hand weapons are swapped as needed, generally opening with locust swarm then wail of doom, flashing shroud and using tainted shackles, following through with a swap to focus for Reaper’s Touch. With Well of Suffering and Reaper’s Touch, the enemy should have a lot of vulnerability on them. You auto attack with the dagger, unless one of two things happens. First is that one of the wells or reaper’s touch is off CD, which in case you use those. Second, is if you need to disengage, heal, or revive.

The frequency of flashes isn’t set in stone. The other important thing to note is that Shroud works as a second HP bar, so if you fear massive damage from an enemy, you can keep shroud reserved for a bit to absorb the hit. Though this build is deceptively tanky. The wells give protection, the flashing gives weakness, coming to a total damage reduction of 51% (effectively giving you 38k HP). Factor in the life steal and you’ll be surprised how little your HP bar will budge. With that said, the moment you feel safe to flash, do it. That extra fury and weakness mean a lot.

You’re probably wondering about ranged damage. Well, there are two things here. With Death Shroud giving you a lot of HP and the build’s overall tankiness, you really won’t find yourself needing to “range” that much at all. But, should you find yourself in a situation where disengage is necessary, you still have ranged attacks in the form of Lich Form and Life blast. Don’t be afraid to use lich form, because after you’ve dropped your wells it does more damage than the dagger auto. Aside from that, Life Siphon can provide a minor heal an ranged offense while disengaging, and against a group the siphon from transfusion is pretty good, too.

The last utility slot is whatever is needed. Well of suffering is obvious, and well of corruption is a mini WoS that can also strip boons. Well of Darkness is a good choice because it makes anything without a break bar useless for 6 seconds or so. Well of Power is good if you find yourself in a condi/stun heavy area and aren’t running consume conditions, however against stun you’ll usually pop into shroud and counter-doom the enemy who stunned you. Spectral armor is also a good stun breaker, giving more protection while also giving more life force. If nothing catches your fancy and you’re basically fighting against big bags of HP, then Signet of Spite gives a meaningful boost to damage. Blood is Power is also a decent might boost when with a group. The main difference between consume conditions and well of blood is group support.

There are two ways to engage an enemy. Against frail but dangerous enemies, you’ll want to go whole hog and just burst them down as fast as possible. Against vet, you’ll want to keep your wells in check, waiting for their health to hit the half way mark for the 20% damage boost. For Champions and extremely durable enemies, the “whole hog” tactic works again, but reserve lich form for disengage or when they are half health.

With that build, I basically carved through all HoT content to get the reaper. The combination of high durability, high damage, good regen, and constant boon stripping makes this build capable of simply out-lasting groups of enemies with very little “skill” or counterplay needed. Just don’t stand directly in the glowing lines of the snipers and move after a ravager teleports to you, and you should be good.

As for the force/bursting thing, no. A sigil of bursting is wasted on anything that isn’t a pure condi build. In fact, the extra might stacks from a sigil of strength would offer more condi damage than a sigil of bursting would. If you have a dedicated group that is always going to be giving a lot of might, you can swap out strength for accuracy or bloodlust. You would never need traveling runes and quickening thirst at the same time. For a rune set, scholar is good, strength is good, chronomancer is good, eagle is good, heck straight up ruby orbs are still a solid option.

That’s a solid “maybe”. Fact is, nobody knows (not even Anet) until they up and decide to do it.

DGraves.3720:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

It doesn’t matter if it gives a significant improvement. All that matters is if the potency of that skill competes with the others. When power builds needed ascended gear to compete with condition build’s exotic gear, then that’s a problem.

… But it doesn’t. At all. I’ve no idea how you guys do your math and crazy numbers but condition damage isn’t ever going to do better than raw consistent burst simply because one stack never hits that kind of damage. Ever.

Aside from Burnzerkers briefly demonstrating this false, the fact is that condition damage is inflicted by all the stacks, not just one. Also, condition damage is usually safer to use than power damage, which means that while in a vacuum a power build does better, in practice a condition build does better. Conditions aren’t affected by protection or weakness, either, which chip away at power builds and can be a severe pain (especially in higher fractals). Also consider that condition builds still do direct damage, which after maximum might/fury and team buffs, still stand for a substantial contribution to damage outside of just the conditions that are inflicted.

Then again, last I checked you have no clue how condition damage works. It appears that fact has not changed.

DGraves.3720:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

As for the OP, I suppose the biggest issue I have is that I see this completely in reverse. It isn’t unfair to other builds because power builds get a 5% increase via weapon strength with ascended. It is unfair to power builds because they have to get ascended to get their full potential. It is an extra demand necessary for the build.

This makes no sense. The best tier gives you significantly improved potential and you are complaining while the best tier does not significantly improve the potential of other builds?

Is this real life?

It doesn’t matter if it gives a significant improvement. All that matters is if the potency of that skill competes with the others. When power builds needed ascended gear to compete with condition build’s exotic gear, then that’s a problem.

Of course there is a best MMO. The best MMO is the one that combines the various elements which constitute an MMO in the best way possible.

As for if GW2 is the best MMO… unless City of Heroes spontaneously rises from the dead or my idea for an MMORTS actually takes off… then GW2 is definitely a strong contender.

PROs:
*Very smooth gameplay. It flows easily and it makes sense.
*Solid dynamic action. This is a technical aspect that is underlooked a lot, but the fact that I can fire a fireball at an enemy, have it arc over and get body blocked by a different enemy, all in real time is an amazing achievement.
*Decent class system. Note: I hate the holy trinity..
*In recent releases, enemy design has stepped up to be meaningful encounters that are both dangerous enough to make you loose, but easy enough that you’ll most likely win.
*Stable economy. Yes, that is a big achievement.
*Fair. Everything gives experience, and the game is more concerned with rewarding who was there instead of dicing up everyone’s contribution to try and reward who did the most.
*Beautiful landscape design. Though in most places there’s nothing to actually do, the aesthetics of the whole place is awesome.
*Dynamic event system. It is much better than the old “fetch seven bear kitten” quest system that seemingly every other game uses.
*Auto scaling makes the entire world more valuable.\
*Comparatively little grind. The emphasis of balancing around exotics means that you don’t have to spend months to reach a bare minimum level of competency.
*Community is meh. Yes, “meh” is an achievement for MMOs, as most MMO communities are filled with whiny brats who can dedicate a full time job’s worth of time to being a pain in the kitten .

CONS:
*The story sucks. It is generic mystic babble following mediocre characters in a hastily written and generic storyline. Poor and obvious direction choices, poor implementation.
*The company has no idea what it is doing. Arenanet is an ideal based company, and so it’ll throw in grandiose ideas that sound good in their head, but overall fail in implementation.
*The market is bland. With all drops being indiscriminate bags filled with boxes filled with sacks, the prospect of finding a much needed but rare material in obscure corners of the world is lost.
*As said above, the world is mostly empty, having very little reason to go places other than to see a place.
*Balance passes take forever, meaning that if something is imbalanced or broken it will stay like that for several months.
*The code is spaghetti, and every time something is fixed, 2 things are broken.
*The community moderators are oppressive and ideologically motivated.
*Though the combat is done very well, there is little to do other than combat and “press F”.

This probably should be in the Q and A section, but I’ll answer.

Once you use a skin to paint an armor, that option is gone for good. But, the skin is unlocked in the wardrobe, so later you can use a transmutation charge to put it onto another piece of armor.

nicknamenick.2437:

If so then also revert the critical dmg nerf from the past that decreased the power dmg builds by atleast 10%.

This nerf was done because of the ascended armor/weapons/trinkets.

It really wasn’t. The nerf was done because there wasn’t a uniform distribution of crit damage across different stat pieces, and this lead to an overall greater performance than intended. Trust me, the zerker meta used to be quite a bit more severe than it is now.

As for the OP, I suppose the biggest issue I have is that I see this completely in reverse. It isn’t unfair to other builds because power builds get a 5% increase via weapon strength with ascended. It is unfair to power builds because they have to get ascended to get their full potential. It is an extra demand necessary for the build.

However I digress: the thing with healing builds, condition builds, tank builds etc. is that they still do power damage. Quite a bit, actually. While power damage may not be the main component of their role or what they do, the contribution of ascended weaponry doesn’t suddenly go away just because you focus on condi damage.

I’ve been barking up that swimsuit tree for years. All I can say about that is ARF ARF ARF GRRRRRR!

But seriously, the swimsuit issue is one of those things that perplexes me. It shouldn’t be a ratings thing, because we can already strip down our characters and NPCs are already wearing swimsuits. There’s no technical limitations, as we’ve already seen active character models wearing them. As outfits they are guaranteed to sell in the gemstore. So… why no swimsuits?

LordSaa.8357:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I just wouldn’t play.

GW2 was designed specifically to be lenient in death, so it can make death and dying all the more common. If you want a permadeath game, you have to build it from the ground up.

I believe enviroments works just fine it just that most of a people anyway focus in a mmorpg in a part wich is -RPG (character progression wich is excatly a same then in a aRPG what you are doing). A playing style would change of course to more adaptive and rushing will kill you for sure. Unless you play in very organized group.

You’d have to extend that list a bit. You’d get killed unless
A) You play in a very organized group
B) You never do a jumping puzzle, since failure in those leads to instant death
C) You never do fractals, because they’re loaded full of instant death mechanics and can require literally hundreds of hours to get the necessary gear.
D) You never do raids, for the same reason as fractals.
E) You never do an overworld event with too many people, as the bosses would scale up and cause instant death even in with full tank gear opponents.
F) You never go in to heart of thorns, as the place is also full of near instant death mechanics.
G) You never walk into a WvW zone. Oh, I shutter to think what would happen in a WvW area with permanent death.
I) You only play on a high end computer capable of processing the game no matter what the circumstances create.
J) You only play with a reliable high speed internet connection, as a d/c can result in death.
K)You only play a select group of specific builds on the most durable of classes.

The fact is that if you make a game that requires dozens of hours to build a character, that game can’t also have PVE mechanics that one-shot said character even when fully geared and properly built. For comparison, lets take a popular perma-death game: The Binding of Isaac. BoI is a game that is tough as nails and has RPG elements, along with a randomly generated (I.E. not necessarily “fair”) map layout. The reason why it is BoI can get away with, and is actually enhanced by, the perma-death mechanic is the fact that the game only takes an hour and a half to complete. At any point, when you start, you are only an hour or so away from your goal, so failure does not sting. It enhances the stakes, and it gives meaning: the 1.5 hours is an accomplishment only because if you die at any time in that timeframe, you have to start over.

You can’t just go to any game and say “permadeath, now its cool.”. Anything resembling perma-death in GW2 would actually be immensely harmful, because anyone who didn’t get turned off by the prospect of having 100 hours literally vanish into thin air will only play the must dumbed down content and neutered and boring builds to survive.

I just wouldn’t play.

GW2 was designed specifically to be lenient in death, so it can make death and dying all the more common. If you want a permadeath game, you have to build it from the ground up.

I hear you can somehow bind the scroll wheel on the mouse to rapidly click to open bags. I’m not exactly sure how.

For raids, currently it is the Thief. You can only bring a thief when every other important role has been filled.

I look at norn and human women mostly, just to see what looks hot and what doesn’t. Otherwise, most character’s appearances might as well be a max compression jpeg of their character. Random colors and fins and spikes everywhere.

I’m doing the top DPS. That’s all you need to know.

But seriously, nobody knows. In theory it is elementalists, but in practice it is not always elementalists.

I’m surprised that no one has mentioned that the only reliable way to get the new stat sets in HoT is by crafting them.

I’m a City of Heroes refugee myself. Yes, we’re refugee’s now. But I guess I was a bit of a different kind of refugee… When I played CoH, I was theorycrafting full IO sets for all my toons to get soft-capped defenses, and would frequently host trials because I didn’t want to stand around and wait for someone else to host the trial. Some of my funnest moments was when I went and hosted a +4x8 Barracuda Strike Force / Whatever the hero equivalent was (the one with the Reichsman). That, and the first time I soloed an Archvillain.

That all said, this game is not as lenient as City of Heroes, where you could run around with SO enhancements. Heart of Thorns was built assuming that players who walked into the jungle were competent with their toons, as well as fully equipped. It is there to satisfy the yearning of harder overworld content that was created when the NPE nerfed everything.

I myself am not a good player. I am slow, I can’t see half of the time, I am captain fumble fingers, and I cannot break away from mouse-activating skills no matter how much I set my keybinds and practice. And yet, I don’t think there’s anything in the game that I cannot complete. This isn’t Tekken, you don’t need twitch reflexes to compete. This isn’t runescape, you don’t need to dedicate a full time job to grind out all the gear needed to even function. You only need 3 things:

#1: A good build.
#2: Good Gear (exotic level. Probably zerker or sinister/viper).
#3: The knowledge of the tactics and combos that come with that build.

And due to the sheer power that comes with these 3 things, you’ll find that many encounters will melt away with only the barest sense of competence.

It could be that, because you’ve never set foot in dungeons or joined a team, you haven’t received proper feedback or practice with your skills, and haven’t been put into a situation that would require critical thinking to succeed. You’ve got to get over the self conscious thing. To quote Jake the Dog “being terrible at something is just the first step to being kind of good at something”. Yes, you’ll probably drag down a group you join, but so long as you’re kicking those legs you’ll start running with the pack. And that will be necessary, because some of the hero points in HoT are designed specifically for groups.

Maybe if we got a sense of your gear, builds, and tactics we might see what the problem is. I’m not ready to surrender and rewrite the games code just because you have no confidence.

I noticed a drop in players, too. But… probably not where you guys have. I’m an avid forumer. I pay attention to the speed at which topics and threads move, and for awhile now the forum has been going at a snails pace. It is the slowest that I’ve ever seen it, really.

Although I do have a theory about this. It isn’t so much a “HoT is bad” as much as it is a “HoT wasn’t good enough” theory. Here’s how it goes: the thing with advertising and hyping up an expansion pack is that it can be theoretically anything. It can be the worst thing to happen ever in the history of gaming, but in general people like to speculate about how awesome everything will become. Because of this, the era before the release of an expansion pack is one of the busiest times for an MMO. It is full of people speculating and preparing for stuff that might be fun, as well as those players who are getting a last hurrah out of a game that they will fear to change.

But, once an expansion pack is released, then the infinite possibilities built up by expectations all come crashing down into a singular reality. In this moment, you will loose players based not only on how good the expansion pack is, but how high their expectations were. It doesn’t matter if something is only a minor nuisance. If it isn’t awesome, its the worst thing since EA. So after the pre-pack surge, you’ll get a pack surge when people actually buy it, then you’ll get a dramatic fall off afterward.

It is pretty horrendous. Considering that you’ll be literally loitering in an armor for 10 minutes, the fact that it kicks you out in 15 seconds or so is just poorly designed.

But that’s the thing. The problem isn’t a “meta”. The issue is that, when players experiment with or bang out their own builds, the elite specs come out on top. Personally I don’t follow the meta in any sense. All of the builds I use I make myself, and any time I do some theorycrafting or some number crunching, the e-specs win.

The builds don’t become the meta because there’s some Illuminati conspiracy to manipulate the sheeple for some convoluted money-making scheme. The builds become meta because a whole host of theorycrafters test them out or run some numbers, and then come to the same conclusion. And there’s a very good explanation for this, too: The elite specs were designed to either give the class something they didn’t have previously, or to improve upon areas where the class was lacking. “Covering Weaknesses” and “More Potency” lead to “better” a surprisingly frequent amount of times.

Mostly it isn’t. In PVE if you want more survivability you’re better off going with Marauder or Carrion Gear, as in small amounts HP adds more durability.

The different classes kind of fulfill different roles. So while something like Ele is arguably the strongest a group of 10 eles is definitely not the strongets.

If anything, it has been my experience that elite specs are almost always going to be better than standard specs. For PVE. The exceptions to this being Ranger, in which normal ranger does more damage (but good luck getting a non-druid healer into a raid), and Engineer who still prefers a condi spec.

The ability to respect mastery points as needed defeats the whole purpose of having mastery points as gradual progression. Otherwise you just get 20 or so and then you can go anywhere, do anything.

I myself am playing the game mostly to get ascended weapons on all of my toons. At least on their power weapons, anyway.

With the introduction of raids, the writing on the wall became clear: Go ascended or go home. The game difficulty is being ramped up to the point where the extra 10% damage from ascended weapons and trinkets is a necessity, if not by content design then by the tiny margin of error demanding far more from me. Enrage timers take what was leisure and changes it into an imposing demand for performance. Suddenly, I can’t afford to be “not peak” anymore.

Thankfully I’m more than half way done. Out of all of my toons, I only have a few guardian weapons left, and that herald shield which requires me to do HoT story mode. I don’t have ascended UW weapons, but those can wait. After the weapons, I have a few backpacks to make, and laurels to collect for accessories.

And after that… I do other things and wait for the game to get my interest again. Otherwise, college keeps me busy.

There is a world that is just for me. It is not a very nice world, but alas it is mine, in the sense that it is new, and it is made just for me.

After walking for about 45 minutes, I am home. And at such a great time to be home, for the servers have reset, and now I can do my dailies. The first task I am up to do is Quartz Crystal farming, as it gives a lot of money in a short time. I just have to get onto a t4 or higher drytop map. But then, as I often do, I encounter an anomaly.

Tier 1, 41 minutes past the hour. Tier 1 is a level that is surpassed easily by a single player doing single events on the map. I must conclude that this map, it is new. There were no others before me. It is world for me.

Or is it? As misfortune would also have it, updates tend to roll around at server reset time. When updates are released, the tiers of drytop are reset, and the world for everybody is low tier. But, how do I know this is the case? The other worlds, I cannot see. The only thing I see is the world for me.

As I rush in and out of the map, the only thing to see is still the subtly diabolical map that is the world for me. I check the LFG, but there’s no taxi to see. I plead for a taxi, but there is none who sees me. Filled with doubt, but fueled by frustration, in and again I run through the doorway. For 17 minutes, back and forth every which way, I run and run, but to my dismay, I still see only a world for me.

It has happened before. It’ll happen some more. At the end of the line, the threshold of failure, I will get in to a world for everybody. Tier 4, Tier 5, I know they exist. I know there is room, because I can taxi and be taxi’d. I wonder why so few taxi. I guess others don’t know about the world for me. Or they just don’t care, it could be.

At 3:47, I notice something strange. The world I am in is not for me, but it is only tier 3! The updates have rolled out, and have killed our progress. It causes all of us here great distress. To see that we could not go past tier 3, it nearly brings out a tear in me. I must try again at a later date, and hope at night so late, I will not see a world just for me.

So, now that the world knows how much I suck a poetry, I have to reiterate a very common complaint. The way events and maps are being designed, the random scattering of players throughout different maps, capping at 85% capacity just doesn’t cut it. The taxi system is a workaround, but nonetheless it is frustrating precisely because it requires players to be both lucky and generous enough to get into a functioning map to begin with, and try to pull in others, and also fight against taxi’s for less desirable maps. The volunteer system is broken, and will frequently dump me into a less populated and less complete map, but I have to go there because several poor saps volunteer as tribute without knowing that the whole system is broken.

We need some kind of reliable shard selection if we keep designing maps in such a way that organization and the completion of pre events are necessary for one big, regularly scheduled event.

Maybe it is because I’m one of those guys who does the calculations, but it has been my understanding that the ideal circumstances would never actually be reached, as they would require perfect play with perfect RNG when fighting against certain bosses.

Let me put this in simile: There is a language in the world that can be heard from 10 miles away. It is a whistling language of… Madagascar I think. Anyway, it holds the Guinness Book of World Records record for the furthest a conversation can be heard, completely unaided. However, this record did have a few stipulations to it:
#1: This was at night
#2: Over still waters
#3: On a night with no wind or other interference.

While someone can say that this shouldn’t count, due to the rarity at which seafaring whistlers will need to speak to each other, that ignores a critical factor that no one else was able to hold a conversation over 10 miles of still water. When analyzed on the margins, it is obvious that the whistling language is the best at long distance communication.

Likewise, most theorycrafting is done in a sterile environment, on the margin. This means that we are be looking at individual skill contributions, and pairing them with other individual skills to find out which one has the most effect. Yes, in practical situations you will need to dodge and heal, and your attacks will miss, or your fingers will slip, or your teammate will go down, or any number of unusual things will happen. But this doesn’t mean that, suddenly, Elixir U is better Grenades. Even if you have to spend half the fight dodging and rezzing, it doesn’t change which skill causes more damage.

Thus, while realistically the max DPS builds won’t get their maximum DPS, for any practical sense they are still the best builds and rotations you can run. The only time that changes is when there is a mechanical complication that would force one skill to be better than another. I.E. a boss with near permanent projectile reflection would render grenades nigh useless. This, however, is not license to take any Max-DPS builds and sweep them under the carpet without further thought. What this is, is encouragement to use discretion, to critically think about your predicament and make a judgement for which utility or weapon will be better at the time.

The whole “listing the maximum” thing isn’t unique to just theorycrafters. Most of the world does it, actually. For example, your car’s MPG is listed assuming it is running at 45 MPH on a straight asphalt road, instead of crawling along in gridlock. Your internet connection will not always be at it’s maximum MBps. Your horse will not always output a horsepower of power. Etc. and so on. I hate to be the one to tell you this… actually no, I love to be the one who tells you this: get ready for a world of disappointment, as nearly every product is marketed in ideal conditions, and will rarely ever reach them.

I’m not sure what the big deal is. It is only on the rarest occasions that I can’t get into a DS map of some kind. If I don’t squad taxi or just automatically group with people on a map reset, I usually end up in an ancillary map that other people also have been grouped up in. Then we taxi for a bit to fill our new map, and get things under way. After every reset there are countless maps that are filled with people, so even if I don’t end up on one of the big maps that’s already filled, there’s a lenient taxi time for which I can either port to another not-as-full map, or I can fill my own map.

To get keys?

I get a lot of tomes and writs, so every week I make a toon, farm a key, and then continue on with my life as normal.

If you’re thinking of spending gems to get an extra character slot to farm keys, I’d say no, forget it.

That doesn’t make what I said false. That’s just getting into specific technicalities when comparing a real world resource to a virtual one, in that there’s an additional limitation in the real world.

The hardest part about reading this whole discussion is that it is premised on some very incorrect definitions and assertions.

#1: There is a “sink” in the real world. In fact, there are a lot of sinks. Everything you buy will wear and tear and break down, to the point where it doesn’t provide its original function, and thus the item effectively disappears. For example: food. When I buy a meal, I eat the meal, and it will give me pleasure in taste and the pleasure of being full, but that will fade, and I will need to buy a different meal. Thus, my stomach is a food “sink”.

#2: Not all of the game can be considered leisure. Grind, particularly grinding in MMOs, encourages players to play when the game is no longer fun. This is done in part via psychological trickery, which puts some kind of accolade or promise of fun behind a wall to climb. Thus, for many players (most, arguably), most activity in the MMO becomes “work”, where you work toward the part where you can have “fun”.

#3: “Infinite” is very poorly defined here, and also it is not true. The word you guys are probably looking for is “fluctuating”, because while in theory there can be limitless resources in a game, in reality there isn’t. In any game’s lifespan, there will be a finite amount of any resource produced, due to the finite number of hours that every person will play the game for. At any moment in time, there is a fluctuating but finite limit on any resource, and this limit cannot be surpassed by the will of the players. For something to be infinite, it would have to be available instantaneously at any desired quantity. So in any practical sense, as well as in any real sense, the resources in the game are finite, unless the resource is programmed specifically to be available instantaneously at any desired quantity.

#4: Something can be of “no value” if and only if it is not desired. Thus, a virtual currency can have value. And since players do, indeed, desire in-game gold, then in-game gold is valuable.

That all said, personally I am for the soulbound/account bound system. Mostly because I have played games where there was unrestricted trade with no termination points and no hard restrictions on supply, and the end result was predictable: massive deflation over time. Though it is possible for this game to function without binding, several things in the game (I.E. Wardrobe system) would have to be changed to avoid economic problems.

TD is a decent concept in theory, but failed in execution. It is a labyrinth that is tightly packed with extremely dangerous enemies, which make navigation hard, except there’s one big problem: You have no reason to go into those labyrinths.

The reality of Tangled Depths is that it is a fairly generic map structure with complicated labyrinths tacked on to the sides. Once you get to Ley-Line Confluence Waypoint the entire map is pretty linear. You just head down the labeled tunnel to get to the respective labeled waypoints. The hardest part from there is figuring out whether you go up or down to get to an event from that respective waypoint.

Oh, there are plenty of confusing paths and mazes in the map, but there’s no reason to go into them. All of the big and important events are usually tethered to Confluence Waypoint, or one of the respective main waypoints in the map, so if you find your bearings there, you’ve basically explored the whole map. The Nuhoch wallows trivialize pretty much everything else from there.

Starlightmagus.8654:

RNG is something I’ve long come to terms with in MMOs. I’m sure many here have played WoW, and comparisons to that game are inevitable, so I’ll simply use it as a point of reference without focusing too heavily upon it. GW2 has, from the beginning, been heavily about RNG loot. Occasionally you get good things, but often what you get is utter garbage (garbage you can salvage is still garbage). I often found my bags filling up with greens and the occasional yellow that’s only use were to be broken down into hopefully useful materials that I can presumably use for other things.

I have to question the reasoning behind this. It’s tedious to click salvage on what ends up being dozens of otherwise useless items. This has only grown far, far more pronounced in the new content to the point where I don’t even want the loot for the sheer tedium of having to go through my bags every half hour salvaging oodles of worthless items for semi-worthless materials and then pitch all the accumulated Minor Sigils of Why Are These Even Here Get Out of my Bags. It’s ultimately tiresome.

Never fear, explain man is here.

You may remember the emphasis on playing how you want that was part of GW2’s design. Well, to accomplish this there were a few stipulations. In particular was the loot system. In older games, loot was tied to the area it was found, the enemy who was killed, whomever dropped it, etc. This traditional design decision is actually fairly good, since unique drops would mean that an area would always have players in it, so long as those materials are demanded.

But, to have a PHIW game, this loot system would have to be largely abandoned for a different one. You would need a loot system that rewarded, fairly randomly to maintain scarcity and a dynamic market, an even spread of materials regardless of your location and preferred game type. Thus, we got the random loot system we have now, where no matter where you go or what you do you receive an endless stream of generic, low quality gear. The high crafting costs and demands for items was tacked on later as a sink for these materials, as well as a method to provide demand for low level materials, which per original design were to be largely abandoned once you outleveled them.

The complicated nature of the loot table in the game meant that, in order to meaningfully impact loot, ancillary tables needed to be added. You may know these as boxes or bags. The advantage to the system of constantly tiering boxes and bags is that, if an item is to be introduced into the game (I.E. ascended crafting materials), it is most easily done by manipulating the drop table of boxes and bags than it is manipulating the drop table for every enemy who might be at the appropriate level. Hand health problems aside, of course.

Now, as these bags have their own loot table (and thus a range of items they can drop), for newer HoT content, it was again simpler to, instead of making the new crates and caches drop those same items, the caches and crates would drop the boxes and bags which dropped those items. So really, the whole bag issue is a product of a game design shortcut. This wouldn’t be so bad, if there was a “click to open all boxes” button.

As for the constantly growing influx of loot, that also has an explanation. Since everything is rewarded everywhere for doing anything, there are very few draws you can put into an area to counteract the increased difficulty it may have. That draw, of course, is the volume of loot you receive. You can’t really receive better items, but you can definitely receive more items. Very easily actually. You just increase the number of bags. But, to keep the exotics market stable, you can’t just have more and more exotics. The reason why rare things are valuable is because they are rare, and if they quit being rare then they would quit being valuable. So, you just get more junk loot.

The game is alright. I’ve certainly seen worse. I.E. buy to play grind-for-months super glitchy and buggy borefests.

If I were to pick the place with the biggest flaws, it would definitely be the story.

#1: As much as Woodenpotatoes loves the lore, I just see it as generic mystic babble. It isn’t some kind of insight or metaphor for the nature of humanity or the universe, or anything of the sort. It isn’t a thought experiment on how things would be in a different world. It is not provoking in any way. All the lore consists of is “generic fantasy trope does generic fantasy thing to other generic fantasy trope”. No, the Sylvari are not interesting. They are green elf children

#2: The story isn’t reinforced thematically by gameplay in any way. For a world under siege by nigh unstoppable forces of nature mass producing instruments of death every waking second, it certainly seems like a pleasant jolly jaunt exploring the place. Other than the story occasionally saying there’s a gigantic threat looming over us, there’s nothing that seems pressing or urgent. The elder dragons don’t seem like any more of a threat than the wildlife around Tyria. Right now, most players are more terrified of Chak than the elder dragons.

#3: The characters are dull or annoying. I say this seriously: if you were to kill off all of the A and B iconics, I wouldn’t care. I hear that it is a bit better in the HoT story (which I haven’t done yet, see above: the story is bad), but pre-hot most of what they do is stand around plainly saying plot relevant things to us or themselves. If we’re lucky we get a line or two quipping about something. We don’t have a good supporting cast, but we also don’t have a good villain, either.

#4: The presentation isn’t the best. For the personal story we had NPCs standing side by side talking. For LWS1 and S2 we had NPCs somewhere on the map saying something. For HoT we at least get some cutscenes. But I’ll be frank: I’d be fine with a gigantic wall of text if it was done right.

So to recap, we have an uninteresting world filled with uninteresting people that you (barely) learn about in uninteresting ways, and as far as gameplay is considered the story might as well not exist. The reason why I pick on the story so much is because a good story is an extremely powerful driving force in gaming, and it will keep people coming back even if they don’t like playing the game anymore.

Maybe I’m just lucky, but I never D/C at DS.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Xhyros.1340:

You are wrong and demonstrate a clear lack of understanding of what dps means. Stop posting, spend a day or 2 and think, and then delete all your wrong posts, it might confuse other people.

Without a clear explanation of how the OP is wrong or even of what DPS means in the context of condition duration, I have to assume this respondent simply wanted to rant and isn’t really interested in helping others understand.

It’s not quite that. I mentioned this before, but it bears mentioning again: the train of thought the OP goes through is utterly baffling. It took me awhile to even figure out what mistakes were made, and I’m still not sure how it is that, knowing what the OP knows, he arrived at those mistakes in the first place. So if it is perplexing to me, captain explain-stuff-as-a-hobby with several years of professional experience as an educator, then to the average joe it must look like madness.

And to that madness, a case in which someone sees something is clearly wrong but cannot clearly see how someone has gotten it so wrong, what advice can they give? It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve heard someone say “just sit back and think on it for a bit”.

As the Sinister vs. Viper guy, I’ve seen many arguments on the subject.
A) The “stealing stacks” claim. Originates from the old condi system and a wiki with conflicting definitions in different places.
B) The “lower sum” claim. Originates from a minor mathematical error somewhere that results in a lower product of damage x time than it should.
C) The “thinner spread” claim. Originates from a history of other games wherein the “spreading” of a resources is dependent on a net value, and is not the product of independently growing stats like in GW2.
D) The “longer fights” claim. Originates from a PVP build tactic that emphasizes condi burst in a high cleanse environment, and forgets that in PVE and in low cleanse environments the longer duration actually makes things faster.

Until today, I have never seen the “intensity stacks are an illusion” claim, nor the “two different stat sets have to be equally divisible” claim. I think that the mistake is a variation of the “thinner spread” claim, wherein DGraves is implicitly asserting that the displayed damage isn’t the result of stacking conditions ticking simultaneously, but a mis-directing display of cumulative damage, and that all conditions actually tick apply damage sequentially in spite of ticking down concurrently. The “equally divisible” claim I think is a variation of the steal stacks claim hybridized with the thinner spread claim, borrowing from the old mechanic of sequentially damaging sequentially ticking conditions, and implies that so long as a condition is constantly refreshed it has the same DPS sustained throughout. Essentially it is a form of begging the question, wherein my explanation has to be wrong because it doesn’t agree with his.

I still don’t know how this hybridized conclusion was arrived at. At bare minimum, any player should readily see that if you apply a condition, it ticks the enemy’s health bar down at the same rate while displaying the same number, and if you apply a second condition it ticks down the enemies health bar faster at a higher displayed number. Or if you don’t use conditions, in PVP you should’ve felt the sting of a condi burst as it melts your HP in a few seconds. Even if you have old knowledge of duration stacking conditions, you should still be aware that intensity stacking conditions inflict damage concurrently as they tick down concurrently, and that the revised condi system didn’t exist just to further ruin how everything worked. Even if you don’t have the old knowledge of old conditions, you should be able to see by looking at your utility skills that skills with higher stacks of conditions have higher damage listed.

Well, time to begin.

DGraves.3720:

Ayrilana.1396:

Here’s an explanation about it:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Sinister-vs-Viper/first#post5695741

There is one problem with that math. It isn’t in balance. Algebraically you would need an LCD to compare the two, right, but I’ll use my 6s and 12s bleed as an example:

The full damage of the six second bleed is also written as: 720/6 = 120.
The full damage of the twelve second bleed is written as 1,200/12 =100.

When you compare the two you need like denominators.

Math is not numbers that can be pulled and pushed into a void at will. The numbers must have meaning. You must have units. I don’t know what these denominators are, what they stand for, where they come from, what units they represent, what the units of the operation they perform become, or why it is that the “full damage” that a skill does is being cut by more than an order of magnitude.

DGraves.3720:

If you raise the 720/6 by a factor of 2 you get 1,440/12

No. A factor of “2” is 2/1, which would give you 1440/6. You multiplied it by 2/2, which is equal to 1.

DGraves.3720:

Another proof is just to find when they are equivalent over X time, generally the duration of the lowest unit, which is 1 second so 120/1 = 100x/1 where X is the difference, we do the math and come to the obvious conclusion of 20%, and you could do it backwards too where it’s 120x/1=100/1 to come out with the same result. By the way when you put them in like terms the answer is always consistently 1.2, whether it be 720/600 or 1,440/1,200 or 120/100. This is how you know the ratio is equivalent and the math is correct because there should only be one answer to this linear system.

I’m not even sure where to begin here. Apparently, what you’ve done is taken the entire issue of duration out of the equation, pretend it doesn’t exist, then taken intensity stacking out of the equation and pretended that doesn’t exist, and are saying that because conditions tick once per second, the overall duration of a condition is irrelevant.

I guess I’m going to have to start from basics. For this demonstration, I will give you a few things:

#1: There is a player
#2: Who is attacking once per second
#3: That applies a bleed once per attack
#4: That lasts for 5 seconds, base duration.

So an auto attacking like scenario. Stripped bare and with its most basic premises.. There are few things to look at. First, consider this: if we were to do one attack, that attack would take 1 second, and would inflict bleeding for 5 seconds. Thus, the overall damage that the attack would do is equal to 5 ticks of bleed, and since it takes one second to execute that attack, that is roughly equal to 5 ticks of bleed per second. This may seem a bit odd, but consider this: while that bleed is ticking away, you are capable of performing other actions at the same time, which may add more bleeds or do more damage. This can be considered the “DPS per skill use”, and it is one way of comparing damage.

But there are other ways. Taking into consideration the fact that we can perform multiple actions while a bleed is ticking away, we can use this time to apply more bleeds, using the same “5 ticks of bleed per second”. Over the period of 10 seconds, we would see this happen:

1st second: 1 bleed
2nd second: 2 bleeds
3rd second: 3 bleeds
4th second: 4 bleeds
5th second: 5 bleeds
6th second: 5 bleeds
7th second: 5 bleeds
8th second: 5 bleeds
9th second: 5 bleeds
10th second: 5 bleeds

The crucial part being that, once we reach 5 seconds, the first bleed that we applied has expired, and thus the new bleeds replace the old one. While the overall damage inflicted doesn’t go away, the DPS of this setup is going to be equivalent to the damage that 5 bleeds will do. So, if your bleed ticks for 120, you will be doing 600 DPS, or 120 × 5. This is called many things, such as the stacking limit or the stacking threshold, and it is the average amount of conditions you sustain going through a rotation. You may notice that the DPS we got from the stacking limit is equal to the DPS we got from considering the “DPS per skill” method above. That is not coincidence. The time it takes to reach this peak is the “ramp up time” for conditions.

Now, lets add in a comparison. Lets say that, instead of lasting for 5 seconds, the bleed lasts for 8 seconds. Looking at a 10 second period, we’d get the following:

1st second: 1 bleed
2nd second: 2 bleeds
3rd second: 3 bleeds
4th second: 4 bleeds
5th second: 5 bleeds
6th second: 6 bleeds
7th second: 7 bleeds
8th second: 8 bleeds
9th second: 8 bleeds
10th second: 8 bleeds

See what happened here? The bleed lasts longer, so you get more concurrent stacks of bleeding at the same time. Assuming the bleeds do 100 damage instead of 120, this means that from 8 seconds onward, you will be doing 800 damage per second, which is more than the 600 damage per second that the previous setup capped at.

You can also consider this a DPS per skill use: one attack inflicts 8 ticks of bleeding per second, and even given the weaker bleed, this means that in the long run, you will do more damage and have higher sustained DPS than the 5 second long but stronger bleeds.

Lets take the bleeds in isolation. One 5-second long bleed, and one 8-second long bleed. Lets put their total cumulative damage side by side.

1st second: 100 | 120
2nd second: 200 | 240
3rd second: 300 | 360
4th second: 400 | 480
5th second: 500 | 600
6th second: 600 | 600
7th second: 700 | 600
8th second: 800 | 600
9th second: 800 | 600

The 5 second long bleed stops doing damage at 5 seconds, and the 8 second long bleed stops doing damage at 8 seconds. What happened here is that, at 6 seconds, their cumulative damage became equal, and at 7 seconds, the longer bleed did more cumulative damage. So, even though the 8 second long bleed does more damage in the long run, it has a longer ramp up time, which means that in the short run it does less damage.

In general, you’ll want to go zerk.

In specific…

For power builds, zerk and assassin are in close competition. Sometimes assassin pulls ahead.

For Elementalists, Thieves, and Guardians who have a hard time surviving, Marauder gear is an option. It only does around 10% less damage than zerk, but the extra health adds a much larger safety net for survival.

For Condi builds, it is torn between Viper and Sinister. In general, I go for Viper, but if you start going over the cap for condi duration sinister becomes the better option.

Yes, the optimal way to play the game is to go full damage. When Anet made this game into a “play how you want” action style MMO, this meant that there are no repercussions for going full glass cannon.

I find being analytical and well reasoned to be the best ways to get heard. It works for my cases, certainly.

The reason why it is that someone like woodenpotatoes sees so many of his things get put into the game isn’t just because he makes videos. It is because he makes videos where he analyzes in detail very specific parts of GW2 for 20 minutes or so.

Are you talking about power or effective power? Because those are two very different things.

Effective power is your power x (crit chance x crit damage + chance to not crit) x additional modifiers. For example, my power engi currently sits at 2599 power, but has a 46.8% crit chance, and 209.9% crit damage, giving him an effective power of 3936. Under max might and fury, taking traits into consideration…

Resting Base Bower: 3,349
Crit Chance: 46.8 +10 (High Caliber) + 10 (Hematic Focus) + 20 (fury) = 86.8%
Crit Damage: 209.9%
Crit Modifier: 1.95
Resting Effective Power: 6544
Additional Mods: x1.1 (scholar runes) x1.05 (glass cannon) x 1.07 (Shaped Charge) x 1.1 (modified ammunition*) x 1.25 (max vulnerability)
Total: 11,120 effective power.

And that is without factoring in particular teammate buffs (spotter, banners, etc), or particular weapon buffs (explosive powder, perfectly weighted, etc). For particular weapons it might as well be 12,232 effective power.

Keep in mind this is the scaled effective power assuming both crits and non-crits.

I’m perplexed with what you guys are talking about. I play a thief, and their heals are excellent. Signet of Malice and Invigorating Precision are excellent heals, hitting upwards of 3k health per second in peak conditions. Aside from SoM, Channeled Vigor hits 366 health per second untraited with full endurance, and Withdraw can heal for 241 health per second, 301 when traited. The other traits to consider are mug (2k per 30 seconds), driven fortitude (458 per second), shadow’s rejuvenation (293 per second), leeching venoms (325 per hit), and the newly buffed Assassin’s Reward (102 per second).

Thieves are paper, but thief healing is solid, if not dependent on the opponents actions. Out of all the classes I play, the one that has the least healing (at least for me) is the necromancer. Necromancers have high bulk and life force, but their raw healing power is actually pretty low.

I have the most luck with Daredevil in general. The ability to do damage while evading, and the ability to constantly evade makes it so given perfect play you can defeat nearly anything.

I usually alternate weapons depending on what I need to do.

Overall best damage is the staff. However, it is hard to use, and requires a lot of experience/proper positioning, and luck as highly mobile enemies will run right out of your range and you may end up charging yourself right into a damage patch. Vault’s ability to dodge is extremely valuable, though.

The low maintenance option is D/X. The dagger auto was buffed recently, so in an auto attack war it beats out staff. I haven’t used the dagger in awhile, but I believe the rotation is still CnD → Backstab → two auto chains. The damage buff from revealed is good, as well as the aggro dropping, and heartseeker spam in a smoke field is excellent finishing damage. But, if you want more group support, off-hand pistol is good for blinding mobs and breaking bars.

Sword is the most “supporty” weapon of the bunch. The biggest advantage is the spammable condi cure, so sword/x is good in places with high condition damage. Pistol whip is also good for self preservation, and in those rare cases where you need boons gone but nobody can remove them for some reason, Sword/Dagger still has use. Most likely this will be the least used set, but don’t forget that it is there.

I’ve been away for awhile, but as I play the Engi, I almost never auto attack.

That said, I decided to compare the base values of the autos (that is, the damage with no additional stats or traits at level 80), then divided them by their total duration to get base DPS.

Hammer Auto: 382
Rifle Auto: 326
Flame Jet: 346 + burn
Grenade Auto: 351
Bomb Auto: 528

From a power standpoint, it seems like the best option is to camp bomb kit when not using other skills. The issue is, however, that the period of time for which “other skills” are not being used is very short. My standard rotations look something like this:

Switch to bomb kit, fire bomb -> big ole bomb -> orbital strike
Swap to elixir gun, acid bomb mid-air cancel into glob shot
Swap to Hammer, Thunderclasp -> Shock Shield -> Rocket Charge
Swap to Grenade kit Shrapnel Grenade -> Frost Grenade -> Barrage -> Poison Grenade

Continue cycling highest DPS skills and interspersing healing, blocks, blast finishers, and whatever utilities I need. Maybe I’ll get a few generic bombs off, but I’m too busy playing Mozart to really auto. This rotation isn’t optimized in any way, as fights are usually too chaotic to really “sustain” anything.

To that end, the question is this: does the grenade add enough damage over other utilities to justify its use? The auto is already beaten out, but looking at the other skills…

Grenade Barrage: 798
Shrapnel Grenade: 585 + bleeds
Freeze Grenade: 534
Poison Grenade: 534 + Poison

Flame Blast + Detonate: 888 over unknown amount of time (1 second? 0.75 seconds?)
Elixir U: 50% auto damage for 6 seconds (792 if using bombs)
Mine Field: 930

Now, the hard part about interpreting these numbers is that we have to consider them in comparison to the bomb auto, which is 528. Though the grenade kit has a quite a few higher damage skills, they aren’t much better than just using the bomb kit. For example, when comparing the freeze grenade to bomb auto, the grenade only gives you 6 extra damage points: a mere 1% increase over the auto every 20 seconds. That’s… not really worth much. Shrapnel and poison grenade add condi damage, which makes them worthwhile in max might circumstances. It is hard to say, but in a decent “max might” situation where bombs can easily hit for 8k, the extra condi damage is equal to about 2k, making shrapnel and poison hit for about 11k and 10k respectively, which is a 25% bonus every 6 and 25 seconds. So… 690 and 660 roughly for comparison.

So grenades definitely beat out Elixir U. Comparing to the flamethrower kit (I’m going to assume a 0.75 seconds, or a point blank use), Flame Blast + Detonate adds 1,184 damage every 6 seconds, which is quite massive. If we’re taking the difference in bomb kit damage, this is 656 additional DPS every 6 seconds. To compare, Grenade kit will add 164, 134, 270, and 6 damage over the bomb auto, totaling to 574 when combining every skill grenade kit offers.

This doesn’t tell the whole story. Not by a long shot. The important thing to consider is recharge. Flame Blast adds 656 every 6 seconds, so this is an additional tooltip DPS of 109. Shrapnel Grenade has a 5 second recharge, so that adds. 32.8 additional DPS. Taking other skills and their recharges into account, the grenade kit adds a total of 49.26 additional DPS. If we assume flame blast has a 1 second activation time, then the total additional DPS of flame burst is 60.

What this means is the entire grenade kits contribution to offense is beaten out by flame burst alone. This… can be argued. Shrapnel adds an additional 5% onto grenade damage in max might situations. The innate damage boost to explosives, while not meaningfully affecting the ratio between grenades and bombs, changes the ratio between flame blast and bombs. Assuming explosive powder, the relative damage increase over bombs for flame blast becomes 51, which can technically be less than grenades (which would have to be recalculated, since their condi components don’t receive the benefit of explosive powder).

Throw Napalm and Incendiary Ammo onto the mix, and I’m not sure that Grenade Kit beats out Flamethrower. So, in conclusion, I would say that grenades are far from necessary. First, because I’m fairly certain that the flamethrower does more damage in ideal conditions. Second, because the grenade kit lacks any real useful utility, so it is the first to go when you need something like additional blocks or reflects or rezzes or something. Though grenades are nice for hammer scrappers, as they provide a ranged offense.

Mostly I just use staff. Fire/Air/Tempest build, specced for maximum damage. Against targets with large hitboxes I use glyph of storms, ice bow, and fiery greatsword. The damage buffs from holding FGS really help out with the damage output overall, so generally the starting rotation goes something like this:

FGS -> Firestorm -> Lightning Storm -> Lightning overload -> Ice Bow -> Ice Storm -> switch and camp fire for 60 seconds or so. This doesn’t work well on every target, but if the enemy is stationary and/or big, then this releases an utterly satisfying torrent of unmatched damage.

For more defensive or buff based builds, I use arcane wave, aftershock, and a filler place. Both are blast finishers, but the AoE magnetic aura of aftershock is highly underrated. Sometimes I use glyph of storms to lay down a blind field, should my team be lacking one.

There’s an alternate build I use for Mai Trin: Air/Arcane/Tempest with Dagger/Focus. It doesn’t have the raw damage of D/D, but the off-hand focus provides several invulnerability skills for the more defensive minded elementalist. The lack of fury on blast finishers is missed, but thankfully other teammates can take care of that now. Fresh Air build, where spamming overloads as much as possible is the preferred damage rotation. This build isn’t really set in stone, as it exists specifically to fight Mai Trin in high level fractals, but with minor modifications it should go well with anything.

I’m hesitant to use the warhorn myself. I’m sure it is valuable in certain circumstances, though. I also am hesitant to use the scepter. Everything is full berserker, and currently I use Runes of Strength for greater might stacking.

I don’t go into raids. So far, the most difficult thing I’ve done on my ele is 90+ fractals.

Hardest part for me is that I don’t have any one reason why I like a playstyle. What I want is different each day, and I find myself playing various alts so much that I really don’t have a “main”.

Of the classes I do play, there’s one general theme. I like power. Potency. The ability to melt face, or the ability to be a linchpin and turn the tide of battle.

There’s a certain saying that this thread reminds me of. I don’t know where it is from, because I’ve only seen it as a signature on another forum:

“Cultivating an immunity to rebuttal is not a substitute for being correct”.

Case in point, it the OP is incorrect on so many accounts it is hard to know where to begin.

#1: GC gear doesn’t have problem against larger mobs. Tactics have far more impact than gear on performance, both in damage and survival. GC gear is more than capable of handling itself against champions and breakbars alike, so long as you have the wits to recognize the strengths of your enemies and know how to beat those strengths.

#2: GC gear has a necessary exchange between survival and damage that makes it so even given the false premise of a boss that would sustain so much damage as to force waypoint rushing, a more durable gear would do the same damage as GC gear because its increased engage time means increased overall DPS. The divide between GC gear and durable gear given identical tactics isn’t actually that big. For example, for many classes Berserker gear only does 50% more damage than full Soldier gear.

#3: Anet already has a solution to this problem that is actively used. If you remember the discussions following the tequatl revamp (particularly the video demonstration), they mentioned that splintered coast waypoint was disabled specifically to increase the run-back time. The being that any death is technically equal to a 1-minute time-out, as enforced by the length of time it would take to run back. So really, this is an issue that has already be considered and solved by Anet. If Anet wants an event where you can’t rez and run back in the middle, they make it a fractal or raid wing.

#4: It deserves stating again that this event is in theory only. It doesn’t exist. Even if someone agreed in theory, there would be nothing practical to apply it to. Nothing to be “done about”.

#5: Lets ignore all that for a moment that says that this exists, and that this is true. What, exactly, would be done about it in such a way that wouldn’t also discriminate against other gear types? For you see, waypoint rushing in GC gear wouldn’t be much different from rez spamming and going down over and over again in GC gear. They’re still unloading all their DPS before dying, only to come back and unload their DPS again. If we are given that an event exists such that the DPS is so chaotic and difficult as to disallow using GC gear, disallow rallying the downed via any number of skills and tactics, and also disallow rezzing the defeated, then the other gear types wouldn’t be able to beat the event because they would have to be so defensive that they couldn’t inflict sufficient damage. What would require such a thing is an event that is harder than the current raids or high level fractals.

Incorrect premises, and incorrect conclusions assuming incorrect premises are true, and incorrect products even assuming the the incorrect conclusion is true.