Guild Wars 2

They’re using the ladder to repair warrior’s skill ceiling right now, you can have it when they’re done.

As you’re improving as a player I like to think the first step is understanding your own class well, and being able to execute a strategy to win. The second step is recognizing and understanding what the strats are for other class, and learning their weaknesses. That seems like where you’re at right now.

Here’s a few tips, but I’d recommend you watch some videos/streams of good people playing the class (or even better, try it yourself):

Mesmer:
-Anticipate the shatters when they get 3 clones up, try to mitigate it with defensive abilities or dodges.
-Blurred frenzy is a strong channeled sword attack with invulnerability, on short CD (~8s?). Try not to stand in it, don’t waste your strong damage attacks during it.
-Common defensive CDs are a short duration stealth and teleport. Typically I try to put out enough pressure on mes to force these CDs, but save my strongest burst for after.

Warrior – 90% of warriors will run Bulls Charge + Frenzy + 100 blades. It’s a KD, followed by double attack speed for huge damage on long cd. You have to, have to, have to save a defensive CD/stun break for bull’s charge (or dodge it if you can). As long as you can do this, you should be able to kite around the war. Cripples and chills are practically a hard counter.

Guardian:
Several defensive CDs, great healing. Best counter is lots of condition damage. If that’s not your build, you may need friends. Another class where you need to work through the defensive CDs, then go for the kill.

Just FYI, this build is still pretty nice on the new map. The immobilize on LB is great against runners, and the new bleed on it isn’t bad. Still devastating to blow up a point with, when you need to.

I think it’s redundant with matchmaking and hotjoin. The question is kinda biasing though. I wouldn’t say no I don’t want it, but I’d rather the devs focus their limited resources on other things

^ agreed

And as far as support ele vs. shout warrior. Even if you called healing/condition removal similar, ele utilities win over shouts (more survivability/forgiving).

There’s also GS/Sw+WH for ultra mobility.

Gotta agree with Defektive here. Also, his build is also just brutal for locking down an orb carrier when needed.

I’m also liking longbow builds on this map because of numerous terrain advantages and the root, which counters RTL.

Here’s a question though- Warhorn’s convert conditions to boons trait: Is that self or group applied? That might be an alternative to shout healing to try and fill a group support role.

expectations are waaayy too high here. I don’t know where people got this idea that this patch would fix everything. It’s going to be incremental changes, probably some good some not so good, just like it was in Dec.

isn’t this what hotjoin is?

hammer warrior?

epic thread already

GS/LB is what I run. I’ve tried shout healing, but I prefer running frenzy+BC so you can still punish a single target in melees, small group fights. Also can be nice to knock out one of those pesky stealth chaining thieves. I like it especially because it feels like it has good impact in both small group and large group pvp. Also GS has solid mobility.

no one mentions longbow 5?

Just to clear up longbow burst (using similar, not identical build/gearing):
5x ticks of 400 damage, 800 crit (~3k total). (could be 1k on lighter armors)
11x ticks of fire, ~400 dmg (cannot crit) (~4.4k total)

So you’re talking about 7k-9k damage if you can keep your target in the field for the full duration.

It’s my favorite weapon loadout, and this is a good build on it, thanks Def. Brings a lot more practical dps throughput compared to axe/sh, although Schwar’s been saying that for weeks.

They didn’t expect it to work well with their combat system. Too much burst damage without healing to deal with it iirc.

I’m fine with it as is. That’s a very long immobilize, and gives plenty of time to swap to a weapon set with gap closers or bull’s charge. Pairs well with 100B or for setting up hammer cc chain.

Also pulls by nature are one of the most effectice controls. Should be implemented sparingly.

I’ve run this build for awhile with some minor differences. It’s fun, and shines in small group fights, but I didn’t find it to be a huge factor in WvW so I’ve switched. Here’s a summary:

Pros –
It’s a great counter to glass cannons and high healing/low health builds (like some guardians).
Excels in small group pvp where getting 1 or 2 downs can give an advantage.
Can score downs and kills on wall players who normally would be free to back off.
Warhorn group buffs (swiftness, endurance, cripple-break) are a huge asset to a group.

Cons-
Not great against good players in 1v1 situations (if they can dodge your burst).
No aoe damage to contribute to large fights.
Single target damage is not a big factor in large fights, downed players are quickly revived if you can’t get out aoe pressure.

score check anyone?

axe has the fastest hit rate (unless both hits count for longbow), should be the most adrenaline. Some of the trait options for adrenaline really dwarf it though, if you’re really worried about it.

agreed that some burst skills should be improved.

I don’t really care about the trait changes though. I’m fine with having an option for passive adrenaline damage, it’s an interesting spec choice for customizing playstyle.

I would just focus on balancing burst abilities so that there’s always good situational reasons to use them.

It seems like it’s somewhat true. I do see one cpu getting stressed significantly more than the others, somewhere around 80%, but the other cpus do get used when I’m stressing the game out.

One kinda curious thing though, I see that my max frequency (using resource monitor) looks to be capping out at about 70%. I’ve got my power settings on max performance so I thought that should be running a bit higher. I’m still not sure cpu is really what’s limiting me here but that’s a little odd.

Also, memory usage and cpu usage don’t appear to be capping out (~1.5GB, 30% CPU). I do see my disk usage as pretty high, over 1MB/sec while playing GW2, but I’m not sure what’s normal there.

Up until recently I’ve had no issues running gw2. Framerate has always been smooth and over 30 fps.

In the last few days I’ve noticed a large drop in fps, down into the 20s, and lower when rotating the camera. I’ve done some basic checkout and it appears that all hardware is working correctly and other programs run normally. I’ve restarted, cleared out background tasks, and implemented the low fps tips from this forum but nothing has helped.

Is anyone else having trouble? Might there have been a recent patch that may have changed some graphics settings?

Hardware is as follows (laptop):
i7-2670QM 2.2 GHz
AMD Radeon HD 6900M (2GB)
8GB ram
GW2 installed on 500GB HDD, 60% free space

grats to DH on their defense the last 12hrs. Was hell trying to take their EB keep last night, and they must have kept up the effort all night.

Maybe next week

Yes, but the main drawback will be lack of aoe (excluding piercing shots). I play primarily with rifle, but I do keep a bow and melee weapons handy if aoe damage is needed.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Defiant

Bosses will get stacks of this immunity. As a group you could try and burn sacrificial CCs to land a specific CC you want. It seems I’ve seen some bosses that just generate stacks too fast to ever get through though.

I think it’s where it needs to be. If you compare it to elementalist it’s a bit weak, but that’s a different argument.

IMO the downed state should be weak.

^ I didn’t play DAoC so I can’t tell you about it, maybe they had a system that was resistant to exploiting. If you’re familiar with it, was there any reason you couldn’t kill trade or farm alts for rank?

This also happened in SWG with the force ranking system back in the day (“fight clubbing”)

Anything like this is going to be really easy to exploit. SWTOR tried two implementations for rank in their game: objective based rank up, and then kill-based rank up. Both systems got exploited.

Objective based rank resulted in opposing factions trading captures of objectives.

Kill based ranks resulted in opposing groups getting together and trading kills, and farming alts (also spawn camping).

I’m not opposed to something like this if there’s no reward besides bragging rights. People will still exploit that, but at least it doesn’t put players that don’t at a tangible disadvantage.

Still though, I’m partly of the mind that the only reward for pvp should be victory. Putting in side incentives typically countermand that goal (remember dolyak farming).

retaliation, confusion

word, thanks for putting out the effort on this

what was the final score?

DB has a relatively strong night crew but most of our day crew has transferred. Might be a rollercoaster of a week.

I agree with the OP philosophy of slow and steady, but I don’t think the devs have been terrible so far. It has been a little slow yes, but I greatly prefer that to nerfing every new fotm build into the ground.

What does worry me is the next major game update. SWTOR ran into an issue with making a large amount of pvp balance changes all at once and it really changed the dynamic of the game in some bad ways. I think the retrospective consensus from that game is slow and steady changes really are best. Hopefully anet doesn’t put all their chips on this new patch, but instead continues with incremental changes.

cool build. I run the exact same skill loadout but run discipline instead of tactics in my traits (and make up some of the defense lost in gear). I’m focused around rifle burst damage instead of hybridizing with condition damage. It’s fantastic for scoring quick kills but I like your condition removal and heals. Maybe an alternative I can play around with sometime.