Guild Wars 2

The biggest issue is, increasing burning duration, it will only make it take longer to see results.

Increasing burning damage, makes us suffer the loss of other more useful stats.

The reason to increase condition duration on other conditions is to allow you to achieve higher stacks. If my bleed wears off in 4 seconds, and I can apply 1 stack a second, the highest I can ever get my bleed is 4.

Increase the duration of bleeding to 6, with 1 stack a second, now you can achieve 6 stacks of bleed with that attack alone.

So for stacking in duration is bad for burning itself as a condition, but good for the ancillary effects, such as 10% more damage on burning targets and 10% more damage on targets with conditions (Fiery Wrath/Radiant Power)

Increasing duration should only be done to the extent of how long the fight will take, anything beyond that is a waste and did not help us kill faster. This is practically impossible to determine though.

Going for burning damage has been somewhat alleviated in the loss of stats with this most recent patch, but the primary focus is still raw damage and not condition damage.

Foofad brings up an extremely good point in the sense that, more burning on multiple targets gains the most benefit out of the condition in the sense of damage. If I stack 5 burns on one guy, it will take 5 seconds to see that damage, resulting in exactly the same dps each second.

If I stack 1 burn on 5 different guys, my theoretical dps went up, because all 5 burns ticked.

This alone makes permeating wrath the best way to get more damage out of burning, for the sense of “dps”.

To contradict myself now somewhat, increasing burning duration is helpful to get more “short” ticks of burning, because we can now get permeating wrath to proc more frequently.

This is still inline with my previous statement though, because the burning duration is not being stacked over the duration of the fight, but simply firing off more frequently in short bursts (a sort of 2 for 1).

Coming back full circle, is it worth it? I really enjoy permeating wrath in AE situations if my build is already down virtues.

Virtues is a commonly used trait line already for Boonway/Healway style guardians.

So is it worth it? Well we are already down there, but for different reasons. So Yes, it can be worth it.

Very true, thank you Zedd

^ disheartens me and I dislike the trend with gear progression.

One way, only way, best gear way…. Regardless, it is true, ascended has more stats available so we have to accept the gear grind :p

Sorry beating a dead horse hehe

Messing with a build calculator on burning duration with the new traits and it starts to look pretty scary on burning damage if someone can pull it off

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQJArflYgKCHESJEf4Ei1DCChKoqHxj+4hXFoIA-jAyA4sASLAIBgpwioxWNLiGrmBTjSEV7RKiWdQALC-e

100% condition duration
2288 condition damage
900 burning damage
2 burning every VoJ proc = 1800 burning damage every 2 seconds/5 hits

Just min/maxing so this is not an optimal build or even the right weapons to use with it. It also has absolutely no condition cleanses.

What I would like to see is that kind of damage with permeating wrath, but you have to switch runes around to make up for a loss of radiant fire and lose some condition damage from rune of undead.

Ah, my mistake. Took it from a tooltip that didn’t have a bleed stack icon, but it did have a 4 second duration, so I needed to break that down to 1 sec.

With that in mind, burning is more damaging than other conditions, but does not scale well with further applications.

I still contend that burning is supplemental and not a focus. Or a better way to put it, burning provides pressure and bleeds provide burst.

Given that conditions tick on strongest application to weakest, group play makes it even less viable.

The biggest benefit of burning for the guardian is the fact that it is even on the target in the first place, which provides us 20% more damage done. Do we need that 20% more damage in our gameplay comes up to preference and opinion.

If you don’t go 10 in zeal and/or 25 in radiance, the burning condition matters very little to you.

25 stacks of bleeds with 1454 condition damage would do 2881 damage. Practically speaking it would not be maintained by a single player. so we will figure 4 stacks of bleeds like originally mentioned which would maintain 460 damage a second.

100% Burning up time with 1454 condition damage would do 692 damage.

So again, one is spike the other is pressure. Supplement 692 damage to any attacks we do and it is a nice bump in damage, but not by itself.

Base damage seems high versus bleeds, but then you have to take into account availability of stacks, and typically on the auto attack they can maintain 3 to 4, sometimes even 6 stacks of bleeds with ease. Also they have the availability to spike bleed damage for short periods of time with multiple stacks.

Base damage of bleed is 170.
170*3=510

Base damage of bleed is 43

Base damage of burn is 328

Bleeding would need to maintain 7 stacks to match burning at 328 damage. Is that unheard of? It may fluctuate but possible.

So burning is not a better damaging condition with no condition power added.

Poison is less damage, but its application provides 33% reduction in healing. Very powerful in PvP and even PvE on some mobs.

Confusion has a very low base damage of 65, but is fairly unique to mesmers and to some degree engineers. It acts much like retaliation in the sense of punishing attackers for attacking, so it is throttled back to not be overpowering. Still they can maintain a stack of 3-5 resulting in consistent 195-325 damage, allowing for higher spikes of 1625 at full stacks…not practical as a means of dps but meant as burst.

I do not believe chill has damage associated with it. It’s main function is control by slowing down enemy attacks and movement.

Once again I rally to have burning receive a secondary effect to its damage the same way poison and chill have one.

My solution would be to allow guardians to trait to have burning also reduce attackers damage, making burning a defensive and support condition unique to the guardians archetype.

I have participated in the pyroclasm thread and encourage more looking into it. As pointed out, Permeating wrath makes burning scale well with AE fights.

What was not mentioned in that thread is that if you are adding burning to up to 5 targets around you, you can now receive the benefit of Fiery Wrath and Radiant power for a 20% increase in physical damage for the ae situation.

This is as opposed to doing AE and only single target burning. So the greatest benefit of Permeating wrath is to enhance physical damage once again with burning as a supplement. Still a very worthwhile investment if you are building for an AE scenario, such PvE farming or WvW zergs.

The biggest take away from pyroclasm that I got was the idea of increasing burning damage by stacking multiple burns on multiple targets, not multiple burns on a single target.

With the patch there have been a lot of talks about build diversity and the plausibility of burning damage.

Previously in order to build for conditions, we as guardians had to sacrifice direct damage. This was a known and voiced complaint that conditions hinder dps performance, especially in group fights.

If you look at the changes made for guardians now, they are trying to provide us with direct damage as well as condition damage by having us stack down the Zeal trait line.

Two birds with one stone? We also complained that Zeal was not viable prior to patch.

How can we get players to use the Zeal trait line and make condition damage more prevalent on guardians?

They took two of our problems and answered them with one solution:
Make them build for power to get condition damage.

The question now is, did it work? Is Zeal still less than optimal, and does giving us power in addition to condition damage provide us with the damage output we were looking for?

If min/maxing condition damage prior to patch your stats would look like this in the mists:

10/30/30/0/0
Rabid Amulet/Jewel
Rune of Undead

Power – 916 -> Attack – 2016
Precision – 1860 -> Crit Chance – 49%
Toughness – 1910 -> Armor – 3121
Vitality – 916 -> Health – 10805
Condition Damage – 1502 -> Burning – 704
Crit Damage – 30%
Condition Duration – 10%

After the patch our min/maxed condition damage builds will look like this:

30/30/10/0/0
Carrion Amulet/Jewel
Rune of Undead

Power – 1860 -> Attack – 2960
Precision – 1216 -> Crit Chance – 18% (can bump up to 21% with trait)
Toughness – 1066 -> Armor – 2277
Vitality – 1560 -> Health – 17245
Condition Damage – 1645 -> Burning – 740
Crit Damage – 10%
Conditon Duration – 30%

It looks more balanced out on paper and even gained us a little bit more condition damage.

We now have an offensive and defensive oriented burning set up.

Granted, an effective build may sacrifice condition damage stats for other more beneficial stats, but this is just theory crafting for the sake at looking at our mechanics and the direction the devs are trying to take us.

So the question remains, is it worth it? Did they succeed in giving us a condition build? Do you want to take Zeal traits now?

Right now I am not convinced, but I am all for theory crafting!

You point out 100% burning duration increase and how it helps. For those looking to increase burning:

Food:
Bowl of Fire Meat Chili (15% burning)
Rare Veggie Pizza (40% condition duration)
Bowl of Garlic Kale Sautee (40% condition duration)

Sigil:
Sigil of Smoldering (10% burning)

Rune:
Rune of the Forge x 2 (15% burning)
Rune of Flame Legion x 2 (15% burning)
Rune of Balthazar x 2 (15% burning)
Rune of the Baelfire x 2 (15% burning)
Rune of the Elementalist x 6 (20% burning)
Rune of Lyssa x 2 (10% condition duration)
Rune of the Mad King x 2 (10% condition duration)

Traits:
30 points in Zeal (30% burning)
Radiant Fire (20% burning)

The above will net you 100% burn duration with a few different pairs of the runes or sigils of your choice.

Defensively, if you want to increase your burning by 100% with a single trait or set of runes you can use the following.

On block:
Superior Rune of the Guardian x 6 (1s per block)
Defender’s Flame (1s per block)
Shattered Aegis (1s on Aegis block)

Previously I had used the above defensive combination to cause 2 second burning on blocks and 3 second burning on Aegis blocking with some degree of success early in the game.

Very good points about enemies running reduced condition duration negating our unbuffed condition time.

Aiming for 60% increase in burning should provide us with maximum burn potential against reduced condition duration players.

I did not realize that other weapon effect persisting after swap gain the heal from ZB. That is kind of nice in a way for dual symbol drops to tripple up on AE healing.

4 targets, 25 heal per target per a hit:
Whirling wrath (4*9) * 25 = 900 healing
Symbol of Wrath (4*5) * 25 = 500 healing
Symbol of Swiftness (4*5) * 25 = 500 healing

Total = 1900 healing every 16 to 20 seconds.

Don’t have time to compare other healing sources, and the less target the less effective, but sounds decent.

Add on top of that, symbols cause healing with writ of the merciful, or AH and you have some interesting healing going on while using GS.

Awesome work foofad, and I keep a softcopy myself of what you did

Yeah, good catch on that.

I noticed this before when I saw that it gave protection, and figured maybe I could pop it and drop it for another way of keeping prot up, but to my dismay, the developers did not intend for it to be used that way so they made it drop boons on removal.

Side affect to that is exactly what you pointed out, additional boons added after the fact are wiped as well, even if they were not caused by the transformation.

Is it protection/regen only, or all boons?

Scaling off something other than healing power is not unheard of, as the DoT from Binding Blades scales off condition damage and not power.

I just did a test with 30 in each trait line while using Zealous Blades, and none of them increased healing over 25 per a hit with Great Sword.

So if it does scale with a stat, it needs to be over 300 at least.

Interested to hear more, but it sounds like a lot of stats just to get 1-2 points of healing. Not worth it at initial observation unless it has some synergies we can pull off from that much stacking of a stat.

My only tests on the % increase in damage traits have been in the mists, so unsure if it is inconsistent in pve or not, but they only increase physical damage and not condition damage.

Like you said, akamon, the possibility of being overwritten with higher condition damage and having to wait for your damage to even happen makes conditions even less appealing.

So with that in mind, maybe that “is” what the developers are thinking when giving us increased burning and increased condition duration.

Add in the mix of cleanses and cooldown time for reapplication of a burn, then you get inconsistent spikey damage. Which as you said, is difficult to build for because of all the variables.

I agree obtena, but I’m still constantly swapping things around and testing them when I can

Well, Fiery Wrath is not technically burning damage. It is an augmentation of physical damage due to having a specific condition on the target. Much as the same as Radiant Power is not condition damage.

A lot of non-condition damage builds opt to go for one or both of those traits.

So when I say burning damage, is it worth it? I mean the condition it self and not the linked mechanics.

If you want to go full circle though, if you have burning on a target for 100% of the fight, then both those 2 traits increase our damage for 20% the whole time, versus what most builds right now have, which is 20% for 4-6 seconds of burst.

So I agree with you, burning is good, but not the burn itself per say.

Lord Trejgon,
Yes, the other sources of healing increase with healing power, but zealous blade remains the same. It is not worthless per say with healing power, as it supplements your primary forms of healing, but it is not as effective pairing it up with more heal centric builds.

ZB is meant to be an offensive, minimal heal.

By all means, if you find a way to think outside of the box and make it work differently, then I am for it. I love innovation and breaking molds.

Writ of the Merciful – 0.075
Pure of Heart – 0.1
Zealous Blade – 0
Altruistic Healing – 0.01
Monk’s Focus – 0.1
Virtue of Resolve – 0.06
Faithful Strike – 0.18
Regeneration – 0.125
Shield of Absorption – 0.2
Selfless Daring – 1
Sanctuary – 0.05
Empower – 1

The above are the healing power coefficients for each skill. I am unsure if they are out of date now with the new patch as I haven’t read through it all just yet.

So the closer to a whole number, each of those skills get to, the better with healing power they become.

This is not the whole picture though, because you have to think about frequency of use.

You could have a skill that is on a 1:1 ratio with healing power, but you could only use it once every 60 seconds, then have a skill that is only getting 50% of your healing power, but it procs so frequently that it out heals the previous skill.

So experiment away

@Obtena

True, we can have burning maintain on a target, with specific setups. Torch 4 can keep 3 melee range targets burning for the prolonged duration of a fight, with some burning duration increases you can fill the gap in burning.

In a large AE fight consisting of 4 to 5 targets, 1 attack will proc burning. Doing AE with Permeating Wrath is quite nice on clusters of mobs, so that they all die evenly.

The question is, is it worth it?

I started off focusing on burns as a guardian, trying to find a way to make a defensive build that punishes players for hitting me with burns and retaliation. Did a lot of experimentation trying to make it effective. 1v1 it worked really well, but it was not really useful in the long run, so I have since dropped it.

I personally would love for burns to be more integral to our play as guardians, but it is too easy to cleanse off, and does not do damage fast enough to threaten other players.

Admittedly, I tend to think in terms of pvp when looking to enhance the guardian, so that may be my limitation factor in vision of what we can do or need.

One player with bleeds can typically maintain 4-5 stacks alone. Base damage for bleeds is 134 damage. so 134*4 = 680 damage a second.

One player with burns will do 328 damage a tick. Increasing stacks of burn prolong the damage, so I’m still doing 328 damage a tick.

If the player with bleeds increases the stacks for burst, lets say to 10…they will do 1340 damage a second.

So burning will not provide burst, and in a normal rotation of minimal bleed applications, it still under perform as a condition.

I really think burning needs a secondary effect to it, much like how chill slows a target and increases recharge time of skill and poison reduces healing. Both work in duration, but provide a control aspect to them.

Bleed is the dps condition.

Burn could reduce damage done by the burning target by a small % to use situationally as anti burst. This would be in line with the defensive support theme that guardians have and give burning more of a reason to be applied proactively instead of passively.

Great break down Danicco, and thank you for speaking up.

As far as larger symbols and faster 2h cooldowns, they still make sense in the support trait line in the aspect of larger symbols provide more boons to more people further from the guardian

Also our best group support weapon is the staff, so more empowers for large stacks of might and small group burst healing.

The few traits that bug me are ones that force me to trait into things that I will never use, such as increasing scepter damage in the zeal line…..but i had to trait for symbols to get there, which the scepter does not have.

For your mesmer, the more damage on phantasms I am sure is to allow them to be useful since they are alive longer, without having to trait too far down two trees to make one of those helpful.

Coming back to address symbol size. The visual of an untraited symbol from GS, Staff, and possibly Hammer is much smaller than the effective size. Mace is the appropriate size for the visual radius.

Untraited, the radius is as big as it looks visually when traited for larger symbols

Try to stand just out of range of a target dummy for a symbol and drop it, you will see it does damage.

Now keep standing there and trait for larger symbols and you will see that the new visual radius encompasses that exact same radius you invisibility had….of course now you have larger symbols so back up some more and drop a symbol and see that you can still hit outside of your symbol range.

I tested this in the mists, unsure of how this goes in PvE. Possibly just bugged, but I reported it regardless.

on a 6 second burn, an increase of 70% will gain 4.2 seconds, round off the .2 and you get 10 seconds of burning.

A 1 second burn would gain 0.7 seconds of burning, which will not be seen as a tick of damage until it clears whole number marker.

To make it complicated though, the fractions of a second left as remainders add up if you apply them quickly.

so if I do 0.5 seconds of burning on one skill and 0.5 on another, I will get 1 second of burning, producing a tick of damage.

So in quick succession, you may see an extra tick of burning or two with multi hit attacks and procing VoJ.

On our burning application abilities, you will get maybe 2-4 more ticks of damage with burning.

Which is nice as a overall damage number (2-4 more ticks typically is about 700-1400 more damge). But you have to wait 2-4 more seconds to see that damage.

Burning duration does not provide us with any useful burst, nor does it supply us with DPS.

In my opinion, the best reason to take burning duration is to prolong the times the target has a condition and a burn on it to make use of Fiery Wrath and Radiant power.

If we could find a way to maintain a burn on a target consistently with little to no gaps between cooldowns, maybe burning duration would be good then.

This drives me crazy, because the Devs constantly try to find ways to give us longer burning duration. Either I don’t get it or the Devs don’t get it….I assume I am missing something since “they” made the game…but I can’t find the logic.

…unsure how you get 97.5% burning from 10 points in zeal (10% longer conditions) and Radiant Fire (20% longer burns).

Maybe I am misunderstanding what you mean?

Back to the OP, I agree that burning does not gain as much benefit from condition duration as the damage only happens on a full second tick.

Condition damage and shorter burns (read procs from VoJ or burn on blocks) will contribute to our DPS in a great way, but it is mostly unnoticed by the player.

Pretty much add an extra 300-500 damage ontop of our auto attack chain, or any skill that hits 4-5 times and that is what VoJ burning is doing for us.

Also if you take burn on block with protectors strike, every time you block you do damage, add that 300-500 burn on the block and you have a nice hefty increase to the damage on each of those skills.

Keep in mind, condition damage goes through armor, so against more protective enemies (bunkers, bosses, or while low level in high level areas) you can maintain some damage output by supplementing burning to your physical attacks.

Burning is supplemental, not our primary form of damage.

As KrisHQ.4719 but some didn’t read or understand, putting on clerics gear or increasing healing power will not improve the heal from zealous blade.

To do that is a waste.

Now take that into consideration if building to use zealous blade, healing power bad, but don’t have heals to keep yourself alive? What else can you use that works well without healing power to increase sustain?

Answer is again AH or MF………

This will provide more consistent healing between the gaps of using meditations with MF or supplement the little heals you get from AH through boon application.

ZB is in a power tree and an offensive trait, they are trying to incentiveise us to go more damage by making that more obtainable. Up to you if you think it matches your playstyle, but it “of course” won’t have the survivability that a more tanking build would have. So don’t get disappointed when you can’t tank things with ZB…because you are using it wrong.

Also as mentioned earlier, it heals 25 for each target struck, so it benefits off AE situations…but diminishes in effect with less targets around.

One other synergy is that Greatsword drops a symbol and we can trait for heals with symbols. You could double up AE healing with ZB and Writ of the Merciful, for some extra staying power.

Again, not a face tanking trait, but can be powerful in burst situations.

The bug with our repeat fire after miss is that it hits both times if you watch the video again.

If you have a target and miss it will still hit the target. If you do not have a target and miss it will continue to fire off to the side 3 times before restarting the chain.

So you can force 2 swordwaves in a row for extra burst.

Was looking at boon duration and what we could do with it and came up with this build.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQJARWlUgyCXFyvDfIFS2jVCBTQ7DAEmCMKjuFA-ToAA2CoI8S1lrLjXycs5MEZJC

Emphasis is a lot of weapon swaps and always keep empower going. result is consistent 15+ stacks of might throughout the duration of a fight for your team and about 21+ stacks of might for yourself through use of:

Virtue of Justice w/ inspired inscriptions – 3 stacks of might for 8 seconds (refresh on enemy kill)
Empower – 17 stacks of might for 16 seconds (16 second refresh)
Sigil of battle -3 might for 20 seconds every 9 seconds
Greatsword chain attack – 1 might for 5 seconds every 1.5 seconds

Additionally you gain long durations of retaliation which is powerful in group fights, aided in damage by your might stacks.

With longer boon durations, shouts add more well known group benefits.

The result is keeping your team moving with swiftness, retaliation, and 15+ might.

Survivability in this build is gained through use of protection and regeneration with frequent use of blocks and invulnerability through shelter and renewed focus and lots of dodge rolls heals with vigor on crits and selfless daring. Empower provides some extra burst healing but keeps you stationary becoming prone to attacks.

You will not be weak in fights either, as you have supplemented your lack of power with 20+ stacks of might keeping your attack rating at 3300. This easily lets you contribute to group damage and AE with staff and greatsword.

Minimal condition management is provided via traited virtue of courage, but you can drop points out of radiance and get valor for more condition cleansing via meditations or purity.

Staff is mandatory with this build but the weapon swap could be anything you prefer. I chose greatsword because of the added retaliation and might as well as it’s AE damage.

I have not tested this in solo fights yet, but I have seen the immediate benefit in group fights while keeping you offensive instead of defensive support.

Saw a ranger video that showcased missing attacks allow them to leap a couple times to close the gap with sword leap chain and it got me wondering what I could find on our weapons.

I do it with the greatsword sometimes too, but can’t recreate it reliably.

I agree that boons and conditions are not meaningful enough and used unstrategically.

I was always under the impression that they should be short in duration and strong in effect, which would make counter play of boon and condition stripping more meaningful.

Right now they are abundant and secondary in thought. If you have it, use it.

Boons are a little bit more strategic in use, but they are also very abundant, yet not strong enough to feel like a huge benefit was given for the most part.

Increase the effect and reduce the reoccurrence.

Mentioned it before, but no one ever seems to acknowledge it. Here is a little video about the sword and something odd it can do.

http://youtu.be/VJctr83uNIU

Yes I submitted a bug report, and yes it works on moving targets such as other players.

And what do you do with that 495 ilvl gear? You use that as a gateway to join real raids to get 500 ilvl gear, or what ever the true version of that gear is.

If you take that 495 ilvl gear into battlegrounds or arenas, you wont have resilience, but can still be somewhat effective. I stopped playing a long time ago but heard they were making resilience matter more, so pve gear in pvp is even less useful now.

Open world pvp is pretty much dead in wow, minus a few high level gankers in low level zones. So you could play hero and protect the lowbies if you like for a little bit.

Compare that to before the expansion. You had the top ilvl gear or near the top. Nothing else to grind other than maybe raids to try to get better drops. It is the same thing here.

GW2 has minimized the gear incentive and tried to provide us with other goals (somewhat unsucessfully, but they are trying). Our rewards are gold, crafting mats, weapon and armor skins, and a chance at precursors and legendaries.

Instead of raiding a specific instance once a week, we are given the ability to do this anywhere in the game. In wvw, in lower level zones, or in dungeons.

It sounds good, but plays less interesting for some. In the end they do the same thing.

you just played “jump to conclusions” ordered chaos… please don’t apply your biases onto what I said.

I never indicated I wanted charr and human players to fight in open world pvp. I stated it would be good for the playerbase to have a measurable impact on the world based on actions we took.

The example I used was from the previous post about charr and human conflict. I stated it would be interesting but not work due to the game having charr as a playable race, so that if humans and charr were at war, it would make no sense to have charr and human players together peacefully.

I indicated the above example would be interesting for “dynamic world” reasons, but impractical for gameplay reasons.

Other scenarios could apply that template on player polls based on actions taken. That was just an example used to elaborate the idea.

Hate less, think more.

In my mind, I envisioned the way they might do a dynamic world is via a sort of “poll”.

Players can do regular content, and depending on how many people participate in certain events and which conversation choices the majority of players pick, the story changes.

What if we all choose to stop helping the human/charr treaty negotiations and let the separatists rule the area for a month? Consequence of players not participating in the content is that war breaks out with the charr.

Kind of extreme and can’t happen, otherwise charr players and human players would now be at odds with each other, but something to that effect.

kRiza krimos.1637:

So you fight one smart mob in melee and other ranged mob put 2 arrows in you from 1200 before you even noticed it joined fight, poof you are dead and what fun it was. Fighting more than 2 opponents would mean you lost since there is no chance to avoid every attack.
Besides, gw2 is game about heroes. Some heroes we would be if a minion could get 1 shot at you and defeat you. What you are asking is fight with champions, only you have to hit him more than once while 2 shots on you is enough for him. Isnt that even more compelling and exiting…

edit: wassn’t 1 hit KO thing that every1 complained about, and suddenly it would be better if every fight was 1 hit KO.

As it stands now, the game can not work the way I described it due to things based on stats and the ability to be hit a few times over and over.

That is understood and acknowledged.

For a game to work like I suggested it would have to minimize or do away with stats and be all animation/cool down dependent.

As far as ranged attacks, that would have to be throttled down or changed into control moves as well as providing everyone some way of dodging/blocking/absorbing/reflecting “some” projectiles to give people a chance to survive a ranged attack or two.

After that, it becomes very compelling and positioning, situational awareness, and teamwork come into play.

Maybe those ranged attackers have an effective range of 1200, fight on the outskirts of that ranged attack and be aware of the distance.

Maybe a guardian or mesmer is with you with projectile blockers, now you can survive a volley or two and close the gap to fight in melee. Now the ranged attacker has to swap to melee or they are very vulnerable (npc and pc weapon swaps).

It is a very compelling and interesting way to fight…brings in the realism and threat of death in combat, versus what we have now. I can just auto attack or spam buttons and I will win. If its a vet or a champion, then I roll around every now and then but mostly just spamming buttons till the red bar of life whittles away.

You could do it in the tune of how some first person shooters are today. No HP, but a successive strike system, where if you are hit too many times in a row then you die. Get out of the damage for a bit and you recover slightly to be ready to get back into the fray.

Lots of ways to do this and I think they are more compelling than auto attack… but it will never happen because it would be a complete revamp and negation of all the things that have progressed so far with the game.

What is more dynamic?

I hit a monster and it hits back for a couple of minutes as we trade blows or…

I am gauging striking distance from a monster as it swings at me and I try to get one or two good hits to kill it before it gets a hit on me.

Imagine if a game of tag were played like this: If you get tagged about 20 or 30 times, then you are it…. Otherwise 1 touch is ok, and you won’t lose. I wouldn’t be so worried about being touched then.

In a game of tag, one touch and you lose. Causing a compelling and exciting interaction between players trying to not get “hit”.

TLDR: my idea of challenging content is less HP not more.

I am a huge proponent of risky combat as interesting content.

What i mean by that is faster combat with 1-3 hits and you can kill an enemy. The same goes for the player as well as far as minimal tolerance for being hit.

Now players have to time and evaluate their attacks so as not to be hit themselves.

This came to me after playing the simplistic, yet somehow interesting Super Adventure Box. It went back to old school games and gave you 3 hearts for HP and most mobs went down in 1-2 hits themselves.

The frog king boss fight was interesting and difficult until you learned how to avoid being hit and expose the frog king to take damage.

Take those fight mechanic ideas and apply them to a more rampped up scale of combat. Now fighting in this game is risky and heart thumping.

Effective builds and players can clear groups of mobs quickly and efficently, but they have to play smart or they can die too.

Groups of mobs become a challenge for solo players, but can be doable. Group play balances the playing field and helps players handle large amount of mobs.

Control skills become pivotal as ways to buy time before you get over run.

AE skills can be powerful, but would have a limitation such as long cast time and/or long cooldown time, so as to not be a I win button.

Healing/support skills become about preventing a hit rather than healing from damage.

The only downside to a combat system like this is that ranged attacks would prevail. Why get in close when I can kill from a distance. There are projectile blocks and absorbs available, but they should also become more control oriented in a system like this, or slower in combat versus melee fighting.

This is all a pipe dream, but I just want to spread the inspiration is all.

I think it was the search for efficiency and power.

With the large amount of skills in the game, and the various ways to put them together. People were trying to crack that code to figure out what was good and what was worthless.

Eventually the meta kicked in and popular builds were published for anyone to pick up. Grinding for loot and upgrades to swap builds and try new things was the challenge.

Also a lot of people soloed content, so finding a build that you could run to solo content helped you feel accomplished.

Lastly, there was the pvp. Finding a build and setup that could beat the opposing team in game based off magic the gathering bring your deck of cards style fight.

We as gamers have grown and evolved, so maybe the old things are less compelling than they used to be. Trying to recreate the past to enjoy it now is always challenging and not the same as the first time you experienced it.

I really wonder how combat would go if it was one or two hits and you die, vice versa with the mobs.

One on one fights would be doable, two on one would be risky, three on one would be a challenge.

Shorter, faster fights, with more emphasis on timing and skill to land a hit while avoiding being hit yourself, versus large HP pools, stats, and auto attacks.

Engaging in combat is more interesting and adrenalin filled if you are afraid of being hit. Now you have to pick and choose our fights as well as know your enemy.

I see what you got out of my analogy, but that isn’t what I meant.

Race track = Content
Car = Gear
Reward = Winning

Do I always need new Cars(gear) to get Rewards(win)? Or can I take my current Car(gear) and go to a new Race Track(content) to find new Rewards(wins).

I think we are hitting on the same thing though, with different answers.

What is the reward? For you, you think that gear itself could be the reward. I am looking for something other than gear to be my reward. Most of the time it comes with satisfaction of winning itself or bragging rights in essence.

In an MMO though, everyone has a chance to win at the PvE content, so it is hard to have bragging rights you can care about.

“I finished that dungeon!!”……..(other person) “yeah so what, so did I…”

Enter loot rewards- “I finished that dungeon and I got this awesome loot!”
(other person) “I finished the dungeon too, but I didn’t get anything, I’ll have to do it again to be like you”.

See it is a synthetic feeling of achievement in world meant for players to succeed at everything yet make them feel special at the same time.

This can be done with RNG, or with a dedicated grind with a reward at the end of the grind.

I’ll play devil’s advocate, In this proposed elite endgame dungeon, what are the reward factors to address the risk involved?

Harder =/= compelling content.

Thus the crux of every game designer ever. How do I make it so people like to play my game?

Large difficult events like the karka queen meta are now all but ignored because the incentive to do said content disappeared.

In the end, I am with you though, content needs to remain fun and interesting, even if repeating it is one of the desired interactions. Gear is not the end all to fun.

Interesting and good suggestion. Would help to make the world more populated by other players. +1

Let’s say I have a car that I race in. I beat everyone on that same race track that everyone uses in town. Do I need a new car to make that race track more compelling? Or do I need a new race track to make my currently owned car more enjoyable.

Would you feel the need to buy a new car for each new race track you were to compete on?

(this is the least wordy I can get, as my other posts are large blocks of philosophy, psychology, and rambling)

Some how I am a day one player and I still play for hours on end with only one 80. I have one of each profession, but I stay on my Guardian the most because of the affinity I have for the character (been playing by that name since EQ1, so it is “me” in all intents and purposes).

I honestly have spent hours just testing things out in the mists breaking down weapon/skill stats or testing new builds for effectiveness.

Every time I try to grind for gear or money I immediately get bored. I do now have a couple of different full set of exotics for different builds.

I have done all the dungeons once or twice, and ran through fractals for a bit. Only up to 12 or 13, I don’t remember, but it became too repetitive for me and I don’t care about gear that much.

I completed leveling and 100% world completion pretty early on, then reverted to spvp for a while. I step toe in wvw every now and then, but i was deterred due to the impact gear had on that front. I feel that in wvw I do not have the proper knowledge/gear/build to be effective and I am a solo player, so fighting zergs by myself is really intimidating.

As far as achievements go I am motivated but not driven by them, so it is always nice to knock out an achievement that I think I can do without a lot of effort.

I really am surprised it has been a year and I have done so LITTLE, compared to how I used to play games. I am passively working for a legendary by stockpiling up materials and hitting up the mystic forge every now and then, but it is not a focus. Also back to wvw, I am jumping in there again because I want a bigger challenge, but I think I need to find a better core group of people to play with instead of my solo routine that I do.

I think this laid back casual gameplay that I have developed stemmed from a couple of things. I am much older now than when I started playing MMOs back with EQ. Just turned 33 this month.

Also as I quit playing WoW, the only thing I did was sit around town afk, while looking for arena teams or waiting for my team mates to log in so we could push rating. Majority of my time was afk and ignoring PvE content, as it was not compelling to me after Lich King story.

So for me, gear is not an answer, but more compelling content and challenges are. I have always been interested in pvp and competitive gameplay though, as I was big in leaderboards for FPS games like quake3 and jedi knight outcast no force power saber dueling.

Fighting computers based AI is less engaging to me versus fighting against a real person with different ways of thinking and moving than a bot. What turned me off from WoW pvp was the emphasis of gear making it so that skill was less of an issue and gear became a pretty large factor on who would win a fight or not. It always felt good to beat a better geared player though.

Currently what has kept me playing has actually been the living story and the limited time on them. I want to experience them all and complete the available achievements during those times.

Admittedly the living story is a different form of carrot and stick, as they do not really do much other than provide some limited time gear skins with a grind placed in front of them… mixed with a heavy dose of RNG

Yet it has worked for me at the moment and I am relieved when the event comes to a close for a bit so I can relax….at the moment they seem to be back to back and I don’t like it in ways, because it is taking up all my time.

If someone were to forcibly climb onto my back and poke me for a very long time, I think I might want to die too…..

open ended question… my mistake

For me, my progress is in understanding game/class mechanics, finding a new build that no one has done, exploration, pvp/competitive gameplay, maybe even become a recognized expert or respected member of the community.

All of that I can do without new gear tiers, if anything more gear would cause those things to be harder to achieve because it would hinder my attempts at doing those things without getting the new gear first.

Can you think of other ways to “progress” beyond gear?

Baring the addition of harder content, more gear results in unbalanced game and characters that are too powerful.

With that in mind, developers add more difficult content to match the increase of players increase in strength. Thus matching the strength of the players making it so your new gear puts you on par with the game, and not better.

OP, Take a second to step back and evaluate what you are saying.

You said that you:

• can’t be bothered to level right now.
• were spared a grind due to being lucky with the mystic forge.
• have everything you could think of to ask for in terms of loot.
• You said you want a gear grind otherwise there is no incentive to log in.

The root of the problem is that you don’t have anything to do, and you are unsatisfied with the prospect of grinding more levels or gear.

Yet, now you are asking to for the game to give you new gear to grind.

When you get that new gear, you will run out of things to do again, so another set of gear will need to be released to keep you motivated. Hence the treadmill effect.

Remove gear as your incentive and replace it with another thing:

• Looks
• Wealth
• Power
• Fame

In fact, lets attack this problem from another angle…

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/60/Maslow%27s_Hierarchy_of_Needs.svg

In essence you have satisfied your physicalogical and saftey needs.

So in order to make you feel satisfied I think one or more of three things needs to happen:

• Your physiological needs have to resurface
  (introduction of new loot to gain)
• Your safety needs have to become threatened
  (harder content and which challenges your characters ability to survive)
• You need to move onto the next tier of needs and find a core group of friends in game which give you incentive to log in
  (find people you have a real connection with in game, not just random friends or guild mates you don’t talk to)

This can then continue on with

• Esteem
  Feel good about yourself and respected by others. Maybe even a public figure.
• Self Actualization
  Play the game simply for the sake of enjoyment and not have a need to play.

Now self actualization is one of those things that almost no one ever achieves, in real life or in game. Realistically these needs are in a state of flux at all times as we play a sort of “root beer tapper” game trying to satisfy them.

Some people also start to apply the needs of others around them onto their own personal needs. So if I feel that I am safe, but those around me that are in my person circle are not, their needs of safety become my needs as well. Until they are safe I am not satisfied.

So to sum it up, you have satisfied your needs and wants, but there are more ways to keep on “needing” something beyond a gear grind.

tldr: Gear treadmills are a means to an ends, but they are not the core of the problem.

lol, I also remember in EQ, dropping a fortune in copper to see someone pick it up and get stuck in place……….how BAD do you want that money…orcs come to kill you as you clutch onto the money

Way back in the day, Everquest had a thing they experimented with that allowed you to log in as a monster.

You could walk around and attack other players, and you could level up that monster over time. If a player killed you though, your monster was gone for good and you had to start over.

I “think” LoTRO had something like this too? I only played that for a little bit so really fuzzy.

Great concept, bad execution on EQ’s part, but something I would be interested in again if they did it right.

Play as an Orr zombie and wreck havoc on other players. Level up and become a champion mob with special abilities. Maybe earn titles and such like “the scourge of tyria”.

Only thing to be worried about is possibility of exploits since a player is now controlling the MOB instead of AI. They can let other players win if they like and give loot or what ever the rewards are.

Although with player controlled mobs, you could have bounties placed and player run events to find the monster and kill it.

Lots of potential, but has to be done right.

http://youtu.be/rTEWPGScLoI

Always wanted to try my hand at video editing, and this provided me an opportunity. Nothing special, just a couple clips of the blind stomps I was talking about.

Trying to figure out how to make the little watermark overlay and position it correctly took hours…..I don’t know if I enjoy this enough to sit there and record everything I do then sort around for good clips :p

Ran with the following:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQRAsf7elUgSDHHyNEfIFRuArHA8g+DXw1DI6wGC-TwAg0CnISSlkLJTSyksJNuYVwGkJEA

Was not trying for any serious competitive build, just something to mess around with voj stomps.

You are bad guy…..but this does not mean you are “bad guy?” shrug

http://youtu.be/Eh4f8SUp-PU?t

Yeah, GS is “typically” burst while sword is sustained dps. Same thing with hammer, the hammer symbol on auto chain provide a more consistent dps over time versus greatsword.

GS gives us more flashy numbers though, and those always feel nice

Sword is pretty strong on paper. Fast attacks, multi hitting auto attack which procs virtue of justice every rotation, high mobility, and for shortage of gap closer you have a projectile blocker available until your port is ready.

Biggest problem with sword is that it is a single target oriented weapon and AE weapons can do just as much damage and perform better in a majority of the fights you will encounter.

On a boss PvE fight or even in a 1v1 fight, sword will perform well. Same goes for scepter as it suffers from the same design ideas of fast attacking but single target oriented.

Throwing out a random statistic, 95% of the fights you run into throughout the game are group oriented fights, making sword and scepter only shine in about 5% of the game. Made up statistics are made up, but the idea I think holds true.

The other downside to sword is that ZD is (as so often pointed out) not strong enough to warrant use most of the time. Added on top of the fact that you are rooted in place and it is easy to run out of the projectile range or even strafe them.

Faster projectiles, or homing projectiles can assist making this better. Higher damage wouldn’t hurt as well. As it is now though, it is more of a utility thing than a primary on cooldown attack.

The approximate “burst” time of ZD is about 2 seconds worth of casting give or take. The auto attack chain is also an approximate 2 second rotation. Our auto chain hits 5 times while zd will hit 8 times. Shorten VoJ procs to 4 hits to burn and ZD will do slightly more damage than the auto chain, but that is a lot of trait points to made ZD “almost” useful in the sense of damage.