Guild Wars 2

My statement was not to justify but to put perspective on the situation. I am more patient because of the gaming history in the past these (to me) 10 seconds are fairly quick.

When the game has issues and loads for 20-30 seconds, that’s when I begin to get annoyed and I have had that happen to me.

When reaching a loading screen you are in essence connecting to a new “room” with different chat, textures, models, sounds, and what ever other hidden things that may go on with loading. This is a smart thing to do because it allows your computer to stop running things that are not needed, thus reducing the data being used/stored by cutting the fat and only holding things that are pertinent to the current gaming situation.

Now, I used to be on a SSD Raid 0 configuration till one of my SSDs died on me, so I switched back to a HD for space/stability. Load times, surprisingly enough are about the same. What this is telling me is that it is not the hard drive spin that is slowing down load times, but the CPU/Memory and the network that are slow.

CPU/Memory you have some control over by upgrading, network…you are prone to the effects of the great Internet.

Other than that, optimization of code could help prioritize things to load onto the player and then let them load into the game “faster”.

The other option is streaming zone loading much like WoW does. You may not notice it, but wow has zones and there is a bit of load time when you cross zones. Why did they not choose to go with streaming instead of this physical zone separation?

My only guess would be: better manipulation of zones separate from each other, in the event that an update is needed or a zone needs to go down they do not have to take down the whole world.

Also, WoW zone transition art is horrible in my eyes… at first its bright red, then it turns all lush green with like maybe a foot of transition. By splitting zones like this then you are able to make your game art graphics very distinct without having to worry about area transitions breaking up your theme.

I take it you guys never played games like Everquest….

could you imagine doing the mad king’s clock tower like this??!!! 0.o

wxkin.7904:

its simple revert the game back to the previous state + publish the Change log we kill the Batman.

Fixed that for you….

Putting my in game bug report in this thread as well for more justification for devs to address this issue hopefully:

Jumping physics have just changed with this last patch that has completely revamped how many players have learned to play the game.

Previously a player could be falling for a split second and still accomplish a jump. At the moment, as soon as the game registers a falling animation it prevents jumping and pulls the player down.

The issue with this is that latency and graphical frame rates will now vastly inhibit player performance in jumping because of prediction algorithms for online games telling the server that the player is indeed falling when the client side has not registered this fall yet, causing a miss match with what the player sees and does and what the server says.

As of now, jumping puzzles were created with certain obtainable distances in mind, but now players may not be able to accomplish those distances due to the new physics of jumping.

I’ll just paste my response in this thread as well in hopes a dev will see this and maybe readjust jumping:

You can see what the effect is by going to lions arch and going to the ramp directly to the left, walking out of the bank. Run at the ramp and jump right as you hit the lip of that ramp going down.

What happens is you are in a “falling” state for a split second so it prevents you from jumping and instead pulls you down.

This is adverse to what the jumping physics previously were because you were able to begin a slight fall for a split second and still input a jump command to gain some extra distance into your jump.

So they either “fixed” the physics or “broke” some jumping puzzles that used to require you to jump certain distances that were REALLY picky on how close to the edge you were when you jumped.

Now add latency into the mix and you can see how being too precise on when the player inputs a jump command can cause issues.

edit
I think gravity physics are stronger too, feels like I get pulled down pretty fast now when falling off a ledge or just jumping in general. I am going to test some falls to see if I take more damage now than before (i.e. will it kill me now when it didn’t used to)

update
Falling damage seems fine, just the animation when falling feels like an anchor pulling me down. Could just be muscle memory rejecting the end result.

You can see what the effect is by going to lions arch and going to the ramp directly to the left, walking out of the bank. Run at the ramp and jump right as you hit the lip of that ramp going down.

What happens is you are in a “falling” state for a split second so it prevent you from jumping and instead pulls you down.

This is adverse to what the jumping physics previously were because you were able to begin a slight fall for a split second and still input a jump command to gain some extra distance into your jump.

So they either “fixed” the physics or “broke” some jumping puzzles that used to require you to jump certain distances that were REALLY picky on how close to the edge you were when you jumped.

Now add latency into the mix and you can see how being too precise on when the player inputs a jump command can cause issues.

@ Blackwolfe

Inspired would mean welsh/gaelic “sounding” names and words, but the OP pointed out that they use actual words.

Sylvari do have gender differentiation as seen in character creation, voices, body types. They are not bound by gender roles though and will mix male male or female female relationships.

Apple castle doesn’t make complete sense, but it isn’t out of this world either. It sounds like two randomly picked words to make a name. Think of it this way, how ridiculous do you find it when you see people name their kids things like: Blanket, or Pilot Inspector (real names look them up).

They are not wrong, but just sound random and dumb to some people, much like Apple Castle sounds dumb to the OP.

I think the OPs concerns are valid and the points he brings up can be distracting. Think about all those Japanese “Engrish” memes and how that would be distracting to real english speaking people to see someone use “Engrish” as the language of a race in a game…..on second thought that might be amazing.

But back to my point. Your response to the OPs argument is “no it isn’t”….no value or substance to it, just blind and deaf shaking of the head and ignoring anything he said.

Guardian’s have a built in mechanic “Virtue of Courage” that provides an Aegis every 40 seconds or so. 30 seconds if traited. this Aegis lasts indefinitely. Other on demand aegis last a much shorter duration as you were probably expecting.

To maximize the mace we should look at what it does:

Slow/big hits
Heals
Blocks

So by that quick list we see that it is a bursty type fighting style that could benifit from crits and crit damage, it has great sources of healing to maintain fighting, and any “on block” abilities are greatly utilized here. (Namely on block burn and on block might)

Many discredit the utilization of healing power, and while I don’t think it is something that we should focus on, it definitely helps maintain your life in a fight. I think of it more as a passive regen ability versus a burst recovery heal ability like in most traditional MMO styles.

Question 1: Guardian has a lot of self healing capability to make up for the lower HP pool. If you want to concentrate on healing others, then you may need to change the way you think because this game does not want a traditional holy trinity of tank dps and healer.

I hear elementalists heal others better than guardians, but again don’t focus on being a “healer”.

Question 2: PvP is fairly simple with guardian in that the meta right now is to be “bunker”. Meaning you survive a lot of attacks and self heal a lot. While doing this you prevent the enemy from taking the point you are standing on. If you go full bunker you will not kill too many people.

If you go full offensive, there are some options such as Judge’s Intervention (teleport) and Whirling Wrath on the greatsword or other bursty type abilities. There are offensive options and a lot of people have shown them in various videos on this forum.

The majority like to emphasize the built in mechanics of this class and focus on defense/support though.

I have played LoL, but only for a week, I assume Jarvan is a defensive dps type character that diverts and redirects a lot of damage. You can do that with guardians via burn on blocks or the retaliation skill, but it is difficult to do right as you can only block 1-3 attacks before you are just sitting and waiting for cooldowns to refresh.

Very situational, but I wonder how effective AH would be combined with fury on burn effect would be. Granted AH would only heal for about 70-75 and the burn would be doing 200-600-ish depending on condition damage.

But you could get a few stacks of burn on yourself and cleanse them off before they tick.

Not that a lot of things apply burning like that.

I also want to point out the difference in sustained DPS and burst damage. On these training golems big bursty abilities can eat through chunks of life quickly, but refresh slowly. So they may look like they kill faster on a small HP pool, but in a long duration fight it may change in effectiveness.

So as gunglai pointed out damage over time abilities don’t reach full potential and other things like long cooldown attacks.

@ Minion of Vey.4398

That actually was very insightful and I think a key idea that helped complete something I was missing.

Earlier in this thread Logun.5360 posted a video to a class room discussion about an economics class. A long video but I sat and listened it as I did some farming, dungeons, and other stuff in the game.

At the end of that video the instructor did a small experiment where he had a group of buyers and a group of sellers. Long story short the buyers and sellers without knowing all the rules and theories of economics made trades that showed the true market value of an item.

Your post Minion of Vey.4398 helped clarify that whole bit for me. Figure out the true value and then you are able to buy low and sell high without needing to do any sort of market manipulation or pump and dumps.

I have admittedly always been poor on MMOs and never been successful at any sort of in game economy, but I am finding I need to learn if I want to get anywhere in this game.

Something that has been brought up on the Guardian boards a few times is that while our ranged attack has a 1/4s attack refresh, it is in actuality closer to 1 1/4 second attack refresh.

Many of our chain attacks seems to be more aligned to a 1s attack tempo regardless of what the tool tip says.

So fast attacking weapons that strike faster than 1s get tied to a 1s interval which affects the perceived effectiveness that you would think it would have via the tool tips.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

What.

I think you just summed up your understanding of the math behind this pretty well just now and how dps works. What I was trying to provide you in short was “lowest common denominator” of the dps of our attacks.

Regardless, previous posts show that actual effect of attacks differs from the tool tip attack times and cooldowns, as we are gated loosely by an attack every second. So while my previous calculations are spot on for what the tooltips say, the game does not apparently obey by the rules it lists in those tooltips it provides us.

Intended by the devs? sure I guess, but I wonder why give us attack swing timers if we are limited by animations so greatly.

OneManArmy.5617:

I tested the scepter at point blank, 600range,900range and 1200range.
In all cases there were 75 hits registered over 60seconds.

After reading your post I went back through and tested it myself and the attacks in application do seem gated by the game. The tooltips show 1/4 a second cast time so you would think the scepter attacks every 1/4 a second. In 60 seconds that should be 240 attacks.

My tests were only 20 seconds and I came up with about 25 to 26 attacks in 20 seconds for scepter and for the sword I came up with 24 to 25 attacks.

A really small sample and prone to human error but the scepter “DOES” swing faster, but it is limited by the game animations it seems. Not exactly by the second but pretty close to it.

ran another test with lowest graphics possible running about 300 frames per a second.

Attacked for 20.4 seconds and got 26 attacks with the scepter.

Previously I had fps limited by monitor refresh rate so it was at 60 frames per a second.

Just a quick thought on if fps affected attack performance.

If someone could get sub 60fps and test this that would be nice.

Did another test with mace just now and got 19 attacks in 20.5 seconds.

So attacks do vary from weapon to weapon as far as speed, but they do not reflect the tool tips very well.

And for the sake of matching my previous statements about attack speed with greatsword and scepter, I tested greatsword and got 25 attacks in 20.5 seconds

they are divided by a quarter second based on cooldown, and they show how the attacks damage over time in smaller increments. So instead of averaging the damage over a period of time to how much damage is done in a second. this is taking that 1 second increment of damage and shrinking it down into a smaller point of measurement so that some attacks that do round down into a second evenly are more consistent with each other.

It is taking the same idea that you are looking for and reducing it down to its very root so that you can see each weapon without inflated numbers. Traits after that can be used to better improve the performance individually, but they are based off that basic form.
What this shows is that weapons in increments of 1/4 of a second have stronger or weaker effects. Some weapons have equivalent auto attack chains, while others have stronger or weaker auto attack chains.

This information is still in line with some of your own calculations, so take a second to look and read instead of shrug off cause it is not your information.

For example:

You can not just take scepter auto attack and divide by 4……it’s auto attack happens every 0.25 seconds and does 28 damage, so if you were to divide 28 by 4 you get 7. This is wrong because in 1/4 a second (0.25) it does exactly 28 damage.

So lets take the Greatsword.
It’s auto chain has a sequence of: 37+37+56
This totals into 130 damage.
The swings occur in a time sequence of: 0.5, 0.5, 0.5
Totaling into 1.5 seconds of attacking to complete the auto attack chain.

Dividing 130 by 4 would result in 32.5
This again is wrong because the attacks do not fit into 1 perfect second, but extend into a second and a half.

So break down the attack chain into 1/4 of a second to see how it performs.

130/6 = 21.67 damage per 1/4 a second.

So to compare those two auto attack chains, the scepter does 28 damage every 1/4 a second and the greatsword does 21.67 damage every 1/4 a second.

This is not the full picture though, because the greatsword has a symbol and a DOT that you can have ticking at the same time as the greatsword auto attack so if I combine those damages for the greatsword it can do 36 damage per 1/4 a second for a short period of time.

The scepter can only combo together smite and the orb auto attack and it can at a maximum do 33 damage per 1/4 of a second.

Ok great, now we know that the greatsword does 21.67 damage every 1/4 of a second. What happens in a 60 second fight?

well there are 240 increments of 1/4 of a second in 60 seconds. So multiply 21.67 by 240.
5200.8 damage done.
Well how much damage did I do “per a second?”
86.68 dps
Well a second has 4 quarters to it, i.e. 1/4 of a second so how much damage would 86.68 damage per a second be if I were to break it down to 1/4 of a second?
21.67 damage per 1/4 of a second.

We can do this all day, it is the same numbers as you should be getting in your dps calculations but smaller fractions of the same number because I’m measuring to a finer degree than you are.

edit
…these numbers are derived from naked, in the mists, without any traits selected, using steady weapons
edit

I have also delved into various spread sheets and weapon break downs, heal break downs, and burn break downs in an attempt to understand the functions of our class so I can better utilize and manipulate the skills we are given.

That said the last time I posted I was also called to quantify my data and had to address certain flaws in how the numbers were derived and what they were actually showing.

One interesting take away from that previous post was a PM from Brutality and more discussion about hammer DPS. He had some problems with the numbers I was showing and he was getting higher numbers with hammer than I was.

Through that discussion I had an idea to break down weapon damage by 1/4 of a second. Many of our abilities revolve around an attack swing of 1/4, 1/2, or a full second. Also we seem to have damage happen more than “per a second” and some things tick pretty fast so I think 1/4 of a second break down helps brings these attacks to a common level so we see how they perform in equal timing.

The following is that break down:

Sword
Skill 1 – 32.75
Skill 2 – 0.2
Skill 3 – 1.866666667

Mace
Skill 1 – 17.125
Skill 2 – 3.28125
Skill 3 – 1

Scepter
Skill 1 – 28
Skill 2 – 5.541666667

Staff
Skill 1 – 14
Skill 2 – 4.75
Skill 3 – 1.916666667

Staff Burst
Skill 1 – 14
Skill 2 – 1.770833333
Skill 3 – 1.916666667

Greatsword
Skill 1 – 21.66666667
Skill 2 – 4.025
Skill 3 – 0.85
Skill 4 – 1.4375
Skill 5 – 13.725

Hammer
Skill 1 – 21.77777778
Skill 2 – 4.15
Skill 3 – 0.616666667
Skill 4 – 0.47

What do these mean? Auto attack chains do better damage per 1/4 a second because they rotate and do not have dead periods in which they are on cool down.

Each weapon has different utilities they can offer but a good majority of DPS is gained from the auto attack. Great sword is kind of a unique weapon in which almost every attack is a choice of DPS but they cancel each other out since you can’t do both at the same time.

Somethings, like scepter 1 and 2 can be used “together” as you can have smite cast in a fraction of a second and have that ticking while you are still firing off auto attacks, thus creating a better synergy with the skills.

So, I believe, a lot of our cooldown abilities are mostly to generate burst or utility and not really a form of sustained DPS. Used correctly in conjunction with our chain abilities they will pump up our overall DPS, but some should be ignored if you are going for purely damage (such as sword 2) unless it generates some sort of boon or condition that will help increase damage (such as sword 2 causing blindness and then getting 10% more damage on a target that has conditions on it).

One more time… What does this mean? “I don’t know….” but they are interesting numbers to sort through.

It was a long ordeal, and I think the take away is that we were able to finish it with adverse odds and while it was an uphill struggle, we all felt accomplished at the end. So we finished a level 40 dungeon with a 22, 42, and an 80.

Would I want that to be the normal experience? No….but a challenge one time and success is rather fun. You are right I wasn’t trying to gain anything from the dungeon, other than face a challenge and succeed.

No real interesting point to this post but just wanted to share a dungeon experience I had.

My friend and brother and one of my friends started playing GW2 recently. Right now they have a 42 thief and a 22 ranger. I (an 80 guardian) took them into CM story mode yesterday and had a very long, interesting and challenging experience.

My brother, the 22 ranger died at a blink of an eye. The agro radius around him was huge because of his low level I guess and sometimes the separatist snipers would ignore me and I would see them crouch down and point the rifle in some random direction. I would look over there and see my brother trying to get a couple of pot shots off and hide behind a wall….then BAM he died in one hit. Lets just say he got naked real early on in the dungeon.

He did help though, some things he kept on him and distracted long enough where we were able to revive and or kite things, but it was sure a challenge to get him through the dungeon.

My buddy, the 42 thief fared a little bit better but he did get smacked pretty hard if it ever stopped looking at me and decided to turn around and show him some love.

I am playing an AH hammer guardian right now and I only have yellows on that I bought from the TP with P/V/T cause well I was in a all MF set and wanted to buy a quick and cheap dungeon set to do fractals and other stuff without catching flak from pugs.

So our tactic was they hide, I face tank/dodge/run/try to carry them through the dungeon. We would pull and kill 1 or 2 things then run to reset the fight. Kill the non vets/champs first so we would have reduced incoming dps and make the fights more bearable, but it was still pretty rough if there were 3 medium level mobs (silver borders). All in all we did it and I think I personally died maybe 3 or 4 times (dogs and fears are rough!) but I got them through, we had a blast and this is the most fun I had in a dungeon.

We were on skype, we died more than I ever died in a pug EVER! But we were having a blast trying out different tactics and watching my brother get 1 shot left and right.

As many have said in the past, try to do a dungeon with an organized group and it is great fun. Hell I did it will an incomplete and totally unorganized group but we took it slow and had a good time.

Yeah, that was my last try for me after about 5 hours. Got booted one time and couldn’t get back into the same server/map as my group, crashed a second time and had to submit a crash report to close gw2, and then this patch hits me at the end for a third time.

Lets just say I have dropped a lot of trees on big crabs tonight for no point.

It is not a clear cut answer for most things but the above samples give some insight as to how our weapons work.

If you calculate weapon damage and rate of hits in, then you get a significantly higher damage output from a weapon with procced burning effects (assuming you are not using the virtue as a cooldown and simply letting it proc every 5-4 hits depending on how you trait)

Due to that, you will see things like scepter, greatsword and sword providing higher damage output via burning.

Other weapons benefit very little from burning so raw increase in power and/or crit dmg and chance help provide better damage for those weapons, such as hammer and mace.

Scepter only “looks” like it does more damage because in a perfect situation the target is at point blank range and not moving so there is no travel time and there is no misses due to movement. It is our best 1h damage output though, so on a boss fight maybe switch to scepter to focus your damage on a single target better. This again is fight dependent.

Greatsword is our best damage dealer overall due to the fast attacks, strong hits, and good application of burning procs. Also it provides decent AE with the wide arc and whirling wrath. As most guardians found when they started, the greatsword is a good weapon overall and they favored it greatly as they felt the usefulness of it more reliably than other weapons that you have to tweek to get to work well.

Hammer is good burst damage but bad sustained dps damage. The biggest bonus of the hammer is the all to famous AH healing. Combine that with might procs and you have good utility from crits giving might and a lesser heal, fast symbols providing high up time on protection which reduces damage, and consistent healing via symbol boons giving more healing via AH and if you trait for it, symbols can stack heals on top of it as well.

So scepter can be good if used right just because of how fast it attacks, greatsword is a well rounded tool that focuses on damage and works single target or multi-target, hammer is our perfect utility weapon that gives us damage and survivability.

What about mace, sword and staff?

Mace provides tons of healing, but in a game that likes to downplay healing you can find better survivability via protection boons with hammer. This is still a great weapon for defensive play and stack some crit on that and you will see some big burst hits.

Sword is a good balance between the full offensive scepter and the full defensive mace. Sword has no symbol so stack power on it and condition damage to see more gain in damage. Crit always helps any attack but I am unsure if the smaller hits will see as much of an effect from crit as it might from pure power increase and condition damage from fast attacks.

Staff is a full defensive weapon but it attacks fast like the scepter with a wide arc auto attack chain. Downside to the AE is you can only proc burning to 1 target at a time. But if you have 5 targets infront of you, then every ae strike from attack 1 will proc a burn. The biggest bonus for me with staff is the swiftness boon and the might boon. This is a good offhand for traveling and in the event that you need a ranged weapon it is “decent” but not as good in damage as scepter.

Our off hands are more about utility and use them as you see fit. Shield is group utility with burst damage reduction through on demand protection. You can not maintain that, but in the event of a big hit coming your way, you can provide the group with protection and hopefully mitigate that damage by 33%. We don’t have a 1 hit block, but we have a group “shield” through that ability.

Focus is very selfish in its useage, but provides better cooldowns than the shield in terms of stopping full damage for 3 hits.

Torch is a great suppliment to low damage 1 handers through burning effects. Like the mace for example, horrible dps but good burst. Combine that with the torch and you have a decent balance of defense in one hand and offense in the other hand.

But if you put the torch with a fast proccing weapon like the sword or scepter, then you see less use in burn damage. What you can do though is ensure the burn condition is up and combine that with Fiery Wrath for an extra 10% damage on burning targets.

Cleansing flame does direct damage and not burning damage, but you have to think about the fact that you are not doing any other attack while breathing that flame. So unless you combine with smite, you are only doing 1 attack or the other. The sword auto attack does about the same damage as Cleansing flame and the scepter auto attack does less. I would have to run some numbers to see if it is worth it to use that over the auto attacks or not.

Long “conclusions” about my work and I hate to use the tired old phrase but: With the above information, hopefully you can play the way you want to play. Just with more information on the choices you are making.

Passive burning will provide the best effect in a solo situation. In a group situation active burning by triggering the trait would probably be best as with 5 people and 5 seconds per each burn you can make it so burn stays applied on the target until you are ready to trigger VoJ again to refresh the burn stacks.

Each person’s condition damage changes the burn damage individually and as shown in the gw2 wiki each person’s burn application would take turns doing their full effect.

The thing to remember with burning is if I add 60 stacks of burning, I have to wait 60 seconds to see that damage.

Passive burning allows you to not have to wait for damage so it happens with your attacks instead of next to your attacks. (5 strikes add 1 second of burning on 5th strike versus 10 seconds of burning on the target and you hit 5 times and added 1 more second, now you have to wait 11 seconds to see full damage potential)

I pasted my spreadsheet for damage rotations into a googledocs, best way to show it.

Again NOT perfect, because I rounded damage attacks to the nearest second to quickly show myself a projected turn based attack rotation for each skill. This way skills can not execute in conjunction with each other, but must wait to trigger.

These are not the optimal attack rotations either, that would take a lot more time/effort/calculations. Some skills should be ignored if you want to do the best “dps” but again this is a quick down and dirty way to show how weapons could perform.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Au1z6TUkf93KdGNkRThhX2NKSEJFMnM3R29McTl5T1E

Amins, zealots defense and other projectile blocks do not provide burning effects from the trait. They simply “block” as a line of sight and not as a blocking mechanic.

Obtena, I completely understand and as I said it is purely based off of numbers of the skills themselves and not the rotation you would actually use.

I do have a spreadsheet showing projected damage rotations and I will say the damage trends do match up but the damage totals come out differently as expected because you have cast times in this attacks and they can’t be used simultaneously.

I can post those as well if you like but again they are much less clean in appearance.

Additionally I have spreadsheets on our healing and healing traits such as zealous healing, altruistic healing, and monk’s focus….those are much more scatter brained though and in no condition to make any sense to others.

Overall answer for that is that AH is best in groups and sufficient solo, Monks is best for burst heals and solo survivability, and the lesser known fact is that Zealous Blade heals fairly well and scales great with multiple targets.

Try combining Zealous blade with Monk’s focus for some fun greatsword play without feeling too squishy.

Also AH and Empowering Might procs are not the primary focus of what AH Crit hammer builds are good, the seal boon applies so consistently and reduce damage at the same time that it makes that build great, the might procs are good and help provide group utility and damage but not so much a focus in survivability.

I actually built one based of blocking a while back when I was testing defensive damage in spvp and this is what I came up with.

Been seeing a lot of posts about burning damage and what weapons to use, or just what weapons do the most damage in general. Here is a spreadsheet I developed for myself using steady weapons in the mists.

keep in mind that attacks can not happen simultaneously, so the numbers are misleading and should be thought of in attack sequence to find the true damage output

Even with that caveat, these numbers give interesting insight to each weapon and the end results mirror what is shown with smaller numbers.

Basing the information purely off of numbers is slightly misleading if you factor in scepter and staff orb travel time, but it does show in a static perfect condition scenario how the weapons would preform without any enhancements from traits and such.

For me this helps me see how some weapons benefit from burning more than others and helps emphasize what I might want to use with certain traits.

Hopefully I cleaned it up enough for someone other than me to understand it, but across the top the spreadsheet shows what weapon/attack is in that column, how much time is being evaluated in the fight in seconds, how much damage in burning is being done, and the hits needed to proc the burning effect from our virtue.

This also shows how many attacks were done in that time and how many second of burning were applied via those attacks.

Chain attacks are totaled together as one hit for damage, but the individual strikes are counted for the hits to burn count.

The torch is slightly misleading since the primary source of damage is burning so those do not count towards the hits done.

In essence, the torch can do all the burning damage you need so any other burning you stack on top of that just prolongs the duration. If you already have enough burning to make it to the next application refresh then you are over doing it with burning.

Hope this helps people, but this is a one dimensional spreadsheet showing damage, which does not take into account utility.

(TLDR) Maybe add some world vs world type game play into PvE, where the players defend towns and upgrade them against PvE enemies, much like WvW you defend them against other players.(TLDR)

I disagree that this is a moot thread. Everything to do what I suggested is in place and ready to go. That is what is so frustrating for I think many in considering the state of the game…. What they want is right there it is tangible.

Villages already burn, monsters overtake towns, difficulty scales (more mobs at least) to the number of people at the DE. Step it up a notch and let us fail though, and reward us when winning other than “success” or “fail” with some karma and maybe a new vendor or two.

There was a post from the devs a while back that stated they did not want DEs to be ultimately fail-able because of the notion of other players causing failure being distracting to those trying to win the objectives.

What I simply stated is allow people to fail and feel consequences while at the same time failure provides MORE objects to do. Through failing you generate more content. Through winning you provide more challenges. There is no technical wall in this, simply adding more dynamic events on top of the ones that exist.

Scenario: Village is under attack by centaurs (classic example by the devs). You fend off the centaurs and they run away. Village thanks the heroes and the town is prosperous. Rewards ensue (more farming nodes, new dynamic events of good nature, town oriented stuff, maybe even higher percentage of rare drops or more coin if fighting near the town, like a proximity buff to a saved town).

Well the centaurs are angry and hurt. They go back and muster more forces. This time they come back with an ace in the hole, a champion of their kind (boss fight!). This time the centaurs return and they return with a vengeance. The heroes can’t withstand the power of this awesome creature and the village is lost. Sadness ensues and the town is over run with centaurs. All of our bonuses of the saved town are gone and we have to fight for it back.

With the return fight there should be absolutely no champions, but maybe some veterans. This would give wandering players a chance to save the town instead of needing a raid force. Staying to defend should require a strong force to promote guild ownership of a town, much like a WvW objective where you can claim a keep for your guild and provide upgrades to that keep. The town could even have the guild tabard showing if you put time and effort into building up the town to withstand another attack.

If players stay to defend the town it can continuously become harder and more champions or different champions come to storm the town. Huge karma rewards for protecting the town should be in place if anything, again intensive to stay and defend.

This way there is not punishment for losing the town, it generates more DEs to guide players to save the town, if you do save the town you can now defend the town and provide prosperity to the local area and players around the town.

While I don’t think a village should “stay” rescued, there should always be some sort of struggle so that the world feels dynamic and interesting. I do agree that the refresh rate of dynamic events is far too quick. It is as if they expected the over populated rate of players completing the dynamic events would stay consistent, but as population changes due to level spread and players leaving, then you have a less dense population in that area to DO those quickly refreshing events, making them tedious for the few that are working on the DE.

Additionally I really feel there should be greater consequences. Good and bad. If players do not save the village and should domino effect and eventually the world falls to ruin. Go all in ANet and give us definitive consequences.

If we save the village then the attacking forces are repelled and the town is safe. Give us new dynamic events or awards. Maybe the village gives a drastic increasing in gathering nodes because it is peaceful and flourishing in prosperity.

Some sort of award more than a karma merchant and the knowledge that the DE will refresh soon.

Even better yet, if we fail over and over have the village fall apart and the Mobs in the area become more manageable for solo players (because obviously no one has been putting effort into saving the village). Call it atrophy for not having to fight heroes for so long.

On the counter side, if people are constantly saving the village ramp up the difficulty and the Mobs start sending their own champions out until they can defeat the heroes. The higher the difficulty the higher the rewards for staying around and defending the towns. This becomes a sort of WvW type objective in PvE. Stay and defend, take key locations in the world and reward the players in the area for saving the town.

Honestly not a bad idea and I have been thinking about this for one good reason.

Cross world and free guild representation.

With those two things you could have a Guardian guild on every server and it could act like a mentor/question chat channel in game. Got a guardian question, swap your guild to the Guard guild and ask the question to other guardians.

Only down side would be guild size, because I’m sure it would be filled quickly if used appropriately.

This is one of those times where 500 members seems tiny.

One thing I forgot to mention is that you can also cast smite condition while channeling another attack ability if you have instant meditations. So say you are spinning doing whirling wrath, you can also hit smite condition and you don’t clip your attack.

Kind of nice if you want to do things like those listed above.

The biggest advantage/use of zealous blade is that it heals for every target struck. So in a large cluster of mobs you can multiple that 25 heal by the number of enemies. The greatsword is one of our faster attacking weapons with good AE so this makes zealous blade, which on the surface look like a worthless heal, into a pretty significant self sustaining ability. Combine Zealous blade with Monks Focus and you have yourself a decent survival build with good damage.

Down side is that Altruistic Healing scales so well with a group that it outshines Zealous Blade and Monks Focus with the more allies you have around you. Zealous Blade reduces its effectiveness throughout the duration of the fight because you are killing things. Altruistic Healing stays consistent throughout the fight because your allies (hopefully) are still alive as you do damage, even if it is less damage.

So take your pick. Maybe solo go monks/zealous blade and maybe grouped do altruistic healing.

Softspoken really hits it on the head as far as condition damage versus condition duration for us.

The useless stat I would argue is condition duration. Increasing the time that burning stays applied to a target does not give us faster kills. By the nature of the condition stacking in duration and not intensity the game is telling us that if we want to increase the effect of burning we need to stack condition damage to make it “better”.

60 seconds of burning doing 300 damage per a tick results in 18000 damage
30 second of burning doing 600 damage per a tick results in 18000 damage

Do I want to wait 60 seconds to do 18000 damage or 30 seconds?
What if the fight is only 30 seconds long? Then with a 60 second burn I wasted my damage and was ineffective.

Beyond that, is condition damage as good as crit or power based builds? Depends on the weapon you are using.

Fast attacking weapons will apply more burning stacks over time than slower hitting weapons. So Scepter, Greatsword, and Sword are good burning weapons if you do not pop virtue of justice and let it do its thing and proc every 4-5 attacks.

The rest of our weapons you would probably do better off with crit damage as they are slower and more bursty in damage output.

Now in a group situation popping virtue of justice instead of letting it proc periodically works well because 5 people activating a 5 second burn results in 25 seconds of burning with an ability that has a 30 second cool down. Combine that with other burning sources and you can maintain burn on a target for the duration of the fight.

Going back to condition duration. The biggest use of condition duration is to keep debuffs like vulnerability, weakness, and immobilize on the target as long as possible. Unfortunately we are not the best profession out there to maintain stacks of vulnerability or weakness on a target so we honestly shouldn’t worry about those too much and let others focus on that with a better effect. But if you are the only one in the group that can provide a steady source of weakness in the form of Signet of Judgement, then great, 5-6 seconds of weakness could save your group from death so do it.

I have been testing this myself and if we are getting any frame skips, we are getting them in such an insignificant decrease of animation time that it is negligible as far as damage output. Beyond that, “dps” in this game is not like in other games where you are trying to beat an enrage timer or kill something before your group runs out of mana for healing so minor increases in dps in the terms of fractions of a benifit are not “worth it” (to me).

What this DOES do is allow you to sneak in a Selfless Daring roll mid combat without significantly reducing or stopping your auto attack chain with the hammer. I.E. “more” healing done without skipping a beat. Also this allows me to “roll in place” so I can stay centered on the combat area I want to be in versus go flying all the way the heck out to left field then having to run my clunky self back to combat.

Personally I have had this happen before I realized what it was and it annoyed me. Because I was in an auto attack chain, i see a big attack incoming and I dodge…but since the dodge animation is cut short I don’t end up dodging the big ugly fist coming down on my face and I get downed like a dummy. Now that I know what is happening I at least understand it and can “attempt” to anticipate big attacks and try to not have them line up with auto swing #2 if using the hammer.

Cost/benefit of this move are highly situational.

Maybe a little faster output on the 3rd hammer swing, and if it reduces a 62 frame animation into a 49 frame animation (a loss of 13 frames) we still end up with an auto attack chain that is approximately 50 frames long…. Is this going to make us unstoppable beasts in pvp/pve? No, we didn’t make it as if we are hasted from mesmers or something. Will this make an extremely close fight end possibly in your favor? Fractions of a second could buy you the win and if this helped then cool

Do I think this is a glitch/bug/exploit? Yes but the question is do they care, and at this rate it seems so minor and non game changing that it doesn’t matter to them. Many people bring up fighting game examples where you say yourself that it was an unintended effect (read glitch) that players exploited to gain an advantage. The only difference is those game developers liked it and we are unsure of how these game developers view this topic.

Although I believe that with the lack of a GM response that this is low on the totem pole and if it really was a hot topic that was punishable by some degree they would have put this fire out a few days ago. By the silence they pretty much say that if this is increasing our combat ability by any degree it is not enough to matter to them as game developers.

Interesting note, if you take the trait “focused mind” it allows you to cast mediation instantly, which in turn allows you to cast smite condition while feared.

Will it cleanse the fear off you? Maybe if there are no other conditions on your character.

Stuns on the other hand are not considered conditions, so this will not remove a stun/knock down. You can still cast it I believe and it will cleanse a condition while stunned/knocked down.

Players move differently than NPCs. Most NPCs don’t try to kite you, so as you mentioned the hammer can be difficult to complete the chain attack consistently versus players.

Of course you have ring of warding or zealots embrace to help, they are not up consistently enough to maintain pressure. Utilizing the utility skills would help via knockdowns/immobilization or teleports.

Many people love the Judge’s Intervention/Banish combo for a surprise knockback.

spvp is a very different beast and I detest hammer in it because of the speed of the weapon. Some people like it, but to do so you need to play a very “jousty” type of fight. Move in move out. This may be the reason they added the chance to slow on crit to help people land more hits in pvp

Was just thinking, factoring in staff symbol+empower it would result in more boons (more self healing) than hammer would and more group utility. Again you would not have protection, but it does about the same damage as hammer. Same exact traits just change weapon.

Oddly enough the staff which is a defensive weapon provides more offense in a group (via might from empower).

This is in contrast to the hammer which is a balanced weapon will provide more defense (via protection from chain attack).

So what does your group need more, defense or offense. You can always swap weapons consistently and provide a little bit of both.

Something else to keep in mind as far as AH/Might Crits, Empowering Might has an internal cool down of approximately 1 second, so successive crits in a short time span are wasted as far as group utility goes and stacking party boons to trigger more AH.

That said a slow weapon based on EM and AH work fine since you will attack about as fast as the internal cool down for EM to trigger again. (Vigorous Precision does not appear to have any coo ldown so triggers on every single crit)

A far as more damage or more AE damage, hammer is lower than greatsword but higher than staff (not by much) on paper.

The biggest advantage of hammer is the ease of use and precision of attacks. Greatsword drops out on damage due to whirling wrath damage being inconsistent especially on a moving target.

Hammer does damage in short bursts with the 1 and 2 abilities so it gets more complete hits on a target. If you factor in symbols the symbol lasts shorter so again you maximize the intended time for a target to be in a symbol versus the greatsword where they often run out of the symbol on a mobile fight.

End result: people like hammer better because it is easier to use and maintains a better synergy with altruistic healing because of shorter symbol cooldown and more boons in a fight. EM also works well with hammer due to the slower nature of attacks so crits are not “wasted”.

Mace is often overlooked in its healing potential being greater than hammer for a crit/hammer build but it does not provide the same up time of protection as hammer, so again hammer wins out in this factor.

Crit/hammer is our best chance at staying alive and doing sustainable damage with as little effort on the players part. It is not more damage via numbers but a dead player = zero damage.

If solo, crit/hammer is less effective because there are not multiple players to stack boons on, so a meditation build actually provides more benefit. Great thing is you already are down the same trait line so you can switch without much effort or cost.

While my spreadsheets I have been making probably make no sense to anyone else I compiled the different meditation heals versus the boon heals from the two traits.

In short, meditation heals will gain you better self healing when solo, but as soon as there is one other person with you altruistic healing nets you better survivability. Increase that to a group of 5 then it is a clear winner.

While soloing PvE content you usually don’t need the higher healing output as much so altruistic healing is sufficient, while PvPing it all depends on if you plan to be 100% alone with no one to stack boons on or not. Most of the time PvP is a group effort unless there is a complete and utter lack of team or you are dueling.

So while boons provide much smaller heals, they happen more frequently throughout the duration of the fight and if you are applying boons to multiple allies then it becomes a clear winner. Stack that on top of might and/or vigor when critting and you get passive heals for DPSing.

Perfect, I was just thinking on my way to work that we hadn’t had any indepth mesmer input yet and here we go.

It sounds like mesmers have a lot of direct control over mob and group placement as well as mobility.

I have used the portal skips a few times and those saved time for sure, and time warp is everyone’s friend as mentioned earlier.

I did notice mesmers have pretty good ability to reapply blinds and with that confusions, so good amount of damage reduction and damage return/thorns type damage while supporting the group as well.

Sweet some ranger updates.

What it sounds like is that rangers give more damage stops via stuns/dazes and pushbacks.

Minor buffing via spirit pets but not “as” effective as they could be.

Very single target control oriented it seems, sounds like you guys could use some buffs or we need to learn to play them better. I finished leveling my guard so this might be my new challenge to L2P this game better!

edit—-
oh just read your post about fields and finishers, and it makes rangers even tricker than I thought. Pop a light field and then bounce an axe around for some burst healing.

This goes along with another mechanic I saw about ranger pets, foraging for weapons in combat such as feathers or “muck” to create new combo fields. Sounds like rangers go for more emphasis in creating combos for the group in various ways.

awesome list runeblade.

By the way I’m taking these things and compiling them into my own little spread sheet to see if I can figure out how they intended us to group versus just every man for himself =p Good input all.

lcpdragonslayer, thanks for the necro input. As I forgot the condition damage from earlier and SiNoS reminded me necromancer become a great boon to the group….ok that pun was totally intended and used in the corniest way possible.

Just how good are the necro pets, they have good self survivabilty or damage? I don’t play necro so not sure about them.

Sounds like necros are the judo/aikido form of fighters that turn enemy damage into positive benefits for themselves!

good compilation omgwtflolbbl =)

I do tend to feel restricted on my guardian thinking I have to trait a specific way to make my group support more effective. I swap out wall of reflection on fights that have a lot of ranged for sure though.

I have noticed a lot of elementalist support focus since release. I heard a lot of griping at first because they were nerfed from where they were in the beta weekends, but now staff elementalists have found a great niche, especially as bunker types in sPvP. As you said everything relies on switch attunements at the right times.

That said, the two more known support classes are the only ones to post. Guardians and Elementalists. Good info but not the only ones out there! One guard or elementalist cant’/shouldn’t do it all.

Hammer guardian and earth elementalist can keep protection on for a good amount of time, I think warrior can keep weakness on fairly well but haven’t tested it extensively myself.

Protection (30% reduced incoming damge) + weakness (50% of attacks are 50% weaker) = approximately 80% damage reduction on 50% of the attacks and 30% on the rest

THAT sounds like a lot of survivability but can we keep weakness and protection up sufficiently?

good call I forgot about condition removals, I did notice some fights were having a reliable way to wipe conditions helps survivability a ton