Guild Wars 2

I’d go with rabid gear since it has condition damage and toughness (with precision to proc more conditions from sigils, etc.) and probably slot an offhand pistol for general roaming. You’ll kill things faster which is worth a lot more than the little extra toughness and control you get from the shield. For dungeons, or anything more group oriented, feel free to swap back to the shield for the utility and blast finisher.

With axe/axe and longbow a ranger can tag mobs like a fiend in DE’s. He’s not really much of a condition damage class though. Most of his conditions come as mere side effects that are nice extras, but hard to build around.

I sort of like my condition flamethrower build. Getting decent amounts of bleed and vulnerability in an aoe without acquiring carpal tunnel from spamming grenades. However, the build is falling apart without “knights” versions of ascended gear. (runes of undead, energized armor, tuning crystals turn all that toughness into more power/condition damage) The lack of precision means I’m losing all my crit %. sad panda

I’ve supported anet for nearly a decade now (started gw1 it’s first week) but it has gotten to the point that they’re pretty indefensible now. The game is nearly half a year old and stuff like this is still coming out half baked; meanwhile balancing, bugs, and loot tables continue to remain unaddressed.

I’ve never really liked the Elder Scrolls franchise, but I may have to give their mmo a try.

I get the feeling ANet is trying to cull a lot of the mid-ground hybrid builds out there. I loved running knight’s since you could get good survivability, decent power, and with traits/items turn your toughness into condition damage as well.

I can’t really say I want to see engy dps get increaed (or other’s dps be decreased to match). We have so much control and potential survivability that more dps would be pretty near broken. I would like to see some normalization between power dps and condition dps, and possibly a removal of condition stack caps in pve, but those aren’t even issues specific to engineers as they’re at the top of my mind as I play my necro too.

I’ve been playing since release, but haven’t really gotten anywhere. I think I’ve deleted half a dozen or more mid-high level characters because I decided I preferred a different race/class/biography combination. I’ve learned two things doing this though: 1. I’m sick of levelling, though I still love playing, and 2. I need to play classes that explore well.

I’ll start with number 2. When I was playing a ranger I felt pretty godlike through level 50 or so. I could dive into combat with several vets and various adds with reasonable confidence that I would at least survive, if not dominate, the encounter. Does this ability to go, see, and conquer extend all the way to 80? Do other classes (like engineer maybe? please?) also have this ability in the end? I can pretty well guess that warriors and guardians do, but I’m trying to figure out which others do as well.

As for number 1, are there any good guides out there on how to level yourself through crafting on the cheap? Playing the game is always a lot more fun once you’re relatively set than when you’re still trying to claw your way up the ranks.

What possible reason is there to nerf lvl 80 experience from low level events? Anet should be encouraging people to spread out and do lower areas rather than congregate in Orr. The early zones are already ghost towns at the best of times.

Of course that should work. For that matter, you can just get the Lionguard karma weapons and do the same thing, bypassing commendations entirely.

I would prefer it to be account wide, but just to play devil’s advocate I can think of one very compelling reason why it shouldn’t be. Weeks or months from now most people will have reached a relatively high difficulty level and be unlikely to run lower. New players, or those just reaching 80 will have a very tough time finding groups to work their way up the ladder. Having people who still need to grind up their alts at least provides a small outlet for group formation.

Maybe this is crazy talk, but how about making these 1 time events for solo and/or small group play rather than 100k man zerg fests? We all know that GW2 is at its worst when being zerg rushed, so let’s avoid the problem rather than finagle a work-around.

Mini-missions or some such could be available for a limited amount of time (24-48 hours or so) so people group up and do the LA fight on their own time. We all get to see the cutscene at our leisure, we get to feel like big kitten heroes, and so on.

Also, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, design should definitely move away from single points of failure. No more npc’s like Canach who need to be fought by thousands of people all at once. It isn’t a compelling event, nor does it convey the intimidation evident in the dialogue. It just bugs out. If there does need to be npcs with which to interact then it should be dialogue only. There’s obviously some malicious piece of DE and skillpoint code that keeps causing these things to break when pushed too hard.

You don’t need to go in the dungeon to find the sub director: he/she (too many players around to see) is in Caledonian forest. Fair warning though, null and the guy afterwards are pretty universally bugged now.

I’ll start by saying that I’m really enjoying the event and the investigation chains that go along with it. However, the next time they do one of these huge things they should probably avoid any sort of systems that require their entire population to converge on single points. It just leads to things like LA, and these npcs, becoming a cluster****.

Ganzo.5079:

Until now, our goal was: reach the maximun level stats in a shot amount of time, and then start the real play, go on dungeon for skins, go WvW, or try to achieve personals goals, like defeat an orr champion alone… This are the things that the team must ADD… PERSONALS GOALS…

I appreciate what you’re getting after, but you’ve got it a little wrong. The idea that devs need to provide us with things is the mentality that gets desires for gear treadmills started. Devs can’t provide anyone with personal goals, they can only put pieces into the world. We have to put on our big boy pants at some point and realize that numbers /= goals, and we need to set those for ourselves.

Linsey Murdock

By adding challenging new combat mechanics to end-game content and ways to mitigate those mechanics through gear progression for high-end players, we can add personal progression without making the game feel like an endless treadmill of gear that is just out of your reach….

This is just the beginning. In November, we’re only adding the first level of Infusions and Ascended Rings and Back slots, so that leaves us a lot of room to build upon these levels of Item progression in future content.

So they’re adding power to monsters, giving players new gear to put them on par with these monsters, and will continue to expand this trend as the future rolls along? WoW! I’m so glad that’s not a treadmill!!

I’ll admit to feeling a bit like the OP at first. I thought ANet was going out of their way to show us that sylvari have no homosexuality bias, so it seemed fake and broke my suspension of disbelief a bit. I mean, sure they have no anti-homosexuality issues, cool…but when it’s shouted in my face it forces me to think in terms of “alright, now the game is trying to make a point” rather than “alright, now the game is telling me a story”.

HOWEVER, after another day or two playing different storylines and hanging around different parts of sylvari-land I discovered I was just suffering from sample bias. I had somehow managed to experience almost every instance of homosexuality before coming across my first few heterosexual couples.