Guild Wars 2

Adapt. It’s not as if stacking in one single spot was the only possible strategy. I had little issues with my mesmer in Cliffside 82 and I did not have a ranged weapon equipped at all.

You didn’t get anything.

First, your brilliant post is still there. You just posted it in another thread and not in here, so stop whining.
Second, this is ANet’s forum. That means that they have domestic authority and that so-called “freedom of expression” is irrelevant for the most part.
Third, your posts still hardly make sense and give cancer when one tries to read them.
Fourth, it’s absolutely glorious to spam the entire forum with a one-line post.

Pretty good patch. Fractal-related changes were great, but the new zone also looks fine.

And still the randoms I did the fractal with died like flies. Maybe I was too busy thinking of how I can best rezz them to notice a big difference in his attack pattern.

Maybe you should just start writing intelligible posts, that would help a lot.

Didn’t notice too much of a difference compared to before the patch, just charge was a bit less frequent. It still murders PUGs who have the combat awareness of a brick. So … most of them.

Simple Fox.9820:

No, she’s doesn’t do as much DPS as my Ele, but I feel like I have greater survivability and generally don’t have issues taking on multiple mobs. I’ve hardly felt the experience was a “miserable” one.

For the record, she’s mostly running around as GS – S/*, Dom, Illus & Chron traits, and usually wells. Occasionally I switch things up to run S/S – S/P, but again I generally prefer to fight ranged.

Maybe I’m just more easily amused?

Compared to ele, you may even have more survivability. I play mine too rarely to be able to judge it. But when I look at my guard, mesmer is just depressing.

TexZero.7910:

As far as the instabs, i feel its more of people not adapting to change yet again after being used to steamrolling poorly tuned content.

I absolutely agree. There are a few little annoying things, but I’m very happy with the overall direction of the fractal changes. And I did not use any ranged weapon at Cliffside 82 …

If you take that much damage from social awkwardness with its tiny circles, you obviously kitten up your positioning.

Did 82 today in one go without any substantial problems. Some situations got a bit more hairy than usually, but not a big deal.

Poison trail is orders of magnitude better than the stupid boon thieves. Did Cliffside an hour ago and while it’s certainly not a stroll in the park, the instabilities are anything but overpowered. Seems mainly like a l2p issue to me.

Haven’t played Cliffside with that instability yet, but yesterday in Thaumanova and Molten Furnace it created little to no problems. Melee players need to be a little bit more careful, but that’s it.

Necessary changes that arrived much too late, but at least they did happen.

Mostly great changes, especially killing the most boring/dumb old instabilities. The new ones were much more interesting in today’s T4 fractals. Just the Thaumanova anomaly was pretty painful without any indicator to when the flux bombs blow up. That should be fixed in some way.

Chad.6104:

I’ve not ever raided but aren’t raids supposed to be this difficult content that groups of players do as a team?

Yeah, that’s the original concept behind raids in MMOs in general. And that’s why I still curse the path Blizzard took with WotLK, trying to make raids accessible at any cost. It just devalued team efforts and on the other hand gave rise to that toxic attitude where people want to get everything served on a silver plate without any effort.

Or, to paraphrase some previous poster from this thread:
PUG raiders. The cancer of MMOs.

Dirame.8521:

How do you deal with large groups of enemies as a mesmer? Simple! Play condi. Condi hits everything in the area, you apply 2 conditions that the enemy will always take full damage from and you’re not dependent on a phantasm to do damage.

And by the time your condis have killed the enemies, all other classes with a power build have already killed the next two packs.

Tsumiju.3071:

So YOU get to decide that I need to spend months and a ton of gold refitting my gear to suit YOUR playstyle but won’t even discuss other players ways of doing things?

If he takes the responsibility of organising/leading the raid group, of course he has the right to determine what kind of players get into his group. The freedom of “play what you want” is restricted in a team environment, as there are 9 other players who have their own interests. And I doubt most players are interested in carrying a staff-camping nomad guard with full spirit weapons (or a comparable special snowflake build you seem to be so fond of).

Ah, pocket raptors. How I hated them, until I found out that damage fields and a few AoEs work perfectly against them.

As to the OP, I’d indeed appreciate some more challenge. But that would require some thoughts from ANet’s side and not just mindless increases of HP, toughness and damage per attack.

Remember that infusions aren’t as expensive as they used to be, now that you can stick to 9s and don’t need 10/11 anymore.

Necro doing twice as much damage in open world content? Now that sounds rather improbable. Open world mobs melt extremely fast against a properly built guard.

Danikat.8537:

GW2 is very different in that respect. Some professions (like guardians) would have a very hard time swapping all the burning in their build for other damage types. It would basically be penalising those people.

Well, there’s little reason to play a burn guard at all in PvE and other classes should have a sufficient amount of other conditions available. I think there are more relevant issues than destroyers’ burn immunity.

Obviously, a new dps elite spec would need to sacrifice a substantial amount of group support. And I definitely agree with some of the previous posters – for such a spec, the current shatter/phantasm mechanics would need to be replaced by something new, which isn’t dragged down by the current ramp up and target issues.

Cynz.9437:

CptAurellian.9537:

Well, is there anything in high-level fractals that’s not super easy with such a combo?

I play thief and run t4s with any group really, you don’t have to have that “perfect comp” to do 100 mai in few min.

Old news, but the basic problem remains. Necros just have an incredibly low risk-reward ratio and a poor necro will be less damaging to the group than a poor thief or [insert any other class here].

Nice picture and RD perfectly describes the reasons for this state of fractals. I’d love to see some accurate statistics about class prevalence in T4 fractals. Less for seeing that necros are massively over-represented (a certainty anyway), but more for the other classes.

A push back is about the worst idea possible for focus 5.

Well, is there anything in high-level fractals that’s not super easy with such a combo?

KickzNGigglez.4958:

I will however admit this was one of those 170 mastery groups, so they definitely had their dodge button binded somewhere.

I can’t see any correlation between mastery points and Bloomy performance. Had more than enough 170s who apparently didn’t even know that a dodge ability exists.

Rednik.3809:

Jerus.4350:

How do pugs affect your ability to evade big attacks and play well?

Because you cant break all breakbars alone?

Most obvious answer. Besides, trying to melee Bloomy in a pug will most likely be pointless anyway because you’d spend most of the time chasing him when he charged or jumped at another player again.

Erm, swamp is rather fun. Bloomy is a nice noob filter.

Practical question: how would contemplation of purity interact with such a trait? :P

Anyway, I like the heals.

Artanis.4963:

But if you practice in a controlled environment first, then you have eliminated the variable “how do I mine for DPS?” by ensuring everyone knows that already, and you can then focus on practicing and winning the actual boss fight.

That’s only the very first step. Doing (near-)perfect dps on a practice target and doing the same in a real boss fight are two completely different things.

Ceridwen.6703:

Stevie will beach itself for our convenience and have an enslaved quaggan army constantly chucking buckets of water over it, keeping it from drying out.

Would probably be preferable to all the underwater crap.

There is no prestige in having been blessed by RNGsus once.

Neurion.4086:

Alaoglu.4637:

For people who consider they lost a lot and guild wars 2 support doing nothing for them i guess you should contact a Consumer organization

Suuure. We might appeal to Supreme Court as well.

ECHR :P

Anyway, got my lost ascended weapons chest back from support. Seems they handle the stuff reasonably.

Lost an ascended assassin weapon chest from fractals and some smaller stuff. Pretty annoying as my chars still need quite a few weapons.

Straegen.2938:

GW2 didn’t have the trinity at launch, but Durability runes and boon duration have essentially created builds with massive defensive sustain.

Which is, for the classical tank role, pointless as long as you don’t have the means to reliably keep an enemy’s aggro.

mrauls.6519:

Also, #2 & #5 should not end if your target stealths… #2 is a freaking AoE ability.

Those “features” of GS#2 are absolutely amazing. You don’t even need your target to stealth, simply losing the target also ends the cast -.-

Frost.1503:

My team mate always die in fractal and often i’m the last one to survive.

You play necro. Of course, survival isn’t difficult with that faceroll class. You would help your comrades more if you sacrificed some needless extra survivability from celestial gear for more damage. Killing mobs faster means less opportunities for your mates to screw up.

Carighan.6758:

I think that while not having dedicated tank setups is a nice idea, we still need more differentiation. That is to say, maybe a Warrior ought to be a durable fighter, unstoppable, difficult to put down, but in turn deals low damage per second and low burst, but because they’re difficult to get out of your face or dead, their total damage adds up.

And so on. Baked in at a class level. not for typical tank / healer / DPS / buffer/ debuffer/ CCer setups, but to add some RPG-ness into it. Guardians as nearly invincible frontliners, constantly preventing damage on their allies, Warriors as unstoppable juggernauts, Thiefs as unpinnable fighters who punish straying from the team, Mesmers as unhittable illusionists who in turn cause very little real damage, Engineers as completely superior bombardment specialists who can cause a ridiculous amount of AE damage but very little pinpoint damage, and so on.

That idea is just plain horrible. By design, GW2 is a game where everyone plays for himself on a very basic level. Even in group content, players first have to be self-sufficient and anything else is a bonus on top. In consequence, all of that has one prerequisite: Everyone needs to be able to deal substantial damage, which clashes with your ideas of class-level specialisations.

Having such specialisations below class level, maybe even more pronounced than they are now, is fine. But every class needs to have the choice whether it wants to be able to deal big damage or do something else. Which is, btw, an issue where mesmer sucks -.-

Vayne.8563:

I’ve always hating tanking. Always. Tanking, to me, is the worst thing that’s happened to the MMO genre.

I mean the typical tank and spank scenario is you have a tank, who draws all the aggro and stands there, while being healed by a healer, while everyone else takes it down. What part of this is not completely contrived.

Sounds like, dunno, 1990s. Trinity-based fights have evolved since then, you know? I can’t judge the GW2 raids, which seem to have moved back to trinity, but I can judge the rest of GW2’s PvE. And frankly, the combat system is by far inferior to games like Wildstar (although that one has massive other problems). The “dodge or die” principle, though usually not as pronounced as it once was, severely limits design options. Trinity may be contrived, but at least it allows to make fights much more complex and interesting.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Having done this several times now, I can say that its nowhere near as bad as I initially thought. Some build tweeks and learn the mechanics and its not bad at all, albeit a bit long.

Pretty much this. I still think that the champs are superfluous, but at least I finally managed to get hit by one! Made me wake up …

I’m somehow amused by the direction our OP took after the first post. Anyway, GW2 is not p2w, no matter whether you can obtain ingame currency via money or not. As a previous poster said, we may have the “pay” part, but not the “win”.

Another thread reminding me of Einstein’s great insight about two infinite things.

I always see the difference when one of our team of three (we other two don’t play necro at all) decides to play his thief instead of his necro in T4 fractals. Runs suddenly become a lot more stressful. On the other hand, runs where we have 3 necros are usually a piece of cake. I don’t think any other class offers the same effort-reward ratio as the necro. Not what I’d call good class balance, but I can hardly change it.

Have to agree with the consensus here. Traps are boring and I wouldn’t mind having other competitive options.

Blaeys.3102:

Raids are poorly designed. They reinforce a tired meta game where “skill” is measured not by how good you are as a player, but rather your ability to copy and paste the highest dps build from a third party website.

This gamemode could have been something unique and amazing. Instead, they chose the same tired system used by every other raiding game out there. The result is not only bad for raiding, but is having a negative impact on the rest of the game as well. Half the fun of GW2 was making a semi-unique build based around how you enjoy playing – and still feeling like the entire game was open to you.

Raiding – in the format they chose to implement – changed that. It turned the game into a me-too where copy paste skills are the most important gameplay element. I only hope they see this and change course before continuing down this path.

That doesn’t make sense. Apart from the proven fact that perfect meta dps execution and I don’t know what else is not required for raid success, how exactly do raids influence all the other game modes? I don’t raid due to time constraints, but so far I have not noticed that copy paste stuff being an important element in other PvE areas, although raid builds certainly were a nice inspiration after a break of two years.

Which reminds me … even if raid builds did influence other stuff, that would hardly be something new. I still remember the (pointless) QQ about the dungeon meta back then, so it almost seems as if nothing has changed.

BlaqueFyre.5678:

The champs are fine, they add another layer, do you ignore them and try to dps Bloomhunger or do you kill them first before too many are there.

Additional layers are fine when they’re meaningful in some way. Those oakheart champs just aren’t. They are some kind of noob filter killing people who are even slower than the champs themselves (which should hardly be possible), but apart from that issue they are just another rather long health bar.

Ging.6485:

The problem is that unlike dungeon and fractal encounters where you can mess up as much as you want but you will pretty much be guaranteed to complete the encounter within an hour or two at the most, raids have people fail on a boss for 10+ hours with an unexperienced group.

Oh noez, how horrible. 10+ hours of wiping to a raid boss for the first kill, how can anyone expect people to put some time into raiding?

Seriously, 10 hours are nothing. The best raid bosses I’ve played (not in GW2, not enough time for two raids in parallel) took much longer to master with an average guild. And when they went down, the feeling was just amazing. I get it that the wish for free loot is pretty prevalent now, but all that whining with regard to raids is just embarrassing.

It’s not that hard once you think a bit about the fight, but then pretty much all of the people who didn’t get the basics of the fight left the group very quickly. Don’t think they learned anything, so for them it will stay “new” for a long time.