Guild Wars 2

Khisanth.2948:

Daedraz.1650:

Khisanth.2948:

Spacial.1683:

Linken.6345:

You are wrong mate, mesmers got terrible damage but boost the whole group with alacrity, necro got mediocer damage but since they dont give the group anything they are rarely wanted, and elementalists got highest damage on big targets + a crap ton of boons from combo fields that they blast.

Thank you. I lack your expience.

However, my understanding from others is that magic users can take very little damage, relative to heavy armour users.

Which is the point I was originally making.

That isn’t true either. Necromancer has one of the highest passive sustain.

Same with chronomancer that runs domi/illu. You have so much active dmg mitigation that you have to make an effort to die in pve. Elementalists are really the only ones with the ’can’t take much dmg’ problem. If an enemy so much as sneezes on them they flop on the ground dead.

There is a reason I said passive.

In terms of active defense an ele has enough tools to deal with things but active defenses relies heavily on player skill and experience regardless of class.

Whether it is passive or active sustain should not matter since I was referring to the ‘magic users can’t take much dmg’ part. Even with the active and whatever passive mitigation that ele has, due to it having the lowest base hp and armor, it really can’t truck through the kind of dmg a necro or chronomancer can. This becomes even more true in the meta sense since ele is full berserker gear; necro in viper still has way more HP than ele and has shroud; chronomancer is in commanders which makes basically makes them indestructible.

Khisanth.2948:

Spacial.1683:

Linken.6345:

You are wrong mate, mesmers got terrible damage but boost the whole group with alacrity, necro got mediocer damage but since they dont give the group anything they are rarely wanted, and elementalists got highest damage on big targets + a crap ton of boons from combo fields that they blast.

Thank you. I lack your expience.

However, my understanding from others is that magic users can take very little damage, relative to heavy armour users.

Which is the point I was originally making.

That isn’t true either. Necromancer has one of the highest passive sustain.

Same with chronomancer that runs domi/illu. You have so much active dmg mitigation that you have to make an effort to die in pve. Elementalists are really the only ones with the ’can’t take much dmg’ problem. If an enemy so much as sneezes on them they flop on the ground dead.

Pressing F to pick up loot manually isn’t such a monumental task you know.. You’re making it seem as if manually pressing F to loot is like going through the 12 labors of Hercules.

DeanBB.4268:

Can a core account get viper’s gear? I didn’t think so? Is there a near-alternative?

I am actually not 100% sure about the acquisition limitations for viper.

Regarding a near-alternative, sadly I don’t think there are any other condition oriented sets that are as good as viper. Most condi dps classes rely on at least 2 different conditions to maintain dps- mainly bleed and burns, and to a lesser extent, poison. The problem with not having viper gear is that you have to focus your sigils and runes to max out bleed and have weak burns, or max out burns and have weak bleeds, or have mediocre burns and bleeds. Without the concentration stat from viper gear, you won’t be able to hit the optimal duration increase for you to have good dps from bleeds, burns, and poison. The only exception would probably be engineer. Engineers get this amazing trait called chemical rounds, where when they are wielding pistols they get 50% condition duration for everything. So theoretically, you could run a non-viper condi set like sinister or rabid and have 2 runes that give you 10% burn duration, 2 runes that give you 10% bleed duration, and 2 runes that give you 5% condition duration, sigil of malice (10% condi duration) and sigil of earth/bursting on your dual pistols, and use toxic focusing crystals (10% condi duration) and rare veggie pizza (20% condi duration). That way you’ll be able to hit 100% on both burns and bleeds.

To answer OP’s question, I guess we can add a non-viper engi to the list and thief as well. Even without daredevil, dagger/dagger base thief still does some holy moly dps and is nothing to laugh about.

As mentioned, PS warrior (even if you don’t have berserker unlocked) will be highly sought after- people care about that 25 party might more than whether you have berserker unlocked or not.

Base ranger and engi in viper gear are really fun and great classes to play. Those two are also some of the, if not THE most hard hitting condi classes in the game and no raid/fractal group will say no to them.

Necro definitely needs a buff to compensate for the lich form nerf- not a whole lot, but just enough to justify it occupying a dps slot. Right now, necro dps has fallen so low that there really is no reason to bring a necro into a dps slot. But if we’re trying to be positive, at least necros aren’t in the same boat as revenants. Oh boy, poor rev mains.

For lower level pve content base mesmer and any halfway decent pve build will get the job done. But I think power oriented builds are the most effective out of the basic pve builds.

But if you ever end up wanting to do end game content such as raids or high tier fractals, you will most certainly need chronomancer.

Even in full berserker’s gear, mesmer/chrono will never really do ‘good’ dmg, which is why they are pigeonholed into playing quickness and alacrity support builds most of the time. Swapping out berserker gear for boon duration gear is a significant loss to personal dps, but that doesn’t matter because chronomancers make up for that loss by boosting the entire group’s dps significantly by providing perma quickness and alacrity. The only caveat of this is that boon duration gear (even exotic ones) is quite costly to craft and the perma quickness/alacrity rotation can be really perplexing to learn at first.

Sounds like you need to join a raid premade/static or a raiding guild. PUG learning groups won’t get you much mileage simply because raids are designed to be the most challenging and difficult pve content- you don’t have a good chance of clearing bosses in a PUG group where most of the members are still learning and don’t have a good understanding of the boss mechanics.

PUG learning groups are sort of a never ending loop that gets you nowhere. You’ll join one where most members are inexperienced and presumably will not be able to kill a single boss. Then when the group disbands, you’ll join another learning PUG the following week where most members are inexperienced, and you won’t beat a single boss again. And that cycle will continue over and over again. A premade/static or guild raid group (even if members are inexperienced), guarantees that your raid members will actually learn and retain the knowledge relevant to raids.

The plot of ep3 was okay for me. The pacing of the story did feel dragged out and a bit slow compared to the other episodes- most of what you’re doing is gathering a bunch of mats to make a potion that allows you access to the final boss area. A lot of it sort of felt like mundane filler content. There were some mild irritants such as the constant chills and CC put out by mobs, but overall, I didn’t feel that anything was overtly designed badly.

I personally liked the Aurene training part. The concept of fostering this nascent, playful, and adorable baby dragon that will one day grow up to become a world changing power was a neat touch.

As for Braham, I felt that his character development was believable (while being quite irritating). He is young, stubborn, hotheaded, and is unable to cope with the death of Eir. The death of a loved one is definitely a world shattering experience. I can tell he is blinded and consumed with hatred towards the dragons, and seems to be taking his rage out on everyone and the entire world. The ending of ep3 has me worried for Hoelbrak- its denizens will follow Braham to their doom.

For dungeons, the build won’t really matter assuming you’re not running something really bizarre and nonsensical like a cleric engi. For t3+ fractals and raids, viper p/p all the way.

The only caveat to playing condi engi is that its dps relies on mastering a rather complex rotation that takes some training and practice to get used to. You sort of need to develop an internal clock to intuitively know when certain skills on kits are off cooldown or not, etc.

The image is way too small to accurately determine what armor that guardian is wearing. Also the dark red/black color scheme doesn’t help. Judging from the general appearance of the leggings, the shoulders, and that scarf-ish look on the neck, my best guess is that the armor in question is the Ghostly Outfit (with helm appearance toggled off) from the gemstore.

Amineo.8951:

If anything, I think Alacrity should be nerfed or removed from the game, I fail to see the logic with it being restricted to Mesmers only, like why? Why is it not a boon that other professions can apply?

“Thief brings nothing to the raid group in terms of utility or support so lets remove a unique utility/support that another class has.” Thief, by design, is meant to be a selfish dps class. And it is not a bad or unfair design (although I agree there needs to be a rework on how alacrity affects thief), because you forget that whatever dps a chronomancer can dish out, a thief can do like 10 times more. Thieves are one of the highest dps classes while chronomancer dps is so awful that nobody even bothers to do benchmarks on them. Chronomancers make up for that awful dps by having ample access to powerful boons like alacrity and quickness. And also, a lot of people spent some serious time and gold getting commander or minstrel’s gear with leadership runes, platinum doubloons, and sigils of concentration. Nerfing alacrity or removing it would not go over well.

I frankly don’t even know why you are so upset about alacrity being a mesmer specific buff. A lot of classes have profession unique buffs that are just as, if not more powerful than alacrity, such as ranger storm spirit, druid grace of the land, warrior banners, and profession specific traits such as spotter, empowered, assassin’s presence. By keeping these buffs profession exclusive, it can guarantee at least some degree of raid diversity.

Khailyn.6248:

it is odd how there isnt a condition damage minion outside of lich form and rise. i think it would be awesome to have bone minions provide bleeding to their targets even if their auto damage would have to be ‘balanced’ to compensate. would give non reapers a condition minion. and a choice of whether to keep them or blow them up.

The minions you get from Rise are not condi dmg minions. They look the same as the jagged horrors you summon in lich form, but they are actually shambling horrors and do not inflict any conditions whatsoever on their own. But that being said, giving bleed to shambling horrors from Rise or bone minions would be great way to begin offsetting this awful lich form nerf, although the changes of that actually happening will be very slim.

Sometimes when I am on my necro, I like to spam epidemic and pretend I’m a sewer rat going around spreading bubonic plague in medieval Europe.

CMM.6712:

No way.

Why should you be taken seriously when you come here and say you A] aren’t willing to purchase the game a lot of us and have and do what we did to get the skins and B] slap veterans in the face with your justification being the game has been out for some time C] also sit there and try to justify this lame idea by calling outfits atrocious.

Sorry if my post has offended you. That was genuinely not my intention. I guess older folks like me sometimes severely underestimate how much video games/achievements matter to younger people. In my mind, it just did not seem like that much of a prickly subject- a select few armor skins (several of which you can automatically unlock just for buying gw1 and linking accounts) from an old game of the past that presumably not many people really care about when gw2 is around. But I guess that is a gross oversimplification and not well thought-out. Since I never played gw1 in the first place, it is fair to say I’ll never really understand what earning those skins mean. In that aspect i’ll certainly defer to the opinions of people who’ve actually played since gw1 and take my lesson. Thanks all.

Lahmia.2193:

Anet has said that HoM items will never be available from any source other than the HoM in gw1.

Oh that is a bummer. I guess i’ll just have to deal with being 1% less fabulous while afking in divinity’s reach. Thanks.

Maybe this is just me being selfish, but I often find myself wishing that there was some other way to obtain heritage armor in gw2. Every now and then I see someone with an amazing armor cosmetic set up, and I go “Oh wow, that chest piece is exactly what I’ve been looking for,” only to find that the said armor piece is part of the heritage set. And I certainly have no interest in shelling out $19.99 for gw1, another $19.99 for the eye in the north expansion, and running around an empty game trying to do certain achievements for HoM points, just so I can obtain a few armor skins. Although I would be keen on buying certain heritage skins if they were ever featured in the gemstore.

I know the heritage skins are ANet’s way of tipping their hats to those who played gw1 and supported ANet as a company, and I certainly don’t mean to undermine the time and effort that those players sunk into gw1. But that being said, gw2 has been out for quite some time, and I honestly think it may not be a bad idea for ANet to feature heritage armor skins on the gemstore. I am confident that they would sell a lot better than some of those atrocious costumes that they have/had in gemstore.

An alternative to viper’s could possibly be full rabid gear with superior rune of the afflicted (30% bleed and 15% poison duration), superior sigil of earth on scepter and venom (20% poison duration) on dagger off hand. With the scepter trait in curses, you’ll be doing 50% additional bleed duration while wielding a scepter (which you will be using all the time). And then rare veggie pizza (20% condition duration) and master tuning crystals will be needed. As such, you will have a total of 100% bleed duration, 55% poison duration, and heaps of condi dmg.

Just based on my experience running a full viper necro, I would say that you get 90%+ of your dps from bleeds, which means that it is in your best interest to try to extend bleed duration as much as you can (all condition durations cap at 100%). The reason why people run full viper is because then people can cap out bleed, poison as well as adding on a bunch of agony and chill duration. The poison and agony dmg is more or less the cherry on top of a sundae in that while they add a noticeable chunk of extra dmg, it is nowhere near as big or significant as bleed dmg. Even without the capped poison and extra agony duration, you’ll be shredding down mobs in any pve content with epidemic.

For tier 1 fractals your standard power reaper will work perfectly fine. But starting from tier 2 fractals I’d 200% agree with Hesacon. Viper condi build all the way. Some of the fractal instabilities such as last laugh and social awkwardness are annoying as all get out (if not dangerous) if you’re playing a melee build. Viper condi build guarantees that you stay at range most of the time and also does much more damage than power reaper. Viper reaper is also a class whose potency increases exponentially the more viper reapers you have in the party. Having multiple viper condi reapers in the party creates this immense synergy because they can just bounce epidemic and shred down mobs in seconds. It is common to see high level fractal parties with 2+ viper reapers in them.

Go with full exotic berserker’s gear for all 3 classes. Warrior, guardian, and elementalist are some of the highest dps classes in the game and it makes no sense to use defensive stat gear on them unless you’re in a raid and have to trait specifically for a support role. Pivoting to berserkers gear can make your characters feel more squishy, but its okay because when you’re dishing out 20K+ hundred blades on warrior or 20K+ whirling wrath on guardian, you tend to kill mobs/veterans off so quickly that they just don’t have time to inflict any significant dmg on you. Here are my suggestions.

Warrior: superior rune of strength on armor. Greatsword with superior sigil of strength and force. Axe with superior sigil of air and mace offhand with superior sigil of bloodlust or force. Traits should be strength (middle, middle, top), tactics (bottom, bottom, bottom), berserker (top, top, top). Skill slots should be healing signet, for great justice, banner of strength, banner of discipline, signet of rage.

Guardian: superior rune of the scholar on armor. Greatsword with superior sigil of force and bloodlust. Sword with superior sigil of air and shield(or focus or torch. Doesnt matter) with superior sigil of force. Traits should be zeal (mid, mid, bottom), virtues (top, mid, bottom), and dragon hunter (top, mid, bottom). Skills should be shelter (purification works fine), test of faith, procession of blades, bane signet, and dragon’s maw (or feel my wrath).

Elementalist: I’m personally fond of fresh air staff tempest. scholar runes on armor, sigil of force and bloodlust or air on staff. Traits are fire (top, top, top), air (bottom, middle, middle), tempest (middle, bottom, middle). Skills are arcane brilliance, signet of fire, glyph of storms, mist form, and glyph of elementals.

Along with the aforementioned tips, certain classes have very strong burst dps that can dispatch enemies in mere seconds. For example, the guardian dragon hunter can dish out insanely high burst dps in a short span with his traps and greatsword, but once he uses those skills up and is waiting for cooldown, his dps drops sharply. A lot of mobs in silverwaste and HoT are tough to kill, but not tough enough to withstand the tremendous burst dps of certain classes like guardian dragon hunter, necromancer reaper, etc.

Not to be overtly cynical, but I don’t think anyone is going to send you 1000 gold when there’s no guarantee that they’ll actually receive a sunlight. Just saying, “I have no interest in scamming” is also what those ‘Nigerian Princes’ tell you in their emails. Without an actual safeguard system (which there is none for player-to-player direct barter), nobody is going to take up on your offer.

Fresh air tempest is currently my favorite.

Imo the most boring class award goes to herald. Just toggle on facets and sword 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 until your target dies.

There really is no easy way to get ascended. You can get ascended chests randomly at very low chances from doing pvp, wvw, or pve world events/bosses/fractals raids. But the drop chance is really low and not a reliable method to obtain ascended gear. Even in t4 fractals where you need like 150 agony resistance, ascended chests are really scarce based on my personal experience. Ascended accessories are easy enough to get however- you can get them via laurels, fractals, and guild commendations. The only reliable way to obtain ascended gear (armor and weapons) is to get your crafting up to 500 and craft it yourself. But crafting ascended is no fun task.

1) it costs a ton of gold. Especially in today’s inflated game economy, it’ll cost you hundreds and hundreds of gold. I am actually in the process of outfitting my third alt in full ascended and I’ve sunk around 150 gold so far for a helm and shoulder only. Getting your crafting up to 500 also costs a lot. According to the gw2craft website (which btw is an amazing guide), it should cost you around 100 gold to get tailoring up to 500.

2) You need a lot of ascended crafting material that you cannot buy off TP due to them being account bound- bloodstone dust, dragonite, empyreal shards. You’ll need an excess of a thousand of these for a full ascended set. Frankly, the bloodstone and dragonite is incredibly easy to get. However, empyreal fragments are a huge pain in the butt to grind. Essentially, the pace of your ascended crafted is more or less often dictated by how quickly you can grind empyreal frags.

HoT is pretty vital. A lot of the endgame activity take place in Maguuma, which is the HoT area. That includes raids. Raids right now are the “be all, end all” endgame content. Nobody runs dungeons anymore and high level fractals are rarely pugged. Bloodstone fen is a new area and it is in Maguuma as well.

I would say core ranger is still viable, as most people specced into druid are still running zerk gear with longbow/GS anyways for most pve content. Raids are the only time where rangers actually have to throw dps out the window and go ham on healing power druid.

My two cents on classes:

Thief: As mentioned above, lowest party utility. But it hits hard. High burst with stealth/backstab and high sustain dps with dagger auto attack. Good amount of evades, blinds. But has low HP pool and is squishy. Dies very easily if you don’t have good knowledge of content.

Revenant: Much more durable than thief as it has higher base hp pool and wears heavy armor. Great party boon support through facets. But imo has an incredibly boring gameplay where your dps comes from autoattacking with sword for ages.

Warrior: Very straightforward and simple dps class where you just run in and smash things with a greatsword or axe. Fairly high dps. Highest hp pool and heavy armor makes warrior very durable, therefore lots of room for errors. If specced for phalanx strength, warrior has unparalleled might sharing for party. Warrior strength and discipline banners are also invaluable in terms of party support. Due to its capability of providing amazing party dps support, warriors/berserkers are always welcome in parties. Just can’t go wrong with one. Pretty much have to go with zerk gear on warrior these days. When they first came out, condi berserkers were just brokenly powerful. Then Arena Net nerfed them to the ground so hard they are no longer viable.

Guardian: Sort of like warrior, but has much higher learning curve. Has extremely high burst dps with greatsword and traps if running dragon hunter spec. Can be specced to do amazing party support, but meta more or less dictates guards to go full zerk gear. While being frontline class guard has the lowest hp pool alongside elementalist and thief. Guardian has to make good use of aegis and blinds to survive. Very important to know fights/when to dodge/pop aegis/pop blind, etc. Not much room for error.

Elementalist: Very squishy, but arguably the highest dps class. The tempest spec with fresh air trait makes elementalist a dps machine. Ele is also an extremely versatile class that can be specced to perform dps or party support roles. Not much room for error due to lowest hp pool and light armor. Have to be quick with fingers and know fights in and out.

Necromancer: Light armor class, but highest hp pool alongside warriors. Despite being light armor, they are one of the tankiest classes because of their shroud ability. Necros can be great dps classes if specced for zerk gear. Zerk reaper can do some great damage, but for high level fractals or raids where bosses have a lot of dmg resistance/physical dmg defense, condi reaper is much better. Condi reaper requires viper gear, which is incredibly expensive to craft. But it is satisfying seeing 15K+ bleed and 5K+ poison per tick on a boss.

Engineer: Medium armor class with decent hp pool. Vanilla engi’s usefulness has somewhat diminished after the scrapper spec was released with heart of thorn expansion. Scrapper forces engi to adhere to a “in your face melee” style, but it is worth it because zerk scrapper does some holy moly dmg. Due to the toolbelt mechanic, scrapper engi is somewhat complicated to play, and you need to be very quick with your fingers.

Mesmer: medium high hp pool with low armor. No matter what you do, mesmer dps will be lackluster. Vanilla mesmer, similar to vanilla engi, has diminished value to parties these days because it just doesn’t do much. However, the elite spec chronomancer mesmer is invaluable to parties because it can provide a boon that no other class can- alacrity. Alacrity makes all party members’ skills recharge 33% faster. Along with certain skills that provide quickness, chronomancer can shave off a good chunk of time off of a boss fight with the support they bring.

Ranger: Medium hp, medium armor class. They don’t particularly excel in the dps department as you found out, but honestly their dps isn’t terrible either. If you want to talk about terrible dps, you just have to take a look at mesmer. Ranger’s strength lies more in party support. Vanilla ranger has diminished value after heart of thorns release, but frost spirit and spotter are still a great additions to any party. If specced for druid, rangers can dish out unparalleled healing capabilities, which makes them valuable for raids, wvw, or even pvp (druids are like immortal in pvp).

Swink.5172:

Okej cool kids.

FYI prob way better then you at dodging. That is however not the topic. Just you kids acting up with assumptions. Leave that off the table please.

Guardians are, IMO completly wrong designed and stupid. I guess you two both play guardians, you quite fit the profile. Compared to what they do they hurt way to much, they have way to much block, stability, invulnerability and condi cleanse. They dont really do much for the output that they have. Just a class for stoners that are too high to press buttons.

Again, rework it!

Tbh DHs are only hard to go up against if you have little pvp experience and don’t really have a good idea on how DHs fight. Once you figure it out, DHs are quite easy to counter and frankly, one of the more predictable classes.

For DHs to go ham on dmg, they have to forfeit most of their boon/condi cleanse utilities and go with test of faith, procession of blades, and dragon’s maw. A lot of DHs do not run shelter or renewed focus, so I’m not quite sure where you get the “They have too much invulnerability and blocks.” This makes DHs surprisingly fragile and highly susceptible to condi oriented builds. It also does not help that DHs and guardians in general, have terrible mobility. I pvp on my meditrapper DH every now and then, and viper reapers and chronophantasma mesmers are the bane of my existence.

DH traps are also quite easy to dodge out of. Simply triggering DH traps won’t hurt you that much. But panicking and running through test of faith or sitting in procession of blades will hurt a lot. This is easily avoided by you know… Not running through test of faith or sitting in procession of blades. The daze from triggering traps is short anyways, that you can dodge straight out of them before any meaningful dmg is inflicted. This is actually a reason why I find myself pvping on my DH less and less. Too many seasoned pvpers these days know exactly how to escape out of traps unscathed.

Here is my warrior. I went for the ‘roman centurion’ look, which i’m sure a lot of people have tried in many different ways using different armor mix and matches.

Armor used: vigil helm, dark pauldron, dark chest armor, dark gauntlets, arah leggings, banded boots.

Colors used: ox blood, abyssal, antique bronze.

Weapon: shield of the wing, honor of humanity

I have played several mmorpg games over the past decades that had very sophisticated music systems. As a multi-instrumentalist, I enjoy writing and playing music not only in real life but also in games. Now, gw2 has a very rudimentary and clunky music/instrument playing system, which I think should be revamped. Based on some other mmo games i’ve played over the years, i would like to propose some suggestions.

1) Implement a system where npcs sell music scrolls, on which players can write music and press a button to auto play. And also implement a party music system where members in your party can participate with you to play in sync. This was a very popular mechanic in a mmo game called mabinogi, where people would brainstorm for days and weeks, and literally come up with entire orchestras with each members having a music scroll for a different melody line or base line. I feel that without such system, the musical instruments that are on sale in the cash shop are really not worth even 100 gems, let alone 800.

2) if implementing a music scroll is the least of Arena Net’s priorities, then please adjust the instrument playing system so it is less clunky. A problem that most people who play around with instruments in gw2 is that the responsiveness of these instruments are terribly slow, rendering players unable to execute musical techniques such as arpeggios or passacaglias.

I feel that if Arena Net revamped gw2’s music system, then it would be killing two birds with 1 stone. I am certain that more players would actually buy those musical instruments from cash shop since they can actually do something substantial with them, such as you know.. actually playing music. And plus. everyone loves music, so having a revamped system would make the player base much more happy, and give them more stuff to do other than just mechanically grinding dungeons or pvp.