Guild Wars 2

Mega Skeleton.8259:

harold.3526:

Revenant, PS Berserker for POWER

Engineer for CONDITION

Are other classes viable? yes! exactly as power Ranger was viable before the new trait system, viable but you will be discriminated on LFG.

Harold, a post like this contributes to that kind of discrimination, though I don’t think that’s what you meant.

His post isn’t to blame. It’s the truth behind his post that really drives this.

Very good insight from the OP. I think that #7 (power creep) is the biggest issue that’s keeping me personally from really being able to get into the post-HoT PvP environment.

If honestly reflect on why some previous meta builds fell out of favor, you’ll probably realize that most of them didn’t get nerfed (even if it feels that way). The sad truth is that there’s just more builds out there that are better and stronger.

In the current meta…I wouldn’t recommend it. It can work to some extent in Stronghold though.

Here ya go:
Condi Engi Video Guide
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0HeqybrxEQ

And ya, mortar is more of a contingency for when a boss is out of range of grenades as well as for the blast finisher. It’s also worth using anytime you’re running to the fight or running back.

On something like Gorseval where you don’t really have much range issues, you could probably be better off with Supply Crate.

Gonna quote part of MetaBattle to show why this isn’t necessarily a bad thing:

Unlike some other minions and pets, Sneak Gyro Sneak Gyro will not teleport to your position when traversing difficult terrain. You can use this to your advantage when trying to escape in some situations; jumping off of ledges or across gaps will cause your Gyro to attempt to find a different path to follow you, which can lead opponents to believe you are still within its radius.

Warriors are pretty awesome in dungeons. It can be a bit tricky to play them in high level fractals, but if you can pull it off, they give some amazing might and dps boosts through banners with the right build (look up PS or Phalanx Strength warrior build).

Revenants are also a solid choice.

Guardians are good, but aren’t shining as much as they have in the past.

Peter.5347:

Some verbatim quotes I’ve had said to me through whisper and team chat in ranked.

“kill yourself warrior scum”

“you should delete your warrior, useless class”

“it didnt help that you were playing warrior”

“you know every class does everything you can do better, right?”

Among countless others. These are games where I have like 200 points and am contributing greatly to the fights, and we happen to lose cause they play the map better. People just see fit to treat you like garbage and blame the game on you for picking warrior.

Gee, thanks Anet! I’m having a blast in your expansion.

Yea, there’s no justification for that behavior. You’re pointing your finger at the company that developed the game you enjoy instead of people who are directly being kittens to you…I don’t think you have your priorities straight.

Junkpile.7439:

Well raids are actually easier do with PUGs because you can just kick all party members who fail until you have 10 perfects players who have viper, zealot what ever gears, most expensive runes and sigils and so on. When you run with guild you can’t be total kittenhole.

As a raid leader in a guild, I’m starting to agree with this more and more. =/

No offense, but this is how raids got ruined in WoW. If this same crap happens to GW2 as it did to WoW, then I’m done…

Pandabro.8743:

Crystal Reid.2481:

It doesn’t have anything to do with allowing you to play the way you want and so I’d like to share some insight into why we made the change.

We’re actually perfectly okay with players not interrupting a break bar. However what we’re not okay with is having all the deadly mechanics of the encounter removed during this period. Honestly that’s really just an oversight on my part in how I built the encounter. This was the most simple change we could make that was relatively low impact.

Thank you for being transparent about this. I’m glad you are setting a precedent for fixing unintended gameplay as we know what happens to mechanics when players are allowed to cheese them for extended periods of time (Looks at dungeons).

Agreed. Thank you for this!

I agree that the price is too restrictive for these runes.

However, I hope they look at how restrictive a set of condition gear is as well (viper’s armor with sinister trinkets).

And the devs thought that raid difficulty would cause tears…

Esquilax.3491:

So expensive though.

Well…at least we don’t need Leadership runes like Mesmers. Those cost 100 Crystalline Ore each and require the Dragon’s Stand meta to succeed for the vendor.

If people are trying to decide on what class to play for raids, I suggest thinking less about what is “most optimal” and more about what is more likely to be needed.

For example, it’s pretty common for groups to want 2 revenants and 2 PS warriors. It can be argued that a chronomancer is just as optimal for a group as one of these classes, but groups probably won’t want more than 1 of these since the benefit of additional chronomancers becomes a bit redundant.

On the other hand, if you already have 2 revenants, you can have a 3rd keep up prot instead of might/fury to produce more boon benefits while also bringing very high dps. With warriors, if you already have 2 PS wars, you can have the additional warriors run condi, which fills the role of both ranged and condition DPS. Condi warriors also do some of the best DPS on the Gorseval fight due to the large hit box.

So you can pick a class that’s not only viable, but also very strong and still have trouble fitting in a group.

My top recommendations for people looking to be accepted into groups would be:
1) Revenant (Have a Zerk DPS and maybe a tank set too)
2) Warrior (Zerk DPS and Viper dps set)
3) Condi Engi (Have a Viper dps set and maybe a Rabid tank set too)

If your budget is tight, Revenant is your best bet since building a viper condi set is really expensive and time consuming.

Not gonna touch on conquest, but for against a healing ele, you gotta chain your CC (probably Point Blank → F2 Taunt) on the ele while dropping your burst on the NPC at the same time. If you have 2 eles, you’ll need a teammate to help you, just like in any other circumstance against 2 decent enemies.

There will always be times where you’re just hard countered in a 1 v 1. I don’t think that should seem to be a new concept for a vet, so you need to look beyond simply what you can do in terms of your own mechanical abilities and also pay attention to what your teammates can do to help and who you should be nearby for when you do need help.

After all, it’s still a team game.

Cerby.1069:

This is kinda the opposite of what everyone has been telling me lately. Vitality over toughness. Ferocity over power. Your crit rate is still a bit low to just go all in ferocity isn’kitten Can someone explain the logic behind ferocity with such a low precision to me? I’m not meaning to criticize, I just legitimately don’t understand based on what other people tell me.

I would actually say that vitality over toughness is a good idea for PvP since vitality helps against condi and gives you time to escape or get healed when needed.

The ferocity, however I agree on. I actually wonder if an int sigil would be better on the rifle.

Phineas Poe.3018:

Allie.4925:

I’m not a fan of the “meta”, because optimistically thinking, only about 5% of players can play it perfectly, which is what is required for it to actually be as good as it is.

You just drop fire fields on cooldown while trying to maximize your shrapnel grenades per minute.

What’s hard to understand?

Well, to do it well, it’s a bit more than that, lol.

However, if you watch the videos of people who’ve cleared bosses on engineer, you’ll see that it’s not only rare for people to pull off the rotation very well, but also not necessary.

Example: World first Vale Guard from Engi PoV – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8AKNIO_q2Q&feature=youtu.be

Well, as much as I’ve loved PvP, I’ve avoided the ranked stuff so far. It’s not really been out of any boycott mentality, so much as just not really having much drive to participate in something that’s turned out badly.

If you think about it, it’s really just a reflection of a movement in the meta that’s been around since D/D eles:

Utilize boons to allow a build to be more offensive or defensive than it would otherwise be.

D/D eles did this with might stacking and Scrappers have been doing this with HGH might. Durability runes just allow them to also go with an offensive amulet and utilize protection to have enough damage reduction.

It’s no wonder that Mallyx revenants are doing so well. They essentially bring boon strip while also being able to run an amulet that’s more offensive than they normally could due to the defense from durability runes.

That and the access to protection for classes that generally are balanced around not having much protection.

Take marauder scrapper for example: HGH makes might stacking a big part of damage. Boon duration is a huge bump to this. On top of that Engineers have next to no protection and have generally been balanced around that (they have lots of blocks/invulns).

Interesting build. It does sound good for the current meta…however, this got me wondering:

If you use Shield Stance or Counterblow while traited with Shield Master, will you reflect things like Mirror Blade and Shadow Shot or do they still land since they’re unblockable?

Knowing when and how to use these weapons pretty much eliminates most of the issues outlined here (magnet bug is still tough to work around in most situations):

• Overcharged Shot – Just don’t use it on targets with stab or invuln, lol. You can also combo it with stability (elixir or a stunbreak, but even if you didn’t need you, you’d never want to waste a cooldown like this on a target with stab/invuln.

• Jump Shot – No idea why you’re even comparing this to UA. It’s a much shorter animation, especially if you’re using it for burst. The only time the animation lasts for long is if you use it over a long distance, in which case it’s the same issue with any movement skill. Besides, you can always kit-swap to cancel the animation.

• Magnet Pull – Yea, buggy as hell, but good players will often avoid it anyways. Only use this to bait dodges, when obscured by a ton of AoE effects, or when you know a player is out of dodges/evades/invulns. This is particularly good for interrupting anyone who’s blocking (such as guardians healing).

• Gear Shield – Yea, don’t wait until you’re almost dead to use this. There’s a lot of unblockable stuff that’s in the meta, which is why this has fallen out of favor. It’s not a bad skill. It’s just not well suited for the current meta.

As for advice, I think the best advice you can get is this: Don’t get caught up in thinking “this is a bad skill because of this weakness”. Instead, think “how does my play style need to change to cover weaknesses and make the most of the strengths of the tools I have available”.

This mentality will lead you to your best uses of the skills which then allows you to make the best decisions in which skills to use.

I had a bit of fun playing with it in open world for a while, but there’s just better options out there.

If you are looking for a way to use it, however, just drop it on a fire or lightning field. Fire field will toss AoE burning and lightning will do AoE vuln.

Eh…it’s not really that simple, even if thieves do tend to get melted by bomb kit.

However, I think you could say that heavy conditions applied by kits like bomb, grenade, and elixir gun are easily countered by necros. Also, the multi-hit aspect of grenades and the frequent damage tick of the flamethrower auto do make those kits susceptible to taking a lot of damage from retaliation.

Bwadark.2519:

Dahkeus.8243:

Whether this is an acceptable risk or not is up to the players and the members of that raid group who are affected by this.

It is an acceptable risk. As much as I love the theory crafters and what they do. Seeing all these wonderfully structured optimal builds that fall into the ‘meta’ category makes me just die a little inside. As then it’s the expected norm for like you said, perhaps a negligible difference.
(edit: Just want to state for the record we’re not going for a PHIW approach. We have everyone fine tuning their builds and getting as much advice as they can, we play with what we have, and we make it work. We find that fun ^^)

Theory crafting though doesn’t end with the Classes, it goes on to groups. An example based on what is observed. Guardian Tank, Druid Healer, 1 Berserker, 2 Heralds, 3 Condi-engineers, 1 Chronomancer. and whatever else.

These casts out entire classes, let alone builds or gear. Yes it’s the most optimal way and also the highest chance of success. But if I have to leave my girlfriend who is an Elementalist or my best friend who is a Thief, it becomes a no deal.

I apologise, this was off topic, if you wish to continue this send me a message. Back on topic.

As stated above the condition slots have been filled, one by a condi-engineer, already. I do not have vipers gear, but I have Zerker. I would be interest to hear about this build being compared to other power based builds of other classes. How does it match up?

It’s an acceptable risk to you. If you decide to hardline on this opinion, then I hope you can expect the same resistance that people with a pure meta perspective get all the time.

In the end, a sub-optimal build will decrease your chance of downing a boss, which means that you could end up having to put in more attempts before you see a successful boss kill. If played well, it’s hard to believe that any build would likely be bad enough to completely prevent a boss kill to any group dedicated enough to put in the effort, so that’s not really the issue.

Maybe that chance is so low or other factors, such as the performance of you or your group are such that you don’t actually have to do any more boss attempts than you would have if you had used a better build (of course, this is impossible to prove), but the fact remains:

If you use a better build, you will have better chances of succeeding.

A perfect build will never win a boss fight for you, but if played with equal skill in an equal group, the result’s not really questionable.

Curring.9752:

Dahkeus.8243:

It’s the berserker amulet of condi. Personally, I think the issue is more along the lines of a class/build being able to thrive with absolutely no defensive stats.

It’s not the Berzerker of condi, it’s more like sinister but forgoing additional power for some extra condi pressure, it’s a hybrid. The condi equiv to berzerker would be condi/prec/exp, just like the wanderers is basically the condi equiv of Marauders.

I agree with the second line, it is issues with the class it self rather than the amulet. I’ve been playing a few builds with viper but wanderers typically does better.

Like Morwath, you took that comparison a little too literal. It’s like Berserker because it’s pure offensive stats with no defensive stats.

Nocta pretty much made the point I was trying to make.

Grenade engi. Spammable AoE CC and DPS at the same time.

Eh, the constant bugs I wrestled with killed any interest in the story, but I don’t think it was something I would have cared much for, even if it went smoothly.

Junkpile.7439:

Well raids are actually easier do with PUGs because you can just kick all party members who fail until you have 10 perfects players who have viper, zealot what ever gears, most expensive runes and sigils and so on. When you run with guild you can’t be total kittenhole.

A valid point, but success in raids probably has more to do with having a group that can perform the mechanics and understands them on a very strong level. It doesn’t matter how perfect your gear is if you don’t push back seekers or focus on your rotation at the expense of dodging out of bad stuff.

Renn.8241:

Dungeons and Fractals ARE your easier Raids.

This. ^

If they make an easy version of raids, then I’m done. That’s one of the big reasons I quit WoW.

Shovel Face.4512:

Since many people are ignorant and hate on Thieves for whatever reason, why not have a Raid boss that requires stealth as one of its mechanics? Just a thought.

Sadly, because an engineer would do it better, lol.

It’s the berserker amulet of condi. Personally, I think the issue is more along the lines of a class/build being able to thrive with absolutely no defensive stats.

Leagues are independant of MMR, so your rank in the league doesn’t really mean much, at least until you get to the really high up ranks.

Sometimes it’s good to take a game at a slow, relaxed pace. Personally, I really don’t find GW2 as a good game for that, but I recently bought Pillars of Eternity on sale from Steam and have found that it suits that type of gameplay very well (single-player text-heavy RPG).

The best defending builds tend to be builds that are high damage with strong AoE and CC utility so that you can take out NPCs fast and shut down anyone trying to heal them.

Jobu.7241:

I see the Elixir Kit on this build a lot but haven’t found too much use for it during battles other than the blast finisher from 4. What am I missing that makes it important enough to take up that spot?

HGH.

Personally though, I don’t really enjoy the build much. It’s effective, but for me it feels like running a generic necro build or something and just isn’t as fun kitten many other kit swapping builds that were around before this.

Yea, I got nothing against playing meta builds, particularly with regards to being competitive. Historically, in the past 3 years I’ve played, I’ve payed attention to what works and played based on that.

But the selection of meta builds right now is pretty terrible. There’s little diversity in role and it’s really just a handful of viable builds that all play a tanky-yet-high-damage hybrid bruiser build. Additionally, two classes (thief and warrior) are really in such a bad spot, they just don’t even fit in the meta anywhere at all.

It’s nice to see Rangers viable…even though it’s through them playing their new healer specialization, which is completely different than any other PvP build they’ve ever had before.

I’ll stick to either unranked or will avoid PvP altogether until there’s a balance patch that actually shakes things up. Considering the problems that are popping up with MMR punishing good players from progressing in leagues, it sounds like this is probably for the best until they get that stuff worked out anyways.

One other tip I haven’t seen is that if you’re in green circle duty, don’t just run and stand on the circle as soon as it spawns. Wait until the inner circle is almost matching the outer circle so that you stand in it just before it pops. There’s two reasons for doing this:

1) Seekers follow players, so if you’re standing in the circle, seekers will likely float directly to the circle.

2) In the last phase, the teleport spots will hit ranged as well as melee. If you’re all sitting on the circle and get a teleport spawn under you, then you’ll be forced out of the circle. However, if you wait until the last second, you avoid this.

Daharahj.1325:

XxsdgxX.8109:

warbignime.4610:

Burtnik.5218:

They always post on reddit instead of their official forum for kitten know what reason.

Oh yeah, read your own comments and others above you, feel the rage and madness. I wonder why.

Yep, cause this place is full of cancer. Just keep reading all the other comments, full of toxicity.

Well people passionate about the game tend to be the first ones to get upset and vocal.

“YOU RUINED SOMETHING I LIKE AND NOW I FEEL BAD… HOW DOES IT FEEL?”

People that don’t care just shrug it off and quit.

Yes and no…

People that care do tend to rage instead of quitting. However, if this goes on for long enough, those raging players eventually stop caring and quit. That’s pretty much how I left WoW. For a long time, I really spoke up about a lot of the things I was unhappy with because I loved my earlier experience with the game.

However, eventually, the inevitability of the bad decisions sank in and I stopped posting…then I stopped logging in…then I unsubbed.

I actually find myself asking “What’s the point?” the most with the league right now. Kinda sad because I’ve generally been a big fan of PvP in this game, but in the 3 years I’ve played, this is the least enjoyable meta I’ve seen and I can’t get myself to really care about how the league is even set up, even though this was something I was really looking forward to.

Without a balance patch, there’s just not much point in PvPing, let alone to try and be competitive at it.

I actually would have rather had a delay on the release of PvP leagues than a league pushed out without a balance patch.

Anyone else in this camp?

Azure.8670:

Purple Miku.7032:

CntrlAltDefeat.1465:

Azure.8670:

Warrior’s personal DPS is absurdly high right now in PvE and they’re in really good shape at the moment, what are you two on about?

I’ll agree that as far as group utility is concerned, it’s not as exciting of a class to take anymore but there are still banners and EA and phalanx strength is still a great asset to group play despite it not being absolutely necessary in order for there to be capped might at the table.

As far as survival is concerned, warrior isn’t really a class that should experience much of a problem anywhere in PvE unless you’re in a situation that would probably end up in a disaster on pretty much all other classes as well. Azure you’re right about most of warrior’s heal options being extremely situational, which is why healing signet is generally always the best choice when you actually need to concern yourself about sustaining in combat. It still heals over 20k hp/min, which is significantly higher than what most other classes have.

Now, one thing that I wonder is if you’re trying to exclusively play with the elite spec or if you think warrior in general is in bad shape? There is a problem with the elite spec actually— you have to sacrifice a lot of useful options in order to take it, be it the arms traitline or the discipline one.

Discipline is mainly needed because of fast hands to have a comfortable rotation, whereas arms is needed because of signet mastery and furious however it also has blademaster for reducing sword skill cooldowns. This can be used for a 12s riposte instead of a 15s one, and that results in having blocks available for 18.75% of an encounter. Thats pretty darn good for surviving.

To anybody else that might claim warrior’s current state in PvE for damage is bad hough… seriously, you’re doing something horribly wrong. Both condi builds and direct damage builds are higher now than they were pretty much ever as far as I know since Bloody Roar got that nice 10% damage modifier.

I formerly wasn’t convinced that the current maximum potential of a warrior could compare with the warrior of the pre-ferocity days, but now it’s pretty obvious that it can.

Im happy you came to this thread PM, good to see you.

I agree Berserkers dps is great, especially condi which I will admit I tried sinister/viper as fast as possible and I had no success with it but my build was kitten by bad rune and sigil choices, im glad to see a more patient theorycrafter put together the current condi (meta).

As for Berserker power dps, I too agree it is a beautiful thing, but Its not higher than revs at least from what I can see. I know the numbers said Rev has the highest dps for a power build and I argued that was wrong, but ive been too busy to really test berserker vs rev and decided im prob wrong at this point since ive seen no one else come to berserkers side in this argument.

However, I DO struggle in pve using a power build. NOT for anything group related, but for solo things such as farming currency and such in HoT maps, I just get eaten alive and I truly dont understand it. Half of it is because ive always hated rifle and I feel like its necessary to use for farming in hot (I dont know why tbh). It seems this is user error however since like you said, it shouldnt be difficult at all.

Im happy you agree with me on the healing as most people dont even think about this since theyre so stuck on healing signet. Healing signet IS great, ill never say its not, but I think I prefer the berserkers new heal.

My issue with berserker over all is the core warrior. Fast hands not being baseline, regen on banners not being baseline (I can understand why theyre not, somewhat) and our lack of variety in weapons is somewhat.. disturbing. We have the most weapons in the game and have such limits on what we can use. Mace and Hammer are both great weapons that are limited by either Berserkers F1, or their lack of actual dps.

I can go on and on but theres so many posts about this

Yea, power builds are pretty rough in the new open world content. That’s about the only legitimate gripe I can see for warrior in PvE. =P

PistolWhip.2697:

Yes, of course.

If you thought we were called Warriors because we had a weapon in our hands you were wrong.

We’re Warriors because in times of hardship like these our best thrive. A good Warrior can still intimidate opponents. An amazing Warrior demands both fear and respect, more so than ever at this moment.

Bring it on, lads.

Someone’s been watching a bit too much Braveheart, lol.

“We strongly believe that regular balance updates are one of the key pillars of building a successful competitive game. As such, prior to each season, there will be a balance update. League play will generally begin about two weeks after a balance update to ensure that the metagame has stabilized in an appropriate manner. Balance will be closely monitored throughout the season with the goal of having solid balance going into the postseason tournaments.”

beefjus.9347:

Dahkeus.8243:

Spartacus.3192:

What condi builds are you using may i ask? I havent really touched War except for getting his elite spec hero points done in the first week.

Not sure about PvP, but here’s the meta raid condi build:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/external?l=http%3A%2F%2Fgw2skills.net%2Feditor%2F%3FvJAQNBjYD7kpDolUs2Dw7DgOEsMFYHHhAwITJIED6Bvn2XbtF-TFSFAB9r%2BzgKBR2CCAeIAEr8r3rAgS7H0uuhAAIAzcmJzyMwMn5Qn5QnZpAgZZF-w

It also works pretty well on SW farming since condi works so well there. You can melt slingers and keep a lane painted pretty easily with longbow.

No torch?

Doh, that should be torch, not warhorn.

Thuggernaut.1250:

To be fair, I didn’t expect ANet to drop a meta-shattering balance patch right as the season started. Esports LOL.

Still disappointing that Warrior suffers another patch without a single token change. Not even a measly bug-fix.

Well, that hasn’t stopped them in the past, at least with big name tournament series.

Funny how the posts that get the most replies tend to be the ones where people have the most negative stuff to say.

Good luck with your new class!

Spartacus.3192:

What condi builds are you using may i ask? I havent really touched War except for getting his elite spec hero points done in the first week.

Not sure about PvP, but here’s the meta raid condi build:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/external?l=http%3A%2F%2Fgw2skills.net%2Feditor%2F%3FvJAQNBjYD7kpDolUs2Dw7DgOEsMFYHHhAwITJIED6Bvn2XbtF-TFSFAB9r%2BzgKBR2CCAeIAEr8r3rAgS7H0uuhAAIAzcmJzyMwMn5Qn5QnZpAgZZF-w

It also works pretty well on SW farming since condi works so well there. You can melt slingers and keep a lane painted pretty easily with longbow.

It looks like a caster staff, not a melee staff. I.e. same problem with 99% of staff skins for thieves.