How much power, precision, crit chance, crit damage do you have your builds?
If you’re expecting some kind of magic stat balance that is the most efficient you’re going to be disappointed. Your personal play-experience is probably just as good a basis as anyone’s.
Me personally I’ve recently decided to pursue a gear-setup based on the following stat-weights.
My build is D/D – SB – 15/30/0/25/0 a typical burst build but with 25 points in Acrobatics for PvE and general survivability.
Power – 1.0
Precision – 0.8
Vitality – 0.7
Crit-Damage – 0.5
Toughness – 0.5
Condition Damage – 0.3
Healing – 0.2
Reasoning is that I currently have a very mixed set with rather a lot of Healing and little Power. I got this because I considered Precision to be the most important stat…which apparently it’s not. I also undervalued Toughness where even a little can make quite a difference.
My current base crit-chance is about 45% according to my character sheet. But considering all the buffs, proccs and effects…..it’s probably closer to 70% in practice (Fury + Sigil of Accuracy + other stuff).
But now I’m looking to maximize Power while maintaining a healthy level of Vitality and replacing most of my Healing with Toughness.
My main set should soon look like this:
Gear: Power/Vitality/Toughness
Accessories: Berserker’s or Valkyries, depending on my gut-feeling.
Should my base crit-rate drop below 35% I’ll replace “Executioner” with the auto-crit from Stealth.
Most crafting professions follow a simple rule when trying to level efficiently.
Only try to discover new items. Avoid making the same item twice. Salvage results to retain some of the mats.
Most crating jobs have a certain item combination that will yield discoveries. Stuff like 1 Shaft + 1 String + xyz = new discovery.
Just combine the various elements so you’re always discovering something new and you should level crafting very quickly and efficiently.
Yes, people are entitles to their Legendary if they put in the work. It should not be limited by some stupid RNG element.
1. farming a Legendary is essentially GW2’s endgame. Like it or not, but that’s what people are doing at level 80. It’s the only form of character progression, even if it’s just cosmetic.
2. It’s part of the character panel achievement list and therefor on the same page as map exploration and sPvP ranking. It’s not a “hidden” or “special” feature. It’s right there in your face. It is obviously meant for everyone to pursue.
GW2’s character development is all about builds, aka. a particular combination of gear + traits + abilities.
You won’t get all that much engagement from unlocking abilities or using the 10 abilities you have access to. Overall the system has quite a bit of depth once it gets ironed out a little more.
It’s a shame that a lot of builds really don’t get much out of 2-3 of their weapons skills, making some builds about no more than 7 abilities.
I share your sentiments and I believe most people do.
Underwater combat in this game is just as tedious and bad as in any previous MMO. It’s a shame because ANet explicitly stated they wanted to make it fun and they clearly put quite a lot of emphasis on it (some early videos claim that roughly 30% of content will be underwater).
But instead of seizing the opportunity to make it engaging….it turned out just as bad as ever.
1. Instead of making players slightly overpowered underwater to compensate for the unnatural environment…they seemed to have made players weaker. Underwater combat is static and boring with very few interesting abilities or meaningful combo-fields.
2. The fact that mob density is already insane in this game gets exasperated in a 3D environment. You can’t move freely because you’re constantly adding mobs with their ridiculous threat range. I rarely ever finish a fight by killing all the attacking mobs. I usually end up giving up at some point and just move on because of the constant stream of adds underwater.
3. Mob movement, especially that of large Megalodons etc. is very erratic and buggy. They jump around in unpredictable patterns and rarely have any interesting mechanics. It just not well designed.
I thought it was kind of amusing when I was trying to coordinate a united attack in WvW.
I was like “Everyone get ready to push in 10 seconds”
Then “5”, “4”, “3”, “2” ……“message suppressed due to excess spaming”.
Needless to say that attack ended up a clusterkitten.
I know there are workarounds and the feature serves a purpose….but yeah….it’s a little sub-optimal at times.
Eternal Battlegrounds:
+more diverse Landscape
+higher level resource-nodes
+relatively flat
-commonly populated with random players
-everything is very close together
_______________________________________
Borderlands
+slightly more spread out
-copy-pasta landscapes 3 times
-excessive elevation (aka. too many high cliffs)
-lower-level resources
-too symmetrical
Overall I much prefer the EB even if things are too close together. The fact that the three Borderlands are practically identical and very symmetrical they get boring very quickly.
Dee,
It’s not just one class. Sometimes i see one person out there and so i go attack him. Well then i realize that 15 more pop up and I’m dead b/c they didn’t render yet.
True, now that you mention it I do recall a few situations where it took a good few moments before an entire enemy zerg was rendered in front of me.
Abaddon’s Mouth player here:
1. Bots always switch to the winning server in WvW so they farmed less. We’ve had them on our side….but also on the enemies side when losing. It’s nothing specific to our server. It’s just what botters do so they get killed less frequently.
Edit: I haven’t heard or seen bots actively partake in WvW yet. All I’ve seen of them is farming mobs in the water. But maybe they’ve evolved.
2. Yes, I can confirm that some individuals used hacks to claim the Orb shortly after the reset. I was there in TS when people made the observation. But this was an action of a few non-representative players. I can confirm that the vast majority of our players were just as surprised about this as you were. I believe many of our players reported them too.
The so called “culling issue” (aka. the non-rendering of enemy players) is still affecting Thieves when they leave Stealth.
I have been killed by invisible Thieves and, based on how people (don’t) react when I attack them, I too have killed people while invisible.
This really isn’t helping the general reputation of Thieves and is pretty detrimental to WvW battles.
I too am seriously impressed by this Holiday event. And I don’t generally get carried away by this sort of stuff.
Act I was a little “meh” and I expected the rest of the event to continue like that.
But it grew…significantly.
Act 3 was finally when things got rolling. That’s when I first got really invested in the whole thing and am now eagerly anticipating Act 4.
Well done ANet!
Yeah I too missed the “one time event” expecting it to be something unique and special. I actually thought it was going to be this last achievement I had missing from my list.
Turns out it was just a cut-scene, which is fine and all, but a little misleading.
I’ve done everything I could do regarding the Halloween Event but this Achievement still seems to be missing.
Any idea what it is and how to get it?
Was it really tied to today’s event which I could not attend?
I’m just curious if I’m missing something.
I don’t tPvP much and have pretty much stopped sPvP for most part because there’s simply no point to it aside from testing new builds.
I think that from a general perspective, Mesmers are too good in all aspects of the game.
Their portal has been talked about enough. It opens up far more options than any other ability in game. Nothing comes close to providing such utility, opening up completely new tactical options.
Their group raid support, not just group utility is unrivaled. Where Guardians may have excellent group support, Mesmers can use theirs to buff the whole zerg.
Their Phantasms and Illusions make them the lowest target priority since in the heat of battle, it’s hard to figure out the original. These minions also spawn in all sorts of locations, attacking people on walls etc. They can even draw boss aggro in PvE which can be useful at times.
They are by far the best 1v1 profession. I doubt anything comes close.
TL;DR Mesmers are too good at too many things compared to other professions. Their tool-set is just miles ahead of anyone else’s.
I agree to a certain extent. I’ve noticed this in PvE as well where it seems like I as a Thief am contributing almost half of the groups DPS.
I mean Heartseeker does 4-5k on the push of a button, and I’m not even full glass-cannon. Other classes aside from Warriors aren’t anywhere near that kind of damage.
But then again, we lack splash damage with D/D so maybe it evens out.
I’ve noticed this on my Disabling Shot a lot.
It also happens with Heartseeker at times.
I think GW2 needs a setting that says: “If button X is pressed twice within 0.5 seconds, count this as one press. If it is pressed less frequently account for each press individually.”
I like the PvP inside the jumping puzzle, mostly…as it’s as close as we get in GW2 to classic “open PvP”. It also tends to be smaller in scale where personal skill matters more.
However I have nothing but disdain for kittens who camp the entrance with 4+ people picking off single players as they enter. That’s just pretty low. I will go out of my way to make these gankers pay and they pay up, every time (even if it takes a while).
I do admit it feels good once you’ve completed it. I went at it for roughly 4 hours straight before finally nailing it.
The feeling was quite akin to achieving a Raid Boss First Kill with your guild, except it was a personal achievement.
I still sympathize with those who haven’t managed it however as I still believe it’s a tad overtuned. The time vortex needs to just be 1-2 seconds slower.
It’s good but just a tad too tightly balanced.
I don’ think it was tested in an online environment with way more variables than a LAN PTR.
I’d like to see this feature added in PvE as well.
People who beat the tower = Leave tower alone, it’s fine!
People who failed to beta tower = QQ, tower is too hard online.
I honestly don’t think either side is better. Both have a sense of entitlement. None is superior to the other.
It does seem like something that wasn’t tested with more than a handful of people at once before it was rolled out.
Considering internet latency and other players….it’s a little excessive.
What might seems challenging on a private server with 0 latency becomes an entirely different matter in an online environment with a dozen players and an average 100ms.
I also doubt the designers tested it with all the available races.
(edited by Dee Jay.2460)
Good video although I despise the Japanese/Korean pop song you had in there.
I really like Pistol/Dagger in PvP but just can’t bring myself to play it in PvE. A shame because the play style is a lot of fun. A shame though that Body Shot is so crappy and you rarely use Pistol 3. Essentially you’re just rotating between auto-attack and C&D 95% of the time, which is probably the most effective way to play.
Maybe there’s some sort of memory leak. This is typically something that could occur in stressful situations.
I have a modern, fairly high-end PC.
i5-3450
Samsung 830 SSD with 256GB of RAM
Radeon HD 7850 with 2048 MB
Windows 7 – 64 bit
Sennheiser PC333D Headset + Soundcard
8 GB of DDR 1600 RAM
In fact, GW2 was my primary reason to get this new PC when I did.
Now generally speaking, everything seems to run fine most of the time. But as of recent…in the past 2 weeks maybe, frequent crashes in busy situations (farming Plinx, storming keeps, zerg vs. zerg battles etc.) are really ruining the fun of WvW especially, where things can get very intense at times.
The crash is always the same, a total freez-up of the entire system, forcing me to use to task-manager to shut down and restart GW2. Often this is announced with a weird WEEEUUEEE sound looping bug after which the game crashes a few seconds later.
I will point out again that this wasn’t always the case. In fact in many ways the earlier versions of this game seemed to run better and more fluently.
I agree, just like nobody should be able to stun-lock you for 5+ seconds or tank 3 players for 30+ seconds.
Unfortunately however ANet has taken a very binary approach towards balance allowing extremes rather than keeping everything a little more moderate.
Putting 40 exotic level 80 Staffs into the Mystic Forge and guess what happened?
in Crafting
Posted by: Dee Jay.2460
ANet has screwed up so bad with this kitten it’s unbelievable.
It’s either be a hacker/botter, extremely lucky….or go home.
Legendaries are obviously designed for everybody to pursue (hence they are an account-wide achievement). But they really have to find a better solution to this Precursor BS, it’s game breaking and is discouraging a lot of people from playing.
I’m still a far cry from my Legendary but I fear the moment when the Precursor is the only item left on my list. I doubt I’ll have the money to buy it…..and after all these stories I refuse to gamble on it.
That’s just a kittened up system and the poorest implementation of endgame in any MMO to date.
This kitten would be hard to sell even in Korea.
+ no excessive intro
+ no cheesy Backstabs
+ skillful use of Infiltrator Strike
+ nice bow
- kind of short…but that’s preferable over being too long.
- too many 1v1 vs. upleveled players. They weren’t bad fights, just tipped in your favor.
- Japanese / Korean schmalzsongs? Really…? An odd choice to say the least. Not my cup of tea.
I want to add to this that I’m hitting people for over 5500 in WvW when not manually detonating. And I don’t even have such great gear. I assume with full Berserker’s you could easily surpass 6000 Crits.
There has definitely been some changes made to this ability because I certainly wasn’t hitting for that much before.
OP probably shoots at Daggerstorming Thieves.
Because that’s where half the damage comes from. It’s also easy to counter by simply doing melee damage.
It’s also one of the few abilities that discourages people to bunch up into zergs. It’s an anti-zerg ability and the game needs more of them rather than less.
Powerful? Maybe….but overall good for the game. It’s also easy to counter for anyone who reads the ability description.
It also happens to be a dozen times better in WvW than it is in sPvP or even tPvP. That’s where you’ll see a lot more Thieves Guilds and the occasional Basilisk Venom.
If you can’t beat them, join them.
That seems to be the mantra for WvW…why not also in sPvP.
Although I’m pretty sure you’ll return to your old class soon enough when you realize Thieves aren’t all they are cut out to be.
Nothing really changed too much regarding the total damage of the Backstab combo so there was no reason to expect much of a change in this regard.
I generally dislike this “hard-counter” balance approach that ANet seems to be taking but I’ll just say that 100 Blades is equally as capable at 1-shotting and that Chaining Hammer stuns can effectively stun-lock any Thief to death who doesn’t have a stun-breaker (aka. most glass-cannon thieves).
For WvW burst damage rules supreme as you rarely have fair 1v1 or even 1v2 situations where you have the time and room to outplay your enemies.
However in those rare situations P/D rules supreme over any D/D burst-build.
I’ finding it hard the point out exactly what feels different about Cluster Bomb since the patch but something has definitely changed.
1. The cluster bomb seems to fly where your mouse pointer is at the beginning of the cast-time, rather than at the end of the 1 second cast-time.
2. Damage is now significantly higher if you don’t manually detonate the round. I’m pretty sure it used the be the exact opposite in that the Cluster Bomb would deal more damage if you detonated it manually
3. Did they change something about the cast-time? Was it really always that long? It feels longer and less “snappy” than usual. Looking at old footage I’m sure the Cluster Bomb used to launch faster.
Am I the only one seeing this? I’ve found it especially noticeable while farming Events in Orr.
Yeah, let’s reference a guide written during beta to comment on the current game state.
I agree that Venoms are lackluster. But the traits aren’t the biggest issue. They are mostly underwhelming, yes, but not what’s broken about them.
The biggest downside of Venoms is that you have to give up some really useful utility spells in order to use them. Venoms aren’t just competing with themselves, they are competing with stun-breakers, Shadow Refuge, Caltrops and various Singets.
When you look at the opportunity costs of using a Venom build (which requires at least 2+ Venoms) then you always come up short.
Yeah, as of yesterday Arah Path 4 has a progress blocking bug.
I’d only really consider MF gear for DE farming as your personal performance hardly matters.
As for the stat itself, I’m convinced it works. I remember seeing a HUGE increase in yellow drops going from 0 to 200+ MF. It’s not just a placebo stat like some people claim.
Infiltrators Strike does seem uniquely suitable for Zerg vs. Zerg fights. The added AoE damage is just icing on the cake.
D/D might have slightly more burst for picking off single targets but it doesn’t have Infiltrator’s Strike.
I agree about the waypoint costs being too high.
Aside from the other points made it also:
1. Encourages farming in a single location
2. Punishes people for making the world their play-ground.
3. Undermines the convenience provided by the system
The higher-level you are…the dummer it gets.
This stance might have been justifiable when you didn’t want to have repair-bills but now that we have both….waypoint costs need to come down.
So I finally got a group rolling today willing to approach route 4 in Arah explorable.
Everything went better than expected until we reached Lupicus.
Instead of initiating the fight as expected, the mob simply did nothing and remained “green” and thus…unattackable. The human NPC didn’t seem to trigger the cut-scene and even killing the NPC and leaving the instance didn’t fix the issue.
I find it absolutely unacceptable that we are still seeing so many Progress Blocking bugs in such essential content over 2 months after launching the game. Bug fixing in this game has been the poorest I have ever seen in an MMO.
Generally speaking I love the idea and concept of JPs.
However many clipping issues and collision detection errors can really frustrate at times. I really hope they have a review team that can iron out some of the more wonky jumps out there.
I want to fail because I executed the jump poorly not because I jumped into some invisible wall or odd clipping error.
Someone linked an interesting article on http://gw2hub.com/features/editorials/underbelly-hacks-cheats-bots-and-exploits that details just how far-reaching the hacking and exploiting extends in GW2 currently.
Botters….ergo programs that play the game for you are only the simplest of tools. The rabbit hole is far far deeper. But read for yourself.
The Suggestion forum is where threads go to die.
You’ll have much more attention and discussion here.
Corpse dancing, jumping and other humilation tactics -- When are they acceptable?
in WvW
Posted by: Dee Jay.2460
When I kill really obnoxious people or lucky cheesers (like people who camp the entrance of the JP) I like to sit on their faces.
It’s my way of saying. You got owned,
Deal with it!
I just had this odd little idea.
Currently the badge system is largely random as far as I can tell. You seem to have a 20-30% chance to get 1-2 badges for killing an enemy. I guess it’s ok, but not really satisfying (personally I believe there’s a little more to it than just random chance).
Anyway, I was thinking what if it was possible for a player to acquire a “bounty”. Ergo, for each player you kill (must deal at least 30% damage) your bounty is increased by one badge. That means instead of dropping 0-2 badges on death at a random chance, you drop your bounty’s worth of badges.
Now this would largely be a hidden mechanic. So aside from counting players won’t know how much they are currently “worth”. The enemy players wouldn’t know either until they looted your body….and suddenly found a dozen Badges of Honor.
On the positive side ganking players would be discouraged as they’d never be worth any Badges. It might lead to a light badge inflation but nothing too drastic.
Sounds like a self-fixing issue.
The bandwagoners jump to the most successful server because it wins.
The good guilds transfers because of excessive queue times.
Bandwagoners ruin server prowess, good guilds carry bad servers up the ladder.
The cycle continues.
Yeah, I haven’t sPvP’d too much since the patch (especially not as a Backstabber) but I haven’t noticed much difference in WvW and other aspects of the game.
I wouldn’t say we’re notably stronger either. Just that nothing much has changed.
Crafting in general won’t net you a lot of money in itself. In fact in many cases you’ll make more money buy selling the raw materials.
That is…unless you can find a specific market niche. Sometimes people sell of specific components for less than their raw materials are worth so there’s a profit margin to be had.
But during all that time you also have to consider the opportunity costs. All the time you spend crafting and scanning the TP could also spent farming Events like a Bot (I mean like a Boss). Not only would that net you a lot of loot but also a lot of Karma.