Guild Wars 2

The raid loot reset is actually an hour earlier than that, at 11:30pm PST on Sunday night. I do not know why this is the time, but it is.

EDIT: When daylight savings time starts again, the reset time will in fact be 12:30 PDT.

Condi necro is certainly good in raids. Some people do not want them for sabetha because they bug out her flak shot, however running double necro in that fight gives extremely high dps and some teams just attempt to deal with the flak and collect their 15k-20k bleed ticks.

That being said, you need to be full Viper’s gear. I believe on necro you even want all Viper’s trinkets as well (Exotic Viper’s is better than Ascended Sinister). You cannot come with celestial trinkets, as you will screw up the aggro for vale guardian and gorseval. And even for sabetha where there is no tank, honestly a pug group would probably kick you if they found out you were bringing cele trinkets on a necro. There are people playing elementalist in full zerk/assassin gear and staying alive in the raid fights, you can stay alive just fine on necromancer in full viper’s.

This only applies for raids though, for fractals play whatever you want.

Every class has seen its “unique” mechanics encroached upon as time has gone on. Engineer itself stole group stealth from thieves with stealth gyro.

It’s also a bit funny that two of your suggestions are dark and ethereal fields, which are necromancer and mesmer mechanics in the same way that superspeed is for engineer.
Because really there very few actual unique party level mechanics in the game. Most of them are like superspeed and ethereal fields and dark fields – they come in abundance on a specific class, and some other classes have very minor access to them. Access to superspeed outside of engineer is pretty rare, and no other class benefits from it as much by far. So superspeed still is an engi thing really, it’s just that some other classes can also use it on occasion.

Shovel Face.4512:

NoTrigger.8396:

TexZero.7910:

Rev will still be viable (borderline optimal)

rev will be stronger than before.

How? Their sword auto is getting nerfed

The current highest personal dps classes for the raid are revenant, tempest, and condi warrior. Revenant might be getting their sword auto nerfed, but tempest and condi war (and many other classes) are getting their alacrity nerfed, which likely will amount to a similar dps loss. Additionally, Revenant’s sword 2 is getting a pretty decent buff, as it will be extremely easy to hit any of the current raid bosses with all three projectiles every time.

So even if Revenants deal less damage than before overall, relative to most other classes they will stay about the same (or maybe get better). And all this ignores the fact that their party buffs are extremely good (on demand regen, fury, might, boon duration, protection for five people; ferocity buff for five people).

I would guess that a typical build will look something like this:

1 Druid
1 Chrono
2 PS Warrior
2-4 Revenant
2-4 Tempest (Staff vs Fresh Air depends on fight and group needs)
0-3 Condi Engineer
0-2 Thief (Power)

Obviously any of the fights could be and currently are completed with the classes I didn’t list here (in fact if Sabetha’s flak gets fixed then two condi necros would be meta in that fight). But pug groups tend to want the current “best” comp and I would guess that it will gravitate towards something like this.

And of course, a lot of what becomes the new meta comps depends on the specifics of the patch. It’s possible that the new King of Fires will actually be really good, and condi wars will just switch to rune of balthazar or nightmare or something and get spammed fire auras by 4 tempests. It depends on the implementation of the trait. Similarly, the usefulness of Thieves depends a lot on exactly how much damage they gained, because they provide zero in the way of party buffs which really makes them only interchangeable with tempests in a group comp.

Engineer can absolutely tank both VG and Gorseval. When I’ve done it I just throw on a couple rabid rings and make sure everyone else is below my toughness, and spec into scrapper or inventions.

Note that on VG engineer can execute the tank role just fine, but generally you want your ranged damage dealers on the lightning team, and if you have an engineer tanking it may be tough to come up with a teamcomp that includes 5 ranged on lightning. The VG dps check is pretty low anyway though, so it shouldn’t really be a huge problem.

On gorseval engineer tank is extremely good. It is probably the best tank you can have besides druid since most gorseval comps run an engineer anyway.

Likes:
- Many fractals have interesting, unique mechanics
- Many fractals are challenging
- Daily rewards are fair
- Playing through snippets of Tyria’s past is a cool concept

Dislikes:
- Minimal incentive to attempt most scales, resulting in certain scales being run repeatedly
- Minimal incentive to attempt fractals at all outside of dailies, besides scale 40. This especially applies to higher tier fractals.
- Almost every instability feels frustrating rather than challenging, and some make certain classes a near necessity. This severely impacts the popularity of certain 10-scale ranges (even 41 swamp isn’t run)
- Extremely slow response to bugs/exploits, even for anet
- No new content or updates to existing content despite an apparent desire for players to do fractals.
- LFG tiers are not the same as daily fractal tiers (or that the LFG tiers exist at all)

insanemaniac.2456:

Dinosaurs.8674:

Condi engineer and Warrior on the other hand probably get close to the full 40% damage boost (or 36% or whatever depending on cast times), because they have high dps skills with low cooldowns, and can remove their lower dps skills from their rotations entirely.

this is approximately what i was asking. but after thinking about it more, what weth is saying is that high cd classes approach the higher upper bound of +66% damage almost regardless of quickness, while autoing classes approach the upper bound approach the lower upper bound of +50% damage almost regardless of alacrity.

when i have both buffs on a high cd class, i still do more damage because i am able to work in the lower dps skills i wouldnt have time to cast without quickness, but its still bounded by that number thats somewhere between 50 and 66%.

I wasn’t disagreeing with that idea, I was actually saying something else altogether that I though deserved expanding upon from the original post. I was pointing out that a nerf to alacrity is actually a substantial buff to builds/classes if their max dps rotation already didn’t involve primarily skills with no cooldowns. I mean sure rev sword autos might be nerfed by 10% or whatever, but if the other highest dps classes got nerfed even harder by alacrity changes, then rev is going to actually become more desirable because rev will do more damage now relative to condi warrior, engineer, tempest, etc.

First of all, if you have a raid group then the correct answer is “whatever your group needs”. My answer below is assuming you don’t have one and you’re pugging it.

Out of the four builds you listed, the only ones I can say for sure will be good after the balance patch are Tempest and condi Engineer. Both were indirectly nerfed by the alacrity changes but don’t suffer at all otherwise. Tempest’s Fresh Air even got a substantial buff, and if you make Tempest don’t be surprised if D/W becomes more desired than staff in some cases.

Condi Warrior will still probably be decent damage, but it’s tough to out-utility an engineer. It’s possible the new king of fires will actually be really good though, depending on how it’s implemented and how good Tempests are.

Thief is kindof a wildcard here. I wouldn’t be surprised if it still never saw use in raids because their party buffs are extremely minimal and their mobility and stealth are mostly useless in the first raid wing. But on the other hand, a 30% sword autoattack dps buff (which I believe is what was stated in the preview) is pretty huge, and their other weapons may receive buffs as well. Furthermore, power Thieves are completely unaffected by the alacrity nerf. It’s very possible that running a thief or maybe even two won’t be uncommon. They’re really competing with Tempest for the “dps with minimal party buffs” group slot, so a lot of it depends on the relative usefulness of Tempest vs Thief in a particular fight.

One problem with this post is that it assumes 100% alacrity uptime no matter what. In reality the alacrity nerf is harder than you suggest, because reduced alacrity effectiveness on the chronomancer also reduces alacrity uptime for the entire party, especially in a raid scenario where he may be trying to provide for two separate groups.

Also you did touch on it in your post a bit, but the disparity between alacrity effectiveness on different classes is monstrously high. Alacrity on power Revenant and power Thief has virtually no effect since neither one uses cooldown skills at all (with a couple minor exceptions) in their max dps rotation, and so almost every bit of the cooldown reduction is wasted and the dps increase is probably like 2-3% or maybe even less. Condi engineer and Warrior on the other hand probably get close to the full 40% damage boost (or 36% or whatever depending on cast times), because they have high dps skills with low cooldowns, and can remove their lower dps skills from their rotations entirely. So an alacrity nerf by 15% or whatever is indirectly a damage buff to Rev and Thief by about that amount for many pve applications, since their personal dps will not suffer at all.

Other than that it’s pretty solid though. I doubt most players think about the actual dps boost provided by either of these buffs, they just know that they increase party dps by a whole lot, lol.

For your specific problem with getting teleported out of the green lightning circle, there are two ways you can deal with it. The first is to have the lightning team not enter the green circle until a little bit before it goes off. Since the blue lightning targets player locations, it will not spawn in the green lightning circle if no one is in it. Even if the blue lightning begins to spawn in the green lightning circle after everyone moves it, the green lightning will go off first and you can just dodge the blue.

If people have trouble with that, the second solution is to have everyone who goes into the green lightning stack on top of each other. This will ensure that, if blue lightning spawns, the blue lightning will be concentrated in one place and the lightning team can just move to the other side of the green circle. This is less reliable but easier to get people to actually do.

In general, things you can do to help not miss the lightning are:
1.) Send 5 people. The DPS required on VG is really low, and so there is little incentive not to send an extra person.
2.) Use mobility skills. A lot of classes can afford to drop a dps skill for a movement skill if you are having trouble with the green lightning because, again, the required dps is pretty low. For example, you can take rocket boots over bomb kit on a condi engineer.
3.) Have good boss movement. Move the guardian ahead of time, even if this means taking some damage from the electrified floor, in order to guarantee a predictable lightning spawn. Your team isn’t going to wipe to a few ticks of floor damage, they’re going to wipe to half the lightning team being out of position.
4.) In the same vein as 3, make sure you are breaking the guardian’s bar almost instantly. This allows the tank to move the boss as needed and will prevent lightning spawning on an electrified floor or having a 50/50 chance to spawn in the wrong zone.

EDIT: You can also dodge across the diameter of the green circle as slydevil said above. This works extremely well if you can position yourself right and have good timing on the dodge.

I haven’t experienced any change in Gorseval’s behavior or damage, and I run this fight almost daily. My best guess is that for whatever reason your group is now doing poorly with killing the spirits that he consumes that boost his damage. Each one he eats will increase both his personal damage as well as the environment damage (aka “haunting aura”). So check if you guys are actually dealing with the spirits, maybe you have a different comp/teammates and no one is focused on killing them anymore or something.

If you plan on pug raiding you will have a hard time getting a raid group as a Dragonhunter at this point. Joining a guild that does raids is really the best solution as you will have teammates who will be patient with you and raid with you to teach mechanics rather than go for a kill immediately. Even if you had a “meta” class you would have a hard time finding a pug group that would be patient with you as you learned the mechanics of the fight, since for most people the times of spending hours grinding a boss while players learn the fight are over; instead people just want to complete the raid as fast as possible. This is even worse for you because on Dragonhunter your only role in the first raid fight (VG) is tank, which is extremely difficult compared to every other role in that fight.

Heh I actually didn’t know about that table, good to know my spreadsheet is accurate though lol. You actually do go off the table though and it is common in a raid scenario. With ferocity food (butternut squash), ferocious winds, banner of discipline, and assassin’s presence you have 250.46 crit multi. You actually go off without the food as well, but not by as much.

The power value at which the last point of precision is better than power with 250.46 crit multi is 3495, in case anyone cares =P

It depends on what your application is. The usefulness of capping crit is dependent on what other buffs you have. In raids where you always expect to have 25 might and various other power buffs, you will gain damage by going from 99% to 100% crit and dropping 21 power.

If you do not expect to have a lot of might and other group power buffs – for example if you are playing solo in open world – or often even in fractals and dungeons – then you should just stay full zerker, because in that situation points in power increase average dps more than points in precision.

So the short and unhelpful version is “the optimal crit chance depends on how much power you have”. I can say though that unless your application is raids you might as well just stay full zerker and use precision food. The amount of power required to make going from 99% to 100% crit worth it is very high.

There isn’t “no reason” but staying in fire is generally the highest dps because lava font does so much damage and has a fairly low cooldown.

You can swap to water for heals and a chill; Air for swiftness, blind, stun, and a lightning field; Earth for immob, reflect, and a blast finisher. Once you have tempest, overload earth is also a 20 second group protection skill, which is situationally useful. But these are generally utility applications, and if you just want to kill whatever you’re against the fastest you should stay in fire, so that is the dps rotation you asked for.

Once you start filling out other traitlines, there is stuff you can do like swap to air for extra crit chance while you use a conjured weapon and glyph of storms, and then swap back to fire when the conjure is used up.

+33% Bleeding comes from the Firearms Minor Grandmaster trait Serrated Steel.

+33% Burning cones from the Firearms Major Grandmaster trait Incendiary Powder.

Since it was mentioned above, I will add the the 50% condition duration on pistol skills given by Chemical Rounds is independent of the normal condition duration cap of 100%. So if you stack to ~100% with Serrated Steel/Incendiary Powder (33%), Food (30%), Sigil of Malice (10%), Viper’s Armor+Weapons+Ammy (26.4%), then your pistol skills’ burns and bleeds will have 150% additional condition duration.

softblackcarbon.1537:

I want to just disagree with two points Dinosaurs made, but overall I think their comment is also quite helpful. Hopefully between mine and theirs, your eles will feel better about their job.

1. I don’t like telling your spirit holders (during split phase) to run into orbs to hold the spirits. If your orb clear is good, this shouldn’t be a problem in the first place, but if it is, have them call out where they need orb clearing, and have your tempests start working on that ASAP. Most of the classes that hold can at least apply soft ccs (in this case meaning anything but immob) from range and should avoid getting the orb debuff if possible. Obviously if it’s a choice between wiping and getting the orb debuff, get the debuff but if you’re finding that’s the case a lot, I’d predict that there was some other problem you’re probably just not seeing.

2. It’s pretty unnecessary to have a second person clearing orbs during the second split phase. I am the only one clearing orbs in my group and I can always clear every single orb during that phase by myself and leave us a completely clear arena for the next updraft phase. Obviously people can help out if it’s not a loss for them (sometimes my revs like to run over and kill orbs right when they spawn because you can auto them far enough away to not get debuffed) but it’s not strictly necessary to assign an extra person to do this at all.

I’ll be raiding tonight so message me in-game if your group needs any help!

1.) I guess it depends on how you split up your team during the split phase, we usually send one person to 3 of the spirits and then zerg them down one by one. If one of the people who is alone has an orb covering their spirit, we just have them walk in and CC the spirit anyway. Then once the orbs are clear they just pick up the orange orbs. Most of the time it’s probably fine if they wait, but if theyre the last person the zerg comes to or something there could be problems if they wait too long. DPS during the split phase doesn’t matter unless your damage is so poor that you are hitting the enrage timer so taking the dps hit is pretty unimportant.

I certainly would not advise the entire zerg (5-7 players) walking into the orbs.

2.) From the perspective of players who aren’t practiced at clearing orbs, two players are necessary. If they are having trouble with orbs already I don’t want them to think they should be cutting back on orb clearers, lol. And again, dps during split doesn’t really matter so there is little incentive to not have two players clearing orbs to get them down as fast as possible.

I don’t think I would go so far as to say shoulders are more common than everything else based on such a limited sample size, though I would not be surprised at all if the cheaper ascended pieces (shoulders gloves boots) were more common than the others. This is also in line with my own ascended drops from fractals/raids (3 boots, no more than 1 of anything else), though again a larger sample size is required to make any real determination.

I also would not consider it unfair if the more valuable ascended pieces were harder to get.

Jayjaydee.3827:

My static group has been stuck on gorseval for the past month. There are two things that seem to consistently be a problem for us, and nobody is sure how to fix it.

1) when we go to the wall, we cant consistently aggro the adds to follow. Some stay back in the middle and we have no idea why. Whats the best technique for this?

2) blue orbs. We generally have 2 eles on orb duty, but its usually out of control by the last phase and we cant make it to the wall for the last updraft. I dont play ele at all, so I dont know waht it takes to clear the orbs. I guess my quesiton here is; if an ele is on orb duty, is that ALL they should be doing, or are they splitting there time between orbs and dps on gorseval? The videos of gorseval clears I have watched are all pretty clear of orbs. I dont know. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

1.) If the problem is not pets or spirits, the most likely reason for this is that your entire party isn’t moving to the wall fast enough. I can’t say for sure since I obviously haven’t seen video of your group, but it happened many times when I played ele and tried to stay back a bit to clear extra orbs that the spirits would aggro onto me since I was the only one left in the center, and then one or more of them would never make it to the outside. You need to get on your group members to move to the wall quickly when it is time to go – no staying behind to clear orbs or dps or feed your cat. it is also possible that your tank is moving too late in general, but this shouldn’t be an issue assuming he runs all the way to the wall when it is time to move.

2.) I play ele almost every time on this fight, and at this point I am usually the only ele in 8-10 man runs. Here is all the advice I can give regarding clearing orbs:

A.) Having higher party dps makes orb clearing easier. If gorseval dies faster, fewer orbs spawn and the ones that do have less time to grow. With two eles this shouldn’t be an issue anyway, but you may need to take a hard look at your party comp and your players’ dps rotations.

B.) Leave the stack as little as possible. Lava font has 1200 range and the edge of it can hit further. When you leave the stack two very bad things happen. First, the bug/feature that causes gorseval to aggro onto the furthest person away can cause him to move. This can cause a severe loss of party dps, which gives orbs more time to grow. Second, when you leave the stack you stop gaining might/fury. Not having enough might means that it takes more attacks to clear an orb, and you will spend more time clearing each one.

C.) Don’t be afraid to use non-lava font skills on orbs, especially when they are grouped up. 2 orbs near each other? Glyph of storms that kitten. Oh look at those 3 orbs over there, too bad my lava font can’t hit them all. No problem, lava font 1 or 2, and drop a meteor shower on that kitten. Lava font on cooldown? Ice Bow 4 that kitten (assuming you run Ice Bow, I usually take feel the burn because it’s easier and gives a small heal but tbh I’m not sure which is better). This isn’t always optimal, but it gets the job done and your group isn’t going for speed clears anyway. Eles are very high dps on Gorseval, but your group should have the dps to kill it without you min-maxing your skill usage. A 6 man kill was just posted, if your group doesn’t have the dps for a 10 man kill then that is not the ele’s fault.

D.) Clear every orb you see that is within a reasonable range immediately, until the second split phase is over. Then only clear orbs where the remaining updraft(s) are located, or any orbs which are encroaching on the middle where he jumps to do the ground pound.

E.) Tell your team to stop being little kittenes and just run into the orb to CC the spirits. On the pull-gorseval-to-updraft you should not stay behind to clear, as this can mess up the spirit aggro as stated in my response to question 1. So you can only clear the ones that are close enough to gorseval’s pull path. This means orbs will build up on the opposite side. When you land the circles might start to get big. It’s ok. Just clear what is on your side until he goes to ground pound, and then clear the orbs during the ground pound. If there are orbs still there when the split phase happens, tell your guy at top right or whatever to stop freaking out, you’re coming to clear orbs, just CC him and grab the orange spheres afterwards to remove the orb debuff. Also kittenty protip, if you get downed and come back up via rally on spirit/res the debuff is removed from you, I have actually done this a couple times but it’s pretty suboptimal, lol.

F.) Learn how to not go down. A downed ele cannot clear orbs, unless you are downed on an orb and your auto lava font trait procs, but this is a poor solution to the problem. Getting you back up also wastes dps. Use overload during ground pound for protection, try to avoid the spirits if they’re up, stay on the heal stack as much as possible, and most importantly DO NOT GET SLAMMED. If your ele is doing these things and still getting downed consistently then you need to politely tell your druid to watch some videos and get good. It can also help to bring a little extra healing on non-druid classes, like the ele trait that heals when you apply an aura, or the engineer can bring inventions instead of tools/scrapper for extra healing and negligible dps loss.

G.) In the same vein as F, when you are clearing orbs during split you should know where your druid is. Eles take a lot of environment damage relative to other classes, and it’s ok if you need to walk over to your druid for heals, or he needs to walk over to you. If your group is having trouble with killing the spirits that give gorseval the 10% damage buff, this can be a big problem for eles, as the environment damage is amplified as well. So hopefully you you fix issue #1 it helps with issue #2.

H.) Have a good build. Be crit capped with zerk/assassin. Use runes of the scholar. Have ascended staff+trinkets at least.

I.) Put at least 1 tempest in a group with your chronomancer. Alacrity works wonders for orb clearing as well as party dps. (This should probably be one of the first things I said, lol).

J.) Practice, I know you said your group has been at it for a while, but practice still helps. The things I layed out here are pretty conservative, once your eles know the fight well and your group is consistent they will know where they can cut corners to get in more dps.

Sorry if this is too much. Good luck, hope this helps!

P.S. If you run with only one ele, you still need one other person clearing orbs during second split phase. Condi war or engineer is fine.

deSade.9437:

spoj.9672:

I have a problem with all this support for making fights as mechanical as possible. VG and Sabetha both have a lot of mechanics to deal with. And as a result it feels less like you are fighting the boss and more like you are fighting the mechanics/arena. I dont find that fun.

On the other hand Gorseval is much more about the boss itself. Its a lot more fun. But as a result its easier once you get the dps check and basic mechanics sorted. The thing is that style can be really good if its expanded on.

PREACH. IT.

I’m actually really surprised that many people have agreed with this opinion. Gorseval is my least favorite fight of the three for the exact reason that some people apparently love it – the fight is less mechanics based, and everyone goes through the same mechanics at the same time as a team. Therefore there is very little personal responsibility on the fight and it doesn’t feel like much of an accomplishment to defeat it. If your group has enough dps then once you learn the egg timings and break patterns the fight goes to farm mode very fast.

Also the opposite side, I actually think the “fighting the arena” thing is a lot of fun and doesn’t feel at all like you aren’t fighting the boss also. The VG fight to me never feels like you aren’t fighting VG itself, and the Sabetha fight I guess is against her entire bandit gang, but I actually think that’s pretty cool from a flavor standpoint. I don’t think that either of them isn’t “about the boss” at all.

To me, most of the enjoyment of the fight is in dealing with the combinations of mechanics. VG’s mechanics (seekers, blue lightning, green lightning, rotating electrified floor) all go on at the same time and can all interact to make the others more difficult to deal with if you aren’t prepared. Sabetha’s mechanics don’t have as much complex inteteraction – it’s mostly just a lot of kitten dropping on you or flying at you while you try to avoid the flame wall and send people up to canons. But having to execute rotations and stack in the right locations and keep kiting bullets etc etc is still pretty fun to me. I also like that a single mistake from one person can ruin the entire fight. Gorseval’s mechanics all come one by one in a predictable order against the entire party at once. If you (or one person on your team who is calling) know the order and you aren’t stupid you have already won. “Watch next attack for slam…get ready to break…hold CC…be ready to get max melee/far/close to avoid black goop….ok break….ok eggs are coming now keep moving…pull him to wall…pull spirits and cleave them down…jump to updraft….” kind of overkill there but it gets the point across – this exact mechanics rotation will occur in every single gorseval fight, and the way to deal with the mechanics is the exact same every time. If your party has the DPS to kill gorseval without using updrafts the fight is even more of a joke.

This predictability exists in VG and sab too, but at least in those fights there is a lot of kitten going on at once, so even if you know things are coming if they interact with each other you might have to deal with a unforseen difficult situation like seekers + blue on lightning field or something. Gorseval’s only interacting mechanic is orbs, but if your elementalist is good those should be a non-issue.

I’m not saying your opinion is “wrong” or something, it’s not like I can tell you how you feel lol. I just wanted to offer a differing opinion on the 3 fights, because I personally would much rather see more fights like VG than like Gorseval and I would assume there are others that feel the same way.

Having fights be more mechanics based versus dps based also makes them much more accessible to players without a lot of money to spend on ascended gear, which judging by some of the responses in this thread is an issue people care about lol.

Xyonon.3987:

Therefore yes, I 100% agree with your statement that every condi engi should take Malice and Geomancy as their sigils … unless ofc you are a lucky kitten and got all ascended viper trinkets from the raids Then you go for Bursting and Geomancy.

Greez!
- Ziggy

Haha yeah, I was writing under the assumption that you would actually need to use sigil of malice to cap condi duraton. I’ve been lucky enough to get a ring from VG…maybe if I get more luck from VG and Gorseval I can do it! Or if the Gorseval trinkets are made non-unique like the VG ring two of those+1 ring+ammy would only be slightly below cap (99.7% assuming my spreadsheet doesn’t suck)…pretty sure it’s all just a pipe dream though unless they make ascended trinkets craftable/buyable, lol

I would like to see mechanics that require mobility and that require players to split up more. Vale guardian has this to an extent, though the mobility requirement is really pretty lax and the fight is so easy overall that it isn’t much of a test. Gorseval and Sabetha require some splitting but only for a short period of time, and not for very many players at once. The latter two fights are 90% everyone stacked hitting the boss and going through the same boss mechanics at the same time. I would like to see a fight where players spend large chunks of time or even most of the raid in small groups or alone in a situation where a specific skillset is needed. Would also like to see fights where swiftness/superspeed/blinks/leaps are not a slight benefit but are essentially required.

There are plenty of other game mechanics that I think it would be nice to have some relevance in a raid boss fight, like blind, resistance, and condi removal. Generally would be nice if many of the CCs in the game were actually used for what they did rather than just being taken to remove a break bar.

Engineer is better against VG because it has lots of cc and seeker control and can attack from extremely long range.

Warrior does insane dps against gorseval and is better in general, though it is worth noting that most groups will always bring one engineer against gorseval to break his bar with slick shoes.

Against sabetha the engineer utilities are unimportant, and warrior is better simply by having more damage.

In the end both are very good; however nothing is beating warrior in terms of condi dps, especially against an immobile target.

Thanks for posting this, I’ve been using runes of the berserker under the logic of “it was in the patch notes a while ago and haven’t seen anyone complain about it”, but I wasn’t actually sure it was fixed lol.

As an aside on the “condition damage” thing, the “condition damage” in sigil of bursting is not the same as in rune of the berserker. Bursting will increase your condition damage stat by 6%, which actually isn’t very good. On condi engineer you will gain much more damage from using sigil of geomancy instead (ofc paired with sigil of malice). Just in case some people still don’t know this. Enjoy your ~10g in savings.

Can you even get ball of dark energy from rings? It never even occurred to me that that might be an option. I and many others I know have salvaged waaaaay more than 9 rings and have never gotten ball of dark energy. If it’s possible the chance must be obscenely low.

The ascended amulet salvage data on the wiki has 1/8 chance to get ball of dark energy from amulets, though the sample size is really small (64) and I think the chance is actually lower than that, maybe 1/10? Anyway, even with a 1/8 chance to get ball of dark energy, your chance of not getting one from 10 amulet salvages is 26.3%, a far cry from a statistical anomaly. Salvaging ascended armor and weapons has always been the more cost effective way to go, since the ball of dark energy is guaranteed.

There is nothing wrong with the ball of dark energy salvage rate.

As above posters have said it’s all RNG, I’ve seen a few people say they think the average is around 3 matrices per salvage but i’ve seen no data to back it up. I personally have gotten 20 matrices from a single salvage a couple times, which I think is pretty lucky. Funnily enough it’s actually similar to how encryptions used to be, where the average return was decent but if you didn’t hit the big reward that often then the returns might take a while to pan out. Except 3 stabilizing matrices is worth less than a gold at this point so maybe it isn’t worth it =P

Yeah I have a couple friends in the same situation, and it’s pretty silly. Always fun when your “unique” raid boss drop is worth less than your guaranteed random rare item.

At least give it like 1g vendor price or a mystic forge recipe to turn it into a different mini or something. I understand the logic of not being able to be sold on the tp but come on, you shouldn’t be getting a “unique” raid drop where the highest value option is deleting it.

Artemis Thuras.8795:

Something to add:
Got “Spectral Balm” tonight.
This is the gorseval accessory.
No viper stats.
Apparently there is 2 accessories, however I’m going to suggest that the other one is unique, just like my new spectral balm ( which has zealot stats, which I may use for my druid).

Given that its unique – no having 2 asc zealots accessories?
Alternatively no having two viper accessories?
Same applies for the other stat options I suppose – but these two i know are popular choices for raiding.

Seems like they need to include a wider selection of stats, or not be unique.
The former of those two seems like a better option to me.

I’m guessing this hasn’t been noticed much as they are rng and probably not too many players have them yet.

The stat combos available are based on the type of trinket dropped, and actually there are four accessories, with each one being equivalent to one of the four raid ascended chest categories (Assaulter, Defender, Healer, Malicious). The Spectral Balm is restricted to healer’s stats in the same way as if you had found a “Healer’s Spirit Branch”. Viper’s stats are only available on the “Malicious” equivalent accessory, which I’m assuming is Spectral Talisman.

Interestingly you actually can get 2 Zealot’s accessories despite them being unique because it is an available stat combo for both Assaulter and Healer items. This isn’t true for all stat combos, for example Viper’s is only available on malicious items.

Also interestingly the Vale Guardian ascended rings are not unique, meaning that you can use two identical Viper’s rings and both will have offensive infusion slots.

From personal experience I can say that even when tanking as engineer/scrapper you want viper armor and weapons (or sinister if you cannot afford to swap to viper), along with as many sinister trinkets as you can take while remaining the highest toughness character in your squad (you also need at least one viper’s trinket to cap condi duration). This is the highest dps option on condi engineer ,and extra toughness/vitality from rabid/carrion is unnecessary.

This is especially true against gorseval where dps is important, and you take the same damage as the rest of your squad. If your elementalists can survive being stacked on gorseval in full zerk/assassin gear then you can survive it without resorting to rabid or carrion gear.

Against VG you will probably take a little more damage as tank since you often want to change zones while the floor is still electrified. But that isn’t anywhere near enough damage to require different armor, unless you stand in the seekers like and idiot or your druid doesn’t know what they are doing. Really on VG you could take rabid/carrion/whatever and be fine because the dps required in that fight is really low, but I certainly wouldn’t suggest to someone that they should spend money on carrion/rabid/rampager armor, especially if it is ascended (unless you are crafting it because it is cheap and plan on converting it to vipers, lol).

I actually kindof like having something from the dungeon being drop only, though I admit it’s a bit unfair in this case since there is no other way to obtain rings and accessories with the new stat combos. I wouldn’t be surprised if these trinkets remained drop only and new ways to obtain ascended trinkets with the 4-stat combos were added (crafting, achievements, fractals, etc).

Even though only one is needed per group, chronomancer and druid are probably the most desirable classes for raids. The skill of the chrono and druid can make or break a raid group.

Next is probably warrior since it is highly desirable with both condi and ps war being very strong in raids. It is less “wanted” because there are a lot of warriors out there and the class is fairly easy to play.

Revenant, Engineer, Tempest are probably about even. My group typically brings 1 rev to the raids, though some groups value it really highly and will use 2-4 of them. Revs are pretty common and are also easy to play which makes them somewhat less desirable. Engineer is really good against vale guardian (knockbacks, immobs, ranged, good condi damage) and gorseval (slick shoes), but suffers due to being a condi class that isn’t warrior. Tempest is extremely good in the gorseval and sabetha fights and so you will often see at least two against each boss, though it’s mediocre against VG. Then again some people hate tempest in every fight because it’s squishy and they don’t know how to avoid damage or their druid sucks.

Condi necro is also quite good, though I haven’t seen them be in high demand. Epidemic is really strong against both gorseval and sabetha, but some groups don’t bother since the extra dps is often overkill and the really high dps epi strats require 2 necros which is more than some groups want. A lot of groups also do not do the double necro strat against sabetha because high numbers of minions cause her napalm attack to become bugged and not necessarily target the furthest person away.

Guardian is also pretty good in all the fights because free protection is really helpful for keeping your team alive, but most groups don’t want them except maybe against sab.

Thief/DD is used for pretty much nothing, at least so far!

All this being said, if your group is decent you should be able to play any class and still defeat any of the first wing bosses. This is especially true against vale guardian and sabetha, but even gorseval isn’t that much of a dps check. Most pug groups probably would not take you as thief, but if you raid with guildies they would hopefully take you along sometimes, at least to learn the mechanics. Thief’s DPS isn’t that bad, it’s just worse than the other dps classes and they don’t bring the same raid utility as those other classes as well. But they are certainly the least desirable for the first wing.

Prism.5649:

Actually you only need two accessories to have Assassin’s stats for maximum DPS benefit. Maxing crit chance is easier than you think. Everything else is Berserker.

Also, D/x doesn’t use Lightning Hammer in PvE because you never spend more than a second or two outside of Air attunement, and LH is a DPS loss over the Air/Fire skills.

And if you want to tank, then swap out your accessories for Cleric’s stats. Ele makes a great tank because it has such high self heals. Ele can even fulfill both the healing and tanking role simultaneously with full Cleric/Zealot gear. It can be a bit tough, but is totally possible and there are videos of it being done.

Edit for link:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQFAWn0XCVPgNNAmNA0RgFBALIAUAOACXySQKwt1ObztA-TxRBABkpEDPdAPcBAMTJIAPAgrUeQp6PkBQfBA-e

Without Spotter/Banners you are looking at 89.81% crit chance. Spotter’s is another 7.14% and Banner of Discipline is another 8.09%, for a total of 105.04%. Even if you dropped Signet of Fire you would still be sitting at 96.46% crit chance. Even if you don’t have a Druid healer, you are still sitting at 97.9% crit chance.

Equipping anymore than 2 Assassin’s accessories is absolute overkill. Equipping an entire armor set and possibly more, as you suggested, is quite simply a waste of stats and will lower your DPS in all situations.

And of course, if you’re running the D/x build then you have the 9% crit chance from Aeromancer’s training, so you are guaranteed to have max crit chance at all times.

Lightning Hammer is useful for D/X if you aren’t running fresh air. D/W Fresh Air is the best and most common D/X build right now for raids, but I was talking about ele skills that give precision so I figured I might as well mention it.

Really though you’re right assuming that you’re running precision food instead of power food. It is also potentially useful to be able to take an extra slot skill instead of fire signet, which would require more precision on gear. Assassin’s gear was the right choice for me personally since I already had a full set of berserker trinkets and did not want to buy assassin’s trinkets when I had to get new ascended armor anyway. Ascended stat changes are cheap and many players don’t have lots of laurels. I just use power food and it works out the same.

I should have mentioned that mostly berserker’s stats with precision food is equivalent, though. This is important because precision food is generally much cheaper.

Here is something like what all assassins armor with power food looks like

http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQFAWn0XClNgNNA+XC0RgFBALIAUAOAut2ZbuV4SWCSBA-ThRBABmpEEgHAgoq/8wFAAPdAXp8jUARsMC-e

64.19% crit chance with fire signet, +20% for fury, +15.23% for spotter and banner makes 99.42% crit chance. Not exactly 100% but pretty close. So If I needed to drop fire signet (which you probably dont for the current only wing) I could get some assassin trinkets and swap those out. You are right that berserker’s armor works in general for max crit, but it’s equivalent to assassin’s depending on the food you use. Sorry, I was wrong about the necessity of assassins armor in my earlier post, though it isn’t any worse than berserker’s. Just be sure you have everything sorted out with your trinkets and food.

No need for me to swap my armor back though don’t worry lol

Celestial is not useful for the first wing of Spirit Vale. The meta build for tempest is all out DPS. Note that while Berserker is the highest DPS you can have with no buffs, with the power buffs that are typical in raids (25 might stacks, Banner of Strength, Power food, Empowering Flame while in fire, in addition to various ferocity buffs) Berserker is not the optimal stat choice as it does not allow you to max you critical hit chance. Even if your crit chance is 99%, gaining 21 precision to increase it to 100% is a higher DPS gain than 21 strength assuming you have the buffs listed above (though you don’t need all of those buffs for precision to be better), and so you will likely want a substantial portion of your gear – certainly at least the armor and likely more – to be Assassin’s.

Capping your crit chance is a bit tricky because elementalist has several skills/traits that grant precision only under certain conditions. These are Signet of Fire, Aeromancer’s Training, and Conjure Lightning Hammer. If you are planning on playing staff – and you should be at least for Gorseval – you will be spending almost all your time in fire and therefore should not plan for the Aeromancer’s Training or Lightning Hammer buffs. If you’re playing D/X you will probably be spending a lot of time in lightning and may be running Lightning Hammer for when you swap to other attunements. In both cases you can decide if you want to be running Signet of Fire or if you would rather take more precision on your gear. Ultimately this is a calculation you have to do for yourself since I don’t know how you plan on raiding. When calculating don’t forget that you will likely have Spotter and Banner of Discipline for a free 320 precision, as well as fury for +20% crit chance. You can also run curry butternut squash soup, or even sigil of accuracy if you’re desperate.

Note that outside of raids you may not have all of these buffs, and Berserker would then be better. Additionally, you may have other classes you wish to share the armor with for which Berserker would be better.

Also note that although capping crit is the “best” option for dps and for the first raid wing overall, it isn’t like the raid is unclearable with Berserker’s (or even Celestial) gear. Since the raid opened I have been playing tempest there with exotic berserker’s armor and berserker ascended staff + trinkets to beat Gorseval and Sabetha every week (I played engineer on VG). I only finished my light ascended armor and swapped it to assassin’s a couple weeks ago. So don’t be overly worried about having the 100% best build, I only wrote all this about assassin’s gear because you asked specifically about raids.

tl;dr don’t make celestial, assassin’s is probably best but do you

EDIT: Since you specifically mentioned tanking, typically the tank will just swap out a couple rings or other trinkets until they have the most toughness in the group. A full set of toughness gear is extreme overkill. If your only armor set has toughness you are actually a huge liability in raids because it means no one else can ever tank without having a toughness armor set (which very few people have in ascended) or sacrificing a lot of dps.

phys.7689:

Harper.4173:

Jahroots.6791:

The core problem that plagues all PvE content is effort vs reward. In order to get anything even remotely worthwhile you need to repeat content ad nauseam. It’s flawed design, but ‘necessary’ for Anet’s business model.

Personally, having experienced a variety of approaches to various fractal encounters a few dozen times, I’ll stick to the fastest and safest method where possible. Longer fights really aren’t any more fun. I suspect a great many other players feel the same way.

Agreed – as someone who’s done fractals ever since they were first released I can honestly tell you the last thing I want is to enjoy another full length mossman fight.
The content is old and stale – if not for rewards people wouldn’t touch it.

Of course – we might not feel the same way about it if more and more content was added giving us a large variety of fractal islands – maybe that variety might have been enough to keep older content “fresh” since you might see it more rarely – but alas it was not to be.

the exploit isnt any shorter though, just easier and more monotonous.

but as you said, this is a flaw in design. fractals was made to offer variety, its not really supposed to be about doing the fastest fractals as easily as possible.

fixing the exploits is needed, just because they are exploits, but it wont solve the problem. with current system it will always be about spamming the easiest fractal, if swamp gets fixed it might be aquatic, if aqutic is long, they may find a shortcut in uncategorized.

this is huge and hamstrings new fractals, even if they are better designed, more engaging, they will be competing with swamp, or whatever is the meta easy fast fractal at the time.

This is exactly correct; even without the mossman exploit, boarding the triple swamp daily train for 51+ fractals would still be the most common method since swamp would still be the fastest fractal.

The exploits or design oversights or whatever you want to call them should be fixed on principle, but really that would not fix any of the staleness of fractals. People will gravitate towards to faster/easier option if one is available. This is unavoidable to an extent and it isn’t a problem that players want the most return for their time spent, but it does mean that most players will rarely/never even attempt most of the scales under normal conditions. Others in this thread have pointed out that no one is being forced to run 7 swamp/molten bros for dailies, and this is 100% true. But the daily fractal system – essentially your “fractal goals for the day” – encourages players to take the easy option to get the guaranteed fractal daily success. My guildmates and I are pretty good at the game, and we could beat any of the fractal scales if we tried, but every day our 51+ dailies are still triple swamp. Every day we fight mossman and do the dumb exploit and beat him with 1 finger. Not because we have to, but because if we do anything else we might fail or take a long time and have to try again, and the potential for wasted time discourages us from playing different scales. Judging by the statements anet has made about fractals in recent months I would say this is not what they envisioned.

The obvious solution is to just make the dailies be 3 specific fractal scales (or 3 + boss or 2 + boss) instead of the current 1 specific + 2 of your choice (aka swamp/molten bros). If the dailies are difficult fractals people will still do them, because the daily rewards are actually quite good on average (especially for the 51+ daily, despite what many unlucky posters have said), and so even if it takes longer, you don’t feel as much like you are wasting time by doing aetherblade retreat or cliffside because there is no other option to get the substantial daily reward. Those scales are relatively lengthy and annoying to do, but if there is a good reward in the end I’ll happily do them and feel like I accomplished something afterwards.

I completely understand that the idea of the current daily system was to make fractal rewards achievable by more players, but I think I am not the only player who feels that fractals are less enjoyable than pre-HoT, even with the improved liquid rewards. The exploits are dumb and should be fixed, but those fixes would merely make farming/dailies a bit slower.

Asherah.7651:

This is awesome! Now I’m definitely not going back to staff!! I’m just way more comfortable with D/x….dat mobility!!! Just curious, how does this compare with staff DPS?

Against Vale Guardian specifically the damage is almost certainly much better with D/W since most of the high dps staff skills require the target to remain stationary for the duration. The same applies obviously to any other mobile target in open world.

As far as the other raid bosses go:

Staff is substantially better than every other weapon against Gorseval. He gets hit with almost the entirety of meteor shower, and lava font to clear orbs from range and cleave the wall/spirits means that you maintain extremely high dps even while performing vital utility functions.

Against Sabetha I have no idea which one is better, though I can say with absolute certainty that staff is much easier to execute if you don’t have a lot of practice on the fight. My raid group has run D/W tempest for this fight (though we also ran 2 staff tempests at the same time), mainly because we were lacking protection and the swap to earth for 22 seconds of aoe protection is less of a dps loss as D/W. But even besides that, repeatedly granting static charge to allies on top of the fairly solid overload air dps is some pretty crazy damage. It’s definitely something I’m going to look into.

A few reasons I can see that it might compare unfavorably with staff here is that 1.) a lot times near the end of the sabetha fight it is difficult to stand near her for extended periods of time; 2.) Bolt to the Heart may only be active for half of the fight, but the last 25% of the fight is substantially harder than the rest, so it is really active all the time it actually matters; 3.) lava font is extremely quick and safe turret clearing utility.

I would definitely like to hear from others about D/W vs staff, maybe when I have some free time I’ll math it out and see how it looks.

Although the above posters are correct in that you only have a selection of 3 stats (assassin’s, celestial, minstrel’s(?)), don’t forget that you can still swap its stats with the usual weapon stat swap recipe for a fairly modest price. If you want the North Wind skin back after stat swapping it will cost you a transmutation charge, however.

The VG fight is pretty flexible for who you put on the circle since you don’t really need that much dps to kill it. Obviously the best candidates are the ones that lose the least dps from range; for my group that generally winds up being our 3 condi team members (engi/necro), the druid healer, and one more (our “extra” dps after 4 total rev+warrior).

It’s actually pretty bad to send the chrono onto lightning duty because that means your main dps (likely revs/warriors/other power) are missing out on quickness/alacrity and that can be a substantial dps loss overall.

If you’re running a non-tank dragonhunter it is extremely good for lightning team as you can give protection/aegis to help with seeker emergencies and lightning that spawns on the electrified floor.

This is someone off topic, but I would strongly recommend assigning 5 players to lightning team, at least after the first phase is over. Missing lightning even once can mean then end of your run, and VG is an extremely lenient fight in terms of dps once you learn the mechanics. There is little reason to risk having only 4 on lightning considering all the things that can go wrong in that case (1 person down to seeker, 1 person too far away, someone gets teleported, someone rolls off early). If you want a speed run then obviously only use 4, but if you are going for consistency then having the extra person is helpful. If you are having trouble with dps with 5 on lightning team you likely need to reevaluate your teamcomp or work on mechanics/rotations.