Guild Wars 2

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hybrid.5027:

EcoRI.9273:

Oh, I see that the brackets got reshuffled. Its definitely better than what it was before, can’t wait to take on DnT first round :-D. Not going to bet though.

Unfortunately a team has informed me there is a good chance that they won’t be there so I had to move them to the bottom seed so the highest seed possible could get a bye in case there is a bye.

I’ll try to get some of my rich guildies to bet on us tonight.

Oh, I see that the brackets got reshuffled. Its definitely better than what it was before, can’t wait to take on DnT first round :-D. Not going to bet though.

hybrid.5027:

EcoRI.9273:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/300m6m/perpetual_dungeon_noob_conundrum/

I feel this guy is a prime example of someone that can greatly benefit from this cleric build. Some people just don’t have time to improve their gameplay to warrant running berserker.

I disagree. They are talking about dungeons not fractals. Clerics build is useless in dungeons.

Second, it sounds like they have weird builds. I doubt they are capping Might or Vuln. I would probably guess their ranger may not even be using frost spirit. Just by making a few build changes to be more effective they could be making 30%+ more DPS which would be all the difference in the world.

Quoted from the OP

“Meta build are only “kinda” used. Everyone is more or less aware of them. Everyone tweaks them to suit them. Yes, the rangers love having Longbow and a bear. We’re aware that’s not considered optimal, but we stand by people who want to play what they like."

“I used to play an AH guardian with Knight’s. Usually I’m the healer in various MMOs, so I thought that’s what my Guardian would be.”

“Clearly, we don’t have the time or the energy to do any kind of serious group training. And we probably wouldn’t want to, we’re not aiming to be that hardcore at anything.”

Honestly in PHYW situations with players that don’t plan on improving, Clerics(useless in the sense of speed running) is the way to go for not wiping.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/300m6m/perpetual_dungeon_noob_conundrum/

I feel this guy is a prime example of someone that can greatly benefit from this cleric build. Some people just don’t have time to improve their gameplay to warrant running berserker.

I really like Strife videos. He explains dungeon mechanics and some class mechanics.
Of course his stuff is outdated. Maybe you should make similar videos.

TP is too slow and you get TP suppression after a certain point.

CM p1 Frost also got a radius increase and it seemed like they removed the cooldown so now its firing that frost gun 24/7 non stop.

Fhaeris.9237:

EcoRI.9273:

Lorgus.6148:

EcoRI.9273:

Stealth to skip content, otherwise they are garbage in dungeons.

I wouldn’t call defiant stripping, above-average damage, blinds on trash, blast finishers and projectile absorb to be “garbage”

If Stealth is removed from the game,

This argument makes no sense, do you realize that? You’re a bad troll.

I use hyberpoles alot.
Thief = stealth, and when players who optimize their play consider which class they want to be into their group for dungeons, they don’t really consider the thief’s defiance stripping ability, their blinds or whatever that was mentioned. Most of the secondary kits mentioned do not speed up a dungeon path and are not necessary what so ever for a optimized meta group(2eles 1 guardian 1 warrior 1 thief) that actually use up to date dungeon strategies. Thief’s ability to Stealth >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> (blinds,headshot,dps)

Defiance stripping – Most bosses die before you can even remove all the defiance for a second shot at CC. And even if you can do so for some bosses, it is not optimal play. When a thief is using headshot, they are losing out on all their DPS for a good 5seconds or even longer if they don’t pick up an icebow after headshotting.

Blinds – You bring thieves to stealth skip trashmob, if you are fighting trashmobs, you are doing something suboptimally.

Projectile Absorption – Guardian has it covered.

Thaddeus.4891:

EcoRI.9273:

Honestly in dungeons with optimal play(as in if you want to blaze through dungeons) in consideration, I can’t see defiance stripping with a thief being a good reason to bring them. Most bosses die before you can even remove all the defiance for a second shot at CC. And even if you can do so for some bosses, it is not optimal play, it is safe play( which then goes into the same catagory as why some people bring a healer guardian to dungeons.).

For most encounter yes, but here some example where a defiance ripping capability of the thief will be useful.
- Arah path 1 : The Tar is quite tough to kill. Even in a record run, it take about 50sec to kill. In this situation, it’s better to use Icebow one after the other, rather than all in one shot. In normal speed run or pugs run the Tar will take enough time to kill than 2 or even 3 rounds of Icebow will probably be needed.
- HotW path 1 : The final boss can be a pain in the kitten and hard to melee. A thief keeping the boss wihtout defiant and Icebow to keep the boss almost perma Deep Freeze is the most efficient way of doing this boss that i know off.
- Arah Path 2 : An efficient way or killing him is by using cc to interrupt his beserker mode. It’s faster and your team can continue to dpsing.

That’s three places that come to mind quickly where the cc capability of the Thief is more efficient.

EcoRI.9273:

As for blinds, you bring thieves to stealth skip trashmob, if you are fighting trashmobs, you are doing something suboptimally.

You are right, but I think that you are talking through your hat here. For exemple in TA up, in record run you at Malrona you gonna stealth to here, only kill the last group of spider and kill Malrona. In 99% of the party won’t do that. They will kill all spiders before fighting Malrona. Aggroing all groups in one shot with a thief blinding them is a far superior technique than aggroing these groups one by one.

Same with TA foward in the last fight before the final boss. In a record run, all three adds will die in seconds, while Leurent is Deep Freeze. But that’s aint gonna happen in most group. These adds will land a couple of hits before dying and either a guardian or a thief will be of great help if you want your group to kill all 4 mobs in one shot.

Yes you are right that in optimal situation, you never gonna need the thief blind. But unless you are in a record run guild, almost nobody will be able to reach optimal situation.

Next time for Malrona, try guardian line of warding and a icebow, they will die instantly and your team mates will have 100% HP if the guardian does it right. There are over 20spiders and blinds can only hit 5max

GrimmR.3541:

hybrid.5027:

Fierce is right though. If stealth was removed, people would bring Ranger or engineer instead of Thief.

Don’t get that point. If you remove a other skill, f. e. banners on war then people might again bring thiefs because of the higher damage output! We can play that game for all of the classes. >.>

The whole point of my claim is to identify the key feature of a class. Everything else in a thief’s kit is just pork barrel. I guess what I am also trying to say is I see most thieves in pugs utilizing all these secondary kits but can not stealth if their lives depended on it. Dungeon thieves need to know how to stealth every path.

Jerus.4350:

EcoRI.9273:

Lorgus.6148:

EcoRI.9273:

Stealth to skip content, otherwise they are garbage in dungeons.

I wouldn’t call defiant stripping, above-average damage, blinds on trash, blast finishers and projectile absorb to be “garbage”

If Stealth is removed from the game, I doubt people will want to bring thieves into their party for dungeons.

With current defiance i could see there still being a place, with the changes coming /shrug I imagine there are burstier CC options (inc slick shoes meta! ) though the blind is very very nice in many situations.

Honestly in dungeons with optimal play(as in if you want to blaze through dungeons) in consideration, I can’t see defiance stripping with a thief being a good reason to bring them. Most bosses die before you can even remove all the defiance for a second shot at CC. And even if you can do so for some bosses, it is not optimal play, it is safe play( which then goes into the same catagory as why some people bring a healer guardian to dungeons.). As for blinds, you bring thieves to stealth skip trashmob, if you are fighting trashmobs, you are doing something suboptimally.

Lorgus.6148:

EcoRI.9273:

Stealth to skip content, otherwise they are garbage in dungeons.

I wouldn’t call defiant stripping, above-average damage, blinds on trash, blast finishers and projectile absorb to be “garbage”

If Stealth is removed from the game, I doubt people will want to bring thieves into their party for dungeons.

Stealth to skip content, otherwise they are garbage in dungeons.

I glitched into a contested CoF last night, it still works.

xDudisx.5914:

Yes. In one of my characters I had about 72% crit chance on AC, now it is 53%. I think the power went from 720 to 590. Pretty sure all stats got a reduction when inside ac, cm, etc…

Considering that in lvl 80 the same build had around 63% I think the scaling reduction was actually too strong.

For my ele:

Lvl 80: 63%
Old AC: 72%
New AC: 53%

Are you sure all stats are afffected? My crit damage(ferocity) is still insanely high.

maha.7902:

EcoRI.9273:

xDudisx.5914:

EcoRI.9273:

is crit chance affected?

All stats are affected by the scaling.

Lemme rephrase has crit chance been lowered because of the march 16, 2015 patch?

if your precision stat has been affected by the scaling

then

1 + 1 = ?

????

could be 10 or 2 or 11 depending on how you look at it. my question was vague and the answer I got were vague.
Also I am pretty sure crit damage is unaffected? because They were alittle too high. I never kept track of stats in low levels so I can’t tell

xDudisx.5914:

EcoRI.9273:

is crit chance affected?

All stats are affected by the scaling.

Lemme rephrase has crit chance been lowered because of the march 16, 2015 patch?

:-\ That is a lot of gold lost of if you just copperfed(probably ~3gold over the whole tour.) That perma merch basically pays for itself in 3months if you tour everyday.

is crit chance affected?

There has been times where I had knights gear on and they don’t stick to me like glue and there has been times where i had full zerker and they just wouldn’t get off me. I feel initial aggro plays a heavy part in retaining aggro. And as for the passive defensive stats, I hate to say it but its a player skill thing where if you are skilled, you can do almost everything a clerics can do in berserker. And if you are a total newbie(fresh lvl 80, never did fotm, got dragged in by friends to do a fotm 30 scenario), you probably want Nomads. Again the selling point to the passive defense is the ease of play and its decent clear speed and what gear they choose(Nomads,clerics,knights) depends on how well they play.

You want to merch while a path is active(during time gates) otherwise it is severely slowing down the tour(at least in my experience where there has been times where it takes 5mins to start a path because of people merching)

spoj.9672:

Trying to manipulate the price of the perma merch are we?

No it was just a shower thought that arised from all the healer guardian debate. If all 5 of my teammates has perma merchant and the guardian is a 0dps healer guardian, would I want to trade that guardian for a berserker guardian who has no perma merchant? The answer is I want that healer guardian!

I swear if everyone in your party has one, your tours will be shorter by a whole half a hour! Considering that AC 1-3,CM1-3,TA U/F, SE 1-3, CoF 1, coe, arah takes about 3hours for most speed runners, and considering how often one actually spends DPSing in dungeons, that is over 100%“DPS” increase, just throwing it out there. Troll face.

dboylolz.3916:

Skady.5916:

Hello team!

I started a series of vids showing how to run Cleric Tank Guardian in FOTM.
This build will allow you to face tank any fractal boss virtually without dodging/kiting while your team mates can focus on pure DPS (good old stack here and don’t move strat).

Here is the playlist on youtube with detailed build explanation, rotations and boss specifics. Currently being updated while i’m getting more fractal footage.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCxfgAjHhmmy0a29VtGeRpCK4ADb4SQTS

I hope this will be useful
Have a good one!

P.S. Holy trinity was never missing in GW2 it just never was a part of the meta. You can still play how you want and beat any content

For all of those bosses you can facetank/hold agro while staying full Berserker, blocks are sufficient which you can clearly see on your archdiviner kill. I just don’t see the use of taking Cleric’s gear when it’s not even needed and it’s obvious that you know the deal of rotating blocks/invulns.

I don’t mean to sound rude to the OP, but to me, the selling point of the build is that it is an easier build for most players to run compared to a support berserker guardian. Cleric’s gear and the traits just gives more leniency to mistimed dodges, bad aegis rotations. I feel the video just shows that it is not that slow that everyone claims it to be. Or rather it is not that bad when you consider the overall party DPS.

hybrid.5027:

So here is the thing. You can hold aggro on two or three bosses in the game with full clerics and allow your team to more safely DPS.

But guess what? You can do the same thing with Full berserker and two-three pieces of Soldiers/Knights/Celestial gear without totally gimping your DPS. You don’t need to overload on Toughness. You need just enough to hold aggro. That means every piece of Toughness you equip beyond the necessary minimum is quite unnecessarily prolonging the fight.

“yeah but with mostly zerker when you run out of cool downs you have to dodge and you’ll lose aggro”

Or, you know, your team could keep the boss crippled or chilled (very easy to do at mossman especially thanks to ghost pepper poppers) and when you run low on cool downs you just backpedal slightly faster than he can walk.

The method that I use when I play Guardian is literally face tank mossman/archie in berserker gear. I use my dodge as much as possible for the big hitters and I usually have enough aegis chain rotations and blocks to keep myself alive when I run out of dodges. That retreat and SoA buff makes aegis face tanking so much easier. I also usually hold aggro pretty well in zerker gear :-\(I also use that Obal hammer build 35042 because I like the vigor procs)

/signed

Jerus.4350:

EcoRI.9273:

Element Two.7316:

Zenith.7301:

What’s the point of playing a MOBA if you’re not going to be in the diamond league?

Why do some people like Dark Souls, while others didn’t? The goals in playing a videogame and what’s fun about them vary by person.

Low ELO MOBA games are still fun, challenging and engaging, and there’s the constant feeling of improving your play and furthering yourself as a player, however small.

Yes people have different goals for a game, but no way is AFK auto attacking a boss for 8 minutes whilst a 3rd member rotates aegis anybody’s goal in GW2.

If a pug has to choose AFK auto attack for a guarantee way of progressing vs constant wipe, which would they choose?

“AFK auto attacking a boss for 8 minutes whilst a 3rd member rotates aegis” is a method of obtaining a goal and the goal is to complete the fractal.

P.S. Real life Fishing is boring to me and fun for others. Some people love the AFK playstyle.

Fishing isn’t about fishing, it’s about getting drunk and hanging with friends while doing “something” so you have an excuse to get drunk and hang with friends. (offtopic though but had to chime in).

Can’t the same thing be said about AFK auto attack in game? :-D
CoF p1 is my favorite path because it is time gated and it is super short, it gives me time to socialize. AFK acolytes so fun.

Purple Miku.7032:

EcoRI.9273:

If a pug has to choose AFK auto attack for a guarantee way of progressing vs constant wipe, which would they choose?

See now you’re just reinforcing the point made earlier that this is a training wheels tactic :P

I am an advocate for training wheel tactics and play how you want.

Element Two.7316:

Zenith.7301:

What’s the point of playing a MOBA if you’re not going to be in the diamond league?

Why do some people like Dark Souls, while others didn’t? The goals in playing a videogame and what’s fun about them vary by person.

Low ELO MOBA games are still fun, challenging and engaging, and there’s the constant feeling of improving your play and furthering yourself as a player, however small.

Yes people have different goals for a game, but no way is AFK auto attacking a boss for 8 minutes whilst a 3rd member rotates aegis anybody’s goal in GW2.

If a pug has to choose AFK auto attack for a guarantee way of progressing vs constant wipe, which would they choose?

“AFK auto attacking a boss for 8 minutes whilst a 3rd member rotates aegis” is a method of obtaining a goal and the goal is to complete the fractal.

P.S. Real life Fishing is boring to me and fun for others. Some people love the AFK playstyle.

The game does a very poor job explaining mechanics. Most pugs don’t understand key dungeon mechanics and it is very hard for them to find information on how to do them. There are so many ways of doing dungeons, and every pug does it different. I think the way to help solve this problem honestly is to have ANet publish official dungeon spotlights for every path where they explain every encounter and use the most basic strategies in completing them(much like League of Legends Champion Spotlight).

Hi I am looking for people to add to my friend’s list for FoTM 50/40/30. I play Thief/Guardian/Warrior very well. I can also play Ele pretty decently.
I am in NA east coast and am usually online at 9pm est. I prefer to play with players that know the meta builds/strategies and have personal reward level of 50. If you have a group that needs one more or you are looking for a group to run with, write a mail to me or leave something here, Thank you.

/agree and make ascended sorting bag slots

Nikaido.3457:

The problem with the idea of a “1 healer 4 zerkers” party setup is that the healer can only really be useful and help zerkers avoid dodging and stuff in the easy dungeons only. The idea of using a healer for zerkers breaks in content like Arah and high level FOTM. Your healer can, indeed, keep zerkers from dodging out of something like Bridgette’s retal symbol. It won’t help zerkers on something like Lupicus or Archdiviner. For that the whole party needs to be tanky, which makes run last much longer.

Basically, the only point of a 1healer 4 zerker party setup is to trivialize.. content that is already trivial to begin with. It doesn’t trivialize the more interesting dungeons at all. The net contribution of a healer on something like Lupicus is zero. If someone messed up dodging there on a zerker build, down they’ll go.
That looks rather pointless to me.

[KING] Tournament, 1healer 4zerker(I think they were RTG?) came in second, it works.

PS: I noticed in streams, that alot of players are doing the headshot→icebow strat. If you think about it, it is a very similar concept. Have the thief sacrifice all of its personal DPS just so a team can freeze a boss 1-2 extra times. It is not optimal as well but it makes encounters super easy just like the support guardian.

Ok so I watched the video, the [arty DPS is not that bad, you guys were melting everything pretty quick. Much faster kill times than pugs who are all berserkers for sure.

I personally think in terms of increasing speed for a dungeon run, Berserker build vs Non Berserker build is not a huge priority that some of you guys are claiming it to be. There are other things far more important than that to “PERSONAL” dps that you guys are advocating that can magically turn that 8minute run to 4minutes. Instead of saying the same thing over and over “if your guardian was running meta build, it would have been faster.” The statement has so little weight. I would agrue that if the guardian was berserker meta build, it would be only slightly faster. Strategy is far more important than what a person’s build is. When talking about increasing speed. I would personally rank the following for its ability to shave off time:

1: Figure out how to avoid fighting trash mobs.
2: Figure out how to get to point A to point B as fast as possible.
3: Figure out which events can be skipped.
4: Figure out how to give your overall party more DPS.
5: Personal DPS

instead of giving advice on how to save a few pennies, give advice on how to save a few dollars.

Let’s look at what a healer guardian can bring to the table instead of being ignorant and just claim that a build sucks because it has no personal DPS. And yes it is NOT OPTIMAL but it is not as bad that some of you guys are claiming it to be.
1: healer guardian can be the ultimate bunker, which means your party don’t need to dodge as might to avoid hits. Dodging once in a 10second fight is a 10%loss of personal DPS.
2: Scholar bonus is maintained longer.
3: Vacuum DPS rotation is OP as hell.

Anyone has a clever idea/solution to get people to stop rolling swamp as first map every single time?

You know playing with other thieves is like a game within it self if the person knows how thieves work. It’s like playing simon says but with 4 commands, move, stop, blast, don’t blast.

I thought most hardcore gamers would have SSDs by now and that loading times would be an nonissue. But I guess if a good amount of the dungeon community are still running HDDs I will have to agree with Jerus’s agruments since the restricted rule is the community rule.

I don’t think one should ever take the real world into account to speed runs because one can argue so many things about mice with extra buttons giving advantage, good graphics cards giving advantage, higher display resolution giving advantage, good internet giving advantage and etc.

You don’t need to relog to exit the dungeon by using the front door.

I don’t get why it shouldn’t be allowed. People use waypoints to get NPCs, mobs to path/teleport all the time. If you think about it, the front door can be considered a waypoint in terms of its “intended use” for speed running.

ShadowRX.9024:

13.) Party members may not switch character once the timer has begun.

This means that you cannot leave the dungeon at all too.

But leaving via front door, there won’t be any character switching. I can see an argument of character switching via the character select screen so I will drop that one.

Maybe I missed it but I have not found any rules regarding characters exiting the dungeon.

1: Can players leave the dungeon using character select screen?(nevermind on this one)
2: Can players leave the dungeon using the front door?

AC p3 is probably one of the profitable paths , you just have to do some side events during the burrow phase. My group usually have 1person go exploring just because you don’t need everyone there. ;-)

Draco.9480:

Casual player=/=Focused player
If not enough skill and coordination to keep alive as five berserkers then the group is a total joke because this game is already casual and doesn’t require much of defensive tactics like in WoW or WS.

If the group survive as five berserkers and kill the boss first then it’s more useful and quicker than 4 dpsers and 1 healer/support. But if you wish your composition I don’t mind I just said the facts about speed running and advised you to level above the casual level for the sake of game play, performance, time and efficiency.

I would beg to differ that what is “skilled” play is just a matter of opinion, so I would not argue with you on that.
If 2 team employs the same strategies and one is 4berserkers/1 nonberserker support and another is 5 berserkers, the time efficiency is not that different. Believe it or not, a big portion of most dungeons is running and a smaller portion is actually spent fighting bosses. I am just going to leave it at that.

I think a cheap way of doing hard mode is to just limit the amount of people in a dungeon. If you solo,2man,3man a dungeon it is essentially hard mode and all Anet need to do is to design a reward system that give people reason to do that.

Quick question: I used to sell arah but stopped because of kickers and the long wait time to fill the party slots(even at 3g for arah p2).
In the past month, what is the shortest and longest time it took you guys to fill the party?

J Eberle.9312:

Traits should be visible.
Gear stats should be visible.

*turns and runs away *

They had that in gw1 it was pretty good for pugging.

The easiest way to avoid that is to wait for them to come around the corner and then you run past them.

http://www.twitch.tv/diabiosx/c/4189781
11:30 ish I am “pathing” them. I couldve ran 10secs earlier but I was dozing off