Guild Wars 2

Look, clearly we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot somehow. I’m trying to gauge the situation and make a decision. The first thing I see after logging in after a year is my guild gone, all my friends not online, and the fighting spirit of the server completely wrecked.

As I said, I have no ties to the server any more, so it’s not at all unreasonable for ANYONE in this situation to want to take stock and figure out what to do. I am not ‘being a bandwagoner’ or looking for sympathy. I’m just after information so I can decide what to do.

I’m sorry if that somehow offends you, because it was not my intention to do so.

Jeknar, anything taken out of context like that can be made to sound like a contradiction. Please read the entire post. I’m looking for information and advice. I appreciate your bump to my post, but do you have any info on the subject?

Wow…so I left GW2 around a year ago, when this thread was still fairly new. Kind of disappointing to see no change after so long.

Hobo sacks FTL! >:(

Well, like I said, what I see now didn’t really inspire confidence. Not really sure what’s going on that would cause a server to almost entirely give up like that. But I don’t have the gems to throw down for a server swap anyway. Sorry if I came off as sounding overly pessimistic. I just didn’t expect my first experience with the game after so long to be so….uninspired.

I’ll give it some time, and I need to get in some practice anyway. Basically re-learning the game from scratch, so a lower tier server will do me good!

Anyway, I’m still open to suggestions, and I’m hungry for info on the current state of the game. Are the T1 servers still more or less the same 3 over and over again? Are the lower tier servers actually filled with real competition instead of uberzergs(I should make a character named that….) playing PvDoor?

I just logged back into GW2 after a year of other games. The first thing I see is my guild xferred and SoR owns less than 10% of the map. It doesn’t exactly inspire me to want to go fight.

When I stopped playing a year ago, SoR was a T1/T2 server. We had good fights against TC and a few others. Didn’t always win, but at least it was a strong back and forth battle.

Now I log in to discover that pretty much everyone has left SoR. My guild doesn’t exist anymore, apparently transferring to TC and reforming under the name Golden Company XIII.

Basically right now I’m looking to get back into WvW action, but I’m stuck on a server that’s being completely dominated. SoR hold maybe 10% of the map right now, and after polling the team channel, people just don’t seem very enthusiastic. I don’t have the 1000-2000 gems, or the gold, to pay for a transfer, but it’s something I’m willing to work towards.

I’m not the most experienced player, but I think I would like to be. I enjoy a challenge. But I don’t know enough about the current server rankings and environment to choose a server. So what I’m looking for are recommendations. If things don’t improve on SoR over the next month or so, I’ll probably just shell out the $$$ to move. I have no ties to the server anymore, ankitten ot very optimistic about it’s improvement.

Haven’t played for around a year or more. Looking to get some small scale WvW, maybe a little solo roam. People recommended I go with a condition based Engi.

Whatever I used to know about the game almost certain no longer applies. But I guess there’s a patch coming up for engis, so I guess this is a good time to pick one up. Never played one before, so it will all be new to me.

What do you guys think about the current state of Engineers for WvW and PVE? Is it worth investing time into leveling up and gearing an engi for someone who’s getting back into the game?

I’m a blank slate, so I have no bias towards class or build., only that it works well for farming up some gear, and has a good spec for WvW.

How well does a condition engi hold up under return fire? I’ve been reading up on them and supposedly engis have problems with condition removal on themselves?

Last time I played(granted this was a year ago), engineers were kind of in a bad place. Has that changed much in the current day?

So I’m in-between games right now, and I haven’t played GW2 in quite awhile, as the title says. I’m interested to see how much has changed, and I’m looking to get back into a little WvW skirmishing and roaming.

I’ve got quite a few max level characters. Guardian, Ranger, Thief, Warrior, Mesmer, Elementalist. The only classes I’ve never really played are necro and engi. I’m not really particular to any of them, and I’m mostly concerned with effectiveness.

So what do you guys recommend for a little bit of solo roaming and maybe small team roaming? I understand that thief is most likely still the king of solo roam, but how about some alternatives? Or are they still just that overpowering?

Anyway, recommendations? Opinions?

It’s pronounced:

TeqLOOTle, the Lootless.

Because we’ve been beating the crap out of that kitten dragon and taking it’s loot every 18 hours or so for over a year now.

Aryto.5873:

Consider the fact that games of this type, including the ones Josh himself referenced as his inspiration for Tribulation Mode, all give you infinite lives as a rule.

Whether you buy an Infinite Continue Coin or you stock up on regular ones, the fact is you will need a lot of lives because death is an intrinsic part of the mode’s design. That’s why games like this give you infinite lives…

Do you know why those games were designed that way? The reason behind being designed the the idea of infinite continues? It wasn’t because they thought it was good design. It wasn’t because they wanted to make a better, more enjoyable game.

It was to screw you out of quarters and make money at your expense!

If this is the message Anet wants to send it’s playerbase: that they’re MORE interested in screwing the players than making an enjoyable game, then it’s a good sign to start looking for a new game to play.

Not too hard. What it is, however, is too annoying with only a single life. Especially for people who are playing solo and don’t have a group to cheese off of if they die.

Maybe implement something where you get more lives while soloing?

This change just strikes me as bad overall. SAB is technically a ‘living world’ event or whatever, but to me it seems more like a nice fun break from the normally serious gameplay. It should be something a little more casual, a little more focused on all around good fun.

Unfortunately this 1 life thing seems to move towards a more difficult, and somewhat annoying, gaming experience. I don’t see this as a good thing at all. As much as I appreciate and enjoy the nostalgia that an 8-bit style game brings (and I applaud Anet for bringing SAB back again!), I don’t want to deal with the hassle that 1 life adds to the event.

Continue coins are all well and good, but the overall effect just seems to be trying to annoying players into purchasing coins from the gem store. Which lends itself to the feeling that Anet is using this event as a cash grab.

I’m sure the official reason given is solving a legitimate problem in their eyes. But as for me, I’m just gonna go ahead and skip the event entirely. Not worth the trouble or the money to stock up on continue coins.

I think I might also skip most of this event. It really seems like they went out of their way to make it more annoying this time around. Last SAB the nostalgia mitigated the frustration with lag and and horrible hit detection. This time around it just seems irritating.

I think I might just farm gold to get the skins I want. I’m just not really interested in dealing with being annoyed by SAB for them.

Josh Foreman.8250:

The reason we did the 1 life thing is because we found that lives were not meaningful if you can just pop back in, catch up with your party or die once and catch up with them. Now they are. We also added Continue Coins in each Zone chest, and they are in JP chests as well. And you can buy 5 of them for one Bauble Bubble.

So you removed lives because it wasn’t meaningful, but you spam continue coins everywhere, so they’re still not meaningful. What was the point again?

Title says it all. I could have swore last SAB we got 3 lives. I don’t find spamming my way through with continue coins to be particularly enjoyable, and I don’t see how having only 1 death adds anything to the event besides annoyance.

Kiwibean.3527

That’s a really good screenshot. I like the look a lot. Well done!

Bigboss.3658

Now that’s a menacing char. Would never guess he’s a guardian.

Chiming in here for Healway as well. I’m a cheap kitten when it comes to trying out new builds, and I started out Healway with only rares. I used 2 water runes and 4 altruistic instead of the 3 water/3 monk that the build calls for, so I lost out on a little bit of healing power while still maintaining the boon duration.

The fundamentals of the build still work with such cheap equipment. It is a VERY solid build to try for a fresh 80. You won’t be doing OMGWTFBBQ damage, but you will be extremely hard to kill, while being decent DPS and support for yourself and anyone around you.

Give it a try.

To try and break away from the pointless bickering for a second:

Guardians are very strong in zerg support, and can be very good in small team areas as well. They’re probably not the best for solo roaming, especially if you’re accustomed to Thief.

I’d say you’re going to want to take a look at the HEALWAY post and videos to look at what’s possible while solo roaming, and what it’s capable of in a group. There are different builds for different situations, but it’s pretty flexible.

There’s also a few hammer builds for group play. Altruistic Healing took a bit of a nerf a little bit back IIRC, but is still very good for ZvZ.

Warrior, on the other hand, is actually quite well rounded for pretty much all situations. I’m not as experienced with it, so I’ll leave it to others to fill in the details.

My personal preference is the guardian, because I like being nearly invincible while also providing superior team support. For yourself, I think the deal breaker really comes down to just how much time you want to spend solo roaming. If most of your time is spent solo, you might better served by rolling a warrior. Otherwise I’d recommend Guardian.

The problem lies with the design. The way it’s set up does not promote finishing the event, which REALLY sucks for people who haven’t yet accomplished it. Players should be rewarded and encouraged to work together towards completing events successfully. They should NOT be encouraged to ignore the event objectives.

The easiest way to do this is to up the rewards for a successful completion, and diminish the rewards gained from simple farming. There are numerous ways to accomplish this without being overly draconian.

The way I see it, there are three major flaws with the setup of the current invasion living story. The first is the whole “Every hour on the hour” thing. The second is the length of the invasion and having to be in it for the entire time. The third is the randomness of which maps the invasion happens in. All three of these problems work together to make the entire thing fairly annoying.

It’s nice that I know exactly when the invasions start. However, it’s not nice that if I miss the short window to join the invasion I have to wait another hour to try again. Even if I get into the invasion on time, it might not be the map that I want or need for achievements, meaning that I have to wait around for a full hour to try again.

And even THEN if I’m both on time and it’s the map I want, I have to slug through the entire 30-40 minute invasion and hope that, even if I have the time commitment available, I don’t get disconnected or have my computer die or something else like that.

When all of that lines up correctly, I still have to bounce around in an uber-zerg, which often is more interested in farming champions and chest hunting than completing events.

Sometimes zerging is fun, but for most people it’s not all that great. Many people have performance issues, and sometimes the servers still don’t handle the load very well either. IMHO, zerging kills the fun of WvW, and I’m not at all happy to see it appear here as well. At this point it’s obviously too late to change or reprogram the event. I just hope that Anet looks at these complaints and critiques and takes note.

Small group events like instances or puzzles that can be done at any time are far superior. More JPs, dungeons, riddles, puzzles, or exploration in the next Living Story, please!

Watching your videos makes me want to try playing GW2 and Guardian again.

Ultimately I’m surprised that the loss of control of your character has remained a feature of sword 1 for so long. Has there been any comment from the devs on why the weapon is built this way? AFAIK it’s the only weapon that does this out of all classes.

I’m a little surprised that S/H is the top damage dealing in high end dung/frac. Isn’t the self-rooting a little bit dangerous with such a glass cannon build? Or do things just die so fast that it’s a non-issue?

I just want to point out, that as a relatively new and inexperienced ranger player, I find this thread to be of immense value. Even though you guys are bickering at times, the amount of useful info in the last 3 pages alone outclasses most everything that I’ve seen in the ranger forums combined.

Please continue!

Kootje.9271:

An option is always to first try what suits ur playstyle. Then finetune it with traitchoices and different approaches in the mists on the golems. Andalso worth the try in pvp, cuz ucan finetune ur build based on xp in there. Doesn’t cost a cent to try different sets there. And youtube has a lot of vids of different rangerbuilds which ca help u decide whatsuits u best. Gl

Like I said originally, I’ve already spent some time looking at quite a few builds online here from the forums, and on youtube. I didn’t find much that was current, and specifically targeted at dungeon runs. There’s a few older builds centered around power and either the longbow or shortbow, but I’m not sure if those still work with the current patch or not.

Oh well, I guess the best way is to give it a whirl.

Alright, cool. I was looking to drop some gold on a full equipment set, and I didn’t want to go and spend a crapton of money and find out later that I really needed something very specific.

I guess I’ll run with my cleric gear for now, and change as I get more experience with dungeons.

Asura rangers > all!

Ok, so I’ve looked at a lot of the builds posted here in the forums, and they’re almost all completely out of date, or designed for sPVP and WvW. I couldn’t really find one that’s useful when you’re interested in building for dungeons and fractals.

Is it simply that any build works well? Or that rangers don’t have that one perfect build for fractal runs like other classes? Or did I just miss it somehow?

I’ve been pretty happy with the BM Cleric/apothecary builds for WvW that people like Tupro have posted. And I’m mostly a sPVP/WvW kinda player. Haven’t done much dungeon/fractals at all. Are those builds going to work just fine in both areas? Do I even need to swap gear or spec at all?

Any help or input is much appreciated.

Asura of GTFO!

Puandro, I give you mad respect for bringing hope back to so many Ranger players. Ranger was my first character, and I had long since given up on it. I didn’t think we had any good builds. But after seeing your vids, and reading this thread and a couple of others, I think I might actually give it a shot again.

Many thanks!

Puandro.3245:

Spec and Gear is in the Youtube page. This is my 4th class to WvW on, the other 3 being Ele/Mesmer/Thief.

http://youtu.be/tI7ouz1xt9E

Edit: Exploits is my Rangers name.

The question I have to ask you is: Even with this level of skill, do you think that pets are in a good place? Or do you feel that they still need improving with the AI, or movement, or anything else?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/WHY-ON-EARTH-WOULD-YOU-BUFF-RANGER-PETS/first#post1938176

According to this guy anyway.

Oh man, I swear. It’s always the people that don’t actually play the class shouting the loudest for nerfs.

Gallrvaghn.4921:

After the massive hit on eles, expect rangers to be dominating every match. Mark my words.

omg…I LOL’d so hard! Linking this in the ranger forums to win the internet.

I think a lot of people are reading too much into “unblockable”. It doesn’t mean you can’t defend against it at all and it always hits. It just means than aegis and other blocking skills won’t be able to stop the 3 attacks.

Blind, dodge, weakness, and protection will still work like before.

The OP is right, although he did go into a bit of a rant.

The problem with most, if not all of ranger traits is that there is very little synergy between specializations, and even worse synergy between traits and weapons.

When you look at something like the Guardian altruistic healing build, so much of everything they do works well and supports multiple aspects. Then you look at elementalist and its the same thing: multiple different aspects coming together well.

Then you try to get something decent going with ranger and it’s just a mess. Even some of the best builds I’ve seen out there are still really inefficient, with lots of filler traits that don’t really serve any purpose in the build.

Anet really just needs to go back and refine ranger skill/trait/weapon synergy.

Op, what you described is no different that when everyone on your server logs off to go to sleep, and the night/oceanic crew comes in while you’re away and takes everything.

Sorry, Anet has steadfastly refused to address the issue of population imbalance, hiding behind the excuse of calling it a feature by saying that they want to preserve the random, chaotic battles that can happen in an open environment.

If you don’t like it, don’t play WvW. It’s that simple.

Don’t worry, rank 200 is “Go take a shower”

Rank 210 is “Go outside”

OP forgot to mention, and I didn’t see it anywhere else in the thread(forgive me if I missed it)

Necromancer Corrupt Boon is also going to be unblockable.

Look DaGriller. All you need to do is just play a guardian, and don’t suck. Show us something useful. Contribute something good to the guardian forums. Talk about what you did and why. Discuss your build. Actually HELP people.

Otherwise just take your thread to the WvW forums. You’d probably get a better reception.

I don’t get it. The first thing I see when I checked the stream is you dead on a warrior. You supposedly hide your build like it’s some kind of great secret. Why is this in the guardian forum again? How exactly are you helping guardians instead of shamelessly bumping your stream?

I guess I’m a little confused here. Guardians have swiftness from multiple sources such as:

Retreat
Save yourself
Staff 3

Not to mention abilities that either teleport or leap to your target, like:

Greatsword 3
Sword 2
Judge’s Intervention

Granted, these are not all serve dual purpose as escape moves. But for getting TO your target, you have all the tools you need. The only question is if you want to build for ultra-tankiness, or for mobility. One of the greatest things GW2 does is force you to choose, and not just get everything in a single build.

Huh…been playing GW2 for awhile, didn’t know you could do that. I always assumed it would automatically go to the next in the chain. I’ll give it another shot.

That doens’t mean Anet shouldn’t still fix the attack chain, tho.

EDIT: Hmm….I tried it but it’s still progressing the attack chain, meaning that spamming 1 still self-roots. It’s going to be easier for me to just not use sword in the mainhand.

So the answer is to just not use sword 1? That’s not right.

I’ve been trying this build out for a bit in sPVP. It’s interesting, and definitely survivable. However, main hand sword is still far too crippling to use for me personally. It disrupts the flow of combat, and self-roots you way too often. Have any of you had any success trading out the sword/torch combo for GS or SB?

I really REALLY want to like my ranger again, and I had hopes for this build. But until Anet fixes some of the glaring, fundamental problems with the class and it’s weapons and such, no matter how good the build is, it’s still going to be too frustrating to play.

100% Agreed, put those art team guys to work instead of having them play nerf wars in the office while the level designers and pvp balance guys sweat and work like slaves.

LotuS.4378:

I think guys, you dont understand. HgH is good but only if you runing in group of 5 or less. HgH inside zerg is usless, and basiclly nothing so far will change it. Stop posting videos from WvW where you runing solo, its not sPvP.

This would have merit, except that, as I was told and as I have since learned, EVERYTHING works and nothing is useless when you’re in a zerg.

The only time this doesn’t apply is when you have a really well coordinated group of 10 or more that goes zerg-busting. But even then there’s always going to be stragglers to clean up. Small groups of 1 and 2 that any “solo” build will be useful against. Your team synergy and coordination matter more than your build when zerg-busting anyway.

So yeah, I think HGH (and other roaming, camp-flipping, yak-busting builds) have plenty of reasons to exists in WvW.

Mostly I wish people would stop trying to claim that WvW is or isn’t something. It’s whatever people want it to be. It’s a hybrid between PvE and PvP. It’s small scale skirmishes, it’s 1v1, it’s massive zerg battles.

Play what you want, how you want. And stop trying to tell people how to have their fun.

Normally I have absolutely no respect for you BG guys in T1. Seems like most of your server is pretty zergtastic. But I suppose you could say the same for most servers, even mine. But I gotta give it to ya Dyues, you’re pretty good!

/respect from SoR

Also, excellent choice of music. I approve!

Might want to provide a link to your actual build, with an explanation of gear, sigils, runes, food, whatever.