Guild Wars 2

If my wife was in the top 250 I’d have a lot more children than I do.

Pretty sure they said they’re staying indefinitely. Look in the dev tracker.

Scaar.3059:

Thanks everyone for the fast replies. The sale is what really made me start to think, my local Gamestop has one physical copy for $30 as well. As long as there is a lot to do then I think it would be worth it. I wasn’t sure if it was a quick play through or added a significant amount of extra hours.

The personal story bit of the expac is short, but it comes with so much else, and access to all the new living story stuff that I wouldn’t want to be a regular GW2 player and not have it. Think of it like any other game’s expac, not that big, but if you play regularly you want the expac. It makes core game stuff better plus adds lots of new content.

Bruno.3812:

Actually you do have forks. Look at your hands. Your fingers are the forks that the gods gave you. That should be good enough for anyone.

Tried shoving my fingers through a steak, brb going to hospital.

The myth I’ve heard about forks is that a king didn’t want people with daggers at the dinner table for safety reasons so he had forks invented. You need spoons for soup, knives for meat, and forks for nothing.

If you enjoy playing GW2 and want to continue doing so a lot, I’d definitely get the expac. I believe there is a sale starting on the 8th, if I remember right? It’s on sale now.

If you don’t think you’ll play tons of GW2, the core game has more than enough for you to do.

Just for non-rangers, carrion devourer is far and away the worst pet out of all the terrible pets. And OP is a ranger main.

(Sorry to spoil the joke but I suppose it’s not funny if you don’t how utterly useless that pet is.)

I know it’s popular to hate on Jennah, but I like her, I like her voice acting, and whoever made her model made one serious hottie and a half!

Sajrax.6408:

wanna try into WvW and PVP. I would like to have a lot of dmg, not much survability.

That’s like the exact opposite of what rangers and druids do. :-P

But for big damage, take a look at this one: http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Ranger_-_Power_Survival

It’s not SB, but give it a try and you may like it. It’s long been a community favorite style of playing the ranger.

To be fair, I’ve been using graphics cards for as long as they’ve existed, and I’ve never had any problems until this AMD one (aside from an accidental explosion due to a power surge). Anecdotal for sure, but I don’t see any reason to buy it again when I can buy other brands that have never given me trouble, especially considering other people have had the exact same problem with my card.

Anywho, thanks for the advice all.

I’m not thrilled with the AMD, I googled the problems I’ve been having and apparently it’s pretty common. The screen splits in half with the right half on the left and the left half on the right, and fuzzy lines show up all over the screen.

I’ll take your guys advice to just get “a card” and expect it to die sooner or later. My computer is fairly old anyway.

My current card, a AMD Radeon HD 6850, is in the process of dying and I’d like to get a replacement that will never overheat or have dried out thermal paste or have a fan break or any of that nonsense.

GW2 is the most graphic heavy game I own, and I seriously doubt I’m going to get any newer games anytime in the foreseeable future (1 kid, 2nd in the works). I’d like a card that can play GW2 with high settings, and beyond that my only requirement is for durability so I don’t have to mess it with it ever again.

Does anyone have any expert opinions on a card?

jcbroe.4329:

For a quick breakdown, these are your roles:

• Damage
• Support
  Subroles:
• Mobile
• Immobile

I’d add a 3rd more important category called… uh, “annoyingness” or something? Certain classes have way more survival tricks that put their “ideal fight” somewhere different. So while a scrapper may be mobile support on the Helseth chart, his immortality means he’s totally comfortable in a 1v3 at far supporting no one. You could put a portal mesmer in the same category to an extent. And although a reaper is obviously damage, he has basically no defense at all so his ideal fight has to be with a supporter. His damage loses 1v1 to every single other profession, even the support ones.

I suppose Helseth is coming at it from a team point of view, which basically doesn’t exist anymore, and I’m coming at it from a PUG point of view.

You do fine in team fights, just fight on the outskirts and be ready to stealth or you’ll explode. The only ‘invuln’ we have is on a long cool down and doesn’t stop condis, and stability has a long cast time. If CA isn’t ready just assume you’re on the verge of death at all times.

The healing is great (thus the strong skirmishing ability), the survivability under pressure is less great. That’s the strength of LB and staff, you can heal and support from range.

Non-team fights are where you’re at your best. If you can get into a 2v2 on a point you control, that’s the ideal situation, because you can keep yourself and a friend up really well.

For team fights, play backup to your tempest via your range. Support people via CC and stealth if needed, and the celestial avatar skills can give the tempest some relief. But be prepared to stealth out of trouble quickly; you can’t handle focus fire like a tempest can.

The less pressure you’re under, the more you can heal others, and if you’re in danger, rely on the big range and non-healing support. A LB KB with pet burst at the right time can quickly eliminate a called-target.

You could always “buy” some exotic karma or dungeon token armor for open world stuff/living story kind of stuff.

Zenos Osgorma.2936:

Muddy terrain should blind those directly hit by muddy terrain before it touches the ground , your throwing mud at people expect to be blinded.

there after the area has a cripple effect and knockdown for superspeed users.

This is a good, realistic suggestion, although perhaps a second effect for swiftness users would make it less niche.

Xca.9721:

i love kyhlo, but i get it like 1 out of 20 matches cause everyone votes for skyhammer/legacy…

Khylo is awful for professions that can’t teleport. If they remove any map it should be that one. Or give everyone a special action key teleport for the map…

shadowthejedi.3089:

As far as druid goes, I’d be hard pressed to find 10 that are better than I am

Thanks for the belly laugh.

You don’t have to test anything just do that math.

Thanks.

This is not a whine post.

I am almost intentionally falling from platinum to bronze because I’m trying to complete the profession achievements for the backpiece. My high point MMR was about 1700, and I’m at 1200 and falling FAST. It’s not literally intentional, I just can only play 1 profession. My sincere apologies to those in the way of this stupid task but I’d like the WvW versatility of this backpiece.

What I’ve noticed is the mechanical skill level is not dramatically different. I can win like 60% of my matchups on my classes I don’t know how to play, and I do often encounter people who react intelligently.

1) The huge difference, is the lower I go, the more people over rotate. If we win mid, 4 players go far, or 3 go home to help the 1v1 there.

2) If you believe you are a gold/plat player stuck in lower divisions, go far at start. You can win the matchup 100% of the time if it’s not a hard counter and 75% of the time if it is, and due to people not knowing how to rotate to fix losing home, you should auto-win the game.

That’s really it. Honestly I think the theme of “knowing how to rotate” has been absorbed by new players and then sort of over done. People think if they’re not running at full speed to another point they’re not rotating well enough. The days of 2 years ago where someone camped home for the entire game have been educated out of people, but with a weird consequence.

Condi can work, which is why I described it as decent. But at a certain minimal level of enemy competency, it’s severely subpar, and full traps are totally unviable. I very rarely call anything unviable, but full trap ranger in PvP above a reasonable MMR is totally unviable because it lacks so much and brings so little.

There is the old excuse a competent teammate can keep you alive, but that’s really inefficient. If you’re going to dedicate a whole team slot to keeping someone alive, there are builds and professions that do a lot more damage than a trap ranger, and take less effort to keep standing.

It’s like saying a p/p thief melts people. Of course it can, but it’s a bad build. You’ll never see a trap ranger in a tournament.

Edit: Just to clarify, not knowing if some lurkers know how to make builds. Full traps are bad because it means your utilities can’t provide invulns, stun breaks, condi clears, defenses like taunt, protection, movement, and so on. It objectively makes an unviable build at a certain level where these kinds of things are expected. Pure damage doesn’t cut it when someone can pop an invuln or resistance and negate half your skillbar.

Ya wars are a pain for anyone, but it illustrated how it’s not worth the fact that you have to lose most of the sustain of a mender druid and have minimal (or even zero!) defensive utilities, all to have all your damage simply ignored by someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. I was on a pure glass warrior too. Traps in particular are awful and in no way do enough damage to justify losing out on things like PM, SoS, SoR, etc.

Back when traits gave stat points and before there were any good utilities to choose from, condi rangers could be nice and tanky, but they didn’t keep pace with the rest of the PvP game.

I had an interesting experience today from the “enemy” point of view. I’ve been playing condi warrior in a pathetic attempt to finish the backpiece. My overall win percentage has plummeted to a rather hysterical 40%, so I’m really not good at it. Went up a guy I knew was a condi druid, totally ignored everything he did, intentionally stood in his traps, and just spiked him down. There just isn’t enough damage vs sustain on a condi druid.

voltaicbore.8012:

I tend to feel comfortable around condi druids on the other team – not too hard to eat them alive. Since condi requires a good deal of projectile use, my druid loves dropping staff #5 on a node and watching the condi druid furiously heal me and my pet.

I’ve only ever met one condi druid in ranked, and suffice it to say he wasn’t contributing very much at all. Bunker meta druid (or some other power-support sniper setup) seems to outperform condi way too much right now to make condi worth a team slot.

And the other thing is the tables have turned, power druid counters condi ranger. Tor years condi ranger hard countered power ranger. But then staff counters literally everything in the game to some extent.

If you want a base for efficient killing, like doing world completion or exploring the new harder zones, the fractal build is a really good start. Just change it to whatever makes you happy and are comfy playing.

Otherwise, just toot around doing your thing.

Condi, including SB, is pretty decent, but anything not using staff is starting off at a deficit, and staff doesn’t work that great with condi. It’s just a curse of staff being too good, like scrapper hammer.

valdoreix.4186:

Thanks every one that help and a big thanks to Fluffball for making me lol

All joking aside all 9 professions are viable in all 3 game modes.

Having known you for well over 6 decades now, having been there for the birth of your daughter, for the birth of your daughter’s daughter, having helped you through your wife’s passing, I can tell you that guardian is your favorite character.

Sounds like warrior or engi are what you enjoy playing.

hackks.3687:

interrupt their heal (its the one where they yell and put their arm in the air)

I was healing myself all day yesterday.

If you’re on a very low pop map and push one of the forts up by yourself, I think it makes it more likely to spawn, as it removes the choices of the other bosses spawning over long periods of time. That’s how I got 2 or so of them to spawn anyway. May just have been luck.

Say people like Paul Cezanne and Jean Arp inspire you, if they’re like 100% of other colleges and universities.

Anet at least attempts to make everything enjoyable by removing unfun crap and just getting to the point. If it sucks in other games, chances are extremely good they’ve fixed it in this one.

That’s very much the philosophy, and although we don’t know what you like about any game, this philosophy should quickly become apparent. Just as a 100% random example, you can make your gear look like anything you want through the wardrobe system. You don’t need to re-craft or re-loot some high end piece, just change it to what you want it to look like.

It’s not druid specific but qqmore.net has some great videos. Rotating is not super class specific with some obvious exceptions like thief, ele, scrapper.

When to go far = when mid fight is going badly and it’s obvious your teammates are going to lose. By the time you get there they’ll already be dead or hopefully have bailed out themselves.

When to help mid = when it’s an even matchup and you know another enemy is headed mid to swing the fight into their favor, or you could go +1 if you aren’t needed elsewhere. Don’t spend more than a few seconds +1ing anywhere without re-evaluating why you’re there.

I’m sure this is great but don’t open your video against a F2P player. I was all hyped up and then “bronze squire” is the first person we see.

Justine.6351:

I want to make an obstructed vid 3 but everytime I watch #2 I just can’t see how to top it,

https://youtu.be/XrZVwYyEo_E

Yes. When this happens against a human.

He said his whispers are coming from inside your house!

Anet has balanced the classes so that you’re just going to get a bunch of random “der I like this and I’m 10 years old” responses. Everything is at least reasonably good at everything. Play what you want. Engi is a very solid prof so have at it.

If you enjoy just mindlessly tooting around killing things to relax after work, I definitely recommend the above suggestions to use a bunch of boosters. I had my masteries completely maxed like… weeks after HoT launched just by killing things in my way instead of running past them. I found that enjoyable, and you get some reasonable loot when you kill thousands of trash mobs. You can get more experience from a single out-out-the-way monster than you can for an entire event.

You definitely need to be in glass gear though or be like super into zen rock gardens.

rapthorne.7345:

How can we defeat Fire Elementals with fire?

Use up all the oxygen, elemental gets extinguished.

I saw that typo the day after I posted it and intentionally left it because the mental image of someone digging a h0@l in their backyard, filling it with a garden hose, and throwing a squealing boar into it made me laugh. Glad someone is as weird as me I suppose…

I personally find the skirmishing QD shoutbow to be significantly more effective than the NM version for both damage and defense. I’d be interested to know if you’ve messed around with that any, jcbroe, since I’m likely never going to be ranked.

I’ve unfortunately stopped taking the season seriously after my crazy dropping of like 20 games. I’m sure I could work back up to where I was as things average out of a larger set of games, but I have absolutely no desire to play sober versus the current gold 1 tier players.

For rando-pugs that need the boons, if you keep your inventory open and care enough to go through the effort, you can use torch bonfire, manually change torch for warhorn to blast, then change to axe for the encounter. That used to be a thing way back in the day for dungeons/fractals, but I doubt the clicking is worth it considering how trivial everything has become with power creep.

Alternatively you can try out the level 80 skills and traits in the PvP waiting area. It just saves some effort for a quick preview.

Anela.3867:

Thank you. I don’t mean to sound so ignorant but I just recently started using a staff. I am one of those stubborn people who believe Rangers should use bows and I have been doing my best to do that, to little avail, so I thought I would try other things. Right now, I am working on learning the staff with sword/war horn.

I find it annoying how good the staff is. 4/5 skills heal you or allies, and the 5th one is supporty as well. AND it has movement on it. AND it generates AF without even trying. It really pigeon holes us, any build that doesn’t use staff is starting out at a disadvantage even if it’s a druid build.

Actively healing your pet (or anyone on your team) by any means will heal you.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Live_Vicariously

Staff heals you on the autoattack when you heal your pet with it, and I put staff 2 on him on recharge and stayed close to him. Most people forget staff 2 exists, but it’s actually a solid skill. When he swapped to bristleback I used staff 5. I just outsustained him. S/d is great for dodging important stuff, but there is nothing important to dodge on staff. When he swapped back to staff I used my CC.

As long as you have staff I think your weapon swap is not super important. GS still works.

The other day I beat a competent s/d druid when I had LB equipped because I used a lot of staff.

Start each character and the one you like playing the least is the one you boost. All professions are a LOT more fun to play when you have all the toys unlocked. And even if you still hate it, who cares, you can level the characters you enjoy playing.