Guild Wars 2

Well, the Assassin was also a bringer of balance, a semi-holy servant of Grenth, at least as it was taught at the Shing Jea Academy. They’re like the Faceless Men of A Song of Ice and Fire, in that death is their holy calling (although the Assassins were more discriminating, as shown by the class training quests on Shing Jea and their explanation of the role of the Assassin).

Thief is Assassin with the mystical and religious elements stripped out. Which, if you think about it, makes perfect sense – why would asurans or charr or norn comply with the religious beliefs of the humans who invented the techniques?

Again, this presumes that attacks do the exact damage of the Attack attribute. Has this been confirmed? I don’t see a formula for it on GW2’s wiki. It’s my presumption that attack damage is derived from the Attack attribute, not just attack attribute + modifiers. Otherwise, what explains such varied attack damages as, say, the vast difference between the 2nd and 3rd hits in the Guardian greatsword chain?

Even then, your numbers are off. If 3000 Attack = 3000 damage, then a crit at +50% damage would give you 4500 damage (3000 × 1.5), not 6K. So +10% crit damage would give you 450 damage, not 600.

Pump crit, trait Empowering Might, claim 10% of your party’s damage as your own.

Yep, gonna be variable based on the amount of crit you have.

@Trungalung: Your percentages presume that Power scales linearly – that a point of power when I’ve got 3K is worth as much as when I had 2K in terms of raw damage. Do we know for a fact that this is how it works?

Except that Rangers had spirits in GW1 well before Factions and the creation of the Ritualist. Ranger spirits are spirits of Melandru, whereas Ritualists are using the bound spirits of the dead, tearing them from the Mists and forcing them to do what the Ritualist wants.

@Shimond, yes. Elementalists get reliable burning from #1 on Fire Scepter.

Teleportation existed before the Assassin class, with some Necromancer skills allowing teleportation to a corpse. Shadowstepping was, if anything, a more limited version of teleportation, at least mechanically – you couldn’t carry bundles, or travel through obstacles as well.

Re: How the Pale Tree knew about the OoW attack: Apparently the Pale Tree has simultaneous access to all Sylvari memories (no word on whether this includes Nightmare, Soundless, or Malyk). Anyway, my guess is she put it together from fragments that, on their own, were insufficient, but taken together, clearly pointed to the OoW attack.

My only issue with Hammers is that 90% of the time, you only use skill 1 and 2. The other skills are actually quite good, but only in very specific situations where you need to control specific mobs, or you’re running away. Even the Staff gets more regular skill rotation, with only Wall of Warding being held back for specific situations.

It’s just not that much damage, though, unless you’re in a group, and even then it’s a small difference. Every stack of Vuln is +1% damage. So even using all 3 of your blinds, that’s 3% damage — and it cost you two chase skills to get it, AND you have to use all your blinds right away rather than saving them for big hits or other situational uses, AND they’re gone after a few seconds. Right-Hand Strength will do far more additional damage than Blinding Exposure will ever give you.

So, you have 3 blinds in that build – GS leap, sword port, and Justice. If you use them all (burning Justice and your weapon swap cooldown) you’ll get +3% damage from Blind Exposure for ~5 seconds or so, and lose mobility/chase options in the bargain. I just don’t see how this justifies skipping, say, Radiant Fire, Searing Flames, or Right-Hand Strength. Any of those would give you better return on that last trait slot than Blind Exposure does, by a wide margin.

@Alvik: But that’s not a useful way to look at it, and overvalues what is a very marginal boost. Yeah, it’s the equivalent of 1 person doing 5% more, but there are 5 people doing damage, so why put it in terms of 1 person?

@Chii – It’s not 5% more damage because the entire party is hitting the mob, it’s 1% because before the vuln, the entire party is hitting the mob and all benefit equally from vuln. If the entire party put together was doing 100 DPS before, then the entire party put together is now doing 101 DPS with 1 stack of vuln. Unless you can stack 5-10 deep, odds are you won’t notice the difference.

@akamon: Power is important, but can be made up for in other ways, via gear or traits. Just getting the 20-pt Honor trait Empowering Might will often (and especially in a group) mean way more power than you would’ve had investing the same 20 pts into Zeal, especially if you buff your crit rate via Radiance/Right Hand Strength. Oh, and you get the 200 Vitality and accompanying survivability to go with it.

Shield of Absorption, Sanctuary, and Wall of Reflection only block/reflect projectiles – basically, any skill with the “combo finisher: projectile” type. Ground targeted abilities and the like will not be blocked unless they have a projectile element (I think I’ve seen Phoenix bounce back, for instance, but Lava Font will go off within the shield).

Dunno about your other questions, sorry.

So, here’s my idea, though I’m only partially able to test it due to being level 54. PvE build, so it includes rings/accessories as well.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/en/?fUEQNAsfRlYgiD33RLEfYFRuArHEEh+rqQ8wUgR4fLA;T8AA2ynEOJdS9lyLKcM4IwxijDHJOLIGUMxA

You start off using the greatsword til you hit 25 stacks of Bloodlust, then swap to sword/torch. Between Empowering Might and Bloodlust, you’ll be well above 2K power, with crit rates hovering around 80% with the sword.

On traits:

• Power line is obvious, you want the +10% dmg vs. burning.
• Signet recharge is for your heal – if you’re feeling squishy, knocking off that 8s is huge.
• Valor points could easily be reassigned if you really want Symbolic Exposure (though you’d only have one on-demand symbol, on your swap) or an adept trait in Virtues. But hey, free Aegis, right? And 50 Toughness, which is… something I guess.
• Honor is there almost solely for Empowering Might. Again, nearly 80% crit chance with your sword, so you should stack might pretty deep once combat gets going, which will make up for any deficits you feel from the gear being precision-focused.

On skills:

• Save Yourselves! = 10 seconds of insane beat-stick power every 48s (21% uptime).
• Hold the Line! is good for those super-squishy moments when you need a second to pull back and refresh before diving back into the fight.
• Judge’s Insight for burning and the port.
• Renewed Focus because it’s the easiest to use and adds to your durability.

So, yeah. That’s my plan for 80. We’ll see how it works out.

Zhaitan isn’t a tactician. The dragons aren’t even really aware in the same way as we are. They’re forces of nature more than anything else, really. Zhaitan is as much a tactician as Cthulhu would be. I mean, how much tactics would you put into destroying ants? Because that’s the better comparison, so far as I understand the dragons. Most of the lieutenants are the ones who are actually thinking. So, blame Tequatl the Sunless or the like, not Zhaitan.

The hylek appeared in Nightfall, though only on the continent of Elona (which is connected to Tyria by the Crystal Desert). Who knows how they got here.

The quaggan, if you learn about them in-game, used to dwell in deeper areas. Not open ocean/bottom of the sea type thing, but near the edge of the continental shelf (or that’s the impression I’ve gotten). When the Deep Sea Dragon awoke and drove the krait inland, the krait, being evil slaver types, displaced the quaggan and forced them inland, as well.

They’re problematic for other reasons, as well. The existence of waypoints as “go from anywhere to any waypoint” is a bit rough on a lot of dramatic tension. For instance, I played a story instance that involved a fort being overrun and the defenders having to fall back. Once we were out of danger, we… had to run to our escape method. Nobody just used their waypoints to get away from the enemy, we had to all go by a traditional method of travel. It was rather jarring, if you think waypoints are common in-game. And given that you can use them from your first moments as a character, it seems unlikely that guards and soldiers are barred access to them because they’re not special enough.