Guild Wars 2

No.

Ele has the easiest permswift, Lightning Hammer’s skill 5 creates a static field, blast it with whatever blast finishers you have. You should be able to get at least 3 finishers off.

That gives 1 minute of swiftness every 30 seconds unbuffed. A fully compatible build can proc 2 minutes every 30 seconds, but it’s completely unnecessary given that 1min/30 seconds is already full uptime. However, permswift does not make a class fast at all.

Greatsword skills 5 and 3 with Warrior’s Sprint give much better mobility AND damage than camping a warhorn. The Warrior is the 2nd fastest class in the game because of these skills – which are far more significant than any kind of permaswift.

Variety – Engi
Mobile – Thief
Sustainable – Engi
Fun – YMMV
PvP – Engi
WvW – Thief
PvE – Either, both are easy. Probably thief because superlong stealth.

No, some people actually did some drop rate research post-patch in another thread. The drop rate of fractal weapons was significantly nerfed even comparing post-patch 50 to pre-patch 30. They ARE very rare now.

Toughness is sustained survival, vitality is spike survival.

You’re forgetting that you only get 85% at MAXIMUM (80% if you’re unlucky) of any item you list on the TP after deduction of transaction costs.

If you vendor the rare runes you also get, you’ll get more profit by salvaging everything that drops in the long run. This of course assumes you ever use those ectoplasm.

If you never craft anything at all with ectoplasm, then sell the rares.

Some skills and traits need an overhaul. I’m sure there’s no real need to mention what they are.

Not sure if ‘nerd’ is meant as an insult or compliment, but ‘all classes’.

It’s because there are no diminishing returns. When the same amount of loot is shared by more people, each person gets less so people want to split up. When loot is duplicated for each additional person such that everyone gets their own drop, people want to group up, the more the merrier, so the weak can ride on the coattails of the strong. This was always the case in GW2, megaservers only made it more obvious. But there were already zergs in WvW, FGS, world bosses and Queensdale.

The only times at the moment where people DON’T want a zerg are when this does not hold true. There are three instances – 1: Lyssa, where the champion gorillas she spawns at a rate of ~1/15 people make large zergs simply large graveyards while 3 men can kill her in 4 minutes. 2: Shatterer siegeweapon collection pre, where more people scales up the siegeweapon requirement but doesn’t increase the number of mobs sufficiently such that it can be soloed in 45 seconds but takes a zerg 6 minutes to complete. 3: WvW camp raiding, when adding people doesn’t increase capture efficiency at all, but removes people from the tower/keep assault teams (or parallel camp assault teams) leading to lower points per hour. And in all three cases, a lot of players who are ignorant of the mechanic try to zerg anyway and get hated on by those who do know about it.

But since cooperative play is part of the GW2 design philosophy in the first place, this is unlikely to ever change, even though it is the cause for the zerg.

Therefore, get used to zergs, or change a game. If you want a challenge, go solo champions in nonzerg maps. There are still a few that people don’t want to fight even though there is a high population on that map. Sector Zuhl’s Champion Destroyer Troll for instance.

Trinity is irrelevant, it’s funny how people are even taking that seriously.

Deamhan.9538:

Oh man, the potential for WvW is huge.
For Borderlands:

To take a tower, you must first take and hold two adjacent supply camps. To take a keep, you must take and hold two adjacent towers.

For EB:

Same as the borderlands with the addition that you must capture and hold the keep of faction claiming the castle, and capture and hold the two towers closest to the castle of that same faction, in order to take the castle.

There, it’s not as much of zergs going in circles. You actually have to defend, not only for the sake of keeping it from you enemy but you must also defend in order to take more.

Sure, but only under three conditions:

1. Remove EBG SMC as a map-completion objective. Hell, remove the whole of World vs World as a map-completion objective. People who want it are forced to run around pointlessly to get random PoIs, doing absolutely nothing for the war effort and taking up a player slot on the limited WvW map. The idea of putting WvW as map completion was bad from the start – but under what you’re proposing, SMC will basically never be taken after the first capture on the weekly reset, making it plain impossible to map those points. Having a world badge requirement for a legendary is ok, making people run on maps without helping their world is NOT ok.

2. Rewards must be improved for defending a keep and tower. Not as high-tier as actually capturing one, but it must be far better than what it is now. Put a couple empyreal fragments and dragonite ore randomly in an event chest box together with a chance for rares+ people can get from the sidebar once a defense is complete. This reward should scale by amount of enemy players in an area, so 60 vs 60 tower defenders should get 50-75% of the reward one would get by capturing it. It needs to be lower so people don’t camp towers all day, but not so abysmally low that people don’t bother to defend. Scale this reward down if the defense event is failed but still participated in. Sidebar is important, because the reward must still be attainable even if the player dies in the process of fighting.

3. Scale rewards by world score. Worlds with lower score should give players more personal rewards for defense and conquest, worlds with higher score should have less. This not only encourages people to hop to less populated worlds, but also encourages people who are already losing to fight on instead of simply giving up.

Except ascended rings don’t come with two slots unless they’re infused, and infused rings don’t drop outside mid-high level fractals, and even if they did, they come with both slots empty.

There isn’t a way to answer a question that doesn’t even make sense…

It’s ‘cheaper’ to farm money in the same amount of time, then use that to buy, than to farm tokens and use that to buy, if the OP does dungeons quickly/is good at gaming the TP, but is slow at fractals. If you don’t do opportunity-cost calculations, you cannot determine what is the cheapest. Psychol is correct.

The failure of players to factor in time-cost was the reason I could level-99 every skill in RuneScape within 14 months, while 4 years later my guild mates from back then STILL haven’t matched my level back then after I already quit. By using a method with 5x the xp/hr rate (but a cost of 100k gold/hr), it’s actually ‘cheaper’ than to use the slower one, given another skill raised me 6.8M gold/hr which covered the costs of raising all other skills at max speeds plus enough to buy the most expensive armor sets afterward.

The problem here is that we are unable to calculate this for the OP because we do not know the OP’s fractal dungeon completion speed. For very fast fractallers the backpiece can be the cheapest option (provided the stat combination is available anyway); otherwise, the cheapest option may well be the mystic-forge recipe types for certain stat combinations.

The skin is the t3 asuran one, not the item. There is no such thing as a t3 ascended, the base item is non-class restricted so you can transfer it as soon as it is reskinned to anything except a cultural skin.

If running a healing build I’d really recommend using a Guardian for this instead of a Warrior, for heal/protection symbols and more heals from virtue of resolve in addition to the sigil of water.

Warriors ‘can’ do this role, but it heals for so much less (plus in zergs everyone already has perm regen from some source already anyway) that it’d be much better served acting either as a controller or damage dealer instead for the zerg. The bunker-types usually act as controllers.

^ what Grimm said.

It’d be nice if it was an overlay, since now it still involves leaving the game to check. Granted it’s better than using that post on the website as previously since I no longer have to convert everything across time zone barriers and there’s a waypoint link, but not as convenient as it ‘could have been’.

The best necromancy class in the game is ‘forum posters’.

If your only objective to play is to get a Legendary?

And you’re not going to buy the precursor off someone else?

Then no, you shouldn’t keep playing.

Go play something else. Maybe check back next year to see if they allow for precursor crafting then.

Why are you ignoring the answer you already know?

I vote for Rata Sum.

Game balance.

I’ll see you next century…

Simply put a lot of players are not using the classes for what they’re good at, and ranting about how they’re not as good as some other class in that role – which means their class must be underpowered and needs a buff.

The ranger group is the most likely to do this because the vast majority of them aren’t using their class for what it’s designed for, because what it’s designed for isn’t relevant for the vast majority of PvE content. But most groups, do in general. I’ve even seen warriors complain about being underpowered relative to thief cleave dps.

It’s what you’d expect out of any MMO with variation. The only way these don’t happen is if all the classes play identically – which then would kind of mean the classes are pointless anyway.

I’m not saying the classes are balanced because they’re quite clearly NOT balanced (certain classes ahemwarahem being overpowered in PvE, certain classes ahemnecroahem being overpowered in PvP, certain classes ahemthiefahem being overpowered in WvW). Balancing all game modes separately would resolve this issue, but it seems they are reluctant to do that at present. However, even in the imaginary situation that they really do, someone is going to insist on using a thief as a healing build and complain about how lousy they are relative to a guardian.

It’ll never end.

In general I would say that most forum posters believe Arenanet has done a very good job with Guild Wars 2’s initial release, and a very lackluster job with the updates after that. There are exceptions who hate even the initial release, and exceptions who love everything they’ve done so far, of course, but the law of large numbers applies.

Still the way things are going we’re going to have another white knight versus discontented rebels plus random troll threadfight in here again, and I’ll get another message in my inbox saying a moderator has moved this into the Trashcan…

The problem is that shift-click always links a skill, the poster uses Shift to dodge, and activates skills by clicking on them, so dodging while activating a skill links the skill into the chatbox, the skill doesn’t fire, and people die.

Not everything can be customised.

And no, there is no way I know of to change it. Try using the z key instead of the Shift key, it’s not that far away and wouldn’t cause this issue.

Lastly, these kind of questions you might want to ask in the Players Helping Players subforum. This subforum is more likely to attract trolls than helpful replies.

Try using them in a PvE dungeon and you’ll see. Mesmers specced for condition damage barely break 2500 dps in PvE, they’d be liabilities to the team.

Only necros and rangers have enough condition damage procs to barely survive in PvE (~5000 dps) , and even so, only one can exist per dungeon party before overwriting makes a second one worthless.

The only reason why they can be used in PvP applications is because PvP is about a whole lot more factors than simply damage numbers.

You’re forgetting the cost of training the professions to 500. The first set really does cost that much. Especially if making a light armor set.

Subsequent sets, especially if same stat on same armor class, become way cheaper.

At the moment the limiting factor on my ascended crafting is laurels – I’ve made so many that I ran out of laurels entirely just buying the recipes and amulets + karmic infusions for my 80s. The other materials are starting to pile up…

The attribute stacking ones are those that say ‘add 10 power/10 precision/5 toughness etc per kill up to a maximum of 25 stacks’. The superior sigil of Strength does not add Sigil stacks, rather, it adds stacks of the boon Might, so it can stack with Bloodlust.

This bug is still up? We reported this 5 months ago!

http://i.imgur.com/vKp3gO3.jpg

When the maw is killed before all the collossi can spawn and be killed, phase 3 never starts and the boss is stuck in limbo permanently, removing all the rewards for the fractal and making it uncompletable.

Sometimes it doesn’t pay to be too good.

I’ve a lot of deaths because I like jumping puzzles. Especially the Griffonrook run jumping puzzle with the bomb. Also, getting gangraped by 60 man zergs in WvW.

Basically rarely die to anything else…

All maps give me (…) now. I do believe all have been megaservered.

If you don’t trust this system go to any random map and yell ‘what world are you from?’ At this point, you’ll get mixed replies from every world.

Developer confirmation is completely unnecessary for something you can verify yourself. I’d rather they work on Cantha.

Can’t they just set a minimum hit? Maybe for normal mobs 1 hit, veteran mobs 3 hits, champion mobs 10 hits, world bosses 10 hits? From a server point of view it’d make a heck load more sense counting hits than summing all the damage values, and it’ll stop the dps race issue.

You can also craft toxic sharpening stones with bloodstone dust. No real use for extra dragonite or empyreal fragments yet. I suggest keeping them in case those are added with extra bag slots in one of your characters or in the bank, or else you’ll kick yourself one day if they release something that needs 25000 empyreal fragments, 25000 dragonite ore, 25000 bloodstone dust and 250 ingots of deldrimor steel.

Like… for example, a crafting recipe for Dawn. ;-)

That said it’s ridiculous already. 27,000 dragonite ore would take 1000 world bosses or keep lords, which at an optimistic rate would take 9 months to achieve.

The highest condi specs depend greatly on stacking bleeds for damage. Necromancers and rangers are the best at conditioning; thieves and engineers are second-tier, mesmers are third tier. Only the first tier can use conditions effectively in the majority of PvE, the latter are used more in PvP applications. Warriors can also stack quite some bleed in sword mode, but the necessity of it being in melee range generally makes them less effective than the other 5. Guardians are just bad at conditioning even after the update because of how Retaliation and Burning only stack once in intensity. Elementalists don’t have enough condition procs for that to make any sense.

‘Which class is best at being different and a variation of play style?’

Engineer… it’s so varied some people still haven’t decided what they want to do with it after a year.

On berserker power rangers (it’s nowhere near ‘optimised’, but some people like the gameplay) who have a multiplier per second of 3.3 in cleaved sword mode, to compensate for this bad multiplier, a superior sigil of air would add 0.367 mult/s (a damage increase of 11.1%). Relative to this new value of 3.667, a crit-suppressed sigil of fire would add about 0.346 mult/s to this (which now becomes a damage increase of 9.44%), relative to the 9.5% increase from bloodlust. Since these two values are very similar, one would wish to consider if it is more likely that one fights 5 enemies nearly constantly, or more likely that one can achieve and hold 25 stacks of bloodlust quickly. Someone roaming in WvW for a long period of time would want the bloodlust option. Someone speedrunning a dungeon would probably want the fire option. So now berserker rangers use air + fire or air + bloodlust. Of course if they have boon/might duration, it may actually be air + strength or air + battle instead.

Since you ask specifically about an elementalist – elementalists swap attunements nearly all the time, but they also have the ability to mightbuff themselves a lot. In certain builds, they can AoE perm 25 might on the whole party. Clearly in those builds it does not really do much credit to add an additional weaponswap sigil, but if your build is not one of those, the sigil of battle would add 233 power unbuffed – in the very likely scenario that you have at least 2 arcana (and the boon duration that comes with it), this already becomes 256.3 power from might – superior to bloodlust’s effects. Also, consider your multiplier per second again. If running either a lightning hammer or staff 2-1-1-1-2-1-1-1 rotation build, your multiplier is going to be relatively high (in the region of about 1.4 mult/s); if running a Fresh Air build it will be about 1.2 mult/s, both of which are cleave-type. If you’re going to run a suicidal berserker build on the Fresh Air, the 0.367 multiplier addition from air will lead to a +10.2% damage boost, while the sigil of Battle adds the power at 9.6%. While if running a LH/staff build, battle adds the most at 9.6% damage, while bloodlust would add 8.67%, while air would add 8.73%. So on an FA build you would want air + battle, while on an LH/staff you would want battle + bloodlust or battle + air.

To summarise them all into general (but not always true) principles,

The sigil of air is most appropriate in very high critrate, critdmg, especially if your multiplier per second isn’t high.
The sigil of fire is superior when used in AoE/cleave builds with lower critrate/critdmg and lower multiplier per second. Such as in PvT builds.
The sigil of battle is next on the power list if your character swaps weapons and has some kind of + boon duration trait.
The sigil of bloodlust is next unless your party can maintain 25 might, in which case it is better than the sigil of battle.
The sigil of strength is next. When battle is unusable because of your skill rotation this becomes second tier to bloodlust – or superior if you possess + boon/might duration boosts. For instance, sigil of strength + full runes of strength (+ 45% might duration) gives effective power of 304.5 from the sigil component which is much greater than bloodlust if your mightstacks never reach 25.
Then there’s the sigil of power, which adds 5% flat. Generally speaking this is almost always inferior to some other option, but people still use it a lot anyway. Prior to the patch when air, fire and strength weren’t as strong, sigil of power + sigil of bloodlust was optimised in dungeons where 25 might can be guaranteed or in builds that do not use weapon/attunement swaps in their rotations, but it’s somewhat lackluster now.

To end it all off there’s a 7th sigil called the Superior sigil of the Night that adds 10% damage at night. Some people keep this on a weapon they use ONLY for night dungeons for min-maxing purposes. It’s utterly useless in the day however, so if using it you have to be prepared to change weapons to something else in the day. Since ascended tier weapons overpower the 2% difference between the night sigil and alternate sigils, only do this if you are prepared to craft 2 copies of the same ascended weapon.

And for your final question only your active weapon set’s sigils affect your current damage EXCEPT stacking sigils whose effect persists after a weapon swap. The purpose of the aquatic weapon trick is to keep stacks even after changing a weapon (not swapping, rather completely removing it and replacing its slot with something else). Min-maxers often swap a weapon with a bloodlust sigil with one with a night sigil since both involve a swap anyway – and use the night weapon after achieving full bloodlust stacks on a night dungeon. In day dungeons, they just keep the bloodlust one on. Though usually people like this only run night dungeons.

Sigil calculations have their own mathematics involved.

Depends on classes as well. Warriors can reach 100% critchance in pure berserker alone making assassin completely pointless because of a few (frankly overpowered) traits. Thieves and mesmers on the other hand cannot do the same.

There are 6 sigils that can add damage reliably. Bloodlust adds 250 power. Force adds 5% damage. Strength adds approximately 6 constant might (210 power). Battle adds 6.67 might (233 power).

Air adds a single target multiplier per second of 0.367. Fire adds an AoE multiplier per second of 0.17. Of the two, the sigil of fire’s effects cannot crit while the sigil of air’s effects can, so consider Air’s as an actual multiplier. Fire’s multiplier needs to be downscaled relative to your current crit term; that is, 0.17 / (Critrate * Critdmg + (1-Critrate)). Assuming 100% critrate and 250% critdmg, its effective multiplier per second would be 0.17 / (2.5) = 0.068. But if you were a full PVT character, it would be 0.17 / (0.04*1.5 + 0.96) = 0.167. Multiply these by the average number of enemies you fight, up to the AoE limit of 5.

On characters that already have very high multiplier per second values, adding additional multiplier per second wouldn’t be as effective in terms of raising overall damage. If we were to talk about a zerkwar who only autoattacks, his base multiplier per second is 4.17/s, adding 0.34/s (assuming the flame blast hits all targets) is an increase of 8.15% damage. Assuming an unbuffed power value of 2634 in a full 6-6-0-2-0 zerkwar, adding 250 power via the bloodlust sigil is an increase of 9.5% damage. The sigil of force is always 5% damage. Assuming no might duration, the rest of the sigils at 210 and 233 power does not match the bloodlust sigil’s ability, and also proc their effects through might – which will have its effects capped at 25 might. Clearly, you will want the bloodlust as your first sigil. Now assuming full effects, your next sigil is either 210/2884, 233/2884 (weaponswap required) or + 0.367 mult/s. Or 7.28% 8.08%, 8.8% damage respectively. Since the current zerkwar build does not swap weapons in the middle of a fight, even though it gives slightly more might/s in constant swap, the superior sigil of strength ends up as more useful than battle as swaps are not desired. So we have the result of either bloodlust + strength or bloodlust + air for a zerkwar, of which the Air option does not hit diminishing returns in groups where you can reach 25 might permanently, and the strength option requires taking some kind of boon duration buff.

If we talk about a dagger backstab thief in wvw, the multiplier is 2.4 for the backstab. Damage per second isn’t a very relevant discussion because after a backstab they generally disappear back into stealth (or use heartseeker if the single backstab removes enough HP for HS to down the target). Now among these sigils, the most useful becomes the sigil of air, which adds 1.1 to that half the time – which is an increase of 23% damage on average (but practically, a 46% increase half the time depending on your luck). The second most useful sigil is bloodlust, since permstealth thieves simply don’t die, and player kills grant 5 stacks of bloodlust. Some use air-rage instead for the 50% damage increase for 3 seconds – which is all they need to bring down a target.

Doesn’t always work, because some megaservers are open, some are not.

So go to the map, check the waypoint. If open, good.

If not, logout to character screen, log in again – this may reroll your megaserver if you don’t have any friends on that map. If open, good. If not, repeat.

If you don’t get much success after 3 tries or so, go do something else and repeat this later.

Personally I don’t advocate using fractal relics for shards until all your characters have ascended fractal capacitors and 20slot fractal uncommon equipment boxes in all slots however… due to the difference in the exchange rates involved.

Your mileage may vary.

Veril.9408:

Where can I find the full models?
I come from a game where we had to use nonlinear regression on collected data to find equations that convert stat #s into actual %s and then figure out DPS increases (Neverwinter Online).

Is it the same here? How does Precision #s affect crit %s? What about Ferocity and crit damage?
And is Power # just a straight conversion into damage? Does every skill has its own coefficient? That is, will 100 additional power increase DPS by a static % (after considering existing attack dmg) for all skills or will it vary?

Since it DOES appear you are serious:

Damage per second = Power * Weapon Strength * Multiplier * (Critdmg% * Critrate% + (1-Critrate%) * (1 + 0.01*Vulnerability stack count )/ (Target Defense * Attack Speed)

Also, all damage multipliers from traits, runes and whatnot stack multiplicatively, from what I’ve heard – that is, +5% and +5% is not +10%, but (105%)^2 or +10.25%. These go on top of your damage per second calculations from earlier.

21 precision adds 1% critrate. 9.16 power adds 1% damage (relative to base damage). 15 ferocity adds 1% critdmg. ‘Base’ precision is 822: critrate = (precision – 822)/21. The base power is 916. The base critdmg% is 150% at 0 ferocity (that is, +50% damage relative to normal damage on crit). The multiplier is an innate attribute of the skill – the values for each skill are available on the GW2Wiki. Percentage wise adding power always increases your damage by the same percentage, but multiplier per second is a critical piece of information that determines how much that is worth in the first place.

If your skill damage multiplier is 0.6 per second, you can forget about using that as a direct damage skill. The warrior’s axe autoattack rotation has a power multiplier per second of 1.39 (higher when the full rotation is considered), as a ballpark. The Thief’s Pistol Whip is 1.5 per second. Rangers using their longbow deal 0.5-0.9, and their sword deals 1.1… you can see now why rangers speccing into power can never, ever match warriors, even if all other stats were identical. There’s traits and all that, but the story doesn’t change much.

To obtain final damage per second numbers, write out your entire skill rotation, sum all their multiplier numbers together, and divide this by the amount of time in which you do the skill rotation (‘attack speed’) to obtain the multiplier per second values. You can then compare these to other multiplier per second values for alternate skill rotations to figure out which rotation does the most damage. The ‘effective power’ model some players use is oversimplified and gives wrong conclusions when applied between builds with very different skill rotation lengths, though it has its place in comparing between two gear types for the exact same skill rotation and trait placement.

If comparing across different builds entirely which have different damage multipliers or base power or base critrate, etc… you MUST get the final damage per second values for your entire skill rotation in order to make a meaningful comparison.

Also take into account the various damage mechanics of Cleave (3 targets within the front arc), Pierce (3 targets max in a straight line) and AoE (5 targets per damage tick). While the Warrior’s autoattack rotation of 1.39/s may appear to be superior to a bomb engineer’s 1.25/s, in actuality when used at full potential a warrior may do 4.17/s when Cleaving and a bomb engineer does 6.25/s. Conversely, a necro’s Life blast (used for power necro builds) does only 1.4/s to one target, while its dagger autoattack does 1.33/s to one target – the complete lack of Cleave weapons for the necro class means their power-based builds are on average 33-50% the damage output of warriors. They’re even weaker than rangers when specced into power. A Berserker necromancer in PvE is inferior to a Cleric Guardian in terms of damage output in the average dungeon scenario.

Lastly note that objects cannot be critted. An ‘object’ is anything that never moves – turrets, certain bosses, defensive structures, etc. On these, PVT gear does as much damage as Berserker – and Berserker has a clear advantage over Assassin. Some objects can take condition damage, others can’t.

With these numbers and examples you should be able to figure out the rest for yourself. I played Neverwinter as well… and it certainly was a lot harder to calculate for that game than Guild Wars 2.

Just note that most players here can’t actually calculate, and often blindly follow the builds others created some time before for reasons different from what their original buildmakers intended – then as they cannot defend, they insult everyone who does not agree. That is the reason I ask if you are serious or not before committing to a proper answer.

I’m not experiencing the problem you describe.

Generally berserker deals more damage than assassin, unless you use a lot of on-crit traits /runes/sigils. It’s complicated.

Damage: (21x + 0.01)(y-1) + 21/21(x(y-1) + 1) per point precision
Damage: z/9.16 per point power.

This is where x is precision, y is critdmg%, and z is power.

Don’t ask about the math unless you’re really serious about it…

You ask them. You’re missing communication.

The best profession is to command all professions at your disposal.

LithePanther.5027:

I’ve leveled 6 characters to 80, and the fastest way I’ve found is to alternate human – charr areas. I think they’re the best in terms of hearts/events (except for that kitten FLAG HEART) and make sure to 100% them and gather. I can usually do ~8 levels in 3 or 4 hours.

You mean the stealth one? Run to the left, activate, run to the right, jump on top of the cogs, activate, dodgeroll-jump from the cogs to the top of the tent, drop on the other side, dodgeroll to the post on the left, then wait for the final stealthed seeker to disappear before dodgerolling to his position.

It takes 2 runs, the heart can be cleared in 3 minutes.

Press Y.
If it says ‘Open World Content (…)’ it’s a megaserver.

If in place of ‘…’ your world name is there, it’s not a megaserver.

Not ALL maps are megaservered. Bloodtide, Sparkfly and Frostgorge for instance are not.

Thieves already don’t have cooldowns on weapon skills.

Now imagine if Shadow Refuge didn’t have a cooldown.

Hurr durr.

Thief. Story ends.

My only real opposition to it is hiding adept traits in zones the players can’t even access. Whoever decided on something as ridiculous as this… I can’t even speculate.

The idea of having traits that are unlocked via tasks to me makes some level of sense, but there are three things to improve on.

1. World vs World play now makes any new characters pretty much completely useless – they don’t have train-level income and they don’t have the ability to unlock tasks. Duplicate tasks have to be created for World vs World, or at the very least allow for traits to be bought entirely with World vs World badges ONLY, with no further gold costs.

2. The tasks must be reconsidered. At the very least all adept tasks should be in areas starting from lvl 1 to lvl 30, and the trait menu must be accessible from the start so players can unlock traits AS THEY EXPLORE in beginner areas. This gives an idea of progression even if they can’t use them yet – in contrast, getting points you can’t spend on anything at 30 is even more ridiculous than having to wait till 30 to have the first point to spend in the first place.

3. Trait unlocks should be account-bound, not character bound. I like world exploration. I have 1 100%, 1 90% (to be 100% tomorrow with WvW completion), 1 87%, 1 82% and 1 76%, among others. I will very likely 100% all 8 characters. I had all except Grandmaster XIII unlocked for all 8 characters because I had them all before the patch hit. I STILL don’t support having to individually unlock every trait for every character by doing the same tasks on all 8, as a player who LIKES world exploration.

Save, then get 3 character slots when they’re on sale. After that, buy bank tabs.

No point buying a perm salvage kit with gems when you can buy a perm black lion merchant contract for like 300-400 gold. That acts as a perm salvage kit AND merchant AND perm tools. You’ll never run out of inventory space, kits or tools ever again with just that.

Tengu and skritt, seconded.

Either elementalist or guardian, more likely guardian given your description.

The elementalist pumps the most support in the game in terms of damage-oriented boons (might specifically), and has second-tier AoE regen, AoE heal and AoE protection capabilities, as well as both projectile nullification and reflection. It can possess full uptime on vigor (nonstop dodging essentially), and can buff 500+% uptime on swiftness for crossing maps quickly. It also does more damage. However, it doesn’t exactly take hits well at all – if anything it’s the 2nd glassiest class in the game, and also the hardest to learn due to its complexity and glassiness. It’s often underestimated and rarely played because its innate difficulty of play makes the majority of players incapable of actually using them properly before having at least a week or more of ingame experience – while a handful of veterans still can’t play it after months in GW2. It was also pretty much useless at Player vs Player content, which prompted Anet to give it immunity to critical hits in a recent patch to address its tendency to lie on the floor for entire matches.

The guardian is the most capable of providing Aegis to cover party members who are bad at evasion, also possesses projectile reflection capabilities (with a better uptime actually), and has top-tier heal and damage reduction capabilities. It has second tier AoE boon capabilities. It has horrendous mobility. Damage can be ok-ish if specced to do so, but doing that will impact your ability to provide Aegis and heal. It’s easy to survive in a guardian, not hard to be useful, and very difficult to be an expert at it (perfect Aegis timing involves knowing all the attack patterns of all the mobs). Guardians are very common as it’s really hard to die in one, but expert guardians are as rare as expert elementalists. In both cases, they never, ever die before the rest of the whole party wipes first.

Depends on what you like really. My second character is about to reach world completion status, and I still like it more than most of the game – even though I also run everything else for the sake of getting ascended materials. Eventually I’ll probably get world completion on all 8 characters – that’s more my kind of endgame.

For many other people it’s dungeons, fractals or world vs world.

The question is what you want to do. If all you wanted is to reach the maximum level and nothing else, then you might even want to search for a new game to do that in. We can give you advice as to how to do certain things, but nobody can ever advise you on what you would find fun aside from yourself.

It’s worth noting here that all conditions have a base damage. Condition damage then adds to it according to a particular scaling constant that’s different for every condition, but generally about +1% damage per 8.5 points of Condition damage. Also, any condition is capped at 25 stacks maximum – some only cap at one. For these causes the more condition damage you stack the more effect you get from condition damage stacking, while it’s pretty much insignificant at low values.

In contrast, direct damage does not have a base damage, and everything scales perfectly in proportion to power. There is no cap, either.

If using the sigil of torment, choose either a full-condition damage or no-condition damage build – the first only if your build is already condition based to begin with. Otherwise, add power instead. Don’t attempt to play both on the same character, or you’ll do badly in both.

To add on:

1. Eliminate weaker enemies first, their damage adds up. When they’re down it’s easier to take on the veterans/champions/legendaries.

2. Sustained survivability = toughness * heal per second. This is your effective hp replenishment rate. If it exceeds the damage per second enemies deal to you you will survive indefinitely. If it is smaller, you will survive until you run out of HP. Vitality increases your survivability against large hits, but does not change your long-term survivability by much at all (maybe 4-7 seconds at max). Sustained survivability is nerfed greatly by the Poison condition – do not use your heal skill when poisoned; wait for it to fade first before using it.

3. The main tactic most people use without understanding it is that the total sum damage per second dealt by mobs to players in large mob groups is often larger than your sustained heal per second. By eliminating all mobs except one (usually a champion class or above), the overall damage the mobs can inflict is reduced to a level that some classes can outheal without the need for survivability stats at all. But this is not always true. Play a full-glass thief or elementalist and you will quickly learn that soloing any ranged mob of champion class or above is generally impossible, while the warrior has no such issue even while in full-glass mode because its intrinsic toughness is so much higher that healing signet alone will sustain it permanently. However, if in a given situation against a champion class or greater the mob’s damage to you is greater than your heal can offset, you will always die. Some parties survive at higher levels by reducing incoming damage with projectile reflection, well timed blocks, 100% uptime on evade on every single boss attack (impossible on solo but not hard in a party of 5) in order to bring the incoming damage per second below the sustained heal of the party so that they can still stack full offensive stats without dying. Inexperienced players attempting the same but without the ability to do so are the main cause of wipes in high level dungeon runs.

• There are builds capable of tanking, but none of them are in the damage-based meta for PvE. Some are used to great effect to hold cap points in PvP, while others are used as Commander builds in WvW. Due to the intrinsic importance of sustained survivability and spike survivability to these, they generally run Sentinel and/or Cleric gear (and occasionally Dire, in the case of the AED condition engineer); their use is generally frowned upon in PvE as they’re generally not needed outside specific defense/escort events (Temple of Balthazar, Temple of Grenth, Arah pre-event chain). If making one, bring it to a dungeon only when your party is incapable of surviving; otherwise, use another character with full damage gear for faster completion rates.