Guild Wars 2

I solo an elementalist everywhere (story, world bosses, group events etc etc), and I’m the last to die in dungeons… usually after exhausting all my invulns on ressing downed party members. An elementalist can survive floor 3 of the Nightmare Tower up to the portal Group Event, complete the Group Event alone, and finish the tower. That is pretty much the hardest thing to do in PvE at the moment I know of, anything rivalling it tends to be PvP content of some sort.

Its single target damage is not very good, the elementalist’s main ability aside from boonstacking is AoE damage. You’ll level a lot faster aggroing 10 mobs and killing them at once. My summoning Elite is reserved for Champion+ level mobs only.

PvE is a different beast from PvP however. In PvE mobs follow programmed threat mechanics, and if you’re familiar with their movements you can evade every single major attack and outheal every minor attack. In PvP, everyone focuses down the elementalist first, so you’ll die much, much faster than you’d expect; also, its AoE being its main ability also means you’ll be in a bad spot if fighting alone. For WvW and PvP type content, Mesmers and Thieves will be the strongest soloists due to their higher single target damage, and ability to stealth.

Candy cane, just because.

The end of reason should be rewarded with an emotional party.

Typos aside, this kind of idea leads to inflation. If you were talking WXP, however, I’d buy it. Then modify the amount of reward given by performance… so a large server that does badly will get enough WXP to gain half a rank, a large server that does well will get enough WXP to gain 5 ranks, a small server that does well will get enough WXP to gain 20 ranks, and a small server that does badly will get enough WXP to gain 5 ranks. As an example.

Reward the underdogs, punish the narbcakes, and give the average players average rewards.

Fail because of

1. Movement of players to servers expected to win, leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
2. Dropping of Nightmare tower content in halfway when the League was supposed to be entirely unaffected until the season ends.
3. Ridiculous requirements for the League achievements – you’re encouraging people to run circles capping ruins which might do nothing for the world if the world already owns Bloodlust, and run circles around the map killing random sentries for the lulz. Sentry, Ruin and Camp requirements should have been reduced, Tower, Keep, Player kill requirements should have been increased. SMC shouldn’t have been a requirement because certain small worlds simply cannot take SMC, let alone 5 times.

Locking players to worlds for the duration of the League, announcing matchups only at the start of the League after the server-lock, keeping new content the hell out of WvW and setting achievements which would have been earned in the course of normal WvW would have fixed these issues and turned it into a success.

Either mesmer or thief. Anything with the ability to spam stealth is OP if they can hit you and re-enter stealth before the server recognises your ‘attack’ command.

Thieves in particular are also nigh unkillable, using Shadowstep or Steal on neutral mobs to get insane amounts of distance in addition to the stealth.

Basically, if the thief is bad, he can always run away, even if greatly outnumbered. If the thief is good, he can run circles in stealth around a group of up to 3 players who don’t quite know where to AoE, backstab, stealth, backstab, stealth, backstab, until all 3 die. If the thief is REALLY bad, then it doesn’t matter what the player uses, he’s only good for feeding other worlds with Borderland Bloodlust buffs.

Also, you can never res faster than someone can Finish off, and you can’t stop a thief from finishing someone off when you can’t see him as he’s doing so.

There’s a very easy way to buff havoc squads without buffing zergs.

1. Raise tolerance for Outmanned, so it procs when your world’s players are half or less of an opposing worlds forces OR your world has 10 players or less, regardless of opposing forces.
2. When a world is Outmanned, allow all players in the world to carry 20 supply instead of 10.
3. When Outmanned fades, current supply carried by players remain held, but any new pick up of supply will be back to 10.

This should encourage people to start attempting to cap Outmanned borderlands, and in doing so draw a few people away from each zerg.

If a zerg moves to a borderland, it will fade Outmanned before anyone from the zerg can possibly pick up supply, so 60×20 is impossible.

Zerg players are unaffected, as 60×10 is still more than enough supply. There’s also little appreciable difference, as even if 10 people decided to move to a BL, 50 people are still in the zerg.

By the way, I run a guild specialising in small-group tower (and occasionally Keep) captures, using golems in conjunction with rams/superior rams. It’s not impossible to take a tower with 2-3 people (and almost guaranteed with 4+), but it involves running a golem from a supply camp to the tower, which is unfairly expensive to use on the Commander.

I highly dislike zerging because in those circumstances, results of battle are generally dictated by the number of people, and each person in the zerg adds very little battle power to the overall power of the zerg (2.5%?)… whereas in havoc squads, a skilled player may represent up to 30-40% of the power of a 5-man squad alone.

Engineers have a skill that applies 2 intensity stacks of regeneration at once (Regenerating Mist). Aside from that one exception, regeneration is capped at one cap intensity, where the higher value regen will apply; ie if a 4 second high value regen and 8 second low value regen are applied, only the 4 second value will be used until it expires… then the low value regen will apply for the remaining 4 seconds.

There are some skills which give regeneration-like abilities, which DO stack with regeneration. Look at your status bar – if the icon appearing when the skill is used is the skill’s icon, they stack. If the icon appearing is the orange pentagonal regeneration icon, it does not stack.

For movement speed boosts, the highest value will apply. Stacks are in duration, and only for Swiftness buffs – normal perm +25% speed boosts do not interact in any way.

Ether renewal is one of the best healing skills for an elementalist.

Staves are better at AoE, and do better in groups. For soloing, scepter or dagger as a mainhand will be faster, with dagger as the lowest survivability.

Between offhands, dagger does more damage, focus is more survivability and control. I’ve grown to love projectile nullification and reflection it provides, the invuln, and the freezing effect a lot. Fire Aura is kind of the weak link in the focus skill set.

Between defensives, earth armor is too weak to keep you alive against many bosses’ ultimate attacks, mist form prevents you from using healing skills or whatnot. A combination of Arcane Shield and Ether Renewal tends to yield the best results, but if you’re still having problems a second defensive skill may help after Arcane Shield as the first.

Also, don’t discount Lightning Hammer. For world exploration it’s incredibly useful as its skill 5, when Blasted by your other skills, can give you up to 1 minute 20 seconds swiftness per use… and when you bring yourself to above 15 Might by whatever means, Lightning hammer does very high AoE damage at medium range to everything when autoattacking.

I usually run up to a mob group, summon lightning hammer on the way, drop skill 5 on the group, blast the finishers with the mobs still in the area, then when all the blasts are done I get 4-6 dead mobs’ worth of experience and drops, and 1 minute 20 seconds of swiftness to move to the next area – then pick up my second Lightning hammer before running off.

Done correctly you have permanent swiftness when clearing the map.

My usual combo rotation is Dragon Fang (Blast 1) ->Fire Wall (Fire Field) -> Phoenix (Blast 2, cure one condition) -> Fire Aura (Burning to enemy, Might to self on hit) -> Dodge towards Fire Wall (Fast approach/evade all initial ranged mob attacks) -> Elemental attunement swap: Earth mid dodge (Protection: 8 seconds, 3 Might from weapon sigil) -> Earthquake skill at end of dodge (Blast 3) -> Magnetic Wave at Fire Wall (Projectile Repulsion – 3 seconds, cure 3 conditions, Blast 4) -> Arcane Blast at Fire Wall (Blast 5) -> Summon Lightning Hammer, Autoattack 3 times before Fire Wall fades (Blast 6).

In 8 seconds, I get 21 might lasting ~ 38 seconds (at 190% boon duration). When the Lightning Hammer fades in the ~27 second mark, I repeat this process, and this gives 25 might permanently, while using the second Lightning Hammer to do more AoE damage.

This rotation may vary slightly depending. Players and bosses require more use of accessory skills like Water’s 2 control skills or Air’s projectile nullification and control. Earth 5 invuln and Arcane Shield are used in cases of stun and/or impending lethal damage, water skill 3 is used to heal. Water dodges are also used when Lightning Hammering for healing without having to pause DPS much.

The fastest ones are the one in the northeast of Lion’s Arch, west of Bloodtide coast, and the short one in Malchor’s leap. These are so fast I’d recommend doing them as a daily.

The most interesting/hardest one is Griffonrook run w/bomb. The ultimate challenge, as it were.

The most beautiful ones to me are Spekk’s Lab (Lava!), Griffonrook run and Hidden Garden.

It’s an elementalist on nerf. >.>

Control/AoE Damage – get elementalist.
Single Target Damage – get thief.

You have to choose one… the better classes at each aspect don’t overlap.

If getting the thief, use Dagger/Pistol, and buff initiative with traits. You don’t exactly have knockdowns, but you can stun about 3-4 times in a row… if that’s the kind of control you’d want.

Bear in mind the elementalist is also much harder to use that the two classes you’re used to, whereas the thief is actually generally to use than the mesmer.

As a player with all 8 classes…

The best solo class is the mesmer, period… if you do it right you have an infinite amount of health points, and as long as you’re not fighting players, AI mobs can’t tell the difference between you and your clones. Before the update that gave world bosses timers, I took down every single world boss except the Shatterer, Dwayna and Jormag solo, and I routinely solo WvW camps without going below 75% hp as a mesmer. However it’s also the second most involved class when understanding what your skills do is concerned – if you just spam all your skills as they come off cooldown, you will die very fast.

The most involved class would be the elementalist, but it doesn’t have the kind of insane survivability a mesmer does, even though it does roughly double the amount of damage to compensate for that. The elementalist is also simultaneously the highest skill-floor and highest skill-ceiling class, in addition to needing planning. But the elementalist is far more potent in groups where its might buffing and AoE heals/condition removals actually help someone else as well. While the mesmer is a better soloist, the elementalist is the strongest PvE class in the game, and one of the strongest in WvWvW/PvP behind the permastealth thief and mesmer; its potential is balanced by a high skill floor – so most elementalists you see generally won’t be much of a threat. Still… granted that the skill floor of an elementalist is way above the average GW2 player, the vast majority playing it will die and die badly, giving it the ‘squishy’ reputation it has.

If your skill level is low, Guardians and Warriors are the easiest to use – or to rephrase, the hardest to die in, where Warriors tend to level a bit faster. But they’re not as ‘good’ in soloing… Warriors require 25x might buffing from Guardians or Elementalists to reach their proper potential. Many attempt to compensate with full berserker gear, but unfortunately, most of them are downed too often for that gear to achieve the DPS it could have.

Thieves have very high damage per second on a single target and have stealth, but suck at AoE damage – something that severely impacts their solo potential. There will be some things you find you can’t do against bosses that summon way too much.

Avoid Engineers and Rangers. The current balance mechanic makes it such that both are underpowered. Engineers have a skill floor second only to Elementalists for proper use, though planning isn’t as much of a factor. Rangers in particular have really bad skills for melee combat, while Engineers don’t have any melee options at all. The stronger points of the engineer are all inferior to the Elementalist, and the stronger points of the Ranger are all inferior to the Guardian and Necromancer, depending.

Lastly, necros work better with condition damage and AoE. Their single target spike damage is somewhat limited, but they work relatively well as soloists… just not as good as Elementalists or Mesmers. They’re about in the same category as Warriors and Guardians, but will level slower than warriors and are somewhat less survivable than Guardians.

I’m still waiting for an overdue buff on Engineers and Rangers…

Tl;dr to OP – To be safe, in your case I’d recommend a mesmer first – if you find it easy, move on to ele; if you find it hard, move on to Guardian.

The colors change every week, so you can get different borderlands/keeps. Your starting positions on EBH also change every week.

With patience, the ONLY point you have problems with if your world absolutely sucks at WvWvW is Stonemist Castle, because you can’t quite get that point by default as any world. For that one, try to work together with a guild/assemble a strike force in Lion’s Arch if possible for this purpose. Larger worlds won’t care; for worlds that normally have problems getting SMC, you won’t be the only player stuck out of world completion because of this, so you should be able to get a few. You should have enough resources to win it at least once, whereby you send all your characters into SMC after its taken, one by one, until someone else recaps it from you. That once is all you’ll need.

Hint: It helps to have 4 alpha siege golems. Keeps only need 2, but SMC is special.

My 4-man WvW guild has taken Keeps before… and we routinely take down Towers with no difficulty. And this is against worlds like Fort Aspenwood. If I were to guess, the minimum number of people required to take down SMC if you know what you’re doing is 10.

And then Scarlet summons Tybalt back in the Nightmare Tower just because.

Read the quest text. You’re supposed to kill one of 3 ‘special’ mobs. Killing normal mobs all day won’t open the doors; the Norns only care about the strongest game you kill.

Completed my personal story solo…. my mesmer never had issues with it, and my mesmer’s only weakness is repeated condition damage applications faster than I can [Null Field] – kind of what this boss does.. At that time, I used Rampager. If not for this post, I wouldn’t even know people had problems with the Risen Spiderlord at all.

Focus on boss, kite spiders in a small circle and PBAoE near the boss. Maybe your problem is that you’re using a Greatsword and its attack is being blocked by spiders. Use a Sword up close, skill 2 to ‘Blur’ in response to the first attack against you by the boss, dodge the next, repeat. If you get caught and downed, kill one of the random small spiders with down skill 1 to res. Your Mind Wrack plus Sword autoattacks should kill spider summons faster than they pop with the spillover damage, even when you’re targeting only the boss the whole time. Make sure you only target the boss, so your clones don’t go disappear when a tiny spider dies and you can use them for more [Mind Wrack]

Elementalists AoE so much, it should be a complete non issue. It should be far easier than on the mesmer.

Necros… leech health, PBAoE near boss like in the same way as the mesmer.

The NPCs are unnecessary.

+1.

The gloves are all right since I can still hide the metallic component with my top, but I can’t hide the metal on any other piece… and it clashes.

Shades.4572:

Orionlight.1073:

Were are the backpacks? Can you buy them?

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_Armorer

You can get guild backpacks from an guild armorer if your guild has it unlocked. I’m not sure/don’t think there are other backpack options

There are several other options:

Masterwork level backpieces are available from dungeons as drops.

Exotic level backpieces are available from Orr temple karma vendors after completion of the temples. Different temple, different stat set.

Exotic level alternate backpieces are available from Fractals of the Mist (all same look) for 1250 fractal relics. (I think… could’ve been 1350).

Ascended level backpieces can be made by upgrading the Fractal backpieces at the Mystic forge…

And lastly other Ascended level backpieces can be made by creating them directly at the mystic forge. The two in particular using 250 vicious claws, 50 ectoplasm, philosopher’s stones/crystals and 1x glob of mists essence can both be changed to any stat type in existence, including Celestial.

Backpiece skins are available from most events, and some are tradeable on the Trading Post. Wind catcher, desert rose etc etc etc.

I’m using an Ascended Celestial Wind Catcher.

I’m all for including Perplexity into PvP if they rebalance the mechanic. Having it in its current state is already making it heavily abused in WvWvW… spreading the ‘current’ perplexity into PvP will just basically eliminate diversity altogether, since there wouldn’t be much of a reason to use anything else.

It’s ‘queue’, and having to queue to enter a WvWvW instance is the payback of having 20x the manpower and lolbbqsaucepwning smaller worlds with 50 man zergs all the time.

Playing in a world which isn’t large enough to zergball all the time guarantees zero queue.

The sheer badness of this mechanic is one of the reasons why I’m using a Greatsword on the ranger. The other being the other skill that throws the ranger back so far it often aggroes something else/jumps off a cliff – but at least that’s ‘controllable’.

NO to bonuses, it would cause players to form ‘relationships’ for no good reason.

YES to the system without bonuses. Another line under your name that indicates who you’re ‘married’ to. Another possible thing is to track your ’lover’’s position on the map. Party is blue dot, friendly is green dot, offensive is orange dot. Give lovers a pink dot on the map they can always see regardless of whether in the same party or not.

Then charge like 20-50g for the privilege in the same way that Commander tag users have to pay 100g. It needs to have a cost so that people won’t overspam it, and having another gold sink always helps in this age of inflation – but it should be cheaper than Commander tags since only the lovers can see each other, as opposed to tags which everyone and their cat can see.

For RP purposes this should be a soulbound trait handled similarly to character names, not an account-dependent one.

Also, if implementing, do make sure same-sex marriages are allowed. I mean, Caithe and Duchess Faolain clearly have something going on already, so it’s not exactly out of place…. and this will help greatly people IRL who use characters of alternate genders.

This is not about the buggy mechanics that make the game think you missed and died when you’re clearly on the platform, as that may involve server-authoritative positioning that isn’t immediately clear to the player. This post is about 2 very easily fixable problems that have mysteriously not been fixed.

1. Starting midgame gives you ‘training mode’, and starts you in the middle of the course, with zero rewards. This is stupid, as given the random nature of activity joins, you’ll have this ‘training mode’ issue half the time when you play Sanctum Sprint as a daily. This problem is not shared by ANY other daily – all other activities give you full rewards even if you enter nearer the end of the game. In addition, there are cases where ‘training mode’ starts you at the course start but still zeroes your rewards anyway, and cases where you start with way more than enough time to complete the course, but are forced to zero reward anyway… so all you can do is climb the Windmill at the end for lack of a better thing to do at match end.

Fix: Disable this annoying function. Start everyone at the start. If they finish the course, they get the reward. If they don’t they won’t get any reward anyway. Luck still determines how much time you get, but at least you won’t be forced to get zero when you have more than enough ability to complete the course.

2. Ending the game early means you don’t have anything left to do other than climb the windmill. Yet you cannot leave, or the incremental match counter won’t increase, and the Daily Activity Completion flag will not be completed. You can’t even afk for the remaining 7 minutes, because you will be ‘kicked for inactivity’ by the game, even though you already kind of finished it.

Fix: Increment both the counter and flag upon looting the chest. Optional extra – allow players to go on to the next available Sprint match through NPC interaction so they can do more matches if they complete their matches faster, since there are multiple Sprint instances running in parallel anyway.

Doing these two things would fix the two most annoying things about Sanctum Sprint as a daily activity. I can live with the rest of the issues.

‘Dungeon ownership’ in the first place is nonsensical. The instance should persist until the last person leaves the dungeon.

Instances of hosts ragequitting, hosts who have to leave (sure, YOU wouldn’t do that, but SOMEONE might, and they might be the host), hosts who leave party after looting the chest at the end of a dungeon before others take the chest, etc etc etc.

The whole ‘ownership’ mechanic is broken.

I still haven’t exactly gotten over how all the reward you get from killing the Elder Dragon that threatened the whole world is just ONE pact victory token. It’s tradeable and all, but the Pact requisitioner is one stingy kitten.

The aetherblade jumping puzzle was utter crud what with the platforms that randomly failed to work and the need to do everything over again when they randomly fail to work.

I do like Spekk’s Lab though. A lot.

And Griffonrook Run as well, though it’d be nice if the Griffons didn’t occasionally cheat by attacking from their nest without any animation whatsoever. That kind of nonsense turns a challenging run with a high skill req to a challenging run with a high skill ‘and some luck’ req, and succeeding only about 1/5 times because of that random insta-attack animation is just a little frustrating at times.

It’s hard to believe that it takes more effort to add Valkyrie/Carrion gear that don’t even require an ingame 3D model when they’re releasing a whole line of ascended weapons in a couple of days.

I’d like the duels option. No achievements, no rewards, no penalties, just a straight fight between two players.

It would nullify only the 6th rune source, not the 4th rune source or any Mesmer skills the target might be using. But I see where they’re coming from now, if the main source of Confusion in their experience was being Interrupted. Thanks.

hollowcrown.4872:

Too many people just ruins all challenge and is boring, but too few people really make it too slow/impossible, for example 2 people is definitely not enough to take on a Champion.

They should make bigger dungeons like “raids” as I’ve heard them called, when you get a medium size group doing a dynamic event chain, but not too many people, so it’s still a challenge, that’s pretty much the pinnacle of enjoyment in the game for me.

Actually it’s possible to solo many champions, including the ones from Invasions. It’s slow as hell, but it’s definitely possible in most cases. The only exceptions to this rule I’ve ever fought are the Champion Risen Megalodon and the Champion Krait Witches. Legendaries wise almost all world bosses are soloable, and Lyssa is soloable (all other Temple events are not, though Melandru USED to be soloable back in the days when the Drake transformation was interruptible).

The optimal group size for any event in PvE is ~10 (2 parties) due to condition max stacks of 25 per type and AoE limit of 5. The optimal group size for any event in WvW is 20 due to the minimum supply needed to build sieges. (200 is enough for 4x superior rams, the minimum needed to take down a Keep with Reinforced Gates). Any numbers larger than this will suffer from diminishing returns when the events scale in PvE at a rate greater than the damage output can increase, and due to the travel time between objectives and Righteous Indignation time lockdown in WvW – remember that while a 200 zerg ball is usually unbeatable by a group of 20 players, they can never score WvW objectives as efficiently as 10 groups of 20 players. The only reasons why zergs are preferable are that any given player is less likely to die, and that player skill becomes less of a factor once more or them are around.

The clearest case in which a zerg is clearly worse than a group of 10 players is in killing the Risen Priestess of Lyssa… I believe most players have experiences of smooth runs in small numbers but having 90% of the zerg wiped out by the champion-class apes when the number of people there reaches 40+ numbers, made worse by dead jokers lying there doing nothing waiting for people to resurrect them.

So:

1. Good players like group sizes of ~10 in PvE and ~20 in WvW, their event completion speed is slowed when more people turn up.
2. Bad players like gigantic zergs in any situation since they can’t do it without better players carrying them through.
3. Tiny groups of 5 or less is usually harder for events regardless of what kind of player you are.
4. Farming champions in Invasions is a special case as having more people makes more champions turn up due to scaling. In all other normal cases where champions can have an increase in spawn quantity they also drop nothing (cf. Jormag). Zergballing is STILL worse for invasions if your objective is winning the event (ie. killing Scarlet). If you see 4-5 commanders on one aetherblade pirate captain’s general location it’s a foregone conclusion that they’re there to farm.
5. Map champion farms are zerg-based not because zergs kill them any faster – splitting up and killing would DEFINITELY be faster. They’re also not to generate HQ loot, as loot is determined per person’s MF value, not the number of people in the area. They’re zerg based so that everyone in the zerg gets kill credit for all the champions in the rotation – if people were to split up, you’d get only 2-3 kills for a whole map followed by a 10 minute period of waiting for more to spawn, whereas zergballing means you can kill and get loot in basically a nonstop rotation.

I’m both a Commander AND a world boss soloist… and not the farming kind. I solo world bosses for the kick of trying to kill something with that much more damage/hp, and in Invasions I lead the minority faction that actually tries to kill Scarlet on my world. Nowadays it’s a bit of a challenge to try to do so when most other Commanders on my world try to prolong the aetherblade phase to get more loot. But inasmuch as they attempt to get more loot for themselves at the expense of people who want to win the event/get Scarlet kill completion achievements, I attempt to complete the event for said reasons at the expense of those who try to get more loot.

I’m not very happy with Anet for creating an event in which a conflict of interest like this can happen.

Hold on. Since when did Stability nullify Confusion?

There are three types of conditions: Crowd Control, Damage & Debilitators.

The first is Stun/Daze, Sink/Float, Pull/Push, Knockdown/Launch & Fear.

The second is Poison, Burning, Fear (again), Confusion, Torment and Bleeding.

The third is Blind, Vulnerability, Weakness, Immobilised, Crippled, Chilled and Poison.

The first class prevents your ability to use any skill except stunbreakers, can be removed by stun breakers and can be completely prevented by Stability. These conditions only benefit from increased condition duration.

The second class does direct damage to the target scaling on the user’s Condition Damage attribute and benefit from both increased condition duration and Condition Damage.

The third class nerfs the target’s abilities in some way that doesn’t prevent skill usage, and only benefits from condition duration.

The power of Poison is that it’s both a debilitator and a damager, and the power of Fear is that it’s both a crowd control skill and a damager.

As far as I know the only damaging skill you can prevent with Stability is Fear.

And out of all of the damagers, only confusion damages you heavily for attempting to remove it with an active skill. You’re supposed to run away/evade until Confusion fades, not attempt to remove it. The problem with the Perplexity runes is not that they apply confusion, but that the 6-rune confusion is applied for 10 seconds. Most of the other Confusion skills apply for only 3 seconds.

Hey Devs, if you’re reading this…

Now I don’t really care as much about the removal of karma +% on consumables if we can at least clear our stock of saved items.

But will you consider completely removing the karma consumable system?

If you’re going to give a flat increase of 50% on karma items so that it no longer matters when we use the karma, the incentive is to use them right away so they don’t take up space, but… by putting them in items you’re making players do that many thousands more clicks, which makes zero sense from a gameplay perspective.

If they’re nonmodifiable, just add them directly to the wallet on the completion of a flag that would normally give the item (say, opening of a champion box). If this is incompatible with RNG that would give multiples of a karma boost, just give the average amount of karma you’d get from the mean result of items multiplied by karma per item – things don’t deviate from that after we open 1900 karma items. You’ll save everyone a lot of hand pain in the long run.

Game time is about 6 minutes. Won’t repeat what I said in the other thread. Total possible is 15 minutes, but it doesn’t last that long. I’ve seen games end at the 11 minute mark, and others that go down to the 5 minute mark. But on average, it ends at the 9 minute mark. At 62.5 points a game, it’s 40 games… or 240 minutes, or 4 hours. If you’re really bad it goes up to 8 hours, and if you’re really good it may be as short as 2.5-3 hours.

This may be long, but it doesn’t in any way compare to the ridiculousness of max-tiered WvWvW achievements. Though granted, those aren’t limited-period only things.

Did both aspect and this in one sitting yesterday. Average about 70-100 pts a game, but I wasn’t trying specifically to die unlike some of the earlier posters.

Basically:

Place traps at choke points
Shoot people after trapped
Normal shots for 300 ish HP
Headshot on other players who are trying to headshot other players
Camo kit + Headshot at close range is basically unavoidable kill for most players
Scavenge everything you can
Once you die, farm as many motes as you can at first
Then follow a survivor around, run in front of him and repeatedly drop trap 1 as he walks into it
Find a survivor that likes to scavenge… every time they scavenge a resource a mote is dropped for you to drop in front of his face for like 3 points per resource
If he has no rations left, drop a light trap in front of his run path and he’ll die for sure

If trying to remain alive, stock up on at least 5 rations, preferably 8
Go near the water and as far from island centre as possible so that ghosts cannot see you by proximity radar
Hide behind something that covers your nametag
Stand still and don’t move so that in the off chance someone finds you, he can’t trigger a trap on you. To trigger a trap you must move within its boundary – it doesn’t count if the trap is dropped with you already within its boundary, so if you don’t move you can never be targeted by a trap
If a karka appears press 5, run away from it, and dodge 4 seconds after it’s summoned. Run in a 135 degree angle away from it – directly means it’ll still kill you with lucky shots, and 90 degree means it will get closer to you until you eventually die

Lastly:

Don’t fall for obvious traps.

Glass cannon, I’d say thief. As a mesmer I wouldn’t consider myself to be glass at all even with the lack of defensive stats in my gear. Being able to clone so much makes an above average mesmer already an off-tank class. But burst damage (with the exception of the Mind Wrack burst everyone loves to spam so much) is limited, and doesn’t happen at long ranges. Thieves would be able to do more damage, but is probably an order of magnitude more squishy.

Mesmer has far more power in a solo context, elementalists have more combo options. Mesmers however also have additional mechanics capabilities due to blink and portal. These have helped me carry people with zero jump quest ability across otherwise impossible areas in parties before.

My dream group in a dungeon is generally 1 ranger (for healing) 1 guardian (tanking) 1 thief (dps/stealth) 1 mesmer (cc/portal/blink/dps/stealth/timewarp) 1 warrior (banners/dps/secondary tank).

Attempting to do a Dredge Fractal without a single mesmer, for one, may prove to be very, very difficult.

Group Content

Dungeons – very high coin drops from bosses.
Fractals. Crapload of masterworks and a couple of rares.
World Bosses. There’s a few timers out there that tell you where and when they spawn, each fight will offer you one rare per fight per day. So if you do every world boss, that’s quite a few…

Solo Content

World exploration gives you some coins per heart, more coins per map completed, and some equipment. The Orr maps for instance give you guaranteed Exotic Lvl 80 equipment when completed. I got a Berserker mantle ‘of Divinity’ off one of the map completion bonuses – which is worth basically 9 gold by itself.

Jump quests, once per day, give you guaranteed masterworks and occasionally rares at a higher rate than normal farming. However, it’s not going to be very spammable due to the day limit, and waypoint costs may make profits somewhat lower than you might have expected.

Running around with a steel hatchet and chopping the heck out of trees that drop seasoned wood logs is also good for 80 copper ish per log – or usually about 2.5 silver a tree (some can be chopped 4 times). Multiply this by the number of trees there are, you’ll get easily 1 gold in one map’s worth of trees. These have a spawn timer though so it’s worthwhile unlocking all the maps in which these trees are contained.

Running around Orr with an Orichalcum set of gathering equipment helps, too. There are Orichalcum nodes, Orrian Sapling nodes and a couple of rarer herb-type materials that you can sell for higher than the usual gathering materials.

Other

Trading post stuff. Buy low, sell high. This is actually probably the fastest, but it’s hard to find a good item to do this to that other people’s market monitoring automated tools haven’t already found.

However, honestly, you won’t even need that much gold unless you want a Legendary weapon. Otherwise, in most cases you can reach full power with all the runes you want at, maximum, 150 gold (full exotic berserker armour [20g] + 6 runes of divinity [60g] + 6 exotic weapons [15g] + runes for those [30g] + full exotic berserker trinkets [25g]) – and this build may not even be suitable for many players. Generally 80-100 gold is enough. And you should be able to generate 5 gold a day if you try.

It’s actually ‘The Ultimate Interceptor’ as far as I know…

WvWvW
Legendary weapons
Ascended trinkets (through Fractals – which are a kind of dungeon, but not exactly the same – and have some kind of progress)
World exploration
Soloing Orr events
Playing with guilds
Helping new players
Developing alternate characters
Developing crafting professions
Achievement hunting

1. Balancing classes on the whole based only on PvP. Balance needs to account for WvWvW, PvE and PvP separately optimally, suboptimally WvWvW and PvP as one group and PvE as another. Things that affect mob mechanics simply never affect human players in the same way, so it will never be balanced if you use only one of the mechanisms to balance. The current practice of balancing around PvP has led to some really rotten balance issues in PvE. There’s no need to even mention the class most affected since it’s pretty much obvious to most players, I’m just wondering why the differential balancing thing that was allowed for mesmers (my class) this recent patch was not a courtesy extended to other classes that needed it so much more.

2. WvWvW. Basically, it rotates around zerg rushing, arrow cart spamming and mesmer portal chain + timewarped siege golems. It’s become boring enough that most of the time I run outlier camps in outmanned maps with a PuG or two to flip the lot of them, because taking part in a tower/keep siege feels pointless. Whether or not I’m there feels largely unrelated to the overall effort – in a 90 vs 70 player combat, having 71 players or 91 players doesn’t make much of a difference at all. And skill is largely made irrelevant when the main kill mechanic is how many ranged autoattacks you can stack in a death dot.

3. Multi-classing. If I am to finish all the hearts in the world and explore everything, I’m not exactly given a very strong incentive to do the same in another class. Rather, I have the incentive to simply level that class, and then do Fractals/Dungeons/WvWvW/sPvP in that class instead. The main bit of the content of the game – the exploration, the dynamic events… it’s going to be an issue doing the same ones over and over again with 8 different classes. There just isn’t any difference between making frog juice as a ranger and making frog juice as a warrior – you’re ultimately still just running back and forth and spamming the F key. It may be more interesting if the radiant heart tasks were somehow different for each class to play. When the main content is sidelined for the smaller set of endgame content for class-relevant gameplay, the overall replayability is so much smaller than it could have been. For that matter, world exploration/dynamic events also pay too little in comparison to events like dungeons or fractals. There’s essentially no way to have a difficult PvE challenge with a fair reward for soloists – you either get challenge without fair reward (soloing Orr Champions), or you go for a group activity (Fractals, Dungeons).

• The lack of a queue system is also a problem, but OP only allowed 3.

This only applies to the Crystal Desert world, I’m not going to go world guesting for this (because aside from being insanely troublesome there’s also a limit to how many worlds I can guest). Conversely, if you’re from another North American world you can call on my support by guesting Crystal Desert.

Essentially, I’ve found that, perhaps oddly enough, one of the things that is most enjoyable for me is to help others with their stuff. And I’m not really the kind who goes around every map advertising help so…

If you need help with anything, just ask if you see me online. Ingame, mind, I don’t monitor my message inbox on the forum. Send a whisper or something along those lines and let me know what you need. As a mesmer I can do extremely cheapskate things like complete jump quest portions (or entire jump quests) and vistas by portalling to the end. As one of the stronger mesmer soloists around I can also generally help to take down almost any opponent should you need that for a quest – this is probably more relevant for Personal Story quests since in most of the map cases there should already be a few players around you to help even before you ask for it.

Of course, if I don’t respond to the whisper even though I’m online, I could be:

- In World vs World
- In a Fractal
- In a Dungeon
- Already helping someone else
- Otherwise extremely busy such that I’m not available
- Away From Keyboard

In all of those cases I won’t be able to help you out.

And also bear in mind that I can’t help you optimise your build because I haven’t played any other classes yet – and even for other mesmers your style of play may vary enough from mine that I may not be able to give you any useful advice. That is something you will have to learn for yourself.

Otherwise, I’ll see what I can do to help you out – which can range from information on how you can solve the problem yourself to direct assistance. I’m in the process of unlocking the map now so at first there may be initial delays in getting to locations, but after a while I should be able to get to most waypoints in less than a minute.

There may be cases where I can’t help, in which case I will let you know. But you do not lose anything for asking.

Just leaving this as an open invitation to forum users who may be new to the game. This service is free – it’s just something I’m doing because I find I like to do it, and it’ll add a bit more meaning to my endgame experience over only grinding for a Legendary, WvWvW, Fractals or Dungeons (which I also do). Somehow, it feels meaningless to me to only talk about helping NPCs all the time and earning ingame ‘Karma’ for it without also helping real people as well.

My avatar name ingame is Mikazuki Aura.

South to Kessex Hills. But you could always go through the portal to Lion’s Arch in Divinity’s Reach, then go from Lion’s Arch to another race’s starting area, which are all lvl 1-15 areas.

This map might help you out.

http://gw2.mmorpg-life.com/interactive-maps/