Guild Wars 2

Zaoda.1653:

Call me impatient or whatever, but I’m SO over waiting for the expansion now. I mean, when most games announce something so big, usually they have a price and a release date which follows the announcement, and with most new legendaries for HoT not even being in the beginning stages of conception, worries me a lot.

That’s why today I decided to use up all my tomes of knowledge on my re-rolled engineer, because I have a feeling I’ll be able to get a whole bunch more before HoT is ready, let alone has a release date.

#myhypebarrelisnowempty

I have enough stuff to level the Revenant to 80, the mats necessary to instantly gear it in full ascended of any stat but Zealot, and I’m amassing spare Tomes to instantly max mastery points as I unlock them, while waiting.

At this rate, I’ll probably be able to max out the character within hours of the expack’s release, as will many, many others.

Just saying, it’s entirely possible to oneshot things even with downscaling. In my Brisban farming trips in my thief in a level 24 area, the hyenas in the area are all oneshot by dp3.

It’s significantly faster than running, and gives xp and loot too.

And no, I can guarantee the character only had to exist. My necromancer was level 2 when the NPE hit and she never had to unlock any traits but the XIIIs.

I bought extra char slots and filled them up prior to the update because it was obvious from the preliminary discussion that the current system would really, really suck.

FPS affects jumping puzzle performance on more difficult jumps. Having a keyboard that isn’t 2kro also helps, so you can actually strafe in midair in addition to pressing the forward and jump keys.

Thing is, nobody starts out good at anything. Some people can learn very much faster than others, but even those with an aptitude for it still have to do it a few times to become good at it.

There are a few. The PvP lobby has golems, which you can also use at any level, but not all stat combinations in PvE exist in PvP, and not all skills behave the same way in PvP as PvE.

The Silverwastes also contains some, which you can reach from the northwestern tip of the Brisban Wildlands. The area is technically level 80, but the dummies are in the eastern camp – so it does not matter even if your level is below. The problem though is that dummies are immune to conditions and immune to critical hits or critical effects, so the picture you get will not be accurate.

You could always test by soloing a champion instead in different builds – it’ll allow you to see your survivability after the effects of dodging and such, and timing it will allow you to see your effective DPS. The best for these are wurm type champions as they hit only moderate damage at melee range, and have middling HP – good enough for a test, not so absurdly high that it takes forever.

I’m using a Z97 Gaming 5. Works very well.

Also, high-refresh LCD must be TN, because IPS is incapable of reaching high refresh rates. At highest graphics settings you still will be breaching the monitor’s max refresh quite constantly on most games on a single 970, and all the time on all games if you SLi. 2160p requires 4 times the power of 1080p, so none of the high-refresh monitors ever exceed 1600p as no graphics card would be able to drive them to their main selling point.

I can’t speak for the Samsungs because I haven’t tried them, but the viewing angles of the BenQ ones have no visible issues, and no black level issues at all. Display colors won’t and will never reach IPS standards as that is the defining advantage of IPS. You trade framerate for color accuracy.

As tech progresses, IPS have slowly increased their max refresh limits while TN has slowly improved its colour accuracy.

While the difference is significant enough to make a large impact on any form of shooter gaming (60->120 hz increases your reaction speed by 80 ms in a realm where differences between 20 ms ping and 100 ms ping can make or break games), in something far less demanding on reaction speed/camera responsiveness like Guild Wars 2, the main advantages of high framerate apply to jumping puzzles, Player-vs-player, and using full glass builds on high level fractals. It improves the experience for the rest of the game, but not in as performance-critical a way.

Also, there is a vast difference between competition-grade high-refresh TN, and low-budget TN, and it’s not just in the refresh rates alone. To label the entire technology line as inferior is as misguided as labelling all strawberries as sour from tasting only the cheap stuff – because cheap strawberries really ARE terrible.

There are crap IPS panels as well, and the ghosting issues on those are absolutely dreadful, but they in no way represent the standards that IPS can reach.

The aetherblade one has a random factor, as the cogs don’t always launch you in the direction in which they should – so to complete the whole thing without help, some luck is necessary. This is not true of any other jumping puzzle.

More important to care about:

1. What you like to do
2. What is the most effective way to do #1

Metas are designed to be the most effective way of getting random players of limited skill to work together in large numbers without any prior coordination. They are not designed to be the most optimal for every given role, not even the most effective in the limited role their are meant to achieve – and they update slowly, such that outdated builds that have already been nerfed into the ground 9 months ago are still being touted as meta.

If you’re doing roles not typically expected of the meta because of the content type you do, if your skill level is high enough to use very high risk-high reward styles or if you are able to coordinate with people before an event begins (for instance, to ensure that no more than 1 condition user will be present in a dungeon/fractal party), you will tend to end up using builds that deviate from the meta.

And even if what you want to do deviates greatly from the more efficient roles in the game, if you don’t have any fun doing it, using a max-viability build to do a role you don’t enjoy is a fast way to end up quitting entirely.

All the lvl 70+ dungeons can do the rare thing, yes. A minimum of 180 tokens gets 0.9 ecto, 0.5 dark matters, 0.25 insignia and 0.5 runes in addition to unlocking a skin. On the other hand rare salvage uses 30 tokens and yields 0.9 ecto.

Given that each insignia is worth about 6 ectos, it’s about triple the reward for six times the token cost – whether it’s still worth it or not after you’ve already unlocked the all-skins meta achievement depends on how much you value dark matter.

I’ll need to check the undead potions though. No idea on that since all of mine have been going into skins. XD

Worth stating that there are some cases where it’ll be more effective to drop party and redo from scratch under certain conditions with PuGs, as they are unlikely to be able to finish the dungeon alive (ergo, they can’t even act as effective meatshields):

Requirement 1: Nobody declares that they are new. If new players declare so, they’re open to being taught, and therefore can do well. If they are not skilled but do not ask for instructions, they’re expecting for the others to carry them, are non-receptive to instruction, have enough of an issue with pride to not want to be viewed as inexperienced, or any combination of the three. That tends to lead to the worst possible performance.

Requirement 2: Any of these indicators of extremely bad performance are met:

1. CoFp1 – If 4/5 people are downed at Champ Slave Driver.
2. CoE any path – If 4/5 people are dead at first Alpha OR champ wolf encounter.
3. TA F/U – If 3/5+ people are dead at the 6x wurm encounter.
4. AC – If 3/5+ people are dead at Spider Queen encounter.
5. CM – If 3/5+ people are dead at first boss for p1p3, and if 2/5+ people are dead at first boss for p2.
6. Arah – If 3/5+ people are dead at any of the first bosses.
7. HoTW – If 4/5 people die at elite wolves before getting to troll boss in p1, if 3/5+ people die at first boss in p2p3.

Additional consideration: If at least 3 of the people in the party are in the same guild.

In all other cases it is generally better to finish the dungeon than to attempt to reroll the PuG dice. In these extreme cases, you’ll have the approximate performance equivalent of 2 players instead of 5, so even if you COULD carry all of them through, it would take a really long time between having to race dps against a boss’s heal and having to repeatedly revive dead players.

Maybe I should record timings for the various runs, come back and reattach timings. My impression of the timing might not be what the timing actually is.

I’ll let you know.

The good thing about SE1 is the triple golem champ kills. The annoying thing about it is the amount of time it takes to wait for things to execute – waiting right of the first turret pair for the elites to pass, waiting for the champ golem to activate, killing turrets on the path that drop no loot, and the final legendary boss that drops no loot.

Arah is on top as their Gold reports are tripled relative to most other paths. CoE is next due to the Charged Core/Lodestones, and p3 has a special mention for the t5/t6/dlode bit in addition to the bit after the skipped champ that includes 40 trash mobs in a small area. CoEp2 is somewhat slower because of the gun-bomb golem bit which is even slower when pugs fire at your golem, making them less useful than if they did nothing at all.

Ideally you move from champion to champion, running/stealthing past elite groups you don’t intend to fight and AoEing the heck out of highly concentrated trash mobs.

ACp2 has an equivalent number of champboxes to SEp1, with trash that accompanies them – but is only this good if you kill them all, instead of skipping champs for no reason. Most groups skip 2 champs together with their trash.

CMs are fast in general with a lot of additional trash mobs accompanying champs for extra drops, where path 2 has the most to kill. The hunting hound is usually skipped but gives an additional champ chest for little to no extra time.

I don’t think I normally get 4 minute completion times for SE1. Getting past all the turrets from the initial waiting to the two-at-a-time nonsense tends to already take 6 minutes. I can do a quick run to check.

Edit: Takes 4 minutes to get to Nokk. Takes 8 minutes in total to finish. SE3 in comparison took 10 minutes. Not sure how you can finish the entirety of SE1 in 5 minutes.

Ranger is not the strongest ranged class, Elementalist is. And fractals are meleeable.

PSA: Flame Axes outdamage Frost Bows on the whole with the exception of FB4. If you’re using FB 4, you should use it and drop it if your sustained DPS is high (staff). If your sustained DPS is low (scepter), you should camp FA instead, then drop in your high bursts in between FAs.

I’ve seen so many Elementalists using Frost Bow’s autoattacks on bosses with no idea why the Frost Bow is used.

EcoRI.9273:

CM p1 bomb event is also another good example of stealthing as a skillful activity.

Thief here, that’s easy.

Skilful stealth is Arah p2 and TA forward. with the condition that you never stop to wait for cooldowns.

OP has done a good job of invalidating every opinion that does not agree with him, so I would not waste my time being invalidated in turn.

There’s no easy answer because your completion speeds depend on your level of skill, and some of the most efficient dungeons are also among the harder ones. By level of skill, I’m assuming that your PuG teammates are useless beyond being meatshields and doing basic dungeon mechanics, and you’ll need to carry the games – none of them are hard if you luck out and find a good team.

So in any case, in descending order of rewards/unit time assuming you can carry any and all dungeons…

Arah Path 1
Arah Path 2
Crucible of Eternity Path 3 (24) [5cc, 1.05g, cLode, cCore, t5claw, t6claw, dLode, dCore] <Pre-locked>
Crucible of Eternity Path 1 [5cc, 1.05g. cLode, cCore] <Pre-locked>
Sorrow’s Embrace Path 1 (8) [5cc, 1.05g]
Sorrow’s Embrace Path 3 (10) [5cc, 1.05g]
Crucible of Eternity Path 2 (22) [5 cc, 1.05g, cLode, cCore] <Pre-locked>
Ascalonian Catacombs Path 2 (12) [7cc, 1.55g]
Ascalonian Catacombs Path 1 (11) [4cc, 1.55g]
Ascalonian Catacombs Path 3 (14) [4cc, 1.55g]
Caudecus’ Manor Path 2 (14) [5 cc, 1.05g]
Twilight Arbor Up (14) [4cc, 1.05g]
Caudecus’ Manor Path 1 (13) [3 cc, 1.05g]
Honor of the Waves Path 1 (Melee all bosses) [3 cc, 1.05g]
Twilight Arbor Forward [4cc, 1.05g]
Caudecus’ Manor Path 3 (15) [2 cc, 1.05g]
Honor of the Waves Path 2 [4cc, 1.05g] <Water>
Honor of the Waves Path 3 [4cc, 1.05g] <Water>
Arah Path 3
Citadel of Flame Path 1 [2cc, 1.05g] <Pre-locked>
Citadel of Flame Path 2 [1cc. 1.05g] <Pre-locked>
Sorrow’s Embrace Path 2 [8cc, 1.05g]
Arah Path 4
Citadel of Flame Path 3 [3cc, 1.05g] <Pre-locked>
Twilight Arbor Aetherpath

It’ll take some time to gather moar data. Order is an estimate, bracketed numbers are times, square brackets are rewards (cc = champ chests), triangle brackets are extra info.

Aside from stated rewards all paths also give tokens, which can be converted into insignia for some stat combinations via the exotics for all paths except CoF, whereby the most profitable route for that is to exchange for lvl 70 rare light helms and break for ecto.

Eliminate from this all the dungeons that you’re not capable of carrying, and you get your rotation.

I assume also that you get no Exotic drops worth mentioning, as getting a high value Aetherblade drop would change its place a lot.

This is very different from what most people run, as most people cannot/don’t want to carry pugs through the harder dungeons. I personally don’t want to carry PuGs through HoTW, Arah or Aetherpath, but I’m fine with the others. Most people simply repeat CoF 1,2 AC 3, SE 1,3, TA U as they are the easiest dungeons, but some of them, especially CoF 1 and AC 3, are slow regardless of your skill level due to mechanics you’re forced to wait for.

And if your PuGs cannot complete basic mechanics, some paths like CoF 1 and CM 2 can be uncompletable.

Because it’s the ONLY way in the game to get ascended Zealot chestpieces, boots and pants without buying discontinued recipes off the Trading Post at impossible prices. The helmet, shoulders and gloves also drop, but you can get those off the Triple-Headed Wurm.

Not really. Some of these have English equivalents, it’s just that the German version is so much better known that it makes more sense to co-opt that version than to use the lesser-known English version.

For instance, few people know what epicaricacy means. So few that the GW2 forum interface I’m using thinks that it’s a spelling error. Use its German equivalent on your list and most native English/German speakers will know what you are talking about.

Now back to topic…

It doesn’t matter because any number above your monitor refresh rate disappears entirely. Having spare performance is only good for keeping FPS at your monitor’s maximum at higher demands.

The only difference you can tell between 144 fps and 300 fps on any game on a 144 hz monitor is that the higher number will have more tearing artifacts.

If you are talking about the torches in SB cove, note that you don’t have to kill the bandits in the lower cave. Clear the upper cave, then jump to the torch near the planks over the water. Light that first, then the one at the cave entrance second, then light the lower cave using dodge/proj reflect/teleport skills, jump into the water to break aggro, and jump into the upper cave to light the last one, followed by killing the veteran that spawns immediately. Because of this you can complete it regardless of your DPS or runspeed.

In that case consider Norn race for the archetype.

The Sw/Sh|Mace + Longbow would fit your idea the most. Swapping sword to axe increases DPS, but you lose one gap closer.

Guardians run with two melee sets – usually greatsword/hammer for this idea. Greatsword has greater burst damage, a condition clear, a leap and a pull, while hammer has greater AoE damage over time, constant Protection (-33% damage) to your party, an immobilise and a launch.

Depends on what you want to do though. Warriors would output more damage but offer less support than guardians. Thieves aren’t exactly ‘elusive’ all the time as well, as the SP thief generally does not use stealth in combat at all – and is the most capable tank in the game. It tanks using invulnerability frames, and dies if you screw up the timing – while drawing unstoppable aggro from most mobs. Warriors have a healing signet which attempts to outheal damage done to it, but they draw less aggro due to having less CCs and more HP, and are very vulnerable to Poison. Guardians reduce damage rather than trying to heal through it and use blinds to eliminate some instances of it, but draw even less aggro than warriors due to having lower DPS.

I would recommend using a Samsung or BenQ monitor that can go to at least 100, and preferably 144 Hz or beyond for gaming, rather than a 4k monitor. With a 60 Hz monitor, any framerate above 60 only causes tearing artifacts and wastes power, so you’d be forced to either VSync (which can lead to pointer lag issues) or tolerate it. Between the monitor refresh rate and the FPS values you get, the lower number is the one you actually see – and between 60 to 144 Hz there is a significant difference in performance. On the other hand 1080p has been an industry standard for gaming for a while so higher resolution like 2160p may simply lead to more pixels being used for the same level of detail. The dark side is that these monitors generally support lower resolutions as a tradeoff. Gaming does better with higher refresh, while image or movie editing does better with higher pixel resolution.

Seconded regarding the RAM. Speeds above 1600 get diminishing returns, but 1333 to 1600 will be noticeable. I’m running a 1866, though frankly for all intents and purposes it’ll likely be fairly similar to the 1600.

Re: Twin 970 SLi, I have the intention to do the same thing to my computer eventually, but unless it’s important to run everything at max resolution NOW on max settings, you might want to postpone the second. Reason being most games are already running at nearly maxed settings at a good resolution on a single 970, and the 970’s price will drop over time. If you’re set on using the 4k monitor however, SLi would, indeed, be necessary from the outset.

Not sure why you would use 3 SSDs and one HDD instead of 1 SSD and 2-3 HDDs since I don’t photoshop.

As for power supply, consider getting silver or gold certified ones if electricity is expensive, otherwise what you have will already work – reason being that sometimes if the prices are close enough, the money you save by having greater power efficiency can be more significant than the money you save by buying a cheaper PSU. And since it’d generate less heat as well, you can save on cooling.

With regards to fans, just make sure you have a filter in front of your intake fans, and that you always have more intake fans than output fans. Positive pressure is important, as it forces dust out of any cracks or gaps your computer case may have (ports, etc) – if it is the other way around, dust will get sucked in instead, which tends to result in dustier components faster.

Not enough information. Your description fits the following:

1. Staff/Scepter mainhand Elementalist with Lightning Hammer summon or Dagger mainhand Elementalist with Flame Axe summon.
2. Hammer or sword/mace|shield warrior with Longbow secondary.
3. Sword-pistol thief with Shortbow secondary.
4. Rifle engineer with bomb and tool kits.
5. Sword ranger with longbow secondary.
6. Dagger necromancer with scepter secondary.
7. Sword mainhand mesmer with greatsword secondary.

Guardians are the only class you cannot play this in as they have no viable ranged condition weapon.

All of these are survivable in melee using entirely different methods.

The skill points are unlikely to be your main expense, as a skill point is, on average, worth only about 20-35 silver each post-conversion, depending on TP prices. You’ll get a lot of them from levelling past 80, and more scrolls drop all the time from champion chests as well.

The direct gold cost would be more.

Whether you should buy a trait directly or unlock it through the ‘gameplay’ method depends entirely on how much time you need to spend to unlock the trait outside how you would normally play the game. If unlocking a trait takes you 15 minutes, and your income is on average 5 gold per hour, gamplay unlocking would cost you 1.25 gold in lost profit – and so, for a grandmaster trait worth 1.5 gold + 10 SP (1.8 G equiv), it would be better to unlock it. If unlocking the trait takes you 60 minutes, on the other hand, it would be better to buy it.

The more efficient you are, the more buying it directly becomes a good idea.

PSA: Do NOT do your personal story yet. Do it at end-April, or you may permanently miss story content on your character.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Personal-Story-Restoration-update

I would also recommend joining a guild, as socialising can be the only thing left worth doing in a game after some time, when you have done everything several hundred times and explored the world fully a few times. From personal experience.

No, it’s a large-address-aware 32-bit client.

Sadly.

Excludee.3850:

Sometimes running your monitor at its native resolution makes things behave better too. I get somewhat better performance out of 3840×2160 than slightly lower resolutions. Though seeing the posts here make me feel a bit better about not getting a constant 60fps. Maybe the mac client isn’t quite as terrible as I thought.

It might be. These guys probably have, system-spec speaking, only a fraction of your Mac’s performance.

80% utilisation of a 2000 point system will still exceed 100% utilisation of a 600 point system, if it was possible to somehow collapse system performance into a single variable (it isn’t). But you get my idea.

144 fps normally. 40 fps during large fights.

I can technically ‘get’ higher FPS, but 144 Hz is my monitor refresh limit.

Similarly anyone running 80-100 FPS values who does NOT possess a >60 Hz capable monitor should set the FPS limiter to 60 FPS, as running it above generates more heat and uses more power in exchange for giving you tearing artifacts and zero extra performance.

Fingolfin.6917:

I really understand that ANet has to focus their development on the oncomming expansion and that there is no living world in the meantime – no problem, accepted.

But fact is that we did not get ANY new content since wintersday.
I would really be glad if they just “recycle” some old content:
- bring back one of the festivals – even if it just has the same content as last year
- bring back SAB – I dont need an new world in it to have fun with it
- why not have another Kiel/Gnashblade vote because ppl in LA are so upset about the slow progess in rebuilding their city that they force the council to have another vote to get Gnashblade to power because he promise the folks that he can do better
- why not restart another WvW season with the same rules as last year as a tribute to the “old” alpine map that will be gone soon
- …

I think that ANet could provide content variety without great effort and I would really appreciate this

Nobody has yet countered this effectively, because it cannot be countered. It’s legit.

There’s already content they can make available again with what… 5 minutes of copy-and-paste?

The Lunar New Year event he failed to mention was good. It’s over now though, but they can rotate other things. Reactivate Crown Pavilion… reactivate SAB… reactivate WvW league…

All of this gives us stuff to do without taking any significant resources away from HoT.

Talking about what the upcoming patch is like was already taken to a high art with 2 weeks prior to the feature packs. It won’t work doing this for 4-5 months.

Recycling content, however, would.

1. The HP scale of a boss is determined by the highest number of active players in the boss’s history.

If someone lies dead they don’t do any harm re: scaling as they have ALREADY scaled the boss by joining in the first place. They do block revival of downed players, however, which can lead to more people becoming dead. This does, however, mean that if you are in an area where no other player would die, you can safely stay there until the rotation ends to be resurrected/teleported out without having any negative effects on the raid whatsoever.

1.1 The problem is not so much lying dead, but being dead in the first place. Use something that you can survive in. If you can’t survive in zerker/assassin, use Soldier or Knight – it’s better for you to be suboptimal than a liability. It is better for you to be optimal of course, but if you cannot be, forcing it and dying is much, much worse than being alive and somewhat less optimal.

2. If people run to a boss to ‘help’ with it, they enter the HP scaling zone before they reach attack range. In situations of short timers, ‘helping’ a boss can directly cause it to fail as it can add more HP to the boss than the players trying to ‘help’ will ever remove. This is why Breach commanders at the 1 minute mark generally tell people not to attempt to ‘help’ with bosses yet to be killed – unless that Breach has half the zerg wiping or similar.

3. Event credit does not rely on proximity to the boss, but the actions you have performed. If you’ve already died, you have already been factored into the boss HP, so return and do some good as you are no longer able to affect its scale no matter what you do. Conversely if a boss is at low health and the timer is also low, do not enter the boss’s area as you will be directly sabotaging the efforts of others.

4. Vinewrath vines close after one rotation. That rotation is determined by its instakill move – the lasers at the troll, the darkness stun at the thrasher, and the poison floor at the teragriff. If you die and can get in before that rotation finishes, you can rejoin – else, you will be stuck outside a vine wall. But if you can die and rejoin before one rotation even finishes, you have died WAY too fast, and see point 1.1.

Teq and Vinewrath commanders who know what they’re doing ask people to waypoint because they block revival of downed, not because of the completely unaffected HP scale. The Teq coms ask for people to return because the scale has already been set, but their contribution has not yet been maxed. VW coms do not generally expect people to be able to return before the vine wall closes.

5. Stop perpetuating myths about HP scaling. If you do not know about something, adding false information is worse than not saying anything at all, because people have no idea what is true or false without doing tests, and most people are too lazy to do their own tests. We know about HP scaling behaviour because people used to use a now-banned method of checking boss HP – and this information comes from their input on how the HP fluctuated as people joined, died, and/or rejoined.

P.S. With a little thought you can quite easily derive why it must work this way, even though we already know that it does from more empirical means. If leaving a boss caused its HP scale to drop, no boss will ever be failed as the remaining alive players would get an easier and easier job. Alternatively, if players joining (who had not previously dealt any damage to the boss) did not scale it up, a zerg could instantly kill a world boss if it was scaled for 5 players, and a 40-man zerg enters the fight after it starts.

P.P.S. What is true is determined by looking at the data collected on something, not by the number of people who believe it to be true. The no-AoE fallacy continues to sabotage Breach after Breach on the copper husk, even though it is very easy to determine that it is false.

And lastly @ OP, in a raid that has a potential to fail, people who refuse to sabotage event completion rates by resurrecting the dead are being helpful as raid success gives everyone, including the dead, rewards. If a raid fails because people are trying to ‘feel’ helpful, nobody gets the rewards, and everyone involved in the resurrection, in addition to the dead themselves, are in fact sabotaging everyone in the raid.

Or in other words, doing what you feel is right does not mean you are doing what is right.

Tl;dr In the middle of a fight:

Dying = Bad; Lying dead = Sometimes bad, sometimes no effect; Joining last-minute = usually bad, sometimes helpful; Ressing dead = Always bad; Ressing downed = Good if they can be saved, bad if they cannot.

Easy fix is to just give minions the same iframes as the player when the player dodges.

Minions/pets/turrets/clones being able to stand in the Megadestroyer’s lava when players cannot is broken in the same way phantasms being unstoppably onehit by CoE’s Subject Alpha is broken.

The problem is rarely, if ever, minions dying from standing a long sustained AoE. It’s them getting killed instantly by instakill AoEs that players, but not minions, can dodge.

Invuln skills, blocks and evade frame skills (say, thief Pistol Whip) should continue to protect only the player, but hard dodges should have that iframe protection extended to minions as well.

Go craft it. The kind of asc weapon that drops for me was a Magi weapon.

The crappiness of that stat makes RARES look good.

Try playing a warrior or guardian. The minimum difficulty involved in playing elementalists and engineers isn’t on the same order of magnitude as playing those two.

And by the way, Arnox, with regards to:

“Do those MMO’s also require you to move around ALL THE TIME and DODGE?”

Tera does. For the Slayer class in particular, in addition to positioning within a 3 degree margin of error being compulsory for your attacks to even hit (you must manually aim, you don’t attack automatically in the correct direction), you also have up to 3 seconds of delay before your skill activates. You’re also expected to use them on moving targets. And your only form of defense is dodging – you don’t have invuln skills like GW2 elementalists do. Tera still has 20+ odd skills on the skill bar, and to make things worse, for some skills to be at maximum viability, they have to be chained in a specific order – so you have to keep track of that while dodging while timing and aiming your attacks.

GW2’s difficulty isn’t anywhere close to that.

8 characters.

2 rings, 7 aquatic weapons and 3 armors left until full ascended everything on all 8. And given how asc crafting is purely a time driven process, RNG plays no role here. Probably going to make full asc for the 9th char (revenant) soon after these are done. Didn’t play every day either or buy a single time gated material. Those who did would have completed full asc for even more characters, easily. I know of players with more than 15 chars, and map completion for all of them, which takes even more time.

Every moment you complain about it being too hard is a moment you’re not spending getting it. By the time you’ve given up on the lack of any response from Anet, someone else would have already gotten 2 sets in the meantime.

P.S. The stat advantage is minimal relative to food and utility consumables. You are entitled to complain if you use food and utility consumables for every piece of content you do, because ascended does, in fact, limit your max viability in that case. If you don’t, you’re not being honest with yourself, since the viability loss from asc (~5-7%) is small relative to food (~12%) and potions (10%), and costs what… 1,000 times more?

pRNG uses a time seed, so while looting approximates randomness if the time you loot the chest is random, when the drop rate of anything is low enough, it does not necessarily follow random trends. And since it’s based on a time seed, it’s not even truly luck. RNGesus may depend somewhat on the time in which you play the game.

Too bad, as they say. All you can do is watch tryhards link it 40 times in your face in an attempt to feel better about themselves by making you feel worse. Rinse and repeat for everything from precursors to fractal weapons to tequatl weapons to regurgitated armor.

Not all weapon combinations have t5/6 precursors. Some must be crafted from exo insignia. Soldier, Dire, Rabid for example.

That said I wouldn’t mind paying even an ascended insignia if it gets the worse-than-useless Magi weapon out of my alt mule’s inventory and into the hands of a character that might actually make some use out of it.

I’ve also seen (ahem) flying omega golems, thieves that can backstab 22000 damage on a 3200 armor warrior friend of mine, and a ranger whereby every arrow of his Rapid Fire hits for 8000 damage each, not to mention his downskill hitting 18000 and instantly downing someone from my world from full health. Also, thieves who can apparently reflect a killshot without leaving stealth.

WvW contains far more hackers than the rest of the game does. It’s still not common, by any means, but it can happen.

A tip. When you see someone doing something that’s OBVIOUSLY broken, invite the person to your party to expose his name, then screenshot it the moment the name appears in the top left, if he accepts the bait and joins the party. If not, the best you can do is the guild tag. Talk to the guy and find out if what happened is possible in the first place, you might learn something – but keep the screenshot just in case.

P.S. There was an old bug where people managed to Blink/Shadowstep through walls/gates, often by accident, sometimes not. Maybe the bug happened again. The last time someone did that on Crystal Desert, we warned him to exit the tower immediately, and when he refused to comply, our entire zerg reported him. The same bug is also responsible for glitching to be stuck inside a fort wall with no way out other than for someone else to cap the whole structure, or to waypoint.

P.P.S. The only time I’ve seen a hack outside WvW was in Snowball mayhem, when someone managed somehow to use normal skills within the activity. Needless to say, snowball skills are absolutely no match for standard skills.

Gathering can be 7-8 gold per hour. Inferior to the 10g/h of Arah, but comparable to most dungeons.

Of course, you’ll need to set up proper routes. Stumbling randomly will not be a good gold source.

I was happy once to see a pink drop, and it turned out to be a Magi chest.

Magi is the only stat I believe is actually worse than Nomad.

Bombing griffonrook run is one of my daily events.

Buying a new charslot would be your best bet. With the current state of the trait system, the deletion of a character would not be something I wish on my worst enemy.

Impossible because being in the random proximity of a dynamic event, even one you can’t see in any way, awards you event completion.

The thing annoying me is that we’ve had no news of updates or an LS3, only news about HoT, which at the very earliest would still be in like 4-5 months…

By which time I’d have 40 stacks of 250 dragonite ore, at the rate things are going.

Not sure if they’re even going to update anything anymore until HoT hits.

Well, we now have Mawdrey II as the Bloodstone eater and the Star of Gratitude as the Empyreal eater, but… we still have no Dragonite eater.

Anyone aware of any plans/timeframe to introduce one into the game? I’ve just collected enough ascended mats for full ascended for all characters now, including additional weapons and aquatic weapons – and I still have too much Dragonite to spare.

Healing power multipliers are small, so adding HP has a small % chance relative to base. Power has no ‘base’, so adding anything to direct damage has a more consistent % improvement.

Also, half of the heals in high level play are not direct heals, but triggered as combo finishers on water fields. The classes giving the water fields are normally the ones who want the healing, but the healing is determined by the healing power stat of the person who uses the finisher – so only engineers and staff elementalists really end up benefiting from boosting HP on cb finishers.

There is the problem of people delaying runs because they use limited damage gear even though they’re personally capable of running higher risk-reward builds.

And then there’s the greater problem of people wiping because they use high risk-reward builds they can’t survive in.

Meta isn’t top builds, it’s the builds that achieve highest utility assuming no coordination and limited skill. You don’t want to dump a triple kit engineer build on a new player, and you don’t want condition builds to become too prevalent due to condition capping. Neither will ever appear as a meta build.

Still a good reference for reading.

However, it’s irrelevant to the OP’s question.

Most common WvW classes vary by world but are usually War, Guard, Necro, Ele.

Most common dungeon PvE classes vary by dungeon but are usually War, Guard, Mesmer, Thief.

Most common high fractal classes are Ele, Thief, Guard. Low fractal classes are identical to dungeon breakdown, since the challenge is the same.

Most common world exploration classes are War and Ranger.

Most common sPvP classes are Ranger, Thief and Guardian. If you go into ranked matches you’ll run into some teams previously that ran celestial engi/ele, but they are rare overall, just overrepresented in a few spots. They’ll start vanishing too, since might just got nerfed.

Rarest class in most content is necro, except WvW zergs. Some players also kick necros and rangers on sight from dungeon parties. Some players kick everyone except warriors and guardians as well, if that matters to you. Engineers are normally second rarest, but nobody ever kicks them, at least without kicking all other light/medium classes as well.

These are just usage indices though, and don’t necessarily mean anything about viability.

P.S. @Elegy, some people will only listen to those they perceive as ‘authorities’. They really do need someone they look up to say ‘X is good’ before they think it’s good.

I bank/craft in LA mystic forge’s waypoint, because Miyani tends to be involved in crafting, and I forge runes/sigils. I meet friends in Arah paths 1-3. The bulk of time I spend with them is in that one hour there.

It’s not the toughness that draws the aggro, generally speaking.

Aside from proximity, dps and low health (all of which plague thieves), certain actions also generate immense amounts of aggro.

One is reviving a teammate.

The other is using a crowd control skill. Doesn’t matter whether you merely remove defiance or you actually manage to interrupt a skill, mobs hate cc skills and will tend to retarget their users.

If your thief is using s/p, pistol whip is the reason you’re repeatedly targeted. If not, your dps is the reason you’re targeted. If anything, switching to berserker will make your aggro situation worse. It’ll kill things faster as well, of course.

If you really have aggro problems you can’t handle use a shortbow and plink away.

P.S. People who say there is no tanking in GW2 have never touched a full zerk full damage S/P thief. Nobody can pull aggro off you, even if you are in a 120 man zerg. All world bosses will target you, all champions and dungeon bosses will target you. If you can avoid all that damage with evade frames, you achieve the ‘damage removal’ effect tanks in other games do. The only difference is that you do it while also being the dps, you have no margin for error, and you don’t have a healer.

It’s also in their interests to limit supply, otherwise if it was very easy to get ascended gear, the timegating effect would not be able to keep players locked into playing.

There was another four months ago as well that reached 4 pages, if I remember correctly. But no red post, yeah.