Guild Wars 2

I’m not sure if you’ve been around long enough to see it, but this idea of a condition ‘burst’ to work around the 25 stack limit has already surfaced. At least twice. With no reaction from Anet. No red post, nothing.

The problem with GW2 conditions is that they are tied to the player’s current state – if you apply 8 bleeds and then buff yourself with might the bleeds’ damage will take into account the might effects. They also take into account the duration, which makes doing this repeated calculations pretty much impossible for the server if 140 players apply 8 conditions each on the same boss. I think the current stack limit of 25 is too low, frankly, but I don’t debate that there must be a limit somewhere.

The other suggestions that have also appeared months ago to be fully ignored include things like cutting all condition duration by 75%, and multiplying damage per condition by 4 to keep things the same in terms of individual potential, but effectively raise the limit to 100 stacks relative to present, though that was presented as a dungeon fix – it still wouldn’t deal with the 140-zerg problem.

I’m getting a pretty strong impression they don’t view this as something they want to bother fixing.

P.S. Condition damage has 2.5 stats. One is condition damage itself, the other is condition duration, and they are synergistic. Precision has a significant impact in certain cases where crit causes a condition application, of which the 10 torment 25-bleed mesmer build using Sharper Images is a prime example – but has no impact on others. It’s why sinister builds with +duration runes/sigils/traits exist. Their potential at the moment is high, but they will never be allowed to be meta because having any more than one in a party makes the other a glorified cheerleader.

P.P.S. Epic-rank world bosses are uncrittable, and for those only the power stat matters – as well as knowing where to stand to cleave more than one hitbox, usually a high-risk high-gain strategy. Condition bursting would necessarily cheese those bosses to hell, so if this ever sees the light of day you can expect epic-rank types to be immune to this. This is not to be confused (as a ton of players do) with ‘structures/buildings/objects’, which are immune to conditions, and do not possess more than one hitbox.

Depends on your build really. Full zerk wars may allow as far as 3 mistakes given the current strength of healing signet. Full zerk thieves can’t survive even one and healing power does nothing if every attack one-shots you.

I wouldn’t mind giving healing power more of a use since it’s really weak at the moment. But this will nerf users of Knight/Soldier, not users of Berserker/Assassin, for the most part.

If anything, it’d drive PVT users to use more Berserker, if PVT no longer gives as much additional survivability as it does at present.

Rangers running bows tend to be problematic. Even a liability at times for bosses that have player-targeted instant death skills.

Guardians and mesmers don’t require much by the way of reflexes to use well, and more along the lines of knowing what skill to use on which boss, when. It’s kind of an intellectual difficulty, rather than a twitch reflex one. Warriors in PvE don’t really require much skill to do survivably well in, but at the same time don’t really offer much by the way of progress either.

Stay away from thieves, elementalists and engineers as they require very fast reflexes and pretty good coordination to master. Grenadier engineers in particular cause RMI even for younger players, and sadly aren’t even as effective in most dungeons as bomb engineers, which autoattack works on. The most effective builds involve swapping between 3 kits + 1 weapon to avoid cooldowns, however, which make them really, really difficult to play.

Guardian ranged options aren’t really very good though, so while I’d still advocate going melee mode for dungeons, a mesmer has good damage at both longer and shorter ranges at the cost of having to know when to use what illusion, when to shatter them, and which shatter effect to use. Would recommend Greatsword/Sword-Sword for now, since both S2 and S4 give you a temp save if you’re low on evades in melee. Keep an Illusionary Defender out to soak up 50% of all the damage you’d receive as well.

Staff mesmers are also good for soloing champions out in the world. Its damage isn’t very good, but using your chaos fields properly with the clone spam you’re allowed with it makes it very effective against AI, so you shouldn’t die very often. I learnt all the evade frames and animations from soloing pretty much every single champion in the game (except the Krait Witches) back before megaservers hit on a staff mesmer, and while I use entirely different builds now, it’s kind of the experience from that time that allows me to do what I do now. It’s not very easy to learn any animation form if you’re dead after the first attack, after all.

You already can. Dailies give AP. Every 500 AP you get 1 laurel. Sometimes 2.

The current rate of laurel supply is already greater than it was. If completing 5 dailies gave one laurel per day (thereby doubling supply), it would cause the prices of t6s to crash.

Doesn’t affect zerker builds, boosts cleric builds, nerfs PVT types.

Why stop there though, might as well also drop condition damage’s base damage, and raise the multiplier so that those who spec for it get greater max potential, and those with zero points in it do a lot less.

By the way, vitality conflicts directly with healing power. In cases where damage is determined by your toughness, it has no effect, but in certain cases, damage is calculated as a % of your total HP, in which event the more vitality you have, the worse off you become.

In particular, the most prominent points this appears are fractal Agony damage, Golem Mark II’s lightning fields, Arah p2’s poison fields (which, frankly, you can entirely ignore at this point) and of course Quicksand in Dry Top.

Mapisto.2154:

Thief (which has REALLY FUN skills that NO ONE USES because they are not proper berserker skills.)

Not sure what you’re talking about. Majority of thieves run berserker in S/P, S/D, D/D and occasionally P/D modes for specific targets.

… we don’t talk about P/Ps though.

Mapisto.2154:

When was the last time you saw a player wearing a rampager armor? sinister? shaman?

Sini S/S warriors exist, and you probably don’t want to ever meet one. Basically they’re like walking Volkovs. Rampager is used on some engineer builds that I frankly don’t agree with, but they exist.

Shaman, though… that’s regarded as one of the worst stat types around. Not as bad as Magi, though, because that one makes Nomad look good.

Guards have more protection, selfhealing, burst damage, Aegis, Stability and invulns. They are tied with mesmers for being the slowest class in the game, so if you take it, you’ll want sigils of Speed early on while levelling, and probably Runes of the Traveler at level cap on your exotic/ascended armors. While I’ve met very few guards who know how to Aegis properly, those who do can save people who can’t dodge to save their own lives, repeatedly.

Engis have more condition damage, more might, more AoE sustained dps, more regen, more combo fields, more finishers, are the only other class except thieves that can solo 12s stealthblast, have permanent self-swiftness and can swap roles at any times they wish.

Also, guards have a far gentler learning curve. That isn’t to say that skill doesn’t affect a guard because rotation timing can make >30% differences in DPS in addition to the survivability differences innate to all classes, but a bad guard trails behind a good guard far less than a bad engi trails behind a good engi.

And between the ranger and elementalist in terms of synergy, your ranger friend will already provide regens/water fields (an engi adv), your elementalist will provide protection (a guard adv), blind (a guard adv), burning (a guard adv) and might (an engi adv). Both of those professions can go full ranged, while ranged guards lag severely behind ranged engis.

We’re talking on general terms though. Specific content may recommend specific builds – for instance triple wurm on guard isn’t very good, but on the other hand guards can solo Arah while engineers are at the mercy of RNGesus for Lupi.

P.S. Engineers are hands-down the fastest world-completion class, as they can park turrets at a Heart, run to the next heart, blow up their turrets when they get heart completion notification on the way, re-drop turrets at the next heart…

I’ll just leave this here.

He’s a great deal ruder in the video than I would prefer, but the idea is there.

5 things.

1. There’s already another thread on this someone else already linked.

2. HP of events upscale when players arrive but do not downscale when people leave – this is obtained from results some players got by running a script to read boss HP. The script itself had been ruled illegal by Anet after its inception however, so do not attempt to use it or make your own version, since that would probably contradict ToS. Dead players don’t affect the event – rather, DYING in an event does. After you die, regardless of whether you waypoint or lie there dead, you have already scaled the boss HP up. We ask people to run at Tequatl because they can rejoin the fight from Brooloonu Waypoint – if they decide to leave the map entirely, their impact on Tequatl’s maxHP remains there. For Vinewrath this is a nonfactor since you cannot reenter once you’re kicked out.

Incidentally, if waypointing out of a boss caused its maximum HP to reduce accordingly, no timed boss would ever fail from lack of dps. Rather, it could be FASTER if more people died, because that way the condition stack limit becomes a proportionally smaller issue. It should be quite clear how that would be a problem.

3. Lying dead has a problem even though waypointing does not change boss max HP. That is, the dead body will block some attempts by players to resurrect downed players near them, which leads to some saveable players dying for no reason. This is why we ask people to WP out at Vinewrath, not because of scaling. While dead players lying there dead is thus a legit problem, it generally isn’t the reason an event fails. An event generally fails because of the people dying in the first place. If you must blame someone for a fail, blame people for dying/players near them for not ressing them in time, not for them lying there dead.

Better still, consider how teaching people about the mechanics in advance during the waiting phase would have reduced the number of people that die, whether you could have done anything to res the dead (warbanner, spirit of nature etc), and whether you could have added more dps yourself in any way. We know a lot of people have commander tags, yet the number of people I see lead Vinewrath kills is in the single digit range for my timezone. While you have limited control over others’ decisions, you have full control over your own, and it is taking responsibility for your own decisions and for teaching others that makes a good player a good player, not blaming others that haven’t become as good as you yet for not being as good as you.

4. The simple solution is to eject the dead bodies at the entrance of Vinewrath the moment they die, rather than wait until the event fails before ejecting them – because we know the code already exists. It’s just a matter of moving the condition under which the code triggers. This is what you should petition Anet for.

5. The exception to all ‘res downed’ rules is Golem Mark II and any dead bodies in lava at the Megadestroyer, because the environmental damage rate greatly exceeds the rate at which a downed player can be resurrected.

Vayne.8563:

Actually from other games, I’ve come to realize that the meta really doesn’t mean most effective. What it often means is the most effective way for people to get something done without coordinating or communicating.

Meta’s evolve because people pug. It’s easier if everyone knows what everyone is going going to do. You’re not on mumble with these people, you’re typing. No one really wants to type and run a dungeon. Not with strangers.

So you have this setup which is efficient and might be the most efficient thing you can do without having voice communication.

You can probably do something more efficient than the meta with a team that’s not random and that’s on voice.

Meta is based partly on effectiveness but also partly on ease of use. It’s easy to tell people they need to stack and use zerker gear. So that’s what becomes the meta.

Does that make it more effective than a speed running team that knows the most effective way to do stuff. Nah. But those things won’t work with a PUG.

QFT. Some people think that it means it’s the ‘absolute best possible build for everything’, but the above is how it actually functions. Over time it gets distorted though, and players often take guild leaders/theorycrafters’ words as the ‘indisputable words of God’, so after a while, when some of them started to put it across as ‘best build’ instead of ‘best build for random party setups with no communication’, some meta builds are now believed to be the ‘best for everything’, something a target golem and a stopwatch, or a piece of paper and a calculator would both prove quite easily to be mistaken.

More importantly @OP, words change over time. The words ‘country’, ‘nation’ and ‘state’ used to have distinct definitions, but now they’re all synonyms after decades of misuse and ineffective education. That’s fine. What’s important is that the communication gets through, not to preserve the ‘purity of a language’, since the original definition of a word is arbitrary anyway.

What annoys me more is if misuse of a word inverts its meaning (worst offender: ‘a moot point’), but even so, if everyone uses the inverted (wrong) definition of a word, there’s nothing wrong with also using the wrong definition of it if it gets the point across.

Language is a tool of communication, not a sacrosanct entity – the purity of which has to be defended at all costs.

The only thing I’ve found difficult solo in the entirety of LS2 was getting the Dancer in the Dark achievement. Granted 70% of the difficulty was getting the bugged challenge mote to spawn in the first place, but the rest of it was actually hard, especially at the 20% 6-dodge phases. Still completed it solo because I wanted to, but that took some time to do.

The rest of it can be completed on a full glass thief build, which doesn’t even have the invulns a full glass ele has, and nonexistent heals. Anything tankier should find the instances easier, if somewhat slower.

Also, zergs do complete open-world content slower than soloists do due to HP scaling, though 5 man teams tend to be the most optimal point in general. For instance it used to take me 3-4 minutes to solo Golem Mark II, but now zergs generally kill it in 7 minutes (8 min left on timer). If anything, the game punishes players for zerging. Nowadays I generally tag up and ping my location before soloing a champion, which allows me to bring its HP down to 10% alone while they run, while those who come in later still can get the chest.

Lifestealer.4910:

The good thing about the zerk meta is it actually makes good use of this games combat system, which is actively dodging and timing abilities.

If anything else that isn’t a pure glass was to become meta, it would actually degrade the gameplay (at least for pve)

Now all Anet needs to do is capitalize on this by making more difficult dungeon and bosses that follow the line of thinking when they designed lupicus and this game will become the Dark Souls of MMO.

Erm, lupicus takes less than a minute to kill with reflects. He’s one of the easiest/fastest bosses in Arah. In terms of ‘hard’ dungeon bosses, the HoTW bosses tend to be harder. Meleeing the boss at the end of HoTWp1 without getting downed is significantly harder, and melee cleaving the double quaggan boss in p2 even more so.

It’s enough that most speed clear teams range these two bosses, but nearly everyone melees lupi if they’re not new to Arah explorables.

Wait till you fight the teragriff boss on challenge mote, lol.

Rallying is really pointless there.

I don’t have any issues with the game mode itself. My main issue is how the other players behave in a PvP scenario.

WvW, you don’t get to hear the other side.

PvE, it’s cooperative.

Optimal against husks at Triple wurm, copper husk, legendary annihilator and champion husk at the silverwastes. Viable on higher defense targets in dungeons, but you may not exceed more than one user per party. In all other cases in PvE, direct damage is superior.

Contact me separately if you want a max viability condition build for PvE purposes – just don’t expect it to perform anywhere close to max viability power builds.

Overwriting a might stack with a lower duration might stack, attacking with a lower damage multiplier and without a +15% damage boost are a net DPS loss?

I agree completely that there is no need for further discussion. You are not able to understand how the builds function or their roles, so there is no further benefit for you. And it should be readily apparent to anyone else reading the past few posts which build to use, so I’ve fulfilled my responsibility in that area to others as well.

Let’s return to the original point of the thread, this entire diversion belonged in the warrior subforums and not on a thread about Might. Have a nice day.

The 27th patch removes Last Refuge’s tendency to cancel skill use by changing the Blinding Powder skill itself, which fixes 1/2 of the LR problem. I’m not sure where you’re reading a ‘reduced cooldown’ thing, as the thread does not say anything about LR or its cooldown.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/preview-of-upcoming-balance-changes/

Erm, no. The most optimal for damage would be 66002 A/M V-X-XI, I-V-XIII, III, Truff.steak, relevant potion, scholar, air/night, heal-might-fury-disc-wbanner. I don’t know which universe you’re pulling your ‘meta group play builds’ from, but nobody I know running A/M damage specs ever uses fast hands (why would anyone sacrifice 15% damage for a weapon swap not within their rotation?), and I’m not sure where you’re chucking your spare trait in the master category to contemplate ever dropping Rending Strikes for anything. A/M-GS 56002 was outdated half a year ago with the ferocity update, the GS is there now only for mobility purposes between fights. If you’re seriously considering using postnerf-100b-wwa for a non-PS build at this point of time there is no need for any further discussion any more – and aside from that idea, running 3 in the Disc tree doesn’t have any possible point.

Greatsword skills have a lower damage multiplier per second (7.99 power mult over 5 seconds rotation, 1.6 m/s) relative to axe’s autoattack chain 5 mult over 2.9s, 1.72 m/s), and over their lowest common multiplier of 15, the axe chain hits 30 times, while the GS hits 39 times, for an average difference of 0.2 more vulnerability per second. We haven’t taken into account axe’s feroc or +5% dmg, or +10% attack speed buffs yet, which should handily outweigh the ascended GS’s 10% base damage advantage over the ascended axe. Might on crit is even more undesirable as overwriting a max specced buff ele’s 28 second might stack with 5 second might stacks reduces your overall might overhead.

The only way the post makes any sense at all is if you’re using the pre-patch meta build from half a year ago. I’d explain this in a nicer fashion if the question was asked nicely, but dumping suboptimal builds from your pedestal in a condescending way kind of disqualifies the max friendliness approach here.

Ironically, going from 56003 to 66002 represents a greater increase in damage (~20% at max adrenaline) than the original subject of this thread, which represents a 6% dps reduction at max to the zerk war build.

P.S. You were complaining about accounting for uncrittable targets, but if I threw in the uncrittable condition here, Arms X doesn’t even proc on uncrittable targets. It’s actually a good thing – since you won’t overwrite your friendly neighbourhood ele’s might stacks that way.

Don’t need so many zerkwars. Optimised groups run 1x zerkwar 1x S/F ele 1x zerkthief 1x zerkguard 1x zerkbombengi/assassin-zerkmes.

While it’s less suboptimal than 5x necros, 4x wars 1x guard is nowhere near optimal.

Whether or not it’s ‘meta’, defining ‘meta’ as ‘most popular party composition’, that would depend greatly on your timezone, chosen content and/or your guild’s preferences, but popularity does not necessarily make things optimal.

They also haven’t fully seemed to make up their mind whether charr are variants of wolves or cats.

No, the usage of triple signets already end up with 80% critrate after factoring in the Banner of Discipline. Please stow your condescension and get some experience in creating builds before you try to talk down to theorycrafters.

PS types that run FGJ and full-damage types that run signets, relying on ele buffers, are entirely different builds. The latter uses full berserker and scholar runes, the former uses occasionally full berserker and occasionally assassin-berserker mixes together with strength runes, depending on whether uncrittable objects are to be taken into consideration.

Or they could just scrap the system, since it doesn’t achieve anything at all but annoy people.

Realistically speaking, the only difference it makes is that some people might get 2 additional offensive slots at the cost of 2 additional defensive slots.

+10 power +2% dmg to guards – 10 toughness -2% dmg to guards is a change that makes the word ‘insignificant’ have an inferiority complex.

This has been a problem ever since ascended gear was added in the first place, since ‘Unique’ does not apply anywhere else in the game and suddenly appears there.

It still continues to annoy new players, it seems. And they still have not dealt with the problem.

@John Smith

The problem is not with RNG being random, but with some of the drop rates being too low that the rates are, in a player’s experience, rarely anywhere near their statistical rates. While rarity also gives value, and it is understandable that to have higher value items their overall rates must be low, the current system where the rates are so low that a player cannot ever approach its statistical rate is broken.

The solution is to use a 2-factor drop system. The first factor is always two-digit, anywhere from 10 to 25%, as overly high rates also entirely remove the emotional effect of receiving a drop. This factor awards a ‘scrap’. The second factor is non-RNG based, and gives a 100% chance of combination success of scraps via an NPC vendor. The number of scraps required for combination into the original ‘drop’ item can then be modified to achieve the intended droprate and thus, its intended rarity. The scrap can be left as an account bound item as well to avoid devaluation from increased supply frequency.

Arenanet has already applied this system three times: 10 black lion scraps creates a ticket, 25 keys plus a bandit key creates a key of greater nightmares, and 4 aetherblade key fragments creates one aetherblade chest key.

I see no good reason why it should not be expanded to deal with the problem drops of low frequency: legendary precursors, fractal weapons, tequatl hoards, regurgitated armor boxes, dungeon exotic accessory recipes, arthropoda, and unidentified (amber) insects. The last one was the most mind-boggling – since the system already exists to exchange a token for the required item for the ambrite weapon, it has never made sense to me why the drop rate was not multiplied by 20, and the number of required insects per ambrite core also multiplied by 20. As an added benefit, some of these can be paired to give a choice – fractal runners would be far happier if they got fractal weapon shards which they could combine to get any skin they wanted, as opposed to the current system, where some fractallers hold 14 harpoon guns, but all they wanted was a fractal sword. Using this on precursors would also equalise the cost of all precursors – while all legendaries are still of different value due to different components in the crafting process, the difference in precursor values at the moment makes not only legendaries, but even rares and exotics different in prices between weapon types – which is also one of the reasons people complained about profession based loot.

All complaints about RNG I have seen are because of absurdly low rates that do not allow drops to obey the law of large numbers.

P.S. It would be better if the tokens are treated as currencies. Geodes, bandit crests and whatnot take up an insane amount of inventory space as it is, and it is similarly mind-boggling why they were not coded into the account wallet.

P.P.S. As opposed to a ‘secondary system’ besides the ‘main RNG’ I would rather the ‘main’ system be scrapped entirely and replaced with this for any drop for which the intended drop rate is below 5%.

Given how some of the Teq kills I’ve been at barely proc chain-burn from the 75%-50% mark (that is, it goes invulnerable when its right foot moves), all of those near-fail attempts will now proc a shockwave, a whirlpool phase, and perhaps defense spawns.

The sub-50s are unlikely to have issues as all the ‘+x% damage below 50% hp’ traits will activate by then.

And it can be really bad for triple wurm, since people already do occasionally fail to decapitate wurms now, even with full food, sharpening stones, consumables and might applied.

Someone I know once asked for people to donate Exotic Superior Runes of the Useless, and he ended up with like 4 full stacks of those.

You can calculate for yourself how much that’s worth.

Encounters that require high might stacks on uncrittable targets will definitely feel the difference, even if this was a silent patch.

I’m looking at you, Tequatl/Triple Wurm phase I.

The Legendary Searing Effigy? Nope, don’t think anyone will notice.

Few people do THW for loot because objectively speaking, the loot is really bad. Few people do THW as well.

Quite a few people do Tequatl for loot and karma because objectively speaking, the loot/time is one of the best for any world boss. Many people do Tequatl as well. It also used to be a challenge before the mechanics were fully discovered.

The observation that nobody does it for loot is correct, but is the problem itself. The loot from THW does not scale in any reasonable way with the time required for the attempt, let alone the difficulty in coordination (it’s not frankly very difficult to execute).

Altering the loot rate does not change the reason why people who do it for the challenge already do it, but it does give people who do not do it, a reason to do it.

They work on anything that gives experience and nothing that does not give experience on kill. LS is not the problem here.

Tao.5096:

Since Collections release, I didn’t get even a single exotic except that exotic spoon. And I’m doing it everyday – sometimes twice or 3 times, on other chars too.

I bet you had several Superior Runes of the Useless too.

Offtopic aside the problem is that the law of large numbers only applies once the numbers are large enough to bring rates into the statistical realm; the lower the rate is, the larger the sample size needs to become for the droprate to approximate its set value.

Droprates for anything that hover at the 10% range are not a problem, because doing the content about 100 times will start to approximate the rate – and that is a number that is easily reachable in play.

Droprates for things that are at the 1% range like Tequatl hoards are a problem, because it starts to approach 1000 times – which for a daily restricted chest means three years of attempts.

Droprates for things set at the 0.1% range like precursors are just plain broken, as rolling an exotic drop wheel 10,000 times (that is, getting 10,000 exotic drops, which in itself requires getting close to 1,000,000 drops in total) takes so many attempts that no player can possibly approach statistical rates – so some will have above-statistical rates, and some will have just plain zero rates.

The easiest way to converge them is to increase drop rates without increasing the rates at which the item is granted – for instance, dropping ‘precursor shards’ at a 10% rate, where a 100-stack is required for combination into a precursor. Or a ‘Tequatl hoard shard’ at a 10% rate, with 10 shards required for combination into a hoard box. This allows for people to approach statistical droprates without having to deal with large attempt sample sizes that exceed anyone’s possible playtime – while also having the side effect of having a visible indicator of progress.

The worst thing is that they already did this with black lion ticket scraps, so SOMEONE at Arenanet clearly understands the concept, but the rest of the team simply does not view it as important enough for them to implement the already-existent system to other items with a similarly low drop rate.

P.S. 100% drop rates tend to be bad since people are psychologically conditioned to get more satisfaction from acquisitions with a random component. A better balance tends to be in the two digit percentage range.

Xillllix.3485:

15% nerf to might is more than the 10% damage trait buffs.

It’s not a small nerf, strength runes will probably no longer provide the best damage output.

Just like we had to scrap all our divinity runes, same thing will happen here when guilds make their new WvW/GvG meta.

They already don’t provide the best damage output. They were comparable to scholar’s for a short time when the damage boost was 7%, but when they were cut to 5%, they became inferior, and a niche for PS warriors, mightstacking elementalists, and hybrid builds.

This simply increases the already existent incentive to swap to full Scholar’s runes instead other than for those two exceptions. Hybrid builds just get a double nerf from both sides of the Might equation with no alternative to swap to.

Zui.9245:

Aidan Savage.2078:

Then also realize that even if might is a reduced boost, the “most optimal build” STAYS “the most optimal build.” You lose nothing in the end. So what if the enemies take one or two more hits to kill.

To make such a statement, you must have done the math with respect to optimal Berserker-Assassin mixes for every class and build, and determined the current optimal gear will remain the future optimal gear.

Have you done this? Did you even consider it?

Thieves and warriors are optimal on full berserker given that the full trait setups push both to ~80% before fury, or 100% critrate after, already. He’s probably speaking from that point of view.

Assassin vs Berserker on other classes that don’t have such (overpowered) traits is a complicated discussion, as Prec/Feroc affect reflections when Power does not, Power affects uncrittable targets when Prec/Feroc does not, and Prec affects sigil and trait procrate while power affects the effectiveness of some of those, but not others. Power vs Prec discussions cannot be separated from ‘what content you intend to do with the character’, and the point of optimisation changes drastically with that answer, going from 80% critrate builds to full berserker builds.

Malthurius.6870:

It’s pretty simple to understand.

Might stacking is a dominate strategy; “Path of least resistance” you might say; so they nerfed it to promote different approaches instead of buffing sub-optimal options and causing the ever so deadly “power creep”.

The nerf is pretty small anyway, and most of the players who care about might stacking will continue to do so. Stacking power will still be the best way to speed clear dungeons, and might will still be very powerful in general. This is only a 125 might loss at 25 stacks; very minor.

I believe you meant 125 power/condition, but that aside, this would be ‘major’ in the grand scheme of things as it is a greater effect than losing a food buff. A ‘minor’ thing is like the difference in stats other than base damage between the ascended and exotic tiers, or the difference in stats between using 5 power&agony infusions, and pure 5 agony infusions.

Windsagio.1340:

It’s a stretch because heavy healing/defense setups are less likely to stack might anyways which makes them less effected (since raw increase is per-stack)

It’s also a stretch because most content is simply too easy for it to matter either way.

The first is not true; the proportionate difference in the importance of might usually makes might stacking particularly important for those; I care a lot more for stacking might in my Guardian and Elementalist, which run Cleric/Sentinel and Celestial builds for WvW and fractal purposes, as otherwise their damage rates can be quite pathetic. Especially for cleric/sentinel – without might, while it is unkillable it also can’t kill anything in WvW at all.

Those that spec full power/damage tend to care less about might and more about CCs, which allow for the damage to actually get through a mob/player’s active defenses.

The second differs for each player, but it would be true for most people that this would even affect.

A PuG carried by a mightstacker PS warrior/elementalist might wipe attempting a SEp1 triple golem stack. Aside from that the overall change in speed is unlikely to exceed 10% given that much of the time is spent running, not really fighting.

This will affect raids and WvW zergs far more when people actually make a point to mightstack much of the time, and may cause close calls in Triple Wurm/Tequatl to turn into full fails.

Mireles Lore.5942:

But drops are only worth as much the rarity of their aquisition according to economics. The rewards would just be farmed back into mediocrity after a month.

This would be valid if the rewards in question are tradeable unique items. In fact, what you describe has already occurred for Connie’s Wedding Ring. While this is greatly delayed due to the 1% or lower droprate for the Annelid Rifle skin, it will eventually also follow the same trend.

In the case of untradeable unique items (perhaps with account bound tokens of a sort to allow for partial progress instead of a law-of-large-numbers-ignoring low drop rate), people would do it for the reward because there is no other way of obtaining it.

And in the case of tradeable non-unique items, it increases the supply from this one point at the cost of reducing the value of the supply from other sources at a rate proportional to the difference between the two. Say, if the reward was 8 gold in the chest up from 2 gold, the difference for this encounter would be very large given that most of the other rewards added together barely breach 1 gold most of the time, but the extent to which the economy as a whole is affected by gold inflation from this is greatly limited, given that over 50 minutes of a wurm kill, a semi-competent player speed-running dungeons with pugs over LFG would have acquired 6 gold in completion bonuses and 3-4 gold in drops plus tokens combined – for a total of 9+ gold. Dedicated speedrunning guilds would have even greater return rates. Since the total max theoretical gold generated per hour has not changed, the effect this has on overall inflation in the GW2 gold economy will be limited, and far less than the effect this has on the raid in isolation.

I’m advocating a combination of the latter – account bound tokens that can be exchanged for unique account bound rewards, together with a large increase in guaranteed tradeable nonunique loot, like t6 bags (the same items given by laurel trades), rares and cores/lodestones or anything Anet would prefer the availability of be increased.

I bought an item for gems after changing gold recently, and while the system took my gems, it didn’t grant the item. Filed a ticket to be informed by support that they had no trace of the item, the gem movement or even the gold-gem exchange and therefore absolutely nothing would be done about the situation. This was in spite of having the precise time of the exchange logged.

Don’t get your hopes up over an exchange when even a ‘no goods on arrival’ problem is not addressed. As far as I know they DO have records for real money→gem exchanges though, so this problem I had will never involve real money.

And by the way, Alastia Crow in the personal story wears it, so it’s still part of present content in a way.

Reflects aren’t affected by the user’s power anyway, but by critdmg% and critrate% – part of the reason why mesmers specced for this tend to run a lot of assassin.

It’s possible to run lupi to zero under perfect conditions from 75% from his own attack, either with Feedback or with WoR if he is pushed against a wall before the 75% mark.

Might affects other bosses you actually need to damage, opposed to watch kill themselves.

P.S. The might change does actually nerf staff guards since Empower is less effective. We’re going from bad to slightly worse than bad, though.

It’s because prior to the stone, every character could access any home instance they wanted, and so differences made no difference to gameplay. The stone is the first item that ties a specific racial home to the character – and different functionality for the same price paid for the item is a problem for those who get the short end of the functionality stick.

People who do not have the stone continue not to care about the differences between the racial homes because they can use whatever home they wish to use regardless of race.

The most efficient fix is simply to allow players to designate which racial home they wish to teleport to on portal stone usage from, say, a 5-item list. Physically changing the homes for this will inadvertently affect users who like the homes they way they currently are.

Euryon.9248:

A group of average-skilled players who are cooperating with the commanders is going to have a much better time with TT than a set of “elite” players who are acting on their own and not as a team.

What he said. I have seen PuGs decap a few wurms before based on commands from a commander in say chat (map chat = suppression), but I have never seen a full kill, and it’s difficult to believe that none of those players are skilled.

My problem wasn’t with TT’s difficulty though, but the reward scaling. It still stands as the only content in the game with difficulty in the coordination – and that form of difficulty is something some people, especially those who do said coordination, do enjoy.

According to their guidelines that would indeed be one action per press. It would be difficult to outlaw using keys to move the cursor, as that would also entirely outlaw the use of mousekeys. So what you stated according to what they previously said should be within their range of acceptable behaviour, unless they choose to override it with a new guideline.

I know where you’re coming from, since I crafted 180 superior rams for my use as a WvW Com. That entails 360 rams, 900 of mith and elder, and 180 siege guides… and 4×2×180 clicks.

It was horrible.

Yup, feroc also narrowed the meta further towards zerker, when it previously contained a few mixed Valkyrie-Cavalier builds. Celestial in PvE was hit the hardest by the change. That’s ancient history by now though. And it did nerf overall damage potential.

This change nerfs a different set of stat combinations, but also nerfs damage values overall. I believe that their consideration with PvE was just ‘reduce completion time’ with no regard for relative effectiveness between builds though, while their consideration with PvP was celestial effectiveness (not just eles frankly, engis also ran with an identical concept), and this was just the simplest way to settle both with the least amount of coding effort.

Just chiming in here that all home instances have a belcher’s bluff NPC. Some are just ridiculously deep inside the instance (Asura lab, I’m looking at you).

I used to use WvW for all my banking/TP/merchant needs though, though that may not be advisable if your world is Tier 1, and that will not refund the amount you already spent on the Home Portal Stone…

Which seems to be your main issue here.

P.S. For people who need the functionality. Assuming your world has no WvW queue, the idea is to press B when you need it and log in to any random borderland that does not belong to you, run to the nearby TP/merchant and do your stuff, then press B and click ‘leave the mists’ to instantly be teleported back to the exact spot you were before teleporting into WvW. If you need the bank in particular, the idea is identical, except you have to choose your own world’s borderland, and then you run northeast from the Citadel waypoint to the crafting stations there – which are all banks. It works for the mystic forge if your world has a Garrison Waypoint in its borderland, which is true some of the time.

Exotic to ascended is only an incline for agony resistance on fractals however. The stat bonuses are minimal; the increased base damage from weapons is generally regarded as the main reason why it may be a good idea to upgrade only the weapons. Beyond that the stat bonuses for going up one tier is limited and dwarfed by the power of either cheap food, or even a cheap utility like skale venom.

I see people going into dungeons all the time with ascended equipment but no food/utility buffs. It adds a grind target, but the amount whereby it changes the ultimate efficiency by which the content is done is minimal at best.

Might consists of a greater relative proportion of damage to low-power high-crit than to high-power high-crit builds. Rather than solving the berserker meta this enforces it by making other build types relatively less viable.

As far as patches in recent trends have been concerned, in cases where there were options both to ‘nerf multiple classes’ higher damage builds’ or to ‘buff multiple classes’ lower damage builds’, the result tends to fall in the former category. Whenever any farm got too efficient, it tended to be nerfed shortly after.

Aside from the engineer toolkit and flamethrower and the longbow ranger’s skills, I don’t exactly recall any other class’ skills having their damage increased, either.

Thieves and elementalists in particular felt the chain-nerf trend the most.

P.S. @ Zypher Re: optimisation, the more changes there are, the more fun those of us who do these things have with reassigning builds in response to changes. It’s a bit different from those who prefer higher reward/time ratios on the whole. While I have issues with the unbalanced way the highest reward/time ratios belong to relatively easy content, I actually like every balance change because it gives me something to do.

It’s a different meaning from what Miku meant however, you might not be getting his position.

I’m just stating what Anet’s plans appear to indicate about their motivations from my point of view, but I’m not actually personally against this update.

And yes, my elementalist does run full celestial strength at the moment with battle runes, and it is going to be nerfed extra-hard in staff mode in PvE.

There’s ‘new’ (year old) dungeon content, but the rewards per unit time for those are so dismal that few people run those either. Ditto for world bosses and whatnot – Tequatl and Triple Trouble runs are going to feel this nerf the hardest, as failing to chainburn Tequatl is proportionately far more of a time drag than the effect in a dungeon, and Triple Trouble may even fail to reach decap-phase if players do not consistently run full 25 might plus timewarp plus frost spirit plus food.

They could also raise HP for the same effect, but editing the HP value of all the mobs in the game (which aren’t even static values, but formula-based due to scaling) is considerably more time-consuming than reducing the amount of power and condition a single might stack will give, which in best circumstances is achieved by changing a single line of code.

In terms of ‘making other builds’ relatively ‘better’ that may be the case for PvP, but as you have also detailed it does not apply for PvE, as survivability is irrelevant once you are never downed (if downed, by all means add survivability stats to the build), and not being downed isn’t exactly difficult for a lot of PvE content – especially for hardier classes like the warrior.

Rather, the PvE effect is not ‘relative to other builds’ or increasing build diversity, but a flat effect of reducing the rate at which content can be completed, which increases the total timeframe of the grind-treadmill – which may increase the amount of time the more hardcore players would spend on the game before ‘maxing out’ on skins, ascended gear and whatnot.

The ascended patch in itself already did this, since prior to its inception players were essentially ‘maxed’ with a full set of berserker exotic scholar – which was not anywhere as time-consuming to achieve as a current full set of berserker ascended scholar/strength. The ninja nerf to the strength rune a while back that converted its initial 7% damage boost to 5% is in the same direction as all of these.

As a random aside, as far as I can tell the average drop rate of a Regurgitated Armor Box is 2%±0.5%, and the average drop rate of a Mini Cobalt Wurm head is 1%±0.2%, over all the declared drops over all the successful kills I’ve been with TTS for. It may be higher if people do not declare what they got. I consider myself lucky given some reflect-party regulars have only gotten their first chests recently in spite of having done it every day since launch.

It may be because nerfing might as a whole also nerfs total dps, and they view overloading targets with damage to kill them before their mechanics can discharge as ‘unintended’. Remember how the Ferocity patch was claimed to be undertaken for the sake of normalising berserker accessories, but the critdmg%-Ferocity ratio was also set at a level such that total DPS would be nerfed?

This isn’t the first time.

There are probably more intentions than one in the might change.

If the explanation does not seem to logically fit the result, it may be the case that the explanation is incomplete or wrong.

As far as we know anything that converges more than one action into a single input is banned except musical instruments, with the exception within there that Bell Choir activity macroing is also banned.

If your script puts 4 items in and clicks ‘craft’, it’s probably not going to be acceptable. If it converts the double clicking of an item into a single click/key, it’s debatable, but probably acceptable as the ‘doubleclick’ still results in the single result of ‘select item’.

Back into the related discussion of whether making an autoclicker to open 250 bags was acceptable, it was debatable and probably acceptable to make a macro that double clicked to halve the number of clicks, but probably not acceptable to make one that clicks 500 times, so the best way to do it without running afoul of their guidelines was to bind a click to a mousewheel and scroll.

On-kill effects only trigger on mobs that give experience, as a lazy coding solution of preventing effect stacking from killing ambient whites, and from stacking on killing nonstop-respawn mobs. Therefore all sigils, traits and skills of this type used on zero-experience mobs will not trigger.

As far as I know, this also includes the Vengeance and Illusion of Life effects in many cases.

This answers your ‘how’ question. As for why, that’s Anet’s job to answer.