Guild Wars 2

Also, they’re not only cheaper than other Exotics, but also have better stats even though they’re useable at lower levels… and can even be socketed with agony infusions. Get the crafting backpacks.

It costs approximately 1100G to get a full set of light, medium and heavy ascended berserker armor assuming you made all the timegated materials yourself, rather than outright buying the Damask. And this does not include the costs of training the relevant three disciplines to 500. Light is especially expensive, almost double the price of Medium ascended armor.

If using a condition build your direct damage will consist only about 1/11 of your total damage output, so the 6% (175%/165%) increase of that represented by the ascended tier increase relative to exotic is going to be a sad, sad percentage you won’t see (0.48% extra DPS to be precise). Also, for Engineers specifically, kit damage is not increased by having an Ascended weapon. In those cases, build your armor first.

In all other cases, build your weapon first as the mileage you get out of the stat increase is far greater. Most players skip ascended armor entirely for classes like the Warrior which already have a lot of toughness. Full ascended armor in addition to the weapon is only really important for the interrupt-full glass thief build, as its base defense is so pathetic that every little addition to toughness helps.

Finally, the stat difference for all this investment is miniscule in comparison to the effect from food buffs you can get for a couple of coppers at cheapest, silvers for somewhat better buffs. If you fight in Ascended and you don’t use a food buff, you’d have spent in the order of thousands of times more than someone else for less than half the bonus.

Exotics + dungeon potions/skale venom + cheap food are more than good enough for pretty much everything in the game. Ascendeds in non-fractal content are really more the place of people trying to break speed limits or carry dungeons…. or players who have nothing else left to spend gold on.

It means nearly nothing as mobs drop nearly zero in terms of coins. It was a lot more useful back in the day when dungeon bosses dropped gold directly, which was amped by the gold infusion. Now the gold is in chests which your gold find % has zero effect on.

XP infusion is mostly for people very active in using superior blueprints or t5>t6 conversion, but even converting everything I have I still have 500 spare skillpoint scrolls and 700 skill points remaining, so…. I wouldn’t advise it.

Karmic infusion is generally what most players pick.

Magic find infusion has diminishing returns. At the start, +20% magic find is quite a lot. But when you have 200% magic find… an additional +20% doesn’t really change much. Furthermore it does not affect champ chests or world boss chests where the majority of your good loot will come from anyway, so…

As for what use Karma is, it’s mostly used for Obsidian Shards, a requirement for all ascended crafting and legendary crafting. If ‘never’ intending to make any of these, you can convert them to gold by buying Orrian Jewelry Boxes at any Orr karma vendor. Bear in mind that while karma exotic gear may look like a good deal at first, the exotics cannot be salvaged, so any rune you slot inside them is permanently wasted if you should ever decide to upgrade to Ascended. If using an Exotic stopgap before Ascended tier, use Dungeon Token Exotics as those CAN be broken – and thus you can retrieve your runes.

The breakeven point for BLSK is 1.6 gold worth rune, because of +ecto -fees effect.

In any case, to answer OP’s question, I just do Teq/Wurm/Speedrun dungeons then buy the silk. An hour of dungeons is worth approximately 8-9 gold (depending on drops in addition to guaranteed base), so…

I’d get gold for all the silk I need per day (approx 260 scraps as 40 I already get in drops within the dungeons) within half an hour. If you have a regular dungeon group it can be much faster, but my speed’s somewhat limited by running with LFG-pug groups. Sometimes they’re good, sometimes… not so.

Also rather than running up to a mob, whacking it, then running to the next, try to aggro 5 mobs by hitting all of them once with your ranged weapon, then switching to a melee weapon and hitting them all as they approach.

You’ll literally kill things 3 times faster in a warrior.

For engineers or guardians, up to 5 times faster.

I won’t give a step by step for your issues because the two posters above already have. Read those two posts.

I’m in the SEA region though, so if you have anything else, you should be able to find me ingame…

No, actually it downscales the detail unless you have the bmp flag in your launch options.

Maybe you like compression artifacts.

For the game to consider you to have failed phase 2.

Pic related.

For the uninitiated, 1 wurm decap = bronze, 2 wurm decap = silver, 3 wurm decap = gold. Gold chest + Phase 2 failing to start are not a compatible combination.

This happened the moment phase 2 started. The raid went ‘wat’.

DaShi.1368:

The whole game would have to be dumbed down to a five year old level to keep them happy

I have a bad feeling about this…

The problem isn’t the bags, it’s the players.

Farm in mesmers. If you have problems tagging random mobs in groups, GS4 + Mantra of Pain are your best friends. If others are using projectiles (nearly a guaranteed thing in large zergs), drop glamours on the targets for combo-tags. Null fields on the mobs that like to use boons or conditions, Feedback on the mobs that use projectiles.

If you have problems tagging champions… then use another class.

A skilled player is one who learns.

A failure is one who refuses to learn.

It’s harder to pinpoint skilled players (other than fringe cases when one person ends up soloing the boss in berserker gear after all other 4 players in Soldier gear die), but very easy to pinpoint the failures.

Someone who refuses to learn can run a path 100 times and still be a liability, while someone who bothers to learn can surpass the earlier player even in the first run of that path if another player bothers to teach.

1. Those who attack players who point out things they’re doing wrong that can lead to a party wipe.

2. Those who die at every fight but insist on using gear they can’t play well in.

3. Those who are new to a path but keep silent towards all offers of help/guidance, before people eventually find out when they sabotage the run later on from not knowing what to do (especially clear in cases like CoEp2 and CoFp1 brazier phase).

To summarise, skill is inversely proportional to pride.

Optional skills that go above and beyond:

1. Knowing what every condition and boon in the game does.
2. Synergising all their skills and traits in a build.
3. Knowing every single mechanic from HP scaling to uncrittable targets to double damage spots to Defiance to aggro to Pierce to Cleave.
4. Memorising all the attack rotations of mobs and/or being able to predict all mob actions from the first half a second of the animation.
5. Knowing what every single stat in the game does, precisely, and how they affect a build. This involves being able to understand and explain why condition damage is superior in certain instances in PvE, why it is grossly inferior in many others, whether toughness or vitality is more important for survivability for any given build, whether critrate or power is more important for damage for any given build and under what conditions that is true, whether stacking precision for critbleed or more vitality is better for a condi build.

It’s a gold sink.

If they levelgate combos, that would seriously cripple mesmers in the early game. Luckily they haven’t released any plans to do so yet, but we’ll watch that…

We’re not arguing rather, but throwing several options out for the OP to consider to increase said mesmer performance based on our experiences. Aside from certain traits (sharper images for instance, available at lvl 60), a lot of what we’re saying is relevant regardless of what level someone is at. I’d think we’re on the same side here.

There are gap closers, but there are also gap extenders.

Because the game scales reward with risk somewhat, melee weapons without exception always outdamage ranged weapons on a dps basis (some ranged options have good burst damage however). In PvE, you’ll still want to be in melee range most of the time for max effectiveness… just make sure you don’t die. PvP content is a different story, where keeping someone at range and plinking away can be more effective than closing in, since the level of risk involved with closing with good players massively outweighs any AI risk.

I was mainly focusing on direct damage calculations because of the max-condition-stack nature many combats seem to be in nowadays in PvE, but Esplen’s post above is absolutely correct otherwise. Timing the finishers with any Chaos field can add additional confusion (he mentioned this in the tldr part) – it’s only 20% chance per shot, but each duelist fires 8 times, and a confusion5-stack every 5 seconds is certainly a good addition. This can be very useful in WvW, even if somewhat less so for fights in the PvE context due to an overly low condition cap.

Berserker when against a wall still loses to Swordsman in direct damage terms however, since it’s 2.2 multiplier every 6 seconds relative to the swordsman’s 1.925 every 4 seconds. For it to be better against a single target you’d have to have enough condition damage for the bleed to make more of a difference, or to time the whirl with ethereal combo fields so they proc Confusion. I mentioned Berserker even under direct terms because its 2.2 multiplier (0.55 for each of 4 hits) Cleaves, whereas the Swordsman’s one doesn’t, making it very notable. The only other Cleaving phantasm is the Warden, but that phantasm does very horrid direct damage, and is better used for projectile nullification and condition builds.

With the new changes coming out, there will be some builds now that are capable of stacking bleed via wardens, confusion by dropping ethereal fields on said wardens and sceptre 3, and then stacking torment in addition to that with autoattacks and/or clones making the buffed mesmer a possible competitor to the necromancer for max condition damage output.

I’m sure people can see for themselves how complicated the situation can get from just these few posts. Mesmer gameplay contains a lot of this for max effectiveness.

The thread is now a year old, I’ve had a few requests, but not much as back then, megaservers didn’t quite exist yet.

Now that everyone is smooshed together in the same maps, it’s no longer necessary to guest unless something guild related is happening. I could recreate a new thread, but I don’t really see the point since the general topic hasn’t changed.

Under the new system:

1. You can request for help with any content whenever you need, just add me to your list and whisper when necessary. This can take the form of a question where the help you get is an answer, or it can take the form of going to you and physically completing something. Say, a champion. I am not capable of soloing any of the Krait Witches, Tequatl, Triple Wurm, the Melandru event chain or the Balthazar event chain. Everything else in PvE is not a problem. WvW I cannot help unless we’re on the same world. And regardless of who else is in your party or how they’re geared, I should be able to complete any dungeon left you leave in any state as long as the other people are still playing. My limit for most dungeons is 3-man or 4-man in afk cases, though specific dungeons may be uncompletable for game mechanic reasons (e.g. CoFp1 with one AFK in brazier phase).

2. Unlike one year ago I’ve now mastered every single class and every single crafting discipline, and can now help with any class or profession-specific questions as well. This includes creating builds. Note that different classes are good at different things, so certain things are impossible – I cannot create a condition guardian for you that can ever come close to matching a condition thief, let alone a ranger or necromancer – but I can create the best possible condition build possible for a guardian if necessary. Or the best way to use a sceptre-torch/staff direct damage mesmer in terms of traits/utilities, even if it will never match a mesmer build with a sword in it for direct damage. ‘Play how you want’ will rarely yield the ‘max efficiency approach’, but it’s possible to preserve what you like in a given playstyle while improving the results somewhat.

3. Starting this Feature Patch (which consolidates all guilds across worlds), any new player can also ask for an invite, and I can add you to my guild to buff your Magic Find. Depending on how many people use this, gathering, karma or xp buffs may also be activated – I’ve already unlocked all of these features in the guild. This: 1. helps in asking/answering questions as cc is easier to use than whispers, and 2. gives buffs to everyone involved. Full representation not required and you can leave if you find another community you’d rather be with, this is merely to buff you for free until you find such a guild you want to attach yourself to more permanently.

4. I will not be granting requests for any direct financial help because this kind of thing almost always ends up being abused by players who don’t actually need it. This doesn’t mean that I won’t necessarily give it on my own accord to people who actually need it (because at the moment there’s nothing I need that I don’t already have), but it does mean that begging for gold will get you nothing.

The basic idea is the same as a year ago. Ask and you’ll receive, for free, as long as I’m not otherwise engaged with someone else in the game.

I doubt I’m the only one willing to do this, but I don’t see any other threads in the forum offering, so other veterans who are willing to help newer players may wish to chime in here so people know who to approach.

My signature contains links to all of the builds I’m personally using. They’re all optimised for very specific purposes and are generally speaking not ‘meta’, but all are roles that ‘only that class can do’, in which they have atypically good performance. They’re updated as I change the builds over time in response to patches.

Or just right click on random people running with you and click ‘invite to party’.

There is time you need to activate the skills, so if you activate 6 blast finishers within 4 seconds, you run off with 6×3-4 = 14 seconds of stealth. Alternatively, if you activated 3 blasts simultaneously, you’d run off with 8 seconds.

Rather than absolute number of blasts it is important to make sure the time between the first blast and the last is kept as short as possible, or you may end up blowing more skills with less results. This is why thieves spamming shortbow 2 on the smoke wall skill can only stack 12 seconds of stealth (6 blasts within wall duration, 1 blast per second, approximately), and Shadow Refuge stacks 11 (4 pulses of 3 second duration each, 1 pulse per second in addition to the activation stack). Engineer stealth can actually be longer because we can trigger multiple toolbelt skills at the same time.

I use Rifle and Toolkit in my set so it’s not a possibility, but yes, it is entirely possible to raise this to 17 seconds of area stealth by triggering either inversion or acid bomb at the same time as the aforementioned ones for people that use either P/S set or an Elixir Gun kit. That’s a straight ‘or’, if you use ‘both’, the inversion=>elixir gun swap would take 1.5 seconds, meaning the other one is worth only 1 second or so of stealth, a waste of a cooldown.

Timing the activation to the moment BoB explodes is paramount in ensuring max stealth length.

You simply need to Link Accounts from your My Account option to unlock these. By definition, you need to possess a Guild Wars account in order to link anything in the first place, the code scans the account you link and credits the relevant achievements to you.

So yes, you can.

The cost of making an ascended weapon from crafting level zero varies with the weapon but is approximately 150-160 gold for lvl 500 in that weapon type profession, and then another 30 for the weapon itself, all costs included.

25 Gold won’t cut it. Stick to exotics.

And while ascended is very slightly better than exotic, the difference is entirely dwarfed by the stats that using food gives you. even cheap level 70 odd food. I have never understood people that invest hundreds of gold in ascendeds, but refuse to spend 2 silver on food per hour. I could earn back the difference by harvesting any random iron node.

Also, search for Skale Venom on the wiki. It’s a copper-priced utility consumable that can be used together with food – the vulnerability increases kill rates and the weakness reduces damage dealt by mobs.

You may find the effects from cheap food and skale venom to already make a noticeable difference in play.

Just one…

Play as many classes as you can at the start.

People have different preferences in gameplay, and class mechanics really, really play a major role here. Your initial class may end up being a class whose experience you can’t ever find tolerable, or it may be one you’d really love.

You might want to wait a while until the tournament starts to get it. A lot of servers are intentionally tanking their ranks now so they can cheese the system for easy victories on tournament start, and it may well be the case that your server is one of those doing the tanking – which means you will be getting pretty much zero support for now.

But when the tournament starts you can probably cap every point you need on nearly all your characters with your world zerg.

The worlds that aren’t tanking at the moment are the worlds who should be able to get the PoIs very easily in the absence of resistance… so if you’re having problems it is likely that your world is attempting to tank.

The new trait system makes things very difficult for new characters.

I’d recommend getting back on your 80s to get refreshed first before attempting a new character, since they’re somewhat hamstrung by default now.

Did you make the legendary component Gift of Mastery?

Search for that in your bank.

Given how back then WvW Badges of Honor were inventory items that max-stacked at 250 but we were spammed with them, (as well as obsidian shards we were spammed with when doing Orrian Jewelry Boxes), a lot of us tend to make the Gift of Mastery to conserve bank space.

Given it was one year ago you may not remember making it.

You don’t really earn for promotion of t5 to t6 because you’re using skill points. Rather, you’re selling the skill point.

That is not to say that it isn’t worth doing. IT ABSOLUTELY IS worth promoting t5 blue mats, and ‘some’ of the cores into lodestones, and standard blueprints into superiors, but there’s a limit to this set by the number of skill points you possess.

Sword 3 is a clone leap, it does nearly no damage. The greatest phantasm-baesd sustained single target dps for a mesmer in direct mode is 3x staff phantasms with 8+ conditions constantly on a target, but given how rare this occurs, 3x Sword 5 phantasms is a close second that always works well. 3x berserker phantasms from the GS also works, but more for AoE damage centred on a boss target to wipe out its summons/minions with.

Pistol phantasms are popular as they do high burst on initiation. But they’re actually inferior over a longer term because of the time between their shots. They are very useful for WvW content, but you’d generally want a Focus or Sword offhand for PvE, for additional projectile reflection (traited) or additional damage respectively, to accompany the mainhand sword.

Also worth noting that phantasm HP isn’t very high and they can’t survive deadly AoEs. If you’re dodging one, also make sure you use a Shatter skill so they’re not wasted.

Once the phantasms are set the next things to care about is your personal damage. The highest is Sword autoattacks in melee range, which very slightly outdamage Sword 2 in dps. Use sword 2 for evades, not damage – as usual, most mesmers have the misconception that its dps is higher because it loads the damage more consistently, relative to the sword AA chain where most of the damage is loaded on the third hit.

Lastly, you need to consider combo-based damage. A basic skill is Feedback on an enemy projectile user, which not only reflects their projectile, but combos with their projectile to inflict damage plus confusion back on its user. Allies firing projectiles through ethereal fields also stack confusion, as do allies using whirl finishers within the field. Your 4 fields are staff 5, feedback, null field and time warp. Know all 4 of these, have as many as your build can allow, and place them when you see an ally about to initiate Rapid Fire or some other related skill.

Between whether to take a greatsword or staff, the earlier does more ranged direct damage in a solo situation, the second harmonises better with larger groups.

Note that reflected projectiles use their caster’s Power rating so your Power is irrelevant, but they use your critrate and critdmg%, so your Precision and Ferocity matters.

It’s possible to load quite a lot of damage as a mesmer, though it’s inherently far more complicated than ‘use skills 2,4 then autoattack until the cooldowns are over’ on a a/m warrior. It’s not hard to play as in actions per second, but requires more active thought to use properly.

Mesmers aren’t that bad in the early levels, the traits I run tend to merely reduce cooldowns or add slight damage bonuses. Builds do matter, though – the clone dodge shatter builds are entirely unusable at early levels.

Trait unlocking now is beyond annoying however.

The tanking in the charts is visibly extreme. We’re going to end up with situations where manipulators win again while the legit ones get turned into loot bags

I don’t blame players, mind. It’s natural to do what benefits you the most, any concepts like ‘honor and glory’ are really very, very unnatural behaviours.

On the other hand, there’s someone we can look to who should have prevented this, and did not.

Manasa Devi.7958:

Which has only been exacerbated by the new trait system which mostly just changed badly traited new players into untraited new players.

And may soon be joined by untraited under-statted new players.

Harbinger.8637:

How about being able to forge them and get back a random ascended accessory.

This would make me happy enough already.

Also, if even one ring going in is uninfused, 1/5 chance per try (aka every 20 rings) to create infused version. If all rings are infused, 100% chance to get random infused ascended ring back.

If it’s not broken, fix it.

Tootsie’s always scaled. The minimum to kill is 2 elite players, but practically speaking try to get at least 4.

Tootsie is ok, but you need to save your interrupts. Of course, if you’re a S/P thief, you’ll never fail unless you die.

Serene has really, really bad pathing. T6s are built on the blood and tears of Serene soloists, who get no champ box for the effort, but a hell lot of headache. Most other events aren’t half as annoying.

Giant has too much HP that he’s skipped frequently. The mechanics are fine but the HP bagging is overdone.

Light golem himself is fine, but the 4 turrets on the cliffs surrounding him are not fine.

The Ley Line event has too many mobs.

Tendrils are easy, just AoE a lot. If you’re melee cleaving without either blindspam or invulnerability, you’re doing it wrong. Thief in SB mode can solo this with no risk within 40-55 seconds.

Rescuing downed NPCs is very badly done. At the moment it’s Battle Standard or go home. Centaurs should res the NPCs MUCH faster than they do at present, and the NPCs shouldn’t be allowed to be resurrected by Battle Standard, Nature Spirit and whatnot.

The vendor in Dry Top only seems to give the original mysterious seed, so…

To make mawdrey multiple times, we have to make the exotic nomad and exotic variable stat backpieces AGAIN just to get back the pet seed?

The only things I found hard was jumping shockwaves 400 ms in advance, and predicting what players in WvW do so I can react before they actually even take the actions. Reacting normally to animations is the luxury of North Americans/Europeans in their servers.

None of these were remotely difficult.

“Overall, the update is more good than bad, but probably not 3-week-announcement worthy. That said, these next 2 days may hold surprises…”

This.

Things I’m most interested in are really the account bound tag functionality, promises of better engine optimisation, fix to the instance owner mechanic, a Cleave weapon on the Necro at last and the adrenaline nerf wiping out Sniper Warrior functionality. Much better than a normal patch, but not exactly worth 3 weeks of hype. 1 week of hype, maybe.

If we’re talking speedruns now, then:

1. Elementalist because might-assisted FGS. It’s not even funny.

2. Engineer. I’m running a different build from meta with 5-5-0-0-4 rifle-healturret-toolkit-x-bombkit. The idea is to rotate prybar, confusion bombs, fire fielded BoB (+healturret detonation), spanner throw, rifle 3 and rifle 5. Unless there’s a need to AoE it has nearly full uptime on non-autoattack skills, and in the rare 1 or 2 spare seconds, you use the bomb kit’s AA. Also has access to stealthblasting by setting thumper turret as x. Most of the time x is rifle kit, or elixir B for condiclear. In situations where ranged attacks are useful x is grenade kit, otherwise grenades don’t even appear in my bar. Static discharge adds to what is already very high damage. Elite crate adds even more over time, plus some heal support.

3. Thief, again because like the engineer it’s capable of not caring about the concept of cooldowns. Single target max burst rotations involve CnD+backstabbing until near zero initiative then AAing on the s/p set. Max survivability rotations involve using Pistol Whip nearly exclusively, timed to pit evade frames at boss attack times. Thieves can stealthrun better than engineers too.

4. Warrior. There’s the Axe/Mace signet build used for max personal dps or the Axe/Mace + GS Phalanx strength build used to maintain 100% uptime on 25 might and fury alone on a party, as long as the target is crittable.

5. Guardian. Symbol + VoJspam builds with GS/Hammer. Reflects available.

6. Mesmer. Timewarp, rotation of ethereal combo fields (Null Field and Feedback) for combo confusion in addition to their active effects. Swordsman phantasms for single target boss, berserker phantasms for bosses that summon. iDefender for parties that can’t seem to stay alive without support. Acts as boonstripper due to sword AA functionality. Triple disenchanter phantasms also entirely nullify CoE and HoTWp1’s ‘buffing’ mechanics allowing for parties to mete max dps without wasting time hitting the generators.

7. Ranger. Condi-built, frost spirit and spotter to support direct users in a party, while dealing 16-18 bleedstacks, poison and burn at 1800 ish condi damage. Cat pet does direct damage unaffected by ranger’s gear. More of a place against high defense bosses, less useful otherwise. Power builds suffer because their multipliers are reduced to ‘account for the pet dps’.

8. Necro. AoE condi isn’t necessary when the only things that come in sufficient numbers to be AoEd never live long enough for those to be useful. Main support is in condition-boon conversions for the party, except AoE condiclears held by all classes and the fact that most mob condis are weak mean this support doesn’t really matter. Power builds suffer from no Cleave of any sort and poor power multipliers in general.

P.S. Ele has full uptime on Swiftness by using Blasts on the Lightning Hammer’s Static Field.

P.P.S. Most people use guardians and warriors because the higher ranked ones (elementalist, engineer, thief) all require dealing with a lot more skills at once, better timing, or both., failing which people are ineffectual carpets for bosses to step on. The difference between a grenade AAing engineer or a non-AA engineer in terms of DPS is as large as 30%, for instance, and an elementalist that doesn’t know how to mightstack would easily underperform a far more easy-to-use PS warrior. A bad thief just lies dead the whole fight, every fight – the margin for error is small in the extreme.

Guards and wars on the other hand require far less skill to reach max effect. Mesmers just don’t do as well as the higher tiered ones and can generally be replaced by a thief for stealth/boonstrip or a guardian for reflects except when triple disenchanters are useful. CoFp1 and p2 are very slightly faster with a portal, but aside from that, they don’t really bring much to the table that other classes don’t.

Retaliation is the only thing my pistol whip thief is weak against. It’s functionally invulnerable to all normal attacks when timed right (and will basically always be timed right in dungeons), but retaliation hits very, very hard given how many times PW hits and how little health a full zerk thief has.

Modrem wolves and their AoE retaliation proccing are the most deadly threat in PvE atm to this build, most other sources can have their retal outright stolen away, but when those wolves hit in a pack, you can’t steal ALL of their retal, if you pistol whip back you’ll die in 2 seconds, if you don’t PW you’ll die from their very heavy attacks.

Pretty much the only real way to deal with it is to run away while spamming SB 2 at the ground until the wolves run out of HP.

You need:

1. Bomb kit
2. Thumper turret
3. Healing turret

Rotation:

1. Lay thumper turret.
2. Lay healing turret.
3. Lay Big Ol’ Bomb while switching to bomb kit.
4. Overcharge thumper turret.
5. Smoke bomb (bomb kit 4).
6. Wait for BoB to blow.
7. Detonate healing turret (blast 1) and thumper turret (blasts 2 and 3 – one from standard detonation and one from delayed overcharge) at the same time BoB detonates (blast 4).
8. Toolbelt skill: rumble (blast 5).

The only delay here is the ~ 1 second it takes to regain control of Rumble after the Thumper blows up. (5×3)-1 = 14 seconds stealth for your party.

It should be capable of stealthrunning you entirely though the usual areas in Caudecus’ Manor. Since Path 1’s solo phase requires stealth on low cooldown a thief is still much better (this rotation’s CD is about 50 seconds), but for Paths 2 and 3 you can solo stealthrun people.

Also applicable for the runs in Twilight Arbor, Ascalonian Catacombs or wherever else you need stealthruns. As a plus, Speedy Kits gives us full personal swiftness uptime, which is always helpful.

Both because of reconnecting to a dropped megaserver and because loot allocation factors party damage rather than personal damage. It doesn’t matter in most normal content, but low hp champs in particular sometimes don’t drop their chest for poorly damaging players.

The boons is actually a negative thing. Because party members are prioritised over random players for boon allocation, it leads to uneven Might distribution, where people who already have 25 might may get their stacks refreshed while others around them walk with 0 might. It’s why on Triple Wurm specifically, people usually run without parties in order to raise the chances the kill is successful.

WvW content is different. An party of elite players with 25 might+fury together with, say, 5 random pugs, is far stronger than if all 10 players had 14 might each, because better players use their stats far more effectively. For this cause boon restriction to parties becomes useful in WvW content. This is irrelevant in PvE where most mob AI is incapable of damage reduction, so timing spikes, etc is never a factor.

The salvage rate of rares > lvl 68 into ectoplasm is approximately 0.9 via mystic salvage kits, there’s been large-number studies done on this already.

The salvage rate of ectoplasm into crystalline dust, numbers are limited, but my own tests with several thousand ectoplasm (not enough sample size frankly, to be more accurate we’d want several hundred thousand to be sure) is approximately 2.0 dusts per ectoplasm.

What both of you seem to ignore is that there is a 10+5(x)% loss in listing and transaction fees whenever you use the TP in any form. If you spend 100 gold on rares, you will always lose 15 gold in fees, even though the crystalline dust you get is almost the same base price as the rares themselves. In order to reduce the losses somewhat you’d want to salvage specific rares that give higher value alternate drops in addition to the ectoplasm itself. Such as anything made from cloth, since silk is relatively expensive – and mforging the runes you get out isn’t optional anymore, it’s a necessity to reduce your losses over very large sizes.

Generally, rares > ectoplasm direct purchasing due to the rune and silk you also get in addition to simply the 0.9 ecto/rare.

There are three types of gamers.

1. Casual gamers – they play games to pass the time in a fun way. A lot of this demographic has moved on to mobile gaming because it’s able to take away time in transport and whatnot while computer gaming is somewhat more restrictive in terms of required equipment.

2. Hardcore gamers – there are two variants: those who play a game because they are immersed in the world/community of the game itself, and they live the game as a second life; those who play a game because they want to feel a sense of accomplishment, and since games run on fairly consistent rules, it affords the ability to achieve in a fair environment, while in reality you could throw all your resources into something and never be rewarded when your luck is bad.

3. Professional gamers – they play games to earn money, either through tournaments or through converting ingame resources to real finances.

Professional gamers always go where the money is, and as they have a somewhat higher profile (and occasionally industry sponsorships), games sometimes like to have some of them in play every now and then for marketing exposure. But since their aim is to actually earn money, restrictive costs tends to turn them off from a game. Aside from attempts at ‘e-sports’ (which frankly will likely fail because the complexity of Guild Wars 2 mechanics is way above that of your average esports audience’s ability to grasp without doing prior research), there’s been limited effort in this department.

This thread is started and populated mostly by the achievement-type hardcore gamers. However, traditionally, game companies have relied more on keeping systems generally consistent and fair as the only effort towards this entire community, since the amount of time already invested in the game presents a very high cost to leaving a game. From Marketing’s eyes, it’s not a dollar-efficient effort to retain hardcore gamers.

Casuals seem to be the main target of a lot of these recent updates at the moment. Without time to invest in a game, pay-for-convenience features like gem-gold conversions, buying skins, or gambling RNG are ways to monetize this crowd, but it seems like to avoid turning them off from the rest of the game until they spend more, disproportionate effort has been spent in the initial phases of the game (pre-lvl 80). Once they play enough to become invested as a hardcore player, retention is no longer as much of a concern.

If you want to see things change, the hardcore gamer as a community has to undertake relatively drastic actions, involving cutting the monetization source. It does not necessarily mean you stop playing Guild Wars 2, but it means you stop spending any real world money, if you already do, and limit gold=>gem conversions. Then we engage them in dialogue over certain non-negotiable updates – say, precursor crafting.

Once a promised update has been conceded, spend money or convert gold to gems the moment the patch hits, then if the update frequency stalls, stall the monetization process as well. Once the message is clear that the community will financially support the developers only if they acquiesce to the desires of the community that supports it, it’ll be easier to see updates that you want.

If not prepared to coordinate spending behaviour in response to updates, there will be little or no chance that even developers who are interested in improving things for us will be able to convince the other departments within the company to give them the go-ahead.

I’m serious about the spending phase bit. If you’re expecting them to work for free to create patches for us when only the casuals support them financially, it’s just not going to happen.

Underwater combat is broken in any kind of player vs player content, engineers in particular have access to nearly all of the skills they have on land while most of the other classes have to make do with substandard skills on the spear and harpoon gun/trident.

They’re still fine-ish for pve content where profession balance isn’t nearly as major a consideration, but in general open world only have 8% of hearts underwater, and fractals can be entirely done without any underwater component as starting with Swamp automatically cancels Underwater fractal, while people simply have to avoid HoTWp2/3 to skip all underwater content for dungeons.

It’s kind of sad really.

Big Ol’ Bomb.

There’s something about seeing mobs flying into the air, might-assisted burning into dust that most other skills don’t really replicate even if they do more damage.

If you need to ask, you should probably main a guardian.

If you’re a main-ranger type, you’d have done so before popping the question.

Mystic forge them. Selling incurs a 15% tp transfer cost.

Almost all non-raid non-krait witch group events are soloable. The hardest one so far was recapturing the hylek city in Sparkfly Fen – at the time, it took longer to do this alone capping circles while other circles were being capped back than it did to solo the old version of Tequatl. All of the original world bosses except the shatterer and dwayna were soloable. Off topic though.

The idea of scaling both mob level and loot rarity up is interesting but has an issue – namely that nearly everyone already gets t5 materials by default regardless of mob. Mid-level zones where mobs may drop t4, in particular linen, would still be used by a lot of 80s since those drops are worth exponentially more than t5s. This solution only really helps people clearing maps at lower tiers where material value is still somewhat limited.

It’s pretty much impossible not to tag the Svanir shaman unless you’re very late, he’s a HP bag. Same for fire elemental – if you missed it, you were late, or bugged – you can definitely do enough damage to be recognised as an event completer, a threshold far lower than the requirement to be recognised as a killer of a mob – which isn’t relevant on any epic-rank boss since they’re not mobs. No real exceptions to this. The ‘cannot tag for lack of dps’ problem where non-80s are screwed over happens more during the Ulgoth boss series, and the champs prior to the Caledon Wurm. People usually use parties to increase their chances of getting drops on this map, but it is a problem.

While having ‘80’ versions of maps people can opt in for loot seems the most appealing fix to this problem at present, there would need to be some other form of reward modification. Maybe a higher chance of precursors, exotics or rares, since the masterworks and blues at level 80 are nearly worthless. Ascended bloodstone dust from chests alone isn’t a sufficient incentive as few people have enough alts that they actually need to use most of it.

Pistol engineer with 2 gadgets and 3 kits?

I smell ungodly OPdom.

You must be new here. Not GW2, mind, I mean game forums in general.

People have been complaining for a long time… generally, when people are happy they play the game, when people aren’t happy playing they complain on the official forums, with the exception of a niche white knight community. This is true of any game.

Forums are always filled with disproportionately unhappy people and the game itself is always filled with disproportionately happy people. It is critical for developers to listen to the complaints however, as small unresolved annoyances over long times are more likely to make people eventually quit, relative to massive problems that are quickly patched away in hours, which usually has little or no long term playerbase effect.

At the same time, if you look at any of the forums of any active game you’ll generally have the feeling that the game is going to die. That isn’t the case, either. Take the information and discard the sentiment, as it were.

Ignoring player complaints or believing that the majority of players are disgruntled are equally problematic.