Guild Wars 2

Problematically at the moment low level rares don’t even salvage into luck. That makes their break value inferior to masterworks, which has never sat well with me.

Making lower level equips smash into ecto or perhaps even crystalline dust instead at a low rate might allow for us to have some reasonable choice other than ‘list on TP and hope someone buys it’. Or even a higher luck drop rate than a masterwork. Their drop rate appears to be similar (I’ve done a lot of world-complete levelling cycles) to that of higher level rares, so since the amount of time people spend in the mid levels is not very long, it’s unlikely to affect the ecto market drastically. The volume of rares generated by world boss zerg trains far surpasses the volume people generate from the levelling process, even if it were to dock the value of ecto, it’d barely reduce it by 1 silver. If crystal dust were dropped instead, its maximum price-effect would be closer to reducing ecto value by 50 copper (and crystal dust by 25 copper).

The crafting loop is a good point, but the problem can be entirely avoided by simply preventing crafted rares from salvaging into anything other than materials, as per the current system. They are an entirely separate entity from normal rares in having no rune in their socket, and having an entirely different level bracket where no other dropped rares lie.

The current system where rares smash into less value than masterworks is absurd.

You prefer to run alone or with a group? Warrs and Guards vary in that factor.

“And I really like the idea of like a solo roamer just going around looking for fights and stuff.”

Out of your 4 picks thief is the most appropriate for this.

Problem with the engineer is it scales very highly with player skill, so the difference in power between a master and a new player is staggering. At least the ele has a braindead mode that still works relatively well (staff fire 2-1-1-1), but engineers are very hard to use.

I don’t anticipate it ever becoming a meta regardless of how high they buff it. Though frankly, any buffs to it might lead to horrible OPness at the highest levels of player skill.

FGS isn’t that critical for wurm given high downrate on players and wurms occasionally charging off. It’s more critical for people to not stand in the wrong spot.

Crossplay.2067:

Personally, I want to know how the OP defines “solo pve”. Do you mean farming? Living story missions? Solo champions? Solo dungeons? Something well-rounded enough to do all of the above? Each of these situations has a different answer.

This. If your ranking can apply to all of the listed situations equally, you need to rethink your ranking a lot. Farming requires short cooldowns and often range. Champions require some form of low cooldown utility skills in addition to high damage per second. World completion requires swiftness uptime and high burst.

Guardians for instance are really, really bad at clearing maps due to their near complete absence of swiftness or even +25% speed traits/utilities. By the time you can use Superior Traveler or Speed runes you’ve already generally cleared 60% of the map, and if you’r camping Staff, see you next year. But their effectiveness on champion soloing is very high.

You’re expecting a sentence answer to an essay question, in which case you will never get any correct answer.

Sounds good, actually. At the moment some people seem a bit too happy to nerf rewards from failed events, but people would generally respond better if rewards for succeeding events was increased instead.

Agreed on this.

Knowing how to use combinations properly separates very good players from the merely well-equipped, and while people eventually learn it, the earlier they do, the more engaging their gameplay would be.

The very fastest map-clearers are elementalists and engineers as both have access to very high bursts and 100% swiftness uptime. Warriors also do relatively well; though they take very slightly longer to kill, their GS also has mobility buffers. Thieves have very high burst as well, but lack the swiftness elementalists and engineers have.

Setup is always 45 minutes beforehand. It only stretches to 30 mins before under the worst possible scenarios where there aren’t enough people… normally on wurm. Tequatl is usually set up within 3-5 minutes. You can also taxi people into your map if you’re organising, and ask the people you’re organising to taxi people as well, if scattering is an issue. From personal experience, it takes about 5-10 minutes to taxi pugs into Tequatl until any instance is hardcapped, NOT in TTS conditions- there’s a guild I used to run Tequatl with a lot, and I taxied people a lot. Triple Trouble is still on another level, though, and requires timed coordination very difficult to pull off without some form of voice comms between the commanders for the synchronised decapitation.

On a side note since this thread was spawned, the TTS teamspeak came under DDoS attack approximately 6 hours earlier during the usual Triple Wurm spawn.

Arguing on a thread is one thing. Hatred of people is one thing. You are entitled to both, you are entitled to like as well as dislike people, styles or methods. But remember that it is considered a criminal offence in many countries to undertake something of this nature, regardless of your target. Breaking the law is not acceptable. You know who you are.

On that note, making siege important is a good thing, but making siege all-important is a bad thing.

At the moment Tequatl can be failed regardless of the skill of all other players involved if the 6 turret users are bad.

They can represent a great DPS increase when used properly, but the ‘scales’ mechanic is still something I don’t like after clearing Tequatl possibly a hundred times by now. The Shatterer mortars are in a good place, please don’t drop another invuln nonsense that compromises a hundred people from the incompetence of a few, particularly if it’s impossible to bump them off. Teaching is one thing, but some appear to not be able to use English, or are stubborn, or are griefing.

I crashed too, then I found a ‘karka queen pre’ listing in LFG, taxied in and killed it again for the loot.

This is frustrating though.

Player to Player trade system?

Damage = Power * Weapon Dmg * (Critrate*Critdmg + (1-Critrate)) / Defense.

Before effects of traits or vulnerability.

A weapon with higher base strength scales directly with damage – a 10% increase in weapon damage is a total increase of 10% dps. A weapon with power scales relative to the total power you have. For instance if your weapon has 100 power but you already have 2000 power from other sources, you’d only have an increase of 5%. But if you only have 1000 power from other sources, you’d have an increase of 10%.

Condition damage doesn’t care about your weapon strength however, so it tends to do much better when undergeared, whereas power builds require good gear, preferably ascended weapons.

Level 10’s ‘level reward’ unlocks the entire storyline section. So you have to be level 10, or else you’re hardlocked out of it.

It’ll delay keyfarmers somewhat.

Also, nobody can do anything at level 1 anyway. By the time you hit open world you’re always level 2, the tutorial levels you no matter what.

In case there’s any doubt…

No.

It needs people who know the fight. Teamspeak helps but isn’t actually entirely necessary if everyone knows what they’re doing all the time – which is almost never the case.

We did Triple Trouble in ‘Tribulation Mode’ the other day involving everyone in all three wurms being in one channel, so calling wurm attacks is impossible and coordinating zerg movements is difficult… but we still made the kill. Amber in particular was ready to decap with more than 3 minutes left, and killed the decapped wurm with 30+ seconds to spare, with little or no briefing. And the reason for this was that some people have already gotten bored with the fight being too easy when done under normal full-coordination conditions.

You don’t really get to complete the hardest content in the game without ever bothering to learn about it, though problematically at the moment it is not possible for a few good players to carry the fight – you really need nearly the entirety of the zerg to know what they’re doing. That’s hard without concentrating people who know what they’re doing on the same map – and every time triple trouble is cleared, it’s always under these concentrated conditions. TTS is pretty much the most open ‘guild’ to do these and dedicates time in every run to teach newcomers, though it isn’t by any means the only group capable of defeating the wurm. ‘Guild’ isn’t even really appropriate since the majority of people in the TTS guild swarm have other main guilds, and only rep the tag for the raid kills. It’s more like an alliance of raidhunters than anything else.

Ohoni.6057:

if you take long to kill him the punishment would be that it takes longer rather than you getting nothing at all

Can we make this happen?

Fire Ele AoE telegraphing needs to be improved and its hp needs to be somewhat less low, though HP bagging is not the way to go either. The concept of that fight is good, but with high ping made worse by lag-assisted skill delay, rather than actually avoiding AoEs my main tack is to Stability through the whole thing. It’s quite a bit of missed potential that telegraphing the AoEs even half a second earlier would fix. Of course, moving the melee damage spot into the FE will prevent DD pierces and meleeing it outside melee range nonsense.

Really really like Mark II though. Except without the safespot.

Melandru was fun to solo once, interrupting exactly at the 25% marks to prevent the healphase made for interesting play. Nowadays it’s turned into another zergfest and place to farm revival xp with Battle Standard. And since interrupts no longer work, we’re pressed into the drake gimmick which isn’t frankly anywhere as fun as the main fight itself at all.

The idea behind the LS2 Shadow of the Dragon is great. Would be nice to see something like that for a world boss, if only the dragon would attack back rather than standing there as a HP bag during the weakened phase.

Karka queen is overly easy atm, being summarised into:

1. Facetank melee.
2. Dodge when Stability procs on Queen.
3. Throw eggs when they appear.

That boss needs some sort of rework too.

Would like something that requires more player skill and less coordination. At present Triple Wurm isn’t very hard execution wise, but requires coordination not possible for pugs. Tequatl would be a good benchmark for Shatterer, except:

1. Without the turret gimmicks
2. Without the battery phase gimmicks

All that’s needed is to buff Shatterer’s offense up to Tequatl levels together with spawns (crystals?) that support its offense, AoEs the players can’t stand in for long, etc.

The worst possible benchmark is the Claw of Jormag. That failure of a world boss is a 100% gimmick based difficulty and a HP bag at the end.

Golem Mark II would be a very good boss if there wasn’t a ranged safespot and people were forced to melee it and dodge through.

World bosses are better when they don’t have very high health, but have extremely damaging attacks. More challenge, less boredom in waiting for HP to go down.

I wish I could say that you’ve missed too much to come back, but I can’t.

Repair is free, by the way. Don’t repeatedly repair since you can take a total of 7 deaths before anything goes red, but it’s good to ensure you’re in top condition before you start a dungeon, even though the chances of death in dungeons nowadays is nearly zero.

Several dungeons have anvils at the start point for this purpose.

Elementalists have very high active defenses (blinds, projectile nulls, invulnerability, blocks) so adding high vitality is relatively unnecessary unless you’re running very high level fractals. At the same time they already have the ability to AoEbuff 25 might permanently, so adding power has somewhat diminishing returns at very high buff rates.

Elementalists and engineers are the only classes that properly benefit from Celestial at high level fractal content, but for easier content it’s usually more efficient for an ele to stack precision-ferocity-power and use might the rest of the way to complete the damage.

Crude kit on blues and whites.
Green kit on greens.
Mystic kit on yellows and oranges that have runes/sigils cheaper than 2g 40s.
BLSK on oranges that have runes/sigils more expensive than 2g 40s.

Each BLSK salvage costs about 1 gold 20 silver.

When using green kits on greens you must mforge all the result minor runes/sigils into majors, then into superiors. Otherwise, if you’re not going to mforge the results, use crudes on greens as well, or the extra cost will be wasted.

I normally carry 1 green 4 crudes and a high-charge mystic around. Times I have to use BLSK are rare, and every use of the BLSK has to be considered carefully.

Copper fed salvage o matic and permanent tools are useful if you only have one main, for convenience’s sake. Otherwise, they’re wastes of money. It’s more efficient to carry around a Permanent Black Lion Merchant Contract, from which you can buy all the kits and harvest tools you’ll ever need, plus sell all of the random grey drops. When transferring between alts, it makes it easy to simply move one item as opposed to unequipping, moving and reequipping 4.

Probably 15-24, but no confirmation.

You could always farm a key, birthday gift-boost that char to 20, farm there until they’re replaced by the next level of bag, delete the char and repeat.

I have way too many 20-level boosts.

Still, my tolerance for farming overly easy content is nearly zero, so I won’t be doing this personally. It’s a possibility, though, if you’re into this kind of thing.

10 giants makes more sense, frankly.

This is an achievement I’m just not going to care about…

I don’t understand this complaint. Just remove armor pieces when you’re playing with friends in lower level zones.

My engi was running level 52 armor all the way up to level 68. If you want challenge it’s not undoable.

We have to work with the people we have, not the people we wish we had.

Mid levels give wool, cotton and linen which are pretty expensive. Would be advisable to use those items prior to level 25, then use them after lvl 65 where drops tend to be of poor sellability.

Berserker. Thief survivability utilities and traits are so bad that with or without survivability gear, you don’t have any sustain.

Only real way to survive is to hit really hard when you’re visible, then stealth away and repeat. As long as you can be seen, you’re pretty much screwed.

I’m anticipating 9001 rare rifle drops when doing world boss rotations on my engineer.

Takes about 12 days playing relaxed to get 120 gold, but then again I do end up spending much of it on ascended crafting, so I’ve been stable ish at 190 for some time now.

Warriors are a cleave class, they don’t AoE as well. GS/Hammer specced guards with blind/vuln spam fits OP description better than warriors do. Hammer AA rotation does greater damage than the greatsword AA rotation and also applies protection so you and your allies take less damage as well. Staff heal is inferior to Hammer damage reduction in the grand scheme of things, Virtue of Resolve and any of the heals, especially the block-based heal (think it’s called ‘Shelter’?) should be more than sufficient.

The guardian is out AoEd by engineers, but it requires far more coordination to survive in an engineer so that bit doesn’t tally with your request.

Stick with guard, change weapon set to Hammer/GS, open fights by leaping into mobs with GS3, drop GS4, GS2, switch to Hammer and just autoattack until GS is back up again, then GS2, GS4, aa till hammer… etc etc, spamming Justice whenever anything dies for more blind, vuln, burn and might after you trait them appropriately.

Z6: II, VII, XIII
R3: VI
Va0
H4: III, VIII
Vi1

This should probably set you off pretty well. Vary as needed. Changing Z6 to Z5 and getting Vi2: VI is a common modification that improves your utility in a group. Crits feed might, so you want probably berserker or a berserker-assassin mix. If desiring slightly greater survivability, change berserker pieces for Knight rather than Soldier, and get heal-on-crit foods like the Omnomberry Pie.

Mesmers are a class that gets maximum effects off crits due to the way the burst and phantasm attacks function. If you must add survivability use TPP instead of PTV. Vitality also doesn’t affect your clones and phantasms (there is a trait that adds phantasm health though), while toughness actually does. Reflected projectiles from Feedback don’t factor your Power, but do factor your critrate. Etc etc. PTV on mesmers doesn’t make much sense even though it does do well on warriors.

Getting really badly suited gear still only really reduces effectiveness by 30-40% or so though. It’s not a number I’d like to get saddled with, but it won’t change the outcome of any PvE encounter, only how long the encounter takes. Not knowing how to play the class is far worse. Clone mesmers who don’t shatter, phantasm mesmers who shatter unnecessarily, people who don’t know when to deploy the limited ethereal fields, opening portals beyond maximum range, throwing time warps off their optimal locations, using Greatsword autoattacks at melee range… the penalty for these is far more harsh.

It seems like the upcoming patch is…

Tormenting the OP.

Yeahhh…

The difference between the values of crystalline dust and the ectoplasm needed to make them with Mystic kits is nearly zero. The main cost associated with salvaging ectoplasm is the 15% listing fee, if you’re selling the resultant crystalline dust.

The most financially efficient method is to salvage only as many ectoplasms with mystic kits as crystalline dusts you actually need, then get the rest of luck from blues and greens. Blues are best done with crudes, though basics are only very slightly more expensive. Masterwork kits tend to work well with greens, but if doing so you must mystic forge the runes/sigils you get into higher forms. If not intending to do anything with the sigils, then stick to crudes even for greens.

maha.7902:

Bosses are single target. Why do you need to cleave?

And you use it on ranger because condition DPS caps at like 7k, while berserker rangers can do about ~11.5k. Even higher post-patch.

This ends the discussion quite handily then.

There’s no need for any further discussion when it’s clear that we don’t play the same game.

As for OP, because you’re why I’m here…

You’ll find out sooner or later what’s going on. You don’t have to take anyone’s word for it, but the reality tends to be quite obvious. Peace out.

Sceptre/Dagger + Staff

Staff nuke to aggro a large amount of mobs, condition condition condition, Epidemic, fight is over.

Do you know the significance of 80% critrate? It’s the critrate at which Fury from a party pushes you into 100%. Under full mightbuffing conditions, also the max damage possible output from a direct damage mesmer. Any critrate above 80% is wasted, any critrate below 80% is a dps loss. All of the max damage per second configurations are based on optimising for 80%, merely that warriors and thieves can achieve it even with a full berserker set from traits. Groups not capable of reaching max buff conditions do not ever need to consider min/max calculations, since it’s entirely irrelevant.

Also, using berserker on necros when they have no melee cleave or using it on rangers which barely breaks 1 mult/s as opposed to the 1.5-1.7 typical of most classes…

Feel free to ask in the necromancer and ranger forums if you require further clarification from a larger group of people why these are not advisable. They have more experience in explaining these particular problems… though it will probably come with a bit of harsh language and random complaints towards Anet.

The Hillstead skritt are never really fought. You fight Nightmare court.

The idea of it being a personal story drop seems to be possible however, though I don’t remember ever fighting a skritt in that level range.

Edit: Now that I think about it, there are level 15 ish resources near the skritt camps in the northwestern side of World vs World borderlands. While the area as a whole is level 80, aside from upscaled level 15s who will almost definitely get the bags in question, there may be a small chance even for higher level characters to get those.

Got the achievement for this account when 6 manning shatterer. Certain teleport skills can get you out of the crystal you’re in, then you can break the crystal/another guy’s crystal, and Shatterer is downed very fast when 6 people use mortars with no zergs.

Recently, due to the zergfest that is now all world bosses, crystals have been made more common and more hardy than before. But you’ll still get the highest chance of the achievement by AoE/Cleaving near Shatterer’s right foot.

Just keep clearing the map, you’ll unlock most of the traits naturally – then you can start to aim for specific locked traits after. Solo most content to learn how to use your character properly, then once you can take care of yourself you’ll have enough resources to start considering how to support your group in fights.

Farming tends to give better gold/hr but can be boring, depending on your tolerance.

Berserker is Power/Precision/Ferocity, and a full set of it tends to be the best damage potential for most classes, while having little survivability. The exceptions to this rule are Rangers which do better in Dire, Necros which do better in Rabid and Mesmers who do better in ‘enough Assassin to reach 80% critrate’ and then ‘Berserker for all other slots’. Most people don’t mention the exceptions though.

Edge of the mists is one of the most efficient farms for karma and world experience, but is substandard for pure gold/hr. As someone below lvl 80, you’re also going to be an easy target for griefers in EoTM.

Whisper ingame. If I’m not in a dungeon, killing Tequatl or Triple Wurm, I’m normally available.

It’s not ‘hard’ per se. It’s kind of a luck thing. Just hit Shatterer in melee cleave enough times, and you’ll eventually end up breaking some crystals. By the time you see a crystal it’s usually too late to aim for it, but it tends to use the attack on players closest to it.

This is an example of an achievement that you don’t get when you try for it, but end up getting when you don’t care about it.

GS/Hammer guards hit quite hard. They have both utility and high spike damage, but their dps is inferior to thieves and warriors in exchange for being able to heal, block and reflect projectiles easily.

Wars have a lot of flexibility between buffing modes, tanking modes and personal dps modes in trait builds, in addition with easily hitting 100% on critrate even without ever having to get more precision than the berserker set gives. It’s high damage and mid survivability with very low skill needed in melee range. Its ranged options however are a bit pathetic. While dps is high, burst capabilities are a bit low.

Engineers generally rotate between anywhere from the range of 2 to 4 different kits, swapping kits on the bar between fights and using more than one kit within the same fight. Played well they have little or no relevant cooldowns. In bomb mode they also have the highest AoE damage in the game, but are less powerful against 3 or fewer enemies.

Elementalists must memorise all skills, including the ones on conjured weapons, and know what attunement to be in, where. A low skill version is to camp staff and rotate 2-1-1-1, but the damage and support capabilities of such builds are markedly inferior to players who switch properly, and inferior to the AoE capabilities of bomb engis. It’s still commonly used though since a badly played high potential build is still worse than a build anyone can use.

Mesmers specialise in high burst against single targets both from range and in melee, but are somewhat weak against uncrittable targets. They bring some level of support to the party, but less than Guardians do. In zergs they do very well by allowing Confusion combinations to proc often, but in solo contexts they’re somewhat weak. They can cheese stealth.

Thieves are where most people who want to cheese stealth will go, but survivability is bad without stealth – there are no real sources of stability except an elite, bad stunbreaks, bad condition clears, no blocks, no invulns, weak heals, and worse party support. They possess the highest burst damage in the game behind FGS Rush, are the only class that can interruptlock elites solo, are one of two permanent blind spammers (guardians being a bit conditional), and have the highest DPS against a single target, but are inferior to warriors in DPS in cleave. Bad thieves just lie dead most of the time contributing to their bad rep.

Necros, not having cleave, have absolutely pathetic DPS in power mode; though it’s sometimes used for its high burst in PvP contexts, some people misunderstand this and bring power specs to dungeons when Cleave is more appropriate. They’re the best users of conditions and do well AoEing conditions in zergs however.

Rangers are plagued with bad AI on the pets. They’ve the second highest condition damage in the game behind necros and better damage support for parties via FrostSpotter, but condition damage being problematic with max stack limitations mean that while they would be better than necros in dungeons, it’s still often just better to skip conditions entirely for dungeons. Most ranger players aren’t even aware that condition builds (4700 dps) outdamage power builds (4200 dps) even with crit factored in in 1v1 contexts; the nerf Anet put on ranger power multipliers to ‘compensate for the pet’ has made them unable to perform properly in direct damage roles.

The end result is a meta where in PvE dungeons, people generally run War, Guard or Staff Eles, Mesmers rarely exceed 1 per party, Thieves can be good but often aren’t, Engineers rarely exist, and Rangers/Necros are actively kicked by elitists. In zergs mesmers, rangers and necros start to appear while wars and guards are still there. In 1v1 roaming, people get murdered by thieves and mesmers, then complain on the forums asking for them to be nerfed.

And nearly nobody understands what engineers do or are capable of doing, including many engineers themselves.

Guild Wars 2 uses a pseudorandom number generator based on timing to generate all drops. Because of this all drops, regardless of precursor, exotic class or otherwise, tend to ‘clump’ in the same timing, but nobody really knows when the ‘clump’ occurs.

Your best bet if buying is to watch the market for a while because when one person gets dawn, usually 4 people get dawn at the same time, and then some of them will decide to sell it at the same time.

It’s not entirely luck, the time of the day where you play will affect whether your time bracket for that day is likely to include the time when the precursor can drop, while at all other times the chance is actually zero. For this cause some people can and will get multiple precursors with very little investment, and others will get next to no exotics even after months. It is not clear whether or not the drop timings will ‘drift’ from day to day so that everyone at the same time zone will have a similar overall chance.

As far as the people reading the numbers are aware, the item tick tends to occur every 0.1 seconds, together with the duration accounting for other things like boons and conditions.

Aside from this Anet has kept information on its PRNG so secret we are unable to peer any further into the details of its operation from observation alone. The most reliable method to get a precursor remains to buy it off the TP, as while there are people that can roll one with 200g, there are also people who roll as much as 3000g into the Forge, never getting even a rarer exotic (E.G. Genesis), let alone a precursor.

The system automatically accepts the rewards and adds them to your account as far as I am aware. I’ve had cases before where I had more world boss/wvw rank chests than I opened as well, and there were mysterious items in my inventory I don’t remember picking up…

Warriors have the lowest skill to effectiveness ratio and make good starting characters. It doesn’t mean all warriors are bad, but it does mean it’s very hard to be a bad warrior. On the other hand elementalists and engineers perform badly in the extreme on bad players, but can be amongst the strongest classes of all in good hands. If the max power levels are all balanced (they’re not actually, but they’re pretty close) and equal to 100, an elementalist’s formula might be something like 40 + Skill * 60, while a warrior’s formula would be more similar to 80 + Skill * 20. Rangers are easily survivable but they have a bad reputation as speccing them for damage performance has a high skill multiplier – so many of them end up never really dying, but never being useful either. While thieves also have a bad rep in PvE since they do damage very readily, but survivability has a high skill multiplier.

Rangers and necros, being condition-focused classes with some of their skills tied to friendly AI are in a bit of a disadvantageous place at the moment due to condition overwriting and AI problems, but it’s not something that will be much of a problem early on. Only when you’re trying to maximise a class will these things start to become more relevant.

Would advocate starting in the following: Guardian, Warrior or Necromancer, to learn the basics of the game. Then move to other classes, playing each for a short time to find out which style you like the most. Then develop that one to level 80. From then on it’s up to you whether to max out other classes, or whether to specialise in that one class. Some mechanics are easier to learn in certain classes than others.

Above all you should be more concerned with what you like to play as opposed to what performs best at the highest levels of theorycrafting – unless you find theorycrafting fun, in which case you’ll be in for a world of pain when you realise most of those who try to do it can’t calculate to save their lives.

The idea of a temporary buff for instance owners is better than a total immunity however, as total immunity means some people will start an instance and afk halfway safe in the knowledge they can’t ever be kicked.

The buff can be renewed to 5 minutes every time they enter combat.