Guild Wars 2

I can’t really see how a staff in any way matches a thief’s class design.

That’s like giving a charr a princess wand.

Different weaponspecs have different levels of skill required, and different max potentials. But mesmer skill generally has nothing to do with twitch reflexes, and a lot to do with positioning, deciding when to keep clones and when to blow them up, and when to use which utility. Thieves on the other hand don’t require as much situational awareness on the whole, but reflexes and timing of skills/dodges are far more important than for mesmers.

Mesmers’ greatest weakness is AoE conditioning, and they’re strongest against direct melee attackers.

What frifox said. Mighted Assassin > Mighted Berserker, but unmighted Assassin < unmighted Berserker. Needless to say on uncrittable targets, Berserker is better, and on reflection, Assassin is better. The main reason why full zerk is so useful for thieves and warriors is that they have methods of achieving 80% unfuried crit via traits in full berserker, and any more precision is wasted on beyond-100% critrate. Mesmers don’t have these to nearly the same extent.

Survivability can be increased by spiking healrate with heal-on-crit traits on 100% critrate mesmers and/or using Knight instead of Berserker for the other pieces for which it is not critical that they be Assassin specced, but both cost dps. From a WvW standpoint Knight+Assassin will often work better than Zerk+Assassin, which will work better than Zerk only. Toughness from Knight scales up mesmer healing/mantra healing/crit food or rune healing, as the case may be.

Mesmers tend to reach full potential when used against crittable, reflectable targets, between long and short range. If intending to attack uncrittable, unreflectable targets entirely in melee range, they will lose out to thieves, warriors and engineers who are better specced for this purpose.

Its phantasm has good damage in grouped situations when people spam conditions on bosses. The chaos field + leap plus skill 4 itself can upkeep Chaos Armor for some time, which can be useful for keeping you alive. Paired with DE, you can pretty much solo any champion except the Krait witches.

Don’t expect the autoattack to be of any use though. Basically the idea behind Staff is to keep everything away at you until it eventually dies. Nor is it particularly fast or anything. You’re still going to be relying on mainhand Sword for killing anything that isn’t capable of oneshotting you.

I haven’t seen anything but nerfs to mesmers so far…

Except maybe Rune of the Traveler, even though that wasn’t mesmer specific. Before that things were even worse.

1. Cleave on daggers.
2. A projectile reflection skill. Necromancers are the only class in the game with zero reflects, though Warriors must trait in order to get personal reflects.

Nothing else is needed. It may be wanted, but not needed. It’s somewhat offensive that these two don’t exist yet, though.

Vayne.8563:

In fact if you compare the first two months of the two seasons, the stuff we have open world in Dry Top is more than we got in the entire first Season.

FTFY.

100 dusts for a pot, not 100 bricks. Nothing requires anywhere near that much.

I wish they’d make it tradeable. I’m always short of dusts.

But maybe that’s because I keep running my chars at max power on Toxic utilities, so yeah…

Jana.6831:

MegumiAzusa.2918:

This is the perfect example of why your thinking is flawed. You think everyone for themselves, instead of “for the guild”. If guilds were playing less like individuals with the same goal on the field but more like… actual guilds that support each other and share stuff… but oh no, I forgot, that would make a dent in your profit :O

Are you sure you mean me?
So I’m talking about what upgraded towers cost and you accuse me of thinking of profit?

Nope, doesn’t make sense to me either.

Dungeons: Nothing at all. In the past I could convert Dungeon tokens to equipment, but they are now obsolete, so I just have the tokens sitting there in my inventory.

- Guaranteed gold drops. Guaranteed champion chests. Aside from that, tokens to unlock dungeon armor/weapon skins. Haven’t had much more than that. Maybe 0.8-0.9 rares per run, nearly no exotics.

World Events: Nothing at all.

- If this refers to world bosses, guaranteed rare, dragonite and usually about 2 additional rares. Few to no exotics.

Tequatl: 30 minutes waiting AFK for a 12 minutes battle to get nothing at all. That’s if I can join…

Join 45 minutes beforehand. TTS is your best bet, but other guilds are also capable of doing it. Just make sure it’s 45 minutes beforehand. The later you join the map the less likely you are of being on a barely competent world. I’ve had a single rare waterbreather and a single exotic mini. And a few rares from gold dragon chests. One ascended rabid weapon for my necromancer.

Wurm: Couldn’t even join an organised group yet.

- TTS is pretty much your only bet here. Again, 45 minutes beforehand. I JUST got an ascended regurgitated armor chest today. Other than that usually rares.

Fractals: Got 1 Ascended weapon box once, no fractal skins. Not even before the fractal update.

- One ascended celestial weapon, one fractal dagger (before nerf), a couple of rings, some infused, some not. That’s about it.

PvP: When I was playing PvP, it didn’t even have rewards!!!

- It still doesn’t really have much by the way of rewards really.

WvW: Nothing at all.

The occasional rare and a crapload of worthless greens. Not enough to cover my blueprint costs or tag costs.

Living Story: Nothing at all.

Only the new backpieces.

Personal Story: Nothing at all.
End of Personal Story: One skin worth 4 gold in the TP.

- That same Pact Victory Token, one BL ticket I used to buy and sell a valentine sword.

Map Completion with 3 characters: Worst reward ever for the time dedicated to do so…

- About 120 gold worth in completion chests in runes, lemongrass, ancient wood, linen scraps etc.

No precursors ever. I know of people that had precursor drops, and of a girl who got two precursors from the forge within 5 minutes, but absolutely nothing like that for me.

The only problem you’ll have is the Champion Overgrown Grub in EBG, because… wat.

Other than that, you should almost always have someone willing to help with all other traits.

If it’s not 175/175, not ‘every’ is found. Common misses include the eastern cave in Harathi Hinterlands, the thief cave west of the Queensdale waterfall and the northwestern most skritt city in Harathi Hinterlands. Generally if an area of the map appears pixellated it isn’t explored yet.

Some areas don’t include any PoIs, waypoints or vistas.

Skullduggery.2054:

Considering a traited Combustive Shot costs only 2 Bars instead of 3 and provides a condition cleanse every 7 Seconds, noone can deny Torches are a Joke.

FTFY.

That moment when OP is deleted leaving confusing remains

Comes with some aggro abilities (occasionally a bad thing), some additional damage independent of the user’s stats and some conditions/control skills that you don’t have complete control over.

Rangers’ mechanic can’t be compared to warriors’ mechanic, they don’t function anywhere near the same way. The closest analogue to ranger pets are mesmer clones, and the closest analogue to burst skills on warriors is guardians’ virtues – provides some benefit when skills are not used, more benefit when the skills are used but removes passive effect.

Inb4 person with 40x lvl 80s posts. Classes sometimes don’t play identically on different races after all – a certain charr skill is required for my current warrior build. ;-)

Rangers can cleanse condi AoE, warriors’ support tend to be more structured around boons rather than condition removal. Guardians don’t use regen as much as they use an entirely different class mechanic.

If doing heal support guards are still overall best after traiting for symbols, but their personal survivability is somewhat lower. But heal support has nearly no place in PvE anyway, it’s more of a zerg WvW thing.

I like how all the levels are blacked out.

Sanctuary is a bit underpowered in PvE purposes though. But that’s far more to do with surviving being too easy in PvE.

Trait lines are unavailable until level 30.

Cleansing Fire is powerful for its ability to proc Might when Blasted, set mobs on fire and also remove all conditions. Other than this one exception, I’d rather you experiment and fill the slots with what works with your playstyle rather than trying to theorycraft off the bat.

In translation: No.

The exploration is good, but nearly 100% of it was in place at launch with the singular exception of Dry Top.

As if abusing tags for vanity isn’t enough, adding a title to the mix, ugh.

Tybalt > Canach > Taimi > Sharky Longears and Thunderrrrrnation!

Schoolgirl human character with tentacle backpiece and pink commander tag

It’s just serving to make the most viable Ranger spec (condition frostspotter) even more viable. Power specs has some role in WvW, but Rangers running power specs in PvE will not stop being inferior to other classes (except necros, the partner in pain) running the same gear specs. Condition builds in general are still meta for pvp content however. The amount by which the power multiplier was removed from rangers to ‘compensate for the pet dps’ is still too high for GS/LB to hold any ground against any other class in direct setups.

Corrupted by what? It’s a perfectly pure interest. For Science!

The blocker has nothing to do with how much you message, and everything to do with how repetitive your messages are. Add details, etc, coordinate 2 simultaneous zergs in chat. You won’t be suppressed if you do that.

I just coordinated a T5 dry top. Of course, Anet simply HAD to disconnect me from the client after I made a T5 for others. Such payback.

Stormy Dragon.9210:

Manasa Devi.7958:

It amazes me how many people don’t seem to understand the difference between theft and confiscation.

The only difference between theft and confiscation is that the people confiscating things claim there is a difference.

The difference lies in who has more power.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2df20y/drp2_dry_top_live_map_and_timer_updated_100/

Copy and paste to guide your map.

Adamantium.3682:

If you can only access it from Challenger Cliffs, I think that is fair game.

I’d agree, except the coin can only be accessed from the earlier area. You can’t drop to it from Challenger Cliffs or anything, because the coin is hidden under the ledge.

Expecting people’s actions to follow their words is close to, if not a form of, delusion.

I want a school uniform for my character now…

Vikkela.7261:

I really recommend you to actually level up the hard way in PvE, learning your class mechanics. Following a train hitting autoattack will end up in you becoming a level 80 with a class you don’t know how to play

This unfortunately happens far more often than one might hope.

Reminds me of the Last Week Tonight episode on payday loans…

Except Stonemist Castle. You can imagine trying to do map completion on Eredon Terrace.

Buy greens for levelling as you recoup much of the cost in mats after breaking them – they’re soulbound on use. Upgrade gear every time the green has a tier, but avoid crafting level tiers as those often cost 10x of green items not made by players.

Once you reach 68+, buy yellows as you can recoup the costs by breaking into ectoplasm.

Once you reach 80, you should probably get dungeon armors (earn them from tokens you get from completing dungeons in full lvl 80 yellow armor, then break the yellow armor). This unlocks both the skin for later use, and can also supply you dark matters if you eventually break them down for Ascended replacements. I don’t advocate using non-dungeon exotic armors, rares at level 67 or below, or buying blues at any point in your levelling process (though early on, blue lvl 6 weapon drops can be useful to tide over until hitting the first masterwork tier at lvl 14).

This gives reasonable efficiency while the sum of all your gear-related to costs is about… 40 silver all the way from lvl 1 to 80. Which is partially recouped in Luck essences anyway.

Alaia Skyhawk.5064:

As a fellow Worldboss Commander for the same community as Noobix, I have to say I agree with the 300g per colour being a ridiculous gold sink. I understand the price being hiked for the tags being accountbound, but the multi-colour functionality should come as one package, and not as separate unlocks for 300g EACH.

I echo this sentiment, though going between 500g and 1500g seems more like haggling prices than the general principle behind it.

Actually, account binding isn’t even necessary. It’s helpful, but not necessary. I’d rather have the current system as it is in its soulbound form, and simply have colours added to its current state. If a higher price must be in line because of account binding, so be it, but charging a price per colour is ridiculous.

If this option were to be offered with minimal problems from people who already made multiple tags, the solution is simply to remove all tags from all players who have them now and refund the gold cost and BoH cost in the mail. Then add two forms of Commander’s Compendium – one for a single character, and one account-wide unlock. Maybe the account unlock can cost 500g or something.

Even though I’m an altoholic not all commanders are. At the moment Anet’s action is forcing players to pay 900-1200g for the full suite of abilities to be available to any character, but players who main only one character very successfully are paying the same insane cost as those who command across multiple characters. That’s not fair to them at all.

WvW players are ok, some can actually turn a profit off it. WvW commanders are an entirely different story, every single defended tower takes at least 40 silver to bring down, and gives what… 3 silver to the commander?

And this change doesn’t hit the players, but the commanders.

RuneScape introduced Pay to Win with the Squeal. ArenaNet isn’t perfect and you’ll hear me complain about them elsewhere (esp. slow bugfixing on very simple bugs I can fix for them for free), but they’re not in the same order of magnitude of mismanagement.

I was one of the elite group of players who left RuneScape en-masse during that debacle. By this, I mean a player that had 99 for every single skill. There was about 250-325 of us who left together, we were in partial communication. The update to erase free players from the high scores entirely after that was motivated in part by the majority of maxed players who all terminated RuneScape subscriptions – it doesn’t look nice for your game if your leaderboard is filled with people who had already quit.

More on topic confusion works differently between players and PvE, as well as Warrior skill 5, among others. There are precedents for setting things differently between the PvE and any form of PvP mode, which proves there is no technical limitation – and thus, the act of trying to balance three entire gamemodes on a single situation seems to indicate apathy towards proper optimisation.

As an example, control is hideously overpowered in PvP applications and hideously useless in PvE. Conditions are hideously overpowered in PvP and hideously useless in PvE except fringe cases. Ranged weapons are ok in PvP applications and hideously useless in PvE. Mobility skills are ok in PvP applications and hideously useless in PvE. I’m sure you can think of many more examples.

I’ll just drop in to say that condi builds for rangers always outdamage power builds against any target with 2600 armor and above. Ranger multipliers for power have been cut in order to account for the pet’s damage but pet dps is not affected by the ranger’s stats in any ‘multiplier’ sort of way. The max damage available is through running an Axe/Dagger-Shortbow condi build with Fire Spirit at 4600+dps useable at any range up to 900, a zerker longbow type build at 4200 dps or sword type build at 4500 dps is not only lower in absolute damage, but range as well in both cases the ranges you can use are very narrow. In addition to the very large difference in survivability. The condi build normally runs a cat to add direct damage which runs at full efficiency, since the damage is independent of the ranger’s spec. Frost spirit and spotter, together with Opening Strike also supports power builds in the party, so it’s not correct that it’s necessarily selfish.

Necros are in an even worse situation as anyone who has even touched a necro knows there is no cleave, but there is AoE – but very importantly, the AoEs are more effective as condition appliers than for their initial detonation’s direct damage. Berserker necro builds based on F1 skill 1 are horrendously bad relative to a Rabid spec where the AoE can actually be used on mobs. The statement that condis don’t synergise well with teams is likely due to, and is true for, Necros. Necros are also the only class in the game with zero projectile reflection/nullification abilities, the rest have at least personal projectile null even if they don’t have AoE null. Their place in design was a condition tank, drawing conditions off everyone else so they could run at max efficiency. They pull all the Weakness, Blinds, and such. The problem with them in PvE is that no boss has seriously enough conditions damaging enough for necros to ever be needed. Even Volkov’s bleed can be easily nulled by any form of light field whirl, any null field or even a ranger water field.

I consider these two classes as enforced condition classes, you can ‘play how you want’, but the alternatives are seriously inferior. In nearly all other classes’ case, direct damage tends to outperform condition damage unless the target’s toughness is ridiculously high. However, enforced condition classes cannot be effective if more than one exists in a party. If there is more than one necro/ranger in a party, they’ll overwrite each other if they use condi, and they’re far inferior to warriors, thieves, elementalists, guardians or engineers if they’re using a direct mode. The direct damage side of the Ranger camp has not acknowledged this for more than a year and they continue to deny the maths, but it doesn’t change the reality behind it. I’d go so far as to say that if in your party Rangers+Necromancers > 1, your run will be slower by definition than any other possible combination of classes. And if Rangers + Necromancers = 1, then for your run to not be noticeably inferior, the 1 must be running conditions. This is pretty much the reason why Necros and Rangers have almost died out in any dungeon scenario, where Rangers have a slight advantage over Necros that tends to be nullified by low average pug ranger skill.

Mesmers are complicated issues as they run on crit and stacking power instead of precision leads to dps losses. They’re also bad on any uncrittable target, and not maximising crit properly on a mesmer tends to yield an inferior warrior.

I could get behind this, but I wouldn’t be as behind as the amount of distance lost on thief shortbow 5.

Not sure if Warrior or Necromancer.

Mesmer here.

[Illusionary Disenchanter].

I don’t need another buff on Sword. I need buffs on Torch and Sceptre AA. Some reason to ever use those weapons.

RyuDragnier.9476:

Who the hell stands in the obvious blind field and tries to attack when you can easily hit the thief from outside of the field with melee weapons. Every class has a widely used melee weapon that can easily hit the thief in the field, so if they’re standing in the field they ARE the weakest link.

A thief can’t even hide from melee cleave weapons in an SR field, let alone that pathetic Black Powder. Thieves must dodge within their SR to survive if ever activating it against any target that remotely knows the meaning of Cleave.

I’ve never seen a thief in WvW camp a blind field. If they did, they wouldn’t be thieves, they’d be loot bags.

Kibazuka.1390:

There is zero need for commander tags in tequatl, wurm or any sort of pve instance

Tequatl tags are used to show turrets where to drop cleanses/might and the zerg where double damage melee spots are. The AoE circles in the water are otherwise very hard to see in the middle of particle effects 3600 units away under water, and they have no idea where to drop buffs on in a horde of cyan names.

Triple wurm tags are used in phase 1 for dd to little effect, but are absolutely critical for phase 2 to show players where to stand so the decap wurmhead doesn’t charge off to Cuba.

Dry Top tags are used to show where the zergs should be for main events, while smaller parties/soloists handle fringe events like Serene.

If you have no knowledge of commanding, don’t speak as if you do.

I’m split between frustration on the wasted 100G on my second tag and consolation that I can now run T6 Dry Top on my other alts.

But definitely no question that paying more money per colour is ridiculous.

The current changes are shaping towards rewarding selfish use of tags (showing off for instance, it’s still cheaper to get all colours than a legendary and definitely more visible, especially for asura), while punishing towards the people who should actually be using tags – ie, the people actually spending effort coordinating others. Generally, for zero reward. No Dry Top zerg or WvW zerg has ever given me even a single copper.

While we’re on this topic, ArenaNet, make sure you increase maximum Squad size to 160-200. With the inflow of tagspam by people who will inevitably abuse the feature as a vanity accessory, I’m going to want a way for players who want to coordinate under me to eliminate all other tags on the map, and the Squad feature is the only way to do so. 30 people is Not Enough for running Tequatl or even a single wurmhead, even though it is still tolerable for WvW. I cannot stress this enough. Otherwise with your update you’ll end up making the original problem even worse – namely the problem of people not knowing which tag to follow.

It’s one of the first good fights I’ve had in the story, I’m happy with it.

Liadri in comparison was somewhat gimmicky. This though is legit, even if it could still be made slightly harder. XD

Maybe that’s a mechanic more relevant to party level fights. When doing this alone getting trapped is death, so there’s no need to ever care about it as you should never ever get trapped by the pods – which means you can never be able to damage it anyway.

But thanks for mentioning that bit though. Might be useful to someone who isn’t doing this fight alone.

First and foremost, you should be aware that unlike the original fight, in the Mote Master fight the dragon regenerates health. Berserker’s gear is recommended, but if you don’t have that, Soldier’s isn’t far behind. Condition builds are very unsuitable for the fight as the dragon goes entirely invulnerable within less than 10 seconds – you’ll never have enough time to build up to your max dps point. Bomb/grenade engis are easymode for this particular fight.

Reason for this is that while you cannot crit the dragonhead, you can crit the roots, and you’ll need to clear roots as fast as possible in order to get the dragon attackable before it reaches the next HP phase.

Make sure you have a ranged weapon. Also, as far as possible make sure you have access to Blind. This becomes critical if a vine gets so close you must melee it.

It has 4 HP phases – 100%, 75%, 50% and 25%. You must dps it down to the phase boundary (the multiples of 25) to clear a phase, otherwise the phase repeats until you get to the boundary. Also, you’re only allowed one grace boundary.

In other words:

Phase 1: 100-HP-75: Can DPS to 75.
Phase 2: 100-HP-50: Can DPS to 50.
Phase 3: 75-HP-25: Can DPS to 25.
Phase 4: 50-HP-0: Can DPS to 0.

If the upper boundary is crossed a phase is reset – for instance if in phase 3 you take so long to hit the dragon that it recovers back to 76% HP, you’re reset to phase 2.

At the beginning of phase 3 (first time only) a wolf is spawned. At the beginning of phase 4 (first time only) a thrasher is spawned. This may be somewhat different in parties – I cleared it solo, so someone else will have to fill you in on the spawn characteristics in a party. If soloing, save any summoning elites (hounds of balthazar, thieves’ guild, warband etc) for phase 4 as the thrasher can hit ridiculously hard with its vines-from-ground attack, and there is no AoE circle on the ground to warn you of this.

To make things easier stand at a spot not easily accessible to vine ranged attacks, unlikely to allow a vine to melee range and which is outside the dragon’s AoE patterns. The attached screenshot depicts the spot I used.

A Immobilise debuff will appear on you 3 seconds before you’re stuck in a trap. Dodge to get rid of this debuff. This is pretty much the only thing that can kill you in the fight if you’re not sleeping on the job.

Finally, when the entire ground glows pink then white, a stomp is underway. For the achievement, jump over all of these stomps. On my ping, it requires waiting for 3-3.5 seconds from when the colour first appears before jumping. If you’re located closer to the US server, chances are you may need to wait for 4 seconds. You only need to do this 3-4 times if the other parts are handled well.

Note that you’ll want to range the vines at long range to give yourself max time to react to its attacks – and to stay out of range of the dragon’s AoEs. If you have to fight in melee range, drop a blind field on the vine and burst it down before the blind can wear off. I also had to range the dragonhead since melee didn’t work reliably, but if you can get a melee spot reliably every time, that will be better.

Range the tallest vine first. That’s the only one capable of using ranged attacks. The other two are pushovers if they’re not in melee range.

It is entirely possible to get all three achievements solo in one run. If not prioritise Mote Master, and get the other 2 in a later non-challenge run to make things easier on yourself, if you didn’t unlock them together.

This should make it easier for you to get the achievements, if you’re still stuck.

If the thread helps you bump it so it doesn’t get lost somewhere in page 9.

I seem to be getting more than usual. Such is pRNG.