Guild Wars 2

Many months ago our small, free-for-all & relax guild was level 8. When our leader and I first discovered the recipes and skins for the guild armor and weapons. I only wanted the armorer, he wanted the Tenebrous Weapons as well. It took us many months, thousands of gold and ridiculous ammounts of materials. Not to mention the stuip flax grind. The guild has changed a lot, concept wise and the guildhall became a nice place – although only about 5 % of our members really visit it. We like it and we enjoy the hall with all the perks we unlocked. Few weeks ago we finally unlocked the weapon-recipes.

The only thing which prevents me and many others in our guild from using the vendor are the crystalline ores. Because we do not farm DS. The only person who farms DS is our leader. And a few people who actually do not care about the guild armor/wepons.
Well I guess it could be worse. They could lock every recipe behind another 10k flax I guess?

But the crystalline ores ruined the armors and weapons for me. I’m so frustrated, I don’t want them anymore! Few weeks ago I wanted to change part of my armor/weapon-stats. The recipes for the inscriptions also consumed the crystalline ore. Took me an entire week to collect all the ore – and no will not farm that map because ANet wants me to. I also do not PvP although ANet wants me to. ANet wants me to play PvP and join the tournaments, as they put so much money in there. I’m not interested in PvP and I’m not interested in DS.

Well. Thats it. After all the work we’ve put in, no skins. It was a huge disappointment. Nearly as huge as the one after we completed Tier 1 of the PvP arena. But on the other hand it is a common theme in the guildhall.

Instead I started to decorate the guildhall now. Ofcourse the good decorations are once again locked behind a huge list of materials, lots of flax ofcourse, and tons of other expensive stuff. We have one scribe. It is quite impressive how much a scribe with level 300 can NOT craft. Still the guildhall is a nice place now. I enjoy what I have and try not to be sad about what is locked away.

Congratulations on reaching Chef 400!

Back in the old days we mostly used chef to powerlevel our characters cheap and fast. You were able to make ~ 10 levelups and the materials are still the cheapest of all crafting professions. So you may assume that a chef 400 is not that special.

Yet it is not a useless profession at all. If you check the tp for the expensive food, you may come across a few you want to craft yourselves. Some of them are very complex recipes, with dozens of branches in the crafting-tree. You can also craft feast-items. Those are foods you can drop down in the field and whoever comes across and touches them gets the food-effect (like eating the original item). Feasts do not sell bad either. The major issue of gaining profit out of a crafting profession, no matter which, are the ingredients/materials. However to craft feasts, you need to create recipes with the mystic forge, a bunch of the original food and some other ingredients (check the link).
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Feast_

Another way to get some money out of the crafters, the time-gated crafts. The original crafting professions (armor/weapon) have a few of those, the chef has at least one. Those are items which can only be crafted once per character per day. Out of this problem, there is no unlimited supply, which results in better prices.

[As the guy above me insists in keeping this a secret. I removed the link.]

Even if you buy all the materials straight out of the TP, you get a good pay off, just for the crafting job only.

At last I want to mention the personal benefits of having a chef at 400. By now we have a huge collection of recipes which are account bound and the foods resulting are account-bound as well. Some are used for guildhall expansion, while others just offer good buffs. Some of the foods offer better buffs than you can buy on TP. But as they are account bound, personal use only.

I’ve read the answers, especially yours, again and again. The more I think about it, the more I beleive it was coincidence only. I gonna stop my attempts and focus on normal gameplay again.

Thanks for the map. the thread can be closed.

Thank you very much, you helped me a lot. Both of you ^^

Hello,

curious about where the LS3 might go on, I decided to have a look on the new activity. Surprisingly it was a closed map without any connection to central tyria, so I placed a personal marker.

I did that method several times in the past. The wintersday last year or two years ago revealed something east of brisbane wildlands (snowball mayhem instance). Or the SAB which was surprisingly also located at the magus falls. The last SAB location I checked was somewhere arround the bay of janthir. So I thought the new activity would also be arround that location. … Not exactly.

Here is a screenshot of where the star indicates the activities location and I have no clue what is there.

http://imgur.com/a/yQmB5

When I asked a friend about that area, he mentioned Marhan’s Grotto. So I searched the article in the GW wiki, but it is a bit short. Any ideas?

Had the same issue with a guildmember a few weeks ago. He insisted in having everything checked over and over, so I decided to start from scratch with him once again. I cannot do guildmissions with a guy who cannot read guildchat :S. When we went through the procedure, we realized he forgot the important checkbox and had no clue what representation was ^^.

Back to topic/op. Two steps:

Bottom line, left to the type-in-box is the name of the chat [guild], [say], [map], etc. Just click there (left mouse button) and a list appears. The top 6 entries are of guild. /guild for the one you are currently representing. /g1 – /g5 for all the guilds you may have joined, to see and write in guildchat.

Also, when people are at the chat-window, go to any of the tabs you want to read the guildchat. Left of the name is an arrow down. Click on that arrow, check the box at Guild (2nd from top). When checked, use the arrow to the right, next to the word Guild and check all the guilds you want to read the guildchat in that tab.

After doing both steps, the problem should be solved.

Ameepa.6793:

Can you keep this kind of efficiency up normally or did it all happen to focus just into those two hours? I mean.. that’s extremely impressive!

Exactly my thoughts. 600 g I earn in months.

What I lost? About 5 minutes of walking in circles while talking in guild-chat. Many of us are long enough here to know that any kind of update comes with a bug-fix just a few hours later. That bugfix comes with another quick bugfix, just a few minutes later. I did not predict the rollback though. But I’ve made it a personal habit, not to start anything important the same night of an update. Call me a coward if you want.

I do agree with those who say the rollback was the best solution to the problem. Although I did not expect ANet to have the guts to do it. Good job!

EDIT: Just went through my inventory/banks to realize I’ve lost my matilds weapon crate from fractals. When the announcement about the new build came, we were at the boss of the snowblind fractal. Well. You win some, you lose some. Life goes on ^^.

Had a small disconnect, and now I also cannot go any further than login screen of the game. Login at the forums nearly took 3 minutes, re-opening this thread more than 5 minutes.

banana principle, I’ll try again in a few hours.

Hello,

Some of you may know that our chosen orders still have effects across tyria. We can unlock special dialogue with our orders representatives or access certain hidden areas which are not reachable if you belong to the wrong order. If you read this for the first time, enjoy ^^.

So I had the idea of using this system with our class-decisions. The idea was the ability to interact with certain objects/npcs which are limited for certain classes only. Here are a few examples:

Engineer – Ability to talk to any kind of consoles/switches, which allow to unlock secret passages or spawn hidden treasures behind doors.

Ranger – Ability to talk to certain plants and trees which then give buffs to whoever touches them. Or creating a heal/cleanse field for a few minutes. For example in a boss room.

Revenant – Ability to use rifts in certain locations to open shortcuts, secret passages or teleport mobs/bosses out of a room.

Warrior – Ability to talk to torches and bonfires to apply boons on the other people which last ~ 5 minutes and increase power/crit-chance.

Guardian – Ability to talk to toches and bonfires to apply boons on the other people which also last ~ 5 minutes and increase defenses/healing.

Elementalist – Ability to talk to rock-formations to build additional platforms.

Thief – Ability to unlock decoration boxes for extra loot and unlocking secret switches in shadows.

Mesmer – Ability to let the party pass through glass/mirror walls for shortcuts or secret rooms.

Necromancer – Ability to talk to bones, skulls and candles which causes a dark ritual and a buff on the necromancer. Every mob/boss he comes across while having that buff gets a permanent debuff.

Something like that could make the game more variable and allow more class variety in certain game elements – maybe even raids. This would mean tons of extra work for the devs, so I’m aware that this thread may vanish from the front-page within a few minutes. But if we all hide our ideas, there is no progression at all. Maybe I annoy a person with this and he/she creates an even better suggestion. Thanks for reading.

Some kind of buff like the guardian/ranger/warrior/necromancer, which applies to everyone arround while in combat and gives a fixed bonus on anything. Maybe something like reducing skill-cooldown by 10% or increasing boon-duration by 20%. Something none of the other classes can provide, but makes the enginner worth to have in party (for raids).

A combo (field + bf) that grants area quickness, with stackable duration. I was hoping to see that when the hammer was introduced. Instead we have got another swiftness-source.

A gyro which we can place in mid air and serves as a platform for 20 seconds, 40 seconds cooldown. When overcharging, the gyro explodes and the person standing on it gets launched 10m up.

A skill like the mass stealth detection from the stealth gyro, which either locks all mobs to autoattack only in PvE or blocks weaponswap in PvP for a few seconds. Could be an elite skill, gizmo maybe.

Another combo (field + bf) that generates fury.

Elexir S tossable with 5 target limit.

Big problem with 2nd account: the account bound items. The big reasons I mostly hear are: you can store more items, gather twice the laurels, twice timegated crafts, gather more karma, more achievements and more gathering. All but the first and the last one however are account-bound issues, which means you cannot share these with your main account. There are ways to convert acc bound currency and time-gated crafts into tradeable stuff – i dont argue with that. Not makes much sense to me though ^^.

Honestly I have huge storage problems myself. I do neither farm nor play the market, yet I have a huge collection of “useless” stuff. Plus I feel the need to keep everything sorted and organized. This is how I deal with it:

- long time ago I made a bank guild (as many other veterans out there) with all three sections activated. One I use for runes/sigils/gemstones. One I use for crafting materials, mostly T5/T6 and festival as well as infusions. The third section serves as event-storage, blueprints, food, collector stuff with questionable worth to say the least XD. As it is a guild, all my characters have equal/fast access to it. Sadly I can only store tradeable stuff there.
- Ofcourse I use the regular bank (3 sections) for most account-bound stuff, which is mostly of questionable worth as well. I store my luck there until I fuse it, my insignias/inscriptions, piles of sand, map chest keys, … the usual stuff.
- My mules are two of my characters now. Both I leveled long ago but abandoned as I do not play them at the moment. My elementalist carries all boosters, gear drops with selectable stats (account bound on aquire). The ranger I use for account-bound material stacks which cannot be used with mawdrey II, princess, herta, star of grattitude (haven’t got the 4th one yet ^^).

I mostly main my engineer and have a mesmer, a thief and a guardian I want to develop further. Those I do not use as mules ofc. Although my engineer is pretty occupied with “trash”. When I leave town, he has 40-60/120 slots used already.

This is a thing that comes across whenever I travel central tyria. The first thing I see is a person linking a waypoint and giving a direction where to go, or a person asking for events. Normal stuff.

But after a few minutes at least one person begins to complain that either events are over when he/she arrives at the location or people just solo them for no apparent reason. Already had countless of discussion about this topic and I’m quite sure we had tons of topics on this board as well.

This morning however, I had a funny idea. As the events already scale the mob-numbers/strength (normal/elite/veteran/champion), why not scale the loot as well? Give an extra % of karma, gold and exp for every person who participates in the event. And maybe at every +5 or +10 players add an additonal loot bag.

Not what I was looking for, but interesting anyway. From my understanding, it works like this …

Whenever a new map is created, the megaserver-system tries to fill it up with as many people as possible. Usually it takes the ones who enter that map first. After some time it checks out the other maps of the same area. If there is a map which is not full but a lot older than the new created, the system tries to move the people to that new map. So the megaserver does move you from an active (old) map to an underpopulated (new) map on purpose. For the system itself, the decision is logical, because new > old. For us it looks a bit weird. If machines could think we would not be here, eh? ^^

What I’d love to have, but will never come in this game, is a table i can open, which shows me all open instances of my map, the pouplation and an option to either queue or instantly move to those maps. This would be awesome.

Regular WASD for movement and ^1234567890. Toggle between walking and running I changed to “.” and “n” for stowing weapons, because I use them a lot.

In addition I use a madcatz RAT 5 – technically a shooter mouse. The changeable weights and the size adjustments improve handling a lot. I have ONLY three additional keys at my thumb, which I use for “^” weaponchange, F1 toolbelt healskill (engineer) and elite skill. After they added the 11th skillbutton, I’ve put that on my mousewheel. Works fine. The thumb-wheel I set up for dodging, but as I do not play shooters, I usually hit it by accident which causes me to die in 100% of all cases >_>. I gonna deactivate it again.

I like that mouse more than those extreme MMO designed mice with hundrets of additional buttons for the thumb. I have kinda big hands, so I’m fine with my three additional buttons only ^^.

I really enjoy this patch. Especially:

- salvage-kits change, because it saves so much time and clicking
- new emotes (please more in the future)
- LS3 storyline. I already had hours of dicsuission about the lore. Although I never played GW1, I do a lot of research about it to understand what happens in the LS3. It feels like a really good book which you cannot stop reading. Awesome job, looking forward to the next episodes.
- LS3 achievements so far. It is only one map and only one chapter atm, but I enjoy the difficulty. During LS2, especially after the first episode, I totally lost interest in the achievements. They were too grindy for me, and some felt so hard or used strange mechanics, or required you to do a mission in 3x the regular time … etc. – that might be challenging at some point, but I would not call it a fun experience. The LS3 achievements however are easy to do, without too much grinding or superior gameplay required. Maybe too easy for the hardcore players, but I like them this way more.
- the 11th skill. I added it to my mouse-wheel, where it works perfect. When I completed the LS3 in Bloodstone fen, there was one color I could not see for an hour -
red. A little too much for my taste, but the mechanics with the new skill are awesome.

+ After completing the new mastery, I re-visited the bandit events in Tyria with a couple of friends again. We like the challenge with the executioners and enjoyed the fights since they were added. Once one of my team-mates was down, I came to res and this deadly aoe with the sword from the sky appeared. Out of the sudden, my 11th skill flashed up. I pressed it and it was one of the most epic moments I ever had in this game. My character literally raised his right arm to the sky, caught the blade single-handed, this way he blocked the lethal attack at once. Then I had a sword in my hands, which I could throw at any enemy I wanted. After I told my friends, they did not beleive me at first. After they saw it as well, there was nothing to hold us. We literally ran into every aoe we found, used the skill and fought the boss mostly with his own blades. That aoe is evil, it makes these bosses a real challenge imho. And now we have the option to block it in a way which is just EPIC. We did a lof of bandit fights after that, especially with executioners. Thank you very very much for this new function and please, add more of these in the future ^^.

- Fractals. Although I’m not a fractal farmer, the changes, especially with the infusion changed a lot and made things so much easier.
…

I could add more and more. The only issue which was not that good, were the buged guild-missions. But as this happens after every bigger update, we were kinda warned from the past and predicted that issue. It was challenging at one point, but not much of a dissappointment. To be honest, the fact that we had the odds against us, motivated our members and we managed to do a guildpuzzle with the group, which we thought was impossible with our guild. So … thanks for the bugged guildmissions ^^.

I’m also developing a new stat-configuration and experimenting with different setups. The one I use now, completely relies on soldier stats, which is very heavy but damage is a bit low. Not as low as with my old cleric setup, but I think I can tickle out a little more without sacrificing too much of my tank-status.

Quite curious about the commander-stats, I did a little test run with boon-duration extensions, to see what would make sense and what not. The results were quite easy:

+ 10% boonduration grants +1 permanent Mightstack (if juggernaut and mass momentum combined). Technically it is +20 % = 2 Mightstacks. If you go for + 10% you get jumping numbers, but the average is +1 stack.

Keeping in mind that 15 Concentration equals +1 % Boonduration and the result from above, only setups with 150, 300, 450 … Concentration really make sense (imho).

Next I experimented with setups, to create 150 and 300 Concentration only, with as less point lost as possible. If I replace only the weapons and my armor, except the boots with commander stats, I end up at 303 Concentration. That would be only 3 stat points wasted.

Going on full commander stats means a score of 633 Concentration, 40% Boonduration and +2 … which help not much, if I do not have other boon-duration sources. So to get the best result, I would pick everything but the backpiece. This solution grants you the 40% Boonduration, and only a loss of 6 wasted points.

For me it is the first setup with only +20%, as I use my special food which gives me another 20% ^^. That will be +4 might-stacks, + 30% crit rate and still more than plenty of HP and toughness. And about 1/5 of the time I have 2 stability stacks instead of one. That is not much, but better than nothing.

Honestly I think the secret lies within stat combinations, not full sets of one type.

Note: All tests done with ascended gear.
Note 2: If you stick to the flamethrower, I would suggest fire arms 3/3/1. This will increase you crit rate with the kit by 10% and grants you more fury over time = more crits ^^.

Ah yes, those giant batallions of gather-characters. Therefore it is useful indeed. Fine for me.

Bug Fixes
The Bloodstone Fen Portal Scroll can now only be used by level-80 characters.

Snowblind Fractal:
…

With the Bloodstone Fen you gave us a map with a static +30% experience boost (optional). You gave us a new game-mechanic which allows us to collect currency and experience simply by touching bubbles while gliding through the air. Then you added an item which allowed us to teleport every character we want to the map. However the map itself is locked behind two very easy story missions, which everyone at level 80 can access without any trouble. And to obtain the portalscroll we have to set foot on the map at least once anyway, because the vendor is there.

Now with the above quotet patch-note I’m a little confused. So would you mind explaining: Why did you add the item to the game, if you limit its use to characters who can travel there via waypoints anyway?

The map is not even instanced, as if we leave it, we do not return to where we came from.

In the last tarir assault I participated, I was the only scrapper in the squad. That is sad indeed.

I get your point, you want to have top DPS – especially Xyonon. But what is an engineer? We are not supposed to be a high damage class. We don’t have swords or axes, we only have ranged weapons and shield and, thanks to the scrapper, a hammer. GW2 promised us we could play every playstyle with every class. That works, but only to a certain point for every class.

Think about the following tasks, how far can you go before you realize it is impossible?
- Create a warrior which heals as good as a guardian or a druid.
- Create a thief which tanks as good as a guardian.
- Create a druid that does the same damage as a tempest.
- Create a necromancer who deals same damage as a warrior, without using conditions.
- Create a warrior which deals superior damage by using conditions only.
…
Most of these are ridiculous. If you are crazy enough to try it, you realize it is impossible after some time. But the engineer. The class which was not designed or ever expected to be a good DPS? The engineer should deal massive damage and be superior among other damage dealing classes? seriously?

I play it on tank and support. Other classes can tank better and be better supports. We are most flexible and can play what we want in different situations. Other classes have to respec, change armor, skills. Sometimes they are not capable at all and have to log another character. With all that (for you totally useless) flexibility, we deal average damage, which is nice. Taking a look on the poor durid who would be glad to have our damage peaks. Play the engineer where he is good at. But don’t expect miracles.

It seems I play my engineer totally wrong. The update hardly scratched any of my skills. Some got buffed, few nerfed. For the moment my build works as it should. The heal-gyro is a bit annyoing now, as I can no longer activate it while resurrecting, which still is ok.

Honestly I was expecting to lose the permanent stability of the Juggernaut-Trait at least. Also I expected to get a massive increase for kit-cooldown/switching and some nerfs to the elexir gun as well. Did not happen.

I was hoping to see the infamous gyro-cooldown bug to get fixed, which did not happen either. So infinite mass stealth for another couple of weeks/months, which is nice. ANets priorities are a bit strange. A bug I reported 2 days before the patch got fixed in the patch, while the gyro-issue remains working for months.

In my old MMORPG, I played a gladiator. It was designed to be the best 1v1 class in the game with massive damage output. As I played on a freeshard and the community was mostly in mages, archers and daggers, we literally faced one nerf after another. Whenever we received a new skill, the programmer focused on making it as useless as possible. That was not nice. But I sticked to my gladiator, as I loved the playstyle. After every update/nerf, I looked what was not touched and adjusted my configuration again. When I finally stoped playing the game, my total attackspeed and power were literally cut in half, compared to the days I started the class. I would have played another year, but RL pushed me away.

Playing a class when it is strong is nice. But it is only the shiny side of the coin. I’ve selected the engineer mostly because it is NOT OP in this game. I’ve chosen it because it has a huge variety of skills and possibilities and because of its speed. Managing the recent nerfs might be tough, but not impossible.

Have to agree totally. Just finished reading through the patchnotes, which was a real pleasure. Few more seconds and I can have a look. So much cool stuff has been added.
Even without the LS3, this update is amazing.

THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

Seems to be correct, thank you. I deleted the original.

Two sides, slow and fast:

I started about thinking to create a full ascended set when the feature was introduced and I made plans for that the same time. My crafting professions were arround 0-200, except chef. Until about one year ago, my attempt to get ascended was just getting my first profession Artificer to 450 to craft ascended materials. I crafted them blindly, mostly to get rid of the stacks, only crafted the time-gated ones, but sadly none of the armor related ones. Most of my characters use leather armor, so yes ^^. About one year ago I’ve got my tailor to 450 and was finally able to start crafting stuff needed for the leatherworker 500 – which I did not have either, Huntsman and Leatherworker still arrround 200. By now I have my two professions on 500 and two armor parts missing. By the ammount of time I do farm and the money income I have, I should be able to aquire the last pieces arround xmas 2016. I do some fractals, but honestly I question myself everytime “So i do fractals to obtain agony-resistance, to do more fractals, to get more agony-resistance, to do more fractals, to get more agony-resistance …” and at that point, I realize I still craft my ascended gear way too fast. Also I still try to infuse my rings, but the materials required drop rarely. With the current speed, I may have them completed xmas 2017. Not that I really care about them anyway. Could we get some useful/affordable infusions some day? So activating those slots would make a little sense?

Few months ago we had an exotic player in our guild. We always have and had farmers in the guild, to make that clear. But this guy was a machine. He was camping the farming spots like SW, did dungeons/fractals in the freetime. I’ve never seen him doing something non-efficient in farming terms. Oh wait, I missjudge him. He did, he insulted people when a party did not go well, wiped or newbies were in – that attitude got him kicked from the guild. He was also a huge fan of meta-builds. The standard stereotype of a farmbot. In one of his brighter moments, he joined a discussion in the guildchat about crafting ascended gear and the costs and time needed. He asked me, what he would need to craft a certain staff with (ofc) Zojia stats ^^. I told him about crafting profession, and the expensive mats. He asked me if there is a fast way, and I told him that all the mats can be bought, but for a lot of gold. Then he asked me to list those and what profession he needs at 500. Half an hour later, he had that staff – starting with artificer 0. I beleive this guy still has no clue how the key-mats for ascended armor/weapons are crafted and what ingredients are needed, neither the time and effort it normally takes to obtain them.

I could have completed my ascended-set by now, if I did not participate in building up our guildhall. That thing surely is a huge material and gold-sink. But to be honest, the guildhall was still more rewarding (imho) and I do not regret any donation to it. Everytime I have a look at my shiny stats of the ascended armor, I do question myself why I even bother getting them at all ^^.

First of all, I want to list up the stuff you aim for, so I can refer to those points at every necessary situation:
- PvP
- Conditions (major damage output
- AoE
- survival
- speed

Now let us have a look at your setup.

1. Weapon
The traditional configuration for a condition-build focuses on at least one if not two pistols. As those are excellent condition sources. As you have selected the hammer for felxibility and cc-options, this decision is totally fine. But I want to mention, for this case you could also consider a rifle. It allows swift movement, good cc and (refering to your last post) offers an alternative source for bleeding, which you already want to use as main condition damage source. The vulnerability source might be lower, compared to the hammer. But you have the advantage of not being in melee range to your targets. In terms of swiftness and flexibility, that is a point you may consider wiseley. The farer you can be away from your target, the easier you can escape and the less aditional effort you have to put into your movement (e.g. sacrificing utility-skill-slots, or colldown of the heal-skill).

2. Healskill
I’m going to focus the elexir-issue in the discussion of your trait lines in detail. I have my reasons not to rely on them. If you do not want to follow the traditional 101 engineer, I would suggest you the medic gyro. As you already unlocked the scrapper trait-line, why not use the gyro. It supports you with a direct heal, HOT and a quite useful toolbelt skill which can be used for secondary healing (blast-combos) or for defensive issues. The AED is something I would only consider as an option in 1v1 battles against vicious lethal classes which have the ability to cut you down within a second.

3. Utility
For condition-damage, the selected kits are ok. The flamethrower has some specail abilities which I gonna focus at the discussion of the traits. Depending on your desired combat position, the granade kit (for ranged) and the bomb kit (for melee) could also be nice additions, which you could use instead of that elexir. Normal builds, with direct damage output tend to use those kits more frequently, but there is no basic rule which says you are not allowed to use them for conditons as well. It depends a lot on the situation and what type of enemy you face.

4. Elite
It is a good decision, AoE and condition wise, but you waste some potential with the traits. The toolbelt might look a little useless at first. It can be helpful to piolt weakened or fleeing enemies towards your team-members. Or forcing them to waste their endurance, before the next encounter. Although not very impressive, damage wise, the visuals do a great job in alarming your opponents.

-

Now let us have a look at your traits.

Firearms (minor)
Let’s check your arms again. You have a hammer (melee range). You have a flamethrower (the farest skills have a maximum range of 600). And you have an elexir gun (with a range set between 450 and 900 – which is not much). In the first tier of Firearms, you have the trait “High Caliber”. That increases your ciritical hit chance by 10% as long as you are within a range of 240 to your target. Especially if you want to keep the hammer, I would go for that trait. Also the flamethrower usually forces players to nearly melee their targets. Your earth-sigil on the hammer only activates when you land a critical hit. So while using the hammer or flamethrower, your cirt-chance should be as high as possible. Even if you consider changing your weapon to pistols or rifle, I would stick to that trait. None of the pistol conditions will be any better with a 50% increase of the duration. Two are only for deception purpose, which require a duration of 0.1 seconds to be effective – in terms of cc.

Firearms (major)
The Pinpoint Distribution is an excellent choice. The effect of No Scope is little and the cooldown of 10 seconds with a duration of only 4 seconds, makes this trait more of a gamble. And usually the odds are never in our favor. I would not count on that. With a cirt chance above 50%, granted by the minor trait suggestion, you have a good output of bleeding stacks, especially when using the flamethrower-autoattack or the elexir-gun Fumigate. The Skilled Marksman, even if you consider to use a rifle, should be skiped for direct dps builds.

Firearms (master)
On the first view, I would guess you plan to keep your opponent burning. Which is impossible if you only use the flamethrower autoattack. However even with the Incendiary Powder trait this is not possible. If you combine the toolbelt skill/buff as well, you get that effect. But only on a single target and only for a very short duration of time. The damage increase you get from Flame Jet on buring enemies is power based.

What is the problem with the Juggernaut? It is a common and nowadays even kinda stereotype engineer-trait. But the reason for this is simple, it works. Even if you do not use the Mass Momentum (Scrapper), you get a good ammount of might stacks and a permanent single stability stack. Especially the stability, although it is only one tiny little stack, makes a huge difference and you a hard to catch player, even if you have no speedboosts at all. Also might-stacks improve both direct and condition damage.

Alchemy
Before I start in this trait-line, I want to make this absolutely clear. I would not use this traitline, as long as I focus on kit using. I’ll show you what you can improve in that traitline, to get improved results. But at the end I will show you an alternative traitline as well.

Alchemy (minor)
The engineer is a moving class. A standing engineer is a dead engineer.
Protection Injection is your backup, for the bad case of you getting hit by a cc-skill. Some of those skills have long durations and your protection barely lasts three seconds. And we have no clue how much HP you have left, once you are disabled. We also have no clue how many enemies will go after you. Personally I would focus on avoiding that situation at all costs. Before the great nerf, engineers had permanent vigor. It was a pain and imbalanced, but we were nearly unreachable with nearly infinite endurance. A cc-skill you can dodge, you dont need additional defenses for. The trait in question is called Invigorating Speed, which applies vigor to you once you apply swiftness. Especially in combat, you can never have enough endurance.

Alchemy (major)
Refering to your Projection Injection decision, here is a real life-saver. Self-Regulating Defenses. It has a huge cooldown, but this thing really prevents you from death. It does not matter how much HP you have left, it does not matter how many enemies chase you. And it does not matter if you are disabled. Once you reach the limit, you are invincible and can run wherever you want. If you don’t want to waste your trait on an effect with 60 seconds cooldown, your Backpack Regenerator is the best choice.

Alchemy (master)
If you stick to the elexirs in your skill-setup, there is hardly anything to say against HGH.

Scrapper (minor)
Recovery Matrix is a good choice.

Scrapper (major)
Mass Momentum is designed for direct damage output, but once again might stacks also increase condition damage. Especially If you plan to use the flamethrower for the most time, this trait is worth another thought. The Rapid Regeneration, is not a bad choice either. But I think the ammount of HP healed is a little low, even if combined with the trait in Alchemy.

Scrapper (master)
It is difficult to say something against the Adaptive Armor, especially in PvP, where you don’t have to fear aggro. The Applied Force however is an option worth to think about, especially if you plan to use the flamethrower with both the Juggernaut and the Mass Momentum. Even if you spend 0 effort into boon extension. As long as you are equiped with the flamethrower (for more than a few seconds), you will have the required 10 stacks of might permanently. In that case you constantly have 1/3 of your time quickness = more hits = more crits.

As promised above, I gonna explain an alternative traitline to your Alchemy, the Tools. Honestly I have no clue what is meta atm. I create my builds as I need them and I focus only on the needs and requirements for the situation. Some of the things I say might be part of a common/meta configuration. If that is the case, I’m deeply sorry.

Tools (minor)
The passive already grants you vigor upon the use of any toolbelt skill = more endurance. Reactive Lenses is my kind of a backup system. It is technically a combination of Self Regulating Defenses and Projection Injection, with a lower cooldown and fury instead of protection. Simply you get hit by a cc, walk away like nothing happened and have a free stack of fury with you. Could be worse.

Tools (major)
Streamlines Kits. A build which uses kits, should use that trait. As well as a build with a flamethrower should use the Juggernaut. For me it is a normal as using HB on a warrior who has equiped a Greatsword. It works, so why should you ignore it on purpose?

A thing not many people see with this trait has to do with the spell, mentioned in the tooltip. That spell is always the same for each kit but in two cases it is extremely powerful. On the flamethrower you only get a fire-aura which lasts barely a few seconds and causes only one stack of burning on an attacking opponent. The more important spells are caused by the elexir gun and the motar kit. The Elexir Gun causes Slik Shoes, drops of glue as footprints for a few seconds. The motar kit is even more powerful, as it causes a big spot of goo. That goo is the same, you can steal as a thief. It causes several damage dealing conditions on impact and should not be underestimated by condition builds.

Tools (master)
Adrenal Implant is the the frosting of your cake. Another huge improvement to your endurance regeneration, which makes you swift and hard to catch.

Sigils & Runes
That is something people shall select on their own. The only thing I want to mention for the second weapon sigil. If you have trouble escaping your opponents, you could replace the sigil of doom with a sigil of hydromancy. It causes an AoE chill and alows you to get rid of your opponents if you need to.

EDIT: I forgot a few things to mention. Like the alternatives for the elexir utility skill.

Tool Kit
Depending on your prefered playstyle. If you tend to be in closer range, the Tool Kit could also be nice option. While being a little underestimated, it is a great source for conditions to weaken/slow your opponents, offers the ability to block and drag enemies. In addition it supplies you with an aoe-bleed attack.

Thumper Turret
If you plan to use combos frequently, this thing might be an option as well. When you are away of your enemy, it offers 2, in close combat 3 blastfinishers. If you have quick hands, a good mouse setup or maybe some macros, you can deploy it, overcharget it, detonate it and use the toolbelt in a fraction of a second. Used on the previous mentioned toolbelt-waterfield of the medic gyro, you will get at least 3k+ instant area heal for yourselves and your allies. The overcharge, works as disabling, which allows you to get rid of your opponents or inteerupt their attacks. The toolbelt-skill, same as the one from the elexir gun is a stun-breaker. But in addition, in case you have not equiped the flamethrower or not using the Juggernaut, you will have another stack of stability for one second. Now how can that be of a use? Nowadays many classes not just use one, but several cc-skills at once. As some of use have permanent stability sources, they want to make sure you are disabled for good. The one second stability-stack is simply for that case. Prevents unwanted surprises.

Flame Turret
Considering your focus on AoE and conditions and your attempt to use burning as a damage delivering source, you could try this one as well. While mostly underestimated, it supports you with a burn source, an additional target the enemy has to focus on and the toolbelt skill offers you an additional fire field.

Utility Goggles
Facing classes with a huge variety of cc-skills, you can also use this as a main-skill instead of/in addition to the the trait mentioned above (Tools minor). The toolbelt is a huge vulnerability source and even gives you an edge against stealth classes.

At last I’d like to recommend you reading through the codition-table of Xyonon. The pictures, not the builds. This offers you a good inspiration of what skills you can focus on during the combat, which deal damage and which are just for the looks.

Yes I do use them, I have a permanent weapon-stock of those lovely gizmos, wasting nearly 30 inventory slots. Several of them are quite useful, but unknown to the majority of players. Every attempt making them more popular mostly results in weird looks, like I am a freak or a madman.

I’ll share a few of my gems, which are not listed above:
Healing Seed Pod - This one I used for more than a year. It grants the user a waterfield with a very short cooldown, long duration and grants regeneration in addition. It is still possible to use during the guild rushes with some animal-transformations, most got fixed by now. If your class has blastfinishers but no real source for waterfields, this one is priceless.

Power Matrix - My most recent, yet most controversal discovery. It is not that cheap and does nearly no damage to anything. The major reason it drew my attention was, its tooltip ^^. I’ve done several tests by now and I haven’t reached the enemy-limit yet. Thinking back of the maize-balm farming or the enormous hordes during the queens gauntlet, this could prove useful some day. In ways of flagging loads of mobs with a single strike.

Medical Kit - One of the few EWs you can drop on the ground and othes can pick up. When traveling the world for mapcompletion or leading people through large areas, this one comes in handy. Especially low level characters lack perma-speed. The swiftness-buff in the kit refreshes fast. The kit itself lasts long. It makes movement a lot easier, even you have the kits and not your friend. You can simply arm one, drop it and let it pick up from the person who needs it. It can also be deployed on the ground and be picked up in combat, while the original heal-skill is on cooldown.

Jezza’s Flamethrower - Persuaded a friend of mine to get a stack of those for farming issues. His major complaint was, when farming in groups, he was not able to tag enough mobs in time, they were mostly dead before he reached em. I told him about my flamethrower (engineer mainclass) and he was interested, but not wanted to switch classes. So we got him those. You don’t do much damage with those, but you sure tag a lot of enemies. The red button is sadly NO blastfinisher ;_;.

Grawl ritual Totem - Another of my recent discoveries. Literally annoyed by those stuipd squads of mini raports in HoT maps, I found this quite useful. It creates a short fear-wave, alowing you to move forward or prevent the lethal blow of your enemy. Something like a life-saver.

At last, the most powerful one I found so far. I’m still not sure if that is a joke by ANet or it was simply forgotten while they created HoT. I was totally shocked when I found it and paralized once I unleashed its true potential. In a few seconds you will see why ^^

Frost Gun - This thing is a game-changer. It is basically free cc-skills for everyone. The skills are:
1. Frost Jet – as flamejet from flamethrower, but applies chilled on each tick
2. Rifle Butt – strong cc-skill
3. Frozen Escape – leap back as with the acid bomb from engineer (elexir gun), but leaves timed ice-explosions behind, which also cause chilled
4. Shard Volley – in some bossfights I keep the weapon equiped, as this skill supplies with bleed stacks for condition damage, long range, ground target, short cooldown. The aiming is a little odd but learnable.
5. Deep Freeze – 100% the same as the one from ice bow, very strong cc.

Note: Few days ago I was on a VB map with the matriach battle. Common situation, nearly noone used cc skills. With the frost gun and 1-2 of my own cc-skills I was literally able to interrupt it alone.

-

I’d love to say something about the teleport gun, but I don’t know what actually counts as exploit/bug-using. I know some ways to get the 2nd portal to another heighth, but this includes some stuff with game mechanics. Sorry.

Have to do that discussion about once a week. Most of the phrases already got mentioned above. The line I read the most: “If you want to support you group, go zerk/meta. The more damage your party does, the faster the mob/boss dies and then you need neither a tank nor a healer.” – Berzerker 101.

There are countless of situations out there, especially in PvE where this strategy leads to a wipe and in many cases in several wipes as people refuse to change combat-strategy. Boring, exhausting, annoying. But this is a free place. People can play whatever they like. And if most people want to go meta, then most people go meta.

If you, for what reason ever, decide to leave the path of strength you sooner or later face a situation where most of your group is downed or dead. According to berzerker 101, you should die as well. If your gear and skills prevent you from that you have to decide wether you help your allies or not. If you help your allies, you will be blamed for ruining the dps, and if you cannot prevent the wipe you are the only reason for that.

If you decide to leave the dead ones dead, as they are mostly gc-builds and would die again quickly. You are blamed for elitism, arrogance and selfishness. As you may have noticed, you can only lose. If you succeed where others fail, they only have the chance to blame you. Meta/zerk is by definition foolproof.

The biggest problem people have with, e. g. toughness stats, it increases aggro. Mechanics say the bosses go for the guys which have the highest toughness. So the majority tries to avoid skilling toughness. Most go for vitality instead. The big problem with this strategy is, if all people in the group spend 0 points for toughness, the boss will choose one of them as target. And when endurance and active-defenses are depleted, this guy is dead. The berzerkers are aware of this and hope, the boss is dead before that happens. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. That is life.

There are people out there, me included, who give a kitten about berzerker/meta configurations (I wrote k-i-t-t-e-n to troll the stuipd filter). If you want do walk that path as well, you may gather more new enemies than friends. You have to withstand a lot of criticism and you are blamed for failures more often than other people. Where we have to prove our worth in a party by actions and skill, other just have to link their gear.

Some of the upgrade requirements are hillarious. It feels like the devs were brainstorming in a meeting, guessing about what could be used to get upgrades for guildhalls. The answer is always, more flax. I have a huge list of things I want to craft, but I cannot, because the guild eats linseed oil and kegs in stacks. Not to mention the scribing. We want to decorate the guildhall so we need to level a scriber, but guess what. To level up a scribe, you need certain (= useless) upgrades in the guildhall. Our guild is spread arround 20 servers or more, for what genius reason we had to build this stuipd WAR ROOM? Now we have to do WvWvW upgrades only to be able to get the scribers a few more levels up.

As if I want to buy a car in RL. And to get that car I have to get a house, a garage, a pair of ski, diving equip, soccer goals, an italian coffee-machine, learn russian, learn portugese, learn swedish, adopting a dog, adopting a cat, adopting a cow, milking 2,000 liters of milk out of the cow, opening a lemonade stall, finding a lucky clover, get a teddy bear, an ice bear, a swimming pool which however is not compatible with the diving equip from the beginning, one barrel of oil, one barrel of gasoline, 10,000 needles, a package of chewing gum, a pair of scissors made of wood, back-hair from a three-headed-monkey, a bungee-jumping-rope, a flight-license, a chinese restaurant, 5 aligators, 1 siberian tiger albino, a horse, a wallaby, a chimeny, a coffin, a package of screws and 10 white marbles. And once I’ve collected all this, I get my car TIER 1. Which I cannot drive, which does not look like a car and not even sounds like a car. It is just a photograph of how a car is made in a factory and ofcourse the list for TIER 2.

Wow. Did not expect to get such detalied answers on the first entries. This answers my questions completely. Thank you very much, both of you!

This knowledge will help me a lot ^^.

Hi,

I’ve got some questions about condition-mechanics and I don’t really find answers. The guys in my guild do use condition builds, but their answers weren’t much helpful, mapchat and lfg leaded to no result either :S.

I’ll use numbers to make it easier to answer to single questions, no need to quote everything.

1. When I do conditions on opponents I sometimes get countiously raining numbers, and sometimes I get single hits of numbers. To be honest, I mostly see the tiny numbers. But when I talk to other people, especially players who play on condition damage, they tell me about thousands and thousands of damage they do with a single tick. When occures which effect and why?

2. For example, we take poison.
2.1 Let’s say I have 1200 condition damage and another guy has 1500 conditon damage. I apply poison to the mob first, then he does. When his stack applies, who hurts the enemy?
2.2. The mob now has two stacks of poison, one from me and one from my friend. As far as I have read, with poison more stacks result in more damage. Let’s say a non-conditon build engineer comes by and puts another 2 stacks of poison on the mob, will this increase my damage?
2.3. How about the duration? If I put on the first stack of poison and the mob stays posioned for 5 minutes, will I deliver the entire 5 minutes condition damage or only for the time my original stack would have lasted if no other stack was applied by other people?
2.4. My current strategy, as a non-conditon player, fighting huge zergs of mobs is to lay out large condition fields they walk in to reach me. Do the coniditon-based members of my party benefit from this strategy, or do I weaken their attacks with it?

3. Can conditions land critical hits as well?

4. Condition removers.
4.1. I use conditon removers quite a lot and noticed something odd. When I have a damage and a movement condition applied and I use a cleanse, the movement conditions get removed the last. Is that really the case?
4.2. Recently I’ve noticed that my condition-removers sometimes miss. The ones I use on other people always land, but when I use one on myself I sometimes need two of them to remove a single conditon. Is the success rate really 100%?
4.3. Guardian: Thought about combining trooper runes with the trait Pure Voice. Would that really remove 2 conditions per shout? Or is that not allowed?
4.4. Some skills convert conditions into boons. How does that work with stacks? Do I get a stack for a stack or 1 boon for a stack of one condition?

5. Some classes have traits which allow increased direct damage once a mob has a certain condition applied. Does it matter how the mob got that conditon, let’s say who delivered it?

6.1. In some bossfights, worldboss if I remember correctly, I’ve seen a bleeding stack increase over 99 stacks. The icon number changed to the infinite sign or something like that. Can’t the counter display more than 99 stacks?
6.2. Wiki says 1500 possible stacks. Wiki is not always true and this actually seems a little high, especially if the maximum ammount I saw was only 99. Is that really true?

7. Weakness causes 50% reduction in endurance regeneraiton. I’ve actually seen some bosses using evade, like Kudu in SE, but those evades are timed with hp level and the kind of attack you use on him (AI). Do mobs have reduced endurance regeneraiton with weakness or is that effect for PvP only?

Oh, a little longer than I expected first. I have to admit I did not care about that topic much over the past years. Usually I play tank/support builds. The little ammount of damage I deal, I do with power and direct damage/crits. However, I want to make a character with more focus on damage. But before I start, I want to know how things work and what I have to keep in mind. Sorry for the long post.

(not what you think)

hm, farming I suppose? There are a few situations where leveling up is counterproductive, but none of these really justifies that option. Erasing a character and starting it again, can do the same in no time. Getting to 80 is not that much difficult, neihter getting to any specific level.

On the other hand, a subclass system would bring some replay value imho. Having multiple classes on the same character, every new starts from level 1. But, that would also make the additional character-slot redundant and so remove a money source form ANet.

Just watching the video in question. Seriously im rofling atm. The feature with the chatcodes in guildmessages is old. Been using the method more than half a year ago. I’ve been mocked and laughed about mentioning that feature to other people.

Now to the “film at 11”, seriously? I use that method for flax/quartz farming, quite a long time now. Also we have mentioned the guildbuff, banners and other things do stack. Most people literally ignored that fact and we got laughed at for mentioning it. Waste of time, useless, not worth to move the farmchars to the guildhall for aquiring, … etc. xD

A thing I noticed by now, knowledge may be power. But if you don’t have a big name, noone will ever beleive you. I’m quite sure there are tons of methods out there to make gold even quicker than that, but the community ignores them. Because it is not WP who advertises them. This is a great motivation to keep exploring.

We built our guild with a total of 8-12 people who actively contributed items/gold. Mostly veterans to be honest, but the system not requires a huge 400+ guild to get the job done. And we did not force anyone to contribute – as some other guilds do.

Creating a guildhall for the only purpose of having an arena is … a bit of a waste. I’ve seen several guilds which created an arena and it lies dormant most of the time. If you just want the chance to duel with your 4 other friends, join a guild which already has an arena?

After more than 3 years, still: exploration.

This game has so many cool places, so many secrets and beautiful sights. Whenever I find myself bored with real content, I just explore the beautiful maps. Often I find hidden treasures, rooms, npcs with funny dialogue or just nice views. Even in the maps I’ve played most, it is just awesome.

But this also includes game mechanics and character design. There is so much to see, so much to learn. Recently I found a minor npc who was predicting most of the HoT content, long before the update. I was shocked, surprised and now I’m even more motivated to replay the story missions.

Oh yes, awesome idea. Let us have only legendaries of weapons which are used in meta builds. Do you even imagine how many awesome skins and players we would miss by that. And the metas change over time. What works today can be useless at the next patch.

Besides, many players play not meta. They are good players and nice people. Shall they have no legendaries for their favourite weapons?

Shortbow still is a good option so far. It is an offensive weapon with 5 skills, which could even work as a back-cover. Imagine if they started the canceled legendary set with the underwater-weapons. It could be a lot worse than a shortbow.

Hello,

is there a special reason I cannot gift, bank-tabs, character-slots, storage-expanders or crafting-licenses? Bag-Slots however can be gifted. I want to buy a character-slot for a friend of mine, who is short in gems atm. But gemstore not allows this option :S

Where do I start?
- no precursor dorp in 3+ years
- only slightly improvement of stats compared to exotic/ascended
- most of my classes use dualwield, so I would need two
- my main is engineer with 2 pistols, 4/5 skills already have a unique animation anyway
- most of the time I play with kits = can neither see the pistols nor the animation
- precursor collection looks like 2x the effort of creating a legendary, if you did not get a precursor from drop
- some of the ingredients are pure gold-sinks, like the clovers or the icy runeshards
- some of the ingredients are pure karma-sinks, like the obsidian shards
- some of the unique material requirements look a bit odd, silver doubloons for the jugg as example. Like they wanted to make this one in particular hard to get.
- most classes have at least two switchable weapons on land and underwater, would make at least 4 weapons, nope
- I know many people who quit after creating a legendary weapon, as they had no further goal. Fear to become one of those.
- I know many people who created a legendary weapon, dumped it on a char they never touched again and created the next until they left the game. Fear to become one of those.

Basically I think it is not worth it. I think about making one of the precursors with the legendary masteries, as some of those look good enough. But no legendary any time soon.

I really like armor-deisign in GW2. We can use sets or create our own, we are not bound to use the same colors of all pieces.

Due to the variety of colors, it is possible to create awesome armors. This allows you to give every armor a special attunement. For example you can create a leather armor, which looks like a heavy. You can make robes which look like medium or heavy.

We can combine different types of armor as we wish. We are not forced to any order or system. When I design a new character I usually spend twice the time I need for the caracter-creation on finding and coloring the right armor.

I love walking through the cities, looking at other people’s creations. Over the week I make at lest 5-8 screenshots of beautiful, funny and maginficent designed characters. Honestly, I have no clue what the topic-creator plays, imho it is not GW2 ^^.

However, If you want to create a specific armor, which either exists in RL or you dreamed of it, you will reach limits in this game – as in every other game out there. Some armors look a bit odd. The blade in the middle of the bladed armor, belt heigh, has caused so many unintended laughs. But still the armor looks impressive, and after all the name says “bladed”.

Halken.6970:

I’m asking for any advice to a build for Scrapper/Engi that can solo at Dungs, specifically AC, I just want to get a skin that I liked a lot and I absolutely NEED it …

Why do you think you have to solo AC? It is one of the more common dungeons, easy to run and frequently farmed (compared to others). Finding a group isn’t that hard and if you open a LFG yourself, you get responds within a few minutes. If you only want tears there is absolutely no point in soloing AC (imho).

On the other hand I have to admit, that the weapon-skins you get out of AC change appearance during day/night. During day they have normal appearence, while during night they look like ghostly-weapons with that blue fire arround.

For soloing (I won’t post a link of a build, Xyonon might do that anyway)

- you need mobility:
+ sigil of energy recharges your endurance on weapon-swap/kit-swap, so you can dodge more often.
+ trait Tools, streamlined kits for nearly permanent swiftness in combat (if you use kits). If you use the elexir gun, it will create a spell that drops glue behind you, slowing your enemies = you can evade better.
+ trait Tools, adrenal implant to boost your endurance regeneration by another 50%

- you need some backup in case your endurance runs out, what will happen:
+ If you use a flame-thrower kit, you can go for trait firearms, juggernaut. This grants you permanent stability, so you can literally block one cc-skill in 3 seconds. It also supports you with permanent might stacks, which you need for better dps. If you however run out of stability and endurance, wich may happen sometimes, you get knocked down. Wait until the enemies are close enough to hit and use the Smoke Vent of the flamethrower. It is a short aoe blind, but if timed good, it can save your life.
+ If you play condi, you already have dual pistol as config. The glueshot and the static shot help you to slow your enemies.
+ stun-breakers also help a lot. The toolbelt skills of the elexir gun and the Thumper Turret both work that way, have short cooldown and nearly no cast time at all.

- last but not least, you need damage:
+ you could skill on bombs, which is still quite effective. It allows you to kite most of the enemies. If you use a Thumper turret, you could place it, overcharge it and kite your enemis closely arround it. If you carefully place a waterfield close enough, the overcharge works as blastfinisher = short heal.
+ if you skill on flamethrower and scrapper, you can go for the mass momentum which boosts your power and grants you more permanent might stacks.
+ with the elite skill you could try the motar for an extra blastfinisher, a few condition fields and a bonus waterfield. Also the spell caused by streamlined kits is a great source of conditions, especially if you kite enemies arround.

- healing and defenses:
+ you can use whatever healskill you want. Some prefer the turret, others (like me) prefer the gyro. Both offer short cooldowns and a waterfield. The gyro allows you to stun up to 3 enemies and heals you directly over time, while the turret grants regeneration buff. Elexir and AED might work as well.
+ some survival builds contain a focus on healing power, which may be able to instant-heal your 50% of your max hp (if you dont skill vitality). However for non selfhealing issues, skilling on HP is a bit pointless. Most of our skills scale the lowest with HP :S. So you should focus on either vit or toughness. As you are the only person in the dungeon, there is no need to fear to pull the aggro with too much toughness ^^. Most people just hate toughness, so you can go for vitality.
+ on the other hand you should deal a good ammount of damage, because wholese will? Condi was boosted, so working with conditions might be a good solution.
+ About sigils I already recommended energy for endurance. Then 2nd is up to you. You can go for that AoE torment, poison or boost your condi-damage at all. A trick I use when encoutering huge zergs is the sigil of hydromancy. It causes aoe chill on weapon/kit-swap, which helps you evading again ^^.

- skipping:
+ stealth: you could use the traditional smoke bomb to create a smoke field and put several blast-finishers in it.
+ stealth: more effective is the sneak gyro (elite skill). It has a long duration and follows you, while not pulling aggro itself. The gyro however acts a little silly sometimes. It somehow can overstep rocks and beams, but gets stuck in stairs or walking arround corners.
+ invinciblity: Elexir S allows you to overstep every trap and ignore every knockback/attack. The stealth from the toolbelt can be helpful as well. When I have to tank legendary bosses alone, it helps during the cooldowns of healing skills.

Personally I would not recommend you soloing AC on an engineer. Especially not if you only want tears. If you are looking for a challenge, this might be fun. But for farming issues, better get a group. Saves time, nerves and probably 3-5 keyboards and mouses.

Thank you for the long and detailed explanation. Sadly we cannot see the date the orders were placed. I remember other mmorpgs which work with an expiring-system, orders were only valid a few days and then removed/returned to creator.

The common explanation back then was, they had to do this in order to save storage on their servers. If ANet does not delete the old orders at all, I wonder if we may face a tp expiring system sooner or later.

Anyway, big thx for your time and work. It helps a lot ^^.

Hello,

here is a question that bothers me for years, maybe you can enlighten me:

Whenever I browse the TP for equiping a character, I buy weapons and armor – blue and green gear mostly. Most of the stuff is rather cheap, but sometimes I come across a piece which is ridiculously overpriced. I compared the stats, the effects and the skin, nothing special. There usually exist weapons with the same stats for way lower prices. The skin is standard and can be aquired from other levels for way lower prices. And the runes/sigils are cheap as well.

At first, I thought it has to do with “playing the market.” So people would buy one of a certain kind, buy all on the market and set the price extremely high. And people like me, who just want to get good gear fast, just click without reading.

But to be honest, I have no clue at all. Anyone can explain this, please?

Atm, 73. I hold myself a magic “untouchable” border of 50 gold. I have no clue how I came to this border, superstition probably. During the weeks it fluctuates between 70 and 100 gold mostly.

Usually once I get close to 100, I begin to work on my countless projects. Guildhall is a giant money eater and I’m still crafting my first ascended armor (playing for 3 years+ xD). Don’t really care much about gold either ^^. Life is too short to waste it with farming.

- Not being able to play my character as I want.
- Not being able to equip my character with the gear/runes/sigils I prefer.
- Following guides, instead of trying out or exploring the area.
- Mechanics adjusted to a special group-setup.
- AP/mastery-rank/mastery-insights/gear-checks
- Stupid and sometimes very offensive LFG messages
- No scaling about the group-size. You need the exact ammount of people. Can do fractals/dungeons with 1-5 people, just need time and patience.
- arrogant elitists with no patience at all (not the majority, but enough to ruin the day)
- Downgrade of dungeons thanks to Raids.
… most other things have been listed already.

I hope this thread wont stop growing.

I get this complaint a lot, so to make it clear: There are hints about the location of this puzzle inside the game and even how to reach it. The intel is far away from being detailed or specific about the spot. About the camera. There do exist other spots, some entrances to cave which are slightly that difficult to enter. There is a big difference about the character size. E. g. with an asura it appears to be easier. But I do agree it is a bit of an issue in this game.

dubstax.9102:

Guild bank slots are less likely to be supported if you run into issues over regular bank slots. Does this mean support wouldn’t help you at all? No. However, I would be cautious about loading your personal guild banks up with anything that you feel has high value. This is mainly why I never bothered with a personal guild bank and instead use a mule or two.

If you use a personal guildbank, with only you as member, how you run into issues?

Anyway the multi-guild-system is a little weird in my opinion. As the otherguys showed examples, some people have guilds for nearly every purpose now. In former times you had one guild with people you like and some you don’t (which is part of life). Some were skilled to run hardcore content, others were interested in other stuff. You had an average group of people.

The thing is, we can set the limit to 8, 10, 15, 20 it does not matter. There will always be people who want more. The more slots we have, the less important guilds become. And that should not be the goal. Looking at the guy with the list of 10, it really reminds me of the LFG tool.

(long post)

While reading through this thread, I feel like a tiny mouse which just entered skrittburgh for the first time. Personally I hate farming. When I left my grinder mmorpg ages ago I promised myself not to waste more than a few minutes a day with it. I’m only using about 4 characters. What makes me a tiny stupid infidel, compared to all other flax-farmers ^^.

The others have already told you, that walking to the TD spot is not worth the time – if you go for efficiency. Here is an alternative way:
1.) Place all your characters at the VB flax spot and do that daily, only. 24 Characters are quite a lot, but this gets done quickly.
2.) Now you pick one of your characters and move with it to the TD farm spot. That is another 10 minutes. Farm the flax there and let it be.
3.) The next day you repeat this, but leave the one in TD. Send a second character to TD after he is done in VB.
4.) To see a good outcome, I would get 7-12 of your characters to TD, one per day.
5.) At the last day, you first log the VB chars and get the flax. Then you log the TD chars, farm the flax. Then you port to the VB spot and farm the flax there.
NOTE: Taking your 24 characters, lets say you use 12 for the TD moving. So it would be 13 days for one cycle.
=> You farm 24 spots per day. (24×12 = 288)
=> You farm 12 extra spots during the locating phase.
=> You farm 36 spots during the final day.
=> So in the end you farm 288+12+36= 336 spots in 13 days. The traditional one spot method gives you only 288 spots. That is an increase of ~ 16-17 %. And you only waste about 10 minutes a day for relocating characters. (Note: Some guy above said the way to the TD spot takes 10 minutes, I don’t know how long it takes, because I have never been there yet)

Boosters/Buffs
I use the boosters as well, but only on characters which do not move or only move 5 mins a day. I would not give a booster to a character which is about to move to the TD spot. If you insist in giving all characters boosters, with the above mentioned method your outcome should be better, your loss should be lower.

A strategy you could try, when your characters are in position at TD to give them the boosters when they are there. And after the final day, use them as permanent static farmers at VB only. Until the timer runs out. If you want to do more cycles, I’d recommend you to set a bunch of characters for the moving part who never get a booster. And giving only the static characters the boosters.

The ones which are only at the same spot should also get the buff of a gathering+swiftness banner before you deploy them. The gathering only banner gives a lower bonus than the combination-banner – for what reason ever. You can also join a guild with a gathering guild buff, those cost 0 and last 24 hours. So can be used on all characters. If the guild is good developed, you have a merchant in the guildhall to buy gathering tools and an access to your bank/storage (via the scribing station). You can enter it with your characters, without leaving your current spot.

Health
Farming is not relaxing. You actually are under a lot of tension and pressure while farming a certain thing in a game over and over for hours. Even if it looks like your brain is afk, it is not. Your eyes need to focus the relevant objects quickly. The hands become stiff over the time, the fingers move fast but not in every direction. That are just a few of the countless side-effects.

There are reasons people in some countries get paid for farming in mmorpgs. They work for goldsellers mostly (I do not blame you to be one). But it is taken as some kind of ‘work’. Depending on the laws and rules, some work with third-party-programms instead. Which is luckyly prohibited in GW2.

However, I beleive (personal opinion) that farming and actual play-for-fun gameplay are two separate things. Several people told me that farming is fun, what I totally beleive. The difference comes with the tension and the pressure. That makes the difference between joy and work.

I can easily play for 4-8 hours straight (if I get the time, which is rarely so :S) and enjoy myself in GW2. But if I have to work on the computer, I can do that max 2 hours straight, then I get eye-strain and headache.

Different people have different limits. You can expand them and make your body more sustainable. Or you can stop at a certain point. It is totally up to you.

If you need the charged quartz for guild-hall stuff, have a look at your guilds veteran players. Some have quite a stack in their storage – just in case there would be finally something good to craft. In our guild we solved the entire arena this way. One person had like 50 charged quartz in his vault, rotting without notice. Talk to your people.

As for the hero-point the krait obelisk for the home instance is perfect for it. If you do not have it you can try
+ Durmand Priory [&BOkAAAA=]
+ Dolyak Hero Challenge [&BKkAAAA=] (the one south east)
+ Krait Hero Challenge [&BK4BAAA=]
Those three and probably some others, are easy to reach with a few steps and mostly no mobs block your path. And with a few steps I mean hardly 10 seconds.

When it comes to getting many charged quartz quickly, I would go for the gathering nodes. As the others already mentioned above, there is a small chance to get a free charged quartz out of regular mining. I would just take as many boosters I can get my hands on, to increase the chance.

If you are doing guildhall stuff and building things, you either started farming flax long ago or you are going to start it soon. One way the other, you log your “old” characters at least once a day to get a decent loot. So if you have your gather-only-characters, try to find a gathering banner. Usually you may see them near the home instance entrances of the cities or sometimes at Pagga’s Waypoint [&BKYCAAA=] (or close to the wood-farmspot). If you find one banner which improves gathering, ask a friend to camp next to it and make sure your gather-characters receive the buff. Depending on how many quartz nodes you are farming, one 30 min buff may last 1-3 weeks. I would also recommend to use a gathering-booster. And, if your guild already has, the 24h Guild Enhancement for critical crafting. You can get up to 50% and higher critical gathering chance, which might increase your luck of getting charged quartz as well. Positive side effect: If you use those characters for flax as well, you can get about 20-25 flax just from the spot in VB. Which already is one Vial of Linseed Oil. In order to save the buff-time, simply gather the quartz/flax and click on depoist. Later log your main-character and craft/fuse as you can.

What about the exploits@arena.net email-adress. Everytime I want to send something there, I receive an error that delivery was impossible. (last attempt a few days ago)

Does that e-mail adress still exist?

I don’t really know where to ask this question, so I hope anyone of you can help me.

Normally when I found exploits and evil bugs in the game, I wrote an e-mail to exploits@arena.net. That worked quite well for several months. Recently I found some new, disturbing stuff but all my reports cannot be delivered.

I’ve read through the bug-report sticky over and over, but I only found the “write a ticket” instruction. The email adress is not mentioned there.

When I google the adress, I still find it and no reference wether it works or not.

Did ANet remove it? Or did they just make a new one?

I’m one of the few engineers who play on support an hate the healing-turret. Which granted me a lot of laughs and mockery over the years. Before the gyro I used other things, in PvE I used the Dwayna Healing skill, which created even more mockery when people saw it. The healing turret seems to be as important to the basic engineer, as the GS is to the warrior class. This mostly ruins any controversal discussion about the topic ingame.

My problems with the turret:
- it feels bulky. It has to be depolyed on the ground, cannot be moved and eats damage.
- both waterfields last not much more than the blink of an eye
- makes coordinating blastfinishers difficult. If you want to use the blastfinishers from other people, you need to ogranize it in the group.
- the direct heal ammount of the turret is pretty low.

The gyro in comparison:
- follows your movements, heals you and your allies arround.
- the waterfield is fixed to your character, it moves with you.
- the waterfield has a wide range and a long duration, making it easy to use blastfinishers and allowing others to use theirs.
- the direct heal is low as with the turret, but your gyro follows you and heals you over time – no matter where you go.

What the gyro does in addition:
- you can stun enemies where you stand and not where you used the gyro first.
- the waterfield grants protection as pulse, which is quite handy.

After every update I gave the turret a new try. I always dumped it within a few minutes. When the next update includes any change with the turret, I will give it another try ofcourse. Maybe one day I can understand how to use it correctly. In the meantime, I enjoy the gyro ^^

ty vm. You saved me a huge load of gold and materials ^^.