Guild Wars 2

I would like to request these following items as a standalone shoulder skin:

• Bow ties

• Hanging Cowboy hat

• Cape ^^!

I also want Gwen’s Rose Focus skin back.

Thank you for your consideration!

Our group comp is still (generally) 4-4-2 / 2 reaper, 1 dh, 1 tempest. Hardly feel the nerf :s

My group has been switching to a comp with 2 (full)healers for the past few weeks and we’re comfortably oneshot’n every bosses now – no updraft Gorseval included. It is possible to play with “more” healing in the current raids without the need to specifically design a new encounter around the healer. However, is it possible to demand that play style in any raid groups out there? Eh, it’s up to you to convince your group or play with like-minded people.

Hey guys,

Our recruitment closes today, a little sooner than planned due to an overwhelming amount of applications. Since our staffs and schedules are very limited, we cannot welcome any more new raiders. We thank you for your interest and sincerely wish you good luck on your quest for a new raiding guild. Take care!

Hey guys, sorry for late reply. Could you send me an in game mail instead? Thank you!

How big of the community are you speaking for? Your guild? Your WvW alliance? You 1-man bank guild? Apologize for being skeptical when someone tries to speak as if they represent for a community so vague that they could have been speaking for themselves only.

From what I heard of a dozen of applications to my raiding guild – 80% of which has never killed Gorseval and beyond- the two most identified problems that bar them from raids are time commitment and networking issues. In short, many cannot play for more than 1-2 hour a day and they don’t have enough friends to practice with. Our internal survey reveals that during our training run, new trainees worry about their personal performance, concentration and after-class review more than the boss mechanics. It at least tells me that raid difficulty isn’t that high enough to bring down to another tier. What’s hard is actively involved in the raiding community and get acknowledged. In short, I don’t think easy mode would benefit the current raid scene.

Do you want to start and lead a static group?

pump it up.

Reminder: public recruitment is closing soon!

My ranking as a raid lead who trains new recruit. 2 hours per session, kill by the end.

1. Trio
2. Vale Guardian
3. Escort (I rank this one after VG bc it requires more micromanagement from me. It’s also easier to lose one person early for this encounter. It also has many viable variations.)
4. Gorseval
5. Slothasor
6. Keep Construct (4-6 involves no tanking experience and are fairly flexible with playing around the group comps.)
7. Xera (requires dedicated tankers and a few of personal mechanical skills.)
8. Sabetha (requires a LOT of personal mechanical skills. Easy to lose momentum. Easy to get early wipes -pls don’t stand in the cannon area if you can not dodge the shot!)
9. Matthias (requires extensive situation awareness and adaptation compounding with complex boss mechanics and harder skill check. Tension arise fairly quickly)

My ranking as a member of my static group:
1/2/3/4. VG – Gors – Sabetha. Escort (easy one-shot)
5. Slothasor (usually DPS issue. Smoother with better DPS)
6. Trio (usually half to 8 members die for kitten ing around. The lack of concentration and situation awareness really shine here. One-shot on a good day)
7/8. Keep Construct and Xera (a couple of weak links will noticeably make the run less smooth. One-shot if everyone is on top performance.)
9. Matthias (hilarious chain mistakes happen by the lack of concentration and situation awareness. Group sustain tends to dip here.)

Man, I wish ANet could nerf Underworld after these 7-8 years so that it didn’t take me days to hours to slough this dungeon recently. If anything, I heard they buffed it at one point to prevent farming. Maybe if you ask for compromise enough, it’s not impossible to think that ANet would yield after 3-4 years and give you raid easy mode. Alas, it’s also not impossible to think that they would never produce easy mode to elite content at all!

That said, my idea of story mode with dummy boss is only there to appeal a very specific vocal group which asked for story access without care about raid. I feel pity for them. They are like kids whose candies got taken away from and have no money to buy new candies. Pretty sad. However, the bigger kids who can run to the store to buy candies on their own should encourage themselves to do so. Like if you ask for initiatives to learn raid mechanics, there are plenty of training offers out there. Free of charge. Some trainers are even professional enough to tailor their teaching to their trainees’ capabilities. If you don’t believe me, go see Enko. If you half believe me, go check the guild recruitment session. (Shameless plug: my guild ad is still there. Open recruitment until July 18).
In my opinion, the current raid challenges are fairly easy to learn as a 10-man group (5 noob-5 pro formula). There are no barriers except for mastery requirement, afaik. Each training session is 2-hour long, often with a kill in the end. I encourage casual raiders and new raiders alike to check them out. It only takes 2 hours of your time to learn the encounter but it would take weeks of tuning and testing to release an encounter easy enough to the _majority_’s satisfaction. I see a potential huge time waste right there, and time is money for professionals. That’s something to consider, yes?
On a last note, the last boss Xera’s design was discreetly leaked sometimes in the end of January and the third wing release in June. I assume it takes about 4-5 months to test and tune between internal test team and external player-testers to provide a raid wing which makes the raiding community absolutely happy. Now, can the same teams help make the casual community happy with raiding? Hahaha. Challenge!

I like compromise. I think “story mode” is a good idea. Anet can demote all the bosses to Veteran dummies with little to no mechanics (mean: no wasted resource for development) so that people can bypass them fast to advance to the next bit of story. It shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes to complete the story of all three wings. Oh, and of course, story mode would not gives any raid rewards although I think it’s fair to have player leave the instance with something like one champion bag and two masterwork bags. The same way raiders get from repeating boss kills.

I’m not sure everyone will be happy.

Heads-up!

Forsaken Forest [FF] is closing recruitment on July 17 (1 week from this post). We have received many applicants and it’s about time for us to focus on training to ensure that everyone will end up on equal ground in the near future. Until next week, we are still open to all applicants regardless of raiding experience, as long as there is a clear indication of your motivation and dedication to be a positive asset of our team (read: team players).

Our second static group has been filled but still looking for promising subs. Our guild will open recruitment again once there is a plan for the third static group.

Thank you very much for your consideration!

EXPERIENCED RAIDERS
i. When does FF usually do raids?
- There are three types of concurring runs in the guild. Firstly, the static groups will have their own schedules. If you are invited to a static group, check with your raid leader(s). Secondly, the guild also function as a raiding hub so you can expect random “LFxM – boss – experienced class(es)” at anytime. If you’re more of a pugging person, keep an eye out for those calls – they are filled fast. Last but not least, there are training runs: one of our noted raid leaders will usually plan their training run one day in advance and post a notice in our guild message board. To get into a training run, check the guild message regularly and book your slot.

ii. How do guild ranks and promotion work in FF?
- As previously stated in our introduction, we want to promote a pleasant, engaging and satisfying casual raiding experience. Our values emphasize more on the teamwork and grouping experience than personal skills. Thus, our ranks reflect the wing clear experience of our members to facilitate a quick and easy “group-up-and-play”. Members are promoted by clearing each wing successfully and successively. It also means members who clear the latest wing are also expected to have finished the earlier wings for advancement.

iii. I can evaluate myself as a decent players with vast experience in raiding. I have raided for years in many MMO games and killed all the bosses in GW2 raiding. I have multiple full ascended classes and frequently lead successful pug runs. How do I make the most of my experience in FF?
- So you are a new success awaiting to be discovered! To make your transition into our guild as smooth as possible, let’s go over a few things:

• Expectation: Sometimes our guild ad is misinterpreted and lots of times, your expectation and our expectation are not quite aligned and we ought to meet half way somewhere. We are casual but have an asenal of skilled players in our guilds so our expectation of good players is high but expectation of average players is non-existent. We expect our kill runs to be on point with mechanics/DPS and our training run to be informative and educational. We do not take pride in being a hardcore, elite guild but in being a tolerant and communicative guild.

• Elitism: We consider good players as valuable assets and we constantly encourage members to improve their mechanical skills upon challenges. Even within an established group there is always room to improve. Thus, remember to approach and deliver criticisms with gentle words and an open mind. We have generous tolerance towards elitist behaviors. We don’t go out of our ways to kick people off the guild/run for it but we are not shy of reprimanding the person.

• Community: We made the best experience from interacting with other members in the guild. So play with us, talk to us, sing to us and make new buddies. The more you are bonding with our community, the better your raiding experience. The best outcome that I sincerely hope is for you to be a part of a static group experience.

iv. I have cleared all bosses comfortably weekly but recently started a new class for raiding. What is there to expect?
- Apart from the usual gear and build check, please let the raid leader know that you are playing a class that you’re not normally comfortable with. Go over your rotations with other noted players experienced with your new class. It’s okay to make mistakes and you may have to take a few blames for a certain failure but try to stay focused and positive. Besides, it’s a good idea to join one of our training runs to practice your off class as our expectation in a kill run is usually a lot higher.

Now we have accepted new members to join our ranks, here are a few Frequently Asked Questions.

APPLICATION PROCESS
a. I have asked for a guild invite in my previous mail but I haven’t received any. How come?
- A fundamental part of our recruitment process is to learn about our prospective members. Thus, I require new applicants to write briefly about themselves. Anything, but not all inclusive, from general mechanical skills to past raiding experience, your expertise (i.e. your main class(es) and role(s)), motivation (i.e. learning, clearing, or having fun with a few friends), and limitation (i.e. high ping, infrequent or irregular playing schedule, cardiovascular diseases or any types of inhibiting ailments). Even disclosing your personal quirks is greatly welcome

RAID BEGINNERS
1. I’m new to raid but eager to learn. I have an X class geared up based on metabattle.com. How do I start jumping into the raid?
- It’s great that you have done your homework by prepping your character ready to raid, but Hold On! Let’s check our list first:

• Do you have at least exotic armor, weapons and trinkets with the right stats and sigils? If you cannot afford a full meta stats set, what is your choice of substitute?
• If you play a (zerker) DPS class, have you attained at least ascended weapons and trinkets, or do you plan to? (Hint: you should :])

• Now, you’re only about 20% ready. Have you watched the video about the boss encounter with your class PoV yet? Or have you read any written guides? (Hint: dulfy.com is a popular source for an easy-access and up-to-date raid guides AND class guides).

• Great! That’s about 60% done. The next challenge is to join a training run within our guild. Have you talked to the guild leaders or any raid leaders about your wish to learn a specific boss encounter yet? We don’t have any fixed schedules for training, but most of our leaders are willing to open their time up for it. Depending on the boss difficulty, we don’t clear everything in one go – so expect about 1-2 boss kill within the time budget.

• If you’re still with us and have raked in your first-hand kill of almost all the bosses, you’re 90% close to becoming a “certified” raider. The last step would be trying to finish clearing all the wings and get as many practice outside the training run as you can. Not as discouraging as it may sound, pugging with different groups in fact gives yourself the most well rounded criticism about your raid ability and helps build your confidence and flexibility.

2. I don’t have a mic and/or I’m too shy for voicecom. Is it gonna be a big factor on my raid?
- Absolutely yes and even more so when you’re learning all the mechanics. With our voicecom you will listen to the extra cues and callings provided by our raid leads. It will help you focus on executing a task better. As long as you have a working speaker or headset, joining our Discord channel during the raid is mandatory. You can use browsing website for Discord – even though it’s highly recommended to download their client to easily save our server. If you prefer to use chat channel for communication, expect that they may be not noticed or responded immediately during the run.

3. I really hate playing the meta build, but I’m told to gear up a character with meta build for raid. What do you suggest?
- Tough question, Little Anakin! I think you need to question yourself first whether you are really motivated to do raids. If you really really want to raid then playing meta is a bitter pill to take. In my opinion, meta build is the easiest way to gain optimal results for a harder tuned content like raids. However, if you are confident to put extra effort in your own build to complete the task, I’m sure you will be given the chance to prove yourself in our guild. Be on top of your game or play the meta.

4. How does FF training run work?
- Welcome, new fawns. You are eager to train but have zero experience? Chances are FF will NOT take your hands step-by-step in a progression group through weeks. You will be dragged along (if not, carried) in a semi-experienced group of 4-5 hardcore members, 4-5 relatively new and at most 1-2 completely clueless raiders. Even so, you will be given plenty of pointers and expected to learn your roles and rotation by heart swiftly.

- Our raid leaders prioritize to give training to the latest and/or most difficult boss encounters, naming Xera, Keep Construct, Matthias and Sabetha. They are the most time consuming for their complicated mechanics and DPS requirement. Even if you have not completed any wings yet, you are welcome to sign up. However, in my own opinion, you should at least down Gorseval before any of these mentioned bosses.

- For other easier encounters, we do have catch-up (kill) runs for VG, Gorseval, Slothasor, Trio and Escort advertised throughout the week. Despite not advertised as training runs, they are easy enough to accommodate inexperienced fawns and we welcome all guild members to join for training or helping out.

- Almost all of our training runs occur around server reset time (NA evening), after Monday and during the weekend (NA afternoon and evening).

5. I’m learning the mechanics at a turtle’s speed so I’m afraid of dragging people down even on easiest bosses. Where can I sign up for a slow run with people like me?
- Hmm, it’s tricky. Time is a precious resource for everyone, so it’s difficult to ask for helpers to spend hours on a supposedly slow run. We may not even have enough interest to fill a group. However, some of our core members DO have their main/side guilds which provides very basic training to raids in their respective guilds. If there is specific request, I could give out my reference. If there are enough interests, our raid leaders could arrange for an occasional basic training.

Demonstration of our boss kills:

Xera: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hq9QJjy3frQ

Keep Construct: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Zp0Bc87Qgg

Slothasor (Slippery Slubling): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh2MxR5zzoU

Gorseval (No Updraft): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4VPgNcpv6c

Sabetha (Last Canon): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VOfrdRcsWg

Matthias: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dljBKobF9js

Trio Bandit – Prison Camp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRLL-rZZVEk

Vale Guardian: https://youtu.be/vMhA5BBfl9A

Greetings,

We are an 8-month old establishment that aims to gather interested and prospective raiders in Guild Wars 2. We respect the diverse experience of our members in the three raid wings. As a result, our objectives are not only to provide a friendly casual hub for pick-up squads, but also mechanical training to individuals who wish to advance further inside Forsaken Thicket.

Currently, our non-rep guild has one static group with several satellite members actively in various time zone. With the conclusion of the first raid, we are planning to build up the second static group. Thus, we would like to offer this opportunity to new raid leaders and members – and also extend the invitations to interested raid initiates.

By joining [FF], you are not required to have prior experience in any of the raid wings. As previously stated, we have experienced members to help out with training, and therefore, patience, dedication and cooperation are most valued. However, if you’re an experienced raider only looking for specific weekly clears, we have a simple evaluation system to aid with grouping. General members are ranked by their clear accomplishment: Spirit Wing (Spirit Vale), Salvation Wing (Salvation Pass) and Faithful Wing (Stronghold of the Faithful). Dedicated members of a static group will have their own title – for example the current One-Shot Club and Slubby Seconds. Last but not least, Wing Leaders are recognized accordingly and provided with privilege.

So, if you have read up to this point and are still interested in our guild, why not give it a try? Please send me an in- game mail stating briefly about yourself and your raiding experience, I’ll be sure to send you a reply promptly.

Happy raiding, and look forwards to see you all!

ekarat.1085:

doddbox.8153:

ekarat.1085:

pranker.3748:

Why would u make easy mode raids? They were meant to be a hard core content not some open world event anyone with five minutes of time can do.

‘’I want to participate in PvP tournament final but its too hard, anet do smthn pls.’’

I want easy mode raids because I would enjoy playing them then. Right now, I don’t, so I stopped. I hope their metrics can capture people like me who tried them for a while and then stopped playing.

Also, they do have easy mode PvP — amber/emerald league divisions.

“I don’t like playing Habbo Hotel but if they made it like Call of Duty I would enjoy playing it”

Raids aren’t supposed to be easy, they’re supposed to be pain-staking and difficult to learn. If you don’t grasp that then you aren’t suitable for raids, simple as that.

“Supposed to be?” According to what authority? The MMO Board for Appropriate Use of the Term Raid?

Easy-mode raids exist in other MMOs — and the universe didn’t implode as a result, so it’s not a contradiction. It’s rather well defined what that would mean — same/similar mechanics, but with more forgiving penalties for messing up, more generous timers, less damage given to players, fewer hit points to burn through, etc. In short, you still have to learn the mechanics, but you have more room for mistakes.

Someone asked why anyone would want that. I answered that I would actually enjoy it then, as I don’t enjoy it now. It’s as simple as that.

From the developers:

Fellow Tyrians,

In 2015, we announced that Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns™ would provide players the ultimate challenge with the introduction of raids. To meet that challenge as developers, we set out with a vision to create encounters that would put raiders’ skills and coordination to the test using our groundbreaking combat and dynamic event systems.

- Steven Waller, 2016

It’s a good read: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/a-raiding-retrospective/ about how Guild Wars 2 raid was made and what are the goal and intention of its makers.

Oh hey,

I just want to chime in that if people are interested in the tiny bit of related lore that is provided outside raids, there are five pro-White Mantle Bandit bosses loitering around in Queensdale, Kessex Hill and Brisband’s Wildlands waiting to be discovered and engaged for your immersion’s sake. In the grand scheme of things, they are fortunately very easy to solo; and if you ever feel overwhelmed by their threats, there is always a zerg conveniently stationing nearby to help you with no extra cost.

Edit: don’t – for the sake of your mental health – ever forget to read the extra notes on top of the supply bundles at the crime scene. They gave me so much lore pleasure as well.

StinVec.3621:

Here are a few of my more recent characters.

Very impressive, even with a minimalist choice of color. Your characters always feel like they belong to the world of Tron-Legacy.

Moyayuki.3619:

For additional information, my preferred color combination for a Sylvari Ranger is this:

Skin: Sea Breeze or Spring Green
Glow: a purple/magenta color
Hair: the peachy-pink color or Grapefruit
Eyes: maybe yellow or Wintergreen

I already have a Sylvari Mesmer that has blue skin, purple hair, light purple eyes, and wears armor that’s dark blue, purple, and white.

My experience told me that the simpler you go with the base color of your sylvari, the more variety of look (and armor color) will be available for you. And vice versa.

It will be increasingly more difficult to dye armors the more contrast and out-of-tone colors you use on your sylvari. If you want to create such explosive colorful impact, pick the armor and color first, then adjust the sylvari later with the total makeover kit or so.

Sylvari ranger is my third ever created and favorite character. I’ve spent the longest time and a good amount of fortune (at each time) to outfit her right. The challenge for me has been how few of cultural armors I can use for an outfit. If you browse Gw2style others have presented many brilliant ideas for their sylvari in all class weights. For example: make your sylvari looks like a Harpy with the help of the Hawk wings!!!

Back to my ranger, these three are the current armors which I’m the most satisfied with; from semi-T2 cultural to 1-piece cultural to modern geeking. In my opinion, color makes the look for my sylvari; once I decided on the color palette suitable for a certain theme I’m going for, the rest is just looking for a suitable armor piece with the right texture and silhouette. Most of the out-of-place details can be simply “fixed” with the right dyes.

Recent updates to my mesmer, ranger , guardian and revenant.

#Team166
#166hotline
#166beyond

Have you seen this hammer?

Ayrilana.1396:

I’m revising the post as I had a chance to sit down and actually go through it. Since I was rushed doing the calculations, I had originally over-complicated it.

You can find the probability of getting a specific drop by multiplying the probability of not getting it for each chest and then subtracting that result from 1. So the probability of getting an ascended chest from doing just one Tier 4 fractal is:

1-[(420-14)/420] * [(420-10)/420] * [(420-5)/420] * [(420-1)/420] = 7.0%

The probability of getting an ascended chest from doing all 3 daily fractals is:

1-(1-7%)^3 = 19.51%

Of course, please double-check and make sure I didn’t forget something. I’m a little iffy on the probabilities of getting nothing for the bottom tables.

Make sense: but your number only applies to Ascended Armor, not Weapon. Still, calculation makes sense.

Necro’s dagger MH has a superb attack speed on par with the thief’s dagger for being the fastest at breaking the shaman’s bubble. The bunch of extra minions are probably from Death Magic; they soak damage and cleave like crazy, so definitely good on that fractal.

Wait, wasn’t the champion chest the one you get after three random and one of the boss islands? So it’s technically 4 islands.

Agree to Jahroots; you cannot collapse the data that way. The probability to get ascended armor or weapons at all from playing tier 4 fractals daily is about (20+12+6+1)/ (414×4)= 2.3%.

Auto correct is so bad it makes me face palm. I can’t even edit the post on my phone. RIP, Spockj.

Necro is my go to for pugging t4 fractals these days after chrono and tempest for several reasons:
- I have no qualms in playing the glassiest ele but if my pug is gonna pulling their ranged attack for most of the time to “sustain” the fight, my big dps is gonna be poof – 11k at most. Plus, tempest is a natural aggro magnet. It sucks to cancel my meteor shower to dodge.
- I have no problems playing the crazy 50% quickness and cleverly crowd controlling chrono but, if my group is gonna do kittenpoor damage after tucking themselves in every corners and wait for the opportunity to surprise the enemy, I’d rather do some damage and have the ability to soak it when I’m up against them alone.
- Reaper is in a middle ground (kitten necro). They have damage, cleave, crowd control, non projectile range attack, projectile blocking, boon stripping, innate resilience, so many pets, group condi removal, vertical blink. They can do any versatile roles and solo all the trap, in a pug.
- Condi reaper is good. You can kill things and kite them all days. You can occasionally cleave with your beautiful epidemic. You don’t have to worry about not contributing enough dps to your group. But power reaper is better; they smash faces and carry a bad pug group. Those kinds of pug that still use meta strategy of year 2013 empowered by the meta builds for raids (emphasis on raid) but oblivious to fractal mechanics? Yep, them.
- The Power Reaper groups trash mobs for them, disables them by blinding, daze and knocking down while their teammates can have an easy time to do their meta DPS rotation. Like, an ele doesn’t have to go into defensive mode if the adds focus on them? And they can unleash their powerful staff moves? Good for them.
- The Power Reaper provides a handsome pet when tank is needed – guilt free. Not saying that the condi reaper can’t use Flesh Golden but they are gonna cry a bit inside without their favorite jagged horrors.
- The Power Reaper has Might, the Condi Reaper looks at the PS war in their group.
- The Power Reaper walks out of the fractals feeling good; like they just finish a good workout no matter how their pug experience went. They are independent men and women. They are not gonna sit down and whine a kittenton in guild chat about how bad their pugs are, and beg for a guild group.
- I was a non-believer until the Power Reaper carries me so hard at the Mushroom Queen UP in Tangled Depth. Now i ditch my tempest and become a Power Reaper.

Disclaimer: A satire post. Most of the empowerment can be accomplished by understanding the mechanics properly and some experience in low manning fractals. Can do with all classes but reaper just makes it easiest on high level fractals. True fact: Spock carried me and Jeremy (former SC mesmer) at the freakish mushroom HP so the power of carry is real. Spoj is like the most darling and talented reaper i have seen in this game. Look him up, a lot of good stuffs.

My Monday group has a 7-2-1 comp and we never have any issue with Might, which is also the main reason I can never convince my group to go with 2 PS comp setup. It really depends on the people you play with. Some definitely can do the seemingly impossible.

In pugs, I would give everyone the benefit of doubt. If DPS is an issue, it could be individual DPS rotation sucks, or inadequate Might, Quickness, Alacrity or not enough boon bouncing or too many going down, or druids not doing a good job or someone kitten s a certain mechanics that heavily impedes the DPS, or lag or glitches and etc.

Can someone point me to a video of a zerker ele with toughness signet tank please. It would make a good study for me. I’m all for improving myself but the best i could do is zerker gears with cleric rings/accessories; Fresh Air/ Earth; Wash the Pain Away/Feel the Burn/ Flash Freeze/ Signet of Fire.

You can always find it out in Salvation Pass. One thing for sure though, he does push up quite often

Some bosses can be killed or tanked even way after reaching the enrage phase. If you are worried about not being accepted into a raid group that you request the change of a whole game mode to suit your play style, that’s pretty selfish. Your solution should be looking for people with the same mind set as yours to tackle the challenge. Don’t forget to educate yourself about the boss’ mechanics.

Staff is extremely good at Slothasor for its massive hit box and the cleave on the adds. I’vebeen to a semi friend group that replaced ele with thieves and did fine in the dps department too. The only problem we had to get used to is the lack of group stun break after breaking Sloth defiance bar, which requires either the druid well timed glyph of equality (no frost spirit) or everyone’s on their own for blocking/breaking stun. That’s a huge bonus for bringing tempest there.

For other bosses, DPS aside, tempest is one of the safest class to play with all the small heal and Rebound, and even mistform when you’re down to easily save your kitten .

On the Dorms:

I can confirm that you need to both 1. Break the two aura out off the poison and fire room and 2. Kill the portals in the other two rooms and cut the mob’s aggro to register the bonus. It was fixed a while ago that you no longer need to only rescue the asura in the fire and poison room.

I’m aware that some coordinated groups don’t need this kind of bonus but it gets annoying when they show up in a pug, start triggering the event on its own and waste the bonus without the group’s consent and sometimes not even aware of the undeerlying mechanics – just to shave off a few minutes by sending the rest of the group to start Subject Six early. However, it ends up with a very messy boss fight. The OP totally speaking opinion about this fight. It dooms any classes that melee attack if they trigger the initial aggro. A big Ugh!

Khisanth.2948:

I get the first with medium shaders and the second with shaders on high.

I went back and checked again. Yup, I was confused between my Shader and Shadow settings. I agree with you, medium shader gives that brightly lit blade while high shader gives a more subdue, liquid like shimmer.

AndrewMcLeod.3857:

A few players have noticed that new items can be obtained in the Mystic Forge since last week’s update. We added a number of new items to the possible rewards for combining rare weapons in the mystic forge, including Bloodbound weapons, Aetherized weapons, Shadow of the Mad King weapons, and some orphaned skins from Living World season 1.

This was a part of a bigger update to the mystic forge which wasn’t quite ready for this patch, so we pulled most of the changes as well as the release notes. However, since this change did go into the build, I wanted to let everyone know about it.

Can you give an estimate about how rare those skins are? More or less rarer than precursor chance?

Went to check my sword and it’s still the same as the first picture. I have Highest setting on Animation – Texture – Shader. I guess it’s the cause?

Check out spoj’s guide to necrosis and reaper on Dulfy’s website/ Class Guide section.

I’m using a power build (because of AR reasons) but you can do it with Condi build just fine. I use Spite/Death Magic/Reaper, blood fiend/ CPC/Rise/Plague Signet/Flesh Golem. Use Golem to tank Mai until the lightning field is at her feet, quickly CC her. She has a very small break bar that the reaper can handle it alone. Repeat it one more time then burst her when her stacks are at two or below. Stagger Rise with Flesh Golem and stay in shroud when you really have to blow up your blood fiend.

So I solo the final boss for a bit while waiting for my lfg to fill. I notice that if you can successfully break his defiance bar, he will take longer on the ground before teleporting. Ifyou get hit by any of his attack, you receive stacks of frostbite rebuff that deals increasing damage over time by numbers of stacks and reduction of your personal healing and reduction of your DAMAGE ON THE BOSS. If the boss feels too tank/more HP sponge for you? This would be the main reason. Try not to mindlessly stacking on the boss or spread his icy breath to the whole party.

Also, more tips can be found in gw 2dungeons.net.

This is getting awkward when the most simple solution would be someone buy her the expansion.

ANet employees have to pay bills, taxes, mortgage, insurance and tend to their children, too.

Having a death magic reaper with plague Signet is a god send here. You have a reliable “tank” with ample CC and massive condi transfer. The group can actually max melee and supply with more reflection.

Rising Dusk.2408:

TheArtOfMouts.7468:

Oh and PUG have no incitative to do do 76+ Daily Fractal if it not Swampland or Molten Boss.

I have pugged every single T4 Fractal daily thus far and one-shot it every time with no one dying. The quality of player out and about in the Master tier right now at least is very high.

Totally agree. My pug did a level 80+ Volcanic fractal yesterday with no dedicated reflect class (mes/guard/herald/ranger) and we one-shot it easily. My pug in level 100 Mai Trin also finished it in less than half the time required for the challenge mote with no deaths. Either I have a consistently good luck for the past 3 days or the pug quality has been raised past my expectation.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Yes, please keep it on Monday! I vastly prefer that reset since it lines up better with my guild’s raid nights.

Same opinions here. Both of my social guilds have (massive) raid training events on Sunday. If raid reset moved to an earlier hours, I would have to tend to my core group instead of helping out either training teams. Not all of our guild members care about raids and we schedule world boss events on Saturday. So please keep it on Monday!

Hi Crystal,

What do you mean by:

When the Slublings ramp up later in the phase and turn into Evolved Slublings …

Do the new Evolved Slublings spawn or the existing normal Slublings just power up over 9000 level if left unintended? Please clarify, thank you.

;)

I tried helping some friends to finish their dungeoneer collections, then I realized why I have stopped running dungeons since forever: I fell asleep halfway through it. The power creep makes it worse. I feel guilty for literally not doing (or wanting to do) anything and getting carried all the way to the nine. I’ve run out of classes to feel fresh running through dungeons. AND the inventory problem. I had to stop several times to clear it. Annoying af.

Another day, another post in the forum:
“I’m mad. I don’t like this [ ______ ] part of the game because of [ ______ ], [ ______ ], [ _ ]. I have you know that your game is losing [non factual amounts] of players and it is vastly inferior to the other game namely [ ______ ].”

In a following post:
“I don’t care about other people disagreeing with me but they need to learn to read and respect my opinion.”

My response would be: I’m here with the others not agreeing with a lot of points in OP post. So I’m voting that ANet devs don’t change anything.

The ascended equipment dropped from the boss chests does have HoT stats though. Not the generic ones bought with magnetite shards.

rfdarko.4639:

I wanted to post and condense some of the info we got on how fractal development is going, since 1) not everyone goes on reddit, and 2) the info isn’t well organized since the dev is just replying to random posts. You can trawl through all the replies yourself here: /user/anet_sean

Fractal Leaderboards have evolved into something else entirely, and development is on hold.

“So yeah, development on this has been suspended. The more we worked on Fractal Leaderboards the more we realized it just wouldn’t work with Fractals as they are right now.
We did come up with something else entirely that we really do like as an alternative, but that would take a lot of development work and we just have too many problems with Fractals in their current state before we can devote those kind of resources to a project like that.” [x]

The backpiece is no longer linked to the leaderboard/whatever is replacing the leaderboard.

“I can’t promise a certain date, but we’ve de-linked the backpack from Fractal Leaderboards so we can release it sooner rather than later. […] it was originally tied into leaderboards pretty closely. We had to undo all that, which took time. Now we need to test it and make sure all the changes work correctly.” [x]

No plans to release scales above 100 for the forseable future – instead they want to replace boring/annoying instabilities and revamp old fractals.

“For the near future, replacing most likely. We don’t really want to add more levels past 100, because that opens up a whole new can of worms.” [x]

“…as we develop new, better Instabilities we do plan on phasing out the old ones. We’ll likely end up with a mix of new and old Instabilities for a period though, at least until we develop enough new ones.” [x]

“We’re borrowing a page from Raids here with things like phase transitions and different attacks, which will then become more challenging at higher scales (e.g. larger AoEs, shorter breakbar windows, more punishing attacks when you fail to dodge, etc.)
And yes, we are looking at both doing this for new Fractals and reworking old Fractals to incorporate these things as well. It will take us some time to get to all the old Fractals though.” [x]

“Swamps of the mist” will be addressed through reward structures rather than re- balancing individual fractal difficulty.

“‘Swamps of the Mists’ is definitely not ideal. I think the main driver behind this is how the Daily Achievements are structured, so we’re currently looking into reworking those to encourage players to play all of our different Fractals.” [x]

" we originally though about just making Swamp longer, but realized people would just move onto Jade if we did that… and Snow after that… etc.
We’re hoping the changes to daily achievements will resolve this issue, without actually making any of the individual Fractals longer/harder." [x]
__________________________________________________________________

In terms of a priority list/timeline of changes, from his responses I think it’s something like this:

• Immediate future: Finishing fractal backpiece, changes to reward structure to discourage swamps of the mist.

• Soon-ish future: New/reworked instabilites, new fractal islands with raid-like multiphase bosses.

• On hold/soon™: The “not-leaderboard”, whatever it ends up being.

• wishlist/far future: rework agony, reword scaling system. (“Maybe instead of having scales at all, you would just play Core Molten Duo or Casual Jade Maw or something like that, instead of Scale 40 and Scale 20.” [x])

And, finally, he did confirm that the backpiece will also function as a glider skin. [x] If I missed any big or relevant points let me know and I’ll add them above.

Edit: added links to the quotes.

Thanks for the nice summary. Here’s hoping fractals are exciting to play again.