Guild Wars 2

Ya, this kind of build is tops for pve bosses in fractals and such, since you’ll basically get 20 perma bleed stacks and burning with koi cake. Only signet of fire is really necessary in PvE though. I think runes of perplexity might help since you get 3 stacks of confusion pretty often.

Personally I would run 30/20/20 because lingering elements+elemental attunement+cd improvement+longer boon duration is just way too good, even compared to a few more condi cleanses. The condi cleanses are worth even less when you consider you have diamond skin and ether renewal (+ potentially rock solid) to mitigate conditions.

That would be laughably overpowered. However, 90% is a bit too high. 80 to 85% might be reasonable, but I would rather just see the current form moved to master tier.

I think soldier’s is better for the traits you are running. Easier to keep up diamond skin, easier to survive in general, healed hp has more staying power, and you get more bang for your buck from that 10% toughness converted to condition damage.

Celestial might be even better.

We aren’t as bad as Nikkinella says, but we have like one good build, and have a bunch of horribly and unjustifiably nerfed abilities like ride the lightning (which went from 15s to 40s cooldown because of a single pvp map). Our hp is also way too low.

That said, it’s easy to hop between game modes with the same build compared to some other classes, we are good at tagging things, and good at soloing content in pve due to strong healing over time.

It’s a small victory since forcing necros to run a bit more power instead of balls to the wall condition/survivability makes them just slightly less effective in general. So while running diamond skin is still usually trash, our other builds got a slight buff compared to necro.

Don’t wear your cheezy dire armor then. That stat combo was never meant to be in the game in the first place, and it’s good there is something to dissuade you from using pure dire. If you run carrion you have no excuse for not being able to melt off a piddly 1500 to 2000 hp. If you are a thief just use your power based instead of condition based moves. The whole point of thief no-cd skill system is to be able to use whatever move works best for the situation, and if you are spamming condition moves against a diamond skin ele with a carrion thief (which has a good amount of power), that is l2p.

Well these skins were never going to be exclusive with how many of them there were to begin with. If you like them for looks, get one. If you want exclusivity these have always been some of the absolute worst skins in that regard.

Thanks for making me sell half my cache of 20000 crystals before the hotfix anet. Get it right the first time so you don’t screw players out of money for no reason.

It was a really short-sighted change honestly. They were just like “oh, ground target would be op on heal so let’s just slap it on arcane wave.” They just assume it’s a buff because there’s more range, when in reality it is a lot more clunky now. The beauty of that skill was how effortlessly you could throw it into combos without thinking. Half the time I’m turning the camera when using the skill and now you can barely do that.

Same. It sucks that I bought the halloween costumes the first year and they came back, but didn’t buy the wintersday one and now it hasn’t come back.

juno.1840:

Jabberwock.9014:

This trait is an absolute mess. It renders 1v1 against condition necros a 100% win, but is subpar against almost literally everything else. Anything more than 1v1 you are at a huge disadvantage because that 10% buffer will be gone in a millisecond. Additionally power builds will still destroy you since you can’t take evasive arcana for healing.

The only benefit I can see this having is forcing necros to build some power with their condition damage so they aren’t hard countered by a single trait.

I’m going to ask if you’ve tried it — because I did. It was in 20 on 20 zerg fights in WvW and I thought it was amazing. I could clearly see a difference. I avoided all initial condition spam. In addition, when I top my health off I’m immune again. In fact I don’t have to try sometimes because my team mates are also throwing out group healz which keeps me immune that much longer.

I found myself laughing out loud multiple times last night and probably convinced at least two other players in our guild to dust off their elementalists and give it a go.

Too many theory crafters have crafted this trait as useless, and it’s far from it.

I suppose I tried an offensive build with 25 in fire and carrion amulet which may have contributed. Maybe soldier’s amulet would fare better. But like you say, in wvw zergs with teammates topping your health off it’s probably better. For sPvP or solo roaming I don’t think it’s worth it.

What kind of gear did you have? Healing power? Toughness? Vitality?

I do quite hate the new wave. It is much more annoying to get off fast blast finishers, and now you can miss.

This trait is an absolute mess. It renders 1v1 against condition necros a 100% win, but is subpar against almost literally everything else. Anything more than 1v1 you are at a huge disadvantage because that 10% buffer will be gone in a millisecond. Additionally power builds will still destroy you since you can’t take evasive arcana for healing.

The only benefit I can see this having is forcing necros to build some power with their condition damage so they aren’t hard countered by a single trait.

Hmm, stock is increasing very slightly, but I don’t know if it’s from panic sellers or what. I would have expected a much faster increase in supply if they weren’t taken out, but maybe the drop rate is just even more abysmal.

I guess I didn’t realize drop rates were that low. However it was a 1/2000 chance, and those guys opened 2000 boxes. That doesn’t guarantee it but it’s a good chance to get at least one. To be specific:

1-[(.9995)^2000] = 1 – .36779 = 63.22% chance

Guess I’ll wait for some more data, but it’s not looking good, especially with sigil prices remaining steady. You’d expect prices to tank fast with thousands of players opening gifts

Is this an oversight? Based on preliminary gift opening statistics on reddit you just removed a best in slot item from the game entirely.

Edit: Ok looking at the trading post now it appears supply is beginning to flow in. It took longer than I expected, but ah well.

So did anyone else notice we can now take 3 traits that give us regen at the same time? To be specific, soothing wave, soothing disruption, and elemental attunement. Coupled with cleansing water, and at least in WvW you’ll be looking at constant condi clears along with almost perma regen. Kind of renders diamond skin a bit more irrelevant imo (note I have yet to try diamond skin).

Ok good, it’s not as catastrophic as I thought. I’ll just wait for prices to stabilize in a few days.

All cloth including linen, wool, and gossamer have fallen since patch. Was there just overspeculation/hoarding or is there something about the patch that makes them less important than wood/ore for the ascended weapons patch? Haven’t been able to log in yet so I don’t know.

A related question would be, what are the requirements to make bolt of damask and how much of it do you need to craft ascended armor?

I love how they felt like the fact that new mesmer heal is slightly worse than healing signet is a problem, so much so that they felt they had to make the active better. Do they not realize mesmer is 100x more elusive than warrior? A constantly stealthing mesmer is already impossible to kill, did they really need a passive that heals them for such an obscene amount? Amount of illusions is a non-factor with the clone on dodge trait.

Good lord, blackwater mesmer will be unkillable. Do they think when they make these skills? Giving the class with the most active defenses the best passive heal in the game is madness. And why are they buffing passive ez mode builds like blackwater and phantasm instead of the actual skill based shatter specs?

Great, another pure damage skill with little utility. Like we didn’t have enough of those already. At least in PvE I can make a very slightly better case on ele DPS.

Edit: Take it back, being a blast finisher ups the utility considerably. Still most effective in PvE for might stacking, but for staff builds that’s a ton of extra healing from water fields.

Arcane wave being ground target might be a little annoying actually, even if it is more versatile… since I usually like to use it point blank after laying down a fire field with offhand dagger.

Edit2: Good lord, the mesmer heal is the most overpowered thing I have ever seen in this game. Do they realize how easy it is to keep clones up with clone on dodge? We will now have mesmers with better heal per second than hs warrior, which is mind bogglingly broken with how many active defenses mesmers have.

Most thieves are horrible and easily killed if you aren’t glass, including my thief. However the ones that are really good AND have ascended equipment are the scariest thing in wvw, because there is no way to keep up with their damage and if they can avoid your attacks for 10 seconds you are good as dead. Even the super strong backstab ones which nearly one shot you, if they can’t play can be killed just with collateral damage and conditions (like burning from fire ring and drake’s breath), because they usually don’t pack condition removal. But yesterday I met a thief who shadowstepped all over the kitten place, bypassing my fire fields, curing conditions with shadow return and doing massive damage from stealth (though visibly not as much as a full glass thief). It didn’t help that she caught me off guard with basilisk vemon while I was looking at my map screen (is it just me, or does this always seem to happen?), but even after recovering with armor of earth I was barely able to scratch her. Hopefully the new cast time on shadow return tunes this type of thief down a bit (but more initiative could very well make it stronger). Also thankfully ascended armor will help counter balance ascended weapons, which right now are pushing the balance in favor of offense.

Unfortunately ele hp seems to be balanced on a single trait setup where we get a lot of healing. This destroys our build diversity because if you pick glass traits like a war, you will only do the same or worse damage than a war (even though you would expect better), but die 3x as fast. Thankfully I don’t really care too much about diversity, and the build in question is good in all game modes so you don’t have to bother with always changing traits like some other classes.

I for one am looking forward to owning the most exclusive future weapon skins. Unlike Braham and Rox weapon skins, these ones actually look awesome, so a year from now they could be regarded more highly than legendaries (like the ghastly grinning shield skin currently is).

I just hope they never release limited edition armor, because I’m always finding different combinations of armor that I like, on multiple different characters, and it would suck to never be able to achieve a certain look because the armor’s gone. For me weapons don’t really define a look and are more of a bell+whistle, so I’m fine with them being temp.

I don’t know why anybody actually buys keys for these items. I buy at least 10 of the skins from the tp every new wave of skins for the same price you’ll pay to get a couple tickets the legit way. The fact is, people getting tickets from free blk drops and personal story make the skins far undervalued on the tp compared to what they are actually worth from a gem to gold conversion standpoint.

Thank ogden! I’ve been waiting for this day ever since stockpiling all 10+ of my characters with linen and wool at 40c!

I certainly don’t relish another ridiculous rng grind for this new tonic, much like the endless mystery tonics from black lion chests. Could you please make it available for 100 pristine relics so I at least have something to look forward to if my luck never improves?

So that’s why every green I salvage seems to give me its crappy sigil lately. I knew I wasn’t hallucinating.

Agreed, it’s getting ridiculous. After a couple month long grind of doing most dailies every day, I finally inched my way into the top 1000 yesterday. But with all these living stories and ridiculously grindy WvW achievements and now a new set of dailies, its going to take ages every day to retain a spot. Guess I’ll just take a screenshot and give up. Probably for the best, the achievement grind is like heroin once you get hooked.

Bunker d/d rarely dies for me in zerg v zerg, and I tag people way easier than with staff, or thief/warrior. I’ve had a lot of tagging practice from farming in orr after launch though lol. You can’t go glass though, you need at least 15 in water and 30 arcana, with some defensive gear. You can burning speed right in the middle of a zerg after popping armor of earth, lay down a fire field, drake’s breath and rtl or lf back out if you get too much damage on you. That alone will get you a ton of bags, but usually you can do more while in the thick of it. Like fire grab, earth dodge, earthquake, spike ring (whatever it’s called), lightning whip, cone of cold, etc.

Sigil of geomancy is great for tagging btw.

Of course for really big zergs that outnumber you and ranged skirmishes at chokepoints, switch to staff.

I think scepter is horrible for open world because it’s terrible at hitting multiple foes consistently. D/D you’ll never not be hitting everything in the immediate area.

I feel like keyboard is good for everything but changing targets, looking behind you, and a couple high priority but low usage skills like elites and healing. Looking behind you is the most obvious candidate for a mouse because it’s hard as hell to hold down two buttons (forward and look behind) with the same hand while using skills with that same hand. Otherwise I think it’s faster and less error prone to trigger skills with your keyboard hand. Everyone’s different though.

I noticed that petrification from boxes o fun also trigger runes of perplexity on yourself, so it may have something to do with how petrification is coded in this game.

Or maybe he was using sigil of generosity.

Yep, the poison air was just a stupid “you can’t go there yet” mechanic, but Anet could have spent at least more than half a minute designing the workaround. Like, at least make it so the filter purifies the entire area for a couple weeks instead of one that temporarily cleanses a radius of 2 feet. At least that would have a lasting impact if destroyed (which it logically should be). Or, at the very least station some vigil around the current one to protect it.

Or just make the gas mask an actual plot device instead of a useless achievement award.

The antitoxin will never be fully injected now. I sure as hell am not going all the way up there again when there is nobody else to even finish the events, much less in a timely manner.

It is the right thing to do to reverse a decision that never should have been made. Yes it sucks that they tempted players with a set that they will no longer be able to use, but this is the fairest decision they could have made outside of releasing all cultural armors to all races. But after the refund (assuming the new set isn’t to your liking) you will be in no worse place than you started before the patch, unless you transmuted over some really expensive skin for some reason.

Regina Buenaobra.6193:

Hey, everyone. We’ve been reading all your feedback about the Flamekissed Armor Skin that was released into the Gem Store yesterday.

Although the Flamekissed Armor uses the same mesh as the Tier 3 Human Cultural Armor, it was not our intention to create an armor skin that so closely matched the existing Tier 3 Human Cultural armor set. The intention was to use the mesh as a basis for creating an armor set that stands apart and is distinct in appearance. However, after reading your feedback, we agree that the Flamekissed armor is not visually distinct enough from Human Cultural Tier 3 armor.

We will do a few things to address this issue.

• We will temporarily remove Flamekissed Armor Skin from the Gem Store.
• Players who have purchased Flamekissed Armor Skin will keep the skin.
• We will make new art for the Flamekissed Armor Skin that achieves our goal of making a visually distinct and attractive armor set and does not closely resemble the Human Tier 3 Cultural armor.
• Once this new artwork is completed, we will then update the Flamekissed Armor Skin so that all existing sets that players have purchased get the new art. We will also offer the Flamekissed Armor Skin for sale again at that time.
• When we update the Flamekissed Armor Skins with the new artwork, any player that has already purchased the set and who does not like the new, updated look, can get a full refund by contacting Customer Support.

Note that there is no ETA on when this change will happen. We need to work with the Character Art Team to determine when we can have a new armor skin ready, and this could take some time.

Thank you everyone for providing your feedback. We appreciate that you took the time to let us know how you feel about the new armor set.

Thank you so much for doing the right thing! My faith in you guys has been restored with this move, and if I like the new art enough I will probably end up buying it myself! And thankfully I won’t have to continue my anti-gem buying protest during black friday if there end up being some good deals.

Brighthawk.2705:

Flameseeker Prophecies says “hi”

lol yep. The first legendary to be demoted to second tier, and by a halloween skin no less. Ghastly Grinning Shield skin is the new de facto shield legendary given its price and aesthetics.

It would be my position that they all would be less prestigious, yes. But it would also be my position that it would be fair since they would be equally so.

Ashen.2907:

Ultimately the changes are unfair to human mages, not because it is now cheaper to buy human t3 light armor, even human mages can take advantage of that price reduction, but because their selection of armor did not increase to the same degree as is the case for other races. Had all t3 cultural armor received the same treatment I don’t think there would be a valid complaint other than, possibly, that separate armor skins for each race had merit (to some).

This is where we disagree and it is the same point I keep calling you out on, yet you claim to agree on. Decreasing the price of the knockoff t3 human mage armor IS unfair to human mages because it reduces the prestige and rarity of t3 human mage armor, regardless of the fact that they themselves can buy the new armor.

Ashen.2907:

I specifically make reference (on more than one occasion) to the unfairness of price reduction on one race’s cultural armor. The fair thing to do would be to extend the practice to all cultural armor or to remove the option for the one. What you consider, “a big deal,” (presumably a negative big deal) is exactly what I pointed out as being wrong with the situation. So again, you are agreeing with my point while claiming to disagree.

Can you point me to where you say it in that post? Because all I see is:

Ashen.2907:

I agree that there is a reasonable concern with one race’s supposedly unique cultural armor going into the gemstore for other races to buy, but price reduction over time less so… The issue is not price reductions but unfair access to supposedly race specific skins.

I haven’t read your entire post history to verify that you don’t contradict yourself in a prior post, but at least in this post you seem to make the case that price reduction is not an important factor. Of course the wording “less so” is ambiguous but that is the impression I got, especially with the concluding sentence backing it up.

But anyways, since we seem to agree on everything but degree to an extent, there isn’t really much else to discuss. Whether it be price or exclusivity, this update is unfair to human mages.

Ashen.2907:

Quoting the relevant portion of the post you quoted as I said almost exactly the same thing you are saying seemingly as counter my post (perhaps you were intending it to be taken as a sign of agreement ?)

I’m disagreeing with your assertion that price reduction is not a large factor as well as race exclusivity. In the vacuum that you assume it is certainly not a big deal (things go on sale all the time). However, I claim that it IS a big deal that there is a whopping 50%+ price reduction on a single race’s t3 armor, reducing the prestige of only that race’s armor. There are going to be a LOT more people running around in “human t3 armor” after this update, both because it is available to all races AND cheaper.

Of course in my opinion lack of race exclusivity is still by far the largest problem, and a slap in the face to all humans.

Ashen.2907:

Substance E.4852:

Just because the armor has been in game since launch doesn’t mean most people have had it since launch.

Indeed. Not particularly relevant to the point I made though as prices going down on things that have been around for a while is pretty common in not only games but life as well. People buy something today that will be reduced in price tomorrow all of the time.

I agree that there is a reasonable concern with one race’s supposedly unique cultural armor going into the gemstore for other races to buy, but price reduction over time less so. I mean, if transmutation stones had their price permanently reduced starting tomorrow would people be complaining about having paid the original price six months ago ? I doubt it (hmm, this is the internet so perhaps there would be some). The issue is not price reductions but unfair access to supposedly race specific skins.

The problem is not a price reduction. The problem is a price reduction on ONE race’s t3 armor while leaving the rest the same. Everything wrong with this update is about singling out human light armor wearers. The price reduction and loss of race exclusivity would not be so much of a problem if they were both applied fairly across ALL races and armor classes (which I doubt will ever happen).

0/10, and I would never rate any other update below 5/10. That’s because until today no other update has single handedly destroyed a pillar of the game. Sure some updates might be boring, but at least they never actively sabotaged the existing game.

The thing is, it’s barely even possible to port sylvari and asura armor to other races. So we will likely never see those races singled out in this fashion.

Heavy norn t3 cultural with blue fire. Only fair right?

Beorn Saxon.4762:

I disagree, I think everyone would be fine if all cultural armor was available to all races,

ALL being the operative word. If all cultural armors became available to all races, this move would be understandable. However as it is, only one race and armor type has been singled out to be screwed over. Now light human t3 armor is less unique and prestigious than every other t3 in the game, and arguably every t1 and t2 as well (at least a norn can’t equip those yet). And yes, that is the major problem almost everybody has with this move.

korelg.7862:

but… why is that an “issue”?

>I got an item with a certain amount of effort and I enjoyed it
>new version of said item comes out cheaper

up till that point I see no problem whatsoever and I don’t wanna think that the problem is that now people can get this new version with less effort… i’d understand that for Legendary skins maybe, but cultural armor is really common and easy to get, also you know who got it the “hard” way and who got it from the gemstore just by looking at the weird fire effect

You guys are being quite childish here, If you have your cultural armor and you like it, be happy, you should not care if someone else is getting it for 1 silver a piece, good for them, I have my stuff, I enjoy it, that’s all that matters

The problem is an absolute disrespect for lore, people’s permanent choices, and a singling out of a single race and armor class. It is just a slap in the face seeing sylvari and norns charading in my human’s CULTURAL armor that is meant to be a sign of racial pride, and pride in the choice that I made in the beginning of the game to roll a human. Cultural armor is one of the few defining features of a race along with racial elites. Now there is less and less reason to justify having rolled a human. Norns already get WAY better elites (snow leopard), and now they get to wear our armor too. Just great. Might as well kill off humans for good in the next living story.