Guild Wars 2

Strength all the way. I will say you’re going to be lacking on speed but pretty sure Strength runes will allow you to take locust signet and still be an overall DPS gain compared to slotting something else there, and if you go BM trait line you can grab dagger runspeed as well.

So what I’m reading is, make your weapons, do you guild missions or spend your laurels on earrings (or do achievements for sinister), save laurels (or achievements for sinister) for neck, and do some fractals (or achievements) for rings. Boom you’ve gotten the majority of your advantage and work on armor if you feel like it (by far biggest investment). Ohh and back slot, ehh spend what is it like 100g to get the Thousand Arrows one? woopty do. Sound like you’re looking at a month or so of laurel farming, ~300g if you have your crafting done already, and doing a month of guild missions plus like 20 fractals.

Really something worth complaining about?

CCLegion.5936:

Filling out our crit% is already a nice boost, as are Gravedigger hits. Considering that we have evidence of 30k GD crits, with crits going up to 40k being reported.
That alone should give us respectable damage spikes while above 50%, pulling our overall DPS up. Below 50%, we can spam these hits, again helping the rather weak non GD hits out. While I have done little more than Mk1 Eyeballing the numbers, it looks like GS will beat out dagger in pretty much every scenario due the combination of Gravedigger and Nightfall.
That being said, it looks like new PvE encounters will require more mechanical knowledge than straight up DPS. Vale Guardian had a rather small HP pool for its role. 22 million is not that high when you have 10 people and 7-8min to do it. That is going by the one boss encounter we know though. Not enough data for accurate predictions.
As for the Reaper as tank, Death Magic helps, especially through “Rise!” with a bit of Spectral Armor for Protection uptime.

Don’t forget the phases it’s more like 6-7 mins, but still you don’t need insane DPS.

Certainly didn’t seem shabby and I’m sure they would agree they could do even better. We still haven’t had time to really figure out optimal rotations and what not.

This game is the best you can expect from a modern game. It’s not the games fault, it’s not this communities fault, it’s simply the way the internet has become. I’ll say this is not the best community I’ve seen in an MMO, not even the second best, but it’s not nearly as kittenome people make it out to be. It’s not any worse than anything you’ll see at this point.

I do miss my old EQ community, where I could let strangers just put their dungeon path purchases on a tab and pay me the next time they saw me, or even just pay me whenever they got the cash, I literally never didn’t get paid. I was worried once as the person disappeared after it was over for like 2 days, the next day I get a whisper from them to meet me in the main hub so they could pay me. Really awesome community in that game, but that was a super old game, and still had it’s negatives, on the PVP servers we certainly mastered griefing (I was a kid then so I participated my fair share, my guild even got famous at the time for one of it’s members http://www.notaddicted.com/fansythefamous.php) thankfully that was pretty much reserved for the PVP servers and left there. The non PVP servers if someone was a jerk, you simply didn’t play with them, never really had issues.

Anyways getting off track in nostalgia (if you want a laugh that link is pretty funny, note you couldn’t kill people under level 6 on PVP servers, so he did a lot of things to mess with people, some of the most beautiful trolling/griefing I’ve ever seen), but GW2 is as good as it gets now. Follow that same mentality I saw in EQ and you don’t have many problems. Treat people with respect, avoid people that are jerks (you can usually tell withing the first minute of playing with someone) and your time isn’t wasted often. I’ve personally had very few issues. The thing I find most trollish in this game is the megaservers

BoogerSammich.7189:

Doesn’t the fact that it’s RNG completely negate anything meaningful that would otherwise be derived from your statistics? IE: lets say that there is a hard 16% chance that you get a drop. You can roll on that chance a billion times, however, your chance will always be 16%. Or maybe im wrong, which in retrospect is probably more likely… lol

Your chances of getting something and the probability that you’ll get something over a period of time are two different things.

The probability that it’ll land on red 3 times in a row during roulette doesn’t change that the roll is still the same chance/odds each roll… many gamblers have been tricked by probability.

SlyDevil.3952:

I was getting 3 pop-ups per gravedigger, but no effect was being applied, and no extra damage numbers were popping up when I used dark fields instead.

Soul spiral was getting like 12 popups, but after 2/3 the bolts stopped being applied because they were hitting the condi caps, likewise life steal bolts were only appearing a couple times on dark.

Never got into raids to fiddle with a break bar and chill bolts, work and UI problems conspire against me.

Interesting, and I didn’t even think about that, I knew chill capped at 3 but I figured it’d just re-up, but yeah they don’t, darn. I was thinking how great that paired with the chill→vuln trait, but naw, i mean still not bad, but not that wtf amount of vuln I thought. Sometimes I forget to think.

Sorin.4310:

Zantet.4167:

This happens in at least 95% of the time in every single PUG I join, the worst is ARAH.

Something tells me that if any 1 of us were to join you with 3 other pugs, that night somehow this “at least 95%” would magically go to pretty much 0%. Extreme hyperboles like this sentence make your entire post’s legitimacy come into question.

^^ Everyone I play with regularly from this forum would either start chit chatting about random stuff, laughing at the people that died, offering to help or most likely putting on a fashion show for those that made it.

Problem I see is that if it’s tuned to exotics then anyone who has ascended will have an easier time. Many of these people are the more hardcore, those who have been yearning for this content for a long time… and it gets cheapened because other people aren’t willing to spend the time to get ascended, which simply isn’t that hard to do.

Alternately you can make the extra stats not count, or at least should (when you delevel the bonus stats don’t scale sub 80 I think it was even ascended is treated as exotics), but that just makes all that investment null, leaving a pretty bad taste in a lot of mouths of people who did spend that time.

In the end those who got ascended would be cheated or at least feel that way if the content was tuned to exotic levels.

Personally I rather have my ascended turned into exotic than for me to get an advantage over the tuning level. And I wouldn’t really mind that but I KNOW many would.

But, ascended really isn’t hard to get, I’m sitting on 3 sets of heavy, 4 sets of medium, 1.5 sets of light and have 65 damask in the bank, ohh and like 2 dozen weapons. I really don’t even play that hardcore and certainly never cared much about gold farming.

I can kinda see the argument for newer players, but players of the caliber that can jump into raids in a month or even 2 are not going to see ascended gear as much of a struggle. And I know if I had any of my top tier friends from old games jump into GW2 I’d be decking them out in ascended right away, and they’d probably be able to pay me back within a week.

It’s really not too bad, jump around to breach or near breach maps and farm a little and do the bosses. Bosses aren’t too dull if you melee them, they all can be if done properly (toughest is probably blue, need reflect stuffs).

Anyways do that like a dozen times or so and you can buy both insignia/inscription and then you’re done if you want to just convert ascended gear. Took me a day or two playing there for an hour or two.

Curious, I saw someone say that the speed shrooms will increase attack speed as well as run speed, can anyone confirm/deny that? If so with masteries we’ll have even more damage, meaning even less stressful timers. Again, I have no clue if that’s right, but saw it somewhere and was curious.

Ayrilana.1396:

They won’t do that because it will go against Colin’s speech on it during TwitchCon. Imagine how Underworld is today and the accomplishment it is to solo it. Would it be the same if it were nerfed the next day so that practically any generic team build could beat it?

Unfortunately even Colin’s words are turned around and twisted by ANet to fit whatever their current goals are.

Iris Ng.9845:

You are being too soft, Jerus. Arah didn’t stay difficult for too long. I don’t expect Raid will feel as difficult as we are perceiving it now.

You bet I’m soft, have you seen this community? There’s an even smaller % of players who want even dungeon level content, and now we’re getting like two or three steps ahead of that. A large portion of the community is going to kitten and moan. It’s going to drown out those that really enjoy it with shear numbers. I think that’ll wear on the support they will receive eventually. There has to be something to bring in the numbers.

I think Easy modes are how you do that. Problem is you can’t give the same rewards and have the normal mode still matter. You can’t give superior rewards without still hearing complaints. It’s a difficult situation no matter how you look at it. But, something needs to happen I think just to bolster numbers. Nerfing the raids is NOT the right answer, that’s just lame. Giving easy modes that replace the content isn’t the answer either. The answer is somewhere in between. Without progressing in gear stats the tried and true method of the content being naturally trivialized such that it opens up to more casual players isn’t an option either.

There’s got to be something though, or we’ll just see the same kittenstorm we’ve seen before. I really think removing the special loot, then removing enrage timer or extended the player cap for a training run option once the next wing is released will be the best option, or at least the best one I can think of right now. “here go learn it, once you have it down you’ll be able to do the hard version and get that special item you were looking for,” maybe add a title to those that get the raid down before the next wing opens?

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

One thing that did come to mind today is that Reaper (and Necro in general, really) does have one odd bit of desirable functionality for the Vale Guardian fight. There are circles that appear that you need to stand in. The more bodies in that circle when it ends, the less damage you take from the follow-up attack.

These don’t have to be player bodies. Minions can be used as well. On top of that, at least in the Vale Guardian fight, the boss and NPC’s don’t seem to attack minions much at all. My Flesh Golem was up for the majority of the fight. There are also adds that spawn in the fight, and, although they are largely ignored due to slow movement and melee range, they will let Reaper shouts (including Rise!) scale up.

If that is indeed not a mistake, Minion Necro + Turret Engi = duo every lightning field while throwing range damage on the boss. I have a feeling that will change though.

Ensign.2189:

With the amount of running around to stand in circles in that fight I would think Elementalists would be pretty useful – they still do pretty good DPS (not Revenant / Engineer levels but better than the rest) and do so at range, so they should be competitive while doing to mobile tasks.

Thief? I see no reason to take a thief into a raid as currently constructed.

The mobile tasks require some level of durability though, which could prove troublesome for Ele.

Neko.9021:

My biggest problem with having an “Easy Mode” and “Hard Mode” for raids is that it removes something big for players to strive for.

Right now, players just do the very easiest dungeons, and never do any of the hard dungeons. People sell Fractals and Arah because that few people want to do these. Plus, they can use the money they got from doing all those easy dungeons.

If raids had an “Easy” and “Hard” mode, no one would take raiding seriously, even if someone said it was a “Hard mode” kill. Everyone would just say “Yeah, I killed the Vale Guardian” with a party full of Nomad’s characters versus an untimed Vale Guardian. People would strive for the lowest common denominator (as they already do with dungeons), and ignore the hard content.

By making all raids hard, it forces people to respect raids as difficult content that they must either organize and get better for, or just not do at all.

And unlike many other MMOs, GW2 gives plenty to do for less skilled players. Fractals are being revamped, the Verdent Brink has been great, and stuff like grinding masteries or working on a guild hall all are great distractions for casuals.

And by keeping raids exclusive, when someone does manage to beat a wing, or even a single boss, people will look to that person and know that they were part of a truly skilled group. For the first time, GW2 can grant a real sense of accomplishment to PvE players – something that it’s lacked for a long time (see: credit card legendary weapons and RNG fractal skins).

Raids should be brutal and exclusive. The timer should be kept low to prevent players from using too many support characters or too tanky of builds. And no “Easy Mode”, which would ultimately cause people to just devalue raids and never take them seriously.

Problem with that is you’re designing content for a smaller group of players. Eventually someone will say “wait a minute, this isn’t right” Which is very valid.

I’d love if a business model could maintain that but I don’t think any game truly can.

What I’d like to see, especially if every boss is going to use an enrage timer, is when a new wing is opened, the previous gets an easy mode with the timers removed, perhaps if there is a super special item everyone wants from the raid you keep that in hard mode, it’ll serve as a training ground if they really want that reward. But, either way everyone would have the chance to get a taste of the content, just delayed if you don’t want the challenge.

Keegers.2573:

Iris Ng.9845:

It’s like asking to remove timers from Tequatl or Triple Trouble. Bad move ;(

What if instead of a timer, you had damage from the boss go up exponentially over a set of time, that way you still are under a time constraint but gives more leeway towards exact timers.

That’s exactly what we’re getting, it’s just a harsh amount of damage (already lowered after the beta as per Crystals post). But, yes I agree if they say added 25% damage at 7 mins, then like 50% at 8 mins, 100% at 9 mins, 150% at 10 mins, that’d be ideal as far as I’m concerned. Soft timer, it gets harder, if you take too long you better have a reason for it and be able to survive longer.

That said, GW doesn’t have a trinity system, it’s a more subtle balance. Your tanky guys just need toughness for agro, meaning Rabid on a condi build is pretty much ideal, but maybe Knights or Celestial as alternatives. For healing support again Celestial or maybe keepers if you’re rich. No one should not be focusing on doing as much damage as they can, it’s just that there should be other roles for people to pay attention to as well. Your Healers should not be going to Clerics unless they also intend to tank with toughness (it will screw with agro anyways). Your tanky people shouldn’t need full PVT and surely not all the way to Nomads. GW2 isn’t supposed to have hard roles.

I’m sure people will cite Ele’s but they’re actually a groups most versatile support while doing heavy damage. For a long time the only profession that was truly just DPS was necro and it wasn’t even good at it, now they have some neat support while being decent DPS with Reaper.

Anyways, people should be focusing on damage, timers are needed to keep the pressure of the raid up, otherwise you can just focus on survival and whittle away.

Purple Miku.7032:

Jerus.4350:

50’s are more fun anyways it makes Jade Maw somewhat entertaining at the very least.

I don’t consider clearing a horde of trash very entertaining, this whole encounter is a disappointment due to it not even having a boss fight. So when I get it on any level other than 50 I feel thankful because it means I can semi-AFK it without costing the group anything.

Yeah /shrug, lets be honest the whole game is mainly just keeping you busy. Sure it’s not as fun as Mai or Imbued Shaman, but I hate when the game has me wanting to tab out, I never come back in time.

spoj.9672:

Jerus.4350:

Yeah I was actually looking into that, everyone I asked advised upgrading the router instead saying that long of a cord would still lose a ton… but it’s gotten ridiculous. Once I have time I might just convince them to let me put the modem in my room.

Just get some ethernet powerline adaptors if you dont want a long kitten ethernet cable. They are like £30 for a pair. If you get 2 pairs you can hook 3 computers up to the modem instead of 1.

They do restrict your line speed a bit. But they are perfectly stable and really good if you dont have a ridiculous download speed. I have some that can do 1000Mbps. Which is more than enough for most people.

Got a router, problem is it’d have to string around the house (or through the attic). Will be looking into that if I can’t get the modem in my room though, it’s just gotten beyond bad.

SlyDevil.3952:

Whirl finishers were bugged on gravedigger, I got no procs all weekend while standing in hitboxes. RS 4 only activated a couple whirl finishers, didn’t notice anything happening on break bars(didn’t get to try on the raid boss). From what I heard berserker trait line will replace arms on warriors.

Did you get messages but no effect? I was seeing 3 messages when I was doing it, but I never checked to see if they actually worked.

If you want to have a conversation about it and not just have the generic PVP posturing about how superior you are, please go ahead.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

The problem really comes down to the random unexplained nerfs that appeared on the condition changes patch days.

During the preview 3 days before the patch, bleed was 20% stronger and burn was 20% weaker. This was pretty much perfect. It brought low dps condition classes up, and the god tier classes down and everyone would have been on the same level.

Then on patch day the actual patch nerfed bleed into the ground and buffed burn to the current god tier that it is. There was never any explanation or reasoning given. And no dev has commented on it or even considered nerfing burn since then.

It wouldn’t really bring the “god tier” classes down, ranger and engi both do a lot of bleeds as well, in all honesty it’d probably even out a bit maybe slight decrease but not much. (ranger can burst out quite a few bleeds, engi it’s more their sustain as they just build and build with huge durations).

Anchoku.8142:

High-end PvE should be a difficult, real-time puzzle that changes depending upon actions taken by individuals and teams.

It should be a mixture of (1) tPvP where players need to know what every profession and specialization needs for support with (2) highly-intelligent proactive and reactive AIs aggressively countering a team’s strategy while also having specific strengths and weaknesses players are expected to memorize and build for.

Do the raid bosses dodge red circles or attempt to interrupt big attacks or heals? Were they immune to lightning while the break bar drops faster to blind than any other condition? Did any boss corrupt one type of boon like fury and strip other types?

I’ll say if that was how high end PVE was defined I’d not be doing high end PVE. What you describe is taking PVP and making PVE to replicate it. They’ve very different entities.

The main difference is that I’m not going against a player. It’s not skill vs skill, it’s skill vs mechanics set up to activate either statically or randomly in a way to challenge the player. When randomness doesn’t give you counter play so that you can overcome it with skill, well it’s just silly. Randomly evading bosses are dumb. Ones that intelligently evade can be manipulated and it’d be another form of CC. I could go on, but I think that what you describe is great for PVP because it’s skill vs skill, if you get interrupted/dodged its’ because taht player was good enough to answer your tell, in PVE it’d just be either random or manipulatable and naw, that’s not good design.

50’s are more fun anyways it makes Jade Maw somewhat entertaining at the very least.

Wasabi Kitty.8247:

Rising Dusk.2408:

Ascended gear is really easy to get for free from just playing the content that rewards it. The trick is to not grind for it, but to always do content that has a chance to reward it. Do fractals L50 a bit, or L40 if you think L50 is too hard. And before anyone cries RNG, it’s statistical inevitability when you do the content that rewards it enough.

I beg to differ. I figured I would run fractal 49s for a bit until I got at least 2 or 3 ascended chest drops and then craft the rest of the armor. After 2 weeks of 49 and 40 daily, I have still yet to get a single chest drop. That’s not including the 2/3 weeks of doing 31-39 daily without getting an ascended chest drop.

Very unlucky, or quick question, has your personal level been at 41+ that whole time?

Onerios.4962:

Forum error swallowed post, so will just type out conclusions. Same sort of rough maths as before so don’t go waving it in anyone’s faces as proof.

+ 50% pure greatsword rotation: 1.465 per second
-50% pure greatsword rotation: 1.747 per second
Dagger auto + horn5 (no wells): 1.373 per second
Shroud auto chain: 0.93 per second (which is understandable when you consider that it can solo max might and vulnerability against a lot of things)

Wells add roughly 0.15, so dagger/horn does beat out greatsword over 50% by a bit, so there is probably some sort of optimal dagger/horn/greatsword/shroud rotation that you can do, although you are obviously trading off the utility of a second weapon set for it, so it may not be practical.

BTW, this is a good thing that there is not to great a margin between the two, it means that you can go and fix base necros issues without worrying about sending reaper into overdrive.

That’s my thought, I want to see a rotation and how that works out. The numbers that are thrown around on the forums are not basic singular weapon damages. They’er full rotations.

I’m curious what we can hit with an optimal rotation.

My thought was something like GS 432 → Dagger → Locust if horn or focus4 → auto till weapon swap up, → GS 432 → RS (not sure if any skills here are higher damage?) → drop when dagger ready, rinse/repeat until 50% and can go GD/Well/Nightfall spamming.

With that you get your dagger but then you can get your harder hitting GS skills in too and mitigate the GS auto’s lower damage with RS.

I imagine some kind of rotation like that would be optimal… but hey maybe just sticking to dagger is better? who knows till the math is done I will say the vuln application could be very useful with a full rotation in a group that lacks full uptime).

Cogbyrn.7283:

How are you measuring the success of a class in PvE?

High end PVE is not about speed, at least not in the sense that high end PVE is about speed running. Naw, that’s a fun side game once you’ve mastered the content enough that you find it pretty trivial.

High End PVE is when content is actually something that you might fail and be unable to complete.

In that sense, if a class puts your group at such a disadvantage that it may push it to the point that they can’t complete the content, then it’s a bad profession.

I think Necro is ok at this point, not great, but ok. Reaper is going to be a strong damage profession. Necro as a whole is nice in that it is a very durable profession almost tailor made to do things like absorbing those lightning fields. As far as range damge is concerned I think Necro is actually a decent one, I know compared to Engi it’s very close, if the target is mobile Ele falls a lot, and I’m not sure on Ranger but I’d imagine they’re up there (esp with double LB quick draw).

I’m content with Necro currently esp with the design of what we’ve seen for raids so far. If I had complaints it’d be more general game stuff (bleeds need to be better, burn worse) and I’d still kill for a block and or evade skill (even on longer than average cooldown). I don’t think Necro is far off from being a solid addition, and certainly an acceptable one.

Rising Dusk.2408:

P.S. I really hope we can buy Keeper’s recipes for Karma in HoT. Those should be really fun if healing is meaningful in raids.

Doh, yeah deleted that part when I edited to rephrase. Really hope Keeper and Sinister gear become easier to acquire. Sinister gear isn’t bad but trinkets are tedious. I’d really like if they opened that up a bit. I’d say Nomad’s too but really no one should be using that (Sentinels as well).

About the agro with toughness. It’s actually always been there, it’s just each boss handles agro differently, and even the ones that did really like toughness it was still inconsistent. Watching these raids it seems they strengthened that factor. In fractals it’s heavily based on proximity for many of the fights, toughness being pretty solid as well, but then you have other factors or even maybe just RNG thrown in to prevent being able to have a fully designated tank purely.

That said, doing Clerics guard Fractals it really feels very similar to the trinity. I can sit back and DPS from my max range (dipping in and out of 180 range on my engi) while the tank keeps him still and me healed.

I feel these raids are going to bring some of that back, but with a feeling similar to how the high end of other games do it. Where your healers and tanks aren’t just healers and tanks but also trying to hybridize themselves to pump out as much damage as they can in addition to performing their role. (I miss my fully DPS geared Celestial healer in DCUO solo healing the hardest raid, kept you on your toes )

I don’t think PVT should ever be desirable. Knights/Rabid/Celestial, yes, they should, but we’re already seeing that. I think by the time you get to PVT it’s more annoying than fun. I think they did a great job on this raid, I was very worried but it seems solid, if they continue to build with that design I’ll be happy. I wouldn’t mind wanting another Rabid/Knights/Celestial person being needed. I wouldn’t mind wanting your “healer” in Keeper/Celestial. But, I don’t want it to go to the point where we really have to tank up hard. That just seems contrary to what makes this game good, the focus on actively defending yourself. Healing is actively helping your group, and toughness allows you to manipulate the agro, both a bit different than just raising passive defenses.

Ahh kk, thanks, like I said it’s been a good 10 years since I really touched any of the finer points of statistics, and it’s kitten hard to look up formulas when you don’t remember the terminology. That certainly sounds more like it. Sorry for misreading that.

Personally I’ve actually seen better rewards at 30 than at 50 >.< I should do them more but it’d probably change, just seems everytime I bother to do a 30 I get something of value.

Blaeys.3102:

A lot of people are preaching that the purpose of tight enrage timers are to keep all bunker teams from cheesing the content.

What we are actually seeing in the community however – including by several in this thread – is a general shunning of ANYONE not wanting to play zerker or sinister.

There needs to be a place in raids for those players who want to play a little tankier – who want to focus on soaking up damage so the rest of the team doesn’t have to.

So, yes – all bunker teams shouldnt be viable, but people playing bunker builds should still have a place in the typical raid. In fact, I saw this very clearly in the beta boss fight – one or two bunkers absorbing the orbs actually increases the damage the group can do on the boss.

Designing fights or balancing enrage timers around everyone playing the same way would be bad design. That is true of all bunker groups, but it should be just as true of all zerker (or all pure damage) groups.

So, to the few perpetuating the hate for non-meta builds or people wanting to play bunker, stop and think about what youre really saying.

I think it’s quite contrary. I think a lot of people here have experience with raids. Enrage timers are something that needs to be there or more the idea. If you’re going to tank up, you need to have something that increases the challenge for you otherwise it’s just getting easier but longer. That’s not challenging content.

Also I believe each team that beat the raid brought a Pillar, I’m hesitant to call it a tank, but really it was a tank. We saw NA bring a tankier Engi, LoD bring a Cele Guard, and just in general someone had the toughness to keep agro and survival to live through that. I wouldn’t be surprised if we later saw a fight where we needed to hold 2 bosses in separate areas meaning 2 people with toughness to pull agro (or something to hold agro).

Also, Crystal already loosened up the Enrage by decreasing the buff, with your extra sustain in a more durable group you should be able to last longer into the enrage than a team that focuses offense and just fails the timer. I don’t think she said the number but she seemed to imply that it was less harsh and finishing it past the enrage timer would be doable, but how reasonable it is to survive /shrug.

Anyways, I don’t think you’re wrong in that there should be benefits for alternate build options to have value, it’s just that enrage timers are needed to put pressure on the damage side of things. As i said before I’m a fan of soft enrages, where it’s a gradual or light ramp up that would kill more offensive teams that simply failed but be something that a more defensive team could push through at least for a decent amount of time.

Curious can Ele stomp in obsidian Flesh?

Prisoner.2419:

Going by our drops spreadsheet, the combined ascended chest rate for 50s is ~16.43%. So unless my math is wrong, the chances of not getting an ascended chest in a week of 50s is (1 – .1643)^7, or ~28.5%.

It’s been so long since I did statistics, I was just thinking if its’ ~1/7 chance, then you should expect one every 7 days or so. Is it really only 28.5% chance of getting one in 7 days? just doesn’t seem intuitive, but that’s statistics!

Rising Dusk.2408:

Chokolata.1870:

So, if you dont mind me asking. What would the preferred classes/builds be then?

Lots of Sinister Engineers and Berserker Heralds coupled with a couple tankier/CC-heavy/supporty classes like Guardians, Druids, and Warriors.

Don’t forget Chrono

btw, to those who did the raid, how are the soft CCs working on breakbar. I watched the one Reaper viewpoint I saw but I didn’t see him doing the RS5→RS4 rotation for breakbar, was thinking that’d do some work on it.

Anyways for Condi I’d imagine it’s something like Engi>Ranger>Guard with maybe berserker thrown in there somewhere (still waiting to see what people figure out for that, not huge on warrior but looks interesting to me).

Isn’t the Exotic crafting backpacks only a small fraction off ascended? Or is it still large enough to be hugely impactful? I know the rings/earrings/neck are certainly worth getting. But, those aren’t that hard. What is it 2 weeks of guild missions for an Earring?

Again I’d say the big thing is that it’s a soft requirement, you can be working on the raid while you work on maxing your gear.

phys.7689:

dlonie.6547:

It’s also worth pointing out trinkets. The bulk of the stat increases come from ascended trinkets and they’re thrown at you from pretty much every game mode. You even get some just by logging in daily and saving up laurels.

Getting a decent amount of ascended gear isn’t really a grind at all. Armor can be if you want to craft it, but you can get “enough” ascended gear to be useful without much trouble, and collect the other pieces as they come.

its grind or time gate, rings i will say have the best aquisition method, accessories, and amulet require a signifigant time gate. backpiece is a signifigant grind gate

Its not really better to tell people who want challenge to do boring stuff for a month or log in and log off before they are ready.

The methods of aquisition for ascended overall, are not engaging, and far too time gated. I feel like you will lose a lot of players before they can even attempt a raid with those type of hurdles before playing.

It’s a soft requirement. Nothing will stop you from starting with exotic and working on Ascended in your free time to give yourself a little bump.

If you’re ready for a raid you should be able to farm some fractals which again has a bit of a ramp up to get to all your rewards but it’s something to work on.

Then you can work on your crafting and get ready there.

It’s progression, I mean I’m with you, I’d love if all PVE was just like PVP and i just chose my stats and was of no need to put any work in other than doing the content. That’d be great for me. But, that’s not the game, it’s not an RPG and we’re not going to get it. There will be some progression in this game.

Agree dlonie, from watching the videos seemed pretty easy to avoid on the last guy, which is fine, the difficult part of that is having all the other things to worry about (plus particles) but on the training guardians should probably be a little more intense to ingrain it into your memory.

Personally, in AC I just want to get out ASAP… I don’t know if I would have rushed the boss, but I’d have been tempted. When it comes to anything outside Arah and Fractals I just want to get it over with. Can’t blame other people for feeling the same way. And, in the end 1 champ bag, ehh. This is hardly worth calling malignant imo, rude, sure.

I haven’t done it, but also haven’t heard of anyone who has. But, as someone who’s been playing a lot of condi, mainly Engi and Ranger, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to get by with a ranger, it’s just Engi is the king and all the raids I knew of were focusing on that for their Condi guys. Been a while since I saw the math but I want to say Ranger was at like 17k vs Engi’s 20k, where Ranger like 1.5k of that is pet and the rest is around 90-95% condi or something like that. Engi is like 90% condi IIRC So it’s like ~14k vs 18k in condi damage? Just rough estimate going off what I think the numbers were, I will say I feel it’s easier for Ranger to actually get their full condi where Engi you can easily get mixed up in the rotation and miss a lot of damage (just my opinion there).

As Taku mentions though, you’ll actually be able to make up some of that difference just by giving your Engi’s that Sun Spirit then of course Frost spirit for power users.

TheFantasticGman.9451:

Purple Miku.7032:

Drop rate differences are abysmally low.

There’s also pretty rare chance of getting weapon/armor chests, so doing 2 weeks and not getting any chests is very common and to be expected.

What? Seriously? It’s extremely abnormal for me to go a week with zero ascended chest drops from 50s. I usually get 1-3 chests a week from 50s even more if you factor in 30s and 40s. I get fractal weapons and boxes at least 1/3 of the time, and rings or nothing 2/3 of the time. Take last night as an example. I did my regular 50 and got a fractal mace. Right after did my 40 and got the fractal longbow. Sadly already had both… Only missing the harpoon gun to complete the fractal weapon collection.

Aren’t the odds from those that keep records roughly one a week? Consider yourself a lucky person With the odds as they are 1 a month isn’t that rare and shouldn’t be getting upset till you hit that point IMO.

The other people in the house just browse the internet now and then, mainly e-mail. Nothing they’d have to worry about connection speed really. So I think I could get it done, I just haven’t asked. It was ok for a while, but now… not so much. Half sec-1s delay on everything with spikes of worse

Pretty sure it’s just cause it’s an old house lots of crap in the walls blocking signal probably.

Yeah I was actually looking into that, everyone I asked advised upgrading the router instead saying that long of a cord would still lose a ton… but it’s gotten ridiculous. Once I have time I might just convince them to let me put the modem in my room.

Condi engi is a blast, Power rotation is a little more fun with having to do the acid bomb thing, but I like condi as i’ve been having a lot of lag and I don’t have to worry about screwing that or jump shot up, and it does better in defensive setups (p/s + TK) so yeah, condi all the way.

Downside is mainly constructs and anti condi enemies.

punahou.3986:

some guy posted this in a current thread:

“Gravedigger spam from what I saw does at least 20k DPS. 32k crits every 1,25 sec =25,6k DPS , I dont know the aftercast animation times. Add to this Nightfall+Wells+Whirl Finisher.

Back to engineers : 4k burn ticks, 4k bleed ticks, 1k poison ticks, 5k direct dps =14K DPS without Sinister Set

I dont know what you guys are talking about…Reaper Meta incomming? I have no time to calculate the numbers in the beta , others will do it for you."

Reaper Meta isn’t coming, Reaper allowing Necros to be valuable members of the team, absolutely.

Pretty sure it’s at least a .25 aftercast. So cut that down to 20kish, but I saw a 33k crit in the LoD raid video

punahou.3986:

I’m primarily a pvp player and I have never done nor seen anyone ever hit for 20k+ with a reaper in 3 betas.

Hitting high with GD takes many things. First maximizing your own damage variables with the multipliers you can get plus Might/food/whatever. Then also having a lower toughness enemy with max vuln. Not something you’re going to get often in a PVP situation. And with that animation time you’re a fool to let someone one shot you if you’re playing glassier

Purple Miku.7032:

You mean you’re stuck being routed through level3.net? They kitten something up on the way to the servers in germany really badly for me, and it’s been this way for months. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re causing problems for people trying to play on NA servers as well. There’s unfortunately nothing you can do besides either moving to a different state, try changing the way you’re hooked up to your modem/router, or use a VPN.

However if you’re stuck with way way lower download and upload speeds than what you’re being promised from your ISP, that indicates there’s either a problem with your modem or your ISP is being stupid. Try calling them and asking for a technician if you’re not sure where to begin determining what the cause is.

Naw I just run off wifi and it sucks

As far as feel is concerned I’m not worried. I usually start a fight in GS,432 swap dagger locust, then what I’m curious about is dagger VS RS, with dhuum you can get a nice steady 700-1k extra damage every second from burning even in full zerk. I’m wondering if that’s worthwhile. But either way I’ve been popping locust and daggering away, then back to GS hit my big skills again and off to RS till 50% come out and GD spam+Wells+Nightfall and depending on vuln hitting the 3 as well.

Can’t say from an empirical standpoint that I have any complaints. I’m curious if people have worked up more optimal rotations and done the math.

Wow, 33k Gravediggers, higher than I thought it’d be for max! not bad. (seen in LOD’s raid video).

Anyways, I played a bunch of Arah and a bunch of Fractals with Reaper this weekend, I think it’s good and decent flexibility. Spite/Soulreaping were my favorite pair with it, but I tried Spite and Blood magic as well to get that fun support stuff and I wasn’t complaining.

With CPC and RS2 I think we have some group support especially paired with Blood Magic in many situations.

I don’t know, I like it, it’s not the best, but it’s easily acceptable. Not going to see me complaining about this spec. Only thing I’d complain about is wanting GS outside of Reaper

Miku what did you do to transfer them to me?

Been sitting at 2-3mb download the last few days, 3 is playable, 2 is not so much, or at least very unpleasant.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Jerus.4350:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

We tried to pull the boss with us, but it was not ideal. I agree that having only 5 people would have been best. The biggest problem is you need 5 dps who can keep up high dps at range, which really limits your class options. Ranger and engineer are the best choices here, with most others falling woefully short.

I tried it with my condition reaper, but I just don’t put out the same level of damage as a sinister engineer does. Either I am doing something horribly wrong or Anet needs to make a PvE balance pass before launch.

How much DPS does an Engi/Ranger pump out at range. I mean I know Engi is solid there but only with perfectly aimed skills, doesn’t always happen when something is moving. Necro with DS can pump out around 8k as max potential (so realistically a bit lower) Is that way below what a ranger does? I know it’s not that bad compared to an engi when you take into account the missing grenades or mortar shots

As for balancing pass, absolutely, before or after, either way it needs to happen. Really can’t say enough how much I think burn and bleed needs a bit of balancing between them, burn a little down bleed a bit up. It’s no surprise the best condi professions are the ones with plenty of burns on top of solid set of other condi’s.

I think if they just brought burn down 15% and bleed up 15-20% it would be just about perfect. Which was how it originally was supposed to be in the preview of the condition changes. They changed it on patch day to the current state with no explanation or notice, still have no idea why they did it.

Mhm that’s exactly my thought. And burn 15% down on base and scaling, that base is pretty high. Bleed I’d focus on the scaling. I’m in full support of their change to make condi’s more dependent on the stat.

Ryn.6459:

I would say I am the only one that actually enjoy the cannon phase

If it never screwed up on the telegraphing I’d love it too, but knowing that sometimes you’re just going to get downed through no fault of your own is what makes it frustrating for those that have those issues more often than others. Personally it doesn’t happen that often to me.