Guild Wars 2

How much worse is mace compared to lbow? Could you give me a percentage? :<

Yashuoa.9527:

Keksmuffin.1450:

Yashuoa.9527:

Thanks.

Vikkela.7261:

Everything besides blocks and leaps let you cross it unharmed

Just to be sure, a normal leap does not work to cross over it, but a leap/teleport with a baked in evade in the spell works?

Opc.4718:

Yeah it’s not particularly hard to avoid. To get the most use out of it at a higher level of play, you have to be actively trying to cc your enemies through it.

Yeah the complains from people (enemies) about it have to do with it being new and people having to get used to how to deal with it I think,
because as I see in this thread, there are quite some ways to deal with it.

Exept it does initial damage which has no counterplay on top of the damage people get when they cross the ring. Also ccing people through it with f1 pull doesnt require much effort and at worst you will still force dodges to hit your true shot. I would say the trap is really strong even on higher level play.

All instant spells do initial dmg. In that sense there are more spells without counterplay.

Yeah the trap is strong.

You dont have to use only dodges to deal with the trap and other stuff.
Better to use a block on the non-Test of faith trap skills if you have a block, because it wont work on the trap.

Its not like you can only use dodges vs the trap and that you dont have anything left for the other skills.
There are many ways to deal with the trap and to still have stuff left for Trueshot for example.

On my Scrapper engineer I have a block (2 if I slot the tool kit with Gear shield, which also has a pull on #5 to pull the guard to me).
Sure the blocks dont work for the trap but I can use the blocks vs other skills to save dodges for example for the trap.
As Scrapper engineer I also have reflect on low cd, a leap with build in evade and an invulnerability (elixir S).

Besides if you have a chronomancer in your team, than he can throw a Well of precognition on the trap so that you can just run into it. Its a team game after all.

Than there is the tactic of letting pets activate the trap for those who have pets.

Btw again, I am not saying that the trap is not strong.
I am just pointing out that its not like you are defenceless after your dodges and its not like you can only defend with dodges.

There are more ways than dodges. For both the trap and the other skills.

Your point? I just said it’s very strong and has more uses than just damaging with the damage people get from passing it. You couldn’t deny either because it’s true. :<

Yashuoa.9527:

Thanks.

Vikkela.7261:

Everything besides blocks and leaps let you cross it unharmed

Just to be sure, a normal leap does not work to cross over it, but a leap/teleport with a baked in evade in the spell works?

Opc.4718:

Yeah it’s not particularly hard to avoid. To get the most use out of it at a higher level of play, you have to be actively trying to cc your enemies through it.

Yeah the complains from people (enemies) about it have to do with it being new and people having to get used to how to deal with it I think,
because as I see in this thread, there are quite some ways to deal with it.

Exept it does initial damage which has no counterplay on top of the damage people get when they cross the ring. Also ccing people through it with f1 pull doesnt require much effort and at worst you will still force dodges to hit your true shot. I would say the trap is really strong even on higher level play.

You do realize that longbow is literally the highest dps together with gs and it’s getting used by the pve meta build atm? If anything it needs a nerf because a range weapon doing more dps than melee weapons is kinda stupid.

Since now nothing really 1 shots you in fractals anymore, not even on level 100 and sustain seems more important than extra blocks what do you think about using the trap heal over shelter?

Ragnar the Rock.3174:

I wouldn’t mind it being reduced to 3 seconds base if & only if they drastically reduced the CD to like 35-40 seconds.

As is many guardian abilities are on extremely long cool downs & or have far to long a cast time thus rarely ever see use.
Courage is the rare exception because of how useful it truly is.

40 seconds cooldown sound reasonable.

Farzo.8410:

Everything from the front, yes.

Attack from behind.

I don’t think I’ve gotten hit from behind in any duel so far yet and I’ve done hundreds of duels on DH since the expansion. Even if you’re too bad or too lazy to turn the camera fast enough you can still just autoturn because the game allows you to. :<

So basicly that skill is a 7s block against everything which is really broken but it’s also a defensive skill (stunbreak/stab/block) with casttime which is really inconvinient and clunky.

I would say they should nerf the duration to 3s (4s traited) but make it instant in return to make it less broken and less clunky. I would so prefer that version of the skill. :<

obal.3218:

Hammer ends up doing more dps than gs if you go zeal/radiance/honor after about kitten and can keep the target from moving too much. Raid fights are longer than typical fights so it’s pretty good. It also has more cc. GS is better for shorter fights since hammer burst is not existent. Here are dps charts https://youtu.be/8cumRAX8krE

Guard was pretty underwhelming for the first wing of raids. The utility of the guardian didn’t really have much use so it would be better to just take a higher dps class. Hopefully they will be more useful in the other raid wings.

Keksmuffin.1450:

Guard didn’t really feel useful compared to engi or something. That said I felt more useful on hammer than GS. If my dps is meh anyways I can at least bring some utility like short cd blast and some CC for the break bars and these red orb thingies. Also the protection can be somewhat useful since you kinda have to facetank a bit.

You can have a revenant equip a sword and press 1 with the prot facet active and do the same dps as a guardian with perfect rotations, feel my wrath, bane sig, 50% UC when applicable, and targets never moving out of a symbol. Guard is going to be so OP when expansion hits!!!

I am aware of that but I didn’t feel like rerolling and we made it in the end so whatever.

You’re right though, guard was really disapointing. Aegis got insta stripped by random stuff, cleanses, reflects and stability weren’t needed. Pretty stupid that facetanking and healing got rewarded more than active defenses on that boss.

Guard didn’t really feel useful compared to engi or something. That said I felt more useful on hammer than GS. If my dps is meh anyways I can at least bring some utility like short cd blast and some CC for the break bars and these red orb thingies. Also the protection can be somewhat useful since you kinda have to facetank a bit.

When you change your target during the windup of whirling wrath it sometimes just stops and goes on 3 seconds cooldown.

That also means that this skill often interupts itself when your target goes into stealth which is incredibly annoying when you want to cleave on a downed enemy player and he gets stealthed or a CC’d thief that would have been dead if would have hit your whirling wrath pops blinding powder which makes you lose your target.

Well I guess it’s a matter of priorities. I would prefer playing sword aswell, I got sword skins worth thousands of gold that I can’t really use now while I kinda dislike mace skins in general but I still use mace because it just outclasses sword in pretty much every aspect in pve.

On the plus side mace feels a lot more active and is more than just spamming your auto until weaponswap is up again. Getting a dps increase out of protectors strike is fun.

SirMoogie.9263:

Adam.3716:

kitten I just really want to make sword work for PVE. Love the way Jormag’s breath look on guardian. Any help making a build would be greatly appreciated.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/images/1/18/Jormags_breath_animated.gif

You can play how you want. If you like sword, go for it. Not following the meta doesn’t mean you still can’t do the encounter, it just means you’ll be taking extra time. Depending on group this may be anywhere from a kick to an attitude of “we’re here to have fun, and part of that is you using an awesome sword”. You should try to find more people like the latter IMHO.

He asked about sword/shield being useful so I guess he somewhat cares about being optimal.

Rukiichan.4315:

>Went to frac 33 today
>got to third stage without a hitch
>1 member dced and never came back
>another member said he’s too sleepy to continue
>listed party on lfg for 2 members
> guy joins and made us wait more than 5 mins coz he’s “farming in silverwastes”
> proceeds to be a complete kitten

Lesson learnt: Do not hesitate to use the vote kick function.

*red = him, purple = me, green and blue = other party members.

You didn’t cencor the name of the guy leaving the party. Heh.

Treeoflife.4031:

I’ll jump on this too. Bow 3 is a great projectile skill. Hits multiple enemies in a line with blind. Both the AA and Bow 5 cripple. Use that and positioning and you should be able to use traps effectively. Not to be rude but this is a L2P situation.

It’s also unblockable.

No.

When you fight archdiviner for the first time in cliffside and he drops the hammer it sometimes just disapears when two people try to pick it up at the same time and your party has to wipe to let the hammer respawn.

The “don’t interupt your auto chain” doesn’t mean you should use autoattack over other skills. It just means that if you used the first or the second hit of the auto chain that you should finish that chain before you do anything else.

I agree, breaking the defiance bar felt more like a quicktime event than anything else. With the current defiance you actually have to think about when you use which CC, the defiance bars are pretty brainless compared to that.

Because it’s in your left hand obviously.

Ragnarox.9601:

Keksmuffin.1450:

Ragnarox.9601:

Keksmuffin.1450:

It has a 4s cooldown and it does a lot of damage. It should be dodgeable.

It does average dmg compared to other classes. 5k max if you are lucky. Plus it is dodgable.

I’m hitting up to 7k in pvp. And as I stated in the original post on 1,2k range there is no way to tell if a female character is using true shot or just stopped moving since that is the only indicator for it. The only animation true shot has on female human is your hand glowing a bit which is barely visible on 1,2k range.

What rune are you using? Traveler 4 life.

Never seen more crit than 5.5k even on squishy thief.

I’m using pack runes. Don’t see a reason to run traveler outside of wvw roaming or something. You’re just missing out on so much damage.

Maybe I was just overestimating the players in the 1v1 server though. I dueled a few top players now and most of them were actually able to tell auto and true shot apart most of the times. I don’t really have the oposite perspective because all the dragonhunters I dueled were male for some reason. Maybe the animation is fine. Maybe not. Not sure at this point.

I still think it should be the same for male and female characters though. I mean the male one is basicly killshot and the female one is pretty sneaky.

Ragnarox.9601:

Keksmuffin.1450:

It has a 4s cooldown and it does a lot of damage. It should be dodgeable.

It does average dmg compared to other classes. 5k max if you are lucky. Plus it is dodgable.

I’m hitting up to 7k in pvp. And as I stated in the original post on 1,2k range there is no way to tell if a female character is using true shot or just stopped moving since that is the only indicator for it. The only animation true shot has on female human is your hand glowing a bit which is barely visible on 1,2k range.

It has a 4s cooldown and it does a lot of damage. It should be dodgeable.

There are standard models in pvp so I don’t think that really matters as much. Male and female models still exist though, even in ESL and stuff so yeah.

Hunter.4783:

There is this disturbing trend i have been noticing as of late

Only new/bad players seem to like the dragonhunter wheres any moderately skilled or above player hates it with a passive.

I wonder if dragonhunter is supposed to be the entry level PVE endgame class for HoT…

I’m an ESL player and I like dragonhunter so I guess you’re wrong. :<

Wethospu.6437:

My epic pug life. Joined a fractal group. Attempted to attack bloomhunger. Was told to “wait for rest”. Ok, I wait. People gather up. I attack. I get kicked after like 3 hits.

My mistake. Didn’t realize that “wait for rest” literally meant that we must wait for a fifth guy to join.

Bloomhunger too hard.

Today I had an ele that tried deepfreezing bloomhunger and then died (in a 5 man party). When I asked him if he really just did that he told me to shut the kitten up. :<

Did you try to create the worst build possible?

So I have tried DH on the 1v1 server for quite a bit now. Apart from the fact that it went pretty well and I won pretty much everything exept reves and scappers I found something that might be kind of a problem.

I am playing human female so the animation of true shot is barely any different from the autoattack. So what I did was just stop moving at some point and people thought I would cast true shot which made them dodge my autoattacks. Then when people wasted their dodge I hit True Shot. As soon as people realized what I was doing I started mixing it up and sometimes actually using True Shot instead of faking it.

The result was me hitting pretty much every single True Shot even though people could have dodged it.

Human female is meta anyways. Time for you to reroll.

ok

The auto attack is really good, I don’t see your problem with it.

lbow #2 is very hitable since it only has 4s cooldown and people will run out of dodges pretty fast, especially in teamfights (remember that it also pierces which is pretty decent). Also you can use the knock from heavy light to secure hitting it. (lbow #3 is actually pretty good for triggering that trait now that you can shoot it everywhere arround you).

lbow #5 is pretty useless or at least only useful in niche situations, I can agree with that.

Traps are useless but every class has its useless utilties and you’re not forced to run them on DH so whatever.

DH improved a LOT since the last 2 betaweekends, when will you guys stop whining?

The increased passive doesn’t work. The tooltip of Wings of Resolve state that it would heal 105 per second but it’s actually the default 84 I would have without Absolute Resolution. This bug was arround since the last 2 weekends aswell so I don’t really understand why it’s not fixed. I mean it’s pretty minor but come on.

Apart from that the changes are great. Being able to use Deflecting Shot and the Symbol behind you increases the defense of DH a lot and makes the skills way less clunky.

The auto is cool.

Corelion.7460:

1h sword is actually the second on dps behind on greatsword.. problem is the skills are meh at beast and GS brings a lot more.

Mace is more dps ever since they deleted the 10% modifier for sword and introduced symbolic avenger. Unless of course you talk about pvp where the symbol damage is pretty irrelevant.

Sword and shield are both good at some niche things, sword is nice for roaming in wvw because you get a lot of mobility out of porting to random mobs and shield is pretty good on bunker guard in pvp now that they buffed it.

I don’t really see a reason for using both of them together in any situation though.

nice team comp

RevanCorana.8942:

Glacial heart never was any better than it is now.
The problem is more two-hand training having been removed.
Judge intervention change may seem minor but it is breaking certain builds.
I don’t like it it feels random.

You do realize that the meta build never used two handed training and on top of that the new glacial heart has hammer cooldown reduction built in? The problem is definetly that it got moved from valor to virtues and everybody who denies that doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Single blocks are not useless, aegis helps against his autoattack and his single target lifeleech a lot.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vVAQNAR7dlsAhehYdQwUIwPEHzDV9BSgAAfE7XVk/iUsFB-ThRBABXt/o8DPdDacQAA4JAQp6PmpEUUAPF-e

This is probably one of the easiest builds to solo lupi on. At least it always works for me.

They are overrated, trust me, they don’t really look good on anything.

But yeah a lot of people want them back. Them and the bunny ears. If they would introduce them both at the same time the gemprize would probably double or something.

SlyDevil.3952:

Keksmuffin.1450:

Instead of staff you could just use gs and burst the locusts away when they become annoying without dropping to abyssmal dps on lupi. Also you don’t need to slot any stunbreaks if you just trait for stability on f3. Apart from that I personally would use Retreat over SotA since I think it’s a lot more reliable but I guess they both work.

Also I probably wouldn’t have uploaded a video where I tank kicks and grubs but that’s just me. :<

I was expecting to need to get every modifier I could and I wanted the on the move symbol from staff. SoA was there for the extra target + random aegis for unscathed. I thought it would require much more effort to pull off, I haven’t used a one shot in months and never in a solo.

I can’t really talk about it too much since I never one shot lupi when I solo it on guard but in 5 man groups I use GS for more reflection damage (which is relevant even if you don’t wall-on-wall-kill him) since I can just put down symbol of wrath when he does his aoe and get the modifier from retribution and symbolic avenger.

The only downside it has compared to the staff symbol is that you have to stand on him. It has aftercast that roots you but you can actually cancel that one by stowing your weapon and since you want to be melee in phase 2 anyways so he doesn’t do his shadowstep thingy I really don’t see why you would use staff over gs.

That aside I guess you still made your point. One shotting lupi doesn’t require a lot of effort.

SlyDevil.3952:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjDHPody_R8

This was far easier than I expected, I completely forgot I went out and bought the mob consumables to spawn them when he phased. And scepter sucks balls here, you lose at least 1/3 of smite to invuln locusts and autoattacks + radiant flame throws. I’m pretty sure I could have dropped save yourselves for stand your ground and saved myself the annoyance of failing to time the stun break.

Instead of staff you could just use gs and burst the locusts away when they become annoying without dropping to abyssmal dps on lupi. Also you don’t need to slot any stunbreaks if you just trait for stability on f3. Apart from that I personally would use Retreat over SotA since I think it’s a lot more reliable but I guess they both work.

Also I probably wouldn’t have uploaded a video where I tank kicks and grubs but that’s just me. :<

Yeah I’m getting a lot of “no valid path” thingies when I try to port during leap of faith now… sigh.

Adrenalin.5719:

SlyDevil.3952:

Anyone who wants to waste time fighting the first 2 bosses of arah p3 to lengthen the time it takes them to sell can do that, other people who want to skip half the path and sell it much faster can do that too. How well did that idea work out?

Skipping bosses by glitching thru the terrain is a fundamental different thing than using the core guard class mechanic “reflect” in maximum efficiency. Really, some people call out everything an exploit as long as it’s not the standard way to do it, which would really limit the diversity in this game if everyone would listen to these people. Exploit really lost its meaning in this community.

And no, I never sold any path, but I will try to solo and sell p2 on my main today. Yesterday, I failed at Lupi, trying to oneshot, and today I try again with maxed out gear (I dropped 150 Gold for this).

And even if I’m not the best player in this game, trying to oneshot Lupi SOLO is still not easy, you have to know everything about phase 1 and 2, place the wall perfectly, max out your crit etc. and even then it might fail the os and you have to go thru phase 3. It’s not like press one button and win, not at all, in pugs, where he burns thru phase 1 and there are enough targets to ensure the oneshot with wall, yes, it’s very cheap, but solo, no.

I tried to solo oneshot Lupi yesterday for many hours and couldn’t pull it off… It is definately harder than doing fractals 50 as five in a decent PUG or anything like that.

I mean, the first boss in p2 can be perma reflected, that is real cheap, Lupi requires a perfectly set up wall in a second and 5 minutes of constant kiting and dodging, as solo. That is not cheap.

And btw, why would anyone solo p2 with guard if he can just faceroll war? There must be some reason to play guard instead of warrior.

Guard already is one of the easiest classes to solo lupi on without one shotting him, the animation of his projectile AoE is very obvious and not really fast and phase one is incredibly trivial and usually done in like two minutes at worst so I have to disagree with pretty much everything you said.

Still made me laugh a bit though.

Thaddeus.4891:

Why would you want to duo with a random pug? I understand your frustration, but you really didn’t gave you any chance lol.

I actually searched for duo partners for arah on the lfg system before, late at night when I was bored and to my surprise I actually got really decent people most of the time and it was pretty fun.

Aomine.5012:

Best counter aginast burn Guardian:

PU Condition Mesmer. Just hide and wait til your clones/ phatasm chips him down.

Burn Guardian has good burst, and good anti-spike measure, but if you drag the fight long enough and burn his CDs, you’d win eventually.

You can also beat it with another Burn Guardian lol.. Just outplay them.

Actually power med guard has a pretty decent advantage against burn guard.

With icebow being dead aegis will be really important if you want to melee stuff in high level fractals. Guardian will stay as viable as ever.

I win against most thieves without using mainhand weapons while reading chat when im playing burn guard. I wish i would be joking.

Just delete it and replace it with a trait that benefits power dps guard. It’s really stupid that there are multiple traits in the master slot that are really nice for dps guard but the grandmaster slot offers nothing at all.

I was pugging fractals 40 pretty late at night as usual. I was on guard. I joined the usual metazerk blabla party, we 3 manned swamp and then waited for the last 2 to join.

So then a guard joins and states he isnt planning on rerolling and I quote “You won’t find a better guard than me”. Although that already kinda annoyed me I thought whatever, it was late, 2 guards is not the worst thing in the world. Then we engage archdiviner and I see him on scepter. To make it worse I also see him having selfless daring and strength in numbers. As soon as we saw that we pretty much insta kicked him.

I really don’t know why some people can’t read.

I was kinda exited for a moment when I saw that there was a guardian since they are kinda rare in records nowadays. Then I tried watching his PoV and his game client was in german, he was playing an ugly asura and was clicking skills. :<

laokoko.7403:

I think the reality is you exclude enough noobs, that’s why you have smooth runs.

If you compare pug meta zerk group, they are usually 2x slower for normal dungeon compare to world record, and 1.5x slower compare to world record in fractal. Those kind of time are doable even in 5 necro group.

For me I dont’ really care about group composition. Because unless I get into a group which can get close to meta time which is almost impossible for pug. I just hope my teamates isn’t a bunch of new players who spend 1 hour in cliffside, since even 5 bowbear can run it in 18 minutes, which is usually the time for meta zerk “PUG”.

18 minutes for cliffside? I don’t know which kind of “zerk” pugs you got but the average metazerk pug i get for 40 or 50 is usually done with all 4 fractals in 30 minutes. Sometimes less if we get lucky and get short fractals like grawl or molten duo.

Drennon.7190:

LOL @ Arken…. you’re joking right?

NA either Sunfish or Booms (switch the M & the B. This word filter is extreme)
EU.. idk probably keksmuffin aka bullet punch

tapdatmouse is average at best. I don’t consider myself good, yet I still beat him every time we’ve dueled.

Heh. Thanks. In all honesty though I think Tage is better than me mechanicly. Also Frae was pretty good at some point. Sadly both of them play condi nowadays. Meh.

Apart from that you’re right, that TapDatMouse guy is pretty bad.