Guild Wars 2

Vuln is irrelevant if talking about direct dmg only. Benefit from leaving it out would be the ability to buff without causing dmg to target while still getting precise results.

That gives OMM the potential to outperform frenzy though. Also there are rare occasion, mainly fractals on high lvl, where you fight single enemies without vuln duration reduction long enough to potentially make OMM a good choice.

If we expect vuln not to be overwritten during OMM it also gives roughly 2% partywide dmg increase over 30s period against bosses and double that against other targets, which in a high damage group outperforms signet by a lot. Yes, having regularly vuln stacks that low in such a party is questionable, but expected 30s time period also means 2% dmg increase is the minimum of increase, with the potential to go all the way up to roughly 10% in short fights and, for example, up to 3,5% in a 37s fight.

I still stick to my last opinion of only signet being the lazy (or maybe ignorant) choice. There is room for all of those 3 in terms of reaching the best results, and they aren’t as situational as people make them out to be.

guanlongwucaii.3162:

signet of fury is apparently better than OMM/Frenzy, so I always use it.

only time I use OMM is for lupi and nightmare tree (rip TAFU)

It’s not quite that black and white, most people just choose to use signet of fury everywhere because they are lazy. It is the best general option and has passive effect. In reality all 3 of them have their strengths, frenzy in short fights without timewarp and omm in single target fights where high vuln isn’t otherwise provided while also benefitting from the fight being short.

After 28s fgj is up again pushing it to 36s, at which point arcane wave can be used again to achieve 46s.

Eruption, arcane wave and fgj from a single warrior will maintain fury for 46s assuming 0 boon duration ( war would probably have 10% making it 47,6s, quite irrelevant) which will be enough for majority of the fights.

guanlongwucaii.3162:

pumping precision is only really good if your sole aim is to maximise reflect damage, because power doesn’t scale reflect damage whereas reflected damage does use your base crit%.

and because most organised teams already hit 100% crit chance with buffs up, the boosted precision is mainly for solo play.

In many cases 100% crit is achieved by choosing between precision over power, be it food, stacks or signets. 30 in precision trait line + banner with as much ascended pieces as one can have at the moment, scholar runes and fury gives 81% crit chance (I wouldn’t count on having ranger). I don’t think there is a single profession that can bump that to 100% without choosing the precision alternative from either signets, food or stacks, guardian probably being the closest while using sword.

In cases of food and stacks your options are exactly similar, while with signets I feel precision ones offer better actives making them the preferred choice.

I’m in no way saying 100% or close to it would not be achieved if one so wants without losing efficiency, but I feel you can’t rule out runes just because they offer a maximum of 155 precision over their power alternative, you would aim for that precision in some way at a “later” point of your build.

I believe you would have to dedicate the whole party into bringing the stacks down rather than dpsing which would kind of defeat the purpose of doing so.

Having not every party member meleeing him also delays or completely prevents the transition into fgs which i have yet to see a sustained melee tactic against, basically it becomes more of a race like here.

haviz.1340:

I don’t think we’d find 5 rangers.

We have 3 at least so need only 2 more!

Well, bladetrail can be used gaining both hits in those tow fights also. One important thing i didn’t mention earlier is that you basically have to stay on the same side of your target for the let’s say 2s duration of bladetrail to get both hits, and that is actually a pretty big thing for me at least. It means that you either have to lead with bladetrail when swapping to gs or you have to use it right before swapping back to axe, and need to make sure you can stand on nearly the same spot for the next 2s or dodge away from your target which is generally not desired. Combining these restrictions with boss moves results in what I would call something you can’t take as a standard rotation.

1 vuln stack increases dmg taken by 1 percent. Assume every goroup member does similar dmg compared to each other. 25th vuln compared to 24 vuln adds 0.01/1.24 = 0.008 = 0.8% group wide dmg. If the vuln stack is added to alower amount than 24 the increase is bigger. That would mean an increased dmg of 5*0.8=4% if we wanted to think the added dmg as done by a single person (which is the case when using deep strike). 3-4% crit chance loses against that by far, and will lose by even more if talking about vuln change other than from 24 to 25, and a single warrior doing 1/5th of groups dps seems like a good approximation for me in a group like engi, ele guard 2*war.

The thing is even a single stack of vuln missing would promote rending strikes over deep strike in group play.

Concerning bladetrail I feel it disappears in every high wall, let’s say higher than the caster. I would say majority of walls, or at least a remarkable portion of them are higher than that and there is often an obstacle within 900 range that will absorb bladetrail. There are many encounters where it should be used for sure but I just don’t feel like one can include it into a general rotation.

Has anyone tested if deep strike actually works? At least it doesn’t show in hero panel. 2 Signets would give you 3-4% crit chance assuming it works, so it would only be an ok replacement for rending strikes in solo play or a group that will reliably hit maxed vuln all the time which is rare.

Dub.1273:

Rush has a slightly longer cast than the first autoattack. It’s about 0.8 seconds i believe.
Also, rush has no problems against targets such as lupicus, you just have to stand inside them.
WWA hits three times on average, even on tiny enemies. It’s more based on from where you start and where you’ll end.
Bladetrail is worth casting too, it hits twice and sometimes becomes some weird bouncing projectile that hits 3-5 times per enemy.
Also: What is Deep Strikes? I’m sure you mean Deep Cuts (50% longer bleeds).

Bladetrail needs open environment so you get 2 hits/target be worth using since it disappears in wall which then again will lower the efficiency of WWA. I think melee range rush is quite close to arcing slice so 0.8 must be close estimation.

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

I’m not calculating exact dps, just effective power.

Apparently reading forum posts shouldn’t be the last thing I do before going to bed since you clearly state you are calculating effective power in the original post.

Are gs/axe rotations calculated with or without whirwind and if they are with it how many hits are assumed? 3 boons seems quite conservative if at the same time assuming full dmg buffs, and is the minimum you would assume warrior to have all the time.

Interesting results still and thanks for sharing them.

Yes, shield works against aoe and actually so does sword while still giving you 5% dmg from dual wielding and shorter cooldown. If you are using sword make sure to take a step back from lupi before using 5 so you won’t counter attack when blocking and be prepared to use one dodge before or after block. Since shield block lasts longer you wont need to dodge after or before block.

haviz.1340:

Have you ever played an ele? 66% less hp than mesmer, no vigor on crits, no weapon swapping and no distortion if you want to use conjures. That’s why almost everyone would just go back to 3w/1g/1m, because it’s the easiest and gives results inappropriate to your input.

For damage, you have mes solo 5:40, warrior is 5:08, guardian 5:29. Guess how other professions fare.

As for defense, 2 eles can get you with 50% uptime of projectile absorption and it doesn’t work as often as feedback (Cursed Grasp for instance).

Not to say ele wouldn’t be hard to play but I know you dislike playing with conjures only so you have access to way more things than you make it sound like. You are also aware that ele has access to vigor on crits for example, if you are not going for it that is your personal choice.

I wouldn’t mind eles getting some love if/when fgs gets changed and I do agree playing other than war/guard/mes compositions is usually the more entertaining option.

For me avoiding domes is the same as avoiding barrages. I hope there wasn’t a way to avoid either of those but don’t see why avoiding one would be any different from avoiding the other. Gaining access to offensive utilities gives higher boost to kill time than using wall so if anything avoiding dome should be more questionable. Not to say I wouldn’t avoid it…

Also, very nice job.

It has been several months since tested it last time but at least back then shield of absorption worked just fine. There is a slight delay between the activation and the moment it actually starts to block so you need to use it significantly earlier than feedback for example.

Broadicea.8294:

it’s not like you guys aren’t rolling in enough money to just buy the mats. I mean the whole ascended weapon update is terrible but don’t act like you couldn’t have had one the day after the patch

Money doesn’t automatically get you ascended weapons. You still have to earn the weapons by proving your skills in epic battles all around the world to get the account bound materials.

My vote goes for guardian also, the amount of different kind of tools they have for this fight is just so high.

Also while while mesmer might have potential for faster kill than a guardian it is also far more rng based. I believe guardian would be the faster option out of those two on average.

118% here, 6220 for the next %

I’d say warrior for anything not extremely projectile heavy, guardian for the remaining parts.

koolmutt.9827:

You can learn the 8 orb fight, and still not be able to do it on many classes. Did anyone realistically have an easier time on 8 orb Liadri then on lupi? Solo’ing lupi has become more about how fast someone can do it, not if it can be done.

8 orbs took significantly less time for me to achieve than soloing lupi the first time i tried it.

I would advice you to move the last 5 points from discipline to arms and going 30/25/0/0/15 to gain 10% dmg boost against bleeding targets. Your targets will be bleeding pretty much always because of the precise strikes.

Longbow would offer higher single target and aoe dmg than rifle. If rifle is what you like more or if you feel like needing that extra range or high crippled uptime go ahead and use rifle, the difference really isn’t that big.

The Mexican Cookie.3690:

Dub.1273:

DS aims on getting runs of specific content as efficient done as possible before participating in other content.

Don’t listen to this guy, this is what DS are like at lupicus! (Special link just for Broadicea)

http://youtu.be/hCAT0SWoKUQ

That Whirling Defense reflect in phase 2 was pretty funny though

Needed more rangers.

I would just get rid of the gap closing feature and have it be like the rest of the attack chains. Variety is good but when it comes with the price of not being able to control your character in a game built around evading dmg I’m more than willing to take that trade.

Kain Francois.4328:

Having played Ranger recently (with 1h sword and Jaguar) I noticed the damage really aint that bad at all.

What they lack compared to a warrior is burst, but make up for it with superior ranged damage (yes) and the ability to apply chill longer than any other profession.

Ranger also has the pull on his offhand axe, which is very very VERY GOOD! (Possibly the most underrated and under-appreciated ranger skills.)

I wish they changed sword 1 chain, that’s the biggest issue with ranger for me at least.

kulle.6542:

Um I’m going to need to rephrase this question I think.
So I stopped playing for 10months and when I came back most groups only want Warrior/Mesmer/Guardian. I want to know I guess the DPS ranking of the other 5 classes? Specifically is engineer the lowest dps (people won’t take engineer it seems)? Ele seems to be slightly accepted. Necro/thief/ranger, no idea here.

Basically enlighten me on the knowledge I lost from not playing for 10 months.

In reality all of the 8 classes can bring enough dmg not to be a burden for 99% of the pug groups when played well. Combinations of the 3 professions you mentioned offer and easy way of gaining decent results and are therefore sought after when grouping with people you dont know.

Anubarak.3012:

In organiced groups with perfect players
Ele, Guard, Thief, Ranger, Warrior, Ingineer, Necro, Mesmer

I have to try and start the fight!

When trying to take dungeons as generally as possible, I think more credit should be given for group wide 320 power, 170 cond dmg, 170 prec, and 15 crit dmg the team will automatically lose if not including a certain profession.

Wethospu.6437:

Lies, it’s an AoE on primary target.

I guess you got me there.

haviz.1340:

I think the spin attack (ring of warding) has 2 components and you can only reflect/absorb one of them. Despite that, you can still reflect or negate some portion of the damage.

Invisible frontal cone and visible projectiles.

haviz.1340:

Wethospu.6437:

Did you just list all my virtues?

Only facetanking.

You forgot to add he tends to range harpies making them invulnerable.

Group pressure is getting too high so I had to come and give my +1 too.

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

ilr.9675:

not sure if troll shielding…

.

…But I agree 100% with Byron, you can’t trust anything anyone says on these forums just b/c so few of the most vocal “Pros” ever volunteer or even RUN in pugs. They conveniently have their little private groups that maybe 1 or 2 of them ever puts out a video of which is always heavily edited as well….

Why would anyone pug if they didnt have to? Masochism?

For me it’s actually having to put some effort to get things done. Then again maybe that can be defined masochistic

Wethospu.6437:

Heightened Focus actually just gives 9% Critical Chance so it’s not really worth of it. Last Chance is a big DPS increase on short runs.
I actually didn’t check did it even trigger so there might be room for improvement! (our run might be too short :/)

From the end of invulnerability to the death takes around 6s so we should swap out last chance and go retry.

Hopefully this won’t be our final time, I will start clicking my skills too to shave those seconds.

TheMaskedParadigm.3629:

Konu.1826:

Did you consider you would lose Attack of Opportunity (or Berserker’s Power) if you choose to go deep in discipline for Heightened Focus? I doubt I will want to take that trade myself but we will see.

30/0/0/10/30 doesn’t lose Berserker’s Power.

I never said you would have to give up both, just that you will have to give up either Attack of opportunity or Berserker’s power in order to get Heightened focus. In your example you are losing Attack of opportunity.

TheMaskedParadigm.3629:

Dolan.3071:

Yarp, Warrior’s DPS is taking a small hit, might be enough to warrant swapping us out for a thief or DPS guard. Haha whilst I doubt I’ll be putting as much thought and effort into it as you guys I’m looking forward to today/tomorrow’s patch (it’s almost the 26th here, I forget how far behind America is :P

The Axe autoattack chain’s DPS was increased overall I believe, but it depends on Triple Chop (which isn’t really a problem). You’ve also got access to Heightened Focus with an Axe build, and Axe abilities have cooldown reduction when traited accordingly, and you can use Eviscerate a bit more throughout fights and gain Adrenaline back fairly quickly. So no, Warrior DPS isn’t really taking a hit. Warriors also bring party-wide Fury and Might (as well as Banners) so I don’t see Thieves and Guardians replacing them.

Did you consider you would lose Attack of Opportunity (or Berserker’s Power) if you choose to go deep in discipline for Heightened Focus? I doubt I will want to take that trade myself but we will see.

Puandro.3245:

Nikaido.3457:

Puandro.3245:

As long as a guardian is in the grp 10 Tactics will always be worth keeping for a warrior build.

We tested it by spamming ALL the guardian boons (which is an unrealistic situation) and it only managed to be as good as 30/25/0/0/15, not better. In the real world without as many boons it’s worse.

This build makes even less sense for the people who do things like CoF runs.

Let me guess, your tests where based on hitting mobs instead of actually doing the math on how hard abilities themselves will hit for when all the math to do that is available to do so. 10 Tactics > 0 Tactics a long as you have a guard in the group.

Even if 10 in tactics would be good what are you willing to drop to get it?

You will want 30 strength for berserker’s power, 25 arms for attack of opportunity and 15 discipline for fast hands. Fast hands would be my guess but that would require you to stop using any weapon swap rotations.

McJAC.4739:

I dont know how quickly the boss is supposed to go back to stealth, but I’ve done it yesterday and we were almost unable to get her helath down fast enough. We had to run the sparks like 10-15 times before she died.
I don’t think we had little dps …we had mes, thief, necro, 2x guards(altough one of them was using only staff or scepter which is 0 dps). The problem was that she stealths every time after like 10 seconds. If you get that with a group that is not zerk then you have probably wasted an hour or two of your life. I guess that is what happened to OP too.

Short dps windows are caused by slow spark runs. The first time you get Simin to 50% she will stealth. At this point timer starts ticking. You run sparks, she is revealed and you start dps her. When the timer reaches set time (~45s) Simin stealths and timer restarts. You run the sparks again and dps her, when timer reaches kitten she stealths again resetting timer. If spark kiting takes 30s you have 15s window to dps, if sparks take 20s you have 25s to dps.

haviz.1340:

For quite some time running sparks isn’t so strict, you could probably walk instead of run and still manage to do it. Her healing rate is almost non existant now.

Have you tried soloing it? I still feel single person would have troubles if doing it the intended way.

laharl.8435:

Is there an exploit involved in the Simin solo? I’m surprised one person can run the sparks fast enough and muster the dps needed. I believe Dub when he says he did, but I would like to see a video.

There is a “feature”, I doubt anyone will post video of it. My guess is soloing Simin without it won’t work but naturally I’m not 100% sure.

hedix.1986:

First of, this thread has been a good source of insight and what to do / what not to do, so cheers for that guys.
I’ve never done p4. Mainly due to not finding a party. A couple of times I’ve gotten a few guildies but we couldn’t find a final player, I guess people are having a hard time dedicating 2-3+ hours for a single dungeon. LFG for Arah4 isn’t so promising, at least no on EU servers. However, I’ve done a bit of ‘research’, just to avoid TPK by ignorance once I do manage to find a group.

So my questions are, from experience, what would be the best party configuration to do p4, and how much time would it be reasonable to expect to spend in the dungeon if the players are experienced, but say half of the party hasn’t done this path before?

If your full team is experienced with running dps builds but none of you has done this path before I would go with 3 war, mes, guard. Even if none of the players have done it before you would probably finish in 1-2h depending on how skilled your group is.

Chest is character and tier bound. If your elementalist has personal reward lvl of 30, he can get lvl 1-9 chest, lvl 10-19 chest lvl 20-29 chest and lvl 30-39 chest during one day. If you also have a mesmer with personal reward lvl of 17 you can get a total of 6 chests, 4 with ele and 2 with mesmer. The amount of pristine fractal relics will be 1 in higher tier chests, just like in lvl 10-19 chests.

Did lvl 38 run, got better loot than on average, rng.

I haven’t noticed any difference, most likely just worse group performance than usual.

Ravenmorghane.9287:

Correct me if I am wrong please, but I am pretty sure this has been fixed.

As the dungeon starter, if you disconnect then your group will remain in the dungeon as long as they keep your disconnected character in the party. What kicked them out of the dungeon was them removing you from the party. I’ve had this happen before when I didn’t realise the disconnected person that I was kicking from group was in fact the dungeon starter.
Like i say I could be wrong but I’m a little sure about it.

You are correct. Still this doesn’t solve the problem if the disconnected person can’t reconnect fast, especially when playing with pugs and having no way to inform the other members about the situation.

Still I’m actually happy Anet hasn’t rushed the fix for this because i feel they have to carefully think how the system works in the future. Rushed fix would probably soon be abused in one way or another.

Yes the test is somewhat inaccurate. GS has better self buffs (might). However gs also suffers from bad rotations (not being able to ww → swap, using rush while unable to land it losing even more than a whole second). Usage of axe skills other than 1 still gives you vmore vuln than gs which would mean in group situation gs would get more improvement in that section while axe would get the higher damage from autos. Axe aa is clearly superior to gs aa and if gs still wins that sustained dps test it should be safe to say using gs burst and not only axe gives far more dps. Honestly, I don’t know why people who play warrior themselves would even need video to test it, the difference you see while playing should be clear enough by far if you use good rotations, at least that is how I’ve been feeling.

I actually decided to finally take time and count the interval between stealths. I have always just had the feeling the timer begins from stealth and not from reveal. Using the video I got results of around 45s between every stealth so now I’m even more convinced the timer works like that.