Guild Wars 2

Monki.5012:

For example guardians have a much better scaling: Their HP pool is lower however they have more toughness which smoothens out damage income and with their superior healing they top themselfs off rather quickly. For that onehit swings I talked about earlier they have aegis to survive being oneshot.

Also, in that example, guardians have low HP because they have lots of healing and boons. Their toughness isn’t really that much of a factor, it’s the fact they have aegis and protection boons.

Monki.5012:

I think Vitality is only vital to survive that one Boss Swing which would otherwise Onehit kill you. However Vitality has some major downsides:

After that point of the one swing kill you now survived vit gives you nothing more. Healskills dont scale with it so with more vit it only takes longer to top you off.

Of course the Vitality does something afterwards. Regen, a common buff, effectively gives you a longer health bar so long as you can prolong your life via kiting, dodging or just killing the target. This also has the effect of diluting condition damage you don’t have to cleanse just for that 1 burn that’s ticking away at your health.

If you didn’t have that vitality and you used a healing skill to fill you up, that regen is now doing nothing but being a boon on your window. Basically, Vitality is an enabling trait that feeds off of all mitigation provided by a team. Anything, regen, vigor, aegis, heals, magnify your vitality’s effectiveness since having ‘just enough to survive that one-shot’ can mean the world of difference.

Nothing wrong with a Long Bow Warrior.

It does decent single target damage with some support via its blind (#4), immobilize (#5) and fire field shot (F1). Your direct damage comes from its dual shot (#1) and arcing shot (#3) while fan of fire (#2) doesn’t do very much damage unless you hit the target with all 3 projectiles (so, nearly point blank range).

It’s not as much direct damage as a Rifle, but has a lot of utility along with its damage. Using the fire field burst attack + #3 grants 3 stacks of might to nearby party members and yourself, your other attacks act as projectile combos to cause burning and on top of that, these recharge pretty fast so you can nearly always have a fire field up to burn things with.

The only downfall of Longbow compared to rifle is there aren’t much for traits for it. Rifle has innate range of 1200 + the Crackshot trait makes all your shots into line attacks + reduces cooldowns by 20% (also works for speargun). For longbow, its range is only 900 unless you get the Stronger Bowstrings trait that improves range to 1200 (also, makes all your arrows 100% combo finishers instead of just a 20% chance…all except #3 which is always a 100% combo) and then the Burning Arrows trait which improves longbow damage vs burning foes.

All in all, longbow warrior is nice. Probably not something you’d want to only use (pair it at least with the traditional sword/shield and you can get some decent synergy with bleeds + burning as well as your own personal fire shield). It’s a nice support weapon thanks to Arcing Arrow. Use it to blast off your own fire field or use it to give your team chaos armor, area healing, area weakness, etc.

Chi Malady.2015:

Another obvious issue is the lack of damage from rifle attacks. The rifle just doesn’t hit hard enough to justify taking it over a melee weapon.

Hmm, can melee weapons effectively kill things at 1200 range now?

People can go glass cannon and survive just fine in dungeons. You just have to be good to dodge and maybe have some vigor to back you up.

That said, I’d advise looking at your playstyle and making a decision from there.

IMO, if you’re trying to do damage, Power/Toughness/Vitality isn’t going to get you there. It’s adaquate but you’ll always be able to do better if you took more offensive stats which will still never do as much raw damage than only taking offensive stats.

Precision is a decent stat to build up to, but I’ve heard people getting high crit chances without touching percision via utilities, equipment and traits. If you can manage that, you can forgo precision for a defensive stat (AFAIK, there is no set-up with Power/Condition Dmg/Crit dmg which would be pretty keen in some builds).

Condition Damage…it honestly depends. You’ll most likely be dealing with bleeds and burns. It’s great when you focus on it and you can get your tics over 150 (bleeds). If you’re not aiming for good high tics with decent durations, you probably don’t want to worry much about gearing for it. Keep it as supplemental damage and leave it at that.

Personally, I went Valkyrie as I feel toughness isn’t particularly useful to my style (I focus on not getting hit rather than enduring it). The vitality gives you a bigger buffer for error and you have heals/regens to get it back. Use Arcane Shield, Mist form, whatever defensive spells you have to not get hit in the first place.

I’ve never tried a condition build on an elementalist. It seems to be decent for a mesmer and the alternate armor I have for my condition warrior isn’t half bad which makes me believe a condition elementalist would be pretty good too.

Rayya.2591:

here is mine
not really an sniper look

“This panty shot will be your last…”

ArashiKai.2496:

CONCLUSION: while you will deal more damage (theoretically) by spamming aa’s, simply trading a few hundred damage (in a game that deals in thousands, not a huge deal) for locking down your target, applying might to yourself and any allies nearby, gaining a fire shield, and applying unmitigated damage (if it all hits) is a favorable tradeoff.

If anything, your testing supports the OP.

The problem with the Fire Line traits are they often only help fire spells (longer fire fields, might stacking on casts, etc). Showing a combo of abilities through swapping doing around the same damage as the fire auto-attacks shows how even it can be. You discount some of the extras like the bleed stacks and the extra might on team mates, but then you also assumed the fire mage didn’t apply burning, that they didn’t use any of their other spells and that fire magic is the attunement with all the fire fields for might stacking.

After reading this thread, I’ve come to several conclusions:

-The elementalist forum has become alot more elitist. Now it seems common that everyone needs 30 in Arcane and have to dance constantly or else they are trash. This isn’t true. Not only can you do well without anything in Arcane, you can specialize in certain aspects or your build by doing so.

-A ‘fire mage’ seems to be a viable spec, if only for PvE and dungeon encounters. In many circumstances, there is plenty of support already. You don’t have to be a 1-man support team, simply offering fields for others to capitalize on is support enough. And a ‘fire mage’ will probably be good to stack might on allies by simply using their fields more which they can more easily do by staying in the attunement.

-Reading, some posters have said they can do well by sticking with Water or Air attunement too. I’m betting you can be a viable contributor to a team if you have a ‘Water mage’ build or ‘Air mage’ build (although I’m curious how such a build would work) by being capable of acceptable/good damage while providing the utility of that specific attunement.

-What’s viable in PvP or WvW is a rather different story. Being able to down n00bs with ease or following a zerg doesn’t win against cheating NPCs with gajillion HPs.

Well not everyone PvPs, doesn’t mean the devs shouldn’t support it. So your point doesn’t really resonate with me.

Hey, a fan of GW2. Started 1 month after the Beta Weekend thingies but I’d been keeping an eye on the game for a while.

I’m a migrant from City of Heroes (before those kittens at NCSoft shut it down) and thought CoX did alot of things wrong, it also did alot of things right. One thing CoX had was a kinda video recording option in the /demorecord command and this is all built into the game. And if you had knowledge of the demorecord code, you could make movies and junk, script NPC animations and the like. It was real neat what some people could do with it.

What I’d like to know is, does GW2 have some sort of game session recording feature built into it? If they do, links to how it works would be wonderful. If not, then why not? I figure the companies who put out FRAPS and like software make a killing off of games like this since so many people now-a-days record their sessions for various purposes.

1. Have Healing Signet but try not to use it.

2. Eat Apple Pie (lvl 10), Candy Corn Custard (lvl 10), Banana Cream Pie (lvl 25) or Grape Pie (lvl 40).

3. When you start getting low on health, kite the enemy(ies) until you regen most of your HP back.

Bonus 1: If you fancy, use a longbow. Longbows let you shoot things that are behind you (#3 and F1)

Bonus 2: Have Vit gear so you have more HP to regen. Toughness won’t do much unless you can stack lots of it (which you can’t at a low level) but every point in Vit are points of HP and if you’re constantly regening, it effectively makes your health bar that much longer.

Bonus 3: Watch out for Poison and kill ranged foes first.

Also, you can run the Warrior signet build which gives you percision for every unused signet but that requires you take that trait (Deep Cuts in Arms) which will give you a huge crit chance and kill fast. However, you still need to survive if you can’t kill the target.

Bonus #4: You can combine the regen method and signet method since, of course, Healing Signet is a signet…

PS: When I was lvling a warrior, I had trouble at first too with simple mobs. Then I read some pointers about low lvl regen. I used the regen method up into the lvl 60s with decent success but it starts to be less effective by around lvl 40 when foes hit alot harder than what you can regen every second. But in the low levels? When foes are hitting for 20-60pts and you’re regening 20-30 pts every second (note: mobs don’t hit every second, they have delays between), you’re pretty much immortal. I went from struggling with 2 same level foes to taking down mobs a couple lvls higher in the lvl 20s and 30s.

Yeah, I tried it. Perpetual flight on an Asura warrior.

Testing a few other things: using this trick with Savage leap (sword #2) and…when you get the animation to loop with the shield up, it looks like my asura is…manipulating himself behind his shield. Put ‘Shake It Off!’ on auto for extra hilarity.

I saw someone doing that in LA. I was confused at what it was because I only play Asura and didn’t know what animation that was.

Is that Flurry, the sword burst skill? So if I could do that on my Asura, I could perma-float?!?

Tell me how!

My suggestion? Keep at it. Work hard and learn what you can with the build.

You may be able to teach others the pros and cons that are often overlooked by the majority. I think a condition warrior can work if you’re not busy trying to max stack them but rather applying pressure to force your foe to use cooldowns.

Hmm, am I confusing Vengeance for Rally?

I figure whatever can rally you can count for Sweet Vengeance and I know those gravelings have rally’ed me before. On path 3, I’ve been rally’ed to death on more than one occasion :P

Oglaf.1074:

Better to just use Power/Precision/Crit damage for huge burst potential with Arcing Arrow, really.

OR pretty much all your Rifle skills including the burst.

I know it can certainly come in handy, especially when you just need to shoot a target vs trying to aim at the ground (hey there big event bosses).

Atreus.5429:

@Proven even if the sigil of strength has an internal cooldown (of two seconds according to the wiki) wouldn’t you still get more out of the longbow since you get two attempts at getting a might stack with the longbow as opposed to one attempt with the rifle? Or am I missing something with volley because I think that is where most of the DPS of the rifle will come from…

Dunno, how many foes can you hit in a line (Crack Shot)? So 2 attempts with a bow vs X attempts (where X is how many foes you can line up) with a rifle.

Personally, I use Sigil of Fire in Rifle since unloading in a huddled group tends to get you 2 guys at least + an AoE that hits the whole herd.

I use both Rifle and Long Bow. I just swap out the weapon/traits when I feel like using one or the other. You get bigger DPS with a Rifle if only because it responds better to power and crit damage. Bow feels like it responds better to condition damage since you can make all your flame arrows into projectile finishers or firing through a poison field for poison bolts (I’m Asura) which means better condition poison/burn tics.

Highly.8347:

That’s the problem, we should not have to settle with mediocrity, of just being “alright”, when there are jaw dropping amazing greatsword varieties. And once again, the Crossing is a darker death themed weapon with a lantern and hand.

http://images.mmosite.com/photo/2009/02/27/wowa255AJ88J4D043.jpg
http://www.livetowin.zaidink.com/images/news/2008/february/grandmagisterstafftorrentv2.jpg

These staffs aren’t legendary or anything, but run of the mill stuff obtained from standard raids. I know people from GW2 hate being compared to WoW since the media hype was “WoW Killer” (which is completely untrue, they cater to two different crowds) but GW2 can learn from WoW’s design philosophy that kept people happy with aesthetics for years.

Those linked staves are hideous.

Okay, maybe not hideous but extremely uninspired.

The in-game staves I like are the Memory of the Sky (the winged one), the Toy Staff, the Winter staff skin and the one with the spectra chain hanging from it (never found the name of that one), particularly because they actually have a design aesthetic they are shooting for, unlike those WoW staves (I did an image search for WoW staff as well and the all look the same and boring) which all look like inexplicably glowie thing(s) on a shaft. It’s like when someone was designing them, they asked themselves ‘how can I put some glowie trinket on a shaft that looks different from the last glowie trinket on a shaft I made before’ and accidentally made repeats so put ugly ornate cresty looking things around the glowie trinket. Simple is beautiful, remember that.

If I were suggesting ideas for new staves?

Plant Staff- Verdant Staff doesn’t look plant-like at all. Make one that looks like a living vine with leaves/flowers falling from it when you cast.

Monk Staff- Simple shaft with one of these attached (http://s686.beta.photobucket.com/user/hitokirikuro/media/Monkstaff.jpg.html). The rings move when you move, and there’s that signature jingle when you cast something with it equipped.

Anointed Staff- Just a golden staff with various embroidered designs along it but it produces a warm light behind the character when wielded.

Night Watchman’s Staff- Just a staff with an oil lamp hanging on the end. Lights itself at night.

What I don’t want (but wouldn’t be opposed to them adding some) is random glowie orb inside/on some overly designed crest stuck on the end of a shaft with no rhyme or reason why except ‘MAGIK!’

Zero Angel.9715:

This is a great idea. Even moreso if MF transfers over to other members in a dilute sense. Think for example if you have the MF wearer getting 65% of his MF when grouped and each teammate getting +35% of his MF. Well, the dude who is sporting MF gear might think twice about doing it, and party members might be a little less reluctant to party with him even if he did. Furthermore if you have 2 guys in the party sporting MF gear, you are effectively giving 100% MF to the guys sporting the gear while the other party members get 65% MF (assuming the MF gear guys MF is the same). Assuming that all party members were in full MF gear with the same amount of total MF, they would effectively get 205% of their average base MF, but would be essentially be playing on hard mode due to the stats they would have to give up to get that much combined MF.

….reading that, especially the last part, actually made me excited. I love hard dungeons and going into one with the leader saying “And everyone bring all your magic find gear” would make me say to myself ‘…this is gonna be awesome’.

That is of course if your worn magic find and the sum of the party’s was somehow added or averaged across the team. It’d sate my enjoyment of tough dungeons while giving me some good drop along the way.

As is, I actually only use magic find trinkets and keep my combat armor on (I only have combat armor, currently, often a direct damage set and a condition damage set) then switch to combat trinkets when the beef hits the skillet.

An idea I just had to handle magic find, replace the magic find in gear with something else then add a new type of system. The enchantment system: basically, All Gear can have magic find on it, but it’s a random enchantment on gear that is hidden until you equip it. There could be other enchantments, like maybe +exp, +gold, or other effects that are more for out-of-combat. I’d even look into the ability to transfer enchantments from one piece of gear to another, perhaps once per-story mode run where you talk to an NPC at the end who then does that for you because using a transmutation stone on the two pieces of gear will simply give you a new piece with a hidden stat that will be randomly generated when you put it on.

Oh, that would actually make me want to try on every piece of equipment I get just to see what enchantments it could have so I can get the ones I like. It might even change the economy so those 20 copper warhorns are actually worth a bit more (maybe 25 copper!).

Another form of support is CC. Because my build doesn’t specialize in shouts, warhorn, or banners to either heal or remove conditions and I dislike being wet tissue too much to be full on glass cannon, my build is more balanced and lends to having well timed CC to keep the mob’s attention or to disrupt them from certain actions.

The weapons for the job tend to be mace, hammer or a shield and either ranged weapon for kiting. Utilities are general, things to help you out when something isn’t well timed. It requires knowledge of the foe, their attacks and how to evade/disrupt them and patience since alot of the times you’re in the mob’s face and have to eat some gnarly attacks. During bosses, you’re looking at being flexible, knowledgeable and mobile.

Regarding Magic Find, I sort of agree. I’m a person that loves to eat foods like pizza, pies and various other foods because they can give you bonuses that you can’t get anywhere but specific places like free healing, might on crits, +/-condition duration, etc.

Only recently have I given up using those great foods for extra +gold and +magic find food. It’s hard and scary not having my heal on crits with no internal cooldown. That said, I sort of agree about removing that stat from gear and consolidating it to food…but then I kind of also wish they’d expand gear a bit more so that utility stats like that kind of were open to all gear among other things. Being able to choose Berserker gear with utility stat of +magic find (not talking runes) or maybe +consumable duration or +gold or +experience or +karma etc. Basically you’d be able to choose just what type of utility to use or focus on in gear…I’d definitely focus on magic find while eating my favorite foods but some might prefer to just use +consumables and keep their magic find foods up longer.

I always just use any crating station vs the bank. Crafting stations are usually located inside of zones where you fight while banks are usually within city zones only.

The bank option at a crafting station is the 3rd ‘bag shaped’ icon on the left of the crafting window.

But for the question at hand, inside Rata Sum go down the stairs to the 2nd floor (you’ll be in the center of the map). That room is a triangle and at one corner is the trading post NPCs, at another is the guild bank and the last is the regular bank.

Yeah I figure they were talking about asuras built into the game (NPCs) since there’s already a cute asura thread for player ones.

An update, I took my own proposed justification for my own asura warrior.

He doesn’t use magic or technology to make up for his size, he uses science in a manner of speaking. He literally has charr/norn level of physical strength but it’s a mutation from an inquest experiment gone wrong. Since he was a little one, he’s lived with the mutation, being taller than the average Asura and much more physically powerful.

His field of study covers chaos magic like the contamination in the Thaumanova Reactor in Metrica Province and how to harness the positive effects it might have (like it did on him when he was a kid).

Not only is he physically strong like a charr, he can harness radiation to weaken his rivals in strength to more easily overwhelm them. He also has quite the healing factor. He’s pretty much a mini-asura-hulk

He likes using hammers :P

Gummy.4278:

One thing you do not need buy a book to re-spec…If you do, you are are doing it wrong. The Trainer has the second option to do your re-spec’s. Don’t look at the manuals if you have already learned them.

You can’t even do that if you wanted. Believe me, I tried when I was a noob. Spend gold to buy the book to unlock and retrait after having previously used them all before and it doesn’t let you consume them. I had to sell the book on the TP for a few silver of loss.

Also, lets add to this: That it keeps them recorded the way you have them entered the traits in them. So that a field re-spec will be as fast as possible.

I do not like the idea of buying another book to hold for each spec I want to use.
Stop coming up with ways for more of the little space I have to be used by stuff that I will have to have.

I want the system they had in GW1 just make it a bit more expensive for how many each re-spec’s you want to keep handy.

Actually, my idea was more like unlocking bank inventory slots. It’d be a tab in your trait window that lets you spend gems and poof, you can auto-swap to previous trait set-ups when you go to the retrait trainer. Just spend a few silver to clear your traits or a few silver to swap to another set of traits.

The respec books idea is merely a means of inhibiting someone from swapping back and forth consecutively as I don’t think that’s how the system was meant to work. With such a mock up, the devs can put a limit to how many books you can keep in your inventory, they can give the books a cooldown or whatever they feel keeps the balance while also giving the player the convenience of retraiting in the field.

The question is, how much would players be willing to pay for the option to reset their traits whenever they want or if they’d be willing to spend gold/gems to basically keep ‘multiple builds’ ready to for swapping.

If the answer is none, the question transitions to why the devs implemented retrait trainers in the first place and why they didn’t just allow us to reallocate trait points on the fly. They must have implemented that system for a reason and one has to take those reasons into consideration for an idea like this.

All that aside, I’m in agreement overall with the OP. As I play more and more, I’m starting to amass alternate equipment set-ups for my character but I keep my traits, generally, universal. I’d be more likely to make specialized builds if I had the option to swap them on the fly, even if there’s a limit/timer on it. This would lead to more equipment set-ups, the need for more inventory/bank space and ultimately me spending gems/cash to accommodate.

Heh, so the OP’s idea is so original, ‘pro’ players are stumped by ‘instant spells’.

Hilarious.

You can do the same thing by just mashing all your keys at once. All the instant ones will go off. I’m not even a pro player (just a dungeon crawler) and even I know that…

Simple solution, have the retrait vendor sell respec books for a hearty fee. You can continue to buy the books and use them whenever you feel like retraiting.

To line A-net’s pockets, give us the option to buy 1-3 trait spec ‘guides’ that act like bank reserves for different trait specs that you can swap to at the cost of a respec book and charge gems for this service.

Gold sink + making the devs money + players can swap builds without porting to a specific vendor.

OP, the amount of haters is directly proportional to the level of success you’ve had in a unique build.

IMO, I don’t see the difference between filming yourself taking down upleveled foes or the tankiest of tanks across all servers. The point I took away from the build is, ‘how can I exploit instant cast spells in this game’ and I feel that your build exemplifies that potential. Basically using 4+ attacks at once is a pretty powerful thing if exploited properly.

As for the peanut gallery, if you think you could accomplish the same thing or better, put your keyboard where your mouth is. Mind you, it’s a gimmick build…he even named it after the gimmick.

I actually read this post yesterday before I logged into the game. Having not actually run Arah before since I hadn’t gotten to do story yet, I decided to join in on a whim and have to agree, the dungeon seems unforgiving.

Path 1 wasn’t so bad beyond a few bosses you have to figure out. But there’s definitely something wrong with path 4’s boss (the one that turns players to stone and vanishes to heal). Seriously, the amount of prep work, planning and coordination was just stupid compared to anything else I’ve encountered. You have to pile up a bunch of Dwayna’s tears, you have to pull the boss to a certain spot so 2 guys can round up sparks and the rest of the team doesn’t get aggro, you have to put in a certain amount of spark each round, then on top of all that, you MUST be top damage spec otherwise you might not finish.

It took me and my team almost 4(!!!!!) hours on that single boss trying to figure out how to take it down and by the end we all had to stop, respec our traits, put on specific gear and down the best damage food to finally get it down.

There’s seriously something wrong with that fight. It shouldn’t be turning people to stone every 2 seconds requiring a butt load of tears and a dedicated ‘tear person’ to counter. The sparks are idiots and will shoot at you from range if they don’t aggro any random NPC that might be nearby, and you have to practically force them into the designated point to trigger the boss to come out. The boss heals way too fast when she disappears and requires you to gather the sparks again and finally, it’s just kitten poor AI how she starts disappearing faster giving you less chance to fight her and more chance for her to heal.

I normally like a good dungeon crawl and enjoy repeating them on my various characters but I cannot go wasting 4-5 hours on 1 dungeon that doesn’t give any more reward than your random PUG AC.

For the record, I got 0 exotics from that run too which made the night all the more sour.

Oglaf.1074:

There are like two or three instances in Events out there were male Asura get molested by randy Harpies.

Must be some designer’s little fetish or something, eh?

What are you talking about?

Are you sure you were playing GW2 and not some other +18 game?

Khristophoros.7194:

So what exactly is the reason to do this instead of just damage reduction or some general defensive thing that doesn’t depend on crits?

What about anti-crit is good exactly? It’s a random chance that varies from opponent to opponent. Why ever would I want my defense to be based on that?

The question is, why not? It’s not like the OP said to implement the idea, forgo all other defensive options for Warrior or replace defensive traits to focus on ‘anti-crit’ as a build spec. Ideally, you’d want to shore up mitigation and supplement it with something like this. Guardians are tough just because they heal all the time, but because they have the toughness and condition removal to back those heals.

Dinny.5310:

I wasn’t paying enough attention to determine whether there’s any example of a sylvari falling for someone of another race, but amongst the dominant races, inter-race romances/crushes definitely exist. They aren’t very common – which makes sense, as you’d naturally be more attracted to your own kind – but they do exist.

The most amusing one was a male asura and a female charr. Albeit it was one-sided. One guess as to which way it was one-sided.

Either would be quite amusing to read/watch. Although I always imagined my Asura being the same way, having a preference to women outside of his species for one reason or another.

And people whine there’s not diversity in builds for various classes…

You can build around specific attributes and tactics and make great things happen because of food. Consider, some people will debate about swapping 5 trait points for some extra health regen in their build (like Adrenal Health for Warriors, Metaphisical Rejuvenation for Mesmer, Soothing Mist for Elementalist, etc) and yet, you can just eat some pie (pumpkin, grape, banana cream, peach, mango, etc) for a similar effect and pie is literally pennies.

Or that sigils like Sigil of Blood and Sigil of Strength can fetch a gold or two on the trading post for a chance to steal health or gain might on crits. Well, they have food that also heals you or grants might on crits and they don’t cost much at all.

The most powerful thing about it is, you can STACK those effects and regen a crap ton by traiting for regen and eating pie, or stack lots of might with combo fields/sigils/food.

You’d be a fool, as a mesmer and not eating pizza because it can extend condition durations of your shatters and various powers by 40%. Stack with the domination trait line for an extra 30% and maybe another 10% from runes?

Or consider the price difference between a regular blue/green beserker trinket and an exotic/rare. The stat difference there is probably only 3-8pts but the price is often several gold. Butternut squash soup is only a few silver each and gives you +100 percision and +10% crit damage. That’s like an extra half of an earring for the price of selling some junk to an NPC.

Granted I don’t eat food all the time, only vs things that require me to dodge…but if you don’t eat food, you’re just plain n00b…that or you can’t prioritize value right. You’d probably spend 10g on an earring with 2 more points to a stat over your latest exotic and yet wouldn’t use an item that gives 100x that bonus even if someone gave it to you for free.

Something else people rarely mention: Magnetic Wave and Obsidian Flesh are instant cast. You can use them while you’re channeling other abilities and what not.

As for Focus’ Fire abilities, I always though making the fire line ability work mechanically like mesmer’s Temporal curtain (i.e. you lay it down and for a few seconds, you have the option to pull foes through it). For wall of fire, after laying it down, you have the option of destroying it for a blow-out effect and a small splash of damage. THAT would make Focus too fun to ignore, IMO :P

Khristophoros.7194:

You can’t choose your opponents, so why would you want something that counters specific things like on-crit sigils and on-crit traits?

I think you completely missed the point and you’re on a completely unrelated subjects. I never suggested the topic’s idea to specifically counter on-crit sigils/traits. I said it could work like on-crit sigils/traits since they do exist.

And if such a change were made, you would be taking less damage.

Also, if mobs’ crit rate is very low, you can always adjust them. Make it so they have a decent crit chance while also lowering their damage to break even. Suddenly, everyone’s taking a bit less damage (since a mob would need to crit to get as much damage as they do now…although the weaken condition might not be as powerful against them) and now you have room to add more crit-taken traits across the board for more dynamic play.

The biggest effect would be on PvP though since that’s where you encounter high crit chance and damage along with its plethora of extra effects.

I was wondering if it were possible to get glowie eyes like that pic there Dinny posted. I tried for my last asura I made but couldn’t make them vibrant like some of the NPCs I’ve seen.

Also, when doing personal story, I had to take a pic of this cutie.

My asura prefers large, taller females because he feels less likely to break them (he’s a warrior, you see, with an abnormal physique).

My other asura, not really into relationships. He’s more gaga over fine cuisine and fashion (he’s a tailor and a cook :P).

As for me, I don’t have any sort of attraction to asura females in that way but if I did, why no mention of Traffa from Caudecus’ Manor, or Zrii (pic attached)? They even seem to have bubbly personalities that seem pretty interesting.

I say you should be using all weapons.

As you level up (in PvE), it’s not like you have dedicated builds or stats (generally, just keep your gear updated) so picking a weapons isn’t necessary. Just use them all, find out which gels with your style and figure out some combos with them. Once you’ve gotten a good feel for that weapon, swap to something you don’t use. By lvl 30-40 you should finally be figuring what you want to focus on and go from there.

But even then, using other weapons is a good idea. When I was first lvling my mesmer to 40, I preferred sword/sword and disliked greatsword and torch. After having played a few more classes and coming back to mesmer, I’ve settled on greatsword/sword+torch.

Not sure why I even care for torch, but it’s a unique weapon and I enjoy my aggro-wipe skill without needed to dedicate a utility slot for it (OMG I wish I had more utility slots!!). It can also grant you blast finishers to give AoE chaos armor. Lastly, Phantasmal Mage tends to stick to range so when swarmed, it’s a better chance of stacking up 3 illusions to shatter vs my berserker or swordmen that tend to get gibbed quicker before I can shatter.

I think the only weapon I don’t rotate to is scepter. Not that I don’t like scepter but for lots of clones, vigor + dodge can get me clones. More clones? There’s a utility slot just for that. And since I’m not a condition mesmer, the rest of scepter isn’t appealing.

Khristophoros.7194:

Leo G.4501:

I could definitely see a trait or two combined/created to address Warrior options for direct damage. It’s not ‘stupid’ to add diversity to builds and a Warrior one specifically designed to counter direct damage sounds exactly like a warrior tactic.

It’s stupid to make “anti-crit” mechanics because crit is just direct damage.

It’s smarter to make new mechanics to help mitigate direct damage in general because the current mechanics for that are lacking.

Specifying crit is the stupid part. Crit is not a special form of damage. It is simply damage.

Well, it’s damage that has special stats for it (percision and %critical damage) as well as mechanics specifically aimed at crits (on-crit effects).

It’s not just damage. It’s damage that has stats and mechanics tied to it. And as the rest of my post mentions, an ‘anti-crit’ doesn’t specifically have to be ‘take less damage from them’ but could have some sort of countering mechanic.

Think of it like how you have effects and sigils that have a % chance to trigger and then the ones that have a % chance to trigger on crits. We already have runes and effects that have a % chance to trigger when struck (Rune of the Monk, for instance) and abilities that have a % chance to trigger when struck by a critical hit (Spiked Armor). Now you just need a few more of those types of traits/utilities that aren’t weak and more defensive.

I could definitely see a trait or two combined/created to address Warrior options for direct damage. It’s not ‘stupid’ to add diversity to builds and a Warrior one specifically designed to counter direct damage sounds exactly like a warrior tactic.

Something like “Crits received daze the source”. You still take the damage, it just won’t be fast-spam crits down you in an instant and channeled crit abilities are directly countered.

A trait where “Having a Shield equipped automatically blocks 1 critical hit (cooldown 45sec)” would cull the initial nuker who readied his best attack an initiates with his strongest burst.

A stat is probably out but perhaps a unikittenfect like Mesmer has Distortion, tied to Adrenaline where if you activate your adrenaline bar (maybe with F2) critical hits are reverted to normal hits but costs Adrenaline per hit (crit or regular).

I’m thinking a blink away from the enemy might just have ludicrous synergy. Clone > Swap > Blurred + Shatter > iRiposte + blink away.

Looks like a blend of various armor pieces. I see Citadel of Flames(shoulders & gloves) and Sorrow’s Embrace(helm & chest I think) dungeon armor mixed in there. Those are just the obvious I can tell.

Urthona.3198:

Celestina.2894:

When you have to retrieve that sword for the pre-Order quests, I recall it being hinted that the sylvari had loved the man who stole the sword and left him to die.

If you do the Priory option to actually witness the event, then you see that the squire who stole the sword was a preteen at the time (which makes sense, given that it happened ~20 years ago and the guy is still young enough to be a champion gladiator.) I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the game isn’t implying that the Sylvari revere a pedophile.

Lol when I read post you quoted, I laughed and said the same thing to myself.

But frankly that guy (the Sylvari that story is about) didn’t seem very smart…well, wise. An army of undead on the horizon and it’s only you and your 12-ish year old squire who is admitting he’s wetting himself in fright. “Let’s stand and fight!”

How about just protecting your squire and retreating? Live to fight another day while teaching your young ward a lesson in wisdom and humility.

I sort of felt sorry for the human dude you ended up wiping the floor with. He probably had some guilt buried deep down and used those fights to somehow prove he wasn’t a coward.

And no, I don’t think Riannoc had a sexual attraction to the human boy Waine. If anything, Riannoc was naive hadn’t the words to describe his feelings for the boy besides love. What he meant to say was he cared deeply for the boy as a role model and teacher.

People encounter dagger/dagger elementalist practically all the time, it’s cliche now…so much so many are probably forming personal strats to deal with their various talents. Focus is rare. Some people don’t understand Swirling Winds or Magnetic Wave and so forth. Many haven’t sharpened their strats to deal with them.

Uncertainty can be a weapon too.

Nike.2631:

Just do it.

Fixed.

Just a though: keep the cooldown and duration (maybe shorten the cast time) and add 30sec of swiftness.

…Warrior kind of spoiled me. I can have perma swiftness with some extra boon duration thanks to Signet of Rage elite.

When I ran the order of whispers story on my mesmer…

That at least hints, to me, that just as we intelligent beings have had the thought cross our minds, so would the different races of Tyria…if they really are capable of intelligent though.

Linguistically Inept.6583:

i recall someone suggesting a mainhand dagger ages ago… acting like a reverse GS (more damage the closer they are)… that sounds pretty fun

For some reason, a mainhand dagger doesn’t make sense to me. Dual dagger I guess, and if you had a choice to main a dagger with something else that’s you…but mainhand-only dagger + sword is rather backwards. People tend to wield their shorter weapon in their off hand, not the other way around.

I think mainhand torch would be an interesting addition.

Just imagine, an auto-attach with a Blast Finisher at the end, a cone of PINK flames that blinds foes and creates a clone (that has a BLAST FINISHER) and a Staff-esque defensive/offensive FIRE field that steals boons from foes and grants them to allies while applying burning and a chance to blind as well as retaliation to allies.

If anything, I think it’d could be the flashiest weapon besides staff that a mesmer would have.

So when does the voting start?

knight.8926:

that was pretty cool, what did you do to get all those rally’s?

Easy. Kite the enemy into NPCs. Just tag the NPCs and the enemy’s AoE usually takes down the mobs for you.