Guild Wars 2

Proven.2854:

Are people listening to him? He’s saying that server ratings decided these matchups. If these matchups are bad, it’s because the server ratings were bad. If the server ratings are bad, then you need to shakeup the matchups in order to get more accurate ratings, because the current ratings were gained from stagnant matchups.

Or: it’s not the ratings that are bad and need to be fixed; it’s that there is a huge disparity of WvW population from server to server so that each server only has one or two possible matchups that have the possibility of being competitive. So no matter what the ratings are, whether they’re accurate or not, chances are that either you’ll be in an unbalanced (pop wise) matchup or matchup stagnation.

It is in the interest of everyone to have (roughly) even WvW population amongst all servers. An analogous situation would be a sports league where every team fields a different number of players. It’s certainly not going to be fair/fun/competitive for a team of 10 to be matched up with a team of 5. This limits the number of matchups that are fun and competitive. However, if every team had 11 players, then all matchups would be fair game — whether you win or lose depends not on team size, but skill.

No matter how the WvW rating is tweaked, if WvW population imbalances are not addressed, then each server will still have only a few other servers that it can be competitively matched up with. The result is matchup stagnation.

So if you’re looking for a new server, come to a lower population server — help even out WvW population for the good of all servers!

Noodica.5428:

Lord Kuru.3685:

did [Lost] get a name change too?

They didn’t, you will still see the occasional Lost guy on NSP but most of the WvW side are here on BP

but aren’t they called “Shiverpeaks search and rescue”?

anyway, good luck on BP — unless we get matched up, of course.

did [Lost] get a name change too?

He’s counting minis sold on the TP in the 100 gold/day calculations. Without DR, I can somewhat believe his numbers (if he’s farming 6-7 hours a day). However, 6-7 hours a day means DR is certain to kick in — sounds a bit fishy (pun intended).

Anyway, the southsun event is going to be over in 2 days. There will be no more minis and no more 200% magic find. So even if what he’s saying is possible, it’s practically too late now.

By the way, why would you post about fantastic farming areas? All that does is get places nerfed. Putting my tin foil hat on: I’d say he wants to manipulate scale/armored scale prices (Anet nerfs the area and his scales become more valuable).

transfer to NSP — we have low WvW pop (great PvE community though) so your presence makes a difference.

Best of all, no queues means you can get yelled at without first having to wait 30 mins!

Oh… I just looked at the food you wanted to make: the Orrian truffle and meat stew… where do you find the sage for that? I believe sage is found in the eastern Charr lands, but I haven’t been able to find a consistent source for it.

The herbs in the southeastern part of dredgehaunt return rosemary at a very high rate.
It’s definitely better than 1/12. Different zones specialize in different herbs so even though young/mature herbs can return 12 possible types of herbs you’ll only see a few different types from each zone.

Park a character in that area, every time you log in and log out do a bit of harvesting… in a few days you’ll get all the rosemary you need.

Humor.5763:

I miss the skills that you actually went out, and killed an NPC to obtain a skill. God I remember so well helping my brother out with his Dervish class hunting down the NPC’s that gave skills.

That was fun… I remember having to capture the elite skill from the boss as he casted it (like an interrupt) .. too bad they changed that!

got 2. definitely opened fewer than 40 crates and probably fewer than 30. Got the 2 back to back too!

Oh, and I also got 2 completely worthless mobile crafting stations

NSP has daily temple runs at 5:00 pm pacific time.

Darx.9842:

Which skins are people buying?

I was lucky enough to get a ticket, but can’t pick out a skin I like.

I was lucky enough to get 2 skins (out of fewer than 30 boxes)… got a dagger to replace my ugly pearl-skinned one; and the shield because that eye is huge and therefore awesome. Don’t really like most of the skins because they are too symmetrical.

In the end, if enough people buy RNG boxes with gems, then Anet/NCSoft will continue the RNG model. NCSoft is a public company so the ONLY THING THEY CARE ABOUT IS MAKING MONEY. So the only way to make the RNG stop is to not buy RNG boxes.

Anyway, it’s kind of foolish to buy crates because you don’t even know the odds! If you knew the odds, you could at least do a bit of probability to estimate how many crates you need to buy in order to (more or less) ensure a ticket; and thus you could assign a gem value to the tickets; and thus you would be able to make an informed decision as to whether the skins are worth that gem value. However, you don’t know the odds, so it’s crazy to buy these crates!

Anyway, here’s my solution to the RNG issue.. I think it’s one that would satisfy both players and Anet (others have made very similar suggestions):

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/southsun/Solution-to-RNG-skin-issue/2036322

An (almost functionally equivalent) alternative to the above would be if Anet releases the odds of getting a ticket from a crate (because again, you could calculate how many crates you need to buy in order to (pretty much) guarantee a ticket). However, I don’t see this happening at all.

TLDR: Don’t gamble when you don’t know the odds. Follow link for solution to RNG boxes.

I don’t think we’ll ever see solo dungeons for the same reason we’ll never see organized 1v1 PvP: balance of the professions is very out of whack and solo dungeons would really put that in the forefront.

That said, this game does lack challenging content for solo PvE players. Sure, you can solo some of the group content, but you’ll have to do it purely for the fun as your rewards will not scale to time spent.

Anyway, as suggested above, many dungeons are soloable, with some professions having a much easier time than others. I’d suggest starting with SE p1.

Think about the RNG:

• Getting a precursor to drop in the open world is a big deal.
• Getting one specific precursor to drop in the open world is an enormous deal.
• Getting two specific precursors to drop in the open world: forget about it.

I wouldn’t be surprised if your chances of getting both Dawn and Dusk as drops is less than winning the lottery.

You’ll have to either buy Dawn and Dusk off the TP or dump tons of GS’s into the mystic forge. I’d recommend doing CoF runs as much as possible starting now — I’m expecting a nerf any day now.

Mist Y.5214:

At first it seems sensible to not give WvW rewards for PvE tasks (including map completion), but even without that we have a really messed up system of rewarding badges. Why do claimer NPCs reward badges, and why is it possible to get TWO badges instead of one sometimes?
It should be one badge per player kill, and nothing else. JPs and mapping belong in PvE.

I don’t think NPC’s should give badges either. I’m satisfied with it being RNG upon player kill, however.

ProxyDamage.9826:

Because….? Badges of Honor are the standard WvW base reward.

Note: “Because I felt like it” and “Because I said so” are not acceptable reasons.

This is why:

GuardianOMS.8067:

I think so, for the mere fact that it would cause so many tears from the PvE lords.

Sorry, just saw one too many threads whining about having to get 500 badges for a legendary (together with the usual tons of replies saying to farm the JPs using lots of alts — does that even work anymore?).

Yes, that makes me a bad person.

Badges of honor should be removed as rewards to WvW JP’s. What do you all think?

as I understand it, everything except for the to-be-added Karka Queen meta-event will be taken away on June 11.

see here: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/community-news/a-guide-to-last-stand-at-southsun-cove/

Just wondering: what has happened to the small man tier (T8) now that Anet has shaken up the matchups? Is there a plan to keep it going somehow?

come to Northern Shiverpeaks. We do have zergs during certain parts of the day, but low population much of the time. During the low population times you can really make a difference. Our PvE community is really cool — for example, we have temple runs every day at 5:00pm pacific time.

Zaxares.5419:

I can see why the farmers would be annoyed with this, but as a player who doesn’t farm, reducing mob density in an area is a good thing for me. Less chance to get swarmed and overwhelmed when you aren’t looking.

Now if ANet would only do the same with the swarms of sharks in the bay…

You’ve obviously never even been to that area. There’s no way you could have been overwhelmed by those skelk.

so if one server only has 10 people in WvW, every server has 10 people max? I don’t like that idea at all. This kind of a hard cap will only kitten players off. What we need is for Anet to start encouraging people to move to servers that have low WvW pop to roughly even out populations.

I’m not advocating removal of food (it’s fun, and adds some variety) but I do think that the ability to reduce conditions (not just from foods) can be a bit OP, especially considering the system of counting damage only once per second.

Perhaps calculating damage more often would be a better fix — it’s always best to avoid nerfing becuase that makes people angry. If instead they changed it so that you took 1/4 the damage every 1/4 second, that would be much more reasonable (however, there would be the issue of more server-client data transfer)

Bhawb.7408:

Lord Kuru.3685:

so what DPS utility skills would you use? I made the OP because I was wondering what our best DPS skills are… BiP is indeed really good, but what else do Necros have that increase our DPS?

Minions have good sustained DPS, but you shouldn’t use them only for that. Look at their secondary uses and use them for the damage and that.

Yeah, that’s true. I abolutely love flesh golem’s charge, but bone fiend and shadow fiend’s secondaries execute so long after you activate. Putrid explosion is cool — when you are fighting a single foe; otherwise, it’s so inconsistent.

However, I’m trying to enhance a Tazza (SEp1) soloing build and what I really need is more DPS for a shorter fight — so I’m looking through all Necro utilities looking for DPS… we actually don’t have many! Your testing has been very helpful!

I don’t think Anet should be making more supergroups a la Destiny’s Edge much less Destiny’s Edge: The Next Generation.

Anet is really hit or miss with their (supposedly sympathetic) characters so any supergroup they make will be ruined by having (at least) one AWFUL character.

Old Destiny’s Edge: Eir whines way too much about being over the hill (it’s all she ever talks about)… but it’s Logan Thackarey who ruins the whole thing: I absolutely hate him, he’s just a little kitten.

By the way, anyone else disappointed in Braham’s baby faced in-game looks? It’s just awful compared to his pretty awesome load screen look.

Insidious.3720:

Minion skills DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT, scale with any of your stats. Nothing, nada, zip, zilch. The only thing that you would benefit from would be bloodthirst helping out their healing to you if you choose that trait. Other than that, nothing scales. The stats are fixed, which is why a minion master can spec however the hell they want to because it doesn’t matter at all with regards to minions.

1625 dps? That’s horrible. Add that to your own dps and you might peak at 2k dps, which is craptastic. Look, you aren’t going to be dpsing so much as you are going to be trying to keep your minions alive and debuffing the mob. Also, condition damage in pve? Are you stupid. Condition dmg has no use, NONE, in pve. The reason for this is a dead mob is a mob that isn’t killing you. Faster and better dps will bring it down, not playing a game of attrition whittling away at it. There is a reason why it’s zerker or gtfo for the meta game, and why necros aren’t included on that list. Necro dps, in general, is kitten poor unless you run a power/zerker/BiP setup, and even then, you’re on the bottom end of the totem pole for dps. And if you try and bring minions into end game, you’ll be auto kicked. No one wants those things taking away valuable buffs from their team, aside from the fact that when the mob so much as looks at them they die.

Roll Zerker/Power/BiP and stop being bad and bringing your groups down.

so what DPS utility skills would you use? I made the OP because I was wondering what our best DPS skills are… BiP is indeed really good, but what else do Necros have that increase our DPS?

anyone know whether putrid explosion scales to your stats or is fixed? It’s a minion skill but it’s, in a way, not really the minion doing the damage.

for PvE, they increased the health (and I believe also healing) of the healing minion significantly — it’s definitely viable now for PvE (generally not dungeons though).
I found this to be a really big positive change.

for PvE, minion mastery is pretty fun and doe lots of damage. If you choose to play this way, definitely go for +30% minion damage (spite line), +50% health (death magic line)… outside of this, do whatever you like: you can choose blood magic if you want to heal your minions, or go full on spite for more power… try different things. You’ll struggle in dungeons with minion mastery though.

I like using dagger/focus — dagger has great damage (I’d use scepter only for conditionmancer build) if you have power… Focus #4 is great as it gives vulnerability which is a great condition for minion masters (it boosts damage for all your minions).

Staff is great. Staff #2 helps keep your minions alive.

Thanks for the testing Bhawb!

I did not know that minions don’t share your critical chance.
So minions don’t share your power or precision — do they share any of your stats (besides condition damage)? Maybe critical damage?

This is kind of disturbing… so if your build depends on minions for damage, seems like you should go for full condition stats (or maybe defensive). (I’m talking PvE.. don’t think minion builds work in WvW, don’t know anything about tPvP.)

TheOneNOnlyGeneralBama.9586:

Get more condition duration…what can 1 second of burning do anyways lol 350 dmg a tick..get more condition duration or dont rely on your justice passive

the point is that a very common source of burning is rendered completely useless with a minus-condition duration rune/food. In fact if you eat a -40% condition duration food, I would need to almost double my condition damage to get even one tick out of the virtue of justice burning. (by the way, I get way over 500 dmg a tick on burning.)

A one second condition is, of course, the worst case scenario, but in general, it seems like condition damage is a bit too easily negated/reduced.

anyone done tests on minion DPS and willing to share the numbers?

Let’s say you apply a 1 second burning on a foe, but that foe has runes or food that reduces condition duration. For simplicity, let’s assume this is the first condition that has been applied to this foe (as I understand it, once someone receives his first condition, a clock is started that ticks every second; damage is applied at each tick, so in this example, the clock starts upon reception of your burning). In this case, your foe doesn’t take any damage from your burning?

Seems a bit broken, no? Especially since many burns are exactly 1 second long (guardian virtue of justice).

Anet needs to first acknowledge that population/coverage is the true problem — not inaccurate ratings. Then it must incentivize transfers to the lower WvW pop/coverage servers (WvW pop, not server pop). In the end, if Anet can achieve roughly eequal WvW pops, then we can have much more variety in terms of match-ups fixing our stagnation problem.

In fact, if Anet explains this issue carefully to players, I’ll be many would transfer of their own accord without further incentive.

what about the disease condition from GW1? I always that that was a really cool condition.

This newest animation looks to me like the guardian hammer #4 animation — but it fits really well as a sickle animation. Very creative reuse of resources!

SmoothHussler.6387:

Eviator.9746:

ANet cannot win, it seems. Either the matchups get stale, or they are too imbalanced. I guess you can’t please everyone, but is there a way to please nearly everyone?
.

Its the bandwagon crew that fill up a few servers while the others are empty who ruin the matchups.

This. Exactly this. Anet needs to recognize that this is the real problem. They need to start enouraging (using incentives) people to transfer in such a way that WvW populations will be roughly balanced.

Then we can just have round-robin matchups fixing the stagnant match-up issue.

Even if we have as many finishers as everyone else, the fact is that several of our finishers are deeply flawed.

• Flesh wurm — I really can’t think of a situation where you’d be willing to use it as a finisher.
• Bone minions — if you’re in PvE, fighting a single foe who doesn’t move, they’re great combo finishers. (I actually do encounter this setup, but it’s still really situational) … otherwise, you’ll blast outside of the field most of the time.
• Staff #4: you need to hit a foe for it to be a finisher — that makes it far less useful.
• Flesh wurm, bone fiend finishers are ok, but their attack rates are really slow and you have no control over when they’ll attack. The result: fields often don’t last long enough to get a combo off.
• Staff #1: 20% change + slow attack rate + slow projectile velocity = you pretty much never combo with staff #1.
• we do have a bunch straightforward reliable of water finishers

anyone checked to see if the rate is back to normal?

Pixelpumpkin.4608:

arKRazor.8654:

Not one tear shed for the smashing of thousands of Skritt shinies?

I feel bad for both being Hero of the Skritt and holding the Skritt Slayer achievement :’-(

Funny — I gleefully smash any skritt shiny I see!

Funny… I’m on NSP as well and our population problem is really demoralizing because we really are good when people are actually on. I really hate to say it, but we probably belong in T8.

I was hoping the new rank chests would encourage more PvE’ers to try out WvW… however, looking at the loot I get from these chests, that’s not going to happen.

Anyway, all this matchup business that Anet is doing doesn’t address the basic problem of population imbalance — even if it puts us all in the tier we’re supposed to be in, how will that address the lack of variety in matchups?

I have no doubt Anet does have extensive logs of WvW population/activity.
And they definitely need to begin encouraging people to move to the empty ones.

Imagine a scenario where every server had roughly comparable populations and coverage. Then round robin match-ups would be fair (if you win it’s because you’re awesome, not because of high population, and if you lose it’s because you suck, not because of low pop). This would go a LONG way towards fixing the stagnation we have now in WvW.

As for getting people to move — I say give incentives, starting with free transfers.
And if Anet explained this issue clearly, many would probably move without further incentive.

that’s awesome.. where is it?

my contribution: there’s a heart where you more or less rip baby dolyaks from the breasts of their mothers (and maybe also kill their mothers, don’t quite remember) in the northern part of Wayfarer.

I believe Tarnished Coast is the unofficial RP server so that may be a good fit for you.

Otherwise, I’m on Northern Shiverpeaks… we have a good PvE community and could use some WvW players if you’re into PvP.

There’s free guesting for PvE anyway (I believe once per day) so PvE-wise, your server is not a huge deal.

By the way, I believe you can change servers for free as long as you delete all your toons — since you’re just starting out, maybe you can test the waters a bit.

I’ve watched this very carefully.. it’s always the closer bone minion that is blown up with putrid explosion.

As for using them in combo fields — if you’re in a big field and you cast the minions and immediately blow them up, you’ll get the combo. If the minions have already been cast, they’ll usually be everywhere except in the field. If the field is small and you cast and immediately blow up, you’ll usually get one combo out of the two as one is almost always outside of the field.

Honestly, I’m really disappointed in Anet:

• Initially, the sickle is used like a pick (and with pick sound effects) — plus, the handle is too short so your toon is grabbing the air while hacking away at the plant.
• Then, after players expressed outrage, Anet simply lengthens the handle of the sickle …the message I got out of it was that they were hoping to placate their customers with as little effort as possible.
• Finally they revert the animation to the stock gathering animation, plus a miniaturized version of Healing Spring .. which is invisible when used on certain nodes, and doesn’t even pop up until the harvesting is done and your toon has left the area!

The whole episode gives the impression that Anet just doesn’t care: they just want to spend the minimum amount of effort they can to get your money now. Businesses who don’t care about having return customers… this is how they behave.

By the way, the first time I did this dungeon, it was on my guardian. Total faceroll.
I randomly used my blocks, stability, invulnerability to prevent knockbacks and when I did get knocked back, I used my stun breakers. Didn’t even bother to learn any of Canach’s attack animations.

The dungeon is easy if you know how to do it, but the OP is right.. it is ridiculously easy with a guardian.

Khal Drogo.9631:

Lord Kuru.3685:

I did it today with my necro and got the lightfooted achievement…

Find one explosive mine near a wall. Only work with this mine and skill #2.
Make it green and lead Canach to it.. he will take quite a bit of damage. Then stand with your back to the wall and wait for the mine to respawn. Once it respawns, repeat.
It takes maybe around 15 cycles to kill him this way.

While you’re waiting for respawn, you don’t have anything to do (don’t bother using any skills except for healing and #2) so just watch Canach’s animations — they’ll tell you what he’s about to do. You can dodge his knockback attacks if you pay close attention. And even if you miss a dodge, since your back is against the wall, you won’t get knocked into a mine. (His damage is indeed pretty sad.)

One last note: make sure the mine is green before you lead Canach to it… for some reason, skill #2 occasionally doesn’t work correctly.

Can this be considered as an exploit? The player should be forced to run around and dodge roll mines.

I don’t see how this could be considered an exploit… nothing is being glitched. If Anet wanted to force you to run around and dodge roll mines, then they could have made the walls filled with spikes, or have the fight on a platform similar to the one in the Molten Facility. But they didn’t. You’re simply using the terrain to your advantage (and it’s not like your invulnerable or anything like that.)

I did it today with my necro and got the lightfooted achievement…

Find one explosive mine near a wall. Only work with this mine and skill #2.
Make it green and lead Canach to it.. he will take quite a bit of damage. Then stand with your back to the wall and wait for the mine to respawn. Once it respawns, repeat.
It takes maybe around 15 cycles to kill him this way.

While you’re waiting for respawn, you don’t have anything to do (don’t bother using any skills except for healing and #2) so just watch Canach’s animations — they’ll tell you what he’s about to do. You can dodge his knockback attacks if you pay close attention. And even if you miss a dodge, since your back is against the wall, you won’t get knocked into a mine. (His damage is indeed pretty sad.)

One last note: make sure the mine is green before you lead Canach to it… for some reason, skill #2 occasionally doesn’t work correctly.

Actually one more note: don’t lead Canach to a green mine unless he has recently used his knockback attack… just be patient.