Guild Wars 2

Lotta guys in here seem mad about the flirting thing.

WvW build:

18k well burst, 2600 armor. Chilling darkness plague because OP is OP, even though lich is more fun :P

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQNAndWjQaV6Zaia87JkJFdz4EpoYGGqHlD78hA-jEyAYLioRCCIZZIaJvioxWGLiGr2GTFTEVbyLiWtUARsFA-w

Throw marks, gain LF. Drop wells, go deathshroud, 100% crit for 5 seconds while your wells tick, 109% crit damage. Life transfer. 18k damage, max 5 targets. 34s recharge on the combo. Switch to consume if you’re using waterfields. Add hammer guard and focus mesmer for ‘my wells have 600 radius and you can’t get out of them’ shenanigans if you’re on comms with a small group. Guard needs two handed mastery.

I’ll have the laurels for this next month, should I do it? I don’t wvw much, but I pve even less, so might as well use the laurels on something. I’ll probably never get the backpiece though >.<

Ara.4569:

If Vitality and Toughness are pretty much on par for mitigation (calculations based on 100% direct damage) Carrion is clearly better because of conditions. We may be the best at taking care of them, we still eat alot of burning, poison and bleed stacks…

Having Last Gasp and running Spectral Armor most of the time, I generate a substantial amount of LF. And I tend to be in DS as soon as possible while being “spectral” to preserve health, using DS #1 to fill that extra time, thinking I also take advantage of the Power provided by Carrion. But am I right ?

Now, I wonder which one is better damage wise. But that could be tricky and depends on builds and alot of other things.

They’re not though. As soon as you heal once, toughness is better. This is where this debate always ends though, because it’s simply not possible to figure out what percentage of the damage you take is going to be condition damage in every situation, or how much other healing you will receive based on your group composition and location etc.

If you’re stacking healing power with well of blood and siphons, running with a guard ele and engi, only facing power builds, you’ll get more sustain from toughness (although sustain is less important than EHP when facing pure power comps). If your only healing is coming from your 6 skill and mark of blood regen, plus you have really high LF generation and you’re facing necro engi spirit ranger, you might want to look into carrion for sustain.

As far as damage goes, carrion is better, which keeps builds running dhuumfire, and more to the point, sigil of earth, in check a little bit, being crit procs.

Personally, on my 30/20/0/0/20, I’m running rabid with carrion jewel. I feel like geomancy overextends me too much, and carrion with rabid jewel still isn’t enough crit for fast sigil of earth procs. I’m pretty sure my overall damage would nonetheless be higher with that setup, but I want armour ignoring damage, and I want to restack bleeds fast after each cleanse, to put more pressure on their ability to cleanse. Once you have the rabid amulet though, carrion jewel is both more offense and more defense than rabid jewel (because you want to balance vit and tough as much as possible for the best defense), so it seemed like an easy choice. If you have the carrion amulet, rabid jewel is more defense, but carrion jewel is still more offense (because the amount of power required to make crit equal it in value is unattainable), so it becomes an actual decision.

uberkingkong.8041:

javasocute.1876:

The Kaypud account that’s 14-3 is one of my alt accounts, it’s not Kaypud’s. He always played on his main account because he feels this rating system is poorly designed and he didn’t care about his rank on it.

I didn’t use that account with the intent to steal rating from anyone, I used that account because I didn’t want to lose rating on my main account by duo-queueing with Kaypud when our team wasn’t on. We went 12-3 duo queueing together, and that placed the account in the top 10. Since then I’ve played 2 games on that account every month or so just to halt its ELO decay, but seeing as its about the same rank as my main account anyway, it’s not taking any more or less rating from our opponents than I otherwise would.

This guy got 2 accounts in top 25 and play one tpvp game a month on both, da kitten is this. GW2 allows this kind of stuff? How people going to pass you guys if everyone on top 25 plays 1 game a month?

GW2 got so many issues,
hotjoin newb farming for rank point xp
matchmaking system making one team super high ranks and other team super low ranks
leaderboards people just chilling at top because they can.

funny you see team absolute legends dropping in top 25 because they only ones playing tpvp, with exception of shan, he prob pretended he was sick because he didn’t want a rank hit. this leaderboard funny too funny.

Just goes to show you play tpvp you rank down faster than you rank up.

You’re really struggling with the whole elo concept aren’t you?

I love the golem actually, I just love the old one much more.

Back when I played WAR it was just magus pull, root, chosen magic debuff, drop sorc bombs, move to next fight. We may have had a zealot up the back somewhere to clean up the little scratches we got before we detonated…

flow.6043:

spoj.9672:

If you take damage on your base hp your going to need to heal it back up, but if youve stacked vitality your heal skill is gonna heal you for a lower percentage of your hp. You will get slowly warn down because you cant sustain your main hp pool properly.

Like I said, an extra 1,5 k effective health per main heal on a 18k (rather than a 25k pool to begin with) doesn’t prevent you from getting warn down eventually.
Our heals are just incredibly ineffective, period.
Lf regen is a better way of sustaining hitpoints than having a high amount of toughness and bank on a slightly better heal every 25 seconds.

What you’re saying is definitely worth considering, but the thing is that for this particular case you have to be generating about 140% LF before the extra benefit DS seems to gain from vit over toughness matches up to the benefit tough gains over vit from a single consume conditions. If you can reliably generate more than 140% LF every 25s, yes, you’ll get more benefit from vit.

Even if you were hitting 5 targets. Even if you were hitting 10 targets. Even if people were spamming into your spectral wall. 2% is 2%, and it’s not 8%, 10%, or 25%.

Just quickly, the difference between 2000 and 2500 armour is 20-25% vs an attack from a 1000 damage weapon with 2000 power and a .5 coefficient. I’m fairly certain that’s constant. Looking at the damage formula would suggest so, and it remains constant whenever I plug in different numbers. The only way I can see for rabid to be as low as 8% less incoming damage than carrion is if 569 armour is 8% of your total, which would be a build I’m interested in

flow.6043:

spoj.9672:

Effective healing is way more important than effective health points.

Exactly… vitality makes life force regen more effective.
Life force can be regenerated more reliably than our regular hp pool can be healed, also our lf pool is now 120%. Clearly you can generate more hitpoints with vitality instead of toughness, and by that I mean more than armor could mitigate without extra vitality.

Effective hit points. What Spoj is saying is that toughness also raises the ehp gained from lf generation skills, and he is correct.

However the numbers in the first post do show that vitality is 1-2% more effective than toughness despite this. They don’t include any heals though.

Say you FoC 3 times on recharge, that’s a 2640 gain for toughness, and a 2679 gain for vitality. In the same amount of time you can CC once for around 6k for vitality, and 8k for toughness. Even if you’re spamming staff1 for some reason, and consistently hitting 3 targets, the difference is still outdone by a single heal. That’s before we get into regeneration, stacked healing power, selfless daring guards, water eles, engi turrets, so on and so forth.

ensoriki.5789:

Mammoth.1975:

Remember when people whined about death blossom spam being op?

Im thinking of all those complaints about Guardian burning.

I don’t recall that, but I do recall people complaining about the forums about omgspamevadesendlessbleeds.

The devs must just laugh sometimes.

spoj.9672:

I believe a Dev said toughness reduces damage taken in DS aswell.

I recall this too. Steady weapon test would clarify.

I don’t want glory farmers in my team zerging from point to point, getting crushed at group fights and backcapped when they avoid them. For regular players the glory gain is better in tournaments, for hotjoin farmers the glory gain is better in hotjoin. Perfect.

Remember when people whined about death blossom spam being op?

Probably http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Lotus_Poison

I don’t use the log so I don’t know if it says when a hit is glancing, but that would be my first assumption.

Krayiss.4926:

Tyler Chapman.1832:

Few tips from me!

Basic Tips:

• Defend the capture points you have!
• Use the map ping and drawing feature to better communicate with your team
• Type out in /team when you have incoming and if you might need help

I am usually dead by the time I finished typing my message!

“Hello my team I am inquiring that I receive help at the waterfall because it seems that a thief & mesmer are in stealth and coming at me (I just know it) How do I know it you ask? I just get the eerie feeling that I will be pounce’d on in the near future! con. And I am hoping that either the guardian and/or the rest of my team sjfhsjkdfhjeh oh kitten jesus what half my hp why aren’t my skills working oh I am still typing on no Im downed whered they go, oh stealth stomp my fear missed! ok I am just letting my team “blue” know that I failed at the waterfall and that a thief & mesmer killed me and would like to know where I should go next? … No answer ok I’ll zerg mid with the rest!"

Sadly I have yet to see my teammates respond to my plan because well, since noone seems to like typing!

Any shot at getting voice chat like WoW has?

2 wf?

If you’re struggling to dodge marks it’s on you tbh.

As soon as the necro switches to staff, he is going to be laying mark of blood and probably chillblains. This is because staff 1 is terrible and he would much rather have his scepter out unless he wants to drop marks. This is overridden by either of the following situations however.

When he has a huge stack of condis and staff out, or is immobilised with burst incoming, he is going to be casting putrid, and in the former case, likely following it with reapers to stop the transferred condis being cleansed or transferred back. If someone is down, or he just laid a spectral wall right behind you, he’s going to be casting reapers (or doom, but you want to dodge either right?).

Staff 1 is so bad that avoiding its use by spamming all your marks (in 2-3-4-5-pause-2 order no less, to take advantage of mark of bloods recharge, blast off the poison field, and fear to let the conditions tick) then switching to deathshroud is actually the correct play a fair amount of the time, despite what people think about it. So if you see him throw a mark and he starts to wave that hand again, guess what’s coming?

It’s not all about animations. Sometimes it’s about knowing what your opponents best play is. In fact I usually rely on that more than animations in group fights, considering the particles being thrown around. Unless it’s some giant norn towering over all the ground effects.

Off topic stuff that is indirectly related:

It’s actually just amazing to me when I fear someone with corrupt boon. You popped stability, you know what’s coming. Sure you can gamble on me not having it if you haven’t seen me use it yet, but the effect is strong enough that I’d be willing to spend the endurance on a hedge if I see the necro starting a long animation. If you popped stability with less than six boons, no endurance, no block, no invuln, and no evade when there’s a necro around, I don’t actually know what to say.

It’s like warriors who think they can land earthshaker because they just used backbreaker, but I haven’t used a single stunbreak yet. Or thieves who think I’m going to stand still for their infiltrators strike over my spectral wall.

Whenever you use any ability, if you know your opponents most effective response to it, you put yourself in a position where you know what your opponent is likely to do before he does. That should be influencing your decision making, and his if he is good. You’ll know when you fight someone who is consistently able to move further down that decision tree than you, or adjust more rapidly, because it will feel like everything you do is just a tiny bit too late.

If your opponent makes poor responses to everything you do, you win. If he makes good responses but you’re ready to counter them before he even knows he needs to use them, you win. In that first example, if a ranger uses RaO (don’t ask me why he has RaO slotted :P), and dodges the corrupt he should already know is coming, he probably just killed me, because I have no further responses to someone with 20 seconds of stability. If he uses RaO and fails to dodge the corrupt, he probably just killed himself, because I got a free fear to begin a fearchain with.

Short version of all that:

It is sometimes easy to tell what skill is coming before they even start an animation, because the situation is limiting the number of effective plays they have. Marks are a good example of this.

Can’t tell you that sorry since I don’t know what their decay mechanism is. I can say that your volatility will be quite high if you’ve been inactive for a long period of time, but I don’t know what they’re using as a ratings period. Could be an hour, could be a month. If you take a long break then come back and lose a game, you’re going to lose a lot of rating.

I am actually a little curious about it, since elo is a zero sum game, adding an artificial rating drain will cause problems. I guess it’s affordable if you have a good supply of new players always coming in, and more people with losing records quitting than those with winning records. Otherwise you need something interesting going on.

uberkingkong.8041:

Also that’s just 14 wins and 3 losses, how you know he didn’t “play at odd hours and beat solo que as a premade”

Because 14-3 vs pugs wouldn’t even get your rating into the 90% range. You need to be playing against other high rated players to get to #7 with just 17 games played. Although to be fair, the high volatility glicko gives you when you have a low number of games played means that a good record with only a few games played will gain you a lot more rating than the same record after you’ve played a few hundred games.

uberkingkong.8041:

Think hes saying someone having a leaderboard look good account and play 1 game per month on it and remain top 25 and second account is where they play all there games that they just don’t care.

Like if you look at kaypud account, one of them is in top 25 the other one is in top 50.

Basically it just clutters leaderboard with a bunch of inactive win 1 time a month account and stay at good leaderboard spot making it harder to rank up due to people only playing once a month and having such high leaderboard rank.

Honestly I don’t care anymore about it, its not my job to care about such things its the GW2 developers and if they don’t care and let them abuse there system it aint our fault and nothing we can do, they are the ones that got to fix and worry about that stuff, we should be worrying about winning and losing not people abusing the system.

Say #25 is inactive (sorry to whoever that is atm, just using you as an example).

The inactive #25 got there by having a higher rating than the active #26. Whether or not they are playing now doesn’t change the fact that they had to play at some point to get that rating.

Kwll.1468:

You are not saying anything people do not know. People can’t advance because they don’t have the opportunity to play enough games against people ranked higher then them because a lot of these higher ranked players either rarely play(the super slow decay system allows them to stay ranked highly without playing) or they intentionally only play a few games here and there and use smurf accounts. The rating decay needs to be passed through again end of story you can chant Elo all day long it doesn’t change the fact that the decay system sucks.

Have you thought this through? The players at the top didn’t get to the top by playing against people who were higher rated than them either, because there weren’t any. In fact, for the first little while, there were no high rated players at all. Until the below average players started losing rating to their opponents.

A better win percentage against the same level of competition, or a much better win percentage against lesser competition is what you’re looking at.

Atherakhia.4086:

Expertise isn’t a real stat. People aren’t going 30 points in spite for condition duration. They’re going 30pts in spite for Dhuum and the fact that they get condition duration is a bonus. Before Dhuum they would run 0/30/20/0/20 or 0/30/10/10/20 etc etc. So while this stat can be gotten via trait expenditure or select few sigils/runes, it’s not something gone after specifically to have it.

Expertise boosts damage by more than dhuumfire. The reason people wouldn’t spec into it is because the tree had zero traits that were useful to a condi build. Now it has one.

Grackleflint.4956:

Why go for the middle ground. The only way to ensure complete fairness is a double blind set up where professions are not revealed until the match begins, and classes are then locked at that point.

Seems like a good idea. Character lock and enemy team comp becomes visible at countdown. Make the countdown take 15-30s of pregame if people feel 10s isn’t enough to rearrange their split.

uberkingkong.8041:

leaderboard stuff, forgetting about glicko

Elo based system basics:

If you’re winning and not advancing, it’s because the rating gap between you and the next person is too large for one win to bridge it. If you’re only playing against people who are like rank 900+, it will take you a lot of wins to gain enough rating to move up, and one loss will drop you like a stone (and you’ll get those losses btw, even if it’s to smurfs, it’s very close to inevitable). If the opposition is weaker than you it’s quite easy to go 4 wins 1 loss and when the leaderboards update you’re lower than before. If the gap between you and the next guy up is large enough, it can still take you several wins to pass them even if you’re playing against strong opposition.

BTW smurfing won’t help unless you’re just doing it to protect your rating when you’re not running with your main team, or you get matched against those who are around the same rating as your main account and take more rating from them than they should have lost because your smurf is low rated.

Just like elo hell only exists for those who are unable to adapt their approach to deal with lower skilled games.

I know everyone has their own mythology around elo, but it’s just math. The only way to exploit it is to find a way to make 2+2=5.

As for direction, no. There were probably better ways to address it that would have left more options open in the future. It’s just not gamebreaking with things as they stand.

You still have a pretty good shot vs warriors, even if they’re 100% specced for necro hunting, and you’re 100% specced for guardian hunting. That’s probably a bigger issue for game balance right now honestly.

It’s good that skill is involved and not just buildwars, but the necro/guardian relationship is a lot more lopsided than the warrior/necro one.

Dat 45 seconds.

Asche.5362:

This is my main. Same char, different builds and hence different looks.

From left to right: Town clothes (Fancy Winter Outfit + Top Hat); Hybrid (Arah/CoF mix mostly); Full Condition (Storm Trooper Mix); and WvW.

Town clothes + Storm Trooper outfit get the most reactions by far.

Those two are awesome

It’s really not that bad. Which goes to show how difficult it was for warriors to contend with condis before.

You can pretty much forget it if you’re having a hard time getting 5 together now, it’s going to be much harder when soloboards are in. The competition will be stronger and people will have less reason to seek a team anyway. Hopefully you enjoy soloque.

Reikou will get too irritated when he has horrible teammates and start trolling, tanking his rating. No, I’m kidding :P

NA wise, Chaith and Mythran would both be players I’d expect to see higher on the solo boards than the team boards, as well as Reikou. Kinnu too, if he plays it.

Xeph.4513:

This statement is untrue during peak hours, we mainly teams I would go as far as saying 90% of our games are against teams, only in the later hours of the night do we get solo quers, that’s normally when we stop queuing.

It probably wouldn’t work EU, but NA there are at least two teams who farm pugs at 4am for the leaderboardzzz :P

Neare.9703:

It’s still going to come down to luck though.

Given a large enough sample your effect will show. There won’t be wide gaps, but the better players will come out on top. People who you see right now soloing to top 200 leaderboards are going to be top20. People who are on top of the leaderboards right now with their teams are going to do well too, not just because they’re good players, which they are, but also because they are known as good players and will therefore have an easier time coordinating a team. Until you have played quite a lot of games luck will have a lot to do with it though.

I do mean quite a lot too, as there is going to be a fair bit of variance I think. While the game is balanced for teamplay, a lot of the ‘skill’ in solo queue will be getting a balanced comp, just like it was in RA.

Chase.8415:

It’s going to be full of Bunkers.

Pretty much. Guards can just carry a bit more. Having a bunker on mid has a pretty significant effect on win rate.

What were the other 49 guys doing different?

The new dhuumfire is worth less than 10% more dps, single target only. It’s nothing special, just a better reason than we have ever had before to go into expertise, which is where the real damage is coming from. Before there was nothing, so we didn’t do it. Now there’s one useful trait for condi builds in the whole line, but since blood and death do very, very little to help with our role in pvp, it’s our only real spec.

garethh.3518:

Meh casual game, just pick up the FoTM specs (condi necro, CC war, s/p thief) and roflestomp most pug groups.
Not really notable for anything else.

Anet really doesn’t know what they are doing.
Still so much useless stuff and a few TOP TIER SPECS that are jokingly easy to play…
Anyways I find it hilarious that they make changes, they completely remake traits, that end up being kitten useless…
like they don’t even know their own game well enough to do anything but nerf based on QQ…
If they were so bad at conceptualizing and needed to ‘see how something plays out’ for a few months just to know if they are actually helping balance…
You would have thought the devs, devs who have done this all before, would have given GW2 a simple class/specing setup, to, you know, allow easy balancing, so they could get their heads out of their kitten over trying to make a balanced game and actually focus on making a better game to play…
But nope…
Not even that bright…

You must be dominating on the leaderboards, stompin them pugs with your easy to play fotm specs.

Right?

Too many pets!
Aoe them!
Too much aoe!

The thing that bothers me is the outsourcing of development to the forums. When players whine, sorry, provide constructive balance feedback, and get results, they’ll never stop. If it’s easier to get changes reverted or reduced than it is to adapt to those changes, how is the metagame supposed to ever evolve?

It also means there’s no benefit to presenting honest and truly unbiased feedback, because if you just scream louder you’re more likely to be heard (see: 3 TP players posting separate nerf necro threads, sorry, constructive meta discussion threads). Letting the players design the game is always a recipe for fail. Now it’s just a matter of picking a side and trying to cheer louder so you can shout the other team down on the forums.

As for losing 2 seconds on dhuumfire, I couldn’t give a kitten. It was too strong when players refused to adapt, nerfing it just means they don’t have to anymore.

I had a cool match the other day where I stood in the window of clocktower and freecast for the entire game. At the end, one of the 3 greatsword guardians who was standing in the middle waving his sword ineffectually in the general direction of my bunker for most of the game shared his enlightened opinion that necros need a nerf.

You’re grinding so your gear looks better while you grind.

REALLY kittenful way to miss out. Being told you’re playing BO5 seconds before the round, being up after the 3 games the rules said you were going to play, and then dropping the 2 secret bonus games. No surprise after playing for several hours already either.

Everyone in this thread would be screaming and whining their kittening heads off if it happened to them.

Great post.

The strongest argument for team death match is not having to put up with most peoples absolute inability to understand conquest. It’s not kittening rocket surgery.

Shar.3402:

step 1) hear the treb shout
step 2) count to 3
step 3) dodge

congratulations, you just took 0 damage from a treb shot without wasting an invulnerability cd or whatever

I got a good laugh from this, thanks

Seems like some people don’t realise that the treb can fire faster than you can regen endurance naturally. Spoiled by vigor and regen traits I guess.

1. You can PvE fine without any major traits at all.
2. Condis are horrible for PvE.
3. You can PvE fine without any major traits at all.

Yeah I haven’t heard any of it yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I do. My response would be the same as it is to any ‘nerf X’ comment:

If they’re not strong enough for you to play one, I guess they’re not that strong after all. On the other hand, if your team is running multiple stun warriors, sure, I believe you when you say they might be too strong.

reedju.5786:

I feel like (for the most part) those who main necro want dhuumfire gone (because they know what we are capable of without it) and those who mainly fight necros want DS brought down (theyve faced burst before, but don’t realize how situational/squishy DS really is).

I want people to adjust their comps to deal with a meta change instead of running to the forums to complain. Where do I fit?

jmatb.6307:

Bas.7406:

jmatb.6307:

You don’t want people close to you? LOL

Do you know what Death Shroud is and how it’s best used?

No you don’t want them next to you. I really want to know what profession you main, because I am baffled by your perception of the Necromancer.

So that would be all of them, now that necros can.

I’m a bit of a fan of the effect viable stunwarriors have on the game, and I usually hate all the CC chains in this game. I main necro so they kinda kitten me up, but that’s fine. I like where they’re at right now I think. Have been playing in the kitten brackets so I haven’t faced many good ones since this last patch though.

Luke.4562:

Really I dream every night of me riding my Flesh Golem ordering a charge to my other minions and all together rush victorious into the enemies..

So much win.

What’s that whooshing sound?

Close to death really annoys me. Why put a direct damage trait at the top of the expertise line? Same with lingering precision. Who had the bright idea to put a condi trait at the top of the precision line?

Godofallu.2935:

I love how the answer to stopping necros is a very specific build which is suggested that every team runs. [Stunlock warrior]

I’ve never heard that for shatter mesmer or guardian bunker or s/d elementalist.

What do you mean you’ve never heard that for guardian bunker? Why do you think people bring condis in the first place? To kill berserker amulets with 1800 armor?