Guild Wars 2

Watch these, a little dated but will give you a lot of solid strats and a better idea of whats going on:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtmrC91LQfu5-hlj9Mh2dfwqN57qE3VXU

If you guys think it would result in tier 1 servers getting flooded, than there could be a restriction on guilds aligning there. It could even be used as a mechanism to reinvigorate bottom tier servers.

The design of WvW is at odds with the design of the rest of the game. I want to enjoy this content, particularly the new borderlands in HOT , and it currently has more arbitrarily chosen barriers than the other 2 main facets of the game. I’m happy to accept some costly cooldowns (several months to a year), and limitations, on either/both the guild and the players.

Like you guys have said, there are several options already to joining WvW, and if it didn’t compromise the integrity of the servers (initially, any major changes might result in some turmoil), what’s wrong with adding another method? I think it could be good for getting more players involved in WvW.

Yes, our guild could change our policy and encourage/force everyone to farm gold to start participating in WvW events, but I think that’s against the spirit of the game, and of our guild goals. My point is this limitation seems at odds with the design of the game otherwise, and for no good reason.

Compare that to PvP, which according to Colin, is now seeing more activity than in the history of the franchise. There are likely several factors, but for me personally, adding a decent reward structure helped my motivation immensely. It’s not exactly the same situation, but the rewards here would be playing with people I have fun with. In PvP that was never something I had to think about. It was always an option.

I’m not sure how it would punish smaller guilds? I’m not saying the idea is fully formed but I do think the current system feels very dated both in and out of the game. I understand the point of imposing a barrier of preventing players from changing to any server they want on a whim and spying or whatever, to preserve the integrity of the worlds, but the system currently seems like it has an arbitrary barrier, one that hurts WvW participation as a whole. I’ve paid the 20 dollars and been burnt in the past just to see a server totally fall apart shortly after, ankitten ot eager to try it again.

I’m legitimately surprised if you guys don’t think that the current system is discouraging to new WvW players. It certainly is for me. If you do think it could be better, how would you fix it?

What do you have against the idea? I sincerely believe it would bring guilds together, get a lot more bodies in WvW, and allow more people to experience more content they otherwise wouldn’t bother with.

Anet would lose some gems purchases that seems like an arbitrarily priced service, and part of a system that seems like a relic in a post Megaserver world. Hopefully the amount of people finding a whole new facet to the game would offset those potential loss profits.

If I’m just ignorant, let me know, I fail to see how this is detrimental to the game, if there were harsh enough limitations to prevent switching servers often. The only other “drawback” I can forsee is throwing the current balance of world rankings out of whack because of an influx of new talent joining the fights. That seems like a plus overall.

Yes, because of how isolated it is as a game type. They integrated PvP much better with the game world and it is much better for it (aside from being forced to wait in queue in HOTM), my guild is mostly disinterested in running many WvW events because 100s of members cannot participate without a substantial investment. And it’s a self-feeding cycle, less events means less people willing to make that investment and vice versa. If we could all participate in WvW without having to require 100-200 gold to do so, I can assure you we would definitely start more WvW events.

Considering the game is called “Guild Wars” I think it’s reasonable to encourage larger scale activities between guilds, and the current system discourages that. The only place worlds are relevant is WvW.

As an outsider of WvW, I’m really excited for the new borderlands and I’d love to get more involved in WvW…however a severe setback is that it’s really tough to play WvW with my guild. We’ve stopped requiring people to transfer and as a result very rarely get into it since so many members would be left out.

Why on earth can’t WvW restrictions be more tied to a guild rather than requiring $20 just to play with them? Surely Anet see’s how crippling this is to a massive aspect of their game. I can’t really be bothered to get into it, but if they opened this up to link it closer to guilds (add some multi-week cooldowns to “rep” your guilds world, and make it expensive or otherwise limiting for guilds themselves to re-associate themselves with another world), and I know that immediately we’d have a huge population of players willing to start getting involved with WvW.

Because the current structure just is not attractive. The hefty cost means it’s really difficult to make that a requirement of the guild if its PvX, and consequently there is far less interest in the gameplay as a whole. Please remedy Anet, I have a feeling this would be a ways off but I’d love to experience the new battlegrounds with my friends.

I’ve been trying to consider how to make reaper work as hybrid and its tough to figure out. I haven’t been able to try out BWE’s yet but dhuumfire seems like too heavy of an investment on paper, using up 2 of 3 of your specs. I guess just drop spite and blood for reaper and reaping. That’s my initial impression, anyway. Curses is the most essential to hybrid I think due to the minors. (imagine saying that about necro minors 2 years ago). Though I guess I’d miss the blood utility/siphons big time, if reaper dps and bulk is as solid as I’ve been lead to believe, it might be able to make it up some. Though I don’t see how it would particularly be better than something like power reaper.

This is what I play, I think it’s kittening rad. No one else seems to care. I do FOTM 50s with this:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRAQRAod7Yjc0QLN2cDW3A/NOyFq5QsEJBMAagVIm1bQIA-TBTBABUrsKw9BOfhBn1sQpqGmpE8KlKSrWSGnEA80ToxRAAgHAApAUUYF-e

I run about a 60/40 split on Zerk/Sinisters. Might be closer to 50/50 now as calculations seemed to favor some more condi damage. (Super) Veggie Pizza is a must, the extra condi duration is insane.
Change elite as appropriate, but I find myself using lich less as I don’t gain as much DPS as I’d like from it, still, great for a lot of bosses. Plague is a party saver if sandstorm is down. CPC is underrated but always my first to swap out.

Overall it deals crazy AOE damage and can pile on most conditions with ease.

I want to experiment with Signet of Vamp more but even with the annoying blind on Cleanse Conditions the low cooldown is desirable. I also am considering different rune choices but the sigils seem pretty awesome. (Force/Geo, Energy/Geo)

The more i think about it I could drop traveler’s for quickening thirst (does that movespeed increase work in DS?), and not lose much I think, 20 second ICD on the mini-vampirism signet makes it pretty negligible in group content I think. Though I’m not sure what would be the coolest replacement. I’d had to lose the condition duration.

Simon.3794:

and people saying on crit sigils should be brought down, i mean, it’s not the sigils.
it’s thief and mesmers…

just like it’s not might.
it’s engis and eles

I say just add more on-hit sigils than changing the crit ones. More variety is better and it gives a unique value to precision. (and fury)

I feel like nerfing these sigils exacerbates current problems. I agree they’re strong right now but I think the consequences of losing their strength means more difficulties for handling strong sustain builds already (engi, ele), and weakens classes who cant compete with the amount of evades compared to other classes. I think these are both negative outcomes.

I think a small nerf would be fine. My biggest contention is with Accelerant Packed turrets, I think it needs a tweak. Either bump it up to a master trait in a tree, make it only apply when turrets are manually detonated, or give it a short ICD. Right now being punished for taking down turrets is frustrating design.

No need to be so dismissive, but okay, I’ll gladly see you in the Mists then.

Funnily enough my cele build was inspired by your spectral bruiser after playing it a lot.

Your conclusion doesn’t make sense. Dying to ai is a frustrating prospect, but that’s a matter of strength. I don’t think anyone would be complaining about the AI if it didn’t have the STRENGTH to kill you. If turrets were peashooters or got knocked over by a stiff breeze coming their way, I don’t think you’d be making the same suggestion.

“too excessive” is an important point. If your build is overkill in 90% of fights, its likely suboptimal. I consider stomp control via Foot in the Grave and extra condi removal via Shrouded Removal substantially more valuable than extra stripping. But sure, there are situations where its difficult to keep an ele clean of boons, but I don’t think those traits are wasted in that fight either.

Rym.1469:

You could experiment with a mix of Spectral traits (Curses master major, SR adept major CDR), PoC (XIII Curses) and going for something like 2/6/0/0/6. If you want to build it for Power, of course, because there’s always Condi variation Terrormancer, possibly most common tpvp necro build.

This is basically what I run. I run cele A/F D/D (weapons are actually REALLY flexible with this build but this has become my favorite mix), signet of vamp (passive healing is vastly underrated when combined with cele, its comparable healing to signet of healing provided you’re under constant attack and its got a super neat active), Well of Power, Spectral Wall, Spectral Armor, Lich.

0/6/2/0/6, picking up one or both spectral traits (alternative in SR is DS CDR, which I prefer now), Path of Corruption, Foot in the Grave, Near to Death. Energy and Doom sigils (Battle is fine too, but after nerf I figured I’d nab a strong condition my build lacks), Travelers runes for mobility and solid all around benefits since you actually get a fair amount of boons (Protection, Stab, Retal, Regen, and anything you pick up in WoP), and still have good access to conditions.

Since you’re not running consume conditons you’ll need to be taking advantage of shrouded removal, d4 and WoP to cover you, it’s generally enough to get you through some condi pressure if you play smart.

Overall it brings a lot to the table, and is all around pretty solid. It’s most lacking in burst damage, even lich form is a little piddly, but you can still 1v1 pretty well against a lot of matchups, and the poison and boon removal can even make some pretty heavy bunkers sweat 1v1 (wish I had more poison though tbh, easily removed). I think it’s a good fit for any team. I like that your boon stripping with it is consistent, and not an all or nothing hit like corrupt boon.

D/F Staff is pretty viable too, but I love axe 3 and 2.

Isn’t it possible, provided a premade with characters with very disparate ratings, that you could end up in a game where you still lose points on winning the match?

I agree that the point system is flawed and ultimately a grind, but a strict zero sum has some issues too.

Btw showing this to gui cause its hilarious

I don’t think encouraging people to bail on games is something arenanet will consider at this point, nor do I think they should. If they wont even let us leave the HOTM in queue, they’re not going to let us leave games that easily.

Dailies I suppose, a class daily will net you 2 potions of pvp reward, which I believe are 500 each. So a win on a custom arena for the class daily would net you about equal to a win in the arena.

I actually just made a thread trying to figure out how to handle this. I think style.6173’s implementation is the most fair, but for what its worth is I think a change would adversely affect queue times until profession dailies get changed.

I ran into a few, what I would consider cheesy comps in ranked last night. That is, one match of 5 engis and one match of 5 mesmers. I know I can play those comps as well if I wanted, but I had always figured that it doesn’t necessarily dictate success and sometimes your team falls apart anyway…but other times I feel so helpless vs them.

But I know they lose matches too, so I’m trying to figure out the best ways to handle them. Lots of times it depends on the map, and of course, your own comp. But what are your tips for handling these types of matchups? The main issues with the engis were us being unable to take and hold our points well enough, and overall just fighting a lot of tough guys who were hard to take down and all helped each other a lot, and basically had enough spec variety between them that no one strategy worked. I definitely despise accelerant packed turrets now. (When I’m not on my engi).

The problem with the mesmers was their insane ability to move their whole team from any point of interest with ease, and continue to do so again and again, and the sheer number of shatters available. Its one thing to dodge one, two or even three shatters. But when it just keeps coming, what are you supposed to do when you straight up have no more evades? I would have loved to have been able to focus them down but oftentimes I didn’t even get an opportunity to go on the offensive.

Do you still get losses for class swapping in ranked? Does it pull down people in your party too? Cause that’s the only way I can see countering some of these comps is by playing teams made to hose them. Otherwise you’re stuck with whatever your class has.

It’s just frustrating to play 5x comps of any class.

Class dailies are a miserable failure in their current state. They should remove them until they figure out a way to make them random or semi-random per player. There are far far too many problems with making them globally the same.

I know its probably just coincidence and the dailies really are random, but kitten , I feel like Engi has been in every day for the past week. I feel like I haven’t seen a necro daily in what feels like 2+ weeks and it was another 2ish weeks before one before that.

The ready button is their insurance for preventing 4v5s, in theory, if everyone readies up there are no AFKs and everyone is at their seats ready to play. But yeah, definitely feels like 1 step forward 1 step back to me. I think their reasoning is misguided.

There are also those who try to mock and insult you as a way to get a rise out of you and throw you off your game. If they can demoralize or enrage you, chances are increased you will make poor choices or waste effort writing back to them. Best things are to laugh em off and just deprive them of any attention. but sometimes I can’t help but mock them too. All in good fun, of course. I like the self-deprecating jokes to throw them off.

This guy just sounded like he has issues though. You could refer him to some online resources to manage his anger. I’m sure he’d love that.

Just making sure there are none I overlooked. I personally have found shout warrior too susceptible to focus fire so I wasn’t sure if they were meaty enough to bunker a point, especially solo.

Also was kind of interested if there’s potential in any others that might be up and comers in the current meta.

Ive been noticing decreased effectiveness with my turret engi and bunker guards, but full zerker teams are still no good… so who are the bunkers of today? D/D ele? Shoutbow warr? Any other ideas of viable bunkers in this meta? Minionmaster seems to susceptible to aoe…Maybe some evasion bunkers like thief or ranger will hold a spot. Thoughts?

I want bosses that are actually susceptible to our conditions so our group utility is validated.

Lazaar.9123:

Anything that isn’t Signet of Vampirism or Corrosive Poison Cloud.

I use vamp in pvp and poison cloud in pve and love them both. You could pick worse necro skills than that!

I think if anything, we need some more ways to deal with conditions. It’s clear there’s not enough ways to deal with full condi comps now when having as much removal as possible still isn’t enough. A proactive approach to stopping conditions sounds OP, but it does remind me of something out of GW1. I’m not necessarily clamoring for more removal, but some creative solutions might be an interesting thing that i hope they’re considering for the expansion.

I wish I knew. It’s incredibly frustrating.

Is this 2006 WoW or something? GOTTA GET MY WARLORDS ARMOR.

I was looking at the leaderboards a while back and thought it was curious that so many guys up there had pretty subpar win ratios. I saw the amount of games they played and just assumed maybe they had done bad early on and had gone like kitten (fix your forum filter, it’s censoring forty five to five written as numbers) the past 50 games or so. But no, then I realized the rank is pretty much entirely determined by the points you get, and correct me if I’m wrong, but it is 3 points for a win, -1 for a loss? Doesn’t that mean in theory, if someone just played nonstop, they could achieve a top rank with a 33% win rate? That’s absurd. Especially when you consider that because they’d likely have bad MMR (I’m not sure how that is calculated in GW2), and playing bad players too?

It seems like this system has a long way to go. Please correct me if I’m misinformed cause that just seems real silly.

I love DS, its by far my favorite class mechanic. It causes some issues with the necro class design (lack of regen in DS, lack of any vigor/blocks/evades), but its very very fun.

I use signet of vampirism in pvp and I love it. Try it with a cele build.

Yeah, sinister gear is about the only significant development. Pure DPS condi gear (rampagers but with main stat condi) and a decent candidate for mixing into a hybrid set.

The thing that makes me so salty about this is having no way to know I was tanking my rating with class swapping. There is no indicator. How about a boon/buff that is displayed when you’ve DQ’d yourself so you know what the kitten is going on. That would be a simple answer to my solution, and inform players why they did not receive a win that match.

Demonoid.1974:

I understand the leader board rank and win/loss punishment for swapping. It’s a solid way to stop build wars, counter compositions, oh and totally kill off anyone’s drive to multi-class anymore. Well done, right? Yeah whatever. That’s not my point. My question is, does the punishment of dishonorable status fit the crime of swapping classes as well? It seems like overkill. Shouldn’t multi-class players who don’t care about your new noncompetitive grind-style of a leaderboard be allowed to have fun playing things they like still? You solved build wars, but in return you’ll punish the little guys. That’s cool. It’s cool that the casual players and the new players: the solo mesmer fighting for his life against multiple thieves, the solo necro getting trained by dps guardians and warriors, and so forth will be punished. It’s cool that [TCG] comps have died completely, and everyone will be The Abjured or something else. But now you’re just even more so forcing everyone to swap to jack of all trade classes like celestial D/D elementalist and celestial rifle engineer. Is celestial wars 2 better than build wars 2? The new system is tolerable or celestial amulet is tolerable, but please not both. It seems sad to me if they are both around at the same time. Skip the rant? Point: the lack of build wars is only going to contribute to a stale game state of most, if not all, competitive teams running celestial amulet based team compositions. It’s just the most forgiving choice, in this new unforgiving system.

That’s part of whats frustrating about this philosophy. Is the idea of “Build wars” was dead the MOMENT they made multi-classing not a thing in gw2. When you don’t have access to nearly every single skill on every single class, that problem is reduced substantially immediately. Creating more and more measures to prevent that is redundant and appears to be hurting the game more. I understand why you don’t want to allow class swapping, but people are right in that not allowing pugs to adapt to their team just is another huge disadvantage to solo queuers. I think hiding opponent classes will be the quickest fix (and allowing class swapping while in pre-game), but for something that solves a few issues that crop up with that. How about a permanent shadow refuge in your base until the final countdown? If a player wants to hide their classes they can just stand in that.

And of course, the dailies being global is of course counter intuitive to this entire kittening system. But that’s probably just a lack of communication between teams. Even not including the class swapping penalties, dailies are a huge problem for everyone. The simple fix to me is randomizing the 2 classes per account and the problem is solved IMMEDIATELY. But I assume that it is a little more complicated than that…or why wouldn’t they have done that on implementation?

Please please please make a warning, I’ve played all my ranked games on the thinking that swapping classes was part of the strategy of the game, and encouraged. Yet I was confounded that even with a 68% win rate that my ranking was still abysmal. How could I have known?

I didn’t believe that this was how it worked when my friend told me.

FYI, just learned the hard way that Sinister isn’t tradeable.

Oops.

Made 4 coats.

That’s not a bad idea. I think I may just craft a set of Sinister Exos and carry both sets around for changing builds on the fly.

It occurs to me that Fractal 38 is about the most popular one to farm, and that one specifically hoses necros hard because of the mistslocked instability which means poison and chill effects give enemies boons instead of impacting them. This throws most my rotations out the window.

I currently play a hybrid build with mixed Zerker’s and Rampager’s gear, which I’ve always hated the mainstat Prec on. However, the new Sinister gear surely has some ascended recipes coming shortly, and am considering putting some money down to craft it. The problem is, is it even worth gearing my necro up for fractals? Should I just make some of the Sinister Exotics and call it a day and keep making some ascended Zerker gear to throw on my ele or guardian when I want to get serious with Fractals? It’s personally really frustrating to learn how that particular fractal hoses Necros, since we’re already considered to be gimping groups (at least vs bosses)

I’m a big fan of Signet of Vampirism, I think it allows you to take advantage of the healing power in a substantial manner, at the expense of your condi clear. I know CC is one of the best heals in the game, but I think celestial requires usage of Vamp. It’s quite an impressive heal when paired with a bit of healing power. The idea of using Dhuumfire and Strength Runes (along with some might stacking) is an interesting one. I want to take more advantage of the condi damage, which isn’t as high as I’d like it to be in my current form (still running a similar build)

I’ve been playing D/F cele ele and you’re right, without the might stack you’re nothin. It’s always been difficult to deal a lot of damage with my build, 1v1s are often very tough. I don’t think terror is worth it, especially at the expense of spectral attunement. Spectral Attunement is core to this build.

Aah that’s right, I had forgotten about that. 11% effective damage reduction isn’t too shabby, but blinds are hard enough to come by so that it’s not really worth it. Dropping a Well of Darkness and having quite a high chance of doing nothing to the boss? Bunk.

Norjena.5172:

Necromancer dps is bottom tier.

I remember that thread a few months back that showed that necros had comparable single target DPS to warriors. Has much changed since then?

Wait, why are blinds useless on bosses? Not ridiculing I just don’t know why they’d be bad.

195 trick or treat bags is 9.75g at 5 silver a bag. + 20 slotter if you’re into that.

Necros do fine enough damage IMO, the problem is utility. We have good utility in theory but most dungeons don’t really require the type of utility we offer (aka, offensive utility and reflects) The only decent offensive utility is decent vuln stacking. Also, it’s kinda tough to notice the defensive utility, in general.

Aren’t technically all those candy bags better money than any other reward tracks right now?

Not that i pvp for the money.

Nailing an essential stomp is one of the most satisfying things in the game.

As much as I like this skill, I tend to opt for poison cloud now. It grants solid benefits no matter the size of the group, and weakness and poison are both fairly uncommon to get reliably, but both potent. Aoe weakness is almost as good as protection and the poison aside from being a decent dot in its own right can do substantial healing prevention (effective damage) on any mobs with regen.

Though some people might not be fans of the poison field sitting around there for so long.

Well, I’d say necros are particularly good at putting a stop to that (with boon stiripping), but yeah, I gave my celestial ele a serious shot last night and I was amazed at how effortlessly I dished out damage by just spamming buttons. Obviously the class has a high skill cap but a low barrier to entry to at least do decent. I have to work my kitten off to do substantial damage on my celestial necro but I was just dropping people barely thinking. It does have some shortcomings I missed compared to necro but overall the build pretty much plays itself.

I should just play her for PvE too, at this rate.

Well, for blast finishers, here are the potential outcomes:
3s Blind
3s Chaos Armor
20s Might x3
3s Frost Aura
3s Retal
10s Swiftness
3s Weakness
3s Stealth
Area Heal

Which of these things is not like the other? While I think it’s good to be aware of what fields your group is putting down, as is you deserve a slap in the face for putting anything else down if a fire is down. That’s not good design, in my opinion.

I think 1 or 2 stacks of might or a reduced duration on the 3 stacks would make fire fields more in line with the others and also make a big impact on the dungeon zerging meta that isn’t particularly fun and they’ve been nerfing gradually over the past year (by hotfixing dungeon mechanics and nerfing FGS)