Guild Wars 2

Both are pretty good at taking out big groups of monsters. The Elementalist has a lot more AoE options, so will probably be more effective. They also get a lot of healing options to regenerate HP.
The Thief has less AoE, but if you trait into Acrobatics and bring the right utility you get tons of dodges, which you can use to burn down a group while avoiding most of the incoming damage.

Looking forward to the new dungeon.

I play Elementalist when I do Arah, and generally have not too much trouble with Lupicus. Using staff (Fire skill 4 is your friend here, Earth skill 3 is also very useful in phase 2). Utility is Arcane Shield, Lightning Flash and Mist Form.

For other professions I would recommend bringing skills that grant extra mobility (dodge rolls for Thief, teleports), a stun breaker can be useful and projectile reflects.

Faux.1937:

Or you can buy an Invisible bag and put the mini into that bag… b.c that bag doesnt deposits items.

That’s a hassle when crafting items go in there, and still doesn’t make miniatures appear after logging or changing zone.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

I agree. Precursors should also be super rare. That’s why I feel opening the door to a Scavenger Hunt shouldn’t be implemented. But I think they’re rare enough as is from the MF. Perhaps making them Account Bound would add to their forging values (for individual players of course). Then Legendary wielders would be truly Legendary.

It would only be truly legendary if there was only 1 of each Legendary per server (players with a Legendary wouldn’t be allowed to transfer server to one that already has a player with that same Legendary on it), and that Legendary would have to be earned by beating the most difficult monster in the most hidden place after finishing the most difficult jumping puzzle in the game.

Lol at people thinking that buying a Legendary at a high price makes an item truly legendary.xD

Tired of sending your miniature to the bank when cleaning your inventory by hitting deposit all collectables? Tired of having to manually summon your miniature every time you login or change zone?

Easy solution: Make a seperate equip slot for miniatures.
This way an equipped miniature will not be sent to the bank when clicking deposit all collectables. Have a Hide / Unhide checkbox on it. When checked to Unhide, the miniature will be automatically out, even after logging in/out or changing zone.

The best way to not get hit by those is to make sure to not have any red circles behind your character.

Yeah, it’s really easy to find a group doing story. Plus it only takes like 30 minutes to complete anyway.

Thanks for checking on it. Looking forward to the update.

No, there’s no level requirement on them. I put one on my level 10 character.

Space Cow.2431:

Milennin.4825:

On first sight it looks pretty awesome, having that many skills to choose from. But then you realise how little skills are actually useful in general. A lot of skills are very situational

That is part of why GW1 skills were so awesome.

Suppose you have a skill that costs little mana and has a quick casting animation, causes weak to moderate damage and inflicts a strong condition on the target but also on yourself (poison/deep wound).

By itself, this would not be a very useful skill. But what if you have another skill that purges conditions on yourself and you gain life/mana for each? Or maybe you have a skill that grants you a buff that gives you condition immunity, and you found a way to keep up that buff indefinitely because it has a mechanic that refreshes its duration (lets say, for the sake of argument, that it reduces its own cooldown each time you crit). Combine these with a number of other skills that put conditions on you but also grant you advantages that are substantially better than they otherwise would if they were less situational, and you have yourself an interesting build.

By situational I meant that they weren’t really useful for anything except in very rare and extreme situations. Such as using Water Magic to snare the runners in one of the missions in Nightfall for the bonus objective. Anywhere else in PvE Water Magic was pretty much inferior to Fire and Air, because it did less damage and/or was on longer cooldowns.
And no Warrior ever used hammers in PvE, except maybe doing it for teh lolz. Sword and axe both had good options for AoE damage, which is just way superior over what hammers had to offer in PvE.

I prefer them focusing on revamping current dungeons. I don’t know, but they could have 2 seperate teams? A team for revamping current dungeons, and another team for creating new content?

I would have instantly bought the new dyes if:
-They were account-wide unlocks.
-Sold in a set without any RNG involved.

Ayrilana.1396:

Condition damage will never damage structures. It would not make any sense if you could bleed dirt or poison dirt. It is a minor dps check because you do have a time limit. Saying it’s difficult because your conditions have almost no effect is like going into the dungeon naked and saying you don’t do enough damage.

But it makes sense that we can bleed and poison golems? That we can burn fire elementals? That we can fear the undead?

First I’ll say that I’ve never done a guild bounty.

Didn’t people complain about there nothing to do for guilds? People complained about dynamic events and even dungeons being too easy for an organised group to complete. Well, they gave those people guild bounties. And now you have people complaining about these challenges being too difficult…

ParnAshwind.4823:

Defensive stats? I am talking about a group of new players who has probably mixed gears that are neither dps/defend/etc.

DPS check means – kill them fast enough or you are in for it. Cant take the 1st Necro down in time? 2nd one spawns and wipe you out.

When was the last time you try leading a ragtag group of new players into a dungeon? If you dont do that, obviously you have no idea what people are experiencing. Elementalist? In the 4 enemies left, did I mention Elementalist? If I didnt, why would you assume they are alive?

Get of the forums and find yourself a ragtag group of new players and experience the agony others are experiencing.

A group that couldn’t even handle 4 enemies at a time? Wow.=s
There isn’t an infinite spawn of enemies in that part. It’s just kill a group. Revive the NPC to continue repair trap. Kill the next group. Move on to the next trap.

By the way, I always PUG my dungeons, with none of my characters being in DPS focused gear, so thanks for the advice, but it’s something I do pretty much every day I log in on the game. Like I said, only very rarely does a group fail on the ghosts part in path 2. I’m surprised a group that fails there was able to get past the Spider Queen at all.

In The Ghost Rite mission (priory story, right after Battle for Claw Island), my character transforms into an avatar of Balthazar. The problem is with the camera being in a weird spot, making my character hard to see because it goes partly behind my HP-orb.

I remember doing this same mission like 4 months ago on another character, and I’m pretty sure it didn’t have this camera issue back then.

off-topic: I really love this mission, one of the best story missions in the game. Whoever designed this deserves a medal. Unfortunately I’m going to wait doing it on this character until this camera issue gets fixed.=(

Nretep.2564:

I wonder if there’re ppl buying greatswords and then complain in the forum, that they can’t wear it in a single hand.
I mean … the keyword “Unique”, “Soulbound” or “Greatsword” are displayed at the same position …

If it’s unique, then why can players buy 2 or more of the same item on the same character? You’d think if an item was truly unique, a character could own only 1 of the same item.

ParnAshwind.4823:

That to me is sort of a dps check. Necros do drain health to heal themselves after spamming every known condition on you by the way.

Then by that logic any and all mobs in the game could be seen as a DPS check. If you or your party fails to kill a single mob in a group then it’s going to reset. Well, that’s just all mobs in the game described right there. Obviously you need enough DPS to kill a mob. If you somehow lack the DPS, you must have sacrificed it for defensive stats. If you are fully defensive spec’d how do you even wipe as a party?

If Necromancers are a problem because they drain health, why not take out one of the mobs that don’t heal themselves? Take out the light armour Elementalists first for example. Don’t stay so stuck in the mindset that you must do things in 1 specific order. If it doesn’t work for your party you gotta find another way to make it work.

Kichwas.7152:

Lastly: I have yet to encounter anything in this game that can one-shot any of my 8 characters. Even the big dragon fights. I’ve seen a few things that can two shot me, but most can’t even do that.

I take it, you haven’t fought Kudzu in CoE story yet.

Reikou.7068:

One thing that I see in this topic is that people keep mixing up the term “casual gamer,” with the term “bad gamer.”

Casual gamers are simply gamers who do not spend a significant amount of time on the game. This does not mean that they are bad at the game, and cannot tackle difficult content. it only means that they do not spend a significant amount of time on the game.

Casual means that the player doesn’t spend time researching how the game mechanics work. They don’t spend time learning the ins and outs of the character they play. They don’t spend time learning mob patterns and how to use their utility skills to the fullest to counter mobs.

This is why they’re called casuals. They just play the game doing whatever they like, not caring to look deeper into the game than what they see on their screen. Even if a casual is skilled with what he does, he still lacks the knowledge that ‘hardcore’ players have. And you can have all the skill you want, but it’s wasted if you don’t have the knowledge. Which is why casuals aren’t good players.

It’s really not a DPS check, because the enemies don’t heal or resurrect themselves unless your group’s so bad that it wipes without killing a single enemy. Even by making just 1 kill, the next try at it is going to be easier.
If the ranger knockback’s a problem, then tell your party to use more projectile reflects or use skills that grant stability.

Yeah, I jumped into a group with one of those playing my level 80 Guardian, thinking I would just faceroll over them like I do with all the other enemies in a level 10 area. I was so wrong, did manage to kill them, but only just barely. Must be much worse in a group due to bad scaling. These things are clearly way overtuned.

edit: just watched video. strange that he barely lost any HP to your attacks.=s Didn’t have that problem the one time I fought one.

I’ll agree with condition damage on structures, but the part with the ghosts on path 2 is really not bad. I’ve very rarely seen a party fail on this. The only time a party fails on this part is when your group absolutely sucks, and you should be able to tell that it does 5 minutes into the dungeon. Only once seen a party break on this part (which was months ago when people were still kinda new to dungeons).

I still run AC quite frequently because I like the dungeon. Yeah, I don’t do it for the tokens, or even the cash reward necessarily (although it’s nice), or the drops. It’s the dungeon with the best atmosphere, length-wise it’s just fine. Difficulty has been brought up a little, but is still very do-able in most PUGs. Although I will agree that going in with a PUG consisting of non-80’s is going to be tough at points.

Strange, didn’t know they removed the blogs. Maybe to prevent people from digging up old ‘promises’ they made in some of them (such as account-wide dyes).

How much do you play? What motivates you to play?
Currently several hours a day. It’s pretty fun to play.

What attracted you to this game over other MMOs?
Almost everything. The moment ArenaNet released information about Guild Wars 2 I knew I’d like this game. It does away with a lot of the things I don’t like in MMO’s, and replaces them with better mechanics. For the rest, things like art style, overall quality, combat etc. are good.
Even though I dislike some of things they’ve done with the game, it’s still miles better than any other MMO currently out.

How often do you play with and interact with other players? Are most of your friends people you know from in game, or from real life?
I play with other people almost every day via dungeon PUGs.
Yeah, I don’t really have any ingame friends besides the people I know from real life.

What do you do with your time in game?
Level up a new character with dailies, explore some of the world with them, and do a story mission. Sometimes getting daily Fractal on my latest level 80 character. Often go PUG a random dungeon for fun.

Check your ingame mail?

Plus they have Roll for Initiative which functions as a dodge, stun breaker and returns some initiative. And Death Blossom, not a real dodge, but evades all attacks while used.

I also need that complete feeling on a character I play, which is why I level pretty much 1 character at a time. I just focus on getting that character up, learning how the profession works, unlocking all the dungeon stories and visiting the meta boss locations, finishing the storymode. At level 80 I’ll look for a balanced set of exotic gear that can be used well for any activity I like (exploring, events, dungeons).

Kain Francois.4328:

I remember seeing screens where the Jungle Dragon was rendered on one of the servers inside Caledon Forest.

It was a glitch, and the dragon was untargettable ans stationary, but the sheer fact it was rendered inside the map has a lot of significance to it.

We can speculate ANET actually intended the dragon to appear at some point in that map (perhaps instead of Jungle Wurm.)

Part of the sylvari tutorial dragon boss?

I’ve done this one twice, but can’t remember exactly how it goes besides having to fight Destroyers in the Skritt cave. You’ve tried luring and fighting 1 Destroyer at a time?
If you still need help with it and play on EU servers I can team with you to do it.

Better yet, players should be able to pick whatever 3 stats they want on their Legendary upon creation.

No, because open world is designed more for casual gameplay.

Here’s a simplified timeline of the problem with difficult open world PvE:
-Monsters are tough to kill, and drop bad loot = Frustrating / Waste of player’s time, not many players will bother going there.
-Give monsters better loot = Rewarding, people will try, but most will ultimately fail because the majority of players isn’t good enough to kill tough monsters.
-People form zergs to farm tough monsters without challenge for the good loot = Bye-bye difficulty, bye-bye rewarding players for skilful gameplay, good loot reduces to merely OK loot due to overfarming.
-Area is nerfed (either by making mobs anti-zerg, lowering rewards, adding harsher DR rules) = People will stop going there, leaving the area dead.

The way I see it, the open world is designed for people to explore the different places, go sight-seeing, collect some materials, join up with some friends and pwn some events.
Keep the difficulty inside dungeons, designed for 5-man parties. Way easier to balance out difficulty and rewards.

Also, there are some bosses that 1-2-shot people (depending on player gear and stats). These bosses are covered by so many by particle effects from the zerg that’s attacking it that it’s impossible to see any attack from them coming. This is not difficult, it’s just boring.

I play a Thief in fractals just fine, using a 0, 0, 10, 30, 30 build with dual daggers and shortbow set. I’m not a pro player, but I don’t see myself going down more often than others in my team.

Make its looks depend on which Element you are attuned to. It would have completely different look for other classes using staff, but since this is purely about Elementalist, I’ll only describe that.

While attuned to Fire it spouts fire from the tip of the staff, and gives the player a fiery aura.
While attuned to Water it gives the staff an icy / crystal look with streams of water flowing around it (kinda similar to Bifrost’s rainbow effect, but with water instead).
While attuned to Air it turns the staff in a style similar to that used for the Lightning Hammer, it gives the player an electric aura (similar to Bolt).
While attuned to Earth the staff turns bigger, with some rocks floating around it. It turns the player’s hands and some of their skin to earth.

I don’t care about footsteps, it can be without those.xP

imattacus.3915:

Thanks for all the responses everybody, I’ve decided I’m going to go Human, I like the look of those and from what I’ve played of them – the storyline is quite good. I think I’m going to have a play of elementalist again though just to see if I enjoy that because looking online, dagger elementalist looks super fun!
Thanks again for all your help, the GW2 community really is great

Np, and dual dagger Elementalist totally rocks. My favourite profession and setup.=P

generalraccoon.3857:

This is a good fact to consider. But as I pointed out, harpy fractal, i find it fun, so there’s potential at least that a good amount of people wud share the sentiment, i hope? :P It’s a change from just dungeons being a strictly/largely ‘vs mobs and bosses thing’.

I wouldn’t mind the harpy fractal so much if it made at least the starting position safe and an out-of-combat location. Sometimes my group agros the harpies before I’m able to switch my weapon set or utility skills, and heavily cripples my performance for the first part of the fractal. It doesn’t help that it’s basically impossible to get out of combat, because the harpies can hit you anywhere at the starting point.

There’s a few other projectiles that are immune to reflects / absorbs.
I remember going downed twice in CoE story mode due to this. One time I was using my Thief’s Dagger Storm (which is supposed to reflect any projectiles), yet those lightning orbs from the zappers still hit me. Other time was versus Kudzu in his sniper mode, when he hit me right through my reflect.

Alarion.6097:

Then make a third dungeon difficulty level, ala Diablo II-esc wise. New challenges, elite armor artworks, achieves, the whole deal. Overtuning current content just makes things unnecessarily harder, in a ‘cheese’ way, rather than in a refreshing way.

Any hit in this mode should be an instant death. Death would mean a complete character slot wipe (you not only lose your character, but your character slot as well).

The caster classes all demand a higher skill level than, like, the heavy classes. As you have low base armour, you take more damage. Just something to keep in mind.

The Elementalist kinda takes some time to get started with, since you’ll need to unlock skills for all 4 elements. It took me some time getting used to the element swapping thing, but once you learn how to do it it’s pretty easy, and fun to play.

Currently levelling a Mesmer (at 47). The class does require some knowledge of your skills to stay alive in situations with multiple mobs, because you can’t just stand there and take hits to the face. But they’re also fun to play, could easily recommend them.

Have only played Necromancer up to level 10, but didn’t really interest me too much. I get that they rely a lot on condition damage, and placing marks if you play with staff.

For story, I’ve only played human and sylvari stories. Human story was ok, but I think sylvari had a better one. Heard charr and asura have pretty interesting stories too. Haven’t heard much good from norn storyline.
To level up you just go out in the world and look for events that pop up. Completing daily tasks (shows in upper corner of screen) gives good EXP too, and some other rewards. Gather materials and doing crafting is good for EXP. And story mode missions give good EXP, but you can only do one every 2-3 levels.

I didn’t care too much for GW1’s skill system. On first sight it looks pretty awesome, having that many skills to choose from. But then you realise how little skills are actually useful in general. A lot of skills are very situational, not something any player would want to use except for maybe that one boss fight, or mission objective.
Guild Wars 2 skills suffer from this a lot less. Yeah, there’s still some useless or situational junk in there, but it’s not even half as bad as it was in GW1. Having traits available to boost certain types of skills really helps too.

Two things I would like to see in GW2’s skill system:
Add weapon skill choices. Like, put 2 different skills on weapon slot 2, 3, 4 and 5, and let players choose which one they want to use.
While levelling a new weapon, let the player choose which of the 2 skills they want to freely unlock, and them have them spend a skillpoint to unlock the other option for that slot.

Add more elite skills. Probably the only thing that GW1’s skill system did better is how elite skills were so nicely and easily connected with the rest of their build. Most builds were even built around their elite skill, which was quite cool. GW2 elites just feel kind of out of place. Like something I use once in a while, but really try not to use so I can have it available in a tough situation, but then end up forgetting about it anyway due to the huge cooldowns on them.

I have no idea why they thought placing these in starter zones was a good idea. I mean, they’re merely annoying for a level 80 who knows how to dodge/use stability. But for a new player who’s just going into the open world on his first character, still learning the basics, and getting chain knock-back’d over again by these things must be plain frustrating. I know I’d hate it.

LightningBlaze.4913:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/It-s-time-to-balance-PvP-apart-from-PvE-WvW/page/2#post1801535
You can also find some talk about it during this interview http://www.guildwars2guru.com/news/1109-qa-with-jonathan-sharp-and-jon-peters/

This’ll be nice. I so hate it when skills are being balanced for one part of the game, and then screws over the people using the same skills that were just fine in the other part of the game.

nexxe.7081:

I tried that website last night and got a group within 10-15 min.. i was doing AC story mode too. I seriously hate using 3rd party sites. Hopefully A-net is reasonable and gives us a LFG tool for dungeons.

Yeah, I don’t like using 3rd-party sites for stuff like this either, but at the moment it’s the only reasonable option if you want to find a party for dungeons without spending ages looking for people ingame.
ArenaNet has said they are adding an official LFG tool some time this year. I don’t remember where, it’s somewhere buried in the forums.

GW2LFG is pretty good, usually doesn’t take more than 5-10 minutes to find a group. Sometimes it can take longer, depending on time of posting and which paths you do. Though, in general even finding groups for story mode doesn’t take so long using the website.

Mesmer is an illusional duelist class. Specialises in using clones and phantasms for damage, and shatter them for more damage (or other neat effects). They have a bunch of unique utility that’s fun to play around with. Mostly ranged attacks, but they can go melee with swords.

Elementalist is the typical mage class if you go staff or scepter. You can play them as elemental ninjas using dual daggers. Has a bunch of cool utilities to kick kittens with. You can also use one to go really supportive with boon spread and heals.

Haven’t played much of Necromancer, but they’re your dark mage kind of character. Big focus on condition damage. Can apply marks and wells on the ground, summon minions, steal health, fear stuff etc.

Siphaed.9235:

The key word when you buy items in-game is…

UNIQUE

If you see that, just as in any MMORPG, or RPG, it means that you can only have one equipped and no more.

If it’s so unique, why let the player buy a 2nd one at all on the same character? Unique in its current form doesn’t make sense.

I use dailies to level up new characters. It’s nice EXP, and the other rewards are a good bonus.

Sunrise. It fits my character better, and I love the colours.
Twilight is too dark for me, kinda needs black gear match it, which I don’t really like…

daimasei.4091:

Swagg.9236:

Nope, nope, nope, nope.
Skipping is simply the result of bad dungeon design. Just lower enemy health in the areas that are typically skipped. Problem solved.

Or just add tokens to trash mobs and increase the number of tokens earned by killing some bosses (like Kholer and the troll on AC).
This way, people will love to kill those and also, will reduce the times you need to run a dungeon, hence, reducing you desire to skip (yep, people like OP may want to enjoy the run but most people run for gold and tokens and that require a kittenload of runs and after doing the same over and over, people just want to do it in the fast and easy way).

They had mid-bosses like Kohler give more tokens just after game release, but then people sometimes only farm the first 1 or 2 bosses for fast tokens and reset the dungeons to repeat. Especially common in Arah where most parties weren’t able to pass through Lupicus.