Guild Wars 2

I’ve seen this posted on Nov. 16 in another merged thread, but I’ve since heard several complaints from other elementalists. When Magnetic Grasp is used on a mob standing on uneven terrain, the elementalist gets stunned, floating in front of the mob for the duration of the immobilize.

I’ve seen this happen on hills, ramps and stairs, both ascending and descending. It is most unreliable on rocky terrain like in Sorrow’s Embrace, where any small rock will prevent your leap from reaching the boss.

The monthly updates so far have been just great, but it’s the in-between that gets stale. What would really revive my interest in old characters is a character-specific dungeon armor collection. Player housing might be a ways off into future development, but stuff like manakins or a menu to store armor sets would really incentivise the collection of multiple dungeon armor sets. Collecting an armor set and dropping it in the bank is not quite as fun. I feel this game could really get some mileage out of a wardrobe system similar to RIFT’s.

This suggestion crossed my mind as well. It seems JPs are a fundamentally separate part of the PvE experience, and some WvW. Why not give them their own area for discussion?

I think making MF benefit the entire party would add an interesting system in which players would balance their survival, damage, and MF stats to maximize the loot gain in dungeons. Stacking MF instead of other stats makes the dungeon harder, so it works as a difficulty scaling system (which is something I’d been wanting in every dungeon outside of fractals). I think we’d be seeing the most hardcore groups going MF-heavy on their stat allocation and the casual pugs less so. Balanced properly, it would be a nice risk vs reward system for groups to consider.

@ xCrusadentx: MF seems like the only stat that would make sense to go party-wide. It is like the character’s increased ability to identify rare loot for his party, so one character’s MF could potentially increase another person’s loot rarity.

Not to make anyone feel bad, but the other day I let my brother (who’s never touched an MMO before) try the holiday JP. He completed it in ~40 mins and was able to complete the JP daily after that. He’s clearly better at platforming than I am, but I feel that GW2 has made me a better platformer in the few months I’ve played it. I wasn’t good enough to complete Mad King’s Clocktower, but I look forward to smashing that puzzle next year.

I would say that if you find JPs too difficult now, just give it time and practice on the other JPs in the game. You will get better through practice.

D/D elementalist has been the best tank for me in dungeons. I’ve been a guardian, thief, and mesmer so far, but none of them can beat a d/d ele’s ability to hold a group’s attention indefinitely. Over-the-top survivability, high mobility, decent damage with good mob control make it the most fun profession I’ve played yet.

The only thing that sucks about elementalists is learning how to play them. Once I got past the learning stage, the class felt fun and distinctly different from anything I’ve ever played. In my experience, the playstyle didn’t make much sense until lvl 35ish. I am quite glad i stuck with it though, because at lvl 80 it is amazingly fun.

I’ll chime in with my favorite zone in the game: Harathi Hinterlands, followed closely by Kessex Hills.

The war against the centaurs are some of the best crafted events in the game. It really gives the player the feeling that they just stepped out of Skyrim-esque exploration mode and got dropped into an RTS game where they can make a difference. These zones make it quite fun to run around with a group of 5 players and take part in significant battles that shape the outcome of the war.

I’m using a build I saw mentioned in daphoenix’s thread.

dagger/dagger cantrip build
0/10/10/20/30
Gear choices: PTV armor and weapons, clerics jewelry, 6/6 superior rune of the dolyak, superior sigil of energy, superior sigil of swiftness

Huge survivability that is borderline OP in WvW. I have skirmished and kited groups of 8-10 players to split up an enemy zerg’s focus. You pretty much never have to die unless you choose to.

Glad someone has already screenshot this bug. I thought it wasn’t hitting at all because I expected 8 bleeds, but it looks like the actual spell effect is a equivalent to a ring of earth. The range is quite odd on it, as sometimes it completely misses the target even though the spell goes off right on top of them.

I’m beginning to wonder if the EA churning earth was pulled for balance reasons and substituted with a ring of earth effect. If this is the case, some clarification in the visual effect or tooltip would be most welcome.

I suppose “tank” is classically defined as the “stand-still-and-take-it king of mitigation”. In that sense, maybe guardian is the only tank in the game.

From my experience however, the best character that I can use to run into the fray, damage and slow enemies while mitigating and self-healing is my dagger/dagger elementalist with a cantrip build. It is an innately mobile build that lets you evade most damage and quickly heal yourself if necessary. If you’re looking for a mage profession to fulfill a close-range tank archetype, definitely give the dagger/dagger elementalist a look.

The rally mechanic is a unique and intentional design paradigm that really sets GW2 combat apart from other MMOs. It is not a band-aid to “save the terrible players” from a “broken system that lets you die too quick”. Rally is there because it makes combat interesting. Period. Survivability and damage levels seem to be tuned with rally in consideration.

You might believe PvE is too easy with rally, but have you considered that the problem is simply that there is no challenging PvE yet?

Evasive Arcana added a lot of offensive capability to my d/d build. Until 60 however, you can expect to just gear and trait for tankiness and try to do aoe pulls to kill faster.

Look up daphoenix’s thread on this forum, thats what helped me understand the d/d ele survivability. Here’s a few key points that helped me put the whole playstyle together:

Survivability tips:
Gear for toughness and healing power primarily. Power should be tacked on secondarily.
Your healing ability should be signet of restoration.
5 points in water trait line gives passive regen, this can be quite important for periods of recovery.
10 points in the earth trait line gives earth’s embrace, which adds tons to your survivability.
Use cantrips for utilities. Mist form, Lightning flash, Cleansing fire are the three that I use. Eventually you want to take the 10 point water trait “soothing disruption” to add even more survivability to your cantrip build.

Offensive tips:
10 points in air gives zepher’s boon, which grants fury and swiftness for 10 sec on aura use. As a d/d ele you have 2 auras that you use quite often, so this is a substantial boost to your damage and mobility.
Churning earth is quite a long cast, but don’t stand still while casting it! Use your Lightning Flash utility to teleport behind an enemy or into a group of mobs right before churning earth finishes casting. You can get pretty creative with this utility combo.

Hope this helps!

It can be really tough without the perfect builds. On my 56 ele, I had to go d/d with toughness and healing power gear to survive long enough. That’s the only character I can solo gift mobs on, but a group of princess dolls still owns me every time. I might try a build with even more condi removal instead of regen and see if that works.

@daphoenix

Thanks so much for these guides to d/d ele. I never had the patience to figure out how to survive at such close range, but I’m having great success while leveling my 53 ele. Seems all I needed was tons of toughness and healing power. I’ll keep checking up on this thread, thanks again!

I’m pretty certain that the trailer had elementalists standing in water solely for aesthetic purposes. None of our spells require environmental conditions to take effect.

I would not mind a system that puts players into overflow if a zone has almost no players, that way we can effectively have cross-server zones.

I’ve done dungeons on my 80 mesmer with a staff condition spec that plays decent support with the fury/might buffs bouncing around. It definitely has a supportive feel to it with all the field combos available. I’m not sure I enjoyed the style of play though. Most of the fights were popping 3 staff clones and auto attack.

I haven’t had time to get better at my necro, but at lvl 35ish I can say it feels more like a tanky condition pet class. In dungeons, I think I prefer the necro because the playstyle is more active and I feel like I have better control over enemy movement. Staff and scepter/focus was my choice for my necro, very fun to play in a group.

I’ve logged hundreds of hours already, and have no plans to move to another MMO. The open world cooperative gameplay resonated with everything I’ve ever wanted in an MMO. Definitely not perfect, but I don’t expect perfection from a recently-launched game with so many daring innovations.

Holiday content updates have been great so far, can’t wait to see what else they’ve got for us.

This is a big reason I never could finish my TA armor set. The annoying boss sounds drove me insane.

I’ve experienced this too. Sometimes the sound of ranger pet footsteps or an ele’s flame elemental wing flap gets really, really loud. I turned down the master volume to zero, but I still got the annoyingly loud noise. This bug is really rough on the ears and has been around since launch, so I wonder when it will get fixed.

When I go back to the starting zones to level an alt, I realized that the renown heart system adds too much linearity to the game. I feel like I’m in WoW again with the trail of quests across a zone, with no real free exploration.

My solution? Ignore renown hearts. Seriously, you won’t miss out on any exp. I found that if I just cruised across zones hunting down skill points and moved on, I discovered places and events I never knew existed. I ducked in and out of dynamic events with other players, getting gold rewards every time. Zones felt fresh again and I had more skill points to buy abilities and experiment with new builds.

I’d encourage anyone who has zone fatigue to try this method and see how you like it.

I never understood the significance of finding this star. I wondered if there was a hidden puzzle that I was missing.

I can’t say enough about how much I like the music for this holiday. Great work on that ANet!

The difficulty of the jumping puzzle was just right for me. I found clocktower frustratingly difficult because all players were crowded onto one path. This really isn’t an issue with the wintersday puzzle, so I can enjoy the scenery a bit more and focus on the actual platforms instead of squinting to find my character model in a crowd.

I had a few friends buy the game recently and they find the puzzle quite difficult. Seems understandable, as I was pretty terrible at JPs at the game launch too. The difficulty hasn’t stopped them from enoying the music and scenery though.

I really hope they drop a race change item into the gem store. The restrictions outlined by the OP seem to work fine, except for the completion of the entire personal story. If I recall, the only race-specific part of the storyline is up to lvl 30. Once you join an Order, the story is the same for any other race, so the race change option could become available at this part of the story.

Alternatively, ANet could just reset the personal story on use of the race change item.

Yep this bug is definitely still around. Still blows my ears out in large groups. Sometimes I can make the problem go away for a bit by swapping sound devices in sound options.

I think it would be really fun to have a system that could scale personal difficulty from lvl 1 (starter zone) to lvl 80 (Orr difficulty) within the same zone. Depending on the character’s level, mobs could have extra attacks that kick in at higher difficulties. I see this type of scaling in the fractals dungeon for high difficulties, but I really wish open world PvE had something similar.

Problem:
I really liked playing my thief, but now he’s got all the gear he needs. I’d like to run other dungeons, but I don’t see much point to it beyond selling loot for extra gold.

Proposed solution:
Give players an incentive to collect the gear from more than one dungeon on single character. Perhaps allow us to save different “wardrobes” (similar to Rift’s wardrobe system) and choose between different saved outfits. Monetize the system or create a gold sink by charging a fee for additional wardrobe slots and swapping between outfits.

My thief with t3 shoulder, gloves, and coat. Legs and boots are whispers armor. Helm is thief starter helm.

Dyes used:
Pitch – full body + hood
Iron – coat
Celestial – shoulder blades, bracers + coat buttons
Fluff – daggers on boots

T3 daggers and shortbow look great with this set.

I wonder if I can call GW2 a gear treadmill if the treadmill is running slower than any game I’ve ever played. Still, I would rather have no treadmill of stats. Just give me new aesthetics and an achievement system to incentivize the collection of all currently available armor sets. Horizontal progression made easy.

(go home spellcheck, you’re drunk)

I don’t quite agree with the author of that article. Sure, there are plenty of dead-end guilds that become empty after a while. However, there are also plenty of guilds with great leadership that give members a reason to stay. Good leaders will try to be as inclusive as possible with frequent guild events (not just dungeons), and good members will try to answer questions that the newer players have.

The number of guilds emptying out is no fault of the system, but rather the fault of the members. If you like a guild where everyone is friendly, inclusive, and helpful then perhaps you should start with instilling these qualities in yourself. Guilds aren’t exclusive in this game, so you can’t rely on exclusivity for member retention.

I am having difficulty finding a compatibility between my stealth build for above-water and traits that benefit underwater combat for thieves. Our underwater stealth seems quite limited, so I wonder if anyone has found trait/utility combinations that work well for our underwater abilities.

Pretty much the only strategy I use currently is to take the lead position in groups, get initial agro on enemies, and spam spear ability 3 (channels a block, then counterattacks). With signet of malice, hitting multiple mobs means you get tons of heals that keep you up. You can pretty much chain these attacks until your health gets low, then go evasive with spear ability 5.

I love the way blind works at the moment. I use a stealth build with the trait that causes aoe blind on stealth. Since I use d/d, I cause an aoe blind about every 4 sec with cloak and dagger, and an emergency blind with signet of shadows. The effect reminds me of my guardian’s aegis (blocks the next incoming attack), but blind is put on your enemies instead. This means that aoe blinds can be much more reliable mitigation if all mobs are attacking a single person.

This kind of support in a group usually goes unnoticed, so be sure to remind your guardian tanks that you are keeping that crowd of enemies blinded—they might be able to take more offensive utilities to keep control over mobs.

As a thief, there isn’t a single encounter I haven’t done as melee. You just need to build for survivability and control/support across your entire team for it to work. Dropping aoe aegis, protection, regen, aoe blinds, aoe weakness, aoe petrify all make a huge difference in the survivability of a melee group.

Even on lupicus phase 1, all I do is stack on my group and melee mobs while my group ranges down the boss. Lupi isn’t even close to being a dps race anyway, so I don’t see why people try to have max dps at all times.

I love the PvE gameplay of d/d with a stealth build. I built my thief to be tanky, so I have over 3k toughness and about 18k health. I don’t get hit much in crowded PvE fights because I also take the trait for aoe blind on stealth. The controlling effect of aoe blindness is quite amazing in the vast majority of the fights I’ve done.

I also use shortbow for its kiting potential in fights where melee isn’t the best option. I have yet to see another profession match my kiting ability with this weapon. It also adds tons more mobility, allowing me to play an evasive and mobile medic in fights like giganticus lupicus.

I have 3 characters to 80 so far: mesmer, guardian, and thief. What keeps me sticking with thief is the evasive and mobile gameplay it offers, even when going melee.

I would even say its safe to ignore exotic gear. Even fractals was cake in my set of rare gear for my thief. I chose power/toughness/vitality for my armor and weapons while taking power/precision/condition for my jewelry. Damage was great. Survivability was great.

Honestly I don’t see a good reason to whine to someone about not having good gear. Skill is what makes a dungeon group amazing.

Thanks so much for this post, this site gets me groups in under 10 mins!

Wondering if anyone else is experiencing groupwide lag and disconnects right now. Our group just started AC explorable at 8pm central and we have been experiencing these problems the entire run.

Gate of Madness server has tons of pug groups forming for just about every dungeon except fractals. Overflow server is where you’ll find lots of fractals groups.

No surprise that Orr and dragons are empty at the moment, as the same thing happened during Halloween. I don’t think any sort of elitism is forming from this ascended gear. The only exclusive groups I see are the ones that are going for scaled fractals, but they don’t specify any gear requirements.

http://www.gw2armor.com/human/male/wvw/medium/display.php

This site shows many complete sets on any gender/race. You cant change armor colors on the site, but you can clearly see the color patterns on the armor.

Just fix the downscaling. I hate going into low zones and 3 shotting mobs that used to be difficult to solo. The DE rewards are low, but seem appropriate considering how trivial the events can be.

Shadowlancer.7102:

Quote: "… we have found that our most dedicated players were achieving their set of Exotic gear and hitting “the Legendary wall.” We designed the process of getting Legendary gear to be a long term goal, but players were ready to start on that path much sooner than we expected and were becoming frustrated … " – Linsey Murdock

Comment: You do realize that using Hard Core Players, the very few 1% that owns Legendarys, as a idea player base for judgement and conclusions about gear progress, does not make up for the casual base and thus, hint #1 Player gap.

I think you may be misinterpreting the “legendary wall”. The problem seems to be that character growth is quite fast (most players can get full exotics in under a month). After getting full exotics, character progression turns into a grindfest for legendary mats. That’s why they called it the “legendary wall”.

I think the Ascended gear is an attempt to lengthen the time to achieve that last tier of gear so that players aren’t just griding for legendaries. I feel ANet should have taken progression on a more horizontal route, but slow and cautious vertical gear progression is a decent compromise.

Best halloween event I’ve experienced in any MMO. It’s not even a contest really.

I would agree that this empty feeling is a product of minimal notifications on the map. There are zones that notify you of events from quite far away, and sometimes you will see about 4-5 invasions going on. This makes the game feel like an RTS that the player can jump right into. I’d have to say that being notified of events over a huge range makes the game feel like a dynamic RTS that the player can jump right into, and I much prefer those zones that show events from very far away.

I’d love changes to the usual zerg locations that add complexity to scale with a larger number of players. Additionally, I’d like to see some zerg mobs that actively discourage AoE. Let mobs drop a feedback bubble, area retaliation or something. Maximizing your exp in a zerg shouldn’t be a matter of spamming the most AoE, it should be more about strategy and survival.

I noticed this in PvE today too. Some mobs would start a channel, I’d pop stealth and strafe, and the mob would still channel and track me while stealthed. Quite annoying. I hope this is not intended.

I would not mind keeping the ladder as it is, pairings and all. Just make us blind to the current scores. Tally them up at the end of the week and then show us how the scores look. This minute-by-minute tally system is what keeps most people from queuing for WvW when the opposition is dominating.

I’m speaking from my experiences on SBI, since last week our turnout in WvW was terrible. People were tired of losing to the same guilds on HoD, which is understandable. Now we are in T2 and dominating to the point of no opposition. This situation might be nice for people who want their map completion, but it is still not fun for pvpers. Making us blind to scoring until the end of the week is not the complete answer to the woes of WvW, but it is a step toward promoting a more fun and self-balancing system.

Wall of Reflection (guardian utility)
Feedback (mesmer utility)

Two of the best abilities in WvW by far. And both affect way more than 5 players depending on how skilled you are with them. I’ll take these over portal any day.

I find that money gain in WvW is an issue if I decide to make any upgrades or buy siege for my server to use. There are only a handful of dedicated players and commanders altruistic enough to shell out this money to advance their server, and they are going broke frequently.

Personally, I save up badges in hopes that I will one day reach that sum of 3000 to buy a set of gear for ONE character that will make him optimal in WvW. Since release, I have earned almost 200 badges across all characters. I don’t see how buying siege with badges can be expected of players if they hope to ever earn the exotic badge gear.