Guild Wars 2

MightyMicah.7451:

Oh, so in other words, the only nerf that took place was the overall nerf to ferocity? (Crititcal damage?)

And then since the critical damage was changed to ferocity, it’s no longer possible to “min/max” with the minor gear?

Yes to both. Though to tbh I haven’t done any math on the min/maxing just trusting what other ppl say.

Instead of getting all those sets why not just get celestial gear?

Yes.

screw flanders

Eliminate leather bags as a drop.

Crit damage was previously distributed in non standard way that made getting high crit damage pieces for low stat pieces such as boots, gloves, and helm while getting defensive pieces for high stat pieces such as coat and pants gave the player a better combination of offense and defensive stats then could be achieved any other way. Those builds are now without any advantages over comparable builds due to crit damage being normalized in its distribution over pieces.

Secondly lots of classes have guaranteed crit skills and players were building around that.

Thirdly in good dungeon squads with perma fury and good crit rate boosting the damage from celestial and valks gear could be somewhat close to zerker without the loss of defense.

If you hit the “More” button on the achievements thingy in the corner you will see that there are always other easy PVE achievements to do to hit the 5 needed each day for a Laurel. At first it looks like somedays you need to do PVP or a fractal run or something else noob unfriendly. But look under More and you will see there are always 5 easy PVE categories for getting the daily Laurel.

I think servers all have the same order and trains are getting mixed up for other reasons. A bigger problem than order is which do you do after SB. On my server we always restarted train at Oak after SB but now each SB is a serious threat to spawn multiple trains.

If you wanted celestial for its overt purpose of having all around stats its as good(or bad) as it was before depending on how you view having all around stats.

But lots of ppl got high crit damage gear such as celestial, valks and zerk for just the lesser pieces of armor such as boots and gloves because before there was an advantage to this. Before getting high crit damage gear on lesser pieces gave you the best offensive gains with the smallest defensive losses. Now it doesn’t work like that so ppl who got celestial boots and gloves to go with defensive chest and pants feel robbed.

A full healing ele would have trouble soloing things in PVE like map completion. It would take you so long to kill mobs that they would gang up on you and wear you down. With offensive builds a few aoes and all the trash mobs are dead.

Do bad pugs count? Because then you want staff.

Start your own group. Today the only non zerker offering for AC was one that said you had to be “blazed” to join. There was no blaze test so I got in. We finished it very close to ideal time with no pinging gear or attitudes. Just start your own group and say non zerkers are welcome.

Antonio Cappello.1806:

tigirius.9014:

“It’s RNG deal with it” is no longer a valid argument. It’s well known that mathematically speaking complete and utter randomness is impossible, it is also a well known fact that the typical algorithms used by all mmo companies are skewed. So that being said let’s look at the problem.

Mathematically speaking, complete and utter randomness is quite possible, so I’m not sure what you’re talking about there..

I’ve talked about this with a phd mathematician, in order for a number to be truly random the upper bound would have to be infinity and so the average size of a truly random number is one half infinity and so no computer system will ever be able to use truly random numbers.

FWIW this guy did work on RNG algorithms for industry and he said they don’t really want something approximating real randomness because they don’t like long stretches of unlikely events. He said what industry is in the market for is an algorithm with few long stretches of repeating results but overall is close to random and that’s what he had to program to please the customer.

I have no idea what the problem is supposed to be here.

Scepter 2 is an instant cast skill and does not interrupt other skills. The damage from scepter 1 is a lot less than shown on the screen, as someone said look at the combat log to see the real numbers.

Why does boon duration nerf affect you if you were using full divinity runes?

Inb4 “I hate healing”.

Theory: the ppl complaining about how their celestial gear got ruined aren’t telling the whole story. I think these ppl were using the gear in pve squads with precision boosted from squad mates turning their game leading crit damage stat into a killing force. Or in pvp they were using guaranteed critical skills.

I say this because the whining is just too much to be explained otherwise. For anyone relying only on the crit rate from the gear itself the changes are neutral or positive.

You are playing GW2 too much when Rhapsody In Blue reminds you of the GW2 background music instead of the other way around.

I wish the title’s misspelling went all the way and said Furor City since thats what the forums are about. I mean furorms.

Genetics.

(screw flanders)

Everybody hates treehorn and logan.

The more ppl try to make money flipping on the TP the smaller the spread between the highest and lowest prices and this helps casuals.

I have 100% magic find and the champ bags are giving me much better loot.

But don’t bother with SB and Maw anymore.

Why are so many ppl trumpeting the value of celestial amulets? Is this just a spvp thing?

ICEing.9237:

On death players should drop all their weapons and armor and the killer should be able to loot it

You first.

This was happening to me starting in the days leading up to the patch and became much worse after the patch. I have been avoiding dungeons since I know I prolly won’t finish it.

What is an ice nova?

I think letting anyone learn any skill is called free classing. It seems kind of strange to me that anet dumped the trinity but didn’t adopt free classing at the same time.

Celestial would still be best for what you want.

It seems to me that most eles would rather put points in Air for increasing damage instead of Fire. Has the recent update changed this? Air traitline damage has been weakened in two ways. Firstly it doesn’t give the critical damage increase it used to. Secondly the critical chance increase doesn’t do as much to increase damage as critical damage from gear has been reduced.

Is it still better to put points in Air for damage?

Does anyone ever ping zerker gear and then wear something else?

I know most ppl like 30 points in water better for defense but I’ve always done better with 30 points in arcana for survivability. Elemental Attunement and Evasive Arcana give me more defense and healing than what I get from 30 in water.

Not saying which is better, just saying don’t be afraid to experiment. I always have 30 in arcana and then switch between 30 in earth and 30 in air depending on what I’m doing and how much I need offense or defense.

Making tempest defense work against basilisk venom seems important to me. What am I missing that the pessimists are seeing?

Scepter is a good burst wep but sucks at sustained dps. Its common to use Fresh Air and maximize the number of electric discharge procs to try and overcome this shortcoming. If you don’t like that then you should prolly stick to staff.

I seem to be one of the few fans of Diamond Skin on this forum. Its great for pve cuz you just run right past the mobs trying put cripple on you and nothing happens. Remember all the times you were trying to run past mobs and one slowed you down and the rest caught up to you and killed you? Traveling long distances with diamond skin on is so easy for me.

In good squads the damage I lose from using focus doesn’t matter because everything is dying so fast anyway. In bad squads I need the extra defense from focus to stay alive.

Losing Fire Grab isn’t that big a deal because it has a long cooldown. So does Churning Earth and in bad squads that gets me killed from drawing agro and in good squads the mobs are dead by the time it finishes channeling.

You lose healing by using focus but gain condi removal which helps so I can use arcane brilliance more as a blast finisher. Also I rely on elemental attunement and evasive arcana for most of my healing anyway so losing a healing skill isn’t that big a deal to my play style.

Gale seems more useful to me than Updraft. Swirling winds is great against Dredge mobs.

Put it all together and I like focus better for squads. Think of how many times in dungeon runs you will run past certain sections. Focus is great for that.

For PVP I think it really comes down to how much you value RTL.

Notice how many threads there are complaining about eles dying to fast? You can come up with a damage dealing build that only needs one attunement but to stay alive you always need to switch attunements.

The forums always hate healing with the staff water autoattack but sooner or later you will be in a noob squad and for that its the best choice. So many times I’ve been in squads that were thinking of giving up until I switched to being a staff heal bot and then those noobs could finally do it.

With regard to hot chick toons the female human(usually ele) wearing cultural t3 armor is overdone. Lets hear it for the norn females, I like their sturdy farm girl looks.

Are you using Diamond Skin? Map completion in Orr is brutal on my ele without it. Your gonna need to trait for condi clearing and Diamond Skin and load up on condi clearing utilities.

You get so little value from healing stats, its not worth it. I tried using cleric’s armor and it took forever to kill stuff and the team support wasn’t all that much better. Only thing I miss from that gear is that Ether Renewal was guaranteed to bring me back to full hp which is great when used with Diamond Skin.

What I do now is keep a staff with healing stats and a sigil of life on it in my inventory. Switch to that and the extra healing is enough to support well and you don’t have to screw up your armor. Keeping one staff with healing stats and sigil of life is really all you need to do. If you don’t want to even do that heal with the Frost Bow, it boosts your healing stats and does a great job of healing.

If the players in your group are smart enough to use blast finishers on your water fields you won’t need even a point of healing power.

tldr: healing scales bad with healing stat.

The dulfy link says “Example: Superior rune of strength changed to 1) +25 power, 2) 10% might duration, 3) 50 power, 4) 15% might duration and 25% chance when struck to gain might for 10s with 10s cooldown 5) 100 power, 6) 20% might duration, +5% damage under might.” Thats not as strong as what it says in the OP.

Sauce for sigil changes?

Because of Cleaving and the five target maximum the difference between being a good single target damage class and being a good aoe damage target class aren’t as important as in other games. So many of your best auto attacks(LH and MH dagger air) will hit 3 nearby targets and your true aoes can only hit 5. That last one means GW2 will never have a traditional mage class imo.

There’s nothing wrong with staff ele for pve. If you trait for it at end game the damage per second is tremendous and the constant fire fire field from lava font makes stacking might child’s play. Of course in the ideal situation with the best players you can keep up 25 stacks of might without staff and do slightly better DPS with other weps. But in ordinary squads traited staff is very competitive in damage + might stacking.

At lower levels when you can’t trait for staff damage and yes its damage will fall behind other weps. Big deal. Anyway to maximize staff damage you have to spam Lava Font and Meteor Shower. Have to, no other way to get a lot of damage out of the staff.

The big problem is getting the mobs to stay in range of those two skills. For open world solo pve activities like exploring maps I’ve given up on doing a lot of damage with the staff from a distance. I run right into the middle of the mobs and get them all gathered up on me and hit lava font, flame burst and meteor shower. This is usually enough to kill trash mobs especially if you use arcane power skill on the meteor shower.

Surviving this was hard at lower levels, I had to hit Burning Retreat as soon as I was done and switch to water and self heal. But it still worked and the mobs died while I was busy healing from a safe distance. Now I don’t even need to do that. Use Armor of Earth or some other defense skill and wade right into the mobs and get lava font and meteor shower off at least. They will go down fast enough to keep you alive. Of course the great thing about ranged mobs is you can put a lava font right underneath them and they will stand there and take all the damage without moving out of it.

My main point here is staff works out great don’t worry about needing to use another wep. You will need to spam Lava Font and Meteor shower(especially lava font) to get good damage but thats not really a hard thing to do.

I think GW2 is closer to a traditional MMO than anet lets on. The old magic vs phys attack split exists in GW2 if you consider condi damage as magic damage. In traditional MMOs the casters are weaker at PVE and stronger at PVP and this holds true in its own way for GW2.

I like ele underwater skills better than the regular skills. The underwater version of Tornado is OP. My standard routine is to start in Air and use the bubble skill that floats them to the top and keep shooting while they cant hit me. Then switch to Earth and use the sinking skill that also keeps them from attacking. Then hit them with the Earth blind. Its a long period where the enemy can’t attack you.

You said your using a staff. Untraited dagger will always do the most damage and if you trait for staff damage you will have to spam lava font after every cooldown to realize the damage potential of the staff. Many ppl find that boring. And at level 8 you can’tr trait for staff damage yet.

Get a dagger and lead off with Burning Speed then Drakes Breath then Fire Grab. That should kill trash mobs. If its a group of mobs and their not dead switch to earth and use the 3 powerful AOEs in it including the nuke skill Churning Earth.

If you like having a range weapon get a scepter and start off with Dragon’s Tooth then set up the fire field with Ring of Fire before it lands and put a Phoenix in too. Aim the Phoenix slightly behind the target so it hits 3×. Now you have some might on you so your Fire Grab and Churning Earth should do spectacular damage.

I think when you switch to Earth there should be a 5 second knockdown on all enemies in 300 unit range. When you switch to Water your health should be restored to full and when you switch to Fire everyone else in the game should instantly die. Air is fine the way it is.

For PVE bloodlust sigils are great. Its easy to get up to 25 kills and then you just walk around wrecking mobs.