Guild Wars 2

Totally missed that there was an earth shield around But after your hint I just reckognized it was dropped @Nokk.
Thanks for clarification!

May I ask how you executed that pull on the three champ golems? Looks like a guard using GS 5, but since you were 2 Ele and 1 Thief… could it be that they pulled themselves in by firing some skill on that smokescreen?
Anyway, nice run!

Made me giggle since it instantly remembered me of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdxkVQy7QLM

Anyway, well done guys!

Another thing to pay attention for is- have no mob selected as target. Especially when fighting at the chest seal it’s quite easy to miss the seal when (accidently) having some foe behind you selected as your target, resulting in your toon swinging the hammer in the wrong direction. So always make sure you have no target selected before using hammer 4 on a seal

Depends on the path you’re doing (as stated by Talyn.3295) and the class you’re playing.
E.g. I usually play a guardian in CoE, thus having access to enough blocks, vigor and invulnearbility to easily overcome Alpha.
To prevent getting imprisoned, you need access to stability. As long as everyone fights him in melee range (which is strongly recommended for this boss), crystal prisons should go down in no time due to AoE/Cleave damage. In addition, you can teleport/shadowstep out of them.
If you play a class with less access to evades/blocks, you might consider using a superior sigils of energy on one or even both weapon sets, granting you one extra evade after each weapon swap.
Last but not least- make sure your party brings enough dps. The longer the fight lasts, the bigger the chances are you run out of evades, blocks, etc. or simply make a mistake.
Once you get used to this fight, it’s one of the more fun encounters in GW2 imo

bump this topic may not perish in the meaningless depths of the forum crypt
Help us Gaile Gray. You’re our only hope!

Heh, nice one Scay.1045, I just thought about starting such a topic myself

Unfortunatly, since this is the dungeon/fractals subforum, I fear none of the dev’s will even read the title, so… desperate times call for desperate measures:

“Dear Gaile Gray. Years ago you served the community in the original Guild Wars. Now we beg you to help us in this struggle against the flood of ascended rings. We regret that we are unable to present the community’s request to you in person, but our ship has fallen under attack, and we’re afraid our mission to bring you to a exquisite dinner table has failed. We have placed information vital to the survival of our cause into the memory systems of this sub-forum. The developers will know how to retrieve it. You must see this topic safely delivered to them in the studios. This is our most desperate hour. Help us, Gaile Gray. You’re our only hope.”
Credits go to Mr. George Lucas for giving such an excellent template

tl;dr: can we plz have a statement wether or not it will be able to do something else with ascended rings then either use them, store them or sell/destroy them? No need to get in detail yet (salvage them, put them in the forge to get a random piece of asc. accessory, etc.), just a simple, yes, we’re working on something or no, nothing to do with them but use/store/sell/destroy.

Thanks in advance!

believe.6514:

Khandarus.2738:

Over a dye color? Kay bye.

lol i guess some of us are ok getting screwed over in real life n in game

yes if anyone want. i will give away my gold rather then enriching the rich.

Can’t believe no one said it yet but anyways… I can haz your stuff?

Fluffball.8307:

30s is older? :-O

According to my co-worker in her early twenties it is

31 myself being in a 30+ guild with members all the way up from 30 to their 60s

Jana.6831:

IndigoSundown.5419:

Jana.6831:

I don’t really hate underwater combat but the underwater weapon skills of thieves are really poor, so I usually avoid it.

That’s ironic. I was thinking that Thieves actually have the best UW weapons of the 8 professions.

Cool, get your thief to some underwater veterans or champs and look how it goes, then try any other profession.

Hard to to find an easier way to fight vets/champs than grabbing a thief. Being able to block every single attack and dealing some nice dmg on every counter is pretty OP vs. mob AI.

On topic: I hear a lot of ppl complaining about underwater combat. Reason for most of them is that they constantly lose direction/orientation. Though I’m hardly able to relate to that, I guess it’s just another “casualists” thingy…
The only thing that sometimes really bugs me about underwater combat is the unreliability of big mobs hit boxes. Quite anoying to have a big shark right in front of me and all I stab is water, since its hit box is still 600 units away…

Hmmm… I somewhat miss “Inspiring banners” to get somewhat 99% uptime. Did I just overlook it? Do banners get a flat duration increase in return? Can anyone give some clarification?

Well, since I know that as soon as something desireable becomes RNG in this game I will probably never get it, I don’t really care about the drop rates.
What really bugs me is that distributing the portals in SW/DT exclusivly leads to a rise of casual “phiw, never inform myself at all” players in those maps. Never had a fail SW map for weeks… until yesterday. Breach&VW both failed. Well played ANet, well played.
#losingeverylastbitoffaithingw2playerbase
#rngasaconceptstillsucks

Einlanzer.1627:

Jana.6831:

Einlanzer.1627:

Jana.6831:

Einlanzer.1627:

tramwajarz.2369:

Einlanzer.1627:

The way it should work IMO is that healing power and boon duration should have better synergy than they do currently so that, while you can’t make a 100% healer per se, you should be able to make a close to 100% effective support build. Only the Guardian can come anywhere close to that currently and even then it’s dubious.

and what 100% support build does better than e.g. normal build traited and slotted with appropriate utilities?

That’s the point. Almost all support currently is tied up with offense, which is weird. Support should be better distributed and balanced so that it would be feasible to make effective non-DPS builds.

I see it being 4 soft roles (or specialties) – dps, mitigation, boons, control. You should at baseline be good at any 2 of those roles, with some ability to hybridize into more and end up with at least a moderately effective character. A support character would be someone who was heavily focused on healing and boons, or healing and control.

Granted, it would be difficult to balance, but they could do a much better job than they have to this point.

But I like to be able to do everything with any class I’m using?
I like to solo stuff, I like to heal, support, kill without looking at someone in my party saying “YO; DO YOUR JOB!!”

What I’m talking about would not disrupt that. If you like to do a little of everything, then you’re hybridizing your build in the game currently instead of focusing too much on any one area. You’d still be able to do that in what I proposed above.

No, the trick is that I don’t have to spec into anything to do everything. I’m pure dps and can still heal, still give boons, still support – and I think that’s great.

I don’t think that’s a good thing and I don’t see how anyone can argue that it is. If someone who specs purely into DPS can do everything else, what is the point of spec’ing into anything but DPS? That’s the problem that the majority of the community is complaining about.

You should be able to do a little of everything regardless of spec, but you shouldn’t be really good at everything when spec’ing into DPS.

Same applies as I mentioned above about gear- it’s training wheels. If you’re a dedicated player knowing your class and the encounters, the game rewards you with the ability to spec and gear offensivly, thus getting things done faster. If you’re not (yet) that good, the game still offers you the possibility to spec and gear more defensivly and still get things done.
As soon as one gets rid of thinking in traditional RPG patterns, you will see that there’s a ton of support in GW2 you can do. Just the way you do it is quite different- no manualy selecting of team-members and using a skill on them but active positioning and doing the right things at the right time (giving aegis, using blinds, interrupting a key-skill, executing a combo-field). Just because there’s no big message on the screen like “Congratulations! Your aegis just prevented [insert party member names] from going into downstate!” doesn’t mean you did no support.

Btw.- it’s always a bad idea to claim speaking for the majority of the community…

Rin.1046:

Nash.2681:

[see page 1]

No misconception on my part, but you do raise a valid point that has actually changed the way I feel about this topic in the opposite direction. Previously I thought it was only a problem of reward and event design. But I now think more needs to be changed to buff support builds and stats. The fact you can make an effective support build using stats that are designed to be for high damage builds, you have to ask ‘Why bother giving us other stat options in PvE, if all you need is zerker?’.[…]

Heh, tbh I just waited for that highlighted question, glad you put it on the table
I thought about this myself- “why are there so many stat combos when all you really need is zerk/sins?”. Well, I found an answer for myself. For PvP/WvW it’s quite obvious, since there’s way more variability and more different builds are actually usefull. For PvE again…. the answer I found might not be satisfying for everyone but to me it’s quite simple- training wheels and test dummies. Training wheels for those that don’t get along with zerk armor right away, test dummies for those trying out stuff for WvW/PvP.

About your suggestion: though I think your ideas have indeed some potential (existing stats could be used for that, e.g. thoughness for blocks, healing power for reg/heal, vitality for protection, etc.), I came down to the conclusion, that it won’t effect PvE as much as one might think. Good partys that already burst everything down in seconds will still do so, it doesn’t really matter wether aegis blocks 1, 2 or 3 attacks. Not so good partys with players that need some more defensive gear to get along get some more support, prbly making it even easier for them to get things done.

Rin.1046:

[…]
Healing builds do work, and they do help your team, but they simply aren’t rewarding enough and in the open work or speed run meta, they simply aren’t needed. So it wouldn’t matter how much you buffed healing, if a full team of zerkers can do anything faster and for better rewards, what is the point in going support?[…]

Rin.1046:

[…]And supportive characters should be rewarded just as much for their efforts as zerkers are for their damage.

At the moment the open world can be conquered by zerkers, and that does nothing to encourage build diversity. Hopefully HoT will offer some solutions to this issue.

I think you fell to some common missconceptions about gw2 combat.
a) Zerker is not a build, it’s a stat combination. Nothing more, nothing less.
b) There’s already quite a lot of support in the game, buffing allies with boons (might, fury, aegis, protection, quickness, etc.) handling defiance stacks on bosses, wise usage of blinds and reflects- this are all supportive tasks, yet you don’t need any specific gear to use them. Support evolves from trait choices, utility skills and group composition. So if you want to play a “support” role, you already can do that. The only thing that is usually excluded is traditional healing.
In fact, the demonised zerker-meta aka root of all evil (intentional exageration) includes quite a lot support, shared among all party members, unfortunatly quite a lot of people refuse to accept it and rather beat the dead “omg all they do is stack and press 1” horse.

Even though there’s still a lot room for optimization regarding combat and rewards, I don’t see much sense in OPs suggestion.

Healing Power work perfectly. It’s not the fastest way, but the easiest.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yxE5ED2wPo

They are only 3, one of them is a healing guardian and they are still able to do fractal in a decent time. The run was just easier with an cleric guardian.

Thanks for sharing this, now I don’t have to go search for it

Just some thoughts.
Since there’s already a ton of (good) builds posted with some very detailed “how to play” informations, I somehow get the feeling it’s not the class itself that’s causing trouble to the OP, it’s more his general playstyle paired with the ultra-squishyness of the elementalist.
So I’d like to give you just some general advice about gw2 combat.

Things you should do:
- always keep an eye on your opponent; is he doing something irregular, like glowing or screaming? this usually tells you a big hit is incoming = have your dodge ready
- in addition: use your defensive abilities wisely. well timed blinds, blocks, etc. can mitigate a ton of damage
- keep moving. don’t just stand there, move your feet! ranged foe? strafe to avoid some arrows. meele foe? kite him around, you want as much of his swings to happen when you’re just out of his range
- dodge a lot, but only when needed; random dodges usually are bad and just leave you out of endurance when you need it

Things you shouldn’t do:
- facetank. GW2 combat just isn’t designed for standing still and getting beaten.
- giving up. everything is just a matter of practicing

Good luck!

Oh well, overread the part with the hammer guard, my bad.
There are reasons why I dislike Communal Defender and suggest to drop it:
you have to block first to give block to your party. Now let’s check your blocks- you got:
- mace 3
- focus 5
- Retreat
- F3
- “SY!” and
- Valorous Defense
If you position yourself correct so mace 3 covers your allies, that’s already 3 party wide blocks and 50% of your equipped blocks. So for these, Communal Defender is just overkill. In addition, ComDef’s aegis only lasts for a rather short time, so chances it will just run out without doing anything are pretty high.
So all in all it’s 6 trait points spent for a pretty low impact on your and your team’s performance – imho totally not worth it. And since you titled “I like to support, but also damage.” I showed you away to do both while not running the meta train. Take it or leave it
Anyway, if you already play in a regular party and not pugging via lfg and you are already two guards in the party, I just don’t see any reason for more than one “full support”. There was this topic in the dungeon/fotm subforum a while ago, where someone presented their way of doing high level fotm’s, using 1 full support guard while the rest goes full dps, well knowing that it will slow down the run, while making it quite a piece of cake. here are the videos. You might wanna give that a shot.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Oh wow, I just saw those prices for the ascended recipes… LOL Never going to happen. That is absurd. I really like the build, mitigation, damage and healing with more of everything than my knights setup has (except toughness) a good compromise for how I like to play, but for that money, I’ll never make the armor and you cannot get ascended trinkets yet, I think.

I played with the setup a bit, adding in zerk gear instead of zealot, losing 700 odd healing power and gaining 38% crit dmg, more blinds, changing some traits around etc. Still looking pretty nice to me. Zerk Communal Defender

No offense, but imo that build is quite bad. Given your parameters and presuming you know what is considered meta and for what reasons, I would adjust your build and go with sth. like this: Link
What you lose: Valor Trait line, including Communal Defender, Empowering Might.
What you gain:
- spamability of VoJ = more blinds = more damage mitigation = more support.
- Increased symbol duration = more damage, opportunity to change GS for Hammer if you need some protection ( = more support)
- 5 points in Virtues = omnomnomwtfbbq support when using consecrations (swap in whatever fits the situation), cond remove/stability on F2/F3 (whichever fits the situation), more personal dps
Personaly I would also change your healing skill, Healing Breeze never felt really usefull to me. Hard to aim, especially if your teammates actually move (what they should do anyway) and your stuck on it for 2 1/4 seconds.

obal.3218:

Night or slaying + force is the best where applicable for guard. The only weapon that Night or slaying + X where strength could beat force is scepter. For day you would run force + x. For gs, staff, mace (assuming not hitting crit cap) it would be accuracy since these are bursty weapons that have breaks between bursts where you attack slow and don’t get stacks quick enough. For sword, hammer, and scepter strength would be better than accuracy since they constantly hit fast enough to keep the stacks up. If you don’t need might since your group caps on it then frality if you hitting the crit chance cap with 1h weapons.

If you put points into virtues then you should have 2 or 5. Having 4 means you put points to something else that will do less dps. You should have 3-5 boons while in a group and the multiplier affects all your damage so it’s worth it.

Hey obal,
sorry for my late reply, rl got me quite busy lately. Nevertheless I’d like to thank you again for your input! Though I admit I had doubts about that 5th point in Virtues being superior to a 3rd point in Zeal, you were absolutly correct about it. I did some testing at those golems in the mists and the damage raise was noticeable (didn’t make it very scientific, but the average dps gain was about 5-12,5%, depending on the number of boons on me).
So kudos to you, good sir!

Gaile Gray.6029:

I have to say, that is really impressive armor outfit. And thanks for posting the variations how different weapons look with it — nice to see!

Fixed it for you

Tbh, I don’t know if I should be happy or sad.
Happy, because since this is just another “makes you look just like anyone else” outfit which makes it 100% undesirable for me to buy it, or sad, because it’s not an armor set which would probably be great to mix’n match :/

You can join the same guild, no problems. They all changed it with the big patch last september.
The only thing that will not work is doing WvWvW together, since everyone has to fight for his homeworld (= server).
Anything else like guild missions, guild chests, etc. will be shared across all worlds.
For example: my homeworld is an EU-World (Far Shiverpeaks), while my guild was founded on a german world (Drakkar Lake).

Thanks for your response obal, really appreciate it!

What I posted is just my “core” build, when I’m doing fractals/dungeons I’m constantly swaping traits, weapons and utilities to keep my party going.

But may I ask you two more questions, just for clarification:
- you really think in a scenario where there’s no reliable might-source, Sup Sigil of Force is better than Sup Sigil of Strength? Strenght should give me a constant 3-4 Might stacks = 90-120 Power, +5% flat from force still wins?
- putting 5 into Virtues (besides the benefit of faster virtue recharge and +5% boon duration) is really a dps increase when lowering Zeal to 2, losing 50 Power and some buring uptime (though the latter is prbly too low to notice)? I mean, it’s just 1% per boon?

Can someone describe what can be seen in the video? Unfortunatly it’s blocked here in germany due to some stupid music copyright issues -.-

Just stick to this steps:
1. get into the game
2. select your female norn guardian
3. move to your bank
4. select the wardrobe tab
5. grab a drink (coffee, tea, beer, coke, what ever suits you)
6. check out the tons of armorstyles, mix and match, until you find something that pleases your eyes
7. profit

I just wanted to leave a short but honest “Thank you!”.
This guide gave me plenty of insight and inspiration while juggling with traits and equipment over the past months and I think I finally found a build for myself that does ok’ish dps while maintaining the support abilities I like having and that helps my team to stay alive (background: I’m almost always running with my guildmates, which are a bunch of great people but mostly playing pretty casual/rp’ish, so there’s usually no such things as pre-fight mightstacking etc.).
I started with 0-5-1-6-2, using mostly zerker gear and runes of the traveler (mainly for the boon duration after I had to drop my 2-2-2 combo due to the rune change back then, but I soon fell in love with the movespeed bonus).
Lately I changed my build and adjusted my equipment and now I’m running with this core build:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fVMQNAR89ksAtUI8DRR8Ql5Y8i2+BtQdBAWPBA-TRDBABsfQAq4CAolSiKV95MlgYpEDgHAQWKDMTpQK6GKa/BdUDIgjAQAAEAl4En4EnYTciTciTcijBIP-e
Took me a few hours to get used to it (especially using Shelter instead of SoR as my heal took some time), but after running some fotm and arah lately I’m quite happy about it. Adjustments can be made with little effort (e.g. lowering virtues in favor of zeal or honor, depending on the encounter and used weapons) and my dps increased significantly.
I know it’s not exactly “meta” nor “optimal”, but it works pretty well even under sub-optimal conditions

So again- thank you, Obal!

Haven’t been there lately, but I’m not really surprised about the win rates going down.
For example: I did a ton of breaches and vinewraths in the past and know the encounters pretty well. But as with everything that you do over and over again, SW somewhen stopped being fun. Unfortunatly, my wife was one of those unlucky people not being showered with chestboxes from vinewrath, so we went there over and over again. Until she got the magic drop a few days ago. And guess what? We never set foot in SW ever again. Reasons are simple- unless you’re still trying to finish your Luminiscent Collections, there’s nothing really to do there. Chest farming? Plz spare me, it’s as dull as champ trains, I really disgust that “playstyle”. Doing the events? Dull aswell. Defend the fort, collect rubble, escort supplies. Rinse and repeat. Yawn. And not even rewarding as soon as you don’t need bandit crests anymore (got all lumi parts and all minis, hate chest farming = no need for crests). An in addition you’re doing the work for the chest farm blobb most of the time. No ty.
Oh, and in addition I got really really sick of seeing sands and wastes, nothing but sands and wastes as far as the eye can see all the time.
Asuming that up to now most players that were interested in the collections are done and many feel like me and my wife, I’m not surprised at all about the events failing, since I expect less and less sw “veterans” being there.

tl;dr: I guess most ppl that know what and how to do it have finished everything in sw they wanted and are pretty much fed up with the map = higher rate of breach/vr fails

Just tried to check the exact specs of that Laptop. Found the ones of the HP Pavilion m6-1050sg with a AMD A10-4600M cpu.
Besides the overall not so great hardware this cpu ist just slow. Coupled with GW2 being a cpu-intense game that on top lacks a lot of optimization I’m not surprised that you have fps-issues even on low settings.
If you own the m6-1030sw – just what kokiman said.
Concerning fps problems vs. lags- just what Tribio said.

If you need to play on a laptop (I do that myself though I’m well aware a Desktop PC would be better; but life sometimes just doesn’t allow one to have it all ), I strongly suggest you to go get somekind of machine that was built for gaming. Multimedia notebooks usually don’t do the gaming job all too well.

Thaddeus.4891:

Stealth isn’t really a argument in PvE. The only and single argument D/D vs P/P is the dps difference. Lets compare the meta D/D to this P/P build in a dungeon group :
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fZAQRAqa4Yl0MpwpdPxxJ0PNxLhs9oKb8c8ZNnEA-ThRBABXt/o8DP9D5dCAA4BAQp6PmpEUUARE-e

Ok so we are taking into consideration both warrior banner, perma fury, 25 stack of might and 25 stack of vulnerability. We are taking into consideration these damage modifiers as they were constant. Sigil of Force, Sigil of Night, Scholar, Slaying Potion, Pistol Mastery, First Strike, Executionner, Flanking Strikes and Combined Training. I think I was generous and I estimated that in a 30sec fight you can do 9 Unload and 15 auto-attack. At max each unload will make 22k dmg and each auto-attack with make 3.3k dmg. That give us 7.6k dps of direct dmg over a 30sec period. Add to that the bleed from the auto-attack which is 15 times x 210dmg over the 30sec figth for an additional 105 dps. Grand total of 7.7k dps compare to 11-12k dps of a D/D in the same situation. Now that’s a rough estimate, for better numbers we would have to make a rotation test on golem to make sure how much of each attack we can put into a 30sec fight. But it give you an idea of how much P/P dps is lacking compare to D/D.

Thanks for breaking down the numbers.
So I think this topic boils down to:
- if you play in a (at least semi-) organized party, where ppl care about might-stacking, boon-sharing, trying to do stuff fast, then you really shouldn’t play P/P
- if you play in an uncoordinated party (pug, friends or guild, doesnt really matter), where pretty much everyone is PHIW (some range, some melee, some play offensive, some rather defensive, time til finish doesn’t matter too much) going P/P is absolutly ok since your dps won’t be lower than the other ones

amirite?

So… we had a patch yesterday, but not a single word in the patch notes about coat boxes finally being available at the vendor…
Someone already checked in game wether they just forgot about it in the notes or did they really not include it?

Btw.- since my last post we did another 5 succesfull vinewraths… ofc still no 3rd box for my wife… I really start getting sick of all that sand… kitten…

creepmatic.9435:

A fragment of a forum post on guildwars2guru.com. The bold text is the dev’s response to a poster.
——————————————————————————————————————-

Martin Kerstein

ArenaNet

ArenaNet

Posted 28 January 2011 – 06:30 PM

Dastion said:

That sounds a very hypocritical statement. Being a good tank is not about sitting there getting beat on, especially not in a game with the ability to dodge attacks. Tanking in any MMO always has been about battlefield awareness (you need to pay attention and know if something peels off after a squishy) and control (you need to control the mobs to protect your allies).

Nothing hypocritical there – the keyword in my statement is “traditional”. I played most MMOs on the market, and I did my fair share of tanking as well. In almost all of them, you control aggro via taunt skills (in the form of direct taunts, aggro inducing AoEs etc.) to make mobs aggro on you. You might call this battlefield awareness, and I agree that it is a form of it. But it all boils down to the tank keeping aggro and being pounded upon by mobs in the end.

And if you try that with the guardian, you will eat dirt a lot.

I hope that clarifies my statement.
——————————————————————————————————————-

Here is the hole post about what was the expectations about Guardian and Warrior before the game was released and what the dev response was.

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/11088-guardian-tank-or-warrior-tank/page__st__210

This. Is. Gold. 100%. Thanks for sharing!

I’m pretty sure they asked about “Stability” and not “Retaliation”. In this boss fight it’s a common tactic to stack at a wall, avoiding the laser daze by using party-wide stability and bursting down the golems. As guardian, you should use “Stand your ground!” and “Hallowed ground” for that, having traited “Master of consecrations” for the latter and reduced shout duration for the first (if needed).
No idea wether they messed up the boons names or you missunderstood

I’m surprised no one already came up with… anyway:
I can haz your stuff?

€: darn, just realized hildegain.2106 was faster than me! kitten you!

crossing fingers Plz let it be Axe or Warhorn and all that bow speculations be just that- speculations

katsubo.9875:

Why would someone use this garbage skill in the first place? :p

Serious or trolling? :o

Heh, funny, I’m not the only one pondering about such stuff

Since the shout gives swiftness besides our beloved aegis, I would simply suggest “Charge!” (or may be “Charrge”, for charr guards ).

Olvendred.3027:

Dawdler.8521:

Tactics, tactics and more tactics… yet it all comes down to another thing instead – the amount of people that come.

Actually, it doesn’t come down to that at all. Large groups will wipe if they don’t know what they’re doing, while small groups can be very fast and effective.

100% this.
My best and most enjoyable breach boss fightes were those where I had just a couple of other players besides me. ~5ppl exactly knowing what they are doing is so much superior to a 20-30 ppl zerg mindlessly spamming 1 of which 90% are dead after 1 minute.

My only wish for the new legendaries is, that they don’t look like oversized/exagerated shiny beacons or like some stuff stolen from a 70’s rollerblade disco. Already got plenty of those, now off to some good looking, theme fitting legendaries plz?

RNG is RNG… and this is just another perfect example why this “concept” is so terribly bad, at least as far as it concerns accountbound stuff.
By now I’m having 5 or 6 coat boxes while my wife is still missing one more box… I so wish I could give her one of mine but noooo, acc bound…
It’s like the Dev’s yelling at me: “How dare you not follow RNGesus but wanting to act for charity’s sake! Kitten you!”

And even greater- on a vinewrath run this weekend we both got one of those disconnects, which are so kittening common lately, while fighting the 2nd boss on top lane (yeah, mid failed… again).
Since we were in party with a third guildmember we were automatically thrown back into the same map and started running back to our lane from Hidden Depths WP, getting credit for the champ kill on the run (hope some ppl that prefer to keep lying dead on the ground read that…).
Bottom lane then finished off the 3rd boss and tadaaaa- no tadaaaa. Neither of us was able to loot the big chest, it wasn’t even shown (besides the minimap icon).
Well played A.Net, well played. As if it wasn’t kittening hard for some ppl to get those coatboxes already…
(and yes, I submited a bug report right away but I guess telling it to a wall would have had the same effect…)

I don’t know, but in my experience FotM is still the place with the highest chance for getting good pugs, at least at level 20+ .
Sure, if you go for min-max-super-speed-record-times, you might feel lost, but if all you want is a smooth run within a reasonable time, I’d say 9 out of 10 runs go just fine.
Example: yesterday there was “do one level of fractals” and “finish a fractal 21-30” on the daily. So my wife and I decided to give fractals a shot. Opened 21, searched swamp (well, got swamp right away so I hadn’t to search at all ), set up lfg, sth. like “fotm 21, relaxed after work run, plz have enough ar and know what you’re doing; swamp rdy”.
Filled within seconds and even though I played the first time with an adjusted guardian build I’m not yet 100% used to and we didn’t get the shortest levels at all (swamp followed by uncategorized followed by cliffside, luckily molten boss level in the end) it was done within 45 mins.

I admitt, the 1 out of 10 runs not going so well can be anoying (thinking about that fotm 49 lately at the fire shaman… duh…) but hey- it’s a game after all and live goes on

Sw chests still are rng, you might get your shards there quickly, but not necessarily.
If you like some diversity you might consider doing some fractals every now and then, since they net you up to 9.600 karma/run (presuming personal reward lvl 50 and runngin difficulty lvl 40; karma banners ’n stuff not yet included) which in return can be spend for shards @ balthazar temple (pretty sure you knew the later ).

I feel you, OP.
Though I’m usually all but not favored by RNGesus, Coat boxes seem to be my thing. Besides the one guarenteed box for the first Vinewrath victory I did 6 additional Vinewrath kills- and scored 4 more boxes. My wife however, who fought besides me every time got- 0. If only I could donate her the two I don’t need…. (on the other hand she got the fractal sword skin lately, the only reason I still do FotM, but well….)

So there’s really no point in tweaking droprates as long as the distribution remains 100% rng. A.Net simply has to understand that pure RNG is not the way to go, especially when it’s about non-tradeable items.

First of all: this topic might be better off in the guardian sub-forum, may be a mod will move it.

Anyway, about your topic.
I play a guardian as my 2nd “main” and it’s the class i usually bring to dungeons/fractals (up to lvl 50). I always carry a hammer with me, but I don’t use it very often (I’m talking about PvE exclusively, I don’t use my guard for PvP/WvW).

I don’t think you’re doing anything “wrong”, you just run into the common hammer guardian issues and they might be more anoying to you than for your friends. But the “good” news is- you might be on the majority’s side with this.

The big issue with guardian hammer in PvE is, that most things offered are simply not needed there. Let’s break it down:
- AA-Chain: pretty slow, places a light-combofield; gives (if traited correctly) perma protection
- Skill 2: blast finisher / gap closer (nothing wrong with that, but in coordinated partys usually not needed)
- Skill 3: a little cc, nothing really needed in general
- Skill 4: a guardians way trying to be a bearbow (j/k, but unless you really need to remove a stack of defiance it’s pretty pointless due to its long wind-up time)
- Skill 5: duh… another light field and some cc

The thing is- the few usefull things hammer offers are rarely worth taking it and rather for niche uses. Let’s break it down:
- open world PvE: all you need is mobility and dps. GS outshines Hammer
- dungeons/fractals: you mostly need dps and some specific support (like blinds and pulls for trash so your party can AoE them down). Again, GS outshines Hammer.

So what’s left for the hammer are some thougher boss fights in dungeons and mainly high level fractals where the hammer can actually be usefull for the perma protection.

Don’t get me wrong- you can do everything with your hammer, but usually it won’t be as effective as other weapons. And thanks to that ultra slow AA-Chain it will always feel a bit dull (at least that’s the case for me). But speaking for myself- I started with a hammer guard and now I use it ~10% of the time.

Indeed, 400 gems is just kittening hilarious, that’s half an extra Char-Slot.
The price should be decreased to max. 100 gems per slot.
Though I’d rather have the price doubled or tripled and in return having the upgrade being account wide, that would be real convenient. Those who already spent more than that on extra slots for individual characters could get a refund as it was done before (e.g. commander tags).

So…. if there’s anything left from that LA giveaway…. I can has your stuff?

dulfy.1493:

[…]

• Miniature Ram – 350 gems
• Plush Ram Backpack Set – 300 gems
  […]

o.O shut up and take my money!

Thanks for the replies, question 100% answered

Hey folks,

just a quick question about the grounded achievement (see title). I know you can prevent being electrocuted by using some form of invulnerability skill (mist form, etc.). But I wonder wether it is possible to directly port on the platforms by using skills like Blink or thief shortbow 5?
Anyone already tested it and can confirm wether it works or not?
Thanks in advance!

Fashion Mage.3712:

Nash.2681:

New lazy man’s meta confirmed- 3 shield guards + 2 “whatever is top dps at that moment”.

Three guardians traited for that skill on one team would be a pretty bad idea even with permanent aegis on one point. After all, there’s more than one point/objective in a match. I can see how it might be abusable though, I guess.

Should have mentioned that I’m talking from a PvE only perspective, my bad (gonna edit this in my post).
You’re correct that the impact on sPvP would prbly be lower since splitting up is important there.

Does guardian shield still need some improvements? Definetly.
Should it be like OP suggested?
No. Nonono. Just think about it- a symbol granting a short lasting Aegis every second with an uptime of 5/16 when traited. So regarding PvE group play… take three guards, add just a tiny bit of + boon duration and what you get? Perma Aegis for the entire party + party wide heal.

For all and everybody then can do everything without any effort. Dodging? Pfffff. Having to pay a minimum attention what the enemy does? Nah, why should I anymore? New lazy man’s meta confirmed- 3 shield guards + 2 “whatever is top dps at that moment”.
No thanks. There’s already plenty of input on how to make a guardians shield a solid and viable choice- this aint one of them, sorry.

Pyriel.4370:

[…]
Alesia:

Passive: Being healed grants you 5 seconds of retaliation.

Activated: Convert conditions to boons on hit (20% chance).
[…]

Needs to be changed to
Passive: drains 25% of your maximum endurance per second
Active: Using your healing skill or aplying regenration to allies will instantly kill you

scnr