Guild Wars 2

I don’t know if the orbs is a problem. People giving up is a problem.

People who dont tap when they’re dead generally hurt their team more than they help it. I see no real reason to change.

Ya. I simply can’t tag players on mesmer. I basically have to land the finisher to do tagging damage. And it is different in a group…it’s like the tagging threshold drops by a lot. Playing my ele is compleatly different…it just rains loot.

The badges are only really good for buying siege equipment (1 badge = 1 silver). But I agree that the whole mob and player tagging system is broken for people focusing on support and debuffs.

I dont even think you need stat bonus for ranks. But you do need the ranks. I never played DAoC. Warhammer was I’m sure a poor copy. And the end game was horribly broken. But people logged with a reason to play every day for hours. There was a reason to fight even if you were losing.

You’ll go through several sets of gear a day and your first spec will eventually be 10 in everything. So it really doesn’t matter what you do. Try all the weapons to unlock the skills and get a feel for them.

Your links dont seem to work for me. Maybe try a url shortner?

I’m still trying to feel out a glamour based build for WvW before making the investment in exotics.

I agree that his is a huge problem. I think it’s fun but at some point you lose the achievers that want some kind of progression. I’ve barely touched the sPvP, but it seems like there are ranks, titles, gear unlocks of some sort…all of this is desperately needed as well as some kind of player/guild ranking.

Being downed isn’t fun. Spiking someone is. That’s the point. Downed really is just like a timer where you can be combat rez’d with some added twist.

I dont mind seeing guild names and not player names. But you need to have some kind of guild / player rankings somewhere. If I can look on the rankings and see that guild x on server y had an ele who owns everyone, I’m going to start looking out for the person in WvW.

I came to guild wars with a 100+ person guild. People played, though the various betas, tried everything, leveled like mad, theory crafted. We came looking for WvW. 80% of the people have left. A couple of these may be a little annoying, but these are not the problems.

The problem is there’s no end game. There’s no WvW progression. There’s no titles or ranking for contributing (think vanilla WoW, warhammer, Aion). There’s no better or even different looking gear. You get better gear by farming, distinctive gear by running dungeons, you become a commander by shelling our gold and get a pretty star by doing every jumping puzzle in the game (or whatever).

Having no inherent reason to WvW means people will either tire of the game (because PvP is the only source of user generated content) or just farm PvE all day when it doesn’t look like they can win.

If I’m going to PvE farm all day, I want to use a build / weapon set that works well stacking magic find. I leveled up other classes (guardian, ele, ranger) so that I could use whatever class was most efficient at farming DE (or dungeons, or solo / gathering, or even WvW if it were particularly monotonous).

It is unlikely that the staff will provide more dps, as it provides a whole lot more utility. Some builds can use a staff and do a lot of damage.

All stats are good for all classes. If you plan on doing a lot of conditions, then +condition is better than power and crit damage.

All classes have a sticky build thread. You should start there.

I did armor and weapons on my guardian. My goal was to cover all of the professions among my 5 character slots and to pair the most obvious choices with the character.

I’d say if costs less than 10 gold to level 1-400 if you buy every single mat at market and more likely less than half that. No matter how you craft, you will get 10 levels doing it. There are guids and boosts that will be more efficient with the mats you use.

Because half the people use see wearing heavy armor and swinging great swords are secretly warriors.

If you see a lot of mesmers in a group, those actually are a clone army.

I dont know whether the statistics are by characters created or hours played. (And even then, I wouldn’t could time in the mist because that’s almost like a different character). Guardians (and rangers) are pretty forgiving for PvE leveling and I’d suspect you’d see more of those classes actually wandering around playing.

Roll a warrior, take some damage, hit your heal skill. Note that it barely changes your HP. If I’m dying as a guardian, it’s because I’m making the choice to run in and smash stuff with a GS instead of using range / a shield.

The sword is just two good to pass up. At some point I may be all in with condition damage but until that time, I’ll use the sword for PvE.

I wouldn’t recommend the scepter as a low level PvE weapon. It’s good when you’re stacking a lot of condition damage and confusion but I think for you it’s just providing low dps.

The sword is really strong for PvE. Mostly around the #2 skill but it’s all good.

With any class, your goal is to kite a group of mobs into a clump and then AoE that clump. Staff or GS skills will bounce well in that clump, shatter damage will hit all the targets, and the sword skills will hit all the targets. With a mesmer, I aim to take all targets down at once.

I can’t relate mesmer to engineer because that’s really the class I’ve played the least. But you absolutely will be using all your skills off both your swaps, and your slot skills, and at least F1 and F2 every fight.

The 2 handers are our best weapons. You only swap to a one hander because you can’t live without the run speed buff. Having an off hand without runspeed is pointless.

I like the idea of the torch. The gun looks really strong. But they’d have to be simply AMAZING to give up run speed. And I just dont see that ever being that case. The focus boosts your run speed (and your allies) while crippling your opponent and providing a pull. The torch has good misdirection but I’d need either swiftness, a passive speed boost, or a blink to make it viable.

Thanks for this. This is how I think of the world but generally need to sort though thousands of forum posts to reverse engineer builds to this level of abstraction.

The videos are excellent. I normally avoid videos because I assume they only show 1%ers beating up on everyone else. This doesn’t help me because somehow I wont have the skills / gear / ping or whatever to pull off what they’re doing. (And if I did, it would get considered an exploit and nerfed in the next patch.)

Ya glitched over the door to trigger quest.
Boss was challenging on guardian since I dont really have any range.

I’m pretty sure there’s a mercy rule that comes into play after dying hundreds of times on a story quest. I really never figured out what triggered the endings many times on mesmer…there seems to be infinite respawn with nothing dying. I’ve restarted a few times when too many key NPCs die, but generally just keep tapping and coming back.

Running through those quests now on guardian…it’s just pull everything and AoE it. Totally different experience. Killing the dragon was actually harder as a melee. Story quests are hard on ele as well, you just have to put out a lot more damage when an NPC is doing some tanking because your survivability is worse. Everything is easy on ranger.

I dont see the point of Moa. As a mesmer, I do all my damage when you spam your skills.
Maybe if it were AoE.

I really like guardian under water. I figure water is difficult of everyone so the encounters are tuned for it. Just keep hitting spear #2.

Honestly I leveled 10/10/10/10/10 and used whatever gear dropped. If you’re many levels behind on gear you will feel it, but it almost doesn’t matter what the stats are.

As your second character, it should be easy to afford a few silver got greens every few levels.

I run around in explorer gear but I suspect I’ll use knights when i do craft gold.

I have both at 80. The mesmer is certainly better for messing with people after you’ve already lost. If you live long enough to use ele 3, you might actually make it into a keep and rally.

In general, I’ll rally a ton more on ele vs any other class from all the aoe burning. You can easily die and rally 5+ times in a row.

It’s probably easiest to level with sword / GS. With mirror images, you can pretty much start a fight with 3 clones, blow them us, and then summon phantasms as an extra damage source.

GS pairs well with sword for a direct damage / crit build.
Staff pairs well with scepter for a confusion / condition build.

Leveling up with random gear and traits, use what you like. But once you start optimizing gear and traits, one choice will pull ahead.

Skills and weapons got through buff and nerf cycles so I don’t pay too much attention to what’s top DPS today. What really matters is generally looking for a style and synergy that works for you.

I generally use staff.

Air is great for running. I’ll usually run in, static field, and then switch to fire for damage. The air auto-attack seems pretty strong if you can continuously hit 3 targets with it, but otherwise I like fire. Sometimes I rotate through everything just to get a bunch of combo fields cooldowns for everyone else.

I agree. You can WvW as a noob ele but I wouldn’t try to play a glass canon type class for sPvP until you really understand it. Play something forgiving – like a ranger.

Ele have plenty of power. The just can’t stand and tank mobs.

Guardian and Ranger spoil people for all other classes. Look at things like Ele (or mesmer) when you’re ready for a challenge.

I’m an altaholic. I have and ele, guardian, mesmer, and ranger as fresh 80s.

1) Ele is a mob (or player) tagging machine. Seriously, if you get someone else taking a hit or two and can just sit back and blast, you’ll spend as much time chasing loot bags as anything else.

2) Ele is really fast. You can run circles around players and mobs all day. Maybe this isn’t as big a deal for PvE but you’re feel really, really slow on most other classes (mesmer being just awful).

I’ve gotten to 80 running 10/10/10/10/10 plus whatever gear dropped. But it seems like:

1) You’re either a condition build or you’re not. Condition uses staff/scepter, damages with confusion and bleeds, uses + condition damage and defensive gear. Otherwise you’re using GS/Sword and running berserker gear.

2) You’re either generating and shattering many clones or keeping phantasms for dps.

3) You’re either focus firing or you’re trying for large scale disruptions (glamours).

I’m still figuring things out, but to me, the glamours are what makes the class unique so I’m trying to build around glamour / confusion.

Many items in the game are not soulbound or are bind on account. Don’t farm those items on your mesmer. It is really not hard to get a ranger/guardian/ele to 80. Use those classes for farming. I use my mesmer in a glamour / confusion build for WvW with friends. Not for PvE farming.