Guild Wars 2

I’m curious as to if the additional tracking of the buff and related stomps for points is going to add additional server strain because right now in large T1 fights the server runs out of resources causing skill lag upwards of 20seconds+ now the servers have this new data to chew on too.

I definitely foresee massive battles at these points and wonder if anything has been done on the back-end / server side to help distribute tracking of this along with skills to lessen the skill lag that is ever so common in T1 maps.

Worst case scenario T1 skill lag could end up even worse.

I tried asking this during the live stream but it was never addressed

Zelyhn.8069:

Again, do we have any data on what has been changed, if a change there was at all?

There are no specifics on the exact nature of the change and what was supposively causing the inflated damage. However, pulling out a conjure and testing it in real world situations it is doing significantly less damage.

While this truly may have been a fix it has placed damage of conjured weapons to the “almost pointless” category you’re going to end up with better sustained auto attacking unless you’re running the gimmick build and even then it’s going to be marginal. So perhaps they need to revisit conjured weapons in their current state and reevaluate the base damage vs. what’s capable with all our weapon combos so there is a reason to use them.

zitounae.4803:

Now waiting for a nerf on the “uber op staff” in wvw… and anet shall be finally done with ele. At least i hope so.

This has actually all ready happened more than once. It really doesn’t need another pass.

FrownyClown.8402:

Yeah I got 5k bursted by a kit earlier

You realize some people auto attack for more than that right?

Just another confirmation on it working on the developer preview of Maverick.

In regards to Transgaming updating cider(wine) to take advantage of the new stuff under the hood I find it unlikely to happen any time soon they’re notoriously slow on updates even to their paying customers paying crazy support contract fees

As the topic states has anyone tested any builds to acheiving max condition dmg potential in a pve environment? I enjoy the associated play style but the limited dmg in dungeons a lot of the time seems like it may be disappointing aside from on bosses. Perhaps there is viable hybrids?

Haven’t played really since May not sure which of my chars I’ll be picking up but was curious what roaming builds were still viable for mesmers if any?

Overall ANet seems to care less and less about communicating or listening to it’s users which is always a bad/foreboding sign in MMOs of any kind.

As the topic states I haven’t really actively played since May. I’m curious what the current state of the elementalist is. I typically spend most of my time in WvW however I enjoy general pve dungeon grinding and sPvP on occasion too.

I was considering picking up the Ele again to main for now depending on it’s current state but I also have 80 engineer/necro/ranger/mesmer.

I know most classes in recent patches saw some fairly massive changes so not to sure how things are looking currently.

Kravick.4906:

That being said, if there is only one target, as with 90% of the boss encounters in the game, our bleed stacking is terrible. Also what you said. Since bleed is our primary source of damage, it all gets wiped clean by a single condition clear.

Sorry I completely missed you stated that. While some classes can acheive 25 bleeds easily most of the time it will involve abilities with long cooldowns and they can’t maintain it. Their fillers are not that great typically so in the long run it balances out a little comparatively especially when you factor in the poison uptime.

Bleed is your primary source of damage only if you go full rabid for max condition damage and realistically you’re actually gimping yourself doing that with the current mechanics/balance in the game as a necro. Which is quite the problem imho.

Lolicia.6502:

How are we terrible at stacking bleeds? Staff 2 + mark of evasion + weakening shroud + geomancy is a quick 10 aoe stacks that can turn into 20 stacks on surrounding targets after epidemic. Add in scepter 2/dagger 5 and you can get even more.

We’re not terrible at stacking bleeds I don’t think any one said that. The point is that has little to do with true attrition based combat which involves outlasting your opponent and ANet claims we’re “defined/designed” around that kind of attrition they’ve stated it directly on more than one ocassion.

Oh and your 20+ stacks get instantly removed with one skill and then you get lolburst into oblivion while most of your goodies are on cooldown.. in PvE its not an issue aside from the stacking caps.

A good way to look at it is going carrion you have more flexibility vs. targets with easy access to condition removal. You are not putting all your eggs in one basket so to speak you can still do some decent pewpew while you get them back up on your target.

In WvW for example people running lemongrass+melandru runes for a -65% condition duration along with removal before traits(for further reduction or instant removals) even come into play fighting against them relying “ONLY” on conditions w/rabid armor you’re really pigeonholing yourself into a bad situation.

Carrion gives you the best of both worlds decent damage sustained and direct without being to squishy thanks to the vitality. With that said there is no Carrion stat ascended trinkets which is quite annoying so you could go for the divinity style all-stat ascended items, rampagers for a little precision(pow/pre/con) or directly go for extra power or condition damage depending on your personal preference/playstyle.

In PvE Carrion will win on general dmg vs. rabid as most targets won’t live that long or have mechanics that cause you to do things that may make it hard to keep the conditions rolling nonstop. If you want hybrid damage in pve rampagers is the better route to go you can still survive np being evasive and using DS.

Hopefully it’ll sneak into the 11th Dragon Bash patch. I know the big patch is coming at the end of the month but as one mentioned all ready in WvW this f`n sucks.

OT: I wonder how far out the condition system changes talked about some months ago are. I love my power builds but I’d like to try some condi builds in pve without feeling useless and ashamed. Has anyone heard anything else?

Wiz.1543:

Disastro.4086:

It’s still nice for hits vs a zerg in WvW too also if you activate Glyph of Elemental Power in water attunement switch to fire then meteor shower it’ll proc chilled effect over a nice area along with your other available aoes over the 30s duration too very handy tool for control plus the -66% recharge rate for some quality trololol

How does that work? Chill over a large area with glyph of elemental power and meteor shower. I tried it on some bots in pvp but I can’t seem to pull it off.

This works for any aoe not just meteor shower. The proc percent is 25% per hit. So there is a chance the proc won’t happen. I just tested it against all attunements and the glyph in the spvp area with the cluster of golems and managed to get it to work across the board just remember to activate the glyph, press it the effect is not passive in the attunement effect you want first i.e. water or earth for control the chill duration is short (2s) if you have no condition duration so by the time to click something to check you may not see it. The cripple(earth) last 5 seconds if you’re only wanting to limit movement. Combined with glyph of storms to it’s pretty freakin awesome to proc cripples along with chills (ice) or just mass burning at the same time. A lot of people overlook the ability in WvW.

Loxsus.3841:

Hows your support/healing side? My wife has been thinking about going more support with a staff elementalist and get out of her set of almost all berserker and go into something more sturdy as she has issues with dying in our fractals and stuff. This looks like a promising setup (though we might go 10 air for either 20% signet reduction or 20% more damage on below 33% health.)

Healing even in zerker gear support staff works fine with 0/10/0/30/30 very survivable even in 36+ fractals just need to be careful with the dodges/evasives. Attuning to water = aoe heal+condition removal around 1600(trait) dodge in water = aoe heal+condition removal 1600 again(evasive arcana) geyser ground targeted heal is about 2500-ish heal with no +healing then you can combine that(or healing rain) with a blast finisher (arcane wave utility if you need to stay in water) for another heal around 1500 you can also have your group members also use blasts when you drop it and your entire group is back to full health from being nearly dead. All that aoe healing you can trigger back-to-back before you even need to use your self heal while healing everyone around you it’s pretty effective.

All that done while in berserker gear and still doing good damage. If you still have some issues surviving you could go PVT armor w/ruby orbs + zerker trinkets/jewelry and sigil of perception(help with crit chance) will give you a few more seconds to react and still do more than passable damage in most cases. Going “full” heal gear really isn’t recommended at all the only time there is “ever” a place for that is in WvW and even then it’s questionable.

Wiz.1543:

- Meteor shower although the dps is low compared to the rest of the AOE options. Especially compared to the channeling time. I don’t use this skill very often. only if the rest is on cooldown. I hope it will get buffed.

I just thought I’d chime in here. It’s worth taking note that certain mobs and bosses have a huge hit box in those situations using Meteor Shower as a dps tool can actually come in handy when most hits are landing on 1 mob, all be the situation it few and far between.

It’s still nice for hits vs a zerg in WvW too also if you activate Glyph of Elemental Power in water attunement switch to fire then meteor shower it’ll proc chilled effect over a nice area along with your other available aoes over the 30s duration too very handy tool for control plus the -66% recharge rate for some quality trololol

First let me state “Staff is not perfect, it has problems”

So far most people that do terrible with staff seem to:

1. Fail at ground targeting
2. Bad at positioning & anticipation
3. People think they should be able to 1vX in any situation and be a “solo pro”. Staff works best in organized groups and feels like it was designed with that in mind.

Staff still has great access to fields and depending on utilities /traits has enough blast finishers to fire them off well enough providing aoe frost armor, might, area healing.

As mentioned before there is good access to aoe daze/cripple/chill with blasting staff this covers a rather large area(unrelated to stats).

The “typical” support build that I see people with is the 0/10/0/30/30 setup that some d/d builds runs as well. With full zerker or a mix of pvt/zerker it’s damage output is still good attunement dancing dropping aoes and spamming fire #1 or lightning #1. For healing a lot of the abilities don’t scale that great so using only cleric trinkets/jewelry should be enough to assist with healing more without destroying your damage too.

Being able to crowd control decently and a couple water fields at your disposal you’re great support even with no +healing just make sure finishers are getting used.

With all that said.. the numbers still need a lot of tweaking for both +healing power scaling could be better as well as for the base damage. However if you crunch the numbers you’ll see it’s actually rather competitive with other professions and builds it happens to feel a bit clunky a lot of the time though. Staff could use 1 more native blast finisher Earth #2 is kind of slow if you are not using the utilities/traits for other blasts. The cast times on ground targeted aoes really need to be reduced across the board.

It is not any where nearly as bad as some people think you just have to really milk it to do well mixing the single target with the aoes even on “single targets” questionable design imho makes it feel clunky having to ground target aoe on single targets to maximize damage.

All-in-all its a bit of an awkward weapon to use with a higher-than-it-should-be skill cap that is not easily perceived.

On a side note, even full zerker damage builds regardless of weapon sets can still survive well if you manage cantrips/evades well and play in organized groups for both pve and wvw.

p.s. conjured weapons(hammer/fier gs/bow(aoe on objects is superb gates etc..)) can actually help supplement staff well, you do not have to use them for full duration/charges just as needed.

The whole situation is ridiculous. The fact they ask up to submit tickets too is mind blowing the only response they ever give to mac client players is ‘Sorry we’re unable to assist you with the issue’ or ignore the ticket entirely or reply in some manner that requires you not using the mac you play on. /facepalm

Anet has really dropped the ball the fact this issue has been spread in multiple sections across the forums and we’ve had moderator/community response that the issue was forwarded to the powers that be and Anet and STILL have yet to make any statement just goes to show we’re truly being ignored.

Past few patches I’ve seen general performance w/the mac client tank too in some areas which will also probably go eternally unresolved.

I was able to log back in just now. Seems to be working.

I’d be fine if they reduced it to 30s on non-hits really 40s is to extreme.

LordByron.8369:

for dynamic events and Open PvE mesmer is the worst class in the game….

In some very specific cases they are not up to par but they perform amazing if played well. I can solo champions/events all day long on my mesmer with no issues and do it with relative quickness especially if you’re built for melee the sword 1 cleave is rather large and will hit mobs directly behind you too ^_~ . There are no issues tagging mobs some people will say otherwise because they have horrible timing(hate to say it but it’s a L2P scenario) it “does” require more on the fly thinking/timing time than spam classes however to get the same level of mob tagging in some events and that turns people off (i.e. more work for the same reward since some classes can tag everything with 1 button press). Most champions will require some level of kiting regardless of class some can be easily face tanked though by a variety of classes. The trade off with the mesmer requiring more work is insanely powerful utility which truly benefits groups more than a solo player.

With all that said just do to the way some of the class mechanics work with mesmer, ele will probably give people an easier time need to tag a bunch of mobs in an event either via staff(group) with easily accessable aoe you have to press once or run into a mass of mobs and spam Dagger 1 fire/air and tag tons of stuff while running around all be it D/D solo will still require you to weave-in-and-out of mobs for the evades etc.. not necessarily kiting though.

LordByron.8369:

Mesmer lacks reliable ways to deal with multiple opponents at once….

2 Phantasms capable of aoe attack, Sword 1 Cleave, Sword 2 Blurred Frenzy cleave(the sword cleaves(and warden aoe) are easy to achieve if you use Focus 4 pull to stack mobs up) Then you have shatters on top of that which are also aoe. It’s all about positioning and it’s all still reliable. For ranged mobs that refuse to stack w/focus pull you can interrupt/daze them first and they’ll come running into range or you have a variety of reflection options and they’ll just kill themselves withing out needing to come close while you aoe the rest. There is also staff which has a bouncing projectile attack that hits multiple mobs that can be traited for an extra bounce along with staff’s chaos storm. GS Auto attack as of a couple patches ago has the ability to hit multiple targets near it’s beam. Using abilities in tandem is necessary to maximize aoe though. There are some other options but I’ll leave it at that.

Comparatively how is the DPS relative to a bomb or grenadier build?

ColinJohanson.2394:

Just for clarity, this quote isn’t from NCSoft PR, marketing, or ArenaNet.

I’m really glad to hear this directly . It had me very worried a friend’s guild even knee-jerked, him and their 224 members left for neverwinter over it I know it’s not a very large number but none the less the statement was enough to scare people.

However it does seem the place where this originated is in fact contracted with NCSoft .

Spiral Architect.6540:

/popcorn

I agree with the OP, by the way — deceptive marketing hype is… deceptive. I’m just waiting for the usual troupe of GW2 apologists to weigh in here. This thread will be fun while it lasts.

^ So this.

Now if they truly believe they have released more than an expansions worth of content and most of the content post launch seemingly to be “temporary” content its sad. It makes me fear for the future of the game and especially if they ever release an expansion and what it’ll contain in terms of content.

Most rangers poorly manage their pets or simply use the wrong pets for the wrong situation and it has done nothing but compound a problem that is primarily all related to misconceptions about the class and it’s damage.

In a balanced group ranger dps is on par with the best of them provided they are actually geared/built for dps.

It’s a horrible stigma and I really don’t see it getting much better until they do something that would cause actual group demand like making Zephyr a AoE buff or real dps parsing the latter I find unlikely since it’ll expose to many problems for ANet.

Linnes.2678:

“What is boon stealing, Pat?”

You’re right though, by no normal means they have access to it. However they make up for the lowered dodge rate by having a higher base health.

Necros do not boon steal. They can corrupt boons turning them into conditions. They do not receive any boons from the target. The only access they have vigor from is if a friendly player provides the buff.

The higher base health(warriors have same base health) really isn’t compensation the idea behind no vigor for necros is they can use death shroud to mitigate damage from the developers point of view as I believe this was stated before in one of the video interviews on gw2guru but that really is only a viable solution for certain builds with high life force generation it really is a problem for most builds not centered around LF generation. It’s one of those “it works on paper” things.

Sorry for the off-topic stuff.

Linnes.2678:

Every class has access to vigor already, again this is just adding more utility.

Just FYI necros have no access to vigor at all.

Looking to see what kind of pve tanking builds people are using out there here recently.

I’m assuming a GS BM high regen build is still the way to go?

I’ve noticed a bug with the game when playing in windowed mode. If you actually defocus the window clicking outside of it the framerate goes up significantly vs. having the window in focus you see quite a visible drop during this time everything is still being displayed on the screen seems like a rather odd bug.

Is anyone else seeing this? Easiest way to see results eye-identifiable is at the character select screen and watch the back ground elements and account medals animation.

If he isn’t just completely trolling. Some people just suck at fighting against mesmers because they’re slow in the head literally poor reaction times. That does not make the class OP because it shreds bad players so easily. Shatter mesmers for example are very easily countered by people that know what to do. You see a lot in pug tournaments/hotjoins running shatter but the higher up in skill level you go you see less and less of them for a reason.

It is the best noob/idiot killer in the game no doubt though. “ kitten which one is real!” if anyone has trouble discerning which is one is the actual player they should delete the game and play hello kitty or fischer-price online er I mean that not so wow game.

Spirits post patch with full traits do actually offer a lot if you’re ranged during a defense you’re often going to be standing in locations other support classes are not and you quite frankly have the best water field in the game cooperative organized play means the finishers applied to it are going to benefit the groups more than another class laying down that field. A few extra seconds of protection you can provide w/the spirit can go a VERY long way in Zerg vs Zerg in T1 as well especially if the buff up time of the opposing group is lower. The other AoE Fury/Might/Vigor you can potentially offer via pets and runes(altruism) plus +10% raw dmg w/spirit you can provide is just icing on the cake and you can do this all being effective at a further range from the enemy than others can more often than not while still doing damage giving good “back line” support to the squishier people. The spirits will still likely die regardless of the buffs unless you’re extra careful but in T1 WvW a few seconds of that extra oomph applied helps.

Rangers are capable of helping provide higher up times of poisons more consistently than other classes as well due to both pet fields/abilities and traps over an area of effect that -33% heal on poison vs organized zergs (common T1) is a game changer. Buddy up with some epidemic necros to time their epidemics after a full trap/condition barrage on a group is pure win. The time it takes to apply a lot of conditions/bleed stacks on a necro is actually higher in some cases for them than it is on a ranger surprisingly enough.

Secondary effects in WvW are very potent, they are game changers. Do not underestimate them at all.

Also as previously mentioned there is also a lot AoE CC/Movement restraint potential if you choose to focus on that. Muddy terrain lasts 20 seconds and is a major PITA in a choke point.

A big part of peoples perceived problem with rangers is there is that extra micromanagement with the pets, spirit, traps, and positioning depending your build which requires better planning/quick thinking causing a higher player skill ceiling than face rolling classes. If you are not good at the aforementioned things it is going to make things seem a lot worse than they actually are.

With that said a lot of things mentioned are still lacking and could be improved. I’d say in smaller skirmishing groups rangers will generally be the most effective but they bring some good support and damage to the zerg as well.

As far as personal wishes go we’re capable of keeping a decent amount of boons up on ourselves if built for it, adding a passive to a signet or trait that auto-shares our boons over a certain pulse/time frame to nearby people would go a very long way in adding additional group value.

The biggest problem with the new condition just like every other condition in the game is you’ll end up with stacking and/or priority duration issues rendering it useless half the time just like all the rest of the PvE Condition specs.

I know they reference a tracking/server related issues with changing the condition system but other MMOs have solved this by literally adding together multiple dots of the same and combining them into 1 on the mob with the proper duration/dmg after each additional application and just showing what it would tick for you on your end.

It may turn out well in spvp on the other hand where such things are not as much of an issue.

Is there an internal cooldown for the proc rate of the spirit pets? With the health improvement and the increased proc rate that +10% dmg for the group is looking awfully good.

They either completely dropped the ball on this or will state that block was a bad choice of wording and blame it on semantics.

it’s great that it will finally display the loss but as many have stated something stronger needs to be put in place to discourage the behavior some people don’t care about the rating or leader boards at all so they will just continue to do it unless they are penalized in some fashion.

I’ve reported the issue and a easily reproducible and identifiable exploit in bug reporter but the issues even are still there after a very long time.

I’m pretty sure that sPvP/tPvP bugs and exploits are very low on the priority list. 2nd/3rd class citizens around here after PvE/WvW

I just find it odd how the custom maps take priority above all that aside from an attention grab for something that still isn’t ready.

The cool-down is shared with percentage based proc effects for all on-swap sigils.

This is getting buried.

For clarity’s sake this is a Tournament PvP bug the “reward” for winning the match that is received after you’ve exited of 200 rank and glory points is not applied to your PvP Conqueror achievements at all.

Yeah this is absolutely ridiculous. I hope if this is fix they retroactively upgrade everyone based on total amount of matches won.

Ya i’m aware of the update times we waited 3 cycles of the update and it never showed up so its at least working some of the time.

I don’t think it’s functioning as intended we tested it with 2 people and 1 of them never got any losses reflected.

So as the title says people quitting matches constantly as it appears to actually preserve the win/loss ratio if it looks like there is even a chance they’ll lose. Have had a few people quit doing this and we turn around and win anyway lol.

This seriously needs to be fixed or severely penalized via a long lockout.

Yeah also receiving this. Seems like its probably system wide.

I see. Didn’t realize they added solo joins to tpvp given my schedule it’s hard to be on with the people I normally play with. Good to know!

I haven’t been playing much sPvP lately due to slow fixes on some bugs and balance issues. However this past week I’ve been playing a fair amount and noticed that at peak hours there is usually only 10-15 “full” servers. That hardly seems like any kind of real participation between users, not very many people at all in the grand scheme of things has any one else been noticing as of late? I remember when there was so much more activity.

I’m not trying to be gloom and doom or troll here I’m genuinely curious as to what has happened.

I’ve run something similar http://ow.ly/jGdCb either D/D or D/F (keeping regen and vulnerability up helps a lot) along with Staff as alternate weapon for more regen access and getting conditions up on targets for the dmg increase you get with the build.

This is all while wearing berserker gear too works in PvE / WvW well with some trait adjustments here and there. Optionally can take the 5points out of spite into Soul Reaping for faster LF build up. Works decently w/Axe and dancing in and out of DS for dmg when you know you can’t get close.. Can take some good hits from bosses/champs just due to the siphoning. The food life steal buff helps a lot too when needed if you’re in zerker gear, if you’re a mix of knights or cavaliers the food buff isn’t as neeed. Dagger 1 chain can hit hard if conditions are up on the target looking at 1.5k, 1.5k, 3.2k+(6.2k total 1s) or higher depending on if there is Vulnerability(why focus off can be nice) 8k+ total is possible just from auto attack change in that build.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

timidobserver.7925:

Lopez.7369:

Completely neglecting an entire class for this content is inexcusable, regardless of the reason.

I have to agree with this. I’ve finished it once, but I probably won’t ever do it again since there is nothing for me in it.

EDIT: But, I guess it is april fools. So, april fools to all of you engies out there lol.

He just said they were going to release more skins with each world. So you’ll just be giving yourself less time to get them once they are released if you stop now.

The question is when is that going to happen? Days, Weeks, Months?

DeWolfe.2174:

Seriously, is T1 is the only group experiencing severe skill lag? So bad that you are lucky to get only 1 or 2 skills work?

So far it seems those of us in T1 are hurting from this the most because we keep the WvW servers maxed out almost 24/7 across all maps.

Science.6709:

My impression is that our technology isn’t yet able to create an MMO that runs smoothly.

The actual problem behind some of the things going on with skill lag, condition stacking issues, rubber-banding, amongst a large number of other issues have more to do with their poor network architecture and layout, not to mention their DB implementation and it’s network topology as well. The whole reason we have limited condition stacks is to limit the impact on the aforementioned. It may just be a “budget” thing where they simply do not have the money to invest in expanding their infrastructure to handle things properly because aside from that there is no excuse.

Mespilia.2896:

I noticed the “fluttering birds”, not just owls. No d/cs though.

Noticed the same.

I don’t get DCs sometimes i receive network error messages but I don’t think the network error message are directly related to the mac client.

The cider client isn’t completely horrible but it has a number of issues they haven’t bothered to address in cider in 2+yr (same bugs effecting other games with cider) the 2D rendering performance for things like name plates and sprites and if you end up with to any on your screen it tanks. Memory usage is poor and it doesn’t properly address a lot of GPU acceleration

Frame rates even with the “lowest” WvW settings are getting less than half the frame rate I was able to achieve prior to the patch. There seems to be “rubber banding” occurring as well where i’ll run towards an area then warp back to where I was then warp back.