Guild Wars 2

current guardian shield skill is fail by design

No.
You want a block, get a focus. The shield is perfectly fine as is and one of the best tool in TPVP.

If you only compare stats maybe, but if you compare how that guy plays because he’s fancying himself a healer and swapping to staff autoattack midway through fights like alpha the damage is just beyond awful. Then consider the fact that this guy contributes zero vuln stacking etc.

karles.1435:

for stupid things like “staying behind” (i’m an elementalist lol).

And ?

Broadicea.8294:

Anet’s quality control strikes again.

The patch also introduced new party bugs (heavier troubles) for EU players on US serv. Lord, they fix things like the messed up warrior traits only to bring more bad. Can they do a patch that fix stuff without breaking everything?

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

But why this elitist attitude against other classes in general? Are warriors and guardians really the only way you folks want to play?

Well, when all the necro players are staff camping and fear using, it doesn’t really give a good image. Dagger mh with wells necro are okay, they lack cleaving but they can bring decent contributions to a group. But since they almost only exist in the hands of people who already speedrun with other characters and know what they’re doing, again, necro isn’t a desirable pug class to let into your party.

That is one strategy, not THE exact strategy everyone should be doing that encounter.

No, that’s the best strategy for ascalon. It works with other classes, you don’t need a full war/g group for that. Thieves can maintain ton of blinds which are useful for these LoS bursts, lightning hammer ele can spam blind and also have their stunning field which can be a replacement for ring of warding stopping the initial burst from the mobs while the npc aggro etc.
Never tried it but I guess that other classes skills like Muddy Terrain from ranger could also work decently on that one.
You don’t necessarily need the guardian ring/line of warding, this is a general strategy that a lot of group composition can apply decently.

Not LoS-ing at lvl 48 is a kick offense in most groups I’ve been in, including pugs. Most of the better pugs know that you should LoS and if you don’t at this level you’ll get kicked. If you don’t get kicked for not LoS-ing chances are the group that doesn’t know/care will be your “best” (ohoh) 48 ride.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

But does that make the staff a bad weapon? I think it’s excellent. Especially if you are running a Fear build.

Please tell me you’re not using fear on groups of mobs.

Mesmers already have quite low DPS compared to most classes.. full cleric mesmer? might as well 4man it.

Khisanth.2948:

Chryzo.8906:

Hmm ran it like 35 times pre and post patches, not much, still looking for that frigging reciepe running one more tonight, i ll try to get her to bug. I really want that bloodstone fragment receipe

Just for the name? O_o

It’s one of the better dungeon recipe in terms of profit for selling the crafted item on the TP. It’s worth it for someone who runs a lot of arah.

As someone who has never been lucky with recipes (the only dungeon recipe I ever got was alpha conduit.. ugh.) I wouldn’t even think of trying to spam p4 just for that. Chances are even a thousand try wouldn’t be enough to get it with that luck.

I’m sick of being a permanent second class citizen. I don’t want to think about going back to European servers but I might have to if this keeps going on.

BUMP

The bug came back today and it’s just as bad as it was on the day where no one could join any sort of dungeon instance whatsoever. For god’s sake cut on the fluff living story bull and fix this game breaking bug that completely blocks some of us from doing dungeons.

Broadicea.8294:

How is Unscathed Contender+ Fiery Wrath 40% if aegis only gives 20% and wrath 10%? Are you including the Scholar’s buff or something?

Ask yourself why any guardian dps build should have 25 in radiance even when they don’t use sword.

colesy.8490:

It doesn’t matter how good your non-meta class is if you don’t use it properly. Brazil is in that 0.5% of people who doesn’t just shortbow spam like a giant leeching prick.

And I don’t really see the vast majority of players being able to dodge decently with sword. The nastiness behind that weapon autoattack pretty much makes ranger a high skill floor class to play it at the level of an average warrior player.

Mad Rasputin.7809:

People with ALTs have such an elitist attitude. So, if I had 15 ALTs (which some claim to have), I should be able to get 15 level 48 fractal chests a day? Besides, what would keep me from ALT deleting and recycling to get more chests?

The system is set up great now in that it DOES allow you to get multiple level 48 chests, as long as you have progressed your character to that level. This is much more ALT friendly then even the world boss chests.

Account wide personal reward level should come with account wide daily chest reward. And let’s be honest, that is NOT what all of you want.

We can already do that with other dungeons and I don’t really think there’d be a lot of people out there doing multiple 48 a day through an alt rotation the way we do with dungeons like CoE. Even the best case scenario (best team, best roll, best performance) 48 is closer to the 40 min mark and will give you a lot less than 40/45 min of a dungeon like CoE. Bad runs can go for 1h+. That fractal daily chest is barely worth the pain of doing 48 more than once.

Not to mention the cores/lodestones from the actual Maw chest.

If you care about core/lodestones you should absolutely do CoE. There is no comparison. FOTM is the worst loot vs time spent of the game. CoE is a charged core/lode and destroyer piñata.

Wukunlin.8461:

swiftpaw.6397:

Yaki.9563:

Range doing less damage might be a valid argument if, for example, melee died frequently and were forced to use soldier gear while ranged could sport berserker.

Just you wait, someone will try using that as a valid argument.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/warrior/PvE-Rifle-Warrior-Build-Final-Tweaks/first#post1437107

edit: that was 5 months ago btw

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1ibhr6/ranged_warrior_build_or_how_i_learned_to_love_the/

Longbow + Rifle warrior with 0 melee. Some people just want to watch the world burn.

http://www.twitch.tv/aliettefaye/b/376274889

Here’s a group of people who barely knew the classes they played, and banded together with characters exactly at level 35 to do the new AC because of all these threads whining about the new AC. They even did kholer. All characters were exactly level 35.

AC is not a “lvl 80” dungeon. It just requires a lot more kiting and less faceroll melee if you’re all at 35.

I do think path 2 would be really, really harsh on a low level group though. 3 traps charged might not be enough to kill the boss so you might have to charge traps while he’s attacking you midfight.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Project-Mesmer-WvW-build-Reflection-guide/first#post2218121

Someone else tested in the mists and saw no difference with low and high power.

They also had enough burst. They might not have the best might stacking abilities but they have enough burst for that low HP boss so they don’t need sustained damage. I mean, two timewarp, two tome of wrath for 10 more sec of quickness with the two guards.. if you can’t burst this down during the first wave of reflection you’re probably doing something terribly wrong like running gear that is not level appropriate (high lvl char suffer from downscaling, if you’re running anything but exotics your char will have much worse stats than a low lvl in green).

Or maybe they’re all using the wrong weapons. Like mace guardian, hammer warrior or something.

Broadicea.8294:

and we need something better to do with useless skins than Right Click…Destroy.

Noooo ! that’s not a lot, and not worth running fractals for, but you can salvage these useless skins instead of destroying. Don’t waste globs!

You’re not really seeing the whole. Although I prefer running full DPS guard, AH aren’t bad training wheels and it’s one of the very few, actually working tanking builds of the game.
The difference between shout heal and AH? sustain and group support. A 3 shout bar war is only gimping his (and the group by not having a banner) dps while providing miserable support (a couple of 1K heal every 20 and 30 seconds..), guardians shouts actually have a strong supportive use and AH provides a lot of sustain with hammer symbol and empowering might proc. Plus the -33% damage reduction from Protection which is something warriors can’t do either. It’s not an instant burst heal like popping all three shout on a shout heal war but you heal a lot more over time through all the AH proc from shout, from empowering might, from your symbol of protection, from your virtues etc than you’d ever get from shout heal on war. Add reflection, aegis..

Shout heal is universally reviled because it goes against the nature of the warrior class, which really can’t do much outside of damage, damage and damage. So you’re traiting 30 into tactics to get some paltry heals but what else in terms of support are you going to bring? compared to guard this is different as night and day.

I can still see a use for AH in fractals 48 and I don’t really see a shout heal war being able to do this :
http://youtu.be/XzjBxKwXOpo

A lot of plain old facetanking involved in the later part of the video, keeping the ettin focused on the guard while the rest melee from behind.
An attempt from a shout heal war to facetank this would end in faceplanting into the ground.

Cymric.7368:

Humm? I don’t think you have never done this boss using the range method before.

Firstly, standing on a vine and ranging the the boss only work for TA Up path, only for certain class that have 1200 range and ArenaNet had fix it such that the mortars spawn closer now, you can no longer ignore them. Standing on the vine for TA F/U is a death sentence as there is no room for you to dodge and kite up there while ranging.

It worked, at least from Jan to March since I did it in pugs during this timeframe. There is a particular spot where the spiders couldn’t really hit you and you could go afk range. I can’t go back in time to fraps that (and this would get me another infarction) but it was perfectly possible to afk range the boss. A couple people could go down from some of the hits that did make it through but the group could just keep pressing F while afk ranging and the boss went down.

And.. what class does not have 1200 range ? Guardian scepter, warrior rifle, ranger longbow, staff ele, necro, greatsword mesmer they’re all 1200 range.
Oh, thieves aren’t 1200. I guess it might be a pain if you have a group filled with thieves.

You are also wrong about only needing to kill the first pack. The boss keep summoning waves of spiders at various percentage of his health. Only at ~30% health will he stop summoning the spiders and the fight become relatively safe. (Only need to dodge when the boss slam his left fist and shakes)

It was possible to avoid aggroing the groups that were behind/far away and only aggro the groups in front of the tree. That’s what I meant, and it was clearly not intended for these group to just stand afk while you hit the tree.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFSlvYcONg4
Can see how many spiders close to 14min mark are just afk chilling while the party is max ranging the tree.

I’m sure you are going to say that it was intended for these mob to just chill out. Right.

Just like it was intended for Kholer’s adds to be separated from the boss and leash out.. oh wait, they made it so that you can’t do that anymore.
Just learned today that they did the same thing to the boss right before the destroyer in SE path 3. Can’t get rid of his dredges.

Anet keeps doing the same thing to every single dungeon (prevent you from bypassing the boss mechanics and their adds) but people here seem to think somehow that it’s a glitch when it happens to TA F/U.
It’s not a glitch, they don’t want to let you to abuse the easily exploited game mechanics.

Kagato.5390:

And to get it out of the way: I have 4 legendaries, 7 level 80s all decked in the best equipment, and have been playing for twice the amount of time you have. It’s easy to do this in my guild runs. It’s not even remotely feasible to do it with a bunch of PUGs.

So much arrogance condensed with a sprinkle of bullkitten. You have 1600 achiev points and got your first lvl 80 a month ago yet you pretend to have 4 legendaries, 7 80s AND solid experience in dungeons ?

You either have exactly 0 life and sleep or just spent an inane amount of real money into virtual goods. Either way you can’t possibly pretend to have solid dungeon experience at this point in time.

I wouldn’t go and talk about other people credentials if I were you.

Kagato.5390:

Urg so much stupidity in this thread in support for an obvious flaw/glitched boss.

I’m suuuuuure it’s a glitch that the spiders are now aggroing and not letting you afk autoattack a boss like before. I’m suuuuure it was intended by anet for all of you to jump on the leaf and afk auto too.

Get real. What’s happening is that now you have to complete the fight the intended way, something pugs have never done because this boss was one of the most exploited, afkrange boss of the game until now. The groups “strategies” in pugs until now were all about either jumping on something on the map that allowed you to afkauto or to max range it and only kill the first pack while completely ignoring everything else in the room.

They only changed the aggro mechanism to reflect the way boss adds work in other dungeons. Can you ignore the adds from AC P1 boss, or kholer ? Can you ignore the grubs in the grawl shaman fractal ? the fact that you could do this fight while ignoring everything else in the room was the glitch. Not the current situation.

Mander.6924:

I think you’re a little too full of yourself to actually read the opinions of others…
Sigh, why do I bother?
TA is a fifty five level dungeon: this, I believe, is commmon knowledge.
What I’m asking is: is really TA forward/ up a level 55 exploring dungeon? Or is it a little more (or a lot more) challenging than this?
Not that this is bad: I would just like to know why, and share my experiences with this particular path.
Why labels forward/up as a level 55 dungeon, when we know as a fact, that we need a fully level 80 team with level 80 gears, with tested teamwork, just to hope to complete it?
And why this abysmal difference with the other two paths? Why is it needed?
And your rudeness don’t promote your arguments more than exploiting Hrouda quotes: I refuse to believe you don’t know the difference between the coordination required to do the 3 different paths of TA, paths that are supposed to be doable in the same range of team, skills and level.

We did it without armor boosts at all, so I think lvl 55 with lvl 55 armor would be perfectly fine, with maybe a couple deaths before the boss dies. A lot of people like you complained right after AC was changed that AC couldn’t be done at lvl 35 too, same type of complaints, and a group of people who were levelling their alts banded together and put up a video showing a full team of 35 doing AC.. but it didn’t stop all the whining so I guess the effort was nice but useless.
I’m not exploiting Hrouda’s quote, you’re just too hurt at the thought that there might be content in the game not tailored for random people who have zero communication.
As for all paths from the same dungeon being supposedly doable by a team with the same amount of skill.. have you even ran a dungeon other than TA ? None of the dungeons in this game are like this. SE P2 is much more of a pain in pugs. Arah Path 4. AC Path 2 is almost never ran in pugs. CoF path 3 requires at least three people with a brain to get past the torch part without losing your mind.

Your belief that all dungeon explorable path should have the same amount of difficulty stems from ignorance of this game dungeons.

Anyway I love the “lvl 80 with lvl 80” gear sentence. You don’t even need a full 80 armor set to do this.

Dolan.3071:

A few questions, how come Alpha never did Teeth of Mordremoth? (The ground spike cone attack)

Because this is path 2. This cone attack is only in path 1 and path 3.

I’ll quote Hrouda as many times as you want since you seem to suffer from heavily impaired reading comprehension.

Of course when they stepped into explorable that was a different experience, since we built our explorable dungeons to directly challenge a coordinated 5 man group.

This is an explorable. It doesn’t need a billboard stating that this path is not for beginners. Story mode were intended for beginners.
You again miss the point. Your question is irrelevant (can pug do this path) because whether a random pug kitten group can complete something is not within the requirements for an explorable path. It is for story modes.

Mander.6924:

(again, how many PUGs can pull this off?)

I’ll have to quote Hrouda on this :

Of course when they stepped into explorable that was a different experience, since we built our explorable dungeons to directly challenge a coordinated 5 man group.

That something, for once, can’t be done well/easily in a pug directly follows anet’s intent for the dungeons. The fact that a lot of dungeons are faceroll in pugs is just an indication that they did it wrong, not that they wanted any sort of random pick up group or team composition to faceroll content.

“How many pugs can do this” is not an argument against anything related to dungeons.

If that ticks you off, do what you’re supposed to do in a MMO and find a more permanent team to play with. MMO are “social” games as in you’re better off playing with the same people you know and trust over time than trying for the russian roulette every day.

ilr.9675:

Video about Ranger damage….
Party is 3 Wars and a Guard

Another masterpiece from Brazil

Not surprised he chose to replace the mesmer instead of another war.
And unlike the LH ele the ranger doesn’t really have much war replacing potential. At best they can replace one war. It doesn’t grant the kind of benefit the LH ele does through spamming LH into fire fields. The only things it can bring is done by a single ranger at which point you’ll hit high diminishing returns for taking more.

They also lack the utility such as crowd control with that weapon set and we all know how useful the war mace knockdown / guardian pull or banish / mesmer interrupt / LH launch are for CoE farms. Seems like a leech build, exactly like Nike’s necromancer.

This thread would be brazil’s best troll if it manages to convince a couple people to spend their in game gold to craftlvl a ranger.

Wukunlin.8461:

I use banish a lot in high level snow fractals to smack the aggro’ed elementals near our fire.

I prefer the greatsword pull for that kind of situation. In most cases you’ll want to group more than one mob for cleaving, and even when there’s only one mob, it’s highly likely then that you wouldn’t want to stray too far into their territory lest you pull more and more of these guys.

Broadicea.8294:

Hammer heads need to be larger for the most part and the handles should be like 20% longer. As it stands now they all look like a $20 6-pound sledge you pick up from Home Depot.

I don’t know why they veered more towards realism for hammers while greatswords get to be so ridiculous.

Funny thing is that when you look at the animation and type of skills associated to both weapons it should really be the reverse. Greatsword skills are faster and more graceful, hammers are slow as hell and pack a lot of punch. And yet the greatswords are the biggest weapons of the game (fractal, zenith skin wut) while hammers look a bit too puny considering their skill set (F1 burst on war or skill 2 on guardian).

Most hammers do not really fit moves like Earthshaker and Mighty Blow. For a fantasy setting like this where hammers can do such moves the skins should fit the job a bit more than they do at the moment.

Broadicea.8294:

ugh it’s sooooo difficult to find a non warr/mes party

http://youtu.be/1nCWHb8JamU

[thanks neigeux!]

You are doing god’s work. This link is now my autoanswer to any CoF whine.

Adding more dredge is always the right choice to make an encounter truly fascinating and enjoyable.

Lupicus should spawn a dredge cart and legendary mining suit during each phase transition.

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

The cumulative effect of these bugs is reducing warrior pve dps by approximately 10% for a min-maxed character.

I mean, if this is the dev’s intentions, fine. But if this is actually an error it’s pretty significant and shouldn’t have been excluded from this patch.

It would be very hard to justify heightened focus as a grandmaster if it didn’t give the advertised, buffed amount. Obviously not the dev intent. Seems like they don’t do much testing before patch go live…

Pure of voice is actually rather meh in fractals (and in any other dungeon where you run with ele and a fire field bar) since you don’t really use a lot of shout there. Particularly when you have both SoA and wall on things like the dredge fractal pure of voice is just completely useless.
Almost all of the harsher parts of fractals will make you replace two shouts.

I used to run PoV but you get used to running without it after a while and you don’t really need it in a good group even in a dungeon like TA if your group doesn’t try to outrun your guard while you use staff on the nasty blossoms. Although after a recent TA run where I’ve had people try too hard to outrun me (remember that you run slower while in combat mode and you will be in combat mode while staffing stuff so the people behind can easily outrun you before they get hit by mobs/trigger blossoms) pure of voice can be an almost indispensable crutch and I found myself wishing I had this three shout bar..

Charak.9761:

Devildoc.6721:

Afya.5842:

Hang on after 20, it gets a bit better.

No, it really doesn’t, it REALLY doesn’t.

it totally does though.
In low fractals, as a guardian, people are stepping to side the of wall reflect and avenger shields, like its blocking their shots or something.

then in higher, people understand that guardians keep you healed/buffed and standing behind the wall makes you not take damage.

and I’m getting pretty tired of people running away from me when I go over to heal them

Okay, things get better at 30+ because people learned some of the basics and they can negate agony with their high AR.

At 40+ things can get much worse than in 20- fractals when you pug though because no matter how much AR you have if you get a group with people who can’t handle dodging the agony attacks it can go incredibly worse than any 20- run.

The grawl with a group that doesn’t dodge the arrow even once.. (I’ve seen people who literally never dodge it, not just miss dodges. I mean they never dodge it.).. it’s uh.. quite an experience of its own.
Something that you wouldn’t really notice as much at lvl 30+ if your group has maxxed AR. So 30+ can give you the illusion that higher lvl can be better in pugs than 20-.. but once you reach 40+ it goes downhill.

Gnat.9405:

So I run pretty standard AH build on my Guard in Fractals. I usually go Scepter/Shield for ranged set and GS for melee, but I am going to transition back to Hammer for melee.

Is hammer useful in higher level fractals?

Hammer is one of the guard’s greatest weapon, so yes.
Rather than the hammer, you should question your use of the shield. Its skills aren’t all that desirable in PVE. You’d be better off with focus.

For the hammer in fractals, the main things it provides are :
Ring of Warding, that you should use right after pulling mob to ensure that their first burst gets interrupted with them being knocked, like in Ascalon where all these mob rushing at you will lose their first burst which gives you time to use blinds etc on them at 48 without dying in one shot.
The auto attack symbol of protection, which negates a lot of damage for a melee group.
The damage! it’s not the highest dps weapon of the game, but for a weapon with so much utility, compared to other “utility” weapons of this game, it’s rather high. Even better if you pick up the trait for “Symbol last longer”.
The blast finisher is always nice to have.
The immobilize helps. It’s good to have for fights like the crazy long ettin room in uncategorized when you’re kiting the ettin around with hammer + scepter/focus while the group deals with the other mobs.

Banish has a couple uses but I can’t think of any in fractals though.

Hammer on guardian is, by far, one of my favorite weapon of the game in terms of skill set. It’s not a weapon you use while spamming a rotation for bursts, it’s a weapon that brings lot of utility, and then dps on the autoattack.

It’s just too bad that most skins look bad.. sigh. Give us better hammers anet!

Broadicea.8294:

I agree that Mesmers are indispensable for speedclear groups

We actually managed to get times post patch that were kind of identical between a 2war/1ele/1mes/1guard group and 2guard/1ele/2war in our CoE farms. Since the last patch made portal useless for the typical CoE golem trick we thought we could get faster runs with another guard replacing the mes and using two tome of wrath (spawning one for the 5 sec quickness, leaving it immediately then having the other guard use it again after the first 5 sec of quickness).
Indispensable.. not so much. To replace temporal curtain pulls we have the guard use banish on hammer instead for the alpha fights, and greatsword pull for the first trash fight and the two golem in path 2 and 3 gate event.
The turret golem fight is definitively slower without a mesmer but everything else went faster with dps guards which is why the times were kind of identical. Since we stack might in a different way from the war stacking groups we don’t really have a use for signet of inspiration too.

If they were to nerf feedback into oblivion mesmers would really lose one of the major reason we take them to dungeons like arah. In arah the mesmer is nothing more than a feedback bot.

As for fractals 48 it’s been a while since the last time I’ve ran with a group that used a mes. A lot of the people I group with agree on the fact that we’d rather add another warrior (and have a 3 war / 2 guard group) than have a mes.

I would hardly call that class indispensable. The things that make it useful are borderline OP, and the less useful things are way less than OP and it’s very likely that the OPness is going to get hit hard by the nerf hammer because feedback does negate a couple fights in this game in a way that shouldn’t be fully negated. I do enjoy these lupicus speedkills a lot, but I am also willing to admit that this is almost certainly not the intended way for this fight, and that anet couldn’t possibly ignore how feedback completely bypasses a whole phase at the press of a button (okay, make that two phases when it’s a group as skilled as Dub’s.)

EldrikCZ.1209:

Our attempt to finish Forward/UP =/ 6 attempts but no chance.
2 Warriors, 2 Guardians, 1 Necromancer

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CYfXhHBeco

0/ you failed the first attempt which is pretty hard to fail if your group has decent damage output (which.. really should be the case of a melee group with 2 war, 2 guard and 1 melee necro (can’t really see in that blurry vid whether that necro uses daggers or not) but it does make things 10 times more painful than it should be if you failed this once and try to chop that tree after a wipe. Although it’s still recoverable but it requires pixel perfect cycling of reflection and having some luck with shield of the avenger not dropping dead before its first activation if you still want to give melee a go after a wipe.
1/ reflection is meant to be cycled
2/ you aren’t even taking advantage of the wall of reflection put at the beginning. This makes guardians cry so much when it happens.
3/ dat shout heal is not helping you.
4/ dat shout heal is not helping you.
5/ dat shout heal is not helping you.
6/ target the boss if you want to use something like on my mark… what’s up with using that on the closest silver spidey
6/ when you realize shout heal is not kitten helping you get a real trait build. My naked warrior (losing out on armor and rune damage bonus) does more damage than your fully armored war.
7/ warbanner is meant to be used as an opener if you want to burn something down quickly, not as an emergency rez
8/ stop camping the greatsword, if you don’t want a dual melee rotation (switching between gs and axe all the time) get and camp the axe. Greatsword without a weapon rotation is wrongsword.
9/ tell whoever used banners to stay the hell away from Discipline unless he’s making a troll video but if you wiped 6 times at the boss you’ve gone long past the time for trolling around. Banner of discipline but no banner of strength? You can’t crit on that boss.
10/ jwaz’s link to a “regular” version is actually my troll video. The naked version is a better example of how you’re supposed to do it regardless of whether you wear armor or not.

The melee method is incredibly easy with the group set up you had but you seem to believe that it just amounts to “press 2 to win”. Your video would be a good follow up for Eugene’s Warrior Guide.

Dolan.3071:

Or 15% crit chance (and a buttload of crit damage) from Discipline?

You actually have more crit chance from having points in arms rather than discipline for this trait. Tested while in combat.

I’ve heard heightened focus is bugged and not giving the right amount of crit chance though, so this fact might change in a later patch. As of now, crit chance is NOT the reason why you’d pick this trait line at all, if you want to invest in discipline you’re free to do so but doing it for the crit chance from the grandmaster trait is dumb.

Edit :
This is what arms line is worth (banner of discipline on in the background) :
http://imgur.com/vOkpt9i,LVidw4r,q3Pmf5n,6u7Lgg1

(64 % crit chance if 25 instead of 30 into arms)

Now weight 10% dmg boost from attack of opportunity and the other nice things from arms vs discipline..

gracemillian.1908:

I am so tired of this. I don’t have a warrior, I don’t have a mesmer, I only have a ranger and ele, I do not have time to make a level 80 war or mes. Please Anet for the love of god, do something to balance this ridiculousness. I can’t even run dungeons anymore because of people doing this.

Just, PLEASE do something. I enjoy running dungeons, I just can’t do that anymore.

You’re just sad you can’t farm CoF p1 efficiently so you need to rage on those who can. Because it’s pretty much the only dungeon where you constantly see groups asking for w/m.. as someone who still pugs a lot of dungeons myself, I would almost never be able to run HotW if I waited for zerk wars to join my party at the times of the day where I do it (because at prime time I mostly run other dungeons with my guild).

A quick look at gw2lfg right now shows : 0 group asking for w/m for AC (and exactly 1 asking for an ele), 0 for CM, 0 for CoE, 0 for HotW, 0 for Arah, 0 for TA, 0 for SE, 0 for fractals (with a couple asking for guardians rather than war/mes) and the usual metric ton of w/m requests for the mindless CoF p1.

Which is sad because IMHO because that group composition is better for all dungeons and the difference between a bad group compo and a better one is actually far more obvious in other dungeons than in CoF p1 where 90% of the time is spent running rather than fighting anything.

But you would die and turn into a skeleton in front of your computer from all the waiting if you tried to assemble a zerk war/guard/mes pick up group for anything other than CoF P1. Most of these CoF p1 war are alts that are almost never used anywhere else used by people who have no idea you can run a zerk group in other dungeons since said farming groups don’t even know how to dodge and can only do CoF p1 because not dodging at the effigy has never wiped any (dps) group.

“I can’t run dungeons anymore” because “I can’t join CoF p1 farming groups” sounds like a child’s tantrum.

Yargesh.4965:

You can still ping different gear to what you are wearing.

I don’t think someone dumb enough to run the golemancer rune would have the presence of mind to have a spare set of armor to ping.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

I’ve not done this boss after the change. Is there a clear indication that he’s going to summon the spiders?

The shaking animation.

ilr.9675:

CoE’s not even a DPS test aside from Alpha…

You forgot the destroyer. That one is a true dps test as far as “speedrunning vs non speed” goes because you can only speed run path 3 efficiently if you can kill that destroyer in one go. Anything else wouldn’t bit “a bit” slower, it would be much slower.

http://www.youtube.com/user/obal100

Shows the difference between bad groups and meta a lot more than CoF will ever do.

Well people who hate that much on the meta tend to not be on the bright side of the equation if you catch my drift.

jul.7602:

I find thief DPS underwater to be small compared to warrior and rangers.

You’re probably not using the block spam.

colesy.8490:

Also, why were you running with pug trash?

Not enough people I know online atm to ensure a run, and even if there were I’m not quite sure they’d agree to join a run for the most inane dungeon path of the game. The only reason I’m running this myself is because I want the set quickly. Most people would just wait a couple more days and only run path 1 on all alts.

The Mexican Cookie.3690:

I’d find it more bearable if I didn’t feel like I was wearing white gear, considering the damage output. Surely it can’t just be the crappy breather(s)?

Some classes have it better than others. Elementalist and guardian damage underwater is so craptastic compared to what they can do on land.. on the other hand, underwater warrior and thieves are kind of strong damage wise. I don’t really know about mesmer since I almost never played it underwater.

I’ve been running another hotw spam since I wanted a set from it and one constant in this game is : there is nothing glitchier, buggier and more boring than underwater combat.

At the end of path 2 the end boss got glitched into the “ceiling” and there was absolutely nothing we could do except just disband and forget about the run. He was so far away that we couldn’t aggro him back, couldn’t do AoE or melee weapon damage through which is what usually works when this kind of thing happens. We were out of combat and the boss was just far away up into glitchland.
This is a lot more aggravating when you’ve done the run with pugs that had low dps considering the HUGE amount of hp every single hotw boss have. Not the fault of the group itself but enduring that amount of boss health and losing the run really leaves a terrible taste in the mouth and doesn’t really make me feel like running this path again.

Anet is obviously never going to fix the major issues there is with underwater and glitching into walls, ceiling etc so how about just scrapping the terrible idea that is underwater combat in this game?
Every single time I get the underwater jellyfish in fractal I feel like I’m losing a part of my soul.

Dolan.3071:

A perma staff wielding Necro (don’t actually know if that’s good or not)

You wouldn’t be able to notice the difference between 4manning the run and having a staff necro in your group.

Dolan.3071:

But hey who knows? Maybe I’ll be good enough to join LoD some day, though seeing as I don’t do high level Fractals (what’s the point?) and have yet to venture into Arah, I can’t really say ‘Yeah I’ve done this’ seeing as almost all other content is just faceroll.

It’s only recommended to have experience in arah if your only character is a guardian or mesmer (and to be honest even then you’d be asked to level a warrior because we focus on speedclears and there is only one spot for guard/mes in any of our speedruns).
We do teaching runs where we don’t mind taking people on their war and explaining our speedrun tactics, builds, skill use etc.

LOD is not the guild you think it is. The only elitism you’ll see in there is class elitism as in we don’t intend to take players who only have a main ranger, engineer etc. Your main requirement is being able to learn and progress.

Wukunlin.8461:

like a ranger and pet relationship

Zenith.7301:

It’s perfectly doable in a group. I’ve done it as I’m forced to pug and most of the time 3/5 people on the team are dead

Did you read my post correctly? This is exactly what I meant. You seem to have read the first line and then skipped everything else.

I can record the same instance on my ele doing the same as OP if you want.

There is no point because I never said you couldn’t solo the kiting. Now if you enjoy doing 15+ minutes of running around in circles..