Guild Wars 2

Ryn.6459:

why anyone would bring a condition mesmer on AC?

It could be worse.

It could be a combo of 3 persons from the same guild, who play condi thief, condi ele AND necromancer all in the same party.

Yes, they really did play condi, it wasn’t just a sigil from a noobishly geared character. During the burrow phase, the thief went to kill the mobs spamming death blossoms.

My reasoning is that it’s only useful for prestacking and should never be done in combat. Combat in this game doesn’t last long enough to justify swapping to sb and losing a ton of dps in the process (locked in it for 10sec), but it does last long enough sometimes for might stacks to drop before the end of the fight, so if you rely too much on the thief to provide the blasting then you’re not going to have 100% upkeep on might. The score should obviously not even be close to the score of a class that can guarantee the upkeep of might. And that’s only talking about optimized/organized groups, the value of the thief’s ability to blast is close to zero in solo or pugs, compared to a class like ele or engie. 5/10 is fair.

The filter should affect the party creator too by the way, if anet ever gets around implementing one. I’m done joining parties that say “zerker only”, just to find a bunch of soldier and knight wearing zero dpsers being the ones who made the lfg. I’d rather join more honest random pugs than that. You shouldn’t be able to build a filter around zerk if you’re not wearing it yourself.

That class is going to be the new necromancer of PVE unless they unveil something insanely good hidden in the Power trait line. The things we have seen from the Precision and Ferocity lines is pretty meh.

A permanent fire field, and a single skill that does 3 blast finishers with an 8s CD in the same weapon? Insane.

Only two of the blasts will hit and no one is going to use that weapon in combat.
Ele already have perma fire field and the highest AoE dps of the game. I don’t see the excitement.

Fractals are the best content there is in this game. Unfortunately it’s not really rewarding enough to warrant being run over something else when you want/need to farm gold. You want an expensive skin? Hell, you want ascended grind to run high lvl frac on an alt? Then doing fractals is the worst way to get the gear to do fractals. Just farm gold everyday in the boring easy going dungeons. And then you can do fractals again. Or maybe not. Because you might want another skin along the way. Might as well put off running them indefinitely because it’s just not worth.

GW2: the end game that keeps on giving.

Wethospu.6437:

How would you people rate classes’ capability of:

1) creating fire fields

2) blasting fire fields

Positive factors being amount and least impact on actual gameplay. For example blasts finishers on weapons are better than on utilities.

1/ 10/10 Ele and Engineer, 5/10 Guardian, 4/10 Ranger, 1/10 warrior (honorable mention for the ability to prestack if there’s really no other option than using longbow) 0/10 everyone else.
2/ 10/10 Ele, 7/10 Engineer. 5/10 thief 4/10 warrior (for the prestack). 1/10 guardian (honorable mention for underwater blasting and the meager prestack contrib).
Everyone else: 0.
The way I see it, some classes can have more blast, others can bring some decent fire field, but it always comes at a sacrifice, and almost always is only reasonably usable during prestack, and not in combat (thieves for example.. using SB to blast and being stuck with that for 10 seconds during combat is almost certainly not ever worth doing. A warrior being stuck with his longbow and warhorn? Not even a shred of doubt, useless.).
Ele and engineers shine in their ability to use fire fields without sacrifices. Guardians can bring decent uptime, at the cost of some utilities if they use them solely as fire field and do not keep them specifically for other uses. Ranger is okay if you’re not getting a field from anyone else.

Ele are absolute. They can bring permanent fire field as staff, permanent blasting as LH, or still decently great amount of blast as D/F. Also really strong prestack.
Also, ele are the only ones that also give fury out of blasting fire fields. Truly absolutes.
Guard doesn’t deserve better than 1/10 for blast because hammer light fields are a pain in the * and should only ever be used for prestacking and focus’s cooldown is skyhigh.

There’s a pretty solid hierarchy in there where basically Ele dominates, Engineer is cool, thief and warrior are good prestack and everything else is pretty mediocre.

EdgarMTanaka.7291:

there has to be a perfect group or there is no way to finnish a dungeon.

“Finish the dungeon” isn’t the one goal. “Doing it fast” is. Because dungeons are essentially the only reasonably fun way to make money in this game. Everything else is a complete bore, and probably not as efficient in terms of gold/hour either.

Still, people complain only because they can’t read. I often make random LFG (not speedruns) when I’m bored where I play with underlevelled pugs and when it comes to dungeons like AC it fills fast. If you don’t like speedruns make your own lfg. I’ve even seen experienced pugs start doing explanations in party chat when they saw very low AP ( 300 to 500 ~ ) pugs in the party when I made these random lfg.

Stop relying on others to get what you want. Don’t wait for lfg, make them. Don’t wait for a party leader, lead. You automatically lose any right to complain when you’re not making any effort. You can find people who will willingly join and even at times take the time to explain dungeon mechanics and the like, but you have to extend that hand, not wait for someone to grab yours while you’re hiding them behind your back.

I prefer it when they say it upfront so that you don’t join their lfg.
Unlike this one where nothing was said until we reached it:

dboylolz.3916:

MrSilver.5269:

How is a staff ele overpowered? Serious question.

Excellent CC, excellent damage, excellent survivability, excellent mobility. Something seems off.

You keep the word “excellent” for things that are only “average”. Staff has excellent damage, moderately good CC, but the rest is pretty average. If staff has “excellent mobility” then what would you call a thief or warrior? “Ultra super duper excellent mobility of the extreme excellence”?

oxtred.7658:

Yumiko Ishida.3769:

dlonie.6547:

Hey Yumiko, did anything ever happen with that “Play How You Want” guild you were talking about making? I’m still happy to refer people to it once there’s a forum post up in the guild section for it.

It fell apart I was never able to retain anyone I recruited.

Look like some people are learning, actually.

No, what they do is make and join “zerk only” runs. Yes, I’ve seen people who actually posted “zerk only” lfg who were blatantly tank as hell. It’s not just the people joining, the people making the lfg these days are also doing it.

What happened is that PHIW don’t want to play with too many PHIW in their group. They still want the freedom to tank stuff, but they don’t want the consequences of a run that takes forever either. This is the true reason why “zerk” only lfg are highly sought, and why they fill up faster than their counterpart. There’s not a majority of zerkers in this game PVE, but there is a majority of liars and profiteering kittens.

adozu.6398:

i’d say the nerfs to 100b are likely more related to pve whiners

But 100b wasn’t even that good to begin with. Plenty of classes outdps warrior in PVE by a very large margin. Elementalists and thieves laugh at war dps and they don’t have to stand there in a channel to pull it off. The only thing an ele channels, icebow 4 (and to a lesser degree, the staff fire 5) is such a massive burst on large targets that it actually justifies it being a channel, unlike 100b.

It wasn’t that great of a skill before the nerf. It’s now even worse.

Bohantopa.5729:

Frost.1503:

A necromancer conditioner is good in Fractal??? In pvp is excellent but in pve, wvw and fractal i never see a conditioner (less necromancer conditioner roaming).

Necromancer is currently the lowest dps class in the game

Uh, not, necromancer outdps a few other classes single target wise. The issue is the lack of offensive buff/group contribution.

The boss couldn’t be crit. So unless your party was filled with condition users, it was more about supportive stuff (absorb, reflect, buffing) and even people clad in PVT could kill it in a reasonable time frame. The zerker meta has no blame to take in this part as crit damage is useless for that particular boss.

Because the explorable paths of Twilight Arbor were very similar from a content perspective,

Similar? TA F/U had the better encounters. Bring back Vevina!
Of all the paths, the one that should’ve been nuked, if nuking a path was seen as necessary, should have been forward. That thing is a snoozefest. Almost as much as doing AC P3.

- Take Harpy’s feather with you. They stealth you for 3sec and have low cooldown, they gonna help you a lot while running some portion.

Engis can also blast stealth for 10s, then use Toss Elixir S for 5s more stealth while running. Once stealth runs out, elixir s itself is a decent “oh snap” button if something went wrong while skipping.
It’s a great class, and my post was only about the build/gear, not about the character itself. Engis might not be the fastest runners, or highest dps, but they’re well rounded and have a lot of things for various situations. Condis are fine for some bosses, but you really need some berserker gear for those who are strong against them. You don’t need to roll another character.

Conditions.. are problematic, even in a solo setting. You’ll do okay damage against most bosses, and the added bunkerness will help you during your first times against lupi but against those who defend themselves against conditions, like alphard, you might as well pull your own teeth. You’ll be fine doing most of the content solo as condition, but you really ought to do yourself a favour and get some berserker gear to swap to when you need to.

Dalanor.5387:

Dub.1273:

Just thinking about it, how would they even design challenging content without proper players to test it out? And I have not heard of any decent player they consulted for content creation.

But but but they already have … :C
Look at that amazing innovative gameplay! Look at that and learn something, scrub.

I shouldn’t have clicked that link. I thought I had already seen the worst from anet, but celestial pistol pistol thief with zero useful utilities doing fractal 39 doing nothing but pressing skill 3 takes the cake.

Zelyhn Lekovitch.2867:

Ah for those who did not forget, remember the time when we could do fractals level 80 with almost no AR? Ahh the good times when skill prevailed over gear (or hammer guardians)!

But nope, now we have scripted agony.

This. Anet promised no-grind, purely skill based end game. There was a ring of truth to it, until they did this.

I admit I felt tempted to join and look at what this “deep dark fantasy” really meant.
As for that Arah p1.. they’re probably still not done with it.

There is a lot of time in fractals to decide if a player truly is so toxic that you’d rather get rid of him through a kick than do anything else (including trying to tell him how to handle a situation). If you haven’t kicked said person by the 4th fractal, and decide to do it right at the end when (depending on the amount of dps seen in the pugs, sometimes hour+ long run) possibly an hour has already passed. You know what? You’re a kittenhole. That part is not debatable. No matter how bad OP is as a player (which is something we don’t really know about.) or good the party was (which is not debatable, if they can’t carry at lvl 8 they’re as bad as the man they criticize.) that part is not debatable, that party was filled with absolutely sorry excuses for human beings. That is all. You’ve already figured out if the player was kick worthy by fractal 2, if you’ve kept it all the way through and decide to grief after that much time has passed, there is no defending your party.

Kupper.8074:

you are just not good enough.

We’re talking about a party having difficulties handling this at lvl 8. It’s a lowbie fractal. He might not be good enough but the case could be made about the rest too as lowbie fractals hardly qualifies as “challenging” content.

I don’t see anything wrong with a party kicking a player they don’t want to group with, but that should be done early during the run, not right at the end. Doing this at the 4th fractal definitely is griefing and being a sorry excuse for a human being. I’ve been in parties that have done this and always felt shamed for being part of this (indirectly, because I never confirmed the kicks, not at the very last fractal). I then usually avoid grouping with the people I’ve witnessed doing this.

@OP I don’t think there is anything you can do about it though. Anet doesn’t seem to have much support beyond the basics, it’s not like some subbed MMOs with active game masters. You can report it, but the truth is that nothing will come out of it.

kitten . with the current g/gems and lowest serv transfer price.. it’s gotten quite a pain in the *.

VideoGamermike.5813:

bangs head on wall.
I am not angyr that people disagree. I would not have said anything if somsone said they didn’t find greatsword mesmer very useful. What I am angry at is the malice. For example the necromancer…the -only- comments I saw called the entire profession ranged of ‘selfish’ to ‘useless’ to ’hurting everyone around them." I was called useless and a waste of space for using a greatsword on mesmer, and I was told not having deflection skills is an act of sheer stupidity that deserved to be laughed at and banned.

These are not acts of culture, they are acts of malice. I don’t mind someone saying “I find grewatsword to be less useful due to its single target damage being too situational”, I mean “greatsword mesmers are just a waste of space.” why not spit in my face while you’re at it.
you wanna paint me out as the one as fault, the one acting malicious, try looking at who I went against. I don’t proclaim I was or am a saint in these arguments, but considering how many times I was subjected to very malicious insults simply for a choice of weapon, did you really expect me to sit quietly or be mr.saint? My friend were right to advice me away from the forums.

http://pastebin.com/N3At6SQs

Hohai.

VideoGamermike.5813:

It’s amazing how 2 days here has made me not want to do dungeons anymore.

We all wish..

These threads are so pointless. Even if the vast majority of the player base was against stacking (which I don’t believe) anet wouldn’t do anything beeeeeecause… dungeons are not even remotely close to their top 50 priorities. I wouldn’t even blame them. Look at this player base.. the only time anet did something positive, good for dungeons (the AC revamp, which was a real improvement over the even less inspired bosses it used to have) it turned into a major sstorm and the number of pugs on gw2lfg just completely dwindled over night at the time. Horrible reception all around, so much that I think that the way the player base reacted to this revamp is the N°1 reason why anet didn’t even think of touching the other dungeons, rather than blaming it all on the living story. They focused on the living story because their metrics probably show that most of the player base do complete most of the achievements/living story content whenever they release it and I wouldn’t be surprised if their metrics for the AC revamp was so poor that they had no idea what to do next with dungeons. I don’t think they really expected what happened with the AC revamp and all the “it’s too hard” whine (remember, that was before pugs finally learned that they can do things like meleeing the spider queen..).

There is, simply put, no way for anet to win when it comes to such a player base.
This used to be the most common type of thread here before pugs learned how to imitate (but not always successfully) speedrun type tactics :
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Incredibly-hard-incredibly-unrewarding

I’ve been gaming since the early 90’s, I’ve played over 20 MMOs. The dungeons in GW2 are too hard for such little reward.

kitten ed if they do, kitten ed if they don’t. Why serve a player base like this when they can keep on releasing LS for the casuals and keep them happy with a high retention rate.

Yes, rather than blaming anet, the most logical thought that comes to mind is that the player base is responsible for the direction this game took. Anet is a sensible company, they need money, and thus, a good retention rate over their player base, to keep on going. For some reason the worst of all MMO players just chose this game as their rally point and anet had to oblige.

vincecontix.1264:

The goes for all classes but especially thiefs because basically the team with the most thiefs loses atm.

I feel this was true of ele too. At least before the patch, I can’t say how it is atm because I didn’t play much since the last balance patch (dem balthazar runes!). But I’ve never seen teams with 2+ ele win unless the other team spectacularly failed, like, so bad they should never even touch an online game again. Seeing an ele on my team always felt so cringy since only the best players can barely make it work at a decent level and most of the case the ele you get paired with in soloq aren’t that mythical unicorn ele player. I’ve even seen one who plagued 50% of my morning soloq by staying in water attunement most of the time spamming staff skill 1.

I feel like this type of thread are made by players who don’t actually have much experience with online game, particularly competitive game modes.

If you think the dungeon/pugging community is “hostile” then I’d really like to hear your opinion about the TPVP community. Even the most foul mouthed dungeon runner has nothing over the typical tpvp player.

Also I’ve been a troll in many pugs without ever being kicked, so I can’t help but wonder how much of a baddy you need to be to get kicked from pugs that often.

You’re asking for a build with no mobility nor defenses in a game mode that is all about mobility. Axe/axe makes as much sense as putting a target on your forehead with a gigantic “Asking For It” sign in your hands.

MM necro isn’t overpowered but multiple of pet zoo ranger and mm necro can be about as anti fun as this game can be to fight with your screen cluttered with an unholy amount of crap. I’ve fought a team with two mm, one pet zoo ranger and one mesmer once, I honestly felt like pressing ALT+F4 every time I entered the mid point fight.

The build just shouldn’t exist anyway. Anything that relies on AI pets that much has no place in active combat. Instead of a nerf I would ask for an outright removal of the offending utilities.

CuRtoKy.8576:

Thiefs, S/D Ele, S/F Ele, Supcutie Shatter Mesmer, and a number of other builds.

The only build (well, I mean, in this case, class actually) that is even remotely considered meta in TPVP in your list is Thief. Ele have been kicked out of the tpvp meta and turned into freekills for a long time and mesmers have also been kinda weak to the condi meta. There is literally nothing more cringe inducing than doing soloq and seeing more than one ele in your own team. They are tolerable in small amount but any decent thief that spots a glass canon ele will start shutting him down like crazy. In fact thieves are the reason why berserker is almost completely non-viable on other classes. Going berserker on other classes = playing the role of a thief, without the mobility of a thief, and the ability to get out of fights when the **** hits the fan. Anything that wears zerker in TPVP is just a subpar thief doing the role of a thief without being as good as a thief.

Anierna.6918:

I’ve seen IX and DnT do exactly this, and I’m always puzzled. How can you even call yourself an elite guild when you don’t min/max by default on your daily dungeon tours?

So, a guild whose main requirement (for recruitment) is being able to press 4 and 3 on walls is calling out others on their überl33tn3ss?

Funnily enough, it seems like it’s a reverse nerf when it comes to low level dungeons. Even mediocre dps pugs will output more than enough to trivialize all the AC bosses.

hendo.1940:

Lilith Ajit.6173:

hendo.1940:

dont worry guys, as long as we stay in this subforum, I suppose you could say we have

strength in numbers

Oh god that pug was so versatile.

i’ll never forget him going to res me at mai trin, dumping purging flames down despite nobody having conditions and dropping wall of reflection for no reason

good times

gooooooooood times

Aaah, the “drop walls and feedback” everywhere cargo cult that is the bane of playing elementalist in pugs. Me see reflect work once me thinks reflect best spammed.

Nothing like seeing area retaliation and chaos armor. Although I’ve been guilty of trolling a couple ele at times by putting a symbol right before their rotation since trolling is always funny when it doesn’t happen to you.

Player Character.9467:

inb4 selling arah story mode to pvp’ers

Players who almost only pvp don’t really have the gold to buy dungeon paths, lol. Have you seen the silver rewards from TPVP soloq and teamq. There’s even a daily limit after which even if you do more TPVP matches you can’t gain more gold (but even so you’d have to spam quite a friggin’ lot to even think of reaching the cap. I’m not even sure if it’s humanely possible unless you share the account with someone else which is something that can result in an account ban)

runeblade.7514:

robertul.3679:

Even 25 is far too much for an optional boss. I think 10 would be pretty fair.

Far too little actually.

The skill level in optional bosses is higher than zergy bosses.

Yeah, temples would comparatively give too much vs something like the AC troll if it only dropped 10. Although temple bosses can be interesting when not zergued, since the reward is the same whether they are zergued or not the point is moot, they are very easy when zergued so there would be no justification in getting less dragonite for something that, technically, can’t be zergued, since it’s instanced.

Hell, trying to do the CoE abomination in the average pug would not end well. Aboms have simple mechanics but turn into hell the moment they stack up frenzy which they are guaranteed to do with most parties.

There is no amount of reward that could make me do hotw p2 and p3 again. Not even 30 gold per run in the daily chest would make me feel like doing it. My thinking on underwater combat : anet should just plainly admit the whole idea was a mistake and remove everything from the game. Replace all underwater content with better maps. Remove capricorn in PVP, remove the underwater fractal (that no one runs anyway because they roll swamp), remove hotw p2/p3, remove all mobs from underwater open world and remove underwater combat mechanics, only allowing underwater exploration.

Fixing underwater combat to make it fun would require so much change to the current skill sets / add a variety of skills / missing abilities replaced that it would be too much work put into a section of the game that is not worth it when much more important things need to be changed already. So just admit it’s a mistake and delete everything. Even 1h of dev work put into underwater is 1h that is wasted compared to time that could be put into revamping dungeon bosses, mobs, PVP build balance etc.

Come on, I’m not going through the drudgery of switching to another DSL provider just for one single game. GW2 is the only game that has any issue on my side. And switching ISPs is a pain in the butt.

If I had major issues with the other games I play online like D3 I’d do it, but if it’s only gw2.. well.

hendo.1940:

Transferred back to Europe for a week because I was fed up of having insane lag on NA :/

And I was going to come back to NA but I was one day too late (for the free transfer thingy). At first it seemed like my lag issues had been fixed by transferring to EU but the past few days it got just as bad as when I was on NA so I spent all, rather than most, of my gaming time on DS2 because I didn’t feel like paying for another month of VPN again. Since I lag badly on EU I might as well just play on NA where there is an active player base past midnight, but since I don’t have much gold I’ll have to go through a lot of dungeon again. Probably during the week ends because EU is dead at night.

Dunno what’s wrong with this game but EU or NA it’s just unplayable at times without a VPN. Quite capricious because there are days where there is virtually no lag at all and others where I could stand in an invisible AoE for five seconds before any hit registers on my screen.

Engineer dps has never been good. It can kind of make up for it by stacking vuln all on its own and let other classes like ele take max dps traits and forget about stuff like vuln stacking.

It’s a really fun class, and I encourage you to play it in casual dungeon runs if you like it. Just don’t expect top performance from it. It’s very versatile, so if you like pugging you might end up loving the ability to swap utilities depending on what people bring.

Can you imagine approaching a lvl 80 zombie mob in Arah, that was situated like an spvp team? With AI that was programmed to use certain skills at certain times and they even went in to downed states like the toxic sylvaris and would res each other

Funny you mention arah, because it has the trash that is the closest to being decent in terms of mechanics. The trash packs in arah tends to have diversified skill sets that complement each other : one who can imprison a group into his ring of warding, one with aoe knockbacks, one that grants stability to the whole trash pack and spawns adds that have low HP but high damage, illusionists with heavily damaging AoE etc.
I think the mobs in arah are already fine, much better than most of the boss fights there (apart from Lupicus and Alphard the rest of the dungeon bosses are a bit of a snoozefest and would need a revamp more than any of the trash mobs !), it’s just that there is no point in killing trash so you don’t really get to experience them apart from the four at the gate in p3 and the savage pack in the wraith room of p4.

Mechanics wise I feel they are pretty good, at least compared to most of the game. They’d just need a buff to their HP so that casting a single wall of reflect, and a single stability skill wouldn’t be enough to kill a whole pack safely. In a good meta group they die too fast so you don’t really get to experience their mechanics.

There is no amount of mechanics you can add that would change the fact that those things have too low hp and die in seconds in front of a group that stacks all the good offensive buffs. The game is balanced a bit too much around a PVT wearing, running like headless chicken players and not enough around the idea of an organized group, despite what they said about dungeons years ago. The amount of HP of most trash is evidence of that, they’d have a lot more HP if they were balanced around solid groups.

I facepalmed when I learned that they halved the HP of most things in Ascalonian Catacombs during the days of the revamp. Facepalmed so hard because the new mechanics they introduced were actually kinda interesting but you don’t experience them since they die even faster than the previous boring incarnations. There’s no point in the path 1 boss being able to summon adds if you kill it before it can even summon them. What was the big idea behind the nerf to the boss HP? completely nuts.

Just go to the most unbalanced place in the game, wvwvw, and play against mesmers that are already running perplexity in their unnerfed version and see if it’s really as OP as you think. It’s not.

You should fear perplexity engineers more. That one has high cancer potential.

TurtleDragon.3108:

Nikaido.3457:

Also, you just don’t bring mesmers in SE.

Meta builds doesn’t mean you have to bring the absolute best compositions for each specific dungeon path. If you were going for a record, or doing a serious dungeon tour, then go ahead, but for the more casual runs you can bring a mesmer to everything.

Otherwise, classes like Rangers, Engineers and Necromancers wouldn’t see much play or have a meta build.

Well, if we chose to define meta in such a way then the “meta” build for ele should be 30/30/10 since it’s the one that works best on casual/random group compo, having both fury and some vuln stacking. On the other hand the current 30/10/10/20 shown on the website would be horrible to use outside of specific organized runs.

There is hardly any place in CM that would outlast a feedback in a solid run and you don’t go around killing trash mobs when you bring a thief. Thus, boosting warden’s potential in reflected damage.. meh. Most bosses in CM can’t even be reflected (with some exception like the grenadier) and those that can be reflected will not last much longer than a feedback. Also, you just don’t bring mesmers in SE. Or any place where portal tricks don’t speed up the runs. If there are no portal tricks, don’t bring mesmers. One guardian is all you need for SE’s projectiles. Mesmers are kind of a waste of a slot when they’re not using specific tricks.

Saint.5647:

Yeah and they could remove our weapons too! Then we can all just heal each other all the time!

I had a pug thief once tell the guardian to drop his weapons and focus solely on rezzing. Your joke is something some pugs would actually want to take as granted.

I don’t even know on what universe I’m currently browsing the web on. Someone calling staff ele OP in tpvp, feels like entering the twilight zone.

^ is what happens when people barely understand english. He just took a cheap shot @ Clumsy, didn’t mean it for Goku.

hendo.1940:

Wow, fiery greatswords, that’s so interesting.

Can’t wait for that trash weapon to be nerfed, it’s pathetic.

I feel like anet doesn’t actually have any intent on nerfing it because they mentioned FGS in their feature patch (fixing the use of fiery rush so that it stops working after a teleport, like blink or lightning flash) but no mention of nerfing the damage from the trail.

It seems like nerfing it isn’t a possibility at the moment because it might make those groups that rely a little bit too much on overpowered ele conjures to beat things like the wurm and tequatl cry too much if all that stuff got nerfed to a reasonable amount of damage.

Sundar.1735:

If tanking is not viable, what’s the point in building tank gear?

It’s like asking what’s the point of heavy armor and tower shields in dark souls. If you can’t handle what the game throws at you, then you can equip more sissy gear. There is absolutely no shortage of horrible zerker pugs that would actually benefit from running some knight or pvt gear.
If you think it doesn’t do anything and mention this “one shot everything so zerker is only viable” nonsense I often see on the forums I encourage you to go ahead and join a random play as you want pug with tankier gear and see if things actually one shot you if you don’t wear zerker (fact: most things won’t).

Delay.6908:

Um… eles easily beat warriors DPS wise even without FGS, so do theives providing they have the same buffs as a warrior (which is quite realistic in an organized party) and guardian/ranger are practically the same as a warrior and in fact slightly higher in the guardians case. Stacking warriors for damage is not a good idea.

Not only that but it’s very easy to output mediocre dps on a war. It’s one of the easiest class to play decently (large health pool, nice amount of blocks and evade built in) but at the same time it’s one of the classes that require the most attention paid to rotation to deal the best amount of dps. Anything that interrupts axe auto before the final hit, anything that would make you stop doing 100b and waste more time in gs auto etc not using a quickly interrupted whirlwind when not against a wall etc. if we could see stats about damage done in dungeon per individual member of the party the vast majority of pug warriors would be at the lowest %. I’d wager that most sword rangers (not pvt bowbears) in pugs actually outdps the average unskilled warrior.

It’s written in the article. They were mainly used to destroy pike formations.
Wars of the past weren’t really fought and won through longswords wielders, fantasy settings put too much emphasis on the longsword. It’s kinda surprising how many of the more interesting weapons are missing from games like gw2, such as the whole polearms family (pikes, halberd, spears, naginata etc).
Swords were more of an auxiliary weapon rather than a main army driver. Zweihanders were the only swords that could fight against polearms wielders.

Even the Samurai which in contemporary days are overly pictured as katana wielders were mostly, in fact, spear users. Swords are overrated. And Zweihander aren’t a replacement for longswords, they are used in situations where longswords wouldn’t even be considered at all.

It’s slower than a longsword but it can destroy a polearm. Would you try to fight a pikeman with the reach of a longsword?

There are swords that are much bigger than a longsword in the real world, they’re called Zweihander.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zweih%C3%A4nder

In its developed form, the Zweihänder has acquired the characteristics of a polearm rather than a sword. Consequently, it is not carried in a sheath but across the shoulder like a halberd