Guild Wars 2

jaka.9635:

Can you tell me which dyes you used?

Cinders, blood and abyss.

Giving dragonites for salvaging rings would be such a good idea.

Shanna.4762:

I think part of the problem is that while there’s a lot of “covered” armor for women, a vast majority of it is hideous and are accompanied by not being complimentary of the female form/figure.

Ascended armor is a work of art, covers everything while staying complimentary.
At first I thought it looked ugly when it was introduced but you just need to find the right dyes.
It would take something incredibly better for me to even think of transmuting it into something else.

I just started joining play as you want groups and use a troll guardian build with staff and mace/shield. Knockbacks be funny.

GuildWarsFan.4356:

No, those two fractals are not tied together whatsoever. The fractal stage that you roll is completely random.

Unless I’m in the party. In which case, you will get dredge and you will love it.

spoj.9672:

I prefer mesmer to bait out the champ wolfs attacks.

spoj.9672:

I prefer mesmer

spoj.9672:

mesmer

No.

dasaybz.9524:

This elitist mentality is what bothers me most about this game. Seriously, if you have fun playing a certain class, with a certain weapon, then go for it. If synergy is soooo important to you elitist dungeon runners, whey the hell are you running with pugs in the first place. I paid just as much for this game as anyone else, and I’ll be sure to bring whatever the hell weapon I want.

And we’ll be sure to kick you out of parties. We’re both fine with that arrangement, aren’t we?

RSLongK.8961:

spoj.9672:

^^
yay necros!

Can be done faster though.

Sure thing, if a unorganized PUG made it fast, imagine organzied guild.
moral of story: less qq more l2p.

So a dungeon where there are only two actual enemies to kill with almost no trash or anything to clear is a good example for whether a class is good or not?

Your poor dagger necro group would actually cry if they were to do dredge @ 49. Have fun with your non existent cleave/aoe dps.

CoF has never been a benchmark for anything but mediocre war pugs.

GS. Even on a single target it’s not far inferior to sword, but on the other hand, it’s far superior to anything that has more than one target. Sword’s strongest hit in its chain, the third one, isn’t an actual melee cleave, but a piercing projectile. It only hits multiple foe in a very straight and narrow line.
Ascended gear is most useful in fractals, where you have to.. guess what. Cleave a lot of things.

An ascended hammer would be better though. Unless you want your ascended gear for purposes other than fractals.

Just max melee range it with cripple spam.

The only class whose ranged weapon is actually their highest dps under all conditions is elementalist with staff. And that ranged weapon still does better damage in melee because of traits (need to stay close for a trait proc) and the fact that you don’t want mobs to move out of lava font.

And then there’s the classic and universal fact that you should always be within boon range in your party which means just stick to melee and don’t chicken out.

J Eberle.9312:

Not referring to AR. If you gear check the pugs that join, you can filter out the problems before you even start. There are still people in celestials running around -_-

This doesn’t really work anymore. I got a pug during a frac that we kicked (not a 50 so it’s not OP) who pinged zerker gear with scholar and everything, but then went and did things like use hammer all the time (on a warrior, not guard) and literally had no dps when observed on his own against a mob. He could take a lot of hits too. I’m pretty sure he had two sets of armor with different stats. And the only time I saw a greatsword it had the taint of ascended healing power.

kyubi.3620:

Guess theres no point to run medi heal if it cant ditch the damage to begin with (why did these fools even put the critical damage in the valor line in the first place.

They aren’t fools for putting the crit damage stats in there. Consider this : guardians, even without investing a single point in the crit damage trait line, can reach a very high level of dps. That’s because the guardian’s base damage is very high. If you had crit damage in radiance or zeal that would make the class more overpowered than it already is.
And the way the valor line is built is perfectly fine for a more survivable PVP damage build. Things like gaining fury while casting meditation is of no use in a party that already has enough fury in PVE, but it makes sense in PVP. Valor has great synergy for the builds that can make use of it but none of them are for PVE.

The most foolish trait line in my opinion for guardians is zeal. It has absolutely nonsensical traits like Kindled Zeal. As if there could ever be such a thing as a condition guardian. Must make them burning guardians happy. All three of them.

Greatsword is vastly superior to sword when you’re clearing groups of trash. If you use sword you’re by definition suboptimal in any of those cases such as clearing the first group of golem in CoE etc.
Sword autochain – third hit is pretty meh unless you can hit everything in a line because it’s not a cleave skill and GS has Leap of Faith, Symbol of Wrath, Whirling Wrath which are all pure AoE (5 targets).

Oh by the way, sword’s third hit is a projectile to boot. The cases are few but it’s easy to forget about that and use/swap to sword and selfdestruct with it because of a reflect. The centaur boss in CM, Wraith in Arah p4, jade colossus.. you can feel it when you’re hitting yourself on a dps guardian build.

Plus all the minor issue with sword third hit not connecting sometimes on structures, or the auto attack chain bugging when you’re trying to hit two things at once without being centered on a target (like destroying the barriers in SE path 1) leading to it continuously trying to do sword wave before failing after a couple attempts and going back to the beginning of the auto chain.

Sword has good auto attack dps but it’s a rather quirky and overall suboptimal-to-camp weapon. I’d rather you just camp your gs (or even a hammer) if you had to chose only one melee weapon. The best thing is to use both in a rotation and be aware of sword’s limitations and behavior, but if you really insist on having meleeweapon/something else (like staff) as a swap, please, don’t camp sword.

Lilith Ajit.6173:

Anyway, staff on my guard is only used for TA blooms, usually switch to hammer after. I’m not a huge fan of sword/x but when the occasion is there, I suppose it’s better than mace.

Sword/Focus is infinitely better for any fight that doesn’t last long enough for the protection symbol to matter. Higher dps AND two blinds, which, on quick trash fights, mitigate more damage than being hit under prot. Also strong burst with the focus shield explosion.

Which is pretty much all of TA in a decent group.

I wouldn’t kick someone for using the hammer though. It has good dps. But there is almost no point in running hammer in a dungeon like TA unless your group has spectacularly bad DPS and takes 3 hours to clear trash.

You still contribute more to the average pug by keeping your own dps uptime than by keeping theirs with might stacks anyhow. I’ve seen so many pugs that couldn’t rally on anything as soon as I stopped dpsing (which is one of the reason why I tend to dislike being made to take the hammer in cliffside pugs. Not because I fear using it, I just fear the consequences of letting them do the dps. Cultists/chanters just won’t die and then they start wiping the group with the constant pressure.. I only start picking up the hammer when people drop dead from not using their invulns while running seals at which point the fractal turns into a 1 hour long hellhole). Even if Staff empower had long lasting, permanent 12 might stacking ability, I still wouldn’t use it. And I’m talking about pugs because empower would be of no use in an organized team no matter how much you’d buff it.

Staff only has two pve job : kiting and clearing TA. You still shouldn’t use it during any actual TA fight, but do make sure to clear the blossoms around the wurm boss when he spawns before swapping back to melee, it’s annoying to lose all your hp on these because the guardian somehow forgot that there’s still more to cleanse in the mid. Pretty much the only time I camp staff, I’d rather kill the adds slightly slower and have the room clean when the boss spawns, than enter the boss fight with 30% HP from triggering blossoms everywhere. I’ve seen too many guardians even in good groups have a knee jerk reaction of dropping staff too soon.

Ayrilana.1396:

What’s their excuse to using staff?

“I support with my heals and might stacks” they say, while mostly spamming horrid staff 1 for the whole duration of many, many fights. Also breaking combo fields with their useless symbol is a popular thing. We need that area retal!

The Game Slayer.7632:

You CAN’T however use focus in pvp and get by. Enough said.

So, what? devs have already said that not all weapons sets have to be as good/viable in all game modes and that some can be better for PVE while others better for PVP.

Focus is my favorite PVE weapon and I wouldn’t want to see it lose the things that make it good in PVE just because people have been whining hard enough in this place.

To be honest with pug roulette if you’re going to exclude a class because of the typical pug, guardian would be the number one in my list. I’ve seen more zerk necro with dagger when asking for speedruns than I’ve seen guardians who didn’t fancy themselves staffing mobs.

Guardians feel like they’ve got a “free pass” on not contributing to a group, even a zerk group.

I would have preferred the evade skill to be put on an air main hand skill rather than fire. Actually using burning speed as an evade rather than a way to do dps might feel a bit clunky and unpredictable since you might have put fire on cooldown before the need for an evade arise and air is the only reliably accessible attunement you could ever get on an elementalist, thanks to fresh air.

Unless you do the wrong thing by camping fire attunement, burning speed is NOT going to be the equivalent of a mesmer’s blurred frenzy or a warrior whirlwind or a guardian shelter and will only have very occasional uses.

Anet doesn’t really “get” the ele.

d/f is underestimated. I managed to get a group to let me experiment with it in a couple speed clears like CoE p3 in good conditions where we’d usually run lightning hammer and I didn’t see a major drop in damage. You also contribute more vuln uptime with a d/f rotation than the slow LH pokes when running group contribution builds rather than the LH “leech” build. Weak Spot trait has a 60% chance of vuln on crits and no ICD. I didn’t cast lightning hammer even once during that p3.

LH is still insanely good constant might stacking, plus blind on trash but d/f can defend itself well and the buff to add one more blast finisher is only going to make it look more attractive. So far, the popular belief that mh dagger shouldn’t be mentioned on a dps build seems wrong to me.

S/D and S/F have superior might stacking but most groups should have enough contribution from more than one party member and SD can make you feel like crying whenever something happens that makes you lose your LH. Such autoattack, much fun/damage, wow.

Anierna.6918:

For skipping, use Arcane Shield. It’ll get you back on your feet when you’re CC’d. Use Armor of Earth; it does the same thing.

They are great to slot in, in case you do get hit, but the best thing during skips is to not get hit and thus walk at non combat speed and I find focus’s obsidian flesh invaluable for that. Invulns makes it so that even if you do get hit, while you’re under the effect of invuln, you’re still staying out of combat. Just cast obsidian when you feel like the mobs are looking at you funny.

Arcane is a last resort, since while it will block attacks, if it blocks three it explodes which can hit a mob and get you in combat.

Obsidian Flesh -> Dodge -> Dodge -> Still getting hit? Arcane Shield.

Really good for catching the top left corner mist surrounded by skelks in fractal, casting it right before picking up the mist.

PCanineBrigade.4916:

I’m hesitant because I can’t seem to spam F1 fast enough in mass trash clearing. And 15 radiance is almost useless in single boss fights.

If you have a mouse with more than 2 or 3 buttons bind f1 to a mouse button it’s really easy to spam it that way, when we clear trash we tend to get up to 25 might just from spamming this, plus all the vuln from the blind it’s one of the strongest guardian trait for clearing trash in my opinion.

Control exists even for bosses you just have to make it happen with a decent group. We use icebow 5 a lot more often in fractals with good success and things like interrupt on the dredge end bosses.

You would need someone to bunker bust so the soldier geared warrior with a hammer can go in and stop it. You could have a boss that goes on an absolute tear that people will have to blind, block, and absorb its damage because dodging will not be enough.

This kind of suggestion makes absolute ZERO sense in a game that doesn’t have any concept of a skill that can generate threat. Bunker ? What bunker ? You CAN’T take damage for the team because you CAN’T keep any aggro on you. DPS members on the team would die and then you’d be left soloing things if there was any mechanic in the game that would kill zerkers through active defense like blinds, blocks, invulns and reflect. This game has no concept of threat so there is no way to make your mister soldier build useful for anything in this game unless they do add a threat system, or force ALL 5 players into wearing PVT which would literally kill the whole dungeon community overnight. If we start being able to actually control aggro in this game it’s just going to turn into another WoW-like game. If we can’t control aggro, and add something that requires a player in pvt, what you will end up with, is a mechanic that would require ALL five members to be in pvt.

Oh, good luck soloing something on a full bunker build. Have fun with your 3 hours dungeons.

This is an action based game, stop trying to turn it into #genericmmo101. No one in a community like the dark souls one would complain about endurance and vitality being useless for an experienced player. Those two stats in an action game are only there to help new players/let you through a couple mistakes. Experienced players can do all of dark souls without upgrading any survivability stats, at Soul Level 1. That’s seen as a good thing in that community. The more you get experience with the game, the less you need stats like vitality in PVE, until you end up being able to play builds that would die from single hits.

Why are people so hellbent on making healbots work in this game? we play gw2 because we wanted to escape this mindset.

The world is literally filled and littered by trinity based mmo. Aren’t you happy with WoW? Rift? Tera? FF14? the soon to be released wildstar? does GW2 need to have tanks and healers in PVE to appeal to a base of player that will jump to the next-best-mmo and leave gw2 in droves anyway ?

Staff dps builds are the hardest to survive for an ele. It’s still easier than thief in my opinion, because you have better utilities to avoid some damage in some cases. Zerk thief is the hardest class to play well on full zerk gear. It can only rely on dodges for boss fights, blind, being their main defense mechanism, works incredibly well on trash, but does nothing for boss fights, and smoke screen is very flimsy / unreliable for many projectiles attacks for some reason.

If you want to learn how to play ele on a damage build, I would rather recommend using lightning hammer builds, with a focus offhand. You might sometimes have to drop your LH for a quick use of a focus skill, but in speedclear groups that’s almost never a problem, the charges on your second conjure should last long enough. If you’re in difficulty, with focus you just quickly drop your LH and cast either Obsidian Flesh, Magnetic Wave or Swirling Winds and you’ll be doing fine for most fights, plus Arcane Shield slotted as one of your three utilities. On trash fights, if you have anyone applying an initial blind, your LH will maintain almost constant blind with its third attack in the auto chain. You can afk melee a lot of things with that. LH is inherently easier than staff fire. It’s also a more reliable dps because if you have to swap attunement in case of emergencies you’ll be dropping your dps to near zero on a staff build, pretty much anything apart from fire attunement and you’re out of luck.
Magnetic Wave also provides the very needed condition removal (is also a blast finisher) on ele dps builds, since they don’t have anything else. Well, staff has the water field, but again, the moment you swap to water you’re looking at 10 seconds of being a useless party member..
Some bosses tend to aggro the earth elemental elite, so cast rocky on fractals like cliffside to help you melee from behind.

Anyway, focus is a divine blessing. I often cast obsidian flesh in fractal during the worst trash pulls like the largest groups of dredge right before casting my lightning hammer, then arcane shield past that, giving you some large uptime where you can just do dps without a care in the world.

x/focus (either d or s main hand) is just too fun and great to have for content like high level fractals. Stacking is never a problem with that setup, and in cliffside pugs I’ve had less trouble resurrecting players who tried to kamikaze a seal on my glass elementalist than my guardian. A combo of obsidian flesh, mist form and arcane shield used successively while rezzing a downed person almost never fails to bring them back up. I don’t do cliffside without slotting mist form because it has saved too many pugged runs from losing party members at the last seal.
You’re squishy, and will go down from a single hit from something like the Archdiviner. At the same time, you have the strongest ability to rez people who were downed at his feet when you have your active defense up. More so than even a guardian. Aegis can only block one attack, and most of the guardian active defense will interrupt the action of rezzing. So overall, it’s not that bad. There are far worse balanced classes out there.

<3 focus. My enjoyment of the elementalist wouldn’t even come close to what it is now without it. Also doing a couple chill here and there from time to time while max melee-ing a boss helps. Drop hammer, double chill, pick second one up if you’re the one being aggroed and no one else is using stuff like cripples.

You don’t even need guardians or mesmers to run fractals. They just make it smoother/faster than running a suboptimal party composition, since you have to play it safer and use some defensive utils without them (I said defensive utils. Not tank gear.). I’ve done dredge with zero guard/mes that went better than most pugs-with-guardians.

[edited my text since I wrote the contrary of what I intended to mean. God I suck at English.]

LittleLepton.8915:

J Eberle.9312:

argh -.- Arena net you need to account for human stupidity. If they have an option to press a button they do it, they don’t even read or think.

This makes me laugh because it reminds me of the quote from the dev that basically said they don’t think player chosen combo field priority is something they’ll do because most players don’t know and won’t use it.

(Summary, majority of players are not smart enough to know the mechanics of the game so theres no reason to create a “complicated” code for something only 1% of the people would use)

Dude
I was wishing so hard I’d forget about reading that.. and you just remind me again. Just thinking about the possibilities we’d see in that game if the developers didn’t react to the average idiocy like that..

Combo field priority would be one of the biggest upgrade they could do to this combat system. To think that we can’t have that because of *…

haviz.1340:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

As to cross-profession comparisons, is there really any reason why an elementalist (top tier DPS) deals 50% more DPS than a warrior (tier 4 DPS)? Given that all classes have unique utility options that justifies taking them even if they don’t actually hit any harder (i.e. warrior has banners, ranger has spirits, etc.) such huge DPS disparities aren’t really warranted nor necessary. An elementalist doesn’t need to deal 50% damage than average to be viable; if it dealt ordinary damage, it’d still be plenty good. Look at LH ele, it stacks might and fury to the max and it STILL deals more damage than average. Why.

You complain that warrior in ideal situation deals less damage than ele? Do you now know why noone takes you seriously?

He probably doesn’t play fractals. It’s literally impossible to have 100% uptime on LH without having either both a mes and a guard, or two guard, in the group. You’ll be dropping it often for a swirling, a cond remove on earth 4 or obsidian flesh. Or even just chill some boss. As for the staff dps build, it can’t actually be played without guard/mes or guard/guard pairing again. Any other group composition will force you into attunements other than fire, making you go from “top dps” to “worst dps in the game”.

The way attunement switching works makes anything beside fresh air builds worthless in content like fractals. Fresh air builds with dagger have decent dps, but it’s NOT top dps at all.

When you take non-100% uptime on LH or Fire on staff into account, their dps is not all that over the top. I don’t think any nerf would be justified without completely reworking the attunement mechanism, something anet is never going to do.

DaliIndica.9041:

So what would replace zerker style high dps gameplay? bosses are still going to one shot or hit hard enough that barely a few more seconds are bought.

Actually, that was a myth pushed onto us by PVT baddies because they don’t even know how to build a decent tank/healer trait and gear set up. In truth, it makes the game even more faceroll, just takes a lot longer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZgRUtK7LkM&feature=youtu.be

They didn’t dodge even once in that video. Just think about how more faceroll it’d be even if you were dodging 100% randomly.

The fact that the average “Iamahealer” and “Iamatank” still dies a lot in pugs is evidence of how incredibly bad they are. Of course they are going to hate zerk, and ask for it to be nerfed, because they can’t even handle to play this game in faceroll mode. They see other people do a lot better and thus fall into the sour grapes fallacy. "Hmm these grapes must taste great.. oh, I can’t get up there! they must’ve been sour anyway. turns back "

Great PM, thanks for the laugh.

I want in on this lulz thing. Bring it to me!

Bright.9160:

At least the Fractured update made me finally realize this game will never achieve anything and I’m done with it. Kind of sad to see Nikaido reply to something in another thread, meaning he might have picked the game up again? I don’t know.

I did, but there isn’t a lot of great alternative in terms of mmo when you like action based mechanics.
Depending on what they intend to do to the meta though I might just leave the game for good if they introduce a ton of unavoidable damage and a soft trinity. I didn’t buy this game with the thought that we’d come to having requirement in grouping like having some sort of healer or anything like that. I’d rather play real trinity games if it came to that since they introduce grind with, gasp, new content, unlike gw2 which keeps introducing grinds without introducing new content to come with it. The amount of work done for things like ascended armor (ugh, the light armors) grinding the same content rather than new raids/dungeons etc makes this mmo look really flimsy. If they wanted vertical progression, it shouldn’t have left fractals and each piece should have come with plenty new fractal and levels to complete.

LordByron.8369:

You didn t have warriors burst ready for grubs….

Lupi ate 4 grubs in that playhowyouwant video. That also amplifies his damage quite a bit.

You didn’t watch the video and have absolutely no idea what the hell you’re talking about. Just as usual. LordByron random acts of derailing threads with inanity.

a t s e.9614:

And the ele’s I had in my other run were both LH with 25 might and we still couldnt finish the destroyer in one try like I do with 4 war\ 1 mes.

Ewww I am bad and played with bad ele so it’s not possible to kill the destroyer in one try

Notice the absence of timewarp which most of war pug scrubs rely on to get it done.

Don’t expect any decent might stacking through combo fields in pugs since they don’t care about combo fields or priorities. Don’t expect pug ele to use good builds and lightning hammer. LH does ton more damage than warriors, as does staff.

Your experience with pugs doesn’t say anything about the class, it says something about the players. We just did a dungeon tour of almost all dungeons after reset with this group composition : 1 engineer, 2 elementalists, 1 guardian, 1 mesmer, yes, no warrior and their unique banner buff and it still went as fast as any of our casual (not record attempts) dungeon speedruns. Unless you’re going for a “record attempt” warriors aren’t even needed at all for a strong and fast dungeon run. The banner buffs are nice to have but they’re not so essential that you’d slow down to a grind without them.

And if you can’t pull dps on a thief that says something about you, not the class. Thief is absolute, top tier dps.

You’re just a strife wannabe, someone who had a look at strife videos, or was influenced by someone who watched his videos and think they’re still relevant for anything in this game. Except that he left the game and is not going to update anything anytime soon.

If they introduce a lot of unavoidable damage they better give us a way to swap ascended gear stats. I’m not going to bother with this game anymore if they tell me all the time spent on all my alts has to be thrown away, fractal reset style. They flipped the bird at us once and a second time won’t be tolerated.

KOPPER.1458:

People keep talking about support but that isn’t what he was advertising in his build at all. I understand the importance of it but it’s not what he was “building”

Just because he didn’t advertise it as support doesn’t make it any better. It’s still a stupid build. If your actual goal is to reach the deep ends of DPS without thinking about pesky things like support, you should be playing thief and elementalist. You can try as hard as you can and your “non-supporting, pure dps guardian” isn’t going to replace one of these two in the dps slot. A class should be played with its strengths.

BeoErgon.9107:

Oops, one last then.

I will tell you what I want : I want my mesmer to be a mesmer, to fool the boss, to make him follow my clones, to make him waste hits on them while bitting him in the kitten , to stop him on his tracks, I want my confusion to last enough for at last one hit of the boss, the heck, make it two!!!…

What I don’t want? Stay on his toes. Doesn’t make sense to me for a mesmer and I don’t like it.

They already do though.. just look at how many arrows you have to dodge on the grawl boss when you have a mesmer vs when you don’t. It’s already enough as is. What you’re asking for is to go afk fight by making sure the boss wouldn’t hit you at all as long as you have clones, which, very fortunately, doesn’t happen, you still have to be careful, but having clones does let you take more rest than not having them.

Look at Sanderinoa’s solo of the archdiviner with his mesmer :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVHRanhbbiI

Don’t tell me the clones didn’t do anything for the fight. He played mesmer the way it was meant to be played and god he’s making it look beautiful.

Look, if you want to do a build that offers zero support to the group, why not run elementalist or thief ? they both offer vastly higher dps than guardian or any other classes and the case of elementalist if you really want to range staff builds are the strongest ranged dps of the game. And you’ll still do more support in the form of giving a couple might stacks and fury than whatever that scepter torch guardian can do.

This build is trying to do something the guardian class just wasn’t designed for. There is no point in bringing a guardian if you don’t take the bare minimum of support expected from the class. Other classes are better picks for raw damage and offensive support.

BeoErgon.9107:

I think this is OK with you, but it saddens me. I don’t like the zerk playstyle as efficient as it might be. I would love for control and support to weight as much as dps in encounters.

We use ton of support. Blind aegis stability reflection projectile absorption ring of warding line of warding knockdown knockback pulls stacking might fury vuln AoE cond removal […]. Just not the afk healbot thing you’d like to see in the game.

And the difference between us and your “play as you want” is that we play the game the way it actually is, while you play the game under some sort of different/parallel world fantasy where using a control build would enforce a control gameplay, which obviously doesn’t happen. Just look at the tense you used yourself. “I would love for”. Conditional. That’s because the actual game doesn’t support your way of thinking. It doesn’t weight as much and no amount of wishful thinking is going to make it happen. You’re all almost like TC’s roleplayers. You’re roleplaying in dungeons instead of open world. Roleplaying healbots and tanks groups.

Nemesis.8593:

As for the rest of the people in this thread, or anyone that defends speed killing… speed kill away my friends, and feed good about yourself for using every single broken mechanic/exploit in the game, another +1 Lupicus kill ftw… grind away my friends !

What little sympathy some of the more chillax people around here might’ve felt for you will probably drop as soon as they see that cancer inducing statement about speedrunners being “exploiters” for running good builds and good rotations. I won’t be reading anymore than that, if I did, I’d probably catch AIDS too.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

In the open world this means that the boss has so much Defiant, that by the time you’ve stripped them all, the boss is already dead, thus negating an entire game mechanic.

This is the dungeon subforum and you’ll find not many give a crap about the consequences in the open zerg. In dungeons the defiant stacks are low enough that we could use interrupts as often as necessary if the game actually required us to use interrupts. The fact is even if you removed defiant there is almost no fights in this game where using interrupts would make more sense than using damage mitigation and just dpsing stuff.
Some fights like AC p3 can benefit from an interrupt while dpsing but there ain’t a whole lot.

But another problem is that the purpose of CC skills is not just interrupting. For several classes CC skills are a key form of defense. For the necromancer for example, Fear is not just an interrupt, but a way to drive enemies away from the caster. Landing a fear at the right moment is impossible with stacks of Defiant. Every single time when you would want to strategically drive off the boss, he only loses 1 stack of Defiant, and proceeds to bash your head in. It’s a shame this system wasn’t thought out better, because if designed properly, it would add a layer of strategy that the combat is severely lacking right now.

You could say the same of most classes, since access to CC is rather well distributed in my opinion. I don’t believe CC is a “key” form of defense for necromancer, it just happens to be mildly useful because it’s a broken, badly designed class that doesn’t have much useful active damage mitigation, even lacking any sort of ability to regenerate endurance, something that is unique among all classes. All of the other classes have either an endurance regen trait, an endurance regen utility, a vigor granting trait and skills, or a lot of built in evades and blocks.. necromancers are rather lonely in the “I don’t have anything of use in PVE” category.

- A half bad player like me can immediately destroy the effort of a team in bringing down the defiant stacks with a misplaced CC

That’s your problem. Dungeons are meant for organized groups and as such your point is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if some random breaks something. How can you even do a “misplaced” CC? Are you spamming your whole weapon skill bar every time something is out of cooldown?

Defiant doesn’t solve the issue of CC-skills being used for stun locking

It solves it by making it incredibly inefficient. A thief alone could interrupt every single major attack from a boss if there was no defiant. With defiant, doing that kind of thing requires constant use of CC from the whole group and would literally multiply the time it takes to kill something. There’s no point in stunlocking something for 10 minutes if it dies in 30 seconds without stunlocking.

I think there is a design mistake in the core implementation of CC-skills, which allows stun locking of any creature or player to begin with.

You seem to forget that players can use stability and other active abilities like blocks to protect themselves. There is no design mistake.

Not only does knight more damage, and benefit from a survivability standpoint that doesn’t compare to PVT (what is better, one more dodge or slightly more HP? Perma vigor is the best thing you can get in this game..) but when we’re talking about training wheels there’s also the fact that a newbie in knight will benefit immediately from the first pieces of berserker gear he puts on, because of the high crit chance, all the crit damage he adds is worth something. Which can hardly be said for a mix of soldier/zerk.

PVT isn’t transition/training wheels, it’s zergonzerg gear for players who enjoy PVD.

It’s rather easy to solo the standard 5 stacks of defiant depending on your class. It’s just not needed. They don’t need to remove defiant, they need to give attacks patterns to some boss that would wipe the entire group no matter what if you didn’t interrupt the attack. Now you’d have a justification for spamming pistol 4 on thief, or run a mace swap on war etc. A prime candidate for this would be Lupicus phase 2 AoE. Make it unblockable and impossible to reflect, then give the option to interrupt it.

Defiant is perfectly fine as it is. Don’t touch it.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

When Nemesis refers to elitism, I think he is referring to the expectation that guardians should be dedicated to supporting and heals. I do see this on occasion, with players trying to recruit guardians specifically to be heal bot. It is a bit of a “n00b elitism” where players who don’t know enough about the game to know that they don’t know enough about the game insist on certain specs and class roles that, while making sense in a traditional MMO, are nigh rubbish in GW2.

But he’s waiting to do just that, push the guardian back to the traditional role.
“I made this video so I can safely make the tank guardian build”. Actual quote from the video. He’s fully going to support what you’re calling the n00b elitism of expecting guardians to fulfill traditional mmo roles rather than supporting only through active defenses like reflect, blind and aegis.

He might turn into the guardian edition of what Dontain and the Sonic Boon build have been for the warriors. A serious pug disaster. Great marketing, great visibility, names for the build, no substance in reality, only in a fictional game world that only exists in the creator’s head. A world of fiction where condition damage is a “must have” in any decent party composition, a mesmer can use a wvwvw build in PVE and a guardian is a tank.

mahariel.4981:

Drop your reflects directly on to her or be ready to eat the bomb. New alphard is good, she’s now joined lupicus as a pug destroyer and rewards players for strong, tight gameplay, I.e. speed running arah veterans. Took me like 15 attempts in a pug to get the hang of it, but now I can reflect her quite reliably.

Be careful what you wish for. The last time a change like that happened to a dungeon path (end boss TA Forward/Up) anet agreed with the people who complained that it “became too hard” and simply scraped the path (rather than reverting the change, that would be too hard for the poor developers) for a new living story path.

Coming to you in the next 3 months : Arah Path 2, Scarlet Returns. Now trying to take over the technology of the mursaat. Sad thing is it would probably make sense with the current lore and sabotaging (for 99% of the player base) a currently existing dungeon path would also give anet a good excuse for eliminating it once again for LS content.

Black Box.9312:

robertul.3679:

The main issue with dredge is their immunity to blind. Why are they immune to blind? Because they look like moles? That is a silly reason.
Every creature immune to a condition like embers/destroyers to burning, hylek to poison etc. also applies it. So it follows that dredge should be able to apply blinds too. Please fix this anet so I can enjoy lore immersion.

I always found it ironic that dredge are immune to blind, but are still fooled by stealth.

Let’s hope a dev reads your post so that we can get that in a patch note :

- The Underground Facility fractal now inflicts a permanent revealed debuff.

deSade.9437:

I’m already on the verge of ragequitting everytime I see that stupid fractal. It’s not much harder than others, but it gets on my nerves for reasons that were said at least 20 times already. AND because we happen to get it after Cliffside…

The dredge are very entertaining depending on how strongly you connect with schadenfreude. Quite often my own hate of the fractal is largely offset by the pleasure I derive from all the cries and pain inside the party. Pugging it can provide endless amount of fun if you’re in a talkative (as opposed to the too typical deaf-mutes) group and people start b&moaning. Just as doing things like voting to save the inquest in CoE fast enough to make everyone else follow suit (people tend to click whatever gets the first vote without paying attention once the first vote has been cast). Fun.

I don’t doubt that whoever is in charge of this fractal must share the sentiment. I encourage him to follow the suggestions from this thread.

The dredge would be even more majestic if they added a dredge-ified edition of lupicus complete with spawning dredge instead of grubs&locusts, and spawning new dredge carts during every phase transition. Then you make sure that level 39 fractal always get the dredge as the third fractal as “part” of the instability.

You could also add a dazing, room wide gong whenever he does AoE.