Guild Wars 2

Idujenn.5830:

Thnx again Obal to provide us with this Informations. I hope it helps to transform some old ideas.

I was thinking about the 10/25/0/10/25 with Hammer, but it doesn`t make much sense. I guess if taking a hammer it will be 15/25/0/20/10 then.
But i would be very grateful if Anet implements something like a 2nd Build on switch… or even a third (vor wvw) and a forth (for pvp)

If someone has time to do this:
Since I have always PuG`s and everybody is thinkin`: “Just one time with pro`s…”; It would be great to see such a grp in full dinamic combat action. Let`s say in fotm lvl 49+.
I`m positive, that would bring some more perspective for rdms. (How a good grp operates, communicates, pulls, camps, moves…. and make a load of dmg)

The buffs are important and sometimes there is only one player who even takes Bufffood and this stuff…

I stream every saturday and sunday either full dungeon tours or fotm marathons with DnT groups. They are casual runs, by our standards, but it will give you a good idea of how organized groups play. For a lot of the named dungeons youd be surprised probably by how little we talk on voice comm besides cracking jokes because everyone knows their role and there isnt much communication needed. On fractals we usually communicate much more because a slight bit higher amount of organization is required to do things with the higher level strats. Anyway, subscribe to my twitch channel =D.

My theory of how to get good dps…

1. Get a lot of Power
2. Crank up crit chance to close to 100%
3. get some bad kitten base damage modifiers.
4. Pile on crit damage.

Should be ok then.

If youre only getting 600 hit eviscerates in pvp… it sounds like you arent wearing an amulet.

Vinny.6924:

DivineSlayer.5039:

Join a good guild. If your good enough go for DnT, LOD, or any other good US dungeon guild. If EU try rT, HC or another good EU guild.

I have a guild that I’d like to stay in and rep 100% is the only problem.

Kick the casuals and recruit dungeon runners.

If you don’t like Writ of Persistance or Mantra of Consecration, maybe Guardian isn’t the class for you. A guardian who wont use MoC is like a warrior who wont use a banner.

Also, from a practical standpoint you have to factor in utility. If achieving max deeps only comes at the expense of Master of Consecrations, it isn’t desirable. If you say you don’t need Guardian consecrations for ______ dungeon, then the question is why not bring a thief or ele in that slot instead for real max deeps?

Happy people get the dungeon tokens they want, and happy people get the gold they want. It’s a really great thing. The only unhappy people are tryhard casual ninja BHBs.

Have you ever thought that the reason you see so many ads for only warrior parties is because they aren’t filling quickly whereas the anything goes parties fill quickly?

I think the biggest problem is players with club feet.

Dub.1273:

Selling with a 4/5 party is like using a condom from a person you met at IHOP at 4am. You think you’re safe…

Exactly. And if you’re a scumbag like heitred.5729, you’re the filthy, STD infected waffle house slore.

Linen will run out before Silk does, I reckon. The Linen-pocalypse is imminent.

I haven’t noticed any difference personally. I think sample sizes are too small to make a definite statement either way.

A few pet theories of mine to explain the play how you want mindset. I rate each one by how much it makes me cringe when I hear PHYWs use them.

1. “I don’t like to respec between pve and wvw.”

This is either because the person doesnt play a lot and doesnt have the gold or whatever to maintain two separate gearsets or he is lazy.

Cringe factor: 3/10

2. “I wvw a lot, and PVE is easy so you can play whatever”

This person is similar to the first, except they bring a WvW elitist mindset in. They are pro-zergers (clearly insanely better at pvp than you could ever hope to be) and they don’t mind letting you know how easy pve is as they Scepter/shield the boss down with their Healway Guardian. Since they didn’t take ANY damage (or immediately healed whatever they did take) it proves they are right, and it doesn’t matter that it took 10 minutes longer to finish the run than it could have, because PvE (unlike high stakes wvw zergs) is a pass/fail test.

Cringe Factor: 8/10

3. “This is what I enjoy playing.”

This one knows that shortbow ranger is bad in dungeons, but plays it anyway because he simply finds it fun. He isn’t deluded about the effectiveness of his build; he just likes it better. This one seems innocent at first and you’re inclined to excuse it, but then you realize the ugly truth: he only cares about his experience and doesnt give a kitten if the build he enjoys playing is a nightmare for everyone else in the party.

Cringe Factor: 5/10

4. “the meta builds are for sheep, my build does 10x more damage than those dumb zerker builds. Celestial does nearly as much direct damage as zerker and the extra condition damage puts the dps over the top. Ofcourse my build is better, look at how fancy the graphics are on my youtube channel.”

No need to mention names, but this is the type of guy who doesn’t actually understand the game or the mechanics or the math behind it, but does understand how to make well-editted youtube videos promoting horribad builds. Inexplicably, this person equates build quality with youtube views. When challenged on their math or game mechanic knowledge, they will revert to one of the other PHYW examples here.

Cringe Factor: 7/10

5. “This is a support build because I like to be supportive to my team, NOT dps.”

This person is a relic of some other MMO where there was such a thing as midline support builds. They subconsciously crave the old school trinity class system because it allows them to safely blend into the background and finish dungeons without their team realizing they aren’t good. In an ironic twist, this was the very same person who was incredibly excited when Anet announced that there would be no trinity in GW2. They mistook the concept of ‘no defined healer or tank roles’ with ‘anything goes and everything will be viable.’

Cringe Factor: 4/10

6. Try Hard Casual Ninja

This person hates hardcore players so much, for some reason that seems impossible to determine, that he goes hardcore in griefing them. most often you encounter them only rarely, like a ghost, usually followed by a cursed shore loading screen. Or as a silent down vote on a youtube speed run video. Like an assassin, they quickly enter your party kick you out of the instance and are gone before you even get their name. They love youtube and reddit downvotes, another way to anonymously express their displeasure of people doing things they disagree with, yet aren’t affected by. Some are misguided white knights who think they are helping the community, others are simple trolls and yet others are people who think they are somehow winning a non-zero sum game by aggressively promoting casual gameplay.

Cringe factor: 10/10

Selling without a 4/5 party is like not using a condom with a person you met at IHOP at 4am.

What? You thought we was afraid of you, Obal? I wasn’t going to run a build? Ahhhhhh fooled you, motherkittener. I kittening annihilated some build.

This dps thing was all a smokescreen. I was gas lighting some dps motherkitteners. They were like, “Oh, we are safe in this idiot’s build. We are never getting beaten. Get some sword and focus all over this motherkittener. Post up greatsword. We own this place. This weak punk can’t play anything.”

Ohhhhhhhhh, kitten you Obal. Crept up on that. You are DOOMED. I am back in the game, so you can tell Dekeyz that her dps are NOT going home unscathed from now on.

Ohhhhhhhhh, wait, you play how you want? You don’t actually finish arah because it isnt in your RP? Welcome to my former world, scrub. Let me introduce you to the new way. It’s called getting chopped down by the BEST Guardian Build EVER.

Lord Kuru.3685:

To zerker experts — if you were a dev, how would you modify encounters so that zerker is not necessarily king?

Change aggro so the aggro is predictable and controllable. Add constant, unavoidable dots that require party healing to overcome.

Guess what that game sounds like? every other MMO ever.

Fractals would be more or less fine and people would happily play them if the rewards were worth it. Here are how to fix the rewards…

1. Increase the gold reward by 10s per level, not per tier. 49 should be a 4.9g daily bonus reward, not 1.3g.
2. Remove Rings from the daily loot table at 31+. Especially remove uninfused rings at 31+, currently uninfused rings drop at 49 still and that is painfully bad.
3. Replace ascended _ boxes with the datamined “Universal Ascended ______ boxes”
4. Replace fractal skins with the datamined “Fractal Weapon Box”
5. Add Earrings and amulets to the pristine relic vendor. Additionally, add ascended weapon and armor crafting recipes to the vendor so we can buy them with pristines as opposed to Laurels.
6. Double the drop rate for the ascended boxes and fractal weapon boxes.

These changes, which could be made in a very small amount of time, would turn Fractals into what it should be. If put to a vote, I would bet any amount of money that the end game pve community would prefer my 6 changes here than to have a leaderboard. And since a leaderboard will take significantly more time and effort to code than these changes, Anet should prefer my changes too.

I guess they wanted to preserve the integrity of the achievement leaderboard.

…

I love when simpler people use the term “entitlement” as a pejorative. When they say it, the implication is that you aren’t actually entitled to something that you think you are. Here is the truth about so-called “entitlements” in this game (and real life too): there are times when you’ve earned something, or been promised something, and you are in fact entitled to it legitimately.

spoj.9672:

I would like an ingame speed clear leaderboard and timer. You could grant ap when a group clears a path in a bronze/silver/gold time. And the record times could be put into an official leaderboard on the website.

Wishful thinking.

They should also make it so you can’t trigger the next boss until the one before it dies. Otherwise, what’s the point because it will be Jump Over Walls Wars 2.

Romo.3709:

Bright.9160:

I thought of an analogy today for all the people that keep defending Anet (although this thread is rather void of them) over all of this. The people who say things like “Well, they said they were adding Fractal weapon boxes in higher levels, but they didn’t say which levels, so they didn’t deceive you at all.”

Image a political party promises to do X, Y and Z when they get elected. Once elected, they don’t even give the impression that they’re working on any of their promises. Then when the people confront them they say “well, we didn’t say we’d do all those things this time we got elected, maybe we’ll do it on our next term”. Guess how well that would fly.

It’s a waste of time to try to generalize the thought. We tried over and over to explain to people why we feel the way we do. What I learned is that quite big amount of players on this forum uses “If it doesn’t benefit me, why would it benefit you” quote as base of their arguments, along with “If you get something that I won’t get then I’d rather have us both get nothing”.

I see a lot of “don’t complain about what you didnt get, be happy about what you got.” Unfortunately for those white knights, this update was 100% lose/lose. There was literally no upside, which is impressive in and of itself if you think about it.

As an aside, I like that they consider Ascalon a “short fractal.” I take it that they didn’t ever do it above level 70. At that level it was probably more painful than Cliffside or even Dredge.

First time I’ve done CoF in a really long time. If you have decent Might you shouldnt need to use any Axe stuff.

http://www.twitch.tv/nike_dnt/c/3417694

The main advantage of RHS is stacking Bloodlust instead of Perception.

The faster recharge is superior dps along with 10 in Alchemy if you incorporate bomb kit might stacking into your dps rotation your party will be ahead. I presume that the only reason anyone would bring an engie in a party is might and vuln stacking, and 10 in Alchemy and Short fuse compliments both. Not to mention Short Fuse is also a personal dps increase if you take condition damage into account.

As far as sigils go, ofcourse you should use stacking sigils and switch to constants after you build stacks. However, in a grenade build Force and Bloodlust are absolutely stupid since they don’t add as much to your overall dps as extra crit chance does. Strength vs Battle is potentially good, but I don’t kit swap every 10 seconds in combat so it would seem inefficient to do so just to proc the sigil, I would much rather swap kits when it suits the BOB cool down might stack rotation.

As far as Infused Precision goes, perma-Vigor is one of the most powerful effects in the game.

I calculated the DPS gained by going into 10 tools to be about a 5-6% personal dps increase. The extra might you stack going into Alchemy is a 3% partywide increase. Seems obvious.

lchan.2169:

Comments well taken. But hey…most peoples meta doesnt mean its meta for yourself. I like my build…infact i love it.

Good for you, but the meta is the meta and your build is your build. If everyone had an individual meta there would be no meta, by the definition of the word.

I think having near perpetual elite signet out weights having all ruby orbs or scholar

You can only have one elite at a time so having conflicting traits is highly inefficient. Since Scholar Runes are something like a 20-25% dps boost (over an empty slot) you would have present a more convincing reason than “near perpetual signet” to justify not using that.

For what its worth, you can blame lag spikes all you want but I have guildmates in Europe who play on NA servers with equally bad latency and they can play at an elite level.

2x Rune of the Monk, 2x Lyssa, 2x Mad King

You don’t need a bow on swap. Any boss that is new to you or you know you cant melee change out your greatsword for the bow beforehand.

And two Knights pieces are, at best, 100 toughness. That is basically nothing in terms of damage reduction. You’re fooling yourself if you think that makes you meaningfully less squishy. You never learn to ride a bike until the training wheels come off.

lchan.2169:

i think this is the best PvE setup. I run GS and bow. Bow is used in situation when i cannot melee at that moment.

There is no shame in being unconfident in your melee abilities and to know when you have to range something for the good of your party overall. That said, someone who has to range often enough to keep a bow on swap probably isn’t the right person to judge what is the “best” setup for pve.

We lost all our pre-patch progression. It sucked, but at least we thought, “we’ll get Fractal Weapon Boxes which should be cool” and "hey maybe the leaderboard will be cool too.’ So all we are left with now is “it sucked.”

Yeah, Modified Ammo is too good not to use now. I personally go 30/30/0/10/0, since I value the Vigor and boon duration for Might stacking a bit more than 10% more crit damage. For runes I use 4x Traveler 2x Lyssa. With Koi Cakes exactly 100% condition duration.

Run the meta grenadier build with rabid instead of zerker and it will be ok.

30/30/0/x/x.

You can slowly acquire a set of Berserker armor and weapons as you go.

You used to be able to make that in cof1, but no longer. The best way to make that rate of gold is to run the fast dungeon paths for each dungeon, but you will run out of paths to do after 2 hours or so.

TheKillerAngel.3596:

Keiel.7489:

Goldberg.4831:

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

Goldberg.4831:

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

So yes, I see what you just did there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence

The dungeon pve community of so-called elitists don’t going around reporting people for champ train farming. We don’t go out of our way to troll the champ trains, or whatever other casual content farm there is.

So in all these forums, all of the complaints come from casuals?? I’m confused.

The anti-selling crowd maliciously plans and inflicts harm on the dungeon sellers in game. There is no opposite equivalent in the other direction, dungeon crowd maliciously griefing the casual scene, which is what my example showed. Your post where you switched the words around created a false equivalence as if the two positions were equally malignant. That is not correct.

Your being a tad dramatic, how does anyone maliciously affect your time in GW2, I was simply pointing out the argument could go the other way. (Ie isn’t the casual vs. hardcore argument getting old?) Are we not just gamming enthusiasts with different opinions?

I know exactly what you mean. One of my firsst few times running Arah, we wiped a few times on Lupi, 3 people decided that it was enough and left the group. So me and the other guy posted on LFG asking for an experienced player’s help. 3 People joined up after a few seconds. Then one of them typed something in /p “L2P noobs this dungeon isn’t for you” and another guy “Go watch a video and stop wasting everyone’s time *”. Beofre I could respond to tell them off, my screen changed to the cursed shores loading screen, found myself party-less. Needless to say I was very angry and oh yeah this story is totally made up.

Players who are actually “good” wouldn’t tell you to kitten off and kick you out.

Read the last sentence again.

I don’t claim to be good, actually. But I do claim that there are people in my guild who are truly good.

I wasn’t assuming any additional Power from might. That was just base solo stats and traits. You are correct that the 5% from Strength would get better and better relative to Ruby Orbs as the buffs are piled on.

Goldberg.4831:

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

So yes, I see what you just did there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence

The dungeon pve community of so-called elitists don’t going around reporting people for champ train farming. We don’t go out of our way to troll the champ trains, or whatever other casual content farm there is.

So in all these forums, all of the complaints come from casuals?? I’m confused.

The anti-selling crowd maliciously plans and inflicts harm on the dungeon sellers in game. There is no opposite equivalent in the other direction, dungeon crowd maliciously griefing the casual scene, which is what my example showed. Your post where you switched the words around created a false equivalence as if the two positions were equally malignant. That is not correct.

So yes, I see what you just did there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence

The dungeon pve community of so-called elitists don’t going around reporting people for champ train farming. We don’t go out of our way to troll the champ trains, or whatever other casual content farm there is.

I never claimed to be a good mesmer, especially since that was like, the 5th time I ever went into Arah on my mesmer?

Also, one bad run doesn’t a guild make. No idea who you are, or whatever, but DnT’s credentials go back something like 12 years, and the list of guilds with a better resume than ours is pretty short.

Good job, troll.

Standard 30/25 warrior build

Scholar: 7,867
Ruby: 7,328
Strength: 7,311

It’s more or less identical to Ruby Orbs, and both are about 7% worse than Scholar.

TimTWW.5867:

Erebus.9276:

Being able to sell dungeon armor would be amazing. Then we don’t have to worry about casual tryhards killing our instances.

I thought casual and try-hards opposites :I

If only. What GW2 community has, unlike any I have ever seen, is a bunch of “casuals” who are aggressively anti-hardcore. For some reason, inexplicably, there is a subset of casuals who are greatly angered by what hardcore players do with their time, regardless of whether it has any effect on them at all. What results from that are people who are so aggressively casual, they go out of their way to grief people selling paths, or down vote reddit threads for speed runs, or dislike youtube videos for “zerker builds”, or any number of things like that.

The fact that they go out of their way to aggressively grief/troll with people who aren’t bothering them at all simply because they disagree with their playstyle is what makes them “try-hards.” They have set themselves up as a fun police, and their definition of what is “fun” and what is “allowed” are aggressively enforced regardless of what Anet thinks of the matter.

You yourself are at an impasse. You are not happy with the concept of path selling, fair enough. What is your next step after this thread: will you just ignore it and go about enjoying the game, or will you join with the self-righteous crusaders and kill instances or file frivolous reports against path sellers? Hopefully you make a positive choice.

Per your request…

Assumptions: 25 Might, 25 Vuln, Scholar runes, Dungeon Pots, Slaying Sigil, Banner of D, Banner of Strength, Full Ascended. 30/25/0/0/15 (Greatsword traits)
—————————————
Full Zerker:

Power: 3513
Crit C: 88%
Crit Dmg: 1.59
Base Damage Mods: 2.38

Effective Power No Stacks: 20,060
Effective Power Perception: 21,615
Effective Power Perception + Sweet and Spicy Food: 23,117
Effective Power Curry Butternut + No Stacks: 22,491
————————————————————

Mixed (Helm, Chest, Legs Assassins):

Power: 3,449
Crit C: 91%
Crit Dmg: 1.59
Base Damage mods: 2.38

Effective Power No Stacks: 20,186
Effective Power Bloodlust: 21,650
Effective Power Bloodlust + Curry Butternut Food: 23,202
Effective Power Food No Stacks: 21,606
——————————————————————-

Some interesting data points here. With no stacks, the mixed Assassins is superior. With stacks but no food (when does this happen? Never?) the Zerker build is the slight favorite. With Stacks and Food, the Mixed gear is back ahead. With just food and no stacks, Mixed is more significantly ahead.

Since it never happens that someone has full stacks but doesnt want to use food, we can throw that out as a fairly useless data point. So the Mixed armor is ahead at most places. There, however, some non-data items that actually make Mixed better than full Zerker beyond just the numbers.

1. Perception stacks are awkward. The full zerker with perception his 99% crit chance, which is nice, and why its numbers with stacks and no food were so strong. However, in practice using them is awkward. Some dungeons you can’t stack, some dungeons you can stack, but not until half way or until you’re almost done. In times and places you cannot use your stacks, being at 88% chance to crit is noticeably painful. Should you go down, and lose your stacks, you are back on “low power mode” and the loss is much more noticeable than losing your Bloodlust stacks is.

2. Food. Perception stacks putting you at 99% chance to crit with the full zerker build paints you into an ugly corner. Essentially, you benefit nothing from food that grants Precision. This means when you want to use something like Candied Dragon Rolls or Omnomberry Ghosts for a casual dungeon run, your dps takes a huge hit relative to the Mixed set using those same foods. The only foods that the Zerker+Perception benefits from are the foods that increase Power. Sweet and Spicy Butternut is ridiculously expensive for a casual dungeon run and far from practical. Dragons Breath Buns are nice and cheap, but aren’t good in every dungeon or Fractal. The Mixed gearset gets its best numbers in ideal situations from Curry Butternut which is also 1/3rd the price of SnS, and this is not a trivial consideration. Also, when casualling it with Candied Dragon Rolls it gets a good DPS boost, unlike the Zerker gear set.

3. The one advantage of the Berserker set, its that its theoretical potential is the highest. If your goal isn’t top dps over the course of a whole dungeon, but rather your goal is to get lucky with crit RNG and showoff the highest 100 blades possible full Zerker with Bloodlust will get you the biggest number since the Power is higher. It may take several tries to get a 100b where all 8 hits crit, but it will give you the highest number. However, don’t confuse that with highest average DPS.

Max.5647:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fIAQFARjcOJvZP+OMxBAzDjAqI1D7qrtUhyA-jQBBoiAEBA5pFRjtwpIas6VER1A-e

That was a really good build 3 months ago. Except you use full assassins. Ouch.

D/D+S/P is great for dungeons. Bring Smoke Screen and SR and you are providing your fair share of support.

Extra points for when this happens on livestream.

If your QA team doesnt try to exploit, they will never find the exploits.

What sort of math would you accept? I can show effective power comparisons if you like. What I find, though, is a lot of people have confirmations biases and will ignore anything I say anyway so it is rarely worth my time to provide it.

lLobo.7960:

On trash fights the blind from hammer AA is enought to keep you alive.

The issue with that plan, is living until the third hit. The trash in the ascalon fractal at 49 or Dredge, or even Cliffside will kill you before that happens if your group doesn’t CC properly.

It works. Go to the mists with a 0/0/0/0/30 build with no amulet. See how often you crit with no traits chosen (4%) then enable to the trait and see how often you crit. You’ll notice the difference.