Guild Wars 2

http://youtu.be/BPBWzV4pGKY

2.5s kill with Thief. GZ to brazil

Interceptor.2653:

Someone who invests hundreds of gold based on the OP of a wish thread, deserves to lose the money, because they haven’t done anywhere near the correct amount of research. Casuals aren’t likely to be making ascended gear, and the ones that are probably don’t care about being suboptimal.

I would agree except…

1. He is passing this off as “research” so credulous people may see all those numbers and think it’s legit.

2. There are a ton of casual, semi-casual players out there that want to be optimal and do things the best they can, but they don’t have the interest in writing their own spreadsheets etc. So they trust authorities and resources in the community. People shouldnt mislead that group.

It’s not melodramatic. He is posting bad analysis that could potentially cost someone hundreds of gold.

Your defense is laughable, even in the example he posted with food, signet, banner of Disc he didn’t include traits! He used Toxic oils instead of dungeon food! He is comparing Apples to Oranges in that very example. What kind of person would look at that and defend it as legitimate evidence of anything?

My criticism was that he used incomplete and flawed inputs and gets incomplete and flawed outputs. The very things you quoted show that! You are basically pointing out examples of his horrible conclusions. The problem isn’t me failing to read his OP, it’s you failing to understand why the OP’s post is terrible.

Excalibur.9748:

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

Once the optimal is known, there is only one viable.

Optimal for what?

Let me answer for you – optimal for an organized group for a speed run.

I only PUG so that full zerk thing will never be optimal for me.

It’s best for pugs too.

Your argument is like the old joke, “You aren’t ‘stuck in traffic,’ you ARE traffic.” Except in your case it’s, “You aren’t in a bad pug, you ARE the bad pug.”

Once the optimal is known, there is only one viable.

Clumsy.6257:

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

In PvE, all buffs being equal, Thief has the second highest dps behind Staff Ele. Warriors are squarely in the middle.

I’m pretty sure I saw some calculations from someone that put LH ele at 1.2% above d/d thief on single targets.

That’s correct, but Staff Ele is higher dps than Lightning Hammer too.

MrAmputatoes.6031:

Thief never really had the greatest dps, that’s always gone to the warrior usually. We do however have some decent burst.

And this kinda to be expected.

In PvE, all buffs being equal, Thief has the second highest dps behind Staff Ele. Warriors are squarely in the middle.

Yaki.9563:

Why does anyone care about Lupi? Most worthless encounter in the game that players wave around to enhance their kitten. He’s just a gimmick target dummy. Want to display your zerker skill prowess? Solo some boss with attacks that aren’t slow and predictable and 100% avoidable in a wide open area with plenty of room to dodge around.

Question #1: Where is your lupi solo video?

Q#2: What boss did you have in mind?

Q#3: Why don’t you show your Cleric skill prowess by doing anything contributive to group success?

Ravenmoon.5318:

Name one other MMO that has dungeon path sales, because I’ve played a lot and I’ve never seen one MMO having dungeon selling as a thing or better put – way of earning gold.

Guild Wars 1.

OHHHH SNAP

Yet another thread about someone who feels the need to force other people to live their lives (and play the game) the exact way they think is best.

I would say that these threads are tiresome, but clearly you have boundless energy.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Erebus.9276:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Erebus.9276:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Erebus.9276:

Considering traits you can get +12% crit chance, both of these are semi-“passive” and available in the x/30/0/0/x setup. So yeah they do make a difference in regards to gear selection.

If that would be the case, then we should all pick up Valkeries because with x/30/x we can have 100% crit chance while in stealth.

Then if that is really the case, what’s the point of the ’zerker and ’ssin gears?

Which brings us back here to answer that question.

Stealth is too conditional though, I’m just talking passive bonuses like the op.

Actually if you review the OP, he did consider having 30pts into CS.

He sure did. Also included scholar runes which assumes being over 90% hp and with only 5points in CS gives +5% crit chance. Assassins gear is redundant.

Perhaps Assassin gears are not for 30CS builds? Which makes the comparison still valid because it’s still nice to see the base numbers of both sets side by side, so if I am to use either set in my Power build, I can determine the difference right away since the OP already did part of the calculation for me.

Good mathematical analysis should have a conclusion that helps the reader make a more informed decision. The OP’s analysis fails on that account.

In the context of end game pve, failing to account for traits/nourishments/utilities and common team buffs (banners, 25 Might, perma-Fury) causes the OP to reach suboptimal gearing conclusions. His bottom line conclusion is that people should buy pieces of assassins gear for their pve Thief, which is objectively incorrect, the result of incomplete or irrelevant analysis. Flawed inputs leads to flawed outputs.

Why is the OP drawing such vocal condemnation? He is encouraging suboptimal choices which waste resources for casual players who would be mislead. This is a disservice to the community. Some of us like to support the community and do not want to see such disservices. The costs of Ascended armor is so high for a casual player that a gearing mistake is back-breaking. Thus, people posting misleading gearing information about ascended armor are being actively malicious, even if they don’t intend it to be. People who act maliciously and damage the community are not generally treated sympathetically.

Problem: anet doesn’t like people solo/duo/trio Arah p2.

Solution: Make Alphard have an attack that one shots the party if someone fails to dodge.

Result: Alphard is easier to kill with 2/3 good players who can dodge and read boss tells than she is to kill with 4 pros and 1 bad.

If the intention was to make the path harder to pug while making it take slightly longer to duo/trio you succeeded. In exchange for it being slightly longer I get to sell the path for more gold, thanks!

Now get out there and break the Guardian lupicus solo record and go next level.

I don’t understand your question. If you’re asking where to put points into for a pve condition damage build you’re so far in left field I can’t even begin to answer it.

Norjena.5172:

Why is the benefit from 3 Sin pieces with RHS more then without?
I think it should be less, same OK, but higher? I can´t see the point. Probably a error in your effective power calculation cause it´s i real dps simulation.

Probably an error on your assumptions more than an error on my spreadsheet.

Edit: I remember what it was now. With the 10/25 builds the optimal food for each was different. If I had kept the food constant you would have seen a bigger gap. Since the 10/25 zerker used a different food than 10/25 mixed the results came out in a way you might not expect. But to be clear, the numbers I posted are the best possible numbers with each configuration.

Norjena.5172:

Is Assasins gear (3pieces) still better if u have spotter (150 precision) too?

Probably not for the RHS build, but still true for the others.

And did u realized that 100% critchance does not mean all hits will do critical dmg? U can have more then 100% and still some noncrit attacks…

That has been disproven actually. Dekeyz spent 30 minutes on two different nights in the mist with a 104% chance to crit build and never failed to crit once. I no longer believe in the theory of a hardcap at 99% chance to crit.

I do, however, believe that the projectiles from WW might have some special property that prevents them from being able to crit.

As far as the hammer builds go vs the sword, they are least 15-20% behind simply based on % damage modifiers and pure dps stats.

Those aren’t DPS numbers, they are effective power. Don’t compare the hammer build numbers to the s/f numbers. The hammer numbers are for comparing to other hammer builds and vice versa.

Edit:

Does not assume UC.

Again those aren’t DPS numbers, its EP. The RHS build would still want to use the GS burst, but you don’t want to camp GS auto to get a second WW since the sword autoattack is just way better than gs auto.

Yes the differences are irrelevantly tiny, but for folks who haven’t purchased any pieces yet, its worth knowing.

Check out my last post in Obal’s guide above, a mix of Zerker and Assassins is optimal for Guardian dps builds.

Head, chest, legs Assassin; shoulders, gloves, boots Zerker.

All Assuming 5 Boons, Optimal stacks, best in slot food, warrior banners, 25 might

10/30/0/5/25 Zerker: 21,109
10/30/0/5/25 3 Sin: 21,127

10/25/0/10/25 Zerker: 19,057
10/25/0/10/25 3 Sin: 19,059

Hammer Builds

15/15/0/20/20 Zerker: 15,499
15/15/0/20/20 3 Sin: 15,514

10/25/0/25/10 Zerker: 16,741
10/25/0/25/10 3 Sin: 16,748

My initial guess was wrong, even in RHS builds 3 assassins pieces are optimal.

Dam Debris was nerfed like 8 months ago and thats why people started using spikey fruits in the first place.

It wasnt exactly the right forum to show math since I was streaming the game not a chalk board. Knowing that, it was pointless to continue to allow you to talk because you were being a troll, thus I banned you. If you want to discuss math I would be happy to do it here.

The point of showing how high my crit chance was, for what that argument is worth, is that you dont need assassins gear. You advocate assassins gear. Since I showed 100%+ crit chance easily with Zerker, I proved you don’t know much about your main class. I fully admit I’m not an expert thief, yet somehow I still know a bit more about builds than you do.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

The thread is about maximizing passive stats so traits like Side Strike are not part of his calculations — which that OP had stated at the beginning of the thread.

wish.1027:

This thread is not for the discussion of trait setups or builds btw. This thread is only for discussion about the math behind gear sets, food, sigils and runes.

If you aren’t accounting for traits and utility skills you’re just wasting your time, which is my point. This is a wheel spinning exercise. It reaches useless conclusions using kooky premises.

I find it pathetic to try to discredit someone’s thread to advertise your twitch. :/

I find your value judgement about my twitch pathetic.

Just going to go ahead and mention that since you don’t take Signet of Agility or Side Strikes into your calculations, all that work which looked laborious, was completely wasted. Flawed premise = flawed conclusions, unfortunately.

If you want to learn about Thief dps builds, watch my livestream tonight at 6pm EST where I’ll be discussing Thief and every other profession post patch.

www.twitch.tv/nike_dnt

See you then.

kyubi.3620:

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

The highest dps build possible with 30 in Tactics is about 20% worse (including your own EA buff) than the standard meta build overall. You would be vastly better off stopping at 20 in Tactics if you want to actually contribute more than treading water.

Did i ever said i was building this thing for dpsing purpose? Anyway its possible to run 0 25 15 30 0 as a dire armor condition warrior spamming flurry with a 1h sword and stacking bleed to 25 switching between sword/shield and sword/sword to get that torment in. Youd be surprised at the number of warrior running 1h swords in pvp and pve its just that people loooove to see big number (because a big 32k 4 second greatsword combo looks always more meaningfull then those small little red numbers poping from a 25 stack of bleed) and normaly ignore the very possibility of using condition specs

running tactics warrior is perfectly possible but is more likely to be viable as a condition build then a critical damage build

of course you can always just put 20 in tactics but not going 30 is just not worth it when you got this far in the tree

I use a condition damage build in pvp, and it is great so that’s fine.

However, your logic is flawed when you say “not going 30 is just not worth it.” Those 10 points are costing you about 13-15% dps. That is a HUGE opportunity cost for the benefit of crappy shout heals or crappy banner regeneration. Your logic is so flawed actually, it is the direct opposite of reality: the cost of going to 30 is just not worth it.

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/83915-axemace-dps-build-for-dungeons-and-fractals-101513/

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/86837-questions-about-shout-heal-viability/

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/86495-hb-is-for-casuals-the-empower-allies-dungeon-build/

If your interested in learning more about traits and the basics of warrior build theorycraft.

Best of luck!

Unfortunately there is no place in end game pve for a tank. You will be an anchor, ofcourse, an anchor weighing your team down and drowning them.

fadeaway.2807:

Because I’m tired of offering full explanations and math everywhere I go. Often people don’t care and it ends up as a waste of time, especially when the conclusion basically mirrors Obal’s pve guide anyway.

Always happy to share math and thoughts in private.

Also, many of my posts don’t go into as much detail as I would like because I post from my phone.

I tried to reply to your PM but I do not have the privledge on these forums any more to send PMs.

Fear Me into a wall. Chain Ckittenil out. Have Guardian drop a Sanctuary on him. Should be just as fast as with Fruit.

The highest dps build possible with 30 in Tactics is about 20% worse (including your own EA buff) than the standard meta build overall. You would be vastly better off stopping at 20 in Tactics if you want to actually contribute more than treading water.

fadeaway.2807:

I always use effective power alongside the full damage formula and skill coefficients /dmg to determine Dps.

So why did your post make it sound like you didn’t understand the concept at all?

fadeaway.2807:

Until sword has more than 20 percent more effective power than gs

Effective Power is only a valid tool for comparing two builds from the same profession using the same weaponset. Comparing the Effective Power of a sword build to a gs build is meaningless when it comes to determining anything about DPS.

Reeeeeeeeeported!

People found out how little gossamer you need to level the crafts. You can take tailoring to 400-500 for much less than a stack of gossamer bolts and lots of people had several stacks invested. Once they realized that the demand wasn’t going to be as intense, they dumped.

1. Scepter is only superior dps if all of Smite hits, which only happens on large model bosses. The autoattack is nothing compared to Sword.

2. Torch 5 is less dps than sword auto attack by a significant amount.

3. Sword dps caught another 5% boost today, now there is nothing remotely close.

4. Your link is to a Guangmath thread.

Okibi.5786:

Any advice for ascended armor? I saw that Nike is recommending a mix of berserker/assassin’s for warrior and was wondering if some kind of mix would be optimal for guardian or if I should stick to full berserker.

For a Guardian it depends if you are using Right Hand Strength or not. There are a lot of variables to consider because Guardians look a lot different stat-wise when using 1hs or hammer, but for what it’s worth I’m going full berserker on my Guardian and Mesmer.

Zerk/Sin Mix:

Warrior
Ranger

Full Zerk:

Thief
Mesmer (debatable, but Full zerk allows you to use precision food whereas Sin mix requires power food , which is more expensive)
Guardian (also debatable, for build not using RHS, 2 pieces of Sin [helm+chest] is optimal, with RHS full zerk. since the difference is miniscule I’m just going full zerker)
Elementalist
Engineer

The damage and crit chance bonuses take effect prior to the hit, so you get the big Eviscerate.

I’m pretty sure everyone expected this months ago based on the fact that weapons recipes required laurels. I had 60 laurels saved for this.

Planning ahead is a good thing, try it.

You cannot get them from the crafted armor, unfortunately. Once you finish making your Soldier’s armors for leveling best bet is to just sell them.

Mostly because in pugs no one wants to be the kitten one, and retraiting is a bummer for a pug.

I’m much more interested in why pugs dont use Skale Venom.

LordByron.8369:

i did pug at 67 with 2 thieves 1 mesmer 1 necro and 1 war ._. we got the worst fractals possible at that time…..

does it count?

If you don t want to explain tdon t use excuses…..just keep this in mind:

Discussion:
This is good because…..

Statement
This is good.

P.S. for Aegis ….sometimes you get focused and run out of evasions OR stunbreak…that is when Aegis will save your party or even saves you preemptively saving your evades.

I don’t want to explain because your responses are often irrational and there is no point in arguing with a brick wall. Guardians are vastly dimishing returns after the 1st and you would be better served with literally any class before adding a second Guardian.

LordByron.8369:

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

6. I see people saying 3w/2g is an ideal party comp for fractals. I disagree. 2w/1g/1m/1* is superior. There is no time, especially now that we are hardcapped at 50, where a second guardian is more useful than anything else. I would rather have a Thief or Ele in that last slot over a second Guard in any circumstance.

What can do an ele that a guardian can t do better?
Guard has
-burst healing
-AEGIS <(total lifesaver when a single player get focused)
-DPS
-offensive buffs
-the best CROWD CONTROL for PVE (binding blade, immobilize, line of warding and lot more)
-reflect uptime with 0 risk (mesmer is way more Tricky and risky to achieve)
-might if needed

Can you tell me what an ele is supposed to play to achieve HALF of that?
You want DPS? nice….0 survivability and in fotm you really die to a sneeze (do you remember the lvl 80 archdiviner melee Group? XD with the ele downed 6 times and the Others meleeing with no problems).

You want support? nice, still worse than guardian AND paired with awful dps.

Ele is good for easy content in zerk or to carry bad pugs in stages like mai trinn, molten, aetherblade or volcanic….you can t keep them alive or do any damage but you won t die and if you are good you can ress them all.

I could respond to all of that with well reasoned responses, but you would still disagree and think your 2 Guardian parties are good. I guess I just don’t play at the same high level that you do, so why argue?

FWIW, a thief is the best for that empty slot.

I know a thing or two about PvE so I thought I would interject…

1. Warriors are used in multiples because they require less coordination. Using your FGJ on cool down and spamming Axe 2 and Mace 4 on cool down with 3+ warriors will do a reasonably good job of maintaining Might and Vuln stacks for the party. It won’t be perfectly optimal, but it’s easy. Sure it may only be 80% as much dps as the ideal party comp, but it requires zero coordination and is thus way easier for pugs or for organized groups trying to go really quickly.

2. Rangers are one change to their sword auto attack chain away from being one of the best and most sought after dungeon classes. Spotter and Frost Spirit are OP, and the only limiting factor to their inclusion in every group is the fact that even good players die a lot trying to melee bosses with sword on Ranger.

3. Engineers have the best vuln stacking of any profession and are necessary in any party composition not predicated upon 4 warriors. Sure a 1w/2e/1t/1guardian party sounds high DPS, but they won’t be able to stack 25 vuln for very long and their actual dps isn’t so good. Change the second ele to an engineer and total team dps will skyrocket.

4. Necros are useless for dungeons because they don’t have a Spotter/Banner/Empower Allies/aoe vuln stacking benefit like other classes. They provide almost nothing in dungeons besides their own middling DPS. In fractals they are useful in that most of the challenge of fractals is from powerful trash mobs, and the AOE Weakness stacking of the necro is very valuable in that regard. But even then, 2-3 warriors with warhorns do the same thing and provide better dps so I wouldn’t call them an auto-include. Necros are in bad shape.

5. If we are talking ideal party composition for max dps, the core is Warrior/Ranger/Engineer. The two open slots are probably ele for might stacking, and an switch spot that is Guardian or Mesmer if you need reflects or Thief if you don’t. It’s rare to see anyone run a comp like this because it requires a level of organization that pugs don’t possess and that speed run groups don’t need or want to bother with.

6. I see people saying 3w/2g is an ideal party comp for fractals. I disagree. 2w/1g/1m/1* is superior. There is no time, especially now that we are hardcapped at 50, where a second guardian is more useful than anything else. I would rather have a Thief or Ele in that last slot over a second Guard in any circumstance.

7. Someone said that people ignore certain dungeon paths because they aren’t zerker friendly. Wrong. People ignore TAAP, SE2, CoF3, HotW2/3 because they are way too long and boring with rewards that don’t justify the time. All of those dungeon paths are completely full melee zerker friendly, like everything else.

www.twitch.tv/nike_dnt

I stream dungeon and fractals on the weekends every week from 11am – 4pm est. #1 stream NA, in my opinion.

By “reflects” I meant SoA and Swirling Winds rather than WoR but I should have been more clear since those aren’t actually reflects.

Zelyhn.8069:

It’s not just ignored: we get mocked.

Normally, I would disgaree with statements like this. But one look at the dev tracker shows that devs ARE posting… just about other topics. For whatever reason the fractal update is the singular hot topic that is being consciously ignored in an obvious way.

I cannot fathom the community reaction if a major, flawed WvW patch was released and the devs went 100% completely silent for two weeks. Not a single “We’re looking into it” nor a “This is operating as intended” or “that fix should be in next week’s patch” or “We havent had a chance to address that particular problem yet but we will.”

Take on look at the dev tracker. Edge of the Mists and Collaborative Development (both WvW topics) are getting massive developer involvement. I understand ‘separate teams’ etc. But its obvious where the love is. It’s obvious what the red-headed step child is.

Here is the issue Anet’s PR/community relations people don’t seem to get: silence is worse than bad news. You can tell us that fixes for particular things aren’t coming soon. You can tell us that we shouldn’t expect XYZ. We may not like those answers, but they are at least answers and the put the topic to bed. When you just give silence, people jump to conclusions, forment anger, create conspiracy theories and become disillusioned. I am not a professional PR or community relations spokesperson, but I know for a fact that you are mishandling this situation completely.

Qoltera.3042:

EDIT: tl;dr Will my 30/10/00/30 with heightened focus and deep strikes(2 signets always on) have higher dps than 30/25/00/15 when stacking bloodlust?(not stacking precision because the inconsistency makes my damage drop too much with 30/25/00/15)

No, 30/10 is about 4% worse give or take. Stacking bloodlust is fine with 30/25 just make sure you’re using food that gives precision.

43 and 44 are challenging fractals, some shards being particularly grueling. For the Shaman in particular…

Normal strategy is to use reflects and burst the elementals down quickly during each transition. In this mistlock the best strategy for the transition is to kite the elementals through aoe while maintaining reflects. Warrior longbow firefields, necro wells/marks, staff ele meteor shower/lava font. Take it slower and play safe and smart.

Black Box.9312:

Casmurro.9046:

Well, this is the dungeon forum, so people here usually talk about effectiveness in dungeons, not in pvp or in Tequalt fight and so on.

AC is a dungeon that features plenty of structures.

That aside though, the greater point still remains.

PVT teaches people its ok to eat attacks and never bother having to learn the boss tells. Something that encourages bad play isn’t something that the community should support.

My criticism to that is, if you are voluntarily choosing to be suboptimal by running inferior team compositions (can’t stack Might and Vuln to cap, dont have banners covered, dont have perma-Fury) or choosing to disregard food buffs because they are too expensive, then you have already thrown optimization out the window and you are well into anything-goes-play-how-you-want land.

Long story short, if optimizing for major dps boosts isn’t worth your time I am somewhat perplexed about handwringing over dps tests that have very little outcome differences. It seems penny-wise and pound-foolish.

A little lime juice is very good in a cranberry vodka.