Guild Wars 2

The P2 Wall isn’t anywhere close to the same as the others. The p3 door I’d be happy to ban but the community voted for allowing it, iirc I voted to stop it too.

I don’t see a problem with any of these already allowed things, except the p4 tree jumping puzzle after Simin. The arah p2 and ac story seem to be working fine. coe explorable jumping over the door is clearly an exploit.

Vargamonth.2047:

I don’t get what soloing Lupicus or lvl50 Mossman has to do with the topic.
If the skill requeriment would be at that level for full groups and the majority of the dungeon content, there’s no way we would be talking about a berserker meta.

The point is, when people solo those bosses, they do it in berserker. Allow me to connect the dots for you since I guess I was too vague.

OP says berserker is only good because pve is easy.

I respond that even when the difficulty is increased extremely high, berserker is still the optimal choice.

Therefore, the difficulty of the content (or lack thereof) is not a sufficient explanation for why berserker gear is optimal, and other explanations should be sought if you want to make a legitimate point.

Go solo Lupicus off the wall in berserker gear and post the video here Beast. I’ll wait.

Nova Stiker.8396:

NikeEU.7690:

Thing’s Elementalists do in PvE…

1. Provide 100% Fury uptime for the party. PS warrior doesn’t.
2. Provide insane front loaded burst damage with Ice Bow and Glyph of Storms
3. Have about 40% more personal sustained DPS than a warrior.
4. Provide permanent swiftness to the party.
5. Bring blast finishers on demand in and out of combat for utility

And people are trying to say that a phalanx warrior somehow invalidates Elementalist? You don’t understand the meta at all if you think Ele and warrior are competing for party slots: the warrior is competing with Ranger and Engineer. Those are the classes who should feel bad, if anyone.

-_-

/facepalm. (I main ele btw, I know full well how good our damage is)

The meta is killing nearly any boss in the game under 15 seconds.

I know this.
You know this.
ArenaNet knows this.

Do you honestly think the new expansion, ArenaNet is going to keep letting bosses be shredded with ease?

Lets face it, the zerker meta will end. There is no way ArenaNet will allow players to continue to shred their dungeons in under 15 minutes.

When skilled Ele’s solo difficult bosses, that take minutes to kill, they still bring all the DPS skills. You survive based on Burning Retreat and dodged and retraiting for Vigor. They all run Berserker gear. Listen again: even if the game was made so hard that new group content was as challenging as soloing current group content is, everyone would still use berserker because they would use active defense. The Berserker meta won’t end in PvE, so long as the dodge button and positioning trumps passive defense.

Readymade was never in DnT.

Iris Ng.9845:

oxtred.7658:

J Eberle.9312:

Actually bothered to mail them. Wow I really annoyed someone XD

You won’t laugh when she brings her esport friends :>

My friends said they don’t want to be involved with PvE people. They even left DnT. /shrugs.

I kicked Backpack out of the guild because he was annoying.

Iris Ng.9845:

Precision and Ferocity is really good for burrows. I stand corrected.

And burrows are every fight in the dungeon? You could just admit you were wrong, with class. But no, double down on it. What happened to you?

I would still start the fight in Axe/Mace just for the opening Vuln burst even in a pure GS build.

Thinking the rotation will be….

Double Dodge, → Healing Surge → Eviscerate → axe2, mace4, swap, 100b, WWA, BT, Dodge, Rush, Arcing Slice, 100b, WWA, Autos, Arcing and so on.

Whats wrong with 66060 pure GS? You don’t think increasing your personal DPS by 40-50% is worth 3 Vuln? I do, but I thought it through all the way.

66006 will be for boss solos and if you’re the second warrior in the group. Even if you have Eles stacking might 66060 is better overall DPS for the first warrior due to EA and Empowered.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/warrior/Phalanx-Strength-or-Forceful-Greatsword

Warrior is pushing ele out of the meta guys. Might as well delete your eles.

Thing’s Elementalists do in PvE…

1. Provide 100% Fury uptime for the party. PS warrior doesn’t.
2. Provide insane front loaded burst damage with Ice Bow and Glyph of Storms
3. Have about 40% more personal sustained DPS than a warrior.
4. Provide permanent swiftness to the party.
5. Bring blast finishers on demand in and out of combat for utility

And people are trying to say that a phalanx warrior somehow invalidates Elementalist? You don’t understand the meta at all if you think Ele and warrior are competing for party slots: the warrior is competing with Ranger and Engineer. Those are the classes who should feel bad, if anyone.

Sauzo.6821:

Also I look at it like DPS isn’t everything since if you die in the first 5 secs of a fight, you do less DPS than the D/F ele who lives through the whole fight.

Most experienced staff eles can live through the whole fight too.

Pure greatsword using burst skill on cool down will be less about a rotation and more about skill priority list. It will be a bit less fun than Fast Hands but I won’t be sad actually getting 50k hundred blades in CoE again without gimping my team.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

There is no wilful misinformation on my part.

You used the term “zerker build” which you are probably aware is a term that is meaningless at best, misleading at worst. So which is it?

You are attacking me as a person, not addressing the argument. In fact, you go out of your way to derail the discussion into personal attacks, based on false presumptions about me.

So saying that you’re a game developer is a personal attack? A personal attack usually involves some kind of… I dunno… put down or attack. All I said was that since you say you’re a game developer it was surprising to me that you didn’t understand the term “zerker build” was a red herring. If a nuclear engineer didn’t understand what an electron was I would also express my surprise and just as well it wouldn’t be a personal attack. A personal attack in that example and yours would have been if I followed it up with another sentence that had some kind of pejorative insult.

oxtred.7658:

At least that way we know that the meta won’t change for guardian, no specialization to theorycraft..

Entirely possible, however unlikely, that the trait line will have some good stuff. It would be possible to conceive of a Zeal, Honor, Dragonhunter build with GS+Mace assuming there was something in the new traits that was better than Virtues.

Remember, you dont have to use a bow with the elite specialization. It could very well be that for PvE the specialization traits work out better with the normal weapons.

Ad hominem is a logical fallacy whereby one criticize san idea by attacking the person presenting it in order to discredit the idea. My correction of your (probably) willful misinformation doesn’t fit that description.

Did they fix the terrible combat?

Arioso.8519:

NikeEU.7690:

I wasn’t hostile and I didn’t insult you personally. I’m not sure how you got that out of what I said.

Well…

NikeEU.7690:

The game system encourages you to take off your training wheels as you learn the combat system better, not sure what message it would send to encourage you to keep them on. Perhaps the message would be, “stay bad forever!”

You have to admit, that comes off as a tad hostile. Or at least a bit elitist. Telling someone they’re a “Bad Player” for “keeping their training wheels on” may not be outright hostile, but you can see how people might take it that way, right?

I didn’t call him a bad player. Read more carefully. The point I was making is, when the game system encourages you to not take off your EZ mode training wheels the game system is telling you to never improve. I want the game system to encourage people to develop their combat skills the more they play.

The goal should not be to end zerker builds, but to open up the meta to other builds.

“zerker” isn’t a build, it’s a gear prefix denoting a specific stat combination. All of the so-called zerker builds you see on metabattle can and are run with any prefix you want to run them with. For a game designer I’m surprised this aspect of the game’s design eluded you.

pdavis.8031:

Thaddeus & Ropechef:

It is relevent to the concept. As the point NikeEU was making that Game developers don’t need any sort of state/government license or certification, thus the comparison of a surgeon was not correct. But the cook to game developer comparison also doesn’t work, as in many states/cities/counties in the US require a state/city/county certification and license in order to work with food.
It doesn’t matter how easy it is to obtain a permit/certification. The point is that the comparison doesn’t quite work either.

Although I am still confused as to how this whole thing came about, and what it has to do with players stacking or not…

Well since every business in the country requires a local permit to operate then no comparison is valid if taken to that extreme.

What is valid is that never in my life have I asked a cook where he was trained. I have paid attention to where my doctor went to school. I have never cared where a game designer went to school or what certifications he has, but I would never get surgery done by a surgeon who wasn’t board certified in that specific field.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Even a professional surgeon isn’t necessarily better at performing surgery than your average invested intelligent patient.

You know if that were true, no game company would care about degrees in game design, or work experience in the game industry.

That’s a false equivalence. Surgeons, and other professionals, are licensed by the government and/or professional associations in order to be legally allowed to practice their trade. As far as I know, there is no such barrier of entry for game designers.

A more fitting comparison would be a game designer with a cook at a restaurant. Some go to culinary school. Some start washing dishes at an Applebees. Some game designers go to college. Some start by being QA testers.

Most people will care very much where their surgeon is certified. Most will not care where their chef was trained.

I wasn’t hostile and I didn’t insult you personally. I’m not sure how you got that out of what I said.

I don’t understand how the prefix of your gear changes whether an encounter is boring or not. Do you have some add-on that makes the prefix you’re wearing flash on your screen to remind you what it is? I’m not sure the connection between gear stats and your boredom.

The second point, about rewarding tanky gear, there is already a reward for wearing it: you don’t have to dodge as well/at all. That’s a pretty generous reward for a game based around action combat. Oh you want to have god mode survivability AND more utility? That’s strange. The game system encourages you to take off your training wheels as you learn the combat system better, not sure what message it would send to encourage you to keep them on. Perhaps the message would be, "stay bad forever!"

We need a forum rule where if you cite your experience as a “game designer” to support your argument you should have to produce evidence that is true.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

That seems like a bizarre statement to me, regarding a game that advertizes itself with dynamically scaling events, and which already features large scale challenging content.

8 man raids are harder than 20 man which are harder than 40 man, assuming the scaling/tuning is done properly. Why? Individual responsibility. More single points of failure, less ability for fail players to be carried. World bosses like Triple Wurm are an organizational challenge not a play skill challenge. Convincing 140 players to use good builds and follow the right commander is organizationally challenging, but I don’t think any one would say the fight itself is a test of personal play skill by any measurement. Organizational challenges aren’t particularly engaging and promote frustration during progression.

Iris Ng.9845:

Please apply for thst position!

If only the position existed.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Because the two game play styles conflict. So either you split the two game modes, or you disallow one of the two. If you still allow both, then you are ultimate responsible as a game designer for the problems that arise from allowing it.

This is an extremely uncreative position. If you think its impossible to design content that is challenging and able to be be eventually speed-run you are only demonstrating the limits of your own cognition, and not talking in universals.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

My point exactly. There are higher standards in video games today. The action needs to be visible, and game play is more important than visuals. Combat needs depth and strategy, and not this 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1 spam that we see in GW2.

A few points you continue to miss, intentionally or not…

1. The game isn’t 111111 at the highest level. When speed run guilds doing fast runs fight a boss there are tons of things happening at the same time. You’ve never experienced it, so it isn’t surprising to me you aren’t personally aware. However, you’ve been informed of this many times so the time to stop ignoring it is now.

2. The combat system is ridiculously deep, and many of the bosses have cool and interesting mechanics. The problem is that many of the best bosses don’t have nearly enough HP. Lupicus has about 1.44 million HP and groups have the option to EZ mode it and push him into the wall. If his HP was buffed to, say, 5-10 million, and you didn’t have that wall option the fight would be “epic” in nature. it’s unfortunate that anet balanced the end game pve around the capabilities of the worst players rather than the best or even average.

Derenek.8931:

So it doesn’t tell you anything that there are hundreds if posts by different people all complaining about the same thing?

Doesn’t it tell you anything when there are thousands of responses to those hundreds of posts telling them that they are wrong? Or does volume only matter when it services your position?

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

NikeEU.7690:

1. Almost none of those are “meta” builds. Most of them are PHIW garbage. Which is fine, but stop passing them off as meta.

Do you have even half that number of builds for any given class in GW2?

Depends. Does switching a trait or two count? Does switching a utility skill count? I’ll bet you say no, but I’ll also bet many of your GW1 builds are just minor variations of each other too.

NikeEU.7690:

2. Many of them are boss specific builds. I would make a similar thing for gw2 where I change builds up for particular encounters. I wouldn’t call tweaking a build for a specific scenario a new build.

I have never had to change my build for any boss in GW2.

And I can beat every instance in GW1 with Mesmer/Ritway without changing whats your point?

NikeEU.7690:

GW1 combat was all about layering defense. Since there was no active defense besides a highly skilled prot monk in pvp, the best strategy was to overload on passive defense. 99% of encounters in pve could be beaten by having one DPS class being buffed to the moon by 7 support thanks to insanely high layered defense.

Most boss battles in GW1 were a lot more complicated than that. Besides, lets not forget roles and aggro management.

I ran in. I took aggro. My team’s healers and spirit spam keep be alive. Stuff dies. Wow so complicated.

NikeEU.7690:

If you played the game on a higher level you’d know that people tweak their builds for each encounter. You admit as much that you fail on AC burrows so please stop insinuating that you even have a rudimentary understanding of what experienced players do.

Oh wow, get off your throne please.

It’s a valid commentary. When I watch top players of any game I don’t understand play, I am 100% sure I miss all the nuance and depth of their game play. I don’t know why you think you’re different or why GW2 is different.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

You have got to be kidding me. This has happened to me countless times, and I can’t be alone. Why is it that whenever someone brings up a story from their own experience, and others disagree with it, they immediately yell out that it’s a made up story?

Seriously.

Quite often when I join any PUG, I’m usually the last one standing when it comes to those darn burrows. People either lack DPS, or lack survivability. Either way, the pug wipes, and I can’t clear them by myself. Then with much nagging, and with sometimes some stubborn player who refuses to change his build rage quiting, we finally manage to get one of the eles to bring frostbow, and then we finally pull it off.

You’re the common denominator. Figure it out.

NikeEU.7690:

The combat system isn’t shallow, but some of the encounters are. And lastly, there is as much build variety in the meta as there was in GW1.

No there is not! And stop saying that, you have no idea what you are talking about. You are embarrassing yourself. I need only look at my GINORMOUS list of necromancer builds for GW1, and see how HUGE the difference in build variety is. See the picture below.

I looked at the picture.

1. Almost none of those are “meta” builds. Most of them are PHIW garbage. Which is fine, but stop passing them off as meta.
2. Many of them are boss specific builds. I would make a similar thing for gw2 where I change builds up for particular encounters. I wouldn’t call tweaking a build for a specific scenario a new build.

There was SO much more to combat in GW1, than there is to the current combat in GW2. There was aggro control, disenchanting, buffing, protection, interrupts, hexing, damage, bodyblocking, kiting, use of height difference, energy denial, conditions. And all of those mechanics had a purpose in PVE and PVP.

GW1 combat was all about layering defense. Since there was no active defense besides a highly skilled prot monk in pvp, the best strategy was to overload on passive defense. 99% of encounters in pve could be beaten by having one DPS class being buffed to the moon by 7 support thanks to insanely high layered defense.

That does not happen in GW2. And shame on you for even thinking that there is the same build variety. There objectively is not.

If you played the game on a higher level you’d know that people tweak their builds for each encounter. You admit as much that you fail on AC burrows so please stop insinuating that you even have a rudimentary understanding of what experienced players do.

Warrior: Axe mastery should be adept level. Having to pick a 100% necessary axe DPS trait at GM versus Berserker’s Power at the same slot means that pure axe will never have even the possibility of being good.

The 3-4 average vuln that warrior will lose by using Tactics instead of Discipline is a fair price to pay for getting a 60%ish personal DPS boost when using Phalanx Strength.

Maybe the LH nerf will be removing the blind from the auto chain. That should be enough to bring it in line.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Personally I love min maxing in any other game. But I hate it in GW2. Ideally, I would prefer to run my own build, where I combine offense with a bit of defense. But in GW2 you need to maximize your damage, and I hate it.

You done have to do anything. There is no instance that cannot be beaten by 5 nomads necros.

I hate it when I do AC with random players, only to find out that we are not doing enough collective power as a group to destroy the burrows in time. Either they have too little offense in their build, or their survivability is so poor, that they are eating dirt in mere seconds. I don’t even think it’s a case of them being bad players. They just happen to have a build that does not maximize damage enough for them to finish the dungeon.

I don’t believe that is true at all. I just think the story is remarkably fake. If they are level 80 and have Power anywhere in their stat set they can auto attack and kill everything in AC no problems. This sounds like a made up story to me.

There’s something incredibly boring about tweaking your character to only maximize the damage output. Especially when the combat system is already pretty shallow, and the build variety is equally poor.

No one does that though. Every “meta” build is a support build that sacrifices personal DPS for team utility. The combat system isn’t shallow, but some of the encounters are. And lastly, there is as much build variety in the meta as there was in GW1.

MQM, this has all been explained to you hundreds of times over the past few years but you refuse to listen and continue to repeat the same canards. Let’s not forget the “shallow combat system” you decry you have in the past advocated replacing with colored lights over bosses heads that tell you when to dodge. So I take your “combat system” analysis with a grain of salt.

Had the thought that this leaderboard will be the best way to seed future tournaments fairly. Just add up the total points of the members of the team and the highest points is #1 seed and so on. That’s probably the fairest and least arbitrary system I can think of.

Anyone see any flaws in that?

Windsagio.1340:

It’s less word imo it’s tone.

“PHIW” is fine and descriptive, but you start using it as if it’s an insult we have the problem.

(Not that I’m super qualified to be the arbiter of taste)

It sorta goes back to the classic “two tolerances” argument.

People can tolerate something much more easily when it isn’t part of their life. When it forces it’s way into their life, “tolerance” becomes much more difficult. Tolerating the concept of the existence of something you don’t like is just a lot easier than tolerating the existence of something you don’t like as part of your life.

To bring it around to the conversation here, almost all of us are fine with the existence of anything-goes, no-stacking, no-skipping, anti-meta people doing their thing amongst themselves. Most of us have a much harder time tolerating people who 1. want to force us to include them in our meta groups (pretty rare actually) or 2. people who want to force anet to change the game in order to make whatever their playstyle is into the acceptable meta (much more common).

Good idea Jerus…

http://www.dtguilds.com/forum/m/6563292/viewthread/21531347-competitive-pve-tournament-series-individual-leaderboard

Current leaderboard after 3 tournaments. I would add the fractal tournament KING did but I dont have any of the player or team data.

I imagine LH will still be viable so long as the damage nerf is 10% or less.

And spoj is right, most builds do 1.4 – 1.7 coefficients per second of damage. So long as Ice Storm is about to put out a little bit more than that it will be justifiable.

10% with retaliation seems really bad. in practice that probably works out to a 3% overall buff, if that.

The torch trait is interesting, but has the drawback of having to use Torch instead of focus. And ofcourse getting 2 extra damage ticks per symbol and maintaining 100% symbolic avenger uptime is ridiculously good. I don’t see much comparison really.

That turns the Mace symbol into a 3.5 coefficient. turns the gs symbol into a 3.85 coefficient. Those are going to be among the hardest hitting skills in the game, not even counting the passive benefits each has and the 20% from symbolic avenger and symbolic exposure. In group play, the benefits of Symbolic Exposure are probably the most important of all.

Blind spam hasnt been relevant since Thief became standard in pve teams. 25% crit chance under burning is nice but not a game changer. 10% under retaliation is interesting but your retaliation uptime isn’t very meaningful.

Honor has… Mace cool downs (more symbol uptime), EM (a bit of might to fill in the gap for PS warrior) and Longer symbols. Longer symbols is basically the Persisting Flames for Guardians. Getting an extra tick or two out of each symbol is far, far higher dps than you’ll get from 10% under retalition. Especially given that having 100% symbol uptime = more vuln = 20% dps mod uptime = more direct damage.

GS+Mace/Focus with Zeal/Honor/Virtues is just absurdly good looking.

Radiance is awful. Don;t be too caught up in replicating the old meta. With Precision removed from Radiance and with the nature of Symbolic Avenger being the bread and butter of PvE guardian now, it’s clear that Honor is far, far better for Guardian than Radiance.

Anet is probably only loosely aware that Fresh Air is a PvE concern. All of the balance changes in this regard probably were done out of concern of some PvP burst spec that they were worried about. I don’t think it’s a PvEspiracy just yet.

I don’t think you can say with certainty, beside BttH, what those icons represent or how the traits will be merged.

It’s could easily be Fresh Air and Aeromancer Training are merged into one trait.

edit: It could also be speculated that BttH is going to be buffed as befitting it’s GM status. You don’t think that Bountiful Power is going to stay at 1% and be a GM trait, do you?

wauwi.9162:

I don’t want a nerf to zerker and DPS builds overall – all i want are equal (or almost equal) options next to that.

Equal how? I’m curious to know on what spectrum you want equality on.

66060 warrior for groups will be insane. 66006 warrior for solos will be insane.

The only current meta build that isn’t really improving a lot is staff ele. You’re gonna be forced to pick between DPS modifiers in Earth or Blasting Staff and some useless stuff in Arcana. When you consider that 66060 scepter hammer will be REALLY powerful and 66600 D/F will be really powerful it will make them a lot closer to staff.

Thief and Guardian are improving a lot, though Guardian a lot less so than Thief.

VodCom.6924:

Now I wonder : is increasing the difficulty of instanced content at the cost of losing pugging quality of life worth it ?

To that I have no answer.

If anet had infinite development resources, I would say it is worth it. My example would be, “spending development time on dungeons or pvp shouldn’t make WvWers feel like they had something stolen from them.”

But I think we all know that resources are limited and if a substantial portion of man-hours are dedicated to A by definition there is less for B.

FWIW, I don’t think they could make something that is really unpuggable. Even really challenging coordination checks that “require” voice comm will eventually be completed by silent pugs. All it takes is a “pug method” to be developed by the community as in ‘everyone knows when the boss turns red you count to three and use CC while standing on the switches.’ Sure that is easier on voice com but once the pug community ‘knows’ something it will be doable in silence.

Other games have a pretty good solution for this issue. They introduce hardcore content that is actually legit challenging, and if you beat it in the first 30 days you get a special title. After 30 days they nerf the content or give players a buff to make it easier but once they beat it after it’s nerfed you don’t get the special title anymore. The idea of a limited time prestige title attached to hardcore content as a reward rather than more gold is rather appealing.

Attacking the analogy rather the point is a classic example of bad debate style.

When I say "random is bad’ I’m not saying random as in what RNG is lupicus going to give me. Sometime lupicus will auto attack you 5 times in a row in phase 3. Other times he rises up off the ground 4 times in row. That’s not what I mean by random.

What I mean by random is that instead of lupicus having his normal 4 phase 3 moves this time you encounter him he has 4 other moves. And the next time he has 4 other moves. Or next time you do arah Lupicus isn;t even there its some other boss with other random mechanics. aka Chaos.

Another example of the sort of awful “random good AI” fight people who don’t understand game design want. Get a level 35 character or 5. Go into AC explorable and fight kohler with blue quality gear and no traits. Kohler leaps around and dodges and evades and spams fast auto attacks that cannot all be dodged. This is basically EXACTLY the sort of fight you are all describing.

Unfortunately it’s terrible. PvE mobs (or bosses) evading your attacks is not fun gameplay. It feels like a cheap mechanic, and it is. Designing a boss who gets invuln frames unless you prevent it by doing x,y,z mechanics… thats different. But a lot of people who fancy themselves game designers appear to believe that replicating PVP fights is the epitome of game design for PvE, and it certainly isn’t.

To bring it back to the choreography analogy, I agree that changing the order to dance steps to be random is fine design. But changing the fox trot to the cha-cha from one iteration to another is bad. If we disagree over the semantic term “random” I’ll use a less debatable term, chaos. Chaos is not good PvE design.

Bubi.7942:

Not sure who suggested above more randomness in encounters to test the “real skill” of the players (someone even joked with Random Mossman). And that’s great, that’s exactly what is needed in my oppinion. Less scripted, less predictable fights. Experience still matters, but it would boil down to skill.

Randomness is not good PvE design.

PvE is essentially a puzzle. Each encounter asks a question. A boss with all projectile attacks is asking “did you bring adequate projectile defenses?” A boss with powerful, but easily telegraphed melee attacks is asking if you can dodge properly, or can stay out of range properly.

There are a couple of ways that an encounter can be badly designed. One is the boss simply asks no question. The boss literally sits there and does nothing threatening and all you do it hit it until it dies. The second is the question is too easy to answer. “Can you dodge an easily telegraphed attack once every 15 seconds with no other threat?” Ummm, yeah we can do that. ZZZZZ. The third is the boss is asking a question for which there is no adequate answer. Maybe the attacks aren’t adequately telegraphed. Maybe he has an attack that cannot be blocked or dodged or prevented in any way. Maybe the boss just goes into stealth and randomly downs a person. Either way, after the fight you realize there is really no way to improve it, the next fight will be just as random and meaningless because there is no answer. Cheap mechanics are not good.

What would be a good boss design? Easy: asking lot’s of questions, all very different in nature. “Did you bring good dps?” “did you bring a water field to heal up?” “did you bring a way to strip defiant stacks to interrupt a key attack?” “did you bring a stunbreaker?” “did you bring projectile defense?” “did your team position themselves intelligently where they needed to be each phase?” “did you avoid standing in red circles?” “did you dodge the telegraphed attacks?” A really challenging boss could ask many or all of these questions plus a bunch others too. The key, however, is the second time you fight the boss you will have made progress to knowing the questions you’re being asked and bringing answers. This is how raid progression works outside of gear. Each boss pull you learn the questions the boss is asking better, and bringing improved answers until it dies.

I’ve compared it to a dance. A good boss fight is like learning a very challenging choreography. A bad boss fight is being asked to dance with no music.

There arent enough Energy sigils to keep me from bumping this

Reasons to nerf Berserker gear offered so far… My responses on parenthesizes.

1. Bored. (you’re bored of the content. playing a healer won’t make doing AC more fun)

2. Diversity is a good goal. (We already have build diversity. gear diversity is enforced naturally by the challenge or lack thereof of the content)

3. I enjoy playing other roles than DPS… (so go play them, no one is stopping you!)

4. …but I don’t want to be ineffective. (So you really just want your roleplay build to get buffed)

5. Different gear should enable different playstyles. (Actually, it doesn’t have to do anything. There is no law that says that. Anet designed the game to have traits be a more meaningful determinant of your playstyle than your gear. Simply put, you WANT gear to enable playstyles but that is a far cry from saying is SHOULD enable playstyles.)

6. It makes the game too easy, fights are over before you have to dodge. (Thats a content problem not a gear problem. People who solo bosses take minutes to kill them and dodge a lot and wear berserker so they aren’t being blown up in seconds)

7. In Silverwastes Berserker isn’t meta (It is, but either you aren’t skilled enough to survive or you are but just aren’t aware of it.)

8. Well they should eliminate all gear stats and make all gear the same. (no one here disagrees)

9. Berserker isn’t fun for me. (That’s probably a content issue. Or a roleplaying issue. Or an issue of you not referring to my response to #3)