Guild Wars 2

Ill second the mega server and empty maps. I’ve been forcibly disconnected lately for no apparent reason and when logging in I come into an empty map after being just kicked from a decently full one. I think something else may be going on here.

Honestly I dont think its that bad. One thing making it a bit harder, especially in the further maps, is lack of player density. Thats something that will increase over time. This crap will be an event train in a few weeks just watch.

Yes found out from a friend of mine the common mistakes I was making were not starting mission before queing (dumb requirement given time limit and sometimes obnoxious que times) and not creating a guild PVP team that is participating in the game using the guild tab.

Not sure if reported in this thread but PvP missions cannot be completed from PvP guild missions. Failed attempt 0/500. Saw another user have similar problems outside this thread.

At the moment the “trap bomb” ranger might catch me off guard 1 time in a match. After that I simply type on team chat that ranger is trapper and they are shut down quickly the rest of the match because people know to range them.

Well, as a ranger, I will tell you since the last big push update, I’ve noticed the F2 skill on pets only works like 50% of the time now when downed. Usually getting off a Fear or a Taunt only buys you about 5 seconds. It very rarely turns the game for me.

The other thing I’ve noticed with ranger down states, as ranger, is if fighting another ranger to low health and I down him, I need to be very careful how I stomp him. Because if he downs me while I stomp, he will automatically win duel since his pet will respawn him slightly quicker.

Really happen with this change. Quickness stacking was fun but might stack was what Rangers really needed. Stability too will go a long way to making us more survivable. Thanks for fix.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

Bonus: Bristleback Pet F2 is no longer the Sharpen Spines ability. The F2 is now Spike Barrage to give you more rewarding control.

I noticed you didn’t mention resetting the Bristleback Size when used with Signet of the Wild. Does this mean maybe we still get Godzilla ?

I just realized as well its very easy for warrior to stack quickness with heightened focus. Why is this reasonable for warrior and not ranger? I’m starting to realize since this patch the biggest thing holding the ranger back is the boons we stack well, Fury, Regen and Swiftness, are just not as useful for combat.

Yes before we rip Druid which overall was fairly balanced let’s look a Reaper, Chronomancer and Revenant.

I think the anger stems from the fact that Rangers were supposed to get a bit of a boost in the balance update and ended up with near nothing, leaving them in the lower tier classes still, and how the message was delivered.

Yup, noticed it more lately with ranger, I will often spawn with my pet at half health or I will spawn with burning or confusion on myself.

Any melee weapon to replace the sword would be glorious. A mace or hammer that focuses on CC and heavy hits sounds nice.

I’ve always taken birds because they ride their target like an angry spider money and as bad as the pet ai is most other animals can’t do this. Taunt was certainly a nice upgrade to this. I still take wolf on occasion.

For the classes I played or played against regularly enough to rate….

Reaper
Chrono
Revenant/Druid
Tempest
Dragon Hunter

Reaper is amazingly powerful if setup right. He can be hard countered by Diamond Skin if he relies too much on vulnerability stacking for damage but I chose to roll Cele amulet and put in Dhuumfire instead which turned into a good choice. A lot of people have complained about ranging but I found if I took runes of speed I got a nice boost to life force and enough swiftness uptime I never had problems keeping people in the scythe arc.

Dragon Hunters felt broken to me. I’m still not sure what their role is supposed to be in PvP. The skill adjustments since BWE1 were certainly helpful but I still feel you could get more mileage playing a Shout Bunker or Burn Guard.

Popped out of Arah with friends when Risen High Wizard was going on. Grew my Bristleback and he charged a Veteran Abomination head on in the most epic class of GW2 battle Id ever seen in my life. Another time I fought him in giant form against an Oakheart and it was like a scene from Godzilla, with two huge monsters slowly pummeling each other. This bug brought my a great deal of satisfaction this weekend.

Reaper and Druid are both incredibly fun to play, if for different reasons. With new traits and staff mobility Druid is probably the fastest landspeed class in the game now. It seriously trucks. Its rewarding to burst into a battle with an AOE heal for allies and then dish out some damage. The stuns and crowd control Druid is capable of are great and the heals are very good but not at the sacrifice of decent damage. Overall the druid provides a rewarding blend of hybrid support/damage that I don’t see in other classes.

Reaper plays exactly like I imagined it should. The horror movie theme prevails in it. In the Necro from you are nothing amazing, doing what you can to survive, slowly gaining life force over a period of time. When you pop the shroud though you become a terrifying demon of obliteration turning foes into embers (I carry Dhuumfire with reaper) and dishing out insane amounts of damage. Sure the melee range is limiting but that is why the Reaper is so fun. As an opponent of the reaper it has that horror movie feel that you are only inches away from death and one mess up then you are dead.

I could recommend either one strongly.

Well there was a post not too long ago about Anet mentioning in a podcast that there are undiscovered MF recipes,…. so maybe…

Right dont ruin this. Its 6 free trans charges for beta which by coincidence is a full set of armor. Great for exploring how you are going to outfit your new druid/revenant/dragon hunter/whatever.

Lol, except this isn’t college, fast food or a job for that matter. Trying having all those and being “hard-core.” Let’s remember, Anet is a business and people with money are people without time.

All 5 terrestrial pets work just fine for me. Must be a bug man. Are you sure you are on a beta character? Try creating a new one.

Not a bad idea. I would just add it to the Resounding Tembre trait at that point.

Another option, is to take the concept and move it to a new heal skill. A signet heal would be useful because currently Brutish Seals can feel hard to take since at most it will only apply to 3 utilities. (No elite and no Heal) The passive could copy a random boon every 10 seconds, and the active could apply a static heal and copy 5 random boons on a 30 second CD. The enlarged CD would make it more difficult to exploit quickness overload, as would the random boon selection. The skill would synergize well with Brutish Seals since the 3 stacks of additional might would provide a nice Boon boost when the player needs a heal.

The problem with Stronghold atm is YOLO Blitzkrieg still works. Enlarging team size to 8v8 would fix this but Anet has seemed resistant to that idea from the start. The trebuchet is a great defense tool but is hard to defend alone. At least two more players would be needed on defense to repel an assault of 5 consistently. Currently that’s not possible because running the supply/offense lane with 2 people is inadequate. 8 players just allows more flexibility overall on the team to assign key responsibilities, offense/defense/supply.

Half damage of all skills. Make rangers useless against every class. Then add minor trait to marksmanship. Rangers do 1200% damage to elementalist. Maybe it wouldn’t make us useful but I would feel vindicated to crush the class that so long dominated the meta and I personally blame for WHaO nerf even though they really had nothing to do with it.

Keider.8652:

Rangers players, myself included, were pretty pumped when we heard at Twitchcon that a number of changes were coming to our beloved profession to “bring it more in line” with the others.

This is the heart of it. We were supposed to be getting a buff out of this patch to put us in line with other classes, something we waited a very long time for. I think most people are angry because at the end of the day we didn’t really get anything, and we are going to keep waiting.

Shirk.6421:

Stop crying because of the We Heal As One Nerf/Fix.

Just think about it.

Where was it used the most?

1. Bursting down people in WvW/PvP
2. PvE

What if I told you…

You can still get huge amounts of might/quickness by traiting for it with for example signets. WHAO was primaly used to stack might/quickness pre-fight and burst down people quickly. The thing is that you could always do that and you can still do it. You can get easily 20-25 stacks might and 10 seconds quickness but nobody did it. PvE content is so easy that you don’t need it to be effective (open world is a joke and in a dungeon group you get the stacks either way). It’s just barely used in PvP/WvW for 1 reason: 1 trick pony. You use all your defensive skills to get the damage and if they enemy doesn’t die or even reflect you have to either diesengage or you die. But the might stacking build via WHAO is exactly the same. You blow off everything for the damage. Yes, it’s funny to see people drop like flies but that’s it. You can’t even make use of WHAO while fighting properly because it’s so unrealiable in a serious fight where you could mess up a rotation by 1 click/spell because you need it in exactly that second. You use your heal for the damage while you’re at full hp… pop it too late and half your mightstacks only last 3 seconds.

My fellow rangers – we will stand, we will fight and we won’t falter.

We can still burst people down that easy and making use of WHAO to buff our damage is the same thing as popping SoS for 3 stacks of might. Put your tissues away and man the kitten up.

What? Maximum you can only stack 9 stacks of might with signets? You can get maybe 12 if you throw a pet swap in, and 15 if you break your build to include a warhorn. But the uptime is hardly worth it. The advantage WHaO brought was the uptime of boons. You could recycle your heal every 16 seconds to maintain a relatively high uptime.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Curious: I’m still at work. Have you guys played with WHaO yet since the change? I’ll be trotting out my Ranger tonight, but I wondered if you’re basing your thoughts on statistics — which I can respect — or on playtime — which also is valuable.

Gaile on that same logic did the developers actually gather data on WHaO before they nerfed it? Or did they base their thoughts that it needed a nerf on complaints of other players? It seems hard for me that they were able to collect the data needed to justify a nerf in less than 24hrs. This was completely knee jerk. Why don’t we go back to the original skill, keep it a month, and then look at some metrics at the end of the month to see if it really did make the ranger ridiculously overpowered. My guess is, once people developed new builds based around the skill changes on the last patch and the experimentation with these changes settled down a little bit, the Ranger would probably have fit just fine in with every other class. Now we are nearly back to where we started on a patch that originally seemed like it was supposed to push us higher to be on par with other classes.

What this will do is give people who wanted to play LB or ranged in dungeons a chance to contribute more by allowing a melee pet to collect boons from the party and then receive them on your primary damage source (the ranger.) I am really excited about the synergy of this for PvP though. =D

I was just about to open a thread if anyone had good suggestions for fighting PU condition Mesmer builds. No other Mesmer I have a problem with but specifically this build gives me trouble. The 6 seconds of invis and then reappearing healed really hurts me. More ideas in addition to above? (Primarily for sPvP btw)

Also, was looking at remorseless build. I feel like there is an internal CD on remorseless triggering opening strike. Does anyone else see this? You certainly do not get it every time you generate fury.

Appreciate resources everyone posted. I’ve tried learning this recently as well and am also stuck on Lupi, mainly phase 2 and beyond. I can clear phase 1 rather easily but even with full ascended zerker gear clearing the locust takes more time than he can spawn them at the end of phase 1.

I think this has been my biggest limfac because when he runs his AOE in phase 2 any remaining locust will burst you down quick if rooted on axe 5 or force you out of block on GS4. I’ll take a look at the above though.

Like a few others, I believe the balance in PvP is close to the best its ever been. Every class has access to viable builds right now and balance across the board isn’t perfect but is close for the majority of classes.

I also think D/D ele, as well as Condi PU mesmer, are probably just a hair overtuned. I wouldn’t gut these classes, I would simply make small changes to their individual skills over a series of patches to see how it effected their play ability.

I think most complaints on burning and conditions are people having difficulty adjusting to a mechanic that until now had been largely irrelevant in the game. Its ok for your build to get hard countered by something, that is simply rock-paper-scissors design. I think how often people get hard countered by a specific spec leads them to a false bias that other players are struggling against that spec as much as they are.

^^^ Exactly. People need to realize that most conditions cannot be applied instantly, they have to be landed by a skill. If you want to avoid the conditions, avoid the skills that land them. Just like DD some skills are more important to avoid than others. Auto-attacks that land a condition usually apply bleeds, which aren’t nearly as important as a guardian using whirling wrath in a fire field.

At the end of the day if skill A applies 1000 DD, and skill B applies 500 DD and applies 1 bleed at 100 damage for 5 seconds, Skill A and Skill B apply the same exact damage. The difference is, Skill B has a chance to be mitigated by cleansing the condition before the end of those 5 seconds, where as Skill A, if it hits, gets the full 1000 damage.

Jana.6831:

Thunderbird.8036:

I do not pvp or wvw but you did not specify them or pve nor did you mention a specific class. I disagree with any of them being too easy to play and survive everywhere I go but even if they are I do not see a problem with having some classes capable of a more simple play style as not every person who likes to play games can easily handle complicated numbers of buttons in some specific order. Not everyone is 18 to 25 with instant reflexes; a near zero latency & low frame rate, yet some people who are older, slower reflexes, high latency due to distance from server or whatever, would also like to be able to play & actually survive & maybe they have fun with a simpler way of playing.

No matter condi or power only the skilled people will be the winners in a battle (assuming one on one or equal numbers) so since your complaint appears centred on play being too easy, make & run a toon requiring all the complexity you desire but why complain because some types are at least playable to a satisfactory degree for those not as quick thinking or in reflexes as you may be.

The complaint is actually based around pvp and wvw as (nearly) all rules apply to all 3 modes. And no, condi usually takes away the need for skill – as there’s not enough condi removal to avoid it. And each major patch the condi in at least wvw gets stronger, but our defenses get worse.
Btw: I stomp people who could be my children in wvw and pvp as a glassy zerker D/D thief. My computer could be better, though. Not everybody who is over 30 has got slow reflexes.

ETA: Come to think of it; It’s a pity I don’t have children: “Yo bro, don’t want to tidy up your room? 1 vs 1 me!”

I don’t get how you feel people should have enough condition removal to purge all conditions all the time? This would make a condition build worthless because they would never be able to apply damage since it would all be cleansed. That’s like saying direct damage requires no skill because eventually your opponent will run out of dodges and will not be able to avoid attacks….? It works both ways….

I believe Canach is going to play a more important roll as the story develops. I finished LS2 again this weekend and realized he appears in the cut scene at the end several times. He also, obviously, played an important part in the story of the Beta Weekend story arc.

I’ve done every puzzle in the game, and none of them caused me more frustration or cursing than Griffin’s Rook, trying to nail the bomb on the chest. That was by far the hardest puzzle for me. Eventually got a group of friends to clear the griffins ahead of me, but they couldn’t get every one and it was still challenging.

LA is challenging if done alone just because the risk of falling. Most of the jumps are easy but the route can be confusing and falling in many places can mean restarting an extremely lengthy puzzle from the beginning. I usually team with another Mesmer on this one so we can portal each other back up if one makes a mistake.

Try this in SPvP, I’m still tweaking it a bit.

Axe or Dagger/Warhorn + Staff
Runes Speed
Amulet Valkyrie
Spite 3-1-2
Soul Reaping 1-2-2
Reaper 3-3-3

Utilities up to you.

You will easily cap 25% vulnerability and with Decimate Defense and Death’s perception you will be critting 100% while in shroud. Because of that you can exchange precision for Vitality which gives you more RS up time by increasing the life force pool. Rune of Speed has the same effect while giving you a respectable 20s swiftness from WH5, and 25% speed boost at all other times. This is important because in shroud enemies are going to try and retreat rather quickly and you need to stay up with them. The tempo is to survive outside of shroud long enough to build LF then enter shroud and kill something.

Since you up to 74% critical hit chance without a dime of precision, I build my Reaper with Power/Vit/Ferocity stats. The vitality adds to the life force pool as well as the Reaper’s overall health giving them a ton of sustain for the damage they output while in shroud.

I was on the fence about an MMO for the wife and I because we gamed together a lot and we heard other couples played quite a few MMO’s. I had experience with MMO’s in the past but hated the grindy culture of killing 200 mushrooms to level up enough to move to the next zone.

Watched the Angry Joe review and realized this was a decent shot at a decent MMO. Haven’t looked back. GW2 isn’t perfect, but it is what I think is the best MMO on the market at the moment.

I honestly sort of wish it was coded that 2 players could not occupy the same spot at the same time. I get that its a lot of server data to pass back and forth but I feel like tactics like stacking and what not wouldn’t work as well, causing more tactical gameplay, and it would just be a bit more immersive as well.

Having the same issue. Game is stuck between 17-27 FPS. Changing graphics settings does not effect performance. Turning them all to low yields the same 17-27 FPS as having them all on high.

Running Core i5 4690K
GTX 980 X2 SLI
16GB Ram
Latest Nvidia Drivers

I have 9 level 80s, one of each class and two Rangers. The ones I use the most are ranger, guard, and necro but switch them so often that I’d hardly call any single one a main. They are the only 4 characters that I have 100% map completion and story completion on though.

Other characters I use for different purposes. Mesmer for jumping puzzles, warrior for pvp, elementalist for pvp. The rest I will just play now and then when I want a different experience.

Rangers are fine. They could certainly use more team support but their personal DPS is pretty good right now. Learning to control your pet is a lot of it. I’ve solo’d dungeons as a ranger so saying end game content is undoable by them is simply not true. They also, have great access to quickness, which I see being the next DPS boon to hit the meta.

Shroud 3 grants some really powerful stability that will go a long way toward rezing team mates. Even better when that stab wears thin you can detonate for another second or 2 of fear. I played the reaper in pvp that last bwe and loved it. It fills the design intent well. When you pop shroud you become a melee death entity that every opponent tries every ability to dodge from and run away in terror. You will like the reaper I promise!

Yes, beards please! I would like to be a proper lumber jack but not a full on mountain man!

I wasn’t offended so don’t worry about it. Anyway, if you need help in game feel free to message me. I like to help new players.

Nothing, except there is no “archer” class. Typically you are a ranger, a warrior, or a thief, but not specifically an archer…

Dungeons are unlocked by leveling so in a sense I suppose a few of them are considered end game. Also a few map areas, southsun, silverwaste and dry top were added specifically for level 80. Living Story season 2 was built around being 80 if you purchase it and will probably give you up to 30 hours of story to play through not to mention achievements and some other extras.

Other than that not much content is level gated. That said, especially for a new player, there is a ton of content in this game. You will find new things to pursue all the time that you never even thought of on the way to 80. So don’t worry about things getting dry.

Now for those that have been around a while things are trending now a bit repetitive with no new content recently but that should ease with HoT soon.

Since this thread is about open world pve in general I’d like to add that I wish there was incentive to party for map exploration. Mainly hearts. If you are partied with someone, working the same heart as them, your progress is accrued individually. The thing that bothers me about this, is it makes cooperating on map exploration unrealistic. One person tends to finish before the other and over long period of times gets bored waiting in the heart area for the other person to finish. My wife and I ran map exploration together and tried to stick together for as long as possible. But after about 14 or 15 maps it literally just became an all out race between us to finish first, splitting up in our own directions at the beginning and not communicating or helping each other at all.

I would like to see players get 25% credit toward the heart for each action members of their party does w/in the heart zone. This way, hearts can be completed in the same amount of time solo, but significantly faster if partied, providing incentive to party. A full party of 5 can complete quest twice as fast, which isn’t unreasonable and gives groups incentive to stay together.

I think Bears are the most representative of bunkers. On the ranger proffession the Bear line of pets has the highest health, toughness and sustain, and contains the most amount of support skills like healing, regeneration or condition removal. I think Wolf represents your DPS variant more.

The way I read Pure of Sight, it applies to all skills, meaning it is also effective for scepter skills and a few staff skills as well at 1-2 utilities. This means you are no pigeon holed into playing a DH with a long bow.

Thinking positively, ANET addressed the feedback on the Chrono and Reaper pretty accurately. The fact that the Tempest and the DH were the two most underwhelming elites in the Beta, and their feedback from the developers hasn’t been published yet, is probably not a coincidence. The developers probably got the surveys and realized they made some mistakes in those Elites, and likewise, realize its going to take more than a few small tweaks to fix them. The feedback for the DH and Tempest will probably be quite time consuming.