Guild Wars 2

I found a working DPS meter addon for GW2. Personally, I think that GW2’s policy of no addons is extremely disappointing.

I will only use this for personal use. There is no way to link information shown in the addon in chat so there is no possible way of creating “player toxicity” in game. This is not an exploit and will net me no gains. It does not give me any kind of in game advantage over another player. It is simply a way of seeing information differently in game for PVE only.

My question is will this get me banned?

An image example: http://i.imgur.com/mZ2a8WB.png

Yes, I am aware of the terms of service such as terms 8,15, 17, 19, and 20 in the code of conduct but they are quite vague on consequences.

I feel that the current skill is okay in concept but is way too slow in its casting.

If I were to rework the skill it would be similar to the current one in terms of looks but would have 3 explosions each with their own damage values and effects, with the first one being the weakest and the last explosion being the strongest to reward good skill positioning.

Shatterstone:
Cast time: 0.25 sec
Cooldown: 12 seconds
1st explosion: Light damage, 2 stacks vulnerability
(0.5 sec delay)
2nd explosion: Medium damage, 3 sec chill
(0.5 sec delay)
3rd explosion: Heavy damage, 3 stacks vulnerability, 3 stacks bleeding

As much as I would like for this game to have an expansion/major release/major update, it seems that me and a lot of people are just grasping at straws and connecting dots to form a pattern that just doesn’t exist. I remember a similar thing happened to Mass Effect 3 where people just could not accept that bioware could end the series in a certain way. They came up with crazy theories to try and justify their hopes that ultimately turned out to be in vain as bioware stated that the ending was final and canonical.

That being said, I really really do hope that Arenanet has some form of major content planned for release. Maybe some new skills or even giving more weapon sets to classes. Maybe maps that that are similar in size to the original maps such as queensdale or frostgorge sound. Maybe new dungeons/raids/group activities. Honestly the biggest thing I am hoping for is some new skills or weapon sets for all classes. That would breathe some much needed life into this game IMO.

Bandit.8279:

Hardly any new content?!!!!!!!!! look at what other Sub based MMO’s (looking at you WoW) put out in their first 2 years and GW2 is either on par with them or blows them out of the water. All for free!!

And if you think GW2 is exceptionally buggy then you must be new to the MMO genre. It’s about the same with any other MMO I have played. Especially with new patches.

I would disagree and call that cherrypicking. WoW has released a HUGE amount of content in its lifetime. Hell, between the time that guild wars 2 was released and now, WoW has released 2 full expansions complete with new continents, combat revamps, new skills, and new dungeons and raids. Whether those expansions are good or are a better method for delivering content is up for debate. However, one thing is certain: if you add up all of the content that guild wars 2 has released since the release of the game in 2012, it is pretty meager. Charging a sub probably isn’t a good way for Anet to make money at this point and would probably alienate the most of the playerbase, but one thing is certain: Even though the LS content is free, it just isn’t enough. It is by no means even close to what other large MMOs such as WoW and FF14 offer in terms of new content.
It really is sad to see honestly. I love playing this game and do believe that if the Arenanet can get their s*** together, they could blow every other MMO out of the water in terms of quality. Everything Arenanet needs is there. Beautiful and engaging game world? Check. Cool and Unique Classes? Check. Probably some of the best open world gameplay in the MMO industry? Check. They just need to pull everything together and push out some new substantial content. Not rehashed encounters and events. Not gemstore RNG grab bags. Real content to pump some life into the game that takes more than a few hours to complete and has some decent replay value. As a former employee of Arenanet said on glassdoor: “A studio on the cusp of greatness hindered by poor management decisions. ”

Until several major things change, zerker meta will stay as the prevalent build for all classes in GW2. Why is that you say?

1. No holy trinity. The holy trinity remains as the primary way of designing a combat system in MMOs. It works well and is easy to make content for. However, in guild wars 2 the 2 sides of the trinity: tanking and healing either don’t exist or just kind of suck. There is no way to reliably control aggro, tank stats are pretty useless other than for personal survival. Healing power scales extremely poorly for PVE and is largely seen as useless as every class has a heal skill with high base healing. Instead the “trinity” of gw2 was advertised as DPS, support, and control. However this leads me to my second point…

2. No matter what you build, your CC and boon giving abilities are pretty much the same. The zerker elementalist is going to give roughly the same amount of boons as the full soldiers elementalist. Outside of boon duration, there is really no way to make your support or control abilities stronger. By building any stat except for damage you are really just gimping your party in a way unless you can’t survive. However this leads me to my third point…

3. Content in guild wars 2 is easy. There. I said it. You can view it how you want, but in my opinion, content in guild wars 2, especially older content is fairly easy compared to other popular MMOs because of one mechanic: Dodge. I love dodging in this game, however the ability to have evade frames for a good second at any time if you have the endurance to pay for it makes it so that even the glassiest of characters can survive almost all encounters in the game. I have a feeling that Arenanet won’t change this as they have the motto of “play how you want”. While some players may make this excuse to take strange or “unoptimal” builds, it works both ways. The full cleric guardian should theoretically be able to complete the same content as the 11k hp elementalist. This leads me to my final point…

4. Because of these reasons, there is no real need for teamwork . This is by far one of the biggest gripes I have with the game. Your thief and elementalist are dead or downed? Guardian AFK? Thats okay! Chances are, if you or the other person are good enough you could probably solo or duo the boss. Every class is self sufficient. While this does have its strengths, it really detracts from the most challenging aspect of MMOs, and in my opinion, the part that is the most fun: working as a team to beat challenging content.

I’m not saying that I hate Guild Wars 2. I love playing the game. However like most things, there are many things that could be improved in this game, one of which is the combat. There will be many people who disagree with me, however one of the best parts about playing an MMO is working with other people, often people that you don’t know. The holy trinity was an easy way to make it so that it was necessary to play the different roles and work with other people.

TLDR: I do believe that gw2 can find a way to make their “soft trinity” combat system work, but right now PVE really needs some love from the developers. Until there are major changes to combat or the way encounters are designed, the only trinity in the game is power, precision, and ferocity.

As much as I would like for this game to have an expansion/major release/major update, it seems that me and a lot of people are just grasping at straws and connecting dots to form a pattern that just doesn’t exist. I remember a similar thing happened to Mass Effect 3 where people just could not accept that bioware could end the series in a certain way. They came up with crazy theories to try and justify their hopes that ultimately turned out to be in vain as bioware stated that the ending was final and canonical.

As for me, I’ll give gw2 a year. A year to release or announce some form of major content. Maybe some new skills or even giving more weapon sets to classes. Maybe maps that that are similar in size to the original maps such as queensdale or frostgorge sound. Maybe new dungeons/raids/group activities. Sure gw2 has gotten better with living story releases, but as many other people on this forum have said, when you add everything together, it seems so meager compared to a traditional expansion/major content release. It really is disheartening when you see fewer and fewer of your friends or guildies log on with each successive LS release. I too find myself logging in less and less and soon perhaps another game might take my attention.

+1, I hate the fact that dragons tooth and comet are not ground targeted. It makes no sense and is frustrating to use. Not only does dragons tooth take about 9 years to reach the ground, but I can’t even try and lead an enemy with it because it appears where they were at the moment and any enemy with a brain is going to dodge it or simply walk away.

I love playing guild wars 2 and have been playing it for quite a while now, however as much as I love this game a huge thing I have noticed is there is no way to control aggro. Monster aggro seems to be quite random or worse, monsters go after the person with the least toughness or hp. This has been mentioned a million times before, but what is the point of gearing any kind of non-damage stat if you can’t control aggro? You might feel tanky as a PVT guardian in a dungeon but in reality you are less useful than a zerker guardian counterpart. Not only do you deal less damage than a berserker geared guard, but the zerker guard has the same amount of utility you do.

Hey, see a icebrood dog wailing on your elementalist? Normally you would have to hope the ele knows how to dodge, but dodges are limited by endurance and often they are not enough against monsters that consistently go after one person. With abilities that raise monster aggro on yourself, aka taunts, you can temporarily provoke said icebrood dog into attacking you, giving the ele some breathing room.

You might say: “Well Piratoz, this will make guild wars 2 into the holy trinity, let us play how we want!!!!”. While guild wars 2 does pride itself on being a non-holy trinity MMO, having taunts and aggro control does not make it a trinity. Rather aggro control such as taunts could be added as an extra form of utility and support to supplement existing playstyles. They would be on long cooldowns so characters cannot maintain permanent aggro.

You could also say that the current dungeon meta revolves around stacking and burning enemies down with FGS/icebows so there is no need for aggro control. However Anet has shown that they are listening to players. This is seen in the new enemies seen in dry top which have mechanics which reward good positioning and cater to alternative playstyles. New enemy design coupled with the removal of the ability to do ridiculous amounts of damage the FGS “exploit” would help to discourage stack&burn tactics. Of course the introduction of aggro control is just a step toward improving PVE, there are a host of other problems such condition cap and content rewards but those are other topics for another time. My hope is that the introduction of mechanics such as aggro control would provide some additional depth to PVE encounters. I have also made a list of potential moves that could draw/drop aggro. Without further ado:

Aggro Gain

Guardian

• Shield of Judgement (Shield 4)

• Save Yourselves (Utility)

• Signet of Judgement active (Utility)

• Protector’s Strike (Mace 3) – short duration

Warrior

• Shield Bash (Shield 4)

• Defiant Stance (Heal Skill)

• Bulls Charge (Utility)

Engineer

• Static Shield(Shield 5)

Ranger

• Black Bear F2 (Pet Skill)

• Brown Bear F2 (Pet Skill)

• Polar Bear F2 (Pet Skill)

• Murellow F2 (Pet Skill)

Thief

• Scorpion Wire (Utility)

Elementalist

• Magnetic Shield (Conjure Earth Shield 4)

Mesmer

• Mantra of Disraction active – Power Lock (Utility)

Necromancer

• Tainted Shackles (Death Shroud 5)

• Flesh Golem Command: Charge (Elite)

• Shadow Fiend Command: Haunt (Utility)

Aggro Drop

Elementalist

• Mist Form (Utility)

Thief

• Roll for Initiative (Utility)

Ranger

• Lightning reflexes (Utility)

Personally in my opinion, while Anet has shown improvement in recent content, guild wars 2 still has a lot of problems to fix and has so much potential. What do you guys think about the aggro control and the current state of Guild Wars 2?

I would like to take a moment to say that the living story over the course of season 2 has been a vast improvement over previous content and I am glad to see Anet taking in many of the suggestions made by players. However there are many improvements that the game still needs.

The Good

• The process of obtaining the new backpiece Mysterious Vine/Mawdrey through doing a variety of content to craft it is vastly preferable to RNGsus drops and gemstore acquisition. The same goes for the ambrite weapons. I personally had a good amount of fun hunting for chests while exploring dry top. Hopefully this was a test to see if the same could be applied to the supposed precursor rework.
• Modrem enemies and other various enemies such as the giant beetles in dry top have new mechanics that differ from your standard mob where you could just stand there wail on them with almost no repercussion. New enemies such as the modrem thrasher and giant beetle reward good positioning and modrem husks seem like an attempt to make condition builds more viable.
• The new zone Dry Top is a great area that makes good use of the Z-axis. It is a enjoyable experience to explore the area and find things such as lost coins and buried chests during sandstorms. The area is beautifully designed and stands out as one of the best desert areas I have seen in games.
• [Minor spoilers] The story of season 2 is a big improvement and has its moments. In particular I found story missions involving taimi and the pale tree to be quite good. Taimi while trying to show that she can be strong and capable like the other heroes shows that she is still a child and is vulnerable at times. The missions involving Omadd’s machine and the pale tree are extremely cool and link together things from the lore and scarlett’s journals.
• [Minor spoilers] The inclusion of cinematic cutscenes within the story such as the pale tree’s vision and omadd’s machine cinematics were simply awesome and conveyed points that could never have been presentable using cutscenes made from the game engine.
• The introduction of a BLOODSTONE SINK. No longer will people have piles and piles of bloodstone dust clogging up banks and inventories. The item Mawdrey II consumes bloodstone dust and spits out items in return.
• The introduction of the story journal. One of the biggest complaints was that once a living story episode was done, it could not be accessed again. The story journal rectifies this issue and makes it so that players can play any episode the want at any time.

The Bad

• Linking world events to the living story while being cool in concept did not pan out well in in practice and led to problems such as players being unable to advance their story because a world event was stuck.
• Crafting the new ambrite weapons and the Mawdrey backpiece was fun and definitely a step in the right direction. However the drop rate of fossilized insects from chests was still too low and for some people took upwards of 50 chests to obtain one.
• The hunt for foxfire clusters. This is not fun at all. It is extremely boring and somewhat frustrating to go and run around and farm trees for hours praying to RNGsus that a cluster would drop from a tree.
• Rewards are somewhat unbalanced for certain activities. In particular the legendary sand giant is rarely ever killed as it is inefficient to do so compared to other activities during the sandstorm. This is a shame as the giant does have cool mechanics to it. In my opinion harder bosses such as three-toed-tootsie and the legendary sand giant should give better rewards than your standard champion box such as unique items and drops.

The Ugly

• The biggest thing I noticed that was missing from season 2 content was the lack of coordinated group activites, in particular group instances such as dungeons. This is an MMO after all, group content should be emphasized otherwise it might as well be another single player RPG. Single player instances can be fun but in my opinion should not the be focus of an MMO. Open world events lack the intimacy and teamwork that group instances carry. All too often world bosses degenerate into masses of people spamming 1 until the boss dies with no teamwork involved. However, there are notable exceptions such as three-toed-tootsie which require decent amounts of teamwork to prevent failure. Hopefully Anet has some group instances/dungeons/fractals planned for the future and that they will avoid the mistakes made with dungeons such as the aetherblade path in twilight arbor.

The elite one is slightly bigger but other wise they are identical in terms of looks.

That is what I am proposing, the damage portion trait sort of works like shocking aura’s ICD where each enemy would have his own cooldown so you use an aoe you could strike multiple enemies with lightning bolts at once. A small internal cooldown is needed so it cannot be exploited for massive damage with extremely fast ticking abilities such as FGS 4. Also, to limit the power of the second part of the trait, the air ability cooldown reduction has its own ICD of 1 second. So if you crit 10 enemies multiple times within 2 seconds then the trait will likely proc 2 times reducing air cooldowns by 2 seconds.

Lightning rod, the new grandmaster air trait XIII is pretty underwhelming for a grandmaster. Why take Lightning rod when you could take a host of other talents that are much better such as fresh air, evasive arcana, etc. At its current power level it is probably on par with adept traits. Additionally eles do not have that many abilities that proc it, and the only time it is somewhat useful is with tornado elite and staff air 5.

I feel that this trait should be reworked into something that can compete with must take traits such as elemental attunement and evasive arcana. This is just an example idea I had:

Lightning rod: 50% chance when you critically strike an enemy: strike them with a lightning bolt that inflicts X damage and reduce your air attunement weapon skill cooldowns by 1 second. The damage cannot critically strike and has a ICD of 1 second per enemy. Additionally the air ability cooldown reduction has a ICD of 1 second.

Each enemy has its own separate cooldown kind of like how shocking aura works so you proc the lightning bolt on multiple enemies with one AOE attack. However the air ability cooldown can only occur once per second no matter how many enemies are struck. I think the damage boost and utility provided would be useful for all weapon sets in PvP, WvW, and PvE. Because one would need to spec 6 air this would be a major skill point investment to reduce the cooldowns of powerful abilities such as shocking aura, RTL, updraft, and static field.

TLDR: Lightning rod sucks and needs either a massive improvement or a rework

DutchRiders: the thing is with strength runes and sigil it is extremely easy to stack high amounts of might; all you have to do is attack and have a relatively high crit chance. The 7% damage bonus from rune of strength only needs 1 stack of might to activate so it is essentially always up.

Dexlmentia: Pyromancer’s Puissance looks decent on a build where you camp fire a lot such as a staff dps build. However Persisting Flames increases the amount of time that lava font stays on the ground giving the possibility of having lava font up 100% of the time in addition to granting aoe fury when you blast finish a fire field. This results in Persisting Flames giving a higher dps for yourself and your party than Pyromancer’s Puissance. The best thing about sigil of strength + strength runes is it is essentially a better version of Pyromancer’s Puissance as long as you have decent crit chance and can be utilized in any attunement, not just fire.

In my opinion runes of strength are now superior for dps than scholar runes for a large array of situations. Scholar runes are still the best if you can maintain 90%+ hp for long periods of time and you are in a might stacking party such as scepter/LH ele.

The amount of might you can get from running fresh air/persisting flames d/f with these new runes and sigils is ridiculous. With the new blast finisher on water dagger 3 + sigil of strength/battle you can very easily maintain perma fury and 25 might for yourself and 12-15 might for your party.

With lava font staff build swapping out a sigil of battle for sigil of force still results in around 15-18 might stacks consistently for yourself and around 50% uptime on fury for your party.

The reason why this works is because runes of strength give you 45% might duration now and sigil of strength now has a 60% chance to proc on crit with a 1 second ICD. The might from sigil of strength combined with runes of strength lasts a good 15 seconds. This might be overkill on might if you are running in a organized group that already stacks a lot of might but in pugs is quite good.

Talking about PVE here not PVP.
So when using fresh air d/d, after laying down ring of fire, switching to earth attunement, and using earthquake, is it an increase in total dps to use magnetic leap to leap combo my fire field for a fire aura instead of immediately switching to air for the autoattack? I have zephyr’s boon traited so I gain 5 seconds of fury and swiftness. I am not running 30 fire for persisting flames. I find that with my current frost and shock aura combined with arcane fury from the arcane minor I get around 60-70% uptime on fury if no one else in the party provides fury. Gaining an additional aura on a low cooldown would probably push it toward 100% uptime.

1. Arenanet needs to get rid of this idea that living story has to be mutually exclusive from a expansion pack. In my opinion living story should be a filler between expansion used to tell alot of smaller stories while an actual expansion could take care of the big picture and introduce new zones, dungeons, skills, etc. I personally would be more than willing to pay $30 or even more if the expansion was particularly good.
2. If the gem store didn’t rely so much on RNG items I would be willing to spend more money on stuff like cool skins etc. But when you have a 2% chance of getting a ticket from a black lion chest at 125 gems a key, why should I even try when you need 5 tickets for a skin?
3. Make conditions unique to each player, I’m not sure why the combat system limits conditions to 25 stack max or for burns, poison etc 1 stack max. I don’t think it would be a tech limitation as other games such as WoW do not have stack limits.