Guild Wars 2

Bitoku Kishi.8346:

Necro I’d say is currently the best fractals class aside from possibly Guardian. I’m guessing that dulfy link is way out of date though, so I’d take it with a grain (or maybe bottle) of salt if I were you…

My head hurts.

Troll post or serious post? Too tired to tell.

I do catch your drift and just to make it clear I wasn’t posting with the intent of singling you out at all, but I read about 90% of the posts on the thread so far (or at the very least, skimmed through them) and there’s quite a lot of people under the impression of how this community is supposedly awful.

It’s certainly not perfect and there are obviously a lot of problems that need to be addressed, but people on here really need to understand that elitism is something that will always exist in the world of gaming and like any MMO, there is a large spectrum of good, bad, nice, mean, stupid, and intelligent players.

In that regard, it can be very similar to real life and as such the best way to handle a situation is often times the same way— ignore and avoid those that cause you trouble to the best of your ability.

I completely support the idea of having enrage timers because if you remove the pressure of having to deal enough damage within a certain amount of time, that’s one less thing to worry about in an encounter and ultimately makes it less difficult. This wouldn’t be a good thing because we don’t want to remove pressure from the raid encounters. If there was no enrage timer then it would be much easier to get this done because then you could take tankier setups and reduce your chance of failing without consequence.

And to all the people concerned about having meta builds focused on maximising damage output… seriously, get a grip. Something referred to as a meta build should be something referred to as the publicly accepted best option available.

The general idea is that you only take as much defensive support as you actually need and all other resources are typically allocated to either the offense or some other utility that’s appropriate. This is how the current previewed raid boss is, and this is how it will always be. For all we know we might get way more complex raid bosses that require even more defensive support, and the same principle will apply to those ones as well.

I don’t miss scarlet at all. Too cliché for my tastes.

If you guys think this game’s community is terrible I’m actually kind of glad you never had to experience something like Runescape’s, where you actually had to be scared of people finding out about your Skype or any other applications you used (people would often times make names related to the ingame name they had) because they would do anything and everything they could to DDoS you so that you would die while disconnected and they could loot your stuff, both in PvE and PvP settings.

You should be grateful that there’s nothing terrible to deal with on this community other than elitism and trolling, as opposed to having everything in your bank wiped from being keylogged and having to worry about interacting with people knowing that so many people were scamming and social engineering people into trusting them so they could lure them and steal everything in a heartbeat. You actually had to be careful about letting people know you were wealthy on this game due to the fact that it would make you a bigger target for abuse/hacking. If you were wealthy, you had to worry about whether or not somebody is being kind to you to try to one day be able to snatch your stuff.

Also having tried Archeage last fall, can say without a doubt that community was horrible by comparison. The map chats were literally filled with autotypers, racism and people trash talking new players.

Seriously, this community is angelic compared to what else is out there. I feel like I’m getting too old having said all of this because it’s just like… I don’t know, I’ve experienced so much worse on so many different levels including people sending death threats over pixellated wealth, real life harassment and hacking of emails/facebooks and whatnot… and I’ve not heard of anything as remotely terrible happening on GW2 in nearly 3 years of gameplay other than getting phishing mail and kicked from pug groups from the LFG etc.

Forgive me for being insensitive to your issues, but get some thick skin. Forget the elitism on this game because it is so inconsequential in the grand scheme of things it’s just stupid to let it affect you so much. There are so many different things you can do to avoid it, such as joining guilds and making friends that you can play with for one.

Warrior for low manning content, elementalist for group content.

Jerus.4350:

Personally, in AC I just want to get out ASAP… I don’t know if I would have rushed the boss, but I’d have been tempted. When it comes to anything outside Arah and Fractals I just want to get it over with. Can’t blame other people for feeling the same way. And, in the end 1 champ bag, ehh. This is hardly worth calling malignant imo, rude, sure.

Exactly.

+1111111111111111111

Everything else feels like a huge chore to me outside of arah/fotm.

Jerus.4350:

50’s are more fun anyways it makes Jade Maw somewhat entertaining at the very least.

I don’t consider clearing a horde of trash very entertaining, this whole encounter is a disappointment due to it not even having a boss fight. So when I get it on any level other than 50 I feel thankful because it means I can semi-AFK it without costing the group anything.

I want to buy executioner’s outfit too. I’m willing to pay 2k gems for it if I have to.

Drop rate differences are abysmally low.

There’s also pretty rare chance of getting weapon/armor chests, so doing 2 weeks and not getting any chests is very common and to be expected.

Nah, even if your ethernet cable was like 200 ft long it’d still be fine.

Trust me I wouldn’t be so persistent about this if I wasn’t 100% sure you would notice an immense difference. Just make sure that if you decide to go this route as well, you ensure that every single other person in the future that you find has trouble with lag you do them the favor of making sure it gets through their head that wireless is trash.

I really can’t believe I was so stubborn about it for so long tbh. My ISP wouldn’t give us a different modem for free that has multiple ethernet ports the first two times that I asked and gave some stupid excuse like “sorry we can’t guarantee what kind of modem the technician will end up with, they’ll just use whatever is in their vehicle” and I didn’t want to pay for a new modem. This meant that for many months I had to sacrifice the whole home not having wifi if I wanted to connect my laptop via ethernet.

Looking back on it now, I’m an idiot for not saying “kitten it I’ll just buy a new modem myself.” -_-

In the end they finally gave us one with 4 ports for free, but paying like $100 to not suffer for over half a year with what I did… would have been a worthwhile investment.

Eponet.4829:

Weird, when I played it, it did noticably more than my berserker mesmer.

That’s because mesmer deals atrocious damage in general unless you can somehow manage to maintain 3 phantasms at all times, and considering the unlikelihood of that ever being the case along with the fact that getting 3 up requires ramp-up time, this makes mesmer damage in general very bad unless reflects are involved.

Comparing elementalist to mesmer DPS is pointless since mesmer DPS relies entirely on phantasms.

Pikachu.1829:

Why would you run celestial to begin with?

Pretty much the same question that I want to ask, because the gearset provides a low amount of every kind of attribute and doesn’t excel in anything. What this results in is having average-at-best performance in all circumstances when the reality is that the vast majority of all PvE encounters do not require additional defensive attributes to excel in.

This makes celestial totally pointless.

Well you should do yourself a favor and order the longest ethernet cable that you need. They don’t cost that much and I can guarantee you it’s worth it. That’s actually how I’m being routed through telia instead. For some reason when I’m hooked up directly to my modem rather than the router that’s hooked up to the modem, it changes the path my connection takes to the ncsoft servers.

Take my word for it that it’s worth it. The stability of a wireless connection is too fragile.

You mean you’re stuck being routed through level3.net? They kitten something up on the way to the servers in germany really badly for me, and it’s been this way for months. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re causing problems for people trying to play on NA servers as well. There’s unfortunately nothing you can do besides either moving to a different state, try changing the way you’re hooked up to your modem/router, or use a VPN.

However if you’re stuck with way way lower download and upload speeds than what you’re being promised from your ISP, that indicates there’s either a problem with your modem or your ISP is being stupid. Try calling them and asking for a technician if you’re not sure where to begin determining what the cause is.

Ropechef.6192:

i as super stoked about the poison cloud changes,
I moved this weekend so i missed the play time and i dont have a stable connection currently. (miku i know your pain. its terrible)

Soon as i can solidify connection i am gonna see about that solo. been trying for longer than i care to admit to…

Yeah it’s horrible when you can’t play due to lag. Thankfully 90% of my internet-related problems are gone these days, due to a combination of both not having to deal with wireless anymore and more importantly not getting routed through level3.net.

Meanwhile, my friend is suffering with CenturyLink and often gets stuck with like 1 Mb/sec down and 0.3 up… poor him ;_;

Only way I can enjoy this fight is if I’m soloing it honestly. It kittenes me off to do it with other people unless 1 person removes stacks and the other 4 stealth, it’s just irritating when people drag her away from the debuff fields.

I think it’s a good design for soloing but terrible design for a group encounter.

Ele doesn’t really have much of a use for any of the current raid mechanics. I’m pretty sure if any boss has a large hitbox, you’ll always want an ele.

Thief? I dunno, pretty much no reason to take one for raids unless tons of stealthing on demand without being able to blast is needed for whatever reason or you need to make use of its high mobility for something.

That said, this is just speculation. Eles have been having everything taken away from them in the past year with nothing given to them, they’re in kind of a slump tbh. They’re not a terrible class, they never will be, but they aren’t nearly as valuable anymore.

It is ironic that the people who’ve actually beaten the raid boss found it fun and are looking forward to more whereas the most vocal people that complain about it are either people who haven’t even bought the expansion let alone try it, or people that claim it to be boring and too easy yet haven’t even completed it once.

So you’re basically saying that you can’t do dungeons fast without it being exploiting?

You should know that whatever “regular way” means to you, it is subjective. To me what is a regular way to do dungeons is to normally go with 1-2 friends, not caring at all about what classes we’re using and we will not kill trash mobs unless it’s necessary. This is a regular occurrence for me and it’s not cheating. Is it regular for most people to do dungeons without groups of 5? Certainly not.

Arenanet gives us a choice of whether or not we want to kill enemies, skip events, take shortcuts or whatever. You need to get it out of your head that just because somebody doesn’t like doing something exactly the way that you do it’s exploiting something unintended, because that’s simply false. You don’t know what the original creators of the dungeons intended and at this point they probably don’t even remember because they’ve stopped working on them years ago.

tl;dr – You need to look at the situation from more perspectives than just the way you feel about it. Being close-minded will not only prevent you from being able to understand other people, it will make it more difficult for you to cope with different interests and conflicts that come along the way as a result of them.

Well then welcome to the game, hope you’re having fun thus far. Post again if you have any questions that you need answered!

dlonie.6547:

Miku FTW. That’s it in a nutshell, I was going to say the same thing but take 6 more paragraphs.

We’re on the same wavelength here, buddy!

-salutes-

I’m pretty sure the main reason they were re-enabling and disabling them is because that’s the only way they can actually test whether or not they’re working, due to the fact that the problems that ended up coming about weren’t things they were able to work out on their internal testing servers.

I could be wrong but to be honest if they were temporarily enabling and disabling them without announcing it at all, people would find out and rage hysterically about them not saying anything about it. It is human nature— people are going to be complaining regardless as long as they don’t get what they want.

I think it’s a bad idea to interpret the situation as if they’re trying to offend us, because it’s pretty obvious they’ve been working really hard and just goofed up in many ways. Common sense tells me that they’re probably a whole lot more stressed and upset about the situation than we all are.

That said, I’m also frustrated here with you because this content is literally all that I’m looking forward to in the expansion, everything else is for the most part kind of irrelevant to my interests. I didn’t even get the opportunity to try the raid boss, which really sucks…

xarallei.4279:

It’s a beta. There are no world firsts in beta especially when most of the playerbase can’t get in. But grats!

It would indeed be meaningful if there was actually competition to be had.

I’d like to be able to at least try the boss myself, to gauge whether or not it’s fun or even remotely challenging. We couldn’t even get everybody in our team in the instance at the same time.

In fact, it took like 45 minutes just to form the first squad because people were bugged and stuck in parties and couldn’t leave them etc.

You can’t compare dungeons on this game with a game FFXIV’s without coming to the conclusion of GW2’s being really terrible, and that’s because we have had no maintenance on them for years.

When content is left to rot and no meaningful changes are made along with no new content that has engaging combat is implemented, this is what happens. Everybody hits the max level, everybody ends up repeating the exact same things over and over again and nobody feels like settling for less than what they’re used to.

I don’t think their intentions are to make it so that damage-centric builds are less desirable because balancing content that way would be absolutely horrible.

What they want is to open up the possibility of somebody or multiple people taking on a different role with it actually contributing to the party in a meaningful way. By this I mean, perhaps sacrifice 1 or 2 people to focus entirely on defensive support.

That said, I really don’t know about the difficulty of the raid bosses soon to come but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s difficult enough for at least most groups to justify the idea of taking somebody to heal. To me that’s not a bad thing, what would be a bad thing would be making it so that it’s required to have somebody healing. You don’t necessarily have to make it a requirement to succeed in order for something to have value in groups.

All in all it’s important to understand that it would be unrealistic for content to be designed with the mindset of there being an equal amount of people bringing tanky/healing gear as people focusing on maximisation of their damage. I can’t even imagine how dreadful the content would be to play like that, lol.

Okay so Berserker is STRONG. Like, really strong.

I’m going to test it on a few bosses in Arah right now. Will post more later.

EDIT: Meh, I’m having mixed results but it seems pretty strong on Lupicus. It’s going to take a lot of testing and I probably won’t have clear results until after the expansion launches because my beta character doesn’t have all the stuff I want to test with like embers/ogre pets and stuff.

Zaroua.2714:

NikeEU.7690, Pandabro.8743, Laggo.8973, Purple Miku.7032, HwaRyun.1807, TheFamster.7806, Brimstar.9036 and Zui.9245 all give off white knight vibes. It seems to me that they’re all attacking the people who are criticizing the raid for being too easy and lacking in the mechanical depth department without actually addressing the points being brought up. Again, to me, that’s stereotypical white knight behavior: relentlessly bash anyone who dares to say something negative about what you like..

K so you’ve already proven yourself to be completely clueless referring to me of all people as a white knight. It’s very rare for me to take a stance that’s in defense of anet. This time is one of them because I tend to side with those that think rationally and don’t behave like self-entitled children.

There’s absolutely no post of mine where I “relentlessly bash anyone who dares say something negative about what I don’t like” here. I didn’t say even once that I even like the raids. In fact, I found them to be an overall disappointment. Does that mean that I’m not allowed to post to tell some guy who hasn’t even tried the content at all that he’s being ridiculous? Am I a white knight for trying to get someone to chill out and actually try the content before going into a fit of hysterical rage?

Me a white knight?

Man, I feel sorry for that kid. It must suck being that delirious.

Lopez.7369:

Do you guys realize you’re doing all of this on a live server? Please stop ruining people’s fractal and dungeon runs.

How else are they going to determine whether or not it works if the literal only way they can check is on the live servers, since the problems can’t be reproduced on their internal testing servers/clients?

This has been popularly requested for years, but dungeons are too low of priority for anet in general for this happen.

Believe me when I say this has been asked for… for years… among so so so many other things.

I’ll try to upload some more warrior footage showing both burst and DPS and hopefully some new solo content soon.

Starting out with a short revisit to this. Big numbers :# https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MboKKRRnWAI

Evapor.6849:

Money is an object to me, maybe you can tell anet to send me a copy of the expansion for free to. Weird that you say im raging, more like dissapointed, aren’t you the one that ragequits like on stream all the time?

Yeah, I do ragequit on stream sometimes when things don’t go my way and I tend to lose patience quickly depending on what mood I’m in and what’s happening. What relevance does that have to this thread and how does that change the fact that right now you’re blindly raging about something you have nothing to do with?

I’m pretty calm and rational right now whereas you’re being self-entitled and immature, complaining about something you haven’t even given a chance to try for yourself. What makes you think that any of the negative things you’re saying about anet is going to convince them to change their content?

And if money is a problem for you and you’re not buying the expansion then this shouldn’t even be an issue for you. You have literally no reason to be so upset right now, so take a breather.

Yeah I think extending the beta weekend depending on how long it takes to fix any of these major issues is in order.

I’m understanding, I know that you’re all trying your best to fix all of the problems but it would be quite unfair for all the people who were excited about being able to play this weekend to miss out on one of the 3 promised days. Some people tend to also save their coursework for sundays too (-waves-) so playing on friday/saturday was planned, meaning people like me will only have 1 day to enjoy it (hopefully?).

bladex.9502:

Which is exactly why a lot of people are giving feedback atm, in the hopes that devs actually do something with it, unlike our experiences in the past with issues left undressed for months or even years.

I don’t see why we shouldn’t be allowed to give feedback because its only a small part of the complete raid.

But see I’m telling what I told to a person that just flat out admitted he doesn’t even have the expansion. He hasn’t even tried it, he’s just watching it:

Evapor.6849:

I don’t even have the expansion, watching a group of clueless people on twitch

What valuable feedback could anet get from a person like this who’s just blindly raging about something he hasn’t even tried for himself?

I agree with you about the significance of us giving them feedback bladex but what I’m trying to say is, this guy in particular isn’t providing anything helpful for them whatsoever and it’s only going to make them resent having to interact with us in the longrun when people behave like him.

Keep in mind they aren’t even required to post on the forums as it’s not a part of their job descriptions. They’re just doing it because they’re excited about the content they’re making and want our feedback.

Evapor.6849:

I do wonder why this one in particular was the raid they chose to present when all the mobs you encounter are so uninteresting, literal recolours of each other.

Probably because they want to test the most basic of what they have in store?

I’m generally not that optimistic when it comes to updates/the way that anet handles things but I don’t think this ranting is very rational. Did you even kill the Vale Guardian yet?

No offense but I don’t understand what reason there is to be upset right now other than that the squad UI along with raids were disabled temporarily, resulting in a buzzkill for the day. As far as mechanics are concerned, there’s literally only one raid boss in this demo instance and we’re beta testing it. Not only is it incomplete, but we have half a dozen or so devs actively checking every thread and looking for feedback. In fact, this is the most dev activity I’ve ever seen on this subforum.

So with that in mind I really don’t see what the problem is right now. Even if the mechanics aren’t desirable for the boss, they’re a lot more engaging than anything else is in this game.

Even though the fights in this aren’t that difficult, it’s definitely the case that the game’s current content is indeed way easier. So technically they are fulfilling that part of their promise— it is definitely requiring more effort and coordination to complete than any fractals or dungeons do.

Anyways even though I don’t really like what I’ve previewed so far and find it to be an overall disappointment, I had fun today. I haven’t seen so many people in my guild online and messing around on TS together like this in a long while and it was just fun to play with so many of my friends at once ^^

The problem is that if these raids aren’t sufficient enough to challenge us and fun to play, this is going to be shortlived.

At this point I have no choice but to be hopeful that they’re only showing us the most basic of what they have in store for us.

Azure it’s definitely a DPS increase while actually in the transformation, but the problem is when you’re out of it. You don’t gain adrenaline fast enough without furious to maintain 100% berserker’s power uptime and without the Signet Mastery trait from the Arms specialization you’re not able to activate your Signet of Fury during the downtime for longer fights.

My current opinion is that it’s definitely best to use for fights that don’t last very long particularly due to that one really strong trait at the master level that gives the additional ferocity, but for long fights (raids I guess?) I’m not really sure. It will need a lot of testing to fully decide.

As somebody that plays to maximise efficiency in PvE, tempest is basically worthless.

It’s low DPS, garbage support unless you go for a full healing build or something like that (which wouldn’t even be that good anyways, and besides when is this ever even needed?), and slow + not fun to play. That’s the general conclusion I’ve come up with after playtesting it.

It just brings nothing valuable to groups at all and doesn’t surpass or excel at anything.

It seems like a roleplayer-eque type elite specialization that’s intended to appeal to people who are really into the elemental archetypes of things or liked that show Avatar: The Last Airbender or whatever.

I’m quite disappointed. I still can’t get over the fact that we didn’t end up getting sword tbh… was really hoping for a solid melee option.

I’m not a fan of the GM trait options.

I think that the GM traits should offer an option relevant for both direct and condition damage builds as well as self-defense. Right now it has a taunt when you activate the transformation (Bloody Roar), an asset that improves burning duration and application (King of Fires), and the option to gain stability when breaking out of a stun and when in the transformation (Eternal Champion).

The problem that I have with this in addition to the trait changes in general since the specializations update this summer is that formerly we didn’t really encounter the problem of having nothing relevant to choose from, but now that problem comes up quite often.

Berserker as a whole has the potential to be a really good addition to warriors running direct damage builds but it’s just right now to me that the grandmaster traits seem kind of disappointing. I really like a lot of things about it so far, but this is currently my biggest gripe that I have with it.

As for the heal Blood Reckoning, I like it. It requires some actual thought to be put into it in order to make proper use of and is situationally useful. The only thing I think I’d change about this would be to make it instant cast maybe, because it’d make it more practical to make the best use of it during a rotation/skill combo instead of needing to activate it early on, since a lot of warrior’s damage tends to be backloaded (axe’s triple chop for example). However having this instant cast would make it seem like a stance rather than a rage skill.

As for the utilities, I’m not particularly fond of them other than the leap. I’m honesty not really sure what to make use of them overall since they seem to be kind of irrelevant outside of PvP. The concept of them itself is nice, but since I’m giving feedback with the perspective of somebody that wants to try to make use of this spec in raids/fractals/dungeons I can’t acknowledge these utilities as options worthy of considering.

Jerus.4350:

necromosia.3891:

disconect … Last boss …

Don’t we only have the first boss?

They’re referring to the “practice”/trash mobs before the Vale Guardian.

To be honest Branden, I kind of like it at the bottom like that. Maybe it would be a decent idea to be able to drag it or move it to the top or bottom?

dlonie.6547:

All I know about UW solo is from watching Miku spend over an hour clearing krait during his first FotM 50 solo.

From that, I think tedious is an understatement :P

God I hate krait.

It’s pretty kittening terrible, it’s mostly just the last group of veterans. I’m sure I could do it a lot faster now if I tried but I think I haven’t done it maybe a year, and back then not only was warrior DPS in basically its worst state but I think my aquabreather had the wrong rune on it too so I was using like strength runes 5/6 and just yoloing.

Either way I don’t suggest soloing underwater ruins, the last jellyfish boss is genuinely one of the most tedious encounters I’ve seen in this game and there’s nothing fun about this fractal other than breaking out of the map and goating out of bounds imo.

dlonie speaking the truth there.

Agreed with literally everything in that glorious post of yours. Thumbs up to you buddy!

SlyDevil.3952:

I got 5 volcanic fractals in a row, and with pugs I got the same rolls on consecutive 50,40,30. Whatever goat you’re sacrificing I’ll take one as well.

I wish I had that RNG.

Would love to be able to fight imbued shaman more often than getting kittening cliffside all the time, or dredge/aetherblade retreat where you can barely blast swiftness anywhere without getting stuck in combat for 19 years.

The literal only reason to solo dungeons is because you find it enjoyable to do so.

The other night while I was duoing Arah p2 on stream, the NPC scholar yissa was autoattacking from a distance near a wall and Lupicus kept shadowstepping to her, bugging out and going invisible. During this process he always stays bugged for a few seconds and can do attacks while his character model is absent.

Of course, this won’t ever get fixed nor will any of his other attacks that aren’t working properly like bubble and the rapid fire frenzied blast in phase 3 etc.

vi·a·ble
?v??b(?)l/
adjective
“capable of working successfully; feasible.”

The amount of players in this game’s community that use this word without even knowing what it means is astounding. Either that or OP actually believes it’s impossible to successfully win a match without GS + axe, which is absolute rubbish.

All I can say is it’s hard to feel optimistic at all tbh.

I don’t have any hype but I’ll play the content nonetheless.

If you want to avoid energy sigil altogether you can take focus + shield of the avenger and retreat and there’s basically no way you’ll die unless you don’t know his mechanics and use everything at the wrong time.

To be honest, you have very low UC uptime in a solo setting and especially with Lupicus since it gets stripped even if you use an attack to block with/reflect the projectiles… so if you’re looking to just get the job done then you can drop UC for MoC: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Master_of_Consecrations

Just remember that for dealing with locusts in phase 1, greatsword is for sure the best weapon for dealing with trash mobs in general and for large hitbox enemies, which Lupicus certainly is, scepter is the best DPS by a lot due to smite.

Ideally, scepter+torch and focus swap would be the optimal setup for Lupicus in a solo setting but the problem is you’d need to farm some pretty good swarm RNG in phase 1 because it’s a problem if they stay alive for when phase 2 begins, as you’re gonna wanna stand still in your WoR to reflect the frenzied blast.

Try this, this is just what I picked first glance. http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vVEQNAR7flsAhehYpQwQIQQEHxDVNAag61uBvwjmHjWcGB-ThRBABXtfo8jmFEwT3AAPBAKV/xMlgAA-e

If you need more to survive, then try changing a few other things one at a time, for example you could swap “Fear my Wrath” to Renewed Focus, you could drop the power signet for SotA, you could swap torch to focus, etc. You can do a ton of things. Just remember that each defensive asset you add on takes away from your offensive output, so the goal is to try to take what you need, nothing more.

P.S. I’m positive full berserker would not be best, but I put it there because that’s what mine has and I was just editing the build template off of my own guard’s. Having some assassin’s would mean better reflect damage and more crits from smite, so more DPS.

Pretty much anything using either black feather wings, white feather wings, or the dragon mask skins will make my stomach turn.

Anyways, this is certainly one of my least favorite getup that I’ve seen ingame, ever. I’ve seen worse, but it’s definitely up there as an eyesore.

I call it the “Cringe-Inducing Starter Pack”: