Guild Wars 2

I know how much time he spent on making it and it turned out to be great. I’ll link it in my thread

Technicians are pretty awful yeah, if they fire at someone right before they start stealthing they will continue to channel their attacks at them even if the person is still stealthed.

bretfrag, they were idiots. Sorry for you to have experienced it but unfortunately we all take risks when we use the LFG.

Running around together in a circle is beneficial for the person/people in the front, terrible for the people in the back. It’s ideal to spread out as much as possible or to make use of stealth, provided at least one person is able to be targeted at all times to prevent Mai Trin from resetting.

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

Wouldn’t any fractal difficulty between 41 and 49 (including those) be much more interesting due to the instability?
I never ran 50 because I can’t be kitten d to craft a (light) ascended armor, so I can’t tell how much harder enemies hit/survive/etc. on 50 than they do on a 40-49.

Other than that it does sound interesting.

I don’t think the tournament would make much sense then, because every level results in slight changes with mobs/bosses and we want everyone to be ideally playing with the same difficulty settings as one another. It’s already kind of tough for KING to arbitrarily determine the amount of points each fractal will be worth because it’s based off of how fast they can clear them, if I’m not mistaken.

I will gladly participate in it and will start preparing a party comp for it.

I suggest clarifying the way the scoring system will work unless you haven’t fully sorted that out yet. I’m sure this will be more complicated than the dungeon tournament that just ended but it sounds like it’ll be fun. ^^

Guild name: rT – but I have a question— is only one team able to represent 1 guild for this? If so I might have to just represent another one depending on whether or not there’s a lot of interest in this tournament for other rT members.

Ariete The Phoenix.8276:

Can you imagine perma Chill? nope, nope, nope, nope.

Elite risen elementalists in Arah are pretty good at chill upkeep.

I think this boss is fine the way that it is atm. Giving him more HP doesn’t seem necessary and it has some pretty cool attacks that make the encounter more interesting than most.

You want a “boss” that’s too easy? Legendary Jotun Skygazer.

EcoRI.9273:

I personally think when a team is fullwiped, you just move on to the next match when it is confirmed that the other team is ahead of the wiped team. I think people are complaining that you are streaming something where the outcome is already set, there is not point. It is like watching a movie where the ending already happened, and gives the viewers of “now what?”

I like the fullwipe rule. [rT] decided to do a sloppy stealth and got punished for it. [FGS] decided to risk 1 second extra time to get a clean stealth. There is risk and reward. The fullwipe rule also makes the weakest link of your team very apparent, and forces consistency in skill. When the hunter/crusher was killed for [FGS], and [rT] fullwiped the match should’ve been over and we should’ve moved on. If you recked your car in a race tournament it’s over you are out. It also makes the tournament go faster, more matches = more fun overall. The tourney was 8hours long with 12teams, had we stopped streaming the decided outcomes and moved on, i think we could’ve shrunk it down to 6-7hours of more intense action

Choking is part of the tourney hype, the best and most exciting tourneys are ones where the best can lose, that is why people root for the underdogs.

I’m cool with this.

Ultimately what it comes down to is that the excitement with a match was completely absent once it was confirmed what the outcome was (especially when it was at the start lol).

You can still get it done like that, but it’s really tricky and more erratic to do it all in one go like you used to be able to. Perhaps try exactly what I suggested, but use the first FGS for a rush to clear the hatchings before quickly swapping to ice bow and hoping you select her as a target in time and hoping you get desirable RNG and that she doesn’t open with a poison spray? :P

Sounds like what you’re asking is ultimately going to boil down to RNG… which sucks.

Yeah the massive risk part was great, and I agree with you about that. That’s why I suggested the full instance reset sort of thing— it’s just the idea of watching one team not competing anymore and with no more pressure for time that seems kind of dull… although you did a very good job making up for that with the funny commentary.

Basically, I just would have preferred if there was never a point in time when there was only 1 team doing the dungeon and all suspense is completely lost.

Good point about the bugs getting more attention btw. It’d be really nice to see some more fixes to things like that… would be awesome. I won’t get my hopes up for that though. x_x

Good point, but the main reason I really didn’t like the party wipe rule is for the same reason you mentioned here:

Anyways, the bottom line is that as a viewer, matches where a team wiped/got stuck were boring to watch and matches where both teams were able to play were interesting to watch.

I just wasn’t really interested in watching the match after KING wiped, nor was I interested in watching after Noob wiped at Malrona, nor was I interested in watching after our own guild wiped (sadfais). I can’t speak on behalf of everybody else but since I knew the outcome already, I just wanted the next match to start. :P

I think I’m gonna have to disagree with you about the malrona wipe though; unless they didn’t intend to make it unblockable/unreflectable and it was confirmed as a bug, it’s everyone’s responsibility to know the boss’s mechanics and if they don’t then they should be punished for it (should have to restart from scratch imo). As for an NPC bugging out though? Idk… I’m not really sure how I feel about that one. Some of them are easily preventable but some of the ways that path NPCs can bug out are really obscure and seemingly random at times, so it’s kind of weird…

You must be crazy if you think that everybody would be using warriors for it. o.O

Based off of the way the tournament yesterday went, lots of people were picking obscure paths that they practiced during their own free time because they knew basically no one ever does them (Hotw P2/SE P2 etc). Arah is pretty much one of the only dungeons where warriors are ideal over everything else for soloing really. Some of the boss encounters in lower dungeons are significantly easier with reflects, where mesmers/guardians shine as well.

Actually the last time I checked pre-ferocity, the first boss of SE P2 wasn’t even possible to solo on a warrior without exploiting whereas it was possible, albeit very slow, on a guard/mesmer specifically because of their ability to reflect his OP longrange cc attack. He healed far too fast and was too dangerous to be able to maintain a proper GS rotation in order to deal enough damage. I’ll probably try it again sometime.

Doing AC, CM, TA are all ridiculously easier on an ele than a warrior btw.

Alternatively, you can ice bow #5 her, immediately drop it and use obsidian flesh (earth focus #5) and burn her down with FGS.

It can be tricky, and I suggest first clearing the spider hatchlings first.

I’ll try doing it on vid one of these days because I have done it before, but it’s a little RNG-oriented I guess :S

Wethospu.6437:

Actually I’m pretty curious what was reasoning for that “no res” rule. I don’t really think it made the tournament any better. Even without the rule, wiping and dying would be really bad as it would slow the run down considerably. In my opinion the rule made the tournament way too much about tiny errors instead of good execution of creative tactics.

But perhaps the participants can share how they feel about it. Their fun is the most important thing about the tournament.

I’m pretty sure most people that read this will probably roll their eyes since we’re both in rT, but I agree with you for the most part. However…

Let me add a little modification to what you suggest:

When a party wipes, they must restart the entire path from the start — including crashing instance and reforming it. I was told that there was some sort of similar functionality in GW1’s dungeons (I wouldn’t know because I never played it).

This way it would still be the case that if a team wipes they’re almost guaranteed to lose, but I can imagine things really getting intense if the other team wipes afterwards and they’d have to catch up.

P.S. – I WANT A SOLO TOURNAMENT

Celestial just doesn’t seem like something that a warrior could make the most use of. I can’t think of how it could be advantageous in any circumstance over another set of attributes.

Oh well to each his/her own.

No actually he was pretty unlucky with turrets and the aboms… but what was lucky was that he had no elite hunters/illusionists/etc hugging the wall, so he was able to clear the turret near the far wall without aggroing anything.

A lot of the time I have a champion orrian hunter walking right next to the aboms and I will have to wait until I can engage combat :/

Camping GS is barely the best though. It’s only optimal if you’re able to maintain your rotation. If you aren’t for whatever reason, then it’s actually faster to swap to axe. Think of a situation in which you aren’t able to take advantage to whirlwind/rush. In this case, being on 6/5/0/0/3 and swapping to axe/x would be faster than just doing GS autoattacks in between 100b cd. Whirlwind is crucial in order for camping GS to be worthwhile.

Stand in the dead center of his red circle and you won’t take damage from anything other than his weird purple laser attack (if he’s targeting you). If you aren’t in the exact spot, you will die.

Tons of thing went better. Check out every single boss time of his (shown in the description). Those are fast as hell even if you were to try to grind for individual boss times— plus the Alphard kill in particular was very fast. Getting a 4 minute Alphard kill (on a warrior, at least) is not an easy thing to do…

My best time on it so far is like 4:40-4:45 or something like that (I lost stacks + had to rally off a clone zzz), and he did it in a full run.

Basically besides a few things that went wrong like the aboms before Lupi being all weird and his ogre pet huehue-ing on Lupi phase 1>2 transition, everything went fantastic. I don’t think anybody’s gonna beat this time tbh.

I sell it for 18g and have for months.

P4 is the worst profit/hr by far though because of the fact that there’s always soooo many other groups selling it at the same time and a lot of people sell for cheap as dirt prices.

Yes axe for bloodlust stacks, and ideally you want to wait as long as possible before using Rip, but since you have only a few seconds before swapping back to GS, you may as well use it immediately because you want to do a cyclone axe as well.

I’m keen.

I didn’t like the construction skill on Runescape particularly because of how much of an unnecessary click-intensive money sink it was for little gain, but it did have some awesome uses. You could train prayer efficiently, create teleportation portals, have extra storage, make custom boxing arenas and stuff, and even make your own mini dungeons with mob spawns and treasure chests.

There’s loads of potential for it on GW2 but my gosh it would require an immense amount of development time. I’ll have you know that on 6/6/06, ‘the falador massacre’ happened where a player was able to exploit a major bug with a POH (player-owned-house) allowing him to attack other players and steal their items… and yes, this did happen on that date. I was there… there were so many ingame riots. People went nuts (it was really fun LOL).

So, while I am perfectly cool with these getting implemented into GW2 one day I won’t be surprised if they aren’t because of how massive the project will be and to be honest there’s a lot of things I’d prefer them to focus their attention on over this. This shouldn’t be at the top of their list of things to do imo.

They chose the lazy way out. Instead of making them unblockable/unreflectable, they should have simply made it so that you can’t reflect increased damage from the poison. In my opinion that was the only thing sketchy about it.

Focus more on camping GS, but ideally you want to use hundred blades + whirlwind as soon as you can (within reason). Something else that I could have done to improve my own time is get in the rotation of using whirlwind first then hundred blades, as it stacks might quickly for more damage output. The problem with that is that if you get unlucky RNG, it’s less reliable to break out of a hundred blades channel to dodge than it is to break out if it to whirlwind. I’m sure you’ve figured that out yourself.

When you swap to axe/sword it should pretty much only be for the block/extra dodge, however using impale (and rip) and cyclone axe before swapping back is a good way to make the best of the 5 seconds you have without GS.

I watched it and have some specific advice for ya.

First of all your best phase by far was phase 1, good job. There’s not a whole lot that I can say for phase 1 other than this:
1) try to dodge into him instead of outwards, as it’s noticeable that you have to spend a second or two repositioning yourself before attacking again. Because of this, you aren’t able to begin a hundred blades channel without interrupting yourself with a whirlwind or dodge.
2) Try to stand outside of his red circle when the swarms appear because you’ll be able to hit them with your GS autoattacks along with lupi but without draggin lupi left & right. Ideally you’ll be able to take care of them quickly with 100b+WWA but sometimes it’s not the case when you get more than one.

Phase 2:
You started getting a little shaky with pushing him back into the wall, which is understandable because it takes a lot of practice to do. I understand that the main reason you were autoattacking with GS so much and not doing 100b is because you were struggling to get him on the wall, but the reality is that the phase went pretty slow because of it. Practice pushing him— there are a few awkward spots in the arena where he doesn’t move properly because the terrain is uneven. You’ll get a feel for it and it’ll become second nature at some point.

Phase 3:
This phase I think you need to work on a lot more than 1 & 2. You spent a lot of time autoattacking with GS which is actually really slow damage. You didn’t use hundred blades much at all which is your main source of damage along with whirlwind. Remember that if you click on whirlwind, it’ll go in the direction your camera is facing so you CAN use it as an evasion instead of a dodge roll. If he’s against the wall, you should never ever eviscarate. Unless you accidentally waste all of your dodges, it’s never needed and will hurt your damage.

I guess that’s all the specific things to mention. For reference, I’ll link you to one of my best kills with the least amount of mistakes in it so you can watch and try to see what I do. Hopefully it helps!

http://www.twitch.tv/purpleishawt/c/4510594

EDIT:
I’ll point out some mistakes that I made for you. In phase 1, I wasted 1 dodge roll. In phase 2, I tried to bait out his swipe at the start assuming he was going to, where I should have simply began a 100b channel + WWA instead. In phase 2, the second frenzied blast (AoE barrage) I was a little clumsy with because he did it a little earlier than expected. Phase 3 I caused him to heal 4 ticks total excluding the very final life drink that I went all-out on to finish him.

By the way, it might be really helpful for you to try to find each of the mistakes of mine that I outlined here by watching the video. It will be helpful for you to learn the rotations and figure out what to do… at least I’d think so. Let me know if it helps.

I agree with you and that will be the case in most situations.

In my vid? If so, it’s all RNG and that’s partly why I never wanted to do P3 speed runs in the past.

In the past I would keep killing the risen hands until they spawn in convenient locations where they won’t aggro. There are certain spots where they will not aggro if they spawn there while you’re fighting at the podium but if you run past them and they aggro, they will throw rocks until they die. There are 3 total spawns where they automatically aggro while you’re at the podium (the 2 behind me and the 1 to the far left + behind)… somewhat hard to describe the 3 spots.

So if you stealth and run straight to the podium and there are no risen hands in those 3 spots that I mentioned, you will never have a rock thrown at you unless you accidentally whirlwind off into a random direction. That’s why I click whirlwind so often, so that never happens. ^^

No problem, glad to have helped.

To answer your question, yeah berserker is much more useful on a warrior. The general consensus is that condition builds are king in PvP for this game but when it comes to PvE, direct damage is. The main reason for this is because there is a maximum amount of conditions that a person or mob is capable of being dealt and it limits conditions being applied from everyone.

Let’s say you’re in a hypothetical party with 2 other berserker warriors and they’re making use of the Arms 1 minor trait that has a 33% chance to apply a 4s bleed on crit. The maximum stacks of bleed a boss can have is 25, so if you were to be fighting with them you wouldn’t be able to apply all 25 of those stacks yourself, which really hinders the individual DPS of yours and therefore your contribution. There isn’t a limit with how much direct damage you’re able to deal, so this issue doesn’t exist.

Hopefully that’ll make sense to you and convince you why you should be looking for a different option in group play, but I want to make sure you understand that condition warriors are actually pretty good if you want to solo content.

@OP

Here is a video of me killing him at the podium post-patch. You will see what I did to make sure he didn’t move from the top. Basically, return right before he’s about to finish leeching.

The general idea with the autoattacks is that you can afford to risk taking a hit or two if you’re at full hp (unless you’re using scholar runes, but I would not suggest scholar in solos for the most part), but if you’re low hp you will need to be more hesitant and preemptively make use of dodges/evasions/blocks because there is no tell.

Just so you are aware, I cannot consistently replicate what you see here in this video due to the risen hands. Sometimes they’re just too kitten stubborn and won’t stop pestering me.

For consistent results, I suggest pulling him over to the column near the left wall (left with respect to your position when entering the area) by where the Lyssa priestess appears in P4. Not only is it easier due to no interference from the hands, but it’s actually a bit faster too.

P.S. – one extra trip: ALWAYS use lifesteal food! It will without a doubt be the absolute fastest because not only will you sustain your health more but you won’t need to interrupt as many 100b channels or swap to axe/sword as frequently for that extra dodge/block.

Are you using an energy sigil? If so there shouldn’t be any problems as long as you aren’t wasting dodges. However, are you off wall? Sometimes RNG can make things tricky.

You traited in defense, you aren’t using longbow, and you’re using weird utilities that don’t benefit condition builds at all… frenzy..? :S

I really hope you aren’t using this in groups, because a lot and I mean a lot of people are going to give you a hard time over it. Generally speaking, condition damage is a very bad choice to aim for when in a group setting because even non-cond builds are able to apply conditions and you will lose a significant portion of your DPS even should you choose appropriate gear/traits/utils.

However in solo play, condition builds are capable of dealing pretty close DPS to that of a berserker warrior. To see how, check out this:

http://www.dtguilds.com/forum/m/6563292/viewthread/12956045-ebola-warrior-pve-dps-condition-damage-build-for-solo-play

You will have to follow that guide religiously in order to benefit the most out of condition damage in PvE.

You don’t have to use either the human heal or executioner’s axe.

Alright yeah, after checking there are 9 day fractals and 5 night fractals according to Wiki. Thanks for correcting me.

Tree.3916:

The main reason berserker warriors get better time against Lupicus is the interaction of WWA and the wall, which is a very big DPS boost and evasion in one. Condition damage doesn’t have anything that is close to an evade that also deals 18k damage on a short cool down. Don’t believe me? Do a Lupi solo with the standard 6/5/0/0/3 build but disable your WWA. See what time you get compared to the best possible condi solo. I believe Dub has a 5:24 condi solo? I would be interested to see if a berserker solo without WWA can beat that.

Compare also the kill times for strong condi professions like Engineer and Necro with berserker vs condi and condi is significantly better. So the missing piece of the puzzle is what about warrior makes berserker gear significantly better, and my hypothesis is that the answer is WWA, though Reckless Dodge is useful but more minor.

You’re right about whirlwind being really important for a berserker warrior, but it’s not like if the fight was offwall we’d see condition warriors pull ahead massively or anything like that. I’m pretty sure it might not be possible anymore to get a sub-5 offwall Lupicus solo with a berserker warr, but both Der(p)y + Goku managed to get 4:49 and 4:48 offwall solos pre-ferocity and I’m sure they’d both agree they could have probably gotten times even faster had they wanted to put the effort into it. The time difference is roughly between 30-60 seconds (for the sake of simplicity, ~45s) in a full kill, and right now if you’d factor that into the best times right now between berserker and condition kills it’d put pretty close.

Basically, what I’m trying to get at is that an off-wall Lupicus solo with berserker warrior is still going to be around the same time as the best condition kill (currently), so yeah you’re right about WWA being a deciding factor but it’s not the interaction with the wall that makes ALL of the difference (at least on Lupicus). Take out the WWA altogether then well yeah I agree with you… the kill time will suck. Maybe someday someone will do a better time than Dub’s… but as of right now, I’m pretty sure no one is averaging condition kills as fast as his.

Wethospu.6437:

Only Maw, Dredge, Swamp, Snowblind, Volcanic and Mai Trin are night.

Seriously? I didn’t expect Mai trin to be night and I definitely thought molten facility would be night.

Thanks for the clarification

robertul.3679:

The classes that can solo p3/p4 orbs are thief, mesmer, warrior, necro, norn. Ele perhaps but it might require med kits.

None of you have had the invisible glitch before? I somewhat want it to happen to someone else so I don’t feel so alone with the problem

Hesitant to bother with soloing on ele for this path again because of it. It still has not happened for me on warrior and I don’t know what caused it.

I don’t kick people for not being in zerk, I kick people for being idiots though.

Which ones are day then besides the ones that I mentioned? I forgot about harpy fractal so add that to the ones that I mentioned but I thought Thaumanova/Molten facility/Maw/Molten Duo/Dredge/Swamp/Snowblind/Volcanic were all night?

If I’m wrong about any of those lemme know… or I guess I’ll figure it out based off of what my GS looks like the next time I’m in them lol

Have actually had that happen in a pug run ages ago Nova… almost forgot about it. I joined at Lupicus or something like that so I didn’t really care and just left.

Naus the Gobbo.5172:

There are indeed a lot of breath taking places in Tyria, and if you take it slow and have fun you will have the best experience ever.
By the way, there are a ton of those kinds of tanks in The Black Citadel and in the charr camp in Field of Ruins.

Also, don’t worry about the personal story. I haven’t completed it myself despite the fact that I have been playing since launch.
Personally I just refuse to do the last chapter because it is a group mission, whereas all the other ones were soloable and thus much more immersive to me since I could take my time.

It is completely soloable aside from the gate at the start, which requires 1 other person.

It’s definitely worth it but a third GS probably isn’t needed. I could be wrong about this but I think the only fractals that aren’t night are cliffside, ascalonian city, and mai trin… maybe the underwater fractal too but you can’t use GS on that one anyways.

Basically, most dungeons/fractals are night. You will be fine using a Night+Force for everything and if you love Arah as much as I do then a second one with Undead Slaying+Force will give you pleasant results.

Third one only happened to me that one time. I was pretty p*ssed. He just stayed invulnerable no matter how far away I ran or where I stood.

Fourth has only happened to me once during that duo with Goku, and twice when I solod on my ele. Never happened when I was on my warrior thus far. Also, I was on my ele when I was duoing with Goku. It clearly hates eles.

Cloudflare was hit by the largest DDoS attack in history months ago, making it difficult to play GW2 reliably.

I agree with you, OP.

I shouldn’t feel insulted by the end of a FotM run but every single time, I do. The reward system for it is absolutely pathetic.

xDDD

I lol’d

Got excited thinking you found some crafty way of doing the door by yourself.

:(

Gj though

The amount of bugs in Arah P3 since the past few patches is frustrating the living daylights out of me and I want to know who else has experienced these all. Some of them I know happen for everyone but some of them my friends were baffled about.

They frustrate me to the point of not even wanting to bother with the path as much anymore which is sad, because it used to be my favorite.

Let me know if you guys have experienced any other ones or if you are familiar with all of the same problems I’ve had. The invisible wraithlord one in particular drives me NUTS. It’s happened 3 times total the past two weeks.

—

1. Wraiths in the ritual consistently go invulnerable unless you pretty much hug the center area, sometimes I’m unable to re-aggro them for 5-10 seconds again.

2. There is a knocked-down pillar perpendicular to one standing up on the opposite side of the platform from where you enter where people commonly LoSed the Wraithlord to burn down with FGS, but he goes invulnerable now which I’m not sure if is intended or unintended. Another spot that temporarily worked was on the left edge from the entrance, another knocked-down pillar, but he suddenly stopped coming all the way to it since one of the last builds. I find it highly peculiar for them to care about people using FGS rush on this boss that much.

3. Wraithlord was completely unattackable for me after the ritual two days ago and I had absolutely no way of finishing the path and had to crash the instance to redo from scratch.

4. Wraithlord went invisible on me during a duo with Goku about a week or so ago. We were confused as hell and had no idea where he was, and wiped as a result of it because we were getting corruption stacks from thin air and couldn’t see him. The same thing happened to me in a solo on my ele the other day— but I noticed he did it at a certain spot near the center of the area after rushing to the NPC. I find it hard to believe that the error could be on my end. I’ve seen Lupicus go invisible plenty of times after shadowstepping to people in phase 2, but he always reappears 5-10 seconds later. Wraithlord wasn’t reappearing for me and that’s just BS.

—

P.S.

Warden Illyra bugging at the chicken cage is so annoying. I feel bad for anybody that doesn’t know to lure mobs over to her after reviving her, because wiping / leaving+re-entering doesn’t fix it and I imagine a lot of people quit out of the path if it happens.

She bugs if the spiders aggro on her after the cutscene and kill her, which happens maybe half the time if you actually get hit by them/engage in combat with them while running past.

Alphard is definitely a lesbian.

LOL at acotje’s screenshot… what on earth. I would have expected OMM or something, but you not only had just signet of might but even signet of fury was on cooldown. That’s one hell of a hit.

That better be pre-ferocity, else my mind will a’splode@