Guild Wars 2

Some very good information and advice from Highchu here and I second just about everything they’ve had to say.

Argon.1563:

The reason Warrior is overplayed it because its an easy class. People see others using some cheap greatsword build and think “uhhh. half-decent DPS. Must steal build.”, when in reality, greatsword warrior is slugish. After Hundred-Blades is on cooldown, they’re no use to me any more..

Actually this isn’t true. The autoattack chain isn’t exactly the best ever, but you shouldn’t really have to use it that often. Bladetrail, GS #5 within close range (hits a bit more than half of what an Eviscarate does), and of course Whirlwind Attack. Whirlwind is not only an evasion but deals an immense amount of damage when used against an object or into a wall. Assuming you’re using either 65003 or 66002 + full berserker + proper utils and nourishment, you’ll be critting over 90% of the time and therefore nearly every attack of yours will stack might.

Greatsword warriors are by no means sluggish.

It’s pretty sad how long it took for the fix. I still can’t get over it lol.

Mesmers are continually becoming less and less useful in PvE as Arenanet does things like making mob attacks unblockable + unreflectable. The primary uses of a mesmer in PvE:
-reflects
-time warp
-portals

Aside from that, not much else really. They have some of the lowest DPS without reflects, whereas elementalists have the absolute highest in groups and are generally always wanted/needed in proper groups. However, elementalists are pretty awful to play with in unorganised teams (especially in Arah, for example) due to the excruciatingly low health and weak heals (I assume you’re properly set up to deal high damage/using appropriate DPS builds). In situations like this, I recommend warrior as it has top-of-the-line self-buffing capabilities, high health even in full glass, and a plethora of movement skills and other useful utilities to survive even when your teammates are truly inept and cause the party to wipe. Warrior is the ultimate class for pug teams imo.

In PvP it’s different and mesmers along with elementalists are actually both very good and have a variety of strengths. I don’t like PvP on GW2 but quite a lot of people do.

If so I’m not opposed to it tbh, but they really should make them drop rares or something. This boss encounter is really trivial unless you get combod by a tentacle + the death ray at the same time… or lag. I lag a lot. Not as much as Dub though.

My 2 rifles and 2 daggers bid farewell to you, Veydar.5017.

Imbune.5497:

Purple Miku.7032:

…I’m just gonna go ahead and leave this here.

http://i.imgur.com/J1XHqTK.jpg

Just saying, the vast majority of the attire that’s available on this game is what I’d expect to see on strippers. I really am baffled how you think otherwise. :P

Please make a list of the ‘vast majority of the attire’ that looks like what you’d ‘expect to see on strippers’ please and post it. I’m curious because we either have wildly different interpretations of the term ‘vast majority’ or wildly different expectations of what strippers wear-having you post a list of the armor you think falls in that category will indicate which possibility is real.

Or anyone else who feels ‘the VAST MAJORITY of the attire…..expect to see on strippers’. ‘Majority’…meaning your list of ‘stripper attire’ must be firstly more than 50% of the TOTAL armor available in gw2. ‘Vast’ meaning we can safely add another 10% (to be conservative…have to give you a fighting chance after all) to the criteria…so….show me how more than 60% of gw2’s armor is stripper armor.

So you’re telling me to spend over an hour compiling a list of something that is completely arbitrary just so that you can laugh at the end that I went out of my way to actually do it, only for you to tell me that you don’t agree with my opinion?

Gee, what a nice person you are.

Meluna you’re correct in your OP. Everything you said is true and I feel the same way; that’s why I don’t like to WvW either… very sparingly.

The spam filters are really odd and I’m not sure exactly how they work… however one thing I can tell you is that if you are blocked for excessive messaging, do not keep trying to send anything else! It only prolongs the filter on everything you try to send. Just to be sure I typically wait 3-5 minutes if it ever happens to me.

These are some awesome ideas. I’m used to reading really close-minded topics and massive essay-long threads that could be concisely summarized within a paragraph or two, so it was refreshing to see your thread.

I also like how you went from elaborating on the benefits and drawbacks of each system to providing solutions to said drawbacks, and compared + contrasted.

Well done.

P.S. I really dislike the Megaserver system for Tequatl in particular, as it makes it excruciatingly difficult to know whether or not you’re in the appropriate “shard” or if you’re with an unorganised lot of people that won’t cooperate unless they see commander tags (as if you actually need the person with the tag to do anything that you’re required to do at the events, lol).

…I’m just gonna go ahead and leave this here.

http://i.imgur.com/J1XHqTK.jpg

Just saying, the vast majority of the attire that’s available on this game is what I’d expect to see on strippers. I really am baffled how you think otherwise. :P

Don’t EVER use autotargeting. I don’t think many people understand how complex a feature like that is and how excruciatingly difficult it would be to have autotargeting that never does something wrong.

Turn it off, and learn to play without it. It’s well worth it. What I suggest is that you bind something close to WASD (or your movement keys) for “target nearest enemy.” I personally use C for it and it functions similarly to the way autotarget would, but I have control over it instead of it just randomly shooting other things.

Stark.1350:

So the point of a guild bank is.. ?

To make a personal storage for yourself so that you can hoard as many things as your heart desires.

spoj, it is possible to react to mossman’s attacks from stealth. Did you see Sesshi’s video of lvl 50 mossman solo? I tried and I honestly cannot do it. The best I could get him to was one time 60% hp before wiping. It’s insanely hard.

Three things you can do during his stealth while moving (if you don’t keep moving you will get ganked):
1) strafe left and right
2) blindly evade or try to predict when he will throw his dagger because it usually is consistent. It depends on his distance from you, I think.
3) use a block/invuln

I think mossman is OK, I just hate the kitten wolves.

Anything changed to safespots for Ancient Ooze does not impact me, as I have used my own strategy for it for the longest time.

Pop a harpy feather + order of whisper spykit and impale it, turn around and riposte to block the turrets, stand in a specific spot to LOS it, begin a 100b about 3 seconds before it gets to me, whirlwind backwards out of its range, dodge into it on its 6th bounce, and by then Varra Skylark will have LOSed and ran directly underneath the ooze. Varra will be dead within 1-2 more attacks from the Ooze and then by the time its killed, I’ll be able to stealth when it hits 25% hp and splits, which will result in both the vile oozes teleporting/vanishing.

It’s 100% reliable unless you screw up and get Varra hit by one of the turrets before you begin this, because she’ll start attacking them and won’t stop until she dies. The reason this is a bad thing is because it doesn’t give you the option of pulling Ooze even further closer to the Jotun spirit without her reviving, and if she’s alive when Ooze splits… stealthing won’t work.

AFAIK, there are [were] two spots you could safespot this boss from and they fixed one of them.

mrw when trying to properly interpret the OP: http://i.imgur.com/tzgnudh.gif

As to the video posted above me, I laughed irl xD

Thank you Sophie and I’m glad to know it helps

Haven’t tried it yet, but yeah it was getting really old hearing the same Mothers of Soccer whining about “zomgstackingexploitpreventingitsattacks” over and over again.

Lmfao, Xae that reminds me of how I reacted when I first saw Mage crusher move when I was in a pug.

My 2 friends and I were spamming in caps and laughing… was hysterical. I loved it. Took us offguard xD

Tree.3916:

Plenty examples of this

“Hard” bosses with good design: Lupicus, Liadri, Hunter/Crusher, Wiggins, Boom Boom Baines, Archdiviner, Vivenna, Korga, Dredge Power Suit
“Hard” bosses with bad designs: Champion Orrian Warrior, Mossman

Easy bosses with good design: CoF1 Effigy, Bloomhunger, SEp3 Destroyer, CoE Golem
Easy bosses with bad design: Champion Ice Wolf CoE, Ginva the Butcher, TA end trees, magecrusher, evolved destroyer

I lol’d irl at the champion orrian warrior… he’s such a god kitten kitten xD

To be honest though I have a LOT of fun soloing him, reminds me of Mai Trin where you can only block the certain attack. I find Mage crusher to be really fun as well, but I understand why telegraphed attacks seems to be better design.

Other than Mage crusher, I agree with everything in your post. The only thing I’d like to change about Mage crusher is give him the ability to spawn minions or something… I’d totally expect that from him.

@OP
I agree with you about Belka.

However I don’t necessarily always think that having attacks with little tell are always a bad thing. Alphard, for example, was perfectly fine insta-gibbing before imo… I just don’t think a full party wipe was a good idea. The person who gets pulled getting instantly killed seems justified to me, as it’s not even remotely close to difficult to get out of the AoE afterwards to avoid the bomb. You don’t even need swiftness to get out of it! Therefore, there’s very little danger at all for this encounter unless you really aren’t paying attention at all.

Mage crusher is another example of a boss that I’m fine with little tell for autoattacks. He doesn’t even consistently use the attack, so there’s time to recover in between them.

The thing is with Mage crusher vs. Belka, you can come up with a way to prevent damage taken from Mage crusher’s attacks whereas Belka you cannot. Every attack of hers causes burning and she attacks at a way higher rate than Mage crusher does…

They probably didn’t nerf it at Lupicus because the dungeon itself is dreadful to get past in pugs anyways. The amount of people that struggle desperately to get past Lupicus is still very high…

If they change anything with Lupicus, I want them to fix the stupid glitch where he keeps resetting if you wall him without attacking him first.

1) There’s honestly nothing else out there that gives you more for the money you put into it. GW2 is highly competitive against the most expensive games out there. I’m really interested in FFXIV, for example, but won’t ever play it due to the subscription model.

2) I love my characters and the combat. The combat is really fun.

3) I’m going to go ahead and mimic OP’s #3, because that very accurately describes me.

Anyone who thinks stacking is exploiting is too inept to be taken seriously.

You never HAD to stack to prevent the Spider Queen from using its AoE, christ. All you had to do was stand in melee ranged and it wouldn’t do it. It’s a RANGED attack.

Anyone who thought stacking in the corner was an exploit is basically implying that meleeing anything is cheating and that you should only be ranging everything. Illogical.

-Is it really adding to your overall experience? Yes
-Does it make things too easy? No
-Do I always use it? Why? Yes, because it’s available to me and there’s no reason to hinder myself by making myself hit less damage.
-Do I usually win 1v1 fights against those who don’t use it? I don’t normally WvW to begin with but the impact of food/nourishment is negligible by comparison to the skills used in my rotation/my active defenses.
-Do I craft my own for fun? Or just buy it off the TP? Buy off the tp. There’s no fun in the crafting system because it’s not actually crafting. It’s just a GUI that spits out stuff.
-Do I offer it to other people when I see them without it? Why? Yes, because it’s painful to see teammates that aren’t making use of them… so painful. I can’t stand the inefficiency.

I understand and agree with it being a bit over the top to be able to nearly 1-shot a boss by reflecting a certain attack, but it’s kind of stupid to make things that were reflectable unreflectable altogether. With that kind of change then I can see mesmers losing their places in dungeons more and more

VodCom.6924:

fractals are not soloable (he had one guildy to allow him to repair) and not regularly (you need a good draw).

Erm, you know there’s plenty of things in dungeons that can’t be solod right?

Legendary Shoggroth and Simin, High Priestess of Dwayna are good examples of things that require others for. For Shoggroth you can’t do it with less than 4 people. For Simin you require only 1 other person to help lure sparks if done properly.

There’s a lot of other things in dungeons, like CoF gate controllers etc, that can’t be done soloing too. It’s not just fractals that have anti-solo mechanics.

VodCom.6924:

Then we agree that dungeons are “badly designed” because they are not able to provide an actual challenge to groups (since they can be soloed).

Fractals on the other hand are much better : you actually need a party to complete them.

Counterargument: http://www.twitch.tv/purpleishawt/c/4277337

What’s wrong with soloing…?

RedStar.4218:

Why was it irritating ? Were you killing so much champions that you had stacks and stacks every 5 minutes ?

While playing? Yes. While standing idle? No. I solo dungeons all the time, so they come even slower than if I were to do in groups. Having to destroy several bloodstone stacks in an hour is just obnoxious and no one should have to do that because a very small minority of people have 20 characters and want ascended on all of them.

kitten no, I really hope they lowered the drop rates of them. It’s so irritating how abundant it is. Even if you need it, you have to truly go out of your way to not have enough of it. SO few of people have 21 characters.

@tomlin.8204
The thing I hate hearing the most from ingame characters is “This rose has thorns, and here they are!” lol

They also made the corpses more difficult for the average person to see. You basically will always step over them unless you already know the locations ;P

TRICKY ANET.

calyx.9086:

Purple Miku.7032:

“Harathi Hinterlands
Fixed a bug that would occasionally prevent “Defend the skritt thieves while they steal harpy eggs” from advancing when the Harpy Matriarch was defeated.”

—

YES

YES!

YESSS

I now no longer need to pay random people 1g each to run as far away from the event as possible to stop it from bugging, nor do I need to hurry and log in as fast as humanly possible to do the event right after a patch to make sure I can be there alone.

Omg.

Harpy feathers are no longer the partyhats of GW2.

TYSM ANET.

<3

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-June-03-2014

It’s good that they fixed this bug, I’ve seen it myself trying to get harpy feathers, but to avoid these types of situations why don’t you just buy like, 4 stacks at one time? I typically buy 2 stacks at a time of consumables like this, ogre pet whistle, skale venom, etc.

I buy 10-12 stacks at a time, normally. I just use them a lot because of how often I solo Arah :P

“Harathi Hinterlands
Fixed a bug that would occasionally prevent “Defend the skritt thieves while they steal harpy eggs” from advancing when the Harpy Matriarch was defeated.”

—

YES

YES!

YESSS

I now no longer need to pay random people 1g each to run as far away from the event as possible to stop it from bugging, nor do I need to hurry and log in as fast as humanly possible to do the event right after a patch to make sure I can be there alone.

Omg.

Harpy feathers are no longer the partyhats of GW2.

TYSM ANET.

<3

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-June-03-2014

Lord Kuru.3685:

solo dungeons.

I honestly have no idea how it’s possible for anyone to have trouble getting skill points. Every single time you level up that’s a skill point.

-confused-

maha.7902:

i’d honestly just take 30/25/0/0/15 or 30/30/0/0/10 in pugs, it’s better to maximise your own dps than boost the dps of bad pugs

I second this.

I wouldn’t even consider using phalanx strength personally, especially in a pug team where you have no idea if the other people are going to react to mobs/bosses and/or make proper use of their class skills… too wasteful.

Mossman is one of the best encounters in the game imo, aside from the fact that Arenanet still hasn’t come up with a way to get people to stop bugging him in the water. I immediately leave if I’m in a party and they do this.

deSade, your story about AC I can really relate to. All of the details you emphasized are things that go through my mind too. Ugh, I can only imagine how much of an kitten that person was…

dace.8019:

I always loved how you’d be battling all these undead in epic battles where you’d be giving it your all just to stay on your feet and desperately trying to stay on top of the objective. When, finally, your HP down to its last pixel, your cooldowns ticking over, you’d slay the last of the monsters who almost killed you, the best hope for saving Tyria from the undead dragon and its horde. You’d be triumphant against the odds, your prowess the stuff of heroes.

And, unimpressed, bored Trahearne’s all like “Moving on.”

Hahahaha he does this all the time and I noticed it too one day and was thinking to myself “…m8? You just got your kitten handed to you.”

Azrael, I personally refuse to do harpy fractal with pugs so that isn’t as much of an option for me. I get what you’re trying to do, but I’d rather beat my head against the wall than even attempt to. Minimizing my chance for that fractal is absolutely necessary. It’s just one of those things that I have absolutely no tolerance for without much of an explanation for it other than it genuinely ruins my mood and motivation to keep playing :P

Lately I actually find underwater ruins one kind of fun to duo. Jellyfish boss is boring, but it’s more interesting when you’re duoing it level 50

Tachii.3506:

Purple Miku.7032:

I don’t even understand why the hell people want to use that spot anyways. It’s terrible. Pretty much can never use FGS there (though ice bows get the job done either way lol). I personally like to LOS him in the nearby corner and burn him down, as it’s a lot more reliable and you can aggro him from anywhere instead of waiting for him to walk around the room.

That spot is immune to the rock AoEs. It means even if the pug team is all running PVT armor they will still get the job done since the bosses’ damage alone is negligible. I don’t mind the FGS stacking spots but I wouldn’t push pugs for that spot since I wouldn’t know if their DPS is enough before the rock AoEs starts to fall.

Fair enough, but I don’t do AC unless it’s on my ele so damage isn’t a problem ^^

Well… unless no one picks up my 2nd one for some unknown reason. It’d have to be one hell of an awful party.

There shouldn’t be so many different armors that have the same skins. They should all be unique imo… or at the very least, slightly different.

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

Azrael.4960:

One test I like to pull on groups I host in fractals is just rolling with whatever the first one is. Repeatedly rolling swamp is so boring.

Depends on the group. A bad one will roll for swamp after they have filled the party. Those are boring. And a bad sign about the groups competence if they have problems with anything that isn’t swamp.
A good group, or at least a good party leader, will roll for swamp while waiting for the party to fill up.

100% true. I do fotm on rare occasions nowadays but if I’m ever to host, I always roll for swamp before I even bother hosting LFG because it’s really annoying when people join while you’re rolling… especially when they don’t leave right away after upon finding out I haven’t rolled it yet.

They were completely fine as they were and there was absolutely no reason to change them to begin with.

The personal quest storyline was really, really disappointing in a variety of ways.

Runescape had superior storytelling than GW2 does, and it’s a decade-old game… so that’s saying something.

In order to get people to pay attention and not always feel like skipping the “cutscenes” then we need to have real cutscenes and not this monotonous lecturing done by 2 characters standing still and chatting with watercolor backgrounds. It literally feels like a lecture instead of a story… that’s not what I call a cutscene. There have been actual cutscenes throughout the storyline, just not nearly enough that’s all.

Also, I agree with everybody about the Trahearne nonsense. As if it wasn’t bad enough to have a bland lecture of a story that lacked depth and with all of the characters forgettable with no personal connections between them and I… I find out the story is about this obnoxious NPC with terrible AI “saving” Tyria when in reality, he did jack squat and I did everything. MEH.

l0l

Such a beautiful comic

You guys don’t love fire #3 on dagger?!

One of my favorite skills tbh.

I don’t even understand why the hell people want to use that spot anyways. It’s terrible. Pretty much can never use FGS there (though ice bows get the job done either way lol). I personally like to LOS him in the nearby corner and burn him down, as it’s a lot more reliable and you can aggro him from anywhere instead of waiting for him to walk around the room.

On that note, I’m not sure why but for some reason pug teams always want to stack together right behind this fallen down object after spider queen for the elite + champ gravelings, but it’s a lot nicer to go in between them because they LOS closer to you so that you can kill them instantly with fiery rush… not to mention, if you get cc’d you won’t fly off backwards several paces but will be knocked into the object right behind you instead.

Like you said, Veckna, it seems pugs aren’t even a little bit interested in why it is that they’re going to the locations that they are let alone learning anything better :P

Veydar.5017:

Fractals used to be, will always be and are currently a huge waste of time. Unless you’re still in it for the challenge.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Av4NvDVKEaOzdHJPaTlsRU5LeEJWN3hodklXWGFCU1E&usp=drive_web#gid=0

Quoted for truth.

If you’re doing FotM for rewards, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. It’s VERY unrewarding with respect to time no matter how fast your group goes.

Aphrodesiac, you find scepter more fun than dagger MH?! o_O

I personally hate scepter. Terrible damage and unless they make dragon’s tooth less obnoxious to cast without a target selected I’m always going to opt for dagger :P