Guild Wars 2

If you follow Ascii’s rotation, it might just seem like he’s using everything, but his melting is alongside fears coincides with the slimes coming in. I failed 20-30% of the time at first too, and realized I just need to space things apart a little better to make sure at that crucial 20-25% stage that he is super far away from any other oozes to burst him down.

Being near oozes doesn’t give him regen per se, it allows the small oozes to throw him a significant heal on a moderate CD. That’s why, when you’re a little unlucky, he can go back up to 50% HP and other times get wiped almost immediately.

Your Fear Mark is super important for this, make sure you’re standing point blank to Subject 7, and have a good few oozes at your back, this way when you land the mark, the mini-oozes will be fear one way, while 7 is fear the other, with as few oozes as possible going his way.

I don’t think I have the attention span for stuff like this to do it perfectly for an hour or more to maximize returns so it’s a bit risky for me for monies but it’s alot of fun. I don’t know what build exactly the OP optimized for this but 30/20/0/0/20 standard rabid burning terror condimancer (with new confusion runes instead) is able to do this the majority of the time (don’t forget to use food !).

Yaki.9563:

Ray.3780:

Being the most effective healer Guardian is not possible in GW2 for several reasons. One, there needs to be a Prec/Tough/Healing stat set, this would allow you to have 100% vigor uptime, threat from mobs and double the dodges.

Magi gear gives precision, if that’s what you want. Note the guy a few posts above who uses magi armor with cleric’s accessories for 21% crit.

Not to mention you can get vigor from other sources.

I’m aware of Magi’s armor and mixing it with Cleric’s to get the desired effect. I guess the thing is that threat is determined by toughness, so the more Magi’s you get, the more balanced your defensive stats are, and the better you can keep vigor up, but you risk losing your effectiveness as an anchor. I guess it doesn’t matter since most standard DPS run a few pieces of PVT/Knights and full zerkers nowadays.

The more you invest in precision, the worse your personal DPS gets too, given the lack of critical damage, so either way increasing healing efficiency drops your effectiveness elsewhere significantly.

no, not at the moment.

I thought this when I saw it too, but then I kinda thought about it and I guess it isn’t horrible, depends on your crit. If it’s only around 35-40%, that is, (1 proc every 4+ seconds average).

Earth has a 2s ICD, so with a meh crit chance, it’s .. fairly .. likely that on swap Geomancy will work, (swapping Scepter/Dag to Staff). If you swap on CD though, Earth will never get a chance to apply any bleeds, however if you stay longer in Scepter than Staff, you’ll probably get more bleed damage than with Earth/5% crit or something, presuming your Geomancy hits.

Either way, this little guide helped me get my 3/5 gambit achievement done super easy, tyvm. Never thought about using my Condi Necro to bomb Dunwell.

I can see why Subject 7 is a good choice for a condi necro but I had a far easier time with Dunwall. It’s abit luck-based though and not too consistent. Also for that I took recieve/deal damage gambits.

Also, not sure if I’m looking at the right thing on the TP, but Resplendent Boxes are now like 5s, and were even lower last night I think. Parallel with this, the average ticket’s cost is now about 7s from current Sprocket TP prices.

I think the best way to make a profit off this is just to use the Gauntlet tickets you get by general day-to-day gameplay, because you have no other choice for that.

I’d forgotten about that warrior trait, that sounds horrific to go up against, given your recent access to abit of torment and fairly nice bleed upkeep and synergy for bleed uptime.

Being the most effective healer Guardian is not possible in GW2 for several reasons. One, there needs to be a Prec/Tough/Healing stat set, this would allow you to have 100% vigor uptime, threat from mobs and double the dodges. Two, the way damage is going in GW2 right now is two things, conditions, and spike – though the new gauntlet is a solo boss, she applies cripple, weakness and 1-hit KO’s, a deadly combo. No amount of healing is gonna help there.

Cleric Guardian was the first thing I did when I hit 80, before the Mace 250Healing was introduced. I found 0/30/0/30/10 to be fairly effective with about 800-1000HP. This way you could do decent DPS, have 100% Vigor uptime and hit allies with 1k dodge heals. Resolve share isn’t anywhere NEAR as good as Soothing Mist from an Elementalist (1200 share range), the share range is like 360 units or something and applies every few seconds. This means in most fights, you can’t cover everyone. On the other hand, though shouts suffer the same fate, you can target condition removal and boons to particular people. Cleric Guardian is really fun to play, and I wish it mattered, but it doesn’t. And I’ve seen with my eyes since I made the change to a more DPS oriented spec that killing something 20% faster while providing moderate support in terms of boons, conditon removal, mob positioning and projectile reflection far outweighs beating on something like a wet noodle and never dying while providing situationally useful heals.

The last thing is that I feel Boon duration is wasted on a Guardian who has fairly short base durations on the boons they pump out. You use the abilities for burst survivability, not sustained survivability.

As a crude example, Protection gives about 1300 Toughness, base uptime on traited Hold the Line is 4s every 28s roughly = 185 Toughness. You use up the equivalent of 1000 stat points (100% Boon Duration) to grant another 185 toughness (double duration). True it affects up to 5 people, but how often is everyone getting attacked consistently for a whole 8 seconds?

Most Torches have a generic ‘throw torch and apply burning’ skill unfortunately so if Necro did get torch, this would be what I’d expect to see. I’d love to see it as a group utility option though, or have a sweet finisher somehow worked in, like blast, if it grants a fire field on the other skill.

I used Scepter/Focus and Mace/Torch which is probably really weird, with 0/30/10/30/0. I used Signet Recharge, Torch Recharge and RHS // Purity // Shout traits and Might on crit. I also used condi duration reducing food and sharpening stone and stacked up 25 stacks of major bloodlust stacks. Used save yourselves, retreat and smite condition plus renewed focus and signet heal.

There’s a perfect way to get all her stacks down very quickly but it’s difficult to explain without a video. I used smite to insta-kill the pulling orbs to begin with, then I run over to the first light portal, on the RIGHT of it, the AOE will appear on the LEFT. Then move to the LEFT and the next AOE will appear on the RIGHT and the first shadow will walk straight in at this point, throw and run across to the next portal, her AOE will appear on it, don’t move out, stay on the portal, time your evade to dodge it, turn around and another shadow will be ready to walk in, safe from any others. AFTER this if you did it right, the pulling orb will respawn, smite it, then just get your third crystal however you want when you’re ready to engage her, throw and go. This is also really important, AUTO-ATTACK THE BOSS for crits to gain vigor, doesn’t matter that you’re doing 0 dmg. This way you don’t need to use endurance regen food.

Then, I just kited clockwise, used a shout whenever she crippled me, dropping symbols and smites and Mace #3 and Smite Conditions to fairly slowly aoe her down while always being like 20 steps ahead of her, turning to dps when I had a chance. She will always leap at you in between her AOEing the platform, so that’s a good time for a block.

Using Warhorn #4 during auto-attack cast counts as an interrupt, right?

I like the rune set so far. I personally had to give up 5% crit and something like 50-100 DPS from reduced condi durations, and I’d say it’s worth it for a WvW context if you like roaming.

I don’t know if I could give up OH Dagger for Warhorn, I’ve yet to try it out, but seems a little counterproductive because you lose significant access to AoE Weakness. You can get that back by traiting for it, though, I suppose, but you give up Hemophilia or whatever else in that case, and Dagger #4 which is again, another condition, blind (if a little short-lived) and an awesome cleanser now is lost.

Then again I couldn’t lose Staff and do Scepter/Dagger and WH OH set or something .. although Staff doesn’t actually bring any new conditions to the table, the defensive-offensive utility of it doesn’t match Warhorn .. And I’ve never been a fan of Spectral Grasp, misses more than it hits, but maybe I’ve always been using it wrong, didn’t think about using it at point-blank range. Maybe they’ll allow Fear to count as an interrupt one day, one can dream.

I think the issue with Pain Inverter was that we were already quite pressed with our utilities to try and fit it in, but runes are fairly flexible.

Undead is the all-out brute power choice, Nightmare gives you an RNG fear and helps you easily reach fear/bleed cap and an extra second of burning, Necromancer is sorta in between for people who don’t wanna do Twilight Arbor.

Where Perplexity fits in is giving us a tool against a very anti-condition meta, to punish abilities which break fear and wipe conditions 1-2 at a time.

In an ideal scenario, you proc the first 3 stacks on hit, enemy tries to cast their heal, you interrupt with fear, and they are now liable to take 2k dmg whether or not they attempt to break it and then further damage afterwards for trying to wipe their conditions you managed to slap on in those precious few seconds. This is also one more fairly reliable condition to proc more lifeforce for Scepter #3.

Only problem is the rune set will set you back a good 20-30g right now, but I think it’s worth testing. I think we can presume the 6-set bonus will eventually have an ICD put on it if it doesn’t already, so we won’t see AoE confusion on a zerg, but we can apply that to some extent with Epidemic.

From what I’ve seen, both the on hit proc AND the interrupt seems to generate 3 stacks from what people were getting put on them, but not 100% sure yet, only seen one account. If true, that’s 3 stacks of 10s and 3 stacks of 20s (apparently base duration 5s/10s), assuming a malice stat of around 1500 it’s about 180 per stack which isn’t too shabby on a moderate CD.

(1): +28 Condition Damage
(2): +15% Confusion Duration
(3): +55 Condition Damage
(4): 20% chance to cause Confusion on hit (15 second Cooldown).
(5): +100 Condition Damage
(6): +15% Confusion Duration. Causes 10 second of Confusion on interrupt.

Obviously the set is probably meant to be more directed at mesmers, but might be an interesting set for a 30/20/0/0/20 Burning Terrormancer? I presume we could proc the 6-set on well-timed fears, and with pizza the Confusion is at capped duration. Would like to know if anyone’s tried it / has any thoughts.

Anyone still use this in WvW? I primarily do small group S/D havoc play. What do you think of it vs. the standard maintenance oil or sharpening stone, considering S/D already has access to weakness?

Please make exotic backpack rewards account bound, they are fundamentally useless otherwise. At the very least, allow the chest to be opened on another character.

I’ve run a pure condition build on my necromancer since launch. I have Fractal progression on a few toons which I use to farm a bunch of Pristine Relics when I need them for a new build or whatever.

Anyway, I’ve been feeling more and more like a drag on my Necro as of late, so I want to try a Power build.

Anyone have any traits, runes/sigils, utilities suggestions? In terms of armor of thinking generally full berserker with a couple knights or valk pieces.

I’m currently working with a skeleton of 20/0/0/0/30, can’t decide where I want those last 20pts.

I have recently been getting strange occurences on my Asura Elementalist, (character features – Head Size, biggest as can be, other than that I can’t say what else might be causing this).

What happens is, that when I’m running along, my neck disappears, (the head just drops down to the shoulders and looks smaller) and when I stop running, my head/neck readjusts to normal.

It’s kinda like, when the asura ‘spearheads’ his little head forwards when he begins running, the animation gets stuck just for the head in that position, or something.

It’s not a huge deal, it fixes itself from time to time, I just feel abit stupid running around with no neck while it is going on, not sure if it’s to do with my armor or character selection choices.

EDIT: Zoning seems to trigger the bug alot, and here are some pictures of what I’m talking about.

Most common warrior abilities are super obvious by eye, especially the Burst skills and the weaponset is usually quickly deduced because people love making huge characters for warriors.

Stolen ability is fairly good against most warriors, as even melee weapons have thrown projectiles, so just reflect their stuff back at them. Many warriors have readily available stability and fury, so use that to your advantage since you’re S/D.

Their healing skills are abit more powerful as of the recent patch too I think .. so try to keep poison on them or be ready to interrupt.

So I played it for a few hours, point for point as described with very minor changes (swapped out Sigil of Air, and tried Quick Pockets over Quick Recovery on/off). It’s fun. It definitely has more staying power and is more friendly to S/D players worried about making mistakes, you can eat most burst abilities from a single player and still continue on to win the fight.

But when I was playing my A-game, however, and largely mitigating by dodging, I definitely missed the 40-50% greater damage from a more offensive spec/gear set.

I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t notice team fights feeling smoother, and that boon removal/daze pressure wasn’t really cool and made up for the reduced damage in a big way. However, I did hit walls several times, sometimes with allies around even, and that was no fun.

A missed Steal is also really bad, which smart players began to anticipate. Whether it puts it on the 5s interrupt or 21s whole CD, it can really suck.

Bountiful Theft doesn’t steal full Might stacks, and misses when Steal misses, also, boon steal comes before daze on the priority list. This matters because it lets kinda cool things like stealing a Dagger Storming Thief’s stability, and interrupting him to happen.

I tried Berserker Amulet with the spec and it didn’t work too well, too middlish or something. But maybe it was just a bad round.

You mention people having a science degree (I do), actually in scientific academia, this is exactly what happens. People will defend the outcomes of their own experiments and models to the very bitter end vs. something new. New theories, however eloquently developed, are not always swallowed happily immediately.

This is good and bad. Bad, because if the new theory is right, everyone’s time is being wasted chasing incorrect assumptions/views, but good, because it puts a significant hurdle for the newcomer to overcome, so that we don’t have a situation where the meta’s thinking is changing too often for us to be effective as a community.

I feel bad reading through your rant, but you know, people have recognised your effort and skill as a player in this thread, and I think that’s something you can take home. I don’t think that it was anyone’s intention to offend or belittle your efforts in this thread, most of us just want a little more convincing, but maybe that’s unfair.

What Bobross tried to get across is exactly the kind thing I wanted to say. This isn’t a text-based RPG against fixed enemies with predetermined actions. There too many variables.

You have your build that you’re comfortable with, you play well with it, you’re proud of it and the maths you generated to come to it. And you know what, I have maths that I play around with for my builds too.

I think what people have become upset by, is the potential to mislead new people. You will find it difficult to enforce your mathematical model on people who have a different way of thinking about the game. I’m not saying you are, I think you were just trying to up-play aspects of the build that you believe to be true and wanted to back it up.

It’s always better to put up a build in much more simple terms, and leave out any personal theorycrafting which is based on personal views about game mechanics and I think it avoids debate like this, which, while interesting, is abit abrasive and upsetting for all parties concerned.

The thing I dislike about investing so heavily in trickery, is that power based builds give up so much potential raw damage and pressure, for team utility. Utility that is easily brought by other means, or other classes with less detriment to damage output.

If you want to refill your allies’ endurance, Signet of Agility does that, instantly, on a very low CD, although comes with the caveat of not knowing their endurance and guessing.

I think the fact that you can steal 4 boons is wonderful, but you’re also allowing your target to live longer, indirectly giving them more opportunity to reapply those boons anyway. Currently, the most powerful boon to be stolen, Might, doesn’t steal the full no. of stacks last I checked.

Furthermore, many classes bring their own fury/vigor/swiftness close to 50-100% uptime, and the sharing radius is not huge. Building all this utility into steal also makes you think twice about using it on CD, despite it being only 21s-ish. Do you open with it at 100% HP and waste the majority of the Mug potential? Do you use it to chase/finish someone and/or stay alive but miss out on boonsharing because there’s no one near you?

Every second you keep it off CD though, you’re wasting all those trait points which are reducing its CD. I guess what I’m saying is, you mention that Critical Strikes traits are useless/wasted/avoided, and I feel like that applies to many traits for all classes.

I really like the build though, I’ll give it some real-life practice, I think it’s overall pretty cool, thanks for the write-up.

kay I understands, not used to stacking precision at low levels, cool stuff. thanks

so 20% chance + 2 * level in precision?

Is it intentional for this to provide 20% crit? or a bug? (Leveling ele atm)

There’s a fairly straightforward solution to your difficulty stomping, consider slotting in Well of Power somewhere, I wouldn’t ever run around without a stun breaker, and actually, it’s good for stomping many, but not all classes, and it’s burst condition removal (also some of our only access to VIGOR).

Because #1 on many downed classes actually inflicts fairly dangerous conditions, this utility also drops those so you can get that stomp with 1k HP left or whatever. The stability on it means that no random Joe is gonna run in like a hero and knock you down to save his ally.

I think there’s only two things that gip using Well of Power to stomp people, and that’s Stealth (shadow refuge) or classes which move/clone etc. during downed

I’d swap around utilities abit, I usually swap locust/spectral walk so swiftness only takes 1 slot, you’ll never need both. Also, chill and burn are very strong conditions to spread so consider epidemic, I’d think it would help you solo camps to some extent since only one of your chills is AoE and your burn is ofc single target.

Reaper’s Precision is such a weak trait especially with a fairly low crit chance, (like 0.1% LF/sec) consider shifting around your gear and instead moving points to either gain another 10 DM for Staff CDs or 10 SR for a source of stability which isn’t on a 3min CD for zergs, or some punch behind your DS#1’s.

I think I tested this a while back, you cannot dodge during the second or third attack in the chain if it’s set on auto. At least on my Norn Ranger, I am mid-air, leaping off my target and pouncing during this ability, and it is very characteristic and in my head makes sense to be incapable of dodging during it. You can ALWAYS dodge in the window anytime between the first attack in the chain initiating or ending.

I don’t know if they can fix it but I would hate to lose the ‘stickiness’ of the sword, it has one of the best ranges for any melee weapon in this game (400-430 for 2/3). I think it is non-trivial to have both mobility during the attack chain, and the reason it probably hasn’t been fixed is for two reasons, one, they don’t know about it, or two, they know about it, but there’s such a divide in the community that I don’t think it ever will be.

It’s a very powerful, versatile weapon with a great attack speed and synergy with our pet, yes it could be so much better but I’d rather not risk losing what it has right now.

Revamp the entire system, for all classes, keep the idea of trait points. Break past the idea of TIERS, merge it all into one mess and associate appropriate stats with each trait.

Allow FREE selection of ANY TRAIT for a set amount of trait points.

Adept minor traits

Currrently -
Minimum attainable: 3 (30/30/10/0/0)
Maximum attainable: 5 (15/15/15/15/10)

Proposed -
Selecting any Adept minor trait costs 2 trait points, max. 5.

Master minor traits

Currrently -
Minimum attainable: 2 (30/30/10/0/0)
Maximum attainable: 4 (15/15/15/15/10)

Proposed -
Selecting any Master minor trait costs 3 trait points, max. 4.

Grandmaster minor traits

Currrently -
Minimum attainable: 0 (15/15/15/15/10)
Maximum attainable: 2 (25/25/10/10/0)

Proposed -
Selecting any Grandmaster minor trait costs 4 trait points, max. 2.

-Minor Totals:-

Expected trait points spent on minor traits: ~20 (4 Adept, 2 Master, 2 Grandmaster)
Maximum allowance: 30

Adept major traits

Currrently -
Minimum attainable: 2 (30/30/5/5/0)
Maximum attainable: 5 (15/15/15/15/10)

Proposed -
Selecting any Adept major trait costs 5 trait points, max. 5.

Master major traits

Currrently -
Minimum attainable: 2 (30/30/10/0/0)
Maximum attainable: 3 (20/20/20/10/0)

Proposed -
Selecting any Master major trait costs 8 trait points, max. 3.

Grandmaster major traits

Currrently -
Minimum attainable: 0 (15/15/15/15/10)
Maximum attainable: 2 (30/30/10/0/0)

Proposed -
Selecting any Grandmaster major trait costs 12 points, max. 2.

Major Totals

Expected trait points spent on major traits: ~50 (2 Adept, 2 Master, 2 Grandmaster)
Maximum allowance: 58

Results

People will have ~14 traits. Each trait comes with 2 stats depending the tree it’s in now, 50X and 50Y/5%Z. People will gain 1400 stats total from traits, as is the case now.

Build possibilities will skyrocket, yes, extensive balancing will be required, but this system is much better for the leveling AND endgame player.

Thoughts, everyone?

@Esplen – I thought same sigils don’t stack like that?
@mercrury – thank you !

anyone know if these stack MH/OH?

As it stands, pets cannot live long enough in the PvE vision of Gw2, which throws unreasonable damage at you which must be avoided. Pets never contribute the damage that our weapon co-efficients suggest, without us sacrificing our own DPS/utility to bulk them up, and even then ! This needs to be fixed. In the meantime, why don’t we have a trait which effectively mitigates our damage loss from a dead pet?

In some encounters, a dead pet is /unavoidable/ no matter what you do. For example, Jade Maw, I often see pets getting targeted twice in a row, which puts your CLASS SPECIFIC MECHANIC out of action for 60 seconds, untraited.

Until you do something about this, how about a reasonable trait like -

Damage is increased by x% for y seconds when your pet becomes inactive.

The CLOSEST thing we have is fury/3 stacks of might when pet reaches 50% HP – pathetic on a class with so much fury access.

30/30/10/0/0 for PvE, 0/30/10/0/30 for WvW. You need the stability over burning in WvW, getting targeted left and right.

oh okay, cool, I was looking at corrupt boon as a reference so wasn’t aware, I guess that sounds fair enough.

I could be wrong, and of course it would need to be tested once it goes live, but it doesn’t seem like Torment is going to have a counterpart boon which converts to it and vice versa.

Alongside this, chill and immobilize are additional conditions currently unaffected.

With this in mind, what do people think would be a interesting counterpart boon for Torment or any of the other missing pieces?

I can imagine some kind of ‘standing still’ dependent boon could be interesting, increasing power, defense or maybe even condition defense/- condi duration.

Quickness is also technically not a boon but since its recent nerf, it could be interesting for Chill conversion to be tied into it, if it was officially made a boon. Of course then boon duration would affect it and it’d have to be nerfed even more but it’s interesting either way.

Immobilize is an odd one and I can’t think of anything that really fits. Maybe stealth/camoflage.

My maths might be off but I’ll try and calculate how many procs you can expect to keep up. I am assuming you don’t have any boon duration and that you pop into DS every 10 seconds.

Dagger attacks at a rate of 2 per second on average. Base might is 10 sec durations so you can get 20 hits off before the first possible proc will wear off.

With your stats, on average, 12 of these will crit. Of these crits, on average, 3-4 will grant might. This is equivalent to 105-140 power/condi.

Now, I think the easiest thing would be to hop onto gw2buildcraft.com, put in your gear and traits, and then click on manual and put in the above stacks of might as a baseline, see what happens to your bleed damage and compare it to when you have the 5% sigil in.

It’s hard for anyone to truly give you an answer otherwise without having the whole picture ^^ In my experience, damage multipliers work best when your damage is more on the side of power damage, while might works better when you’re closer to hybrid.

Sigil of flame is another not bad option. If you really want to maximize damage, don’t forget about sigil of the night (10% damage at night) and that you can carry another weapon set with bloodlust sigils for stacking and then swap after. Unfortunately GW2 doesn’t have a feature to save gear sets yet which makes this kind of preparation tedious sometimes.

EDIT – My suggestions are probably more suitable for PvE, but see Flow’s post for some good suggestions for PvP/WvW, although either suggestions would work fine in either.

This was fixed, it only gives 10% as far as I can see, however see my recent post for other ways of reaching a 2s fear.

So, it’s pretty much finalized that burning will very likely be a 30pt Grandmaster trait which makes getting Master of Terror fairly difficult for anyone using a scepter. Here I have a few notes that may enlighten people as to the most cost-efficient way of maximizing burning and terror damage, at least in PvE/WvW

Solution #1: 105% Fear Duration

A. Rare Veggie Pizza, 40%
B. 30pts in Spite, 30%
C. Necromancer Runes x6, 20%
D. Sigil of Paralyzation, 15%

Total: 105%, 70% ALL Condi, 35% Fear only.

Downsides – Lose your offhand sigil and damage from conditions. What I mean is, note that with 70% condition duration, a 4s burn reaches 6.8s, JUST short of a 7th tick.

Solution #2: 95% Fear Duration (Wut?)

Here’s something alot of people might not know, Sigil of Paralyzation is actually bugged, and I believe it multiplies on top of condition duration from other sources, I’ve tested this in Heart of the Mists over and over by eating a pizza before hopping in (buff stays on).

A. Rare Veggie Pizza, 40%
B. 30pts in Spite, 30%
C. Nightmare Runes x6, 10%
D. Sigil of Paralyzation, 15%

Total: 95%, 80% ALL Condi, 15% Fear only. Note .. 1.8s x 1.15 = 2.07s

Downsides – You still lose your offhand sigil, but now you have another burn tick, yay ! Another 35-70DPS depending on your malice.

Solution #3 – 70% Fear Duration

It is known that if a fear is timed, you can actually pump out an extra tick. I can’t do it myself very often but I’ve occasionally seen videos across the forum. Given that bleeds tick continuously, this requires remarkable skill and timing, looking at the enemies health bar and timing it /just/ as it falls from condition ticks. In practice, this is fairly difficult and I don’t recommend this solution. Besides, if you’re skilled enough, you can even do this on the above two solutions and get three ticks probably.

The upshot is you can now use your offhand sigil and whatever runes you want to reach bleed duration cap, though the benefit from having this is severely diminished if anyone else is contributing any bleed stacks at all (if you easily maintain 25 stacks with your weapons/build).

Downsides – Unreliable, mostly luck-based, return is based on group comp/allies nearby.

Solution #4 – 120% Fear Duration

Basically, this is getting Master of Terror anyway. The only situation I can recommend this is in is where you’re not using a Scepter. I don’t think it’s worth dropping BOTH 2% damage per condition and your shot at significant uptime of a buffed weakness / scepter durations above bleed cap for it, but if you’d rather have the burst for your hybrid build, I don’t know.

That’s all for now, hope this is useful to fellow necromancers tomorrow and the coming weeks !! Have fun !

Durzlla – see Engineer, burning on crit is in the power tree, Ranger, bleed on crit, crit tree .. there is no uniform thing.

that said, I’m not convinced they’re real but they could be a couple weeks old.

I like the altruism rune set alot. I used it to set up a boon sharing Ranger with 30pts in NM, 4x Altruism runes and 2xWater runes, giving 60% Boon duration. I personally used Heal As One because of its low CD compared to Spring. I don’t go 6 for Altruism because the Fury granted is only 5s base but it’s not bad. I realize you use Spring to keep pet alive though, so another option is to get like 2xMonk/2xMajor Monk/2xWater for 70% boon duration total but no synergy with healing but that’s ok I guess since warhorn will now be dishing out 25.5s of buffs every 28s. Note that you also hit Regeneration duration cap (if there is one?) with +33% duration from NM and this set up, meaning healing spring gives like 100% Regen uptime if you stand in it.

With fortifying bond, warhorn gives 1-2 might and healing gives 6 stacks of might to your pet (4 set rune of altruism) close to all the time.

Sword Auto attack speed is 1.65 attacks/second, meaning you grant about 4 stacks of might from that before stacks start to fall off. If the leaked patch notes are true, with 70% crit, the new Companion’s Might trait will probably give your pet another 9 stacks of might if there is no ICD.

Of course you can use Sigil of Battle/Strength for more might on yourself too.

Add it all up .. 12-25 stacks of might. This is together with a pretty much 100% uptime on Fury. The sad thing is, swapping pets kills all boons, so be aware of that if you choose to use swapping to grant area might, as your pet will be starting blank on boons. But btw I think Area Might will give 6 stacks of might to your pet with Fortifying Bond. Note also that 25 stacks of might and Expertise Training (350 condi dmg) also brings the pets condition damage to like 1200 .. shame most pets don’t apply conditions very rapidly at all even with BM investment.

As far as your trait points go, I’m not sure why you’ve got 5 in MM. I would go 0/15/30/25. Again, if the leaked patch notes are correct, traiting for spirits will only take 1 trait slot. And imo in dungeons, spirits following you around is bad, you want to strategically place them.

As a rule of thumb, I think their radius is about 900 (so about Axe range) but I could be wrong. Its fairly large actually. They won’t be alive all the time but with recent buffs they don’t die in 1 hit as often, in low level fractals and dungeons especially if your group members don’t stand on top of them. I would use 1-2 spirits depending on the fight. Funnily enough we do have ‘Flame’ and Frost spirits so they fit with your inital theme :P

Yes, I do mean non-mob NPCs.

It’s dagger/focus

There are plenty of things to abuse – e.g. OP weapon kits which can be taken all over the map, see Fireheart Rise’s grenade kit. But, you have fun, right? And isn’t that the point during levelling and grinding? Killing that champ by working together with a strong NPC.

Traited shouts plus ‘Guard!’ → Perma regen/swiftness/protection for pet without any boon duration even required, given 30% base plus Fortifying Bond. Downside – 1s cast time and small radius, although all other shouts are instant, plus, we might have a stun breaker in there. 30WS/30NM/10BM is going to be cool.

The return hit on PoS is more difficult to get off than you might think. People will generally dodge after that first big hit in my experience, and sometimes, the movement which has occured since you sent PoS out will cause the return hit to be obstructed, other times, it’ll just bug out and not return at all, or miss or something. It’s a delayed ability, and despite a low CD, if they do choose to keep the CD the same, I think it’ll be fine because most of the time it just won’t work.

Personally, I would love to see a knockback on the initial hit INSTEAD, increase the CD to make this appropriate.

How hilarious would a knockback on the way out and pull on the way back be though ?! haha, pushing them around like a ragdoll

The colour looks very similar to some colors already in game. However, I do like the idea of legendary dyes that perhaps apply some kind of unique effect, like a shimmer, glow or chromatic effect when used on armor.

We do have things that already do this however, the legendary weapons like the Juggernaut – it might be interesting to see more though, people love making themselves stand out from the crowd.

True, getting an easy ten rezzes is easily done by going to any of dozens of known areas full of dead people, I can see that being a pain.

A Champ bunker with an AoE NPC revive is a great idea though, I like that alot. Just to be clear, I’m mostly talking about lower level areas which have definitely seen a downturn in no. of people, no need to change Orr and any world events like Jormag, just general events.

Another idea would be to dot some ‘Determined’ (Immune to Damage) NPCs and enemies duking out around the place, just to feel like there’s this constant battle going on or something.

I think something really needs to be done to make map exploration fresh, interesting and engaging, now that we’re almost a year in, many people are on their Xth 80 and alot of people I know would rather blow gold on leveling via crafting than face the zones again.

Yes, I understand the illusion of giving the player a sense of purpose, but really? The story, which is a single player chain of events, which pit one person against the odds, one hero (even though there are thousands of us online) to unite the Orders and take down a common enemy.

So basically I have to believe that of the millions of people in Tyria, not a one can defend themselves against any of the threats without ME and only ME there to save them. It’s kinda lame.

I’m not saying they all have to live, but from a personal perspective, I would rather run into a dynamic event, and be like, oh my gosh, these people are fighting to the death, they need my help, rather than .. oh, dear, everyone’s dead, looks like it’s up to me again. I’d like to see maybe a couple veteran or champion NPCs mixed in who can be super weak and can’t finish the event themselves, and have enough regeneration to be standing there perpetually taking damage or something.

Or maybe, if enough time has elapsed since everyone nearby died, rez all the appropriate NPCs so there’s a large chance you’ll walk in on a firefight instead of a deadzone.

Can you bump up the power of NPCs across the world which are under constant attack? I don’t think it would affect that much, it’s pretty lame seeing dead NPCs everywhere I go. I like that reviving them contributes to most renown hearts, but, really, some places, people are just constantly wiped out ..

yeah, you guys aren’t crazy, I thought I was for abit too, but I’ve taken note of it over and over and it’s definitely happening automatically client/server side somehow. I don’t think the trait matters either, I was just giving an example