Guild Wars 2

I actually have alot more trouble with the theifs that don’t go full glass cannon. The glass cannon ones, if they make a mistake, or you outplay them in a short window, are SO SCREWED, its not even funny. The ones that build regularly with some survival however, don’t have to go all-in on you, and they have so many kiting tricks up their sleeve, its really hard to deal with them.

Had my best day token-wise today, picked up roughly 50, during ~7-8 hour stretch. SBIvsHoDvsET is a bloodbath. Half of those tokens i got when HoD sent wave after wave of men into the meatgrinder at DFB (fully upgraded keep with like 15 siege on defense lol)

Condition build is fine in PvE. Not so good in WvW, everyone is packing condition removal, and you won’t have the ability to stack too many bleeds anyways (i’m assuming your running a sword variant with rifle swap?)

Yes its absolutely fine. Depends on what you mean by late game content. You shouldn’t really ever need a shield for solo PvE.

The shield can be very useful in dungeons, if your having survival issues. I pack one just in case for that situation. The shield is also useful in sPvP (basically required really), but it is not that useful in WvWvW (the pvp is completely different)

Basically it doesn’t hurt to carry one around, there will be situations when you might want the extra survival.

1.) bring a rifle (bow is alot harder to use in WvW since the range is shorter and the projectiles are SLOW, so people can roll out easy)

2.) you can go melee, but you need to pick and choose correctly when it is ok. Do NOT go glass cannon in WvW unless you are expecting to stay on rifle the entire time. I go full tough/vit with alot of condition removal and while my damage isn’t that great, when i see an opening, i can run into a kittentorm, finish someone off , and run out easily and live.

3.) lastly, not warrior specific, if you want to actually be useful, don’t just follow a zerg around that is bashing its head into a heavily reinforced tower/keep. Defend supply depots, run supplys if people need to build siege, scout objectives etc. If your zerg isn’t setting up rams at the very least, don’t bother sitting at the gate spamming auto attacks for 10-15 mins before the inevitable counter attack drives you away.

Guess what. Warriors can use bows too. When kitten hits the fan, start kitting your lil tush off like a ranger.

SBI will be fine until the weekend ends. During the week though, we are screwed. I play a bit during the night shift and it is instant-join on SBI past like 12-1AM, when HoD starts to take the entire map. Weekends though we usually have a full crew running the whole time.

A new, shout-based elite skill, so that we have something besides signet of rage. This is the one addition/change i’m hoping for the most.

I’d also like the hammer animations to be sped up a bit, especially the #5 knockdown skill. Otherwise, make that skill do AOE knockdown also (all the other hammer skills are aoe, why not this one?)

The way i see it, Anet needs to decide on going in 1 of 2 ways

1.) Dungeons are epic, time consuming and difficult. They should take multiple hours with incredibly difficult bosses that the average PUG without optimized team setups will fail. The rewards for completing them however will be much, much more tangible (ie more gold, and either directly a piece of armor or enough tokens to buy armor). Think of them as mini-raids.

2.) Dungeons are relatively easy for experienced groups, and most PUGs are able to complete it (slow but doable). Dungeon rewards are small however, encouraging the need to repeat the dungeon multiple times. Should not take more than 30-45 mins to complete.

Right now you guys are like choosing a weird middle ground: You want the dungeons to be difficult and non-trivial to experienced players, but you want the rewards to be small so that people have an incentive to repeat. This is backfiring horribly imo. People would rather just not do dungeons at all when the difficulty is high, and the rewards are so small for completing, and the fact that you punish people that ARE good/fast at completing the dungeons. Make. up. your. mind. before people stop doing them all-together. (the number of people running CoF dropped so fast already, and you almost never see anyone looking to run anything besides Arah and TA now (the next 2 easiest dungeons).

Aggro is hold-able in a “tanky spec” I run healing shouts warrior with axe/axe and 95% of the time everything is glued to me – run in, hit “on my mark” > axe 5 skill and you’re good to go. (which can be good or bad depending on how fast we kill stuff as a team).

Sometimes i’ve noticed i can’t drop aggro even when i switch to ranged and run away and don’t attack for awhile, it just follows and stays glued to me forever.

Dungeons are so unrewarding now, you barely see people looking for them now, and the ones that do, are the poor newbies that hadn’t experienced them before the nerfs.

I also don’t understand why you nerfed the gold drops in dungeons. Do you want the entire 80 population farming trolls in frostgorge, or running around Orr? You have to give us SOME sort of diversity…. its already friggin hard to get money in this game, there’s gold sinks EVERYWHERE.

Its kinda funny. The responses to people playing support is to go man a siege weapon. This DEFEATS the PURPOSE of going support. How can i heal/support if i’m stuck on a siege engine? A pure DPSer can do this also, there’s no difference.

Next people will be like “well maybe i shouldn’t bother rezing teammates since that will distract me from KILLING MORE PEOPLE RAWRkittenderpkitten” Manning a siege is not the answer to getting support more bags (I used to do that myself when i ran a shouts-healing warrior spec into WvW, but i said kitten it, not worth running that spec if im sitting on an arrow cart anyways, might as well go for a kill-build.

Its unfortunate and annoying. Personally i do the jump puzzles because i run a support build and i get like 0-1 badges an hr due to this. It sucks when people siege up the jump puzzles, because its stupidly difficult to clear it out. HoD has like 10 people camping SBI jump puzzle right now with a ballista set up top to shoot people as they jump down the waterfall, its so pathetic.

I generally run axe/axe + bow for dungeons. I pack a shield in case there is a need for it. I run a healing shouts build, so it gives alot of support to the party (and if you go healing shouts you will be tanky).

Don’t be the guy who walks into a party with 5 signets and a GS on. No one will want you in their party. You will pop your 100B, then die instantly and make others res you non-stop, while offering nothing to the team.

If you bought this game without the intent to PvP, you probably had no idea what game you were getting.

Shout builds work very well, I run a similar shouts build myself for PvE stuff, and sometimes for WvW also.

Banners suck. Sorry. Too small of a range; alot of fights you need to stay mobile and you and your party will be too busy kiting to worry about where you placed your banners. 95% of the time signet of rage will be the elite you’re using; warbanner is still pretty bad since the uptime on it is horrible even if you spec into banner cd reduction its like 190 sec cd+

I don’t think the non-axe users know/realize you can dodge while using the skill and it won’t cancel. This alone is freaking awesome. It also fills up your adren super fast Who doesn’t like more meaty fat eviscerates?

Plus people get hella scared when you use it, and start scattering like flies.

Its not so much that signet of rage is good, its that the other options are poor. You MIGHT bring warbanner in for certain dungeons, but thats about it. CD and range on it are terrible. Rampage is the most worthless skill ever; if it was a non-elite it probably wouldn’t see much usage still.

I really hope they add a new elite skill for warrior. A shout would work (you can go full signet and full banner atm, but not full shout yet.) Make the shout give something we don’t have access to yet, like protection boon.

If there’s really an alliance between SB and HoD (i’m from SB) then they forgot to tell all of us playing about it. I’m usually fighting off HoD like 95% of the time when im playing WvWvW, and we only bother with JQ when they get frisky and try to mess with us. Other than that its a constant back and forth battle with HoD the vast majority of the time.

The problem is, most of these dungeons are over tuned in general. Bad aggro/pathfinding/healing mechanics make alot of encounters feel hella random too, like you have very little control over the outcome.

This is a real turn-off to non-hardcore players. Grinding these dungeons for tokens, which you need a TON of kind of sucks already, but grinding dungeons that take a long time to complete is significantly worse.

The defend mag room buff was handled poorly. You should test wheither or not you can kill these mobs with a legitimate group (you can’t). Its a kiting event due to the sheer amount of hp you have to cut through and the damage you will take, sorry. This isn’t the only kiting event in the game, AC expo route 3 has a similar one, and if you said you were supposed to kill all those burrows and defend the 2 points from being attacked i would question your sanity. Its ok to have a kiting event, but having one where your designed to die, and “zombie rush” it to stall is poor design. If you want people to kill those mobs that spawn then you need to 1.) fix healing system in this game 2.) fix damage reduction methods in this game 3.) lower hp of the elites that spawn. 4.) fix aggro system in this game.

I run dual axes (or axe + shield if its hard) / Rifle

Mending (best heal hands down)
Shake it off
For great justice
On my mark
Elite banner.

I go deep into vit talents to pick up banner raidus/cd buff, shout cd buff, and shouts heal. This gives you 3 pretty spammable aoe heals. I go deep into toughness (lots of good revive stuff here, as well as auto endure pain if you go all the way.

If you go deep into toughness you can get the auto activate endure pain which frees up a slot.

I run a pure tank/support build for dungeons, deep toughness and deep vit. I pick up the buffs to shout cd and shout healing so that i can spam AoE heals. This ups your team’s survival so much.

I gotta agree with the elites though. I typically bring 3 shouts (shake it off, for great justice, and on my mark) + war banner. Signet of rage is strictly better though but i feel less selfish if i take the elite banner. Rampage is pure trash skill. I wish they would add an elite shout skill so that i could go full angry bard-mode.

In PvE all the melee weapons are roughly comparable, with GS being maybe slightly more damage, and 1h mace being the worst. You can pretty much go with anything; i’ve used almost every weapon combo at some point, aside from i think mace/mace and mace/horn because i hate mace in main hand in general for soloing.

It works (defy pain auto activate) but the internal cooldown is long, i’m not quite sure how long it is. I also feel like the duration is a little shorter than normal but i might be paranoid; usually when im low and it triggers, i’m already rolling away and/or mashing my block button to survive.

The last stand auto activate is not very noticeable tbh. Most of the time when your knocked down and it triggers, you won’t get say knocked down again. I stopped using it myself.

To melee you really gotta take alot of support stuff.

For example most warriors level with a 5 signet build. I know i sure as hell did. When i do dungeons though, i use 0 signets, cause they are garbage for team play.

I also leveled mostly using hammer. Problem is alot of bosses in dungeons have this boon that blocks CC (it has 5 stacks, and 1 cc removes 1 stack; once you cc him, he regains the boon) so that only 1/5 CC skills actually get through. This made hammer pretty useless. Ended up swapping to sword and board for the survival.

Still have to keep a ranged weapon in 2nd weapon swap. Some bosses are ABSOLUTELY impossible to melee. For example if you do CoF story, you know there’s that one boss that has an immolation aura around it, that is really big. If you stay in it, your constantly under burning effect.

Some fights you will want to pack signet of stamina. Its funny cause this is the weakest signet in solo PvE, but is probably the best/only signet worth using situationally in dungeons. The endurance regen is great for fights where you need to kite alot (like 2nd boss in TA), and gives you another condition removal (always good)

IMO, there are a few skills you will probably always have on your bar for dungeons. 1.) mending. 2.) shake it off 3.) for great justice. These 3 are just way too useful not to have.

Heal signet is good for low-mid level. The regen doesn’t scale well into the higher levels, and it becomes useless.

If i run low level stuff i sometimes take heal signet still, but anything over level 50ish or so and i swap back to mending.

If they want to buff heal signet, the regen needs to be way stronger, like 400 hp a tick minimum.

Once i started doing explorable dungeons, i swapped to a full blown tank-support build. Sword and board it up, went 30 toughness/vit for the defenses and shout/banner buffs, and 10 precision for bleed duration. Damage is totalkitten but the survivability went up alot.

Aggro is wonky in this game, even with crap damage bosses will often stick to me 100% of the time, which can be great since i’m built hella tanky (also bad because sometimes I need like 1-2 seconds of extra breathing room, which i might not get, and then i die)

Bugged on stormbluff isle also. Another SP in straits of devastation bugged there as well, which stops you from completing 2 adjacent maps >_>

You can melee but you need to pull out when your low. Some bosses though just do way too much damage to melee; sometimes its better if no ones meleeing, because the AI on the boss might default to a less damaging ranged skill. Also, alot of bosses have pbaoe damage which is pretty hard to avoid as a melee.

Always pack a gun or bow for dungeons in your secondary weapon swap.

If your soloing its fine. The passives on the signets help alot as well.

When I party though for dungeons, i change everything. I don’t run any signets at all. Usually mending, and some shouts and banners for the team. I change my traits too to be more efficient at rezing people.

Really depends on what your planning to do.

If your gonna do alot of dungeons, going deep into Vit helps alot (you get some healing stuff, some bonuses to rezing others (which you will be doing ALOT of in dungeons) And of course defense helps alot there too.

If your doing pvp, your gonna want to go more offensive, and try to burst people down, so power/crit etc. Also you want to go in the trees for the weapons you plan to use as well.

I currently use sword/axe.

I actually leveled most of the way to 80 using 2h Hammer though. Dps is lower since the weapon is slow, but the CC is great. I swapped to sword/axe since those are the best weapons i found though. Axe is by far the best offhand weapon imo, the 2 skills you get from it are amazing. Sword in MH is great for bleed build, so pack on alot of +condition damage.

I’d go back to hammer if i found a better one, but one thing that annoys me is most enemies in the dungeons have that CC immunity stack buff, that blocks 1 outta 6 cc’s which makes hammer completely useless there.

Always pack a ranged weapon in your 2nd slot; alot of dungeons especially HEAVILY punish you for being in melee range. Its actually insanely unfair.

@cliff

Is the bug i mentioned known? It sounds like your talking about people that haven’t gotten gold from transactions (buy or sell). My problem is with just checking. I’ve bought stuff from the TP several times without issue, but twice now I lost money while just checking and not actually buying anything. And the amount i lose is really specific (only the gold column of my money – silver and copper remains). I’m 100% sure i did not attempt to sell or buy anything when i lost this gold.

This is seriously disturbing though. In the long-term grand scheme of things, the 3 gold i lost isn’t a huge deal (even though its basically all my money i have at the moment) but its so depressing really to just watch your money disappear for no reason.

So many TP bugs at the moment. I’ve lost gold twice now due to the TP bug. For some reason just CHECKING the TP can remove all your gold (not your silver and copper though). The first time it happened i was a little annoyed, (this happened last week). But it just happened AGAIN; I was literally at 2 gold 30 silver, while checking the price of a 12 slot steel box which i was contemplating selling. decided against it since i never actually received any money for the stuff i sold, closed the TP box, and my gold is down to 30 silver >_>. what. the. heck???

I never got any money for items i posted on TP but that doesn’t bother me as much as the current bug that makes you lose gold just for CHECKING the tp. Too scared to ever check it again unless i’m under 1 gold now…..

Same thing. I’ve had this bug happen TWICE now. First time i lost 1 gold, second time i lost 2 gold.

What happens is you lose ONLY the GOLD, but not any SILVER or COPPER. It happened both times while i was checking the TP. I did not buy anything either time i was just price checking an item i made (12 slot steel boxes), and i close the post, and my gold is gone (not my silver or copper though). This bug is back breaking really because gold is so hard to get in this game.