Guild Wars 2

I played the first 7h yesterday. Not enough credit is being given to the teams that assaulted FA borderlands, while they likely had queues, and held 80% of the map for hours on end. Quickly grabbing the 2 side fortresses and even taking garrison under their nose. Then defending garrison for well over an hour with the outer wall trebbed down and bloody fighting everywhere. We drove them out like 3 or 4 times. Going into Aussie time their lead was small and shrinking. It was a very even contest.

The game needs the orbs in some form. It feels stale without them.

Hopefully all the t3-t5 servers will start to shore themselves up with the transfer changes. Its only been a week.

Tbh if people had just stuck with their original server choices and not stacked servers, likely things would be much more balanced.

Khenzy.9348:

Remove the sharks completely, add cannon balls to the backside of dock and beach, add cannons in each side of the ship, add more cannonballs in the hold of the ship, reduce cannon damage due to ammunition availability, add an easy to see and easily accesible from the Ruins entrance to the back of the ship (some kind of underwater small ramp), place the newely added cannonballs in the hold of the ship near this ramp.
Just make the ship the center piece of the map, with easier accesibility and more impact on the match instead of this annoying obstacle it is right now. Now you have a more clever excuse to go from point to point, this includes the Ruins. Thank you for reading.

Better yet just give everyone a cannon.

The bigger question is where is ET? I haven’t seen one all day.

If they had some presence our lead could be minimised some. Last week DH did just that and it was a good FUN fight.

I love giving the sharks retaliation using my signet. Lol good times.

I miss the orbs. They were exciting. Something seems missing now.

Pity cheaters have ruined this.

Since most people in the world live in Asia, no one cares what time it is in NA.

The fight took so long I went and made a sandwich. Hardly worth posting in the complaints department.

Soldier

165 vitality is hard to ignore.

With a gs you just run or leap in front of the mobs and hit 2. One WW and you have done enough damage to loot them. Staff does not do as much damage in such a short amount of time. After about 3 sec all the mobs are dead you need to do a large burst in a very short amount of time.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQNAR8dlYg67mFyKEfYFRuAbGEUg1HiHmCMmxbBA

I used this for quite a while.

This is turning into a real dogfight between FA and Yaks. Some real tough fighting. I kinda think FA underestimated us a bit.

Its not intended and just like a few kittens have got Orbs removed, you’re going to get our last good 2hand weapon nerfed… you just wait.

Ty for the information on how much things heal for.

So was everyone drunk at Anet when they thought it was a good idea that Thieves could attack and NOT become instantly visible?

The Orbs were very exciting. I hope they can be brought back in some form.

I would expect this little dicovery to bring about a nerf. The less than 1% of people who can pull this off will end up hurting all of us.

Maybe its a lag thing but I find the 5 skill on the gs fails to pull things more often than not. Seems like all sort of things will cause it to fail. I am not sure why. It could be because I am in Australia and lag plays some sort of factor. Be nice if it was only a 1 step cast. Push button pull people to you.

I think the 2x boon duration runes would be the way to go.

Another rune to consider is Lyssa for more crit but the 6 piece set removes conditions and grants every buff for a few sec after using. Not so helpful with the golemn Elite but great for the other 3.

Mix of Beserker, Knights and Karma (Pow/Vit/Tough) gear.

^ well we were hoping cd would keep pressing their attack but they backed off. If they had of kept it up we might have snuck in the back door like we did in Eb the other day. No such luck.

They are completely dominating in current pvp. You can’t give a class high survivability, high control and high damage and not expect them to pwn everyone. Something has to give. Not to mention how devastating portal bomb is in wvw… strut up invisible and plonk 40 foes in your midst… c’mon.

I like the trim softly approach.

I think the cd on support skills may be a little long in this game and some of the support weapons not so great. Healing Power was nerfed in Beta and does not seem to be as high as it should be.

Removing Mesmer stealth or putting in some form of stealth detection would seriously reduce these tactics. He could no longer simply strut up and plonk a turtled group in your midst with little risk. The turtlers would be less mobile.

Best suggestion ever.

Toughness and Armor do not mitigate Conditions, more often than not the thing that does the most damage to me is bleeding. When a DOT can be applied every second and Removers are on longish CD… well you get my point. A health pool is often > toughenss.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQNgf5elYgKCHHSNEfIFRuAbGEEhVFi31DISxGC;TgAA2CnoqxUjoGbNuak1A

I used something very similar to this. Or at least this is what I would use, knowing what I know now.

The hammer 5 +judges intervention gets me a lot of kills in wvwvw and spvp.

I really like Mighty Blow because of the leap. You seldom miss. Whereas WW can miss for no reason at all. A person can be a sword length away and start running and it misses. Not to mention Blinding Blade, which is the most frustrating skill in the game and fails more often than not.

It has been a fun weekend. The whole time I was playing it went back and forth. When I logged CD was really coming on strong and took our Orb. They seemed to have quite a zerg while we only had about 20 people in the whole region. This back and forth nature makes this match up very exciting. Haing to play against good foes like DH and CD have helped my guild develop some good strategies. So well done to them for sticking it out all weekend and making us all work very hard.

And Kudos to the Yak commander who gave back an ill-gotten orb. I only heard about it, but it was a pretty classy thing to do. Unlike the odd nitwit who seems to think that ill-gotten gains are good in any shape, manner or form. I know a person who cheated would get to boot from our guild or from most guilds on our server.

Everytime I go to the builder with a class idea I end up making a sight variation of Altruistic Healing. Its just so fundamentally Guardian.

I have tried all sorts of builds and I just find, maybe because we have so little health, that the AH builds outshine all others. I have tried Meditation Builds, Burning Builds and Spirit Weapon builds but the AH builds seem to be better.

I think it comes down to, we don’t have a lot of health, we need to have heals coming in from somewhere. The amount of health we have seems to be limiting what would be effective builds. Without AH or Monk’s Focus, we don’t have the surivivability of a Warrior who has 25k+ health and does better dps. With one of those 2 Tactics our survivability increases substantially. I personally find that AH gives better healing and feel more comfortable with it. But I can see why some might prefer to get their heals in 1k injections.

I certainly find Tome of Courage and Renewed Focus to be good elites. However Renewed Focus is about the same as the Warrior Skill Endure Pain and for them its only a Class Skill…

How can one be an Elite for us and only a Class Skill for the other? It kinda shows how out of touch the Warrior dev is and how conservative the Guardian dev is.

I think our Elites are rather useful but they are on long CD. I would much prefer to have skills that I could fire more often. Maybe Aura’s or something that I could fire every 60 sec and impact the battle, rather than large skills like the Tomes on huge CD. That fits my playstyle. When I played LOL I much preferred classes where you could use the Ultimate a lot instead of ones that were on a 2 min cd. The lack of playstyle choices with Guardian is kind of troubling.

Jumper.9482:

Woah. 12k backstab? You must be running, like… negative toughness or something.
Because the glassiest necros I’ve vs’ed get crit for around 9k.
Most good ones get hit for about 6-7k. Then they turn around and hit you with 10 stacks of bleed which WILL kill you if it goes uncleansed. Not to mention the blinding wells and plague form blind spam and
Wait.. why am I telling you how to play? I’d much rather have that 15 free glory kthnxbye.

I dunno. Its the only time I have been hit that hard. It seemed a bit odd. But stil, 9k means 1 extra cast for the thief. 9k or 12k its still double what most other classes do, specced glass cannon or not.

I’ve played stealth characters in other games before and copped huge nerfs, even though the ttk was >10 sec. I expect thieves to get hammered eventually 3 sec ttk is simply not acceptable.

Well with 26k health on my Necro, I have been killed a few times without even seeing the thief. 12k backstabs and 6k steals take most of my health. By time the stealth reveals them I am dead or maybe a hs or two from it. Takes about 3 sec and you only see the foe when he starts to spike you. Most people would say that was instagibbing.

Twenynge.8520:

I tend to think that the meta is full of bunkers due to the fact that offense, specifically thieves, is TOO good. If you run anything other than a bunker, you run the risk of getting istagibbed by the thief combo. Tone down the burst (while maintaining overall dps) and your bound to start seeing things other than bunkers.

What do you think of that, OP?

I agree with this 100%. The only way to play some classes is to fortify yourself.

If the balance shifts to allow more balanced builds, fights will be longer, builds more diverse and pvp more fun.

Watch the mini map before going anywhere and keep an eye on the points, which are yours, theirs, contested, some logic will help you predict where you can go to give your team the numbers in a fight and score some kills.

If the enemy is turning a point let them have it, hook up with the the green dots instead. As a Necro your not going to 1v1 good players till you get really good at duelling, but you can help your team decimate people in 2v2’s and greater.

Try mace focus as your 2nd weapon , its great in pve.

I used sword torch and mace focus almost exclusively, which is very similar to what you are doing. Synergy between the weapon sets was awesome.

Its funny its like the warrior dev and thief dev used a different math to calculate damage from every single other class in the game. Any other class a 4-5k hit is pretty big.

I am not sure how 5 or 8 sec of stability every minute became perma-stability. Tbh ele’s and engi’s seem to be more resistant to cc.

Hammer 5 + judges intervention almost at same time. Switch to gs and go 4,2.

3,4,5 are mostly pvp skills

I usually go gs/hammer and do gs 4,2 then swithc to hammer. Things die fast.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQJASRlYgCBnCSJEfIFRWBWWpYfyDrgGveoQKyQA

Here is a build using AH that I have run sometimes in SPVP. It works pretty well. The healing is not as high as your normal AH build, but you are still pretty tanky, getting healing everytime you use a Virtue or a Symbol. On the other hand, it does a lot more damage and has more CC than your normal Crithammer build through the 2 Spirit Weapons. It is about 75% as tanky as Crithammer and 75% as offensive as the normal 20/20/0/20/10 Spirit Weapon build. Its hard to measure the CC from the glowy hammer though.

Spirit hammer and gs

These are first rate guides.

My favourite thing to do in pvp with the hammer is use the 5 skill and after they run into it once, punt them into it, then Mighty Blow on their head. It demoralises them so much they just give up and try to run. Thieves just die.

90+50+25 = 165 Vitality and 50 Toughness

TBH I have a second set of gloves that gives me 6/6 Soldier when I want to run lots of shouts.

I am not sure but when I have the 2nd set in my bag the 6/6 is still blue like its equipped. No idea if this is giving me the bonus or not.

Is there a piece or two I should change? My stats are pretty balanced ATM.

Brutaly.6257:

Not meaning to be harsh but if you have Lyssa as your 6th rune then you missed the entire point of the soldier runes and its much cheaper to use orbs and get equal stats.

Regarding blood, its nice and especially with food.

Yeah, I know what the Soldier Runes do but I am not so sure that stripping off a single condition is worth the effort.

What Orbs give out 165 vitality?

I currently run Soldiers Shoulders and Boots, Beserker Chest and Legs, Knights Gloves and Helm and all Knight Jewellery. Runed with 5 Soldiers and 1 Lyssa.

2800 Attack, 46% crit with Sigil, 15975 Health, 3018 Armor.

Is there anything I should tweak to get better numbers or are these OK? I have enough to buy a couple pieces of crafted or a couple pieces of Karma.

My Rampager Hammer has a couple more crit with a little less power.

Think its worth swapping out the Crit Sigil for Blood?

A variation I tried today in SPVP and worked well was 5/10/30/20/5.

Generally I go for Signet Mastery, Meditative Mastery, Retributive Armor, AH, Larger Symbols, and Empowering Might (although will try 2h mastery).

Running GS and Hammer. Sigil of Blood.

Incredibly tanky. The extra symbol of wrath was awesome. Similar damage. But lots and lots of healing coming in.

Robomath.3085:

http://youtu.be/TQFw4tzyajo

full health – thief blinks in, and 3 shots be before reappearing. Ya they aren’t broken at all!

Yeah that happened to me last night too. Died before I could even see him. 12k backstab 6k steal.

Not sure how that constitutes good pvp. IMHO its total kitten. If Anet thinks it is going to be an esport or even fun casual pvp, with stuff like this, its fooling itself.