Guild Wars 2

Archon.3987:

Source?

Looks at the acquisition methods for all 2 of the 2 current legendary backpieces and note the months of unavoidable time gating on both. There’s your proof.

Archon.3987:

And the PvP-League back item is relevant here because…?

Because ANet wanted to time gate legendary backpieces, and that’s OK.

OlliX.1705:

As it stands now every class has at least one viable build in raids. If we’re going to be forced to run mirror comp in order to cover the whole party for quickness, revenant won’t be needed in raids and classes that don’t benefit much from alacrity will be pushed out by other classes that benefit more from it. I fear that this patch may kill the great build diversity we currently enjoy.

Yeah, the proposed changes are devastating to PvE build and class diversity and awful for the health of the game.

Dinosaurs.8674:

People like to generalize classes into a particular role, and sometimes it is appropriate but oftentimes it is not. Everything that people commonly call a “DPS class” does more than just DPS – they have non-DPS selling points that make them valuable in specific fights. Thief has mobility, strong cc, and a bit more DPS; guardian has protection, cc, aegis; elementalist (staff) has area damage, high range, and emergency heals; etc etc.

Necromancer has two non-DPS functions that are commonly used. The first is the ability to trivialize adds via epidemic. Epi bouncing does increase DPS substantially (and is really the only reason to have more than one necro), but people generally don’t bring epidemic necros in fights unless there are dangerous adds to kill, regardless of the ability to bounce epidemic. For example, necro is much more common against sloth and xera than VG and gorseval because the adds in the latter two fights pose little threat even without epi bouncing. The second necromancer utility is passive condition cleanse for allies, which is invaluable against matthias and somewhat useful against slothasor.

I guess what I’m getting at is that the DPS classes you choose are already dependent on encounter specific mechanics. People always choose ele and thief for sabetha because they have blink skills; people always choose necromancer for sloth because of epi and plague signet; Xera has ele for bloodstone shards and necro for epidemic; and so on.

There are probably some specific issues with individual skills or traits on DPS classes (e.g. there is nothing comparable to lava font for orb/bloodstone shard clear; epidemic can make it a negative for bosses to have adds), but in general the DPS classes are actually decently distinct. Sure there’s a few thousand DPS difference here or there, but in general the DPS classes brought for each fight are there for what they bring in addition to DPS.

I would say that the support classes are much, much more of a problem. Druid/warrior/chrono/rev is in literally every single group, in every encounter. Sure there are some variations in builds but they always revolve around providing their respective support buffs while providing additional utility and DPS. There is no comparable replacement for any of these classes in any fight.

This is a really good post, actually, and I encourage people interested in this topic to give it a read. I will say that personally I’m very happy right now with PvE raid class and build diversity overall, but it would be nice if more classes had more comparable offensive support specs.

The problem with “just have a team and a solo queue separate” is population. A long time ago we didn’t have the distinction between ranked and unranked, and just had team and solo queues. The GW2 PvP population can support a two-way split, but not a four-way split of ranked/unranked solo/team queues.

The other problem is what happens when you split it four ways like that and a 4-man queue joins the team queue. That group will have to wait a long, long time for their queue to pop because most competent solo players will be playing in solo queue, and eventually when their queue does pop they’ll get an excruciatingly bad fifth player, resulting in a toxic environment for all and a really bad match-up. Furthermore, the larger the team sizing the more volatile MMR is as a representation of personal skill.

As a person who plays in full teams regularly, I have no problem playing with my full teams in unranked. Ranked serves literally zero purpose other than to get extra rewards. It surely doesn’t represent skill in its current form, nor is it some meaningful test bed for groups trying to get into ESL tournaments (5 v 2+1+1+1 is not helping you get better). Meanwhile, having ranked be solo or duo only would hone in MMR onto a much more representative value for individuals resulting in better matchmaking for everyone. I think the “Yes” option on this poll is spectacular, and I look forward to playing season 5 should it pass.

ANet no longer has a dungeon team and has committed its resources elsewhere. We will not be getting more dungeons, and quite frankly I’m OK with that given the positive trends for Fractal and Raid development.

This thread makes me sad.

• You can play and beat any content in the game using any build you want. (Including even raids)
• The ‘meta’ is decided by what minimizes risks and maximizes efficiency while still doing as much damage as possible, and varies wildly for different content.
• If you play with a guild group, you can play whatever you want wherever you want so long as they’re aware and cool with it (and if you find casual groups, they will be).
• This exact same thing happened in GW1 (DwG / Trenchway / Ursanway / etc) and happens in every other team game. People want to be efficient.

Solo/duo queue is something I’ve wanted for as long as I’ve played PvP and at the very least ever since solo queue was removed so long ago. Looking at this thread, I’m terrified that once it comes back it won’t get a supermajority and it’ll be back to the terrible matchmaking we’re dealing with already.

Here’s hoping that this gets voted in. I’m super excited for it!

I think the Chaos boss is rather uninspired, to be honest. The conditions going away with the shield is bad design and was already fixed for Grawl boss, so it should be fixed here as well. Additionally, I think you should be able to evade frame the floor as well because it’s silly to have attacks that are unevadeable (it’s the primary active damage mitigation technique in-game).

I don’t have strong opinions on the other points, but I do think the fact that the boss just auto attack spams until he gets a breakbar is really silly. He needs some other mechanics for variety—Maybe a big PBAOE with a wind-up or a line attack or something.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Hypairion.9210:

Sometimes I just wish research fonction work in this forum. This subject was discussed quite à few time already, and nothing new will émerge here. There is almost no story in raids, and make several difficulty modes will be just a waste of dev ressources.

+1

A big part of what makes them able to release the content they do on the schedule they have is because there are no raid modes. If they ever added any other modes, suddenly we’d no longer be getting a reasonable pace of content and that would be the new problem of the week. I firmly believe we do not need nor should they make easier / story / other modes for raids. One mode is perfect.

Kusa.6438:

I think it’s the same reason why people don’t understand that Leadership runes are 1000x better than chronomancer runes. They just check and see what metabattle says.

This is provably incorrect. Chronomancer Quickness stacks are some of the best stacks to copy given the way Quickness caps on players. Not to mention that Leadership runes give terrible stats and redundant boon duration. There’s no case where what you’re saying is true.

Sure, there are fewer people now than back then, but that’s natural for any game forum, especially an MMO. Here are some metrics for reference. These same trends can be found in the Blizzard WoW forums, for instance.

If they can manage the server storage space for more bag slots, they should add more bag slots. It is only positive for their revenue to do so, and hurts no one. The same is true of the shared inventory slots. It doesn’t matter what people put in their bags, only that they pay for more bags when available.

Wargameur.6950:

Come on ? no perfectly horrible ratio to show off ?

I wonder where those horrible forum stories come from….

They’re not posting here for fear of toxic members of the community pointing and laughing. Seriously, if you lost 75% of your games and couldn’t get out of emerald, would you show it off in a thread full of legends?

Yeah, Capricorn should be unpinned now that its achievements are moved to historical.

I hadn’t actually registered the use of the term “raiding party” as being related to raids, and instead assumed they meant like the first group on the islands. It would be pretty fabulous if we found Cami’s body at the entrance to the Door of Komalie, though, and had to bust in to stop whatever was trying to come out.

hype intensifies

[VZ] is absolutely still recruiting!

We’ve been doing a lot of training raids lately now that we’ve beaten every boss with our core group, so if you’re interested in learning raids and are willing to have me dictate your builds / gear to some extent, please let us know!

Additionally, even without raids, we do a lot of stuff together throughout the week, so give the OP a look and let one of the officers know if you feel it’s a good fit for you.

maddoctor.2738:

I don’t know where will it be, but I sure want the next Raid to be in the Foundry of Failed Creations. Something (or someone) is opening the Door of Komalie again and we go in there to stop them from re-activating the Foundry. Maybe Primordus or one of his lieutenants.

I was thinking this as well. It would be supremely badkitten, and I seriously hope if the next raid isn’t there that they make a future one there.

Seyiwaji.4082:

Because people passed the stage of complaints. At this point Anet lost.
Vivid Complaint are healthy. Less and less complaint shows that people are fed up and moved away.

…or that people are happy now in general and have less to complain about.

The rewards, really. I can’t get certain armor sets or the Ascension any other way, so I PvP.

It’s fun sometimes, but matchmaking is bad enough that either I demolish the enemy team or am demolished, and it just isn’t enjoyable. Very rarely do I get what I would consider a good game, and oftentimes any game with close numbers is still very frustrating for me because my team lacks the ability to properly rotate, lacks the ability to team fight, or both, so it’s a constant struggle.

kdaddy.5431:

Also i disagree with this thead, the meta was hot garbage.

+1

Blaeys.3102:

There is a reason this topic keeps getting reposted in various forums (and then all moved to this one) – all by different people.

This is something people want – and it just makes sense.

Just because people want something doesn’t make it a good idea. Fortunately, the raid team is savvy enough to know better.

Realistically, Zealot is bad because it tries too hard to do two different things and as a result does both of them poorly. If you want damage / offensive support only and your group is very capable of keeping themselves alive overall, then condition Viper Druid is absolutely the way to go. If you have to spend any time in staff, however, then Magi is the way to go because the damage is crap either way so you may as well go for the gusto with primary stat healing.

In my honest opinion, steady groups that are extremely good at the content should run Viper Druids, and casual / pub groups should always run Magi. If your team is relying on the 10k DPS of a Staff Druid to succeed, then your team needs to work on better handling the mechanics of the encounter instead.

Finally, no matter how experienced your pub runs claim to be, and no matter how many LI they ask you to ping, pub groups aren’t used to working with eachother and people will make grievous mistakes. I have turned countless many-wipe runs into one-shots by running Magi and pulling off killer heroics to save teams.

I really enjoy Stronghold, but it’s a bad case of “not enough players to build competitive teams in matchmaking”. Every match I get it’s a steamroll one way or the other, and usually ends up being a 4+1 vs 1+1+1+1+1 or something.

• Started Sapphire
• Ended Ruby
• 86 Games
• 48 Wins
• 38 Losses

I’m not good enough (apparently) to carry the periodically horribad teams I got and have no PvP friends, so I could never get a strong enough win streak to push up Ruby. Ended up giving up because it felt hopeless and I’d already gotten what I needed for the Ascension. I desperately miss S2/S3’s matchmaking.

Malediktus.3740:

-1
if Anet adds Crystalline Ore to Unbound magic vendors that would be the death of the map
If the map is dead people can no longer do map completion and get HoT legendaries

It is vital to keep all 4 HoT maps alive. The easiest way to achieve this is to give each map unique currencies.

Just play DS if you need ore, you can open over 100 noxious pods (my personal record is 101 pods) in one run if you know what you are doing.

This is the correct answer.

Hypairion.9210:

Sometimes I just wish research fonction work in this forum. This subject was discussed quite à few time already, and nothing new will émerge here. There is almost no story in raids, and make several difficulty modes will be just a waste of dev ressources.

+1

A big part of what makes them able to release the content they do on the schedule they have is because there are no raid modes. If they ever added any other modes, suddenly we’d no longer be getting a reasonable pace of content and that would be the new problem of the week. I firmly believe we do not need nor should they make easier / story / other modes for raids. One mode is perfect.

MarshMellow.8560:

I did get the little side chests on the side screen that jiggled but I didnt get the big boss chest. I dont see it at all.

This is consistent behavior with someone who is killing a boss a second time in a week. Note that the weekly reset is 07:30 UTC (03:30 EST) Monday morning. You must have killed it already that week, even though you didn’t realize it was the same week.

LadyRhonwyn.2501:

I did get the chest but not the mastery unlock… Got the achievement, got the mastery point, got the reward (some part for the legendary armour), but not the thing I wanted most: the unlock. I did die just before the encounter with McLeod, did that ruin my chance for the unlock?

It’s possible this is a bug. I got my unlock forever ago from VG, and they supposedly fixed this a while back for “non-boss” encounters like Siege / Trio, but it may not be working correctly. Paul would have to look at it.

P.S. You get a guaranteed exotic for loot.

thrag.9740:

If you are saying that groups are going to make you go to the golem and demonstrate your dps, I have never seen that happen. Literally, never once.

What they may be referring to is your ability to do a smart rotation of your skills in a raid fight. If you are doing proper rotations, you could try to reach the numbers given by qt here: http://qtfy.enjin.com/dps They explain their conditions.

You should try to reach numbers close to the given numbers. However, you must keep in mind that they are completely min maxed, including the agony infusions and expensive food (which you should use for raids, but may not want to waste on just testing). You are going to be 100 power/condi damage below or more most likely. Additionally, I have heard that qt likes to do these tests multiple times, and then report the absolute highest dps rather than the average. If your getting within 10% of the stated numbers, you are probably doing a correct rotation.

However, the biggest thing I want to emphasize to you is to understand your role in the raid. For example, at VG an ele might get put on green circles team. That ele will most likely want to bring lightning flash instead of a dps boosting utility.

The point is, doing a proper rotation is certainly part of raiding, but it is far from your only responsibility.

+1

Well, it’s hard to know what the Integrated Fractal Matrix number should/would be because it depends heavily on the value of a stabilizing matrix. Currently each integrated matrix is worth ~5g, so if you did something like 10 Integrated Matrices + 50 Pristine Fractal Relics + 1 Fractal Journal it would probably be pretty fair. I’m sure a proper economist could come up with something a bit more ideal, but something in that ballpark would lure me to actually spend my currencies on ascended gear from Fractals (which is really the point).

And again, the point isn’t that you could do it faster via other means. Crafting is—by design—intended to be the fastest approach. I can throw 80g+ at the TP and build an ascended anything in ten minutes if I want to. The idea is you’re trading the gold cost for some time spent in Fractals using Fractals currencies/trophies, which actually rewards players for playing the content. Right now no veteran Fractal player is using any of their currencies at the current prices, which is a real shame and missed opportunity for ANet.

P.S. You can see raid ascended gear costs here. They’re actually lower than what I’m proposing for Fractals, but that’s OK as long as its not too high.

What matters is that the guild has enough gold to do the things it wants to do when it wants to do them. If you adding another 30g to the pot every month will do nothing as you’ve said it would, then I’d say 20g is enough already!

Vegeta.2563:

FYI Pole is broke.. takes me to https://account.arena.net/overview

I had the same issue, but I fixed it by logging out of the forums and logging in when the poll prompted me to.

It would be cool if they added a breakbar when he does his spin attack at lower HP so you could stop that particular attack. It would be more cool if I could see my AOE circles in that boss arena, though.

Ever since they removed lethargic, this boss hit the perfect place of difficulty. As a class without vigor, I can take literally zero damage from him the entire fight if I’m playing well, regardless of my HP or build or whatever. The fight rewards skill and punishes making mistakes. The invulnerable phases go by as fast as you can kill the mobs. It’s pretty much my ideal fractal right now, and wouldn’t want it to change.

If you’re struggling with the knockdown dodge timing, bring a stability or a stunbreak on your utility bar to mitigate it. It’s OK to be a little suboptimal if it means you won’t down/die.

Cynz.9437:

Henry.5713:

Fractals became easier for ranged, a bit more complex for melee and a lot more fun for ranged.

fix’d

It’s funny. For me, it didn’t change at all for ranged, became easier for melee, and became a lot more fun for me either way.

rfdarko.4639:

The problem is there are people who have saved up the pages since they came out nearly a year ago, so it would be a time gate for people just starting but vets could just dump their savings. Having an artificial time gate solves the problem of the vendor being implemented with an already existing token system. The same goes for pristines. In terms of impeding veterans, you kind of have to if you want the currencies to have any value at all.

Pristine fractal relics currently cannot impact the economy in any appreciable way. Regardless of that, the only people who have inordinate amounts of the currency already have invested in other means to getting ascended gear in order to get to the point where they can easily get so much of the currency in the first place. It would be very different if you could sell ascended gear on the TP, but you can’t. As a result, allowing veteran fractal players to spend 20g + 100 pristine + 1 fractal journal per ascended armor piece wouldn’t be a problem at all, and would actually add value to an otherwise dead currency.

Sarahfull.4930:

True, pristine are gated as well. That could work. If a completely new person goes for ascendent gear, they need a months worth of laurels. Would it be a months worth of pristine too?

If it cost a much lower amount of gold akin to raid costs, I’d easily fork out 100+ pristines for a piece of ascended armor.

Sarahfull.4930:

I thought no matter what number of relics anet makes, anyone can " just " do stuff like the level40 farm untill they have enough and that is why we have a high gold cost.

This doesn’t work if you also have journal page and/or pristine fractal relics as part of the cost.

Sarahfull.4930:

The idea of once a week though, I’m coming up blank with a counter to that. Seems like that could work well

I don’t know how many players would buy into an artificial time gate like that. I’d much rather they use pristine fractal relics, which are limited in number per day, to prevent people from speed farming ascended gear. This wouldn’t impede the 10000+ pristine relic veterans by design.

The fight is actually pretty reasonable, but what makes it hard is the extremely narrow area where you fight that champion. I think it’d be better if they move it into the crater-like area behind her current location so that there’s a little more flexibility in movement.

I think it’s pretty important that they take an inventory slot since they’re a tangible combat buff, not just a karma/experience booster or something. What I would be ok with, however, is if they had a mystic forge recipe to combine the three infinite mist potions together into one potion that does everything.

I think the current Fractal ascended costs are ridiculous because I have tons of relics/pristines, and this current system actively discourages me from spending any of them just because I already have L500 crafting for every discipline already. What gives?

Make ascended gear cost an extreme amount of relics so that even if it’s cheaper than crafting in gold you have to invest a huge amount of time to get the relics. Most people will still craft because it can be done with no time investment (just buy everything on TP). Heck, just the idea of time gating the ascended gear with fractal journal pages will discourage people from grinding fractals for it instead of crafting. Buying ascended from Fractals should be a reasonable thing for veteran players to do, not a total waste of gold.

Every boss benefits from 4/4/2 regardless of if pubs run that in all cases or not. You can of course get by and beat bosses with 7/2/1 or whatever, as every boss has very generous enrage timers and hard enrage mechanics. The same can be said for a Minstrel’s Chronomancer versus a Berserker one with 400 toughness. The difference is about a 10k damage adjustment, which if you can make up elsewhere doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. You can even ignore it in most comps and kill the boss with plenty of time to spare anyway.

Obviously, though, Minstrel’s is not objectively “better” than Commander’s or Berserker’s, it’s just safer for people who can’t otherwise handle the incoming damage or want to reduce risk. It’s like on the one hand, most guild groups can get away with Berserker or Viper’s Druids, and yet I run a Magi’s Druid because it enables me to compensate for if my team gets a bit lazy or makes a mistake or, especially for pubs, if I’m really carrying a couple weaker links. I’d rather win in one-two pulls at a little bit slower of a pace than wipe ten times trying to be overly DPS-crazy.

Ultimately, YMMV.

While we’re on the subject, can I start the T2 collection even though I’ve never opened the T1 reward box? I don’t know who I want the free ascended set to go to yet, but I want to start working on the T2 collection.

• Flux Bombs is one of my favorite instabilities. It’s consistent and adds a new mechanic to think about how to handle.
• I generally dislike the Mistlock where it blurs Fractals together as it adds too much of a random element where you can’t predict what is happening when and certain spawns are much more dangerous than others.
• Toxic Trails is pretty painless right now after the nerf, it just requires players think about where they’re standing and where they drag the mobs. Realistically you should just CC the mobs together and lock them down before killing them. If my teams do that, I have no problems on glass builds taking everything down.

We’re still recruiting!

If any of the things we talk about in the OP sound good to you, reach out to myself or one of the other officers and chat with them about the guild! They’ll see if you’re a good fit, and if so they’ll send an invitation. Either post here or message me if you have any questions about the guild, the things we do, the kind of people we are, or whatever!

As before, we’re definitely looking for people interested in raids to go with us on any of our days (Mon/Fri). If you’re interested in learning and are willing to get the gear and build needed, definitely let us know!

Yeah, I just had a conversation with Ben about it and I don’t think there’s any changing their mind. It technically makes sense, too, but it’s really disappointing. This whole patch came and went and I spent… 0 Fractal Relics and 0 Pristine Fractal Relics even though I’d really love to use them toward gearing alts or something. At least Pristines can be used to round out the Golden Fractal Weapon collections, but I feel like there needs to be more.

Zania.8461:

I suspect that the (fairly outrageous) prices of the ascended gear is due to the ability to bypass leveling the crafting skills. Which makes them largely useless for anyone who has the said skills leveled.

Regardless of this fact—which is a good point overall—it ultimately means that they’ve introduced a supposed relic / matrix / page sink that will never realistically get used except by accident.

It would have been much more useful if they had reduced the gold cost to raid vendor levels and then made the (pristine) relic cost very, very high so you either have to play a metric boatload of Fractals to gear up or get to L500 crafting. That would have been a fair trade.

Benjamin Arnold.3457:

Sometimes a fairly unimportant change requires a trivial amount of work, so it is easy to put in. Would you prefer us to not fix these easy things?

I, personally, thank you for addressing it even if it doesn’t help me currently. I hope that we see more of this extra-reward trade-in with Fractals, and also hope that further reward architectures allow us to spend the Fractals currencies to acquire exclusive rewards (a lot like raids). Cheers!

pureperson.2796:

I had some extra fractal tonic(I know some people mad), I wish this one also able to do something as other items…

Give it to another character. In all seriousness, though, they could add a trade-in system like raid rewards have.

Nice! I had a good one like that at Sabetha the other day where I was the only healer and I was also running flak, but everyone kept eating tons of damage. I felt like a leaf on the wind with how I was jumping back-and-forth, saving everyone, keeping flak at range, and then somehow pulling off the kill even with everything falling apart at the end. #FeelsGoodMan