Guild Wars 2

This is very cool, and I’ll definitely be participating. There are so many things in the gem store that I need and the gem conversion has been out of control!

katz.8376:

and my interest in raiding has now dropped off the bottom of the scale. thanks at least for the heads up… so i can stop worrying about bothering.

If you refuse to finish the gliding mastery line for whatever reason, there are still two other raid wings you can play that don’t require Ley Line Gliding.

Thank you for the heads-up, Gaile (and team)!

Absurdo.8309:

Agreed 100% – I thought is was strange that this was moved to this forum, given that it is not an in game event, and that it is tied to fractals, dungeons, and raids. The intended audience for this thread is not in this sub forum.

Yeah sorry about that. Seeing things like “community” and “meeting” in the same thread title set off alarms for the mods to move it to In-Game Events. I let them know about it after Zui brought it to my attention, though, and got it moved back. It shouldn’t get moved around any more at this point.

Also, working on communicating to the team responsible for scaling to determine what can be done to fix the legendary downscaling bug. The hardest part for me to gauge right now is what priority they consider the bug, but I’ll keep you all informed.

It has been a while since I’ve posted, but we are definitely still recruiting! Still looking for people for general good times and all of the things we do, including raids, guild missions, dungeons, fractals, and beyond! We’re primarily PvE as the OP suggests, but we also dabble in other content as well!

If the sorts of things we do interest you, definitely let one of our officers know so that we can chat with you and see if you’re a good fit! No matter what, we’re mostly interested in finding you a good guild to call home, even if it isn’t us.

Michael Henninger.7451:

One more point that game security just brought up:

While your pet is auto-attacking your avatar should be in NO WAY attacking or casting any skill.

This seems a little off. You can CTRL+Right Click any skill to have it autocast from within the game with no external software support. If you set this to your heal skill, you can survive for a very long time while your pet kills stuff for you and you autoloot using the mastery.

Oxidia.8103:

Wow. People complaining they get mats worth 10 gold on tp.

+1

Also I personally love getting free ecto/mystic coins/salvage kits. Salvage kits in particular translate directly into gold assuming you have a ring to salvage, and I still get a ton of those so that’s never a problem. They’re also useful if you ever need dark matter for anything (new legendaries).

I’ve joined pubs and killed bosses with dozens of groups who have never asked me once about my build, or even if I know what the encounter is like. It’s possible they assume I know what’s happening from my AP, but unless I join a group that specifically asks me to ping my gear, no one asks me to ping my gear. I think the only reason he might be getting singled out is if he constantly tries to do VG/Gors and is taking aggro, causing people to ask questions.

Anyway, Nike’s probably right.

Good to know! Thanks! I guess I’ve just been totally crazy all of these years… o_o

So I’ve had discussions about this recently, and apparently I’ve always thought it worked one way while everyone else thinks it works another way. I was always under the impression that conditions applied by Epidemic were affected by the Necromancer’s condition duration. Example:

Warrior applies 5s burn to target, has +100% condition duration
10s duration burn
Necromancer uses Epidemic on the 10s burn, has +100% condition duration
20s duration burn on nearby enemies, 10s burn on target of skill

I could swear it worked like this years back when I was playing my Necromancer more religiously (rip reaper), but some people have been telling me that it doesn’t behave like this. I can’t decide if I was always crazy, or if this changed at some point, or if it still works like that now (unable to test currently).

Has anyone verified this hands-down one way or the other recently? Thanks.

bai long.2085:

I don’t think it’s selfish of me at all to want to be able to complete the raid in the gearset of my choice. Isn’t the entire game founded upon the idea of being able to choose?

You’re intentionally reducing your own overall efficacy in your role by choosing the stat combination you’ve picked. The problem is that you’re telling other people that you’re trying to party with that you are intentionally choosing a weaker build “because you like it” and that they need to be OK with that. That’s why it’s selfish; you’re not thinking about what other people want (efficiency). If you want to play in Nomad’s gear, you need to find a group who is okay with you running Nomad’s gear. It’s as simple as that.

bai long.2085:

For those who say I should just mystic forge all of my gear and roll another stat, I say that I don’t want to. It’s as simple a matter as me not enjoying playing DPS builds.

Run Magi’s stats. If you think that Magi’s stats is a DPS build you’re crazy, but at least with Magi’s you do non-zero damage and won’t mess up the tanking on VG/Gorseval with unnecessary Toughness. Pub groups will accept Druid’s running Magi’s as well, so you should at least be able to pub if you do that.

bai long.2085:

Asking ArenaNet:

-Can we please find a way for all types of builds to viable in the raids?
-If so, can we please ensure that people using these builds are REQUIRED to have knowledge of the mechanics and high general skill?

ANet won’t answer these questions directly because it opens a can of worms, but given that I have a good feeling I understand their stance here I’ll take a crack at it.

• All types of builds are already viable in raids. People can 8-man any boss currently, meaning that the remaining 2 people could be dead the entire fight or wearing Nomad’s or whatever and still succeed. You just need to find a group willing to deal with you either being dead or in Nomad’s gear.
• All players are already required to understand the mechanics of all raid bosses or they will die. There are numerous one-shot and high damage mechanics that will punish any player who doesn’t have any idea what’s happening.

I finished Chuka and Champawat a few weeks ago and I loved the journey so much. I kept every book along the way and periodically reread them for my own amusement.

If there is some new way to execute the exploit, can you please PM me an explanation of how to jump across the platform and skip the mobs / champion to go right to the boss? Additionally, please email it to exploits@arena.net. Thanks.

P.S. No one will be banned for completing Fractals normally ad infinitum (HAH) for the end chest rewards.

BrotherBelial.3094:

Hammer on ranger, someone want there bunny thumper back?

You better believe it!

Revenant looks pretty strong to me. I still see it get taken in pubs, still bring it constantly in my guild group, and it definitely holds its weight well. It’s a strong CC with better-than-medium DPS and great durability. It also enables your Chronomancer to gain ~3k dps by not requiring Commander’s gear at basically no cost to itself.

RS3 applies Stability but isn’t a stunbreak. If you’re already Feared, getting Stability won’t suddenly remove the Fear.

I vastly prefer JP dailies to World Boss dailies. I actually do my dailies in PvE sometimes now as a result, which is cool.

Doggie.3184:

I also want Dagger for Revenant with something Ritualist related.

I strongly considered putting Revenant Dagger over GS in my list. It would be a really cool spec’.

I’m very excited for this, and I also think that the ‘controversial’ change is worth doing. Great proposal, team!

Belenwyn.8674:

There should also be points for successfully upgrading objects and defending the objects against attacks.

They said that upgraded objectives count more for skirmish points, rewarding defending them more than simply flipping them.

I just yolo melee the Jellyfish boss and tank the stun with reckless abandon. He basically can’t down anyone so long as you use your heal skills periodically and kill the baby jellies.

Warrior – Shortbow
Guardian – OH Sword
Revenant – Greatsword
Engineer – MH Mace
Ranger – Hammer
Thief – Rifle
Mesmer – MH Pistol
Necromancer – OH Torch
Elementalist – MH Sword

I would expect the final wing of the Forsaken Thicket sometime in June, with at least the precursor collection finished for legendary armor. I don’t have official confirmation of any of this, but based on their past schedules and the fact that they passed wing 3 to QA a month back or so, I think that’s a reasonable timeline.

TheNecrosanct.4028:

They’re accountbound now. I got one from my dailies 2 days ago that wasn’t soulbound. I’m glad ANet agreed with us on this one.

I hadn’t even noticed, but this is great if so!

The problem with doing this is that those items are not available for people, and would just serve to make already incredibly rare items more in demand. I think if they were to go down this route with things like the Molten Jetpack, Shattered Wings, Spinal Blades, or Sunless Wings, they’d have to bring them back and make them available to players in some fashion.

I join random pugs all the time both on the LFR side and the RLF side, and it works really well. Just advertise for the group style you’re looking for and you’ll find it. Admittedly, this is harder later in the week than earlier, but that’s to be expected.

Fortunately, having this thread exist and having people post in it saying that they want it actually helps make the case for me to bring it back up to them with additional ammo. If you would like Fractal Armor and a fix for the white trails of the Fractal Warhorn/Scepter/Staff/etc. please post here and let it be known!

gin.7158:

Meanwhile, several fractal weapon don’t even have white trail. Maybe someone forgot to code the trail and just ignore it indefinately.

I’ve also brought this up to them repeatedly with no confirmation that they’ll ever deal with it.

I’ve been suggesting Fractal armor to the Fractals team for a long time. I think it’s on their long-term radar, but I’ve heard nothing specific confirming that they will do this at any point in the future.

TokyoGhost.6492:

I would like to buy magnetite shards via laurels, or at least ascended amour with them.

No. Magnetite Shards is a raid currency rewarded for participating in the Forsaken Thicket raid, and is not to be acquired by other means. As for ascended armor, that would trivialize ascended crafting and also reduce the value of the gear substantially, which ANet definitely doesn’t want to do.

SlyDevil.3952:

I wish they’d make the potions account bound.

This is something I will report up to them in my next report. I think this is an easy fix for them and one that’ll help a bit. I also think having the ability to buy a “large” potion with 5 of the “regular” potions will help a lot with inventory management.

Sun Lian.4075:

It is the case, everything that’s worth to run is like that and has been all the time. I’ve noticed it since the day I got level 80 on my necromancer, it’s not even that you get kicked because of a wrong build. No, you get kicked for simply not playing the same thing as them, without questions.
The other day I joined a fractal 40 farm, instantly in chat “necro is so kitteng useless” and I’m out of the group. That’s how ridiculous the meta thing is, while it really matters nothing at all in this case. Can you get how annoying that is when you just like to play your class which is my main, and don’t really have the time or gold to get another character that is in meta, according to them?

I have not experienced this—even on my Necromancer—in a very long time. It doesn’t happen frequently, and if it does happen to you then you need to realize it’s the players’ fault and should never in any way be representative of the “community”. I have joined groups on PHIW ridiculous builds just for fun and as long as I wasn’t doing particularly terrible people didn’t care. Just keep trying and you’ll find good groups easy enough.

Lord Kuru.3685:

Dungeons and fractals both could benefit from DPS. So why was this designed exclusively for HoT? Cash grab perhaps?

I don’t see any reason why adding content and utility to an expansion after the fact would in any way be treated as a cash grab. Of course they want to encourage people to buy the expansion—Recall that the base game is free now after all.

Sun Lian.4075:

1 little thing off “meta” and you’re kicked, that’s how bad the end game is in gw2, not just raids. And that’s just a fact.

If this were actually the case I’d get kicked from pubs a lot more frequently. Unless there are hard requirements up-front (ie. the LFG says ping gear and ping LI’s), then people don’t really judge and/or kick people unless they’re very clearly underperforming. And I don’t mean underperforming by ~10% or whatever, I mean underperforming on the order of downing/dying constantly, missing mechanics entirely, or not doing your designated job (ie. A druid that doesn’t heal people or a Herald that never uses F2).

They were going to do this with Fractal leaderboards, but—

• Players didn’t want it.
• It was taking too much time.
• It was preventing them from having the resources to create new Fractals
• They’ve since canceled leaderboards (confirmed with recent AMA).

DoctorDing.5890:

And on the flip side… I love many changes in the new patch but not the new fractals!
I only do low-level fractals and pug teams doing tier 1 stuff now suffer from the absence of the higher-skilled players who don’t need to do the tier 1 stuff because that reward is included in the tier 4 stuff. I’ve had some truly comical fractal experiences this week.

So, I say to all you fractal gods, spare a thought for us less-uber players and come help us for fun in tier 1 sometimes. A mixed team can carry a couple of inexperienced (or drunk…) players through a fractal as long as a couple of the other players know what they are doing. At times it has felt like I am herding cats….

I’m not sure I understand the purpose of this post. The lower level fractals are substantially easier than the higher level fractals, and thus require far lower individual skill to complete. A number of my friends are at the lower tiers, and they’re not “uber” players by any stretch, but they complete the content just fine. If people are joining your LFGs when you’re asking for experienced players and don’t know what’s going on, just kick them! If you’re not advertising for experienced players, maybe you should be! If you’re willing to help fellow lowbies learn the mechanics because you’re so altruistic, then you should do that and help everyone through it for a good time! Nothing about this is something ANet should do or even could do anything about; the burden is on you to find the people you want to play with. Good luck!

Condition damage is extremely valuable in its current form, but the Necromancer does literally nothing outside of damage and stay alive. You might be able to faceroll, but you’re facerolling really slowly when you have minimal might generation and no damage buffs. Your composition might win and you might not even be advertising it as super optimal, but it’s not just suboptimal, it’s extremely suboptimal. You’re missing out on so many damage buffs that any damage you gain from condition over power due to toughness is completely lost.

In my composition, you could substitute a condition Engineer or even a VenomShare Thief over the Dragonhunter/Tempest and do generally great anyway (maybe even better!). The thing is that it still would retain the core damage buffs while also having great survivability. It doesn’t even require anyone be great players. With permanent protection, perpetual reflect uptime, Aegis, and a Druid’s heals you can basically AFK auto-attack through everything L76+.

Your comp might not even be bad if instead of “random condi person” you had a PS Warrior and your “random other person” were a Tempest or a Dragonhunter. You could even keep both Necromancers and do ‘fine’ with the damage buffs from the other classes.

TexZero.7910:

This is fine until boon thieves and bosses start having perma prot/25might/fury/quickness.
Then your average players start crumpling because things are not dying faster than anticipated.

The only ones that actually matter are giving Protection or Retaliation to the enemy, though, and that’s short-lived. Let’s also not forget that the Mesmer passively rips boons just by attacking, which keeps things very manageable. An enemy with 25 Might/Fury will maybe only get 1 or 2 attacks in before the boons wear off anyway. As to HardRider who was worried about Retaliation I’ll mention that outside of accidentally blasting light fields (which gives negligible Retaliation duration), the DH isn’t going to be applying Retaliation at all so it’s no problem.

I’m still quite frustrated that I have so many Salvage-o-Matic’s wasted sitting around in my personal bank because they’re too valuable to just outright destroy. I, personally, think not refunding the gems for them is a mistake on ANet Support’s part as far as customer satisfaction goes.

I don’t know. Being able to beat content is one thing, but high-level Fractals are easy enough that you should at least be thinking about teamwide buffs like EA/Might/Fury/Banners/etc. Necromancers aren’t bad, and Epidemic is widely usable against trash mobs and even some bosses, but stacking them in spite of teamwide buffs that both benefit damage and survivability isn’t really smart even for a stress free composition.

Also, to those saying that a Necromancer invalidates the boon stealing instability, you’re at least mostly incorrect. Firstly, the punishment of that instability isn’t really that enemies get your boons, it’s that you lose them. Secondly, a Chronomancer is far better than the Necromancer both for survivability and teamwide DPS boosting (Quickness/Alacrity/Distortion Share).

If you want something very stress free that’s going to put out far more damage with much more consistency than what the OP is suggesting, try the following:
- PS Warrior
- Power Tempest
- Hammer Dragonhunter
- Chronomancer
- Condition Druid

You’re basically indestructible, maintain permanent Quickness/Fury/Might/Vuln/Protection/etc. It’s night and day how much better (and even safer!) it is than stacking Necromancers.

I soloed that champion for it without issue, but if you continue to have problems let me recommend using the LFG tool to find some people willing to help! They’re definitely out there!

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

Make Lornarr not teleport up during the ice spikes anymore so that you can DPS him while they fall down; gives you the option to either pull him out of the aoes/play safe or just keep bashing his face in while dodging.

This is actually a great idea. You could keep him immune to damage at that point and have his breakbar activate. Breaking the bar would then end the skill and make him take regular damage again.

I think the entire fractal is great and among my current favorites. The boss fight is also great, and I find that his animations are all very clear and easy to see. The shadow step also has an animation if you notice, since he teleports to a far away person and has to face them before doing so. I’ve gotten in a good rhythm of dodging it every time at this point… and if you can’t then you should bring a stunbreak or something to get you back on your feet quickly. Even at 94 it doesn’t one-shot most ‘zerker classes. About the only suggestion I could have is for him to be a bit bigger so it’d be easier to pick his animations out, but it’s not really that bad currently.

Go ANet! Hopefully they redo uncategorized or snowblind next. The tedium that is champion Ettin/Shaman and Lornar Dragonseeker is painful at high scales.

ANet will definitely correct this with a support ticket, yes. Open one up with them and they’ll take handle it for you.

People want smooth runs, so they want to create “requirements” that ensure that only people who can give smooth runs can join. This will happen in any community and has nothing to do with “raids” or “dungeons” or whatever. The idea is that the content is hard enough such that random players cannot succeed, so people want to hedge against that difficulty with skill and try their best to find likeminded people.

It’s really okay. If you don’t like those requirements, make your own groups! That’s the beauty of the LFG. If you avoid PvE content just because stuff like this exists at all, then that’s a whole section of the game you’re choosing to ignore and there’s nothing Anet can or should do to address that.

Crystal Reid.2481:

Andy’s working on a fix for this.

Great, thank you so much Crystal.

It felt really good doing L100 Mai post-fix the other day. We did it in 17 minutes on the first try, and it was really solid. We ran a Chronomancer with Null Field, a PS Warrior with Shake it Off, and a bunch of Tempests for damage. We used full raid builds with the above tweaks for the encounter. If going with a pub, I imagine a Guardian traited for shouts converting conditions with an otherwise standard Hammer build could carry pretty hard. Good luck!

This is definitely a bug. I’ll make sure to forward this along to the Raids team. I’ll try reaching out to them first on Reddit before doing a formal report to let ’em know.

Condition Ele’s biggest problem is that other than damage it doesn’t do a lot, though. It’s just raw damage, in which case why not use a power Ele which is stronger? The nice niche about condition Necro/Thief/Engi is that they offer a lot of unique utility that helps in myriad ways. Even condition Warrior is more useful IMO because at least that can bring a banner / FGS to free up a slot on a PS War.

• Engineer: Cleave heals from Water blasts, great add control with hard CC utility, lots of collateral conditions that can make adds a lot more tolerable.
• Thief: Incredible CC, great sustain boost thanks to Leeching Venoms and the newly buffed Skelk Venom, 75%+ evasion uptime for surprising bulk, amazing mobility.
• Necromancer: Incredibly bulky with no investment, good personal Stability, incredibly high potential DPS with tricks, DPS loss at range is minimal.

Maybe I’m just missing something, though. What does condi Ele really add to the mix other than like WtPA?

Burtnik.5218:

Sword fix. When? Its been over 2 months. How long are we supposed to wait for this gamebreaking bug?

It’s not even close to a game-breaking bug. All of the sword skills were carefully tuned based on this bug and they’ll have to rebalance it once they do fix it; you won’t suddenly get much stronger.

ButterPeanut.9746:

Condi thief gets no love. It has just as high of a ceiling as engineer and is an easier rotation and has more CC (now that slick shoes is gone). It doesn’t do very well in fights where you waste venoms on adds, but if you time it right it can be very effective. It also has insane opening burst by using venoms twice in a row.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kTft63S6pw

I still use a condition Thief in basically all content. It’s incredibly strong and has the single strongest burst CC skill in-game. I’ve played it on Gorseval and a number of other raid encounters as well and it’s super strong. It has problems against adds and cleaving, as you noted, but it’s overall a ton of fun and has a built in ~75% evasion uptime on its rotation making it silly defensive. Good stuff all around!