Guild Wars 2

Sublimatio.6981:

would be cool if I could actually have blocks (necro)

CPC is better than blocks for most trash anyway due to the extended Weakness and projectile management.

Redfeather.6401:

Is the effect easy to interrupt? Because I am still wondering if I am canceling it by accident before it fully activates.

It’s actually very hard to interrupt. I think weapon swapping is the only thing that cancels it; you can’t move to cancel (for sure) or even dodge to cancel (I think).

• Play a class with a teleport skill (Mesmer/Ele/Thief)
• Never wait until the last second to get to a circle
• It helps to have excess healing on your team when attempting this, so try it with 3 healers
• Always play selfishly and go to the circle that requires only 1 person
• Watch his arrow when he teleports around so you don’t get knocked off of a green circle

It is critically important that the Gift of Battle retain its exclusivity to the WvW game mode. Just like how WvW and PvP players have to go into PvE if they want to get the stuff for certain shiny skins, you, too, must go into WvW to get certain shiny skins. It’s good for the game even if you don’t personally like it. Remember that legendaries are not for everyone, and nothing is forcing you to pursue them.

I like the way they did it with Deimos. You just choose the option at Glenna to disable cinematics and it never even plays. That’s much better than it playing and you having to manually skip it.

The game provides everything it should to help players get into raids, the issue is that you’re trying to pub and not play as part of a guild, and pubs expect a certain level or knowledge and awareness. This is a people problem, first and foremost.

That said, everyone else’s suggestions are good. Get the right gear stats (exotic at least), use the [qT]-recommended build for your class and be mindful of the difficulty of that class and the roles it is expected to do, study the encounters via YouTube videos for the PoV of the class you’re playing, and then look into actually doing it. This is made significantly easier if you use the Looking For subforum to find a guild that you can join which does raids.

Hopefully this helps, and good luck out there!

Nash.2681:

Don’t want to be offensive, but…. are you saying the one (you) being responsible for one of the worst fractal revamps (that ultra dull parts every 25% at bloom where players are forced to run in circles killing trash while picking their noses and trying to not fall asleep until the bar is filled and the actual bossfight continues) is responsible for the new fractal? If so, my hype for a new fractal just died

While this is a pretty unnecessarily pointed post, there’s some merit here. Mechanics like Mai Trin’s cannon phase and Bloomhunger’s army phase are pretty boring because you stop fighting the actual boss for an extended period of time. A neat way to address this for Bloomhunger would be to make the champion Oakheart spawn during the army phase and have the army phase end when it dies. That way you’re still beating up a big guy that you can focus on. This is similar to how the elite Icebrood Goliath works in the Snowblind Fractal, which is a great mechanic.

Benjamin Arnold.3457:

How would you drop the hammer if it was no longer a bundle? Making it a SAS seems like it would nullify the hot potato mechanic.

Being honest, the hot potato mechanic isn’t fun because it replaces your weapon skills, which are a massive reason for even playing a class in Fractals. The only way it would be worth it is if carrying the hammer were stronger than your weapon skills, and even that would be annoying.

That said, if you wanted to use the special action key and have it retain the hot potato feel, you could use the special action key as a “kit” that would swap between the hammer skills and your weapon skills. You’d then make the 5 skill on the hammer version of the kit “drop” the hammer and stop your growing ticks. Others would then get an activated special action key when they picked it up, and could swap to the hammer skills using their special action key.

You actually also need a lot of Fractal Relics and Pristine Fractal Relics that will take much, much more than 1 month to acquire assuming you’re starting from nothing (even worse if you’re starting from Fractal Personal Level 1), but the point still stands that Warbringer is uncharacteristically time gated compared to the other backpacks.

Vavume.8065:

In Short
While in Spawn = Debuffed to receive no rewards
After respawning = 30 sec Immunity to the debuff

People will just AFK at objectives instead or in any number of the nooks and crannies across the maps, then. The pseudo-AFK reward system is unavoidable when you associate the skirmish rewards to a participation level.

We’re looking for friendly, loyal, and casual people who would like to play with us in random content! While we can definitely use people interested in raids, more than anything we’re looking for new friends who might be willing to yolo through dungeons, Fractals, open-world content, and other things with us. If the things we do and the type of people we are sounds good to you based on the OP, please contact one of the officers! We’d love to chat.

insanemaniac.2456:

weird, i recommend doing what you need to to survive… but i also pug 100 cm and i rarely find my groups solo/duo at mama and i never swap parasitic contagion in. nor does the friend i generally drag along. we would need a little more practice to fully duo mama in 1 shot, but 4-5 man is entirely np as is keeping the rest of the team up.

I think it might be the time of day I’m active, really. I do my Fractals on NA during Oceanic prime time, so it’s possible I’m just not seeing all of the better pubs that you or others run across in NA prime.

FrostDraco.8306:

>Havent been in that many pugs

What are you talking about? It appears that you didn’t read my words correctly; my last sentence means (in English) that I basically have to solo/duo half the bosses in almost every run I do.. which I’ve done basically every day since it has come out.

FrostDraco.8306:

Even if your teammates are failing most of the mechanics can be soloed/duoed and remain just as easy.

Yes, and I even said that in my previous post.

FrostDraco.8306:

But i find it funny someone that doesn’t pug, suddenly has anecdotal stats on pugs, which they themselves never join.

We’ve covered this, you just didn’t read correctly. It’s okay.

FrostDraco.8306:

Pugs being bad is only an issue, when you are also bad.

It’s much easier to solo/duo something without people actively getting in your way or going down. Sure, you could just ignore everyone who goes down, let them die, and play it like you plan on soloing it, but I prefer to be more of a team player than that. It’s for those reasons why bringing things like Well of Precognition or IP/PC or whatever can be helpful. Not every random pub is as super skilled as you, dude.

If you can’t burn him down quick enough then you just need to slow your DPS enough and actually kill the oozes. If you never mess up that mechanic, it’s a cakewalk.

Feanor.2358:

It’s not like 100 CM has high pressure anywhere.

You’re not wrong, but 9 out of 10 pub players don’t CC quickly enough, inflict social awkwardness on their whole team, don’t manage enemy boons, don’t share proper team buffs, and don’t properly manage boss mechanics (ie. poison fields at Siax). When you’re dealing with that, it suddenly becomes incredibly high pressure all the time, and little DPS losses to boost your survivability go a long way. I’ve only been in a few pub groups myself where I haven’t had to solo/duo the last 20% of MAMA’s HP or solo/duo the entire second orb phase on Ensolyss.

Feanor.2358:

Like someone pointed out (perhaps on reddit), there’s a difference between the raid and the WvW reward skins. The raid ones are primarily locked behind effort, not so much time. For the WvW ones is the other way around. You don’t need any specific skills, you just need to play hours upon hours of WvW.

You’re absolutely right. At least raid players have the ability to tackle more and harder bosses each week to shorten the grind. Weaker players can always stick to Escort/Trio every week for a much longer haul. While I wish there were something analogous in the new WvW rewards, that’s neither here nor there so I’ll drop it.

• Buy 2 sets of one-time use large Fractal potions.
• Play normal mode L100 a lot and master the core mechanics.
• Watch videos to get a good feeling for what changes are present in the CM variant of the Fractal.
• Join CM groups and work your butt off, always keeping potions active.

Almost none of the 100CM pub groups are remotely optimized for clear times, so my general rule of thumb is to sacrifice some DPS to ensure that you’ll never die. A good example of this is running the standard condition Necromancer build but swapping in Parasitic Contagion to be basically immortal. A similar example is running Invigorating Precision over No Quarter on a power Thief. The DPS difference is minimal and it gives you a helping hand in staying alive through high pressure.

They’re more realistic to achieve in a timely manner than the new WvW reward skins, that’s for sure, and they’ll only get easier to achieve with the more bosses that get added to the game.

The total time add-up is incorrect because it doesn’t factor the number of chests per reward tier. So, for example, while the Wood tier does take 25 pips per chest, there are 4 chests for a total of 100 pips before you can move on to Bronze. Because of that, it takes significantly more time than what you’ve got listed.

Yeah, I’ve been asking for this for a very long time, and I am so pleased that it’s finally here.

rolls eyes This stupid meter is going to get all DPS meters banned for everyone with all the problems it goes through violating Chris Cleary’s terms.

Sly.9518:

It exists, Arc tracks all combat information

Yeah, all you really need is a parser that looks for those things in the arcdps logs and reports them to you in some meaningful way.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

It’s less gold to buy globs directly (unless you’re horribly short on relics)

It’s a real shame what side effects the increase of Mystic Coin value has had on other recipes. That said, remember the demotion recipe creates 3 globs, so you have to divide the cost by 3.

I actually think Preparedness should be baseline and Sleight of Hand should take its place as a minor trait. Then they could add a new GM trait and have some actual choice both within and without that specialization. I generally agree with an above poster that I think Fast Hands shouldn’t be baseline.

#DisableBoombox2017

While some of those things were indeed cool and should be incorporated into new content, I honestly think there’s a lot more that we’ve gained over the years that I vastly prefer to what we used to have. Combat requires a lot more coordination, situational awareness, understanding, and reactivity than it ever has in the past.

I definitely want more solo/utility gameplay using things like stealth / portals / solo sessions in raids and fractals with less linear design, though. I agree with you there.

I loot them every so often for sure, though not as frequently as I get shards. That said, just demote the shards into globs via the recipe here.

Dawdler.8521:

Why should power builds ever be viable when you can go power and condi?

Since you missed the memo, nearly all condition builds in the current meta deal less than 10% of their damage as power damage (Engineer being a notable exception due to particularly high coefficients). Viper’s gear has garbage critical hit chance even fully buffed and no ferocity, so its power damage contribution is incredibly low. Viper’s isn’t even optimized for condition damage classes, quite frankly; we’d need a ++Condition Damage, +Precision, +Expertise stat combination for that.

@OP: Power builds are still just fine on a number of bosses, quite frankly. I run my S/W Tempest in a number of bosses due to its strong cleave, high burst, and the low armor on some bosses making it relatively stronger compared to condition damage builds.

Sublimatio.6981:

i wish the game could be again about dodging and active gameplay instead of just dps rotations on bland bosses…

You remember the old days a lot differently than I do, apparently. Outside of some awesome stealth skips in dungeons that I wish we’d get in raids, the combat was dull and you murdered every boss so fast you skipped 99% of mechanics.

Entenkommando.5208:

Most annoying fractal imo. If they put the hammer on your PvE skill slot it would actually be ok, but I just hate carrying it all the time.

Having the hammer be on your special action key slot would be spectacular. They could have it charge (activate the action key) when you are near something that dies. Ben, please do this!

They’ve said before that they’re never going to do this. They want squads and commander tags visible because a lot of players will only play WvW if there is a tag up indicating that there’s a group, and they want to encourage those more casual players to stick around.

I don’t think the “bonus rewards” threshold will be crazy or in the multiple thousands, I think it’ll be just high enough so that players who have reached r500 or something will get an extra pip per tick that they qualify for. The idea is to reward people with some loyalty to the game mode, regardless of how they got there or over how long a period. It’s analogous to how playing games in ranked PvP at the platinum rank or higher rewards an extra pip.

The LFG changes, quite frankly, sound great. It encourages commanders to list their squads in LFG because then people can auto-join when they enter the map, and it means that newer players can go to the LFG to find players to play with, which is great for encouraging them to get going and figure things out. As a veteran player it means I don’t have to open the map when I enter a WvW map and find a commander, I can just click and go.

neven.3785:

I disagree with your suggestion about removing the items you personally don’t like.

I think that tying in more rewards for commanders and promoting smaller groups is essential to the health of wvw. If you don’t like seeing tag clutter use the UI option to hide other tags. If you don’t like losing a half dozen die on Inc fodder players to the random tags then get better at positioning your group.

The lfg being stream lined Into the squad UI area won’t clutter your screen so stop being so dramatic over it. There are still quite a few people new to the game mode who have no one to play with and map team chat don’t foster a welcoming environment. The old lfg too was horrible for wvw, maybe it will be useful now. Coming from an active guild it’s pretty easy to turn your nose at features put in place that won’t personally help you but other areas of the game use lfg extensively and wvw does need some love for new players (and pvx players too)

Agree with this user 100%.

I don’t love Chaos because it doesn’t feel different enough from the other Fractals; it feels too samey because of the reused assets and mechanics. I also think the Gladiator boss fight is one of the most tedious with the fewest meaningful mechanics (all he does is beat you with his sword, activate his shield, and periodically use a CC skill later in the fight).

My favorites right now are, in order:

1. Snowblind
2. Nightmare
3. Aetherblade
4. Swampland
5. Thaumanova

The ones I hate the most for a variety of reasons are as follows, in order:

1. Aquatic Ruins
2. Molten Furnace
3. Chaos
4. Uncategorized
5. Underground Facility

Amineo.8951:

And even if wing 4 is the easiest wing, why most pugs have trouble with Deimos then?

Because pugs are bad in general regardless of how easy the particular bosses are relative to one another.

zoomborg.9462:

As a player who does raids a lot for a long time i can assure you this is not the case. It goes like this:

1)group/pug asks for a cps
2)random/guildie joins with pps
3) group said they asked for a cps cause pps is plain bad atm
4) random/guildie calls them toxic cause the entire group didnt cater to 1 person’s selfish preferences
5)random/guildie calls out the guild for being toxic elitists, leaves the group then goes to the forums to complain about not being treated as a snowflake in a 10man group

Summary : “I play what i want even if that means im just getting carried.” “screw the commander, im better”, “power necro is competitive” “im not dellusional” “the meta is a lie”

This is pretty spot-on. I’ve never seen someone do anything I would describe as “unjustified”, “cruel”, or “promoting a deep pestilence” by any random raider in a case where it wasn’t the person being attacked’s fault. If you don’t read the LFG and don’t want to work with the commander / group, then you deserve whatever hate you get for wasting that group’s time. Even in the case where DPS classes get kicked for abysmal DPS, it’s either quiet or a “your DPS is bad” followed by the kick. Things almost never get out of hand or get too offensive because it causes everyone who isn’t bad to leave the squad as well. No one wants to be around that.

Minstrel’s Chronomancer is great for the following places where pubs really struggle to stay alive and need as much carrying help as possible:

• Xera
• VG
• Deimos
• Matthias

I’m pretty sure epidemic still hits the middle of her platform, too, so that’s always a problem.

EcoRi, you’re alive!

In Fractals you have a lot of personal leeway with your build because pubs suck and don’t need to run optimal stuff to win (so they don’t). With one small change to my power Daredevil build I can still hit 25k+ DPS properly buffed (12k with no buffs at all) and be essentially invulnerable thanks to Invigorating Precision and some life steal food. Usually I take a defensive utility with stunbreak over Fist Flurry, too. Those kinds of small adjustments have been sufficient in my experience with basically any group, and can help a lot with group survivability because you’re perfectly able to destroy any T4 mob in mere seconds, rally allies, and prevent that now-dead enemy from damaging your party.

Otherwise I agree with other people that a single good support-minded player in any T4 Fractals group can basically keep anyone alive through anything in a normal fight. Magi Druid and Minstrels Chrono both fall into this category, and they help a lot.

I mean, you can get kills with all Guardians, all Necromancers, or even stranger compositions than that. That said, for a beginner group, your composition is making it much harder for everyone than it needs to be. If you have even one player remotely competent at Chronomancer you could carry the rest of the players extremely hard on a Minstrel’s set with permanent protection uptime, distortion sharing, and ancillary healing. Heck, even swapping one ranger in each for a Guardian would be helpful because they can generate some quickness.

Also, for full awareness, running a second Warrior to guarantee that everyone gets the banner/EA buffs is way more valuable than running another Ranger. Running a second Warrior also means you don’t have to run might-generating Druids. To round this all out, with 4 DPS classes in the standard meta composition you can fill all specialty roles very easily with lots of flexibility and backup potential (Sabetha cannons, Slublings, etc). Adding more DPS classes really doesn’t change that.

P.S. If you do get a single Chronomancer, put them in their own subgroup to share quickness and alacrity to everyone else. I noticed in your VG video that subgroup 1 would never get alacrity or quickness due to the subgroup organization.

Hooray for still recruiting!

We’re still looking for casual players who are interested in doing guild missions, raids (only if you want!), and having a good time. We’re very laid back and are looking for more like-minded people to spend time with. Let an officer know if you have any questions!

You have to remember, OP, that everyone was a newbie at some point. I got my first kills in random pub runs or with my very casual guild just beating our faces against it for a long while. The challenge, really, is that it all relies on you and how much you’re willing to try. There are countless guilds / static groups in the Looking For forum that you can post on to get into those groups. Just on the first page I see at least five groups looking for people, some asking for newbies!

For context, my guild’s requirements for raids are:

• Have a good attitude / be patient
• Study up beforehand and listen / react to my feedback after every run
• Constantly improve in whatever way your class can (dps / buff uptime / etc)
• Be understanding that you might not raid every night since different people want to come, learn, try new things, or whatever
• Appreciate that higher priority for raids is given to people who participate in the guild (repping / chatting / guild missions)

That, as an example, is something that a guild could offer you. There are different types for all sorts of players based on what you’re looking for, so your mileage may vary. I seriously recommend browsing the aforementioned forum and finding something that suits you rather than playing pug roulette. That said, you can get kills with pugs, it’s just going to require patience and understanding that you might not kill everything during your playtime in a given week.

I feel like ANet really missed the ball here, more-so than has happened in the past. Not only did they destroy power classes in the meta, as that damage lost cannot be recuperated by any means, but they also didn’t even get rid of the movement modifier on seaweed salad.

Seriously, the following change would’ve been so much better in every possible way:

Seaweed Salad
+10% damage while HP is over 90%
Swiftness Whatever

It would’ve fixed the movement problem they cited, would’ve kept power builds relevant, and would’ve not thrown the Seaweed Salad TP market into mayhem. There would’ve been no downside whatsoever.

It only procs on things that both give experience and could otherwise rally you. There may be some exceptions to this, but realistically it won’t ever get applied in raids before the boss is dead.

Sirbeaumerdier.3740:

Just out of curiosity, how much continous time per week did you have to devote to raid to reach where you are? A realistic guesstimate that consider all the time you had to invest in searching group, prepare, practice, and do the raids. You seem to have worked quite hard, am I right?

Not the person you’re talking to, but I have a similar story. The only continuous time I invested is 2 hours twice a week. That’s it.

They should really just get rid of res utility skills and replace the functionality with something more widely applicable. These too easily skim the line of too strong / too weak.

For context, my guild’s requirements for raids are:

• Have a good attitude / be patient
• Study up beforehand and listen / react to my feedback after every run
• Constantly improve in whatever way your class can (dps / buff uptime / etc)

If those requirements are too strict then raiding simply isn’t for you. There’s not a pub group out there more forgiving or willing to help, but you have to be willing to help yourself or else I’m not going to waste my time.

You should probably include region (NA / EU) and time zone.

Giants were prolific in Elona in GW1, so if we end up going there for the next expansion then the issue could be solved there.